I just got back from a fabulous little trip to New York with plumtreeblossom to find large quantities of presents from silverlibre and ka9sqb in Illinois and bcat1 and spacechicken in North Carolina on my doorstep. And an awful lot of them are the edible kind!

An one very special thing was in the box from Illinois: a photo album of baby pictures of me, depicting a typical day in my life as a baby. Yes, there will be scans.

But not tonight. Tonight bed. I am happily exhausted and need to go curl up with a kitty cat.

So there’s this wonderful family photo of me at around two years old playing in Hyde Park. My mother made a copy for me, which I have somewhere very safe, I’m sure. But my sister also has a copy, and while we were down there last weekend I scanned it in. So here I am:

Me as a toddler 'dowsing' in Hyde Park, London, summer 1968. My parents spent three years in England for my father’s graduate work. This picture of me was taken by a family friend while we were in Hyde Park in London sometime in summer of 1968. My parents always called this my dowsing picture, although I sort of think it looks more like I’m ploughing. I was a cutie, wasn’t I?

(Sorry no Rabbit Hole Day post this year; I don’t have enough brain cells to be creative right now. You get the following by virtue of the fact that most of it was written yesterday on the T.)

So last long weekend was Arisia, and I haven’t stopped having fun since. On Tuesday, I ended up at dinner at the Cambridge location of Addis Red Sea with cathijosephine, ragingamazon, and a bunch of other people in what was sort of an impromptu farewell dinner for ragingamazon. I had never tried their new location, and I hadn’t had Ethiopian food since Meskerem in DC with plumtreeblossom, bcat1, and spacechicken. It was the yum, and the company was lots of fun.

On Wednesday, plumtreeblossom and I went to a gathering at The Burren for members of the davis_square community. The bar gave us free food, and they certainly recouped their investment; there were about 30 or 35 of us there. There were lots of Theatre@First people there, among them the wonderful surrealestate (f/k/a pheromone) and joyeous, but there were also a lot of people we hadn’t met in person, and a lot of people we (especially I) didn’t know at all. It was a great time.

( A few more days, cut for length. )

As I was telling jadia over dinner yesterday, as a child I was an introvert, more or less out of necessity since I was sick a lot (and therefore out of school a lot, and often unable to run and play with other kids). Clearly I am no longer an introvert, but it’s only been in the past few years that my mental image of myself has caught up to reality. I used to think, “Hah, hah! I’ve got everybody fooled; they think I’m an extrovert, just because I get energized by spending lots and lots of time with other people!” and it was only fairly recently that I realized that everybody who thought I was an extrovert was actually right. (I am, though, an extrovert who needs a lot of quiet alone time.) Anyway, if I had lingering doubts, this past week should lay them to rest.

I’ve seen this in zillions of people’s journals. ( The privilege meme. )
I agree with the criticisms lots of people have posted about this meme; lots of the items have to do with education more directly than with privilege (although of course they’re very closely related). And my own particular answers are often affected by geography more than social class (although again there’s some degree of correlation). Still, it was kind of interesting.

(By the way, silverlibre and ka9sqb, you should feel free to correct anything I’m misremembering or misrepresenting.)

I believe that yesterday was the first day since I started growing my hair out again that I looked in the mirror and liked the way my hair looked. That’s partly because it’s finally starting to get long enough that it hangs down rather than sticking out at absurd angles, and partly because it was cool enough that I could drive to the T station with the windows most of the way up.

(I’m sure I’ll still be tempted to shave it off the next day it’s really hot and humid, though.)

So this “ten things you’d tell your 16-year-old self” meme is really interesting, and I’m learning a lot about people from it, but I’m having a hard time putting myself in the right mindset to come up with interesting answers. The point of the thought-exercise would be to change the past, but if I change the past, I would risk losing people who are very very important to me because what led up to my meeting them didn’t happen. For instance, Boston would have been a better place for me to go to school than New Haven (and I say Boston rather than Harvard because I think UMass or Tufts would have gotten me into the same urban setting), but if I hadn’t gone to Yale I wouldn’t have met beetiger, among other people, and I wouldn’t want to give her up. And if I’d found myself in Boston several years earlier, I would have found a different social circle and the community dynamics would have been different when all my actual friends and sweeties showed up in Boston (if I’d even meet them), and I might not have those relationships.

However, for the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to ignore all those issues and pretend that shuffling the deck and dealing a new hand is something I’m OK with. Otherwise it would be all “Make absolutely sure you go to this party that your friend invites you to, and be really certain you say yes when this other person asks you if they can bring a friend to your party, and don’t be late to this event, but make sure you’re late for this other one”.

So anyway, here’s some information for my 16-year-old self:( Some things I’d tell myself at sixteen, if I were going to tell myself stuff at sixteen. )

Well, in the mail today there came photographic evidence that I do in fact have a brain. I’ll probably post more of these when I get a chance to look through them all, but for now, here’s one picture.

( Read more... )

There are many things I should be doing right now instead of posting to LJ, but I’m a sucker for interview memes and I’m feeling slothful. :-)

Put the seven deadly sins in your personal order of preference (your favorite first, most despised last).

