felis_ultharus

Another update, this one about France's laws. A two-parter about laws.

After those, I'll get to the Loyalists, then finally to actually queer topics in Canada -- Alexander Wood, George Herchmer Markland, and some of the victims of the early laws.

Also, I'm nearly halfway through my massive edit -- I am still working on my novel in all this! I'm also at the end of my first week being pretty much the only person in my department (one on paternity leave, the other on vacation).

Mostly, though, my attention is occupied with the Pötterdamerung. I'm glad it's finally here. I pick up my novel at 9 am tomorrow. There have been so many leaks, I'm afraid to go online for fear some jackass is going to ruin it for me :/

Today was the first day in seven that I didn't have to go into my regular job, though I was in training for my very temporary moonlighting one instead, giving Cambridge Exams. My first official day on the job for that is tomorrow afternoon. Then I'm back at my usual on Friday.

I also got my first heavy edit for my novel done today (checking for historical accuracy and internal consistency), as well as getting a little more research done. I stumbled onto a book of 19th-century pictures of British Columbia, which may prove helpful.

I also reread The Half-Blood Prince.

( Only of Interest to Harry Potter fans, otherwise nothing to see here and plenty of spoilers. )

Gah. Starting today, I'm working the next six days. I kept my birthday free, but that's about it. I'm going to be quite worn out by then.

Oh, well. Beltaine was fun, even if we didn't do much -- just got together and got caught up (none of us have seen foi_nefaste in ages). But I guess that's what the holidays are for.

Still enjoying One of the Boys: Homosexual in the Military during World War II, though I'm reading it slowly. And I'm looking forward to Gankutsuou tonight -- the grand finale. I guess holding out for a happy ending is pretty pointless, though.

Happy Jesus/bunny day to those who celebrate it. In Montreal, it seems we've got a white Easter, in place of the white Christmas we didn't get. Yesterday, it was bright and sunny and snowing, which I'd never seen before.

I know April showers bring May flowers, but what do April snowstorms bring?

I'm spending this long weekend in the office. It's quite peaceful. I'm averaging 2,500 words a day now, and I'm proud of that since it's mostly new material (harder to write), and I've worked most of those days.

I'm also on the fourth branch of the Mabinogion, which is the one I've been lifting second-hand fairy-tales to weave into my novel. Since I got all those stories about Math and Gwydion and Llew Llaw Gyffes second-hand, I decided to return to the source.

There are some definite gaps in the the storyline, which is to be expected in mythology -- like, "Why does the wizard Math have to keep his feet in the lap of a virgin most of the time?" That's just dropped in, without explanation. When Aranrhod is revealed as not-a-virgin by Math's magic, I was half-expecting her to shout, "I didn't think that counted!"

Politics

Yesterday was the 200th anniversary of the British beginning to phase out slavery in their Empire. Our Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, made a speech about it yesterday.

They weren't the first to outlaw slavery, and Upper Canada (now southern Ontario) became the first place in the Empire to begin the phase-out more than a decade before. Yet in 1807, Britain was the most powerful nation on Earth, and when they decided to shut it down on their own ships, that was a major turning point.

In other political news, Quebec votes tomorrow and I dislike all three front-runners. All three are centre-right parties, though two pretend to be left-wing during elections even though one of them is led by a former Mulroney Conservative, and the other one by a man who signed Québec Lucide.

Life

Things were quiet today, after a rushed and unpleasant week (my parents were in town, and they used up most of my time around work and NDP functions). I am keeping up with my writing, though little else. I still haven't heard back about the exam I wrote a week ago.

Not much else to report. We are watching a new anime, now -- a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, except the count is now a gay vampire living on the moon, and he now has a kick-ass spaceship.

They must have felt this was too prosaic for anime fans, so they spiced it up by giving all the characters psychedelic outfits with patterns that shift as they move.

Work

I'm on lunch at work right now. Life is quiet, and generally good. It's beginning to look like I won't be unemployed this summer for once, since my coworkers' summer vacations and paternity leave are likely going to coincide.

Lit

Still reading Moby Dick. I like Melville, but he's frustrating -- you can tell he's trying to make a point, but the point is so vague and given to you by people he doesn't seem to want you to trust, so it's hard to tell what that point is. I mean, Ishmael is constantly undermining his own claims in bluntly obvious ways, and narrates things he couldn't possibly know, so how's the reader to supposed to buy his version?

