ang griffen's journal

OH MAN, YOU GUYS. So I have been reading Beverly Lewis's Abram's Daughters series at work lately. And in the FIRST PART, one of the Amish girls is ~seduced~ by an English boy and gets pregnant, and the boy is totally horrible, and she keeps her pregnancy a ~secret~ and then has the baby but it is stillborn and then eventually she gets shunned. BUT HER BABY IS NOT ACTUALLY STILLBORN, even though the only person who knows this is the doctor. And the book is basically like, and the doctor found a nice home for the baby to get adopted into! Yay!

Well, the girl in that book was pregnant at the same time as her mother was, and the daughter had a boy, and the mother had a girl, and I HAVE BEEN WAITING THIS WHOLE TIME FOR ACCIDENTAL INCEST. And basically the books make you think the son is this boy Carl who was adopted by a Mennonite family, and he's in the same class in school as Lydiann (the mother's baby), but then she thinks of him "like a brother" and I was very sad.

BUT THEN IN BOOK FOUR YOU FIND OUT THAT THE SON IS ACTUALLY THIS AMISH KID THAT LYDDIE IS DATING. AND I WAS LIKE "YESSSSSSSSSSSS."

Anyway, like the entire rest of the books are made up of slut-shaming, all her Amish protagonists being secretly more evangelical types than Amish people, and, like, all the stuff I actually want to read (like Mary Ruth becoming a teacher and getting involved with Robert Schwartz after she moves out and becomes a Mennonite instead of getting baptized) gets totally skipped over when a new chapter starts and it's suddenly four years later or some shit.

Also, these people have the most hilariously confusing family tree even without the secret baby.

I haven't been updating very much lately, which is mainly because I haven't been doing very much that is interesting. Most of the updates I would make would be things like:

1. Hey, so you know when you go to the Hall of Mirrors at the carnival in Echo Bazaar, and if you have Nightmares and enough tickets, there's that one mirror that's like "You could look into this mirror, but that would be unhinged"? That's a good way to wind up in A State of Some Confusion at a lower level of Nightmares than will get you there automatically.

On the plus side, I am now Nightmares free! For now. Given my tendency to click things to see what happens, I'm sure I'll get more in the future. [edit: And right after posting this, I clicked on something that gave me Nightmares again. One day I will learn that I cannot have all the secret knowledge.]


2. So I am dating a Secret Canadian*. Me dating someone is really weird because, you know, I'm me?

Driving out to see him has also resulted in the magic of getting lost in Ft. Wayne more ways than I knew how. I think whenever I leave his apartment he immediately brings up Google Maps and waits for my "I did something stupid again" phone call.

* Contains only 25% actual Canadian.


3. I can't decide whether to go to get comics tomorrow or not. I will see how much time I have to spend getting my bicycle, I guess. Right now I am not planning to go to Free Comic Book Day, but I guess we'll see.


4. It is taking me a really long time to finish reading The Fionavar Tapestry, even though I'm enjoying it. It's not like The Summer Tree was an especially long book, and yet it took me about a week to finish.

I am tempted to keep track of the number of times I have cried reading these books. The end result will surely be embarrassing.

On the other hand, I like how that one kid's spirit animal is a unicorn. That was good times.