I had to look them up to get the list. In order:

1. Lust (but not the original luxuria ‘extravagance’) — I’m all for this one!
2. Gluttony
3. Sloth
4. Envy
5. Avarice
6. Pride
(in the sense of ‘hubris’, not in the sense of pride in a job well done)
7. Wrath

Is there a new skill you hope to acquire this year?

( answer )

How long can you go without checking your email before you get antsy for it?

( answer )

What scares you?

( long answer )

Can you think of any wrong that someone's committed to you or a loved one that you're unable to forgive?

( long answer )

But first the bad stuff: For those of you who aren’t in the area, it’s cold in the northeast! The sort of cold where my fingers in the nice thick gloves plumtreeblossom gave me hurt by the time I get to the the T station. The sort of cold where the couple times recently I’ve needed to run to catch a train I feel like there are needles in my chest. The sort of cold where my cheeks stay red and painful for a long time after I get to work. After long deliberation, winter has finally decided to come.

Now some good stuff: On Wednesday my lovely plumtreeblossom and I got together, intending to go to the Finnish steam bath in Quincy, but it turns out they’re closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so we just went to Kagawa for yummy dinner. It had been a very stressful day for her (and a much less stressful but still somewhat frazzled day for me), but we had a warm and delightful time together and the cares fell away. And (as always happens when we see each other on a “school night”, and never happens otherwise) I got in to work on time the next morning. If any of my coworkers had been in, they would have been astonished.

And more good stuff: Yesterday I got to go over to darxus’ house to help him and cathijosephine clean (mostly by keeping them company) and have dinner, which was yummy potato pancakes and bacon, and brownies for dessert. I like the way cathijosephine cooks. Then we watched some Star Trek: TNG before I went home. A lovely and productive evening.

And even more good stuff: I feel kind of conceited telling this story in public, but it made me feel too good to escape notice here. Yesterday at work I got a phone call from an ex of mine whom I haven’t stayed in very close touch with over the past few years, although I still consider her a good friend. She said she was calling just because she’s been complimented a lot recently about how well she takes care of people she loves, and how well she takes care of herself — and she said she feels like she learned a lot of that from her relationship with me! So she was calling to thank me. That made me feel really, really good! We got to do some catching up on the phone, and we’ll get to do some more in person soon.

So I guess I can deal with a little cold weather. :-)

I’ve had lots of wonderful stuff going on since I posted last, and I’m not going to bother trying to catch up. But I wanted to post about seeing plumtreeblossom last night, which was lovely. I brought over dinner in my crock pot, a pre-marinated turkey tenderloin which I had cooked according to a recipe cathijosephine had come up with: cooked for about 5hrs in soy sauce and apple juice, along with lots of quartered small potatoes. I threw in a few spices, too, but I don’t remember exactly what they were. (Pretty sure there was some ginger.) I cooked it on high and it came out amazingly tender, and the potatoes sucked up all the soy-sauce and turkey flavour and were quite yummy themselves. For dessert we had the remainder of a cheesecake plumtreeblossom had made the last time I was over and it was still yum-m-mee. And we had some red wine (don’t remember what kind). Lovely, lovely dinner.

I stayed over at her place last night, and it was the first time we’d tried that on a “school night”, and also the first time I’d taken my CPAP machine away from home. Success on both counts! I admit, waking up at 6:00am is not exactly something I’d just happen to do on my own, but I didn’t complain, and plumtreeblossom made me coffee. :-) I’d been worried that without my humidifier in the room (which makes a huge difference) I’d get completely dry the way I did a few times the first week I was using the machine, but plumtreeblossom has a really pretty lighted ultrasonic humidifier (sort of a cross between a humidifier and a decorative fountain) that she had brought into her room, and it seems to have done the trick.

I’m going to take this opportunity to comment about how much of a difference the CPAP machine has been making. A couple days recently at work I’ve been able to start working on a project in the morning, and just keep working on the same project for the whole day, and not get sidetracked, and not get overwhelmed, and remember what I was working on even when somebody comes in my office and asks me a question. I remember being able to do that! And it’s so good to be able to do it again. The same thing is going on, to a less dramatic because less easily quantifiable degree, in the rest of my life. There are a lot of things (like finishing unpacking) that I’d basically been stalled on for a long time that I’m seeing myself start to make some progress on again. There are all sorts of things — often trivial little things — that I used to think of and think, well, maybe I’ll do that someday if I have the energy, and now I think of them and (sometimes, anyway) I just go ahead and do them, or at least start them. And I’m still absent-minded and spacey sometimes, but my memory (and especially my ability to keep track of things) is clearly much improved. And my alertness and sense that I’m catching what’s going on around me is better. Yay!

Oh, and tonight’s Poly Boston dinner at Bertucci’s was well-attended and full of interesting conversation. (For instance, I learned a lot about the history of Islam, and about particularly flammable radio transmitters.) I think I may make that a monthly thing, since it seems like a venue that works really well.