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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Marissa Lingen's LiveJournal:
| Friday, May 9th, 2008 | |
| 6:55 am | Stuff. This week I have friends in from out of the country, and I have my grands and my Onie in from out of town, and it's my brother's birthday, my godson's birthday, and Mother's Day. Also I am doing PT three times a day, and you all know by now how that feels under this circumstance, and I'm trying to get some writing done and keep the house from completely falling apart. Also I have two medical appointments coming up (one PT, one totally routine allergist visit). Also ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} markgritter has two conference-dealies to attend.And then we're going to California. So what I'm saying here is, if you don't hear from me when you expect you otherwise might, don't panic. It's just sort of being like that for awhile. |
| Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 | |
| 12:22 pm | California planning (on such a spring-ish day) Okay, so here's the plan: What: dinner with me, markgritter, timprov, and whichever other amiable persons might make their presences felt. This is not an "invite your third cousin's roommate's boyfriend" sort of event, but if you have partners or children or houseguests lying around, go on ahead and bring them.Where: Jing Jing, on Emerson just off University Ave. in Palo Alto. If you would ordinarily think of walking somewhere from CalTrain (that is, if you are not me or in a similar circumstance to mine), they are within walking distance of the CalTrain station. They have vegan entrees. Despite the website's claims, they serve food that is not astonishingly spicy as well as fairly spicy food. When: Monday, May 19, at 6:30 or thereabouts. (Not next week. Week after.) One of the reasons we chose Jing Jing is that they're very amiable about people pulling up another chair when needed. We will linger over dinner, and we will probably get gelato or something after, so if the timing seems like it might be tight but you might be able to make it after all, call my cell. If you don't have my cell number, e-mail me and I will tell you what it is. If you think you can't make it until 7, don't worry, we'll get soup and/or appetizers and take our time. Please let me know if you think you're coming. My default assumption will be that you are not coming, which will save those of you who are in London or Boston or White Bear Lake from having to comment or e-mail me with your regrets. This includes those of you who expressed interest from my last post: I'm not assuming that interest equates to ability, so please do let me know. As I said, they're amiable about people pulling up another chair, but I'd like to know when we walk in whether we're looking for a table for 6 or 16 or what. |
| Monday, May 5th, 2008 | |
| 10:08 pm | Rapid cultural change in a nutshell. When Donnie Darko* was set, in 1988, four teenagers jumping on their bikes to go across town in the evening was a reasonable thing. When Donnie Darko was made, in 2001, it was an historical reference. Wow. *Which I watched for the first time tonight. |
| 10:53 am | more damn vertigo Okay, let's try something. Indulge me a minute. Look up. How long did it take you to decide which direction "up" was? Did you, in fact, think through the possible directions and make a decision? Or did you just...y'know...look up? That is one of the things -- one, not the whole -- that happens with my PT exercises. If I am standing in the corner doing head movement exercises with my eyes closed, less than halfway through the set of exercises, I lose track of which way is up and which way is down. I have to consciously think, "up is away from your shoulder; move your chin away from your shoulder." Every time. For at least forty repetitions. Three times a day. Every day. The sensory disorientation does not go away when I open my eyes; then I have the visual cues in addition to the proprioceptive ones. But what I do not have is the one that you, unless you also have vestibular problems, just used automatically. I don't have the essential sense that up is up and down is down. In my family, "she was so tired she didn't know which end was up," is an expression often applied to toddlers, sometimes to bigger people than that. It works the other way: not knowing which end is up is exhausting. And it is very, very literal. I know which end is up right now because my monitor and my computer have strong black vertical lines, and I am looking at them. My desk chair is currently locked so that it can't tip back, because if it could tip back, I would not have a sense of when it had. I can have the "I have leaned back too far and am flailing to keep from falling" reaction when a normal person would have it; I can have it at a few degrees off vertical; I can have it when I have not moved. It comes upon me at unpredictable intervals, and I have to correct for it every time, or fall. It has been this way for months. They tell me it will be this way for months more. And one of the very hard things about it is that there are things I can't talk about without