So far my glorious range of medical malfunctions have had the kindness to avoid the days I’m scheduled to work at Queequeg’s Qoffee Qasa. However, today I have no hours, and my body’s taken the chance to pounce on me.

Luckily, however, I have the two best cures in the world on hand; glorious Ibuprofen, which (once you manage to eat food) makes the symptoms go away, and a beautiful Tazendra to curl up by my side and knead me into wellbeing. She’s being so very cuddly and so very sweet that I can only conclude that it’s a trick designed to convince me that I should quit my job, quit my graduate school and spend every day cuddling with her and doing nothing. The other explanation is that she just REALLY loves this bathrobe.

In other news, she’s losing her baby teeth:

This title (minus the crying) is the traditional title for posts on the nethack newsgroup where a person relates how their Nethack character died in a particularly stupid, funny, or frustrating way.

The problem with Nethack is that one gets very invested in a successful character; after such a character dies, one often cannot play the game for weeks or months. I feel certain that such a Nethackless time is ahead of me. I am in Nethack mourning.

Tinuviel, like most of my Nethack characters in the years since I won the game with a Valkyrie, was a Chaotic Elven Wizard. On about level 3 (the game goes about 50 levels deep, not counting side-branches) I found a wand of wishing with three charges. That was the first inkling I had that this character was going far further than the Gnomish King’s Wine Cellar.

Wish-equipped with silver dragon scale mail, a helm of brilliance, boots of speed and gloves of dexterity, wielding the blessed +2 Magicbane, I continued through the dungeon, and in Sokoban, found another wand of wishing. This character’s luck was insane. Through careful management and the taming of 75% of all dragons encountered, Tinuviel traversed the entire Dungeons of Doom, wrested the Bell of Opening from the Dark One, the Candelabrum of Invocation from Vlad the Impaler, the Book of the Dead from the Wizard of Yendor. Yea, she did descend unto the very depths of Gehennom and seize the Amulet of Yendor from the High Priestess of Moloch. (Needless to say, I have been playing a LOT of Nethack in the last week or so.)

She returned laboriously to the surface and fought her way through the Elemental Planes, losing her remaining pets, Piwacket III, Pete II, and Tazendra IV. With only one amulet of lifesaving left, she fought her way through angels, priests and devils to the first high altar on the Astral Plane. Neutral-aligned, not the Chaotic altar she needed to win the game. Stripped of her mana, killed and reborn for the fourth time, she fought her way to the doorway of the second temple. There stood Famine, and she slew him (once) with the last charge in her wand of death. Stepping forward, she decided to get a carrot out of her bag of holding to cure her blindness. “Y – an uncursed carrot.”

Eat, I typed. “Eat what?” is the traditional response. I typed “Y”, without thinking. When one is standing on a corpse, the response is “There is a [whatever] corpse here. Eat it?” I had just answered ‘yes’ to eating the corpse of one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

“This is instantly fatal. Would you like a list of your possessions?”

I stared, feeling suddenly queasy. How appallingly stupid, on the very threshold of victory. I started to copy paste my inventory, to save a record of my near-miss for posterity. In doing so (using the window menu for the Nethack window) I accidentally closed the window…and apparently it hadn’t saved my score yet. Tinuviel is gone, and not even her score, her ignoble fate, her record of amazing achievements, survives her. It is as if she never existed.

sniffle Maybe I’ll start playing World of Warcraft again for a while.

Update: It gets worse. I HAD another amulet of life saving stuck in a bag of holding. sniffle

Here in our house, one of us amuses herself by captioning the small furry inhabitants. Often this goes something like this:

T: Someday, I will defeat you, Old Master! I will master your Ear Fang Grasp Technique and use it to bring the world to heel!
Q: You are confident but foolish, young one! No one can stand against my sleeping wrath!

Sometimes it is less dramatic, and more like this:

T: Whatcha doooin’?
Q: Eating your food. Leave me alone.
T: Will you be my frieeeeend?
Q: No! You smell bad! Learn to wash!

As you can tell, Qubit is grumpy a lot of late.

