And...here I am again!
I'm a blogging fool this week, aren't I?
I figure that after the sparse nature of recent posts, I'm down to about 2-1/2 people stopping by this place, which frees me up to be tedious, ramble on aimlessly, talk about myself all of the time, and never have, much less get to, any point.
In other words, business as usual.
Hey, speaking of business, it's Friday afternoon and I've pretty much worked solidly all week, so it's time for a little goofing off.
(My endless hours of blogging while at the office did not, it would seem, go entirely unnoticed by Alvin. Just yesterday he mentioned that my publisher must be getting impatient for that novel I seemed to be writing. Gulp. If I hadn't turned over a new leaf just a few days ago, I'd have been feeling pretty scummy, I can tell you. As it was, past is past, so I looked him straight in the eye and said my publisher was a fairly patient type. Heh.)
And now, having been accused, just a moment ago, of aspiring to work for the NYTimes, I feel that the American Way now demands that I stop working and complain about my boss, don't you?
He wanted press releases, okay? I don't have time to run around all over the place collecting quotes from people, so I wrote my own quotes. (I assure you, as I assured him, that they all sound much more intelligent when the quotes come this way. Hmph. Nor have I submitted any fraudulent travel receipts.)
Mostly, though, Alvin is a darned good boss. He even took it in good spirits when, after he declared, at the close of a little disagreement we were having, that this company isn't a democracy, it's a dictatorship and he's the one in charge, I continued to refer to him as Dictator-For-Life for weeks and made sure he got all of the icky work to do. In fact, just yesterday he suggested that from now on we alternate the D-F-L title. Today's my day, but since I'd forgotten about it until just now and since he didn't actually get into the office until around noon, I haven't had much opportunity to abuse my power yet.
Aside from that, and from tormenting A Certain Reader who has taken it amiss that I've posted a few story fragments, an exercise I declined to participate in at her invitation but undertook at the request of another friend, my life has been devoid of excitement this week. I've gotten a ton of work done, though.
I'm sort of impressed with the ability to actually work a full hour day that I've demonstrated this week. It's been, quite frankly, an astonishing number of years since I've done so. (Counting.... I figure, somewhere around 1997 since I did it on a regular basis.) It's not that I haven't been employed during the last five or six years, because mostly I have been. It's just that if working about 4 hours a day produced results that impressed all and sundry, what was the point of working eight hours? ( Actually, having been raised with a fairly well-ingrained Protestant Work Ethic, I attribute to my often ignored sense of guilt over my own slackerhood a fair portion of the responsibility for my subsequent, teeny-tiny breakdown.)
(aside)
From whence do you suppose this tortuous sentence construction comes?
(I'll tell you from whence it comes, you freak. For months now you've been forced to write in simple, declarative sentences in an attempt to produce user manuals and sundry other business-enhancing documents, and when you get to a keyboard on your own account, all of those unused clauses come tumbling out one after another until not even you can remember where you were going when the sentence started.)
(You love clauses. Not usually requiring to stop for breath when you're talking, you don't see much of any real need for reaching a full stop more than occasionally when you're writing.)
Sometimes I wish I'd just shut up and let me write, but no-o-o, at least half of my brain has to be occupied with watching me type, pointing out the increasing number of typos I make as the years go by, reminding me I need to do my nails, wondering if I could glue the cover to the stupid apostrophe key on, and insisting that I come up with something funny, or at least reasonably interesting to say that not about me before everyone stops reading.
(/aside)
I still haven't watched the final two Spike BtVS episodes. It's disgraceful, I know.
I started to watch a move on the SciFi channel last night, but it was so stupid in the first half-hour that I turned it off and watched taped episodes of WW instead.
Before I turned it off, though, I was watching to see who was in it and there was Ladyshoes! but it wasn't Ladyshoes, it turned out to be the Oil Rig Woman from Sen and then, look! there's that guy! that shape-changer guy from XF! And a pudgy Ryan O'Neal, not that I have any room to talk.
