(no subject)

I felt like I should confirm that the insurance accepted my grievance, so I don’t owe fifty-seven thousand dollars anymore. Now I just need to find an alternate location for next time, one the insurance approves of.

On fate and fiction

There’s a kind of story where lots of things happen around the main character, but not much happens because of them. They just pinball around without any agency, while absorbing lessons that are meant to get them to do something. Then at the very end, they finally get a choice, and they do exactly the thing all the lessons are telling them to do. And there’s a part of me that always wants them to make the opposite choice, if only out of spite. Fight that fate!

Greg Egan has a story about a character who’s clearly supposed to be C.S. Lewis. He faces off against a Glorious Transhumanist in the Egan vein, and the whole story is about putting him in a position where he might potentially say yes to becoming a Glorious Transhumanist. In the end, he finally gets the chance to make a choice. And after everything, he still says no, because that’s not how C.S. Lewis rolls.

(no subject)

I think sometimes about the woman our sex ed class used as a cautionary tale. She’d had sex outside of marriage with a man she no longer loved, and she felt like she’d lost something special that she could never get back, so she appeared in a video to tell other young people not to make the same mistake. I wonder if she still feels like she lost something. I hope she found it again, and I hope she realized it wasn’t just the boy who took it from her. It was her parents, her teachers, her neighbors, the makers of the video, and everyone else who made her feel like less of a person.