karawynn

moving

Thu, 21 May 2009 20:11:39 GMT

My personal writing will appear on karawynn.net for the foreseeable future. Also, for a while at least, it should be more frequent. :)

everything's relative

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:57:20 GMT

"You hang onto your pain like it means something, like it's worth something. Well, let me tell you -- it's not worth shit. Let it go. Infinite possibilities and all you can do is whine."

"Well, what am I supposed to do?"

"What do you think? You can do anything you want, you lucky bastard -- you're alive! What's a little pain compared to that?"

It's been a rough few months. Much pain, both physical and not. Watched the last episode of Six Feet Under, Season 4, tonight. Took it to heart ... at least for the moment. We'll see how I feel tomorrow.

"It can't be that simple."

"What if it is?"

...

bad things come in ... what number was that again?

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 01:58:41 GMT

For a partial update on our current status, see http://www.pocketmint.net/.

stacked against love ...

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:56:04 GMT

This is beautifully written, and achingly true: Keith Olbermann on gay marriage.

I know posting the link here is like preaching to the choir, but perhaps some of you have friends or family members who do not support gay marriage rights. This might be a good thing to send them.

"The world is barren enough. It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us — all of us — to go forward ... With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against each other for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?"

whoa

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:08:07 GMT

My userpic has swapped to something I've never seen before. My black-and-white webcam photo has been replaced with something I don't even understand, much less recognize. /jawdrop

LJ account hack or database snafu?

avert disaster: vote

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:55:07 GMT

This amused me for a good ten minutes.

Palin as President

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:27:13 GMT

Yanked from littleowl , a politics quiz:

You are a

Social Liberal
(80% permissive)

and an...

Economic Liberal
(15% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Socialist

You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness.

of friends and food

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:51:51 GMT

After a rough couple of weeks, I finally am having an almost cheerful day. I attribute this largely to the very pleasant dinner we had with Maggy and Patrick last night. Home-cooked Indian good, conversation even better.

This weekend we host a kizlj! For four whole days. I am taking the two weekdays off work because the weekend just isn't enough Stacytime. In addition to the requisite Mashiko trip, she has mentioned a desire to cook with me, yay.

Next weekend was supposed to be travel with urlgirl but was postponed to give her a little breathing room in her schedule. We've invited a couple of game-friends over for dinner but don't have firm acceptance yet. If they can't come it will prolly be just Jak and me.

Last weekend of the month we are cooking dinner for Wolfe and Christa. Jak can be coaxed to participate in the cooking if it involves our outdoor grill and ahi, so that's our centerpiece.

In the dinner invite queue, waiting on their schedules: Maggy & Patrick, tbclone.

It's nice to be able to invite people over again! Yay for remodelling progress.

power revolution

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 06:38:25 GMT

"I've gotten rid of all the goddamn grids."

That's Daniel Nocera, chemistry professor at MIT. For some reason, that one quote makes me want to give him a big hug.

Every once in a long while — sometimes not for years at a time — I read about something and the skiffy-writer part of my brain goes "YES! YES! THAT IS THE FUTURE."

A little over a decade ago I read about "electronic ink" and had that tingly feeling, and I've been waiting for that technology to come of age ever since. Finally, this year, we get the Kindle.

I'm having that skiffy tingle now. So maybe this is premature, but ... in a decade or so, this could be our ticket out of fossil fuel hell.

Best explanations I've found are at Wired and Forbes. (Forbes? huh.)

hey, weren't you supposed to be writing a novel?

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:37:45 GMT

Now that I'm more visibly writing online again, I'm starting to get the 'So, about that whole writing career thing?' question with more frequency. To save myself having to explain it individually, I present

I used to want to have a Standard Skiffy Author Career. I was on that path for a while: published some short stories, got some nominations and awards, networked with other writers, had editors and agents inquiring about a future novel. There was a glorious time in my early twenties when I was a Popular Young Prodigy Of Whom Great Things Were Expected, at the heart of a community of writer friends.

In the mid-nineties, however, my attention fragmented. This wacky new thing called the Web came along, which led me, separately, to a) a career in design, and b) nonfiction writing in the form of personal essays — both developments that were really good for me, on balance. I also had a couple of Bad Relationship Experiences with other people in the internecine SF community, which helped to take the bloom off that particular rose.

Since then I've been basically living my life as seems best at the time, never questioning the idea that 'someday' I will return the whole novel-career-thing to the front burner. Until recently I realized that ... gosh, I don't actually want that Standard Skiffy Author Career anymore.

I do still have one YA novel that (unless I die young) I will definitely write. There's another, far grander SF novel that I really ought to write, but don't know if I can. Beyond that, I am not compelled.

There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that, having run a small press, I now know too much about how the industry works — or doesn't. I won't go into a long rant here, but suffice it to say that publishing is uniquely and badly broken, and that frustrates me.

Two is that I seem to have become prematurely crotchety where fiction is concerned; it's a rare book now that I can stand to start, much less finish. I am irritated by even tiny flaws, and few stories captivate or inspire me the way most things did fifteen or twenty years ago.

Three, I really hated the fall from Popular Young Prodigy to persona non grata. When I was on the approved track, I got lots of attention and lapped it all up. But as soon as I deviated — as soon as I no longer had a good answer to the 'What are you writing now?' question — I discovered that (except in rare individual cases) that attention was all superficial. Success or happiness in any other area of my life was worthless; only progress along the Career Author Track was worthy. So I fell away from the 'community', and focused on people whose friendship wasn't dependent upon regular published output.

Four: I am a feedback junkie. I write to communicate, and I find that to be much more satisfying online than off. Similarly, I prefer short form, if only because I am too impatient to spend a couple of years on a single work and then wait a couple more for it to (maybe) sell and make it into print.

And five ... there are just too many other things I want to do. Ironically, this is part of why I gravitated to the idea of writing to begin with; in high school I was fascinated by things as disparate as theater and genetics, and wanted some way of incorporating all of them into my 'job'. In the years I haven't been writing novels I've been doing a lot of other things, large and small, and ... I feel the richer for it. Building a writing career requires a much more singleminded dedication than I'm generally willing to adopt. I don't want to step on that treadmill.

The one factor that might sway my path is Jak. We've talked about writing a novel together, and if things line up so that we can both commit to it at the same time, it might even happen. Bizarrely, we are very well-matched for this. We know we work well together (having done it for years at a time already without exploding), and our respective writing strengths tend to compensate nicely for each other's weaknesses (which we can admit with a refreshing lack of ego-driven insecurity).

So there you go. Yes, I'll probably write at least one shortish novel someday, but breath-holding is not advised. Meanwhile, I will continue to experiment with other projects, some of which will be writing-based.

struggling for balance

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:00:42 GMT

I'm forcing myself to break the inadvertent lj silence.

There's a momentum thing at work here; the longer it's been since I've posted, the more I feel like I have to make some all-encompassing update, and it quickly becomes just Too Much. So I'm consciously saying Screw That, and writing something quick and haphazard, dammit.

I've been quiet in part because a lot of my recent writing energy has gone toward Pocketmint. And in part, I am embarrassed to admit, because I resumed playing WoW.

I periodically go cold-turkey on the gaming for months at a time, and my overall life always shows measurable improvement when I do. I get more done. But eventually I start talking about it with people, and I get sucked back in, and ... my Real Life productivity suffers.

I'm working on that. Today I am *not* going to log on until I've finished my current Pocketmint post.

In other news: it's been a rough week. My insomnia has returned, coincident with a bunch of early morning appointments. This has resulted in horrible headaches and intermittent nausea. I also had a rare spate of panic attacks yesterday, for no particular reason. This happens to me maybe two to four times a year, usually just for one day, and every time I kick myself for not having asked for an anti-anxiety prescription ... but I never think about it when I'm at the doctor, because it may have been months since my last attack. I'm due for the annual physical now, so I have *got* to remember this time.

public service announcement

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:09:17 GMT

I consider Rotten Tomatoes to be a pretty decent indicator of a movie's worth — the wisdom of crowds and all — but I believe they got it way wrong with Hancock's paltry 37%.

Hancock is a good movie. Not perfect, but good. Definitely worth seeing.

floored

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:12:28 GMT

We’ve been back in our house for a week, but I’m slow on the photographic record — so slow that I missed the window between finished floor and furniture delivery. So the floor photos also star our new dining table, chairs, and sideboard.

We did opt to extend the oak floors, and I’m ecstatic that it worked out, although as with everything in this house, we ran into unforeseen problems that increased the cost. The final result is beautiful, though, especially since refinishing the old oak changed it from a dark walnut to a rich gold, further lightening the space.