In the end, NotLadyshoes wound up impregnated by an alien jellyfish or something. I'm a little unclear on the details because I turned it off and then turned it back on to see the last three minutes. XF Shapeshifter guy survived, in spite of having been possessed by The Spirit and having been channeling god for a while or something. And having been about 25 feet from a nuclear explosion.
It's all possible in the movies.
Me, I'd probably have watched it. I love a cheesy disaster movie and having a rock burst up out of the ground and start menacing the earth in some way (I missed the exposition) seemed to me to be as cheesy as the concept could get.
I mean, worse even than the frog movie, okay?
My roommate, not normally famed for having a more refined taste in entertainment than I possess turned it off, so I ate chocolate while we watched the WW ep where Josh gets de-traumatized by Aaron Sorkin and, all in all, that made a pretty good evening.
Posted by AnneZook at 02:48 PMI can be irritating if I want to.
Personally, I'm not a fan of the WIP. Too many of them are left unfinished, or inadequately edited because the author doesn't want to take the trouble of going back to change something she's already posted.
It's especially stupid when the story in question promises to be about six pages long when (if) finished.
On the other hand, I'm hard-up for material to blog about these days, aren't I?
"Do me."Do Me"I beg your pardon?"
"Do me. It's been hanging in the air since practically the second we met. We've both been thinking about forever and now I think it's time. I want you to do me."
How was he supposed to answer a statement like that?
He was a little too old to do 'offended virtue' and mentioning that it wasn't the most romantic offer he'd ever had didn't seem to strike exactly the right note.
"No," he said. "I haven't been thinking of it. Why have you been thinking of it?" He glared at Mulder. "Why aren't you working?"
"You haven't?" Mulder looked surprised, then shrugged. "Never mind. My mistake I guess. I'll see you tomorrow."
Walter stared as Mulder nodded briefly and left the room.
That was it? Want to? No? Okay, see you around. Was that how it worked these days?
The world was going to hell in a handbasket.
* * *
It was close to midnight before it hit him. 11:42 p.m., to be exact, and the digital clock beside his bed was always exact.
That precision normally reassured Walter, but on some rare occasions, it also annoyed him.
The problem with a digital clock was that there wasn't any context.
It was 11:42 p.m. No earlier, no later.
With an old-fashioned clock, it was also about twenty till midnight. It was a little after 11:30. It was, and you could count the hours quickly, around five and a half hours until the alarm was going to go off. It was 42 minutes after he'd laid down and started not sleeping.
42
42 was one of those weird numbers that showed up more often than there was any reason for. 42 was the number of Mulder's apartment.
Mulder. Do me.
Walter sat up and glared at the darkness of the far wall.
What the hell kind of thing was that to say to your boss?
He'd backed Mulder and Scully through hell and this was how Mulder thanked him? By playing some weird practical joke or running some half-assed psychological experiment or sending coded messages disguised as come-ons or whatever the hell it was he'd been doing?
There were moments, and 11:42 p.m., 11:44 p.m. now, seemed to be one of them, when he wondered what it was that was stopping him from reassigning Scully and kicking Mulder's stubborn, nonconforming ass right out of the Bureau.
Whatever it was that was going on, and Assistant Director Skinner had long, doubtful hours when he still couldn't believe the stuff about aliens and colonization, Walter didn't need this additional layer of weirdness in his life, keeping him awake half the night.
Right. Tomorrow, all it was going to take was One. Wrong. Word. from Mulder.
One eyebrow out of place and he'd find himself back on wiretapping before he finished smirking. In fact, Walter was looking forward to the opportunity.
* * *
What astounds me is that I used to churn out this much stuff while brushing my teeth. Now it takes me two weeks to get around to writing 50 words. (And I still haven't gotten around to rewatching any episodes and am fully aware, thankyou, that the character's voices are wrong. Blame JiM. She's the one who made me promise to try this.)
Posted by AnneZook at 09:41 AMThis whole so-called reality crap is going too far.
It was bad enough when it was a bunch of actor-wannabes out on some island or something, running races or reinventing fire or whatever it was they were doing to prove they were more fit to marry a millionaire or whatever idiocy those things were built on, but this last round of shows is getting...horrible.
