Use this button to subscribe to my Google Calendar: You can also subscribe to the RSS feed or view the calendar directly.

For reasons I won't go into, when I was arranging my trip out here, my tickets had to be rebooked twice.

On Sunday night I got horrid food poisoning and decided I was really not up to traveling home on Monday. I rebooked for today, routing through Seattle and due to arrive in NYC around 9 p.m., figuring the next band of snow wasn't due to hit until a couple hours after that.

Today I got to the airport to find that all flights into New York have been canceled for today and tomorrow due to the blizzard now expected to arrive in the early evening. They offered to send me to Seattle anyway, or Minneapolis, or Salt Lake City, or any number of other places from which I might eventually get a flight home, but as much as it would be fun to surprise! show up on the doorstep of stealthcello or vixyish or mrissa and beg for crash space and the use of a washer and dryer, I decided it would be better to stay here and try to get a little more time with xtina. I therefore rebooked for 6:35 a.m. Thursday, arriving 3 p.m., when there is no snow expected at all. Then I spend 24 hours in NYC and take a bus up to Boston on Friday for Boskone. Honestly, I'd rather have flown straight to Boston on Friday, but they would only rebook me on a different flight going to my original destination.

I am getting really tired of this. I love getting time with xtina, Portland is a very nice place to be stuck in, my host has been incredibly accommodating (including buying soy milk and bananas so I could make smoothies and actually get some calories into my miserable stomach) and his cats are very snuggly, my boss and colleagues are being really nice about me unexpectedly not being in the office, etc. etc. but I would like to go home. And stay home. For at least a couple of weeks.

If only I'd taken the 6:35 a.m. flight today, I'd be home by now. Oh well. No if-onlies, as my mother taught me during my childhood Scrabble games. You play the tiles you get from the bag. In this case, that means getting work done from here, spending more time with my girl, relaxing, and being glad I'm not having to deal with airport and airplane bathrooms and turbulence while recovering from the worst gastrointestinal distress I've experienced since the bout of stomach flu that put me in the hospital a few years ago. Forty-plus hours after onset, I have something like an appetite again, but it's still iffy. Maybe in a bit I'll have some more dairy-free butternut squash soup. For now, I think I'll go stroll in the sun (yay sun!), or maybe take a nap.

This is much more pleasant than being stranded in Illinois during the Blizzard of '96, at least. I suppose I can cope with this happening once every 14 years.

I am so so so glad we went to that show. Alice in Chains rock amazingly hard given how long they've been around (and they're still hardcore enough to smoke onstage, which amused us tremendously). The new frontman is fantastic. I rocked the fuck out at every opportunity, and spent the slower/less favorite songs holding xtina's hand and singing harmony with her, which is definitely one of the better ways I've ever spent an evening.

I would do my traditional setlist-and-ticket photo except a) they took my ticket away at the door and b) I don't have a camera. But yes, I got a setlist. Making friends with the lighting dude = win.

( Check out this amazing fanservice setlist )

I have no voice. Possibly negative voice. And my neck hurts from headbanging. And I really need to sleep. And my ears are ringing a lot. And "Man in the Box" is still playing in my head. And I'm pondering whether I could somehow get tickets to the (sold-out) New York shows... but it wouldn't be the same without my girl.

<3 <3 <3

Right. Passing out now.

Portland is reminding me a lot of California and Arizona and Illinois, all at once. Or maybe it's just reminding me of not-home. I really need to find some way to travel more; as much as I love my city, getting out of the Northeast Corridor is always good for me.

Also, xtina is made of win. Well, win and strange. But even the strange is win! It all works out.

I have no dog in this fight, since I'm not an artist and also not voting in the Hugos this year, but wouldn't it be awesome if Kate Beaton (beatonna) were nominated for this year's best fan artist Hugo?





More at Hark, a Vagrant!. Sure, she mostly does historical funnies, but I'd nominate her for Verne's exploding airship alone. The were-beagle just clinches it (and was published in 2010, so she'll be eligible next year too!).

I appear to be completely adjusted to Pacific Time: went to bed at 1, woke up--ding! like the timer in the turkey popping up--at 8:30. It's a beautiful Portland morning here, sunny with occasional clouds, and warm. By winter-in-New-York standards, anyway.

So here is that belated ( post-therp post )

Now I think I will shower, dress, do something breakfast-like, and maybe go sit in the sun for a bit. Because I want to, and I'm on vacation, and there is absolutely no reason not to indulge my own desires.

Bedtime continues to creep later. Maybe visiting Pacific Time will reset it. Or screw it up more. Who knows? Anyway, I'm all packed and stuff, and I think I can do all my PW work in four hours todorrow, and somewhere in there I will do the thing for aqeldroma that I was supposed to do by yestoday (oops) and then I get on a plane and have all the time in the world and can relax for four fabulous days.

(Did I mention that I'm going to Portland to visit xtina? I'm going to Portland to visit xtina. Now you know!)

Post-therapy post will have to wait, but in the meantime I archive my post-therapy tweets here, to remind myself what I wanted to write about:

"Therapy: repeating and rephrasing things I already knew in ways that make more sense and have new practical applications. Seeing freelance anx as an inner struggle over not wanting the things I'm supposed to want makes it more familiar and easier to cope with."

I really want to write more on that now, but it's late and I need to sleep. More anon, perhaps from the plane.

Holy crap, it worked. The $3000 that New York State owes us? Landing in our bank account tomorrow, thanks to Jihoon Kim in the office of New York State Senator Eric Schneiderman.

