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a journal |
 This book is intended as a place to blog about my life and things I'm interested in and answers to prompts from various blog prompt sites here on WDC, including "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  and "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" I'm not sure yet what it'll turn into, but I'm going to have fun figuring it out. |
| Creation Saturday! Redefine the Ides of March to your liking and/or personal benefit. Okay, first off, I’m not sure I can redefine the Ides of March. I mean, honestly, it means the middle of March. Specifically the fifteenth, although I suppose the sixteenth is more mid when there are thirty-one days. It has specific connotation. The ides of March was when Caesar was killed by his friends in the middle of the Roman senate. Any redefinition that I do is going to cut into that connotative value, and it’s too rich for me to want to play with. By evoking the Ides of March, I get the added benefit of Shakespeare and a soothsayer’s words unheeded. So, if I’m going to write around it, I don’t want to lose any of the definition. But that doesn’t mean I can’t write around it. And so: I didn’t notice the first sign, as such. I mean, when cats start yowling in the middle of the night, you don’t automatically assume that it’s a message for you. You think your neighbor’s cat will have kittens in about two months. The next morning the milk was sour, but the date was about a week past so that didn’t get my attention either. I never drink milk in time, even when I buy the really little bottles. I did notice the crows. A murder of them, following me with their little crow eyes all the way to the car. I noticed them even more when I got out of the car to walk into work. Sitting on the wires, watching me as though they thought I was about to die and leave my eyeballs and assorted soft parts for them in my will. But even that could have been natural. What happened when I booted up my computer—that really freaked me out. “Beware the Ides of March.” In big letters. Running across my screen like a banner. But even that didn’t really scare me. You see, at work, there’s ANNIE. She’s an AI (long story, not important) we’ve been working on for about a year my group. We’ve been treating her like a baby, teaching things gradually—a crawl before you walk kind of thing. Well, my responsibility is language acquisition, and so I’ve been reading to her every day. We started small, but she learns fast, and so we’re up to Shakespeare. Just like we’d train a high school student, and look how well they turn out. But it means that every morning, ANNIE asks me questions about the things we read the day before. We were going to read Julius Caesar today (she has access to the internet) so I guess I just figured that she was getting a head start. “What about it?” I type back. Big silence. She was quiet all day, which wasn’t like her. I read the play, on schedule, and asked my coworkers if they’d noticed anything strange. Nothing. That night, I woke up at three am to cats. Again. The milk was sour, again. And the crows had brought their cousins. At work, the banner was even bigger, and she didn’t talk. At all, to me. As the week wore on, I felt more and more strange. I started noticing the portents around me. The dark clouds that hovered over my apartment building. The moon was bleeding—a darker red than I used to see because of the pollution in the city. Weird horsemen paraded down my street, making it harder to get to work. I stepped in a pile on the way to my car and so my shoe smelled of manure all day long. Tomorrow is the Ides of March. I hear the cats yowling. I really don’t want to go to work. |
| Fun Fact Friday! On this day in 1454, Amerigo Vespucci was born in Florence, Italy...Matthias Ringmann, a German mapmaker, named the American continent in his honor. What unexpected places have your personal explorations led you to? Another mapmaker! In under a week. Apparently March is full of them. Or maybe it’s the whole year, and I’m just becoming aware of them in March. Okay, there are a few ways I can take personal explorations—the most obvious being traveling. Generally, when I travel, it’s been planned for ages. There were a couple of road trips in college that weren’t, of course, because who plans when they’re in college. The first was in December. It was the reading day before finals, and a bunch of us wanted out of town, because—well, it was the day before finals. So, about eight of us from the dorm pack up our bags for two days and head into the mountains to a little cabin one of the girls’ families owned. Did I mention December? The roads were plowed, but the snow was deep enough that the mailbox was covered—so it was a good thing the driver knew where we were going. So, here, my personal exploration led me to a day in the snow with a bunch of other girls. There was hot chocolate involved. And snowball fights and a snowman family. We got back to campus refreshed and unstudied. The other that I remember more clearly was in April. Again, it was just before finals and a bunch of us wanted out of town (which is a recurring theme in college), so about twelve of us got in three cars with tents and