Month: May 2015

What a meal

I thought Mike was going to feed me in a restaurant, but he made pot roast, with veg, mashed potatoes and gravy, and afterwards (since we started late and I had eaten myself in a ‘pleasant state of repletion’) I faceplanted. Awoke at quarter to six and walked home.  What a glorious morning!  The sky is a pearly pale blue and it was just the right amount of walk.  Mike gave me about 20 minutes of very pressure conscious massage on my lower back last night and something let go with an almighty crack, and I remember waking up and thinking “no pain!”.  Course, no cpap either, but o well. I got Mike with about 20 minutes of calf massage – he tried the Wreck Beach stairs for the first time this season this last weekend and he was a hurting unit (should have heard him moaning as we went down the basement stairs).

I am still in prodrome, but I’m doing my best to ignore it.  The hardest part is knowing that whatever mood I’m in, super agitated and cheerful, or super sludgy and meepish, is all, if not false, then certainly questionable,  and that the dishes must still be done and phone calls returned.

I am working on a song for BB King.

Buster, after giving me such a scare with his absence yesterday, was on hand to greet me and thank me for filling his dish, and all in all the world is a very pleasant place this morning, and it will be even yet more amazing after coffee, toast and eggs.

Jeff should be back today.

The wor(l)d as it is

Jumpin’ Jimmy Christmas, I just entered “How do you say fucked in the ass in Hindi” and in .67 seconds (!>?) I have the Hindi text, the gloss pronunciation (not in the international spelled alphabet which I hate so bad.  SO VERY DeRANGeDLY. I could be persuaded that it would be a bad idea to kill the fuckers who invented it, them and all their waste-canister friends, but in marked up but recognizable English plus a rather convulsing rendition of it in a woman’s mechanical voice.)

Given a choice between editing that sentence, which could wring pity from an abandoned kitten, and deleting it, I’m going to just leave it there. If there are flies on the internet, they will soon gather.

I suppose there will be an unanswered question.  Research.  It’s for the novel.  I hope to god I won’t need it.

Not everything is a confused mess

Yesterday 0 writing and 2.0 hours.

Church in the morning, took the bus to get there and it all worked out perfectly, except drinking that Timmy Ho’s coffee I bought coming up the hill from Sapperton Station made me so uncomfortably warm I spent the service in a state resembling that of a dish of colloid.  It was a good service, and would have been even better if the person living next to the Hall hadn’t been running a fucking weed whacker at irregular and annoyingly loud intervals during the exact time the service was running.

After the service I went to New West Station and waited in front of the Landmark for Mike and he was frantic about being late and I told him to relax.  When we bought the tickets, we went to the theatre, sat down, and the movie started, so nobody had to sit through the trailers.

Age of Ultron is a colourful, noisy, spirited MESS.  There are a couple of funny lines, and that’s it; it achieves spectacle without providing more than a tiny nod to anything resembling emotional connection, or pulling more than cursory nods at performance out of the principals.  I have no intention of watching it again.  I was an idiot… we really should have gone to Mad Max, but there’s no point wailing over spilled digital.

After the movie we had a late lunch at the Hub.  Great food and a wonderful view from the deck, but I’ve now lowered my expectations of their service to the point where I’m tempted to give my food orders to the manager rather than the assortment of Sand Snakes (think stunning, raven haired and sorta hostile) they seem to have hired as servers. But it was a yummy lunch, srsly.

After that, we saw Katie and Alex.  Happy sigh.

Then we went on an errand for Mike.  While I was sitting in the car looking through the hole in the roof at the brilliant green of the tree and the glorious blue and white of our unforecasted sky, I completely missed the accident; two bicyclists got into a rear ender with each other cause, hey, no brake lights, and all I could hear through the roof was two dudebros saying, “Sorry, man, jeez I’m sorry.” No injuries except to pride.

Mike was laughing when he came back the car, “Can’t get more Vancouver than that.”

Then we went to the Astoria and I had a grapefruit flavoured beer and no word of a lie I used to think I’d drink any beer, but this stuff was, in the memorable phrase of Dr. Filk, AUTHENTICALLY VILE.  We have reached peak craft beer, son.

Then we went to the Hastings Sauna.  My spidey sense (I’ve had something resembling prodrome for a week now) told me to stay the hell out of the sauna for more than a few minutes at a time. I did that and I believe I was wise. Even so the heat and eucalyptus made me feel very relaxed, and they play spa music in the front room, so I just lay there like a dead thing listening to desultory harp music with the oscillating fan blowing over my sweating and corpulent form while Mike roasted himself.  Ah, English.  It can make anything sound beautiful.

