lotr: adjuva brigitta

Permanent Move

Due to a number of factors, the primary one being the shift of LJ's servers to Russia under the cloud of a whole mess of US/Russian political corruption, I've shifted my blog permanently to jenavira.dreamwidth.org. I'll keep up the crossposting here until I have a good reason not to. If you're someone I've been in contact with and are posting exclusively on Livejournal, let me know and I'll follow you by RSS. If you're moving to Dreamwidth under a new username and want to continue to connect with me, let me know. (Dreamwidth comments are the best way to do this; alternatively, if you have a gmail address for me, it still works.) I am no longer reading or checking Livejournal at all, except the journals I have syndicated over to Dreamwidth.
lotr: adjuva brigitta

Vernal

Paradoxically, as a Pagan with an academic-historical bent, I've always found it harder to dredge any meaning out of the solar holidays, the solstices and equinoxes. Maybe these holidays are under-studied because their meaning seems obvious to the non-religious academic; maybe it's just that the latitude here in the upper Midwest is different enough from northern Europe that the changes aren't as drastic. (I didn't realize how different the latitude was until I was in Ireland for the summer solstice, and it barely got dark at all. That is...not what I am used to, and I can see how that would be a bigger deal, particularly in a world without good artificial lighting.)
 
Or maybe it's because the solar holidays are older than the religion most Irish-flavored Pagans are practicing. The passage tombs (which are probably not primarily tombs at all, but that's what they were always called, and the name's stuck) that align with solar events - Newgrange with the sunrise on the winter solstice, but also the lesser-known Loughcrew tombs aligned with the sunrise on the equinoxes - are five thousand years old, older than Khufu's pyramid; what written records we have can't meaningfully reflect a culture any older than fifteen hundred years. And from what we do know, the late pagan Irish looked at these tombs as otherworldly portals, dwellings of the sidhe, who I am still superstitious enough to call the Good Neighbors. They knew these places were powerful, but they didn't know quite how. Whether or not anyone practicing a religion they would recognize as similar to what I am trying to do ever knew that these places were aligned with the rising sun - we have absolutely no idea.
 
So in a way, I feel that these holidays don't belong to me. They belong to something older and more mysterious than I have access to. I will never feel the difference between summer and winter light in the way someone who has never known electricity will feel it. I will never know why hundreds of people came together over probably dozens of years to build something like Newgrange or Loughcrew, a massive structure under a massive hill of earth, carefully aligned to the rising sun, where, yes, the dead passed some time, but where many other sacred things also doubtless happened. I can never understand it, so the best I can do is to get out of its way.
 
That doesn't mean I don't feel the changing seasons. The extra few minutes of light at the end of the day give me time to take a walk after work, to unwind a little from my day, to move at a slower, more human pace than I'm usually allowed. But the changing of the seasons is broken right now, and a little frightening. There are buds on some of the bushes, but snowstorms keep blowing through. This kind of change heralded the end of civilizations in the past. Climate change probably had a lot to do with the fall of the Egyptian kingdoms, and the Hittites, the Maya, the Viking colony on Greenland. There's something almost comforting in that realization, that other people have lived through this kind of disruption, too.
 
Well. Maybe not lived. Not always.
 
The curious thing about archaeological history is that, when you're not looking at hunter-gatherer sites or garbage dumps, a lot of what you find probably doesn't represent society at its height but society as it fails. A temple doesn't get covered over in dirt if someone's still using it every day, after all. What we dig up isn't the past wholesale, but the very end of things. At some point, someone used this site for feasts, for celebrations, for religious observances - and then they stopped. Maybe there weren't enough people any more to keep using the big site. (Where did they go?) Maybe it became forbidden to hold such rites. (Who forbade it?) What we can find are the remnants of the very last celebration, and I at least can't help but wonder if whoever cast aside those bones, whoever lit that fire, whoever closed those doors, knew that it was for the last time. Did someone once bring the cremated remains of their king, their priest, or their grandmother into Newgrange knowing that they would be the last person so interred? Did someone once stand inside one of the Loughcrew tombs on a cold March morning, watching the sunlight creep down the passageway and wonder if any human would ever do this again?
 
