Lorem Ipsum

Have spent most of the past week doing webmastery kinds of things for last night's launch of Jaggery, Mary Anne's new desi literature magazine.

(I would like to take this opportunity to mention that WordPress turns out to be rather ill-suited to the task of presenting a quarterly magazine that's published in the form of distinct issues. I'm sure it's fine for blogging, and it does have some nice convenience features, but boy is there a lot that you can't do without (a) plugins (many of which turn out to be buggy and unsupported) and/or (b) going in and hand-editing the code. I eventually managed to do pretty much everything we needed to do without changing any PHP code, but it was a near thing.)

Was up until 3ish last night finishing various aspects of that, but somehow the launch has not filled me with excitement or even satisfaction; perhaps partly because there are still various tweaks to be done, but mostly I wasn't sure why. I was kind of grumpy and stressed all day today (and have been for much of this past week). I finally got one of my overdue day-job tasks done this evening, but I still have two or three left to go; have had a hard time focusing on much this week.

Tonight, I watched the end of the incredibly drawn-out marriage-equality proceedings in Hawaiʻi; the state House finally (after 57 hours of public testimony followed by something like twenty hours of House debate) passed a modified version of the state Senate bill, so next week (Tuesday, I think) the Senate will vote on the modified version, which they're very likely to pass, and then Governor Abercrombie has said he would sign it. So, victory in Hawaiʻi is almost here! After twenty years! And yet I'm not terribly excited about that either.

So I wasn't sure what was up with my emotional state. But a few hours ago, I saw work email that said I'm doing an interview on November 11, and I looked and realized that that's Monday.

And I thought: Oh, okay, that explains it.

Because my father would've been 74 years old this coming Monday. And it'll be the 33rd anniversary of my mother's death. And although I haven't been consciously paying a lot of attention to that anniversary (I knew it was coming soon, just hadn't quite noticed it would be this coming Monday), I suspect that has a lot to do with the headspace I've been in this week. (Not the only factor, but I think a signifiant one.)

So this evening I decided to watch a mindless fun action movie. And the one I picked, which I have out from Netflix, was Point Break.

In which, early in the movie, FBI agent Keanu Reeves discovers that a surfer woman (who he wants to use as his entree into the surfing world) lost her parents a couple of years ago. And so he tells her that he lost his parents a couple of years ago, in order to manipulate her into being sympathetic. (Which, by the way, made it a lot harder for me to like him.)

And I thought, Dead Movie Parents Syndrome strikes again. Because (as Kam and I discovered in the months after my father died) when one picks a random fun movie to watch in order to take one's mind off the death of a parent, it very often turns out that the movie just happens to have parental death as a significant plot element. I've lost count, but there do seem to be a remarkable number of Hollywood movies in which one or more parents die, often (as here) just as a plot element in passing rather than a central part of the story. (And btw, at no subsequent point in Point Break do either of the characters in question express any emotion that's directly about their parents being dead (or allegedly dead).)

(As for the rest of the movie: I mostly enjoyed the first three-quarters of it (among other things, it was funnier than I had expected), but I felt like the last quarter kind of fell apart in various ways. Still, worth seeing for cultural literacy if nothing else, and I liked Swayze.)

Anyway. I'm doing okay, just kind of glum. Off to sleep shortly, though I'll probably read a bit more of Mary Poppins first. (So far, I'm finding it interesting and intermittently funny, but not loving it.) This weekend: two social events on the same evening; finishing up some Jaggery stuff; trying to dig myself out from under the vast pile of email that's been accumulating unreplied-to lately (apologies to all); some day-job stuff; trying to get some more fiction writing done; and the usual assortment of miscellaneous to-do tasks.

Added the next morning: I think lack of sleep was also part of the problem. Got eight-plus hours last night, for once; still not exactly cheerful, but a little less glum.