I'm still not feeling great, and it's pissing me off that I can't get rid of all this sinus crap that's keeping me feeling like crap. I've been loading up on drugs, but I just have to let it take its course. The warm weather doesn't help, I want cold.

I'm feeling all kinds of tired and cranky right now, because dammit I'm on vacation, and I deserve to have a nice vacation, not one where I'm tired and have to blow my nose every 3 seconds. I'm currently in the library but need to go home soon and take more drugs. Thank goodness for the sudafed.

I see my two friends Kelly and Bentley are fighting again. I don't know the details, and I don't care to know the details - I've seen this before from the two of them.

I'm probably going to piss them both off right now, but dammit - YOU'RE BOTH ACTING LIKE FUCKING 3 YEAR OLDS. There, I said it. I said what everyone else is probably thinking right now but doesn't want to say, but someone has to say it (there goes my Christmas presents from the two of them, I know).

Bentley, you're pushing her buttons because you know you can, and name calling, and it doesn't matter, you know it pisses her off and will get a reaction from her, and I think you do it in part just to see that reaction. Stop it. I've experienced for myself that you like to push something long past the time when you should have just dropped it.

Kelly I know I've told you before he's just pushing your damned buttons, and if you would just not react to him, he'd stop pushing those buttons and go away. But as long as you give him the reaction he's looking for, he's going to keep on. For crying out loud, this shit that's going on between you guys, fucking STOP IT, BOTH OF YOU. You're both trying to make the other entirely the bad guy and it's never that simple or one-sided. From where I'm sitting, I see wrong from both of you.

Believe it or not, that above is said out of love. And if either of you gets angry at me for saying this (or feels defensive about what I said), before you go all Rambo all over my ass for saying it, stop and think about the fact that if there was no truth to what I just said, you wouldn't get angry (or defensive) about it to begin with. And then when you (quietly in your mind) acknowledge there might be some truth to what I said, think about ways to address that within yourself before taking your little lover's quarrels so public.

Oh and if you still feel the need to go all Rambo all over my ass, go right ahead if it'll make you feel better. I'm a big girl, I can take it (esp since I know I'm not the problem here).

In other news, I haven't been doing much on my vacation. Partly that's a good thing, but I just with I had the energy to go out more and do stuff. It's the lack of energy and the fact that I'm the fucking Snot Queen that's irritating me so much. If I sit at home and do nothing, I want it to be because that's what I want to do, not because that's all I have the energy to do. I want to cut my damned nose off, I'm so sick of being congested all the time.

I'd like to have a couple of friends over for dinner on Thursday, and that would require the energy to get up and make dinner and have friends over. I think I can do this, and I still want to, but shit, that's 2 days away.

I'm trying hard to have some holiday spirit, I really am. But with varying degrees of success.

Fuck it, I'm going to go home and take more drugs. I'm supposed to have dinner tonight with a friend of mine, but I don't know if I frankly have the energy to do so. I am so fucking sick of being sick.

1. Как думаете, снег пойдет до Нового Года?
2. Чего почитать?

I realize that 2009 has been a particularly harsh year for all of us, and I likewise realize that a quick perusal of a typical LiveJournal friends list is an orchestra of pain right now. Harlan Ellison's Paingod might have existed to inflict suffering with the idea that said suffering was the loam from which joy and wonder spring, but this year has been one where I want to collar the little poseur, tell him "I think we can live with just a smidgen less joy and wonder next year," and tell him to take a vacation for a few months. He's been putting in way too much overtime as of late, so it's not like he can't get the paid time off.

I'm right in the boat with the rest of you, and that's why I've been working as much as I can to find distracting and humorous tales to share. However, I'd like to ask a favor of all you lot. Nena, the owner of St. Johns Booksellers, is an old and dear friend, and you might remember her as the host for the Greasing the Pan signing party last June. Right now she's getting hit as badly as everyone else by our miserable economic situation, which is so bad in Portland right now that she's wondering if she'll be able to keep going after the holidays. I'm not saying "go wild with orders through her Web site," but I certainly wouldn't complain if you did. I'd also like to add that if you haven't bought copies of either of my books yet, she still has signed copies available for sale: just ask and she'll get them out posthaste. (I've already ordered my copy of James Gurney's Imaginative Realism, and I'm trying to see if I'll have available funds for more, such as Mickey Leigh's I Slept With Joey Ramone and David Bianculli's Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

The worst part of all of this is that I've been trying, in what ways I can, to help out friends and cohorts all year long, and I know it isn't enough. The question is at what point do you give up, and at what point do you start fighting harder?

