The Price of Hubris, Apparently, is a Tower of Babel

So, I finally stepped down off my personal moral pedestal about accepting financial help from government institutions and filed for unemployment about 10 days ago. Ish. Shudder.

Right. So, I'm minding my own business after sending someone, somewhere, a government-y form, and telling my work ethic bloody independent minded "we take care of our own" streak to shut up and pass the Top Ramen, when I get back an answer, of a sort.

Oh, yeah, sure, of a sort. I get four, count 'em four (4) things, documents, packets, forms, whatever, in the mail from wherever these things come from within the great State of California.

In Spanish.

You read that right. Spanish. Which amused me rather at the time, because I know a lot of Latin from being a scientist and just interested in languages, and I can recognize a few things in Spanish. But it's not like I know it or anything, and it is most certain I can't read Bureaucratese in what is to me an unknown tongue. I admit to an edge of irritation too, at having to figure out who to call in order to rectify the situation. But this, all this, I set aside to fly to San Diego for a hopefully-unemployment-negating encounter.

I find now that one of these linguistically inpenetrable documents included a message telling me to expect a followup call today, which of course, fell on deaf ears [blind eyeballs? whatever], to inquire about a couple of my answers to the initial form I filled out.

I remain blissfully ignorant until the phone rings this morning and I answer, all of which goes something like this:

irritating[*] cell phone ring

me, fumbling with CD player to pause music

me, dashing for cell phone on windowsill, pushing button with my little pink paw and saying, "Hello?"

SOMETHINGSOMETHINGtoofasttohearSOMETHINGSIDRA VITALE?

This is Sidra

Hi, I'm calling from [something EDD department] regarding your interview today.

Huh?

That was me, the witty one.

And, of course, this is how I find out to expect a phone interview with someone from the EDD, today. The subject of which was actually pretty innocuous, so now that I reflect back on it, I'm kind of glad I didn't know to expect it. 'Cause then I would have just worried.

We get things straightened out regarding my need for documents in a language I actually know, and this lady [whose name was apparently transmitted during the intial blast of incomprehensiblity at the beginning of our call] asks me the questions she called to ask, and explained a few things, but only after chastising me for "waiting so long to return my something-something form". To which I very politely did not answer "bite me", but instead explained the minor issue of a language barrier and that I had been out of town chasing down a job, while my voice said, all on its own I assure you, a matter of tone and timbre I had nothing to do with, "back off, strange woman calling me on Saturday morning to talk too fast while I'm trying to listen to Itzhak Perlman play Mozart". I mean, really, with that in the player, be glad I picked up the phone at all. If it had been Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, I would not have bothered.

Anyway. I'm supposed to get new forms sometime soon...and I will oh-so-solemnly immolate the little bits of dead trees if they arrive in Vietnamese.

The moral of my story? Oh, there isn't one, don't worry about it. Except maybe to study more foreign languages, kids!





[*] All cell phones have irritating rings. But, you knew that already.

Oh, Stupidity!

Check out the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, from Business2.com.

Waiting for the Shoe to Drop

But in a good way. I had the best interview I've had in years with a delight of a company [they build telecom hardware and as a result do voice over IP stuff, among other things, and I can tell I'm going to be obsessed about that very topic for some time to come -- it makes so much sense what they're doing? In light of the kind of robust distributed computing you can do these days? And the Internet? Boy, honey, does it ever.]

Anyways.

I liked them. A lot. And the feeling was seriously mutual.

I flew down to San Diego on Monday night, stayed with Janis [inagurating her new hide-a-bed couch, like, actual grownup furniture, I almost couldn't sleep], went in and interviewed Tuesday, flew home that night[*], and have been poking around online looking for apartments in San Diego ever since. Looks pretty serious, kiddies. I love the Bay Area, but when the chips are down [and as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to the ol' career, the chips are always down] I go where the jobs are, bay-bee.

