Nattering

H-O-M-E. Where life is sweet, and the bathrooms are private, and the laundry’s in the back room.

I came home to find a copy of one of my most-anticipated reads of the year, Liz Hand‘s Generation Loss — sadly, it’s going to have to wait a couple of weeks, until my first packet of work is turned in. In the meantime, here’s the wondrous opening paragraph:

There’s always a moment where everything changes. A great photographer — someone like Diane Arbus, or me during that fraction of a second when I was great — she sees that moment coming, and presses the shutter release an instant before the change hits. If you don’t see it coming, if you blink or you’re drunk or just looking the other way — well, everything changes anyway, it’s not like things would have been different.

Most of you who know me well know that I like to diagnose illnesses in myself (and others). Usually, I’m right, although occasionally I’m wrong.

I’d been thinking what I have is a garden variety corona- or rhinovirus — and it may well be — but what it’s really reminding me of? Is mycoplasma, aka walking pneumonia, which I had a few years ago (Wiscon!), and was very similar. I felt crappy and tired, but not at a high enough level to stop all activities and thought. And, more importantly, I had a cough — I never have a cough, in fact, that’s the only other time I can remember having a cough in recent history. Oh, and this is the perfect setting for acquiring such a beast; it’s way common in younger children in close school settings.

So, I’ve made an appointment on Friday for when I get home and we’ll see if I’m right. (If I am, that would be nice, because it won’t get much worse than this before then and a course of antibiotics will kick it.) Luckily, the heavy lifting here is done, now on to packing, and the remaining lectures and paperwork.

I’ve been here for less than an hour and have already set off the (extremely loud) burglar alarm. Score.

A life tip:

All those times you’ve brought along your flight confirmation/e-ticket numbers/hotel confirmations/relevant phone numbers and not needed them? You need them. Bring them. I had a cabbie ask me for the ADDRESS OF THE HOTEL.

I didn’t have my eticket confirmation and had to play the message from orbitz from my voicemail to get the airline rep to help me. And I always have this stuff with me; this time, I had enough other things to get ready, I figured no big to leave it behind, right?

Never again.

Which is to say, maybe I’ll be posting regularly and maybe I won’t. You’ll just have to wait and see. I’ve not yet made it over to the campus, so much is dependent on the Wireless Situation and its acceptability. (However, props to the American Flatbread Co. joint in Burlington* for an excellent dinner. Welcome after a hellish experience that started with the airline having no record of my reservation, and involved shoving through a cattle-esque stampede of not-boarding-yet freaks at JFK.)

I read Cecil‘s Beige on the plane and found it BRILLIANT. Her best book yet, seriously, and I’ll have more to say later on about that. Next up is Sara Zarr’s Story of a Girl, which I’m very excited to finally get to read. (Now, if only I can find a copy of Caitlin‘s latest up here, I’d be truly happy. Oh, and if a nice publicist sent me Ironside … puh-leeze?)

Some links I didn’t get to post before I left:

• Kelly talks to Ysabeau Wilce about her new YA novel Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog. Wisconites among you may remember our Pretty Magic Butlers of Roanoke reading a couple of Wiscons ago: This is the butler!
• Tightrope Girl on difficult characters.
• Hannah being wise on the subject of rejections.
• Education makes you live longer. Maybe.
• James Hynes in the Boston Review on why John Crowley isn’t hailed as the literary genius of our times that he clearly is. Mostly, I like this piece, but it has some odd moments that lapse into "indulging in what it is critical of" in terms of justifying the appeciation of genre that I find bizarre given the overall point. (Via Maud.)
• A lukewarm review for Joe Hill’s first novel Heart-Shaped Box (which I also wouldn’t mind an ARC of…), but it actually makes me want to read it more. Based on his short stories, I can’t imagine lack of ambition being an issue.
• Fictional ruins from fictional worlds.
• The aforementioned John Crowley looking for recs of nonfiction books to recommend to his class in writing F&SF at Yale.
• Nicola Griffith interviewed on NPR. (Thanks, Kelley!)
• Jeff VanderMeer’s Twelve Overlooked Books of 2006 at Locus Online. (Yay, Fairy Tale Review!)

