personal

But I still don’t like Daylight Savings Time

I’ve been having some issues with WordPress lately, which I thought that I (or maybe just magic elves) had resolved, but which returned again this weekend. That meant the blog, this blog, was difficult to update or even read, with 30-second lags between every new page or refresh. Thirty seconds is a long time in Internetese.

But I contacted my hosting provider (Dreamhost) about it this morning, and they resolved the problem by this evening. Everything seems to be working much faster now, which is good.

I wish I could tell you that I spent the weekend doing something worth writing about here, but that would be a lie. It was an okay weekend, but I mostly just did some cleaning yesterday, which made me a little miserable allergy-wise overnight, and reading of Kaleidotrope submissions. I also watched Safety Not Guaranteed, and while I’m not 100% sure about the ending, I liked the movie in general.

My weekly writing group didn’t happen this week, so that’s about it, really.

Work out

It snowed last night, and well into this afternoon, but any hopes that it might lead to a snow day, a day off from work, were dashed pretty quick upon waking up. But it’s okay. The trains were running relatively on time — I think the LIRR officially considers six minutes late or under “on time” — and it wasn’t too difficult getting to work. It wasn’t exactly go-back-to-sleep easy, but at least it was Friday.

I had a training session planned for the second half of the day, one on workload management, but it was canceled. The irony that I was able to use that as an opportunity to actually get some work done is not at all lost on me. The session’s been rescheduled for later this month, and I wonder if that means we’ll get another free lunch out of it. (I’m guessing they’d already paid for the food when they canceled.)

Anyway, that and a lot of work was my Friday.

Tuesday

I liked this Tuesday, when I got to sleep late and work from home, a lot more than last week, when I didn’t. (But, in retrospect, could have.)

Sure, I worked a little late, finally turning off my laptop some time after 8 o’clock, but that wasn’t all consecutive. I mean, I watched an episode of Blackadder over lunch, so it wasn’t all work.

But working late is a whole lot better when it’s working from home. For one thing, the commute’s a lot easier.

Sunday writing

So this kind of got away from me, or maybe I never really had a handle on it in the first place. It’s free-writing, based on a newspaper headline and a drawing from the New York Times book review pages. So it’s almost guaranteed to not be completely coherent. But it’s what I wrote today, beyond the morning pages, which I’ve been doing consistently since the end of January.

If they had killed her, she didn’t remember it. She couldn’t let herself think about that now, anyway, not with the portal behind her closing — no, wait, she’d blinked, and now it was closed — and the next portal not scheduled to appear until she didn’t know when, or how, or where. She didn’t even know what this city was called, much less where the portal had dumped her inside of it. Where were the street signs, the people? It looked so different than it had just a minute ago — not that a minute ago it had looked any less strange. The thing on her belt, what she thought Leo had called the actopulse when he’d first hooked it there and shoved her through, that was blinking; and when she looked at its readout, the red flashing numbers painted across its dented and silvery face, it seemed to suggest she’d traveled forty years into the future. Which, okay, sure, fine, she could believe that. She’d seen a lot weirder happen since she’d bumped into Leo that morning, and time travel at least seemed plausible enough as far as explanations went. But then, was this still the same place, that crazy city that Leo had stranded her in when he pushed her through that first portal? Because then where were the people? And not just the two who had been chasing her, had opened fire just as she’d —

Damn, why couldn’t she remember? It was these portals, or maybe just this last one, that had Swiss-cheesed her brain. She’d liked to give that jerk Leo a piece of her brain when — no, wait, of her mind. He’d probably wanta piece of her brain after this, stuffed in a formaldehyde jar on a shelf in his lab, studying what had happened to her, what happened to a person exposed to the portals, the actopulse — if that even was what he’d called it. And why couldn’t she remember? Had they killed her? She couldn’t be here, forty years later, if they’d done that, could she?

Okay, she thought, brain’s still a little foggy after that last jump. I know I opened the portal to get away from those two guys, the two in black with the weird guns. And they’re not here, so at least that much is good. She just needed to figure out where she was, and —

Maybe there was another Leo here, too? He’s the one who’d sent those goons after her, right? She was starting to remember, at least a little. This was some kind of parallel dimension, and she wasn’t supposed to be here, like physically not supposed to be here, on a quantum level. And the actopulse didn’t really work worth a damn. It kept her from getting ripped apart, atom by atom, whenever she stepped — or got shoved — through a portal, but it didn’t stop wear and tear on those atoms, didn’t keep her memory safe from that wear and tear, and didn’t help her one bit when parallel versions of Leo tried to have her killed for invading his private kingdom.

Would he still be king of this world forty years later? She couldn’t imagine any world dumb enough to let that happen. She needed to find out, get off the street, and then figure out a way to get home. Or at least get to the next portal, which probably wouldn’t be good for her memory or atoms but which might at least lead somewhere better, somewhere else. She’d keep going till the actopulse, or her brain, conked out.

Tonight, I think I’m going to spend reading Kaleidotrope submissions. Because there ain’t no party like a slush-reading party.

Cover story

I spent some of the day cleaning, some of it watching television, some of it reading Kaleidotrope submissions, some it unexpectedly napping, and this evening watching Argo.

I thought I would be more impressed with it than I was. It’s a decent movie, well made and acted, with some moments of greatness. But I don’t think it’s a great movie, or even necessarily Ben Affleck’s best as director. It keeps juggling tones, and doesn’t always do it successfully, and I don’t think the film is really engaging until the second half, once Affleck’s character actually travels to Iran. And then the film is almost undone again by one Hollywood contrivance after another, manufactured tension that can make everyone involved look silly. And that’s leaving aside the possible historical inaccuracies and other criticisms that have followed the film.

I mean, I liked it, but I did not in any way love it. I can’t speak to its being last year’s “best picture,” though it did win that award. I only saw two of the other movies nominated in that category — Django Unchained and Beasts of the Southern Wild — and I don’t know if either were necessarily better than this. Certainly more daring, more personal. But I did like it, for the most part.