I could start this post with a really long explanation of why I'm in the market for a new wallet and why I settled on the one I did, a story that involves a miraculous answered prayer and my need for portability, but I'm trying to crank out about half a week's worth of work in the next 36 hours; I still haven't cleaned, packed, or considered what the heck I'm going to say during my pitch; and I've got some (wonderful, amazing, spectacular) e-mails from friends and readers to answer, so I'll just cut to the chase.
I'm in the market for a new wallet. A few years ago, my mom bought me a seatbelt bag from Harveys, the concept of which I thought was super-cool, but in execution, those bags are really, really heavy. To the point where putting anything in this bag makes it pretty much uncarryable by my little weakling ass. Still, it is a cool idea, the bag is durable as hell, and it hasn't aged a day since I got it, so I considered one of the Harveys clutch wallets for my new-wallet purchase, presuming it would be more portable due to its lower mass of seatbelts woven together.
The store locator for Harveys told me that there were three stores moderately near me which carried Harveys merchandise: one in Rockville, one in Towson, one in Baltimore. I really wanted to pick up and handle the wallet before I committed to it (for my budget, this particular clutch wallet is kind of a big expense), and I wanted to try and buy locally, so I called all of the stores to see if they carried the wallets before I drove an hour each way to any one of them.
Two stores said no, they don't have them. One of the stores didn't answer the phone and hadn't set up their Verizon voice mail.
So I ordered it from Amazon and paid $4 for overnight shipping. The shipping is less expensive than the cost of the gas I would have used to visit the stores, had any of them carried the product I wanted. And, of course, returns are a breeze.
I feel sort of guilty that I resort to Amazon so often, rather than going to stores, but this kind of crap is the reason why. I certainly don't really enjoy the way big-box stores have smooshed little stores; they seem to me in many cases simply to carry more cheap crap from China, rather than actually to have a bigger selection or more convenience or whatever. But there are no stores in my area that carry the dry shampoo I use, so I order it in bulk from Amazon, a lot cheaper than I could have bought it in a store anyway. I don't want to support Best Buy, the only music store in my town, so I buy CDs at much lower costs from Amazon. The closest Asian market to me is 35 minutes in the direction of D.C., right along the Beltway, so if I need a weird ingredient I generally order it from Amazon rather than raising my blood pressure and wasting two hours.
It's just always there. It has mostly flawless service. It has everything. I'm a Prime member, and I'm here to tell you it's worth every single penny. While I can't ignore the guilt twinges I feel for supporting a big behemoth that has the potential eventually to crush every other store in the world, I also can't ignore that, as Carly Simon would say, nobody does it better.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Manic Midnight
To write another blog post about how waiting for readers to get back to you is a land of Boschian nightmare as detailed and engrossing as Homer's Land of Chocolate, only backwards, would be self-indulgent. So I shan't.
Last night I stayed up too late reading Deborah Copaken Kogan's Between Here and April, and when I was ready to turn off the light and sleep, I couldn't. I was too mixed up about the topics of the book (which, from the long view, is about the oppression of women and the difficulty of motherhood; from the short view, it encompasses very, very difficult topics like sexual incompatibility in a marriage, maternal filicide, the recent history of women and mental illness, etc.) to stop my mind racing. I ended up calling Matt and talking with him for 45 minutes, and part of what I told him was that I wished I wasn't as devoted to sleep as I am - I make sleep a priority in my life - because when my mind is revving and chugging in the middle of the night like this, I do really unusually good writing.
It's rare in my adult life that I've gotten up and worked in the middle of the night instead of just trying to effing sleep, but whenever I have, it's been that white-heat writing. The stuff that isn't always usable in its original form, but when it is, it's like it came from somewhere else, and I was just transcribing. Kogan's novel had inspired me to think about scenarios between people, and how I could put some compelling ones together. Earlier in the week, my brain had revisited a very old story idea, and last night I felt like I wanted to get up and get to writing it right then.
The problem with writing in the middle of the night, for me, is manyfold: I exhaust myself, because I don't really know when to stop, when to give up and go to bed, and sometimes it's dawn before I feel ready; my digestive problems are majorly exacerbated by missed sleep, like, to the point where it's not a small concern; it takes me days to get back to normal schedule-wise if I miss part of a night of sleep; and I have held a night-owl schedule before, working nights and sleeping half-days, and I know it's not for me. There are other smaller things - lack of concentration and worsened jaw-clenching the next day, insensible infatuation with what I wrote during that time, a general feeling of misplaced schedules that is hard for me to deal with. So on, so forth. Due to my annoyingly delicate emotional constitution, it's a bad idea.
