(from Facebook)

Who dumped the recycling into the compost bin in the cold winter rain just now and had to dump it out to sort by hand?

That’s right, people! My competence is a thing to behold!

I’m glad I intercepted my first impulse which was to jump into the bin to sort it out without dumping it.

(From FanFare)

So, here’s a weird thing that has happened in my head over the past few years.

I made contact with my birth family in my mid forties about four years ago. I’m an adoptee who was relinquished at birth. Unlike Worf, the people who raised me are both of my biological species and share my general skin tone.

On initial run, Worf’s status as an adoptee always seemed like a throwaway gimmick TNG implemented for the obvious humorous possibilities rather than as a platform for the serious investigation of adoption, caregiving, identity-formation, and natal difference.

Over time, the character’s arc actually did begin to seriously examine many of these issues with intent, as a way of exploring his role as the known Other. This seems to mostly be without the intent of showing us adult adaptions to adoptive status – I would point at Worf’s disrupted relationship with Alexander as a clear example of this.

The show also valorizes Worf’s successful quest to seek identity-reintegration with his natal culture. This is in spite of some things that appear to be unambiguous about Klingon culture within the show, such as the culture’s reliance on and celebration of conquest and enslavement.

I do think both series at times successfully, largely by accident, illuminate American adoption in the late 20th century, specifically and primarily the adoption growth industry of the era, overseas adoption, but also with respect to the growing practice of birth-family reunion and open adoption as at least an ideal.

I suppose, given the character’s role, it’s only reasonable that we see little of Worf struggling with self-loathing or loathing of either of his cultures – that’s maybe more Spock’s gig.

Nonetheless, hey, that’s some solid SF-ing there, to build in social commentary about an aspect of your audience’s experiences without even meaning to do so, commentary that becomes visible only in retrospect. Or via retconning, I suppose, although I think reading themes is maybe not subject to retconning since the reading happens in my head, in the observer rather than in-universe.

Yesterday I experimentally installed a twist-lock base 4-LED mini bulb as a replacement for a 50w halogen, and the new bulb was maybe twice as bright as the bulb it replaced, with a cooler tone. I found a pair of broken sunglasses and popped a lens into the fixture.

I’m pretty sure I’m doing energy efficiency wrong.

A theatrical gel would be the ideal solution. I did spend twenty minutes looking for a set of Mars Staedtler permanent markers i *knew* I had which would have let me make a gel by coloring a piece of glass or cellophane and adjust the colors. They were like an art director set of Sharpies – all the primaries and two steps between each with chisel tips, great pens.

As I was looking I came across a cassette tape. The J-card was really colorful and I knew I had used the Staedtlers to do the card art. I was excited, thinking that possibly the markers were near.

Then I realized I had dubbed the cassette and drawn the J-card before I moved to Seattle, back in Bloomington, before 1990. So presumably I had just spent thirty minutes, thirty logarithmically-fast-paced minutes, looking for a set of markers I last saw and used more than twenty-five years ago.

The sunglass lens works great.