wickedqueen.net

You know, all those years of secondary school gym class, I thought I hated physical activity, but it turns out I just hated fascism.*

I remember all those thousands of hours
that I spent in grade school watching the clock,
waiting for recess or lunch or to go home.
Waiting: for anything but school.
My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James
for all the time they stole from me.

–Richard Brautigan, The Memoirs of Jesse James

(My other reflection on biking lately is that the older I get, the more like my father I seem to become. Biking, cooking,** and I’ve started contemplating camping, which was definitely not my thing as a child, at least not after age 8 or so.)

My hair is also getting really faded. I’m loathe to cover the highlights, which still look good (if faded), but probably I’ll dye it all back to Atomic Pink after I get back from visiting my cousin in LA. This does mean that Cyn and I will not be total twinsies if we get together for lunch, but that may well save the universe from implosion,*** so perhaps I should consider it a necessary sacrifice.

And speaking of the universe imploding, today’s Thursday PARC Forum is about dark matter. Maybe I should go.

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*I’ve remarked this to several people now, which is why I can’t remember who thought it should be on a t-shirt. I think it might be a little long.

***I’ve always been a big fan of parallel universes, such as Star Trek Dark Mirror and the Futurama Cowboy Universe. Maybe there’s one where everyone’s got pink hair EXCEPT Cyn and me. I’ll tell you one thing: I bet Evil Bizarro Cabell has really conservative hair. Lime green would be the photo-negative, but I’ve done that, too.

When I left campus tonight, it was snowing. By the time I got to the bus stop for the outbound #64, it was coming down pretty hard, and it was another 10 minutes before the bus showed up, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t that cold, and I had my enormous rainbow scarf (I heard people marveling at it on my way down Mass Ave), and the snow was gorgeous swirling down and around the streetlights.

When I was younger, when we drove in the snow on dark, DARK country roads, I would pretend that I was flying into hyperspace. I also remember, from even before that, long stretches of pressing my face against cold windows, staring up into fast heavy flakes and feeling like I was flying. Remembering that, turning my face up into falling snow feels like pure joy–and upon reflection, I’m fairly sure it’s because, growing up in southern Missouri, staring up into snow like that was a guarantee that there would be no school the following day.

As an old Calvin & Hobbes strip pointed out, it’s one of the few pleasures in life reserved for those who don’t drive.

It will probably only accumulate about an inch, and I still don’t drive, and MIT has closed for snow like three times since 1945 or something, and anyway I need to go into campus tomorrow to work out, if nothing else (and also so I can be not running the heat in my apartment), but falling snow still makes me happy.

A Theology of Cheap Beer

(One thing I don’t like about Cat and Girl is that doesn’t provide permalinks until a new comic is up, so I’ll have to remember to come back and fix this link tomorrow. ETA: Whew, I remembered.)

It’s so fucking true, though. They did start remaking My Little Pony and Carebears and Strawberry Shortcake (although the new version’s hat totally sucks), but they’re remaking them AS children’s toys, not in the kitschy/trendy mode that boys’ toys get rereleased in. He-Man and Thundercats now have multiple seasons out on DVD, but I haven’t seen any Rainbow Brite or Gem anywhere, and I somehow doubt that people are primarily buying Thundercats for kids.*

Admittedly, the former shows figure larger in my personal childhood than the latter, but man, what I wouldn’t give for a CD of the music from Rainbow Brite for the purposes of ironic rocking out. I do own the soundtrack to The Chipmunk Adventure, you know, and if it came out on DVD I would snap it up in a HEARTBEAT.

You do get a little Carebear and Rainbow Brite stuff at places like Hot Topic, but it seems like it doesn’t stay out very long. I still regret not buying a Rainbow Brite hoodie at Ragstock like two years ago, because I haven’t seen one since.

Just to be a little hypocritical here, the new Transformers trailer IS totally fucking awesome. God, I can’t wait. Optimus Prime, my first love, now in LIVE ACTION.

And in another vein altogether: We have a history: a web card

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*So far, the only thing that has stopped me from buying Thundercats on DVD is a) it is super freaking expensive and b) I know, I KNOW that I would not really enjoy watching it as a 25-year-old adult-type person, and I don’t want to trample on this fragment of my happy childhood.

