Catch-up meme

[resonant]

from china_shop, because I miss you kitties daily even though I can't seem to sustain a posting habit.

So what have you been up to?
Nearly everything is going under major life changes; aside from that, mostly working and driving. I did take a long road trip with my mom, which was lovely.

Also, the kidlet and I are volunteering at the animal shelter, or, to put it another way, we perform the public service of petting cats a couple of evenings a week.

Major life changes? Same old same old?
Where even to begin ...

The spouse is done with school, ordained, and working as a Presbyterian pastor.

Unfortunately, his job is in a town of 3,000 an hour away. So from Sunday afternoon to Friday afternoon, the kidlet and I live in a quite tiny but rather charming duplex in New City, and on the weekends we live with the spouse and the cat in a rambling, eccentric, amazing 1800-vintage house provided by the church.

The church is tiny and friendly and sweet, though a bit less progressive than we would prefer.

The kidlet is 16, getting ready to be a junior in high school, and has come out as agender this year. The kidlet prefers the pronoun 'they,' but I spent four years in journalism school and find a singular 'they' kind of painful, so I'm trying to avoid pronouns altogether. This is easier when talking to the kidlet than when talking about the kidlet. Aside from wrestling with gender, the kidlet is writing fantasy and science fiction, singing, drawing, studying physics, and generally making my brain feel old.

Professionally, I'm in a frustrating place. I'm still working at Teranerd. Generally I like the company, but a massive round of layoffs shook me up; I'm bored with the work I do; also, this job won't stay in this location forever, and I have no desire to go to Minnesota when it moves. I'd like to get project management certified, but I feel like I have zero energy to devote to studying for the exam.

I adore New City and could easily settle here for good, but somehow I'm not making friends here. (Well, normally I'd be using weekends and church to look for friends, but my weekends and my church are both happening in Spouseville.)

What fandom are you in/do you spend most of your time in?
I really miss having a fandom. astolat writes Fast & Furious, so I read Fast & Furious; predatrix.livejournal.com writes Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, so I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I'm much looking forward to Marvel-universe movies but not feeling particularly fannish about them.

Where do you hang out online?
Here, if anywhere. I abandoned my old Tumblr because I couldn't handle the constant undertone of judgment and imminent attack; the kidlet helped me carefully curate a new one that subscribed to basically nothing but the kidlet's own page, some baby-animal pages, Important Birds, Ursula Vernon's personal page, Reapersun, and Iguanamouth.

What are you reading?
Lots of nonfiction about the Mississippi River, which might or might not end up being research for something fictional. I highly recommend Lee Sandlin's Wicked River: The Mississippi When Last It Was Wild.

What are you watching?
Marvel movies. The kidlet makes me look at Homestuck vids sometimes.

What are you making?
I think maybe I'm fallow? Because I'd hate to think I'd just run dry.

What are you squeeing about today?
The dumbo octopus.

If you could rope old fandom friends into a new fandom, it would be.....
I'm waiting for someone to rope me in!

I should really watch/read/dive into _______ and then come talk to you about it!
Something fantastic that I don't already know about.

What else is on your mind?
If my life were a film, all this change would happen in a nice neat montage. But I'm in the middle of it, and it's occupying pretty much all the energy I've got.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

So great to hear from you. And the singular THEY actually has ancient antecedents! I was a convert a while back.

Hang in there. Thanks for posting.

[dira]

I am still head-down in Marvel, so no help to you in the new-squee-finding department (unless perhaps the Marvel Netflix shows? I quite like Agent Carter and am already anticipating having a lot of feelings about Daredevil), but a lot of people seem to be into Maggie Stiefvater's Raven books lately in a fannish way? Or Sense8? Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries?

And regardless of fannish topic, chat is always waiting for you to come back! <3 So good to see you here!

[resonant]

It's perfectly legitimate if you take the grammatical long view (either into the future or into the past), but such a journalistic taboo!

[resonant]

You too! I'm gradually realizing that I need to do my own tiny part to keep this community alive, because it means so much to me.

[out_there]

That is very odd looking octopus. I feel a little bit bad for giggling at its appearance.

If my life were a film, all this change would happen in a nice neat montage.

Hee! Yes, and it would be a 90 second overview, not the 6-9 months of living it daily. I think a "montage option" should be available for living through times of change.

[resonant]

It would also be handy for long car trips, moving, and shampooing carpets.

[china_shop]

*waves*

I'm currently working on a fic in which one of the characters is nonbinary, and constructing unambiguous sentences with singular 'they' is much harder than I expected. It's a fun challenge, though.

Good luck finding RL friends in New City and a new fandom! Your new tumblr sounds very pleasant.