31 years of activism and this is the first time I've ever felt that my government actually worked for me, not just me as a member of various groups of people but me personally. I didn't pull strings through personal connections. I was just a citizen who complained, and things got fixed.

Fixed for us, anyway. Looking at the big picture, a lot is still hugely broken. We agreed that once those funds came through, we would put $50 towards getting us into a fundraising dinner for Sen. Schneiderman next Wednesday, and while I mostly want to thank him--because we were seriously about 48 hours away from putting up a Paypal button--I also want to point out that we can't be the only ones who have run into problems with the grotesque bureaucratic tangle that is the New York State Department of Labor's UI system. He had our votes even before all this, since he supports same-sex marriage and the reform of the Rockefeller drug laws, but I'd be even louder and more enthusiastic in support of him if he led a fight to fix the DOL.

In the meantime, I'm just purely relieved that we're getting that money.

V. brief sleepblogging: went to bed at 2 after earworming myself with VNV Nation's "Fearless" to get past the dregs of horrible depression*, woke up at 8:15, went back to sleep, woke up at 9:30 feeling well-rested and something close to perky. I keep poking at where I expect anxiety or depression to be, and it's not there. Like someone punched me in the face yesterday and yet somehow today I fail to have a black eye.

* It was bad enough that I was debating calling someone on the west coast to talk me through it, except I couldn't see how talking would do anything except keep me from sleeping, which I clearly needed to do. I also realized that my "take a whole bottle of pills" urge was about taking lots of taurine in hopes of feeling better and getting to sleep, rather than anything more drastic. I was actually rather comforted that the idea underneath that was wanting to feel better, since I'd spent most of the day fighting quite hard against the idea of doing anything to feel better**. Depression is a nasty little parasite that does not want to die.

** Using such convoluted logic as "If I feel better, then I'll feel stupid for letting myself get depressed in the first place". sinboy finally said, with some small amount of exasperation, "No, if you feel better you'll feel better." Oh. Right.

I note that we did not leave the house during sunlit hours on Saturday and I felt wretched on Sunday. I note that we went for two long walks during sunlit hours on Sunday and now I'm yawning a bit but otherwise feeling quite good. I deduce that sunlight takes 18 hours to have an effect and maybe this is why Sundays always suck and that probably puts an end to our habit of lounging around the house all day on Saturdays. Also any day where the sun goes down and I realize I haven't gone out in it, I should immediately take vitamin D. Better to actually go out, though.

Now off to work. I'd say "whistling a jaunty tune" but my iPod is full of Alice in Chains (xtina and I are seeing them in concert on Saturday and I wanted to prepare) so, um, no. That will certainly be the acid test of whether the depression is well and truly fled!

Sleepblogging: went to bed just past 2, having firmly decided I would get up when I woke up. Woke up around 7 (the sky was light but the sun not quite up) and after some debate decided that needing to get more than five hours of sleep trumped getting up when I woke up. Woke up again at 8:15. Went back to bed. Woke up again at 9:45. I think. It all kind of blurs.

Felt utterly horribly depressed for most of the day. sinboy made me bacon, put up with my cranky misery, and eventually got me out of the house and into the sun. It didn't help right away, but I perked up a bit by dinnertime. My body told me it wanted roast duck (or any fatty meat, really, but duck preferred) and the Indian Road Cafe happens to have it on their menu, so we splurged and I found myself feeling good about taking care of myself rather than freaked out by spending that much money on dinner. Granted, we probably shouldn't have spent that much money on dinner (sinboy spent all of last week trying to reach someone at the UI offices to ask why they had stopped sending him his money, and was completely unable to get through their clogged-up phone system, so we are really very broke at the moment), but I was so pleased to have any kind of appetite and food preference at all that I felt entirely justified in indulging it.

I do not like feeling like this. I would give in and get the blood tests except see above re: broke; I just can't justify that until the UI people give sinboy a straight answer about when/whether they're going to send him the now nearly $3000 they owe him. P.S. what the fuck. Anyone out there have a connection at the NYS Department of Labor? I emailed our state senator but I don't really expect that to go anywhere; maybe it's worth spending $50 to be able to personally accost him at his fundraiser on Wednesday and ask for help directly.

I thought I was going to be able to get work done when we got home, but the words swim around the page--I've never seen that happen quite so literally before--so I'm glad I said I'd have it done for Tuesday instead of Monday. I do it tomorrow. Tonight, I sleep.

While looking through my February 2005 entries for the one about walking in Central Park in the snow, I found this conversation with my younger self and I cannot stop laughing. vito_excalibur, note the third section's relevance to your recent poll!

I can't decide whether to reprise this as a conversation between 31-year-old me and 14-year-old me, have 31-year-old me join the conversation between 14-year-old me and 26-year-old me, or just leave well enough alone.

I have been remiss in my storytelling! I tell you a story.

Friday night, we went out to a party on the east side, which was lots of fun, and I drank a lot of caffeine (an entire glass of Coca-Cola!) and was all buzzy, and we left the party and went out into the cold and the dark and decided we wanted to walk across Central Park.

I pause for another story, briefly. When we moved back to New York, five years ago this week (!), sinboy coaxed me to walk through the park at night to see the Gates in the snow, and I was terrified because I grew up on stories of women being mugged and raped in the park in the middle of the day, never mind at night; but he said it was safe now, and I was nervous but I believed him, and we walked through the park in the snow and saw the Gates and it was awesome, and since then I have thought of Central Park at night as an us thing, especially in the winter. So I was not about to pass up this opportunity. We reminisced a bit about that night as we walked north up Fifth Avenue, and sinboy said, "Too bad there isn't any snow tonight."

