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Dec. 1st, 2014 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsMy first December meme post! ... will be written up very quickly because of a series of unfortunate events this morning that involved me missing my scheduled bus back to Boston and then accidentally leaving my laptop charger behind in New York in the subsequent chaos. (I did eventually make it back to Boston, I am not stranded in Port Authority in the rest of my natural life, though it felt for a while like a near thing.) Therefore I have about three hours of laptop battery life to hoard until Friday when my charger and I will be gloriously reunited, which will make for an exciting week.
But that's not what I'm supposed to be talking about here, my topic for the first day of the December meme, as requested byapplegnat, is a woman I love and why!
I have two obvious answers to this question, because they are two women who made the bedrock of who I am, and the first is my mom and the second is Diana Wynne Jones.
Why do I love my mom? I mean aside from the whole mom thing, it's because she just keeps doing impressive and incredible things, and has been president of this and honored by that and was the first woman to achieve a full professorship in her department, et cetera et cetera, and if you'd just heard about her in that context you would have quite a different image of her I think than the person she actually is, which is the version of her I usually write about and so you guys hear about, this enthusiastic dorky weirdo who'll get briefly and hilariously obsessed with terrible television shows, who invents robots with iPads for heads in her spare time, who turns everything hard that's happened into her life into a wacky story, which is a convenient way of processing emotionally difficult things that I have inherited and which I'm grateful for. I'm really quite a lot like my mom in a lot of respects, which I am sometimes conflicted about, but there a lot of ways in which I am very, very happy and lucky to be like her.
So that's my mom, who shaped the way I interact with myself, a lot of it. And then there's Diana Wynne Jones, who shaped the way I look at other human beings. I mean, I've said this before, but I do think that because of Diana Wynne Jones I learned early to love characters for all the ways in which they're not perfect, for all their flaws in personality and all the ugly thoughts they carry around. And that translates over well to loving real people, I think, loving them for the people that they are, not the people that you want them to be, and loving them for all the ways in which they're not perfect. Diana Wynne Jones isn't perfect either. I love her for that, too.
But that's not what I'm supposed to be talking about here, my topic for the first day of the December meme, as requested by
applegnat, is a woman I love and why!I have two obvious answers to this question, because they are two women who made the bedrock of who I am, and the first is my mom and the second is Diana Wynne Jones.
Why do I love my mom? I mean aside from the whole mom thing, it's because she just keeps doing impressive and incredible things, and has been president of this and honored by that and was the first woman to achieve a full professorship in her department, et cetera et cetera, and if you'd just heard about her in that context you would have quite a different image of her I think than the person she actually is, which is the version of her I usually write about and so you guys hear about, this enthusiastic dorky weirdo who'll get briefly and hilariously obsessed with terrible television shows, who invents robots with iPads for heads in her spare time, who turns everything hard that's happened into her life into a wacky story, which is a convenient way of processing emotionally difficult things that I have inherited and which I'm grateful for. I'm really quite a lot like my mom in a lot of respects, which I am sometimes conflicted about, but there a lot of ways in which I am very, very happy and lucky to be like her.
So that's my mom, who shaped the way I interact with myself, a lot of it. And then there's Diana Wynne Jones, who shaped the way I look at other human beings. I mean, I've said this before, but I do think that because of Diana Wynne Jones I learned early to love characters for all the ways in which they're not perfect, for all their flaws in personality and all the ugly thoughts they carry around. And that translates over well to loving real people, I think, loving them for the people that they are, not the people that you want them to be, and loving them for all the ways in which they're not perfect. Diana Wynne Jones isn't perfect either. I love her for that, too.
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Date: 2014-12-02 02:06 pm (UTC)