Jan. 10th, 2001

maradydd: (Default)
Not in front of the computer, that's for sure.

Well, okay, that's not true. I am sorta stuck here 9-6, and I did previously update this thing more often from work than from home. More accurate, then: I've had more life than I could reasonably write about.

Highlights of the last month and a half plus, in no particular order:

* Drove to New Orleans with Colin for ExotiCon, which despite the abominable hotel was still well worth the total expenses. I have long held that you don't really get to know someone until you go on a long trip with them: you get to see what they're like when they're tired and cranky from a drive that should have taken six hours but should have been more like eight, what happens when they get woken up at 1 AM in the rain and asked "Could you please drive so that I don't run us off the road if I fall asleep?", what sort of odd roadside attractions they want to check out. (Among other things, a truck stop decorated entirely in frogs. No, I'm not kidding.) It was a good trip. I like what I learned.

The con itself was also way cool: running into Caroline Sharek and one of the Morpheus Company bodyguards just as we got to the hotel (at ungodly o'clock in the morning); watching Night of the Lepus at 4 AM in the suite for New Orleans' Worst Film Festival; finding damn near every anime and kung-fu-flick bootleg we could ever possibly want; meeting a very cool Rei Ayanami lookalike in the live-action anime RPG; playing Channon Yarrow to Paul Riddell's Spider Jerusalem (if you don't know, ask); downing Barenjager cocktails and spectating at quite possibly the most successful impromptu BDSM party ever staged; and more.

Travel tip: Magnetic hotel keys still work on your room door even after you've checked out. (Only really works if you use the in-room system to check out, and didn't bother to drop the keys off in the drop box on the way out.) Thanks to the weather and going to dinner a bit late, we found ourselves still in NO at nearly 10pm, exhausted and with a six-hour drive in front of us. Despite the cramped conditions and nonexistent amenities of our room in the con hotel, we broke back in and crashed for three hours before driving home. Bwaha.

* Spent Thanksgiving at the parents', which I hadn't done since 1993. (A tradition with an unauspicious beginning; it started my freshman year of college, when I couldn't come home because my parents were furious at me for stealing the car two weeks prior in order to get to class to take an exam. It's a long story.) It was a nice quiet weekend, far better than I had expected. It still astounds me how well my parents and I get along these days -- as if somewhere along the line they got it into their heads that I'd grown up. Not that I think I have, mind. But anyway.

* Visited Iowa City with my dad, and met some of the people who'll be my professors and classmates in the fall. I came out of the weekend feeling only encouraged. Iowa City is a small place, but not rural; it has a pleasantly college-town feeling, like Flagstaff without the Grand Canyon traffic, or College Station without the C&W aesthetic. I'd probably be bored off my ass if I stayed longer than two years, but I don't have to stay longer than two years. Plus, my profs and I have similar intellectual origins! Several of them, like me, ran screaming to linguistics after running into creeping postmodernism in anthropology, or literature, or some other part of the humanities. I can't wait.

Well, that's not true. I can, but only because I need to save more money before I leave. :)

* Also spent Christmas with them, the first time I'd done that without Leo. This was ultimately a Good Thing, because Troy came home from Ames (not the one in Iowa) and I actually got to see him more than once over my vacation. (Leo hated driving anywhere that wasn't a toy store or within 15 minutes, ergo a 45-minute drive up to Kingwood was Unacceptable in his weltanschaaung.) We spent the day of Christmas Eve hanging out at Troy's dad's, getting a guided tour of a wide assortment of semiautomatic and automatic weapons, military and otherwise. Fun for the whole family.

Whole families. Heh. My aunt, uncle, and cousins from Columbus, TX decided to come visit on the 23rd, and figured it'd be jolly fun to spend the entire time ragging on me for how much of an asshole I was when I was younger. I admit, I was an asshole when I was younger, but one would think that a nearly fifty-year-old woman would take the high ground and say something like "You know, you hurt my girls' feelings pretty often when you guys were kids" and accept an apology, rather than dredging up all sorts of Embarrassing Details in front of family-plus-boyfriend.

