I Speak With the Tongue of a Thousand White-Hot Lies!

(this is also over on the WP blog, just FYI)

So the reason I sort of fell off the blog over Christmas was that, about three days after I went on break [1] , I got sick.  I got nobody else sick, so I figure it was allergies, but still.  Tired, sore throat, gunk galore out my nasal cavities ... blech.  I managed to take the boy to the best-friend-in-law's Peter Pan [2], finish up all the Christmas shopping, and survive the holidays [3] ... but I was tired and living on Mucinex and Alka-Seltzer sinus.

I started feeling better the Saturday before I had to go back to work, though that gave me about four days.

Now, I had heard about Unfuck Your Habitat before, but I'd never really checked it out.  But earlier in the week, a friend had posted one of those "Things To Make Your Life Easier" memes on Facebook--you know, use nail polish on your keys so you know which is which, cord labels made out a bread ties--and once again, I saw vertical folding.  My dresser was a freaking disaster, I'd just gotten a bunch of new t-shirts and funky socks for Christmas, it was not looking promising ... so I'd thought, why not? ( There be photos below! )

I like the whole 'system,' thus far.  I dig the swearing--it's like cleaning a la Quentin Tarantino!--and the snarkiness of the blog, and I like feeling that it's something I can maybe maintain ('resetting' the house sounds so much more do-able than 'cleaning' every damn day, and I think it's making it easier on the husband, too).  I also like the 20/10s.  Because I sometimes feel overwhelmed and sort of defeated before I begin (like, when I look at the filing? Or the after-Xmas closet?), but this gives me a structure.

In the end, I'm hoping once the major unfucking is done, the resets will not take up a whole lot of time.  And when, inevitably in a house with an elementary-school-age child and a parent who works in a library, we all go down with the plague again and the house devolves into chaos and despair, I'll have the 20/10s and the app and the blog to fall back on.

We shall see how well it works.  So far so good.

Oh, and yes, I am totally doing paperless billing now.

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[1] College library day job; I get Winter Break.

[2] David costumed it--steampunk Peter Pan!  Hook and the pirates basically stole the show, though Peter and Tiger Lily were excellent as well.  The boy loved it; it was a very late night for him, and he was desperately trying to stay awake through intermission, but he refused to fall asleep until he found out how it ended.

[3]  I hate the holidays.  I just do.  I spent a lot of my life trying to deny it, and I always ended up feeling like utter hell once they were over.  When I finally admitted it (in a hysterical monologue in the car to my husband about eleven years ago) and gave up on trying to enjoy them ... I started actually enjoying them a lot more.  I don't try to Scrooge on anyone else's enjoyment of them; I will not Grinch your holiday party.  I just want to peacefully hate getting out the decorations and ignore most of the specials on TV while debating whether a hockey stick or a cattle prod might be more effective in the damn store two days before Christmas.

If you're a Corwyn and Gwen fan, and I hope all of you are, head on over to the WP blog for a short little thing in honor of ... something I link to over there.

If you haven't read "The Drowned Man" over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, it's probably not a prerequisite, but this one won't mean a whole lot if you don't. So, you know, go read that one, too. :)

I posted this on WordPress last week and didn't have a chance to cross-post, so here we are ...

I'm kind of obsessed with myth. (I suppose I could also call it "persona," but I think it's more than that.)

Not the big myths (though I read the hell out of those when I was a kid and really enjoyed my Old Norse class in grad school specifically because we were translating myths and I could decide how I wanted to phrase certain things), but everyday myths. The myth of you, or me, or that dude over there. And the thing that really fascinates me is all the parts of that myth that we'll never know.

Katharine Hepburn's relationship with Spencer Tracy is part of her myth ... but we'll never really know what went on with them, day-to-day. And it's true for everyone, not just celebrities--my husband and I always say that nobody can ever understand someone else's marriage/relationship in the day-to-day interior of it.

Parents are the same way--but I didn't really realize it until I had a kid: there are things about me he'll just never know. Facts, sure. Stories, sure. He'll know where my scars came from; he'll know I went to Europe and spent a semester abroad. God help me, he already knows about my Glee obsession and my (not nearly so explicit, but still) Fish Called Wanda-esque love of Scottish accents ... but there are things he'll never really know. Nor should he--he's my kid, there are boundaries, and everyone needs a secret to discover after someone dies.

