B is for...
May. 8th, 2006 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radegundI asked ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cangetmad for a letter in the alphabet meme, and she gave me a B. (If anyone still wants letters, ask and you'll receive.)
Babies - I mean, babies! They're great! (I'm trying to expand on "great" here, but I've realised that if you agree with me, then you know what makes babies so great, and if you're not that pushed about them, then you're unlikely to accept my assertions.) My first close-up baby was my little sister, who was born when I was 6.5. I wrote stories for her before she was born (I remember one starring my teddy-bear, eponymously titled "Flaubert's Silliness"), and as soon as she arrived I was completely besotted. When my mother was pregnant with my brother (I was 10), I read a heap of her pregnancy literature and was utterly taken with the idea that I could potentially do this amazing thing too. In my mid-twenties I went on a serious, and very unpleasant, ARGH FUCK I AM BARREN OMG!1!eleventy-one!! kick - no evidence for this whatsoever, you understand, just the screaming horrors. So I felt jolly silly, I can tell you, when we eventually got around to trying to conceive and it took us, um, three weeks. So yeah, the paragon of babies, the pinnacle, the apogee (so far) of the class, is that baby I had on 22 August 2004: my Glorious Oyster. He's now over 20 months old, of course, so he's heading rapidly out of baby territory. However, he still identifies as a baby: from time to time he points to himself and explains, gravely, "Oisín baba" (pronounced Unny-baba), which is cute beyond anything one should have to endure. Mind you, this morning he remarked, "Oisín little boy" (Unny-ninni-boy), so I suspect he won't accept the "baby" label for much longer. (But "boy" starts with B too, so it still works.)
Breastfeeding - I didn't like it at first. Not at all, in fact. But after the first six weeks were over I began to see the point. It really is brilliant. My body! Making milk! For my baby! As Anne Enright says in Making Babies, it's a whole new bodily function - astonishing. When I went back to work in 2005 I pumped for the first five months - and I actually sort of liked it. I enjoyed being able to go to a quiet room twice a day and think about my beloved baby. The worst part of pumping was the grindingly tedious washing and sterilising routine. I much preferred the period when I visited the creche for a feed every lunchtime. Now that Oisín eats a full range of grown-up food, of course, he no longer needs my milk from a nutritional point of view (I mean that although it's still beneficial, he'd be OK without it), but the comfort, the convenience, the calming effect, and the sheer cuddliness of breastfeeding make me delighted to carry on. I tend to avoid answering the question "how long are you planning to continue?". I don't feel the need to make a firm statement on the matter. I'm glad we made it to a year, because I never had to mess around with formula. It makes very little sense to me to stop before at least one of us wants to, and until that point it's business as usual.
Battles, picking my - I am a strong theoretical proponent of the "pick your battles" philosophy, whereby you do not beat yourself up over examples of how your actions deviate from your principles (e.g., in my case, using biodegradable disposables instead of cloth nappies, occasionally buying from anti-union companies, not challenging hate speech wherever I hear it, driving to choir rehearsal, not bathing my son often enough, living in squalor, procrastinating over eating cheap and nutritious but unappetising vegetables until they shrivel and die at the back of the fridge and have to be thrown out, etc.), but instead focus on succeeding where you can and celebrating the successes. Over time, the idea is, I suppose, that you "win" some of the battles and can take on a few more. But not being super-person isn't actually equivalent to being DOOMED WORM, despite popular opinion. (Protest too much, much?)
Bach, J.S. - God's more talented brother. Double violin concerto. Goldberg Variations. Art of the Fugue. John Passion. Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. Brandenburg. Cello suites. Piano partitas. Italian concerto. All the billions of motets and cantatas and sonatas and everything else. Awe. Love. Nuff said.
Bisexuality - I've been thinking about bisexuality a fair bit recently. I used to feel that as a clear beneficiary of het privilege I hadn't earned the right to use the label about myself. Certainly, at a time when a significant proportion of my close friends were going through 57 varieties of sheer hell over their decisions to come out, I was footling about, dipping a toe in the rainbow waters, but basically carrying on as "normal". (I did always hate the term "bi-curious", though - particularly the sneering tone in which I often heard it pronounced.) My policy of mentioning partners to my family but not one-night stands meant that the issue never arose in that arena. And although I broke up with one long-term boyfriend over my having snogged a woman, it was only around mid-1998 that I actually articulated the thought that I'd like to explore the space a little more thoroughly - maybe even see if I might find a girlfriend. Then I fell in love with Niall in early 1999, and that was - blissfully - that. So now I'm happily monogamous, planted firmly in the middle of the heteronormative highway, bi-invisible, and feeling increasingly bi-bolshy. One thing I've been doing, in my head, is going back and revisiting the history of my sexuality. I mean, for instance, not glossing over the time I fell passionately in crush with Catherine Byrne as Viola in Twelfth Night (appropriate, no?) circa 1987. Acknowledging that when I look at people, I see not only the obvious "male | female" distinction but also a "phwoar | meh" distinction, which is independent of gender. (Oddly, it took me years to associate my "oh my god, must talk to that woman, eek, hope she'll like me" reaction with sexual attraction, but of course that's what it is.) I'll most likely never kiss another woman, but I feel more bisexual now, in some ways, than when it was an option.