Women going through plastic surgery makeovers just to reinforce that old stereotype that you have to fit a narrow range of "beauty" to be a worthwhile person. I notice we're not seeing any guys volunteering to have their double-chins removed for the amusement of millions of slack-jawed viewers.
And it's worse than that. It's all getting mean. Mean-spirited. Focused on the humiliation factor.
Women competing for the "love" of a millionaire only to be told he's just a working-class guy, then the audience holding its breath to see if she stomps off mad.
And now we get a gay-themed dating game, only the fun (Ha. Ha.) is that the guy isn't competing for the affections of other gay men.
Nooo, they have to "spice it up" by including some het guys in the mix. (As if that isn't going to fuel the nightmares of a million straight men secretly convinced that every gay guy in the world is secretly after his ugly butt.)
What's next? "Reality" shows were guys have to choose their woman from a pool that, all unknown to them, contains a few cross-dressers and a transsexual or two?
Why not go all out and find someone's long-long sister or brother and throw them into the dating pool? What's a little potential incest when these kinds of ratings are at stake?
I blame every single one of you who has watched one of these shows and discussed it around the water cooler the next day. You're all part of the problem, okay?
If people weren't so feeble-minded that this kind of crap passed for entertainment in their lives, the airwaves wouldn't be filled with it today and we wouldn't be threatened with more and more bottom-sucking concepts every year.
You know, I was in a reasonably good mood before a Former Friend* sent me this stupid link.
Occasionally it occurs to me to wonder why I spend so much time watching the Food Channel any more, but then I realize that seeing the factory process to put the Ms on M&Ms or watching some master-chef create a five foot tall sugar sculpture or haring about the best places in the country to get seafood is ten times as interesting as mainstream television.
* Just kidding, piglet, you know that. :P
RPS
These RPS stories are getting completely out of hand.
Posted by AnneZook at 09:03 AMThis is me, doing it, now. (Don't faint in surprise, fall over, hit your head, and fall into a coma, okay?)
And, speaking of 'doing it' I did manage to tape all of the final episode of Spike BtVS last night. Still haven't watched last week's ep but maybe I'll get time to sit down and watch both of them this evening. In the meantime I'm naturally having to avoid all e-mails and news coverage of said final episode.
Still haven't managed to add a single word to the regrettably bad start of the XF story I apparently promised to write. (I still maintain I didn't make a firm commitment, but I'm doing any anyhow. With bad grace, but I'm doing it.)
"Do me."It goes on like that for about three more pages. Blech."I beg your pardon?"
"Do me. It's been hanging in the air since practically the second we met. We've both been thinking about forever and now I think it's time. I want you to do me."
How was he supposed to answer a statement like that?
He was a little too old to do 'offended virtue' and mentioning that it wasn't the most romantic offer he'd ever had didn't seem to strike exactly the right note.
"No," Walter said. "I haven't been thinking of it. Why have you been thinking of it?" He glared at Mulder. "Why aren't you working?"
"You haven't?" Mulder looked surprised, then shrugged. "Never mind. My mistake I guess. I'll see you tomorrow."
Walter stared as Mulder nodded briefly and left the room.
That was it? Want to? No? Okay, see you around. Was that how it worked these days?
The world was going to hell in a handbasket.
I can't believe my own memories of how easy writing used to be. Stuff used to just flood from my brain. I could barely type fast enough, or find enough free hours, to get it all down.
I'm going to have to break down and watch some episodes, I just know I am.
In my copious spare time. (I'm so depressed by the state of the world these days that I've been diving back into escapist fiction most evenings.) I can't muster up any enthusiasm for the idea of watching old episodes, but I suppose I'll enjoy it when I get started. Yawn.
I could work on the OaT story, of course. I have a lot more of it done and I already rewatched half a dozen episodes, so I'm primed.
(For those who didn't see Part 1 of the saga, I'm still obsessing over why I'm not obsessing over writing any more. If I spent as much time writing as I do obsessing over writing, I'd have finished both stories and a new novel by now.)
