Maine, Or, the Legacy of Why We Don't Vote on Human Rights Issues

"Someone in power is finally going to state the obvious truth that gay marriage is absolutely necessary, and they're not going to put it up for a vote, because that's not what you do with basic human rights. You don't let six wolves and four sheep vote on what to have for dinner (or in this case, what, fifty-two wolves and forty-eight sheep?).

The National Guard will stand outside the courthouses and force you to grow the hell up, and you will be remembered in history like those sad ugly white people yelling at the black kids coming to class.

And this isn't the fifties. This is the twenty-first century. Your bisexual grandkids will still be able to Google your sorry ass and see that you were a spiteful hateful closeminded bigot. They'll have your lying ads, annotated with footnotes showing how you knew you were lying at the time. They'll have your ugly homophobic comments and your hate-filled fake news reports captured in crystal clarity on whatever magical Internet++ they're using decades from now. And they're going to be ashamed of you.

All you've done -- all you've accomplished with your lies and hate and fearmongering -- is to delay the inevitable. In the next few years, every widow who loses her home because she "wasn't really married" to her life partner, and the life partner's kids have a good lawyer? Every man who dies scared and alone because the man who should have been his husband wasn't allowed to be at his bedside? Every not-spouse who dies because of not-health-coverage, coverage they would have gotten were they married? Every one of those things that happens between now and whenever the National Guard puts a little learnin' on you? That's on you.

That's your legacy.

(read the rest)

Heart of Veridon

Picked this one up on a whim at Books & co today while I was looking for something else (ended up passing on the other one and got this and Best Served Cold instead).

Folks, I may be in love. I'm 30 pages in and really hoping he doesn't screw it up.

Proper review when I finish, but the guy sure knows how to take you on a bloody, weird, wild ride.

If chicks with swords show up later, I'll have no complaints!

Why is it...

... that so many "lit" stories are about 1) whiny emo college students 2) whiny sub-par college professors?

I wonder, indeed.

Insurance is Officially Back Up

And not a fucking moment too soon. I have $2500 worth of pods that should have been in the mail last week.

The delay means I'll be on shots from tonight until at least tomorrow when/if the shipment arrives. They've been holding it since Monday, likely waiting for the fucking payment to process. Not looking forward to a whole weekend of shots, so let's hope the shipment arrives tomorrow, shall we?

Two Girls -UPDATED

A first pass at video creation with Windows Movie Maker. Cinematic art it ain't, but it looks like if you can navigate PowerPoint 7, you can navigate Movie Maker. This is a pretty hack job I did in a few hours. I'll be interested to see how I can improve things as I figure out what the hell I'm doing. Some of the transitions are still running a little fast.

Video is based on the unpublished short, Two Girls (I wanted to start with a story I didn't mind messing up). View below or go directly to my my YouTube channel.

Website address at the end is still, obviously, not live, but I've started adding it to things in anticipation of the day.



I'm still not sure if giving me these sorts of tools is a good idea or not...

First, they come for...

"I was Jewish. There was no doubt in my mind (what would happen). I left in 34. Hilter had taken over in 33. A girl... and a physicist... and Jewish. Well, that's a combination that had no chance! (laughs) That was clear."

-Hilde Levi, refugee physicist from Nazi Germany (from here)

The Power of Books

(more here)

Mantisland

You know you want to check out the rest....

Exquisite photos. I may be ordering some prints (now that I may no longer be dirt desperate uninsured poor!) if I can figure out how.

Light At the End of the Tunnel

There appears to be some light at the end of the health insurance tunnel, which is good cause today was the day I was going to drop $1154 on health care premiums through Sinclair.

I was able to place my pod order without a problem (!! really !!), and tho our account still shows up as "inactive," I'm told that doctors are taking and processing the claims, which will be back up to date by the time anything we do this week actually gets processed, so at least we don't have to pay out of pocket at the hospital or get turned away.

Still paying out of pocket for prescriptions, but that wasn't my urgent concern. The terror and sleepless nights were in trying to figure out how to come up with $1100 for my pump supplies and $3,000 for J's twice-yearly post-cancer scan (which he was due to have last week).

We are both a lot less hysterical now, and should hopefully be sleeping a lot better. Man, what a nightmare. It's not quite over, but it's a fuck of a lot less urgent. It's like the difference between wondering how you'll survive and just wondering how many nights a week you'll be eating ramen.

Oh, there was some other good news today, too.

As J said, "IT'S LIKE CHRISTMAS!"

Women in the Fight

Images of Women in WWII.

(via Elizabeth Bear)

The Autumn Feast!

Full set here. Here's what we cooked:

Ranch Style Chicken
Sweet-Roasted Rosemary Acorn Squash Wedges
Spicy Pumpkin Soup

Maple syrup substitute for the pumpkin soup and acorn squash consisted of Splenda mixed with no-carb maple "syrup" substitute. Honey called for in the ranch style chicken was substituted with no-carb maple "syrup" (and turned out very well!).

