Don't like elections

Elections have their value, but like all things of value, they take some effort, and sometimes there are lots of side effects.  Elections tend to bring out the best and worst, and because they bring out the worst, we see things in friends (or acquaintances) that we'd rather not, biases, prejudices, stubborn or rudeness streaks, closed minds...we all have some, but sometimes the worst can be worse than we guessed, and if there isn't a lot of basis for the relationship to start with, it becomes clear that maybe there is no basis at all.  If there's more to the relationship, the bad thing can be gotten past like all all of our weaknesses--we'd have no relationships at all without that much--but the other relationships may end.  While it seems from the outside like there might not be anything to lose, we always have hope that even a barely-there friendship might eventually go somewhere valuable, and ending it takes that imaginary future away.

I'm not aware of that sort of thing inspiring a story scene I've written for NaNoWriMo, but it follows that theme.  My character has regained someone she lost but thinks that it still is that imaginary future, a dream of what might have been, and can't accept that the loss has been reversed. 

I never planned to write about insanity and paranoia, and I'm sure I don't know enough about it to make realistic psychological thrillers (they are, in any case, futuristic space science fiction, which isn't quite the right genre for it), but I seem to land there in a lot of my stories, at least on the fringes, and in this particular series, which turns out to have a rather nutty premise and nuttier universe (never intended as I write it, but Dilbert meets Pern's dragons at Plato's Cave is as close as I come to describing the resulting flavor), insanity seems rather more likely than sanity.   I can't imagine that it will be easy to sell as a publishable novel, but trying to write it is a great way to distract myself from the election ads.

Shop hop fun

I participated in a shop hop for quilt shops this weekend. It was fun for different reasons than we expected. We were expecting more sales, easier-to-enter drawings, and more shopping time. What we got was a multi-level hide-and-seek. The first seek was for the stores--they obviously participate in the shop hop as a means of encouraging potential customers to find their well-hidden, inadequately signed, tucked-in-odd corners of the malls shops.

The second seek was for the baskets for the drawing: one ticket, three or four potential prizes, and one basket for each hidden around each store. The hide-and-seek gave us quite the chance to see the area--well over a hundred miles of driving even not counting missing the stores for a pass or two and having to wind our way back through horrible street layouts and interchanges--and the hunts around the stores gave us a good chance to see what kind of selection the stores had. Some weren't different enough to notice, but we made notes about a few, one that specialized in batiks, one that had a better selection than most of multi-colored fabric (as opposed to color-on-same-color patterns and visual textures).

A couple wouldn't sell less than a yard off the bolt, which definitely got on our don't-go-back list, since the prices were too high to make bulk purchases worthwhile, AND they didn't have pre-cut half yards for any of the fabrics we were interested in, nor fat quarters at all. For base fabrics, we go for cheap fabrics, seeing not enough difference in most of the color-on-color patterns with rare exception to be worth the extra price (and the exceptions aren't always expensive), though we will buy small pieces of a specialty fabrics, multi-colors, picture-fabrics, or special themes (water, leaves, space) as accent fabrics and for fussy-cutting. The Batik one now... we're willing to buy a little specialty fabric and so are most quilters we know, so I expect they get enough business even if it's a quarter yard at a time. Thy just need a few more multi-color batiks to fill out the selection.

Anyway, if you spot an opportunity to participate in a shop hop, don the buny ears and go. Its an educational experience. Can't find one in your area? Create your own: find the stores that have something to do with your favorite hobby, map them out, grab some money and a note pad, and learn something new about your town.

Observation of the Day

I have this wonderful drawing of the knights of the round table standing in front of their chairs with their swords all drawn and pointed toward the elaborately decorated center of the table. It's been on my desk for ages and I hardly ever notice that it's even there. Today, i looked at it and thought how much it could easily be seen as a bunch of guys all pointing to the different places they want to go on a map, or different directions they wanted to take to get there, as offering the the classic all for one and one for all sort of salute.

A Victorian 21st Century?

