Tag Archives: personal

Why I love him

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I love Michael because:

  • His first reaction when he hears someone is having a problem is, “How can I help?”
  • He loves to re-read his favorite books again and again.
  • He reads an astounding number of new books every year.
  • He will spend hours letting me babble about a book, a TV show, or a movie that he isn’t really interested in without complaining.
  • His smile always makes me feel happy, no matter how bad a day/week/month/year I’m having.
  • When I’m ranting and raging about something that isn’t working, or that I’ve broken, or that’s just really bothering me, he says, “Okay, honey” without any sarcasm or flippancy in his voice at all.
  • He can fix unfixable equipment.
  • He’s got the prettiest eyes.
  • He acts as if my extremely nerdy mathematics rants are interesting and important.
  • He tells me when I’ve screwed up, but always in private.
  • He doesn’t say, “I told you so” even though he has the right to dozens of times every week.
  • He kisses really well.
  • He can always find things I lose, often right away.
  • He just laughs when I point at something he can’t find that’s right in front of him.
  • He makes the most yummy chicken soup from scratch on the entire planet.
  • He finds ways to anonymously help people.
  • He doesn’t complain about my weird music.
  • When I’m going overboard with the Christmas music, which he can’t stand, he either puts on his own earphones without saying anything, or asks if I can skip to another song.
  • Even though he absolutely hates tomatoes, he helps me grow my own.
  • He has great legs.
  • He has, on way more than one occasion, when learning that someone is limping along on a dying computer, assembled a better system, installed software (sometimes going to interesting lengths to find out what sorts of software the person uses without telling why), tested everything several times, then shipped it off to the person as a surprise.
  • He looks good in a worn work shirt and heavy duty Carhartts.
  • He rocks a Victorian frock coat and top hat.
  • He’s comfortable with us both quietly working on our projects at home all night.
  • He can chop vegetables faster than the human eye can follow.
  • He laughs at my lame jokes.
  • He finds humor in nearly every situation.
  • He believes in people.
  • Even me when I am convinced I don’t deserve it.
  • When I asked, “Will you marry me?” he grinned brighter than the sun and said, “Yes.”

The opposite of shoving

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I told a story earlier this week about someone freaking out at a picture of my husband on my desk many years ago. Now I want to tell you about a completely different experience.

It was some years later. The company had grown, been bought by a giant corporation, split in two, and the division I worked for was sold off to another big company that set us up to run semi-independently. They hired some new people to fill out the most decimated departments. One of the new people hired was a young computer engineer, fresh out of college from Eastern Europe.

One day shortly after he joined our company, Eduard, the young engineer, was setting up my account in the new bug tracking system, showing me how to log in, and so forth. So he was looking over my shoulder while telling me what to do next. When we finished, he pointed to the photo frame on my desk. It was in a very similar location as the previous picture had been. Many things had changed since the previous experience with another engineer. Ray had died, and I had since met, fallen in love with, and now lived with Michael. My office was in a different building, the equipment and furniture were different.

So the man in the picture, the picture frame, the desk, and so on were all different. The only thing that was the same was that I still kept the picture at a spot where I could see it, and where other people could usually ignore it.

He asked in his heavily accented voice: “Who is… Is that your, uh, husband? Partner? I don’t know the word.”

I told him it was my hubby, Michael, and that I never knew what word to use, either. Boyfriend, partner, husband all had difficulties back then.

“Does he work in computers, too?”

I explained that he did computer support for a number of clients, and also worked for a computer refurbisher.

“How did you meet?”

I briefly told him about the science fiction convention where we’d met.

“It’s good to have things in common. I met my wife in the hiking club in college. We both love climbing mountains.”

And so I asked him a few questions about her. It was a simple, brief, very human conversation.

Over the course of the next few years we worked on a lot of software products together. Eduard and his wife had a couple of sons. He started organizing snowboarding excursions for the other employees. He bought a motorcycle and started riding it in to work (and organizing long groups rides with others on summer weekends). He rose to a management position. He was one of the smartest, nicest people I’d ever worked with. One of his best traits was that he accepted everyone at face value, more concerned about getting the job done right than worrying about whether who was the “proper” person for the job.

