But not a whole lot, to be honest. Yesterday I attended the bar mitzvah of one of my pupils, and realized that that was the first time I'd made it to shul in a month. That pretty much means that I've barely socialized at all in that time. Well, not completely, but I have been far more hermitty than is good for me recently.

( stuff )

Author: Stevie Smith

Details: (c) James MacGibbon 1936; Pub 1993 Virago; ISBN 0-86068-146-7

Verdict: Novel on yellow paper is an intriguing glimpse of a character and milieu.

Reasons for reading it: My brother the Thuggish Poet is into early feminist novels at the moment, and has been passing on some gems to me.

How it came into my hands: Pesach present from the aforementioned brother.

( detailed review )

Author: Steven Brust

Details: (c) 1988 Steven KZ Brust; Pub 2002 Ace; ISBN 0-441-00894-1

Verdict: Taltos is a fun read.

Reasons for reading it: I enjoyed the first three in this setting and was very willing to pick up some more. Then I lent the first set to cartesiandaemon, who got on well with them, so I promised him I'd read the next pair before I next see him, so that I can then lend him the volume.

How it came into my hands: I like the series enough that I was willing to splash out for the next couple when I was buying books from Amazon.

( detailed review )

Author: Dan Simmons

Details: (c) 1989 Dan Simmons; Pub Bantam Spectra 1995; ISBN 0-553-28368-5

Verdict: Hyperion is clever but emotionally distancing.

Reasons for reading it: Lots of people have been raving about Simmons at me. I think it was probably rysmiel who told me to start with Hyperion, but I'm not sure.

How it came into my hands: Amazon.

( detailed review )

So rho suggested that we should combat the negativity that can sometimes predominate on LJ by making a list of five awesome things. That sounds like a fun meme, so here goes:

( awesomecakes )

I think I might be a feminist after all.

I've probably been headed in this direction for a while now. My sporadic habit of delving into feminist writing seems to have developed into an ongoing interest, and I've been finding myself more and more taking feminist lines in discussions I've been involved in. At the same time, I've been getting increasingly angry about sexual violence in various forms. I am not completely sure that feminism is the optimal way to address this problem, but there's not much else available in the way of movements organized around the issue, and it's important enough that I feel I have to do something. I can't just dismiss it as somebody else's issue when so many women's lives are constrained by the fear of rape, and when that fear has proved justified for so many of my friends.

There are undoubtedly some people who define themselves as feminists who are not at all nice or even rational people, but I've become increasingly aware of feminists I strongly admire. (Not just people I admire who happen to be feminists, but people I admire because of the way they live as feminists specfically.) It's never a good idea to judge an ideology by its worst adherents! Several people on my flist have influenced me in this direction, but redbird in particular has inspired me. Partly, in fact, by not being terribly evangelistic about feminism, but just being an example of someone who is compassionate and thoughtful and makes sensible and enlightening comments from a feminist perspective.

The immediate cause for making this decision now is to do with the discussion around and reaction to the incredibly stupid Open Source Boob thingy. I found myself following links and reading posts about it almost compulsively, and some of it was really amazing and insightful, but some of it was incredibly, crushingly depressing. I'm not going to talk about it much because really absolutely everything original that could possibly said has already been chewed over about five hundred times. But the point is I was feeling more and more strongly that I want to be on the side of the people who are making insightful and compassionate analyses all over the place, and not on the side of the people who keep coming out with crass and depressing comments.

( further wibbling )

Recanting a long-held opinion is a bit painful, isn't it? Last time I went through a process like this was in my early teens, when I realized that caring about the long term environmental effects of my lifestyle was actually morally important, and not just some stupid trendy bandwagon. It's a big part of my self-image that I am capable of changing my mind if I'm convinced by better evidence or arguments, and that allows me to overcome the cognitive dissonance and just general embarrassment of admitting, actually, I was wrong.

For once in my life I haven't left it to the last minute to book travel, so I actually managed to get some properly cheap flights.

( itinerary for my reference and anyone nosy enough to care )

I was feeling guilty that getting into a long distance relationship has pretty much destroyed all my good resolutions about flying. But to be fair, I've only made one gratuitous trip so far that I should blame the relationship for, and even then it was combined with Screwy's birthday. I would have gone home for Pesach anyway, and I definitely wouldn't want to miss my cousins as it might be years before I see them again. I could possibly have thought of travelling overland to Holland, if I were being less parsimonious with holiday time, but you know.

