0003 Pyevera 05: Lapinian

First off, a Roast Beef-esque comment: "I'm the one who sucks." More accurately, "I'm the one who, in trying to figure out why she couldn't get her phone to connect to her home wireless network when she should've been sleeping, successfully screwed up her wireless internet settings to the point that the only fix was a reset to factory defaults, which she did again when she should've been sleeping, and in such a fit of frustrated pique that she didn't back up her contacts database first."

Short form of the above, if you gave me your contact information any time in the last year, I don't have it now. If you'd like me to have it, please send it to me. Next time, I promise I'll think really hard about waiting until morning before losing my cool at a piece of unfeeling technology next time. =x.x=

Now what am I gonna do about my problems?

---

With that lovely preliminary out of the way, two recent conversations have been weighing on me of late. These thoughts have been swirling around now for some time, and I've made some effort into encapsulating them and making them meaningful, but I'm not really sure that I've done a good job of it up until now. I'm not even really sure that I'm going to do any better this time, but I think I've dwelt on these concepts long enough internally, and so it's time to push them out of the nest to see if they fly.

The human brain relies on labels. We name and categorize, because verbal learning is something that we're good at doing, and because it's convenient for the transmission of ideas. Semiotically, we depend on signifiers to convey intent and meaning about the signified. I recognize that some branches of Eastern philosophy directly oppose this idea, but ironically I have nothing to say about any belief system that holds that to name something is to destroy it.

Unfortunately, as I'm sure everyone has experienced at some point, the map between signifier and signified is an intensely personal one. I'm convinced that everyone has, at some point or another, attempted to talk to someone else and, despite every attempt to come to common ground, failed to make sense of what the other has said. In this, I see communication as an existential crisis. In order for me to say something to you, whoever you are, I must first encode my thoughts, my signified, into a signifier, which you must then decode. Worse, in order to explain my encoding algorithm, I must use it. I can't share with you how I translate signified into signifier without... translating signifieds into signifiers and then trusting you to translate them back in the same way. No two people can communicate with each other beyond the extent to which their encoding and decoding routines overlap, and the degree of that overlap is the degree to which people can actually share ideas with each other.

This isn't to say that we can't learn to communicate with each other, but the process by which we learn to communicate is an essentially non-verbal method. We come to understand, through exposure and effort, the signifieds to which others refer when they use their signifiers, and we learn how to adjust our own signifiers to refer to the same signifieds when trying to communicate with those people. So, not only is the map personal, but it's intersubjective as well. When I say something to one person, I may mean something different from when I say the same thing to another person, simply because I'm trying to adjust for the maps that those people use to decode signifier back to signifed.

If all of this seems complex and convoluted, keep in mind that most of this happens at the sub- or semi-conscious level. We don't, for the most part, think about our language in this way. We simply pick up on these things over time, growing our maps as we interact with people. We identify those people with whom we don't share enough of a communication grid to try to make headway and we remove them from our social circles. We learn the trigger words and phrases that cause others to go into frothy rants and then talk around them. Very rarely is this a deliberate, conscious effort.

I should note that we do this with non-verbal communication, as well. Arms crossed, leaning forward versus back, hands in the pockets, the slouch, the scissorclip walk. We learn to communicate through our body language, our imagery, our clothing and hair. We project information through a broad set of signifiers, all aiming to convey a certain set of signifieds that we hope others can decode.

I'll also note that the map between signifier and signified is a many-to-many relationship. I can have multiple ways of saying the same thing, such as a smile, a hug, a handshake, and the word, "hello" said with joy in my voice. I can bundle a great many signifieds into a single signifier, such as when I attempt to convey both the sense of warmth and the fear of being hurt in the statement, "religion is like fire."

Now, in the past, this would be the point at which I jump in and say that my map is disjoint. However, it would be a very pretty lie. My map's weird, but it's got a pretty broad overlap with other folks. When I speak, I like to think that most people get a pretty good idea of what I'm saying. I couldn't make it as a writer if I couldn't communicate through my words, and I like to think that I manage fairly decently. So, it's not really a communication gap.

I think what I'm finding, instead, is that there's a couple of large but specific discontinuities between my communication map and others', and I think that these gaps are what's causing some of the stranger emotional disconnects that I've had with people. Before I get too deeply into these, though, I want to temporarily branch off of this topic and launch into more pop-cybernetics and show off my Throbbing Verbal Cortex for a bit.

I think that, when a person identifies with a label, there's a desire for that association to be an emotionally positive one. I won't try to claim that this is any sort of universal truth, because I've definitely met people who hold onto self-harmful identities. However, I think that those are offset by other identities that are worth the pain that those negative associations inflict. In this, a label or a signifier is really no different from any other association. We want to enjoy the things we have. We want to like ourselves. We want to respect ourselves. We want our identities to be things that we're proud to be, and we find ways to make those associations positive.

Identification with a label doesn't have to be direct, but it does have to be impactful. If I think of X as a negative assocation, and I like person Y, finding out that Y identifies with X is likely to change my opinions about one or the other, depending on which is more important to me. It's this kind of psychological impact that leads people to encourage the genderqueer and the abnormal to come out to their conservative relatives. As long as a given
label belongs only to Others, people and things outside our personal contexts, there's no impact to hold a negative view of all people who claim that particular label. "Lolfurries."

I could diverge here and launch into an analysis of why people who want to identify with a label will devote such time and energy to destroying others who openly hold it, the politics of shame, and the power of guilt. However, that would be a digression from my point, which is to say lead back to the communications gap I mentioned before. I don't have any personal association to a lot of the labels which are common to modern society. I was born in the United States, but I don't consider myself "American," and looking back at my history, I never have. I was baptized and spent time as an altar boy, but I don't consider myself "Christian," and again I don't think I ever did. I rejected the idea of nation-as-identity from a very young age, and church-as-identity even earlier. I spent twelve years identifying as an "Objectivist," though, and even now I try to rehabilitate the label despite my objections to the term. The collection of labels that I've self-applied doesn't match the set that most people I know had, and as a result I have very different emotional responses to these signifiers, so much so that it's caused communication breakdowns with some of my closest friends.

Breaking out my metaphysical soldering iron, here's where I try to draw together these two concepts and create something new out of them. I've heard a lot of talk of late about reclaiming language, of taking terms away from the mainstream and owning them. I'm no stranger to this idea, and in many ways I'm in support of it. The list of terms that I want to reclaim, however, seems to not line up with the ones that others want to salvage. I have no interest in making "American" mean something positive to me. I've got no reason to want "Christian" to be anything but a stone around someone else's neck. I can agree that "religious" needs to be taken away from the fundamentalists and the orthodox, but I'd rather not see it be used in any sort of unmistakably positive context.

Jessie said to me last night that, for the longest time, I defined myself by what I wasn't. She's right; I did. I was an activist from an early age, setting myself against the Other and defining myself as a constrast against them. I'm starting, however, to understand that I can't exist forever as a shadow. I don't want to be a contrast against someone else's vision. I'm tired of living in opposition to the mainstream, and yet as long as I try to absorb and adopt the labels of the mainstream to mean what I wish, I'll forever be someone else's degenerate interpretation.

The Lapinian Embassy started out as humor, an extension of the joke of international, interplanetary, interstellar, interdimensional diplomatic relations with others who Weren't From Around Here. What it's become, however, is something far more. It's become a label that, at least in my own map, I can own. It's the identity for which I and those I choose to involve can set the standard. It has as its forebears a myriad of others' fringe interpretations, but I'm okay with that. Martin Luther was still Catholic when he nailed his thoughts on indulgences to the door of the church in Wittenberg.

