Editor Genevieve: Hey, is there a screener copy of Invictus in the office?

Editor Josh: Psshhh. Are you really going to watch that?

Genevieve: Why not? It's just what I want for the weekend.

Josh: Oh, it's just that I don't want to see it, and my opinion is more important than anyone else's.

Me: In that case, shouldn't you be writing more reviews for us?

Josh: What, and blow the roof off the world of reviewing? I would like SOME of all the other writers in the world to be able to keep their jobs.

---

Frankly, it's surprising that there hasn't been more goofery in the office lately. We're all kind of grim and punchy at the same time, from consistently trying to do two issues at a time first for the Thanksgiving holidays, now because so many of us are headed for New York and not coming back until sometime next week, and then with Christmas looming in the distance. Add on top of that that there have been roughly four screenings a day all week, and our schedules are all out of whack. Some of those screenings are for movies some of us have already seen, or have screeners of, or know aren't best-of-year contenders, so we aren't all in theaters ALL the time. But for instance, on Wednesday, I spent an eight-hour work day (10 a.m. to 6 p.m.) in screening rooms, then went home and tried to get a day's worth of work done in the evening. We're far ahead of where we normally are at this time of the week — in large part, I think, thanks to heroic organizing and supplemental editing efforts on the part of Mr. My Opinions Are More Important Than Anyone Else's — but still trying to get even more done. Also, I get on the plane for New York in six hours.

I've got my hotel reservations (thanks, neillparatzo, and thanks to everyone else who made suggestions — The Jane looks like a blast, and we'll have to try that next time we're in town with more warning, at which point they'll hopefully have openings), and I've got reservations for a shuttle into Manhattan from the airport, and I've got a stupidly ambitious list of things I'd like to do, such that hopefully I'll wear myself out during the day and then crash at night with my intimidatingly huge stack of screeners. There are SO MANY MOVIES left to watch, ya'll. I hope you appreciate the things I do for you*.

* By which I mean not for you at all. Sorry**.

** I'm not really sorry. Oops.

I'm-a feelin': busy

So, anyone out there have any brilliant suggestions for places to stay while in New York City this weekend? Last time Cass and I went, we stayed in a little family-run inn in Morningside Heights, which was great — the shared bathrooms were skeevy, but the rooms were clean and the staff was friendly and there was a great corner grocery store around the corner, with stacks of fresh fruit outside and homemade baked goods and salads on the inside. And it was $60 or so a night.

And I can't find it again, mostly since I don't remember its name. After hours of frustrating Internet searches, I finally just used Google Street View to take a virtual walk around Morningside Heights and find the address where the place had been, but there's no signage, and Google doesn't acknowledge that there's a hotel in that area.

The last time we stayed in New York, a casual Internet search turned up a dozen or so places like that — semi-sketchy family-run inns with shared bathrooms and cheap rooms. But that was years ago. Now Google is only giving me hostels (as low as $19 a night!) and places in Newark and downtown luxury hotels with rooms up to $995 a night. Was there an entire industry of fly-by-night hotels that got shut down over the last four or five years?

At any rate, I'm flying into town late Friday night, spending the weekend wandering around on my own, probably working in The Onion's NYC office on Monday, and then Monday night, appearing with Keith, Josh, Nathan, and others at Union Hall in Brooklyn to do a reading / presentation on behalf of our new book Inventory. (30% off on Amazon, though for a while it was 75% off, which propelled it into the top 100 bestselling books on the site.)

So if you find yourself in the area on Monday night, you should absolutely come out and say hi.

And in the meantime, I'm actually considering a hostel, since I've never stayed in one, and I'm curious. It'd be an adventure. Besides, when traveling, I pretty much just view a hotel room as a place to be unconscious for a while when exhausted, so I don't really want to pay $250 for a bed I'll use exactly the same way whether it's in a nice private room or a hostel. Though I am also considering staying at the Chelsea, just to stay at the Chelsea. Unfortunately, they have rooms available Sunday and Monday night, but not Friday or Saturday. So… I dunno. I'm perilously close to pulling a catechism and sleeping on a park bench. That also would be an adventure.

I'm-a feelin': indecisive

Shortly after I came home from my night screening…

Cass: Yeah, so [some friends] are busy tonight with something that involved a lot of giggling over the phone. I'm not sure whether that means sex, or World Of Warcraft, or what. Or maybe World Of Sexcraft.

Me: Ohhhhhh. I am fairly sure I do not want to know anything more about World Of Sexcraft.

Cass: But it's MASSIVELY multiplayer!

Me: Really? Perhaps we should check and see if they have enough people in their party. They might need more fps.

Cass: First-person shooter?

Me: Oh. I was thinking "fucking per second," since dps, damage per second, is such a big thing.

Cass: See, I would have just kept that as "dps," for "double penetrations."

Me: Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Cass: What, did I go too far?

Me: No, yours was just funnier than mine, which is way worse.

I'm-a feelin': pouty

So I kinda ran over Cass with my bike today. But it was totally his fault, cause he was the one who suggested we bike in the rain.

We're still not sure entirely what happened, but we were biking down to Devon to meet his mom, sister, and brother-in-law for lunch, and I was following him, and he was going slowly because he was pulling one of his gloves on, so I was too close behind him, and I called out to let him know it was okay to go faster, and he looked back to see where I was. And probably then his front wheel turned slightly with his body, and he hit a puddle or some wet leaves — it was raining lightly — and he skidded and then went down in the road on his side right in front of me, sliding on the road with his bike partly on top of him.

And everything slowed down enough for me to think If I brake I'll just slide into him, but if I veer right I'll hit a parked car and if I veer left I might be pulling into the path of a moving vehicle and crap I'm going to hit him, and then I swore and slammed into him, and of course with the sudden stop, my bike flipped and I went over the handlebars and mostly landed on top of him. Which was a fairly odd sensation — I felt my ribcage sort of bounce off his and both of them compressed and we both went "Whoof!" and then I was rolling off him.

Surprisingly enough, we mostly came out of it fine — he went down slow enough that he didn't get road rash, especially since his coat absorbed most of the impact, and me, I landed on something soft. We both have bruises in new and interesting places, and his knees aren't happy with him, and something in my lower back feels very weird, but all in all, we came out of it pretty close to unscathed.

Unfortunately, on the way home after late-lunch and a stroll around Indian Barrier Park, his back tire went flat and we made most of the trip with him jogging his bike and me sloooooowly peddling along next to him, or waiting as he reinflated it. At one point while he was doing that, we were near an elementary school, so I cycled around its grounds to see what it was like, and I noticed there was a hopscotch grid stenciled on the playground (do kids still play hopscotch?), plus a couple of squares divided into four numbered quadrants. And I took one look at those and thought Those are for foursquare, even though I've never played foursquare, never seen a foursquare grid that I'm aware of, and have absolutely no idea what the rules to foursquare are.

So I came home and looked 'em up, and it turns out there's an International Foursquare League and foursquare clubs and tournaments and a world's record (28 hours) and college teams and all kinds of wacky stuff. Which just proves once again something we talked about a bunch over Thanksgiving: The world is big and there are a lot of people in it, and they occupy themselves with some pretty odd stuff sometimes.

But I really wonder whether any of the kids who go to school there actually know the rules to foursquare, and play it obsessively at recess, the way we used to play kickball Back In The Day.

I'm-a feelin': sore

In the locker room of the health club the other day, a middle-aged woman near me was singing loudly and enthusiastically:

Middle-aged woman: Back in the saaaaddle again…

Older woman walking up: I wish.

Middle-aged woman: You aren't back in the saddle?

Older woman: No, unfortunately.

Middle-aged woman: You aren't making it to class today? Why not? You have an ailment?

Older woman: WHAT? Oh. No, no, I mean… y'know, THAT saddle.

Middle-aged woman: [Confused pause, then…] OH. [Awkward silence on both sides.]

How entirely random.

I'm-a feelin': rushed

So I decided this might be a good week to not spend any time, y'know, thinking. Which hasn't been hard. It's involved going to the gym every morning and pushing myself until I ache. Then going to work, which has been a fucktastrophe of intense overclocking due to all the huge, complicated Best Of The Decade pieces on top of our normal workload, plus having to get the print edition together a day and a half early due to Thanksgiving deadlines. Then I've seen one or two movies — usually two — every night, which has meant a lot of dragging home at 1 a.m., then getting up at 7:30 to go back to the gym.

At least this has been good for getting caught up before our best of the year in film coverage. Every year, our film editor Scott Tobias puts out a list of films we should all try to watch before writing our best-in-film pieces, and every year I post it for the generally curious and completist. Here 'tis. I'm way behind this year, though as usual, many of these haven't even come out yet, and the next few weeks will be packed with screenings and screeners. Also, this is the year I finally accept that my tastes and Scott's do not overlap all that often; in particular, I just don't get much out of gory horror films, and I have no particular intentions of taking him up on watching The House Of The Devil. Probably not Paranormal Activity, either. I'm still mad at him and Keith for suckering me into seeing Drag Me To Hell.

( The ones in bold, I've already seen. )

I'm-a feelin': BUSY

The thing that bothers me most about our cat's death is that she used to be a cat — a complicated ongoing process of personality and interaction — and now she's just a story, a couple of bloodless lines of text. She was a feral rescue. She was shy around strangers but very affectionate. We had her for 12 1/2 years. She developed liver cancer and we had to put her to sleep. The end. And one reason I got so emotional when she was diagnosed was that we were doing this before she was even dead: pruning her story down to base elements, simplifying it into a form that we could agree on with strangers. Streamlining the horrible, fearful days of illness and diagnosis and second-guessing down to She developed cancer. Turning more than a decade together into She was shy but sweet. We told the same few lines of story to several vets and techs who asked for it, including the one who euthanized her, and the more I heard the story in my own mouth, the more it didn’t have anything to do with her, or with what I was experiencing—it was just a bunch of pro forma stuff to say. But I felt like we were discarding most of her.

The simplifying process happens with everyone and everything eventually, and it's always tragic. That's actually a favorite theme of mine in fiction — the generational story where you find out that a person’s neatly packaged—in fact possibly deliberately repackaged—story handed down to the next generation really has nothing to do with the actual life from the previous generation. (Margaret Atwood's book Alias Grace and John Sayles' film Lone Star are particularly terrific examples of this.) But where reading about it can be fascinating, being part of the process is just depressing.

I couldn’t help realize at various points, as people asked about her, how easy it would have been to tell them any damn bullshit we wanted. We only got her a year ago. We liberated her from a testing lab. She was an experiment in animal cloning. How would they know? They hadn't shared her real story.

Granted, a housecat's story is not really worth sharing with the world, no matter that a billion Internet sites think differently. Even the vastly expanded version, the "real" version, would just be a lot of variants on mundane habits — the way she liked to sleep on my butt when I slept on my stomach. The way we had to hide our hands under the blankets at night, or she'd come poke her wet nose into them to see if she could nudge them into petting mode. The way she carried our other cat around by the neck when they were both barely out of kittenhood, and she was only a little bigger than him, so his feet dragged on the ground, but he passively accepted it anyway. None of this is relevant in the way even the shortest or more mundane human life is. But there’s no way to bring it across to other people.

All of this is the kind of irrational emotional reaction that takes over a brain in times of stress; I don’t know that any of it means anything. It’s just been bugging me the last few days. I’m feeling better; as I told komainu, I’m intellectually where I need to be with all this, I just haven’t caught up emotionally. To which she wisely replied that there’s no particular hurry on that.

