
Turns out making tiny polymer clay tulips is much,
much harder than making tiny polymer clay roses.
It’s the shape of the petals—which I seem to have gotten wrong—as well as the way the petals overlap.
Plus the leaves should bend more from the stalks.
Also, the colors I wanted were only in Sculpey, and Sculpey, an oil-based clay, is much gluier and therefore difficult to work with than Fimo, a mineral-based clay.
Nevertheless, I present them here so that when I’m in that Alzheimer’s home and enraging my keepers by my insistence on sitting in a corner, drooling, and turning out perfect, tiny polymer clay tulip after perfect, tiny polymer clay tulip, they’ll be able to look back and see where the story began.
###
The secret to growing old gracefully, I suspect, is to stay cheerful about one’s own irrelevance.
I had two conversations yesterday about sexual harassment with people who are considerably younger than me.
Unsurprisingly, their attitudes about it are far more draconian than my own.
I don’t fault guys for hitting on women so long as those guys can take, “No,” for an answer.
Of course, a
pattern of hitting on the same woman constitutes sexual harassment.
But the initial approach?
Nuh-uh.
Nor does it matter to me if the come-on happens in a workplace. Where else do you meet real live people as a grown-up if you don’t go to church, or belong to a bowling league, or hang out in bars, or have friends who give dinner parties? I’ve always thought that culling romantic or sexual prospects from a pool of real live people had it all over reading a profile on OKStoopid or swiping left on Tinder.
I was a very, very early Internet adopter, but I didn’t grow up with the Internet, and I still don’t consider the experiences I have there as even remotely akin to the experiences I have in real life. I have many friends I initially met online, but those friendships have been vetted in real time by hanging out.
So, the Internet?
Adjunct to real live life! Not parallel track.
But, of course, I also know that attitudes like mine are the attitudes a brontosaurus with a Dell computer and a dial-up modem might have had two days before the asteroid hit.
It doesn’t matter what I think.
My era of ascendancy is gone, bay-bee, gone.
Attitudes are fashioned by the people who control the narrative.
And the people who control the narrative now?
They're young.
I'm old. I'm
over.
###
As an interesting sidebar to the above:
poliphilo brought up the diaries of Chips Cannon this morning. They’re being excerpted in
The Daily Mail. Cannon was an MP in the 1930s, a social climber
par excellence, whose chief claim to modern attention is that he was an obsessive diarist who met practically all the headers and footnotes in that historical epoch.
On one of his carefree driving trips through pre-war Germany, he wrote:
The [labor]
camps looked tidy, even gay, and the boys, all about 18, looked like the ordinary German peasant boy, fair, healthy and sunburned. They are taught the preliminary military drills, gardening, etc, and their health and strength are built up. They were all smiling and clean. Chips Cannon was a great admirer of Adolph Hitler. And laughably naive. The inmates he saw were Nazi loyalists, drafted for the occasion. Shades of the Danish Red Cross’s tour of the Terezin concentration camp.
But the forgotten fact is that practically
everyone in the British aristocratic class was a great admirer of Adolph Hitler. (The one notable exception was Winston Churchill.) And quite a few members of the middle and lower classes were great admirers as well.
Today, of course, such admiration is unimaginable, but in the narrative of the time, it made perfect sense: Adolph Hitler was going to save the world from Joseph Stalin.
In terms of genocide, Hitler and Stalin run neck and neck. In fact, Stalin might have a slight edge.
So, I don’t think you can really say the narrative changed because Hitler was the greater monster.
No, the narrative changed because Hitler declared war on the Allies but the Allies won.
It’s never about the facts. It’s
always about the stories.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth.