Rambling: Longing for bubbles and syrup

So my daily posts are demonstrating a distinctly fluffball nature.  Is this because I'm blogging every day? Am I diluting my thoughts to the point that there won't be anything solid? Or is it just that the solid thoughts aren't going to come any more frequently?

We'll find out. I'm going for the second interpretation. Back when I was doing pretty reliable Scent Of The Day posts, some of them were solid and some of them were fluff.

I also wrote most of them while adequately caffeinated.

I want a Coke and I want it now.

OK, I'm stopping at fluffball here.

Rambling: Random Thoughts

Weeeekend! Ha!

The roses are going crazy, weeks early.

I'm thinking of learning iOS programming.

I still haven't fitted the perfect shirt pattern.

I have fitted a perfectly nice pattern that would be great for summer skirts. Why aren't I sewing them?

I haven't had a Coke in a week. This is a resumption of the sugar-cutting.

I want a different pair of walking skirt shoes. I bought a perfectly nice pair of Danskos, but the round toes make me look like I'm a six-year-old dressed for Sunday school.

We seem to have just skipped spring this year. So I'm having spring cleaning thoughts in summer weather.

I want chicken.

If I can't have Coke, I want chicken.

Did I mention the chicken?

Tomorrow I should fry something.

That is all.

Blogging: Books and books

Dang. Missed two days. Oh, well.

I’ve been reading The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish, by Linda Przybyszewski. My favorite quote so far is “I may be the only historical to lecture the Supreme Court in a suit that won a blue ribbon at a country fair.” That’s from the author herself, not from any of the historical subjects that she discusses. I'm barely two chapters in, but I'm enjoying it. And I'll leave it at that until I'm further along.

I've also been re-reading Service Included, by Phoebe Damrosch, about her time working at a waiter at Per Se. Well, and about other things. Also enjoyable.

I'm also about a third of the way through American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Also good.

I'm halfway through each of two books about software.

I should really finish something.

That is all.

Blogging: Um.

So I'm trying to do that daily blogging thing.

So I'm sitting in front of a blank screen.

And no thoughts are coming out.

Um.

It's not that I'm not having thoughts. All sorts of thoughts happened today. We were busy and active and did all sorts of things. Ending with eating lots of Chinese food.

It's just that none of them are coming out worth posting.

Um.

This would be a great time for a nice cat picture, but that won't work, because I have yet to figure out how to add a picture when blogging on the iPad, and the Mac isn't handy. That's also why the post below has the wrong font.

OK, I'm going to try again tomorrow.

Rambling: A Wrinkle in Time (on paper, on stage, and in my head)

(I wrote this yesterday. Then I got sleepy and forgot to hit Publish. So I'm calling it yesterday's post. Yep.) 

 The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is showing a production of A Wrinkle in Time, adapted for the stage by Tracy Young. You should all go see it. Run along and order your tickets. I'll wait till you get back. I can tell you where to eat in Ashland, too.

But that's not mostly the point of this post. Part of the point of this post is that the play made me cry. That's no big deal, in general: plays often want to do that. But...

OK, digression. Really, this is going to be relevant. My mother has a story about my brother as a baby, eating creamed spinach. I think it was spinach; anyway, it was something he didn't like the taste of. He would willingly open his mouth for a spoonful, experience the taste, and cry. And then he'd open his mouth again. He utterly failed to make the connection between accepting the spoon, and his crying.

I have a similar disconnect with what's making me cry when I see this play. Or think about this play. Or talk about this play. I get a few words in, and off go all those wanna-cry body parts. (Not that I'm saying I don't like the taste of the play. Did I mention that you should go see it?)

But the wanna-cry isn't associated with identifiable thoughts. Or feelings. Or images. Or characters. There's no, "Oh, poor Meg," or Charles Wallace, or Calvin, or any of those. I'm burbling "Yeah, they did a really good job of carrying out the spirit of the book without slavishly sticking to elements that wouldn't work onstage, and the thing they did with the viewfoils...dagnabbit, why am I crying again?!"