Weirdly, we’re probably going to adopt more cats almost instantly. Cass has been wanting a third cat for years now, and I was reluctant to bring a new one into the mix, given how stranger-shy both of ours were. But the surviving cat, Balrog, has become increasingly needy and neurotic on his own, and we’re gone most of the day, and Cass thinks it’s cruel to leave him on his own all the time, especially since he was always more cat-social than people-social. So we’re going to the anti-cruelty society by my office tomorrow to meet new cats. It’s going to be very, very strange, but I imagine any cats we take home will be grateful for a new life.

So as I said in the last post, our cat Morgoth started declining rapidly a little over a week ago. She's always been an aggressively affectionate lap-cat, but suddenly she wasn't interested in us any more. She lost weight, and she'd already been bony to begin with. She couldn't sit down or lie on her side, and spent all her time in a hunched position with her legs tucked under her. Her fur started coming out by the handful. Her pads were inflamed. She would spend hours in a sort of reverie, staring at a bowl of food or at the stairs without tackling either. Cass took her to the vet for blood and urine and stool tests, and came back with a painkiller, an antibiotic, and a list of problems — a UTI, gum disease, a flaky rash on her belly that we hadn't known about because she wasn't coming to us to be touched anymore. The vet suggested an ultrasound.

We took her in for that on Thursday. The results weren't great, but they weren't conclusive, either, so their tech suggested a needle biopsy. The results would take a few days and we only had about a 60% chance of a solid diagnosis, but the alternative was anesthetizing her and cutting a hole in her for a full biopsy, and given her weakened, miserable, shaky state, I just didn't think she could take that.

We got the call this morning with the results — inappropriately enough, while we were downtown at a critics' screening for a cotton-candy-like animated kids' comedy. Biliary carcinoma — essentially a form of liver cancer. Inoperable, untreatable, time remaining measured in days rather than weeks. We talked about it for a while, but putting it off just seemed cruel, for our comfort – or worse yet, our convenience — so we got on public transit, went straight home, spent a little time with her, and took her to the clinic just before they closed for the weekend.

And we had her euthanized. I've had a huge number of pets over the years, starting from my earliest childhood, but I've never had to put one down before. Even knowing she was suffering, that she trembled half the time and the painkillers weren't doing much for her, that she couldn't deal with the litterbox anymore because she couldn't sit or squat, even though she was barely eating and didn't seem to be sleeping so much as zoning out… even through all of that, it was a phenomenally difficult, painful thing to do. I've dealt with a lot of dead pets — misadventure with cars, disease, other animals, even in one grisly case, a housepet that killed and ate another housepet — but I've never had to look at one and say "Yeah, it is time for you to die. Right now." It's normally awful dealing with the suddenness and arbitrariness of death, in animals and in friends and family and acquaintances, but until now there's always been a sort of feeling of "This was outside my scope, and I had no control over the situation," which is simultaneously frightening and comforting.

But deciding to kill one of our pets — which, in spite of all the kind euphemisms available, is exactly what it came down to — was new and horrible to both of us. I started crying in the multiplex while on the phone with the vet, and continued crying all the way home, all the way to the vet's, and all the way through the procedure. And I am not a crier. I think it's literally been years since I last cried. This was just… beyond.

I can't recommend Cat Hospital Of Chicago (where catechism sent us when Morgoth first started acting ill) enough. They've been extremely patient and caring and knowledgeable about all the exams and tests and treatments, and they lived up to that standard today. The doctor gently walked us through the entire procedure beforehand and let us know exactly what to expect at each stage. She didn't make a big deal about my crying or try to comfort me, which would have made me profoundly uncomfortable, but she didn't seem fazed or put off or embarrassed by it either; she treated it as natural and unremarkable, which is what I needed. They gave us a private room and plenty of time alone with Morgoth to get her calmed down from the trip and stop her shaking, and eventually, we got her purring. They never rushed us or made us feel like time was an issue. They were gentle and compassionate with the actual process, and afterward, they gave us some privacy with her body and let us leave on our own when we were ready. They're obviously experienced with this kind of thing, and they made it as easy as it could possibly be. I hope we get that level of care when we're ready to go.

We have a lot of friends who've gone through this in the past two years, more or less all in the same pattern — as we keep hearing, cats are predators and competitors, and it's in their nature to not show weakness until they're too sick to hide it any more, and a lot of times by the time something's visibly wrong, it's already too late. I know all the aphorisms, about how it was time, and how we did it to stop her suffering. I know a lot of people have been through this, and I want to thank everyone who talked to us about it, here and in person. But oh God, is it ever hard.

This is her in healthier times. She was a feral rescue; she had 12 and a half good years with us, four times the life expectancy of a feral cat. She was an incredibly sweet girl. And as Cass says, right now the house is full of ghosts of her.

I've been in one of my non-communicative moods lately. It isn't quite like depression — I can function fine, I just have nothing to say to anyone. Even coming up with 140 worthwhile characters for Twitter is a stretch. I seem to be coming out of it, but I'm still not feeling verbose. So briefly:

• We went down to Halsted Street again this year for Halloween. It was cold, so we did a quick tour, just an hour or so of wandering around goggling. The best costume I saw was a group: Minnie Mouse, Mighty Mouse, and Speedy Gonzales… all blind, tail-less, and using canes. Best moment, though, was when two guys dressed in standard prefab Ernie and Bert costumes ran into two guys dressed in the exact same costumes… plus bondage gear. Bondage Bert pointed and shrieked like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, and the other Ernie and Bert pair backed off nervously.
  
  
• I'm reading Cory Doctorow's Makers and alternating between loving it, and wanting to smack him for his Michael Moore-esque blinkeredness about anything that falls outside his narrow agenda.
  
  
• And weirdly, I'm listening to a lot of heavy metal lately, courtesy of Pandora Radio. I've never been a fan before, but maybe it's the only thing that expresses how mute and frustrated I feel right now. I've been discovering a lot of artists everyone else in the world already knew about, and enjoying them, but I'm betting this phase doesn't last long.
  
  
• Last week was hugely stressful, in large part due to an interview scheduled at the end of the day Thursday and conducted on Friday. Stressed myself into nausea last-minute-prepping for it, and then it turned out to be profoundly boring and disappointing. No, I'm not saying with who.
  
  
• I also interviewed Glen Hansard (who was not boring; in fact, he talked about how he almost ended up as Rorschach in Watchmen) and co-wrote a piece on how to survive in a Stephen King story. Comments for both were pretty disappointing, but those two pieces are topping our most-emailed list.
  
  
• Consuming most of my mind at the moment: One of our cats is seriously ill of as-yet-unclear causes, and we're having to contemplate putting her to sleep. I've never had to make this decision about a pet before. It's horrible and we're constantly second-guessing ourselves as we wait for more test results and contemplate further tests and surgery that might help, or might just be spending thousands of dollars to make her even more miserable. We're medicating her twice a day (antibiotics and painkillers) and sometimes once the meds kick in, she seems almost normal, and I think "How could we possibly even contemplate putting her down?" and then hours later she's a trembling little ball of wretched bony misery with falling-out fur, and I think we shouldn't even bother waiting for the test results. People keep telling us "You'll know when it's time," which is one of the things you're supposed to say at a time like this, and I've always believed that. Except that her state changes from day to day, and no, we really just don't know. I suspect we'll have to decide in the next few days, and either way, I'll feel like I've made the wrong choice.
  

I'm-a feelin': depressed

• If you're in Chicago tonight, come hang out with the A.V. Club crew. We're reading at the Book Cellar (4736 N Lincoln Ave, Lawrence) at 7 p.m., in support of our new book Inventory. It's currently the last Chicago reading planned for the book, so it might be now or never. The Milwaukee reading was postponed due to swine flu and other absences, and is now on Tuesday, November 10, still at Boswell Book Company, 2559 N. Downer Ave., at 7.
  
  
• This morning, coming out of the health club, I didn't have my contacts on, and I walked by their little church-front marquee advertising the title of the next sermon. It was "Do not pass me by," but I momentarily misread it as "Do not piss me off," and I thought "Man, the church must be having problems with its neighbors."
  
  
• Watched more final-season BSG last night — resolution of the big Gaeta plotline, and a core-dump about Cylon history from Anders. SO MUCH LESS ANNOYING than our previous viewing. The show had me back in minutes. Onscreen, there was only one angry sweeping of things off tables, and no other tantruming. Offscreen, there was still a little yelling at the TV — mostly Kevin, very frustrated over Doc Cottle's "let's let any old person into the ER to stand over critically ill people and confront them and make them worse" policy. But overall, much less screaming by the characters and by us. Cass says the key to good BSG is just more Cylons, all the time, and he seems to be right.
  
  
• Someone made pumpkin-apple-nut muffins and brought them in for the staff. Editor Genevieve just asked if I want to split one. I told her no thanks, I don't like pumpkin anything. She gave me a pitying look and said "So… you basically aren't planning on eating anything during this two-month period?" I have to admit that my consumption of baked goods has been down lately. And that my local grocery store now has pumpkin donuts, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin coffee cake, pumpkin muffins, and pumpkin cheesecake all up by the front door.
  
  
• Genevieve also just sent me this high-larious link. Clearly I am not the only one tickled by terrible bootleg costumes. Cyber-Man! Eurasian Traveler! Green Guy! The names of these rip-off costumes sound like the crazy boss on The IT Crowd naming off the members of The A-Team: Body! Doyle! Tiger! The Jewelry Man!
  
  
• Plants Vs. Zombies ate my brains, but they seem to be slowly growing back; I've just about exhausted all the mini-games and puzzles and "survival mode," and after a one-week intense love affair, I'm finally starting to see daylight again. It looks strangely non-zombie-shaped.
  
  
• Saw The Road and Fantastic Mr. Fox yesterday, as the first salvo in prestige-movie season. Can't talk much about either yet, but I'll note that what stuck with me most about Mr. Fox was that Wes Anderson replaced all swear words with "cuss," as in "What the cuss?" and "Holy cuss!" and "I swear to cuss…" By the end of the movie, people are saying things like "I like to cuss with their heads," and "This is a total clustercuss." Finally, there's a scene in a city where, off in the background is a huge, colorful, gang-tag-style graffito on the wall that just says "CUSS." The whole movie is about that level of tweedorable. Plan your viewing or non-viewing accordingly.
  

I'm-a feelin': busy

Three updates on this post, about general office wackiness:

1. As far as I know, everyone in the office is back after the H1N1 scare, and things are largely back to normal. But I just walked into the bathroom, and the floor was soaking wet and smelled chokingly of bleach. Like "We spilled a bottle of bleach in here and just smeared it around" levels of stench. The office manager walked in a minute later and told me that the cleaning crew has been bleaching the floors twice a day to prevent the swine flu from spreading. WTF? Is the primary method of transference people licking unbleached bathroom floors?
   
   
2. Also back to normal: I got up at a decent hour today and got in a full, non-curtailed workout for the first time in weeks. So I feel awesome about myself, except for the part where I spent the first couple hours of work prepping to fall on my face sound asleep, both from the working out and from low blood sugar.
   
   
3. Bronson Pinchot called Nathan at home on Saturday to say hi and to discuss the wacky world of being suddenly famous as that guy who called Tom Cruise a homophobe. He apparently was "pleased and a little overwhelmed" by the sudden media attention, but promised to call Nathan again the next time he needs to stir up a big controversy. He also said more hilarious things about Tom Cruise that are not for public consumption. And now he's Tweeting 50 times a day — he started the account back in August and then seemed to immediately lose interest, but he's back with a vengeance, and quite frankly, he sounds lonely and a little unhinged. Go be Bronson Pinchot's friend! He needs the validation, and he's funny as hell, and he probably knows more celebrities than you.