I spent yesterday in wine country with friends from Stanford; it was fun. Mostly what we did was taste wine, and I suppose I could have gotten Thrilling Action Shots of that, but I was kind of busy drinking tasting. And getting surprisingly blotto surprisingly fast from what seemed like very small quantities of wine, although I guess we did share a bottle at lunch, but come on, there were FOUR OF US. My friend Anne suggests it was the altitude, which sounds like a good excuse.

Anyway, the wineries were cool. Brandy was collecting ceramic coasters from them, and I did a little Christmas shopping. There were also some totally bizarre random aspects to the buildings and grounds, Exhibit A being the Giant Thumb at Clos Pegase:

No, we don’t know, either. Awesome thumb, though.

Clos Pegase was my favorite of the wineries that we visited, although in the interest of full disclosure, it was also the last. Their emblem was Pegasus, which was cool and reminded me of my childhood, when my parents and I would have long and no doubt frustrating discussions in which they would attempt to explain to me that “Pegasus” was the name of a SPECIFIC WINGED HORSE, rather than a categorical reference for all horses with wings, and I would steadfastly ignore them. I was a strong-willed child.*

Today I walked to Mountain View intending to visit Target and Trader Joe’s, but got sidetracked checking in at the Happy Salon, which I am always passing by and wondering if they do walk-ins, which they didn’t exactly, but they said I could come back in an hour, and I REALLY needed an eyebrow wax.

So instead of walking the rest of the way to Trader Joe’s for milk and produce,** I elected to browse the Tower Records going-out-of-business sale across the street. I was checking the science fiction paperbacks for S.M. Stirling*** when a nerdy middle-aged man wearing a baseball cap inexpertedly fabric puffy painted “45!” came up to me.

“Ah, hi,” he said.
“Hello…” I said.
“I’m on a scavenger hunt for my friend’s birthday–he’s 45–pointing at hat–we just started, and we have to find someone with at least two piercings not in their ears, and, um–I was wondering if by chance–”

I stuck my tongue out at him. He was overjoyed.

“Can I take your picture?”

I permitted it. He thanked me effusively and darted off. Twenty minutes later the woman who waxed my eyebrows at the Happy Salon was grilling me on what I use on my hair, and how often, and how do I get that color? I only wished that Kristen, who once doubted my accounts of the attention my hair draws in public, could have been there to see it all. (I realize that Scavenger Hunt Guy didn’t ACTUALLY say anything about my HAIR, but let’s consider why he was so sure that I’d have a second non-ear piercing.)

At least one wine taster guy remarked on my hair at GREAT length. Then he carded me. It’s not exactly MATURE hair, I’ll grant you.

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*My sister gets those at the children’s museum a lot.

***If you like the post-apocalypse–or as my father puts it, if you are big on revenge fantasies–you will dig S.M. Stirling.

Recently I have been reading S.M. Stirling’s post-apocalyptic science fiction tomes, Dies the Fire and The Protector’s War. My father recommended them to me, knowing well how much I love the post-apocalyse, in all its many and varied forms:

1. Nuclear war
2. Meteor strike
3. Zombies
4. Plague (this is usually my favorite)
5. Slow inexorable human destruction of the environment (cf. Tank Girl)
6. Alien invasion (this can be followed by either enslavement or diaspora; the latter case, as in Titan AE, is probably my second favorite)
7. Abrupt replacement of science with magic
8. Miscellaneous

Stirling’s books seem to fall into this last category, although they combine elements of several–thus far, there has been some cataclysmic event that has caused the basic chemical reactions behind combustion (guns, engines, also electricity, including, like, digital watches) to stop working, but no one knows how or why. Aliens have been speculated about but have not actually appeared. Apparently there is a companion trilogy, already written, in which a chunk of Nantucket disappears and reappears in the 17th century or something, but given that combustion has stopped functioning as we know it in these books, it doesn’t seem like it would be a straightforward case of geographic time wormhole. And while the story does have a strong mythic flavor to it, which I like, no one is casting magic missile or anything.

I don’t really know why I love the post-apocalypse so much, especially given my extremely focused love for the internet* and my deep appreciation for impractical attire that sparkles, but I’ve always had a special place in my heart for it. I suppose as a child I did have some pastoral fantasies, in a gothic kind of way. I wanted to be Robin Hood, or possibly a widely feared forest-dwelling witch.

