Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Marissa Lingen's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
1:45 pm	books read, late November ( not spoilery, just long ) (7 Comments |Comment on this)
11:27 am	Conspiring again I have a short story, "The Grandmother-Granddaughter Conspiracy," up at this month's Clarkesworld. Go, read, enjoy. It was inspired by a pair of earrings of the same title, which I bought from elisem and gave to my mom. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 30th, 2009
9:37 pm	deep breaths for everybody I am trying not to over-interpret/over-ascribe. But. Yesterday I simply did not have the time or the physical energy to have a workout. It was a day with a steady bit in it, and I became hungry like a normal person when dinnertime rolled around, without spending an hour and a half on the bike to cut through the nausea. (Because no vertigo for six hours meant no nausea.) And the peasants rejoiced etc. Today has been so much easier in so many ways. I slept better. I had an hour and a half workout, and that was much easier. This is not surprising. Bodies need rest from time to time. This is known. I haven't been working out for 1.5-2 hours daily because I think it's the best thing for a person, I've been doing it because it's how I can eat, and I am firmly of the opinion that people need to eat. (Even if they don't need to eat where we had dinner. But that's the previous entry.) I also have two new stories coming along, and I am switching from frame to frame trying to keep up with idea notes on both of them. (Edited to add: Um. Three.) I have been a bit short on new stories for awhile now. I know the shape of both of these. I don't want to say that it has to be connected. But...minds are not separable from bodies, either. Both need rest. Being really physically exhausted and feeling like I'm fighting for just the normal things in life may not, it turns out, be the most conducive thing ever to creative work. I'm not committing that I will always use my steady days to skip workouts; clearly that's the wrong solution for the long-term outcome for which we devoutly hope, that is, that all my days will become steady days. But it seemed worth reminding myself, and possibly some of you could use the reminder as well: taking a rest does not make you lazy or bad. It does not mean you lack dedication or commitment or passion or artistic/intellectual rigor. It means you are a human, and humans need rest as well as work, down as well as up, dark as well as light. And there is nothing wrong with that, and something valuable in remembering it. (The only thing is, I wrote seagrit "The Witch's Second Daughter," and I hope it's not too confusing that I'm now writing "The Witch's Second." I don't intend to also write "The Witch's" and "The." I'd say you never know, but that's wrong, sometimes you know. At least I do.) (16 Comments |Comment on this)
6:59 pm	So you don't have to. Finding a really awesome restaurant in an outer-ring suburb is a great joy, but you don't expect it. The outer ring people are farther from everybody else, so quite often the restaurants out there are shooting for displeasing as few people as possible, while still remaining a step above well-known chain restaurants in their genre. What you don't want is for people in Lakeville to say, "There's a Red Lobster up in Burnsville; we might as well go to that if we want seafood and don't want to drive all the way into the city." We tried Molly Cool's down on Cedar and Dodd tonight, and I expect that that is exactly what the people in Lakeville are saying of it. We decided to share appetizers around the table as the main meal, because the entrees they had were so completely standard that it didn't even seem worth bothering with them--we feel perfectly competent to broil a fresh piece of common fish and dump lemon butter on it all by ourselves, and do not feel that having a restaurant chef perform this service is worth the price. Not one of the things we had was interesting or good. Not one. Calamari was boring and grainy, walleye was boring, crab-stuffed portobello was boring (and the mushroom was tough), oysters were boring, chowder was boring, beet salad was boring. I am all for mild beets. These beets were so mild that I kept poking at them to try to determine whether they had dyed potatoes red. The texture was wrong for that. But the flavor was right. Hint: people who go to the trouble of ordering beet salad in a restaurant are often familiar with the concept that beets have a flavor, and are offering to exchange money for something with that flavor. The up sides are twofold: 1) now none of you will be obliged to do this unless you like really, really boring seafood, and 2) I have returned from what was meant to be a fairly large dinner out with plenty of room for ice cream. Jinkies. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