I can’t tell you how many engineering managers I’ve met who pigeonhole non-engineers the moment they meet them. They assume all tech writers know nothing about technology (and don’t really want to know), but only worry about things such as Oxford commons, split infinitives, and making text look pretty. With that sort, any time I made intelligent comments on specifications, or suggested workable fixes to problems, they would look at me as if I’d grown and second head and ask, “How do you know about that?”

Eduard wasn’t that way. When, for instance, we had to resurrect some old functionality in one codebase that hadn’t been used in many years, and I started explaining about how we had sampled which parts of the digital signal, he just started asking questions about the technology. It wasn’t until the end of our discussion that he asked how I knew it so well. When I told him I’d been the software tester on the project when we’d first developed the functionality, he just nodded and asked if I’d be willing to explain it to the engineers who had to re-create the functionality, and was I willing to review test plans.

Then one June Monday I was in the office, busy because I had some big deadlines looming. I had heard on the news about a late season blizzard that had struck nearby Mt Rainier days earlier, and how rescuers had had to retrieve two climbers who had gotten caught in the storm. One of them hadn’t survived.

It was quite a shock when I learned the climbers were Eduard and his wife. They were very experienced climbers. It had just been one of those times when nature reminds us just how small we are. They had had to dig in to take shelter, and as the storm raged on, Eduard had wrapped himself around his wife, using his body to shield her from the worst of the cold. He saved her, but it cost his life.

And that’s how this queer middle-aged man, from a very low-church Southern evangelical background wound up standing in a very high church, orthodox funeral mass surrounded by teary-eyed co-workers in the very unchurched Northwest a week later.

He had been raised in a culture that was much less gay-friendly than ours (which still isn’t terribly), but I had never felt the slightest hint of judgement or awkwardness from him. He had treated the discovery of my husband’s picture completely matter-of-factly, and any other conversations that drifted into family or related topics remained that way. He approached the world with an open mind and an open heart.

Because of the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and the annual commemoration in many places with a Pride Parade, I always end up writing about gay rights or people who oppose them even more often than usual during June. But for the last few years, June also makes me think about Eduard—a straight guy with a wife, kids, and a predilection for adrenaline-pumping hobbies—who had reacted exactly the opposite as that other engineer upon seeing a simple picture of a man on my desk. Whereas the other guy had taken offense and demanded that I be punished and forbidden to have the picture in my office, Eduard had asked how we’d met.

I hold out hope for the day when Eduard’s open-hearted outlook on the world is the norm from straight guys everywhere.

Daddy issues

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I usually avoid writing about Father’s Day.

Lots of people have great dads. Some people have more than one awesome dad. Why should I ruin their special day to tell their awesome dad just how great he is by talking about the other kinds of dads? So the few times I have written anything about the subject of Father’s Day, I’ve instead focused on my experiences with my awesome grandfathers and my wonderful great-grandfather. Because they were great and awesome, and I consider myself extremely lucky to have had them in my life.

But I’m not the only person who did not have a great dad. I’m not the only person who cringes when certain statements or stereotypes of fatherhood are trotted out with the implication that every single father who ever existed was a shining paragon of wisdom, hard work, and sacrifice. I’m not the only one who has been chastised (sometimes by complete strangers) with statements like, “He’s your father! Can’t you at least show a little gratitude for the things he did right?”

Besides, reminding people that bad fathers exist actually makes all the great dads more remarkable. It reminds us that being a good father is not automatic, it doesn’t just naturally happen, and it isn’t easy. Being a good father takes work. Those fathers who are great, awesome, and wonderful deserve to be appreciated and loved and praised for the remarkable people they are.

Bad fathers come in many forms. When I was young, my father was verbally and physically abusive. That abuse resulted in broken bones or wounds requiring stitches on more than one occasion. The abuse was always worst when he was drunk, and he seemed to be drunk an awful lot. After my parents divorced, Mom, my sister, and I moved 1200 miles away.

Dad remarried and started a second family. A series of accidents led him to admit he had a drinking problem, so he joined AA. Certain relatives kept telling me that he had changed since getting sober. He was a completely different person, they said, and I should give him another chance. He never sounded any different on the phone, or the couple of times I saw him in person afterward, but they were around him more often than me. I don’t know whether I just wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, or if I like to believe that everyone is capable of redemption, or maybe I just prefer stories with happy endings, but for a while I told people that he’d straightened his life out and I wished him well.

