Delightful Inconsistent

Is this the year I finally get into Hüsker Dü? My problem has always been that I find the vocalist boring, but I was listening to a live set (in a recording) where I couldn't really hear the vocalist, and then I liked the music a lot. Potentially, if I listened to enough Hüsker Dü, I'd start singing along with it, and then the vocalist I'd hear would be me. Hmmm.

The current issue of Wired has an interview with that deranged tech guy who is trying to stay eternally young by injecting himself with his son's blood and semen and so forth, and he says something fairly revealing because I think it's a belief widely shared by our current tech guys: "Most people today spend every waking moment pursuing wealth. And the time they're not spending wealth, they're pursuing some sort of status or prestige."

Um, no. No, Bryan Johnson. No most people are not doing that. The revealed preference of most people is that they want a comfy chair and something good to watch on television, and want to spend as little time pursuing wealth and status as possible so they can spend more time in the comfy chair with the television.

It did make me think about my own motivations. Unfortunately for me, I am very much a team player, so the answer to "why did you do that" is almost always either (1) somebody asked me to or (2) I saw that it wasn't getting done - either because it was being done incompetently or because nobody stepped up at all. Absent one of those, I mostly play games and solve puzzles and read. The reason I say "unfortunately for me" is that there's an endless supply of (2) so I overclock most of the time. I have to be careful when listening to true crime podcasts because when an investigation is poorly handled I start thinking I need to switch careers and become a police detective. Just run straight toward the dysfunction.

Random bit of autobiography that never comes up: I'm naturally an endurance athlete. I was terrible at everything in gym class because I'm not strong or flexible or fast and I don't have much in the way of ball skills. But I would win contests that were about going forever: jogging around the yard, jump rope, sit ups. In martial arts dojos, teachers would use this fact about me to take overly aggressive dudes down a peg - here, let's all do a contest. I can swim forever. I can float forever. I can hike an infinite distance.

Unrelatedly, I was also reasonably good at archery, but not brilliant, and this was almost never relevant.

Anyway, I don't like having to do tedious repetitive tasks (I mean, I do, it depends). But the answer to "are you still hanging in there" is always yes. How is not something I can answer; it's intrinsic. I assume someday age or illness will knock that out, but based on my ancestors I also think maybe not. My whole family of origin is like this. I used to joke that it was the clue I'm secretly a robot, but the thing is, I outlast robots.

If civilization goes down, I can walk to you if you are in the Americas. I can do it. It will probably take me less time than you think.

Feeling beleaguered because most of the tasks I've been dealing with are like level grind fetch quest chains, where doing any given thing just unlocks the next stage of the thing I have to do:

request medical record; wait for medical record to come in the mail; send medical record to someone else

request an actor fill out a questionnaire; submit answers to the theatre company for approval; hear back the next day that they're approved; send actor link from the theatre company so they can re-upload the same documents

ask over and over for information from various writers and editors so I can make their form letters and galleys and send them money and make a report about the money I have sent

I know all of this is fairly normal for management and admin work; it's sheep herding essentially. But it feels very similar to getting nothing done while also being incredibly vital. I don't feel I really should be in these information chains, but other people are fairly determined that the information does need to flow through me, and the systems break down when it doesn't.

It's like I'm constantly increasing how full completion bars are, but the tasks don't actually clear until I reach 100% so my to do list stays exactly the same. Very hard to feel I am making any progress, although I am. Bogged down in the producer side of being in the arts (and the household), basically.

On the other hand, my Salsa teacher has asked me to help with a dance demo next week, which should be fun. I think it may be the first time I've performed dance as an adult; the last time would be when I was maybe four, when I did a tap dance number about the Care Bears.

Something I can't get out of my head is a clip from the senate race in Texas, a debate earlier this week between Ted Cruz and challenger Colin Allred. It's a question about abortion rights. Allred says something sane. Cruz then addresses the audience very smugly, and says, approximately, "as a mother don't you think you have the right to know your daughter is pregnant?" I'm paraphrasing because I can't find a transcript and don't want to watch the clip again. It's a non-sequitor on top of everything else; it's not following any mention of underage pregnancy. Just hits out of nowhere.

I completely recoil from it (literally I cringed backward into my chair), because he's not actually talking about parental notification, he's talking about parental nullification. He's saying "I know that as a woman, protecting your own life is less important than this: you want to be able to force your underage daughter to give birth." He knows this! He knows this about me, he's sure!

He's sure that's definitely what I dream about. Definitely that's what I want for my children and also for myself. Who cares about the stuff Allred said about rape victims and lives at risk and sterility? I might have been persuaded, but ultimately the cost of not being able to force a minor in my care to remain pregnant is too high a cost to bear.

