hey love, I'm an inconstant satellite

I got a text from my mother at 8:10 this morning, finally, after no contact since she blew me off on December 2. All it said was, "Arriving Delta at 5:13. Shall I just cab it? See you tonight"

I wrote back and then heard nothing all day.

...

...

So her flight landed ten minutes ago, and I texted her again.

Oh, hey, I finally got a response. Guess I'm heading home to meet her there. Good to know, Mom, thanks.

The polite thing to do when you bleed is to clean up your own damn biohazards. I didn't agree to be exposed to that.

Also how did you live past 40 without knowing how to clean up a broken glass? You hurt yourself and there were still shards (on the floor and the counter!). Seriously: broom and wet paper towel, pieces into a paper bag. It's not that hard.

Today I am feeling too crap to do the work I would like to do, so instead I have paid my medical bills (in the sense that they are now on a credit card anyway) and written to my confusing health insurance people about getting counseling. If that means I cry at work today, then SO BE IT, I am great and anyone with a problem can go fuck themselves.

Mostly things are being very very stressful right now, because I am learning that one should NEVER EVER use U-Haul's U-Box service. For one thing, everyone I have spoken to there assured me that it is 100% impossible to change the payment method on an order after the order is placed, which... is a thing that businesses can do...? Not U-Haul, though! Also I have spent multiple hours on the phone talking to over a dozen people, getting nothing but runaround and confusion from people who were mostly rather nice but entirely unable to help me, because they almost to a one mentioned needing more training. Once I had found, through sheer luck, the one department that is able to change orders in the computer system, they proved to be unable to change them usefully -- my stuff's guaranteed-delivery-by date is now LATER than before. Aaaand last night when I called in having never gotten a confirmation for the promised pod pickup last Friday, I discovered that no such pickup had occurred, it was scheduled for this coming Wednesday. Ask rushthatspeaks and gaudior how happy I was then. I talked to the location manager, who said he would try to expedite it, but basically I am planning to move to my new apartment without my stuff being there (however frustrating that may be, and it SO IS) because NONE OF WHAT I WAS PROMISED IS TRUE. There will be some fucking refunds over this, I tell you what.

But! On Saturday for almost the whole day I was able to ignore that clusterfuck, and here are some good things.

1. When I was heading out to do errands, I found adorable free art on the sidewalk! I almost went past it to do my shopping, but decided I'd better grab it and take it home right away. There is a leopard and a giraffe, who must be like the giraffe first-grade teacher because she's leading three little giraffes, and they're all in a very flat-looking jungle. It's great.

2. Subsequently I went back out again and did my errands like an adult.

3. Nap.

4. For the first time here, I had a good interaction at the video store. Having watched The Fortune Cookie last night and found it dark and upsetting more than funny, I have to retroactively question the guy's judgement, but it was awfully nice to talk to an employee at that store who had the slightest interest in talking to customers. Plus, they had a display of Star Trek novels for $2.50, which included Uhura's Song in great shape, and when I bought it I think I managed to promote Hellspark to him effectively!

5. I had a lovely walk home from Porter in the still-humid-but-cool dusk, including a stop at the yogurt shop (where I resisted feeling like a jerk and told them how to cook their mochi a little longer to stop it being chalky, because it's been that way twice now and I want to eat it if it's good!) and walking a way I hadn't gone before to tie my mental map of the area together. There was a big pavilion set up outside Harvard Yard where they often put them for events, but no event right then, so a little kid was riding their bike around in it, which cheered me up even more.

6. Joss Whedon's 2012 film of Much Ado About Nothing is not perfect, but it's mostly very good, and there were several points that I've never seen done so well before. Unfortunately the person I was watching it with hasn't seen/read it a million times and didn't have subtitles, which made it a lot harder to follow. Sorry, J. I may watch it again myself before I take it back, though. :)

At conference all day. Filled with hate despite cool science. (Well, awkward situation with PI is awkward, but.)

Found international market at Kanayama Station on the way home! Overpriced as fuck, but had Indian and Thai and American food OMG. Once I go to a market with more than three veggies in it, there will be green curry.