I eventually learned that the abuse never stopped. The alcoholism was never the cause, it was just the excuse. There was a period of over a year where at least one of his other kids had restraining orders out on him, forbidding him from being around his own grandchildren without supervision. In the few conversations we have now, he still holds all the racist, misogynist, and generally angry opinions about everyone else, blaming everything wrong in his life on other people.

Yes, he has some good points. He kept a roof over his families’ heads, put food on the table, and helped out when certain kinds of problems arose. He is capable of the occasional gesture of affection—sometimes coming through in surprising ways. But those things don’t make up for the abusing, the controlling, the blaming and shaming, or the refusal to take responsibility for the damage he causes.

I don’t hate him. I fear becoming him. I was definitely on the road to becoming him at one point. I’m glad that I had friends who were willing to stand up to me and tell me I was turning into a verbal bully.

Counseling help. Friends who pointed out when I backslid, but remained friends, helped. Coming out of the closet helped an incredible amount. All that energy expended hiding who I was, plus the fear of being discovered, and the anger about the presumed rejection was like an over-pressurized boiler ready to explode. I seem to have avoided that path, though I still worry about it. Any times when certain tones of voice come out of my mouth, for instance.

Dad’s issues are different than mine. I know some of the sources of his anger and resentment. I’m sure there are more extenuating circumstance than the ones I’m aware of. It does give me sympathy for his situation. I sincerely hope that someday he finds a way out of them and into a place of peace. I do wish him well.

I don’t hold massive grudges against him. Truth be told, I seldom think about him at all. I think it’s sad that we don’t have the kind of relationship that we’re supposed to be thankful for on this day especially.

But I’m glad that many other people do.

Telling

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Whenever we tell someone about something that happened to us, we’re telling a story. Humans tell stories to make sense of the world. And even when we think we are just recounting what happened, we’re actually making dozens of unconscious editorial decisions—emphasising some details, omitting others—to put a particular spin on the events in order to give them meaning.

For example, one morning I was a little early to my bus stop, and I decided to run into the drug store next to the stop to pick up one item. I thought I had enough time. But there was only one clerk working check out, and an older gentleman in front of me had a small number of items, but a huge number of coupons, and his transaction took so long that I missed the bus.

One time when I told that story, I gave a summary similar to the above paragraph, and concluded with a self-depracating comment of how silly it had been for me to risk missing my bus, when there was another drugstore close to my office where I could have stopped after getting downtown.

But the day of the incident, I was annoyed about missing the bus, so that night when I told the story, I went into great detail about how the man in front of me had argued and fussed with the cashier over every single price that rang up, and which coupons were expired, which ones applied to a slightly different item than the one he had, and particularly the long discussion he had with her about one bag of holiday-themed Hershey Kisses® that he was certain he had a new coupon for at home, and why she should let him have it at the lower price and how when she refused, which meant he berated her for a while before finally ordering her to keep the bag behind the counter because he was going to walk home, find the coupon, and come back.

And before he walked out the door he came back three times to interrupt her attempt to check my one item out to warn her about not putting that bag of candy back on the shelf.

Both accounts are absolutely true. But they sound like very different events, don’t they?

Because the day it happened, I was upset about missing my bus, and so the meaning of the events was how another person’s stubborness had messed up my day. Later, as I was walking past the second drugstore one morning after getting off the bus, I realized that the earlier incident had been my own fault for not thinking things through and planning better.

Same events, different perspective, different stories…

Growing vegetables in the dirt

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“Because I’m an old Southern woman and we’re supposed to wear funny looking hats and ugly clothes and grow vegetables in the dirt. Don’t ask me those questions. I don’t know why, I don’t make the rules!” —Louisa “Ouiser” Boudreaux, Steel Magnolias

I’m not really from the south. The small town where I was born (and where Dad had grown up, and several of my grandparents lived) was in the northwest corner of Colorado, but oil had been discovered there just before the Great Depression. When certain foreign powers suddenly needed to buy a lot of oil during the 1930s, the quickest way to get oil flowing out (and money flowing in) was to hire and move a whole bunch of experienced but out-of-work oil workers from the south. A few decades later, by the time I was born, nearly ever single person who lived in the town was either from the south, or their parents were. Even though my dad’s work caused us to move around between lots of small towns in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah throughout my grade school years, our attendance of Southern Baptist Churches kept me in a sort of virtual south throughout.