Along the way we also ripped out the stairwell ‘fence’; Jak and I were in complete accord about the hideousness of that particular feature, which was cobbled together out of mismatched pieces of ... er, I don’t even know the word for it, but the part of the door-facing that the latch and hinges are attached to. I want to replace it with some wide-spaced posts that don't block the light from the sliding door.

In addition to a stair railing, we still need the walls smoothed and painted, plus a bunch of trim work. I’m still trying to decide on colors; I want something lighter than the pumpkin-mustard and chocolate-brown we inherited, but still vibrant and not washed-out. We also have a list of furniture to acquire, as finances allow: two or three tables, a chair, a lamp, a coat rack, and two bookshelves.

But despite the mismatched walls, we do now have the basics for inviting people over: space and dinner seating. No toddlers, though, until we get a new banister ...

More photos and notes are available on Flickr.

suitcase living

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:10:10 GMT

To briefly recap where I've been since last post:

First there was the solo trip to Nashville, which was entertaining and informative on several levels. I didn't think about this in advance, but this was the first time I'd been out on my own in seven years. Turns out the trip was much easier than I expected, and reintegrating with my normal life was harder.

Then there were a hectic few days at home and work, followed by another week in a motel, much less comfortably, while further house renovations commenced. (I'll have photos in a day or two.)

Turns out Sammy? Doesn't travel well. Dog was brilliant, not a bit of trouble. Cat was desperate to get OUT OUT OUT of this strange small room, and let us hear about it at top volume. Almost non-stop the first night, and then at regular intervals for the six days thereafter. Sleep? Not so much.

Never. Again. Next time, cat gets a cage in a kennel.

Also, about three weeks ago I decided to start a new project, so most of my non-sleeping, non-working hours lately have gone into that. I brought it online tonight, beating my arbitrary self-imposed deadline by a week. That's what obsession will do for you.

Now I have to go do laundry.

stop now

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:51:38 GMT

ursulav speaks for me. The only difference is that I started out with a slight preference for Clinton, which eventually inverted to be a slight preference for Obama.

But ye gods and little fishes, I am so tired of hearing about this. I am an NPR junkie and I’ve been turning the radio off on my commutes, because the DTs are preferable to more Clinton/Obama primary analysis. CAN WE MOVE ON ALREADY PLEASE?

fair enough

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 01:32:09 GMT

Following urlgirl’s lead:

The ‘What tarot card resembles you’ Test

Your Score: Justice

You scored 38 change, 67 wellbeing, 54 wisdom, and 63 truth

Balancing the wrongs of the past and setting them correct. Just as in the laws of karma there is a cause and effect to each and every action that we do. The sword is held high in the right hand to symbolize the action of correcting wrongs and holding the balance of justice, also symbolizes the cutting out of negative thoughts.

some extra words:

respecting justice
insisting on fairness
acting on ethical principles
being involved in legal concerns
committing to honesty
seeking equality
being impartial
trying to do what is right

assuming responsibility
settling old accounts and debts
being accountable
acknowledging the truth
admitting involvement
handling the situation
doing what has to be done

preparing for a decision
weighing all sides of an issue
setting a course for the future
balancing all factors
determining right action
choosing with full awareness

understanding cause and effect
accepting the results you created
seeing how you chose your situation
recognizing the action of karma
knowing that what is makes sense
making connections between events

Take the test?

For the same reasons, I’m sure, that my enneagram leads with One.

in the country of the blind

Thu, 29 May 2008 07:46:18 GMT

As I recently noted over at nayad’s place, I have a long list of repeating nightmares. One common recurring theme is ‘bits of me that break’ — most commonly teeth breaking or falling out, hair being cut or falling out, or contacts shattering either in my hand or in my eye.

I guess my contacts are not technically a piece of me, but they might as well be; I’m certainly as dependent upon them as any usual body part. I’ve had contacts for over thirty years now — much longer than I’ve had, say, breasts — having acquired them at the tender young age of seven, because my eyes were just That Bad.

In this age of disposable soft lenses and lasik surgery I am suited for neither; I’ve still got the old-style ‘hard’ or ‘rigid’ lenses valiantly trying to hold some shape to my poor eyeballs. Rigid lenses are both breakable and expensive, a happy combination.

