NOTE: If this is your first visit to one of my pages, you might want to check out my home page first, so you have an idea where I'm coming from. The entries within each month are in reverse chronological order -- the newest is first. Enjoy! -- Mary Anne
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Well, a fairly productive day today. Finished a new story for my Fiction class, a somewhat disturbing one. It deals a lot more with ethnicity than anything I've worked on before -- we'll see how they like it. I have a feeling it's too currently too personal -- the effectiveness of the story has gotten a little lost in the recounting of factual details...argh, a little hard to explain what I mean. Except that lies are sometimes truer than facts....
Did some formatting work on my stories page, and cleaned up some of the stories as well. Pretty good, but a ways to go. Ah well.
Spent some time looking for appropriate quotes on censorship/pornography/etc. for my book. Found some fun ones -- if Dave Barry lets me use that one of his, I'll be happy. :-)
As it's now October, it seems appropriate to look at that list of stuff from last month and see how I've progresesd. Deep breath. Here goes:
· Revise "Was It Good For You" for the book -- should probably revise the essays too.
· Find out what the status of the magazine is from my lovely editors. Solicit more contributions. (well, sort of done. The mag is on hiatus)
· Call the phone company and have another line put in so I can log in from home. (This one actually shouldn't be too hard to do).
· Translate at least one, preferably three of my stories to screenplays because several people have shown interest, one with funding, and that's not the sort of thing a wise writer who wants to make money ignores
· Get going on the erotic horror novella for Puritan -- not due for a couple of months, but those things take me a while
· Get the majordomo software up and running to the erotica mailing list.
· Design their web pages.
· Figure out some way to get my computer fixed. The disk drive is broken, which makes it seriously difficult to bring work home (sure, I can cut and paste it to the net, but what a pain. I don't have a car, so I'm not sure how I can get it to a shop -- I don't even know what kind of shop I need. :( And my friends with cars all work during the day, which is presumably when shops are open. Argh.
· Oh, and for some reason I volunteered to design the web pages from Skiffy, my college science fiction club. Not only that, but I want them to be interesting, so it'll probably be a fairly complex design. I'll let y'all poke at it and give me comments once I get going on them.
· Not to mention all the unfinished revisions lying around, the quest I haven't finished on Holomuck, etc. and so on...
Ick. That doesn't look good at all, even though I *have* done a bunch of other stuff....sigh. Well, back to the grindstone.
Gosh, it seems like it takes longer a longer each day to just do the minimum of net.stuff to keep on top of my life. Two hours so far today, and I'm just finishing with the journal entry. Ah well -- I mostly enjoy it. Would be nice to have a personal assistant to sort through my junk e-mail though....:-) Keep dreaming, huh?
I was feeling a bit tired and discouraged last night, but am better now. Firstly, because really I'm a very very lucky person -- I am so much closer to doing exactly what I want to do with my life (and with exactly the people I want to do it with) than most people....the last several years have really been wonderful. *grin* If I'm not the happiest girl in the world, I'm probably pretty close. Secondly, talked to Kevin for hours last night, and it turns out he can visit after all (got something of a deal on a ticket from Philly)! Calloo, callay, as Jabberwocky says! I really have been going around all morning feeling like 'chortling with joy'. :-) He can also time it to coincide with a teaching break, which means he gets to come for ten whole days...
Funny thing happened yesterday. I got out of the Renaissance Poetry class sometime around noon, right? Went to the computer room, worked for a while, started feeling tired, checked my watch. 1:15. Felt really tired, so I decided to go home, eat some lunch, try to work from home. Walked home, ate something, looked at my watch again. 1:15. Looked at the kitchen clock, startled. Turned out it was actually after 6. I've heard of getting lost in your work, but this is ridiculous. No wonder I was tired and hungry...
You know, I've been moaning a bit about how busy and tired I am -- well, that's true, but I don't want y'all to get the wrong idea. So much of the time I'm just enjoying the peace, the calm in which to work, the lovely campus and the lack of a really rigid schedule. I HATE the 9-to-5 thing -- I hope I never have to do it again.