Ultimately when people are really monstrous what gets to me is their assumption that I'm also monstrous and am only pretending to have other feelings, feelings that aren't a rapacious and bottomless need for control and dominance.

I just cannot imagine ever in the world feeling I should be allowed to force a child to have a baby. It's stunning that he suspects this is a feeling most mothers have, and that he feels comfortable saying so on television.

I have no place to put the feeling of hearing this. I don't know what the feeling is called.

I was first introduced to the album Grace, by Jeff Buckley, my freshman year of college. And at that point he'd already drowned and was already mythologized, and at that point I was already more interested in his posthumous album, My Sweetheart the Drunk, because of the ways it was less polished, although I was assured that this was not what Jeff Buckley would have wanted because look at the smoothness of Grace. Wouldn't it have wound up more like Grace?

So I listened to Grace and I own Grace and I'm very familiar with Grace and I like the songs on it.

Only... I keep gradually recognizing not only how much of Grace is covers, but how much of Grace is straight imitations. He's not just singing "Lilac Wine." He's singing "Lilac Wine" exactly like Nina Simone. He's singing "Corpus Christi Carol" like Janet Baker, and Janet Baker sings it how everybody sings Corpus Christi Carol, because that's how Benjamin Britten wrote it. My love for that song probably doesn't have much to do with Jeff Buckley and probably has a lot to do with how much I like Benjamin Britten.

I feel confused about what to feel because I could say that Jeff Buckley introduced me to those songs, but I sort probably would have found them anyway. We live in an age of recorded music. There was not a time Jeff Buckley was alive when he would have had to say "let me sing it to you so you know what I'm talking about." He could always have put on the record.

I'm not sure what the point of cover bands is, if they're not reinterpreting. I mean, I sing karaoke and I love to. But I mostly do it alone in a room, because who cares? Who cares that I can sing that song the same way it's sung on the recording? I sing Lilac Wine like Nina Simone does. I'm not Nina Simone.

I don't know. I run into this problem with Cream too, with early blues, although there at least there's an actual recording technology gap.

I feel weird about it. Simultaneously, I am in the process of ordering the Benjamin Britten sheet music.

I've picked Go back up after not playing for about 20 years. I was never any good at it. I am still not good at it. From reading Go forums, that's just how it is - you play a hundred some games of Go and you start actually seeing patterns, but also you always feel bad at it, always, forever.

(I am bad at it, though. I do not win against other beginners with even less experience than me. This is surprising to them because I'm very good at most board games.)

It does not seem like I'm getting any better, but I have one clue that something is going on: I become very tired and headachy after about 15 minutes of doing tsumego problems.

Clearly my brain is working hard to figure out something. But it's still a black box.

In Atlanta visiting my sister and her three-legged dog. Spent the morning at the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History, and took a photo with The General (a historic train), Nana-style. This means posing as though you made something you definitely did not make, in homage to a picture of our paternal grandmother next to a gingerbread house. The museum itself is excellent at walking you through most the war's strategic decisions (very very very railroad-based).

I'm going to do more reading on the USMRR (US Military Railroads) - an organization of mostly Black railroad workers who not only maintained, repaired, and extended rail lines throughout the campaign (this is sort of an origin of the Pullman porters) but spent about a month early on figuring out the best ways to sabotage and destroy rail lines, and made a how-to guide.

Bought a light switch plate at the gift shop, and some peach butter.

At Waffle House, the waitress and I both had blue mascara, and were both interested spectators as her truck's windshield was replaced in the parking lot.

Played pinball for about an hour. The machines I was good on were Addams Family, Swamp Thing, and Doctor Who. I regret that when I picked out my socks in the morning and was torn between Toulouse-Lautrec and Daleks, I did not chose Daleks.

House is cold. Temps aren't hideously low, but there's not much insulation. I sleep in a sweater.

I continue to do a lot in any given day while also feeling terribly behind because of all the deadlines I'm behind on, all for things that don't pay my bills (or in some cases anything at all). Most impending are a huge pile of unfinished slush reading and 9/10 of my manuscript edits for Nothing in the Basement.

Friday:

On work breaks, packed the kids' weekend stuff for Ciro's and did Pilates. Ended work, ran Nico to a friend's house, headed into Boston for Boskone; was on panels about the idea of separatist space colonies (I moderated) and about writing an imaginary doctorate. Ate a quick sandwich in between in the lobby, which I'd packed in my purse for dinner. Parked at a cheap garage about a seven minute walk from the convention hotel; passed some fun public art. Stuck with that garage for the rest of the weekend.

