About Fred

Friday

It was a long week, thanks in part to the conference that took up my Monday (and the nearly full work day I put in over the weekend to try and make up for that). It was a good week, though, and while the next couple of months still promise to be incredibly busy, I squared away the most immediate and time-sensitive of my deadlines and managed to do some real work.

I also met this morning with the young woman I’ll be mentoring, as part of my job objectives for 2014, who I only got to chat with very briefly at the office holiday party. I’m hoping I can give her some insight into the development process, assuming I have any insights to give, and I think once we’ve settled on a project she can take the lead on that’ll be easier.

I was supposed to go this evening to a “write-in” — basically, the kind of free-writing group I got to every Sunday, only this one with more people, and with a small price tag. My friend Maurice suggested it, but when train troubles prevented him from getting into Manhattan himself, I took it as a sign to take my tired body home and watch episodes of Babylon 5. (I also watched the last How I Met Your Mother episode, but that was really underwhelming.) I haven’t done a lot of writing in 2014 yet, though I’m going to turn my attention back to it this weekend.

I was so happy not to be taking my computer home with me this evening, I can’t even tell you. We’re only two weeks into January, but I’m so glad this is a long weekend. I’m looking forward to not evening thinking about work until Tuesday.

Random 10 1-17-14

Last week. This week:

  1. “So Far Away” by Dire Straits, guessed by Occupant
    Here I am again in this mean old town
  2. “Ok” by the Beastie Boys
    It’s a gift, it’s a curse, it’s a telephone
  3. “Closer” by Tegan and Sara
    All I dream of lately is how to get you underneath me
  4. “The Ballad of Frankie Crisp” by George Harrison
    Joan and Molly sweep the stairs
  5. “Bones” by MS MR
    These are hard times for dreamers and love lost believers
  6. “Bird as Prophet” by Christine Fellows
    We are creatures of such like desire
  7. “Joey’s on the Streets Again” by the Boomtown Rats
    He used to lie against the wall like he was holding up the bricks
  8. “Big Wheel” by Tori Amos
    Gonna turn that whiskey into rain
  9. “Ocean of Noise” by Calexico (orig. Arcade Fire)
    You’ve got your reasons, and me I’ve got mine
  10. “1999” by Prince, guessed by Occupant
    Forgive me if it goes astray

It’s less complicated than you might think. Good luck!

Wednesday

It was incredibly foggy this morning, which surprised me a bit, and a little icy on the ground, which actually surprised me a bit more. I guess it warmed up just enough for yesterday’s rain, then cooled down just enough to slick the sidewalks in invisible ice.

It seemed to be gone this evening, though the fog had rolled back in. Not quite ghost pirate weather, but somewhere in the neighborhood. Frankly, a part of me just wishes winter would let itself be winter again. (This obviously is not the part of me that just a week ago though the earth was trying to kill him with cold.)

Meanwhile, January, or at least this week of it, has marked the return of Year of the Meeting at work. Busy times that aren’t likely to let up until the spring, or at least until I get a few of these books handed over to production.

But I finished the report I’ve been working on, the one that ate up several hours of my weekend, so that’s good.

I also finished reading Jonathan Carroll’s The Bones of the Moon, which was odd in all the sorts of ways you expect a Jonathan Carroll novel to be. I don’t know that I loved it, necessarily, but I found a lot in that I really liked, these (spoiler-free) passages included:

Sometimes dreams bite like fleas and leave little itchy bumps all over your skin.

We want to be loved for what we are, but also for what we want others to think we are.

Our actions and responsibilities are our own: what later returns to either haunt or applaud us is neither possible to predict nor always completely understandable.

How far was a dream allowed to trespass into real life, before it was caught and sent back to its proper place? Could it go haywire and take over everything you knew? Was it permitted to live wherever it wanted? Or had I reached a point where laws and distinctions, rules of the game, had disappeared? A point where everything in my mind, in my life, was up for grabs?

It’s hard convincing yourself that where you are at the moment is your home, an it’s not always where your heart is.

And that’s that.

Publish or perish

I spent the entire day (and some change) attending a conference for work. It was interesting, and offered several different perspectives, but I think have digital-publishing’ed me out for the rest of the evening. I was happy to come home (a couple of trains late) and do nothing more exciting than watch several episodes of Babylon 5. (I’m midway through my re-watch of the third season.)

I took lots of notes so will undoubtedly revisit everything I heard and learned today, but for now I’m just happy to turn the work part of my brain off for a little while.

Sunday

I wish I could say I spent no more time working from home this afternoon, but that would be a lie. I spent a couple of hours before dinner summarizing some more of this large report I’m not going to get a chance to work on tomorrow.

Before that, though, I did get to go to do the Sunday crossword, watch some Babylon 5, and go to my Sunday writing group. So there’s that.

The radio was playing that old familiar song, the one that she had always liked, and Albert switched it off. I won’t remember doing that, he thought. I won’t remember standing here, thinking this, and then I won’t remember the song, or the radio, or even, eventually, her. All of this, every last moment of this, will be gone. If Margaret was there now, he’d want to tell her this, force her to remember for him, but it was that kind of thing that had made her leave in the first place. When she’d left, all he’d had to turn to was his work, and that was why was here, now, and why in ten minutes from now he wouldn’t be. In ten minutes — no, Albert looked at the clock, saw it was now only eight — there would be someone else standing here, someone other than Albert. The computer would no longer tell him what that new personality would be like, not since Albert had forgotten his access codes, but he could already feel it reaching into the darker corners of his brain, taking up residence. The Albert that he was, standing here now, wondering who had turned off the radio, that man was being rewritten. Why had he done this again? There had been a reason, he was sure of it. National security? To get back at Margaret? He wished Margaret was here now to tell him what that reason was, or at least to get him back into the computer using her own access codes. Everything had gotten hazy since Margaret had left.

It was cold in here, standing by the window. There was snow on the ground outside. Albert was tempted to call it frigid, but that didn’t sound like the right word. He wished he could think of the right word. It was difficult to think ever since somebody had turned off the radio.

“Because we focused on the snake, we missed the scorpion,” he thought, wondering why. Were those the new thoughts or the old, the buds of spring pushing up from the earth or the last of the autumn leaves to fall from the tree? He didn’t think he’d been a poet, and that had the ring of poetry to it. But then again, what he thought, and what he was, had been narrowing to a fine point over the last couple of days. And in just ten minutes — or was it five? — all of that would be gone. Albert just hoped whoever he was becoming was someone good.

And that was Sunday.