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Posts Tagged ‘personal’

Now begins the boring part

I’m back from Okinawa (about which more later), and as of this morning, I am done with the ankle surgery. But only with the surgery part of it: now I’m facing a month of incarceration in a plastic boot.

Since I’ve done this before, I have the dubious joy of knowing exactly what I’m in for. Though I’ve made at least one improvement this time around; putting one of my arch support inserts in the boot has done wonders for the circulation to my toes, which I remember as one of the chief miseries of the last round. On the other hand, this evening my foot twitched in a fashion that sent a bad enough spike of pain up my leg for me to call my orthopedist, except it was after office hours, so I probably won’t hear back from him until tomorrow. So that officially undoes all my happiness at the circulation thing. >_<

This is the most tedious part. I can’t do anything to speed my recovery; I can only (try to) avoid setting it back. In a month I’ll get to do PT, which will be a joy by comparison — please remind me of that when I’m suffering through it. šŸ˜› But at least the surgery itself is over, which is a relief.

Jay Lake

Most of you have probably seen in one or more places already that Jay Lake passed away, after a long . . .

I don’t actually know how to finish that sentence. The usual phrase is “battle with cancer,” but Jay had opinions on that metaphor and its flaws. I remember him noting that it would be more precise to say he was the battlefield of cancer.

Last December I sent him an email with a link to a song that made me think of him. The email was much larded about with warnings that the song was about death, and I would totally understand if that was something he thought about enough already; I had no way of judging whether this would be of interest to him or one straw too many. He wrote back to say he did indeed like the song, which I had described as sort of “an atheist anthem about the afterlife.” Jay was a committed atheist — he had no belief that he would persist after he died — but this is an afterlife I think he could believe in:

But I place one foot before the other, confident because
I know that everything we are right now is everything that was

(Full lyrics here.)

I didn’t know Jay nearly as well as many of the people memorializing him today. I met him at ICFA and hung out with him there on several occasions; I showed up to various dinners and such when he came to the Bay Area, or would say hi to him in passing at conventions. Diana Sherman and I once chased him through a room party at World Fantasy describing the anthology concept we’d had over dinner, until he suddenly turned and began declaiming ex tempore the epic charge of the war elephants across the fields of Gettysburg. (Another reason to be sad Jay is gone: we never did get that anthology off the ground, and if it happens eventually it will not have the title story from Jay that it deserved.) He had an expansive personality, boundless energy, and a faster wit than probably any human being I’ve ever met.

Cancer is a thief, taking those things from Jay, from all of us. If you want to do something for Jay, and for what he fought for, make a donation here:

Clayton Memorial Medical Fund
c/o OSFCI
P.O. Box 5703
Portland, Oregon 97228

Jay is gone, but he is remembered; he remains.

The whole way through, I’m narrating this in my head

For the last couple of months, I’ve been trying out the meditation thing — largely through an app called Headspace. I’m not terribly far into it yet, so I can’t give a full review, but the short form is that it’s a secular program developed by a former Buddhist monk that guides you through the basics of meditation. It starts off with a free series called “Take 10,” which is ten days of ten-minute sessions; then if you subscribe, it moves on to “Take 15” (fifteen days of fifteen-minute sessions), followed by “Take 20” (you can guess how that one goes). After that it expands into other stuff — the “Discovery Series” and so on — but I can’t tell you about those because I haven’t started them yet. The program does require you to take everything in order, but I can understand why; fifteen minutes is a non-trivial step up from ten minutes, and likewise twenty from fifteen, so working your way up to it isn’t a bad idea.

Because I’m only a little more than a month into the program, I can’t say much yet as to what it’s done for my mental health. But one thing I can say: it has exposed just how deep-seated my instinct to narrate is.

