My love has concrete feet, my love's an iron ball
A significantly larger percentage of yesterday was spent trudging doggedly through snow-blasted wind tunnels than I had even prepared for. The good news is that the sunlight was brilliant, I got some great views of Boston under snow, and I still have all my fingers and toes. Today, with one unavoidable exception, I dedicated myself to staying indoors and not risking my luck a second time. It is so solidly, gaspingly cold outside that even with the heat on in the apartment I am mostly living in a pile of blankets on the couch and treasure whenever a cat comes over to add its warmth to mine. Someday I will write properly about Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), but today is not that day.
I re-read Madeleine L'Engle's Many Waters (1986) last night for the first time in at least a decade. The seraphim and the nephilim hold up: the colors of their wings and eyes, their names and animal hosts, the shape-change and nonhumanness. The quantum unicorns remain a brilliant conceit, as do the tiny mammoths. I like Yalith, taken to God merkabah-style. The ways in which the wickedness of the descendants of Cain is sexually coded and concentrated in the temptress character of Tiglah, with her shallow, selfish hedonism and too-on-the-nose metaphor of sweet perfumes covering up offputting smells, leapt out at me this time, not pleasantly. It's much more conservative than I think of L'Engle as being. I do appreciate her making Ham the fairest-skinned of Noah's sons.
In latest news of my alien biology, I am on a medication which normally increases appetite—that's not why I'm on it, that's just a side effect so well-documented I was warned about it in advance—and so naturally it's working on me as an appetite suppressant. I am finding it physically unnerving. It's not the same as not wanting to eat because of pain or depression or missing a meal because I'm absorbed in work: I am used to making myself eat under those circumstances. I am not used to my body simply feeling as though it doesn't need food, as if I had eaten recently or were still running off a substantial meal, because then when I try to make myself eat it feels like I'm going to make myself sick instead. This morning I ate the top off an oatmeal scone. The rest of the scone felt like way too much food and I passed it off onto![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch. And then this afternoon I got up from the couch and my vision turned to white noise because the only thing I had eaten all day was some maple glaze and like a micrometer of oats. For dinner I made myself squid ink pasta with tomato kipper sauce; it smelled and tasted good and I ate a little more than a bowl. The remains have been stashed in the refrigerator because Autolycus feels strongly that just because I have no appetite for my food is no reason for him not to eat it. I recognize that I would almost certainly be even more unnerved if I were suddenly starving all the time, but it really does feel like someone just flicked off a switch in my brain and it is not pleasant. Corporeality is complicated.
I re-read Madeleine L'Engle's Many Waters (1986) last night for the first time in at least a decade. The seraphim and the nephilim hold up: the colors of their wings and eyes, their names and animal hosts, the shape-change and nonhumanness. The quantum unicorns remain a brilliant conceit, as do the tiny mammoths. I like Yalith, taken to God merkabah-style. The ways in which the wickedness of the descendants of Cain is sexually coded and concentrated in the temptress character of Tiglah, with her shallow, selfish hedonism and too-on-the-nose metaphor of sweet perfumes covering up offputting smells, leapt out at me this time, not pleasantly. It's much more conservative than I think of L'Engle as being. I do appreciate her making Ham the fairest-skinned of Noah's sons.
In latest news of my alien biology, I am on a medication which normally increases appetite—that's not why I'm on it, that's just a side effect so well-documented I was warned about it in advance—and so naturally it's working on me as an appetite suppressant. I am finding it physically unnerving. It's not the same as not wanting to eat because of pain or depression or missing a meal because I'm absorbed in work: I am used to making myself eat under those circumstances. I am not used to my body simply feeling as though it doesn't need food, as if I had eaten recently or were still running off a substantial meal, because then when I try to make myself eat it feels like I'm going to make myself sick instead. This morning I ate the top off an oatmeal scone. The rest of the scone felt like way too much food and I passed it off onto
spatch. And then this afternoon I got up from the couch and my vision turned to white noise because the only thing I had eaten all day was some maple glaze and like a micrometer of oats. For dinner I made myself squid ink pasta with tomato kipper sauce; it smelled and tasted good and I ate a little more than a bowl. The remains have been stashed in the refrigerator because Autolycus feels strongly that just because I have no appetite for my food is no reason for him not to eat it. I recognize that I would almost certainly be even more unnerved if I were suddenly starving all the time, but it really does feel like someone just flicked off a switch in my brain and it is not pleasant. Corporeality is complicated.
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* There are also some sympathetic victims — the unicorn, one of the other daughters-in-law, and said DiL’s sister Lucy who is an australopithecene.
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Whoa.
Noah's middle son is traditionally Ham: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Though if you already have one of them married to Lucifer, you can probably do whatever you like with birth order.
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Ham would make sense if Not Wanted on the Voyage is turning the flood story inside out, because his extra-Biblical reputation is as the son who was cursed.
(Textually, his son was cursed and nothing in the Tanakh says why it worked out that way, cue millennia of speculation that drifts into some pretty ridiculously racist areas, whee.)