Describe God.

I started at the bottom of the prompt sheet because the question about coffee looked easier (safer?) to answer than the one at the very top. This was the second to last, THANKS Lisa, heh.

I grew up Christian. Scratch that. I grew up really Christian. I grew up in a church. Several churches, I guess, since we moved from Ottawa to North Carolina when I was 10. The churches we went to in Ottawa were primarily Chinese speaking, the space rented from the white people churches, the time slots given the less desirable (this meant that I got to sleep in on a Sunday).

When we moved to NC, my father had already been down South for a year at that point, and had met some folks and found a church. It was a white people church, but we were sponsored in by some kind folk (still amazingly good friends, one of whom is Native American, and gets it, gets the isolation) who also sponsored in a Latino family at one point. The sponsoring in was probably like, difficult, but normal difficult? for my parents. For me, it was intolerable. The folks at this church felt way more cliqueish than the folks at school and I hated all of them. I dunno, maybe that’s unkind, maybe it was incredibly hard for my parents too.

I don’t know how to describe God, I’ve had God described to me way too often, and never in the guise of someone who I love.

I converted again at a Billy Graham concert when I was 7 or 8 (or 9, I dunno, those years feel far away). I was baptised twice, once because the first time didn’t count, y’see. I’ve been in a Christian puppet group, taught music school in a Christian summer camp, played the piano and organ in 3 different denominations of churches, read the Bible a few times, confronted a few volunteer Sunday School teachers angrily, sang in a few church choirs. I’m not sure I can describe God.

For the next 28 entries, I’m responding to a series of prompts written by my buddy Lisa.

How do you drink your coffee?

These days I drink my coffee black. Before that, I put a bit of half and half in, the way my first boyfriend’s mother drank hers. She was incredibly hip, incredibly generous and nice and I haven’t gotten along with a partner’s family even a tenth as well since then.

At boarding school, Bob and I would sometimes go off campus to the coffee shop across the street and I’d drink Americanos with flavored syrup.

Before that, when I was what, 14?, when I was still learning how to drink coffee, I would stir two spoonfuls of white cane sugar and two spoonfuls of skim milk into the machine drip dark roast brew that my father made. My parents don’t stock cow milk anymore--I joke that they went full hippie when I left home--but these last two years, my mom buys her soy milk at the store instead of making it herself.

Of course, I’m pretty lactose intolerant these days. It’s why I dropped the half and half, and it’s why even when I’m home these days, my folks don’t stock cow milk anymore. I’m thinking about trying lactase. This past year, I started taking allergy meds when going to houses with cats and it’s been a game changer. Who knew cats were so hilarious and soft and delightful? For the next 29 entries, I’m responding to a series of prompts written by my buddy Lisa.

the books I didn’t read in 2015

I got a Kindle in the Fall of 2013. It promptly froze, hilariously, on a page of Bleeding Edge. I was job hunting in Oakland at the time, and not just a little bit frantic, and I didn’t get around to calling in for a replacement. I got another Kindle, finally, after a lot of hem-hawing, December of 2014 and hoo does my reading volume show it. 

Badly formatted, these are the books I bought from the Kindle store. I also read the entire corpus of A.J. Hall (btw, even if you don’t think you like fanfiction, if you like comedy of manners, you should go read Lust over Pendle), which spawned me to finally pick up the Vorkosigan saga and damn! better break-up reading there isn’t! I kind of dread catching up with old friends right now, because the concise summary of what’s been going on with me includes: oh, well, my boyfriend (partner? God, I hate that term, it’s so accurate yet so erasing) that I grew up with, that I got through my early 20s with, and I broke up OH and! there was a few months there where I thought my father would never be allowed back in the country but LOOKEE over Christmas we found out that maybe he’ll be allowed back in for more visits?

It’s kind of easier just to say that I had a “serious breakup and my father got deported”, even though I wince at the drama of that phrasing. It’s even easier to avoid talking about it, to not email old friends to catch up, to hope that eventually the news will be old and maybe dear God they’ll have heard about it from my Twitter account?