And now I must sleep. Please forgive if the next two weeks here are incoherent/poorly attributed/practically insane.

*A very Portland-y, Madison-y kind of town at first glance, but sprawlier.

Y’all light up my life and I hope 2007 has only the best in store for you (and me). I’m behind on emails and posting may be light this week; I’ll do my best.

This morning when I think I’m leaving for work I step outside into a paper storm. It’s trash day. 

Yes, that’s right. Some (not so) nice person went rummaging through our trash/recycling bin between 7 and 7:30 a.m. this morning, broke open a bag filled with the discards from my desk cleaning, and rejected them again — all over the street.

Sailing down our block and half the next one in the wind of rush hour traffic are: Trampoline postcards, a print-out from a PDF of Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller (from before it came out), various chapters of Aztec Dance Tunes, and other miscellaneous crap (an old computer manual, CD-ROMs, old floppy disks, etc.). I would have taken a picture, but we had a limited time window in which to clean up the mess before the actual garbage guys showed.

Armed with trash bags, Mr. Rowe and I canvassed the blocks, as if participating in a litter clean-up game show of some kind. The neighbors came out and helped with the worst of it, then had to leave for work. Half-way down the block, I happen on a clutch of pages from my novel.

Let me tell you, there’s nothing like picking up an early draft of your book off the street to put things in perspective. While I’m having this little moment, two ladies approach with armfuls of paper. Not realizing they have actually wandered into an indie movie scene wrought with ironic symbolism, they assume it’s the end of Wonder Boys. Or so it seems at first.

"You must be a teacher," says one.

"Yes," I lie, because it seems the most efficient response.

The gap-toothed blonde hands me a huge stack of my novel.

"This is all trash," I tell her. "Someone dumped it out a few minutes ago."

"Oh," she says. "I thought it was something important."

Her friend says, "I thought it was trash."

"It is," I agree, and send them on their way.

(But, hey, they both came back to help. Faith in human nature and all that.)

UPDATE:

Christopher sends the following note:

Found a few minutes ago blown up against the architecture firm next to JONK down on Third Street.

A single piece of paper, BLANK, except for a header reading: Bond: Aztec Dance Tunes: 66.

For the lack of content. I find — irritatingly enough — that I’m still worn out from the Dread Bug of Last Week and have some lingering head-coldyness that is making it hard for me to focus on anything too complicated. In short: SLEEPY. And no time to sleep.

We did break down and get a Playstation 2 as our overall "You Must Deal With the Season" consolatory present last weekend. So, expect a post soon on my impressions of the buying/playing process as a video game novice. (Bully is my runaway favorite so far, which is all Bookshelves of Doom‘s fault.)

In the meantime, did I mention how sleepy I am? Very, very sleepy.

The wind outside is crazy wild today. A group of school children on a field trip downtown went by a few minutes ago, holding hands and shrieking, surrounded by flying leaves. The temperature has already dropped about 20 degrees since this morning. If this were a movie, Dennis Quaid would be getting out the snowshoes right about now.

Gobal climate change is scary.

But I believe we’ll be disappointed yet again on the point of snow. We’ll probably get ice instead or just really nasty conditions. Yesterday, I posted a picture of Christopher’s lunch, today I’m talking about the weather. What are the other blogger cliches I need to fill?

And, yes, feeling considerably better today, so the weird woozy malady of yesterday appears to have been a viral thing that is passing quickly. Fingers crossed, anyway.

I would really, really, really appreciate it if I did not catch every bug going around during you.

Love,

your swim-headed BondGirl

p.s. Don’t expect much from me until this passes. Also, please ignore any comments where I may have said things backward or spelled something wrong. I have learned my lesson. No more commenting until normalized.