Ad of the Week: Yaya

Yaya or Yiayia, the Greek word for grandmother.

A celebration and a wedding

The celebration has nothing to do with William and Kate -- it has to do with the return of a working laptop! yay! My computer troubles have ceased as a new (used, but refurbished) machine arrived and the old hard drive was popped into it. Wondrous. All the files I worried about have been recovered -- and scrupulously backed up.

I've also decided that I'm going to get up before 6AM tomorrow to watch the royal wedding. Hey, why not? It's finals week here, I'm done with finals -- I'm done with coursework for my master's in general -- I can get up early and lounge in my pajamas if I want.

And I want to. I really, really want to.

I'm not one of those chicks who has to get married now. I'm in absolutely no rush on the wedding front -- but I do love weddings. Actually, I think I like the theatrical aspect of weddings (and big parties in general) better than the social aspect. This is why I spent as much time in theater as I did: I love putting on a show, making a world for the audience to experience; taking a dream and making it real.

And then there's wedding TV which I love because it's pretty. I find Say yes to the dress and Whose wedding is it anyway? to be giant time sucks, especially now that I can stream them instantly on Netflix.

So of course I'll be watching the royal wedding, because, duh, it's a royal wedding -- and that means better than normal.

To put it into perspective, theLiz recently highlighted the contrast between us and them by sharing that

Kate Middleton is marrying a Prince on Friday, and I have to reach into my toilet to flush it. That's all I'm gonna say.

I've found that while there are cable and network TV stations carrying the wedding, it's also streaming live on YouTube on the royal wedding channel. And I'm kind of tempted to watch that instead of putting up with a potentially annoying commentator talking over the video.

RIP computer

Turns out I didn't fry my hard drive.  I fried my motherboard.  Even. Worse.

The computer has been given its last rites and a laptop has been ordered.  Whether or not the IT gurus can retrieve files from the old hard drive remains to be seen.  I will keep my fingers crossed.  Either way, I'm not worrying about it until the end of finals/semester.

5:00 PM EDIT: IT gurus called; they recovered 16 Gb of data.  Hopefully that contains the two Word docs that I really really really want.

Sleep?!!

This cartoon from Hugh MacLeod about sums it up.  Ah the craziness and sleeplessness of my life right now. And on top of that my car battery died last week.  And this weekend my hard drive died.  I lost a month's worth of work and all my niffty little ABC graphics that I'd been posting to my A to Z challenge posts.  

The night that I realized what had happened to all my files that hadn't been backed up in the past month, I started hunting around for any "signs" that were in there.  The obvious "sign" was stop doing the A to Z challenge, you weren't that good at it anyway, and now you have no spiffy graphics.  And I was like, okay, I can deal with that.

I thought about what I was really disappointed to have lost.  Edits on two short stories which had taken me days each.  This affirms how much I love those stories and how much hope I have for them.  And how desperately close I was to having them finished--gah!  Redoing those edits will be my first priority.  

I lost 3000 words of a 5000 word novel start.  I lost 2500 words of another novel start (the entire first scene and the entire novel b/c I'd just started it this past weekend). 

Realization: what the hell am I doing with so many "started" novels?

Sign: I wasn't all that disappointed they were gone.

I got all morose for one evening.  But I've shaken it off.  I've been too busy to do otherwise.  And I've not gotten enough sleep lately to be anything but efficient.  A week of student conferences capped by presenting a conference paper is a schedule that is working very hard to make me forget what that "sleep" thing is.

Motivation, Making it happen, and Me

Three M concepts for today.  Let's start with "me":  my crusader challenge interview is up on Cerebral Lunchbox today.  Check it out here.

Motivation is one of those tricky, intangible forces of the universe.  If I push on a block of wood, that's a force that can be seen.  But like gravity and centripetal force, motivation can't be seen.  But it can be felt and measured.

Okay, so there is no standardized means of measuring motivation, but I'm certain you could make a personal scale if you wanted to.  You know when the force of motivation is affecting you and you know when it's absolutely not part of the picture.  The question is, can a body at rest perform work without the influence of motivation?

Did I just make the part of your brain that vaguely remembers high school physics freak out? Because I definitely have a little part of my brain spazzing out right now.

There's so much involved to go from body at rest, to applying motivational force, to making it happen -- whatever "it" is.  Take for instance the garbage disposal.

Several months ago -- yes, months -- I convinced my garbage disposal to stop working when I stuck a lemon half down it and the disposal protested by stopping and not starting.  I thought I'd burned out the motor.  I thought I needed to go put in a work order with the apartment office idiots (oh, I have reason to think very little of my on-site staff, like when they said they were taking me to court for over a thousand dollars of unpaid rent and then it turned out they owed me $70).  And then wait for lord knows how long for a repair man to show up for my not-very-urgent repair.  And I, of course, would want to be home for this so that my cats would not dart off into the wide yonder when the repair guy came into the place if I wasn't here.

