Bleh. The time I was going to spend writing things for LJ last week turned into work, and the parts that weren't work were a detailed mathy analysis of the ruby strategy in Scepter of Zavandor (because I needed to chew on something decidedly left-brain-y). Which means I failed to mention Wednesday gaming, Sunday brunch and housewarming, or Tuesday dinner and conversation.

Not that I've much to say about any of those. Other than that spending time with a few good people is Good, in almost exactly the way that spending time with lots of people I don't know well isn't.

---

Via Dr rivka, A Mathematician's Lament (warning: PDF), in which I discover that I should have been a mathematician.

To wit: on page 3 or 4, there's a picture of a triangle inside a rectangle, and the question: "how much of the rectangle does the triangle take up?" I looked at it for like five seconds and said "oh, that's easy, you just run a perpendicular line from the top of the triangle to the base, and you've got two rectangles, each half filled with a triangle. So the whole triangle takes up half the area of the whole box." Which, yeah, he goes on to explain that. Then a page later he rails against the fact that kids aren't taught that that process of discovery and problem-solving is math. Instead, math is plugging numbers into "A = 1/2*b*h".

And I got it. I understood, conceptually, why that's the area of a triangle, in a way I never had before. And it is simple and elegant and beautiful, and it took my breath away.

I love things like that. The moment of perfect clarity when something just makes sense, when the bits of a problem come together and fall into place. It's. . . euphoric. It's spellbinding in the same way the Ansel Adams exhibit had me transfixed, with the added bonus of: I did that.

Not that I had any idea that that was what math was really about. Sure, I read Martin Gardner and Douglas Hofstadter, and was on "the math team" in eighth grade, but. . . that was fun. Math was algebra and calculus and diffy-q, problem set after problem set and painstaking attention to every minute detail. Exactly the kind of thing I can't stand.

But, still. A triangle is half the size of the rectangle it fits into. Gorgeous.

From nixve, Comment "WORDS" to this entry and I will comment back with five words I associate with you. Then you post this in your journal elaborating.

• Games have many facets. Systems with rules that can be optimized, semisocial activities, entertainment, a source of friendly competition that's actually friendly, a strange way of telling stories. I've owned a copy of James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games for the better part of a decade now. Thanks for reminding me to slot it into the queue.
  
• Books are nicer, more interesting, and less scary than people. (Except for 1984, which freaked me right the hell out.) My paternal grandfather had the back wall of his living room done in wall-to-wall bookcases. It's no accident that his house is one of the few places I can think of as "home."
  
• Patriarchivore would be my nom de blog if I were to start / join a feminist blog. Because some things just need devouring, that's why. Rar. (As a side note, I'm sympathetic to the argument that kyriarchy is a better term for the situation.)
  
• Love is vital, and it makes me happy. I'm not sure what else can be said about it.
  
• Barefeet have been part of my life for a very long time. I can remember getting yelled at for going without shoes in school as early as sophomore year. I love the feel of grass and dirt on my toes and I love the way my feet can bend more unshod.

jmax315 reminds me of the least pleasant (though possibly most entertaining in retrospect) part of Origins.

Grah. Headache, tired, problems dealing with UPS and setting up weekend plans, and now it turns out my email isn't being sent to places other than itself. And I'm here late today to make up for shoulderstuff on Monday and sleepstuff on Thursday. Not a good start to the day.

On the other hand, Toki Tori is on sale for 99 cents. Perhaps that will improve matters.

---

Speaking of shoulderstuff, it seems that the problem actually lies in the muscles pulling the shoulderblade, and not in the arm itself, at least not anymore. Not sure what I can do about that, other than ice it and stretch it. Taking a few weeks off from phys.ther to see if it gets better.

I can no longer use the desktop at home for longer than about fifteen minutes. Something about the desk and chair and position of my arms is just too painful. I hope a better chair will solve this problem but at this point I don't even know what a "better chair" would be. Aeron, I suppose.

So, Origins. Driving down Wednesday afternoon is an acceptable plan; missing Lab setup doesn't make me cry, missing the insanity of the Wednesday night Fluxx tournament makes me happy, and saving a vacation day for use elsewhere is certainly a good thing. Contrariwise, staying over Sunday night and taking Monday as a driving and recuperating day is a far better plan than driving back Sunday afternoon/evening: it gives me one more night of Origins, and it means I'm not completely fried when I get back to work.