I'm-a feelin': busy

spreadnparanoia recently forwarded me a press release that I think is just genius. A little downtown-Chicago gym is launching a "zombie-preparedness fitness class," with the idea that they'll get you in shape for the upcoming zombpocalypse. From the press release:

"Zombies are the biggest paranormal threat facing society today, and a fit, strong body is the best tool you have for survival during the coming invasion! A free trial class on October 31 followed by an affordable four-week session at Unicus Fitness is the absolute best way to get you physically and mentally ready for when zombies actually attack. Endurance and strength drills will help you develop the skills you need to execute the necessary stunts, and also build the mental toughness you will need to cope with extreme stress. (Zombie-specific defense drills will also be covered.) Would you be a survivor of the zombie apocalypse? Find out on October 31 at Unicus Fitness!"

I cannot think of a better way to make exercise and self-defense fun than by basically making people into movie protagonists facing a currently popular horror scenario. To top it off, some of the proceeds are going to a local theater company, which gets a history writeup in the press release; I can only assume they've hired some local actors to come be zombies for the class.

Astonishingly, the gym's website says nothing about this. (It also looks rather as though it hasn't been updated since the '90s, given the super-simple design and front-page screens and screens of ugly text and thumbnail photos.) But here are the details: "To Register: Email sarah@unicusfitness.com or call 312-819-4466 by Friday, October 30 at 5 p.m. Your name must be added to a security clearance list in the building in order for you to attend. Location: Unicus Fitness, 233 N Michigan Ave. Free Trial Class: Saturday, Oct 31 at 10 am. Session 1 Dates: Nov 7, Nov 14, Nov 21, Dec 5. Cost: $15 per class or $45 for 4-class session."

I'm mighty tempted by the free trial class myself. Of course, it's also downtown, an hour away from home, at 10 a.m. on a Saturday where I expect to be up very late. So I imagine I will also be mighty tempted by sleep. But I mean C'MON. Who doesn't want to burn calories by fighting zombies? Perhaps my contribution to my friend group when the apocalypse breaks out will not be entirely limited to dutifully reminding people that we all signed a pact not to hide it when we get bit!

I'm-a feelin': curious

Tonight, Chris, Sam, and Kevin came over and we finally started Battlestar Galactica season 4.5, the final chapter. As is often the case with me and BSG, within five minutes of starting, I wanted to slap half the people on the show, and shoot the other half. I don't even have a love-hate relationship with this show; it's more hate-hate. I can't even explain why I'm still watching it, except that dinner-and-a-movie-or-some-TV is a primary social function for me and Cass, and I'm always drawn to things I know a bunch of people want to see. And I want to see how the plot plays out, even though I already know the BIG FINAL TWIST, and I already know from reading interviews with the writers that the Cylons didn't have a plan, and the writers didn't have a plan, and they just kinda faked it, and the seams were really clear at the end. And also even though every new development just frustrates me, as virtually every character on the show proves over and over and over that they're horrible, irredeemable people.

As far as I'm concerned, the primary theme of the show is the monumental selfishness that overtakes people in the wake of fear and despair. Everyone in the series is caught up at various times with overwhelming self-righteousness and self-absorption. Character-wise, this is expressed most clearly via Kara Thrace, who is literally only happy when she's set loose to cause mayhem and kill things, and thus she doesn't care about causes or morals or motives, she just wants someone to start a fight so she can dive in and kick ass. If there's no fighting going on, she either starts one or sits around brooding until she works up enough misery that she decides to push it onto other people and make them as miserable as she is.

And action-wise, this is expressed most clearly in the way all of the main characters express unhappiness either by hurting other people, or by destroying things, which is a gigantic moral crime on a spaceship with horribly limited resources. Someone is always throwing a glass across a room or smashing a mirror or pouring all the booze down the drain or crushing an intricate model ship or something. And every time they do, I don't see emotional pain, I see someone so self-important that they think it's perfectly acceptable to deny a tiny, desperate population something non-replaceable. In the three episodes we watched tonight, one character expressed her loss of faith by burning a BSG-Bible page by page. (Cass and Chris both pointed out that she was wasting precious oxygen as well as destroying a priceless artifact, one of her civilization's last books.) The same character later makes another symbolic gesture by sweeping a table-load of precious medications into her trash can. Later, someone confronts Kara Thrace about something while she's eating soup, and she promptly throws the bowl, spoon, and soup across the room, one-handed, without changing expression. It's almost as if the character thinks, because of the environment she's in, that no one will know she's angry unless she's wasting something and making a mess for someone else to clean up.

Don't even get me started on the politics of information control on BSG, where there's always a tiny elite that know everything and decide to make bad decisions on the basis of their intel, then either lie to the general population about what's going on, or completely deny them information, generally in order to support those bad decisions. Sometimes the bad decisions are rammed down the population's throats with guns. Which are greased with lies.

At any rate. Somewhere in the middle of the episodes we watched tonight, two characters started sleeping together, and I protested that it was hugely out of character for them, in part based on a previous interaction between them. Which led to this:

Me: Earlier, [character X] was coming on to [character Y] in a hugely aggressive way, and Y turned X down flat. So what's changed between them suddenly, offscreen? If anything, they've been moving sharply away from each other ever since. Why are they suddenly in bed with each other now?

Sam: I didn't read the scene that way at all. I thought they brought it up and it was mutually agreed that they weren't interested.

Kevin: Yeah, it was definitely an equal decision to not have the relationship go there.

Me: Really? I thought X was throwing around hints the size of dump trucks, and Y was stiff-arming the entire time.

Chris: I have to take the side of my esteemed colleagues on this side of the room on this one. It was an equal decision.

Cass: I'm with Tasha on this. Oh no, now we'll have to split the fleet! And they've got all the orange dreamsicle candies over there!

Me: Don't worry, I'll express my irritation by storming over there and throwing them across the room, because if I can't have them, no one will.

Kevin: That seems fair.

Me: Also, I actually have information that would prove my interpretation is right, but I've realized that it would be dangerous and destabilizing for the rest of you to have it. So I'm going to withhold it, but I'm also going to treat you all like shit from now on because you're ignorant and can't be trusted because you're making decisions without the benefit of this information.

Cass: Okay, enough of BSG LARP.

Kevin: [Laughing.] Okay, now I'm picturing us all walking into [place at Northwestern that hosts the LARP where we all met] with little ship models, and politicking at each other, and then whenever someone gets mad they have to smash their ship model to show they're serious.

Me: Conflicts can be resolved with rock-paper-scissors-tantrum. With tantrum, you beat everybody else in the room, no matter what they throw, by finding a table with things on it, and angrily sweeping everything onto the floor. Tantrum can only be beaten by a bigger tantrum.

Cass: Alternately, everyone gets a ship model to smash, and whoever ends up with the smallest piece of ship model in their hand wins. Like the opposite of a turkey wishbone.

Actually, I think BSG LARP would be a lot like any LARP I've ever been in — a couple people in the back room making all the decisions with all the information, and everybody else bored and hostile and running around making huge trouble for each other and waving their game-dicks around. There would just be more sweeping things off tables. The GMs would have their hands full, trying to keep rooms well-stocked with tables covered with things. Maybe everyone would have to have a "number of tables near you with things on them" stat to keep track of.

And maybe I need to go the hell to bed. Yeahhhh…

I'm-a feelin': annoyed as ever

I can't help but wonder if the banking industry is in bed with the companies who manufacture paper shredders. I would feel much less need for a personal shredder if my bank and my credit-card companies would only stop sending me fake checks with my personal info on them, checks which, if used, would immediately become credit-card debt or a bank loan at whatever rates they feel like charging. Brrr. Tearing those things up just isn't thorough enough for them; I don't want any vestige of them out there. It also isn't mean enough for how I feel about them. I kinda want to stab them, but apparently the banking industry is not in bed with any stabbing machines, because I'm not aware of any on the market.

Among the many other thrilling things we've been up to this weekend, we went through several months of accumulated junk mail, mostly bank statements, and print versions of bills we pay online, and solicitations for donations or for new credit cards, or to change our insurance, or whatever. Every time we spend a depressing hour doing this, I tell myself "If you'd just open these things as they come in, this wouldn't happen." Two months from now, though, we'll no doubt be doing it again. I hate junk mail, but I can't just throw it away and send it off to the landfill; I have to open it, tear it up if it's non-sensitive and doesn't contain plastic or decals, and then recycle it, or shred it if it has info I don't want floating around. I think the reason I put it off so long is that I resent the imposition. A pile of solicitation mail at some point takes on the weight of a telemarketing call in the middle of dinner; a minor inconvenience, but a major annoyance. It makes me feel curmudgeonly and crotchety and old, dealing with it. You are stealing my time. I had plans for that time. And you're wasting your time too, not to mention resources that would be better spent elsewhere. GO AWAY. I need a "Hey you kids, get your junk mail outta my box" sign.

I'm-a feelin': aggravated

So… I check Shirt Woot! and Tee Fury every day to see what they're up to, since they have a new design every day, and you have 24 hours to buy it, and then it's gone forever. (Unless the artists, who get to keep the rights, want to make the shirts themselves, I guess.)

Today's Tee Fury shirt is simple and hilarious. I'd also never wear it, because it'd look like my boobs had arms. Which is not what the designer is going for. I think this is neater as a concept than it is in practice; it looks perfect as an image of a shirt, but wouldn't work as well on an actual human being.

And yet I can't stop looking at it and giggling.



Incidentally, to this day I have only bought one shirt from either site. (It was this one. It's even prettier in person.) I really don't need more T-shirts. There's just something startlingly tempting about the creativity and quality and ephemerality of the designs, most days. Once in a while, I wind up downloading the art rather than buying the shirt. I have no idea what I might do with it, except make more LJ icons; I just hate to let it go entirely. I mostly look at them and wish someone was marketing prints or posters of them rather than just shirts. The problem with art on a shirt is that I'm the one who likes it and bought it, yet I'm the one that gets to see the least of it.

While I was in Portland visiting PD and ladymajor, we went to Powell's Books, and I saw a guy in a Woot! shirt that had hugely tempted me: an orange-and-black design of a tree made out of flame. So I stopped him and asked him about it; the shirts are fairly cheap, so I'd wondered what the quality was like. And he seemed OVERJOYED to meet someone else who knew about Shirt Woot!, and to talk about his experience with them. It was a pretty random encounter, but kinda neat. I've had the same experience with Threadless shirts, for that matter — sometimes when I see people wearing them, I stop to comment on the shirts, and they always seem happy to talk about Threadless.

I think this is the closest I'm ever going to be to being the kind of person who says "Oh! Is that a LaCoste original? Are those Jimmy Choos? Is your purse a real Louis Vuitton?" But I'd totally be ready to comment on runway fashion at the Oscars if everyone was wearing T-shirts they bought online.

I'm-a feelin': calm

Which is worse, the slutty-costumes-for-girls trend, or elaborate costumes for pets?

How about a trend that combines both? Cass has alerted me to the existence of Matching Costumes For Dogs, in which "sexy" women's costumes are paired with "sexy" costumes for their pets.

