Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in RiceVermicelli's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012
9:05 pm	Last Wednesday evening, I noticed something odd going on with one of my breasts. On Thursday, I called my doctor about it. On Friday, I saw my doctor, who scheduled me for a mammogram on Saturday, and a consultation with a breast specialist on Monday morning. That appointment wound up including a set of FNA biopsies, which meant that I spent yesterday walking around being really aware of how odd my breast was, which they assure me is a side effect of it being really bruised. The FNA biopsies were inconclusive, and I trucked back to the hospital today for dual core needle biopsies. Now I'm waiting. Five days. For the test results. There are results of the biopsies that are really clear already, like OMFG am I sore. They shot me up with lidocaine, which obscured the fact that they were sticking big needles through existing bruises, but the lidocaine has worn off, and that fact is no longer obscure. I spent an hour and a half lying very still, with one arm stretched above my head to keep it out of the way, and may have hyperextended my shoulder and elbow a bit. You know how people sometimes criticize cover art and comics and stuff for putting women in hugely uncomfortable and totally unrealistic positions? Those women are having mammograms. They just airbrushed out the machinery. (23 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
10:25 pm	On Sunday, I took Danger Lad! and Hotspur shopping for a birthday present for their cousin, Hattie, who had a birthday. DL!, after much consideration, chose a Boba Fett blaster for her. I hope she is enjoying it, and I hope that my sister will forgive me. Also, DL! is giving a lot of consideration to what occasions might be coming up that could be finagled into him getting a blaster too. If I go deaf, for example, this might be a great consolation present. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 14th, 2012
9:28 pm	Here, Read These A long long time ago, I didn't bother to pour my heart out to much of anyone about the glory that was Kage Baker, and I have regretted it. Stung as I am by that extended non-incident, I refuse to walk the path of silence again. Would you people please all go out tomorrow, or tonight, or whenever, and pick up Flora Segunda, Flora's Dare, and Flora's Fury by Ysabeau Wilce? I need people to talk to them about. I need to make up t-shirts that say things like "What Would General Fyrdraaca Do?" and "Paimon Doesn't Eat People. Hadraadas Eat People." and it would be nice to have people understand them. I am doing the best I can to recommend these without spoiling them, so, here goes - reasons why you should read these books: 1. The author's name is Ysabeau. How cool is that medieval y, amirite? 2. The use of language is fantastic. The heroine can dive from Bridget Jones to army slang without sounding fake. 3. Steampunk/Aztec/weird unexplained alternate history setting, and fashion. 4. A wide variety of kick-ass women. 5. The parent characters get to be interesting. (This sentence is an understatement.) 6. Implications of the cool stuff are actually explored. The fascinating threads of possible future plots strewn liberally about the landscape in this series. Maybe if enough of us buy it, the nice lady with the Y in her name will write more. I already bought mine. Your turn. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 13th, 2012
11:43 pm	Sometimes, parenthood is an exercise in noticing the details. Like how the emergency stop buttons on the escalator work, and how badly (from a user interface, not accidentally pressing the alarm, standpoint) elevator controls are designed, and what sequence people learn to climb out of their cribs and manage doorknobs in, and where the produce sprayers at the grocery store are. The kids are asleep. Bless. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 11th, 2012
11:12 am	We went to the open house today, and although DL! was a bouncing terror, I feel hugely reassured. The kindergarten teachers are nice. The playground is lovely. The outdoor classroom is gorgeous and brimming with science projects. The music program is amazing, but it's one teacher, and if he dies or quits or anything, I'll cry. He let DL! Play with a guitar, thus winning his affection for all time. The boy didn't want to leave, but was thrilled to meet his friends on the playground back at preschool. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 10th, 2012
11:19 am	A Hive of Scum and Incompetence The Boston Public Schools sent me a postcard two weeks ago, congratulating me on registering my child for kindergarten, and letting me know that we can pick up a free t-shirt at our public library in June. Today, I got an email from them with a link to a calendar of welcome sessions for new kindergartners. The calendar is only accessible by clicking the link in the email - if I go to the website directly and attempt to open the calendar, I'm asked for a user name and a password. The Welcome Session for Danger Lad!'s school is tomorrow. Amount of notice for free t-shirt: six weeks. Amount of notice for welcome session: 23 hours. Availability of free t-shirt info: email, postcard, multiple unrestricted sections of website. Availability of welcome session info: link from email only. I am so glad they have mastered the art of distributing free t-shirts. Current Mood: annoyed (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 23rd, 2012