I've had much to enjoy in the New York Times over the years, and it's inevitable that I'd come across a clinker of an article sooner or later, this time from Natalie Angier. A half-assed discussion of floral defenses started with a backhand to vegetarians? Do we get as a followup a bare-bones diatribe about the New York journalistic freelance community that starts with a beating of barely literate hipsters whose high school newspaper sponsors thought they were cool?

SNOW :D
It snowed yesterday, and then I think it rained last night, and it's gone REALLY icy, and my car won't even make it out the end of the road, haha. Such a shame I can't get to work!

I love snow :)

Sunday, four of the customers made me happy.

At first, the mom in the group annoyed the shit out of me. She had one of those gravelly yet nasal voices - gargled with rocks while whining sort of sound. She was nagging her three sons excessively, to the point that others were also a little annoyed, because the three of them were camped out at the bargain cart of kids books I was working on during lulls of checking customers out. The boys, however, knew her raspy bark had no bite, and they took heed only when she got a certain edge. They were not bad kids, however, pitching fits and sassing back. Just loud.

And boy were they loud - age five and maybe seven, and a little one less than a year in a stroller. All four were blond with blue eyes and the boys will be heartbreakers in a decade or so. Mama had seen better days but you could see the former hottie in her face and body.

But she nagged her boys as they ravaged the cart, looking for the right book. The little one began to buck in the stroller until the middle son handed him a book, an interactive book with pop-ups, little folded envelopes that you open and a small paper doll or car is inside. The little boy's face calmed and he began to smile, fingering the book and all its envelopes and pockets and windows. I watched him and felt calmed. He just smiled, immediately in his own world with his book. It was the sort of moment that made me want a kid, a little kid who would smile and entertain himself with his book, easily pleased and innately happy.

His older brothers continued to paw the racks and found two books a piece. Mama, for all her nagging, did not want to tell them no. She had some bargain books of her own. We had all $1 paperbacks for 50 cents last weekend and she had two, but she also had what we call a "love parcel" which is three or four romance novels shrink wrapped together for $3 or $4. She told me to put the love parcel she had selected back, presumably to be able to pay for her sons' books, and I told her that those books, despite being marked $4 for the bunch, was 50 cents for the bundle. Her face softened. She would have the cash for the books her sons wanted and the books she wanted.

But then suddenly she realized the book the little one had. She winced when she saw the price. I looked at it. It was $4.98 and I had not had a chance to mark it down. I also noticed that her sons had picked out dollar books I needed to mark to 50 cents. So I marked them down for her. She seemed to think I was doing her a favor. Really, I was just behind on markdowns, but she was able to pay and all was well.

Then she said, "Can they each have a bag? They like each having their own bag." She asked it like she expect me to say no. Hell yeah, I gave each older kid his bag.

The best part was to come. As she was ringing up, they had started running slightly amok. But when she called them over to get their books, their first response, both of them, was "Thank you, mama!"

Their gratitude did not seemed forced, like they were kids forced to say, "Thank you!" or "Yes, Ma'am." They were just... happy and grateful that their mama bought them books.

I loathe it when people ask for discounts because they can. But sometimes people ask for discounts because they need them. She didn't ask and I was happy I could provide them without bending the rules, but sometimes I bend the rules. I have a drawer full of 15% off coupons and I am unsure if I am supposed to give them out but I don't ask because I don't want to be told no. I do it when I can see that someone would love to have something and is a little short. For the grateful to have what they want when it will make them so happy is no small thing in my Universe anymore and I am glad, even when assholes toss money at me and refuse to speak to me, that I have this tiny amount of power to affect someone's day.

That happy little boy in his stroller, smiling at his new book, is a memory akin to the story of the little girl and the dachshund in Franny and Zooey. As Zooey said, looking at the unbridled joy of a little girl reunited with her dog, and the dog's joy at being reunited with her:

"There are nice things in the world – and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked."