Anyway, Gmail says that I emailed books to my Kindle 29 other times, and Verso (who are the BEST and give you DRM free ebooks with every paper book purchase GO BUY THINGS FROM THEM) says that I bought and emailed 14 books to my Kindle, and I prolly read at least 15 paper books, and well, yeah what didn’t I read in 2015?

I traveled a lot in 2015. I counted, after I heard that Lisa had urged Allison to do so, and I spent 133 nights away from home. I took one of the longest airplane flights in the world from NYC to Johannesberg, direct, to go to Cape Town, to give a not-practiced-enough way-too-technical-to-be-interesting talk about databases at a pretty fun conference. I went to North Carolina a few times, to be with my mom after my dad had left, to see my sister graduate high school, to see D before we parted ways. I went to SF a few times, once for a conference where I gave a way-more-practiced-yet-still-too-technical-talk to an audience of DBAs, once illadvisedly, and one more time because dammit, what are you even supposed to do in this life but see your friends. (I went a few other places too.)

Anyway, I’m trying to read a bit more deliberately this coming year. I’m still struggling a bit, to be honest, but there’s a lot of things I need to learn and I need to make time for things that aren’t pure escapism. I’m starting to think of myself as an American citizen...you know, a disenfranchised one. I make this joke (I’m sure all of you have heard me make it), that there’s a long-ass history of disenfranchised Americans! It’s more American than having privilege! Still grappling with this a lot, and I have a long reading list to help me with it. Let me know if you want to talk about these things--I would love that. 

I made a lot of space in my life in 2015. Breaking up with D, and, separately of that, simply not being in a long distance relationship, stepping down from organizing !!Con, making the decision to not speak at conferences outside of NYC this coming year....yeah, I feel good about this. I’m a little bit more confident about how to spend my time at work (I got promoted!), and I’m hoping that the confluence of all these things will make the space that I need to think & read & write about the issues I’ve been grappling with for a long time. Honestly, I suspect I’ve made more space than that can fill--not sure what else is gonna go in there! 

30 prompts, 30 days

My buddy Lisa and I traded 30 writing prompts*. This space is gonna be taken over by first draft responses, one a day, for the next 30 days. I might do my own prompts after them, making it 60 days.

* okay, I haven’t given her all 30 yet because I’m resolutedly always behind, BUT!

friend book exchange

A while ago, on Twitter, I proposed a monthly book exchange between friends. For those opted in, every month we pick a book we think the other will like and send it to them.

This month, for Dan I picked Bleeding Edge. I’ve written a bit about Bleeding Edge here before, mostly about how it feels, ridiculously, like a book got me to move to NYC in the Fall of 2013. When it came out, D.G. told me about it and said, “I think Pynchon wrote a book just for you”. Bleeding Edge is backed by a mystery novel plot and placed in the simultaneously burgeoning and about to die NYC tech industry in the precarious time between the first dot-com bubble collapse and 9/11. Yup, it’s perfect. To top it off, Pynchon depicts characters from teenage gamers to the middle-aged mom private detective and all the characters she meets on her hunt. I’m still in awe at how pitch-perfect his depictions of multiple generations is. : D

For Dakota, I picked To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. Dakota’s a history & political science buff, and hadn’t heard of Willis at all. I find some of Willis’s later books in the time travel arc (Blackout/All Clear) kind of tedious and poorly paced, but To Say Nothing of the Dog is a delight, especially as an intro to her time travel constructs & the Oxford University time travel world. To me, this book is a quintessential light summer read. A comedy of manners pitched against a  fun romp through time.

things i'm reading before going to cape town

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_South_Africans. I love these articles, and they're pretty much a required reading for me now before travelling abroad, just to get a sense of what the local racial prejudices will be. I think sometimes I pass as not-Chinese, depending on what the local demographics are, so curious as to what that'll be like in Capetown.

bunches of R.W. Johnson from the LRB archives before I realized that his more recent work was really racist. http://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/rw-johnson

Niq Mhlongo's Way Back Home

What looks to be a light (maybe airplane?) read in Emma Van Der Vliet's Thirty Second World.

