Jill Doughtie

“The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation!” — a character in Jonathan Larson’s Rent

(View larger)

Kindle and veggie juice at Le Pain Quotidien.

(View larger)

Kindle, coffee and Gavin at Intelligentsia.

(View larger)

Kindle at Buster’s.

*     *     *     *     *

I like buying books on the Kindle because I like the idea of paying for content. I think it is important for paying for content to start feeling normal, even when the content does not come attached to something tangible (like paper). I want to be able to read high quality, expensive-to-produce content without it being laced with ads, and without having to buy it stamped on dead trees. I am not sure that ads alone could pay for that content to be produced, but even if they could, I also want content that is not at the mercy of advertisers. I want a clear, clean transaction where I pay money, and where the author’s loyalty belongs to the truth or to their art or to me.

*     *     *     *     *

(View larger)

I also like being able to search my entire library, and being able to buy books instantly.

(View larger)

Spider in the Natural History Museum’s Spider Pavilion.

• Neal Stephenson: In the Beginning was the Command Line
• WikiLeaks: a wiki of leaked documents and news stories
• WikiLeaks plans to make the web a leakier place (ComputerWorld)
• David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster (Gourmet):

  “…watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings …and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in? I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here—at least I don’t think so. I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.” (more)

• Beau Lotto: Optical illusions show how we see (TED)
• Elephant Birth (YouTube)
• 14th Annual At-Home Dad’s Convention

(View larger)

I like Laura, the main character in Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net. She’s not a sex symbol, although she does have and enjoy sex a few times in the book. She’s not moody. She’s not larger than life. She feels like a real person  – like a real woman — she feels true to life. This is unusual. I can’t remember finding a female main character in a book by a male author who plays a hero role and who feels this true to life before.

She’s a mother of a baby, she’s a wife, she’s a business person, and she’s an idealist. When forced to choose her priorities, she chooses her ideals and her career first. She doesn’t believe she’s being forced to choose at the time — she thinks it will all work out and she’ll end up with the world she wants to live in, her career advancing, and her family intact with her husband and baby waiting for her at home.

The book doesn’t have a traditional happy ending, but Laura is transformed. And she is a hero. And it’s not clear at all that she made the wrong choice — it doesn’t seem like the choice was ever framed as right or wrong. There was doing what she thought was right in the big picture and there was putting her family’s cohesiveness first and letting someone else worry about the big picture. She chose the big picture. Her marriage unravels, but she ends up closer to her mother, who it turns out had also made similar choices, and who she had not understood before. I was going to write that her family unravels in that last sentence, but her family doesn’t — it shifts, deeply. She’s more alone at the end, but it’s bittersweet. It’s not a morality tale to scare women off from pursuing careers — nothing like that. It’s deeper. It’s more complicated. It’s more like real life.

I’m leaving out the details of the story, which is what most of the reviewers on Amazon seem to care about. As science fiction, it’s interesting and I liked it. But it’s Laura I am drawn to here.  It’s Laura I am still thinking about. If the main character had been Lawrence, I still would have liked the book, but I wouldn’t have been struck by Lawrence. He would have seemed normal and relatively realistic. Maybe even a little bit boring. The woman heroes I usually come across are sexy, dominant, moody or somehow super. A woman character who is so normal as to be a little bit boring as a person, but who chooses what she does and goes through what she does — that’s new to me. And I like it.

Ignore the picture on the front of the book.

(View larger)

This is my second Cinderella pumpkin. It’s smaller and less pancake shaped than its predecessor.

(View larger)

I am drying the seeds from the first pumpkin and saving them for next year.

(View larger)

(View larger)

(View larger)

• Stewart & Brown’s mulberry lydia cocktail dress
• Red wellingtons and yellow clogs
• Hand knit tabi socks

(View larger)

Some day, I want to live in Kirkland.

(View larger)

I’d like to live right by the lake. There’s so much water there, and there are so many green things growing.

(View larger)

I like all of the new construction. I like how the coffee shops are full of people in the tech industry. I like the walkable downtown. I like the shops, especially promesse. I like Bombaii Cutters, where I got my first very short haircut. I like the restaurants, especially Trellis. I like the cocktails at The Slip.

(View larger)

I like balconies with lake views.