Technical Difficulties

1. The new bread pans work very nicely. They're a little shorter (length-wise rather than depth-wise) than my old ones, so I get these very tall majestic loaves. They do, however, definitely need greasing, at least around the top.

2. Also, the new bread pans are deep red. My bread mixing bowl is golden-yellow. Our counters are bright blue (so not our choice). As I said to matociquala yesterday, I feel like I've wandered into some trendy yupster magazine article on baking your own bread.

3. Stuff I'm working on right now, at least hypothetically: (1) A Reckoning of Men: matociquala lobbed the ball back and it's awesomely cool, but I have to figure out how to play it. (2) Shadow Unit: "Hope Is Stronger Than Love," which gave me something this morning which should be OMG TEH CREEPY if I can make it work. (3) "Doc Holliday Makes A Deal": I hope this will consent to be a short story, but otherwise it's the first chapter of Doc Holliday, Demon Hunter.

4. Saturday night of Penguicon, mirrorthaw and I were flipping channels (we don't have cable, so this is a sort of weird special occasion thing when we stay in hotels) and we found a college women's fast-pitch softball game, Tennessee vs. Alabama, and Tennessee was getting shellacked. mirrorthaw can confirm that I turned into the most geeked out, fangirliest fangirl EVAR, because OMG there are women playing sports on my TV. I'm totally the same way about women's basketball, even though basketball is not a sport that does much for me, so IMAGINE MY GEEKITUDE. And not only was it women playing baseball (under the generous definition of baseball, yes), but, unlike with women's basketball, these were not women built like supermodels. This is totally not a slam against the women who play basketball, but their sport selects for women who are tall and willowy and thus fit right in with the cultural image of what sort of women you see on your TV. Fast-pitch softball does not select for tall and willowy; from the evidence of the Tennessee and Alabama teams, it selects for women who are short and stocky and strong. Women who are built like me. I can't even explain how awesome it was. I also loved the breakdown of the dichotomized performance of female gender roles: these are athletes, visibly powerful women (Alabama hit several home runs while we were watching), wearing softball uniforms (and Tennessee with that terrible orange, too), and they've got the black bars under their eyes to cut the glare, and yet the Tennessee pitchers have all done their hair the same way, with the French braid along one side and the pale blue bow at the back, and I love the way that they're doing both, that they can be serious athletes and yet still make choices about their gender performance--they can code themselves along a spectrum of femininities*--and they can by god play their sport and mean it.

5. I want to say thank you publicly to Penguicon's concom and staff, who did a wonderful job this weekend--especially but not at all exclusively Yanni Kuznia, who was running the literature track. Thank you all very much!

---
*pitselly objected to my using the butch/femme dichotomy/continuum to talk about this, but the suggested replacement of masculine/feminine is wrong, because it implies that there's only one way to perform femininity, and that is NOT AT ALL what I mean. It also implies that the women who didn't go for the braids and pale blue bows were being, or trying to be, like male athletes, and that is equally not what I mean. They're all women athletes, and what I love is the fact that they have a variety of gender performances without being stigmatized as quote-unquote masculine (those girls are just trying to pretend they're men) or stigmatized the opposite way as quote-unquote feminine (those girls, they can't cope with a real man's game). And there isn't a lot of vocabulary to talk about that.