The latter is probably the best position for my post-apocalyptic skill set, except for the part where I know nothing about herbs–well, except for a bunch of things that are poisonous, which might interest some. I can also read Tarot and act pretty freaky, and I have strong cat lady tendencies.

It might also be good to remove the temptation of human contact, since one thing that would be a really terrible idea for Post-Apocalyptic Me would be pregnancy. Not only do I have a genetic factor that makes it more likely that I would have a blood clot, for which pregnancy is a precipitating factor,** but I have my mother’s non-existent hips. She was in labor with me for like 36 hours before the C-section, an option I imagine would be fantastically dangerous if available at all, in the post-apocalypse.

On the other hand, my clotting disorder is fairly common probably precisely because young women are unlikely to get clots (I am an outlier), and it probably confers a slight advantage from an evolutionary perspective–I’m more prone to blood clots because my blood, in general, is slightly thicker and faster clotting than your average person’s, but this also means that I am less likely to bleed to death from traumatic injury. My genes certainly don’t care if I get a fatal blood clot on my fifth or sixth pregnancy in my mid to late thirties, but if I ignore reproductive survival in favor of the more personal, hey–less likely to bleed to death.

Furthermore, I have some training and experience in fencing. I am not very good by the standards of people who have fenced for any length of time, but we can assume that I’d be better than most members of the drastically reduced post-apocalypse population. I am generally fit–while my low body fat might leave me at a disadvantage in starvation conditions, I am willing to try my hand at beating the shit out of the less fit for their share of the food.*** While not a runner, I have stamina. I could cover long distances, especially with, say, a post-apocalyptic mountain bike.

And finally my hair, even–or perhaps especially–reverted to its natural state, is FEARSOME.

Of course, it’s not like fearsome hair is unwitchy. So it’s hard to decide. Isolated cat-keeping sorceress or bicycle-mounted Amazon? I would hope that as the latter I would attract a few groupies (of the non-pregnancy risk variety), but on the other hand, just because it’s the post-apocalypse doesn’t mean I have to be a NOMAD. I have nesting tendencies.

So where are YOU in the post-apocalypse?

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*Some people might describe this in more pejorative terms, believing it to be unhealthy. Some people think that light sockets are leaking poisonous electricity. I’m just saying. So far it doesn’t seem to be inhibiting my ability to function.

***I would, however, try to avoid cannibalism. You will just get diseased and weaken and die anyway. But if you MUST eat the flesh of other humans, for godsakes, cook it THOROUGHLY.

When I was eight years old, I spent part of a summer in Tucson, alternating between my grandparents, who lived just outside the city in Sauhuarita, and my father, who was doing something with a lab at the University of Arizona.**

My clearest memory of this summer is of watching episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series on the old black and white TV in the back bedroom with the red batik bedspread and the ancient faded red corduroy chair. I loved Star Trek. Most of all, I loved Mr. Spock; he was my second non-animated crush, the first having been Michael Praed as Robin Hood in the BBC’s Robin of Sherwood.*** I spent many happy hours, perched on that red corduroy chair, imagining myself aboard the Enterprise in Mary Sue-like glory.

Some years later, I discovered slash fan fiction on the internets. This was initially through Highlander, but you don’t spend much time looking at slash without encountering ST:TOS. And then, yesterday, Daniel sends me this:

This is a slash vid set to “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails. As you should know, this means it is Not Safe For Work. It’s “Closer,” for fuck’s sake. And the arrangement of the video clips strongly suggests that Kirk and Spock are making turbulent man-love aboard the Starship Enterprise.

It was just too good not to share. My favorite part is the grainy, sepia-tone quality of the clips, which is what reminds me, more than anything else, of watching the show on that old black-and-white at my grandparents’ house. The more things change, and all.

On a related note, I used to have an “Amok Time” t-shirt that I got at the Salvation Army in Kirksville, Missouri. Like so many other awesome things I have owned, it has vanished without a trace. Lame. At least I still have my HighlandsBarbarian!Duncan McLeod nightshirt.

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*Pon farr

**Unless I made this up in my head. But I was right about John Lennon.

***The animated ones were Lion-O, leader of the Thundercats, and Optimus Prime, leader of the Transformers. What can I say, I have a lust for power. Although apparently it is not a sufficient aphrodisiac for William Shatner.

