I am also listening to the Canada Reads folks, and they’re explaining how ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’ is so culturally specific (ie not about whites, not about men) that they cannot possibly recommend it to all Canadians, as opposed to King Leary, which is safely about a hockey player, and that’s not a culture at all. My heart is with this book to win, but my brain knows it won’t. Speculative fiction! Women! Caribbean culture! Better get to more standard books about snow and white and ice and snow in Canada.

It’s really a rather nice feeling.

So to counteract that, I will complain.

When I was going somewhere I didn’t want to go to, at -20 weather, before 8 on Saturday, I had to pick up gas. (Subcomplaint: lost my bus pass.) Fine. I also decided to get myself one of those machine espressos, which are unaccountably tasty and in any case hot.

I go to pay, and the guy at the counter asks me if I am cold. Well, yes, it’s minus fucking twenty out, of course I’m cold. No, he says, he means I seem cold-like-unfriendly. I am not sure how friendly I am supposed to be while waiting in line at the cash while he chats with another customer, but obviously friendlier. I ignore that and say it’s early and cold, and he informs me this is Canada! And we must get used to the cold! And not complain![1] And also I should smile more and be less cold.

Today’s xkcd comic:

The forum for the chat about this thread? Unsurprisingly, how it just happens to be true, women are just worse at math than men (overlapping bell curves etc), hunter gatherer proves it, how could we think otherwise, etc etc. Historically, there’s been a lot of trying to prove that people who aren’t white Christian men are stupider than those who are, by trying to parse brain size, brain weight ratio, size of various subparts of the brain, and so on, and they’ve all been shown to be bullshit. So the standard of proof to show that there is an innate biological difference that makes women stupider than men is really high, and it’s so far been unproven.

Some of my favourite quotes:

Seriously, I think that, on average, boys are better at math than girls (just because of the way our brains evolved)

It’s just science! I think it, and I used a science word, so I proved it.

I believe the genders were in equal positions during the hunter-gatherer era (women may have even had a little more going for them than men) but the trend was towards men dominating women during the agricultural revolution, due to unequal division (i.e. specialization) of tasks due to biological differences.

I’m not sexist, because I claim that thousands or tens of thousands or a lot of years ago, women were smarter than men, but now they have uteruses so they don’t have to think.

Well, the whole point is that they’re brains function somewhat differently, actually, because they serve somewhat different purposes. Just think about an average society: generally the male will be the one doing the hunting/raising the money, right? To do that he needs to solve problems. To do that he needs more logical components of his brain.

Men work more, therefore they are smarter. There are absolutely no societal reasons for this to be true, so it must be the brain. Men hunt down the money, like when they work as middle management, and women gather up the laundry.

Now, I’m not dismissing society as a factor; in fact, I think societal forces are the main factor (as they are what magnify the differences—in a balanced society, I think the differences would probably be minimal); it’s just that, when looking for the origin of all of these societal forces, I can think of no other explanation than biology.

I can’t think of another answer. Some might say that this proves that men aren’t creative, but I say it proves that there is no other answer.

There are some people valiantly (and, of course, pointlessly) fighting the good fight there, but I am going to go and smile and be super friendly to all the strangers I pass by on the street so that when they try to pick me up, I’m a bitch for not being interested in them.

[1] What would we ever talk about if we didn’t complain about the weather? We can no longer even complain that HNIC always shows the Leafs since, due to their not being very good, they don’t.

Now of course I have the world’s teensiest circle of friends. But they are friends that I can count on, even if, between everyone’s busy-ness, I never actually see any of them.

But though I know I used to be more dedicated at trying to keep in touch, I don’t remember how I did it, or imagine how it could have been me who did it. I cannot figure out how I might try to do the same thing again. As I sometimes feel it might be nice to have a few more friends, I think, oh, I ought to try making some, but I’m not entirely sure how (my better friends also have small circles of friends), and perhaps I will make an effort, briefly, say on facebook, but if it’s not reciprocated, well, that’s it. I do not want to force myself onto people. Probably they’re lazy like me, but the truth is that I do not want to know the truth.

This is generally true. I do not want to know what people really think of me. If there is a specific action I do that drives you nuts, it’s not a weird pet peeve, and you’re actually someone I care about making happy, tell me. Otherwise: no. I don’t want to know that friend A wishes I’d message less and friend B wishes I’d go to restaurants that serve things that are neither Indian nor breakfast. (Look, I will go to those, but why bother, when there is so much Indian food and so many pancakes around?) Or whatever my irritations are, no doubt legion. I even more do not want to know what casual acquaintances think of me. Polite fictions, people.

Matilda, for instance, is fine. She doesn’t limp anymore and she’s fat, as really skinny cats go. She has a nice purse dog collar (apparently purse dogs have smaller necks than cats, and cat collars are too big for her) and doesn’t try to go outside now. She is on and off loving again, though she slept on me this morning and purred. She never does that except when it is inconvenient.

Mostly I am not talking about things to people. Mostly I am not thinking about things. Will it break them? Will it help? I don’t know, or don’t want to know. Avoiding works well. I can forget things after a time, float along on a river of things working themselves out behind the scenes. This isn’t what caused things to go bad. I don’t think anything caused that. I don’t know if avoidance helped (kept me sane, ish) or hurt (kept me from doing things that might or might not have made a change) but it was all I could manage.

It’s interesting sometimes to see how other people deal. Mostly it seems to be the same way I do: avoidance for personal issues, working their asses off for other people. Averages out, in the end.

