one cannot be brave who has no fear

I’d been interning with her as an artist/executive assistant for some time. To put a long story short she’d developed a tremor that kept her from doing a certain amount of studio work, so in between sending emails and invoices for her I’d chip in and help with line art or drafting on longer projects. A lot of it was the two of us sitting in her basement studio, doing our own thing, waiting for the phone to ring. We got to talking a lot. I’d just moved across the country and was still finding my footing.

There was a handyman she had over occasionally — he was a personal friend who enjoyed her company more than she enjoyed his. She didn’t dislike him by any means, but he definitely had feelings for her that she didn’t reciprocate. One day, after he’d come over to repair something-or-other and left, she and I started talking about relationships.

She asked if I had a boyfriend. I told her I wasn’t interested in being in a relationship with anyone and that I’d never had a desire to be in a relationship. Admittedly, I was bracing for the “You’ll meet the right person someday” response. I knew it generally came from a place of care, but it never changed how much I dreaded to hear it. I really respected my mentor and I was prepared to nod along to whatever response she gave me. Instead of anything I expected her to say, she just kind of nodded and said, “Me neither. I think I’m — what’s the term — asexual?”

I was ecstatic. I told her I was asexual, too. I saw her sigh in relief, the same way I did. I couldn’t believe it.

We didn’t get much work done that day, we just started talking about our experiences. She’d been married once when she was younger and even during that period of her life her disinterest in a sexual relationship didn’t change. She had a roommate after graduating college who confessed to having feelings for her and she had to tell her “It’s not that I don’t like girls, it’s that I don’t like anybody.” The roommate harbored enough bitterness over this that they had to split ways. Her mother told her that she would quote “rather have a gay daughter than a daughter who didn’t fancy anyone at all” unquote.

I didn’t have nearly as many experiences as she did, but I was able to share my own for the first time. I shared how it was easier to say I was taking time to work on myself than to say I had no interest in being in a relationship. We talked about the words “You’ll meet the right person someday” and “You’ll know when you’re in love” and “Don’t worry, one day you’ll meet some guy that changes everything.” As if something was broken.

“I’ve been alive for sixty five years,” my mentor told me, “and I’ve never felt like I was missing something, even if everybody told me I was.”

Currently, my mentor lives with her parrot, her cats, and her backyard-wildlife pals in a house that she owns. She makes art and hosts community art groups and volunteers at care homes and is the most self-fulfilled woman I’ve ever met. And she loves her life. She loves the people she knows and they love her, too. If I could be half as cool as she is when I grow up, I think that’d be pretty amazing.

A pedestrian bridge over a freeway, Earth

Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.

“You feel the bulge in his pants” - implies that you are feeling some guy’s penis, may be sexy depending on context

Except Dracula is a story that plays itself straight. The vampire himself is not stupid. He’s possibly the oldest vampire of all which means he upgraded from animal instinct and mindless echoes of past memories to someone who’s regained his critical thinking skills. The story begins because he’s already adapted to how the modern world works now by hiring a solicitor who understands modern laws.

He knows now that he doesn’t have to march into London with an army like he used to; He can just buy property and the laws of London are forced to respect that. Similarly he’s already experimented in and discovered loopholes to vampire rules and limitations; Vampires are bound by the permission of owners so he simply uses his solicitor to buy and own a bunch of properties. If he needs to be invited in, Dracula hypnotizes someone to let him in.

Vampires need to return to their grave every dusk/dawn (whichever comes sooner), which causes their coffin to act as an anchor that limits how far from it they can travel? Dracula simply rations the earth of his grave into fifty coffins and spreads them across London so his range becomes exponentially larger.

All of these things make the story almost come across as a deconstruction and it might just be! It’s just that Dracula the novel became such a trendsetter that people nowadays see it as playing things fully straight. It almost feels as if the novel is written with the idea that readers have a basic understanding of vampires and their rules, so part of the thrill comes in the revelation of how the titular vampire is working around these rules. Likewise I’ve heard it used to be a trope in English literature for a traveler to visit some foreign land with a monster and escape by going home. But here the foreign aspect of the story is just the first (and final) arc; The monster’s plan hinges on coming to the UK itself!

Jonathan brings photographs of the properties to show to Dracula that he took with a Kodak portable camera.

Seward keeps an audio journal via phonograph recording.

Seward being a psychiatrist- the idea that you could actually try to talk to and understand a "lunatic" in order to help them get better instead of just throwing away the key was a depressingly novel concept in medicine at the time. Freud's Studies on Hysteria only came out two years before Dracula, for instance.

Blood transfusions. It's easy to make jokes about how Dracula was written before people knew about blood types and that's why Lucy gets transfusions from so many people with no problem, but because blood types wouldn't be discovered until 3 years after it was published, blood transfusion was still an extremely experimental and risky treatment that many doctors would hesitate to even consider, because sometimes when it was performed the patient would instantly die and no one knew why.

Mina's joke about "the New Woman"- anxieties about gender and feminism in Dracula are the kind of thing whole theses have been written about, but there's an obvious irony to this comment because Mina kind of is the New Woman. In contrast to Lucy, Mina is a highly-educated woman with a real actual job, and she works to hone those practical job skills because she plans to be an active participant in Jonathan's work.

When Van Helsing decks Lucy's room out with garlic flowers, he telegrams to Holland for overnight shipping across the Channel from a friend who owns a greenhouse, because garlic flowers are a good 3 months or so out of season at the time the chapter is set.

quark subplot: