Grindhouse

Like everything I've seen of Tarantino's, Grindhouse is a rollicking good ride, but a disturbing, uncomfortable one that remixes cliches and then one-ups them by taking everything just that much further than anybody else does.

You want blood and gore? Oh, indeed, there will be blood! Buckets! Cheesy dialogue? You bet! Strippers with hearts of gold? Loads! Sharpshooting hero with the Mysterious Past? (I never miss!!!) Of course!

The first feature on offer is "Planet Terror," which runs after a couple of previews for "upcoming attractions," including "Machete," an action movie about a machete-wielding Mexican assassin hired to kill a Senator who's pro-immigration. Yes. It's this sort of movie.

So, Planet Terror is a bloody, slapstick zombie flick complete with Iraqi scientist Naveen Andrews, who I'm sure some people actually do think is Iraqi cause he plays one on tv. But anyway. So Naveen is dealing with some ex US soldiers who were exposed to this zombifying gas. Now the only thing that keeps them from zombifying is small amounts of the gas. But the deal goes bad, there's some castration (you know how it goes), and then the gas gets loose in small town Austin and... Planet Terror ensues!

Anyway, the "plot," such as it is, really isn't all that important.

Iraqis and zombie gas, OK?

In the meantime, Rose McGowan opens the film with a gratuitous go-go dance ("It's go go, not cry-cry." heh heh. Sorry, the dialogue is just great). Rose McGowan is pretty buff. And the dance is pretty gratuitous. Which is the point. Everything in this SF spoof blood bath zombie terror homage flick thing is supposed to be about 800 times crazier than in a "regular" movie.


So maybe that's what made the whole camera-devouring-half-naked-McGowan thing so uncomfortable for me. I really want to love all of of the cliche-fucking stuff, the over the top blood and gore and SF ridiculousness and hyper-masculinity and silly femme fatales and their lesbian lovers, and mostly I do, but...

You know, I was reading one of Patrick's posts where he pointed out to a board commenter that both male and female characters in Jade Empire are dressed in rather revealing clothing, and he argued that if you complain about one character's dress being provocative, you have to admit that the other one's is, too.

Though I don't personally think either character's poses and clothing choices are terribly provocative or objectifying as gaming characters go (they were pretty tame, really), male skin is still treated differently than female skin, usually in the posing. Not only are the guys already being presented as, well, men and so have that whole male priviledge thing going on, coming from a place of relative power over women, socially, but when a guy takes his shirt off and strikes a pose, it's never the pose of someone being looked at but somebody who's looking. Or posing to intimidate, not to sexually excite. Taking off his shirt isn't an invitation to be sexually ravished, it's an invitation to size him up for a fight. If he was posed the way women usually are, it'd look something more like this. But probably more skin. I'm thinking thongs and assless chaps.

So the hyper-cliches in the movie really do a lot to show off the sexism inherenent in the cliche standards themselves. You can let it go in Casino Royale, but during the sex scene where our Hero takes off his shirt, and the camera spends all of its time lovingly licking over McGowan's body, not the Hero's, it's tougher to pretend that it's all just good fun and totally normal. One of the things that happens when you turn up the dial on movie cliches in these sorts of movies is that it forces you to look some of the absurdist sexist crap in a real stark light, too. It doesn't get glossed over as "Well, you know, action movie, whatever."

Anyway, McGowan does in fact lose her leg to zombies at one point. For better or worse, this is the highlight of the show, cause her Boyfriend with the Mysterious Past (TM) retrofits her with a machine gun in place of her leg, and so she gets to weild bloody revenge on the zombie hordes. And though her Boyfriend with the Mysterious Past (TM) may not make it, he does of course, Go On. Cause he Never Misses. The Holy Womb allows him to carry on.

But I really didn't care, cause she had a machine gun for a leg. I'll forgive a lot.

Most people (including me) liked Planet Terror better than the second offering, Death Proof, though this was the one that made the most of the cliche-fucking. Unfortunately, Tarantino takes his own sweet time getting there, and after all the blood and gore and suspense and booty-shaking in the last movie, you're not really sure what to make of this one until, like, the last ten minutes.


This one was a tough one to watch. Kurt Russell stalks a bunch of women who are out having a night on the town. Tarantino spends a lot of time letting you get to know the women, their relationships, careers, gets you to at least sympathize with them if not like them, and talking, talking talking while they're stalked by this guy in a big black car. Rose McGowan shows up again, getting hit on by the stalker and eventually going home with him.

She doesn't make it home, of course. He has a stunt car with a closed-off passenger seat, and straps himself in while allowing her to go unbelted, then kills her with some fancy driving. It's bloody and stupid, especially after you just watched McGowan machine gun a bunch of zombies in Planet Terror with her machine-gun leg and lead a colony of survivors in Mexico. I mean, really.

Said stalker then bashes his car into the car carrying the four women you've spent half an hour getting to know, and they all die a bloody, horrible, dismembered death. There's sex and drugs in there, too, which is another of the reason's he's able to get away with vehicular homicide.

So, movie keeps going, and now he's stalking another group of women. I'm really uncomfortable by this point. I hate stupid bloody needless stalker violence against women. Probably for personal reasons. I mean, getting killed by nerve-gas zombies is one thing, but killed by crazy stalker hits a nerve.

Anyway, so here are four more women you're getting ready to watch die horrible, bloody, needless deaths because they're out having too much fun instead of staying home sucking cock in the kitchen.

But these women are a little different.

This *is* the same guy who wrote Kill Bill. The first one was good, anyway.

One of the women, Kim, is a smart-talking stunt woman who carries a gun. Zoe is another stunt woman with "cat-like" agility who's a gearhead New Zealander. There's an actress cheerleader type tagging along for variety and Rosario Dawson, who is some sort of cameraperson or something.

Anyway, this bunch wants to con a car out of guy and go stunt riding with it cause Zoe's always wanted to stunt ride on this certain kind of car (no, I'm not a gearhead. White thunderbird? Some car. Anyway). So Zoe, Kim, and Rosario Dawson leave the cheerleader behind to entertain the car owner and take the car out, attach their belts to the window frames of the car, and Zoe lies down on her back on the hood, hanging onto the belts on either side, and Kim drives like a bat out of hell down the back roads of Austin with Zoe freeriding on the hood.

Kurt Russell the stalker is in pursuit.

It's got all of the elements for Gory Female Death. Independent-minded women in tight clothes who talk about sex and con a guy out of something - ie act like bad girls - and go out joy riding and having a good time while being stalked by crazy white guy.

In movie cliche terms, They Have It Coming.

I kind of wanted to leave just then, cause if this was all Tarantino had to offer me, I'd call Planet Terror worth my $7 and leave it at that.

But it turns out these women have guts, and when he finally runs them off the road, Kim pulls out her gun and shoots him. He's injured, but manages to drive away.

All the women - still alive, miraculously - hop back into the car and gleefully decide to go after him.

And the hunter becomes the hunted.

It was a fun little reversal, and being a rah-rah women need to be strong and fearless and defend themselves sort of person, I thought it was a cool money-shot there at the end, but I don't think the preceding 80 minutes of the movie were really worth the ten minutes at the end. I was also concerned about that whole potential message of the, "Well, if women fought back they wouldn't be raped/killed so if they are, it's their fault," thing, which does come up in a conversation among the heroines before the stalking. Kim - the gun carrier - insists that it's her right to do her goddamn laundry whenever she feels like it, and she's not going to avoid her building's basement at midnight cause she's scared of getting raped. She'd rather pack a gun.

I'd rather guys just didn't rape and murder people. But you know. You do what you gotta do until we live in a culture where that's not OK. I'll keep lifting my weights and going back to boxing lessons as soon as I'm employed.

To sum up, there was good stuff here that entertained and even got me thinking about how fucking stupid the whole "bad guys rape women!" cliche is, and how tired I am of seeing go-go dancers without machine guns for legs, and stuff like that. I learned that Indians are Hollywood's best stand-in for Iraqis, and I take Rosario Dawson much more seriously when costume designers don't dress her like a fourteen year old.

Also, I still like blood and gore and women beating people up, which is a fine substitute for being bloody and beating people up in real life. It's very cathartic.

Also, if I lose my leg to diabetes when I'm 100, I want a machine gun for a leg.

I'm just sayin'.

Creativity and Education

"If you're afraid to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."

Math is Hard

One of the toughest things I've been dealing with the last month - aside from (and relating to) negotiating personal relationships - is depression. It's not bad enough that I can't function, but the longer I go without a job, the worse my health gets, the less money I have for stuff like meds and food, the more down on myself I get.

There have been good days. My recent depression is related to stuff in addition to all of that, but no matter the cause, it's something I deal with. Chronic illness, starting three relationships and ending two in a year, losing one of my best friends, getting laid off, dealing with a crazy homelife while coming to terms with the chronic illness stuff (physical and emotional), and a sudden and rapid move to another state without the benefit of moving here with... well, with anything to do but keep going (no job prospects, living on the good graces of friends)... it gets to me.

I remember trying so hard, in the beginning, when I was first diagnosed, to just get up and brush myself off and carry on. But that became impossible as I began to feel terrified and constricted in my personal life and started making all sorts of crazy decisions in order to set back the clock to my pre-illness days. But you can't erase a year's worth of pain that you've put other people through while thinking you were doing the absolutely most rational thing in the whole world. And that all took a toll on me, and on other people in my life.