This would all be worth it for good work, if I had a completely malleable schedule and nothing else to worry about but the writing. But that's just not true right now. This weekend I have to worry about meeting my other-work quota, cleaning the damn house, and reviewing all the conference stuff (I leave Wednesday!) to decide what to attend, assemble everything I need to bring, yadda yadda. And in theory I should make a movie date with a friend to whom I gave a rain-check last weekend and do the laundry and re-dye my hair and and and and.
On a total tangent, I finally realized a couple of weeks ago what the heart of nostalgia for childhood is to me. I was not a happy kid, growing up; I felt like the world as it was meant to be was closed to me, and I was impatient to be taken seriously. But in recent years I've started to wish for the life I had as a kid, which is baffling, because I know intellectually that I really disliked being young. I realized that the reason for this is not that I was happier then, because I wasn't, but that I had a lot less to remember. The shorthand for this is that I had fewer responsibilities, but I don't think this is fair to what kids have to accomplish when they're kids - school, homework, meeting expectations, dealing with social stuff, and the business of growing up, all of which is way more stressful than we, societally, give kids credit for. It's not fewer responsibilities, it's having to keep in your head all the things you have to keep track of. Do I have enough groceries in the house? Did I pay all the bills, with all their different due dates, on time? Is the car due for service (again)? Is that membership expiring? Did I take that stuff to the dry cleaner, did I pick it up? Am I out of toner (again)? Isn't it next weekend that thing is happening, and don't I need to bring something? Have I written e-mails and returned calls to all the people who deserve them?
So on. So forth. I don't think any of these responsibilities are more dire than what a 13-year-old is faced with (I remember being 13, and it sucked), but there are so many of them. So infinitely many things to think of. When you're a kid, someone else is tasked to think of these things for you. You have to do a lot of hard shit on your own, but much of your basic daily business is taken care of. The solution to this problem as an adult is to hire a personal assistant, whose job it is to manage you in this way. But then, of course, the personal assistant has to look after your life and her own, as well, and the insanity just gets pushed on to someone else. God help the personal assistant if she has kids.
ANYWAY. Ultimately last night I decided to stay in bed and try to sleep, drinking hot chocolate made from a packet of unknown age, rather than writing. I think this was the right call. I'm not sure what my next writing project is going to be, whether I'll churn out essays and stories or sketch out my next book, but I don't think I'm ready to start on it yet. Maybe after the conference, or maybe after May is over. A lot of uncertainty should be settled by June, so part of me wants to just put off the serious stuff until the chaos dies down. Yet, as I've had reason to remember lately, life happens all the time, and not just when you wait until the time is right. Do it now, as they say. Do it now, do it now, do it now.
Last night I stayed up too late reading Deborah Copaken Kogan's Between Here and April, and when I was ready to turn off the light and sleep, I couldn't. I was too mixed up about the topics of the book (which, from the long view, is about the oppression of women and the difficulty of motherhood; from the short view, it encompasses very, very difficult topics like sexual incompatibility in a marriage, maternal filicide, the recent history of women and mental illness, etc.) to stop my mind racing. I ended up calling Matt and talking with him for 45 minutes, and part of what I told him was that I wished I wasn't as devoted to sleep as I am - I make sleep a priority in my life - because when my mind is revving and chugging in the middle of the night like this, I do really unusually good writing.
It's rare in my adult life that I've gotten up and worked in the middle of the night instead of just trying to effing sleep, but whenever I have, it's been that white-heat writing. The stuff that isn't always usable in its original form, but when it is, it's like it came from somewhere else, and I was just transcribing. Kogan's novel had inspired me to think about scenarios between people, and how I could put some compelling ones together. Earlier in the week, my brain had revisited a very old story idea, and last night I felt like I wanted to get up and get to writing it right then.