Well, I need to finish up here and run to class -- today they hack apart my newest story, "Interruptions". Let's hope they like it. :-) Have a good day, everyone.
Well, a productive morning -- major revisions on "Interruptions" which I think actually improved the piece (while putting tons more of my RL into it; I think this is one of those 'can't publish till your parents are dead' pieces). We'll see what class and Fiction online workshop say.
Theoretically I'm supposed to be revising Dreams from scratch right now, but am feeling unmotivated. I'll tell you about what I'm reading and watching instead, okay? :-) I finally saw the new version of Little Women yesterday -- they did a superlative job, I thought. I actually cried in spots (okay, that's not so hard to get me to do, but I thought this would be schlocky and it totally wasn't). God, Winona Ryder is gorgeous. Paul claims that she's the current incarnation of the dark-haired goddess, and I don't think I can contradict him (Tori Amos is apparently the red-haired goddesss....he isn't sure there is a current blonde incarnation).
I've been rereading the Earthsea trilogy by Le Guin -- I find children's books relaxing when the rest of my life is stressed, and Le Guin's style can only be a good influence on me. I'm partway through The Farthest Shore right now and have just hit one of my favorite lines: "And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content."
Last night Cliff and Thida came over for a late dinner. Made chicken cacciatore from the Fannie Farmer cookbook (convenient because almost all the ingredients are stuff I have around -- we have tomatoes in the backyard, and the rest is onion, garlic, tomato paste, herbs, chicken) with angelhair pasta and breaded portobello mushrooms with a garlic sauce. Ellison, one of my housemates, is a wizard in the kitchen -- I asked him what I should do with the mushrooms and he just rattled off the following:
Dip them in egg white and dredge in seasoned bread crumbs. Set aside until two minutes before serving. Mince a fair bit of garlic, saute in olive oil, cool somewhat, stir in mayonnaise on very low heat. Fry mushrooms briefly in olive oil and serve with garlic mayonnaise. (He even minced the garlic for me)
It was absolutely delicious, even though the mayonnaise separated somewhat, turning it more into a garlicky-oil thing. FF cookbook says one should whisk in a drop of boiling water, over and over, to correct a separated (broken) mayonnaise, which I tried until I got tired, and it worked partway. :-)
Okay, enough procrastinating. I will now ignore the fact that it's a beautiful fall day and get back to work. Really. Maybe if I keep telling myself I love my work, really I do....:-)
--3:10. No, I didn't do any work. Not writing work, anyway. I decided this would be a good time to start throwing together that recipes file I've been meaning to do....definitely still under construction. Did I miss any?
Sorry for the delay -- it's just too irritating trying to type much at home, and I didn't come into campus this weekend.
Am late for class, so a quick poem or two from this weekend. I may try to write more later -- depends on how much work I get done. :-)
NO SOLACE, EVEN IN WORDS
When first I wrote of you, my rage,
seething and suffocating
strangled my throat. My voice emerged
a thin whisper, a drowning reed.
Back to the beginning.
Concrete the images --
thin face, cold and stern;
the long line of your back,
twisted as you turned away;
fey and strange, with no
human gentleness left for me.
There you were, and my ink
flowed easier, chronicling each
disappearing mark of love long gone
till you lay complete
and beautiful
upon the white sheets.
It seems the pen has betrayed my heart.
*****
October 8, 1996
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION:
LOVE IS MORE POWERFUL THAN POETRY
I scatter images and
metaphors across my page;
ships loaded high with
weighty cargo.
Poets agree that this common language
may be shaded and revealed
with close analysis.
You confound my every explanation
and attempt. For single example:
broken leaves should emphasize
dying; each sere and yellowed leaf
a whispered promise that age is
inescapable, even forboding;
yet I cannot help
remembering -- you loved the autumn.
