kaffy_r | Entries tagged with cognitive dissonance

Bridgerton LOLs and More

On the last Monday of February, I should probably try to catch up. Bob's been under the weather; not ill, just under the weather, and his mood is fairly good, which is excellent, but it's been rather front and center over the last few days. This morning, however, I got up and decided to make the day work for me.

First - well, it's not productive, but it was odd fun to binge watch "Bridgerton" on Netflix over the weekend. I did it because images from it had been floating around on the web, including a YouTube video from a costume specialist who said the show's putatively Regency Era costumes were apparently horribly and anachronistically un-Regency, but still worked. Reader, I was intrigued. In addition, it had the old fanfic trope of "pretending to be in love For Reasons, and then really falling in love." That amused me as well, despite not being a romance reader, either of original romance fiction or similarly themed fanfic.

( More under here. )

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: the home office
Current Music: Secret Garden "The Voyage"
Crossposts: https://kaffyr.livejournal.com/574203.html

And Kinfolk Are the Weirdest, Amirite?

This is a thing that I have thought about for years. I don't know what it says about me, or about anything or anyone else, but I think I look at it as something like a message from the universe. I'm just not sure what the message is.

When I watch people walking outside my window, or walking through an airport, or crossing a street with me, or ... fill in the blank - anywhere, really - they are, for me, in a state of grace.

Everyone I see, even on a crowded street, exists for me as someone good. They have done nothing wrong.

Sometimes they smile at me. Sometimes they've helped me out - pointed out where I need to go, picked up something I've dropped and handed it to me, joined with me in bitching about the weather. Sometimes they don't even notice me. But they are not harming me.

I know that I have probably seen abusers. thugs, thieves, criminals of all types, probably even a murderer or two, pass me by in my life. But I don't know that about them. And what I don't know, I am able to disregard.

Is this good? Is it a reminder from the universe to try and see the good in everyone? Is it, on the contrary, a distancing tool I use to keep from realizing all the evil in people all around me, or in myself?

Damned if I know. But at least, if you're walking by my window, you'll know that, for those few seconds at least, you're in a state of grace.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: the home office
Crossposts: https://kaffyr.livejournal.com/530104.html

Just Call Me a Yule-ish Capitalist

I have done all my Christmas and holiday shopping. Two days of research, an hour of checking with my Best Beloved for agreement on choices, one text, one frenzied 20-minute stretch online.

Oh, and weeks of guilt over abandoning brick and mortar stores and the living they grant their employees.

Go, me.

How do the rest of you handle it?

Current Mood: confused
Current Location: the living room.
Current Music: Christmas music. WHAT?!?
Crossposts: https://kaffyr.livejournal.com/505947.html

Wut

I'm realizing how sexy Twelve is. This is not a thing of which I should be aware.

Current Mood: confused
Current Location: the living room.
Current Music: Jan Jorgenson "Man of Mystery"
Crossposts: https://kaffyr.livejournal.com/505017.html

Boo-Yah!

Tonight, when I go to my monthly union local meeting, I fully expect my emotions to be, as the subject line says, whipsawed.

Still mourning Jerry. Many of us at the meeting will mourn him as well. But we're also celebrating this news (it's been a long time coming), and I know Jerry would be so incredibly happy to hear this news. I'm hoping he's looking down (or up, or sideways, or from That Other Dimension of Perfect Justice) and cheering. God knows, he helped get us here.

So on his behalf?

BOO-YAH!

(Yes, the union election has yet to take place, but our remarkable organizers wouldn't have announced it, wouldn't have gone public with the news — or the very sophisticated pro-union Trib newsroom employee website — if we didn't have a fairly strong expectation that we'll win this one. I'm knocking wood as I say that, of course.)

Still ...

BOO-YAH!

Current Mood: indescribable
Current Location: the home office
Crossposts: https://kaffyr.livejournal.com/484129.html

You Know ...

Sitting in front of a screen, fighting codeine-generated nausea and an increasingly bleak mood, listening to Steely Dan warble about crossing one's old man back in Oregon, pleading with an unseen authority figure, "don't take me alive" ...

... is not necessarily a shining example of emotional hygiene.

Perhaps it's time to go to bed.

Yes, I know it's only 7:50 p.m.

WHAT??!?!

Current Mood: gloomy
Current Location: the livingroom
Current Music: Steely Dan "Don't Take Me Alive"
Crossposts: https://kaffyr.livejournal.com/465415.html

Based On Something BB Said

A search was conducted.

I can now more or less confidently tell the world that there is no Huntley-Brinkley fanfic.

I am disappoint.

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: the livingroom
Crossposts: http://kaffyr.livejournal.com/448140.html

When You Just Can't Get Enough Stupid ...

... I'm here to point you in the direction of more. With much thanks to Anu Garg's delightful A Word A Day, who pointed this out; one writer's contemplation about the reaction one school community had to hearing the Pledge of Allegiance spoken in Arabic.

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Location: the home office
Crossposts: http://kaffyr.livejournal.com/353160.html

I've Been Thinking

I am old enough* that seeing an airplane go overhead was cause to run out of the house and look to the skies when I was growing up.
I am old enough that the first telephone number I remember was 884.
I am old enough that I remember the excitement when they put a transmitter up that allowed us to get our second television station. In black and white.
I am old enough that I learned to type on a 1930s-era Remington.
I am old enough to remember bristol board, manila paper, paper with the wood chips still in it, and school tests printed in purple aniline dye by a spirit duplicator**
I am old enough that my first comic book cost 8 cents. It went up to 12 cents when I was in fourth or fifth grade.
I am old enough to remember Boer War veterans coming to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day.***
I am old enough to have listened to the funeral of John F. Kennedy piped through my school classroom****
I am old enough to have sent a telegram unselfconsciously.