headed to Zion’s so we could climb Angel’s Landing. On the way down, our driver had to talk us out of a ticket, which was unfair, because we really were going with the traffic. It wasn’t our fault that the traffic was going twenty-five miles over the speed limit. We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows and slept in a tent, and the next day we went up the mountain as a group. I was one of the less fit people, so I brought up the rear most of the way up, and up. Lots of switchbacks on that trail, and then at the top, you head out to the point along a trail that has three hundred foot drops on both sides. It made me wonder how Dad had gotten Mom out there on their honeymoon (she doesn’t hike. or camp). Going down went quicker, although the trail was a bit damp because it rained while we were descending. And then we went back to campus. So, there my personal explorations led me to a hike and sore muscles just in time for finals. And an opportunity to see a place that has personal connection to my family. But I have to admit, a lot of my personal explorations have taken me through books, not through roads at all. For example, one semester, I had to write a twenty-five page essay on Shakespeare. I chose Much Ado about Nothing, because I like that play, and then I started reading the literature I could find about the play and marriage and 16th c England until I came up with a thesis (which involved the two major marriages in the play and the fact that marriage in Shakespeare’s time was acknowledged to have two parts, the public and the private—I could go on, of course. For twenty-five pages, at least). And then I did my best to prove that thesis in twenty-five pages, which was difficult, but I learned a lot about marriage and the play and what I wanted my marriage to contain—and other things like that. Once we add in explorations on the internet (which begin with a simple question and end hours and stories later)—well, personal exploration through words is something I believe in. And they’ve led me here, to this blog post, in my bedroom at my laptop—worlds and stories later. |
| Huh. Well, first off, let me just let everyone know that I don’t let myself get shamed for anything. So, I’m not sure I get this question. I figure, if I’m going to do something, there’s no point on letting myself get second guessed at some later point by a person who judges my actions without being around in my head to deal with deciding on that action in the first place. This is the result of living for most of my life with a mother who takes passive/aggressive to a studied level. My father is nearly as bad (possibly in self defense). Fortunately, she’s not as bad as my grandmother, who is the result of her grandmother (we’re talking my great-great grandmother, who took in my grandmother after my great-grandmother died and my great-grandfather basically abandoned the children, and proceeded to mess them up emotionally until my grandmother finally escaped into service (as a maid) at about fourteen) . . . so she can be reasoned with. Most of the time. So, I’ve discovered that the only real way to live is to act in such a way that guilt cannot be thrust upon you. As a result—right now, my bed is unmade, and I don’t make it except when I’ve just washed the sheets. Most of my life is in boxes, and has been for about six months because I don’t want to have to unpack them, although I’ve been slowly unpacking books as I’ve needed them (my books alone were twenty boxes). I have the minimum amount of clothes unpacked. I have hardwood floors that I don’t sweep (or vacuum—I have a fear of vacuum cleaners that goes back to my senior year in high school). I wash the dishes and clean the counters in a timely manner because I’m grossed out by bugs and it’s more difficult to wash off food when it’s dried on. I clean the bathroom regularly, again, because I don’t like to be grossed out. I clean the living room, but whenever I do, I have a bad attitude about it so that people don’t bug me when I’m doing it. I’m the oldest of six children. Everyone knew better than to be in my line of sight when I cleaned, although they had to be within earshot so that when I bellowed for them to come get some precious thing that they’d left on the floor for me to toss, they’d come quickly and quietly, get it, and go away again. I don’t spend long lazy days in bed. In the first place, I need to get up regularly so that I can do my basal injection in a timely manner. After all, running high (this is a blood sugar/insulin issue. I inject so I don’t go high) makes me irritable. But after I inject and eat breakfast, I sometimes go back to bed. And sometimes get up. It depends on the day and my mood. Right now, I don’t have a job, so I spend some time every day trying to fix that. I knit. This keeps my hands busy. I can knit while I’m watching TV or reading a book, and I do so. Some of what I make ends up on an etsy store that my mother has set up, so even that isn’t really lazy. So, I guess the definition that I’ve come up with is, the right level of laziness is the level where everything gets done, eventually, and no one had better try and make me do things quicker than I’m good and ready to do them, because then, they get done slower. That’s the stubbornness thing. I get it from my parents. |
