InkGrrl/InkBlog

4.26.2002

Here's the Friday Five:
1. What are your hobbies? Crocheting - mostly baby blankets. Refinishing furniture, often with dimension-bending results. Doing my physical therapy - I call it a hobby, because I'm not consistent in taking care of myself ;-> For that matter, I guess being in pain is a sort of hobby, when I don't do my PT... yeah, coming up with non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical ways to manage arthritis pain. That's kind of a hobby. Writing short stories - I guess that has to fall into the hobby category until I get paid for it. *sigh*
2. Do you collect anything? If so, what? Pens, really good fountain pens. And journals. Mind you, I never write in them, just like to have them around me as glimmering potential in yummy wrappers. Also camels and dragons and elephants - statues, mind you, not the real things. And books - have a first edition of a Tarzan book, and lots of signed first editions of more modern authors. And boxes - I love having places to put stuff, even if I never do.
3. Is there a hobby you're interested in, but just don't have the time/money to do? Jewelry making - no time. And actually getting my greeting card business off the ground - again, a distraction from writing. And building more websites - I love that, but again again, a distraction from writing.
4. Have you ever turned a hobby into a moneymaking opportunity? Writing snarky stuff - made a nice little chunk of change from Universal writing columns on Things That Can Kill You, and Horrorskopes, and episode reviews of Buffy, Angel and X-Files.
5. Besides web-related stuff (burbs, rings, etc.), what clubs do you belong to? Not much of a joiner - tend to agree with Mark Twain's opinion on that sort of thing - wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have me. Unless there's feather boas and ball gags and lots of pretty shiny things... ahem. Yeah.
quoth at 10:58 AM

Once and again, Mark Morford says good things (I really gotta stop using his stuff as filler, but he's soooo good):

"World War III will not be two egomaniacal superpowers battling for supremacy and bragging rights. It will be scattershot and bewildering, a hundred different battles fought on a hundred different fronts for a thousand ever-shifting reasons, each and every one twisted and distorted by regulation GOP spin doctors who somehow convince the bulk of the populace that it's somehow patriotic to be cavity searched and fingerprinted and beaten with a stick when you buy groceries."
quoth at 10:09 AM

Something's been troubling me for a while and I feel compelled to blog about it - my bird, a psitticine of the cockatiel variety (aptly named Jackson Pollack both for my painter-husband's love of that particular fractal spaz artist, and in tribute to the little guy's ability to decorate any surface in splatters) seems to have developed an unnatural romantic fascination with my right hand. Mind you, I'm right handed, so it's a bit inconvenient when he insists on pressing his suit right about the same time I'm blogging or replying to email or fragging a zombie. I've tried to persuade him that my left hand is just as comely a potential mate, but he's having none of that. As a matter of fact, he actually seems to consider my left hand as his primary competition for my right hand's affections, so if the left hand comes into his field of view while he's making his moves on the right hand, he attacks viciously and with no quarter given. He's quite the little warrior of fluffy love. And before someone calls the ASPCA and accuses me of bird abuse, I've been trying to dissuade him of the whole courtship thing altogether for a few years now, with no success - he apparently feels he has no alternatives and it's spring time, so a bird's gotta do what a bird's gotta do. Maybe we shouldn't paper the bottom of his cage with pages from Vogue...
quoth at 10:05 AM

4.25.2002

Some things man - and woman - was not meant to know. Universal had me collect all my Horrorskopes and send them over in a nice tidy bundle so they could pass them along to their German 13thStreet website, where the whole concept apparently originated. I guess they didn't want to keep paying some German guy to write them, so they figured why not reuse mine for free? Well, I just had to look - and it's not pretty. Especially when translated back into English from German by some auto-language-bot - I give you an excerpt for Taurus: "Is certainly unpleasant with the hooves on the back of the head to be always stepped. You feel so similar on Wednesday also." Don'cha love those wacky Germans?
quoth at 11:13 AM

I gleefully shot off one of Mark Morford's definitions to The Lorax this morning, who paused briefly to consider the carnage, then picked up the ball o'puns and ran with it:

InkGrrl: I think this is my new favorite word ;->

bedizen \bi-'d-zen, -"di-\ verb transitive (1661) - To dress or adorn gaudily
bedizenment - noun
Usage example: Bedizened in nothing but enormous peacock feathers and a latex thong and pink stilettos and way, way too much eye makeup, a very loaded Lynne Cheney suddenly burst into the nuclear strategy meeting and flung open her arms and yelled, "Do me now you warmongering slug-monkeys!"

The Lorax: you're referring to "slug-monkeys," right?

InkGrrl: bedizen, bedizen, bedizen... ack. I'm out of sequins.