It could be the aforementioned "state of the world" thing, of course. For a decade or more, I was largely apolitical, disgusted with the entire system. While not the behavior of a responsible citizen, it did have the effect of freeing up my brain to think about other things. Mostly smut, of course. I'm not sure that my recent re-entry into the world of being an informed, opinionated citizen is good for me. Every. Single. Thing. this Administration does pisses me off.
I blame television executives.
If they'd managed to put a show on that I found myself all fannish and slashy about at any point in the last three years, I wouldn't have turned to bitching about politicians as a way to fill my time and avoid the work piling up on my desk.
I used to FMT and AtWPUOMD by writing when I was supposed to be working, but that, as previously discussed, doesn't seem to be an option these days.
Blah, blah, blah
Clearly this isn't one of the days when I had anything in particular to say.
The problem with my recent course of reading is that is doesn't offer much food for discussion in this particular forum. I mean, unless anyone wants to see reviews of the (non-political) books I've been reading, which I very much doubt, even though A Cook's Tour was both fascinating and disturbing.
Of course, I could always load up all of the unfinished bits and pieces of stories I've abandoned over the years and post each of them as a separate blog entry, couldn't I?
As we've all seen, there are many, many authors who post unloved and unfinished bits of stories on their pages. Clearly the detritus of the writer's brain is thought to be of absorbing interest to the public and all of these ragged leftovers are fascinating to the reader, right?
I mean, they must be. Some authors go to the extreme of posting this crap material to actual fiction lists.
No doubt they sit back and watch the kudos roll in.
On the other hand, what if I posted some leftover piece of drek here and sat back and the kudos did roll in and half a dozen people said they loved it and then I had to realized that I've never written an actual story that got that much feedback and then I started thinking about killing myself because all of my (six) friends who read this blog were clearly brain-damaged morons?
No, better not take the chance.
In case it's not obvious by now, I'm in a bad mood. Not for any reason. I just sort of am.
I edited the installation manual this morning and in a minute, I have to turn back to the PowerPoint From Hell and see if I can get it done. I should call a couple of clients.
Maybe it's my blood sugar. I'll eat lunch.
Posted by AnneZook at 04:20 PMAnd that work ethic thing is still all over me.
Not that that was my plan for today.
Quite frankly, I'm sick to death of PowerPoint and all of its features. I'm sick of trying to make the same five statements over and over using different words so that the customer won't get bored. I'm sick of thinking about "our product" and what it can do. I'm sick of making screen captures and reformatting them and dinking with the color so that they don't clash with the beeyootiful but impractical PowerPoint template I created.
I'd rather be talking about Spike BtVS, which I see has garnered farewell notices all over the place, but I can't.
For one thing, I haven't gotten last week's episode watched yet. (I was reading a book, okay? Five books, in fact.)
Anyhow. I'll have to watch last week's episode tonight while this week's episode tapes and then tomorrow night I can watch this week's episode and then factoring in that work ethic thing, I should be ready to discuss it all in early June.
Another possibility occurs to me (in reference to that, 'why ain't I writing?' entry below, I mean), which is that I've been doing so much writing at work for the last nine months that maybe I just don't have any enthusiasm for stringing words together during my off hours?
[deleted nine paragraphs of me whining about how tedious it is to be overpaid for not working very hard. Sheesh. I am such a brat.]
Still, I'd like to point out that an aptitude for snappy dialogue and an unfortunate predilection forman-on-man sex scenes does not qualify one for any kind of professional writing.
Oh, dear.
I should stop whining about how badly I have it. I'm employed. I have it good.
Posted by AnneZook at 04:06 PMSome kind of vestigial work ethic seems to have overtaken me in the last week or two.
West Wing! That was a great season-ender. It speaks volumes for Sorkin's ability to suck me into his world that the entire "ripped from the headlines" cheesiness of the "Zoe gets kidnapped" plot didn't occur to me until three days after I saw the first half of this arc.
I loathe those shows that scream RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES!!!! at you during commercials. I go to television to escape from reality or, in some cases, to get a context for what's happening in the world but I have serious doubts about whether or not a cop show or lawyer show would treat its RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES!!!! material with enough honesty and accuracy to qualify as "educational" in my book.
