In Which A New Superhero Name Is Coveted

25 March 2003

I have decided that I want to be a different superhero. The Non Sequitess is not enough for my needs right now. I want to be The Determinist. My superpower would be that I could point at people and make them make up their minds on a given topic. Their mind wouldn't stay made up once they got new data, necessarily, but then when people were hemming and hawing over what make for dinner or what story to buy or who to hire, I could just zap them with my Determinist rays, and they would know. I would use it selectively, because I know that sometimes if someone absolutely had to make up their mind, they would do it in a way I didn't like. But when people in stores were nattering about whether they should go with the green sweater or the blue one, zzzzzot! The Determinist strikes again!

In the meantime, I guess I'll just get by as the Non Sequitess. The good thing about being the Non Sequitess is that the costume doesn't really have to make sense with anything -- you can just pull something out of nowhere, and that makes it appropriate.

Oh, that's low. I got my first spam with the subject line "I'm being deployed." That is just not okay.

One of the things that concerns me about protesters lately is that falsifiability doesn't seem like a concern for groups on either side. One side feels comfortable claiming that it will be responsible for saving a number of Iraqi lives by changing the way the war is waged. The other feels comfortable claiming that it will be responsible for returning soldiers not getting spit on and otherwise mistreated. I'm at least mildly skeptical of both claims, because I don't think there's anyway to verify them. It's easy to say things like that, just as it's easy to claim that things would be better if Al Gore had been sworn in as president after either the 2000 election or the impeachment of Bill Clinton, depending on which side wants to rewrite history. "Would have" is slippery enough when you're writing alternate history, where the criteria are "majorly interesting and minorly plausible." Whereas when the reverse are the criteria in real-life speculation...it's just impossible to tell. The claims shouldn't be made as fact. As possibilities, sure, but not as irrefutable, incontrovertible facts.

Ah well. I've been wanting to write the scene with the volva/seeress that I talked about a few days ago, but I couldn't figure out why I needed it, and I didn't want to put it in just to be nifty. (This is a YA novel: it's short. There is less room for things that are just nifty than there might be in a grown-up novel.) But my subconscious finally has its vindication: I know why I need it. It does go in the book. So there.

Like any of you argued with me in the first place.

We went to Tennessee Valley but ran into no Authority whatsoever. Marin is not big on authorities, generally. It was a good day: chat at Stan and Judy's, then a few miles of hike through Tennessee Valley to the beach, then back to Stan and Judy's for tea and strawberries and lovely amaretti cookies, then more chat, and then down to Jennie Low's, Stan and Judy's favorite Chinese place in Mill Valley. I tried to get coffee at a nice little bookstore/coffee place across the street (we'd been to the bookstore before, though not to Jennie Low's), but they were just closing, so we had to find another coffee place instead. And it had chocolates as well, and Mark and I were spoiled and Timprov was virtuous. So. Good day. Pictures here, with us and scenery and blue, blue butterflies.

Today: another appointment for Timprov, and it's close enough to the library that I'll probably drop off some books, maybe pick a few up and maybe not, depending on timing and what I need to stick around for. And lots of editing, of course. Also I'll be reading Patrick O'Leary's The Impossible Bird, which I really like so far but didn't have much chance to read yesterday.

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