Alewife Bayou: November 1998
slipshod samhain
two eleven thirteen
Welcome to November. I think I put off writing this entry for two days because I didn't want November to be here. That and I wanted people to see the poem at the end of October. As soon as I press the -30- button, dear Heliotrope will correctly determine that it is no longer October and will start a new monthly directory ... and October will be gone forever, deep in the archives where no one ever sees it again.
I was proud of that poem. My writing is going to hell but at least I can still devise decent doggerel on demand dependably.
I don't think of the postcards as having titles, except in rare circumstances. The title is only something I come up with afterward so Heliotrope has something to link to. But a few people noted that they liked the titles -- a lot. If it had just been my friend Eric saying that, I'd have written it off as a known eccentricity, but I heard it from others too. So I've built the title into the template -- now all the pieces have titles, which frets me since it means I must now shorten my dateline to make it inconspicuous -- my sense of style won't let me have two eyecatching lines at the top, competing with each other.
It's funny. I write very competent poems, funny or otherwise, and they're never planned in advance -- I just compose them when the mood to write one takes me (which is why I write poetry so seldom). The titles for these pieces are literally a two-second afterthought, yet Eric kids me about liking the titles more than the entries. The journal entries themselves take very little thought -- I just dump out my brain.
Clearly the secret to writing is to not put any effort into it and do an utterly half-assed job. Then everyone will love it.
Too bad I can't get away with writing stories like that.
Forgive my angst. That was the third reason I didn't write this weekend -- I didn't want to inflict Excessive B**chiness on you. This is the first Samhain in many years where I have done nothing -- didn't even go meditate somewhere. You'd think a cross-dresser wouldn't pass up the only opportunity each year to go out in public en femme, but I did.
One of the problems is that I cannot abide the club scene here. I'd say I was too old for it, but that's not quite right. The story "Telepath, Landsdowne St," which you'll find in the story area as usual, has my thoughts on the matter. The protagonist's bitterness about the club scene (though not her horrid outlook on everything else) is one I share.
Unwilling to go to a club, not knowing enough people to get invited to a private party, I sat at home and brooded over how poorly the CGI project was going -- sigh -- while a small trickle of trickertreaters came to our door. Not much of that in the Big Nasty City, don'tcha know. It doesn't help that we can't make our front porch light stay on -- it's on a motion sensor and I don't know how to override it.
You want to see a real Hallowe'en time, go read Anita's entry about what she did.
Now, if you'll pardon me, I will dump one of the files in my brain. I did write a book with Wiccan characters in it, after all, and I always do my research ... and since in my current mood it is extremely unlikely you will ever read the book, you might as well profit by this information anyway.
Samhain (most often said SOW-in) is an interval of change which you can view as being the end of the old year, or as belonging neither to the old year or the new (the latter is the Celtic tradition, among others). It marks the beginning of the dark half of the year, the portion in which the male aspect of the Wiccan deity/duality is active.
(The female aspect comes into ascendancy during that famous fertility celebration, Beltane or May Day, six months from now. The Wiccan calendar is quite symmetric.)
In pastoral terms, this is the time in which any livestock which could not survive the winter were slaughtered. This translates directly into a Wiccan ceremony performed around this time, where a fire is built in a cauldron, and you write whatever bad habit or vice you want to get rid of on a piece of paper, throw it in, and visualize the vice being burned away as the paper is.
Yes, among other things coopted by other religions and rites, Al, you can add the "new year's resolution." And Anita, if you think that sounds a lot like the Cacophony's Scapegoat, you're right!
But I never make my own resolutions, because I am a stubborn creature who is normally completely content with her faults. I find it more profitable to ask other people what they think my faults are. It's usually hard to convince them I mean it, but on the rare occasions when I do, I get good advice.
Do you have any to spare?
what's to protest?
two eleven twenty-three
Listening to the Bob Dylan "Royal Albert Hall" concert. I couldn't stand Bob Dylan until recently -- then something happened. I do that.
This concert was an eye-opener for me, listening to it all the years after the fact. The first half of the show is acoustic, the second half electric. All through this tour, Dylan had been encountering hostility from the audience, who felt that by going Loud and Electric he was Selling Out and abandoning his core audience of folk-music and protest-song fans. (Dylan hated the idea that he wrote "protest songs," and he was desperately trying to escape the box his folkie fans had confined him in.)
On these tapes you can hear fans boo him, deliberately clap out of time with the music, so forth, all during the second set. At one point someone shouts "Judas!"
Can you imagine?
I like folk music OK. What I dislike is pigeonholing. So you don't like country. Does that mean if I want to put a fiddle and a banjo on top of my twelve-bar blues, I'm not allowed. I don't like commercial country either -- Mr. Garth "I Am God" Brooks comes to mind -- but there are country performers out there who never forgot bluegrass, like Dwight Yoakam, and those who utterly defy characterization, like Lyle Lovett.
Protest songs were always a harder sell to me, because it strikes me that, to paraphrase Tom Lehrer, it's a lot easier to listen to a protest song than to actually protest. Aussie is now going to speak up and tell me there was quite a bit of actual protest going on in the sixties -- yes -- I don't disagree, but I still think protest songs are largely a crutch, a way to give a false sense of social conscience. And sitting somewhere and singing them is not a protest.
I think if I had something I felt strongly enough about to protest, I'd want to go chain myself to a factory door or hurl tomatoes at someone or at least hand out leaflets. Something a little more ... actual. But like most of my generation, I'm too content.
We will know that the situation in this country has become dire when the younger generations actually begin protesting once again. They are facing bleak existences even now -- it might happen in my lifetime.
Oh, well. If this rant tires you out, you can go look at the Boston gallery [Dec 2004: No, you can't], where I have added five new photos which were taken on 12 October.
votes and alterations
three eleven twenty-two
Aussie wrote me about the Dylan thing. I should clarify: If you're a singer or songwriter, you talented thing, you (I envy talents I don't have and have no respect for my own -- one day my muse is going to leave me in a huff), then by all means write and sing protest songs -- that's how you do your part in whatever revolution you happen to be in. But if you're a listener, sooner or later you need to get off your derriere and do something.
Even voting would be a start. I voted today. Did you? If you're reading this, it's too late now.
Actually, I don't worry about voter apathy all that much -- I figure it's as much contentment as anything else, and once a sufficient number of people get irritated enough with the status quo, people will start to vote again. But, goodness -- you really do forfeit your right to complain if you don't.
Over here the ballot questions were more interesting than the candidates. We have a constitutional amendment pending -- if passed, it will not only prevent legislators from voting themselves that Old Pay Raise, but will tie their salaries to how well the state economy is doing. Interesting idea, huh? I'm looking for the flaw in it -- it's so simplistic, there's got to be one -- but I haven't found it yet.
Productive night, sorta. Finished three photo morphs -- I'm working on transforming someone into all of the signs of the Zodiac. Five to go; Sagittarius is going to be really hard. The pictures take me about an hour each, and aside from showing up on my web site and hers, they're good for nothing at all, but yet I still feel as if I've been productive. After all, it was creative output.
More relaxing than writing too -- just put in that Louis Prima collection and fire up the Wacom tablet and a cup of peppermint tea.
danger - contains campaign finance
four eleven ten
At home temporarily with an upset stomach and the election results. No, the two aren't connected. Although ...
I note that the Massachusetts voters approved an initiative which will create a new and massive system of public campaign financing. If candidates agree to certain rigidly defined (there's a table of them in the text of the initiative) spending limits and a limit of $100 on individual contributions, they are allowed to receive a set amount of public money for their campaigns, beginning with the 2002 election.
In order to qualify, you have to be able to get a minimum number of contributions from voters, all under the $100 limit, and they have to have been collected during a limited amount of time before the election. Then, "subject to appropriation," (i.e. if the state can't afford it, tough), you get some public money, which you must spend only on campaigning and of which you must return any unspent portion.
For the governor's primary, for example:
- You'd have to have already gotten 6000 individual contributions,
- Your total spending limit would be $1,800,000,
- And $1,500,000 of that would come from the public purse.
- You'd have to have already gotten 6000 individual contributions,
- Your total spending limit would be $1,800,000,
- And $1,500,000 of that would come from the public purse.
If you opt out of the entire system -- you campaign, but refuse to play by these rules -- then if you spend above the cap, the state will match funds for the other candidates who are playing along, to bring them up to your extravagant levels, up to twice the cap amount.
There are also limits on in-kind individual donations, adjustments for inflation, et cetera, but there's the meat of it. Can you believe this was an initiative? That the voters proposed it by petition, and that it didn't originate from some smoke-filled room somewhere?
I know the intention is to take the exorbitant spending out of elections, but really.
Number one, lowering individual contributions to $100 or less just forces the campaigners to spend more time stumping for money and making calls from their office phones and renting the Lincoln Bedroom -- and not enough time doing their job. Politicians view their job as getting reelected, and they'd rather work full-time on that than reform the tax code, if they must.
Number two, I don't want any of the politicians to have any of the taxpayer money so they can campaign. That's just wrong.
You really want campaigns sane again? Fine. Be really Draconian. Set an absolute cap. Set it so low that no politician will have trouble coming up with that kind of money on his own. If you're a city politician, even in a poor area, and you can't raise half a million for a big race, you're not very good, are you?
Figure out what these acceptable low limits are, and make them absolute. Doesn't matter where you get the money from. You can get the whole pile from your favorite lobbyist if you like. There are only two rules:
1. Full disclosure -- we want to know where you're getting the money from.
2. If you spend more than that -- poof! -- you're disqualified from the race. Tough luck, kid, shoulda checked your bookkeeping.
1. Full disclosure -- we want to know where you're getting the money from.
2. If you spend more than that -- poof! -- you're disqualified from the race. Tough luck, kid, shoulda checked your bookkeeping.
Note that I believe the limits should be set low enough to prevent television advertising, and not even much advertising of any kind. I feel that when politicians campaign, it should not be an announcement on a loudspeaker. I want politicians to be forced to get out and stump -- to go to events, shake hands, debate, make nice with the people. I'd reduce their budgets to zero if I thought it would get them to wear out shoe leather more often.
Would someone please tell me where the flaw in my idea is? Where's Molly Ivins when I need her for a reality check?
[Dec 2004: I discuss the responses I got to this two entries hence.]
On the good side, this weird idea about the salaries of the legislators which I mentioned below passed -- that should be fun to watch -- and Al D'Amato finally got kicked out of office in New York. A lot of Democrats won across the board, but I'm so disenchanted with both parties that I no longer automatically consider that a Good Thing.
psst!
four eleven eleven
In my mailbox a moment ago:
"Pssssst! This is a secret. Spread this around to everyone except for John Glenn.