Wishing I could find some good, post-apartheid non-fiction. 

Trying to keep up with the Times's writing on South Africa until I go so that I can be aware of the most recent things, but the ones I read recently were about trade disputes around chickens and Marlene Dumas.

literature and moving

I went on a long-ish (long for staying inside NYC bounds) bike ride with my friend Aki today. We were going up through North Brooklyn over the Pulaski to get to the Queensboro, and we weren't in any rush, so we stopped at one of my favorite bookstores in town WORD.

They, like a lot of stores in this town, have an entire section devoted to New York. I was eyeing it, looking for a copy of Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities that I need to be reading for an ad-hoc reading group with some other friends.

The shelf, and the books on it, reminded me that in some senses, I moved to NYC because of a book. I was reading Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge at the time I was job hunting in Oakland. I still think this is one of the best works of literature I've ever read, and it's set in the NYC tech scene in the year after the first dot-com crash and before 9/11 occurs. A tense time, a time in between scenes, very fruitful for a novel like this. The novel was just so powerful to me, that I could really imagine myself living in New York, at least for a while. Crazy, huh?

rossgrady, started reading Altered Carbon on my gushing 140 char twitter review. That's another novel with a strong sense of place. You really feel the geography of San Francisco, even though you're pulled wayyyyy far into the future there. I think that's partially why I liked it more than I liked the two sequels, but there's also an element of repetitiveness. The protagonist gets a little too super-powered, in their charisma, etc. not just the technical parts of why they he's actually superpowered, heh. Honestly it started to feel a little like a Mary Sue, about halfway through the last book. Still, totally worth reading, and totally enjoyable. Also, I think I might've liked the first one the best because one of my favorite sub-genres of mystery novels is the locked-house mystery ("cozy English house mystery"). Probably also why I liked Jo Walton's Farthing so much. Would love to read more of that sub-genre. Any recs?

a serious ramble on margaret atwood

I started the final book in the Maddaddam series this weekend.

I wasn't impressed enough with the previous two books to hunt down the 3rd until I happened across it at a bookstore--already in paperback. This is Margaret Atwood's take on the currently hip and hot dystopia (although let's be clear--Atwood totally got there before the Hunger Games), and it's certainly less escapist reading than the latest critique of YA fiction in the Guardian would have you believe. I'm finding this 3rd book, if anything, uncomfortable, a theme in the fiction I'm reading lately.

I'm getting old (? not actually sure what to attribute it to) enough now that the romantic relationships seem like more than just foils or character devices. I seem to be able to see *the space between two characters*, now in a way that I don't think I ever did before. It's kind of strange, I re-read American Gods recently, and I found myself incredibly sympathetic to the protagonist's relationship--in the past I thought he was a weird strange kind of push over.

The first book in the Maddaddam series, Oryx and Crake, was one of my best friends in high school's favorite book for a while there. I think I found it boring when I tried to read it (okay, so maybe I've been bearish on dystopias for a while now), but eventually got around to it sometime before college--clearly it didn't leave much of an impression. D bought me a copy of the 2nd in the series as a surprise book present when it first came out, shortly after we started dating. We were living on Alameda on the time, and the bookstore on the island was maybe 10-20 blocks down the road--it was hot that September in the East bay (I think it's always hotter in Alameda than in Oakland or Berkeley, actually) and he was sweating when he came in the apartment door. I read the book in a night, but only have dim recollections of it now, 3 years later, something something biopharmaceutical lab, something something peak oil--a plotline that felt too pat for 2011 America, and not futuristic enough to be from the time it was allegedly telling us a story from.