I don't much go in for politics but can't help but be exposed to various views from friends, family, passing bits on the news, and advertising in the middle of otherwise good shows on tv. Maybe it's the splashy sort of exposure among other, very-different topics (including medieval re-creation, discussions of steampunk and cyberspace, crafts and cooking) that caused the image to form, rather than any real trends. Still, it was startling in its sudden clarity and completeness. Here are some of the pieces that stuck in my mind:
Republican's who originated things like the clean water act encouraging the dismantlement of environmental protection on behalf of big business (may or may not be true but it seems to be a popular claim by opponents);
the small size of the American middle class, working poor, homeless families that used to be upper middle class, more billionaires (really? with all those bank disasters and big company closures? Small businesses used to be the source of retired millionaires, but not billionaires where did they come from?); Crime crime crime (okay, it's actually way down despite the bad economy, but you'd never know if from the push to increase the size of every police and security force in sight),
union breaking (older relatives think the democrats and others are mad because the Wisconsin leadership decided the barely-above poverty teachers and state workers should all pay a bit of their own medical insurance like everyone else. Friends say the employees had no objection to that but resented the union breaking and related maneuvering to get it through congress on the sly);
plants and animals going extinct in every direction, indicative of bad environment and unpleasant living conditions for crowded humans (and yet they think the housing market is a key indicator for the economy? Do they realize some people are consciously choosing to not add to overpopulation and sprawl?);
Reduced retirment benefits, few pensions, and savings poured into heroic medicine (that is, the overuse of medical treatments when readily available and cheaper means of prevention would have worked far better)
Mansions continue to be built while foreclosure signs abound
Modest dress even among teens? (though they choose to how off the oddest selection of body parts sometimes...) and still parents complain at inappropriate dress and sexting and other expressions of... shall we say post-pubescent biological imperatives? (Which generation invented mid-drifts, hip huggers, and hot pants anyway?)

So what do you get (as an image if not the reality?): Seriously conservative dress, rich rich, homeless poor, struggling farmers, a wild west image of rampant crime and guns, bartering and subsistance living, working until death, overbearing cops and security forces who barely understand law and rights: a dirty, privileged, bright candles and dark alleys, glittering crystal and invisible victims of poverty and death, Victorian era with smart phones.

Grimm

Saw it. Liked it for now but we'll see if they can keep it up. A little heavy on the almost-werewolf stuff as opposed to the other story elements of the Brothers Grimm stories, but maybe it will help the transition to have something that has been recently popular, as does the contemporary detective-story-like setting. Not brand new fantasy by any means, nor high fantasy (my favorite) but I'm always happy to see anything with strong traditional elements because it means things that were popular awhile back might become popular again and some of my own writings are not in the current pop themes.

I caught a glimpse of some other show last weekend that I thought was the same series but obviously it's a competitor, with strong similarities and distinct differences (that one seemed to switch between contemporary worlds and somewhere else in a way that this one does not, but I didn't catch enough of it to be sure. Often I've seen stations come out with shows and movie producers come out with movies that have such an obviously shared basis or premise that I wonder if they are two scripts based very loosely on the same book or story, whether someone writes a proposal like a back-of-book blurb and the stories are written based on just that much info, or whether its more like a writing prompt, where a phrase or statement is presented and everyone--at the conference or web site or whatever--is invited to write their own version. I get the challenge, I can see it in series at the same network - hallway chatter? A news blurb passed around the e-mail net that inspires? But when there are so many themes and premises and all out there, can't we get a little wider range of material to choose from?

OOOh, there are times I'm reminded not to talk to co-workers on topics that even border on politics. One learns things one would rather not. Politics not only come out, but people reveal too much information about other aspects of their life, as if the normally taboo subject of politics opened a door. Among other things, I'm always amazed to find out that people making a decent living at a full time job often still have outside jobs, apparently just to fill their time. I don't get it. Noe if they loved the work... well, I suppose they at least like the work, but to me it often sounds like work, not like writing.

