health

A fantastic day

All day long, and even since late last night when I think it first happened, I’ve had what I think is maybe the single itchiest mosquito bite on the inside of my left leg. It’s driven me quite mad throughout the day.

But this evening, despite all that, I went back to the Center for Fiction in Manhattan for a panel discussion on Why Fantasy Matters. It was about as interesting, but a lot more on point, as the utopia/dystopia panel on Monday. I’m a big fan of Kelly Link, and I quite enjoyed Naomi Novik’s first Temeraire book. And if I’ve yet to read anything by Felix Gilman and my experience with Lev Grossman’s writing has been less than terrific, everybody had a lot of interesting things to say about the genre. Including Grossman, who I actually quite like as critic of (and apologist for) fantasy, and whose much better known novels I may just have to pretend don’t exist. (Seriously, if I haven’t made it clear, I hated The Magicians.)

Two things I particularly liked. First, Grossman’s acknowledgment that “one thinks a lot of grandiose and unacceptable things as one is starting a novel.” And Novik’s writing advice: find writing that you like and critique it. I find this is one of — possibly the only, but certainly one of — the benefits of having a slush pile, as I do with Kaleidotrope. Figuring out why a piece of fiction does or doesn’t work, and putting that critique into words, can be valuable experience for a writer. (It also doesn’t hurt to see the other side of the rejection letter. It’s almost never fun for anybody.) You can learn just as much, if not more, from giving critique as from receiving it, Novik said (to a nodding Kelly Link beside her).

There are a few more events this month at the Center that I may be going to, but that’s it for this week. Onward to a perfectly ordinary, realistic Thursday.

I will not buy this Monday, it is scratched

I was more than a little convinced, for most of the morning, that today was really just an elaborate practical joke, or perhaps just an unusually vivid dream. It seemed just off enough that I was occasionally looking for hidden cameras or pinching myself in order to wake up.

Part of that’s just a product of the past few days. We had a little bit of a health scare here at the household recently, enough that my sister and her husband came to visit over the weekend, but everything seems to be significantly better now. (It’s funny, but just typing that now made me feel significantly better.) The weekend, my first full one since returning from Canada, was kind of a blur, and I’m kind of glad to have put it behind me.

But it was also the day itself, which started with a bizarre e-mail from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, “apologizing” for their recent price hikes — which I’ve grumbled about here and elsewhere myself — and detailing the company’s plans to split itself in two.

This is quite honestly the worst thing they could have done. While they claim they’re “done with” pricing changes, that’s only now that the new rates have already gone into effect. They’re taking what was a costly and increasingly less certain product — Netflix has been losing studio deals left and right, and their streaming catalog is looking less appealing every day — and they’ve made it twice as difficult to navigate. The new DVD-by-mail side of the business, named (rather poorly) Qwikster, won’t be tied to the streaming-only Netflix in any obvious way. Customers who opt for both options, like I currently do, will have to navigate two completely separate websites and will receive two completely separate bills. And there’s every indication that Qwikster’s being created just so it can be spun off and sold somewhere — probably not very far — down the line.

Somehow Hastings and company think this is what customers (and investors) didn’t like about the recent price hike. I stuck with them through all of that — I didn’t change or cancel my plan, despite the grumbling — but I’m seriously eying the door right now. I’ve been a customer of theirs for more than ten years now, but I think this might just be the end of the road.

The day just got more Monday-ish after that. I missed my morning train — the later one, the one that’s usually my aw-let’s-sleep-in-a-little back-up — and then got on a subway headed downtown instead of up when I arrived at Penn Station. I figured it out pretty quickly, but wound up on the local instead of the express going back. I wasn’t very late to work or anything, but it was a weird start to the day.

And then the fire alarms at the office… It was almost like being at the old office, where they went off all the time, with only occasional information relayed about why.

By noon, though, the day had more or less righted itself — as much as a Monday can, I suppose — and I carried on as usual. This evening, I finished Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which really has some wonderful writing advice in it. It’s warm, patient, and funny, at times feeling revelatory without being especially ground-breaking. I mean, her best advice — and Lamott admits its not even hers — is write. Put one damn word in front of the other. I didn’t quite do that myself this evening, as I still have a fair amount of line-editing that needs to be done if I’m going to get an issue of Kaleidotrope out before November, but I at least dug out my notebook and started re-reading the story I’ve been working on. Now that the weird Monday — and the health crisis — have passed, I’d like very much to get back into the swing of it, writing again.

Tuesday is not the new Monday

I seem to be feeling a lot better today. Not quite 100% — I’m still feeling the effects of allergies and, occasionally, I think, remnants of those allergy meds — but much better than I was last night, when I went to be around 10:30 with a box of tissues beside my head. (It was actually really annoying, knowing that I could make it all go away, the sneezing and sniffling and itchiness, with just one little pill, but the trade-off of vague but persistent unease just isn’t worth it.)

Other than the allergies, it was a pretty normal day. I got some things accomplished at work; I finished reading a really nice book. I may go to sleep a little early again tonight, but overall Tuesday was a lot better than Monday.

Allergic to Mondays

The problem with quitting allergy medicine is that you’re suddenly stuck with the symptoms of allergies. It wasn’t so bad throughout most of the day, despite my not having slept very well again last night and having decided to forgo caffeine as well. (It not surprisingly makes the edginess worse and seems to kick up whatever’s left of the Allegra in my system.) But this evening…man, I’ve just been miserable. Sneezing, runny nose, itchy and watery eyes, scratchy throat, sinus headache — all that fun stuff listed as symptoms on the box for seasonal allergies.

So I may just turn in early tonight and try to get some sleep.

I got word today from Heather that the temperature’s already in the forties in Banff, where I’ll be in a little over two weeks. Right now, when it’s muggy and allergy-y like this, and “cool” is mid-seventies, that sounds pretty darn nice.

Rain city

It poured rain for most of today.

I didn’t sleep terrifically last night, still feeling some of the effects of the Allegra, which will probably take a couple of days to fully work itself out of my system. If my allergies continue to be bad in another week or so — and my red and itchy eye, cough, and persistent sneezing suggest they just might — I may try the Claritin again, since the active ingredient’s different, and in the past I’ve taken it without incident. But the other still has me feeling a little antsy at times, and it’s a feeling I don’t really enjoy.

I spent the day working (though not yet finishing) the Sunday crossword and watching Torchwood (just awful) and Breaking Bad (terrific, though not, y’know, in any way calming). I also went out to Huntington for my weekly writing group. We spent several hours, my friend and I, talking about books and movies and TV, discussing our writing, and I wrote this:

Jake stares at the hypnotic display of readouts on the wavecycle’s computer screen, wishing, not for the first time, that he had paid closer attention in that morning’s flight class. He knows, almost instinctively, and from the pressure readings up and down the arms of his own flight suit, that the cycle wasn’t built for altitudes like this. The wind shear alone would have sent a saner man back to the ground. There are already ice crystals starting to form along the front engine block, and probably more on the underside of the cycle, away from even that much radiant heat. But Jake doesn’t know what any of the lights on the computer display actually mean — if a flashing red bar indicates danger, if a blinking yellow number suggests the fuel reserves are running low, if a swirling block of taupe means —

Who the hell designs a computer readout in taupe?

Jake knows he shouldn’t be this high up, but short of the fiery obvious, he doesn’t know how to reunite the wavecycle with the ground. The radio’s been shorted out for at least a thousand feet, not even static; and while he’s somehow managed to slow his ascent, Jake and the cycle are still rising. Soon enough, he’ll have to switch to the oxygen tanks to keep breathing, and soon after that the oxygen will run out altogether, seeing as how the tanks both are less than half-filled and Jake’s never mastered that Zen-like slow-breathing crap they tried spoon-feeding them in flight class. If Jake can’t figure out how to turn the cycle back around, and soon, he’s going to run out of air, and ice crystals are going to start forming on his underside as well.

He thinks back to that morning, less than two hours ago now, and his stupid insistence on taking the wavecycle out on a solo flight. Captain Demond hadn’t been looking for volunteers, but Jake had volunteered all the same. He wasn’t looking to get up in the air so much as for an excuse to get off the base. The wavecycle itself quite frankly bored him, archaic and clunky in its design, largely abandoned by most of the branches in favor of larger troop transports or more aerodynamic aerial attack craft. It was old and looked unstable, just another random relic dumped here with all the rest. But it would take him up and out, and that morning Jake had somewhere else he desperately needed to be.

This was more a writing exercise than a piece I’d develop into anything else. There are lots of places it could go, sure, but nothing I feel really compelled, or even particularly interested, to write. It was more for the practice of crafting sentences, rhythms, phrasing, that kind of thing, than the development of any real story. Sometimes that’s all these are, but sometimes that’s good enough.