azurelunatic | Colliding Subsets

Most men I've heard from think that Heinlein women are reasonable or admirable. Most women I've heard from think -- well, the best summation I've heard was "Heinlein women are spunky because Heinlein men like them that way". Admittedly, a lot of Heinlein's characterization problems applied to both sexes, but the only Heinlein female I can respect is Hazel in _Moon_ and _Rolling Stones_.

Actually, I wanted to be like a Heinlein heroine for the longest time... sometime between the ages of twelve and sixteen...

Of all Heinlein's heroines, Podkayne bothers me the most. And Gillian, post-Martian. Anne the Fair Witness, I adore, mostly because she's like a very strong grown-up version of Mona. It pleases her to be a secretary, not the other way around.

I like Friday because she kicks ass, she's accustomed to kicking ass, and she gets bloody sick of all the bullshit and just wants to settle down happily in a family. She hasn't stagnated, the last we've heard from her. She's an active voice in the community and doing just fine. Gillian seems to have become less, become consumed by her duties and the rest of the community. Friday's still a fighter.

I'm still growing out of having been stomped on by Shawn. Darkside has very mixed feelings about Shawn. He thinks on the one hand that he'd like to get together with the guy to compare notes on mayhem; on the other hand, he despises the guy who could have left me with the reactions I still have despite it all. (Midnight crying on the phone to one's best friend does nothing to reinforce said best friend's good opinion of Shawn.)

In self-defense, lately I've been choosing men who like me spunky.

Yeah, makes sense. It's the idea of only having a spine because your guy wants you to that disturbs me. (Well, the word "spunky" disturbs me too, but I think it's the implied patronization.)

These days, I'll have a spine whether a guy wants me to or not. It wasn't always that way, though. (See Shawn.) Darkside's trying to train me out of spinelessness, and when he catches me at it, gives me what-for. Not a tongue-lashing, exactly, but a "I know you're smarter and stronger and braver than that; I know you; you can't fool me" lecture.

I find it interesting that one of my deep reasons for going so ga-ga over Darkside is that I like the person I am when I'm around him. I want to be clueful and spineful on my own, and smart and happy and funny and ... well... yeah. So I'm learning that, and hanging around with him... the me that he likes is the me that I like, and that makes me happy.

Bothari. Cordelia.

I think everyone does it to some extent. Finding a tidy ends-tucked-in like that (both of you liking the same form of you, which happens around him) is good, especially if it happens in the other direction too.

I don't know what he thinks of himself when he's around me versus who he is at other times. He can stand me for longer periods of time than he can stand other people. As he's as true-introvert as they come, this is a good sign.

...that I love the way you can put several pages' worth of analysis into two words and a few lines after that? I followed you with exactness, which was of course what I was intended to do; I have a feeling that if

wiredferret gets to this post, she's going to follow as well; so's everyone who reads Bujold and retains the important bits.

I really do like layers-upon-layers of meaning and symbolism packed into words. It's so fun to encode it, then try to decode someone else's. Except I'm not very good at encoding in any language other than my personal experience shorthand, which makes for mass confusion for everyone who hasn't lived through the same events, read the same books. That's one of the things that I want Rose to explore.

Thankee. I did cheat though, because Bujold did all of the encoding for those words. Very very occasionally, I've been able to say a few keystone words or phrases that weren't set up by someone else. It's a wonderful feeling. If I could do it at all consistently, I'd write more poetry and use it.

I try not to use my personal experience shorthand, but in specific fields of knowledge (i.e., not just my personal experience, but spinning or programming or some such) I just give up and give inline definitions for everything. For some time I wrote diaries in public based on personal experience shorthand (in symbols! It was fun). I still enjoy tucking for-me-only bits into seemingly public information. I think much more naturally in non-obvious conversation bits -- tone of voice, eye position, body shape and motion, pauses between words -- than I do in straightforward communication, so I don't always translate all of it. I can't always translate all of it. Frustrating.

Does anybody ever write dance-poetry?

I boggle bizarrities upon bizarrities and wind up using combinations of predefined things to stand for personal experience, which is keys to gajillions of other things. For example, cross Barrayar with Friday and what do you get? Something very scary, if-and-only-if you're me.

You are a GLF. That-idiot-Shawn is a BLF. A VBLF.

