Doing what you love? OR Loving what you do?

I have only occasionally talked about it here, but I am the Guild Leader of The Pentaverate on Thunderhorn, a casual guild on the Alliance side. I didn’t start out as the guild leader of this guild, but since I had begged my friend Jared to do the founding of the guild, when he was ready to step down after two years, I felt obliged to step up and take on the role. It’s mostly been good. It’s had its challenges, like any change, but I’ve been doing it for about a year now, and I think I have a good groove going most of the time.

At first, we were small, and there was no officer corps but the GM and his lovely wife. But around the time that the guild grew enough to need an officer or two, I was it. I liked the acknowledgement of the work I had done to help the guild, and at the time, a promotion seemed the only way to do it. I loved the process of growing, and we were tiny for a long time. We weren’t selective enough at first, though some might say EVER, and we paid a price for that in occasional flurries of immaturity and drama. I learned to use my /gkick, and eventually, we instituted a process of recruiting and introductory ranks that sorted a lot of that out.

I was playing a hunter then. It was easy to solo, and I assure you I was very much every bit the Bad Hunter of WoW stereotypes. I never really instanced on my hunter until 70, and certainly I never learned to TRAP or anything else that made for good hunters in BC. I wasn’t all that wedded to playing her, which was good, because I was about to do my first main-switch for guild benefit.

We were talking about moving into doing a little casual raiding, but our guild lacked a tank at level 70. I had a paladin who I had leveled as holy, for whatever that means for someone who never really understood that holy was for healing, not soloing quests. Masochism comes in many, many forms, I guess. So I changed her spec to Protection and started learning, with the help of patient guildies, how to be a good tank. I took pride in being a woman in a role that many raiders thought were for guys only, and whenever someone assumed I was a man, I happily corrected them. I was a tank, damn it.

But come Wrath, many of our healers had decided to move to other servers, re-roll as DPS, or were taking the slow leveling route to 80. I had a healer-alt sitting at 70, and my guild needed me to heal more than they needed me to tank. So I main-swtiched again, first to a Holy Priest and then to Discipline. (I will NEVER go back to Holy having healed Ulduar on as Discipline. Bubbles! OMG, BUBBLES!) I have theory-crafted and “dug deep” with healing more than I ever did as a tank, and I think it’s paid off. I am confident of my ability to heal anything in the game. Being good at healing has been a source of pride for me, but it’s also kept me locked into doing that for my guild, sometimes when I couldn’t get any benefit from the content we were running other than to help other people to gear up. I felt burn-out rearing its ugly head. I wasn’t sure how to proceed. Insist that I get to tank the alts run? We had abundant tanks, even for the alts run. If I insisted, someone would be out a tanking slot on an alt, or the second run might not happen at all. That wasn’t really any choice at all.

So I made a decision to more or less shelve my tank except for heroics. My current project is my Boomkin, who is needed to help make our second raiding team go. (Comprised both of alts like mine and the people who don’t have a slot in the Tuesday/Thursday raiding from week to week. The perils of having about 15 people in the guild who want to raid regularly.) I’ve been learning what it takes to be good ranged DPS, and it’s been really educational. I am loving Boomkin quite a bit, but I find that I am having a small identity crisis after all this divided focus.

Am I still a tank? A healer? Am I now a DPSer, obsessed with meters and crits? Is this masochism? Self-sacrifice? Am I happy even though I don’t get to tank anymore? Do I do what I love? Or is my WoW experience entirely learning to love what I am doing?

None of my main-switches or leveling decisions were made out of a personal impetus beyond what the guild needed. I would NEVER have thought to try tanking without that need, but I loved doing it. I wouldn’t have given up tanking but that we wouldn’t have raided at all without more healers, and I really think now I identify as a healer about all else. The newest wrinkle is that I’m actually enjoying the Boomkin thing, and watching the big numbers roll in over my target.

So I am loving what I am doing, even if they weren’t the choices I would have made for myself, absent the need of the people I play with, and finding satisfaction in that. But it’s not the satisfaction that comes from a martyr’s sacrifice, but genuinely loving roles I wouldn’t have chosen for myself.

Her Fearful Symmetry

Her Fearful Symmetry: A Novel by Audrey Niffenegger

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I borrowed this from Jenn to read over break, and while I didn’t quite finish it during Winter Break, I managed to polish it off this morning. I had liked The Time Traveler’s Wife reasonably well, but the back blurb for this one had generally excited me. Ghosts! Twins! London! Highgate Cemetary!

While some of that remained exciting (Niffenegger’s fist chapter about Elspeth learning to be a ghost is particularly charming), I found I only empathized with a couple of the characters at all. Many of them I prayed would grow up or meet a bad end…and Niffenegger refused to deliver on that.

With the exception of Martin, I found that the likable characters in this book met the saddest ends, and the truly despicable characters, like Elspeth, got happier endings. In that sense, I found it ultimately unsatisfying, but there were many aspects of the book I found really enjoyable, and so I can still comfortably give it 3 stars.

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Re-greets

Well, I never intended this blog to become books only, but we’ve certainly made a slide that direction. Let’s see what we can’t do to rectify that, before law school erases good habits and good intentions!

Midnight Never Come

Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read this on the plane home for Christmas, and I found it completely engrossing despite a packed airplane and an uncomfortable seat.

The history is a little glossed, as other reviewers have alluded to, but had she offered the details of the lives discussed in the book, she could have easily doubled her number of pages. It reads as a fun supplement to the life of Queen Elizabeth I, but no one should expect that this novel will get you the full workings of Gloriana’s court. Dissertations have been written about less. I suggest Alison Weir’s excellent biography, if you want to know more.

