The fight for diverse and conscious voices

Home today sick with noro. Bad day yesterday, bad night, including two frustrating hours of sitting in an ER waiting room (in pain) and getting no help. I'd rather be miserable at home in my own warm bed than on a cold bench in a bright lobby - though to be fair they did bring me a heated blanket on request. Pygment was her usual awesome self. After two hours I felt better enough to walk steadily down the hall to the bathroom so I said fukkit and left.

This is far from my first rodeo, for which there is a story...

Once upon a time I went to undergrad at UPenn (aka Not Penn State). Student Health there was part of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP). At that time, and generally whenever I check, HUP is rated as one of the best teaching hospitals in the US. This means that you get a lot of older staff - who have seen it all and are pretty damned jaded - and a lot of younger staff. This dichotomy later will lead to the "two out of three doctors surveyed" incident, but that's a different story.

To tell this story I have to start Freshman year. Those of you who've known me in person know that I have a full beard. Back then, though, I did not. My beard (at age 18) was pretty scraggly, so I shaved. Often I shaved the sides to give myself what we called a "Klingon beard". Kind of like this dude - https://www.writeups.org/wp-content/uploads/Klingon-soldiers-b.jpg particularly since I had long hair at the time and there were several (original) Trek nerds in our social group.

Problem was that I was an absolute spaz with a razor. I'd nick myself on Day 1 and then on Day 2 I'd scrape it and make it worse. Scraggly or not, my beard grew pretty quickly. On a bad day I'd look like I had tried to go nose-to-nose with a feral bobcat.

Scroll forward to Sophomore year. By now I've learned that I can get all my classes stacked on M/W/F. This gave me two days mid-week to catch up on homework and assignments (leaving my weekends free for D&D and drinking - see "why do I never drink rum&coke"). This also meant that I only shaved three days a week, leaving four days for healing.

Then came November of that year; I distinctly remember I started feeling bad and left SCA Dance Practice early. By the time I made it to my dorm I headed straight for the bathroom and... just eww. In those days we didn't have the word "norovirus"; we called it the "running runs" because you were constantly running for the (gods help us shared dorm) bathroom in order to evacuate both ends.

After a few rounds of this it became clear that it wasn't just a one-time thing and I called Student Health, where the gent who answered... well, I could hear the grizzle in his voice. He told me to stay put, try to drink water or flat ginger ale, and come in when student health opened at 7. This is also where I learned that when your mouth tastes like metal you are really dehydrated.

So I did the shelter-in-place thing, didn't sleep at all, and dragged my exhausted ass down to SH before it opened. They had unlocked the outer airlock door but not the inner so I could at least stand in a foyer out of the cold. And I must have passed out briefly because I leaned up against the locked inner door. The next thing I know I am literally _falling_ into Student Health because the junior resident apparently decided I was giving him a hard time about being five minutes late and just unlocked the door and stepped back.

Once he realized his mistake he was all the apologetic and gave me many good drugs, including my first experience with a suppository. Turns out that if you want a medication delivered to the lower colon this is a super-effective way to do that. A couple hours later I was sufficiently hydrated and under control to drag my ass back to my dorm and pass out. I slept through most of Wednesday, waking up long enough to shower and drink a little water then go back to sleep. By Friday I was able to manage some Saltines and felt pretty good about that.

Then it was the weekend and by the time Monday rolled around again I looked in the mirror and I had a full week's worth of beard, which was actually pretty good and past the scraggly stage. I threw my razor in the trash and haven't shaved since.

----------

I hope you've enjoyed this story and I have a question for you. If you are the sort of person who kisses people who shave, does stubble bother you? I find it irritating as heck, but maybe it's a thing you get used to?

...that will grow the stones away."

John Perry Barlow is dead, and our world is so much poorer. Is it strange to cry at news of the death of someone you've only met a couple times?

I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls 'turn-key totalitarianism.'
-- Barlow, quoted in his obit posted by the EFF

I knew of Barlow, of course. I was a Deadhead of sorts and he was famously their lyricist for 25 years, writing words to dozens of songs. Then one year I went to a conference on cyberspace and there he was, all shaggy hair and big hands and that neck scarf.

Yes, cyberspace. Hush, you, we did indeed used to have conferences on that. Maybe before we knew better, or before we lost our idealism, which Barlow never did. So a bunch of us hung out for a few days and debated things like liberty and transnationalism and at night a small handful of us started out in Barlow's room, smoked pot, and walked on a beach. We talked cattle ranching and about the sorry state of our nation. Barlow wasn't much for telling personal stories - he liked to talk about bigger things. The next year, he was back but more withdrawn, didn't stay for the whole thing. Found out later he was deep in the discussions that would lead to founding the EFF.

