GCF
In Windows, there's a type of error called a General Protection Fault, also known as GPF. I personally sometimes experience a different type of error: the GCF, or General Coping Failure. Today's GCF had the usual symptom: a desire to curl up into a ball and hide, and let someone else do all the coping for a while. Being a grownup has many advantages, but with great power comes great responsibility, as they say, and sometimes it's easier to let someone else be the grownup.
Anyway, eventually the combination of sunshine, food, Kam, and a couple episodes of Alias resulted in a more or less full recovery.
The sunshine, sadly, had the side effect of sunburning both my legs. You'd think I would know better by now. I'm applying lots of aloe vera gel.
While I was sitting in the sun, I read the rest of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, which is quite good, though pretty depressing. Definitely recommended.
Unrelatedly: thanks to those who've pointed out the various recent links to the SH "Stories We See Too Often" page. I gather it appeared in Making Light the other day, then BoingBoing, and now Neil Gaiman's blog. I'm always pleased when people like that page, but also a little embarrassed, 'cause I feel like I should make clearer that it's not meant to be a canonical list of Bad Stories, just a list of stories we see a lot of. And authors have started paying attention to it, so we see a lot less of most of those stories than we used to, so in a sense it's a sort of self-negating list.
We do occasionally get stories with cover letters that say "I know this plot is on your stories-we-see-too-often list, but this version of it isn't the same as the ones you see all the time." Sometimes that turns out to be true; sometimes it doesn't.
This paragraph would be where I would put a pithy summing-up and conclusion, both witty and profound, if only I had such a thing. Instead, it'll just be where I say good night and head off to bed. Tomorrow, they tell me, is another day; I hope they're right.
