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Chair of Georgia Filkcon; musician, songwriter, essayist & dilettante-at-large. Almost certainly not what you expect. (they/them)

The time is all we’ve lost, I’ll try it

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On January 6, 2013

In Blog

Last week, my friend Joey posted something on Facebook referencing the 2004 Will Ferrell vehicle “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy”. I mentioned that I’d never seen it, and he encouraged me to giving a try, noting that it was a dumb movie but quite funny.

Well, thanks to HBO, I’ve now seen the first half of the movie. While I found it sporadically funny, it really wasn’t grabbing me, and at the point when the dog gets drop-kicked off the bridge, I turned to kitanzi and said ‘We can stop.’ She noted that if everyone had been dumb *except* for the Christina Appelgate character, that might have been salvageable, but when she turned out to be (or at least appear) just as much a moron as the rest, we quickly fell into the Valley of the Shadow of Idon’tcarewhathappenstothesepeople, from which few ever escape.

One item of note from the movie. I do believe that’s the first time in recent memory I’ve seen Fred Willard play a character where he was the *smartest* guy in the room.

A much more agreeable film was “I Love You Man”, a 2009 bromance romcom starring Paul Rudd, Jason Segal, and Rashida Jones. Peter (Rudd) is engaged to be married, but has no close guy friends, which worries his fiancée Zooey (Jones) and her girlfriends. So he sets out to make some, and in the process meets up with Sydney (Segal), a sort of man-child guru who gets Peter in touch with his inner bro, but ends up creating tensions between Peter and Zooey as he spends more and more time running off to spend time with his new friend. Rudd is fantastic as the uptight straight man, Jones is charming and attractive, and Segal plays a familiar-for-him character with all his usual flair. The ending is predictable, but sweet, and there’s an interesting subtext to the whole thing if you view it through the lens of polyamory.

On the whole, I’d give “I Love You Man” a recommend, and “Anchorman” a skip.

My pencils are sharp enough. Even the dull ones will leave a mark…

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On January 4, 2013

In Blog

I was just now linking someone else to the brilliant work of Ze Frank, and it occurred to me:

1) How much I love the first episode of his new web show
2) How much it still affects me
3) How I need to listen to it every day until I internalise it.

…And never worry about the fall

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On January 2, 2013

In Blog

Earlier today in the #frogpants chat room, Malynor (my 19th favourite Canadian), asked how I was doing on my first real day of unemployment, and commented that planned unemployment was probably less stressful.

I said “Well, planned unemployment is slightly less stressful in that it’s, well, planned and I have resources set aside to deal with it. But it’s still weird for much the same reason skydiving is.

Because of your careful preparations and precautions, you have a strong belief that everything is going to work out fine at the end of the fall, but you still can’t quite shake the fear that you just stepped out of a perfectly good aeroplane.”

A long December, and there’s reason to believe…

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On January 1, 2013

In Blog

…maybe this year will be better than the last.

To be honest, 2012 wasn’t a bad year, as such. It was a slow and frustrating year. It was the year of holding still, the year of planning, the year of being restless and unable to proceed. And now, having run in place for so long, things are about to move very quickly, indeed.

As of today, I am a professional hobo. At least, for a time. I will be aggressively looking for new employment as soon as we get to Seattle, which we will do within the month, but for now, I am an agent without portfolio for the first time since 1996. I have no words to describe how utterly weird that is to me. Yesterday, I went out to lunch with my manager and those of my team who were in the office that day. I’m going to miss working with them (though I have a suspicion they will miss working with me more).

Over the next week, my primary focus will be on packing and shifting things to the storage unit, and planning how to pack what we’re bringing with us. Because of the financial uncertainty brought about by not having our income locked down, we’re choosing to leave most of what we’ll eventually move in a storage unit here in Georgia, to be sent for when we know the money won’t be needed for rent and food and such. After that, it’s crunch time for Gafilk, and I have plenty to do in the leadup for that to keep me busy until we actually have the con and then we’ll hit the road.

One of the things I’d like to try and do in the new year is write more, and in particular write more in this journal. For a variety of reasons, I stopped posting much a few years ago; primarily, it was because what was mostly on my mind at the time wasn’t really for public reading, and then I fell out of the habit. But when I go back and re-read my journal from 1999-2006, I like how so much of what was going in my life was documented there, and I dislike the big empty silent place my journal turns into. Of course, it’s harder due to the fact that fewer and fewer people are participating here, and I’m a comment-driven writer to a certain extent, but since I’m mostly writing for myself, I should be able to get up a regular schedule. Expect to see my prattle on a bit in the common weeks, and possibly live-blog our drive across country.

