personal

Sunday, once more with feeling

It’s cold and snowing outside right now. Not so much that I expect any real accumulation — it’s more like a wet dusting — but I’m nonetheless glad I’ll be working from home tomorrow.

It was an unexciting weekend. Yesterday afternoon, we set up the outdoor Christmas lights, making us one of the last people in the neighborhood to do so. Every year I get to feel more like a Scrooge because I don’t want Christmas lights and trees and songs until it’s actually Christmas. I’ll even be generous and say let’s have it all for the two weeks beforehand, and keep the lights up until New Year’s. And during that time, go for broke. I like Christmas a lot. But maybe we don’t need to adorn everything with holiday decorations months in advance. Maybe Christmas doesn’t have to start while we’re still eating Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe that, which was once just a joke or a come from retailers, doesn’t have to be the new rule. Maybe what makes holidays special is that they aren’t every day of the year.

Then again, just about an hour ago, I heard somebody setting off fireworks, which now seems to happen year-round in this neighborhood. So clearly I’m in the minority with this whole “celebrate everything all the time” thing.

It’s a shame, because I do like Christmas.

So anyway. Last night I watched Zero Dark Thirty, which is decidedly not a Christmas movie. It’s well crafted, if a little more pro-torture than I was expecting, but I can’t necessarily say that I enjoyed it. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why, but part of it’s the torture thing.

Today I did the crossword puzzle and went to my Sunday writing group. I was thinking I might continue working on the thing I wrote last week, but, as I think will become quickly evident, the writing prompts that were given to me kind of made that impossible:

The Panther leaped from the rooftop to the busy street below. He’s not even looking, Jodie thought. What a show-off. She’d be leaping tall buildings too if she had super-powers, if she’d been “infused with the mighty spirit of the jungle” instead of being tasked with finding them a parking spot nearby and feeding the meter. She didn’t like driving in the city on the weekends and the Panther knew it, but “evil doesn’t sleep in on Sundays, chum,” was all he’d said. She’d asked him to stop calling her “chum,” but apparently that’s what he called all his sidekicks, super-powered or not. No wonder every one of them had up and quit.

She didn’t need this. She could probably go back to MIT, get her old teaching job back. She still had friends in the computer science department, the same ones who’d been so happy to have a techie whiz kid like her on the faculty, then so shocked when only three years in she’d said she was going to turn her talents to crime-fighting instead. They’d bought her a cape as a going-away present, and the dean said, “come back anytime,” but it was obvious they didn’t approve.

Three years into this, Jodie couldn’t say she blamed them. She’d tried to make a go of it as a lone avenger — never with the cape, but only because she worried about dry-cleaning — but she had neither the mutant powers nor gymnastic skills it seemed like every bank robber, hostage-taker, and even petty thief in the city had nowadays. She’d bounced around for a while through different identities and costumes, tried to solder together some weaponry from old computer parts, but in the end the best she’d had to show for it was a couple of cracked ribs and a bruised pride.

Enter the Panther. His last sidekick had just left — turned to super-villainy was the rumor, but the man himself wouldn’t confirm or deny. Jodie’s tech skills didn’t seem like an obvious fit for a man raised from a boy by the jungle, who could scale twenty-story buildings like they were vine-covered trees, then back-flip through a hail of on-coming bullets. He was still using a dial-up when she met him. But he’d seemed nice enough — she’d liked that “chum” back then — and she couldn’t deny they’d had a shared enemy in common.

Dr. Werewolf.

God, it sounded stupid now even just saying his name, remembering a time when a nerdy rocket-scientist-turned-lycanthrope had been the closest thing she’d had to an arch-nemesis. The Panther and Werewolf had had their own run-ins, and somehow the evil doctor had managed to escape at the last minute each time. Maybe if Jodie and the Panther pooled their resources?

It hadn’t taken long after that to find the Werewolf’s lair…

And that was my weekend.

Tuesday

I have had worse days, I’ll just say that.

I finished one review report and sent it to the commissioning editor this morning, then kind of unexpectedly did the same for another review report after lunch. Both are projects that I inherited from colleagues who’ve left the company — at their own choosing, and we were sorry to see them both go — and the latter is just one I’m helping to shepherd along until our new development editor starts work in a few weeks. In all honesty, there wasn’t a lot to be done, and I was just compiling the reviews and summarizing what they said. Of course, there weren’t a lot of reviews, so points of consensus were a little scarce on the ground. But the feedback was generally positive, and I think the book will do just fine without me.