"When John Glenn returns from space, everybody dress in ape suits.
"Pass it on."
we the congress
five eleven navy blue
I can tell that those of you masochistic enough to read regularly do not really like the political discussion, because you've been silent. Actually a reader I expected to hear from viz. the rants below is on a business trip -- I may get a delayed flame from her when she comes back.
Let me do a little defusing in advance, just in case.
I got a scathing email from REM and a gentle one from Ranjit. They were both absolutely correct, but the thing is, I knew they were correct when I wrote the postcards. Somewhere in there, my tone of sarcasm got lost -- a bad error for a writer to make.
Although it's obvious, for example, that I'm really unhappy about this campaign-finance initiative, it's less obvious that I realize my "solution" won't work either. So in case you missed that: It won't. I said it as a combination of spite and wishful thinking. As REM noted, it runs afoul of freedom of speech. Political contributions are a form of free speech. You do not want to be in a position where someone is told he/she can't give money to his/her candidate.
Of course, the ideals and the reality do conflict -- small contributions from individuals barely mean anything in current campaigns, and it sometimes seems silly to be worried about the ten bucks Joe Voter gives at a rally, when it'll be invisible next to the ten thousand from the lobbyist.
But the exceptions prove the rule. David Duke, an execrable man but an absolutely hypnotic speaker, financed his campaign twice, start to finish, solely on the basis of those $5 and $10 contributions from rallies. No big backer would come near him. And, because the campaign-finance laws in Louisiana were made truly rigorous (partially as a response to Duke's money-gathering methods), he had to report and itemize all of them. Which he did. A determined man, Mr. Duke. Also intelligent. I so badly wish he were on the side of the good guys.
But I digress.
My contempt for the legislator's-salaries item may not have been clear either, although I did call it "simplistic," which is not a complimentary word when I use it. In Texas the legislator's salaries are enshrined in the constitution. Read Molly Ivins to find out how well that hasn't worked. It's a bad idea for a number of reasons, some obvious, some not.
I admit I voted for the salary-tie item. And I did it out of malice. I believe the public which goes for the simple solution gets what they deserve, and if they want to make their own bed, I'll help them lie in it. Isn't that a horrible, elitist attitude? I'm ashamed of myself. I don't really believe that. Can we say I voted for it out of whimsy instead, or is that even worse?
Speaking of whimsy ...
This occurred to me on the way to work today, eclipsing other events (such as watching people load what appeared to be a small Zamboni onto the subway train with the aid of a metal plate -- weird).
What if there were no political campaigning at all? What if legislators on the state and local levels (forget national for a moment) were selected from among registered voters by a process akin to the lottery for jury duty? You'd get a letter in the mail, etc etc. The only difference is that opt-out would be voluntary. You wouldn't even have to give a reason. You could just say "I don't want to," and that would be that.
The job would have to pay well, enough that the compensation would make up for a year of missed work -- because it would have to be fairly long-term; you can't legislate well when the faces change every two weeks. And no employer is going to give you a year's paid leave. In fact, the employer might have to be given compensation too, as an inducement for you to still have a job waiting for you when you're done.
This is, of course, completely impractical and unworkable. No question. I present it not as a viable idea but more of a thought experiment. Say it could be pulled off. Assume that no one will be scared to accept the position because of work-related concerns. They may, however, have other reasons for declining -- tedium, apathy, worry that they won't be able to understand the matters being discussed, etc.
What would happen? What would this fictitious legislature look like? What would be its median intelligence, racial composition, career sector, et cetera? And would it make better or worse laws than what we have now?
OK, I'll shut up about politics for a while.
sugar, bagels, and sundries
six eleven red satin
Having ranted about political things for two-three days, I should work my way down my laundry list of "short things which have flown into my brain and won't leave." I have a lot of those. I have even more that do leave and I never see them again.
[clears throat]
Both Al and Beth mentioned really, really liking Pepsi One ... one of them (I think it was Al) wondered about what strange and diabolical new sweetener was in it. Well, this is the kind of thing which sends me straight into Stay Tuned mode, and I took great pains at the grocery store to check out a Pepsi One label.
The soda actually contains two sweeteners, which may explain something -- synthesis usually results in a more balanced taste, which is why blended scotches are easier to get used to than single malts. One of them is aspartame, usually sold in the US under the brand name NutraSweet (Equal is a sweetener which contains NutraSweet, but the chemical itself is sold as NutraSweet -- clear as mud).
Aspartame, as long-time readers will recall, is not as safe as kittens, since it's not just the two joined amino acids they're always going on about, and in fact can release formaldehyde into your body as you digest it. I can dig up the URLs from my report on it, if anyone cares.
The other is acesulfame potassium (acesulfame-K), which is not a new toy -- it's been around a while, but few people sell it. The most commonly seen brand is ... hmmm, I'd have to go back to that same report to remember. I think it's "Sweet Ones."
Some people think it may cause cancer, under the same conditions where saccharin causes cancer -- that is, when you feed a rat more of it, in ratio to body mass, than a human would ever possibly consume even if he/she were a pighog.
I'm not trying to scare anyone away from Pepsi One -- I am merely pointing out the same message I was when I originally wrote about sweeteners: There is no free ride. If you want to avoid real sugar, then you take your penalties elsewhere, in the form of a slight risk of cancer or other nasties. If you seek to avoid eating fat and go for Olestra, you get the runs. Pick and choose.
- - -
Speaking of consumer issues, there are two other food items floating around in my brain.
One of them is that Beth mentioned a while back that she was getting some great bagels at Einstein Bros. Now, I actually think they make a pretty good bagel for a chain -- of course, with the Jewish community here I go straight to the source on the rare occasions I crave a bagel, but the Einstein ones aren't bad. So I was prepared to agree with Beth, until she mentioned dubious bagel "flavors" like gingerbread and chocolate chip. There she lost me.
All I can say, Beth, is you're lucky my spouse isn't writing this, because she gets evil when confronted by the dreaded "goyische bagel." There's a place here that has a strawberry one. Urgh. Though not a Jew, I tend to agree.
Acid test: Bagels are not supposed to be sweet. Savory, yes. Oniony, garlicky, whatever. Fine. But not sweet. If you see a sweet bagel, something is wrong.
Mind you, I'm not saying they're bad! Eat them all you like. But don't call them bagels. Hmm -- we need another name. "Sweet heavy boiled and baked dough rings" is a little clumsy.
What was my other food item? Oh, yes. Got a container of Edy's for the spouse the other night. On the side of the lid, it says (and I am not making this up - all of these words are actually printed, in a repeating pattern, on the lid):
Pint-and-a-Half
50% more than a pint!
50% more than a pint!
In case you couldn't do the math on your own, I guess.
- - -
Let's see. I could mention how I got my first-ever ICQ spam the other night ... or how the spouse has been doing yoga every night and it's actually working ... but on the whole, I just yakked so much about foodstuffs that I should probably stop now. Used up my quota.
oh, wait.
I promised to say something about Jesse "The Body" Ventura. He ran for governor of -- Minnesota, right? -- as a third-party candidate, just for fun. I don't think even he took his candidacy seriously.
Jesse Ventura is an ex-professional wrestler. He won the election.
Boy, I bet he's surprised.
I have read a number of analyses about why this happened and what the voters could possibly have been thinking -- the one which was simultaneously the most incisive and amusing was James Lileks' -- he's a Minnesotan -- but he doesn't archive, so it's unavailable now.
I won't speculate on why the voters did this (since, after all, I admitted the other day to voting for something just so I could watch the chaos if it passed -- no stones from this glass house!) I would much rather speculate on whether he'll be a good governor. I am inclined to believe that the answer will surprise everyone.
- - -
Several people, I am delighted to say, have asked me about the datelines. Keep watching. I ain't sayin' no mo'.
One person asked me about the Zamboni, and I'd answer privately, but just in case anyone else was wondering: This is the machine that comes out periodically to smooth down the ice, at hockey games or skating rinks. Big ones have a place for a driver to sit on them; little ones are steered around like a pushcart.
That's plenty for now. Wheeee!
off to see the wizard
seven eleven none
Went to go see the lovingly restored print of The Wizard of Oz this evening. I've seen it about a zillion times, but always on a television-sized screen; that plus the better print made it almost like seeing a new movie.
Here are some random notes. Actually, they're sequential notes, in more or less the order I thought them while watching:
First off, why is Warner Bros. rereleasing an MGM film? I admit I don't keep track of studios too closely -- did MGM go under?
The framing sequence isn't in black-and-white exactly; it's in sepia tones, like old photographs, and it is absolutely gorgeous. In fact, Garland looks better in those sequences than she does in the color portions, where her facial makeup makes her look a little like she has a skin condition.
The reason "Over The Rainbow" works here, and never never works when anyone else sings it, is that Garland underplays it considerably, never trying to hit that dramatic note, never reaching for the power. It's the only way to sing it.
The cyclone's great too -- is that actual back-projected footage of a twister, or did they make it in a tank? Did they even have effects tanks then? [Dec 2004: They made it in a tank. The DVD discusses it in the extras.]
The plants in Munchkin land are plastic! They're so deliberately unnaturally shiny! Even the leaves on the cornstalks in the Scarecrow's field are shiny. [The poppies aren't, though.]
Spouse's favorite factoid: Technicolor was named for MIT (which was commonly nicknamed Tech at the time).
I didn't see the filmed version of The Man Who Came To Dinner until a few years ago -- I've seen it performed on stage a few times -- and this is my first exposure to Oz since then. I find I cannot look at Billie Burke quite the same way. I've become aware of just how delightfully ditzy Glenda is.
The special effect with the cloud of red smoke that marks Margaret Hamilton's appearances and disappearances is still effective, darn it. Who knows how many years later and I still get anticipatory chills when that red smoke begins to billow. [Spouse: "Of course, some of it is due to Margaret Hamilton."]
You have to place things in historical context. Ray Bolger and Bert Lahr had both made some reputation for themselves by then. Bolger was mostly noted for his unique, zany dance style. When the 1939 audience saw the Scarecrow, they knew the character was going to do some dancing. It'd be like casting Gregory Hines as the Scarecrow today. One brings preconceptions with one.
A lot of people have this idea that Oz is a place frozen in the past, reinforced by the fact that the definitive Oz movie is almost sixty years old, and the Oz books nearly a century. But Baum's Oz was mostly contemporaneous with his 1900's world -- with odd and occasionally futuristic touches -- the City Of The Future appearance of the Emerald City domes in the movie's matte paintings would have fit Baum's ideas for the city perfectly.
