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Saturday, June 29, 2002

< !-- begin terminally boring self-centered entry -- >

Several summer projects that are nearing the launch pad here at Chez Kat:

1. The Getting of Regular Exercise;
2. The Eating of At Least Somewhat Nutritious Food;
3. The Daily Sitting-Down of Ass on Zafu for Meditation Purposes;
4. The Significant Reduction in Cigarette Consumption;
5. The Carrying Through to Completion of Tasks Begun (including, but not limited to, household reorganization, web projects at work, and, oh, maybe, I dunno, some writing?!)

This is not a grandiose list; I've left off those things, like The Keeping Up With E-Mail, which cause me to snort and go "sshyeah, right." These are all things I've managed to do on a regular basis in the past, and while getting them re-started is not necessarily going to be easy, they're doable. Pretty straightforward. The one that has me boggled, oddly enough, is #2.

Oddly, because for the first time in my life it's not just a matter of making the correct food choices, going for the salads instead of the corn chips, but rather of getting any food into the system at all. I've always been what you might call a good feeder, someone with a hearty appetite who liked both cooking and eating. But lately ... it's not that I don't get hungry, but much of the time, when a meal seems called for, I stop, and ponder, and mull over options, and really can't come up with anything that sounds good. I still like cooking for other people from time to time, as a sort of performance art, but the prospect of actually putting in the effort to fix something for myself is fatiguing, and mildly repellent. If someone plunked a nice grilled-chicken Caesar salad down in front of me, I'd probably eat it, but the labor of putting one together myself just doesn't seem worth it, and I end up munching some crackers and maybe drinking a glass of milk instead. I've always been a big-hearty-breakfast person, but these days, if I manage to get down most of a slice of toast with peanut butter (along with the statutory gallon of coffee), it feels like a big accomplishment. I try to remember to take vitamins, but the fact is I'm probably mildly malnourished, on a chronic basis, and this no doubt contributes to the ongoing fatigue and torpor.

What's scary about it is that I've always thought of this kind of food attitude as part and parcel of Weird Little Old Lady Syndrome. (You know, the LOLs who wear dingy mismatched clothes and drag around huge cracked-vinyl purses full of oddments and live in funky-smelling rooming houses and scare small children.) My grandmother, who lived to be 92, spent the last five or ten years of her life basically subsisting on home-baked persimmon cookies and Sanka. (And her persimmon cookies were awful things, thick, doughy, flavorless.) I don't want to end up like her; but the prospect of having to come up with some kind of nutritious foodstuff to dump into the system, three times a day every day for the rest of my life, is -- aaaaggghh. I just want a bunch of those Food Pills that the science fiction of my youth promised would be part of our future.

< !-- end terminally boring self-centeredness, for the time being -- >

Posted @ 08:35 AM CST [Link]5 comments

Friday, June 28, 2002

The past week or two, I've noticed a different quality about the early morning light; when it falls on surfaces (bedroom wall, neighbor's fence) it's a different color than usual, a sort of orangey-peachy shade. It's pretty; but it's unsettling, in a subtle nagging way, to have the light be the wrong color. Listening to the local radio news this morning, I realize that this is because of the smoke from the fires in the west, high in the atmosphere. Which is pretty amazing, given that they're hundreds of miles away. Again, unsettling.

I wrote a story a while back which posited as a plot point the explosion of a European nuclear power plant, and I spent some time researching the potential dispersion patterns of radioactive fallout, research which I revisited during the recent India/Pakistan sabre-rattling. I know some people--people more spiritually grounded and deeper than I--who take enduring comfort from the interconnectedness of all things, the sense that the weave of being ties us all together. Me--well, it makes me nervous. Too many weirdnesses in the economy, in the political climate, the social climate, the color of the morning sunlight. There are too many whackjobs pulling at the threads in that great weave of being, and there's no way I can really untangle myself from them all.

But then, there are some threads I do like being connected to; I've added to the links list Fay Jay, who's posted some very interesting comments, and sparked good responses, on the perennial theme of quality of writing in fanfiction, "literary" vs. "badfic," etc. A year or two ago I wrote a cranky post to a list proposing that we establish a track system of some kind in fanfiction, and then ask writers to simply let us know upfront if they're on track A (writing basically to amuse self and buddies, not interested in getting substantive critique of quality of product) or track B (trying, however well or badly, to produce writing that meets some kind of quality standard, and open to comments about their successes and failures in that endeavor). I have no axe whatsoever to grind with people who are on track A and are at peace with it; I do get a little tired of the amount of snitting that goes on simply because track-A people are not on track B, and I think we could all save ourselves a lot of grief if we got clear upfront that different people write for different reasons and different audiences, with different purposes. Thamiris's latest entry speaks to this point cogently. I'm still pondering possible alternatives to the term "cathartic fiction," but I'm in agreement with her main point -- that it's not particularly useful to criticize somebody for failing to do something they weren't trying to do in the first place.

Posted @ 08:59 AM CST [Link]4 comments

Monday, June 24, 2002

It is hot. I am braindead. The two phenomena definitely correlate. For days now my most-frequently-clicked link has been to weather.com, to activate the Doppler-radar map-in-motion, to see when the next huge drenching storm is likely to wham into us, and how sodden the dewpoint is, and how hot it's going to get by afternoon. Right at this moment, there's another big wall of red creeping southwestward across the radar toward Minneapolis, and thunder rumbling in the distance, and I wish to god I could send this storm down to Arizona (my minor inconveniences of heat and wet being nothing compared to what people down there are suffering).

When not checking the radar this weekend, I sat hunched over the keyboard, damp with sweat, moving only only occasionally to insert a sentence, delete a sentence, bash my forehead against the monitor. I keep remembering what John Gardner once said about writing a novel requiring the disposition and stamina of a draft horse. I keep remembering E.L. Doctorow's line, quoted by Anne Lamott: "Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." I take the part of my brain that keeps calling me ugly hateful names and I walk it into a quiet room, sit it down with a nice cool glass of lemonade, and then slam the door and triple-lock it. Unfortunately, this part of my brain is a gifted escape artist, so we have to keep taking that walk over and over.

All of this keeps me occupied and passes the time. Not very productively, to be sure, but -- [time-out here while I note that big heavy drops have started splatting down, and I go around and close all the windows, pausing briefly to inhale the deliriously rich fragrance of the linden-trees that are blossoming on the boulevard]. Anyway, productivity, eh -- the journey is what matters, not the arrival, right? I could perhaps sell myself on this concept a little more successfully if I'd posted anything whatsoever in the past year, or if I hadn't also spent chunks of the weekend rereading marvelous stories by friends, which make me feel in comparison like Old Leadfoot, The Mentally Challenged Guernsey. (OK, you? Back in the room, and this time I swear you're not even getting any lemonade!)

Anyway, enough of that. In another spasmodic effort to keep up with the land boom in blog/LJ-ville, I've added a few more people -- deejay, Ardent, meghan, and realitycek (who I can't believe I didn't get linked long ago). I know there are many other smart interesting folks out there whom I should link, whom I track through others' links/friends lists, but I've basically given up on being completist here, and am simply trying not to inadvertently leave off any buddies due to mental disorganization.

Posted @ 08:07 AM CST [Link]5 comments