Good Night, Good Night

Sleep well. Dream good dreams. Wake up and live them.

Packing for Denver

I'll be leaving for Denver straight from work tomorrow.

Now, the big question: how the hell to fit everything I need in carry-on luggage.

The drawback to working out in hotels: you need yet another extra pair of shoes and clothes.

Suck it up.

The Fighting Life: Ah

Sweet fuck, I've missed going to my MA school.

Accountants, attorneys, paralegals, project managers, architects by day -



Kick-ass Amazons by night.

Oh, how I have missed them.

For those in the Chicago area, my martial arts school is offering me the month of February free if somebody signs up and says I referred them. And, seeing's as how my MA school charges me a sweet pretty penny, I could totally use the windfall.

So, if you've been wanting to kick some ass, take a chance and come in for a trial class. Don't worry, it's January, so there's *tons* of newbies. Keep in mind that everybody there was a newbie once, and a lot of them were also 50lbs heavier.

Everybody's a frickin' sweetheart, and Sifu Katalin rocks the house.

Can't Get Enough of These Things

You can just never have too many of these things. I break into uncontrollable glee every damn time.

I Just Can't Pass This One Up

It's MSN, after all:

Ten Things Your Teenage Girl Won't Tell You.

Notice this wasn't number one, but should have been:

1) "Hot damn, dad, sex is great! I want to have it all the time! There are so many hot guys in the world!(And that chick is French class isn't bad either!)"

Ah, to be a teenager again.

Not that I'm much better at 25.

Because Everybody Always Gets Very Passionate About My Depression Posts

When I was in Denver last week (flying out there again tomorrow night), I tore an article out of my complimentary hotel USA Today - you know you're a freakshow blogger when you do something like this.

Apparently:

Lives were threatened and Americans treated like "guinea pigs" because Eli Lilly & Co. officials lied 15 years ago in denying there was any evidence the anti-depressant Prozac could cause suicidal behavior, a Harvard psychiatrist has charged...

Teicher, who considers Prozac valuable, said many of the problems with suicidal behavior were in patients given high doses, and that's how the drug was used for the first few years in the USA. "American people were guinea pigs for a few years. If we had known the truth, we would have used it more wisely from the start," Teicher said.

Isn't that just the shit?

What I worry about with the huge rush for more and better happy drugs is shit like this happening: the same sort of "oops, actually, it's worse for you to be on the drug than off it" thing that happens with a lot of weight loss drugs.

I've got buddies on Zoloft and family members on Prozac, and you know, though I'm all for drugs as a last resort (and for diagnosed conditions, though the "diagnoses" list is starting to look about as long as the "hysterical symptoms" list at the beginning of the last century), I freak at the idea that popping a pill is the first thing we're being taught to reach for. Somebody's getting really fucking rich while we search for "normalcy."

So. Pause a minute and decompress before going for the bottle, OK?

Same goes for pretty much all solutions found in a bottle.

If She Didn't Turn Into a Vegetable, It Wouldn't Be Winning Shit

Million Dollar Baby's taking home a bunch of awards.

Makes me wonder, if Swank didn't turn into a dependent vegetable at the end, would the movie have made such a splash?

You know, I'm thinking... not.

What's Happening

Amanda's got some really thought-provoking stuff up about how the uproar about public schools and what's being taught in them (history, sex ed, creationism) could act as a long-term dismantling of the public school system: making mucho bucks for the privateers. Check it out.

And yea, I'm still irritated with the hullabaloo about the Tsunami. Sure, it's great, the whole world throwing money and people out there; the media frenzy is amazing (everyone's so glad to stop talking about Iraq and whether or not Ashlee Simpson really knows how to sing).

And here's why I'm still really irritated:

Guess what happened today?

About 600 people in South Africa died of AIDS.

That's about 219,000 dead people in South Africa every year. Dead for a stupid, preventable reason. Not a natural disaster. One we can do something about through AIDS research, education, prevention, and giving money to local sustainable community project in SA.

Where's the money? Where's the public outcry? Where are the hordes of relief workers? Nelson Mandela's son just died of AIDS. Wake up, people.

In this country, the highest rate of HIV infection is among black women. Where's that on the news? How come Cheney and Edwards had absolutely no idea this was so during their debates?

Yea. It bugs me. We play "who's giving the most money" on Christmas, and tell people to blow off the other 364 days a year.

Nightlife

Beer is good. There should be more of it in the world.

Fuck It.