The largest portion of each session is spent focusing on your breath and letting go of other thoughts — or trying to. My mind, of course, immediately identifies this as prime Thinking About Story time. So I gently take it by the hand and lead it back to my breathing . . . until it wanders off again . . . so back to the breathing we go . . . and after a while it gets the idea, sort of. Whereupon it begins narrating my experience of focusing on my breathing. It isn’t really possible to make a story out of “this time my shoulders rose more than last time, and my exhalation was slower,” but god damn if my brain doesn’t try. And it thinks about what I’m experiencing — difficulties with not thinking included — and starts crafting the blog post in which I will tell you all about it. You have no idea how many times I’ve written this post in my head. (I have a faint hope that actually writing it will head this tendency off at the pass, but it is a faint hope indeed.)

It’s actually kind of hilarious, watching my brain scrabble for a way to narrativize what’s going on. I knew I was the sort of person who will run imaginary conversations in my head, or mentally compose blog posts, or whatever, but I underestimated just how much my thought processes are bound up in telling the story of what I’m thinking about. Turning that off is haaaaaaaaaaaaard. By which I mean, I basically haven’t succeeded yet.

This is not unrelated to my difficulty with the mindfulness thing in general: focusing on my physical experience of something, rather than thinking about other stuff while I do it. I live very much in my head, with all my imaginary friends (i.e. my characters), and if what I’m doing doesn’t demand my attention, I tend to daydream. I can focus when it’s something like karate; that’s detailed and intensive enough that I can sink my thoughts into muscle and bone and breath. But without a focal point like that, not so much.

So I keep practicing. One of these days I’ll get a handle on it . . . right?

I believe the abbreviation I’m looking for is FML

Same song, second verse. A little bit louder, a little bit more JESUS H CHRIST THIS ISN’T FUNNY ANY MORE.

Which is to say, I will be having ankle surgery.

Again.

Same ligament as before . . .

. . . just on the other foot.

Listen up, kids: sprain your ankles too often as a youth, and this will be your reward before you’re anywhere near your dotage. An orthopedist wiggling your foot around and saying “Wow!,” followed immediately by “Sorry, that’s not what you want to hear your doctor say, is it?” An unstable ankle joint that’s causing microabrasions and is already building up a bone spur, so let’s get this surgery done soon, shall we, before we’ve got ourselves a lovely case of arthritis? Oh and it’s so helpful that you still have the boot from the last round. We can just stick you right back in it. Not your first rodeo, here’s your forms, you know how this goes, and hey you’ve even got some blog posts to remind you of the unpleasant things in your future. Isn’t this great.

The surgery isn’t scheduled yet, but it will be some time between the very end of July and mid-September. Putting it off that long probably isn’t the most intelligent thing I’ve ever done, but god dammit I am going to Okinawa. The last time this karate seminar happened was five years ago; I don’t know when it will happen again. And I am not letting my stupid fucking ankles keep me from it.

The Value of Travel

I originally posted this as a reply to John Scalzi here, but it occurred to me that it was something that might be of interest to my local audience — especially since I’m posting all these photos from trips I’ve taken. šŸ™‚

In discussing his own feelings about travel, Scalzi said:

The fact of the matter is Iā€™m not hugely motivated by travel. This is not to say that I donā€™t enjoy it when I do it, nor that there are not places I would like to visit, but the fact of the matter is that for me, given the choice between visiting places and visiting people, I tend to want to visit people ā€” a fact that means that my destinations are less about the locale than the company. Iā€™d rather go to Spokane than Venice, in other words, if Spokane has people I like in it, and all Venice has is a bunch of buildings which are cool but which I will be able to see better in pictures.

To which I said:

I like seeing people, sure ā€” but the second half of the comment is boggling to me, because itā€™s so radically different from my own view, in two respects.

