Monthly Archives: September 2009

Who can categorise everything?

Biking at Making Light

1 Comment

I’ve been trying to write about my life as a bicycle commuter for a couple of years now. I’ve touched on specific aspects, both here and on Making Light.

But a lot of the ways that biking to work matters to me really are not verbal, so I’ve struggled to phrase things in any useful or meaningful way. I knew what I wanted to say in the middle of the post (what routes, how far, how long it took) and at the end (thinking as I ride). But how to begin?

My sordid history as a Rush fan came to the rescue. The immediacy of the lyrics of Red Barchetta was exactly the tone I was looking for to pull the reader into the experience.

The result: My own personal Rota Fortunae.

About Me, Politics, Who can categorise everything?

Not dead, nor yet a zombie

2 Comments

[insert typical “sorry I don’t blog here more often” paragraph]

The fact of the matter is that I am still writing, rather a lot, over at Making Light, a blog owned by my friends Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden1.

This is kind of unfair to everyone who keeps looking here for news of me. I know this. I’m going to start doing pointers to Making Light when I’ve posted something there that people here might be interested in, and hanging out here for people who want to talk about those things with me rather than a large crowd of strangers2.

My most recent post is about the quilt that I made this spring: Works and Days of Hands. It’s also about the process of making something like that, and how process and design mirrored each other for me.

Fibonacci spiral quilt: front Fibonacci spiral quilt: back

Another post I really enjoyed writing was Op anger tale, which is an exploration of the relationship between a particular Dutch dialect and Wikipedia.

One thing I’ve been talking about over there, rather a lot, has been the US health care situation. The conversation can get quite heated from time to time, of course, but that heat has certainly caused me to clarify and reaffirm my own beliefs in this matter.

  1. That phrasing makes it sound like we were friends, and then I pitched up on their blog. Really, it was the other way round.
  2. Though many of my friends here are also friends on Making Light, it’s a smaller group.