Social

[liv]

I've had a good month for seeing friends I don't spend time with often enough. I managed long phone chats with hatam_soferet and lethargic_man, and jack and I managed to get most of a weekend with doseybat and her mother and verazea, and the wonderful angelofthenorth came to stay with me for a few days.

I feel really really blessed by having such wonderful friends, especially when they reach out to me when I'm doing badly at keeping in touch. And several other people have got in touch too and I really do want to get back to them to make plans. And I'm not doing at all well at posting or commenting here (though I'm still reading, definitely, I haven't missed a day.)

It's easy to worry that I'm failing to live up to the standard I've always held, that I shouldn't let friendships slide because I'm too absorbed in romantic relationships. But I think that's not really true, that's just me being self-critical; there are lots of reasons why I'm finding keeping in touch hard, and it's not particularly because I'm poly or caught up in NRE. (Really, it's been 2½ years, I can hardly blame newness.) I've always struggled with regular correspondence, and keeping lots of different friendships going is hard for everybody at a life stage when we're dealing with demanding jobs, parenting – and it's more and more common that my friends have caring responsibilities for older relatives, grandparents or even parents.

And the fact that lots of my time and energy is taken up by commuting. I can't socialize much during the week since basically none of my friends live near me (since mathcathy moved away). I can't easily cram socializing into my extremely tight weekends, because if I go anywhere other than Cambridge I end up not seeing my partners for ages. Also, everybody is ridiculously busy and booked up at weekends. I think the solution to this is probably to move nearer to my main social group, who are in Cambridge and London, and hopefully that will give me more time for friends who are more distant. That is obviously quite a difficult thing to sort out, though, and I don't want to pin too much hope on everything magically becoming easier.

Anyway, the only way to restart the habit of posting here is to just go ahead and do so. Have a meme which ghoti sensibly imported from FB: suggest a category and I'll tell you my top five things in that category. Feel free to propagate it if you think it would be a fun thing to do in your own journal.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Top five festivals

[liv]

Ooh, great category!

Religiously, Shavuot (Pentecost), because it has cheesecake and Torah study and its megillah is Ruth.

I can't pick just one, but I love that Sweden has three festivals specially for different cakes: Fettisdag, which is Shrove Tuesday, when they eat this amazing almond cream bun called a semla. Våffeldagen, because the word for "waffle" sounds a bit like the word for "Our Lady" so obviously it makes sense to eat waffles for Annunciation. And Kanelbullensdag, which is a special annual day for eating cinnamon buns without even the most tenuous of religious justifications.

Culturally appropriated from somebody else's religion, I really like the Catalan version of St George's day, Sant Jordi, when people give eachother roses and books.

I haven't yet met a culture festival to beat the Edinburgh fringe.

And for recently made-up festivals, I really like Mitzvah Day, when UK Progressive Jews get together with their communities and other religious groups to do something socially useful.

[wildeabandon]

Heh, I was just about to ask this.

[mathemagicalschema]

Top five places to spend an afternoon?

[liv]

The Fitzwilliam Museum

The Pembury pub

Brighton. It's where most of my siblings live, so I know it well enough that I don't need more than an afternoon to explore. And it has any number of eateries (whether pubs, cafés or restaurants), and quirky interesting little places, and a seafront, and streets that are fun to just wander, so it's great in any weather.

Skomer Island is my favourite nature reserve in the world.

A friend's house with endless flow of tea and conversation.

[onyxlynx]

Oooh, "Categories Are" without the handclapping and the pressure to name things quickly!

Top five comedies?

[liv]

I do enjoy that kind of fast silly game, though I've never played Categories Are, but taking time to think of good examples is more interesting (and lets me play asynchronously with my friends in different time zones).

I watch very few comedies at all, so this is a hard category for me!

The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (that dates me!)

R.E.D, which is a sort of comic action movie, I'm not sure it actually counts as a comedy.

Kind hearts and coronets

Amélie. Again, only approximately a comedy...

Umm, cheating slightly on the definition, Much Ado about Nothing

[green_knight]

I understand the 'no time to socialise' thing too well :-(

It's not that I even see people who live in London, but much of my internet circles have drifted away, dissolved, or moved to Facebook, which is too loud, too transient, and too shallow for me. My relationship has taken away my prime e-mail/socializing time - I now have relatively stable mealtimes (yay), and conversations, and board games and dishwashing in the evenings, but that's taking 2-3h that I used to spend socialising, and I haven't quite found a way to make up for it, even though - as I said - a lot of people have just drifted away anyway.

What are your top five short board games?