The whole experience felt skimpy this year. Bought a couple RPG books, and a couple of games I'd been meaning to pick up anyway. Overloaded on Lab time on Friday with mastering for the overlong Zendo tournament, so skipped the IIT on Satyrday for my own mental health. (Although I did hand over the scepter to Mr Davenport, to whom congratulations.) Played perhaps a half-dozen games, and two RPGs.

On the other hand, I saw a whole mess of good people that I only ever see at Origins, I got to play two RPGs, and in general the whole weekend was sort of the last gasp of my vacation time.

Also, North Market still sells the best convention food ever.

I'll be going back next year but not working as much in the Lab. I am no longer a broke college student; I'm a DINK. Time is in much shorter supply than money. I don't need the free badge; I need the gaming. I'll likely continue to run Fluxx because it gives me a good excuse to be in the Lab and see people and wear my labcoat, but that's about it.

OK, here are the rules: 15 Books

Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what books my friends choose.

Bleh to Facebook and bleh to tagging people, but yay to books.

The standard five:
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Steven Brust, Agyar
Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall
Andy Runton, Owly: The Way Home and The Bittersweet Summer
John M. Ford, Heat of Fusion and Other Stories

And ten more:
Beatrix Potter, The Tailor of Gloucester
Ursula K. Le Guin, Tao Te Ching
Roger Zelazny, Jack of Shadows
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
Isaac Asimov, Foundation trilogy (hey, I read them all in one volume, it counts)
John M. Ford / Gene Wolfe, Fugue State / The Death of Doctor Island
Erick Wujick, Amber Diceless Role-Playing
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Changeling
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

---

I survived Origins, saw a lot of awesome people, and didn't play nearly enough games. More tomorrow.

The Importance of Being Politically Correct: "[Tolerance is] about attempting to understand people who are radically different from you, and saying to them you want their voice in the process. . . . The conservative movement has never gotten 'tolerance.' They think tolerance is something you do as a favor for someone else, that it's a slogan, that it involves appointing a showman who employs ancient slang. They don't understand. Tolerance is about warfare-- it makes your army bigger than the other guy's army."

(As a side note, every time I hear or read the phrase "politically incorrect," I mentally replace it with "being an asshole," because that's more honest. More "politically incorrect," if you will.)

The Bobblespeak Translations: Obama Press Conference, June 23, 2009:

Q: what took you so long to express your meaningless outrage about an election in a far-off country where we have a history of illegal interference?

Obama: because I'm not a total dumbass and didn't want to give the Iranian government ammunition!

Q: that's Reagan's job

Obama: exactly!

---

The problem with this whole "posting more" thing is that then I get comments, many of which are quite intelligent and thus take time to craft responses to. (Also, my sacks of gold are so heavy!) I will, however, get there. Today, even.

And we leave for Origins this afternoon. I'm less excited about Origins this year than ever before. It's kind of odd. Partly this is a disillusionment with board gaming (that's its own post: tl;dr is that it's not feeding my social needs as well as it used to), and partly it's that I've been travelling more so it's not as huge a trip. And partly that some of the people I'd been hoping to see won't be there. But, I'll see rislyn and Good Chris and J. and various Looney folk. So that'll be alright.

When I was in fourth grade, Dad was assigned to a battalion in the 320th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment [you read that right; they drop very large guns out of airplanes]. That fall, for reasons that remain murky, the parts of the 320th that were under the 82nd Airborne Division were changed over to be part of the 319 AFAR.

This necessitated a big formal ceremony in the middle of the afternoon, with lots of marching and speechmaking and all. Dad, as an officer, had to be there. Mom, as an officer's wife, had to be there. I have no idea why I had to be there. I got pulled out of school and taken over to sit on a metal chair under a green camo tarp in the hot sun, read my library copy of Howard Pyle's Robin Hood, and wonder why anyone cared.

I'd been dragged in early enough to see a rehearsal, before the actual ceremony. It looked pretty good; these guys were professionals, after all.