There are so many things wrong with this. For starters:

1. Dogs are not sexy. Dogs in revealing clothing are extra not-sexy.
   
   
2. Even if dogs were sexy, chihuahuas would not be sexy.
   
   
3. Even if chihuahuas were super-sexy… still, incredibly sad, embarrassed-looking chihuahuas would not be sexy. Almost all the dogs on this page of costumes look like they're thinking WHY IN GOD'S NAME DO YOU HATE ME I JUST WANT TO BE LOOOOOOOOVED
   
   
4. Even if sad, embarrassed-looking chihuahuas were sexy, they would not look sexy shoved into an ill-fitting, cheap costume next to a girl in the same thing who fills it out better. It's like cramming five bridesmaids of radically different heights, shapes, and builds into the exact same dress — some of them are going to look bad, and it's going to make the dress look bad too. Actually, the wrinkled little dog in the wrinkled little costume makes the girl look worse, too. And isn't there a little sense there of the bride who deliberately puts her bridesmaids in ugly dresses so they won't outshine her? Walking around in slut-gear with a dog dressed in the same slut-gear seems a little desperate, like saying "Okay, maybe I don't really have the figure for this micro-skirt, but at least I look hotter than a chihuahua!"
   
   
5. See #1. Dogs? NOT SEXY.
   
   
6. For god's sake, if you're going to be lame enough to force your poor sad dog into a costume that "matches" yours, at least create a theme rather than just both wearing the same thing. No one likes showing up to the parade in the same costume as someone else. If you're going to be Slutty Alice, don't dress your dog up as Slutty Alice #2, dress him up as the Mad Hatter or the White Rabbit or the Cheshire Cat. If you must be a Slutty Cheerleader, turn your dog into the quarterback you're no doubt sleeping with. If you must be a Slutty — what the hell is that blue thing with all the tulle, anyway? Little Bo Peep, I guess — then why wouldn't you dress your dog up as the sheep?

Actually, what cracks me up most about this site is that there are a whole bunch of not-match-oriented costumes for dogs… and they're broken down by gender. Yes, there are costumes for female dogs (bride, princess, "hula girl," "hausfrau") and male dogs (pimp, cowboy, fireman, astronaut). Because EVEN DOGS need regressive sexual stereotyping.

So why not just cut to the chase and put the dog in a pimp costume and you in a whore costume? At least that way the dog can retain some dignity. And that purple hat is STYLIN'.

I'm-a feelin': eye-rolly

This is a little weird, but the hardest part of my day to schedule is the part when I'm on the train to and from work, because it's the only part of the day when there are no distractions or other calls on my time — no tempting Internet, no IMs or emails demanding immediate answers, no calls or people walking up to my desk asking for things, no communication and sudden shifts of priorities. I can get a lot done on the train; it's just a question of what most needs doing. The last couple of days have looked like this in my head:

Should I edit? I'm a little behind on the weekly edits. We have a lot of features going up this week. I get a lot done on the train. And there's the new book to consider.

Should I answer email? I get hundreds of emails a day, and I have a bad habit of glancing at the ones that actually require response, and thinking "I'll get to that in a minute." Then another hundred emails come in and whatever "that" was scrolls off the screen and is forgotten, and periodically I need to go back and catch up, preferably while in a space where no new emails are coming in, or I'll get distracted and discouraged and go do something else.

Should I write up that LJ post I was thinking about? I often can't blog at work just because there are so many other things I should be writing or editing. But I feel like something posted at night or on the weekends is less likely to get read. Ideally, I'd write an LJ post on the way into work and post it when I get there, so it's up during the work day when people are bored, but I didn't put office time into it.

Should I read a book? We're supposed to start discussing Ghost Story on the site on Monday. I'm still only halfway through. Should prioritize that. Also, all those books I was curious about two weeks ago just suddenly came in at the library, so I gotta get crackin' or they'll all have to go back unread.

Should I read comics? My backlog is immense, and our latest comics review column is due. There's no getting caught up, but I should at least contribute something, which means at least wading through this week's pile of new series from Image and seeing if there's something in there we should promote.

Should I… maybe… play some Plants Vs. Zombies? Cause I've been wanting to all day while at work, but I've been good, and now I'd really really like to get back to the current crack-like addiction. *shifty look* Um… Of course, the problem with playing PVZ on the train is that the levels get pretty intense at the end, and there's a SMALL risk I might get distracted and overshoot my stop.

twice this week in fact but who's counting la de dah de dah

It's actually a wonder at this point that with all these priorities jostling for attention, I haven't made my commute into just as distracted as my normal work day, as I flit from one thing to the next. But I'm half-thinking at this point that if I want to get things done over the weekend, I should just ride the el around all day. Kind of the urban equivalent of a writer's retreat.

I'm-a feelin': busy

Well, this has been a weird couple of days. We're mostly back in the office and back to work — a few new people are out sick now, but most of the first-wave sickies are better enough to come into the office. From what I'm hearing, very few people actually have verified swine flu; the "OMG WE ALL HAVE H1N1" came because one editor was diagnosed over the phone. She wasn't tested; her doctor just said "That's the flu strain going around now, so if you have the flu, you have H1N1." Which is fine, except a couple people in the office were tested and had different strains of it.

Nonetheless, I've been way out of it — a week of working at home and sleeping in every day has made me lazy and self-indulgent. I'm sleeping too late, eating too much, not getting enough done. Today I mostly caught up on work, but I need to get myself back on a reasonable sleep schedule and start getting back to the gym before my limbs all shrivel up and I turn into a couch potato.

That aside… on Tuesday, we posted a very entertaining interview with Perfect Strangers star Bronson Pinchot. It was one of our "Random Rules" pieces, where an interviewer throws out a bunch of random titles of projects a star's been in, and encourages him to just say whatever comes to mind about the production all these years later. Pinchot wound up casually mentioning Tom Cruise's constant weird homophobic comments when he was 20, and talking about how profoundly unpleasant Denzel Washington and Bette Midler are on-set.

And then the Internet had a spazz attack. Gawker and the Huffington Post picked it up — Pinchot slags one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, calling him a crazy homophobe!!!!1! — and from there it spread to Entertainment Weekly and the Wall Street Journal and TVGuide.com and IndieWire and the Guardian, not to mention about a thousand celeb gossip sites that all repeat each other's tips. We got a big traffic spike, and email from Inside Edition requesting verification on the exact words Pinchot used. And of course people all over the Internet, not familiar with us or the idea of Random Roles, and not bothering to read the original, assumed Pinchot just called a press conference and yelled "Tom Cruise is an asshole!" because he thought it would get headlines. A lot of the Internet response seems to boil down to "who duz he think he is lol hazbin wants attenshun." (The rest amounts to "Ha ha, Tom Cruise, you closeted asswipe.")

It's been interesting watching this spread, in part because with every retelling, the story gets bigger. Someone asked Cruise's PR rep for a response, and he said something tossed-off about how that didn't sound like Tom and it was probably a joke, and then a bunch of places ran stories under headlines like CRUISE RESPONDS TO PINCHOT'S ACCUSATIONS, except retooling and recasting the PR guy's quote and claiming Cruise said it himself.

The latest development is from the Wall Street Journal again — I was wondering how long it would take for this to happen — sending someone to get follow-up quotes from Pinchot, who is admirably candid and calm in the face of this momentary teapot-tempest and essentially said "Yeah, I said that, I wasn't being malicious, but it's true." Good for him.

Tomorrow the week will be over, and I'll be glad. Monday, a new week will start, and I'll try to be a competent adult then. In between, I've got about four sets of conflicting plans, and no idea which of them I'll end up doing. Maybe I'll call Pinchot and ask about advice on that. He seems to have a good head on his shoulders.

ETA: Real-person fanfic about Tom Cruise ordering ice cream in case there are no gay people here. One-note but pretty damn funny. It just keeps spreading.

I'm-a feelin': amazed

Radio interviews are done. Man, that was pretty surreal. Today, all the ones I actually did were excellent — enthusiastic, lively, charismatic hosts who'd actually read the book and wanted to talk about their favorite lists, and add items to them, and and take issue with our choices.

And then… Then there was the one interview where I tuned into their online stream to see what kind of station they were, and it sounded like live public-access TV: a bunch of locals discussing local garden initiatives, a new art show at the local community center, a kids' program at a local park where they could meet "Grandmother Oak," the oldest tree in the area, and a lot more. The hosts basically said "What are this week's programs?" and then let the guests chatter on uninterrupted at great length. It was all very wholesome and very tiny-town-community-life, and I couldn't help but wonder why they would want to hear from a bunch of Chicago smart-asses about their Chicago smart-ass book.

Then they brought on some guy with a guitar who was evidently going to play at one of these events, and he fumbled through a monotonal, dirgey song to the effect of "Pop radio killed my soul, tear the towers down and take control," except that he didn't remember half the words. So he just repeated himself a bunch, and eventually said "I don't really remember the third verse, but if you want to come down on Saturday, I promise I'll remember it then. It'll be a reason for you to come out." Co-editor Josh, who had also tuned in because we weren't sure which of us they were going to call, IMed me: "I feel like I'm caught in a Christopher Guest movie."

Then they all talked for a while about the local ongoing "save the peckers" campaign, which they did not explain at all, but giggled over just a little. They also mentioned that listeners could come down to the Center to meet "Little Elvis," evidently a three-month-old dressed like Presley.

And finally, they wrapped up the show by having monotonal guy sing a version of "You Are My Sunshine" that only had one note, and what sounded like an extemporized, babbly verse in the middle. Eventually, he started warbling up and down with no rhyme or reason or melody… And that was when he said "Everybody sing!" and both hosts and the other guests all tried to sing along to a song being sung with no tune whatsoever. It was gloriously insane.

And then the segment ended and the hosts said goodbye, and suddenly the station changed over to an all-Spanish channel, and Cass IM'ed me to say "I don't think these new guys are going to interview you." I had to agree. But I was good with that. Listening in on the program beforehand, I could not imagine what any of us would have to say to each other. And I'm so glad I wasn't a part of that sing-along.

But how did we end up booked onto that show in the first place? And what motivated them to skip us? I know it was the right station, and I know they were expecting us, because we're listed as part of today's programming on their site. I'm betting there's just a lot I don't understand about exactly how radio programs are planned, put together, and winged.

I'm-a feelin': baffled

About to start round two of morning radio interviews for our new book Inventory. Actual live interviews, for those who want to play along:

7:10 a.m. Detroit, MI, WPHM-AM, Paul Miller Morning Show

7:30 a.m. Sirius Satellite Network, Bill Press Show

9:30 a.m. Portland, OR, KPOJ-AM Carl Wolfson Morning Show

11:45 a.m. Sonoma-Santa Rosa, CA, KSVY-FM, Ken Brown Morning Show

All times Central, so adjust accordingly.

There was an 8:30 interview in there, but he canceled due to illness (swine flu, I wonder?), so there's a block where I'll likely go back to bed, given that I can't stop yawning, and that I went to bed late enough that I was addled into believing that setting my alarm for 7:30 a.m. would get me up in time for the 7:10 interview. Fortunately I was all wired up and couldn't sleep at all after 6 a.m.

ETA: Ohhkay, that was odd. The subject line of this post was meant to evoke "Mexican Radio," which was running through my head. It got to be 7:12 and the first station hadn't called me, so I picked up the phone to make sure it wasn't off the hook. Paul Miller was already on the line, waiting for me; the phone just hadn't rung. Which was a little jarring. And then he started playing "Mexican Radio" at me. Things get a little surreal for me at this time of morning — usually I'm already at the gym and working out by the time I really wake up properly — so I'm not entirely sure any of that just happened. In my dream state, though, it seemed like a good interview; he was funny and friendly and he'd actually read the book and had a lot to say about it.