Now I need to sort out the summer. It's possible that I might try to get to north America some time this summer, but I don't know. It's been far too long since I saw rysmiel and darcydodo and compilerbitch and there are lots of other cool people out there. I was hoping to use the excuse of a conference in Quebec, but I haven't heard any news of the conference actually happening. There's a page in Google's cache suggesting it might be the first week in June, but the domain doesn't resolve currently, and if the info in the cached page is correct it's probably too late to apply. Without the conference, well, it's a lot of time and money and travelling, and I can't really kid myself that the whole of North America is all one place.

I want to spend some time in England at some stage, probably arranged around shreena's wedding. I think both darcydodo and hatam_soferet are going to be around, so I should definitely see them. A couple of weeks in England isn't at all hard to arrange, but it's a case of how it fits in with everything else. The other plan is travelling in Sweden a bit, possibly with my parents joining me for some or all of that. Again, not hard to arrange, but taking holiday in several short discontinuous bits might not be the most productive from a work point of view.

*sigh* I hate geography and logistics is on its side. But the overall conclusion is getting to see my friends, which is yayful.

Can anyone who understands these things explain to me how Pesach is supposed to work when it falls on Saturday night? We had a long debate about what we were supposed to do, and couldn't think of any way to coordinate things, and our haggaddahs weren't helpful at all.

I assume you're supposed to wait until shabbat is fully out to start the seder? We didn't bother, because it would have been ludicrously late at this time of year, but in theory, you're supposed to, right? Then what? How do you light the festival candles if it's already been chag for an hour? Are you supposed to mess around with tapers and a long-burning candle?

Obviously you do havdalah before starting the festival stuff, that's normal, but how exactly does it work? The best instructions we could find implied that you were supposed to do "between holy and holy" with only the candle, leaving out the wine and spices. I don't quite get that either; I assume you don't do the wine because you're about to make kiddush anyway, and you don't want to bless the same wine twice. But why leave out the spices? And with the fire, Screwy thought that you say "the lights of the fire" over the festival candles themselves, rather than lighting a havdalah candle. Dad thought you should light the havdalah candle and then not extinguish it, because as soon as you lit it it would be chag, but I'm not sure that's right, I have it in my head that you can extinguish on chag even if you can't light.

In terms of food, it makes sense that you're supposed to clear out the chametz by lunch time (or halachic midday, or something) on Friday, and then not eat any chametz over Shabbat. Fine. But does that mean you eat breadless meals with no motzi, even on Shabbat itself? Or is there some workround I haven't thought of?

Part of the reason I've not had much time for LJ recently has been that I'm very busy with work just now, and on top of that it was Pesach, and on top of that there was teaching. Teaching makes me very happy, so I'm going to talk about it.

( lots of teaching )

I love teaching so much, and I'm more and more thinking that I need to find a job where I get paid to teach, instead of doing odd bits of volunteering that is a distraction from my main job, even though I get far more out of it than what I'm supposed to be doing.

Author: Jo Walton

Details: (c) 2006 Jo Walton; Pub 2007 Tor; ISBN 0-7653-5280-X

Verdict: Farthing is incredibly poignant.

Reasons for reading it: I was reading papersky's journal when she was discussing writing it, and it sounded like the kind of novel that would interest me, but also likely to be very disturbing. Then it was published and all sorts of people raved about it, so I decided to get over the disturbingness and read it anyway.

How it came into my hands: I got a free ebook version of it from Tor's website promotion. I realized that a lot of time was passing and I just wasn't getting round to sitting at the computer concentrating on reading a whole novel, without the opportunity for reading during the boring bits of commuting. So I decided that I needed to get hold of a physical copy. Happily, bugshaw lent it to cartesiandaemon and gave him permission to sub-lend it to me, so thank you both.

( detailed review )

This is one book that really lives up to its hype. I've been enthusiastically recommending it to everyone I've spoken to since reading it, and I'm going to try and see if I can get hold of a copy for my parents because I think they'd appreciate it.

Hope everyone that's celebrating is enjoying Pesach at the moment.

( my pesach )

I made it back to Stockholm without incident Sunday evening. The very curtailed visit was necessary because I ended up with teaching commitments Monday afternoon as well as Thursday. The teaching is great fun, and I should make a separate post about it.

