Rosemary for Remembrance

I'm greatly enjoying this book, and looking forward to learning what happens next. (Avoid the TV series. It's terrible.)

The premise that Myfanwy Thomas wakes up with complete amnesia and has to interpret the world through letters she's left herself. (This isn't Memento; she's sorting out a government conspiracy rather than a murder.)

So far, there have been two moments that threw me out of the book. Here's the first. Myfanwy is standing in front of a mirror for the first time, naked.

I am nondescript, she thought. Nondescript features with shoulder-length dark hair. Hmm. She opened the robe and looked critically at her body.

Lots of adjectives beginning with the letter S are appropriate here, she thought grimly. Short. Scrawny. Small breasts. Skinned knees (although presumably those were only temporary). She remembered something from the letter and felt along the inside of her left thigh. A small hard scar. From falling out of a tree and impaling this leg at the age of nine, she thought. Her body was not particularly fit-looking but seemed blessedly free of cellulite. Shaved legs. A conservative and recent bikini wax. More bruises had risen to the surface, but they didn't conceal the fact that she was not possessed of an especially sexy body. I think I could do better, she thought. I won't be able to hit the level of Hot, but I might be able to manage Cute. If I have a big enough budget. Or at least some makeup to work with.

Hands up if you think this description was written by a woman. Two sentences for her face, a paragraph for her body. Focusing on "how sexy I am" (see also bikini wax) and not "what does my face say about me?" Like, I'd be wondering how old I was. What color my eyes were. Whether I looked like I smiled a lot. The bikini wax would come very low on the list.

Five pages later, our heroine looks at her picture. "Ordinary features, pale, with independent-minded eyebrows." Her driver's license tells her that her hair is brown, her eyes, blue, and she's thirty-one. She hasn't noticed any of these until she looks at the license.

Second, our heroine has called a cab.

She gave the address to the extremely scruffy driver and was then forced to concede that she didn't know where it was.
...
So you have no idea where this house is? the driver asked. He was elderly and wearing one of those dubious flat caps.

It's been established that our heroine is fabulously wealthy. Surely she'd be calling a black cab, whose driver had The Knowledge? (I checked. Yup, author is Australian.) If she did call a minicab, surely it would have GPS?

It's a ripping yarn. I am enjoying it. I am just a picky crankypants.

George R.R. Martin has issued a statement on File 770.

For those of you out of the convention fandom loop (and I listen but do not congo), for a decade or so GRRM has thrown the "Hugo Losers Party", at which winners are welcome to attend but have to wear funny hats and be mocked. For a couple of years those parties became the responsibility of the Worldcon where they were held; GRRM took them back. This year's party was a logistics disaster. People who couldn't get into the Hugo Awards (another logistics problem) went directly to the Hugo Losers Party. That meant that when the actual losers had finished with the awards, the party was full up. People were dropped off by minibus in front of the venue and left to wait until space was freed up by people leaving. There were tweets. There was anger.

I linked to GRRM's statement of what happened. The mood of the piece is that the Hugo Losers Party is a gift he gives congoers, not an entitlement. That's completely reasonable and appropriate. Renting out a floor of a brewery for a party is an extravagant thing to do.

However, wow, were there bad logistics choices made. GRRM rented a venue with a capacity of 450; there were worries that the venue might be too small. The contingency plan was the expectation that the venue would violate the fire code (if there were still a marquee tag, I'd be using it) or allow the party to overflow into space they hadn't rented. Even if he'd offered cash to expand it on the night, it would have been much too late to staff that space.

GRRM was at least annoyed by the discovery that there would be 280 spots reserved for the Hugo losers and their plus-ones. "280 spots of out 450 were already gone, before I had even invited a single guest of my own. " Here's the core problem. GRRM doesn't see the losers as guests of his own. This isn't actually the Hugo Losers' party, and that's just fine; GRRM can throw any party he likes. But being annoyed that the Hugo losers expect to go is dooming yourself to disappointment. This realization would also have been a great moment to reevaluate the amount of space being rented. However, as he amply documents, even GRRM couldn't have afforded to rent another floor, with liquor and the food required by Irish law.