Then Mike gave me a lift home and I collapsed, while I realized I’d left my phone at Mike’s place when we stopped off there to get Mike’s bag.  He’ll drop it off sometime after he achieves consciousness today.

And then I couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t sleep.  It was one before I slept and seven when I woke up.  I feel okay though.

Today writing, laundry and cleaning, and ignoring the stuff on the PVR until Jeff gets home.

Lots and lots

Yesterday I wrote 1700 words, only 1200 of which will end up in the novel unless I tweak them hard.

Keith came over and blitzed through GoT after taking me for a walk (we went to the Twist and got beer, which Keith kindly carried home, which is good, because I am very sore), and I made bread rolls, which was pretty much all I had to do to get Keith to come over.  (I think in some ways Keith considers my cooking to be pretty good.) The rolls are incredibly dense and chewy.  I will have to do that again, this time when Jeff’s here and before they vanish.

1.2 hours.

Margot and Buster are irritated that Jeff’s door is closed. Margot mewed as loudly as she could to wake me up this morning, which is not very loud but reasonably effective when she’s jamming her face under my door (the gap is very big.) Margot’s in the living room right now and Buster is on the top bunk sleeping in my suitcase.

Back to writing.  Pharos and George are working their way through a long to-do list.  mOm is enjoying it and so I wonder what I’ll dream up today.

The land and the people are one

EDIT.  This was brought on by thoughts of geobonding – the way a language spoken on a land for a long time in some ways becomes a land. I am envious of those who speak a language which has been on the land for a long time, because it has depths of richness and resonates in ways that English, the language that records its colonial history, cannot.  There are about 35 at-risk languages in BC alone, and the death of a language is part of the extinction that is genocide.

____________________________________

It is your land – or you belong to it, after a while the distinction blurs –  because every syllable of your language matches in magic the staccato calls of birds, the falls of rock, the crashing ocean, the dear familiar taste of this corm or that other, your particular delicacy. Only those friendly voices, who speak as you speak, and understand as you do, can share those nuances with you. This is what your language is. Each time you kill a language, my dear human, you are killing a small but measurable way to look at the world.  Do not be an idiot!  If a people live on a land for 50 years they forget the poor children (in capitalist terms, and even then it’s charitable) they stole it from.  If they live on it ten thousand, twenty thousand, thirty thousand years, ah, then strange things start to happen.

They have sung there for 30,000 years.  Their land has felt the resonance of their ir/reverant voices for 30,000 years,. You say it isn’t theirs.  Of course it is.  They’ve been putting their people in the ground, or elsewhere, for that long; birthed and suffered great wounds and triumphed and been wrong to the point of extinction on that land, and then been kicked off of most of it or transposed entire. 

Then they experienced that moment, which you are not allowed to co-opt, you with your fucking lawyers, god damn them all and I say that as an atheist so you hell-coupled miscreants will attend me, when you, with all of your people, have been ground up in the Malthusian sequelae of geopolitics, and weather, and religion, and war, and disease, and alcohol or opium or speed, and all of you are thrown into history like pretty stones into a rock polisher. When you come out, you are bright and shiny and new, for the house organs of capitalism likewise wear you down, and tell you that if you do not look like the rest of the world (however defined, but since humans are racially all one big playground, it’s really the same everywhere – the local rich) you will be Othered until you have the sense to kill yourself or otherwise die young from generations of trauma.

But. Life’s not fair.  Your enemies (demonstrably trying to kill you = enemies, pull on your beard as you may) co-opt everything about your people that they think is cool (an ever shrinking target as your blessed elders die), conflate it with sex and race and linguistic ability in a new language, and with skill and speed and a keen eye for the main chance, mock and countersue and vilify and beat and rape and jail and drug and abuse the living shit out of you if you even dare to whimper in the courts, or in any way upend the folkways of racism, Jim Crow and apartheid and the hell-coupled residential schools, so you have to get creative about how to keep fighting, but in the meantime everything you love about your culture you must keep alive (and even some shit you hate, but hey, tradition.) There is no one else.

So please be poor and mount court challenges to systemic discrimination against white people, while being among the last three hundred people who speak English, on Earth, while living in Nigeria with no clean water, before you pour verbal abuse on people who are in exactly the same situation, now, with just.the.names.changed. Your inability to understand with any human feeling or compassion the responsibility placed on the holders of a language in jeopardy transforms you into an enemy, always, until you free your mind.  For even if I grant that you have the right to the land, shelter on this challenging planet (which no uncoerced indigenous person ever shall), by killing a language you have committed a crime against humanity, and of spreading the blame and shame of it across an entire country, every colonial government must stand accused.

