(no subject)

[kittydesade]

Today is apparently More Joy Day, so I will post only happy things.

I had an absolutely fabulous makeup day today. Even though I got distracted by a thing and ended up running late I also ended up with fabulous makeup. I remembered to bring materials for a healthy lunch, and my music is helping keep me energized and upbeat, or at least energized and wrathful enough to fight off the despair. It depends on the song and my mood. Also I brought headphones to work in case the Lurking Bandit blasts (he's half deaf) the inauguration so I don't have to listen to NPR today.

I went to order my next chunk of research books at the local bookstore and discovered there's a discount card for a lot of local stores (at least ten or twelve that I frequent anyway and a few more that I've thought of) that'll take on average 10% off whatever purchases I make, or services I get. Including the boy's massage place! Plus the girl there was very friendly and I found a Medici/Renaissance Florence/etc book that I don't need but look I'm finding that more and more fun anyway so *shrug*

I have an overabundance of things I could be doing, but my brain isn't working overdrive on Must! Do! All of them! For which I am fairly grateful. I am getting them done one by one, and not overstressing myself as I do.

Bat Cat went into the cat carrier by himself today, which means we might be able to get him into the carrier and take him to the vet without much incident. The boy also said he carried him around the house to at least introduce him by sight to the others. I'm not sure how much that'll do because they've already seen him several times at least, out the front windows and from the back patio, but sure why not. It can't hurt and they can at least smell him in the rest of the house too. Plus it gets Bat Cat used to being carried.

And the boy's dentistry yesterday, semi-emergency dentistry because he knew his molar had a chip in it but hadn't taken care of it because there were insurance and finding a new dentist issues to resolve. But that went well and cost considerably less than we expected because it wasn't as bad as the dentist had initially guessed. (Or predicted, possibly, in case he was wrong.) So it was more like $Massachusetts instead of $Montana.

So those are my happy things. Leave me a comment with a topic, either one you've seen me talk about here or one at complete random, and I will tell you something that brings me joy of it! Even if it's just "gee this looks cool I'd love to learn more" because come on, if there's one thing you should know about me by now it's that learning new things always brings me joy.

Comments

[pameladean]

I think you would do this spontaneously, but I do always enjoy anything you have to say about languages.

I'm so glad Bat Cat went into the carrier on his own! White-stone day!

P.

[kittydesade]

It is!

LANGUAGES. Oh where to start.

I love the way they all fit together. Within a language, the way parts come together that don't make sense individually, suffixes and nouns and particles and prepositions, and then you put them together and they mean something greater than each bit. Or the way the languages all fit together into families and branches and you can trace where different groups of people met and exchanged things by the way some words migrated to other words. There's German in Japanese and Arabic in Spanish and both Irish and Russian have similar possession constructions. I have so much fun seeing all the patterns as I pick up new ones or just learn phrases.

I love the moment of comprehension, whether it's realizing that I can translate paragraphs of Russian with a bit of help from a dictionary or the split second when I realize hand-writing Hindi would be so much easier if I did this instead of that. The moments when it's all coming together and it clicks and how much you've learned is really evident.

I love that you can tell the same story in different languages and either they mean different things, or you end up using hugely different words to mean the same thing. (That may not make much sense but it is the thing!)

I love all the different ways languages sound. No real reason I just do. I love talking to people and the different accents everyone has in whichever language we're speaking.

In the last five-sevenish years we've learned so much about what learning languages does to the human brain in different stages of growth and life and that's just cool.

[pameladean]

This was so lovely that it rendered me speechless.

I know what you mean about the ways different languages sound. It's endlessly fascinating to listen, even if one doesn't understand a word.

And the insight about writing Hindi -- I had one of those when I realized that the mere fact that the classical Greek alphabet is related to the modern English one does not mean it should be written as if it were an aberrant form of the modern English alphabet. This was particularly useful for the diphthongs, which are so very squiggly.

P.

[longmagpieroads]

Okay so I really love that you're finding one of my favorite periods more and more fun because a) it IS b) I really love nerding about it with you.

Which book was it?

[kittydesade]

... Hell, and I left it at home so I can't refer to it now. Let's see if Amazon oh yes it will help. This one!

Actually in college that was going to be one of my two areas of speciality for history, but there was no one who taught it as their speciality and there was someone who taught Tudor-Stuart England, so I went with that. But look, the Italian Renaissance is the beginning and a lot of ways the center of courtesans, daVinci, hilarious politics, wacky politics, stuffed people, Caterina Sforza.... I mean really. I'm a sucker for any era that has women who stand up and say "this is mine fuck off."

[switterbeet]

Music! Tell me about your playlists, your favourite artists, your must-scream-along-lyrics!

Also I don't say this often enough, but bless you for all your work with cats. =^_^=

[kittydesade]

It is my absolute pleasure to work with cats and care for the ones that come around. <3 I've always been a big cat person, and I'm fortunate that the boyfriend is also a complete cat lover and joins me in making shelters for our cats and showing them the crawlspace to get indoors, etc.

Music! Hm. The first thing that comes to mind about music is that a lot of the stuff I listen to is from the sixties to the eighties and early nineties. I mean, even when I was a kid I was listening to stuff twice my age. So I have an entire playlist that I call "classic rock" that's Steely Dan, Rolling Stones, Crosby Stills Nash (and Young some of it), and all the rest. David Bowie definitely, David Bowie's songs were a huge part of the soundtrack of my childhood, and Peter Gabriel and the Beatles and Sting. This may or may not be relevant to your interests.

Two of my favorite current playlists are Fight Like A Girl (all women or women-leaning genderfluid artists) that has a variety of fighty songs, some more blatant like Dessa's The Bullpen and some more spirit/mind oriented like Hungry Lucy's The Standing Ones. Anything that shores me up as a ciswoman.

And the other one is Zen and the Art of Courtesans, which is less obvious from the title so, hmm. This is the playlist I put on when I want to breathe deep and calm my mind either from panic or from too many projects do all the things! This one has a lot of Fever Ray, some Bat for Lashes, some anime like Kaze No Torimichi (Path of the Wind) from My Neighbor Totoro and Aoi Hitomi from Vision of Escaflowne, I want to get a good version of Voices from Macross on there. There's some Enya and Sarah McLachlan, the usual suspects. Massive Attack. And then idle single songs from other artists.

I have playlists for my characters and my novels that I'm working on. Those tend to be things I find by surfing related artists and mood playlists on Spotify.

My Fight Like A Girl playlist tends to be the one I sing along to most often (P!nk's Perfect, Sara Bareilles' Brave, and of course Fight Song) but I dance to a lot of Irish and French-Canadian music like Grand Derangement and Bill Whelan and Solas and Leahy.

And then I don't do it as much as I used to, but for inspiration and motivation to practice I have a playlist called Guitar Goals with some Tracy Chapman, Eagles, Metallica, the songs I wanted to play (and some of them I even can now!) to remind me of my goals.

[switterbeet]

Ooo, this is exactly what I was hoping for - specific themes for specific mental cravings. :) And woot French-Canadian music recs, because je dois plus francais dans ma vie. <3

(Escaflowne!!!!)

Thank you for sharing. ^_^