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OH YIPE YULETIDE NOMS ARE OPEN WHAT TO NOM WHAT TO NOM

ETA: For my future reference, I nommed (though I may change this later) "Time Travel Girl - Seanan McGuire (Song)", "Earthquake Weather - Seanan McGuire (Song)", and "House of Stone and Light - Dartmouth Decibelles (Song)".

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Oh that's not good. That's not good at all. I have brought two boxes down from the bedroom today. Count 'em: two. And my arms pretty much do not want to play anymore. My wrists in particular, quelle surprise—here I feel it worth observing that at work I am banned from hauling the five-gallon jugs of water around, because of my wrists, but no one in my family has offered to carry one single box for me. (I mean, parents did haul furniture with me, but the other option in that case was renting a moving truck and movers.) But the rest of my arms too.

I guess I'm going to go shower and then dive into my textbooks for a couple hours. I meant to work overtime today, too...but I guess that ain't happening.

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Dorothy Allison's "River of Names": trigger warnings out the wazoo. Suicide, rape, murder, epic family dysfunction. (Queer protagonist, but ye gods does she have a downer of a family history.)

Richard Bausch's "All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona": maybe not a good read for someone with alcohol problems. Also contains epic family dysfunction.

Why are the assigned-reading stories always so down?

Also. Locate one surprise in the first pages of "River of Names" that caused you to believe in the story? Provide that surprise here and explain why it surprised you and how that surprise caused you to believe in the fictional dream. Nope, not this story. Ugh.

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Observation inspired by lecture video: It is easier to create a believable story within a dominant culture than a non-dominant one. Especially if the intended audience is the dominant culture. Professor Larison was talking about how "we've all been there" with the details of the picnic scene in the Flagstaff story, but stories like NK Jemisin's "The Effluent Engine", we really, really have not all been there. Jemisin's protagonist's experience of racism is not common to all of Jemisin's audience, in particular the white parts of said audience. Jemisin also has an uphill battle in that she's writing speculative, not realistic, fiction ("The Effluent Engine" is specifically alt-history steampunk). Prof. Larison says to write to convince the most skeptical reader; in the case of a speculative fiction writer, that most skeptical reader is guaranteed to not be a speculative fiction reader. It seems to me that these are similar, though orthogonal, problems.

There is something fundamentally unfair about this.

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I feel like I should say something about the seven hundred dead in the tragedy in Mecca during the Hajj but I don't know what. Except to wonder why the first I heard about it was just now, in context of atheist mockery of these people's devotion.

May their families find their memories to be blessings.

Langsamer, bitte.

Wie sagt man "This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes" auf Deutsch?

(Skype is required software for the course, you see. It's funny in my head... And no, I don't actually need this information for any particular purpose. I just think I'm a comedian.)

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I suppose mandatory overtime is good for the wallet, anyway.

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My desktop computer at home is all set up now WOOHOOOOOO

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*debates fixing Yuletide noms*

See, I somehow managed not to actually start reading aldersprig's Edally Academy stories until tonight—but the opening of this chapter (which is chapter 5 of book 2) caught my eye so I started at the beginning, and guess what I now want to nominate for Yuletide. The problem is, that requires taking out one of my existing noms...