The problem with writing in the middle of the night, for me, is manyfold: I exhaust myself, because I don't really know when to stop, when to give up and go to bed, and sometimes it's dawn before I feel ready; my digestive problems are majorly exacerbated by missed sleep, like, to the point where it's not a small concern; it takes me days to get back to normal schedule-wise if I miss part of a night of sleep; and I have held a night-owl schedule before, working nights and sleeping half-days, and I know it's not for me. There are other smaller things - lack of concentration and worsened jaw-clenching the next day, insensible infatuation with what I wrote during that time, a general feeling of misplaced schedules that is hard for me to deal with. So on, so forth. Due to my annoyingly delicate emotional constitution, it's a bad idea.
This would all be worth it for good work, if I had a completely malleable schedule and nothing else to worry about but the writing. But that's just not true right now. This weekend I have to worry about meeting my other-work quota, cleaning the damn house, and reviewing all the conference stuff (I leave Wednesday!) to decide what to attend, assemble everything I need to bring, yadda yadda. And in theory I should make a movie date with a friend to whom I gave a rain-check last weekend and do the laundry and re-dye my hair and and and and.
On a total tangent, I finally realized a couple of weeks ago what the heart of nostalgia for childhood is to me. I was not a happy kid, growing up; I felt like the world as it was meant to be was closed to me, and I was impatient to be taken seriously. But in recent years I've started to wish for the life I had as a kid, which is baffling, because I know intellectually that I really disliked being young. I realized that the reason for this is not that I was happier then, because I wasn't, but that I had a lot less to remember. The shorthand for this is that I had fewer responsibilities, but I don't think this is fair to what kids have to accomplish when they're kids - school, homework, meeting expectations, dealing with social stuff, and the business of growing up, all of which is way more stressful than we, societally, give kids credit for. It's not fewer responsibilities, it's having to keep in your head all the things you have to keep track of. Do I have enough groceries in the house? Did I pay all the bills, with all their different due dates, on time? Is the car due for service (again)? Is that membership expiring? Did I take that stuff to the dry cleaner, did I pick it up? Am I out of toner (again)? Isn't it next weekend that thing is happening, and don't I need to bring something? Have I written e-mails and returned calls to all the people who deserve them?
So on. So forth. I don't think any of these responsibilities are more dire than what a 13-year-old is faced with (I remember being 13, and it sucked), but there are so many of them. So infinitely many things to think of. When you're a kid, someone else is tasked to think of these things for you. You have to do a lot of hard shit on your own, but much of your basic daily business is taken care of. The solution to this problem as an adult is to hire a personal assistant, whose job it is to manage you in this way. But then, of course, the personal assistant has to look after your life and her own, as well, and the insanity just gets pushed on to someone else. God help the personal assistant if she has kids.
ANYWAY. Ultimately last night I decided to stay in bed and try to sleep, drinking hot chocolate made from a packet of unknown age, rather than writing. I think this was the right call. I'm not sure what my next writing project is going to be, whether I'll churn out essays and stories or sketch out my next book, but I don't think I'm ready to start on it yet. Maybe after the conference, or maybe after May is over. A lot of uncertainty should be settled by June, so part of me wants to just put off the serious stuff until the chaos dies down. Yet, as I've had reason to remember lately, life happens all the time, and not just when you wait until the time is right. Do it now, as they say. Do it now, do it now, do it now.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Spectacular Spectacular
When I found out that they were re-releasing Titanic this spring to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the sinking, I instantly thought this was the most heartless, transparently cash-in-y thing I'd ever heard of. And immediately afterward, thought "I can't wait to see it BIG again."
Last weekend, I did. I saw it big, in 3D, and oh good glory, it was the best thing I've seen this year.
For starters, I forgot that Cameron does not take the tragedy of the sinking lightly. I'm not denying that there's something inherently squicky about cha-CHINGing the anniversary of 1,500 deaths, but his camerawork under the ocean, and the words he puts in Old Rose's mouth, are not cheap or trashy, nor are they the smallest part of the experience.
For two, I feel sad that Titanic has become a big ol' joke. I get mad when people don't take pop culture seriously, or when they take Art so seriously that absurdity and fun can't be appreciated. Pop culture is important. It's the place most of us live most of the time, and it's how an alien species or an anthropologist could have any hope of understanding us, of reaching us. These are the things that shape our lives: not just the noble ideals and and masterpieces of great thinkers and artists of the past, but the dialogue in Back to the Future and the music of Madonna.