[liv]

Yes, I think part of the problem is that I can no longer just assume that very nearly everybody is on LJ. When I was generally aware of what was going on in the day-to-day lives of about 80% of my friends, it was a lot less intimidating to drop a note saying, hi, shall we meet up some time in the next few weeks. And it's true offline too, we no longer regularly gather in London venues like the Pembury, because my people are no longer concentrated in East London with plenty of free time, now they're even more scattered and busy than when we were all in our 20s. It's not that I used to see everybody in the Pembury and the circuit of house parties, it's that that was a big enough proportion of my social group that making time for the rest was a lot easier.

[jack]

I also wonder whether you've accumulated more people over time, so there's more people you'd LIKE to stay in touch with, in addition to the people you want to stay in touch with being less and less concentrated in one place.

[liv]

To a minor extent, yes. But I haven't been meeting new people nearly as fast in the past decade as I did in the decade before that. I mean, work colleagues and friends of friends I wouldn't be sad to see, but mainly the people I miss are people I've known for more than 10 years.

[liv]

Short board games, what a great category!

I'm still madly loving Patchwork, though most of the people I game with are bored of it.

Like every other gamer, Codenames.

Top dogs doesn't literally have a board, but it's a board game type of game that plays in about 15-20 minutes and works well with a mixed group of adults and children, an important priority for me these days.

Takenoko is maybe more like medium length than short, BGG reckons it's about a 45 minute game, but I really really love it, and it's certainly not at long game.

Cacao I've only played online, but it feels shorter than a lot of the online games I play, and it's again reckoned at 45 minutes.

[green_knight]

Oooh, I shall check these out. It's not that I don't love long games, but while I might add one or two to my collection (I would LOVE to play Dominion - it looks fun, but so does Magic the Gathering until you play it), but we don't have time for a long session that often, and we already have plenty of games to fill that slot with.

(Where and how do you play these things online? That sounds like a great way of discovering things.)

[liv]

Dominion has none of the downsides of Magic: The Gathering. It took me a little while to learn but after the first few games, I usually find that it plays in no more than 20 minutes. I wouldn't be surprised if it had been deliberately designed to be like Magic without the annoying aspects. You don't need to buy (or memorize) thousands of cards and you don't lose because your opponent has more money to spend on rares than you do. Expansions exist but the base game (20 cards) is really fun on its own and in my experience has years worth of replayability without having to buy any extra cards. Also the cards are far less complicated than most Magic ones, you can easily understand how they work just by reading them without needing a zillion edge case rules. It condenses the deckbuilding element of MtG down to something that just happens naturally over the course of the game, no advance planning needed, and even a total beginner can usually get something that works.I thoroughly recommend Dominion, it really is a good bits only version of Magic: the Gathering.

Playing online: come and join us at Yucata! It's a really lovely board gaming site, mostly German in culture, and explicitly set up to play asynchronous games. It's free as in beer; they ask for donations but don't nag at all and there is no downside to being a free user. And it has over 100 games, about 90% of which are high quality Eurogames; they've thought carefully about what is actually suited to the format, so eg they don't have games with a lot of trading and haggling, since those don't really work asynchronously. Also they get explicit permission from the game publishers for every game they offer on their site, so you don't need to feel guilty about playing the games without buying them. My user name there is ewerb, but my experience has been that playing with strangers is always pleasant, it has a very friendly culture where people are there for the games, not to win and not to be abusive to other players.

[rysmiel]

I kind of feel logic compels a request for top five long board games here. This is fun.

[liv]

Agricola, unquestionably.

Pandemic Legacy, which AYK is a fairly new thing, a connected series of games, though each individual episode is not that huge.

I don't play a lot of other really long games because it's so rare for me to have more than a couple of hours free with other gamers. But in the medium to long category:

Smash up, which is a very fun game but a bit clumsily implemented, and IME rather slow with more than a couple of players.

And a couple of fairly middle-of-the-road Eurogames I like a lot, playing time between 1 and 2 hours I think, so not really long.

The Castles of Burgundy

Egizia

[ewt]

Top five rabbits (real or fictional).

(I have no idea why I thought of this, but now I'm genuinely curious.)

[jack]

I almost want the top five fictional rabbis separately, there are so many amazing real-world rabbis, but I'd be really interested to know.

[ewt]

I genuinely meant rabbits as in the hopping things rather than rabbis, but I suppose if one doesn't know many rabbits at all, choosing the top 5 could be difficult.

[jack]

Doh! I'm sorry, real-and-fictional rabbits totally makes more sense, I just read it without the 't'.

[liv]

I am not actually sure I can think of five definitely fictional rabbis, and writing "Jesus" would be blatant trolling. Rabbis in fiction often play a really minor role, they're rarely actual characters, just represent either wisdom or the religious establishment.

Gershon Loran in Chaim Potok's The book of lights. And probably quite a lot of other Potok characters.

