In which it is July the 7th and I haven’t left the house all damned day.
Okay, first of all, NLW hired me to do some data entry for her AND the Ritzville blues festival gig is this weekend, so I’ll be able to buy foodz, like refried beans and tortillas and stuff, which is A Very Good Thing. Not to mention that my rent and bills are all late.
Second of all, I have a lunch date tomorrow with a local woman I met on Twitter who needs a web site built. That one will be for charity, but it’s not like I a.) don’t know how to build web sites and b.) HAVE SEVERAL METRIC FUCKTONS OF FREE TIME.
Third of all, the boys over at Cocky & Rude totally nagged me into doing an online group weight loss thing so now I have to drink a lot less alcohol because god hates me and filled alcohol with EMPTY CALORIES OMG WHAT WILL I DO WITH ALL OF THESE EMOTIONS?!?!
I woke up yesterday morning from a dream about a shapeshifter who was embedded (as a cow, of all things) in some off-world ranch operated by bad guys. It was there to shift into bipedal form and then help an agent escape. The shapeshifter’s real form was this awesome bizarro giant shrimp thing. AND it was a romance, although how you’d Do It with a giant shrimp escapes me. The cow was REALLY WEIRD LOOKING. This is why it’s better that I rarely remember my dreams.
So far today I’ve only had 550 calories and I’m star. Ving. Excuse me while I go hork down a couple tacos and half my physical volume in lettuce.
In which this is a blog post containing words and pictures.
I spent most of last week reading, knitting, and watching old television series. I watched all of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and a season of Black Books and a season of Spaced.
I worked on wisp and the art nouveau poncho.
To celebrate Independence Day eve, I went out with a couple of friends and got drunk. This happened only because they paid for everything. There were shots of Jäger.
On the 4th, I went to my aunt and uncle’s and ate macaroni salad and about four pounds of melon.
This morning I finished the poncho, and (as soon as I take it off) I’m going to block it in hopes that blocking will solve the rolling problem at the bottom. If not, the thing may end up with fringe to weight down the hem. Srsly. Seventies brown poncho from hell, people! FRINGE! Whoo hoo!
In other news (because this is the sort of shit that happens when you have zero cash flow), my brother dumped the unlimited data portion of our cell phone contract because we’re poor, and so naturally last month my phone used data all on its own and I’ve been charged $42.09 for 1,403kb worth of data transfer. (Yes, you read that right: kilobytes of data. That’s less than a megabyte and a half.) Now I’m watching stupid fucking FAQ videos for my phone, trying to find out what application is using data and how to turn it the fuck off.
Later, I will knit more and watch more old British television. I will probably walk my dog. I will make some rice and Japanese curry, once the tofu is defrosted. I will do situps I don’t want to do. I will try to figure out what I’m going to do if it’s really true that I’m not eligible for EUC. I will be glad I’m too poor to buy booze because if I weren’t, I’d probably just drink myself into a hellatious hangover because there’s no work here and I might not be able to go back to school after all and I don’t really want to move because my dog’s old and I don’t have a car and damn it I like it here.
And by then the poncho should be dry and I’ll put fringe on it. Whee!
In which there’s a free-form ramble on the topic of writing. This is a zero draft with only basic editing.
People keep telling me to write, that I should write, that I should “be a writer,” and I do write. I write hundreds of thousands of words every year, but the secret I know is that I’ve read great writers and I’m not one.
I loathe my own mediocrity, I suppose, though I grok the math of the curve and accept my position here in the middle with everyone else. It’s cool here, it’s groovy and chummy; we can’t all be the cream in this pail of milk, the world just isn’t made that way, it’s made of gradations and variations and grades and levels, and if I’m to be allowed to be very good at something then it follows that I must also be not good at something else, those are just the rules. If I’m going to be average, why can’t I do it in an office somewhere, an office with a big fat OC3 pipe to the Internet and a 401k and phones that don’t ring very often? Why do I have to write?
Like I’m not writing? I am writing. I write all the time! You’re looking at nine years of writing right here, and it’s not brilliant: I know brilliant. I eat brilliant for breakfast. I’ve read a hundred pounds of brilliant books and what I do here, my noodling, sure, it’s good in places, really good in others, I’ll give you that, but if you want to read a writer, a real writer, someone who shines, a proper real life honest-to-God writer, well, I have a list for you. In the world there are paragraphs that change the way your brain works, chapters that make you weep, phrases exquisite and ephemeral and surgical like the light in a Caravaggio.
That is not what I’m doing around here.