Of course people who grew up in and live in all parts of the world grow vegetables in their yards. Yet, I can’t help but feel that the reason the last few years I have felt the need to at least grow a few tomato plants in containers, is because of the “rule” which the character in Steel Magnolias states. Even when I casually mention it, I don’t say “I’m growing a few tomato plants in containers.” No, what comes out of my mouth, if I don’t stop myself, is a drawl that sounds just like my Dad or Grandpa, “I got a couple tomatuhs growin’.”

When I was a kid, because we moved around a lot, we seldom had a vegetable garden of our own. But I spent at least part of every summer staying with either my grandparents or great-grandparents, and usually got drafted to help with theirs. Living in the city most of my adult life, I haven’t usually had a yard of my own to turn part of it over to growing vegetables. My gardening skills are spotty, at best, therefore.

In our current place, there is a small yard shared with the other households in our building. With the landlady’s permission, I’ve been planting flowers in two small beds in addition to several planters on the porch and a couple of hanging pots.

I started two years ago with one tomato. I had a large plastic pot that I had previously house a rubber tree indoors for many years. At the urging of a friend the previous year I’d tried to grow scallions in it, to no avail. I had a better luck with the tomato, getting about a handful of cherry tomatoes a week for the latter half of the summer and early fall. I spent a lot of time worrying about what the overnight temperatures were in the late spring and summer, moving the pot up against the brick house in the evening if I thought it would be too cool over night, then back out where they could get full sun during the day.

Last year I bought two more containers. I had two different breeds of cherry tomatoes and one grape tomato. I didn’t fret so much about temperatures in the beginning of the growing season. There was one point when we had a lot of sunny days, where I overdid it with the watering—when you over water, tomatoes start splitting open on the plant. I did not get three times as many tomatoes as the previous year. And the least productive plant was the grape tomato.

Just starting to produce!
Just starting to produce!
So this year I’m trying one cherry tomato, an heirloom yellow tomato that is supposed to produce small round 7-ish ounce tomatoes, and another that’s supposed to produce slighty smaller red oblong tomatoes. All three have started to flower, but only the cherry has started to show any fruit.

I’m looking forward to eating some fresh tomatoes. Three plants is probably our limit, since Michael doesn’t like tomatoes. I would have liked to get a few more than I did last year, but don’t want to get to the point where I’m needing to give a lot away.

Of course, I do get a craving for my grandma’s green tomato relish from time to time. Unfortunately I never learned her recipe, so if I did find myself with a bunch of green tomatoes, I’d be trying someone else’s recipe. And I’m not likely to have enough to experiment much if I did. So I probably ought not to think about that.

Of course, you only need a few small green tomatoes to fry up a mess of fried green tomatoes. And I know exactly how to make those.

Now that’s a taste of the south that I could really go for.

Why I hate hay fever, reason #5834

life,

Because even the most ordinary tasks are annoying when your head feels as if it is about to explode. And you’re having sneezing fits that make it worse. And waking up in the middle of the night because you can’t breathe through your nose, your head hurts, and you’re unable to tell whether you’re coming down with a cold, someone has released a noxious chemical into the air, or you’re just having an extra special bad hay fever attack.

I love flowers. I plant too many. So some of this is self-inflicted.

But I refuse to give up my right to grumble!

Even though one of the first things I did when I woke up this morning was to go outside and water my tomatoes. Then I paused to smell the flowers our friend gave us yesterday for our anniversary. Which made me stop to check the roses I gave Michael for the same reason.

I want my pretty flowers, and I think it is really cosmically unfair that I have to put up with all these other symptoms to get them.

*whine* *whine* *grumble*

Six months ago today…

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…the sweetest man on the planet said, “I do” when asked if he would take me as his husband.

Michael is the handsome devil on the right.
Michael is the handsome devil on the right.
I really don’t quite understand how I got lucky enough to have him in my life. The fact that he’s stuck with me for more than 15 years now is a daily wonder.

Making a big fuss about a six month “anniversary” is a bit silly. For one thing, one of the Latin roots of anniversary means “year”—the literal definition is “returning yearly,” so the phrase “six month anniversary” is nonsensical. If you were to insist on a Latinate word for it you could call it the semi-anniversary, but then someone is going to say, “Don’t you mean semi-annular” at which point you have to explain that semi-annular refers to the shape or form of a half-ring rather than a unit of time and once you’re down that pedantic rabbit hole you might as well give up.