Jessie once said that everyone becomes a liberal at the point at which zie realizes that zie's different from others. It's in the nature of liberalism to divide, to separate, to evolve and grow and change over time. In this, I embrace these divisions, these separations, in order to evolve, not as a reflection of someone else's world, but as an embodiment of my own. I step out of the shadow of others, and into my own light.

I am Lapinian... whatever that means. =n.n=

All Clenches must schism.

0003 Radera 01

So, another month, another lack of update.

Really, it's not that I don't care about this thing any more. It's more the case that I get caught up in doing things and I don't really think about telling folks about it. I just don't "blog" the way most people do. Rather than talk about what's going on right now with my life, I tend to save up and dump it all out into large blocks, and then I forget stuff between when I start saving and when I figure it's time to post. So, chalk it up to use differences, more than interest fatigue.

So, this serves as a prelude to answering the question, "what has th' buni been doing for the last six weeks?"

Despite the removal of one user from my IRC server and the subsequent disappearance of a few others, the universe has not imploded, nor did I really expect anything like that to happen. I did expect a much larger hew and cry about the whole affair, but on the whole people seem to be pleased with the outcome. The community doesn't appear to have splintered, and in fact seems cohesive enough to assemble an anthology of short stories posted to the Shifti, though I'm not involved in the project directly. Still, things seem to be on an even keel there, so I'm not inclined to do too much rocking.

Anthrocon came and went during the downtime. I'm usually uncomfortably enthusiastic for AC, but this year was a little weird. Everything felt very last-minute, very rushed. Part of this was my own inertia; I didn't get the hotel situation resolved until the last minute, and we ended up having to change rooms twice during our stay in Pittsburgh. Part of it was a general lack of planning on my part, and I confess part of it was the ever-present sensation that I've failed in my own goal to have something for the dealers' room. However, as always, I went and had a blast and look forward to going again next year.

Of course, one thing that I've lamented for years is my lack of anything worth selling in the dealers' room. So, my plan is for AC next year, if not for some con prior, to have Beautiful World ready for publication by then. I'm actually further along on this project than it seems. I've broken the halfway mark for a science fiction novel—forty-thousand words—and I'm not yet halfway through the development. I've charted it out, and as long as I'm finishing a chapter every three weeks, I'll have enough time left to get the novel into publishable shape in time to get some advance copies for Anthrocon next year.

Unfortunately, this isn't coming without a price. I'm sure somebody has noticed by now that links to three of the chapters I'd posted previously have gone missing from my website. This isn't an act of censorship so much as it's an attempt to preserve the "publishability"—if that's a word—of the rest of the book. I'm not sure if this is an actual concern, but I'm in better-safe-than-sorry mode. This also means that I won't be posting any more parts of the book to my website, and when FA comes back up, I'll be removing some of the previous sections. I'm not entirely happy with it, but it seems like the best of a set of questionable alternatives.

Now, what this also means is that I'm looking for a shortlist of folks who'd be interested in serving as alpha-readers of the new parts of the story as they become available. One of the things I'll confess quickly and eagerly is that feedback is a large part of what helps drive the creative beast, and I'm making strides with generating that internally, but I'm also aware that other people reading my stuff helps me feel like making more. I don't think I want the universe involved in this process, but I'd love to have a pawful of folks interested in helping me make the book better. I'm not sure what I can offer right now for services rendered other than, like, autographed copies, but I'm sure I can come up with something.

In other news, I've successfully paid off the bankruptcy, which means that the thousand-per-month drain on my budget is now gone, to soon be replaced by a seven-hundred-per-month car payment, if my estimations are right, as well as gas and car insurance which should round me out to the money I'm presently "saving". So, no real movement ahead, but I'll have my own transport again, which will go a long way towards restoring my confidence in my ability to get ahead. Right now, the most likely vehicle on my list is a hybrid Ford Escape, not because I want an SUV but because nobody makes a hybrid station wagon that I wouldn't have to import and I can't afford to hold out until next year for some of the theoretical sixty-miles-to-the-gallon BMW or similiar. Plus, I can fit inside the Escape, or at least I'm led to believe that I can.

Speaking of fitting, the Weight Chart is back online. I found a scale with a 400-pound capacity, and I'm rather embarrassed to admit that at the beginning of the measurements, I needed it. The current trend shocks me, but today's lunch will likely change the direction of the red line for a day or two, mostly because I was in a hurry and ate faster than I could register it. That and portion control seem to be my biggest bugbears, but even there I'm getting better, little by little.

I actually weight to a doctor about my weight, and I learned a few interesting things I'd rather not have known. Rather, I'm glad i know them, but I'm not happy about them being facts, or even historical trends. Basically, whatever my weight was when I was eighteen, give or take two years, is my body's "set point", and most of the natural tendencies will be to maintain that number. Since I weighed 350 pounds at eighteen, I'm likely going to be fighting uphill forever. I've looked into bariatric surgery, but what I'm seeing in the latest reports is that it's a six-year "fix" that ends up not actually solving anything and compounds outstanding problems with new dietary fuckery. Most of the drugs combatting weight loss lead to side effects worse than the weight itself causes. So, apparently the sane goal for someone of my size and history is 315, which is ten percent of base body mass. I'm headed in the right direction, but it's likely going to be a long, painful road.

I'm not saying I'm giving up on the goal. I'm merely setting the expectations for myself and everyone else. Failure is likely, for reasons that have nothing to do with how hard I try or how much I want it.

That one thing aside, though... things seem to be shockingly good. There've been a few dips and wobbles here and there, but they're all things that can be resolved through talking and effort. I'm still not exactly the most social person alive, but I'm feeling better about casual interaction than I have in a while. I still have a pretty big back log of rants on various subjects, but the urge to drop trou and shit into a text file has gone down significantly in the last few months, even if the subject matter is itself fascinating. I really don't have any reason to bitch.

Perhaps that more than anything is driving the silence. I'm just... happy with my life, for the most part, and the elements with which I'm dissatisfied are all things on which I'm actively working. Happy people don't make waves. I'd love to be up for challenging the system and burning the world, but really, I've got it good right now, and I don't want to blow it.

Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

0003 Byetera 01: Removal

Tonight, I removed WolvenOne, formerly known as Wolf-0013, from the TFnet IRC server. In a previous post, I spoke of a user causing problems, and a collection of users by extension that I considered to be memetically dangerous to the type of community I want to create. As a result of the previous altercation, Jessie asked him directly what sort of punishment he would impose if he were in our shoes. He suggested a moratorium on the subject matter from the user in question and that he would ban on the next offense. We agreed that that would be fair.

Tonight, he jumped with all four feet into a political discussion, and Jessie caught him doing it.

I didn't do this lightly. I didn't do this joyfully. I'm sorry that the situation has come to this, but I'm not sorry I did it. For many years, I have been a poor example of a community-minder. I don't own the dialogue, nor do I own the concepts or the people. I do, however, own the space on which the dialogue has occurred, and as such I have a responsiblity to ensure that my users have a positive experience. WolvenOne, in my opinion, was a net negative on the vast majority of people present, and removing him from the conversation is a step I took to preserve the health of the community as a whole.

No doubt some of you who read this and who use the service will disagree. This is your right, and I will not tell you that you're wrong.