First of all, seeing is only part of the experience. Looking at a picture is flat, whereas being there is a full-body surround-sound sensory experience. Thereā€™s sound, smell, the feeling of space or lack thereof, the process of walking through. Highgate Cemetery was more than its headstones; it was the blustery autumn day with the wind rushing through the trees raining leaves down on us and the tip of my nose going cold. Point Lobos is more than the cypresses; itā€™s the smell of the cypresses and the feel of the dirt under my feet and the distant barking of the sea lions. Furthermore, pictures will never show me even everything from the visual channel: they may show me the nave of the church, but usually not the ceiling, nor the floor with its worn grave slabs. They will show me the garden, but not the autumn leaf caught in the spider web between two trees. I would have to look at hundreds of pictures from Malbork Castle to capture what I saw there. (Heck, I took hundreds of pictures there!)

Second, the most memorable part to me is usually the bit I wouldnā€™t have thought to go looking for if I werenā€™t there. The first time I went to Japan, my sister and I went to see the famous temple of Ginkakuji, which I loved ā€” but I loved even better the tiny shrine off to the left outside Ginkakuji, whose name I still donā€™t know. Or when I was in Winchester, and she and I walked to St. Cross outside of town; we went for the porterā€™s dole (old medieval tradition: even now — or at least in 1998 — if you walk up to the gate and ask for the dole, they will give you bread and water), but stayed for the courtyard with the enormous tree and the most amazingly plush grass I have ever flung myself full-length in. I can look at pictures of famous buildings in Venice, but Iā€™m unlikely to see pictures of the stuff I wouldnā€™t think to look for.

I write all of this in the full awareness that I have been extremely fortunate in my travel opportunities. My fatherā€™s work has often taken him abroad, so he has a giant pile of frequent flyer miles, and both in childhood and now Iā€™ve been able to afford trips to other countries: British Virgin Islands, Costa Rica, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Israel, Japan, India, Poland, Greece, Italy, Turkey, France, the Bahamas. Itā€™s created a positive feedback loop: these trips have led me to really enjoy travel and the different experiences I have when I go places, so as a result I arrange more trips when I can. As a replacement, pictures donā€™t even begin to cut it.

Not part of my comment to Scalzi, but I will add two further observations:

1) Clearly I do see value in pictures, though, or I wouldn’t take so damn many of them. šŸ˜›

2) What it says about my sociability that I am liable to travel to places rather than to people is left as an exercise for the reader.

things I have been enjoying since I got back

1) Not wearing the jacket I’ve been wearing every day for nearly a month.

2) Not wearing the shoes I’ve been wearing every day for nearly a month.

3) Not wearing shoes at all for much of the day, if I do not choose to.

4) Sleeping in my own bed.

5) Sleeeeeeeeeeeeping.

6) Going to the dojo and the gym. (There’s some discomfort associated with this one, because I basically didn’t stretch for a month and also walking = full exercise, but it’s still good.)

7) Seeing Thor: The Dark World, to which I said “Needz moar Loki.” My husband claims they actually filmed extra Loki scenes after the fact.

8) Seeing how my pictures from the trip turned out. (There are still too many of them.)

9) Working on the third Memoir. I sorted out some fun plot points on the trip, so now I get to make them happen.

10) Seriously, though. NO. SHOES.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/600935.html. Comment here or there.

last of the photos

The last seven of these are new.

No photos from Brighton, alas. Partly because I was busy at the con, but more because it rained a fair bit while I was there, and when it wasn’t raining, the wind was trying to fling me into traffic. No, really: at one point a guy waiting at the intersection with me was leaning back into the wind at about a fifteen-degree angle, just letting it hold him up. It was kind of ridiculous. Since the weather also meant my glasses were constantly being coated in a thin layer of salt and grit, I decided not to expose my camera to such trials.

It might also have something to do with me being all OMG NO MORE PHOTOS, though. During this trip, I took nearly 3500 shots in total. A first pass of culling has dragged that number down to about 2400, which (by comparison) looks much more reasonable, but — jeebus. If we exclude the major outliers, i.e. the days where I took less than forty pictures, I averaged almost 230 per day. When we went to Highgate Cemetery, I took 350 in two and a half hours.

