Meredith > Recent Status Updates

Somehow I had naively assumed that cars were crashed tested with both 50 percentile male and female dummies. Alas, the "female" crash test dummy is a scaled down male dummy that is not even tested in the driver's seat with the seat in the standard position for physiological females. Women drivers are considered "out of position" drivers because they sit farther forward, and there aren't tests for this seat position.

Perez: An analysis of 248 performance reviews ... found that women receive negative personality criticism that men simply don’t. Women are told to watch their tone, to step back. They are called bossy, abrasive, strident, aggressive, emotional, and irrational. Out of all these words, only 'aggressive' appeared in men’s reviews at all – ‘twice with an exhortation to be more of it’.
Me: Amen! Preach, sister!

Perez: The truth is that around the world, women continue to be disadvantaged by a working culture that is based on the ideological belief that male needs are universal.

Perez: ... a workplace predicated on the assumption that a worker can come into work everyday at times and locations wholly unrelated to the location or opening hours of schools, childcare centers, doctors, and grocery stores simply doesn't work for women. It hasn't been designed to.

Perez: The traditional workplace is tailored to the life of a mythical unencumbered worker. He -- and it implicitly is a he -- need to concern himself with taking care of children or elderly relatives, of cooking, of cleaning, of doctors appointments and grocery shopping and grazed knees and bullies and homework and bathtime and bedtime and starting it all again tomorrow.

Perez: Urban planning that fails to account for the risk of being sexually assaulted is a clear violation of women’s equal right to public spaces.

Lestat: You are like an adult who, looking back on childhood, realizes he never appreciated it. You cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys, asking for love and care to be showered on you again simply because now you know their worth.

Lestat to Louis: You whining coward of a vampire who prowls the night killing alley cats and rats and staring for hours at candles as if they were people and standing in the rain like a zombie until your clothes are drenched and you smell like old wardrobe trunks in attics and have the look of a baffled idiot at the zoo.
Me: Lestat's telling it like it is.

Louis: Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

This has been on my re-read list for ages.

Mrs. Oldknow: For every person who comes here, different things happen.

Archery inaccuracy! As a traditional archer, writers who don’t do their homework (or due diligence Google search) drive me nuts. Beginning archers wouldn’t be shooting at targets 200 ft away. They would start at 10 or 20 yrds.

Yaz: If I leave my friends to die, even if I can't help them, even if they would tell me to go ... I would leave something of myself with them that I know I need.

Thurin: Honesty is a knife that we can use to pare away [the walls of camouflage, disguise, interpretation behind which people hide their darkness], but one slip, go too deep, and who knows that injuries might be inflicted. The wounds an honest tongue can open sometimes can take a lifetime to heal.

Thurnin [quoting Eular]: When you put some people together for the first time, there's a kind of gravitation, a slow spiral dance as they're drawn into each other's orbit, each opening to the other by degrees, discovering how closely their wants and hopes and passions align.

Yaz: The hurts done to us as children cast shadows as long as our lives.

Yaz: But then does anyone fully understand themselves, or even want to? Wouldn’t that be very dull?

Maya: The first part of any fight is to understand the enemy.

Maya: In war you have to learn to let go.

Back down the magical Iron Age rabbit hole.

Okay. Did she really just meet someone she knew down here? Or is this trick?

Steampunk Alice In Wonderland?

The story seems to have taken an unexpected steampunk detour.

Yaz: Throw any single life away as if it holds no meaning and how will your own life be valued thereafter?

Yaz: Sometimes all your words are the wrong shape, and none of them will fit into the silence left when the conversation pauses.