CATGIRL GOTH RAVE and other stuff!

[rax]

Your weekly "not school, not pokemon" post:

• CATGIRL GOTH RAVE IS ON. We are booked for December 18th in San Francisco. This will be our sixth year; if people fly in from other places (I'm looking at you, Boston, Seattle, and Texas) I expect between us we'll set up some additional social events in the days before and after as well. Selene is looking approvingly at me as I write this post; you know you want to be there. More details and a formal invitation that can be passed around will go out in a couple of weeks.
• I lost two productive evenings this week to eating things I shouldn't have, both by accident. The first, my housemate was not only kind enough to make me a separate bowl of guac without tomato in it, but he even went and got new tortilla chips when the ones he had bought had jalapeno on them. (nightshade!) He came back with Tostitos with lime. This was totally not his fault, but still. :( The second was entirely my fault; I forgot paprika was a nightshade and was so excited that I had found a tofu curry thing that didn't use any nightshades. Yeah, no. Goodbye, productive Thursday night.
• In other "I am increasingly ready for a robot body" news, I twisted my ankle something fierce when my brand-new heels snapped --- the heel half-detaching from the shoe --- as I was walking down the stairs in my house. (Carefully!) They're handmade by an awesome company who I hope will either repair or replace them, but it's still kind of errrrrgh, since it hurts enough that I wasn't able to go hiking this morning and can't walk or bike long distances right now. It already feels better than it did this morning; I'm hoping I will be OK to take the bus to school on Monday and walk the ten-fifteen minutes from the city bus stop rather than having to navigate the campus buses as well. I do still have a cane, if it comes to that!
• While we're itemizing negative things --- commit your atrocities early, kids! --- yesterday evening I was getting a ride from a friend and while she was turning left a car came at us at like 50mph. Directly at me. Part of my brain enacted what I would do to get out of the situation were I driving, part of my brain attempted to communicate this to the driver (but I think came out "Guh!!"), and part of my brain prepared itself for death. I am darkly amused that that process returned the value "I was hoping for something more glamorous." By my recollection the car did not hit us; the driver checked the car and there was a nasty gash down the side where I had been sitting. I probably dissociated. No one was hurt, the other person hit and ran. "At least I wasn't on a bike?" [0]
• In other news, I don't have to spend my free days going to Ohio for work for a while! How cool is that? (Answer: VERY COOL.) I will miss the jacuzzi in the hotel where they know my name when I check in though. "Oh, it's the pink-haired lady who checks in dressed like a college student and leaves in the morning in formal businesswear! She gets room 409."
• Still don't want to jinx it, but the likelihood of picking up a Housemate #2 next weekend is like 80 or 90%; my "turn down OK to good people in favor of waiting for good to awesome people" strategy appears to be working like whoah.
• Anyone have recommendations for bike lights that, rather than optimizing for "being seen" like the ones I have, provide the functionality "allow me to see?" I have a halogen that theoretically does this but it's not really cutting it for me. While biking around here during the day is way tamer than Boscamberville, it's kind of a death trap at night; the students are insane and the roads are dark enough that I can't see. Since I don't yet have all the roads memorized, and where the potholes are and that sort of thing, this is a pretty major problem, and it's starting to be dark when I get out of class. I can't fix the student insanity (there is no way I would bike through campus at 10pm on a weekend night, I like not dying) but I should be able to fix the darkness, and it's getting dark earlier every day.
• This is technically school-related, but I got permission from my advisor to work on human/animal boundary things, and animality in general, in my research both for her class and in general. This is so cool, y'all. So cool. I have so much more to read now! I even got permission to do "some crazy first-person vegan furry thing" informed by theory --- this is the class where we're encouraged to write experimentally, which I  mentioned before. We will see how this goes. I have already started outlining. I want to make this good.
• You know how lots of minivans and SUVs have those stick figure decals that show you who's in the family? I saw one the other day that was clearly legible as soldier-man gardener-wife basketball-girl football-boy baseball-boy and four dogs. I thought "Man, I wanna see one where both parents are women. Or where there are three adults. Or where their careers are things like computer-woman, management-androgyne, bookworm-child." I got to thinking --- how far into weird could you go before people would just start not seeing the weird and parsing it as something else? I think that a family that otherwise looked normal but had two gardener-wives and no man would read as lesbian parents, especially if combined with left-leaning bumper stickers or something. If you had two men and a woman, on the other hand, I think most people would assume one of them was either a grandparent or an adult child before thinking menage a trois. I think it would be interesting to see how far you could go before people snapped back to normativizing interpretations, and would be particularly interesting to compare this across populations and times. I was thinking "Somebody should do this research!" and then I thought "I'm a paid staff member in gender studies at a research university..." I'm probably not going to do this project, but I could, and that's badass. (Feel free to grab it if you want.)

[0] This particular situation could not possibly have happened to me on a bike, but the general case of "grazed by fast-moving car" would probably have been worse.
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/53660.html.