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allekhaIn skating, I think I might be getting mohawk turns down, after avoiding practicing them for a long time because I didn't like doing them. In my last lesson, we worked on spirals - on my good side they're not bad, but on my bad side I have a habit of not getting over my hip properly so they go crooked. We also started doing outside edge spirals, and I'd like to try catchfoot spirals sometime, since I'm flexible enough. There is not very much ice time around here during June, and what does exist is expensive freestyle sessions, so we might leave off the ice dance lessons until there is accessible public ice again.
Our coach showed us some core exercises at the end of our last lesson. While both of us need it, I actually did better than R at them. (He doesn't really do non-skating exercise, while I do, though not as consistently as I should.) Skating seems like it should be all about the legs, but your upper body is involved more than I initially thought.
My plants are now planted, save my lavender, which needs a bigger pot that I haven't bought yet, and I poked my flower seeds into the dirt. Hope they all come up. The plants are looking happy so far; after some weather, we're having a nice rainstorm today.
While I was digging out there, I was listening to the short podcast series "Bear Brook", which I've now finished. It's an interesting podcast about a mysterious murder case that took place in a town called Bear Brook, which is one that I had heard about before and remembered as "that one where they found the woman and kids in big drums in the woods".
It was an interesting podcast and mostly well-done, though there were two main things that bugged me about it, besides a couple of editing quirks. The first is that I thought it fell somewhat into that trap of true crime where the serial killer (usually a man) gets held up as the most interesting person in the picture, as opposed to the victims (usually women). In this case, it may be more understandable than in some others, because the victims are still unidentified and so there really is only so much you can say about them. However, there were still several points where I got irritated about this tendency:
1) The podcast spends a lot of time talking about genetic genealogy, since a related case is what launched it as a technique (not, as I had thought, the one in California). But the podcast takes a long time to get around to explaining why it hasn't been used so far to identify the Bear Brook victims, and puts that information in a kind of awkward place. (The problem has been difficulties in extracting DNA of high enough quality to test.)
2) The host at one point starts waxing on about the serial killer's personality and how smart he must have been not to tell anyone about his past misdeeds while in prison for a different murder, in a way that made me roll my eyes at my eggplants.
3) The one that really irked me: in the first update after the initial run of episodes, the first thing the host tells us about the content of the update is that no, they haven't found any more victims of the serial killer. Uh, no, my first thought, if I hadn't already checked Wikipedia, would have been wondering if they were any closer to identifying the victims in the case that the podcast is named after.
The other thing that bugged me is not specific to this podcast, but it got me thinking about it. I have this odd pet peeve about the phrase "real name". The serial killer in the Bear Brook case used several aliases over the years, and when the podcast got to the point where law enforcement discovered his birth name, the host called it his "real name".
Part of my dislike of this phrase might come from the fact that I can and will very much overthink things - it's one of the reasons why strict Utilitarianism does not work for me. What does "real name" even mean? This serial killer went through half a dozen aliases, sure, but he used them for years at a time, and spent a decade going by the last one after he was finally arrested. If you go by a name for long enough, if you respond to it and are known by it, does that make a "real" name, or is that not enough? My parents both changed their names - my dad to the more common nickname version of his birth name, my mom to a completely different one, since she hated her birth name - and have gone by them for decades. Are those their "real" names? Does it make a difference that they had 'good' reasons and legally changed them? (Journalists seem to have dialed back on referring to the birth names of adoptees and trans people as "real" names, at least.) What makes a stage name or pen name (or screen name) that might be the only name a person might be publicly known as less "real" than a legal name? Can someone only have one "real" name? Certainly people seem to use the phrase that way.
The other part stems from an experience I had when I was younger which, I suspect, is not a very common one. I think I was eight or so, and my dad took me into our living room, sat me down, and started to repeatedly have an exchange like this with me:
Dad: Who are you?
Me: [legal name].
Dad: Okay, let's try that again: who are you?
Me: [legal name]?
Which eventually progressed to something like this:
Dad: Let's say your name was [name of character I adored]. In that case, who are you?
Me: [character's name]!
Dad: And if your name was [legal name] again?
Me: [legal name]???
As you can imagine, I got more and more confused, as we repeated this for a long time, until I finally understood what he was getting at and said, "Me! I'd be me!" and understood that my name wasn't me and didn't define me, it was a label for 'me'.
I don't think names are meaningless; humans ascribe an awful lot of meaning to things that may not be 'inherently' meaningful. Like, there's nothing to the sounds of 'book'/'libre'/'hon', or the symbol 本, or [insert ASL sign for 'book'] that makes it mean the general concept of a book, except that people have made those things meaningful. I still think there is social meaning to my name and the associations people have with it, such as its associated gender or what it says about my cultural background, and even if names don't define people, there are plenty of good reasons for people to change their name, including just not liking it.
But ever since then, I've never liked the idea of a "real name", in real life or even in the context of fantasy worlds where knowing something's "true name" gives you power over it. I realize that this is a weird hangup to have, but there it is. I don't think either of the names I use IRL is that much more 'really' my name than the other, and a screen name I chose almost half my life ago works almost as well as a label.
(Side thought: are there any fantasy series where "true names" for things aren't or don't have to be in a spoken language?)