We found an entrance and strolled into the park and marveled at the quiet, and the wind died down, and the air had that perfect crisp cold scent, and we turned onto the boulevard that leads up to Bethesda Terrace and it was like walking along a highway that we had all to ourselves. And we stopped and stared, because on the other side of the boulevard, there were what looked like enormous sprinklers spraying clouds of mist into the air. We speculated: perhaps hot water to keep the pipes in fountains from freezing? And then we got a little closer, and realized they were snow machines. Just sitting there, spewing snow into the night, piling it up in mounds and hills, frosting the low-hanging branches of nearby trees.

We strolled past, boots crunching in the thin layer of snow that had been blown past the fences, and sinboy speculatively looked up at the sky and the magnificent full moon and said, "Too bad it isn't raining thousand-dollar bills!"

Apparently that trick only works once.

It was a very good trick, though!

This is the problem with planless weekend days: I'm sleepy all morning and I sit around internetting or knitting or reading or whatever, and then I wake up in the afternoon and suddenly want to bustle around and Do Stuff. But there is no planned stuff to do, and I'm so twitchy that it's hard to come up with ideas that sound good (for example, I could do l*undry, but feh! not bustly enough! not stimulating enough!), and then I just slump and grump. I'd go for a walk but it is bloody cold out and also that requires me to shower and put on clothes. Which I should maybe do anyway, since these nightclothes are about due for a wash.

What should I do to shake off the ennuiiiiiiiiiiii?

Sleepblogging: Went to snuggle with sinboy around midnight and realized I didn't want to get up when he got up to go into his own room around 0030, so I just asked him to turn off the light, and I went to sleep right then and there. Of course, this meant I woke up at something like 7. Ugh. Told sunrise to piss off and dozed for another hour, which was maybe a mistake as I am now all groggy. I really really wish I drank coffee.

Even with eating an early dinner and waking up early, I still didn't get hungry until 10. I wonder whether it's possible for me to get hungry earlier in the morning without totally starving myself at night. I'd probably have to jump out of bed and immediately bustle around and shower and no. I mean, I'm guessing that would be good for me, but it is just more wholesomeness than I can currently contemplate.

sinboy, who is much more awake than I am, is going to the cafe to get me hot chocolate and croissants. It is so cold out that the little icon in ForecastFox just says "COLD". He must really love me.

We have no plans at all for today. I wonder what we'll end up doing. I mean, I have to wake up and move around at some point. In theory.

And of course today my schedule was all fucked by a dental cleaning that got in the way of lunch and made me two hours late to work and left my mouth too sore for eating a proper dinner (we made smoothies instead). I did four hours of work at the office and an hour at home, though, and I had a lovely (but too-brief) phonedate with xtina, and I have a lunch date with Miriam for tomorrow at noon, and I'm going to bed at just a little bit past 1. No bed-snuggles for the kitten tonight, but she's been nestled against my foot for the past half hour at least, so I think she'll be okay.

Also why did no one tell me that Georgette Heyer wrote the GAYEST KINKIEST BOOKS IN THE WORLD OMG. It is very hard to keep myself from just finishing this one tonight, but I have 100 pages to go and my bedtime is precisely now. I'm yawning, even. I should resist the lure of the book and extricate my foot from under the kitten and go parlay the yawn into something resembling sleep.

If you're going to ICFA, check out this American Airlines fare sale: weekday flights between many U.S. airports and Orlando International are $89 one way.

I could totally afford that if I could find, say, three roommates for the convention.

Hm.

Very quick sleepblogging: To bed at 0045; snuggled the kitten (who was thrilled) and knit until 0110; taurine etc.; lights out; tossed and turned for what I suspect was most of an hour after that. Was WIDE awake. Eventually slept and dreamed about... something. But I woke up mid-dream without an alarm at 0835, so I must have done something right.

I also woke up feeling very physically tense. My immediate thought was "I should lie back and relax" followed by "Oh, is this why I go back to sleep?". So I tried to relax without falling asleep again, and got up shortly after the backup alarm went off at 0845, feeling a little bit better (and much cheered to see the short-lived snowstorm out the window).

Breakfast did not happen at 9; I just wasn't hungry yet. Instead, at 1030 I got up and showered while sinboy cooked sausages, which I consumed once I'd gotten dressed. Now it's 1116 and I need to go brush my teeth and then head down to the dentist for my annual cleaning. My neck is still stiff, but I'm otherwise feeling reasonably mellow and ready to face the day. Hooray!

Anyone want to meet up for lunch tomorrow? Timing and location are flexible as long as I get to work (at Park Ave and 26th) by 1.

Lovely brunch with supertailz but still felt meh. Got to work and got work done but still felt meh. Wrote up a list of things to talk with therp about, most pertaining to feeling of meh.

( Therpitude and reduction of mehness, plus sinboy being totally awesome )

I realized after I wrote it down that one of the things on my list was something I could really tackle on my own: needing a real sense of how my ideal weekday should go now that I've shifted my sleep schedule around, and especially needing to know how freelance work fits in. ( So here it is )

That's the theory, anyway. Time to go see how well I can stick to it.