Okay, I know plenty of people that don't get that writing isn't work, that revising can be enjoyable (it is, after all, the core of writing). So I suppose other people are allowed to enjoy things that I find to be work. Still, I wonder how many of them find it to be work, too, and just do it to fill the time, as it sounds. Are they deceiving themselves, unwilling to admit they like it (because it is seen as work and not pleasant by many and are taught to think of it as such). Or do they just really not have things to fill their time? I really can't imagine it myself. If my mind needs a break, I crochet or quilt (the quilting part is fairly mindless, not the designing part). If my hands need a break, typing and revising is less demanding than hand writing. If I get bored (unlikely but it can happen) and have a little energy left, there's always some corner of the house that needs to be pulled apart and cleaned and put back together again. (Did you picture a corner structure of brick or wood being pulled apart and reassembled with mortar or nails? I thought of that interpretation just as I finished the sentence; slang has its place, but it does not add clarity in content)

Best Wishes to the teachers

Will it be a new era, or merely a minor spat as the citizens of America give up yet another of so many rights that we have lost this decade? Last I heard, the teachers had even accepted the budget changes, all to their loss despite their typically low state government pay (but nice benefits such as every full-time employee should be able to have). What they really want is to keep their democratic rights, collective bargaining, hard won and long accepted as a symbol of the power of the people, now so active in Egypt and its neighbors. To have it snatched away without debate (I smile with delight and offer encouragement to the senators,too, who delay the premature vote and aide the debate their rivals would end unbegun) is not democracy but short sightedness and the loss of yet another freedom in the name of expediency. Power to the teachers and the other state employees. Power to the people and to the remnants of American democracy.

Best Wishes to Egypt

I'm not a big news watcher, and these days my first thought is always, how distorted is the news from reality, still, the apparent awakening of the populace in Egypt struck me as classic democracy in action that I felt a desire to cheer when I first heard about it. It's never just the people all getting fed up with an out of date system all at once. There are surely triggers, though nothing necessarily that an outsider would notice or comprehend, but still, the need for change became recognized and thus we have a classic revolution, though it is unfortunate that it has turned to violence.

In some ways, I suppose that it is inevitable, though violence should never be. A man who has ruled for thirty years should be ready to retire, but no one likes to be pressured into change, especially into a change that feels like a loss instead of merely a change. the fact remains that no one can rule effectively for thirty years, even in middle management. The ivory tower at the top or even the upper windows of the corporation highrise, offers too poor a view of what is happening on the ground, and thirty years of memories, even if they are undistorted by time, convey nothing of the changes in technology, culture, attitudes, needs, and expectations. A leader cannot lead effectively a people that they no longer know.

A few years is typical, ten if the leader is a good listener and brilliant, but no one in a position of ultimate power can be effective for thirty years. If nothing else, being effective is typically exhausting unless there is a solid structure beneath doing most of the ruling and maintaining contact with the people. If that were true Cairo, I suspect there wouldn't have been more than a token protest, as a reminder, and the leader would have been more ready to step down to contented retirement long ago.

A career suggestion

Between ads, census, chance encounters, and young people at work, I think a great career choice these days would be geospatial information system stuff, especially if the student combined it with studies of communications (journalism perhaps) and maybe a regional minor. In the end, the region doesn't matter; it's just a way to learn how to apply the GIS stuff to something substantial, but with all the GPS, census, weather, and other data being collected every which way around us, any company with sense is going to be hiring the GIS analyst type who can make order of the data. And they'll be looking for people who can communicate the technical gibberish to customers, sales people, and managers quickly and effectively. It's a rare skill combination with endless demand soon to come.

End of year wrap up

i end the year with some dark thoughts, spurred by the recent air travel and other issues that leave me lamenting the conitinuing loss of rights and liberties, the unenlightenedness of the world--our way must be the right way because it is ours, reason and common sense no where to be found being just one element of it all.

