Organizational What?

One of the problems with writing a weekly blog post is trying to come up with something to write about.  That almost requires something to actually happen, and as you know, nothing ever happens around here.  I mean, except for weird ear infections and things that cats do and the kitchen flooding and the refrigerator needing to be fixed and now the dryer's on the fritz and I'm afraid Joan is going to run out of pants before it's fixed and my former boss leaving me weird messages and this old guy turning up on our doorstep, three times on three different days, pounding on the door and demanding to be let in.

What's more, I actually have to come up with two things, because that's how blog posts work.  I'll bet you didn't know there's a pattern to this, did you? Well, there is.  First you spout off for two or three paragraphs about something that's not really important, just to warm up a little.  It can be about anything; politics, a joke you heard yesterday, the religious leanings of grasshoppers or even a monologue about dwarf bowling.  Then you say, "Speaking of androgynous left-handed bullriders who speak Mandarin Chinese, here's something that happened..."  and you go off on another topic.

I don't know how blog posts evolved to follow this format.  They just do.  I don't see any reason to break the pattern, either.  So speaking of slithery touch typists with gout who wear SAS shoes, here's what's new around here: Professional Reading.

Yes, I know. Professional Reading should not be new.  Anybody who has a job, much less a career, ought to be trying to get better at it one way or another, whether that's by taking a class or volunteering for extra projects or, yes, Professional Reading.  But it is new.  Or at least, it's new that I have any desire whatsoever to do it.  For that I blame Joan and these things called podcasts.

I'm pretty sure I posted about this a while back, around the time I figured out that I had heard most of the songs that ever came on the radio at least 9,185 times apiece since the early 1980s.  Joan installed a "podcast app" on my phone, which talks to my car and plays itself over my car speakers, and lo and behold, I could actually learn something while driving all over creation, or all over Dallas, anyway.  What a concept.  My current favorite is this one on neuroscience called "The Hidden Brain."  It's the only podcast on neuroscience I've come across where I can actually understand about 90% of it. I'm also a fan of The 12-Step Buddhist, The Podcast of Doom (failure analysis on a large scale) and Witness, a history podcast from BBC America. 

And just when I realized I was hitting the "refresh" button on my phone a little too often, something new happened. Audiobooks. Audiobooks about business.  What's more, audiobooks about business that are perfectly free.

Yup.  The Dallas Library has this app called Libby that gives you access to audiobooks. With nothing more than a common ordinary library card, you can check them out---again, for free--and download them on your phone and play them over your speakers just like a podcast.  In fact, your phone automatically kicks on when you start your car and goes right back to the place you left off.  I'm currently reading, or rather, listening to "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hseih, the guy who founded Zappos and then sold it to Amazon for $1.2 billion.  You wouldn't think it, but the life story of an industry titan is actually pretty hilarious.  Especially the part where he declares that his life partner is Red Bull, but you'd probably have to hear that for yourself.

Anyway, the Dallas Library has a pretty good selection of business audio books.  A lot of them have waiting lists, but that's okay; it takes me a couple of weeks to get through each one, anyway, and by the time I'm done, there's another one waiting for me.  I'm not sure why I'm suddenly interested in stuff like management and leadership and organizational psychology.  It may have something to do with my new boss, who is the PR guy at the law firm. (Most law firms are set up like this. One partner is the PR guy, one is the money guy and one is the Brilliant Legal Mind who keeps the others in line.)  My office is right next to his so I get to listen to him on the phone all day, and believe me, he really is on the phone all day.  What's more, he has to be nice to all those people he's talking to, even if they're cranky back.  And he does it.  It's pretty amazing.

So I figure it can't possibly hurt to know how one does that sort of thing, and more stuff about how people work together generally.  I'm supervising two people that are much younger than me and one who's the same age but who comes from a totally different background.  I have to talk and interact with them all the time, and it can't possibly hurt to learn how.  For whatever reason, I've always felt like an anthropologist in this thing called human society, tentatively approaching with a notepad and a pen and hoping not to interrupt the village ceremony.  Who knows; maybe if I learn enough about How People Talk To Each Other At Work and What That All Means, I can at least be a better mimic.  Even if I never start a company and sell it to Amazon for $1.2 billion.

Earregularities

Holy moley, two blog posts in less than a week's time. Could this be the start of a trend? It could.  I would like, if I may, to update this thing once a week.  I think that'd be good for traffic, get me to write more stuff, and keep me off the streets, where I'm bound to cause trouble.  So look for this space to be updated on Thursdays. Thursday seems to be a good day.  It also means I have an extra day in case I miss Thursday; there's rarely anything going on at our place on Friday night, apart from a baseball game, and (snif) the season's almost over (snif, snif).  Remember, kids, writers churn the stuff out on a regular basis.  Once a week is regular.  I'm a regular kind of gal.  Well, okay, I'm really not.  But I'd like to be.  See last blog post re: getting my shit together and things I'm supposed to be doing every day. 

Anyway:  About a week ago, I suddenly became aware that both of my ears were swollen shut.  This isn't exactly an uncommon occurrence, but it was a kind of odd time of year.  I get two ear and/or sinus infections every year, and I have them in April (right around the time of the big Dallas Book Festival, as it usually happens) and November (right around the time I have to get on an airplane to go someplace, as it usually happens).  Which is annoying, but I can live with it.  When I was a somewhat younger person I had so many colds and sinus infections I ended up having The Surgery, and while that was not fun, it did make things much, much better.  Two sinus infections a year are really No Big Deal.  You go see the doctor, the doctor reads your medical history, she skips the whole lecture about overprescribing antibiotics is going to cause the Apocalypse, and she prescribes you antibiotics. You take them for a week and you're fine.

So I called my doc, and she told me to come on in, like she always does. I went in, got weighed, had my blood pressure checked (112 over 70), had my o-sat and heart rate checked (70 at first, then I decided I could do better than that and dropped it to 63; yes, I can manipulate my heart rate, and yes, I do do it to scare medical assistants sometimes).  Then the doc came in, looked in both of my ears with the little scopey thing, and said, "You don't have an ear infection."

I looked at her like she was crazy.  Excuse me, but my ears were swollen shut.  There are only two things that cause that; an ear infection, or swimmer's ear (which is like an ear infection, but it's on the outside of your ear, so you don't always need to take antibiotics; sometimes all you need are ear drops).  So I said something stupid, like, "Are you sure?" and she said, "Yep.  No infection at all.  What you have is eczema."

Eczema, by the way, is a skin condition, usually caused by being exposed to something you're allergic to.  In short, I was having an allergic reaction in my ears.  Which is particularly weird, because not much goes there.  I mean, they're ears.  "So figure out what you've been putting in your ears lately," she said, "and in the meantime, put this lotion on a q-tip and stick it in your ears twice a day."  Oh boy. What if I'm allergic to q-tips?

I found this immensely puzzling. Again, not much goes in my ears.  I mean, I have ear buds, and I wear them sometimes, but I really didn't think it was the ear buds.  I pour a solution of hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol into my ears after I swim, to prevent swimmer's ear, but I really didn't think I was allergic to rubbing alcohol or peroxide, either (though that might have dried out the skin, giving the eczema a place to take root).

And then, I remembered my SwimPod.

Okay, it's not really called a SwimPod. That's just what I like to call it, and that's what it is; it's an iPod that's been modified for underwater use.  My sister, who's awesome, gave it to me for Christmas a few years ago. It clips to the back of your swim cap, the ear buds are very short (and waterproof), and while the sound isn't quadrophonic stereo with JBL quality, it's still an iPod you can listen to while you're swimming.  I mean, how cool is that?  It gets lonely out there sometimes.  A SwimPod makes things a lot less lonely.  I've got everything from Seals and Crofts to Big Country to Lady Gaga on there.  30 years of pop music. Underwater. Not to mention some classical stuff, and even a little jazz, if you call Ray Lynch jazz, and I think some people would.

For a heart-stopping moment, I wondered if I was allergic to my SwimPod. The thought was horrifying.  I mean, yes, I can always try another pair of ear buds. There are actually several different kinds of waterproof ear buds (check them out at www.swimoutlet.com if you're curious), but the ones that come with it are the best. They have the short cord, for one thing, which means there isn't a long cord to get in the way.  Plus, they seem to last a reasonable amount of time.  Something about being underwater means that ear buds have a rather limited life span.  I've yet to have a pair last for more than six months, and some lasted less than three.  Always get the optional warranty when buying underwater ear buds, folks.  You'll use it more often than not.

Then I remembered that I actually hadn't been listening to my SwimPod for the last couple of weeks. I'd taken it out of commission to add some more music to it and take some off, and I'd left it on my desk, where it promptly disappeared into a haze of gel pens, random pieces of paper and stuff I'd brought home from work and didn't know what to do with. I fished it back out (luckily, it was still there and hadn't been carried off by a cat) and examined the ear buds. Silicone. I'm sure that some people somewhere are allergic to silicone, but I'm pretty sure I'm not one of them. And never mind how I know that.

So if not the SwimPod, then what?  Oh yes. The morning I first left my SwimPod on my desk, I'd arrived at the pool with no ear buds, so I bought a pair of ear plugs at the front desk.  I pulled those out of my swim bag. Latex.  People, I'm almost 50 and just found out I might be allergic to latex.  I'd appreciate it if somebody would fill me in on those things sooner.