Saturday:

More Boskone panels (screenwriting, then a discussion of hiking in Lord of the Rings); another packed sandwich. (This time, cheese and Branston pickle; yesterday was speck and hummus.) Waltzed for about 90 minutes. Caught up with writer friend Rob Cameron, in from NYC. Back home to do some magazine and scouting admin. Ate roast duck to celebrate Lunar New Year. Watched Jennifer's Body, which I hadn't seen. Was shocked by how underpraised the directing was; I remember a lot of buzz about the screenplay, but... Karyn Kusama directed Girlfight, which won Sundance! She's a protege of John Sayles! A really genius director who I guess got pushed into TV after this movie? Aggravating.

Sunday:

Spent an hour or two deep-cleaning the rug in the parlor (the cats' favorite room.) Then to a Boskone panel on the legal and economic rules surrounding ownership in space - what the treaties are and how I think they're going to be violated and who is going to get away with it. Then a song circle on celestial themes. (I sang Darkest of the Days, which has the solstice, the moon, and a collaborator named star.) Home to very quickly eat leftover duck and an orange, then headed to the dance studio to mambo for about 90 minutes. Scrubbed a pot in which carrots had burned (Mom making dinner for a friend undergoing chemo). Ate dinner, then picked up kids from Ciro and got them to bed.

Monday:

Pretty wiped out; physically tired after a physically demanding weekend. More admin for Strange Horizons and cub scouts - helping someone book a space, setting up a special issue, looking at a Poetry Foundation grant application. Spent two hours tweaking and formatting documents for a fellowship Chris and I are applying to, the Rhinebeck Writer's Residency, where we'd be able to finish revising our musical The Lady Takes the Mic. Short nap. Did Pilates. Made bone broth. Fed kids weird new "cosmic" Oreos that seemingly have Pop Rocks mixed into the cream. Do not recommend from a taste perspective but I guess experientially it is worth having a bite of one. A bite. Of one. Will play D&D later.

--

I should probably summarize what I actually said on panels, some of which was interesting, and some of which I'm the primary source on ("this is how I approach doing this specific thing" or "this is what I predict is going to happen in this area"). But I'm exhausted. Tomorrow is a huge snowstorm, so I imagine I'll be shoveling. And trying to get through slush and all the thousand things.

Always a bit weird to be on panels and constantly say totally true things I've done and remember that I've done a lot of stuff. It surprises me to recall or notice, even though it's obvious in a day-to-day way that I do a lot of stuff. Just none of it seems to matter beyond the moment, maybe? It's like I'm simultaneously messing up both sides of Yoda's "All his life has he looked away to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was! What he was doing!" I am always so much in the moment that I can't remember or be satisfied with the past, even the earlier in the same day past, and I am always so aware of the pile of things that I still need to do, that stand in between me and where I want to go.

The house catty-corner from me has been toilet papered, which I think is something you do to show you are displeased with someone. However, it looks beautiful. Snow on the ground, leafless trees, waving white paper. It reminds me of art installations by Yakusaki Onishi.

Been sleeping badly. I can fall asleep but I wake up, sometimes multiple times and always too early - racing heart, stress. Early in the day all the skin around my eyes hurt like the skin was sunburned, but I managed to nap and calm that down.

Spent a few hours working on being able to eventually work on things - re-installing software, figuring out where various sound files got shuffled to as Ciro repeatedly moved things from drive to drive without warning or documentation, hooking it back up to the DAW, and figuring out how the DAW now works (the usual nonsense where if you look away for a minute, an operating system update changes the entire user interface for no real reason). Then trying to make the whole file architecture a little more robust so I don't have to do this again. I have things working well enough that maybe the next time I sit down I can actually compose.

I also listened to and cleaned up some of the sound samples I made last week with my sweet little Sony field recorder - working from an idea of industrial music that is instead domestic - brooms sweeping, pans scraping, coins rattling in a leather cup. I'm working on a piece that I'm going to try to make only rhythm and vocal, but multitracked vocal and extremely textured rhythm sounds. And it's blues. It's funny and angry and doesn't rhyme.

Is there an audience? Is there a distribution plan? Probably, and no.

Hoping to get it finished by the end of this month, although I wouldn't be surprised if it takes through February. It's nominally a New Year's Day song, but I mean "it's a new year" more metaphysically, the same way "Independence Day" might mean the fourth of July but might also have a different personal date for someone. "New Year" meaning a clean slate or a dividing line. It's possible I'll drastically rewrite both the lyrics and the melody. This is one of those rare times when I know the drum line before I'm sure about the vocal. I know it's often that way for Paul Simon and for Mark Ronson, but it's atypical for me.

A family member has a mild case of the flu. Have to cancel things, reschedule things.

"Darkest of the Days" got really popular all across India last week, where "really popular" means like 70 different people listened to it. But they are people I don't know and they are in different towns. I am not sure what happened. I assume they know each other. It's nice to think about, though.