Point is, a movie like Gone with the Wind, a big epic spectacle, sticks with the culture for decades on end. Whole generations watch it and then show it to their kids, who show it to their kids. People have a place in their hearts for that movie that they feel belongs just to them - but it belongs to everybody, because that's how great pop art feels: ubiquitous and unique. Titanic (despite its weaker script) sits easily on the shelf next to Gone with the Wind, and a critic who fails to see that simply doesn't have the long view.
There were long minutes during the sinking sequence when my mouth didn't close at all. I know this movie pretty durn well; I saw it in the theater three times (my moviegoing companion over the weekend had seen it eight times in '97-'98), and I used to put it on the DVD player in my laptop while I knitted in my little room in Massachusetts. No single line is a surprise, although I don't have most of it by heart as I do GWTW. But it was still completely different on the big screen, just as GWTW had been when I saw it on a rerelease in the mid-90s. (I will never forget that day. It was an irreplaceable experience to see it on a theater-sized screen. I badly want it to go back in the theater again.) It was still all of the best of any moviegoing experience compressed into a paltry three hours and fourteen minutes. We go to the cinema to see something spectacular, that is our only goal, I firmly believe. And that is exactly what Titanic is, no more and no less.
This time around I gave some more thought to the way Cameron writes female characters. I think he tends to veer away from the standard male gaze in ways that I enormously admire, although I don't know if his motivation is because he's a feminist or because he just wants as big an audience as possible. Rose (and all this goes for Sarah Connor in T2, and Ripley in Aliens) is objectified to some extent, but I really want to be her, the same way men want to be Philip Marlowe. She's fully realized, not sketched. She doesn't just behave the way you want her to, acquiesce and trot along with the motion of the plot, but actually follows her own lights and helps to drive it all forward. This is not the way most female characters behave in Hollywood.
There are sexist aspects to Titanic, but they match the period of the piece. If anything, it's anachronistically unsexist in many spots. And it's not perfect, you know, there's a lot of Men Stuff that goes on, but never does it seem (to me) inherently more important than the bedroom drama between Rose and the expectations placed upon her. Which is sort of the whole dynamic between Men Stuff and Lady Stuff in fiction, the boardroom vs. the bedroom, and one of them being necessarily more interesting because it's populated by the masters of the universe. Footnoted to A Room of One's Own.
I could be giving credit to Cameron where it's not due, but I find that, over and over in his oeuvre, he does not falter or dick-swing when he writes female characters, and I really believe Titanic is no exception. Even if Rose does require saving, according to herself. She's just a teenager, after all.
So, upshot: Go see it, if you missed it the first time around, or even if you didn't. Even if you hated it. Try it on for size. It's big enough to fit most everybody.
Last weekend, I did. I saw it big, in 3D, and oh good glory, it was the best thing I've seen this year.
For starters, I forgot that Cameron does not take the tragedy of the sinking lightly. I'm not denying that there's something inherently squicky about cha-CHINGing the anniversary of 1,500 deaths, but his camerawork under the ocean, and the words he puts in Old Rose's mouth, are not cheap or trashy, nor are they the smallest part of the experience.
For two, I feel sad that Titanic has become a big ol' joke. I get mad when people don't take pop culture seriously, or when they take Art so seriously that absurdity and fun can't be appreciated. Pop culture is important. It's the place most of us live most of the time, and it's how an alien species or an anthropologist could have any hope of understanding us, of reaching us. These are the things that shape our lives: not just the noble ideals and and masterpieces of great thinkers and artists of the past, but the dialogue in Back to the Future and the music of Madonna.
Point is, a movie like Gone with the Wind, a big epic spectacle, sticks with the culture for decades on end. Whole generations watch it and then show it to their kids, who show it to their kids. People have a place in their hearts for that movie that they feel belongs just to them - but it belongs to everybody, because that's how great pop art feels: ubiquitous and unique. Titanic (despite its weaker script) sits easily on the shelf next to Gone with the Wind, and a critic who fails to see that simply doesn't have the long view.
There were long minutes during the sinking sequence when my mouth didn't close at all. I know this movie pretty durn well; I saw it in the theater three times (my moviegoing companion over the weekend had seen it eight times in '97-'98), and I used to put it on the DVD player in my laptop while I knitted in my little room in Massachusetts. No single line is a surprise, although I don't have most of it by heart as I do GWTW. But it was still completely different on the big screen, just as GWTW had been when I saw it on a rerelease in the mid-90s. (I will never forget that day. It was an irreplaceable experience to see it on a theater-sized screen. I badly want it to go back in the theater again.) It was still all of the best of any moviegoing experience compressed into a paltry three hours and fourteen minutes. We go to the cinema to see something spectacular, that is our only goal, I firmly believe. And that is exactly what Titanic is, no more and no less.
