(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Let me steal liv's format for a life update.

Reading: Is sort of up in the air. I just finished Swing Time and I have a stack of big books waiting to be read, but I'm not sure what I'm actually reading. I've dipped my head into Adam Levin's The Instructions, enough to think I'm going to love it, but it's actually so big at nearly 1100 pages that it's unwieldy to read in bed. I went back to Bolaño's 2666, which I've been slowly reading since at least 2011, and read another fifty pages. Someday I'll hit the end, probably. And my book-on-phone that I read when I don't have any book with me and have a few minutes is Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence- I've been reading that since August and am a little over halfway through.

Social:

-Went to a birthday party for Jon the Saturday before last. Fifty-fifty split between people I've known since we were teenagers and people I'd never met before, and mostly I sat around a table talking with the people I've known forever, which was fine. I sometimes wish I were the kind of person who was good at engaging with strangers at parties, but I'm not, and I'm at peace with that. I forgot to get Jon a birthday present until the last minute, so I scrounged around on my shelf and found a little fanzine I'd picked up at Sasquan, a Brad Foster work called Personal Inventory, consisting of tiny drawings of every physical thing Foster owned. It seemed like the kind of objet d'art Jon likes to have. He seemed to enjoy it.

-D&D was the following Monday. I'm not sure if I mentioned, but my half-orc ranger was killed by a bear, sacrificing himself to save his brother, about two months ago. I've created a new character, a dwarven sorcerer, and am figuring out how to integrate him into the party. Also, my DM got married the weekend of Philcon, which I missed because of a)Philcon but b)the wedding started on Shabbos. I felt very torn about that- if the wedding had been all after Shabbos, I'd have skipped Philcon for it, and felt a little little resentful about missing all the friends I only see once a year. But the way it was scheduled, the ceremony and most of the party were on Shabbos, but if I stayed home for Shabbos I could have jumped in my car at Havdalah and caught the very end of the party. I decided that didn't make sense and went to Philcon, but I feel bad about the idea of skipping a close friend's wedding to go to a Con. And also most years I would've been telling my DM friend all my Philcon stories, this year I've been consciously editing them out of my conversations with him.

-I had my semi-weekly writing date with a guy I met doing NaNo about four years ago. We've kept on-going write-ins throughout the year since then even though neither of us did NaNo this year. It's great even on the weeks when I don't have much to write, as a carved out productivity time with someone I can bounce ideas off. I mostly worked on a Gilmore Girls fic.

-I've reactivated my SawYouAtSinai account, aka That-Jewish-Dating-Site-Mathematically-Designed-To-Mess-With-My-Head. It seems weirdly more successful this time around at introducing me to women who seem like plausible romantic partners, but I can't seem to actually talk to any of them. I've been playing phone tag with two matches for the past two weeks, and a third just contacted me with a brief and ambiguous message on facebook. Hopefully things will start connecting there.

-I talked on the phone to my mother a couple nights ago for a while. Let me ask you people, how often do you talk to your parents? This is a thing I'm renegotiating since I moved out. I don't think I'm that far out of contact with my parents- we live like ten miles apart, I see my father at least once a week at synagogue, I sometimes run into my mother at the supermarket or otherwise around town, it's not like I moved to Alaska or something. But sometimes I get busy and I go more than a week before calling my mother. And even when I don't, even when it's just a day or two between calls, every single time I talk to my mother she opens with a guilt trip about how I've dropped off the map since moving out.

I think part of the problem is that my sister calls my mother constantly. My sister calls my mother for advice on what to make for dinner, for advice on how to handle some banking problem, for advice on social etiquette... That's their relationship, that's always been how they interact. I like to solve a lot of these problems on my own without turning to my parents, even if I end up making mistakes as a result. But in general my sister is way more socially competent than I am.

Also, my mother never calls me. She claims whenever I confront her about this that this is because she worries that she'll be interrupting me in the middle of something, but I have voicemail and can choose not to pick up if I'm actually busy. So anyway she never calls me and she guilts me when I don't call her, and the whole thing is annoying because I see her all the time! Like, since I moved out six months ago I've not gone more than two weeks without seeing her in person, and often I've seen her multiple times in a week. Or I don't know, maybe I should call my mother more often.