The Interview [cue dramatic music, roll tape, aaaaaaaaand Action!]:

Met the head of MIS, whose minion I will become if all goes well, and we talked over several internal support tools he wants built/maintained/improved. This is a web application development position I was interviewing for, by the way. Much of what we discussed involves standard issues of interdepartmental communication that I've tackled before. One of their biggest things with which they want to deal right away is a problem I've already solved, and have the code, open source, on my laptop, like, right this second. I've been remiss and haven't stuck it up on SourceForge yet. My bad.

Chatted with HR, very nice lady, for about a half hour.

Moved onto the Veep who I actually met in a hallway at a different company, which just goes to show that a small small small small world it really is sometimes, and we hit it off like ham and eggs. We chit-chatted on quite a number of things.

I got a great author recommendation out of the head of MIS, CD, to wit, Guy Gavriel Kay, who wrote a trilogy, and I paraphrase, which does not suffer by comparison to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. That's a pretty impressive statement, so I schlepped to the library yesterday and picked up the specific trilogy in question and started it. So far, so good.


And here I am now, not-quite-twiddling-my-thumbs, waiting.

[*] A gentleman celebrating his 81st birthday experienced chest pains during the flight, and paramedics came aboard for him after we grounded in San Jose to whisk him away. On his birthday. Bleah. I do hope he's all right.

The 911 Call

That's the name of a screenplay, by yours truly. I just finished the second real draft [after the first round of mentor comments] after having a stack of marked-up copies sitting to my right for months. Anyway, I'm pleased with the level of improvement. I've definitely worked up the dialogue in the last act way better, and so I'll probably print it out and send back to J&M and ask them to put their Actor/Director/TeacherHats back on and give me more feedback.

Cool TV

Better yet, awesome TV. I was never a big Law and Order fan, I've watched it occasionally, that was about all, and I was kind of put off by the spinoffs. I've seen one or two eps of SVU and 2? 3? episodes of Criminal Intent, with Vincent D'onofrio and Kathryn Erbe. This past Sunday's episode, about a felon who gets killed and 400K of robbery money that had never been recovered, absolutely knocked me on my cute li'l tuckus.

I am in awe. Beautiful writing and stellar performances, there were two segments that stood out so beautifully -- one when Erbe and D'onofrio pull a good cop/bad cop on this woman who is the key to their investigation, and piss her off so impressively to get her to reveal more than she intended, and the very end when D'onofrio is "talking down", so to speak, the guy responsible for murder.
Compassionate, apparently guileless, it was just amazing.

Well done, folks, well done.

Funny

Unattributed:

"The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than
the British or Americans. On the other hand, the French eat a lot of
fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
Conclusion: Eat what you like. It's speaking English that kills you."

Own this remark? Tell me.

In The Paramecia Department

Don't look at me too funny, but along with my various other obsessions, I have a thing about bugs. No, no, not those kind, the other ones: communicable disease. My fave are the filoviruses [Ebola, Marburg], but I have a new appreciation for the long under-appreciated tularemia and other bacteria as well.

Sigh. So many possible careers, so little time.

If you're interested on keeping your finger on the pulse of the world, disease-wise, consider subscribing to the Weekly Epidemiological Record.

Fascinating stuff. It amazes me that we even manage to live at all, sometimes.

The Weekly Epidemiological Record (WER) serves as an essential instrument for the rapid and accurate dissemination of epidemiological information on cases and outbreaks of diseases under the International Health Regulations, other communicable diseases of public health importance, including the newly emerging or re-emerging infections, non-communicable diseases and other health problems.

The WER is distributed every Friday in a bilingual English/French edition.

To SUBSCRIBE: please send a message to majordomo@who.int with the command "subscribe wer-reh" as the only text of the message. To add an address other than the one from which you are sending the request, give that address in the command, e.g."subscribe wer-reh emailadd@dom.com".

WriterGirl Thoughts[tm]

If you're not interested in WriterGirl navel-gazing, this entry may be a disappointment. I had another Epiphany[tm] about what some of my flaws are as a writer. Oh, I'm sure I'll have plenty more. Trust me.

I can write other people's characters -- I wrote fanfic for some years as well as turning my hand to original work -- dialogue, setting, what's going on in people's heads, etc. Script format, prose, whatever. Some of the funniest fanfic I ever wrote is all [and I mean all] dialogue. I say wrote because I consider myself retired from the form, or at least semi-retired.