WW, in spite of being impossibly idealized, is educational. (There's no way they could cover the real, messy details of political life in an hour show. Each plot point would have to cover three episodes.) It's also enthralling, engrossing, and fascinating.
Charlie! Josh! Toby! POTUS! And Leo! "Leo will know what to do."
How can I wait months to see the rest of this? How can the rest of it possibly measure up if it isn't written by Sorkin?
Am I the only one wondering if Sam is biting his nails and wishing he was in the White House now that his friends are having all of this trauma and really need him?
Does he feel out of the loop, lost and alone? Does he lose sleep over these things?
Did he win his election?
I also wonder how Hoynes is taking it, realizing how much POTUS needs him right now and realizing that his own idiocy not only took him him out of his party's running for the next nomination but probably handed the next presidency to the other party into the bargain?
What do they do to members of foreign royalty who thought they were taking, and sharing, illegal drugs but who turn out to be the victims of terrorists? Probably just send them home and never issue them another visa until said royalty wants to come back to the country and has some kind of political or economic clout that someone in the Administration wants to take advantage of. (I know. "Cynical much?")
I've read a lot of people who thought that Frenchie was Part Of the Plot, but I never thought so.
It's a pity they cast John Goodman as the temporary president. Not that I have anything against him except that the only think I know about him is that he was one Roseanne and I used to flip past that show ASAP since I don't find "slob humor" at all humorous.
I suppose if I say the guy needs to drop a couple of hundred pounds before he keels over dead from congestive heart failure I suppose I'll start a huge war about me being bigoted or something, but that guys' size was scary, okay?
Anyhow, I'm sorry they cast him because while it's easy enough to bring on a guy who plays the Hostile Heavy-handed Replacement and who turns out to be an honest man who does the right thing even when it's not his personal choice, I think it would have been a lot more interesting to bring on someone more low-key and then have him either appear to be cooperative and turn out to be two-faced, or have the staff try and walk on him and have the whole "I'm in charge!" outburst come a bit later.
This coming in and laying down the law fast is the right way to take temporary control, don't get me wrong, but dramatically it was predictable.
I'm just saying, okay? Everything they've done with Replacement Guy (I have to learn his name) I predicted the instant we heard what '25' was and that the guy was a Republican. Except for not knowing it was Goodman, I "saw" the whole thing play out in two seconds in my brain.
Without Sorkin, I fear the wrap-up of this plotline won't be subtle enough to surprise and please me.
Spike BtVS!
I've been very good about not boring y'all with this lately, haven't I?
Posted by AnneZook at 09:21 AMI've been thinking of you. Honest, I have.
I taped Spike BtVS Tuesday and was thinking sadly that when I get a chance to watch it, I won't be able to blog about Spike it obsessively because of complaints about the all-Spike, all the time nature of recent entries.
I also thought about blogging the SB, as I mentioned before, but there's still a possibility it will show up in a story some time soon, so I don't want to use up the concept.
I could have blogged about the new airline that's being started up, but I think the concept of Hooters Air is pretty much self-basting, don't you?
I was having lunch with a couple of friends earlier this week (yes, I hogged all the conversation, as usual) and got to brooding over the hiatus in writing that some of us are having. Three of us got medicated at about the same time, making us card-carrying members of the Prozac generation.
Not one of us has written a single word since we got the dosages right.
There's a lot to that theory that writers are unbalanced, isn't there? The more mentally and emotionally stable I become, the less I feel the drive to write.
And yet, I did write one thing. I wrote the NaNoWriMo novel, and while it sucked on an Oscar-worthy scale, that tells me that the three of us could be writing, if we could just find a different way of tapping into that energy than the pressure of escapism that used to drive each of us. (Writing well is another story. I have nightmares about some of the passages in that NaNoWritMo novel.)
I wonder how many other fanfic writers have dropped out of fandom, not because life got really stressful and bad, but because things improved for them to the extent that they also stopped needing the outlet for stress? (Not that my friends and I are now leading stress-free lives, especially in the case of one of us, but the medication means she's able to deal with it all.)
It's a Point To Ponder, isn't it?