Toto is an exceptionally well-trained dog. I never noticed that before. I don't know why.
I seem to recall that in the books, Glenda is the good witch of the South (the red section), not the north (purple). You know how long it's been since I read the Oz books?
I saw only one special effect in the movie which didn't seem to have held up well -- the owls and vultures in the haunted forest with the obviously peanut-bulb eyes. Ok, that, and the flying monkeys lost a little something in the new print -- you can see how artificial the masks are. But the vital parts hold.
The children in the audience were very respectful of the movie. I'm not sure it held their attention at all times, but they seemed to realize that their parents were having a lot of fun. Or something. I swear I heard several cases in the movie where the adultts were all laughing at something, and then the kid laughter would chime in, as if they knew something was supposed to be funny there but weren't sure what it was.
When Hamilton is sending the monkeys to capture Dorothy and torment the others, she says, "Send the little insect creatures first, to soften them up," or some such. This, I believe, is a cue for the missing Jitter Bug sequence, part of the movie's rather substantial lore.
I could tell you all the other lore as well: How Frank Morgan and Garland were not the original choices to play those roles, how Jack Haley was a replacement for Buddy Epsen, how Haley's makeup and Hamilton's gave them skin conditions, how the Munchkins made life unholy hell for everyone with their rowdiness, how the actors nearly got heatstroke (the whole thing was filmed on soundstages under the oppressive lighting needed for color filming at the time -- over a hundred degrees on set) ... but you already know all those.
The writer for the Globe points out that the film was a flop for its time. It was made for what was then an ungodly three and a half million, and didn't break even. Did you ever wonder why the only Oscars the movie won were for Best Song and Best Original Score? Easy. (Put your hand down, over there in Austin; I know you know.) 1939 was a banner year for American cinema, maybe the best ever: Among others, it also produced Gone With The Wind, Dark Victory, The Women, Destry Rides Again, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
Victor Fleming, the director, probably didn't even get any attention/blame for Wizard flopping that year; his name was the one which eventually went on Gone With The Wind, which was not a flop. (George Cukor, who got cheated out of the credit for GWTW, should not be pitied -- The Women by itself would have been a reputation-making film. And don't let's go into the whole story behind GWTW, because that's really tawdry territory.)
After the film, I asked the spouse and Marc: You know, there have been a whole slew of rereleases of classic films in the last year or so. Is it cynical of me to think this means the public is disenchanted with the current state of Hollywood product?
Spouse replied: It has nothing to do with that. It's that the studios have realized they're sitting on a profit goldmine -- that people will actually pay to see the old films.
Marc thought that the answer was probably a little of both. Marc is probably right.
song of the cranky em-dash
nine eleven burgundy floral print
My mail program has been acting strange. I have repaired my Mac any way I know how (which is a lot of ways), and no other application is acting strange anyway. Just that one. It doesn't like displaying messages in Courier anymore. It shows them in this weird garbled format. The text is actually fine. If you roll up the window and then open it again, forcing it to redraw, it looks great. But if you type, often it reverts to the garbled version again.
I messed with all sorts of settings and such -- in the process, I inadvertently set my email to send my Columbine messages out under my birth name, which is exceedingly annoying to me. I didn't find that out until this morning when I started seeing the replies, and now I'm upset, in the sense that one is upset when one finds one's slip has been hanging out all day or one's fly has been open.
To solve the mail appearance problem, I eventually had to switch to another, prettier font last night, which annoys me as well. I have this idea that email should not be pretty.
If I use a real font, it makes me forget that email is a very unsophisticated technology, where only a very limited set of characters is acceptable. If I use a font which has an em-dash, I might be tempted to use it, and then no one will be able to read it. Em-dashes, printer's ("real") apostrophes, other goodies like that -- forget it. You can't use them in mail unless you know perfectly well that the recipient's using the same mail program, on the same kind of computer, under the same phase of the moon.
We have Harrison Bergeron technology. We are offered the best of all possible worlds, but we generally end up playing to the least common denominator instead. Computers have been able to show funky characters on their screens for ages now, and do amazing things with visual layout, but we are generally reduced to a more limited reality somewhere along the trip. There is a thin point in the pipeline, a strait dating back to the time when a computer was a teletype with a screen.
I don't have this gripe about web pages, which some people do, because I can do everything I want with a web page and still have people read it. As far as I'm concerned, there is no excuse for Java or Shockwave or any of that flashy stuff. The web is about words and pictures, and I can send those just fine. Need to do something fancy? That's what the CGI format is for. (Look at Heliotrope, or the message board systems I've written, or any of that -- hey, no Java! How about that?)
I spend a lot of time telling people how to build simple, spartan web pages. The virtues of simplicity. And here I am, trashing email because I can't get a real em-dash ... which, as shown several places above, I don't really need.
Moral: Technology is only unacceptable when it doesn't do what you want it to do.
Never mind.
I was going to write about Pleasantville today, but I find I have nothing to say about it. Go see it. It's quite good. There.
sins and shoes and safety stickers
ten eleven rose
I think that just breaking down the world into sins of commission and sins of omission is not enough.
As someone who has committed a variety of sins of omission over the past few days, I think there are actually several flavors:
1. Things you didn't do because you honestly keep forgetting about them.
You might argue that these aren't really sins at all, but have you noticed how seldom you forget to do things you really want to do? Look more deeply into your subconscious, and you will find one of the types below underlying your memory loss.
2. Things you didn't do because there was something else you wanted to do more.
In my case, this means I would rather write or read or play computer games than go buy new shoes or debug my code. Neither of the latter two is intrinsically unpleasant to me, they're just not as much fun. I lack willpower sometimes.
3. Things you didn't do because you cannot abide doing them, and shirk them whenever possible.
- - -
I haven't gotten the car inspected. I thought I was going to get it done yesterday but I missed my window of opportunity. It's thoroughly unpleasant. I must take time out from whatever I'm doing, drive around for a while to get the car hot enough for the emissions check, pull it into a narrow and hard-to-navigate garage, and then pay two surly mechanics for the privilege of checking to see if all my lights work and sticking a little nozzle up my tailpipe to see how foul my car's breath is.
I don't think emissions tests are a bad joke, the way some writers around here do. It's true that your car has to be one of the old Plymouths that spews black smoke all over the street -- you know what I mean -- in order to flunk the tests, and that watching new or newish cars for emissions is a little bit of a red herring. On the other hand, how do you get rid of those one-in-one-hundred polluting cars if not with emissions tests?
It amuses me that the emissions test is the only part of the inspection that is taken seriously here. They don't check your brakes, your wipers, any of that. Just your lights and your tailpipe. In Louisiana, they do no emissions test -- but they drive your car in circles around a parking lot and check your stopping distance. Go figure.
Oh, well. I didn't get the car inspected, but I did buy shoes. Shoes are too expensive! I compared prices at five shoe stores and finally concluded that I was going to be in sticker shock no matter where I went.
(Cars are too expensive too. They should be getting cheaper, not pricier. I bought a car new for $8000 in '92. I will never be able to do that again. It depresses me. But that's another rant.)
- - -
If you don't walk a lot during the day, you may not notice how difficult it is to think about other things when you're wearing a new article of clothing. No, this isn't vanity. It's a change in the usual set of sensations which distracts. When I got my lovely new coat, I kept thinking about how it felt and what it did as I moved. I couldn't help it. It wasn't what I was used to. New shoes always do that. I literally could not focus on anything else this morning except the strange way my feet felt while I walked.
Shoe changes make me aware of what my feet are doing; coats and hanging clothing make me aware of what my shoulders and back are doing; tights make me aware of what my hips (what hips?) are doing.
And of course walking down the street in clothing meant for the opposite gender is like being under a magnifying glass. You don't concentrate on anything except your step and your poise and whether your hips are moving too much and keep your shoulders back and look ahead, not at the sidewalk and wow I'd forgotten how much these shoes pinch and I bet the wind is ruining my hair and smile, always remember to smile, a friendly face is much less weird and threatening than a surly one.
unisex sins and oz
twelve eleven robin's-egg blue
i don't feel like using capitals today, or being really fastidious about my sentences. you can live with it, right?
i described my outlook as a blue sky with fast-moving cumulus clouds. mostly good disposition but every so often something blots out the sun for a few seconds.
or the flip side: i don't stay in bad moods for long, which is a good thing since i get them so often.
today's bad mood is brought to you by the boston globe. read the article on the way out of the house, got irate, folded it up and brought it with me, and by the time the first round of crises is over with and i can type this, i'm no longer angry over it.
of course, i will vent here and you'll think i'm angry. remember though that you're on electronic delay. this is old angry.
anyway ...
the article was about people giving children unisex names, and the slant of the article was negative. although the author (one joe kahn) noted a fair number of people who have done well despite having a name "meant" for the other sex, the overall tone was of annoyance, with people who have such names citing the way people assume their gender before meeting them, and so forth.
well, guess what, mr. joe kahn, wrong approach. the idea is to fight the assumptions, not the names. the idea is to get to a point where someone can have a "boy" name and not have people assume they're a boy, sight unseen. the names aren't the problem. and quoting "experts" who say things like "androgynous names unfortunately don't stay that way; once a boys' name becomes a girls' name, it's usually a one-way street" just exacerbates the same old problem, which is that it's okay for girls to be boys, but not for boys to be girls.
i get so tired of this. so tired of telling people that myths get stronger the more you repeat them. and i'm re-annoying myself so to heck with it.
i wrote a book with a main character whose name was robin. aside from the fact that my mother has been nicknamed that since birth, it's a nice unisex name. i'd like to be named that. i'd like that book to be finished one day. i'd like a lot of things. and yes, i got the email, whoever you are.
in other news ...
i missed a titling opportunity. i should have called the previous postcard "omission, commission, emission." but i didn't. marc noted today that i didn't cover nearly all of the possibilities -- there are also such subclasses as
- things you did in good conscience that only later turned out to be wrong
- things you avoided doing based on sound knowledge that was itself inaccurate
- things you did with intent to harm, that instead benefitted the recipient, unbeknownst to you
- things omitted which looked beneficial at the time, but later turned out would have been lethal
but marc is a philosopher and you can see that he's more interested in slopping around in those vague concepts of "good" and "evil," whereas i try to avoid those mud puddles whenever i can.
finally ...
i got some interesting urls and mail about the wizard of oz. beth, who understands the glories of children's books, could not believe that marc has never read a single oz book! beth, you're going to help me double-team marc until he reads them all,right?
the spouse, ever since we went to the movie, has been trying to find dirt on a wild theory she once heard that the whole movie is an extended metaphor for the united states going off the gold standard. she finally found a site that discusses it (along with other wild ideas).
judy sent me this document from a reviewer who's in the nasty position of having to review a film everyone already knows about, and therefore has no recourse but to be snide and funny. actually i think this guy genuinely loves the movie and is just having some fun.
however -- i just bought a copy of the classic cult movies by danny peary, and when peary talks about th' wizard, it's clear he loves the movie too, but he does something i've seen few people do -- he is openly critical of it, picking apart its more gaping holes.
he points out one that has always annoyed me, that the central "lesson" of the movie is a flawed one. what does dorothy learn in oz? that "there's no place like home." but home is horrible for dorothy -- she has no peers that we ever see, she's living on this dreary marginal farm with no outlet for her imagination, her aunt and uncle, though i'm sure they love her, are fairly remote ... and miss gulch will still want to have toto killed when she gets home, something she's apparently forgotten.
it's worth noting that in the books, dorothy makes three separate trips to oz. (right, beth? been a long time.) the first two are accidental, the third not, as i vaguely recall; she brings her aunt and uncle in with her and stays in oz.
it's true that there's nothing like the feeling of belonging. that there's nothing like having a family and friends. but as far as "there's no place like home" is concerned, oz can kick the snot out of kansas any day.
talking to the names
twelve eleven again
Someone (Kymm, but I didn't say that) nagged me about not writing anything. Actually, her email, sent at about the same time this morning that I was posting the previous entry, said, in its entirety:
Where ARE you????
