It's been a wonderful weekend, full of portents of the past and present and future. I just said goodbye to my friend Raquel, possibly for the last time in a long time, not for the last time ever: I promised to see her again, no matter where I have to go to do so. Maybe China again, on a short visit; maybe some other country, as she's hoping to travel the world herself. Maybe I'll have the pleasure of hosting her in Portland someday. I hope so.

I met Raquel during my brief stay in Shenzhen; we were staying in a hostel together; we stayed up all night talking, woke up after scant sleep and talked some more. She's a student in Beijing, studying Spanish, and having a better grasp on English than any other Chinese person I've met here -- the subtleties, the nuances, the slang -- and a connection to subculture that's rare here, but somewhere in there I'm also at least half in love, in such a way that I don't know whether I'd be more so or less so if there were a possibility of seeing her in the long term. Probably it would settle out to the kind of romantic friendship heron61 talks much about. That's not in the cards, though. It's enough to just connect and go our separate ways with the promise of a future meeting.

There are so many people like that in my life -- people I love deeply but don't live near -- and when I think of them I think again of the idea I had several years ago, of asking these people to select small images to tattoo in a row on my skin. Maybe someday I'll know where it goes.

--

While I was walking with her and another American today, a reporter (for apparently a large newspaper!) stopped us to ask what we thought about the earthquake. I said that I thought it was a terrible tragedy, that I was glad the pandas are safe, and that my hope for the future is that China will learn to build buildings the way they do in California. Which about sums up my thoughts.

Saying that, I realized that I'm still the person who looks at a tragedy and says, what good can come of this? Seven years haven't changed it. I often fear it makes me come off as callous, but Raquel pointed out that right now, people are becoming intensely superstitious about all the frightening events in China this year and what they mean about the Olympics, and optimism can only do good.

I learned also that the tension has led to some gay bars being shut down and others going quiet, which is why I did not have the opportunity to do a drag show this weekend. I am angry about this, and also frightened: it means that they're not acting based on what the powerful countries will realistically perceive of China, since of the first-world nations, the US is pretty much bringing up the rear on acceptance of queer people, and the US isn't shutting down gay bars. They're acting based on some twisted mirror image that doesn't exist in the world outside.

More diplomatically, I said to the reporter when she asked me, People are too nervous about the Olympics and they need to relax. Everything will go better if they relax.

I hope that gets out there if anything does.

--

I'm going to see the Great Wall tomorrow, and going to get up stupidly early to do it. I'll be quite exhausted by the time I go back to Yangzhou and sleeping on the train probably won't help. But now I'm in the process of saying my goodbyes to China, and feel the urgency of transience in a way I haven't before.

Yesterday I visited the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. I have not so much to say about the latter except that the feel of the place reminded me of the feel of the Washington Monument, which, when you think about it: oh, just think about it. Ugh. Moving on.

The Forbidden City -- the ancient palace complex -- was fascinating. I saw relatively little of it; it would take multiple visits to really complete the exploration; but I walked among as much of it as I could. The grounds themselves interested me more than the museum, especially from the point at which I began to experience fragments of story.

This was in one tier of... a walled stone area that must have been a garden, once, by the look of it. In my mind there was the story of a child, a small girl playing in the garden, with the sort of extremely internalized thoughts children have. And then I thought: Is that my own mind generating story, as I've always assumed, or am I experiencing a ghost?

When I visit certain kinds of places I get fragments of stories around them; it's a writer thing. It's always happened and I've never really questioned it.

I opened up my mind a little more and tried to experience the drifts of whatever else might be caught on the stones, and I got a few more distinct moments like that, including one which was more or less backed up by the information on a sign which I saw a minute later.

Yesterday I theorized that I might be engaging a kind of mental time travel -- which is how I think of ghosts, at least of the common "here is a moment repeated" kind: either that moment's thoughts are travelling forward to meet your mind or your mind is travelling backward to meet that one. (Theoretically, you can also run into others who are travelling backward to meet you, but I'm not all that sure what they're going to look like.)

Now, this is the kind of person I am: Is it my mind making story or are these fragments related to people from the past? Or people from story-land who are hanging out around pieces of history? Who knows! Who cares! It is what it is.

I know that I am a story-making thing, and I'm part of a story-making machinery, not all of which exists inside of me.

(In fact, the above could be a statement of the nature of my belief in God.)

But as I contemplated all of this I remembered that belief itself is an act of Will; a choice made from moment to moment.

