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Adventures in glasses-wearing
So a little bit ago my dad, who is notorious for leaving his glasses lying around, was looking for them. We looked in the kitchen. We looked in the library, and I checked the bathroom while he went up to check his room.
Then I went into the living room and called, “I found your glasses, Dad!”
And I HAD found them.
On MY FACE.
*MY* glasses were lying on the coffee table, because I, too, have developed a terrible habit of leaving my glasses lying around (only since my eyes got to be about 45 years old, mind you, and Dad’s been doing it since at least his mid-thirties). I’d picked up Dad’s, which were on the kitchen table, after I’d eaten lunch.
I’d put them on. I’d thought, “Wow, God, how did my glasses get SO DIRTY since I last wore them?”
I took them off. I cleaned them. I thought, “Ugh, I didn’t do a good job, my right eye’s vision is poor.” I took them off again to check, but the lenses looked quite clean. I put them on and, no, my vision was still funny.
I took the glasses off AGAIN and tried to clean out the corner of my eye, in case that was where the vision problem was. Put them back on, nope, still fuzzy. “Christ,” I thought, “I only got a new prescription last July or something, has my vision changed again that much already?”
No. No, it hadn’t. Dad’s prescription and mine have always been quite close to interchangeable, but my right eye has always been worse than his, so while I was fine with the left lens, the right just wasn’t quite strong enough, BUT I DIDN’T REALIZE THE PROBLEM.
And NEITHER DID THE TWO PEOPLE WHO HAD _LOOKED AT ME_ WHILE I WAS WEARING DAD’S GLASSES!
It turns out that our glasses are shaped quite a lot alike, as well as being similar in prescription. Mine are purple, but dark enough, apparently, to be mistaken for Dad’s very similar black-rimmed glasses.
We’ve been laughing about it for about fifteen minutes now. :) :) :)
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missed connections
It’s been a week of missed connections in the funniest of ways. :)
Last week I was going out to work, which my friend Sarah and I have been meeting up to do in this sort of inept way–neither of us has WhatsApp notifications turned on because they’re too distracting, but also neither of us ever thinks to text or call, so we attempt to communicate in what amounts to telephone tag except both of us have the phones with us all the time.
In this scenario, I am taking public transport and it is Pouring Rain.
Me: Hey I can get out to work
Sarah, 90 minutes later: oh great! I have to be at my new house waiting for the gas man from 1-5 if you want to come over and sit in the cold or I can meet you later!
Me, 15 minutes later: I can come!
Me, 40 minutes later, standing in the rain, banging on the door and getting no response, WhatsApps: hey i’m here
Me, 3 minutes later: *bang bang bang* / Hi hey I’m here?
Me: I’m here? Hello?
Me, 2 minutes later: HEY THIS IS A *PHONE* I COULD *CALL* *calls*
Sarah, sounding like I’ve woken her up: Hello?
Me, suddenly afraid my number is, like, no longer in her phone or something: It’s Catie? I’m at your house?
Sarah: *indistinct*
Me: Hello?
Phone call goes dead. A moment later, a message arrives:
Sarah: OH MY GOD NO MY PETAL I THOUGHT YOU MEANT *TOMORROW* I AM AT THE LIBRARY (hence the super quiet indistinct speech of earlier) I WILL COME TO YOU IMMEDIATELY
Me: OH MY GOD NO IT’S POURING RAIN STAY WHERE YOU ARE IT’S NBD
Sarah: I RUSH TO YOU
Me: BUT IT’S POURING RAIN
Sarah: CAFE?
Me, seeing a bus that will get me to the cafe: YES CAFE
Anyway, so she was meeting someone ELSE at her house the next day and just misread the text as saying I was also going to be able to go out and work the next day and thought “hooray we can all work together!” except…no. That wasn’t what was happening. *laughs* But we got some work done, and got to see each other, which was what counted!
And then LAST NIGHT–so okay we’ve got double-feature tickets to Infinity War/Endgame on the 24th, right? Infinity War is at half eight, midnight showing of Endgame because that’s how we roll. :) And a couple of friends are joining us, hooray! It’s gonna be great!
