Dime a Dozen, or: What's the BIG Idea?

One of the more difficult things to explain to anyone who is not (already) a writer is that ideas are all but beside the point. People are always having ideas. Ideas are easy - they are as multiplicitous as bunnies, and as quick to scamper, hence the term plot bunnies.

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
--Thomas Mann

"Somebody should write a book" was an ongoing conversation in my house, growing up. I have little doubt the conversation began a generation previous to my advent - if not more.

We used to talk about practical ideas for a book. Humor came up perhaps most frequently. History. We were always having ideas - or sometimes floating one, to which the inevitable refrain might be offered in return.


Ideas are wonderful, but they are just ingredients. Anyone can have high quality vanilla in their kitchen, but how many of us can put it toward a truly superior buttercream icing?

I'm no cook - but I am an author - and my work in that regard is where "somebody should write a book" became I *did* write one (and am working on another; and have strong feelings about what the third one will be).

Thoughts From a Thursday

Why is it humans bite our tongues while we're eating? NEVER seen this in my dog or my cat, never heard of it. Do other primates? Enquiring minds want to know.

Ahw man, it's Gruesome Injury Story Time at work. Should I bust out (hee) the one about the time I had to go to the ER twice in a day, or the one about when I fell full on my face on the curb at age four, and tried to wash off the bruises because I didn't even know what they were?

How is it I still need to lose 70 pounds, when I can't even finish a salad for lunch or a 1.5 oz package of nuts, and I'm getting in .8 mile walks at work AND walking the dog most mornings and evenings? 48-year-old metabolism, you need to suck it.

... and, even as I think that, according to my daily "why aren't you logging onto Twitter EVERY. DAY?" email revals to me that @Alancumming says, "It's amazing how upcoming nude scenes make you suddenly find the time to do more cardio." I dig Alan Cumming like a double-wide grave, I dig him like a strip-mining operation. I dig him the mostest. Or at least a whole big bunch.

I do'wanna do recall notices today. Can I update a document only one person has asked for in six months instead? Can I, huh? Pleeeeeeezzz?

90s dance tuneage is better motivation than Dokken to do desk calesthenics. But 100% Pure Love would have been better than Gypsy Woman (AKA La Da Dee/La Da Dum), brainworm-wise. Still: Pump up the Jam, yaw.

Dropping Science

We talked about science and morality as if the two were the same thing.
--Geoff Ryman, WAS

It's a funny thing, reading Was right after reading H. G. Wells' Marriage. The quote above comes from a long internal monologue from a character who is thinking about a period pretty darn close to that of Marriage, and echoes some of the aspirational philosophy of Wells' work.

Through the early decades of the twentieth century, science and discovery fed an American identity filled with pride in innovation . Certainly, this has its problems in itself, but undeniably it co-opted study and basic science into an support for applied science that was core to the hurtling progress of our nineteeth and twentieth centuries, and is such a part of what the nation is, for good and ill. We gained a reputation as plastic people, perhaps - but we also burgeoned with domestic productivity which later we became ashamed of and sold away, and have not yet quite rebuilt - even as we fear and revile those to whom we gave up manufacture and labor economically.

Image: Wikipedia

A year or so ago, I wrote a post about my dad and his religious faith, and the consternation I've always felt, that people imagine scientists are by definition godless. I took that post down because it was too personal, but I'll echo it now with this observation - when I came to him as a kid, upset because the good little southern Christians in my class taunted me that my father couldn't believe in G-d because he was a scientist ... dad told me that his faith was the very reason he studied the workings of the world. When I was little, he said it in simple terms; but we had that conversation all my life, and his curiosity and spiritual wonder were never far apart. He enacted it in more than his profession; he was engaged by how everything worked - history, cars, carpentry, our minds and hearts, even politics.