ETA2: Man, this is such a fun and interesting (if sometimes a little intimidating) process. But here's one thing that throws me every single time: They call me. They give me a countdown to air. They play intro music. They chat me up. They praise the book and our work and are effusive and friendly, with big radio personalities. We try to make a connection and sound warm and lively and like we're having a conversation. And then the SECOND the segment is over, I'm disconnected, usually while they're still doing the segment outro — "We've been talking to Tasha Robinson from The — *CLICK* But… but… I am a girl! I want to cuddle and talk afterward! I thought you really liked me, and now it turns out you were just using me to fill air time? *snif*

I'm-a feelin': still not a morning person

Workin' At Home Yet Again Haiku

Thump and crash upstairs
Followed by a fleeing cat
Do I want to know?

I'm-a feelin': sigh.

Update: still do not have swine flu. Most people were out sick or working at home Friday; it's been suggested that we also avoid the office on Monday. A crew is coming in over the weekend to "sterilize the office," which I suspect will mean wiping down the doorknobs and kitchen table with Lysol and calling it a day.

In other news, bobbler mentioned this at inediblebuddha's impromptu birthday celebration on Wednesday, and it's been stuck in my head ever since. Ever wondered what the members of G.I. Joe and Cobra from the ’80s G.I. Joe cartoon do in their downtime? No? Me neither, really. But apparently a fairly astonishing cast of cosplaying celebrities, including Julianne Moore, Henry Rollins, Billy Crudup, Alexis Bledel, Zach Galifianakis, Tony Hale, and Vinnie Jones did. Or at least were cool with producing a music video about it. I've been digging around looking for backstory on this, and finding nothing but Internet commentors swooning over how the characters in this look better than they did in this year's G.I. Joe movie. Full cast list at YouTube.




And yeah, that's actually Sgt. Slaughter there at the end.

I'm-a feelin': amused

Tuesday night we had our book release and launch party.

Wednesday morning, I stayed home to do radio interviews. Josh also stayed home to do radio interviews, but reported throughout the day that he was feeling weird, then tired, then feverish, then sick. Our web producer, Jesse, reported that he was vomiting and had a high fever. Co-editor Genevieve went home with a fever and a cough and the chills. Co-editor Kyle was in the office and reported that five people had gone home sick. Noel, who was in town for the reading, flew home sick.

Today we had a reading in Madison. Jesse's still out sick, and had to cancel a trip. Assistant editor Steve went home sick. Josh reported that he's full-on sick, the worst he's been in years, and would have to skip the Madison trip. Tech guy Alex cut out in the middle of the day. Kyle stayed home to work. Scott was in the office and reported that it was deserted. I ducked in late today to grab something, and saw a lot of empty desks, and heard our designer, Jun, coughing. It seemed like every hour, we were getting another report of someone who was suddenly and spectacularly ill and heading home.

Late today, Genevieve got to the doctor, and it was confirmed: our office has swine flu. It's been profoundly creepy, watching how fast it's spread and developed; it's like being in The Stand, except without all the grotesque death. Kyle suspects the culprit is the open bowls of M&M's available on Jun's desk, with people putting their grubby diseased hands in the bowl and leaving their germs for everybody else to share.

A lot of people are working at home tomorrow to be safe.

Mostly, I'm astonished to see something the media's been spreading panic about actually show up in tangible form in my life. Having failed to die of avian flu, or killer African bees, or the Y2K virus, or anything else I've failed to panic about over the last decade, I was really ignoring swine flu. It'd serve me right if I got it. But I'm hiding at home and breathing only the finest bottled air until all this blows over.

I'm-a feelin': not sick yet

Turns out this was a good day to stay at home and do radio interviews for six hours. Our web producer called in sick. Noel, who was in town from Arkansas for the book launch, got home sore-throated and achy. Apparently five people left the office sick today, and other people are planning to work from home tomorrow to avoid further exposure. Which sounds reasonable to me, because it's going to be a short, weird week for all of us, given all the book publicity stuff, and not only can we not afford to get sick because it would mess up the book release "tour," we extra can't afford to get sick because we're all working extra hard and fast to try to get our normal work done in between book events. I spent most of today post-interview editing things and putting them up on the site myself so our web guy could sleep. Tomorrow we all knock off early and drive to Madison for another signing.

I am god-awful tired. It may be time to put another blanket on the bed already; I couldn't seem to get warm last night or this morning when I grabbed a nap between interviews, and I suspect that's part of the reason I feel so beat.

The radio interview experience was a good thing to go through as an interviewer. It was clearer than ever to me how the interviewer sets the tone of the exchange, and how much an aggressive question puts the subject on the defensive, and how much a really interesting or incisive one can make the subject drop their guard and muse. The interviews today really ran a wide gamut. The Madison Public Radio one centered on the host encouraging people to call in and interact with me, coming up with new items for our book lists, or guessing what might be on them. One pair of morning DJs wanted to talk about The Onion; another interviewer didn't seem to know anything about The Onion, The A.V. Club, or our book. We talked for three minutes of our 10-minute slot, and the questions never really reached above "So, you guys wrote a book?" level. Two stations never called me for their interview at all.

The last guy to call in had a series of technical problems, and kept accidentally hanging up on me, but he asked the best questions, and we wound up chatting before and after the interview about various things. Of all the taped interviews, his is the one I'm most curious to hear once it's edited and complete. He's promised to send me a link; apparently it's syndicated, but is also available as a podcast. That'll be worth hearing. I hope I still think I was a decent subject a couple weeks down the line.

Either way, I imagine this whole thing will improve my own interviewing technique. I'd like to be the kind of interviewer whom subjects remember fondly after the fact, as I will with some of the people I talked to today.

I'm-a feelin': sleepy

In a few minutes, I'm going to be on Madison Public Radio for the next hour. If you happen to be in the area and conscious — which I only barely am — feel free to tune in and see whether I can put together any coherent sentences about the Inventory book.

ETA: Whew. From the interview schedule, I was afraid it was going to be just 50 minutes of me talking, but we're taking breaks for national news, to take calls, and for pledge-drive content, and I'm just tuned in for this hour. That's a relief.

ETA2: And now I'm into a block of 10 brief interviews with radio stations around the country. They're spaced about 15-20 minutes apart, so I'm not getting much done as I wait nervously for the phone to ring. It's really interesting being on the other side of the interview table, with the combined sense that the interviewees are probably all going to ask the exact same questions and I'm going to be repeating myself a lot, and the sense that there could be a pitfall around any corner, as they ask for some piece of trivia I'm not prepared to answer, or go in some unexpected direction, and leave me stammering like a fool.

There's already been one bit of panic as a radio station called me two hours early to say they've been promo-ing me for the wrong time, and could they call me back in an hour and do the interview then? Unfortunately, I was already talking to another station in that slot, so no, so now they're in a juggling panic. And I'm sitting here waiting for the phone to ring again in the next 60 seconds or so.

I'm-a feelin': sleepy

Geez, I've been busy or gone lately, and I've completely failed to mention that The A.V. Club has a book out today. I still pretty much hate book trailers, but I thought this one was really funny:



This is Inventory, the book spin-off of our weekly Inventory feature. Planning, contributing to, organizing, editing, re-editing, and meeting over this book consumed much of last year for me, and it's fairly astounding to actually see it completed and in actual book form. We're all pretty damn proud of it. For those of you in Chicago… Tonight at 7 p.m., we'll be doing a presentation/Q&A/signing with 10 A.V. Clubbers at the Borders at 2817 North Clark. At 9, we'll troop down the street to Crossroads Public House at 2630 N. Clark and host a book-release party, where there will be "free beer from Chicago’s own Goose Island, with a special emphasis on Goose Island Harvest Ale." You should come. Free beer and hanging out with us at a public party, yo.

For those of you in Madison or Milwaukee, we're hitting the road for more readings this and next week. Schedule is here. And for those of you who want to see us but can't make it tonight, there's a second Chicago reading/presentation thing on Wednesday the 28th at the Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln Ave.

Whee. One reason I haven't talked about this yet is because it's making all our lives crazy at the moment. We have four readings to go to, two of which involve mass road trips. kp3000 has been sidelined with a family emergency, so tomorrow it looks like I'm doing 12 different radio interviews on his behalf, starting at 6 a.m., with another batch to come next week. Today, I have a screening (Astro Boy), we're recording a podcast about Where The Wild Things Are (which I saw last night), we're doing the weekly production meeting, and then it's off to the reading. And somewhere in here I have to actually, y'know, do the day's work. So come out tonight and watch me be extremely frazzled, and then possibly drink beer. Whee!

I'm-a feelin': vibrating

Is there such a thing as winter cleaning? I mean, obviously there is, because I'm doing it, but it's not something I'm familiar with as a Thing, like spring cleaning.

A lot of this weekend's cleaning frenzy was just practical. We somehow tore one of our summer sheets, and it was time to get it off the bed, so washing the winter jersey sheets and re-making the bed with an extra blanket just made sense. We may get our first frost Monday night, so it was necessary to harvest the last batch of hot peppers and basil and take cuttings from anything I want to winter over indoors. Which necessitated some amount of adjusting things indoors to make room.

And some of it is just a natural reaction to being back from vacation: "Ah, home sweet home. Hey, why is this place such a mess?"

But the manic need to dust and de-hair everything? The desire to sort out piles of stuff that have sat undisturbed for months, and get everything where it goes? The need to throw things away, to make a book-selling run and a library run just to get things out of the house? The urge to move the couch and vacuum under it and wipe down the windowsill behind it, which we haven't done since moving in? The weird urge to use things up in the kitchen instead of grocery shopping — even if it means a couple of strange odds-and-ends meals — just to empty shelves and drawers?

That's about winter, and the sudden feeling that it's unpleasantly cold outside, and we're about to move into our cocoon for the duration, so it should at least be a nice, orderly cocoon. I feel like I'm feathering a nest. Unfortunately, while I spent the vast majority of the weekend feathering, when I wasn't working on a couple of big AVC projects, the nest still has a pretty long way to go. And I have a busy-ass week and a couple of crowded weekends ahead. Which is frustrating. For some reason right now I'd rather be dusting the entertainment-center shelf in the living room, which really really needs it.

At least I got some of the basil and the rosemary and the potted plants safely indoors. The coleus weren't as lucky. I was saving that project for today, but last night was too cold for them, and they all shriveled up. I managed to save a couple of ragged bits that might root and produce viable plants by springtime. I seem to remember going through this exact same thing last year.

But man, springtime feels far freakin' away right now.

I'm-a feelin': tired

Tonight Cass and I ran a couple of errands that took us to a strip mall where there are currently two temporary mega Halloween outlets, Spirit and Halloween USA. So we wandered around both a little. Both were kind of depressing — a lot of overpriced, cheaply made, ugly crap that smells like vinyl. Plus Spirit had walls and walls of "sexy" skimpy women's costumes (Sexy Ghostbuster? Really? SEXY FORM-FITTING GIRL SPONGEBOB?) made of ultra-cheap material. Wandering around in that section, we were doing a lot of this:

Me: That slutty witch costume is called "Rich Witch." I wonder why? How do you know she's rich?

Cass: Well, she can obviously afford to heat her home really well.

Me: Hey, there's a "Sexy Scottie" costume.

Cass: Think her engines canna take any more of that? Cause she looks like she's about to blow.

And so forth. Weirdest thing I saw: A whole line of slutty Marvel and DC superhero costumes, largely for male heroes, except with teeny little skirts and low-cut bodices. Like Captain Marvel and black-costume Spider-Man, but in scanty-girl-gear form.

Halloween USA had a lot more dumb-gag costumes for men, like "escaped patient," a hospital gown with the backside open and a fake rubber ass hanging out, with a thermometer wedged into it. Or "rock out with your cock out," a stuffed rooster head that's supposed to stick out of your unzipped fly. Or "the breathalyzer," a big boxy contraption with dials and indicators and a tube you're supposed to blow into, protruding from the crotch.