*****
October 8, 1996
--ugh. It's so hot, it's hard to think, much less work. gonna go get some lunch then try finding a cooler computer lab. wish me luck.
Sorry it's been a while, but I've been having some family problems which knocked me out for a few days. Then Kevin arrived for a visit, so I spent the weekend down in the South Bay with him, with no real net access. But I'm back! :-)
Hmmm...not much exciting to report, really. Finalizing book cover design; going over final proofs. Book should be at the printer within days, and I think will be out by early November (though don't quote me on that :-).
Sunday was a lovely day out at the park watching the Blue Angels -- airshows aren't usually my thing, but these formation pilots were really impressive --- and the stealth that was up before them was simply beautiful.
Entering the second round of revisions on "Interruptions" -- this may well be my best story yet. :-) I'm very pleased with it, though it's a lot of work. I'm also working on a series of children's poems (along the lines of "The Tummy" from '95) that may well turn into a book. I'm starting to look for an illustrator to work with.
Generally in a good mood today. Was way down for a while following upset with the folks, but must soldier on, yes? People have been most encouraging and supporting, which is helpful.
All right -- off to attempt some more work. Going to take a stab at starting the Skiffy web pages today. Going to collaborate with Sherman -- that way I get to make him do a lot of the grunt work and he gets credit for HTML design. :-)
4:20 -- gosh, had great fun today. Along with starting up the Skiffy (temporarily at this address, comments welcome) pages, spent some time studying HTML. Now know how to do transparent GIFs (none on my pages yet, as I didn't really have any images suitable, but we'll be putting some on the Skiffy pages) and interlaced GIFs (see the flower on my home page. :-) Very very exciting. Also learned tables, which are tedious, but not too difficult. I don't plan to use a lot of fancy stuff in these pages, but I may occasionally supplement my income with web designing, and thus must learna few more things. Frames, sounds, video, CGI scripts. Not a high priority, but is fun, so I may learn 'em soon anyway. I can highly recommend Lemay's book on HTML; quite clear, and good design principles.
Oh, also took a break and watched The Tall Guy, a very cute film with Emma Thompson (goddess incarnate). Laughed lots. Do not watch if you are overly fond of musicals and do not liked to be poked fun at. :-)
May be a bit out of access the next couple days, as I'll be down at Kevin's parents again. Will try to check in, but may be somewhat erratic till Th/Fri. Have a good week, if I don't talk to you!
Just a quick note to say that I'm down with a bad flu (and Kevin's dad has a really slow connection), so will post again when I feel better. Sniffle. The fever went down yesterday, so hopefully I'll be fine in a day or so.
Lazy Sunday, though it didn't start out that way. Last night, Kevin and I went to the wedding reception of a friend of his (part of the reason his trip was scheduled for now). It was much more fun than I expected, but we ended up staying up rather late, and his dad and I took Kev to the airport at 7 this morning. Ick. 4 hours of sleep and still recovering from being sick and saying goodbye again (god, I hate long distance relationships) -- not a fun way to start the morning. It rapidly improved, though...
Took the train into S.F., crashed at a friend's place for a couple hours until I felt human again, had yummy Ethiopian food for lunch, then played 5 hours of Warcraft, an evil, addicting strategy game. Me against the evil orcs. :-) When I finish the game, I get to start over -- playing the orcs. :-)
Just made some minor revisions to the favorite poems page, including a new poem that someone sent me by a poet named Cavafy, whom I hadn't heard of before. Pretty good. I'm really very behind in updating my web pages, and everything else (combination of sickness and Kevin :-), but plan to work work work this next week and see if I can catch up. I have to at least bring my backlogged e-mail down from 100 flagged messages to 50. Not to mention writing another novella for Puritan (the erotic horror one) by next weekend so I have money to pay my rent....oh, and of course, there's always schoolword. :-) Actually, the schoolwork does take priorty, though that might be a little hard to infer from reading this -- probably 'cause I don't generally stress about it as much, although perhaps I should. Oh well...