My experience with the "godless" kids began in the nineteen-seventies. But there has been a shift in the national psyche since then, especially strong in the eighties and nineties, and bringing us to a place where the idea topping this post is inconceivable to too many people. Born of the same kinds of folk who raised my old tormenters, and of those tormenters themselves, now busily teaching their children the same biases and fears. The Reagan years pushed off this shift, and the increasing primacy of faith and fear politically has confirmed its power.

Now we talk about science and morality as if they are antagonistic properties. We are short on kids wanting to enter the sciences, and treat those who do as curiosities - perhaps to be admired, and we know we need them, but still the adults in research and even development are subject to skepticism and a perception as odd, if not outright dangerous.

Research and science are constant sources of cultural anxiety, and I'm not going to say that is without good reason. But human innovation has always brought with it ethical questions, and those are insufficient reason to simply shut down our attempts to eff the ineffable.


We've gone from inheriting the wind to breaking it.

Years - and Years

Flipping channels tonight, I ran across The Brady Bunch Movie, and thanks to the wonder of modern teevee, I could see its release date at the touch of the Info button on my remote. 1995.

So that film actually falls exactly halfway back in time, to the early 70s era it had a little fun with remembering. It's been as long since that movie came out, as it had been then since the show itself was on.

For no reason worth blogging, this just kind of blows my mind. I was an adult (of sorts) when the movie came out - I made fun, in memory, of the show, as it did, and hit all its marks right there with it. When the series was on, I was a little kid. It seems like there should be a wider chasm between the series and the movie, not just as large a chasm between the movie and *now*.

And yet, the older I get, the more things like this seem to happen. In its way, the cognitive dissonance is still amusing.

But once we get to the 20s, and I realize it's been sixty years since the decade when I was born - and twenty since today - I might have to pass out a little bit.

Cough Meds

You know your cold medicine is working when you sing, "Where do I put mom's birthday present, where do I put mom's birthday present, where do I put mom's birthday preSENT?  Upstairs in the guest room" to the tune of What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor.

You also know you are a member of my family and know songs like this thanks to that one ex-uncle you had ...

Am I Blue?

So, the blue-screenery of life appeared only Sunday, and has ramped up with rather ostentatious ominousness, but Safe Mode is a wonderful thing (if not purty purty purty).  So posting will continue sporadically until I can bring myself to do something about that.

In the meantime, go read Janet Reid, because she is more awesome than I, and you got on here to read, didn't you?  Go.  Do.

The Page 69 Test?

I'm intrigued by this random-sampling idea found at Gary Corby's blog.  Of course, doing it by pagination is random as well - the same manuscript with different font, margin, or spacing choices will render a different page sixty-nine with every option; but there's no particular value in shifting that for, say, the 2500th-word test.  The point is to randomize in some way.  Corby's page sixty-nine sounds pretty good!

In the working draft for The Ax and the Vase, page sixty-nine finds us about to go to war for the first time:

The last work of the celebration was done.  The battle was ready to begin.
... (T)he King of Soissons—the Master of Soldiers—would not get to wait for spring.

Trek, Trying, and The Solitary Author Thing

The Writing Process isn't much a part of my work here on this blog - frankly, so many authors have so much rarefied and high-class stuff to say about How I Write that anything I'd add would look pretty paltry ... and, in any case, it's really nobody's business.  Process isn't the sort of thing some other person could try on for themselves (and it's not like I've got any success anyone could possibly care to emulate, anyway - though I stand by my actual results).

But, tonight, my process broke down in a good way.  Not least, because the breakdown is temporary.

Some authors have an office, or a secluded space - they cordon off sequestered hours of a day, or walls not to be breached, or what have you.  Some may need that - those with kids, or a partner, or other demands on their space, time, what have you.  But this house is all mine - apart from sharing it with Gossie the Editor Cat and Penelope, there aren't any actual voices to call me away nor distract me.  And so, I can work wherever, whenever I please (outside of my nine-to-five).

The odd thing - perhaps embarrassing (if only I had any shame) - is that I actually synthesize voices.  I don't want to create distractions, but silence is for me problematic, and I don't currently (nor for the past thirteen years or so) own a decent stereo system.  So I turn on the boob tube.

