About Fred

Tuesday

Today marked the first time since Thursday that I went outside, wore anything but pajamas, or did anything more strenuous than watch several episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show*. After four long days of illness and convalescence, of stomach bug and fever, I finally went back to work.

Sunday was pretty miserable, though, and it’s what convinced me I needed the extra day off. I’d planned to go to the doctor yesterday, but by that morning the fever was gone — and moreover, it seemed to stay gone without any outside assistance. I was still pretty beat, and so I lay about all day, but I was feeling a lot better long before the end of it. A lot better than the day before, definitely, when I’d had to take a long break between eating the two halves of a fairly small banana.

So I went back to work today. It was pretty uneventful, except for the yearly emergency preparedness training the building makes all of the floor’s fire safety team go to. And even that’s just sitting around learning about what to do in case of a biological attack, or gas leak, or zombie outbreak. I’ve still got lots of imminent deadlines and projects that I wish were more finished than they are, but it was nice to not come back to more of them.

And it was nice to get a chance to read again, something I couldn’t really do while I was sick. On Friday I couldn’t even concentrate on television. (Though later, putting Galaxy Quest and then Goonies on in the background while I tried to sleep was actually quite a comfort. Good movies, those.) Tonight, I finished reading Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred. It’s a simple but powerful book, a reminder of Butler’s talents, and though it’s a novel written about the antebellum South and slavery from the viewpoint of 1976, it doesn’t feel the slightest bit dated. I liked it a lot.

February promises to not be entirely normal, just looking at my schedule coming up, but it was nice to get back to a little bit of normal, today, anyway.

* Seriously, why have I never really watched this show before? It’s a little dated in places, but it holds up remarkably well. It’s endearing and funny.

Sick daze

So I don’t know about you, but I had a kind of a terrible week.

There was that whole kerfuffle on Tuesday, when I missed the Broadway show I had been planning to see, but after that, I thought everything was going to go back to normal.

And then on Friday I got sick.

I woke up that morning a few hours before I normally do, and that’s when the vomiting began. I’ll spare you any more of the graphic details. It’s enough to say that I spent a long and uncomfortable day at home, lying in bed, occasionally turning to Twitter or my work e-mail when I could, trying to sleep when I couldn’t. Later that night my fever spiked at close to 103, but at least by then I was able to hold down enough water to swallow some Tylenol, which seemed to make a big difference.

I’m much better today. The fever’s not gone completely, but it’s in the much more manageable double digits, and I’m actually managing to hold down solid food. (This being toast and rice pudding, all-day-meal of champions.) I even finally took a shower, brushed my teeth, and put my glasses back on. And I’m writing this. Whatever I had isn’t completely gone, but it seems to have done most of its damage in a real hurry.

I’m not doing anything much more adventurous today than eating rice pudding. I’m still lying in bed — new clean sheets, though — and watching episodes of Scandal and Supernatural (both ridiculous in their own charming ways).

The one silver lining in all this — beyond the fact that I am feeling better — is that the team outing I missed on Friday, the lunch and museum visit with my colleagues I missed in favor of retching and sleeping, has been postponed. I was looking forward to that, and I’d have been sorry to have missed it. I’m glad they were able to reschedule it. I would have made lousy company yesterday.

The snow must go on

So today took a hard left turn into suck.

For Christmas, Heather very generously and unexpectedly bought a gift card for Telecharge, which I decided to put towards a Broadway show. Specifically Waiting for Godot, starring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, which is running between now and then and end of March and is supposed to be very good. I bought a ticket several weeks ago, and had decided upon tonight. I had my ticket in hand, was traveling light, and eager to see the play.

And then it snowed.

I knew the snow was coming since at least yesterday, but I thought it would start later than it did, and I hoped it wouldn’t be so bad. Then it just kept falling, and the wind picked up, and it got a little difficult and messy to walk outside our office, and then our announced that it was closing early, letting everyone go home if they wanted by 3:30. The MTA was recommending that people not stay in the city if they could help it; if you were traveling on the Long Island Railroad, you were encouraged to do so before the weather got worse and they started suspending service.

