There Is No Safety In This World

Hi! I have loved LJ for a long time, and am happy that this journal exists. However, for a variety of reasons, I'm now using Dreamwidth as my primary site and cross-posting here.

I'm leaving comments here open, for anyone who isn't comfortable using Dreamwidth even as a Guest or with an OpenID. There are a couple things you should note, however:

• I don't check here as often as I check there.


• It's apparently possible to 'like' my entries here on LJ, but I don't get told who does it. This means I get email notifications that tell me 'Someone likes your entry!' but I will never know who. So if you want to be a mysterious admirer, go for it! Who am I to stop you? I'm flattered. But on the whole, I'd much rather you commented even very briefly, so I could know who I'm interacting with.

That's all! Thank you!

So odd. When my car slid off the road, I didn't even realize it at first, and then - possibly because everything was happening so slowly (truly slowly, not shocky slowly) - I never got seriously scared. I was alarmed when I realized I was heading toward the retaining wall and relieved when I didn't hit it, and exasperated through the process of trying to get it out. Standing around in the cold while AAA helped me out was surprisingly pleasant. I came back inside and called work, and posted about it feeling, if anything, rather good-humored, as I said.

After that, I settled in for an involuntarily cozy morning, continuing to feel pretty placid, which is rare for me and much enjoyed.

An hour or two later, I had a brief conversation about the condition of the roads with Julian and about 90 seconds after that, discovered that I was in a full-blown panic.


Ah, dissociation, my old friend. In this case, highly adaptive.


I am having tea.

Crossposted with Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there , whichever you prefer.

I don't love snow. Not most of the time. I want to love snow, but I only have an occasional burst of enjoyment from it. I blame a lot of this on too much urban living, which isn't really fair: I look at snow and think about digging my car out and traffic congestion, but digging my car out is something I might have to worry about anywhere. Actually, when I was living in an actual city, I had onstreet parking which was usually less shoveling than a driveway, and besides, a lot of the time I didn't even have a car because I could get everywhere I needed to go on public transit. Whatever the reason, I've come to see something beautiful in terms of labor and inconvenience and time pressure, and I don't like this state of affairs.

Today, I think I'd be quite justified in disliking the snow, but in fact I'm feeling pleasantly exhilarated. There is no logic here, but I don't mind.

About an hour and a half ago, I went out to clear off my car, and then grabbed my stuff and headed out to work. I got stuck at the end of the driveway. A kind young neighbor with a shovel dug the snow out from under my tires so that I could pull out, whereupon my car, instead of turning hard left as I had planned, slid in a graceful, beautiful, relaxed arc across the street and off the other side.

It turned enough that it ended up parallel to the road, with the left tires a foot or so on the side and the right completely off. This was gratifying, as for a minute there I saw the opposite neighbor's retaining wall coasting toward me in a disarmingly leisurely way. I was going about one mile per hour so hitting it wouldn't have been a disaster, but I very much appreciated that I ended up companionably alongside the wall instead of confrontationally perpendicular.

The kind young neighbor tried to help with a little more digging and some pushing, to no avail. I went back into the house called AAA for the simplest rescue ever, since my vehicle was still exactly across from my driveway, and waited for a shockingly short time before a tow truck showed up. (I also called work and asked the admin there to cancel my pre-lunch appointments.) Now, my car is back in my driveway, and I am sitting comfortably in my living room, refusing to leave until the road conditions have changed.

I am contemplating cocoa. I probably won't make a snowman, as I don't have the right boots and gloves for it, but I am feeling inexplicably serene. Possibly standing outside in the snow waiting for the car to get the help it needed was good for me, and I should do it more often.

Crossposted with Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there , whichever you prefer.

Plea to anyone out there who has a better grip on comparing health insurance plans than I do.

(Non US readers, you can just back away slowly, here. This is a completely US-ian madness.)

I need to choose my plan for 2020. I /believe/ I have figured out that 2 out of the 4 available plans are not going to work for me. The remaining two are similar, but not so similar that I want to just stick a pin in the screen, metaphorically speaking, to choose between them.

Here's my logic. I need someone to check it for me:

A: The plans are identical in how much they cover for different services except for their annual cost and the deductible.

B: They are also identical in copays.

C: They are also identical in which providers are covered, and which prescriptions.

D: The higher deductible is $1500. My health isn't bad, but I have enough going on that I'm pretty likely to meet that.

Therefore, it seems to me that I can ignore everything except the cost of the deductible + the annual cost of the plan.

Right? Am I missing anything significant?



I can't tell whether this business really is fiendishly complicated or merely appallingly obfuscatory.

Crossposted with Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there , whichever you prefer.

To anyone who cares to answer:

What is the difference between 'sad' and 'unhappy' to you?

Crossposted with Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there , whichever you prefer.

I am amused. In rereading King of the Dead, I discover that the title of this journal - which I imported from the title of my LiveJournal and so have been using for more than 17 years - is a misquote. The actual quote is 'There is no safety in this life.'

If I had discovered that 6 months in, I might have changed the journal title, but at this point, I think I'll simply own it. My journal title is a quote and it is original and it is a mistake, all three, and none contradictory. It's a good thing to keep in mind - which makes four.

Crossposted with Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there , whichever you prefer.

I have just, with frustration more than sadness, returned to Audible my purchase of R. A. MacAvoy's Lens of the World. I dearly love the book and was looking forward to listening to the whole series over the next couple weeks of commuting, but I could not cope with the narration.