GRRM arranged for a single minibus seating twenty to bring people from the convention center to the party. He appears to have thought of this as a way to slowly integrate new partygoers. Instead, it meant long lines at the buses. He is annoyed that ConZealand decided that there wouldn't be enough taxi space to accommodate all the partygoers, and rented two bus-sized buses to transport partygoers to the party. There went GRRM's only attempt at crowd control.

> They were obeying what we were told was the law.

"What we were told"? I mean, come on, this is basic basic big-party planning that GRRM's team should have figured out months in advance. Fire codes are a thing in every venue everywhere, and when they aren't, people die.

> But much of the outrage about what happened seems to have its root in a mistaken belief that this was their party, intended to “honor” or “celebrate” them, that it was being staged “for” them, that they should have been given preference over everyone else, an assertion that just reeks of entitlement.

GRRM doesn't want to throw the Hugo Losers party. That's fine. But everybody should stop calling GRMM's party by its original name.

She's going into surgery right now. More as I know it. Prayers and good wishes appreciated. My brother's flying up tomorrow.

My son's car now has California plates and a California registration in the glovebox.

Holy cow. He took possession of that car July 17, 2018 (a number I know because I have filled it in to so so many damn forms.) All the months since then have been spent either waiting for my mother to execute forms on her end, waiting for DMV appointments, being denied at the DMV, waiting for Indiana BMV appointments, being denied at the BMV, getting duplicate titles, waiting for paperwork to wing here, there, and thither. It's been 13 months of anxiety.

It's done. The damn thing is registered. That's currently my longest-running worry. Shutting the gates of my mind to all the worries that think they deserve promotion.

I turned sixty this year. I won't say I'm the same person as at (say) thirty-five; I'm bitterer, less hopeful, and of course disabled. But the fun-having part of me is pretty much the same. I get seriously involved in fun things, until the fun wears off or I get anxious about not doing them right. (Ask me about knitting.) Sometimes, when I'm lucky, I do them forever.

The strangest thing about being old is the way some younger people react to my very existence in fandom and gaming spaces. Some are creeped out. Some applaud me for my ... daring originality? If you play Don't Starve Together, yesterday I was called "Our very own Wickerbottom!" (Yes, I am a Wickerbottom main. She's a librarian. Duh.)

I've heard the first gen fanzine writers complain about the very same thing. When a hobby has been active for forty-plus years, dating slash to Leslie Fish, then you're going to have people who are fifty-plus (at least) years old doing it. Home videogaming is also forty-plus years old, and the same applies.

Does anybody remember an SF story called something like "Grandma Won't Rock", about somebody assuming their grandmother ought to be doing grandmotherly things? I feel like that.

So, as reported in the Guardian:

Scientists have found that the devastating eating disorder anorexia nervosa is not purely a psychiatric condition but is also driven by problems with metabolism.

The finding may help to explain doctors’ poor record in treating the illness and pave the way for radical new approaches to predict and treat those who are most at risk.

Researchers made the discovery after comparing the DNA of nearly 17,000 people with anorexia and more than 55,000 healthy controls. Those with anorexia submitted their DNA through the Anorexia Nervosa Genetics Initiative or the eating disorders working group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium.

The study revealed eight genes that linked anorexia to anxiety, depression and obsessive compulsive disorder, all of which was expected. But it also flagged up DNA involved in burning fat, being physically active and having resistance to type 2 diabetes.
...
Doctors have long considered family environment to be a factor in anorexia nervosa, but in some cases even widely held beliefs might be mistaken. Perfectionism, for example, has been blamed as a cause of anorexia, but the latest work suggests it is the other way around.