If somebody cares about me, I haven't exactly been a fun person to be around for the last year, because when I'm in a high stress situation, what I want, more than anything, is to be left alone. Something that I've realized the more I've dealt with the diabetes stuff is just how wacked out I can be when my sugar's off. Overly anxious, sometimes hysterical, so *certain* that my hyper-crazy feelings are totally *right on.* Panicky. Cloudy. I've learned to shut up when I'm feeling this way. It's best just not to talk to me when I feel like crap, because if I start getting all sorts of questions, I'm likely to explode.

Which means, something innocent like, "Are you OK? Are you sure you're OK? Do you still like me? Do you hate me? Are you sure you're OK? Is there something I can do? Why aren't you talking right now? What's wrong with you? Is it me?"

Is likely to get a response like, "NO I'M NOT OK I FUCKING HATE YOU AND I NEVER WANT TO TALK TO YOU AGAIN," and at the time, that feels like a totally valid response.

I've gotten a lot better with just saying, "It's not you. I just don't feel well," or "I just have low sugar, so I'm over anxious," or "I can't talk right now, I have high sugar and I'm fucking pissy," but it's taken me a lot of experience and a lot of effort to get there. One of the great things about living with Ian and Stephanie is that they don't ask a lot of questions, they give me a lot of space, and there isn't somebody hovering over me asking me all the time if I'm all right.

Frankly, if I had to answer that question, half the time no, I wouldn't be all right, and then talking about how not all right I was would make me feel worse, and then I'd get really depressed, and then I'd start resenting whoever it was who was pulling all this bad feeling out of me.

And around and around.

I've been putting on weight again, which, once again, is an issue because I can't afford to buy new clothes, so I'm giving up some things that I've come to use as a crutch - particularly stuff like candied nuts, which aren't great for my sugar anyway. The upping of my food consumption directly cooresponds to my decreasing bank account. The more I spend, the more I want to buy more food, the more I eat, the less money is in my bank account...

So I'm cutting out some of that stuff. I need to wean myself back off that crutch. Including all those morning pancakes. I've had a couple of bad weeks out here, and my initial couple weeks were just getting settled in. Back to weights *every* morning, 6 days a week of cardio instead of just 4, that sort of thing.

You know, it's a funny thing. People are always asking skinny people how they stay skinny. They're not asking heavier people how *they* stay in shape. I don't think anybody looks at me and goes, wow, she's only 200! She could be 270, but she takes care of herself! How *does* she stay at 200 pounds!!???

Cause yeah, you let it go for four weeks, and whoa boy, time to get back on track. It's something you have to be aware of all the time, if you want to have cool biceps. And feel less doughy. And keep your pants on. This is what it's like to have no metabolsm. The diabetes doesn't help. Reasonable eating and exercise just doesn't cut it. It's 6 days a week, and no peanuts. And that's just to keep me in pants.

In the meantime, yeah, my sugar could be better. I keep vaccillating between 16 and 18 u a day of Lantus, my long-lasting insulin. I don't want to go all the way back up to 18 cause back when I was working all day in a high rise and biking to work, I got away with 14 u a day, and that was pretty sexy. Going back up to 18 feels like a defeat.

The solution would be 2 workouts a day. Or, you know, just taking 18 units of Lantus.

Blast.

Anyway, this post isn't really about anything at all, except to say that boo-hoo, life is hard, and I'm sick of giving myself shots, and I'm going to miss my cinnamon almonds, and I need sexier shoulders, and I have enough money for about 3-4 more weeks of groceries, and some days life really sucks and boo-hoo math is hard.

I'm sure tomorrow will be better. It usually is.

Not Much Worse...

... than wacky sugar numbers and the resulting cognitive fuzz that makes you just not care.

So tired.

Minimum Credit Card Payments for April:

$410.00

Yup, that's the last time I can pay those without being employed.

If nothing comes up next week, I'll pick up those food service applications. I'm not going to make it, otherwise.

International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

In honor of the first annual International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, here's Two Girls. This story's been freely available on and off for years, but never sold.

In addition, of course, there are the stories freely available on the sidebar.

Decision

I turned down the job offer yesterday morning, after speaking with family and friends about it.

As much as I need the money, and the first-day health benefits, well, if I took that job, packed up my shit, and started Monday, I would *really* need the health benefits because I'd break myself down.

It took everything I had left in order to get to Dayton. The time between when I realized things were so bad in Chicago that I had to leave and when I actually left was less than 7 days, and I'd spent the last six or eight months there giving everything I had to repair a broken friendship. I haven't talked here about just how bad things were there.

Out of respect for Jenn, I haven't gone into the details, but it was really, really, really bad. The worst it's ever been in any relationship - friendly or otherwise - that I've ever had. There was duel blame and mutual fault and a lot of shit in there because I was desperately crazy and sick last year for the initial push that got things to that point, but no matter the reason, it was fucking bad.

I wouldn't have come to Dayton unless things were desperate.

And what I need now is to take care of myself and recover. I need to pull my health and my self-esteem back together, and that's not going to happen in Chicago working a high-stress job in a place where I have absolutely no support network.

It was a hard decision, because I'm stubborn and prideful, and I wanted to gun through the move and the job just to "prove" I could do it. Sure, I could do it.

But I've been pushing myself to "just keep going" for a long time now. It hasn't made anything better. It's just prolonged all the badness.

So I'm going to keep trying to get some work here in Dayton. I got a surprise check from my 401(K) payout and just got my last paycheck from my old job, so I can keep going for another 6 weeks or so before I can't pay my bills. Hopefully I'll have some temp stuff by then. If I don't have anything in another couple weeks, I'll give in and work at Starbucks.

There's always food service.

In the meantime, I finished up a draft of the GW synopsis, finished rewriting the first 30 pages (for the fourth time, officially), and am working through the rest of the manuscript. Query letter et al will go out by the end of the month.

Struck Dead By Technology

For various reasons, I'm up late tonight, unable to sleep, and began obsessively clicking on my "stumbleupon" button in the upper right hand corner of my toolbar.

Suddenly, I was brought up short with a pop-up window stating, "Unknown error - database failure."

I continued obsessively clicking on the button, and continued to get the stumbleupon error message.

"Oh my god," I thought, "How will I surf the internet?"

Job Offer

Well, my old boss back in Chicago pulled through and made me a job offer. I asked for 45K and a 5K moving bonus. I received a job offer letter for 43K and a 4K moving bonus and a 30-day "free stay" at the company residential "service center" place.

Medical starts right away. 3 weeks vacation after the first year. They'll be operating near my old office (not in Palatine), and I've got a title, "Leasing Specialist" which I assume I'll be trained on how to do, cause I don't do leasing.

But anyway.

Sounds lovely, doesn't it?

The catch?

The catch is, they want me to start on Monday.

This means putting as much stuff as possible into boxes between now and Sunday, buying an overpriced plane ticket ($700), spending the week "working" back in Chicago, then spending the weekend in Chicago finding a place, then flying back to Dayton the next weekend and paying movers to move my stuff to said place.

And working for my old boss. Who, yes, I do love. But the work is hard, and life-consuming. These guys get eaten up by this industry. And I'd be doing it again.

But it's 43K plus health insurance.

If I had money or a job here, I'd say no.

Going to sit down and talk with Ian and Steph about it tonight and decide what I want to do.

Insulin Calculator

Put this Insulin Calculator (scroll to the bottom) at the top of the list of things I wished I'd been made aware of when I first got diagnosed.

It probably took me about 6 months to figure out the exact same conversation rate (base sugar number, plus amount of carbs you want to eat = take X amount of insulin).

It's a neat little pop-up window calculator, but Jenn rigged a spreadsheet for me that does the same thing. Just wish I would have had this a little sooner...

Collecting the Set

I have an interview with my fourth Dayton temp agency tomorrow.

Four.

I'm curious as to how many more there actually are in this city. I suppose I may as well collect the set.

The Anonymity of the Internets (or lack thereof)

But even women who don't put their pictures or real names online are subject to virtual harassment. A recent study showed that when the gender of an online username appears female, they are 25 times more likely to experience harassment. The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, found that female user-names averaged 163 threatening and/or sexually explicit messages a day.

Sugar Acrobatics

I've been having some issues with my sugar since I got back from Spain, so I've been running numbers like this

(as a refresher: a normal person has a fasting glucose of about 80. I need to stay under 150. Over 200, you do permanent damage. I record three times a day: before breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I test more than that, but generally, these are the only ones I record):

185 - bad
91
91

142 - OK
122
82

125
70
70

148 - OK
99
157 - OK

119
177 - bad
108

These aren't horrible numbers, but I've only been able to make them by adjusting my insulin in the middle of the night. When I test at night because I've woken up for some reason - usually because my feet are bothering me (poor circulation caused by high sugar) or I have to pee (also caused by high sugar).

So at night, instead of running around 100 - which is what I test at before bed, my sugar has been climbing by nearly a hundred points at night while I sleep. So I'll test at 185/200/175 around midnight/three am (no, unless I wake up because of some discomfort, I don't generally test in the middle of the night)

Ideally, I'd like to get these sorts of numbers from a few weeks ago, which I was achieving *without* this odd midnight adjustmentof 4-5 units:

96
88
99

144 - OK
157 - OK
68

95
126
97

118
116
68

153 - OK
105
98

Of course, looking at the actual differences between those numbers now, side by side, I realize I'm being kind of anal about the whole thing.

