[personal] Miscellaneous miscellany
Yesterday was a long, good day. Day Jobbery went well, even better than normal. We had a terrific Open Dinner here in Austin, with @dratz, @itsaJuliasaurus (a/k/a Mrs. @dratz), ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=1)
stillsostrange, @StevenBrust, Skyler White, D—, old Austin Slug Tribe friends Jn4 and CH, jess_ka, E—, sophielandon and Mr. sophielandon. I got to talk with everyone but E—, to whom I regretfully didn’t even manage to say good-bye.
Afterwards, we rolled back to chez @dratz where I wound up interviewing @StevenBrust and Skyler White on camera.
This was a cold interview, from my perspective, in that I hadn’t known I’d be conducting it until about a minute before the interview started, and I’d done none of my usual interview preparation. Nonetheless, Steve and Skyler were gracious and cooperative interview subjects. Oddly, I went to bed feeling a bad attack of imposter syndrome post-interview. That’s mostly a measure of how tired I was, given my usual bullet-resistant writerly ego.
Now I’m heading back to Portland, rather underslept and feeling more than a bit behind on my writing. The latter is not in fact true, this is just my psychotically persistent writerself talking, so I’ll be fine. After lunch with mlerules, I’ll be working Day Jobbery this afternoon, then photographing the_child‘s lacrosse team, and spending the evening with her. More Day Jobbery tomorrow and (hopefully) lunch with kenscholes. Then off to Detroit on Thursday.
I do owe a couple of blog posts, time and mental focus permitting. Among other things, I want to document last Saturday’s cheesefest at Paradise Lost II.
Also of note, a dream from a couple of nights ago. I was watching television (in my dream). It was a nature documentary about a family of manta rays that had adopted a kitten. That was all very sweet and adorbz until at one point in the documentary, the manta rays turned on their kitten. As they began slashing at the animal, taking bites out of it, I felt the stinging, tearing pain of each bite in my body. I got wrapped up in wondering how the documentary crew had managed to capture then broadcast the pain to me, the viewer. Interpretation of the meaning of this dream is left as an exercise for the reader.
At any rate, I’m off. Be well.
Photo © 2012 Donnie Reynolds and Waterloo Productions. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.
Tags: Austin, Child, Detroit, dreams, friends, interviews, Photos, Portland, Process, Travel, work, Writing
Posted: 3:21 am Tue May 22 2012 | Comments(0) |
[personal] Teachable moments
It’s been quite a good conference here professionally speaking, but last night I went to bed early feeling irritated and sour. This morning I woke up feeling depressed and upset.
I walked for an hour along San Antonio’s Riverwalk and tried to really get down into why I felt the way I did. Some facile explanations readily presented themselves, but even in the midst of my emotional distress, I recognized those for what they were. I think I eventually reached a better understanding, which in turn made me rather uncomfortable.
The fact that I was rather uncomfortable strikes me as a important, and as a reason to talk about this despite my first impulse to keep the whole business to myself in a fit of passive-aggressive sulking. This is especially true in the light of John Scalzi’s recent, excellent post on the Lowest Difficulty Setting.
Last night, well after all our formal events were concluded, about a dozen of us were in the conference suite goofing off, cutting up, and so forth, as one does. Alcohol had been flowing, a little of it into me. For me, this evening space at writing conventions and conferences among like-minded people has always been one of the few places in my life where I can really cut loose and be my unfettered self. Fast talking, flirty, potty mouthed, pun riddled, and rather over the top. Those of you who’ve known me for a while in real life have probably seen me in this mode.
Most of the time I’m Dad, or an employee, or a professional writer representing myself, my work and my field, or a cancer patient. (A hell of a lot of that last one.) Or I’m just some guy in the grocery store or the post office or whatever, going about his business. All of those are roles, adopted with varying degrees of self-consciousness. But that convention/conference party space is one of those rare places where I have always felt I can just be me.
Except it went wrong for me last night. To be clear right up front, not through anyone else’s bad behavior, as no one treated me badly at all, but through my own internal processes.
A joke with religious content was told. Someone was offended and left abruptly. I neither told the joke nor was upset by it, but I certainly made a strong material contribution to the fast-and-loose social environment that made that joke seem reasonable to the teller, and made all of us but one laugh uproariously.
In the wake of that moment, the bunch of us got into a lengthy, serious discussion about our social responsibilities to one another, what I in a moment of flipness called a “white people encounter group.” It was rather productive, especially given that a number of us were at least tipsy, and we were all pretty tired. It was also eye-opening for me.