In order to prevent myself from feeling any need to WATCH it, I spend a lot of streaming hours going through the many Trek offerings, with the occasional Buffy or Angel thrown in.  Most of these series, I have seen enough that they're like the music I do listen to at work:  it can be on incredibly quietly, but I know what I'm hearing, and that is enough.  TV is the same way - it can be on, I know it's telling me a story (that story has zero connection to/influence on whatever I'm working on), and that is enough.

In silence, I find myself noting the pain in my hands from typing, the *sound* of my typing, how fast or how slow I am going.  The noise, oddly enough, keeps me from becoming too focused on the physical details of writing work.

I've read that people doodling in meetings and on calls actually aids in concentration, rather than reducing it - that the mental removal-from-the-moment by something abstract, yet which takes up one's attention, can allow for free form focus.  In my mind, it's the old cliche' - that a writer faced with a blank sheet of paper, nothing else, and with time to fill it, is something at a loss.  For me, the laptop and nothing else is perhaps similarly problematic.

I don't succumb, to speak of, to any mental state I'd describe as "writer's block" - but I do seem to find the demand itself, of writing work to be done, stultifying.  I don't get paralyzed, but I sure do find a lot of drawers to clean, laundry to do, adorable pet antics to laugh about, and so on.  Creating my own, controlled, "distractions" seems to allow me the freedom to focus, in my own free form and abstract way.  Though I'm aware abstract focus is oxymoronic - pure focus just never has been for me.

Which - at last - brings me to the way it broke down earlier this evening.

The episode I've reached in the latest random streaming was Star Trek:  The Next Generation, "Half a Life".  This is the first time in all canon the character of Lwaxana Troi (played by Majel Barrett, the character is mother to the emotive and pretty Deanna, ship's counselor) is treated with dignity and real depth.  Sadly, the ep does start off with a *heavy* dose of insulting "humor" at her expense from every male in the cast., but the extent to which it redeems itself makes me forgive that every time I see it.  David Ogden Stiers is wrenching, indelible, excellent - and presents the dignity of a culture which at first presentation might have been an opportunity for the human-centric and culturally superior plotline ... and which, in the end, is not.

Season four of ST:TNG has some excellent stories, but "Half a Life" is one I would be proud to show someone, in order to exemplify the best of Trek - to show why I am such a lifelong fan.  It's powerful and *inclusive* in the way that has made Trek so important to so many.  It easily transcends every last possible criticism anyone has ever had of Star Trek - means something - is transformative - and it's entertaining.  Hell, it's gripping.

Watching "Half a Life", you don't know where it will go, and it's a fascinating look at one of the better-drawn imagined species' culture.  The Kaelons expectations, offensive in the extreme to the Federation mindset, are treated with an internal logic, and expressed by two characters in particular with both emotional conviction, and heartbreakingly believable doubt.  Stiers' turn here - a one-off character never to appear again on screen - may be one of the greatest roles of his career (and I loved Winchester; grew up on M*A*S*H, too).  But it's Michelle Forbes (later to return to ST:TNG as an entirely different character, the contumacious Bajoran Ro Laren), in a single scene, who really tears apart the preconceptions about this culture - and who, in one single *line* - delivers possibly the most devastating emotional blow Trek has ever produced without killing anyone.  Her face is a master class, actually - she's a great casting choice to put with Stiers.

I didn't make as much progress on revisions tonight as I had hoped.  But I was wonderfully transported by something I genuinely love -and I count that an acceptable diversion.

For those who are not Trekkies or Trekkers (and who, like me, also don't freak out about which term is used), the episode is #22, here.  If you've ever wondered what the deal is with Star Trek anyway ... consider watching it.  And, please - tell me what you think, if you do.