I'm sending the Beast back to Asimov's. There's been an editor change since then.

Screw it. It's a good fucking story.

Campbell Hopefuls

A couple of my fellow Clarion compatriots (class of 00, shit, has it been five years?) are up for nomination this year for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in spec. fic. (this is a bit of a big deal in science fiction circles), Amy Sisson and my buddy Greg Beatty (who's got enough weird-ass publications to kill a horse. Check out his Aliens Enter the Conversation)

Buddy Movies

I was watching the extended edition of Return of the King last night, and Jenn popped in and we got into a discussion about what a great job Jackson & co. did sticking to the original heart of the story while boosting the believability and interest of the female characters, and ditching some of the classist bullshit Tolkien was so obsessed with.

And we started talking about these sorts of war movies, how the heart of them is about friendships forged by men, about characters who have been given this huge responsibility, and the arcs those characters take (one of my favorite character arcs is Frodo's, because he's given this one task on which the world depends - all he has to do is throw the ring away. He goes on the tremendous journey, and gets there primarily because he's got Sam, and all he has to do is this one thing: and when the shit hits the fan, when it comes down to the wire, he can't do it. And I always wonder, how would that person live, afterward? Knowing that when you were tested, when it came down to it, you ultimately failed? Great stuff).

Inevitably, we started to try and think of buddy movies about women bonding in this way, women who would carry each other up the mountain, and about all we had was Thelma & Louise, in which the protagonists, of course, die, so that one doesn't really count. Female buddy movies tend to be about women who come together over smaller, more domestic issues, and are friends because they have similiar past experiences or live in the same place. They don't bond over a great world-changing experience. Joy Luck Club, Steel Magnolias, Secrets of Ya-ya Sisterhood.

When you do get those rockin' types of women, they're either saving their children, or their love interest (which is never, of course, a woman). So you've got Linda Hamilton saving her son John Conner (though in the first Terminator movie, she does save *herself* at the end, which, believe it or not, isn't seen that often either), Drew Barrymore throwing the prince over her shoulders in Ever After, and Kate Winslet running through the corridors of the Titanic with an ax in a desperate effort to save Leo.

The reason Thelma & Louise was such a big deal is because Louise pulls out the gun and shoots the fucker trying to rape Thelma. She protects her friend. It's this huge gaping cinematic hole that people have gotten so used to that they won't even mention it when they say, "Why is it women are their own worst problem? Why do they hate each other and compete over male approval?"

Well, you know what, we don't exactly get a lot of great images about female loyalty and friendship.

The best women-bonding-in-war movie I've seen recently was Cold Mountain (Scarlett doesn't exactly bond with any women in Gone With the Wind). They totally nailed that one. Kidman has a great rant about how she's been taught to be an ornament, how she doesn't know how to *do* anything, and her frustration comes through, that idea that now that the shit's hit the fan, she doesn't have any skills whatsoever to deal with her predicament. She and Zellweger get to have a buddy-sort of friendship where a man doesn't come between them; they don't fight over him, and their situation is often a life-or-death one.

In fact, I just went and looked through my DVD collection to make sure I wasn't missing anything mainstream (indy movies tend to get more leeway with this, but I want to stick with what's up for "popular" consumption), and I couldn't find anything else. Keira Knightly goes out to save Orlando in Pirates (there's mutal saving in this movie, which I love), but her and the female pirate don't even exchange any words, let alone form a friendship.

So where are all the *women* watching each others' backs? Apparently, these sorts of movies are reserved for "chick flicks" like Under the Tuscan Sun (I like they way they left this one open-ended, which is why I can stomach it: it's not *really* a romance movie, it's about finding yourself and creating friendships and families - and doing that your own way).

I suppose war, and performing acts that are seen to impact the very Nature of the Universe or Fate of Humanity have always been seen as male preserves. And if women are involved, it must be because they're hot on the guys.

I was clicking through movie trailers at apple.com and was startled by the trailer for Miss Congeniality 2: try to ignore for a minute the fact that they feel they have to figure out a plot device for Bullock to go from snorty to hot again and look at this - the trailer makes it look like a buddy movie.

A buddy movie where the two main characters are female cops, and not only that, one of them is black.

Unfortunately, it's not Lethal Weapon with women, which would be cool; they had to play it with Bullock being prettied up, so there's lots of "female"/"feminine" jokes they can make. But shiiiiit. A female cop buddy movie? When the hell was the last time I saw that?