Those little boys, polite, spirited, happy, and budding bibliophiles, were nice things.

In the early Seventies, my best friend at the time snagged what was then a gigantic cache of old comics, comprised mostly of superhero and horror comics from the Sixties. We were both far too young to have read or even heard of the old EC horror comics of the Thirties, and the multitude of old House of Mystery and Tales of the Unexpected issues were, in a way, more horrifying. (I still half-remember one tale involving a man who captured a vampire and kept it in a net made of silver wire, feeding it vegetables in the hope that it would become human. Our main character comes across the vampire years later, or what's left of it: a vampire bat skeleton caught up in the silver net like a moth in a cobweb.) The Comics Code Authority prevented obvious gore from appearing in comics for years, but some of the odd concepts in those post-Authority comics did a lot more damage to our fragile little minds.

Now, whenever I'd come over to Scott's house during summer vacation and we'd spend the next 48 hours reading comics until our eyes bled, he'd immediately go for the Spider-Man comics in that giant old packing box, because even three years later, he still had comics toward the bottom he hadn't read yet. (I'm serious: this was a huge box. We'd head down to his basement to get comics, and trudge upstairs wheezing from the armfuls of comics we'd drag back to the light, and the box barely looked touched.) My favorite, though, were the chronicles of Turok, Son of Stone, which combined the heretical idea of American Indians in pop culture who weren't stereotypes with a lost valley full of dinosaurs. At a time where I was already doing my best to fight back against elementary school teachers who thought that dinosaurs were a waste of time, those issues of Turok were welcome inoculations against the likelihood of my becoming a Waffle House waitress or an elementary school teacher in Michigan.

And it looks like I might actually have to head back to the comic shop next year, as Dark Horse Comics is reprinting the entire run in hardcover. There's even a set of Turok trading cards with reasonably scientifically accurate dinosaurs. Silly, I know, but there's still a seven-year-old behind my eyes who calls the shots about half the time, and he still remembers that when everybody else in his school wanted to be Peter Parker or Captain Kirk when they grew up, he wanted to be Turok.

As can be told, I'm an enthusiastic fan of John Wyndham's original novel Day of the Triffids. I still thoroughly enjoy the 1981 BBC adaptation of the novel, and I've been waiting to see what the Beeb did with its new adaptation, which premieres next Monday. Now I don't have to bring up jokes involving Himalayan balsam to get the Czarina to watch: all I have to do is mention the presence of Eddie Izzard.

Last week, I was vaguely wondering about when we'd start seeing as much garage-level tinkering in horticulture as we've already seen in electronics, and that's when rocza let me know about the DIY Biotech movement and droserary passed on the URL for the Synthetic Biology community. At this point, the Czarina and I both tell each other "We're getting a larger place next year...we're getting a larger place next year...", and this doesn't help the aggravation of waiting until next April.

Just to give advance warning, things may be quiet on the online front for the next couple of weeks. Specifically, I have enough amassed vacation time from the Day Job to contemplate my big project over the last remaining days of 2009: cleaning the bombed-out nightmare I laughingly call my office. It's times like these where I'm very glad that we don't have cable, because otherwise I can see the Czarina giggling at me "Honey, do you want to be on television?" And she would, too.

Huh. It's good to know that for all its other faults, Mockingbird Station in Dallas is now worm-free.

EDIT: I'm going to have to get pictures, but one of the many reasons why Mockingbird Station amuses me is because of its, shall we say, interesting ad campaigns. The Dallas Area Rapid Transit train line currently has big ad posters at several stations advertising the holiday fun to be had in Mockingbird. The amusing part comes from one of the models used, where the Station is trying its best to present itself as something other than "where the elite meet to eat preheated meaty treats", who's notable for his perfectly round head and drooping sideburns. I can understand having one model in the lineup who doesn't look like he's two operations and one augmentation away from declaring war on the Daleks, but I swear that I've seen him somewhere before...

12/21/09 marks my third wedding anniversary. Henry and I had been together for over 12 years when we got hitched so it was just him, me and the JP. On the way to the Driskell where we spent our "honeymoon" we passed a pretty little gift shop and went inside and this ornament was one of the first things we saw. Happy anniversary, baby!

