Frogs and Ravens

Away

Well, I'm off. I'm turning off the computer and hopping into the car. I might get a chance to go online Wednesday if my dad lets me at his computer, but otherwise, I'll be incommunicado until I get back.

See you in December!

Buckle Up

And hang onto your hats. With exquisite timing, it seems that I've been linked by Atrios, just before I go away for two weeks! AAAAH!

So, anyway, I'm giving D. the keys to the car while I'm away. He has been granted the power of banning and deleting and cluesticking, and he knows from flame wars, and is more of a hardass about trolls than I am, but he also has a day job, unlike me. So...

Play nice, folks, and help the newcomers settle in. Try to avoid playing with any trolls, even if they're really pitiful and thus entertaining. Feel free to disagree with each other, but do it in a polite and respectful way. It would be the height of irony if a post on blogging culture and etiquette turned into a troll-infested flame war, no?

Just So You Know

By the way, just because I've added another post doesn't mean I'm not still interested in continuing the discussion about blog cultures. Please, if you wish to comment, do so!

Observations - November 12th

The "fall" part of autumn continues. There are leaves everywhere. Our backyard is so full of leaves that you cannot see anything of the ground or grass beneath them. It's pretty obvious what D. and I are going to spend tomorrow doing!

The neighbors have also been busy wrangling leaves. West neighbor blew their leaves around yesterday. Today South neighbor is the one blowing leaves. There's this continuous leaf-blower whine drifting into the house as a result. What I'm finding interesting about it is the way the sound is familiar, but in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with leaves or blowing them around. We didn't have leaf-blowers when I was a kid (hell, we never lived in places that had leaves needing blowing), doing whatever raking that needed doing with, well, a rake. But we did have a shop vac (several over the years, in fact), and it made exactly the same sort of whine. So I'm sitting here and my brain is vaguely noting the sound, and if I try to envision what's going on, I'm imagining a shop vac sucking up something (perhaps even leaves) instead of some guy blowing things around. Odd, that. I guess it's another example of how the brain prefers to see things in terms of the familiar, instead of as the new things they are, on their own terms.

The weather does and does not feel like late autumn. D. was remarking today, as we were on a walk (a walk that unfortunately included me having to scream aggressively at a dog that was threatening to bite us -- scary!) that it felt a lot like November to him, something to do with the quality of the air, the quality of the light... It's not that the air is crisp or cool or anything like that; in fact, it's mild and warm. But the light is indeed coming at a low angle (which makes for beautiful alpenglow at sunrise and sunset) and the air is dry and nothing like warm summer air. It is full of static, among other things -- my hair was going in all directions this morning (well, more so than usual) -- and I can feel it in my sinuses and in my skin getting all dried out. Lots of lotion being applied here these days!

One interesting side effect of the trees losing their leaves is that much more of the local ecoscape is exposed to view. We can now easily see the neighbors to the north (back) of us, where before our view was blocked by a screen of trees and brush. The contours of the land are much more visible, with things like hills and sinks and watercourses now easy to discern. It's less difficult to birdwatch; what used to be rustles and the jiggling of leafy branches is now transformed into small shapes flitting among twigs. I've also become more aware of the great range of tree species and cultivars around here, partly because of the wide variety of leaf types (I hadn't known before this, for example, how many different ways a maple could improvise on the basic maple leaf shape) and partly because, when stripped of leaves, the shapes and barks of trees are so much more noticeable.

It will be interesting to see what games traveling plays with my sense of season. There's the seasonal pattern for this part of Red State now, and what it might be when I return at the start of December. There's the pattern for Chicago (colder), which is where I'm catching my flight out to Oregon. (Complicated story; basically, it's worth a long drive for me to not have to leave my car in airport parking, so I'm leaving it with D's mother.) Then there's the pattern in Oregon where my parents live (cold and wet). Finally there's the pattern for Okinawa (warm, not so wet). It's going to be confusing, as I suspect huge amounts of this trip will be. (Being 50% functionally illiterate, not simply language-ignorant, is going to be very strange.) As you can imagine, too, packing is complicated.

Speaking of which... I need to go do some.

Blog Wars and Blog Cultures

Some of you may have heard about the "Shitstorm in a Snow Globe" regarding Bitch, Ph.D.'s blog these past few days. I'm not going to comment on it directly, because I have no interest in visiting The Moron's self-humiliating blog to get the full picture, but I'm fascinated by all the various responses to it.

The ones that fascinate me the most are those that get at what is a continuing debate across the blogosphere: that is, what the obligations of a blog owner are regarding his or her commenters, the commenters' obligations in turn, and in particular these obligations with regards to blog content and banning policies.

Spousal Notification - What It Really Entails

There has been a lot of blog discussion about spousal notification laws these days. The bulk of the conversation is centering on the questions of what such a law says about the legal status of women relative to men, wives relative to husbands, fetuses relative to fathers and mothers, and so on.