But today, the dynamic was different, for today there was a soundtrack. I took out my hautboy and decided, rather than playing in my messy playspace, to play out on the landing — if not en plein air, then, optimistically speaking, en demi-plein air (half full air! I kill me.) The response from the felines was immediate. Whilst we of the double reed are more used to being told we sound like snake charmers — and, indeed, to emulating them in some pieces — the mammalian audience was fascinated. They paced back and forth looking curiously at the instrument. Each of them in turn climbed a nearby desk and put out the super-tentative ‘is it alive?’ paw to touch the bell of the instrument. Neither seemed particularly to trust the sound, but neither was particularly inclined to leave, either.

That was while I was warming up and playing exercises. When I broke out my adored Mozart Concerto (K 314), things changed. Soon, Tazendra started circling me and mewing in a desolate tone little befitting a warrior. Just as I was beginning to think the mewing meant something was actually amiss, Qubit charged the kitten and…started washing her face. For the rest of the oboe practice, Tazendra continued to stare at me in a disturbed manner and occasionally mew plaintively, and Qubit continued to snuggle up against her, wash her reassuringly, and generally act as if she actually liked her. She also wreathed my calves appreciatively.

It was simply bizarre. Odder yet, Qubit looked at me longingly after I stopped playing, and haunted the site where the music stand had been until at last she concluded I wasn’t going to play anymore. At that point, she ran across the room and started a fight with Tazendra. So apparently Qubit likes Mozart to the point of personality change…. That’s actually kind of creepy.

Learned a new word, courtesy of an erudite poster over on Feministe:

anomie

Useful and darkly mellifluous, with a suggestively hollow sound.

I listened to Bush’s address yesterday, on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I really didn’t want to. I had a very nice recorded book ready to shove in, but sadly, I don’t feel I have the luxury of ignoring politics these days. I can’t, in all conscience, ignore politics when my country is hemorrhaging money and credibility, deeply corrupt, and less free by the month. Oh, and when people are actually managing to revive the debate over contraception. Contra-bloody-ception. Oy.

At any rate, I listened to the whole speech. It started out reasonably smoothly. The opening paragraphs were fairly well written, and either Bush was speaking a little less choppily and awkwardly than usual, or exposure to his style is getting me used to it. I ended up having plenty of problems with the speech — it certainly wasn’t the ‘non-political’ speech his handlers had promised, it wasn’t focused on the occasion it marked, it persistently roped me into a ‘we’ I don’t feel a part of, and it assumed all Americans believe in “a loving God who made us to be free” — but my first and most important problem was the rhetoric of ‘civilization’.

The word ‘civilized’ first appeared in this context:

And we have learned that their goal is to build a radical Islamic empire where women are prisoners in their homes, men are beaten for missing prayer meetings, and terrorists have a safe haven to plan and launch attacks on America and other civilized nations.

Is America civilized? Sure, certainly by the textbook definition of ‘civilization’ beaten into my head years ago (is it still there? Hmm…surplus food supply, specialization of labor, formation of cities, and something else I cannot recall…) it is. Likewise Britain, and Spain…okay, so countries which have been targeted by terrorists are civilized. But the word has to have some reason for being there—the fact that it’s true isn’t enough, or we’d have speeches mentioning that America, Britain and Spain are all colored pink on somebody’s map in geography class. The use of the word ‘civilized’ here is serving to imply that the Arab countries from which terrorists have come are not civilized. When I heard that sentence for the first time yesterday, I said out loud, “Hey! That’s racist!” (Yes, I talk out loud alone in my car.)

When Mr. Bush later said

This struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it is a struggle for civilization.

that also struck me as racist. I recognize that the racist meaning is a few layers under the surface, but the basic problem is this: we spent several hundred years operating on the assumption that Western, predominantly white nations were Civilized and that we had an obligation to spread said Civilization to other countries, which coincidentally were peopled by non-Caucasians. That was called Colonialism. It worked so well that Colonialism is now practically a dirty word.

Civilization is a pretty low bar. We humans pretty much all have it these days. And, here’s what’s particularly offensive about this kind of Neocolonialist jargon being used against the Middle East: civilization started there. There may be questions about whether civilization only began in one place, but archeology tells us that the first place it occured was, in fact, Iraq. The poor downtrodden ‘decent people’ Bush paints as yearning for civilized countries to offer them freedom developed the systems of mathematics that underlie modern engineering and science, and inadvertently ended the European Dark Ages when the Crusaders nicked bits of their culture and knowledge and carried the loot back home. Don’t condescend to the Arab people, Mr. Bush.