Except last night one of our party texted me at 8:07pm with “I’m here, laden with snacks, where are you?”
I was like “um. at home? this is catie?” because I was convinced she was meeting someone else for a movie last night, since the one we had a date for wasn’t for TWO FULL WEEKS, and just had texted me instead of her date for the night.
But no, she had the right number, just the wrong night. So I threw on my shoes and ran for the door and 31 minutes later arrived at the theatre so we could go see Captain Marvel together, because she hadn’t seen it yet and how terrible to be left bereft at the movies when you expected an all-nighter with friends!
It was great fun and very very funny and I’m very glad I went and anyway, hell of a week of missed connections. :) :) :)
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A Brief Lesson on Feminism & Queen Elizabeth I, by Me
On the way home from school, Indy asked about King Henry, and I said there had been several of them, from about 1200 to about 1550 (I was wrong, they started in 1100, but close enough). I said Henry VIII was the last one, and that after him his son Edward had been king, and then his daughter Mary had been queen, and then finally his daughter Elizabeth had been queen for a long time, and she’d never married or had any children.
Why not, queried my child, and I said well, she wanted to be queen, and back then if she’d gotten married her husband would have been considered more important than she was.
Indy, baffled, said, “What?! But she was QUEEN!”
I said yep, but back then, and even still in a lot of ways now, people considered men to be more important than women (Indy gaped disbelievingly), so if she’d gotten married, people would have thought her husband was more important, and listened to him instead of her, and she didn’t want that. I said she’d considered getting married a lot of times, and had pretended she might to build political alliances–
“Oh *no*! That wasn’t nice!”
“Oh,” I said airily, “no, that happened a lot. Most of the time people, especially kings and queens and other nobility, didn’t get married for love. They got married because it would give them more land or more money.”
“So they would share,” Indy said, satisfied.
“Well, no,” I said, “see, if I had a lot of land, and I’d gotten married back then, my land would all become my husband’s. Women were basically owned by their husbands.”
By this time Indy was horrified. “*SLAVERY*!?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” I said.
Indy, completely horrified: “BUT THAT’S *WRONG*!!!! Mommy, I’m going to say this, and you might not like it, but *people weren’t very nice back then*!”
I agreed that they weren’t, and that things were somewhat better now, and that we all had to keep working until everybody believed men and women were equal. And then we talked about Victoria and Elizabeth II and then we were home. :)
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Worldcon 75: Day Five
Sunday morning at breakfast looked like everybody at the con hotel had just gone, “…yeah, no, screw it,” and not gotten up to eat. :)
*I’d* gotten up because I wanted to go to Walter Jon Williams’ guest of honor interview, which I did (although I went into the wrong room first and was pretty torn about leaving what proved to be an astronaut’s lecture, but did anyway). The first half of it was full of what I thought were really great general questions for a writer and I wanted to be answering them! The second half got more specific about his career, but as he said at the end of the hour, “Well, that got us up to 1985, so please come to the next convention for the other half…” :)
(jedward has sorry not sorry, get down low, i dont know why, and walking the wire on his playlist. dammit, norwegian air is supposed to have wifi on board and i’m dying to be tweeting this! also he’s singing a lot to himself, just under his breath, which for some reason i find wonderful. people should sing more! also, just in case anyone wondered: he can sing.)
I bailed on the con after that because I really wanted to see a little of Helsinki without it trying to drown me. This would have been better if I had not somehow failed to put a meet-up with somebody into my calendar and forgotten about it, but she forgave me and I had a nice walk around some harbor-type thing where there were a number of trees shattered by the previous night’s storm.
