April 29, 2002 at 4:39 pm
(meh)
WOWEE!!! Just sent out e-vites for our housewarming party / Geminifest, and heard back from an old and very dear friend whom I only see once every umpteen years anymore, but who, despite that, is still one of my all-time favorite people. She’s preggers!!!! WOWEE - those kids are just a’poppin outta every available orifice. I better cross my legs, stat! I just had to put some of my email to her up here, as it pretty much conveys some of my recent befuddledness…
Okay, where do I start? Hmm… everybody I know’s having kids, but I refuse to get knocked up just for the fun accessories. Anne’s pregnancy has just enabled me to put off the reproduction for a bit longer, as I’ll have another kid to get accessories for - yay! I do so love those fuzzy little chew toys. In an wholesome, apple-pie Americana sort of way, of course - I mean, I’d never get one in a particularly lovely shade of turquoise just so I can pet it and make myself feel better. Nope, not me.
I’m continuing to be astounded at the extensive time and money suck that a 50-year old house with negligent former owners can be (it’s a mess, but it’s our mess only goes so far) as well as impressed with my hubby’s extensive repertoire of home-improvement skills. I love handymen ;-> Even though I finally have a room of my own to write in, I hardly ever enter it to write because I’m usually working on a project around the house that doesn’t involve writing. But! I am in workshops and hang out with lots of published authors who nag me to write always, and have work in the works (am researching for a novel at the moment, about to start outlining and writing… big whoopdydoo) and can therefore delude myself that I’m pursuing writerly stuff even though few words make it to ink.
The hubby got laid off in February - one of the many hazards of having the sexy dot-com job - and has been completing my extensive honey-do list around the house which is great except for when he falls off a ladder and damages himself and won’t stop bleeding, like he did yesterday. I finally had to tell him that if he bled on the couch, I was gonna go out and buy all new stuff this weekend, to the tune of about four grand, so he obligingly stopped making a mess and now he just has a spot that continues to ooze blood and lymph. Ow. I don’t like it when my sweetie’s damaged 
For the time being I’m the sole wage earner which I kinda like in an empowering it’s-all-about-my-credit-rating sort of way (’cuz I finally have credit - heh), except for the part where I can’t just flake and take a month off to write something. Interesting power and gender role issues around that one, especially with a man from a severely traditional society, but we work around everything, somehow. That seems to the the best explanation for marriage - you work around everything, somehow. Even when you’d rather throw pudding.
I am still so happy that I changed jobs and got back a few hours a day there where I’m not sucking someone else’s exhaust on the 101! The tech writer thing continues to proceed apace, and the only fly in my ointment here is that Lotus Notes went wacky with the notion of my keeping my maiden name as part of my identity - bet it was programmed by men. And I like what I do, especially the way it leaves me lots of brain space to be creative. So creative that I’m considering going back to school - I’ve either gotta finish my thesis at UCSB or start a new degree program somewhere else so I can attain the higher halls of learning someday. Mount St. Mary’s has a nice weekend program, but it’s that whole kid-in-a-candy-store thang - I want to study everything all at the same time and never sleep. On the third hand, I’ve been thinking about taking up the violin just because I have my own room to practice in, but there’s the novel staring me in the creativity chakra. *mumph**licks eyebrows* I either need to clone myself immediately and get cracking on that whole immortality thing, that or stretch time. Note to self: make both of those steps #47 and #48 in my plan to conquer the world.
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April 26, 2002 at 9:58 am
(meh)
Here’s the Friday Five:
1. What are your hobbies? Crocheting - mostly baby blankets. Refinishing furniture, often with dimension-bending results. Doing my physical therapy - I call it a hobby, because I’m not consistent in taking care of myself ;-> For that matter, I guess being in pain is a sort of hobby, when I don’t do my PT… yeah, coming up with non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical ways to manage arthritis pain. That’s kind of a hobby. Writing short stories - I guess that has to fall into the hobby category until I get paid for it. *sigh*
2. Do you collect anything? If so, what? Pens, really good fountain pens. And journals. Mind you, I never write in them, just like to have them around me as glimmering potential in yummy wrappers. Also camels and dragons and elephants - statues, mind you, not the real things. And books - have a first edition of a Tarzan book, and lots of signed first editions of more modern authors. And boxes - I love having places to put stuff, even if I never do.
