(no subject)

I would have sworn that if you got a story idea that was, "What if George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden got married in an alternate universe? HAhahahahaHA!", you should maybe, at most, post it on your lj in the above one-sentence form and move on with your life. I am mistaken. Apparently you should send it to F&SF, where they will give you some of my money for it.

Also, the David Gerrold story in that issue goes beyond the maudlin dog story into a saccharine-walled moral pit, and I hope I do not meet the man at a con, because while I wouldn't actually have any difficulty not punching him after reading that damn story, I would sit there and think about it really really hard.

yhlee, darlin', you'd have classed up the joint anyway, but I'm sorry it took so much work to do so.

Picked Last for Gym

cakmpls and writingortyping got me thinking, and what started out a comment got long, so it got moved over here instead. cakmpls was talking about sharing or not sharing one's SAT scores as an adult, and writingortyping was talking about being picked last in gym class (over on her non-lj blog).

The only important thing to me about my score on the SAT was that I wanted to beat my dad's score. Most of the schools in the Midwest accept ACT scores, and I think at least one of the ones I applied to required them. I didn't have a "competition" with anyone at my school -- we just weren't really like that -- and with the SAT I could compete with my dad. They hadn't done the major recentering of the test yet, but I still wonder about the drift from the time he took it until the time I did. I'm very good at standardized tests. I'm also very good at recognizing how very little they mean, so I can definitely sympathize with cakmpls's general policy of not sharing. It's a lot harder when you have a very high score, because if you say you had some average score, fewer people would mistake a point of data for a point of pride. (If you say you learned to read in kindergarten or first grade, nobody takes it as anything but a data point, but I had to wonder about commenting that I'd learned to read at 2 in one of yesterday's posts. I don't think it makes me a better or smarter person than someone who learned to read much later, but I've learned to worry about people seeing things that way.)

writingortyping said that something like 80% of people she knows claim to be the kid who was always picked last in gym, and that certainly not everybody could have been picked last. I opined that it was something like bragging about high school class rank or SAT scores: if you went around saying, "I was always picked first in gym in high school," it's a pretty lame boast. It makes it sound like you still think high school gym is important to your life. As much as high school jocks get petted and praised in our culture, washed-up ex-high school jocks are not similarly respected -- at least, not in any circle I've ever been in or seen. I've heard people say things like, "I was the captain of my high school football team," merely offering a point of information, not bragging, and get responses like, "Goody for you." So if I had been picked first all the time, I'd probably keep my mouth shut about it.

(I was not picked dead last, usually. I was never picked first, but I was also not generally enough of a disaster to be the last person picked. Ralston High had much bigger disasters than me. I've never liked team sports, unless you count floor hockey, which rocks because you get to hit people with sticks. I am much better at things I can be bothered to pay attention to, especially with the elbowing-and-checking component, but no one paid enough attention to notice that I was much better at it than I was at other sports, so I didn't get picked any sooner.)

I'm extremely ambivalent about things that are "very good for your age." Age-appropriateness was often used as a bludgeoning weapon when I was a kid: what you are doing right now is very good for your age, so don't you dare try to do more or better. What you're doing now is very good for your age, so I don't have to treat you with any respect, just a patronizing tolerance. One of my friends was once explaining that one of the problems with only children* is that we end up with no sense of age-appropriateness, that we want to be able to do everything just plain well rather than well for one of the kids. I hope she has given up on getting me to see this as a bad thing. When I was saying this to someone close to me recently, he told me, "mrissas are not age-appropriate," and it is perfectly true. I don't see the point to wanting to be a good writer for a 26-year-old, any more than I want to be a good writer for a girl or anything else obnoxious like that. I just want to be a good writer. I don't see why this should have been less true 10 or 20 years ago. I was still a writer then -- more fundamentally than I was a 6-year-old or a 16-year-old, I think, because I'm still a writer and have stopped being those other things.

On the other hand, Roo's current inability to play toccatas and fugues does not indicate that the kid is not very musical. Sometimes age-appropriateness really is, well, appropriate. Doing well in sports in high school is a good thing for people that age who value athletics. Doing well on the SAT is a good thing for people that age who value vocabulary and other similar test elements. I would never scorn Robin's crookedly drawn letters ("Is -- izzat an I?") because they weren't mechaieh's calligraphy. It's a balance, I guess. It's about timing and perspective.

*I have never once tried to explain to her the problems with people with siblings, but she has explained to me the problems with only children on more than one occasion. It's charming.

