Miles Edward

 It's just under 3 weeks until Purim, which means it's time to start baking and getting serious about finding nice jams and butters. I already have prune and apricot in my fridge, but I'd really like raspberry and possibly something else, as well. Hopefully I'll get to the store Monday and can see what they have in the way of weird ones I haven't tried before.

More importantly, what I'm really excited about: Research updates! Our kickstarter to get funds for digitizing documents is $20 over our goal and still has 11 days to go, which is way better than we were hoping for.

We also may have found Simons! My hunch was right, and he was lying about his name; he was really Simonson. Unfortunately there were two David Simonsons living in Manhattan in 1900, with their parents' names the same (yes, really), but even accounting for moving between the dates of the two records and someone deciding to troll the census taker, they're definitely not the same person; one lived with his parents and was unmarried, the other was married and had children. Unfortunately the one we're pretty sure is right vanishes after that, but we have ideas on where to keep looking for him, so we're optimistic.

 Bad news: My sister's in the hospital. I won't get into details now, but needless to say I am stressed.

Good news: Because I needed a distraction, I called my sister in DC and asked her to distract me. While I was talking to her I realised that while we've gone through as much information as we can from the larger English on the strike, nobody on my team even mentioned the possibility of local papers in other languages reporting on it. This despite the fact that Simmons claimed 40% of the strikers were Jewish and the face of the strike was Italian!

So now I'm off to figure out if we can find any papers in other languages that have been saved and, ideally, digitized, and if so, figure out translators for Yiddish, Italian, and possibly some form of Chinese.

Over the summer, I was invited to help moderate a Discord server, and commented that I was surprised as I "didn't consider myself a dog". I then paused and explained the sheepdog theory I have, which is that there are three kinds of people: sheep, sheepdogs, and goats. None of them are inherently better than any of the others, just suited to different jobs. If you're at all familiar with herds, you can probably figure out what I mean by each of these: Sheepdogs lead and direct, sheep follow, and goats kind of do what they want until they get their heads stuck in the fences and some poor farmer has to come get them out.

This isn't the best thought out metaphor, considering that "sheeple" is such a universally acknowledged insult, at least here in the US. But it did lead to the other mods commenting that I have a knack for metaphors. Since then I've noticed it more myself, and marked out some especially great/unusual metaphors I've used in the past months. A couple weeks ago, when I posted Learning How To Ask on Ao3, one of the first comments I got on it was about the simile used in it. 

The thing about metaphors and similes, is that used properly in writing they tell you just as much about the viewpoint character (or omniscient narrator, as the case may be) as they do about the situation. The viewpoint character in the above fic was raised wealthy and genteel, and is used to that world (no pun intended); a jewelry box simile works for her. For a different character I might use their paints, or carpentry tools. 

So, anyway, here's a list of fun metaphors/similes I've used, both in conversation and in fic over the past few months, in no particular order. Several of these are from WiPs.

(in regards to a 2am idea about writing a book on the Newsboy Strike of 1899)"I think we should all sleep on it and decide in like 2 weeks lest this prove as ill thought out as the strike itself."

(on the phenomenon of entire friend groups ending up being gay) "birds of a feather flock together even when they all think they're drab sparrows instead of clever magpies."

"So Yoni took Mikhail and climbed out onto the fire escape, or up onto the roof, and looked for stars they couldn’t see, thinking of the town in the desert that Tateh wanted, where the stars looked like flour sprinkled across the table for kneading challah."

"He eyed Dina carefully, like she was an etrog he was thinking of buying. He looked at Cowboy for a moment and smiled. Dina’s heart didn’t slow down when he did that.
"Dawn broke, like an egg, like an earthen pitcher knocked onto the floor by the family mouser(a term which has fallen out of use in the intervening century, as cats have taken the roles of beloved pets and internet memes, rather than working animals, and mice are taken care of by means of traps), and sunlight oozed through the open window into the tiny room."

"[...]many words have dripped into the abominable English tongue in our day, filling the cracks like tar filling the cracks in a badly maintained asphalt road, serving as terms for words Americans believe are needed yet lacked before."

Do you guys have any favorite metaphors/similes? Ones you created or ones you just like to use, either in writing or in speaking?

The wonderful thing about Netflix is that is was the first of digital streaming services, and the wonderful thing about digital streaming services is that they host professional shoots of plays, thus allowing me to take a couple hours to relax and remember that competent, professional techies and production teams exist!