OK, yea, there's Charlie's Angels. But the recent Charlie's Angels movies are played so over the top as to be terribly funny. The women aren't supposed to really be able to do those things. How the hell they're doing those kinds of kicks in 3-inch heels without busting an ankle, I'd love to know (in fact, I just busted out my pair of 2 1/2 inch sensible, square heels and tried to do a roundhouse kick - it's almost possible, but if you turn that square heel into a spike, I think it's all over, and unless you were a dancer, you'd be on your ass). Women are only allowed to kick ass and be friends if they're little, pretty, and fem enough not to cause anyone to feel insecure. And the angels, though friends, don't spend much time saving each other. They tend to save their male bosses and love interests.

I know that I find myself writing these gaping-hole types of stories all the time. I'm in the business of fantasy sagas, and the first thing I did was create a buddy-buddy central relationship between a man and woman who, I decided wouldn't be sexually interested in each other. I was looking for some sort of "pure" unsulllied friendship that had the same feel of the Frodo/Sam or Fellowship buddy relationships. It wasn't until I got through all of book one (the third version of it), that I started to see that there were pretty much no female friendships in the book, or at least strong ones. The women were still all rotating around relationships with men, even in my egalitarian society. In my female dominated society, where everybody was expected to form close friendships with other women and the default was being attracted to women (the whole Plato idea on its head - women can only truly "love" other women, because only women and women will ever be equal: men will always be inferior), I chose to have the viewpoint character for that society be a terribly staight female fighter with what she considered a rather shameful attraction to men that she'd never really been able to push toward women, and very few friendships with anyone.

There I go, stabbing myself in the foot.

If you see these sorts of images and stories often enough, you internalize them. You make them up that that's what it's supposed to be.

Why are women clawing at each other all the time? Why, as my dad said, do so many people think "you women are your own worst problem"?

Because we aren't taught to like each other. Boys get told to go out and save each other, and women, and kids, and we get told that women are our rivals, our enemies, and that what we're really looking for is to be that lone female fighter, the "token man" who can then look down on all the women around us. That, or you're just supposed to be the usual: a love interest, a damsel in distress, etc. etc.

I want more female buddy movies.

I want women carrying each other up the goddamn mountain.

What Hurts This Morning

Had my Saturday pilates class followed by my boxing class, neither of which I've been to in almost a month, due to holiday closures, and my own holiday and work travel.

This morning's aches are in (surprise) the delts, dorsal muscles, and triceps. Because I'm jogging with something like regularity now, the jump roping was easy. I'll be in Denver most of this week, so I'm packing up my jump rope, CD player, and jogging clothes.

I have two big concerns about living out of hotels, because you generally see two types of female travelers: the ones who deal with it by living on lemon water and exercising 3 hours at the hotel gym every night, and the ones who deal with it living out of stuff they can get out of the minibar, which is convienent after long hours sitting in front of a computer and meeting with hysterical guys all day.

I don't really want to be either of these "types."

I'm packing mixed nuts and protein bars, they have omelettes for breakfast at the hotel instead of those hunger-inducing bread-filled continental type breakfasts, I can order salads from the cafeteria in the central corp. building for lunch, and they've got Lean Cuisine meals in the hotel "pantry" that you can take up to your room and microwave. They've also got a fridge in the room, so I can pack out some string cheese, too.

I'm trying to make them get my traveling schedule down so I can still get to my MA classes on Monday and Saturday. Throw in two jogging days the rest of the week, either one on Sunday and another on Weds or Thursday, or one on Tues. and one on Thurs. I'm also looking into buying water-inflatable free weights that I can pack with me so I can keep my morning free weights routine up.

Mainly, this is my way of battling depression, believe it or not. I'm well aware that living out of hotel rooms is going to be stressful on me, and my best bet for warding off freak-outs is to have very set routines: eating right and exercising has always been the first thing I change/interrogate when my moods start to spike. I've also invested way too much time in these great arm muscles and kicking leg strength to see them atrophy in Denver, or Dallas, or New York.

This is gonna be a bitch, yea, but nothing worth doing is easy, and I think it'll keep me sane throughout what's ramping up to be a really frickin wacky year.

Night Thoughts

Totally Worth it.

If I ever go to jail, I hope it's for something like this.

Dreaming By the Book

Had a dream last night that I went to New York and tracked down the lit. agent who's got my 50 pages. I was given a letter saying how great she thought it was, and oh-so-sorry to take so long, and a request for the entire manuscript.

