(no subject)

[gwydion]

* Apologies for the shortage of non-Archeology/history news. This are still happening in the world, obviously. The protests against the lack of official help for women who are being harassed and sexually assaulted continue with one dead and two injured last I checked. Food prices in Damascus are triple normal and the Winter is settling in, meaning that dying from secondary causes will likely add to the human misery and devastation from the genocide. In Kenya, armed gangs are trying to fix the election my descending on villages and killing or driving away the inhabitants who are likely to vote for opponents. There have been terrible cyclones in the South Pacific, and various ad sundry wars are ongoing, including ours in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Western media is tied up in things like the Pope's speech, the English royal family, and stupid things like mocking the Mayans for predicting the end of the world even though that's not what they said and the Modern Mayans kept trying to explain that that's not what they believe, because mocking indigenous people over something white people made up about them and decided to believe is way more fun than talking about what's going on in say Mali or the Congo.

* Jack Klugman has died at 90. He's likely better known for the Odd Couple and Quincey, but I will always remember him from Twelve Angry Men:

* "Research finds crisis in Syria has Mesopotamian precedent:" http://www.shef.ac.uk/news/nr/crisis-syria-mesopotamian-precedent-1.232282

* "How Did Female Genital Mutilation Begin?:" http://news.discovery.com/history/female-genital-mutilation-begin-121210.html

* "Mummy murder mystery solved: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2012/12/19/mummy-murder-mystery-solved/

* "Nazca lines may be a labyrinth:" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9740303/Nazca-lines-may-be-a-labyrinth.html

* "Napoleon Wasn’t Defeated by the Russians" http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/pandemics/2012/12/napoleon_march_to_russia_in_1812_typhus_spread_by_lice_was_more_powerful.single.html

* "Hans Christian Andersen's First Fairy Tale Discovered:" http://news.discovery.com/history/hans-christian-andersens-first-fairy-tale-discovered-121214.html

* Luckily the meds I picked up last night included a restart of my regular antibiotics that I'm supposed to me on periodically. Within twelve hours of the first one, plus medicinal tea, magic soup, lots of protein, and orange juice things are markedly better. Significantly less coughing when I'm sitting. It no longer feels like I'm going to lose a lung when I cough and walking short distances is less nightmarish. I am less dizzy. I am scared to lie down as that tends o be the worst for breathing as I can't sleep propped. If things continue at this rate, I think I can manage without a Doctor. I wasn't convinced these anti-biotics would kill the bronchitis as they are the wrong type and not as strong as the cipro. Apparently without the black mold this antibiotic can handle it, which might contributing to fewer bronchitis episodes in the last year as well. As I'm on it about half the time, it likely being a preventative to prevent secondary bacterial infections after my usual bouts of illness. *fingers crossed*

* This MUSH thing is really stirring my compost. It's good to do that now and then, so I'm going through with it. Still, trying to convey to them what it's really like at a private school is hard. It's easy to explain the different social messages cars convey and the like. It is so much harder to convey the constant pressure and pervasive lack of safety. The way class distinction is like water quality to fish in places like that. To turn the vast catalog of unwritten rules into words. How to make someone who didn't live that way what it's like to be threatened with a bad college if you don't read well enough fast enough in kindergarten or do badly in a first grade spelling test, the constant threat of violence and bursts of actual violence. Of year after year watching other children break and crash. The interrogations designed to break you and casual cruelty of the teachers, and why the kind ones were generally more damaging than the sadists. How to explain to people for whom private school is a naughty fantasy how much of the sex was semi-consensual or out right rape and why being fast and clever was so important to staying safe? I built a boy for myself out of boys I knew put into a blender and am still learning his shape, his odd compulsions. It is weirdly exhilarating to play him, and simultaneously terrifying. I am enjoying it, but it also hurts. I'm glad it's only a once or twice a week thing for sure. I don't think I could do all this every day the way I did Stagio or Gwion.

* Greenwick found, "12 Most Awesome Wheelchair Costumes:" http://www.oddee.com/item_98434.aspx
"Wheelchair costumes that are better than anything I could ever pull off (20 Photos):" http://thechive.com/2012/10/02/some-wheelchair-costumes-that-are-better-than-anything-i-could-ever-pull-off-20-photos/#X5kPkwwyZgymAXy9.99


* The Clutch:

Comments

[tibicina]

MUSH thing? I think I missed the beginning of this. And, to be fair to the other people, my private school experience was very much different from yours, though some things remain the same. (The heightened class consciousness which was never mitigated by uniforms - no matter what they tried to tell us about them - and the constant academic pressure certainly being two of the things which I think end up being pretty much endemic to all prep schools.)