Who I am is what I make of my reality.

And to some people that might be a cynical thought, but for me it just makes me love the world more.

The bug pills are helping my wrists some but I am still mostly off the internets. Trying to get better all the way. So this may be the last for a while. Take care out there in computerland, kids.

Since I was first alerted to the quake by partners and people from my MFA program sending worried emails (today) I think that answers any outstanding questions about my safety.

Still mostly off the computer, but will hopefully get back to your comments when my wrists have recovered. (Which 15 minutes of typing this morning tells me they haven't, yet, alas.)

VoicePost 984K 5:10

(no transcription available)

mostly I have to cold turkey the internet because my wrists are killing me.

so I went into a drugstore and pointed at my wrist and said 'tong' until they understood me.

i asked for chinese medicine, because nsaids are mostly useless for this shit below dangerous levels. so they gave me these pills. I'm only online because I had to look them up. hong yao pian. little red pills.

they are insect pills.

they contain insects.

this insect to be specific.

they apparently can cure liver cancer too, according to tcm journals, which is great, just in case I had a case of liver cancer I didn't know about. (rather unlikely but hey.)

i have a strange kind of faith in them, because, hey, those dumb doctors who kept telling me to take ibuprofen never mentioned insects.

wikipedia hasn't even heard of them.

i think i will take them.

the other side of the world is such a strange place.

So the other day I took a spontaneous nap (occasionally my irregular sleep cycle sticks me with a time of day where I'm more or less forced to lie down, then insta-conk-out when I do) and had a dream that worked like the Internet. (It made me think of helen99's clickable people heads!)

Not a dream of using the Internet. I've had those before and they're very boring unless something else is going on.

Rather, I was following dream-thought processes and they chained together in links and tabs, expanded and reduced the way webpages do. My novel characters and daily life and factoids and baubles: I'd "click" on something in my head and go there, then hit the "back button" and withdraw to the previous level...

Quotation marks because I did this with thoughts, not a mouse, and it was in my head, not on a computer. Not even a dream computer.

I wouldn't want to dream like that all the time (it lacked the narrative and physical aspects that many truly interesting dreams have) but at the same time it wasn't the rigid thought process one gets into with the real internet either -- it was a lot more flowing and natural, strange and cool. This dream was to web-surfing as a "movie-style dream" is to a movie -- like the waking-world thing, but a dimension deeper and somehow infinite and oceanic.

Four more weeks exactly (and six or seven hours) until I step onto the airplane. Due to the magic of time-zones, I will step onto the airplane on Wednesday afternoon and step off it also on Wednesday afternoon on the other side of the world.

The other night I dreamed of going out for a sandwich.

I just learned that Erick Wujcik, reported dying of cancer in December then reported to be responding to treatment, is no longer responding to treatment.

He's the creator of my favorite roleplaying game, the Amber DRPG.

Madeleine L'Engle and Robert Jordan and Arthur C. Clarke and Albert Hofmann. And I'm sure there's at least one more I'm forgetting, or blocking out.

Between these things, and Terry Pratchett facing Alzheimer's, and the tragedy that has befallen the extended family of my heart, this has been a heavy year.

I have a lot of hope in my heart and I am frequently frivolous. And when I turn to look at my life, these things are natural to me, today and tomorrow and the next day. That's who and what I am.

But my life isn't the only life in the world, and so many have ended, are ending.

There's no good way to conclude this post.

It just seems that sometimes in between looking at my life I should turn my head and look over my shoulder, and say to all the great faces and to one small face I never knew, thank you for your life. I'm sorry for your death.

And I'm writing this to give permission, if anybody needs it, for others to do the same.

Someone on the FreeGeek list forwarded this amusing crossover...

I'm going to have to postpone the writing stunt a bit more, folks. My wrist is swelling in the heat and I have to use my spoons for writing some things I've already committed to.

Later though.

Via Making Light...

I'd be buying this right now if I weren't tight on cash:
The Complete Spockanalia (fanzines)

GLAH. Want.

I love early fandom things. And I love Spock things. And I strongly encourage someone on my f'list to go out and buy this so that I can beg a look at it later. Go on, you know you want to.<sup>1

1</sup>Comments of "No, I don't" from straight boys,² non-TOS fans and non-Spock-appreciators are hereby deprecated by this disclaimer.

²I'd include lesbians in that, except I regularly encounter women who are not interested in playing with RL men, but like textual ones all the same. Vive la difference!