But you know, high numbers in the middle of the night (which I generally don't record, so they don't show up in this comparison) make me feel like shit the next morning.

This particular morning, I blame the two pieces of pizza I had last night, but you know, after covering for said pizza and going to bed 4 hours after eating with a 75 number only to wake up at 3:30 am with a 207 is just *weird.*

Bodies are *weird.*

Infidel

I've spent the last couple of days devouring Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel. It's been a long time since I devoured a book with this kind of desperate hunger, and I think my compulsion to lock myself in my room in order to finish the book surprised even me.

Hirsi Ali is the Somalian-born former Muslim woman turned atheist, women's activist, and member of Dutch Parliament. She is best known as the woman who wrote Submission, the short film that criticises the Quran's pronouncements about women and the carrying out of those prescriptions toward women in Islam. In answer, there were protests and riots throughout Holland, and director Theo Van Gogh was stabbed shot, stabbed 28 times and had his throat cut in broad daylight in front of 30 witnesses by a Muslim fundamentalist. A death threat to Hirsi Ali was pinned to Van Gogh's chest. She's been living under high security ever since, and currently lives in the US.

I'd first read about Hirsi Ali when I was in South Africa, and I remember feeling uncomfortable about what she was said to believe in an NYT piece about her rise to Parliament. Hirsi Ali - first and foremost an advocate of Muslim women's rights - believes that in order for Muslim women to become truly emancipated, there's going to need to be a revolution within Islam. She calls it an Enlightenment: a concerted study of the Quran not as the Holy Absolute Word of God but as a text written by human beings, and therefore a text open to interpretation. One of the reasons her film was seen as so obscene was because words of such incredible holiness - the words of the Quran - were written on objects of such incredible baseness - women.

What she wants Muslims to do is, roughly, what Christians have had to do in order to reconcile the words and prescriptions of their faith in the Old and New Testament with modern ideas about freedom of expression, women's rights, the rights of children, incest laws, corporal punishment, and etc.

Though "an eye for an eye" is still set down in the Old Testament and having sex with your father and marrying multiple wives and bloody stonings and chopping people were seen as OK in the text, most Christians like the idea of following the far less bloody New Testament teachings of Jesus: the he who casts the first stone school.

When most Christians describe their faith, they call it a faith of peace, of love. Hirsi Ali argues that when Muslims call Islam a religion of peace, they're flat wrong, because according to their faith, the Quran is holy and absolutely right, and if that's true, it advocates the beating of women, flogging in the streets, hands getting chopped off for stealing, and above all - the slaughtering of anyone who doesn't believe as you do. A number of fundamentalist Christians who insist that the Bible is the absolute word of God can get themselves stuck in the same line of reasoning. She insists it's a package deal, and until Muslims deal with this and come out and say, "Well, really, we understand that we're interpreting the book and we're not to take it literally because these were the ideas set down for the bloody, brutal world the prophet lived in a thousand years ago," then they can't pretend it's a religion that preaches peace.

This is, among other things, why Hirsi Ali is such a controversial figure. The liberal hippie in me was appalled at the idea of telling people how they had to observe their religion. Afterall, what about freedom of religion? That, too, is a freedom of Western society just as much - if not more so (certainly historically!)- than the equality of women. On the other hand, watching anyone justify rape, beheading, slaughter, the confinement of women, and etc. to a holy book of any kind pisses me off. Instead of opening your eyes, making observations, and coming to your own conclusions, there are people who want to swallow somebody else's ideas about the way the world should be as set down a thousand or two thousand years before.

One of the fascinating things about reading Hirsi Ali's book is watching her go down the road of working through all of the contradictions of her faith. When she first questioned the teachings of the Quran, she was told to shut up and believe; to be silent, to submit. Submission to one's husband, one's clan, one's God, was what Islam was all about. Once she escaped to the West she began to delve into these contradictions more deeply with the help of access to a broader range of thinkers, of ideas.

As a writer, one of the most moving parts of the book is when she talks about the impact reading books had on her as a teenager and young adult. They gave her windows into other worlds, into other ways of thinking, and they got her to question the way the world was. Until she was exposed to other ideas, the harsh, brutal world in which she lived, where women believed that their endurance of violence, spousal rape, and etc would put them on the path to Heaven, she believed this was simply the way things were. There was nothing else. Being exposed to other worlds, she realized things could be different. Incredibly so.

I was admittedly uncomfortable with Hirsi Ali's complete embrace of the Western world and her turn from Islam to athism, because I worry that her example is going to be "this is how all Muslim women should be!" She does make very clear, however, that she does not want or believe that her path is the right path for anyone; only the right path for her.

For better or worse, as Westerners, we love stories like this: the brutalized woman who is emancipated in a Western country; gosh yay, look how much better we are than other cultures! We get to pat ourselves on the back. But Hirsi Ali talks about many other women from similar circumstances who did not embrace the West so whole heartedly. I do get the impression that she believes it *is* possible to reconcile Islam with Western values of free speech, individual freedom, but it's going to be a long, bloody road, and she doesn't seem terribly optimistic about it.

And, to be honest, yeah, the West is loads better than anywhere else she talked about for somebody like me. I wouldn't trade places; but I do know that much of the violence in the world, particularly in former colonies, is taking place because of the shitty way things were and are being handled by Western countries. That's not to blame the despots any less, but a number of them would have had a lot less hardware if we'd stop giving it to them.

Radical Islam is very much a reaction *against* the West, and it's going to be the moderates, not the radicals, who are going to work on reconciling these ideas, according to Hirsi Ali. There are always going to be radicals - there are radical fundamentalist Christians who blow up abortion clinics, after all. Above all, though, I feel like Hirsi Ali's crusade - if you want to call it that - is to tell the truth as she sees it. She lived in a world where you didn't talk about the way things really were, how you really felt, what you really wanted. You submitted everything to the will of your parents, your clan, your God.

I trolled Google video for some interviews with her, and one of the most striking things about her is that she's actually incredibly soft-spoken. She's this little, fine-boned woman who does not raise her voice or make wild gestures. She takes her time answering questions. She doesn't let anyone rush her.

Above all, this is a powerful book, and an incredible read. How do you go from being the daughter to a Somalian revolutionary who's got three wives scattered across three countries, living in a two-room concrete block and getting beaten by your mother and cicumcised by your grandmother to becoming a member of the Dutch Parliament and living with constant security because so many people want you dead? I think what struck me so much about the story is that it wasn't that it was impossible. It was that it took courage. Huge amounts of courage. And will.

Anyone who stands up for themselves, for their right to tell the truth: it's not as if that's a physically difficult thing. Sometimes it just takes getting on a train. Buying a ticket. That first step. One foot. You just stand up. You refuse to shut up. It *sounds* so easy. And yet the guts it takes to do that - and to keep doing it, even after suffering bodily harm and being threatened with more of it as a result of your actions - that's the most incredible thing.

The New Routine

Called in available to my temp agencies and scheduled another interview for tomorrow at 10am with yet another temp agency. That'll be three agencies I'm registered with.

In the meantime, on my tax forms, I put down that my occupation was "writer."

It felt much better than writing "employed."

Anyway, more GW edits. The book's going out before Wiscon, come hell or high water.

And So

If I declare myself and business and report my writing income ($4500), then I owe $1221.

If I don't declare myself a busines and report my writing income ($4500), then I owe $421.

This probably wouldn't have happened if I'd kept all of my con reciepts.

EDIT: Final Federal taxes owed: $553

Yeah, right!

I wonder if I have anything left on any of my credit cards?

Tonight's Song, Stuck on Repeat

Nickelback: Rockstar

I'm through with standin' in line
at clubs I'll never get in
It's like the bottom of the ninth
and I'm never gonna win
this life hasn't turned out
quite the way I want it to be
(Tell me what you want)

I want a brand new house
on an episode of Cribs
And a bathroom I can play baseball in
And a king size tub big enough
for ten plus me
--(Yea, So what you need)--

I need a credit card that's got no limit
And a big black jet with a bedroom in it
Gonna join the mile high club
At thirty-seven thousand feet
--(Been there done that)--

I want a new tour bus full of old guitars
My own star on Hollywood Boulevard
Somewhere between Cher and
James Dean is fine for me
(So how you gonna do it?)

I'm gonna trade this life for fortune and fame
I'd even cut my hair and change my name

[CHORUS]
'Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars and
Live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars
The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap
We'll all stay skinny 'cause we just won't eat
we'll hang out in the coolest bars
in the VIP with the movie stars
Every good gold digger's
Gonna wind up there
Every Playboy bunny
With her bleach blonde hair
And well...

Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar
Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar

I wanna be great like Elvis without the tassels
Hire eight body guards that love to beat up assholes
Sign a couple autographs
So I can eat my meals for free
--(I'll have the quesadilla, ha-ha,)--

I'm gonna dress my ass
with the latest fashion
Get a front door key to the Playboy mansion

Gonna date a centerfold that loves to
blow my money for me
(So how you gonna do it?)

