bodlon | Sound, fury, and why I’m craving a Red Bull

The last two days have been pretty good for my ego, overall.

I've got a handful of nice e-mails -- not earth-shattering nice, but smiling nice -- that I can't quite talk about until proper announcements go out. Considering my level of fatigue right now, though? It's a much-needed confidence boost.

Say it with me kids: 60 hour weeks plus school? Never again.

I have also gotten a haircut (and have Twitpic'd the evidence), which has elicited a lot of positive commentary. I enjoyed having the crazy author hair while it lasted, but I was starting to pass the Dylan Moran stage and move toward Russell Brand. That way lies madness.

The bad kind. Not the good kind.

These next seven days are going to be something of an adventure, what with Hold Something prep in play and finishing up my current (re)Visions: Alice novella draft. If you find me huddled in a corner somewhere, just send somebody nice over to feed me a cup of tea and pet my (now very, very short) hair and say kind things. I'll snap out of it.

Well, probably.

Tonight is exciting because I get to go see S. Bear Bergman speak. Bear wrote one of my favorite books about transness, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, and a talk called "Sing If You're Glad To Be Trans" is bound to be a worthwhile thing to catch on a Thursday night.

Tomorrow, meanwhile, is a Great Big Writing Day, and a day to take some of the dogs to the vet for check-ups, and to otherwise catch up on the world.

Oh, and at some point I will write about the fact that I've started watching Glee, whose fault it is, and why I'm totally allowed to do this even when my roommate is in the living room playing Minecraft.

~*~

- Until this week I had never heard of Vladimir Komarov, a cosmonaut who died when his equipment failed during a mission he may have known was doomed. (A follow-up piece to the first article can be found here.) It's an awful truth that space travel is dangerous, and especially so when the science of it is still a work in progress. It may well be that this particular account of Komarov's death is wildly inaccurate, but it's haunting in ways that make me want to write stories about it. It's an interesting reminder that truth and accuracy can be two different things.

- This anti-bullying PSA from Ireland is a thing of beauty.

- The Florida ACLU's Incorporate My Uterus project is, meanwhile, ingenious.

- Climate critic's data unexpectedly supports consensus. This is interesting to me for two reasons: one, Muller was hand-picked by social conservatives who wanted him to refute the prior, government-supported studies, and two: this is really only preliminary work by Muller and his team. Still, it's significant stuff.

- GOP unveils plan to privatize Medicare. Which is kind of hilarious, because that's really not what they ran on in 2010, and killing the single payer system actually does more harm to individuals than a) the current donut hole, b) what the GOP claims Obamacare does. And by "hilarious" I mean "kind of horrible for people who are already vulnerable and going without."

- Some married gay couples are "refusing to lie" on their tax forms. I find this fascinating and (as someone of fairly modest means) a little terrifying because the IRS is very big. I hope this turns out to be a useful and viable means of protest.

- People Say They Won’t Shock Others for Cash, But Do. I should touch base with the psych departments here in town. I was the guy who tended to volunteer to get shocked in Earth Science in school. Surely there's money in that somewhere.

- Antibiotic resistant strains: on the rise and still really, really scary. And almost the entire population of the industrialized world is too young to really understand why. I'll just be over here in this nice, sterile room...

- So, how many of us self-identified LGBTQ people are there in the US, anyway? About 9 million according to the Williams Institute, or just under 4% of the population. Around 11% of the population, though, admits to having experienced at least one same-sex attraction or same-sex sexual experience. So that's a thing.

I often wonder if I am too political with my links. Like I should be posting more about other things, or if my relatively clear political leanings are problematic for readers. The conclusion I have come to on this can more or less be summarized in the following way:

- I'm a politically active person. I regularly call and write my elected officials to express concerns about the things I am passionate about.
- Those things I am passionate about -- maintaining critical social programs, reproductive rights, civil rights, religious freedom (including freedom of conscience which is inclusive of from religion), diversity, and equality -- are significant, and things are happening with them.
- While I'm interested in many things besides those things, I tend to write about those other things outside of the linkdump (see above).
- I do include things that aren't political or about social justice in the linkdump when I have them sitting around in my tabs. It's just that I tend to consume a lot of news and commentary, and have lots of friends who do the same.
- Look, it's this or fantasy baseball, and I've never really gotten into baseball properly, okay?

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com