Yesterday was a little odd, for us, as a distant cousin got married in a very Orthodox Jewish ceremony. I was out of my depth, there, as the only other similar ceremony I've ever attended was in 1968 or thereabouts. It was uncomfortably crowded, as the whole community attended.

Home again, we got some cleanup chores done, and we had a visit from Dana. And that was the day.

I was very grateful to get this job but days like the last two leave me tired and demoralized. People who wait on others for money take a lot of shit and there is nothing we can do about it. Managers try to help but there is nothing they can do about some people's innate nastiness. There is nothing they can do about vile tones of voice, attitudes of entitlement and the desire to rain out rudeness. If someone hits me, management will do something about it. Possibly even if someone curses at me. But there is nothing they can do about people who drip contempt for me and it gets very tiring. Generally I have 20 wonderful customers for every bad one. Today I had three horrible customers for every good one.

The hell of it is others see it too. Sarah, who has as much register time as I do, has become down a bit and a little bitter at the treatment we get. She's much younger than me and still capable of shock at the horribleness people exhibit. Today, a man came up to the counter and tossed a gift card at me because he wanted to buy it. Okay, not the first time it happened but unpleasant. I asked him how much he wanted on the card as I activated it. He then tossed a $20 bill at me. Never said a word. Just threw things at me, comfortable in the knowledge that he could do it and that I would figure out what he wanted as he refused to so much as speak to me. Sarah was appalled. "What an asshole," she said.

All day, people were angry, contemptuous and hateful. It's been a long time since the barrage of shit came from outside my head rather than messed up brain chemistry and depression.

I was so demoralized Henry suggested I quit. He's got a job now where five hours of overtime equals a week pay for me (not bragging - you all know the horror we have been through, and Henry had worked hard his whole life for the skill set that helped him land this job and he deserves every penny).

But that's not what I do. If I quit it will screw people over, and I like my coworkers (even if many of them did not hear me calling for register backup today, dammit). I just...

People are so worn down by life. The economy. And the holidays, which are meant to uplift us, invariably bring out the worst in a lot of people. It trickles down. People yell at their kids. They kick the dog. They are rude to cashiers. So it has ever been and so it will always be. The best anyone can do is remember what it felt like to be the dog or the cashier and just chill the fuck out when dealing with others.

...so all apologies to Jefferson Airplane when I say, "Remember what the Dormouse said! GO TO BED!"

The week had come and gone. Still exhaused from the company party the night before this Friday night was going to be quiet. No bars, no parties, no alcohol. In short it was the perfect time to read. I was ready, my Kindle2 in hand, a bath being drawn. My eyes fell to the screen, a message was waiting. It explained that the batteries were done, they needed to be recharged. This should come as no surprise but it was. Every portable electronic device I've used has at one time or another run out of power. Yet with the Kindle2, something I think of more as a book than a electronic device, I was surprised. It was like I took a book from my shelf only to the pages blank, except for a post-it note: come back later.

Is this the future: Please come back later?

Posted via email from mhat's posterous

I had a great time last night at the Center-For Inquiry-Austin Saturnalia party. I did not sacrifice a goat, only a small gift for a gift exchange -- and went home with a sandwich grill! Our white elephant exchange involved 70 people and took only about an hour. I was actually afraid it was going to take 3-4 hours, because a similar exchange at the FACT (science fiction fandom) party last Saturday involved 25 people and took 1.5 hours. Yet there were significant differences between people's behavior at the two parties, that makes an armchair anthropologist wonder.

For those of my LJ friends from across the ocean who might not know what a white elephant exchange is, it's a certain protocol for exchanging gifts at a holiday party. All participants bring a wrapped gift (so it's impossible to know what's in a package) and put them all together under a Christmas (or Solstice, as the case may be) tree. Then one person after another go and pick a present. They can either pick an unopened present from under the tree, or "steal" an opened present from someone else. If they choose to open a present, they have to keep it, unless someone "steals" it from them. In that case they can steal someone else's present, or open a new one from under the tree. And so on. It's easy to see that when many people have opened their presents, someone stealing a present from someone else can trigger a long chain of stealing.

