Random observations, theories and speculation:
Tagged: observations RSS
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Chrysoula
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Chrysoula
A middle-aged man with a middle-aged women mentions Goldshire. He explains how in Goldshire, everything is located in sensible locations. Engineering trainers. Cooking trainers! And downstairs, warlock trainers! Soon after, they leave.
Then my attention is drawn to the trio the next table over by Mr. Hubbard and philisophical machine. It’s strange stuff, a mixture of business discussion and organizational theory and emotional talk. The primary speaker is relaxed and laughing a lot. He asks a lot of questions, encouraging the small business owner to pour out his dreams while the third member of the trio, a woman, looks on. The first thing I noticed about them, when I first arrived, was the paperwork on the table: a chart and what looked like a contract and notebooks.
They’re back to Mr. Hubbard and his philosophical machine again. The businessman is so interested. He’s a self-described pessimist who used to be an optimist, who does some sort of support consulting service, and who prefers to work with charities. He used to work for Microsoft. He has a three year old.
And now they’re looking at a binder, which outlines programs and training of some sort, with pricetags attached. The businessman asks if there’s a list of benefits to the training, rather than a list of what it contains. He’s in interviewer-mode now, listening to the primary speaker explain a list of bulletpoints about his experience, and nodding with the oh-so-neutral ‘k and mm-hmm of a hardened interviewer. Maybe this is some kind of sting. I can hope. The businessman volunteered to stay until 5, earlier. Now the woman is asking questions. She’s been very quiet previously; maybe she’s an employee or partner instead of a wife?
The businessman has gone to the bathroom now. The woman confides in the primary speaker that they own everything. She’s definitely involved with the businessman in some intimate fashion, or wants to be. She’s been taking very careful notes.
*sigh* There are better things to do with my time than this. It’s educational but I’m tired, and there’s not a pen or napkin to be found (where I might scribble a handy url for somebody else to find).
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Michelle
Which coffeeshop did you go to?
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Chrysoula
Starbucks at Fairwood shopping center. I signed up for the t-mobile wifi addon plan for my new cellphone!
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Chrysoula
So, I’ve hit a snag on the outlining that will require a slowdown– some worldbulding, some re-consideration. My self-imposed schedule, as you might recall, is very tight. Even tighter, since I was aiming for finishing the outline on the 30th so I could have a day to breathe before launching into the text.
I get all panicky when I think of my schedule as a hard deadline, as ‘must have X by end of November’.
But when I think of it like I was taught to think of deadlines at work, as ‘I think I can have X by the end of November, but of course events may revise that’, I feel calm, relaxed, as if it’s achievable.
I have to remember my theories about not rushing. But I also have to balance those against various unavoidable time limits. Juggle juggle.
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Nathan Fall
jugling is always fun…
I’m doing well with a stick Shift and it’s only been ehh… 5 days
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Chrysoula
For various reasons, I’m familiar with a lot of the stress and controversy and problems associated with breastfeeding vs. formula. Blogs and articles and ridiculous protests or complaints over and against breastfeeding imagery.
I thought I’d share the impression my own upbringing left me with, regarding breastfeeding, the ideas that all the science and data and reason must push against. ‘Cause I haven’t seen them mentioned by anybody else. Most protests are ‘gross!’ or ‘sexual objects in view of children!’ (I speak of the social reasons some people wouldn’t want to see other people doing it; the personal or occupational reasons one might not breastfeed cause no significant reaction).
On breastfeeding itself, I never got the impression that it was gross or offensive. Instead, I picked up the idea that it was something poor people did. Poor people, who couldn’t afford all the amenities of civilized life, fed their children the natural way. Formula and bottles were like tampons, eyeglasses and birth control. They were like nice clothes, and disposable diapers. They were like automobiles instead of bikes or horses. If you could use a bottle, you did. If you couldn’t, society was politely sympathetic and looked away when you found yourself temporarily embarassed. Society usually looks away when somebody experiences an unavoidable natural biological event.
This very well may have been a unique idea I cobbled together purely from observations and comparisons.
The other idea buried deep inside is that I should never ever let something I’m not comfortable with happen to my breasts. Except mammograms. With a grandmother who died of breast cancer because she was too shy to get treatment, my mother was very firm about that exception. But infants were never mentioned.
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Daniel Martin
You know what ticks me off about this? Breastfeeding, which should be accepted, is dismissed by such a large portion of the population that the pro-breastfeeding people get really, really militant about it, and work strongly to put out, not a message of “accept breastfeeding”, but of “if you don’t breastfeed you are EVIL AND WRONG”.
This never seems tempered by the fact that there are some women who really can’t breastfeed – sometimes the milk really truly doesn’t come in, or the mother is taking medications that come through in the milk. (Why would anyone want to tell a woman suffering from post-partum depression that she shouldn’t be taking her psychiatric medication?)
Now I will admit that some of the commercial interests selling infants formula in fact fully deserve the EVIL label, but I don’t see why it’s applied to mothers. That just seems counter-productive; it seems that the goal of more women breastfeeding would be more easily met by ensuring that there were adequate facilities for breastfeeding everywhere, and by eliminating the prejudice against seeing breastfeeding among others.
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Daniel Martin
You know, as I left that comment I was noticing this “Say It!” button. That’s one of Katherine’s current phrases for “read this aloud”: she’ll bring a book over, open it into your lap and point insistently at the words: “Say it, Daddy! Say It! Say it to me. Please.”. This is also what she uses if she wants you to read to her what it says on a sign: “Say the letters. Say Them!”