The thing is, the law in question (if we are referring specifically to the one that Alito approved of) is really about none of these things. It can be spun in terms of fatherhood rights, or husbands' rights, or about protecting an unborn fetus, but it does not in practice work to protect any of those things. All it does is punish women who choose, while married, to not carry a pregnancy to term.

The law, therefore, is about the legal right of the state to define reproductive expectations for married women, and to punish women who fail to fulfill them.

Let me spell it out. First, here's how the law works (with crucial points emphasized):

Fancy That

You Are a Blogging Expert

You got 7/8 correct! You know so much about blogging, you should blog for a living.

How Much Do You Know About Blogging?

Your Blogging Type is Confident and Insightful

You've got a ton of brain power, and you leverage it into brilliant blog. Both creative and logical, you come up with amazing ideas and insights. A total perfectionist, you find yourself revising and rewriting posts a lot of the time. You blog for yourself - and you don't care how popular (or unpopular) your blog is!

What's Your Blogging Personality?

(I don't think I've ever revised a blog post. Maybe a sentence or a type here and there, but I don't really see the point, since I'm not doing this to create a lasting, accurate record, but more a way to share and vent and connect.)

Busy Weekend

My, what a hectic two days. And we didn't even really go anywhere!

We decided, along with several of our neighbors independently, that Saturday was leaf day. Our lawns were covered with leaves, the hardware store was having a rake sale ($4.99 a rake!), and the day was clear (though the sky did threaten a bit later). So D. and I went out and had at it with rakes, and our neighbors to the west and across the street were out there with the leaf blowers. I can't say that the leaf blowing was any faster than hand-raking -- especially when it came to transporting large quantities of leafs using a moving pad -- but it likely was not as tiring. My forearms are still aching, aching in a way that is uncomfortably close to the way they felt when I had a brief bout with carpal tunnel syndrome in grad school. Still, I liked watching the piles of leaves get big, and the smell of the greenery underneath as it was scratched by the rakes, and the astringent vegetable scent of the leaves themselves.

What was also cool was that today the leaf-sucker truck came by and slurped up the piles of leaves along the road. SO fun to watch! (And very satisfying.)

Our adjoining neighbor's father must have felt somewhat sorry for us raking leaves the hard way, because he insisted on leaf-blowing the part of our yard that runs into his son's. It did save us some work, so we invited him in for tea, and ended up hearing much of his life story, his philosophy on writing, and I ended up buying one of his novels for my father. (I don't know how good it is, but it's in a genre he likes, and we had an interesting afternoon out of the experience.) It seemed to be my day for people to spill out their life stories to me; earlier a woman in the craft store found herself telling me about her stroke, and her pregnancy, and about how her doctor has told her to avoid stress, and that's why she no longer knits but crochets. I am coming to wonder, as this has happened a lot here, whether it's something about the people of Small Town, or of Red State (since the father isn't from Small Town), or whether I've finally inherited my mother's "listening face." (This is a bit of a family joke, stemming from the fact that everywhere my mother goes, someone ends up telling her their life story, completely unprovoked for the most part.) Perhaps it is a combination of all of the above.

After the leaf-raking I rewarded myself by going to South City (poor D. had to stay home and grade papers) to buy more Japanese books, get a new headlamp, and buy a present for my nephew. I also picked up some carry-out Thai for dinner (so D. wasn't completely deprived). We finished off the day with a few episodes of the Muppet Show. (I love the muppet chickens!)

Then that night a HUGE wind came in, and I bet you can guess what happened. Oh, the pain of new leaves on the newly-raked lawn, plus the additional pain of second-hand leaves (although that pain was well spread around; the only people who got off easy were the ones on the windward side of the block, with no trees or neighbors upwind of them). (At least the bulk of the piles remained in place for the leaf-sucker truck.) The wind also ripped a branch off the neighbor's tree, which make a weird crunchy crashing sound that sent us outside to see what had happened (this was about 1am). Luckily it was not an enormous branch, and even more luckily it managed to avoid their house, our house, the other trees, and any wires. There was also much thunder and lightning throughout the night -- such excitement! -- and it dumped about a centimeter of rain on us (to go by my spankin' new rain gauge).