But I still remember that still evening of starlight, love and laughter, covert sensuality behind a half-closed door.

rosalynde is perhaps my attempt at encoding the things that have happened in my life so that others may wind up drawing on the experience, referring to it.

Can of beans.
Pencil in the microwave.
Air tazer.
Ultimate Penetration Headphones.
Firecrackers in the campfire.
Refueling the lawnmower.
Drinking the experiment.

I know you've got to remember some of these.

Terrible Tuesday.

River never really grokked poetry until I started to demonstrate it to him. Not by looking up poems in a book, but by talking to him on the phone, speaking of the view outside my window. I painted it for him, warm wood frame inside, black crackle birch branch with white snow, cold cold. Soft from the sky falling, down... Cold. Warm and dry, watching.

He never got poetry, not until he heard my voice. Then he started to picture it for himself, the way he heard me say it. I knew I had to be careful. Musn't break the boy's mind; I knew what to say, so I musn't say it. All my feelings, thoughts, could be his too, if I phrased it right. I could speak, and he would feel and believe. Thin chalk sidewalk-line of ethics: break the back.

Anne seemed very -- very bland to me. I also disliked Heinlein's simplistic view of what telling the complete truth was without making assumptions. There are very few things you can actually attest to without assumption. I didn't get much of a feel for Anne as a person, though. She filled a number of boxes in my mind, but didn't have a...a voice.

Podkayne is scary, yeah. ("I don't really want to be a space captain. I'd rather be in charge of a creche and play with all the babies and marry the space captain.") Maybe he was trying to better appeal to girls of that time?

I'd need to reread _Friday_ to discuss her character well. Right now I mostly remember that the picture cover was spooky (damn near my hair and eye color), that she was one of the characters who hid intelligence so as not to spook the normals, and that she was one of the...call them humane rights characters. Heinlein did a fair amount of pushing on the humane rights boundaries, especially for his time. Intelligent anything == people, even if it's not human. The way she was implementing female spooked me, but I could have missed some of her layers of blending in with everyone else. I'll reread at some point, I guess. Heinlein's still comfort reading for me, because I grew up with it.

I wanted to be Jubal Harshaw, Kip (_Have Spacesuit, Will Travel_), or Clark (Podkayne). They actually come close to the Maiden/Mother/Crone symbol space covering, which is amusing. Lazarus would fit better in that space, but he's a prick, and a rather boring one at that. (Jubal is close to the same character as Lazarus, but would be more fun to be.) The character(s) I really most wanted to be weren't Heinlein characters. They're in a story I later learned was a snide commentary on educational theory. Two Earth kids discover teaching materials from mumble-mumble-alien-space (experimental transporter dropped them on Earth instead) and learn well enough from them that they're able to use the Jabberwocky to transit to the other space. A completely different learning system. I still want.

Darkside's response to Shawn sounds a little like the stereotypical big sibling response to someone picking on the little sibling. I don't know if that's an accurate assessment, but it might be an interesting perspective on your relationship w/Darkside.

Anne gained a voice for me with her comments about getting drunk with some of her classmates, and then her comment that the Fair Witness robe didn't mean that she wouldn't step on feet if people were crowding her, and that high heels give one's footstomps Authority. Miriam never had a voice for me, other than marrying the guy that Jubal called "Stinky". The other one isn't even showing up on my screens, even though I know that there were three of them.

Jubal was classic Heinlein: that is to say, after reading Grumbles From The Grave, that was clearly Heinlein himself there. His line "Them stairs are killing me" shows up in his letters in one form or another far too often. It would be interesting to know if Heinlein ever attempted suicide.

I read Lazarus as complete Mary Sue. I don't see Harshaw so much as a Mary Sue, because Harshaw is so very much Heinlein, warts and all. Lazarus does bore me, though the sex entertained me in my rampantly horny phase.

I remember Maureen as being scarier than Friday. Maureen was raised in the "Be a good little woman" era, and survived into ... well, you've read the books. Friday had the excuse of being raised without a family and being super-competent just because she was. Maureen reads like she never had to work at anything; life just arranges itself around her, and she tidies up and does her research and carries on with her shopping and housekeeping as the universe spins backward to work out exactly right for her.