In addition, Rabbit—Phil Geusz—has announced that he will not be returning. When the situation arose, he said that his honor was at stake if he didn't take a principled stand against our actions. We in turn said that our authority as administrators were at stake if we issued warnings and then did not act on them when our users made deals with us and then broke them. He said that he understood, and we accepted his reasons for departing.

To be utterly sure, I am not naming names in this post to call anyone out. I am not here to insult, deride, or harangue. I am not here to put anyone On Notice, and I am not here to incite riot. I am providing as close to a neutral accounting of the events in question as possible to eliminate the chance of rumor and hearsay. For all that we disagree on politics, I still consider Phil a friend, and I wish him nothing but the best. I will hate to see him go, and I hope that one day he has a change of heart and returns.

No doubt others of you will wish to do the same. You will also be missed.

Welcome to Rumour Control. These are the facts.

0003 Dalera 22: Censor

As some of you may know, I run an IRC server dedicated—in theory—to writers and readers of "transformation fiction," a fancy way of dressing up various ideas such as age-regression, furry and animal transformation, sex and gender alteration, and the like all under a common banner. The history of how I ended up the administrator of this service is long and varied, and by and large it's unimportant. What matters at this point is that the service sits on my server.

I bring this up not because I want to talk about the details of the service. I'm not interested—right now—in talking about the people who inhabit the place. I'm not bringing this up to talk up the quality of the writers and other artists who visit. I'm not even interested in tooting my own horn as an administrator, because Connie knows what a shitty job I've done of that. No, I mention the IRC server because I have a question to my friends regarding political philosophy.

This may not seem like an obvious connection, so let me try to draw in some of the missing lines. I like to think of myself as a pretty leftist sort. If you click on over to Political Compass, I'm somewhere around a (-7,-7) based on their quick test, and I've got no real reason to think this is that far off from true. This puts me somewhere to the "left" of Dennis Kucinich, who is routinely disregarded as a laughable nutjob for his "dangerously liberal" political views. In fact, it puts me around Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, quite far away from the political center and nigh-uncrossable oceans removed from what is considered "the center" in American politics.

What this means, as related to the above, is that I regard the IRC server that I run as a service. I don't expect recompense for my work. I do it because I believe that it needs to be done. I'm not now asking to be showered with praise, nor am I asking for money. I'm pointing out that I've kept this thing running for five years over three moves and multiple hardware upgrades. I kept the service going even in the depths of The Bad when I really couldn't afford to pay for internet connectivity, because I felt it was important to maintain the server for the folks who used it. This is my fandom, too, and this is how I support it.

Now, all this might by itself be happy backpatting, if not for the real meat of this post. I have a number of users who are, for lack of a better descriptor, bootstrap-libertarians. They, like everyone, connect to the server because they are members of the transformation fandom. They enjoy a good story as much as the next person, and they all do their parts to support the "scene," as it were. However, they—like any other normal human being—have interests that extend beyond the one single topic that unites us, and this means that on a fairly regular basis, I have a small but devoted crowd of people spouting ideology that is utter anathema to my own.

Now, I want to reiterate here, just in case it's been missed. I don't hate these people. I don't reject the basic humanity of these people. I don't think these people are bad people. I think they're dangerously misguided. I think that their ideas are broken because they're based on logical fallacies and untrue assumptions about the basic human condition. However, I've attempted more than once to "agree to disagree" and yet the topics seem to come back time and again, and I'm frankly getting sick of having to deal with the subject matter.

To make matters more... challenging... I find myself thinking of them all, collectively, as hypocrites. The users who understand the idea of a service willingly provided because of the betterment of the commons as a result, I accept and gladly. I wouldn't expect money from them, because they all know why I do what I do, and they in turn don't get on my case for not being the best admin money can buy, because I'm not doing this for profit. The BSLs, on the other hand, all spout at length about the elimination of government handouts, the evils of taxation, and the general stupidity of "liberals," and yet not one of these people has ever once offered to pay for zir bandwidth, nor has a one of them recognized that they're receiving a "handout" and left in protest, or set up a competing paid service.

Is it really so difficult to understand, that if I agreed with their ideals I would have shut down the server long ago as unprofitable?

One of the cornerstones of my philosophy, and one I don't think I've ever really gotten to state here, is that of the "transitivity of tolerance." That is, I am tolerant of any philosophy which is itself tolerant of other philosophies. I am likewise intolerant and rejecting of any philosophy which claims to be the One True Way. It is in this fashion that I lay claim to the mantle of open-mindedness while actively telling those who insist that they have a monopoly on truth that they're unreservedly wrong.

So, now we come full circle, and I get to the question I originally wanted to ask. Would I be out of line in telling the libertarians who inhabit my server that they're welcome to take their business elsewhere? Am I committing some error of judgment or knowledge towards that political system that would bring it back into the realm of "welcoming of other views?"

On the one hand, I see this both as memetic health and cultural health. I believe in a healthy state of political debate, but there has to be some agreement on basics before that debate can happen, and with these people I feel that there's no way to have that. Just as I couldn't have a discussion on the minutae of biology with a creationist, I simply have no means to have a policy debate on the extent of government assistance with someone who says that the government has no business offering it.

On the other, this is censorship, after a fashion. It may be healthy censorship, as any successful forum moderator has had to apply at some point but I don't want to paint a pretty face on it and pretend it's something that it's not. This is the elimination of a certain set of ideas from the public discourse. I'm not stopping them from forming their own forum. I'm not telling them they have no right to be heard. I am, however, saying that they no longer have a right to use my server to further their ideals. As much as I can tell myself over and over again that this is utterly consistent not only with my ideals but my rivals' as well, I feel like I need a second pair of eyes on this before I pull the trigger.

0003 Dalera 09: Patience

Today started with a dream:

It's late, and Jessie and I and two other people are driving in the darkness. We're lost, and we're tired, and we need to find a place to stop for the night. We come across a manorhouse, and the servant that answers the door looks at us suspiciously and tells us that, "the families are under oath not to turn away the needy, but tonight was a bad night for us to arrive." He assigns us each a room by giving us each a card and telling us to sleep in our specified quarters, nowhere else, and then in the morning we should be gone with first light if we can.

The two people with us that I didn't recognize received the same room, a "master bedroom for guests" with a king-sized bed meant for two people. In one corner of the room is a rope, and the servant says that it holds the chandelier in another room above someone's bed. They crawl into bed and are unconscious almost instantly, tossing and turning. He mentions off-handedly what a tragedy it would be if one of the guests pulled the rope loose in their sleep. As we're leaving, we hear a crash, and then a few drops of blood spatter the sheet covering our "associates."

Jessie receives a room with a single day bed and we reluctantly part, knowing we'd be incapable of sharing that space to sleep. My room is upstairs somewhere. I'm told that it's in the Topiary, near the Cambrai Hall, or at least that's what I think I hear. I tell the servant I think I can find it, and he looks at me skeptically but leaves me to wander the halls of this ancient house, filled with living plants and shadows. Twice I go up a staircase and think I've come back to the same landing as before.

All of the rooms and halls are labelled in small brass plaques, but what I thought was archaic English may not be. The word I heard as "Cambrai" is spelled with something that's either an abnormally stylized "final i" or else it's some other letter entirely, a short vertical stroke with a long intro serif, more like a one or a stylized seven than a letter. Now I'm starting to doubt what I heard, and where I am. I still haven't slept; I can't find my room. I find the Topiary, but not the bedroom I've been told is within, and I'm loath to fall asleep anywhere else, now more than ever.

