Spontaneous Musings

I've decided to just float for a bit. My mind isn't really focusing that well anyhow.

I'm inundated with COVID stuff still from the organization where I work, and bereavement notices of folks parents dying.

Today - I went grocery shopping again - and noticed while people wore masks inside, they didn't as much outside, although many are. One guy wearing a baby breath's blue jogger suit was screaming and spitting into his cell phone outside. I gave him a wide berth.

I need to get the flu shot again - I wonder if I can get it from the pharmacy? Doctor appointment isn't until November 24, and I want the COVID booster then. Crazy Org - is giving them, but out in Mineola.

Shoulders still hurt. And fingers. I think it may be the weather?

Looked at Ancestry.com and discovered I'm now 29% Scottish, 27% Irish, 15% Welsh, 15% Scandinavian, and 3% German. Which is odd, considering my mother's father was 100% German, and I've German on my father's side. I don't know, been listening to The Cooking Gene - and that was eye-opening. 23andMe provides DNA for minorities. Ancestry tends to have mainly Western European. So...how does one know for certain?

From the Times:

* Los Angeles will require proof of Covid vaccination to enter many indoor businesses, in one of the strictest rules in the country.

The new law, which will take effect on Nov. 4, includes restaurants, gyms, museums, movie theaters and salons. Canada will also make vaccination mandatory as of next Tuesday for air and rail passengers, and as of Oct. 29 for federal workers.

In other virus news, the U.S. will spend $1 billion to quadruple the availability of at-home rapid coronavirus tests by the end of the year, White House officials said. Officials said that 200 million rapid tests will soon be available to Americans each month.

* There was a shooter in Arlington, Texas today - another school shooting. There's been so many that it's almost routine. Other countries respond by putting in tight gun restrictions. The US? Na-Da. I mean Britain got upset about teens killing each other with scissors so restricted it. An 18 year old shoots up his school, kills and injures several people and all we do is pray for those who died and mourn them. Then it happens again, and we do the same thing, like there's nothing else we can do. Seriously? Every other country in the world outlawed guns. Texas is going for International Darwin Award big time on all levels. It pre-empted the soap or a press briefing was supposed to - but nothing happened and we just got a rerun for no apparent reason, folks were confused. LOL!

* I got distracted by BAD ART FRIEND about a literary writer, Sonya Larson, who co-opted another writer's personal kidney donation story (a writer she disliked and wanted to hurt) in a writer's group for a short story. Depicting said friend in a negative light. Getting lots of acclaim and press for said story. Until it was discovered that oopsie, she'd plagiarized a letter that the so-called friend had posted on FB. (Hemingway by the way did this all the time, and history has not smiled on Hemingway, and now he's been ripped apart by others in their stories. The Universe has a wicked sense of humor - because careful what arguments you engage in - it likes to throw you on the opposite side of them for its own amusement.)

In the Times Story - Sonya Larson does not come across well, nor do her writer friends including Celeste Ng (writer of Little Fires Everywhere). They attempt to play the "race" card - which is another way of playing the "victim" card to get a free pass. Uh. No. Sorry.

What they did to Dorland, a woman who donated a kidney to a stranger, and is furthering her cause organ donation - was cruel and unnecessary. What did Larson and her FB writers group do? Larson wrote a short story - with a white woman character, who is priveleged and from wealth, who donates a kidney to an alcoholic Chinese-American woman. The White Woman is portrayed as having "White Savior Complex" and as a narcissist. Larson goes so far as to take word by word a letter Dorland wrote - and puts it in the story. Then proceeds to pass judgement on Dorland, and write her as a racist white savior and narcissist. With her friends cheering her own, and supporting her along the way.

Then the NY Times Journalist writes a story about it - that paints Larson and her friends as bullies, and does it using their words, except in a manner that is justified - because they freely stated these things to the writer - having no control how he'd interpret them or present them.

I left the story outraged, and thinking I'm not buying another literary work of fiction again as long as I live. I'm sticking with genre fiction.
It is a problem with writing what "you know" or "think you know" - you can co-opt someone else's personal story for your own. Adding your layers of judgement and criticism on top of it. I know, I did it when I wrote short stories - I did it with my father in a story entitled "Just a Bunch of Clouds" - it was about an man on an airplane sitting next to an elderly woman who was dying, he was struggling with his own mortality and with what to do with his mother. I took something my father had told me about his mother - and wrote a story about it. My father was forgiving (he's a writer too) but we couldn't have people in our family read it. It won an award. I got $500 for it. Paid off an bank overdraft.