I hope that everyone had a wonderful turning of the year, and may your 2013 be full of health, magic, and prosperity.

RIP Dayna (1998-2012)

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On December 6, 2012

In Blog

Nearly fifteen years ago, shortly after our apartment burned down and we had moved into a townhouse in Norcross, our neighbor asked a_blue_moon_cat and I if we’d be willing to adopt a couple of kittens. She’d rescued the mother from the parking lot of her workplace, and she had two that she’d been unable to find homes for. We already had two cats at the time, but the kittens were adorable, and we decided to take them on. We named them Tarrant and Dayna, continuing the Blake’s Seven theme our other two cats shared.

When a_blue_moon_cat and I split up a few years later, she kept all four cats, but a couple of years after that asked me if I’d take one of them, as she was about to move and didn’t think she could find a rental that would let her bring in four cats. We agreed to take Dayna.

Dayna was a neurotic cat even by feline standards. Wild-eyed and curious, she loved sounds, and would frequently rattle blinds or scratch the sides of boxes just to hear the sound they made. She was convinced the knowledge of mankind could be hers if only she could eat enough magazines, and any periodical left within her grasp soon looked like it had been attacked by a confetti punch.

She was often shy about attention, but she always liked being near people, if not quite within arms reach. In recent years, and especially since our other cat Jenna passed away she’d become much friendlier, and spent many a night curled up between [personal profile] kitanzi and me while we watched television, and she slept many nights on the bed with us, purring contently to be near.

As we prepared to make the move to Seattle, the question of how best to move Dayna was discussed. She had become older and frailer as her years advanced, and she’d lost some weight recently which concerned us. We took her to the Cat Clinic in Roswell, which had been her vets her entire life, and they checked her over and found some early kidney disease, but otherwise found her to be in good health for a cat her age. They gave her some meds to help with that and to clear up a small infection, and said she should be fine. As we got closer to Thanksgiving, I again raised concern to the vet, and they even did an ultrasound to rule out any early cancers. The vet cleared her for travel, saying our only concern was finding something she liked to eat to get her up to a healthier weight.

She flew back to Seattle with runnerwolf, who would take good care of her and help get her settled into our new home. But it quickly became obvious that she was continuing to fade. Tonight, Beth called me, a couple of hours ago, and said “I don’t think she’s going to last much longer.” We discussed her condition, and I asked her to put the phone down where Dayna could hear me. I said “Dayna….we love you. If you need to go, it’s okay. We understand.” Beth says that when I spoke to her, she flicked her ears a couple of times, and a few moments later peacefully slipped away.

In her last days, as in all her life, she was pampered and loved by those around her. She had a long and full life, and in the end her suffering was minimal. I wasn’t ready for this, and I will miss her more than I have any words for…she’s been a constant presence in my life for 15 years, and you are never really prepared to say goodbye.

Farewell, Dayna-cat. I love you, always.

Gafilk announces 2013 Super Secret Guest: Larry Niven

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On December 1, 2012

In Blog

Author Larry Niven has won Hugos (five of them) and a Nebula, and various other awards for his stories, including Ringworld and 50 other books. He co-authored The Mote in God’s Eye and Lucifer’s Hammer, and edited the Man-Kzin War series. He also loves filk music. He goes out of his way to attend filk conventions on the west coast, not seeking any attention, not asking for any of the perks that authors usually expect like readings and signings. He goes to filk cons because he wants to hear this music.

Misty Lackey even created a game around Larry’s love of filk called “Make Larry Cry”. It’s not very hard to do. You just write a beautiful melody and fill it with poignant, compelling lyrics…and make sure that the science is at the very least plausible, and sing it to Larry. (Ask Bill Sutton about his humbling attempt to win the contest with Pilot’s Eyes.)

Mendel’s Rules do apply, so we shouldn’t be too surprised that there are other filkers in the Niven closet. In fact, you’ll be enjoying the song styling of Larry’s filking nephew, Tim Griffin, at the ConCom’s Choice concert. (Who knew!?!) Larry Niven is very approachable, enjoys a good conversation, and contributes to the circle in his own delightful ways. We’re extremely happy to have him as Super Secret Guest for GAFilk 2013.

You can get more information (and buy your membership!) at http://www.gafilk.org/

Now Why Would I Ever Stop Doing This?