I wasn’t very good at taking care of my contacts at seven (or eight, or nine), something which frustrated and angered my parents no end at the time, but to which I now say, WELL DUH. Your average seven-year-old is NOT EQUIPPED to handle very tiny fragile pieces of plastic several times a day without a certain amount of attrition.

I lost quite a few contact lenses as a kid but only ever broke one once. I was around eight or nine and apparently managed to snap it inside the case; when I next went to put it in I was confronted with spiky shards-of-contact, and a sick ‘Oh god I am so dead’ feeling.

This no doubt informed my nightmares for the next three decades. Often my sleeping brain elaborated upon the concept with charming scenarios that involved sticking a contact into my eyeball without noticing its brokenness, followed by all sorts of gelatinous slicing and inability to remove the offending object. But other times the dreams involved a simple, straightforward snap followed by the horrifying realization that a) that was going to cost a whole lot of money and b) I was screwed for actual sight.

So on Monday, when I got up from a nap (ah, holidays) and opened my case and picked up HALF A CONTACT my first three thoughts were, “Oh shit,” “Oh wait, this must be another one of those dreams,” and “No way, am I actually awake??”.

My second three thoughts were “Fuck me,” “Fuck me,” and “Fuck me.”

Anyway, that was Monday afternoon. Tuesday morning at 9:00:23a I was on the phone to my optometrist’s office; they rush-ordered a replacement lens for me, which I got shortly after lunchtime Wednesday. I appreciate their promptness, because it was pretty much like being without a hand. Yeah sure, you’ve still got one, but you don’t realize exactly how much you need that second one until it's gone.

vague bag

Fri, 23 May 2008 23:54:31 GMT

coopted from tommx:

What American accent do you have?

Neutral. Not Northern, Southern, or Western, just American. Your national American identity is more important to you than your local identity, because you don’t really have a local identity to begin with.

Also interesting is the map, which you can add to once you’ve taken the quiz.

worth a thousand?

Thu, 15 May 2008 04:22:22 GMT

We are back from Mexico. Third day actually, but I’ve been catching up hither and yon, and while urlgirl can attest that I have been incomparably voluble in person, I’m not sorted enough yet to say much in writing.

I have begun to upload select photos to Flickr, specifically ones where I was trying for artistry rather than mere snapshot documentation. Those of you with some photographic know-how are encouraged to leave suggestions and comments.

Some of the ‘we were here’ photos will be along later.

roiling

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:42:58 GMT

I heard about the (poorly-named) Open Source Boob Project because a friend posted to her LJ about it with a level of mouth-frothing that startled me. I came to it a day or two after the initial post, after the poster had already added certain salient details that were apparently missing from his original description. So I do not have a true measure of what my response would have been if I’d first seen only the original, as many people did.

As it was, on first reading I had a very mild response. I had a moment of identification with the author, as one high-school geek outcast to another. And I had a moment of discomfort and pity at the description of the girl who hesitantly asked whether her breasts were ‘good enough to touch’. Otherwise, I was pretty shrug about the whole thing. Knowing myself, I doubt I would have felt much more strongly before the revision began.

Here’s one explanation: I don’t tend to make judgments about people and circumstances unless I have a great deal of firsthand information plus some correlating secondhand data. I don’t say that from a horse of any particular height; it’s just what makes sense to me. If I know a person well, I will usually have a filter whereby I interpret things she says based on my understanding of her particular psychology. Anything related by a complete stranger gets a fairly Spock-like response: “Fascinating.” Judgment remains in indefinite superposition. I am certainly not the sort of person to respond with rage over an event for which I was not present and where I know none of the participants. Rage for me is a very personal response, on behalf of myself or someone else I know and care about.

Here’s another: Unless the speaker is someone I know from personal experience is an unreliable narrator, I tend to take everything he says at face value. Someone says ‘This happened, and it was good,’ and I assume that’s true until and unless evidence to the contrary presents itself. (And by ‘presents’ I mean ‘smacks me repeatedly upside the head’.) I am particularly trusting of people’s self-assessments; if someone tells me, ‘I am this way, and this,’ I typically accept it without question. She has to regularly and consistently behave otherwise before I will adjust my filter away from her stated self-assessment.

Both of these things are true. The former strikes me as a good place to be; the latter is dangerously naive, and has bitten me in the ass more times than I can count. I need to stop it.