(Though, I also woke up one morning a couple of weeks ago and discovered that I'd become lactose intolerant virtually overnight.  One day I could have milk, cream in my coffee, ice cream or frozen yogurt. The next day the same stuff made me sick as hell.  Bam.  Just like that. So I guess these things can happen.  And I'm in good company. Joan is lactose intolerant, too.)

I stayed out of the pool for a couple of days to give the weird ear lotion time to work. Then I tried out the SwimPod again.  No problems. I am definitely not allergic to silicone ear buds.  But I am allergic to latex ones.  I think if you're allergic to latex, you have to tell your doctor and you can't have some kinds of surgery or wear certain kinds of Band-Aids (come to think of it, the flexible fabric ones, which use a latex adhesive, always did make me itchy). 

So now I'm allergic to latex, milk products, codeine, sulfa drugs and their derivatives, cockroaches, five of the most common trees in the United States and every kind of grass there is.  Yes, including the kind you're probably thinking about.  I never understood why smoking that stuff is so much fun when all it ever did for me was cause projectile vomiting.  Peace out.

So How's The Class Going, You Ask

Or maybe you don't, but I'm going to tell you anyway.  It has gotten a lot better since I got my mitts on this portable keyboard here, which now clicks into my tablet and basically means I no longer have to haul my laptop around.  Except maybe for meetings.  The keyboard is by Arteck and it was all of about $20 bucks from Amazon and I can't even tell you how much easier it's made everything.  I'm typing on it now, in fact, in my favorite restaurant, Afrah, in the 20 or so minutes I have before I take off for my Meditation Group (TM).  (It's like church. Only quieter.)  

Anyway, I'm in what should be the third week but is actually the second week of the writing exercises in the book, "90 Days To Your Novel" by Sarah Domet (accept no imitations.) You're probably going to be mildly appalled to hear this, but the actual novel writing hasn't even started yet. We've been doing writing exercises this whole time. Now, I am no big fan of exercise of any kind (except for swimming and lifting weights and bicycling and once in a while I'll walk somewhere), but I'm actually really enjoying it.  Sitting down at the keyboard and being unable to write anything positively sucks. Sitting down at the keyboard and realizing I have something to do because I have to knock off the writing exercises on page 105 and 106 is actually kind of awesome.  One thing I was Not Doing before all this started was making time to sit down and write.  And I mean, yes, there's the Very Demanding Job and the Chauffer Duties and the Household that I'm supposed to keep running and two Cats that I need to make happy, but I just wasn't using my spare minutes very well.  I blame baseball season.  Luckily, the Rangers are tanking.  

The class meets in the basement of somebody's apartment building, which happens to be right across the street from where Joan works. So she Rollators over there and meets me, and does cross stitch while the rest of us (there are, I think, about nine people; we'll see how many show up this Friday) talk literary things. And writing exercises.  And one of the things I've figured out is that I might only think I know what I'm doing.  Seriously.  It's entirely possible I've been writing stuff for close on thirty years without the foggiest idea how any of it actually works.  

So I'm not sure when the writing exercises end and the manuscript writing actually starts, but it's completely untrue we're writing this thing in 90 days. It sounds like it's going to be a lot closer to 60 days or maybe even less than that.  Now, I did the National Novel Writing Month thing, which involved 50,000 words in November, and that, for the record, is crazy talk.  Of course, I once wrote fifty pages of Spellbinder in eighteen hours.  (And yes, I was manic as hell at the time, but That's Not The Point.)  So it can be done.  And hopefully, once we finally charge in there, I will have enough background put together to do a good job, or at least a passable job. (First drafts can suck. That's perfectly okay. Ask anybody.)  

In fact, so far my biggest problem has been which of the various works in progress I have strewn around my brain is going to be the winner of the Great 90 Day Novel Experiment.  Because I always have works in progress strewn around my brain, from a wild romp through alternative Dallas with Loki, Thor and living statues to the fifth part of the increasingly-inaccurately-named Mindbender trilogy.  But I think I've finally settled on one, and I think you're going to like it, and it's not my fault it's going to get lumped into that vague, nebulous category of YA fiction.  These days, you have a protagonist that's under thirty and the whole novel is suddenly YA fiction, even if it features blood, gore, gratuitous torture scenes and wild sex with men/women/fantasy critters.  After The Hunger Games, all bets were just off.  Kids killing kids was the last taboo in YA fiction, and Katniss Everdeen didn't just cross that line, she plowed right through that sucker with guns (oh, okay, arrows) blazing.  So anything goes.  Really.  Absolutely anything.  Next thing you know they'll have YA books about how to do your taxes and the finer points of the Microsoft Office suite. 

Anyway, I've settled on a project and I've done a bunch of exercises and I think I'm starting to write an outline, though the way these exercises work, they kind of sneak up on whatever thing it is you're doing, so you may not know you're writing an outline until you're halfway through it.  Now the only thing I need is for people to keep showing up to this class.  Every week we have a few less.  Of course, that's true of any school-type situation; I started paralegal school with 13 other wide-eyed and eager legal eagles to be, and there were only nine left when we graduated nine months later.  But it's also, I think, a function of the class not costing anything. Seriously, it should cost something.  If you pay money for a thing, you're a lot more likely to show up and see it through.  Or so some researchers said once, and I believe them.  Not, by the way, that I'm arguing for this particular class to cost something because the orange guy is still in the White House and the moon still goes through all its phases every twenty-eight days and I'm still broke, thank you very much. But it's something to think about.  

Anyway, that's the State of the Class.  Everything else kind of sucks at the moment, and I don't know if that's me, or the orange guy in the White House.  But hey, Memorial Day Weekend is coming. And so's my sister. So that's cool.  

A Classy Dame

Another Thursday, another sandwich at Afrah before I run off to a meeting.  And, inshallah, another blog post. I've taken to cramming what little writing I do lately into the small spaces between this and that. Which is okay, I guess. I keep thinking about getting another portable keyboard for my tablet so that I don't have to haul around my computer. The first keyboard didn't work out so well.  Maybe technology has improved since then. I saw one keyboard that didn't even really exist;  it was projected, like a hologram, onto whatever surface you happened to be sitting at. So you could type on anything from a table to Formica to a stuffed animal, as long as it was reasonably flat.   Now that was pretty cool.  But I'd settle for something that approaches regular keyboard size so I don't have to keep an eye on my fingers the whole time I'm typing.

Now before I get into the whole blog posty thing, I gotta report something I just found out today; Kameron Hurley has a new Nyx book coming out. It's called Apocalypse Nyx and it'll be out in July.  So if you haven't read the Bel Dame Apocrypha (and if you haven't, what's wrong with you?) go get yourself a copy of God's War and get busy. Heck, I might just go read them all again myself. In between the book I'm supposed to read for my book group and all the professoinal reading I'm not doing and blah blah blah.

Speaking of writing stuff (were we speaking of writing stuff?), what am I up to lately, anyway?  Um, honestly, not a lot.  I mean, I'm working on a thing, and I'm like over 100 pages and so on, but it just doesn't, you know, pop the way the increasingly-inacurately-named Mindbender trilogy did. (Of course, I also feel guilty for leaving Cameron standing in a cemetery, a strange man's hand on his shoulder, having just heard someone say, "Your Honor, a word please."  I know who it is and I know what the question is but damned if I know the answer, so there we are.  Kind of like the ringbearers staring down at Balin's tomb in Moria. And stop me before I subreference again.)  So I don't know if I should keep slogging away at it, or just chuck the whole thing and move on. I mean, I don't know if I can make something pop.  It might be that it just either does or it doesn't. Like having babies. Either they have hair or they don't, and either way it takes you nine months to find out.

So just about now I figure it can't possibly hurt to take a class.

Yeah. I get up at 4:30 and some nights I don't get home til 10; I drive all over the damn place; I work a job that can stretch to ridiculous hours; but sure, I can take a class. I can do two or three hours of homework a night.  Why not.  It's not like I need to sleep or anything.

Get this; the class is called "90 Days To Your Novel."

I've been reading the textbook for the class.  (Of course I'm reading the textbook. I don't have time to do all that other reading, but this textbook I can manage.) Not only do they honestly expect you to knock out a novel in 90 days, they expect you to outline it first.  You know.  Plotting.  Graphing.  Charting. Creating a narrative arc. Actually planning where you're going before you go there? Why, that's like--like buying maps at the gas station or charging the batteries in your GPS or something.  Who'd have ever thought?  Not me.  I usually just wing it and see what happens.  And--she hesitates, then goes on--maybe that's been the problem the whole time. 

So anyway, the class starts next Friday.  In the meantime I need to shovel off my desk, find some kind of program with which I can make digital flash cards (Joan may have found me one; thanks, Joan) and figure out how I can make my old computer fast enough to keep up.  Or else break down and buy a new computer, but I'm trying not to buy anything expensive until I get a new mattress.  Maybe I can get a used computer on Craigslist.  And while I'm at it maybe I can throw lots of money out my car windows and see if it's still there when I turn around. Cheers, all.

Work In Progress

I have this bad habit of starting blog posts and then not finishing them.  Last week I got into full-on rant mode about a letter to Dear Carolyn, where this lady’s husband was disabled (as in, on disability/SSI and unable to work) and her family not only didn’t believe he was disabled, but kept asking him when he was going to get off his lazy ass and get a job.  I mean, excuse me?  They don’t just put you on disability if you walk with a limp, you know.  You have to apply (often more than once) and there are hearings and doctors are called in to testify and, you know, it’s kind of a big deal.