Shortly after the ceremony proper started, I thought, "Why are they doing this? They did the ceremony already. This is just for show. It's totally meaningless to the people involved." The act of the ceremony meant nothing in terms of the process, so why bother with it? The answer "Because the people watching want to see it" felt wrong: they want to be fooled into thinking they're witnessing something valid and momentous?

I've never been able to shake that sense that ritual and ceremony have no inherent meaning. Over time that's metastasized into a general distaste for all over-rehearsed, over-formal celebrations. I want no part of mouthing the words, of going through the motions. Of faking it.

Weddings are the worst offenders. Not only do you rehearse rehearse rehearse, you're following a script that's so overdone as to have had all the meaning sucked out of it. Often it's religious, and I think I've been to perhaps one wedding where that meant anything to either the bride or the groom. And if I never hear 1 Corinthians 13 again it will be too soon.

When my sister got married the first time, I didn't escape the church fast enough, so they dragged me in for Family Pictures. This meant I got to hang around watching the wedding photographer restage the entire ceremony, with pauses so he could snap pictures. This did very little to bolster my sense of the authenticity of weddings. But hey. I'm sure it looked good.

I've started a filter that covers my ramblings on what I'm writing. I've sort of guessed at who might be interested in reading such a thing; if you are and you can't see the previous post, let me know and I'll add you. Contrariwise, if you'd rather not be subject to those posts and currently are, you can ask to be removed and I won't be offended in the slightest.

I spent Satyrday at 80% of an an outdoor wedding in Culpeper, followed by an outdoor reception, where it was both hot and humid. I hate Virginia summers. uilos was gorgeous in her purple bridesmaid dress and sculpted hair, as was rislyn, who simply glowed.

Like every wedding I've been to, this one sharply reduced my desire to ever get married. This should be taken as no reflection on the happy couple, merely on my own tolerance for Ceremony and Tradition and Doing It This Way Because My Relatives Insist. If my relatives (or my partner's) want a party they can throw it themselves, preferably without inviting me.

The cake can stay, though.

As mentioned, Sunday was really really good, mostly because I spent it with uilos. We slept in, went out for breakfast at a place called the Good Egg (where I had the second-best crab eggs benedict I've ever had), came back, bummed around for awhile, applied a bit of sunscreen, and hit the beach.

The water was chill but not cold, and one barely noticed it after a few minutes. Some good splashing about and bobbing in waves ensued. (It turns out that in the ocean I can float on my back. Who knew?) We retrieved a couple of balloons that had drifted out from a party, and watched the pelicans lazily drifting up and down the beach.

And also the ghost crabs. The beach was alive with them. You could sit a little ways back from the high-tide line and watch the water, and after a minute your eye would be drawn to a bit of motion, and then you'd see little sand-colored discs with eye stalks, scuttling everywhere. All sizes, from smaller than your pinky nail to larger than a paperback. The big ones had a more yellowish tinge to their shells, making them slightly easier to see when they sat still. And they'd poke a little ways out of their hole, and wait a few seconds, and then scurry all the way out and around, dodging the beachwalkers, and into another hole. Or sometimes you'd see one duck in and then back out again and scatter a clawful of sand (in clumps, because of the rain). They're amazing to watch.

(At the edge of my vision I saw a dog bark, and then a beach twit start pounding on the sand with his shoe. uilos said he was attacking a crab. I hate people sometimes.)

After an hour or so we came back in, showered, and bummed around for a bit longer, and then decided to walk down to Island Books. The Device said it was about a two-mile walk, which seemed reasonable. So we loaded up the daypack with a water bottle and headed out. (Something fairly important is missing from our preparations. This will become relevant shortly.)

It was a good day for a walk: not too hot, breezy, bright. We gently mocked the oversized houses, attempted to stop in at the new wildlife learning center (CLOSED SUNDAYS DUE TO BUDGET RESTRICTIONS), and eventually found our way to the bookstore. I snagged a now-in-paperback copy of The Dragons of Babel, the sequel to Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter. uilos refrained from buying anything, having splurged when we were there last month.

