Not feeling great AND meetings. Joy.

I put tomorrow’s hair appointment off to the following week, because at least that is minimally disruptive.

I delayed a phone call this evening to Thursday, so again, minimal disruption.

I did go to the meeting regarding A.’s difficulties in Spanish today, and wow, there were a lot of people there. The learning center person, school psychologist, a vice principal, the Spanish teacher, A. and I and for all I know I forgot someone (probably a counselor of some sort? Who is the local expert on shuffling schedules around?). We came up with a really nice solution, which was A. stays in Spanish, but her English and History classes are flipped, which may improve some stressors there (overlapping teachers in co-taught classes so not completely unfamiliar, and some of the people who will no longer be her teacher maybe that’s good all around?). But the reason was because English and Spanish back to back were two classes that are particularly difficult (autism and communication!), so getting a little separation there might help all by itself. We shall see! The psychologist also picked up on something I mentioned about how A. often remembers for a while the emotional impact of struggling with something even after she has established competency — she kinda has a delayed belief in her own competency. I think that’s common — I do it a bit, where I believe I won’t understand something said in a language that I have been working to learn, and I actually do understand it, or some of it, and I’m surprised. Like, _really_ surprised. For me, it is a belief I have to let go of. But emotionally, I think it’s bigger impact for her. The psychologist recognized that issue and has some curriculum for that issue so hey, that might help, too!

Meanwhile, back at home, R. was doing the HVAC meeting, so when I got home, I went up to join that. That was pretty productive, altho it can be a real struggle to keep R. on track. This was the plumbing end of HVAC, and while the electrical engineer was in on the call, the electrician was not, and so those questions kinda needed to wait.

Book group looks like it is on track for tonight, hopefully?

Some rambling remarks about rereading SFF novels

I’m gonna lead with the stupid funny story, and then proceed from there. Once upon a time, when I was in my 20s and going through an anarchist phase (I’m still kind of idealistically a social-anarchist, but as a practical matter, I believe in government and quite a lot of it), and spending far too much time trying to figure out if my values could fit into anarcho-capitalism (they can’t, and I say that as someone who is actually a pretty big believer in capitalism, so this was something of a surprise to me). Anyway. There were recommended books list that circulated among people associated with this stuff, things like Benson’s Enterprise of Law and Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, but also things like Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Please do not view this as in any way recommending that you read any of these books! But the person who hooked me up with this crowd and who I lived with for a time and dated for a longer period of time and so forth, he kept saying he was really confused about the Heinlein book being on that list. He said he’d read it and it was just an adventure novel. I mostly blew this off the first couple times he said it, but I eventually became something of a Heinlein completist and read it on the path to doing that (yeah, look, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, and this is on the list).

Obviously, it completely makes sense to put Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress on an anarcho-capitalism book list! Duh! So I said to the person in question, when did you read that book? “When I was four.” I’m like, you probably should read it again. I think you may have missed some things.

For reference purposes, this person was so lacking in self-insight and generally NOT introspective that he wished he had spent more time when he was a child reading the classics. I’m like, what’s the point, you wouldn’t get much out of them as a child anyway. Obviously, my opinion would have been different if he had not been vehemently opposed to rereading books.

In any event, I’ve always enjoyed rereading books and for the first thirty or so years of my life I pretty consistently got a lot more out of each reread. But after a while, mostly what I got out of rereading books was a combination of shame and sadness that I had ever loved a book that now was glaringly … not okay. The specifics of the Not Okay were variable, but the reality of the Not Okay was pretty amazingly consistent. There were a few books that got better coming back to them in my thirties and forties, altho I would be hard pressed to name a single one now.

This has not necessarily stopped me from rereading books! Sometimes I see with clarity the Not Okayness, so if I still want to reread something that has problems, it’s not a sad and embarrassing surprise and I just acknowledge and accept whatever it was that I wish was different. Lately, I’ve been rereading things that I did not _want_ to reread previously, because I had quit reading them over the Not Okay. Specifically, I revisited Jennifer Crusie after the Liz Danger releases were announced and I’d read the first one and decided I really wanted to know what 54 year old Walkitout would thing of Crusie’s body of work. Also, I have that monograph I keep thinking about involving commercially successful authors and reuse. I was _very_ surprised how oblivious to setting I had been in previous reading of Crusie novels. Prior to moving out of Seattle, I just had no fucking clue what Ohio was like. I mean, I still have never lived in Ohio, but I at least have a better sense of Ohio now, and wow, having a sense of what Ohio is like and noticing that all Crusie novels are about Ohio just changes everything. It was a _pleasure_ to reread them as a lens for thinking about politics in the United States over the course of my adult life. I mean, look, politics over the course of my life have not been _pretty_ and certainly lack a lot when it comes to pleasure, but using those books as a way to get an inside perspective on the feelings … that was amazing.

I got to thinking about Alis Rasmussen, and wondering if I could use her work as part of the Project. She’s about 10 years younger than JAK and Crusie, but has over three decades of published work, and while most of her work is nominally SF or F, it also consistently has significant romance components/tropes/arcs. I cannot remember now whether I first read The Highroad trilogy, or if I read Jaran and then backtracked to The Highroad trilogy, but I definitely remember having to work pretty hard to find a copy of the third book in the Highroad trilogy and generally finding the entire thing riveting and being really confused when no one else much cared for it. I don’t know that I have reread it since 2000, and it’s possible I haven’t reread it since the mid 1990s. I _suspect_ I loaned them out to someone who never returned them, but I’m just not sure.

Anyway. They’re available on kindle, and the first two were really cheap so I bought them both to make sure they didn’t re-increase in price. I started reading the first one, and wow. I’m reading this and having so very many thoughts.

First off, I do not think I reread this series _after_ I started doing martial arts myself. So, that is point one. And a big point it is! Second, I read Melissa Scott’s Roads of Heaven trilogy, which was written _before_ The Highroad trilogy_, long after I read Rasmussen’s books. For whatever reason, in that order, I don’t think I realized the influences, but at this point, I not only want to finish readind Rasmussen’s trilogy, I’m thinking I’ll follow it up with Scott’s trilogy for comparison purposes. (I don’t think Scott has anything specifically to offer to the reuse project, altho if you think otherwise, try to convince me! I’m open to the idea.)

And then there is a massive cascade of other books I keep thinking about. The Liaden books that focus on merchanters. Cherryh’s work, same. M.A. Foster’s Morphodite (I am so sorry about that name) trilogy. These are all SFF books that are heavy on philosophy, disillusionment, frustration with conservative (big c, small c, other c) families of origin, PTSD, episodic, intense connections developed rapidly and just as rapidly left behind while moving to the next stage of the journey. The Liaden books are the _least_ like this, in that over time the universe has wrapped around and reconnected so many people (and resurrected at least one), but that happened later.

I do sort of wonder how many of these books are reworking authorial experiences in the counterculture movement of the late 60s/70s. I don’t mean to suggest they directly participated in anything, but they all lived through that time period, and a lot of the themes surrounding social unrest in the books sound like that era.

Obviously, there are tons of other SFF books that directly interact with that countercultural movement, but honestly, the direct interactions are somewhat less interesting to me than the ones that are so intricately worked out in a very different culture / time / place.