discretion is the better part of everything

contact

2006-12-04T22:45:52Z

I'm making a holiday card list. This list will not be for this year-- I'll be lucky if I can keep myself fed, bathed, and dressed the rest of the month, much less find the time to make out cards-- but I will, I swear, use it next year. Anyway, now seemed like a good time to get correct addresses.

So! If you a) actually know me in person (I know, I'm lame, I'm sorry!), and b) plan on being at the same address next year that you are at this year, you should leave me a comment with your address-- I'll be screening comments, so they won't actually appear below. I promise to reward your effort with, um, a card. Eventually.

Thanks!

rue10 @ 2006-11-08T18:17:00

2006-11-08T23:17:01Z

"Outsourcing and other funky developments in soldiering and spying brought to us by the War on Terror."

FYI: where Leah is

2006-10-20T21:21:28Z

After Marauding for the Cure tomorrow morning as a very pink pirate, I'm off to Brazil for the rest of the month with the boyfriend. See y'all in November. :)

rue10 @ 2006-10-19T09:42:00

2006-10-19T14:43:26Z

pig eulogy

"Mommy, what's an editor?"

2006-10-18T16:44:28Z

Link to an explanation of my job :)

rue10 @ 2006-10-15T15:23:00

2006-10-15T15:23:46Z

Guinea pig died last night.

the two weeks pre-birthday fleh

2006-09-28T22:38:26Z

It's possible made this phenomenon up; I have this vague recollection of someone telling me about it, possibly even Mom, but that seems unlikely. But I've always, in a very tongue-in-cheek fashion, referred to the two weeks before my birthday as, well, kind of crappy.

Usually I'd use the word "funk" to describe it-- it's usually manifested itself as a kind of inexplicable low mood-- but this year I appear to have just become scatterbrained. Like, really really scatterbrained. I'm totally overwhelmed by things I'd usually have a handle on work-wise, both of the manuscripts I turned in last week were missing photos or had out-of-whack TOCs, and usually my manuscripts are clean enough to eat off of. It's not necessarily bad, it's just . . . bizarre. (And I'm breaking out-- and I almost never really break out-- which doesn't help.) I've become oddly, as Beth put it last week-ish, "ADD" all of sudden as well: easily distractable, prone to very interesting shifts in conversation and incapable of finishing a task without forgetting what I was supposed to be doing.

So here I am, on the downslope of my bizarre funk/fleh. And it occurred to me to be curious, since I usually only consider this phenomenon in my own head: this sound familiar to anybody else?

Adventures in Budgeting

2006-09-18T20:28:12Z

(Is it lame that I want to be wearing a Thor hat right now?)

So I've been budgeting, lately. And okay, yes, I've always budgeted, because apparently I skipped proper irresponsible teenage- and young-adulthood entirely in favor of acting like I'm forty. I think 10 pm is a kick-ass bedtime. I have always considered drinking to get drunk to be the stupidest thing imaginable. And I fell out of college right into a detailed line item budget delineating exactly how much I could spend on what each week in order to still sock away a couple hundred bucks into my savings at the end of the month (which was handy when, for instance, my car decided its last transmission just wasn't good enough for it).

But this year I decided I was going to travel. "If I put away $500 a month," I thought to myself, "I can both afford to go to Japan and Brazil, and still manage to save enough to also reach a slightly lowered end-of-year savings goal!" (I had obviously gotten inexplicably cocky, about both my will power and my ability to avoid unexpected expenses like car repairs, the previous largest unexpected-expense culprit, which I have so far avoided this year by driving as little as possible and just not taking the damn thing in.)

Already this optimistic hypothesis has proven incorrect: I ended up taking some freelance work, which luckily covered my trip to Japan, and also kept me busy enough during the weekends that I didn't feel the need to go out and spend money.

I'm still on track to make it, if I scale down my Christmas presents a bit from what I usually buy (which sucks, because I really like buying Christmas presents, but I think my friends and family will survive) and don't break any bones or develop weird diseases (knock on wood). But that involves continuing this strangely monk-like lifestyle I'm currently living.

Now, okay, that's not fair. Mostly because I have this fabulous boyfriend who, like, buys me dinner and takes me to the rodeo (which, btw, was *awesome*) and stuff. But I've begun to show the signs of excessive non-shopping-- and I don't know how much longer I can hold out.

