I'm Feeling DownToday: Time for a Random Useless Quiz

KNIGHT

You are the Knight, the
legendary, romantic hero of great kingdoms. The
Knight is a true warrior and an epic hero. He
will do anything to defend his honor and his
kingdom. Whatever his lord or king commands he
will do without hesitation. He is very
virtuous; he holds honesty, loyalty, and
bravery in very high regard.

Color:
Purple
Animal: Lion
Gem: Ruby
Symbol:
Shield

Image:
http://www.deviantart.com/view/7339749/


Who would you be if you were a character in an epic fantasy? (beautiful pictures)
brought to you by Quizilla

What's with all this "he" crap?

(via tempest)

Total Book Count For The House:

2,749

Dude, we're so hitting the over 3,000 count by next year.

My sad, paltry piece of this count?

A mere 544 of these actually belong to me.

What kind of writer am I?????

Ah, yes: a poor one.

Need to work on that.

Off to Indy

Well, work is crazy mad wild and they're sending me to Indianpolis next week from Monday-Thursday. We're bascially living out of a hotel room there. I whined and complained about Indiana as much as possible, but it only served to delay the trip. We've got some insane amout of work to get done in the next twelve days.

Bah. But I was so happy spending all day writing and playing computer games!

So it goes. There's gotta be at least a couple times a year where I actually get paid to do my actual job. I guess. So I'm told.

Ha Ha

Ha ha. I see a new market has arrived for my Body History story.

This makes me happy. Goal is to have five stories total in the mail as of Monday.

Just Think of How Much Better the Ratings Would Be!

::cough:: ::cough::

(via Nick)

What a Slow Day

Slooooooooooooooooooowwww

Note

Do not use nasty wine even as cooking wine.

It is still gross after it is cooked.

Ug

Yea. Getting back to the gym after a break: now everything hurts.

In a good way, but damn, it hurts to raise my arms.

I Tucked in My Shirt Today

And the world did not recoil in horror.

Being Rachael Ray

I admit it, I have a huge crush on Rachael Ray, and I'm sometimes found secretly sighing over her on The Food Network.

As I'm a totaly sucker for the small-time-girl-makes-it-big story (for obvious reasons), I was delighted to find this:

Most of the thousands of recipes Ms. Ray has "canoodled" over the years were written in her cabin. She rented it 13 years ago and has lived there off and on with her mother and, sometimes, her younger brother, since. Some months she could barely put together enough money to cover the $550 rent.

"It was check-to-check living," Ms. Ray said.

She had grown up around Lake George, but the cycle of small-town life and low-paying jobs was wearing thin. In 1995, Ms. Ray headed to New York City. She worked first at the Macy's Marketplace candy counter and moved up the ranks quickly, learning about everything from buying cheese to how to shop for Liza Minnelli's holiday food gifts. When Macy's tried to promote her to a buyer in accessories, she moved to Agata & Valentina, the specialty foods store.

She stayed in the city for only two years. After a bad break-up, a broken ankle and a violent mugging in front of her Queens apartment that left her scraped and shaken, she headed home.

Ms. Ray moved back into the cabin and eventually landed a job at the fanciest food and equipment store in Albany. She was a buyer and a cook, preparing hundreds of pounds of food every day. As a holiday promotion, she developed a class to help people get dinner on the table in half an hour.

It caught on, so Ms. Ray started teaching the concept at a chain of local grocery stores and on a Schenectady television station. Anywhere they would let her, really. By 1998, she figured she could sell a companion cookbook, so she talked an independent Manhattan publisher into turning her pile of photocopied recipes into a book.

Then her moment arrived.

In 2001 a Food Network executive heard Ms. Ray cook on an upstate public radio show. The same week, a "Today" show producer saw her book and called.

Ms. Ray and her mom drove nine hours south in a snowstorm, and she nailed the "Today" show appearance. The next day, she said, the Food Network signed her to a $360,000 contract to teach America what she had been teaching the folks upstate.

My favorite part:

A favorite slam is that her meals take more than 30 minutes, which, especially for people with little kitchen acumen, they often do. They say she is untrained and relies on too many shortcuts, like shredded cheese and frozen French fries.

To which Ms. Ray says, they're right.

"I have no formal anything," she said. "I'm completely unqualified for any job I've ever had."

ha ha. Translation: Fuck you.

Tuesday Poetry

All Those Inuit Names for Snow
by Tom Tempkin

My mother is watching her mother die.
Gravity has declared war against the lower lip.
Salt has worn to fine gauze the threads

sprouting from the inner ear. For each one
that goes, we must learn a new word
for what we think life is, what we dream

it will be. Among our tricks and screams
and flowered boudoirs, we must all wear once
the wedding gown stained with mother's blood

or dance the implicit waltz while meandering
to victory with a swollen hand.
I will feed the cat when you're gone.