This time around I gave some more thought to the way Cameron writes female characters. I think he tends to veer away from the standard male gaze in ways that I enormously admire, although I don't know if his motivation is because he's a feminist or because he just wants as big an audience as possible. Rose (and all this goes for Sarah Connor in T2, and Ripley in Aliens) is objectified to some extent, but I really want to be her, the same way men want to be Philip Marlowe. She's fully realized, not sketched. She doesn't just behave the way you want her to, acquiesce and trot along with the motion of the plot, but actually follows her own lights and helps to drive it all forward. This is not the way most female characters behave in Hollywood.
There are sexist aspects to Titanic, but they match the period of the piece. If anything, it's anachronistically unsexist in many spots. And it's not perfect, you know, there's a lot of Men Stuff that goes on, but never does it seem (to me) inherently more important than the bedroom drama between Rose and the expectations placed upon her. Which is sort of the whole dynamic between Men Stuff and Lady Stuff in fiction, the boardroom vs. the bedroom, and one of them being necessarily more interesting because it's populated by the masters of the universe. Footnoted to A Room of One's Own.
I could be giving credit to Cameron where it's not due, but I find that, over and over in his oeuvre, he does not falter or dick-swing when he writes female characters, and I really believe Titanic is no exception. Even if Rose does require saving, according to herself. She's just a teenager, after all.
So, upshot: Go see it, if you missed it the first time around, or even if you didn't. Even if you hated it. Try it on for size. It's big enough to fit most everybody.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Peace
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| Very obviously, I do not possess the copyright to this image. |
On Friday I walked to the mailbox, and discovered that it was a stunning, cloudless day. I decided I'd take a walk after lunch, just a short one for some fresh air. There's a passage in Bridget Jones's Diary that I've never forgotten, where Bridget muses that perhaps there are only so many beautiful clear spring days ever apportioned to one lifetime, and sitting inside on one (or many) of them is wasting a valuable gift. This is probably far more dire a problem in England, and living in California would bring me more than my share of such days, but the spirit and the point of the passage remain, and bothered me during every single beautiful day I ever spent behind a desk in an office.
So I took my walk, looking up at the sky, walking over to the trees and smelling their blossoms, feeling and hearing the breeze. I was filled with wonder at how perfect the temperature was, how fresh the air. I walked up the hill to the strange little wisteria-enveloped not-exactly-a-gazebo thing a couple of blocks away, and then walked back. On the way home I noticed a field that I had somehow never noticed particularly, a rough circle of land that had recently been mown and was set away from the road behind some low bushes. I walked into it, found a flat spot with good grass cover, and sat down. Then I lay down. Then I closed my eyes.
I felt the sun on my skin. I felt the breeze play over my shirt. I heard the trees rustle, heard some kids practicing layups on the community basketball court a few hundred feet away. Occasionally a car passed.
I could have stayed there all day.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Feedback FTW / Enlightened by Edna
I had another one of those Lost Days yesterday: I got home from class fully intending to work for a little while, and then knock out the last revision of the [non-]horror novel, and then go back to working, meeting my responsibilities for the day with some time to spare. But it didn't work out that way. I didn't do any paid work at all, in fact; I revised for most of the day, into the evening.
Although I have a far better handle on my work schedule now than I did in, say, February, I am still trying to figure out how to make it more intuitive, more like something that I just do without thinking about it, the way I just got up and went to work and then got up and went home when I had a day job. The situation is so loose that I don't feel like holding myself to a specific schedule is necessary - nor do I think it's really the way in which to get the best work out of myself.
In any case, after yesterday's edit, I am through with actively revising for the moment. The book is starting to all blur together and not be new anymore, so I'm going to take notes on the feedback I get from here on and wait a month or two to implement it. I have been getting a LOT more discussion and feedback from readers on this book than I did on the Greenland book, which is either a good sign (because I wrote a more interesting book) or a good sign (because I was clearer with my readers). It's lovely to hear from so many people, especially the unexpected or critical feedback. Keep it coming, folks.