giving a misleading impression of whether it was a good or a bad experience. If, instead of point three in the previous entry, I'd written about how exhausting and frustrating it was to navigate MIA trading off which family member had my arm, it would have sounded like I'd had a bad afternoon. I didn't. I was with markgritter and my folks, and we looked at flower arrangements and more permanent kinds of art, and it was good. But writing about the reality of the vertiginous aspect of it would make it sound like it was bad, like I'd had a horrible time. I didn't. MIA patrons were no more inconsiderate, no more physically rude, than strangers anywhere else. And that's the problem: that even the good days, even the good times, are really exhausting and a lot of trouble. They are worth the trouble. They are worth the exhaustion. I feel it's generally a good idea to work for the good things in your life, even when the good things are smaller and the work is harder. But what frustrates me is that I seem to have a choice between describing the hairy, frankly awful details, and having them swamp the idea that it was a good time, or else not describing them, and having people assume that they're going away, that I must be feeling better or I wouldn't be out and about. I'm not. I'm just going completely stir-crazy.Every week of PT, I think, "All right, this is the hardest bit." I think I'm going to keep thinking that until it's over. Because I think it's going to keep being true. |
| 8:28 am | Mrissa's Correct And Cranky Rules for a Monday Morning (applicable other days as well) 1. It turns out that legality is not the only standard of behavior required in civilized circles. If pointing out that you have broken no laws is all it takes for your circle of acquaintance to approve of your behavior, you need a better circle of acquaintance. This is true of presidential candidates, of Harry Potter RPGers, and of any other circle you care to name: it being legal to do something does not make it kind, tasteful, interesting, or a dozen other things that a person might wish it to be. 2. Until nanotechnology progresses further than it has to date, neither soaps nor linens are traps for the young or unwary guest, nor should they be treated as such. If you don't want someone washing their hands with something, don't put it in a soap dish by the sink. If you don't want someone drying their hands on something, don't hang it on a towel bar in the bathroom or set it on the bathroom counter conveniently close by if guests are on their way. If you suspect that you have left something unsuitable in the bathroom because your guests have caught you unawares, for heaven's sake dart in and check. 3. If someone is clinging to someone else's arm in a public place, please consider that she may not be doing it for affection's sake, and do not attempt to bully her into letting go. Your failure condition if you navigate around her is that you may have given leeway to someone who is fluttery with new romance: not necessary, certainly, but not catastrophic. Whereas your failure condition if you attempt to bull through her is that you may cause great inconvenience and further suffering to someone for whom walking around in an ordinary fashion is already more difficult than she would like it to be; anticipation of this problem may keep her from useful or enjoyable activities when she's having a difficult day. If you feel the need, you may glare discouragingly in case she's doing it for fun, because by this point she does not give the proverbial rodent's hindquarters what you think as long as you don't try to knock her down. |
| Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 | |
| 5:32 pm | Hypothetical conversation, real topic. So you'll be in California two weeks from now. Yep. Sitting on the sand, basking in the sun.... No, the other California. Sitting on the rocks, basking in the fog? Bingo. Hey, I thought you felt really crappy all the time. Yep. I thought you weren't able to do normal things like drive and cook and walk unassisted. Yep. I thought riding in a car or on a train or in an airplane made you even dizzier. Yep. I thought you were doing PT sessions three times a day. You can do PT in hotel rooms. I suppose. Still and all, it doesn't sound like the most fun a person has ever had on a trip to California. I expect not. So what's the deal? My friend Amber is getting married, and one has the general notion that she won't be doing it again so often that one would get bored of it. Do you think she'll be upset with you if you don't come? No. I think I will. Does this have anything to do with ongoing regrets about missing another dear friend's wedding due to vertigo issues? That's a very personal question, hypothetical person! Hush. Hey! I have just recalled that I am part of the hypothetical livejournal-reading conversation-holding sort of person that lives in Northern California! I hope you're very happy there. And you seem to like me! Probably I do, then; I sometimes give the impression of being willing to be around people I'm only barely willing to tolerate, but if I actively seem to like you, that's hardly ever misleading. It only goes the other way around. So are you going to come see me while you're out there? No. Awww. Why not? Is it because you don't love me any more? Probably. Or else I never loved you to begin with, because ours was a doomed and tragic passion. Seriously, why not? Because I think that this trip is going to be a bit hard on me, and running around the Bay Area would move it from "difficult" into "really unreasonably hard or impossible." Aren't you going to make any effort at all to see me? Sort of. I am going to plan a restaurant dinner people can attend if they're willing and able. Depending on other pieces of data not under my control, it will be either 5/18 (Sunday) or 5/19 (Monday). Would you like to hear whether I am around either of those nights and interested in hearing more? Definitely. Would e-mail or comments do? Of course. Will this dinner be convenient to BART? Alas, probably not. The wedding is in Palo Alto, so we will probably be getting a hotel in that general vicinity in the interest of not hauling me from pillar to post. Will this dinner be convenient to CalTrain? Quite possibly. If I can't come to dinner, will there be some other opportunity? Probably not on this trip. But, y'know, markgritter's job is in the Bay Area, and timprov and I both have family there as well as friends, so you should expect me to be out there again someday. Possibly even with the middle-ear problems cured. That'd be swell. Tell me about it. |
| Friday, May 2nd, 2008 | |
| 5:01 pm | PT retesting report Good news is: there is progress since the last time we did these tests a month ago. Good news is: there is no indication that I am hitting a plateau and will not continue to get better from here. Bad news is: we're scheduling out at least six weeks' more PT with a retest after that, and probably at least a few more sessions after that. So the dizzy, the falling, the incapacity for doing simple household tasks: we expect this to last a noticeable time longer. Where's the turbo button on this damn thing? |
| 1:36 pm | What today is like The thing about going up the stairs on all fours with the stupid vertigo is that it gets a lot more tempting to lie down and have a nap in the middle of them, since I'm already so much closer to the floor anyway. The thing about feeling this way before I go in for my PT testing and the Purple Room Of Doom -- well, that thing is left as an exercise for the reader. |
| Thursday, May 1st, 2008 | |
| 8:45 am | Books read, late April This is, to no one's great surprise, not the year I manage to do May Baskets. Sigh. ( books read, late April ) |
| Monday, April 28th, 2008 | |
| 5:49 pm | More giving up! There are a couple of memes going around the friendslist wherein people indicate which books on a list they have read and which they haven't finished reading. And in the, "Dance for me, monkeys!" school of lj posting, I just want to say: talk about it! Tell me why you didn't finish the ones you didn't finish! Did they bore you (and if so, how)? Confuse you (and if so, how)? Require returning to the library? Get left on a train or in a coffeehouse or an airport lounge or your cousin's backseat? Get dropped in the bath and rendered too crunkly to read? I'd far rather read why you didn't finish one book on one of those lists than have fifty of them marked whether you did without explanation. And in the spirit of dancing for you, monkeys, I give you the reasons I have quit reading library books recently: 1. Chatty piece of nonfiction went from elementary to oversimplifying to flat-out wrong. 2. Point of view issues: the first-person omniscient is extremely difficult to carry off without making me run away, far away, very quickly. If you want to know what someone's aunt was doing at every second of every day, give a mechanism or don't use the first-person. 3. Total contempt for characters. On the author's part, not on my part. I read 50 pages and thought, "If she's so sure these people are all tiresome, petty people, what am I still doing here?" 4 (multiple examples). Mystery novels that started in the following format: CLUNK: corpse. CLUNK: some random trivia about our detective, such as her opinion on lima beans, Greenpeace, or the musical career of Peter, Paul, and Mary. Sorry, folks, but, "Here is a dead body. Mary liked gorgonzola," is just not a way to get me into a book. Even though I like gorgonzola, and even though I have been known to bring it up more or less completely out of the blue (as a few people can attest from this weekend) if my need for gorgonzola overcomes my social filters. But I don't do it in fiction, is the difference. I'm a little alarmed by this pattern showing up in more than one book. If I wasn't reading mystery novels with far better beginnings than this, I'd begin to think it was a genre convention and despair of my ability to ever write a mystery novel. As it is, it reminds me once again that I don't have book-selection protocols set up for picking mysteries the way I do for picking science fiction and/or fantasy novels. Not a surprise, since I've been working on the latter for much longer. I keep plugging away at it, but I'm not sure I'm seeing much progress. 