Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

juliansinger offered to pick a letter for anyone who asked, and then we're supposed to pick ten things that start with that letter, and write about them and what they mean to us.

She gave me T. I started by listing some things, and then selected from them based on what I felt ready to write about. This proved trickier than I thought it would be (lots of T's in that sentence, but not ones I want to use) and the results may be more free-associative than was being asked for.

Tea is both my maintenance drug, for maintaining reasonable levels of alertness, and a great comfort to me. I enjoy the flavor of tea and the comfort of the hot liquid, I like different kinds (mostly black teas, but the occasional green as well), and I will get irritated and sometimes even snarky when restaurants bring a tea bag and some not-hot-enough water. Once in a rare while, being snarky even works: some years ago, agrumer and I were having breakfast at a con hotel when the waitress brought these to me. Not yet awake enough to be polite, I said something to the effect of "Don't you know that you need boiling water to make tea?" It turned out she didn't, but was willing to learn, and soon after I had a cup of actual tea. (Black tea, which is what most Americans mean when they just say "tea," won't brew up properly unless the water is close to 100°C, what those of us who live at sea level call "boiling." The flavor diminishes, and if it's really not hot enough, the caffeine isn't extracted either.) I do drink iced tea, but primarily brewed at home (including friends' homes), rather than the bottled stuff, because most of that has too much sugar, even when it's made with decent tea and has suitable flavor and stimulant value.

Trees are so basic that this may be fish-describing-water time. I don't climb them much--I'm built like a hobbit, and most of the trees around here are trimmed so that the first branch is at least six feet above the ground. But I like looking at them, and being under them, and sometimes leaning on or holding or even talking to them. One of the reasons cattitude and I have lived where we have for 19 years is the park across the street, and a lot of that is the trees, watching the seasons in maples flowering and leafing out, and all the other flowers, and the birds who live in the trees and sing over who gets to nest where.

Tangerines: a citrus fruit, but one I'm especially fond of. I most like the clementines shipped from Morocco and Spain in November and December, and what the shops in Chinatown call "New Year's tangerines" for a little while in February. At one point I labeled this journal "living on tea and tangerines" because those were the apparent mainstays of my diet. There aren't a lot of tangerine-flavored things out there other than the fruit itself, and my attempt at making tangerine ice cream using my lemon ice cream recipe produced something closer to sweet cream. I cheerfully buy them by the five-pound (two-kilo) crate when they're in season, then schlep them home (usually about half a mile total, to and from the subway). julian_tiger shares my extreme fondness for tangerines.

Tolkien: This one feels a little odd. I used to identify fairly strongly with hobbits, but that's faded a bit, in part because a year or so back, Cattitude and I picked The Hobbit for a read-at-bedtime book, and I was finding Bilbo genuinely annoying, someone I didn't think I'd want to spend time with. I haven't looked at the rest of my Tolkien since--I don't know if that was a passing mood, or if I'd be happier rereading Lord of the Rings, or if the pace of being read to made a real difference. Nonetheless, hobbits and Ents and Tom Bombadil and the Rings of Power.

Tattoos surprised me. I was wandering around one of jbsegal's Baitcon weekend parties, and there was someone with a gorgeous dragonfly on his shoulder, and I thought "I want one." The only reason my first tattoo wasn't a dragonfly is that it would have felt too much like impinging on someone else's space and symbolism. I now have a cardinal (right out of the Peterson field guide), a tribal-style armband, violets, and a coelacanth. It occurred to me recently that if those fit together in a message, that message is persistence. And the other day I caught myself thinking "you don't need a dragonfly backpiece"--but it's a tempting thought. Oh, in case you were wondering, the difference between people with tattoos and people without tattoos is that some people without tattoos think that there's a significant difference. Also, yes it hurts.

Talking with people. A first look at this meme suggests that everyone should have 260 things they'd be prepared to write about this way--or maybe closer to 200, if we eliminate a few letters like X and Q--but of course there are synonyms. If I'd been given C I might have used "caffeine" (though maybe not, tea is important to me in ways that go beyond the drug value), "citrus," and "conversation." Conversation isn't always spoken, though there's a value to in-person conversation, with touch and body language and tone of voice. A fair amount of mine is in text; if that didn't work for me, I probably wouldn't be doing this meme, because most of what I've used Usenet and LiveJournal for is talking to people. If I weren't looking for interaction, this journal would still be on paper (well, except the gym notes, which would probably still be transcribed to computer files). This is one of those topics that is, I think, as large as human culture, the zillion interactions that help build peace and society and cities and science.

Turtles are animals I just like. At this point, they have a pleasant association with my sweetie adrian_turtle, but Cattitude and I have been happily watching turtles on logs and rocks in the sun for years (mostly at zoos and in the inlet across the street).

Thumbs are right up there with talking as what made our species what we are: we are gatherers and shapers, tool makers and users, at least as much as we are pattern-finders. "All thumbs" is a very odd phrase--try doing things without using your thumbs sometime. There are tool-using and even tool-making species without thumbs--crows, notably--but our tool-shaping is very much dependent on our opposable thumbs.

Taxonomy includes Linnaeus's remarkably useful system of labeling and grouping plants and animals: the binomial nomenclature that correctly assumes relatedness, but predates the idea of evolution as the source of that relatedness. It's easily dismissed as not really being science, but understanding how lifeforms are related tells us a lot about how they live and interact. Animal models for human diseases work because humans are related to those other animals. And it works both ways--people studying livestock diseases are using humans as a model organism, because we're a well-studied mammal species whose genome has been published.