I must admit, I feel somewhat deflated at the moment. Partly it's that I don't quite have the emotional balance of seeing cartesiandaemon very briefly and intensely and then being away from him for several weeks; I'm sure I'll settle into it, but just now I'm crashing hard after each visit. I've never been like this in long distance relationships in the past, and we have plenty of communication in spite of geography, so I'm not sure why I'm reacting like this. I think in this case it's partly plain tiredness; I haven't really had a proper break this Pesach, or even time to recover from last week being manic. Partly it's all my skin and membranes being irritated because of spending time in horrible allergenic Cambridge (though my breathing settled down within a few hours of leaving). And I think partly it's Pesach itself. I don't really like being on my own during the festival, even though I have at least managed a seder en famille and exactly as it should be. There's plenty that I can eat, of course, but all of it requires preparation and forward planning, and I can't snack on toast or biscuits or even buy junk food.

Oh well, this is a very minor complaint. Communication would be appreciated, even if it's just LJ comments, and it's much more likely that I'll be happy to hear from you than whiny.

Body image and fat prejudice is a topic I've been trying to talk about almost ever since I started this journal, and I keep reading things that bring me back to it, and every time I start a post I give up because I'm pretty sure I'm going to offend people. Quite often I upset myself too. I've finally come to the conclusion that the best way to start discussing the question is to be very personal. I'm going to talk about my own experience of being fat, and not draw any implications yet.

I've been fat ever since I hit puberty. To be precise, I've been on the borderline between the "overweight" and "obese" BMI categories pretty much that whole time. On the whole, that hasn't really affected my life very negatively, but it has coloured my experience of the world.

( body image discussion may be upsetting or triggering )

What upsets me is not that the hand I was dealt was one that included being so-called obese. It's the constant irritation of encountering hateful comments about fat people, even from sources that are otherwise quite sensitive and respectful. Sometimes people reassure me that they don't mean me, they mean really fat people. I'm not "fat", because I'm not ugly, or lazy, or stupid, or irresponsible. Well, guess what, most other fat people aren't those things either, or at least they're no more likely to be so than thin people. It's clearly true that many people are much fatter than me, and have often had a much, much more difficult time as a result than I have; I'm not trying to be a drama queen or look for sympathy here. But the thing is, any time somebody is making the assumption that there's some kind of size boundary above which you're a disgusting pig with no self-respect or willpower, the fact that I fall below that boundary in their eyes isn't much of a comfort to me. The boundary of what is defined as "fat" is very much dependent on context, and as I said at the beginning, the official medical definition makes me obese.

Another pattern that sometimes happens is that people justify their prejudiced comments because being fat is "unhealthy". But even if being fat is bad for you, which is debateable, there's no excuse to make prejudiced assumptions about people or even call for restrictions on their rights because they happen to have some unhealthy behaviours.

I'm going to leave this contentious topic at that for the time being. I just want to make it absolutely clear that comments about how disgusting fat people are, or about how fat people shouldn't get healthcare, or hurtful "jokes" about fatness, or anything along those lines, are comments about me. I hear them as comments about me, and in extreme cases, as threats to me. And I'm not prepared to hate my body in order to avoid being emotionally affected by those comments.

Author: Dave Duncan

Details: (c) Dave Duncan 1996; Pub Corgi 1997; ISBN 0-552-14509-2

Verdict: Past imperative is a slightly cliched but enjoyable fantasy.

Reasons for reading it: cartesiandaemon read it recently and thought it might interest me.

How it came into my hands: More specifically, my beau was reading it on the flight here, and decided he might as well leave it with me for me to bring back next time I see him.

( detailed review )

I had a busy schedule today, but still didn't do a great job of getting out of the house.

( mild work whining )

It started sleeting heavily some time mid afternoon, and the yucky weather continued. I'd dressed for the spring which appeared to be firmly here when I got up this morning, so I was a bit cold and miserable coming home.

On the way, I overheard two women having an earnest discussion of Latin verb conjugations.

I got home at 10:30, and completely failed at putting chocolate spread on a cracker. It turns out that the state of "oh look, I appear to be covered in chocolate" doesn't have many fun outcomes available when you're on your own.

Well, at least I've got a fair bit of experimental work done. And now I have tea, and don't have to deal with today any more. So that's positive overall, I think.

Author: Melanie Rawn

Details: (c) 2006 Melanie Rawn; Pub 2007 Tor; ISBN 0-7653-5436-5

Verdict: Spellbinder is a bizarre mixture of eye-bleedingly bad with quite decent.

Reasons for reading it: I love Melanie Rawn, and she's keeping everyone on tenterhooks waiting for the third of her really amazing Exiles trilogy, so I was happy to read a new standalone by her while I'm waiting for that.