They also had one of my favorite low-rent Halloween store things: you-aren't-fooling-anyone costume elements that are clearly ripping off specific celebrities or characters, but get around it by giving them generic names. Like the ZZ Top beard labeled only as "Southern rocker beard." Or the white rhinestoned Elvis getup labeled "rock-star jumpsuit." Unfortunately, in the look-alikes section, I saw a Michael Jackson circa Thriller hairpiece ("wet look wig"), and that's when I had the horrible realization.

Everyone in the entire world is going to be zombie Michael Jackson for Halloween this year. EVERYONE.

Prove me wrong. If you're doing a Halloween costume this year, do you know what it is yet? Please tell me it isn't going to be dead MJ.

I'm-a feelin': horrorified

Perhaps inevitably, but in the same spirit of curiosity…

Name something hideous.

I'm-a feelin': tired

Man, yesterday was productive in everything but work.

Coming back from vacation, I always have first-day-of-school jitters, so when I woke up an hour before my alarm (which is set to half-hour-earlier-than-I-actually-get-up snooze-friendly time), I said screw it and got up. The rest of the day looked like this:

• Did a bunch of organizing around the house
  
• Watered all the plants, indoors and outside
  
• Loaded the car full of comics to trade in and stuff to take to work
  
• Took the el to the health club for an actual leisurely workout (so I wouldn't have to park downtown)
  
• Got back home just in time to see Cass pulling out in the car
  
• Called him and got him to come back and get me, then drove to the el station nearest to his work, and let him take off in the car
  
• Went to the Lincoln Square Farmers Market, which serendipitously happened to be in full swing at that el station, and bought focaccia and exotic peppers for lunch, and various vegetables for later
  
• Took the train to work
  
• Sorted out a problem with one of my credit cards
  
• Sorted out a problem with our automatic toll-paying transponder (They wanted to charge us an $80 fine for toll evasion; turned out they had the wrong address, phone numbers, AND license plate in their records for us)
  
• Hauled three more full bookbags of comics to the comics store, where I met Cass and we traded in a ton of stuff
  
• Drove to the library to trade seven things I was done with for three they had on hold for me, including John Updike’s Witches Of Eastwick on CD
  
• Drove into downtown Evanston, where he dropped me off at my friendly neighborhood salon
  
• While waiting for my stylist-o-choice, ripped the first CD of Witches and put it on my iPod
  
• Got my hair cut, then walked a mile and a half home in the screaming wind (which I just wanted to be out in), listening to the first disc of Witches
  
• Stopped at the grocery store on the way home for some extra fruit and hummus for lunches this week.

By the time I got home at 9:30, I was completely wrecked, what with the day of exercising and hauling heavy things around and walking, and I pretty much fell into a puddle.

By comparison, work was a mess of sorting through tons of unopened mail and unanswered emails, dealing with a software problem that kept me off IM most of the day, and meeting with co-workers to catch up on the status of our next 30 or so articles and to plan our book readings next week, among many other things. Given that I normally judge my productivity by how much text I process in a day, and given how little text I touched yesterday, I feel like I didn’t actually do anything at work, as though I sat in a hammock all day, sipping boat drinks. Which I’m going to pay for today.

And today doesn’t promise to be much more productive. Apparently yesterday was more exhausting than I thought, because I slept through my 7 a.m. alarm, woke up at 9, and missed the last express train to work. So I’m getting in late and I’m going to have to leave early to go get a root canal. This is likely going to be one of those weeks where I’m steadily running behind, and I don’t really catch up until the weekend.

I'm-a feelin': yargh!

I'm back at work. As an apology for being gone for a week and making people's lives harder and spending the whole damn week Twittering at them about how much fun I was having, I brought in cocoa-covered dark chocolate almonds from Portland, and honey-raspberry almonds (which are AMAZING, omg) from the Stackhouse Brothers Orchards table in the Pike Street Market in Seattle. (I also bought honey-orange, which are even better, and coming out next.) I have them out on my desk in bowls.

So far the cocoa-chocolate ones are more popular; only problem is that they leave cocoa on the fingers. Leading to this from good ol' co-worker Josh:

Josh: Hey, I'm grabbing your nuts here, but they're getting gunk all over my hands.

Me: Oh Josh, I've missed you.

Josh: You mean you've missed my hands on your tasty nuts.

Keith: Are we ready for our meeting?

Josh: In a second. I have to go wash the sticky schmutz from Tasha's nuts off my fingers.

Keith: [Sad-panda face.] Ohhh. I'm just gonna go back into my office now.

I really have missed this place.

I'm-a feelin': amused

One more Portland transit story: We were a couple of MAX stops away from the airport when Cass glanced up from the Lovecraft-inspired anthology he was reading (The Tsathoggua Cycle) and meditatively offered this:

Cass: So… I was thinking about speaking to the tram driver, and telling him a harrowing tale of how there are worlds other than our own, lurking just outside our sight, filled with elder gods too alien to comprehend, and how we may unwittingly, inescapably betray our own species to them due to horrific flaws in our genetic makeup and the crimes of our ancestry.

Me: Uhhh. Okay. Could you wait on that until we actually reach the airport?

Cass: Should I? I was thinking about doing it while the train was still moving.

Me: It’s just that if he goes spectacularly mad and locks himself in the tram cab in order to eat his own entrails, we’re going to have a hard time getting to the airport, since his tram is going to block other trams from getting through. And we might miss our flight.

Cass: Oh, right, right. That makes sense. That’s probably why they put up the sign.

Me: Huh? What sign?

Cass: [Points.]

( Groooooan. )

P.S. Given that said sign prevented him from calling down the full evil of the Mythos on an innocent soul, should I assume it was an Elder Sign?

I'm-a feelin': massive eyeroll

Following a light-rail ride and a plane ride and a van ride, we’re home from our Seattle-Portland trip. As a woman on the plane behind me said before we set out, “I don’t want to leave, but I really want to go home.” That pretty much sums it up. Our cats are still alive, everything we own has not been stolen, our home has not been burned down, and we didn't die in transit, so I'm chalking this whole trip up as a win.

We ended up with an extra hour or so between leaving PD and flying out, so we rode the MAX out to Gresham and back just to see a little more of the city. The landscape was boring, but the people weren’t. At various points on the trip out, we shared a car with:

• a heavyset, white-bearded man in a studded black-leather shirt and three-cornered pirate hat, making balloon animals
  
  
• A very weatherbeaten, skinny 50-something woman wearing a hot-pink newsboy cap and a black jacket covered in hot-pink skulls and crossbones
  
  
• Her companion, an extremely large 40-something lady with her hair in pigtails, wearing knit hot-pink leg warmers, knee-length white sweatpants tucked into them, and black high-tops painted with pink roses. She was also carrying an abacus…
  
  
• A sylphlike girl wearing hugely baggy grey sweatpants, a tight electric-blue shirt, oversized reflective sunglasses, and a giant, waist-length, ratty white David-Bowie-in-Labyrinth fright wig
  
  
• Another weatherbeaten, 50-something woman, this one in an electric-blue tartan newsboy cap, green cats-eye glasses, and a blouse consisting entirely of big cherry-red flamenco-dancer ruffles with black trim
  
  
• A stunningly wide-tushed woman in a skin-tight, banana-yellow blouse with an embossed leopard-skin pattern, topped with a hot-pink hoodie, with her hair pulled up into a scrunchie, forming a hair-fountain coming out of the top of her head

I felt tragically underdressed. In our nondescript clothes, we clearly were not doing our part to Keep Portland Weird.

Also, at the second-to-last stop, the tram pulled in and I noticed a lost gray fleece sitting on one of the station’s built-in tables. At the same time, a guy getting off the tram going the other way also noticed it. He was Arabic-looking, in his 20s, with a thick black beard oiled into a cone shape that reached down to mid-chest; long, thick black hair oiled backward into a point at the back of his head; and an assortment of facial piercings. He was carrying a giant backpack with a djembe strapped to it. He was wearing a red Thundercats T-shirt, baggy green cords, and a brown jacket covered with tiny rainbows. He walked up to the fleece and looked around for an owner; briefly, for a second, our eyes met, and he gave me a slightly sheepish but cheery grin. Then he started going through the jacket’s pockets.

And hey, there were a couple of dollar bills wedged into one pocket, which he pulled out with a startled “I struck gold!” look. He looked back up at me and held them up with an exaggerated grin, and I gave him a big exaggerated grin back, and laughed as we pulled away.

And that’s really kind how I personally think of Portland: kinda odd, grubby, and out for your spare change, but really pretty cheery and good-natured. Granted, that's the perspective of someone who's been there for less than a week total, and has spent half of that residency watching movies about horrors from beyond, so take it with a boulder of salt, but that's still been about my experience. I wonder how people with similarly narrow experiences of Chicago see MY city.

I'm-a feelin': cheerful

Came downstairs this morning, after showering and packing up to head home. ladymajor had gone off to work, and phaedrusdeinus and Cass were deep in conversation:

phaedrusdeinus: Oh, hi. We’ve just fixed everything wrong with modern fiction.

cassielsander: We’ve come up with a summarizing list.

phaedrusdeinus: We’re going to issue a manifesto to the Fiction Association Of The World.

Both of them, in unison: The FAW.

phaedrusdeinus: After that, I’m going to draft up the charter of the Fiction Association Of The World, which will include the specifications that it will be overseen by the manifesto, effectively fixing modern fiction.

cassielsander: Basically we’re issuing a FAtWa.

Me: Well, that sounds like a plan. It’s exactly like a plan, in fact, in that it consists of a series of steps that a person could undertake.

phaedrusdeinus: And with a stated goal, even!

cassielsander: It isn’t even missing a step in the middle, like that Underpants Gnome plan. So it is clearly a much better plan.

Me: Have at.

---

I went off to the bathroom to put in my contacts and finish getting ready. When I came back out, this was happening:

cassielsander: …so we have a lot of Westerns to catch up on.

phaedrusdeinus: No you don’t. Not really. There’s a reason they made those things cheaply in Italy. There aren’t a lot of them that you really need to see.

cassielsander: Well we’ve missed a lot of the classic ones—we’ve only seen two John Fords. Though I find I like the Jimmy Stewart movies the best. He’s kind of the Han Solo, Rick-Blaine-from-Casablanca guy who used to be idealistic, who doesn’t want to stick his neck out for nobody, but of course does. Wayne is more of the guy who does good without caring what anybody thinks, so they all hate him.

phaedrusdeinus: Well, that’s because he’s a paladin.

cassielsander: Oh, good point.

Me: So basically The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is your ultimate Western, because it requires John Wayne and his lawless, wild-man ways to give way to Jimmy Stewart’s superior calming love of societal boundaries.

cassielsander: Well kind of…

phaedrusdeinus: Jimmy Stewart is more of…

Both together: …a ranger.

Me: Really? I don’t see him as a ranger. He isn’t out-going or amoral enough.

phaedrusdeinus: Rangers aren’t outgoing. They’re very introverted and quiet.

Me: No, I mean out-going. You know, there are all those woods, and they go out into them. Jimmy Stewart just stays at home with his law books.

phaedrusdeinus: Oh, sorry. I failed to note that you were using that word in that sense in which actual speakers of English do not use it at all.

I'm-a feelin': amused

Yesterday, phaedrusdeinus and ladymajor took us to Powell's Books, which I'd sort of gently resisted because my bookshelves are beyond full of stuff I've dragged home from work, and I need more books about like I need more legs. But Cass wanted to go, and we were in the area, and I had heard so much about it and I was curious.