Yesterday was a holiday for me, I'll have you know, and I don't tend to write these on holidays because I'm usually too busy goofing off, which is what I feel one is ordained to do on holidays.
Besides, I've been a slacker lately. What did you think I was getting at, with all the talk about sins of omission?
I have, for example, been dangerously behind on reading the sites in the webring, which is why I am only now finding out a lot of things I should have found out several days ago. Both Kymm and Beth, for example, met one of their idols while I wasn't looking.
I'm not sure I ever met someone who was one of my idols and actually had the privilege of speaking to that person as an equal, as they did. (Book signings and such don't count -- that's someone holding court.) Hmm. I had a conversation with Lisa Palac last year; that was the closest I've come in recent memory.
I think I tend to think of the people I consider Big Names as unapproachable -- even if I liked Randy Newman as intensely as Kymm does, I would never dare go backstage to meet him. That would just seem rude to me -- after a show he wants to rest, unmolested, right? If I send email to a Famous Personage, I'm just another fanboy or fangirl -- and we won't go into the Fan discussion again, OK?
(In short, I believe that one should never, ever tell a Famous Person how much you like his/her cultural contributions. Ooh, that's screwed up. Hmm. Let me rethink that.)
By contrast, a person who has achieved a smaller kind of fame in his or her circle is apparently fair game, to my brain, though I respect his or her good works no less. Some of the people I consider "small celebrities" are Keith Dawson, who writes TBTF; Anne Semans and Cathy Winks, who write the Good Vibrations Guide to Sex; Eric Raymond, one of the most verbal advocates of Open Source software development; Alexander Seropian, head of Bungie Software, the company that showed you could make good games on the Mac; and this weird woman in NYC who handles the Open Pages ring, the premiere listing of online journallers everywhere. (Her name's been mentioned enough in this entry already.)
All of these people are at top-of-game in the fields they've carved for themselves (although they may protest that statement). Yet, with almost no angst, I have sent (and usually received) email from these people and interacted with them as peers. They don't intimidate me. Being in a room with them (I've met two of six) [Dec 2004: later, four of six] doesn't intimidate me. But being in a room with Joe Haldeman, who has taught my spouse at MIT and who is sweet as can be, even when cranky, did intimidate me. Or maybe "intimidate" is the wrong word. Put it another way: my spouse was entitled to say hello to him. I was not.
You may tell me I'm schizophrenic if you like. No news flash there.
The oddest thing is: Although I'm about as far from a celebrity as you can get, I hunger for feedback, contact from readers -- I adore it. Good, bad, otherwise. I wonder: Would there ever come a point (assuming I got off my rear and became famous) where I'd change, to the point where hearing from people became the nuisance I seem to think celebrities find it?
Being at MIT has made me acutely aware of this dichotomy in me, because there are Great Minds lurking around here, and most of them are going about their rounds fairly inconspicuously. (We saw Noam Chomsky on the subway the other day.) Students argue with them; administration gives them a certain amount of hell; no one treats them with kid gloves just because they have a major book contract or a lecture tour. For the most part, they don't insist that people genuflect. (There are exceptions, such as Nick Negroponte and His Travelling Ego.)
One thing about the diehard lovers of knowledge -- and I think I consider this a good thing -- they don't usually play rank. Richard Feynman describes how Bohr and his son would come find him to bounce ideas off at Los Alamos -- because Feynman was the only one willing to argue back with the Great Man. Feynman just didn't care -- for him the idea was more important than the politics or the rank.
I'd like more people to be like that, and it frets me a little that I can't achieve it more often myself.
dateline: the future
thirteen eleven twelve
I am tired of messing with the dateline. Very few people noticed my fooling with it, which confirmed my suspicions, so now the experiment is over, and we return to the format I decided I like best.
Since it is no longer my intention to be cryptic, I will explain it: Day, month, and hour. If you're still wondering what "red satin" and other nonsense meant, never mind, forget it, it didn't happen -- just a joke that fell flat.
All sorts of mail in the mailbox I could talk about, and thank you for the fascinating correspondence! But I don't really want to discuss them today -- maybe tomorrow -- maybe later.
Instead I'm going to do something radical. Well, for me it's radical.
Work on The Novel has all but stopped. I just don't seem to want to follow that story right now. On the other hand, there's another story which has kept popping into my head. Late at night, or during idle moments, A.D. keeps coming back and asking me when I'm going to show the world his diary. So finally, figuring that it was better to work on a second project and split my effort than write nothing at all, I went back to his story.
I first wrote a rough of this, with all the essential elements intact, in the mid-eighties. I fleshed it out into a long and good if amateurish story -- novelette, actually -- in 1986. I began to rewrite it last year, and the rewrite is what I began to reexamine last night. [Dec 2004: There have been more rewrites since -- including to the part quoted below, which is now painful to read. The novel was actually finished, was then savaged by my friend Eric, and though I know how to rework it to make it viable, the effort involved has left it gathering dust for several years since.]
The radical part: I am hypersensitive, as you may know, about putting any writing on the web which may at some point earn me money. There are a number of reasons for this, some sensible, some paranoid, which are lengthy enough to discuss another day.
Anyway, this excerpt will be the first time I have ever put something in public, on any of my three web sites, that I was writing with deliberate intent to sell.
Of course I am always happy to receive comments of any sort.
blind spots
sixteen eleven thirteen
Running a little late today. The usual crises. Hope you had a nice weekend, although my mailbox seems to imply otherwise. For some reason a lot of people were at low ebb this weekend. I am now psychically exuding goodwill into the aether, in hopes of cheering everyone up. It may not do much good, but short of lending an ear -- which I do anyway -- it's the best I can offer.
Oh, and I annoyed someone this weekend because of a bad habit of mine -- a habit of fussing at someone because I'm concerned about them. Sometimes I see someone who really causes my heart to bleed. I want to help them, but I also want to pick them up and shake them and slap them a little, just to wake them up: You're not thinking clearly, you fool. You've got a big blind spot.
Unfortunately the urge to shake them sometimes wins, and many people interpret this as being kicked when they're down, and I always regret it later.
The flip side of my email this weekend was people commenting on the excerpt from A.D.'s journal. Everyone said, in nearly these exact words, "So what happens next?" which I guess is a good sign -- it means that at the very least I held your interest.
(I also worry that I'm leading you to the wrong expectations. The book doesn't really begin until A.D. leaves the planet, and the other characters in the excerpt, after a few more days in A.D. time, will never figure again except tangentially.)
I wrote about another 3000 words of the revision this weekend, so that's coming along. I also finished reading my book on entophagy, bought a slew of the Dover reprints of the Oz books with original illustrations (Dover rules -- I may have said that before) and read a bunch of them, and began reading V.
The problem with Pynchon is that there's only enough room for one Pynchon in the universe. If I wrote a book that rambles as much as this one does, my panel of esteemed literary advisors would tell me to cut the fat. No one else will be allowed to write like Pynchon until Pynchon is dead.
Of course, given that I argue that no one is allowed to steal the way I say things, and that only I have the rights to profit from my own writing style, it's obvious that I'm at cross-purposes with myself again. Big surprise. I want to filch good things from other people but I don't want anyone filching mine.
Wow, that's kind of an eye-opener. I hate becoming aware of yet another personal hypocrisy. I have too many.
Like this morning, when I read a letter in Entertainment Weekly about MTV. Now, I have the same complaint about MTV that all the other children of the eighties have: They don't show videos anymore. I mean that they don't show little short movies with storylines to go along with whatever pop song happens to be the current radio darling. VH-1 shows a video now and again, but it's telling that the videos on Pop-Up Video are all usually several years old.
Anyway, an EW critic panned MTV's strategies a few issues back, for different reasons. In this issue, there was a reply from the president of MTV, Judith McGrath, and her reply made me aware all of a sudden that the reason I don't like MTV is that it's become all music for an audience I don't belong to.
A largely black and Latino audience. Uh-oh. Racism alert.
It's not so much the fact that, with rare exceptions, I don't care for rap -- that's personal taste. It's more that I found myself thinking, "Why don't they play any good music?" and was actually asking "Why don't they play any white people music?" without realizing that's what I was doing.
Cut to Columbine hiding her head in the sand.
Meanwhile, Jette talks about how Austin is one of the least conservative places to live in Texas. That's as may be, and I tend to agree, having hopscotched all over that state ... but Austin is also one of the most segregated cities I've ever been in. The interstate bisects the city north to south ... and there are no black people on the west side of it, no white people on the east.
We all have blind spots. It's always disconcerting to become aware of what you weren't seeing, or were refusing to see.
don't look at me
seventeen eleven thirteen
Columbine has tired-looking eyes. They don't necessarily have bags or dark circles (sometimes they do, when she's been up all night), but they always have that thin line of red along the eyelids, that slightly inflamed look.
Her eyes are blue. Which blue depends on the light, the mood, the sleep, and the clothing. Today they are a watery, diluted, washed-out blue.
Columbine has slightly hollow cheeks. Not starvation hollow, but definitely concave. They make her cheekbones more prominent, which she hates. She wants a soft face, not a bony one, although she admits that a rawboned face sits well on her gawky body.
Columbine is all leg and elbow, told her whole life that she was too tall and skinny to be ladylike, exacerbated by a clumsiness which lasted into her twenties, when she finally learned to move her unwieldy form around a room with something approximating grace.