I feel more kinship in these speculations this year than I have before, even while my suspicion grows that no, no one realizes their world is ending until it's really over, because the human instinct is toward hope, toward the one unlikely event that will save us all, and that makes it so hard to see the end coming. It probably puts off that end, too; I don't want to diminish the importance of hope. But everything ends. History teaches us this if it teaches us nothing else. The prevailing theories in history and archaeology right now emphasize continuity over massive change: the slow decline of the Aztec Empire, not a single catastrophic fall; the progressive expansion of the Indo-Europeans, not the single invasion of Europe. Probably our end will be like that, too, the kind of thing that can only be clearly seen fifty or a hundred or five hundred years down the road. But you have to think, then, too, of the people fifty or a hundred or five hundred years from now, who will look back on us and wonder, Did they know? Did they see the end coming? Did they wake up one morning and know that this would be the last time?
 
And I'm not sure if I want to send a message forward to them to say yes, some of us did, some of us saw it and fought it every inch of the way. Because we don't have messages like that from the past, not for the most part. What we have are the scraps of things they left behind: old tombs and old gods, midden pits and abandoned villages, jewelry and game pieces and the shadows of old roads. Things that let us look back and see, not the end of things, but our own roots: the beginnings of who we are now. This entry was originally posted at http://jenavira.dreamwidth.org/987502.html. Please comment on Dreamwidth.
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lotr: adjuva brigitta

In honor of International Women's Day: A series of heartfelt apologies to women I have known.

(This was the piece I started writing to submit to The Toast, and then The Toast shut down. But I didn't want to abandon it completely, and it seemed like a good day for it.)

1. I'm sorry I told everyone you'd brainwashed your husband into being an asshole. He was probably an asshole already.

2. I'm sorry you had to put up with your mom. Did I ever tell you about the time, when she was babysitting me, that she stood in the bathroom to watch every one of the kids pee so she could figure out who was using too much toilet paper? Of course I didn't, I didn't tell anyone about that, but that was no reason for me to be mean to you.

3. I'm sorry I didn't go to your dad's funeral, and I'm even sorrier that I didn't understand why you wouldn't talk to me the next time we had a chance to get together. I was a selfish asshole at seventeen.

4. I'm sorry that you weren't the person I thought you were, that you said stupid things in public, that you wrote books that were short-sighted and disappointing and erased an already vulnerable part of the human population, but I'm a little bit grateful, too. You gave me the opportunity to build on the work of someone I admire and make it better. Not that it wouldn't be great if you were better, too, mind. (Also, I'm sorry that I brought literally every book you'd ever written to a signing. I didn't know any better. Thank you for signing them anyway.)

5. I'm sorry I wasn't a successful adult in time for you to see it. I know you'd tell me that's a stupid thing to be sorry for, but I'm sorry for it anyway. I wish I had asked you if you knew what you were doing when you bought me witch books, but I was afraid you didn't and if you found out you would hate me. I'm sorry for being afraid of that, too.

6. I'm sorry for blaming your bizarre social meltdowns on suppressed boy problems. You had plenty of problems of your own that had nothing at all to do with boys.

7. I'm sorry for shutting down our conversations about trans rights. They hurt me, you see, and I didn't know why. Turns out my gender identity is more complicated than I thought. I'm sorry this is stopping me from being as close as we once were, I miss being friends with you, but I genuinely don't know that I can get past your belief that trans women aren't women.

8. I'm sorry for forgetting your name for the past six years. I found it again while I was cleaning out my bookshelves, in the autobiography I wrote in the eighth grade. I've written it down. I won't forget again.

9. I'm sorry we drifted apart before I told you how much you meant to me. You were my very first friend. I heard your mom passed away. Breast cancer. I missed her when I heard that, a longing ache for a woman I hadn't seen since I was twelve years old. I miss you, too. I hope you're well, and that you miss your mom with a longing ache that will fade into the background over time until it doesn't take over your entire life.

10. I'm sorry I hated you a little bit for going to the prom with boys older than us for four years running. You were the most self-possessed, confident girl I'd ever met and I didn't know how to cope with that. I still wonder where you are, how you're doing, what you've done with your life. I'm sure it was something amazing.