And I love writing that dialogue. I enjoy writing in a script format, it's fun, you can do visual things you maybe can't do elsewhere. It's a different genre. I've taken stories originally written in prose and rewritten them as scripts, and vice versa, for fun, for practice, and just because I thought it might work better that way.

Yet, when I write a completely original story, I have very little dialogue. What, I ask, is up with that?

Obviously there's a connection to my tendency to write solo-character stories, and a marked tendency to do terrible things to them emotionally [clears throat]. Now, there's nothing wrong in doing terrible things to your characters, and it may in fact be vital. I believe it was in an afterword to one of her novels where Lois McMaster Bujold remarked that she liked to come up with the worst possible thing that could happen to her character at that time, and then do it to them. I think that's a fine rule of thumb and plan on remembering it. Heh, heh, heh.

So, where did my dialogue go? I dunno. Unalakleet, perhaps? 'Cause it ain't around here.

What I do know, thinking back, is that I've always done it this way, which means it's high time to change and do something else. I'm not sure what, but I think I may have started something by returning to an out and out romance I outlined sometime a couple years ago. I'm not a big romance buyer -- it's not that I dislike people having relationships, I just have this science fiction/fantasy focus and that's where I go for reading material. But the only romance novel I remember reading several years ago I really liked, so why the hell not? Particularly if being "stuck" writing two people who are falling in love and have to, you know, talk, will get me out of this dialogueless mode and into something broader and new.

Ultraviolet

I just spent last night and this morning in an Ultraviolet marathon. Oh, time very well spent, I assure you. I've seen it 3 or 4 times now, and I'm still not at the point where I can watch and talk to myself about editing choices, or direction, or the writing. When it's something I've seen several times, I watch for the art and the craft as much as for the story, because I want to learn how to do it right. This makes me potentially a very irritating viewing mate ("Oh, that was a nice scene", "Look at that shot"), but I swear, I don't do it on the first viewing unless it's a really bad piece of work, a la MST3K.

Ultraviolet does not suffer in that regard. It's just so damn good at sucking me in. Oh, look, a pun.

If you've never seen this UK series, hie ye to Amazon (US, UK) and get it. You're in for a treat. Vampires as public health threat.

Once you've immersed yourself in this remarkable thriller [don't take your eyes off the screen for a second during Terra Incognita], swing round the Ultraviolet Official Site [be advised, the shows theme plays when loaded] and read an interview with Joe Ahearne, the man behind the series. All 4 parts of that interview s/b linked from the main page.

Women on Film

I was watching one of those entertainment shows [Extra, or Access Hollywood, or both], and there was this segment on over-40 actresses, no doubt due to the systemic shock of having Judi Dench get an Oscar nod.

The segment hit on several 'mature' actresses, and a few remarks on ageism in the industry. There was this blurb on a project Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn are doing together [looks neat], and a little snippet of interview with Rene Russo on the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair she did, where everyone was just agog over the fact that she and Pierce Brosnan are, like, the same age.

Gosh! They can still act over 40! No frickin duh.

It was a fine segment, I have no objections to it, and I'm glad to see that

a) women are, albeit too slowly, accumulating more power in Hollywood; opening their own production companies, directing stellar films, etc.
b) some actors are actually willing to comment on Hollywood's ageism and sexist practices.

These are all good, important things. To the average schmuck, the entertainment industry is just this glittery machine, and you don't see the pain, the effort, the screwing people over, the screwing people to get the job, the day-to-day doing the job, any of it, really. And I think it's important to tear those walls down and bring this idea of celebrity back down to earth and start treating actors as human beings instead of cardboard cutouts.

What blew me away was this feeling during the segment of WOW! There's ageism and sexism in Hollywood! Oh My God: This is Big News!

Yeah, 50+ male actors cast with 20-something female leads. Big surprise. What, are you telling me you hadn't noticed?

And if you honestly, honestly, have never thought about this before, I suggest you take a look around, and ask yourself why.

Lord of the Hackers? I Think Not

Sherry Turkle wrote an op-ed article March 07 in the NY Times on computers and Lord of the Rings, that I disagree with in almost every respect. The whole thing just seems like a stretch.