Mind you, the closest I’ve ever come to that situation is where I had sprained my ankle really bad and was limping around on crutches, and I went with my family to dinner and the bartender (really no idea what prompted this) suddenly yelled, “Faker!  She’s faking!” for the whole restaurant to hear.  He’s lucky I didn’t sail a crutch right into his wall of nicely decorated bottles.  I can’t imagine having to deal with that kind of cr@p every DAY.  Much less from family members.  So I got all into a rant about it, but I fizzled out two paragraphs in. I kind of Didn’t Know Where To Go With That. So that was it for that blog post.

Another time I started a blog post about the Buddhist Five Precepts and how they did and didn’t relate to the Ten Commandments and Thich Nhat Hanh’s Five Mindfulness Trainings, but that was just a tiny bit esoteric and it was so boring it put my teeth to sleep.  So that one didn’t get published either.  I don’t think this sort of thing is unique to me; I’ll bet Stephen King has lots of stuff he started writing and then bailed on when he realized he was never going to be able to hook the monster up with the protagonist without a lot of mental gymnastics and an apologetic phone call to Bram Stoker.  (Incidentally, did Bram Stoker answer the phone? Because THAT would make a really good Stephen King story.)

Let’s take painting, for example.  I was just at an art museum a few days ago, and whenever I go to an art museum I invariably want to go home and paint.  I’m working on a picture of an iris (the flower, not the eyeball) and it’s not going to be great; it’s still kind of a work in progress but I can tell that nobody’s ever gonna pay $1.4 million for it at a Sotheby’s auction.  That’s okay, though.  I like painting, it’s fun and I’ve done lots worse.  Once I was taking a class and we had a nude model come in and pose for us.  I was so embarrassed that there was a naked woman in the room that I couldn’t do much more than peek at her every ten minutes or so, and what I painted ended up looking kind of like a gargoyle with a bad case of mange. You can bet that one got gessoed over really fast.  Years from now, after I die, they’ll X-ray my copy of The Beheading of St. John the Baptist by Rubens and find this really bad nude underneath it and wonder what I was thinking. I was probably thinking about how much I wished the model was wearing a dress.  (And speaking of John the Baptist’s head, I did Salome’s nose so many times trying to get it right that she looked like Michael Jackson.  My instructor had to come over and fix it for me.  Imagine, getting a nose job from a painting instructor.)  

The thing about failed first attempts at anything is, you tried it, right?  Lots of people don't bother trying anything (and criticize those who do, for reasons I'm a little unclear on.)  If your first knitted square looks like something the cat threw up, or your first silver white cake collapses in the middle, or your first painting looks like, well, a gargoyle with mange, there's no need to freak out or even show it to anybody.  (Sometimes failed first attempts are good for getting a laugh, though.)  The point is, you did it.  Maybe the next attempt will come out better.  Maybe there won't be a next attempt, because you figured out you never really wanted to learn how to knit in the first place.  But you won't know that unless you give it a try.  I didn't want to write a blog post tonight, for example, but darned if I haven't done one anyway.  Which is a good thing.  And now I'm going back to my painting.  Cheers, all.  

Good News at a Bad Time

It's been nothing but good news all week.

First, and by far the most important, the Supreme Court threw out Texas's omnibus "make abortion completely inaccessible for most people who live outside the big cities and don't have lots and lots of money" law in a 5-3 split that marked the most significant court decision on abortion since--oh, well, since Roe v. Wade, probably.  Cutting through a mass of legal gobbledygook, the Court stated very clearly that states can't just go around slapping new regulations on abortion clinics to drive them out of business.  Which prompted the part-time Texas governor and full-time asshole Greg Abbott to accidentally admit that's what he was trying to do all along.  Now all we need is for somebody to admit that what anti-abortion activists are really all about is trying to punish women for having sex and we'll start having this discussion in an atmosphere of intellectual honesty.  Which would be refreshing.

Next, a much less significant Court here in Texas allowed the reinstatement of a lawsuit it had pitched out, and in a shocking twist, the Court even admitted that a "clerical error" might have led to the dismissal of the lawsuit in the first place.  It's a small thing, but I'll take it.  It beats the hell out of having to refile the petition, repay the $300-odd fee, re-serve all the defendants (presuming I can even find them again), and all the other stuff we'd need to do if we hadn't been able to get it reinstated.  So kudos to my boss, for good arguing at the hearing.  And me, for writing a good motion.  Rah.

And finally:  I have a new project.  I haven't the foggiest idea what it is, though I'm kicking around a few things, but I have a new project.  I have mentioned Rhett from Jinks, Oklahoma before, but only in passing and not as "the really cool guy I met at the Pen to Press Writer's Conference in 2010 and we're still friends all these years later."  So Rhett is this really cool guy--right.  And a couple of days ago I finally got up the nerve to ask him if he wanted us to write something together.  And he said yes.  Whoo hoo!!  So again, we don't know what we're going to do yet, but we're going to do something.  I'm leaning toward a suspense thriller with lots of blood, chapter cliffhangers, shocking "Game of Thrones" style deaths and the occasional gallows humor.  If you knew Rhett (and you should, because again, he's really cool) you'd probably think that's his kind of thing, too.

So anyway, it's all been good news.  And me?

Well...

Let's see here.  On Monday I became elated that a Big Country song was on the radio and a few minutes later started sobbing because it reminded me of my ex, who died recently, and now I'll never know why blah blah blah etc. etc.

On Tuesday, I caught myself driving 80 mph on the freeway.

On Wednesday, I had a complete meltdown at the gym and cried for ten minutes because I was so upset about the way our society treats fish.

And on Thursday, I called my doctor and said, "Something jist ain't right here."

Yep. After three or four years of being stable and pretty much asymptomatic, I'm suddenly spiking bipolar symptoms all over the place again for no apparent reason.  It's been kind of like having a storm of little earthquakes.  Either that's the fault line settling into a new and more stable position, or it's the buildup to the Big One and who the hell knows which?  So it's been pretty scary. I mean, I like being asymptomatic.  It's almost like being Normal.

However, This Does Happen. Things change, people change, haircuts change, body chemistry changes and sometimes doses of meds that have worked for a long time don't work anymore.  My doc upped my dose of something or other to see if that would help.  (Again, psychiatry is a lot like alchemy; you try a little bit of this and a little bit of that, try to find a good drug cocktail that treats the most obvious symptoms while not killing you with side effects, and if you happen to turn lead into gold at the same time, good on ya.)  So far, I have an upset stomach and I'm more scatterbrained than usual.  Oh, and I had a migraine yesterday, but that could be coincidental.  So I'm typing with crossed fingers because seriously, that's not bad at all.

And so July arrives, not with a bang but a whimper.  July, of course, is Swim for Distance Month for my swim team.  We try to swim as far as possible in the alloted 31 days, and the winner gets some cheesy prize, but I'm never going to come anywhere close to winning because I just don't swim that fast.  I am, however, shooting for 23 miles, which will be tough but doable.  (Think a mile a day for 23 days out of 31.  Again, should be doable.)

Also, I am once again inviting people to pledge me by the mile, the meter, or just generally for the 23 miles, or however far I get.  If you want to toss in a dollar a mile, or 50 cents a kilometer, or whatever you're comfortable with, that would be great.  I'll post regular updates here and all money raised (which is usually not a lot; I don't have many rich friends) will go to Heifer International, which is a nonprofit that helps people in poverty by giving them animals to raise. (Donations are tax deductible.) It's hard to imagine if you live in the United States or anywhere else in the 1st World, but an animal can make a huge difference to a family living in poverty.  A goat, for example, will give milk, which both helps with nutrition and can also be made into cheese and sold.  Also, a goat can get together with another goat and make baby goats, which can then be sold to other families and help them, too. In fact, a pair of goats can benefit a whole village. So Heifer's pretty neat.  I'd love to raise enough money to buy a water buffalo ($250.00).  You know, swimming, water buffalo--sort of follows, doesn't it?

Last thing:  I finally saw an announcement about that 5000 meter race I was going to enter.  It will be in mid-September. Actual date to follow shortly.

Another Saturday Night of Wild and Reckless Abandon.

So it's Saturday night.  Across the globe, couples dance and drink in seedy bars, go to sporting events, throw parties, take in movies, go on wild crime sprees that always end in a Tijuana prison cell, lying on the floor with a nude Barbie doll.  And I?  Well, I'm at Half Price Books.  Typing away.

Why Half Price Books, you might ask.  Well, two reasons.  One, they have free wi-fi, though half the time I'm not able to get my laptop to talk to it (ie, tonight).  There are also lots of tables in the common area, and some of them face the aquarium.  I'm big on aquariums.  I miss my fish.  There's also a little coffee shop that sells fine Italian sodas and decadent sweet things that I'm not supposed to have.  But most importantly, Half Price Books isn't my house and doesn't have a ten-week-old kitten gallumphing at high speed around corners and down hallways, causing hiss fests with other cats and occasionally launching herself at my feet in a brutal takedown attack that's evidently supposed to render me footless (no luck there so far).

Besides, Starbucks is too pricey and when I order something as mundane as a regular coffee, all the overdressed rich women who apparently have nothing better to do than hang out there look at me like I'm crazy.