| War Chest Wednesday! For the new kids in the back, these were future prompt ideas sent in by previous challengers. So, don't blame me, but feel free to take them in any direction you'd like. Whispers, or screams? The problem with either/or questions is that my first inclination is always to answer “yes” or “no” depending on the question and my mood and the phase of the moon and the orientation of the heavens and how much sugar I’ve had in the previous twenty-four hours. Right now? I am more inclined to whisper than to scream. I’ve had a cough that began with a cold at the end of January and has lingered through now with a tickle at the back of my throat, and so when I consider screaming, I just know it will end in a coughing fit that will hurt my ribs and scrape my throat raw, and I’ve just regained enough of a voice to sing. It’s difficult to lead the music in church on a Sunday if you can’t sing. Or to teach a Sunday School class. Both of which I do. So, for practical reasons, screaming is out. The thing is, whispering is not much better for your voice. After all, have you ever been in a laryngitis type situation where all you could do is whisper, unvoiced at that, just the air over your vocal chords and no real sound coming out? Well, that hurts. It makes my vocal issues last longer than they would have if I just shut my mouth and let sound pass me by. So, whispering hurts, too. I do have some ASL. Not very much, of course, because I don’t have any deaf friends that I can talk to regularly (I used to when I lived in MD near DC, which is the reason I have some ASL, but that was a long time ago). You know, you can whisper and shout in ASL just like you can in a spoken language. After all, otherwise, how could you have an irrational argument with your sisters? I do whisper sometimes, when my throat isn’t tickling like it is at the moment (I wish it would heal—cough drops and hot herbal teas for the past three weeks, so that I don’t cough and make it worse, over and over), although sometimes that can be louder than screaming. I mean, have you ever heard a five year old whisper? Somehow, whispering never involves the use of the inside voice without a specific mention by parent (or in my case, aunt) and so the thing the kid wanted to keep a secret gets shouted across the entire group of people. I never scream on a rollercoaster or when I’m watching a scary movie (which I don’t do). I don’t know why. Vocal training, maybe. There’s nothing like a serious discussion about vocal nodes with pictures to make a person not want to experience that. Ever. Instead I laugh. Except when I’m ill, when anything, even laughter, sends me into a coughing fit the likes of which I don’t want to deal with ever again. But, that was the long way around to say that at present, when asked: whispers or screams, I apparently choose coughing. |
| Talk Tuesday! What would you prefer...talking pets, or humans with heightened animal sensibilities? I have no dependence on the interest of a conversation with animals. Right now, when I meet a cat or a dog, I can pretty much tell what he or she wants to say, and it always feels like a series of orders (or pleas) that I may or may not have time for. I keep on thinking about the seagulls on Finding Nemo—and wonder if a pet would have anything more to say. As you may (or may not) be able to tell, I don’t have a pet. We had cats and a dog when I was young, but they gradually faded away. As my mother puts it, she had six kids, she couldn’t afford a pet, too. Now that I’m grown, I still have no real desire for a pet (although I don’t know if that would change if I lived alone). I’m one of those people who gets up in the morning and starts doing something like reading or writing, and all of a sudden, it’s dinner time and I’m starving because I haven’t eaten all day. That kind of person shouldn’t afflict a pet with her version of care. So, I’m not really interested in pets, talking or otherwise. Which leaves me with the other option. Humans with heightened animal sensibilities. While I’m not completely sure what that means (I don’t want a nose like a dogs, for example. I have a hard enough time dealing with bad smells) I hesitate there as well. It strikes me that any heightened sense is going to come with major drawbacks. A lot of animals live in the absolute outside edge of their skins, and humans can’t do that and maintain vestiges of civilization. So, I’m kind of not terribly wanting that, either. Which probably sounds boring. It’s like when someone asks me where I would go if I could travel in time, and I say, I don’t want to because the time periods I’m most interested in were all before the discovery and manufacture of insulin for human consumption (injection?) and I’d be dead in less than a week. Painfully. And then, the person asking the question says, but I didn’t mean it like that! and the conversation goes off into the realm of why do I have to be such a spoilsport. But I don’t want to live with the drawbacks of having heightened animal sensibilities, and I have no desire to have conversations with pets . . . so. There we are. |
