Was it right for you to stay? Was it wrong to walk away?
It is amazing the things that haunt a person who is just trying to get to sleep. There I am in the wolf-hours of the morning, having put in some dedicated effort to cool down from a thing that upset me right before bed, and like a picture postcard from a personal enemy my brain zaps in an interaction I hadn't thought of in years. I must have been about thirteen, because I was still doing archery in North Andover instead of Dedham; the person I knew best at the range beside the instructor was a woman with short silver hair who had started about the same time I did. We were talking about equipment—I can't remember what I wanted, although the chances are good it was new arrows, but she declared that she was going to reward herself with a new sight "when [she] hit thirty." She meant, of course, when she achieved the highest possible score of all three arrows of an end clustered within the concentric gold ten-rings at the center of the target. I said curiously, "How old are you now?" Considerably after the fact, I recognized I had reproduced a pattern of joke that is so much older than dirt that it's a recurring bit of vaudeville in The Great Muppet Caper (1981), but in the moment it took me one of those slow-dawning stomach-drops to understand the reactions around me and why my older friend was roaring, "Hold your tongue, young Sonya!" which was so archaically reproachful, I felt like Peregrin Took on the spot. I can't remember how I managed the apology, which I hope she believed; it didn't sear into my memory in the same detail. I still couldn't tell you her age. Now with any luck I have sufficiently desensitized the story that it won't pop scaldingly back into my head while I'm lying in the dawn-dark tonight. I've sort of gone back to not sleeping. Have some links.
1. Almost seventy years after the publication of Alan Turing's "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" (1952), our understanding of what are now called Turing patterns has progressed to the point where they can be introduced into colonies of E. coli and look really cool. I remember earlier research manipulating the reaction-diffusion process within individual cells to create bacterial letters. I wonder what our patterns are.
2. I enjoyed this interview by Tananarive Due with Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins about The Silence of the Lambs (1991).![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks showed me that film.
3. Courtesy ofselkie: a votive amulet from Athens and a petrified tree on Lesbos.
4. Courtesy ofspatch: the guiña, melanistic edition.
5. Actually, just admire this tweet of his.
There is a full moon; it is Purim; I will be making hamantashn with my mother tomorrow. It was the last holiday we celebrated normally in 2020. And now here we are again. I have nothing more profound than that. There are people whose names should be blotted out.
1. Almost seventy years after the publication of Alan Turing's "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" (1952), our understanding of what are now called Turing patterns has progressed to the point where they can be introduced into colonies of E. coli and look really cool. I remember earlier research manipulating the reaction-diffusion process within individual cells to create bacterial letters. I wonder what our patterns are.
2. I enjoyed this interview by Tananarive Due with Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins about The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
rushthatspeaks showed me that film.3. Courtesy of
selkie: a votive amulet from Athens and a petrified tree on Lesbos.4. Courtesy of
spatch: the guiña, melanistic edition.5. Actually, just admire this tweet of his.
There is a full moon; it is Purim; I will be making hamantashn with my mother tomorrow. It was the last holiday we celebrated normally in 2020. And now here we are again. I have nothing more profound than that. There are people whose names should be blotted out.
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If it’s any consolation, there’s an extensive Tumblr thread about how academia is the perfect hideout for vampires in part because anybody there can look any age and it indicates very little...
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Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (1991) posits similarly about fairies.