I read the next chapter in that HTML book, by the way -- audio and video. I understand how to include the files, but it was a little unclear on how one would convert a regular audio tape or video tape to something viewable on-line -- maybe one wouldn't. I'm really not sure. :( It's too bad -- I was thinking it might be fun to do a journal entry or a poem or story on tape and stick it up here, so those of you who are insanely curious can hear my voice (I actually hate the way my voice sounds recorded -- it's all high and tinny, which is probably the way it sounds in RL, but I promise you that it sounds much deeper and more pleasant to me. :-) Something to do with echoes inside your skull or some such, I imagine -- I know a lot of people who complain about this phenomenon). Well, I'll ask around and maybe I can figure it out. Mills has a lot of graphic arts stuff -- maybe they'll have the tools I need to do this.
Turns out that an old friend of mine, Clive (a.k.a. Tanais) is in town and with any luck we'll be having dinner tomorrow -- that should be lots of fun. He's a friend of a friend I met in England a few years ago -- if I'm lucky, he'll still have his accent. I have a terrible weakness for accents...even if he had nothing to say (which he of course won't :-) I'd be happy just listinening to his voice. Did you see the movie "Far and Away"? Gorgeous Irish accents in that one. Absolutely gorgeous.
Well, I think I may go play just a little more Warcraft -- my brain is still pretty mushy from lack of sleep. Good luck with the week, everyone -- don't work too hard. :-)
Tomatoes. Tomatoes are my dilemma today. Do any of you know anything about growing tomatoes? See, our house came with four tomato plants (actually, seven, 'cause three have grown together). Way more than we can use, actually. And so they've been rotting on the vine. I decided to makee a big batch of tomato sauce today and jar it, so they are't entirely wasted. But I couldn't content myself with just picking the healthy tomatoes, oh, no. I'm compulsive enough that I started pruning the plant I was picking from, just cutting away the deadwood. Well, by the time I was finished, I had pruned it back fiercely, and it's looking rather bare -- and I have no idea if that's a good thing for tomato plants or not. The only plant-type thing I've spent any time with before is a rosebush -- and that you were definitely supposed to prune back sharply. I'm afraid I may have killed this poor thing....well, guess I'll just ask my roommates and wait for one of you to tell me if I done wrong. If not, then I get to attack the others -- I'm itching to get my hands on them. :-)
It's amazing how much household work gets done when I have writing I'm supposed to do. :-) Seriously, I did want to clean some, 'cause it looks like Clive can definitely make it to dinner (not that he'll care how clean the place is, but as we noted before, I'm compulsive). It's also a nice break 'cause it's cold in my house, and my fingers get really cold typing. Washing dishes in hot water or pruning out in the sun is a nice break. I think I may need to get a pair of fingerless gloves -- perhaps they'll help.
Big crunch on work these next two weeks, I think. I've been neglecting my classes a bit.
I had some promising thoughts on the subway this morning about the novel. The task for today is to try to gel those into a coherent outline. That and get through a bunch of mail. :-) Y'know, I don't get nearly as much mail in response to this journal as I used to -- am I boring you? Are you still there? (I know Brian and Kristen and Dale are :-) Maybe I'll put a counter on the November pages and check to see what the numbers are. Maybe not, though. Just knowing someone's listening is helpful -- both to keep me writing and to help me feel not so alone during down times.
I miss Kevin already. Two months to Christmas.
Well. Ask a simple question, get a lot of simple answers. I have been reliably informed by many of you (and yes, there are definitely lots of you still out there :-) that tomatoes are a one season affair -- I don't need to prune 'em unless they're diseased, and they're all going to die soon from the frost in any case. So I will leave the other six plants alone (except for harvesting the green tomatoes that I think are not even going to ripen).
I picked most of the ripe tomatoes yesterday and made two bottles of tomato sauce (very basic, just fried onions, garlic, herbs in olive oil and added diced plum tomatoes and simmered). I feel frugal. :-) I hated seeing all those tomatoes rotting on the vines. Now I get to decide when is the right season to prune back the roses....how do you tell seasons in this crazy climate?