3:20 pm	with bonus menus The last of our house guests departed about three hours ago, and we've been washing linens and trying to reassemble the place a bit. Dinner guets are still due in a couple of hours (and I need to shower still...), but they'll be gone again long before bedtime. Or not so long, depending on how fast we fall over. It's been good to have everybody here we've had in the last fortnight--we had a good time with all of them--but I could really use a return to quiet routine for a bit. ...which, of course, is not going to happen, since markgritter's California trip will be unusually long this time, and also there are people who are going to do more basement work starting tomorrow. Ah well. Never a dull moment, and at least I finished off one of the two never-ending novelettes. Here, have a brunch menu: canteloupe raspberries [I should have had pears here but forgot to put them on the table, so I will be eating pears this week] cold blueberry soup with mango and cardamom lefse chocolate bread choice of butter, apple butter, or strawberry preserves (the latter two made by porphyrin) roasted yams with sea salt and rosemary gravlax scrambled eggs with tomatoes, basil, and sharp cheddar. And a dinner menu: carrots pizza ice cream. Sometimes ordering in is the better part of valor. You heard it was discretion, didn't you? Just goes to show you can't believe everything you hear. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
8:35 am	Progress of sorts Numb3rs cast Andre Royo (Bubbles from The Wire) as someone who was not any kind of drug addict at all. I mean, okay, he was a safecracker and a jailbreak designer. So still a criminal. But not messed up on anything! Possibly by the time he is 70 he will get to play something lofty like Innocuous Citizen #4. But this confirms my idea that someone should make me a show where Andre Royo is an engineering prof and Francis Capra is his TA. I can just hear them in my head going, "Naw, naw, you set up the matrix all wrong, here's what you gotta do instead." That'll happen right after the John Cusack Batman movie gets made, I'm sure. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
10:06 am	Mostly not turkey At moiread's request, I have posted my chili verde recipe. For those of you who have a lot of tomatillos on hand or can get them, mostly; for some of you this will be a recipe for next summer/fall. Our plan is to see how much we miss chili verde when we've used up all the frozen tomatillo goop and then judge from there whether we'll put more tomatillo plants in the garden next year. Processing tomatillos is tedious and sticky, but the results are very satisfying. My contributions to tomorrow's holiday meal are fairly incidental and easy to accomplish, so I am not in the turkey-induced panic some of you seem to be feeling. When I did the main dish for Thanksgiving, we had lasagna, because I don't like turkey particularly; on the other hand, I don't dislike turkey so much as to be unable to eat it for one meal (one yammy, stuffingy meal), and my grandmother really loves it. So it's just as well that Mom is willing. And we'll have lasagna Saturday night anyway, so all is well on that front. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
4:17 pm	Haul out the @#$%&*#$ holly. So. We have already had Halloween, and we have already had the holiday which comes between Halloween and Thanksgiving, which is The Day markgritter Brings Home A Pomegranate And Then Ignores It For Weeks. (I hope yours was merry and bright.) I wrote something for Veteran's Day, and it was my first "private" post ever, because once I had written it I felt unready to share it. Macy's--very specifically not Dayton's--is having a rerun this year on the Eighth Floor. A rerun. "Back by popular demand," says their website, and I say, "Bullshit." Last year's Eighth Floor was not even a story, just a series of Christmas-themed tableaux, and those were constructed from the remains of previous years' tableaux from actual stories--if you'd been to the Eighth Floor a lot you could spot the dwarves from Snow White as elves, and the plum pudding from Mary Poppins, and like that. So it was bad enough last year. And now this year, it's not even the cannibalized remnants of other stories. It's just...the same again. "Times are tough," said my mother, but times were tough in previous recessions. "They're trying to kill demand so they have an excuse not to do it any more," said my father, and I think he's right. I will still have the holiday of Taking The Godkids To the 8th Floor, because they want to go, and I will even enjoy it, but the other kids with whom I've been going are as disgusted as I am. So we will have something different this year. Not entirely sure when or what yet. I am also--and I am sorry to tell you this--not going to observe that popular holiday, The Day I Call Otto. Otto is a delight. But we can get all the Otto's things at the Ukrainian deli up by porphyrin. If it was just a matter of paying the postage, I wouldn't mind, but I actually want there to be a local place that stocks the Hungarian food items we use. And there's only so much csabai I can justify buying. Also several people I love are going through pretty tough stuff right now, ill health