I'm gonna trade this life
For fortune and fame
I'd even cut my hair
And change my name

'Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars
And live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars
The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap
we'll all stay skinny 'cause we just won't eat
And we'll hang out in the coolest bars
in the VIP with the movie stars
Every good gold digger's
Gonna wind up there
Every Playboy bunny
With her bleach blonde hair
And we'll hide out in the private rooms
With the latest dictionary of
today's who's who
They'll get you anything
with that evil smile
Everybody's got a
drug dealer on speed dial, well
Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar

I'm gonna sing those songs
That offend the censors
Gonna pop my pills
from a Pez dispenser
Get washed-up singers writing all my songs
Lip --sync-- 'em every night so I don't get 'em wrong

Well we all just wanna be big rockstars
And live in Hilltop houses driving fifteen cars
The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap
We'll all stay skinny 'cause we just won't eat
And we'll hang out in the coolest bars
in the VIP with the movie stars
Every good gold digger's
Gonna wind up there
Every Playboy bunny
With her bleach blond hair
And we'll hide out in the private rooms
With the latest dictionary of
today's who's who
They'll get you anything
with that evil smile
Everybody's got a
drug dealer on speed dial, well

Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar
Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar

What Keeps Me Up At Night

"God’s War is a 97,000 word fantasy novel of faith, blood, betrayal and submission played out in the contaminated deserts of Nasheen, a matriarchal state engaged in a centuries-old holy war with polygamous Chenja."

Hm, no, that's not right.

I typed: Polygamous.

No, that means multiple partners of either sex. What's more than one wife?

Poly something. Poly... poly... poly...

::looks it up in actual paper dictionary next to desk:::

Yes, see, that's multiple spouses, not multiple wives.

And... Polyandry. That's more than one husband.

Yum.

OK, can't get distracted.

::looks through poly- words:::

Aha. Here it is.

OK, polygyny.

P-O-L-Y-G-Y-N-Y.

That's more than one husband. Yes, says so right here. OK, so that would be:

Polygynous.

:::types::: P-O-L-Y-G-Y-N-O-U-S

Hm.

Wait.

But.

Word doesn't recognize this word.

Is this the right word?

Spell it again.

:::types::: P-O-L-Y-G-Y-N-O-U-S

Yes, it says so right here.

Why does Word recognize POLYGAMOUS but not POLYGYNOUS?

Is my dictionary on crack? (possible)

Is Word broken? (probable)

This is the exciting writing life we all dream of.

Mmmmm Query Letters

The only thing I hate drafting more than query letters are synopses.

That's going to be next.

And I just printed out GW AGAIN so I can go through ANOTHER round of line edits.

I hacked and combined several chapters during the last pass, and I need to make sure those run smoothly. I've also got pages and pages of detail notes that I'd like to go back and put into the narrative. They look like minor things: details about school, religion, the literal world building of Nyx's planet from a rock into something more or less habitable, but they're the sorts of details that make a so-so novel a memorable one.

Gee, it's like writing is actual work or something.

I hate that.

The Good German

I picked up a copy of The Good German at Heathrow, mainly because it has this winning first line: "The war had made him famous."

This is a beautifully written thriller set in Berlin just after the German surrender during WWII. The novel revolves around the murder of a nobody American soldier (in the Russian-occupied part of the city) after the "peace," and one American journalist's interest in getting the story. The reason our journalist hero has come back to Berlin, however, is to find his married lover, whom he left behind during the war.

The two stories end up connecting, of course, as they would in any good thriller, and the strength of the setting here really sold this one for me.

Even better than that, it's beautifully plotted.

One of the big things I've been working on - and reading for - is plot. It's another reason I was blazing through Stephen King novels last year. Watching somebody place their pieces and then neatly set them off like a line of dominoes is an exercise I find terribly satsifying, probably becuase it's something I find incredibly difficult to do in my own writing.

Character, setting, sure, lovely, but plot? Knowing where I'm headed before I get there? I still write plot the way I live my life: messy and disjointed and whatever feels right at the time.

I think both my life and my writing may perhaps do a bit better with some structure.

Then again, most real lives aren't so neatly plotted, and you don't get a six-page Sherlock Holmes description of events and motives at the end. How comforting fiction can be, with all those loose ends tied up so neatly...

All fiction is comfort fiction.

Why Positive Feedback Matters

In general, I'm a fan of brutal critiques. I don't need anybody pussy-footing around my ego. If I've written a shit story, I need to know it was a shit story.

The reverse of that, however, is that if I've written a good story, I need to know it was a good story.

This may come as a surprise. Afterall, if you write a brilliant story, you just know it, right? You realize your utter genius and thrust it into the mail and make tons of money and win shiny awards and sell the movie rights, right?

No, not really.

I rarely know if what I'm writing is any good. I secretly hope it is. But I rarely, if ever, know.

Sure, there have been some short stories I liked just as they were. I didn't ask for feedback because I knew I could sell them as-is. And I've sold stories I got feedback on of the "you'll never sell this as-is sort." I've also not sold stories that me and my critiquers thought were great.

That's how it goes.

But when I'm working on projects that take years, that I look at all the time, I have to have outside feedback. I need to have a handful of very different voices telling me how what I'm doing is coming across, because if I'm ridiculous, I need to know I'm ridiculous. If I'm spending years on something totally useless, I'd like somebody to tell me. I may end up disagreeing with them, but at least I'm prepared for that kind of feedback from the Big Bad World.

I like harsh, constructive, detailed critiques for the initial revision phase when I'm fixing everything that's wrong, but once I've gotten 6 or 8 or 12 months into revisions, revisions that sometimes take years, some of the best feedback to have around is the glowing shit. The "this was brilliant!" shit.

For me, this was an email I got from my buddy Julian who read the first draft of GW. He absolutely loved book, and gushed about it, and every time I felt horrible and defeated tonight, I thought about that email, and I pushed through it. Because, believe me, sitting here in Dayton, OH at midnight working on this last round of line edits, it's pretty much all I had. I've wanted to throw in the towel with this book at least half a dozen times tonight (not to mention how many times the last couple of months, particularly after some other critiques).

I keep thinking: "This book is shit! It's the worst! It's going to be horribly embarrassing! What if it IS published, and then people I know READ it, and they say, THIS IS THE WORST SHIT IN THE WORLD! And suddenly they avoid me at social functions and I have no friends and people are very polite in public but talking about my shitty book in private and OH DEAR GOD I'M GOING TO WRITE ANOTHER BOOK AND IT'S GOING TO SIT IN ANOTHER FUCKING DRAWER OH GAWD THAT'S EVEN WORSE."

These are the things that pass through my mind at midnight in Dayton, OH.

The rest of the time, I secretly believe I'm brilliant.

But man, you know, for those Long Dark Teatimes of the Soul, like tonight, line edit pass number three on a book I technically finished in September and wanted to start marketing in February, first-draft-praise-letters are fucking priceless.

I have finished my stack of line edits. I'm going to bed, rereading the whole fucking thing tomorrow, and starting work on my synopsis and query letters.

Gawd.

And Then There Were Some

Some stuff you don't often hear about being done by women.

Women Gladiators:

Wiki

Gladiatrix

Journal of Combative Sport

Women Bullfighters:

La Diosa Rubia

A Few Fighters

Marie Barcelo

Rebuilding

Today was the first time since I moved that I managed to finish the entirety of my morning weights routine. Depression, laziness, and an inadequate room set-up for working out were keeping me from bothering to do it properly. Some of it is also that I don't have a fixed time for getting up in the morning, which is a problem. I'm usually up by 9:30 am, but I'd like to be up at something more reasonable like 7 or 7:30.

A lot of the trick to being unemployed and living off the good graces of others is not to let yourself wallow - you'll end up regretting all that time you wasted once you've got a job again, so I've been making an effort to work out some kind of lay-off routine or schedule.

I've been making an effort to get in some cardio everyday, but I realized yesterday that instead of bike riding or working out on the elliptical, I was starting to get used to the idea of taking long walks instead. Sure, that's better than nothing, but it's not going to get me looking buff again. I've been feeling rather doughy. There's a boxing gym here in Dayton, but that's going to involve me having money, which will involve me being employed. So.

I have a lot of things that need to get done right now, but this week, the focus is getting GW line edits done and getting it in the mail by the end of the month. Seriously. I was supposed to have this out in February, and having a bunch of unfinished projects lying around is driving me crazy.

The good part about living in Dayton is that, you know, I haven't had to move back in with my parents yet. But I stress the "yet." The problem with Dayton is that there aren't a lot of jobs here, and you're lucky to get offered something for more than $8 an hour. As somebody who was used to making nearly $19 full time and $15 an hour as a temp, there's been some sticker shock when interviewing with temp agencies.

I can also get away with not having a car in Dayton. If I moved back home, we're talking insurance, car payment, and worst of all - gas. I can make it in Dayton on $950 a month. I'd need a lot more to make it in BG.

Right now, the plan is to stay here until I can get back on my feet, financially, or until I can get a good job offer elsewhere and afford to move out. As it is, I pretty much blew through the last of everything I had in getting here, and I have a long way to go to build things up again.

I'm nearly but not quite fucked.

And I stress the "not quite" part.

In the meantime, I'm spending my days drinking pots of coffee and getting on with Ian and Stephanie's dog. Ian's a materials scientist PhD student, so he's usually out of the house by noon at the latest, and Stephanie works as a medical receptionist, so she's out of here at godawful early hours, and I've got most of the day to myself. Most of which I spend reading and doing line edits and scraping paint off doors, as Ian and Steph have been renovating the house, and it gives me a sense of accomplishment to help out with the more mundane tasks involved in that.