Mainly, I just like to get out behind my desk and go out into the wild.  You know.  Libraries.  Bookstores.  Coffee establishments.  Anywhere I can sit, look busy, type fast and deflect curiosity.  I used to do my blog posts at Afrah and then one night this like 18-year-old waiter tried to pick me up, not realizing I was old enough to be his mother (which was nice, if a little awkward).  I still go to Afrah sometimes, but tonight I'm at Half Price.  There's no pita bread here, unfortunately.

And how's the writing going, anyway, you ask.  Well, it's been better.  I've been kicking around a small thing that I'll probably go back and work on in a few minutes here, and I've got another thing that's basically done but needs some major slash and burn editing, and there's another one that's almost done but I think I'm going to have to go back some 80 pages from the end, just chop them the hell off and make it all happen differently.  Which I'm not up for at the moment.

The truth is, I haven't been very excited about anything I've written since I finished the increasingly inaccurately named Mindbender trilogy.  (Quadrology? Quintology?)  I've been able to get angry enough to write something Serious (the thing that's basically finished), but I'm not sure I hit the point I'd been trying to make and I'm equally not sure I can make it hit that point, regardless.  I also have a major time crunch that I didn't have during the Mindbender era (swimming) and very little time in the evenings to sit down with a keyboard.  Most of the thing that's basically finished was written on the fly, longhand, between appointments, in waiting rooms and wherever else I happened to be when I had a few minutes.  Which is one way to go about it, I guess.  Transcribing it was a lot of fun, though.  You should see my handwriting.  No, you probably shouldn't.  You've seen what happens when you whack a bug and splatter its guts all over the wall, haven't you?

(By the way, whacking a bug is a big Buddhist no-no.  It's better to usher them outside.  I usually scream for Joan, which is sort of outsourcing my violations of the First Precept.  You know, like the United States exports its industrial pollution by manufacturing goods in countries that don't have the strict environmental laws we have here.)

So I'm here, and I'm gonna try to write something, but in the meantime, I just made a modest proposal that might lead to yet another project.  I hope so.  I'm probably going to shut off my Internet connection now just to avoid having to read whatever comes back, but let it be known that I proposed it.  Whatever it is.

And I hope I get to tell you whatever it is very soon.

Kindle This

Okay, it wasn't this bad. It was bad, though.

So I went to Brother ChiSing's funeral last Sunday.  I gotta say, it was the best Baptist funeral for a Zen Buddhist I've ever been to.  Let this go to show you, folks, that no matter how explicit you are in your will about what you want for your funeral, your family will always win, because they're alive and you're not. And it's really for them, anyway, isn't it?  But there were some bizarre moments.  Firstly, Brother ChiSing made an appearance in a coffin. That's not very common in Buddhism, though I'm aware it's common in America in our time.  (He looked awful, too.  Shriveled up.  Not sure what caused that, the illness or the fact that he'd been dead for almost a week.)  Second, he was buried, like in a coffin in the ground, which I'm positive wasn't his idea. Thirdly and most odd of all, they put him in a suit, jacket and tie for the occasion. Look, I didn't know the man well, but I did know him for almost ten years and I promise you, he did not ever wear a suit, jacket and tie.  Worse still, it was a  brown suit, jacket and tie.  I mean, does anyone even wear brown suits?  I thought they went out with green ones in the 70s, and good riddance and all that.

And I mean, the Bible readings and stuff were okay, and the barbershop quartet was a nice touch, but when the pastor announced that "Norman" (yes, his real name was Norman) "will be waiting for us in the Christian heaven, with all those that have gone before him," I expected ChiSing to get out of his coffin and just walk out in disgust. Of course, he couldn't do that because he's probably already a newborn in Sri Lanka or someplace. ChiSing was not one to wait around.  Thankfully, there will be a second memorial service at the meditation center, and it will be a raucous, noisy celebration of life. Plenty of music, some dancing, snacks to be served afterward.  That would be Sunday, April 3 at 5:00 at CSL, 4801 Spring Valley Road  No. 115, Dallas, TX. See you there.

Meanwhile, a really good friend gave me a nifty gift; a writing master class with James Patterson.  Yes, that James Patterson, purveyor of airplane books the world over. (And in case you do not know what an airplane book is, I'm going to tell you.  It's the sort of book that you pick up because you realize when you get to the airport that, in spite of careful packing, you don't have anything to read on the airplane, which, if you're a reader, is like trying to cross the desert without any water, and so you run into the little airport bookstore thingy and grab something from the display in the front and then you read it on the airplane and forget about it half an hour later.  Which doesn't mean it's a bad book.  I mean it kept you entertained on the airplane, didn't it?  It's just usually not all that memorable. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was my lucky exception.)  It's online and I've logged in and so on but I haven't actually watched any of the lectures yet. Why? Because my life seems to be in free fall at the moment.  Between work and swimming and training for this frick'n 5,000 meter race (which just got moved from July to September, which means that I get to train an extra three whole months for this thing, and whose idiot idea was that?  Idiots) I feel like I haven't been home for more than ten minutes at a stretch, except to sleep.

Yet, somehow, this thing I'm writing keeps crawling along.  And, to my surprise, I recently came to The End.  Well, not the actual end.  There's still a little wrap-up and banal dialogue to go, maybe a chapter or so.  But the basic narrative has ended.  The plot has resolved, I guess you could say.  And I've just run into a problem that I basically have never had before in my life: The darn thing is too short.

Too short? you say.  How could a book be too short?  Plenty of books are too long, but too short?  Doesn't happen.  Well, except that it does.  This li'l work of mine just topped 31,000 words.  That is, seriously, between 20 and 30,000 words too short.  Publishers like to print books that are of a certain length because that's how the big ol' printers and cardboard cutters and so on are calibrated.  Make a book that's too long and it's too expensive to print because you have to reset all the calibrations and the page counters and the--actually, I have only the vaguest idea what I'm talking about here, but anyway, there are machines involved and things do need to be of a certain size.  Make a book too short and it's not worth the money to fire up the machines in the first place.  A work of 30,000 words is pretty deep into novella territory.  And what is a novella, you ask?  Let's let Stephen King tell you (I paraphrase, very loosely):  "Buenas tardes and welcome to Novella, senor!  How long will you be staying with us?  A few weeks, you say?  Senor, I have to tell you, you will be in Novella for a very long time, si?"  Silly stereotypes aside, though, it's true. Novellas don't tend to go anywhere.  They just sit there.  Unless they're written by Stephen King, of course, and then they get wrapped up in a collection with three or four other novellas and published like a group of short stories and sell bazillions of copies and make everybody rich.  But I am not Stephen King and this ain't no Stephen King novella.  It's just a cheery yarn about statues coming to life, the impending destruction of all reality, and why it's critically important that we get Fleetwood Mac back together, preferably pre-Rumors.

Believe me, I've tried to make the thing longer.  I've been able to stuff in a few extra sentences here and there.  But for the most part, it just won't go.  It's the length that it is, and the length is too short.  So I'm not sure what to do with it, except maybe publish it on Amazon for 99 cents or, as has been gently suggested to me by people who actually know what they're talking about, more like $1.99.  You don't need calibrated printing machines to make a Kindle file. And you don't even need a Kindle to read one.  You can just go here or to your app store of choice and download the Kindle app, and then you can read it anywhere on your phone or tablet.

So that's the plan, and at the rate things are going I'd say it'll be ready in another month or so. If you think this is a bad idea, let me know, willya?  Because everything sounds brilliant at 3 in the morning when you can't sleep.

Even Later

Yes, okay, three weeks between blog posts is too long.  My screaming fans (both of them) demand regular content.  I'm sorry, you guys, but it's been a pretty interesting three weeks.  My boss's other paralegal quit and he doesn't want to hire anyone else because he's about to get the influx of Summer Interns (law students from the local schools that work for a ridiculously low amount of money to gain experience in writing and research so they can get jobs after they graduate).  So I am now managing 140 cases.  (Thank God it's not 180; we almost took on another big MDL litigation.)  Note that I said "managing."  That does not mean "working."  (Which is good.)  My assistant got promoted and I now have a Team.  My assistant, another paralegal and the office manager, who helps me find people (like interns) to do things that need doing.  So I find people to do the things that need doing, they do it, I make sure it gets done, and then it goes out the door.  My job, as it has sometimes been, is to keep track of it all.

Luckily, I'm a huge fan of maps and graphs and spreadsheets and stranger things.  The entire office is now revolving around one big spreadsheet that is tracking all the cases and what needs to be done for each.  If I ever misplace that spreadsheet, I'm toast.  We're having meetings once a week to reassign things depending on everybody's workload, I've got people using some software to track case notes and I'm starting to use fancy management words like "implementation" and "chaos theory."  I;m getting my work email on my phone now, though I've been warned that this is a one way ticket down a black hole.

I've even started dressing better.  Yes, that was a dress I wore on Wednesday. Even painted my nails to match. Electric blue.

So now that I'm Management, it of course makes perfect sense for me to sign up for another class, since the one I'm already taking in federal civil procedure isn't nearly enough, and going to OA meetings, getting together with my meditation group and swimming four days a week isn't taking up near enough of my time.  Okay, yes, I did sign up for another class.  But it's a writing class, so it's kosher.  It's about journal writing and spiritual development and it's actually really good, although we've only met once so far.  I'm reading my chapters and doing my little writing exercises like I'm supposed to.  (Though I'm not sure what chapter we're on for this week. If it's chapter five, I'm good to go.  If we're supposed to be up through chapter six, I'm a chapter behind.)

