INTERESTING BUT...
...Possibly bunk.
So, it's just past 0300 hours on what is effectively my Friday (a night early this week, as I've a class to go to on Wednesday to satisfy the certification gods) and, bored but with T1 access at work, I checked out This article and took the quizzes.
Hrm, somehow I don't think so, but maybe just possibly. I scored abysmally low on the empathy scale, low enough to qualify as a very high functioning autistic or an individual with Asperger's Syndrome, and also ridiculously high on the systematizing scale, high enough, that's right, to qualify as a very high functioning autistic or an individual with Asperger's Syndrome.
Golly, you'd think a school counselor or human resources specialist might have said something to this effect before now, hey what?
So, as you might guess, I'm not going to lose a great deal of sleep over this, except for the occasional chuckle at inappropriate moments when I am completely unaware that my chuckling might be taken the wrong way by some hypersensitive freak who is trapped with me in the room...
Heh heh heh.
Monday, June 06, 2005
FOUR EYES (AND COUNTING)
Well, not really.
It was, I suppose, only a matter of time. MODPM is nearsighted as all hell, and MODPD equally, as he has aged, farsighted, so really, how many more non-bespectacled years had I to look forward to, really? A brief spell in high school notwithstanding, of course; I didn't really need them and once I was (cough) financially independent I didn't appreciate the expense and more or less chucked them wholesale -- especially since I made some, let us say, unfortunate fashion choices as an early 90s college hipster w/r/t frame selection. Must I elaborate? Oh, all right. Tiny. Purple. Oval. Metal. Frames. On a face that, even before I gained the freshman 15 and then some at Beaudacious Bard College, could best be described as closely resembling that of the Laughing Buddha. Bad.
Recent and embarrassing experiences at work and elsewhere with a continual incapacity to call the right phone number even from lists rendered in very large type sizes, plus a continual rash of migraine and other headaches, led me to conclude that it was maybe time to pay a vist to an optometrist again after lo these many years. Even though as a state employee who nevermind the ten hour underground shifts staring at three computer monitors I have no vision insurance...
Long story short, my eyes are in fantastic health but are shaped somewhat like footballs, and I might indeed benefit from ocular aid when doing detail work; and from antireflective coating to cope with the three computer screens.
A month later (it apparently takes a very long time indeed to put this coating on a lens or two) and here they sit as I type, perched on the end of my nose: a brand new pair of glasses. Woot, as they say, woo.
So far, I think I'm still getting used to the slight correction they provide, and so have experienced a sort of low-grade headache from the get go; either that or I'm just really annoyed with people (we did have to close interstate 80 for the better part of a day due to snow and stupid crashes, and the disbelieving phone calls about this extended far into the following day. Really, people, there is no law of man or nature that says it can't snow in June, especially at these elevations).
And when did glasses get so very postmodern and funky? Really, these things are sort of sly allusions to glasses; the ear pieces are straight with only a slight inward curve; the metal thin and ribbonlike, the ends rather on the sharp side, as though perhaps these things are meant to double as shuriken or something. The lenses are even smaller than my unfortunate purple ovals of yesteryear but this time, at least they are trapped in frames that I'm told are really quite complimentary to my face (at least my fellow dispatchers, who, let's face it, have to look at me more and for longer continuous periods of time than anyone, say so, and it would not be in their best interests to fib about it, would it? Given that they do have to look at me? Right?).
The really funny thing about all of this is what I have learned over the last two days about how people perceive each other in general and me in particular. I'm reminded a bit of the way my coffee buddies in Saratoga have, to a man, apparently and extensively edited their memories of me as a child to accommodate the flaming red hair I sport as an adult. "You always were a flaming little redhead," the Lord Macklebrains has said on more than one occasion, obviously forgetting that, though there were strawberry tones I was most definitely a blonde, blonde, blonde little girl, and still blonde as a teenybopper; blond of a shade so unusual that no one believed it was natural; hence my joke in later years; no one believed my blonde hair was real back then, and now no one believes my red hair is fake.
Now, more revisionism, as proven not the very day but the day after I first showed up at work with four eyes. One colleague, who shall remain nameless, put it most amusingly and succinctly: "Hey, I like those new glasses! They're a lot better than the old ones."
Hee hee. The closest thing I have to "old ones" are the aforementioned specs discarded back before anyone had ever heard of Nirvana, and thus long pre-dating my acquaintance with any of this crew.
But almost to a woman (and man) the mental picture of me that they have had appears to include glasses.
Is it because of all the reading I do?
Hmm.
Well, not really.
It was, I suppose, only a matter of time. MODPM is nearsighted as all hell, and MODPD equally, as he has aged, farsighted, so really, how many more non-bespectacled years had I to look forward to, really? A brief spell in high school notwithstanding, of course; I didn't really need them and once I was (cough) financially independent I didn't appreciate the expense and more or less chucked them wholesale -- especially since I made some, let us say, unfortunate fashion choices as an early 90s college hipster w/r/t frame selection. Must I elaborate? Oh, all right. Tiny. Purple. Oval. Metal. Frames. On a face that, even before I gained the freshman 15 and then some at Beaudacious Bard College, could best be described as closely resembling that of the Laughing Buddha. Bad.
Recent and embarrassing experiences at work and elsewhere with a continual incapacity to call the right phone number even from lists rendered in very large type sizes, plus a continual rash of migraine and other headaches, led me to conclude that it was maybe time to pay a vist to an optometrist again after lo these many years. Even though as a state employee who nevermind the ten hour underground shifts staring at three computer monitors I have no vision insurance...
Long story short, my eyes are in fantastic health but are shaped somewhat like footballs, and I might indeed benefit from ocular aid when doing detail work; and from antireflective coating to cope with the three computer screens.
A month later (it apparently takes a very long time indeed to put this coating on a lens or two) and here they sit as I type, perched on the end of my nose: a brand new pair of glasses. Woot, as they say, woo.
So far, I think I'm still getting used to the slight correction they provide, and so have experienced a sort of low-grade headache from the get go; either that or I'm just really annoyed with people (we did have to close interstate 80 for the better part of a day due to snow and stupid crashes, and the disbelieving phone calls about this extended far into the following day. Really, people, there is no law of man or nature that says it can't snow in June, especially at these elevations).
And when did glasses get so very postmodern and funky? Really, these things are sort of sly allusions to glasses; the ear pieces are straight with only a slight inward curve; the metal thin and ribbonlike, the ends rather on the sharp side, as though perhaps these things are meant to double as shuriken or something. The lenses are even smaller than my unfortunate purple ovals of yesteryear but this time, at least they are trapped in frames that I'm told are really quite complimentary to my face (at least my fellow dispatchers, who, let's face it, have to look at me more and for longer continuous periods of time than anyone, say so, and it would not be in their best interests to fib about it, would it? Given that they do have to look at me? Right?).
The really funny thing about all of this is what I have learned over the last two days about how people perceive each other in general and me in particular. I'm reminded a bit of the way my coffee buddies in Saratoga have, to a man, apparently and extensively edited their memories of me as a child to accommodate the flaming red hair I sport as an adult. "You always were a flaming little redhead," the Lord Macklebrains has said on more than one occasion, obviously forgetting that, though there were strawberry tones I was most definitely a blonde, blonde, blonde little girl, and still blonde as a teenybopper; blond of a shade so unusual that no one believed it was natural; hence my joke in later years; no one believed my blonde hair was real back then, and now no one believes my red hair is fake.
Now, more revisionism, as proven not the very day but the day after I first showed up at work with four eyes. One colleague, who shall remain nameless, put it most amusingly and succinctly: "Hey, I like those new glasses! They're a lot better than the old ones."
Hee hee. The closest thing I have to "old ones" are the aforementioned specs discarded back before anyone had ever heard of Nirvana, and thus long pre-dating my acquaintance with any of this crew.
But almost to a woman (and man) the mental picture of me that they have had appears to include glasses.
Is it because of all the reading I do?
Hmm.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
THE ANTI-BLOG?
Xbox and its ilk in general are pretty much all-consuming and preclude any other activity or entertainment anyway, right?
Now this has its good points and its bad points; among its bad points are the same kind of bad points associated with similar geekish pursuits, computer hacking, model building and whatnot - it's mostly a solitary activity (its slogans about it being "good to play together" to the contrary; you can play Xbox with other people... over a broadband connection, meaning of course that you're playing with some other solitary souls engaging in pretend combat via their furniture), a largely sedentary one (even if, like me, quite a lot of emotional affect is demonstrated by changing posture, heartrate, etc.) and almost always indoors (one can therefore judge by the degree of pallor, vitamin deficiency, etc. in how much game play a given individual engages on a regular basis; allowing of course for cases like mine; remember I work nights).
Chief among its good points (claptrap about it maybe being good for developing young brains after all aside) are... one can be entertained for simply hours without being subjected to any sales pitches, and it is self-evident that the use of a standard videogame controller (which requires two hands) and scarfing down snack food are mutually exclusive.
So, it's actually a weight loss program. Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket. Hey, if smokers can use that excuse, so can I, dammit.
And furthermore, after only about 17 months of living here and not-so-diligently searching, I have at long last found a congenial place in which to swim laps. And lo, ain't my face red(der than usual; I have rosacea), as it is of course the Cheyenne Municipal Swimming Pool, 25 meters of slightly warmer than I like it and maybe a tad more highly chlorinated lap swimming goodness, with two hour blocs of time set aside several times a week just for folks like me (or so I judge from my maiden appearance there during a visit by My Own Dear Personal Mom, who shames me now by making, along with Mrs. Famous Bill, My Old Kindergarten Teacher, My Old Middle School Principal, Nana, and a few others, pilgrimages en masse on 80 mile round trips to swim laps and do water aerobics in Rawlins. Rawlins! Whereas, as it turns out, the Cheyenne Municipal Pool is mere blocks -- blocks! -- from WYDOT HQ and the dungeon in which I sit here now, at 0128 hours on a fine rainy flash floody Saturday morning.