So I put it off.  And put it off.  There was no motivation to get it fixed.  I had another sink I could use, so I did.  I had a working dishwasher I could use, so I did.  It wasn't convenient, but it was manageable, therefore cancelling out any force that might have become motivation to fix the situation.

And this is where "what I've learned from the TV show Dexter" comes into play.  Srsly.

Then, during my marathoning of four seasons of Dexter, I watched the character Dexter "break" a garbage disposal, take it apart to look for evidence, and flip a switch to get it going again.  And I was like, wtf? there's a switch down there? So I wondered over to my garbage disposal, looked underneath, and sure enough, there's a reset button down there.  Ten seconds later: working garbage disposal.

I learned a lifeskill from watching Dexter -- how many people can say that?
 

Lousy, lame, less than optimal

If "lousy" is your choice for your L entry of the A to Z blogging challenge, then you already know you're pretty lame. Of course, you chose "lousy" because you're already feeling pretty lame. It is a less than optimal choice. I'm not feeling up to it. I'm not feeling up to a lot of things. I've hit a wall.  Failed a little bit bigger than I intended to (not with the blog but with things in my life). My brain is spinning but not gaining traction. Recovery. Recovery period. That's what I need  Is it time for my R post yet?

The strange I

I wasn't sure what to write for my "I" post for the A to Z challenge. Somehow I ended up at this site with a list of strange and unusual words beginning with "I."  And I was struck by far too many of them.  Here are some of the highlights.

ibidem: Latin. Meaning "in the same place."  This one caught my eye because I have no idea how many times I've used ibid. in end notes without knowing what the damn word meant or why we use it.

ichthyomancy: divination by inspecting fish entrails. so much more reliable than weather.com.

ignivomous: vomiting or spewing forth fire.  So now you'll know what to tell the doctor next time it happens.

illeist: one who refers to oneself in the third person.  Synonymous with asshole.

idioglossia: private language developed between children which I think includes twin-speak.  I want to have my own idioglossia.  I tried to make up a language when I was a child.  Does it count if you're the only one who uses it?

ideophone: word that is spoken but not written.  This one got me thinking about the potential of such a concept as the central conceit of a piece of fiction.  The word which cannot be written.  Why can't it, or why shouldn't it?  What would happen if it was written down?  Or is it just too perfect and pure and conceptual to be confined to mere letters and phonemes?

Gernsback

 

Gernsback has been one of my areas of research this past year. And reading about him has been beyond fun for me.

Hugo Gernsback emigrated to the United States from Belgium in the early twentieth century.  He immediately set up shop in New York City as a entrepreneur.  He first had his own radio business, importing, fixing and selling.  Then he started producing his own wireless sets--really they were the only wireless radio that worked reliably at the time.  From there he produced a catalog.  And from the catalog, a hobby magazine, Modern Electrics.

He started writing "what if" essays in Modern Electrics which were often speculations of the future.  He also wrote a series of stories set in the year 2660 about Ralph 124C 41+ which were published in individual issues and eventually collected as the novel Ralph 124C 41+: a romance of the year 2660.

The next step was, perhaps, inevitable.  He hopped into publishing an all-fiction pulp magazine.  But unlike other pulp fiction publishers, Gernsback focused only on scientific fiction--his passion--which he called "scientifiction," a name which never really caught on.  After three years of publishing Amazing Stories he switched terms and effectively coined the term "science fiction" to describe what his magazine produced.

Always the entrepreneur, he started dozens of magazines over the next forty years and had 80 patents in his name when he died in 1967, including one for the personal TV he's shown wearing in the picture below.  It strapped onto your head ... but you still had to adjust the antennae.

Forest for the Trees

Lately I've been reading the new edition of The Forest for the Trees: an editor's advice to writers by Betsy Lerner.  It's not a "how to write" book, but a collection of insightful, well written essays about all that Lerner has seen during her years in the creative business.  She writes with perspective on her experiences and a keen sense of perception that cuts through the bullshit and the fantasy of what it is to be a "writer."

This book should be required reading for everyone who finishes an MFA.  Like a detox kit they hand you as you walk out the door.

Lerner writes:

To say that attending graduate school is the end of innocence is not an exaggeration.

Lerner's experience in an MFA program is definitely of a different era, but she doesn't dwell on the superficial differences, instead her focus has found such truth that bit still applies to today's MFA programs.  And she does this without being disparaging or whipping out some chicken soup for the soul.

She doesn't focus on writing programs, but they feature in the occasional essay because they were part of her experience.  Nor does she focus only on the "literary" writers.  In fact, she pokes a bit of fun at those who think they're "literary" and discuss writing a "commercial" novel to make a bit of cash, like it's that simple.  She also pokes at notions of selling your first story to The New Yorker and those groups and mythos that perpetuate such notions.

I'm only 80 pages into The Forest for the Trees and I'm already prepared to recommend it to everyone.  Not only are the insights in-the-know yet down to earth, the prose itself is a joy to read. And there's a sly sense of humor which appeals to me.

