10.30.09
Gotta Rec This to All My Writin’ Friends
What to Write Next by Colson Whitehead
I love the Times.
10.24.09
The Writing Blues
I’ve finally figured out why I get paralyzed every time I try to write anything. After spending the last several months almost exclusively on polishing, I sit down to write something new and everything coming out of my brain sounds like total crap. And then I get mad and start deleting, and then I get mad and go wash dishes or play the piano or… solitaire. 
Oops. I just gotta remind myself that first drafts will never sound great; that’s what revisions are for. Yesterday I finally let the yuck flow, and it started to be fun again. I think next week will be good for writing.
In other news, I didn’t mention that my recent run in with translating a sentence pushed me over the edge and made me decide to start learning Norse. (Yes, I know, in normal people thought processes, “I want to read the Eddas…. I’ll learn Norse!” does not make sense.) Anyway, I think I was afraid if I mentioned it too early, if I gave up having learned no more than “Heil! Ek heiti Jackie!” that I’d be a quitter. But, well, I’ve got down the present tense verb conjugations and masculine declinsions through the dative. I’m learning cool quirks like in the Eddas they would be more likely to say, “King Olaf offered the vikings to get on his ship” than “King Olaf commanded the vikings to get on his ship.” (Heehee… an offer they can’t refuse…) Not a ton, but a significant enough accomplishment that I feel justified in saying, “I’m learning Norse!” I do find it endlessly amusing that instead of “to love” being the first verb (other than “to be”) that I learn to conjugate (like my other language learning experiences), Oskar Gudlaugsson and Haukur Thorgeirsson (the online site I’m learning from) teaches you “to slay” first. Now that’s vikings for you.
10.20.09
This Totally Made My Day
10.16.09
Net-a-rific
I’ve been running into some awesome quotes and stuff lately, so I thought I’d share a few.
Steve Faber from his article in Script Magazine called Mining for Real Comedy in a Techno-Virtual Lexicon Pit:
The “global economy,” a term contextualized to suggest economic freedom, fairness in the trade and exchange of commodities, a syntactical symbol of what we as a nation stand for, is in fact a colloquialism meaning “my sneakers were made in the South Pacific by a 6 year-old child who eats once a week.”Arlie Hochschild from his article in The New York Times called The State of Families, Class and Culture:
In survey after survey, Americans show up as valuing marriage more than people almost anywhere else. Yet at the same time we have the highest divorce — and romantic breakup — rate in the world… Children born of married parents in America face a higher risk of seeing them break up than children born of unmarried parents in Sweden… The culprit is not the absence of family values, I believe, but a continual state of unconscious immersion in a market turnover culture. It is this that sets us apart from a more stable Europe.
Not a quote, but if you’ve got a little under and hour and want to see something really cool and hopeful, Rick Steves goes to Iran.
And in case you want to see something less hopeful… you know it’s bad when John Stewart can’t make it all funny: Rape-Nuts.
A totally random new book technology thing called Vook that I’d dying to try. And for $6.99? I guess that’s cheaper than death.
And finally, save Dollhouse! Catch up on hulu.com and keep tuning in!
10.10.09
Scott-World Out of Order
My husband has three favorite things in life, and I’m not sure where I rank among them: coffee, wine, and woodworking. He’s also a health nut, but that is best identified by the CrossFit slogan: “Our fun is not fun.” Coffee, wine, and woodworking are Scott’s fun that is actually fun.
My poor darling’s world has been ravaged in the last two weeks. First it was the Expobar, our espresso maker (with which he makes himself 3 double shots every morning. Yes. My husband has six espressos every day. I have 1 latte, 2 on weekends). The boiler (or something) quit in a rather spectacular fashion involving sparks and melting metal. I don’t know; I was still asleep and Scott was in the morning non-caffeinated coma when it happened, so all shared details of in the incident are suspect. I will say in favor of the machine that it has served us faithfully for well past its warranty and has paid back in time and shots well more than we spent on it. It’s a good machine. But it died while making the first espresso of the day, so The Scott was The Uncaffeinated Scott when he left the house. Bad sign. We survived on French press for a week.
After a short search, however, we found The Alex to replace The Expobar. It’s huge. But it makes incredible coffee. World righted, minus a hefty chunk of change right in between my final paycheck and Christmas. Ouch.
Then two days ago Scott wakes me up with another French press and a cry of distress. The grinder has ceased functioning. Now, this grinder is apparently awesome, but as far as I’m concerned it throws ground everywhere and has had a broken switch for as long as I can remember, which has required Scott to jury-rig some ugly yellow wires to it in some fashion that I’m sure is not approved by fire codes in any country that has them. Other than the fact that this will require a further expenditure, I am not sad. But I am drinking French press again, which is extra-harsh with the gleaming and expensive Alex taunting us in its uselessness sans correctly ground coffee. (We have, ahem, borrowed an unused grinder from, uh, somewhere, but unfortunately it is a blade grinder, not a burr grinder which does not allow it to produce fine enough grounds for the Alex to do anything but dump semi-brown water out of the portafilter. This is the problem with fancy espresso machines; they require fancy espresso grinders.)
So another grinder is on its way, this time one that supposedly flings fewer grounds and does not (yet) require hazardous and hideous rewiring to work. When this arrives, I will be happy (and poor).
Then today the (hopefully) final blow when the refrigeration unit for the wine cooler failed. Luckily this bad boy’s still under warranty and we’re in a cold snap so it will cost no more than shipping to replace (which I still think is a ripoff) and the wine has not been destroyed (which would be reallyreallyreally bad as Scott’s developed a collection that we cannot afford to even partially replace). Still, we need to get the new one in before the weather warms up (which I think is next week) or find a chilled place to put a couple hundred bottles of wine. Ack. Then Scott will need to spend time that we both wish he was using to work on the new bathroom counter that will allow us to get an occupancy permit and get heat working in the upstairs before winter officially rolls in.
AckAckAck. In just over three months now, my car has broken down (massive repair bill), my computer has broken (fixed on our own; lost a day’s worth of work), the refrigerator quit running (fixed on our own; lost most of the fridge food and all of the frozen except the bottle of Grey Goose, which I kept regardless of what the temperature change might’ve done), I popped a tire (potentially when I was hydroplaning off the road into an embankment), the espresso machine exploded (bought a new one), the grinder died (bought a new one), and the wine cooler failed (still dealing with). I shall not ask “What next?” for fear the universe will answer that question.