"Oh, silent, I the hunter, til the answers clear"

[hermionesviolin]

Is it drier today than it was yesterday?  'Cause I went outside ~2:00 when it was ~91F and it wasn't deathly.

My second-floor, not-air-conditioned, residence was even comfortably habitable.

I forewent (yes, that is correct) getting my hair cut after work due to hunger pangs, but of course when I did get home I wasn't inclined to cook dinner. (It's still summer heat.) Sigh.

However, I bought a cookie sheet when I was at Target yesterday and wondered why I had done that since I'm really not gonna bake, but tonight it occurred to me that I could bake my frozen french fries on it (esp. since our toaster oven isn't very big).

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Harvard - Radcliffe Summer Theatre is doing You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.  Should I go?  Would I like it?

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I was looking at my yogurt container at lunch today (Yoplait, Peaches&Cream) and it said something about how consuming dairy helps your body burn calories ... I forget the exact wording (maybe it was about this?), and the containers I have in the fridge don't have it, but it was definitely weird.  I've been reading Food Politics, so I've been sensitized to how the meat and dairy industries influence what kinds of notices get put on food.

Midday news: Nestlé bought Jenny Craig.  They own Lean Cuisine and a whole lotta other brands.  Reading Food Politics also made me want to boycott Nestlé because of the whole marketing infant formula in the Third World thing.  As I was reading the book and thinking about boycotting Nestlé, I was also thinking about how I'd certainly at least heard of this boycott before and had just brushed it off as I do all things from The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy.  It's kind of sad how my instinctive reaction to anything resembling The Left is to disagree/oppose.  (Four years at Smith plus a contrary nature will do that, I suppose.)

I already boycott Philip Morris ['cause they're selling death which I just don't truck with], which means abstaining from all Kraft and Nabisco (and Miller beer, but I barely drink beer -- ew -- and never remember that Philip Morris owns a beer company when I am out drinking), and reading Food Politics makes me feel like I should boycott every food corporation evar -- which is obviously not practical; Nestlé might be worth the effort, though.

Back to the yogurt: Its ingredients list says, "kosher gelatin."  *stabs*  The web tells me that "Some Kosher gelatins are made with agar-agar, most are not."  I was gonna phase out yogurt at some point in my attempts to approximate veganism (sidenote: anyone have non-dairy milk-like beverages they love?) but it looks like after I finish the yogurt I have I won't be getting any more.  I knew gelatin was used in jello and marshmallows (which I thus refuse to eat) and some photo emulsion and swallowable tablets (which I'm less scrupulous about avoiding) and some sweets (which labels I try to remember to check) but I totally hadn't realized it was in so many food products.  Guess I'm gonna have to be much more conscientious about reading labels.

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Today, lunabee34 wrote:

My birthday is tomorrow, and in honor of this blessed day *g*, I wanna start a meme--the I Love My Friends Meme. It seems like a lot more wank than usual has been floating around lj and lots of people have been feeling down or ill or just not as available as usual, like me. So to celebrate my birthday, tell your flist how much they mean to you. If you've got a huge flist, split it up over a few days or even weeks, but tell your fandom friends how much they've enriched your lives.

Leaving aside the problematic generalization of "fandom friends" (I know various people on LJ whom I knew through meatspace first, many of whom are not at all fannish), I have recurrent angst (not quite accurate, but the best word I could come up with) about the fact that I have various people on my flist whom I don't really feel connected to.  There are many people I don't communicate with that often but whom I still consider friends (and I would hope the feeling is mutual) but there are also people whom I find myself wondering, "Why do I still read this person?"  This leads to ponderments about why people have me friended and also about what the heck I want in friends.  I don't care all that much about people's personal lives until I'm invested in them as people, so I've got nothing as for why people (who aren't previously invested in relationship with me) still have me friended.  As for what I want in people, the only thing I've been able to come up with is that I want people I can have discussions with. And I'm gonna stop now before this turns really negative, as that would be even less in the spirit of what Lorraine wanted.

Comments

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

Well, you made me laugh with that comment, so that's good enough for me. :)

Glad to hear it.

I actually considered waiting to make this post until later in the week because it seemed so inappropriate to hear someone say "For my birthday, what I really want is for people to share what they like about other people" and turn around and post "I hate people la la la."

That seems so weird to me to friend people when creating an LJ for someone. When I made an LJ for my mom I friended myself, but that was it.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

That seems so weird to me to friend people when creating an LJ for someone.

I think I had a really unique situation with mine. When amejisuto and suki_blue made my journal for me, they apparently told their flist about it and asked them to friend the journal (they were making it for me as a surprise). A handful of these people had already been reading my fic on the Yahoo listserv or at the Parrot archive. Them doing a flist for me had a lot of really positive benefits . I started out with a flist instead of having to build one over time. There at the beginning, I had a group of people I could interact with and who responded to my fic. I do not think I would have had nearly the success with writing if I hadn't already had a flist made up for me. Granted this flist was small, probably about half the number of journals I currently have friended, but Ame and Suki are very well connected in the Buffy fandom, so I ended up with a flist that contains what I consider to be several BNFs in the Buffy fandom. So I got this sort of instant cred and gravitas that I think most people have to build up slowly over time.

The only negative aspect to them creating a flist for me is that were maybe two or three people on the flist that I didn't have much in common with. I probably would not have friended their journals on my own; it's not that I didn't like these people, I just don't have anything to talk about with them really. But that was a very very small price to pay for the positive benefits.

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm definitely used to the idea of "Look, my friend has an LJ. Friend him/her." Did you just automatically friend them back? (I was already reading LJs before I got my own and started in a nonfannish context, so I got to get eased into the implications of "friending.")

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

By the time they gave me the journal, they had friended back all the journals that friended mine and also joined my lj in a variety of communities they thought I might be interested in. And at first, I did automatically friend back every journal that friended me just because I didn't know any better, or rather didn't know anything about those implications you mention.