Breathing easy

Alex can crawl at what I consider a goodly pace. He smiled politely at my attempts at baby talk, and then got into a disagreement with one of my Crocs. (Katie will verify that he indeed made noises of displeasure at my shoe. Not the left one, the right one, since one of you is sure to ask.) And he slept like an angel during our meal. I am a topped-up grandma.

2.1 on the cpap.  It only being 4 am and me being shy on sleep I should probably put it back on…. but I prob’ly won’t.

Malcolm Gladwell quote

People are so insecure and neurotic about their ‘material.’ It’s not your material. You got it from a thousand places, the person who uses it is going to take it in a thousand directions. Everyone should just chill out. I thought that Jonah Lehrer was sloppy and made mistakes and all that, but the real question is: Did you read his books and learn something from it? If you did, who cares whether the Dylan quote had that precise wording or had a slightly different wording? I don’t know, I just don’t have the strength and patience for these kinds of intramural arguments that writers have about whether this precise use of words matched this precise use of words. I’d just much rather answer the question of whether something is being learned, or something interesting is happening.

 

word

Saw Alex today

and wrote 1222 words, and had phÆ¡ for dinner and really life is okay even if not a single person responds to any of the resumes I’ve sent out in the last two weeks.

Alex is sitting up, crawling, grinning and in general running his mama ragged. By which I mean: Alex can crawl at what I consider a goodly pace. He smiled politely at my attempts at baby talk, and then got into a disagreement with one of my Crocs. (Katie will verify that he indeed made noises of displeasure at my shoe. Not the left one, the right one, since one of you is sure to ask.) And he slept like an angel during our meal. I am a topped-up grandma.

whatevs

I am in a super strange mood, as I often be when the migraine (atypical) is pending (which it can do for weeks and then go back into its hole).  I shall make no decisions heavier than what to order for dinner (Mike’s treat) for the next 24 hours, and somebody please shoot me if I start making meeping noises about how nobody loves me, cause it just ain’t true.  Also, I’m doing laundry, because no matter what I do I get food on mah clothes.

Bwa ha ha, mistook Mike’s voice for Keith’s on the phone today.  I blame my brain chemistry.

I made word count yesterday (500 words a day is the recommended minimum) but continue, even after cleaning it with serious thoroughness to rassle with the cpap.

Wrigley!!!! omg Chipper you are the best.  I wish you could have heard me scream when I read that, you would have laughed your ass off.

Sometimes the cops have to use deadly force.

But sometimes it really seems like they don’t.

Back to naming babies.  Michel is NOT THE PERSON FOR THIS JOB.  Which is why he volunteered for it.  And of course he has ulterior motives, which add up to “The sooner the babies are born the sooner I can go back to making time with Kima hurrr durrr.”

Paul is supposed to collect me mid-afternoon to go walkies.  I am having trouble even making 2 k, but I suspect if I stick to someplace flat I’ll be fine.

 

Light mother

Still feeling very loved from last night; it was good to be with everyone, and getting a ride home from your son and not having to worry about how he drives is very pleasant too.

Alex is very vigorous.  I got to hold him and bounce him a couple of times but really he’s all about his ma.

Archie Panjabi is getting her own show.  Yay!  Hopefully it won’t be crap.

 

Writing is the very devil

666 words today.

Paul and Keith hosted our Mother’s Day dinner, Katie and Alex also being in attendance. I didn’t take any pictures, but I have lovely mental images now of Alex confidently and speedily crawling while carrying things and jamming them in his mouth, showing a mastery of multitasking one normally doesn’t attribute to a seven month old infant. Of course my notion of normal doesn’t really apply.  Once a grandmother, imagination takes wing, hyperbole becomes common speech, modesty goes skinny dipping with the paparazzi, and sanity departs on a baby-powder scented puff of wind.

wonderful meal

Rantroid

I just read Murray Rothbard on the subject of whether parents should be legally obliged to feed their children in a libertarian paradise, and since I find his views so repellent I shan’t repeat them here.

Yesterday I was supposed to go to church, and didn’t, because Sue never got my texts and didn’t respond to any that I sent her.  I couldn’t contact anyone at church and Jeff, sensing that my neurotic desire to find out if my friend was dead in her apartment was not just a passing phase, assisted with that.  Finally Robbie called me back and all was well and Sue was at church and we agreed to phone instead of text in future, but I was quite prostrate with concern and then embarrassment in consequence.