We turned on the heat for the first time last night -- it was so nice not being freezing. Once the rain starts, we'll probably start using the fireplace too -- god, I love fires. I'm such a pyromaniac. :-) There was this time when I was a kid (maybe 8?) and I had a metal jewelry box. For some bizarre reason, I was setting little pieces of paper on fire and watching them burn inside the box. Fairly safe, except the outside of the box was coated with some flammable paint, and when I got a little careless dropping in some paper, the whole thing went up WHOOSH! Scary as all heck, but not actually very dangerous as I'd actually been prudent enough to keep some water nearby, which I promptly dumped on the box, making a sodden mess (sodden is my new favorite word :-). I have no idea why I just told you that story.
Clive did come for dinner, and I made too much food as usual. Potato curry, mixed vegetable curry, Sri Lankan fried egg accompaniment and my reheated leftover kung prao chicken (I didn't cook that - Kevin and I ordered Chinese a couple nights ago). Ah well -- dinner tonight as well. It was great fun talking to him -- he's interested in all sorts of music and storytelling stuff (he had a GORGEOUS Plains Indian flute -- I was so jealous), and he's managed to retain the accent. :-) He's apparently spending about half the year at his house in England and the other half bumming around with friend in the U.S. Not a bad way to live.
Did a bunch more household stuff this morning and started reworking my novel. God, it drives me crazy sometime. Here are my working notes on it -- perhaps they'll amuse you. Got to go revise some poems and Interruptions now, and critique some of my classmates' work.
Dreams by Lamplight -- an exploration
Women. Sexuality. Prejudice. Memory and dream and stories. A woman's search for her past and identity. Patriotism. Loyalty to self versus country. A society's image of itself and other societies' images of it. Its ethics reflected in the way it treats its malcontents. Hypocrisy and betrayal. Faith. The durability of love.
Radhika begins the story appearing as a blank slate, a woman wiped clean of memory and identity. In actuality, she is who she is, regardless, which becomes apparent as she struggles to regain her freedom and past. In her encounters with people as she journeys, we see reflected both her society and her own identity and opinions. She takes shape once again throughout the course of the book, until by the end, when she regains her memory, it should be clear to the reader exactly what she will do on receiving some disturbing information.
Radhika blank -- sold as slave. Conversation with eunuch defining her position and exploring her society's (Ranek) treatment of slaves. Conversation with fellow slave exploring women in Ranek. Conversation with Daniv - story? Conversation with Amesty and Arjun on the road - Arjun's story reflects life of peasant in Ranek. Freedom within constraints. Radhika at court in Liella -- Danivs actual treatment of her within his society. Radhika and priestess -- direct confrontation of cultures; priestess' story of submission to constraints -- wililngly, because unwilling constraint is the only other option. Radhika and Daniv in bed -- story of an episode as courtesan; Daniv's reaction. Radhika to Melusane; women searching for identity/place in society/peace. Memory returns. Radhika's early story. Daniv finds her -- queen is not dead; ruse -- Radhika left to confront loyalties. Climax. End of first book.
2:05 - Just spent entirely too long rearranging the poems directory the way it should have been arranged originally. Undoubtedly messed up a bunch of links to individual poems. Sigh. Just couldn't stand the mess in my main directory anymore.
Good morning. Y'know, it's really difficult to get out of bed when the house is cold. You probably knew that. :-)
I'm still in bed, but luckily the computer is right next to the bed (convenient for those middle of the night inspirations) and have been up for a while going through morning mail and revising poetry. I am starting to run out of ways to avoid the real work I need to do. :-) Current urgencies: revise Interruptions; restart novel; write two letters and a novella for Puritan. All that should really be done by the end of the week. I had an academic paper to write too, but that's been mercifully moved to next week.
Currently reading Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" for my fiction class. I think the teacher asked us to read it 'cause a lot of us are currently working with ethnicity -- it's definitely an interesting book, although only tangentially related to what I'm doing. Too complex to simply summarize here, I'm afraid.
