There’s nothing on

Smiles of a Summer Night

I didn’t have cable growing up, because, as my mother rightfully pointed out, I would have watched it all the time. So I think that “there’s nothing on,” a common whine of the period, was pretty justified. I mean, we had something like five channels in total.

Now I sometimes feel that way about the internet, when all my regular haunts either haven’t been updated recently or don’t contain anything of interest. This is clearly irrational. There is always something “on” the internet. It’s akin to that parental gem about only boring people being bored.

In this spirit, I try to break out of my internet rut from time to time. At other times, there is no rut (the feast v. famine phenomenon). For instance, over the last couple days, I’ve seen great material everywhere, such as this article on reality and authenticity and marketing from The Awl, and this essay it links to on David Foster Wallace. Or this discussion on Slate’s Double X blog about The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, by French feminist Elisabeth Badinter. I guess the latter book has been bandied about in many places online for what one of the Slate discussants says is “18 months,” but damned if I’ve caught any of the conversation. Perhaps it is only because the topic is recently relevant to me that I am just now noticing.

Anyhoo. There is always something on, especially online. But also on TV, now, and then: when I was a teenager, I turned on the TV out of extreme boredom one night at one or two a.m. I ended up watching Smiles of a Summer Night on PBS. I found it very strange at the time. Years later, I saw A Little Night Music and realized it was based on that same Bergman film. And just like that, my teenage boredom was transmogrified into smug cultural self-satisfaction, a feeling so potent that I’ve apparently carried it around with me for years, waiting for a moment to impress no one about it.

Now that the moment has come, I hope to present it with as much self-deprecation as I can muster, in deference to David Foster Wallace, the trap of solipsism, and the impossibility of a truly authentic response. Read that link above! Good stuff, even if I don’t agree with all of it. I was convinced, for example, that its author is not a writer of fiction, though I found that’s not the case.

No show

Dragon baby...Seth and I are also dragons: triple plus good.

I guess I’m lousy with big announcements, preferring to fly under the radar and such, but…Seth and I are expecting a baby (!). I told all my immediate colleagues at work after the first trimester, and assumed that my news would out itself in short order to those who I work with more peripherally. It’s surprisingly difficult to squeeze into casual conversation. Plus, I hate to veer into it’s-all-about-me territory, except here, ha.

Anyhoo. For weeks now I have walking around looking as if I had just consumed a large meal, and as my everyday work clothing tends not to be overtly revealing, seem to have been passing as my usual self. I in fact became so accustomed to this under-the-radar mode that this past week, the week I finally began to show in an appreciable way, I labored under the delusion that no one could tell. But someone finally called me out on Friday, so it’s time to embrace what I sincerely wish the popular press and others would cease referring to as the “bump.”

A couple weeks ago, a friend in my writing group said that his favorite college English teacher used to say that women did their best writing while pregnant (The corollary for men was “cigarettes.” Is this misogynistic or damning? Impossible for me to say.) . But this was a welcome thing for me to hear. I’ve been working on a short story that’s a distinct departure for me, and it’s hard to say whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. By this I mean that I’m not sure if it’s working yet, though the same could be said of just about all of my first drafts. The point is that it’s different for me, and change is good. Especially when I’ve been sending out the same eight stories to no avail.

It’s time to get something fresh in the mix, or multiple somethings, of all different types.

Lady talk

via vavoomvintage.blogspot.com

This is a narrative I have seen play out in various fashion-y shows on television, and also within the pages of magazines: a woman, old enough to know what’s what, is measured for a bra by a professional for the first time in her life. She discovers that the size she has been wearing is wrong! Very wrong, embarrassingly so. She is paired with a new bra, which has a transformative effect on her appearance (generally making her appear thinner), the fit of her clothes, and her self-image. It is a minor miracle.

So this weekend I read an article on bra fitting in a magazine. I measured myself according to the method described and discovered that the size I’ve been wearing is wrong! Very wrong, embarrassingly so. The size I’m alleged to wear is weird, and so I could not find it in my usual sorts of bra-getting places. I felt cornered into making a trip to Victoria’s Secret.

It’s been over ten years since Victoria’s Secret was a place I even had a passing interest in visiting. In the ensuring years, it has become a sort of tweeny haven, especially the side of the store branded “Pink.” (I remember seeing a lengthy debate on FB not too long ago about whether this is self-conscious or accidental euphemism on the part of VS; it’s probably safe to say that the nuance is lost on the target demographic). The tweens all had their swains in tow. I accidentally locked eyes with one such swain as he was in the act of shooting a yellow thong at his girlfriend as if it was a rubber band. He had the grace to look embarrassed.

