mysterious as the dark side of the moon

Last night, I was reading _In Conquest Born_. I started it last winter, then went off traveling and got distracted by booooks and didn't pick it up again until last week. I'm really enjoying it now, and putting it aside for so long set up a wonderful coincidence. Music was coming in from outside for about 2 minutes, presumably while someone playing a car stereo way too loud waited behind a bus and stopped for a red light. The song was "Make a Man Out Of You," from _Mulan_. The juxtaposition of the song with the book (towards the end of the book, when the primary characters had made contact but had not started their conclusive interaction) was really impressive.

I recognized that I was reading one genre and listening to another, with different presumptions, intentions, and target audiences. For all that, it felt like noticing a difference between mid-'80s feminism and late-'90s feminism...differences in ironic tone and anger that I had chalked up to my own changes in going from 18-year-old student (when _In Conquest Born_ was published) to rather isolated 30-year-old engineer. As ever, it's more complicated.

another uncontrolled experiment

My Saturday afternoon was catastrophically bad for my hands. What about Saturday afternoon? Dunno. I hate latent reactions. The unusual things I did were chopping half a cabbage, changing the light in the hall, and an experimental 5 minutes with a rowing machine at the gym. (Sometimes I get so frustrated with not being able to do any upper body exercise without setting off pain flares. After going to all the trouble of getting to the gym in the snow, I wanted to feel like I was accomplishing something. Hah. The erg looked like a possibility because I didn't need to grip with my whole hands, I could just curl my fingers around the bar.) I was trying to keep my thumbs relaxed and not involved. I don't know if my best efforts weren't good enough, or if something else caused this flare. All that fiddling with the uncooperative light fixture? Cold damp weather? Combined effects?

It might not have been the erg, but I still don't think I'm going to risk it again. This flare is really bad. I can type, if I'm careful about the spacebar. But the motion of my thumb in rolling up my sleeve this morning -- yikes! I hate it that such trivial, ordinary things as trying to open a door or turn the pages of an old worn paperback can defeat me.