I didn’t much feel like getting stuck in Manhattan overnight, getting out of the play around…well, around now, actually, between 9 and 10 o’clock, only to discover that the trains home had stopped. Was I supposed to try and get an overpriced hotel room then? Find someplace open late at night to buy clothes so I’d at least have some clean underwear the next morning? I hated doing it, but I decided, better safe than sorry, and I headed home.

The commute wasn’t all that bad, hardly bad at all, actually. I’ve had better, but I’ve certainly had much worse. It’s still snowing, and they did suspend some service after 8 o’clock, reporting delays on the lines that are still running. But honestly, I don’t know if I made the right decision. I may never really know. It was a judgement call. I’m sorry it lost me the show — and much more the opportunity to make use of the thoughtful gift — but it seemed like the best bad decision to make at the time.

And I have actually seen Patrick Stewart on Broadway once before, so it’s not all bad. (I thought that show was kind of lousy, but I don’t think he or his co-star there were to blame.) There will be other shows and other opportunities and better decisions to be made.

It’s funny, any other day all of this wouldn’t have been so terrible. In fact, it would just be the fun story of how I got to leave work an hour early, which is pretty good, since my hands were starting to cramp up from typing up my conference notes all day. (Eight hours and ten sessions led to a lot of notes.)

I don’t know what the weather or commute will be like tomorrow. At my boss’ recommendation, we all took our computers home with us in case it’s too difficult to get in. Of course, I had to borrow a bag from her having left mine at home. I’d decided not to bring it with me today, because, see, I was going to the theater…

Oh well. Best laid plans and all that. It’s disappointing, but that’s okay.

Monday

It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so I was off from work. I still had to wake up a little early to go with my father to get his car inspected, but I was able to go back to sleep when we came back home.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I watched a bunch of episodes from the last season of 30 Rock, then the first episode in the new third season of Sherlock. (I think I’d maybe have a half-letter-grade kinder to the episode that this review, but it’s pretty much spot on.)

Then this evening I read the first volume of Walter Simonson’s run on The Mighty Thor from the early ’80s. It’s a lot of fun, with many weird and unexpected ideas and a great dash of humor. It’s little surprise that a lot of the recent Thor movies are drawn so heavily from Simonson’s work on the title. (Though I wonder if we’ll ever see Beta Ray Bill on the big screen.)

And that, somehow, was a full day. I also put some bird seed and suet in the feeder, went to a local burger joint for lunch, and read some submissions for Kaleidotrope. And I haven’t once looked at my work e-mail since Friday. It wasn’t an exciting weekend, but sometimes that’s for the best.

Saturday and Sunday

It’s been a pretty quiet weekend.

Last night I watched Riddick, which turned out to be surprisingly entertaining, given how remarkably terrible its predecessor turned out to be. It’s not a brilliant movie, and hardly original, but I quite enjoyed it.

Today, I went to my weekly writing group, where we each spent our forty minutes working on a prompt from Writer’s Digest, from their monthly contest. Using their first sentence as a jumping-off point, this is what I wrote:

“If you can guess what I have in my pocket, you can have it.”

She says this like I’m supposed to be impressed, when we both know the pocket and whatever she’s tossed in it are stolen. She wants me to think she’s learned to fold space, that’s fine, but she knows as well as I do that this particular pocket of it isn’t her handiwork. It’s too polished a job for that, the seams too neat. It hardly shows up on her ship’s sensors, probably wouldn’t show up at all on mine, and there’s nobody outside the core planets who could have done this kind of work so well. What it’s doing all the way out here, or why the core might have abandoned it, I don’t know, but she’s not fooling anybody if she thinks I believe she did this herself. This little pocket, and whatever she’s got hidden inside it, are like everything else in my sister’s life: an unhappy accident she wants to make somebody else’s problem.