An interesting difference between those two parties was that at the CFI gift exchange not many people "stole" presents from one another, although the presents were far more valuable than those exchanged at the FACT party. Well, I admit I was one of them, and that's how I ended up with the sandwich grill. Surprisingly, nobody else took it from me. Among other things CFI'ers brought were a telescope, a guitar (not sure if it was real or a toy), a cosmetics gift set; SF fans brought DVDs, books and chocolates. It seemed that science fiction fans enjoyed not so much the gifts themselves, as the possibility to steal them. To them, it was the whole point of gift exchange, a form of human interaction. As I said, one person "stealing" a gift from another would trigger a seemingly unending domino chain of passing gifts back and forth. Throughout the game you were kept in suspense whether you'll be able to take your favorite gift home. Thus SF fans entertained themselves with a light game of strategy, suspense, humor and annoyance. The playfulness aspect of it became apparent to me only in retrospective, when I compared it to the CFI's efficient gift exchange. So when I being bored out of my mind at the FACT exchange, wondering if I'll have to be here until dawn, I was missing the point. They were basically just entertaining each other. Fortunately, I am never without my laptop, so I was checking Facebook, Twitter and blogs throughout. So I wasn't really bored. Still, I would have preferred to spend that time having conversations with people instead of observing the increasingly repetitive (as more gifts were opened and put into circulation) game. You can't really maintain an in-depth conversation with anyone throughout this game, because you get constantly interrupted by people wanting to examine a gift you are holding, or comment on someone else's, or making light fun of someone's choices.

That's not to say I don't want to ever participate in a gift exchange: I probably will do so next year -- assuming this blog post won't get me barred from future FACT holiday parties. :-)

We had a very busy day, yesterday. Started out that we got into the back bedroom, dumping some stuff, shifting other items to places where they're more likely to get used properly, and so on. Then, we got to work on moving the entertainment system into the living room.

A young lady dropped in and spent some time with forestcats riding horseback while I got some laundry done. After she left, we rebuilt the stereo and hooked up the VCR to the living room TV. The PS2 will go into the den with the new TV along with the DVR.

Finally, we got ready and went to the Rancho Specialty Hospital Christmas party, and had a reasonably good time; chatted with some folks, ate, danced a bit.

Slept like a log...

 

Posted via email from mhat's posterous

Bear with me. In approximately 4 weeks, I will be able to respond to comments again and comment in your journals. Right now I have just enough time to work, sleep, crap, do laundry and rant.

1) Pants have pockets for wallets and purses have spaces for wallets. Keep your money there. You should only keep your money in your sock or your bra if you have no intentions of spending it ever, ever, ever.

True story: My second day at work, a woman who now haunts my dreams, came to the counter to buy a flat of VHS tapes (we put the tapes in a box, it's a bargain thing and you more or less buy them blind). I had no idea what she was doing as I was new and called Cameron, one of the shift leaders, over to help me. He gave me the lowdown on the boxes and the prices and I charged her for a box. She then reached into her ample bosom and pulled out a scented, moist ten dollar bill. Cameron, who has some of the best dead-pan facial expressions ever, glanced over at me to see how I would react. I did not react, taking the warm, sweaty bill and making change for her. The second she was gone, we both went to the hand sanitizer. She comes in once a week. She dresses mostly in tiger prints and metallics. She wears a musky perfume and she keeps all her money, quarters included, in her bra. :twitch:

2) Yes, yes, I know it seems insane that we don't have our inventory computerized, but see, we are a used book store and not, say, Barnes and Noble. We are fully aware that the technology exists to scan all the books into a computer. Thanks for calling us fucking morons for not being aware of that fact, but we are aware of it. Technology is not the problem. Manpower is. The reason you get books so cheap is because we keep costs low. If we scanned all the books we buy used into a computer, that initial scan is not where it ends. You see, paperbacks have a short shelf life and go from half price, to a dollar, to being donated to charity in a short space of time. If we have to scan those books into a system, change the prices then remove them from the system when they are donated, the man hours it would take would be extreme and we will pass the savings onto to you. Be rude to me about it again and I will explain this to you in excruciating detail. All the Dell assholes who shop with us, take special note: We know you could program a simple process to scan the books into an inventory. Why dontcha spend the time doing it and get back to us so we can tell you our specs and go from there. Thanks!

