Debbie N.

05:47 pm: Nostrils Above Water
Usually I keep up with Dreamwidth and LJ. Usually, when I'm really busy, I keep up with a short reading list of the people whose lives I most want to be in touch with. Usually, if I take a long vacation, I catch up at least with that list.

These last three weeks haven't been like that.

I knew I was going to have to do Fourth Street Fantasy publications when I got back from WisCon. And I knew there would be some WisCon and Tiptree wrap-up; there always is. I knew I have a day job, and that I wouldn't be able to take time off from it between WisCon and Fourth Street. I knew that I always have a complicated and logistics-heavy life.

Before I left for WisCon, I also knew that Kim Stanley Robinson, the one author who still requests me as a copy-editor (and whose work I love) had a big novel coming, and that it might land shortly after WisCon.

Here's what I didn't know:

• A dear friend from the process work community (not a native English speaker) would get told that she needed significant editing help with her final masters' project about four days before her deadline to turn it in and graduate, or that the person who offered to help her with half of it would flake out.
• The Robinson manuscript was 571 pages.
• Volume 12 (and last) of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon would be ready for "proofreading" (which really means light copy-editing in this case) with a nine-day overlap after the deadline for the Robinson ms. I also didn't really believe it was almost 800 pages long. I almost said "no" to this, but I also know that those books need a knowledgeable proofreader, especially with Paul Williams out of commission. They are Paul's heartchild, and I couldn't see any way to hand the job off to someone who doesn't know the work or the field the way I do. (Heck, it could have been published with Delany's name spelled incorrectly throughout if the wrong person had gotten the job. And I do it as an unpaid job, so I couldn't hand this one off to someone who needed the money.)

So I've been burning the midnight oil, and the 5 a.m. oil, and I honestly haven't logged into either Dreamwidth or LJ for about two weeks (except for two things that people specifically pointed me to in conversation). However, the Robinson and Sturgeon are turned in, the Fourth Street electronic publications are in process and the paper publications are sititng in a copy shop in Minnesota. I get on a plane tomorrow, and I even think the house will be acceptably clean when I leave.

So I don't know what's going on with you, even though I want to. I'll pick up reading again in the next day or two, but I'll start by going back only one day. So if you've gotten married, or divorced, or adopted a baby, or written something brilliant, or controversial, or interesting, let me know. If you wrote about something that Body Impolitic is interested, let me know that too.

Y'know, it's weird to think of a seven-day trip to two cities, including a convention, as relaxing ...

07:49 pm: The Truth Will Out
The California Supreme Court verdict upholding Prop. 8? It's my fault.

People, you're just going to have to hold me down and not let me leave (or come home) around important news events.

In May 1979, I flew home to San Francisco. The plane touched down around 7:00. My partner picked me up at the airport, and he and I listened to the news on the way home, to find out that the rally that became the White Night riots was beginning. My partner at the time and I had to decide whether to go join them or go home (and figure out the best traffic routes). We went home, which was probably a good decision.

In November 2000, I flew to Japan on election night, after voting, and after hearing at least one major network declare the election for Al Gore. When I landed in Japan, the election results were in chaos, and (as we all know), eventually the Supreme Court gave the presidency to the Shrub.

Today I flew home to San Francisco. When the plane landed, pokershaman , cynthia1960 , whump , and I all got to find out that the Supreme Court upheld Prop. 8.

Think I should be a homebody? (Sadly enough, I have definite plans for travel in June and likely plans for travel in July and possibly September. I may have to coordinate with the news, though.)

09:41 am: Remembering Where to Look
WisCon is coming up (ack! next week!) and for complicated reasons I'm one of the co-ordinators (with my beloved friends Jim Hudson and Diane Martin). That puts us all in the hot seat regarding any convention controversies. In the year immediately after a norovirus felled 10% or more of the attendees and an Internet trolling controversy affected at least as many, this can be a touchy spot to be in. The Internet explosions around RaceFail and last week's MammothFail are also affecting people's expectations of the convention.

When emotions are running high, I'm hardly immune. I'm in a private email conversation with an old friend who sees the Internet trolling as a truly dangerous attack on WisCon and all it represents. I had a phone call last night from another friend who sees the convention's first attempt at a privacy policy (which I helped to write) as potentially invasive and interfering with the open-ness of the convention. These two conversations seem to me to represent the poles of opposition on the trolling issues, and it's very easy for me to get caught up in trying to make everyone feel better.