“What makes you think I want it?” I ask. “Even if I guess right, I’ve got cargo of my own left to unload.”

“You’re running light and you know it,” she says. She adjusts the screen with a few random taps and the pocket is outlined in a dark angry green. It’s nothing you could see with the naked eye, if you tried staring out into the blackness of space, but Claire knows I trust the ship’s readings. After all, this salvage tug used to be my own. “And you’re gonna wanna guess. It could earn you millions.”

“If it’s so tasty a haul why don’t you sell it?” I ask. “What’s with the hide-and-seek, the guessing games? That’s not why I agreed to come out here.”

“No,” she says, “you’re just checking up on me for the core, reporting back on my movements. Just like Dad would’ve wanted, right?” She’s angry when she says this, even though she knows it isn’t even half as simple. “But, don’t you see, Nick,” she adds, “that’s exactly why I can’t be the one to unload this. The core’s already got it in for me. They’d take me before I even got planetside.”

“If you’d just talk to them,” I tell her, “I’m sure they’d drop the charges.”

“If I just let Dad talk to them, you mean. Let him pull a few strings, rehabilitate his smuggler daughter. That’s what the core wants, Nick. I set one foot back in the system and that’s what they’ll get.”

“So what, you want to off-load this on me, whatever smuggled goods you’ve got to hide in pocket of space all the way out here in the ass end of nowhere? I’ve got cargo, Claire. I’ve got a reputable business.”

“You could also have millions,” she says. “And all you have to do is guess.”

I don’t think I have any intention of trying to submit that to the contest, not least of all because it isn’t yet a story, and yet at 480 words it’s well past half of the magazine’s 750-word limit. But I had fun writing it, even if it took me a long while to get into anything like a groove.

I noted on Twitter yesterday that I occasionally get stories that were very clearly written based on writing prompts, most notably for the Machine of Death anthologies. Those books had such a distinctive premise, no matter how very different the stories that were written for them, that I always feel weird when I encounter it again in my own submissions. I understand the impulse to try and take a story you’re proud of, one that for whatever reason didn’t make it into either of the two anthologies, and try to sell it elsewhere. But even if I loved the story, I don’t know that I would feel entirely comfortable accepting it. For one thing, you’re admitting the story has already been rejected elsewhere, although, really, that’s hardly a factor. I have to assume that Kaleidotrope isn’t the first stop for a lot of the writers who submit. But, more importantly, it’s such a distinctive premise that your story can’t help but be seen as a cast-off, a reject, by the reader. That’s maybe unfair, but I think that’s the reality. I less frequently see stories clearly based off the prompts from The First Line, which I’ve noted in the past, but I think that’s much different, easier to work around, maybe even less central to the story. I don’t reject stories out of hand just because they clearly were first intended for someone else. But I’m probably more likely to pass on stories where a machine that predicts the cause of everyone’s death is a central concern.

Finally, this evening, I read What now? by Ann Patchett. I liked it, although it’s maybe a bit of a cheat as an actual book. It’s the text of a commencement speech that Patchett gave at her alma mater Sarah Lawrence a number of years ago, and while it’s a good speech, the book is really quite short. It’s full of large print and white spaces, as well as many full-page stock photographs of mazes, footprints, puzzle pieces, and other things that would probably put Patchett well above the “cliché quota” she mentions at the top of the speech. It’s the sort of book you give as a gift, mostly to graduating seniors, and while fifteen bucks seems a little pricey for that gift, it’s a gift of kindly good advice. It’s a very short book, hardly a book at all, but it ends well:

The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way. What now is not just a panic-stricken question tossed out into a dark unknown. What now can also be our joy. It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance. It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow. There’s a time in our lives when we all crave the answers. It seems terrifying not to know what’s coming next. But there is another time, a better time, when we see our lives as a series of choices, and What now represents our excitement and our future, the very vitality of life.