She's not so skinny you want to tell her to go eat something. Her clothing is usually loose enough that you can't tell what she's shaped like anyway. She wears a 36B bra. Her shoulders are too broad. Her feet are too big.
No model looks like Columbine. Columbine is not some people's idea of pretty. Yesterday she saw a woman in a magazine ad that came reasonably close to the way she'd like to look at her best. She was startled. Unfortunately she can't find a copy of it online to show you.
Columbine dreamed of being a mermaid last night. It's one of her two most common dreams where she's not a human. In the other, she's a dryad, and sometimes she stops to let her feet root, closing her eyes and extending her arms up unto the sun, letting the light feed her green photosynthetic skin.
home sick mortal no return
eighteen eleven twelve
I am home today. I'm sick. I have all the body aches and headaches and sore eyes of a bad case of flu. It hurts to move. The disturbing part is that my sinuses and nose aren't bothering me at all. I find this worrisome. I would much rather have flu than mononucleosis, for one thing.
It's been building up for several days, days in which I was just unusually tired. Now it is definitely tangible.
This business of being sick is going to make me look bad, because we are having a memorial service at work today for a co-worker who died unexpectedly, and now a few people are going to suspect me of being sick in order to avoid going to it.
I admit they have justification. I still don't understand funerals. This is worse than going to something out of a sense of obligation -- here is a funeral I'd be going to out of a sense of politics -- because of what other people in the office might say if I wasn't there. That's a lousy reason to show up.
I didn't know the man! He worked only a few doors down from me but I didn't know him. We exchanged maybe five words. I don't know most of the people here. I hardly talk to them. There is exactly one person in my department whom I can comfortably have a long conversation with.
When I die I'm going to do like Janis Joplin did and leave money so all my friends can have a wild all-night party instead. I want you to get drunk when I die and have wild sex and tell jokes. I want you to laugh when I die. I don't want you standing around in a room pulling long faces. Don't waste your time. Because when I cross over to hell or beyond, I am not looking back.
Sorry.
As I say, I'm not feeling well today.
deliberate abuse
nineteen eleven fifteen
I didn't hear from the clinic about the bloodwork by one, so I called them. Ain't nothing wrong with my blood. Oh, little things -- I've been slightly iron-poor for years, like my dad, which is why I take vitamins ... and there may have been some signs that my body has been fighting off ick for the last few days. If I were more sanguine about this (there's a pun there, but never mind) I'd take that as all the explanation I need -- that I've been fighting something which never managed to make it up into more obvious symptoms, just the ache and fatigue.
But I'm not mollified. For two reasons.
Number one, now I'm really embarrassed. I see a doctor once a year at most. I don't even like taking aspirin. Rhonda, among other readers, is familiar with my stance. I'm not a medical Luddite, I just feel that doctors are for when something is seriously wrong, not for every time you feel bad. And here I've gone to the doctor and the trip was completely unjustified -- nothing was wrong! I feel like such a hypochondriac now, and in my lexicon that's one of the worst things you could possibly call me.
Number two, I woke up feeling pretty chipper this morning. I'd had a lot of sleep -- too much, in fact; aside from the neck and back pain I know as a symptom of too long in bed, everything was dandy. My eyes didn't hurt and I didn't feel tired. Then I sat at the computer to work (I wasn't going into work until I found out I didn't have something nastily contagious) and within ten minutes I felt fatigued again.
Then I reflected on how much I've been at the computer lately. When I haven't been working (I mean, at my job, which is a computer job), I've been writing. When I haven't been writing, I've been emailing. And when I haven't been doing either of those, I've been playing Clan Lord.
I haven't mentioned Clan Lord here, but since I got an email today saying "I love your journal! -- By any chance are you the same Columbine I saw in Clan Lord the other night?" it's probably time.
It's an online multiplayer game, it's still in the test stages, and it's entertaining, although it can be really annoying or monotonous at times. It also doesn't eat my brain the way writing does, which means when I'm too burned out to write, as I was yesterday, I can still play. And it sucks you in -- you can play it for hours and not notice the time until you stop.
Every time I've put in a particularly long session at the computer recently, Clan Lord or otherwise, I have been extremely fatigued afterwards.
Believe it or not, this may just be an eye thing. Computers make my eyes irritated. For years this has been an "I'm tired" cue to my psyche. So it may be that my eyes are hurting and I think I'm tireder than I am. This is supported that if I go away from the computer and do something else for a half hour, or take a walk, I feel energetic again. It's weird to exercise and feel less tired.
It might be that I can solve this problem by just rationing myself. I hope so.
Clan Lord's a self-limiting thing at this point; I made second circle yesterday morning and quickly got disillusioned -- I still can't go anywhere safely or kill any of the more dangerous creatures, and I'm a moderately advanced character. I'll advance my healer character to second circle, to see what's what, and who knows, after that I may stop cold. Very little investment there.
But I cannot afford to not be able to write. It's already galling me enough that I can't focus to work on A.D.'s journal. I was focused last night, but last night all that focus went into mouth organ, it being a Wednesday.
- - -
Postscript: It occurs to me that I have, in fact, been using the computer all afternoon (despite good intentions) and the fatigue, aside from that first flash of eye irritation at the beginning, is not happening. So my lousy sleep cycle might have something to do with it -- last night was the first time in several weeks where I've had more than six hours.
I didn't want to say that, because now the spouse will nag me about it and we'll have an argument. If I have to get more sleep than I'm getting, then I will just be fatigued all the time. I'm adamant on this. There aren't enough hours in the day already to do the things I want. I'm with Thomas Edison on this one: Sleep is mankind's biggest inefficiency.
new coat of paint
nineteen eleven twenty-one
Since once again I haven't had the brainpower to write yet today, I have been drinking (shhh!) and listening to Marianne Faithfull on 2-CD set. That combination would be enough to drive weaker mortals to slit their wrists, but -- ha! -- I am made of sterner stuff.
I have also been editing images, including a spiffy new splash on the Alewife Bayou top page and some new faces for the postcards.
You'll notice I haven't gone back and replaced all the old faces. Actually [ahem] I did -- it takes only a second with my fancy editor -- and then I had to go undo the change. Because, you see, the expressions didn't match!
I didn't take any pains in particular to make the same set of expressions, much less keep them in the same order, and if some new reader saw a grumpy postcard accompanied by the grinning face, he or she might well think I had lost my mind, or that I have a very sick sense of humor at the least.
Both of which are true, sometimes ... but why should I encourage the belief?
So you'll see the new faces gradually ... unless you know how to cheat and trick Heliotrope into showing you all twenty.
Enjoy the new coat of paint. Same old words, of course.
marking off time
twenty eleven eleven
I was all prepared to talk about professional athletics this morning -- the only field which suffers more than politics from Too Much Money. The Patriots are moving to Hartford, having been given an unbelievable $350,000,000+ blowjob (forgive my unladylike usage), and the sportswriters are wearing ashes and sackcloth, rending their hair and gnashing their teeth. We couldn't keep Mo Vaughn, they cry, now we are losing the Patriots as well. [Dec 2004: The deal fell through, as I'm sure you know.]
But you know what? I realized I don't really care. I didn't attend athletic events before and I'm not going to attend them now, and I'm not going to trump up some indignation just because some overpaid athletes and owners make a good rant.
So there.
Instead I will talk a little about anniversaries. Did it ever strike you that it's a curious impulse, this need to mark off a point and look back on it at regular intervals? Not a bad thing -- just odd, in the same way that it strikes me as odd every now and then that I keep small livestock in my house by choice.
I note that a lot of journallers who have gone on for more than a year like to link back to whatever they wrote a year ago. I don't think I'd do that. I've been writing here for more than a year, of course, but not in any contiguous format. When and if this journal becomes a year old, I may comment on it, but I'm not sure I'll look back to see where I was.
Some people would say: But if you don't use it to see where you were, to remember what took place, then what's the point of keeping a journal? To which I would reply: Nolo contendere.
Not too many journals last a year, statistically speaking. Someone (I think it's Diane) keeps a list of the ones which have. You may think the flameout rate is unexpectedly high, especially with the large exodus of journallers over the past two weeks, but it's not. Think of all the people who started paper diaries and never did anything with them. People like me. (Several times.) The only reason I can keep this up is because I have reduced the physical labor of doing it as little as possible. If I had to actually write it every day -- I mean write longhand -- forget it.
Apparently there is some crucial point -- a point where, if you're still writing the journal, you're hooked and you're not going to stop. The journal may change names and locations, but by then the monkey is on your back. I don't know where that point is. It probably varies from person to person.
A year is as good a milestone as any.
But back to anniversaries.
People who know me in person know that I am severely anti-birthday. I have trouble remembering other people's birthdays, and I am more likely to buy someone dinner or a drink than give them a present. As for my own, I am notorious for not wanting to receive gifts or celebrate the event. (Good wishes are always acceptable, although I may wonder at your priorities.) It just doesn't seem like something which deserves special notice.
I don't mean that in the cranky, oh-god-i'm-getting-older way. I like being this age; my childhood wasn't all that great and I'm having progressively more fun the older I get. It just seems like a foolish thing to mark off, that's all.
Let me try it a third way, because I still don't think I'm conveying it: There are important dates in my life, dates where I look back and reflect on how I've progressed, but the day I was born has never been one of them.
Lest you think I am building up to this: Today is not my birthday. My exact birthday is a state secret, but I am a Pisces, so you can see that we're not even in the neighborhood.
Today, however, is the day on which my true love and I are celebrating five years together. The earth has not come to an end, nor have we killed each other, nor have our friends decided to kill us.
It's a date that not only affects my life profoundly, but someone else's as well. If that's not an occasion to mark off, I don't know what is.
the void reply
twenty eleven eighteen
I used to never never give advice to anyone, and I was cursed for being uninvolved.
Now I give advice on occasion, and very often the giving of the advice causes more trouble than it's worth.
I think I'll just be uninvolved again.
When I give you advice it doesn't mean I think you're a fool, it doesn't mean I'm callous, it doesn't mean I'm angry. It just means I'm giving you advice. You're always free to ignore it. It may well be bad advice. Who knows?
I don't do sympathy well. Empty noises of sympathy do not strike me as a useful response for either party. If I give you advice -- if I even try to give you advice -- it means I'm sympathetic. It means I'm willing to be involved. It means that your problem either concerns me or itches me or both. If I wasn't interested in your problem, I wouldn't say a damned thing about it.
This is a part of the "boy side" of my brain I've never attempted to overcome because it seems like the useful, sensible way to go. But I'm concluding that some people don't want the advice. They just want me to stand around and make tut-tut noises while they sort their own heads out.
