Merry Christmas. We’re having a really quiet one this year; there just hasn’t been enough energy to do much, not even think up things we’d like to have. The only thing I really want is more energy and more stability, and those are hard to give for Christmas.

I had a half-day at work yesterday, which was nice. Got all “outstanding” ratings on my four-month probation evaluation, which is nice to hear; I was a little nervous, although I think I’m doing a pretty solid job. Two more four-month evaluations, and I’ll be out of probation and actually have union protections.

I’m in the middle of a big data-cleanup job at work - nothing exciting, going through about 500 forms and normalizing the product names so they can be used for statistics. (You’d be amazed how many different ways people will refer to, say, Adobe Creative Cloud.)

Also being asked to sort of “run” a particularly visible process - I’m not the figurehead or spokesman, but I’m doing pretty much all of the organizing, PM work, and an even share of the analysis and research. So that’s cool.

Looks like in the medium-term future, I’m going to be asked to use my coding experience to integrate a bunch of APIs into our system, which… Hopefully means more working semi-independently and not hand-in-glove with the fellow I’ve found somewhat frustrating.

(And the poor older fellow I actually really like got scolded for using the wrong pronouns for me, which I feel bad about. I’m not offended - it’s obviously accidental and he feels quite embarrassed about it, and I’m not going to get mad at a seventy-year-old man who needs to update his pronoun heuristics from “vocal pitch” for the first time in his life. Dude’s great. Probably the biggest nerd on the team, so while our special interests only somewhat intersect, I really enjoy chatting with him. Plus, I get the spicy horror stories about, say, contract arbitration. So… hopefully everything is fine on that front; I appreciate that the department takes misgendering seriously but yeesh, I think the fact that it’s clearly unintentional should go a really long way.)

So… that’s the work front. Hopefully things continue going well. I’m still fairly wary, and the giant slate of meetings last week was exhausting, but if I can keep just doing my own thing… It’s no public health research, but it works.

The cats are having a lovely time in the cool weather; there are four on the couch right now, two in my lap and two with Z. It’s my favorite time of year, though I wish it were a little colder - or at least a little less gusting rain, so we could have the bedroom windows open at night without everything getting soaked.

Z has the whole week off, and is using it to recharge, which looks eminently sensible. I’ve only got the four hours granted by the governor, and today - so I’m back at work tomorrow. I only have two days of vacation time so far, so it’ll be a while before I have enough built up to feel safe using.

(Especially after the bad experience with covid a couple of years ago, where I had to pull all-nighters to make sure I wouldn’t spike a fever high enough to need to go to the ER. It was running about 104.8F for a few hours while I had acetaminophen and ibuprofen at the max recommended doses, plus three icepacks, so that was a very real concern. If I’m very feverish and running on no sleep, I might well have to take a week off work - and I just don’t have that kind of PTO yet, even combining sick leave and vacation time.)

M and I went to the library on Tuesday, which was nice; Tuesday is the knitting and crochet circle, which is definitely a different vibe from the friendly chaos of the makerspace. The makerspace was closed this week, probably to give the employees a break - and the knitters are lovely, but definitely much quieter. I get the impression that most of them work pretty tiring jobs, mostly in IT and academics, and this is their time to unwind for a couple of hours before going home. Totally valid, and I’ll probably be back sometimes, but I’m looking for something that provides novelty and amps me up a bit, rather than a way to wind down. I think the makerspace might be a better fit for that, but we’ll see how things develop; December is always an odd month for this sort of community involvement, with everyone’s schedule disrupted.

I’m still knitting those socks for M - slowly. Finished weaving in ends on the bulky-weight red blanket I made a couple of months ago, thankfully before it needed to be thrown in the wash - always a concern with six cats. Did some light repairs - glued the cracking plastic on some headphones, helped M get the jammed mailbox open, repaired the zippered cat bed where the zipper had started separating from the wool felt of the body, fixed up a fraying kitchen towel.

Very exciting stuff, but it feels like a good time of year for repairs and getting things back in order, and I’m taking it as a sign that I’m finally starting to come out of the hibernation of existential dread. Having a job really helps; at least that’s some security, and as much as I have mixed feelings about working for the state, at least it’s one of the few workplaces that does actually have protections for speech outside the office - so I’m less likely to be fired for my politics or for being trans.

Watching Alone: The Beast, which I got partway through a while ago, but I’m fully rewatching now. It’s interesting - quite dissimilar from the main Alone show, in that the participants are in teams of three and clearly being followed by a camera crew - but still interesting. The gimmick is that the participants have nothing but a freshly-killed large animal (moose, muskox, alligator) and the clothes on their backs. No tools, and that means they’re rushing to create stone-age tools good enough to process a large animal and create fire, quickly enough that the meat doesn’t spoil. It’s largely an adventure in stone-age engineering and tool use, and that’s interesting to watch.

The current episode I’m watching is in the American Southeast, and … I had never considered that a swamp really doesn’t have stones available, which makes stone age tools much trickier. They’re down to reeds and shells for tools, which is fascinating to watch. It’s doable, but clearly very hard.

In terms of books -

Letters to Jenny (Piers Anthony) -

Such a strange read.