Dancing last night was glorious. During "Hudson Barn" I had a few of those fabulous transcendent moments; very therapeutic, and a grand farewell to the 13th Street church hall. Hanging out with supertailz before and after was also delightful. And I really really really want to write a dance to s00j's song "Carousel" now.

To bed at 2, woke up briefly at some morningish time and then fell right back asleep (not good), forced myself awake at 9:40. In a rather wretched and sullen mood since then. Should have deprived myself even further of sleep to make it easier to go to bed at midnight tonight.

Brunch date with supertailz will get me out of the house (mostly) on time today. Dentist appointment will do it tomorrow. Anyone want to meet for lunch on Friday somewhere Madison Square-ish around noon? I am not at my best early in the day (I still think of noon as early), but good company is always cheering, as is getting to work on time.

I really need to get some freelance work done tonight, so think cheering-up and non-manic-energizing thoughts for me, please.

I'm clearly hitting my end-of-month slump, which I suspect is hormonal and thus difficult to treat, but: there is kindness in the world, and love, and sarcasm, and the Chrysler building, and bacon, and dear friends who remind me of these things. It can't be all bad.

Today is Rabbit Hole Day, apparently, so if people on your flist are posting very weird things--weirder than usual, I mean--that's why. As exhausting as it is, I do recommend approaching all posts with some cynicism until you've determined whether you're reading fact or fiction. It'll be over soon.

sinboy and I recently bought Cardamom and Lime, a Middle Eastern cookbook, and promised each other that we would make ten recipes from it to justify the expenditure. I love dumplings, so when I saw a recipe for a dumpling stew in there, I insisted that we make it first.

The dumplings turned out to be a total failure because I didn't roll the dough out nearly enough. We decided not to do it that way again. Instead, this is the recipe with the dumpling filling ingredients mixed into the stew, which I think would work much better and also be faster and easier.

( Middle Eastern Lime Stew )

Just got my preliminary schedule for Boskone. I stress preliminary; at the top of the email was this request:

Some program descriptions may have not yet been
completed, or may need to be improved. Please help!
If you have specific comments or questions to include,
we'll try to incorporate such suggestions.

I nodded and scrolled down, and stared:

Friday 8pm Paranormal Romance: Threat or Menace....Or??
It seems that they're beginning to dominate the shelves, doesn't it?
Many people find this fusion of the romance and sf/fantasy field
*wrong*....but is it really? Will it expand the audience (and/or
possibilities) of the field, or simply destroy it? Is any of it any
good? What is your opinion of this new (marketing?) category?

IS ANY OF IT ANY GOOD.

Seriously.

I have a lot of tolerance for panel descriptions that are being overtly presented as in need of some work, but the underlying problem isn't that this one is badly written; it's that its premises are ridiculous and insulting. "Beginning to dominate the shelves"? I was under the impression that Boskone took place every year, so I'm not sure why their information on this is over a decade old. "Many people find this... *wrong*" and "Is any of it any good"? Wait, didn't we just establish that it sells phenomenally well? Are we supposed to be the nerdy outcasts sneering at anything popular? And if this is a new category, why have the PEARL awards been going on since 1999?

I understand that Boskone is pretty old-school, but this degree of snide insularity is absurd. Of course paranormal romance is expanding the audience and possibilities of speculative fiction. It has been for years. Why not have a panel celebrating it or exploring the reasons for its success, or at the very least presenting PR 101 "what is it and why should we care" information suitable for old-timers who are struggling to get used to the idea that women can write good books with female protagonists and romantic plotlines?

Needless to say, I have written back to them with my comments... or tried to, because the email with the panel info came from an email address at "boskoneprogram.org", which doesn't exist. *facepalm* I tried again with boskoneprogram.com and didn't get a bounce, so maybe that worked.

The other panels they have me on look reasonably interesting. I sincerely hope this one is an outlier and the rest of the program finds ways to ask pointed and complex questions without mockery.

EDIT: That was quick! Got a reply back saying "Thank you so much, we're glad you feel this way, please help us rewrite it". Am mollified. Good customer service there.

I went to bed just past midnight and got up at 10:30. I probably should have gotten up at 8 when I first woke up but it felt so good to sleep in.

In today's fun news, apparently New York State stopped sending us sinboy's unemployment compensation sometime in early December. Did they tell us they were doing this? Of course not. Here I thought we'd just been spending all our money! I was also not in my right mind for most of December and not really paying attention to the bank account. Oops. He'll call them on Monday to get that sorted out, because according to their website he's not even close to maxing out his benefits so WTF.

Fortunately, we put about $3000 worth of Arisia stuff on our Amex and then got a check from the Arisia treasurer to pay us back for it, so that check will cover our rent and bills while we harangue the state into giving us money, and then we'll pay off the Amex next month. Ugh but also whew.

We would very much appreciate positive thoughts towards this week's job interviews working out well, and also recommendations for the best way to sell off some of my Subterranean limited editions to make some quick cash (LJ auction? eBay? Half.com?).

Vague plan for today:

* Try not to stress about money.
* Eat some lunch. One banana < sufficient food.
* Sort out plans for upcoming trip to Portland (yay!).
* Do housework (I clean the bathroom and hallway, sinboy cleans the kitchen and does dishes).
* Shower and dress.
* Leave the house by 3 to get sinboy to his job interview. While he's there, I sit in a nearby Starbucks-or-equivalent and do some freelance work.
* Buy high-efficiency l*undry detergent (our building just installed new washing machines) and ingredients for tonight's dinner.
* Come home, make dinner, eat dinner.
* Maybe do l*undry.
* Maybe do some Arisia stuff.
* Maybe do more freelance work. I wanted to work on our super-secret project, but sinboy says that's my reward for getting some paying freelancing done.
* Try not to stress about money.