for themselves or loved ones, unemployment, appallingly bad behavior from people close to them. And it's the first holiday season without Grandpa. Grandpa would be the first person to want us to have a merry Christmas and a happy every other thing we do, and I will by God try. But I don't think even he would expect that it would be on my mind. So. I have part of the work of a Christmas card done, by which I mean timprov has his part done and I have to do the rest except for some bits we will all three do. It should be a good Christmas card. I am pleased with it. And I have a particular surprise for one member of my family by choice, so there's that, and we have some charity stuff in mind, so there's that, too. I'm still trying to think, though. I want to do things that will be special for people I love, and I'm not sure what goes on that list at the moment. There will still be Lucia Day, and we'll do the decorating when Matt is here, probably, because Mark will be gone a big chunk of time after that. For some reason I am feeling uninspired on the baking front. I'm feeling very inspired about Cookie Day--I am positively excited about Cookie Day--and I'm hoping to get it scheduled with Mom and Grandma tonight. But I'm not thinking of a great many things I want to make. I'm sure once we get going we'll have ideas occur to us. But right now I'm not sure what to put on the grocery list for it, other than butter and flour. What do you want in Christmas treats? Spice this and lemon that and caramel the other? Chocolate-dipped somethings? Or if you don't celebrate Christmas, what kind of treat don't you get enough of? (65 Comments |Comment on this)
11:37 am	Scents My Body Wash Manufacturer Did Not Need to Add to my Body Wash 1. Baby powder 2. Crushed-up Pez Fail fail fail fail fail. And now the three unopened bottles I bought last night, when I was steady, will go to the local women's shelter, and I will have to ask my mom to haul my wobbling self around Target on my big PT day so I can do the ensniffening all over again and pick a new body wash that does not smell like baby powder (which is at least reasonable, just not me) or Pez (not a reasonable smell for body wash! just not!). (23 Comments |Comment on this)
9:00 am	stew, vertigo, etc. At porphyrin and moiread's request, I have posted my lamb stew recipe. If "recipe" is the right word. Many of the quantities are "some" and "awhile" and "if you like that sort of thing." Stews do not want precision. I did not get 17 hours of steadiness this time around. I got somewhere between 6 and 11, because I went to bed at the 6-hour mark and was feeling fine and woke up at the 11-hour mark with a very, very bad vertigo-induced nightmare. Somewhere in the middle there, though. Prior to last week, I was always getting unsteady again before bedtime, so this still feels like progress, though obviously not monotonic progress. I also feel like the good steady times are getting longer and the bad vertigo times are getting slightly more intense. We'll see if it continues like this. Hmmm. With moiread in and mattgritter coming right after her departure and then markgritter leaving right after his brother does for an extended trip to California, I'm feeling like the end of the year and all its holidays are upon me right now. But markgritter will be back in time for Lucia Day, and so things are not quite so precipitous as all that. (Still should remember to do everything what needs doing, though.) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
1:54 pm	PSA: geek relationships This came up in Numb3rs and then again in House, so I'm sort of feeling like it needs saying: Geeks! You are allowed to talk about your work on a date! No, really. You're not allowed to be boring about your work on a date. But you're also not allowed to be boring about your family, your reading material, your friends, personal anecdotes, travel plans, etc. Deciding in advance that you're not going to talk about work when you are mutually interested in work is silly, silly, silly. Far better to get to having a comfortable, interesting conversation about work that mutates into a comfortable, interesting conversation about other things than to try to force the conversation in ways it won't naturally go. When I lived with three other women physics students the summer I was doing research in Ohio, we were hanging around in our pajamas eating popcorn and getting to know each other. We were hoping to be friends extending beyond our work. And we did not set ground rules for the conversation about not talking about work. As a result, the conversation flowed from "bad boyfriend" stories to "bad lab partner" stories to "I dated my lab partner and what a bad idea that was" stories without lots of artificial starts and stops, and in talking about those things we ended up talking about our families and our groups of friends back home and the things we liked other than physics, and it was good. And no, that was not a date, but I'm pretty skeptical of rules of dating that treat "people one might date" as a completely separate category from "people one might be friends with." (28 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