11. I'm sorry I haven't been a better friend. Thank you for sticking around so that I can keep trying.

This entry was originally posted at http://jenavira.dreamwidth.org/987163.html. Please comment on Dreamwidth.
lotr: adjuva brigitta

(no subject)

 A couple of months ago I picked up, for some light comfort reading, Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson. It is a housekeeping manual. It was recommended to me as "an INTJ does housework," which is exactly what it is; it's thorough, analytical, detailed, and in the November-December span when I couldn't stop thinking about the end of the world, it was the only thing that would put me to sleep at night. (Well, that and Sleep With Me, still the greatest podcast ever invented.) 

So having read that recently, and it being spring and all (I don't know what your standard for spring is, but mine is definitely "the first tornado warning of the season"), I decided to spend this weekend doing spring cleaning. I haven't done one of these in a while - three apartments ago, at least. Probably ten years? But there is something very satisfying about having everything clean. I have cleaned the drains. I have brushed the harp cover. I have washed my pillows. I have removed every cobweb and dust bunny. I have vacuumed the rugs, and under the rugs. I have polished the candlesticks. I have dry cleaning to pick up on Tuesday. (Dry cleaning!) 

And now the oven is finishing its self-cleaning cycle, and when that's done then everything will be clean. I am utterly exhausted, but damn am I glad I did it. I am almost ready to be a functional human again. The two are connected, for some reason; I've been really out of whack the past - well, for a while now. The past couple of weeks especially I've been letting things slide: not going to bed on time, skipping yoga, eating whatever random crap I scrounge together. Doing a big cleaning project feels like a re-set, like I have to live up to my newly cleaned apartment. A person who has dusted their harp cover is not a person who eats microwave popcorn for dinner and leaves the bag on the coffee table for a week. 

(Shit. I forgot to dust the dining room fan. In my defense, it's been on all day, and I'm not turning it off until the oven is done. I'm sure I'm going to be doing this all week. Okay, almost everything is clean.)  This entry was originally posted at http://jenavira.dreamwidth.org/986927.html. Please comment on Dreamwidth.
lotr: adjuva brigitta

Media Update February 2017

On February 5th, I saw Diamond Dogs, a science fiction play by the House Theatre based on Alistair Reynolds's novella, with puppets by Mary Robinette Kowall. I can't remember where I heard about it, but holy god it was good. It runs through March 5; if you can get to Chicago to see it, you should go.

Also watched that weekend: Rogue One, finally. I cried. It was amazing. Bodhi Rook is a precious angel and needs to be protected at all costs. K-2S0 is the most relatable droid. I'm sorry I didn't see it earlier. I am so bad at going to movies lately. (And then came home and watched A New Hope right away; the transition between the two is seamless, A+ fanservice all around.)

Watched since then: I've been thinking about Jeremiah a lot again lately, so last Sunday I finally stuck it in the DVD player, thinking I'd watch an episode or two and move on. I'm finishing season one tonight. There are a few real clunkers ("Ring of Truth," oh my god, why; "Moon in Gemini," what the actual fuck) but there's also the TINY NERD defending his library with a shotgun, and Jeremiah and Kurdy's recruitment to join Thunder Mountain is literally on the condition that Markus help them fuck up a KKK group, and that is the kind of quality post-apocalyptic content I need right now. From what I remember about season two, it's going to fuck me up even more, and frankly I am here for that.

(I may also be preparing a tumblr photoessay on why Kurdy is the most perfect object of the female gaze, quite possibly as a direct result of writing against stereotypes of large Black men. He's a poet! He finds sex unsatisfying unless it's preceded by engaging conversation! He calls libraries more sacred than churches and punches Nazis and when offered a miracle, any miracle he could wish for, he wishes that all the guns in the world would disappear! Kurdy is pure and perfect and wholesome, we all need a Kurdy in our lives.)

New Magnus Archives episodes, MAG 50 - "Foundations" & MAG 51 - "High Pressure". We're starting to see some threads coming together, architecture/fractals/corridors/mazes/genius loci, in MAG 50, emptiness/Leitner books/wealthy lunatics/exploration in MAG 51. Also, Tim is bisexual. (Not sure if I'm happy that Tim is bisexual and it's not a big thing, or annoyed that we know Tim is bisexual because he's carrying on affairs with at least two people at the same time.) Hoping that Martin shows up in tonight's episode; I miss Martin, I want to know how he's doing.