My weakness is clothes. I get enough of books at work, I'm sad to say, and any extracurricular reading I feel like doing, well, what else is my roommate's bookshelf for? (Plus, I'm still not through the books I picked up at BEA.) The Internet and fanmixes have soothed my music rumblings. I have work-related Netflix slots. I am totally happy with my six-year-old phone, even if it isn't totally happy at not yet being released to whereever it is that cell phones go to die, and while it'd be great to replace my eight-year-old Mac powerbook, it still word processes and gets the Internet fine, so who am I to complain? Clothes are the only thing I have to buy to get (I'm no seamstress, trust me on this). And I'm not allowed to have any.

I have pretty solid self-control, in general. But I've definitely verged into the area of excessive self-control, and that's a difficult thing to keep up. Once you let it have a little bit of reign, it wants to take over. I buy a pair of jeans, sheerly because I want a pair of jeans and not because my last pair fell apart and I actually do need some, and it feels so good I want to buy more. Not a lot more-- I could never, in good conscience, ever run up an unplanned clothing bill over a couple hundred dollars, and even that's really pushing it-- but, you know, maybe a cute top, and a pair of boots or something. And it kinda sucks that I can't.

It's hard to feel sorry for myself, though. Because I'm only "suffering" so I can go to Brazil, and see cool stuff, and sleep in, and eat, and hang out with the boyfriend. I believe Beth said it best when she wrote, "Awww, would you like some champagne and strawberries to go with that self-pity?"

And saying no to myself isn't, really, the hard part. The hard part is saying no to other people-- feeling justified in saying to someone who wants me to go out to dinner, or a movie, or to, oh, anything, "No, I choose not to afford it." Because that's the crux of it: I could afford to go out to dinner, I just can't afford to go out to dinner and go to Brazil, and I choose Brazil. It's my choice to make; it's just irritating and depressing to make it over and over and over again. To have to explain it's not a matter of not having the money until payday; it's a matter of not having the money period. I have a finite amount, and all of it has already been carefully parsed out.

And the less I spend, the more money I can manage *not* to spend on a day to day basis, the more I get to have available later . . . so I can shop in Brazil.

best cat picture ever

2006-08-11T03:08:30Z

dealingwith is so going to be jealous he didn't find this particular cat picture first.

the cat is a stud

Christmas list

2006-08-09T14:31:00Z

Turpitude and I discussed our Christmas lists this morning, and she has decided that she would like the following:

1) a bird on a stick (tm Dad)
2) a good kitten-grooming brush
3) a wooden or rope scratching post with a carpeted platform high enough that she can sit on it and watch the guinea pig

She finds these to be reasonable demands, but she has obviously not recently priced decent scratching posts. :)

more of me being quoteable

2006-07-27T16:45:41Z

Wisteria Lane Goes South . . . Really South -- article on Argentina's Desperate Housewives adaptation

---

In other news, I've returned successfully, if sleepily, from Japan. More, including pictures, to follow.

I'm out

2006-07-18T14:16:51Z

Headed to Japan early tomorrow morning. Have fun without me. :)

earning my BEA keep

2006-07-12T16:19:40Z

Night Watch

Almost done with this book (series of three that may or may not have been published separately in Russia, originally-- I'm not clear), and I'm really, really impressed with it. My favorite thing I've picked up at any BEA by a long shot.

I'm too lazy to really give you a decent description or anything, but it's paranormal/fantasy set in modern day Russia focusing on the classic good and evil struggle (except isn't anywhere near as lame as that always sounds), subtle, well-told, and highly recommended.

the most Libran thing I've done all day

2006-07-07T19:29:02Z

Talk me into or out of adopting one of our already-fixed stray kittens.

Ready? Go!

food cravings and mood swings

2006-07-04T15:32:40Z

I'm sitting in Barnes and Noble, reading essays, when all of a sudden I am struck by the most ridiculously overwhelming junk food craving I have ever had in my entire life. I can go home and eat there, I think stubbornly, putting the cafe cheesecake out of mind. But of course the only things in the condo are fruits, and vegetables, and bread, and bread, and none of that sounds the least bit appetizing. So I pack up my things, drop them off at the car, and then walk a storefront or two down to Tom Thumb, where I proceed to purchase an unnecessary $7 of chips and little ice cream bars and completely fail to make it all the way home (a five minute drive) before opening both the bag of fritos and the Dove miniatures ice cream bars. I'm downright manic. But god, salt and grease and chocolate have never tasted so good.

