Tag Archives: life

Why’d he do that?

writing,

What?
What?
My fiction seldom contains much exposition. I describe the actions of the characters, I give them a lot of dialogue, then just try to let the action and interaction speak for itself. Not everyone can always infer the motives or feelings a character is experiencing just from the action and dialog. So, when my writer’s group points those things out, I try to fix it.

I was reminded about the difficulty in perceiving character motivation by an extremely odd set of actions on my bus ride Tuesday morning…

Continue reading Why’d he do that? →

I don’t mean to be grumpy

life, ,

Jimmy Tohill/National Geographic Contest
I’ve had better days.
I’d been looking forward to Sunday for weeks. A friend (who is a very talented artist and teacher) had suggested a meet up on Sunday afternoon at a restaurant/tavern several of us enjoy for the express purpose of drawing or otherwise arting together, while drinking with friends. Two of my New Year’s resolutions are to do more socializing that isn’t driven by specific projects, and to do more art and music. So this was a tangible way to do a bit of both. Then my favorite meteorology professor said, during his weekly science of weather segment on one of the local NPR stations, said that we had a probability of lowland snow this weekend, and the further north of Seattle one went, the higher the probability.

And specifically he said, “Bellingham will see it for sure.” Bellingham being where the host of the event lives, and the location of the event being a spot sort of midway between Seattle and Bellingham, therefore in the snow zone, there was a possibility the event would be canceled… Continue reading I don’t mean to be grumpy →

Which part of ‘no’ are you having trouble with?

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Creepy stalker face
That smile…
One night last week I was doing my thing—reading news online, occassionally checking my twitter feed—when a message pops up on IM. Honestly, I’d forgotten that my instant messaging client was up. I’d run it earlier in the day because it was a work-from-home day, and just forgot to log out of all the accounts. Anyway, the message that pops up says, “I liked what you wrote.” I didn’t recognize the name, but sometimes that’s just because I forget all the handles some of my friends use (and let’s not even get into the friends who have a habit of changing the name and user picture on their accounts all the frikkin’ time…).

So I type back, “Thanks. Which thing, specifically, did you like?”

I write a lot of things, and have them posted/published lots of places, so this seemed like a reasonable question… Continue reading Which part of ‘no’ are you having trouble with? →

Martian flu trumps Writers’ Night

life, , ,

Kitten in a blanket.
I just want to stay under the covers.
My friend, Barb, referred to the weird lingering cold, maybe flu, maybe multiple colds that seems to be hitting a lot of people as “the Martian flu,” and I’ve decided it’s a great name. I want to mention that said friend lives 1400 miles away, in Arizona. Another friend who reports a similar phenomenon in his community in January, lives 2200 miles away, in Texas. And another friend who reported it in her area lives 2800 miles away, in North Carolina. I mention this because I’ve had a couple of conversations with other long distance acquaintances where I mention the illness running around my office, where they’ve said, “I’m glad I’m not in Seattle!”

The thing is that I’ve been sick nearly continuously since the end of December, and so have a lot of people I know. We’ll be really sick with a certain constellation of symptoms for a few days, start to get better for a few days. Then we’ll have a couple days where we don’t feel completely, 100% healthy, but definitely nearly well. And then a slightly different constellation of symptoms will hit is full bore, and the cycle will begin again.

So, when I was up all night with symptoms that you do not want me to describe Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, I felt an awful lot like that bowl of flowers in the Hitchhiker’s Guide books: “Oh, no. Not again!”… Continue reading Martian flu trumps Writers’ Night →

What’s the big deal about Valentine’s Day?

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dailyotter.org
Together forever.
We’ve never made a super big deal out of Valentines Day. I think we’ve both had more fun, the last couple of years, meeting up with friends to celebrate Jared’s birthday, instead of doing the Valentine’s thing. Nor have we ever been really over the top on any of our anniversaries. In fact, both of us frequently forget them altogether. It could be argued that it’s because we have too many. One reason we have so many is because for the longest time, we couldn’t agree on what constituted our anniversary, since we weren’t able to legally marry until very recently. I favored February 7, as the anniversary of our first date. Michael leaned toward Easter, because we first met (nearly three years before that first date) at the NorthWest Science Fiction Convention on an Easter weekend. There was also a strong argument to be made for the date we signed and notarized the domestic partnership papers and had a party with friends, of course.

Now that we are finally legally hitched (and given what a struggle it has been to get it legal here), shouldn’t our wedding anniversary be the one we observe?