Books - a Tor.com collection (the 2012 Best Of, which was much shorter than the more recent ones, which was honestly kind of disappointing because I was counting on that to keep me busy during boring desk shifts for at least a month); The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel, a modern gothic that was just a little too Hollywood-glossy to have as much impact as it should have; White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi, which was even better than I'd been led to expect (and my expectations were high); Bishop to Queen's Knight by Bartenn Mills, my best friend's mom's first book, which was delightful in many ways (and had a het romance I didn't hate!); and Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, recommended as a good follow-up to Diamond Dogs, and my first Culture novel. I've had Consider Phlebas on my TBR shelf for several years; it's next in the queue, once I get through some of these library books.
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lotr: adjuva brigitta

Media Update, Late January

Lots of movies and TV this month; I'm still running on low brainpower, and lying on the couch letting something move on the screen is about what I'm up for.


Two more episodes of Daredevil Season 2 - "Semper Fidelis" and "Guilty as Sin." I'm finding this season less compelling than Season 1 (obviously, as I still haven't finished watching it), but that doesn't mean it's not good, just that I'm less addicted to Matt's-fucked-up-romances than I am to Matt-and-Foggy's-friendship-of-lies. I'd like to like Elektra, but she scares me. I do love Frank.


Star Trek Beyond, the first of the NuTrek movies that really feels like old school Star Trek to me. Spock and Bones stranded on an alien planet together! Scotty randomly adopting a feral alien teenager! Kirk's love of classical music! (Sulu gently rocking out to the Beastie Boys while flying the ship!) I mean, it was pretty forgettable, but I did enjoy the hell out of watching it.


Endeavour episode 4x02, "Canticle," half of which was a perfectly reasonable Colin Dexter-ish plot and the other half of which was them trying to do hippies again. I wish they'd stop trying to do hippies. (I've fallen behind; I'll get to the last two episodes of the season sometime soon.)


Regression, a movie about the Satanic Panic which would have been much better if the bad guy hadn't been the teenage girl. (The psychologist is a perfect bad guy here! Or the people teaching cops to be afraid of Satanism, like what actually happened! Or how about no one is the bad guy! That is also an option!) Still, a movie about the Satanic Panic.


A random episode of Copper; usually when I have one random episode of something it's because there's an actor I'm following in it, but I couldn't identify anyone in this, and nothing in the show was compelling enough to make me want to go back and watch the bits I'd missed, so there's one thing off my to-do list.


Series of Unfortunate Events episodes one through six (covering the first three books), which is delightful, why did they not do the whole series all at once? Why must I wait even longer for my excellent Lemony Snicket adaptation? I shall hoard The Miserable Mill for a while, and sulk.


Twin Peaks, the first three episodes, because April was appalled I hadn't ever seen it. Dale Cooper is my hero.


An old documentary on Netflix called Children of God, about one of those weird Christian sex-cults of the late seventies. Honestly not very good, but I was in the mood for a weird cult documentary, so there you go.


Last weekend was my short weekend, only one day off, and I wanted to completely ignore the world and maybe cry a little, so I checked out a bunch of movies from the library: The Green Mile, Dead Poet's Society, Flowers in the Attic, Big Fish. I've read The Green Mile but I don't think I've seen the movie before; it was fine. I still cry a little at the end of Dead Poet's Society, it turns out, even though I was starting to really feel the lack of female characters by the end of it. Flowers in the Attic was surprisingly flat; I want more melodrama in my melodrama than that. Big Fish is still pretty good. Mostly I just really noticed how many more women are in the movies I watch now, because there wasn't a Bechdel-test pass - or even a chance for one - among the three older films.