I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. Skeptical about my alleged new size, I purchased a slightly more realistic-seeming size without trying it on. At home, I discovered that it did not fit, necessitating a second visit to Victoria’s Secret today, for return purposes. This time I tried on a couple of options, which seemed fine in store, but as soon as I got home, revealed themselves to be not fine. It looks as if a third trip is in order. If I had been more thorough-going in my initial visit, I could have avoided all this annoyance. Perhaps I should be ordering things online?

Le sigh. The happy ending part of this little narrative had better be as satisfying as it’s purported to be on TV.

Lone Wolf

Click for source

I toyed with the idea of posting a wish list here. The reason was not to guide people looking for gifts to give me, as that is at once presumptuous and unnecessary: this is stuff I’m likely to get myself. It seemed to me, in part, that to do so would be kind of like curating random cool things I’ve found recently, the performance of a kind of shopping public service. But yuck. Also, I am uncomfortable with my instinctive materialism and try to battle it at every turn.

Besides, when I made the list, I realized that the thing I am most excited about this year is Christmas tamales. My mom is getting a dozen, and I am bringing a dozen home from Tucson Tamale Company. It’s going to be an epic meal, with family – along with my mom’s holiday breakfast rolls, the best part of the whole weekend.

That said, one of the items on my list is the pictured fingerless knuckle tattoo gloves. I prefer “Lone Wolf,” and make no mistake, they shall be mine. It’s been unusually cold in Tucson this month, a distressing state of affairs for thin-blooded whiners such as myself. I am the kind of person who keeps her office thermostat at 80 degrees and still has to put on a jacket, shivering, when the afternoon light shifts away from my windows. In the fall, when the weather here turns and the highs are in the mid-90s, I bust out the fleece blankets and bundle up. This sounds like exaggeration, but I assure you, it is not. It’s in the 40s or 50s now, and I’m in Sherpa boots and have a fleece blanket draped over my head  and my hands. I really need those fingerless gloves, I’m telling you, and I’ll need them even more when my new writing nook is functional.

He’s doing excellent work

Hectic

So the quality ‘round these parts has really taken a dive of late. Rather than go for long dry spells with no activity, I feel compelled to throw things up anyway, even when it is of dubious quality. I realize this strategy is probably not the best one, and yet, I doggedly continue.

Here are some things that are keeping me from the blog:

–          Massive backload of work projects

–          Creative lull vis a vis the novel

–          The purchase and impending massive renovation of a new house

–          The creeping malaise of the holiday season

–          Mercury in retrograde (I kid.)

Anyhoo. I shall endeavor, by Sunday, to post actually interesting content. Meantime, here is this lovely gem from Flight of the Conchords. The song from this episode was also hilarious, but I can’t remember what it was called, just that it involved self-identification as a kiwi.

Mercury in retrograde

Photo via NASA

There are many things about astrology that inspire one’s inner skeptic to pipe up in righteous disgust. Is there any greater case to be made for mistaking correlation for causation than retrospectively finding “meaning” or a “warning” in one’s daily horoscope?

I don’t know. It’s late and I’m tired. We spent most of the day traveling, and just as I was preparing to get ready for bed, happened to double-check an email to prepare for our first-thing-in-the-morning closing appointment. Of course Seth immediately noticed a fatal flaw in my planning. What the hell was I thinking? Anyway. Mercury is in retrograde?

When traveling, leave early and allow for extra travel time. Have all bags double-taped closed, count your belongings, double-check addresses and reconfirm appointments. Things get lost when Mercury messes us up. Take NOTHING for granted.

 Via and here.

Wampug

It’s been a busy week, too busy to properly blog, but! Wampug!

Doesn’t that make everything better?

Holy crap

The mind boggles. The part in the video where she begins to trim out the paper makes me twitch. But these Momantai Design Masterpieces  are pretty cool nonetheless. I especially like the monochromatic examples on the site.

Via Swiss Miss.

The shock of the inevitable

One of my first computers was a Mac SE that my dad built. When I was finished with it, I returned it to him, and he still has it. It’s in the guest room closet. It might even still run. I mainly used it for WordPerfect, but it also had (has) some primitive iteration of CAD loaded onto it.

The death of culturally significant people is a strange thing. Even in cases like this, in which someone is visibly ill, I feel a distinct shock at the news. The shock is not the same as loss or grief (which are reserved for those who knew the person, and perhaps extended in this case to the design community at large). Instead there’s the regret of a potentially larger legacy abbreviated, and a general unease – almost completely unconscious – at the reminder that no one, however extraordinary, can escape the inevitable. I hope that he left this world easily.