Vaudevillain Girls and Violin Strings

Future you will thank you for not pinning your ability to enjoy and get any sense of achievement on having the base energy levels of a teenager.

The narration just dips into anybody’s head whenever it feels like to give us a summary of who they are as a person and what they care about. Very straightforward. Very effective. Very much not the modern approach.

This extends to telling us straight out, like half a chapter after the iconic Darcy-snubbing-Elizabeth scene, that he had now developed a massive crush. This comes as a great shock to Elizabeth quite a bit later, but the audience spends much of the book enjoying the layers and/or dramatic irony. Who knew!

Elizabeth on the other hand had a crush on Wickham.

Wickham is genuinely good at being likeable not an obvious sleaze and the fact that he’s a bad guy was an actual plot twist, though I’m sure plenty of people saw it coming even when the book was new.

As much as the book attends to women’s concerns, being as it is a book very much about a woman, the greatest explicit thematic force of the novel is the question of class.

Specifically, that great and renowned engine of Anglophone egalitarianism, the conviction of the upper middle class that they are every bit as good as the true upper class, or that if they aren’t it’s only a question of opportunity.

Seriously, the fact that the ultimate symbol of emotional resolution the story closes out on is that the new Darcy family has over for Christmas Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle the Gardiners, who are in trade and don’t even live in the nice part of London but are nice and sensible and not at all people it is mortifying to be related to, even though Darcy assumed as much without having met them, while avoiding both her tawdry shallow mother and his awful smug aunt, who are very similar people for all one is a wretched social climber and the other a minor aristocrat obsessed with her own consequence…that’s it, that’s the book.

Additionally the fact that this novel is from the end of the 18th century , when in England the Industrial Revolution was gaining momentum but no one knew what it meant yet, including I’m pretty darn certain Jane Austen.

(Though since she waited 16 years to publish it she may have had a better sense by then, and even made amendments to that effect.)

So everyone’s sense of what is real wealth and security and thus valid social status is still vested in land ownership and income specifically from agricultural rent, and yet you can feel the change coming, because the desire to write this book in this way arises from the cultural forces that were at that time in play, particularly the question of upward mobility.

Elizabeth’s grandsons will have to get into trade in some sort of way, or their children in turn may not be able to keep Pemberly in adequate repair.

 By loosening the stubborn Darcy/Fitzwilliam pride in this particular regard Elizabeth may in fact have saved the house from dissolution.

Btw the thematic import of Mr. Darcy having his mother’s maiden name as his first name, in part because she actually ranked his father, as wealthy and respectable as the Darcys may be. His family legacy is literally his whole identity and part of what Elizabeth brings to the marriage is having helped him understand that it doesn’t have to be.

Over 90% of parents of visibly intersex children opt for cosmetic surgery on their infants.

The ones that don't experience medical violence then, likely experience it as a teenager.

I didn't.

I am very rare in that I did not experience medical violence.

Why? Because I learned what intersexuality was as a young age, and I actively fought against what doctors wanted to do to me. All the way down to legal research on what medical care minors can be forced into. I remember walking into that doctor's appointment with the state law written down that proved that if I did not consent they could not do surgery.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond