We let the paste dry overnight, and then it was back to work... using coarse-grained drywall sandpaper for the first pass...
And fine-grained paper for the second pass.
Tools of the trade
Home renovation chic.
The reason we were wearing masks.
Time to take a break while the dust clears...
Then it's back upstairs to vacuum up the loose dust on the walls and prep for the retexturing.
Retexturing... in a can!
OK, it took 3 cans.
But hot damn, that ceiling looks better...
Oh yes indeed.
Tomorrow: primer and paint, round 3.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
How to Re-tape and Re-paste Your Drywall: Pt 2 - Sanding and Re-texturing
The Lies of Locke Lamora
I'm forty pages in (and only that through sheer force of will) and I am BORED TO TEARS.
Band of young thieves gallavanting around a seedy medieval underworld.
And, are there any women in this book? Like, not even POV characters, but, like, secondary characters? "As you know Bob" babes, even, or shit, I'll take a fucking useless love interest.
Does this world have women?
If it doesn't get better in 30 pages, I'm selling it on eBay.
Bloody fucking shame, too. I bought this bastard in hardcover.
Barring the Removal of a Certain Piece of Hardware, I Can't Really Become Pregnant, So....
According to the definitions sections of Senate Bill 51:
The term woman means a female human being who is capable of becoming pregnant, whether or not she has reached the age of majority.
I do wonder what this mysterious Third Gender is, tho: what do we call all of those barren, menopausal, and sugically sterile women?
Do we get a special bathroom?
Saturday, May 19, 2007
How to Re-tape and Re-paste Your Drywall: Pt 1
Wear comfy shoes. And put plastic over fucking everything.
Invest in a big ole' bucket o' paste.
Remove crappy tape and apply new tape. If you are unable to remove crappy tape job done by contractors, fucking put new tape over it anyway.
Tape tape tape. It is self-adhesive!
Begin paste job. Slather paste. Two slather things work well for this (yes, "slather things" is the technical term).
Fiddle with the light fixtures. This will make the lights in the rest of the room go out. 
Take a break. 
Keep fucking slathering paste.
Tomorrow, we sand this fucker. Again.
And then Stephanie and I demo and drywall the basement ourselves! (and this time, it will REALLY BE FREE)
Tomorrow: the EXCITING SAGA CONTINES WITH...
Sanding and painting, PART TWO!!!!!!!!!
Friday, May 18, 2007
In the BAG
I AM DONE WITH GW EDITS FOREVER.
DONE I TELL YOU. FUCKING DONE.
FINISHED all line edits today. FINISHED. NO, REALLY.
I WILL NOT do any more edits on this book until or unless asked to do so by an editor or agent.
IT IS IN THE FUCKING BAG. I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON THIS BOOK FOR FOUR YEARS AND IT IS TIME TO LET IT GO. IT IS DONE I TELL YOU.
Now I'm going back to writing Black Desert full time. And outlining Big Genocidal Family Saga Epic (with female guerrilla fighters).
DONE I TELL YOU.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Bible Fight!
I like that Mary can whoop some ass while carrying the baby Jesus.
The controls are a little tricky to work with, but the fact that I can play Eve vs. Satan motivates me...
To While Away the Livelong Night
Or, if you can't sleep, here's some distractions (you'll want to mute the sound):
Grow!
Grow RPG version!
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Paycheck
Received my paycheck today for the three days of work I did at the investment firm last week.
It means I can afford to pay my minimum credit card payments this month, but even with my student loans deferred, I'm still paying for all of my groceries with credit cards.
However, now that I've done some work in Ohio, I finally went ahead and applied for Ohio unemployment. I have no idea of my claim will be approved (I put this off because I figured since I quit my last position, I wouldn't be eligible - it appears that illness/injury and "moving" are among the choices I have for quitting, though. So there may be hope yet).
If I can qualify for unemployment I might be able to stop running up this credit card bill.
The bill is staggering at this point. Absolutely staggering.
Moderating Trolls
I've seen Cory's post about comments moderation in several other places, but I wanted to post a link to it here because Fear of Trolls is a subject that's come up a *lot* among women bloggers (and has been one of the most-attended panels at the Blogher conference, I've heard). Cory's primary "troll whisperer" example in this article is, of course, Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
The last time I posted about comments moderation, I brought up the great example of TNH, as well. I even brought up TNH during The Great "Kameron Hurley is a Straw Feminist" Debate of `05.
There are a lot of great places for feminist discussion. Pandagon does pretty well, but I recently spent a big chunk of time reading a whole thread over at Twisty's place, and I was really impressed. You can engage in a radical lesbian feminist discussion there without being radical, female, or lesbian.
It's a safe space for productive discussion. For everyone. You just need to actively *add* to the discussion. If you're just there to be an asshat, you're not going to see your asshatted comment posted. Twisty's even got some guidelines. From what I've seen, if she doesn't like what you have to say, she'll just delete your post. Or make fun of you. Or make fun of you and then delete your post.
Be civil or go home.
That's been my approach to comment moderation since I started this blog. Be civil or go home. If you're not interested in having a productive discussion, go play somewhere else. I've had some hate mail and a number of inappropriate comments, but I just deleted it all. I'm lucky in that traffic is low enough that I don't have to employ the use of spam filters yet, but those help too, particularly the ones you can use to filter posts that contain certain words.
One of the blogs that, I think, failed to community build properly was Feministing. I remember spending some time trying to comment there, and finding the comments section filled with self-proclaimed "Men's Rights Activists" who, like many MRAs, used there personal grievances against their wives and girlfriends as excuses to rail against feminists in general and take over feminist discussions. I learned pretty quickly that Feministing wasn't somewhere you'd go for discussion, just news (it's one of those sites that could even subsist just fine *without* comments).
You don't have to engage with every poster. You don't have to air the flighty, non-relevant, asshatted ramblings of every poster. I think that a lot of self-described "liberals" have a lot of problems with the idea of deleting comments cause they see it as "censorship." But think of it this way: I wouldn't tolerate somebody calling me a dick-sucking straw feminist in "real life," so why would I put up with it online? I'm didn't create this space so I could be somebody else's doormat.
Moderation is an exercise in community building. You figure out what kind of community you want, and you encourage it.
For women who are still terrified at the idea of hate mail and sexual harassment in their threads, well, just know this: it's going to happen. It happens because you having a voice threatens some people, and the best way to kow-tow is to shut up again.
I don't know about you, but I'm sick of kow-towing to asshats.
So blog away. Just remember it's your space, not theirs. You're not here to be "nice." You're here to be heard.
Does Diabetes Hurt?
Ian asked me yesterday if diabetes hurts.
The short answer to that is: if you don't monitor it like an SOB, yeah, it hurts, and it eventually breaks you down and kills you. As does life. So.
When my sugar runs high (above 180 or 200) for a few hours in a day, I have a lot of problems with my feet. They start to throb, and then I get these shooting pains sometimes that go up my legs, usually when I'm trying to get to sleep at night. It means I have trouble sleeping. And I get sugar-high headaches, which are fucking annoying.
There are other symptoms of malaise as well - muzzy thinking, bitchiness, tiredness, trouble seeing - but I suppose these aren't actual *pain.* When my sugar's low, I start to shake and if I'm real low my vision starts to blacken. But, again, these aren't actually *painful* things.
The shots hurt about a third of the time. Sometimes there's burning when the insulin on the syringe goes into your skin. Sometimes you hit a blood vessel. Mostly, though, you're injecting into fat, and if you do it firm and fast, it doesn't hurt much. If, like me, you have to reuse needles, it probably hurts more than it should, and generally toward the end of the day when you're taking your third shot with the same syringe, which is now duller than it was during the first shot in the morning.
And, you know, I have some reservations about saying "if you take care of it, diabetes isn't so bad," because you know, you can do everything "right" and still have fucking bad days. There's nothing more frustrating than doing everything right and hitting 226 and feeling like shit (for physical *and* psychological reasons; ie guilt). There can be stress, unexpected sugar syrup in a latte that was supposed to have sugar-free, a haggerd schedule with no room for exercise... in other words, Life can come between you and The Numbers.
Which is kind of ironic, if you think about it.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
By the Numbers
Numbers for the last four days:
92
67
65
106
65
102
93
108
113
98
94
90
For the record, getting these numbers back on track has been a fucking bitch.
I've been forcing myself to get up before 9am (which I should have been doing anyway), which helps fight off the higher morning numbers - I take my meal insulin before the morning glucose rush.
It looks like what was giving me those weird nighttime spikes that I had to adjust at 2am was probably all those damned cinnamon almonds and butter toffee peanuts I was eating. I cut those out, and cut out the extra cheese I was eating too, mainly cause of the calorie issue as opposed to the sugar issue, and things straightened up.
However, it means eating pretty fucking strictly, even for me. I still have my one whole wheat pancake on Sat and Sun mornings, but that's pretty much it. Luckily, berries are in season, so my food routine is something like this:
Breakfast:
2 egg vegetarian omelette w/salsa
2 pieces turkey bacon
Lunch:
Mixed stirfry of chicken/beef, carrots, onions, peas, tomato, cilantro, garlic and parmesan cheese
A cup of mixed berries
Dinner:
tomato soup
cheese quesedilla (I found a 9 carb tortilla!)
salad or green vegetable (I like brussel sprouts)
Mixed berries if still hungry
(This isn't a strict thing - I'll mix up dinner and lunch or make a tostada or "nachos" by cutting up and toasting the low carb tortilla, but I try to use these same basic ingrediants for my meals: vegetables, meats, low carb tortillas, cheese, vegtable soup etc)
And, of course, regular exercise; bike riding or some time on the elliptical and my morning weights.
Yeah, they're great fucking numbers, but you can't keep this up all the time. It's mainly something I can do during the weekdays because I've got a routine, but during vacations, traveling of any sort, big upsets, it's just not all that feasible. Still, this is what I'd like to see the vast majority of the time, mainly because it means my feet never bother me at night, I have lots more energy, and I just all around feel fantastic.
Fucking pain in the ass, tho.
Farming the Third World
If I didn't know just how much armed bands of revolutionaries really did affect crop yields, I might have had some qualms about this one.
As it is: diversify, diversify, diversify. And don't invest too much in peanuts.
Hypo.... what?
I spent a couple of hours at Walmart today scouring the shelves for hypoallergenic products. Before I moved out here to Dayton I'd never concerned myself with this shit before. Who were all of these people out there with "sensitive" skin? Did this mean the creams were less abrasive? Were there no crushed walnuts in these particular brands of face wash?
What I came to learn, living in a house with someone who is, well, allergic to everything, is that "hypoallergenic" and "made for sensitive skin" and "fragrance free" are often the labels that distinguish between "safe to use in the house" and "instant death."
Ian's allergic to a number of household chemicals; nobody's entirely sure of which ones, but if we stick to hypoallergenic, fragrance-free, "for sensitive skin" he doesn't have to be taken into the emergency room.
Steph and Ian have been together for 8 years, and I'd always known he was allergic to perfumes, scented candles, and all Lysol products, but until I moved in here, I wasn't aware of just how violent that reaction was, and how many things could trigger it.
We had a couple of near-misses with my spray-on deodorant and at least one roll on substitute that turned out to be worse and made him tear up and start hacking (I switched to Dove unscented anti-persperant deodorant "for sensitive skin," and that one seems to be a keeper), but the day I nearly killed him was when I was using my face wash and he walked into the bathroom after me and started hacking.
What I've realized since that episode is that instead of replacing my empty bottle of face wash with the same kind I'd had before, I'd accidentally picked up the same brand in a different bottle, but instead of saying "sensitive skin" it said "blemish control." I spent several days trying to figure out why he'd had a sudden reaction to this facewash I'd had for a month, and then realized I must have made a stupid error when picking up the replacement.
While going through products to verify that it was, indeed, the face wash, he ended up huffing too much of the stuff and spent an hour prone on the couch while his lungs seized. He eventually had to use an epi-pen so he could breathe.
This is scary fucking shit, to be poisoned by common household products, and it's been a struggle to find products that work that don't kill him.
I finally had to go in today, a month or so after that reaction, to get hair products because I realized that some of that "you need to dress more professionally" thing during one of my interviews had to do with the fact that since I was no longer using product on my hair, I really looked like dirt.
I've found that Dove and Aveeno actually make the most "fragrance free" and "for sensitive skin" products. That's pretty much all we use around the house. Ian uses some salon products as well, Paul Mitchell, I think, which also manage to wash and style without the threat of sudden death.
The Godfather
When men were men! And women were women! With varying degrees of success.
I started reading The Godfather so I could take a look at the way Mario Puzo had rolled out the plot. The next book I'm working on is a sprawling family saga of revenge, rebellion, genocide, and female guerrilla fighters, and though reading Gone With the Wind has been entertaining, the narrative is a sprawling mess.
Puzo's book is much stronger, and I feel he has a far better handle on his characters and how the book's chapters were going to be set up than Mitchell did with hers.
Besides, The Godfather is the fucking premier bloody generational saga.
The movie's plot stuck pretty closely to what's in the book - the book's got more characters, much more background on each of the supporting characters, and more history of the Corleone family. About what you'd expect.
What interested me were a couple of things he did with the narrative; not just the rolling distant flashbacks, but the way he'd say "this happened" at the end of a chapter (Sonny Corleone's body is revealed) and then spend the *next* chapter telling you *how* it happened.
I used to snap at a writer friend of mine who'd set up his fiction and nonfiction this way: here's what happened. Here's how it happened. He used the structure so much that I'd find myself skipping over the explanation of what happened in order to go to the next chronological event - I never felt that the explanation of how something happened added anything to the action itself.
I'm still not sure how Puzo makes this work. In the case of Sonny's death, it's vital that we know *how* this event occurred because it sets up Michael's murder of his brother in law at the end - we need to understand the events that are set into motion by this event.
By placing the scene with the undertaker *before* the death of Sonny, it means we're not yawning through that whole background chapter about the undertaker already *knowing* why the Godfather has called on his services. It's a pacing/suspense issue.
As far as the women in this story, well, tackling that bit would be like trying to tackle the racism and stereotypes, and well... you sort of have to swallow it wholesale if you're going to read this. Both of the women who's heads we get into have only ever been with Corleone men, and were so affected by the experience that they were either *never* with anyone else or only with somebody else after the death of the one they wanted. These are strong women, and pretty well fleshed out (these aren't cardboard people) but this story isn't about them. It's about their husbands. Just in case you were hoping for something suprising.
In any case, I liked the traditional "tragedy" set-up where the story begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral. There was a nice open and close with that. I haven't stolen that yet.
I've gone so far as to wonder if I'll literally map out the plot of my next book by taking a chapter-by-chapter plot from something like The Godfather that's well-plotted. It might help with some of my plot flailing midway and my sudden, delirious rush to the end once I figure out what the hell I'm doing.
It's time to make up a better writing guidebook, cause what I got ain't cutting it.