I also have three books I'm supposed to have read by next Saturday and one of them is this late-1800s novel that's like 500 pages long.  Sheesh.

Oh yeah, and I'm writing a book, too.  I think.

Imagine if I'd had kids.

One Of Those "The Shoe Is On The Other Foot" Experiences.

Ever had one of those pieces of good news that you've been wanting to tell everybody about, but you can't because one or two things haven't been confirmed yet?  Well, that's kind of been my situation for the last three weeks.  I knew I had the job, was told I'd for sure be getting an offer, it was just a matter of someone being back in the office long enough to do something about it, so hold tight and don't take any other offers.  Well, I wasn't going to, because they came looking for me and not the other way around, but anyway, everything finally fell together so I can now tell y'all that I have a new job.  Yay!  

I'm very excited.  It's a good job with a very good firm, their reputation is excellent, I got to spend about 20 minutes with my future boss and I think we will work together very well, and all the positive signs are where they should be.  The downside was having to tell my current boss, whom I like a lot, that I'm leaving.  Fortunately, he took it pretty well, though he was obviously less than thrilled.

The other downside has been that I'm mostly in charge of hiring my replacement.  We placed an ad, and after a few hours of getting just one resume, then another and then another, we suddenly got something like 85 all at once.  I'm not sure where they were hiding, but they're here now, and so over the last couple of days I've had the joy of reading 120-odd resumes.  And some of them were very odd indeed.  

People, I have mailed resumes and I have mailed resumes.  I have drafted clever cover letters and I have filled out online forms.  I have, in other words, done my share of job searching, but I've never been on the other side of the desk before and I had no idea how utterly weird it could be.  How weird?  Well, here's just a smattering of the things I've come across.

• Quite a few resumes had really obvious spelling and grammatical errors.  If you're applying for a "legal assistant" position, you might wanna know how to spell "assistant." 
• And then there was the guy who misspelled the name of a FORMER EMPLOYER.  Let me get this straight; you worked there three years and never learned how to spell the name of the company? 
• There were also resumes that addressed the wrong law firm, referenced the wrong position, or addressed to "Dear Mr. Smothers" when there was no "Mr. Smothers" in the job ad.  I mean, that's just not paying attention, people.  
• And speaking of not paying attention, try not to apply for the same job twice on two consecutive days.  You ARE keeping a record of all this, aren't you?
• It's nice that you're looking for an evening/weekend position, but, uh, that's NOT WHAT WE'RE HIRING FOR.  
• And then there were the creative email addresses.  Like "Fairywings@whatever.com" and one very memorable "studhorse56@p0rnapal00za.com."  People, no potential employer is going to reply to an email address like that.  Please, for the love of God, get a Gmail or Yahoo address that's just your "lastname.firstname@..." 
• I'm glad you were born again in Christ on July 2, 2012, but it doesn't need to be on your resume.  Honest.
• Nor do I care that you've been sober for 12 years.  In fact, I'd rather not know that.  
• And I just love getting your resume not from you, but from your academic advisor.  Because that's classy. 
• Odd statements: "I prefer a salary that reflects my ability, experience & commitment.  Of course, I am willing to address that as necessary."  Well, I would hope so? 
• "My present job is not a legal assistant job, but it pays the bills."  Um. Okay? 
• "I am a fast learner and will be able to transfer fundamental skills like organization (spelled wrong), customer service, negotiation (spelled wrong) and case preparation to your office." Great, but I suspect that's your way of telling me you don't have any litigation experience and...hey, I'm right.

I'll admit I went to business school a long time ago, but for the love of God, have things changed that much?  I mean, I hope this is just a case of not knowing any better, because honestly, I'm becoming depressed about the fate of future generations and all that.  Of the 120-odd resumes, we got exactly nine that we're considering.  Nine.  I mean that's about 10%.  Which, I discovered after a couple of quick Google searches, was about average.  That's even more depressing. 

Look, people, it's your resume.  It will get you, or not get you, a job interview.  It needs to be perfect.  If you aren't good at noticing misspellings and typos, get someone else to look at it for you.  Get more than one someone else, if you have to, and listen to what they say.  You probably know someone who has occasion to look at resumes once in a while.  Even if you don't, you probably know someone whose education went further than yours, who works in a higher position than you do, who majored in English or literature or something and can at least tell you if your resume is written in the right language.  Even if you end up having to pay someone, just do it.  Again, it's your resume.  You deserve to have a good one.  Or at least one that won't embarrass you in public.  

I know of what I speak. Back when I first got out of college, I was writing resumes for all my friends and getting paid in pounds of coffee. (All my friends worked at Starbucks.)  I still do it from time to time, sometimes for actual cash money.  And if I had to sum up the elements that make a great resume, the list would look something like this:

•  Put the most important information first.  The average hiring manager is going to glance at your resume for about ten seconds, so make sure your most critical skills are on top.  If you've had a few jobs and been in the workforce for a while, put your job experience first. If you're brand-new to the job market and just graduated from someplace, put your educational experience first.  If neither of those apply, you might want to lead off with your most important job skills--which tend to be computer skills these days, but it depends on what job you're applying for.  Talk to somebody in the field to get a better idea of what should go where.
• Don't be afraid to vary your resume according to the job you're applying for.  A lot of companies use screening software to look for specific words, and if those words aren't in your resume, you'll get skipped.  The best way to avoid this is to read the job ad carefully and look for terms of art like "civil litigation" and "appellate filings" (because I'm in the legal field; your mileage may vary).  Make sure those terms appear somewhere in your resume.
• Don't go over two pages.  Even if you've been in the field for 30 years, nobody's going to read more than two pages.  It's okay to sum up the first ten years of your career in a sentence or two, and then provide details for the last ten years (which is primarily what a hiring manager wants to know about). Things change very quickly these days.  A "legal secretary" when I first started working was using a typewriter and carbon paper.  Obviously that's no longer the case, so a "legal secretary" job from 20 years ago is going to be pretty meaningless to your current job skills.  Or I hope so, anyway.
• Use bullet lists and keep the format consistent.  This makes it easier for the hiring manager to pick out the important stuff in a hurry.  And they're always in a hurry.
• Use a nice, clean readable font, like Times Roman, Arial or Bookman Old Style.  If you want to vary the look of certain areas, try bolding and underlining, or changing the text size.  Don't use more than one font; it looks sloppy and like you forgot to read it over before you submitted it.  And please, please don't use script fonts.  Yes, I know they're pretty, but they're very hard to read.  Save them for party invitations.  Please. 

Finally, here are a couple of tips for job hunting in general:

• Apply fast.  I got 120 resumes in one day; if you're applying three days out from the day the ad appeared, you're probably too late.  Focus on the current day's ads, then go back a day or two days if you have time. 
• Most job ads appear on Friday or Monday, because that's when people tend to give notice.  So try to set aside extra time for job hunting on those days, because you'll need it.
• If you haven't been there lately, your local library has a ton of resources for job hunters, from books about how to put together a good resume to computers you can use to apply for jobs if you happen not to have one at home.  A lot of libraries even have programs like "job hunter's boot camp" available for free or for a nominal fee.  Be sure to ask.  Remember, your librarian is your friend.
• Talk to people. Tell everyone you know that you're looking for work.  Keep a couple of resumes in your car with you, because you never know when you might run into someone who knows someone who is looking for someone.  
• Above all, take good care of yourself. Get plenty of sleep, exercise regularly, eat a good diet with lots of fruits and vegetables, and try to have a little fun every day.  Job hunting is hard work.  It's physically draining and mentally grueling.  You'll be more up to the challenge if you're feeling physically well.  

Okay, I'm getting off my soapbox now.  I'll resume commentary on Buddhism, writing, things legal and the sorry state of the planet with my next post.  Meantime, soldier on. And remember, you can't get Ebola without doing something that's pretty gross.  Cheers!

Mini-Post: 3bdr, 2ba, No Pool

It's official.  Yesterday it was two weeks since I've been in a pool full of chlorinated water, swimming back and forth and doing my thing.  I've been on dry land so long my gills are starting to recede, and if this continues I'm pretty sure the webbed skin between my toes is just going to dry up and fall the heck off.  If I don't smell like chlorine, am I still me?  Actually at the moment, I and everything I've been in contact with for the last 24 hours smell like Sweet Pumpkin Spice body spray.  Which spilled in my work bag.  Does anyone know how to get the overpowering reek of body spray out of a work bag? Or should I just throw it out and get a new work bag?  I've washed it in the washing machine twice now. The work bag, I mean.

Anyway, I've been really sick.  It started off as an ear infection.  I get those once in a while (see above re: swimming).  Then instead of getting better, I got worse and what had been an ear infection took over my whole head, and my chest.  I'm on my second set of antibiotics and I don't think they're doing a lot of good.  I mean, I am getting incrementally better, but I think I'm fighting a war of attrition, not one of nuclear weapons.  Usually two or three days on antibiotics and I'm fine, or at least a lot better.  It's now Day 16 and I'm still wheezing and coughing.  It's hard to swim when you can't breathe in the first place.