You ponder for a while, while I go get a little more work done....
[time passes]
I see no one has commented on this yet. (Okay, it's not posted yet, but that hardly matters around here. I don't think anyone accidentally stumbling over this place is under the impression that I'm doing anything more than watching myself perform in a tastefully decorated but largely empty theatre. Have I mentioned the egomania thing recently?)
Anyhow. I'm sort of proud of this manual. From a blank pages and a hand-waving description of a piece of vaporware, I've created a 46-page explanation and walkthrough of the program, complete with screen-captures and explanations for how to do a great number of things I'm not certain I could do myself if pressed. It's highly likely, in fact, that I will be called upon to do these things.
It's a good thing I have a walkthough, isn't it?
And now, I have one hour and ten minutes until my 4 hour meeting and I'm not ready for it, so I have to leave you again. I'll be back soon. Promise.
Posted by AnneZook at 10:57 AM
Stalking Alan Rickman
Monday: Fed up with being a faithful wife. Unwilling to cheat with just anyone because in my wedding vows, I promised not to. Fortunately, I slipped in a loophole. Right after "I do," I embraced my beloved and whispered in his ear, "Of course, if a celebrity ever asks me to run away with him, you're history as far as I'm concerned. You understand that, don't you?" I think he did - the look on his face had to be agreement. Through the subsequent decades, I have threatened to leave him for men ranging from Johnny Depp to Denzel Washington and yet I haven't gone, so he has become complacent. The old fool. Now's my time to move.Tuesday: Have narrowed my list of possible mates for mid-life grand passion. Focus. Must have focus. Keanu? Too young. Harrison? I've read he has a bad back. Jackie? Maybe, but he would probably expect athletic sex. I think I would be impressed yet intimidated by someone who could strip, then bounce off the wall and land on the bed in a handstand. No, upon consideration, my destiny is clear. He's tall and lean, moody and complicated, with a baritone that melts the butter on my kitchen table: Alan Rickman.
No, it's not mine. It's Cyndi's and it's adorable.
Go. Read.
Actualy, EOS design has the cleverest site tour I've ever seen. (Great wallpapers and website graphics, too.)
Posted by AnneZook at 10:20 PMThe stupid lawyer just sent me 14 pages worth of document he wants to use to create a contract that should have been outlined in 2-3 pages. There goes the weekend.
All I can say is that this client had just better come through with a substantial amount of business, and darned soon!
Also, the Terminator was on her way out of my life but she's ba-a-a-ack and likely to be becoming a much larger part of the problem things. She seems to have discovered/remembered that an outside consultant has wide latitude for coming in and laying down the law right and left without actually having to do any of the work, so she's about to become an outside consultant.
Just what I need. Her, licensed, even paid to explain to me how I'm doing it all wrong and need to stop and consult her every five seconds to keep myself on the right path.
When I grow up, I want to be an outside consultant.
At some point Wednesday evening I seem to have enraged an Attention-Deficit Demon. I was just sitting in a chair, and when I stood up, ouch!. My ankle sprouted pain and stiffness for no discernable reason. It was sore enough yesterday that I could barely walk on it, but today it's practically well.
What kind of crippling owie disappears in 24 hours? Cut-rate demons, that's all you get these days.
And, speaking of demons, our VCR had a problem Tuesday and I didn't get Spike BtVS taped. (Our VCR needs a new user. The old one is defective.) I wouldn't care, except that I've heard there were some great funny scenes.
(Two more episodes, that's all. Surely it's not beyond me to be able to tape two lousy episodes of a show? Surely I have brain enough for that?)
This week I exercised (well, until the ADDemon struck), did huge amounts of laundry, Collapsed for many hours, fed about a million Insaniquarium fish, read five books, watched one hour of television, ate at least half a pound of chocolate, sat up until midnight every night, overslept every morning, and was generally a less-than completely productive member of society.
It was lovely.
It isn't that I can't, or don't do exactly those same things when my roommate is at home, except for leaving the television off for days at a time, it's just the luxury of hours and hours of untrammeled solitude.
Posted by AnneZook at 03:07 PM