Which is by way of saying that, while I’ll definitely post more pictures later, it’s going to take a while for me to go through them all and do the necessary editing, labeling, etc. Don’t look for that to happen any time soon, I’m afraid. I had been all proud of myself and the work I’d done on my pre-existing catalogue of photos. All I had left to go through were my honeymoon and Poland, and I was thinking I could see the light at the end of the tunnel . . . but it turns out to have been the oncoming train of this trip. šŸ˜›

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/600762.html. Comment here or there.

five more photos

Added an additional five shots to the photoset so far. Still one per day, but not caught up to the present yet; I’ve fallen behind in dealing with my photos (surprise!), so there are three days I haven’t even gone through yet in search of good shots.

These are, for the record, totally unedited. I’ve tried to pick ones that look good already, but just think how much better they’ll look once they’ve gone through Lightroom!

In other news, I have discovered how many days is too many to be continually on my feet sightseeing. If I ever plan a trip this long again, I need to build in more downtime — or rather, find some way to silence the little voice that insists I should be out seeing stuff, being as how I went to all the effort of getting here.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/600365.html. Comment here or there.

Before and After: or, The Magic of Lightroom

My father got moderately serious about photography some years ago, buying gear and software and taking lessons and so on. I, being less serious about photography, would occasionally ping him for tips, but resisted his suggestion that I invest in a program called Lightroom, because I wasn’t interested in doing all of that post-processing on photos.

Last fall, I made a mistake: I brought a couple of my Poland photos over on a thumb drive and asked my father to show me what Lightroom could do.

I could try to describe to you all the speed with which I fell. I could recount how I told my father on the spot that the only thing I wanted for Christmas was that program. I could rave at the magic even a simple click on “Auto-Tone” can work (on those occasions when Lightroom has good ideas — sometimes I have no idea what crack its algorithms are smoking). But pictures, words, conversion ratio thereof, ne? So here’s a shot I snapped at the Asian Art Museum today. Took this with my phone’s camera, through glass, so not what you would call ideal photography conditions in the first place.

Not only is it not a great photo, it isn’t even a great representation of what my eye saw, standing there. Apart from being fuzzy, it’s too yellow, and you can barely make out the designs on the body of the pot.

So when I got home, I popped my camera pics into Lightroom and commenced mucking about. Here is the result:

(more…)

where I’ve been; where I’ll be

I was offline for a bit (sort of) because my laptop had to go in for repair, leaving me mostly functioning off a tablet for the duration of its absence. Not conducive to blogging, nor to anything much resembling productivity. šŸ˜›

But! There are interesting things afoot, and I would like help from you all, dear readers, in prepping for them.

To whit, the [profile] kniedzw and I are going to England. (Mostly to London, though we’ll be attending a friend’s wedding in Oxfordshire, and I’ll be winding up in Brighton at the end for World Fantasy. Also, we’re probably going to pop over to Paris for a bit to see his old roommate.) We’ll be there from October 11th through the end of the month . . .

. . . and I have no idea where we should stay.

“But [personal profile] swan_tower,” you say, “haven’t you stayed in London, like, a bazillion times?” Why yes, yes I have — for values of “a bazillion” that equal half a dozen or so, that is. But the first of those, I stayed with a friend’s sister, and the last four, I stayed in the cheapest hostel possible, neither of which are really what we’re looking for in this case. (The remaining time — or possibly two — I have no memory at all of where I stayed.) I honestly don’t even know what neighborhood we should aim for. We’re there for sightseeing, not research, so I don’t need to be smack dab in the middle of the City. In fact, I’d prefer not to be, since you can’t get food there after 6 p.m. šŸ˜›

Where should we look at? Our price range is flexible; we’re not looking for luxury, but we want better than a backpacker hostel. Convenience to a Tube station is key, though probably not hard to get. Moderately central location preferable, i.e. maybe we could save a bundle by staying somewhere out in Richmond but it isn’t worth trekking back and forth.

