Just a little (link) love: First Burn edition
August 23, 2018
RIP Aretha Franklin.
Dinosaur Fiction! “The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat” by Brooke Bolander
This thread is amazing, I wish I could have volunteered for that snack. I mean, study. Also, fat shaming is bad.
Can you break from these wedding traditions? Is your family / friend set ready? Ours isn’t but I hope that we can wean ourselves away.
Done by Forty on Food Deserts. I never knew about those non competes!
I most certainly dream about luxury travel but we still haven’t done it. The most luxurious thing we’ve done is enjoyed a lounge as part of our travel card benefits. The travel itself remains the main attraction.
I want to jump up and down for NK Jemisin who won a third Hugo in a row. Historic! Her Broken Sky trilogy is beyond amazing. (This link is NOT broken, WordPress is just being a wart and pretending that it is, and I can’t fix it. ARGH!)
Cloud on uncertainty and grace. I’m trying to practice this now that we’re hitting some troughs in our once-balanced lives. We’ve had an extraordinarily good run in job stability and it’s ended but I remind myself that we went through a trough before this good peak and that if we are lucky and work at it, we will end this trough with another peak. I can’t embrace the good without acknowledging and understanding that bad comes with it. Or put it another way, we spent three years with professional ease which allowed us to deal with a most difficult phase of parenting and now that THAT is arguably less harrowing, the professional side of our lives needs more attention. That’s fair.
I’m glad to see Kelly Marie Tran again. The online harassment of her as a woman and POC with a leading role in Star Wars was unconscionable. Also, I adored her character in Star Wars.
First Burn
I missed this Hamildrop in April but it is SENSATIONAL. Just utterly beautiful down to the bone.
It looks like you accidentally hit strike through rather than underline for the NK
Jemisin link. Her speech was great!
Thanks, I left a note for the link because that’s a WordPress error pretending that the link is broken when it isn’t. I don’t know why it does this every so often!
We got married in our 30s, so we already had stuff–but a lot of it was incomplete sets, or things we’d put up with but didn’t really like, etc. And people expect registries, so we registered.
Our rule of thumb was that we didn’t list anything we weren’t willing to buy for ourselves. Now, there are some things that I wish we hadn’t included (I don’t know why we thought we wanted champagne flutes), but overall I feel okay about how we approached this.
But did we require people to give us gifts? Nope. That’s not why we invited them.
Apparently our best man’s mother gave him grief about not giving us a gift. My response was, “You bought a plane ticket, rented a tux, and delivered an amazing speech. What object are you going to hand us that’s more of a gift than all of that?”
We had the same rule! I moved a handful of things from my wish list to the registry š
And that answer was spot on. There is no price that can be put on someone taking the time and energy and spending the money to come be there for you on a special day.
W00t w00t thank you so much for the shout-out babycakes!
In Dwayne Johnson’s voice: You’re WELLLLLLCOMEE!!!
I want you to know that I say this with all due respect as I enjoy reading your blog about your personal struggles. There are few blogs out there that hide the first name of the writer, often their family, but never their own. But if you feel the need for that much privacy then, certainly, that is your choice.
But regarding the gender of your child, it’s so difficult to keep tripping over the unisex gender terms when reading your blog, and it is hard to see how it is helping your privacy in any way. [Harriet here makes a comment about typos that SURELY indicate which gender JB is.]
In any case those gender terms certainly slow the reading down and, respectfully, come off as pretentious. I just want to urge you to reconsider this habit.
It’s a funny thing. Saying “With all due respect” doesn’t erase the abominable rudeness that followed that phrase.
I don’t mean calling my writing pretentious, that was just everyday rudeness. As is dismissing my conscious choice to protect my child’s identity as a “habit” as if it were just a nervous tic.
But shading my writing is nothing compared to your trying to out JB’s gender based on some typos caused by autocorrect. I pointed out *years* ago that my iPhone, where I did most of my writing, autocorrected “hir” to “her” all the time. I corrected those when I caught them, and readers who had respect for our privacy emailed me quietly about the ones I didn’t catch.
Your choice was to leave a comment to explicitly try to out JB as a particular gender – a guess based on typos. What was that? Trying to make the point moot? To force me to take your unsolicited suggestion to heart as if I didn’t already know that using gender neutral pronouns was not totally common?
Let’s be clear here – I’m JB’s parent and protecting zir is my job. What we don’t know about how even the littlest information on the internet can be used against people and especially the vulnerable and elderly is ASTOUNDING. I choose to use gender neutral pronouns on purpose. Your inability to imagine how that protects zir is no excuse for trying to make the decision for me.
I am aware that not everyone is aware of gender neutral pronouns. That’s ok, it’s not going to hurt anyone to learn two new words. It might, at best, mildly inconvenience them for a while. Reading ease vs protecting my child’s identity until ze is old enough to consent is absolutely a no brainer.
In 14 years, if JB wants to proclaim to the world that ze was my Unstoppable JuggerBaby, ze will be old enough to start understanding consent and understanding there is an everlasting impact to what you do on the internet.
If I spent these last four years, and future years, sharing photos and stories with zir identity, and at age 18, ze says: I wish you hadn’t done that, there will be NOTHING we can do to put that back in the bottle.
I can only imagine how you could simultaneously reframe my choice to protect my child’s identity as “a habit that comes off as pretentious” while also being completely unaware of how your public comment when you have zero relationship with me comes across.
Kudos to you for taking and maintaining such a strong approach. There have been countless times I have winced in pain for the kids made unconsenting public subjects of their parents’ writing.
Harriet,
This being my first time reading anything from you I have no other basis for comparison to judge the type of person you are. So, that being said, you are coming off as an asshole here.
As a fellow parent I will ALWAYS do what is in the best interest of my child and my family. If Revanche has made the deliberate effort to shield their child from the unforgiving scrutiny of the internet then that is their choice. Revanche laid out boundaries, and you came in with some sort of “GOTCHA” moment over a handful of old typos tell me that you have no respect for the wishes of others. Not when you get to come off as a pseudo-intellectual pedant instead.
I’m not here to White Knight for Revanche. They are 100% strong enough to fight their own battles. What I am here for is to stand arm in arm with another parent because I feel that protecting the essence of family safety is the core of what makes for the best people. We will not be deterred from protecting our children from people who wish to use them as a sociopolitical token.
Harriett–
You’ll get used to it the more you see it. I suggest practicing fixing your problems with it rather than telling a blogger to change how she does stuff. (That is also what we tell anyone who complains about this to us.)
How do you practice? Read more feminist blogs, write paragraphs using gender neutral pronouns, stop forcing everything to be male and female, start asking yourself why it matters that you know in each instance that it bothers you, etc.
Alternatively, you can do whatever you want on your own highly gendered blog.
Harriet, taking it upon yourself to try to out JB’s gender makes you a douche canoe. That is all.
Thanks so much for the recent shout outs!
I’ve been thinking about our mortgage & thought of you. I would love to chat/twitter chat sometime about the relative benefits of a mortgage recast vs. aggressively paying down a mortgage. There seem to be very few articles comparing the numbers on this.
You’re welcome!
We can chat about it! In very brief, though, I don’t feel like I’m choosing one over the other. I feel like they are complementary tools!
Hi. Just curious, what happened with your employment that has caused instability? I am looking around and don’t see a reference to a recent occurrence.
I, too recently had a job change after 4 years with my employer. I wish you a speedy open window to this closed door.
Hi Anna,
I can’t share the details yet, you didn’t miss anything! Thanks, and good luck with your employment!