Later that night I'm crying almost-uncontrollably-- I'm frustrated and feeling weak and helpless and just worn down. It's not the same as depressive crying-- though I'm sure taking the other half of my celexa wouldn't have hurt-- it's just weird and hormonal and wet.

If it weren't so deeply improbable (I take pills for this, after all), you'd think I was pregnant.

But I'm wondering if the whole thing doesn't have that much more to do with how tightly I've been living lately-- how precisely disciplined, how structured. I may have lunch out once a week. Any clothing purchases must be a) on sale, b) already be on my need-to-buy list, and c) able to withstand the extensive berating which must preface any actual buying.

There's no room for indulgence, but there's also no room for anything that isn't planned-- for accidents, or any other deviance I don't have control over. There's no redundancy plan, and everything is so neatly laid out that one error sets everything back.

No matter how much self-control I have-- and apparently I have a lot more than I ever thought-- I can't stop those things. And even the act of having so much self-control, so consistently, without any kind of break, backfires-- it backfires in junk food cravings and inexplicable indulgences, crying jags and the inability to enjoy anything, even when it's something that was planned.

I need some equilibrium, and the Tom Thumb, as it happens, is fresh out.

List (someday I'll have content again)

2006-06-29T19:52:15Z

1) I am currently in love with Amy's Frozen Broccoli Pot Pies. I'm thinking of asking them to marry me. Curiously, I am not particularly fond of either broccoli or pot pies.

2) I've returned from Seattle (obviously), and I even have pictures, of both that and my stint as Emily Edison, but the cord that connects my digital camera to my computer is still MIA.

3) Booked my flight to Japan to visit my sister! I'll be gone July 19-26. Anybody have any do/eat/buy-while-I'm-there suggestions? (Ed? :P)

4) My inbox was down to an unprecedented 15 emails this morning. Early email number prediction upon my return from Japan? 275. And only that low because I won't be around to respond to any of them, and thus solicit more.

5) I managed to elicit an actual email response from the ex-boyfriend today (the one that makes me wonder what I was thinking and who I have apparently stopped referring to by name, not the one that regularly reads this). I'm thinking the both of us should just switch to newsletter format, as his response to my letter consisted of "here's what I'm doing; here's what people I know who you used to subsequently hang out with upon occasion are doing; sounds like you're fine and I'm not going to remark on how cool going to Japan sounds or how exciting it is you got that big guest editor coup at work." It's quite a bit like emailing a very busy wall. On a note completely unrelated to that criticism, I continue to suspect he and the current boyfriend would get along quite well, and am not sure if that should concern me or not. :)

It's tough being a Heat fan in Dallas . . .

2006-06-21T15:20:24Z

. . . but because I'm a nice person, I shall keep my celebration down to this article: Zo Reaches the Pinnacle. Yay Zo!

(Zo's the only one I really care about anyway. Though that Wade kid, he's pretty good. . . .)

Brief State(s) of Affairs, in the style of trillian42

2006-06-14T22:37:13Z

Work: Finished with big external freelance project, and am hitting an exciting one week lull at work in another week-plus! I don't even know what to do with myself anymore. But I'm totally on top of, and excited about, all my projects, except for my email inbox. (I've decided, for sake of my sanity, that I cannot be held to the same standards as normal editors. Most of them have only one author per book. I have twenty.)

Location: Will be in Seattle and then Vancouver this weekend. Don't wait up! (Will also be at the Meridian Room in Dallas in an hour, though, for half-price food night, which is almost as exciting.)

Small furry animals: Litter of very cute stray kittens living under our porch, who often frolic in an arched and sideways-jumping fashion in front of our glass door, and allow us to come out, hang out, pick them up, and pet them. We (by "we," I mean Beth, because I'm not as cool as she is) have named them: the mother is Juliet, lovely, quiet, and long-haired (but with a bit of a stray-cat temper, which is understandable); the kids are twins Mojo and HoJo/FloJo (collectively "the Joes"), Terpitude (called Turbo), and Pokey (the only name I had a hand in picking--notice how it's the lamest? :P).

Sundry: Still cheering for the Miami Heat to win the championship series, no matter what Josh threatens me with.

Dear Old Duke, Thy Name We Sing . . .

2006-06-14T17:26:47Z

Sex & Scandal at Duke University, from Rolling Stone

Anyone else kind of feel like they want to throw up?

You know, I spent a lot of my time at Duke nauseated, and thought it was from the general depression-induced shame. I may have to re-evaluate.

---

ETA: Okay, fine, I've officially already shamed myself into some actual, if minor, commentary only five minutes after my initial post.

