You can't make this stuff up

I'm not normally the international-news type, but yesterday I was poking around the Big Picture blog and looked through this post on the Iranian presidential election. It was full of lovely pictures of people with ribbons and flags and signs and things (you should really go look). There were only six comments at the time, with a note that the election results would come out the next day, so I had to check this morning to see how it turned out.

It turned out that Ahmadinejad was declared the winner via many levels of insultingly obvious, over-the-top fraud. The results came in too fast for the tens of millions of paper ballots to have been counted at all, bypassed the mandatory waiting period for checking the figures before the officially-official announcement, and were not consistent with any prior polls or demographics or statistics or logic of any kind. The government came prepared for the massive crying of shenanigans by cutting off all text messaging service before the results were even announced (with phone lines and most of the internet soon to follow), house-arresting the main challengers immediately afterward for no reason, and meeting the protesters with police violence.

Apparently, hopes had been much higher for this election than normal. Whereas once the streets might have been merely loud, this time they are shut down and on fire. Literal shouting from the rooftops, as encouraged by the last round of Twitter messages before it was blocked altogether, continued well past midnight local time. People who know these things say the last public outcry of this magnitude was during Iran's actual revolution.

Overall liveblogs/roundups:
The Lede (NYT)

Andrew Sullivan collects, filters, and comments

Tehran Bureau - tons of articles

Individual items of note:
Look at this graph. No, ignore it. No, look at it. No, don't. And so on.

Beatings.

Riots.

Perspective.

I have only ever spent one hour of my life seriously thinking my government was all a giant lie that I would never get to participate in in any honest, meaningful way. It was a more awful feeling than I would have believed I could have about politics, and one of the most memorably terrible hours of my life. But then I learned some more information I had been missing, and it was over. I can't imagine what today has been like for the people of Iran, and I'm scared for them.

I just discovered there is a Broadway musical version of Frog and Toad! There is a link, just in case you are not familiar with Frog and Toad. Anyway, I discovered this by finding it at Half Price Books just now and I cannot wait to listen to it.* Here is how that went:

CHECKOUT GIRL: Frog and Toad!

ME: I know! I didn't know this existed!

CHECKOUT GIRL: I know! I used to read Frog and Toad over and over when I was a kid!

ME: I know!!

Look! Look at it! Look at those two guys; how perfect and adorable are they? Man, I buy myself the best presents.

...I keep shaking salt into my hand and licking it up, as a snack. I should probably move the salt shaker further away from my desk.

I also picked up Palimpsest, which I've been meaning to do for a while. (Free related short story.) The author keeps a Livejournal, which I like-- in fact I first heard of her by having a tiny chat with her in the comments at Cleolinda's-- but she always writes Very Seriously in it, which turned me off for a while. Always does. I know I take too much pride in things like knowing better than to refer to my own thoughts as "musings," and I should probably grow up more and keep working on being secure in myself for positive reasons instead of having to make a note of everyone I find Doing It Wrong. I'm pretty sure, at least, it's not (purely?) out of a sense of superiority, but a desire to take things as a lesson for myself. Or is that what everyone's sense of superiority is like?

Really I think it makes me uncomfortable to see someone so confident that people will care what they have to say, since I know I don't have that kind of confidence. I never even began to try to develop it until the last couple of months-- mostly to keep up with, and keep in check, a girlfriend who will happily go on about her boss' secretary's errands for as long as she feels is necessary to sustain the conversation. (But she is a darling, etc.) This still leaves me not knowing what I can reasonably expect will matter to people in general, and I'm all about erring on the side of caution.

...So that's why I can't conclude a line of thought gracefully have negative reactions to some people sometimes!

Now I just have to figure out why there's a small, bloodshot bump on the surface of my eyeball.

*And by "cannot," I mean "will," because it's my bedtime.

Hi! My name's Brenna. It actually really is.

As I said somewhat more Internet-tastically on my LJ, I had some trouble deciding what I wanted my username to be, which is a problem I'm sure a lot of people can relate to right now. I've had this problem with choosing names for kind of a while, and I'd really been getting tired of the two I've relied on forever. I was starting to feel really silly, and not in a good way, about being called something I made up myself to sound cute, or clever, or pretty, because it always just ends up sounding dumb-- eventually, to me, and probably immediately to others. I didn't even try very hard to come up with anything, if we're talking straight, because I just didn't trust myself to.

I wanted to avoid looking like this or that-- like the kind of poser who's clearly just looking for Internet Points, like I have a true spirit name but when asked about it, I only say "eh, I just made it up" because I haven't felt forced yet to separate what I'm serious about from what I'm embarrassed by. But I decided I couldn't just worry about looking like that, because one of the big things I've been telling myself lately is to give people credit for their perceptions. It's standard to refer to a negative impression as "the wrong impression," but not everything negative is a mistaken assumption on other people's part that I helpfully go and correct for them. Knowing this about myself, that unflattering truths come gently disguised as tactical considerations about how I "might seem," I decided I probably wasn't going to succeed in finding the perfect amusing short phrase or fantasy name or reference-- the one that would satisfy my desire to have an amusing phrase or fantasy name or reference but, oh noes, wouldn't give the wrong impression-- after all.

So that seemed to leave only things I didn't choose for myself. I've only ever had one real nickname, and if I ever tell the story you'll know why I don't identify with it. (It's not a dreadful tale of abuse and woe; it's just entertaining.) That pretty much left my own real name. Well, it happens to be pretty. I obviously have a history with it. It feels like it'll help connect what I'm actually like with what I'm willing to talk about-- something I'm really wanting to bring about in myself. I've always been an amazingly private person, and it's only lately I've been realizing how little of that is for good reasons. Finally, it's arbitrary-- and yes, I ended up thinking of that as a positive. How can you possibly do a good job of naming yourself meaningfully, permanently? I know I can't.

My only doubt was that I wouldn't use it enough, or well enough, to deserve to be THE Brenna. But whatever. Even if I don't: such is life! This, what I'm doing, is called assertiveness, and it is awesome.

And so it came to pass. I need to get my style figured out. That's another thing I was counting on having more time to put off figure out. Anyway, Dreamwidth! Here's to -- oh, forget it, I can feel the legion of jinxes staring at me. Let's just all friend each other. We know what we mean.