Wetlands

I grew up on the swamps between the Tidewater and the Piedmont, and the office complex where I work is a stone’s throw from the home of my childhood.  The land here is where my brother used to go exploring, coming home with odd treasures, from Civil War bullets to contemporary plastic casings, to that one partially skinned deer hide that one time.  People have tried to prettify the term swamp by calling these wetlands, and as much as possible, man has chosen to landscape over the marshy ground and put it to “good use” as we like that term.

Fortunately, there are still a few members of mankind who protect what is necessary to us, and these swamps have not been overdeveloped in the past thirty years.  There’s more than there was out here – and traffic is like nothing I imagined when I was a kid – but the swamps themselves continue, in places, unmolested.

To me, this is absolutely beautiful.

At my last job, which was near here but in a more landscaped/manmade part of the office park, we used to run to the windows like little kids – to watch the weather, to watch eagles fly, to catch a glimpse of deer or the fin of a carp, or the sight which still captivates me, the White Egret.  It was a wonderful moment, here and there, getting to remember what it was like watching Wild Kingdom as little kids – but in our own backyard.

A bit down the road and off the landscaped path, my current building lies on a very low bluff over the swamp proper.  No grass gets mowed outside our windows, the land just drops off after a couple of yards or so out from the building, and it’s bare trees and patches water and dead leaves and squirrels’ nests.

Again – to me, absolute loveliness.  Even now, in winter, the colors muted and the sky drear with leftover snow and rain, the untouched sight (or, at least, if we must be honest and not call this “natural” – at least it is less-touched than almost anything else I can expect to see day-to-day) can be full of peace.  And marvels, too.

This morning, we had snow, and it was a frost-swept wonderland out there.  When I got out of my car, in a corporate parking lot, the air was still and sound muffled, just like it always was when it snowed when I was growing up.  Impossible not to think of that time my dad and I walked to my grandmother’s apartment in the snow, and shared fresh-baked cinnamon rolls with her, just the three of us.  And walking home, dad telling me how snow used to be so cold in his smalltown home in the Midwest, that it crunched, dry, beneath your feet.  Impossible not to remember the time I found a bright feather on the packed snow of our street, on my birthday – a feather, I have to believe, I still have pressed somewhere in an old diary, journal, or book.

Yesterday, the evocative veils and whorls of thick fog.  Not an all-encompassing sky full of mist, but clearly delineated piles of it, walls of it beside the roadways, clinging in the trees, rolling down the gulleys behind the building.  Wondrously pretty.

The swamps make me pause, make me slow down even when I am busy commuting, and take in the odd dead trunk or bed of cattails, the breadth of space not overtaken by *buildings*, the way the light plays in spaces I’ve known all my life – the way, sometimes, it doesn’t, and how that is lovely too.  These quiet spaces lurk, peace between a drugstore and that service station dad used to walk home from after dropping off the car; places where kids explore and find treasures, where birds eat and ignore us and go on about the business of life, which is older – and will outlast (that blessing, that marvelousness) every strip mall and drive-through we erect to sustain our silliness.  There is peace between those townhouses, built in the 1950s or 60s, and the slender grey stalks of trees, of those grown and died since I grew up here myself, of those still coming up, of those dead now and quietly standing, still.

Every day of my job, I come home in a unique way – some days, I feel it powerfully.  Summer, the windows open, a song on the radio which might have played when I was a teenager, the quality of light JUST as it simply *is* in this town, in this place, in this world, which can’t change the way it plays.  I drive home eastward, past places I have known in one hundred different ways, and I’m grateful I get to live in this place that *feels* like home.  In this place that doesn’t reject me, nor change against me, nor spit out its own past like so much disposable trash.

There’s some past around here we must regret, but to do that we must remember it too.


