Livre d'Or

I don't really do new year resolutions, partly because the behavioural change evidence is against them, partly because I don't really consider January 1^st to be the new year. (For people who are complaining that it's hypocritical to celebrate new year, which is Pagan, if you reject celebrating Christmas, which is Christian, yes, you are in fact correct: I don't celebrate Christmas and I also don't celebrate the Gregorian New Year. But I don't have a problem with other people celebrating these things or giving appropriate seasonal greetings or living with a consensus calendar which happens to have months named after Pagan gods.)

However, somewhat before the end of this year I am hoping to be living a completely different life from now. (No, not pregnant. Different big life change.)

This means that on a fairly short timescale, I need to:

• Learn to drive
• Learn modern Hebrew
• Get my finances in order
• A certain amount of sorting out my house
• Sort out my social media presence

( details )

Any advice on any of these welcome, especially if it's UK-specific when that matters. And especially if you can help me with getting past those mostly psychological blocks preventing me even getting started. I hope that writing down some goals will help me feel accountable for actually making progress. Sorry for boring post.

sovay has a really interesting proposal to use philosexual as an alternative to demisexual. I wanted to note it here because I found the neologism, and the discussion chez Sovay, helpful.

( sexuality microlabels noodling )

I've talked a few times before about being extremely hyperlexic, particularly as a child. ( social media context, and my thoughts )

So I was born just about a year before the end of a decade, meaning that I'm inclined to look back on decades when I reach a round number birthday rather than when the calendar turns over to a year ending in zero. Rather than repeat what I wrote when I turned 40, let me talk about what I didn't do in the 2010s.

( my life this decade )

Really, the decade kind of divides into two halves. The first half, I was trying to establish a scientific career, and I was living long distance but very much entangled with my life partner jack. The second half, I was getting myself out of the ruins of that unsuccessful career attempt, and moved back to Cambridge (in stages, I bought a house here and started spending all my spare time here in 2014, then actually properly moved back here in 2017). Now I have three partners who live in the same city, and my career builds on my scientific background but is primarily about teaching, which was always my first love. Politically, well, the second half of the decade has been incredibly worse than the first half, but I'm still here and my life still works really well and suits me, at least for now.

So in less than two weeks:

• I had to find emergency housing for someone in crisis.
  
• I flew out to Sweden to see ghoti_mhic_uait and the children.
  
• My father-in-law was taken ill very suddenly, and died a few days later.
  
• I squeezed half a holiday with my dear friends pseudomonas and hatam_soferet and her husband and daughter, around supporting jack dealing with grief and death bureaucracy.
  
• I gave a talk about my research to an international audience.

And now it's my last week at work and I have a zillion things to finish off before I leave.

Most of these are things I don't want to talk about outside a lock, but the upshot is I'm not very present online at the moment. We are coping on the whole, but if you have extra niceness to spare please send it jack's way.

A song that has many meanings for you. I think this has to be Some kind of stranger by Sisters of Mercy. Partly because it's lyrically complex; I have never been sure if it's about a positive relationship or a breakup, a long-term connection or a casual affair, and it may well not be about romantic love at all.

This is another song that doseybat introduced me to when we were teenagers. So it's tied up with discovering alternative music and the goth scene, and forming my own tastes in music as well as more broadly. A period of my life when I think I did the most growing up.

In some ways it's a song about keeping faith in spite of everything that might push you towards despair. And that's why I keep coming back to it, whether it's faith in a person or just more broadly:

And I know the world is cold
But if we hold on tight to what we find
We might not mind so much
That even this must pass away

Then it's the soundtrack of my PhD. The bit where my brother had a bad accident and I was in an emotional mess, but the science was still inspiring and still needed doing. The bit where it wasn't inspiring any more, it was a slog, and I had to keep going. One more step, one more flask of cells, one more measurement. The long repetitive bit at the end Come here I think you're beautiful over and over again, when I was sitting in the cell culture room with my headphones a portable tape player, and just keeping my cells alive and nourished before I could actually do any experiments took about three hours three times a week. You can't miss a sesssion or the cells die or mutate and you lose months of work. You have to concentrate enough not to get anything contaminated, but it's not exactly intellectually stimulating. In fact, a lot of the point of my PhD was providing justification for replacing me with a robot, but grad students are cheaper than robots, and I was just sitting there screening through hundreds of potential new drugs.

It's also a song about making friends with rysmiel, towards the end of that PhD and the years just afterwards. rysmiel is also a Sisters fan and gave me a recording of one of their concerts, since it's nearly impossible to buy studio versions of most of their music since the 80s. The ambiguous words might be about a sudden, intense yet enduring friendship, maybe. Some kind of stranger / some kind of angel.