Marking the lesser milestones seems premature when you’re talking about a brand-new relationship, because you’re presumed to still be in the giddy state of having not really gotten to know each other, and where hormones and the novelty of newness makes one more prone to overlook any signs of incompatibility. There is also a fear of jinxing things.

Neither of those would seem to apply to us, having been together for more than 15 years. But that immediately raises the question, shouldn’t we observe the anniversary of the day we met, or our first date, or the day we moved in together, et cetera, rather than the date of this more recent formalization of the existing relationship?

I have several responses to that one.

The less obvious response is that neither of us had the foresight to make a note of the precise date of those other events. We don’t even agree on when we first met. Michael remembers meeting me at an early morning panel on a Friday at NorWesCon (NorthWest Science Fiction Convention). I don’t recall that meeting, but rather remember meeting him at a Saturday room party at the same NorWesCon. Which is why for years Michael said we should just think of NorWesCon as our anniversary. Our first go-out-for-dinner date was in February ’98, a few months after Ray died. I think it was the 7th, but I’m not completely sure. We made plans to move in together, but we were going to wait until after the anniversary of Ray’s death, because it seemed unseemly to do so before that. But a series of bizarre incidents with two of Michael’s roommates made me feel he wasn’t safe there, so we accelerated plans and what with the flurry of events that ensued, we don’t quite agree on which month the actual moving in happened, let alone which day. Our various registrations of domestic partnerships (in different jurisdictions, et al) were dictated by external legal and insurance-requirement reasons, without much planning or fanfare.

My next argument is that the vast majority of married couples have all of those significant dates, too, but the one everyone focuses is on is the date you stand up in front of witnesses and an officiant to say “I do,” even though the emotional commitment happened before that point.

And my biggest argument is that the date for which the even vaster majority of friends, family, and acquaintances of all those married couples consider “real” is the date that one became legally married. That’s when you made things official. That’s when society gave the stamp of approval (or at least recognition). If you’re required to produce proof, that’s the date which will be on the certification you can request from an appropriate agency.

For us, that date didn’t become possible until we had already been together for many years. We did it on the first day it was legal in the state we reside in for several reasons. Yes, one was because we’d been waiting for a long time, goddammit! Another was that it was a date where it was easy to get several of the people we wanted to be there, there (though given how many of them volunteered to stand in line with us at midnight when licenses were first available, if that’s when we wanted to get ours, I realize that easy wasn’t one of their requirements).

But it was also because that day, December 9, 2012, was the first day in America that same-sex couples were allowed to marry as a result of a vote of the people. Yes, three states passed marriage equality on Election Day, 2012, but by pure chance, Michael and I lived in the state of those three whose constitution gave the earliest date such a law became effective. We beat out Maine by 20 days, and Maryland by 22.

If I’d really wanted to be historical, we should have tried to be one of the couples married after midnight by the county judge who came in to do those. Admittedly, it would have been very cool to have our official marriage certificate signed by Judge Mary Yu—isn’t that the coolest name for a judge? Regardless, I’m proud that a majority of our state citizens were willing to recognize the basic humanity and fairness issues involved. Do I think it should have happened years ago? Of course we wish the culture had been less intolerant long ago. But that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the fact that a lot of people have reached that conclusion—so having our anniversary on the historic day lets us commemorate that event, too.

And I can’t help being a product of my culture. I grew up with everything from fairy tales, television, family, and the community at large saying that the milestone worth marking is the wedding day. Not the day you signed civil union papers. Not the day you realized that his smile was something you would go out of your way to make reappear. Not the day you first signed a lease together. Not the day you caught yourself changing a favorite recipe because he doesn’t like tomatoes. Not the night you bought a major kitchen appliance together. Not the day that you first realized that you never wanted a morning to dawn without him at your side. Not even the day you picked up your marriage license.

No, the date you’re supposed to remember, the date that matters, is the day you got married.

So, yeah, even though I’m a bit of an old man, and we’ve been together for as long as we have, I’m going to keep being a bit of a silly, giddy newlywed. I’m probably going to keep saying “Happy Anniversary” on the 9th of every month for the rest of the year. I’m going to keep getting a silly grin on my face and a tear in my eye when I realize it’s been another month since I stood there, holding flowers and trying not to cry too hard to repeat my vows.

Because six months ago today, the sweetest man in the world married me. And don’t you forget it!

Is that your car?

