Category: Social Life

Interactions with others, and attempts to articulate the effects.

Things I cannot believe.

I saw The Last Unicorn tonight. On the big screen, with Peter S. Beagle in attendance and answering questions, and signing books afterwards (and taking pictures with people! I have a picture of myself with Peter S. Beagle now). And before I get any further I will note that tour dates are here and it would be lovely if you could pass that along to anyone you know of who’s interested.

I thought I might not cry this time, which is foolish. I never forget that I cry when I hear the theme song. But I always forget how sure it is, the tears coming up as smooth and sure as a stone drops down through water, and I thought that since I listened to the music last night as well the effect might be somewhat muted, and so I was sitting down to watch and thinking maybe this time I wouldn’t cry, and…

Yep. Tears. 🙂

(Did you know that the composition of your tears differs based on the emotion that evokes them?)

But yes. Peter S. Beagle was answering questions before the movie, and Connor Cochran[1] was… was maître d‘-ing or toastmastering or whatever the term is, and interjecting little anecdotes. And one of them was that when he first met Peter thirteen years ago, Peter thought he was a failure.

I… just hearing that was like the split-second of freefall confusion when our dog once yanked me off our front steps. Not the moment where I landed on the edge of the step and bruised myself purple-black for weeks. But the sudden absence of ground where there’d been that solid unquestioned presence only a second before.

Peter S. Beagle ever thought he was a failure.

Peter S. Beagle.

I would expect that sentiment no more from him than I would expect it from Ursula K. LeGuin.

I came home with more books than I went out with, and they are signed. And I am happy, and teary, and a little giddy, and so very very glad I got to tell him thank you for everything he’d written. And I’m sitting here, doing a little reading and being glad that things seem to be going better for him, and trying to wrap my head around how he could ever have believed…

I hope things keep getting better for him. I truly do.
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[1] I am 95% sure this is the man, but I checked with the light of my life, and he never gave his name, and I meant to ask. Actually I am 99.8% sure, and I would be surer except it takes me a while to learn people’s faces and I did not see him for long. But 99.8% sure is not bad, so I set it down.

London-bound.

I’m working my way through The Weird[1], and there are these lovely moments when I’m just browsing through it and I recognize something. (It’s way more fun, I think, to browse through the book than to look at the table of contents. I am better with snippets of text than with titles, many times.) Today I reread “The Summer People”, and deliberately held off on “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles”, because it is a cuddly sort of story that I will save for tonight, in case I am tired.

In other news, that is totally not actually news, I am going to Loncon 3. This is not a surprise; I have been saving for the trip since I heard about the bid, which was way back in May of 2010. It just seems a lot realler now that I’m in the calendar year that the convention will be occurring in. It will be my first WorldCon in five years, and I hope it is as much fun as the last one, and I will probably be flailing gently at practical details over the next couple of weeks.

(I realized that I own a ton of things I would love to have signed by people who are likely to be there, but the trouble is that those things are largely books. As a result, they weigh… well, not actually a ton, but I’m guessing quite a lot, and definitely more than I would like to carry. I am not fussed about this, because I have lots of time to figure out what I’m going to do.)
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[1] This book, combined with the collected Gormenghast in one volume, is why I’m only aiming to read eighty books this year.

A very quick note

(1) I am exhausted. So much so it is not even funny.

(2) CanCon had some lovely panels today, including one on the portrayal of disability in specfic (modded by Derek Newman-Stille, who runs Speculating Canada, and involving Tanya Huff and Dominik Parisien). Did not properly tweet during that one, being distracted by discussion.

(3) Related to that last, am sharing Captain Awkward’s #514: Justifying Your Deviance From Ordinary In A Work Setting.

(4) More later!

Two cents on Farthing Party – Friday

(That title sounded cleverer in my head. In any case…!)

I’ve never written a con summary before, so this may meander a bit.

Friday

After a bus ride across the aisle from two people who were still young enough to know everything and were telling each other about it[1], I got into Montreal on Friday and checked into the Hotel Victor. Continue reading “Two cents on Farthing Party – Friday”

Keeping moving

My cat is sleeping on me. This makes me feel useful.

We went to visit friends for the Labour Day weekend. The travel there was pretty painful, but once we arrived, the event was actually really nice; a lot more people them I’m used to seeing at once for a lot longer than I’m used to hanging out. I was a little worried I’d burn out (or be horribly unwelcome after the first few hours), but neither happened.

(As a tangent: in and around Detroit, diners are called “coneys” or “coney islands”. I find myself oddly delighted by this.)

However, yesterday and today (and possibly tomorrow, creeping on its dusty path from day to day, as it is after midnight) have been a little vacant. I’m getting things done, but these things are trending more heavily towards the “maintenance duties” end of the spectrum than towards the “active interest” end of it.