Just thinking about “being a writer” makes me think of the writers I’ve read, and let me tell you something, buddy: there are the brilliant, yes, but then too there are the rest: a whole big bunch these days that are crappy banal crap. So many people devour so many words each day that embarrassingly common strings of them are just available for sale any old place, just as cheap and poorly-made as any cheap poorly-made imported t-shirt with the thin fabric and the crooked seams and a flaw in every single one of the damn lot of five thousand.
My point is this: even though they sell, no one wants to make those cheap fucking t-shirts because the work sucks!
You can get bad writing all over the place, and be just as pissed as I am when I snuggle in, expectant and open, to read, only to discover that I won’t be enjoying it. If I were a writer, if I were writing I would be only slightly better than that. I love to read, I love it perfectly and without reservation: how could I stand myself to sully it with a torrent of words only barely lyrical? What is the fucking point of that, I ask you!
I do write. I’m writing right now! What you’re actually asking me to do is monetize it, turn it into a job, and do the best I can at a volume of labor that forces me, enforces me, to work at my own median level, which is the very median of all possible writing, the mean, the middle, the mediocre, and I can’t figure out why I should do to the world something like that.
Sometimes, though, sometimes: sometimes I do approach something lyrical with these words here. I’m such a late bloomer, though. Now that I’ve glimpsed it and named it and scritched it under its chin do you suppose it will take me another thirty years to tame it?
In which I ain’t got no money.
I knew my UI benefits were about to run out so I checked my post office box once a week. But then they didn’t run out, and I got complacent and blew off getting my mail for a few weeks.
Until today, when my deposit was uncharacteristically late.
I logged into the Employment Security Department website, and lo it did say these horrible words: Your claim for the week ending on Jun 26, 2010 was processed on Jun 28, 2010. No payment was made because your benefits are exhausted, or your benefit year has expired. Your remaining balance is $0.00.
Aw, FUCK.
I found and re-read the information about EUC (emergency unemployment compensation) and discovered that I am – oh crap – not eligible for EUC because my benefits weren’t exhausted between May 22, 2010 and June 2, 2010. They ran out on June 19, 2010: seventeen days too late. I also learned that I will have to apply anyway, if they send me an application.
(Congress may extend EUC benefits, but the bill’s currently stalled in the Senate. As of May 2010, Washington state’s unemployment rate is at 9.1%. If I don’t end up getting any EUC at all, I have only 20 weeks of benefits left and no idea how to accomplish the going-back-to-school plan: it depended on receiving the EUC I was assured I would be eligible for.)
(Christ! SEVENTEEN FUCKING DAYS. If my first claim had been exhausted seventeen days earlier, I would have gotten the damn EUC.)
Anyway. I assumed that I must have been sent an application, because otherwise wouldn’t my EB (extended benefits), for which I have already applied and for which I have already been approved, be paying out?
I went to the post office and yup, I had received an application. I brought it home and filled it out. I read the small print. Guess what’s awesome [where awesome equals utter crap]? What’s awesome is that the EUC processing office doesn’t accept faxes or online applications. I have to mail my application in, and of course everything’s closed on Monday for the holiday, and they’re going to deny me anyway. Still, I have to apply, because if I don’t Washington state won’t give me my EB. Even though they’ve already approved them.
Long boring story short, my total net worth is less than $1 in change and my next paying gig isn’t until July 10th.
Oh, and without EUC I have to see if I can either 1.) borrow five grand in student loans, or 2.) bag the whole school idea altogether and bail to ANY TOWN I CAN GET A STUPID JOB IN, ANY TOWN AT ALL.
Aw, fuck.
My rent is due tomorrow. I have maybe three or four days worth of food left before I have to start stealing from G’ma. It will probably be two weeks, minimum, before I get another deposit. My cell phone service will probably be suspended in the interim. Thank God the DSL is paid up for the next three weeks, at least.
Um. Yeah. So. Remember that one time a few years ago when my marriage failed spectacularly, leaving me homeless and jobless and broke, and how much that totally sucked? Well, this is kinda like that, except that now I’m about to start mooching off my 87-year-old grandmother.
Related: ApPROVED, bitches!
In which I wanna bitch about financial stuff.
As you may or may not know, I’m not a legitimate adult-type person. I’m actually one of those financially marginalized creatures who literally cannot cash a check on her own. Anywhere. Ever.
In fact, I’m so marginalized that I can’t use my own money without paying fees because I don’t have enough of it.
Below a certain point, poverty is inevitable because it just plain costs extra to be poor. If you don’t have a checking account, you cannot cash a check for free. Even if you walk into the bank with seven pieces of ID, they’ll charge you a non-customer cashing fee. If the bank the check was drawn on isn’t local, you have to go to a check cashing place, and their fees are as high as the state you’re in will allow.