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My sleepy little residential neighborhood is occasionally the site of dramas.

Our building has four units. The building next door is a mirror image of ours, also with four units. Eighteen years ago, when I moved in, the buildings were owned by one family. About fourteen years ago the buildings were sold, separately. There are a couple of shared facilities: a driveway, a tiny parking lot that has fewer spaces than there are units. Each building has its own laundry room and small yards, which are shared, but only between the people in each respective building.

So we have eight households who live close together and have reasons to try to get along besides just happening to be living on the same street. And then, of course, there are other houses and small apartment buildings up and down the block.

There’s one neighbor in the next-door building who is drunk all the time. He’s been in that state for years, and he just doesn’t have many brain cells left. Since his significant other passed away (turns out they weren’t married, which is something we only learned after she died, and her family did everything in their power to keep him away from the funeral, et al), he’s been through a series of increasingly dysfunctional roommates. The latest one seems to be drunk even more often than he is.

When I see them, you’re never sure when one of them is going to be grumpy and snarling, or happy and gregarious. So I limit my interactions mostly to smiling and nodding.

Fairly late last night there was a knock on our door.

A couple of young guys moved into a downstairs unit in our building last week. Until last night, I had only met one of them. They had just witnessed a hit and run involving a car parked on the street in front of our buildings, and weren’t sure whose car was whose.

The weather was warm and muggy yesterday, so they had been standing outside with another neighbor, chatting in the cool air, when a van pulled into the driveway between our building and the building next door. The aforementioned new roommate of the drunk in the other building stumbled out, apparently even more extremely drunk than usual. The van backed up out of the driveway, slammed into a parked car, and then zoomed away.

By the time I had shoes on and was outside, the extremely drunk neighbor was insisting she didn’t know who had dropped her off, another neighbor was on the phone with police trying to describe the runaway car, while the neighbor who owned the damaged car was trying to figure out how bad said damage was.

After ascertaining that no one had been hurt, I wasn’t sure what help I could be. If police came to take a statement, since I had neither seen nor heard the crash, I figured me standing around outside would just add to the confusion.

And it was a little awkward listening to one of the owners of the damaged car trying to get the extremely drunk person to admit to remembering anything useful.

I should be out there dealing with some weeds and doing some pruning of the one rose bush that is going a bit bananas. Or at least take the trash out.

But I keep finding excuses to stay inside, because I anticipate awkward conversations or something.

Which is silly. Because the awkwardness isn’t even mine. I’m not even a witness. I’m barely a bystander.

But you feel bad for people who are in awkward situations. And you wish, somehow, that you could fix things.

It feels wrong to just say, “It’s nothing to do with me.” Because while the current situation doesn’t directly involve me, the ongoing difficulties of having the two clueless drunks living next to everyone—and the string of odd, annoying, and occasionally more serious issues that keep happening around them—are shared by all of us.

Even more surely than the shared driveway.

There’s some profound point in all of this, I’m sure. Something about unchosen communities and why we can’t go through life saying, “nothing to do with me.” And something about that weird spectrum with meddling in other people’s lives on one end and not caring what happens to them at the other, and how do we find an acceptable position in the middle.

If I think of it, I’ll let you know.

Theory and practice

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I’ve described before how I hear conversations in my head between various fictitious characters, and that’s where a lot of my story ideas come from. The other night, while listening to a friend’s band playing at their album release party, I suddenly heard one of my characters, the Mathemagician, explaining to someone:

“Zombies can be manifest in several different ways, though almost all of the spells or rituals that create them call upon the same principles of magic: Induced Cognition, the Principle of Correspondence, Induced Thaumaturgic Recapitulation–”

Then he was interrupted by his partner, Mier of the Tam Clan: “Oh, you’re over complicating it. All you need to make a zombie is: a corpse, a bell, a fresh egg, a pinch of tea, and most importantly, a drummer who can keep a beat.”

I’m not sure what caused that to pop into my head. It’s possible that a band member (or someone in the crowd near me) had made a comment about the drummer. Or not. Who knows how anyone’s subconscious works?

The exchange itself was interesting to me on several levels. First, it’s perfectly in character. The Mathemagician approaches magic from the perspective of rules and patterns. He’s big on futzing with theory, and he will tinker and fiddle with the theory until he needs to apply it. He’s an academic-style wizard. Meir is a shaman. He thinks in terms of analogy and intuition. He’s more concerned with getting things done than worrying too much about why things work.