Endings

Endings always strike me as bittersweet. Narratively, I crave the ending. I want to know what happens, how the story ends. I want to feel the rush and the thrill of the rising dramatic tension. I will stay up all night reading just to get to the ending. I fall into bed thinking of it. I wake up the next morning and my thoughts are clouded by the story that still plays heavily on my mind. I'm in love. In love with the heady rush of the story.

I'm in love, and I'm in mourning.

It's over. There is no more narrative to anticipate. The characters, whom I have taken in as my own people, have left. The world I briefly lived in, is gone. I can revisit them by rereading, but that's only revisiting old memories, not making new ones. Our lives are permanently cut off from each other once the story arc ends.  And I'm sad for that.

I know, I know: it's just a story. But all the same, I don't think I would have done too well on a three month long passage across the Atlantic to the New World. It's not about homesickness; it's about knowing a door has shut, that you'll absolutely never see someone again.

April is end of spring semester at the university. This is the third year I've been in grad school, and I have to say, I can't remember the two previous Aprils. The energy the end of semester takes seems to obliterate memory.  Ends of semester have their own sense of heightened tension, much like a narrative ending, a hectice rush that I love. It stresses me out, but I also thrive on it. I'm never as productive as I am at the last minute.

When real life endings occur, I'm usually happy to have achieved something, but sad to see that phase of my life end. Not so this April. Oh, I'm still happy with my achievements, but I'm not sad. This may be my last semester teaching composition at this particular university -- but that doesn't sadden me. This is my last MFA workshop -- but that doesn't sadden me. There are so many endings arriving this month; they're just as stressful as ever, but not particularly sad or bittersweet. It's a strange predicament.

I don't think I've changed all that much; I think I'm just ready to move on.

Dexter Obsessed

My new obsession is the TV show Dexter.  I started streaming episodes of it on Netflix this weekend on a recommendation.  I finished seasons one and two over the weekend.  Then realized I was going to have to wait for the disks for season three (Netflix won't stream them).  But I then discovered that Amazon streams TV shows as well as sells you the disks.  And so I just got through three.  I already got four.  Addict.

It really took me a while to get used to the idea of "sympathetic serial killer," which was why I didn't immediately go watch the show when it was recommended to me.  The constant killing does kind of overload me at times.  But the character is fascinating and the narration voice-over is frequently hilarious.  Season two in particular had me frequently laughing out loud.  It's a very dark humor, obviously.

As a storyteller, I have to say this show does awesome things with characters.  No one is a flat character.  They all have masks and secrets.  Everyone has their own goals, their own reasons to lie, and no one's exempt.  Even the heinous mother-in-law character which most shows would leave as obnoxious and "there for the best interest of her daughter" has another layer in this show.  Her self-sacrificing isn't really self-sacrificing.  Of course she can move across the country to be with her daughter's family because she got fired from her job -- and hasn't told anyone.  And that's just the mother-in-law character.  All the characters are treated with the same sort of care.  That sort of depth in storytelling is what makes stories fascinating.

And it's the kind of thing that keeps me up half the night reading, or in this case, watching.

Cat Catcher

My friend told me about this wooden cat perch you can buy and attach to your desk.  For fifty bucks.  My first thought was that the moment you spend money on a cat toy, the cat will find the box more interesting than the toy.  Which is often true.  Why not just put a box on your desk?

So I did.

It was an instant hit.

The box used its magnetic powers to immediately suck in any cat who arrived on my desk top.

But the problem is I have two cats.  And only one cat can fit in the magic cat catcher at a time.

So I got a shoe box out.

It's amazing how much cat you can stuff into a small box.

Banned Ad of the Week

Banned ad from Belgium (booya! two "B" concepts for day two of the A to Z challenge while still sticking to our regularly scheduled Ad-on-Saturday programming ... yes, I'm feeling smug about that).


Edit: the previously embedded video became "private"; this one seems to work as of Saturday afternoon.

Almost April Fooled

Long ago it would seem I signed up for the A to Z blogging challenge (more here) which asks its participants to write 26 blog posts in the month of April, one per day, except Sundays, and to have the topics of those posts relate to the letter of the day.

April 1 is A -- and I almost screwed it up.

I'd forgotten about the challenge.  Or maybe it would be more precise to say I'd forgotten that it was almost April.

I'd love to ruminate on where the fuck March went, but today's meditation is on almost.  That nice try but not quite there adverb.

Like last night's musical episode of Grey's Anatomy.  Almost, guys.  Almost.

Like how my cat spends long minutes wiggling her butt thinking about jumping on to the counter and then gives a few false starts, finally jumps and only gets halfway to her goal height.  Almost, kitty.  Almost.

Like the students on campus who have decided it's spring and they must therefore go coat-less and/or wear flip-flops -- in spite of the forty degree weather.  We're almost there, buddy.  Just hang on a little bit longer.