The Lorax: you just suffered a sequinsing error
quoth at 10:47 AM

The Sliding Scale of Atrocity

Back to the political crap - first, lemme just say that I feel so much better now that Robert Fisk has passed along the intelligence to us that a senior leader of Hamas in Gaza has declared that the latest *suicide bombers* - three teenage boys, who in an overwrought and not very effective teenage way tried to attack the Israeli settlement of Netzarim and were killed before they got very far - were in fact completely out of bounds as they were too young to fight the good fight in a religious way. Nice to know that Hamas does draw the line somewhere; although I have to say, being the cynic that I am, that it's probably just because by the time a boy reaches eighteen years of age, he's usually put on a bit more muscle than a scrawny fourteen or fifteen year old and thus can pack more explosives into enemy territory.

On another note, the Palestinians are really stepping on their dicks in the propaganda arena with all this talk about the atrocities of Jenin being worse than the Nazi Holocaust, worse than Bosnia, worse than 9/11. Five will get you ten that they'd never in a million years say that Jenin was worse than Qana, on the sliding scale of horror - even though having whole neighborhoods systematically razed and snipers taking out anyone daring to show their face on the street is, in many ways, worse than being blown to bits in between heartbeats, at least for the survivors (witness the faces of those who lived in Beirut twenty years ago when the PLO took over, and then the Israelis showed up). Qana holds a holy place on that sliding scale of horror, as it should, given the innocents killed there in their sleep; but it's still not as significant from an historical perspective as the Armenian Holocaust, the Nazi Holocaust, the Bosnian concentration camps, or 9/11 - sheer numbers alone decry that leveling, much less the effect on a nationalistic and world-wide scale. It's one thing to indulge in overblown rhetoric for the sake of the press, but quite another to expect to be taken seriously in an international forum when one lacks perspective. I have no children, and thus cannot truly speak to the pain of a mother losing her child, but I have lost close family members in violent ways, and I can say with certainty that there are better and worse contexts to frame a death, to frame the remains in a casket, to frame a painful set of memories that never quite fade enough for peace. It doesn't make it better to know that someone else killed your brother than to know that a brother has chosen to end his own life, and it doesn't make it better to know that an impartial disease has eaten the life of your loved one than to know that a drunk driver smeared your loved one's brains across the pavement. But there can be perspective, if we allow ourselves to lift our eyes to a level above our individual pain and see that the world goes on and we can choose to remain a part of history or we can actively participate in creating a better future. Maybe even stop something before it goes too far and more people get hurt. It starts with telling the truth - on all sides.
quoth at 10:02 AM

4.24.2002

Chickens In Spaaace!!!!!! YAY!!!!

Um. Yeah.

Dunno exactly why this makes me so giggly and trolloppy-umlauttish, if that's even a description of a possible state of being, but it do!

Oh, and I think my butt-feathers are all a-kerfuffle about it too.
quoth at 3:29 PM

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for a reminder of one of the reasons I write:

"Working your way through a character's evolution can therefore become, I discovered again, a little digression through your own needs and wants. It can let you say things you'd never say in real life but that make you feel more complete for articulating. It's safe therapy, I suppose, in which you can feel things and say things and even believe things without ever having to take personal responsibility for them. You can call that acting. But you can also call it a kind of freedom."

So it's all experience and therapy. 'Kay, I'll take it.
quoth at 1:57 PM

4.23.2002

Just gotta share this - the Secret Diaries of LOTR. How very fannish of me - but they're a hoot! BTW - did I mention that I followed Jeri Ryan around the grocery store in Encino on Sunday afternoon? Didn't actually speak to her - I'm sure my covert glances were enough to freak her out but I didn't want to go all stalker-fannish on her... just know that even in baggy pants and a sweatshirt with a ballcap and no makeup, Seven-of-Nine is still a knockout! I was actually suprised - in person most actresses, no matter how gorgeous onscreen, look like regurgitated baby barf that's been ridden hard and put away wet - and she's teeny-tiny too (yes boys, she has a great ass). My hubby was so jealous that he didn't go shopping with me... tee hee!
quoth at 1:45 PM

Was potentially falling into pissyness again, but went out and cruised some blogs and found out a way to measure my true worth: HumanForSale.com - oh Happy Noodles! According to them, I am worth "exactly: $2,544,684.00." I feel so much better about myself now. I could sell myself on eBay, thus driving up my price by a factor of at least two or three, and retire to a small private island to spend the rest of my days writing transcendent novels and glimmering poetry. My gratitude (and acceptance speech) goes out to imaZine, without whom I would never have realized my true potential worth.
quoth at 1:31 PM

An interesting if slanted POV on the legitimacy of the Palestinian claims to nationhood - fails utterly to take into account the rise of nationalistic consciousness among placed and displaced peoples of the world in the late 18th and early 19th century.
quoth at 10:13 AM

I'm an aunt again!!!!! My sis-in-law gave birth to a bouncing baby boy - Alexander Robert - at four-ish this morning. Vital stats: 7 lbs. 6 oz, 20 3/4 " long, hearing and vision and all Apgars in the wonderful zone! Yay!!!! I get to go see him tonight - my boss, is again, totally cool. He told me to leave even earlier than I was asking to go see the new squirt while he's still fresh out of the bag. HAAPPYYYY!!!!!!!!

On another, slightly more salacious note, thanks again to Mark Morford of the Morning Fix for this wonderful bit of farmer-bondage animation ;->
quoth at 9:44 AM

4.22.2002

Time for a writerly link - Carl Sandburg on Those Who Make Poems from the Atlantic Monthly Online.
quoth at 2:39 PM

Oh wait, I'm not done yet today. I've been in a state of high disgruntlement since about 11:23 a.m. yesterday morning, when I realized that no-way, no-how was I gonna get any writing done this weekend. See, Saturday was pretty much a wash due to running around planning my new desk and bookshelves, followed by pissyness and total exhaustion. Sunday morning we had to get up early 'cuz we have a cleaning lady (Vicky) who wanted to be there at 8 a.m. but settled on 10 a.m. to give us a break.

*segue* I just found Vicky when she showed up last week at Lane's jewelry party to clean up after everybody. She's Inger Miller's cleaning lady, and she also does the apartment of Lane's business partner who also is a sports massage therapist for superstars like Inger and the Dallas Cowboys, etc. She's gonna work on me as soon as I can afford her (the sports massage therapist, not the cleaning lady). Turns out Vicky has four kids - three are still living in Guatemala where the eldest is about to graduate from college with a teaching credential, thanks to the money that mom sends home every two weeks, and the youngest (about to turn 11) here with mom. No mention of dad or father or husband... maybe back in Guatemala? Anyhoo - had major weirdness/class consciousness issues until I got that she's working her butt off for her kids and that's what we're all doing here for my husband's family - the differences are in the number of people pulling together to make money in America, and the number of folks supported by it. That's what makes this country great - even if you can only make money by cleaning houses or doing one of those other crappy jobs that most folks don't want, if you're in the right place at the right time and work hard and keep your nose clean and all those other cliches that cling to the Great American Dream like flies on shit, you can still get a hell of a lot further ahead than if you had stayed in your village back in the home land. Or at least you can help the people you care about survive. Not to over-romanticize or anything, but I know of so many people who are educated professionals in their home countries, but come here and work as manicurists, gardeners, house cleaners, etc., because that's all they can do to make money here and it's still more than they'd make back home as a surgeon or chemist or teacher, and making money to take care of their families is their only reason for leaving them. That sucks. My family has been here for over three hundred years, my husband's for over a decade, but both groups came here for the same reason, and had to leave everything and everyone they knew and loved behind. I'm getting a bit overwrought and sappy, so I'll stop here and give you something snarky instead....

Thanks to Live From the WTC for this little walk down Propaganda Lane... oh, and as I commented in reply to her post "...we're only supposed to intervene when it will hurt our interests..." um, pretty much, yeah. Unless, of course, that means foregoing the higher moral ground and getting caught doing it (both conditions required). Has anybody else noticed that Venezuela has huge oil reserves and we just signed a trade agreement with them? Sing it with me now: "bye, bye, miss arabian pie..." */segue*

Back to my pissyness of further up the page - I really don't have time for this whole housekeeping, cooking and laundry bullshit on top of the day job which takes me away from writing for at least 9 hours a day - less if I sneak blogging into the mix - but does this count toward my daily pages? FUCKSHITDAMMIT! I feel the need to jump up and down on something small, fluffy and squeaky (and non-living - I don't do crush) like my nephew's favorite Tickle Me Elmo doll. Too bad those things are built to withstand toddlers - I wouldn't stand a chance of destroying it with the power of my awesome pissyness without at least a Krypton ray or two on my shoulders. It's already the end of April, and all I have done so far this year is a few months of Horroskopes, lots of technical documentation, chewed up and spit out a couple of short stories that are almost dead a'borning, and blogged. Oh yeah, and outlined a novel and done lots of research for it. I am Dejected Research Queen. What brought this mood cyclone on? I'm doing a one-day workshop to get back in novelist mode this coming Saturday with a couple of folks - Will Shetterly and Emma Bull - who run a weekly workshop as well that I attended for a month before I realized I'd better go there with novel pages, not just lots of short stories. Both are sweet, tactful and soft-spoken. When I sent Will an email last week gong "Look What I Can Do!!!" and basically being a hit-counter trollop, he replied that he liked my blog (you are here) but not to let it distract me from writing stories. *snivel*

quoth at 1:16 PM

The repipe is done - thank the gods of home improvement (think I'll have to create a little shrine to them somewhere) - and the house is cleaned of all the muck and mire attendant therein. oy.

Found a link to a page about the Redneck Neighbor's Home Improvement Efforts - very funny and thanks much to The Back Porch by way of Mark Carstairs for that one! Now I can revel in someone else's misery for a while. I'll post my Dead Cat Under the House Redux later... yes, there's a redux. mumph.
quoth at 10:05 AM