Wrote two more poems last night -- I've added them (as well as a bunch of others) to the '96 poetry page. "Sweet Innocent Goes Hungry Again" and "Five Years Into It, She Considers".
Was a bit down yesterday evening. Just tiredness I think -- I worked fairly hard all day yesterday. My evenings are sometimes overly empty -- I think I spend too many of them on-line. Ah well. Did recently read quite a few of the Lloyd Alexander children's books -- none I liked as well as his Chronicles of Prydain, but still pleasant. While Kevin was here we spent a day up in Berkeley visiting a friend and bookstores. There's a fantasy/sf one there called, I think, Another Change of Hobbit, that has a very good children's section. Picked up quite a few books I'd been looking for. Now if I can just find those out-of-print Engdahl books, I'll be happy...
Ah well -- back to work. Have a good day, everyone.
5:15. Tired. Have a 6:00 Walrus (lit mag) meeting, and then I told Sophie that I'd work with her on the Walrus web page. Just want to go home and sleep. Oh well. Didn't do anything I said I would (well, got partway into the Interruptions revisions, but didn't finish), but did manage to finish "Endings", another short story. This is another one my family won't like, I'm afraid -- no sex, but lots of family specifics. Even if I change the names (and I did), and put in a bunch of fiction (which I plan to) people will still assume it's mostly true (which it is). Which is okay with me, but my parents are definitely not happy about it. Argh. Interruptions is even more of the same problem. Don't have anywhere to publish them yet, but when I do.... (y'know, it strikes me that perhaps I'm starting to think like a professional writer -- I no longer doubt that I *can* publish something -- now it's a question if I can get paid for it. :-)
Argh. Rambling. Anyway...currently reading a LeGuin short story, "the
Eye of the Heron" -- she's so damn good it makes me almost angry sometimes
-- a petty part of me hopes she had to work really hard at it. God, I'm hungry
too. Didn't bring in any money to campus, what an idjit. Want to go home and
eat....okay, okay I'm whining. Enough already.
Okay, I'm gonna go web browse and set my brain to autopilot for a while. Ellison said he'd cook tonight, so a nice dinner should be waiting when I get home. I can think pleasant thoughts of that.
Raining today. Misting, really. It's amazing how much a little rain affects them out here -- my professor was 20 minutes late to class 'cause of traffic. Makes me wonder what they'd do with snow. :-)
Been going through and trying to fix the broken links in the journal (many thanks to Kristen for finding them for me). Should be done with that today. If anyone feels exceptionally bored and wants to hunt for broken links in the rest of my pages, that's always welcome help.
> I finally finished the second set of revisions to Interruptions today. I'm not sure what I feel about them -- some of the changes were clearly necessary -- others...dunno. I asked some friends to look at them -- we'll see what they think. I often have this problem with revisions -- the language somehow feels more stilted. One of my early stories, "The Queen o' Fairies, She Called Me" was, I think, a much better story before I revised it. Not that the problems weren't there -- just that I didn't do a good job of fixing them. *sigh* A skill I have to learn, I know.
Class today was frustrating. We're doing close reading of poetry, which means that we end up analyzing each word and phrase and comma to death. And yes, in some cases it really helps you appreciate the poem, but I do feel that a lot of the connections we're making are more than a little dubious. This is what English grad students do all the time; it's part of the reason I decided to do a M.F.A. instead of a Ph.D. Still not sure that was the right decision -- I may even go do the Ph.D. afterthis -- well, we'll see. No need to decide yet, though I think my advisor thinks I should transfer out this year into a Ph.D. program. Not going to. So far, I'm enjoying this year too much. :-)
Today, at 5, there's an open mike reading on campus. I really should go and try to get a spot to read. I'm terrified by reading my work out loud. It's odd, because I positively enjoy reading other people's work, and I like public speaking, and I'm obviously willing to put my work up here for the perusal of thousands -- yet I get positively ill when I go up to read my own work, even with a sympathetic crowd, which I'm sure this one will be. Guess I just have to bite down and learn to do it, though -- if the book does well I'm going to have to do a lot of it.