3. Is there a hobby you’re interested in, but just don’t have the time/money to do? Jewelry making - no time. And actually getting my greeting card business off the ground - again, a distraction from writing. And building more websites - I love that, but again again, a distraction from writing.
4. Have you ever turned a hobby into a moneymaking opportunity? Writing snarky stuff - made a nice little chunk of change from Universal writing columns on Things That Can Kill You, and Horrorskopes, and episode reviews of Buffy, Angel and X-Files.
5. Besides web-related stuff (burbs, rings, etc.), what clubs do you belong to? Not much of a joiner - tend to agree with Mark Twain’s opinion on that sort of thing - wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have me. Unless there’s feather boas and ball gags and lots of pretty shiny things… ahem. Yeah.
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April 26, 2002 at 9:09 am
(meh)
Once and again, Mark Morford says good things (I really gotta stop using his stuff as filler, but he’s soooo good):
“World War III will not be two egomaniacal superpowers battling for supremacy and bragging rights. It will be scattershot and bewildering, a hundred different battles fought on a hundred different fronts for a thousand ever-shifting reasons, each and every one twisted and distorted by regulation GOP spin doctors who somehow convince the bulk of the populace that it’s somehow patriotic to be cavity searched and fingerprinted and beaten with a stick when you buy groceries.”
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April 26, 2002 at 9:05 am
(meh)
Something’s been troubling me for a while and I feel compelled to blog about it - my bird, a psitticine of the cockatiel variety (aptly named Jackson Pollack both for my painter-husband’s love of that particular fractal spaz artist, and in tribute to the little guy’s ability to decorate any surface in splatters) seems to have developed an unnatural romantic fascination with my right hand. Mind you, I’m right handed, so it’s a bit inconvenient when he insists on pressing his suit right about the same time I’m blogging or replying to email or fragging a zombie. I’ve tried to persuade him that my left hand is just as comely a potential mate, but he’s having none of that. As a matter of fact, he actually seems to consider my left hand as his primary competition for my right hand’s affections, so if the left hand comes into his field of view while he’s making his moves on the right hand, he attacks viciously and with no quarter given. He’s quite the little warrior of fluffy love. And before someone calls the ASPCA and accuses me of bird abuse, I’ve been trying to dissuade him of the whole courtship thing altogether for a few years now, with no success - he apparently feels he has no alternatives and it’s spring time, so a bird’s gotta do what a bird’s gotta do. Maybe we shouldn’t paper the bottom of his cage with pages from Vogue…
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April 25, 2002 at 10:13 am
(meh)
Some things man - and woman - was not meant to know. Universal had me collect all my Horrorskopes and send them over in a nice tidy bundle so they could pass them along to their German 13thStreet website, where the whole concept apparently originated. I guess they didn’t want to keep paying some German guy to write them, so they figured why not reuse mine for free? Well, I just had to look - and it’s not pretty. Especially when translated back into English from German by some auto-language-bot - I give you an excerpt for Taurus: “Is certainly unpleasant with the hooves on the back of the head to be always stepped. You feel so similar on Wednesday also.” Don’cha love those wacky Germans?
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April 25, 2002 at 9:47 am
(meh)
I gleefully shot off one of Mark Morford’s definitions to The Lorax this morning, who paused briefly to consider the carnage, then picked up the ball o’puns and ran with it:
InkGrrl: I think this is my new favorite word ;->
bedizen \bi-’d-zen, -”di-\ verb transitive (1661) - To dress or adorn gaudily
bedizenment - noun
Usage example: Bedizened in nothing but enormous peacock feathers and a latex thong and pink stilettos and way, way too much eye makeup, a very loaded Lynne Cheney suddenly burst into the nuclear strategy meeting and flung open her arms and yelled, “Do me now you warmongering slug-monkeys!”
The Lorax: you’re referring to “slug-monkeys,” right?
InkGrrl: bedizen, bedizen, bedizen… ack. I’m out of sequins.
