Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I got up for a midnight snack and a glass of warm milk. Observation: when attempting to improvise a sauce "vaguely inspired by" alfredo, that's one of the times margarine does not work as a substitute for butter.

Perrine wanted to play chase, completely ignoring the toys I threw as a counteroffer. Finally, I gave in and chased her around downstairs for a bit, after which we started taking turns. "Chase" isn't usually a game I think of as having points to score, but the way she played it tonight I'm inclined to say she scored points on me. I chased her down the front hall then ducked back into a doorway to wait for her to reverse direction, but she looped around through the server room and came up behind me quickly enough to startle the heck out of me. (About three times as quickly as I've ever seen her take that route before -- otherwise I'd have been ready.) Later I cornered her under the radiator by the front door when she mistimed my approach, but it didn't feel as significant a triumph as her making me jump. She got me good.

In other cat news, Perrine seems to have decided that a column of water flowing from the faucet is no longer interesting enough to play with -- her current thrill is watching the whirlpool that forms when I dump a large amount of water into the sink at once. That fascinates her.

Now to see whether that warm milk is going to be effective...

An inauguration day twofer:

"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." -- Mark Twain

"Politics is the entertainment branch of industry." -- Frank Zappa (I have also seen him quoted as saying, "Government is the Entertainment Division of the military-industrial complex," but the first version seems to be more frequently cited.)

I could've sworn I'd written about this before, but a few 'grep' commands show that I don't seem to have gotten around to doing so in my own journal yet. Since it came up recently, I'll copy and paste (with minor edits) from email I sent to a friend who wrote to me:

In YYYY's experience, a woman can't be friends with a man; he's having trouble with the fact that XXXX's closer friends tend to be male.

Ah, yeah, that ties into an observation I made ten or twenty years ago about what I call "homosocial" and "heterosocial" groups, but I've never been sure whether the appropriate groups to measure are communities, subcultures, or generations. (I noticed it as a generational thing but wasn't sure whether age was the key or the fact that my friends are fannish and my parents' friends mundane was the relevant datum.)

In (mostly-heterosexual) homosocial groups, men hang out with male friends, women hang out with female friends, and couples hang out with other couples. Anything else feels awkward and/or raises eyebrows. Men and women can be friends, but they don't do things together outside of large-group activities, or act as close friends unless there's a romantic or sexual component or they're exploring the potential for one. Couples socialize with other couples; individual members of a couple may also socialize separately with single same-sex friends, though there seems to be a strong trend of singles mostly losing touch with their just-married friends as the married couple shifts gears socially to mostly interacting with other couples. And if a man and a woman meet for dinner, spend a lot of time on the phone, or attend a cultural event together, others assume that they're starting to date ... Or, if either or both is dating or married to someone else, suspicion of cheating is aroused and gossip starts up. Some amount of friendly non-romantic interaction is stifled to preserve the appearance of propriety. This seems to be how my parents' social group, most of my aunts and uncles, and the writers and characters of most pre-1990 sitcoms and movies process social interaction and gender.

In heterosocial groups (mostly-heterosexual or containing a diverse assortment of orientations), all bets are off regarding who might hang out with whom as non-romantic friends. Many women have mostly male friends, men are likely to invite a female buddy to an event just for company with no eyebrows being raised, people meet with dinner partners of either gender just to catch up, couples continue to hang out with their single friends, married couples operate socially as individuals as well as jointly, and nobody assumes that secret (or budding) romance is involved until much stronger clues than "they've been seen together a lot" are provided. Uh ... and folks in heterosocial environments are often rather confused about "dating", because when a romantic interest does develop, nobody's quite sure what constitutes a "date" as opposed to how friends hang out; and because there are no clear lines between dating and hanging out, inviting someone out and seeing whether they accept isn't a reliable way to find out whether they're as romantically interested in you as you are in them, unless the intent is made pretty clear in the invitation. There are couples who really don't know how long they've been couples, because their romance developed out of an existing friendship and it's not clear when that magical line got crossed. And there are adults with solid romantic histories who are not really sure whether they've ever "been on a date".

An interesting side effect of heterosocial patterns of interactions and assumptions is that (as far as I can tell) a het man is more likely to be comfortable going to dinner, a movie, or a concert with an openly gay male friend than in a homosocial social structure. Since nobody would make any assumptions if he were there with a non-romantic female friend, he doesn't feel as though people are going to question his orientation because of his hanging out with an openly gay male friend. But I probably need to collect more data on this point, and I could be wrong about the cause (it may just be that the heterosocial groups I've observed happened to be less homophobic than the homosocial ones by mere coincidence).

I do not have sufficient data to make any observations about mostly-homosexual or mostly-bisexual social groups. And polyamoury adds another layer to all this, but I'll ignore it for the moment.

When folks from homosocial and heterosocial backgrounds interact, there's an uncomfortable dissonance, as each person's assumptions about or interpretations of the others behaviour and speech lead to judgemental and usually incorrect conclusions.

As I said, I've long wondered whether this is a generational difference, or a fannish/mundane one, or some other division. But I have observed the existence of both patterns of behaviour and social expectations.