As far as self-esteem goes, yeah, that's been a really fucking tough one. It's been difficult to build that back up, not to wallow in a lot of self-hatred. When you're used to being strong and capable and figuring things out and you suddenly fail, utterly, again, yeah, boy, that's pretty fucking hard. It's the way life is, sure, "Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight," but that doesn't make the falling down or getting up part much easier.

Some of the miserable self-esteem stuff comes from how bad things were back in Chicago. Removing myself from that situation has helped with some of that, but you know, selling a book or having a job or succeeding at something sure as hell would help, too. Being able to afford my meds would help.

You know, every little thing helps.

But I did do some traveling last week, and that was divine. It's nice to just get away from bullshit for awhile and get to a place where you feel hopeful about the future instead of terrified. OK, there's some terror, too, but mostly, hope, and there's nothing like navigating a foreign country to get some of your self esteem back. Just because you fail at things doesn't mean you can't do anything. It just means you failed. And you have to keep trying.

It's like writing a lot of bad books. Doesn't mean they'll all be bad. Just means these ones are bad. It doesn't mean you give up. It means you learn from the last one so you can make the next one even better.

Which also sounds a lot easier than it actually is....

Today's Song, Stuck on Repeat

... while I finish the third round of GW line edits. Line edits are the worst part of the whole process for me. The big revision stuff, that's fun. The actual writing, the revising while writing, the outlining, etc. Fine, fine.

The line edits? The round after round of line edits?

Pure torture.

A Perfect Circle - The Noose

So glad to see you well
Overcome and completely silent now
With heaven's help
You cast your demons out
And not to pull your halo down
Around your neck and tug you off your cloud
But I'm more than just a little curious
How you're planning to go about
Making your amends to the dead
To the dead

Recall the deeds as if
They're all someone else's
Atrocious stories
Now you stand reborn before us all
So glad to see you well

And not to pull your halo down
Around your neck and tug you to the ground
But I'm more than just a little curious
How you're planning to go about
Making your amends to the dead
To the dead

With your halo slipping down
Your halo slipping
Your halo slipping down
Your halo slipping down

Your halo slipping down
I'm more than just a little curious
How you're planning to go about
Making your amends [repeated]

Your halo slipping down
Your halo slipping down to choke you now

News & Reviews

I moved in with my buddies Ian & Stephanie a few weeks ago, after they graciously offered to put me up rent-free until I can get my staggering credit card debt and jobless (ie temp work only, no perm position) situation all sorted out. Much of my silence has been because of moving logistics, sorting out personal relationships, and interviewing with local temp agencies, and putting back together some sort of writing schedule for the year, since the one I had is pretty much screwed.

And believe me, you wouldn't have wanted to read anything I've had to say the last few weeks, cause most of it has been boo-hoo poor me stuff. Nobody's perfect.

In the meantime, I've done some traveling, read some books, and seen some movies. And been drinking a lot of coffee.

No joke, I've been having a tough time with this transition. There are few things that make you feel more like a loser than having to move in with friends/parents because of a job layoff, sudden chronic illness (and resulting costs), and exploding personal situation, but you know, shit happens, and I've been working really hard at being OK with that whole "shit happens" thing. I mean, I didn't exactly plan on getting a chronic illness and losing my job and etc. I keep thinking I could have handled it all better, but regardless, this is how it's been handled, so I need to stop and breathe for a second and plan and pick myself up again. I'm just lucky that I've got people around who'll help me out and support me while I do that.

I mean, isn't every writer supposed to live in a friends' basement at some point? It'll sound great during the NYT interview. I'm telling you.

In any case:

I read A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, after seeing it several times at Starbucks, at the local bookshop, and hearing about Beah's interview on The Daily Show.

This one starts out really strong - Beah was forced into "service" as a child soldier for the government forces in Sierra Leone in the late 90s. He gives a brutal, detailed account of how he lost his family literally overnight, was captured by soldiers and forced to commit atrocities. I've read a lot of books about conflict in Africa, mainly southern Africa, but Sierra Leone was a new one for me, and Beah gave me a really clear, vivid understanding of the surreal chaos of a violent revolution and how they impact the people who live there how one day the war is something far off, something you hear about, something that will never really affect you, and the next day your entire world is torn apart. You can read all sorts of books by foreign journalists - or even local ones - and dispassionate histories, but this one came from somebody who lived there, lived through it, and hearing his voice was.... powerful. Powerful not just because he was there, but because we hear these voices so rarely. Instead, we hear about conflict 2nd and 3rd hand, from foreigners, journalists, which is certainly better than nothing, but it pales in comparison to these missing voices.

There are some great things he does here - he shows you the good with the bad. There are horrific things done here, things he does and things done to him and those around him, but there are pauses in the narrative for the good things, the human things, the small acts of kindness, the dancing, the game-playing, the snide joking among friends, and long passages that show his love of the physical landscape of the country. Yes, people do terrible things, but they are just people, like everyone else. It's one of those things that everyone says when they hear about people committing atrocities - hacking people up, the mass slaughter of millions - how could they do it? How is that possible? And in Beah's book, you see exactly how that becomes possible. You see the steps along the way, the increasing chaos, the breakdown of the communities, and you can put yourself there and say, "Would I really have reacted so differently?"

No, probably not.

The book drags a little in the middle and then wraps up really quickly with Beah's rehabilitation, some time living with his uncle and becoming a spokesperson for children at a UN conference, and then his rapid flight across the border when Sierra Leone's capital is finally overrun. We don't actually get the nitty-gritty of how he managed to get to America after crossing the border, only that one of the friends he met and kept in touch with after the UN conference in New York agreed to give him a home if he could make it across the border. Because of this, the book seems to end abruptly, and there's nothing tying it together. It simply... is.

Not long after reading this one, I watched Blood Diamond, and I recommend reading Beah's story and then watching this movie if you're at all interested in the complexities of war and revolution in Sierra Leone or even Africa in general, as the politics and players are similiar in many other countries. Blood Diamond gives you an idea of the big players in these conflicts - the international corporations, the revolutionaries, the aid workers, the mercenaries/smugglers, the civilians, pretty much everybody gets a nod here. The cast was talented enough to sort of wash over the idea that they were all sort of stand-ins for their respective groups (black local, white American journalist, white African smuggler), but they all bordered on cliche at one time or another.

Still, it was a powerful film, and after reading Beah's books, the sections about the boy soldiers rang utterly and terribly true, and it made me sit up and pay attention. The people who put this one together did a lot of work. It's good.

Some other movies:

I also finally saw the latest Bond movie, Casino Royale. I put off watching this one because, yeah, I wasn't so sure I'd like the new Bond Guy.

I was wrong.

They brought Bond back from cheese and made him cool again, and that was a neat trick. Brosnan wasn't bad, but the scripts and direction he were given were turning the Bond movies into a parody of Bond movies ("I thought Christmas only comes *once* a year" Oh lord). The women are bad and die, of course, because this is a Bond movie (but then, pretty much everyone who isn't Bond is bad and dies), but you don't watch a Bond movie expecting to get a lot of conversations between women. I do like what they're doing with M; keeping Dench as M was a great decision. She's just excellent. There was some danger of her appearing motherly toward Bond, which they could have done, but because it's Dench, I think they've managed to avoid that route. She also doesn't dress like a nun (or dress like she's pretending to be 14), which you don't see much with older women actresses, and that was cool. She has some good sparring matches with Bond, and you get enough icy coolness from her that you do wonder just what she'd do if Bond ever did piss her off enough to off him.

Somehow, this movie even made having an asthmatic, one-eyed, scarred villain something other than Bond-movie-cliche laughable.

To round out my movie watching, I also watched The Holiday, mainly because it had Jude Law and Kate Winslet. This was one of those movies that could have been really great, but as it was, just sort of... well, was. Jude Law ended up playing the best character, suprisingly, but Kate and Cameron hammed it up too much to be really sympathetic, and instead, came across as a couple of silly girls. I wasn't really rooting for either of them to have boyfriends. I wanted them to sort their lives out themselves first. I wanted them to grow up.

Kate was doing this miserable Bridget Jones routine (that can be a fun character, but I didn't believe her gumption in the end because I never saw it the whole way through, whereas when Renee Zellweger played it, I believed Bridget's transformation; I felt like Bridget did a little growing up), and Cameron was just doing LA-parody, which wasn't so much her fault - a lot of that was definately a directorial choice.

And you know, there's nothing more miserable than writers writing about writers or movie people making movies about movie people. It's a real turnoff.

A lot of what didn't work for me was also the fact that none of the pairings in the movie had actual chemistry. Cameron and Jude Law have tons of sex, and though I believed the chemistry on his end (I believed it was *acted* but I believed in the acting), she wasn't really clicking much with him, and Kate and Jack Black were just... weirdly paired. It's like you get two people together who were supposed to play the "best friend" role in other movies and then put them together as a leading copule and they still play "best friend" with each other. Which, yes, I realize was what they were going for, but generally, when two people who've played best friend to others get together and you know, get hot on each other, they do actually get hot around each other and have hot, wild sex. Insead, these two get two kisses, and they're not hot kisses at ALL. I didn't believe their connection in the least.

