Bread and Circus

Good bits:
Today my choir had our winter concert, featuring Vivaldi's "Magnificat" and accompanied by an incredible strings section. I think having soloists and fewer strings helped un-muddle the sound, which is a common problem with layering a lot of voices and instruments. (listen to a movement from Vivaldi's "Magnificat", performed by the Budapest Madrigal Choir and Budapest Strings). Also with the addition of the strings, which I didn't know about till the dress rehearsal, "Whisper to Me" by David Hamilton became an unexpected favourite. (listen to a performance by Bella Cantoris - it's taken faster than we did, and the recording quality isn't terrific, but you get the idea.)

In the "Magnificat", the conductor made a choice to slow down the vocal section, let the strings move past us, and then slowly picked up tempo again to catch us up with the strings as both of us went to a presstissimo. (we called it the "choo choo" section, referencing a runaway choo choo train. very technical, haha.) One guy in the audience looked like we had blown his mind, which was very rewarding, especially for the conductor, I'm sure, who had to learn how to conduct 2 different tempos with both hands.

I looked out into the audience at some point and thought I saw the manager for the professional-ish choir that I used to be a part of for a really long time, and I almost cried onstage at thought of everything coming back full circle, a pillar of the organisation I came from, now here to listen to me sing again in the city where I've ended up. Well...unfortunately, my mild face-blindness strikes again, and it wasn't him, just someone with a passing resemblance. Whoops. Awkward, but a nice fairytale moment while it lasted.

Reception later was wonderful, drinks later with the choir and conductor at the John Harvard brewery, underneath the stained glass windows of local sports legends, because that's who we are, as a city. Some of the audience members were also at the brewery and came over to chat with us, which was nice.



The one on the far right is Bobby Orr:



( Read more... )

I really miss the days of landline phones. Landline phones allowed a mobility that mobile phones don't. (Ironic, yes?)

Having a mobile phone as my main contact number seemed to make sense after I got out of college. I'm 24 now, and I'm still moving around as I try to figure out where I want to live and what I want to do. Landlines seemed like an unnecessary extravagance.

Now, however, mobile phones demand my availability to the world for as long as it's on my person (and even when it isn't, because the loss of it displays me as negligent and even uncaring.) It's my own choice to keep my main point of contact via my mobile phone, but attitudes towards the mobile have changed since its birth.

My parents, for example, expect to use my mobile to keep tabs on me and to contact me regularly, even going so far as to guilt me if I don't answer my phone when they call, and they call for great and small reasons daily, urgent and inconsequential, which mobile phones can't filter. (It used to be that mobiles were only under duress of emergency, and everything else went to the landline,)

I spent my formative years in the world of landline phones, much like my parents did, and understood that distance from outside contacts for periods of time when I was away from my home were important in fostering memories, connections, and experiences. It's completely analogous to how millenials my age are portrayed today - surgically tied to their technology and internet. Friends my age understand how to contact a person carrying a mobile. I will answer them readily when they call because I know it is urgent and they need something right away.

On the other hand, people from my parents generation use the phone more obsessively than we do, a well documented phenomenon, perhaps stemming from a life devoid of such technology to the degree that its existence is a novelty to be abused. My parents text/call back and forth between themselves a million times a day for bewilderingly unimportant things. While staying with me, my mom even told me before going to sleep to text my dad to let him know we were sleeping, as if this were a crucial and monumentous event.

Given this kind of obsessive use by the older generation, it's no wonder my parents think I communicate less consistently and reliably than they do. Here's a tip: look up differentiation. You too, young adults, if you ever wanted to know why you get the strong urge to separate from your parents and think that every tidbit you share with them, every call you take, is an infringement on your independence. No worries, I feel the same right now.

In the world of mobile phones, parents expect their children to keep in contact with them 24-7, even in the years when children are supposed to strike out on their own and learn how to live by themselves. Landline phones facilitated that. They made reaching out to other people easier, but somewhere along the way, we degraded the line between the facility of reach out vs. the agency of not letting others in.

In the world of my parents, not picking up the phone at all times is a deliberate refusal of their right to get ahold of me wherever I am and whatever I'm doing. To me, it's giving up my right to privacy to those parties who should understand what life was like before everyone had to be connected up at all times.