I’ve been explicitly aware of the concept of privilege, as discussed in progressive social circles, since the late 1980s. The first time I can recall hearing the term with this meaning was listening to an interview on NPR in 1988 or so with Peggy McIntosh discussing her essay on white privilege and male privilege, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.
I’ve been thinking and writing about it both directly and indirectly for the quarter century since then. I’ve expended a lot effort in my personal life to avoid leveraging that privilege in areas where I do have control. Put very simply, for example, not cutting in front of the deli line because I’m the tall(ish) white guy standing in the crowd and the clerk points to me next.
I’m also co-parenting a child who is a female person of color. One of my primary jobs as her parent is prepare for her life by helping her become a happy, self-confident, intelligent young woman with enough wisdom and resilience to deal with all the stuff she’ll have to wade through that has simply never come my way.
As for me, in Scalzi’s terms, yeah, I’m playing life on the lowest difficulty setting. I sometimes joke that if I were fifty pounds lighter and $500,000 richer, I would be The Man. Except that’s not a joke, it’s true. And yes, I can point to a lot of obstacles in my life history from childhood sexual abuse to deep clinical depression in my teens and twenties to cancer in my forties, but all of those were overcome in part through my privilege as a white male, for example, by having the kind of family support and adult employment that gave me full access to high quality healthcare with excellent doctors who treated me with respectful attention. Even with all the crap, I’m still playing on the lowest difficulty setting.
What I realized last night, what depressed and upset me, was that my sense of being free and unfettered, of being able to cut loose and be myself, is itself a distinct form of privilege. Once we got serious, some of the women in the room were willing to speak up and explain that certain jokes which had passed earlier made them uncomfortable, but they didn’t want to ruin the mood by saying anything. I myself pointed out that there had been some psuedohomoerotic clowning around by straight guys, including me, which would probably have made any LGBTQ-identified people in the room uncomfortable, though no one had spoken up. I was sharply (and appropriately) corrected when I prefaced one of my comments by saying we now live in a culture where offense is in the eye of the beholder. That is certainly my experience, but I’m speaking and thinking from a position of privilege, almost all of it transparent to me as its beneficiary. As the other person pointed out, women are constantly being told by men what they should or shouldn’t be offended by. Probably including me, some of the time.
I feel like I lost something important last night. I feel like I lost a sense of unguarded social freedom. How I lost that sense of unguarded social freedom was by realizing deep in my gut something which I’ve known intellectually for years. That is, that for most people, that sense of unguarded social freedom never existed in the first place.
That makes me very, very sad.
I hate teachable moments, especially when I’m on the receiving end of them.
Tags: Child, Conventions, Culture, gender, Personal, race
Posted: 6:57 am Sun May 20 2012 | Comments(5) |
[personal] Happy Mother’s Day
Happy Mother’s Day to my mom and step-mom, and to Mother of the Child, and to you.
Whoever you are, you probably started out life with a mother. If you’re lucky, you still have her. You might be a mother, or be partnered with a mother. If you have kids, they quite possibly have a mother. Even if you’re a male mom, you’re still a mother.
So, well, Happy Mother’s Day to you and all the mothers in your life.
Tags: family, Personal
Posted: 6:50 am Sun May 13 2012 | Comments(1) |
[personal|photos] This, that and the other thing; with bonus ranting about architecture
Some generally unrelated squibs for your amusement…
Writing
In between bouts of napping in a Lorazepam-induced haze, I got through about a quarter of the Kalimpura copy edit on the plane yesterday. So far it seems to be a pretty clean manuscript. There’s a little mental game I play with myself on copy edits, which is to count how many pages I get without a single markup. Those pages are the ones I “won”. So far, in 104 pages processed, exactly two have been clean.
This isn’t as bad as it might sound, as many of the CEM markups are typesetting notes and whatnot, so for example, every manuscript page with a scene break on it has markup. Likewise some basic usage stuff which doesn’t reflect errors on my part or copy editors queries, but rather conformance to Tor’s house style. However, for my little mental game, only clean pages count, regardless of the reason for the markups. 2/100 is about average for me, I think.
Go, me!
Weight
I hate part of this monster for dinner last night:
Terminator sandwich from the Rock House Grill at Cartlandia.
This may have something to do with me weighing in this morning at the highest weight I’ve been at in several years. So, time to get very serious about diet and exercise. The frustrating thing is that chemo has apparently changed my metabolism. (Again.) Despite yesterday’s sandwich, I’ve been eating and exercising at levels consistent with my behaviors prior to this last round of cancer, which were sufficient to keep my weight down in the 220s. That same level of diet and exercise now seems to peg me around 240. So I’m going to have to work more and eat less to maintain where I used to be. Which is both irritating and discouraging, to say the least.