So between swimming and Xboxing (obsession of the moment, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, aka Western On Another Planet, in which my player character is a bounty hunter who can run on all fours and whose ammunition is not only live but informs him on a regular basis that he needs a shave, smells bad, and is maybe not the most accurate shot in the world. Holy frijoles, I'm in heaven) and being on days off and out of this dungeon (furnished, it must be said, with a screamingly fast internet connection of some kind; T1, I'm guessing, since we are the government and we're here to help you), no traffic here at all, all apologies, blame the verities of my apartment life, in a building that can't take DSL or cable modems (nor, to be honest, can my budget accommodate them at the moment) and so has just SLOW crappy dial-up, I swear they've slowed it down to make us all make the jump to more expensive services but hahahaha I still remember the three-digit baud days... but I'm digressing.
Anyway, it feels good to be active again, metaphorically and literally.
Oh, and by the way, Star Wars III holds up pretty well to a second viewing, well enough to where I think I'll take in a third. At matinee price at any rate.
Ta!
Xbox and its ilk in general are pretty much all-consuming and preclude any other activity or entertainment anyway, right?
Now this has its good points and its bad points; among its bad points are the same kind of bad points associated with similar geekish pursuits, computer hacking, model building and whatnot - it's mostly a solitary activity (its slogans about it being "good to play together" to the contrary; you can play Xbox with other people... over a broadband connection, meaning of course that you're playing with some other solitary souls engaging in pretend combat via their furniture), a largely sedentary one (even if, like me, quite a lot of emotional affect is demonstrated by changing posture, heartrate, etc.) and almost always indoors (one can therefore judge by the degree of pallor, vitamin deficiency, etc. in how much game play a given individual engages on a regular basis; allowing of course for cases like mine; remember I work nights).
Chief among its good points (claptrap about it maybe being good for developing young brains after all aside) are... one can be entertained for simply hours without being subjected to any sales pitches, and it is self-evident that the use of a standard videogame controller (which requires two hands) and scarfing down snack food are mutually exclusive.
So, it's actually a weight loss program. Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket. Hey, if smokers can use that excuse, so can I, dammit.
And furthermore, after only about 17 months of living here and not-so-diligently searching, I have at long last found a congenial place in which to swim laps. And lo, ain't my face red(der than usual; I have rosacea), as it is of course the Cheyenne Municipal Swimming Pool, 25 meters of slightly warmer than I like it and maybe a tad more highly chlorinated lap swimming goodness, with two hour blocs of time set aside several times a week just for folks like me (or so I judge from my maiden appearance there during a visit by My Own Dear Personal Mom, who shames me now by making, along with Mrs. Famous Bill, My Old Kindergarten Teacher, My Old Middle School Principal, Nana, and a few others, pilgrimages en masse on 80 mile round trips to swim laps and do water aerobics in Rawlins. Rawlins! Whereas, as it turns out, the Cheyenne Municipal Pool is mere blocks -- blocks! -- from WYDOT HQ and the dungeon in which I sit here now, at 0128 hours on a fine rainy flash floody Saturday morning.
So between swimming and Xboxing (obsession of the moment, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, aka Western On Another Planet, in which my player character is a bounty hunter who can run on all fours and whose ammunition is not only live but informs him on a regular basis that he needs a shave, smells bad, and is maybe not the most accurate shot in the world. Holy frijoles, I'm in heaven) and being on days off and out of this dungeon (furnished, it must be said, with a screamingly fast internet connection of some kind; T1, I'm guessing, since we are the government and we're here to help you), no traffic here at all, all apologies, blame the verities of my apartment life, in a building that can't take DSL or cable modems (nor, to be honest, can my budget accommodate them at the moment) and so has just SLOW crappy dial-up, I swear they've slowed it down to make us all make the jump to more expensive services but hahahaha I still remember the three-digit baud days... but I'm digressing.
Anyway, it feels good to be active again, metaphorically and literally.
Oh, and by the way, Star Wars III holds up pretty well to a second viewing, well enough to where I think I'll take in a third. At matinee price at any rate.
Ta!
Monday, May 30, 2005
OH, PLEASE
I'm in the midst of sort of watching this week's edition of BBCAmerica's "Talking Movies," a half-hour promotional/critical/sorta-newsy look at films in current release I'm a grudging fan of, mostly because it's a mostly pleasing way to eat up the half hour between my morning walk with the Collie of Folly at 0515 (right when I get home from work) and the reruns of Angel on TNT. Which means, yes, I have digital cable. Sue me; I live in Cheyenne and have yet to acquire companions of the caliber to which I am accustomed (i.e., no Sewer Kings or Rock Stars or Punk Martha Stewarts or Tad the Grocers or Famous Bills).
But I digress, as usual.
The last two segments of this week's edition of "Talking Movies" have concerned recent Hollywood potrayals of Africa and the new movie Crash, which I can just tell, casting altogether aside (Sandra Bullock; her last name is onomontopoeic and descriptively emetic-sounding), will not be a patch on the Stephen Soderberg film of yesteryear. Both segments were full of moralizing and handwringing about the moral responsibility of film directors and actors, on how important it is that these big budget, ego-inflating, bloated celluloid dungheaps also be in some way educational.
Oh, of course, it is not just the movie industry who is guilty of this kind of nauseating posturing; some artists in other media are just as full of it (can anyone say Bono? But, of course, Bono rocks, and seems, most of the time, to be at least marginally aware that his causes and cajoling are taken in by most of the people who pay attention when he shows his mug as a mere sideshow to the music; a sort of ticket price we pay for enjoying the worthwhile stuff he has given the world, that being a bunch of really great songs and two decades and counting of really amazing concerts). For some reason, however, I'm realizing now as I watch the end of "Talking Movies," closing with a musical number from the new computer-animated kiddie film Madagascar, that I just find it more offensive when Hollywood does it.
Let me put on my Old Fart hat for a moment. Since discovering both Netflix and Turner Classic Movies, I've been indulging joyfully in scads of movies made, for the most part, before I was born, or at least before I was really able to follow anything more complicated than, say Dumbo. And while yes, many of them have as a central theme big stuff like political corruption (Chinatown, anyone?), murder (too numerous to mention), insanity (hello, Aguirre), slavery (Spartacus!), etc., etc... they're not preachy. The big issues are integral to the plot, but pretty much mostly because they make really good drama (or, in the case of, say, Doctor Strangelove, knee-slapping comedy) and are thus, gasp, entertaining. These films, in other words, don't pretend to be anything but entertainment.
And it used to be okay that this was so. It really did.
What the hell happened?
Now, I am not knocking films made after, say, 1975 altogether. My life wouldn't be anything like what it is without all the films I've seen and loved over the years since then. Readers of this web page know what they are; I needn't list them again. And yes, some of them are obviously made with an agenda, but they're good films so I don't care.
But good god, how and why did it become necessary for me to have to listen to Samuel L. Jackson pontificate about how it's his responsibility as an actor to educate us about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or Sidney Pollack about how the we need to support the UN more in dealing with violence around the world, or Sandra Bullock, about how disconnected people are from one another nowadays? Shut the hell up already; I am now expected to fork over $5 for a matinee and I don't do that for a moral lesson. Church is free. I pay to be amused, dammit.
I am of course aware that no gun was pointing to my head forcing me to watch "Talking Movies" and listen to these clowns trying to make what still amounts to big budget Punch and Judy shows into something of great Meaning and Importance (argh! But at least Sonny Bono and Clint Eastwood and Fred Grandy got off the soapbox and got down and dirty with the people who really are actually, shock, working to make the world go round). I could have switched it off and, say, played Halo or gone to bed early or read another chapter or two of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, so my irritation is really mostly my own fault. That's no big deal, though.
The big deal is that we all have allowed this to happen, both by spuriously demanding that our pleasures mask themselves as something "good for us" or "improving" so that we can feel less guilty about them (thank you, John Calvin), and by allowing and encouraging this kind of behavior from our movie and TV stars, our film directors, and our rock stars.
I entertain no illusions that this is going to change anytime soon, but still, this is my web page and it has entertained me to register this, my curmudgeonly opinion on the worthlessness of media figures who pretend to be preachers.
And yes, I include Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, et al in that number.
I'm in the midst of sort of watching this week's edition of BBCAmerica's "Talking Movies," a half-hour promotional/critical/sorta-newsy look at films in current release I'm a grudging fan of, mostly because it's a mostly pleasing way to eat up the half hour between my morning walk with the Collie of Folly at 0515 (right when I get home from work) and the reruns of Angel on TNT. Which means, yes, I have digital cable. Sue me; I live in Cheyenne and have yet to acquire companions of the caliber to which I am accustomed (i.e., no Sewer Kings or Rock Stars or Punk Martha Stewarts or Tad the Grocers or Famous Bills).
But I digress, as usual.
The last two segments of this week's edition of "Talking Movies" have concerned recent Hollywood potrayals of Africa and the new movie Crash, which I can just tell, casting altogether aside (Sandra Bullock; her last name is onomontopoeic and descriptively emetic-sounding), will not be a patch on the Stephen Soderberg film of yesteryear. Both segments were full of moralizing and handwringing about the moral responsibility of film directors and actors, on how important it is that these big budget, ego-inflating, bloated celluloid dungheaps also be in some way educational.
Oh, of course, it is not just the movie industry who is guilty of this kind of nauseating posturing; some artists in other media are just as full of it (can anyone say Bono? But, of course, Bono rocks, and seems, most of the time, to be at least marginally aware that his causes and cajoling are taken in by most of the people who pay attention when he shows his mug as a mere sideshow to the music; a sort of ticket price we pay for enjoying the worthwhile stuff he has given the world, that being a bunch of really great songs and two decades and counting of really amazing concerts). For some reason, however, I'm realizing now as I watch the end of "Talking Movies," closing with a musical number from the new computer-animated kiddie film Madagascar, that I just find it more offensive when Hollywood does it.