To complicate my own feelings: also in the last 24 hours, a misunderstanding between two committee members leading to bad feeling, an issue in my family of origin where I'm silently at odds with other people's values and choices. Also, not enough sleep. All of this makes me jangly and nervous and prone to do or say the wrong thing in the hopes that I can do something.

But none of that is the point of this post. The friend who called to express her concerns about the WisCon privacy policy told me something far more important than any of the issues above. A friend of hers, who is an admired acquaintance of mine, was in court this week to testify at the trial of her husband, for beating her up (choking her to near unconsciousness, among other things) in front of their children and an adult witness. The police pressed charges.

The (female, Northern California) judge reduced the charge from "battery and child endangerment" to "disturbing the peace," and criticized my acquaintance's tears on the witness stand as "histrionic." As the mutual friend who is keeping us informed says, this means that what he did is being treated as if he hosted a loud party on the block.

That's the point. We have real enemies. We're in real danger. In liberal northern California, women are still objects that can be damaged or destroyed at the whim of their owners.

RaceFail was a huge reminder for me that me and mine have a lot of housecleaning to do. (A great summary of a lot of what can be learned from it is here.) We not only have enemies, we are potential enemies of the folks we claim to support: that's true of all of us, regardless of race, gender, ability, etc., etc.

The folks who think Internet trolling of WisCon is fun? They don't actually belong on my radar. They have no power to hurt me, and I'm not in danger of hurting them. I need to take all this jangly energy and point it in the right directions.

Tags: mammothfail, racefail, trolling, wiscon

08:21 pm: What the Heck Is Grenadine, Anyway?
Aquenigmatic dropped by for a casual dinner, and was admiring our new countertop carbonator for home-made fizzy water. The talk turned to grenadine as a flavoring.

None of us knew what grenadine actually was. pokershaman guessed that maybe it was from Grenada, which seemed plausible. I happened to know that Pantryslut wasn't planning to be home this evening, so I had to turn to Wikipedia for a real answer.

Grenade is French for pomegranate. According to Wikipedia,

But contemporary "grenadine" is all high-fructose corn syrup. Boo! Hiss.

However, still from the Wikipedia article "Grenadine can be created by simmering pomegranate juice for 15 minutes on the stove, then adding superfine sugar. Grenadine can also be quickly prepared 'cold' by adding superfine sugar to cold pomegranate juice, then shaking vigorously for a few minutes."

I have got to try this. Have any of you tried it?

11:52 pm: Random Bits
For now, I'll be cross-posting and taking comments both places. I'm very excited about Dreamwidth <I>and</i> my reason to be on LJ is the range of my people that read it, so migrating just to Dreamwidth defeats the purpose.

1) I'm wondering if anyone who reads this journal (either on LJ or on Dreamwidth), a) lives in the Bay Area, preferably East Bay or San Francisco, and b) cuts hair. Mine is Officially Too Long and I no longer want to travel more than an hour in each direction for my previous hairdresser, wonderful as she was. Alternatively, if you have a hairdresser that you love (who is not fatphobic), I'd like to know that too.

2) My long-time body image activism partner Laurie Toby Edison has joined LJ (but not, at this point, Dreamwidth) as "laurieopal." She'll be writing about her jewelry-making activities, primarily. Check it out; you won't be sorry.

3) In the "urban snippets" department, I bring you this story from two weekends ago:

I notice a family at the Berkeley Bowl. The toddler, in the baby section of the shopping cart, is crying, so I start flirting with him/her to give the parents a break. The older girl is standing kind of behind her father, smiling shyly at me. I smile back. She waves. I wave back. She reaches out and hands me a penny! Her dad says, "That's nice! You never know when someone might need that penny." I thank her profusely and then watch for a moment to slip the penny back to her father, saying, "Give it to her sometime when she's unhappy." He smiles. I then see her flirting with another couple; after her family leaves, I find out from them that she gave them <I>two</i> pennies.

11:54 pm: Public Service Announcement
I've now been a publishing contracts manager for well over six years, and I came to the job with some expertise. I do it for the publishing industry: I try to share my knowledge with the lower-resource side, the authors, in various ways. One of these ways is that I've put a contract consultation on auction in accessiblehouse (closes April 25) and another one in con_or_bust (closes April 13). Minimum bid on each is $30.

