Dichroic Reflections

I do love work-at-home days, even when they involve a dentist visit. Also, feeling a bit smug because (it was a two-doctor day) the eye doctor says my right eye is down to 20/18. The left is always a bit weaker, but when ‘weaker’ is 20/20 I’l take it. On the down side they’ve felt a bit dry lately, but he gave me what he called “stickier” eyedrops that should help. Hopefully it’s temporary. Also, I don’t think my eyes are focusing well together , but I know it took a while for them to learn when I first got contact lenses so I’m not worried. (When I say the left eye is “weaker”, I mean not only in visual acuity; my eyes have never focused together well and when I was little the left one tended to turn in and I had to wear an eye patch for a year when I was about three. Beige plastic clipped to my glasses, not a cool pirate style. I can still cross one eye, which I think is not normal.)

Bad news and good news on the Kindle front – yes, I’ve been buying from Amazon again since they did fix the #Amazonfail problem promptly, though the lack of apology still leaves me a little skeptic. Anyway, the third Erec Rex book is out now but not yet available for Kindle. On the plus side, when looking up Andre Norton books for Shweta’s list of YA fantasy books about characters of color, I learned that all of her Magic Books are available on Kindle. I promptly bought two favorites and one I hadn’t read yet.

And neatly tying everything together, in Octagon Magic I came across a quote pertaining to a Kindle situation. I mentioned on a discussion group lately that someone had asked to borrow my Kindle for a couple of days. That was a little painful for me because I was in the middle of a (900+ page) book, but it’s not like I don’t have other reading material around, or like I mind having multiple books going. Anyway, someone on the list responded earnestly that I shouldn’t loan it, and if I did I should make sure it was insured, and anyway taking care of it was too heavy and risky a burden to put on a borrower. I was a bit shocked because I hadn’t even considered not lending it; the person requesting has been exceedingly nice to me. For instance she and her husband have invited me to dinner several times when they knew Ted was away and I was alone. (Her husband works with us.) Even more important, she’s another reader expat, also a frequent traveler, so the circumstances that have made the Kindle such a blessing to me apply equally to her. Her husband told me they brought 15 kg of books back from the Netherlands on their trip a few weeks ago. In Octagon Magic there is the line, “Nothing, child, is too precious to give or lend to one who has need of it.” I’m more cynical than that – living by that motto you could end up giving your rent money to a junkie – but it certainly applies in this case. And there *are* trustworthy people, and this is one of them or rather two. (In the event, she returned it via her husband the next day – I’d expected her to keep it for a couple of days.)

Despite the Norton purchases, tomorrow I will go treat myself to a visit to one or both of the good bookstores – they’re only a few blocks apart. I’m debating whether I dare to take the MRT (train) on its first day open in my neighborhood. I’m sure it will work fine, I’m just worried about huge crowds. It will also depend on whether it’s too hot for me, since the bookstores are a good walk from the train.

And finally, I can tell the partner in life and crime has been away too long when I start getting weepy over the daughter I don’t have because of an ABBA song. (Er, getting weepy because of a song. No ABBA song has anything to do with our decision not to reproduce.)

Another thing I keep forgetting to write: Cut-My-Own-Throat Dibbler would be entirely at home at any public event here. Sausage onna stick! Fruit onna stick! Anonymous dried things onna stick! Corndogs onna stick! And most of all, Squid onna stick!

Five words from Alma, below. You know the drill – if you want words of your own, holler “Words!” in comments.

Travel
Um, yes. All seven continents – and Alma herself is the only person I know who’s lived in more countries than I have. (Though I think even she didn’t manage / get subjected to three in three years.) I do eventually get travel fatigue and want to go home if I’m in a different place every night for too many days, but as long as I can stay somewhere for a bit and think of it as home base I’m good. Upcoming trips: US East Coast in August (brother’s wedding, about which I’m excited) and World Masters Games in Sydney in October, in which I’ll be competing in a double and a four.

Space
My big regret is that it looks like my travel may be bounded 35000′ up (where jetliners go). I feel robbed, really; growing up it seemed perfectly reasonable that I could expect to get to the moon someday, or further. It’s still possible of course, and it cheers me to see space moving into private industry instead of being closed to everyone but government. Private industry moves a lot faster, in most cases.

