elisem

Thank you to everybody who came to the Haiku Earring Party and made it so much fun. Especially thanks to the intrepid set-up gang and clean-up gang. I am trying to remember all the people who helped, because it was a blur of helpfulness -- I know my sister was there, and roadnotes and Barb whose LJ handle I forget, darn it, and I believe redbird helped, and there were at least four other people who I am spacing out right now, but it was awesome. (Please leave a post here and tell me if you were one of them, you guys, ok? My forgettery is due to tiredness and spaciness, not due to lack of appreciation.) Speaking of appreciation, I'm grateful that polyfrog made us some wonderful ice cream, and I hope many of you got a chance to taste it. Also, big thanks to everybody who joined in on the musical interlude that ended the party.

So, did you write a haiku and get earrings this year?

I'm over at the May Day Cafe, because the upgrade at our house didn't go so well, and the valiant Juan will be thumping on it a bit tonight to see if he can get it working. Until then, email and everything else will probably have to wait, although I do have some email access on my phone. (It's limited by my ability to look at tiny-screen email and by the extreme tiredness of post-convention life, though. Tired! So tired! But very happy.)

I'll try to write up a convention report and post it when the net's back at our house. Until then, it was so great to see everybody, and thank you all for so much fun.

I'll be off to the wonderland of WisCon bright and early tomorrow. Juan stays home to mind the fort. If anyone is interested in table-sitting or helping with the Haiku Earring Party or such things, stop by my table in the dealers' room and we'll confer.

Yay! WisCon!

I'm looking for some of the usual suspects (and welcoming some new ones) who might like to help out here and there, either with Haiku Earring Party set-up and hosting, or with a bit of table-minding while this Lioness goes for lunch or panels.

Interested?

Congratulations on your Nebula win, Jo!

*dances the happy happy dance, throwing sparkles around, and waving at papersky*

I love looking at really cool stuff that I don't do. If you do art, do you do that too?

My latest "oooh, nice!" is some wire-wrapped jewelry, but not the kind I do at all. Isn't it neat? I love the green earrings a lot.

Hey, there's a Kickstarter thingie for M.K. Hobson's next book. I'm in. If you're interested, check it out.

There are forty-two pairs of haiku earrings partly-done, which means they need their earwires attached and then they're finished. These plus the hundred-some I did a while ago mean that I'm nearly three-quarters to where I want to be, at a minimum, before the Haiku Earring Party at WisCon.

Also, some lovely checks came in the mail, so I get to mail more shinies out. Yay!

And there are new necklaces. I need to take photographs. And there are more earrings of the not-haiku type to finish as well.

Work is a great goodness.

I need to go to the workbench and make something, just to get the taste out of my mind. It's been a bumpy night. Beads will help.

Did you know that the Florida "Stand Your Ground" law specifically exempts domestic violence cases? I didn't, until I read this. The last paragraph is illustrative. (Emphasis mine.)

"On top of that, nearly one out of every three women killed dies at the hands of an intimate partner. These women wouldn’t be saved by Stand Your Ground — even if Stand Your Ground were an effective way of protecting victims of crime — and they aren’t who the law was ever intended to protect.

Edited to add: I am not sure I read that law right, at this point. Am still reading up on various things. There are a bunch of articles about it out there; go read.

Before it's all done, I should say: Happy May Day!

Hal-an-tow, and all!

Setting: Many years ago, when my hearing was much worse than it is now.

Scenario: Person whom I am dating and I are sitting in room with television and VCR. Person tells me that they are very excited to show me a particular movie which means vast amounts to them. Person puts movie on.

Movie turns out to be entirely done in voice-over. Or at least the first ten minutes were, because that's how long I tried to manage to hear something, anything, that I could understand so I could try to guess what the rest of the words were. I tried and tried, turned the volume up, tried more. After ten minutes I said I was sorry but I couldn't hear it and it just wasn't working.

Person then proceeds to get mad at me and to bewail the horrible fate of not being able to show their precious important movie to me. Oh, so disappointing! Oh, so heartbreaking! Oh, that I could not share this peek into their soul! Well, I got a peek into something, all right.

Did you think about the fact that it was all in voice-over, and that there were no captions and not even any lips to try to read? No. OK, well, that's not optimal, but when we discovered this and you learned that it would be a problem, did you try to think of any way you could make it more accessible to me? Or did you just strike a pose and need somebody to call the waaaaaahmbulance? I was sitting there trying not to cry, and you were all upset at me and at the universe.

Yeah, I still think you were a jerk. And yeah, that's a big piece of why I broke up with you. Things never did really recover, after that -- because it was one outcropping of a larger problematic foundation. But disabilism is how it manifested that day, and it was pretty awful to be on the receiving end of, from somebody who said they cared about me.

For those of you who have ever told me or any other hearing-impaired person, "Oh, there are times when I can't hear what's going on either!" I have one question:

Have you ever been left in your workplace during a fire drill because you could not hear the fire alarm?

I have.

So if you haven't, kindly shut the frack up next time you want to compare our situations. And then go think on how patronizing and clueless "Oh, everybody has trouble hearing sometimes!" is, when you say it to me and people like me. Thank you.

Here. Enjoy. (Note: subtitles available in 23 languages. YES! WIN!) (Also note: his wife is awesome.)

(Yeah, so it's another Silly Body Day, meaning that standing up for long is problematic. Therefore you get a whole lot of posting from me today and yesterday, here and elsewhere.)

The President is the last steam-powered canalboat, and canalboats are cool and steam power is cool, but that's not the reason it really matters so much. The reason is the little plaque the vessel is entitled to carry, the one that reads "Dunkirk 1940."