This is my promise.
The first one to wake whispers to the other:
poinsetta, aspen, sweet fig, dream of orchid, rose.

Why Arming Women Won't Stop Violence Against Women

So here's our heroine's choices. She can shoot him and get convicted of a variety of crimes, because you can't just go around shooting guys. The only guys you can shoot are burglars and guys who Don't Look Like Us. So she goes to jail. Then what do the rest of us do? She becomes like Andrea Yates or Susan Smith---the real life version of all those Evil Disney Mothers, while real life male scumbags get tossed into the collective dustbin of consciousness. We can't think ill of those that rule us. We can't look too closely at how they do it.

So tell me how giving women guns without changing the culture will do any damned good at all. It won't protect women, and chances are it will enrage the men who laugh at the idea that a woman has a right to enjoy her body while he does not. I have to say, too, a stray thought occurred to me. Guys who think they have such rights to women's bodies---what do you suppose their attitude is toward other methods of controlling those women's bodies? Do you really think you have to right to do anything with your body if they don't get off on it? Do you think they care about your body except if it gets them off? Do you really think they give a shit at all?

Giving women guns is just going to put more women behind bars. The very men who proclaim that this will solve the problem are removing themselves and their buddies from the responsible party list by suggesting it. "Hey," they whine, "We gave you an option, you chose not to take it. Not our problem any longer."

Writing Today

Got a couple stories back in the mail this weekend. Now I need to work on some new material.

Ah, I love the fall. I'm making a tasty vegetarian pasta tonight.

World Fantasy Schedule, Revised

I've finally nailed down the last bit of info I needed in order to book for the World Fantasy Convention in Madison, WI.

Jenn's got her proposal dissertation defense that Friday, so instead of bumming a ride up with her, I'm taking the train up late Thursday. I'll be getting in around midnight, but should be good to go for Friday/Saturday/Sunday.

I cancelled my reservations at the Doubletree because for the same amount I could get a lakeview suite at the Hilton Madison Monona Terrace, where Jenn and I stayed for our first Wiscon. We love it there, so I booked and prepaid for a slightly better rate.

Hope to see some of you there!

Once More Around the Mulberry Bush

Back to my morning weights, back to the gym tonight, back to drinking coffee.

Ahhhhhh

Here at work, Blaine's back from his honeymoon. Apparently, "Glad to be back," which says something about what a workaholic he's become. Dude, give *me* your two weeks in Hawaii, dude...

My Eyes Are Small And Squinty

Oh, I need to sleep more.

Octopus Vs. Shark

Cool.

Surreal Moment of the Day

Explaining to the new counterperson at the very new Starbucks on our corporate campus what "breve" meant, after repeating my order four times with varying degrees of slowness, so she could map down all the Starbucks-speak.

It was surreal not because she didn't know, but because I did.

Sometimes I worry that the corporate card and the nice shoes will turn me into a yuppie. All I need now is to actually be making money and driving an SUV.

I'm such a liberal hippie.

Friday Beer Blogging

Woman! Someday is Today!!

Women! Someday is today

Is motherhood instinctive or learned behavior? Both religion and science tell us that it is instinctive, much to the distaste of the feminist ideologists, who have never been overburdened by a solid grasp on either. But one need only watch the way in which a young girl mothers her stuffed animals to see the maternal instinct at work.

Her stuffed animals???

Researcher 1: As you can see, this female engages in play activities with her stuffed animals. This is instictive maternal behavior.

Researcher 2: And yet, this male child here is also engaging in play activities with his stuffed animals.

Researcher 1: He is learning animal anatomy in order to prepare him for the hunt.

Researcher 2: But this girl's stuffed animals have been separated into two teams, and one is mounting a strategic air attack against the other. And this boy appears to be... feeding his animals and calling them "Floppy."

Researcher 1: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.... ::waves hands in front of colleague's face:::

Although the Equalitarian Society is now, by most statistical measures, structured so as to favor its female members, it nevertheless poses a cruel choice to those women cursed by its costly blessings

Wow, I'd love to see how our Western Equalitarian society "favors" it's female members. We get to go to prison, too! Where are these "statistical measures, I wonder? hmmmmm

And a woman foolish enough to wait more than two decades before attempting to have children has no one to blame but herself.