Words of Wisdom
"There is nothing on the internet as interesting as the book you are supposed to be writing. Get back to work." - David Lubar
(via Shaken & Stirred)
Monday, May 14, 2007
New Diggs & Haircut
I realize I haven't posted any pics of my new diggs yet.
Here's my new room configuration and workspace:
The map to the left of the desk is my GW world map. Sometimes actual WORK even gets done here. I even have line edits just SITTING on my desk WAITING to get input.
Don't knock the stuffed rabbit, man. It is a vital part of my PROCESS. Actually, it makes a really good pillow.
Behold, TESSA: the ferocious hell beast who REALLY rules this household. Just look at that bold, disapproving stare.
And.... haircut.
NOW I'm ready for Wiscon.
"But Really, They Did it For Free"
What I did this weekend....
Attempted to re-paste, re-sand, prime and paint this with my roomies:
Up into the attic....
From here it doesn't look so bad!!
Wait a minute. There's something odd about that ceiling...
What the hell...?
OMG.
OMGWTFBBQ FOR SERIOUS
(for the record, it looks about 10X worse in real life - getting the shading to show up in the pics was tough)
But really, it's almost like they did it for free....
In Which The Protagonist Gets a Bad Haircut
Well, at least it's shorter.
You know, Stephanie used to tell these little anecdotes about the difference between living in Dayton and the PNW, and I used to think they were terribly funny.
Her oft-repeated story is one in which she was sitting around with the other receptionists at her workplace and she used the word "egregious" in regular conversation.
"Egri... what?" one of them asked.
"Why do you use all of these big words?" they asked her after a few months. "Are you trying to sound smarter than us?"
They have since learned that they can ask Stephanie how to spell things like "side effects." She was also able to explain that "anxiety" isn't spelled with an "e."
I thought these were terribly funny stories.
At the salon today the stylist - a young 20-something woman - rang me up, and I asked her if she had any hypoallergenic styling products, since Ian is allergic to, well, everything.
"Hypo... what?" she asked.
I am officially in Dayton.
Some Other Things That Aren't Cutting Edge
"The debate rages over whether or not this image represents an artistic interpretation of a sexual fantasy, or if it just glorifies rape. As the fashion industry continues to push the envelope and strives to remain cutting edge the line between risque and offensive continues to blur."
We're surrounded by images very like the one at the link above on a daily basis. If women aren't actively inviting objectification, "deflowerment" or merely "ravishment" (ie forced sex, rape), then they're looking pained and frightened and hungry and vulnerable. I've seen so many images like this one that I just sort of shrugged and went, "Yeah, another oh-boy-she-likes-it fuck fest circle jerk."
Whatever.
Then I read the script underneath it. About how the "reason" fashion designers are putting out ads like this because they want to remain "cutting edge." Though I'm sure this particular writer was just making an educated guess with that wording, I'd suspect the designers themselves would say something really similiar.
After all, if we're not beating up women in new and interesting ways in fashion ads, how are we going to remain new and interesting and cutting edge? If we don't beat up women, nobody will even pay attention! They won't want to buy these sexy clothes that invite men to beat them up. And what man doesn't want to beat up a woman wearing these clothes!
What gets me about so many -isms running rampant in mass media isn't even that it's just fucking wrong. It's that it's fucking lazy. You put a bunch of fresh young people in a room and we come out with the same sexist, racist, classist bullshit we've been churning out for the last fifty years.
Dear producers of mass media and writers writing about mass media,
Stylized rape isn't cutting edge. I could link to about a bazillion other ads just like this one.
Gory shots of female crime victims? Not cutting edge.
Raping women to show just how bad your bad guys are? Not cutting edge. (yes, even if the person allowing it to continue is female)
Women doing laundry dressed in thongs and pearls? Not cutting edge (yes, even if she's doing a superhero's laundry).
What frustrates me so much, reading and writing SF, is to see just how much we all keep rehashing the same old shit. I've come to expect it from the fashion industry, you know? But there's this assumption that the brutal treatment of women is a universally human thing. That we'll just always do this. That it's always been this way and will always be this way.
In a genre that's supposed to show us how things can be really different, that should challenge us to think beyond our assumptions, seeing even the stuff that gets high praise relying on the same sad assumptions of race and class (the way things are now is the way they will always be) is fucking depressing.
We can sit around and putz with SF gadgets and teleporters and FTL all day, but plugging in a new technology, a people on a new planet, and making everybody think and act in exactly the way they would today, without said technologies, here on this planet, is fucking lazy, and it takes all the gosh-wow-how-cool feeling from it. I just can't take your gadgetry seriously when your blond secondary female love interest only shows up to flirt with and fuck the geeky, misunderstood protagonist(for example - I am picking on BSG with the links, but I'm thinking primarily of Heinlein).
Obviously, SF isn't the only place where this happens, as seen in the fashion links above, but these are the sorts of things that influence us on a level we don't think about and aren't often aware of until after the fact, when we realize the only reason we included our heroine getting raped was to give her sufficient motivation to severely injure a guy. Because unless she was raped, you know, hurting a guy like that just wouldn't be OK (yes, I did this in GW. I have since taken out the rape backstory).
We all do this stuff. We put shit in there without thinking about it. These assumptions become so invisible - like het privledge, male privledge, white priviledge - that you just don't see them anymore. You take them for granted. And so you just keep on perpetuating them.
I want to see something really fucking cutting edge, all right. I want to see a fashion ad with powerful women who don't get beat up or shit on or hung by the neck, women who don't look starved and frightened. I want to see somebody thinking outside of the fucking box. And it's sad that even something as simple as that would be so fucking different that people would sit up and take notice. So. Fucking. Simple.
Sure I'd love to see something cutting edge.
But this isn't it.
Somethin' For the Mommas
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Happy Anniversary
My parents called me tonight to remind me that it was a year ago today that Jenn called them to say I'd been brought into the hospital in a diabetic coma.
My condition was "stable," but though Jenn knew that was better than the condition under which I'd been brought in, the doctor on duty told my mom that I was the top priority case brought in that night, and it would be in my parents' best interests to get on a plane to Chicago.
My mom remembers this because she'd seen Jenn's number on the caller ID and thought, "Oh, let them sweat. Kameron forgot to call me on Mother's Day!" and then felt absolutely miserable about it later when it turned out the reason Jenn was calling them at 11pm west coast time, 1am Chicago time, is because I'd been hauled into the emergency room.
It's a funny thing, because I've never known which date to count it from. Should it be the 14th, when Jenn had actually called the paramedics? (at around 11:30 pm or so) Or should I tally it from the 15th, when I actually arrived at the hospital? (it was just after midnight on Monday the 15th).
I supppose my mom's way of reckoning it is probably the most accurate.
I could remember today as the day I was diagnosed with a chronic illness, the day my whole life changed, the beginning of the end of a very good friendship, the beginnging of the end of my life in Chicago.
But mostly, it's the anniversary of another chance at living.
By all rights, I should be dead, and if Jenn hadn't stayed up that night, worrying over my increasingly delusional state ("I need to do my taxes...," "There's a little black dog...") before finally finding me standing up but completely glassy-eyed and nonresponsive in the bathroom, well, yeah, hey, I may not be here.
After realizing the seriousness of my condition, much later, I thought a lot about whether or not I would have been OK with the idea of my life ending that night. And you know, I would have been OK with it if that's how it turned out. I wouldn't have done anything differently up to that point. I'd had a fucking good run.
I had left home three days after turning 18 and shacked up with my high school boyfriend. I dumped him six months later after he ran off to join the Marines and I was evicted from our apartment. I had to pawn my books, the tv, the vcr. I had to call my parents from a pay phone to come and get me and the last of my stuff.