Well, I can understand the idea of a sympathetic ear. I'll be happy to listen. I am always happy to listen.
But if you don't want advice, say so in advance, so I can remember to not reply.
This goes back to a conversation I had with an old friend about why I didn't reply to her emails. I said, "I love getting your emails. I enjoy your emails immensely. But I never reply to them because I never have anything in particular to say in return."
She said, "I just want some reply that indicates you're there and you got it and read it. Even if all you do is say 'I don't have anything to say in reply to that,' it's better than nothing."
Well, I still don't understand it.
You get real information in return, or you get silence. I do not play the game of social pleasantries.
I know, I know, I'd make a lousy Southern belle.
I'll go crawl back into my hole now.
keeping ledgers, keeping counsel
twenty-three eleven eleven
Oh, heavens, there's so much I want to write about today! You can expect this to be a multiple-entry day. There is literally too much to write in one postcard, and I must put it all in at some point today, before it evaporates from my brain the way that information tends to do.
I discussed journals and diaries with a friend of mine this weekend. I had also asked the mighty Kymm about this, for other reasons, and I suppose the subject was on my mind. My friend keeps a diary. This, on the other hand, is a journal.
He writes what he had for dinner, what he did that day, how the sex was -- the details of his daily life. I write about what I was thinking, what I was angry about, events that have caused my mind to reel, and in general whatever's filling my head.
I admit that, when it comes to reading other people's lives, I normally find the latter kind more interesting to read than the former. I'm not insulting him by saying that -- he himself said that if anyone else ever read his diary voluntarily it'd have be for the sex parts.
The interesting thing is that we are both, fundamentally, keeping our ledgers as a memory aid. But we differ in what we want to remember. I am not personally very interested in what I was eating or where I went -- but I do want to have notes about how my political views changed, what I was losing time worrying about that year, who I was fighting with ... On the other hand, I suppose knowing where you were and what you were doing also reflects that -- for example, if he didn't eat mashed potatoes twenty years ago and adores them now.
I lost ten years of my life. I went through a mental Dark Ages -- the causes were complex and only partially my fault -- and had to start over. I am sometimes very unhappy about that, that I am having experiences at thirty which most of my peers had at twenty. One of the things I noticed this morning -- and what is inspiring this meta-rant -- is that I am vain. Ten years ago I was not.
I don't mean "vain" in a derogatory sense, like "narcissistic." Shorthand. What I mean is that I now notice and take some pains about my public appearance. Actually, I usually don't take the pains; I just notice. The "I can't believe I'm going out looking like this" phenomenon is a fairly new one to me, and there are some ironies here.
I didn't start caring about having other humans look at my appearance favorably until I was already basically committed into a happy relationship and out of the market. In my late teens, when most people start getting interested in dating, and preening in front of the mirror, I was oblivious to the whole thing. Now I'm noticing my appearance but what's the point?
I'm starting to worry about presenting a good appearance just as my body is beginning to show the first signs of aging. Great. Ten years ago I might have looked sexy had I put some effort into it.
I know, I know, this all strikes you as shallow. I'm sorry. And to the love of my life, who is probably reading this, I don't mean this to demean our relationship in any way - as I say, I'm quite happy with you, and in general I am quite happy with my life. However, I grow steadily less happy with me as years go by.
I can't count the number of people I knew in high school and my abortive attempts at college who thought I was cute and were probably attracted to me. I was oblivious. I don't generally pound myself over the head with missed opportunities, especially when the story has a happy ending, so do forgive me ten seconds of wailing and gnashing, and then we'll proceed.
OK. Deep breath.
Last week was a weird week, with my brain caught in a loop of speculation about flowers and funerals and other people's psychoses. I know two people who I am very worried about right now. Not because I think they're self-destructing, but because they think they are, and I can't agree and there is no good way to tell them I think they're wrong. This is one of the things that touched off the rant on giving advice, below.
So for the moment I'm keeping my mouth shut, trying not to make what is already a tense situation worse. One of them is an old friend and normally I feel perfectly free to have loud shouting matches with her, since we're both hotheads ... but right now I am scared to make any loud noises around her, I worry she might vibrate apart.
Incidentally, part of that advice rant -- the "no reply to email" part -- annoyed dear SR, but I've apologized. I should state it for everyone else's benefit too: Just because I don't see the virtues of the social pleasantry, or the message which simply says, "Hi, I'm here and still paying attention," does not mean that you're foolish if you do, or that I think less of you because you do. This is very much a your-mileage-may-vary situation.
Actually, I'm rethinking my position on the whole mess. SR, whose persuasive paragraphs are so smooth that I think he must have secretly negotiated the Wye accords, included this wonderful statement:
To a certain extent, if I tell somebody about my problems, the subtext is, "Tell me that you understand me. That this is normal. That my reactions are sane." And the ritual confirmations carry the subtext of "I understand what you're going through. You're okay." I'm not really looking for solutions; I know I have to work things out for myself. I just want reassurance that I can do so.
Thanks, SR. It doesn't cover some of the situations I most object to -- getting a problem or a cry of anguish from someone, I agree, calls for a reply; getting general news/gossip/babble maybe does not. Nonetheless, in a way you couldn't possibly anticipate, it helps me clear up some of the things that have confused me over the past four days.
You folks have got to remember that I barely spoke to humans outside my family for years. I think I said about ten words in my first three years of high school - those Dark Ages I mentioned. I'm having to learn this human-interaction thing late in life, just like everything else I'm learning.
More to come today. Check back again later.
technical difficulties
twenty-four eleven twelve
Maybe I'm having flu in installments. Last week my body hurt like flu but my throat and sinuses were fine. Today my body is fine and my head feels like someone's been stuffing sandpaper into all its cavities and rasping it. Go figure.
Only one of you was blunt enough to point it out, but I did promise multiple entries yesterday and I didn't deliver. Mea culpa, and I apologize if you kept checking to see when the promised words would come in. It wasn't apathy, it was my monitor.
Let me digress. This is a very long digression, but I need to dump this out of my brain before I can proceed:
As early as kindergarten we learn about mixing paint. We learn that there are three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow; three secondary colors obtained by mixing any two of those, orange, violet, and green; and that when you mix all three primaries together, you get black.
That's an oversimplification when you're actually mixing paints, because the colors described above are theoretical ones, and tubes of paint aren't pure colors ... but that's too much of a digression, and besides there's an excellent book on it, called Blue And Yellow Don't Make Green.
When you work with computer graphics, even a little bit, sooner or later you have to come to grips with the fact that monitors use a different system. The three primary colors are red, green, and blue. There are also three secondary colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow. Mixing all three primaries gets you white.
"Cyan" and "magenta" may seem like vague terms, but in computers they have a very specific meaning. (And in printing. The "CMYK" or "four-color" process refers to the fact that color pictures, like in your newspaper, are printed as a Cyan layer, a Magenta layer, a Yellow layer, and a blacK layer. But that's another digression, and we shouldn't go there since, from a computer point of view, you have to mix the colors backwards.)
Cyan, in the computer world, is what you get when you mix equal amounts of blue and green. Looking at the color, this is the most intuitive of the three. It isn't hard to visually imagine that this light aqua color could be the child of blue and green. Nor, with a little more twisting, is it difficult to see magenta as equal parts red and blue. It's a purple-red; no problem.
But mixing red and green to get yellow? That's truly counterintuitive. When I'm making RGB hexes (the little codes for colors in HTML, like #FFFFFF), I can usually get what I want by working in my head (it helps to be able to think in hexadecimal) ... but yellows are always the ones I have to go look up.
I'll never have to look it up again. The "blue gun" in my monitor has begun to go out. No more blue. Now, think about that. If a white dot means that the blue gun, the red gun, and the green gun are all hitting that point with full intensity, but the blue gun isn't working .... All the white areas on my screen become yellow. Everything acquires a yellowish tint. And blue areas show up as black - meaning nothing's hitting those pixels at all.
Actually, using the yellowed screen wouldn't be a problem; it's the steady flicker back and forth that's distracting.
Like I said, a long digression. I had to get all that color-theory stuff out of my head. Anyway, that's why I didn't write last night. My monitor's dying.
This is really annoying since the monitor has already been repaired under warranty once -- several months ago, when the red gun went out and everything looked like it was underwater for a few days.
- - -
Most of the things I wanted to write about yesterday are now uninteresting to me. I was going to mention the problems at Boston Latin school with their racial admissions issues, but on second thought it's a no-win situation and I'll keep my mouth shut. The paper's moaning about the Patriots leaving and for once I find myself agreeing with inflammatory ultra-conservative columnist Howie Carr: Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
I am still upset about AOL and Netscape, though. I loathe AOL, I use Netscape, and if AOL buys Netscape, I will have to face the very real fact that I may have to curtail web usage somewhere down the road because I do not have an acceptable browser.
(I will not use the Microsoft Product, for two reasons which have nothing to do with my dislike of Microsoft. One: it's intrusive; it likes to intertwine itself into your system and set itself up as the default handler for various things you don't want it to touch. Two: On a Mac? You must be kidding. Microsoft products haven't run well on Macs in years.)
Actually, Netscape already has more features than I use, so I can just stick with this version for a long time to come. It's too big, of course -- the program should, by rights, be half its size and run twice as fast. But all software is these days -- I've come to accept bloat, even though I will never learn to be quiet about it.
Here is a quote from today's paper from industry analyst Danny Rimer which tells why I oppose AOL's potential purchase of Netscape:
"It used to be you could claim that AOL was the on-line service for beginners and then you graduate to the Internet and to Netscape. This gets rid of the myth."
[Hyphen in "online" and caps on "internet" are his. I take no blame for either.]
Yes. From now on, no one will graduate at all. It will all be dumbed down and all the good parts will be locked away. Too dangerous for us feeble users.
If you use AOL: I have nothing against you personally. However, you are probably already aware how much your reputation is being besmirched by the company you're keeping.
The other thing is that this will undermine the anti-trust case against Microsoft. True! They are already beginning the strategy. ("See? See? We can't really dominate the market as much as you say if our competitors can take action like this!") That's a horrendous reason for this crucial fight to fall apart. If AOL really does unseat the Microsoft trial with this greed-inspired move, I may have to go Unabomber and start sending strange packages to Steve Case in Virginia.
we owe you a reality check
twenty-four eleven twenty-three
Consumer culture is so weird. I never have to search far for examples. With Stay Tuned I never ran out of material, although I frequently ran out of energy to search for it.