Booklife

So, I'm, like, a writer fighting to get my first book into stores. At least into Kindles? Published would be great. It's been languishing, but hopefully that'll change soonish.

Anyway, I'm also an introvert. I write books. I don't market them. I'm an introvert by nature... it's one of the reasons I became a writer. One of the toughest things for introverted writers to negotiate has always been the marketing of their books, and with the rise of ever more "social" and viral ways to market books, the landscape has gotten tougher to manage. Most of the time, I feel little overwhelmed.

I'm often caught in this weird place where people tell me I share too much, or too little, or don't engage enough, or engage too much. And you know, all I want to do is write. I can write here or plunk away in cool silence in this big 1890s house, but at some point, if you want anybody to read anything you write, you need to crawl out of the house and back into the world.

Booklife came to me at just the right time. I'd sold a book, had it get caught in limbo, and was happily cocooning in my real life. Trouble is there are two big parts to The Writing Life. There's the writing, and there's the marketing. There's the interacting with the world, and there's creating worlds. Today, it often feels like I can do one or the other but not both at once. And... well, let's say that interacting with the world makes me tired. I'm in marketing at the day job, and that means people and politics and social media all day. It's the last thing I want to do when I come home.

I enjoyed Booklife because I got to see how another writer negotiated the writing vs. marketing portions of life. Because let me tell you - it often feels like they're directly opposing forces. He gives some great strategies on how to move from writing to marketing mode and leverage social media tools. Yes, the tools he talks about may be obsolete soon, but the rules of social media (thus far) are pretty portable across mediums.

For me, it was the right book at the right time. How do you interact with the world without exhausting yourself? How do you withdraw enough that you can be creative but not lose momentum with your social media audience? It's a tough negotiation that I'm right smack in the middle of right now, and seeing how VanderMeer is negotiating his own booklife was... comforting? I want to know it can be done. That I can build a writing career and still have some part of my life that's still mine. I need enough left to create something.

Because I've spent a year being battered around by publishing woes, and I'm far too young and unpublished to become a bitter midlister just yet.

The Irrational Politics of Web 2.0

ME: One of the folks I know is dating one of my exes! And she unfriended me on LJ!

J: Well, yanno, that’s what happens when you start dating someone. You have to unfriend all their exes on the LJ, honey. It's, like, a rule or something.

ME: But!

J: It's a RULE.

ME: But!!!

J: When was the last time you talked to this person?

ME: Well… um. I haven’t been going to cons, really, which is where everyone is… and, um, OK, I don’t comment much on the blogs anymore, and um…. I sort of dropped off the face of the writing earth last year. But!! I do LIKE her!! Now she will NEVER TALK TO ME AGAIN.

J: I think you will be OK.

ME: So I guess I shouldn’t friend her on Facebook?

J: Probably not.

This is the trouble with web 2.0. Sometimes it makes you feel just like you did in high school, and the feelings are just as ridiculously irrational.

Particularly because I’m terribly happy for both of them.

Scurvy Dogs (happy Friday)

This is Not My Beautiful Life...

I first noticed this phenomenon in the photos of folks I have on my Yahoo IM chat list. More often than not, women with young children would use the photo of their children as their avatar photo. The first couple times, you figure, hey, they're just really proud of their kids. Then I saw my mom use a photo of my neice and nephew as her user pic on Facebook and I thought... huh?

On the one hand, as the author points out, it's almost refreshing to see a focus other than me-me-me on traditionally me-centric social media sites. On the other hand... um? I'm proud of a good many things in my life, and no doubt if I ever have a child, I'll be proud of them too, but why use the photo as a stand in for... me?

There are plenty of photos of folks with their best friends, mothers *with* their kids, fathers with their kids, and of course, whole families together that sit in as user pics. So it's not like this is as huge a trend as the author points out. But it does come up often enough for me to go "hm," too. I haven't seen any fathers use pics of their children as their user photo, for instance. But I may just not be looking, or I don't note them as much when I see them?

I wonder if it's a mix of pride and guilt? Are you more likely to see working mothers using photos of their kids as avatars? I don't buy that it's about creating anonymity, as there are plenty of folks who just use objects/random scenery shots to hide behind. Is it really a flight from aging, like the author suggests? I don't buy into that so much. I'd be interested to find the commonalities and differences among men and women alike (because there must be some guy, somewhere) who use their children's photos for their social media pics.

I'd be interested, for instance, if it's more likely working moms or stay at home moms who do it. Or is there a class distinction? Is it really an age difference? Do over-30s just view the web differently, and shy away from its me-centric nature more than 20-somethings? Or has our culture really shifted... now that we all have less children, we invest more in them... and more of ourselves in them, and carry them close the same way we would anything else we'd invested so much of our youth in?