How it came into my hands: Bought new on Amazon, based purely on my enthusiasm for Rawn.

( detailed review )

Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

Details: (c) Lois McMaster Bujold 2003; Pub Voyager 2004; ISBN 0-00-713849-0

Verdict: Paladin of souls is enjoyable and romantic, though a little flat.

Reasons for reading it: It's the sequel to The curse of Chalion, which I very much enjoyed. I wouldn't normally read the sequel so soon after the original, but I was excited to play more in this world.

How it came into my hands: Reading both volumes in succession was also helped by the fact that cartesiandaemon kindly lent me both of them!

( detailed review )

Oh, and a couple of other book reviews from the past couple of weeks, though I'm still rather behind:
- Diane Duane: So you want to be a wizard
- Matt Ruff: Set this house in order

Things that are pleasing:

1. I have given my two lectures with a degree of success. That was believe it or not the first opportunity I've had to give university-level lectures in my own professional subject. A good group, tiny (officially 6 people but not all of them show up), but really keen. That meant that the lectures were more or less large tutorials or small seminars, but I got lots of good and interesting questions. I'm generally proud of myself.
   
   
2. This means I can now catch up on sleeeeeeeeeep and start attending to the rest of my life.
   
   
3. I had lovely friends supporting me through the painful process of recovering from the worst deadline mismanagement I've ever committed. Thank you all so much, especially darcydodo and cartesiandaemon and rysmiel, for holding my hand and for refusing to accept that needing my hand held makes me pathetic and worthless.
   
   
4. I am blessed with a particularly wonderful beau, who is very cuddly and fun to talk to.
   
   
5. I have lovely, accomplished, enthusiastic bar mitzvah pupils, and generally an excellent Jewish community.
   
   
6. I have booked flights to come to England for Pesach.
   
   
7. Teeeeeeeeeeea

( whining about unpleasing things cut )

Today was the bar mitzvah of the first of this year's crop of pupils. I found myself nearly as nervous as I was at my own bat mitzvah, but in fact everything went perfectly. The star of the occasion did very well and more importantly enjoyed himself; this is a guy who at the beginning of the course had no Hebrew and was unsure he could cope with standing up in front of everybody without falling apart due to stage fright. So I'm particularly proud of him; he's worked very hard, and compensated for some SEN issues, and you can just see him fighting with grim determination against the biological forces that want to turn a 13-year-old boy into a monster.

I gave a sermon on the concept of holiness and how that relates to this week's Torah portion; it was a little bit stream of consciousness, but seemed to go down well. Thanks to hatam_soferet and Screwy for providing input when I was working out what to say.

Doing that kind of thing uses up my entire day's quotient of energy; I came home to collapse for a couple of hours before going out again, and made myself a desperately needed pot of tea, and promptly put it down with its centre of gravity over the edge of the table. So I smashed my good teapot, and made a mess and didn't even get to drink the tea. (Fortunately I didn't spill much of the hot tea on myself, though scalded toes are a bit annoying.)

Then I had to go to the memorial event for my neighbour Alice. The idea was to have the kind of teaparty that Alice would have loved, gathering a bunch of her friends and neighbours (she made a point of getting to know every household in her street) to eat lots of cake and sing songs and make merry together. This we did, and it was a beautiful way to remember her life. But I didn't get home until quite late, and the clocks are going forward tonight, stealing an hour that I really need for preparing the lecture for Tuesday. So, sleep for me fairly soon.

Reasons for watching it: No very obvious reason; it just happened to be an English-language film that was on at the cinema.

Circumstances of watching it: I'd just got back home from seeing ewtikins and hairyears off, and was settling down with tea and my flist when Joanna called me and asked if I wanted to go to the cinema with her and her mother. I was a bit tired, and it was exceptionally cold outside, but I thought, why not be sociable. And indeed it was a lovely evening; Joanna won a lottery for an Easter egg, and we had a nice chat over tea afterwards, so I'm glad I braved the cold night.

Verdict: Once is a bit slow-moving but quite charming.


( detailed review )

I have about a dozen posts I want to make, lots of book reviews, talking about the fun social stuff I've been doing, thoughtful essays about things like the future of LJ, ageing, stuff from Limmud that I still haven't caught up with... However, I am in a bit of an uncommunicative mood, and it's not helped by feeling overwhelmed with all the stuff I need to post about before I can post about other stuff. I have several emails that I've started and am not really making headway with too.