Not-swimming is probably one of the worst things that can possibly happen to me.  Not just because of the not-swimming part, which sucks plenty, but because it throws the rest of my routine all to hell.  If I'm not swimming, then I'm not getting up at the right time of the morning.  If I'm not getting up at the right time of the morning, I'm sleepy on and off all day.  If I'm sleepy, I'm not getting what I need to do done in the evening; I'm just going straight to bed.  So the house is a mess and I'm kind of a mess and I'm not getting any writing done and did I mention everything I touch smells like Sweet Pumpkin Spice body spray?

Oh, and a guy in Suriname tweeted his undying love to me earlier this morning.  Not quite a Twitter marriage proposal, but close.

Why Haven't You Heard From Me?

Lily: I'm in trouble with this damn play, and you don't care.
Dash: Lily, it's your first play.  It's not like anybody's gonna miss ya.

--Julia

If you've been hanging around here long enough, you've probably wondered why I haven't written a book, or a play, or Something Of Substance.  If you've really been hanging around here long enough, you know that I've actually written three of them, thankewverymuch, and that's not counting one I self-published that sold about twenty copies and another one that I wrote, uh, basically for my mother.  (Everybody writes stuff for their mother.  Just ask Elvis.  Oh, wait, you can't, Never mind.)  Three of them even ganged up on each other and formed a trilogy.  (Ah, trilogies.  The word sounds like a lost Asian nation, doesn't it?  "Hey stlanger, wercome to Trilogy!  You be here long time, yes?"  Oh God, somebody smack me for being a racist.)

Anyway, they're called Mindbender, Spellbinder and Soulmender, and they're still hanging around my house like lazy post-adolescent children, too fond of the free food and the clean laundry to move out and get their own place.  Which is to say, they're not published yet.  I had a literary agent once, but he quit the business to run for Congress and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.  (He didn't win, either.  Actually he didn't have a chance, and the only one who didn't seem to know that was him, but never mind.)  So I've been kind of orphaned ever since.  I'm looking for a new agent, which means I've been writing lots of goddamned earnest letters to total strangers asking them to take me on as a client for their eighty-hour-a-week mostly unpaid job convincing some publishing house that I'll sell like Suzanne Collins when in fact I might sell more like David Moody.  And if you haven't heard of David Moody, well, that kind of makes my point, doesn't it?  (To be honest, I'd love to sell like David Moody.  Hi, David!  How's it going?)

So anyway, I've written all these letters, and I haven't really gotten anywhere, although I have had some responses, so it's apparently not hopeless.  I just need to keep on writing these darn letters until I get a yes.  Considering that I have anxiety the size of a large nervous T-rex when I'm writing one of these things, that is no small feat. (For more information on all the fun I've had writing query letters, click on the label "angsty query letter crap", below.  Yeah, and meet Scaley and Fang, my dinosaurs of anxiety and sudden panic.)

A reasonable person might very well ask why bother, anyway.  Literary agents take on something like .001% of the people who write to them as clients.  By the time I'm in the right place at the right time with the right letter on the right day, I could be a hundred years old (or maybe even dead; by the time I die I'm sure that querytracker.net will  be able to send query letters for you in perpetuity, pursuing the dream of publication beyond the physical realm.) Well, it's like this (and here comes the Buddhism again): Being published, or not being published, isn't anywhere near as important as writing.  Writing is everything.  Publishing is business.  It's a good business if you can get it, but it's still only business.  Sooner or later you have to leave business and go home and eat some fresh butter-flavored tortillas from the Kroger Bakery.  And then you can write something.

Another way of putting this is an old OA saying:  "I'm chairman of the planning committee, not the results committee." I do the right things.  I write a lot. I rewrite a lot.  I read a lot.  I hang around with other writers a lot.  I go to seminars, I show up at open mic events (though I've never actually said much more than "Good evening, and this is so and so."), I've even been to the occasional conference.  In short, I live like a writer's supposed to live, minus the alcohol binges and the frequent trips to rehab (that's the Buddhism again).  The fact that nobody's paying me for it doesn't make it any less important.  The fact that I have a "day job" doesn't make it any less important.  The fact that I"m not where I wanted to be by now doesn't make it any less important.  The only person hovering over me with a stopwatch is, uh, me.

That is to say, I had constructed this whole theoretical timeline, based on nothing more than conjecture, of What I'd Be Doing By The Time I'm Forty-Five.  I got plenty annoyed with myself when I failed to meet just about every conjectural deadline.  Which was ridiculous.  Plenty of people don't produce stunning masterpieces that change the face of fiction for all time by the time they're forty-five, and no harm comes to them.  (And plenty of people who do come to bad ends.  Look what happened to Truman Capote.  And he wasn't even writing fiction.)  The point is, I'm responsible for the process, not the outcome.  I'm not responsible for how long the process takes.  I'm also not responsible for getting paid.  Some of those things we just need to leave up to God.

Yes, I know I don't believe in God.  But I do believe in something.  So sue me.  And if you know a literary agent, send him or her my way, willya?  Thank you.  And have a nice day.  

Jen's List of Ten Influential Books

There's a thing on Facebook right now where you're supposed to list the ten most influential books you have ever read.  I'm not sure why this is a thing, but I'm sure glad they're books instead of, say, movies or video games.  So I guess I could have just put this on Facebook, but I figured, why waste a perfectly good blog post on Facebook when you could stick it on your blog and beat your Thursday deadline by almost a full forty-eight hours?  (And boy, are they ever strict about those deadlines around here.  Last time I missed one they threatened to cut my salary in half.  Eep.)  Anyway, here they are, in no particular order except for the last one. 

Very Far Away From Anywhere Else by Ursula Le Guin.  Really, if you haven't read it there's no way I can explain.  Pick it up and give it a read; it's only about 70 pages long, and if you don't cry at the end, there's something wrong with you.  

I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Hannah Green.  Read it at least 40+ times and I get something different out of it every single time.  (Like the John Calvin vs. Thomas Hobbes for custody of the child in the middle third--didn't know that was even in there, did ya?)  And yes, it's dated, and some of its theories have since been proven wrong, but it was the Sixties, and things were different then. Go back in time and experience them. 

God's War by Kameron Hurley, and its two sequels to a lesser extent.  Best Muslim space western sci-fi shoot-em-up ever.  And possibly only.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins - not because it's a great story, although it is, or because the author is so good at building characters, though she is, but because it exploded the boundaries of YA fiction in a way that had never been done before and made the series that came came after (Divergent, Wasteland, the Matched trilogy) not only possible but plausible.  

Columbine by Dave Cullen.  Yes, it's about the high school shooting, and no, it's not pleasant reading, but guess what? Almost everything you know about Columbine is wrong.  A series of popular myths has grown out of Columbine and other school shootings, and those myths need to be addressed with the actual cold hard facts.  This book goes a long way toward doing that--if we're willing to listen and put some of our Robin Hood fantasies down.  

Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey.  Hey, they said most influential, not Most Scholarly and Serious.  This was my introduction to Anne McCaffrey, and it blew me away (though unfortunately, a lot of the later ones in this series didn't).  But here we have a rather simple tale about a girl nobody understands, who turns out to be one of the most important people in the world because of something she--sings.  How can you not like a story like that?  And the old "be yourself, and do what you have to do no matter where it takes you" message isn't that hard on the old subconscious either.  

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Good Omens takes Douglas Adams' general wackiness and runs with it at a speed I would not have thought possible.  You cannot get through a page without laughing out loud, and it confirmed some of the things I always suspected but didn't know for sure (like, for example, the truth that any cassette tape, left long enough in a car, will somehow morph into Queen's Greatest Hits no matter what it started out as).  Especially in light of Sir Pratchett's failing health, I'm glad we have this gem among gems (his Discworld series is pretty awesome, too).

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.  Lots of authors write lots of books about lots of things that really happened, but not very many of them invent a whole new subgenre while they're at it.  To Mr. Capote, inventor of what's now called "narrative nonfiction," I give a bow.  And to In Cold Blood, which is a dark and brooding tale that well deserves every single award it ever won, a salute.

Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God by John Donne.  Okay, it's a sonnet and not a book, but it so perfectly captures my problem with religion that I just couldn't help but include it here.  Look, if you want me to believe in your God, your God is gonna have to steamroller me to get my attention. That's exactly what John Donne said--only much better, and much more wistfully.  In about 1618.  So Google it, it's long since out of copyright.

And finally:

The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson.  

This is my favorite book of all time.

Of. All. Time.  

If you haven't read it, what are you waiting for?  Yeah, you know how it ends, but still, give it a try. Again, it's about 70 pages long. You can read it in an hour, even with all that highfalutin' 19th-century prose.  The way that Stevenson sets up his final shocker is masterful; we start with Mr. Utterson, the lawyer, follow him around for a while, then he exits stage left right around the time another character enters from stage right, and then we get to follow him for a while.  Dr. Jeckyll, himself, doesn't show up as a character until almost 2/3 of the way through the book, and by then you're not sure you can trust anything he says even though you desperately want to know what the hell is going on.

I could go on for decades (I'd make this book my master's thesis, if I were going to grad school, which I am not) but I'll just stop with this:  This is not only the scariest book I ever read, it's one of the most important--heck, maybe even the most important.  And if the idea of your subconscious leaving your body and walking around on its own, developing a personality, meeting your friends, taking your stuff and just maybe going on a murder spree, doesn't scare you, my friend, I suspect not very much will.  For other versions of this story I'll give honorable mention to the movie Mary Reilly, which documents some of the same events and is one of Ms. Julia Roberts' best performances ever, and the BBC series Jeckyll, starring James Nesbitt (who was robbed of a Golden Globe for his performance here).  

