#16: This IS my happy face

Actual Updates

So last month I said I may be moving and one of the drawbacks of that is that I’ll certainly lose friends. Do you want to know what happened right after I published that? Someone unsubscribed! Please understand I find this terribly funny and am not crying myself to sleep over it! The timing was too perfect.

That said, though, I feel like one good reason people might unsubscribe is that this has been a sort of relentless catalog of misery, and I get it if you don’t want to read something that’s glum and grim all the time. So, with that in mind, here is some stuff I feel pretty good about.

My kid has started preschool! He should really have started it back in the fall, but last fall we weren’t in a hurry to send him anywhere, or in fact leave our house at all. He’s having a whale of a time, I’m getting work done (until he gets home, when he wants to cram a whole day’s worth of hangs into the remainder of the afternoon, which unfortunately starts before my work day is done), he even has a little friend whom he specifically attempts to make laugh. In case there was any doubt that this kid was my kid. Is he successfully eating his lunch there? Hahaha, no, of course not, but we can’t have everything. He’s even doing a moderately ok job of getting ready in the morning in time to get out the door on time without too many battles. Once he gets the kinks ironed out I think he’s going to really thrive there.

My parents, in BC, are getting vaccinated! My dad’s had his first shot, and my mom’s is next week. It continues to surprise me that the rollout there has been slower than the rollout here - I know they made various choices, on a government level, that led to this outcome, but really I’m more surprised that we’re doing better at it here! The general population here in Massachusetts can start registering in a couple weeks, too. I know it’s not a magic bullet and we’re not safe safe once we have it, still gotta take precautions around unvaccinated people and proceed carefully in general, but it’s just going to be one big mental load off and I’m looking forward to it.

There’s also something fairly decent that happened at work - I can’t get into the specifics, but I was incredibly nervous about how my presentation was going to be received, and it actually went over so well that I’m going to do it again fairly soon. I don’t know why I expect people to look down on, roll their eyes at, publicly disparage, etc., things that I like (jk! I absolutely do know why!), but every time I put something I care about out there in front of people, I want to die. It’s always monumentally surprising when nothing bad happens; when people are actively complimentary about it, I’m always utterly lost and undone.

Well. As you see, I couldn’t keep my cynical ass out of the way even when trying to be cheery. But I tried! And trying is half the battle.

Some Links

Phew, this one is A Lot. A Bestselling Author Became Obsessed With Freeing a Man From Prison. It Nearly Ruined Her Life.

I am still retraining my brain on this! And that’s an endeavour worth doing; there are other, better targets for smart mouth remarks than single-use tools. Trying to remind myself to ask “who does this help?” and approach that in a spirit of honest inquiry. Products Mocked as “Lazy” or “Useless” Are Often Important Tools for People with Disabilities

Guess what? In a complete lack of surprise, that whole 50s pulp-novel panic about women’s prisons being full of “dangerous” and actively-recruiting lesbians was not just The Heteros Being Upseteros as usual, it was also directly related to racism! Lesbians in Prison: The Making of a Threat

You know, every month there’s one link that I just know is going to get all the clicks. 18th-Century Dildo Found in Bog

How about a Twitter thread on the history of velvet as a fabric? This was fascinating to me. Plus: pictures of great historic dresses!

From one textile to another! This one’s not only about a lost art, but also about colonialism ruining everything (as always) and scandalous naked dresses of yore! The Ancient Fabric That No One Knows How to Make

If you’re not reading Hunter Harris’ newsletter yet, I don’t know what else I can do for you. This isn’t the most recent one but that just means you have more to catch up on, doesn’t it? In Their Flop Era1

SMART SQUIDS! I can’t quite pin down why I feel like this is somewhere relatively high on the ominousness scale. My initial comment on it when this link was shared in a work channel was “it’s the Cthulhu of it all” and as far as an explanation goes, that’s as good as it’s going to get. A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed For Human Children

Ever read a book and wonder why someone is referred to as “The Earl of W___” or something? Wonder no longer! The Dostoevsky Dash: The Reasons for Dashed Out Information in Literature

Tunes I’ve Been Listening To Lately

I can’t tell if this is a parody of country songs or if it’s in earnest, but I don’t care.

There are a lot of songs on this album that are really excellent, but when I was trying to pick one, I realized that this one gets stuck in my head the most of all, even when it wasn’t one of the ones I was trying to pick between.

The thing about this song is that I think I know it until I start trying to sing along with it, at which point I realize that I do not. It’s all the place names! I have no idea what goes where!

This Month’s Top 5: References I’ve made lately that haven’t landed

Before you ask, yes, I am actually a double Gemini.

1. When my kid was playing with a toy seal and needed me to sing a seal-related song, I busted into “Kiss from a Rose.” BAYBAY!

2. Going on a tangent about Valient Thorr during my D&D game

3. Pulling a Jack-from-LOST “We have to go back” during my other D&D game

4. Promising to say a bad word, namely “guts,” in honor of Beverly Cleary passing away. This one got utter crickets. Is that not an equally classic Ramona moment as the boi-oi-oing curls or squeezing out all the toothpaste? Just me?

5. Oh, did someone bring up North Carolina? Well then of course I am going to say “come on and raise up” - this one was not a total failure the time I deployed it recently, but it usually is and so it’s on the list in spirit.

Honorable mention to literally any “sorry to this man” reference I make or have made, ever.

Well, okay, have a great April and don’t forget that the British royal family would rather launch an investigation into whether Meghan Markle was mean to her staff than into whether Prince Andrew is a sex offender.