X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2Fdrafts%2Fa-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009.md;h=a9d32c976664dfc18108f54f4720281ce79ef622;hp=6bbd894dc85c47335e33080e9f2c9d0b5b8e0579;hb=610ce6dbe60d881d0fd471f48cd0e2e2227d2068;hpb=f118ff67ed08a6f8611da636c45c07a927df3499

diff --git a/content/drafts/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009.md b/content/drafts/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009.md
index 6bbd894..a9d32c9 100644
--- a/content/drafts/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009.md
+++ b/content/drafts/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009.md
@@ -1,17 +1,19 @@
 Title: A Common Misunderstanding; Or, The Spirit of the Staircase (24 January 2009)
 Date: 2020-01-01 
 Category: other
+Tags: personal
 Status: draft
 
-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 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 remember (and the Diary entry helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin being in town. This was back a little less than nine 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 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 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 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 found 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. I have a weakness for what you might call _narrative optimization_: doing things not for any real-world utility, but rather because they would seem thematically appropriate if this were a story rather than real life.
 
-(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.)
+(I still have the "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. 
+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, so I could pencil in "corrections" of how it should have gone
 
-[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]
+
+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