Tonight in the grocery store I saw boxes of cereal called Flutie Flakes, with Doug Flutie on the front, big as life. I think he's a football player, which means I wouldn't notice if the earth swallowed him up, and I certainly don't want him in my house on top of my refrigerator.
Then, in line, I looked at the magazine Woman's World, which I'd say is like the dark side of Martha Stewart except that Martha is the dark side. On the cover, a picture of a snowman, and the caption "Wow! This Snowman's a Party Dip!"
Does a cream-cheese snowman strike anyone else besides me as surreal? How 'bout those Flutie Flakes? [giggle] Can you say the name aloud without laughing?
Every time I look at culture of consumer excess, I find it either strikes me as irritating or bizarre. Usually the irritation lapses into amusement, because I'm just that kind of person, but I do worry about what I'll be like when I'm fifty.
[I should note, in fairness, that I was there buying a frozen pizza because I didn't want to cook. That sound you hear is the wall of my glass house cracking.]
Once in a while, though, I see someone who is clearly doing things the Right Way. And it startles me. Which is maybe not a good sign.
This was in the paper yesterday. It's from a local company which is a general retailer of odd lots, like insurance writeoffs, surplus merchandise, et cetera. You never know what you'll find in their stores, but it'll be cheap and it'll be presented as exactly what it is.
They're known for their weird, frank ads, and this one is no exception:
Don't you just hate it when people who sell you stuff lie to you! Well, it happens, and it happened to me last month when we bought 2400 "Cuddle Knit" sweaters from a @#$%^! New York sharpie. He told me that the fancy department stores sell them for $29.99 to $39.99 ... and since I had a sample in my hands, I (fool that I am) believed him. So I decided to put them out for $9.99.
I've since done some research, and I'm convinced that these are $20 sweaters. $9.99 is too high ... I've marked them down to $5.95. So ... if you bought one of these sweaters from us for $9.99, then WE OWE YOU $4.04. Bring in your receipt and get your money.
I want more ads like that.
grasshoppers, turkeys, and other object lessons
twenty-five eleven eleven
Tomorrow's Thanksgiving. I'm not looking forward to it. Big dinner with lots of strangers, and I'm shy. Plus I am the Known Dessert Pro, so I must make pies tonight, in addition to writing a mouth organ column. Fortunately I already know what both the column and the pies are going to be like.
Woke up with the nasty head again today. Ranjit wrote to say that for some reason his brain kept reading my earlier comment as saying that my head had been "stuffed with grasshoppers." Not far from the truth. Two mornings now I have had to steam my sinuses open in the shower. The sore throat is from sleeping on my back and breathing roughly through my mouth all night, nose unusable. Oddly enough, I don't consider this critical or debilitating -- this is just what winter is like for a Southerner in New England.
By the by, I've noticed something about Thanksgiving in New England. If you're also a mouth organ reader, I beg your pardon, because you're going to see this twice, but basically, I've noticed that of the two "American" holidays, Thanksgiving is a bigger deal in the North and the Fourth of July is a bigger one in the South. We never laid on a huge feast or invited random people to Thanksgiving at home. Many places didn't close. Here everything closes. On the other hand, on the 4th at home the huge picnic/barbeque spread is laid out, all manner of humans are invited over, etc etc. Here there's a gala to-do on the Charles, but not much in the way of home celebration.
Oh well. I just offer that as idle speculation, especially since any postcards from me in the next few days will be catch-as-catch-can. Tomorrow is hectic, and on Friday I hope to be wining and dining a visitor from the West Coast.
- - -
Radical change of subject now. I'm not bothering to try to segue these two together.
I was commenting to someone about quirks involving objects. Things which must be in a certain place, arranged a certain way, et cetera. Oddly (since, in general, my true love is the anal-retentive one and I'm a freewheeler) I have more of these than she does. We're both slobs a lot of the time (too busy) but I'm an eccentric slob.
She leaves her credit card receipts all over the house because she doesn't use them to check her books later; I do use mine for that, and therefore the receipts must be in one of several set locations for me to not lose them. If I see one of her receipts lying around, I hate to throw it out -- she might want it -- but I also don't want it lying there, I'll think it's mine and panic because it's not where it's supposed to be.
I despise changing the kitchen light. It's a very high fixture which I have to stand on a chair to reach, it involves two headless screws which are nearly impossible to undo, and the glass panels tend to come out when you move it, which means you need a third hand. So I turn the kitchen light off whenever no one's actually in the room. She seems to think of the kitchen light as the "security" light -- when she's home, it's on. So we're always flipping that switch back and forth. On the other hand, I believe in leaving the light on in the front hall when I leave the house, and she usually won't leave the house until it's completely dark - every light must be turned off. I ceded that one -- I can find my way around the house with my eyes shut now.
I leave my glasses in one position every night when I turn off the computer and go to bed. That position has drifted a few times, but the point is, if the glasses aren't in that special location or actually being worn, I will generally have trouble finding them. This is one quirk which may actually be advantageous.
I don't like her to spread out one day's newspaper until she has recycled the previous day's. If for some reason the previous day's needs to be kept out, then I want her to keep each paper in a separate room. I hate mixing newspaper sections.
I don't have problems with my keys, which is what originally inspired these musings, but that's because they're always either in my dresser or my pants pocket. If I were wearing dresses and carrying a purse I might have more trouble.
I guess everyone has weirdnesses like these. If you want to share some of them with the world, send them to me and I'll mention them here.
bugs and commandments
twenty-nine eleven one
A lovely filmgoing night. First they showed the Star Wars trailer unexpectedly. I hadn't seen it. Looks good -- no surprise there.
Then they showed a trailer for The Prince Of Egypt -- a little surprising, since we were there to see a Disney film, and Disney and Dreamworks want to kill each other right now.
The idea behind this film did not interest me in the least the last time I saw this trailer. For, lo, what is so tedious as an animated Bible story? You just know they're going to sanitize the snot out of it.
But the other night the second half of our household Cultural Exchange program took place. See, I (the Southern belle) made my true love see Gone With The Wind in a theatre recently; so, she (the Jewish princess) in retaliation made me sit down and watch The Ten Commandments last night. And, you know, it's a pretty fair swap.
Both are about four hours long. Both have lurid color and horrid miscasting and moments placed in the film for pure spectacle's sake. Both have parts which are so cheesy that you cannot help but giggle aloud. And, when all is said and done, they're both really durable movies. They are Epics -- they're too big to be "good" or "bad" movies. They defy that.
Anyway, although I'm becoming something of an amateur Bible scholar with all this reading, it took seeing DeMille's extravaganza to make me actually want to see The Prince of Egypt. Go figure. It's obvious the animators have seen The Ten Commandments a few times -- as was pointed out, they'd be foolish not to have. I noticed that my ear wasn't hearing something ... then I realized that whoever's doing the voice of Rameses, he's no Yul Brynner. I miss that vibrato.
We had red wine. Wine improves this film. Next time I see GWTW, I'm going to smuggle booze into the theatre.
But, back to this evening's film experience:
Then they showed a funny house piece with the Sesame Street Muppets - not the (also hilarious) one that Sony usually shows, with the Rules of The Theatre, but a special one for Sesame Street's 30th, with Cookie Monster narrating the History of Film. Really, really, funny, with some nice film jokes way over the kids' heads, like when he eats Rosebud.
And then the main attraction! But, no! Pixar has decided to add a Short Feature! Yes, they showed Geri's Game, which I like, but not as much as Tin Toy, their other award-winning short.
And finally the main event: A Bug's Life.
The reviewer for Entertainment Weekly said that there was so much going on in this picture visually that it actually distracted from his enjoyment of it -- that there was literally too much going on. I wouldn't go that far, but I was bombarded enough that I couldn't stop to figure out the main thing which was bothering me about it until it was over.
It has a traditional Disney flaw: a weak center. The hero is nowhere near as interesting as the colorful supporting characters. Even the "female lead" is interesting enough -- she has a lot of nervous tics that make her fun to watch (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, doing her Elaine schtick) -- but the lead is just plain bland. As much as I dislike Woody Allen's whining, the protagonist in Antz was more compelling.
That said, this movie is much more visually interesting than Antz, although Antz has a darkness and ominousness to it that you'll never see in anything with the Disney label. In both movies the voice work is superb. Pixar's graphics are better -- they practially invented this field, after all, and their software's been bubbling for a lot longer. Perhaps it would be appropriate to view Antz as the dark side of A Bug's Life. At any rate I do not believe their sales will cannibalize one another in the least.
Watching the audience this time, vs. the audience for Toy Story, I noticed that the discussions after the movie were as much "Wasn't that scene great?" as they were "Wow, did you see how well the computer did rain effects?" I think Toy Story had a handicap to overcome in that people had to get used to the technology. Now the way is paved. No one ever marvels at the infrastructure behind conventional animated cartoons, even though the labor is no less daunting. Not since the innovation of the multiplane camera, anyway, and that was back in the days of Snow White.
(My true love and I, and other people who have enough of a foot in the door to appreciate the geeky stuff, don't count. Yes, we were trying to speculate which scenes in Aladdin were computer-generated -- check out the pillars in the sultan's throne room -- but not many others were. Cartoons are taken for granted as part of our cultural lexicon. Computer animation is not -- yet.)
It's sort of ironic that the idea is to do it so perfectly that one doesn't notice the infrastructure. A Bug's Life is not all of the film it could be on some points -- I laugh with glee more every time I see Luxo Jr. stomp on the letter I in PIXAR than I did at any point during the movie -- but it cannot be said that the computer gets in the way. I don't recall a point where I was pulled out of the movie because I was noticing process ... and when it comes to computers, I tend to see nothing but.
Pixar folks are twisted people, and I'm happy to see that Disney is comfortable enough to let them display some of that warped sense of humor. (The second grade play that is performed for the circus troupe when they arrive, for example.) OK, there were no Mutant Toys or squeezy aliens in this ("The Claaaw! The Claw is our Master!"), but there was enough that I'd go see another Pixar film in a heartbeat.
Anyway, enough tongue-wagging about that. When you see the film, and you should, be sure to sit all the way through the credits. Pixar has put some surprises in.
- - -
Not going to write about Thanksgiving or other local events now, because I wanted to dump the movie stuff while it was fresh in my mind. I'll get to the other news tomorrow or Monday.
I do want to note that another "sublet" has appeared on inu.org, and this one's not a journal. It's a game, of sorts, Twenty Questions, and I'm one of the brains devising it. Give it a look.
End of advertisement. Time to sleep.
journally jottings
thirty eleven thirteen
My long weekend got a little longer involuntary. I was snuffling and wheezing and coughing all through Thanksgiving, and it's not notably better, so here I am at home, catching up on all the journals I didn't read for four days.