I keep waking up in worse worlds. I want to go to sleep and wake up in a better one, maybe one where Barlow is still alive. Wherever he is, it will be a better world, with people who believe they can make a difference, people filled with hope and the certainty that no problem created by people cannot be solved.

whipchick wrote a lovely vignette that she didn't title, but that starts with that phrase. This is not her piece, but I was inspired to write it down because of her piece. This is a trustory(*).

----------

This is a story about two long-ago friends of mine, whom I shall call Eric and Kim, because those were their names. At the time I knew them they were both free-carousing young men. We began the night in question by having a couple drinks, after which I was tired and headed home.

Kim and Eric were not tired and were... what is the right term here... chemically fueled. They continued to wander Sixth Street (in Austin) and visit various clubs and bars. Eventually, even the late-night establishments closed and they were set to contemplate heading home.

Fortunately, they were sensible young men and realized they were in no shape to drive, but never fear Eric said, my house is nearby and so the two of them stumbled their way to Eric's place and in, blessing Austin's level-ground design, for stairs would surely have been a challenge. Eric gave Kim sheets and a pillow so he could sack out on the couch, and crawled off to his own bed.

Some few hours later, in the very darkest part of the night, Kim woke up with *that* feeling. If you've never drunk too much, nor been a certain kind of ill, the phrase "sick to your stomach" might not adequately describe it but suffice it to say Kim was not a novice and knew for sure what that feeling meant. Except, he did not know where the bathroom was.

What he knew of the house was the small patch of living room in which he lay and the path from the front door to his current spot. So he did what any considerate houseguest would have done and evacuated the premises before he... well, evacuated himself.

And that is why, gentle reader, Eric felt able to settle any future disagreement between the two of them by stating emphatically, "Yeah, man, but you yarked in my yard!"

----------

(*) I have long been aware of how fragile memories are, and how easily they can be wrong. When I say something is a "true story" I mean it represents the truth as best I can verify it. A trustory is something that I represent as actually having happened because that's the way it was told me. You are encouraged to assign your own truth values to such things.

In this post I'm going to try to explain what kind of Jew I think I am, in relation to other kinds of Jews. It'll be useful background for framing the rest of what I want to talk about. Part 1 is here.
( Jews come in lots of flavors, with several jokes )

Chrissy Amphlett, lead singer of the DiVinyls, has died of cancer at age 53. Because she also suffered from MS she was unable to take most of the typical radiation and chemo treatments used to fight cancers.

( You knew there was going to be a story )

In the previous entry I asked if folk knew the origin of a quote, which began the novel Neuromancer.

The reason I posted it was that I was over at taura_g's place and she was having problems getting her PC to show proper images on her television. The result was just about that sort of gray (though less staticky) that Gibson was talking about and it prompted me to utter the line. She didn't recognize the quote I made so I wanted to see how many of my friends would get it.

Once upon a long ago I was extolling the imagery of that line to Bruce Sterling who replied that he though it was "crap." I asked why and he said it was crap because in the future people wouldn't watch television, things wouldn't have channels, and the people in the novel wouldn't make that sort of metaphor. It was an image uniquely of its time. In fact, Sterling asserted, people would read the novel in the future and have no idea what that color was, thus rendering it meaningless.

I was curious to see how many of my friends would know the line, and know what it refers to.

As dr_memory pointed out, and Bruce Sterling got me to believe, Neuromancer isn't really the right messenger for the meme that was cyberpunk. The short story "The Gernsback Continuum" is a far better representative, carrying as it does the distilled acidic essence of the idea that science fiction could be something so wrenchingly different. But far fewer people have read that story than have read Neuromancer and it was the novel and its imagery that captured the public imagination. Even if the opening line is crap.

I was reminded yet again over Thanksgiving that I don't know nearly as much about my friends as I tend to think I do. So this is an open invite to write something about yourself that you don't think I know.

If you choose to, you can write anonymously and I've set it to screen anonymous comments so please tell me if you want yours un-screened.

I thought this was grotesquely obvious at the time but apparently my brain is more convoluted than I first thought.

Set up: in Warcraft guild chat one of my guildmates is complaining about the fashion disaster that is the game-supplied reputation tabard. It has our logo but messes up the color schemes and frankly looks like a Gloria Gaynor cast-off.

Me: are you complaining about the fashion of the tabard? Just turn to the left.

Him: (pause) I did that - it still looks just as bad.

Me: Well, turn to the right.

Him: I'm sure that if I do that it'll still look bad.

Me: Ooh.

Guild chat: *crickets*

Apparently not everyone has this on their brain - even Pygment didn't get it, knowing it was a set-up. Apparently, I'm oooold or something.

...if only to document this week's worth of insanity.
( and this is just the first three days )