Architecture
So my hotel bathroom in Columbus, OH had apparently been designed by an architect who’d never actually shut a bathroom door, or taken a shower. This was a nice, upscale business class hotel, where I wouldn’t expect such weirdness.
The bathroom was sort of triangular in shape. I’m not sure why, as the building itself was a pretty standard 15- or 20-story box like most hotels of its class. Because of the triangular shape, the bathroom door was hinged down the middle, as well as being hung from the doorframe in the usual fashion. Sort of like one of those bifold closet doors gone freelancing. So you pushed open the door and folded it at the same time.
The bathroom door
However, that is a solid core door. It’s fairly heavy, and only made heavier by all the hardware. Not so hard to open from the outside, but if you’re inside the bathroom and have managed to close the door, in order to open it again, you have to do a little dance around the vanity and the toilet. There’s simply no place to stand when the door is swinging open or shut. And if there’s a bathmat on the floor in the usual place one might put a bathmat, just outside the shower, it’s pretty much impossible to open the door again because it snags on the bathmat. God help you if you’ve dropped a towel on the floor.
The pièce de résistance, however was the shower.
It’s quite elegant looking. That’s a long shower pan on the floor, with a floor-to-ceiling pane of glass blocking the water splash in lieu of a shower curtain. However, in order to turn the shower on, you have to step into the enclosure and reach forward to the water controls. This results in an unavoidable blast of water in the face, as there’s no other way to approach them. In an unfamiliar hotel, you have no idea how hot it’s going to be on any given setting. In my case, nearly scalding water nailed me in the face, which I then had to reach through, twice, to adjust to a tolerable temperature.
There’s no damned way to control the water except by standing in it, thanks to that pane of glass.
Not to mention which, once you insert your corpus delecti in the shower stream, all the water splashing off your body goes right out the step-in opening and soaks the bathmat.
Which makes the damned door that much harder to open.
I’m sure someone thought they were very clever when they designed this bathroom, but I have to say, the architects were idiots, as were the hotel execs who approved this design. People who design this stuff ought to be forced to use it before it can be foisted on an unsuspecting public.
That’s all the ranty I got this morning.
Photos © 2012, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Books, Cancer, Food, Funny, health, Kalimpura, Photos, Process, Travel, Writing
Posted: 6:47 am Sun May 13 2012 | Comments(0) |
[personal] Updatery of various kinds
In no particular order…
I’m off to Seattle shortly this morning for a Day Jobbe trade show. Somewhat unusually for me, I’ll be taking the train from Portland northward. Thursday I fly from SEA to Columbus, OH, for a day of meetings on Friday. Back home Saturday morning. So three travel days this week, and what look to be two twelve-hour work days as well as one more (hopefully) normal work day. Oh, the glamor. There is, however, the Open Dinner in Columbus, OH Friday night. [ LiveJournal ] Watch this space, though. If my meetings run short, I might try to catch a late flight home Friday and cancel dinner accordingly.
On the plus side, I’m (probably) one writing session away from finishing the first draft of Their Currents Turn Awry, Sunspin volume two. At that point, it will go into the drawer for a while, likely until the fall.
My next effort in sequence is to process agent feedback on the book proposal for Going to Extremes, though I’ll take a few days off for a brain break, not to mention dealing with the forthcoming crazy week, before picking that up. I’m ahead of schedule in terms of my production calendar. This is nice. June is set aside for short fiction and miscellaneous projects, so if you’re looking for something from me, now would be a nice time to remind me. I do track that stuff, but sometimes projects slip through the cracks.
Yesterday, the_child and I (and a friend of hers) went to see The Avengers [ imdb ]. As my (step)mother commented, “But no Emma Peel!”
For reals, it was an awesome movie. So awesome I don’t really have a review. The film bypassed my critical brain and inserted raw entertainment. Not a lot of books or movies can do that to me anymore. If you’re any kind of a fan of action movies, this one is a real winner.
I think I was most impressed by the dialog, which was often extremely apropos, rather witty and sometimes inducing of swoon in my otherwise silent-at-that-point writer brain. Which given this was co-written and directed by Joss Whedon should be unsurprising. I will also comment that you don’t have to be particularly familiar with Marvel comics or the recent spate of Marvel-based superhero movies that serve as prequels to this film, though it would help if you were. I’m sure I missed a bunch of in-jokes, but the ones I caught were enough.
So, yeah, things go boom with witty banter. Though for my money the best line in the whole movie is Harry Dean Stanton’s cameo security guard talking to Incredible Hulk Bruce Banner. “You got a condition, son.”
Ok, maybe that was a review.
Off to be busy. Posting may be more irregular than usual for a travel week due to the odd schedule.