I cannot imagine putting to sea under those circumstances to do that job in such a small craft. My hat is off to the skipper and his son.

Ah! I got that wrong. I conflated two articles, and it is another boat whose skipper and son I was thinking of: the New Brittanic. Her story is well worth reading as well.

The President, as it turns out, wasn't part of the Dunkirk evacuation, but is a historic boat nevertheless, and will be part of the pageant mentioned below, as will many other historic boats.

The President will be part of the flotilla of historic boats which will also include many Little Ships of Dunkirk at the Diamond Jubilee.

(Edited to fix my errors.)

I have new beads. If I can stand up long enough to get to the workbench today (it's being a difficult day), I'll see what some of them might want to be.

I've also got to contact my two outstanding custom-piece winners from two fundraisers, so we can make solid plans for when I come see them and do their work. I'm looking forward to that a lot.

Oh, I forgot to say: some of the new beads are these amazing great honking chrysoprase nuggets. And some are quartz nuggets with shiny shiny pyrite crystals in them. Should be fun.

(Happy Blogging Against Disabilism Day. Note to nice abled people: if you are going to get torqued off by reading me expressing sarcastic humorous biting sentiments about abled people, save us both time and just post I AM TORQUED OFF FOR THAT REASON U SAID in the comments. I can number them later and use them in a performance piece or something. Kthanks.)

OK. Welcome to me being unfiltered and unfair. I've been irked by a thing lately. There's a... well, let's call it a discussion group for people dealing with a certain issue that I've been going to lately, and this woman in the group did something that's making me uncomfortable. And if she keeps doing it, I am going to have to ask her to stop, and I'm really not looking forward to what might happen next, because you know how annoying and super-drama-llama abled people get. They take so much maintenance.

I mean, everybody here has had the experience of going about their day and being in a discussion group, and then when you get into small groups for an exercise you have to come out about being hearing impaired right at the beginning so that people will know you're lipreading and will enunciate and speak up, and also will avoid covering their mouths with their hands and all those other barriers-to-communication things people do sometimes. Everybody's done that, right? And we all know how careful we have to be to make this explanation light and cheerful and matter-of-fact so that the abled people don't flip out into "OMG I am afraid of doing it wrong so I will avoid talking to this person!" or some variant thereof. Seriously, they need so much special attention, it just makes me tired thinking about it.

But anyhow, I did the usual and was ready to have a fine small group discussion, and this lady got totally weird on me. Like I uttered the phrase "I am hearing-impaired" and apparently the Mystical Able-Bodied Person Wordfilter changed what I said into "I am a poor widdle thing who you should hug! No, really, come into my personal space three times during the next hour, touch me on the arm, take my hands, come up real close and grab me around the shoulders and hug hug hug! Ignore all body language to the contrary! And also talk exaggeratedly loud and sweetsie-toned to me!" Which she did. And I was sufficiently gobsmacked that I just stared at her.

The Mystical Able-Bodied Person Wordfilter doesn't affect every abled person. Thank God. But boy howdy, this was a spectacular one.

I'm still not sure exactly how I'm going to handle it if she does it again this week. After all, she means well, and there's the sacred duty of us folks with disabilities Never To Hurt The Feelings Of A Well-Meaning Abled Person Ever For Any Reason. Even if she's setting off my PTSD by coming up and grabbing me in an affectionate stranglehold.

Yikes.

Oh, well. I had hoped to have something lovely and courageous and inspirational for Blogging Against Disabilism Day, but it's the same old crap.

Wish me luck, eh? But really, I do need to do all that reassurance, and I should do it cheerfully and uncomplainingly, because the nice abled people need to go about their day feeling good and right and righteous and all that.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go search the websites again to see if The Cabin in the Woods has a captioned showing in my state, rather than the next state over, and likewise the Hunger Games. So far, haven't found captioned showings of the former in Minnesota, and for the latter I haven't found one I can get to on public transportation in the Twin Cities that's less than two hours each way. But hey, abled people, feel free to keep telling me I should see them. And keep hugging*.

Not.


*(Hey, if you're an abled person and need to be reassured that you never do this, just get in the comments and take a number. I'm putting all the Reassure Abled People That They're Doin It Rite tasks off until tomorrow, because today's Blogging Against Disabilism Day, and if we get any days off from that, it ought to be this one. Also, my silly body is acting up today, and I'm just really not up for it, nor for writing a new piece, so you get this thing, which has been in draft for a few days.)

From the March 2012 Harper's Bazaar, in a piece called "The New Season," we get this gem from Menkes:

"So what exactly is the post-power woman wearing?"

Wait, what now? POST-power? We had power and I missed it and now it's over?

Seriously, what on earth is she on about?

I love this blog post so hard. Just sayin'.

When I'm looking at various fashion magazines, which is something some of us jewelry-makers do (and some more snarkily than others), I argue with them out loud sometimes. "Oh, come on!" and hoots of laughter and other less printable responses come out. At a certain point, I have to put them down and do something else, usually make a piece of jewelry that feels more affirming to me than the fashion layouts on the pages did. (Yeah, looking at fashion magazines is part of my job, but not in the way some people expect it to be. Mwahaha, and all that.)

Anyhow, there are some other places I go to get the taste out of my mind, as Mike used to say. None of these palate cleansers are a complete and balanced aesthetic diet in their own right, but they help. (And I'm always looking for more, so suggestions are eagerly welcomed.) Today I wound up clicking over to Advanced Style, which I've probably mentioned before. "Spring Colors in Midtown" made me think of these earrings.