Month: February 2022

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I think I can be forgiven

…for falling off the wagon over the last week or so, between going back to the office for the first time, starting a professional development course, and the sort of creepingly ubiquitously distracting awfulness of what is going on in Ukraine as I type.

I think I will try to keep conversation on that particular matter to a relative minimum here; there are many who can discuss such things with more insight than I have. It is heartbreaking and more than a little terrifying.

It is strange to me, though, that somehow the rest of life is…still going. That we finished up our watch of the Ring Cycle and, right on time, started a playthrough of Elden Ring over the weekend. That I made a meal plan and went to the grocery store and thought to boil some eggs and folded laundry and did…all of the other things, even though an amber alert late last week may have given me a momentary heart attack as it did many others. That I did homework and prepared for tonight’s session of this professional development course, as I always do.

I keep waking up not dead, I suppose. It’s a start.

And, should the very worst happen, I suppose at least it’ll be over with pretty quickly for me, so that’s a mercy.

For now, it’s pretty quiet, but it is a very, very weird feeling.

I wonder what will be next.

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So today I read a piece about how browsing isn’t so much a thing any longer.

This strikes me as both true and – as someone who has quite enjoyed long afternoons wandering over to the local bookshop and just…seeing what there was to see – rather depressing. I like puttering around; I like exploring. I have missed it tremendously during this long time of Not Very Much.

At least there are things beginning to happen, I suppose; today was my first day back in the office in a very great while. This meant quite some time today went toward moving all my things from one desk to another to support social distancing, for example – and wiping dust off things, organizing papers, making sure everything’s in order with my dishes and such…

And then there was a group meeting tonight for classwork – and, oh yeah, also all the everything what with us maybe being on the brink of another world war or similar, and…

Yeah. I think I’m tired.

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A non-comprehensive list

…of things I have caught myself daydreaming about doing over the last couple of weeks:

  • Spending some time building maps in Dungeon Alchemist, once it is released in March, then using these as the basis to build a little module. Offer this as a freebie to friends of mine who are running campaigns where dungeon crawls might feasibly happen.
  • Planning an elaborate dinner party that is based around the principles of the Great Work of alchemy – so, for example, the first amuse-bouche represents calcination, and so on. There are potentially a lot of phases, so it would have to be a “many small plates” kind of affair – or else you’d have to do a drink pairing for each that would represent a phase. Bonus points if I could arrange it such that the ingredients for each course had the right concordances.
  • Playing Persona 4 Golden, to re-visit a world I enjoyed very much the first time.
  • Attempting to put together a trip to Ireland themed entirely around folklore and ballads.
  • Playing in a roleplaying campaign again. (I miss the one that would become my benchmark for all future campaigns; would love to reconnect with that energy for a while.)
  • Going for dinner somewhere I’ve never been before, and then to the theatre for a show.
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Unreliable narration

A few days ago I was poking around the random site results on Marginalia (I’ve recently linked this, but if anyone reading this missed it: It’s a search engine that deliberately emphasizes the weird little sites that don’t have a lot of “weight.” They’re not necessarily popular, so larger search engines like Google won’t recommend them.)

A lot of these are the kind of thing you’d expect to make up such results: tiny little blogs and personal sites. Shrines to favorite characters. Members of webrings (Web rings! Those still exist!) People who make loads and loads of dedicated little animated link buttons that you can download and use to link back to them. It’s a weirdly nostalgic little reminder of how the internet was before everything became an app; before all of the weird nooks and crannies and edges were filed off into a nonthreatening corporate realm of sans-serif fonts and vowel-less names and vague promises to reinvent the [insert everyday object or concept here].

One thing that is…completely expectedly popular on sites like these: Assortments of personality test results. A site owner may list themselves as an Enneagram type 5 and an INFJ and a Choleric type and also Lawful Neutral…and so on. I am not surprised to see these. I took most of these at some point in history myself (Enneagram type 4w5, INFP, Neutral Good, for the record.)

Looking at these also makes me ponder something about those personality tests: I wonder how many of us take those more for validation of our ideas about ourselves than we do to learn something about ourselves. Surely I cannot be the only teenager who was disappointed to find that an assortment of responses to multiple-choice questions determined that I was a warm and fuzzy loyalist who was kind and committed to people rather than something exciting, like a sensitive artist or a brave adventurer?

