Tag: blogging

January 29th, 2024

Bloganuary writing prompt
What are your favorite sports to watch and play?
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But not on television. I can’t think of any sport at all I would specifically tune in to watch on television — unless the Saints or the 49ers are playing in the Superbowl, and even then, the ads are half the fun.

I will, however, in a park or stadium, watch almost any baseball game from beginning to end. The one exception was a game I attended last autumn in Boston where it was raining heavily and the seats were close to the field but at such an angle I had to crane my neck to make out what was happening.

My preferred seating is high up in the bleachers so I can see everything play out below me. Which is why I don’t like watching baseball on TV. I don’t care what the batter looks like, and I don’t want to hear his stats. I don’t want to see a closeup of some young pitcher’s face as his sports career dribbles down the drain when he screws up. I’m not interested in hearing predictions about what the coach is going to do next.

I just want to eat a hot link and sit in the bleachers and watch that big, beautiful dial of a field tick through the innings, while I groan at outs and jump up and yell when someone gets to a base or home.
January 23rd, 2024
Bloganuary writing prompt
List five things you do for fun.
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1. An old D&D player am I, and other role-playing games like Call of Cthulu. Somewhere I still have a bag filled with many-sided dice. And board games like Monopoly, Risk, etc. These days my current favorite table-top game, and my husband’s, is Train Dominoes. There is nothing like gathering with good friends, good wine and good food for a good, long, twelve-round game that settles your brain into soothing number patterns.
2. The Sims. I have played it since Sims 1. Currently I play Sims 4, or, as longtime Sims players who remember Sims 3 call it, Sims 2&1/2. (Don’t get me started on EA corporate decisions and their customer service. That’s for another post. A long and angry one. )
3. Reading. There is always a book in the offing, sometimes literary, sometimes pop ephemera. Usually one of each.
4. Movies and TV, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become increasingly picky because the older you get, the more predictable are the stories and the more exacting I’ve become about plotting. I try to avoid the “just add water” genre of comic book adaptations. I prefer classics, pre-code, and foreign.
5. Walking. I am lucky enough to live in a good walking city, with hills, stairway walks, a waterfront, interesting shops, etc. Every day I walk for at least an hour.
  
  Without a cellphone. I’ve watched, at noon, a French executive throwing a massive tantrum on the corner of Sutter and Kearny, waving his fists, sputtering subjunctives, surrounded by half a dozen alarmed American executives in expensive suits trying to calm him. I’ve watched a fleeing shoplifter on Market pelting a female security guard pursuer with the socks he’d stashed under his coat. On Post Street, just after sunset, I’ve been accosted by someone stepping in front of me from a doorway who looked solemnly into my eyes and said “The briefcase is bullet-proof” before stepping back into the doorway. (Neither I nor this person were carrying briefcases.)
  
  In each incident I looked around to see other pedestrians who were completely oblivious, their heads bent over their cellphones.
January 21st, 2024

Bloganuary writing prompt
Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc.
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My first name was invented by the 16th century poet, Sir Philip Sidney for his long pastoral poem Arcadia. Presumably, it means “filled with honey.”

It got picked up again in the 18th century by Samuel Richardson, as the name of a virtuous teenage servant girl who spends much of the novel being sexually assaulted, kidnapped, and imprisoned by her upper-class, “importunate” employer. I took a stab at reading it when I was fifteen. A quarter of the way through, exasperated, I flipped to the end, learned the “happy” ending is that she marries the man and reforms him with her piety, and gave it all up as a bad idea. I wish I could say I was indignant as an incipient feminist whose keen insight cut brutally through the romantic conventions of the time, but I wasn’t. I just didn’t believe a word.

At the time I was born, the name my mother chose for me was at the height of its popularity, though I don’t think she knew that. It was her third choice. Her first was flatly and reasonably rejected by my father because, coupled with my surname, it would have doomed me to a lifetime of bad jokes. Her second would have made my full name sound like someone walking through slush. So she chose another name she liked, it worked, and now it’s mine.

It’s not exactly exotic. There was always at least one other girl with my first name at school. When I moved to San Francisco in my twenties, there was another woman here with both my name and surname. We never met, but we did keep stumbling across each other when we applied for library and video rental cards.

The advent of the internet revealed just how common is my full name. At one point, in my forties, I got a cluster of emails congratulating me on graduating high school and asking when I would come visit relatives in Israel. I wrote back, explained my location and age, and then, rather tentatively, asked how anyone with my Irish surname ended up in Israel.

The response I got was polite, amused and kind. Theirs was a shortened version of the name of a shtetl in eastern Europe, that, in turn was named after the French city from which its population had been driven after a pogrom — the same city that had given my family its name. So, the email writer observed, if our ancestors had not been relatives, they had been neighbors.

I believe I sent back thanks and an apology for my forebears.
January 20th, 2024

Bloganuary writing prompt
What’s your dream job?
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The first was just after I moved to California in 1986. My boyfriend, a software engineer, was following the Silicon Valley gold rush. Everyone knew why he was moving to the Bay Area, but when they asked me why I was going with him, I felt something more than “the weather and the sushi” was called for. I was in my twenties and had a degree in writing, so I would say “I want to work for a magazine.”