Am I the only person who sees "Remember me" checkboxes when logging into websites and auto-completes "but ah! forget my fate"? I get Dido lamenting in my head nearly every day and it's rather annoying.

I have 200 LJ userpic slots and only 153 userpics. Clearly 153 is not enough! I know I need new work and freelancing userpics. New writing and editing userpics would be good too. My userpic-making userpic is a bit out of date. I have pretty good ones for shopping, cooking, knitting, reading, books, clothes, travel, weather, the color green, my partners, my city, drugs, therapy, being queer, being a wise-ass... what else is there to life? I guess I'm set for hosting but could use one for guesting. Maybe a cross-stitch one. Something something I dunno. Maybe one for staring off into space with a glazed look on my face on a Friday afternoon when all my work is done...

rosefox: I am so full of "WHAT" that every time I try to kill the process it just keeps running in the background.
xtina: kill -9 WHAT
rosefox: ...it's not working.

(Yes, this was on the phone.)

I haven't looked at Free Will Astrology in ages, but I'm very amused by mine (Gemini) this week:

"Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. "Life becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights -- the coldness increases, the responsibility increases." I bring these thoughts to your attention, Gemini, because in the next two months you'll be in a prime position to renounce some of the "privileges" of your laziness. Please hear me out. I'm not saying that your lackadaisical attitudes are any worse than mine or anyone else's. But there come times in everyone's cycle when he or she has a chance to outgrow those lackadaisical attitudes so as to reach a higher level that's both more demanding and more rewarding. This will be one of those times for you.

That is, in fact, precisely what I have been thinking a lot about today, and starting to make some moves on. My mental state has been stable and strong for three weeks; that's long enough for me to put off those super-expensive medical tests for a while, and also long enough that I need to stop putting off things like picking up freelance work again. Taking a break for a while has been really good for me, but being poor is bad for me, and I can't allow myself to start thinking that my mental health is predicated on only working part-time at a job I love during a season with lots of holidays and time off. That way lies DOOM.

So yesterday I talked with a recruiter and sent in a contract and W-9, and today I confirmed an interview for a different job (I'm not leaving PW, just looking for other gigs I can do at the same time and building up contacts in case PW folds) and set up a meeting about going back to work for a client I'd been on hiatus from and started work on a freelance gig for a new client and emailed a couple of contacts about taking on more work. I'm a little nervous about getting back to the grind--among other things, I haven't yet figured out how to fit freelancing into my new sleep schedule--but mostly it feels good, and that's a big relief.

"More demanding" is certain. "More rewarding": well, I can hope. Laziness always feels so immediately rewarding. Long-term, though, it will be much more rewarding to live more on cash than credit, and to look at my bank balance every day with a feeling of pleasure and satisfaction rather than dread and anxiety, and to feel confident that my clients will give me more work because they know I get things done well and on time. And the more my moods settle down, the easier it is to think beyond this moment and work towards a happier, more stable, more comfortable future. It's a good theory, at least. We'll see.

Or, three reasons why we don't live in one:

Bloomsbury whitewashes the cover of another YA book with a non-white protagonist. ellen_datlow writes a fabulous letter in response; that post has contact info so you can make your own disapproval heard.

Pat Robertson voodoo doll. This one definitely gets filed under "what is this I don't even". The photo is really disturbing. Current bid: $1200... going to the poorly-run high-overhead American Red Cross rather than MSF/DWB or Partners in Health, so they get a double helping of facepalm. At least the auction for the Rush Limbaugh voodoo doll (no, I'm not linking, one is bad enough) benefits MSF/DWB.

bradhicks on American and European culpability for Haiti's poverty and the earthquake's death toll. If you don't know much about Haiti other than there was an earthquake there and like some people died or something, read this right now, for serious. EDIT: Several people have pointed out this post as well, which just summarizes the history. I agree that the first post is inflammatory and full of possibly wacky conspiracy theories; I still think it's worth reading and discussing. Lots of good comments are popping up on the LJ version of this post. Read those too.

I expected to just be making a YAY HOME AND KITTIES AND HOME AND MY OWN BED AND HOME post-con post, but these kind of demanded attention. Anyway, yay, we're home, the kitties missed us, I we now own about 40 pounds of butter packets, home home home, etc. Now I go pass out. Proper post-con post tomorrow.

It feels tremendously indulgent to still be in my nightshirt at 10:30 a.m. Many thanks to sinboy, xoder, and erin_trying for staffing the room this morning so I could get a few precious hours to myself.

It's the last day of Arisia and I am mostly out of words, so instead I point you to N.K. Jemisin's explanation of why Racefail '09 was a good thing. I've fumbled for ways to explain this to lots of people who thought it was stupid or a waste of time or nothing but pain, and she lays it out very clearly. Highly recommended reading.

Not at all unrelatedly, I saw more POC at Arisia than ever before (and got to spend a few minutes chatting with sparkymonster! and got a lovely hug from Andrea Hairston! and never managed to be in the same room with Nnedi Okorafor, but there will be other cons), and we had a bit of... unracefail? racefailsealarm? and I heard of no other drama of any kind at all. Very very mellow convention this year, for which we are all very glad. I think 2009 left us all too tired for drama.