Politics

The province is gearing up for an election. Rather than vote for one of the three stooges -- who only differ on the sovreignty question -- I'll be voting for Québec Solidaire.

This is the first time I'll be voting for a separatist party,though I'm a federalist. But the way I see it, separation is the least-important issue -- it's the only one we get direct democracy on. I can vote for Québec solidaire, then vote "no" in a referendum, but Charest, Boisclair, and Dumont would never give me a referendum on health-care and education-slashing, social-safety-net ripping, or any of the other right-wing policies they've championed in the past.

To many of my fellow anglos, this amounts to treason. But the way to put this issue behind us is to ignore it by voting with other issues in mind. The PQ and the Liberals keep harping on this subject because they know they can bring people to the polls election after election for them no matter how badly they perform. The province is being held hostage on both sides.

And I've restarted the rewrite of my novel, with a heavy overhaul. Don't hate me, oh ye who've been following my progress!

I've been scarce from cyberspace of late. Most of my time is divided between work and my novel re-write (which is at 39,000 words -- approximately 2000 words a day).

I'm at work now, on break. This is the big data-entry weekend. Outside, the weather is Vancouver-ish -- a misty, rainy 9 degrees Celsius.

I'm getting weird spam at work. My favourite is the spammer who sends us stuff with randomly-constructed strange names and completely random subject headers. The other day, a Jaroslaw Stowell sent me a message entitled "your centaur." Sadly, he was just trying to sell pharmaceuticals.

No one ever asks about my centaur unless they want to sell me something.

And thanks to this article, I now know that uitwaaien is Dutch for walking in the wind for fun, and a koshatnik is a Russian dealer in stolen cats. I picture a man in a dark alley, with a set of unhappy-looking cats hidden inside a long trenchcoat.

So I've been at the office all weekend (I'm only halfway through my work-week). Trying to input attendance for a few thousand students on ancient '486 computers is an exercise in patience -- my computer sometimes freezes for ten minutes at a time while it does all the necessary calculations.

Writing on the thing-I-do-not-want-to-call-a-second-novel-at-this-early-stage is going well, but working on a second novel feels vaguely like cheating on a boyfriend.

Meanwhile, I've been reading Shakespeare. And the funny thing is that reading a Shakespeare play for the first time is that you keep stumbling against quotes you've heard dozens of times.

The funniest lines are the ones that sound completely different in context than in quotation. My favourite so far "If music be the food of love, play on." This is one of those sweet-sounding lines, fit for Hallmark cards, that you get in books of famous sayings, and quoted endlessly in old movies and bad newspaper articles.

The original context:

"If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die."

In modern English: "If music is the food of love, keep playing -- that way, by forcefeeding me, I'll want to throw up and won't be in love anymore."

You won't find that on a greeting card.

So I'm working my first ever Saturday at the office, and it's actually kind of neat. I have this huge office to myself, I can work by natural light and desk lamp rather than the droning fluorescents, and -- best of all, the office is silent except for the music I brought with me.

Data entry in this environment is a little like what it must have been like to be a monk copying books in a monastery in the Middle Ages.

I can also take my breaks when I want, and post online when I take them ^_^

So to recap the last two weeks, I'm not dead. I've spent the last 7 days constantly on the go with school, work and the NDP, and didn't get a chance to relax at all until Thursday evening.

I printed up two copies of my novel, and they're still in the hands of the people who've been reading them. Meanwhile, I've been ressurrecting old short stories and giving them full overhauls.

It's comforting to know the Bard of Stratford, the Great Wordsmith, the man who gave the French language its nickname for English (la langue de Shakespeare), occasionally had his off days.

Possibly Shakespeare's worst lines, from Henry IV, part I:

"...Come, let me taste my horse,
Who is to bear me like a thunderbolt
Against the bosom of the Prince of Wales,
Harry to Harry shall, hot horse to horse,
Meet, and ne'er part till one drop down a cor[p]se.
O that Glendower were come!"

For the record, the speaker's nickname is "Hotspur."

Not much else to report, save that I'm a hairsbreadth from the halfway point on the great culling of my novel. And I'm still enjoying my readings for school.

Other than that, it's not been a nice day. I was almost paralyzed with pain from a toothache this morning and afternoon (I have a dentist's appointment tomorrow -- it feels like something serious). And I had to find my way back home from a commercial wasteland west of Namur station, after doing placement tests all alone -- buses in that region only run at peak hours.