Recommendations? And feel free to propose nifty things to see in London that I haven’t already done.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/597064.html. Comment here or there.

Happy my birthday to you!

I’m borrowing my approach from [personal profile] mrissa, who says, quite reasonably, that one should of course hope for others to have a happy time of it on one’s own birthday.

I can’t be a proper hobbit and give presents to you all, but I do have one thing: for the entire month of September, Lies and Prophecy is a dollar off at Book View Cafe. (I’m also going to have something else for you guys later this month, but it isn’t ready quite yet.)

Have a lovely day! I certainly intend to.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/596327.html. Comment here or there.

tonight’s random experiment

My braid weighs approximately six ounces.

For those of you who were wondering.

(It doesn’t sound like that much, does it? Though when I said “so my hair in its entirety probably weighs about half a pound,” that sounded like a good deal more.)

(This experiment was brought to you by the bun into which I had put my hair for karate starting to pull painfully on my scalp, and me wondering just how much weight I had hanging in a lump off the back of my head.)

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/593365.html. Comment here or there.

livin’ la vida monastica

I’m in North Carolina now, for the TIP course I mentioned before. Ahhhh, dorm life: I’m living in a cinderblock box that normally houses two undergrads, and boy, do I pity them. This is not what you would call a spacious room.

It’s funny to watch myself fall back into a mode I’ve lived in before, which I tend to think of as “monk-like.” With so few possessions, I become very organized about putting them all away in their places. (You would think that’s a more necessary trait when you have lots of stuff, and you would be right. But I’m better about it when my life is spartan.) I’ll have a very organized schedule, too, including a much earlier bedtime than is my wont. This is how I lived on digs, and much like how I live when I travel, too. It’s a stripped-down existence, with my attention almost entirely focused on what I’m here to do.

Of course, since what I’m here to do is “teach creative writing,” there’s a certain overlap with my normal life. On the way out here, for no apparent reason, one of the short stories I thought I would never actually write stepped up and spat out nearly four hundred words. “Fate, Hope, Friendship, Foe,” the seedlet that for the last nine years has consisted of a set of signs I saw while driving from Dallas up to Bloomington, and the fact that I had a life-sized statue of Atropos in my backseat at the time. Will it turn into a complete story? Who knows. And I have a new idea, too. I don’t know if preparing to teach creative writing flipped a switch in my brain, or if this is the same switch that’s been flipped since early this year, when I found myself itching to write half a dozen short stories instead of the novel I needed to finish.

Anyway, blogging will likely be scarce around here for a while, as I am going to be very busy. But if there’s any cool news to report, I’ll be sure to let you all know.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/589262.html. Comment here or there.

‘puter troubles, desktop edition

It never rains but it pours.

Remember how my laptop was going kaput a while ago, and I asked for tablet advice? (Thanks for all the responses, btw. I ended up going with a Google Nexus, and I’m quite pleased with it. In fact, that’s what I’m writing this post on.)

Well, my desktop has been acting strangely, to the point where I think I should look into getting a new one. The current one is pretty elderly, and I think I’d rather make the switch before it goes completely belly-up.

So now I’m looking for opinions on that end of the spectrum. I’m a Windows user (please don’t try to get me to convert), and 90% of the work done on that machine falls into the categories of word processing and internet, so I don’t need anything massive. I am running Lightroom these days, though, and I’ve found that sometimes I can’t even play Steam games on the thing because they’re too advanced for its graphics card; ergo, I’m likely to aim a bit higher this time than my usual bare-bones build. Current machine is a Dell, as was its predecessor; I’ve been happy with them, but I haven’t been keeping up with the state of the art, and I don’t know whether I should be looking at other manufacturers.