Death of Poplars

If you had two* people in a house, one who made green things grow and one who made them die, you might be forgiven for thinking that the latter was the appropriate person to set to pruning the bushes. I am no longer sure of this decision at all. I'm not done with the beastly things, but they are already hacked-up, pitiful excuses for greenery, and it is not likely to get any better from here.

I think Mike is going to cry when he comes here. It's usually very good to have friends who do cool things like bonsai, but then when you have to go cut the bushes that they will walk past on their way into the house, you see their face in your head, kind of half-horrified and half-laughing -- because they are good enough friends that you know that expression -- and you hear their voice going, "What happened?" And the answer is, I'm not entirely sure. I pruned them last year. How often do I have to do this? Seven times? (If you say seventy times seven, I will weep.) They are attempting to take over the front walk. I am attempting not to let them. I have the concept that visitors to my home should be safe from the foliage. They drew blood, but I mostly filled the yard waste bin. I have retired from the field of honor, bloodied but unbowed. Mostly unbowed. Only slightly bowed.

Dealing with the yard makes me feel like a hideous combination of Meg March and Lucy Ricardo. I don't like feeling like either of them, and my reaction to it is not to sob theatrically and try to get someone else (someone male) to handle it but to kill things. Faster! More branches! Wah!

My mom tried to tell me last year that working out in the yard would make it feel more like my yard. It does not. I still expect someone to come along when I'm hacking at things with the clippers and shout, "Get away from there! You damn kids! What do you think you're doing?"

Chives. I like the chives. They came back all bright and cheerful and budded and are lovely and do not attack me. I think I shall plant the whole yard full of chives. I will mow the chives weekly. My yard shoes will smell permanently like a baked potato. Probably my feet will smell that way a good deal of the time, since my yard shoes are Dr. Scholl's sandals. It will be better than this cranky clash of barbary bushes and God knows what those red things are and the little prickly weeds that can go through the garden gloves and poplars, oh, poplars. Sometimes they are sneaky little bastards, the poplars, and they grow right up next to bushes, inside where you can't see them until they're two-year-old trees and you can't yank them out easily any more. But I am the death of poplars. Wah.

*Yes, there are three people in this house. But one has back spasms bad enough that the other two are encouraging him to stay away from sharp implements.

Artificial equations

I know I'm post-y today. Sorry. I promise no more babbling on until I'm back from Michigan on Sunday. I'll have e-mail and internet access at our hotel, but I have no idea how much time I'll have. (markgritter and I are joining seagrit and various other NOLJ family members for my little brother-in-law Matt's college graduation. The PotUS will be the graduation speaker. I hope to have nothing whatever to say about that, but we'll see.)

Anyway: over at matociquala's, a bunch of us are talking about John Kessel and Ender's Game and many good things of that nature. Other people have had branching-off posts from it, too. I ended up saying this:

It's like "The Cold Equations." The author has set it up to make his point: the choice is deliberately impossible. In both cases, the author sets it up so that it feels to the reader like a natural thing, like "the world" has done this, but in fact it's not natural at all, it's extremely artificial, human-created.

I have grown extremely skeptical of situations where "the world" demands much of anything. Not that I think they don't exist, but that they are often used in authorial slight of hand, especially in spec fic where you have the choice of your worldbuilding. "The world" doesn't like magic-users: why not? More often than not because the author wants a disadvantage to magic use, or because the author wants to write about besieged smart people in disguise. And it's fine to do that, but it's also fine to criticize it, to say, no, human nature isn't like that: human survival does not rely on vicious abuse of a gifted little boy, and it never will. That will never be the only option unless we make it into the only option. I would like to have seen that recognition from Card, and I don't think it's in any of the books at all.

I wanted to put that where I could poke at it and see if anything else came out. Especially if some of you want to poke at it with me.

I also want to say that accepting things as "laws of nature" that are actually human decisions is responsible for a good deal of misery throughout history and into the present, and spotting it in fiction may well be a useful exercise, because we will need to keep spotting it in our lives. Finding a multiplicity of choices where we're handed two bad ones, or one, or none, is one of the things creativity is concretely good for. We're not excused from it just because it's easier to choose between killing the alien race and sacrificing ourselves than to see what other options might exist. Manufacturing things that aren't evil when we're handed the choice of the lesser of two evils: that's part of the job of being human. Sometimes we fail in it. But the effort is not optional.