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Michelle
Daniel, there are also some breast, ah, architecture problems with breastfeeding. Nipples that just don’t poke outward, intense pain, not enough milk coming out due to hole problems (can’t just take a needle to those!) and such stuff are a few of the problems I’ve heard.
And Chrysoula, there was a perception in the past that BF was something poor people did. It seemed to be tied into the whole processed-food-is-cool craze. And now there’s a perception that formula is what poor people use.
For both of these you can pick your reason, it’s either because they don’t know any better or they don’t care about their kids or they don’t have the money to afford whatever the privelege-du-jour is.
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Stacy
This was interesting to read.
Since my Mom breastfed both my sister and me, I guess I always assumed that I would be able to breastfeed my babies. That’s what I wanted. I cried the first time I had to feed Asher formula. Oh, well. Like the other commenters said, breastfeeding just doesn’t work out for everyone.
Incidentally, breastfeeding is supposed to reduce your chances of getting breast cancer. Since my grandmother had breast cancer (actually it recently reappeared after 40 years or so of being in remission), that’s a benefit I was excited about.
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Annabelle
I didn’t know we had a grandmother die of breast cancer. But I do know that Merry wanted to breast feed her children but she had something wrong with her nipples.
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Annabelle
Which was probably the reason I went cholic. I am allergic to milk and was unable to be breastfeed. (Most of the time babies are not allergic to their mother’s milk.) I was given subsitute milk and cried my eyes and parent’s ears off.
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Spencer
Breastfeeding is gross. I believe in it, but it is still gross. The flip side of making enough milk is that I leak all the time. This is not comfortable or convenient. And, I agree with the perception that it is something that poor people do. One of the reasons we chose to breastfeed was economics. Formula would break our bank.
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Chrysoula
Anna, my darling sister, that’s not what I recall. Mom never tried to breastfeed either of us. She took medications to stop her from even producing milk– offering it was apparently standard for women in the military. We were both formula fed from day one. She did the same thing with Nathan. Her nipples were fine.
Also, you didn’t have a grandmother who died of breast cancer; it was the original Chrysoula Tzavelas, my biological father’s mother. So you probably never got the same lectures I did.
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Michelle, and 
Chrysoula are discussing. 
Nathan Fall is discussing. 
Spencer, 
Annabelle and 3 others are discussing. 
Michelle 2:24 am on February 20, 2007 Permalink
I feel like the god plot has been done enough, mostly in comics. Not that this means the creators won’t do it. It also feels strange that they’d be making a big deal out of the genetics of the thing if there was a supernatural element to it. I suppose it’s a way out of the not-so-great science they’ve used so far, but that would make me sad. I’d rather they tried to make their science internally consisted then go with “it’s magick!”.
I remember reading something about the creators commenting that the Heroes were the next stage in human evolution (granted it was on a biology in science fiction blog which was explaining that that was impossible; #3 at http://sciencefictionbiology.blogspot.com/2007/02/genetics-of-heroes.html).
Michelle 2:27 am on February 20, 2007 Permalink
*sigh* Somehow that comment posted before I was done with it. I have no idea how, actually.
Anyway, my only edits would be to change ‘consisted’ to ‘consistent’ and ‘impossible’ to ‘wrong’.
You know, we’re just getting into cell division in biology and soon we’ll be talking about genetics…
Chrysoula 2:55 am on February 20, 2007 Permalink
Well, they also talk about destiny a lot and I think that’s kind of bullshit. And it really seemed like the genetics thing is the excuse the scientists are making.
Hm. Apparently the creators of the show have said that the number 9 is a clue, as well as subcontinent mythology. 9 is one short of ‘perfection’, from what I’ve dug up. And of course, Sylar sees what is broken and how to fix it; apparently he thinks he needs to fix it by collecting all the powers. Hmmm.
Michelle 10:49 am on February 20, 2007 Permalink
Huh. I never got the impression he was trying to ‘fix’ anything by collecting the powers; simply making himself more powerful because he wants to be important. Especially after Mohinder’s father was so dismissive of him.
Chrysoula 12:54 pm on February 20, 2007 Permalink
I thought he said something to that effect in Six Months Ago, when he killed his first victim. At the time it seemed like a reference to the person not wanting his powers.
Michelle 5:24 pm on February 20, 2007 Permalink
Oh, he did! I just interpreted it as him seeing the mutation as something to fix but not that gathering the powers is part of that “fixing”. And he’s not fixing these people, he’s just killing them. He’s not even limiting it to people who don’t want their powers.
He said something about how powerful he’d be once he got the convincing-power which given his reaction to being told he didn’t have a power at the beginning of his plot makes me think he just wants to be powerful (to “prove” himself).
He doesn’t seem to have much method to his madness though. I would think there would be some powers that maybe he doesn’t want but if so we haven’t seen them yet.
It would be cool to see how exactly he gains their powers. I mean, eating their brains wouldn’t really work that way plus if it’s genetic then he doesn’t *need* their brains in the first place. I kind of wonder if he destroys it because there is some malformed part of the brain related to the mutation and he doesn’t want it found in an autopsy but he only needs to see the wrong bits to replicate them in himself. I dunno.
It all depends not only on what the writers want to do with the plot but also what changes they’re going to make to real science to fit the TV science. I can make extrapolations based on what I know about science but I can’t assume we all know the same things.
I guess… I’d have to say that making it magical seems as dumb to me as making the force biological does to Star Wars fans. It probably wouldn’t be a deal breaker but it would make me sad.
Michelle 10:38 pm on February 21, 2007 Permalink
Another thing that could support my something-going-on-in-the-brain idea is that one of Mohinder’s beginning monologues mentioned the “humans only use 10% of their brains!” myth.