But when the rising waters scatter you, who's going to warm you?

[sovay]

I just got back from wandering around with spatch in the blasting blue-freezing dusk because I got sick of being in so much pain that all I wanted to do was lie on a couch and try to get a refund on my internal organs. I recognize this is a bit like hitting yourself with a hammer to distract from the fact that you just walked into a door, but it was a really beautiful evening nonetheless. Construction proceeds apace on the GLX. We can no longer get up onto even the footbridge over School Street, but the intermingling noises of the rotary drill rig down on the tracks and the backhoe at the top of the cut had echoed into an off-kilter industrial beat that Rob said was perfect music for a hellmouth. "Good sound design, planet!" I said. A string of Herzog flatcars went by at our feet and added some polyrhythms.

The list of actors who have turned up in my dreams now includes Burn Gorman, whom a friend of a friend brought to a party. He was cheerful, conversational, and somewhat geeky, which at least does not contradict the impression I've gotten from gifsets of conventions. I still feel the primo wish fulfillment at work here was the concept of attending a party with friends in the first place.

A box of books and mermaidish things arrived yesterday courtesy of yhlee. I had to inform him that my niece bogarted the mermaid stickers on sight, but I kept all the books, including Jane Yolen's Sister Fox's Field Guide to the Writing Life (2013) and Janine A. Southard's Silk & Steel: A Queer Speculative Adventure Anthology (2020), and the sea-dice full of shells and sand.

selkie sent me this thread by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on Deuteronomy 22:5; it is worth reading.

I am now going to lie on the couch and watch an episode of Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001) that skygiants has interested me in. Said semi-facetiously, because I really did enjoy as much of that show as phi screened for me in 2015: I will do a lot for the popular reception of J. Robert Oppenheimer. [edit] Indeed: "The day when we tested the Cascade, when I saw that blinding light, brighter than a thousand suns, I knew at that moment exactly what I had become."

Comments

[selkie]

I am rebuilding my stability shingle by shingle on a foundation of delightful Shanghainese food. I still wish you could be at a party with Burn Gorman, and not in pain, besides.

[gwynnega]

I hope your pain level decreases soonest!

[asakiyume]

Thanks to this entry, I went running off to image-search a Herzog flatcar. I love what I end up learning, reading your entries (and am always impressed by the rich and varied terminology you have at your fingertips).

I hope the rotary drill and the backhoe were able to provide a brief distraction from the pain.

[sovay]

I hope your pain level decreases soonest!

Thank you! I could do with the ironic con crud from virtual Arisia also fucking off!

[sovay]

I am rebuilding my stability shingle by shingle on a foundation of delightful Shanghainese food.

That sounds like a very fine way to do it. I used leftover Taiwanese, hot goat's milk with honey, and some of the last of the Girl Scout cookies we ordered from your child.

I still wish you could be at a party with Burn Gorman, and not in pain, besides.

Thank you. I think it'd be cool.

*hugs, carefully, so as not to cause our respective physical machineries to dissolve*

[sovay]

I love what I end up learning, reading your entries (and am always impressed by the rich and varied terminology you have at your fingertips).

I appear incapable of reacting to this compliment without saying something self-puncturing, so I slamming my desk drawer shut on Tiny Wittgenstein and saying thank you!

I hope the rotary drill and the backhoe were able to provide a brief distraction from the pain.

It was actually pretty great. I retain ambivalent feelings toward the GLX, but I do like railroads.

[thisbluespirit]

I do hope you feel better soon. And here's to real parties eventually, although I suppose at least dream ones can have favourite actors as well as friends! ♥

[poliphilo]

I once saw the actual Burn Gorman. Ailz and I were sitting in a hospital waiting room- and so was he. I did my best to pretend I wasn't scoping him out. I suppose he must live somewhere round here.

[oracne]

I am sorry you're in pain. Glad you got to go out, though.

[selkie]

*whines* Why are bodies, though?!
...I am jacked on coffee and legal painkillers and I hear that was a perennial favorite of those Very White Dude Writers in the Fifties, so I cannot wait to see what I come up with today. All I had planned was aspidistra.

Might get a ficus instead.
*hugs*

[sporky_rat]

It's always so neat to see people you've seen on the television (or other screens) in a real life places, like hospital or grocery store.

[mrissa]

Sometimes hitting yourself with a hammer to distract from the fact that you jsut walked into a door is a really, really sensible thing to do, in disability metaphor terms. Solidarity.

[dramaticirony]

Hope Voyager is a successful distraction!

So many cool people love that show. I need to go back to it--I was a bit burned out on episodic Trek at the time, but suspect it will be a welcome change from all the interwoven story arcs that prestige TV has wrought.

[sovay]

I do hope you feel better soon. And here's to real parties eventually, although I suppose at least dream ones can have favourite actors as well as friends!

Thank you! It is true that my chances of running into Burn Gorman in person are technically non-zero, but my chances of Leslie Howard are a lot lower.

[sovay]

I once saw the actual Burn Gorman. Ailz and I were sitting in a hospital waiting room- and so was he.

That's really neat! My family once observed Roy Scheider in the cafeteria of the American Museum of Natural History, and I ran into Sam Waterston in a grocery store in New Haven. (I think it is my best celebrity story. I was clinically dehydrated and complimented his eyebrows.)

[sovay]

I am sorry you're in pain. Glad you got to go out, though.

Thank you. It made me happier than staying in.

[sovay]

Solidarity.

Thank you. I did like the trains better than lying on the couch.

[sovay]

Hope Voyager is a successful distraction!

Sufficiently so that I want to write about it! I just feel like hell and am not sure of the odds. My ironic virtual con crud has progressed.

I bounced off Voyager at the time when I first saw it, but I didn't watch a lot of television beyond Babylon 5 at that point in my life and it seems that the pilot and the second half of the third-to-fourth-season cliffhanger were not representative of the series at its best; in 2015 phi showed me a selection of favorite and characteristic episodes and I was really impressed. When it was off, it seems to have been off by light-years, but when it was on, it could be brilliant. One of the Doctor-centric episodes was one of the hardest pieces of science fiction I'd seen on Star Trek and this one I just finished managed to carry off an Oppenheimer analogy without being anvillicious, which I'd have sworn couldn't be done in this franchise. Also just a nice character piece, which I always appreciate.