The Magnus Archives, two new episodes "Lost in the Crowd" reminded me of nothing so much as Don't Look Now in general atmosphere (or maybe that's just my go-to reference for horror set in Italy) but guest-starred Gerard Kaey, whom I have finally decided I like very much. "The Butcher's Window" was another grotesquerie (Delicatessen, if you want a film reference) featuring the return of The Boneturner's Tale, which at this point is cropping up so often that I expect it might become deeply relevant in the long-term plot. (Is Michael the result of it? Or of another Leitner book?) (If none of this makes sense to you, I urge you to start listening. It still won't make sense, but at least you'll be able to join the rest of us in yelling about it.)


Reading: Geek Feminist Revolution, Kameron Hurley's collection of essays, which I bought the weekend after the election because I needed something to get me through this. It's pretty good for that purpose. There are quite a few essays about GamerGate which feel more relevant than I want them to, some others about the publishing industry that are downright discouraging, but - Kameron Hurley is one of the people who has taught me how to apologize and when, and how to be angry and use my anger usefully. If those are things that matter to you, this is a good book to read.


The Fall of the House of Cabal, the last Johannes Cabal novel by Jonathan L. Howard. I didn't enjoy it as much as previous entries in the series, but I'm willing to lay a lot of the blame for that on me and my state of mind lately, because I can't think of anything about the book that I disliked. It does have that vaguely-serial let's-wrap-everything-up roundup that often comes at the end of long series, (although this is a series of only five books), so maybe that's it. I still love Horst the best, but Madame Zarenyia gives him a run for his money.


Spiritual Cleansing by Draja Mickaharic, a book of general psychic housekeeping, which turned out to be tremendously practical and just what I needed right now. I look forward to fumigating myself with frankincense; in the meantime, I've purchased a bottle of ammonia, a number of eggs, and an evil eye pendant.


The Last Ring-bearer by Kirill Yeskov, a book of uncertain legal status (apparently it was commercially published in Russia; I read a free fan-translation into English) that's - well, it's not quite fanfiction of Lord of the Rings, but it's more that than anything else. As far as I can tell, this is the result of looking at the plot of LotR, stripping out all the true-king romanticism, and reasoning out what it would look like if you start with the assumption that science and technology are net goods and social stagnation is a net evil. What that gets you is Elves who are trying to control the world and the freedom fighters of Mordor, Umbar, and Ithilien who are trying to defend their forward-thinking society. A lot of the worldbuilding choices don't make sense to me - Elves are real, but everyone else is just humans of a different ethnic background; some of the history that makes sense as written is altered to fit the demands of the new plot. I was profoundly disappointed with the treatment of Harad. As fiction it's deeply weird, jumping POV a lot, maintaining a weirdly colloquial vocabulary that's completely at odds with LotR itself, and frankly the female characters are still a disgrace, but reading it as an extended exercise in what-if, it's actually pretty fun. (Especially if you like spy fiction; Baron Tangorn, The Spy Who Never Went Out In the Cold, is pretty terrific.) Fair warning, though, most of the heroes of LotR are the bad guys in this one, and written cartoonishly evil. If Faramir hadn't managed to stay a good guy, I wouldn't have been able to finish it.


And today I'm re-reading A Tale of Two Cities, because I've been feeling a bit like Madame Defarge lately, knitting and seeing nothing.

"Look around and consider the lives of all the world that we know, consider the faces of all the world that we know, consider the rage and discontent to which the Jacquerie addresses itself with more and more of certainty every hour. Can such things last? Bah! I mock you."



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lotr: adjuva brigitta

root to rise

So last week I strained my knee at work, and then I had a cyst in my back get infected, and long story short I haven't been able to get any exercise in a week. But I've been thinking about my yoga videos anyway. For the past couple of years I've been doing Yoga With Adriene's January challenges, and they're kind of amazing. (I mean. I got into Crow pose for about ten seconds last week, and I'm still pumped.) Not just for the physical challenge, which is terrific, but the way she weaves in the psychological and spiritual aspects as well, in a very gentle, low-pressure kind of way. If you just want a workout that's fine, but you'll probably get something else out of it, too.
 
The phrase that's been running through my head this week is root to rise. Place your feet firmly on the ground before straightening your spine. Find places to ground and places to lift. Feel your connection to where you are. Make sure you won't fall before you push yourself up, before you stretch out a little further. Strong foundation. Everything builds from there.
 