Food: I baked cookies last night, because there was a recipe on the cereal box and I said "Ok, I'll try that." The result was basically mediocre sugar cookies with cheerios embedded, and I don't see the point, but the mechanical act of making cookies was nice and I should try that more often.


Games: Other than D&D, not too much. A little Bohnanza with my D&D group on a night when the DM wasn't up to run a game. We learned we've been playing it wrong, and everyone I've ever taught the game to has been playing it wrong- there are no three-way trades in Bohnanza! When the active player receives a card in a trade, he sets it aside for planting as soon as the trading phase is completed. This radically changes the game. It's still a really fun game, but wow, I've played this game a LOT and it's weird to realize it's not the game we thought it was.


Watching: Ha, so I started this massive multifandom vid last month and basically everything I watch is because I'm evaluating it to use in the vid. Which is a weird way to watch things, because most fandoms I watch, I'm looking for the three seconds of footage I'm going to be able to use. It's weird, I have DVDs coming in almost daily from Netflix and library holds and so every day I add another three seconds to the vid. It's coming together like coral. I'm not sure I want to say more publicly about that vid yet, but I'm sure I'll have a million things to say about all the fandoms when I finally post the vid.

About the only thing I've watched lately that wasn't for the vid was the new season of Mozart in the Jungle, which I liked, though not universally. I thought the first half of the season went on too long, when I wanted the return to symphony hijinx to come sooner. I also thought the Rikers episode didn't quite land- it wasn't sure if it wanted to be funny or not, and landed somewhere in between funny and profound. But Nico Muhly's "Amy Fisher" aria was terrific and I am now sad he's not actually writing that opera.

And tonight I have a ticket to see Rogue One!!!!!


Listening: The new Norah Jones album, a bit. It's a regression back to the Norah Jones who I admired but didn't love, before she got interesting and adventuresome, and that's fine, it's a well-crafted jazz vocal album. Also a wild Eastern European folk album by Karolina Cicha called Nine Languages, because it's got songs in nine languages, capped by the final song in Esperanto.


Making: Yuletide fic was finished crazy early this year because I didn't do NaNo. Crazy early. I'm really pleased with it and I think my recip is going to like it. Festivid is at a decent draft, but I need to return to that and finish it.

freeradical42 is getting married in a month and I'm one of his groomsmen. I've been brainstorming wedding shtick- and I want to make some sort of simple dancing robot for the wedding, so I've bought a few motors and motor controllers, but I haven't had a chance to play with them yet. Maybe Sunday. Or probably this won't happen.

Comments

[metamorphage]

I talk to my parents every week or so, sometimes every two weeks. But I have also lived with them for only about six months out of the past twelve years (since I started college).

[ghost_lingering]

"The result was basically mediocre sugar cookies with cheerios embedded" hahaha, AMAZING. I want the food blog post where you use fruit loops and post a lot of artfully arranged photos that look hilarious and then mumblemumble at the end about the actual quality of the cookie.

But mostly I'm replying because based on your description of your phone calls with your mother, I think we might be long lost sibblings. Your mom sounds E X A C T L Y like my mom. My brother calls or skypes with my parents basically every day -- he did this even before my nephew was born, so I can't even blame it on grandma and grandpa wanting to see their grandson on skype. Whereas I have to remember to call them at least once a week.

Of course every time we talk it's "we haven't talked to you in SO LONG" and "I miss hearing your voice" and "I feel like I don't know what you've been up to" etc, which means I feel really guilty about how much I talk with them. When I tell my parents they should call me, they don't want to because I might be busy. I've asked other friends how often they call their parents and the answers were anywhere from "once a month" to "every day". My conclusion: I honestly don't think there is a right amount to call parents.

A few strategies: my mom e-mails almost every day and if I reply to her e-mails, even with just a sentence, then she knows I'm alive and doesn't get as worried. I also call them when there is clearly a time limit placed on it -- "I'm walking to the store and you're just keeping me company" "I'm waiting for my friend who I am going to the opera with and when he gets here I have to hang up" -- that way the conversations aren't as long so I feel up to calling them more often, which makes them happier even if the total time I talk to them in a week stays about the same.

(I enjoy talking to my parents, but I hate talking on phones.)