This weekend I have to get down to business on the promo materials I'll take with me to Colorado - synopsis, elevator pitch. I thought I might draft a query letter, too, while I'm at it. Matt gave me a terrific opening for it, so I think it'll be a bit easier than other queries I've written. Since I need to update my website, too, I've got to put together a synopsis and blurb for the Greenland book, which I find a dreadful prospect. I always find that I have either one sentence or three pages to say about that book, because it's so weird and straddles a few different things.
I'm almost finished with a book of Edna O'Brien short stories. The first book of hers I read was The Light of Evening, which is on my Special Shelf. I was utterly bowled over, and very nearly decided to stop writing altogether after I read it. I was overwhelmed by how not as good as her I would always be - how very minuscule and worthless my talent was compared to hers. (The reason I changed my mind is an entirely other post.) Then I read In the Forest, and I was sort of...disappointed. It was a great book, beautiful and vague in sort of the same way, but not a totally Other experience the way Evening had been. I thought, okay, well, she had an off (ish) book. I'll try again another time. So I got this book of short stories, and now that I'm all but two finished with it, I'm feeling the same sort of way: but...but...this was supposed to be otherworldly! It was supposed to knock me flat! And this is just...highly accomplished. It's still fiction I could never write, it just doesn't seem like it came from the pen of God, as Evening did.
I don't know what's up with this, whether maybe it's me, but I partly wish I hadn't started on her oeuvre with Evening, hadn't gotten my expectations so worked up. I'm going to keep trying - I just requested the Country Girls trilogy from the library, the books that got Ireland's panties in a bunch when they were published in the 60s - but I'm going to lower my expectations a bit.
Also, read The Light of Evening. You will never be the same.
Although I have a far better handle on my work schedule now than I did in, say, February, I am still trying to figure out how to make it more intuitive, more like something that I just do without thinking about it, the way I just got up and went to work and then got up and went home when I had a day job. The situation is so loose that I don't feel like holding myself to a specific schedule is necessary - nor do I think it's really the way in which to get the best work out of myself.
In any case, after yesterday's edit, I am through with actively revising for the moment. The book is starting to all blur together and not be new anymore, so I'm going to take notes on the feedback I get from here on and wait a month or two to implement it. I have been getting a LOT more discussion and feedback from readers on this book than I did on the Greenland book, which is either a good sign (because I wrote a more interesting book) or a good sign (because I was clearer with my readers). It's lovely to hear from so many people, especially the unexpected or critical feedback. Keep it coming, folks.
This weekend I have to get down to business on the promo materials I'll take with me to Colorado - synopsis, elevator pitch. I thought I might draft a query letter, too, while I'm at it. Matt gave me a terrific opening for it, so I think it'll be a bit easier than other queries I've written. Since I need to update my website, too, I've got to put together a synopsis and blurb for the Greenland book, which I find a dreadful prospect. I always find that I have either one sentence or three pages to say about that book, because it's so weird and straddles a few different things.
I'm almost finished with a book of Edna O'Brien short stories. The first book of hers I read was The Light of Evening, which is on my Special Shelf. I was utterly bowled over, and very nearly decided to stop writing altogether after I read it. I was overwhelmed by how not as good as her I would always be - how very minuscule and worthless my talent was compared to hers. (The reason I changed my mind is an entirely other post.) Then I read In the Forest, and I was sort of...disappointed. It was a great book, beautiful and vague in sort of the same way, but not a totally Other experience the way Evening had been. I thought, okay, well, she had an off (ish) book. I'll try again another time. So I got this book of short stories, and now that I'm all but two finished with it, I'm feeling the same sort of way: but...but...this was supposed to be otherworldly! It was supposed to knock me flat! And this is just...highly accomplished. It's still fiction I could never write, it just doesn't seem like it came from the pen of God, as Evening did.
I don't know what's up with this, whether maybe it's me, but I partly wish I hadn't started on her oeuvre with Evening, hadn't gotten my expectations so worked up. I'm going to keep trying - I just requested the Country Girls trilogy from the library, the books that got Ireland's panties in a bunch when they were published in the 60s - but I'm going to lower my expectations a bit.
Also, read The Light of Evening. You will never be the same.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Not Crimson Glow, But It'll Do
The big news is that I dyed the last couple of inches of my hair purple yesterday.