This book is an excellent merging of the history with the fae, and the author’s initial inspiration was the World of Darkness’s Changeling role playing book. It was a fascinating example of a great story idea working in two venues (the game and the novel), and for fans of both story-telling vehicles, this is an interesting read.

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Cast in Silence

Cast in Silence by Michelle Sagara West

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Though this is my least favorite series that Michelle Sagara West has written, it’s still very good, and I continue to enjoy it. It’s shockingly light on the romance for a title published by a division of Harlequin, and though there are a couple of places I thought we were headed that direction, it never quite got there.

I feel like I am in the minority in preferring Severn to Nightshade, though I thought Nightshade was better in this book. Kaylin has struck me as painfully childish in previous books, and every novel seems to move her farther from those behaviors that annoyed me at the start of the series.

This book was very good, and I am ready to read the next book in the series. Should be out sometime this coming year!

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The Innkeeper’s Song

The Innkeeper’s Song by Peter S. Beagle

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Peter Beagle is an author I should read more of. His “The Last Unicorn” is one of my favorite books, as well as having been made into a cartoon that was in nigh constant rotation during my childhood. In fact, I still own it today.

This book had moments of startlingly beautiful prose. Whole chapters as finely wrought as any in genre fiction. But sometimes it was inscrutable, holding me at arms distance, a mean feat for a book comprised of short, overlapping first person perspectives. I wonder if this isn’t a book too delicate and subtle for my law school brain at the moment, and so I am promising to reread it soon.

You know, this summer, or after the JD.

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Green by Jay Lake

Green by Jay Lake

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I enjoyed this book very much, despite some initial trepidation about its origins. I picked it up from the library after seeing it reviewed at John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, as well as at The Hathor Legacy, where it was reviewed most favorably. Books that pass the Bechdel Test can be pretty rare, even in genre fiction, but this book passed with flying colors. I had to try it.

The book was written by Jay Lake as a gift for his daughter. That gave me pause. I was worried it would be a little paen to Mary Sue Lake, and the twee would overwhelm the potential for a good story. I was wrong. This story, full of adventure, is also a story with plot advancing casual sex, torture, and a heroine who makes devastating mistakes that she has to live with. It wasn’t EVER saccharine or sentimental, and I found myself thinking Jay Lake’s daughter is a pretty lucky girl, to have been given such a gift.

The world is marvelous, particularly the theology, and I found myself hoping that Lake plans to return to this world again. I would certainly read anything he wrote that further explores this world or its gods, and I plan to pick up his other series as soon as I clear out my library queue a bit.

ETA: Left purposefully vague, because I think I would hate to spoil any of the plot twists.

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Happy Birthday, Victoria Woodhull!

Today is the 171st birthday of one of my favorite 19th century feminists, Victoria Woodhull. This biography sums her up beautifully.

Woodhull was a woman ahead of her time in nearly every way. She was the first woman to open a brokerage firm on Wall Street. She ran her own weekly newspaper. She ran for the U.S. Presidency in 1872. She advocated a woman’s sexual autonomy and free love 100 years before the Summer of Love. She was by far one of the most interesting women who campaigned for suffrage in her time.

If self-government be the rule, every self must be its subject. If a person govern, not only himself but others, that is despotic government, and it matters not if that control be over one or over a thousand individuals, or over a nation; in each case it, would be the same principle of power exerted outside of self and over others, and this is despotism, whether it is exercised by one person over his subjects, or by twenty persons over a nation, or by one-half the people of a nation over the other half thereof. There is no escaping the fact that the principle by which the male citizens of these United States assume to rule the female citizens is not that of self-government, but that of despotism; and so the fact is that poets have sung songs of freedom, and anthems of liberty have resounded for an empty shadow.

The Woodhull Center for Ethical Leadership has this to say about their namesake:

The woman who inspired and served as namesake to this organization is Victoria Woodhull, a nineteenth-century feminist who was the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street; the first woman to produce her own newspaper; and the first woman to run for President of the United States when women did not even have the right to vote. Victoria Woodhull was a fearless lobbyist, businesswoman, writer and investor who advocated for a woman’s equal status in the workplace, political arena, church and family.

Victoria Woodhull was in some ways like the Susan B. Anthonys and Elizabeth Cady Stantons of her time. Like them, she advocated for the full education of daughters, foregoing the 19th century belief that daughters, mothers and wives should be silent ‘angels of the house’ submissively catering to men’s needs. Like them, she called for a vote and a voice. But there the resemblance ends – for she was in many ways a quintessentially modern woman, and far ahead of her time.

She spoke frankly of the need for women to take control of their reproductive life and health- so frankly that she was not received in the most respectable drawing rooms, even those belonging to the feminists of her day. Even her language differs sharply from that of her well-meaning sisters in the suffrage movement: where they were often circuitous and genteel, Woodhull had no patience for mincing words; every speech was ablaze with bold honesty as she savagely criticized Victorian hypocrisies and political inequities.

The other organization I found that bears her name is the Woodhull Freedom Foundation. Their list of current projects is pretty amazing. Right at the top is this:

21st Century Census
The current Census exemplifies the government’s outdated view of America’s residents and their relationships. The Census suggests that marriage is the only type of relationship that really matters, it suggests that households all consist of a group of people related to a head of the household, it suggests that male and female are the only two options for gender, etc. If government is going to serve Americans optimally, then it needs to have an updated, accurate understanding of the rich range of personal characteristics and interpersonal relationships that exist in America.

Woodhull is working to restructure the discourse in America about sex and sexuality and about the personal characteristics and interpersonal relationships that stem from that. As part of this work, Woodhull has formed working groups to address these issues around the Census and to present the group’s recommendations to the government.

As a legacy, I don’t think either of these things would displease her. Happy birthday!