On a practical level, I have the first of my bar mitzvahs this Saturday, and my first ever opportunity to give a real lecture in my actual professional field on Tuesday. Both of those are things that I'm hugely looking forward to, but both require intellectual and logistical preparation, and I'm really struggling with procrastination. So as much as I am capable of getting my act together in this mood, those have to be the priority.

Many apologies; I'm not really managing my own life very well just now, let alone being there for friends. And I don't even know what's brought this funk on, there is plenty of light (bright skies over snow) and I've had lots of highly social fun in the past couple of weeks, and I have interesting things going on at work, and I've been enjoying plenty of really positive chats with friends. But I'm not entirely coping.

Author: Diane Duane

Details: (c) 1983 Diane Duane (dduane); Pub Corgi 1991; ISBN 0-552-52645-2

Verdict: So you want to be a wizard is a polished and enjoyable children's fantasy.

Reasons for reading it: I'd heard good things about Diane Duane, so meant to pick up some of her stuff at some point.

How it came into my hands: cartesiandaemon lent it to me.

( detailed review )

Author: Matt Ruff

Details: (c) 2003 Matt Ruff (matt_ruff); Pub Harper Perennial 2004; ISBN 0-06-095485-X

Verdict: Set this house in order is well-written and emotionally complex.

Reasons for reading it: There was a lot of buzz about it when it came out, particularly in connection with winning the Tiptree award (was that your Tiptree year, redbird?) It sounded like my kind of thing, and I enjoyed the sample chapters posted on the web; this is one case where pixel-stained techopeasantry led to me buying a new book I might not otherwise have picked up, or waited until it turned up second-hand.

How it came into my hands: Amazon, with the help of lovely hatam_soferet

( detailed review )

cartesiandaemon was amazingly impressive this weekend. Not for doing anything silly like rescuing me from dragons, but because he agreed to come with me to Screwy's birthday party and meet my entire family at once. This in fact went brilliantly, and he even made a good impression on Granny.

In fact, everything we planned went as well as it possibly could, and it added up to an absolutely perfect weekend. There was loads of the best kind of socializing, and a good but not excessive amount of coupliness. *bounce*

( minimally nauseating, I assure you )

Now I fall over. But yay for lots and lots of geography-defying fun with lots of cool people. By the way, apologies to the people to whom I failed to make it clear that I had decided to make the trip this weekend instead of going to Eastercon next weekend. I think the decision was right, but I still regret that it meant missing out on another potentially fun thing. And I'm particularly sorry that I don't get to see lethargic_man, friend_of_tofu and other Eastercon people.

Between now and Monday night I have to:

go to morning minyan in a few minutes (which is why I'm up so few hours after getting to bed last night), in order to find people for this evening

go to work, finish writing my presentation ie make up a week's work in a day

help someone from the community sit shiva, fulfil the mourning requirements for her mother, which is the major spanner in the works that has turned my plan from a tight schedule into not really manageable chaos

pack and get things organized for trip to England, which is probably going to have to happen during time I should be asleep tonight, since I don't have any other options

get up after a few hours' kip on Friday and give a group meeting about why I don't have enough data

get myself to Cambridge, arriving about 1 am Friday night if all goes well

get up on Saturday in time to have breakfast and not get into trouble with the parents

go to shul

go to cartesiandaemon's and try to fit a whole romantic weekend into a couple of hours

attend various meet cartesiandaemon's friends social events Saturday afternoon and evening

get up far earlier than I would like to in the circumstances on Sunday, connect with parents and go to Brighton for Screwy's birthday

end up in the Pembury Sunday night and see lovely people

sleep for a few hours, then get a morning flight from Heathrow Monday morning

walk straight off the plane and into my bar mitzvah class Monday evening.

So I'm pretty much abandoning the chat to my friends part of my normal daily routine, sorry guys.

This morning, in a state between bleary daze and outright panic, I discover that LJ is no longer offering free accounts. It's bad when some wanky protest community gives you better information than the official news post. I need to think this over when I'm more with it, but this is probably the last straw that will drive me away from using LJ as the main place I hang out online. There aren't any good alternatives; I'm really hoping Scribblit actually launches rather than fizzling out.

This weekend is going to be crazy, and I don't think I've scheduled any time for sleep. But I hope to make it to the Pembury games evening on Sunday 16^th March, and it would be lovely to see anyone who can make it. And I'm bringing cartesiandaemon, in case you happen to be curious to meet him.