Despite her Catholic upbringing, apparently she does not know what a high ground is.

But my mom stood up for me. I was shocked. Happy-shocked, mind.

* Drove to Dallas with Colin for New Year's Eve, where we happily swilled champagne at Bar of Soap (America's first combination bar/laundromat), necked in public where it was socially acceptable for once, and hung out/crashed with Paul and Liz Riddell. I'd forgotten how peculiar driving on snow was; we nearly wrecked the car at one point thanks to a sudden slick patch. Fortunately, the freeway was almost completely empty at the time, and Reginald the Saturn is none the worse for wear--just very dirty.

* I bought a Diamond Rio PMP300. Geek toys rule.

* Racked up a small pile of rejection letters, since I've been sending out more stories and most of them are old (i.e., from my career as a creative writing major). I seem to go through two- or three-year cycles in this regard: every few years I'll look back at something I wrote (sometimes less; I'm still pimping a piece that won an award in late '99, but which now reads as completely overwrought) and think "Christ, what was I thinking when I scribbled this sludge?"

In fact, the cycles are getting shorter. Perhaps this means I'm actually starting to do what all the pros say you're supposed to do, and improving the current writing based on the last effort, as opposed to five or six short stories ago.

* Fast forward: as of the end of this month, I'll have packed up all my goodies from my north-side apartment and moved in with C-kun.

And that's the news.

Really seems like a shocking amount of stuff, I guess. I suppose it has been.

May you live in interesting times.

Oh, yeah

Jan. 10th, 2001 04:01 pm
maradydd: (Default)
And I almost got to be on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. Statistics fucked me at the last minute.

Here's how it works: When the lines are open, people call and are asked a series of three put-these-four-things-in-order questions. Get one wrong and you're out; get all three right, and there is a chance that you'll be one of 40 people from that night who selected the same tape date who gets called back the next day. I've done this a couple of times in the past, and usually got hosed on a sports or pop culture question. This time (on Thanksgiving, actually) the second question was of the "Put these sports figures in order based on their date of birth, starting with the oldest" variety. I recognized two: James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, and Jackie Robinson. After the fact I realized that one of the two I'd WAG(1)ed on was a fresh-faced young NASCAR driver I've seen on commercials in the movie theatre. Hurray for preconscious filing systems.

Anywho: The next day, whammo! At the crack of 10:30 ayem, the phone rang and I answered; it was a scheduling plebe at ABC. The scheduling plebe explained that I would have to call a toll-free number on Thursday, the 30th of November, to play a second round of put-'em-in-order questions, just like the first one except with five questions. Okay, I said, verified a whole bunch of information, hung up, and ran off to tell my dad.

"Great!" he said. "But did you tell them you'll be in Iowa?"

So: fast-forward to November 30th, a small utility-closet-cum-graduate-computer-room on the 5th floor of the English Philosophy Building at the University of Iowa. It's where the Linguistics department keeps the only phone that isn't in someone's office. Perched on the edge of a small plastic chair, I navigated through five more questions -- again having to WAG on a stumper about "put these media figures in order based on their ages" -- and, trembling from the adrenaline, aced 'em all. I keyed in a callback number (my dad's cellphone), verified some more information, hugged the English-is-not-her-first-language grad student who was making photocopies while I was on the phone, and sprinted back to the hotel to tell Dad.

We vegged for the next few hours, since the callback was supposed to be between 4 and 7 pm that day. We did a little math to estimate how likely it'd be that I'd get a callback, and figured it was probably about 1 in 10; later on, I saw statistics saying that about 900 people play in each second-round competition, so you have to figure the numbers are better than 1 in 10, since at least some of the people are going to screw the pooch, but either way the numbers were still against me. They didn't call back. I wasn't too terribly surprised, though I was kinda disappointed.

Anyway, if you ever wanted to know what the process is like, now you do. I'm going to try again next time they open the lines, in a more systematic fashion this time--since I'm at work till 6 anyway and that's when they start taking calls, I'll just give them a ring every day before I leave work and see if they call me back the next day. Cross yer fingers.

1. Wild-Assed Guess.

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