I guess this does raise the question of what does make a person themself - what is the 'me' that is being labeled? - and I'm not philosophical enough to answer that one. I remember I also had a children's book called, "I Am My Body, NOT!", but I'm also a believer in neurological monism, which raises plenty of questions by itself. So I've left that train of thought alone for now.
Our coach showed us some core exercises at the end of our last lesson. While both of us need it, I actually did better than R at them. (He doesn't really do non-skating exercise, while I do, though not as consistently as I should.) Skating seems like it should be all about the legs, but your upper body is involved more than I initially thought.
My plants are now planted, save my lavender, which needs a bigger pot that I haven't bought yet, and I poked my flower seeds into the dirt. Hope they all come up. The plants are looking happy so far; after some weather, we're having a nice rainstorm today.
While I was digging out there, I was listening to the short podcast series "Bear Brook", which I've now finished. It's an interesting podcast about a mysterious murder case that took place in a town called Bear Brook, which is one that I had heard about before and remembered as "that one where they found the woman and kids in big drums in the woods".
It was an interesting podcast and mostly well-done, though there were two main things that bugged me about it, besides a couple of editing quirks. The first is that I thought it fell somewhat into that trap of true crime where the serial killer (usually a man) gets held up as the most interesting person in the picture, as opposed to the victims (usually women). In this case, it may be more understandable than in some others, because the victims are still unidentified and so there really is only so much you can say about them. However, there were still several points where I got irritated about this tendency:
1) The podcast spends a lot of time talking about genetic genealogy, since a related case is what launched it as a technique (not, as I had thought, the one in California). But the podcast takes a long time to get around to explaining why it hasn't been used so far to identify the Bear Brook victims, and puts that information in a kind of awkward place. (The problem has been difficulties in extracting DNA of high enough quality to test.)
2) The host at one point starts waxing on about the serial killer's personality and how smart he must have been not to tell anyone about his past misdeeds while in prison for a different murder, in a way that made me roll my eyes at my eggplants.
3) The one that really irked me: in the first update after the initial run of episodes, the first thing the host tells us about the content of the update is that no, they haven't found any more victims of the serial killer. Uh, no, my first thought, if I hadn't already checked Wikipedia, would have been wondering if they were any closer to identifying the victims in the case that the podcast is named after.
The other thing that bugged me is not specific to this podcast, but it got me thinking about it. I have this odd pet peeve about the phrase "real name". The serial killer in the Bear Brook case used several aliases over the years, and when the podcast got to the point where law enforcement discovered his birth name, the host called it his "real name".
Part of my dislike of this phrase might come from the fact that I can and will very much overthink things - it's one of the reasons why strict Utilitarianism does not work for me. What does "real name" even mean? This serial killer went through half a dozen aliases, sure, but he used them for years at a time, and spent a decade going by the last one after he was finally arrested. If you go by a name for long enough, if you respond to it and are known by it, does that make a "real" name, or is that not enough? My parents both changed their names - my dad to the more common nickname version of his birth name, my mom to a completely different one, since she hated her birth name - and have gone by them for decades. Are those their "real" names? Does it make a difference that they had 'good' reasons and legally changed them? (Journalists seem to have dialed back on referring to the birth names of adoptees and trans people as "real" names, at least.) What makes a stage name or pen name (or screen name) that might be the only name a person might be publicly known as less "real" than a legal name? Can someone only have one "real" name? Certainly people seem to use the phrase that way.
The other part stems from an experience I had when I was younger which, I suspect, is not a very common one. I think I was eight or so, and my dad took me into our living room, sat me down, and started to repeatedly have an exchange like this with me:
Dad: Who are you?
Me: [legal name].
Dad: Okay, let's try that again: who are you?
Me: [legal name]?
Which eventually progressed to something like this:
Dad: Let's say your name was [name of character I adored]. In that case, who are you?
Me: [character's name]!
Dad: And if your name was [legal name] again?
Me: [legal name]???
As you can imagine, I got more and more confused, as we repeated this for a long time, until I finally understood what he was getting at and said, "Me! I'd be me!" and understood that my name wasn't me and didn't define me, it was a label for 'me'.
I don't think names are meaningless; humans ascribe an awful lot of meaning to things that may not be 'inherently' meaningful. Like, there's nothing to the sounds of 'book'/'libre'/'hon', or the symbol 本, or [insert ASL sign for 'book'] that makes it mean the general concept of a book, except that people have made those things meaningful. I still think there is social meaning to my name and the associations people have with it, such as its associated gender or what it says about my cultural background, and even if names don't define people, there are plenty of good reasons for people to change their name, including just not liking it.
But ever since then, I've never liked the idea of a "real name", in real life or even in the context of fantasy worlds where knowing something's "true name" gives you power over it. I realize that this is a weird hangup to have, but there it is. I don't think either of the names I use IRL is that much more 'really' my name than the other, and a screen name I chose almost half my life ago works almost as well as a label.
(Side thought: are there any fantasy series where "true names" for things aren't or don't have to be in a spoken language?)
I guess this does raise the question of what does make a person themself - what is the 'me' that is being labeled? - and I'm not philosophical enough to answer that one. I remember I also had a children's book called, "I Am My Body, NOT!", but I'm also a believer in neurological monism, which raises plenty of questions by itself. So I've left that train of thought alone for now.
