Oh, boy....

It looks like I'm gonna be applying somewhere else after my work practice ends next week after all! Not with any hard feelings really, but I guess it's really difficult for them to hire people for less than 4 days a week - maybe impossible actually? Right now I feel a lot better than in January, but I'm still pretty confident I couldn't manage four days a week.

It's mayyyyybe actually a relief in some ways - I've wondered if the store near my house, which is smaller, would be better in other ways too (the main negative there is that it has more scented stuff and there's a distinct perfumey odor in it. I'm sensitive to that, but I haven't actually had an allergic reaction, I'm just... sensitive to perfumes and allergic to some of them so I'm paranoid about them. But I can take antihistamines). And my dislike of adapting to new places was definitely a big thing keeping me from investigating other alternatives since I already liked the place. But it wasn't perfect.

I didn't like being surprised to learn this though! And this morning I had a disaster trying to pay for a bus card on my new phone and didn't see Twitter before work, so I found out about the war after this long interview (at which I cried, which probably looked completely incomprehensible to my counselor and the manager, because I was actually crying thinking about how exhausted I was by January, but I don't think that really makes sense to a person with normal spoons). I found out like this:

COUNSELOR: So have a good day with the rest of your work day and try to have a relaxing weekend, both of you!
MANAGER: On the contrary. Have you seen the news this morning?
COUNSELOR: Oh, yeah. Well, that's true. It's terrible, really horrifying.
MANAGER: It's so awful and I'm so distracted and worried.
ME: What? What happened???
MANAGER: Russia attacked Ukraine overnight. They're bombing civilian targets all around Kiev. From Belarus as well.

So. Yeah. I spent the afternoon thinking alternately that maybe I should try to find work I can do in one place, not moving, like Wax's customer service gig (though I couldn't do that, I'm not fluent trilingual like boo), because that's the only way I could manage four or five days a week probably... and telling myself to drop it until the meeting with my counselor next week and then immediately thinking "I wonder if I'm staring down World War 3?"

Obviously, my concerns are laughably small next to the attack on Ukraine. I hope the ludicrously ineffective powers of North America, Europe, and the UK at least manage to get their act together enough for the massive economic sanctions that are needed.

I fell asleep almost as soon as I came home, but I could still sleep for a few days.

The Riddle-Master of Hed and Dragon Keeper

I read all of Robin Hobb's Dragon Keeper in a couple of days. I enjoyed it a lot and found it very readable and interesting, although it still has too many POV characters for my taste. In fact, I barely read any of McKillip's The Riddle-Master of Hed in the middle of it.

But then I got to the end unexpectedly and realized it wasn't just ending on a cliffhanger, or a TOTAL cliffhanger (although not as total as Zelazny's literal cliffhanger): it was ending halfway through all the major plot threads of what felt, to the genre-literate reader me as I went along, like the plot of the book. Like she just wrote... about half a book and published it as a book?! So I got the second book right away, but when I opened it and it didn't start with the speed and plot involvement of the end of Dragon Keeper, my annoyance overcame my curiosity during the "previously, on this unfinished trilogy" infodump stuff, and I set it aside again. This world admittedly got extra points for the dragons being central to it from me, and that still holds true even though they are not really very close to my favorite sorts of dragons. The worldbuilding is still cool. Another big part of the credit comes from the multiple female protagonists though. I was getting sick of male narrators. (I also feel a little silly for having avoided trying Robin Hobb for such a long time? I guess she was another victim of my sense that things that are too popular can't be really good. But on the other hand, maybe writing half books is annoying enough to justify that avoidance after all, not sure yet.)

The Riddle-Master of Hed continues interesting, and it's only got the one narrator, which is great, but it doesn't really have any important female characters with a lot of page time. I mean, it's not sexist; there are powerful and well-rounded women and they have full personalities and motivations and are different from each other. Just. They're sort of encountered along the way, so far. Also, the central force in this book is the title character being torn between his obvious destiny and his desire for the simple beautiful farming life on his little rural island farming paradise. Which is like, I feel your pain, but you start to look pretty stupid trying to "that's not my business tho" when an unknown malevolent force keeps sending magic assassins after you? Like you clearly aren't getting much of a choice here. He even argues with multiple people who point out that just going back to his farm isn't going to help because the magical assassins will just follow him and he's like "But then I can die a peaceful yet over-educated farmer who just happens to have omens and portents and a magical mystical ancient harp...", and he only finally gives in to the idea of engaging with reality when he realizes he'll have to permanently break up with his potential betrothed if he just waits for death. Man, seriously?

I like the style though. And I don't have any grudges against this book, philosophically speaking, that would prevent me continuing the trilogy with Heir of Sea and Fire! I might need to find another female-led fantasy book to read before I try Dragon Haven, though.

Recommended sources on Ukraine include kleptocracy expert Casey Michel

NBC Opinion: Why does Russia want to invade Ukraine? To rewrite the post-Cold War order
Moscow’s demands were always about more than the security arrangements in Ukraine: The West can’t say we weren’t warned, Feb. 23, 2022, by Casey Michel, author of "American Kleptocracy"

For analysis, I mean.

I have noticed a tendency for my American friends and family to be more surprised, and to have missed more of the background stuff going on with Putin's Russia, than I expected, having spent my adult life here in Finland.

I learned about the Maidan protests and the 2014 invasion of Crimea in realtime with my Ukrainian and baltic friends in the advanced Finnish class I was taking at the time, and Finland is full of Russians who have fled Russia. I think we have two Ukrainians and a Russian out of like less than twenty employees at the store where I still (until next Wednesday) work.

So... talking to my family about this today gave me a bit of worldview vertigo.