More broadly, taxonomies are classification systems, and different groupings provide different ways of looking at things. Sometimes the names aren't ideal: it's true and useful to know that the giant panda is related to cats and wolves and mink more closely than to giraffes, mice, or oak trees, but while that group of animals is called Carnivora, pandas are as far from carnivorous as mammals get. The other night, discussing what to have for dinner, I noted that I was dividing food into the categories "Chinese" and "not Chinese"—a less-than-useful grouping for most purposes, especially given that I haven't learned to cook in the former idiom, but it was what made sense to me that evening. Every time someone says "there are two kinds of people in the world, X and Y," they're both highlighting a specific distinction, and asserting that everything is either X or Y. When the latter is true, it's usually because Y is defined as "not-X": "believers and infidels," "Americans and foreigners," "people who care about Z and those who don't." Most of the time, people recognize that this isn't the only way to divide things up: the person who is saying "Americans and foreigners" at one time will be sure, at another, that the key difference is gender, or between their relatives and the rest of the world, or between humans and everything else.

Taxonomies can have trouble with edge cases (perhaps fortunately, neither "liminal" nor "interstitial" begins with T). Divide the universe into living things and everything else, and you have to decide where to put viruses. Divide it into female and male, and you're either ignoring the existence of intersexed people or making some arbitrary assigments into one or the other category, possibly "men have penises, anyone else is a woman" or "women can give birth, anyone else is a man"--not only are both arbitrary, but they don't produce the same groups. Trying to apply that classification beyond multicelled animals can lead to even more trouble, but slime molds, trees, and planets aren't likely to make their disagreements known, or be harmed by either label, though we may lose by the distortions.

Trains (and walking) are my basic transport. I started taking the subway by myself, occasionally, when I was ten (to go to the dentist--from which we may infer that I didn't especially mind going to the dentist, because I could in fact be trusted to get myself to my appointments) and was commuting to school daily starting in seventh grade (two months before my twelfth birthday). I prefer trains to buses (or any internal combustion vehicle) because, for reasons I'm not really sure of, I get motion sick when I read in a bus or car, but not in a train. That said, most of my trips to Boston to see Adrian are by bus, because it costs about 1/5 as much--but the A train gets me to the bus station, and when I get off the bus at South Station I'm heading for the Red Line. Sometimes train systems entangle in my head, and I find myself hanging onto a Charlie Card [sic] that I get at South Station because the way I swiped and retrieved it feels like the London Underground, so a bit of me expects to have to show it again when I exit. [Yes. I know. The whole "Charlie on the MTA" thing was about not having to pay when you exit.] One of the things I like about where I live is that it's not just in walking distance of the subway--it's in walking distance of two different subway lines, so if there's a problem with one, I can take the other. One of the things trains mean to me is security--many years ago, I got a ride from someone else at college to Boston for a Boskone, and he dropped me at some random place downtown, not quite realizing that downtown Boston isn't that tiny. I wasn't sure what to do, so I asked someone where the subway was. They told me, I found the (Blue Line) station, bought a token, and felt calmer as soon as I walked through the turnstile, as if I was no longer in $strange_city but in some set-of-all-subway-systems that I knew and could find my way around in. Yes, the T is straightforward, but there's more to it than that. I have photo IDs for the purchase of weekly tickets for the London Underground [which may be obsolete, given Oyster Cards) and the Paris Metro sitting in a drawer, next to my foreign currency and my passport.

The Tiptree Award is given for science fiction or fantasy that expand our understanding of gender. It's not the only literary prize that includes a cash award; I think it's the only one that also includes both chocolate and the chance to wear a tiara, and I'm almost certain it's the only one funded by bake sales. I spent a year as a member of the award jury, reading a lot of books and shorter fiction, with gender as a focus. I discovered, among other things, that a five-person jury is enough to have significant disagreements about what gender is and which works actually fit the goals of the award. This may be increased by the Motherboard's refusal to define any of the terms: they select the jury, and the jurors get have to define things for themselves. We wound up with disagreement not only over gender, but over what constitutes science fiction or fantasy. I'm still not entirely convinced that Matt Ruff's Set This House in Order, the book we selected, is science fiction (we were pretty much agreed that it isn't fantasy, it's either sf or a realistic novel). The main thing I got out of it, other than a stack of books I still need to sort through and some good reading, was a greater realization of just how fuzzy gender is. I don't have gender identity "issues", in any of the usual senses--I don't sit here thinking "I'm not really/shouldn't be a woman" nor yet have trouble convincing people that I am one. But I don't seem to be as invested in gender as a lot of people I know. Things like gendered food (portions labeled "man-sized," or the salad called a "bachelor" that one of my fellow jurors posted about) either irritate or puzzle me, but they don't leave me with any idea that I shouldn't eat them.

That's ten. This one went to eleven, and I don't feel like dropping one of the short bits. Entries I didn't write: tintinnabulation (I just like the sound of it), technology (another "all of human civilization and history" entry), thesaurus (interesting in part for the taxonomy used therein), tigers (which might have brought in cats, in the taxonomic sense, as well as tigers specifically), time-binding (Le Guin has noted that dragons, being myths, are neither time-binding nor time-bound), and touch (which could have gotten into relationships, communication, metaphors, and several other things). Also travel, which I forgot I listed--I used to do more exploring and seeing places, lately I'm almost entirely visiting people.

I also resisted the impulse to stop at nine, followed by "T is for Ten."