And Heinlein’s “Requiem”, the sequel to “The Man Who Sold the Moon” makes me cry every time.

Musicals
It’s a family thing – we all like them. I grew up on a nondenominational combination of Fiddler on the Roof and The Sound of Music I am a musical conservative, though – I love Rogers and Hammerstein, and am not much of a fan of Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Webber. (Yes, Phantom has some nice songs, but they all sound alike). I have never seen any of the recent musicals. I want to – I know I’d love Spamalot and especially Avenue Q, for instance – but I just haven’t had a chance. I do like where movies have gone recently: I loved both Moulin Rouge and Mamma Mia! for example. But it would be nice to see something more original.

Immigrants
I’m going to cheat and repeat what I said to Deck, because it’s almost all I have to say on the subject (and any specifics I might debate are based entirely on this):

Whenever I point out to those people that I myself am only a couple generations from immigrants (3 of my grandparents came in as small children), they always say, “But your family came here legally”. True, they did – I think that’s largely because it’s fairly difficult to sneak across an ocean. Given that they were fleeing injustice, persecution and dire poverty (i.e. the same reasons today’s illegal imigrants are coming in) I’m fairly sure they’d have come in any way they could get there. And if they hadn’t then, they surely would have as adults, in the face of the looming Holocaust.

Faith
I think there’s Something out there. I find a lot of value in the traditions of my ancestors, most especially the part that says (or that I interpret to say) “read the source material, look at other people’s learned opinions, and make up your own mind”.

Beyond that, Iris Dement speaks for me:

Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

Some say they’re goin’ to a place called Glory and I ain’t saying it ain’t a fact.
But I’ve heard that I’m on the road to purgatory and I don’t like the sound of that.
Well, I believe in love and I live my life accordingly.
But I choose to let the mystery be.

I’ve been meaning to write that I spent much of last weekend indulging in an orgy of reality TV – I bought a season each of What Not to Wear and How to Look Good Naked. The latter has me avmbivalent; on the one hand I’m thinking that Carson, snarky as he can be, is a genuinely nice guy and concerned for the women he’s helping. And in one way it feels like progress that he can choose to prance around (what? I’m not sterotyping. Carson Kressley prances) and make comments about going off to look at hot guys in a mainstream TV show; on the other hand it feels like maybe gay guys still need to prance in order to appear nonthreatening, and how sad is it that we still have so much baggage between the sexes that a man has to be nearly a caricature before a vulnerable woman can feel safe around him. Plus, of course, there’s the obvious manipulation: clearly the women expect him and have previously arranged to take time off, and it seems unlikely that every woman is surprised by the “nude” (actually well-covered with a flatteringly draped piece of cloth) photo session. I suppose it’s possible, if what I’m watching is the first season and if they taped most episodes before the show aired – certainly in What Not to Wear there’s a more convincing mix of people who know how the show goes and people who don’t.

Finally, it seems unlikely that when they take a woman who hates her body mostly because it’s showing natural signs of age and common amounts of weight gain, and they show her in bra and panties on a billboard, every single person who walks by thinks she’s beautiful and sexy. I certainly don’t find some of them beautiful in that getup (I’m not thrilled about my own signs of aging and recent weight gain either). Granted they all look gorgeous in the nude photo session, but with professionally-done hair and makeup and artfully draped coverage, who wouldn’t? I appreciate the idea of the show and the whole concept of teaching a woman she can be beautiful, I think the new haircut and lessons on flattering clothing may even be helpful in the long-term, and I like the idea that beauty isn’t limited to size 0 and age 21. But the idea that we are all beautiful in all circumstances sounds to me too much like the idea that we should all have high self-esteem because we’re all above average. I’ve seen beautiful women of all ages (Hepburn in her 80s springs to mind) and in a wide range of sizes (Queen Latifah has beautiful face, skin, and shape) and almost every women has things to be proud of in both appearance and interior. But not every woman is beautiful, and that’s fine.

I still enjoy the show, though.
(Clarification: Carson Kressley is a large reason for the success of two well-known TV shows, a dedicated gay activist and apparently a world-level equestrian. I don’t think he’s a caricature, just his persona on the show.)