The plows are going by on Memorial Drive for the third time since I woke up, which means it's time for me to get up and shower and pack our bags and go get reimbursed for the nearly $3000 I've spent on behalf of the convention this year. (Thank you, American Express, for making this possible.) Then I go help shut down the room and shut down the con, and we drive back in the sleet (which I hope will have stopped by then) and HOME HOME HOME KITTIES HOME. My back cries out for my own bed. It's been lovely but I am so very done.

I'm neck-deep in cooking, hence the radio silence, but I wanted to take a moment to post this.

If you can, please help Haiti recover from a terrible earthquake. If you prefer to give to individuals rather than organizations, the lovely idiomagic (whom I know personally and can vouch for entirely), also known as Hurricane Girl for her heroic exploits in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, is facing enormous bills for vital dental work, and gafferbear (a dear friend of many dear friends of mine), a musician and bard in the truest sense of the term, is trying to escape a bad living situation in a hurry. They could both use a helping hand. idiomagic is also selling some extraordinary diamond and sapphire jewelry, so if you have a spare thousand bucks and want to get something truly special for it, or you know someone who might, check out that post.

chillguru: Sweetie, why is there salt on your bedside table?
bbbsg: I'm trying to figure out a snappy comeback...
sinboy: "For your wounds, my dear!"
rosefox: "I've already torn down your city and the next step is to sow the earth with salt."

We do try to be helpful to our hosts.

Also, driving around Somerville makes me miss xtina intensely.

( Sleepblogging )

Yesterday was my first appointment with my new therapist. I like her and think I will keep her. She's very emotive--if she's admiring or sympathetic or shocked, she makes sure you know it!--but otherwise not obviously flawed. She also did the thing most therapists do with me the first few visits where she attempted to boost my self-esteem. I find this hilarious. My self-esteem does not need boosting. I esteem myself perhaps too highly. But I'm sure she'll get past that quickly enough. I don't think I'm likely to do the "fall in love with your therapist" thing with her, though one can never tell; that's probably good but also makes me a little wistful for my fabulous San Francisco therapist, over whom I still occasionally swoon.

Right, off to bathe and so forth before meeting kitteridge for lunch, working a few hours, and getting vast quantities of blood drawn. Must remember to drink a lot of water today.

( Sleepblogging, mealblogging )

Must pull myself away from compiling the Lazy Critic's Lexicon and shower and go in. ANY MINUTE NOW. *glares at self*

Any car-enabled Bostonians/Cambervillains want to come visit us this weekend and then chauffeur us north on Sunday morning? *) Offers of driving us around to various stores during the day next Monday and Tuesday (the 11th and 12th) would also be much appreciated (especially if you have an SUV or minivan that we can pack full of groceries), as would offers of hanging out and cooking with us Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. We will repay all your kindness with tasty baked goods and/or chili at Arisia, plus access to the member-only awesomeness of Costco and Restaurant Depot, plus signing Arisia volunteer timesheets for hours spent shopping and cooking, so this is a great deal for anyone who likes to cook and wants a t-shirt (eight hours) or comp membership (twelve hours).

Pretty please?

Very quick sleepblogging: to bed at 2:40, woke up cleanly at 8:30, dozed until alarm went off at 9 and again at 9:10. Alert, perky, not quite well-rested but not too bad, getting hungry. Amazing! Now off to shower and dress and get some breakfast before going to work.

(That's what my mother used to say when I staggered upstairs after sleeping until 2 p.m. on weekends, and occasionally on weekdays.)

( Sleepblogging )

I note that nighttime panic attacks have been quite absent since I went off the vitamin D. Good riddance. It has been weird to occasionally get insomnia of the stare-at-the-ceiling-for-an-hour variety when I accidentally go to bed at one of my perky times, but that's much better than panic.

Anyone out there freelance copyedit/proofread for (or have other connections to) a publisher or imprint who does not publish SF/F or romance on paper? I'm looking for more freelance editing gigs, but they can't be in areas that I cover at PW. E-books are fine, though, as long as the pay is decent. Any pointers gratefully appreciated.

Sleepblogging: went to bed a bit before 1, woke up very abruptly just past 8. Given that I slept about four hours yesterday, I can't possibly be caught up, but I decided to continue the radical experiment of getting up when I wake up. I expect I'll nap later.

Am quite groggy--it was a rough transition between asleep and awake, like emerging from an airplane into a radically different latitude and time zone--and the light looks wrong. I'm not used to being around for the hours between 7 and 11. Presently waiting for sinboy to invite me in for cuddles and perhaps dozing; he's also awake (maybe hearing him moving around is what woke me?) but not yet up for company.

Feeling like this is apparently what coffee and tea are for. Too bad caffeine and I have such a fraught relationship. For that matter, morning and I have a fraught relationship. I associate being awake at this hour with being made to do things I don't want to do (e.g. school, work). It will be interesting trying to engineer a mental shift towards the notion that I'm awake at 8 a.m. because my body woke itself up and I decided to follow its lead--towards the notion that I am capable of just wanting to go to bed at 1 and get up at 8. I mean, that's a weird thing to want! Why would I want it?

Oh, right, because it dramatically increases my odds of going outside while the sun is up, and gives me a lot more time to spend with my husband. Very clever of me, really. Devious. I'll pretend to be normal and human and they will Never Suspect.

...clearly not fully awake yet.

