Fiction : Part one of FutureFest 2024....

 Didn't win...minor upside is that now it's just mine.

stocked and colorful as ever, but, with what exactly, it wasn’t as clear. Reports from Greenland foretold the future, as usual, but, whereas, before I had ignored them, today, I was unmoored. A friend, a former D-1 scholarship athlete, confided he had stopped exercising, while my mother, who is sixty-three, enrolled in not one but three Pilates classes. The elevator opened and I stepped from this liminal haze into face-to-face confrontation with the chairman of the board.

He nodded when he saw me, and gazed at some point below my forehead to avoid considering my breasts, which seemed more prominent to my own eyes since I wasn’t sitting in a wheelchair anymore.  Now, it seemed there were other reasons not to face me eye to eye.“Implant working well, I see,” It was less a question than a statement, but I wanted the chance to prove myself without being Special Needs Virtual Reality Designer. I reminded myself that I was lucky to literally find my footing at this stage of my life. “You bet, sir.” I said, feeling like a toady.

“Glad to hear it,” he said, his nod making him look more like a macaw than the owl he resembled at rest. I wasn’t sure he’d want to hear if things weren’t going great. I would have to make a success of the conference and justify his faith in my “living experiment.”There was a lot more riding on it than my own enhanced mobility, including the possible physical freedom of millions of people like me, but I tried to take everything a day at a time. Still, the pressure of my long-term vision made me tense sometimes.

I didn’t tell him I thought I felt weirdly because of it, and that I wasn’t sure whether I should call my doctor or put in a tech-support ticket. Experimenting on myself, even while it benefited my professional growth, was undoubtedly taking a lot out of me and I felt glad that I brought my wheelchair with me. I told myself that conferences generally made me nervous, so that didn’t mean that the virtual cerebrum that our team developed to provide the coordination that Nature hadn’t was failing. “Mind over matter,” I told myself.  All I had to do was get through the next day and a half. I reached into my swag bag and ripped open the cereal bar in it. As  I ate it, I tried to imagine its carbs providing energy in  a way that would get me into a modified Senior Olympics in forty years. I believed myself too. For about fifteen minutes, as I straightened my back, stuck out my chin and determined to face towards the future. I had to wait as my foot shook. It finally stopped, but I knew I couldn’t avoid thinking about it forever.

“Get back to me, Sanjit.” (It had been my partner’s idea to forgo the old-school removable helmet for a chip that connected to my brain more securely. It made sense at the time, but now that I was practically limping and sweating from my temples, my goal of looking cosmetically like everyone else at Futurefest 2023 seemed like sad irony. I crept slowly through the lobby, marveling that through pandemics and drone wars, hotel lobby

Finally saw

The Problem With Apu which I liked...it has a nice mix of explaining the problem mixed with affection for the source material.(Even though I also like Apu, I can imagine that having him follow you around with some wiseass all "Heh, heh, that's you/ your dad" would not be fun *at all*...if it would make people feel better to retire him in some way, I could accept that...although I'm not sure Groundskeeper Willie is quite strong enough to encapsulate the immigrant experience, though.)

also, it wouldn't hurt Hank Azaria to look thoughtful about his work and say for example "I intended this as an affectionate homage, but had never considered what it would be like for people to think he represented your culture. also, I forgot what rotten little shits junior-high boys are."

Still, couldn't help picturing a  world where I could hunt down half of Hollywood and ask for comment for my thirty-seven part documentary "Every Piece of Disability Oscar Bait Ever!"" (although being born with a disability, maybe I could confine my ire to the ones where crusading mothers teach kids like me our letters and prove to some resistant teacher/doctor/principal that we're "in there" over and over. )

our event got Zoom-bombed...

 by what looked like a bunch of bored teenagers typing racial slurs. Shouldn't people have better shit to do?

Jojo Moyes Can Create Decent Disability Rep Sometimes...

  Not, again, #OurVoices, but I did wonder who Moyes might know  who's blind, because the character, Camille, though minor, as the landlady's daughter, and therefore a secondary character does have more facets than many abled writers tend to give a blind character, including her endangering her marriage through a thoughtless affair.(One day, though, I'd like to stop thinking a writer has to have a family member in the club to care about us and rich portrayals.  Also, to see more of our books get more attention, but you knew that!)