And even though it's a pretty downbeat song, it's a very happy song for me now. It promised me that I could endure, and I have. My brother is fine now. I still love most of the people who sustained me in my late teens and early 20s. I've succeeded at some things that were hard and failed at others, but I have people who love me for myself, not my achievements. And nothing is permanent, but as long as I'm here and get to experience things and love people, I can cope with that.

( video embed, audio only )

A song that you would sing as a duet on karaoke. I don't do karaoke, and I don't do duets, so this is a bit of a non-starter for me.

No, let me explain, because I'm having fun answering this meme in way too much detail. I think karaoke is an absolutely excellent idea in theory. It's really great to encourage people to sing just for fun and not worry about skill level. And it's really great to use technology to play the backing music and display the lyrics so that someone can just get up and sing the melody with little preparation.

The problem is that for me personally, karaoke means packaging up 30 plus years of abject humiliation over not being able to sing in tune, and asking me to enjoy that in public. I find it hard anyway to make myself sing in front of other people; I do it, because I absolutely do believe that music belongs to everybody (not just people who are "musical"), and shared music is a great way for people to connect. Singing in front of an audience who are paying attention to me, or even worse, in a competition, however light-hearted, is too terrifying.

Duets are possibly extra impossible, because singing in unison with someone else is already hard for me. Especially if they have a lower range; I can't really hear octaves, so I find it very difficult to join in with someone singing in the bass clef range. Singing in harmony is really really hard, because not only do I have to sing the correct notes which I always find difficult to remember, I also have to match the note which is very imperfectly in my head while being distracted by my partner singing a different note that my actual ears can hear. I can sometimes do multi-part harmony if there are several people singing each section, so I can listen to someone else who is singing the same line as me. And I'm fine with parts in music in general when I don't have to worry about pitch. But a sung duet is really tricky.

And really, I can think of very few duets that I know at all, for whatever reason, even to listen to. Let's call the whole thing off might work, because (at least in this superlatively great version with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong) it's mostly alternating verses or lines between the two singers rather than harmony. But hypothetically, if I were to find the courage to sing karaoke, I probably wouldn't start with something really amazingly great; somehow I'd feel less bad about murdering some ephemeral extruded pop product than attempting an actually good song.

I will admit, though, that my brother and I have been known to sing Always by Bon Jovi, as a sort of duet, sometimes in public and definitely not caring that neither of us can really sing. Partly because we always liked the dubious rhyme of:

I'll be there til the stars don't shine
Til the heavens burst, and the words don't rhyme

And partly because Bon Jovi can't really sing either, he just projected a persona calculated to appeal to teenaged girls in the 90s. So I probably wouldn't sing it actually in karaoke, and I probably wouldn't sing it with anyone other than my brother, but it seems slightly less impossible than any other options, so I think it seems in the spirit of the meme.

( video embed )

A song that makes you sad. It's hard to find anything sadder than one of my friends who posted a video of a scratch orchestra playing the European anthem Ode to Joy the day after the UK voted to leave the EU. But the song most likely to make me cry, personally, is the aria Voi che sapete from Mozart's The marriage of Figaro.

( break-up sadness, plus video )

So someone on FB, who is an introvert, expressed a desire for extroverts to talk more about what it's like to be an extrovert, as this is something they don't understand. So I thought I'd give it a go, here rather than FB cos I don't like posting thinky things that just vanish into FB's ether.

( living up to the stereotype by talking about myself )

Any other extroverts want to comment? I'm making this a public post and will link it from FB for the benefit of the person who wanted to learn about what it's like to be us.

I've been in a funny mood these past couple of weeks. There have been lovely things, viz:

( misc bitty things; mentions death )

Anyway, it's been the kind of time when I keep opening compose windows and not knowing what to say. And I haven't got anything new for Reading Wednesday as I have read basically no fiction in the past couple of weeks. So have some links to other people's writing:

• I rather appreciated evilrooster's fic Silence in the hill country. It's not at all the sort of thing I normally like, since it's NT fic for one thing, and for another the main topic is Mary's pregnancy. And I'm slightly hesitant to recommend Christian Bible fic, but as far as I can tell the story is framed in a reverent way; the writer is a practising Christian.
  
  
• A rather sweet story about a so-called natural inseminator, a man who helps women to become pregnant by having sex with them rather than just donating sperm. Although there is a weird bit in the middle where the journalist expresses horror at the idea that people with genetic diseases or autistic people might donate sperm, so if you don't want to run into sudden unexpected eugenics you probably shouldn't follow the link.
  
  
• rachelmanija started a wonderful discussion about how people find hope in a time of despair. I should note, I could hardly be further from despair, there are many many good things in my life and I have more to look forward to. And some of what people are writing about is dealing with absolutely horrible circumstances, pretty much everything horrible that could happen to anyone is in the comments somewhere. I'm finding something very moving about people's descriptions of just still being here after the worst possible things happened to them.