When I was very small indeed, there was this one long road nearby – which went, one way, out to the country where we drove to see my family – and, the other way, into the city where we drove when shopping or some sort of event demanded it.  I conceived an idea that this road, this long, straight byway into the country, into the city, rising and falling over hills but rarely bending, was the route to the past, or to the future.  In the West was the past.  Go far enough beyond the country I knew, past the farms where the red clay lived, where the old grey wood house was, in which my mother was born – far enough, so far as to be inconceivable, where the big red sun set – that was where Jesus lived, where olden times were, where the Revolutionary people and Civil War people were.  Go east – the direction we rarely took to speak of, at least beyond a particular hill – that was the future.

I can still remember when I found out that road – that road that never ended, that went so far it encompassed time itself, had an endpoint in the east.

Where it terminates in the west … I still have never traveled there.

And, to this day, when I drive out of my mid-century, Norman Rockwell neighborhood, coming west on that road, I come every day to my own past, and don’t proceed beyond the land I knew, the land I crawled on, growing up.

And, every night … I drive home.  Eastward.  Toward the future.  Leaving the swamps behind … but only for a little while.  They’ll be there.  They’ll be there tomorrow.  And I’ll be back again.  I’ll never forget.  And I’ll never stop loving the patches, the creeks, the dead trees and cattails.  And the miracle of the birds I still get so excited to watch and wonder at.

The Thing About Search Strings

Okay, so the troll incident(s) today have for good or ill set in stone one of the few posts here (there are two) I have actually ever considered removing from the blog.

This post is one of the top hits on several engines, for people looking for slimy groupie tales about Peter Steele.  Given a good read, it should be obvious I didn't share the story to go on about myself, but to memorialize a musician I've enjoyed, and with whom I had a personal experience which has intrigued me for years ... for all that it was - and, far more, for all that it could not be because of the unfortunate dynamics.

This blog is intended as my public, authorial presence.  It being attached to my real name, the story is one I had questions about before ever posting it, and have had since sometimes.  That post having ALWAYS been one of the most-read posts on this blog, and it being  beside the point of what this site is intended to convey - history, archaeology, costume, writing, and publishing - it has always felt somewhat inappropriate to the rest of the content here.

Meeting Peter Steele has not been the central point of pride in my life, but among the actually-personal posts here, it explores thoughts I have found interesting enough to leave intact, even with those questions.  And, indeed, 100% of the traffic to it previously has either (a) remained silent, or (b) provided nothing but thanks for the MEMORIAL aspect of the post.  Feedback has included grown men brought to tears by that post - not something I set out for, but a reaction I have honored and been humbled to have created.  You can see that the comments span years, but apart from the occasional wry thought I have to myself, of how disappointing it must be for someone looking for salacious tales of the rockstar womanizer, it seems largely to have hit its mark.  People get it, and many appreciate it, as well as the very in-depth link it also leads to, an incredibly personal piece about Pete's death, from those who lived it.  Pete mattered to people.  People have written about that since long before he died.


Today's trolling, of course, only confirms that the post is here to stay.  The whole thing may have been no brag in its making, but it's now become an issue of another kind.

To dismantle a memorial because some twerp came and took a tinkle next to it:  well, that isn't going to happen.

Bullies - even exceptionally weak and wildly misguided ones - don't earn MY being ashamed, for their troubles.  And so.  No matter what Parental Advisory does to anyone's image of me, the foolishness in the comments now means its homage to the image of an artist I admire and miss is - well - set in Steele.  Pattern-welded, for the sword geeks among us.

Fashion Obsession - the Cure ...

Oh my.  Yep, I did it.

It didn't go well.

The antidote ...  Bowie, of course.

Oh, and there I am:

Muuuuuuch better ...

(Also - apropos of I-know-you-don't-care - boy, do I miss those glasses.)

Dead Men's Limbs, Flumps, and Eggs - Oh My!

My elder niece has said that, if she had to have a health condition and could choose, she would choose synesthesia.  This is the sort of thing we discuss in my family.

One Londoner, blessed with the condition himself, has mapped the fruits (and veggies) of his crossed wires.  Voila!  I give you the synesthesiac map of the best tasting Tube stations in London.

Mojourner and I agree, though - recipes beginning with suet are for the birds ...