Jude and Kate, as brother and sister, had way more chemistry than any other pairing in the movie.

I also watched parts of Night at the Museum, but Jumanji was better, even if this movie did have Owen Wilson in it.

Overheard at a Bookstore Today in Dayton, OH

"Well, I'm looking at getting either one of these Left Behind books or this Sarah Waters book."

IDOL

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!

If You Could Balance a Flip Phone on Your Nose Would You Use it to Save the World?

Zeroes.

"The 300" Workout

With the Iron Diva's "scaled for stronger female clients" workout assessment.

When All Else Fails...

At least there are Pirates.

Radio Silence (for a time)

Some Seasonings

Star Wars Wiki.

Bullshit bingo for the workplace (something to do during all those meetings!)

Seahenge.

Cryogenic frogs.

The Miracle Fruit.

Universal doormat.

Excerpt Meme (because I'm too headfull [tm] to make up my own content today)

Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven’t gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven’t gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.

“No, long before that. What was left of you was sent here to Faleen because it has the highest concentration of magicians outside of Mushtallah. They called me in because I was your regular magician and had your case history.”

(hey, it caught me in the middle of a dialogue)

Lost words

Lost words.

Why is it so Cold Today?

Why? Why? Why?

Man, My Ass Hurts

I got up at 5:30 am this morning and it was cold and dark outside and I thought, "What the fuck am I doing? It's cold and dark outside."

But by the time I was cognizant enough to realize how stupid this was, I'd already taken my adjusted Lantus dose, and half an hour later, my adjusted Novolog dose, so ready or not, I was biking to work.

It took less than an hour to get up there this morning, because there was no headwind. The weather wasn't bad at all and I thought: yeah, hey, I can do this!

Coming home was a different story.

My ass hurt all day from this morning's biking and the biking I did last night, and getting on the bike again tonight wasn't exactly something I was looking forward to. I somehow got lost looking for the cross-street that would get me back onto the lake path. I ended up spending more time on the street. The headwind was a bitch.

It was really fucking cold.

It was so cold along the lakefront that I stopped and pulled out my insulin from my bag and tugged it inside my double layer of coats because I was worried it was going to freeze.

The wind sent up waves along the bike path, and yea, all that displaced water froze. There were battered ice chunks all over the place, and it started to get dark around 6ish and I still had at least three miles to go.

I was tired. The headwind was bad. I blame that fucking headwind.

I was so tired, and I kept going. I just kept going, and that's what I told myself, though my legs wobbled and it hurt to breathe in the cold air: I just have to keep going. And it reminded me of this post, and then I thought, how weird is it when your own life reminds you of your own life? I mean, I'm not chugging down the lakefront thinking, "This is just like that one episode of Buffy!" I'm thinking, "fuck, yea, I've been through this before. And I did OK that time. I can do it again."

Maybe this is what it's like to be old.

I don't mind it, really.

Because I kept going. I just kept going. The last six or eights months have been like that. Just keep going. Just keep going. It'll be OK. It'll be OK. You can do this. It will get better.

For somebody that doesn't put any trust in any God, who doesn't believe in much of anything at all, I sure do run a lot on blind faith.

I had to walk the bike the last four blocks or so, after I came off the lakefront, because I didn't trust myself to be able to navigate those last few blocks on the street without getting hit by a car. My legs felt like they belonged to someone else and my toes were numb.

I carried my bike up three flights of steps and then sank into a hot bath.

I'm saving $80 a month in transit costs. I'm saving at least 6.5 units of insulin a day.

Someday, it will be spring, and I will not be fighting a frozen headwind coming in off the lake, throwing ice in my face.

Someday.

Until then.... yeah.

Keep going.

Where I'm Going to Be In 26 Days:

Thank God.

The Kama Sutra of Reading

Dancing

I have now successfully paid (or partially paid, in the case of the doctors' bills), all of my bills except for the one from unemployment. The Office says they "overpaid" me by $65, and they'd like that money back. During the 4 weeks I was out of work, I received a whopping $655 from the State. That's not even enough to cover rent and utilities.

At some point, you just have to laugh.

In the meantime, things around here have fallen by the wayside. There's a lot of cleaning that hasn't gotten done, and I spent much of my evening hours catching up on the shithole that has become my home. I'm so behind on Black Desert that I've had to re-forecast the completion date on my novel schedule. My writing work this year is really tightly packed, so even being two weeks behind really throws everything else off.

I've also been thinking about putting tDW back into circulation. This will require me to read through it again, and make any changes I feel are neccessary. The worldbuilding in tDW isn't as complex as in the GW books, which may or may not be a problem.

I'm also hip-dip in yet ANOTHER round of line edits for GW, the last set before it sees daylight, and they're taking a long time. A lot of this work is synching it up with what's going on in Black Desert and, you know, making the plot make coherent sense.

You know, little things.

The characters and setting are cool, tho.

I have a whopping two stories currently in the mail, and I think I'm going to sit down and work on another writing schedule - a more detailed one - in order to fit in all the writing and other activities I'd like to get in. Right now I'm having a lot of trouble staying motivated, which is probably because I'm so awash in concerns like grocery money and finding a real job (I'm covered for "catastrophes" insurance-wise until the end of March. After that, I don't know where the money will come from in order to save my ass if I get hit by a car).

I've also committed to a trip to Spain at the end of the month with David, for which I've already bought my plane tickets and made hotel reservations, so financially-able or not, that's coming up as well. Basically, the $800 "leftover" from the 401(K) check of $2000 that *didn't* go toward health insurance is going toward spending money for Spain ($300) and covering the time I'll be out of work ($500).

Getting by on a knife edge... it's like being in college again!

Only, with more debt!

One of the big things I finally did today is head downtown and buy a decent bike, a chain, a foot pump, and a tire repair kit (I was able to "afford" to pay cash for this through aforementioned creative accounting). I then road the bike from my office downtown to my place in Uptown and timed myself. It took me about an hour and fifteen minutes to go the 7-8 miles from there to here, and that was with two stops to adjust the pressure in the tires and a blustery headwind that probably made the sweltering 30-degree weather feel like the teens. But hey, it beats -30, and my hope is that now that it's March, we're going to avoid extremes like that and I can bike from downtown to home twice a day.

This does a lot of things for me. It'll save me $80 in transit costs a month, get rid of my doctor's shit about my weight (I was 204 at WFC and I'm holding steady now at 206 - 14 miles of bike riding five days a week will likely alter that), and result in me using less insulin. Insulin is fucktastically expensive, and I'll be dropping my basel Lantus insulin from 16 units to 14 a day and subtracting two units of breakfast insulin to start. I started out from downtown with a 156 number (hmmmm cinnamon dolce latte with free Starbucks card!) and an hour after getting home, I was at 68, so it'll kill the hell out of my sugar, which is great.

It's also going to go a long way toward improving my fitness level, which I haven't been happy with since I started getting sick. WisCon is going to mark the one-year anniversery of the whole "suprise, you have a chronic illness!" thing, and after a year of ups and downs and adjustments and craziness and job layoffs and bizarre interpersonal events related to my personal life, it would be nice to be at a place where I felt physically and mentally put back together again. I think I'm moving toward that place. Now that Jenn's been feeling better, I have more time to devout to fixing all of the stuff inside and outside of me that's been broken.

The last couple of weeks I've had a lot of trouble staying focused. It has to do with feeling overwhelmed: whenever I have a moment to myself, I just sort of wander around aimlessly, playing Cossaks, opening up the gaming company module, opening up story files, clicking obsessively on the Stumbleupon button, mentally noting the fact that the bathroom hasn't been cleaned in two weeks and wondering who's going to do something about that, etc.

One of the other good things about the long bikerides is that it's going to give me a lot of time to myself to think things through. At home, I'm spending a lot of mental energy helping Jenn through her rough times with school, and on the train, there are so many people you need to be aware of that you can't totally retreat, and at work, well... at work it's my job to pretend I like people and be friendly, and there's nothing more exhausting for an introvert than to spend all day being nice to people.

Since over five miles of the bike ride is actually along the paved lakefront path, I don't have to worry the whole time about getting hit by a car, and I can sort some things out in my head about what I need to do, how I need to sort through my time, and most of all, how to get myself back into a positive mindset.

You know, the whole power-feminism brutal women mindset.

I had a lot of fun doing all-weather biking in Alaska, and it did a lot for me and my moods, my strength, and getting myself sorted out in the head after a long winter hanging out with less than virtous characters. I came out of that winter and started my summer with bike rides, Clarion, some success at my actual field of study, a decision to go to grad school and leave Alaska, and etc. I had a map that got me closer to what I wanted.

I wouldn't mind having one of those again.

Not the knowing what I want part: rest assured, I know exactly what I want.

It's the map I'm having trouble with.

Without Comment

Interest

The company I work for leases the top ten or twelve floors of a big high rise downtown, and my co-receptionist, Nell, and I receive all of the FedEx, DHL, UPS and messenger deliveries for all ten floors on our floor. We serve as the public reception desk - there's another one on the Executive floor and another on the Legal floor. When we get a delivery, we notify the recipient and they usually come up or down to get it.

Yesterday, one of the women from the Legal department, let's call her Val, stopped by the desk while Nell was away and asked me if I remembered a delivery she'd gotten a week before.

"You know," she said, "the big weird bamboo thing."

"Yea," I said, "I remember that one."

