26 March 2003

I am happy with the Merc for once. (This may be because I haven't read past the Food & Wine section yet.) I wrote in asking their recipe-finding lady if anybody knew how to make Kookaburras, and she printed the question, so maybe somebody will. Yay, potential Kookaburras.

Also, it has come to my attention that there may be other Non Sequitesses. Perhaps there are Non Sequitors as well. Perhaps we are like Green Lanterns.

I'm a little frightened that I knew that analogy to draw.

So here's what I did yesterday: edited. Also, edited. And then: edited. Timprov was feeling yucky, so we called and verified that he was feeling the wrong kind of yucky for them to deal with at yesterday's appointment. And indeed, they determined that they would much rather deal with an entirely different flavor of yucky, so we rescheduled. So I didn't even have that reason to stop editing. So I didn't.

For today, I have two large-ish tasks left on Dwarf's Blood Mead, and then I start typing the changes in. I put circled letters next to spots where I had something to add. I did A through Z and am now up to epsilon. I don't think I'll get all the way to omega, though. I doubt I'll get past theta. Anything beyond that will probably be done to the next iteration, which can be lettered anew without confusion, as I will have a different hard copy. Soon, even. It'll be good. I'm getting optimistic again, because there are aspects of this book that I really like, so if it makes no sense to anyone who doesn't live in my head, I'll just fix that part, even if it takes thousands of words of cuts and rewrites and all. Watch the roller coaster cycle of editing emotions roll along before your very eyes.

I also wrote a couple hundred words on a short story called "Two Point Three," which I may finish soon or I may put aside indefinitely. I don't know. It's been rattling around for awhile, and then the beginning was suddenly clear, so I wrote it down. The books are still more of a focus, but if a short story comes out, hey, it comes out.

I'm a bit frustrated with The Impossible Bird right now. It's good, but as I was describing to David, it feels...done, was the word that kept coming up. It feels like O'Leary was using the same script as Jonathan Carroll and the rest of them, the same requirements of how much profundity, how many insights, how many clever metaphors, how many tangled relationships and what kind and how tender/acrimonious, how many keen visual images...I felt like he could have edited it using a list with checkboxes. And I like Jonathan Carroll, and I like this O'Leary novel as well, and I'll probably seek out another of his later. But...meh. It may just be the mood I'm in, but the line between conventions and conventionality is more bothersome than it usually is right now.

There's an oddly consistent mental soundtrack going to the last few months. Some of the songs make total sense -- if I had to pick one that was in my head more often than the others, it'd probably be Blues Traveler's "Just Wait." Well, yes. Understandable. Barenaked Ladies' "Helicopters" and "Sell Sell Sell" work in an entirely different way but are still timely. But why on earth do I have Billie Holiday's take on "Pennies from Heaven" in my head at least once a day? I can make sense of Ben Folds' "Alice Childress" (if that's even the title) making the subconscious list, but "Underground," why that? Same thing for David Gray: "Shine," sure, definitely, but "Afternoon's Debauchery"...not really topical most days. Actually, not topical any days: I don't share five bottles of wine on a snowy/haily afternoon and roll on the rug at all. We have no rug (carpet, yes), it doesn't snow or hail here, and two and a half bottles of wine would render me unfit for any kind of consensual debauchery in the world. But the song keeps popping into my head.

It just keeps going, too: a fairly small and only intermittently sensible playlist. I can make a case for "The Long December" and "Carolina On My Mind" and "I'll Stand By You" and approximately half of Carole King's "Tapestry" album ("Home Again" and "So Far Away" and "Where You Lead" and "Way Over Yonder"...). I can make sense of "I Will Not Take These Things For Granted," although I can't even listen to it on my mental soundtrack and have to drown it out even mentally. (Which is too bad, but there you have it.) But I am entirely baffled by "What A Wonderful World" and Simon and Garfunkel's "America" and They Might Be Giants' "She's An Angel" and that one Crash Test Dummies song about T.S. Eliot and wearing pajamas in the daytime. I mean, "someday I'll wear pajamas in the daytime," sure. But that hasn't really changed lately -- I still shower and get dressed at widely varying times in a given week.

I think the problem is I'm trying to make sense of it instead of just humming along.

Yay! Something birthdayish coming up for David, so those of you I have been bothering about, "What's a birthday thing to do?" can stop worrying: strawberry shortcakes. That's what. (Although if you have other magical birthday insights, please do share.)

Other than that, yarg. I think I'll stay in "buried in work" mode until I can figure out some other way to be in a good mood. I can be in a good mood with lots of focus on DBM, or in a bad mood in some other way right now, so...good it is. Right then.