I mean, the more accurate way of looking at it is probably that I have some of both of those things in me; I care a lot about my friends and relations, yes, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I also long to be a creative person, and – more than that – to really feel like I belong in the land of creative people, which is much harder if you are like me and regularly bump into our old friend imposter syndrome on the bus.

From there of course it gets a lot more existential – who gets to decide where the bar is that one must get over in order to be “really” creative? Is “creativity” a thing you have, or a thing you do? Both? Neither?

What “counts” as a creative activity? Is cooking creative if you are following a recipe? Is writing creative if all you are doing is expressing yourself about what happened in the checkout line at the grocery store? Can something be creative if it is also analytical?

These things are so often set up as opposites, as “or”; one is either a logical left-brained robot with a genius for puzzle-solving and language OR a messy and colorful right-brained artist who is brilliant with visuals but not both, never both, never ever ever both. You are supposed to pick a side; the two camps are mortal enemies with one constantly seeking to crush the vibrant soul of the other and force it to do times tables, or something. (This is rather unfair to both the analytical and the creative brain, of course, neither of which deserves to be pigeonholed forever as either a flaky, self-important artiste or a soulless lizard-person in a sleek business suit just because they happen to be good at different jobs.)

But how would you know whether or not you already are what you want to be?

How would anyone know?

Perhaps that is the point of all the lists, really. To reassure those of us who sense that our inner narrator might be unreliable that someone, somewhere, agrees that we might be a thing we believe we are but cannot prove.

Nobody can disprove it either, not precisely, but there are some of us who will otherwise always wonder. Am I who I think I am? Am I who I want to be?

How would I know?

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So tasty, but so much I am probably mispronouncing on the menu.

So, yesterday was one of those holidays.

You know the ones – the ones that you feel a little conflicted about honoring even if you enjoy a little party every now and then, the ones where it just seems a little too much like you can feel the grinning specter of corporate profit looming over everything.

But it IS nice to have an excuse to celebrate something, especially now, and so I bought a box of chocolates and around lunchtime we realized we’d need to do SOMEthing for dinner but didn’t yet have a plan. After a brief Google search revealed that some places were doing prix fixe meals in honor of the occasion, we rolled the dice and tried shooting an email to a place to see if we could arrange some last-minute takeout from a place we’d never tried before.

To my very great surprise, the answer was “No, sorry, we’re not accepting takeout orders for tonight – but we’ve just had a couple of cancellations. Want to dine in instead?”

Well. I mean. Why not?

And so it was that we found ourselves heading down to St. Clair to try some Filipino food at Lamesa. No sooner had we pulled into the public parking space when a departing driver offered us their parking ticket, which was fortuitously paid through to the next morning. Serendipity was really with us, I suppose!

As to the dinner itself: I am by no means an authority on this particular cuisine – I think I have sampled it a grand total of once – but this was excellent in my opinion. I had:

  • An amuse-bouche of crisp wontons with a sausage filling
  • Ukoy, a kind of shrimp-and-vegetable fritter
  • A main of chicken adobo with rice
  • Mango tiramisu for dessert

All of the courses were tasty, with an interesting balance of textures and of sweet/sour/salt/acid that I think is characteristic of Filipino cuisine in general. These are big, bright, powerful flavors that are easy to linger over with a cocktail. The service was great, too, and the space is charming and cozy – in non-pandemic times I can easily imagine it being a vibrant little neighborhood spot. I’d be interested in going back in order to try some of their other offerings!

…I’d be interested in going anywhere, really. Going out now – being out in the world – really drives home how limited our environments have been during the pandemic. How little there is to do, and how much of what there IS is mediated by screens. It’s been both kind of exciting and kind of exhausting to get out and about in the World these days (I certainly find myself wanting to curl up and not engage with anyone when I get home.) I wonder how long that will take to go away? If it will go away?

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Why did we not choose this moment to go away?

This morning’s internet brings this little essay about charlatanry. There have been con men as long as there have been men, I suppose; who, I wonder, was first to try sleight of hand, first to sell nothing as something one simply must have? Who was it? Was there a stone you could tuck into your basket in the hunting and gathering days to ensure it was never empty? A charm to ensure your arrows always struck true?