So that's it. My list of ten influential books.  Hm, nothing by Hemingway or Big Steve.  That's interesting.  Maybe I'll do this again in a year without looking back and see if anything changed.  In the meantime, happy reading, kids.

So I'm 45 Years Old.

Yep, another birthday.  This is an important one, though, because it has a 5 in it.  Any birthday with a 5 in it is important.  The first 5 and you're ready to start kindergarten, thus ending the period of time known as childhood.  The second 5 and you're ready to date.  The third 5 has you out of college, probably working some menial job somewhere and wondering what in hell just happened.  By the time you get to the fourth 5, though, you've probably figured it out.  And then there's my 5.  Meaning, I only have 5 years left before every single year has a 5 in it for ten entire years.  Which, when you think about it, is pretty scary, because after that last 5 year, there's only 5 more years until you start collecting Social Security.  Unless you start early.

45 puts you smack in your Middle Forties.   By the time that 5 sneaks in there, you can't say that you're in your "early forties" anymore.  5 is halfway to 50, and I'm not going to be one of those creepy adults who tells you "It all went so fast I feel like I was seventeen just days ago."  What crap.  Plenty has happened since I was seventeen, and here's a news flash: A lot of time had gone by since then.  I was 17 in the Eighties, when everything was big and brash.  Fashions were big.  Hair was big.  Politicians were big (and they all wanted to be Ronald Reagan).  Pop music was big, AIDS wasn't yet a thing and everybody was doing cocaine.  Or at least, everybody who could afford it was doing cocaine.  Compared to what's going on now, it was practically an alien planet.  Who would walk down the street these days wearing stacked heels six inches high, shoulder pads that reach to her ears and hair that adds another foot to her height?  I mean, besides Sandra Bernhard?

Yeah.  A lot's happened.  And I'm on the other end of it, meaning I survived it.  Some of my friends didn't and are stuck somewhere between 1989 and now.  The thing that sucks about dying young is that you're forever mired in the context of whatever was going on when you checked out.  My friend Roberta, colloquially known as Burt, lives on in my head wearing the same black jeans and The Clash t-shirt she had on the last time I saw her.  Would she have gone on to embrace grunge, hip hop, Air Jordans and cargo pants?  Maybe, but we'll never know now, will we?

Anyway, I got to live to be this old.  And like the guy at the end of Saving Private Ryan, I'm sort of wondering if I've done anything that merits it.  I didn't cure cancer or bring peace to the Middle East.  I never sang with Lennon, or played in Jimi's band; I never met no president nor shook a Gandhi's hand.  (Oops.  Apologies to Stuart.)  Like everybody else on the planet, I was born with big dreams and fantastic visions.  Where did I end up?  Well, for the last fifteen years I've made lots of lawyers look good in court.  I wish some of them would have been arguing key human rights cases or at least fighting the big insurance companies, but most of them weren't.  Yay.  Go, me.

I need one of those It's a Wonderful Life experiences where I get to see what the world is like without me.  Maybe Noah would have formed a grunge band and ended up world famous in Estonia.  Maybe Kim would have moved to San Francisco, founded a tech company and changed the whole nature of right-clicking on things.  Maybe Joan would've led an armed band of church ladies into MGM Studios and forced Bruce Lansbury to start making Wild Wild West episodes again.  Immediately.  (No, not the godawful movie; the really cool TV show.) For that matter, maybe John O. Pastore would have never been elected to Congress, having his campaign undone when his affair with Madalyn Murray O'Hare came to light.  (And maybe Madalyn wouldn't have disappeared under mysterious circumstances, but then, who doesn't love a good mystery?)  And in case you have no earthly idea what I'm talking about or who these people are, well, that's what Wikipedia is for, kids.  As I was saying, a lot happened between then and now.  You can't exactly expect me to spell it all out.

Speaking of It's A Wonderful Life, though, I wonder what would have happened if George Bailey were to have gone back to Pottersville-that-could-have-been and discovered that most of his friends were doing just fine.  Mary Hatch married Sam Wainwright and had six brilliant children that invented things and cracked the stock market and created a new generation of jet airplanes.  Burt the cop and Ernie the cab driver formed a comedy duo in which they used puppets to argue with each other in an Odd Couple kind of way.  Mr. Potter found Transcendental Meditation through the Beatles and gave away his fortune to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who didn't want it but said what the hell and used it to develop a new line of Tarot cards. (Wikipedia, people.  Wikipedia.  Come on, it's just you and Google.  Who's gonna know, besides the forensics cops that will be tearing your computer apart after your wife disappears?)

And my little corner of the world?  Well, that's just what I'm wondering.  What if everything just kept rolling along, fine as paint, my absence marked by nothing more interesting than the lack of a bassoon player in a certain high school band?  I mean, bands can live without bassoon players, folks.  That's what the little tiny notes written above the second trombone part are for.

It's after midnight and I have a pool to be in around eight tomorrow, so we'll have to shut down speculation on this whole thing before I throw myself off a bridge into the Bedford River just to find out.  If nothing else, Chloe the Cat would not be happy if there wasn't a Jen-shaped human mattress to curl up uponst in the middle of the night.  And Joan might have something to say about it, too.  Anyway, I'm 45 years old.  That I've survived this long must mean something or other.  I wonder what.

State of the Onion and Book O'the Decade

Okay, already.  I know it's been ages since my last post.  Can I help it if I've hardly had time to breathe between rounds of dodging assassins, chasing bad guys, treasure hunting, romancing beautiful girls (okay, girl--just one girl--like I have time for more than one?) and exposing sinister government conspiracies? Honestly, my days are just packed.  Plus, the novel I'm writing (okay, I'm writing a novel.  That's sort of exciting) is being composed longhand in a spiral-bound notebook, like I used to do when I was a kid.  So I'm not hauling the laptop, or the tablet, all over town to write in various Starbucks locations.   Which makes it less likely I can kick out a blog post on top of everything else.  Well, you know.  Lack of equipment.  It's hard to type on a cell phone.

Besides, since our momentous trip to Austin, not a lot has happened.  Joan's leg is still bothering her and she's in physical therapy.  I had another squamous cell carcinoma lopped off my nose.  Many things legal got typed, filed, revised, proofed, filed, served and otherwise dealt with.  They were all very interesting. This month I'm trying to clock 1500 meters in 45 minutes every time I go to the pool, and I've done pretty well so far. (Thus to build up to the Big Swim in July.  I believe in starting early.)  One of my scrips is $100 a month with insurance, which is only slightly ameliorated by the fact that two of them are absolutely free.  I keep not reading my email.  But I am reading a spiffy book, The Martian by Andy Weir.  Meet my new Book O'the Decade.

Due to a big misunderstanding, astronaut and botanist Mark Watney is marooned on Mars when his team evacuates during a sandstorm.  What do you do, if you're stranded on a hostile planet that sort of fails to offer breathable air, water, food and, you know, other things you've sort of counted on since you first crawled out of the womb?  You invent things that will help you survive and find a way home.  With a wry sense of humor and plenty of old-fashioned determination, Watney narrates his ramble across the Red Planet,  intercut with news of home (on Earth, and at NASA) as his fellow scientists scramble to rescue him.  The Martian is compulsively readable.  Do not pick it up at 10 o'clock at night unless you want to be up until three or four in the morning.  I gotta knock the rest of it off this weekend because I was No. 6 on the waiting list of 29 or so people who wanted to borrow it from the library, and the sooner I get it into the hands of No. 7, the happier everyone will be.

The thing about this book is, it's hard to know what to call it.  Is it sci-fi?  Well, in a sense; a lot of the technology that shows up doesn't exist yet, though it's all perfectly plausible and, in all likelihood, not that far off.  But it all sounds perfectly factual, like the best narrative nonfiction.  Besides, it could happen.  Just like Gravity, sooner or later we're going to have a big snafu in space and people's lives are going to be at risk.  How are we, the rest of us that is, going to handle that?

Consider for a second that Mars is 34 million miles away from Earth at its closest point.  That's a long journey for a rescue helicopter, or even a space ship. How do we decide if that's important enough to put all the time and money behind going there?  We went to the moon because it was hard, as JFK famously said, but then we just sort of puttered around for a while before losing interest.  We humans also spent months and millions of dollars looking for a missing airliner that is, in all likelihood, lost with all hands, yet we can't seem to get our collective asses together to find 237 kidnapped Nigerian girls that are probably still alive.  (We also spent over $2 million to lock up Justina Pelletier for the past 15 months, and the girl didn't even do anything wrong.  I'm just saying.)  So would there be a big rally to rescue the man on Mars?  Or would he be written off as a tragic example of sometimes shit happens?  Anyway, you need to read the book, but it does inspire some serious thinking.

Other than that, there really isn't a lot going on.  The spring's been mild, with fairly cool temperatures and a lot more rain than usual even though (all together now) It Doesn't Make A Dent In Our Current Drought. I've become a compulsive walker at noontime; give me my twenty-minute ramble through Lee Park or face the consequences.  My gang of Buddhists is still meeting every Wednesday night to meditate, mutter, melodize and mope about misanthropic mendacities (to say nothing of aggrandizing alliterating assholes).  Tonight I'm going out with the girls to a burlesque, which I guess is the 1890s version of a strip show except nobody actually gets naked (I hope).  If so, I'll be the fat chick blushing in the back row. I am such a prude.