If you don’t have a checking account, you have to pay fees in order to pay your bills: money orders cost $2 or more apiece these days, and even pre-paid debit cards’ BillPay services cost $1 per check.
If you don’t have a checking account, you pay transaction fees. Every single time you swipe your pre-paid debit card, it costs $2.
I can’t get a real account at a real bank because I’m listed on TeleCheck. My last checking account was literally seized by an unscrupulous collector, and the bank reported me for not paying overdraft fees or something.
I’m still really pissed off about all this, because putting a lien on my checking account wasn’t strictly legal, and my bank certainly wasn’t authorized to let some strange company take all of my money. By the time I discovered that the collector had done it all bass-ackwards (the judgement should have come first, you dickwad, and I hope you suffer a terrifying and painfully fatal heart attack quite soon for fucking up my life like this for six hundred dollars) and that my bank was probably culpable too and that I could, with sufficiently herculean effort, make them all undo what they’d done it was three years later and I didn’t even try.
Anyway.
The point is that I have a pre-paid debit card, because that’s all I can get.
Continue reading »
In which I keep you up-to-date.
I went to a Walla Walla Sweets baseball game last week. (Yeah, we have a new team. Fun!) It was FUCKING FREEZING, but I had a good time, especially after I was loaned a down parka. There was a wind you just would not believe. Cold June-uary is cold.
I spent a big fat chunk of time in front of the computer and edited the hell out of the story. (Y’all got a first draft. Sorry.) Then I formatted it properly (with Courier and no italics and everything) and went looking for somewhere to submit it. Decided on F&SF because I think I’d actually have a chance with them, but they only take paper manuscript submissions. I need printer access; the story’s 56 pages long.
I thought a lot (and wrote a little) about my relationship with petroleum:
There was some cooking of Indian food!
There has been knitting, because it’s still knitting weather around here. (I know the rest of you have already had your faces melt off, but I’ve been running around in socks and sweaters.) I’ve done, oh, maybe two rounds on the eternal socks.
I started and then abandoned a scarf-thing called Wisp (the yarn I was using didn’t show the stitches well enough). I decided the yarn would make a better poncho (particularly this one) and splurged on a set of size 13 needles (to match my Options set) and two skeins of lace weight yarn for Wisp and, you know, just to have. They were on clearance; 500 yards for $2.50 a skein.
I started and am nearly halfway through with a pair of toeless socks:
Went up and played with Rob and the fellas on the square at 1st & Main last Sunday. Have another gig in the winery next door on Friday night.
I went and hiked the Mill Creek trail again with my friend Toni.
This is the first week that I get to draw benefits without having to look for work. I’m officially a student! Yay!
My transcripts should be at WWCC this week; MIU shows I took a math class and I hope WWCC will let me opt out of their basic business math or whatever the hell it is I’m supposed to take.
I have recently rediscovered water. It’s good shit, mang.
I watched three entire seasons of Absolutely Fabulous. And I’m totally on top of the whole eleventh Doctor thing, too. (Actually, when I noticed that my hard drive was nearly full and went to delete some media, I discovered that all of the TV series I have – except Firefly – are British.) I need some external storage.
Oh, except I’m POOR. Poor, poor, poor. I barely pay my bills, and I can’t really afford anything else. Maybe I can spend the occasional fifteen bucks on knitting supplies, but no hefty purchases. No external drives, or clothing sprees, or shoes, or iPods (one is full, the other is dying)… I haven’t had my hair done since October, and the only reason I go to the dentist is because they’ll let me carry a balance and I have no desire to sit through a third planing & scaling, thank you very much.
Now plz to excuse me while I go watch episode 12 of Doctor Who.
In which there’s a finale. (See chapter 4.)
25.
“Oh dude,” I said. “That would be awesome. I don’t know how to test the water, or if the soil will support earth seeds–”
“I can teach you,” the baby said. “I have knowledge that was supposed to be accessible to you.”
Someone on my comm yelled, “All that shit’s in the wiki, Jenny! Ask him what he is!”
I turned down my comm speakers. “So, giant alien baby. What are you? And why do you look like a giant human baby?”
“I didn’t know that these were many dead individuals. I thought it was one dead individual and asked it how to be an infant. This is what they showed me. I’ve never seen many dead individuals.”
“Whenever you encounter dead individual, you ask it how to be a baby?”
“Yes, and then we’re a baby, and we grow up, and we die. Until someone else asks us how to be a baby!” Giant baby was overwhelmed with happiness by this and clapped his hands.