1:01 pm	Casting Aesir and other Norse gods Last week a friend wrote to ask me what should be a very simple question: who would I cast as Thor in a movie or TV series? Short answer is, apparently, I wouldn't; or else I'd have to hold really good open casting calls, because I could not think of a single actor I considered right to play Thor. But I did have some ideas for some other Norse gods: I want Tina Majorino (Mac from Veronica Mars) to play Hel, because I think she would rock that role like an unspecified rocking thing. I want T. J. Thyne (Hodgins from Bones) to play Loki, because he has the exactly right manic chaotic spark, and also it would fit and be just right that he would be fairly small compared to the rest of the gods. And my moment of brilliance in this, in my own completely unbiased opinion, was that Tahmoh Penikett (Helo from Battlestar Galactica) and Jim True-Frost (Prez from The Wire) should play brothers in lo these many things, and in this case Tahmoh Penikett should be Tyr and Jim True-Frost should be Hod. I'm also thinking of Allison Janney (C.J. Cregg from The West Wing) as Frigg. Anybody else full of theories? I know, I know: startling lack of Jane Lynch. timprov thought she should be Hel instead, but I just can't give up Tina Majorino in that. (60 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
9:50 pm	Telmarines and wiktory I can't tell whether the vertigo feels really bad tonight because it is or because of contrast with the complete lack this morning. Ah well. Those of you who have visited us and looked out the back windows or doors know that the back of our property is wooded. There is a wooded strip starting with our southern neighbors and extending north of us until you get to the lake. Except that today our northern neighbors have decided to be Telmarines. They hired a company to come in and dribble gasoline on our lawn and drive and walk all over it and park right in front of our house, blocking our mailbox--and guess what? The mailbeing does not deliver here when you block the mailbox--and making a great deal of noise and smell and chaos all day long. Hmm. Okay, to be fair to the Telmarines, I doubt this was their primary aim in hiring this company. Their primary aim seems to have been getting rid of lots and lots of trees, most of them healthy young birches and poplars, and also a bunch of scrub bush and underbrush beneath them. We were already, since we live in Minnesota, nr lk in real estate parlance. (Because--as I have said before and will say again--the whole state is nr lk.) Now we have lk vw, not just in winter but all year round. I like lakes, or I wouldn't live here. I even like this lake. But it turns out I like trees, too, and we were not short of lakes. And who is it that brings in machines to chop down the trees and make unpleasant noises and build a bridge over the Ford of Beruna? Telmarines. I know this one. I read it ages ago. I'm sure I will get used to it. But I like being able to completely ignore our neighbors behind us for most of the year. I will miss it. It makes me want to plant a row of alternating ash and fir on the side yard until I'm sure they're going back through the door in the air to Telmar. (Not that I'd cut them down if they did go.) I would even be fine if it was a row of cherry and plum. Maple and spruce. I am flexible. I am just not terribly flexible about lack of trees. (Note: I'm quite clear that this is their property and they may do as they wish with it. There are miles and miles between "you have no right" and "I wish you wouldn't.") In more wiktorious news, the ban on brussels sprouts in the house has ended! I am so pleased. timprov was drawn in by a stalk of beautiful fresh ones at Byerly's, and I roasted them, and we discovered that while neither markgritter nor timprov is now turning cartwheels of joy over the prospect of brussels sprouts, neither are they fleeing through the door in the air to Telmar to get away from the smell, so we have an approach that will allow me to get my brussels sprouts fix without anyone else feeling that their home is unbearable. And the roasted brussels sprouts were nice enough and brussels sproutsy enough that I do not feel that I will pine away for braised or steamed. So there's that. (34 Comments |Comment on this)
9:57 am	Even though I'm not Dragaeran The magic number is 17. That is: yesterday I got my steady time as usual, and instead of stopping in the 3-6 hour range, it continued for 17 hours straight. Seventeen hours without vertigo! That's the longest stretch I've had in two years. I got a full night's sleep without dreaming of space stations malfunctioning or carnival rides malfunctioning or anything, anything at all malfunctioning. It ended this morning, about an hour ago--I am dizzy, vertiginous, unbalanced again. And I have to admit that even after all this time there was a part of me that thought, "Maybe I'm just done now. Maybe I don't have to deal with this stuff any more," and was disappointed when that proved not to be the case. But 17 hours. This is what we call progress. Maybe. We hope. Otherwise it's what we call a really nice fluke. But we're hoping it's what we call progress. (47 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 16th, 2009
