psocoptera

In theory, go-arounds are pretty rare in commercial aviation, but I was just in my second one landing in Boston today. The previous time was in heavy clouds/fog, so I'm not actually sure how close we came to the runway before pulling back up - this one we actually bumped on the runway, but the plane was rocking a lot, so I guess they decided it was less risky to go back up than to try to complete an iffy landing. The captain said something about wind conditions. Second landing attempt from a different direction went fine. I was pretty rattled and tbh am still - even knowing that's a normal thing they practice, I would rather not be a passenger in any kind of unplanned airplane event. My heart rate went through the roof at the time and keeps having little upticks. (I guess now I know what Justin meant when he said he didn't want to think about it.)

II. The Mouse

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Romeo and Juliet at the ART. Cut for being long. ( Read more... )

The King at Re Albi. Lebannen, set post-"Firelight", 2800 words.

I have felt like I wanted to write something about Ged and Lebannen since I first read Other Wind more than twenty years ago. It took me a lot of Le Guin book club and a lot of reading and rereading a whole bunch of her works to finally have anything to say. But, here it is, my little thing to say.

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I finished a thing! I don't know that anyone here wants to *read* this thing, but people in the Le Guin bookclub have been hearing me talk about it, so if any of you are curious about it, now you can know. I'm in the stage of recently-finished where I just want to babble about it, so it's also fine if nobody is curious. :)

The thing: Ways To Make A Marriage, a sedoretu AU of The Untamed, a Chinese fantasy TV series.

I say that I don't think anyone wants to read it because it leans pretty heavily on knowledge of canon (although maybe someone here is also in this fandom? hi!). It's a fix-it fic, and I think a lot of what's neat about it is seeing how things change in this AU. (With bonus irony of the characters having no idea how dark canon was going to get, so sometimes they're like "such bad things have happened!". Haha, you have no idea.) The story follows four women, three of whom die fridgey deaths in canon - part of why I wanted to write a sedoretu AU for this fandom was because I like how the sedoretu structure (when written strictly) forces there to be 50% women for every 'ship, and part of why I wanted to write about the women in particular was because the show was not great to them, both in terms of having them in the first place (there are 2 or 3 times as many named male characters) and in terms of who's left standing at the end.

More specifically, it's a fix-it fic where the fix is "What Would Ursula Le Guin Do?", or maybe "what might Le Guin's Taoism suggest as alternate solutions to the central conflicts of the first half", drawing on Four Ways to Forgiveness, Tehanu, and "Unlocking the Air", as well as Le Guin's Tao Te Ching. (And, obviously, her sedoretu stories.) And I finally figured out what I wanted to do with the voices/POVs after reading Birthday of the World - I was aiming for the same "telling my life story" voice as some of those stories. So that's what I've been up to lately! It's also the longest thing I've finished since like 2015, so that's exciting for me.

Back from Endoscopy 2! They said it went well. (I mean, I know firsthand that all the bits I was awake for went smoothly, but the key bit was the bit in the middle where I wasn't.)

So Monday I had a swallowing event, or rather a non-swallowing event involving complete blockage of the esophagus and a trip to the ER. (Not choking, but it turns out that you really want your saliva to be able to go somewhere.) Today I had an endoscopy and am learning about a variety of interesting conditions like "Schatzki ring" and "eosinophilic esophagitis", some of which they are still in the process of determining whether I have or not. Between then and now I've been unable to eat solid food and living off plant-based Ensure (vile! I get that it has to be sweet because you need sugars, but why play it up with the vanilla?), bone broth, soy milk, and pureed butternut soup, but the endoscopy doc thinks I should be safe to do soft solids. Probably what happens next is either another endoscopy soon or a more complicated Food Allergy Journey*. Endoscopy has always been very high on my personal "medical stuff I'm phobic about" list but the drugs work and the bit where I woke up a little feels more like a bad dream than an actual trauma.

(*the hypothetical elimination list is literally nearly everything I eat, so, that's pretty scary to contemplate, but it also sounds like there are different approaches, so, we'll see, I guess.)

So, last year, my top-ranked priority to-read books were My Favorite Thing Is Monsters vol 2, Alecto the Ninth and Nona the Ninth, Sisters of the Forsaken Stars, and Across a Field of Starlight from Blue Delliquanti, of which I read Nona and Sisters, and (coughs) got partway through Across a Field and let myself get sidetracked by other things, oops. Also Golden Enclaves went on as a priority 1 and popped off again.