I've been wanting to do this since high school. I've really been itching to do it since I quit my paralegal job in November of last year. But when Matt got laid off, there seemed a chance that I'd have to go back to conservative office work, so I resolved to wait until he got a job. He started work yesterday, the dear thing, so I bought a Splat kit and went to town.
It was surprisingly easy. The bleach barely fried my hair at all, no breakage. And I'm very happy with it. And I know I couldn't have for all sorts of reasons, but I kind of wish I'd done this years ago and could have had fun experimenting ever since.
Aside from this, which is kind of a headline in my life in that it's a big and much-desired first for me, there really isn't much news. Today, after work is done, I'm going to run through the [non-]horror novel and do the aw-crap-did-I-really-overlook-that-mistake edit, so I can order another 10 copies of it from Lulu (I ran through the first 10 already, which yay (?)), most or all of which will go with me to the conference later in the month. I'm still not feeling in a writing mood yet, for stories/essays/whatever. I've been mulling over a story that was inspired by Star Wars - someone I trust told me that it's a good idea, and I was thinking of mutating it from SW into a more generic sci-fi background and seeing if it works out. But with money-work and life stuff the way they are this month, I'm not sure if I'll get to it before May.
Oh, but when/if I do, Margaret Atwood has started a sci-fi mag! This is terrific. And the pay scale is pretty significant. Canada has better litmags than the U.S., if you ask me, and I'm sure this will be no exception.
Unrelated to all else, GO BIG BLUE.
I've been wanting to do this since high school. I've really been itching to do it since I quit my paralegal job in November of last year. But when Matt got laid off, there seemed a chance that I'd have to go back to conservative office work, so I resolved to wait until he got a job. He started work yesterday, the dear thing, so I bought a Splat kit and went to town.
It was surprisingly easy. The bleach barely fried my hair at all, no breakage. And I'm very happy with it. And I know I couldn't have for all sorts of reasons, but I kind of wish I'd done this years ago and could have had fun experimenting ever since.
Aside from this, which is kind of a headline in my life in that it's a big and much-desired first for me, there really isn't much news. Today, after work is done, I'm going to run through the [non-]horror novel and do the aw-crap-did-I-really-overlook-that-mistake edit, so I can order another 10 copies of it from Lulu (I ran through the first 10 already, which yay (?)), most or all of which will go with me to the conference later in the month. I'm still not feeling in a writing mood yet, for stories/essays/whatever. I've been mulling over a story that was inspired by Star Wars - someone I trust told me that it's a good idea, and I was thinking of mutating it from SW into a more generic sci-fi background and seeing if it works out. But with money-work and life stuff the way they are this month, I'm not sure if I'll get to it before May.
Oh, but when/if I do, Margaret Atwood has started a sci-fi mag! This is terrific. And the pay scale is pretty significant. Canada has better litmags than the U.S., if you ask me, and I'm sure this will be no exception.
Unrelated to all else, GO BIG BLUE.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Alone with the Critic in My Head
The difference between Matt being gone and Matt being here in terms of how I behave is only ever clear after he leaves. I hold to the notion that having him around really isn't very different from being by myself, in that I don't censor myself really at all, I don't feel compelled to act one way or another, I don't change into someone that he could like better than "the real me" - it's just me. Behaving like somebody else is just too much work. And I'm fortunate that he brings out the best in me. I've had boyfriends who have brought out the worst, and it was...bad.
Anyway, this morning, I woke up around 7:00, still tired (my sleep has gotten whittled at opposite ends over the last few months, for some reason, and I don't really know what to do about it). Rather than jumping out of bed and getting to the gym or to work, which was what I thought I'd do last night, I stayed in bed and read my book. I got up for breakfast and brought it back to bed, and read on until 9:00.
In the abstract, I really enjoy getting a jump on the day in terms of work or chores, starting at 7:30 so I can finish up by early afternoon, but most mornings I don't really feel like it when I'm still in bed. If Matt had been here, I'd've risen, foraged for food, and set to work. (I probably still wouldn't have gone to the gym.) I'd have been too ashamed to be a slugabed. Somebody else would have been nearby, and would hence have eyewitness evidence that I'd stayed in bed for two gratuitous hours when I could have gotten the productive part of my day going. Obviously it's not a very big deal, a big thing to be ashamed of, since I'm admitting it on the internet. But someone observing it is a whole different thing than admitting it after the fact.