Or were those perhaps articles of faith, and the abuse of that faith came later?

All one needs in order for a liar to exist is a truth that is inconvenient, but at what point do civilizations start to see true con men emerge among them?

Oh, they’re not always bad, not all the time. Some of them can even be the heroes of the piece, in this world where we all grow up with vague mistrust of the Man and a general sense that a degree of cunning is required to get ahead. Sometimes even the overtly criminal type of con man is a little more Robin Hood and a little less scammer, as in the delightful “The Great Pretender,” where our core squad of confidence-folk go after other criminals, mainly. Other folk who have been so bad, and their comeuppances are so satisfying. We love them. We wish we were as smart, as witty, as charming.

Raw “The Magician” energy, I suppose. In its purest form, all fire and heady glee at the Great Work before it.

And yet we also know there is the other kind of charlatanry. The one that promises infinite wealth if only you yourself can be charming enough to convince others to buy in underneath you. The one that promises health and vitality if only you will buy that miracle cure. The one that promises a bright, secure future, one that looks a lot like your past if you squint, if only you will follow that flag, salute just so.

Why do we not choose that moment to go away?

I suppose some of us are going away, or at least trying to. We quit Facebook (as much as it is possible to quit something that would happily buy its way into tracking every minute of our lives, anyway). We stop watching the news or logging into Twitter. We host our own websites, like this one, in a manner that another of this morning’s reads likens to a modern extension of the sixties’ “dropping out.”

Dropping out, back then, was a way to preserve your inner life, protect it from all of the things that The Man was throwing at it. Certainly feels timely now, what with so many parts of our world engineered to devour our attention, keep you “engaged” as cheaply and easily as possible so that out there in a nebulous somewhere a line will go up and a shareholder will be pleased.

Of course, we also feel guilty, now, for not engaging. There is so much in the world that is so awful, and even if we can do little about most of it, one feels that, at a minimum, one should stay informed. Perhaps, after all, there may eventually BE some meaningful action we can take, one where the smallness of our selves will not matter as much as the greatness of our intent.

Still. There must be some sort of balance one can attain, wobbly though it might be.

It is weird to think of this little writing exercise as a form of resistance – as choosing a moment to go away – but perhaps in a way it is.

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Only phoning it in a little?

Once again, it is Friday, and once again, things are a little crazy today which makes it a little hard to carve out writing time. (Not to mention the vague writing-malaise of the week: it has been hard to come up with something to write about. From which I mainly glean that I need more shit going on in my life. Thanks, COVID!)

For now, here’s a little link roundup for the day.

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There is still life after twenty-five, you know

This morning’s review of Arts & Letters Daily turned up this little personal history from someone who (as the essay states) used to sing opera. As someone who was into an array of performing arts in school, I feel this.

I mean, for me the performing side was never all that likely to happen; I am too big a girl to be seriously considered for casting in any of the most desirable roles. Always was – though oh boy did I ever get cast as sexy/slutty characters for a while there, presumably thanks to the…generosity of my endowments. I hated it; didn’t I have it in me to be intelligent, thoughtful, spiritual, whatever? And, of course, I do…but that doesn’t matter a bit when all that anyone will really care about is whether you have the “right” look for whatever they’re casting.

Perhaps fortunately for me, I really enjoyed the other half of theatre work – running lights and painting sets and managing costumes; seeing to it that all was in readiness for the big night, then watching it all come together. The technical folk seemed a bit less…highly-strung, shall we say, as well (not so odd perhaps, considering.)

Still. I can relate to this experience, I think. The intensity of pressure, that “well, goodness, you’re twenty-five so if you haven’t made it by now it’s basically over.” One wonders if anyone who attempts to go into performing arts professionally actually gets to have any fun with it; perhaps the amateur space is where it’s at in more ways than one. If only doing it didn’t require one to be basically nocturnal! (I mean, okay, I would be basically nocturnal if I were following my chronotype, but most of the rest of the people and things in my life are diurnal instead, so we’d have a real Ladyhawke thing going on.)