My impression of Helsinki was that it has wonderfully wide streets, excellent pedestrian areas, very good public transport, amazing bike lanes, a lot of very fit, Finnish-looking people, good tap water (they’ve got signs everywhere saying “you can drink water right from the sinks!”), and a sort of vaguely creepy Bladerunner-ish (to me) corporate ubiquitousness with innumerable signs proclaiming business affiliations everywhere vibe. It felt like being in a city labeled like Nascar jumpsuits. Someone I was with said it had a post-Soviet vibe to them, which may be more accurate, but it wasn’t what came to my mind. :)
I went out to dinnner with friends and tried to find the Dead Dog party, gave up and sent one of our party ahead, then thought we HAD found it and went through a lot of contortions to contact said party member, only to find out later we’d screwed up and he’d almost been at the actual party and we’d called him back. We felt very badly. *moop* And I was a little disappointed to not get to the party because I’d wanted to say goodbye to Nicholas, at least, only as we sat around in the hotel lobby he happened to come through so I got to say bye anyway, yay. :)
Famous Authors Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch & CE Murphy :) Shockingly, I completely failed to get to bed early, although I’d planned to. In the morning, Carol and I packed up, went downstairs to the lobby, happened to see eBear and Scott again, and then took ourselves off to the airport, where, to cap it all off, I sat next to half of Jedward, who smelled too much of cologne. And thus ends my Worldcon 2017 report!
(Except for the pictures post I’m going to do! And anything else I remember later! :))
(Like the moment on the way to the Hugos when I muttered (or so I thought), “That is an *extremely* attractive man,” about the gentleman in front of me, who was someone else’s husband. But apparently 3 days of convention was not good for my muttering skills, because he looked over his shoulder and smiled, which was both funny and mortifying. But my *god*, he really was extremely, *extremely* attractive.)
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Worldcon 75: Day Four
The trouble with the first several days of Worldcon was that I was having so much fun I kept lying awake at night grinning like an idiot and keeping myself awake with happiness, which meant that although I technically went to bed about 3:15 on Saturday morning, it was tragically closer to 4 before sleep actually arrived.
I considered showing up to the panel like this but then I remembered I was a Very Serious Author. :) And I had a 10am panel.
Frankly, my friends, I did not expect it to go well. None of us did, in fact. We were all privately agreeing that this was probably going to be a disaster, because we were just wrecked and nobody could think clearly and our voices were shot and yeah.
Surprisingly, it went REALLY WELL. Or at least we panelists thought so. :) We were talking about women writing comics and it turned out we had reasonably intelligent things to say, and we focused on our experiences with writing comics but broadened it into women artists as well, and it did seem to go well. We were very pleased. :)
Post-panel I had lunch with my friend Mika, and that was really nice. Then I caught up with Ursula and Kevin, and did an interview for Kevin’s organizational podcast, which was fun. I’ll link to it when it’s available. And it just occurs to me I didn’t actually get any pictures WITH them, which is a thing I keep failing to do. Well, next time. :)
SPEAKING OF NEXT TIME
Dublin has won the bid to host the 2019 Worldcon! I will of course be billing it as the “Come hang out with Catie!” con for the next two years, but to my delight, Diane Duane will be the guest of honor (I had a bet going with myself that she would be, and am smug to have won!) and Ian McDonald will be joining us, and it’s going to be a hell of a good party, so COME ON OVER!
I have real hopes that the core war room writers will all be able to make it, and if enough of us do, we’ll probably see about doing a panel about supporting other writers or something, which would be really neat. I’m so excited! I mean, odds were PRETTY GOOD that we were going to win (we were the only ones bidding), but I’m still unexpectedly chuffed for it to be official and to be able to say it’s time to start making real plans for getting here for it! YAY!
Anyway, during the afternoon I ran into my con-friend Margaret again, and she invited me to a little get-together off-site, which I decided would be nice to drop in to, as I wanted to get away from the con for a little while anyway. So I toddled into Helsinki and dropped by for just a little while, then went out to explore and look for dinner.