8:44 pm	books read, early November Christopher Benfey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan. This was supposed to be about the intersection of cultures between New England and Japan in the late 19th century. The balance tipped a great deal more towards New England than I would have preferred, but it was still interesting, a fresh look at cultural figures I knew and a few I'd never heard of. A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book. There were a few things that got under my skin about this book but mostly I did not care, because it was so immersive for me. And it hit so many of my personal buttons: Arts and Crafts movement! 19th century anarchists! World War I! I think I liked it, even. I'm pretty sure I liked it. But mostly it was the sort of book I appreciated so much that it didn't even matter whether it summed to liking. Wanted more of nearly everybody. Rumer Godden, Breakfast with the Nikolides. I find it very difficult to talk about this book without major spoilers at the moment. Suffice it to say that it was very well done, and that there was a piece of the subject matter (not the piece you will be able to predict from the first page) that was particularly difficult at this moment in my life. Reginald Hill, Arms and the Women. wshaffer said these could be read out of order, so I grabbed one from the library. I suspect this is not the absolute best place to start, but I come out of it really eager for more. I liked Dalziel, and I liked Wieldy, and I liked the other members of the Pascoe family well enough that I suspect I will like Pascoe himself when I have more of him by himself or at work. After the first short bit, the voice and the characters had me absolutely hooked, committed to several more books in this series sight unseen. And delighted, so delighted. Stephen Hunt, The Court of the Air. There is a character in this book who is a steamman (robot) who is an abomination, a composite of other previous steammen's souls. The text does not share the social view of the steamman society that this creature should not exist. Which is a good thing, because if you look at it too hard, that's exactly what this book is doing, and if it considered itself an abomination, well, that would be unfortunate. Entertaining enough steampunk, although a bit too long for itself and sometimes plotted a bit on autopilot. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics. I am tone-deaf to comics. I recognize that there are all sorts of cool things happening in this art form, but they do not appear to be my cool things. I read this in hopes of fixing some of that and instead came away with the perception that there is a darn good reason why. I remain very much not a visual person, and some of the mode switching stuff McCloud was talking about just does not happen for me. (I am also very skeptical that it happens as he describes for very many people. I think he overstated his case a lot. But I wasn't coming into it with the idea that comics could not possibly be an art form--in fact, I've been pretty sure it is one--so in that sense I was not the target for many of his arguments.) Bill Streever, Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places. Not as immersive as I was hoping for in this unseasonably warm November, but still had interesting bits, particularly when he moved away from talking about humans doing stupid things and got more into flora and fauna and humans doing non-stupid things. (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 13th, 2009
4:42 pm	Force, object. Or possibly pot, kettle. So today on the Writing Carter Hall Channel, we have a minor plot question. Which is stronger: a spell placed upon you by the Queen of Air and Darkness, or the instinct and ingrained knowledge of 50 years that your 5'2", 75-year-old, Up-North-Minnesotan mother is really not someone you want to mess with? Or, to put it a different way, exactly how much of a world of hurt is Coach Rob Laird in for? Heh. Oh dear. (38 Comments |Comment on this)
11:14 am	She's very sneaky, and you might be, too. truepenny reports that she will now be writing as Katherine Addison instead of Sarah Monette, to fool bookstore computers. (If you're still confused about this after reading her entry, ask and people here can explain.) Which made me wonder: how many of us have a list of pen names we would use in this situation? I know I do. I skip the most obvious one, which is my actual legal name (Marissa Gritter), because I have a possibly weird personal bias about pen names, and this bias only applies to me: I am not Dutch. I don't want to use a Dutch name for my writing because I am not Dutch, not Dutch-American or Dutch-Michigander or any other thing that might tie to being Dutch. I am greatly fond of my Dutch-Michigander