In time, sunlight starts to filter into the house, and I start to hear voices as people rise. Twice I see people in Edwardian garb talking in the halls, and only luck keeps me from being seen. I'm not supposed to be here. Someone spots me and approaches, an older woman with red hair. She smiles when she sees me and addresses me as quot;Adama," saying it's good to see me again after so long. I stammer my way through a conversation, apologizing for being distracted and claiming I haven't slept a wink. She says she understands, expressing excitement at a "full gathering" after so long. She says she'll see me at breakfast in the main hall.

I say, "Thanks, auntie," on a hunch, and she makes a face, obviously annoyed. She tells me that she's tired of that joke and reminds me that I'm her cousin, not her niece. I blush and apologize, saying it was meant in jest and that if it stung, I was sorry. She's mollified at this and leaves me to my search. I find the bedroom, but now I'm too curious to sleep, and didn't we have to be gone at first light? I hurry downstairs, looking for Jessie's room or the others, but the house has changed. Her room is gone, and in its place is a long, open space lined with statues.

I start to panic, but before I can do anything an older man grabs my shoulder, spins me around, and begins to regale me with how wonderful it is to see the family's "shining star." He goes on at length about how he knew from the first moment he saw me that I would go on to do great things, that he knew it from my sculpt. I blink, and he motions behind me to an empty space in the corridor where he is obviously seeing something I can't. He describes it in detail, and others present nod admiringly. He then tells me that outside, everyone is "muddy" and "cloudy", but that he can spot a member of the clan in an instant because they're "clear" with a "shining heart" inside. My panic is at odds with my confusion. If he can spot outsiders, why haven't I been sent away yet?

Everyone leaves, and I ask someone in parting if there's breakfast. He looks at me patronizingly and says it's in the Great Hall, but that I should watch myself, as Brogan—I think—has it in for me. I follow the crowd, and on the way I hear someone say, disparagingly, "once a Mercedes, always a Mercedes." No-one's looking at me as this is being said; I think it's in reference to Brogan. I still have no idea what's happening, but now I'm more hungry than tired.

Sunlight floods the Great Hall and six longtables are set with fine china and genuine silver. Servants bring in food and start serving, and we all take our seats. Someone pelts me with a roll, and I turn to see a man—a grown boy, really, not much older than I— with a sneering smirk and sideburns, in a white button-down shirt, brown suspenders that match his pants and shoes, and gold cufflinks. I heft the roll as if to throw it back, but before I can a crash fills the hallway. One of the servants, in adjusting a heavy mirror hanging on the wall, has brought it down on top of himself. Part of the glass has shattered and spilled on the ground, the rest crushing him under its weight.

In a flash, Brogan is rushing to the back of the hall, reciting lyric inspirational poetry, and suddenly I understand everything. The clan is filled with hereditary mages, and I am apparently one of my generation's most powerful; I'm expected to rise one day to lead. The Mercedes family has long been marginalized because their power is weak, but they're planning a coup because unlike most of the families, they actually train in their talents, learning to make the most of what they have. Brogan Mercedes is my rival for leadership of the clan, not very powerful, but very showy and very skilled at what he can do.

Brogan puts the audience in thrall as he infuses strength into the family servant, lifting one trembling fist in a gesture of triumph. The servant groans and strains, and then lifts the heavy glass and silver mirror off of himself, rising and single-handedly returning it to the wall. Brogan turns to me, smirks again, waves his hand at the shattered glass, and spits a final couplet that fuses the shards of shattered glass into a heart-shaped mirror. The Mercedes family erupts in applause for their golden child while the remainder of the gathered clap half-heartedly.

A few elders look to me, disapprovingly. An older woman—likely an aunt, perhaps the mother of the woman with red hair—clucks her tongue at me and chides me for letting Brogan show off and prove he's got the gift. If I'd just lifted the mirror, I could've gotten the applause and put Brogan in his place. I smile back and say that I've forced Brogan to give away his method, that in his haste to demonstrate what he could do, he's revealed his focus, and that now if I need to face him, I know how to put a stop to his powers. This earns me some raised eyebrows and some quiet chuckles as the clan's next leader proves her worth once more.

That's when my body said I'd had enough sleep, and I had work besides. I could try to analyze this one, and there are just enough hooks to point me in the right direction, but I'm loath to spoil what was in all other regards this really awesome hidden-reality vision of modern people in fin de siècle clothing and magic and internecine feuding.

---

In other news, Jessie and I have once again surfed the Luck Plane.

Those who've been following the continuing saga know that I filed bankruptcy, and that I surrendered the house. As part of my bankruptcy plan, I had to keep paying the utilities on the property until the bank got around to the
foreclosure. That, as it turned out, would be a long and arduous process. They told me that, because I was still in bankruptcy, they were legally obliged to leave me alone and not contact me or do anything with or to the house or mortgage. I didn't have to pay, of course, and they weren't going to ask me to do so, but they also had a backlog of cases to resolve and weren't in any hurry to deal with me because of the bankruptcy flag. Thus, I thought I'd be in a state of limbo for a while, paying for utilities on two places.

One of the bills on my list of obligations was, of course, the combined water/sewer/trash bill. The trash portion of the bill was a non-negotiable seventy-seven dollars and twenty-five cents, and I even called to try to get that relieved but met a brick wall. The water/sewer portion, however, was a negligible amount, perhaps fifty dollars each every three months to cover the water that evaporated out of the heating system or flowed through the pipes to keep them from freezing in winter. I wrote off the bill every quarter as an annoyance, but not really anything I could fix for several months at a minimum.

Last Saturday, I received a bill from the Borough of Pottstown for one month's water/sewer/trash, not three. The bill amount was USD5977.20. That's over an order of magnitude greater than the last bill, for one-third of the time. The bill also tells me how much water that is, and according to the meter, I used 968,660 gallons of water. In a month.

On Thilya, I called the utility department and asked them to check the meter. The clerk said that she'd be glad to help out, since this was "highly abnormal," and that they'd call be back in a few days to tell me what the real reading on the meter was.

Bralya morning, she woke me up with a call at 08h00, telling me that she was sorry to call so early, but that she had authorized the utility department to turn off the water at the street, because "the agent that went out to read the meter said he could hear water running inside the house, and the meter was even higher than before." I told her she did the right thing, and that I'd have to call my lawyer to find out next steps. She asked me when I'd be able to come out and have a plumber find out what was wrong, and I took the five minutes to explain the whole story to her. At the end, she replied with a quiet "oh" and then thanked me for letting her know before ending the call.

My lawyer didn't have great news for me at first; the bill was obviously mine to handle, because I was obligated to pay the utilities. However, when I told him of the "running water" bit, he said I needed to contact
Countrywide as soon as possible to let them know there might be damage to the property and that they might take care of things, but he didn't leave me with a lot of hope on the matter. I called Countrywide on Thursday afternoon, but I spent half an hour in IVR-hell and then gave up.

Kimya morning, I managed to get through to an operator and got the name of the specialist assigned to my case. I then proceeded to get him on the phone with me, live, and give him a fast synopsis of the problem, ending the explanation with "you need to do something because Countrywide's investment here is at potential risk of damages." His response was, essentially, to tell me that anything I had been told prior about his company not being able to do anything because of my bankruptcy was crap. He said that, as my surrender of the property was in an approved plan, that was as good as relief from stay in the eyes of the law and that he was going to file the paperwork to move me out of bankruptcy status. He told me to call back in a week, and that I should be able to get through to general customer service instead of the bankruptcy department. They would then be able to tell me where to send the bill and everything else.