Most people get flowers or balloons or even cookie or candy arrangements, but she'd received a big square vase of living bamboo shoots trained into a sort of umbrella shape. I remember her reading the card and looking puzzled and a little flustered. She actually told us she really didn't want them, and did we want them? Before finally, grudgingly, bringing them upstairs (we have actually had a couple of women refuse deliveries like these from admirers. You'd be surprised)

"Do you remember who delivered it?" Val asked. "I mean, who actually came up here and delivered it?"

"The messenger service," I said. I know the three messengers who work downstairs by name now: Tern, Brett, and Nessa. I once made Brett blush.

"So who are they? They're employed by the building?"

"Yeah. What happens is the messenger services are employed by whatever company sent the gift, and dropped off with the building's service, and then the building's messengers come up here. It's a security thing."

Since 9/11, security downtown has been pretty tight. You have to have a badge to get through the downstairs turnstiles and another badge that allows you access to the inner doors of whatever floor you're on. There's *another* set of doors beyond the reception desks that you have to get buzzed through, as well, in order to access the rooms beyond. I only have a card that's good on my floor and to get passed downstairs security. So I don't have access to any other company floors. If I want to get into them, I have to have somebody who has access to that floor escort me through.

"Good," she said, and she launched into this story about how she was shopping for furniture at Macy's and discussing furniture with one of the salesmen, and she'd casually mentioned that instead of getting something delivered, she'd probably just rent a truck here downtown since she worked at XXX company here at XX South XXX street."

He ended up giving her his card, with, convienently, his home number scrawled on the back.

She didn't think anything of it until a few days later, when this bizarre bamboo tree complete with cheesy poem-of-obvious-interest arrived.

"So there's no way he knows what floor I work on?" she asked me.

"No," I said, "he couldn't have gotten up here."

She was more than a little flustered, and probably overly worried, but you know, when a guy puts his home number on the back of a card, pretty much anybody knows what that means. If she doesn't call you back, it means she's not interested. Sending something to her place of business after one casual conversation, after she *hasn't* called you back... not a great idea.

It was a very strange moment, because I could sympathize with both parties. I'd love to live in a world where sending flowers to a stranger *wasn't* considered an opening move to stalking.

"I've learned my lesson," she said. "I'm never going to be so casual about telling strangers where I work again."

There's this belief that women are totally and absolutely responsible for any assault made against them. They're expected to be constantly alert for psychos, to assume the worst of every nice guy, to guard their behavior closely in case they're mistaken for sluts, for "asking for it," for being too flirty.

And it's a double-edged sword, because if you *are* nice to somebody who turns out to be crazy, then it's your fault if he hacks you up after work cause you were dumb enough to *tell him where you worked* and if you're cool and impersonal toward him you're just some cold frigid man-hating bitch.

More often than not, women who are cool and reserved toward strange men are, in fact, protecting themselves. It's not that we don't want to be nice. I'd love to be nicer to people. But after smiling at guys on the street and having them assume that was some kind of invitation to harrassment or following me home, well, I've learned my lesson too insofar as city living goes.

In conversations with strangers, one of the best ways to establish early on that you're not interested in anything romantic, of course, is to pull the "my boyfriend" card. Jenn used to do this when she worked at a comic book shop full of friendly geeky boys who liked to talk. She loved talking to them - she was just, obviously, never especially interested, so she made up a boyfriend, and made sure so work in a reference to her imaginary boyfriend any time a guy seemed to be getting super friendly (sure, you could make up a girlfriend or tell them about your real girlfriend, I guess, but I there can sometimes be anxiety around outing yourself to strangers because 1) they might give you shittier service/be assholes 2) be even more turned on and pushy at the idea ie "she just needs a good hetero fuck! I'll cure her!" variety). It's a nice way to establish the, "Yes, I like you, but merely in a friendly way!" thing without the guy heading for the hills in embarrassment. The ones who don't back off after this probably aren't the sort you'd want as friends anyway.

It's an interesting dance, and I remember spending a couple of days in the kitchen at work here having lunch with some of the construction guys and Ms. Conner, the janitor, and laughing it up, telling dirty jokes, and generally just having a good time. The problem was, after the second day of that, the recently divorced guy with the type-1 diabetic daughter tried to push that a step further and made a comment about how great it would be if he and I just had casual sex without any strings, and ah, yes, alas, so much for casual joking days in the kitchen. The next time I saw him, I went from friendly to professional, and sadly, I saw him feel the chill, and I was kind of sad about the whole thing, cause we'd had a lot of fun joking around.

Negotiating interest feels like it's one of those invisible privlege things that guys have. If a woman's interested and you blow her off, you're not usually worried about her pulling some psycho shit and stalking you (sure, it happens, but as a society, we don't really train guys to be worried about this sort of behavior). As women, it feels like there's this constant dance around boundaries, around establishing friendliness vs. interest and etc., and if there's any mistake, if a guys *does* go wacko because you turned him down, it's always going to be your fault for not being polite, for not being polite enough, for not mentioning soon enough that you had a boyfriend/girlfriend, for wearing that short skirt, for continuing to even speak in the same space....

Diversions

Speed-reading test. The problem is, you've gotta test for comprehension. It's like asking someone to take a typing test and then not subtracting from their score based on mistakes they make. Hey, I can type 300 words a minute going ASOWHOHD nsdoafnsohf[oweihf aosdjfao sidkjf fajsd pfajsodf!!!

Cheerful hamster for breakfast!

The Speech Accent Archive. English speakers' (native and non-native) accents from around the globe.

Useful phrases. How to say, "Oh my God, there's an ax in my head!" in various lanaguages.

C'mon, you know you wondered.

Well, Fuck

It's snowing again. In March.

The thing is, when I got back to the lower 48 after my two-year stint in Alaska, I got into the habit of assuming that Spring came in... March. This is because in WA State, where I'm originally from, the Spring bulbs spring in... March.

But here in Chicago, Spring does not start until April.

In Alaska, Spring happened in May. By April, I was clawing at the windows waiting for Spring and wondering what the hell all the snow was still doing on the ground, even knowing that yes, indeed, Spring in Fairbanks (AKA: Meltdown) actually happened in May.

I'm always ready for Spring about a month before it's ready for me, no matter where I am.*

* Durban didn't have seasons. It was hot, very hot, or hot and raining.

Solace

When I'm feeling really down about my work, I go to the bookstore downtown or down the street and I stand in front of the SF/F section. Then I open books at random and read the first few lines, the first paragraph.

98% of the time, it makes me feel a lot better.

The rest of the time, I buy the book.

Everybody wins.

My Latest Doctor's Bill

So, I cashed out my 401(K) so I could pay $360 a month for "catastrophic" health insurance, which means they don't pay anything toward any of my medical costs until after I pay $2500 out of pocket. No co-pays, no 50% and certainly no 80% of anything, until I cough $2500 out of my ass this year.

For $1615, I have this dubious form of health insurance through the end of March, which might be real useful if I, like, get hit by a car (knock on wood). Otherwise, basically, I just blew $1615 and gave the government a nice chunk of my retirement savings in the form of taxes.

And I just got my doctor's bill for my January appointment:

Office visit: $90
Comp Metabolic Profile: $50
Hemoglobin A1C: $50
BC/RP DF (no idea what this is): $20

THEN I got the medical bill from the actual LAB that does the work:

Hemoglobin, Glycosylated: $45.50
Comprehen Metabolic Panel: $50

So where am I supposed to get this "extra" $305 when I make $1999 a month and my bills are $1900 a month?

I seriously considered not going to the doctor again until I have health insurance (I mean, REAL insurance), and then I realized that the medical system has insured that I can't do that: I *have to pay someone* to give me my insulin prescriptions.

I have to pay them not only for my meds, but for the privilege of getting the meds that keep me alive.

God bless America.

Details

One of the first things you learn, as a traveler, one of the hardest lessons, is that you always take yourself with you.

This sometimes really sucks.

You default to the best and worst in yourself when you strip everything else away, and you figure out how much of who you are is tied to place and how much of you is something you carry with you, always, the same way you carry your heart, your lungs, your faulty pancreas.

I figured this out in Alaska, when I bought a one way ticket to Fairbanks and decided to start over in a little town at the edge of nowhere. The whole world was wide open, and I believed I could be anyone I wanted to be. I broke a lot of my own rules. I drank too much and ran around with drug addicts and drank home brewed beer and carried around a rifle and collected stories. I biked everywhere, worked out regularly, and said yes to nearly every party invitation. I didn’t want to be a sedentary wallflower anymore. I wanted to build somebody different.

But when things got bad, when somebody’s girlfriend threatened to kill me, when I got brushed off by the guy I was – for some bizarre reason – pursuing, I would default to old ways of dealing with stress. I’d retreat to my room, sleep a lot, eat ice cream sandwiches and yogurt pretzels. I would stop saying yes to invitations. Bruised from all the effort it took to be with people only to get hit over the head, I knew how to retreat, how to protect myself, and I reverted to those ways of comforting myself, though I knew that by reverting to those old habits, it was just a step to the right of reverting to everything else I was, everything I had been and had hated.