Russell Stone in the point-and-click mystery game The Shivah.

Dovid in Naomi Alderman's Disobedience.

The unnamed rabbi in The West Wing which I haven't even watched, just listened to a podcast about him.

The ur-rabbi of rabbi, priest and atheist jokes.

(You can see I'm kinda scraping the barrel here!)

[jack]

Yeah, I was afraid of that :( But I hoped you might know better than me. It's true, I can think of almost no other examples at all.

[liv]

Wow, fictional rabbits, that's a tough one :-) And I can't think of any real rabbits I have any particular feelings for, so it will have to be fictional ones.

Hazel, obviously. I could easily just choose five characters from Watership Down, but I will try to be more interesting than that.

Roger Rabbit

Judy Hopps from Zootropolis.

Alice's White Rabbit

Mr Rabbit from Maurice Sendak's Mr Rabbit and the lovely present, which I really liked as a kid.

[(Anonymous)]

Follow up question - why is Hazel obvious? (I think part of the reason I dislike Watership Down is that I don't care about Hazel as a character, the other half being that I find the second half unmemorable to the extent that I read the book three times before remembering I'd actually finished it three times)

[liv]

That makes sense. I like WD a lot, and cared a lot about all the characters including Hazel, but I think even if I weren't fond of the book, I think he must count among the top five fictional rabbits, given that's a really small category. Did you ever read siderea's commentary on the book? I think it is a fair criticism that the rabbits in that are archetypes more than psychologically realistic, but I read the book at an age when I was reading a lot of fairy tales and older children's books and very willing to believe in less rounded fictional characters.

[ewt]

If it would help, I could come to visit at some point. (I don't know if you have space at Keele. I can probably find crashspace in Cambridge, and I know hairyears likes going there too, it's just a matter of finding weekends when we are both free.)

[liv]

I would extremely much like a visit from you, especially as you're one of the people I am sad about failing to make plans with.

Options: you are very welcome to come to Keele; I have a tiny tiny flat, but it does have a small sofabed, so I could sleep there and you could sleep in my bed. In Cambridge we have a bit more space, and a double futon; I don't know how well you sleep on futons but you and hairyears would be welcome to the spare room if you like.

Also I am planning to be in London 5^th March and possibly 4^th as well; do you have any free time then and would you like me to come and visit you?

It's probably not sensible to propose meeting in Edinburgh, is it? If you're mostly going to Aberdeen on the sleeper you won't be in a position to break the journey in Edinburgh. I can get to Aberdeen but it's basically a whole day of travelling, so on that basis it's more sensible for me to try to get to London, much as I would love an excuse to be back in east Scotland.

[kht]

Top five top fives?

:-p

[liv]

Over-specific categories, so not just "books" but "books with redheaded characters".

Quirky random categories where I've never considered what might be my favourite before.

Lists that reveal something interesting about the person choosing examples.

When other people are choosing the fives, lists I can pick up recommendations from.

Meta and self-referential top fives.

[emperor]

Top five works of fiction?

[liv]

Wow, no small easy questions here. My obvious cultural bias, let me show you it:

Ruth from the Bible
Τρῳάδες ('Trojan Women') by Euripides
The Aeneid by Vergil
Hamlet by Shakespeare
The lord of the rings by JRR Tolkien

[wildeabandon]

Top five feminist writers

[liv]

Ooh, nice question!

Virginia Wolf
Alice Walker
Stevie Smith
AS Byatt
Julia Serano

[rysmiel]

Top five films generally, if that's not too impossible?

[liv]

It is fairly impossible, but let's try. These are more films I love than films I think are artistically great; I just haven't seen enough films to really pick the actual best five.

The Dépardieu Cyrano de Bergerac

Pride

Tillsammans ('Together')

Pacific Rim

La Haine

[kerrypolka]

Aggadah! ❤

[liv]

Ooh! Lots to choose from; I generally like lives of the rabbis stories more than more legendary sorts of midrash.

The tragic love story of Resh Lakish and R' Yochanan.

The somewhat less tragic love story of R' Akiva and Rachel, especially the bit where she teaches him to read and then they roll in the hay until he's educated enough to go to yeshiva.

The bit where Moses time travels to R' Akiva's yeshiva and sits at the back and doesn't understand anything (not so much the way that ends up with R' Akiva being executed, but oh well).

The one where Honi the circle-drawer sleeps for a generation and learns about the importance of planting trees.

The lovely debate in Avodah Zarah, can't remember who this is, one of the Tannaim, where somebody asks a rabbi whether it isn't idolatry to be in a bathhouse dedicated to Aphrodite and he argues that it can't really be sacred to Aphrodite because the Romans wouldn't piss and fuck in front of an actual idol of their goddess.