It's almost too obvious to unpack any further.
 
I spent last year re-establishing my equilibrium, bringing my baseline up a little higher than it had been. I'd spent several years struggling, but finally got my medications sorted out again, started making changes to my diet, started exercising regularly. It worked: I lost 35 pounds, I had more energy, my baseline "today was fine" mood was higher than it has been in years. And then November happened, and I kind of fell apart. 
 
Now I'm looking at having to recalibrate again. I spent last year focused on myself; right now there are so many things pulling my attention. My equilibrium is still high, but I'm slipping below it more and more often, and not giving myself time to recover. The past two months have been a rollercoaster - I'm fine, so I dive back into current events, and then I'm wiped out and not fine, and then I recover a little bit and go back to it, lather, rinse, repeat. I can't keep doing that.
 
I hate having to say this, but: I cannot spend my energy calling congresspeople. The cost-benefit ratio is all off for me. It takes too much energy to convince myself to do it, and I no longer believe I can count on the Democrats to save us (if I ever thought we could, which, realistically...yeah). But that's the smallest-action that everyone is focused on right now, so I also have to spend energy figuring out what to do instead.
 
(I'm not saying that you shouldn't call your congresspeople. It's worthwhile! It has produced results in the past couple of weeks! If it works for you keep doing it, please, because one of the things that lets me let this go is knowing that other people have that particular thing covered.)
 
I've always had trouble cutting things out of my life. It feels like giving up on an opportunity. I know that it also means that I'm spread too thin to really get deep into any one thing, but making that tradeoff has always been incredibly, impossibly hard. But right now - there are things I need to do, so that I will be able to do other things in the future. So there will be a future in which to do other things.
 
Root to rise. My first priority needs to be my own health, mental and physical, and the preservation of the spaces in which I can be myself. That is the only way that I can do anything else. And when I look really hard at my life, the other two things that I need to do, that I will suffer from the lack of, are activism and writing. I need to re-evaluate the kind of activism I'm able to do, and I need to re-evaluate the kind of writing I'm doing and how I'm sharing it, but those are my priorities right now. Call it a five-year plan. I can't even think about five years from now, but I'm giving myself permission to change my priorities then. I will give myself this much hope for the future: that five years from now, I might do something different with my time.
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lotr: adjuva brigitta

(no subject)

I'm having a rough day, and it's only in the past hour or so that I let myself stop being in denial and think about why. So I made you a Spotify playlist of fight songs. Additional suggestions welcome.

There was only one that Spotify doesn't have, and it's the best one, so I'm happy to feature it. (Thank you, Welcome to Night Vale, for the Weather):

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god of militant librarians

Mid-January Media Update

 (I'm still working out what I want to be posting here, and trying to decide if I want to re-launch my real name blog. So for now, an update on what I've been reading & watching & listening to this month.)
 
