personal

Tuesday or Thursday, it’s all the same to me

Today was a lot like yesterday, only I couldn’t log into my computer for the first fifteen or twenty minutes in the office. Luckily, I sit right near IT so I was able to get the problem resolved relatively quickly.

And that’s it, really. A lot of work, some of it the same as yesterday, some of it new. Right now, I’m mostly just waiting on some twenty-two reviews that were supposed to have come in either while I was out on vacation or before.

It’s tempting to ask these instructors what they would do if their students handed in an assignment a month or more late.

Tempting, but I don’t.

Back to the same old same old

I went back to work today, after almost three full weeks off, and it was…pretty ordinary.

I’m almost disappointed by how uncrazy my day was — busy, yes, most definitely. But my in box was not at all unmanageable, and I had a pretty much average day. Sure, I managed without too much effort to get a seat on the subway this morning, and that’s almost unheard of, but the work day, after that? Yeah, nothing special.

I got a lot done, followed up with all the people who were supposed to have sent me reviews while I was out but didn’t, and then came home. Yes, I’m quite glad that today only felt like Monday, that the weekend is so close. And sure, the whole waking up early to get a train isn’t all that appealing compared to…well, not. But, by and large, an ordinary day.

Seconded

I have been off from work for eighteen days, and for at least a week of that I have been unable to check my e-mail. I go back to the office tomorrow morning, and that should be…interesting. I can’t say I’m looking forward to the early mornings and sensible bedtimes, but I am looking forward to reading more, since I don’t seem to do much of that while I’m home, sadly. I do sort of rely on my daily commute for that. And, if nothing else, at least it’s only a three-day week, to ease with the transition.

Last night, I went out to dinner with my parents. We had a nice time, and a good meal, even if the restaurant itself was a little pricey, the menu unexpectedly limited, and the service not all that great. (It took forever for us to get the bill, and credit card, back, for instance, and even then it was completely wrong.) After that, I came home and watched The Great Escape, which was pretty good — and certainly better than The World Is Not Enough, which is what I watched today. (Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones? Sadly not the most ridiculous thing about it.)

I also got the latest issue of Kaleidotrope up and running last night, with a few necessary tweaks this morning. (I’ve been having some issues, both here and there, with the latest update to WordPress.) If you like stories about trolls, magic, body swaps, other planets, witches, monsters, time travel, stories themselves, and true love, then I can’t recommend it enough. Or even if you just like free fiction and poetry! I’m always interested to hear what readers think.

Today, there wasn’t much besides the movie. I poked around a short story a little, though I’m not sure I can call what I did writing.

I think I’m just still reeling from the idea that I have to go back to work tomorrow after almost three weeks. Where did all that time go?

Twenty-twelve

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what. Now try How and Why. – Margaret Atwood, “Happy Endings”

So, 2012…that was a year, huh?

At the start of it, I declared — half in jest — that it would be the Year of the Meeting. Had I only known how true that prediction was going to turn out to be…

At the start of January, a number of changes were already underway at work, with my boss’ boss having taken retirement at the end of 2011 and some of the organization in the company changing in the wake of that. Things

wouldn’t really change for my group until early March, however…and that, of course, is when the cold that I’d been fighting for the past few weeks was diagnosed as being a little pneumonia.

I spent a week at home, I suppose you could say convalescing, at my doctor’s recommendation, and at what turned out to be a very strange time for doing that. While I was out, two other people on the team were let go, which I got to hear about via e-mail, and then in a very odd teleconference call discussing the changes and the reasons for them. Shortly after I returned to the office, I learned that I still had a job…but that it would soon be as part of different group, with a different boss, on the opposite side of the building.

The new job, which I’ve had officially since the start of April, is probably a better fit. I’m still a development editor, working on textbooks, but I’m much more involved in the process, and slowly but surely working on projects beyond the narrow borders of psychology. (Which is where I’d been working exclusively before.) I like the people I work with, and for, even if that too has changed slightly since mid-year. And while it has meant a lot more work — many more irons in the fire, as it were — I’m in a good position for going forward. I miss the people I used to work with — I don’t even see them very often, and there have been a lot of other changes there, too — but I’m getting more of a chance to do the sort of development work I was hired to do.

Sometime in March, I also found time to go to my cousin’s wedding. It was a really busy month for me this year. It’s little wonder that I didn’t have much time or inclination to reflect on my also turning thirty-five.

The rest of the year has seemed almost dull by comparison.

I published four issues of Kaleidotrope this year. I’m still figuring it out as I go, but I think the zine has benefited from being published more often in a year, and from moving from print to online. I miss some of the physicality of print layout — let’s put this photo here, let’s put a little Easter egg in the margins there, etc. — but I don’t miss the costly and time-consuming photocopies, or the hours spent addressing envelopes and standing in line at the post office. The whole thing is probably just as much a money-losing operation for me as it ever was, probably even more so, since I traded those costs for upping my pay to authors. (To the still-far-below-professional rate of a cent a word for fiction.) In 2013, for instance, I will spend an estimated $2,000 putting out another four issues of the zine, which is, admittedly, a little expensive as far as hobbies go. It’s why I’ve re-added a donation link to the site. I’m going to try to lower my costs a little going forward, although that’s mainly going to be by accepting less. I’ve already decided that next year I’ll only be open to submissions from January to March, and even then I’m going to have to be even more choosy than usual. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’m edging up to a $1,000 already for 2014.

This is at least part of the reason I don’t go on vacation very often. My parents went on vacation to Italy, my sister and her husband to Turkey. I went on a work trip to the University of Maryland, Towson, and, a month ago, to Hofstra, maybe ten minutes away by car. Oh, exciting times!

We did take my father fishing for Father’s Day, and that was fun.

And then, of course, there was Hurricane Sandy, many months later. There was the week of work that I lost to that, the power outages, the awfulness of the commute in the weeks that followed.

Yeah… 2012 sure was a year.

I’m looking forward to 2013, just a change — although hopefully not as much of a change as this year, this past March in particular, turned out to be. I would like to move out, to an apartment of my own, maybe sometime in the spring, but that remains to be seen. Beyond that, I’m not really making any resolutions. I want to — I have to — write more. (I have a membership in the Online Writing Workshop that would be wasted if I didn’t.) But beyond that, I’m just going to take it as it comes.

Sunday

I go back to work in a couple of days, which I still find rather difficult to believe. I haven’t been in the office since December 14, which on the one hand seems like just yesterday. It’s going to be a strange transition going back.

But that’s not until Wednesday, a whole new year from now. Today, I mostly just did the crossword puzzle, went with my father to Lowe’s to pick up a couple of space heaters — dear lord do they work — and joined my weekly writing group. This is what three short prompts, two of which I didn’t even work in, netted me:

I don’t remember where I was the day the world first ended. I’m lucky I even remember who I was.

I couldn’t have been too close to the blast radius. Scientists, the few that are left, say the epicenter was somewhere a few miles north of Moscow, where most of the changed men have been found, where most of the dead were first risen. I woke up, after it first happened, someplace in Finland. I didn’t remember how I’d got there, or much of anything, really; I only knew I wasn’t Finnish myself, judging by my inability to read any of the road signs, or decipher the map I found folded in my jacket pocket, or make sense of the panicked shouts that accompanied my stumbling approach to the nearest town. The townspeople hadn’t been changed, not from what I could tell, but we must have still been well within the path of the first shockwaves, since they seemed even more disoriented than me.

There are symptoms of the blast, telltale signs. Those of us who have, as it were, survived have been warned in the year or two since the event that we must always be watchful. The changed men and the dead who walk are not the only dangers in this new world, and there are few places, if any, that are still safe. The closer you get to the blast radius, where the worst of those things first fell to Earth, the more you have to watch.

I didn’t know that in Finland. That was still only just days, or for all I know just hours, since the event, and I’d been close enough to still feel shaky on my feet. I knew my name, and what seemed like a few central facts, even if none of those involved how I’d got there, or what exactly had happened to us all since. I didn’t know about the change then, or about the dead, and wouldn’t still for days, but if I’d known even half of what I do now, even guessed at it, I’d have turned and run from that town without a second thought.

It’s not quite a story, but there could be something there.

Then tonight, I watched (or re-watched, actually) the surprisingly well-executed Tomorrow Never Dies. It’s absolutely ridiculous, but in the ways that a Bond movie should be. I wasn’t expecting it to be quite that much fun, even if I did remember liking the scene with the remote-controlled car.

And that was Sunday.