Or course, it’s impossible to forget about Valentine’s Day. I know this because I have been told many, many, many times by various people how the way our society deals with Valentine’s Day amounts to oppression or even abuse of people who are not in a relationship… Continue reading What’s the big deal about Valentine’s Day? →

In the end…

love,

I had something else planned for today, but between being sick (again? still? I have no idea), and long hours, I’m going to leave it to others:

To truly master the Way
we must pass through all life’s hellish cycles;
at last, we reach the higher heights.
Only three things necessary for paradise after all:
endurance, alertness,
and a righteous heart.

from The Book of the Heart by Loy Ching-Yuen

Clone, clone of my own…

life, , ,

hdcatwallpapers.com
Who, us?
I’ve told the story more than once of the friend in high school who got angry at me over some family photographs. My mom had decided to change things up in the living room and had hung a bunch of old family photos on the wall. Among them were some pictures from when my parents were teen-agers hanging out with family and friends. There was also a photo of my paternal grandparents from their wedding day. My friend saw those particular pictures and thought that they were pictures of me. He specifically thought they had been taken at one of those amusement park or similar places where you and friends can put on some costume pieces and get a photo filtered in a way to look like an old sepia-tone photo from the late 1800s.

When I explained to my friend that the guy he thought was me in one of the pictures was my dad, and the guy in another was my grandpa, he didn’t believe me. And when I wouldn’t change my story as he demanded again and again that I admit I was joking, he angrily stormed out of the house and refused to talk to me for several days, until my mom confirmed the story…

Continue reading Clone, clone of my own… →

Making progress, making plans

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I set some goals for the year, and since this sort of thing often does not go as well as we hoped, I tried to set some very concrete steps for the goals. I tried to model the tasks on the notion how one trains a pet: if a dog shows a penchant for chewing up shoes, it isn’t enough to scold the dog and try to keep the shoes out of reach; you must give the dog an acceptable chew toy. In other words, replace a bad habit with a better one.

Since being accountable to someone seems to keep me motivated, I also planned to post updates throughout the year. The beginning of a new month seems like a good time to do that:

Goal: Reduce the outrage.

Step: Listen to the Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me podcast once a week, limit the amount of time I read news during work breaks.

Progress: I have been limiting the amount of time I spend reading the during breaks and listening to the Wait! Wait podcast each week. I’m still getting riled up about certain kinds of news, but I also feel as if I’m laughing at the antics of the wingnuts slightly more often than I was.

Goal: Write more regularly.

Step: Spend the reclaimed break time writing. Find other ways to motivate myself to write rather than twiddle the keys.

Progress: I have been writing during part of my lunch break at work, though I’ve been writing blog posts more often than fiction. I’ll keep working on this.

Goal: See friends for fun more, as opposed to all of my social interactions being driven by various projects.

Step: I didn’t have a good concrete step for that. Which may be just as well, given that for most of the month of January, my husband and I have been sick or trying to get over being sick, et cetera.

Progress: We haven’t been able to resume our weekly get together and chat night. I didn’t have to cancel Writers’ Night nor miss out on the AFK Tavern meet-up with out-of-town friends, so I wasn’t a total hermit.

My friend, Anthony, has been trying to get folks together for a regular “drink and draw” on a Sunday afternoon at AFK Tavern, and I’ve put the next one on our calendar. Which may help with the next goal.

Goal: Paint, draw, and make music.

Step: I didn’t have a good way to make myself do that instead of other things.

Progress: If I can manage to attend the Drink ‘n’ Draw meet ups, I should get some sketching done there, as well as seeing friends just for fun. I still need to come up with some more steps to push this one along.

Eyes on the road

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Cat driving.
Just trying to get somewhere.
Some days I wonder who has stolen the brains of all the other drivers. Recently, while I was giving my hubby a ride to work (one of my favorite parts of work-from-home day is taking him to work, because that means I need to go pick him up at the end of the day, which means I see him sooner!), just a few blocks from our house, a driver, rather than pulling into the middle turn lane to make a left turn, instead turned sideways, blocking both the middle lane and our lane. That’s when I should have realized that it wasn’t Friday, no it was Stick Out Into Traffic Day. Continue reading Eyes on the road →

The jerk in the closet

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A lynx in the snowy woods, barely visible.
Can you spot the lynx?
I spent a huge amount of time in elementary school, middle school, and high school trying to blend in. Sometimes I just wished I could be invisible, and that no one would notice me at all. Other times I tried to act like the people that the other kids seemed to like.

It was always worst right after we moved. My father’s job in the oil fields resulted in me attending ten different elementary schools in four different states. And at each new school it was never long before some of the kids (and occasionally some of the teachers) were teasing, harassing, or outright bullying me for being a sissy, pussy, or fag. Most of the times those words were hurled around in the lower grades, no one was literally accusing me of homosexuality. All they meant was I didn’t act like a “normal” boy.

In middle school it was a bit different. For one thing, everyone’s hormones were going crazy. In elementary school most of the normal boys had thought girls were icky (and one of the ways I kept being abnormal was I always got along better with the girls than most of the boys), but suddenly those same boys were trying to find a girlfriend. And the insults changed. Now “pussy” was the nicest thing any of the other boys or male teachers called me.

It’s not that they ever caught me in flagrante delicto. Well, except one bully. Though “caught” isn’t the right word. But I’ll get back to him…

Continue reading The jerk in the closet →