She suggests that Tolkien's universe is similar to that constructed by a computer programmer, because it is rule-driven and bounded. In short, an internally consistent universe. Now, Tolkien as computer programmer, just because he created an internally consistent universe? Nonsense. As readers, we require internal consistency in fantasy, science fiction, horror, all forms of work, or we refuse to suspend disbelief and insert ourselves into the story.

Turkle brings it up like Tolkien was the first or only person to do that, and further, that his work is inherently computer "programmatic" because computer geeks have a binary perspective and LOTR has clearly delineated good and evil.

My response to that is

a. Computers didn't bring binary perspectives into the world -- as soon as Og and Thag had their first disagreement about the best way to club some cavegirl over the head and drag her off by her hair, humanity's relentless fight over binary options ensued. Tastes Great! Less Filling! Allah! JHVH!

b. Oodles of stories have clearly delineated good and evil. Why, take religion, for example.

Now, I CAN agree that the type of person who gravitates to well-constructed fantasy universes, and role playing, gravitates to (computer) science. It takes, now that I think of it this way, someone obsessed with imposing internally consistent structure on a system [i.e., developing a program with logical flow, or conducting scientific research] and a person who has a high creativity [to see the software/hardware/experiment/whatever before it is ever built, and then call it into existence], in order to do this kind of work in a really top-notch way.

So I propose that geeks are a natural audience for work like Tolkien's [not the only one, to be sure], and where they tend to cluster [science in general, and certainly computers] is where you can see the earmarks of influence in support of and influence by work like Tolkien's. Elvish fonts. Middle-Earth based role-playing games. A zillion school or organization network domains named after Tolkien characters. Campus dormitories -- I lived in the Middle-Earth complex at UC Irvine! Yep, geeks helped keep Tolkien's popularity high, but they do that to all kinds of great stories, from Middle Earth to Red Dwarf to Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The fonts and Tolkienesque role-player games is just textual poaching in a non-fanfic kind of way.

Now, Turkle points up how easy it is to appropriate a Tolkienesque story into a computerized format, i.e., a role-playing game, and asserts that there is little room for variation and ambiguity in such constructs. I beg to differ. A colleague of mine responds to Turkle's remarks with the following:

If you read Gary Gyjax' books, he talks quite a lot about how to interpret the numbers assigned for strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc. He gives explicit examples of how the same character stats could be played completely differently. The idea was that your character is like a character portrayed by an actor-- how it comes out is a matter of interpretation and of your own skill as a role-player.

The problem is that adolescent boys are LOUSY role-players. They don't want to delve into interesting psychological issues or character interpretation.

And then Turkle starts talking about gender in science and in Middle-Earth. She points up similarities between the computer world and Frodo's world, where men are together in a fraternity of sorts, and they bond and show affection for one another. The computer culture, is, by and large, a culture dominated in every way by men and their perspectives, sadly. But it is not the only facet of society that is.

The fact that Tolkien has few women in his work doesn't bug me. It was written in the 50's, for pete's sake, and a universe modeled on previous human societies. At least in Middle Earth, men love one another with true feeling, and actually can express it sometimes. That's a wonderful thing.

To suggest that Tolkien and computer games are similar because he has few women and games have few women -- heck, the US government and computer games are similar for that same reason. Tolkien and computer games are worlds constructed by other human beings. Sure, they're often going to share some characteristics, particularly if the writer of the latter is a fan of the former. That has nothing to do with Tolkien per se.

Turkle analogizes LOTR and computer games further:

"Like Tolkien's world, most computer games are about mastery through violence; they serve as socialization into the computer culture for adolescent boys." While I don't take odds much against the latter half of her comment, I do with the first. In Tolkien's world, the paradise of the Shire -- a peaceful agrarian lifestyle -- is interrupted by the introduction of evil, first subtly, and then by The Return of The King, overtly. Those who go on the great quest -- Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin -- are not warriors, they are not great heros, they do not seek these roles out, and while the quest, which does include violence -- which they again do not seek out willingly -- changes them forever, and while partly into warriors and heros it changes them so much they are literally unrecognizable when they do return home, and in the end, no longer fit there and there no longer fits them very well. The nature of personal growth, Tolkien pointing up that nosiree, you certainly cannot go home again. Old shoes never fit right after you lay them aside. Tolkien was writing about the end of an age and the beginning of a new one on multiple levels.