Oh, and it's January. I'll have to get used to that. I'd just gotten used to December and then they took it away. The year transition is never as tricky for me as the month transition for some reason.

sinboy went to bed around 11, but I stayed up to ring in the new year with knitting, movies, and homemade cookies. There are worse ways to do it. I hope the omen is for a relaxed and peaceful 2010.

Most uncharacteristically, I have realized that while I could keep knitting, I would actually rather sleep, and it doesn't at all bother me to set the project aside--not even at a milestone!--with the expectation of coming back to it tomorrow. I chalk this up to having slept from 12:30 to 3:30 a.m. and then napped fitfully from maybe 3 to 4:30 p.m. It felt good to be underslept today, though, very tired but calm and even cheerful, not quite awake enough to be fazed by anything. My brain was slow, but I didn't need it for anything, so that was okay. It was an excellent antidote to the two previous days of sleeping 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. or whatever it was.

I'm especially glad I could give sinboy a mellow day. I hope he sleeps better tonight because of it.

I'm off to sleep for what I hope will be about seven or eight hours. That would be nice. A good start to what I hope is a good year.

May 2010 be marvelous for everyone.

We now know two Peter & Erin couples and two Laura & Adam couples and at least two Liz & David couples. I feel like that moment in The Truman Show when Truman realizes the same cars keep driving past his house over and over.

A lot of people are reviewing the ways they spent the last ten years. I've decided I would really rather not. (Among the phrases you will never hear from me are "I wish I could relive my 20s".) Instead, I will open the floor to questions. Is there anything about the past ten years of my life that you're curious about? Feel free to ask. I will try to at least answer every question with a link to the relevant post or tag, but I reserve the right to skip talking about painful or unhappy things.

I see a lot of people also talking about their plans for 2010, but hardly anyone talking about plans for the next decade. Does anyone even make plans that far in advance anymore? What would one even plan for? I'm in a happy, stable long-term relationship configuration, done with formal education, as settled career-wise as I can be given the instability in my chosen industry. Last night I said to sinboy that it's a good thing we don't want kids, because we certainly couldn't afford to have any right now and having to put it off would be one more source of stress and unhappiness. I guess all that's left on the Big Life Events is buying a home, and that's never ranked very high on our priorities. So mostly what I hope for in the next decade is for us to earn a comfortable living in ways that make us happy, and to attend at least twice as many weddings as funerals. If I can look back from 2019 and see that that was true for most of the twenty-teens, I'll be quite contented.

I will do a year-in-review post mostly ( for my own reference )

I may regret this in the morning, but: if sinboy and I wrote a poly historical romance, would you want to read it?

(FSVO "historical", obviously.)

What does "home" mean to you? What makes people want or need a place they can call home (as opposed to merely an abode)? Are there people who don't want or need to have a home? Are nomads always home, or never home? What stories have you encountered that do interesting things with the idea of home?

Can you lend a New York street vendor $50 to help pay outrageous and unfair fines? I'm very familiar with the work of the Street Vendor Project, which is administering this particular fundraising effort; I can vouch that this is legit.

This morning I couldn't fall asleep until 8 a.m., which is unusually bad for me. I tried to go to bed at 5 and lay there staring at the ceiling and fending off panic. It was like 1999 all over again. No fun. Eventually I got up and played some Plants vs. Zombies and when I was completely exhausted I took more taurine and managed to fall asleep. I had weird dreams and only slept maybe six or seven uncomfortable hours.

But! That meant that when I woke up, it was still light out. And it looked like a beautiful day. And after shaking off the grogginess I felt suddenly motivated to get up and go out. sinboy went out to the deli and got us sandwiches while I showered and dressed, and then we got out at about 3:45 and took a short stroll along the few parts of the street that were still getting direct sun. He went off to the market and I sat on a bench and basked for a good fifteen minutes or so.

Since we didn't go out at all on Thursday and didn't go out during daylight on Friday and Saturday, I conclude that vitamin D is no substitute for the real thing.

The spring-like air and sun were absolutely revitalizing. I came home, opened all the windows, cleaned the dining table and my room, took out the trash, and generally bustled. When sinboy got home, I cut up vegetables for the beef stew he'd decided to make and then started four loads of l*undry. @jaimealyse (if she has an LJ account, I don't know about it) stopped by briefly to get cross-stitch supplies--I have this huge stash just sitting around, she needed a few things, I invited her to come over and take whatever she needed so at least it would be put to good use--so that meant straightening up the living room and pulling out all my thread and fabric; after she left, I put it all away again (truly away, not just in a heap in the corner of my room) and changed the l*undry around and then sorted and folded it and brought it upstairs. It all felt So Good (even if folding l*undry -> dry hands -> biting my nails something awful).

The stew was delicious. I don't remember the last time we cooked beef at home; I try not to eat it much, because cattle farming is so environmentally awful. It is super tasty, though! Mmmm, beef.

sinboy bought chocolate chips at the market, since we'd snacked our way through the last package, and as he was going to bed I got a whim to make cookies. I wanted to give some to the super and some to the l*undry guys and some to the security guards and building staff at work, so I figured I would make a whole batch. (The package claims that one batch makes 48 cookies. That didn't seem like very much, when divided among so many people.) I went to get the butter out of the fridge to soften... and realized we didn't have any butter in the fridge. Frozen butter takes a while to soften up, but I optimistically put two sticks on the table and went back to playing Plants vs. Zombies.

About four hours later, as I was getting ready to go to bed, I remembered the butter.