10:38 pm	Progress Hotspur finished outgrowing her crib this evening by climbing out of it. I don't have a substitute yet, so she's asleep on a cushion that used to live in a papa-san chair, snuggled up to a Nerf sword. There are no monsters under her bed, because there is no under under her bed, and also, she slew them. Danger Lad! read things - just a word or two here and there, but reading! Independent sounding out of words happened! More will probably follow! Batman comics for the win! I was so pleased, and then he was so pleased with himself. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
9:53 pm	Death to the One Piece Sweater ( Cut because if you don't knit you don't care ) (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 19th, 2012
3:06 pm	This guy I've never heard of wrote this incredible article on the experience of having a child 7 weeks prematurely, something that evidently happened to him quite recently. He is amazingly put together for a guy with such a new baby, never mind the rest. By my calculations, his kid was four days old when he wrote this. My best recollection is that, at that point, we hadn't gotten around to naming the baby. I could do sentences maybe about 50% of the time. Entire paragraphs were out of the question. So this essay is a superhuman feat, performed by a person with uncanny powers of coherence. I wish him and his family the very best, and the two months salary and the fetching Norwegian wet nurse that he believes we all deserve. And the article is amazing and funny and true, but it's a lot true, so if you are a fainting risk when exposed to detailed descriptions of surgery, probably best not to go there. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
10:53 am	Legend of Korra I've known that the first two eps of Legend of Korra have been on iTunes for a while, but we only just got around to watching them last night. I in insta-fangirl mode. Korra looks like she plays street hockey in Harlem, and I kind of love that. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 11th, 2012
8:38 pm	You know how sometimes you get obsessed with something dumb for no reason, and then wind up really frustrated about it? That can't just be me, can it? So, for the last little bit, I have been wanting to read Game of Thrones, and my husband wants to read it too, and lending is a pain in the ass when one person has a Kindle app for an Android and the other has a political stance opposed to Amazon's draconian DRM, so it would be really much really better to get the darn thing on paper. I was going to stop by the bookstore at lunch, but I forgot that today was Staff Lunch day, so instead of having a leisurely read by myself, I was wandering around with giant bags of takeout. I was going to stop on the way home, but then I was running late. And then there was some sort of unexplained medical emergency further down the line that meant that I sat on a bridge for long enough to download and read Amazon's free sample, so now I really need the paper version. I wound up at the grocery store tonight, and it occurred to me that this was perfect! This is a bestselling book! It'd be in the grocery store. Except it wasn't. And then I checked CVS, and Walgreen's, and looked inside Hess long enough to determine that they didn't sell reading material. The whole thing was getting rather silly, I thought, so I wasn't going to stop at Rite Aid on the way past, but then there was a bus stopped right in front of it, and I thought what the hey, might as well. This would be such a satisfying story if I'd been able to get my fix at Rite Aid, but Rite Aid only had the second book. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 5th, 2012
5:02 pm	Why They Didn't Open/Read/Understand/Respond To Your Email (Posted entirely for my own satisfaction.) 1. Because the annoying part showed up in autopreview. Do not put guilt trips or nagging in the first paragraph. This may mean that you have to pad out an otherwise one-paragraph email to be longer than strictly necessary, but that's life. Note that if you have been working at this person for so long that your name is the annoying part, there's nothing you can do, except hope that they have an assistant who isn't also pissed off. 2. Because something you said in autopreview made them think they were done. Avoid "Just FYI", "You're Welcome!" and "Thank you!" unless you really are finished. It's probably best not to get in the habit of fastidiously closing all your loops (don't send that "You're Welcome!" email), because then your correspondents will get in the habit of assuming that if they think they're done, they can ignore your next message. 3. Because you sent it to a billion people and they think it's a virus. 4. Because you didn't use paragraph breaks. Their eyes glazed over and they have no idea what you wrote. Note that when you cut and paste into an email, the paragraph breaks don't always make it through. 