semperfiona: (name cats)
Chris got a call this morning from the landlord's wife. She thought one of our cats had been hit by a car on our road. At noon, he went to the house to check, and after half-an-hour's search, he found him. The young king has passed.

He'd been abandoned in Cabool outside Polly's Diner, so he was first named Polly after the diner outside which they had found him. His maleness became obvious quickly, however, and he had to have a new name. "Paulie" was vetoed, so being the sixth cat in the household, he became Henry the VI.

As a youngster he had a terrible habit of molesting mooses. )

He grew up to be an imposing young silver tabby, cuddly on his terms but somewhat aloof, and like his namesake, lord of all he surveyed. This summer, he acquired a cauliflower ear. It gave him a rakish look that suited him well.

He was bound and determined to be an outside cat despite all our best efforts. It was a pissing contest, literally: he peed on the bed even while people were in it. Eventually we gave in, and let him go out; by preference he spent most of his time outside. Unlike the Washington house, though, this one is on a deceptively busy street, and we knew even then that this might be the result. It doesn't make it any easier to take, though.

He was a good cat. I will miss him.

Spelling

Mar. 7th, 2002 12:08 pm
semperfiona: (Default)
I just edited last night's post because I happened to notice I'd left the first P off of "people". Anal-retentive? Moi? Only about spelling. My own, or in published documents.

Spelling is another of my pet peeves. I don't mind typos and spelling errors in email, IM, letters, or casual writing like LJ (lest anyone get paranoid and stop writing to me!), and in fact while I usually correct my own typos if I notice them, I sometimes let them slide or don't notice them in those contexts. (I feel the need to reiterate this several more times. It's my spelling that I'm anal about. Not yours. Any of you.)

I do have a strong dislike for intentional misspelling of the 3l33t d00d warez ilk. Certain words, such as "boi" and "grrl", which use a changed spelling to connote a distinctly different meaning than the original word, are fine with me. But please, if you're writing to me, take the millisecond of extra time and write 'you' instead of 'u' and 'are' instead of 'r'. I can wait that long. It takes me far longer to read intentionally misspelled words--or to type them: I have to think out each letter instead of following the normal pattern. Spelling is one of my semi-useless talents: I recognize words by their pattern, and misspelled words stand out because the pattern is wrong. I think that might be why I can read so quickly: it's almost as if English were a ideographic language like Chinese, and each word's meaning is encompassed within its shape.

I was the district spelling champion three years running, and the Wisconsin state spelling champion in the eighth grade, though to get to that point required a lot of nightly spelling drills learning more and more esoteric words.

For the record I earned twelfth place in the national competition. I was eliminated on the word "frigorimeter", which dictionary.com doesn't even have an entry for. It means a thermometer for very cold temperatures, and I spelled it "frigarimeter". Funny the things that stick in one's head: this happened in the summer of 1982! I also remember the very last word of the state bee: emu, and the very last word of the national bee: beriberi.

Spelling bees always contain a large element of luck as well as skill and practice. The order of the word list is determined before the event, the turn order of the contestants is drawn from a hat, and depending on when your turn comes up you might get something very easy or something extremely difficult. I knew every single word that the national champion happened to get, but didn't know one of mine. C'est la guerre.

But returning to my spelling peeve, what really gets to me are published books containing spelling errors or words which are clearly Just Wrong, and appear to have been selected from the spellchecker correction list by mistake. There's a place in Laurell K. Hamilton's book Bloody Bones where the word catamount appears in place of the correct word catamite. I'm quite sure Laurell knows the difference, and the error crept in somewhere along the line. Modern books are getting worse and worse in this regard. The recently published Great Book of Amber, by Roger Zelazny, contains numerous word-choice errors and even a missing paragraph (one of the preceding paragraphs is duplicated in its stead).

Bring back human proofreaders!

Senior year

Feb. 7th, 2002 11:12 pm
semperfiona: (Default)
When I was a senior at Indiana University, the university had free computer accounts for students, with an internal bulletin board systerm called the Forum, where students could start topics and discussions. I spent hours on that, and then VAXphone (it was like a cross between AIM and chat: it worked with up to 5 people at a time) with people I had met there, and eventually meeting the people in person. It was at that time that I began using "semper, fiona" as my signoff phrase, and Fiona of Amber began to be my alter-ego/role-model.

Two of the first people I came to know were Lore and her friend Deb. I spent a lot of time with them in the beginning of that year. Lore talked about her boyfriend, Kirk, but I had never met or talked to him. Then one day I was on VAXphone with Lore, when Kirk logged on and she invited him into the conversation. When we happened to glance aside from the computers we were using in the lab, and noticed exactly the same thing on each other's screens, we realized we were sitting next to each other. That is how I met Kirk. It wasn't long after that that we became fast friends. We started going to the free movie premieres at the student union, sometimes with other VAXfriends, or just the three of us.