Let me put on my Old Fart hat for a moment. Since discovering both Netflix and Turner Classic Movies, I've been indulging joyfully in scads of movies made, for the most part, before I was born, or at least before I was really able to follow anything more complicated than, say Dumbo. And while yes, many of them have as a central theme big stuff like political corruption (Chinatown, anyone?), murder (too numerous to mention), insanity (hello, Aguirre), slavery (Spartacus!), etc., etc... they're not preachy. The big issues are integral to the plot, but pretty much mostly because they make really good drama (or, in the case of, say, Doctor Strangelove, knee-slapping comedy) and are thus, gasp, entertaining. These films, in other words, don't pretend to be anything but entertainment.
And it used to be okay that this was so. It really did.
What the hell happened?
Now, I am not knocking films made after, say, 1975 altogether. My life wouldn't be anything like what it is without all the films I've seen and loved over the years since then. Readers of this web page know what they are; I needn't list them again. And yes, some of them are obviously made with an agenda, but they're good films so I don't care.
But good god, how and why did it become necessary for me to have to listen to Samuel L. Jackson pontificate about how it's his responsibility as an actor to educate us about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or Sidney Pollack about how the we need to support the UN more in dealing with violence around the world, or Sandra Bullock, about how disconnected people are from one another nowadays? Shut the hell up already; I am now expected to fork over $5 for a matinee and I don't do that for a moral lesson. Church is free. I pay to be amused, dammit.
I am of course aware that no gun was pointing to my head forcing me to watch "Talking Movies" and listen to these clowns trying to make what still amounts to big budget Punch and Judy shows into something of great Meaning and Importance (argh! But at least Sonny Bono and Clint Eastwood and Fred Grandy got off the soapbox and got down and dirty with the people who really are actually, shock, working to make the world go round). I could have switched it off and, say, played Halo or gone to bed early or read another chapter or two of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, so my irritation is really mostly my own fault. That's no big deal, though.
The big deal is that we all have allowed this to happen, both by spuriously demanding that our pleasures mask themselves as something "good for us" or "improving" so that we can feel less guilty about them (thank you, John Calvin), and by allowing and encouraging this kind of behavior from our movie and TV stars, our film directors, and our rock stars.
I entertain no illusions that this is going to change anytime soon, but still, this is my web page and it has entertained me to register this, my curmudgeonly opinion on the worthlessness of media figures who pretend to be preachers.
And yes, I include Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, et al in that number.
Saturday, May 28, 2005
LIANT BOTMC
Special Memorial Day Edition!
All the Rage
F. Paul Wilson
New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2000
I have a lot of odd and seasonal habits, as I have commented before on this here website. I have this thing every "spring" (I place that word in quotation marks because this is, after all, Wyoming), about April or so, when I absolutely have to listen to hours and hours of King's X at top volume (much curtailed now that the Collie of Folly and I live in an apartment building - it's like that Volkswagon commercial, except I won't be buying a house in which to jump around anytime soon), particularly the eponymous album they put out in 1992 when Buzzmo and I were chin deep in senior thesis muck at Beaudacious Bard College. It's sort of to commemorate that, I suppose, that I play this music in the spring. It brings it all back: the anxiety and anticipation of graduating, the panic at all of the work I hadn't done, the procrastinative skinny dipping in the Sawkill Falls...
There are others... winter is for Henry Purcell, especially "Rejoice in the Lord Alway," the opening bars of which never fail to calm and move me, and for Radiohead (though really, it's always a good time for Radiohead), and for Ween for reasons I really can't explain...
I also have books I read every year at certain times. Some are obvious, like my overpowering need to read lots and lots of H.P. Lovecraft every October, some less so, like my annual bout of everything Tolkein every January or so. That's mostly to start the year, I think. And it's gotten much richer since the last of the extended version DVDs of the films came out, just in time for My Own Dear Personal Sister to give it to me for Christmas...
And there are others, but I can't think of them right now because it is 0137 hours and I'm at work and not much is going on, eerily enough for a Memorial Day Weekend (though I must say, perhaps I missed my calling a bit - those State Parks guys seem to go to an awful lot of parties... though I wonder how welcome they really are...). That, however, is immaterial, because my intro is complete!
What I've accomplished here is really quite an elegant segue, but you readers who haven't yet discovered F. Paul Wilson and his Repairman Jack series, or at least All the Rage (by the way, have I any readers anymore? Perhaps my strategy of letting my old readers just naturally rediscover that I'm posting here again is not as elegant as I'd envisioned. If any of you have, in fact, rediscovered this, give me a shout, would you? I told the Zenball Wizard, but that's all. Guess I should start notifying...) wouldn't know this, because you don't know that this fun little thriller/fantasy/whatever is set during, that's right, Memorial Day weekend!
I'm only about a third of the way through this, but I'm already recommending it highly. Oh, it's not one for the ages, will never be assigned for a short paper in a college literature class (unless it's a very funky one like the one that introduced me to Jorge Luis Borges and also gave me college credit for reading Ursula K. Leguin and Thomas Pynchon) or sold in 25th anniversary heritage editions or published by Barnes and Noble's special cheapo minibook editions when the copyright on it runs out, but it's not completely throwaway crap either -- in fact, I just took a look at abebooks.com and find that first editions of this and other Repairman Jack books go for quite a chunk of change, though I also note with some annoyance that there are extra really rare editions -- lettered, just 26 copies -- artificial rarities, I think they're called. Nothing so bad as what was done with Neal Stephenson's last few books, but still.
What it is is a nicely paced, engaging and yes, thrilling book, part of a series that tends to remind me strongly of Kolchak the Night Stalker, but with a very different hero. Where the TV show's hero, Kolchak, is a wire service reporter who keeps stumbling across the weird and the supernatural in investigating the robberies of high society bluehairs and whatnot, Repairman Jack is quite another -- and original -- animal, a sort of libertarian superhero, who has somehow (details on how are never forthcoming, alas, but this is a fantasy series, of sorts) gotten all of his official records erased; the man has no legal existence at all.
For his living, he fixes, not objects, but situations, situations that have a habit of turning very, very odd, very, very quickly. An ancient Hindu devil may be skulking the streets of Manhattan, for instance, or in this case, a phantom molecule with bizarre and somewhat disturbing properties is stalking the labs and nervous systems of NYC and beyond. It's part designer drug, part chemical McGuffin (extracted raw from the blood of a carnival freak, the Sharkman) and it's causing everybody problems, especially the pharmaceutical company marketing it under the table via a glamorous Serbian thug who isn't going to take it very well when the source dies off, which, as I complete the first third or so of the book, is imminent.
I'm fond, in writing these "book club" entries, of quoting passages or bits of text to show, rather than just telling, why I have chosen a particular book, but really, there's no bit that really stands out here; as I said, these are not great literary works, not terribly quotable either. What does stand out here is the invention; this is truly a unique hero and Wilson seems pretty good at coming up with unique situations through which his characters must work their way. In very much the thriller vein, he's made this one as difficult as possible from the get go; though at the moment a molecule that not only mutates into something very different according to the phase of the moon but also alters reality so that even computer printouts and hand drawings are retroactively edited to reflect its new configuration is a bit difficult to just swallow and go with (says the girl who just went along with all the damnfoolishness delivered by the latest Star Wars movie), I'm engaged enough to want to see how it all comes out.
And if the last two thirds are as engaging as the first, and if the payoff is half-decent, maybe I'll have an annual Memorial Day book from now on.
Special Memorial Day Edition!
All the Rage
F. Paul Wilson
New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2000
I have a lot of odd and seasonal habits, as I have commented before on this here website. I have this thing every "spring" (I place that word in quotation marks because this is, after all, Wyoming), about April or so, when I absolutely have to listen to hours and hours of King's X at top volume (much curtailed now that the Collie of Folly and I live in an apartment building - it's like that Volkswagon commercial, except I won't be buying a house in which to jump around anytime soon), particularly the eponymous album they put out in 1992 when Buzzmo and I were chin deep in senior thesis muck at Beaudacious Bard College. It's sort of to commemorate that, I suppose, that I play this music in the spring. It brings it all back: the anxiety and anticipation of graduating, the panic at all of the work I hadn't done, the procrastinative skinny dipping in the Sawkill Falls...
There are others... winter is for Henry Purcell, especially "Rejoice in the Lord Alway," the opening bars of which never fail to calm and move me, and for Radiohead (though really, it's always a good time for Radiohead), and for Ween for reasons I really can't explain...
I also have books I read every year at certain times. Some are obvious, like my overpowering need to read lots and lots of H.P. Lovecraft every October, some less so, like my annual bout of everything Tolkein every January or so. That's mostly to start the year, I think. And it's gotten much richer since the last of the extended version DVDs of the films came out, just in time for My Own Dear Personal Sister to give it to me for Christmas...
And there are others, but I can't think of them right now because it is 0137 hours and I'm at work and not much is going on, eerily enough for a Memorial Day Weekend (though I must say, perhaps I missed my calling a bit - those State Parks guys seem to go to an awful lot of parties... though I wonder how welcome they really are...). That, however, is immaterial, because my intro is complete!
What I've accomplished here is really quite an elegant segue, but you readers who haven't yet discovered F. Paul Wilson and his Repairman Jack series, or at least All the Rage (by the way, have I any readers anymore? Perhaps my strategy of letting my old readers just naturally rediscover that I'm posting here again is not as elegant as I'd envisioned. If any of you have, in fact, rediscovered this, give me a shout, would you? I told the Zenball Wizard, but that's all. Guess I should start notifying...) wouldn't know this, because you don't know that this fun little thriller/fantasy/whatever is set during, that's right, Memorial Day weekend!
