23 March 2003

I don't care about the Oscars. You know what? If we were not in the middle of a war, I would still not care about the Oscars. The Oscars are people I don't care about getting together and forming a club and giving awards to other people I don't care about, many of whom are poorly dressed. If I want to see poorly dressed people patting each other on the back, I live 45 minutes from Berkeley on the train. I can have it live.

Occasionally someone makes a movie I like, and that's nice. And occasionally the people who get together, dress poorly, form a club, and give awards manage to give an award to something related to that movie. And it seems to make the people involved happy, so again, how nice. For them. For me? What does it have to do with me? If it was my club giving the award, it would, but it's not. If it was a club to which I aspired -- but again, no.

I like to watch movies, but we've seen fewer and fewer of them in the theatre over the years. Part of that is that we live in California, where things are more expensive (uff da, so much more expensive). Part is that Mark was boycotting the MPAA for awhile a few years ago, so we got out of the habit of movie dates, and then we realized that the boycott didn't matter so much as our total disinterest in most of the movies out there. We'll go to several this year, I think...but we didn't make it to a bunch of the ones we planned to last year. So maybe not.

Did they report numbers of casualties every day on the news during the Gulf War? We didn't have cable then. I guess they must have, because I've heard that it started during Vietnam. I don't remember it in the earlier war in Iraq, though. (Nor in Vietnam, but for different and more obvious reasons.)

When they said it was an American soldier who had managed to kill or injure 14 of his fellows, I thought, "Oh, please, let him be white. Let him be some kind of half-assed C-&-E Christian from Washington state, so it can't be a religious thing or an ethnic thing or any kind of thing. Let him just be nuts. Let him just be crazy, oh, please." But this Time article is saying he has a Muslim name, and the newspaper is claiming he's a Muslim convert. Crud. It doesn't rule out the crazy factor, but...crud.

I'm so frustrated with people who think that any civil disobedience is obviously in the same tradition as the Civil Rights Movement. If we're going to learn from history, we have to learn from history, not proclaim two things identical and attempt to enforce the past on the present by analogy. Sometimes it really isn't the same at all, and the results won't come out the same, either. Why block the entrance to work of a Blue Cross insurance worker? How does that protest war? That's not the tradition of the Civil Rights Movement. That doesn't even make sense. Let them in to process the paperwork to pay for Timprov's doctor's appointment, for heaven's sake! And don't whinge about how you have to do something and make your voice heard. If you want to say, "No war on my account," and your voice is heard as saying, "More traffic on my account," how is that helpful? Saying the wrong thing is less helpful than saying nothing. I'm not saying, "Don't speak," but I am saying, "For heaven's sake, think about what you're actually saying, not just what you wish you were saying."

CNN goes off and on here. Can't keep it on for long, can't leave it off for long.

Despite all that, I managed to finish the new chapter for Dwarf's Blood Mead and get a little more done on the edits for that. All of this is longhand, so my back is better than it could be, and my eyes are, too. But it'll all have to get typed eventually. I'll probably edit the new sections as I type them. We'll see. I know I keep repeating that the end is going to take longer than the beginning, but I really think it will. But it's still interesting. It's still worth doing.

I also broke my own personal "rejections in a month" record yesterday. I thank Abyss and Apex and their speedy e-sub turnaround time. It's good to have stuff out there. It's good to keep trying. And also, grown-ups aren't supposed to play with sticker books, but self-adhesive stamps and address labels are totally allowed. So there's that aspect of it as well.

I also read some of Golden Witchbreed yesterday and enjoyed it, but I'm not done with it yet. Not even close. I've been wandery and distractible. Mostly I want to be somewhere else, but not like Berkeley or Half Moon Bay or even like Carmel or the Sierras. I want to be somewhere really really else. It's not just ants in the bathroom or people hammering on the neighbors' doors over and over again. It's the whole thing. It's not time for this any more.

But I'll distract myself with someone else's worlds or my own. I don't have to do it for so much longer, and I've been pretty good at it so far.

So...some phone time on the agenda, some house stuff and bill paying and boot care and all that. (I swear I take better care of these boots than of any other footware I've ever owned. Thing is, I can see the use in it. If I clean them off and waterproof them, they will keep my toes dry better later.) More editing and more Golden Witchbreed. Probably some e-mail. Maybe some sushi. There will be good things today. There will be good things tomorrow, and the next day, and so on. And I will find them.

Probably not by turning on CNN. But I do it anyway. Looking for the good things doesn't have to mean avoiding the reality of the bad ones.