There is now an EPIC quantity of chocolate chip cookie dough in the fridge. It takes up the entire front of the top shelf. It is an Equally Large Boa of cookie dough. The actual baking can wait until tomorrow.

I still feel good, cheerful but not wired. I feel like I'll be able to fall asleep and sleep well and dream happy dreams and wake up well-rested after about seven hours. I have not taken any pills today, and I went out in the sun. I think these things are related. Just one week until the new year starts I can schedule all those tests to find out what exactly is wrong with my brain and body chemistry, and I've never been so eager to have blood drawn. No more trial and error for me.

Not much posting as not much is happening; we've been to Chinatown a couple of times, decided not to bother with movies, I've been playing a lot of Plants vs. Zombies. It's a holiday weekend. *)

Speaking of holidays, sinboy's birthday is coming up on January 5th. I have an idea for a group gift for him that I think he'd like very much. If you want to contribute towards it--totally optional, of course!--please let me know.

We have absolutely no plans for Christmas, and are therefore contemplating the traditional Chinatown-lunch-or-dinner-and-a-movie plan. Ninja Assassin is still in theaters and probably won't be too crowded on Christmas Day, since everyone will be off seeing Sherlock Holmes instead. Anyone want to go see it? Or should we attempt to get Sherlock Holmes tickets just for the experience of being completely surrounded by screaming steampunk fangirls?

Okay, I'm quite sure I didn't go to bed any later than 2 a.m., and I think it was earlier. I slept a little restlessly (as I often do when I go to bed before 4) but always went right back to sleep. My alarm went off at 11*; I hit the ten-minute snooze six or seven times and then flat-out went back to sleep. sinboy called at 12:45 to ask whether I wanted to meet him for lunch--expecting that I was either at my office or on my way downtown--and woke me up out of a weird dream where all the cubicles at PW were being moved around and I couldn't find any of my stuff.

* A time optimistically chosen because I figured I'd be awake by then anyway and would thus be sure to get to work on time. Ahahaha.

WTF. I didn't think I was that tired. I hope this doesn't mean I stay up until 6 a.m. tonight. On the bright side, now that I'm fully awake, I'm feeling more mood-stable than I have in days. Somewhere in all that snoozing I must have made the decision that getting what felt like enough sleep was more important than getting to the office on time, and I think that was probably smart, on the whole.

I definitely need to get up and get going now, though!

One of the perennial questions in my life is why I stay up late when I'm exhausted and know that I should sleep. Some possible reasons:

* to defy "should" even if it's bad for me
* because it's my time to be alone and self-directed and I want to be awake to enjoy it
* because I get caught up in something that seems more important, or that I have classified as "I'll go to sleep when I'm done with this" and then takes much longer than I expect it to (last night it was laboriously figuring out how I did what I did on one sleeve of a knitted dress so I could do the same thing on the other sleeve)
* because going to bed means the day is over, and then I have to face everything I haven't gotten done
* because I'm lonely and I want to spend time reaching out to other people

Tonight I'm mostly lonely. I had a lovely day--I actually got work done while at work during regular working hours! first time that's happened in weeks--and a lovely evening out with sinboy, pricing Arisia ingredients in Chinatown and dodging Little Italy barkers and devouring crispy squab and strolling through SoHo. I'm utterly exhausted by two nights in a row of seriously insufficient sleep. I need sleep. I've even taken taurine and put on my nightshirt and turned off my heat (I leave it on during the day and turn it off at night because I like to fall asleep in warmth and wake up in the cold) and kicked the cat out and brushed my teeth and put on lip balm (stupid dry winter air) and generally gotten ready for bed. But oh the aching loneliness, made worse by exhaustion and yet making it so hard to go to bed. And oh the guilt and self-loathing misery over not yet getting that freelance stuff done, ditto.

I don't want to give up on the night because I don't want it to give up on me. I don't want to give in and admit that this is the best I can do, the highest note I can go out on. Some days I want to go to sleep and not wake up until I'm better. I guess some nights I want to stay awake and not go to bed until I'm better. Keeping vigil for myself, or something; waiting, by candlelight, for my sanity to come riding home.

If that's what this is, though, I learned a long time ago that the best way to spend a vigil is asleep. If I am waiting and watching, it's because there's nothing I can be doing to fix things, and if there's nothing I can be doing to fix things, the best thing I can do is take care of myself in the meantime. Staying awake won't actually hasten whatever I'm waiting for. It'll just give me time to stress and worry while other events take their course. This is all the more true if I'm likely to be waiting for more than a day, which is obviously the case here. If there's the possibility of bad news--which there pretty much always is, if one is already in the position of waiting up and fretting--then I should be as well-rested as I can manage so I can bear up under it and help to support anyone else who's affected, or at least be less of a burden on them. It doesn't hurt to be well-rested for good news, either, and I'll feel silly if I keep myself up for what turns out to be nothing. If anything truly important happens while I'm asleep, either I'll be woken up to learn it or (more likely) it can wait until I've gotten my eight hours. I believe pretty thoroughly in the power of focused will, but the batteries providing that power do need to recharge from time to time. My temporary unconsciousness, a brief pause in will-emitting, harms no one.

All right, then. A vigil it is. I speak this language; I know this pattern. The memories attached to it are sad but not too painful, and if this is what helps me set aside the guilt and fretting and get some sleep, I'll take it; much better to be a little sad and well-rested than exhausted and hating myself.

And hey, maybe I'll wake up to the news that my brain has fixed itself. Some vigils end well. You never know.