Glasses, Horror, Particle Physics and Book o'the Decade

It's official: We are living in the Jetsons era.  I still don't have a flying car (Detroit's working on it, right after they finish filing for bankruptcy) but I have just done something unprecedented in the lives of modern human beings.  I have ordered glasses through the Internet.  Not sunglasses but actual glasses.

Seriously, I don't know if they had a parade when this service first became available but if they didn't, they should have.  The only thing worse than shopping for glasses is shopping for shoes.  (And no, I've never successfully ordered shoes from the Internet, but if SAS ever makes them available, it'll be time to break out the credit card.)  By the time I've eliminated all the frames that won't work with my prescription and all the ones that are butt-ugly, I'm usually stuck with one, maybe two choices, both of which make me look like a librarian.  And there's nothing wrong with looking like a librarian if you are one, but I'm not one.  The last pair of glasses I got new made my boss's boss call me "Darth Vader" for a week.  (Or was that the temporary shades I had to sport because I had posterior iritis?  I forget.)  Anyway, I was able to pick out a nice pair with plastic frames and springs, with a scratchproof coating (I've had bad experiences with those, but hey, try and try again) and UV protection for only about $150.00.  That's cheap, when we're talking about glasses.  I believe my last pair was about $250.

Anyway, that's one of the danger of ice storms: Online shopping.  Never mind traffic accidents and frostbite and ice-laden trees crashing through your roof: Beware Amazon.com.  You can't leave your house without risking a fall on your butt (I've fallen twice now) so you stay in your house, and if you have a credit card and an Internet connection, the siren call of merchandising is hard to ignore.  Especially this time of year, when you must express your love for your fellow beings through lots and lots of commerce.  If Christmas gifts were good enough for Baby Jesus, they're good enough for everybody else on the planet.  So bring it on.  Let's go to Wal-Mart and get Maced over a cheap Blu-Ray player.

That said, however, I also bought a book for my Nook.  (I love my Nook.  Have I mentioned lately how much I love my Nook?  I love my Nook.)  Barnes & Noble shells out a free Nook book every Friday, and often they're not that interesting but sometimes they are (ie, Kameron Hurley's "God's War," which, at least for me, created a monster). Last week's selection wasn't particularly interesting, so I bought a different one: Edge by Koji Suzuki.

Koji-san is known as the "Stephen King of Japan," but that's kind of a misnomer.  His books are scary but they're suspenseful first and, if I may say so, cerebral.  Koji-san is responsible for Ringu, remade in the U.S. as The Ring and starring Naomi Watts--one of my top five horror films and one which scared the pants off me, broke my heart and scared the pants off me again. (And there I was outside the theater, just after midnight, waddlin' around with a broken heart and no pants.)  So naturally I would be curious about Edge.

Unfortunately, it suffers from a rather clunky translation.  I'm of the opinion that if you're translating something from Language A to Language B, Language B better be your native language, and you ought to be able to write a little, too.  Because seriously: "Life in the name of all things that have shells separating them from the outside, the ability to sustain and reproduce themselves, and the capacity to evolve." (Page 356.) Is that even a sentence?  Given the fact that one of the main characters is a publisher who specializes in translations, the clunky language is doubly ironic.

Apart from that, though, this is a hard book to put down.  It starts off slowly, like Japanese books sort of always do, but then it picks up speed until you're struggling to keep up with it, turning pages as fast as possible.  (Or clicking pages, in my case).  Mathematicians across the world are discovering that, inexplicably, the value of pi has changed.  The value of pi, by the way, is used for calculating everything from the radius of a circle to the mirrors on the Hubble Space Telescope.  If pi has changed, then there's something fundamentally wrong at the quantum level.  And it doesn't help that large numbers of people--from whole families to about a hundred people visiting a public garden--are disappearing without a trace. Throw in weird phenomena like a giant chasm suddenly opening in the earth in California and you can see how we might have a serious problem.  But what is that problem?  How did it start?  Where did it come from? What's going to happen? And on a planet where the only thing we've been able to do at the quantum level is start a nuclear chain reaction, how in hell are we supposed to fix it?

Truth to be told, we've done quite a bit of research at the quantum level (which is all about subatomic particles and how they move around and behave; not only are they unpredictable but they seem to move when they know you're watching them).  We know, for example, that since atoms are mostly empty space, it should be theoretically possible to put your hand through a solid wall.  The fact that for the most part, we can't is one of the great mysteries of physics.  And get this:  All these subatomic particles moving around seem to create time itself, and time theoretically should move backward as well as forward on its trek.  So why don't we have memories of the future?  Well, I'd posit that some of us do, and at the end of Edge, it seems that some of us not only remember the future, but act on it.  And about that I'll say no more because Edge has not just one but two twist endings.  I'm not the easiest person to surprise, but I never saw either of them coming.

So anyway, Edge by Koji Suzuki.  Book o' the Decade.  Check it out. And stay warm.

Uh, Now? Really? Right Now?

So Joan's in the hospital.  For those of you who missed the beginning of this saga, lemme catch you up.  Joan had a tumor on her leg, and the docs thought it was a thing called a lipoma (a fatty tumor) but because it was growing so fast, there was a decent chance that it was a liposarcoma.  Anything in the medical world that ends in "sarcoma" is usually Not Good, so they did the surgery pretty quickly.  And the tumor turned out to be a lipoma--a nuisance, but essentially harmless.  It was one big one with budding little ones, and that was a bit strange, but anyway, there was no "sarcoma".  So that was good.

Then, about two and a half weeks after the surgery, the wound site--which was healing fine, though it was a bit swollen--started turning red and unhappy lookin'.  Back to the doc we went.  The doc took one look at it and said, "Okay, I'm admitting you to the hospital."  The lack of "sarcoma" notwithstanding.

That was last Wednesday.  Joan's been in the hospital ever since.  That's--let me see here--six days in the hospital.  I've been going to work, going to the hospital, then coming home and crashing into bed.  Today I finally did the effing dishes and made up the beds with clean sheets.  And now I'm sitting here writing this because my brain won't wind down.  

Have you ever noticed that when it rains, it pours?  The best possible example would be 2001.  In a span of three months, the Twin Towers fell, a guy in my church choir died, Joan's mom died and Stuart Adamson died.  I mean, I'm sure they all didn't plan it that way (except maybe Stuart) but I had just started to crawl out of a crippling depression and by that December I'd turned around and crawled right back into it.  I wouldn't really be back to normal for another couple of years, during which I made such a mess of my life that when Joan made the first suggestion about moving to Texas I said, "Great, how long will it take you to pack?" instead of "Where? Isn't that near North Dakota someplace?"

And since the universe really listens to me when I tell it these things, let me just reiterate that I don't need my wife very sick in the hospital when I'm trying to a. keep my job and b. not go crazy.  Okay? Okay? Hello? McFly?

That's the thing about being me.  It's like I'm Oklahoma.  Most of the time I'm fairly peaceful, running a casino in a small town in Durant County, but then suddenly the sky darkens and this tornado rips through everything and destroys jobs, friendships, mortgages, relationships.  Tornadoes are entities unto themselves once they really get going, but they need supercell thunderstorms to set them off.  In 2001, three people I cared about dropping dead in a matter of weeks was the supercell. And the Twin Towers thing didn't help.  (By the way, I have no idea if there's actually a Durant County in Oklahoma.  I just think there should be.  The man got the railroad built, didn't he?)

In case this isn't obvious, things are just Not Going Well at the moment.  Not going well at work, not going well at the house (though we got the first part of the major plumbing repair done, for less than we thought it was going to cost, and even managed to squeeze in a new water heater as part of the deal).  Not going well here on the old laptop, with my writing group, with swimming and with being alive generally. I'm pretty sure I've already heard the tornado warning sirens kick on a couple of times, but then, maybe not.  Maybe they were false alarms.  Anyway, I feel like I'm sitting here in a weather tower, watching one hell of a big supercell start to rotate not all that far away.  And wondering if there's anything I can do to keep it from sucking (pun intended).

But, as my doc keeps reminding me, everything's different now.  I'm medicated, I'm meditated, I'm surrounded by good friends and I'm Doing All The Right Things (except for hitting the sugar, and I'm doing that pretty hard).  I'm not drinking anymore, I'm not a member of a Lutheran church filled with easily-ruffled feathers and my options for getting into trouble are somewhat limited.

Plus, there was that moment on the freeway where I was hurtling toward the hospital after a ridiculously long day at work and getting more and more upset at the way things were going when suddenly it occurred to me that if I couldn't stay calm in this situation, of all situations, I did not need to be calling myself a Buddhist.  And I like being a Buddhist.  Even if you have to stay calm through some pretty hairy moments.  Like tornadoes.

The thing about tornadoes is, you can't really predict them.  You can say, "Oh, yeah, conditions are perfect out here," and then watch a supercell rotate all day and do jackshit nothing.  Or you can think this is just a little spring shower and suddenly the alarms go off.  So if you can't predict them, the best alternative is to duck into a well-built underground shelter while one goes by.  Which is the equivalent of staying calm in a catastrophe.  Yes, even in Durant County.  If it exists.