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We had our first Toastmasters meeting here last night. I was more or less dragged kicking and screaming into it – the raison d’etre for this chapter is to improve people’s English so they wanted a native English speaker. I’m happy to help, just not thrilled about spending my whole evening on it (I got home last night just about in time to read email, poke around online a little, brush my teeth and go to bed).

But it was more fun than I expected: our ’sponsors’, the experienced Toastmaster guys, did tend to drivel on a bit, but I thought our own people’s speeches were very good. Since I got pressured into being VP Education, I’m responsible for lining people up to speak and to do various other jobs. I felt bad a little, because the first speaker was so nervous he was visibly shaking, but he held it together and did well. The second speaker was stellar – apparently her past experience includes being a “demo lady” at computer shows. I think the nearest US equivalent would be the women who stand on platforms with the cars at car-shows. So she’s very used to speaking in front of an audience, though in the past she was repeating someone else’s words rather than her own.

I took the “Language Evaluator” role, and expect to be taking it at most meetings for a while. So I get to pick on people’s grammar, pronunciation and word choice. it’s rather harder to do that than to correct written English as I’m more used to doing, but I’m sure I’ll get better at it. It would have helped if the sponsors had told me to keep it general and not mention names *before* I started speaking. Oops. Fortunately I’d only mentioned a few people who are very experienced (in one case, has near-native fluency) before they told me that part. Most of the speakers are pretty fluent. I identified five common mistakes: not pronouncing plosives (generally ‘t’, often ‘d’, sometimes ‘k’) at the end of a word or syllable; ‘d’ for ‘th’ in some contexts; omitting word endings especially for adverbs or gerunds; mixing up ‘he’ and ’she’; confusing ‘l’ and ‘r’. Those last two are extremely common in Chinese speakers learning English, but I only heard them a couple of times last night – and when I did, they were from our guests the Toastmaster sponsors, not my colleagues.

It’s kind of an odd experience when you stand up to correct people and get an ovation that includes whoops and hollering. I guess it was because I was the only one of us in an evaluator role. I’ve gotten a couple nice emails today, too.

Other than two trips to pick up the dress in previous photo (on Saturday we decided to take it in a little more under the bust, so I went back to get it Sunday), I spent a lot of the weekend knitting. I finished the sock I was working on, grafted the toe and wove in ends (actually, that might have been Thursday – not sure), cast on the second sock, and powered through the leg and heel. Now I’ve just got the gusset and foot to finish. That’s one reason I really prefer toe-up socks – it seems to take so long to get through the gusset decreases when you’re doing them after the heel, somehow.

I also swatched and cast on for a sleeveless Primrose Path sweater – after all that lace and sock knitting it will be nice to get back to fat yarn and needles. This sweater is entirely ribbed, which is a bit slower than knitting stockinette, but I think it will seem relatively quick because of the much bigger gauge and lack of sleeves. I’m doing it in a pale green – it actually feels a little strange to be knitting in the same color as the pattern! Not the same exact yarn – I had a bad experience with Optimum that left me dienchanted with the Southwest Trading Company – but Ella Rae Bamboo Silk, which is very similar.

Also, I’m finding this dress comfortable enough that I’m really tempted to get another one made, same fit but a little different. Definitely shorter. Maybe claret-colored? Damask pattern, or something like that if they have it. Or, since the shop makes traditional cheong-sams also, I suppose I could go wild with a Chinese figured satin – but I think I’d get a lot less wear out of that. I could also vary the design – one possibility would be a waist seam and some gathering in the top, or maybe a flared swingy skirt. Hmmmm…

I took the following photo yesterday to show the dress I had made here (I am so emphatically *not* hour-glass-shaped that it’s normally hard for me, even in the US, to find a fit in this style, so this is a very nice change). But it has occurred to me that with my hair at this stage of growing out and my coloring, this is very close to how I usually picture Harriet Vane. I think the dress nearly works for her time (maybe it would have been a smidgen longer?) But what would she have worn over it?

(Note: I am wearing it to work today to verify that I like the fit – I can still take it back and have changes made if I want – same shoes and with the addition of a long blue beaded necklace worn as a belt. No comments at work so far, but I expect some because this is more dressed-up than I usually get.)