We talked for an hour, and then I took pity on everyone else and set up a board and read their questions from it, and the giant baby answered them, and the visit spawned about seventeen Martianbaby wikis as he talked. He was really good at telling us the human knowledge he had absorbed, but was maddeningly vague about himself.
Before I left the dome, he let me take a sample of him. I approached with a sample collection pack he had located for me, and touched his fat knee with a swab I then sealed into a tube. I also made a couple of slides. He wasn’t smooth; he was dusty and pink. His skin looked more like something you’d find in your shop-vac than anything else, and I had the impression that he’d blow away in a strong wind.
“Would you blow away in a strong wind?” I asked him.
“Um, yeah. No? We’re not sure. We’re very big!” He clapped again, but he didn’t disintegrate, so maybe not.
“Well, when the dust storm comes, you’ll have to wait it out in here,” I said.
Continue reading »
In which there’s a fourth chapter. (Go to chapter 3.)
19.
“My dome? What?” I replied, grabbing my helmet so I could actually talk to the guy. “What do you mean?”
“There’s something wrong with the cameras, Fred,” someone said calmly.
“It’s a fucking Martian! Ye gods, even worse: some bastard child of human DNA and Mars!” someone else shouted.
“Can you see the video feed?” asked the man from Higher, who was apparently called Fred.
“Nope, I’m in the restaurant,” I said. I can just walk over there–”
“She can fix the cameras,” voice #2 said.
“No! Don’t go into the dome until we establish communication with it!” said voice #3.
“Restaurant?” said yet another voice.
“Listen, listen!” Fred said, and I could literally hear him flapping his arm for silence. “It looks like there’s a life form in the dome. We want audio. Can you manage that?”
“A life form,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“In the dome.”
“Yeah.”
“The dome is filled with dead people, Fred,” I said. “All my friends’ bodies are in there, Fred.”
“Get somewhere you can see the video feed and call back, okay, kid?”
“Okay,” I said.
“And then we’re totally gonna need audio,” Fred said.
“Whatever,” I said.
Continue reading »
In which there’s a third installment. (Back to chapter 2.)
13.
Every single day I cursed my wretched, useless public school education.
Why didn’t I know basic chemistry? Why didn’t I know how to test melted Martian ice for drinkability? Why didn’t I know what was poisonous and what wasn’t?
Why did I need a fucking calculator to find out how many years worth of water I had left?
Why didn’t I have better reference materials? I had my wiki copy, of course, but it was too broad to be an in-depth learning tool.
Why, if I was so damned smart, hadn’t I known to bring proper reference materials to a hostile goddamned planet? I had ten years worth of movies, but no basic chemistry classes. Typical idiot American, I thought, and gunned my little forklift as I made my daily commute to the dome.
14.
Not that it really mattered.
I had a lifetime’s worth of food and power and no way to have children. The settlement, such as it was, had already failed. I might see another human being eventually, but it wouldn’t be for years. Landing sites were spread out all over the planet, and only one had been equipped with vehicles capable of going long distances.
I turned away from my sustainability issues and focused on communications. Hours of research revealed instructions for blowing the comm right off the ship; when I armed the sequence and retreated the regulation ninety meters, there was a synchronized series of tiny explosions and a whole chunk of the ship fell off and landed on airbags on the regolith.
Pretty trick.
A day and a half of removing panels and airbags and I had the comm – a big rack filled with computer components. I built it a shelter between the ship and the dome, stocked with everything a data center would need: screens, boards and pointers, speakers, chairs with wheels, and a hot beverage dispenser.
Continue reading »
In which there is a second installment. (Back to chapter 1.)
7.
It took my stupid-tired self about fifty minutes to shut down the dome. I didn’t want the bodies exposed to air and heat; they’d just rot. Somebody would want this site preserved for forensics or something.
Maybe.
Plus it was a waste of resources, running an entire dome for a bunch of dead people. Life-long near-poverty had made me nothing if not frugal.
I’d walked around, still inside my suit, and looked at them – the people on my team, the people I’d applied with, trained with, and traveled through space with – for a morbidly long time. Some just looked like they were asleep, but many of them had done the sorts of things you’d expect during a real death. They were in weird positions, eyes open or half open, and I was glad I couldn’t smell the air in the dome. Once I realized that they were all actually, literally, and unequivocally deceased, it became important that I shut off the dome. I knew they were all filled with bacteria that wanted to turn them into puddles, but they were humans – from earth – and precious to me. I wanted them intact.
When the power whined down I realized I should have vented the air first. Now I’d have to operate the airlock manually. I sighed, and waddled over to the lock.
Continue reading »
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4 random books from my Library!