I've decided that I'm going to read less this year, largely because if I give myself leave to read as much as I want, I will do nothing else, and I want to write. So I'm limiting myself to five library books, five of my own books, and two re-reads a month. (Yes, yes, I know. But last year I was doing double that for the first six months. I read a lot, okay?) And I'm already almost done with my library book ration:
  • Necessary Evil, the final book in Ian Tregillis's Milkweed Tryptich, an alternate-history World War II X-Men versus eldrich abomination series. I loved the first book, was OK with the second one, and found this one tedious, largely because the first third of it is a re-hash of the first book (yay time travel?). If you were reading them a year apart as they were coming out it'd probably be fine; reading them all in one big gulp just got annoying. Also by the last book everyone was bitter and horrible and it was just less fun to read. But I still recommend the series, and the first book especially.
  • The Deadly Dinner Party by Jonathan A. Edlow, an epidemiology book in the tradition of The Medical Detectives but not as good or interesting. There's a moralizing tone to this I didn't like: Edlow is using these stories to instruct the public, not just to illuminate the complexities of the interaction between the human body and its environment, and it makes it feel a bit like you're being talked down to.
  • Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, which I started reading as a library book and then bought myself a copy of because I knew I'd want to reread it within the first three chapters. It's rough going right now, though, being a book about surviving an America where central government has fallen apart and survival is a much larger part of everyone's life. But it's also about building community, and creating a frame of mind from which you can both survive and try to improve, and though painful, I also found it inspiring and reassuring. I mean, you don't need me to tell you this book is a classic for a reason, but it is.
  • A Wilderness of Error, Errol Morris's deconstruction of the Jeffrey MacDonald case. To recap: Captain Jeffrey MacDonald was a surgeon with the Green Berets in Fort Bragg, Virginia in 1970; in February of that year his pregnant wife and two small daughters were murdered. He was injured, and said he'd been sleeping on the couch and woke to find himself being attacked by a woman, two white men, and a black man wearing a military jacket, "hippy types." The police decided that MacDonald had done it. The Army had a hearing to determine if there should be a court-martial; they determined there was no evidence that MacDonald was guilty. In 1979 he was finally brought to trial in civilian court and convicted, he's still in prison on three consecutive life sentences. Morris breaks down the timeline and chain of events as best as possible. He does a good job of pointing out where you can no longer say for sure what happened, where people screwed up in their handling of the case, where you should be suspicious of the government's narrative, who might have once had something else to say about it, and just how much MacDonald did not have a fair trial. This is the kind of shit I love. It's about narrative and how our expectations influence the way we read facts, how we tell stories about things we don't know for certain and how those stories later affect our ability to find out the truth. If you liked Making a Murderer, you'll love this.
  • King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard, which, ugh. I'm sure I downloaded this from Project Gutenberg when I was into League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was years ago now, and yes it's the ancestor to Indiana Jones and all other adventure fiction and blah blah blah and look, it's super racist, it's super misogynist, you knew that, I knew that, we all know that. It's not the worst book I've ever read, but It's really not good enough to read for anything other than historical value at this point. I finished it largely out of momentum.
  • I'm also working my way through Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson, which I fully intend to read cover-to-cover because this is soothing comfort-reading for me: detailed descriptions of the various components that go into making a dwelling space a comfortable home, and how to do them properly. It was recommended to me as "an INTJ dissects housework," and it's perfect. I'm in the middle of the coffee-tea-and-wine chapter right now, and it's like a Hobbit wrote a manual for being the best possible Hobbit.
 
The new season of Endeavour has started, and already it's better than last season (which wouldn't take much): "Game" is a set of murders clustered around a showpiece chess match between a Russian grandmaster and a computer. Lots of Dorothea in this one, too! Lots of good character bits for everyone, really, including Win Thursday (getting a job!), Fred (sulking because everyone is leaving him AND THEN GETTING OVER IT), and Morse (throwing a hissy fit at Bright who, for once, does not actually deserve it). Morse needs to stop making sad faces about Joan, though.
 
I spent most of last weekend marathon-watching all of The Thick of It, which was honestly kind of refreshing to watch in the middle of all this political bullshit, because it lets me imagine members of congress running about in a panic and swearing at everyone. No one can swear as well as Malcolm Tucker, though. He is just as good on TV as he is in gifs. (Although not better; most of the actual plot in the show is just a vehicle for Malcolm swearing at people.)
 
And, of course, there's The Magnus Archives, my new tiny-fandom obsession. It's a horror podcast in the tradition of M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood, but with a compelling central character and a metaplot mystery that's got everyone drowning in paranoia (not least the central character). I've been re-listening to old episodes to try to pick up details that might come up again in the near future. This week's episode was a hell of a reveal, and I'm biting my fingernails waiting for the next one. (Which will probably have no metaplot at all, just to make me miserable.) There are forty-odd episodes so far; if you want to get into it, you might as well start at the beginning, as the first episode is a pretty good taste of what you'll get from the show. If you want a sample of metaplot, try "The Boneturner's Tale" or "Squirm." And then come back here and join me in yelling about Jonathan's total lack of self-preservation.
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lotr: adjuva brigitta

On Normalization

(Epistemic status: pedantry.)
 
 
Aside from "fascism" (which I am not thrilled that I'm finally learning to spell correctly on the first try), "alt-right," and "epic Twitter meltdown," the word of the past couple of months has been "normalization." As in, Don't let the media normalize Trump. As in, the normalization of authoritarianism. As in, This is not normal, this is fucked up.
 
