Author: Frances K R

The road goes on and ever on.

Checked out and waiting in the lobby for the shuttle to the off-site parking. My nerves are killing me and I’m not sure why. I think part of out might be leaving the hotel, rather than a friend’s place. Feels a lot more final and a lot less amenable to having anything we forgot mailed to us.

Also, going to the States. I’m looking forward to seeing John’s friend and family, but I am not looking forward to the border crossing. Never had any trouble, but I know that sometimes they take (very boring) ages, and have heard the horror stories.

That, and, well… it’s the States. It’s NotHome. Which is an interesting disconnect, since as far as I can remember I did not have this anticipatory flinching when I went to London, and that is considerably less close to home and rather more anxiously edging towards draconian.[1]

Call it half lack of familiarity and half the horror stories John keeps finding.
—
[1] Than Canada.

Belated and stunned.

Didn’t post last night, and am actually okay with that.  It’s nice to not be spiralling into some kind of slough of despond over missing one day, and instead getting up and dusting off and carrying on.  🙂

Went to the Daredevils exhibit in the IMAX Theatre today.  It was actually rather upsetting, to be honest.  I understand people being cruel, or petty, or unthinkingly stupid.  (I don’t like it one bit, but I understand.)  And the stories about all the people voluntarily cheerfully planning to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel was baffling, and a little sad.

One man thought it would be a good idea to tie an anvil to his feet inside the barrel.  For ballast, you see.  Ballast would mean that the barrel would float right way up when he got to the bottom of the falls!

They found his right arm.

And then there’s the man who made it over and survived but suffocated when his air ran out, and the man who made dinner reservations whose body was never found, and… I really do not understand.  Especially having seen the falls.  The idea of going over them is terrifying, and this was entirely voluntary.

An anvil.  Was there no-one around to say “hey, Chuck, maybe this ‘going over Niagara Falls in an enclosed space with a 100 lb chunk of iron loose in there with you’ idea is not the greatest”?  Why didn’t he listen, if there was?

Splendid isolation/I don’t need no-one

So, John and I are driving around, and between the GPS in the cars and our phones, it’s a very well-informed trip.  And it came up in casual discussion that many many horror movie plots have been rendered unworkable by the existence of these things–GPS systems and cellphones.

This is pretty obvious stuff; it ties back to the truism about horror movies being, in many ways, about isolation.  Being able to dial 911 and start hiking out with a map that shows you your heading and the distance to the highway makes things a lot more manageable.  (Or, you know, the amusing values of being able to Google something like “chainsaw sabotage”…  But I digress.)

We went back to it later, a bit.  If you eliminate the tactical elements of isolation, then what you’re left with is two options.  There’s social isolation (“they won’t believe me” or “they didn’t believe me”)[1] which has a long and storied history, including those godawful fifties movies about the aliens landing and the teenagers being the only ones to see them.  Or else there’s self-imposed isolation, where the protagonists don’t want to call for help; what that sprang to mind was them being in a haunted house where they had no right to be[2], but Session 9 is also a beautiful example.  The guy needs the job, there’s no way to leave and get it done, and he can’t afford to take the time to call for help.  Alright, yes, there is definitely an element of social isolation there; that’s fine.  One kind doesn’t need to do all the work.

So I am discussing this with John, and he points out that splitting up becomes a lot less frightening, a lot more manageable, if you have something like Google Latitude in place.  You know where people are, you can track them.  And I nod in agreement, and then he smiles and points out that it isn’t true.

“You don’t know where I am.  You know where my phone is.”

I do confess I shuddered.  (A lovely moment over lunch, to be sure.)

Because that takes it out of isolation and into uncertainty, which is the other great foundation of horror.  The world crumbling out from under you, slowly or suddenly.  In some ways it ties to isolation–not having anything you can be sure of to reach out to–but it’s a basically different development.  It’s the horror of “The calls are coming from inside the house!“, which relies not on there being no-one to help but on the space that you were sure was safe being taken away.

So that’s something else to look to, I guess.  Not sure how much good it’d be for movies, which don’t necessarily have a lot of time to establish certainty, but definitely something to keep in mind for written work.

(ObDisclaimer: no, not all horror movies rely on isolation.  Scream, f’r ex, handles the advent of the ubiquitous cellphone quite well.)

—
[1] See also: all the travel horror that involves being surrounded by those terrible strange Other People (usually brown).[3]
[2] Or this 90s movie about four suburban guys out for a night on the town who accidentally see a murder and don’t want to call for help because they hit someone with their car… I will try and look up the title later.
[3] …echoes of HP Lovecraft, actually…

Old-fashioned cheese and water power

Upper Canada Village today. Kingston. Dinner with Becky. The Long Sault and the Lost Islands. (Had never heard of them before.)

Cat here purrs like splitting celery. And is warm.

Probably not making 200 words today.

Back of thighs starting to ache really badly just above knees on the outside sides. Not used to this much walking.

Goodnight.

Rhinos and llamas and tigers, oh my.

Went to the Granby Zoo today.  Walked for about seven hours.  My feet are gearing up to kill me, my hair smells faintly of something that I persist in identifying as llamas[1], and I don’t think I’ve been so ready to sleep so early in months.

I had a wonderful time.  😀

I have 380 pictures on my phone, and more on my camera (the batteries died).  I’ll be sorting through those later, but I think some of them turned out pretty well.  It was cold (7’C) and  very seriously rainy; we’d been expecting a light drizzle.  I ended up buying a disposable poncho in the guest shop for a couple of bucks.  (I don’t think it was meant to be disposable, but after the rainbow lorikeets descended upon me en masse it got a couple of holes in it and the situation just got worse as the day progressed.)

Watched a tiger for about twenty minutes.  She was playing with a giant plastic ball, which fell into the pond and which she then spent a quarter hour trying to get out.  It didn’t work; she was sort of quite adorably sad.  I took a *lot* of pictures, and really need to figure out exactly what the “action shot” mode on my camera phone is meant to do.

—
[1] It’s totally not llamas.  I suppose it’s “ruminants and straw”, or more generally “zoo”.

Very relaxed.

My tolerance, FTR, is terrible. Had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner and am two-thirds of the way through a beer, all over the last for hours. I’m feeling comfortable.

Over at Jack and Rachel’s. We’ve met a lot of lizards and three cats. Were over at John’s aunts for dinner. It was mostly very nice, although after…

There was some stuff about how if twenty percent of the population has a “mental disease” then obviously it’s time to get the psychiatrists to adjust their definitions. And a description of a comedy about four people living in a house, two guys and two girls, each with a different mental illness, that sounded really funny. Until she heard the second ad for it and realized it was a documentary trying to demystify mental illness, and… well, that just didn’t sound as interesting.

I completely defend someone’s right to not watch something they’re not interested in. At the same time, it’d be nice to not feel like I was being lumped into the category of one of those people. Those funny, self-indulgent punchlines. You know the ones.

Pretty sure none of them know I’m on medication. I need to be on medication.

I generally try not to hide that I suffer from depression. Mind, I couldn’t quite manage to find a way to point out that I’m one of that twenty percent (whose claim of being ill is obviously suspect, but I’m not bitter).

I suppose that isn’t very interesting to hear about either.

Tagging

Been trying to write tags for Excolo on the phone. The fact that Swype changes “Excolo” to “Wiki” makes posting in the OOC a bit awkward.

Had a bit of a shock when I went to edit this post and remembered the draft was stored *locally* in my phone, not on the Dashboard I can get to by Internet.

I wrote a post about Glass having… I suppose that at seven months it’s not a miscarriage, but the phrase “having a stillbirth” sounds *entirely* wrong. It went over pretty well, I think; reaction posts that show you’ve hit the note you were aiming for are always satisfying.  (Earned a !caution tag, which I was hoping for but which I honestly wasn’t sure it merited.)  Next up I need to write something bouncy and cheerful, and then a couple of comfortable and mildly curious tags.

I think collaborative writing (and I do think it merits being called that) can actually really help you switch gears, especially when you’re working on more than one scene at once.  On the other hand, it can really leave you high and dry when it comes to practicing plotting.  Genuinely not knowing exactly what the other person is going to do, and trusting them to give you something to react to, doesn’t exactly give you a lot of practice in Getting An Idea.

And I honestly twitch when I hear people talking about their characters as if they were real people.  I understand that it can be a perfectly useful shorthand for “I have constructed an idea of a personality that, while I haven’t exactly sat down and analyzed it to death, is resiliant enough that I have a (sometimes unconcsious) idea of what the character in question will naturally tend to do.”  And that’s fine.

But the “I totally didn’t want to do this, $CHARACTER just screamed at me until I typed it, and hey maybe they will do my housework later if you bribe them” lines?  I… would call that not so fine.  I really would.  There’s a level of responsibility for conscious action that I get a bit uncomfortable over when I see it being eschewed.

Ugh.  That sentence needs editing.  Very badly.  I may come back to this later.

Living up to deadlines.

It’s odd, I don’t usually think of deadlines as something to live up to.

I also don’t usually think of the day as being over at midnight, but that seems like a possibly specious distinction to work with at the moment, so I’m here again, composing on my phone. I’ve set it to vibrate, which is slightly less annoying than clicking for Sudoku, but I am finding it a bit buzzy for typing.

It’s occurring to me that I have a lot of electronic wafers–little slices of screen and plastic and buttons that exist as ways to get to something else that isn’t exactly tangible. My Kobo. My laptop. This phone.

I say, sometimes, that I love living in the future. Usually I say it when John tells me something new and wonderful about technology or medicine or astronomy. But I think the first time I really noticed was several years ago…

I was watching the realtime map for the London Underground, and some of the stations lit up (means there was a service interruption). I was curious and clicked for details, and it said there’d been an incident on the tracks with a passenger. The timestamp was seven minutes old.

Someone got onto the Tube tracks in London and I found out about it in seven minutes. I can’t walk a mile in seven minutes, and…how far away is London? How many people do I know who’ve never even seen it? And I’m getting news from there in less time than it takes to drink a coffee, unless you really chug it.

(Full disclosure; I am a slow coffee drinker.)

((Fuller disclosure; I had a morbid streak when I was younger, and my second thought upon seeing the map information was “I wonder how far he splashed.” Which is ridiculous, really, I don’t even know that anyone was hurt rather than just being a Gap-hopping twit, but… Oh, the lurid imaginations of youth.))

I think the second time the shrinking of intervening distances really hit me was several years later, when a friend in the UK had forgotten his wallet at work and didn’t have groceries in the house and I ordered him a pizza. Because Internet. You can do a lot with the Internet.

Have noticed a possible downside to composing on the phone; small screen means it’s harder to glance back up at what I said earlier, and easier to ramble very far afield. Will mind that in future. Of course, it’s also easier to not get bogged down in going back and editing yourself, which is something I’ve been hoping to work on for a bit.

Right. Been writing for half an hour, and want to get up early tomorrow. Think I will call it a night.