I'm only about a third of the way through this, but I'm already recommending it highly. Oh, it's not one for the ages, will never be assigned for a short paper in a college literature class (unless it's a very funky one like the one that introduced me to Jorge Luis Borges and also gave me college credit for reading Ursula K. Leguin and Thomas Pynchon) or sold in 25th anniversary heritage editions or published by Barnes and Noble's special cheapo minibook editions when the copyright on it runs out, but it's not completely throwaway crap either -- in fact, I just took a look at abebooks.com and find that first editions of this and other Repairman Jack books go for quite a chunk of change, though I also note with some annoyance that there are extra really rare editions -- lettered, just 26 copies -- artificial rarities, I think they're called. Nothing so bad as what was done with Neal Stephenson's last few books, but still.
What it is is a nicely paced, engaging and yes, thrilling book, part of a series that tends to remind me strongly of Kolchak the Night Stalker, but with a very different hero. Where the TV show's hero, Kolchak, is a wire service reporter who keeps stumbling across the weird and the supernatural in investigating the robberies of high society bluehairs and whatnot, Repairman Jack is quite another -- and original -- animal, a sort of libertarian superhero, who has somehow (details on how are never forthcoming, alas, but this is a fantasy series, of sorts) gotten all of his official records erased; the man has no legal existence at all.
For his living, he fixes, not objects, but situations, situations that have a habit of turning very, very odd, very, very quickly. An ancient Hindu devil may be skulking the streets of Manhattan, for instance, or in this case, a phantom molecule with bizarre and somewhat disturbing properties is stalking the labs and nervous systems of NYC and beyond. It's part designer drug, part chemical McGuffin (extracted raw from the blood of a carnival freak, the Sharkman) and it's causing everybody problems, especially the pharmaceutical company marketing it under the table via a glamorous Serbian thug who isn't going to take it very well when the source dies off, which, as I complete the first third or so of the book, is imminent.
I'm fond, in writing these "book club" entries, of quoting passages or bits of text to show, rather than just telling, why I have chosen a particular book, but really, there's no bit that really stands out here; as I said, these are not great literary works, not terribly quotable either. What does stand out here is the invention; this is truly a unique hero and Wilson seems pretty good at coming up with unique situations through which his characters must work their way. In very much the thriller vein, he's made this one as difficult as possible from the get go; though at the moment a molecule that not only mutates into something very different according to the phase of the moon but also alters reality so that even computer printouts and hand drawings are retroactively edited to reflect its new configuration is a bit difficult to just swallow and go with (says the girl who just went along with all the damnfoolishness delivered by the latest Star Wars movie), I'm engaged enough to want to see how it all comes out.
And if the last two thirds are as engaging as the first, and if the payoff is half-decent, maybe I'll have an annual Memorial Day book from now on.
Thursday, May 26, 2005
ROAD REPORT (short)
By the way, hooray, WYO 130, aka the Snowy Range Road, is open for the season, all though what with the deep high canyons of snow and all WYDOT is recommending we all refrain from trying to tow camper trailers or drive giant RVs over it as yet.
Woo hoo!
In other news, the Punk Martha Stewart is back in Wyoming for the summer, too! Huzzah!
By the way, hooray, WYO 130, aka the Snowy Range Road, is open for the season, all though what with the deep high canyons of snow and all WYDOT is recommending we all refrain from trying to tow camper trailers or drive giant RVs over it as yet.
Woo hoo!
In other news, the Punk Martha Stewart is back in Wyoming for the summer, too! Huzzah!
SITH HEADS, SITH HEADS, ROLY POLY...
I am so weak.
So very, very weak.
Barely a week after promising My Own Dear Personal Mom that I would wait until Star Wars VI/III/Trois/San/Whatever was playing at the Lincoln and see it with her, well, I broke down, forked over $5 and took in a matinee yesterday.
So, okay, no one ever accused George Lucas of being the Noel Coward of fantasy cinema; his dialog, particularly between Mr. and Mrs. Midichlorin (is he really, daddyless Anakin, entitled to the name of Skywalker?), even made all of the teenagers, barfed out of a Laramie County school bus for an educational experience like no other, make all kinds of snarky little gagging sounds. This, however, is not news, and his scenes with Anakin and Padme are mercifully short and to the point "Hey, I'm pregnant" "Wow, that's wonderful" "Hey, you're beautiful" "I will not continue quoting this because what followed was too ridiculous even to be enshrined here, on LIANT" "Ok, then I'll stop saying it; let's cut to a fight scene somewhere" "OK, love you" "Love you, too" "Hey, you forgot to pout" "No I didn't, this is the third movie and my sexy scar pouts for me."
Actually, that exchange would have been better, but what the hey. That's not what I go to Star Wars for, at least not since the first two, which actually, you know, conveyed character through dialogue because it was actually concerned with character.
What we have here is much older and more formal storytelling, Balinese shadow puppet theater writ larger, more expensive, and a lot more gee-whiz, the characters stand-ins for archetypes with no real senses of self at all, which is why they can actually get away with out-and-out crap like "You're breaking my heart" and the best one-word howl since Captain Kirk realized he was trapped inside the Genesis planet.
But, but, but, you're all asking, Kate dear, do you think Revenge of the Sith is any good?
Well, it's certainly better than the other two prequel movies, and I'd venture to say it's even marginally better than Return of the Jedi, though again, Jedi was more character-driven than any of the "second/first" trilogy, it was still really pretty dumb with the Ewoks and all, and I'm not a guy, so Carrie Fisher in a space bikini did nothing for me.
Star Wars Trois, however, did have something to offer, and I'm ashamed and feel like a dirty old woman for saying this, but dayam, didn't Hayden Christensen grow up to be, in the parlance of the teenieboppers sitting all around me, a hottie?
Ahem. Who said that? For shame, for shame.
But seriously, was this worth five bucks/years of waiting/your gnawing charge against George Lucas here?
Well, I'm glad I didn't wait in line with the faithful, all though that would have been fun. Instead, I was busy not helping My Own Dear Personal Dad paint the kitchen in Saratoga; in the middle of an epic remodeling project (I feel the need always to use the word "epic" a lot when I'm discussing Star Wars), he told me over the phone he really, really needed my help with the painting... but when I got there all he had me do was wash a wall because, in his words "If I mess up, I've got no one to blame but myself." So instead of waiting in line to see the movie first, I watched paint dry.
Fair trade, I think.
But is the movie any good, you're all now ready to scream, I'm sure. Quit your pussyfooting and pontificating, Kate! How badly does Sith suck, already?!?
Thing is, while I was watching the movie, I was happy and entertained. I just sat there and swallowed the admittedly somewhat silly notion that here they were, two movies and how many years later, and nobody had caught on yet that Chancellor Palpatine is the Grand Master Sithman, and the even sillier notion that a few nightmares about his wife dying in childbirth in a space age milieu in which, apparently, it takes her no time at all to travel from Trantor (oops, I mean Courosaunt) to whatever that volcano planet is but apparently lacks prenatal care would be enough to make Anakin buy into the notion that the Dark Side could bring her back to life (Tleilaxu, anyone?) and swear mickle oaths to the Grand Master Sithman... And I sat there and swallowed the very silly notion that Anakin and Obi Wan could duke it out over live molten lava flows without being incinerated (at least until Ani is legless, and I'm not talking drunk) (oops, belated spoiler alert) (like anyone with any interest at all in this movie doesn't already know what is going to, what has to happen, to connect it to A New Hope etc.). I just took it all with a grain of salt and enjoyed it.
And maybe, just maybe, my eyeball rolling that I couldn't help pointed as much to flaws in myself as to those in the film, no? Maybe I've just never truly been in love like Ani and Padme are in love, to the point of inane and inarticulate babbling. And maybe, never having been so in love, I just don't know how it feels to be so afraid that my beloved is going to die stupidly.
Wait, no, you know what, I have, and I've really lost someone impossibly dear to me, and even in the very depths of my grief, I did not become Evil Kate.
Anyway...
Look, given that there's no suspense except, how is George Lucas going to move grouchy Anakin and saintly Padme and patient Obi Wan and kickass Yoda from where they were in the "first" two films to where they are at the beginning of Star Wars (talk about your middle chapter problems!), and given that we don't go to Star Wars films for sparkling wit and dialog anymore, and given that those "first" two films which sucked so hard I deign not to name them even here, it all came out pretty well. I did not leave feeling cheated, and while this particular film did not on its own earn one bit of my emotion or enjoyment (that all is tracable to the good memories I treasure of what I guess we now have to call Episodes IV-VI), I had a good time nonetheless, for whatever reason.
I'm as puzzled as y'all, really, given my impossible persnicketiness about books and music and movies in general. I think maybe this is just a case of a film readily meeting, and maybe even surpassing, my lowered expectations.
I'll probably have to go see it again to be sure. Let's hear it for matinees, and me working the graveyard shift!
I am so weak.
So very, very weak.
Barely a week after promising My Own Dear Personal Mom that I would wait until Star Wars VI/III/Trois/San/Whatever was playing at the Lincoln and see it with her, well, I broke down, forked over $5 and took in a matinee yesterday.
So, okay, no one ever accused George Lucas of being the Noel Coward of fantasy cinema; his dialog, particularly between Mr. and Mrs. Midichlorin (is he really, daddyless Anakin, entitled to the name of Skywalker?), even made all of the teenagers, barfed out of a Laramie County school bus for an educational experience like no other, make all kinds of snarky little gagging sounds. This, however, is not news, and his scenes with Anakin and Padme are mercifully short and to the point "Hey, I'm pregnant" "Wow, that's wonderful" "Hey, you're beautiful" "I will not continue quoting this because what followed was too ridiculous even to be enshrined here, on LIANT" "Ok, then I'll stop saying it; let's cut to a fight scene somewhere" "OK, love you" "Love you, too" "Hey, you forgot to pout" "No I didn't, this is the third movie and my sexy scar pouts for me."
Actually, that exchange would have been better, but what the hey. That's not what I go to Star Wars for, at least not since the first two, which actually, you know, conveyed character through dialogue because it was actually concerned with character.