I then shared a taxi back to my hotel with Ellen Datlow and Sheila Williams.

Yea. There's a lot on my mind. The day all my dominos line up is gonna be amazing.

Honeymoon's Over

Bear with me, everybody.

It's gonna be a long 6 months.

The thing I always forget about this job is that the reason we can all sit around and screw off for 6 months is because for the other 6 months, we're working 24/7.

Blaine's a frickin' sweetheart, and he must have talked me up like I was fuckin' Jesus Christ, because I realize I've just been handed a career along with my corporate card. I'll be supervising document controls for all the new projects coming down the pipeline, which means training and overseeing the support staff in each location and making sure they're delivering and tracking the right information.

I didn't take in the full scope of what this really meant until we had our meeting in the warroom, and I realized I was the youngest person at a table full of men, and my name was up there on the "top" part of the top-down org chart, along with theirs.

What the fuck just happened?

Oh, shit, I got handed a career. Which I could still very well fuck up.

And, worse: which I don't really want.

It's funny, you get your shiny shoes and your suit jacket, and you get told to make plane reservations to camp out in Denver, and it's like, isn't this it? This s the top? This is corporate America. This is why you go to college, to get a good job like this with great health care and a 401(K).

And if I stay here too long, I'm gonna get my soul sucked out.

Don't think I don't know that.

I just want to write books. Fuck. Just pay me for *that*, OK?

So updates and rants here are going to be a lot more sporadic.

The Big Boys are going out to negotiate the NYC project next week, which everyone agrees is going to be long and messy. Prepare for rants from the warroom in NYC.

I've also come to the conclusion that I won't move to Denver. I talked with Yellow about it (they asked him to move out there), and I basically have the same reservations he does: I'm not in love with Denver, the corp. office is waaaaay too corporate (seeing Yellow spiff up for a real corp office was amusing), and honestly, Chicago is just way better than Denver. There's just no contest.

I either love a place, or I'm indifferent about it, and I don't know that I'd have any interest in living somewhere that's halfway between the West and the Midwest.

It feels like going backwards.

The News From Denver

Quotes of the day:

Reddy, the construction lead, on our participation in the NYC project:

“When I got hired here, I told them there were two places I never wanted to be assigned to: Iraq, and New York City.”

From Yellow, when he heard that I’d be heading up document controls for his new project in addition to the three or four others we discussed that day:

“Kameron, how many of you are there?”

My response: “I’m starting to wonder that, too.”

Denver is cold (about 2 degrees. A lot like Fairbanks in March, actually), with what I consider to be less than a mile of visibility, though the pilot insisted there’s 3. The roads are shit. I passed three car accidents, two ambulances, and a fire truck on the way out here. It’s a mixture of snow and crappy visibility – and the rich kids on vacation who have stopped their cars on the side of the roads and are whining to their parents on their cell phones.

I’m from a really, really small branch office of this company. We run a tight ship. We reuse paper and have to make lengthy petitions for office supplies. Our HR manager and the lead architect make sure of that. At most, we have 18 people working there, but nobody’s in all at once, and haven’t been for about six months. It’s relaxed, laid back, and they’ve been known to put the speakerphone on mute when corp. starts bitching during conference calls, so they can bitch back.

It’s a bit like working for a mom n’ pop operation. Only, more conference calls.

I expected that in Denver I’d walk up to the corporate office and find that it maybe took up a couple floors of a high rise. Maybe a whole building.

When I arrived, I found I’d been dropped off at the wrong building.

Oh, yes, this was XX Company, but the wrong building belonging to XX company.

Corporate Denver consists of three buildings.

They’ve got every single division of the company headed out of here, not just wireless.

They’ve got charts up on the wall for Iraq projects.

It’s like I sold my soul and woke up working for Halliburton.

Locked Up

It should be illegal to get up before 5am.

Not sure how long they'll keep me locked up today, but my hotel has wireless.

See you all tonight.

Go drink some coffee for me.

I transferred all my writing files to my company laptop.

Ha ha

Stepping Out

My whole body hurts.

I tried on my suit jacket in preparation for the Denver trip. I haven't touched it in months. When I pulled it on, I was surprised to find that it seemed to have a tighter fit than I remembered, which was physically impossible, I thought, because I've dropped two sizes in the last year.

It zipped up fine.

The problem was the shoulders.

Of course. Spend two or three days a week beating the shit out of something, and work with 30lb free weights five mornings a week, and you get broad in the shoulders. I was already broad in the shoulders.