husband and in-laws and those of their Dutch-Michigander friends and associates I have met, but if it is true as they say in Grand Rapids that if y'ain't Dutch, y'ain't much, I am, in fact, not much. But I would write as a Fossback, because that was my Gran's name, or as a Haugan, because it would amuse me to go incognito as Ms. Norwegian Underhill, or as a few other things that are both ethnically appropriate to me and reasonably spellable. (As I said, this does not apply to you lot. If you are Italian-American and you write as Julio Nguyen-Markowicz, I would not be the least put off by that. But the only exception for me personally that we've joked about is that if I start writing teen romance novels, I would do so as Melissa Glitter. The likelihood of this is well into the negative numbers--I can imagine writing in a lot of genres and categories, but none of them are romance.) So. Do you know who you'd be to fool bookstore computers? And do you have a rationale? ("I like that name" is a rationale.) (99 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
9:50 pm	Onwards, Teb. Also, it's like a Martian talking to a Fungo, but I'm still not sure which is who. I should know by now that "I am up to my elbows in dishwater" is not a good reason to fail to write something down. There was an insight into The True Tale of Carter Hall, and now it's gone. Fee. Come back, little insight! Join your friends! The other insight, which is not gone, can be summed up in an index card reading, "Earlier Wild Hunt snowmobile deaths." So there's that at least. The impulse to restructure the entire book is such a seductive one. I should remember that next time it hits. It nearly allows a reset to the beginning of the process, when all things seem possible, and also it means that the wibbling I'm doing is productive, creative wibbling, except when it totally isn't. This happened with What We Did to Save the Kingdom, too: "Maybe I need a second POV character!" No, you don't. "Maybe I need extensive flashback structure so that each chapter comes with a bit of the protag's past!" No. No, you don't. Write the book. Don't think, meat, just pitch. And stop breathing out the wrong eyelid. I mean William Blake. I have no idea how people who don't have Bull Durham and Galaxy Quest in their brain write books, truly I don't. It's not that I don't believe there's a way, because of course there's a way. I did it myself, when I was 11 and again when I was 14. It's just that I don't remember how it goes any more. What gets you through revisions when you get to the middle of the book and spontaneously rant, "This scene was badly written," and then you don't think of Sigourney Weaver and grin? I'm not sure. I'm just glad to have it to hug to myself and move on. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
9:14 pm	Notes to self 1. The tea rule: when markgritter is out of town, you must remember to make your own afternoon tea. This is a good rule. 2. The miso rule: in months when you would by default wear socks, you must have something warm with at least one and preferably two meals a day. This, too, is a good rule. 3. The salad rule: no more than one meal a day can be solely composed of cold raw vegetables, or you will wake up in the middle of the night cold and hungry. (Clarification: adding cold nuts to the cold raw vegetables is only enough for ONE meal a day. NOT TWO.) This is a very, very good rule. See how much better tonight is for these rules than yesterday was without them? Yah. Good. Remember that. 4. You can doubt yourself when you're away from the computer. Doubt yourself in the shower, doubt yourself propped up next to the stove, doubt yourself riding in the car, whatever you need to do. Not required but permitted from time to time. But at the computer you write. 5. It turns out that being funny in a book does not make it easier, as a writer, to deal with the incredibly emotionally difficult plot points you have written into it, YOU BLITHERING MORON. But it turns out not to be physically possible just yet to go back in time and shake yourself by the shoulders for plotting it that way before you knew how this year would be. And it will be better this way. It really will. But--gee, huh, why might you be avoiding writing that chapter, self? What an incomprehensible behavior! Wholly inexplicable by any means except LOGIC AND DEDUCTIVE REASONING. Sheesh, some monkeys. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