Last night I went to get my booster for COVID at last; again I find myself marveling a bit at just how efficient they’ve made everything. (Those poor people at registration though, having to say over and over and over again “have you been out of the country? do you have fever?” and so on seventy billion times a day.) So far so good on the symptoms front, though my left arm is absolutely killing me this morning.

And tonight I make tacos.

And I feel a little flicker of something like anger at how boring I feel writing this out. (Frustration. Related to anger, but mostly about the sensation that there are forces I can’t control that are preventing a desired outcome. Also the dominant feeling of the last couple of weeks. Sigh.)

Delightful thing of the day: this selection of abandoned villages and towns. Sort of spooky and weirdly appealing at the same time.

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WIBTA if I gave a guy a potion to make him forget his girlfriend and fall in love with me? (Gotterdammerung, part 1)

A lot of people who write tales of grand, mythic, sweeping epic things seem to feel compelled to end them with the disintegration of all of the things that make them grand and epic and sweeping. Magic fades; the legendary folk go into the west; the world is left a safer place for the Ordinary Folk who remain, perhaps, but without any of the things that made it so marvelous a place to get lost in for a series of books or films or what have you.

I’ve never understood why this is, really; adult me figures it must have something to do with the way that people who are old enough to write things have had some time to internalize the concept of entropy, and perhaps that if one is telling a just-so story about how things came to be the way they are one must eventually come to the point where…well, things become the way they are, which is almost invariably less vivid and exciting than the way they were.

Kid me, on the other hand, was regularly driven insane by this. Why on earth would you conjure such wonders only to kill them all off? (Or worse, pull off the mask and reveal that, surprise, you’ve been reading about Jesus all along, like some sort of hyper-sanctimonious episode of Scooby-Doo. I have never quite forgiven C.S. Lewis for that.)

Why did everyone seem to think that the right and proper way for the world to be was a place without any magic in it, where all there was to look forward to was laundry and paperwork and grocery shopping every week forever? It was maddening.

Is maddening, I guess; a good part of me still feels that way, and believe me, if I ever found a door into Somewhere Else I would be off like a shot, especially the way things are now.

All of which is sort of a roundabout response to having started Gotterdammerung, which we did last night. I say “started” because it’s a Project – this one’s long, guys. And it’s very much of the “and now the mythic world crumbles” school, beginning as it does with the three Norns first prophesying an end to it all before losing their gifts of prophecy forever in the first scene. (They also imply that the world tree, Yggdrasil, is dying – and, moreover, that the reason for that death may be in part because of that spear Odin crafted out of it. You know, the one that got shattered last opera. Nice job breaking it, Odin – again.)

Notably, from that point forth there is almost nobody onstage representing the powerful, legendary forces that have driven literally everything else up to this point: the vast majority of the cast are assorted mortals. We’ve got Siegfried and Brunnhilde, of course, who spend WAY longer than is strictly necessary seeing each other off before he, inexplicably, leaves her on her mountain to go questing, leaving her the Ring as a token of his love.

We’ve got three scions of the Gibichung clan, descended from a king local to…wherever this is. Gunther, oldest son, is advised by his half-brother Hagen that really, it’s about time he and his sister Gutrune got married. Problem: How to find partners for them both that will increase their prestige? No worries, Hagen’s got an answer: see, there’s this legendarily amazing woman named Brunnhilde who’d be perfect, and this hero named Siegfried who’d make a great partner for Gutrune.

The part where the proposed partners for these folks are already in a relationship with each other doesn’t seem to matter a bit to anyone, so this rapidly turns into a breathtakingly awful plan straight from Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” wherein Hagen reveals that he’s got a potion that will wipe all of Siegfried’s memories of Brunnhilde and make him fall in love with her instead. She is…a lot more fine with this than I would be.

(Reddit verdict: Everyone sucks here.)

Anyway, this being the Ring Cycle the plan is put into play immediately and goes off without a hitch. Siegfried shows up, trustingly drinks the potion, forgets all about Brunnhilde and goes absolutely wild for Gutrune, so he’s all about it when Gunther proposes they head to this mountain and pick up this Brunnhilde chick, whoever SHE is.