I started over and rebuilt things. I had failed pretty completely. I had nothing. I remember thinking that I'd died. Everything I'd tried to build, wanted to be, was dead, so I was going to break it all down and start over. When you hit bottom, you've got nowhere to go but up.
So I jumped off a bridge, bought a one-way ticket to Fairbanks, went to school at the U of Alaska, took a semester writing course with David Marusek who encouraged me to reapply to Clarion... and life just got bigger and brighter. It was like I was living someone else's life, this life I always wanted to live... I went to Clarion, went to grad school in South Africa, started selling stories, moved to Chicago, got a grown up job and a corporate card and started traveling to all these cities... I started lifting 30 lb weights and taking boxing and martial arts classes... I started blogging, started a long distance relationship and started spending one weekend a month in New York City...
It was a big, great, surreal, big-city life. And I loved it. I loved living with Jenn. I loved selling short fiction. Loved building who I was going to be. Jenn and I getting together felt like a natural progression of a great friendship.
But the first five months of 2006 were dark months. So fucking dark. It was like the spring would never come. I was sleeping all the time, terribly hungry and thirsty, traveling too much, sleeping too much... so dark.
It's the six months before and after today, one year ago, that I want to take back. I want to do over. I want to do better. I want to do smarter and saner and more rationally. I want to go back and explain myself better and understand my illness better. I want to go back and do it again because I honestly think that maybe I'd have hurt fewer people - I want to go back and fix it so I didn't hurt B, so I didn't hurt Jenn and destroy the friendship. I want to go back and understand how sick I was.
Those are the parts I want back.
But the rest of it? Tanking at 18 and starting over in Alaska and going to Clarion and getting a grad degree in South Africa and playing Career Woman in Chicago? The writing, the boxing, the cons, the traveling. No, I loved all of that. It was a fucking fantastic life. It was amazing. And if I would have died that night, one year ago today, I would have had no regrets.
For better or worse, though, I didn't die a year ago. I kept going. Because of Jenn's courage, and my own stubborness.
Now I have another shot at life, and I'm at another point in my life where I've blasted out everything, where everything has fallen apart and broken down. My friendships, my finances, my health, and to some degree, however small, my spirit.
There is a glorious thing that happens when everything is stripped away, though; when you break it down. You get to start over. If you've got nothing, you have nothing to lose.
I may not be able to go back and fix what I did wrong, but I have the opportunity to go forward and build something better; to learn from what I did wrong last time and come out of it a stronger person.
I can't guarantee that I'll do anything better, or that I'll never hurt anyone again. What I can say is, I think it's going to be an interesting run. The last time I hit this place life turned out to be far bigger and more beautiful than I'd imagined, and I have a feeling it's not done surprising me yet.
So, for better or worse:
Happy anniversary.
The Joys of Home Renovation
Ian and Stephanie bought this little house here in Ohio and they've been fixing it up since they moved in back in September. It wasn't a shithole, but it wasn't exactly the tidiest, most up to date place on the block. They replaced all of the windows, tore up all the carpet and had the hardwood floors refinished, cleaned it top to bottom, repainted the whole downstairs, and we've been working on scraping, sanding and repainting the doors.
They hired a contractor to come in on Monday and pull out the shitty rotting half-insulated crap in the big room upstairs and put up new drywall, so the house has been full of dust and rather messy this week cause all the stuff from the upstairs (which they use as the Master bedroom) is now in the living room and Ian's office.
So Stephanie and I spent most of today covered in paint and primer, working on the upstairs room now that the drywall's done.
What we realized after the contractors left and we started to prep the room for painting was that... they had done a really shitty job. Not knowing much about drywall and wanting them to get the hell out of the house after 3 days of work on a job that was supposed to take "a day or two" we pushed them out of the house without insisting that they reputty the walls and fucking sand them properly, and then the three of use found ourselves staring at the cold, hard reality of unsanded drywall paste, loose tape seams, uncovered nail holes and divets in the drywall.
Steph, Ian, and I spent the morning hand sanding and puttying; then Steph and I started putting on the primer.
After the second coat, we realized things weren't looking much better.
"Oh dear lord this is bad," I said.
"Well, they practically did it for free," Stephanie said. "Five hundred in labor for three people over three days is, basically free."
"But you did pay them five hundred dollars," I said.
"Let me keep thinking it was free. If I admit we paid them for this shit I'm going to cry."
We slathered on some more paste after the first coat of primer, put on the second coat, made a couple runs to Home Depot for more paint, and then put on the first layer of paint.
Ian arrived home, went upstairs and took a look and said, "Um, you guys realize this looks like crap, right?"
"Yes," we said, "Yes we do."
"But they practically did it for free," he said.
Ian suggested we rent a sprayer and texture the walls. Maybe it'll make the bad paste job sort of, you know, blend in.
I mean, it's not a bad job really.
It was practically free.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Living with a Scientist
Ian and I are going to Home Depot to pick up paste and paint rollers to finish the drywall work the contractors did upstairs.
"OK," Ian says, "Do you have a stopwatch?"
"Um, no?"
"OK, we can just use my cell phone."
We get in the truck and he hands me his cell phone. He has a notepad with him and I'm thinking, "Well, that's great! He's actually made a *list* of things we're getting."
"OK," he says, and hands me the cell phone. "When we get going, hit `OK' and it will start the stopwatch. And when I tell you to hit the `OK' button again, and it will stop the stopwatch. Then record the time on this piece of paper." He puts the notepad between us in the truck, and I see it has some cryptic chart-like happenings on it.
"Um, OK," I said.
"I have to do this experiment for class where I run an experiment and include mutiple :;something something somethings:::. So I'm timing myself to and from the university on weekdays, on weekends, taking different routes."
"Sure," I say. Note that at no time during this entire thing have I asked any questions. I completely take all of this for granted.
So we drive along the 20 minutes to the university, and when we come up to the university stopsign he's designated as the end point, he tells me to hit "OK."
I record the time. We go across the street to Home Depot.
On the way back: I record the time.
The surreal realization here was not that I thought this was an odd thing to do, but that I thought it was a perfectly reasonable way for one to spend one's afternoon.
Sound Familiar?
The new conservatives wished to impose not only British laws but also western values on India. The country would be not only ruled but redeemed. Local laws which offended Christian sensibilities were abrogated - the burning of widows, for instance, was banned. One of the East India Company directors, Charles Grant, spoke for many when he wrote of how he believed providence had brought the British to India for a higher purpose: "Is it not necessary to conclude that our Asiatic territories were given to us, not merely that we draw a profit from them, but that we might diffuse among their inhabitants, long sunk in darkness, the light of Truth?"
Man, I really wish more presidents and policy makers read history books.
This, though, was my favorite:
"The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and western imperialism have, after all, long been closely and dangerously intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths have always needed each other to reinforce each other's prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the others."
We feed each other.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Fuck You, Sugar (muwahaha aha )
Numbers for the last four days:
108
74
94
104
99
58
95
113
73
117
85
67
Now *that's* more like it.
Looks like I can drop my Lantus dose from 18 u back down to 16 again, too, to prevent that evening low.
The Right Kind of Dead Woman (Not Any Woman Will Do)
"I have something to say about the recent Supreme Court decision that upheld the ban on late-term abortions, whether or not the pregnancy endangers the woman’s life.
I’m a pragmatic contextual ethicist with a spiritual sensibility, and I cannot be silent. I cannot pretend that I don’t understand the next step in this game. If you stop for a moment to think about it, what will be required next is blindingly obvious.