Oncoming storm in Helsinki 
One minute later 
Three minutes later! Instead I found a thunderstorm. I stopped to take a picture of it rolling in and posted on Twitter to say “thunderhead coming in over Helsinki, aka ‘soon i will be very wet'” and less than a minute later it hit. And when I say hit I mean hit. A huge wind came out of nowhere and snatched up all the grit from the roads and sidewalks and pelted into the air (and my clothes, and skin, and hair…) and some raindrops smashed down and within 90 seconds I was thoroughly damp.
And then the rain *really* started. Huge, smashing, dramatic raindrops that filled the streets in literally seconds and lightning was crashing everywhere and thunder was rolling and I still had to GET TO THE TRAM to get back to the hotel, so I went from ‘thoroughly damp’ to ‘soaked completely through’ and it was frankly exhilarating. If the amount of lightning hadn’t seemed so dangerous I might well have stayed out in it longer, but I dripped my way back to the hotel and took a shower and changed clothes completely, because literally soaked through.
By then I was brainless with hunger and it was still thundering and lighteninging, so I just ate at the hotel restaurant, but one of my friends happened upon me and joined me and we had a lovely couple hours of chatting before deciding to try to brave the celebratory Dublin 2019 partly. Although I went in with the intention of saying “Hello! Good night!” to everyone, and actually kept it. The funniest bit of that was crouching at at a table full of friends and Ian McDonald (who may have the drink taken) leaning over and roaring, “COME TO IRELAND!” at me cheerfully.
“She’s IN Ireland!” said everyone at the table.
Ian, still leaning, took this information under long and careful consideration. Long. And careful. Consideration. And then leaned slightly farther in at me and roared, “COME TO IRELAND!” again, which made us all laugh and I promised I would. (The next day I saw him and he gave me a slightly sheepish nod–I’m pretty sure he hadn’t remembered me, which is fine as it’d been quite some time since we’d last spoken, and I’ve cut my hair since then–and I thought it was all pretty funny. :))
(i’m sorry i’m typing this on the plane and a very cologne-laden young man is in the seat beside me and he took a nap and i looked over at him and i’m about 90% sure he’s half of jedward, altho his phone pictures, which he’s scrolling thru, only seem to have one blonde boy in them, but then i guess they would seem that way unless they were together in a photo and i just have to say that.)
SO ANYWAY
Worldcon roomies at the Hugos!! I actually did take myself off to the room after that, but then in the great tradition of sleepovers everywhere Carol and I stayed up much too late talking (it’s the only night we did, and I’m really awfully glad we did, because great tradition of sleepovers everywhere!). We had a long and very funny discussion about Irish accents that featured Colin Farrell’s absolutely false Irish accent he uses while in America and which eventually landed on something that clarified a Thing About Irish English to me!
So Irish people are forEEEEVER saying they’ll be there in two minutes. Two. Always two. And they’re never ever ever there in two minutes. Ever. So! It turns out there’s an Irish word, cúpla, that means “a few”, and that because it sounds like “couple” there’s a kind of slide from Irish to English on that word which means that if you ask an Irish person if they want a couple cookies and they say yes, they then think you’re really kind of stingy if they only get TWO cookies.
But! I am now convinced that when Irish people say they’ll be there in two minutes, they’re moving *back* on that transliterative (is that the right word? it’ll do) slide, and what they really mean is cúpla, and that they’ll be there in a few minutes.
THIS MAKES SO MUCH SENSE!
(oh shit yeah no there’s pictures of both of them, it is half of jedward!!!)
Anyway, we went to bed after that except then I was still giddy and I was remembering that Kari and Camille and I had discussed cosplaying Josie & the Pussycats for Dublin 2019 and I had to post on Twitter to ask if other people kept themselves awake at night thinking that obviously it would be totally reasonable to actually learn to play the guitar and do a tribute concert at the con and then because it was clearly terribly important RIGHT THEN, trying to remember the words to Ballroom Blitz…
…or if it was just me that thought that way. :)
(Kari said it wasn’t just me but I did understand that I was Josie, right? And I was like yes, I did, although I wasn’t sure I was vocally up for that because Camille’s amazing and Kari’s Welsh, so, y’know, obvs. :))
And then I went to sleep. :)