So…yeah. Brunnhilde gets a visitation from her sister Waltraute, one of the very few representatives of the mythic folk in this part of the story. She gets to tell us all what’s going on with the gods: Odin has apparently just straight given up (which may I guess explain why we haven’t seen him on stage at all). He’s ordered what remains of the now weak and fading Yggdrasil chopped down and piled all around Valhalla, ready to burn, and is now just sitting on his throne brooding about the impending end of everything. All he has said on the matter is that if only the ring were returned to the Rhinemaidens, all would be well and Valhalla could yet be saved.

But of course Brunnhilde cannot bring herself to part with Siegfried’s love token, so she tells Waltraute in no uncertain terms to fuck off – and then is promptly given cause to regret it when someone who sure looks a lot like Gunther (actually Siegfried, wearing the Tarnhelm) shows up, claims her as his bride, and rips the ring right off her finger.

Back at the Gibichung hall, we learn that the probable force behind this asshole plan is…Alberich, who apparently swore off love but not sex: he’s Hagen’s father, and there’s some manipulation going on behind the scenes to get that pesky ring back. There will certainly be plenty of distraction going on, what with the double wedding and all – Siegfried to Gutrune, and Gunther to an extremely depressed Brunnhilde.

…Well, an extremely depressed and enraged Brunnhilde, once she spots Siegfried and realizes he seems not to know her and is apparently totally willing to just let her be married off to some asshole – and, moreover, is still wearing the ring that was taken from her. (Siegfried may be ensorcelled but he’s still not very quick on the uptake.)

Well, Hagen needs that ring back, and Brunnhilde’s feeling pretty vengeful, so when he proposes a little old fashioned murder she’s into it, revealing that although she did cast a number of protections on him before sending him out into the world, she didn’t cover his back. All righty then, no problem: arrange a convenient hunting accident and vengeance will be hers (and the ring, doubtless, Hagen’s.)

I’m sure everyone can see where this is going, though we left off there last night.

It occurs to me that the Ring hasn’t actually DONE much here besides be a MacGuffin – at least, not onstage. Sure, we hear that it’s supposed to grant world-dominating power, but it couldn’t even let Brunnhilde keep herself from being violated when push came to shove. Shouldn’t it be seen to…do…something, before all of this is over?

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Tuesday’s not that great either

I’m sure this is not a controversial opinion, but February kind of sucks. By that time it’s been winter long enough that everyone is getting sick of it, and it’s still far too long before spring will get here, and the only holiday in sight is one that tends to…induce stress, shall we say. (Not for me, not this time; I tend to favor relatively modest “let’s just have a nice time” celebrations, and have already ordered a little surprise that unfortunately was a bit spoilt when a certain someone got to the door before me. Well, whatever; it will still be enjoyed.)

Factor in a week full of adulting-commitments taking up time in the evenings (at least one of these is my vaccine booster, so there’s that) and…yeah. Vague dissatisfaction ensues.

Trying to name this feeling. What is it? Frustration? Boredom? Both?

Things aren’t bad, is the thing. Everything is more or less fine, or at least as fine as “fine” gets in the world in which we live. (Depressing that we have to knock a -2 modifier off everything for the general aura of the world.)

But I keep picking up books and putting them back down. Starting the day with the intent to move around regularly and maybe even burn an extra calorie or two and then somehow just…not getting up from my desk for three hours. Catching myself zoning out midway through a podcast I am listening to, stabbing angrily at rewind, taking 20 minutes of time to finish 5 minutes of audio as it happens again and again and again.

Nothing is really wrong. I mean, what is the worst I can say: that sometimes I feel unappreciated? That it’s a bummer that it’s been hard to find people to play games I want to play with recently? That I feel tired and irritable and would rather like to eat half a chocolate bar except I am trying to be at least kinda sorta mindful about calories, and the sense of deprivation makes me feel a bit like chucking the nearest chair out a window? These are barely even first-world problems, let alone actual problems.

Vague feelings of unmet needs are a thing right now, I guess. I do not know what you call this. I cannot even be a Karen and demand to speak to the manager because there is no manager; no one and nothing to direct my frustration at, justified or otherwise.

Perhaps frustration is the word then. There’s a lot going on I can do nothing about that sure seems to be stopping things from being as good as they might otherwise be. Well, ok, I could in theory do something about the chocolate bar part, but I am supposed to be being A Responsible Adult.

At the moment I feel about that rather as I do about February.