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January 9, 2004 /

Whoa! Moon shot!

If this ever comes to anything, it could actually make things really convenient for a certain movie franchise that has yet to be written.

January 9, 2004 /

I say “you gotta believe” a lot, because… well, I believe it, philosophically and biologically. It’s a motto and a mantra. I don’t think I’ll ever know if I picked it up subconsciously somewhere, or whether it’s just one of those examples of convergent phrase evolution.

Turns out there is a specific person to whom it’s ascribed, though, and his name was Tug McGraw, and he died yesterday. His obituary is sad, but it’s also good reading. He lived what he said.

January 7, 2004 /

I’d read on Neil Gaiman’s blog some time ago that, in a press conference, Margaret Atwood had declared that Oryx and Crake was not speculative fiction, as everything in it was extrapolated from some current trend. Both Mr. Gaiman and myself thought that was a fairly strange statement to make, and I was a little disturbed to hear it from a writer I like so much, but it turns out that she does say it’s speculative fiction after all. So much for gossip.

This is pretty much a post just to reassure myself, actually. Sorry.

Last spring, I read Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead, a series of transcribed lectures about writing. The themes of that book formed a large part of my senior statement, and had probably as much influence on the way I write structurally as her style has had on my actual prose. Which is to say a lot.

I often have difficulty liking things–books, music, visual art–without somebody else’s trusted opinion to back me up and give it cred. I don’t particularly like this about myself, but it has saved me from some embarrassing devotions (let’s remember that I was big into the Gin Blossoms). There are a few things, though, that I feel I came by honestly. Semisonic is one, Checkerboard Nightmare another, and Atwood is a third: the three of them form a rough but fairly clear portrait of my taste in nearly everything written.

More on writing, in probably a couple of days. (Oh, and thanks to Sumana for the O&C link.)

January 2, 2004 /

As today’s Stone Soup points out, it’s actually pretty silly to even think about working today, but for some reason I did, and dragged myself out of bed at 6:30 just as normal. It was a little strange to be one of like four (as opposed to eighty) people waiting for an elevator, and a little stranger when all the lights on our part of the floor were deliberately off. When I read that comic strip and waited an hour and still only tech support was there, I took off like one of the wiser characters in a survival horror movie.

After that I mostly… slept? And played Double Dash. Maria got a GameCube for Christmas, so unless she bans me from using it I’ll probably never accomplish anything worthwhile again. We actually unlocked almost everything on New Year’s Eve, along with our stay-in-and-snack companion Lisa, but we lacked a memory card at that point and were bereft of saving ability. I got one of those on the aforementioned trip home from work today, so now we get to do it all again. This is a fine and noble thing.

Tonight it’s out to dinner at some fancy place where they make you eat so slowly that it takes two hours to finish the soup, then Strizzle Lizzle rehizzle, and finally sometime after midnight Ian and I will drive to the hinterlands and crash (as in sleep, not… hit things). The next morning, we and forty of our closest relatives will race tiny cars down a track for eight hours until one emerges supreme. Seriously. We’ve been doing it every year since before I was born.