Yesterday was quieter, though still busy. I went for the Sunday papers (our town is too small for home delivery of the NYT, to D's quiet disappointment), shellacked a couple of pine needle baskets, and studied Japanese until my eyeballs fell out. (Luckily, they soon returned.) I'm continuing to enjoy my studies and the challenge of figuring out what's going on -- indeed, for the earlier chapters, I've turned on the kanji feature because it was too easy with the transliterations. It's weird seeing what I find easy and what I find difficult, and seeing how that changes. For some reason, numbers, which should be difficult, are a breeze. I look forward to the number chapters, because they are a break. On the other hand, the numerical adjectives (as in "two women" or "three men") are frustrating, especially since it seems that there are different sets depending on whether you are talking about people or non-people. (The way the program keeps you engaged is that it never explains anything; it just gives you clustered sets of examples in such a way as to encourage you to notice and learn overall patterns. It's pretty good at this; it will offer four options, for example, that are all alike except for color. Then it will offer ones where two variables will overlap (red ball, red rectangle, green ball, green rectangle). Then it adds a new set (big, little). Then another set (little square, big square, little ball and little square, big ball and big square). Then a combination (little square is green, big square is red...). Then a new concept (green square is bigger than red square, green square is smaller than red square...). And so on.

At first, it was the concepts that were bugging me, and the lack of vocabulary didn't help. But as my vocabulary has grown, and my understanding of how concepts are presented has improved, it's getting easier. I'm pretty good most of the time, with the exceptions of when new vocabulary is provided, or a complicated new concept appears, and the occasional moment when the picture they chose isn't as clear or as simple as they'd like. (It took me a while, for example, to figure out the section where they were offering a choice between "tall person wearing glasses" "short person wearing glasses" "tall person not wearing glasses" and "short person not wearing glasses" because the earlier point when "glasses" was introduced had confused me (I thought the distinguhishing feature of the subject was her hat, not her glasses) and because the glasses were hard to see. Still, I'm seeing progress!

My Head Is Full and I Am Tired

The mad cramming of Japanese into my skull continues. I'm devoting about 5-7 hours a day to it, dividing my time among working with my educational CD-ROM (which gets the lion's share), practicing writing hiragana characters, and doing exercises in a teach-yourself-Japanese textbook aimed at the business traveler (which, really, isn't the best choice, vocabulary- and situation-wise, but it does aim to teach you the essentials quickly, which is what I need).

I have to say I'm really loving the computer program. I'd used the Spanish version of it before, but that was after I'd had some practice with Spanish already, so it was more like vocabulary review and practice than learning an entire language. Here, I'm doing it all at once -- which, really, is what the program is designed for. It throws text, sound, and pictures at you, rewarding you when you put them together properly, and beeping sourly at you when you make a mistake. As you grasp the basics, it tosses in variations, then adds a few more basics, while adding more variations, and so on, in increasing degrees of complexity. At first, you're just struggling to distinguish words from each other and remember them, then you're grasping concepts and trying to figure out what the smaller distinctions are, then you're wrestling with nuance.

None of this is explained to you; you just proceed by trial and error, being rewarded when your interpretations of what's going on are correct, being discouraged when they are not, with the tasks getting more and more subtle as you go. I've been intensifying this experience by spending a good chunk of the time going through a sub-chapter until I have it completely down, then going through several additional chapters until I am totally confused. Everyday the bits at the start become more familiar and comprehensible, to the point that I can do the earlier exercises perfectly, and simultaneously it's taking longer for me to become confused, and I make fewer mistakes even when I visit a chapter for the first time.

I love it. It's like a great huge puzzle. Plus, the repetition is very helpful in getting things into my head; I find my mind full of earworm-like phrases burrowing deeper into my subconscious. Very, very cool.

It is, however, exhausting, which I admit is also deliberate. Not only am I short on time, but I have this theory that things you learn when you are tired will be things you remember better than those that you learn only when you are fresh and paying attention. I want my understanding to be as instinctual as possible; while the mental puzzles keep me engaged and moving forward, I don't want to have to do them when someone chatters something at me at top speed -- I want it going in, making sense, and triggering the appropriate response without having to put my full attention to it.

Still, I'm feeling impressed with how fast it's apparently going, and how well things are sticking. SO bizarre.

In other news, my hair is now shorter by about four inches. Whoo.

What's Going On

Okay, I'm tired of the meme for now. I'll try not to let it go unfinished for too long; if nothing else, it's a useful reminder to myself of possible post ideas.

The weather here has been confused. It's been unseasonably warm (so they say) but there certainly hasn't been a dearth of things like wind. Last night the whole house creaked with it, and there are enough intermittant gusts today to keep things lively.

We've also seen the first invading ladybugs (all attaching themselves to various parts of the fan-dalier) and our trees have finally developed a respectable degree of color and are shedding leaves all over the lawn (although less than I would have thought, given the aforementioned winds).

I haven't been outside as much as I ought this week. I've really been a slacker. I also have a new toy, which I am hastily putting through its paces so that I won't be a complete doof when my family visits Japan in two weeks. (Two! Weeks! AAAAAH!) Eventually I will have to leave the house; my hair needs cutting, and I have overdue, no-more-renewals-for-you,-missy! library books to deal with.