Hospital again

Gramps is in the hospital again. I really do not need this shit.

Belly Dancing

Hey internet LJ belly-dancing friends! rika_rayven is interested in the belly dancing, but seeing as how she's in backwater state (sorry darling, it's true) far far away she can't go aaminahlefae's classes or anything like that. Any recommendations on good instructional videos?

Plumbers and hospitals

Plumber will be here around noon. I'm gonna shower and head up to Swedish for a bit. Then back here for the plumber. And then hopefully there will be no need to go back to Swedish.

I have a sense of the inevitable going on right now. Maybe not this time, but soon. It can't be good to have him going in every other month.

I'm surprisingly unemotional right now. Not even stressed. I tend not to worry about stuff like this. It happens or it doesn't. I just don't want to have to go through the suck if things go downhill.

Forever Free, Joe Haldeman

This is the third installment in Joe Haldeman's Forever series. In the previous installments, Earth has been at war with an alien race called the Taurans. Travelling at relativistic speeds, soldiers travel from planet to planet to battle. Because of relativism, soldiers have been fighting for thousands of years. They return every once in a while to find that man has changed. Many re-enlist. Eventually, humans on earth begin cloning themselves rather than breeding and when they get enough people with the same D.N.A. they develop a group mind by accident. Taurans have a group mind too. Then they realize they don't need to fight and the war is over, just waiting for the soldiers to find out. But on their return many of them don't like the idea of a group mind, and eventually many settle on the planet M.F. (euphemistically known as Middle Finger).

And that's where this book starts. Even there, the former soldier feel trapped. Man, the name for the human group mind, keeps them around for their genetic diversity, just in case. It's like a zoo. So they plan to escape. Head out from the galaxy perpendicular to the galactic plane. They plan to travel at relativistic speeds, returning 40,000 years later, though have aged only a couple of decades themselves. The idea being that the world will have changed by then and maybe they'll fit in.

Only something goes wrong. They lose their anti-matter and have no power to keep going. So most everyone returns to M.F. in the escape pods.

( spoilers )

Yeah, it's an interesting premise, but the writing left me flat. Most of the book has no connection to the ending. It's like Haldeman had a cool idea, and then wrote 200 pages of filler and 70 of meat. I think this would have been better as a more thematically focused short story or novella. Except for the narrator and one Man, none of the characters ever was fleshed out to any degree. They just pop in and out when Haldeman needs a plot device.

So yeah, this was not tops on my list.

Haldeman, Joe W.
Forever free / Joe Haldeman.
ISBN 0-441-00787-2
274 p.
PS3558.A353 F59 1999
99-033231

Gramps

Don't know what's wrong. No results on tests yet. Haven't asked what happened, cause I don't want to know.

I'll be getting up early tomorrow to take Gram to Swedish.

Sorry for bailing on a couple of people today. Have a lot going on in my head.

I will be out shortly. In times of emotional upheaval, I like reverting to angry, stompy music. For those who see me out and have read this, please don't ask how I am. I don't need to be left alone, but I don't really want to discuss this stuff either.