“Any magazine in particular?” they would ask. I only knew about one that was published in the Bay Area.

“Locus Magazine,” I said.

Yeah, right, a voice inside me would mutter.

I spent my first few days in Berkeley happily discovering the local bookstores — Cody’s, Shakespeare and Company, Dark Carnival and The Other Change of Hobbit. It was at that last store that I saw a notice on a bulletin board in the back. Locus Magazine was hiring.

One of the store’s owners, Debbie Notkin, noticed me writing down the information and came over. “I wouldn’t,” she said. “Charlie’s impossible as a boss.”

“Oh?” I asked, vaguely.

“You should talk to someone first. You should call…” She gave me a name and wrote down the number for me. “She can tell you all about what it’s like working there. Nobody lasts there more than a couple of years.”

I never called that other name. I called the number on the job notice and got an immediate callback.

The next day I sat in an armchair in Charlie’s living room. “You don’t cry easily, do you?” he asked, near the end of the interview.

“No,” I told him, truthfully. There was a slight, awkward pause as I considered asking him if he cried easily. A boss I’d had in Greensboro, the owner of a very successful restaurant, had been a nice man, but he’d cried sometimes. Usually it was after store meetings, when he’d mention something like the fact that we were using commercial cleaner instead of white vinegar while wiping down the tables. He’d burst into tears and say we were all ruining him, and we’d all gather around to tell him everything would be all right and we loved him.

I kept cagily quiet. Asking a question implying I had made my last employer cry would send the wrong message.

Charlie hired me, I agreed to come in the following morning, and just as I was about to rise from my chair, the hinges of one of the old fashioned, adjustable standing lamps nearby gave way. The lamp fell, bonking me neatly, but not painfully on the head. I refused to take it as an omen.

And so, I got my “dream job.”

Debbie’s prediction did not come entirely true. I lasted, not just a couple of years, but four. I did leave — as so many did — with much yelling and slamming of doors. But I was never, never sorry for having worked there.

Over a decade would pass before I got another “dream job,” one I liked as much as I’d liked working at Locus. That time, nobody asked if I cried easily and nothing hit me in the head during the interview. I stayed for twenty years.
January 18th, 2024

Bloganuary writing prompt
If you could un-invent something, what would it be?
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I had an uncle whom I still remember as a sort of prophet. He had the beard and the fiery eyes and, like most prophets, he was considered slightly mad. A geek before his time, as early as the 1970s he hauled a “portable” computer — a rectangular slab the size of a large suitcase — to and from his no-doubt-thankless job connected to the EPA in Louisiana.

And well before then, what had truly made everyone shake their heads, was his opposition to Eisenhower’s Federal highway project in 1956.

“We all thought he was crazy,” I’ve been told.

American southerners across the political spectrum were likely to be enthusiastic about any effort at improving roads — which tended to be underfunded and badly maintained in poorer states like Mississippi, Alabama, etc. My uncle, however, could not be moved on the subject. This project, he said, would benefit mainly the highway, fossil-fuel and automotive lobbies and would result in even greater dependence on cars & trucks, more pollution. It would be far better to invest in a good rail system and public transit.

As usual, he was right. Trains were uncermoniously dumped as a pleasant and efficient option for cross-country travel, replaced by broad, bland, interstate highways that can make even extended journeys thuddingly monotonous.

And yes, I mean “dumped” rather than died out naturally. A railway historian at a lecture I attended described how, sometime in the sixties, entire carloads of railway passengers were told in mid-journey that passenger service had been discontinued, and they’d have to get out at the next stop and fend for themselves. The future for trains was strictly freight, no matter how much people liked using them.

I love road trips — but they aren’t really road trips unless you get off those pale interstates and explore. If they’re only by way of the major highways they are mere exercises in getting from point A to point Z using what feels like a long, white concrete tunnel with much the same view no matter what state or region you pass through.
January 15th, 2024

Bloganuary writing prompt
What is your favorite animal?
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I can’t be trusted with flora, but I like most fauna. If I had a favorite, I suppose it must be cats, because I have always had cats. I can count off my life with them. The two Siameses we had when I was kid; the bobcat hybrid I adopted in college; the Abyssinian I adopted with Tim and later, the Abyssinian’s roommate, the Boston Charlie; the yellow Maine Coon who inveigled Michael into bringing it home; and now Emmeline, who is a “dilute calico”, mostly white, with gray and brown patches.

Of them all, the bobcat hybrid was the most fun because bobcat hybrids don’t stop being kittens. He was always bouncy — never entered the dozing throw-pillow stage most cats go through. Once, because the guy kept blinking, he launched himself into the face of a Mormon missionary who was sitting on the sofa — the cat hit him full-on with his soft furry stomach, then slid into his lap, purring. The man was startled, but very nice about it, considering. Just straightened his glasses and went on talking.

The Abyssinian was the most elegant and affectionate. The Boston Charlie was the shyest, but the best climber.