Children have always been a source of pride. I just can't ever see my grandmother posting a photo of her children as her user pic, if I could ever get her to join FB...

Batten Down the Hatches

I've spent some time tightening up our budget this week, which is rough to say the least. Monday morning I'll be sending J. in to Sinclair community college with a credit card authorization giving UHC $1145 to cover the two of us through J's account since they're no longer honoring my work account.

As noted elsewhere, I can't go more than 60 days without coverage, and tho once this whole debacle is sorted out they'll retroactively cover me for the gap... well, let's just say I don't want any paperwork in exsitence anywhere that says I went more than 60 days without coverage. I have to live my whole life as a t1, and trust me - insurance companies will find every crazy way possible to shunt the most expensive folks from their ranks. And I'm one of them. And tho I could fight them when they pulled out that "no coverage since Sep 1st" letter... it would take 6 months to sort out, and I would be fighting it my whole life. Every time I changed insurance providers or J. or I had a big medical bill, they'd root through our account. We'd never escape it.

So Monday morning we're out $1154. It's an 80/20 plan, so we've started stuffing money toward paying for expenses. He's got an MRI every 6 months that runs $3,000. My drugs, if I drop my pump and get real lean, may "only" run $350 if I'm careful. Add that to regular endo appointments for me and port flushes for him (J.'s a cancer survivor. There's another year of follow-up before he's insurable again outside a major employer-sponsored group plan), and we're looking at about $11-12,000 a year in bare bones medical expenses. You figure we'll need to come up with, what, $2400-3000 of that out of pocket in addition to the $1145.

Hopefully we'll only be out coverage for 3-6 months. So let's say $1500 out of pocket over the next 3 months in addition to the $1145.

That's an extra $500 a month we need to pull from thin air (not counting the $1145, which is going on the credit card I had nearly paid off).

Sorry this has become the "all shitty health insurance, all the time blog," the last couple of weeks, but these issues weigh pretty heavily on me, and getting all the facts and numbers down on paper actually helps me cope and process the whole thing.

I've shaved about $150 from the budget right now by tossing out netflix and severely cutting our "misc./fun" budget from $200 a month to $100 a month (we already live pretty lean. You don't go from having $17,000 in credit card debt to $2,800 in 3 years if you aren't already living lean). We'll be making up the rest by paying a little less toward that fucking credit card bill (did I mention I was just $2,800 and 5 months away from paying it off completely?), and relying on J's new part-time job. I'm also working on hunting down a few freelance gigs. One of the roughest things going on right now is that my student loans have come due this month. That was fine when the credit card was going to be paid off. Now I have to juggle those with the CC payments and medical costs.

We'll make it through this. But it doesn't make me any happier about it. The most frustrating part is that it's totally out of my hands. At least when UHC was only fucking *me* over, I had some control over it. I could spend hours and hours yelling at them and get the issue resolved. Now I'm totally powerless to do anything but pay for a second policy. That's incredibly, brutally frustrating. Because ya'll know me: I'm a fighter. I fight to the end. Being on the passive end of this whole fiasco drives me crazy.

So, I'm doing what I can. Cutting back, paying bills, eating a lot of soup and beanless chili... Recipes to come! Because when it looks like everything is crap, it's good to remember that you can still afford to eat. And with how rough it is out there right now, that's nothing to sniff at.

Happy 80th to Le Guin

Happy 80th birthday, Ursula K. Le Guin.

Here's to many more! (and many more books!)

Pathfinder

This was not the movie I wanted to see. See, I wanted somebody to take the opportunity to tell the story about complex, fully developed Native American societies whoopin some Viking ass.

Instead, it's just another cliched ramble about "noble savages" getting saved by The Great White Hope.

It was like watching 10,000 BC... in Saskatchewan.

What Would...

OmniPod Upgrade: Solo Patch

Slimmer than my current pod... but the big bonus - as you can see on some of the later pictures - is that the default medical adhesive is (WAIT FOR IT!!): hypafix.

Watch the video demo here.

Smart. Smart. Smart. Smart. "Hey, let's make our *default* medical adhesive the one that folks *won't develop a medical adhesive allergy to*!"

Yes. Let's!

These aren't yet for sale (and battling to get insurance to cover them... let's not get into that), but it's fun to see the tech improving for insulin pumps. Looks like there will be a huge cost savings, as the base is replaced every 3 MONTHS instead of every 3 days (the plastic interior is replaced every 3 days with the Solo, but should cost less than replacing the whole mechanism, like you do with the omipod now, every 3 days). Another awesome feature: being able to bolus even without the remote.

And I can get a remote in red!

Love it. Love it. Love it.

I just ordered a demo kit.