Such irony. I've spent my whole life wishing I was smaller, and here I am, getting bigger, taking up more space.

I've been issued a company laptop, a corporate card. Rumor has it I'll be traveling to Dallas, New York, maybe Fresno this year. I'll be talking with my new boss about what they can offer me in Denver.

I'll be 25 next week.

I went jogging tonight. I'm not sure why, because I was prepared to pack all my jogging clothes for Denver (my hotel has a gym), but I was full of this nervous energy that I couldn't get rid of, so I pulled on my Hurley hoodie (I was so gleeful to find that "Hurley" was an actual clothing brand) and hit the pavement.

By the time I got to the park, the wind was up, coming in from over the lake, and it was snowing.

I picked a sport I like - boxing - that requires the one exercise I have hated the whole of my entire life with a blazing passion - jogging - in order to be in any way effective.

I hate jogging. I have always hated it. I can't say why. Maybe memories of those truly awful fitness days in PE when you all got clocked on doing your mile, and I always seemed to be lagging behind back there with the other fat kids. Mostly, I think, I didn't like the idea of running much because, well, I gained about 30lbs during puberty, and all of the sudden there was a lot more extra flesh to jiggle around and attract attention, and I hated drawing attention, because I never looked on any of it as good.

So for whatever reason, I hate jogging, but here I am, knowing I have to be up by 3:30am to catch my flight, knowing I should be sleeping, but too edgy to sit still.

I've learned to pace myself, which took awhile to figure out. Now, whenever I start moving too fast, I remind myself that it's better to feel like I'm trotting out the duration than to have to stop because I'm gasping. The breathing thing took forever to figure out, too. All from the diaphram. If you lose the breathing part, you're finished, and that's what I'm paying attention to the whole time, that and my music.

I'm just about to reach the place where I usually stop for my hundred-yard walk (usually my halfway and turn-around point), but there's a good song on (Snow Patrol: Run), and I keep going, and you know, just past where I usually stop, the path is way better lighted, and you know, there's some bike riders out here tonight, hey is that another female jogger? Hell, I'll keep going.

Past the skating park, cool, why aren't I tired? Another good song (Velvet Underground: These Days), put it on repeat, keep going.

I'm not sure why I'm not tired. It's like I've given my brain leave to gnaw on all the bullshit I've been tossing and turning about in bed, and it's taking the opportunity to hash it out while I run.

I'm worried about this job, worried about sticking with it, because I'm so damn terrified of sticking with anything for more than two years (yea, about the time it took for my last actual relastionship to go from blandly sour to freakshow. I'll be the first to bang that one on the head).

But what did I always want? A job where I got opportunities to travel, that gave me time to write (if I only work 6-9 months a year when projects are going, guess what I'm doing the rest of the time?), a job that paid off my student loans, because until I get out from under the burden of all this debt, I'm going to feel leashed.

I can see the tennis courts now, and I've mapped this route before. To the tennis courts and back is over 4 miles.

The snow's coming down thick now. My fingers are numb.

Train: Ordinary (repeat)

I jog past the tennis courts, take my 100 yard half-way point walk, turn around, and head back.

I'm facing more into the wind now, and the snow's like sleet against my face.

This is stupid. Why am I doing this?

I'm tired, but I can't stop now because to stop and walk means to frickin' freeze my ass off.

I just don't want to do this. I hate this. Skip, go back to Snow Patrol (repeat). Keep going.

The last mile and a half is a blistering bitch.

I tell myself I'll let myself walk at least under the tunnel. Just a breather, just a...

And I headed into the tunnel, and I realized there was no one waiting on the other side of it.

I told a buddy of mine once that I always felt like I was running away from something, and he said, "Are you sure you weren't running *toward* something?"

Maybe I am, maybe I'm not, but tonight, the only person behind me was me, the only person ahead of me was me.

I was running away from somebody I was, and running toward somebody I wanted to be.

I had this litany running through my head, "You've got three degrees. You've trekked 160 km into rural Africa. You've written eight books (no, they aren't very good, but I fucking finished them). You can run four miles. This is the last of your shit that you need to get together. Fit and strong. That's it. You'll be there."

I've been looking for somebody to fight my whole life, when the only person I've got to fight is myself.

But it's like once you start running, you can't stop.

For better or worse, I'm stuck with myself.

May as well be a better self.

But goddamn, it's a bitch to get there.