A dead woman."
The right kind of dead woman, of course. There either has to be massive female dead in the thousands or one rich white young beautiful married Christian woman death.
All deaths are not created equal in the media's high court.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Some Things I'm Learning About My Sugar
1) It really is better if I get up between 5-7am instead of 10-11 am. My numbers just look better when I get an early jump start on the day. I'll test around 90-100 between 5-7, but by 10-11, my sugar's already risen cause of the whole dawn phenomenon, and I'll come out at 130-160(!).
2) Jelly beans and graham crackers really are some of the best foods for 50s and 60s low sugar episodes. There's little to no fiber and fat to slow down sugar absorption, so you're not getting initial upswing followed by a delayed upswing that you have to correct later.
3) Cooking up my old Alaska staple of meat, carrots, peas, garlic, onion, tomatoes, parmesan cheese, and rice *without* the rice is actually just as good, and I can save half a unit of dinner insulin.
Impending Feministacon
"The program schedule for WisCon 31 will go live on April 30, 2007."
So, um, where is it?
"Everything Will Be All Right"
I just received a check in the mail for $502 from my old employer. Apparently, they've just now gotten around to re-purchasing the company stock that I had with them.
Damn, I get by by the skin of my teeth...
OK, technically I owe $110 of this to my endocrinologist back in Chicago and $200 to the podiatrist, but I can afford my minimum credit card payments for May now and MAYBE EVEN JUNE!
Fucking miracle.
The only thing that pisses me off is the huge surprise at just how much money I actually had stuffed away for old age. I've gotten three checks and close to 5K, and that's *after* taxes. All gone now.
So it goes.
Coming Out
"Transgender Canadians are coming out at younger ages than ever before. Support groups for transgender teens report growing memberships, and are sprouting up beyond the major cities in areas such as Kitchener, Ont., and the Niagara region. One by one, school boards are amending their human rights policies to include gender identity...
In recent years, the success of the gay-rights movement has helped to pave the way for transgender rights, some say. For teenagers, the increasing presence of transsexual role models in the mainstream media has helped make it easier to come out at a younger age."
I think you see a lot of this "coming out at an earlier age" thing among gay, lesbian, and bisexual teens as well, mainly because we do now have so many people who publicly identify themselves as being GLBT.
What I like about that idea is that you're no longer neccessarily struggling in the dark for so long to try and figure out what the hell it is you're feeling and what it means and who that makes you.
The downside is that by giving everything a label and a name, I fear that GBLT identities could become just as fixed as het male/female identities (which are changing, but a lot of people still grow up with fairytale templates).
One more reason to knock them all apart.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
The Hidden Costs of of Living in a Hypermasculine Culture
"The trouble with manhood, American-style, is that it is maintained at the expense of every man's feminine side -- the frantically repressed Inner Wussy -- and the demonization of the feminine and the gay wherever we see them."
I do love that even in an article about how we demonize the feminine, the feminine is still described as the "Inner Wussy."
And Miles To Go
Temp work until 12:30 today, followed by one interview at same place I'd been temping that's looking for somebody to assist one of the investment brokers. Bike ride home, lunch, bus ride downtown for second interview for a receptionist/project assistant position that's got a commute out to fucking Springboro and a 7:30 am start time.
Collapsing now.
I have a follow-up second interview with investment firm tomorrow at 9am (they had others to see this afternoon). Both positions are open because they've had temps either burst into tears and quit or just not show up. Repeatedly.
I always end up getting called in for jobs that no one else will do. Ha ha.
There are two big problems with my resume. The first being that I've only stayed at one job longer than a year, and the second... my Master's Degree.
Everybody expects that I'll ask for 60K. And yeah, it would make sense that I'd want 60K... (which I do!) until you look at aforementioned job history where I've never been anywhere more than 3 years. You need to work up to that salary. And work somewhere where you can do that. I just never cared about my jobs all that much. I'll put in my 8-5 and work my butt off when I'm there, but when I'm done for the day, I'm done. I don't bring work home.
I'd rather be writing.
Both promising interviews, but only one that I want. C'mon investment firm with the 3-mile bikeride commute!
At this point, of course, beggars can't be choosers, but I wouldn't mind a little frosting with my toast.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
How Did I Get On This List?
"Occupation" is turning out to be one of those stories that, like "Genderbending," I didn't realize anybody actually liked, read, or cared about until a year after it was published.
Now Occupation's on a "notable stories of 2006" list and reprinted in a Year's Best SF.
And, to be honest, of the three stories I wrote at about the same time that covered similiar themes, this was actually the one I felt had the least chance at getting published and getting any attention.
Goes to show how much writers know...
I'm starting to get that's just how it goes. Once something's out there, it really does sink or swim on its own. It sort of stops being yours.
Monday, May 07, 2007
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Yeah, I Need to Get Back to Watching Fights...
I didn't see the fight, but knowing the result sure makes me miss watching `em. I was surprised at the result, actually, even having seen De La Hoya when he was seriously out of fighting shape.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
OK, But Only if I'm Played By Christian Bale
| You Are Batman |
 Billionaire playboy by day. Saving the world by night. And you're not even a true superhero. Just someone with a lot of expensive toys! |
Friday, May 04, 2007
Conversations With My Roommate(s)
Ian and I went out on a beer and pie run tonight. On the way back, I mentioned I'd sent out some query letters today.
"Wow," Ian said, "if you got a big fat check for that book, you might almost be cool again."
State of the Union
Had to turn down interviews for a couple of short-term temp assignments because... well, after I was told I wasn't going to be interviewed for one of them, I went ahead and booked Wiscon for some extra days, and now I'm committed to doing that instead of a possible 2-week assignment for 20 an hour.
Dammit fucking hell.
But people are calling me now, and that's a huge improvement over the last few weeks. I'll take what I can get.
I've sent out some preliminary query letters for GW, and I'll be sending some more soon. The line edits are pretty much done, I'm just re-reading the last 80 pages or so and making sure my chapters are still sequential after some of the cutting I did.
Stephanie works at a hospital, so she asked around for some endocrinologist recommendations, and I have a name and number for a new one.
I'm interested in starting work on some new writing projects, but GW fine-tuning and marketing has been taking up a lot of energy. After this weekend, I should be able to finally start working on some original material again. It occurred to me the other day that I've been working on this book since 2003.
Spent the morning deferring my student loans and trying to find hardship applications for my credit cards, without much luck. Not sure what I'll do with those.
I wish I was doing a lot more - going to school, boxing classes - but I'd settle for being able to pay my bills.
I'm telling you: the whole starving artist thing is seriously overrated.
Gender Testing of Female Atheletes
Are you a boy or a girl? Flash presentation.
You know, I always wondered, do/did they ever test people competing as *male* atheletes to make sure they're *really* men, or has this always been some kind of wacked-out, let's make sure the girls are protected macho thing?
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Black Desert: Excerpt
The train dropped Nyx off at a refueling station within view of Mushira where the local farmers collected fuel for their farming equipment and personal vehicles.
Nyx alighted and pulled up the hood of her burnous. She started to put on her goggles and then looked out over Mushira and stopped. She wouldn’t need those here. After the rolling desolation of the dunes and the flat white sea of the desert, the green terraced hills around Mushira were a jarring change of scenery.
She waited around at the train station until the hottest part of the day had passed, then began the long walk down to the river.