| Motivational Monday! Flemish mapmaker Gerardus Mercator was born on this day in 1512. What's been your reasoning behind going anywhere you once thought before you'd never get to? First off, I read this question, and I think, here’s a person who talks the way I think! I’ve actually traveled quite a bit inside the US (I’ve lived in eight different states all across the country, plus road trips), and I spent about eighteen months in Northern England (the Lakes, mostly) after I graduated college with my BA. I’ve also visited Canada. I have every confidence that if I really want to visit a country, I’ll figure out a way to make it happen, so there aren’t many places that I’ve thought I’d never get to. There are still places I want to go—like New Zealand to see all the places behind Lord of the Rings, and to Australia, just because. I’ve wanted to see Greece and France and Italy and Spain and the rest of Europe because the bones of the land must be steeped in stories. I want to see Sweden and Wales and Germany and more of England because I have family from there. I want to see Ireland and the Isle of Man because . . . stories. But I don’t have any preconceptions about what I will see when I get there. I want it to unfold before me like a story, adding upon itself. Inside the states, I wouldn’t mind visiting Disney World (or Disney Land) because I’ve never been, and the Appalachian Trail because I think it would be fun to spend a summer just walking through the mountains, as long as I had good shoes and could get down before it was really cold. I don’t like the cold. I want to visit the ocean again, and see the waves wash onto the sand and taste the salt in the air and remember what it was like to be a child. I want to climb lighthouses in Maine, the old ones that still have a mirror that they polish so that it could shine brighter than a sun. I want to crawl through caves where echoes answer every sound and when the lights go off, there’s true darkness. I want to swim in Hawaii and dance the hula. The thing is, there’s no reason why I couldn’t get there. Someday. If not in person, in a story. |
| The Sunday News! In February, teachers throughout the entire state of West Virginia went on strike , citing poor working conditions including low salaries and rising costs of benefits. Strikes by public employees aren't legal in WV, yet the teachers have been willing to take the risk because the situation can't get much worse, and there aren't enough certified teachers in the state in part because starting salaries are startlingly low. What do you think? What's a fair salary for teacher, based on the expectations faculty administrations and parents place on them? Any other thoughts on the topic? First off, I am not a teacher. I’ve worked as an instructor for university (on a graduate assistant’s pay), I have grandparents, parents, aunts, and siblings who are teachers, and I’ve had a lot of teachers over the years, and I’m trying to get a teaching job, but I’m not a teacher. I don’t have the certification. I also have never been directly affected by a strike (although when my father worked for the phone company, he had to go out when strikes were on and fix things because he was salaried). I know that most teachers are over worked and under paid. They have more homework than their students. A conscientious teacher will want to do more for his or her students than he or she can. They spend hours with them, more waking hours than even their parents when the children are in elementary school. I think that most teachers should be paid more than they are. They should also get the kind of respect that few of them receive. From what I read in the article, West Virginia’s teachers are some of the poorest paid and most overworked in the nation. I even understand that West Virginia has a history of strikes and that the communities are supportive of what the teachers have done. However, I think that this disruption of classes over the past month is going to ultimately hurt the students of West Virginia without helping the teachers in the ways that they need. The legislators are going to waffle about and maybe fix something, and then, the teachers will go back, and their students will be a month behind—and that includes in things like standardized tests, college entrance exams, graduations—all those things that should have been doing over the past month. West Virginia is a rural state, but that doesn’t mean that its children don’t deserve consistent education. I don’t like the fact that while the teachers (and their students, I understand from the article) are participating in their right to fight for their teacher’s livelihood, the students are not in classrooms. Learning is a cumulative process. We build upon the things that we’ve learned yesterday to grasp the new concepts of tomorrow, and these students are having an involuntary break. When they come back, instead of being at the March or April level in their lessons, they’ll still be in January, or worse, will have regressed to December or November. And that makes me sad. I wish there was a better way of fixing things. |