So, by Slacking off, I've been able to pass the buck on some kind of major plumbing disaster at my old property, sidestep a six-thousand-dollar bill, jump the queue on the foreclosure track, drop some karma on the mortgage company that would still be getting paid if only they'd negotiated a short sale in the first place, and leave a mess for somebody else to clean.

I feel like I ought to feel bad about my failure to be the responsible adult in this situation, but I'm too busy bathing in schadenfreude to care.

I'm into making lampshades out of the skin of "just his way"people.

0003 Yortera 04: Blur

First of all, happy belated Thilafa to everyone! Our cleaning came early, in the form of making Jessie's studio a habitable space for two people again, which is all kinds of awesome. Now I can sit next to her and yell at her instead of doing it from the living room! In all seriousness, though, this really has made a huge difference in both of our lives, being able to spend time together in the same room, even if we don't work on the same things together all the time.

The calendar isn't forgotten or abandoned, nor is anything else. Right now, the order of the day is... well, I'd have to call it "rebuilding," but that's not quite the right word. The truth is while everything is going absolutely swimmingly in terms of our immediate finances, we're still in a much more precarious position than I would like. We have no credit and no cushion on which to fall in case something bad happens, and I'm much too keenly aware of Coyote's eyes on the back of my head than to tempt fate and suggest that nothing will go wrong. I've done that before; I know better now. At the moment I'm socking away a good chunk of change every month, I'm paying off the bankruptcy, and we're doing what we can to watch spending without turning into hermit crabs. Negotiations are underway to greatly increase our quality of life, but little enough should be said on those until they actually come to pass.

Actually, the real reason I'm updating is because I happened to run across a piece of information that I think needs to be shared, not just with my immediate circle but out into the wider world: Labor of Love, a real-life story of a happily married transman who opted to stop taking his testosterone and become pregnant to carry the child that his wife could not.

It's unfortunately rare that something happens that causes people to reconsider how they view the world. Most people, confronted with new ideas, merely filter them through the lens of pre-existing decisions. Anything that causes cognitive dissonance simply gets rejected as "wrong" or "immoral." I'm under no delusions that this will do anything else, but I can hold out hope that maybe this will be the trigger that forces at least a few people to really
start thinking about the interplay of sex and gender, and how destructive these things can be for some people.

What is a male, really? We as a society, as a people, do very poorly when trying to explain this idea, this concept of "man" as distinct from "woman" or from "person." We hold up procreation, differences in thought and mind, historical and biological perspective, and all manner of religious pronouncement to divide one from the other, and yet in the end, we really have done little more but paint two rooms in different colors and called that a meaningful distinction. Is this really all there is to our view of male and female?

To be sure, there are underlying biological distinctions that can be drawn, and these should be important. Genuine issues of health and physical well-being arise when talking of how to treat one versus another, and these distinctions are non-trivial. However, they are also non-applicable outside of that realm, and yet we continue to try to propagate these biological notions of sex into some sort of meaningful social context, as though the presence or absense of any one of a number of physical or genetic markers is somehow indicative of a deeper pattern.

The problem, really, is not that we have ideas of "male" and "female". It's that we have so many different ideas of them and yet we have no way to reconcile them all. A person can be genetically male, hormonally female, physically male, and emotionally ambiguous, and yet this same person is expected to compress these near-orthogonal states of being into a single false dichotomy. Worse, many places consider this answer immutable, and almost all consider at most a single state change to be legitimate. Where is the place for those who simply can't answer the question "are you male XOR female" with anything other than "mu"?

Often, when these sorts of issues arise, I heard it asked if I think it's fair to expect people who have no experience with these issues and can be reasonably expected never to deal with them to have to change their worldview to accomodate the extreme minority that this sort of issue impacts. To these people, I can only ask whether they consider us worthy of equality of not. Do these people expect me to respect their decision to be treated as male or female, to not simply refer to them all as "sir" or "ma'am," whichever least matches their presentation that day? Or worse, to simply decide at a whim which to use, and change my mind and pronouns for them daily? Do they expect me to grant them their gender and respect their decision not to question their biology? Do they expect me to their their claims of being gendered seriously when they've never seriously considered the implications of their insistence?

When the assumptions of "what is normal" change, so too do the assumptions of what is polite.

And yet, even through all of this, I am left with the dilemma: how do we as a people overcome this normativity that permeates our culture? Do we even bother trying? Do we treat escape from labelling as a TAZ and revel in it when we can do it, with the expectation that we will all return to the Great Lie outside? Do we storm the barricades and refuse to let ourselves be defined in such simplistic falsehoods? Is there even a single right answer to this question, or, like gender itself, do we each have to make it up as we go?

I'd like to think that, collectively, we could make an impact on the larger society, and yet I have to honestly state that our chances of making any real positive impact are probably vanishingly small, while our chances of screwing things up for ourselves is quite comparatively large. Nevertheless, I'd like to think that, in small ways, we are making an impact. With every person refusing to conform to the expected norms, whether from a pregnant transman or a hijra demanding recognition of zir own sex, we're all pushing the boundaries of what is male, what is female, and what is normal.

I doubt I'll see the kinds of change I'd like within my lifetime, but I can dream.

If I could know for certain the real situation behind the curtain....

0002 Lakera 22: Court

Whenever anybody says "court," there is a certain set of images and expectations that evolve out of this. This is part and parcel of having a connotative language. Running strictly by the denotative sense, of course, "court" is really just a venue, a location where proceedings occur. However, far more than the strict physical locale comes to mind—at least to my mind; your results may vary—when someone suggests something is to happen in or at court.

So, that in mind, the experience of going to the "bankruptcy court" today was very little like what I expected it to be. This is not a complaint, really, so much as it's just something I consider noteworthy.

Now, it should be noted that over the weekend, I managed to throw off my sleep schedule somewhat. Again, no complaints in the slightest about it, so much as this is important to set the stage for things to come. I did my level best to reset things prior to Thilya morning, but it simply did not happen. At 02h00, I was still fairly wide-awake and tossing and turning in bed, unable to rest. I asked Jessie—herself suffering even worse than I for being circadian-deficient—to lie down with me for a bit, and I did eventually pass out, but when I woke up this morning at 06h00, I was quite literally unable to function. I managed to hit the snooze bar once, hoping the problem would resolve itself, and then to reset the alarm for an extra hour, but that too failed to solve the problem.

In fact, when I did finally haul my tail out of bed, it was solely because the clock said 07h25, and I knew that if I didn't start the process of getting ready, I would be late. My instructions all said to be at court promptly at 08h30, I knew I had to find parking, and I had to fight morning traffic, which all meant that I needed to be out the door at 07h30 at the absolute latest. Fortunately, I had laid out everything I needed to get myself together the night before. Unfortunately, I had left my laptop lid open from the night before and made the mistake of looking at something while I put on my socks and shoes.

I made it out the door at 07h45, scampering furiously up to Tanya's car to make a mad dash for downtown. Monday morning traffic was light, for a change, but still far thicker than I had hoped, and the whole way there I alternated between grumbling and grousing, still only a third awake and not feeling very comfortable in the only nice shirt I now own which doesn't quite fit because it—like most of my clothing—is too short. Still, I managed to get downtown in a reasonable time and I even found a parking garage across the street that promised not to cost a small fortune since I was there before 09h00 and could get in on their early-riser special.

