personal

Friday

All I know is, this seemed like a very quick week.

It was a very busy week, which might account for that. There were at least a couple of mornings when I’d look around the office and realize, with some surprise, that I hadn’t moved from the same spot at my computer for over two hours. I think things will settle down a little after March, even if only because if some of these projects aren’t finished by April there’s almost no point in finishing them at all. (That’s an exaggeration, but no, they really should be finished sooner rather than later.)

Meanwhile…well, there hasn’t been too much of a meanwhile. There was a crew fixing the roof here for the past couple of days, a roof that was leaking again in the dining room after all of that snow, but luckily I wasn’t home for most of the hammering. Honestly, when I look back on the week, it doesn’t even seem possible that that’s what it was. A day, maybe two or three, but a week? Where did all that time go?

Monday

It threatened to snow last night, half a foot by some accounts, and we spent much of the weekend dreading the snow’s arrival. I am so finished with winter.

And it did snow in the night, though it started much later than had been predicted, and was at best a good dusting. (The picture up above is from early January.) It was cold and gray enough that none of the snow melted, but I think we all acknowledge that we dodged a bullet this time.

This time.

Sunday

I wrote this today:

Time travel can be like this: it fractures cause and effect, confuses the linear patterns that seem to govern our lives, and makes a patchwork of our memories, ripped and torn at unexpected seams. You remember things that never happened; you get a life you never lived. Take Abraham, for instance.

“I’m going to write a story about a time machine,” Abraham says. “It’s a mechanical device for traveling to the past that will become its own blueprint when future generations read it.”

“You’ll have to get it published first,” Laura says. She likes Abraham but doesn’t know when or where this talk of writing and time machines started. He still hasn’t even graduated high school. “Hand me that mop,” she says. “Somebody broke a jar of pickles in aisle six.”

“That isn’t a problem,” Abraham says, meaning the story of the time machine, of course. Laura has to reach past him to grab the mop. “I just have to write the right story and the time machine will exist. It will always have existed. And they’ll send it back to meet me.”

Laura likes Abraham. When he first started working here at the start of summer, she thought he was kind of cute. But he has some pretty weird notions, and this time travel business is just the latest.

“Is that important to you?” she asks. She heads back out to the front of the store, toting the bucket and mop, and Abraham follows. “A visit from the future?”

“I want to know how the story ends,” he tells her.

“Black holes are basically time machines,” she says. It’s something she read, maybe for class, maybe not, she doesn’t remember. She knows she probably shouldn’t be humoring him, adding fuel to this fire, but the night shifts are long, and dull except for broken jars of pickles, so she says it. “Maybe your time machine should be built out of a black hole.”

I’m not exactly pleased with it, but sometimes that’s the nature of the beast: you struggle through forty minutes of free-writing only to have nothing much at all to show for it. I’m not saying there isn’t the start of some kind of story buried in this somewhere, just that, if there is, it’s well buried indeed. But in writing, even the wrong words are better than no words.

I’m not watching the Oscars this evening, though I can’t claim to have made a better choice by watching A Good Day to Die Hard. It’s easily the worst movie in the series, rarely even rising to the level of interesting, and I can only imagine how ridiculous any sixth movie in the Die Hard franchise would have to be.

I probably should have spent the evening writing. Even more bad words would have been better than this.

Saturday

On Thursday I was on campus, talking with instructors. I still need to type up and distribute my notes, but I’m done with campus calling until the fall, which makes me happy.

Yesterday, we had a team outing to Astoria, where we had a very nice lunch, followed by a visit to the Museum of the Moving Image, and then a drink before heading home. (My mixed drink was called a Suffering Bastard, which was much more pleasant than it sounds.) This was the outing we’d planned for a month ago when I got sick, so it was nice to finally get a chance to do it. It was a really fun day out with my co-workers.

Today, I gave blood. They had some trouble with the vein on my right arm, leaving me with a nasty-looking bruise, but it was smooth sailing once we switched to the left. Thanks to the switch, though, it took a little longer than I’d expected, and after I decided to head home for lunch rather than try to go get a (much-needed, admittedly) haircut.

Tonight, I watched Dreamcatcher. It’s not one of Stephen King’s best, but I remember liking the book well enough — even if a quick glance at Goodreads shows I only gave it two stars — but the movie is just ridiculously bad. On occasion, the ridiculous trumps the bad, making it almost enjoyable in its lousy craziness, but it’s often not even fun in a “so bad it’s good” way.

Anyway, that’s been my past few days.

The last three days (again)

There’s not a whole lot to report, actually.

The weather, while it has taken a turn the cold and flurrying since the weekend, hasn’t been the soul-crushing winter that the rest of February was. Then again, it also beggars belief that it’s the end of February already. It’s a shorter month, but not by that much. It’s still early days, but I may look back and remember it as the longest and shortest month of 2014.

At work, I handed over a book to production, and I don’t think I was quite prepared for the huge feeling of relief that would follow. But the handing-over itself? That was just a lot of paperwork and formatting and back-and-forth with authors. I’ll have two more books in quick succession that will need to go into production very soon, and I think the feeling of relief was only because they couldn’t be handed over immediately. (One manuscript has permission issues for which I’ve contracted a freelancer, and the other isn’t expected until Monday.) I had a little breathing room, in which I could focus on some other smaller projects — I have manuscripts out for review, I’m mentoring someone (and worried I’m just giving her busy work to do) — and finally typing up my notes from my campus trips a couple of weeks ago. I’ll be on campus again tomorrow, headed to Stony Brook University, unless illness or weather unravel those plans for a third time.

I finished reading Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. It’s an interesting book, one that I’ve actually attempted to read a couple of times in the past. I’m not sure exactly why those attempts fell apart on me like they did, since it’s actually a really good book and maybe one of Dick’s more accessible, less out-there books. (I’d actually started reading The Divine Invasion, then quit maybe a hundred pages in when I learned it was the middle book in the so-called “VALIS Trilogy.”) The book is an alternate history, of a world where Nazi Germany and Japan won World War II, and I think Dick makes a really smart move centering most of the action in Japanese-controlled San Francisco. The book is less about the mechanics of this world, the kind of thing you see in countless “what if the Nazis had won?” stories, and more about using that world to look at our own. If it had been set in Germany, or Nazi-controlled New York, it would have been a very different book.

And that’s about it, really. Just a handful of decent but uneventful days.