hard reboot on life

So as part of this thing I'm doing where I try to get my life under some kind of control, I went and deleted all THIRTY SEVEN HUNDRED and change e-mails sitting in my inbox.

That's not like a joke, like when I say "There's thirty seven hundred mostly empty bottles of salad dressing in this refrigerator, OMG." That's a real number. Some of them I had read, some of them were comment notifications for things I'd already responded to. Many of them were things I hadn't read or answered, but you know, it was just at the point where I knew I wasn't going to, because facing that kind of backlog and going through it to separate out things that I need to respond to from things that I can let go from things that I should've responded to at the time but the moment has now passed -- that was just terrifying and depressing, and I knew I wasn't going to do it.

I know I suck at this stuff, Dear Readers, and I wish I were better at it. Like I said, I'm trying to organize my life a little differently and hopefully *be* better at it. Sometimes it's laziness or my desire to move onto the next shiny thing in my head. Sometimes it's the weird brand of social anxiety that I have where I actually get a little freaked out by comments and feedback and e-mail, because it's nice to know that people are listening, but then holy fucking God, people are listening and I periodically find that really intimidating and then I can't go near the whole thing until it wears off. Whatever the reason, it's obnoxious behavior, and I'm trying to cut down on it. Having a clean slate, I think, will help some.

So if you're one of the people who have been disappointed or insulted because you tried to contact me and I didn't respond, I apologize to you. My ability to deal with other human beings kind of runs in cycles, and I'm really sorry you got caught on a downward slope. Hopefully some of the stuff I'm trying to do differently now will result in some improvement to my ability to control those cycles.

oh, and also, OSC? fuck you.

I don't know if I could really respond better than this to the latest salvo of unhinged homophobic batshittery from Orson Scott Card.

I remember reading the Memory of Earth series in college, back when it was even harder than it is now to find even vague references to homosexuality in genre fiction. One of the main characters was a gay man who married a woman because it was required of him, and I remember thinking it was just a really intelligent, poignant treatment of a character who had made this terrible choice between two mutually exclusive types of happiness. It's weird to look back now and realize that whole arc was not, as I believed at the time, *descriptive* of what it's like to live under enforced heteronormativity, but *prescriptive.* Card doesn't hate gay people; he just hates gay people who selfishly destroy civilization by refusing to enter heterosexual marriages and breed.

Oh, and by the way, the reason Card doesn't consider himself a homophobe is that he subscribes to a very specific definition of the word, where homophobia means a fear of homosexuality that is so crippling as to interfere with one's life. Well, I sort of think he's crossed that bridge now, since he's so terrified of teh gay conspiracy to destroy everything good and pure in lif that he can't think of any other recourse than civil war. That sort of seems like it's getting in the way of being, you know, a normal human being who doesn't want to incite civil wars? Oh, and also, a lot of his former fans now wouldn't buy one of his books if it came with a lifetime's supply of cool shoes and lubricant, so it's not been a great boon to his career, either.

Also, fuck Orson Scott Card.

attorney general, take three. seriously, is this a joke? are we being punk'd?

"Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime."

YES, IT IS, MUKASEY, YOU EVIL PIECE OF SHIT. THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THE WORD "CRIME" MEANS.