A side story: When my paternal grandmother, from whom I get my first name, passed away--we found out her name hadn't actually been "Laura." Apparently, she started life as "Lauretta." A few years later, my husband's paternal grandmother passed away, and we found out she was actually a year older than her husband; no one outside her sisters and her husband knew this. My maternal grandmother passed away recently, and so far we haven't had any such shocking revelations about her, but I have to admit I was wondering what we'd find out when we sorted through her things.

I don't think I'm the only person who watches celebrities, or the President and his wife, or my friends, and wonders, "How does that work when no one's around?" There's a tension there, though, because I also love mysteries, especially the sort that are hinted at but rarely solved.

(If you've read my stuff, you are likely not surprised by this ...)

I have a story up for Halloween on the other blog, so if you're in the mood, feel free to pop over and read it. (Hell, if you don't want to read it, just pop over and make my site stats go up.)

I work in a college library, and today has been non-stop ridiculous:

• computers up and down--both in the power sense and the internet sense


• printers down


• unscheduled professors using our classrooms (which is okay, just chaotic)


• one student assistant out


• a roach on the third floor (we're having an ongoing bug battle this rainy season)


• the usual sorts of mysteries from the InterLibrary Loan system

More of these issues than I'd like required me to crawl around on the floor, and I'm really glad I wore pants and not a skirt today, let me tell you.

And my wrist hurts.

It's Banned Books Week.

My go-to banned book is To Kill a Mockingbird ... perhaps one day I shall tell you the story of my love for this book, but the very short version is that To Kill a Mockingbird was the one book I read in high school, for class, that I absolutely loved and did not want to have end.

I wasn't a kid who didn't read; my A-ha! Books are *awesome*! moment probably happened around the age of two, when I figured out that there were stories in these flappy things my parents kept giving me. But I always think about the utter joy I had, reading To Kill a Mockingbird during silent reading in English Honors II, and coming across this quote, quite near the beginning of the novel:

Atticus had urged them to accept the state's generosity in allowing them to plead Guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives, but they were Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass. The Haverfords had dispatched Maycomb's leading blacksmith in a misunderstanding arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a mare, were imprudent enough to do it in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that the-son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coming-to-him was a good enough defense for anybody.

Dude, ohmygod, I was reading a book in class that had swearing in it! And it was funny!

And what if I'd been a kid who hated reading, and that had been my a-ha! moment? What if I were a kid for whom that could have been my a-ha! moment, but because the book had been yanked from the school curriculum because of its language, I never got to read it?

So, yeah. Go read To Kill a Mockingbird. Or, hell, 50 Shades of Grey. Or both, why not? Check them out of your library.

***

Kyle Cassidy makes an interesting and uncomfortable point about banned books and books that are kept from publication.

(My first thought was that this was opening a door for anyone whose novel is passed over by an agent/publisher to start yelling about being censored, but then I realized that people do that, anyway.)

Let's be honest--I would totally love a world where people weren't horrible. And I would like them to all agree to my terms of not being horrible. But ... yeah, no.

I've been a First Amendment nutjob since high school. Which means I have to respect and defend the right of anyone to say whatever they want to say, vile or not. And I do actually believe that the best way to combat the vile things that people say is to argue with those things. Critique them. Poke holes in their arguments; show the rest of the world the logical fallacies and the rage-induced hyperbole.** (I taught argumentative writing; it slips out now and then.)

Because, as my lovely friend Jason says, you have the right to say whatever you want, but that doesn't mean you have the right to not get called on it. It's discourse, and by trying to ban books, we take that possibility for discourse away.



*I am capable of this, myself; just ask the husband about watching Star Trek: Into Darkness with me this past weekend.

So I've got some links to give y'all ...

Tangent Online reviews Beneath Ceaseless Skies 120, which is the issue my story, "The Drowned Man" appeared in.

Locus Online also reviews BCS 120.

And I have a WordPress blog, which has (and will continue to have) basically the same stuff as I have here, but will, I hope, not go down due to Russian hackers or whatnot. If you feel moved to comment, you can do so here or there.