From petra Reply to this post saying 'icon', and I will tell you my favourite icon of yours. Then post this to your own journal using your own favourite icon.

This was actually really hard to pick a favorite icon but I love this one which I call 'running towards a happy ending'. I just love the hopefulness of this. It feels like where I am today as well since the day ended up warming up and being sunny, it felt like Spring for the first time in a bit.

It's been several days since I finished Cristina Rivera Garcia's No One Will See Me Cry (translated by Andrew Hurley) and I've still sort of singularly failed to formulate an opinion about it; I just keep sort of mentally picking the book up and turning it over and putting it uneasily down again.

In some ways this book reminds me of A Month in the Country, in that both are historical novels that delicately build up a picture of lives destabilized by and lived in the cracks after an epoch-shaking event, while carefully avoiding -- tracing the parameters of, writing around, turning the camera consistently away from -- the event itself. The difference is that A Month in the Country does in fact feel light, delicate, balanced against the heavy thing at its center, while No One Will See Me Cry isn't in any way a light book; aside from the heaviness of its subject matter, feels laden with symbolism at every turn, although the symbolism itself is often specific and startling.

The premise: in 1920s Mexico City, an aging, morphine-addicted photographer who's been hired to take portraits of asylum inmates meets Matilda, a woman he last photographed many years ago, when she was a prostitute. Joaquin engages in a kind of narrative barter with, first the asylum doctor, then with Matilda herself, in an attempt to understand her story and how it intersects with his own to bring them both to this asylum. Both of them, it turns out, formatively knew and formatively loved the same woman, a revolutionary, in the years before the war -- but neither of them was actually involved in the Revolution, neither of them were active agents for or against the transformation of their livetimes; Joaquin describes himself more than once as the only photographer of his generation who didn't take any photographs of the war, and Matilda was, at the time, involved in an emotional affair with a desert landscape.

There are some tropes that one expects, and is braced for, around Women and Lost Women and Madwomen, especially when insanity is used as a thematic metaphor around national trajectory, especially when all that is inextrictable from questions of poverty and indigineity. Rivera Garcia is definitely deploying some of those tropes with purpose and to a point and I absolutely do not know enough to have a full sense of what she's doing with them. This is one of those situations where I wish I was reading a book in context of a class or a club. As it is, what I'm left with is interest, unease, some beautiful and surprising images, and a sense that I ought to read a lot more about the Mexican Revolution.

Was 17.8 KM, 11.1 miles, contending with noisy roads (12/18, County K, etc) all the way there and back. I needed that. Well, not the noisy roads aspect, that I could've done without, but the ride, yes.

I also needed the farmers market run to the square, if for different reasons. Farm fresh eggs, smoked trout that's going to end up in sandwiches with dark seed bread, and a veggie curry empanada that'll be breakfast tomorrow. :) Also a brief catch-up with one of my favorite vendors, Cora the empanada baker. She is just a delightful person, one of those folks who is unfailingly and honestly kind to everyone she meets.

I did not need the Brewer game loss, blah, but oh well. Nothing I can do about that. Except swear a little, heh.

Welcome to dw100! Challenges are posted approximately once a week.

Challenge 1087 is document.

The rules:

• All stories must be 100 words long
• Please place your story behind a cut if it contains spoilers for the current season
• You don't have to use the challenge word or phrase in your story; it's just there for inspiration
• Please include the challenge word or phrase in the subject line of your post
• Please use the challenge tag 1087: document on any story posted to this challenge

Good luck!

Happy Thursday!

What is your pup's Roman Empire? I.e. what is a subject your character can't help but think about at least once a day?

I have three, count 'em, THREE new additions to my assortment of medical terms you just never really wanted to know! Thank the Gods, I encountered them while reading stuff completely unrelated to *me*, but...

( It's spleeny in here. )

I'll just stop there and come back with extra Lore: Disturbing at a later time.