I did listen to the whole thing first, which I could not have done with some narrators. Lloyd James (Curse of Chalion, dammit, which is another book I love), Gerard Doyle (most of Diana Wynne Jones, dammit twice over), a few others whose names I have mercifully forgotten, start each sentence as though they can't be sure where it's going to end, and frequently hit commas and periods like someone hitting the last step of a staircase either one step sooner or one step later than they expected. The people who have only one sentence melody, the people who speak like a 45 record played at 33*, the ones who read lines of dialogue exactly opposite to the way the text describes them ("Hello!!!" she said drearily) - theirs, I stop, return, and delete after only a couple pages.

Jeremy Arthur isn't one of those. His reading isn't inspired, his ability to distinguish one voice from another is limited and not very graceful, but he's not outright painful to the ears. Unfortunately, he has a positive genius for placing emphasis on the wrong part of a sentence, trampling on parallelisms and wasting all of MacAvoy's deftly turned phrases. Even more unfortunately, he mispronounces a /lot/ of words in ways which are at first confusing and then deeply aggravating. 'Credibly' for 'credibility' is one example I recall. I was reduced to shouting at my dashboard more than once, in spite of all my resolutions to just let it roll off me.

I would have been more amused than anything else by his consistent reading of 'cavalry' as 'Calvary' if only the word didn't occur quite so often in the story.



* Sometimes I enjoy dating myself.**

** We generally split the bill. ***

*** What? It's late, okay?

Edited to correct an unfortunate construction which indicated that I delete readers themselves, which even I - who take such things seriously - would consider rather harsh.

Crossposted with Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there , whichever you prefer.

I saw an adolescent today whose mother used to force him into psych hospitals, counseling, psych meds, all based on fictitious stories about his behavior and mental health, before she abandoned him altogether to relatives and never looked back.* For him to choose to go into counseling again on his own account - this time to deal with the effects of that history - seems to me a demonstration of breathtaking courage.

I feel daily awe, doing this work.


* As ever, identifying characteristics altered to maintain confidentiality.

Crossposted with Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there , whichever you prefer.

Many years ago, friends told me I should watch a show called Farscape, and leant me some terrible-quality VHS tapes (I did say many years ago) of Season 1 episodes. I was entranced from the first episode: so much world-building, happening so quickly and elliptically. A whole set of plot and relationships being revealed woven through the quite interesting plot.

Then I found out that what I had thought was the premiere (you can't really call it the pilot when there's an important character called Pilot) was episode 7 (PK Tech Girl).

I mean, I still like the show. But that sense of breathless excitement I had watching that first ('first') episode promised things that were never quite fulfilled.

More recently, I got a book called Deathwish on spec for $2 from BookBub by an author I'd never heard of (Rob Thurman), and was immediately drawn in and agog for a couple chapters, until I followed up on a sneaking suspicion and found it was actually the fourth book in a series. (I read the whole series. I have many, many mixed feelings about it, but that is another story and will be gone into at another time.)

Tonight, I have realized that the reason why the opening sequence of the first episode of Naruto Shippuden is so breathtakingly bewildering, and the world-building with its jutsus and mysterious headbands and kazekagis and hokages slips by so fast and smooth isn't that it's being tantalizing and expecting its viewers to keep up, it's that this is actually the second Naruto series.

My bad. I could have known that. I blame my young client/informant, who assured me that I had to see all of Naruto Shippuden before I could watch Naruto Next Generation, but failed to mention that there might have been anything before either - but really, given the first 5-10 minutes of Naruto Shippuden, I should have guessed that anime aimed at oh, probably younger teens, wouldn't be quite so sneaky or demanding of its viewers. I /did/ finally stop and check, not because of the speed and slipperiness of the establishment of plot, world, characters, and relationships, but because of the sharp change of pace between those beginning sequences and what followed.

Mostly, I think, I don't catch it sooner when these things happen because I love the sensation of being dropped into a river midstream and expected to get my head pointing in the right direction and start moving with the current on my own. It's exciting and intriguing, and in all three cases, I wish I'd been right.

Alas, what is learned cannot be unlearned*, and so I am going to go back and at least poke at the first Naruto series.


(The art's not bad and there is, blessedly, no fan service (read, T&A) that I've seen yet, and the girl who is probably supposed to be the Healer Type also is wildly powerful and destructive. Unfortunately, Naruto follows the classic model of the brash, cheeky young hero, who does very little for me. We'll see. There are hints that he has backstory angst, which might help.)

* This is manifestly untrue, of course. There are probably more ways of forgetting things than there are of learning them in the first place, but a good aphorism doesn't have to rely on such paltry factors as accuracy.

Crossposted with Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there , whichever you prefer.

My TV-watching plans, following up on suggestions, have been derailed; I have an adolescent client who wants me to see the anime he likes so he can talk about it with me, so I'm checking out Naruto.

I figure, even if I like it and start watching it a lot, it's going to be a long time before I'm caught up with him, which is actually good. Once he feels confident that I can get it, then he can describe episodes to me the way he perceives them, which is much more interesting than me just forming my own opinions about his viewing material. He focuses on the parts that matter to him, and then I can respond about the parts that matter to him*, and it could turn out very well.

Besides, I may like it.



* This could stand as a thumbnail sketch of the difference between a counselor and a friend: if I were his friend, I'd respond by talking about the parts that matter to me.

Crossposted with Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there , whichever you prefer.