5. Bad sex between characters. Bad sex can be all right if it's needed in context, but as the opening event of the book, I am going to need to see some reason why I should care about these people who, in this particular case of bad sex, don't care about each other. That context is going to be difficult to establish right out of the gate, there. 6. Main character is a shining gem among Philistines who do not truly understand the deep beauty of her soul but are interested in shallow, worldly things. No irony apparent. Next. 7. Author believes that beautiful imagery excuses her from making any sense whatsoever. Bad enough if I agreed with her on what images were beautiful. There really are lots of good books I'm actually finishing; it's just that it doesn't take much time to discard the bad ones, or even just the ones that strike me wrong, so I can go through them rather quickly and send them back to the library with no harm done. Also I have quit work on a particular short story for the time being and have picked up a different story in a different genre. It's going much better than the previous one. Hurrah for quitting. |
| Sunday, April 27th, 2008 | |
| 1:11 pm | Little Brother The deal was, you could get a free ARC of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother if you agreed to read it and talk about it right away. Sold, says I! So here we are, after rescuing the poor book from the bushes where the UPS man decided to fling it, possibly in a fit of pique. Friends, this is good stuff. But I am reminded of when Neil Gaiman's Coraline came out, and he discovered, to many people's surprise, that it was a great deal more disturbing to adults than to children. I have friends of all ages, but there's a line somewhere between a few of you who read this lj and are in your late teens and my friend K who is 13. She is not just my friends' kid, but she is my friends' kid, and I am one of her grown-up friends. At this age, it makes a difference. K will be going into high school in the fall. She is old enough to make mildly racy jokes in company, old enough to think through adult discussion and ask questions, old enough to read this book. But I am old enough that if I gave her a copy for her 14th birthday later this year, it would come with apologies. Not for the book itself; the book is extremely well-done. But I am so, so sorry that it's needed. I am so very sorry that this is the book we should give her at this age. "If this goes on" was not moonbases and trips to Mars when I was a teenager, but it was genetic engineering, at least. It had nothing to do with the Department of Homeland Security, because we didn't have one then, and it had nothing to do with torture because in my halcyon teen days, torturers were universally known to be the bad guys. We had room to be angry teenagers, cynical Gen Xers, without someone bringing up how the terrorists would win if we didn't straighten up and fly right. And I am so immensely sorry that my dear K and her equally dear just-younger sibs are coming of age in a world where that's not true. This is not a book that hides what it's actually saying under coy name changes: the US Department of Homeland Security is called the US Department of Homeland Security, not the "Federal Department of Protecting the Motherland, country unspecified." If you are looking for a book that lets you pretend we're talking about something else, somewhere else, this is not that book. Nor should it be. It is ultimately a very hopeful book: hopeful about human ingenuity, hopeful about human freedoms, hopeful about communities and not just about individuals, while recognizing that communities are made up of individuals. It has an ear for teen dialog. It has a nose for San Francisco life -- if anybody can tell me where to get burritos like that here in the Twin Cities, I will be in your debt, because they're one of the things I miss generically (rather than House of Nanking in specific, say, or other individual places like that). And it has a distinct feel for family life that understands the adult perspective without assuming that it's always right. This is the right book at the right time. I'm just sorry that we didn't manage to make this into some other time instead. |
| Friday, April 25th, 2008 | |
| 3:55 pm | In honor of the playoffs Today I've done clinic PT (progress: everything that was making me insufficiently dizzy and is now made harder so it will make me sufficiently dizzy and sick again! Yay!), and I'm going to a concert with markgritter and timprov; tomorrow I expect to be completely useless, but these things happen.But! The completely non-useless news of the day is that On Spec has bought another of the Carter Hall hockey fantasies: "Carter Hall Judges the Lines." Yay! We like On Spec. We like hockey. We like fantasy. We like money. How can any of this possibly be a bad thing? (This is the one where Carter has to adjudicate among a certain set of three Greek goddesses while also dealing with peewee hockey. Things ensue, as you'd expect they might.) |
| Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 | |
