24 July 2001

Happy birthday, Susan! Oh, excuse me, I'm sorry, I should say, happy birthday, Susan! There are good things awaiting you in the future. I should know.

I sent out a couple of short stories yesterday, wrote on a couple more, and did scenes for three different novels. And rested my back and hands and arms a bit reading Leviathan's Deep and The World Inside. Decently good stuff. Went to bed early, got reasonable amounts of sleep.

Yesterday I had decided that sleeplets might be the preferred nappish term for naps because Timprov, when he is tired and driving, eats Sixlets to help him stay awake. And thus sleeplets would be the opposite of Sixlets. He laughed a lot when I told him this theory, but it made a lot of sense at the time.

There was a really disturbing article on Salon yesterday. It's about pro-anorexia support groups on the internet. For people who want to continue being anorexic. They have a cute little nickname for it, "ana."

I'm not for government regulation of the internet, but which is legal, showing a 14-year-old pictures of naked people in consensual sexual situations? Or teaching a 14-year-old how to more effectively kill herself? We don't care if they die, but for God's sake don't let them have sex. Or, you know, think about sex.

It reminds me of a lethal version of the groups wherein deaf people are opposed to things like cochlear implants, because they don't want to "destroy deaf culture." Because they claim that it shouldn't be viewed as a handicap. And while I don't think we should patronize deaf or hearing-impaired people, I also think it's okay to say that it's better to have hearing than not to have hearing. Does that make me morally superior to a deaf or hearing-impaired person? No, of course not, but it does mean that if we have the ability to help someone hear, we should.

The anorexia thing is even more so. Our culture is pretty attached to claiming that we're not making judgments (even as we make them, of course), but I'm feeling pretty confident about saying that one of my friends from high school is better alive than dead. And that is to say, she's better having her anorexia treated than letting it go. She was within an inch or two of my height -- certainly no shorter than 5'5" and might have been as much as 5'8", I can't gauge very accurately in memory -- and at one point weighed 88 pounds. She was a skeleton. Scared the crap out of us. And she was a bright girl, sweet and sensitive. The kind of person you'd prefer to have around and contributing to the human race for another sixty to ninety years.

I'm really glad that she had friends (I'm not talking about me -- closer friends than me) who tried to get her to the doctor and encouraged her to eat more, rather than friends who taught her their own tricks for hiding food and disguising how little they were eating. And I'm pretty upset that these people have organized, and that Yahoo is willing to sponsor space for them.

In other news, I got two birthday cards I opened yesterday and one I did not. Erica sent me one online, with somersaulting hedgehogs, so I had to open it right away. And Liz sent me one in the mail, but she said I had to open it right away so that I could answer her letter. (Liz, your Questions aren't that hard, so I'll do my part in getting a letter back to you before Pennsic. The postal service I will not vouch for.) The one I did not open was from my great-aunt Donna, who addressed it to "Mrs. Mark Gritter." And yes, that's the proper etiquette format if you're going to use Mrs., since "Mrs. Marissa Gritter" would imply that I was divorced. But I still don't like it, and Mark doesn't like it either. It's my birthday. I feel like my birthday cards should be addressed to me, not to Mrs. him. They could leave off the Mrs. entirely or go with Ms. if they were really into the title thing, which I am not. I know that my aunties are older, and that this is how they were taught to do things properly. I'm certainly not mad at anybody over it -- I'm happy that the aunties send me birthday cards to begin with. I'm just a little sad that that's what's "proper" for them still.