And don’t misunderstand your own, either. We are supposed to believe that Arabic “people will choose freedom over [terrorists’] extremist ideology” when our country is giving up freedoms by the bushelful?

We are fighting to maintain the way of life enjoyed by free nations. And we’re fighting for the possibility that good and decent people across the Middle East can raise up societies based on freedom and tolerance and personal dignity.

We are now in the early hours of this struggle between tyranny and freedom. Amid the violence, some question whether the people of the Middle East want their freedom and whether the forces of moderation can prevail.

I question many things, Mr. President. I question foreign policy based on ‘secret’ information, I question the erasure of checks and balances, I question a leadership that doesn’t believe the function of the National Guard is to guard the nation. Most of all, I question whether a nation can in all conscience attempt to impose “societies based on freedom and tolerance and personal dignity” on others, when that nation is wiretapping its citizens, eroding the divisions between Church and State, and imprisoning people without trial. I question any society based on fear, hatred, and dogmatic nationalism.

I hear one has no cred as a starving artist until one gets a day job, so I hastened out and got one. I now sling beans and brew at a coffee establishment that shall remain nameless. I am waiting for the cred to start rolling in!

I am in the midst of writing a response/commentary to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopia based on Fundamentalism’s grab for reproductive control of women. And I continuously run into one stylistic question: what do I call the protagonist?

So far, I am using, well, “the protagonist,” but it is cumbersome. The issue is that her ‘name’ in the novel, “Offred,” is not her name. It’s a possessive title indicating she is the property of Fred (and which applies to her only so long as she is assigned to him.) By using this name, I feel I would be somehow complicit, legitimizing the protagonist’s reproductive slavery. (Yes, I know she’s fictional, but I am an English major. Words have power and I have ethical qualms about my treatment of fictional characters.)

She has a name, this fictional woman, but it is never stated. A good guess is possible from a close reading, but it’s hardly clear communication to use the possible answer to a riddle as a fact. So, I struggle on with “the protagonist,” using “Offred” only in scare-quotes, and suspecting that this quandary was precisely Atwood’s intention.

I’m reading a fascinating book for my grad school studies, Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature. It’s a well-organized collection of essays introducing the reader to Jungian thought, especially on the ‘dark side’ and the construction of the self. It was published in 1991, so perhaps times have changed enough since then that my surprise is unwarranted when I note that so far, there has been no discussion of homosexuality.

At this point, I imagine some of you may roll your eyes and think that I’m being ‘politically correct’ by demanding a little GLBT in my human psych. However, the way these theories handle gender is important. The development of the self is linked to archetypes like the ‘anima/animus’, defined as “the internalized ideal images of the opposite sex” (MtS, p. 5). While it isn’t made explicit until later, that is a sexual ideal, an ideal of attractiveness. The anima/animus is in sharp contrast to other archetypes, like the double or twin, which ARE the same gender as the person in question. It’s important to the theory that the anima/animus is the opposite gender from the person. To me, reading this, in full awareness of the many female people who aren’t attracted to males and vice versa, this constitutes a hole in the theory. It makes the theory less useful¹.

Heteronormative language like this isn’t just marginalizing or insulting to non-heterosexuals — it weakens discourse by distancing that discourse further from reality. Theories that attempt to explain or model things in the real world need to reflect that real world more closely, and that real world has gay and lesbian people in it.

Disclaimer: As I said, this book was written in 1991, so I’m not raging against its heteronormative oppression. Rather, my frustration at the holes in the theories sparked this musing on the necessity of avoiding heteronormative language in academic discourse.

¹ I do plan to do some research, or at least wiki-digging, after I finish the book and find out how and whether Jungian thought has expanded to consider non-heterosexual individuals.

I’ve finally finished Season 2 of BSG. I have but one sentence:

What the FRAK was that?

Most specific word EVER, which rawther limits its usefulness in my vocabulary, but new nonetheless!

kenosis: “the relinquishment of divine attributes by Jesus Christ in becoming human.”