Not sure what to work on now -- I've got about 3 1/2 hours to kill. I'm going to let Interruptions sit for a week while people crit it. Can't write the Puritan letters 'cause I need the magazines (complicated) and I left them at home. So I can either work on the novel or the novella. The novel is more important long term, but it scares me, and the novella is currently feeling very dull, but is due next week. Ick.
Been reading Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind. I don't like it as well as her earlier Writing Down the Bones, but I loaned out my copy of that and it never came back. :( So anyway, one thing she said in there struck me -- that you often hear people saying they want to be writers, or artists -- even hugely successful people, businessmen, doctors. But you never hear a writer say they want to be something else. A richer writer, sure, a more successful one, a better one. It's as if once you've tasted the high that writing can give you, nothing can match that -- so you give up job, security, shut out friends and family, turn into a troll living in a dank cave and snarling at the computer, bitch constantly about blocks and deadlines and starving -- and you wouldn't even consider giving it up. The ultimate drug. And if you do give it up, you become depressed or alcoholic or worse. Even if you keep the job and family and friends, you must do some writing -- maybe even in secret. Somehow you have to feed that habit or you'll go mad.
All right, perhaps I'm exaggerating a little. Perhaps not. :-)
Gosh, I've been bad. Didn't realize so much time had gone by since my last entry. Can't talk long now, as I'm a) on deadline for Puritan novella and b) behind in my classes (just a little :-). But to answer a bunch of curious questions, yes, I did the reading Thursday night. Felt ill for a full hour previous (cold hands, trembling, slightly nauseous, the works), but reading went fine, and people came up afterwards and said nice things (also said I should read slower :-).
Hosted a lovely dinner for the local poly group Friday night - 25 people showed up, and met a lot of nice people. Went to 2:30 a.m. -- very late for Mary Anne's. :-) I tend to be a bed at 10, up at 6 person naturally. Weird, I know. All my friends are night owls.
Saturday cleaned the house and then went to a formal masquerade ball -- great fun. Got to wear my dressiest clothes and jewelry, and danced lots (luckily people were quite willing to put up with my picking up the steps as I went along :-). Sunday hung out with Clive and Sherman and then Sherman and Owen (S's roommate, also a friend of mine from U Chicago) went around the corner to Cafe du Norde - free swing lessons at 8 p.m. every Sunday night -- really neat. Think we'll go back next week (and maybe take Sherman's parents (two of the coolest people on the face of the planet).
Today I made up for being bad all weekend by writing 4000 words of the novella, interspersed with checking e-mail and levels of Warcraft. God, what an addictive game. It's a damn good thing I only play when I'm visiting Sherman and Owen's place, or I'd never get anything done. I sat down to play one level at 1:15 and when I finished the level and looked up it was 4:30. Oof. Good thing I only have about 3000 words of the novella left (did about 2K previously). Another couple of hours should finish it off, and then I'll know for sure that I have January rent. :-)
Hmm....this went longer than I'd planned -- ah well. I've missed talking to y'all. This journal is a great place to vent. :-) I'll try to be a bit more regular, but this week may be rather spotty, as I really do have a bunch of schoolwork to catch up on. (That Renaissance Poetry thesis is driving me mad...). Have a good week, dears.
Hey y'all. Didn't think you'd hear from me today, did you? Well, my workload got lifted a little (moved, actually -- professor moved a deadline to later), so this week isn't quite as frantic as I'd expected.
Meeting tonight at 6 to find out about a job helping to author the Mills pages. It pays diddly over squat ($5.75/hr -- I haven't made that little in the last 6-7 years), but it probably wouldn't be that hard, and might be a nice web authoring credit to my name, and I could use a little extra cash. Have to think about whether I really want to commit to 6-8 hours/week of doing this. Maybe maybe. A nice small regular income wouldn't hurt.