Not much new in the current rank 1s: MFTIM2, Alecto, Across a Field, and Mel Gillman's Other Ever Afters, which shares with Across a Field the misfeature of my actually having purchased it instead of getting it from the library and having a natural deadline. Some exciting 2023 works in the rank 2s though: Arkady Martine's Prescribed Burn, Malka Older's Mimicking of Known Successes, Ann Leckie's new Radch novel Translation State, Ben Wilgus's MG graphic novel Grace Needs Space, and Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory, which used to be a 2022 release but seems to have pushed back at some point. And I'm actively in a library queue for Megan Whalen Turner's Moira's Pen 2022 story collection.

What are other people no really definitely reading this year (assuming it actually comes out, which MFTIM2 probably won't and Alecto is a tossup)? Answers are not binding. :)

How to Keep House While Drowning: a gentle approach to cleaning and organizing, KC Davis. Pretty much exactly what it says: some kind and reasonable thoughts about not giving yourself too hard a time over housekeeping, but getting done what most needs to get done or what will most improve your life. Which, sure, yes, good, but it didn't really end up speaking to most of what I find most difficult, wasn't quite the book I was hoping for. (I feel too lazy to really try to write up what kind of book I am looking for, but it would have chapters like "you only have control of your own actions and yet your house has a bunch of other people in it" and "you grew up in a different size of house than you now live in so your sense of how much stuff you should be able to own is fundamentally off by 30%".)

His Secret Illuminations, Scarlett Gale. Het romance novel by someone whose fanfic I'm a big fan of. I've read so many het romances with big burly warrior dudes and delicate little ladies, so I was delighted to read this delicate little monk swooning over his big burly warrior lady. This is the first half of a duology but really more like the first half of one long book; the second one promises to be even more femdommy. I was wishing the other day for queer readalikes for all the het romances but I will also take this sort of trope subversion, yay.

Trouble the Saints, Alaya Dawn Johnson. I have Definitely Been Finally Reading This Book This Month for over a year, while Hugo deadlines and bookclubs and library queues have always made something else the actual next thing. But now I really finally have!

I have the utmost respect for Johnson as an author - Summer Prince is one of the best works of YA science fiction I've ever read (here is my initial review; I reread it for book club this past winter and loved it all over again), and Love is the Drug is forever memorable to me as the first time I really *got* the near-future US as dystopia (review here). Like, not my first US-set dystopia at all, I had already read pretty much all of the dystopia classics, but I think I always thought of them as science fiction or alternate history, some other fork of the timeline or provoking what-if, and then here's Johnson, like, no, maybe the actual US you recognize is something people need to escape.

So I had high hopes for whatever interesting and unexpected thing Johnson might hit me with in her latest novel! Unfortunately I did not get this book at all. I mean, I feel like usually I can tell what an author is trying to do whether it's working for me or not - did they have a cool worldbuilding idea, were they drawn to the pathos or humor of some situation, am I supposed to be getting a romance zing or a vindication zing or a heist zing, are they trying to dissect some particular character trait or write something that has the nuance and ultraspecificity of "real life". But here I feel like I don't even know what book Johnson thinks she wrote. I guess it's noir? So, like, the inevitable playing out of circumstances? Stark, heightened, bleak? Do I mean tragedy? It is very much a book about no-longer-young people who are confronting their past choices and their failure to have done better, and, I don't know, that seems like a theoretically relevant topic to me, but in practice I just felt like nothing was actually happening or no one was actually doing anything. The stuff about passing, and the choices and consequences thereof, was strong, but it didn't quite form an arc. Near the end I felt like she was maybe getting somewhere interesting when the perspective zoomed back a bit to talk about "the hands" as a post-Reconstruction phenomenon, but then it didn't quite land anywhere for me. I don't know, I hope it did land for someone, and I hope it sold well enough that we get to see Johnson's next book. "This book was actually great and I was just too dumb to get it" would be an excellent outcome here! I am mostly pleased that I can finally stop meaning to read it.

(I guess I have not said in this particular forum but I have been in covid at-home isolation for ten days. Hopefully testing negative and getting to go downstairs this evening. It has been fantastic for my productivity in the very specific area of closing open browser tabs - I haven't been keeping exact count but I would guess I've closed more than four dozen tabs. Things I was meaning to read that I finally read, and things I was meaning to read that I gave myself the gift of not reading, and things I was meaning to do something about that it was too late to do something about that I admitted and let go, and even a few things I could actually do the thing about. I still have a lot of tabs open (again, I don't have an exact count, there probably is a way to get that but I've never done it) but I think I've cut the total something like in half. And I've managed to do a few other things in a similar spirit, working on my inbox and some similar low-key to-do-list items. I don't know how different this will make anything when I get out. But maybe a little.)