Maybe that's why I'm thinking about this at almost 2 in the morning on a sleepless workday that will demand all of my attention, a workday in which I will need to split that attention to my phone every hour. And maybe I'm sitting here drinking gin and drunk-blogging because after a lifetime of trying to be the best that I can, I might as well act like a "shitty child" to my parents if I'm going to be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

I look forward to a day when I'm not expected to be on call every hour of the day. I look forward to turning off my phone without feeling guilty about irresponsibility. I look forward to investing in a landline phone to make some memories and experiences and pathways for myself.

EDT: I am really fucking tired and angry and weepy and powered on gin. Any typos are my own.
EDT: More on the changing use of landline/mobile phones.

"Don't be too sentimental. You have to deal with this (person/problem/situation) straight."

Thanks for always keeping it real, dad.

Are there certain things in fiction (fan or original) that just put you off? For instance, I was just reading something that had the main character whine, pout, and flutter eyelashes (those exact words) all in one chapter. I was done. Goodbye. I don't know what it is about those particular descriptions, but I utterly detest them, even in characters that are supposed to be detestable. (I don't usually read stories with those sorts of villains anyway.)

Is there anything in fiction (fanfiction or original) that you can't stand? On the flip side, is there anything you particularly like? For instance, I really like concepts of strangers becoming family, underestimated people proving their worth, and geeky characters. This is perhaps one reason why I like Joss Whedon's work so much. Ditto Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis. These shows are all about people with different talents working together for common causes while still retaining great individual personalities. They have a manageable cast of characters that don't stretch the richness of their relationships too thin, and I love the snappy dialogue. The characters are always dedicated (a polite word. Obsessed is probably more appropriate) to something (history, engineering, anything), and they always figure out how to use these strengths effectively. If you read anything that I recommend, the heart of them is usually all about people choosing their own families.

Mieux vaut faire, et se repentir,
Que se repentir, et rien faire.

Mellin de SAINT-GELAIS, Quatrains, LXXVIII

It's better to do something, and regret it,
Than to regret, and do nothing.

Okay, I had to write this paper for my Science, Technology, and Society class (a writing class for engineers), and I'm actually kind of proud of it. It investigates approaches to software development against a book we had to read called Shop Class As Soulcraft that addresses the state and history of craft or trade vocations such as mechanics. I don't usually post college work up here, but whatever. It's really as much for my records as anything.

( What Can Computer Scientists Learn From Mechanics? )

Right, so I wrote down a longer private entry where I cried my eyes out and wrote a lot of terribly soul-bearing and incoherent stuff, so now I feel like I can condense some things into a clean and intelligible whole.

Background
Alarmingly, I've found myself becoming the asexual 'spokesperson' to many students at my university. This is strange for me, because I didn't identify as an asexual till very recently. Still, I understand that I am perhaps one of the only out asexuals that people know, and a lot of friends and acquaintances have come to me with questions. I think it's so great that the majority of people here are accepting and curious about aces, and I've tried to read up extensively about asexuality so that I can give them good sound answers. I'm the 'new kid' in the asexual community, so I know that I don't know everything, but I've really tried to do my best to fully educate myself so I can spread awareness.

The Problem
There's a girl I've been interested in for some time. She has a wonderful free spirited personality, and I consider her very attractive. Through circumstances and details that will just muddy up the narrative, I kissed her very recently, and I felt absolutely nothing. I don't understand this at all. I like her very much. There was the initial elation of, "Yeah, I kissed her! Go, emotionally-introverted me!" But then I discovered kissing was just, "Meh. Lips. Kind of weird to have them in proximity. Whatever" instead of...I don't know, what everyone says you should feel. Has the cynical Mortal really bought into all the sappy media hype about romance? I'm not sure. All I know is that I desperately wanted to feel something, and I didn't. For the first time, I felt truly bereft, cheated, and alien from everyone else.

Inner Conflict
But now I am confused as hell and don't know if I'll ever feel anything, as much as I want to. I don't know who I can talk to about this, since I'm pretty much the only well-informed asexual around. I'm sure there are other asexuals out there, but they haven't come out of the woodwork. I don't know if I should post this as a question on AVEN. I tried speaking to some members on the chat, but they didn't seem to care. They were too busy giving physical descriptions of themselves and being depressed about how they looked while others encouraged them and criticised their own looks. Really? Are we still at this point? "Oh, I look terrible." "No, darling, you don't. I look terrible." What, are we in an issue of fucking Cosmo?

What about other aces at the university? I only know one other ace who can't be bothered and is a more sexually inclined grey-sexual who might not understand anything I'm talking about. (There are also some other personal issues that make him a less than ideal confidante.) I'm very lost here, and I'm not sure if talking to a non-ace about it will just make them doubt my convictions about being asexual and undo a lot of the work I've already done.