Friday has the universe dropping natural talent down upon her, and is yet another iteration of the Pinnochio story. Friday just wants to be loved, to have a family: something she never had. She tries to get it by pretending to be normal: she can't pretend to be normal, and loses the family. (I think that's the one time that Heinlein addressed the dark side of poly.) Eventually, Friday finds love with people who love her for who she is, and goes through fire and water and everything else to be with them. In some circles, settling down with a family would not be an acceptable goal for a genetically tweaked superhuman, but raising a family in a frontier world is just as challenging as anything else, and Friday's already demonstrated her own competence at a stunning variety of "appropriate" careers, and found them to be less than personally emotionally satisfying, not without people to love and be loved by. She can't go for off-planet jobs, not with the situation she found herself in. I think Heinlein may have done her an injustice in not writing the rollicking frontier planet adventures of Friday and her family (hmm, Heinlein's version of the Little House books...), but he may have already done that with the Stone family.

Yeah, Lazarus is straight Mary Sue. I think most of Heinlein's female characters are to some extent or other. Concept I was discussing with Arlo a while back: assume we get Varley-level body mods (Most body mods become the time/money/danger/reversibility equivalent of getting your teeth cleaned or hair cut nowadays.). This will really wig out all the straight guys simultaneously, because half of them will transform themselves into Playboy models and the other half will hit on them. (Other chaos will ensue; this is just the most amusing.) Heinlein does this indirectly a lot, and directly in at least two ways: Laz and Lor and the situation in _I Will Fear No Evil_ (male brain transplanted into curvaceous female secretary).

I vaguely remember Miriam as being meek and scuttly after she married Stinky, but that may or may not be accurate. Stinky was filled out more and more of a pain in the uncut version. The other was Gillian, who went on the magical mystery tour with Mike and was writing the Martian-English dictionary. No, she was the nurse. I don't remember who the third secretary was either. I never saw Anne doing anything for herself. Even the footstomps were because they were escorting Mike through the press of people to the meeting with the UN head or whatever. Secretary Douglas, maybe?

Maureen is one of the strongest incest stories. Maybe it's just that my family is ugly, but I'm not terribly interested in incest stories. I hadn't thought about the world working perfectly for her, but you're right: it is unrealistic in an annoying way.

Friday's family didn't read as a dark side of poly to me, but it's been a while ago. It read as Anita (? The unacknowledged family boss) being a manipulative bitch. I think there were also some comments from one of the men of the family about tiptoeing around her or humoring her or some such. Warning bells. If you have to tiptoe around and soften the truth for one you're married to, either they're currently recovering from a huge shock (or otherwise in a temporarily wacked condition), or your marriage is for shit. Admittedly, the way it worked out required poly for the proper complexity, but you could get much the same dynamic in a sibling rivalry relationship or any number of third-grade friendships. Friday's having been designed that way was quite a satisfactory explanation for her overhelping of cool features, yes.

Um, I apologize for and will translate any sentences which have run away with me. Late night. Good, complex book.

I vaguely remember Miriam as being sassy to Jubal when she was his secretary because he expected it of her, and much more reserved after marriage, but with what looked like genuine maternal-happiness over the kid. She just doesn't stick in my mind very much. The three secretaries were blond, brunette, and redhead, and small, medium, and large -- and just so interchangeable at first!

Did it seem to you that after Patty came along, she got all of her own personality, and then all of Gillian's too? They were, IIRC, pretty much a physical match, and then started becoming a personality match as well, but in such a way that Mike latched on to Patty as his #1 and sent Gillian off into the background.

I liked the fact that Johann really needed the help once he found himself in the new body. If Eunice had been kicked out, and he'd started doing all that on his own, it would have been ... well, not as good a story, for one. I grew up on that book. Perhaps my favorite part about so many of those Crazy Years books is the newspaper clippings.

Anne gains more of her own when she appears as a cameo character in other books, like when she shows up at the end of Number of the Beast. That was her, right? I've always had a fondness for the silent kind of character who's just there. I don't remember where it was that it was mentioned, but somewhere in one of the books, it mentioned that in the Fair Witness training, it took an act of supreme Will to speak up while you were in Fair Witness mode.

Any happy-happy family that has internal dynamics like that has a Bad Thing going on. I point it out as the Dark Side of Poly only because Heinlein usually has such a rose-tinted view of polyamory shown in his stories; this one's got not only Janet & George & their third, it's also got a dysfunctional poly family that's probably going to wind up in serious trouble a few more crises down the line. It's showing that it's not the number of people that makes for happy loving family, it's the personalities and compatibility and communication therein that makes for a happy family. I like that he was capable of writing a poly family gone wrong.

