Oop North

Jul. 30th, 2025 09:01 pm
wildeabandon: picture of me (Default)
[personal profile] wildeabandon
I've been Oop North for the last few days doing many things, most delightful, a couple less so. I have:

  • Seen Everybody's Talking About Jamie, including [personal profile] leonato being unreasonably hot as drag queen Laika Virgin
  • Been to the wedding of an old friend WINODW, and caught up with various Cambridge and ex-Cambridge folk
  • Travelled back from Keighley to York by bus, because the trains into and out of Leeds were completely fucked (one of the less delightful bits)
  • Had a lovely quiet Sunday with M, mostly reading whilst he pottered and packed to go away this week, interspersed with eating simple but tasty food, low key chatting, playing board games, and so on
  • Visited the mother of an ex-boyfriend who died last year, to share some of my memories of him (also not exactly a fun afternoon, but I think she found it helpful, so I'm glad I did it)
  • Stayed with my parents for another quiet day of low key and relaxing conversation
  • Discussed John 9 with Bible Club. We still haven't managed to find a theodicy that completely solves the problem of evil, but I'm sure if we keep coming back to it then we'll get there eventually.
  • Had someone shove a needle followed by a rather thick metal ring through my genitals three times in quick succession. (And yes, that definitely counts amongst the delightful parts of the trip. Getting my tongue done a few months ago has firmly reawakened the bug, and I may be in 'Pierce All The Things' (whilst being sensible about not getting more than three at once and giving my body time to heal between each set cos I'm a grown up now) mode for some time
  • Taken advantage of being in Manchester to visit [personal profile] cosmolinguist, [personal profile] angelofthenorth, [personal profile] diffrentcolours, and [personal profile] mother_bones


Now on the train home, which is of course running late, and looking forward to the sleep of someone who has been having altogether too much fun...

Excursions

Jul. 28th, 2025 03:02 pm
liv: Table laid with teapot, scones and accoutrements (yum)
[personal profile] liv
This week P'tite Soeur organized a family trip to London. All four siblings and Dad, which is quite a feat of logistics even if we didn't manage to also include partners.

London )

Another thing I was able to do due to not being in Israel was to visit the community I'll be spending Yom Kippur with, the amazing Kehillat Kernow, a peripatetic community covering most of the Cornwall peninsula. (Yes, that's me in the news article at the top of their website, they are very prompt at reporting!) The long train journey was not as wonderful as I had hoped, because the trains were very very overcrowded in peak season, but at least I had a seat and got to enjoy the lovely views. And read a bunch of novels, which is definitely making my brain happier.

They invited me to dinner Friday evening, and had a very Liv conversation about dealing with racism in education and medicine, with the other guests having direct professional expertise, not just setting the world to rights. And put me up in a super nice hotel in a neo-gothic pile that used to be a convent, and were gracious enough to invite me to stay Saturday night as well so I even got a little bit of time in Truro, which is where they held this particular service. I walked along the river a bit, I found a teeny-tiny Pride festival in the town centre, but it was packing up by the time I had finished dinner at 7 pm, so I wasn't able to get dessert from one of the sparkly rainbow doughnut stands.

In between I lead a Shabbat service, with very enthusiastic participation from the community, and they even appreciated my somewhat political sermon about whether we can still be Zionists in this moment. Because it was the new moon of Av, I got to read from their super-exciting Historic scroll. Well, actually I chanted the verses about the creation of the sun and moon; it's still a big deal for me to do that in public. I'm pretty pleased with how all that went.

And now I'm back and I have another month of relatively uncrowded schedule. It's very nice.

television serieses on a small screen

Jul. 26th, 2025 11:27 pm
gool_duck: (Default)
[personal profile] gool_duck
Just finished watching Kdrama, The Secret Life of My Secretary , which had the male lead afflicted with prosopagnosia! The second K-drama I have watched where this happened, the one I watched before was Beauty Inside.
This time I think the disabling part of it was expressed better: first because the male lead's ability to read facial expressions is very good so other people experience it as 'mind reading', he's very aware of their feelings and intentions through their expressions. So when he loses that it's a real loss, he suddenly can't tell what people are thinking and what their intentions towards him are. And there are bits where he blanks his best friend , or gives a stranger the flowers and the hug he meant to give his mother, and those are embarrassing and inappropriate things to do, and he has to come up with excuses. It feels like more of a *disability*. In 'Beauty Inside' when we meet the male lead is after a few years of adjusting to having prosopagnosia and he has more coping mechanisms in place, he's very aware of people's hairstyles and little details like who has pierced ears. In the secret life of my secretary he is only just starting to develop systems, he just recognised faces before and he wasn't keeping track of, e.g., their hair.
Part of it is just the contrast to what he had before that he cannot access now.

EDITED TO ADD: I liked the way the prosopagnosia was depiscted at first, with people's faces just shifting so the same person had a different face every time he looked at them.
Later there was just a blur where the face should be, when his condition worsened: as though it were better to see no face at all than to see the face wrong.

THe trouble I had with 'Beauty Inside' is that prosopagnosia is just how life is. Of course I don't recognise celebrities out of context. Of course if I haven't seen someone in a while I need to re-adjust and update my memory of their face. Of course when k-pop boy Hyunjin StrayKids got all his hair buzzed down to a centimetre I could not recognise his face.

*

Series I started to watch now that I finished prosopagnosia content: genders again!

A Korean series that just started, 'My Girlfriend is the Man', in which a girl wakes up one morning and finds herself a very handsome boy. It's a condition, it runs in the family.

(i really like the first episode, which introduces the boyfriend and girlfriend, it shows he's devoted by having him show up after her job interview - with flowers - and with plasters for her feet and comfortable slippers to change into, because he knows she wore her pretty-but-uncomfortable shoes. It shows her mentioning her boyfriend giving her a book she loves at a job interview with the publisher of this book. It shows them snogging he walks her home - they are cute and in love and attracted to each other, and the show knows how to show it.)

A Japanese series, 'Cinderella's Closet', in which one of the main characters is a cross dresser who sometimes presents as female and sometimes presents as male.

*

Not in Israel

Jul. 18th, 2025 12:55 pm
liv: In English: My fandom is text obsessed / In Hebrew: These are the words (words)
[personal profile] liv
It's been a full and emotional couple of months, friends. The main thing to report is that I was supposed to be in Israel as of a week ago, but Israel bombed Iran and Iran retaliated and the go/no-go date for my summer programme was right in the middle of the 11 days when Israel was in full lockdown due to lots of missile attacks, so they really had to cancel it. I have a whoooooole lot of emotions and thoughts about this, and I also have an unexpected summer month with almost no commitments.

rab student life in interesting times )

I will fully admit that I'm glad I didn't end up getting on a flight two days later. Intellectually it goes without saying that I would far rather Israel was in fact safe enough for me to be there, and that it had been consistently obvious it would be over the past couple of months. But personally, I am absolutely delighted to be at home. And have a chance to see my family and do fun summer things like go to concerts and have picnic dates and sort out practical things that I've let slip with the intensity of everything since Mum got sick. I even managed to overlap in London with [personal profile] redbird and her partners this week, which was an unexpected and wonderful bonus. Among many chill, non-urgent summer plans I am hoping to be a bit more present here.

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