Photos!
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Not-so-bad news: a friend who can read Chinese (and is also a Reader) checked into it: the bookstore I love is not closing. I can’t call it good news, because they are closing another branch (that I’ve never visited) and bookstores closing are never good news. But I’m not bereft. I’m figuring on a jaunt there (and maybe to the second-best bookstore in town, a few blocks away) a week froom Saturday, for an anniversary treat to myself.

Oursin gave me the following five words to write about. Usual memeage rules apply: comment here if you want five words I associate with you.

Expatriate
Rowing
Knitting
Earrings
Marriage

Expatriate: Yup, that’s me. Wish I’d done it years ago, both for realizing how America-centric most Americans’ views are (I bet this is similar in Australia and China and Russia; people in smaller countries have world-awareness forced on them to a much greater extent) and because my relatives would have been younger and in better heath. On the other hand, I think it would have been much harder without the internet, and even by the mid-90s it wasn’t what it is now. To me it’s socialization with other people I can speak to, news, information source and place to order stuff I can’t get here. Of course it was all those things back home too, but I think I depend on it much more here.

Rowing: I’ve told this story before: in 1990, Ted talked me into trying it, saying ÿou can always quit if you don’t like it. And here I am, though I’m still not sure if I like it. That’s OK: I don’t “like” reading either – it’s just part of who I am. I get out on the water a lot less often these days which means I have a close and deep friendship with the erg. I miss the water. I mean, I literally miss water: I like being close to water, on it or beside it, plus there are aspects of rowing you don’t get to practice on the erg. What I like about it, though, is that it’s a lifelong sport. The oldest competitive rower I ever knew was rocing at 91. So anything I don’t do this year I can always do next year. (Plus, next year I get to move up an age category!)

Knitting: I knit because I read and row. When I did something like beadwork or embroidery, I had to stop doing whatever else I was doing, which is why I don’t embroider at all and only bead every couple of weeks these days. I learned to knit because it was something I could do while reading or while in the car on the way to regattas (these days, while on the way to work). So I don’t take on really complex projects, and the Icarus shawl I just finished took me three months, but I get to play with pretty yarn and make things I couldn’t buy. And have sweaters with armholes that fit!

Earrings: What I make most when I do beadwork, because they’re what I wear most. Also, they’re kind of like knitting socks: you can make something quite simple to show off a beautiful yarn / bead or something complex with plainer materials. And my nom online, Dichroic, was inspired by the earrings I was wearing when I began my first blog in March 2001.

Marriage: A week and a day short of 16 years, so far. Marriage, when it’s to the right person*, is a wonderful thing and I believe with all my heart that it should be available to any consenting adults who love each other and want to commit for a lifetime. (*The “right person” is not only one you love and who loves you, but also one who commits to the marriage and is willing to put effort into making it a good one. Also, I do not believe marriage is defined by weddings or that a couple who is not legally wedded is necessarily any less committed to each other – but it’s important for people who want them to be able to have legal weddings to give them all the rights they need to take care of each other, since legal marriage is the system on which we currently base those rights.)

What I want right now is a good rowdy bar to hang out in. Or conversely, to go out in a desert night and watch the stars.

However, I suppose I will settle for finishing a sock toe and stir-frying some vegetables. Not quite the same. Maybe if I pop up a batch of popcorn, grab a beer and play some Bonnie Raitt it will help…

My favorite local bookstore is having what they’re referring to as a “Bye-Bye Sale”. Here’s hoping it’s just a bad translation, but I am not sanguine.

(Please, no laments for the wonders of indie bookstores. This is Page One, an international chain that I think is based in Singapore.)

Otherwise, the good news is that I did have enough pins to block my shawl; the bad news is that I didn’t have quite enough space. It will look OK, just not as large or airy as I’d hoped.

Oh well, if I don’t like it I can always reblock.

Tonight’s plan: weave in ends on shawl, set it to soak, walk over to nearby hypermarket, buy pins (if they have them) and some veggies. Go home, stirfry veggies, block shawl, take pictures (of shawl, not veggies).

The boy left today for another @#$#$* business trip; it’s good to at least have something gratifying to look forward to.