Christened The Office, Redshifts

Saturday morning I woke up with a Story(tm) in my head. Got up, relocated my corporeal self into MY HOME OFFICE [mwahahahahahah], fired up the laptop and put finger to keyboard.

Muse! Baby! Good to see ya! How was the vacation!?

Actually, it's not that bad. It's just the unpacking and buying of things, and finding stuff and settling into work and a new home has [quite understandably] taken over my life recently. It felt good to drop back into the groove and start pounding out what I think will be a very warped little science fiction story.

In other news...

I cut off all my hair this weekend, and, not at all coincidentally, bought a bed. Trust me, I don't buy beds whenever I get a haircut. It may look like a causal relationship, but only because I'm travelling near the speed of light. It's why I appear to be posting with a lower frequency right now, too.

Funny Thing About Unpacking

Just like with packing, the more I unpack, the more I find to unpack.

It is possible for me to lose one of the largest books I own -- my Yale Complete Shakespeare. For 2 friggin' years. How did I accomplish that feat? Apparently, I move in mysterious ways, my wonders to behold. Or, more properly, to not behold, to want to behold, to wonder where might be behidden, damn it, to give up on, and then behold completely unexpectedly. Hallelujah chorus optional, your mileage may vary, professional driver on a closed course.

Gosh, but finding the hammer and nails would sure make hanging things up easier, don't you think?

20 Billion Channels

And still nothing to watch. [*]

Although, A&E is showing a new Nero Wolfe series, with Tim Hutton as Archie Goodwin, Maury Chaykin as Nero Wolfe -- the wondferful gourmand orchid-loving misanthrope -- and it looks, visually, really, really neat. Lots of bright colors but not obnoxious. I'm not sure if I'm in love with it, I

1. have only seen 1.5 episodes, though the first was Death of a Doxy


2. am very, very picky about my Wolfe.
   

So, we shall see what we shall see.


[*] I got cable. Digital cable. Don't look at me like that.

We're Brenda -- consume!

New York in Bloom

I was listening to NPR this morning and there was a story about daffodils in New York. Not long after the 9/11/2001 attacks, flower bulb distributor Hans van Waardenburg, of B&K Flowerbulbs, donated half a million daffodil bulbs to the city of New York. As his gift , one later matched in kind by the city of Rotterdam, and subsequently expanded on by other organizations and companies to form a memorial, a field of gold than now wends its way across the city of New York.

At first glance, you might say, "jesus, Sid, flowers? What's the point?"

The point, friend and neighbor, is about making something beautiful out of tragedy. The point is about celebrating life in the midst of death, the point is about the very human desire to offer what you have to give to others.

What do you have to give?

The Daffodil Project

NPR

Musical Absurdities

The morning team on San Diego area station 91X [91.1 on my FM dial], has discovered "Gonads and Strife".

One of, just to be blindingly clear here, the silliest, goofiest, funniest things I've ever seen in a LONG long time.

Pathetic Excuses for Not Posting

by Sidra Vitale, esquire

• I'm moving.


• I'm lame.[awwww, how sweet, the person behind me as I type claims this is not true.]


• no net connection at home


• afraid I might break my glasses in all the excitement


• the cat peed on the cable modem


• my insomnia went away -- no more time for posting!


• master plan for world domination ramping up -- just too darn busy taking over small countries to post regularly!


• my muse went to Bermuda [and didn't take me]

Kiddie Lit Half-Rant

Some notes on gender and children's literature:

My assertion: The absence of strong female characters in children's literature is irrelevant to the children reading it UNTIL the children are told by society that their gender differences are the most critical things about them.

For boys, that's pre-puberty. For girls, it's puberty. Until we start to get boobs, we can do and be anything or anyone. Harry Potter? You bet. One of the Stone twins? Sure thing! They're fun, they're smart, and they give good one-liners.

Give a copy of 'Have Space Suit, Will Travel' to a nine year old girl, and she's going to identify with Kip just as strongly as her 8 year old brother does. Not Peewee. Kip. Kip, like many of Heinlein's young heroes, is a boy scout ideal incarnate: smart, honest, dutiful, eager, and, you guessed it, well prepared.

To a young girl, the fact that Kip is a 'he' is irrelevant. He's just part of a great adventure story that you can come along on. Gosh, why would gender have anything to do with it?

It isn't until that same girl hits puberty and becomes suddenly, more importantly than anything else, FEMALE, that the omnipresence of boys as protagonists in children's literature becomes a significant problem.

It is then that the lack of female role models becomes a critical lack, as girls are told that they are DIFFERENT from boys, that they are OTHER. The inference drawn from that information, that wedge driven between boys and girls, is that boys as role models are no longer appropriate. And then a girl turns around, looks at the literature presented for consumption, the TV, pop culture as a whole, and says 'well, if I'm so different, where's the stuff that's just for me?' Where are the strong female role models?

And, of course, there are very few to be found.

No wonder we get depressed during adolescence. We look upon the wasteland, and it is for us.

San Diego

Here in San Diego, new job, working on the new digs, more later.

DotCom Reunion

Do other dotcommers do this? A bunch of us from Zelerate got together tonight on what is essentially the anniversary of the company going bellyup, to laugh and drink and swap stories about what we've been doing since.

Funny Thing About Packing

1. The more you pack, the more you find to pack.
2. Re-using boxes from previous moves has the added benefit of amusement, when people like Janis have written things like

"dishes, glasses, mugs, dead body"

or

"secret plans for nuclear device"

on the boxflap as a label.

 

Honorably Mentioned!

Yours truly was a semi-finalist in The Writers of the Future Contest! For a story I wrote called The Song of the Ghost Ship, which I'm going to do a little editing on and send off somewhere else. But, alas, I think doing that may have to wait until after I've relocated. Which means I'm now sitting on something like 6 stories, waiting to find out what my new address is. That sucks.

I digress. The WOF contest is conducted quarterly, so I'll be entering again, and hopefully with even better work.

I will, of course, not receive any monetary award for being a finalist of the semi variety, but this was a real jolt to the ol' ego, and I'm pleased as punch.

My Favorite Four-Letter Word

Work. As in, I have some again. I've just accepted a position with a San Diego company to do internal web application development as part of the MIS department, and I'm really looking forward to it. Moving will be a pain [my, my, another 4-letter word, I'm just full of 'em], but that's to be expected. I gave 30 days on my apartment, brought all the flattened boxes in from the shed, and will go buy the following shortly:

a) several rolls of packing tape;
b) one bottle of champagne

and start packing up all my books -- always the biggest part of the process.

I am really looking forward to this. Really really.

Oscars

Congratulations to all the talented artists honored with nominations by the Academy for their film work this year. May you have many more productive, exciting, and daring years to come.

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.