Month: December 2009

It’s cold outside, there’s no kind of atmosphere…


Via Cynical-C.

So it snowed a little here last night.

At a guess, it’s about 12-14 inches. So it’s just as well that I don’t have to go in to work tomorrow morning. Or for any morning until January 4. That’s right, I’m using the last of my vacation days at the end of the year, just like in 2008. There’s really something wonderful about having all those days of not having to do anything stretched out ahead of me. (And, of course, being paid for it. My heart goes out to anyone out of work this holiday season.)

I plan to do some reading — I’ve still got a little ways to go to meet my self-imposed 50-books-a-year minimum, thanks largely to a little year-long reading project — some movie and TV-watching, and maybe, just maybe some writing. I’m seriously thinking of entering the Geist Literary Postcard Contest. I’ve got the postcard, and I think the stirrings of a story idea to accompany it. Let’s see if that January 15th deadline is enough of an impetus to get me to finish it.

Other than that, not much to report. We put up the Christmas lights, though we’ll probably wait to decorate the tree until my sister comes home later this week, and we spent most of this morning shoveling out the driveway. It was a pleasantly lazy weekend here, and I’m looking forward to plenty more of the same.

Random 10 12/18

Last week. This week:

  1. “Italian Leather Sofa” by Cake, guessed by Clayton
    She doesn’t care whether or not he’s an island
  2. “Every Time” by Glen Hansard & Colm Maclomaire (orig. Britney Spears)
    Why carry on without me?
  3. “I’m Not in Love” by Tori Amos (orig. 10cc), guessed by Clayton
    That doesn’t mean you mean that much to me
  4. “Love Sick” by Bob Dylan
    I’m walking through streets that are dead
  5. “Add it Up” by Violent Femmes, guessed by Clayton
    Why can’t I get just one kiss?
  6. “Lonely Boy” by Andrew Gold, guessed by Clayton
    We’ll dress him up warmly and we’ll send him to school
  7. “East of Woodstock, West of Vietnam” by Tom Russell
    And on the roads outside Oshogbo, Lord I fell down on my knees
  8. “Didn’t Want to Have to Do it” by Marshall Crenshaw (orig. the Lovin’ Spoonful)
    I kept a-hopin’ there’d be somethin’ to delay it again
  9. “I’m Free” by the Who” guessed by Betty
    And no one had the guts to leave the temple
  10. “Pensacola” by Joan Osborne, guessed by Clayton
    He got all of the transcripts back to 1963

That’s just how it works. Good luck!

The science fiction of cancer itself

I’m currently reading Lorrie Moore’s stunning short story collection, Birds of America. This morning on the train, I read “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” which I’d actually read once before, I think in my freshman fiction writing workshop. It can be a tough story to get through because of its subject matter, pediatric cancer, but it’s a masterful work. (It won the O. Henry Award for Moore in 1998.) Here’s a small bit:

Sifting through the videocassettes, the Mother wonders what science fiction could begin to compete with the science fiction of cancer itself — a tumor with its differentiated muscle and bone cells, a clump of wild nothing and its mad, ambitious desire to be something: something inside you, instead of you, another organism, but with a monster’s architecture, a demon’s sabotage and chaos. Think of leukemia, a tumor diabolically taking liquid form, better to swim about incognito in the blood. George Lucas, direct that!

Thursday various