I feel as if I'm standing outside myself getting exasperated as I crash, like an unstable computer. But there's no core dump, nothing to analyze.

Well, no feelings to analyze, but that leads to the second part of this post, where I realize that I'm seeing a metaphor in the play that I think was there all along in the book, and wondering how I could possibly have missed it, and wondering if I made it up. But, see, I can talk about that metaphor all day and it doesn't make me cry. So it doesn't solve the puzzle.

Anyway. This is going to be a spoiler. Spoiler. Not the final spoiler in the story, but a spoiler, so stop reading if you want to read (or see--bought those tickets yet?) A Wrinkle In Time without being influenced by my interpretation.

You remember the room, the metaphorical "cloven pine" and Mr. Murray (Meg's father) and Meg with Mrs. Who's glasses? Yes? Mr. Murray's trapped in the room, a prison with transparent walls. He can't see, and no one can get in to help him, or even communicate with him, no matter how loud they shout or how hard they pound on the walls. All they can do is watch him suffer.

But when Meg puts on Mrs. Who's glasses, she can walk through the cold transparent walls. She gives the glasses to her father--puts them on him herself, I think, against his "that won't work" protests--and he can see. He can see, and he can get through the walls, though now she's blind. He scoops her up and walks out of his prison, carrying her.

Are you seeing what I'm seeing? Was this obvious to everyone but me?

Is there a child of disordered parents who has not, at times, wanted nothing on earth more than the ability to make their parents see, and to empower them to escape from the prison of their own making? And also to give up their own self-imposed responsibility and become a child, finally cared for, rescued, by that parent?

Suddenly that's what I get from that scene, in the book or the play. Suddenly IT, and Camazotz, are all metaphor. They're Mr. Murray. The mind imprisoning and controlling him is his own mind. The mind that tried but failed to destroy his children is his own mind. I don't know if Madeline l'Engle meant that, consciously or unconsciously, but there it is all the same.

But I can discuss that, and write it, and nothing wants to cry. So there's got to be something else in there.

Or I just need a clean reinstall.

Writing: Hmmm. And I didn't mean to create a clip show post, but...

I noticed that I have a lot of little scraps of writing that I never posted. I think. If I'm going to blog every day, that seems to be a fine time to use them. Here's one, written a few weeks ago. I think.

In The Forest for the Trees, Betsy Lerner says, "If you are struggling with what you should be writing, look at your scraps. Encoded there are the themes and subjects that you should be grappling with as a writer."

A few weeks or months after I wrote my brief series of StoryADay stories, I noticed patterns in them, and then I saw the same ones, less clearly, in my other fiction scraps.

In Bitter Oranges and The Princess and the Caffeine, predators befriend prey. In Recycling and The Princess and the Caffeine, parents don't care a fig about their children. In Recycling and Tulips and Butter, children fight the pull to fulfill their parents' needs. In Coriolis Effect and Tulips and Butter, parents impose their needs on their children, with the classic "for their own good" excuse. There's betrayal in Caveat Emptor and The Princess and the Caffeine, and the last line of Bitter Oranges. Recycling involves finding love (sort of) somewhere new, walking away from where it was sought before. So does The Princess and the Caffeine. So does Caveat Emptor. So does Bitter Oranges.

Hmm.

Allies acting as enemies, enemies acting as allies, finding what you need somewhere else.

Now I want to write a new set of stories, just so several months later I can once again figure out what I was writing about.

Blogging: Considering the daily blog again

Long ago, I blogged a daily Scent of the Day post every single day for...er...a while. I have it in my head that I did was over a hundred days, but I suspect that I made that up. This Sunday (in, yet again, BlogChat) I remembered that and half-resolved to start blogging every day again--not necessarily about perfume, just about stuff. That was three days ago, and I haven't posted yet. So much for resolutions.

But I could still give it a try.