Those two modes of thinking apply to all sorts of things, not just the world of fictional wizards. When I try to explain about the craft of writing, sometimes I feel as if I’m being the Mathemagician: what I’m explaining is true, but it might only be understood by people who already know it.

On the other hand, Mier’s style of explanation seems simpler and more practical. Yet one realizes, after a moment, that all he’s given is a list of ingredients. The recipe—instructions for how to use those things to create your very own unliving servant—has been left as an exercise for the reader.

Storytelling is more than a bit of a mysterious process. It isn’t a matter of following a simple recipe. But it’s more than understanding theory.

My third observation is, that I have no idea who they were explaining this to, nor do I know whether this scene belongs in any story which I’m currently working on that includes these characters. Yes, there is an evil necromancer and an army of undead in the novel I’m currently working on, but I’m not sure there is any reason, within the story, for these two characters to explain to someone else how zombies are made.

But I typed it up and saved it, just in case. You never know when it might come in handy.

Starting your day right

life, , ,

A few weeks ago I found myself trying to explain to a good friend precisely why it is I forget to eat breakfast on weekends, and more specifically, why “You just need to get into the habit” isn’t helpful to hear. While I agree that it’s never too late to learn knew things, it’s important to recognize that when one has failed for decades to undo a bad habit, it is going to take more than a pep talk to change it.

Which isn’t to say that I’m not still trying. It’s not the only habit I fight with. When I was in my 30s, for instance, was when I first realized that I was no longer capable of staying up to all hours a few nights every week and still put in a full, productive work week. I had to get out of the habit of staying up really late and sleeping in on weekends. And as I started doing a better job of getting up on weekends only a little later than weekdays, I found Mondays no longer felt like such a drudge and disaster.

It’s not easy. I’m not a morning person, and that isn’t just a preference. If given a chance, my natural body clock switches to almost a nocturnal schedule. Some of us are wired that way. So pursuing a career involving a more or less traditional office job is a constant fight.

After my late hubby went through his first round of chemotherapy, he had a very hard time sleeping more than a couple of hours at a time. One of the things we tried was melatonin, which is a natural hormone involved in regulating the sleep cycle. Melatonin tablets are very useful for people who work rotating shifts, or otherwise can’t sleep at the same time each day. It didn’t really help Ray.

Since I’d done a lot of research on it before Ray tried it, it occurred to me that I could use it when my sleep schedule got out of whack. Since it’s the same hormone that causes drowsiness naturally, taking the tablets don’t “dope you up” like other kinds of sleeping pills. Though research indicates we can’t build up much of a tolerance for it (it’s a hormone, after all), there is some concern that over-using might cause your body to produce less of it naturally. The upshot is that it’s advised only to use it the first night or two when you need to change your schedule.

So I tried it one Sunday evening, taking it about an hour before I needed to be asleep to get ready for work, and I laid down with a book. I conked out about a half hour later, and as the cliché says, slept like a baby.

I woke up the next morning about a half hour before my alarm went off, feeling better that I ever remembered having felt on a Monday morning. And the weird thing was, without taking any more pills, I reliably started getting drowsy for the next three or four days right about the time I’d taken the pill on Sunday. My personal natural cycle of not feeling drowsy until well after midnight did start to assert itself after a number of days, but for most of the week, it was great.

So, I decided that I should make it a regular thing to take one tablet every Sunday. And it works great.

When I remember to do it.

The problem is, if I don’t pay close attention to the time on a Sunday evening, it’s easy to miss the time. If you take it later, that defeats the purpose, because you’re setting the sleep cycle wrong.

I first tried it 18 years ago. I go through phases where I get good at remembering to do it, week after week, and it’s easy to get up and get into work on time without doing a lot of rushing, or feeling discombobulated at the beginning of the week.

But then I’ll miss a Sunday. And then I miss another, and pretty soon months have gone by without me remembering.

No amount of setting computer reminders or giving myself pep talks will work. Because no matter how determined I may be when I set the reminder to go do it as soon as the reminder happens, if by chance I’m in the middle of writing something that I’ve been trying to finish for a long time, or working on some other thing, I’ll think, “Yes, I’ll do that in just a minute…” and the next thing I know, it’s 45 minutes later.

But man, when I do remember, those Mondays are awesome!