personal

Thursday

I spent yesterday on campus — that’s a photo of, I think, the school’s mascot up above — talking with instructors and bookstore employees. I tried talking with someone at the library as well, but I was only able to leave my card thanks to the (quite noisy) renovation that was happening.

This is the first of three campus visits I’ll make this month — we’re tasked with about six meetings each at three different schools a semester — and this one went reasonably well. I still have to pull together my notes, and follow up with a couple of people by phone, but the heightened nervousness I was feeling at the start of it kind of went away. To be replaced only by ordinary nervousness, but at least that’s a step up. I think I was just so out of practice, since we don’t have to do this over the summer, and had such a difficult time actually scheduling these appointments, that I was fearing the worst.

I wouldn’t say yesterday was the best, but the weather was nice, the campus was small and easy to get around — it’s ten minutes from my door and I’d never been there before — and I think I walked away with some interesting feedback. And my hat’s off to the one professor at the end of the afternoon who still agreed to meet despite having her young ear-infected son and nowhere for him to be except for underfoot.

Anyway, today was a pretty good day as well. I had three phone calls with instructors planned, which turned into one. (The first wasn’t there but called me back; the second apologized for giving me the wrong day; and the third was apparently on the phone with someone else when I called…and, in all fairness, hadn’t confirmed the time with me anyway.) But, more important, I finished the large report I wasn’t expecting to finish until at least tomorrow afternoon. It’s been delayed a lot longer than I wanted it to be, and I’m glad to finally have it off my plate.

Not least of all because I won’t be in the office at all next week.

Sunday, again

No writing group again this week, as we’re taking a short hiatus.

So instead, I put a new issue of Kaleidotrope online. The new issue has stories of alien encounters, warring tribes, strange events and stranger journeys, and, of course, the future. Plus poems and silly horoscopes. I’m pleased with how it came out, though I’d appreciate any feedback, there or here. (I don’t get a lot of feedback on the zine, actually.)

I wish I could say it’s been a busy week otherwise, but I’ve mostly just been working.

Last night I watched Prince of Darkness. It’s a deeply odd and silly movie on some levels, but also really creepy and smart about what’s frightening. It’s far from John Carpenter’s best — I’d say that’s easily Halloween followed by The Thing — but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

I was not surprised by how much I enjoyed the finale of Breaking Bad this evening, though. There’s been a lot of hype, particularly if you’re on Twitter, calling it “the best show ever,” and some of that is probably overblown. But I liked it a lot, and I thought tonight’s episode was as strong as the show has ever been.

I mean, it’s no Sleepy Hollow, of course, but then what is?

Sunday

It’s been a few days, or maybe even a few days more than that. Last week was a little strange, and I don’t know that I’ve quite adjusted to the regular schedule, whatever that means, just yet.

On Thursday afternoon, there was a memorial service for my uncle in Connecticut. My sister, who lives in Maryland, arrived here the night before, so on Thursday morning we all drove out to Mystic. Under different circumstances, it would have been a lovely day, gorgeous weather along the river and good food at both lunch and dinner. But it was good that the family could be there, even just for the few hours of the service. His death was not a shock, but I don’t know that that makes it any easier, particularly for my aunt and their two (grown) sons. So, while sad, it was sort of a lovely day after all.

On Friday, I shook hands with my company’s new CEO-designate.

This is not something I expected, although I had expected to go see him speak, as he was addressing all of our New York offices. This is our global parent company, not just the publishing part of it that I work for day to day, and the event wasn’t even in our building. (Though we were all required to be there.) I somehow managed to be near the front of the line, having caught a lucky break with one of the elevators down to the street, and before I could even get my ID out — you needed photo ID to get in — who should sneak past and try to cut the line but the future CEO himself. (Perhaps I should add that this is obviously a joke, to any investors trolling for even the most ridiculously un-scandalous of scandalous news. He didn’t cut; I was glad to let him go ahead of me. There, good?) But I was still right behind him when it was time to take the elevators upstairs, and while we rode up he introduced himself and shook my hand.

I’m sorry if I made it sound like this was some kind of story, of how I was plucked from obscurity thanks to a chance meeting with the head of the company and hand-picked for greatness. I mean, I did point him in the direction of the men’s room when he visited our offices later in the day, but that’s about the extent of our interaction. He seemed like a nice enough guy, and I’m cautiously optimistic about what he shared of his business philosophy and future plans, but that’s about it.

That was…right, Friday. That night we went out to dinner. It was okay, although I think my scallops were a little gritty. That’s neither here nor there, but if you came here for there or here, you likely came to the wrong place.

Last night I watched Rear Window, which I’d never seen before. It’s good, although maybe a little strange and gimmicky even by Hitchcock standards. It’s surprisingly entertaining, given how slow the real suspense is to arrive, but it’s quite entertaining nevertheless.

And today, I had no writing group, just the crossword puzzle. I grumbled a little on Twitter about how surprisingly difficult that turned out to be, and I can’t say it was a particularly thrilling puzzle all on its own.

But, anyway, that’s been the past few days.

Sunday

It’s been a relatively quiet weekend, although we did have some very bad news yesterday afternoon. One of my uncles, my mother’s oldest brother and my godfather, passed away after a protracted illness. We knew this was coming — my parents, along with the rest of my mother’s siblings, went to visit him a few weeks ago — and there’s some comfort in knowing he’s no longer in pain. But it’s still a shock, it always is, and my mother especially is still grieving. He and I weren’t necessarily close, but I always liked him, and it’s sad to think of the world without him. We’re still waiting to hear about the funeral arrangements.

Life does go on, though. Last night, I watched Elmer Gantry. It’s a complicated movie about religion and revivalism and faith, with an Oscar-winning performance by Burt Lancaster. (And one by Shirley Jones, too, I just discovered, although she’s also quite good in it.) I quite enjoyed the movie, although at two and a half hours it did occasionally feel a little long.

And then this afternoon I wrote this:

The trouble all started when they blew up the world.

It was just one planet of a dozen slated for demolition that year, uninhabited and, moreover, uninhabitable, at least by every estimate and simulation the Corportion’s budget had allowed them to run. “Not so much as a protozoa on the surface,” the chief engineer was fond of saying, with what he always hoped the colonial press would characterize as a hearty chuckle. “Not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse.”

Which was not to suggest that the discovery of indigenous life somewhere topside would have necesarily halted the project. A mouse was just a mouse. The Corporation had a mandate to catalog and preserve any extraterrestrial life they might happen to find, but in eighty-plus years of stellar expansion they had so far found exactly none. Just one long stretch of stars, and the dead hunks of worlds too fiery or gaseous or bitterly cold for human settlement. Most planets, they’d long since discovred, weren’t good for much of anything unless you broke them down into their constituent parts, brought in the demo team’s world-eater ships and vacuumed up the natural resources. You couldn’t settle on a big ball of methane or frozen nickel ore, but you could fill the ships a hundred times over. And then, when the giant rock was reduced to dust and rubble, and the orbits of everything else in the local system had been carefully adjusted, you could take those ships and power the Corporation’s real purpose for being: the singularity drive.

Each one had a black hole at the center, and each one of them was a picky eater.

James Way didn’t have any worries that the planet on his viewscreen, which was designated #579NI-17-5LQB5 in all of their log books, harbored any sort of life. He had faith in the chief engineer, if not the man’s strange sense of humor, and furthermore he trusted the simulations and surface telemetry that he’d checked at least a half dozen times himself. But it always paid to be sure. Way knew you couldn’t just turn the world-eaters off — “you don’t start it, you unleash it,” he’d been told his first week with the Corporation, when he’d first stood and watched a planet turned into its base elements and ash — and nothing that was down there had any chance of surviving.

The first blip on his screen took him totally by surprise.

One of the prompts that inspired it, the last quote at the end, was taken from a magazine ad for some car, so I’d probably have to rework that. (And I don’t know, can nickel ore even be frozen?) But I like it, mostly because it occurred to me near the end that I could introduce a character, and it could start to be a story, not just backstory. That might sound obvious, in part because stories often do start with character, but here it wasn’t until the appearance of James Way — somewhere near the end of our forty free-writing minutes — that this started to feel like something to me.

Anyway, that — plus failing at the Sunday crossword, and watching tonight’s incredible episode of Breaking Bad — was my weekend, both good and bad.

Thursday

I think the week may be starting to get to me. Or maybe that’s just this Thursday talking.

I overslept this morning, waking up ten minutes before my regular train. No, I’m sorry, I exaggerate. Eleven minutes. Yet I managed to shower, brush my teeth, get dressed, and get out the door to be on the station platform at exactly the moment the train was pulling in. If there were an Olympic team for that sort of thing, I feel like I at least aced the qualifying rounds.

Amazingly, I was still expected to do other things for the rest of the day, like work. But believe me, there’s no lack of that stuff to be done.

At lunch, I didn’t take my umbrella with me, primarily because it wasn’t raining. Sometime between buying my sandwich and eating it, however, the skies opened up and the started bucketing down. And I thought, well, it’s just two or maybe three blocks to the office. Just how wet could I possibly get? I waited under the overhang of a scaffolding on 42nd Street until the light at the crosswalk changed, and then I bolted across the street. And discovered, unsurprisingly, that the answer to my earlier question was: a whole lot of wet. Somewhere between sopping and soaking. You know those log flume rides at water parks, where you get thoroughly drenched? (Do they still have those? I haven’t been to a water park in a long time.) I looked like that.

I spent the rest of the day damp and cold. Luckily the office wasn’t at its peak freezing temperatures — last week had us all fooled into thinking it was early fall — and I compensated with an extra cup of coffee. (I’d bought a box of K-cups from a nearby Tim Horton’s on the non-rain-drenching part of my lunch break.)

It was really nice to finally get home and change my socks.

But tomorrow’s Friday, and with the rain today the temperatures, which had jumped back up to muggy and insane, are supposed to go back down. It’s not quite fall by any stretch, but we’ll get there, by hell or high water. (Though neither one of those would be super-appreciated. I have only so many socks.)