Dull, Boring, and Orange Sheep Taking Scotland Postmodern

The History Girls are up to some wonderful hijinks, check 'em out (complete with photos)!

I've Finally Found Them ...

... the most seriously deranged sellers on eBay.  I've been buying for thirteen years, but never seen anything QUITE like these folks' offerings.  And the variety of ways it's whackadoodle is dizzying.  The 100-item lot of condoms.  The Christian literature.  The cheap vintage plastic beads for fifty and seventy bucks.  The freebie flip-flops you can see TOE MARKS in from use.  The hand-heart-silhouette-over-sunset photos which have nothing to do with given items.

And yet ... they do have a feedback rating.  Someone has bought this stuff.  I'm half tempted by the (fully functioning!) Tupperware keyring myself ...  But - wow.  I spent a good twenty minutes just scrolling and marveling at all this stuff!

Background to Writing

Looking for something I could listen to without watching carefully, I miscalculated slightly.  Though "Hercules - Legendary Journeys" is light occupation for my mind, I'd forgotten how extremely much Aeolus looks like my ex husband, and caught myself staring.  Heh.

Though, actually - Beloved Ex's eyes were bluer.  Like Windex.

Yeah. I Have Them.

Mom found them somewhere several years ago, and gave me my orthopedic little red shoes.  As low as my pigeon-toed-ness looms in my life (it's something X may not even *know* about me - and X knows almost every possible thing anybody could know about me), I remember these shoes very clearly.  I hated them - of course ... vanity is hardly a new thing for me, and when you are six and stuck in conspicuously hideous, 1940s style red leather brogans when it's the 1970s and ALL the other girls are cute, clopping, stiff brogans are unnecessary to a tantrum-throwing extent.

And so, when they reappeared after thirty-five years of oblivion, I kept them.  They probably mean more to and about me than the little patent leather baby shoes my uncle bought me when I was an infant.  (And yep - I have those too.)  They have the character of wear - and are no less stiff with age than they felt when they were fresh, if never fresh looking, out of the hideous shoe store.  I have an ambivalence to them, now, deeper with age and physical pain, even than the loathing I felt as an unpopular and unfashionable little girl.

My mom didn't understand - they never do, of course.  She was pretty (I didn't know it explicitly, but I sensed she had never been the ugly kid I was).  She was sociable and got to wear good shoes.  I used to play in the shoes she had worn as a young professional lady, working at a bank (shoes I frankly emulate today, and thank goodness for the popularity of vintage styles right now).  She was everything I could not even conceive of hoping to be.  And she was mean, and tried to make me wear ugly shoes - all just because my TOE turned in.  Bitter life.


It's predictable beyond wasting a short story on it, but the shoes above probably contributed powerfully to my obsession with osteo-punishers - and I am unrepentant.

Ahh, but Guess is a pretty well made (amazingly comfortable!) punisher.  I can't call myself a sinner - and they were on sale.


***


I have downshifted in my workaday shoes.  1930s styles being good to go right now, I am loving a pair of Aerosoles with adorable, short, sturdy heels, good toe boxes, and generous insole cushioning.  And the red Rampage ones with the band across the upper.  And the beautiful sculpted-heel navy Circa Joan and Davids with, again, space for actual toes in the toe boxes - and practically ripped from my mom's single-days stylebook.

Saturday night?  Still goes to things like the Guess pretties above.  But I can't pretend age, taste, fashion, and de-escalating heel heights make an unpalatable style cocktail at this point.

"Poke Out That Toe There, Diskey"

I was born (and remain) a little bit pigeon-toed.  It isn't cosmetically outrageous, and apart from The Red Shoes of my childhood, hasn't really played much part in my life.  Its major presence was in a short script from my dad (seen above in the subject line), accompanied by his sticking a foot between mine, and kicking out my toes.

Not long ago, I realized that the ankle injuries I've had in my life, especially the most recent, seem to favor my right side.  Or disfavor, I suppose.

