I'm in London! We saw the Tower of London (lots of people died there), ate at the Mudlark (where a scene in Harry Potter 3 was filmed- the bit where ron's dad tells Harry that he's being hunted by Sirius), and tomorrow we'll see the London Eye, which teh Doctor used to save earth from the plastic people in the first ep of the Chris Eccleston series. GEEK. I'll start a proper travel blog when I get to Galway and internet doesn't cost 10 bucks an hour.

Whew. So I'm leaving the country in about 2.5 weeks. Frickin scary.

I worked on the farm on Monday when it was like 100+ degrees out, and I got some cbad sunstroke. NOT FUN.

However, I AM currently addicted to the show Freaks and Geeks.

And I'm blogging from my new laptop! Whooo!

Woohoo!
I just bought a laptop!
$589 for a Dell 1405 (that's the little, lite-sized one) with 40 GB hd and 1 gig of memory! I'm so pleased.

The end.

Well, meeting the parents went well. I think. Meh.

Beth Orton was fun. There was a belligerent dude in front of us who was being borderline abusive to his girlfriend. Both were very drunk, and she was doing shit to him, too, but you could tell by the way she sat and took his angry tirade that she's experienced it before. It made me feel sad and almost blindingly angry.

So, I just finished Robin McKinley's Deerskin, and I think I'm in love. With her words. And their elliptical way of glancing, at times gently, at times fiercely, against the tale she's telling. It's a nearly brutal book, but it resonates despite its setting, and it has a depth of clarity that is at once beautiful and horrible.

Unnerving, to say the least.

She was the guest of honor at Wiscon 2005, and in her speech she gave the following bit of anecdote which I find myself agreeing with on some sort of bizarre visceral level: "I've found to my dismay that in England I still get the reaction, oh, you're a feminist? You don't look like a feminist. And we all know what that means. The temptation is to punch them in the eye and then as they stand there trying to staunch the blood, say, now do I look like a feminist? But I don't guess that would do the cause any good, so I have abstained. So far."

Thanks, Louise, for your recent post. I wrote Tammy Baldwin to thank her for voting against Bush's veto on H.R. 810. Y'all, stem-cell research is a good thing! They should slap a label across the research room doors stating "no potential babies were harmed in the quest for miraculous disease-curing medical techniques." People are stupid. Sometimes that thought terrifies me so much I want nothing more than to burrow into my bed and hide from them for the rest of my life. But that's hardly a worthwhile pursuit.

Oh yeah, and I guess I'm slated to meet my girlfriend's parents tonight. This will be a terrifying experience, I'm quite sure. After that it's a Beth Orton concert, though, so that should be pretty good.

Well, haven't updated in a month. Oops.

I'm currently helping Jaci put the finishing touches on the book she's making for her sister. It's full of feminist postcards, articles, pictures, comics, excerpts etc on all this stuff. It's pretty awesome.

Also, the zine I'm working on, the Femocrat, will be published sometime in the next couple of weeks. I wrote an article about feminism in my generation. I don't think it's that good, but the editor of the zine really likes it, so it's in the July issue.

I'm seriously obsessed with Alison Bechdel right now. She's a comic/graphic novelist, most well-known for her strip Dykes To Watch Out For, but she just put out a graphic novel memoir called Fun Home and it's frickin beautiful. Someday I would like to put something that amazingly honest into words and pictures. Here's an interview between Alison and Craig Thomson (who wrote Blankets, which is also an amazingly beautiful graphic memoir). She's going to be speaking at Room next week Friday, and I'm really excited to go and sell coffee for it.

Life is generally good. My girlfriend is ever-increasingly more amazing. We're pretty fuckin happy together, which is great. I'll miss her when I go to Ireland. And everyone else, too. But, y'know.

We're goin to see the Madkings tonight, it should be a good time.

Well, I got to go to WisCon... sort of. I basically did some badge-swapping with folks, which limited my opportunities. I didn't get to see the Dr Who panel, for instance, but I did go to the panel on Octavia Butler (which was hugely disappointing-some woman just read us her paper) and one on finding queer scifi (which was somewhat disappointing, but not as much as the previous one). I did, however, get to go to the big sign-out, where all of the authors sat at tables and signed stuff. I got Mary Doria Russell to sign, Nicola Griffith, Amy Thomson, and Ursula LeGuin. Turns out Patricia C Wrede was there, but I didn't know that so I didn't like, bring any books of hers. They're all in MH anyhow, but... still.

I was wearing Room's generic badge, so Nicola was like, "so... am I supposed to make it out to "Room"?" and I told her how fantastic Ammonite was. She was like, "Room, eh? good job to have."

I also told Amy Thomson how great *her* books are, especially Storyteller, and she seemed gratified. She ended up waiting just behind me in line for Ursula LeGuin, and we chatted for some ten-fifteen minutes. She told me that the Color of Distance was inspired by about three sentences in Left Hand of Darkness, the part where Genly is standing on a hill watching his people disembarking from their spaceship, and he realized that they look like aliens. That, in retrospect, is evident in the Color of Distance (which ya'll should read, by the way, because it's great).

I'm in the middle of Melissa Scott's Shadow Man, and if it weren't out of print and not in any of the used book stores I checked, I would have had a signed copy of that one, too. Good book, so far.

Well, anyhow. Life goes on. I went swimming and sunning all day Sunday instead of going to WisCon, and ended up with a great deal of color. We made mohitos and watched Eddie Izzard last night, and I didn't sleep because it's a hundred and seventy in my room. One hopes it rains, and gets nice and chilly for Thursday. I start my job on the organic farm on Thursday. Wish me luck!