Mushira was full of fat, soft, happy people. These were the hills of her childhood, the terraced green and amber fields that she had run into the desert to forget. Mushira was an isolated oasis; they used up all of the local water for farming, so nobody came in to ship it out. Though there were some people who came into town to do business, Mushirans didn’t make a habit of traveling. Nyx had known Mushira was an anomaly even while she was growing up there, because the sand was never more than a few hours walk from her mother’s farm, and the trains and bakkies that ferried goods in and out of Mushira were operated by hard-bitten, skinny desert people who knew how to use a knife for something other than carving up synthetic fuel bricks.
Nyx remembered spending many evenings standing out at the edge of the fields and watching the sand blow over the dunes beyond the line of low scrub and fat bulb trees that held back the desert. Some nights she believed the encroachment of the sand was inevitable, and she welcomed it. Other nights she feared the desert would devour her, and she convinced her little brother Ghazi to go out with her and walk the tree barrier after dark, to scare away the sand. He had been afraid of sand cats, so they brought machetes with them - poor protection against the far more likely but less tangible threats of the desert at night: flesh beetles and airborne bursts, rogue magicians and wild shape shifters. But at the time, Nyx had promised Ghazi that she was the most dangerous thing in the desert.
It was the thirty-first, so Nyx had the afternoon to find herself a place and get cleaned up before the morning meeting at the mosque. The mosque was a domed structure at the center of the city, on the eastern bank of the river. Six spiraling minarets ringed the mosque, and during the call to prayer, all six were staffed with muezzins. Mushirians didn't miss a prayer.
Nyx hadn’t been to Mushira since she had returned from the front at nineteen and found nothing waiting for her but a bit of charred, plowed-over land that no longer belonged to her mother. Her mother’s farm had been burned out by Chenjan terrorists as part of a wider raid on Mushira when Nyx was at the front, and by the time she was reconstituted the neighbors had bought the farm and her mother had died at the coast due to complications during her second pregnancy. Nyx hadn’t had any reason to come back.
Nyx walked down into the main square at the entrance to the grounds of the mosque and looked around for a couple of public hotels. There was a convention complex just south of the mosque that should do fine.
The people on the street gave her looks ranging from surreptitious glances to outright stares. Long lines of children followed after their mothers carrying baskets of starches and giant ladybird cages. Nyx kept tugging at her burnous in an attempt to hide her sun sore face. Most desert traders didn’t come down to the square during the off-season, and bel dames and bounty hunters generally stayed out of rural areas - Nyx hadn’t seen her first bel dame until she was sixteen. If Nyx didn’t want to be noticed at the mosque she’d need to buy some new clothes and swap out her sandals for work boots. She probably shouldn’t be going around armed in Mushirah, either. Not visibly, anyway.
She scouted out a hotel and walked over to the marketplace on the other side of the river and bought some new clothes that she couldn’t afford. She found a public bathhouse and changed, then unbuckled her blade and her pistols and stored them in her shopping bag. For a handful of change she got herself a bath and had a girl re-braid her hair in a style more suitable to Mushirian farm matrons. Her mother had worn her hair that way.
When she walked back onto the street she got fewer looks, but the boots hurt and she felt half naked with her sword in a bag instead of on her back. The hotel clerk gave her an odd look when she walked in, but the notes she handed the clerk were mostly clean and certainly valid, and after that she got no trouble.
Nyx spent an uneasy night staring out at the square from the filtered window of her little room. There was a balcony, and after it got dark she moved out there and leaned over the railing. She was tired, and hungry, and ordered up enough food to feed a couple of people, ate it all, and fell into a deep sleep that felt like water after a day in the desert. Her dreams were cloying things; dark and tangled, full of old blood and regret.
The call to prayer woke her at midnight, and after that she couldn’t get back to sleep. She went to the privy down the hall and vomited everything she’d eaten. After, she stayed curled around the hard stone basin with her cheek pressed against the rim while the roaches inside the bowl greedily devoured her offal.
Nasheen was being slowly eaten from the inside, and when somebody had cancer, it had to be cut out. Nyx hadn’t had a steady hand in a long time.
I can’t fuck this up, she thought, and she tried to hold that thought in her fist like a tangible thing, like a stone. But her resolve slipped away, trickled through her fingers like sand.
She couldn't hold back the desert anymore.
Marriage, a History
One of the strongest arguments for continuing to teach history is the incredible sense of freedom it gives an individual who's grown up thinking that the cultural norms, the "reality" that they've grown up in is just "the way things are" or "the way things have always been." Spent some time studying history, and every single one of your assumptions about the way people are, the way the world has to be, will change.
One of the big arguments you get from conservatives about the current US regulations regarding marriage is that marriage has, from time immemorable, been between ONE man and ONE woman. Even somebody who's only ever read the Bible can tell you that that's, well, not true. But it sure *sounds* really good. The kicker is that the sort of male breadwinner marriage "ideal" of ONE man and ONE woman, the nuclear family ideal, is actually only about 50 or 60 years old (and those narrow, aberrant expectations are, even now, changing).
In Marriage, a History, Stephanie Coontz tracks the history of Western conceptions of marriage from early hunter-gatherer societies to the present day, exploring not only the number and kinds of acceptable partners that made up marriages, but what "marriage" meant in a cultural and economic sense during different periods.
Her interest primarily centers on when and how marriage went from being a largely economic enterprise to one based almost exclusively on mutual affection and devotion; from a business merger between families to a partnering of individuals based exclusively on "love."
Coontz isn't a great writer, and I think that she sometimes tries too hard to appeal to a mainstream audience with all her little jokes and exclamation marks, but that also mean this isn't dry as old toast like some of the history tomes you dust off about, say, ancient Assyria (which could be really fucking rad if written with some oomph). She's entirely without theory, which also helps with the play-by-play reading.
What struck me, reading this history, is how successive women's movements paired with technological advances were key in the shift from women and men partnering as purely economic helpmeets to making it possible for us to make partnering decisions based on something so fickle as love and affection.
Polygamous marriages, she explained, were highly valued not just because they 1) produced more heirs, in the case of one man with multiple wives or 2) in the case of multiple husbands, helped land stay in families, but also because marrying more than one person increased the number of inlaws an individual had. This wasn't only a concern for the rich and powerful: powerful inlaws kept you alive. Without a strong kin network during hard times, you were a goner.
In a world of modern convienences, living wages, and social welfare programs, an extended kin network is no longer as vital, and instead of chiding men and women for putting affection for their partner above that of their kin, people are now often seen as a little loopy for dumping a partner based on what their mother thinks. Back in the day, your mother told you to drop somebody, and you dropped them. The saying went, "You have only one family, but you can always get another wife."
That's not to say, of course, that "love" never existed. Certainly there was lust and mutual affection, but the word "love" was rarely used as an expression of affection between husbands and wives until, I believe, the 19th century. In the early 18th centurey, American lovers said they were "in candor" with one another. The definition of "love" in 1828 was "to be pleased with, to regard with affection. We love a man who has done us a favor."
It was also surprising to see that the more autonomy women had, the more independence, the more taboo homosexuality became among women *and* men. Sleeping in the same bed, women kissing each other, these weren't big things until the 1920s, when women got the vote, a lot of guys died in the war, and women were setting up Boston marriages and fending for themselves. All the sudden, the idea that the sexes could get along without one another was a very real possibility, and marriage conservatives freaked out.
In fact, there's a long history of conservative backlash every time divorce and marriage laws were liberalized. Predictably, we're seeing the same thing now, with some of the same arguments. However, despite all of the doom and gloom, *more* people are actually getting married today than were getting married back in the 1800s when you needed to work up enough capital to start a family. A lot of people just never came up with the money they felt they needed in order to conduct a proper household.
