One Last Once Before The New Year - December 02020

Greetings! There is good news in the fight against coronavirus, and that is that vaccine doses are happening right now. How the vaccinations roll out and the underlying infrastructure that will be needed to support them might be much less organized, but that's a thing to be patient with in the States. Other places with a more unified set of logistics may have an easier time getting vaccine to the places they want them to go.

(The Algorithm believes that what you really want to see after many of the images and videos of people receiving the vaccination are people who believe conspiracy theories about the vaccinations being either untested, cover for some other nefarious program, or otherwise not actually what it says it is. Most of those comments, of course, offer no evidence, because social media is about who shouts loudest, not who's actually right. So ware the comments, as usual.)

( More matters of The Virus )

( The Rest of Everything )

Last for tonight, The Staunch Book Prize, offering prizes to the best pieces that don't beat, stalk, murder, rape, or sexually exploit the women in their stories. Along with global good news stories for the year 2020, on the assumption that you welcome news of carbon emissions falling, countries becoming less autocratic, more women and girls being educated, diseases being shown the door, and infrastructure changing so that it will be less terrible to both people and planet in the future.

And a meditation on the idea of not even being in competition with yourself, much less anybody else, for anything you do, and how so much of what we do that we might be good (or terrible) at, we disclaim, because there's always some asshole out there who's going to sniff and declare that it's not objectively good. (And that sometimes that asshole is our past self.) Since we all spent this year learning How To Be At Home (a video poem), that we managed it as well as we did says enough about us.

All the same, if there are things you would like to do and challenge for the new year, there is a cookbook_challenge with the idea of actually making the recipes that have been in your cookbooks or bookmarks and having a community to help and cheer you on, and there is both a journal to look back upon the year that was and the idea of setting a word for the year, rather than a resolution (or many resolutions) that may help you orient to something you would like. Or, perhaps, you could engage in trying to read at least one book by a BIPOC writer each month, with each month being on a different theme.

December Days 2020 #31: Ending Where We Began

[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]

I was thinking again, which is always dangerous, but I was perusing other people's December lists to see if there were any good questions that I could pluck for myself to fill space with and I saw someone asking about cooking and relating to cooking. For me, I tend to summarize my skills as "put a recipe in front of me and I can produce something that resembles what the recipe wants to produce" (even if I might have an anxiety about whether it's going to turn out well, especially if this is the first time I've gone through the recipe process). I'm not particularly skilled at kitchen improvisation, or that remarkable skill of being able to look at a basket of ingredients and say, "that looks like [protein] in the style of [cuisine], guest-starring [greens! vegetables! sauces!], and it'll take us about an hour to make completely." Maybe with more recipe experience, I'll be able to do that better, but for now, I don't know that I could do it into something that will be delicious.

There's a slightly bigger question hiding behind the one about cooking, for me, because of the way that I would phrase the answer to the question. I'd say "I can follow a recipe, but I'm not particularly good at cooking," because the act of improvisation and creation has become cooking, while following a recipe is not being creative, it's following directions. It's the equivalent of saying "Well, I can trace a drawing pretty well, but I'm not any good at art" or "I can create fanfic, but I'm not any good at writing." Because there's become an assumption, sometimes an insistence, that the ability to create ex nihilo, "totally original", is the thing that actually counts as a creative endeavor. So the question that I should probably be required to answer is:

What are you good at?

And I will probably say "not much, you?" because of the assumption that creating from whole cloth, without guide, without recipe, without tracing, (possibly without references, but really, that's stretching it a bit past too far) is the sign that someone is good at something, is truly creative, and that anything else is not as valid, because it's copying or derivative or imitation or just following directions.

( Okay, That's Going To Need An Explanation )

So, if there were something I was going to say that I am good at, the most honest answer I have is "I'm good at following directions." Which is also probably the most misleading answer that I can give to that question, too, because without the context above, that answer doesn't sound like it would amount to anything at all. Although I think it might make some of the scientists and engineers laugh, because they probably understand that in so many things in life, and especially in an information profession like mine, you charge someone one dollar for the chalk mark, and nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars for knowing where to put it and how hard to hit the thing once you've drawn the mark.