Arrived in Indiana
Jun. 14th, 2024 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydamorehouse We are currently in a hotel room in Valparaiso, Indiana, basically waiting for the visitation to begin.
The drive down was just grueling. Without fun roadside attractions (which just didn't seem appropriate, as much as I would still like to see the Paul and Matilda Wegner Grotto someday,) it was just a slog. Plus, we managed to hit Chicago at THE WORST traffic time, the evening rush hour, and GPS made some.... let's call them "interesting" choices to try to avoid a 30 minute slowdown. At one point, our very hangry, irritated family managed to be on some random sideroad in some random Chicago exo-suburb and we got stopped by an actual TRAIN on the tracks. I really thought that there might be some kind of mutual murder, wherein we all just gnawed each other to death in our collective frustration.
My family needs to eat regularly on road trips. This is not news. We know this. We have learned this from hard won experience. YET, there always seems to be a trip like this where the stars misalign and we are hungry and angry and still hours from our destination and we all collectively lose our SH*T.
This was one of those.
I'm sure, too, that our general mood was all made that much worse by the fact that no one wanted to have to go to Valparaiso, and especially not for something like a funeral. (For those just tuning in, my mother-in-law passed away last Tuesday. She was 96.)
On the way down, I was listening to a book that was recommended on some list or other as queer cyberpunk. It's Charlie Stross's Rule 34, and I can't decide if this is the weirdest book I've ever listened to, or the most brilliant. Do you ever have books like that? The thing that I feel is weirdly genius is the way the book is told. The entire full-length novel is told in 2nd person, so it's all "You" do this, and "you" are having a bad hair day, and it really should not work as well as it does. Maybe it fails when read, silently, in one's head, but it becomes nearly invisible after a while in the audiobook narrative. I'm impressed. The book itself reminds me of all those British police procedurals that Shawn loves. It takes place in a near-future Scotland where our sort of main character. Liz, (we follow a number of different people's storylines, but she starts the book off) works for the police as a kind of meme cop, in a world where memes can be dangerous--sort of murderous versions of the Tide pod craze. It's very cyberpunk in that regard, and Liz is a lesbian, her lover is poly, and queerness is just threaded through most of the storylines in one way or another. I'm actually pretty impressed with Stross's backstory for Liz for the ways in which it mirrors my own experience (Liz manages to go to college and only hang out with gay men at the clubs and somehow misses ALL THE LESBIANS in the feminist study courses.) I may hate it when it all wraps up, but it's pretty decent so far? I wonder if, if a person read it to themselves, some of the procedural parts of the story would actually be boring enough to knock a person out, but for me, hearing it, it rolled just like watching something like In the Line of Fire or Vera.
Alright, my family is starting to make a move, so I'll end things here.
Hope you are all having a better day than the one we're about to have.
The drive down was just grueling. Without fun roadside attractions (which just didn't seem appropriate, as much as I would still like to see the Paul and Matilda Wegner Grotto someday,) it was just a slog. Plus, we managed to hit Chicago at THE WORST traffic time, the evening rush hour, and GPS made some.... let's call them "interesting" choices to try to avoid a 30 minute slowdown. At one point, our very hangry, irritated family managed to be on some random sideroad in some random Chicago exo-suburb and we got stopped by an actual TRAIN on the tracks. I really thought that there might be some kind of mutual murder, wherein we all just gnawed each other to death in our collective frustration.
My family needs to eat regularly on road trips. This is not news. We know this. We have learned this from hard won experience. YET, there always seems to be a trip like this where the stars misalign and we are hungry and angry and still hours from our destination and we all collectively lose our SH*T.
This was one of those.
I'm sure, too, that our general mood was all made that much worse by the fact that no one wanted to have to go to Valparaiso, and especially not for something like a funeral. (For those just tuning in, my mother-in-law passed away last Tuesday. She was 96.)
On the way down, I was listening to a book that was recommended on some list or other as queer cyberpunk. It's Charlie Stross's Rule 34, and I can't decide if this is the weirdest book I've ever listened to, or the most brilliant. Do you ever have books like that? The thing that I feel is weirdly genius is the way the book is told. The entire full-length novel is told in 2nd person, so it's all "You" do this, and "you" are having a bad hair day, and it really should not work as well as it does. Maybe it fails when read, silently, in one's head, but it becomes nearly invisible after a while in the audiobook narrative. I'm impressed. The book itself reminds me of all those British police procedurals that Shawn loves. It takes place in a near-future Scotland where our sort of main character. Liz, (we follow a number of different people's storylines, but she starts the book off) works for the police as a kind of meme cop, in a world where memes can be dangerous--sort of murderous versions of the Tide pod craze. It's very cyberpunk in that regard, and Liz is a lesbian, her lover is poly, and queerness is just threaded through most of the storylines in one way or another. I'm actually pretty impressed with Stross's backstory for Liz for the ways in which it mirrors my own experience (Liz manages to go to college and only hang out with gay men at the clubs and somehow misses ALL THE LESBIANS in the feminist study courses.) I may hate it when it all wraps up, but it's pretty decent so far? I wonder if, if a person read it to themselves, some of the procedural parts of the story would actually be boring enough to knock a person out, but for me, hearing it, it rolled just like watching something like In the Line of Fire or Vera.
Alright, my family is starting to make a move, so I'll end things here.
Hope you are all having a better day than the one we're about to have.
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Date: 2024-06-15 10:39 am (UTC)