| 10:09 pm | Straw. Gold. I should be away from the computer and getting ready for bed, but like Arlo says, you can't always do what you're supposed to be doing. So what I did instead is celebrate International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day by putting a reprint up. Goats' Gold is not a very serious story, but it's free to all who want to read it. Originally appeared in Spellbound, which was a children's magazine. Suitable for the kiddies, and not just by my "cut my teeth on Norse myth" standards. It's not very long, but it's goofy, and it's mine own. Now don't say I never gave you nothin'. |
| 1:52 pm | ...and hanging on. After that last post, I thought of one more thing I should say when next I was at the computer: Another question I asked myself about the vanishing friendship in question is whether this person was behaving reasonably and my standards were unusually high because the rest of my family, friends, and cordial acquaintances have been so extremely awesome through this whole PT nonsense. I don't think that's it, either, but I just wanted to say, hey, I notice these things. This could easily have been a very lonely time for me, and everything from major household help to simple words of encouragement have made sure that it is not. It still sucks, lo, mightily to be vertiginous all the time, and I look forward to the day when it's all better. But in the meantime, thank you, thank you, and more thank you. Yes, you. |
| 10:59 am | Letting go Several times lately I've had something I've wanted to post to lj about, and I've had to leave the computer for awhile because of the vertigo, and by the time I've gotten back to it, the urge to write the entry was gone. I was going to write about being a "local author" at Career Day at one of the private high schools around here, but that was last Friday, and it's no longer on my mind quite so much. I was going to rant about how the current system of arranging symphony orchestra concerts is the equivalent of selling tickets to a double-header with the Andrews Sisters and Metallica: sure, there are people who like both, but it's not perhaps the most graceful combination ever. I was going to say lots of things, but there was the vertigo, and I didn't, and now I've sort of let go of them. Another thing I'm letting go of is going to sound silly: it's the book list. Sort of. I will still have my Amazon list and my library list, but the library list is getting mightily consolidated. It used to be five closely written pages (with much crossing-out, but still), plus the file on the computer for things I should look up to see if the library has them. Some of those things have been removed from the stacks since I wrote them down. With some I've forgotten why I wanted to read them in the first place. So I've checked out a big stack of library books that have been on the list for awhile, and I'm going to continue doing that. But I'm also letting go of some books. If it's something our library doesn't have, do I want it enough to get it on ILL? Do I want it enough to buy it? Sometimes yes. But sometimes no. Fairly often no. If not, keeping it written down somewhere doesn't seem to serve much purpose. I'm letting go of the lists as a crutch. I'm using them as a practical aid or not at all. I have known for quite some time that I would never read everything that has ever interested me, and that's a good thing. Means that people keep writing good books. If the lists are going to be clutter rather than leading me to books I want, I don't want them. There are a few other things I'm trying to let go of, triggered by the vertigo months. I absolutely hate it when people set up traps for other people, the kind that are phrased as, "If you were REALLY my friend, you would..." or, "If you REALLY loved me, you would...." I refuse to do that. But it's not the same thing to set up traps like that as to realize that some people are not the friends they once were, and some people are not the friends you thought they were. Not everybody has to be your best friend. Not everybody even has to be the kind of cordial acquaintance with whom you interact frequently. But I think there does have to be some kind of feeling that one person is not carrying the whole relationship, whether it's an intense, close friendship or a casual, occasional one. There needs to be some sense of mutuality, whether that means that we exchange lj comments every couple of months or that we e-mail each other daily. And with one particular friend (who has told me that they never read stuff on the internet, so it's not you!), there has been neither the slightest whisker of concern for how I'm doing nor a particularly good reason why not. This isn't like the people who have a new baby, or the people who have a medical problem of their own, or the people in stressful work situations, or the people who never knew me that well in the first place, or...a million other things. It's just the expectation that if there is to be a friendship, it's my job to make it happen. And it turns out that I am not short on monkeys. I am not even short on monkeys who like me and are willing to do something so drastic as write a quick e-mail or make a quick comment once in several