These are good for any issues with publishing contracts, from specific questions to just general overviews of what goes into a publishing contract: what should be there, what shouldn't, what you can ask for, what you might get. Also, advice on agents.

If you have missed either one of these auctions, accessiblehouse is to help my friends erickavan and jbru stay in the home they have made accessible for Ericka's disabilities. They are facing foreclosure, and the auction looks like it may let them keep their home. con_or_bust will bring people of color to WisCon.

An amazing array of other good things are available in both auctions. Check them out!

09:43 am: Dining in the Dark
A few years ago, I found a website where you can buy discount coupons for a lot of restaurants. I've used them off and on for a while: generally, it's a $10 coupon for a $25 discount, not a bad deal at all. Around Christmastime, they had a sale, and were selling $25 coupons for $5, which made me cast my net a bit further.

I found Opaque: Dining in the Dark there, and I've been a little curious about eating in pitch darkness since I first heard about it, so I bought a coupon. I didn't think abostick59 would be interested (turns out I was wrong), so I asked my friend M. if she would join me. She loved the idea.

On further investigation, I found out that the restaurant is hella expensive, way out of my non-treat, non-special-occasion price range, but by that point I had gotten somewhat hooked on the idea, and M. was also really excited, so we rubbed our pennies together and last night we went to dine in the dark.

We entered through a doorway leading to a long flight of stairs going down. At the foot of the stairs, in a narrow hallway, you sit, read the menu, and place your order with the sighted host: appetizer, main course, and dessert for a fixed price. Then your blind server comes out through a curtain, you "train up" with her (hands on shoulders) and walk into blackness. Our server, Becca, led us to a table, helped us figure out where the chairs were and get seated, and then left to bring our beverages.

It was genuinely pitch black, so much so that we eventually figured out that the occasional flash of light we saw was static electricity from rubbing against the tablecloth. We were there for over two hours and neither of us was ever able to distinguish a shape.

Becca would find our hands and hand us a glass of liquid or a plate of food. The presentation is entirely "elegant restaurant," with an amuse-bouche, and a plate of crudites with three sauces, as well as what we ordered. Once I used my hands to learn the size of the table and the location of things, I found most of the physical experience fairly easy. It turns out I know how to butter the (excellent) bread in the dark, that I can track where my water and iced tea are, and that (I knew this already) it doesn't bother me to get my hands in my food when I'm eating. (They bring you finger bowls before dessert; that's called knowing your business.)

The food was very good indeed; just about what I'd expect from a restaurant of that style. But of course, you pay extra for the experience, and we were both paying more attention to that than to the food. The ambient music was a little louder than it would be in a lighted restaurant, probably to mute the conversation from the other tables. We were aware of the other diners, but I was only "eavesdropping" when they were trying to figure out how to navigate the situation; I don't know what they were talking about otherwise. I was curious about whether M. and I would talk differently if we couldn't see each other (my experience, for example, is that I talk differently with lovers in the dark than in the light), but neither of us could detect a difference--we always have excellent conversations and this was very much in keeping.

We were frequently amused by the logistics of trying to share tastes: ("Okay, hand your plate to the right." "I can't find it." "I have it high up." "Oh, right, mine is at table level.") or having our hands meet in the bread basket.

I found some pleasure in really really stretching in a way I don't generally do in public, and I also enjoyed eating (partially) with my hands, especially messy things like my panna cotta dessert. M. really really wanted to get up and walk around and experience the whole space, rather than just our table.

The one silly frill was a "game" where they hand each table a little pouch of items and let you identify them by touch: generally super-easy and gimmicky, but not unpleasant.

When we were finished, Becca led us and the diners at the next table out together. Back in the narrow foyer, we paid for our meal and left. I had a little trouble keeping my balance back in the light, but my eyes adjusted much better than I expected.

Even if it were affordable, it isn't something I'd want to do often, but it's something I'm very glad I did. It seems like it would be very difficult (but potentially also very romantic) with someone you didn't know well. It would obviously be extremely well-suited to a sexy evening. For me, it counts as a fascinating sensory experience that I'm very glad I had.

08:23 pm: Urban Life Snapshot
Friday night, riding home on the BART.

The young women (maybe teenagers) in the seats behind me were discussing how they would like to have television on the BART. One of them suggested it because the other looked bored.

The "bored" one, while agreeing that television might be nice, said, "I don't want television. I want tequila!"

A woman across the way said, "If you had my job, you'd just be appreciating the quiet!"