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On November 15, 2012

In Blog

Actual conversations at my house:

Me: “So, sure, lots of people know that’s called a ball-peen hammer, but they may not know that it’s called that because the peen of the hammer is shaped like a ball, rather than it just being a weird name for a hammer.
Her: “Right, it could have been invented by Joe Ballpeen.”
Me: “A claw hammer is technically a claw-peen hammer. All hammers have a peen”
Her: “True, true.”
Me: “All boy hammers do, at least.”
Her: “What would a girl hammer look like?”

Sleeping on a planter at the Port Authority…

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On October 24, 2012

In Blog

I’m often amused to see what Twitter bots follow you based on what you post there. All manner of random commercial enterprises have suddenly followed me after a casual(and often completely devoid of context) reference to a product, place, or activity. Tourism sites, personal trainers, rap DJs…its like a bizarre form of bingo where no one ever wins anything.

This happens to a lesser degree on Livejournal, particularly if you haven’t disabled anonymous comments. But it’s fairly uncommon, at least enough so that I never really gave it a lot of thought, until this particular post began to attract the spambots. I’ve deleted at least five in the last couple of weeks.

I wonder what there is about my amusing but inconsequential exchange with a drugstore clerk has attracted so much interest from the sub-sentient crawlers of the blogosphere? Most of them seem to be trying to sell me knock-off designer clothing or boots, which makes me suspect it was the paragraph about looking for vests. But their persistence is puzzling.

So I Turned Myself To Face Me

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On October 23, 2012

In Blog

Sometimes, you realise something about yourself so fundamentally obvious in hindsight that you’re not sure how it took you so long for it to occur to you.

I’ve been struggling a bit with my depression in recent weeks. Given the amount of slow-motion change in my life right now, that’s hardly surprising, but today, while thinking about a comment thread yesterday in osewalrus‘s Facebook page, something clicked in my brain that clarified to me why I’ve felt so unsettled.

I have two strong behavioural methods for temporarily punching up my mood: eating and buying things.

Neither of which I can really do right now.

I’m trying hard to get back on my fitness plan, which means I have a careful budget with regards to what and how much I can eat in a given day.

I’m saving up money to move across country in 3 months and need to be prepared to weather out a period of unemployment, so I can’t really shop for much of anything I don’t actually require.

It could be argued that neither of this are strictly healthy ways of dealing with stress and depression, but I’ve been me for a long time, and I know they both work, at least in the short term. And right now, for a variety for reasons, I’m denied their outlet.

Not sure what to do with this information presently, but there you have it.

Guess I got distracted, but hey at least I tried

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On October 15, 2012

In Blog

This weekend involved a great deal of unproductive productivity brought on by having a better idea after having already implemented the not-as-good-idea.

See, in addition to a great number of books, we have a great many DVDs. I like movies and TV and over the years I’ve accumulated a great many of these, and while it makes for a really cool shelf look, they take up a lot of space. Because there’s no way we were going to watch the great majority of these between now and moving day, they were (along with the bulk of the library) the first things to get boxed up and moved into storage.

But then I got to thinking — we don’t know how long those are gonna have to stay in storage. And who knows what we’ll want to watch once we’re settled in. For at least a while, our entertainment options are going to be necessarily limited to cheap things, and “watching movies you already own” is as cheap as it gets.

So over the weekend, I initiated Project Recovery, which involved going to the storage unit, shifting through all the boxes to find the ones with DVDs in them. (Yes, it would have been helpful to have labelled them in the first place. Thanks for pointing that out.) My original plan was to go through each one there in the unit and move the actual discs into a very large binder I’d bought for the purpose. After one box of this, I decided this was a dumb idea, and loaded the remaining boxes of DVDs into the car and brought them home to complete this task in the air conditioning.

I still suspect there’s a few discs floating about, since I can’t find my dvd of “The Quantum of Solace” anywhere. But the vast majority of the DVDs have now been reduced from several banker-boxes worth of space into two enormous binders which together take up about the same amount of space as a piece of carry-on luggage. This will make it relatively trivial to bring all of them with us when we drive out in January.

(I also took the occasion to weed out some duplicates, including “Firefly” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, both of which have been upgraded to BluRay, and the first two seasons of M*A*S*H, made redundant when I gave kitanzi the “Medicine and Martinis” box set for Christmas a few years ago. I passed these on to Matt and Mary when they were here for dinner on Saturday.)

This is, I’m afraid, the limit of my useful productivity for the weekend, but I think it will reward us in a few months when we’re wishing our movie collection was closer to hand. 🙂

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