For the better part of a week, now, I’ve been thoroughly — perhaps even obsessively — reading spinoffs from the original post ... comments and posts and comments to the posts and comments to the comments ad infinitum. A certain percentage of them are crap, but a surprising number are thoughtful and eloquent and resonant.

Periodically, I’ve also gone back and reread the original post. And what’s interesting to me (“Fascinating.”) is how my feelings about it have changed over these several days. I am still holding to the non-judgment regarding the original participants and circumstances. But I now read those same words and flinch, repeatedly, in places that didn’t affect me before. It’s like I had been wearing heavy woolen gloves, and now I’m touching it with my bare skin.

I’ve also been thinking a lot. Not so much about the OSBP per se, but about my own experiences: of being female in this time and place, of bodies and sex and more.

I believe I have learned some things this week, and been reminded of some others I’d forgotten. My mind is roiling with it all, even in sleep.

I would go into more detail, but I am about to spend ten whole days sans both internet and computer. Perhaps I’ll be able to gather my thoughts into something coherent when I return.

let down your

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 04:53:17 GMT

We had a pair of free movie passes that expired in two days, so headed out to see Forbidden Kingdom tonight.

OH MY GOD I WANT PREHENSILE KUNG FU RAPUNZEL HAIR.

That is all.

my skin is incomplete

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:44:47 GMT

O gurus of LiveJournal, how do I make it so that single-entry pages maintain the overall journal template instead of the default look? Or is that a paid-account-only feature?

wall-eyed

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 03:44:34 GMT

About this time last year, after replacing ten windows and a sliding door, we began eyeing Major Project Number Two, which was taking down the wall between the kitchen and the living room, thereby opening up enough space that we could seat more than three people for dinner at a time. (This house is a bit odd in its space allocation ... you’d think that anything with five bedrooms would have room for at least that many people to sit and eat, but no.)

So I found a structural engineer, had him out to the house; he looked it over and pronounced it not load-bearing, and shortly afterward Jak and I commenced wall destruction.

Got most of the drywall peeled off (unearthing a mess of old plumbing in the process — I am baffled as to its original use) before we discovered that the beam at the top did not extend the length of the wall, despite outward appearances. Engineer then wondered why the roof hadn’t fallen in already, and told us we need to install a massive beam across the width of the room.

Off to find a contractor, who came out and gave us a bid for over six thousand dollars, making the project an order of magnitude more expensive than we’d expected.

Ouch.

Well, having very recently laid down nearly $10K for the windows, we did not have another six to put towards this. Plus it was summer, and finding contractors who even had time to answer their phones was tough, much less ones who’d come out and bid. So here we sat, with the half-destroyed wall ...

I had surgery in August, leaving me mobility-impaired for several months ... then Christmas and kids’ January birthdays ... what with one thing and another it was early March before I finally started researching contractors again.

Last week, more than eleven months after we began this saga, the wall was finally fully removed. (We managed to shave about a fourth off the initial $6K bid, though we lost the best deal while waiting for a third quote. Once the weather turns nice, the good contractors get snapped up in a hurry.)

And now we have space! Jak and I have been known to stand in the ex-wall spot and dance, we’re so happy to have it gone. The paint job needs to be completely redone, and the floor — I want to match the oak floor into the kitchen if we can afford it, or maybe bamboo if not — but these are aesthetic details, not functional ones. In May we’re going to get a dining table that seats six to eight, and assorted other furniture, and then we can actually begin to invite people into our home.

Here’s a tip for anyone redecorating: www.findyourfurniture.com has a pretty good free Flash-based room planner. More photos and a screenshot of my floorplan reside on Flickr.

beautifully wrong

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 15:48:15 GMT

Yes, those are tulips. Yes, that is snow. Yes, this is April. No, I have no explanation.

hobby incoming

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:19:52 GMT

Jak just gave the thumbs-up on buying a new camera prior to our Mexico trip. This is likely to fix two of my biggest problems taking photos with our current camera (a model in the same line from 2003): the interminable millennia between shots, and the blurriness from having arms instead of tripods. I am excited!

The third problem I have with our current camera is that it has a bazillion options and I never RTFMed. This will also be true with the new camera, if not moreso. But I have several days in which I have nothing much scheduled but lying around on a beach and learning the camera. If I can manage not to spill margarita on it, we should be good ...

And then my Flickr account will actually get some use!