(I am also reading a fair bit. Reading is good. It is not all I want to do.)

I am staying up too late and running myself into a dully tired state, and that needs to stop. I think a couple of days of strict scheduling may be in order.

Small world.

I ran across an interview of Silvia Moreno-Garcia yesterday (publisher of Innsmouth Free Press, which I love), and was mildly amused to find that the blog running the interview belongs to one of the people that I ran into at a convention last year. I’d lost his card, so it’s nice to find it again.[1]

(Also, if I trip over Ian Rogers’ name one more time in the next week I am going to need to get Every House is Haunted next, just because the frequency illusion[2] effects are getting a bit surreal. (It’s on the list to get anyway, but I would ideally like to finish a couple more books first.))

Also, I finished a short story draft last night. It’s a horribly clunky draft-zero draft, but it’s a draft. I’m thinking I should set it aside for a week or so and then try to make it a little less horrible–I know usually people advise longer, but I think that perhaps the time gap from draft-zero to first-draft can be a little shorter. In a lot of ways it feels more like shovelling than chiselling detail.
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[1] This was a theme for said convention. Annoyingly. I must organize better in future.
[2] Also called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, a term it took me a ridiculously long time to find, because for some reason I was stuck on “cognitive bias”.

Carrying on.

I occasionally wish there was someplace I could file a complaint for matters related to real life – not anything that is anyone’s fault, you understand, more little hiccups that just need to be rectified.

For example, the way stress makes you hungry without actually seeking to burn up anything in the way of fat our calories. Come on, seriously? It would just make so much more sense if the two were linked. And then I could go out after a week of trying to do three people’s jobs in the time allotted to one person, and not feel bad about the fact that I want a hamburger. I really want a hamburger.

In the meantime, however, there is a drink:

image

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Bless the weekend.

I thought I was somewhere different, but everything felt the same.

The work week so far has felt like I am scrambling to put one foot in front of the other so that I actually keep doing something that could charitably be called “hurrying forward” rather than “falling and rolling downhill”. Between the person I was replacing coming back and the person replacing someone else moving offices, it’s been a bit hectic.

I went out of town over the weekend, on a day trip, which was odd; I don’t travel much on my own, and I always enjoy it. Wandered a little, met a friend for tea and geekery (knitting, moving, books, Cthulhu, gaming, horror, gaming) in a lovely little tea shop, and headed home. It felt weirdly not like leaving town, and I am trying to figure out why. I’ve had a stronger “oh I am away” reaction when going down to visit one of the tiny yarn stores that you need a car to get to. Possibly a combination of going to a place I know (in passing) and being sure I could get home even if there was a problem with the planned return.[1]
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[1] I checked. If I’d missed the bus, I could’ve gotten a train, and then a local bus and a walk to get home. Not pleasant, rather expensive, but still a definite option.

This just in…

…and by “this”, I mean “me”.  Just got in from the late showing of The Avengers.  We were going to the earlier one, but it was sold out, so we all went for dinner and hung out for a bit.  And now are home.

Some quick notes, not spoilery:
(1) Much love for Banner.  More the more I think about it, actually.  I… really bought him.  Been there, know that guy.
(2) Heee, the lines.
(3) Liked Loki and Thor much better than in the Thor movie.

But yes.  And aside from that, something happened on the way to the movie:

I ran into a friend.

This hasn’t happened in… years?

I mean, I see people, sure.  But I don’t meet them by chance–and no, I don’t count meeting a knitting friend that I know from knitting at the knitting store where we both go a fair bit as meeting by chance.  Meeting the knitting friend that I know from knitting because she is headed one way after dinner and I am headed the other for a movie and our paths happened to cross?  That is meeting by chance.

Nice feeling.  Makes this place seem a bit less lonely.

Right.  Sleep is in order, now.

What does silence give, again?

So on Friday, someone said something that I honestly thought was… uhm.  Deeply deeply problematic and insulting. Actually two people said it.

And I didn’t say anything. I mean, I wasn’t thrilled about this, and I ended up swearing to a friend over it, and they made a pretty reasonable suggestion about the whole thing.  Which I ended up taking, today.

But I didn’t think of it on my own, and more to the point, I didn’t say anything.  A couple of acquaintances are saying stuff that–Jesus, I can’t even believe it, I didn’t think I knew anyone who was stupid and shrilly desperate and passive-aggressive and did I mention stupid enough to say that.  And I know people who say some fairly stupid stuff.  I don’t spend time around most of them.

And I didn’t say anything.

I feel like a coward.  I suppose I am a coward, and I am currently going to work on not being nothing but a coward.  For what it’s worth, which doesn’t feel like enough.

Today I apologized to the person they were talking in front of for not saying anything.

…yeah.  Definitely not enough.