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

Also I'm low on eloquence and the tireds are setting in, so forgive the rare brevity.

a Covid vaccine booster in the arm=:)
a fantastic musical performance (Hairspray, which my family loves pretty much to a person)=:)
walking the Horicon Marsh main trail=:)
*not* losing a glove on the very same trail thanks to a reasonably brief search, whew!=:)
not getting to pet the black labby who whimpered at me out a slow-moving car's open window=:( - I had to settle for saying "Awwww, baby," as the friendly fuzz and their possibly-a-golden sibling went by. They were clearly well-loved, but still. I would have so pet both puppydogs, had I been given the chance and the okay.
Storm damage=:( - not us, but other parts of Wisconsin, yikes
Merlin IDs=:)
Cardamom in black coffee=:)
Neighbors being excellent to each other=:)
Oldtime radio streams=:)
Synaesthesia=:)
The chance to, potentially, audit a summer course on the literature of the U.S. women's suffrage movement=:) the professor is making sure to include PoC voices in her selections, too
A family and friends political zoom getting zoombombed by that same professor's 50-pound short-haired pointer deciding to be a lap dog=:) there were pets by proxy
Daylilies overwintering successfully and returning from a dormant state=:) Yay! Little green shoots are go! I thought she was a goner for a second there.

Aaaaand not conking out in my chair is probably a good idea. I'm going the heck to bed!

Welcome to dw100! Challenges are posted approximately once a week.

Challenge #1086 is obviate.
The rules:

• All stories must be 100 words long
• Please place your story behind a cut if it contains spoilers for any upcoming episodes
• You don't have to use the challenge word or phrase in your story; it's just there for inspiration
• Please include the challenge word or phrase in the subject line of your post
• Please use the challenge tag 1086: obviate on any story posted to this challenge

Good luck!

I've been meaning for months to write up Knight Flower, the Joseon-era kdrama about a RESPECTABLE WIDOW BY DAY, VIGILANTE BY NIGHT who spends her days dutifully kneeling by her husband's portrait and serving her mother-in-law and her nights running around town in a black mask dispensing justice by the sword.

I enjoyed this drama very much, but it's kind of an odd beast -- it's genuinely interested in the awful constraints on Joseon's women's worlds and widow's worlds in particular and wants to explore that seriously, and it also wants have our heroine be extremely cool and fight off five guys in an alley every episode and toss off a one-liner about it, and it also wants our [middle-aged! widow!] heroine to be a charming sitcom naif who gets comically overcome by the sight of a man's midriff and is shocked! shocked! to learn about some of the various injustices going on in Joseon despite the fact that she's been wandering the streets dispensing vigilante justice for ten years. (They attempt to square some of this circle by virtue of the fact that our heroine's arranged husband was killed! by bandits! on his very wedding day! and so she has spent ten years dutifully mourning a man she never actually met, let alone slept with.)

And because Lee Hanee is a talented actress, she can almost more or less pull all of that off and make RESPECTABLE WIDOW SECRET VIGILANTE JO YEO-HWA a coherent character -- helped in large part by the various interesting women around her, including:

- Yeo-hwa's hard-nosed and cynical maid, whom Yeo-hwa rescued off the streets as a teenager, and who has spent her years since then in the single-minded pursuit of enough money for An Independent Place, which she is going to move into JUST as soon as her chaotic mistress to whom she is unfortunately absolutely loyal is Out Of This Fucking House and No Longer Doing This Stupid Vigilante Shit
- Yeo-hwa's mother-in-law, who holds Yeo-hwa harshly to the extremely narrow line of conduct allowed for widows [go nowhere; speak to no one; serve your husband's family; accept that it's an embarrassment for you to be alive when your husband is dead] and sees her largely as a walking reputational vector for the family -- but hey, at least she would never pressure Yeo-hwa to commit honorable suicide, like some other mother-in-laws-of-widows of their acquaintance, so that's something! In any other drama this character would be a cruel stereotype but in this drama she's played by Kim Mi-kyung with sympathy and complexity; she's the immediate bane of Yeo-hwa's life, and nonetheless she and Yeo-hwa have spent a decade bound together as family with a kind of affection, and Yeo-hwa understands perfectly well that her mother-in-law is also trapped by the only rules she knows
- Yeo-hwa's business partner and accomplice, a merchant whom Yeo-hwa also rescued on the streets and who has also spent the time since then like You Could Just Leave This Fucking House, I will prepare a fake identity for you, it won't be hard
- the main female villain, ( who is somewhat of a spoiler though this all starts to come out pretty early on )

Obviously Jo Yeo-hwa also has a love interest. He's an honorable baby cop who wants to fight corruption and also has a backstory tied up in the ten-years-ago political plot. He's completely fine. His older brother, an upright schemer who's been helping the virtuous king lay long-term plots to take back control from his evil ministers,* has an very cute B-plot bookstore romance with the cynical maid that I frankly found much more compelling in the glimpses of it that we got. More compelling yet ( is spoilers again! )

*there's nothing kdramas love more than a virtuous king who's trying to take back control from his evil ministers