Okay, so today I'm playing with sound. I'm in a fairly private room at Mills, and am going to try reading some of my poems out and then put them on here so people can hear my voice. Comments? Anything else you'd like to hear? I'd like to keep it short, so I won't do any of the long stories. Maybe a journal entry? I can't remember what the HTML book I read said about formats -- the program automatically saves in AIFF, but I'm not sure that's the best format to put them up in.
Okay, I'm gonna get kinda techie here. Feel free to skip. So I used Soundhack to record my speaking a four-line poem (not one of mine). Saved at a 22050 sample rate, a 16-bit linear sample size, and stereo. Ended up 1.6 meg, which is huge, as far as I'm concerned. Am I doing something wrong? It's taking forever (22 minutes) to Fetch over into my account -- surely I don't need the files to be this large? I can't tell yet whether it's going to take an unreasonable amount of time to download. All of my pictures together only take up 1.8 meg. This is silly. I'm going to try recording it at a smaller sample size -- don't know if I'll still get reasonable sound quality.
Hmmm....looks okay (I mean, sounds okay) from here. Recorded at 11025, mono instead of stereo, still 16 bits (8 bits gives me nasty feedback), down to .3 megs. When the large one finishes transferring, I'll Fetch this one, then put them both up here so y'all can hear them and let me know how it works.
T'ang Poem - 1.6 meg.
T'ang Poem 2 - .3 meg
Argh. Can't hear those. Apparently Netscape doesn't read .aiff format. Have converted second to .au and am uploading now.
T'ang Poem 3 - .3 meg, .au format
Double argh. Still can't hear anything. Don't know what I'm doing wrong. Any inspiration gratefully accepted. I'm going to give up for now and try and get some work done.
4:15. Managed to write another 1K of the novella. I think I'm only going to do 2K more and call it quits. Turns out the darn sound files do work -- they're just appallingly slow. At least the .au files work -- I'm not sure about the .aiff, as I'm pretty sure Netscape can't read 'em.
5:17. Oh, and they're really soft. Going to see what needs to be done to fix that.
5:44. Cropped and interlaced the main photo of me. Can you tell I'm avoiding work? I hate that it's dark already. Hope I can get a ride home from this dumb meeting. Appear to have messed something up, so I've gone back to old photo. Weird.
Morning, everyone. Getting a bit of a late start today, as I stayed up late talking to Kevin. My phone bill is going to be appalling - somehow five hours went by without my even noticing. And half that time we spent discussing effective teaching modalities in calculus...::-) Oh well.
Thank y'all for confirming that the sound files survived the transfer. I know they're awfully soft -- I'm going to futz around with input volumes today (if I can find 'em :-). Don't think I've come up with anything fancy to help with size, though a couple people kind of vaguely mentioned compression.
So I took the little web authoring job for Mills -- it's just six hours/week, whenever I feel like working them. Don't know if it's a good idea at that pay scale, but we'll try it and see how it goes.
My room is a pit. Gotta clean it up. Otherwise today, I'm supposed to write another chapter of the novella, and possibly something substantial for the novel. We'll see. I'm feeling kinda sluggish from the cold (the house was freezing when I woke up - heating slowly) and tired from being a little short on sleep. It may be laundry time again too.
I'm rather dreading tonight. We're having housemate problems, only tangentially related to me, but I need to be at the meeting we're having tonight, and it'll probably be somewhat unpleasant. I hate, really hate, confrontation. Avoiding the problem has always worked better for me. :-)
Okay, off to deal with an appalling amount of backed-up mail.
Happy Halloween, everyone! Spent much of the last several hours dealing with mail change stuff -- Chicago is shutting down alumni accounts, so all mail for me should be sent to mohanraj@ella.mills.edu. For the next two years, at any rate.
I'm tired and frustrated and I haven't had lunch, so I'm gonna go take care of that. Talk to y'all tomorrow.
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