five things

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Fri 13 Aug 2010

Five things make a Friday

Posted by PJ under erotica, fire, five things, food, health, Min, shakespeare, sin, work
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1.  It’s busy season at work.  The good news is, we were voted one of the best places to work in L.A.  Some who work here are dubious, but most of those people have never worked in the private sector and don’t realize how bad things can get.

2.  Last Saturday my friends and I prepared a picnic dinner and drove off to San Pedro to see Shakespeare in the park.  None of us had checked the website for months.  The venue had been changed because the city wanted to host “The Taste of San Pedro” in that particular park.  We drove home, built a fire in my fire pit, and ate our picnic in the backyard.  It actually turned out to be quite a pleasant evening.  Once we learned to never build a fire with paper and green kindling and turned on the fan to blow the smoke away from the picnic table and us.  “Hey, it’s Shakespeare for Dummies!” I said.  I smelt smoke for days afterwards.

3.  Maybe I should write erotica full time.  Then again, it’s so boring.

4.  Min has taken to sleeping on the pillow next to me.  I turn over in the night and get a faceful of cat and an indignant “Meow!”  So of course I turn over on the other side so as not to crowd her.

5.  I got really good results on my last blood test so I’ve spent the entire week doing all the things I had to give up in order to improve my blood test.  Penance will begin on Monday.  But first there will be ice cream!

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Fri 25 Jun 2010

Numbered thingy

Posted by PJ under being human, five things, Links, movies, research, rewrites, technology, writing
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I hope to return to real blogging soon, but it’s been hella busy. In the meantime, here’s another one of those numbered thingies:

1. Listening to the graduate students around here make excuses to their professors as to why they haven’t completed their coursework, it strikes me that not much has changed since elementary school. They’ve just found more sophisticated, elaborate, and convoluted ways of saying, “The dog ate my homework.”

2. I’m on chapter eleven of the read-through of Venus in Transit. I should be much further along as I hadn’t intended to do any restructuring or heavy editing, but you know how it goes. A couple (or more) scenes that just had to be rewritten, language desperately needed de-clunkifying, things had to be looked up and pondered… There’s still plenty more that needs fixing, no worries, but it’s amazing to me how many of the smaller threads of plot and characterization got left untied. I’ll definitely deal with those in the next draft.

3. I’ve acquired a sudden re-fascination with cunning folk, witchery, and folk medicine, et al. lately. I’ve been reading books and scouring JSTOR for articles. (I love JSTOR. Thank goodness for institutional subscriptions.) If research interest is an indicator of which novel my right brain next wants to write, things are looking good for my proto-novel, Time in a Bottle, the idea based in part on my novella, “Sealed with a Curse.” That novella involved an 18th century cunning man, infidelity, wastrelism, and a witch’s bottle. The novel version carries forward to the 21st century descendants of some of the folks involved in that affair. And maybe time travel. Or maybe not.

4. I’m wondering if a subscription to Netflix would be worth it to me since I rarely am in the mood to watch a movie at home more than once or twice a month? I used to devour movies at a massive rate, but I lost the love somewhere along the way. The $8.99 one would definitely be sufficient, but I’m not sure I’d get my money’s worth even then.

5. Come the Singularity, I suspect I will not be allowed on the lifeboat. I suspect I will be okay with that. Utopian visions rarely turn out well for humanity at large. I have zero confidence that techo-utopians will be any better at it than every other millennial movement that has wrecked humanity in the past. I am not a Luddite. I really do enjoy living in the bright, shiny techno-age—but sweeping mass social engineering never works. That’s the lesson of history. That’s the lesson of any close study of human nature. Power corrupts, even utopian techno power—and besides, these yahoos aren’t even trying to be egalitarian. This is all about ego and rich mostly whitefolk trying to escape the filthy masses.

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