Futurism is hard, and the role of science fiction is certainly up for debate (as Margaret Atwood is happy to chip in on), but I'd like to think that there's more to it than blah-blah-blah nice setting for remarks on contemporary problems. Our contemporary problems are just that--contemporary, and honestly nothing about the specifics of our current environmental-political-social crisis has any intrinsic significance. Science fiction is just a kinda fiction, honestly, and fiction's capacity and abilities don't lie in the intrinsic plot, but appear when you go deeper and start to probe into the why and the wherefore and the who of we are. 

Anyway, so I'm still having trouble stomaching reading the 3rd book. It's uncomfortable. These people are not comfortable, in a way that I think fluffy dystopia doesn't get at. Fluffy dystopia is actually super comfortable, an escapist read, a superhero to save the day. So far, there's no superhero in this book--just a woman with an uncomfortable relationship with a man she's not quite sure loves her enough, the folks they've fallen in with, an alien species, a pair of meanspirited enemies, and the possibility of running out of food supplies needed to outlast them all.

things i read today

* https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/gkrichar/papers/onward2013-wuerthinger-truffle.pdf

* Model View Culture, Quarterly no. 2

* http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n14/perry-anderson/why-partition

my real children, the redux

I finished My Real Children, (a while, maybe two weeks ago), and I couldn't decide how I felt about it. Certainly, I felt nervous about my parents. Do I tell them I love them enough? Do I show them my love enough? What the hell is going to happen as they grow old? My emotions on this front are probably magnified by the fact that I only have 1 grandparent left (the 2nd to last one just passed away this December). 

My grandfather (the 2nd to last grandparent to be alive) was born on the 4th of July---in China, in what my mother tells me was "another calendar, so he wasn't actually born on the 4th of July American style." I don't know how you translate these calendars, but from the perspective of a Software Engineer I'm sure damn glad we don't use them today--time zones are hard enough as is.

I don't know--I really enjoyed My Real Children and you should probably go read it  but I'm not sure I came away from it with anything more than a general sense of anxiety (this read, at least). I'm not sure I'm so good to my parents (are any of us sure about this?) and my anxieties thereof overrode any wonder that I could've gotten out of this book from this read.

One more, more soapboxy thing--I got the sense that there's some Sexual Assault that's like, heavy to some folks. It wasn't particularly to me, because I assume these days that Women Are Assaulted. Maybe if you felt that way you should contemplate how yr assumptions are different. 

a year and a half ago

about a year and a half ago one of dawson's friends who was cutting out to rehab soon came out to visit us in SF as a last minute visit before hand. i've been meaning to write a play about the whole visit (also involved: a former roommate turned poundbag weed dealer, a last ditch attempt to make some cash by the friend), but in addition to all that, the friend in question started reading a book of mine that i had left out: aye and gommarah, a collection of short stories by samuel delany. the book less-than-mysteriously disappeared around the time the friend left, and i'd like to think that he read it all voraciously and continues to be a huge samuel delany fan.

i thought about this recently, as i found a jo walton review of it.

finished scalzi's old man's war

(finally. I've been reading it off and on for at least a month now.)

It's a super fast paced book, mostly an homage to Heinlein in all the bad and good parts (reverential but paternalistic attitude towards women, a 'can do it' attitude) with a protagonist that's a bit luckier than I think Heinlein would ever let happen. Honestly it just feels like there's no dramatic tension *ever* in the novel after the first 20 pages or so. Things just go too well.

late hour bookshops

Stopped by Unnameable Books on Vanderbilt tonight walking home from attempting to go to the T-Mobile in Park Slope. It's really wonderful to be able to walk to a bookstore open until 11pm. 

I browsed through a copy of Crazy Rich Asians. I've moved a lot in my life and it's something very special to know that no matter where I go or when I'll always be a member of the overseas Chinese. It's nice to know that you belong somewhere.

I ended up picking up a copy of NW, by Zadie Smith, finally. I haven't wanted to read it enough to pay full price, and there was a copy in the used section.

jo walton: my real children

I am nervously excited about the release of her new book, My Real Children. There's an excerpt up on Tor here and it makes me feel all sorts of uncomfortable, sad, slightly melancholy, anticipative, twitchy feelings.