Tags: Books, Child, Currents, Movies, Ohio, reviews, Seattle, Sunspin, Travel, Writing
Posted: 5:18 am Mon May 07 2012 | Comments(2) |
[personal|photos] A wee bit of updatery
Last night I slept eight and half hours. Then I got up and went for a two-hour walk this morning, including the hidden canyon stretch of the Springwater Trail. I always feel good when I’m walking like that, which makes me wonder why I don’t do it more often.
While down in the greenery, I ran across these two gentlemen:
(Sorry for the blur, this is a tight crop of a phone cam shot taken from a distance.)
A bit later, walking past the police station, I saw another group of birds:
Clearly, there was a theme to the morning.
Laying low today, except for the_child‘s late afternoon lacrosse game, and a possible dinner with lizzyshannon this evening. (We’re still discussing logistics.) Likewise laying low tomorrow except for taking the_child to choir practice. The only other things I am doing are morning bloggery, writing time on Their Currents Turn Awry, and packing for this coming week’s travel.
The week itself is going to be a mother bear of a trip. Even so, I’m close on the book, and expect to be done within a few days despite travel silliness. I’ll take a couple of days’ brain break, then be back on Going to Extremes. But this weekend… low and slow.
Photos © 2012, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Books, Child, Currents, Extremes, nature, Personal, Photos, Portland, Travel, Writing
Posted: 8:35 am Sat May 05 2012 | Comments(1) |
[personal|family] Happy Birthday to my mom
Today is the birthday of tillyjane, a/k/a my mom. We’re having a family celebration a bit later this morning. I just wanted to wish her a happy birthday right here.
Thanks for a lot of wonderful years.
Tags: family, Personal
Posted: 6:46 am Sun April 22 2012 | Comments(0) |
[personal|cool] Mysterious lights were seen in the sky, flashing
Yesterday was by design a pretty slow day. the_child was heading off for snowboarding at Mt. Hood, and I had planned only two things. One, to spend some time working on Their Currents Turn Awry; and two, to spend some time visiting lizzyshannon, who continues in the throes of post-operative recovery. After an almost too-solid night’s sleep, I made it so.
Plus as a bonus round, between writing time and Lizzy time, I threw in a quick trip to Powell’s Books. I wanted to pick up a birthday gift for tillyjane (a/k/a my mom), and the_child had asked me to score some Brent Weeks books for her. I signed stock while I was there, picked up a copy of the first volume of the A Game of Thrones graphic novelization [ Powells | BN ], and some brag copies of the April issue of Portland Monthly, wherein I penned a review of Mary Robinette Kowal‘s new novel, Glamour in Glass [ Powells | BN ] (first line thereof optional).
I left Lizzy’s place late yesterday afternoon feeling pretty tired. I just wanted to go home and go to bed early. (This happens sometimes after I’ve overslept significantly the night before.) I’d done everything I’d planned that day, the_child was away with friends, and, hey, it as Saturday. But I kept thinking about the Lyrid meteor shower due last night. And how clear and beautiful the sky was as I’d cruised around all day in the Genre Car with the top down. And how I wasn’t a sick man right now, and didn’t have to protect my sleep quite so ferociously. And how there would be meteor showers that night.
So I ate, shopped for groceries, then went home and brooded in my easy chair for a while about how tired I was. I then rattled up mlerules to see if she was free. We headed out to the Portland Women’s Forum State Scenic Viewpoint, overlooking the western end of the Columbia Gorge, to watch the skies for a while from the comfort of the Genre Car’s fully reclined seats with the top still down.
We were there perhaps an hour. Clouds were moving in and out from the east, which was annoying, as that horizon had been clear at sunset. The sky stayed mostly clear, with stars down to fourth or fifth magnitude easily visible, and perhaps a bit beyond that at a squint, so there must have been some haze at altitude. Still, we saw a ton of satellites, including one Iridium flare. mlerules spotted a meteor trail that I happened to be looking in the wrong direction to see. A bit later, we both spotted a long, bright meteor that trailed across the sky in two pulses. For the win!
Finally, my case of the tireds overtook me. We were there too early for the Lyrids’ peak, but we saw cool stuff. Well worth the extra couple of hours of awake time. And hey, who doesn’t like mysterious lights seen in the sky, flashing?
Tags: Books, Child, Cool, Currents, friends, Personal, Portland, Science, Writing
Posted: 6:44 am Sun April 22 2012 | Comments(0) |
[personal] A three hour tour…
Nearly lost the S.S. Minnow last night. Ah, the world we live in.
I’d left work a little early yesterday to take lizzyshannon to the coast for the afternoon and dinner. She’s about to be housebound for a bit of a while, and it was something for us to do together.
