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01/31/01
Good friends and coworkers are gone. And all I can think about is joshp and his toadies, smirking up on the hill.
Now I'm supposed to figure out a way to send out authoritative email recommendations for categories I know nothing about, and automate pages that can't be automated.
They cut good, hardworking people who earned a ton of cash every day for this company. That's wrong.
01/28/01
Happy Year of the Golden Snake! We're going to see a kung fu demonstration and dragon dances today.
I did some writing yesterday, and sorted through all my old comics and zines. I've got two big boxes of stuff to get rid of now--Jen gets first dibs, but after that, anybody who wants a whole mess of great stuff is welcome to it.
Some of my all-time favorite zines:
01/23/01
How cool is this disposable cell phone?
We've started maxing out our PS2, and we're now hopelessly addicted to SSX and Dynasty Warriors 2. It was a full-on nerd weekend, but now we're paying the price--I'm hideously behind at work and Jen is fighting a persistent bacterial invasion.
I'm going to devote a couple hours every Saturday to writing. A literary friend suggested that I get up early every weekday to do research, since that's my inertial thing right now, but I feel as if I barely get enough sleep to make it through the week as it is.
I miss the ocean. I want to go surfing.
01/18/01
Buzz among web editors is Plastic--they took the Slashdot model and applied it to mainstream "news." They're touting the value of editing... I hope this means there'll be lots of editor jobs on the web when I leave Amazon. But I suspect I won't visit Plastic very often. It's too busy! What I need is a really harsh web "news" editor who hacks and slashes the day's data with wild abandon, finally offering me one, single, lovely, distilled piece of information. Like Allen's elegant little blog, only sensical. (I think Allen may have created the most zen page I've ever seen on the web.)
Second aikido training session tonight, then Jen said she's taking me out for an ice cream sundae because I had a shitty week. I love her.
01/17/01
The Articulation Page. Everyone has their own reasons.
I used to daydream about being an artist. My art would have been imaginary skeletons made of bones and dead-tech machine parts. Right about the time I started collecting bones and old clocks to get started, I saw a gallery show of stuff just like I had wanted to do. But I still enjoy looking at bones and thinking about rearticulating them with machine bits.
There's a Chinook helicopter moving southward over Elliott Bay right now. Wonder what they're doing?
01/15/01
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I was thinking about how every city I've lived in has an MLK Boulevard that runs through the poorer sections of town. A conservative African-American woman wrote about the phenomenon, saying the situation is a "backhanded insult" to Black America. The Seattle Times did a piece with five other cities offering more varied perspectives.
01/12/01
An angry day. I'm very tired of bureaucrats. Feeling many of the same frustrations I used to at my government job. Why do people like to hear themselves talk so much in meetings designed to do nothing and take a long time doing it? I wonder if there's a formula describing the phenomenon--how about this:
blahblah = ego/usefulness
Calling my senators today to weigh in on Dubya's cabinet choices. It's going to be a long and awful four years.
And on a completely different note, here's the only spider I've ever loved.
01/10/01
A very binary date.
Isn't it funny how in some cities, crumbly old buildings are torn down and trashed, while in others, they become the trendiest lofts and warehouse digs of the hipsterati? Take any of those Detroit ruins and plunk it down just south of downtown Seattle and it would be crammed with artists and self-marginalized youngsters in no time.
Rob has hantavirus now, too. I'm calling the CDC.
I'm a little disheartened on the literary front. I just got the advance reader's copy of a novel that is very like the one I'm working on. Very like. The author even thanks Mervyn Peake as an influence. Sigh. I suppose there are no new ideas, no new stories, and it's all in the telling, but this particular book seems brilliant and lovely. I don't think I'll read it.
01/08/01
Ever have one of those days where you work like a machine, tirelessly and efficiently ticking things off your to-do list? That's me today. It's a relief, because my work inertia (or winertia, if you will) has been paralyzing lately, and it's really hard to continue at a job that you won't do.
I love books. I could talk about books for days. I like comparing and contrasting them, thinking about what the author was thinking, smelling them, looking in the back to see what font they used, and sorting them over and over in various ways. My current shelving system is:
- Novels I haven't read
- Fiction anthologies and collections I haven't read (a.b.a.)
- Novels I've read
- Anthologies and collections I've read
- Literary criticism and fiction-related reference
- Books related to the novel I'm writing (fiction, nonfic, reference, and comics)
- Kids' books
- Art, graphic novels, perfect-bound zines, oddities
- Hagiographic fiction and nonfic
- Travel and language
- General reference
- Botany and gardening
- Biographies
- Pop culture and general nonfic
- Biology
- Other science
- Oversize
Some of the categories are organized alphabetically by author, but I haven't had time to do them all. Probably a good thing.
01/05/01
Archived old entries for your reading pleasure. And now, on to 2001.
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