What we have here is much older and more formal storytelling, Balinese shadow puppet theater writ larger, more expensive, and a lot more gee-whiz, the characters stand-ins for archetypes with no real senses of self at all, which is why they can actually get away with out-and-out crap like "You're breaking my heart" and the best one-word howl since Captain Kirk realized he was trapped inside the Genesis planet.
But, but, but, you're all asking, Kate dear, do you think Revenge of the Sith is any good?
Well, it's certainly better than the other two prequel movies, and I'd venture to say it's even marginally better than Return of the Jedi, though again, Jedi was more character-driven than any of the "second/first" trilogy, it was still really pretty dumb with the Ewoks and all, and I'm not a guy, so Carrie Fisher in a space bikini did nothing for me.
Star Wars Trois, however, did have something to offer, and I'm ashamed and feel like a dirty old woman for saying this, but dayam, didn't Hayden Christensen grow up to be, in the parlance of the teenieboppers sitting all around me, a hottie?
Ahem. Who said that? For shame, for shame.
But seriously, was this worth five bucks/years of waiting/your gnawing charge against George Lucas here?
Well, I'm glad I didn't wait in line with the faithful, all though that would have been fun. Instead, I was busy not helping My Own Dear Personal Dad paint the kitchen in Saratoga; in the middle of an epic remodeling project (I feel the need always to use the word "epic" a lot when I'm discussing Star Wars), he told me over the phone he really, really needed my help with the painting... but when I got there all he had me do was wash a wall because, in his words "If I mess up, I've got no one to blame but myself." So instead of waiting in line to see the movie first, I watched paint dry.
Fair trade, I think.
But is the movie any good, you're all now ready to scream, I'm sure. Quit your pussyfooting and pontificating, Kate! How badly does Sith suck, already?!?
Thing is, while I was watching the movie, I was happy and entertained. I just sat there and swallowed the admittedly somewhat silly notion that here they were, two movies and how many years later, and nobody had caught on yet that Chancellor Palpatine is the Grand Master Sithman, and the even sillier notion that a few nightmares about his wife dying in childbirth in a space age milieu in which, apparently, it takes her no time at all to travel from Trantor (oops, I mean Courosaunt) to whatever that volcano planet is but apparently lacks prenatal care would be enough to make Anakin buy into the notion that the Dark Side could bring her back to life (Tleilaxu, anyone?) and swear mickle oaths to the Grand Master Sithman... And I sat there and swallowed the very silly notion that Anakin and Obi Wan could duke it out over live molten lava flows without being incinerated (at least until Ani is legless, and I'm not talking drunk) (oops, belated spoiler alert) (like anyone with any interest at all in this movie doesn't already know what is going to, what has to happen, to connect it to A New Hope etc.). I just took it all with a grain of salt and enjoyed it.
And maybe, just maybe, my eyeball rolling that I couldn't help pointed as much to flaws in myself as to those in the film, no? Maybe I've just never truly been in love like Ani and Padme are in love, to the point of inane and inarticulate babbling. And maybe, never having been so in love, I just don't know how it feels to be so afraid that my beloved is going to die stupidly.
Wait, no, you know what, I have, and I've really lost someone impossibly dear to me, and even in the very depths of my grief, I did not become Evil Kate.
Anyway...
Look, given that there's no suspense except, how is George Lucas going to move grouchy Anakin and saintly Padme and patient Obi Wan and kickass Yoda from where they were in the "first" two films to where they are at the beginning of Star Wars (talk about your middle chapter problems!), and given that we don't go to Star Wars films for sparkling wit and dialog anymore, and given that those "first" two films which sucked so hard I deign not to name them even here, it all came out pretty well. I did not leave feeling cheated, and while this particular film did not on its own earn one bit of my emotion or enjoyment (that all is tracable to the good memories I treasure of what I guess we now have to call Episodes IV-VI), I had a good time nonetheless, for whatever reason.
I'm as puzzled as y'all, really, given my impossible persnicketiness about books and music and movies in general. I think maybe this is just a case of a film readily meeting, and maybe even surpassing, my lowered expectations.
I'll probably have to go see it again to be sure. Let's hear it for matinees, and me working the graveyard shift!
Monday, May 16, 2005
AHH, SPRING
Spring, aka "mud season" has never been my favorite, but there is always one thing to which I look forward, which I realize now is another thing I took largely for granted during the halcyon days when all I had with which to occupy myself were council meetings and water and sewer projects and where to build the community center and how to pay for it and how many volunteers I was going to need to staff the beer tent at the chariot races (lo, I do still describe myself as a recovering politician!)...
I write, of course, about the prospect of being able to make the journey from Cheyenne to Saratoga via the scenic route, known variously as Hwy 130, the Snowy Range Road, the road to Centennial, etc., which at this point in time is still closed -- a hell of a lot more snow got dumped on it this month, more, I think, than it got throughout what the calendar insists on delimiting officially as winter (but which we all know is an arbitrary and artifical creation marked more by downturns in local economies and more room for us'uns in the hot pool than anything else, much the way members of the upper classes in America regard weekends essentially as those two days every week when the banks are closed). Traditionally, my current employer, the Wyoming Department of Transportation, tries to get this road open by Memorial Day so the Greenies and denizens of the People's Republic of Laramie and the suckers at the government teat who live in Cheyenne can come and spend money in Saratoga and Encampment in time to keep the locals from going nuts and starting to act like denizens of the far eastern steppes of the former Soviet Union after the fall of same (for an idea of that, I refer you to The Exile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia, reviewed a few years ago in this very blog!). I can only hope this tradition will somehow continue, even if it does mean the first few trips over the pass will be largely free of scenery, unless huge canyon walls of piled-up snow count as same.
I'm still a little out of sorts to be on the wrong side of this pass making my living, by the way. It feels wrong, wrong, wrong, to be one of the teat-suckers in Cheyenne, whose small reserve of disposable income is sought after by my former comrades in scraping together change to fill the cooler at Kate's Landing as a sort of economic lifeblood, to look westward to see the Snowy Range (and to be too far away to be able to see it anyway), to drink rather good-tasting tap water that is in part pumped, at great expense, out of Hog Park reservoir, to show up in town behind the wheel of my current car, aka "Jack the Booktastic Buick", with it's 2-county plates...
I suppose I wouldn't mind so much if I could find something to enjoy, really enjoy about Cheyenne. This is partly my own fault, of course; I tend, on my days off, to just lounge around the house reading books, my own and the very good public library's, watching crap on digital cable and playing with my dog when I could be out somewhere meeting people and doing things like...well, I know there's an astronomy society (but they tend to meet on Friday nights when I'm working), and book clubs here and there (Starbuck's sponsors and plugs one, but I tend to be inclined to sneer at its choices, snot that I am), hobbyists of all sorts (but I am not a quilter or a baker or a candlestick maker, not a cowboy, Christian or otherwise, not a collector of anything except books and dust, nor do I wish to be any of these things). I found someone to play D&D with at one point, but he tended to want to make RPG versions of video games he's played over the years and, well, I could just play the video games...
Which I do, yes I do; as last November I, of all people, bought an Xbox, choosing that system in order to be able to play Fable, a game I played with great frequency and feverish intensity for two months almost solid and beat twice but still do not feel I've "played out" because I have still failed to make a truly evil player-character (just can't bring myself to kill all those wandering merchants & c.). Other than that I tend to favor things like Oddworld over, e.g. Halo, though I do have that one, too. And Fatal Frame 2, shudder, meep, yelp, ieee!
Several months ago a work colleague dragged me out to hang with her pool league team, and I wound up doing that for a while once a week, even wound up dating one of them, but that lost its charm long before I stopped doing it. Professional drunks are just saddening (I exempt from this category my beloved River Scum, who at least do things while drinking, like float the river or go camping, and have conversations that are more than just litanies of woes and unpleasant encounters with cops), I've decided, and bars are really quite unhappy places and any relationships begun or largely conducted in them are largely unsatisfying.
I say this having spent much of my time in Saratoga in bars, but there, there I had already established friendships of many years with those people outside the bars -- at school, through political activities, floating the river, going about all the random small errands and things that make up daily life -- and so the bars where just where we met, not why we met, and that made them cheerful, mostly, even if we were having a wake.
Which brings me back to Saratoga, which, along with Encampment, I have decided, shall be the only place where I'm even going to bother going to bars anymore (a possible exception being the Plains Hotel after cheapo movies at the Lincoln Movie Palace across the street on Wednesday afternoons this summer -- they have Guiness on tap, natch). What's the point, otherwise, even if, as is sure to happen over the years, I actually know fewer and fewer of the people sitting in them... At least we have things in common, Saratoga's newcomers and I, for now. Sort of.
And in the meantime, I keep checking out the people I encounter around Cheyenne, at the library, the bookstore, Starbuck's, the grocery store... pardon me if I seem to be eavesdropping; I probably am.
I'm still looking for my tribe here.
Spring, aka "mud season" has never been my favorite, but there is always one thing to which I look forward, which I realize now is another thing I took largely for granted during the halcyon days when all I had with which to occupy myself were council meetings and water and sewer projects and where to build the community center and how to pay for it and how many volunteers I was going to need to staff the beer tent at the chariot races (lo, I do still describe myself as a recovering politician!)...
I write, of course, about the prospect of being able to make the journey from Cheyenne to Saratoga via the scenic route, known variously as Hwy 130, the Snowy Range Road, the road to Centennial, etc., which at this point in time is still closed -- a hell of a lot more snow got dumped on it this month, more, I think, than it got throughout what the calendar insists on delimiting officially as winter (but which we all know is an arbitrary and artifical creation marked more by downturns in local economies and more room for us'uns in the hot pool than anything else, much the way members of the upper classes in America regard weekends essentially as those two days every week when the banks are closed). Traditionally, my current employer, the Wyoming Department of Transportation, tries to get this road open by Memorial Day so the Greenies and denizens of the People's Republic of Laramie and the suckers at the government teat who live in Cheyenne can come and spend money in Saratoga and Encampment in time to keep the locals from going nuts and starting to act like denizens of the far eastern steppes of the former Soviet Union after the fall of same (for an idea of that, I refer you to The Exile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia, reviewed a few years ago in this very blog!). I can only hope this tradition will somehow continue, even if it does mean the first few trips over the pass will be largely free of scenery, unless huge canyon walls of piled-up snow count as same.