I occasionally theorize that the gotta-add-a-picture factor slows down blogging. The need for a picture seems vaguely silly--it's not as if y'all would come here, see a text-only post, and promptly shriek and run away, right? Right? I mean, a good fuzzy cat picture is a fine thing, but it's not as if it's mandatory

If I skipped the picture, I could even blog from my phone. Maybe. There's some sort of post-by-email thing.

Speaking of writing on my phone, I've been playing with (NAYY) the combination of Daedalus (an iOS app) and Ulysses (a Mac app.)  They're both text editors with bonus features for managing lots of text files, and, since, they're written by the same company, they sync with each other using that cloud thing. So if I have an inspiration for a random ramble while I'm waiting in line at the grocery, I can start to tap it into my phone, and when I get home to my Mac and an actual keyboard, the post fragment is there for me.

Now, the problem with this for general writing purposes is that while I'm perfectly happy to have my blog posts wafting here and there, I'm not as sure about trusting some theoretical future novel to a cloud thing. The very fact that I keep referring to it as a "cloud thing" presumably communicates my uneasiness. There's no logical reason to trust cloud syncing less than I trust email--I should really trust it more--but there it is.

Um.

So will I post again tomorrow?

We'll see. Meanwhile, I'm going to tack on a nice cat picture. According to Wikimedia Commons, his name is Noodles.

Image: By Antony Stanley. Wikimedia Commons.

Blogging: The Transaction Vibe, and What's Wrong With It

So, I was just on Blogchat, unsuccessfully trying to express an opinion in 140 characters. And thought I'd try to express it here.

There are business interactions where the customer is well aware of the nature of the transaction, and are perfectly comfortable with it. When you enter a store, or eat in a restaurant, or get your shoes shined, you are quite aware that the interaction is a transaction. It's about money. It's about you getting value for your money and the business getting value for their products or services.

But there are other interactions that aren't that way. When you go to a movie, for example, you're well aware that it's a transaction from the point of view of the theater--you buy your ticket, you pay money for your popcorn, and so on. But the movie is not supposed to be a transaction. It may be packed to the gills with product placements, but that fact is supposed to be invisible to the viewer.

The same is true of television, and books, and newspapers. You're aware that the whole experience is framed with money--you see the commercials, you paid for the books, you see the ads in the newspapers. But you expect the core of the experience to be business-free, to be just for you, without any "But what about us?" vibe from the business.

And sometimes, the same can be true of the earlier things that I mentioned--the store, the restaurant, and so on. When you go to a Michelin-starred restaurant and spring for the tasting menu, you expect the subsequent experience to be free of further financial/business/transaction elements. That tiny piece of foie gras should look like no other size would do, rather than looking like the restauranter calculated just the right size to make a profit.

But the customer experience in (most) stores, and fast food restaurants, and groceries, and most other businesses, is soaked in the transaction vibe from beginning to end. You supersize things, you hand over your coupons, you walk past big blazing sale signs.

I think that some for-profit bloggers think that they're like the grocery store, and that since they're in business to make money, there's no harm in looking like they're in business to make money.

But there is, because readers don't want the transaction vibe. They're not at the blog to help the blogger make money, any more than a movie viewer is at the movie to help the studio to make money. The intrusion of that transaction vibe reduces the reader's enjoyment, and makes them more likely to wander off and find another blog that doesn't have that vibe.

Most of the really successful  for-profit blogs are, I believe, aware of this, even if they wouldn't put it quite that way. But many, many less successful ones are not, and I suspect that that's part of why they're not successful.

There.

Phew.

140 characters just doesn't cut it.

Picture: None. Oh, my God, no picture! The freedom of a non-profit blog.

Budget Of a Dozen Change Purses

I owe the squirrel four dollars.

I had to type that. Because I could.