We drove the ninety minutes or so from her house down to Lincoln City, OR, visited a couple of beaches, and had a lovely Thai dinner at the Andaman Thai restaurant there. In the rainy, dark evening we drove the ninety minutes or so from Lincoln City back to her house here in Greater Portlandia.
On arrival we discovered I didn’t have my satchel with my wallet, reading glasses, etc. A quick phone call confirmed that I’d left the bag in the restaurant.
So, instead of getting on with my evening, including a needful bit of late Day Jobbery, I drove the ninety minutes or so from her house down to Lincoln City, OR, and visited the Andaman Thai restaurant there, whose proprietor graciously stayed late to meet us. In the rainy, dark evening we drove the ninety minutes or so from Lincoln City back to her house here in Greater Portlandia.
As a result, I went to bed much later than planned, much more exhausted than planned, and much less productive than planned. This will have significant ripple effects into today in terms of both Day Jobbery and writing. Among several very annoying things, I’m going to have to pull my second no-writing day in a row, I’m almost sure of it. (Also this is why today’s blogging is very limited. I did not have time last night or this morning to prepare.)
I’d like the blame cancer brain, but I’m pretty sure this was garden variety goofiness. But man am I frustrated with myself.
Tags: Cancer, Funny, health, Oregon, Personal
Posted: 5:25 am Fri April 13 2012 | Comments(0) |
[personal|politics] Informing opinions
I have a good friend back in Austin, Texas, who happens to be quite conservative. He’s an intelligent, humane, reasonable guy, and a lot of fun, and except for this minor character defect is really someone I like and admire a lot. I once asked him why he was conservative. His answer was fascinating.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “I asked my mom why we were Republicans. She told me it was because the Democrats wanted to take away our money and give it other people.” (His parents were, and I suppose still are, small businesspeople who owned one or two restaurants.)
In a sense, that conversation set his opinions for life. He’s spent the years since amassing logical reasons to be a Republican, but there’s an emotional core underneath it all that’s woven into the fabric of who he is.
Me, I’m a bad liberal in at least one important sense. I’m very uncomfortable with the power of unions. Now, before you jump all over me, let me state that as a thinking adult it’s perfectly clear to me that unions have been a very important force in bettering the working lives of all Americans, and that such power as they ever had has long been gutted by decades of conservatives campaigning both at the legislative level as well as down in the trenches of dirty tricks and media smears. Millions of conservative Americans who would be appalled at giving up their weekends and paid vacations don’t recognize that the only reason they have those things in the first place is because of union activism.
Yet in my case, two childhood events set me with a prejudice that I carry to this day. One, when i was nine years old, in 1973, we were back in the U.S. on home leave from Taiwan. Mom and Dad drove us across the country on a combination of vacation and various family visits. This concluded with a couple of days in southern California to visit Seaworld and Disneyland. We made it to Disneyland just fine, but the day we went to Seaworld the park was closed due to a strike.
It’s not like we could just come back another day. We’d traveled halfway around the world to be there, and were about to travel halfway around the world to go home again. At the time I didn’t know anything about labor relations or union contracts or working conditions. All I knew was that a union strike kept me away from something I never did get to do.
Fast forward to 1981, me in high school, thinking pretty seriously about going to college to study drama from the backstage side and head for a career in technical theater. I thought it would be pretty cool to be a stage manager on Broadway someday. Our high school’s resident technical director (we had one of those and two theatrical directors at Choate at the time) pulled me aside one day and explained that I could study drama all I wanted, but I’d probably never work in New York because I wouldn’t be able to get into the union. You had to pass a test, see, and the test was graded by standards that weren’t publicly disclosed. This made sure that the sons and nephews of union members could get in, even with lousy scores, while outsiders and other people the union guys disliked didn’t stand a chance no matter how well they performed on the tests.
To this day, I don’t actually know if that was true, then or now. I do know that at the time I believed my TD, and went looking for other dreams, because a closed union shop with arbitrary admissions rules meant I couldn’t follow the dream I had.
Logical? No. But those two events left me with a lifelong distrust of unions that I have to do conscious work to overcome.
I wonder how many of us liberals and conservatives, religious and atheist/agnostic, nationalist and internationalists, how many of us had those beliefs informed by early experience and the reinforced by a lifetime of selective learning and listening?
Sometimes, when I think about this carefully, it gives me real pause. After all, how do you talk to someone in a lateral way about something they believe down in their bones?
Tags: family, Personal, Politics, Texas, Travel
Posted: 5:43 am Wed April 11 2012 | Comments(6) |
« Older Posts |