The pigeon foot happens to be my right, and for the past year I have noticed, too, a pretty astounding amount of pain in this foot.  I've begun to notice that the level of pain in my normal leg and foot is just about nil in comparison with the right.  Many mornings, I get up and actually hobble at least two steps before my right leg can bear any weight.  At work, sitting too long, if I don't stand a few moments in my cube before trying to walk, it can be painful.  I'm no longer convinced it's just normal ageing, is the thing.  The level has increased too fast (particularly since the April Fool's sprain), and too high to seem "right" to me.

Most recently, I spent the day at the fair with my mom, family, and friend B, and by the end of the day - and extensive walking - I was in enough pain that masking it had become impossible, and walking normally simply became impossible.  I was astounded at how bad it was.  And, frankly, pretty embarrassed.

Now, my mom would say I am paying the price for one too many pair of foxy girl heels - and obviously, even if I am right in thinking my misaligned feet are a part of the problem, and also have invited the injuries I've had perhaps more than average over my lifetime, heels are clearly not courting good bone health.  But the worst pain comes when I have gone out walking Siddy (invariably a flat-shod activity) in sneakers with even slightly less than the best cushioning.

And, really - ALL the sneakers have less than perfect shock absorption.  My Sketchers are by far the worst - no arch support, of course (Sketchers are too cute for arch support), but also thinner soles than any of the tennies I have ever owned.  The lawn-mowing Spaldings were once the best shoes I could ask for - but, at something now like nine years of age, and heavily rotated for at least six of those, they're compressed quite a bit.  Their arch support is still good - heh - and they suit well for grass staining.  But at this point, I don't own even one pair of shoes which are actually any good for walking.  See also:  the State Fair.

Ow.

Anyway, so my thinking is that my ankles are pretty weak, or at least the one is.  I'm not daintily enough built for anyone to think me frail, but this peculiarity isn't even strong enough to really be visible to people.

The foot I fell on on April 1 was my right.  The way I fell was a misstep on the back stairs, and my alignment was off.  On a foot which was built - even if only by the tiniest degree - misaligned.

I think this goes on that list for the imaginary "one of these days" trip I need to make to the doctor.  What about this pain, Dr. M.?  And what about the history of sprains - particularly this most recent, and extraordinary one.

Grey Weekends

Overcast and rain are kind of a wonderful thing to see around here, after years of frequent and often sustained drought.  The past week and a half have been unusually grey and wet, and the past week has been more than once hot and humid rather than cool, feeling like the beginning of autumn.  It isn't unusual for September to stay warm - but even in years without so much drought, humidity is usually finished with us at this point.  I've worn sweaters a couple of times, and put the sundresses away, exchanging for a few three-quarter sleeve or multi-season weight longer sleeve knits.  But October is less than a week away, and the short sleeves aren't ready for retirement just yet.

Today, the SBC gets together, and today I may send a query directly to the publisher who posted at one of my fora, asking for submissions from authors.  This morning, I take another fistful of analgesics.  Tonight, I suspect I will rest.

Grey Sundays are nice.  I'm beginning to look forward to sunshine again, though.  I get restless even with too much of a good thing.

Hope and Magic

I've always been fascinated by the idea of magic, but I really haven't ever felt it to be real in my own life.  There's still a swath of me open to it, and like most people I practice sympathetic magic and superstition in small ways, at least.  But my belief in a concept as sweet as that seems mostly to be as witness, rather than as a participant.  I've seen my brother and sister-in-law touched in small ways by magic.  I've heard the most beautiful story of the spirit, from my grandmother.  I know magic is that aspect of spirituality we can't explain concretely ... but my life is pedestrian, and largely easy to explain.

The only spell I ever cast is by wearing some talisman in hope it can evoke some manner of blessing ... in praying ... in scenting my domain in perfume and candles ... in the things of the heart, speakable only between mine and X's, and most of those not even then.  Unlike many people, I've never seen magic in death, no special timing, no visions afterward.  I've never seen animal magic, really - as much as I am breath-taken by the power some of them contain.