See, I'm playing budgeting games. Part of the plan is to give myself a monthly allowance of pocket money, in cash, so that every casual penny I spend feels real. I can't spend cash online, of course, so when I spend money online or use a credit card I move the same amount of cash out of my wallet and into a little leather change purse decorated with a squirrel. Isn't he cute? The squirrel money, of course, belongs to the bank account that will eventually pay the credit card. Since the bank account also produces the pocket money, it will just be the starting point of next month's supply. Whee!

Then there's jellybean money. No, I don't have a purse decorated with jelly beans; the jellybean purse is decorated with odd little rolling hills.  The term comes from a Dagwood comic strip in which Dagwood came home with his paycheck and handed out the allowances and the grocery money and filled the envelopes for all the bills, and had enough left for a bag of jelly beans for himself.

So it's for fun things. I won't be buying jelly beans. I'll be buying perfume. Among other things.

Jellybean money is an older convention for me than the pocket money or the squirrel. It comes from a variety of sources, mostly unexpected modest windfalls. ("I never cashed that check from selling my bike at the bike sale two years ago? You're sending me a new one? Cool!") And gifts. Larger windfalls (tax refunds, say, or if I had the type of employer inclined to give bonuses) mostly go into savings or proper un-jellybean expenses, but I tend to kick a percentage into jellybean money. And now any leftover monthly pocket money will also go in the jellybean purse.

Jellybean money is like a little prison with flexible walls--if it's too small I'll just burst out of it and spend regular money on fun expenses; if it's too big it negates the goal of saving more. All my jellybean funds are in cash, because, again, cash feels real. I rather doubt that I'll save enough to get to a "wow, that's a lot of cash to keep in the house" situation. There are too many perfumes out there. And scarves. And books. And fabric. And patterns.

This is, yes, one of those diary-like posts where I babble about things that have no particular use to the reader. It also gives me a post to link to when I say things like, "...I spent half the jellybean money..."

An added budget rule is that I'm only allowed to spend jellybean money on Last Saturday. (See? Linking!) Otherwise, it will always be there to rescue me from mismanagement of pocket money.

I was thinking of requiring that jellybean funds follow a rule that I've occasionally seen for children's allowances--a rule where they have to save a certain percentage of their allowances and then spend that saved money only on purchases above a certain value. I think that the idea is to ensure that they get the experience of saving up, rather than spending their entire childhood frittering every dime on candy the instant they get their hands on it. But, really, how many little frittering purchases can I make in one day a month? I'll think this one over.

Of course, today is last Saturday, so any new rules will be applied next month. I already bought three short cuts of gaudy silk that I hope to successfully make into scarves with the serger. We'll see how that goes.

Um.

That seems to be all.

Photos: Mine.

Rambling: Weekend (In which I engage in self-absorbed burbling, without even a picture.)

I'm taking Friday off. So it's the weekend. Now. Woohoo!

I've been experiencing stress stupidity--stuff just dropping out of my head and letting the rest of my mind deal with the hole. A three-day weekend of no obligations should spackle over all that. I hope.

In fact, I can tell that I'm already settling down because I started, earlier in the day, to develop a migraine, complete with nausea. Whee! This is normal for me--when I've been rushing around trying to fulfill demands for a sustained period, and then suddenly get to relax, the migraine comes. I believe it's called a "stress letdown migraine." I have a tradition of consuming plenty of caffeine on the first day of a vacation or the first day after a project is done and delivered, to reduce the odds of it coming on full force. That works beautifully if I've been limiting caffeine, but not so much if I haven't; today's headache just giggled at the Coke that I tried to pour on it. So I just smacked it with Excedrin Tension Headache. That'll teach it. No, this is not a product placement; I only take the stuff as a last-ditch sort of measure, and firmly intend to cut down on the caffeine so that ordinary caffeinated beverages become the nuclear option. If you see what I mean.

I'm sounding like one of those elderly people that discuss their health quirks in excruciating detail. At least you don't have to maintain eye contact and an interested expression. And I promise I won't tell you to stop mumbling.

Um.

That is all.