I'm sure that some of you have wondered at the odd nature of these postcards. They don't seem to be about anything in particular, do they? All over the map. I noted the other day that I'm not really a diarist -- I don't talk about the events of my life enough. Well, here's why: A poor self-image and an easily distracted mind.
I was all prepared to give you the minutiae of Thanksgiving. I was! I even said in the last postcard that I was going to talk about it. But reading journals this morning I noticed so many other things that I just have to comment on, all of which have got to be more interesting to you than the details of my holiday. I mean, really, my life is only interesting to me, right?
I'm just not cut out to be a diarist. Some of what I write here I write for my own sake; some of it I write for the reader's sake; in neither of those categories do I care to recall what I ate for Thanksgiving dinner.
But perhaps I should do so, just to prove a point (what point, I'm not sure, but never mind). Tell you what. I have all day -- I'm too full of mucus to write fiction, I don't have the energy to leave the house, and I'm tired of computer games. So after I finish this postcard, and I refill my coffee, I'll compose a wholly different one. Then you can compare and contrast.
Meanwhile ... congratulations on the Whitman winners. I note that the two members of my webring who won Whitman awards are the two who don't read my postcards. The moral is very clear: If you're a diarist, you must stop reading these pages immediately, thereby guaranteeing yourself the award.
No, I'm only kidding. Actually, the Thinking Aloud ring has a heck of a pedigree - only ten sites, but among those ten are two Whitman judges and two Whitman winners. Wow!
Speaking of that "only ten sites" claim -- I am looking for a new site. One. A single new journal site to add to the ring, preferably one which sticks to the criteria on the ring's About page. (To wit: The entries should give that "thinking aloud" feel, the site should be updated several times a week, and the site must keep archives of old entries). Here's the problem:
One site in the ring, Sam Marcello's page (Bowing Down To My Addiction), only updates once a week at most, and she is about to go on hiatus. I can't blame her -- she's trying to get into college and coping with a bunch of other things at once. I love her words dearly and I am not about to pull her from the ring -- but it seems to me that an eleventh site, one which does update several times weekly, is called for. Any suggestions? A male would be nice, as this ring is rather gender-uneven, but it's not a strong criterion.
Reading the sites in the ring, I am struck once again by the common interests, and the fervor of those interests. I figure all I would have to do is produce a theatrical adaptation of any classic SF story, and I would be able to get lively discussion from every single ring member on the subject.
It does make me sometimes feel like the odd non-fan out, especially since I am no longer watching any TV, not even Chris Carter shows, not even my beloved Sammo Hung -- I just haven't been in the mood for many weeks. (I did watch the Voyager episode where Kim and Chakotay have to retroactively save the ship from destruction -- the only well-constructed episode in a long while.) Apparently Babylon 5 ended. Several journals commented on it. Never saw it, not once. I don't feel left out, exactly -- more like it was something I should have been aware of but wasn't, as if I were finding out only today that the president is under impeachment hearings.
I have been having a couple of unrelated email discussions this morning which touch on the faces one presents in one's electronic writings, vs. the real person beneath. Once in a while we see something that uncovers a person there we don't know about, and it surprises us.
There are lots of things about my life I don't mention here. Seeing Al mention Rocky Horror, for example, brought back a whole slew of memories, good and bad, from that turbulent period. Rocky Horror was literally the most important thing in my life for about two years .... I don't think I've ever mentioned any of that here at all.
You don't get a good picture of me from my words. Of course, what I think I'm presenting may be different from what you're actually seeing, but I suspect that if you saw the real personality lurking under these words, you'd find it considerably less likable/interesting.
I should note, though, that Mary Anne, an online friend whom I have seen in the flesh twice now and who says I'm too self-deprecating, would probably disagree. Rhonda, who was an in-the-flesh friend before she became an electronic friend, would have a thing or two to say also.
I am self-deprecating. Some of it is the Southern Belle mentality. Read Marlyn Schwarz's A Southern Belle Primer about how they will never, never accept a compliment. I was taught that humility was the first of all virtues.
I also don't think that I do anything especially well, it's just that most of the world does everything so half-assed that mere competence comes to look a lot like excellence.
But I wasn't writing this postcard to talk about me.
The last thing that came to my mind, reading journals this morning, is that Felix talks about being estranged from a close relative. I was going to write her about this and tell her that it's all right, sometimes you have to do things like that, and it doesn't mean you're an ogre or cold-blooded or anything. But then I realized that I wouldn't come off as especially impartial. When I speak of "my family" I am always referring to my maternal family. I haven't seen my father since before I came to Boston, and I haven't seen any of my father's family since, hmm, probably before I finished high school.
It's always curious to feel regret over the fact that you feel no regret.
thanksgiving recollected
thirty eleven fourteen
All right -- this is my second postcard today, and if you haven't read the one before it, you might want to read that first.
Rose and Eric are friends of ours. Eric's mother died earlier this year, and they decided that they wanted to have one last Thanksgiving in her house, a big Thanksgiving dinner with some of Eric's favorite traditional foods and lots of guests.
Being in the house, which has been left basically untouched since Eric's mother's death, was a little creepy at first. One guest, one of the ones who had known Eric's mother well, had to leave -- she was simply too upset to stay. But it became less of an issue as everyone got used to the surroundings.
Food was something of an impasse, although a tasty one. Rose and the spouse, who were doing most of the cooking, are Gourmet readers who like to do off-beat things with food, and add lots of spicy; Eric I would describe as more of a traditionalist -- he tends to like simple, unadulterated tastes. For example, we had to split the mashed potatoes in half, because we could only add garlic to one half. I'm not sure that was Eric's request or not. Actually I am coming to the conclusion that I prefer them without garlic myself. Horseradish, on the other hand, is a welcome addition, and one which I had never encountered before ye spouse came along.
I didn't really cook anything, just stood around the kitchen handing people the right bowl at the right time, cleaning up behind the two industrious people. I'm an adequate cook; more importantly, though, I can be useful to someone without getting in their way, a rare skill which led me to seriously consider nursing school, until my aunt the RN told me what hell it was.
I also don't enjoy cooking usually, except for desserts, which are fun. I made a pecan pie and a pumpkin pie. The pecan pie recipe was a new one for me -- it had cane syrup in addition to the corn syrup. Now, you're not likely to have tasted cane syrup unless you've spent a lot of time in the Deep South. It's more like molasses, with a vaguely metallic taste, than syrup. It gave the pie an interesting flavor. Everyone loved it but me -- I think I'll use my old recipe next time. More importantly, I can still make fantastic pie crust, a skill I cherish, since it's the only thing I can make that my mother can't. Heh.
You may add "stuffing" to your list of things where there is a north vs. south divide. In the South, stuffing is likely as not called "dressing," and the basis is almost always cornbread. In the North, stuffing is made from white bread. Aside from Stove Top, I'd never had white-bread dressing before coming up here. This fits the general tendency of the South to prefer cornbreads and quick breads, and the North for yeasted breads. It has to do with hard vs. soft flours and we can have that spiel another day.
My spouse has been using the Cook's Illustrated method of turkey roasting for the last few years. It's elaborate -- you need a V-rack and a means of turning the entire turkey over midway through, while it's molten -- but it solves the usual problem, which is that the white meat cooks faster than the dark meat and usually becomes dry. Also the Cook's method is very careful about temperatures, which is good because roasting a turkey with stuffing inside is a very real bacterial hazard unless you watch the stuffing's temperature carefully.
The food list:
Turkey (we talked Rose down from a 20 lb. one -- good thing, because ye spouse got 4 lbs of leftovers off the carcass)
Stuffing
Mashed potatoes, garlic optional
Brown-sugar carrots
Mixed greens cooked with bacon (we opted for a non-standard vegetable this time)
Pearl onions in a reduction of balsamic vinegar (spouse has to make at least one trendy Gourmet item or she goes nuts)
Sweet potato casserole (my mother's recipe -- the potatoes are shredded, not mashed, and it's not overly sweet like the usual kind)
Biscuits
Cranberry sauce, homemade with whole berries
Cranberry sauce, gelatinous canned variety (there are two schools of thought on cranberry sauce)
Pumpkin pie
Pecan pie
Apple pie (I think we had five pies on the table in all -- and Eric asked Rose to go get some ice cream to have with them!)
Turkey (we talked Rose down from a 20 lb. one -- good thing, because ye spouse got 4 lbs of leftovers off the carcass)
Stuffing
Mashed potatoes, garlic optional
Brown-sugar carrots
Mixed greens cooked with bacon (we opted for a non-standard vegetable this time)
Pearl onions in a reduction of balsamic vinegar (spouse has to make at least one trendy Gourmet item or she goes nuts)
Sweet potato casserole (my mother's recipe -- the potatoes are shredded, not mashed, and it's not overly sweet like the usual kind)
Biscuits
Cranberry sauce, homemade with whole berries
Cranberry sauce, gelatinous canned variety (there are two schools of thought on cranberry sauce)
Pumpkin pie
Pecan pie
Apple pie (I think we had five pies on the table in all -- and Eric asked Rose to go get some ice cream to have with them!)
There were, hmm, eleven people at dinner. We were somewhat overfed. Sleepy from the turkey and red wine. (There were "tryptophan" jokes made, this being an intellectual crowd, and Seinfeld jokes made, because they unfortunately seem to be unavoidable.)
The only real downside of the dinner, aside from the one premature departure, was that Eric's son Gus wasn't feeling well -- it was pretty obvious, as he's a gregarious person like his dad, and when he was in a room full of people and food, showing utterly no interest in either ... Rose finally led him to the sofa in the living room and he slept through most of the evening.
On Friday, Mary Anne was in town, in the middle of sort of a Grand Tour of her East Coast relatives. We were happy to treat her to brunch and talk her ears off (and vice versa) -- it's amazing how people who correspond with each other almost daily can find so many things to say. We talked and talked and she came back to the house and met Inu and we talked some more and then drove her to her aunt's.
I wasn't double-teamed but once, when they ganged up on me to try to convince me to make a trip to California, to see the sights and also all our friends out there. I'm not as reluctant as they think I am, but we have neither the time nor the money to make a trip of the length we'd need to do it justice. Why doesn't everyone come visit the East Coast instead? Boston's lovely, and you don't need a car to sightsee.
One of the things that perturbs me about Californians (not anyone specific -- this is a stereotype) is how they feel that California is the best place in the world to live, like it's a paradise on earth or something. (New Yorkers are like that too, but they at least admit that their city has big problems, which gives them a certain paradoxical flair.)
Even so, I recognize that a trip to see the other ocean is inevitable. It will happen, sooner or later.
18 April 2026