Once, I had an experience of Christ, which to this day has held me in love.

But in this world, I practice hope, more than incantation.  Some hope is blessed with expectation; some with nothing more than the trembling magic of innocence, tenderly and shyly wished.  Most hope, of course, doesn't come to anything.

But the smart person knows how to cultivate the hope that can be realized.  To farm it, work it, expect harvest.  The domestication of magic.  The control of destiny.  The direction of will to what is attainable.

Perhaps this strips the ineffable of its luster.

But it does make for satisfaction.



I muse on this, because just now, setting out my things for tomorrow, I found myself indulging magic.  I put out my perfume.

I never wear perfume, except in those moments I need magic.  Which means I rarely put it on these days.  It's almost never part of my wardrobe for work - so seldom, I probably haven't worn it one day since starting the "new" (one year this Tuesday ... !) job.  I did wear a drop to church today, and still it haunts my skin so quietly.

For all I don't believe, as much as I believe in magic - I still find it romantic to court it.  To flirt and make myself open to magic.  There is a softness, a familiarity, a beauty ... and a hope.  Always, so many hopes.

If much of my hope is ambition - there is that in my heart so much more childlike.  Needing escape from the day-to-day.  Needing reassurance from G-d ... or my father ... or just that breeze I felt this morning, after church, talking with my dearest friend there ...

Romans says it - "For in hope we were saved" ...

Sometimes, the vulnerable, open part of myself just wants to remember how to let go ... and thereby be best served.

David Starkey's Mother's ... Um ...

In the U.S., the term don is oftenest associated with la cosa nostra. In the U.K., though, a don is a professor. I have an appreciation for the humor there, but this is just an instructive intro.

The phenomenon of the teledon is not unique to Britain, of course - though we don't really have such a nice name for them, we've got Neal deGrasse Tyson, and it could even be said Carl Sagan pioneered the type for everybody. I seem to just love all of them - James Burke is probably my favorite of all time - but it's not an entirely uncritical liking. Which brings us to David Starkey.

Starkey, for those unfamiliar with him, was once famous as the rudest man in Britain, but that in itself is not a problem for me. By the time I started to run across him much, I was either choosing the wrong venues for his vitriol, or he had mellowed. My issue with Starkey is his grammar-school level historical wisdom. This is a guy, the impression is, who'd teach about Washington's cherry tree as if it were assured knowledge. To be sure, his take on the men of history (Starkey has zero use for women; and his defense against the charge of sexism consists of saying he's written books about women - never mind that lots of people write about the things they don't especially admire nor give credit to - and he doesn't) seems almost Whig-historian-ish in its selective-awareness.

Even so, I consume Starkey TV if only because his historical documentaries do at least hit subject I am interested in - and he isn't 100% "wrong" nor even dismissable.

When I watch him, I'm often struck by the singularness of his mannerism. The emphatic inflection, the bobbing of his head. It makes me think of Sagan, actually, and *that* is what makes a teledon. TeeVee goes for personalities, and a certain type of professorial presence does make its way to the screen.

I like that certain kind of enthusiasm in instructiveness. I recognize it from my dad; a teacher not merely by profession, but deep in his blood. Coming from a family of teachers (and not all of them paid to be so), the fire a real teacher's interest and excitement stokes bears a warmth I feel like few other things. I love a good teacher, I remember them all, I make myself susceptible to the contagion of their infectiousness. It's a wonderful thing, to be imbued with this. It's this energy, actually, I found animating the attractiveness of the doctor I found so attractive last week; good looking to be sure, he only became truly appealing when he began to speak, and his interest informed his testimony.

So it wasn't with a dismissive sort of pooh-pooh-ery I read this interview with Starkey. It's funny, to be sure, and interesting (to a history nerd like me). And, if you're not that great a nerdball, it is also not too long. Enjoy!