7:04 am	Mt Goats good, audience stupid Dear Mr. John Darnielle: Thank you for a lovely concert. Are you sure you weren't one of my lab students 10-12 years ago? You don't look like any particular one of them, just a representative of the type. In any case, well done. Thanks also to your band. Fondly, mrissa Dear audience at the concert of Mr. John Darnielle: Okay, look. I know some of you are apparently new. I know that in the cave in which you were raised, all entertainment came with mute, pause, and fast-forward buttons. But here in adultland, we have this thing called live shows where both the performers and the fellow audience members are fellow human beings. This time even the opening act qualified as a fellow human being! It's astonishing! What does this mean? It means: If the venue has a very small number of seats off to one side, approaching those seats to ask, "Are these reserved/taken?" is quite reasonable (and thanks to the vast majority of people who handled that as polite members of society). Sneering, "Are these for special people?" at the people already seated in them is not quite the same thing. It is already such a special experience to require assistance to get into the concert at all, to worry whether one's needed accommodations will be handled gracefully despite one's calling in advance (they were), and to have one's particular special condition exacerbated by the decadent overindulgence of sitting in dark halls two nights in a row. What I really need to make the experience complete is your open resentment that I have been permitted something so flagrantly self-indulgent as a chair. Then when we indicate that it's because of disability, what I need even more is for you to recoil as though I have whipped out graphic pictures of some surgery or internal organ. Thanks ever so. Do not answer your damn cell phone. If it rings during a quiet moment in the music, your course of action is to look extremely sheepish and mute it or turn it off, as you should have done at the start of the show. If they call for which you are waiting is truly life and death important, please stand close to the doors so you can duck out into the lobby to answer it. If you are taking pictures, do not turn your flash up to "everybody take your iodine, there's been a nuclear event" level. I live with one photographer and see quite a bit of some others socially, and so I am pretty sure that this is not necessary. And if it was necessary, it might be a sign that you should just not try to get that picture. This is a rock show. One of the things that means is dynamic variation. You can pretty well guarantee that there will be a loud bit at some point, and then there is a loud bit, you can say things to your companion in a loudish conversational voice. You can rummage around in the purse you have apparently filled entirely with cellophane. You can make impatient little noises with your water bottle. What you should not do is to perform these irritating little acts compulsively when the music is having quiet, contemplative/emotional moments. If something in your purse is that important and takes two full songs to find, perhaps you should go out to the lobby, where there is better lighting. Or perhaps you should stand closer to the individuals in one of the paragraphs adjacent to you, as they were augmenting the lighting on a fairly regular basis. If you must light up and stay lit up for the entire concert (which, frankly, I doubt is quite as imperative as you seemed to find it), do us all a favor and spring for the good pot. "But Mris," you may be saying, "you do not smoke pot. How do you know which is the good pot?" I have said this before, but since some people are, as I said, apparently new, I will repeat it. In fact, this is general advice from Auntie mrissa, applicable to sweaters and roommates and cupcakes and quarter-scale reproductions of the SF-MoMA porcelain statue of Michael Jackson and his chimp as well as to weed: things that smell like burning unwashed ass are bad. You do not want them. If you wish to be in full control of which songs you hear at which times, I have some wonderful news for you! It is now possible to purchase a number of devices that facilitate this behavior. You can, for example, use a CD player. You can use a music player on your computer or on a portable device. You can even, should you be inclined, make cassette tapes and fast-forward or rewind them as you desire. If that is not retro enough for you, some bars feature machines into which you may feed money for this purpose. However, this is not the jukebox option. That being the case, will you please permit the performers to perform more than one song before you begin shouting the names of their one or two most popular pieces? (Or any others. But especially those.) They arrived for this event aware that their engagement in this venue was for the purposes of providing music. They have therefore given some thought to music they know or might remember some of, and if they don't say, "So what d'you want to hear?" or otherwise seem to be flailing, let them play. If the show appears to be winding down, you may then express your enthusiasm for the performers' one or two most popular songs if those have not been played, and if you feel that they may be unaware of which pieces catch your particular individual fancy and the particular individual fancy of every other person who has ever heard of this band. But give the poor musicians at least a few minutes to get settled in onstage before you shatter their illusion that you might be here for more than just the one three-minute song. I'm so glad we've cleared all that up. Sternly, mrissa (45 Comments |Comment on this)