And the fact that the state doesn't provide child and healthcare. And the fact that it took her those two decades to go to school and have a career that would make it financially possible for her to raise a child responsibly. Oh, and she had to find an actual, you know, willing partner to help her out with all this, and let's remember that men aren't all that eager to have kids at 20 years old, either. For reasons outlined above: want to go to med school? There's a decade, right there.

Oh, I'm sorry. I mean: women, it's all YOUR FAULT!

As for the likelihood that the technological future will eventually solve such problems, it is worth noting that no society that possesses artificial wombs, robot sex dolls, multiplayer video games and 24-hour sports networks is one in which men are likely to show a tremendous amount of interest in relationships or the opposite sex.

But I thought this was all women's fault? I'm confused now.

Bring on the babies in jars, in any case.

Fortunately, as we have not yet reached Nerdvana, there are a number of steps that a woman whose priority remains marriage and children can take in order to happily achieve those goals:

Well, thank Jesus for that!

Don't engage in casual dating relationships after 18. They're fun, and they'll also prevent you from pursuing more fruitful relationships.

Become a nun.

Make those potential long-term relationships your top priority. If you put college or your job first, there's a reasonable chance that a job is all you'll have at 40 ... and 60.

You should remain poor and illiterate. Men like women this way.

Consider the president's new Supreme Court nominee. The unmarried and childless Creepy McCrypto is on the verge of becoming one of the two most powerful professional women in the country – does she really represent the ideal American woman?

Wow! Kudos for getting Miers in here. No wonder the right wingers all hate Miers. She's unmarried and childless! This all makes a LOT more sense. *These* are the credentials they're looking for and can't find. They don't care that she's never been a judge. They're freaking out cause she's not married!

Settle earlier rather than later.

If it breathes and has a dick, hop on.

Those who are not still single at 35 are now married to men generally considered to be of lower quality than the men they spurned before.

Who are now gas station attendants.

Remember, your choices narrow as you get older, while men's choices broaden.

After 35, no man will ever want to have sex with you. Ever. Not even your husband. He has statstical measures, I'm sure. Though, I mean, we don't get to see them.

Luckily, if you're a lesbian, you get to luck out of this fate. Oddly, he doesn't mention this. Perhaps he thinks lesbians are mythical creatures made up in liberal hippie fairy books.

Let everyone know that marriage and children is your ultimate goal. Too many women, fearing the wrath of the Sisterhood, secretly wish for them while publicly and piously professing feminist-approved cant to the contrary.

The Wrath of the Sisterhood? Who be these sisters of wrath? Yea, cause, like, everybody from my hometown who was like, "I want to get married and have kids. That's my ultimate goal," I totally beat them up and strangled them.

No. If that's what you want out of life, you go for it. If you want that and a shitload more, I intend to remind you of that.

Unlike their female counterparts, men who say they don't want to get married or have kids usually mean it.

Ummmm. Yea. Cause we EVIL WOMEN LIE ALL THE TIME about such things. I really, desperately want 16 children and three husbands. I want to become a Mormon and move to Utah and make my own clothes and give up coffee.

And if you believe that, I have a some Nigerian money scheme I'll let you in on for only $29.95 a month.

Shed your man-hating friends, as well as those who buy seriously into the Equalitarian dogma. Misery loves company and miserable women like nothing better than to make everyone within a five-mile radius miserable, too.

Oh, finally we get to the lesbians. Kick out those lesbian friends of yours, and those closet-lesbians who sleep with men but say women need equal rights and access to contraception and equal pay for equal work! Those lesbian-friendly douchebags should be dropped like jeans and replaced with skirts, dammit.

The lesbians and lesbian-friendlies are just out to make you miserable, to teach you that you can fulfill all of your greatest hopes and dreams and live the life you've imagined! And who the hell wants that when you can marry the gas attendant at the local 7-eleven and bust out a couple of babies at 16 and live in poverty married to a guy who doesn't love you and who you aren't all that into?

Because isn't that what every woman wants?

Be brutal when assessing the men who are interested in you.

Castrate them.

Oh, sorry, different rant.

The way he treats others is the way he will eventually treat you.

Well now, how can I argue with that?

If you want the odds of easily bearing healthy children to be in your favor, set a goal of marrying by 25. You can always go back to school, you can't go back in time.

Because having children with the wrong person who steals your money and your self-esteem and fighting over your kids is a lot better than finding your own self-esteem, figuring out who you are, and boldly engaging in an equal partnership with a strong, smart, person who shares your goals and values.

Babies are more important than you are.

Remember that love is a choice, an action and a commitment, it is not a feeling.

Wow. That's very medieval. On to arranged marriages, anyone?