Brains - I love intelligence. I love people who are roaringly, searingly, triple-somersaultificaciously intelligent and articulate. I love people who can take a handful of tangled propositions and factoids and build from them an elegant, clear argument that distinguishes convincingly between relevancy and distraction, between rhetoric and substance. I love people who care passionately about a subject and can explain its complexities to the uninitiated. I love people who can tell a story, make a poem or construct a piece of visual art in a way that communicates with power and truth. I love people who are secure enough in their intelligence that they don't feel threatened by that of others, who are able to step outside of the mental constructs they create and acknowledge that starting with a different set of assumptions would lead to a different result. I love people who use their intellect generously - not to show how clever they are and how superior to anyone whose talents happen to lie in other directions, but to share their abilities, to enlighten and amuse, to open doors to fields of thought where their hearers may not have ventured. Brains rock.
Brel, Jacques - When I listen to music with lyrics, it's for the lyrics. If the lyrics make me squirm, I can't like the song. Brel is one of the great lyricists - his anger, irony, bitter humour and (yes) intelligence just get right in amongst me and make my heart sing along. I'm a total sucker for emotionally open, simple, unafraid songs, and Brel at his best is peerless in this genre. See also, Bragg, Billy, who can reduce me to tears in two faux-banal lines.
Broadband - I sort of don't remember what it was like not to have broadband - let alone not to have an Internet connection at all. What dark ages those must have been! Our children will ask us about them and greet our answers with disbelieving smirks (one's immediate prehistory, I think, being always the hardest period to grasp). When we first got ADSL I wrote a very silly poem about it.
Biodegradability - When I rule the world, no non-biodegradable substance for which there exists a biodegradable alternative will be permitted (and I don't mean a "financially viable" alternative or a "realistic" alternative, either - do the research, people). That is all.
Bed - Oh, god, bed. The sheer bliss of being horizontal, in the dark, with nothing to do (until the next squawk) but sleep. I get spam from time to time with the subject line "Last longer in bed". I'm tempted, I can tell you. Of course, I'm useless at going to bed early, so I don't get to spend nearly as much quality time with my bed as I'd like. But I'm working on that.
cangetmad for a letter in the alphabet meme, and she gave me a B. (If anyone still wants letters, ask and you'll receive.)Babies - I mean, babies! They're great! (I'm trying to expand on "great" here, but I've realised that if you agree with me, then you know what makes babies so great, and if you're not that pushed about them, then you're unlikely to accept my assertions.) My first close-up baby was my little sister, who was born when I was 6.5. I wrote stories for her before she was born (I remember one starring my teddy-bear, eponymously titled "Flaubert's Silliness"), and as soon as she arrived I was completely besotted. When my mother was pregnant with my brother (I was 10), I read a heap of her pregnancy literature and was utterly taken with the idea that I could potentially do this amazing thing too. In my mid-twenties I went on a serious, and very unpleasant, ARGH FUCK I AM BARREN OMG!1!eleventy-one!! kick - no evidence for this whatsoever, you understand, just the screaming horrors. So I felt jolly silly, I can tell you, when we eventually got around to trying to conceive and it took us, um, three weeks. So yeah, the paragon of babies, the pinnacle, the apogee (so far) of the class, is that baby I had on 22 August 2004: my Glorious Oyster. He's now over 20 months old, of course, so he's heading rapidly out of baby territory. However, he still identifies as a baby: from time to time he points to himself and explains, gravely, "Oisín baba" (pronounced Unny-baba), which is cute beyond anything one should have to endure. Mind you, this morning he remarked, "Oisín little boy" (Unny-ninni-boy), so I suspect he won't accept the "baby" label for much longer. (But "boy" starts with B too, so it still works.)
Breastfeeding - I didn't like it at first. Not at all, in fact. But after the first six weeks were over I began to see the point. It really is brilliant. My body! Making milk! For my baby! As Anne Enright says in Making Babies, it's a whole new bodily function - astonishing. When I went back to work in 2005 I pumped for the first five months - and I actually sort of liked it. I enjoyed being able to go to a quiet room twice a day and think about my beloved baby. The worst part of pumping was the grindingly tedious washing and sterilising routine. I much preferred the period when I visited the creche for a feed every lunchtime. Now that Oisín eats a full range of grown-up food, of course, he no longer needs my milk from a nutritional point of view (I mean that although it's still beneficial, he'd be OK without it), but the comfort, the convenience, the calming effect, and the sheer cuddliness of breastfeeding make me delighted to carry on. I tend to avoid answering the question "how long are you planning to continue?". I don't feel the need to make a firm statement on the matter. I'm glad we made it to a year, because I never had to mess around with formula. It makes very little sense to me to stop before at least one of us wants to, and until that point it's business as usual.