There's tons of stuff like this that Matt prevents me from doing, without intending to. His second pair of eyes helps me to see my errors and overlookings, and while it makes me critical of myself in ways that I think he doesn't cotton to - he's told me over and over that he doesn't give a damn if I can't keep the bedroom tidy - it also helps me not to have that sort of bacheloresque, this-ain't-the-Ritz attitude which I think is pretty bad to slip into. Hard to get out of, and hard not to be self-centered when you're in it.
When he's not around, the critic in my head who needles about what Matt will think if he witnesses me doing this or that just...falls silent. It's more of a wheedle than a needle when I'm on my own, because I genuinely don't care about the bedroom being messy except for a) what bad things about my personality it potentially reflects that I can't keep it neat, and b) how it looks to others that I can't keep it neat. These worries are a lot more muffled by myself.
I don't think Matt would care if I stayed in bed until 9:00. (Especially on a Sunday.) Or if I left my crap everywhere instead of nominally putting it away before going to bed. Or if I spent another half-hour than I intended to poking around town before coming back home after class yesterday morning, which I did, because I wasn't in any hurry to get home. I don't think he would think any less of me, or that I would become less attractive to him. But I feel a responsibility to this other human in my life not to be a person who lives entirely by her own lights when he's around. To be the best me. The one he helps me to be.
This brings up all sorts of questions for me about gender and expectations, and those topics in the context of marriage, but I think I'll just leave it where it is. In the last month or so, I've gotten really, really tired of thinking about gender, getting angry about it, discovering where my position lies on Issues of Gender. Fuck it. I just want to live. And occasionally have a lie-in on Sundays.
Anyway, this morning, I woke up around 7:00, still tired (my sleep has gotten whittled at opposite ends over the last few months, for some reason, and I don't really know what to do about it). Rather than jumping out of bed and getting to the gym or to work, which was what I thought I'd do last night, I stayed in bed and read my book. I got up for breakfast and brought it back to bed, and read on until 9:00.
In the abstract, I really enjoy getting a jump on the day in terms of work or chores, starting at 7:30 so I can finish up by early afternoon, but most mornings I don't really feel like it when I'm still in bed. If Matt had been here, I'd've risen, foraged for food, and set to work. (I probably still wouldn't have gone to the gym.) I'd have been too ashamed to be a slugabed. Somebody else would have been nearby, and would hence have eyewitness evidence that I'd stayed in bed for two gratuitous hours when I could have gotten the productive part of my day going. Obviously it's not a very big deal, a big thing to be ashamed of, since I'm admitting it on the internet. But someone observing it is a whole different thing than admitting it after the fact.
There's tons of stuff like this that Matt prevents me from doing, without intending to. His second pair of eyes helps me to see my errors and overlookings, and while it makes me critical of myself in ways that I think he doesn't cotton to - he's told me over and over that he doesn't give a damn if I can't keep the bedroom tidy - it also helps me not to have that sort of bacheloresque, this-ain't-the-Ritz attitude which I think is pretty bad to slip into. Hard to get out of, and hard not to be self-centered when you're in it.
When he's not around, the critic in my head who needles about what Matt will think if he witnesses me doing this or that just...falls silent. It's more of a wheedle than a needle when I'm on my own, because I genuinely don't care about the bedroom being messy except for a) what bad things about my personality it potentially reflects that I can't keep it neat, and b) how it looks to others that I can't keep it neat. These worries are a lot more muffled by myself.
I don't think Matt would care if I stayed in bed until 9:00. (Especially on a Sunday.) Or if I left my crap everywhere instead of nominally putting it away before going to bed. Or if I spent another half-hour than I intended to poking around town before coming back home after class yesterday morning, which I did, because I wasn't in any hurry to get home. I don't think he would think any less of me, or that I would become less attractive to him. But I feel a responsibility to this other human in my life not to be a person who lives entirely by her own lights when he's around. To be the best me. The one he helps me to be.
This brings up all sorts of questions for me about gender and expectations, and those topics in the context of marriage, but I think I'll just leave it where it is. In the last month or so, I've gotten really, really tired of thinking about gender, getting angry about it, discovering where my position lies on Issues of Gender. Fuck it. I just want to live. And occasionally have a lie-in on Sundays.
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