Lived Experience

In the middle of many things, so let's do a snapshot of what I'm feeling in the middle of right now.

Game of Thrones is back on!  I generally don't have time to watch it on Sundays (unless I'm at a party or something), so I watched it Monday night.  This is kind of fun, as my friends have already watched it and I can go on gchat and provide running commentary to Mariah without interrupting her viewing.  Running commentary is my favorite thing.  I've never read the books, but the show is amazing.



I'm also watching Gilmore Girls for the first time, which is a very nice balance with GoT.  It's adorable.  Lorelei is actually kind of annoying sometimes--OMG the babbling is not a sign of emotional health--but Rory is the best, and I love how much humanity everyone is treated with.  Even the worst people here aren't villains.  I love Stars Hollow so very much.  (Except Michele.  He's awful!)

Listening to Six of Crows and Hamilton, pretty much exclusively.  Hamilton remains Hamilton; "Wait for It" made me cry in the car the other day.  Aside from the notion that "everyone who loves [him] has died," I just find that song very true to the inevitability and inexorability of life.  It also reminds me a bit of Colin Hay's "Waiting for My Real Life to Begin."


They have different takes on that same feeling, but it's one that I'm very familiar with--if you keep your head down and wait, the "right" opportunity will come by.  It's something I've had to fight, and I like the two very different senses that these songs have of the same idea.

Finally, I read this blog post by the amazing Siderea (whose Patreon I sponsor--not sure if that's a disclosure or a brag) about how our society devalues subjective experience.  Since I've only recently begun to realize/believe that design has significant value beyond functionality, I've been thinking about this a lot lately; she ties it in to emotional labor and consent in rape culture.

"This seems to me of a piece with how American culture treats all emotional labor. Emotional labor is labor to effect subjective facts. Since in our society subjective facts are deprecated, those who concern themselves with attempting to effect subjective facts are dismissed as engaged in trivialities, and their work to that end is not considered worth much if anything, especially if reckoned in cold, hard cash. From childrearing to design to the arts to housekeeping to customer service to kinkeeping to maintenance: that which concerns anticipating the subjective effect of something on someone is work that is typically low esteem and low compensation – if any."

Everything she writes is great--you should check out her whole site, but this article is the one I've been thinking about this week.

There's my quick and dirty summary of how my week is going.  Reviews of The Wolf Road and the fabulous Ursula Vernon to come soon, which will round out my run-down.  Stay tuned!