Finished the damn thing at around 5:00 in the morning. Slept, gave it another pass through, then put it in the mail.
I’m beat. I have thoughts about the class for Clarion 2009 being announced, but those will have to wait for another time. No more from me, except to say that by far the most exciting thing to happen on the internet today was the discovery of a photocopy of Alan Moore’s Big Numbers issue 3.
Manu Ginobili forcing amorous attention on Ian Mahinmi after they are singled out by the Kiss Cam during a stoppage of play:
(Were you aware that I am a fanatical supporter of the San Antonio Spurs? I’m a fanatical supporter of the San Antonio Spurs. This is my only sports obsession.)
Crohn’s patients, I have come to learn, frequently experience what are known as “flare ups”: sudden spikes in the severity of their symptoms, often requiring agressive medicinal intervention to combat. I had a flare up yesterday, and it had me–during my more lucid moments–reflecting again that “flare up” is a far less evocative phrase for the experience than I think it deserves. I would prefer something like “perpetual stomach stomp,” or, perhaps, “gutsplosion.” (How great a world would this be if students across the nation had to do PubMed database searches for gutsplosion references to write their papers?)
Anyway. I spent nearly all of yesterday in a drug induced stupor, sleeping when I could and downing pain meds and reading when I couldn’t. After about 20 hours of this things began to improve slightly, and I decided to get out my computer and see if it would be possible to get any work done. Despite the end of the month deadline, working on the story I’m writing for the Genomics Forum competition, for which I am still figuring out the characters, seemed too hard. So I opened up the file for another story I’ve been arduously revising for the past month.
Words started falling out of me like grains from a split sack of rice.
I have no explanation for this. Up until yesterday, revising this story had been like pulling teeth. But last night I could suddenly see through the haze of the story as I had written it once clearly through to the end of the story as it should be written. I think I will be able to finish the revision today.
No deep thoughts here. Other than perhaps that it is surprising how far ending on a bright note can go toward changing one’s perceptions of a miserable experience.
“If I were an earthworm….”
“If I were a dragonfly….”
Over at the Sundance Channel website, you can watch Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno videos, in which she dresses up in colorful costumes and enthusiastically and accurately demonstrates the sexual behaviors of various invertebrates. Utterly fabulous.
Ted Chiang has a story, “Exhalation,” up for a Hugo award this year. It was originally published in the anthology Eclipse 2, and now Night Shade Books has made it available for download. I just read it, and loved it. It is in structure and tone very similar to one of my very favorite short stories, “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges. In fact, the similarities are such that I wonder if Borges was a direct inspiration. Compare the first lines.
Borges: “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite, series of hexagonal galleries.”
Chiang: “It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life.”
Additionally, both stories end with the narrator drawing comfort from imagining a universe which extends beyond what is commonly conceived of as the boundaries of the one he inhabits. Borges’s story uses combinatorial complexity as the basis of its thematic explorations, while Chiang’s uses the laws of thermodynamics. Basically, Chiang has written the physics-y version of my favorite math-y story ever, and has thus made my inner scientist very happy.
Still too focused on my short story to put any mental energy into structuring these thoughts.
My full rant about how terrible the last episode of Battlestar Galactica was (including the stupid implications of Hera being mitochondrial Eve) will have to wait, as I am out working on my short story for the Genomics Forum competition (and again posting from my phone). In the meantime, I agree with pretty much all of the points raised by the Battlestar Round Table at tor.com.
Oh my gods, that was such a train wreck. What the frak was Ron Moore thinking?
Decree: there is no last hour of Battlestar Galactica, in much the same way that there is only one season of Heroes. Battlestar Galactica ends with the ship getting destroyed at the colony when they attempt to jump away. The last hour is an insane fantasy that goes through the mind Kara Thrace (who is NOT a fucking angel pigeon) right before she turns the jump key.
As I have suspended my ban on buying books for Love Your Indie Month, I went ahead and picked up a copy of James Kennedy’s The Order of Odd Fish, which first came to my attention after I read a highly entertaining short story on his blog. Last night I read 130 pages of it–about a third of the book–and…I think I’m going to put it down and move on to something else.
It isn’t that the book is bad. It isn’t. In fact, I think that if this book had been handed to me when I was eight years old I would have read it and re-read it, laughing uproariously every time. But while I have a great appreciation for absurdity, I think that to stay entertained these days I need some degree of subtlety or connection to reality. The Order of Odd Fish is a fabulously mad, over the top cartoon. The images are outrageous, but the story just isn’t capturing me. I’ve been reading a lot of books marketed as YA lately. Some, like M. T. Anderson’s books I don’t think I could have fully appreciated when I was young. Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series I find light, entertaining reading that may have seemed more fraught with meaning to me when I was younger, but I suspect I would have related to about the same coming to it at any age. The Order of Odd Fish I think I came to too late to appreciate the way it should be. I will try to get my copy to someone it will have the chance to touch more significantly.
Check out the “signs and symptoms ” section of the Wikipedia article on Cushing’s syndrome. I am experiencing most of these; not because I actually have Cushing’s, but because I have Crohn’s disease, which is currently being treated with prednisone, which ups my cortisol levels–functionally giving me an artificial case of Cushing’s. One of the symptoms on that list is central body obesity: weight gain that affects the trunk and head but not the limbs. After I started on prednisone I very quickly gained 30 lbs. and was suddenly at risk of needing to buy a whole new closet full of clothes. That, plus the acne, plus the moon face, meant that I had traded chronic pain for a host of body image issues. I think, on net, that’s a good trade, but still is less than ideal. So, despite my doctor rolling his eyes and saying, “On prednisone? Good luck with that,” I decided to try going on a weight loss regimen with the hopes of at least stabilizing my weight before all of my pants stopped fitting. Since the symptoms from my Crohn’s are still at a level that makes exercise difficult, I chose to focus on dietary weight control. To that end I downloaded an app for my iPhone called Lose It to help me track my calorie intake.
That was a little over four weeks ago. I’ve lost 9.5 lbs.
Lose It is more than just a calorie tracker. It calculates your resting metabolic rate and assigns you a daily calorie budget to meet your weight loss goal. Every day you put in the food you eat and, if you so desire, the exercise you undertake, and it keeps statistics about your budget management on a daily and weekly basis. What makes it really effective is that its interface for tracking diet is connected to an online food database that makes it largely unnecessary to know the caloric content of what you are eating beforehand; you can find the the meal you just ate, or a reasonable approximation thereof, from within the program itself. The database has specific meals from many national restaurant chains, most national grocery brands, and any individual ingredient you are likely to use. You can input custom recipes and foodstuffs, and the app remembers them so you need only select it the next time. I’m not an eater of staggering variety, so after a month of using Lose It I very rarely have to search for foods anymore; most of what I eat is there to be selected from my list of previous meals. I’m also not a person of great willpower, but the subtle feedback of my green calorie bar turning red when I go over-budget for day seems to be enough to keep me in line. I’m averaging about one over-budget day a week, making me consistently under-budget on a week-by-week basis. And, as I mentioned, it’s working. I’m losing weight.
Lose It (iTunes App Store link) is a great. It even has nutrition tracking functions, which I haven’t used because I’m more interested in vanity than health, but I’m sure they’re excellent. It’s a free download, so if you are an iPhone user there’s no reason not to check it out.