We then walked over to an ice cream place, where she got a lime slushee and I got two ginormous scoops of ice cream in a waffle cone. Seriously, this was like a meal and a half. It was so much ice cream that they stuck the whole thing in a bowl so it wouldn't fall over. Then we walked back along the beach, and laughed at the large brown birds (thrashers maybe?) that were pretending to be sandpipers and doing a poor job of it, and admired the speckled gravel left behind after the waves rolled back, and then admired it even more when it wriggled and dug back under the sand. I have never seen so many tiny bivalves in my life.

On our return I was informed several times that my face had taken on a distinctly rubeous hue. Applying aloe made me wince but was probably worth it in the interest of decreasing the severity of the burn. Even today, my scalp is still crunchy.

Moderately painful sunburn aside, that's about what I'd like vacations to be like. The kind where I'm actually trying to relax and not Travel and See People and such, anyway.

Over the weekend I realised that some of the people I most enjoy reading have either slowed down their posting rate, or abandoned LJ altogether (for Facebook or Twitter or "real life," who can say). In an effort to stem this tide, I'm going to try posting more myself.

(My thoughts on Twitter are best summed up by the closing of the Facebook Haggadah: "This year our ceremony still contains some time for reflection, and some ability to remain on the same topic for more than a minute or two. But next year, may our ceremony be faster, divided into bite-sized chunks, and with each utterance no more than 140 characters. And so we say together, NEXT YEAR IN TWITTER.")

Also, it helps out with one of the four things I want to do more of (write; run; play in a deeply character-oriented RPG; meet someone awesome), so there's that. (These goals have their own issues but they'll do for now.)

---

So, I spent the weekend (plus Monday) at the beach with my family. It was possibly the worst family trip I've had since I went to college. On the other hand, all the parts that only involved uilos totally rocked.

In retrospect it was sort of the film version of my last year or so of high school and first couple years of college. "Okay, so we compress the action down to the space of a weekend, and cut some of these extraneous girlfriend characters. Maybe make the sister into more of an antagonist, play up the sibling rivalry aspect. The parents need to be a little more sympathetic to compensate, they're kind of one-dimensional in the original. Keep the Arkansans around for background color, add in a kid. No, two. Kids'll amp up the chick appeal. Sound good? Do it!"

We drove down to uilos's parents' place in Richmond on Friday night, in what was probably the easiest Friday I-95 traffic I've ever seen. To make up for it, the three-hour trip from Richmond to Corolla took between five and six hours. Much of the delay can be directly attributed to taking 460 instead of I-64, with all the attendant traffic lights and fluctuations in speed limit and construction one might expect if one had been thinking a little more clearly. The rest came from the most rain I have ever seen in one place. Seriously. Visibility was about eight feet at times. The fields had flooded up to the rims of the tractor wheels. Route 12, the main road north on the island, looked like the Red Sea in places. Excitement and adventure and really wild things.

But we made it, little the worse for wear. I think we may have been behind Jennie Breeden for a brief time on 12 (black hatchback [ETA painted all over with octopi], with a large WWW.THEDEVILSPANTIES.COM bumpersticker and a whole lot of smaller moderately-clever stickers), until she turned off and took a shortcut into Duck.

And if I'm going to post this today I need to stop here. Tune in next time for RELATED TO PEOPLE I CAN'T RELATE TO, or, HOW I MET MY SISTER.

I had a perfectly wonderful weekend and then seem to have turned the rest of the week into stress and late nights and no sleep, for perfectly good reasons that still leave me feeling rather burnt out. (Brothers Bloom is not the brilliant revelation that Brick was but is still worth seeing.) And this weekend is "relaxing" by driving down to the beach to spend several days with my dad's extended family, and next week is rislyn's wedding, and the week after is Origins, and the week after that is the Fourth which is the proximate cause of some amount of this week's stress.