I am still young enough to relish all those things.

* .. and lived as a child in a rural enough area ... but it was not in a wilderness.
** or Ditto machine.
*** Hey, I was very young, and the two of them were very old. Very old.
**** And I was in Canada.

Current Location: the home office
Crossposts: http://kaffyr.livejournal.com/352438.html

Good, Challenging, and Confusing

It's about time, and inhuman personages of great but fluctuating powers, battling against incomprehensible dangers that are, again, largely time-connected, and about the results on humans caught in the wash of the battles, even when they are sometimes the cause of the battles.

Nope. Not Doctor Who.

( Weird television show, ahoy! )

( On abysses of understanding in TV skiffy )

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: the livingroom
Current Music: Snoring kitty Alex
Crossposts: http://kaffyr.livejournal.com/310880.html

Once Upon A Time

Hmmm. Four episodes in thanks to my son's Netflix account. I'm not sure ... the comedy is good, and watching it from the beginning - as opposed to having dropped in on one episode back during its first season and having been disappointed by the cheesiness of the "fairytale" section of the story, and the incredible blandness of a couple of the lead fairytale characters - may make me more interested in those characters.

The Emma character is good so far. The Queen/Mayor is really rather hard to take, because if she's supposed to be impressing me as either delightfully and two-dimensionally villainous, or three-dimensionally and therefore fascinatingly villainous, she's failing miserably. On the other hand, the woman playing Mary Margaret/Snow White is less boring than she struck me on that first abortive watch and seems actually somewhat less than cardboard. James, or Charming, or whoever he is, is - marginally - less uninteresting on second watch.

And if I take the cheesiness of the fairy tale world and look at it as an artistic, or thematic, or meta choice on the part of the showrunners, I suppose I could run with it.

And it is only four episodes in.

But I'm not altogether sure. So far, the fics and vids have shown far more quality than the source material.*

*The exception is, of course Robert Carlyle. So far, he and the woman playing Emma appear to me to be the strongest actors, and the only ones really holding my attention. Certainly, Carlyle's the only one who can chew scenery and still retain my respect.

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Location: Going to bed
Crossposts: http://kaffyr.livejournal.com/252302.html

Post Election Considerations

Thanks in no small part to the vast and evil knowledge of

james_davis_nicoll and the kindly directional wisdom of

autopope that pointed me to this post over at Making Light, I've had the dubious pleasure of reading the extreme expressions of displeasure of those at the fruitbattier end of the "ZOMG Obama End Times AAAAAaaaaaiiiieee!!!!!!" spectrum. And because I like to a) spread the WTFness and b) I do, meanly, enjoy drinking their tears, I provide the links to you.

( Under which I ruminate )
On the other hand, I also want to pass along news of good things and I consider this campaign purely, positively, cheekily brilliant. The moment I read this was truly joyful. This idea almost makes using the phrase "thinking outside the box" worthwhile. For people who thought that the Occupy movement had faded away, this is a particularly lovely heads-up that it hasn't. Thanks to

supergee and, again, to Making Light.

And of course, there's this. If you haven't seen it by now, perhaps it will make you smile. Hell, even if you've seen it before, you might want to see it again. And I'd much rather react to my ideological opponents in this fashion than in the splenetic, grammatically challenged perorations you'll find courtesy of the first couple of links.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: the livingroom
Current Music: hammers and saws somewhere
Crossposts: http://kaffyr.livejournal.com/240356.html

Public Service Announcement

Because I care.

Thank you. Goodnight America, and all the ships at sea.

Addendum: thanks to the most estimable wendymr, who pointed this out to me before mainstream news folks did.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: Going to bed
Current Music: My son.
Crossposts: http://kaffyr.livejournal.com/235826.html

I Can Haz Proper Cutz Nao!!

Yes I can! I am the proud fixer of the stupid LJ "scissors icon" cut denoter on my journal. I know that sounds rather silly, since I was directed to the fix by other people (thanks

sallymn and

ljgeoff , for pointing me in the right direction), but here's the thing. Although the patch was already and ready to paste into the space awaiting it in the CSS coding area , and I knew I could use it, because my journal is in the right LJ style, I needed to find the right code for my journal's background color, because I don't have a plain white background.

And no one had said where I could find that.

Well. Did I let that dissuade me? Not at all. I figured out where to go to look for the coding, figured out (sort of) what the hell "layers" and "children" were, then clicked through to where I figured the color codes were. I couldn't find anything that looked like my shades of green, despite knowing I was in the right place. And then I thought it through some more, and realized I'd been looking at the proper code as I sat there. I tried it out, and - yay! - it worked.

So, even though I'm sure I've used the wrong terms to explain what I did, and even though I still retain my membership in the Sub-Luddite Club, I erased the damned scissors, and I am proud. Excuse me, while I shake my head at myself. Heh.

And speaking of shaking one's head at oneself, I've had a couple of weird dreams lately.( And I shall proceed to tell you at boring length about them. )

No I didn't get much more written on "Hearts and Moons," why do you ask?

Current Mood: full
Current Location: the livingroom
Current Music: PBS. Just finished "Amy's Choice"
Crossposts: http://kaffyr.livejournal.com/219379.html

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Grasping at Grace (and Growth)

Transformation is Inescapable

Entries tagged with cognitive dissonance

Dept. of Mondays

Dept. of All Humans Are My Kin

Dept. of Existential Seasonal Angst

Dept. of Oh. My. God.

Department of Whipsawed Emotions

Dept. of This I Believe

Dept. of Alert the Press

Dept. of Watch Your Language

Dept. of Me, Me, Me!

Dept. of Media Skiffy

Dept. of Oh Dear

Dept. of Ruminations

Dept. of I Love The Internet

Dept. of Victory is Mine!