The doom-and-gloom that *did* come true was the conservatives' fear of divorce: yep, we do have a 50% divorce rate. That rate has saved a lot of people from bad marriages, but the ease of divorce has also convinced a lot of people who wouldn't have otherwise gotten married to get married anyway. More people getting married hasn't "destroyed" marriage. It just means more people get married. The same panic happened when people started pulling down the interracial marriage laws. There were more marriages, more divorces, but the world didn't end. In fact, more marriages goes a long way toward improving the economy. I think expanding marriage rights would be a great economic strategy, really...
Because even with that 50% divorce rate, people still get married. Maybe cause we all keep hoping we can love forever, for longer, than any other group of folks in history. Believe me, the people living now are some of the first in the history of the world to have the opportunity to spend 70 years or more married. When we first thought up marriage, marriage was, at most, a commitment of 15-20 years. Usually more like 10.
I think what fascinates me is our expectation that we can live up to some far-off ideal, something that we think existed somewhere, somewhen, when everybody paired off perfectly and lived in harmony for 70 years with the love of their life.
No. You were lucky to end up with somebody who you respected and cared for and didn't beat you for 15 years before one of you dropped dead of influenza.
Man, I'm such a romantic.
My Boobs Make Me Smarter!
Great conversation over at Pandagon about advertising and breast augmentation.
Living Fiction
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I just finished re-reading Jeff VanderMeer's Veniss Underground. I read it and loved it when it first came out, lured by a stunning review of the book by Michael Moorcock.
This time around, as I re-read Veniss I started to think about what draws me back to particular books. I don't re-read a lot of books, but when I do, it's because there's some kind of emotional core to the story that speaks to me, something that claws at my heart and makes me go, "oh." I had different reasons, I thought, for loving some books and not others, but as I read, I realized there was something more to it, something that the ones I re-read have in common.
Oh, sure, there's the awesome stuff, too. Veniss is probably the most beautifully nightmarish city I've ever clawed through in fiction. People selling their parts for bread, programmers running a dying city, independent governments ruling various sections of the city, Living Artists who hack up themselves and others in the pursuit of the perfect organic creation, sludge-filled seas and vast underground caverns and weird, fantastic, horrible creatures that slurp and crawl and beg and grovel and fight and tear; creatures full of rage and sadness.
But there are other books that do a lot of great worldbuilding that I haven't re-read, that I thought were good or at least interesting reads, but never loved: Perdido Street Station, In Viriconium, Move Underground, Calenture, and Tainaron, to name a few. There are similiarly nightmarish qualities to The Book of the New Sun cycle as well.
The difference between books I like and books I keep returning to out of love (as opposed to reading to see how something was pulled off, technically, which you do a lot more of as a writer than a reader) has to do with how well it resonates with me. As a writer, this is sort of terrifying: you can cut yourself open on the page and put all the good stuff there, but unless you have a reader who's also bringing something to the table, emotionally, it's going to fall flat.
And it's true. When I looked at the few books I've reread: Veniss, Lust, The Hours, Flesh and Blood, The Etched City, The Affirmation, Dradin, in Love (I even went so far as to buy the hugely expensive Buzzcity Press edition) and The Book of Revelation, I realize that each of them touches on a core emotional truth or emotional journey that I can relate to in some way.
Veniss is told from three points of view: Nicolas, a selfish, starving "Living Artist" and compulsive liar who sells himself out to the mysterious crime boss-like Quin, creator of the city's most beautiful and terrible creatures. Nicola is Nicolas' twin sister, and works in one of the big highrises as a programmer who keeps all of the city's vital systems functioning and once worked as a sort of social worker/guide who helped people who won the lottery to come up from the level upon level of cities "down below" adjust to life in the above-ground city. Shadrach is Nicola's former lover, a man who spent the first twenty-four years of his life down below and fell in love with Nicola at the same moment he fell in love with the light, with the world above ground.
Nicola, in turn, fell in love with Shadrach:
His eyes held the light, except that somehow he made you smile. His eyes held you, and you found yourself thinking how odd it was that to find the light you must descend into darkness. He eclipsed your senses, and you still do not know whether you fell in love with him in that instant, at first sight, or whether it was his love for you, as radiant as the sun, that you came to love so fiercely.
But over time, her love faded as she realized he did not love her, but the idea of her:
Eventually, he became familiar to you, which you didn't mind, for no one can long sustain passion without the relief, the release, of domestic tranquility. What you could not tolerate was the inequality that crept up on you. It was the inequality of worship, for Shadrach mastered the city, became a part of it, and in this mastery he gained a distinct advantage over you, the resident, who had never needed mastery to make the city work for you... Somehow, you realized one day, as he surprised you with flowers and dinner at a fancy restaurant; somehow, instead of becoming more real to him, you had become less real, until you existed so far above him and yet so far below that to become real again, you had to escape - his body, his scent, his words.
On a bare bones level, this is a quest story: Nicolas gets himself into trouble with the mighty Quin, Nicola tries to rescue him and is, in turn, captured. Shadrach gives up everything and goes after her into Hell itself, down below, the place he never wanted to go back to. Because without Nicola - even a Nicola who he knows does not love him - he has nothing. He's lost the light.
Shadrach's journey is heart wrenching. He does literally descend into hell, full of bloody, flayed creatures, crimson light, millions locked in eternal, purposeless drudgery, piles of limbs, organs sold for bread, and he does it all to find a woman who does not love him.
There's a terrible moment when, after he's already shared her memories while she's comatose in order to find out who threw her into a donor scrap heap of body parts and left her for dead, that he knows with utter certainty, without a doubt, that she really, truly doesn't love him. And sure, he knew that all along. They've been apart for five years: but experiencing that from her point of view, to know it, to feel it, nearly breaks him. But even after all that, there's this moment:
... then he realized he had seen the forest in Nicola's head, in her mind. And he wondered whether there really was such a place above level. What if he had entered a series of dreams in her mind - of things that actually happened, but that were distorted, unsound, mirror images. For a moment, this thought disoriented him (didn't it mean she might love him after all?).
And this is, I think, why I keep coming back to this story. Because in the end, the guy doesn't get the girl. He does everything a hero should do in a fairytale. He fights for her. He loves her to the point of obsession. He goes out to avenge her. He fights the monsters and brings her back up into the light.
But when he looks at her in the end, under the stars, he does so knowing that she does not love him and will not love him. He did what he did out of love for her, knowing it wouldn't change anything (hoping, maybe, during the worst of it, but always knowing she did not love him).
It's a story that always makes me think about unconditional love, and hero tropes. After proving one's love, you're supposed to be rewarded. You're supposed to get the girl. That's the payoff. That's how it works, right? But in real life, no, it doesn't work that way, and even better: I think VanderMeer did a really fantastic job working from Nicola's POV and making us understand *why* it wasn't going to work that way. If we just got Shadrach's POV - here's the woman I worshipped, who I did everything right with, who scorned me - I don't think we'd understand. It's getting Nicola's POV that sells this, that explains why she can't love him. She can't be worshipped. She needs to be a real person.
And I think that was where I really connected with this story. I've loved people who didn't love me back, yes, and that makes the Shadrach parts of the book even more heart wrenching, but I have even more experience being somebody's Best Thing, being made up to be better than I am, to be perfect. And to have to turn away from someone because you feel you're being held up as something you're not, going from equals to unequals over the course of time, slowly losing yourself to someone else's idea of you... that's what I always connect with, every time. And the truth of that, of how that feels, always strikes me as terribly true, and terribly sad.
