Category: other
Status: draft
-I remember (and the Diary entry helps, too) there was a party at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, back during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the _M_ and _R_ in _MIRI_ were still an _S_ and an _A_, respectively; before the Eternal September, before everyone was poly, and _long_ before everyone was trans.
+I remember (and the Diary entry helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin Hanson being in town. This was back around eight-and-a-half years ago, during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the _M_ and _R_ in _MIRI_ were still an _S_ and an _A_, respectively—before the Eternal September, before everyone was poly, and _long_ before everyone was trans.
-I worked the 0600 to 1500 bookkeeper/customer-service shift at my supermarket dayjob that day. After work, I dropped off the week's bag of coupons at store #936, bought a woefully-misnamed espresso medicinal from the hegemon's coffee kiösk there, then drove downtown and parked by the library construction site to buy a "FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE" button at Ming Quong to put on my bag as a replacement for the one I had bought in 'aught-six and lost at some point.
+I worked the 0600 to 1500 bookkeeper/customer-service shift at my supermarket dayjob that day. After work, I dropped off the week's bag of redeemed manufacturer's coupons at store #936 (what the company did with them after that, I was never told—perhaps they weighed them), bought a woefully-misnamed espresso medicinal from the hegemon's coffee kiösk there, then drove downtown and parked near the library construction site; I had some time to kill before I was scheduled to rendezvous at University and Shattuck in Berkeley at 1745 with a local genetics blogger with whom I had arranged to give a ride to the party. I walked to Ming Quong and bought a "FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE" button to put on my bag as a replacement for the one I had bought in 'aught-six and lost at some point. I had recently reöutfitted my bag with buttons I had bought from a site I knew because the proprietor occasionally commented on the blog (_the_ blog). My newly-accessorized bag could hardly be complete without a gender pin, and for some sentimental reason I wanted it _before_ taking the geneticist to the social. [narrative optimization note]
+
+(I still have that "radical notion" pin, but it's no longer proudly pinned to my backpack. Ideology—in the general case—is not my style anymore.)
+
+The party was amazing, as always, but there's one exchange that haunts me to this day, a moment when I was caught off guard by having been _seen through_ in a way that, at the time, I couldn't permit myself to anticipate or understand. I wish I had an actual transcript of it.
+
+[something about how narrative optimization should be deliberate: you should keep separate track of what actually happened and what _should_ have happened, rather than blurring them together]
+
+(rather than the narratively-convenient reconstruction of an eight-and-change-year-old memory and a Diary entry from the Monday after), so that I could pencil in corrections of
[...]
+A blonde woman wearing a red dress and black high heels stuck out among the predominantly male throng of geeks.
+
+casually referred to my desire for social dominance.
+
+
+I stammered out a shocked and perhaps unconvincing denial.
+
+She regarded me skeptically. "You _look_ male," she said.
+
+"But that doesn't mean I'm _happy_ about it!" I burst out defensively, to the apparent surprise of
+
+The woman's skepticism was unpreturbed. "I'm not getting a tranny vibe from you," she said.
+
"Right, you're thinking of the good kind," is what I _should_ have said. "I'm the bad kind."
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff