More stuff
The past few days have been kind of a blur, even though very little has been happening. I'm slowly getting back in the swing of magazine stuff (it's nice to have nitpicky detail work to do that doesn't require any brainpower or contact with people, like entering subs into our database), preparing to go back to work Monday, talking on the phone with various people.
In addition to all the great comments and emails and phone calls, I've received some very nice papermail. Cards, letters, small gifts. Lori HC sent me some good chocolate with a note reminding me of a time I told her, years ago, "In times of great stress, it helps to have good chocolate." I had totally forgotten about that. Fran sent me a lovely long letter. Karen sent a card and a little tin of Badger Sleep Balm (I love the caption under the photo on that page, btw) with a label that says: "A dreamy night balm rich with precious oils to calm, encourage, cheer and relax poetic badgers and other restless wanderers." Michael figured out how to order me a pizza remotely. I'm pretty sure that there were other gifts that I'm blanking on. Most of these things have made me cry. Which is good.
Got some much-needed alone-time Tuesday and Wednesday. Saw Kam Thursday night. Friday night, Debby B visited (she was in CA for the Conference for College Composition and Communication (hint to web page creators: if you're going to use an acronym throughout your page, expand it somewhere for the benefit of clueless visitors)). Hoping to see Arthur and/or Pam today or tomorrow, and Lola tomorrow. I'm more or less capable of interacting with one or two close friends a day at the moment, but wouldn't want to attempt much more than that.
(Btw, I've been making a lot more typos in the past two weeks than I ever have before. If you see any in my journal entries, forgive me. And let me know, and I'll fix 'em. I'd rather know than not know, y'know?)
A surprising number of the friends I've talked with didn't know that Peter was involved in a child-support dispute. I can't talk about the details here, but suffice it to say that Peter was the biological father of (as far as we know) four people: our older half-sister (who Jay finally got in touch with earlier this week, and who I've been talking with in email, and who may read this; hi, G!) who lives in LA and who I haven't yet met in person; me; Jay; and our half-brother F, who's now about 17 or 18 and who lives in Florida and who none of us have ever had any kind of interaction with. I know it's confusing; even some members of my family are confused about it. There are a lot of layers to this story (if it can even be considered all one story), and most of them are big messes.
Okay, onward to stuff I can talk about:
I finished reading Ring of Swords. Somehow I was expecting light fluff, and there are fluffy bits now and then, but it's a really rich, excellent, moving, wise book. The whole second half of my copy is littered with Book Darts—I didn't have any with me on the trip to WA or the first half would've been as well. I've always liked Eleanor's Hwarhath stories; this book is as good as the best of them.
Spent a little time meandering through various people's journals. Favorite lines from the entries and comments I came across include:
"[T]he high lit world is awakening from the long, cold sleep of realism."
—Ben Rosenbaum, in David's journal
And:
"[F]or most of the world today technological change is spacelike, not timelike (advanced technology comes to Africa not from the future, but from the US or Europe; to the US not from the future but—increasingly—from Asia and, for some reason, Finland)...."
—David Moles, in a journal entry
And:
"For me, the process of writing is like taking a perfect little bird and pulling out all of its feathers, leaving it dead and bleeding, then gluing the feathers to a page in a pathetic imitation of the original bird."
—David Levine, in Jenn's journal
I've been continuing to use and like the new Treo. It has a few really annoying interface quirks (for example, even some of the built-in applications don't work very well with the 5-way controller; I'd like to be able to use it effectively without ever using the stylus, but that doesn't seem to be possible in many cases), but overall I think it makes a great replacement for my aging cell phone and my aging Palm m500. I'm not 100% certain that I'm gonna stick with it yet, but it's increasingly likely. If I do, that means I'm down to carrying three devices: Treo, digital camera, iPod. (The Treo has a camera built in, which is much nicer than the camera in the previous model of Treo, but it's not nearly high-quality enough to entirely supplant my Canon Digital Elph.)
I know there was more I was going to say, but I can't think what. Perhaps that's a sign that it's time for me to go read subs.
I know I keep saying this, but it's still true: thank you all. Your support and words and thoughts mean a tremendous amount to me.