I made a lot of headway toward being somebody I wanted to be, in Alaska, but I still spent far too much of my vacation in Juneau sleeping in the hotel room and eating overpriced steak. I learned to love to be alone, and I kept loving people who didn’t care about me, because believe me, loving people who don’t love you is really cozy and safe and totally free of obligations. I built a lot of my own safe spaces, and I’ve spent much of my 20s in a constant state of advance and retreat, advance and retreat, running out of the trenches waving my arms and screaming and then holing up somewhere and sobbing hysterically before the next push.

In South Africa, I played the same sort of game, rushing outside and going to parties and a couple of clubs in an attempt to be extroverted and pretend I was slim and blond and brilliant. Mostly, social interactions left me with a horrible feeling that I had somehow failed. I had failed to be pretty enough, well dressed enough, witty enough, brave enough. I spent most of my time in South Africa drinking Laborie Pinotage and smoking Peter Stuvyesant cigarettes.

I also wrote a thesis and finished a book and was asked to measure my worth in cows.

Thus, it wasn’t all self-immolation, but the undercurrent was there, because when I became fearful, when I was uncertain (which was pretty much my entire time in SA), I retreated back to old modes of behavior, old ways of dealing with stress – sleeping and eating; retreating inward. Being fearful.

When I was under pressure, the fear often won out over my drive to be better, do better, to learn new ways of coping.

I am constantly amazed at how difficult it is to change oneself, to alter these childhood patterns that we learned to keep us safe.

I can learn other ways of behaving; I can even learn to cope differently and consistently apply those new methods. But when everything breaks, when my new lives fail, what I find at core, after I’ve stripped it all down, are those same coping mechanisms that have worked so well for me in the past.

But there are other things I find, too.

When everything else fails me, when people fail me, when my body fails me, there is something else I reach for, something I carry with me just as I carry those bad habits, something that keeps me going when I have nothing and no one else (or feel that way, at least). I push myself back up. I have books to write. Places to see. Things to accomplish. Miles and miles to run before I sleep. I have lists and lists of things I need to be doing, things that I’ll be happy once I’ve done, completed, made steps toward, but I’m never completely satisfied, because the closer I get to these goals, the further out the goals move. I can’t ever die, really, because I have too much to do.

When I sit down and open the book of my life, there are things I want to see there, and those things are huge and big, things you see out there in the stars; I want everything. I want the whole world; I want more than I can hold.

So despite getting knocked down, despite watching myself fall off the wagon during the worst of it, I still reach for those huge things; that big life, the one where I’m tootling around Rome and have a beach house and a couple of other vacation houses and I make a living writing and I take up a whole shelf at the book store and I travel wherever the hell I want, and I am happy and spend time on the beach and I have good friends, good food, good coffee, good conversation. I’m strong, and I’m healthy, and I am surrounded by people I love more than my life.

Sometimes I feel bad that I still want those things, I feel foolish and youthful and I think, “Man, why don’t I just settle into the fact that I’ll be a bitter secretary my whole life!”

And then I remember that the reason I don’t do that is because, well, it’s not true.

That’s not the life I want. It’s not the life I’m going to have. I’ve been presented with a good deal of different lives to choose from in the last decade, and despite several things having been chosen for me (dead pancreas), I’ve chosen the life I wanted wherever possible. I have a very clear idea what I want. I’m down, yeah. I’ve been down before. I’ll be down again. But every time I’ve hit a wall I’ve gotten back up again with a clearer idea of who I am, what I want, what I can do.

Because yea, you know, we all carry these things with us through our travels, through life: we carry the bad things, the broken pancreases, the reversion to red wine and binge eating as a means of getting through a shitty day, but there’s the good stuff, too. There’s the passion. There’s the determination. There’s the blind stubbornness in the face of overwhelming odds. There’s the drive. There’s the persistence. Always, the persistence.

I fall and I fall and I fall and I fall…

It’s not a perfect life I’ve lived. I could weave a pretty good story from some of the highlights, but the brutal truth is that the highlights aren’t living. We leave out the drudgery. The getting up everyday, the persistence. We write about the big heroism, the great war, the big book sale, the wedding, the funeral, the birth, the marriage.

But life is about how you lived on turnips and spent long hours reading outdated magazines during the bombing of the city, and the big box of rejection slips in your garage and that night when you got the rejection from Ellen Datlow and cried because it was just the perfect way to top off the perfect shitty fucking day, and it’s how you courted somebody you really thought you should marry but weren’t sure and had nightmares for months that you’d lose them and how you fell all over yourself trying to be too perfect, trying to be just right; it’s how you dealt with the daily quiet grief of death, how you ate your eggs alone every morning afterward with this big hole in your life; and how you make that marriage work during the horrible times when you’re both being assholes and you’re exhausted because there’s no money and everyone in the whole world looks like a better mate than whoever the hell this person is you ended up with, and how you get up every day, after, and how you learn to love them again.

Life is the details. It’s in the lows between the markers where we spend most of our lives. It’s in the imperfect times. The boring times. Those long stretches of desert that not everybody gets through, but that I slog through on my way to the big hills, the grand vistas.

Life is the stuff you blog about.

Strange & Unusual Dictionaries

Including dictionaries of all-vowel words, all-consonant words, and one letter words.

Fuck the Sugar

Note to self: yea, you know, all those complex carbs you know you can't eat anymore but you decided to get all pissed off and eat anyway?

Yea, that's why you had headaches all last week and felt like your feet were going to fall off at night.

A bagel once a week is fine. A bagel followed the next day by some pizza, and the next day by half a muffin and a croissant, and etc... no. No, really, you can't do that anymore.

Nice thought, tho.

Choice

Games, Like Crack

Improve your spacial reasoning skills! Trounce others online!

Make the biggest snowball ever! Trounce others online!

Kill slugs! Pretend to kill other people's slugs!

Ne fume pas! Trounce smokers!

Yeah, it was another great ass-kissing day here in balmy Chicago...

Campbell Award Eligibility

Well, it looks like I'm still eligible for the Campbell award for Best New SF/F writer (2nd year of eligibility) because of the screwy rules regarding when Strange Horizons became a pro market.

For anyone interested in voting, here's the list of eligible nominees.

SO VOTE! No pressure. :)

As usual, I'm a pretty small fish (I mean, Naomi Novik, Justine? Sarah Monette? And then there's Meghan McCarron and Cherie Priest. Yea, right).

Tra la.

Is it Spring Yet?

Really, any time now, folks.

Free Hugs

On Thursday night I was walking home from work downtown when I saw a woman on the corner of Washington and State holding up a Free Hugs sign. I'd already seen the original Free Hugs video on YouTube, so I had a little shot of happiness at seeing somebody out in Chicago doing the same and prepared to step hastily by and get to my train.

But as I passed by and saw her hugging people, my step faltered, and I wanted to turn back.

I really wanted a hug.

Here was this person offering some bit of comfort without requesting anything in return, without obligation, without any power-crazy or twisted ulterior motives (that's the idea, anyway). You don't see that a lot. You don't get unconditional comfort or affection all that often.

It made me wonder if this is what the appeal of prostitution is, that you can pay someone to pretend to care about you for an hour. The difference, in this case, of course, is that Free Hugs are given without the need to receive anything in turn. I'm not shaking hands or giving out blow jobs because I can't pay my rent. It's done out of pure compassion as opposed to desperation/material gain.

And man, did I want to turn around and go back, to the point where I started crying there in the street, because I couldn't believe that it was possible for anyone to give me something without desperately needing something back, without taking something away from me, and I was so, so tired; after the year or two I've had, I felt like I had nothing to give to anyone, and I couldn't turn back and receive that hug because I didn't have anything to give her in return.

So I cried on the way home on the train, and I thought about a world full of free hugs, of compassion without obligation, of being able to give of yourself without fear of having someone try and take it all away.

I would like to live in a world like that, or even a world where I believed that was possible.

One of the best heroines I've come across in a really long time is Nausicaa of comic book fame. She's strong and compassionate and will fight if she needs to, but prefers negotiation and the showing of love and compassion over brute force if possible. I loved the idea that that heroine could exist. The idea of nonviolence and universal love as a means of changing the world is what draws me to stories of people like Ghandi or Jesus or even MLK. I want to believe that love can change the world. I write about bloody, violent, mean people who fight hate with hate; they're the sort of monsters created by societies that use hate against hate, that keep order through strength and submission.

That is not the world I want to live in, and it's not the world I want to believe in. I write about it because it fascinates me, and because I hope that someday, if I can understand it, I can find an alternative to it, one that I really believe in. I don't buy the idea that all we need to do is stand in a circle and put flowers in our hair and dance around saying "I believe in fairies!" (what about health care? Who's going to make insulin? Who's going to do the laundry and build the houses and make great medical breakthroughs if we're all standing around in a circle all day patting each other on the back?), but I know that there's an alternative to all this blood and anger and hate.

Sometimes I feel that what I do with a lot of my writing is take all of the anger and hate and violence that I've absorbed from the world and try and excise it through writing. Otherwise I just turn it inward, and it seethes inside of me and treies to claw itself out, and it chews me to pieces. I'm tired of being full of self-loathing.

I want to be able to let good things in, to appreciate all that good stuff, all those free hugs, without the desperate fear that by letting those things in, by releasing all the fear and anger, I'll become weak and vulnerable.

The only way to learn how to fly is to let everything go. I know that, but the fear of falling, the fear of falling... that's the worst fear of all.

Revolutionaries

The Secret Lives of Secretaries (Blowjob Edition)

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