I'm still a little out of sorts to be on the wrong side of this pass making my living, by the way. It feels wrong, wrong, wrong, to be one of the teat-suckers in Cheyenne, whose small reserve of disposable income is sought after by my former comrades in scraping together change to fill the cooler at Kate's Landing as a sort of economic lifeblood, to look westward to see the Snowy Range (and to be too far away to be able to see it anyway), to drink rather good-tasting tap water that is in part pumped, at great expense, out of Hog Park reservoir, to show up in town behind the wheel of my current car, aka "Jack the Booktastic Buick", with it's 2-county plates...
I suppose I wouldn't mind so much if I could find something to enjoy, really enjoy about Cheyenne. This is partly my own fault, of course; I tend, on my days off, to just lounge around the house reading books, my own and the very good public library's, watching crap on digital cable and playing with my dog when I could be out somewhere meeting people and doing things like...well, I know there's an astronomy society (but they tend to meet on Friday nights when I'm working), and book clubs here and there (Starbuck's sponsors and plugs one, but I tend to be inclined to sneer at its choices, snot that I am), hobbyists of all sorts (but I am not a quilter or a baker or a candlestick maker, not a cowboy, Christian or otherwise, not a collector of anything except books and dust, nor do I wish to be any of these things). I found someone to play D&D with at one point, but he tended to want to make RPG versions of video games he's played over the years and, well, I could just play the video games...
Which I do, yes I do; as last November I, of all people, bought an Xbox, choosing that system in order to be able to play Fable, a game I played with great frequency and feverish intensity for two months almost solid and beat twice but still do not feel I've "played out" because I have still failed to make a truly evil player-character (just can't bring myself to kill all those wandering merchants & c.). Other than that I tend to favor things like Oddworld over, e.g. Halo, though I do have that one, too. And Fatal Frame 2, shudder, meep, yelp, ieee!
Several months ago a work colleague dragged me out to hang with her pool league team, and I wound up doing that for a while once a week, even wound up dating one of them, but that lost its charm long before I stopped doing it. Professional drunks are just saddening (I exempt from this category my beloved River Scum, who at least do things while drinking, like float the river or go camping, and have conversations that are more than just litanies of woes and unpleasant encounters with cops), I've decided, and bars are really quite unhappy places and any relationships begun or largely conducted in them are largely unsatisfying.
I say this having spent much of my time in Saratoga in bars, but there, there I had already established friendships of many years with those people outside the bars -- at school, through political activities, floating the river, going about all the random small errands and things that make up daily life -- and so the bars where just where we met, not why we met, and that made them cheerful, mostly, even if we were having a wake.
Which brings me back to Saratoga, which, along with Encampment, I have decided, shall be the only place where I'm even going to bother going to bars anymore (a possible exception being the Plains Hotel after cheapo movies at the Lincoln Movie Palace across the street on Wednesday afternoons this summer -- they have Guiness on tap, natch). What's the point, otherwise, even if, as is sure to happen over the years, I actually know fewer and fewer of the people sitting in them... At least we have things in common, Saratoga's newcomers and I, for now. Sort of.
And in the meantime, I keep checking out the people I encounter around Cheyenne, at the library, the bookstore, Starbuck's, the grocery store... pardon me if I seem to be eavesdropping; I probably am.
I'm still looking for my tribe here.
Monday, May 02, 2005
D'OH!
So, okay, I said I was going to start posting here again... about a month ago, and I have not. It's not for not wanting to share with you, my dear readers-that-were, but what can I say, time passeth, time passeth.
In between helping with the handing out of speeding tickets, waking up cranky sleepy livestock owners to courteously ask them to get their cows/horses/sheep/mules/llamas the hell off my highway, and whipping out my Magic 8-Ball to answer the general public's burning questions about whether or not it's going to be snowing on I 80 next Tuesday, I've also been, oh... well... not much, really.
I haven't even been to a film, or read a "new" book in a long time, busying myself again with catching up on old films I've always wanted to see (viva Netflix! I've even gotten to see The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and A Zed and Two Noughts, stuff I never, ever thought I'd get to see. And Juzo Itami's The Funeral! And Dario Argento's entire catalogue! And The Testament of Doctor Mabuse! And I'm finally going to get to see the rest of Ballykissangel, on which MODPM and I got hooked many years ago, only to move back to Saratoga, where BBCAmerica existeth not. Glory!
As for books, I've taken it upon myself, at long last, to get down to reading a whole bunch of the tomes which have graced my shelves, some of them for many years, acquired over many years of being completely unable to walk into a used bookstore (you don't even want to know about the wet dreams I have about Mad Dog and Pilgrim, the used book barn at Sweetwater Crossing, land of "Old Books and Fresh Eggs) without taking something home even if I've a towering heap of library books to get through already.
And so the last month or two has seen me finally slogging through Middlemarch, slapping my forehead along with Ford Madox Ford through The Good Soldier, snickering at the idiot relatives of Cousin Bette, jonesing for a last cigarette with the Confessions of Zeno (which I was supposed to have read for my "Forms of Modern Fiction" class my sophomore year at Beaudacious Bard College, but did not, though I got an "A" on my paper anyway), and sighing helplessly over the sad fate of "Freya of the Seven Isles."
And there's more to come, sad but true, sad but true. I've never read Moby Dick all the way through; my freshman seminar professor at Beaudacious Bard College had recently completed his PhD thesis on Herman Melville and made me quite sick of him through that semester. I still can't stand to even think of "Billy Bud, Handsome Sailor," but I've owned a very nice copy of MD ever since my first visit to Avenue Victor Hugo during my Boston days, and it's high time I had a proper look-see.
I acquired, uncounted years ago, a copy of The Tin Drum even though I'd fallen asleep during a screening of the film adaptation at the Glamorplex Gymeon (the old gym, in which a film clique screened a truly eclectic catalogue of flicks, most of which were in keeping with their unofficial credo of Pretentiousness At All Costs, though I confess it is through their efforts that I discovered my favorite director of all time, Peter Greenaway, when they showed us Drowning by Numbers, and they did treat us to the occasional screening of, say, the entire original Star Wars trilogy or a whole mess'o'Terry Gilliam). It was a tough semester, and I fell asleep a lot, back then, because I was taking six classes (including calculus! My first ever grade below a B! And it was also lower than a C! Yay for me!), driving a campus shuttle van, slogging food in the cafeteria, working for the campus emergency medical service, and playing ungodly amounts of Car Wars, D&D, and Shadowrun. Alas.
I've also got a very pretty copy, possibly a first edition, of Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game (Actually, that's the English rendition of the title, which is something like "Der Glaspenspiel" but I'm not sure how to spell it, and at work I am a few miles away from my bookshelves), of which I have only ever read but a chapter. That, I remember, came out of the Montague Book Mill in Montague, Mass., heaven on earth...
Yes, this little trip of mine is bringing back a lot of mostly pleasant memories, but it also makes me a little sad. I am homesick for old homes, though I would never trade Wyoming for them again -- homesick, too, for Saratoga, of course, but I never seemed to have the time, in my life there, to do this in-depth sort of reading, reading which now, if all of you members of the motoring public are behaving yourselves of an extremely early (we're talking 1 a.m. to 5 a.m.) morning, I get paid to do -- and I'm also regretful that I've let these books go unread for so long (especially since it's quite scandalous that I've not read some of them, like Moby Dick, having been a literature major and all)...
And most of these books themselves are on the melancholy side, though I for one, found Middlemarch a hoot as perhaps only a reader with direct experience in the muck of municipal level politics can... and perhaps I've more in common with Oscar "one must have a heart of stone to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing" Wilde than is really good for me. They all so far have seemed largely concerned with bad marriages, for example, and that may be adversely affecting my attitude towards my own significant other...
But I'm rambling, as if trying in one post to make up for over a month of silence. Forgive me. I'm down to the last hour of my shift and it's on the verge of being Monday morning for you all.
Anyway, that's what's been going on.
So, okay, I said I was going to start posting here again... about a month ago, and I have not. It's not for not wanting to share with you, my dear readers-that-were, but what can I say, time passeth, time passeth.
In between helping with the handing out of speeding tickets, waking up cranky sleepy livestock owners to courteously ask them to get their cows/horses/sheep/mules/llamas the hell off my highway, and whipping out my Magic 8-Ball to answer the general public's burning questions about whether or not it's going to be snowing on I 80 next Tuesday, I've also been, oh... well... not much, really.
I haven't even been to a film, or read a "new" book in a long time, busying myself again with catching up on old films I've always wanted to see (viva Netflix! I've even gotten to see The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and A Zed and Two Noughts, stuff I never, ever thought I'd get to see. And Juzo Itami's The Funeral! And Dario Argento's entire catalogue! And The Testament of Doctor Mabuse! And I'm finally going to get to see the rest of Ballykissangel, on which MODPM and I got hooked many years ago, only to move back to Saratoga, where BBCAmerica existeth not. Glory!
As for books, I've taken it upon myself, at long last, to get down to reading a whole bunch of the tomes which have graced my shelves, some of them for many years, acquired over many years of being completely unable to walk into a used bookstore (you don't even want to know about the wet dreams I have about Mad Dog and Pilgrim, the used book barn at Sweetwater Crossing, land of "Old Books and Fresh Eggs) without taking something home even if I've a towering heap of library books to get through already.
And so the last month or two has seen me finally slogging through Middlemarch, slapping my forehead along with Ford Madox Ford through The Good Soldier, snickering at the idiot relatives of Cousin Bette, jonesing for a last cigarette with the Confessions of Zeno (which I was supposed to have read for my "Forms of Modern Fiction" class my sophomore year at Beaudacious Bard College, but did not, though I got an "A" on my paper anyway), and sighing helplessly over the sad fate of "Freya of the Seven Isles."