But..afterwards, I decided no, I will not write others stories. It's why I chose not to go into journalism. It's also why I've not written two stories that are more literary - Opal Kloppenheimer's Daughter (about my Grandmother's family) and Talking About My Family. I may wait until people are dead. And even then, perhaps not. Do we have the right to tell another's story or take it for our own? I don't know. It feels exploitive somehow.

This ended up being the subject of a kerfuffle of sorts on "Literary" Twitter (which by the way makes me never want to buy another book again - I'm sticking with Amazon e-books and audio and paying next to nothing for independently published genre novels, although I was kind of already there. And I hardly need to - I've enough books that I've not read yet in my apartment and in the basement of my apartment building and on the side streets and in area libraries to last me for a very very long time). Cat Sebastain was discussing it. Along with various other writers on literary twitter:

1/ Okay, Literary Twitter, you got me. Here's one more writer's take on "Bad Art Friend" aka The Kidney Story:

One party is a needy weirdo who did, in fact, donate a kidney.

The other knowingly plagiarized the letter portion of her story and repeatedly states this in writing.

Yup.

And apparently Bad Art Friend followed a similar story in Slate: Cat Person

The other bit as brought up on Twitter - was something I've had issues with my entire life. When a group of people get together - they can often decide to go after one person they don't like very well and bully or exclude them. I told my mother why I left my college sorority in college, actually why Wales and I both left it.

Mother: wasn't it because you got tired of it or you didn't fit in?
Me: Not at all. It was because of what they did to one woman during rush. A woman who'd gone through rush twice. Rush is a series of parties. The final one you get a name tag - telling you that you've been accepted to the sorority and why. The sorority I'd joined was for the most part all inclusive. Known for accepting everyone, and a little dorky. But I discovered it wasn't. I watched them lead this poor girl on. She'd gone through twice. She'd been encouraged to try again. There was no way they'd ever let her in. I knew that from the discussions. But one of the members wanted revenge - so the sorority led her on, and at the final party - she didn't get the invite and was crushed.
Mother: How awful. I didn't know that. I thought a sorority would be a good experience for you - or I'd never have encouraged it -
Me: It was. I don't regret it. Groups are like that. People are like that.
And you had no way of knowing, you'd never been in a sorority - but it's why I hate groups of people, if they are exclusive? I avoid like the plague.

The Bad Art story reminds me a lot of that, and various fandom kerfuffles, where someone else was the subject of a group complain discussion or I was. I've been on both sides of that argument. Actually most of us probably have. Human beings are annoying, self-centered, and often selfish assholes. The pandemic has proven that without a shadow of a doubt.

On Twitter, the genre writers were proclaiming themselves better than the literary writers because at least they just made up stuff. LOL! (True, it's why I prefer writing genre. I'd rather make up stuff than try to write about reality. Reality is painful, and at times exploitative. Making up stuff is more fun. And I think metaphorically so I can hide it all in metaphors.)

**

Covid
Via the Times:

* The U.S. is starting to recover from a summer surge, but public health officials say the pandemic remains a potent threat.

* A new study found that “Covid toes” may be caused by an immune system overreaction.

*Sweden and Denmark paused the use of Moderna’s vaccine for younger age groups because of possible rare side effects, Reuters reported.

*U.S. hospitals in less vaccinated areas are struggling financially under a surge of patients, The Washington Post reported.

*Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set deadlines for employees of Canada’s federal government to be vaccinated. [Hmm, we're kind of ahead of Canada on this one - the US Federal Government mandated it in the Spring.]

*The choice for a Colorado patient: Get the Covid vaccine, or miss out on a kidney transplant.[ Decisions, decisions.]

***

Did UU Bible Study again tonight. We discussed Tower of Babel. One member wondered why God had scattered everyone and made them speak different tongues after building the tower. (The Torah version isn't very clear on why this pissed off God enough to do that.) I read the passage out of another biblical translation. And it was to punish humanity for basically aspiring to be gods or reaching god. No, no, we can't have that - back down you go.

But I like it for it's metaphorical symbolism - the idea of how the more we attempt to communicate the more impossible it becomes. We want to connect to each other - we desperately try to - but so many things get in the way. Everything from racial, gender, age, etc differences, to language. Even though we can speak the same language - we don't always or often understand one another. We all perceive the same words differently. I know, because today at work I had to explain something to my manager again - which I've explained to him ten different times, in ten different ways.

At check in - I kept it simple. I didn't try to communicate much at all.
"I'm floating," I said. "God tethers me, as I float, so I don't just float away into space." This statement was aided by my background (which you can pick on Zoom) that was space. It's basically planets behind my Zoom image.

Random photo of the day...

Jordan Pound Rocks in Arcadia National Park, Maine - circa 2010.