Turkle later asserts:

"Just as each episode of "The Lord of the Rings" presents a danger and each has its resolution, so many adolescent boys move from one block of intransigent code to another, from one screen to the next, declaring victory as they go."

I just don't buy this analogy at all -- the mastery of blocks of code and resolution and advancement of Tolkien's story? This is how humans go about solving problems, and how we tell stories. Small steps forward. Conflict, action, resolution, conflict, action, resolution, embedded [in a really complex story or program] in a larger arc or set of arcs of -- wait for it -- conflict, action, and resolution.

Basically, all of her comparisons of computer society, games, and Tolkien could be made with any other constructed universe. Star Wars, for instance.

Just about the only thing Turkle says that I do like is at the end of her article when she implies that escapist literature increases in popularity when life is particularly complex and difficult.

Poking fun at net.romeos

I've been lucky, I don't get many sweet nothings poured in my delicate, seashell-pink ear via email simply because I have a website. I have friends who do, thank god, so I get to lampoon the misguided efforts of their unsolicited email suitors. Feel free to insert an evil laugh here. Go on, I'll wait.

I have in particular one friend of both Pakistani and northern European extraction, who is

a. a woman of great inner and outer beauty, wit, and charm, and a great sense of humor;
b. raised as Muslim, which is apparent on her website;
c. with a photo of herself on her website.

And when a particularly choice Mr. Net D. Romeo comes a-callin',....oh, sometimes I just gotta. Now, you have to understand, some of the South Asian Romeos are simply incredible -- I get 'em now and then because of my name, but not often -- you get a marvelous sense of cognitive dissonance reading these things, assuming they're coherent at all.

But I digress.

One of the most amazing emails I've ever seen presented itself recently, chocked so full of possiblilities I hardly knew where to begin. I finally had to limit myself to the following, in response to an epistle sent by a self-described "rebel". The more familiar you are with net.romeos, South Asian ones in particular, the more likely this is to amuse you.


Wife Wanted

Please respond to my inquiry if you meet the following qualifications
for the position "My Wife".

Job Description:

Act as good right arm in battle against infidels of secular
humanism. Exchange witty, barbed repartee with senators and other
leaders during diplomatic functions in the US and abroad. Conduct
arm-twisting while wearing 5" heels and black seamed stockings.
Transition from highest social mileiu to hidden mountain or
salt marsh rebel bases on regular schedule. Multiple languages a
plus. Frequent travel required.

Job Requirements:

1. Familiarity with computers and the Internet. Facility with
   programming languages not required.
2. Take the wing off a fly at 75 paces with an M16.
3. 2-3 years experience as a model -- runway or catalog.
4. Toastmaster membership or other public speaking experience.
5. Fertility.
6. Bachelor's or graduate degree, or equivalent work experience.

Marshland survival and marketing techniques a plus!

Three Things


0. Been busy, not posting. It'll probably happen again, knowing me.
1. The Great Petrowski, by Gina Berriault. A short, endearing fable about an opera singing parrot who tries to save his native rainforest. Worth reading.
2. Tips when writing horror: be visceral. Imbue a sense of immediacy. Don' t be afraid of bizarre language. Think about how Steve King writes on pain at the beginning of Misery -- the pilings and the tide, sometimes they were covered but the pilings were always there. I'm going to carry that imagery around in my head until Alzheimer's or death kicks it out. That's serious staying power.


If it occurs to you I've been editing a horror story via the technique of asking WWSKD?, you may be right.

Wacky


Oh, that wacky Washington state legislature!

SB 6500
Requiring that textbooks and curriculum shall teach the self-evident truth of creation.

Random Post Stuff

Pastiche, an interesting band I listened to this morning [interview and music selections] on a local station in Sunnyvale. Er, I think this was them.