[ghost_lingering]

I should also say: my parents share a cell phone that they keep turned off and they have a landline that I use to call them. So it's not a matter of calling my mom OR my dad. It's calling their shared phone, which might mean talking to one of them or both of them.

[ambyr]

I talk to my mom probably 1-3 times a week. I usually call her while I'm walking home from work, so I talk to her more often when it isn't winter--when the temperature drops below freezing I don't want to have my hands out of my coat pockets, even gloved, to hold a phone, and also honestly I'm likely to just take transit home. I would say it used to be pretty consistently 3x a week, and then I discovered the wonders of audiobooks while walking, so now it's more like 1x a week unless I get stuck in the middle of a book I'm not actually enjoying.

I talk to my dad rather more sporadically, because he's not usually home during my commute time. Maybe every other week? Talks with my mom run 30-60 minutes; talks with my dad run 5-10.

I try to call my grandparents every other week but I'm not very good at it and usually manage more like once a month. I can't call them while I'm out walking because their hearing is sufficiently bad that I really need to be sitting somewhere with no background noise for them to hear me, and I just don't sit around during hours when they're awake very often.

My grandparents will call me when they haven't heard from me in a while (in fact, they did on Sunday...I should really return that call). My parents will pretty much only call me if they have a specific time-sensitive question to ask me, and even then, if it's my dad, he'll probably Facebook message me instead. No one guilt trips me if a long time goes between calls, which I appreciate it.

[ambyr]

I feel like I should add, I trained my parents out of expecting to hear from me regularly early: the first three years I was at college, I resolutely refused to own any sort of telephone device. If they wanted to communicate with me, they had to e-mail.

So I think mom is mostly just happy I have rediscovered the telephone, and not inclined to complain about when or how I use it.

[calledtovienna]

I try to call my parents about once a week, but it is actually once every ten days, or once every two weeks or so. It used to be once a week always when I was away at college, but has slipped over the years. Plus, I live in CA and they live on the East Coast, which means that if I want to call them when they are home from work, it has to happen between 5pm and 7pm my time. That's cutting it pretty close for my work hours. I think that all my family members share a distaste for minutae though, which means that calling much more often than that would be kind of draining to everyone and pointless.

My mom has a once a week, Sunday morning video chat with my grandmother, who is still in Moscow. My grandmother and I try to schedule video calls once a month to catch up, but it is hard for a variety of reasons, including the roughly 11 hours time difference.

[scintilla72]

> [personal profile] freeradical42 is getting married in a month and I'm one of his groomsmen.

Why am I always the last to find out about these things?

Also, these days I basically only call my parents when we need to plan some sort of get-together, which is only every few months, and my mother will also call me maybe once every few months if she's got something specific she needs to bring up. It doesn't seem to bother them.

[grrlpup]

Gilmore Girls fic!!

I think my parents are still living in the "long distance is expensive and for holidays and emergencies" mindset, which suits me well. But we exchange letter-length emails about every two weeks.

[lannamichaels]

Let me ask you people, how often do you talk to your parents?

I e-mail with my dad a lot, but call him very rarely, and never without e-mailing in advance for one of us to ask the other if there's a good time to talk. I call my mom before shabbos, either Friday afternoon, or Thursday night, depending on the time of year.

[sanguinity]

I hate to say it, but I think the way the thing with calling mothers works, if the question even arises, it's over: you haven't been calling your mother enough, go call her.

Back-of-the-box recipes: every once in a while there's a good one, but they're mostly a way to sell you more stuff. Sugar-cookies-with-scheerios-in sounds particularly disappointing, but then sugar cookies themselves have always disappointed me: I grew up on a cookie that looks exactly like sugar cookies, but is made with buttermilk and anise and is tender and flavorful. So every sugar cookie I've eaten in my life has been an exercise in, "Oh, wow, here are some of... those cookies that are a crushing disappointment in every way and have no excuse for existing and yet everyone keeps making them WHY."

Hahaha, I am still watching things for the massive multi vid I finished six months ago. Except now it's basically a massive game of regret roulette.

...and I am not massively behind in all my making, but I am def careening from due-date to due-date by the skin of my teeth. To the point that I'm considering defaulting on Festivids tomorrow.