The Lorax: you just suffered a sequinsing error
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April 25, 2002 at 9:02 am
(meh)
Back to the political crap - first, lemme just say that I feel so much better now that Robert Fisk has passed along the intelligence to us that a senior leader of Hamas in Gaza has declared that the latest *suicide bombers* - three teenage boys, who in an overwrought and not very effective teenage way tried to attack the Israeli settlement of Netzarim and were killed before they got very far - were in fact completely out of bounds as they were too young to fight the good fight in a religious way. Nice to know that Hamas does draw the line somewhere; although I have to say, being the cynic that I am, that it’s probably just because by the time a boy reaches eighteen years of age, he’s usually put on a bit more muscle than a scrawny fourteen or fifteen year old and thus can pack more explosives into enemy territory.
On another note, the Palestinians are really stepping on their dicks in the propaganda arena with all this talk about the atrocities of Jenin being worse than the Nazi Holocaust, worse than Bosnia, worse than 9/11. Five will get you ten that they’d never in a million years say that Jenin was worse than Qana, on the sliding scale of horror - even though having whole neighborhoods systematically razed and snipers taking out anyone daring to show their face on the street is, in many ways, worse than being blown to bits in between heartbeats, at least for the survivors (witness the faces of those who lived in Beirut twenty years ago when the PLO took over, and then the Israelis showed up). Qana holds a holy place on that sliding scale of horror, as it should, given the innocents killed there in their sleep; but it’s still not as significant from an historical perspective as the Armenian Holocaust, the Nazi Holocaust, the Bosnian concentration camps, or 9/11 - sheer numbers alone decry that leveling, much less the effect on a nationalistic and world-wide scale. It’s one thing to indulge in overblown rhetoric for the sake of the press, but quite another to expect to be taken seriously in an international forum when one lacks perspective. I have no children, and thus cannot truly speak to the pain of a mother losing her child, but I have lost close family members in violent ways, and I can say with certainty that there are better and worse contexts to frame a death, to frame the remains in a casket, to frame a painful set of memories that never quite fade enough for peace. It doesn’t make it better to know that someone else killed your brother than to know that a brother has chosen to end his own life, and it doesn’t make it better to know that an impartial disease has eaten the life of your loved one than to know that a drunk driver smeared your loved one’s brains across the pavement. But there can be perspective, if we allow ourselves to lift our eyes to a level above our individual pain and see that the world goes on and we can choose to remain a part of history or we can actively participate in creating a better future. Maybe even stop something before it goes too far and more people get hurt. It starts with telling the truth - on all sides.
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April 24, 2002 at 2:29 pm
(meh)
Chickens In Spaaace!!!!!! YAY!!!!
Um. Yeah.
Dunno exactly why this makes me so giggly and trolloppy-umlauttish, if that’s even a description of a possible state of being, but it do!
Oh, and I think my butt-feathers are all a-kerfuffle about it too.
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April 24, 2002 at 12:57 pm
(meh)
Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for a reminder of one of the reasons I write:
“Working your way through a character’s evolution can therefore become, I discovered again, a little digression through your own needs and wants. It can let you say things you’d never say in real life but that make you feel more complete for articulating. It’s safe therapy, I suppose, in which you can feel things and say things and even believe things without ever having to take personal responsibility for them. You can call that acting. But you can also call it a kind of freedom.”
So it’s all experience and therapy. ‘Kay, I’ll take it.
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April 23, 2002 at 12:45 pm
(meh)
Just gotta share this - the Secret Diaries of LOTR. How very fannish of me - but they’re a hoot! BTW - did I mention that I followed Jeri Ryan around the grocery store in Encino on Sunday afternoon? Didn’t actually speak to her - I’m sure my covert glances were enough to freak her out but I didn’t want to go all stalker-fannish on her… just know that even in baggy pants and a sweatshirt with a ballcap and no makeup, Seven-of-Nine is still a knockout! I was actually suprised - in person most actresses, no matter how gorgeous onscreen, look like regurgitated baby barf that’s been ridden hard and put away wet - and she’s teeny-tiny too (yes boys, she has a great ass). My hubby was so jealous that he didn’t go shopping with me… tee hee!
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