5. Because the body of the email was obviously quoted from another message, or forwarded on to them. Most people don't read the blue and purple stuff. 6. Because you used some kind of twee stationary graphic (which is redundant - they're all twee). They popped a contact rolling their eyes at it, and then forgot all about your email. 7. Because you wrote it haphazardly. People tend to assume that a single paragraph covers a single subject. If you started out talking about dinner, they didn't notice that two sentences later you asked them to write up the day's news. 8. Because a request for a response followed one of those phrases that mean "you're done." Seriously, don't put those words in until the end of the email. 9. Because they received it just before the end of the business day, in time to open it but not respond, and then forgot about it in the morning (when it was underneath the overnight haul of spam). 4:59 is the timestamp of death. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012
1:39 pm	Maybe? Are any of you fine people within reaching distance of an HP CP2025dn color printer? Is there any chance you could get me a sample of something printed on one, in color? (Comment on this)
9:56 am	I Ran Across This Thing Today (From here.) C. Jane Kendrick contemplates the story of her own birth, and the realization that her mother's labor was induced. Labor induction is not without controversy. It can be a tool in reducing neonatal morbidity and preventing c-sections, or it can be the evil intervention that leads almost inevitably to that very c-section. But C. Jane (as I can't stop calling her) goes for more. Babies apparently choose when to be born. So induction is the theft of "the first gift of mortality: agency." I haven't been able to find information concerning how many offspring C. Jane has, but they must be either quite small, or uncommonly disinclined to be willful. The thought of allowing my children untrammeled agency makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. Did we go to McDonalds tonight? Did Danger Lad! eat fries and fly a new Sinestro toy around the living room while Hotspur had two bites of cheeseburger and then licked a pint of ketchup off her fingers? Are we having a Clone Wars marathon and then staying up all night playing Angry Birds? No? Alas for that first gift of mortality. My babies can have their agency back just as soon as I finish spending their therapy funds on caramel lattes. Even assuming that babies decide when to be born (I doubt it), we generally don't feel that they should be responsible for important decisions until they're old enough to understand the consequences. C. Jane then goes on to relate this one circumstance of her birth to her infant personality. "'No wonder I was a horrible baby,' I said to Chup, my mind reeling in these new discoveries. 'I'm sure some babies don't mind the chemical push, but that sort of thing would've just made me mad.'" To the extent that any baby is horrible (and I certainly see that most of them are, at least from time to time), it is just a stage that they go through. It's not anything anyone did. While you're in the early stages of adjusting to the change from perfect comfort at all times to life in this cold world, where it is possible to be tired, hungry, wet, stinky, and uncontrollably bashing yourself in the face with your hands, it is only natural that you will do a little screaming, to take out your frustrations on those around you. Labor is not, ever, a particularly comfortable experience for a baby, but I don't know that it makes them mad at their parents. That would imply that they understood what was going on, and how and why it happened, which is a lot to expect of someone who is at least a year away from the understanding that you shouldn't stick paperclips into the electrical sockets. Maybe if we acknowledged that the baby didn't have this kind of comprehension, it would be easier to cut the entire family some slack. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 21st, 2012
7:34 pm	To The People Down the Street... ...Who Also Have A Screaming Baby, Oh lord I am with you. There is only so much that parents can do in our situation, even when we help each other. Do you have mixers? I have strawberry vodka, but no mixers. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 15th, 2012