The woman sitting next to me said, "Teach kindergarteners all day and you'll really appreciate the quiet!"

The woman who had recommended quiet said, "I feel like I teach kindergarten kids all day, but they look like grownups."

Before we knew it, we were five or six women, of at least three races/ethnicities, and probably damn close to a forty-year age range, all talking about what we did, what we liked to do after work, who likes their jobs. It didn't last very long, but every single one of us smiled at the others when we got off at our various stops.

My kind of BART ride!

11:27 am: More on Race, the Universe, and Everything
One of the problems with breaking silence is knowing when to stop speaking. I'm hoping this post can be my last on this topic for a while.

A couple of people pointed out, extremely cogently, that silence is not always a privilege. Silence can be a privilege (and in my case, in not talking sooner about RaceFail, that's what it was). It can also be a behavior caused by oppression, a response to a personal need (such as "watch your body and your breathing," which is advice I gave everyone), a heartfelt desire not to say the wrong thing, and lots of other things. We know what drives our own silences; we can only guess what drives other people's silences.

Privilege makes you stupid, and it does not protect you from pain. It protects you from seeing, let alone feeling, some kinds of pain, but it leaves others wide open. stoneself has an excellent summary of privilege here. Read the whole thing.

The point I'm getting at is fairly far down: "you can suffer under one set of privileges and benefit from another." I'd take it one step further and say that we can only tell some things about another person's privilege by looking at or listening to them, and we can be wrong about those things as well. Race, gender, and ability are three of the most obvious axes of privilege, and none of them are clearly determinable by sight and sound. One privilege that rarely gets discussed is the privilege of having had a supportive, loving childhood. I carry that privilege to an intense degree, and one of the things becoming aware of it has done for me is help me to see how much easier my life is than that of people who don't carry it. And I can't recognize who does and who doesn't.

If you haven't read dolphin__girl on "yelling class," you're missing something.

Okay, those are my general comments.

From here in, everything I want to say is completely, totally, personal to me. I know some of you will read it as if I was trying to instruct or guide you, and of course I hope that some of it will instruct or guide some of you, but my points are completely about me. Everyone reading this will take from it what they want to take, and I think that's how it should be.

I've been taught that everything in a conflict, or a war, or an internet controversy is in me. When I look for RaceFail in me, I find a lot of things: I find rage at institutionalized racism and people who believe in colorblindness. I find fear that if I say "the wrong thing" I'll lose friends and respect. I find some tendency toward displaying the behavior people are (accurately) calling "White Women's Tears." I find worry for my friends on all sides of the story, for the literary field to which I have devoted a good chunk of my life, and for the publisher which was my employer, and which has brought many good books into the world. I find privilege that allows me to walk away some of the time, and commitment that forces me to come back again and again.

I can't help feeling that the election of President Obama is a factor in the timing of this discussion, perhaps in part because it brings a ray of hope into places that have so long been hopeless. And that the economic situation is frightening everyone. I know it makes it harder for me to be my best self, and I am protected from it it in astonishingly significant and privileged ways (among many other things, my privilege has allowed me to donate to verb_noire, about which I am excited).

I believe that colorblind racism and institutional prejudice are true and terrible things which affect people's lives in direct and important ways. I think it's vital to fight against them, and I 'm committed to that fight. At the same time, I believe that everyone who has fucked up as allies in this mess wants Obama alive and President, wants the killers of Oscar Grant brought to justice, wants New Orleans rebuilt as a place where people of color can live and thrive. And has worked and will work toward those goals. That counts too.

To nonarbitrarily mention the people who are taking the most heat for being racists, Bear, Emma, Kathryn, Patrick, Teresa, and Will are not one person. Even the ones who are married to each other are not one person; as a feminist, I'm required to remember that, even if I didn't know it separately. I don't want to get into a dissection of what each of them did or didn't do; I'll just say that I don't intend to shun any of them, I don't think any of them are monsters (though Kathryn and Will have both done things I find particularly hard to swallow, which is a statement about me, not about them). On the whole and overall, hardly anyone (except for igorsanchez and darkerblogistan) has done anything that I might not find myself having done (and regretting) under the wrong kind of stress at the wrong time.

When I escalate into rage or fear (or both), it can give me an adrenaline rush of energy and excitement. Even though I'm highly unlikely to admit it at the time, it feels kind of good. I recently saw some of the recent anger described as "warrior energy," and I think that's true and right. It's not especially my business to value or appreciate that warrior energy, and at the same time I can't help just being glad that it's there. Nisi Shawl and Cindy Ward, in their superb Writing the Other talk about how we need hate, and I agree.

