my lack of desire to assimilate with Elizabeth Moon

I fixed my horrible sleep cycle by dint of dragging M out on every errand ever last night and then crawling into bed soon after we got home. I am slightly sick, again, and do not feel great but I am hoping I can keep to something viable for a while.

Most of said errands related to Thanksgiving, or thinking about Thanksgiving. As you may remember, I am not warmly disposed towards Thanksgiving. Of course I am also an immigrant who has no desire to assimilate with Elizabeth Moon. M isn't particularly attached to it. We don't have anyone else to spend it with this year, as everyone else has moved out of state. But it's still there, in a 'what else are we going to do on Thursday?' way. May as well stay home and make tasty food, and that then begs questions like 'what is tasty food' and 'why'.

There will be bikkits, as I've promised to feed people bikkits on Friday. See again my grand central disconnect with Thanksgiving; in the UK, Harvest Thanksgiving/Harvest Festival is a minor religious occasion at which you give food away. I have a great deal of disgust with the idea of expressing thankfulness via personal greed. The gigantic shoppingfest immediately afterwards does not help (though Boxing Day in the UK is equal in terms of following fail with more of the same; one celebrates the passing of the gigantic consumerist orgy that is Christmas by having a gigantic consumerist orgy. A break, please, I want one.)

(This is without even getting into the mythic history chain of events, in which Thanksgiving was instituted to commemerate a massacre, and then got associated with a myth about sharing food with the people who just got massacred, which still perpetuates itself in bizarre stereotypes that completely ignore both the present lives and the history of the people they're supposedly about, and nobody ever mentions history, this ongoing bloody brawl that gave birth to us and that we still live in, at all. Nobody ever asks why they're not sharing what they have with said people now. Thanksgiving is fundamentally opposite to what it says it is in that regard; nobody shares with the Other at Thanksgiving, period. It's all Us, the Self, the Family, no openness to Them.)



I am the others.



I am wondering if I am just getting bad at the concept of celebrating, or generally joyless - I need to make a Christmas post soon, possibly on LJ, gah. Idk, but I think Thanksgiving would have an aura of massive suck either way, for all the reasons stated last year although probably less magnified.

We have laid in silly things we like but usually can't afford, like crisps and pie. I have been hawkishly studying the cost of various roasts and we may actually buy one tonight, idk. And maybe some shellfish (again, can't usually afford). Thanksgiving is expensive, maybe about as much so as a meal out, but that's okay, ish?


I need to write :/ I got another few hundred words in the day before yesterday and also pretty much blocked out what there is left to do; most of a scene which will be hard, an entire scene that should be mostly okay, and a fiddly paragraph or two that's missing from the Different Strings scene, which will probably involve exchanging lots of concentration for very few words. Shall see what I can do with it today.

today+yesterday: written nothing, but have mended 9 pairs of socks!

(I kinda hate having to throw away socks because they are irrepairably ex-socks. Especially when it was my green and white stripy sheep socks. I saved the sheeps in case I want to sew them on something else.)

Interesting post, reminds me somewhat of me & Chris's conclusions about the love-hate relationship with irony:

The problem is that valuing geekiness as the be-all and end-all of what makes someone a worthwhile person is as stupid as a jock** thinking that it's limited to how much you can bench-press, or a prep** thinking it's about how much money you have. It's a worthless measure in isolation- what can you actually do with it? Are you a good person by the measures of honesty, trustworthiness, loyalty, and compassion? Sure, you have a lot of SF books or DVDs, great LARPing costumes, go to cons, can name stats for your favorite series, and have signed copies of your favorite comics- but are you someone that your friends will call when they've had a bad day and need someone to talk to? You can code, you can hack, you can mcguyver a solution to any technical problem and you do it with the elegance and efficiency of a world-conquering AI. Hell, Artificial Intelligence programs that ace the Turing test and are even now plotting the path towards the singularity totally read your blog. But if you can't treat other people's needs and thoughts as anything more than the inconvenient pauses between your amazing oration opportunities, I don't want to hang out with you or share a theater with you.

Because Geek, Please, this is not a contest or a competition. You do not have to prove yourself by winning against some imagined set of judges, defeating some specter of past bullies, some invented quantifiable measure of absolute worth. I'd like to get to know actual people, not just their collection of quotes. Stop performing. It's okay. You are safe, among friends, and they'd like to see more than a childhood label. You won't get past the (reasonable, understandable) fear of rejection and your craving for acceptance until you get to a point that you can allow others into a space in your life that isn't defended with displays, but is instead accepting of other's need to interact on a more genuine and respectful basis.

Or at least shut up and let me watch my movie in peace.

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