I've been thinking  a lot about fandom lately. I got into Archive of Our Own earlier in the year, and I will admit that I was completely converted from the first go. I post my fanfiction in a number of different places, and it's a total pain for me to go back and make edits in multiple places. Archive of Our Own seemed like the perfect way to consolidate all of my work in one place. It was made for fic writers BY fic writers, and it really represented many things that I felt were lacking in Livejournal.

Uploading stories and standardizing information about them was absurdly easy. Whatever grievances we have with fanfiction.net, it is admittedly very easy to post and share stories. AO3 took that a step further and allowed fans to go back and change stories instead of having to upload entirely new ones. Livejournal has their stupid word limits and finicky text formatiing, things that drive me absolutely bonkers. I am a coder in real life, and I have spent a lot of free time trying to write up an add-on that could make it easier for people to post stories on LJ. I'm still wondering if LJ will get around to doing something like this, a Story Posting option up there next to Voice Posting and the rest.

The time came when I really couldn't do it any more. I had to break up stories with longer chapters like The Professor's Wife, and I saw how much that changed the flow and style of the story. I said hell with it, and decided to rely solely on AO3 and then link back to LJ. But after experiencing both sites, I'm still torn. AO3 is amazing for storage, but LJ is wonderful for personality. Reading on someone's journal gets you a feel for who they are, and I've noticed that reading on LJ makes people more inclined to leave comments rather than the AO3 Kudos, which are great for letting people know you've read the story, but not so good for constructive feedback and getting to know people. Another plus with LJ is the stability of the system, which is honestly because LJ has been around for longer and ironed out bugs along the way. AO3 is young and still growing in exciting directions (hopefully with ways to track stories, a MAJOR plus with LJ), but that often means site outage. In those circumstances, I usually find myself trying to find the same work on LJ and reading from there. LJ is still my backup, no matter what.

Linking to my AO3 stories on LJ is all well and good, but there's just something about LJ that encourages interactivity with the writer and readers. Maybe because for good or for ill, the different journal layouts show you as a person, someone accessible with personality. Maybe LJ does something with how readers can submit feedback that facilitates the interaction better than AO3. Whatever it is, I hope AO3 captures it too, because as a writer trying to get my stories out there, I really do love AO3 dearly. I don't regret switching over, even if it means now I have to split my attentions between it and LJ. The fans and the people behind AO3 are all wonderful and work tirelessly, and I truly appreciate all they do.

The only difference is that now for shorter stories I try to give readers the option of reading on LJ or AO3. (Posting on AO3 first, pasting into LJ later, because Microsoft fucking Word either strips formatting or dumps in a large amount of code if you save as an HTML, and LJ does not help this along.) In that, I hope I can contribute that much more to the personality reflected in my LJ while still making story posting and edits efficient. 

What have been your experiences with these sites? Thoughts?

 Love your writing

The people that are saying, "Well, duh" --good for you. Sure, we've all gone back and said, "Oh, this writing sucks." Congratulations, you've just leveled up. That's why writing is so amazing; you can see visible progress whenever you look back. You know how you've improved and in what areas. It's so rewarding in that sense and has one of the best feedbacks for improvement of any other area of work. You reach a point where you start finding less and less newbie mistakes in your work because you're learning, and your newer stuff is showing that. That's such an amazing feeling!

I actually started this whole Advice From a Newbie monster post because I was going back through a story I had written last October and found a pattern in the mistakes I was catching. I thought it might be useful to itemise these mistakes as well as go over some things I've seen with other newbie authors or with my work when I was really REALLY a newbie nine years ago. Even four years ago. Hey, even last October. We're never done improving.

One alarming thing I found was the existence of people that genuinely hated their work. While a little self-doubt and flexibility keeps you from turning into an arrogant asshole, I also know people who hate their writing. They can't look at it, they say terrible things about it. If you don't support your work, who will? Writing is like your child, it is born from you and represents so much of who you are, your thoughts, and how you see the world. (Now you can explain how that PWP is actually a deep philosophical analysis of geopolitical zeitgeist and the situation in the Middle East.)

If you say you hate hate hate your writing, it's self-harming and self-hating, and you should always love yourself. This was a pretty hard lesson for me to learn, and I'm not there yet either, but I'm trying. Now, I may still not be comfortable with who I am, but I love what I write. There's no other way writers can sit down during their valuable free time* and hammer away at their keyboards for little or no foreseeable gain. (Back to main advice page)