months of this difficulty. For quite awhile, I kept thinking that while I didn't actually want to talk to this particular person, I wanted to want to someday in the future. Now...I'm having some difficulty seeing why. It's probably a sign about the friendship that all of the reasons why this is bothering me are not things that I will miss about being friends with this person -- I was missing those even when this person was around -- but doubts about how I ought to treat people. Have I given enough of the benefit of the doubt? Have I allowed for the way that friendships naturally ebb and flow? Did I talk to this person about things that were bothering me before deciding to just let it go? Am I trying to demand that my health problems should be the center of everyone's life and attention? But I think that's yes, yes, yes, and no, respectively. I think it's okay not to be angry, not to be snarky, not to be hurt, just to be...done. And to feel like you are seeing clearly that it's done, that this is not your friend any more. So I guess I am. |
| Monday, April 21st, 2008 | |
| 6:43 pm | Memo to fellow SF writers: Okay, fellow SF writers: Asian-Americans have been a part of America's rich tapestry since before their contributions to the railroads in the mid-1800s. They are us. They are totally normal Americans. Get used to it. What does "get used to it" mean? It means that you be extremely careful in describing Asian-American female characters using the following words and/or references: exotic; inscrutable; dragon lady; or any martial arts metaphors. When you hit all four in less than ten pages, I will put the book down and gape like a fish. Why? Because the technical term for this is racist bullshit.* And if it's because of a character's viewpoint rather than the authorial viewpoint, you need to show us that fast, lest everybody run screaming from the racist bullshit. When I pick up a Kim Stanley Robinson novel -- published in this decade, for heaven's sake -- I am totally not prepared for that sort of thing. It caught me completely off-guard. "We need to fix climate change!" -- that I expected. "This inscrutable dragon lady would be a great person to work on that problem!" -- uh, no. Nononono. Seriously, just -- no. I'm going to give this book a chance to get past this, but it's a worse mismatch than "think of these characters as if they were movie stars!" for me to have such a relentless message that I am to think of this character as foreign and other -- even though she's clearly "good other" rather than "bad other." There is a lot of getting past to be done here. Uff da. Seriously, "exotic"? No American in ordinary American clothes is exotic, whether her ancestors were from Yokohama or York or Yola. Just -- not. Aiiiigh. *You do not get bonus points for avoiding geisha and porcelain doll references; that avoidance is elementary civilized behavior. |
| 10:34 am | Meme, gym class, synopses (numbered for your convenience) 1. I never tag people to do chain memes, but I've been tagged myself: page 123 of the nearest book to me, fifth, sixth, and seventh sentences, are: But of course Frank couldn't call him. Even his cell phone might be bugged; and Edgardo's too. Suddenly he recalled that workman in his new office, installing a power strip. That's from Kim Stanley Robinson's Fifty Degrees Below, which I am not reading yet. A friend's manuscript is actually closer than that, but I don't really want to post bits of other people's unpublished work without their permission; it seems like not the thing. 2. Robin has, with impeccable five-year-old logic, decided that what I am doing once a week in the clinic is gym class. When they teach his body to do different things, that's gym class. So it must be with mine as well. And he wanted to know what they were doing in my gym class. I told him they were having me move my head different ways to teach my body not to fall down, and he started demonstrating moving his head in different ways in case any of those might prove helpful to me. He is the best godson ever. 3. I hate writing synopses, but timprov has an insight about them that makes me much more cheerful. "The novel is how you tell the story," he said. "The synopsis is how your Norwegian great-uncle* tells the story." This is very useful indeed.The Aesir noir novel: Sorkvir Sturlasson gets his fanny in a sling working for the gods. Well, like you do. Uses fancy detective skills to stop Ragnarok, which was his own fool fault anyway. Also there's this girl, doncha know. What We Did to Save the Kingdom: Ordinal Yaritte gets her fanny in a sling because she can't leave well enough alone. Well, like you do. The king is a young idiot, doesn't that go figure, and folks get worked up about it. And Yaritte can only get them partway calmed down. Isn't that a thing. And like that. I suspect that having all synopses start with somebody's fanny in a sling might get boring to editors -- American editors; I hear tell that it would provoke quite a different reaction from British editors, as I hear that word is a different euphemism over there -- but I suspect other standard synopsis forms get pretty boring too. Now I'm wondering which of my other relatives are useful for synopsis purposes. I think it would be hard to mark up a synopsis to indicate where my uncle Bill waves his hands in the air like giant enthusiastic parentheses. Possibly this will only work for generic rather than specific forms of relatives. *I have more than one. Of course I do. He means the Platonic form of the critter. |
