It *was* supposed to be a fic journal

Title: Boukenka
Fandom: Star Trek (Reboot)
Rating: G
Categories: gen, Sulu
Wordcount: ~670
Summary: Hikaru Sulu dreamed of adventure. (Prompt from lady_ganesh, who wanted why Sulu became a pilot.)
( The answer is, I think, implict. )

(no subject)

Signs the five-ish hours of sleep I'm getting per night aren't enough:

A couple of minutes ago, I went into Chas and Dean's bedroom and turned on the light.

Now, to the best of my reasonably-certain knowledge, in the last two weeks, the only person who's entered that room is me, and I've gone all of one step past the doorway, placing a couple of items of laundry on a hanger three feet inside the door, and putting their mail on the desk in there. (Well, until tonight, as you'll see.)

But I'd swear something moved in there as the light came on.

I looked around the room, though, and there's nothing in there, and nowhere anything could hide, so.

Now that I think about it, it's probably some kind of light-activated booby trap Dean put in there to mess with my mind, somehow foreseeing that I would be stopping by on my way to bed at quarter past four in the morning to put her jacket away. (Because for two weeks I've been moving it around the main room to get it out of the way, and finally I got around to just taking it the hell upstairs, already.)

Speaking of hell, actually: I only this evening found out about the sincere movement to substitute "heaveno" for "hello", because people are morons.

Things of Good/A Photo For Today

1) I realised that the doctor I saw yesterday has put a waterproof dressing over my sutures. I CAN HAVE A REAL SHOWER. After a week of washing with a cloth standing at the bathroom sink, this is positively exciting. (Hint in case you ever need to do this: If it's winter, use a heater in the bathroom if you possibly can. Sure, bathroom heaters are normally only really necessary when it's *very very cold*, but that's because the shower water keeps you warm. Standing damp and naked by the sink is freezing cold.)

2) Only two days left until my pre-trial conference for the insurance thing. I am deeply hoping that it all gets resolved on Wednesday, but trying not to set myself up for hideous disappointment if it isn't.

3) I can has challenge. Playing Left 4 Dead on Advanced difficulty is hard, but not impossibly so. (Still playing single player. If nothing else, I don't have three friends to play with, and I don't want to play with randoms, for fear of risking harm to Chas's reputation, since I'm playing as him.)

4) I need to go to the chemist; this would be bad, since I'm conserving going-out spoons for a busy week of stuff (see point 2, among others), except that there's a chemist literally a 90-second walk from my house. And that's assuming I have to pause while a car goes past to cross the road.

5) Why is a bassoon better than an oboe?

It burns longer.

A photo!

( Of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. )

We should be clear on certain things: Names, identity, and why certain people need to shut up hard

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the surname I was born with was "Resume". And it's pronounced like the verb - r'ZYOOM. (I'd IPA it but I can't be bothered.) And all my life, people have made a habit of pronouncing it wrong - r'ZOOM or REZyoom or rezyoomay, like it's the word for a CV.

And all my life, when people mispronounce my name, I've corrected them.

You'd think this would be a fairly minor thing - we're all agreed it's open to some interpretation, but we're also, I'd hope, all in agreement that it's my name and how it's pronounced is up to me. Sure, people on my father's side of the family have a vote, and they can pick another pronunciation if they really want to, because then it's their name, but in as much as the name I bear is MINE, how to pronounce it is up to me.

I'd hope, but I know that isn't so. Because all my life, I've had people correct me on how to pronounce my name.

Not "they read it off a form or a list and got it wrong", correct me, but I mean, they've got it wrong, I've said no, it's pronounced like this, and they've said no it isn't, or just pointedly kept repeating it their way.

Quick tip: If you do this to someone, they are going to conclude that you're an asshole, and they're going to be right.

Because my name is part of who I am, a part of me. Names are important. And if you try to tell me that you know how to pronounce my name and I don't, you're trying to tell me that you have more of a right to define who I am than I do.

I don't think it's coincidence that the people who do this tend to be the kind of people who play power games all the time - it's a way of controlling the conversation, controlling the discourse, controlling you. Which is why, since recognising that, I don't let that slide. I will be smiling and pleasant but I will be firm.

To quote Lieutenant Data: One is my name. The other is not.

Where it gets interesting, to me, is the cultural aspect. The surname I was born with was originally Germanic, but it was anglicised around the time of the First World War - a more anglo spelling, though the pronunciation has shifted to be yet more anglo since. Trying to define the pronunciation sometimes feels like people are trying to define the degree to which my cultural identity is permitted.

Which isn't a big thing, when it's someone like me - I'm only vaguely foreign, and in any case, I'm still white - but then you get the cases where it's really political.

Yes, I'm talking about Judge Sotomayor.

I'm not giving a link to that ass Krikorian, but he said:

Deferring to people's own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference) ... and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn't be giving in to. [...]

This may seem like carping, but it's not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options -- the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

NO THERE ISN'T. Because, asshole, there's a difference between pronouncing a name in a way that is already Anglicised but to an approximation of correct and anything that can possibly be called "unnatural". What is not natural to English is rolling the R. Which is not required. Syllabic emphasis variation is deeply, profoundly within the category of SUCK IT UP. Attempting to pronounce someone's name correctly is the most basic of courtesies.

Trying to define how non-Anglos should pronounce their names is a clear attempt to exert control - to force Sotomayor, and anyone else, to abandon any visible markers of differing cultural identity. America doesn't follow English pronunciation rules at all, after all, or are we changing the pronunciation of Arkansas at last?

Shut up, right wing morons. Just shut up.