| Creation Saturday! This is the title and cover of your next book. What's it about? And what are some of the world-famous authors saying on its back cover? Adventure: Alpaca My Bags First off, let me just say that I would have had a difficult time with this prompt even if I hadn’t just spent about twelve hours in a car (well—make that eight hours in the car, four hours in the meeting between car rides), because I don’t tend to start with a title. Especially one that’s specifically punny. Titles are something that tend to happen to me after most of the creative process is over and done with, the draft rewritten several times, and then, a title happens. Even then, I tend to revamp the title. In fact, I tend to start out anything (essay or short story in specific) with the working title “The Absolute Worst Title in the World” which holds me until I can come up with something short and pithy. That having been said, alpacas immediately make me think knitting (and Peru, and that yarn that I knit my first big shawl with (it was dark gray fingering weight, and I don’t know if it actually had alpaca in it or just came from Peru, but I think it did have bamboo—or that may have been a dark green that came before it . . . I’m just not sure) which leads to a short story that I wrote for workshop a couple of years ago. I set it in a knit shop, with the viewpoint character being the owner, who was trying to come up with the next step in an argument she was having with her best friend about why she shouldn’t be able to buy into the shop. The thing is, I’ve spent a lot of time sitting with my mother at knit shops, listening to the ladies sit around a table and knit (every knit shop worthy of its name has a little table where people sit and knit and offer sage advice when people come in about knitting), and it’s always struck me that there is story there. People who spend a lot of time working with their hands and talking about life and jobs and their husbands’ operations and the fact that their nephew is in ICU—and some of the talk is under the surface, like the lady who used to work at the store who staged a big scene when she quit because she lives a scorched earth policy. So, this story is about the yarn store, its owner, its employees, its patrons. They all live in a small town, and other things are happening at the same time—weddings, funerals, a granddaughter who has come back home pregnant and angry, the couple down the street who are trying for sustainable living with thirteen chickens, two goats, a garden full of vegetables, and a smallish herd of alpacas, because . . . why not. And I have no idea what world famous authors are saying about the book. My workshop friends said they were surprised the tension I could get into such a quiet setting but that I needed to expand it into novel length. I tend to get that a lot in workshop. sigh. |
| Fun Fact Friday! On this day in 1984, the first McDonald's franchise was closed; a new location was opened across the street from the old one in Des Plaines, Illinois. Have you ever worked in fast food (or the restaurant industry in general)? Tell us about your experience! Good, bad, ugly, and/or fun! And if you haven't, I'm sure you've got an entertaining restaurant experience from the customer's perspective you'd be more than willing to share. *** I have never worked in the food service industry. Well, let me take that back. One day in the summer after my first year in college, I spent bussing tables at a Mexican restaurant. I was tired afterwards and was glad when another opening happened, this one to be part time nanny (five hours a day, five days a week) for my mother’s boss’s three-month old. This job paid more, and although it involved cleaning up after the baby, it also involved a lot of down time when the baby was asleep and I could curl up on the couch and read my book. She was a cute baby. So, I got a check from the one day’s work at the restaurant and played with a baby all summer. I really don’t have many restaurant stories—the one that immediately springs to mind is more a car story than a restaurant story . . . but here you go. I live in a city with storm sewers that can’t always handle the volume of water that is common in the city. This means, when a particularly nasty thunderstorm runs through, there is the potential for flooding in the streets. This happened one Sunday when the heavens opened. We had a car (little gold four door) parked out in the front of the house. Across the street, a new hotel had been put in, with a storm drain between us and them (on the other side of the street), but apparently, it wasn’t totally working. So, when we got home from church, the street was basically three feet deep in water stretching from the hotel, across the ditch with the storm sewer to half way up our lawn. The car itself was at one of the lower points in this system, and had so much water that the cup holders were filled. The water drained within two hours or so. Dad got a shop vac and cleaned up the car. It started. We thought everything was fine. So, the next Tuesday, Mom and I use the car to go to a little Chinese buffet not far from campus (we were both working on campus at the time—Mom at the library, me in IT, Dad was a professor—and so we spent our lunch hours together when we could). The food was good, the atmosphere was good. When we got out of the restaurant, the car wouldn’t start. We spent two hours at that restaurant smelling the food