Sad, even more, because Shadrach realized, finally, what he loves so much about Nicola, something he's never told her:
So perhaps he had believed in symbols after all - perhaps the frame of the light as he ascended that first time drew him to her as it touched her body: blind moth to blinding flame. And maybe it was just this: when he came up into the light, the light shone upon her and she was not perfect. She had a face a trifle too narrow, a dull red birthmark between her thumb and forefinger, hair framing her face in tangled black strands. Such perfect imperfection, and he fell into her eyes because now, and only now, could he believe in this new world into which he had been reborn. It was populated with imperfect, beautifully imperfect, strangers, and how it had broken his heart that first time - to know that after so much darkness, the light could be so real, so alive. Not perfect, but real - all of it, the world, the woman, his life.
The paragraph above also illustrates something else that many of the books I've reread (particularly Lust and The Hours) have in common: a deep love for humanity in all of its imperfections. In Veniss, we're shown the full horror of human abuses and vices, and also shown what one person will go through for love. And then you get this sad, joyful acceptance - even love - of the good and the bad; of people, of life.
It is this, from The Hours:
Yes, Clarissa thinks, it's time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
And it's this doomed love of humanity; despite or because of all of our faults and miscommunication, that speaks to me most, that keeps me coming back to these sorts of books; this shared idea that sure, life can be crap, and it can be so lovely and light, and light or dark it's ours, it's what we have. We make do.
And hope for more.
It's this love that makes me fall in love with these books; it's the passion, the acceptance and celebration of imperfection.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
When Did You First Realize You Were A Girl? (or Boy?)
There's an interesting conversation going on at Jed's about gender identity.
He actually asks *how* you know you're a girl/boy, but I'm also quite interested in when?
When did you know?
Eat, Shoots & Leaves
The Game/Quiz.
If I ever publish GW, I want to make a flash game where you go around cutting off people's heads and collect bugs that give you special powers and healing abilities.
That would be kewl.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
But Don't Ya'll Just Lay There?
Gazing at the enormous organs (of male ducks), she (Dr. Brennan) asked herself a question that apparently no one had asked before.
“So what does the female look like?” she said. “Obviously you can’t have something like that without some place to put it in. You need a garage to park the car.”
The lower oviduct (the equivalent of the vagina in birds) is typically a simple tube. But when Dr. Brennan dissected some female ducks, she discovered they had a radically different anatomy. “There were all these weird structures, these pockets and spirals,” she said.
Somehow, generations of biologists had never noticed this anatomy before.
Arg.
It's About Damn Time
And, suddenly, my phone is ringing off the hook with temp agencies submitting my resume to people. Is there some kind of quarterly budget thing happening where people are eager to hire all of a sudden, or what?
Hey, I'll take what I can get...
Breathing Air
My credit card company, for some inane reason, decided to up my credit limit (I mean, I'm unemployed! What better reason to up my limit!).
So I took the opportunity to stock up on my meds, since as soon as I can't make that CC payment, they're going to cut me off.
This cost me:
2 50-count containers of testing strips (I test 4-7 times a day): $60.00
1 bottle of Lantus (long-lasting insulin): $86.59
1 bottle of Novolog (meal insulin): $95.99
Technically, this is only supposed to last me about a month. If I push it (which I will), it can last me two months (except the testing strips, which I'll have to buy more of in a few weeks).
For serious, when I have health insurance again and the chief topic on my mind is no longer, "How can I afford the drugs I need in order to keep breathing air?" I will likely blog about them less, but for better or worse, these are the life details that are sort of consuming me at the moment.
Also: faxing resumes costs me $14. And there were stamps to buy (going up 2 cents on the 14th) and manilla envelopes. And $32.99 for computer ink.
Don't bother to add that all up. It was a lot. I closed my eyes and swiped the card.
Things will get better.
Some Candid Answers to Common Interview Questions
Q: What would you say is your strongest quality?
A: My ability to bullshit on the fly
Q: What would you say is your biggest weakness?
A: This hole in my foot.
Q: What methods would you use to priortize tasks?
A: I would sort them by color and shoot them.
Q: Do you have any questions for me?
A: What kind of cheap ass has a benefit start date of 90 days after hire?
Q: Where do you see yourself in five years?
A: Drinking the blood of my enemies.
I Have a HOLE in my FOOT
So, I went in to see the podiatrist yesterday to have this callous on my toe checked out. I first noticed it last year just before I went into the hospital, and since then, I've been frantically looking up horrific pictures of diabetic foot ulcers, worrying that this was going to turn into something gangrenous that would eat my whole foot off (warning: none of these are happy pictures).
It was, thus, with much trepadation that I finally went in to have my foot looked at. Why now, you may ask? Because it felt like so much had gone wrong this year that this would just turn out to be the icing on the cake. It would just figure.
After a long wait at an understaffed office (I really should think about going into the healthcare field. God knows every single office is understaffed), I settled up on the podiatrist's chair, waited some more, and he came in, took one look at my toe and said, "Oh, that's a wart."
"Oh, thank God," I said.
But can you blame me for being extra paranoid these days?
We chatted about diabetes. He wanted to know how they'd figured I was a type 1 and not a type 2. Did they do a test?
"Uh, well," I said, "I was brought into the hospital in a coma."
"What did they say triggered it?"
This question didn't surprise me, because the "cause" of type one is still apparently a really contentious thing. You'll hear different things, but what my doctor told me, and what sounds right as far as my experience goes is, I was already predisposed to be a type 1 (my dad and his cousins in France are type 2s, and if you have diabetics of any kind in your family, you're going to have a bigger chance of having t1 or t2) and then I got some kind of virus. The virus triggered my body's immune response, but instead of just killing the virus, it caused my body to turn on the beta cells in my pancreas. The reason I didn't get t1 sooner is because whatever it was that triggered the response didn't happen until I was 25. It could have happened at 5 months, 5 years, 15... or 25. It just so happened mine got triggered at 25 (I then spent a year getting progressively sicker until I went into a coma).
The podiatrist said he's always interested to know the sugar # for a type 1 who was brought in to the hospital for the first time. I told him I was a 680, which I used to think was pretty impressive, but Anne Rice apparently had something closer to 1100, and the podiatrist insisted he had a guy come in who said he'd gone into the hospital fully conscious with a 1300 number.
I'm not so sure I believe that one, but it sure does put my little 680 to shame. I was comatose for a whole day at 680? Sheesh!
I asked him what a "real" foot ulcer would look like in the first stages, and he said it would start out with some red swelling and then look more like a blood blister, not a callous.
OK, I'll keep that in mind for next time...
The med assistant brought me into the room with the little laser thing to zap the wart, and asked me why I'd been diagnosed with type 1 instead of type 2. I realized that at this particular clinic, which is in an upper-middle class neighborhood full of older people, they probably hadn't seen a lot of type 1s. Still, dude, you've worked here EIGHT YEARS. Treating DIABETIC FEET. You should know these things.
"Uh," I said, "it's not that I produce too little insulin or that it's not absorbed well. I don't produce any insulin at all. My body ate all of my beta cells, which is what produces insulin."
"No shit?" she said (she was a very entertaining, gruff, and disillusioned med assistant).
So they shot me up with some anasthetic and the doctor lasered out a GIANT HOLE in my foot.
I was astounded at its giantness this morning when I took off the dressing. And here I'd gone into the podatrist to AVOID giant holes in my feet.
Ah well. I have a follow-up in two weeks to make sure I don't get an infection and get a REAL foot ulcer, and in the meantime, I have super antibiotic cream and band aids.
Oh, and an interview today.
The excitement never stops, I'm TELLING you.
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