Friends still in need; see previous posts for details. Thank you all who have put something in, or even thought of doing so. (They're accepting prayers, too, btw, and I assume this extends to your own particular definition of prayer: it all comes from the same place somewhere up the line...) I am going to be off the internet for a day or two as my wrists are tired out. Take care, everyone.

I switched up the interests in my profile a bit and made some new ones.

Also, took out the friend quotes which I still love and will keep here for posterity:

"I think with experience, you'll be able to feign closeness to ordinary interactional patterns a lot better. Sadly, that will be mistaken for maturity." --azurelunatic

"You are more wrong than a Mormon porno." --_kudzu_

They've been there for literally several years and I thought it was time for a change. They may be replaced with others, as time goes by.

---
Apropos of nothing, anthologie brings synchronized kittens.
---

If you're wondering what the gripping news is, see my last post, or, if you're feeling lazy and just want to click once, go here and please donate if you have something to spare. thomryng is another writer -- the person who wrote the King In Yellow play that came out from Pagan Publishing, several years ago -- and I've spent holidays with him and jaynefury and assorted of their families, and I feel terrible for his son, who's a really nice guy.

I'm going on with my day, thousands of miles removed, but it's a big shock. I sent what I could and I'm probably going to resurrect my flash fiction commission stunt again, at the end of this work-week, to pay off the debt I incurred doing so ('cause in daily life I am not breaking even) and possibly contribute more by some large percentage if the need is still present. If you want to help and can't spare much, though, it would be better to do it directly now rather than buying a story later, as my friends' need is pretty damn immediate.

Something terrible has happened to a family I love.

Details here.

If you can and if you will, please donate to Tristan's defense fund. If you are a praying type from any angle whatsoever, prayers are also requested.


4/29, 21:13 PDT: There are more details in comments on this page and in the entries I have linked. My friends were unfortunately not the first to hear about the accident. The particulars can now be found via Google, and pretty much anything anybody knows is laid out in one way or another. Please remember when making remarks in the comment thread that the family going through this tragedy is also reading. I know it's easy to want to dissect things that happen at a distance, but it is not at a distance for them, and to some extent for me. I can't be on the computer all day, but out of respect, please be kind.

My only investment in this is trying to prevent one horrible tragedy from following on the heels of another.

I've been in an Ani DiFranco mood a lot lately, and wanted to share this bit from a song I just discovered:

when you look in the mirror
do you see visions of your past
I ain't got time for halfway
I ain't got time for halfassed
when I look in the mirror
I see my days to come
and my face is just a trace
of where I'm coming from

So I have been attempting to read the first few Anita Blake books. You know, the ones purportedly before Hamilton fired her editor. I've been doing this so that I can be up on canon for the purposes of a roleplaying game.

I made it through the first, and a small part of the second. Then, today, while doing some editing in connexion with that piece of news in that recent entry of mine (I just wanted to say 'connexion', kthx) I noticed. That my prose style. Was turning into. Inane sentence fragments. And overly simplistic language.

FUCK! Infected.

At least. I hadn't reached. The repetitive redundancy. You know, where things repeat themselves. Like the overly simplistic language. In the prose style.

See, normally I can balance out stylistic influences by reading more text, but there is just not so much text here in China. And most prose styles I dislike are, well, not so sticky. It's something about the rhythm, in this case, that gets into my head like a bad pop song.

The most irritating part of this whole problem is that I may end up reading more of these books anyway just because I have them, and like I said, books are hard to come by here, and there's a point at which bad is better than none. But I'll need to deliberately saturate my brain with Shakespeare before and after in order to purge the creeping badness.

It's hard to place loneliness sometimes. I had a lot of stuff to get done today, but managed only a small part of it, and I should be in bed but I'm not.

Everything is going great except for the part where I'm here, and you're not.

It's this human response like staring over the horizon to see if the bus is coming -- even when you know the exact time it'll arrive, and that it isn't now.

The counter on my homepage says: 44 more days.

Something to look forward to tomorrow, though: I get to print, sign, scan and email off a certain contract.

And then set forward into my life with this in mind.

If you have any questions/concerns about orphan works, please visit the sagacious Maradydd. As a writer who's been following the saga of copyright law for about eight years, I'll say this post is solid. Another friend of mine who commented in agreement there is actually in law school.

I'm only adding all these reassurances because I *know* writers and artists can get twitchy about their babies -- I've heard too many stories of newbies refusing to send their work to publishers because they think the publishers will steal it! It's an emotional reaction, and it's one that rumor-mongers will prey on. So take care, and arm yourself with knowledge.

