Day: October 18, 2010

Six years of Mondays

Today marked my six-year anniversary at work, although the day itself was just like any other Monday. I’ve actually got a pretty busy week planned, at least near the end of it, and this evening I managed to schedule my MRI. It’s this Saturday at 7 a.m. Luckily, the radiology place is right nearby, and the woman on the phone assured me that I’ll be in and out pretty quick, since I’m definitely the first appointment of the day. I still need to call my spine doctor to confirm they squared the insurance authorization — as well as to schedule a follow-up with him to discuss the MRI results — but it’s nice to have a plan of action worked out for the week.

Still, I remain wholly unconvinced that six whole years have gone by since I moved back home from Pennsylvania. On the one hand, I’m glad. I had some friends in Pennsylvania, although fewer as the years went by and more graduated, and I absolutely didn’t hate working for the university. But New York was the only place I was going to get an entry-level job in publishing, if only because this is where ninety-something percent of all publishing jobs are located. Moving back home was not at all a mistake. And yet, the thought of buying a home (or rather apartment or condo) and settling down…I still really don’t know how I feel about that. I like my job and the people I work with, and I do want to move out on my own again, but is New York really where I want to stay?

It should be noted I am not the most decisive of individuals. That’s sort of how six year go by just like that.

Monday various

  • Jonathan Coulton remembers Benoit Mandelbrot, who died last Thursday at 85:

    I can remember stumbling across his book “The Fractal Geometry of Nature” in my high school library, reading it and not really understanding it, but finding it mind blowing nonetheless. To me, that particular brand of hazy understanding feels like the correct way to think about a lot of things – fractals, electron clouds, cats in boxes waiting to be poisoned – the natural world is really too complicated and beautiful for any of us to fully understand, and that’s OK. That’s in fact what makes it so beautiful.

  • I don’t even watch Mythbusters and I still find the idea that Barrack Obama will appear on an episode pretty cool. [via]
  • The Sunburst Awards need your help:

    We’re looking for short (30 second to 2 minutes) videos that say what you think about Canadian speculative fiction. These should be interview-style videos in the vein of Speaker’s Corner and can be recorded as simply as with a web camera. Prior interviews or footage can be submitted provided that you have permission to do so. We will host these individually on a YouTube channel (sunburstaward), but will also edit them in order to create a series of short videos to promote awareness of the fundraising campaign. A longer video will be shown at the opening remarks to the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium.

  • Seven Authors Who Wrote While Nude thankfully includes no photographs. [via]
  • And finally, I really liked this Paolo Bacigalupi interview, not least of all for the pronunciation guide to his last name (“BATCH-i-ga-LOOP-ee”) and the idea that it translates to “kiss of the wolf.” But he also some interesting writing advice:

    But mostly I sat down and said, I’m not going to write a boring story. And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems. Don’t dick around too much in the weeds of, oh, gee, this character’s deep interiority or anything like that. Get it done and make this character do some stuff and make stuff explode. That seems to work pretty well. [via]