And dayum, but that is one amazing, big ol' bookstore. There are so many rooms that they're color-coded. Exploring all the floors and rooms would have been a little more fun if I'd had a solid Book Quest to go on, but as it was, it was simply boggling.

My favorite part, though, was the odd touches of humor, the evidence of many active and entertaining minds. Over one of the registers was a sign giving current exchange rates between the dollar, the pound, the yen, and various other forms of currency… including the quatloo. There were cute little staffer notes all over the store, pointing out various things we might like.

And while I was up looking at the rare book room, this announcement came over the PA: "Hello there! If you were just shopping in the landscape book section, and you are very small, and you are missing a sock, please come to the information desk in the Green Room and describe it to retrieve it. Again, if you are a very small person with one very cold foot, we have your sock in the Green Room."

Also, there were at least four people wandering around imperiously in full Victorian regalia. No idea what that was about, and frankly, I was too overwhelmed with OMG BOOKS to pursue it. Compared to everything else, it was only passingly, mildly interesting.

I'm-a feelin': tired

So we were at the Lovecraft Film Festival, watching the Italian film Color From The Dark. In this film, as in the Lovecraft story, this ancient, I don't know, alien color or something starts poisoning a farm and everyone goes crazy.

[Naked woman in bath on screen starts cutting open her cheek with a razor. Most of the audience moans and groans with disgust.]

Random dude up front: Shut up, that's hot!

[Naked woman slowly, thoughtfully pulls her slashed-open cheek apart, exposing her graphically bloody, lovingly rendered jaw muscles and teeth. More audience groans and cries.]

Random dude in back: Well, is THAT hot?

Random dude up front: YES.

[Time passes. Slashed-open woman has been locked in the barn because of acting crazypants. A priest comes in to exorcise her, but has unknowingly used tainted-by-evil-alien-color water in his aspergillum. She grabs his arm, breaks it, throws him to the ground, jumps on him, and uses the aspergillum to spray droplets of evil water on his face. They smoke and burn holes in his face. He screams and prays frantically in Latin, trying to push her away with his broken arm. This continues for a long, long time, with the screaming and the burning and his face disappearing in smoke and her shrieking. It goes on so long that the audience goes from being frozen in horror to laughing because it's reached the point of ridiculousness. Eventually they go all the way back around to being silent again. At which point…]

Random third dude: Now THAT'S hot.

I'm-a feelin': creeped out

As most of you hopefully know, ladymajor and phaedrusdeinus recently got engaged. Visiting them right now means we've gotten in on some of the earliest wedding planning, which is ambitious and awesome. A site is being chosen; nothing has yet been ruled out. Leading to this sort of thing:

ladymajor: [Nosing around online.] Look, the B'nai B'rith have a camp nearby that they rent out for weddings. It has a confidence course!

Me: I approve of the confidence-course wedding. If your guests don't love you enough to make it over the love wall, they shouldn't get to attend anyway.

ladymajor: I was thinking we would have to do the confidence course as part of the ceremony.

phaedrusdeinus: You'll have to have your bridesmaids holding up your skirt as you hop through the tire run.

Me: Don't forget the ringbearer holding up your train as he tire-hops along behind you. Also, you could have someone giving you away by swinging in on a rope. "Who gives this woman in matrimony?" and they Tarzan-swing in and say "I do!" and Tarzan-swing out. Since that's usually all the time that person spends onstage anyway.

ladymajor: True. Also, we were thinking about having karaoke at the wedding.

Me: Wait, for the guests, or just for you?

ladymajor: We were thinking for the guests, but now that you mention it, maybe it should just be a karaoke ceremony. With Auto-Tune. The all Auto-Tune wedding. [Sings in Auto-Tune voice.] Do you take this here woman?

phaedrusdeinus: [Auto-Tune singing.] Well I will take this WO-HO-man…

ladymajor: You sure you take this woooooooman?

phaedrusdeinus: I'm gonna take this WOOOOOO-man!

ladymajor: Oh. Oh my. Here's another camp. It says it's the only — no, the OLDEST — nudist camp in Oregon. And they do weddings. Nude wedding?

Me: Um. Let's get back to the karaoke confidence-course wedding.

And so forth and so on. Actually, their core wedding plan sounds really neat, but that's for them to tell. Also, if there are carnival rides and pony rides, ya'll can thank me, 'cause I'm the one that suggested it. Ponies!

I'm-a feelin': cheerful

Getting ready to head off to Portland adventures, followed by our last day at the Lovecraft Film Festival. Cass just came in and took off the shirt he slept in. His filmfest admission badge was still around his neck under his shirt.

Cass: I can't believe I wore this thing to bed. No wonder I had terrifying nightmares.

Me: Did you have terrifying nightmares?

Cass: No, not at all. And it's a wonder I didn't!

I'm-a feelin': amused

Me: [Bunch of silliness that is irrelevant.] And for an extra dollar, you get a pom-pom on top so you can use the baton to lead the band.

ladymajor: OooOOOOoOoOoOooO!

phaedrusdeinus: Honey, no.

ladymajor: But…

phaedrusdeinus: Just no.

ladymajor: [Shifty look.] Mrp…

phaedrusdeinus: Uh-uh.

ladymajor: [Big-eyed innocent look.] Rrrt…

phaedrusdeinus: What did I say?

ladymajor: Buuuuuttttt…

phaedrusdeinus: Ain't gonna happen.

ladymajor: [Runs off upstairs mock-weeping.]

Me: Man, I have missed you guys.

phaedrusdeinus: We've missed having an audience.

---

And just now…

ladymajor: rollick? Would you like to put on some shoes so we can go?

Me: In a sec. I am writing down everything you say for the Internet.

ladymajor: Nooooooooooo!

phaedrusdeinus: We can stop her. All we have to do is talk much faster than she can type.

[They both babble wildly. I type wildly and then shriek. They point and laugh. I give up. Exuent.]

I'm-a feelin': delighted

On our way out of the Seattle airport yesterday, we were getting tickets for the light rail. I gave the machine a weathered $5 bill, which was soft and cloth-y with use. The machine rejected the bill; when I tried to remove it from the dispenser, it tore neatly in half. We gave the machine a newer $5 and got on the train, me still holding the money-bits.

Me: What do we do with this?

Cass: Let's give the halves to two different homeless guys.

Me: *glare*

Cass: …who are right next to each other.

Me: *more glare*

Cass: …and then sit back and watch them fight.

Me: *even more glare*

Cass: What's the matter, aren't you interested in local culture?

Me: ALTERNATELY, we could make little NECKLACES out of them, and each wear one half of this bill around our NECKS at all times to show our LOOOOVE for each other, like those little HEART LOCKETS that you break in half and wear to show your TOTAL DEVOTION TO EACH OTHER. It'd be SOOOO BEAUTIFUL.

Cass: *glare*

I'm-a feelin': silly

Name something beautiful.

I'm-a feelin': sleepy

Two things: I am headed out on vacation tomorrow, and I spent a bunch of time today stuck on an express train marooned at a station because of a medical emergency. Bereft of Internet and having finished the editing I wanted to do on the train, I decided I should maybe look through my zillion open Firefox tabs and windows and see how many of them I could resolve and close, as sort of a tidying-up before my trip.

Because, see, I have a bad habit of haring off in a random mental direction, maybe following a chain of news stories or starting research on something or looking for something prompted by whatever I'm editing. And then I get distracted by another job or random thought. Then I look up and I have 50 windows open, each one of them representing something I never really finished. It’s like looking up a stream and seeing dozens of salmon gasping for air on the shore, or dried out and beginning to smell — I can see exactly how far I made it upstream on each particular occasion before the energy and drive petered out and that thought got stranded and left to die.

And thanks to Firefox’s memory function, I can shut down or reboot or go through a systems crash and still find all my windows waiting for me the next time I open up the browser, which means some of these salmon have literally been dead on the bank for a couple of months. Here are a few of the windows I’m closing right now:

Baha’i House Of Worship Activities: The primary Baha’i Temple of the United States is just a few miles away from us, a gorgeous carved white edifice surrounded by amazing gardens. The grounds are open 24/7, and I’ve done a lot of quiet walking around there at very late hours, but I’ve never actually been to a service, and I’ve been meaning to go to one for years. I finally got around to looking up service times… maybe six weeks ago. And then never going. Maybe in October, at their next choir event.

Nerdworld Blogs at Time magazine: I recently read Lev Grossman’s novel The Magicians, and edited the AVC review of the book and the AVC interview with Grossman. All of which were intriguing enough that I wanted to read more about/by him, so I checked out his Time blog. There’s enough material there to keep me busy trying to catch up for a month, so I left it open and figured “I’ll get back to this later.” I didn’t.

The Ankylosing Spondylitis Society Of America: Every morning, I see ads on the train telling me that a local university is doing an ankylosing spondylitis study, and every morning, I think "That sounds totally made up." So I've been meaning to look it up for months now. And I finally did, and it isn't made up, and then I didn't close the window because I vaguely wanted to post about it… weeks ago.

101 Simple Salads For The Season: Something I saw at nytimes.com in July. None of the recipes particularly appealed to me — an awful lot them sound like “Arrange three things that don’t go together in a bowl and call them a high-concept salad” — but I liked the idea, so I kept the window open, presuming that someday I’d suddenly want carrot-blueberry-sunflower-seed “salad” and need the "recipe." *eyeroll*

"The Bird Parliament": At the beginning of September, the AVC ran an interview with Little, Big author John Crowley, who among other things talked about how an ancient Sufi text called "The Bird Parliament" informed his writing, though he said it was sadly unavailable online. Disbelieving, I did a search and pulled it up right away. Then noticed it was long, and decided to get back to it later. I didn't.

Amazon’s Laura Lippman page: Back in July, I finally got around to reading What The Dead Know, a book that’s been on my shelf since January or so. I didn’t like it enough to keep it—half the point of my reading the contemporary fiction I bring home from work is so I can get rid of the book and free up shelf space—but I did like it enough to look up what else Lippman has done. Turns out she’s written more than a dozen other books, which made me groan a little with a sense of obligation. I had this whole post planned about the weird collector’s drive that makes me feel a need to read everything by an author if I read one book I like, so I left that window open to remind me… two months ago. And never made the post.

The Wall Street Journal's coverage of the Netflix award: Given my obsession with Netflix and the Netflix award, how did I manage to miss all the stories about the competition closing and the million-dollar prize being handed out? How did that not make the AVC newswire? I recently found out about this and bookmarked a random news story with the intention of reading more eventually. Which I finally did! Hooray, mission accomplished, I hereby declare myself to be efficient now! Kindly ignore all those other abandoned tabs that I still haven't closed. Um, gonna go pack now.

I'm-a feelin': easily distracted

The best part of Chinese food for dinner is still stir-frying the leftovers in the morning with a bunch of additional fresh vegetables thrown in for fresh crunch and better nutrition.

The worst part of a good gaming session is still waking up the next morning feeling vaguely hungover from having spent the previous night in an altered state of mind. And the separation anxiety, which feels like I was in the middle of a good book that I'd like to go back to, but I can't because someone else walked off with it. It'd be more accurate to say that the next chapter hasn't been written yet, but the feeling is always more akin to "AUGH WHERE IS MY BOOK WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?"

We just got our cats one of those automatic food-dispensers. The best part of this is that they didn't sit on us at 7 a.m. and whine for food, per usual. The worst part is that they're obsessed with shaking it to make just one… more… pellet come out, so they've been dragging it all over the kitchen and leaving it stranded in the doorway, where it's begging me to trip over it.