(Hrm. I really need an icon appropriate to 'neurochemistry geekery.')

So -- what do we know about tyramine? It's kind of under-examined. It's present in cheese, wine, and other preserved foods. Key fact: fermentation changes tyrosine (an important amino acid for neurotransmitter-building) to tyramine.

Mostly, as far as I'd seen before, something you're not supposed to eat while on MAO inhibitors, to avoid elevating it dangerously. It's also linked to migraine in some sufferers, but not others. In the short term it's linked to high blood pressure.*

But I got to wondering. A lot of things on the tyramine-containing food list are things I crave periodically. I'm a fiend for avocados, aged cheese, wine, beer, smoked salmon...

So clearly it must be doing something I want.

Wikipedia says (and other sources say:)

The displacement of norepinephrine(noradrenaline) from neuronal storage vesicles by acute tyramine ingestion is thought to cause the vasoconstriction and increased heart rate and blood pressure of the pressor response.

However, if one has had repeated exposure to tyramine, there is a decreased pressor response; tyramine is degraded to octopamine, which is subsequently packaged in synaptic vesicles with norepinephrine(noradrenaline). Therefore, after repeated tyramine exposure, these vesicles contain an increased amount of octopamine and a relatively reduced amount of norepinephrine (noradrenaline).

Hmm. Eeenteresting. So what's this octopamine stuff?

It's a dopamine analog.

Nobody is quite sure what it does in humans -- this has mostly been ignored in research -- but it seems to be involved in learning, memory, and energetic activity in lower life forms. Basically, a fair set of dopamine functions. It's involved in the honey bee dance.

Now, I'm not a fruit fly, but when my body goes "want that", and seems to do so more under conditions I associate with low dopamine -- and improves those conditions somewhat -- I gotta say it's an interesting link.



*Semi-relevant curiosity: Caffeine also starts migraines in some people (and stops them in others); it is also known for elevating blood pressure, and releasing dopamine.

Eeauugh! I'm not sure anything can capture the mixture of incredulity, disgust, surreality and horror I get from this piece of news, but the article's author, Mark Morford, sure did a pretty good job of it.

More than anything, right now, I want to be at home with my essential oils and my beads. Making things. Seven weeks and three days more. I'm going mad / doing well / going mad.

Mostly I feel stuck. I want to be making things, with supplies I have at home and can't get here. I want to be working out and getting in shape. I can sort of half-assedly do the latter, but only by means of calisthenics and weird adult playgrounds, which seem to be China's answer to gyms. They have monkey bars and swingsets and these weird sort of walking swings. I'm using the rings to work on my lats, so that's something, at least.

Saw the last Pirates. Many things made me go yay, some things made me go WTF.

I'm half inclined to write a snarky sex fanfic about the ending, featuring the line, "Well, I'm technically in the water..." Tell me if it has been done.

Other than that I have been poking at online forums and crawling up the walls. Wish I could do more LJ/blogging, but Tor is sloooow. I bite the internet blocking. Rarr.

Speaking of the Silicon Curtain, Wikipedia is now unblocked, as was Blogspot a few days ago (may not be now) but everything seems to have ground to a vast slowdown. I suspect they are trying to pretend everything's back to normal post-rioting, and also doing their yearly-ish "go visit what you like and we will watch you to see if it's questionable" thing. I know someone who ran afoul of this visiting too much info on T1@n@nm3n Squ@r3 last year and got her IP blocked permanently, so that she can browse from home only by using a proxy. Freaky shit.

This is the first year I've really felt like me.

Maybe it's the hormones' effect on my voice and face shape. Maybe it's the fact that I'm turning 24 this month, which is the age I've thought of myself as being since I was 18, and it rectifies some kind of unseen wrongness -- like, now I'm on track with myself, now I'm not unstuck in time anymore. I'm suddenly aware that I am growing older, and suddenly determined to enjoy my youth -- and if you know me you know how completely bizarre that is to the way I've thought all my life, but there it is. Maybe it's the fact that I'm teaching college classes, which makes me permanently a bit harder to dismiss.

But, whatever it is, it's removed this huge cloud of dissonance from my life, and I feel like I can go forward into the real things I've been flinching away from doing; I'm suddenly confident they'll come out right, or that if they come out wrong it won't hurt me the same way it once would have.

It's a good feeling.