Corollary question: Windows 8? [profile] kniedzw tells me I will haaaaaaaaaaaate it, because I started computing back in the days of DOS, and object to operating systems that try to keep me from rummaging around in their guts. I’d be interested in feedback from people who have used it at all.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/588292.html. Comment here or there.

Talk to me about tablets, part 2

I made that post the other day in a hurry, hence not going into detail about what I’m looking for and how I’m using my laptop right now. But in a way, that made it more interesting; I got a broad array of answers. Thank you all!

So now comes the detail, and if you have other advice to offer, please do.

First of all, I have a desktop computer, which is where I do 95% of my writing work — maybe more. Also a lot of e-mail, websurfing, listening to music, and most of my game-playing. That’s still working fine.

My laptop mostly gets used in front of the TV, where I deal with e-mail and surf the web while watching TV. Sometimes I write blog posts. It also gets taken along when I travel, and that’s where its deficiency really starts to show: it’s too large, too heavy, too inconvenient. It takes too long to wake up and reacquire a wireless signal, which is partly a function of its slow degeneration from age — but not entirely.

Ergo, I want something that is smaller, lighter, and more responsive, as well as something that can function as a better ebook reader than the tiny screen of my phone. Netbooks are generally too small; I don’t have large hands, but it’s still a bad ergonomic idea for me to try and type a lot on such a small keyboard. I think I’d be better off with a Bluetooth keyboard for a tablet, which will be about the size of the one on my current laptop. An ultrabook is a possibility . . . but I’m not sure I really need something on that scale, for the use I make of it.

On the other hand, I’m not a fan of the restricted environment of an app market, whether Android or iOS, which is a point against tablets. (The Surface would be a compromise on that front, but it has other things against it — price for one, and apparently it’s a nightmare to repair.)

Anyway, I’m likely to go test-drive some prospects soon, as this laptop is having an increasing amount of trouble finding our wireless network and maintaining a connection to it. Without that, it’s nothing more than a very hot brick. So if you have advice to offer, get it in fast, ’cause time is running out!

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/575793.html. Comment here or there.

Happy Retcon Day

Once upon a time, there was a guy who was interested in a girl. He’d been interested in her for a month or two, and they had recently gone out to dinner on (theoretically) non-romantic grounds, so he was intending to ask her out.

He faced a choice, though. The aforementioned dinner had been on February 12th. Should he ask her out on Valentine’s Day? No, he decided; that would be (his choice of words) “cheesy.” He baked her cookies on the 14th, though, and ultimately asked her out on the 16th.

The two of them dated for many years, and eventually got married. But along the way, a small problem developed.

You see, this guy — sometimes known to the internet as [profile] kniedzw — decided, in direct contradiction of his own reasoning before, to declare Valentine’s Day their anniversary. The girl — sometimes known to the internet as [personal profile] swan_tower — is perfectly happy to celebrate the fourteenth of February as Valentine’s Day and also their Cookie Anniversary (a very important occasion!), but she objects strenuously to this blatant ret-conning of their past.

(She attempted to settle this matter more firmly by proposing to him on the sixteenth of February seven years after they started dating, in the hopes that it would give that date greater historical weight. No dice.)

At this point, of course, she suspects he’s sticking to the point simply because arguing over it has become tradition. But in the meantime, she is celebrating her Cookie Anniversary (nom nom nom), and wishes you all a very happy Retcon Day.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/575336.html. Comment here or there.

Talk to me about tablets

My laptop is, after nearly six years of good-to-middling service, tottering along on its last legs. I’m thinking that at this point it makes the most sense for me to pick up a tablet instead of a full laptop, but I don’t really know what to look at.

What’s out there right now, that isn’t an iPad? (I’m considering that too, but A: I’m a PC user and B: my brother worked on the iPad, so if I need proselytizing and/or information, all I have to do is walk down the street.) What do you recommend? What do you recommend I stay away from?

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/575174.html. Comment here or there.