Of course, the desire to “enlighten” is probably nearly as dangerous. How much of that is “my view” too? Except that my view of enlightenment allows others to live in peace almost entirely as they like, so long as they do the same for me. Is that bad for them? Does it allow me to still offend and harm them, just by being, living my own life my way? I suppose it's possible.

All in all, the world is still open to dreams, it's just that the dreams of space travel and utopian futures requires more enlightment, more sense, more cooperation to even approach. it's a big task that can't be achieved by one or even one nation or several nations without solid commitment. Solar energy as a twenty year commitment in Germany is big, and yet it is so small compared to the visions offered by space fiction. Even my own, sometimes dark, Cerel Gold can’t even approach happening (or just the nice parts) without the leaps of technology and cooperation and advancement in certain fields (solar power and energy common sense being the smallest fraction of them).

Cerel puts Earth in the place it has earned: a third world of potential instead of a leader. We can’t even attain that measure of galactic role in the foreseeable future, though fifty years ago it seemed something that we should be able to achieve this century, or the end of the last. Nothing new there, I suppose. Life progresses apace, but not always where we would like it to go. And for now, it isn't toward new planets across the galaxy.

The computer world has gone places most of us didn’t imagine, but it remains a virtual world, and one with as many problems as benefits, giving us the illusion of increased communication (the news calls it vastly increased communication , but it is vastly increased data flow, and that is a universe apart from communication. The messages, if anyone is bothering to send them, are lost in the noise, and most don’t even try. The e-mails that substitute for letters of the past are full of trivia of the day. Over time we might get some sense and hints of the nature of people’s lives, but I have yet to receive one that contained the depth of feeling of even a bland summary letter. Many who were poor letter writers are even worse as e-mail writers, though they can write to everyone at once and hit send. It all gives the illusion of communication at every level, from family and friends to international news. Yet all level have also lost, with news reports lacking substance or even the attempt at balanced reporting that was standard at the end of the last century. Recently, my sister and I might agree with a opinion and still rebel at the report because it is so obvious that they made no effort to convey the other side, which had value too, reasons, if not enough reason for the cost. We are surrounded by trivia in the name of facts while missing utterly any truth. We get the bits and pieces of data on a thousand topics, and not enough substance for any of them to give us the smallest measure of understanding.

Still, it offers a vast opening for writers: many issues to address ala the anti-utopians of the past. Now it's the nightmares and possibilities of the future: virtual life, the computer generation youth who think they are communicating even while their ability to interrelate with people in person deteriorates with lack of excercise to the necessary parts of the brain. Genetic coding is a nightmare to personal rights, privacy, insurance, adjusting, while potentially an aide to preventive medicine (if it is understood correctly and not misapplied as seems more likely in my gloomier moods). The stories are there to be written and I begin to understand the interest in near future speculative fiction, (even if I still don’t consider most of of it science fiction). It has the better chance of sliding into literary, nongenre fiction and popular atrention. In the end, that can be good for the future of the genre fiction, too, if it it prods the readers to ask the questions that have gone too long unasked about where technology is taking us and how can it get us to where we should be aiming.

Having someone to skate with

On my recent travels, I noted a couple holding hands, mostly because it has been an unusual sight, lately. Public displays of affection have come to be uncool, I guess. Then i saw an advertisement that had a couple skating and my thoughts wandered in a similar direction... Having someone to hold hands with, to skate with has many advantages beyond the obvious romantic ones:

: someone to cling to, hold hands with during a firghtening movie or a walk through a rough neighborhood

: someone being there makes us braver, stronger,

: widens our view of the possibilities,

{ presents alternatives when we can't see any

: helps us through the day to day trials and annoyances with cheerful words, helping hands, pleasant distractions,

: someone to lean on, fall back on, offering freedom to take modest risks, knowing that someone else is there to catch us

Faith can sometimes take the place of a romantic partner: God as our our safeguard, our help in troubled times. But faith, too, is stronger shared, and being physical beings, a physical hand to hold can go along way in helping us take that first frightening step on the ice.