When I de-escalate, I can have a sensation of relief and relaxation which also feels good. I'm not always good at telling which is more satisfying to me in any given moment, but I do need both of them for my survival. I cannot live on a diet of hate, or anger, alone. I'm painfully aware that, so far, most of the peacemaker energy has come from white people defining ourselves as allies, and I think that's extremely problematic. And nonetheless, I can't deny my own peacemaker tendencies; I can only say that my feeling this way is about me, and doesn't request a response from anyone else.

I can only speak for myself. I need to be listening to as many people as I can. I need to be on the side of eventual de-escalation while still valuing the rage. I need to keep caring about my friends. I need to be looking for the constructive approaches (Verb Noire, the WisCon scholarship fund, 50books_poc). And I need to be encouraging everyone who reads this to remember that you know what you need to be doing (and not doing).

Comments are screened. Comments that engage my points will be unscreened. Comments that heap vitriol on me will be unscreened. Comments that heap vitriol on other people by name will not be unscreened. I'm the judge of what constitutes vitriol.

08:13 am: Nonrandom Thoughts about Life, RaceFail, and Everything
1) Silence is a privilege, and I've been exercising it in this space and on this topic for far too long.

2) White people (and I definitely identify as white) need to be quieter around people of color and more vocal about social justice issues around other white people. This is a reminder to myself.

3) When I was a science fiction acquisitions editor (in the late 1980s and to some extent on through the mid-1990s), I learned that I had real power in a community, especially but not only the power to affect people's livelihoods and careers (i.e., to buy or not buy their novels for publication). Here's one of the many things that taught me: it really doesn't matter how much I want to be seen as just an individual. The people I had power over could not afford to see me the way I wanted to be seen. The best ethical choice I could find was to be more careful about what I say in public, to always remember that I had (and have) power, even when I don't feel it, and to take my vulnerabilities into a smaller circle of people who know me better and have less to lose by seeing my wholeness. This is not fair; it's just true. It's also not easy, it's just true. Everyone wants to be treated as an equal and no one wants to acknowledge that their power gets in the way of their personal relationships. To the very significant extent that I have and had power, I just have to suck it up as best I could. Privilege has its downsides, which all of us know, because all of us have privilege in some areas. I don't believe I ever used that power to threaten--I hope I didn't. If I did and I was made aware of it, that would be a hard guilt to get past. If I did, and you know it, please make me aware of it.

4) Issues of race and racism are vitally important to me personally. Here's what I said to ladyjax when she asked, "Does dealing with race have anything at all to do with your survival?

It totally is about my survival, and it's totally not.

I'm white. I consider being Jewish in this time and place to be white, and no one knows I'm Jewish anyway unless I tell them. I'm white. I can leave racism, whiteness, and all that behind. So it's not about my survival.

And yet ...

Here's something I read this morning, from Carol Emshwiller's Carmen Dog, that makes my point better than I could:

"Does not some atavistic need exist in all of us to save the world, exactly to the degree that we would save ourselves, for aren't we "the world" as much as any other piece in it?"

My world has racism in it; I can't leave that behind without leaving my world behind. So it is about my survival.

5) My track record on race and racism speaks for itself, as does everyone's. From where I stand, I can't hear what it says. I always want it to speak better, and I (think I) work hard in daily life to keep improving. At least one RaceFail poster asked for direct answers on what we do to improve the situation, and I'm not going to provide them because I don't know how to do that without sounding like I'm blowing my own horn. I'm in favor of people blowing their own horns in many situations, but not this one.

6) People are far more rich, complicated, and confusing than any position they take. If a man gives his entire life to the betterment of others in demonstrably productive ways and also beats his wife, is he a saint or a monster? In small, this example is true of all of us. Some people have so much power over me that I can't escape them. When that isn't true, I can decide how much I want that person in my life based on their actions. What I can't decide is whether or not they are a monster, or a "toxic person." Some of the people who are being named as toxic in this dispersed discussion have important roles in my live: I am frequently hugely at odds with what they say, but it doesn't make me hate or decide to avoid them. This (and most of this post) is about me; everyone should make their own decisions.