I think that my childhood longing to enter the field of paleontology can be largely explained by the desire to someday, somewhere, call something a demon duck of doom.

Those paleonotologists! A laugh a minute! I still have not forgiven them for suddenly deciding that brontosaurus was actually a misidentified apatosaurus specimen. I hate the name “apatosaurus.” I also once yelled at another small child, at a birthday party if I recall correctly, for mispronouncing “diplodocus.” Claims of birth order effect on attitudes (cf. Sulloway 1996) may have been discredited (Freese et al. 1999), but I was one hell of an authoritarian firstborn.* I bet I also have high testosterone. I wish there were some avenue available to me to have this confirmed, other than informal observation of my hairy digits.**

When I was in Japan, I subbed for a little girl’s private English tutor a couple of times; her spoken English was fine (I believe her father was from Hong Kong), but she was behind in reading and writing. She had a Japanese book about dinosaurs that we looked at once, and she was amazed by my knowledge of all the English names. It is kind of funny that I still remember all that. Those brain cells could be holding valuable tidbits about social psychology, but instead: ankylosaurus. It had a clubbed tail. Yeah, that’s helpful.

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+I am backdating this post because I was writing it last night and then accidently deleted it.

**You do not even know. WEREWOLF FINGERS, that is what I have.

I wonder how much overlap there is between the people who never swear and the people who distrust atheists.

When I started kindergarten, my parents felt compelled to give me a talk about places it was not appropriate to say “fuck”–i.e. kindergarten. They also had to complain to the administration to put a stop to all the kindergarteners being led in the “Thank You God” song every day at snacktime. So I think we know who to blame for my outlierhood.

Today is my good friend Laura’s birthday. We’ve known each other since preschool, although it was not until the 1st or 2nd grade that I became jealous of her for having a pretty birthstone (aquamarine) instead of a hideous one (topaz).

I had actually written down “MAIL LAURA’S B-DAY CARD” on my planner for last Friday, so of course it is going out today, which as you might surmise means that it is going to be late. But I’d like to point out that, even in the face of the many stressors of grad school and my life, I did remember her birthday. In advance and everything.

Laura used to alert me to important changes of location at school, which I would never have noticed on my own because I was always absorbed in non-school-related fiction:

“Cabell, it’s time for music class.”
“Cabell, it’s time for lunch.”
“Cabell, it’s time to go home.”

If not for Laura, I might still be hunched over my desk in Mrs. Pinkston’s classroom, reading Babysitters Club books. She also introduced me to Dirty Dancing at her 10th or 11th birthday slumber party, which changed my young life.

Happy birthday, Laura.

This always happens. I add one piece to the overall decor of my apartment, and it’s like a Rubik’s cube. Everything has to move.

Actually, I guess it’s two pieces–I got a big collage photo frame over Christmas at Famous Barr (it was on sale), and then realized when I got home that I had another smaller collage frame that had been sitting around forever with no pictures in it. So this weekend I finally got around to printing out a bunch of photos for them.

I decided to do a childhood theme in the big one, which holds eight 4×6 prints; since Dad started scanning and posting all our old photos in his domain photo album, there are a lot of good pictures to choose from. So I’ve got me leaning evilly over baby Sophie, baby Sophie looking goofy (this one doesn’t seem to actually be in the photo album; I must have gotten it elsewhere), me and Dad and Sophie playing in the yard at the Henderson house (this is one of my favorite pictures ever; I have it set as the desktop on my computer), me and Sophie in the Henderson house, me and Sophie right after I gave us both haircuts, me, Terri, Sophie, and Michael on the porch of the Henderson House, and then, somewhat newer photos to represent Hannah: Dad fixing Hannah’s bike at the Schoolhouse and Mom restraining a crazedly jubilant Hannah at the Henderson house.

It turned out that this collage frame could only be hung horizontally, which was not my plan. So I had to move another frame that could be switched to vertical, and then I thought I should go ahead and replace the photos in THAT frame with a few more childhood pics, which I did, and now I need to move another frame over to the other wall so that the black frames are all together, and I’m thinking, hell, I have access to better photos now; I should replace the ones in THAT frame, too.

And while I’m at it, maybe I should put new photos in the cat collage frame, too (shut up). The current photos have been faded pretty badly by the sun, and Legba isn’t even represented. It’s a chain reaction of mementos, dammit.