| Sunday, April 20th, 2008 | |
| 10:01 pm | Are you sure it has to be a volcano? Wouldn't the washing machine do? Ista's birthday was Friday. Mark picked out a birthday present for her. It is a soft toy ring. It's so cute one might even say it's precious. ....oh dear. |
| Saturday, April 19th, 2008 | |
| 10:52 am | Six random things make a baker's entry (except I'm still not baking, sigh). 1. My regular e-mail is in up-and-down mode lately, and since I'm in up-and-down mode myself, the coincidences of the two are not always fortuitous in terms of me getting to read and reply to things. Just so's you know. 2. markgritter got home this morning early. His luggage did not. So we have hopes in that direction, eventually. Apparently his luggage decided that a vacation to Seattle was just the ticket. As none of you in the greater Seattle metro are close personal friends with our luggage, I expect that there are no glad cries greeting this announcement; certainly we were not inspired to any.3. I re-discovered this morning that it is not a good omen for my enjoyment of a book when an author sees fit to describe characters in terms of which movie stars they resemble. It doesn't matter if they've chosen classic actors and actresses rather than the flavor of the month -- I'd have thought it would, but it doesn't. It's just generally a signal that this author wants me to process a book differently than I want to process a book, and other mismatches will almost certainly follow. Now that I've said this, someone will come up with an exception that I did actually like. I almost hope they do. 4. The snow mound in the center of our circle is gone, and the ice is off the nearby lakes. I can't swear to the condition of larger lakes. 5. If this washes as well as I think it will, I will get one in each color (the one I have now is black) and wear them until they fall apart. So very comfortable. (And my experience of Athleta's stuff is that "until they fall apart" is really quite some time.) 6. This week has been rather fuller than I expected. There's the currently-normal PT stuff, which is not any fun all by itself. And there were fun additions (like doing Career Day at an area high school, more on which anon) and one horrible addition that turned out all right: my friend V's dog was attacked by three other dogs -- completely out of the blue and unprovoked, says an unbiased witness -- and was injured enough to need veterinary care. He's doing all right now, poor boy, but he was a rescue dog in the first place; he didn't need more violence and fear in his life. But Mom and timprov and I went up to visit V and the pup, and we scritched his tummy and let him lay on my arm and whack timprov affectionately with his big square head and generally told him what a brave good boy he was. So we're very glad he's healing and also very glad that he's not too fearful to enjoy new monkeys.Anyway, I am more or less whumped. I seem to have acquired a list of stuff to say once I get around to saying it, but apparently now is not that time. Have a good weekend. |
| Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 | |
| 5:03 pm | An idea whose time has come. I have mostly steered clear of controversial political issues in this lj, but a friend's post has made me aware that there is an issue on which I can no longer in good conscience keep silence. To wit: playoff beards. I am for 'em. Let there be no confusion: distinctly in favor. Brent Burns looks like a demented hillbilly in his, to be sure, but Burnsie looks like a demented hillbilly under most circumstances, so that harm is outweighed by the great joy that is everybody else's playoff beard. In fact, while I'm enjoying the NHL playoffs a great deal more than I am enjoying or expect to enjoy the PotUSA playoffs (though with equal doubts, I suspect, about the officiating), I would like to suggest that people could grow playoff beards for that as well. Don't shave until your team wins the...well, it's not as cool as the Stanley Cup, but if you don't bother to learn to play hockey, you can't really expect it. But the US Presidency, at least, which has a few consolations despite its distinct lack of Stanley Cup. And if you don't have a team in this particular set of playoffs, you could still grow a playoff beard in support of those who do, and sort of to add to the pleasant parts of the spectacle of the thing. At least for me personally, and isn't that what's important here? People whose beards look as though someone snuck in while they were sleeping and drew on their face with a cheap Bic pen and then ran away when it looked like they were waking up are exempt from this exhortation, I suppose. I suppose. Also, nobody is strictly required to buy a Life of Brian style beard for my amusement. No. Definitely not a requirement. |