7) In my opinion, nothing anyone says on the Internet is equivalent to rape. I am not a rape survivor (by my own definitions--I have stories that other people might very well define as rape-victim stories). Nonetheless, I believe that rape is a violation of the body and that using the metaphor with regard to pixels on a screen, however nasty those pixels might be, attenuates the importance of the physical act.

8) Scores of people have said extremely important things in this discussion. nojojojo's recent post tells the truth and breaks my heart. I hope to get to know bossymarmalade because of this post, which wordweaverlynn described perfectly as "great-hearted." matociquala is thoughtful, and continues to try, and I appreciate her from the bottom of my heart. rydra_wong is doing the heavy link and resource lifting for all of us. Here's a resource I got from her, created by kate_nepveu, one of the people making genuinely constructive suggestions. There are literally dozens of other people whom I appreciate in this; if you don't see your name, you're still probably one of them.

9) When it's right for you, keep reading. Keep listening. Open your heart when you can, and close it when you need to. Pay attention to your body and your breathing. We all need each other to lean on.

02:41 pm: Got Ten Minutes to Help Thousands of People?
Some of you know my friend goodbadgirl and some of you don't.

Those of you who don't are missing out on something ... but that's another story.

Fran is coping staunchly (which often means by the absolute skin of her teeth) with late-stage Lyme Disease, a condition which a lot of "experts" don't believe in. Oprah Winfrey is considering THIS WEEK whether or not to do a show on late-stage Lyme. Oprah has a huge reach; the show could make a really genuine difference.

You can check out goodbadgirl's post here for lots of details. If you don't have time to do that, here's what you have to do.

1) Register on the Oprah site; an easy registration process.

2) Once you get the confirming email from your registration, go here and post a message encouraging Oprah's staff to do the show.

Fran and her posse (and probably dozens of other people doing their own outreach) have moved the number of comments from 129 to over 1,000. More is better.

I'm glad I did it.

10:14 pm: Some Birthdays Need Celebrating
I'm not so much about the "happy birthday!" posts myself, but today is loracs birthday, and if anyone was ever due for a happy birthday and a good year, loracs, it's you.

Here's hoping for a year so good that it will balance out the one you're finishing up. I hope you had a lovely day, and that the sunshine and warmth was a harbinger of how things will change for you and the folks you love in the immediate future.

11:02 pm: For those of you who like publishing jargon ...
here's a blog that exists to define publishing terms.

I'm not sure about the author's definition of "advances" as short for "advance copies," and I never heard "copies advanced." But publishing houses differ slightly and it's probably right for where she is. The rest is pure gold if you want to know what publishing folks are talking about.

Thanks to kestrell, who found it.

03:40 pm: Here's a Question ...
This comes out of the five-week process work intensive I just completed on Thursday. The answer has some practical utility in specific situations, but I'm just asking because I find the variety of answers interesting.

When you wake up from sleep, how do you know you're awake?

I'll start.

I know I'm awake because my thoughts are basically organized and linear, which they aren't at all when I'm dreaming or drifting. At the same time, I said this to someone in Portland who said, "Okay, who notices that your thoughts are organized and linear?" This is a good point; some other part of me has to do the noticing, because "Look! I'm awake and my thoughts are organized," is not part of the organized thinking.

Since I think in words almost exclusively, in the language of process work this means that I know I'm awake in the "auditory channel."

02:55 pm: Oops!
Apologies to those of you who saw the Winter Intensive journal entry, which was supposed to be to an opt-in filter.

It's fixed now.

08:08 am: Fuck Cancer
Okay, okay.

I know that these things come in cycles. I know that I know and care about an extraordinary number of people, and that skews the statistics for early everything (and long-lived everything too, but that's harder to see from where I am). I know that many many many people survive.

But ...

A lovely woman at work (not a close friend, but a respected colleague) has breast cancer with some (but not a lot of) lymph node involvement, which she discovered in December.
serenejournal's thyroid biopsy was "suspicious" and she's scheduling surgery.
Someone whose cancer journey I've been following for about 15 years has a recurrence, and there's not much reason to believe the doctors will be able to do anything about it, based on the information from the last recurrence. More news soon.
Someone else in my immediate circle has just been diagnosed with renal cancer. Zie has lots of other health problems, which won't make treatment any easier.

Emma's first post-treatment CAT scans were very positive. But that doesn't mean she and her family haven't been through hell.

I'm having a hard time carrying it all. And I'm not in the first line of defense for any of these people (though I could do a hell of a lot more for two of them and their families if I wasn't going to be gone for five weeks).