Also mOm I figured out what I was seeing (Jeff helped.)  The hummingbird was chasing the jay because it had just eaten its egg.  Happy Mother’s Day indeed!  I thought it was funny, and it was tragic.  How often our opinions are shaped by our location when we form them.

Katie knows me so well she figured I’d bail on our mother’s day walk after this contretemps, and actually I wanted to go after a while but she’d already changed plans to hang out with Suzanne. Oh well.

So yesterday was a day of thinking about the dark mother, and of course Kima trying to be pregnant and not dead.  I wrote about 500 words yesterday.  Pudding’s philosophy may not make it into the book, but the 250 words on Kima’s new section will. Yes, one of the babies is named Pudding. Her naming story will be included in the book.

I need to write some more query letters and there are a couple more beta readers.

No cpap – after a couple of days no problems with allergies, the nice weather has kept the pollen count moderate, so my schnozz is rejecting having anything stuck on it.

Miss Margot is continuing to learn how to fight the rodent menace under Buster’s tutelage.  I heard a ratling squeak as it ran into her googly face the other day, scaring it back toward Buster who admittedly is better at catching everything except flies.

Buster’s covered in scratches again.  There’s a big black and white cat from across the street that he always scraps with.

I have a google news alarm set up for Dorothy Dunnett.  Everytime something comes up on the internet about her I scan it to see if other Dunnett heads have any interest and then post it to the twitter Dunnett fan account.  I also have one set up for filk and then post to the Filker account on facebook.  Somewhere in the English speaking world the perfect actor to play Lymond has been born….. sigh. Show up soon!

 

My filking friend Andrew Ross wrote this

all such things as copyright belong to him  If you know the song, you’ll be howling by the end, and I think it’s a masterpiece

SONG-O-MATIC #15-13
Tune = Taylor Swift, “Shake it Off”
Definitely doing this one at Sasquan. Definitely needs a music video.

I don’t know how to play
I read my life away
That’s what people say, uh-huh
And then they look away

What I put on display
May rub them the wrong way
Well, be that as it may, uh-huh
I’m doing it my way

I’m animating, I’m not hibernating
It’s so fascinating, I’m at the World Con, and it’s gonna be alright

‘Cause the panelists will speak, speak, speak, speak, speak, speak
And the filkers gonna shriek, shriek, shriek, shriek, shriek, shriek
We’re gonna have all week, week, week, week, week, week, week
To geek it up, geek it up!
The cosplay will be chic, chic, chic, chic, chic, chic
And steampunk is antique, tique, tique, tique, tique, tique
It’s all in the technique, nique, nique, nique, nique, nique
We’ll geek it up, we’ll geek it up!

Sci-fi and fantasy
They set my spirit free
And that’s what they don’t see, uh-huh
They don’t see why I squee

The stories that they show (stories that they show)
That make my spirit grow (make my spirit grow)
That’s what they don’t know, uh-huh
They don’t know where I go

But I’m just nerdy, literate and wordy
Filking till 4:30, we’re at the World Con and it’s gonna be alright

‘Cause creators will create, rate, rate, rate, rate, rate
The animators animate, mate, mate, mate
The artists gonna illustrate, strate, strate, strate
And geek it up, and geek it up!
The writers will narrate, rate, rate, rate, rate
Their tales exhilarate, rate, rate, rate
I wanna hyperventilate, late, late, late
And geek it up! And geek it up!

I geek it up! I geek it up! I geek it up! I geek it up!
I geek it up! I geek it up! I geek it up! I geek it up!

Hey-hey-hey, just think while you’ve been getting down and posting comment after comment about that rotten old Hugo ballot, you could be getting down to the biggest geek party we got going!

My best friend’s moping at my door
Going, “Oh my God, the puppies piddled on the floor!”
I just took her to explore with the fella dressed like Thor
And with a rebel yell, we cried More, More, More!

‘Cause the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Don’t matter what they nominate, nate, nate, nate
Just No-Award the slate, slate, slate, slate, slate, slate
And geek it up, and geek it up!
And daleks will exterminate, nate, nate, nate
And succubi will undulate, late, late, late
And I for one can’t wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait
To geek it up! To geek it up!

We geek it up! We geek it up! We geek it up! We geek it up!
We geek it up! We geek it up! We geek it up! We geek it up!

My creative commons stuff does not apply to the above noted song, this parody belongs to Andrew Ross.