They were also talking about how Obama just isn’t able to make the witty retort in a debate. It’s just not a talent he has. Which is a load of crap. Yes, certainly it’s easier for some people to do the quotable phrase, and some subjects lend themselves to it more than others. But it’s a skill, a learnable one, especially if you’re as intelligent as Obama clearly is. It may not be a skill he thinks is worth learning, or it may be useful to him to be able to claim that he can’t do the witty remarks, he can only do the long, well-thought out speeches.

What amazed me was the credulity – or feigned credulity – of the hosts. “Why yes! Obama is just not able to come up with bon mots! Absolutely! Nor can any of the speechwriters he has, nor are there any speechwriters capable of coming up with them who are willing to work on the Obama campaign.”

It’s a skill, like charm, not an inborn talent. It requires practice. This is something which a radio interview host ought to know, because it’s a skill they use, too.

Things are a lot easier once you realize they’re practiced skills. He’s not charming, he is actively charming you. Charm as a verb. It’s great to have that ability, and it’s clear some people have it more easily than others, but it’s something people can choose to do or not, and it’s something I am wary of, because it’s so often used cleverly, to mask something else. (Usually, but not always, to mask obnoxious levels of self-interest.)

I, of course, am effortlessly charming, and clever, and am never hiding a hidden agenda. Vote for me! I won’t bother to do much, which means I won’t do anything wrong.

Nothing majorly bad happened, just a huge list of fucking irritating shit, including forgetting my bus pass and having to reinstall Office several times and still having it not work right. I watched last night’s House, though, which though a little farfetched medically was funny again and surprised me with the twist at the end, so I am in a reasonably good mood to go to sleep. Then tomorrow will be better, because I will complain to someone if it is *worse*.

Moon posts will start tomorrow. I wanted to start them on something a little less irritated.

But in random looking about, I came upon a list of the seas of the moon, and decided to blog under their names, one a day, until I either finish them or get bored.

I also particularly hate when the ground is painfully slippery, so I walk very slowly (even worse than usual) terrified I will fall and break my legs. I have fallen in the past, and though I’ve gotten nasty bruises, I have never broken anything from slipping on the ice. But still, I am constantly paranoid about this. So I am in the cold and the wind even longer as I pick my way on the few ice-free sidewalk parts.

A quick hate shout-out to: people who congregate at the front of the bus, leaving lots of room at the back, and the bus drivers who let them do that and then drive by chilled and hopeful people waiting at bus stops despite there being room in the bus; people who stop on the wrong side of the escalator, especially if they were standing on the right side for half the stairs, then moved over to block everyone for the second half; people who drive into an obviously blocked intersection so they can be stuck there during the red light, especially those who do it over a crosswalk; people who forget to reset their alarm clocks so they cannot sleep in even though they carefully scheduled it so they could. I’m tired again today and I have only myself to blame.

It is somehow Creme Egg (and Caramilk Egg) time. I have the sneaking suspicion that the egg season has been slowly growing (though the end date cutoff seems unchanged at Easter), but I have no resentment about how the season is getting longer and longer, now it starts before Valentine’s Day — what’s next, red and green eggs for Christmas? No, I think: hurray! Overly sweet candy for an extra month!

Then I get my hair cut, ending my not so successful try with long layers. Not that it looked particularly bad, but the ends being all different lengths drove me nuts. They’re driving me more nuts every day, but I am holding off on cutting my own hair with blunt scissors, if just barely.

And then we take family photos, which will show an amusing clash of outfits: my mother in jeans and a winter shirt, me in jeans and a summer shirt, one sister in a fancy dress. Nothing says “awesome party” like “dress however you want”. (I may wear a long sleeved shirt underneath, if I can find a navy one.) I am dragging a friend, who will probably require something incredibly annoying in return. Still preferable than going solo. Someone to be mean with!

The NYT article called “At last, a $20,000 cup of coffee” amazes me. Were we all waiting for a coffee brewer that costs about one thousand times as much as a cheap one? Was it on anyone’s wishlist? Is there no way to make a good cup of brewed coffee for some intermediate price? Yes, I would totally go buy a cup of that coffee if I knew it were for sale nearby.

I was too tired to uncover my car this evening, and I know that tomorrow morning, I will bitterly regret having waited.

Matilda likes to sleep under the bathtub, and all the wet catfood in a can of her favourite kind of food won’t tempt her out. Perverse thing. She’ll appear at about 3 in the morning, because it’s best to be friendly in the inconvenient hours.

(I just made the muffins anyhow, as I woke up not very tired, though with strawberries instead of raspberries.)

Update: they turned out all raw on the inside. No muffins for me.

In other irritable person news, I overheard some woman yelling at someone on the phone. Apparently the person (guy, I think) had ditched her without notice, and she explained that it was ok if he called to let her know beforehand (I would agree, for reasonable amounts of beforehand, where reasonable is not “well, I tried to call you 45 minutes before but you didn’t pick up your cell”), but no one could screw her over twice! She’d forgive him this time, but no one screws her over twice! It’s ok if you have to cancel, but don’t screw her over, because no one does that twice!

She was wrong, though. This guy could totally make plans with her and blow her off, screwing her over twice. He wouldn’t, one presumes, have a chance to do it three times.

We have the love trials of the wealthy girls (though with less sex than in the Upper East Side), we have the unnamed narrator, we have the focus on the narrator’s use of the internet.

I am enjoying the book, but I am reading it in Kristen Bell’s voice, which is causing some cognitive dissonance.