Since I'm posting anyway, let's do a reminder that if you want to be on my daily posting filter for my trip to Portland leave a comment on that post or this post.

02:22 pm: Little Big Things
(What I worry about: I worry about whether this should be one post or several. Srsly.) But I finally decided to make it one post.

1) I've been very remiss in updating you all on my niece Emma, who when we last left her, was in the early stages of treatment for Hodgkins lymphoma. She's now done with treatment, her hair is growing back, and she has the first of her monitoring CT scans next week. The percentages are very significantly in her favor; the individual situation has yet to be resolved. She turned 16 toward the end of September, is taking this semester off from school and recuperating, and sounds great. I'll be seeing her in a few weeks, about which more further down this post.

2) I wanted to remind everyone that Potlatch 18, a smallish West Coast science fiction convention ("where readers and writers meet on common ground") is in the San Francisco Bay Area this year, specifically in Sunnyvale, from February 27 through March 1. Books of honor are Growing Up Weightless by John M. Ford and Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin. I'm a small-time committee member (but with a big mouth) and I think it's going to be a really good convention. Details and registration forms at the link.

3) abostick59 and I are going off on An Adventure for much of January and February. Specifically, we're going to make a temporary move to Portland to participate in the Process Work Institute's Winter Intensive Course. Alan calls it "Clarion for psychologists." I'm not a psychologist and have no plans to become one, but this work fascinates me and it's been a long time since I've done something radically different from my day-to-day life. The Process Work Institute is the same group that organizes the two international peace and conflict conferences we went to in 2006 and 2008, and also where Alan was in graduate school for a time a few years ago.

I've been curious about the Winter Intensive since I first learned about process work from fattest in 2001. This seemed like the year to do it, but I was pretty afraid the course would be cancelled, just because the cost is prohibitive for a lot of people even in good economic times. But it's up and running, my job is on board with my leave, we have a sublet in downtown Portland, and now that the holidays are over I'm starting to seriously figure out what's involved in leaving my life behind for five weeks. (We leave on January 18, start classes on January 19, which is coincidentally Alan's 50th birthday, and I will return on February 21, with Alan doing one more process-work seminar (!) and returning a few days later.)

An extra plus for me is that Emma and her family live in Seattle, so we'll get two weekend visits, one in Portland and one in Seattle. I'm almost as excited about that as I am about the intensive itself: I haven't seen any of them since July.

Finally, I'm planning to use the intensive as a jump-start for more regular entries in this journal. I'd like to chronicle the experience on a daily basis, at least the five days a week that we have classes. Hard to say what this will be like: could be theoretical, could be deeply personal, could be somewhat woo-woo (from my relentlessly rationalist perspective). Seems like opt-in is the way to go for this one, so let me know if you want to see those entries, which will almost certainly be friends-locked.

Whew! That's my list for now, but who knows what else will crop up?

09:01 pm: Seven Swans A'Happy
Well, my room isn't done (in fact, it looks worse), but a lot is done, including all but one (well, maybe two) of the nasty bits. I can see clean house from here.

And the niblings called and were very happy with their Chanukah presents.

So far, so good.

08:55 am: Five-Sixths of Happy
I missed posting on Christmas day because we were out all morning and then until after midnight and I slept most of the afternoon.

It was a generally happy day: old friends and new in the morning, good dim sum (in less than ideal crowding and crowd management circumstances) plus our not-very-successful attempt at The John Carroll Christmas Quiz. LJ users among the group: abostick59, irontongue, waywardcats.

In the evening, the local poker nickel game relaxed its standards and let abostick59 and me in. A good time was had by all, I won $1.65, and there was mulled cider.

SundayFriday was mostly playing board games with abostick59, vylarkaftan, and Vylar's partner Shannon. Again, good times with good people and a lot to laugh about. abostick59 was in particularly good form with his one-line zingers both days, which always adds to the quality of time.

Also, I made marinated mushrooms for the first time ever: super-easy and very successful. And I cleaned out and scrubbed the refrigerator. Both of these things make me happy.

Today is housecleaning day. By tonight, I want to be happy about the state of my room.

09:46 pm: Tetrahappiness
Impulse get-together on Christmas eve with beckastar (who was just going to come over for the afternoon) and alibi_shop. A walk in the light rain, Thai food, and great company!

Happiness downstairs seeping upstairs!