Currently eating the HELL out of a can of Hormel chili with cheddar tortilla chips while HIDING IN MY ROOM.

Well, I feel like I failed right now. I was just on a panel about self-objectification and geek girls, which I am competent to talk about in a cultural way. Unfortunately it was taken in a direction that was All About Cosplay At Cons, which I am not so knowledgeable about, and apparently I am the only one who thinks LESS objectification OVERALL would be better than ONLY having people who aren't thin-white-pretty-abled-etc. claim their ability to feel sexy by wearing revealing stuff in public. I think that can be great! I also think it can be problematic, for cultural reasons that the panel's source material addresses but our discussion kept veering away from.

And maybe I should be sorry, but I'm not: I do think individuals have a responsibility for the messages they're sending to others in public, regardless of how they personally feel about the outfit. (See "In Defense of Slave Leia" -- which I like a lot, I just disagree with the conclusion. Not every woman gets empowered.) The personal is political. I didn't expect to be alone in saying that at Wiscon.

So (1) the panel went wrong for me to begin with; the mod kept asking questions based solely in cosplay and cons, so we never really got to my material. (While I am annoyed with the result, it was a legitimate interpretation of the panel; I just wish we'd talked in advance so we could have modulated based on everyone's input.)
(2) We were missing a panelist due to injury. We got a substitute toward the end, and I really wish she'd been there all along! Up until then we had nobody who cosplays regularly, nobody familiar with the community, which it sounds like can be really great and supportive.
(3) I undoubtedly came off more extreme than I felt because it seemed like no one was hearing the cultural stuff I was trying to convey. THERE ARE CULTURAL FORCES, PEOPLE. Sometimes you want to dress up sexy because you're told to want that. No one is immune! Kids and babies are incredibly adept at picking up language and cultural cues, and social animals like us have evolved to be excellent at conforming because conformers don't get killed by their social groups. What I actually think is: when we know what our environmental factors are, we (yay humans!) can consciously choose to conform or not, and there are powerful choices to be made on both sides.

I wanted to talk about the Science Cheerleaders, man. And fucking Team Unicorn. Clearly cosplay is a huge topic that everyone wants to discuss, though. We didn't get to a quarter of the audience questions. Maybe I'll attend that panel next year (to hear what a jerk I was?). Hopefully I can be on one eventually that talks about the broader geek culture in a way that's more interesting to me.

I am all grouchy today, so I give you something highly absurd.



This is from a game in which my female character grew a full beard in her jail cell, so clearly the developer's understanding of sexual dimorphism is limited, but: breasts are made of flesh.

Today I once again had the annoying problem where graphs from Excel 2011 cannot be pasted into Illustrator CS4 without turning all text into strings of non-letter symbols. My wish to wallow in the misery of others like myself led me to discover, deep in a comment thread on the Adobe site, the fact that the problem is actually Microsoft's default fonts. If you change the font to something reasonable, like Helvetica, the problem is solved. WTF.

Anyway, it's a pain to change all the fonts manually on each graph produced, so one would think that changing the default font in Excel Preferences would help. No! Only the spreadsheet cells use that format. The graphs pay it no mind.

Apparently what you have to do is make a new "theme" (I called mine HELVETICA DAMMIT) and manually select it in each file. And I thought I hated Office 2011 before.

From mail to marzipan_pig:

I have just gotten A RESULT from MY SOFTWARE and it took for freakin' ever and I would have loved to have it WEEKS AGO but it is GOOD.

Off to Japan tomorrow! I spent largish amounts of money yesterday on presents for my hosts (Theo Chocolate), presentation outfit (Calvin Klein dress on the comparative cheap), and a sufficiently femme laptop bag (ratty backpack will not do). New haircut from Monday was way cute until washing and now will take getting used to again, alas.

Because (1) House republicans are ten years old: "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act" is really your idea of an appropriate name for an official government action?

And (2) Rick Santorum is an evil, disgusting man. (Not a surprise at all, sadly, though his sheer brazenness is.)