[goss]

Hi!! Great to see you round these parts! Love how many people are doing this meme. :)

[resonant]

It's going to be interesting to see how the language evolves to catch up to the reality. Yet another case where people may turn to sci-fi writers just for information about how to adapt to the part of the future that we live in.

[resonant]

Me too! Most of the time my complaints about Tumblr-dominance are just complaints, but occasionally they lead to action.

[china_shop]

Or maybe we'll copy the School children of Baltimore. :-)

[resonant]

Now that is amazing! I love those rare moments when someone gets to see language evolving.

(I read somewhere that Esperanto now has multiple generations of native speakers -- and as a result, it's developing irregularities!)

[blnchflr]

It sounds like your skills are underused/undeveloping in your job - hoping for changes for you on this front.

The last too many years I've thought I'm done falling for new fandoms, and then I eventually force myself into a new fandom on will alone or I kind of manage to fall for a new fandom after all, even if the fall isn't as hard as it was back in the day.

I was having another dearth, when at a small fan meet-up in May, people showed me hockey vids, and the rest is history? Which is another way of saying I wish someone could introduce you to hockey fandom, because while it's not unproblematic, in the mean time, it gives great .gifs and great fics :)

Best of energy to deal with the changes.

[fox]

I have recently been sipping with extreme caution at the singular-they kool-aid. I may slowly be building up a tolerance.

Also, hi res yay glad to see you!

[akacat]

I highly recommend following the San Diego Zoo's Tumblr, if you aren't already.

[kass]

*waving*

I don't have any wisdom to offer, on any fronts, just wanted to say hi.

[resonant]

You too! Hope your world is good.

[resonant]

I used to fall for fandoms when the people I hung out with in chat wrote things that I found irresistible. Apparently I can be fannish without a television but not without chat. So there's that.

[resonant]

Ooh, neato! Beautiful jaguar photo.

[resonant]

Hi! Great to see you!

[montanaharper]

Alas, I'm in the same "no current fandom" boat that you are.

I've been revisiting SGA and remembering how being so madly in love with a fandom used to feel, which has done wonders for my outlook on life.

[nestra]

Have you tried Sense8?

(Picture me as a brightly smiling missionary at your door.)

[saraht]

Ugh, not having a fandom/feeling fallow is the worst, isn't it?

Speaking of dumbo octopuses, I have a friend who works with these guys:

http://www.nautiluslive.org/video/2015/08/21/shy-dumbo-octopus-hides-inside-its-own-tentacles

[likeaduck]

Hi there, this is nice to read. :) There are volunteer gigs where you pet cats? I maybe need to find out if that's a thing in my area.

Re: pronouns, I find being used to contorting my sentences to avoid them at all to be pretty useful when I don't yet know someone's pronouns, so your current practice may pay off in other scenarios. (On the other hand some folks find it upsetting/erasing when people tapdance around their pronouns, so definitely not always the best plan.)

[king_touchy]

Pronouns: I have two kids. People ask me about them. About my son I tell them the usual "he's doing this and that." About my youngest I say, "they're up to that and this." If I'm talking about my youngest only, some people get confused -- "What, you mean both your kids?" -- or (probably 90% of the time) they'll ask specifically if my youngest is a boy or girl. Knowing the gender of kids is so important in general -- to other parents in particular. I try hard to be as gender neutral as possible in all my speech, and it's a wicked challenge.

Pronouns are hard.

[resonant]

I've noticed an upsurge in SGA love on my subscription list, and Due South love too; it's great to see the old loves come around again.

[resonant]

No! But I've seen many recs. I should check it out. The TV is in spousetown, but I always watch TV on my computer anyway.

[resonant]

Your friend works with the Nautilus crew? That's the most amazing thing -- I've been loving their videos. Giant squid swim-by!

[resonant]

The cat-petting gig is definitely a thing, though I don't know if all animal shelters have it. When you think about it, a cat that gets regular pettins will be calmer and happier, and a kitten that gets lots of love will be more affectionate and thus more likely to find a home.

I can see what you mean about the tapdancing thing. The flipside of the journalistic taboo on the singular 'they' is that I have literally 35 years of experience re-wording sentences to avoid unwanted pronouns, so I hope it's not too obvious when I do it. One interesting consequence of applying this in speaking (rather than just in writing) is that my mind inserts a microscopic pause before every gender-specific pronoun to give me a chance to re-word -- I'm probably saying 'he' and 'she' less in general, whether referring to the kidlet or not.

[resonant]

Years before the kidlet was born, I had a professor who used the word "omnirelevant" to talk about gender, and pointed out, "What's the first thing you ask when you hear that someone has had a baby?" Since then I've tried hard to ask, first, whether everybody's healthy!

[saraht]

She was on the ship when the whale swam by!