(no subject)

Dinner last night stands in stark contrast with the days away, despite what might seem like grounds for similarity. The friends we went away with i met through Meeting: D proactively pursuing friendship, her reclusive partner L finding Christine & i comfortable, and we them. SG the artist was someone i met through a spiritual group, too, and she counts me as the person who introduced her to Quakers.

I found spending the time with D&L to be easy and flexible and fluid: sociable while respecting needs for quiet and space. They told stories i could listen to, and they listened to us. I am in awe at how limited our need for coordination and planning was, and glad i did not have the cycles before the trip to elicit plans and add a layer of unnecessary effort. (A note that Christine found some things in the dynamic that made her feel uncomfortable in the shared space.)

Listening to SG last night, i am even more aware of how she choose to control my choices by limiting the advanced notice of her arrival. I am trying to be more conscious of just sharing things instead waiting for invitations to self disclose in conversation: SG never asked about Christine at all, but did ask after my sister somewhat out of the blue. The other question she asked was whether happy with my work, which i felt she gave time to listen, yet there were aspects to her listening that were problematic.

I feel i'm just at the cusp of a certain maturity, where i can feel comfortable accepting what SG offers when it suits my terms and declining when it presses me uncomfortably, and trust that i have communicated the level at which i am comfortable reciprocating. I believe she spins stories in her mind about me -- as we all do about each other -- but i am detaching from being concerned about how attached she is to her mental model of me. It used to drive me nuts, as we clashed over her insistance of how i was.

We clashed a little this time: she apparently has some post card from 2001 describing my wait to hear about being hired, from which she drew the conclusion that the person who interviewed me broke her leg and i didn't hear for three weeks. I interviewed with my current male boss, but it's possible that she conflated the HR manager as the hiring manager, and there was something about the HR manager that delayed a decision. Her insistence that the person who interviewed me broke her leg, and her assertion that there is a postcard that will provide evidence one way or another is an example of a certain rigidity in framing her understanding of me that is just a little disconcerting.

The flip side is her rambly narratives that leave me grasping for the main thread. She did have some little digression about how certain people in the town where she lives think of themselves as artists but have never sold a piece, and that doesn't matter to her, but she's not sure how to handle them: this continues to underscore *my* story of *her* as someone who has a need to validate her work with the prices she fetches, admittedly due to constant parental disapproval of her abandoning a medical profession for such a frivolous endeavor.

In news of my own hangups, her choice of Fleur de Lys near Nob Hill in San Francisco as a dinner location had me scrambling a bit to find something to wear from work to dinner, and actually applying makeup at work. I really had no idea what their sense of clothing and style was, so i wore one of my dressier shell tops (that i do wear to work on occasion) and tossed a dressy jacket in the car. My inclination on returning to work was to wear jeans but i wore slacks. When i met SG and her partner in the lobby of the Mark Hopkins Intercontinental, their clothing was casual, and i felt a bit over-shiny. On the other hand, everyone who came into Fleur de Lys was suited or dressy, so i felt very comfortable and in place. So did SG and W: i admire their comfort in their simple clothing.

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Fleur de Lys was quite a treat: two rounds of amuse-bouche that i cannot entirely recall, but asparagus soup in an aperitif glass was one. When we ordered, i wasn't sure how many courses they were ordering: three seemed to be the minimum. I ordered three, forgetting desert would count as a course. They ordered two and had desert. It created one of those weird serving patterns where my second course went on without them, but it wasn't entirely clear that i was the only one with a second course.

My first course was a roasted fennel, the second a vegetable ragout (the poached egg far more runny than i care for, but i managed to arrange so i could enjoy the dish), the third swordfish with a "Basquaise[1] and pinot sauce" that was a marvel. It has salsify[2] in the sauce, which was a simple vegetable crunch. I don't know if they held out the speck[3], which i assumed was another veggie but turns out to be bacon.

[1] a Basque sauce?
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsify
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speck -- oops.

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Firecat has a list of women SF writers here: http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/677593.html

I wanted to suggest the two women Quaker writers i have enjoyed, and going to that list led me to a few other books. Skimming this list - http://www.adherents.com/lit/sf_quaker.html - of *mentions* of Quakerism in SF (which seems to include note of the Quaker Oats advertising icon, so strong emphasis on *mentions*) and skimming some Wikipedia bios, i find a few books i would enjoy reading:

* Molly Gloss - Wild Life. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2000 [Tiptree] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Gloss
* Joan Slonczewski - Still Forms on Foxfield (Avon, 1988; first pub. 1980)
* Nancy Kress - Crossfire. New York: Tor (2003) [New Quakers]
* Judith Moffett - Pennterra. New York: Congdon & Weed, Inc. (1987) [Quaker colonized world, note frequent child-parent incest warning]


* David E. Morse - The Iron Bridge. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. (1998) [time traveler meets early Quakers]