Coming back up for air!

I haven't been posting or reading LJ a lot this week; it's been too busy. Suffice it to say that Tuesday morning was the big hump of my week and now that it's over everything seems to be coasting along at a much calmer pace. That's not to say that things aren't still insane: this Saturday Kouryou-chan's school is having their annual auction and Sunday she's been invited to a birthday party, so it's not like I actually have that elusive quality known as "free time." Oh, Hell, I'm even going to miss SEAF this year, and SakuraCon (not that I have any money with which to go to SakuraCon). That said, I'm mostly glad that the big stresses in my life are temporarily under control.

I have been writing. Not as much as I like: I only did 4,000 words last week but I had a great inspiration for the next Honesty epsiode. On Misuko's third trip to Indigo 161-4 there will be a mix of students from the prior trip and new people, and on the flight out, what if one of the younger students, a stereotypical geek-girl with glasses, nurses a massive crush on Linia. Angstilarity ensues. A friend of mine commented, "If your characters ever figure out who you are, they'll lynch you." Isn't that true of most writers?

And I have two new toys: the new laptop is finally truly stabilized after three months. It runs without crashing on a regular basis, although if I want to run the video card's 3D features, I need to reboot it and disable those same features before the suspend/resume cycle works properly. A small price to pay, as it reboots very quickly and I have to log in as a different user anyway to enable the gaming features. TV out isn't working, but it does talk infra-red to my palm. It even takes IR commands from a remote control, which would be nice if I'd figured out how the TV-out feature worked. The CPU underclocker works, saving the battery. It talks to my Archos, my phone, my art pad, and to my other new toy.

Which is an iPod. I wouldn't have bought one myself; I was reasonably happy with the Archos, but compared to an iPod the Archos looks like something built by the Soviets: big, clunky, and inadequate. It was a shipping gift from work. The only headache with the iPod is that it's not filesystem based: it imposes its own structure for navigating to a song, and learning to use that system and adapting my own collection to using it, has been quite the learning curve. I've even figured out how to use FAAC to convert MP3 and CD-ROM audiobooks to the M4B format that the iPod uses. The interface doesn't make it apparent how to upload photos or videos, both of which this player supposedly supports, but I figure I'll get it eventually. I do like the sound reproduction quality; I was listening to Pale Pink Dance by Yuki Kajiura the other day, a kind of nifty Spanish-guitar over a techno background piece (I'm a sucker for good Spanish guitar, and the mashup is done very well). On the Archos, I liked it; on the iPod, I can hear every hit of the strings so clearly it's amazing.

Last weekend was nothing much to write about. Saturday I had to stay home because Omaha was out with friends; Sunday, I had to drive Kouryou-chan to yet another birthday party. We also managed to make it to Home Despot to replace my power-washer, which had died after only about six hours of use. I hope the new one isn't is chintzy; the house exterior needs a lot of work. We've been cooking a little more, but not as much as I'd like.

All in all, routine and ordinary.

An insight into poverty.

I read a fascinating article the other day. It regarded a survey of mothers in Georgia who receive financial aid of some sort, and it asked a lot of the usual questions and one of them was "If your children aren't in school, how often do you play with them?" But it also asked one of the most important questions of all: "If you had the time to do so, would you play with your children more often? If not, why not?"

It may surprise you to know that a huge percentage of the respondents said "no." But what's really interesting is the reason over half of them gave: doing so would interfere with the child's childhood. Because an adult interacting with a child is an imposition on this one and only time in a child's life when a child gets to be childlike.

It has long been observed that poor women don't interact with their children as much as middle-class mothers, and that this lack of interaction leads to a much slower development of language and other learning skills. But now we learn that some of them are doing so because skills like being able to communicate with an adult, and to read and write and so on, are the provinces of adults. To impose those skills on a small child is to deny that child his childhood. For poor women adulthood sucks, and her holding it off for her children as long as possible is perceived as a mercy.

The only question remains, how do we undo this perception and help these people realize that they're not really doing their children any favors? Because this attitude ensures that adulthood will suck for their children.