8 December 2002

I slept until 6:50! Woohoo! Nifty nifty nifty. Of course, the trade-off was, I dreamed that my grandparents were playing this joke on me with "beef sushi," which was actually soy protein done up to look and taste like raw beef. Which is not their sort of joke at all, but it was still a bit disturbing.

Also I woke up with a bit of an inflammation in the tear duct of my left eye. It stings a little bit. I'm going to leave my lenses out for the day and see if it goes away. If it sticks around or gets worse, well, we need to head to an eye doctor soon anyway to get Timprov's new glasses (he's jury-rigged the old ones so far, without any tape even, but this situation will not last).

I woke up thinking about The Changing Face of America: The Chinese Americans. Worked on it a lot yesterday. I'm down to slightly less than 1 kilowords/day for the time I have remaining to work on it. I don't want to just sit down and write 1k a day and then stop, though. I want to get it done earlier than that. We'll see. I obviously could in some sense, but I am so sick of modern Chinese immigration. So sick and tired. I figured out all the sidebars, which is a relief. I'm almost done reading Linda Jakobson's A Million Truths, which would have been pretty good if I hadn't been All Modern Chinaed Out. The sick thing about this woman, though, is that I was reading her bio, and it started out, "Linda Jakobson, the daughter of a Finnish diplomat, grew up in New York...." And I think I know who her father is. She's the right age to be Max Jakobson's daughter, and how many Finnish diplomats named Jakobson would there have been at that time? Not many. That's weird to me, though. Picking up a random book on China and reading the author bio and thinking, "I know who your dad is! I've read his books, too!" It just seems like there should be more Finns than that.

Anyway, I'm going to finish reading A Million Truths and see what I can get done on my book today. Hope for the best etc. We're supposed to hang out with Amber tonight, though I don't know what we're supposed to be doing. I'll call her this morning. Other than that, lists and lists, tasks and tasks. Mostly the Chinese book, though. The floors need washing -- actually, the whole house could use a cleaning -- but I'm going to finish this book first, I think. Unless I go nuts and can't work on it any more today.

I did take a "break" last night, watching "K-Pax" with Mark and writing in Christmas cards. I didn't think much of "K-Pax." I think it would have been interesting to someone who had read no science fiction, because I don't think there was anything new about what they did with the "is he really an alien?" question. Oh, and also, the people who wrote this movie so wished that they were Ken Kesey. They had read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest so very many times, you could just tell.

There was also an "E.T." DVD preview on the "K-Pax" tape, and I was a little startled. I hadn't paid attention to "E.T." in awhile, and Elliott is so...young. I mean, he was a big kid when it came out. That's how I remember it, anyway. It came out in 1982...I turned four in 1982. But he's so little. Weird.

I finished reading Empress of the World yesterday, too, and I put a few comments on that page of recommended stuff I've read. Mainly: the geekiness of the characters was nice, and I liked that. I don't so much care about the fact that the love story was lesbian/bisexual -- that's not a big plus or minus for me. But nobody ends up tragically dead at the end, so that's a nice feature. And it kept me wanting to read until the very end.

I think. I think it did. Either that or I really didn't want to work on the Chinese book. Ah well.

Well, want to or not, it's coming due, and I need to get it done. It'll be fine once I get into a rhythm of it today, but I feel like I need a bit of a running start. Hmmm. Ah well. Have a good Sunday.