The yellow Maine Coon was the most aggressive. For some reason, my using the tv remote could enrage him, and occasionally we’d have to lock him in the bedroom.

Emmeline is the smartest. She allows me to use the remote and watches tv with us, and by that I don’t mean she sleeps on the couch while we watch tv. She watches it, commenting whenever any animal appears on the screen. During ball games, she’s been known to sit up and wave a paw at the screen as if trying to catch something.

I do like dogs. I’ll go out of my way to walk past a dog park so I can watch them.

Also, when I was twelve I was acquainted with a hippo who loved it when I scratched his gums. He was far from my favorite, but I think it’s worth mentioning.
January 14th, 2024

Bloganuary writing prompt
In what ways do you communicate online?
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I hope. That’s not always easy.

This is a shortened version of a piece I posted to a discussion forum. It was probably after yet another extended thread on an interesting topic had devolved into name-calling, insults, and calls — from the namecallers and insulters — for the thread to be shut down. Discussion forums, alas, seem to have largely died out on the Internet, but this piece still sums up my view of talking online.

___

An evangelical hostility to smart, extended debate has become the norm all over the Internet.

Here and elsewhere I’ve seen people apologize for either posting OPs that resulted in long and fascinating discussions, or for taking part in such discussions. (In contrast, I’ve seen very few apologies posted for almost interminable threads in which people do nothing but post sex jokes, funny pitchers, and links to comic sketches.) I’ve seen people hop onto interesting threads and deliberately derail them into nonsense. I’ve seen reasoned disagreement equated with “trolling.”

There seem to be several factors at work. One is an inability to distinguish polite disagreement from personal affront. Another is the fact that it’s easier to offer ‘tude in lieu of logical argument, which can involve a certain amount of work (as opposed to making faces and thinking up insults.)

Yet another is the notion of online forums as territory. Sometimes people who have an established presence on a forum believe they should be able to browse the thread headers on the homepage without being upset by the subject lines.

And finally, there’s the widespread belief that one is entitled to the last word. A bizarre but common reaction to argument I’ve encountered online is the poster who objects to getting civil and thoughtful responses to his or her own posts and plainly considers it harassment — even as he or she continues to respond to the person he or she is complaining about.

Surely there’s room for a few small pockets of sense online? Let’s stop apologizing for spending time actually talking about issues rather than playing video games and browsing for funny cat pictures. If you enjoy discussion – even debate — then politely discuss and debate as long as you have time and the subject interests you.

And if you don’t, well hey, there are plenty of threads and forums where you can indulge in a taste for nonsense. Nobody is forcing you to read or take part in, or even continue in a thread that makes you uncomfortable.

Please don’t try to get them shut down.

If I’m wrong, and in fact, someone is standing over you with a sharp stick or gun forcing you to respond to posts in a thread you dislike, you should know that this is illegal and people who do that should go to jail. I suggest we use a safe word you can gently work into the conversation, like “eggplant.”

If we see that, we’ll continue the discussion – but discreetly signal someone else so they can call the police and get you out of there.
December 25th, 2023

For Christmas, at Michael’s request, I made sausage Jambalaya. It’s not a dish I cook much anymore, given concerns about fat and sodium content. Last night, just as I was stirring it before serving, I realized I’d left out the Thyme. That was an accident, but I also deliberately cut the amount of salt in half. (Why even add salt when you’re cooking with ham and sausage?)

Michael didn’t seem to mind, and it turns out I actually like it better this way. It’s creamier and got a nice sweetness offsetting the heat.

Also, I made a chocolate apricot cake. And a pot of Smoking Bishop. Lovely celebration.

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December 3rd, 2023

I have been online long enough to remember terms like “flaming,” “cyberstalking,” and “douced,” pre-GIF ripostes like “ROFL,” and “Bingo!” and the ritual invocation of Godwin’s Law. I can even remember when “troll” referred, not simply to someone who disagreed with you, but to someone online pretending to be something they were not. Most frequently these classic “trolls” were male posters to USENET or Compuserve forums pretending to be women and revealing their sex with posts on women’s issues forums like “I’ve had my breasts grabbed in the bar where I work, and I don’t mind. Consider it a compliment, in fact.”

In 2023, this classic trollishness crops up frequently as non-readers of books pretending to be readers of books. A favorite canned internet response these days , is “educate yourself”, (which has replaced 2012-16’s “read some history,” invariably invoked by people who don’t.) Any request for book titles or authors in the aid of this self-education will usually get only a vague gesture and either “Google it” or “Google is free.”

When someone online responds to the question “what have you read recently on this subject” with “Oh, lots and LOTS!” with no titles or authors offered, you can generally bet the last book they cracked was assigned in school. The same goes for someone who replies to “what’s your favorite book” with “Oh, too many to say!” They don’t get that actual readers are eager to share the names of their favorite authors, cherished titles, to talk about them, quote them, etc.

Perhaps as the result of readers now storing their volumes out of sight on a device rather than bookshelves, people who don’t read books for pleasure no longer have any idea how many books people who enjoy reading actually read.

Intepreting “what’s your favorite book” as a request to list every book you’ve ever read and liked is a dead giveaway.

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