4:42 pm	In Which I Am Neither Transgressive Nor Revolutionary Over on Huffington post about two weeks ago, Rhiana Maidenberg congratulated herself for coping with a transgender nanny. As another parent with a trans nanny, I kind of want to kick her. Maidenberg's article dwells on her anxiety in a way that oddly and specifically attempts to locate the nanny on a non-stereotypical part of the gender spectrum: How would she change? What did this mean for our relationship? How would this affect my girls? They already had one straight male caregiver (my husband), but now, who would provide them with that other side of femininity?. My indignation at the reference to "that other side of femininity" - as though there are only two feminine options - nearly overwhelms my larger objections. Maidenberg writes as though the nanny is some kind of museum exhibit for her daughters, who are presumed to be incapable of absorbing information about people who are not regular features in their home. Would that it were so, and I never had to explain to Danger Lad! why it is that he, unlike his friend Anthony, will not be getting an iPad for his birthday. It's the last paragraph that really makes me twitch: Given their ages, at the time I did not need to explain to my daughters much more than Y's name change. However, when the girls are older I am actually looking forward to telling them about Y's transition. While he may not provide them with that second side of womanhood that I had I hoped Y would offer, he is a brave example of pride and conviction in becoming who you are meant to be. How open-minded! She's actually looking forward to telling her children someone else's personal story! Maybe the making-the-best-of-it, I-get-some-good-drugs-with-my-root-canal tone is my imagination, spurred by the observation that Maidenberg has so thoroughly overcome her fears that she now plans to appropriate the narrative. And how facile is that conclusion, as though pride and conviction are the only factors in becoming who we are meant to be, as though trans people face no social barriers, but only fear within themselves. (26 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 5th, 2012
11:39 am	The Real Female Fantasy Sequence in "What to Expect..." While we were out of town last week, bookdivalia took Hotspur to the library, and ran into a toddler playgroup. While there, he was quizzed about his age, his exact relation to Hotspur, Hotspur's parents' occupations, and Hotspur's (non-existent) enrichment activities. Subsequently, he was taken to task for offering Hotspur a store-bought granola bar, instead of (we suppose) organic dried fruit. I am unreasonably smug about the fact that Hotspur spent this time showing off her tutu (you're never fully dressed without one!), building things with blocks, singing and signing the alphabet, and demonstrating advanced social skills like not clobbering her peers with toys. I'm glad I didn't have that encounter personally. Encounters with other parents sometimes make me feel old. I want to growl that, in my day, you just had a glass of wine and hoped it made the baby sleepy. We used disposables because we hate doing laundry. I might have had to whip out a Hostess cupcake. I saw some previews yesterday for a movie based on What to Expect When You're Expecting, which, in general, looks about as loathsome as it sounds. The parts of the preview focused on women and pregnancy look incoherent and unappealing. While, in one scene, Cameron Diaz gloats about her fabulous pregnant breasts, the preview makes some extra efforts to convey the idea that breast feeding is weird and gross. Boobs are for sex - got that? The only scenes that seem remotely entertaining are those featuring a father's group. The guys get together on a playground and confess their darkest parenting secrets. ("My kid ate a cigarette yesterday." "I picked up the wrong baby from daycare." "No judging!") Later, they explain women to a hapless newbie ("If your wife says you're just looking at houses, you're buying a house.") There are two fantasies here: the fantasy of acceptance and camaraderie, and the fantasy that someone else will explain you to your partner, rendering your actions and motives comprehensible without requiring you to personally do all that unpleasant admitting to feet of clay. The latter may be just me, but I do not know why the former is so unattainable that even in fiction it cannot be depicted as a community containing women. In a world where women do the majority of the parenting, surely the majority of accidents, failures and lapses in parental judgment involve women. A depiction of those women admitting to these things would be fantastic, even liberating. The only rational reason not to have those admissions made by a group of women is Chris Rock's line delivery. The only thing keeping me from sending my husband to hang out with these guys would be my desire to hang out with them myself. This is especially true in light of our playgroup experiences. I want a village to help me raise my children, but not a village of grown-up Mean Girls. While I'm trying to find these guys and learn where they hang out, I suppose that watching a movie about them is a reasonable alternative. I wish I didn't have to sit through that other movie in order to do it. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
11:12 pm	Heading down to New York tomorrow, with Danger Lad!, for the funeral. Probably back late Saturday. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
3:50 pm	Can't... Sort... My family is being really helpful, and offering to do lots of things. I am grateful to have the help, but my ability to coordinate is toast. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 27th, 2012
1:08 pm	Really Long Shot Is it possible that anyone has a daytime parking spot I could use somewhere in the vicinity of Harvard or Central, just this week? (3 Comments |Comment on this)