people i stalk...in a totally not creepy way. no, really.

My US passport expired in 2024, and I haven't got around to renewing it yet (as mentioned in my last post) because I have a shiny new biometric Finnish passport, and didn't anticipate traveling out of the EU in the near future. (We had just started planning to meet in Montreal at WorldCon next year, but I could've used my EU passport.)

Now that my father has died suddenly the question comes up of traveling to the US. Of course, you can enter on a Finnish passport, but I was concerned about visas (Finns need one usually, US citizens do not, but if I had the wrong passport?) and also about it looking sketchy and causing discrimination of some kind at the border, given the current state of everything. I was planning to call the embassy to ask this, but I spent some time on their website first, and it gives the impression that they are very pressed for time and their definition of emergency is quite narrow. I COULD still have tried their phone queue - people doing that kind of service are usually very nice and helpful - but I was hoping to find an answer to my question on their website, which I did not. I did find that the Finnish foreign ministry is currently not recommending avoiding the US, so that seems to be a good sign. It probably means nobody with Finnish passports has been menaced, harmed, illegally interrogated, etc recently.

There is such a thing as an emergency passport if you have to travel within 2 weeks, but I might not actually need one. Would have to call them and ask about that first.

However, apparently the embassy can renew my expired passport in most likely 4-6 weeks, and I just heard from my sister that they've scheduled a service (Unitarian Universalist and non-supernatural) in a couple of months, maybe more like three, and my dad's extended family will probably be coming then. He will be cremated in a few weeks from now, so not sure why the service is that far out. My BIL's mother has offered to come from Texas to stay with them for a short while to help with cleaning and cooking. So I will talk to my mom later today, and if she or my sister prefers for me to come as soon as possible instead of later, I will attempt to do that (starting with calling the embassy to ask about travel documents). I do not care about the service itself, but I would gain something from mourning together with dad's extended family; but that's not as important a consideration as whether my presence would be helpful, or at least pleasant, for my mom and sister.

Otherwise, I should have plenty of time to have my US passport renewed through the embassy before the service. Our printer doesn't work at the moment, but I think I can print and photocopy at the library, which is a block and a half's walk.

I'm not looking forward to traveling to the US in general though. I always find it hard to sleep when traveling and my stomach seems to be upset most of the time I'm there every single time. There's universal availability of lactose-free dairy here, and I will have to either do research on the pills you can take for it or just eat mostly vegan there (but no fresh produce)!

Tips for international travel and eating on same gratefully accepted. Or knowledge about lactose pills, or whatever they are! Practical stuff. No condolences yet though please, I am not ready to wallow right now!

A part of me always wants to have my hair in a bob, but long enough to tuck behind my ears.

But another part of me always feels that my hair isn't queer enough, and urges me several times a day to cut it short, at least on the sides. (It takes forever to grow back, though, and I always want it in a bob again as soon as I cut it.)

Since I am prone to nerve pain headaches when my head gets cold behind the ears, I count this as an additional argument in favor of the bob.

But recently I'm thinking "should be more androgynous" every time I see a mirror. Ideally I should be able to switch back and forth at will.

Does this count as two wolves? I tried to get a witty title out of that, but I couldn't connect the wolves with hairstyle successfully.

There was a trailer for a new Sense & Sensibility before The Odyssey. I usually see any Austen adaptations that, like, took it seriously (not that recent terrible Persuasion with Dakota Johnson). But this new one has a bunch of actors who look really good but the hair in the trailer is SO bad.

It's worse than the MP miniseries where Billie Piper was wearing a lob in a half ponytail the whole time, because it's multiple women and their hair is down AND TANGLED with daywear. Repeatedly, apparently? It's not just that wearing their hair loose like this is unthinkably shocking and reads as abandoned. It's that you literally COULDN'T treat your hair like this with the hair care technology that existed at that time. It had to be brushed and confined to protect it, because they didn't have shampoo and conditioner!

So anyway, I'm still mad about this. And I'm much more annoyed about it than I am about any of the hilariously dumb choices in The Odyssey.

In addition to inaccurate, it's incoherent. A choice to basically use modern hair, or Ren Faire hair, on all the women in the movie would be more understandable (the hair in Bridgerton and Merlin and Galavant can obviously be down without looking out of place). A systematically inaccurate costume scheme, too, like Bridgerton, or in a more theatrical way, could work. But the trailer seemed to present this hair alongside other women wearing at least normal levels of tv 19th century updos.