3) There is no easy way to alphabetize block books. Stop acting surprised when you see they aren't alphabetized. And even if we did arrange them by author, the author name is seldom on the spine anyway so would it really do you much good in the long run?

4) When you sneeze in my face, I am permitted by law to punch you in the nose. Check the Texas Constitution. It's in there, right by that law that forbids shooting buffalo from the second story of a hotel.

5) STOP ACTING SHOCKED, APPALLED, AND ANGRY THAT WE DON'T HAVE THE GODDAMNED TWILIGHT BOOKS IN STOCK. IT'S NOT LIKE THEY ARE POPULAR OR ANYTHING, AND GIRLS HANG ONTO THEM WHEN THEY BUY THEM. IT'S ALSO NOT AS IF THEY GET PURCHASED WITHIN MINUTES OF US BUYING A COPY, BEING SO POPULAR AND ALL. AGAIN, WE ARE A USED BOOK STORE. WE CAN ONLY SELL WHAT PEOPLE SELL TO US. THIS HAPPENS SO OFTEN THAT CAPS LOCK IS THE ONLY WAY I CAN ADDRESS IT.

6) ALSO, TWILIGHT IS TOTALLY A YOUNG ADULT TITLE. SO ARE THE VAMPIRE DIARIES. STOP ARGUING WITH ME ABOUT THIS. I KNOW YOU THINK THEY ARE ADULT SERIES BECAUSE YOU WANT TO DO THE MAIN CHARACTERS UNTIL YOU CHAFE BUT THE FACT REMAINS THEY ARE INDEED YOUNG ADULT SERIES. SO, BY ALL MEANS, GO WASTE YOUR TIME WANDERING IN THE ADULT FICTION AFTER I TELL YOU TO LOOK IN YOUNG ADULT (ESPECIALLY MYSTERY, WHICH TOTALLY MAKES SENSE, NO? CHECK THE WESTERNS NEXT!).

7) Please, in the name of all that is holy, decide what you want before you come to the counter to purchase items. When you fill a cart with bargain books, unload them on the counter, then dither over which books you really want, AND you do this during the Christmas rush, it means you are a moron or an asshole. Though really there is no reason you cannot be both. Select items to buy, then come to pay. It makes perfect sense to me. Let me draw you a map.

Yeah, today sort of sucked.

Last Wednesday I went to Startup Speed Dating, hosted by Capital Factory. It's like conventional speed dating, but it matched "sellers" (i.e entrepreneurs) with "builders" (developers and technical people). I assumed sellers came here to sell their ideas to the builders -- to "seduce" a builder to work on the seller's product. At least the structure of the "courtship" implied that. The builders were seated, and sellers went from builder to builder to talk, which is analogous to female and male roles in conventional speed dating. Since I was a builder, I enjoyed being courted. :-) But the actual distribution of roles turned out to be far more vague.

Only a few sellers had a startup they were working on. Many others were "between startups". They had built and sold companies before, with varying degrees of success. A few of them were interested in what kinds of products "builders" were working on. I figured they wanted to hitch themselves to an interesting product that had potential to become a moneymaking startup, to which they could offer their business and marketing expertise. So maybe the title "seller" was more literal, meaning a salesperson. Unexpectedly I found they were asking me (and other builders, I assume) to pitch my startup idea to them. I did that enthusiastically, even though it wasn't my original reason for coming here. I came to look for job opportunities in interesting startups, but of course I, like everyone in Austin, have my own startup ideas. Not all sellers understood what would be the purpose of the application I wanted to create; those that understood sounded somewhat skeptical about the feasibility of its implementation. (I'm already used to the fact that my ideas are hard to implement, both in fiction and in software.) But some understood, and one guy, before I even finished telling him my idea, exclaimed: "you need semantic web for that!", making it the best moment of the evening -- because that's exactly what I was thinking.

Another memorable moment, in a different sense, happened when a seller said: "CMS is a knockoff of Dreamweaver, right?" Umm, no. It's most definitely not. And this came from a person who was going to build her company's website herself! Ahem. :-)