I always feel a little weird talking about work here, in part because I’m not sure it’s interesting to anybody else but me. (Then again, I could probably argue that about two thirds or more of what I post here.) I like what I do, but the mechanics of it aren’t necessarily exciting. I do market research, look at courses and enrollments, send out questionnaires and surveys to instructors, get feedback on textbook chapters and pedagogy, look for points of consensus about the strengths we want to highlight and the weaknesses we need to address, and put this all into a format that’s hopefully easily digestible for the book’s editor and its author(s). I do other stuff, taking books from proposal to production to publication, but that’s the main thing. And while textbook research can be surprisingly interesting — I think about pedagogy more now than I ever did as a student — it’s probably not the kind of interesting that’s easily conveyed in a weblog post, much less that’s infectious.

Though, honestly, without all that, the most interesting thing that happened all day was that I forgot my MetroCard at home and had to buy a new one this morning. And if you thought collating and summarizing reviewer feedback was less than scintillating…

Anyway, it was a pretty good day.

Sunday

The Sunday crossword puzzle and my weekly writing group. I don’t ask a lot out of Sunday.

She had been interrogated. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, Sergei thought. There was not a spot of blood, for one thing, and although her left eye was blackened and swollen shut, he knew for a fact that she had arrived here like that. A souvenir of the front, he’d been told, though possibly self-inflicted. Already the medics had seen to it and her other wounds, and she was in better health than most of the other prisoners that had arrived the same day. There was nothing about her now that bespoke of hardship or captivity, much less the fist and boot of a proper interrogation.

The recruits they sent him, these young boys from the country, were so helpless and timid. They handled her with kids’ gloves, if they handled her at all. The duty sheet nailed outside the cell door said she had last been visited three hours ago, shortly after the noonday meal, and questioned. He saw the word forcefully penciled in beneath that but knew it was a joke. The boys meant well, even those who were enlisted only because the farms held no more work, but they wouldn’t know forcefully if it slapped them across the face. They would put their questions to the woman, dutifully repeat the scripts they had been handed, but they did not recognize her danger. They did not understand that you needed real force to loosen the enemy’s tongue, that you survived this war only with cold steel in your veins, and that you should never suffer a witch to live.

He had not seen the witchcraft himself. Even the soldiers who had delivered the prisoners, had faced this woman and her compatriots on the field of battle, would speak only hesitantly about what the hag had done. Darkened skies, a river turned to mud. Sergei had seen these things himself in the war’s early days, before the enemy’s mages had been killed, before he’d lost his leg and had been re-stationed here. Now, though, these magics were less common, more woman’s work, and the soldiers who encountered them were perhaps less prepared to act. They could not even tell him if she’d lost her eye in the volley of fire or…

We got movie sign

Last night, I watched How to Steal a Million, which, while enjoyably pleasant, was maybe less than you’d expect from a romantic heist movie set in Paris starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole.

This afternoon, I re-watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I haven’t seen in several years. It’s still quite stunning, and a hugely important work, but it’s a movie I probably admire more than I enjoy. (I’m sort of tempted to seek out the sequel, which I remember having something of the opposite problem.)

After that, I went for a walk, then came back and watched Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. I do think I like his earlier movies, like The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo better, but there’s no denying this is much more epic and beautifully shot. Seriously, I could watch the castle attack — which this clip shows but doesn’t really do justice to — almost all day.

After that — I took a short break to go to the local diner with my parents for dinner — I watched John Carpenter’s The Ward, which I was just kind of waiting to be over. It’s really not very good, boring more than anything else, with a twist ending that almost seemed clever the first hundred times I’ve seen it in other movies. A couple of months ago, I watched Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, which is at least interesting in its flaws. Weirdly, unshakably interesting. The Ward, on the other hand, isn’t even representative of Carpenter at his absolute, crazy worst (like the terrible In the Mouth of Madness). There’s nothing distinctive about it at all. It’s not even risibly bad; it just kind of is.

Which isn’t a great way to end the evening or a day spent mostly in movies. But there you have it.

It’s hard to believe the long weekend is almost over. There’s still tomorrow, and I don’t go back to the office on Monday, but it’ll be back to work for me soon. Of course, that’s only for a couple of weeks. When the heck did it become December already?