20 June 2002

Well, everybody talked and ate soup and enjoyed the movie. I could hardly have asked for more. (I could have asked that the plantains would be ripe enough to cook. Hence the hedge-word "hardly." But that's not a big deal.) I liked "Better Off Dead." I don't think I'd call it good in many ways (although Zed was right, it made quite effective use of the running gag), but it was lots of fun, and sometimes that's more important. The only real drawback to people sticking around is that I now feel like a lemur. This is what happens when you have dark eyes, pale skin, and a tendency to get skittery when you're tired.

It's hard to tell how well the list worked yesterday. I had specific stuff I needed to do, and I did it, and then when I was done doing it, I sat down with Unquenchable Fire. Of course, that accounted for maybe fifteen minutes total. I can't blame the list that I didn't spend the evening working. I think I'll have to have another couple of days with specific day-lists in order to see how that works. I'm not sure what-all goes on today's, though. "Hang out with David" is not a list item. I think I'll just work on the book a bit and see which scenes present themselves. This is why I didn't keep making the daily agenda lists: sometimes it's just better to see what presents itself.

If I was one of you chronological people, I'm sure it'd be different.

I broke a glass this morning. Mark broke one on Tuesday. I guess we'll be watching out for Timprov to break one. We have enough glasses that it isn't a problem, but it's always startling how streaky these things are.

In an attempt not to have "Girl Inside My Head" inside my head for the fourth day running, I'm playing the "Maroon" album, which I like a lot. Do you know what I like about the Barenaked Ladies besides all of the other stuff I like about the Barenaked Ladies? They're like a geek buffet. They have all the major geeketypes. They have Pudgy Angsty Geek, Skinny Hyper Geek, Pale Quiet Geek, Totally Nuts Geek, and Unexpected Talent Geek. (And don't I wish I could buy those for future children. So much better than Barbies.) And most of us have been more than one of the above at some point, or some hybrid like Pale Angsty Geek. But pretty much whatever flavor of geek you want, they have one.

Geek buffet. Oh yeah.

What I really really want, sometime before I'm dead, is a girlgeek band that makes it big. That would make me so happy.

The thing that I like about "Beat the Geeks" is that the geeks on it are actually geeks. They answer questions in full geek style. They obsess. They get snotty. They're not the most pleasant representatives of my people, but they do work as such. The guest geeks, though, are often just dorks, and the contestants are nearly always just dorks. And they almost never have questions in my fields of geekery. So it's not a show I watch, but I do appreciate the concept, and the fact that they're paying three genuine geeks to be, well, genuinely geeky.

"I collect Matchbox cars" is never the right answer to "what's the geekiest thing about you?", though. Ever, ever, ever.

So. Well. Um. The individual days don't seem at all long when I'm in them -- there's so much to do in them, and I'm interested in most of it, or else uninterested enough that I can think about other things entirely (like when chopping vegetables, for example). But the days that aren't here yet, tomorrow and the next one and the next one, they seem long. It's Thursday. We're going to Albany on Saturday and maybe to the City. That is officially forever away. It's not even that I'm in squirmy-puppy mode. It's that the gap between "now" and "not now" seems to have gotten a bit more distant lately. I recognized this awhile ago when it came to the past -- that I was thinking of things as being a month ago when they were two weeks ago or less. But it's working that way with the future, too. After next Wednesday, I won't be allowed to buy myself any more books, because it'll be a month before my birthday. That time frame no longer makes any mental sense to me. It seems equidistant with WorldCon, moving home to the Midwest, and the Eschaton. (There is an Eskaton retirement village around here. Um.)

That makes it sound depressing, that it all seems so far away. But in some way it's comfortable, because I know I'm feeling that way. And I do things that seem normal, like telling Amber we should go to the Gilroy Garlic Festival on my birthday, as if that was a sensible amount of time. But if she had some ideas for the year she and Mark turn 80, I'd be at least as likely to agree to them, mentally file them away, and go with them as plans.

I believe in the distant future, is part of it, I guess. I'm enough of an optimist that I really believe we'll Get There Eventually. And lately, sometimes There is the BART station, and sometimes it's the 2046 WorldCon. Whatever.

In one of my unfinished stories, one of the characters tells another that Boston and Mars are equidistant from Rapid City, SD. So I guess I've always had a sense of space working like this, more quantized than we generally try to think. It's just lately that it's been working this way with time.

I do hope I get out of this mindset, though, because while it's not actively distressing, it kind of sucks the anticipation out of things until the last minute. And I like anticipation. I'm fond of it. I think that once the Fourth of July is past, though, the birthday anticipation will kick in. That's what the Fourth always meant in my head, fireworks and water fights and parades and barbecues, but also that it was reasonable to think about my birthday.

I wonder if this isn't a coping mechanism for all of the anticipation I try not to feel about the stories and books I have out. Could be. Don't know. I got a couple of rejections yesterday from places I'd submitted to in February and March. I'm hoping that the change in postal rates will mean that some of the slower editors clear the decks a bit, to minimize the extra postage they have to pay to get the letters back to the authors.

Yeah, whatever.