And there's more to come, sad but true, sad but true. I've never read Moby Dick all the way through; my freshman seminar professor at Beaudacious Bard College had recently completed his PhD thesis on Herman Melville and made me quite sick of him through that semester. I still can't stand to even think of "Billy Bud, Handsome Sailor," but I've owned a very nice copy of MD ever since my first visit to Avenue Victor Hugo during my Boston days, and it's high time I had a proper look-see.
I acquired, uncounted years ago, a copy of The Tin Drum even though I'd fallen asleep during a screening of the film adaptation at the Glamorplex Gymeon (the old gym, in which a film clique screened a truly eclectic catalogue of flicks, most of which were in keeping with their unofficial credo of Pretentiousness At All Costs, though I confess it is through their efforts that I discovered my favorite director of all time, Peter Greenaway, when they showed us Drowning by Numbers, and they did treat us to the occasional screening of, say, the entire original Star Wars trilogy or a whole mess'o'Terry Gilliam). It was a tough semester, and I fell asleep a lot, back then, because I was taking six classes (including calculus! My first ever grade below a B! And it was also lower than a C! Yay for me!), driving a campus shuttle van, slogging food in the cafeteria, working for the campus emergency medical service, and playing ungodly amounts of Car Wars, D&D, and Shadowrun. Alas.
I've also got a very pretty copy, possibly a first edition, of Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game (Actually, that's the English rendition of the title, which is something like "Der Glaspenspiel" but I'm not sure how to spell it, and at work I am a few miles away from my bookshelves), of which I have only ever read but a chapter. That, I remember, came out of the Montague Book Mill in Montague, Mass., heaven on earth...
Yes, this little trip of mine is bringing back a lot of mostly pleasant memories, but it also makes me a little sad. I am homesick for old homes, though I would never trade Wyoming for them again -- homesick, too, for Saratoga, of course, but I never seemed to have the time, in my life there, to do this in-depth sort of reading, reading which now, if all of you members of the motoring public are behaving yourselves of an extremely early (we're talking 1 a.m. to 5 a.m.) morning, I get paid to do -- and I'm also regretful that I've let these books go unread for so long (especially since it's quite scandalous that I've not read some of them, like Moby Dick, having been a literature major and all)...
And most of these books themselves are on the melancholy side, though I for one, found Middlemarch a hoot as perhaps only a reader with direct experience in the muck of municipal level politics can... and perhaps I've more in common with Oscar "one must have a heart of stone to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing" Wilde than is really good for me. They all so far have seemed largely concerned with bad marriages, for example, and that may be adversely affecting my attitude towards my own significant other...
But I'm rambling, as if trying in one post to make up for over a month of silence. Forgive me. I'm down to the last hour of my shift and it's on the verge of being Monday morning for you all.
Anyway, that's what's been going on.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
SINCE YOU ASKED...
Yes, Saratoga is still there and so am I. Your humble blogger has been absent from this page for a little over a year, not for lack of material or the will to share, but from sheer bewilderment at the changes this year has brought, and, to be honest, uncertainty that any of you, my much-missed readers, would be interested in my new milieu.
The New Milieu is inherently interesting, I assure you, but, well, a touchy matter on which to comment or opine or share with the random Googling public. I am now a law enforcement dispatcher - one of those disembodied voices heard over car radios on cop shows to add verisimilitude to various crime scenes, car chases and other staples of Glass Teat exicitment - for a Certain State Agency (heretoafter to be referred to as CSA). And it just kills me, it really does, that I don't feel wholly free to share the tragedies and comedies that now make up my workday (or rather, night, as I am a happy graveyard shift worker).
And, to be honest, for the first year I didn't have much of a life outside of work. Old-time readers of this blog who say they've missed me but have probably given up on me in disgust (and out of sheer cussedness and perversity, I'm keeping mum about resuming publication; they'll have to find me on their own) will know that I led an appallingly full life in Saratoga... a term on the town council, a seat on the water and sewer joint powers board, a seat on the community center joint powers board, time served as the director of the local chamber of commerce, time served as a newspaper reporter/columnist, time served hawking dust catchers in a silly little downtown store, time served as a substitute teacher... whew, I get tired just filling in all of these spaces between commas.
So, I took last year off. No community involvement of any kind, except for my job, of course, helping officers find and deal with all manner of stranded motorists, drunk drivers, car crashes, cattle on the highway, poaching, traffic hazards, and motorists who think our agency has nothing better to do than to find the guy who flipped them off from a moving vehicle somewhere on the interstate two days ago and give same flipping motorist a good talking to... but I am drifting into editorializing on that last point, something I seek not to do in resuming this blog because it could make things sticky on this job that I enjoy so.
I live now in Cheyenne, a city mostly identified in the larger consciousness of this nation and the greater world with a Big Scary Rodeo and the odd western-themed film of old. But it's even weirder than this might indicate, a city on the crossing of two interstate highways and a railroad, the capital city of Wyoming, and thus a haven for scary drifters and bureaucrats alike. It boasts of a symphony orchestra of mild repute (I've yet to attend a performance, since I work weekend nights), an astonishing collection of flea markets and funky mom-and-pop businesses and surreal crap stores, one of Wyoming's three, count them three, shopping malls, an assortment of chain restaurants (newest addition: Hooter's, a sign of civilization that is surely on a par with the advent of modern sanitation and of the mastery of fire and the fermentation of certain grains to make alcohol, surely) and incomprehensible zoning. Parts of Cheyenne resemble every post-urban pod Robert Kaplan ever saw; other parts look like something out of the Andy Griffith show; still others like something straight of of a William Faulkner novel.
I still haven't really found my place here, another hindrance to the continuation of this blog. But I miss publishing this almost as much as certain readers (Aunt Scarry, My Own Dear Personal Mom, the Sewer King, the Rock Star) claim to have missed reading it, and so, I make this attempt to continue it again.
Consider this my long-overdue Christmas letter. I'm still here, my family is fine, we're all making progress towards new plateaus of happiness and irritation, and, to quote Samwise Gamgee, well, I'm back.
Since you asked...
Yes, Saratoga is still there and so am I. Your humble blogger has been absent from this page for a little over a year, not for lack of material or the will to share, but from sheer bewilderment at the changes this year has brought, and, to be honest, uncertainty that any of you, my much-missed readers, would be interested in my new milieu.
The New Milieu is inherently interesting, I assure you, but, well, a touchy matter on which to comment or opine or share with the random Googling public. I am now a law enforcement dispatcher - one of those disembodied voices heard over car radios on cop shows to add verisimilitude to various crime scenes, car chases and other staples of Glass Teat exicitment - for a Certain State Agency (heretoafter to be referred to as CSA). And it just kills me, it really does, that I don't feel wholly free to share the tragedies and comedies that now make up my workday (or rather, night, as I am a happy graveyard shift worker).
And, to be honest, for the first year I didn't have much of a life outside of work. Old-time readers of this blog who say they've missed me but have probably given up on me in disgust (and out of sheer cussedness and perversity, I'm keeping mum about resuming publication; they'll have to find me on their own) will know that I led an appallingly full life in Saratoga... a term on the town council, a seat on the water and sewer joint powers board, a seat on the community center joint powers board, time served as the director of the local chamber of commerce, time served as a newspaper reporter/columnist, time served hawking dust catchers in a silly little downtown store, time served as a substitute teacher... whew, I get tired just filling in all of these spaces between commas.
So, I took last year off. No community involvement of any kind, except for my job, of course, helping officers find and deal with all manner of stranded motorists, drunk drivers, car crashes, cattle on the highway, poaching, traffic hazards, and motorists who think our agency has nothing better to do than to find the guy who flipped them off from a moving vehicle somewhere on the interstate two days ago and give same flipping motorist a good talking to... but I am drifting into editorializing on that last point, something I seek not to do in resuming this blog because it could make things sticky on this job that I enjoy so.
I live now in Cheyenne, a city mostly identified in the larger consciousness of this nation and the greater world with a Big Scary Rodeo and the odd western-themed film of old. But it's even weirder than this might indicate, a city on the crossing of two interstate highways and a railroad, the capital city of Wyoming, and thus a haven for scary drifters and bureaucrats alike. It boasts of a symphony orchestra of mild repute (I've yet to attend a performance, since I work weekend nights), an astonishing collection of flea markets and funky mom-and-pop businesses and surreal crap stores, one of Wyoming's three, count them three, shopping malls, an assortment of chain restaurants (newest addition: Hooter's, a sign of civilization that is surely on a par with the advent of modern sanitation and of the mastery of fire and the fermentation of certain grains to make alcohol, surely) and incomprehensible zoning. Parts of Cheyenne resemble every post-urban pod Robert Kaplan ever saw; other parts look like something out of the Andy Griffith show; still others like something straight of of a William Faulkner novel.
I still haven't really found my place here, another hindrance to the continuation of this blog. But I miss publishing this almost as much as certain readers (Aunt Scarry, My Own Dear Personal Mom, the Sewer King, the Rock Star) claim to have missed reading it, and so, I make this attempt to continue it again.
Consider this my long-overdue Christmas letter. I'm still here, my family is fine, we're all making progress towards new plateaus of happiness and irritation, and, to quote Samwise Gamgee, well, I'm back.
Since you asked...
Monday, November 10, 2003
GOING BACK ON MY PROMISE
OK, I believe I said a few days ago that I wasn't going to inflict my NaNoWriMo travails on my LIANT readers this year, but it's all I'm able to think about right now, and rather than just let this go unfreshened, I offer the following.
It was my contribution today to a NaNoWriMo whine forum dedicated to letters to amateur novelists from their main characters entitled "Dear Author of My Life, you're starting to tick me off".
Matilda is my protagonist's name. Qate is my name on NaNoWriMo.
