Yes, you should read John Scalzi’s naked power-grab with fear and trepidation, but if nothing else, for the ultimate comment on writing workshops:
Certain events of the past few days have convinced me that most of writerdom has trouble finding its own ass without a claque of workshop buddies to comment on the journey (“I like the way you used your hands to search, but did you really need to use the flashlight?”).
My mom is moving out of the ICU today, and is walking with assistance and communicating. She’s expected to make a full recovery, but a very slow one.
My kids brought me breakfast in bed this morning, consisting of a cake the Littlest Paladin made all by herself, fruit and coffee. Kid Peligro felt bad that he couldn’t cook, so he farmed high-level Inspirations for me in City of Heroes, and left a bunch of his stuffed animals on the bed to keep me company.
I’m spending the remainder of the day at work. Mom-love doesn’t shovel all the paperwork off my desk.
I can’t really explain Your Cousin Vito’s how-do any better than telling you to go look.
Somebody needs to print this and staple it to Joe Quesada’s forehead.
Chris Clarke very succinctly gets to the not-so-hidden sexism behind the nostalgia for “quality of life”.
Though it goes beyond neo-environmentalism and caretaking; scratch an argument about the good old days when life was less impersonal and hurried, and you’ll find someone bitching that women aren’t doing more of the heavy lifting. “Families don’t sit down to dinner anymore”? Mom isn’t home and expected to have a hot meal on the table for everybody, 7 days a week, 364 days a year. (Mothers’ Day is her day off. That’s why you take Mom out to brunch, or make her breakfast in bed–it’s a reverse-holiday, where everybody cooks for and waits on Mom for a single day of the year.) “Parents are overworked and don’t have time with their children”? Why the hell isn’t Mom holding down a nice part-time job for butter-and-egg money?
The only thing I hear less of is whining about ‘latchkey kids’, because it’s turned into whining about daycare. And we all know whose fault it is that the children are in daycare. Certainly not Daddy’s.
On the laments of women who insist they really, truly would like more female friends, but are baffled as to how to make any.
As always when I play Answer Bitch, I will be happy to give you the complete truth that you didn’t want to hear, and are now mad at me for sharing instead of making up fluffy white lies.
You are as sexist as any Modern Neanderthal Man. Yes, you are. Oh, sure, you fervently believe that women ought to get paid as much as men and have the same job opportunities, and you’d kill anyone who suggests that you find computers baffling just because you’re a girl.
But most women…oh, well, they’re petty and they backstab and they giggle and think about their nail polish. That’s just how women are. MNM says the same thing, by the way: if you point out to him that you’re smart and can do math, he’ll agree that sure, you are special, but that’s just you, not most women. Which leads us into the second problem:
You like being special. You get an ego boost out of being the only girl around all the cool guys. You’re the woman chosen as funny, smart, elite, geeky, non-frivolous, whatever. Maybe they call you an “honorary guy”. If just any woman could be admired as an equal, where would you be?
You don’t call your guy friends on their shit. Part of being sexist is buying into the idea that male > female, and that annoying guy behavior is forgiveable while annoying girl behavior is deadly. Girl talks about eyeshadow? Off the guest list. Guy talks about football? Rolling of eyes, maybe, but he’s still your buddy. And of course, we must judge all women by the actions of a few:
I’ve been manipulated, sabotaged, and backstabbed by women in the past. The closest woman in my life, my mother, is a mental basketcase and the queen of guilt and manipulation.
If a man said this as a reason why he shuns female friends, you’d tear him a new one. If a woman said that she couldn’t stand men because they were obnoxious, sexist, paternalistic and she was sick of having her ass grabbed, you’d be sympathetic, but you’d also be thinking she was overgeneralizing and being unfair to the good guys. Yet this is an acceptable rationale for cutting women out of your life–some of them are bitches!
I actually just have a hard time relating to women and I recently realized that I actually treat some of them with suspicion, as the only chick in my office who’s close to my age just came over to chat for 2 minutes and I found myself continually questioning why she was here and what she was trying to find out by talking to me.
Has this woman done anything weird or offputting? Well, yes. She actually, if you can believe it, came over to chat. That’s, like, as if she was trying to make friends or something!
And believe me: the kind of woman you claim you want to be friends with, the smart one who isn’t petty and backstabbing, who is cool and friendly and won’t forget you exist when she gets a boyfriend? That “I’m the Queen of the Guys, get away from me, suspicious female!” might as well be painted on your furrowed brow.
Simple way to make female friends: stop the sexist attitude where you see men as human beings first, and women as females first. Don’t value the applause of your guy friends as the highest measure of your having overcome your unfortunate female genetic tendency towards pink things and giggling. Assume that women, like men, are capable of being assholes; they’re also capable of being pretty damn cool people.
If you really want to, that is. Perhaps you don’t.
Since I spent a lot of time sitting in a hospital room this week, I did get some reading done.
Samwise warned me that Accelerando was awfully hip, and it is. It’s like reading Neal Stephenson, but smarter and more entertaining, and without the bits where the author just can’t restrain himself anymore and barges out of the book to ramble at you. Unfortunately, like Stephenson, the characters and dialogue are far secondary to the hip, futuristic idea stream. And after a while they all start to sound alike. The secondary characters are flat and uninteresting (especially the female characters) and the protagonists are just annoying. I got about halfway through before deciding that I really didn’t care enough about any of these people to want to find out what happened next, and I was a little tired out from keeping up with the new! cool! future! that was being thrown at me.
The Atrocity Archives was much better. It still has the problem where any character onscreen for more than fifteen consecutive minutes sounding exactly like every other character, and Bob, the quantum/supernatural hacker dude, really is as annoying as every Slashdot groupie you’ve ever met; but it manages to be funny without diminishing from the horror. The title novella was the best of the two; “The Concrete Jungle” started out strong but simply wasn’t as good at “The Atrocity Archive”, and the ending was eye-rollingly pat.
I was going to post about my amazing, nearly free, last-minute vacation with Samwise to Las Vegas, but it was somewhat interrupted by the fact that my mother had a stroke this weekend.
There’s not much to tell except she’s still in the ICU but is improving, and I’ll be in Michigan until things are sorted out.
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