The federal court building in downtown Seattle is quite nice, though it has the ubiquitous enless army of steps up from the street to impress upon all who go there that Serious Business occurs within, which always is a little off-putting to me. So, too, is the screening procedure through which one must go to get inside. I understand and respect the need for security, but here it was rather silly. You see, the inside of the court building is dominated by a large pond, presumably with fish in it; I didn't look that closely. Then, off to the right of this giant open space is a small walkway in which the police have set up their conveyor belt and their metal detector. Nothing actually prevents anyone from just jumping over the pond other than a desire not to get one's clothes or feet wet, and the likelihood that anyone caught trying to do that will be assumed guilty of something, even if that something is just a harmless prank.

I did think about asking the guards if anyone had ever tried it, but I was already down to five minutes and I still hadn't gotten beeped yet. Instead, I handed over my purse and my paperwork and my jacket and Tanya's keys, and then I went through the metal detector and promptly set it off because I had forgotten to remove Jessie's collar. Now, when I'm going to airports, I know I have to remove it, and I have standing permission to do so when I'm travelling, but honestly it's become such an integral part of me that I don't even really think about it. I don't take it off to sleep, or to bathe, or even apparently to get past a metal detector going into a courthouse.

Thankfully, the security guards were very understanding and let me get away with being wanded rather than having to remove the collar. They were less understanding of the can of soda I brought with me. They asked if I was waiting for a jury summons, but when I said no they told me that I couldn't keep my can and that I'd have to leave it there or throw it away. I'm not sure why a can of soda is a problem, but I'm guessing it's a bludgeoning risk or somesuch. At any rate, I couldn't keep it.

So, as usual, the bad kind of inspiration struck, and I asked if they had a trash can nearby. One of the officers said they had one behind the desk. I couldn't take the can, and I didn't want to leave it or throw it away while full, so I took the only other option: I chugged it. I will state here for the record that Black Cherry Fresca is very fizzy, as in burns-the-nose carbonated, but having already set myself up for a Bad Idea, I was going to follow through with it. The police started to applaud when I got onto the fourth and final tilt, draining the can dry in about ten seconds. One of them said with a smile, "you went to college, didn't you?" Another accepted the empty can from me and pointed me towards the bathrooms.

My lawyer called me as I was getting into the elevator to get up to the floor with the bankruptcy court. The clock said exactly 08h31.

Now, having gone through all of this to get to the courthouse on-time, I have to say that the process itself was... shockingly short. I was quite literally in and out in half an hour. The first fifteen minutes went to the attorney for the bankruptcy trustee talking about the proceedings, and then calling two names for people who weren't there. I was third on the list, and by 08h45 I was seated at a small table with my attorney, the trustee's attorney, and a clerk of the court taking notes. The trustee's attorney asked me a few quick questions about the accuracy and completeness of the paperwork, we made one quick amendment to the plan to remove a claim that Tanya's employer is paying but for which I had to co-sign, and then I was done.

I'd expected to be sitting in a courtroom pew all day waiting to get up and do the whole witness thing and see a judge and all that. The whole affair was rather... anticlimactic.

Still, I was glad for it, as it meant I could come home and curl up next to Jessie and get a nap. I'll still sleep well tonight, but I was a very tired buni still, and I was glad for the fact that I had taken the day off of work in anticipation of having to be sequestered for most of it. It gave me a chance to sequester myself when I got home, and I needed it.

Now all I have to do is... pay off the remaining debt. This is actually the easy part. At a thousand a month, I'll be free and clear in just over a year, and I can easily spare that much. I won't even really have to panic
too much over Anthrocon, though I'm going to have to engage in some fancy financing tricks to pay for the plane tickets while they cheap, since I don't have a credit card any more. That, however, is only a minor hiccough in the plans, and then we should be ready to go.

From the rooftops, shout it out.

---

Having been somewhat off-kilter for the last few days, Jessie and I had done more than our share of eating out over the weekend. So, we both agreed that tonight we wouldn't be going anywhere, or even ordering take-out, once we decided that it could be füd tiem nao plz. However, right after this proclamation, we noticed that, while we had many things that could be used to make food, we didn't really have anything that would qualify as food outright. We had a lot of ingredients, but no obvious combination of them that could be added up to a known meal.

Thus, it became time to prepare Emergency Food.

Emergency Food differs from Regular Food in that Regular Food starts with a known outcome, like "lasagna" or "chicken pot pie" or even "taco-don", then proceeds to the gathering or assembling of ingredients, and onto cooking and then presentation and consumption. The root of Regular Food is the meal, an end-goal around which ingredients are planned.

Emergency Food, in contrast, starts with a list of ingredients and then proceeds directly into cooking, with the hope the outcome will be some form of success. For those of you familiar with World Tree, Emergency Food is to sponting what Regular Food is to actual spells. You aren't working from a known recipe, so much as you're throwing together a bunch of stuff that you're pretty sure ought to go together in this fashion, but you've never really tried it before, or at least you've never written it down anywhere.

So, tonight's dinner ended up being Sponted Stew. Because it is sponted, you can't really have a recipe, but nevertheless I shall recreate the process by which this came about:

1. Stare at your canned-goods shelf for a long time and hope that something eventually falls out that makes some semblance of sense. Select one can each of carrots, green beans, and peas. Consider the can of beets curiously, start to pick it up, and then put it down again.
2. Ignore your mate's attempts at levity when she starts pulling ingredients at random off the shelves. Attempt to impart through the medium of a single wordless expression the idea that if she keeps you from cooking, she gets to eat cold cereal without any milk and maybe a can of refried beans with Triscuits for dinner.
3. Remember that you have chicken in the freezer and cans of chicken broth on the shelf, as well as a blue cylinder of Wondra on the spice shelf and some butter in the fridge, which means you can make chicken with gravy and vegetables, which everyone in the apartment who is not a jackal with an anti-vegetable field should eat. The anti-veg jackal has already started a personal pizza in the oven and has removed herself from the Emergency Food process.
4. Carry the cans to the counter and open them. Drain the liquid out of them and pour their contents into a glass bowl that you find under the counter.
5. Ask your mate to come back out of her studio and get her to start making rice in the ricer. Grumble quietly when she suggest that the liquid from the canned vegetables could have been used to flavor the rice and retain some of the nutrients that got poured out. If you have Time 2 or Ruloc Tempador, send a message to yourself back on step four to save the liquid.
6. Open the freezer to get out the frozen chicken and remember that chicken gravy really doesn't work so well; cream gravy works a lot better. Close the freezer and open the fridge to get out the milk that isn't there. If you have Correspondence 2 or Mutoc Locador, get the milk out of the dairy case at the store instead. If not, close the fridge and change your plan to the pound of beefs sitting in the door, since beef gravy works fine with beefs.
7. Start the ground beef defrosting and get out some butter to brown it. Find a clean pot or wash one, put the butter in the pot, and then go and confirm that you actually have beef broth as well as chicken. If you have Time 4 or Ruloc Tempador, do this before starting the beefs to defrost.
8. Once the beefs are defrosted, brown them in butter and then drain well, adding the beefs to the glass bowl and the fat to the can that you didn't throw away after pouring the vegetables out of it. If you had Forces 3 or a good amount of Creoc Pyrador, you can bypass the need for a stove here.
9. Wash the now-empty pot in which you browned your beefs; for this, you may have to rearrange dirty dishes in the sink and wash your hands if you don't have Matter and Life each at 2, or else a good amount of Creoc Aquador or maybe some Destroc Corpador. Either way, combine butter and flour into a roux in the clean pot.
10. Stir continuously with a utensil in one hand if you can't set up some Forces effects or else Ruloc Corprador to keep the stirring-thing moving in the pot to keep. Slowly add your beef broth to your roux and then stir some more. Did I mention to stir? Keep stirring it and add more broth, a little at a time. You may want to stir at this point. No really. If you don't keep stirring and add the liquid slowly, you will get lumps, and then you either have to go back with Time 4 or Mutoc Tempador and stir to keep them from forming or else you have to really Matter or Mutoc Corprador to get the lumps out after they've formed, and you don't want that, so keep stirring.
11. Once your beef broth and your roux are combined into a gravy, decide that it's not thick enough and add more flour. You will need about three hands' worth of stirring at this point, and you only have two, so you're going to get lumps anyway. Deal with them as mentioned above. Add black pepper and oregano to the gravy to help convert the meal from "heavy" to "hearty."
12. Pour your hopefully-not-too-lumpy gravy over the combined beefs and vegetables. Gently fold the ingredients together in the bowl, as you have just about filled it to capacity. Correspondence 1 or Creoc Locador can be helpful in expanding the volume of the bowl to make this step simpler.
13. Discover that the rice is just about ready. If it's not, then you should have used Time 1 or Kennoc Tempador to figure out when you should have asked your mate to start the rice to make sure everything lines up right. Call everyone into dinner. Serves enough, with leftovers.

