Among the things making me happy:

The Tachikawa penholder (viewable here and here) I've been using for the envelopes I'm currently lettering (in tandem with a Mitchell 2.5 nib). One of my most-used souvenirs from my 2005 visit to Japan (the other being a velvet German jacket I bought at Kimono-Off).

My closest friend from college has successfully defended her dissertation proposal.

Mer sent a copy of A Field Guide to Surreal Botany home with the BYM. It looks very delectable indeed.

Bishop Gene Robinson will be leading prayers at the opening of President-elect Obama's inaugural festivities. I am pleased not only by Obama's inclusion of Robinson, but by Robinson's desire to include non-Christians. From Laurie Goodstein's report in the New York Times:

Bishop Robinson said he had been reading inaugural prayers through history and was "horrified" at how "specifically and aggressively Christian they were."

"I am very clear," he said, "that this will not be a Christian prayer, and I won't be quoting Scripture or anything like that. The texts that I hold as sacred are not sacred texts for all Americans, and I want all people to feel that this is their prayer."

Bishop Robinson said he might address the prayer to "the God of our many understandings," language that he said he learned from the 12-step program he attended for his alcohol addiction.

[Because I am a terminal crank, I can't help noting that Robinson sets himself an impossible task - there is no including everyone, never mind pleasing them. But I do very much appreciate his desire at least to try.]

A very nice note from an editor/author I copyedited.

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The impossibility of pleasing all readers/listeners/what-all-have-you (and its obverse, avoiding offense) has been much on my mind this week. This is in part because a partner in crime with rhyme and I have been working through an extended tangle over a line that she loved -- that I eventually harassed her into shelving -- because we have different assumptions on how readers would perceive it (and our collaboration as a whole).

This has also been because I skimmed through some of the links and comments at Elizabeth Bear's on multiculturalism(/racism/cultural appropriation) in fiction (and, via etrangere, there are more links and comments at rydra wong) ... and, on my end, there is both too much to say and more I need to consider before attempting to articulate it, in part because it's complicated by my ever-simmering resentment of people who expect me to have a one-approach-fits-all answer to such issues, or to be way more engaged with them than I feel I can spare the time/energy for while doing justice to the things I do feel compelled to write about, which often have little directly to do with me being an Asian American Southerner, although the experience of being one does tint and skew my worldview in innumerable, often invisible ways. (But so does identifying as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. And so does having lived both paycheck-to-paycheck and with a corporate expense account. And so does being an introvert who swears at least once a week I'm going to lock myself in my kitchen and cease trying to talk to people at all. [The BYM is probably laughing himself sick now, since our kitchen has never had a lock and is currently gutted.])

Um. All that aside, what particularly caught my attention in some of the comments to Bear was how more than one person talked about giving up writing in part because they felt they could not handle the pressure of trying depict all the characters fairly and accurately, especially those of different ethnicities/religions/backgrounds. (This may not be a precise summary of their fears, but it's the impression I came away with after my skim-through.) I don't think they're wusses for deciding the task was too much for them -- there are reasons why my Raav-Huang saga hasn't made it past the sketchbook stage -- but I'm also struck by such confessions because I have an opposing hangup: I am less likely to write about Asian women in part because I don't want my writing to be viewed as autobiographical - at least, not as the default, and especially not when the characters are behaving way differently than I would. (I am perhaps overly touchy about this because I have run into this throughout my entire writing career.)

So whenever there are calls/hopes/wishes for more writers of color to write more about characters of color, I feel more than a little ambivalent and conflicted -- because, yes, it's one of the ways to make more of us less Other, but at the same time, I'm annoyed when I meet people who suggest I should be striving to write the next Joy-Luck Club instead of obsessing over the lyrics of a morose, second-tier sixteenth-century Scottish courtier. Or who ask me to assess the authenticity of something Chinese (since, first, China is a freaking large country with a really long history and lots of subgroups that don't even remotely agree with any of the others on what's "authentic"; second, there's the whole parents-were-fiercely-pro-Taiwanese-independence thang; third, many of my non-Asian friends know far more about the language and culture than I, and have spent way more time there) -- I mean, people from the same city here in the United States can't even agree on what constitutes "authentic" barbeque, and you want me to speak for the entirety of Asian America on the meal we just ate?

[Am I overreacting? Sure. But I'm this intense and micro-thinkety about a lot of things (and under-reactive to other things for which a larger response from me often seems expected -- the BYM recently declared, "No one would ever accuse you of being hyper"), including barbeque. (I like it tomato-based and sweet-but-not-too-sweet. Carolina 'cue throws me for a loop - can't eat it without baked beans. And then there are the wholly unresolvable "what belongs in potato salad" skirmirshes, and I promise you wars have been waged over far less.]