Battles, picking my - I am a strong theoretical proponent of the "pick your battles" philosophy, whereby you do not beat yourself up over examples of how your actions deviate from your principles (e.g., in my case, using biodegradable disposables instead of cloth nappies, occasionally buying from anti-union companies, not challenging hate speech wherever I hear it, driving to choir rehearsal, not bathing my son often enough, living in squalor, procrastinating over eating cheap and nutritious but unappetising vegetables until they shrivel and die at the back of the fridge and have to be thrown out, etc.), but instead focus on succeeding where you can and celebrating the successes. Over time, the idea is, I suppose, that you "win" some of the battles and can take on a few more. But not being super-person isn't actually equivalent to being DOOMED WORM, despite popular opinion. (Protest too much, much?)
Bach, J.S. - God's more talented brother. Double violin concerto. Goldberg Variations. Art of the Fugue. John Passion. Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. Brandenburg. Cello suites. Piano partitas. Italian concerto. All the billions of motets and cantatas and sonatas and everything else. Awe. Love. Nuff said.
Bisexuality - I've been thinking about bisexuality a fair bit recently. I used to feel that as a clear beneficiary of het privilege I hadn't earned the right to use the label about myself. Certainly, at a time when a significant proportion of my close friends were going through 57 varieties of sheer hell over their decisions to come out, I was footling about, dipping a toe in the rainbow waters, but basically carrying on as "normal". (I did always hate the term "bi-curious", though - particularly the sneering tone in which I often heard it pronounced.) My policy of mentioning partners to my family but not one-night stands meant that the issue never arose in that arena. And although I broke up with one long-term boyfriend over my having snogged a woman, it was only around mid-1998 that I actually articulated the thought that I'd like to explore the space a little more thoroughly - maybe even see if I might find a girlfriend. Then I fell in love with Niall in early 1999, and that was - blissfully - that. So now I'm happily monogamous, planted firmly in the middle of the heteronormative highway, bi-invisible, and feeling increasingly bi-bolshy. One thing I've been doing, in my head, is going back and revisiting the history of my sexuality. I mean, for instance, not glossing over the time I fell passionately in crush with Catherine Byrne as Viola in Twelfth Night (appropriate, no?) circa 1987. Acknowledging that when I look at people, I see not only the obvious "male | female" distinction but also a "phwoar | meh" distinction, which is independent of gender. (Oddly, it took me years to associate my "oh my god, must talk to that woman, eek, hope she'll like me" reaction with sexual attraction, but of course that's what it is.) I'll most likely never kiss another woman, but I feel more bisexual now, in some ways, than when it was an option.
Brains - I love intelligence. I love people who are roaringly, searingly, triple-somersaultificaciously intelligent and articulate. I love people who can take a handful of tangled propositions and factoids and build from them an elegant, clear argument that distinguishes convincingly between relevancy and distraction, between rhetoric and substance. I love people who care passionately about a subject and can explain its complexities to the uninitiated. I love people who can tell a story, make a poem or construct a piece of visual art in a way that communicates with power and truth. I love people who are secure enough in their intelligence that they don't feel threatened by that of others, who are able to step outside of the mental constructs they create and acknowledge that starting with a different set of assumptions would lead to a different result. I love people who use their intellect generously - not to show how clever they are and how superior to anyone whose talents happen to lie in other directions, but to share their abilities, to enlighten and amuse, to open doors to fields of thought where their hearers may not have ventured. Brains rock.
Brel, Jacques - When I listen to music with lyrics, it's for the lyrics. If the lyrics make me squirm, I can't like the song. Brel is one of the great lyricists - his anger, irony, bitter humour and (yes) intelligence just get right in amongst me and make my heart sing along. I'm a total sucker for emotionally open, simple, unafraid songs, and Brel at his best is peerless in this genre. See also, Bragg, Billy, who can reduce me to tears in two faux-banal lines.
Broadband - I sort of don't remember what it was like not to have broadband - let alone not to have an Internet connection at all. What dark ages those must have been! Our children will ask us about them and greet our answers with disbelieving smirks (one's immediate prehistory, I think, being always the hardest period to grasp). When we first got ADSL I wrote a very silly poem about it.
Biodegradability - When I rule the world, no non-biodegradable substance for which there exists a biodegradable alternative will be permitted (and I don't mean a "financially viable" alternative or a "realistic" alternative, either - do the research, people). That is all.
Bed - Oh, god, bed. The sheer bliss of being horizontal, in the dark, with nothing to do (until the next squawk) but sleep. I get spam from time to time with the subject line "Last longer in bed". I'm tempted, I can tell you. Of course, I'm useless at going to bed early, so I don't get to spend nearly as much quality time with my bed as I'd like. But I'm working on that.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 10:05 am (UTC)I understand the ideas around "heterosexual privilege", and, as you know, have my own benefits there as someone who happens and chooses to look not conventionally lesbian, but I think it overlooks the internal aspects. Yes, it's bloody important not to experience violence and discrimination. But to disappear, to have no external solidarity when your internal reality is still not the same as most people's - that's real and important, too.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-11 10:04 am (UTC)