The best part of Sunday is the feeling of possibility in an open afternoon stretching ahead with no plans until 6 p.m. The worst part is trying to bully myself into spending the entire day working, which I really need to if I don't want to be doing panicked fill-in work during my vacation next week.

Speaking of which, the worst part of a vacation for me is the planning — mostly trying to figure out how much is too much, and how little is not enough. Part of me wants to be totally spontaneous about it; part of me wants to make the most of my time by knowing everything there is to know about where I'm going, which would eliminate much of the point of exploring.

The best part of LiveJournal is finding out where my friends' heads are at on a regular basis. The worst part is trying to come up with some way to reciprocate without being fantastically boring.

I'm-a feelin': working

I stopped eating _____________________ when I found out how it was made.

My answers: alfredo sauce (seriously, never again, simply because I can't deal with the inherent fat levels of melted-cheese-and-butter soup) and hot dogs. (I'll break down once in a long while and eat one at somebody else's barbecue, because they smell so good. Pity they never taste remotely that good.)

I'm-a feelin': awake

Remember many months back when I experienced vicious savage tooth pain after a dentist's visit, and I called them to wail and they didn't call me back and I ranted about it here and everyone was very comforting and told me to give them a massive telling-off and find a new dentist?

Well, two things about that.

1) It turns out they'd called me back within 24 hours with a very concerned message to get in touch with them right away and they'd do what they could for me. But for some reason, my cell-phone service provider didn't actually deliver that voicemail message to me for more than a week. (I've had that problem a couple times now.) It just turned up randomly in my voicemail inbox one day. By that time, of course, the pain was gone and I'd moved on with my life.

2) Turns out that was the pain of the nerve dying in the tooth, possibly (my dentist thinks) from the trauma of him drilling out the way-old filling in that tooth and replacing it. Unfortunately, that left space for an infection, which is now manifesting in the form of this entirely gross lesion-like thing on my gums. Diagnosis: root canal needed. My first. Bleah.

None of which is of much interest to anyone but me and my insurance company, except that seanan_mcguire just posted this hilarious dialogue. (insidian, if you missed the entry title or didn't believe me or decided to brave it anyway, this is your last chance. Seriously, stop now.) Her musings on revenge via bed-full-of-spiders reminded me of Cass and me talking on the drive back from the dentist, like so:

Me: So it turns out this thing in my mouth is — this is really gross, honestly. Way grosser than I thought.

Cass: Embedded spider eggs?

Me: [Long pause.] Okay, I said grosser than I thought, not the grossest thing imaginable.

Cass: Sorry.

Me: Though now that I think about it, the treatment for a mouthful of spider eggs is probably better than the actual treatment that I'm facing already. I think with spider eggs, they advise you to just let them hatch. There are many advantages to a mouthful of spiders. They're protein-rich. You can spit them at people defensively. They can eat any stray insects that somehow wind up in your mouth.

Cass: They can teach you to spell, and sing songs with you.

Me: And save you from death and tell everybody you're "terrific" and "some pig." Man, I really wish I had a mouthful of baby spiders about now.

I'm-a feelin': disgusted

Went to a critics' screening of the Fame remake tonight, and rather to my astonishment, I really enjoyed it. Like the original 1980 film, it's kind of a shapeless series of interconnected events at a famous New York arts magnet school. There's no one protagonist, no focus on one character. I really assumed that would be changed in this version, and that it'd focus on one or two (bland, white, dewy-eyed, super-polished, High School Musical-ready) characters. Instead, we got the big-picture, multi-culti, multidisciplinary approach, which pleased me.

But… I stayed through the credits, and as I got up to go, the only other people left in the theater, a couple of middle-aged ladies, walked out behind me, loudly talking about it. And the first said "That had no plot at all! The original movie was MUCH better! This was just this completely random series of events!" (WTF?)

And then I walked away from them and into the bathroom, where I almost ran into a group of twentysomething girls coming out. One was looking back over her shoulder and laughing and telling her friends "Oh, come on! Who even cares about the original Fame? Who even remembers that stupid movie, anyway?"

And then when I came back out of the bathroom, I walked past another group of late-20s/early-30s girls, one of whom was loudly bitching "That sucked! They didn't even do 'I Sing The Body Electric!' That was the best part of the first movie, and I can't believe they completely ruined this one by leaving that out!"

It was weirdly like being in a montage, with all these flash cuts of people who, not being in the same scene together, were unaware of how their comments ironically commented on each other. I strongly disagreed with all three of these ladies, but getting the jump-cut edition of the crowd review was fairly neat. Clearly I should barge through crowds after films more often.

I'm-a feelin': pleased

I'm still mourning the loss of our brief, mostly kinda chilly summer. But one possible reason to look forward to the onset of cold: Once our windows and our neighbors' windows are sealed up for winter, said neighbors are much less likely to wake us up at 6 a.m. with another one of their patented shrieking fights.

Bleah.

I'm-a feelin': sleepy

So lately I've been reading Gene Wolfe's Book Of The New Sun series, which I last tried to crack when I was in my very early teens. At the time, I found it impenetrable, seemingly just a bunch of thick environmental/situational description with very little story, and a surprising lack of torture, or anything else as scary as the cover. Years ago, shortly after Cass and I first moved to Chicago, we went to a local open-mic where Gene Wolfe got up and read from a novel he was working on. I loved what he read, and I was struck with a general admiration for his personality and persona, and I realized I needed to revisit his work. But it's taken me quite a while to a) get back into reading for fun, and b) clear my plate enough of obligatories, such that I had time for something this dense.

I'm almost done with the first of the four novels in the series, and I'm finding more than anything, it reminds me of Robert Silverberg's Majipoor books — a sort of dark hero's journey through a rich fantasia. There's a little Candide and a little of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird in there too. But above everything else, it reminds me of The Phrontistery: A Dictionary Of Obscure Words, or possibly Worthless Word For The Day. I'm half-convinced that Wolfe wrote this book with The Phrontistery open in his lap the entire time, constructing entire sentences solely around obscure and semi-lost words.

Here are the unfamiliar words I've run across in roughly the last 40 pages alone:

anacrisis
tokoloshe
uakaris
gowdalie
oreodont
pelycosaur
fearnought
cumaean
gonfalon
ephor
lechwes
atroxes
pagne
hipparch
pavonine
sabretache
baculus
renascent
gamboge
graisle
cynocephalus
xenagie
chiliarch
braquemar
simar
paracoita
genicon
scopolagna
cangues
abacination

I've looked half a dozen of these up, and they're all real words, though sometimes with the spelling a little tweaked. The rest, I haven't had time for. It generally isn't difficult to pick up approximate meaning from context in this book: a chiliarch is a kind of official, a uakaris is a kind of animal, a sabretache is a kind of purse, a simar is a kind of dress, and so forth. But I've gone past the point of feeling like my vocabulary has been expanded and more into the realm of "I'm reading fantasy anyway; all these words could be made up so far as I know or care."

Actually, when I started looking up these words, one of the first things I came across was this 2006 blog entry by a fellow reading the same book, and encountering the same issue, and being pretty irked about it. In his words, "I am tempted to say that using words like these isn’t even writing: It’s a default on the promise of writing. Can the slithy toves be far behind?"

I don't fully agree with what he's saying. If Wolfe's vocabulary exercise was such that I couldn't figure out a sentence's meaning without knowing what "abacination" meant, yeah, I might have stopped reading by now, but it's never really tripped me up yet, and I've somewhat enjoyed the guessing game. I agree with the blogger that he's kind of showing off, particularly when he uses a $2 word where a 10-cent one would do. But his other complaints — that the vocabulary is out of character for the narrator, that Wolfe isn't really writing when he's using these words — go a bit over my head.

Mostly, this just makes me covet a Kindle, given that one of the Kindle's built-in features is a dictionary that can define terms as you're reading them. Virtually no other aspect of the Kindle interests me, but it certainly would be nice to know exactly what a baculus is when I come to it in the text, which is pretty much the only time I actually care.

I'm-a feelin': absorbed

Here's a random urban politesse question for you: Is it rude to discard something into a trash can on the street if someone is rooting around in it at the time?

I'm-a feelin': uncertain

Last night I went to a pre-screening of Love Happens, the Jennifer Aniston/Aaron Eckhart romantic comedy, about which I have not much to say. It's a romantic comedy; it's familiar stuff. But one thing about it really bugged me: Midway through, Eckhart talks about how his wife made him promise that if anything happened to her, he'd set her pet parrot free in the wild. So of course as part of the healing process, he and new flame Aniston go and get the bird and try to set it free. Which bugged me for three reasons. 1) They're in Seattle, which does not strike me as particularly congenial for tropical birds, and even if it was, 2) Freeing your hand-raised, fully tame domestic animal is terribly cruel and short-sighted even if it is a congenial environment, and 3) When they go get the bird, it's a cockatoo.

It honestly jolted me out of the movie. I kept thinking "Could they not get an actual parrot? Couldn't they have just changed the line? Did no one on the film know or care that cockatoos and parrots are different?"

I was thinking about that again today, and just to make sure I wasn't being an idiot, I looked it up. And lo and behold, cockatoos ARE considered parrots, in a complicated sort of way: They aren't "true parrots" (psittacidae family), but they're from the same order, and breeding sites seem to consider cockatoos to be parrots. This continues to bug me; it's as if Eckhart was supposed to take care of his wife's pet dog, and when he shows up to get it, it's a fox, and I'm all "WTF FOXES R NOT DOGS" and the Internet is all "Yuh-huh, they are."

But here's the fun part. When my first couple of lunges at the problem (just looking up "cockatoo" on Google) got me to some highly unhelpful sites, I typed "Is a cockatoo a parrot?" into the search field, figuring someone else had probably asked this question before.

Before I'd gotten past "Is a c," Google promptly suggested many other things I might be typing:

Is a cucumber a fruit or a vegetable
Is a chiropractor a doctor
Is a cold sore herpes
Is a circle a polygon
Is a cherry a berry
Is a centipede an insect

For one thing, this looks like either poetry or a children's book to me; it reminds me strangely of If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. Delete the c, and the questions headed further out into unlikeliness:

Is a DWI a felony
Is a sinus infection contagious
Is a square a rectangle
Is a shark a mammal
Is a shark a reptile
Is a cucumber a fruit
Is a dogs mouth cleaner than a humans

So I've been playing around with it, adding and subtracting letters to see what other apparently common, Google-approved queries I can get. So far, some of my favorites:

Is an MBA worth it
Is anybody there
Is Anderson Cooper out of the closet
Is an associate degree worth anything
Is Michael Jackson dead
Is a haunting real
Is a jackalope real
Is a kiss cheating
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow
Is an ugly baby harder to love
Is a zombie outbreak possible

Not to mention innumerable categorization questions: Is an octopus a mammal? Is a killer whale a dolphin? Is this or that or the other thing a fruit or a vegetable? An insect? A rodent? An animal?

I'm not sure why this game is delighting me so much. Partially it's the image of thousands of sweaty, worried Americans biting their lips and sitting down to their beloved, helpful Internet, hoping for nonjudgmental answers to the burning question: What IS a jalapeno pepper, anyway? I love the idea of being able to see into all these people's minds as they seek relief or reassurance or try to settle a bet, especially when I think the answers are particularly bizarre or silly.

But somewhere out there right now, someone is sitting down to ask the Internet whether a chimpanzee is a monkey, and is finding out that someone else out there doesn't know whether a cockatoo is a parrot, and that person is laughing his or her ass off at me. Crap! To that person, I say: "Well yeah, but at least I know what a goddamn shark is!"

I'm-a feelin': enchanted