I'm not sure what I was really  looking for when I foundWindfallen which is a personable summer read about how the restoration of a hotel helps two women put their lives back together. (I liked it, but didn't start reading it thinking I'd have any thoughts to offer, especially as I  liked "Me before You," till about halfway through(Yes, I knew what it was about and all, but I can't stop wishing that it had been written about Lou and Will both getting a new lease on life, whether they ended up together or not. That is something I somewhat relate to and think there should be movies about.)

But Ms. Moyes wrote the best-seller and I am the person who underestimated  how much audiences want a good cry at disabled expense. " Windfallen" was Moyes' second novel, but I kind of feel she had it more right then.

The More Big Tech talks...

 it makes me miss the internet I first met.  Where everybody's pages didn't look the same, and where it didn't seem like everybody's goal was either catpile consensus or a lynch mob.

Don't get me wrong, the brushes with fame have been fun. But I think I'd give them up to have the sense that we could build our own treehouses again.

Media Roundup...

 

I usually don’t like labor-and-delivery scenes on TV. It seems like most of what I write here is about flicking people on the head and yelling out “respect my Lived Experience!1”, but I remember having that feeling before realizing that my attendance at most baby showers tends to be viewed as a pastel-clad Ghost of Christmas Future.
I came through a difficult birth and lived to tell(and retell) the tale, but even the most rose-colored optimist would not really describe my story as one who Turned Out Okay.  I think I remind people of the ways these incidents aren’t Okay, in ways that, in real life happen thousands of times a year.
I don’t think I thought that my whole life…just maybe that it’s a lot of gamy realism for a medium that doesn’t like to show people even in their underwear. It just never comes off right to me, even when the actresses are moms that might remember what it’s like.(and that’s without the sloppy writing that decides that the best way to show a couple on the right track is to show a woman rubbing a smug hand over a swelling belly.

If I still wrote crossover fanfiction, I would absolutely do a Shameless/Buffy one wherein Fiona Gallagher got her hit of shareware Slayer power. If I wanted to fiddle with timelines and dates, maybe even an AU where she ends up in the Faith role(Would she be as vulnerable to the Mayor? Maybe if her brothers were in trouble.)

My Younger Self Didn't Give...

Passion Fish  enough of a chance, even if it does have that repetitive "God, I can't feel my legs !1" opening so acutely beloved by Academy voters and industry types(Perhaps Crip Camp could have notched that win if someone in it "woke up disabled" as they had done every day for fifty years.  Right?) And once, again, Ms. O'Donnell is not in a chair, but I think nineteen-year-old me was too hard on her for not being a credit to the minority that she doesn't belong to....can't believe I was ever so ladylike to get so bothered by an injured character's f-bombs, but growing up took me a long time, what can I say? However, a director like John Sayles, who seems to have a leisurely approach to film-making might have been a pioneer if he'd included an actual paraplegic or two somewhere in the film.(Maybe it just *looks* like it spun out like a tall tale, however, still think it would be great for diversity if people looked into how often it's 100% necessary to put in a 16-hour day on a set versus how much the people that do feel like warriors afterward. Just a thought.)

I liked the Louisiana locale much more this time than on my original viewing.(Made for some great, zydeco soundtrack offerings as well.) Initially, I think I had a book-club-questions-at-end-of-the-paperback take on the whole representation question and literally expected to see my own life on screen in a way that would defy logic. The movie kicks into gear once Alfre Woodard, as the attendant with  her own problems(relatable in my experience) shows up. *SO* hoped that  the O'Donnell character eventually finds a new erogenous zone with the Strathairn character, but either way, this movie has a nice sense of future and possibility, given that it's also about a soap actress turning her back on old pursuits.

Usual quibbles apply, in terms of money(it would be *ungodly* expensive to buy "all the stuff in the gimp catalog" for real.) and how much access you could get in a  Louisiana farmhouse. Like May-Alice goes from marooned on one couch in a corner to cooking in the kitchen.  Really? Straitharn has a magic toolbox.