Podkayne was his absolute favorite character of all time. ...Somehow this scares me more.

I've read at least one story about the character he developed her out of. Puddin'. Turns out the great boyfriend she's trying to starve herself for likes Rubinesque women -- there's an important near-end scene in an art museum -- and they all live happily ever after, or some such. Very much a nonentity. A similar character, but with a little spine, shows up in _Menace from Earth_: she's going to marry him and take his name, but they'll keep on working together on building spaceships. (I find the concept of automatically taking his name more repulsive if they're going to name the equal-shares, both-of-them business Name and Name, Inc. It's also a stupid marketing decision.)

I read that one too, and I liked her a lot better there than as Podkayne. I liked the one in "The Menace from Earth" a lot better, most likely because she felt like me; I ran into her sometime in junior high.

I wonder how much of my attitude towards men came from Heinlein's women?

That's a very, very good assessment of my relationship with Darkside, actually. We're either acting like siblings or like a grade school dating pair. He's acting more like a sibling, and I'm acting exactly like a fifth grader with a crush, only with more inherent and aware sexuality. (Darkside's been more often coming out with these absolutely incredible chances for me to make bug-eyes and raise Freudian eyebrows at him, which has been amusing. He hasn't gotten any in a long time.)

But yes, Darkside and I are almost like brother and sister, functionally. I tag along after him like the little sister here and there, and he gets grouchy at any guy I make eyes at until he gets to know the guy, and then if the guy is making me feel bad in any way, he gets grouchy with the guy again. He hits me over the head to cheer me up. That's very much a sibling thing to do. He worries about me getting enough sleep; I worry about him getting enough sleep.

It would really be rather cute if it were more appropriate for our age level.

Neighbor, on the other hand, is the one that I address as Big Brother. (I'm Little Sister to him.) He's suggested that I set a goal to marry Darkside (!) and then just wait for him to grow up. Um... Um. I think I did that with Shawn? Darkside's not Shawn, though. Neighbor thinks that I have Darkside, and that Darkside doesn't realize it yet.

...as long as you're acting appropriately. :)

Seriously, acting younger isn't necessarily bad. Acting dumber or meaner or more impulsively often is, but just acting younger can be fine.

No more fixer-upper relationships, please. Bad for you. Less time with the carpenter's level, more with the flowers. Good strong solid friendships with mutual support in are good for you, though. Whatever it develops into or doesn't, you and Darkside have that. Good thing.

Darkside needs to grow up before anybody thinks about marrying him or he thinks about marrying anybody. We had a bit of a discussion about that today, as a matter of fact: there was a Spaceballs reference he made about his homework, which I responded to; he responded to the reference with a "No"; I pointed out that a), he'd have to grow up before I would even consider that, and b), I'd been asking about his homework.

"I need to grow up?" He pointed out that I could stand a little more maturity myself, and the omnipresent fact that he's just not interested in me that way, which I pointed out that I already knew.

It's not that he's not a full adult yet -- he is, but he isn't, but he is -- it's just that he's not done growing yet. Some young men would have stopped growing by this point. He hasn't. He's still got a long way to go before realizing his full potential, while still being years ahead of other twenty-three-year-old boys I've run across. I'm not done yet either.

There's a distinct difference between growing together and fixer-uppering, and Darkside and I are both growing. Handing each other nails and picking up dropped hammers and occasionally giving shaky bits of structure a good solid smack to make it come tumbling down so it'll get rebuilt stronger, but growing. I think it's that the effort's mutual. I've never had a romantically-tinged friendship-with-a-guy before where I've been perceived as the lesser-stable one of the pair.

He sees me as utterly insane, sometimes, and is pushing me away from him every now and then so I'll be able to stand up on my own.

I like that. I like it that I don't need him. I like it that I wouldn't shrivel up and die without him. I'd be lonely, but I'd recover. There would always be a Darkside-shaped place in my mental shields where he fits just exactly so -- but I'd survive and stay functional, mostly, after a while.

Colliding Subsets

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and did I mention

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age level, schmage level...

Re: age level, schmage level...