In summary: yet another disease primarily experienced by women turns out not to be purely psychiatric, which might be why psychiatry alone isn't working all that well for many people. And possibly not their parents' fault, either? Who knew it wasn't all in their heads?

Grrrr.

So, in between all the excitements of this year, my brother was diagnosed with lymphoma/thyroid cancer/not clear which in the week when he was visiting my dememted mother in spring. (I forget which month. It's been that kind of year.) He wound up with a pretty good prognosis: remove the thyroid, radiation, life is good thereafter.

The thyroid removal was supposed to be about three hours ending in noon his time today. It didn't end until seven his time.

I have been steadfastly avoiding pressing my sister-in-law, who has more than enough on her plate. But I don't know why the surgery took so long, or how bad the results are, or what, in general, the fuck.

Thoughts and prayers, please.

I got 5 bags of clothes and shoes out of the bedroom. That's tall kitchen trashbags (12 quarts), mind you. I may yet be able to reenter and use the closet.

I feel like admitting this sort of thing is admitting to being a mess and a hoarder, but progressing away from that is still progress.

I give myself triple points because this morning I had to ward off my mom's buying airplane tickets (from the dementia ward, on her computer) to make a surprise visit to my brother who'll be recovering from cancer surgery. That was a trip and a half.

My son is the eldest (only) son of an eldest (only) son of an eldest (only) son.

When he was a child in North Carolina, his public school teachers/elders -- not my father-in-law -- kept telling him that he was going to be the head of the family, and he needed to be prepared to take that responsibility.

Weird. (and my son and husband find it weird, too.)

Destroy the patriarchy.

It has become clear that my parents stayed in the lowest step of a retirement community far, far longer than they should have. My mother concealed my father's dementia. My parents refused all offers to move to the next step -- a completely independent apartment -- long after they were incapable of caring for themselves in a duplex. My widowed mother continued to refuse all offers until she wound up in the dementia ward with hallucinations -- which have been cured when her medications, hydration, and food intake were supervised. She continues to insist, in the dementia ward, that she is capable of moving back to their house, and refuses to move to an assisted apartment.

My husband, bless his heart and I mean this absolutely seriously, thinks there Ought To Be A Solution. It ought to be possible to move people where they need to go. We need to make plans so we won't do this to our children.

And the thing is, it doesn't work that way. Power of attorney, and the nursing home's ability to force change, are a binary. Is the person capable of making legally binding decisions yes/no? And if they're capable of making legally binding decisions, no matter how self-sabotaging or how stupid, you can't protect them. The nursing home can't move them until they are demonstrated to be incapable. The children can't move them until they are demonstrated to be incapable. And we couldn't take away the car keys until either the Indiana BMV did it, or until my mother became so legally incompetent that we had the right. The car keys are hidden now; my mother's best friend has my mother's driver's license. And that's only possible because we have my mother's POA and her lawyer agrees that she's demented. The ultimate irony here is that my parents moved to the multistep retirement community to save my brother and me the agonies they went with their parents.

My husband lucked out, after a fashion: his parents were willing to move from step to step as it became necessary. Soon after they moved to the independent apartment, his father, rest his educated soul, developed Parkinson's. A couple of years after her husband died, my mother-in-law, who had always disliked driving, gave up her driver's license and her car. To be fair, she is fiercely annoyed by the next next step, in which nurses aides show up regularly to check her insulin and make sure she's safe.

I hope, as an aging mother, to behave more like my in-laws than like my parents. I hope -- very much hope -- that I am neither so secretive nor so fiercely independent as my parents. But, you know, I inherit my mom's (and my dad's) bossiness, and who knows how aging further will treat me.

There isn't a settled solution to dementia. Up until the point where it demonstrably happens, you can't override a competent parent's decision. And after it demonstrably happens, you may have a fight on your hands.

I would say "hope I die before I get old", but I'm sixty. Love you, children. Hope I'm more reasonable when aging further than my parents were.