One night (the movie was "Look Who's Talking"), Kirk got out a deck of cards while we waited in line, and we bemoaned the lack of a fourth for euchre. At that, the boy seated in front of us in line turned and said he'd play; he became my partner. That was Jim. We played euchre until the movie started. Afterwards, a large group of us including Jim and his roommate, Kirk and Lore and some other friends, went back to Kirk's dorm and played cards and talked some more. Before the night was over, we had decided to make a trip to Brown County State Park that weekend to see the fall colors.

Jim collected everyone's phone numbers "to make the arrangements", and I don't know how I knew it, but I knew he did that just so he could get mine. Sure enough, two days later he asked me out, commenting that he'd wanted to call right away but waited because that was what you're "supposed to do". Odd thing: I still remember what I was wearing that night. In fact, I still have it (not for sentimental reasons, I still have most of the clothes I owned then). It was a pink sweater my parents had given me. I remember one other thing distinctly. Jim bet a dollar that no one would guess his middle name, given that his initial was C. Many guesses were made, but before too long I guessed it. Cecil. He paid me four quarters. I dated Jim all that year. We had a tumultous relationship, but he was my first real lover and I held on for dear life even after it was clearly falling apart.

I'd had sex for the first time with someone else (a man named Matt, six or eight years older than me) shortly before, but only once, somewhat under the influence of alcohol, and didn't make a relationship out of it. In fact I avoided him as much as possible given that we had two classes in common, especially after I'd met Jim. I didn't really like him, he gave me the willies a little bit. But he liked me a great deal--too much, in fact: he'd liked me since freshman year and after my junior year away he still remembered me. I remember him telling me once "I'd know that walk anywhere."

I felt almost stalked, but I didn't quite recognize it. I don't know why I ever slept with him, other than that I was somewhat drunk and also tired of being a 21-year-old virgin. I remember thinking that. "Finally, that's done with." I pointed him out to Lore once. Her comment was, "He's evil." And I hadn't told her anything about him at all.

It took me a lot of years after that to start finding redhaired men attractive again. Britton had been a redhead, and I had always liked red hair on men, but afte Matt that attraction switched off for a long time.
semperfiona: (Default)
Been thinking about Kirk just now. It's been almost a year since I've seen him, and the previous time was over two years before that. We've been staying very weakly connected by playing backgammon and go at It's Your Turn, but even if we sent little messages with every move, which we don't, it's not at all the same kind of intense connection we used to have before everything fell apart in 1997-98. I miss that, and I miss him. I think i'm going to make a point to call him sometime during the yule season.


Kirk is the oldest friend I have; we met in college in 1989. The four of us, he and his girlfriend Lore, and I and my boyfriend Jim, were nearly inseparable. Oddly, and the four of us even remarked on it at times, the pairings seemed to be wrong-way-round. Kirk and I were much more compatible than Jim and I, and Jim and Lore were very compatible as well.
Kirk told me the following spring that he had been in love with me for several months, and that Lore had agreed that he and I could sleep together if I was willing. But I was still trying to hang on to the shreds of my relationship with Jim, so I turned him down. After that we still managed to maintain the friendship as close and cuddly as ever, perhaps even a bit more so, with regular flirting and teasing.
Come the next year, I moved to St. Louis to start a job. I returned to B'ton to visit him several times over the next year, and then I met and began dating Ray. Ray and I even went to B'ton once to vist Kirk together. I remember Kirk telling Ray pretty much exactly how he felt about me and Ray saying that it was ok as long as...what were his criteria? Probably words to the effect of "as long as nothing happens and I know it's one-sided".
Ray and I got married--Kirk was my "maid of honor"--and we moved to the UK. Kirk and I wrote lots of long letters back and forth, and sometime in there I realized that I loved him and always had. He met the wonderful Laura and decided to marry her. Ray and I flew home and I was "best man" at the wedding. I told Kirk during a long conversation alone something of what I'd come to realize, and we again agreed that it was not possible.
Then sometime after Ray and I moved home again, Kirk told me that he and Laura were opening their marriage. This floored me. I had never even considered such a thing to be possible, even if some of the situations with Lore and Jim came close. I started remembering all the novels I'd read, with things like group marriages, and did a 'net search on exactly that phrase, which led me to alt.polyamory.
In May 1997 I went to B'ton again, alone this time, and finally expressed my full feelings. And again we decided to put our feelings on hold until I could talk to Ray and gain his consent.
That talk is what started us on the road that ended up in divorce. Ray was incapable of accepting even the fact of my feelings, let alone any physical expression of them. He went to his priest that week and was told that "most men would have divorced her already"--for having feelings!
We tried, or at least I tried, to reach compromise, but it was not possible, even after four different periods of counseling with three different counselors. Ray was adamant on "Marriage is..." and would not admit even the tiniest corner of a compromise.
In the course of all that, while I was fighting to keep the marriage at all costs, the towering oak of my friendship with Kirk was cut down. The roots are still alive, I think, and there is a sapling there, but it is fragile and slender.
Ironically, Kirk and Laura have since re-closed their marriage, but I've decided that I am truly poly. I could list five or six people that I love "like that".

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