Briefly, this is a series of letters written by Anthony to a twelve-year-old fan, at her mother’s request; she had been hit by a car and was comatose and then dealing with brainstem injuries, so while she was psychologically intact, her ability to move and communicate was seriously impaired. He wrote to her weekly; this book covers a year of letters, but their correspondence continued afterward.

That’s very sweet, and it’s something Anthony did quite often - he devoted a lot of his time to correspondence with fans, especially those who clearly just needed someone to talk to, like depressed teenagers or prison inmates.

It’s also deeply weird, because Anthony cultivates a tone of… I don’t know, playful naughtiness? There’s a lot of slightly naughty humor (sex, farts, bodily functions). A lot of a continued joke of “don’t tell your mother” (which is clearly a joke because Jenny isn’t capable of independent communication, and her mother is reading the letters to her - so it’s just not possible that anything else was going on). A lot of Anthony musing on what he personally finds attractive, like long hair or particular older movie stars. I mean, hell, when they meet in person at a convention, he tells her the story of a thirteen-year-old disabled girl seducing an adult man. He’s like “hmm I don’t know if this is a good idea - but it’s such a good story, she’ll find it inspirational probably!”

Huge red flags, and while in this particular instance - with all communication vetted by other adults, with zero chance that anything untoward happened while unsupervised - we can be quite sure that nothing bad happened, it’s still wildly unsettling to read.

It feels like this comes from a sense of… not wanting to pretend that children - especially teens - are sexless creatures with no prurient interests, which feels valid, and goodness knows our culture has swung hard in the other direction. But it also feels like Anthony has zero understanding that there’s a power imbalance - he seems to almost think of himself and other adults as “really” giggling kids inside, with the same mildly-naughty sense of humor, and therefore believes it’s appropriate and respectful to treat tweens and teens as essentially peers who are also in on the joke.

Which, uh. Whoof. The power imbalance between a middle-aged man, however juvenile his humor, and a tween, are………. yeah.

Not gonna lie, our current society has swung hard toward puritanism and child protection in a way which I don’t think is entirely warranted - see also, trans kids’ access to gender affirming care, for instance. But this is wildly uncomfortable. I don’t think Anthony has ever evolved out of that 1970s worldview, whereas most of the dirty-old-man authors of that era have died or stopped writing. It feels a lot like reading older genre fiction - it’s not shocking, it’s just gross.

And interspersed with that is just… the banality of writing a letter to someone regularly, when you don’t have anything very interesting to share. You talk about daily life, recount an anecdote or two, talk about what you read or watched, enclose a newspaper clipping or a funny comic. It’s weirdly familiar, because I’ve been there - not really here, where I’m not trying to entertain so much as chronicle, but when I was dating someone in the military and trying to send frequent letters.

Not a book that holds up terribly well, and not one I’m keeping, but it does shed light on Anthony’s personal worldview and makes him make some more sense. I think he does kind of still think of himself as a “fellow kid”, and that’s… bizarre, but it makes him make more sense as a writer.

Weird. Donating.


When Zachary Beaver Came to Town (Kimberly Willis Holt) -

I hate to say it, but this one felt… overwhelmingly artificial. It felt like the 1971 Texas setting was something put on as a costume, not something really embodied by the characters, and I can’t quite put my finger on why.

I feel like a jerk saying it, because it sounds like that really was the lived experience - at least the setting - of the author, but this book was written in 1999, and the 1971 of the book just doesn’t quite feel real. Maybe it’s just that the author had a few very specific scenes and images in mind, and everything else was cobbled together out of necessity. Maybe it’s that the characters don’t feel emotionally invested and dramatic the way I remember being at thirteen.

Briefly, the main character is a thirteen-year-old in a very small town in western Texas, in 1971. His mom has left for Nashville to chase her show business dreams, he has his first big crush, his best friend’s brother is away in Vietnam. He is, in the way of a YA protagonist, fumbling his way toward adulthood and doing a mediocre job.

The titular character and inciting incident is a tiny sideshow which comes to town - the “fattest boy in the world”, who puts up with being rudely stared at for money, and gets essentially abandoned in his tiny trailer for a few weeks. Poor kid feels like the most authentic thing in the book - a fifteen-year-old who is grouchy and self-conscious about being stared at, and tries to pretend his life as a sideshow is a lot more exciting and interesting than it actually is, telling stories about worldtrotting when he’s probably never left the southeast.

And… that’s kinda it. All the interpersonal notes go in the way you think they would. The kid’s parents divorce and they both love him but it’s hard to adjust. His crush seems like she likes him but actually just likes him as a friend. The boy in Vietnam dies. The protagonist has one implausible magic event with the sideshow kid, which brings the whole town together, before the sideshow kid leaves and never comes back. (In this case, inexplicably, deciding the kid actually secretly wants to be baptized? No idea.)

Again, I feel like a dick saying it, but… Yeah, this is why I gravitated so hard toward genre fiction as a kid. It’s the kind of bildungsroman which leans heavily on misunderstandings and immaturity in the characters for its central conflict, and I’ve never liked that style much. Give me an external conflict any time - not interpersonal shit.

I don’t think I ever actually read this one as a kid, because I have no memory of it, though it’s definitely a copy I’ve had since I was the expected age.

So… Yeah. Donating. Not my thing.