0002 Indera 21: Holidays

Joyous Athamara to everyone! I know sending out seasons' greetings after the holiday is over is usually a bit tacky, but this year things got so hectic, I totally forgot to say something in advance. I didn't even get to hang up any paper chains, and my gifts for folks really were slapdash at best. I suck as founding holidays. Well, truth is, I'm apparently pretty good at it, so much so that other folks actually did a better job of celebrating it than I did this time around.

Actually, the truth is that things have been really... um... weird. I know I haven't written anything in several months, and I'm not particularly happy with myself about that. The sad truth is that silence is it's own worst feedback mechanism. Say nothing, and no-one replies. No-one replying means nobody's listening, and if no-one is listening then there's no reason to speak, is there? Consciously, I know that's not true, but it's a hard voice to try to override with just words and some attempts at self-pepping.

No, nothing bad has happened between Jessie and I. We continue to grow together, laugh together, love together. Life with her is a blessèd thing, and I continue to treasure every moment I get with her. Most days, I feel like this is entirely too few for anyone's good, but I keep steady with thoughts of retirement and one day having all the time we want to spend together. This may drive us both mad. Time will tell.

Anyway, I suppose I should go into a bit of depth as to why I've been silent for so long. It really isn't good to leave anyone, myself included, hanging, and the story has only gotten more interesting with time. As folks might remember, I mentioned several months ago that my finances were in a state that could best be described as Slow Leak. With both a mortgage payment and a monthly rent bill, I was losing about three hundred a month, then making up about ninety percent of it all on bonus checks and the occasional boost in roommate rent. While not tenable for the long run, we were making do, though constantly in a state of "we really can't afford this," whatever it happened to be.

Now, contracts with realtors usually expire on or around 180-day intervals, and on Pyevera 6 (October 6 Gregorian) my contract with my realtor was set to run out. Fourteen months by any calendar, and no real motion on the house, with no end in sight to the collapse of the housing market. I owed more on the property than any sane investor site said the house was worth, and nobody in zir right mind wanted to move to Pottstown anyway.

On Pyevera 1, we got an offer. It was for USD90,000, far less than I owed, but it was a solid offer, a genuine offer, with earnest money and a contract and everything. My realtor said the buyer was "highly motivated" and wanted to close a deal in two weeks. Jessie and I were elated. Ecstatic. Near-delirious with joy. An end to our ordeal!

Now all we had to do was navigate the precarious waters known in real estate terms as the "short sale." As can be surmised from its name, a short sale happens when the seller of a property goes to the bank and asks to be released from a portion of debt as part of a sale transaction. Banks do not like short sales, but under many conditions they will be glad to accept them, such as, for example, an alternative to foreclosing on a property in default, or as part of a legally-mandated sale as part of a divorce or other legal proceeding, or when the market has so grossly overvalued a house at some point in the past that any attempt to recoup those losses through a legitimate business transaction could only meet in resounding failure.

Yeah, I was dreaming, too. With my father's help, I put together a plan to pay off my second mortgage and offer a short sale to the bank on the first that left a mere twenty-thousand dollars to be forgiven, an amount that I was willing to claim on my taxes if it meant no longer being burdened by a vacant house on the opposite coast. I thought, silly me, that if I presented it to the bank in a rational and lucid manner, they would have no choice but to agree that forgiving twenty grand would be far favorable to keeping such a risky property on the books.

Oh, how wrong I was.

For starters, CitiMortgage, my second mortgage holder, simply refused to discuss short sales. Ever. On each of the first five or six attempts I made to speak with a representative about short sales, all anyone would ever tell me was "fill out the workout packet and fax it to us; someone will call you." No-one ever did. Then, on about the sixth or seventh attempt, when I finally blew my stack at someone, I got a supervisor on the phone who simply told me that Citi categorically refuses to authorize short sales for second mortgages, and explained quite bluntly that by doing so they guaranteed either that they were paid in full or that their clients were forced into foreclosure to prevent the first mortgage company from benefitting. They called this a win-win situation.

Countrywide, my primary mortgage holder, was more lenient, by which I mean they were actually willing to let me submit a short sale plan and a hardship letter. However, after receiving it and running all the numbers through their spreadsheets, they decided that they, too, were going to hold out for full payoff, and insisted that I make a counteroffer.

I explained to the negotiator quite clearly and using multiple phrases that there was no more money on my side of the table with which to make such an offer. I had brought one-hundred-twenty percent of my available resources to bear in the initial plan by securing a guarantee from my father for some help, and that left us completely tapped, financially.

The negotiator said in response to this that we should force Citi to accept the short sale, then, since they were the second mortgage company, and my financial obligations were to Countrywide first and foremost.

I said that Citi had refused to negotiate a short sale under any condition precisely because they were the second mortgage company and it made no financial sense for them to do so.

The negotiator then made the vocal equivalent of a shrug and said she couldn't help me. She offered to leave my file open for a week, but said that she'd have to close it after that and I'd have to go through "a process" to get it opened again. She did not say what that process was.

Now, it's worth noting at this point that Countrywide said they couldn't turn around a short sale in anything less than forty-five days. I tried to explain multiple times that I had a buyer that might walk if the bank took too long. At every point in this process, I warned Countrywide—and Citi, though I had fewer opportunities to do so—that I was rapidly running out of capacity to continue to pay the mortgage, and that I had successfully juggled things this long by racking up credit card debt to keep my mortgage current. This, obviously, could not last forever, and was nearing the cutoff point past which I would have to take drastic measures.

Countrywide's response to this was, and I quote, "We're willing to take that risk."