And I mean, for all intents and purposes, I agree. Acting like this is the same as any other election year is bullshit. Acting like our fear and concern are the same as what Republicans felt in 2008 is bullshit. Acting like using Cabinet appointments to humiliate people who opposed you is a thing that all Presidents do is bullshit. Acting like throwing hissy fits on Twitter that violate decades of international policy is a thing that any politician does is bullshit. But...
 
Look, I am an anxious person. I have anxiety. Not as bad as a lot of people I know, but I have medication. I self-medicate. I meditate, which sometimes helps and sometimes doesn't. And I cannot live in the headspace that I was in for those two weeks after November 8. That was -- I have been less miserable when close family members died. It was brutal. I cannot do that, not and survive. I'm not gonna lie, I did more activism in those two weeks than I have in two years and more, so maybe it's useful, but it's also fucking ruinous and I was about to snap. And then my family -- close, good family, people I love and who, this is key, do not disagree with me about the level of bullshit going on right now -- descended upon my apartment and we had Thanksgiving. We stopped talking about politics and watched Ghostbusters. We ate way too much and drank too much wine and played board games. It was normal. And just like that, I'm okay. I'm still scared, I'm still angry, but I no longer feel like I am personally responsible for beating back the tide of 21st century fascism, and I can breathe again. I can sleep again. I might survive this after all.
 
We need normal. And you know what, this shit is not going to go away just because we're exhausted, broken down, wound too tight. Barring some miracle -- and it would take and qualify as a miracle at this point -- Donald Trump is going to be the President of the United States for the next four years. (Ugh, that's the first time I've been able to even write that, and it makes me want to go take a shower.) Four years is a long time. We are now living in a new normal, and we're all going to have to figure out how to deal with it.
 
Not to mention the little voice in the back of my head going, well if you look at Brexit...if you look at Greece, and Italy, and France...if you look at Russia and Australia...maybe this is normal. Gambia just had its first ever peaceful transition of power. China's censorship of the Internet is a well-known punchline. North Korea literally kidnapped people from the beaches of Japan and kind of shrugged and went on with their lives. If normal means common, well then...maybe this is normal, and it's the past two hundred-odd years that were the abnormality.
 
So okay, fine, maybe this is normal. Maybe virulent racism and authoritarian politics and corruption and the constant threat of war is normal. But it is also not okay.
 
I had my first existential crisis last month, on the strength of that word, "normal." As a kid I flew straight from one religion into a totally different one without a backwards glance, but watching the tide of fascism rise in the US and Europe shook me hard. I talked strong for a couple of days, here and on Tumblr and Twitter, and then I fell apart. This was, I think, the first time I really, honestly took the Black Lives Matter movement to heart and realized: this is already normal for too many people. This fear, this threat, this danger. I thought I understood my own privilege before now, but I had no idea. 
 
I watched the documentary 13th on Netflix, and someone said - forgive me, this won't be a direct quote - that a lot of white people look at the Civil Rights movement and say, oh, I wonder if I would have been on those marches with them, if I had lived in that time. What must it have been like to live then, and to stand up for what's right? Would I have been brave enough to march with Dr. King? I think I would. And he said, guess what, that time is now. You are living in that time. And if you're wondering, you're not there.
 
So okay. This is normal. But it is not fine. It is not okay. It is fucked up. It was fucked up on November 7, and it is fucked up now. It was fucked up last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and it will be fucked up tomorrow, and it will still be fucked up if Congress gets their shit together and impeaches Trump for one of the many illegal things he is going to do, and it will still be fucked up if we manage to elect whatever Democrat runs in 2020. 
 
And I guess that's really my problem with normalization, with this project of "fighting the normalization of Trump." Yes, acting like this is just a thing that happens sometimes has the potential to make the consequences much worse; we should not let that happen. But there's also value in taking this opportunity to open our eyes and see what normal really looks like. Normal is fucked up, you guys, and that's not on Trump. He's a symptom, not the disease. The disease is so much bigger than that.
 

(Proudly continuing my trend of getting more liberal and radical with every year on this Earth) (at this rate when I'm 90 I will be the human embodiment of The Revolution)
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