I haven't really seen a lot of mocking the Mayans over the apocalypse thing. I've seen a lot more of mocking the stupid people who bought into it, instead. But I also stay away from a lot of the "news" shows because otherwise the destruction of all of humanity starts seeming like a better and better idea all the time.

[gwydion]

I got invited to a little once a week sandbox thing.

They noticed what sort of shoes you had or whether the uniform components were second hand, ready made, or bespoke. They noticed what car your parents drove.

My school had a boy's school culture, despite the slow integration of girls. There was a ritual nature to some of the sexual aggression, and there was a serious issue with the teachers not taking the rape culture aspects seriously, dismissing it as "boys will be boys." The reality that more than half of the sexual aggression was boy on boy went under the radar, I think because the adult men did not want to think about it. Similarly, the alcohol fueled rape of women at parties just got swept under the carpet by every one concerned. It was bad for the school's image, bad for college applications. They had a similar reproach to pedophile teachers. If they went for boys, they were asked to resign and shuffled to some other school; if they went for girls, it was ignored by both the school and the girl's parents.

Re: Mayas. I wanted to slug someone over at CNN last night. BBC's been going the mock the idiots route. I haven't done a survey of all networks as I've been sick and my patience for network anchors is strained during normal nnews cycles, let alone the fluff season between Christmas Eve and New years.

[tibicina]

Though that reminds me - Ryan and I set up a MUSH for hanging out and discussing putting together an nWoD. It's down at the moment because we needed to move the box it's on and we haven't gotten it set back up, yet. But remind me to get you the address at some point.

Yeah, being a girls' school, they noticed your shoes and jewelry and what close you wore on free-dress days and what car you or your parents drove (and if you got a car for your 16th birthday, and if you did whether it was new or your parents old car while they got a new one) and whether your parents were on the board and and and. So far as I know, we never had any sexual abuse from teachers. There was at least one case where it was pretty clear that one of the parents was physically abusing his children, but he was on the board so teachers were specifically told not to report it in violation of the law.

That said, I did have one person look very confused at me when he found out I went there and say, before he really thought about it, "But I thought only sluts and bitches went there?!" Which.... yeah. Though I think that says more about the ways that relatively assertive women are classified by society than the school, itself.

I also know that I was girly enough to not get some of the nasty treatment one of my good friends there got for being too masculine, assertive enough that no one doubted that I would complain long and loudly if people actually stepped over a line with me, and enough of a teacher's pet to enough of the teachers and staff (and generally the more popular teachers and staff) that people didn't much mess with me. I was often excluded, but rarely harassed.

[gwydion]

Oh the Agnes Irwin girls were terrifying on the hockey field (Aggie I was an all girl school that was my school's sister school when we were all boys), but our girls were aggressive competitors too, having been raised in an environment were competition was full throated and blood thirsty. At college I was startled how different the girls were in fencing (which was coed). Most of them had never learned to compete all out. It made me sad for them to make it to eighteen without ever learning to throw themselves all the way into a pursuit they loved. For all the things wrong with Private School, that's one of the things (along with college prep academics) they do right. Those young women looked so tentative and scared of really going for it.

Of course, the women in my family were strong, opinionated, and prone to decisiveness so my preferences in female friends may have been effected by that as much as the expectation at school that girls could compete with the boys in the classroom and socially.

My status was pretty much unique and very complicated even without the ways it evolved over time, which is a whole other subject. Private schools like to ground down the horn to make a unicorn into a horse, and I was not willing to become like everyone else. I stuck in the gears and no one could ever quote figure out what to do with that. It lead to a love hate thing with teachers. The really good ones loved me, but most of them set about trying to even the wheat stalks and I was impossible to handle once I started resisting. The nastier the adults got, the more immovable object I got. I was generally brighter than the adults trying to break me, which I turned to my benefit.

I think my position with the other students was extra complicated because I was generally acknowledged to be one of the most attractive in class although it was said in whispers between boys unwilling to say it out loud, but I was also willing to fight all out when cornered and was considered like something feral, outside of both gender hierarchies and fundamentally alien. Later, when the social tide turned again, and Graham and they suddenly realized that different was good, I was willing to play my games of starting competing fads with Graham, but I was unwilling to have anything to do with any of them sexually for a variety of reasons, and I couldn't particularly like most of them. The hand full of eccentrics I liked, but were for one reason or another not available to me. the rest I could divide into cowards and bullies. I was much happier conducting most of my social life outside in the real world. I was just as exotic and alien there, but there was an honesty to the friendships and romantic/sexual relationships with those outside that was not possible in a pressure cooker where everyone was in everyone's business and many of us had known each other over a decade. Too much complicated history, too incestuous, too much blood under the bridge.

Do send me the details when you have them. I can't do the every night thing like I used to, but I could come hang out once or twice a week.

[deepseasiren.livejournal.com]

Merry Christmas to you, my friend, and get better.