and waiting for the tow truck and then a ride to get back to work. The people were nice, but I have to admit, spending that time there made both Mom and I a little leery of going back. Bad vibes. Turns out, flooding is an automatic total. The wires got wet, something shorted, and that would involve rebuilding the whole car, so we bought a new car (again, little and gold—my parents are kind of stuck in a rut). Fast forward a couple of months. We haven’t been back to the Chinese because Mom has bad vibes, so she’s on jury duty, and Dad wants to prove to her there isn’t anything bad luck-y about the restaurant, so he and I go to the Chinese buffet. Again, good food, good experience. We go out—a Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving. The car starts fine. We’re driving back to campus, minding our own business, when an SUV pulls out of a parking lot in front of us, loses control, and hits us (the other driver’s fault, she’d borrowed her son’s car and didn’t realize how it handled). Airbags deploy, my face looks like someone used me as a punching back, I break my glasses, Dad misses his class (and the students probably rejoice because he was going to give a quiz), and I miss the rest of the work day. The SUV drives away. We’re totaled (airbags mean automatic total). The car isn’t six weeks old. We never go back to that particular Chinese buffet again. We can’t afford another totaled car. |
| First off, let me make clear that I don’t often have large sums of money given to me. I’ve been a college student for most of my adult life, and haven’t had much money at all. The largest checks I’ve ever written have been for tuition (which I think is worth it). The largest single purchase that I have ever made was back in 2002, when I had just paid off my student loans from my undergrad and bought a computer. It was a major purchase at the time (nearly as much as a semester of tuition) and involved a huge monitor, a tower, speakers, a microphone that I never used, a printer, and more cords than are reasonable. I set it up in my bedroom and spent a lot of time online—mostly on Stories.com (as the site used to be called). When I went back to school in 2003 (quitting my job in the process—which meant more student work and more loans) we packed the whole thing in the back of a rental along with my clothes and books and headed off. My student apartment didn’t have the internet at the time, so the computer was only used for writing essays and stories and poems as needed for my major and my sanity. When I came home again, I shipped the computer because it was easier than taking it on the train, and it lurked upstairs for a while, still unconnected to the internet because I didn’t have reasonable virus protection. It died about five years ago, slipping away quietly and taking some files with it. I almost want to see of someone could open it up and make sure I have all my files off the hard drive. I think I have them all on a stick, but I don’t know for certain. Another large purchase that I’ve made (more recently—2014?) was my insulin pump. It was the end of the year, because at the end of the year, when people with diabetes have met their out of pocket is when the pump companies start to congregate and tell you that this is something that you really need—a new delivery system for your insulin that will mean that you only have to buy one kind of insulin and only stick yourself once every three days (instead of two kinds of insulin four times a day). The insurance would cover most of the $6000 system. What they don’t tell you is that the system itself is nothing. But once you’re hooked, then comes the real drain. Infusion sets (the thing that sticks into you for three days, dripping insulin constantly into your body), and reservoirs (the thing that holds the insulin inside the pump and is only good for about 180 units, after which it needs to be changed) together run about $500 ever three months, which is okay as long as the insurance helps, but at the time . . . well, it didn’t. I was on the pump for a little over a year before I decided that multiple daily injections were the less expensive alternative, especially for someone who was about to graduate and was losing my work as an instructor. I’ve been basically unemployed (and looking) since 2015. That’s when I spent three months helping out my sister who was having some severe health issues. She had three kids at the time, and I was nanny. Last year, I finally got my act together and finished my thesis, so I’m no longer in college, but I’m still looking for a job. So, my versions of major purchases at this point are things like new sandals when something falls apart, or yarn. I do knit. Recently, I made about $100 for a study I’m in (no, I’m not in the process of selling any important organs). I saw the money, and wanted to spend it, so I purchased a lovely gradient yarn (green to black to blue)—about 670 yards of pure Marino wool for about $45—and I made it into a shawl. And then, I bought another ball of the same stuff to make into another shall that I still haven’t chosen, yet. Which is a terrible thing to do when the yarn is worth more than my bank account . . . but there you go. |
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