So, starting with the mid-Fathera payment, I quit paying my mortgage. At first, I was working from an assumption—a valid one, I would later learn—that part of the reason they were so unwilling to work with me on resolving this little financial crisis was that my account with them was in good standing. It seems so backwards, and yet at the same time I can see the twisted logic of it. As long as you pay on time, play by the rules, and do nothing to rock the boat, banks and possibly other large institutions are more prone to look at you as an annuity payment than as a customer. Their assumption about you as a person is that you'll continue to make payments on time and that they don't have to treat you well for you to do the right thing. Their interests are focused instead on the people who rack up huge debts and then don't pay, because it's there that these financial groups stand to actually lose money.

Never mind the fact that if they didn't lend money to people who did that in the first place, they'd have fewer problems. That, dear friends, is an argument for another day.

At any rate, not handing over a lot of money to Countrywide felt really good, and I kept it up for a few weeks, riding pretty high on the emotional lift that giving The Man the finger had given me. Of course, this also added to my stress levels pretty severely, which is one reason I haven't produced a lot of writing lately. Bunnies don't make good anarchists, though I did a pretty good imitation of one for a while.

Now, after a few months of this, I'm sure everyone can imagine just how happy the bank was to talk with me, especially when you consider the fact that I had done this deliberately to yank their short-and-curlies to get their attention. Starting around early Ertera, I started getting the phone calls from their pressure-folks asking when I'd be making a payment and would I like to set one up now while they have me on the phone. This went on for a few weeks, and then I had an epiphany: this wasn't going to get any better.

So, I declared bankruptcy.

Now, I say that like it's a cakewalk. It's actually something that takes some time. You can't just walk into town square and declare yourself to be broke. In this state, you have to go to a lawyer, you have to take a course in responsible finances, you have to submit forms detailing everything you own, you have to find your tax returns for the last two years, and you have to prove that you aren't just doing this to spite someone, even if you are. However, I found a nice lawyer who was very willing to help walk me through the whole process, and together we worked out that, yes, filing for Chapter 13 did actually make a lot of sense, especially if we could beat the bank to the foreclosure.

See, the bankruptcy laws have some interesting rules. One is that if you have a debt backed by an asset—a secured debt—you can choose under bankruptcy to surrender the asset as full payment for the debt, regardless of the relative value of the asset and the debt at the time of surrender. That is, by declaring bankruptcy, I can just give the house back to the bank and they're legally obligated to accept it in full compensation for the money I owe them through the mortgage. They can't actually ask for any more money, since hey, they got the house.

If I'd waited for the bank to foreclose to declare bankruptcy, things would not have gone so smoothly. What happens under this condition is messy, but suffice to say I would have ended up having to pay a lot more money than I wanted. Anthrocon would have been out for about five years, as would a lot of other things.

Now, I do have some other debts besides the house that the bankruptcy court will force me to pay back, since credit card debt is all unsecured and I can't just walk away from it with the money I make. However, even if I'm forced to pay it back at maximum rate, I'm pinching pennies for a year and then I'm completely out of debt with no mortgage to worry about. Under the plan I've submitted, I'm out in a year-and-a-half, with lots of pocket change in the meantime. It's possible the court may force me to pay back faster than I'd like, but that just means less time in the plan.

In fact, the worst thing about this whole situation, really, is that for the next seven years I have a black mark on my aura credit report indicating that I have committed Diablerie declared bankruptcy, which will make it harder for me to avoid a Blood Hunt get loans. However, I can rebuild my actual credit score in about two years, less with some help from friends and family. More on that in another post. Really, given the expanded Blood Pool and increased Disciplines fiscal benefits, consuming my Sire declaring bankruptcy is probably the best thing I could've done in this situation.

The best part is that I signed all the paperwork last Thilya, which means this was an awesome Athamara present to myself and the rest of the Embassy.

Speaking of Athamara, actually, I can't thank enough all the people who actually took me seriously and helped me create this wonderful holiday. Thanks to Cobaltie and Zander for coming out this way to visit. Thanks also to Zander for the rare scarlet emerald! Who only knows what I'll be able to summon with it! Thanks to Tanya for the vintage slang deck; murder but it's the most! Thanks to Orbus and Mufi for the copy of World Tree! Thanks especially to Bard for the signed copy of Marriage of Insects! I very much look forward to reading it!

I got very little for folks. I suck. I did, however, provide a place for people to congregate and hosted Zander's visit to Seattle. I hope that, Grey Sky notwithstanding, we convinced the mad scientist to become "our
resident mad scientist." Too soon to tell, but scheduling a blue sky and a trip to Ivar's Brunch Buffet on the final day may have been a good selling point.

Now, all this may sound like skittles and beer, and not really the cause for radio static, but the truth is it's all been very stressful, and I've been pretty much spending my evenings coming home and vegetating. Plus, the work situation is getting... odd. I dare not say "untenable," because it's still very manageable. However, it's becoming increasingly clear that the new CIO and the people he's hired to help convert T-Mobile from being a small-fast-lean company into being a large-established-conventional industry leader have a very different vision for what a good company is than I do. To illustrate this, I point no further than the fact that when we as a company scored lower-than-expected on our employee satisfaction survey, his response was to buy a copy of Who Moved My Cheese? and to tell us all at our quarterly all-hands meeting that their poor grade was because of our failure to properly embrace the changes they made to the company.

I haven't quit outright, but I did have my first interview outside T-Mobile in almost three years. It hurts, letting go, but at the same time, I'm not so sure I feel like waiting to see if this guy gets fired before he screws up anything else finishes implementing his vision.

Also, somewhere in all of this the Lapinian Embassy celebrated its largest Rocksgiving West Bandaza ever. Rather than try to recollect two months back with crystal clarity, let me just provide a quick rundown:

• Thirteen people showed up.
• Two tofurkeys actually made it to the table.
• Five pounds of potatoes got mashed.
• Multiple people rocked out with our East Coast counterparts.
• One fursuiter attended and briefly played drums in-suit.
• Six pumpkin pies met a timely and delicious fate.
• One giant spice cake and several other desserts also vanished.
• Several people stayed multiple days to help with leftovers.
• The last of the dishes are just now being resolved.

As noted at the time, this almost turned out more like Thanksgivicon Zero than anything else. Next year, we may do conbooks.

Finally, I have been Sick. Now, when I say sick, I don't just mean a sniffle, a cough, or some funky discharges. I'm talking about full-blown lungbutter, technicolor sputum the consistency of semi-set Jell-O, night sweats, and the occasional thirty-eight degree fever. I have, in fact, been in one form of ill health from Rachel's return from MFF through to... um... today. I'm still coughing, still have a sore throat, and still wake up with the occasional bout of nasty throat crap that has to be coughed free. Yes, I've been to a doctor, and she told me that I probably had a really nice case of bronchitis on top of sinusitis, and that from here there's nothing more I can do besides lozenges, pain killers, and cough suppressants when I need them. I'm quite literally sick of being sick at this point.

And that's what's been up. In retrospect, it doesn't sound like a lot, but when you mix it in with everything else that has to happen in the ordinary course of living one's life, it's really quite a lot, or at least it felt like it at the time. I can only hope that I'll be better in the future about keeping people apprised of what's going on in a timely fashion. I know I've said that before, though, and all I can do is say that I'm aware of how poorly I do this. Most of my friends tend to update their diaries on a much more frequent basis, and I tend to save up for larger posts, so I always feel like I'm "the quiet one." That's probably not going to change any time soon.

P.S. I won't be at FC this year, or probably any year, really. If I'm going to take off a week for my own private holiday, it's really hard to get another week less than a month later, no matter how much time in advance I give notice. You guys are just going to have to move the con.