Dear Qate:
I can understand why you're making me cross-country ski everywhere, really I can. I sense from your not-entirely-but-still-sorta clumsy foreshadowing that I'm in Year One of the three-year winter before Ragnarok (though as your boyfriend observed, would that really start in Wyoming, just because YOU happen to live there?) and it's the future when we're running out of fossil fuels so we can't use cars just whenever we want to. By the way, that is why I have to ski everywhere, right? You'd better not be just making me ski my ass off because you feel like it. There'd better be a reason why my truck is always frozen in the driveway.
---- Wait, you DIDN'T know it was the future and there was a fossil fuel shortage???????? What the hell is wrong with you. If I could reach you, I'd poke your eye out with my freakin' ski pole, you moron. ----
But why did you have to drag my boring old motel-owning parents into this. Isn't this supposed to be about me and Modi, the god-like energy executive who is secretly behind its being Fimbulvetr? I mean, he's cool as all hell and kind of sexy (you are going to let me bone him before this is all over, right? Right? Listen to your boyfriend, dummy. You said no sex scenes, no bullshit romantic subplot/dada and what did he say? That's right. He said "Blah." And he was RIGHT!!!) and oh, yes, he's TRYING TO BRING ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD.
Can we please, please, please ditch my parents?
Please?
Oh, and how exactly is Modi going to "set the tribes to warring"? So he's got the weather thing happening, that makes sense. But the war part. Hm?
And do I get to go see his crazy uncle sometime?
What about his brother?
You know what your problem is? You are still thinking you're Garrison Fucking Keeler instead of your own self who is interested in a lot more than just listening to a bunch of old men sit around at coffee and talk about buckshot and rain gutters and college basketball. Let yourself cut loose and be the weirdo you know you really are.
Ditch the coffee boys and stop listening to Prof. Rodewald, wouldja? Your boyfriend has the right idea. Think big and be bold and remember, I need to get laid, OK?
Still keeping my fingers (and ski poles) crossed,
Matilda Barto
Dear Matilda:
Baby, I had to start somewhere. I had to establish the scene, the winter, the difficulty of living under it, give people an idea of who you are and where you come from. But if you really don't think your parents and their tribulations running the Barto Hotel accomplish that, I'll axe that stuff (but, dear Matilda, that sets my word count back rather a lot, and it's barely over 5000 as it is!).
And yes, you'll get laid. But you might regret it. Remember what happened to Semele.
Kidding, I'm kidding.
I think.
And yes, I'm letting Tim be my muse. I even wear his shirt when I write, now. It's helping already.
Keep cool, you crazy cat (ha! ha! Like you have a choice! It's Fimbulvetr!!).
Your ever loving,
Author
OK, I believe I said a few days ago that I wasn't going to inflict my NaNoWriMo travails on my LIANT readers this year, but it's all I'm able to think about right now, and rather than just let this go unfreshened, I offer the following.
It was my contribution today to a NaNoWriMo whine forum dedicated to letters to amateur novelists from their main characters entitled "Dear Author of My Life, you're starting to tick me off".
Matilda is my protagonist's name. Qate is my name on NaNoWriMo.
Dear Qate:
I can understand why you're making me cross-country ski everywhere, really I can. I sense from your not-entirely-but-still-sorta clumsy foreshadowing that I'm in Year One of the three-year winter before Ragnarok (though as your boyfriend observed, would that really start in Wyoming, just because YOU happen to live there?) and it's the future when we're running out of fossil fuels so we can't use cars just whenever we want to. By the way, that is why I have to ski everywhere, right? You'd better not be just making me ski my ass off because you feel like it. There'd better be a reason why my truck is always frozen in the driveway.
---- Wait, you DIDN'T know it was the future and there was a fossil fuel shortage???????? What the hell is wrong with you. If I could reach you, I'd poke your eye out with my freakin' ski pole, you moron. ----
But why did you have to drag my boring old motel-owning parents into this. Isn't this supposed to be about me and Modi, the god-like energy executive who is secretly behind its being Fimbulvetr? I mean, he's cool as all hell and kind of sexy (you are going to let me bone him before this is all over, right? Right? Listen to your boyfriend, dummy. You said no sex scenes, no bullshit romantic subplot/dada and what did he say? That's right. He said "Blah." And he was RIGHT!!!) and oh, yes, he's TRYING TO BRING ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD.
Can we please, please, please ditch my parents?
Please?
Oh, and how exactly is Modi going to "set the tribes to warring"? So he's got the weather thing happening, that makes sense. But the war part. Hm?
And do I get to go see his crazy uncle sometime?
What about his brother?
You know what your problem is? You are still thinking you're Garrison Fucking Keeler instead of your own self who is interested in a lot more than just listening to a bunch of old men sit around at coffee and talk about buckshot and rain gutters and college basketball. Let yourself cut loose and be the weirdo you know you really are.
Ditch the coffee boys and stop listening to Prof. Rodewald, wouldja? Your boyfriend has the right idea. Think big and be bold and remember, I need to get laid, OK?
Still keeping my fingers (and ski poles) crossed,
Matilda Barto
Dear Matilda:
Baby, I had to start somewhere. I had to establish the scene, the winter, the difficulty of living under it, give people an idea of who you are and where you come from. But if you really don't think your parents and their tribulations running the Barto Hotel accomplish that, I'll axe that stuff (but, dear Matilda, that sets my word count back rather a lot, and it's barely over 5000 as it is!).
And yes, you'll get laid. But you might regret it. Remember what happened to Semele.
Kidding, I'm kidding.
I think.
And yes, I'm letting Tim be my muse. I even wear his shirt when I write, now. It's helping already.
Keep cool, you crazy cat (ha! ha! Like you have a choice! It's Fimbulvetr!!).
Your ever loving,
Author
Monday, November 03, 2003
HOME EC, HUH?
Another of my famous "remote" posts. I'm sitting in the classroom/kitchen that houses the Home Economics program (wait, isn't that called "consumer science" now?) at the Encampment School. I'm pretty glad to be here after a scary, slushy drive down 130/70 to get here, first putt, putt, putting along after a schoolbus, then dodging snowplows. All good material for my NaNoWriMo novel, which among other things concerns the experiences of people enduring three straight years of winter (Fimbulvetr). I have a strong feeling that a certain Anglo-Saxon-syllable-intensive entry from this here blog (PLOP!) is going to mutate into a scene...
So yes, I'm a substitute teacher, for the first time in charge of junior high and high school kids, Bog help me. First period was quiet, two guys I last remember as goofy seventh grade football players (now juniors in high school!) making cookie dough. Now there's a little girl (ok, probably a sophomore, but you know) sewing together little pieces of paper with a sewing machine. I'm keeping my distance. Sewing machines and I, well, we have a long and ignominious history. I'm convinced they've all developed a taste for my blood.
One nice advantage to subbing in the Home Ec room: there is a coffee maker right here, and a freshly-opened can of Folgers. I have a whole pot of coffee to myself, in other words, and don't have to meander down the hall like so many sixth graders seeking soda every time I need a refill. Hooray!
All in all, not a bad way to earn a few bucks with which to maybe actually do some Christ-X shopping. Oy, I can't believe that's coming up already. One's Halloween Hangover is barely banished (okay, not mine personally, because I was just one day off my sickbed and stuck to club soda), the glitter from one's last-minute costume (I glammed it up and went as the "Anti-Kate" in a Stevie Nicks skirt, high heeled boots, gold lame tube top fashioned from a scarf, tons of makeup, and enormous hoop earrings. People all night kept telling me I looked "hot", leading me to wonder how I look the rest of the time. Am I really that frumpy?) still stubbornly clinging to one's face and cleavage despite one's best and soapiest ministrations, and suddenly everything is red and green and jolly and there's Christ-X music all over the place and the sixth period Foods class is going to be decorating Christ-X cookies this afternoon oh Bog!
Oh well, at least it's pretty much time to start skiing again. Rex?
Another of my famous "remote" posts. I'm sitting in the classroom/kitchen that houses the Home Economics program (wait, isn't that called "consumer science" now?) at the Encampment School. I'm pretty glad to be here after a scary, slushy drive down 130/70 to get here, first putt, putt, putting along after a schoolbus, then dodging snowplows. All good material for my NaNoWriMo novel, which among other things concerns the experiences of people enduring three straight years of winter (Fimbulvetr). I have a strong feeling that a certain Anglo-Saxon-syllable-intensive entry from this here blog (PLOP!) is going to mutate into a scene...
So yes, I'm a substitute teacher, for the first time in charge of junior high and high school kids, Bog help me. First period was quiet, two guys I last remember as goofy seventh grade football players (now juniors in high school!) making cookie dough. Now there's a little girl (ok, probably a sophomore, but you know) sewing together little pieces of paper with a sewing machine. I'm keeping my distance. Sewing machines and I, well, we have a long and ignominious history. I'm convinced they've all developed a taste for my blood.
One nice advantage to subbing in the Home Ec room: there is a coffee maker right here, and a freshly-opened can of Folgers. I have a whole pot of coffee to myself, in other words, and don't have to meander down the hall like so many sixth graders seeking soda every time I need a refill. Hooray!
All in all, not a bad way to earn a few bucks with which to maybe actually do some Christ-X shopping. Oy, I can't believe that's coming up already. One's Halloween Hangover is barely banished (okay, not mine personally, because I was just one day off my sickbed and stuck to club soda), the glitter from one's last-minute costume (I glammed it up and went as the "Anti-Kate" in a Stevie Nicks skirt, high heeled boots, gold lame tube top fashioned from a scarf, tons of makeup, and enormous hoop earrings. People all night kept telling me I looked "hot", leading me to wonder how I look the rest of the time. Am I really that frumpy?) still stubbornly clinging to one's face and cleavage despite one's best and soapiest ministrations, and suddenly everything is red and green and jolly and there's Christ-X music all over the place and the sixth period Foods class is going to be decorating Christ-X cookies this afternoon oh Bog!
Oh well, at least it's pretty much time to start skiing again. Rex?
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