Saturday, Jan. 13, 2024 - 12:04 pm.
I'm tempted to write extensively about the new role I'm stepping into in uni, being in charge of a sort of gender committee for my faculty. It's nice to be considered for such thing and I hope to do a good job, but the whole politics involved feel like a punch in the stomach coming up. I'll just stand my ground and do my best. Wish me luck.
Now, onto things that matter: that anthology book of a renowned publisher which includes a story of mine is out. That got me (and other authors in the anthology) invited to an online book club in Guadalajara. Imagine that. I get the feeling it is a club run by two women who read for the sheer pleasure of it. They seem very enthusiast and the one who wrote me was really nice, and even acknowledged our time difference to appreciate my being there. I appreciate the invitation.
Also, I've been moving forward with a couple of projects I have. I keep working on the translation of my novel and trying to get a second edition published in its original language (self-published just so the predatory publisher will stop getting any money, in case someone buys it). Regarding the translation, let me tell you that AI will never get the nuances of one language to map a fair interpretation of its worldview onto another language. Regarding the second edition, I've finally talked to my friend K. This is the friend about whom I went through a handful of negative assumptions in my head about how she saw me, when she had nothing but a great opinion of me.
I'm excited to have her do the cover of my book. She's an illustrator and animator, and has done a lot of work for studios and writers and lots of other cool stuff. It's a luxury to have her on board. But luxury is expensive, and I'll pay more for her work than I had prepared for. This is my own doing, though. She said she had a system of pay-what-you-want with her friends, and that I could name the price. But I wanted to pay her price, really, because she knows better than me all the time, effort, and expertise that goes into what I'm asking her to do. So she gave me her price. I thought "shit", but I said "ok". It's worth it. One thing's the price and the other is the worth.
Andrew and I encountered a similar situation with a piece of furniture we want for our home. One of our friends' partner, C., builds things. Like, with his hands. I sound very dumb saying this, but I'm a person who sits in front of a computer all day (when I'm not in meetings) typing away, so to me the fact that someone can build furniture and actual houses from scratch is mindblowing. And knowing them personally, all the more so.
So we asked our friend's partner to build an embedded bookcase and to fix the wooden frame of a big mirror that we have. People never tell you how important (and expensive!) mirrors are for the place where you live. Anyway, the partner gave us a budget and we had to pass on the bookcase for now, because we can't afford it at the moment. We're trying to recover from buying and setting up the apartment, on top of other expenses, such as stupid blood tests for our cats (it turned out -thankfully- that their main health condition is being 13 years old). We thought we could make an effort to stretch our finances a bit further, but you know what? Let's not.
What I'm getting at, though, is that their (K's, C's) work is worth their price. Andrew and I agreed, "it's too expensive", but what we meant is "we can't afford it at the moment, but this is worth every penny and more". C. does beautiful work with wood; we did get the mirror reframed and it's a very fine thing what he did. Hopefully we'll get back on track with our finances and get the bookcase before our child comes. Crap, I hear having children is expensive, too.
Speaking of which, we've signed up for a three-session adoption workshop. That's the last hoop we have to jump through, after passing our individual and family assessment, to be recognized as fully certified to adopt.
On that note, my family's doing well. I haven't mentioned them in a couple of entries. They're expecting us in May in my home country, but we haven't bought the plane tickets because the airline website keeps rejecting our credit cards. We've tried everything one tries in these situations but we keep encountering the same problem and we remain ticketless.
One last thing: we had a colleague over last night for dinner, G. It's the queer elder I mentioned before. I don't mean queer elder to other him, but to celebrate I've finally crossed paths with one. G is a gay man in his 60s; the shit he's seen and gone through, man: a decades-long dictatorship and exile, the AIDS crisis, colleagues trying to out him and him taking so much control of it that not a peep was heard afterwards.
Andrew has known G for over a decade since he worked coordinating undergrad elective courses, and G was (still is) a uni professor who taught a few. I've known him since last year and we've bonded over our common cause of normalizing queerness in all forms and ages. We have some plans to do that in uni, especially now that I'm in this role that I mentioned at the beginning. I came out to him last night, it was not-a-thing for him (which was great) but I wanted to make very clear that I'm not straight.
Enough chit-chat. It's the weekend. Gotta go live my life.
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