The damnable thing about all this is that I actually started writing again on Sunday. It was difficult and emotional and I collapsed at the end of it, and even so it felt so bloody good to be doing again. I'd utterly forgotten the joy of piecing together the right words, of turning the lightning bug into the lightning, of finding out why it is you really ought to go five miles out of your way instead of cutting through the greenwood between the towns. (I still don't know, but I understand the ways in which I don't know. It makes sense to me.) And then. . . nothing. No time, no energy.

my dreams came in like needy children tugging at my sleeve
and i said i have no way of feeding you so leave

What I would really seriously love to do is to take about three days off. From everything. Spend the first day sleeping late and reading and napping and decompressing and generally Not Getting Anything Done. The second day would start out like this but I'd be restless by about two PM. At that point it's time to break into the writing. That can carry me through much of the day. Collapse in the evening, let the brain recharge. Get up on day three and dive more or less straight in. That's likely to be enough time to have something that's actually finished, something I've not done (for anything longer than a couple pages, anyway) in, oh, well over three years.

Eh. In the meantime, back on my head.

This weekend was pretty much the worst-case stress test for the 'weekend trip, go to work monday' plan: driving from BWI to work during morning rush hour on less than four hours' sleep. I seem to have survived. Came home and crashed hard but that's not unexpected.

On the other hand, it took me two hours forty-five minutes to get to BWI on Friday. Standard weekender traffic plus fierce thunderstorms plus no one in the DC area can drive if there's anything interesting to see on the other side of the road. Yeesh.

( bits and bobs from a weekend )

And it's neither raining nor ridiculously warm here today, so life is decent.

We were advised that our options were to deliver into the world a child who’s life would be filled with horrible pain and suffering or fly out to Wichita Kansas and to terminate the pregnancy under the direction of Dr. George Tiller.

Context: R.I.P.

And please consider making a donation to Planned Parenthood. First charitable donation I've made: disposable income ought to be good for something, and now it is.

Went in for a sleep study two nights ago. That was perhaps the least restful night's sleep I've had in years, including the nights when I just couldn't get my brain to shut up already. Something about having wires trailing out of one's skull makes it difficult to get comfortable. Also, the pillow was flatter than the average hotel pillow, which is saying something.

Based on the entirely unscientific reports of the attendant, we can confirm that I do, in fact, snore, something fierce. Reports of actual apnea, teeth grinding, or restless leg syndrome will have to wait until the doctor reviews the results. (I'm betting no on the third and yes on the second, and I have no idea what to think about the first. It'd explain the snoring, certainly.)

Physical therapy for my shoulder continues apace. Full mobility is just about back, and it hurts at far fewer random times during the day. As an added bonus there's more stretching and less slouching in my life.

I'm having urges again to drive down to Fayetteville for a weekend. Usually just thinking about the traffic on 95 between DC and Fredericksburg is enough to stifle these. I dunno. It might be neat to see what I can remember, and what's changed.

Off to Washington state for a weekend with nixve, mostly to see her and partly to see if 'weekend trips' (leave Friday evening, get back Monday morning having "slept" on the plane, go to work Monday, crash hard Monday night) are at all viable. I suspect I'll do alright.

Home from the beach, where the water did eventually warm up enough to be worth getting into. I think I need to spend some time there when I don't feel an urgency to Play Games Now.

I'd thought today was going to be a slow day of reading and lounging around with uilos, possibly going to see The Brothers Bloom (a new film by the writer/director of Brick) and having dinner at Da Marco in Silver Spring.

Unfortunately she just got kidnapped for a bridal shower she thought was going to be next weekend. So, um. At least I've got my books. (Oryx and Crake, Le Guin's Annals of the Western Shore, Jirel of Joiry, JMF's Scholars of Night, and something called Genesis by Bernard Beckett that I picked up yesterday on a whim and with a 40% off coupon. And eventually the Susanna Clarke collection, though that was for discussion with someone who may or not still be interested in talking to me so there's no rush on that front.)

I suppose there might be some unpacking or writing in between.

If you're in the DC area (even on a visit) I can highly recommend taking an evening to see Tom Stoppard's modern classic Arcadia, now playing at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre. Everyone involved did an excellent job; the only quibble I had was that Lady Croom was a bit too over-the-top and, well, theatrical, for my tastes. I'd always thought of her as being more of the devastatingly-raised-eyebrow type. This was pretty clearly a deliberate directorial choice, and one that worked well enough.

If you're unfamiliar with Arcadia, go see it anyway. It is hilarious and smart and poignant, often all at once, from the very second line through to the final blackout.

---

I can't remember the last time I was at the Folger. It may have been spring '96 (or maybe '97), watching Troupe's performance at the Student Shakespeare Festival. It's. . . unchanged. Very odd, to see the long marble walkway and think "right, those are the stairs where we took group pictures," or the narrow lobby with the big marble columns around the stairways, or the giant awkward pillars on the stage.

Running into Alicia McBride (who I think recognised me) and her father (who didn't until I introduced myself) outside only added to the surreality of the whole experience.

High school was a really long time ago now.

It's easy enough to say "don't post on topics that may inspire lots of comments on a day when you aren't going to be around to continue a fairly fascinating conversation." Only, who knows what those topics may turn out to be? Which is to say, lots of good stuff from last Friday, and thank you all.

I ran off that weekend to have my shoulder looked at. The one that's been bothering me for, um, around eighteen months now. The physical therapist has me doing stretches and things to generally improve my posture, which can only be to the good. Having actual instructions other than 'don't slouch' (those being 'drop your shoulders' and 'tighten your shoulderblades together') is likely to help matters.

Also visited the Canadian embassy in DC and got told that only the Buffalo office handles immigration matters. Waste of a perfectly good afternoon.

After that, uilos and I headed off to the wilds of Pennsylvania for a weekend of camping. Said weekend mostly consisted of things that didn't work out quite as anticipated but were really good anyway. Getting locked out of one campground ("oh, we don't actually open for camping for another two weeks. yeah, you're not the first people to try this after reading the website. sorry about that") and driving another 30 minutes to another. A BRIDGE OUT detour that took us through crazy back roads (and thank gord for the Device, as without it we'd never have realised that the detour kicked us out further north on 82 than we needed to be). Enough rain that the picnic table oozed water when we sat on it, but still a mostly-dry Satyrday for hiking and campfire. (Which was its own Experience, as the wood had really only had time to dry out on the outside. I don't think I've ever had that much trouble making a fire before.) Also, protip: do not refrigerate the two-year-old marshmallows, as this causes them to become like unto chewy sticky rocks. Even after toasting.

The rain dripped through much of Sunday morning while we were breaking camp, and then opened up on us as we loaded the last of the things into the car. Rather decent of it, I thought.

Once loaded we met up with tamnonlinear for a run through the Brandywine Museum (a gorgeous converted mill), featuring various Wyeths and most importantly a wonderful Edward Gorey exhibit. Plenty of illustrations from the books; also, decorated envelopes from letters to his mother, a handful of sketchbooks, and Gorey's fur coat. Then lunch (french toast, despite the name, should probably not be made from french bread; the pancakes, on the other hand, were nothing short of amazing), and an enjoyable ramble through the Book Barn. And then home, through more rain. (We waved to elvenyukiryu as we passed Avondale but were too exhausted and wet to stop and say hi.)

In all, an immensely pleasant weekend. The tent has been set up on the porch since Sunday evening. At this point I'm starting to wonder if it will ever have a chance to dry out.

it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while

--archy (Don Marquis), "the lesson of the moth"

A couple months ago I went and saw Coraline, with some lovely people. At the end there was a secret word of some kind.

That night I was poking around on the movie website, and found a place that seemed to want a secret word of some kind. So I went ahead and entered it, and answered a question about the film, and found myself entered to win a really neat pair of shoes.

"Sure, why not," I said, gave them my info (including shoe size), and thought no more about it.

Until I checked my email in Vancouver after getting lunch with uilos and Cynthia, and saw a subject line of "Congratulations - You have been selected as a winner in the Coraline Nike Dunks Giveaway."

I think I said "Huh!" Followed by "But I don't even wear shoes!"

They got here today. They're rather nice as size 10 shoes go. They're also too narrow for my 9.5EEEE feet: I could wear them, but they'd get stretched around my toes. (Same problem all normal shoes have.)

So. . . what do I do? The going rate on eBay seems to be on the order of $200. I'd feel really weird just selling them. . . but I also feel like someone else would appreciate them a lot more than I do. I'd wear them, but then they'd fall apart relatively quickly.

I'm definitely wearing them to work tomorrow, because I told my coworkers I would. I think they may collectively die of shock to see me in shoes.

Any thoughts?