No, this is not representative of the majority of Duke students. Yes, it regards only a selective group who I can't actually imagine wanting to hang out with-- and didn't. But while these may be the worst and most shocking examples, they're just an intensification of attitudes that prevade the campus. This selective group just has the money and the popularity and the safety net to act on them. That the behavior can exist says something about the campus atmosphere and values. It's not as if there are these "Core 400" people doing this stuff, and a couple thousand looking at them like they're insane-- a large percentage of that couple thousand are looking on in jealousy, or wistfulness, knowing if they weren't being held back (by looks or attitude or money or religion or whatever) that they'd be doing the same thing. And it's that uneasiness, that exclusion and the heady thickness of desire that comes with it, that prevades the campus, not the behavior (and the ramifications) itself. Which, I don't know, seems to me just as bad-- maybe worse.

miscellania

2006-06-09T19:54:13Z

How tempted am I to get this Veronica Mars-themed now-or-never shirt from TWoP?

(Pretty tempted, in case you were curious.)

Why I'll Be Cheering Against Dallas in the NBA Finals

2006-06-08T15:18:08Z

How can you not want this man to win a championship?

I think I love him. :)

---

ETA: Dave Barry's take on the series It doesn't mention Zo, but it does make some points you really can't argue regarding our fair city of Dallas.

morning reading

2006-05-25T13:52:26Z

Up With Grups, courtesy of Josh, who reads way more news than me and is kind enough to pass on the better bits

He owns eleven pairs of sneakers, hasn’t worn anything but jeans in a year, and won’t shut up about the latest Death Cab for Cutie CD. But he is no kid. He is among the ascendant breed of grown-up who has redefined adulthood as we once knew it and killed off the generation gap.

Alias finale

2006-05-24T15:11:27Z

I wanted to look at the Alias finale like a fan. I really, really did.

I wanted to just be happy for the characters. To be thrilled by Sydney and Vaughn's and Dixon's happy endings (and Rachel's, and Marshall's-- and Sark's!), and mourn Jack andpotentially even Irina and Sloane. To just be satisfied that they'd given us an ending-- the answer to Rambaldi's work, and Sydney's role in it.

But there were too many questions. Why was Irina blowing up Washington and London, exactly? I'm still not sure exactly what Sloane got from Mt. Subacio. And what did seasons three and four have to do with any of this?

Sure, okay, it was smarter of them to drop everything raised in those two years and return to the show's base, those first two seasons: Jack and Irina and Sloane, Rambaldi and Sydney, family and shifting loyalties and hard decisions and fighting fate. I understand that. But the very fact of season three and four having happened (and don't get me wrong, I enjoyed season three quite a bit-- check out my Julia/Lauren essay here at Operation_Alias) leaves it feeling a little hollow. Like Sydney between seasons two and three, it requires us erasing two years of Alias history. But it's still there just under the surface, no matter how we may try to forget it. Why take Sydney's eggs? What was up with Elena and that big red ball over Russia? She couldn't have been just trying for the correct immortality formula and failing. Etc and etc.

Also, it rewrote Jack's history with Sydney slightly-- making his enrollment of her in Project Christmas more about her abilities than his fear and his heartbreak and his anger . . . which cheapened, for me, just slightly, the struggle they'd been through to get to where we saw them in this episode.

All that said: the finale did so many things right. Particularly in how Jack and Irina, and effectively Sloane, all had to die for Sydney to finally be free. They all shaped her too thoroughly for her to have been able to become her own woman without it. Perhaps Jack could have lived-- but he had unfinished business with Sloane, and his sacrifice to keep Sloane from doing any more damage felt right. Sydney had to be the one to shoot Sloane, even if it didn't take. She had to be the one to confront her mother-- in fact, I'm somewhat disappointed they had Sydney's involvement in Irina's death be so accidental, though obviously having Irina felled by her own almost-tragic need for power due to her early powerlessness (and what she lost because of it) resonated. If they were really making Irina evil, if that was their final word on her motivations, then Sydney, I can't help feeling, should have had to confront her in a much more meaningful and concrete way.

The grace note of little Isabel, building the tower and then knocking it down-- having the capacity, and choosing not to use it, choosing her own destiny, not being shaped by the fears and desires of her parents (the way Sydney, having built the same tower, presumably was)-- was just lovely. And Dixon as de facto grandfather, the way he served as a father/mentor to Sydney early on was a very nice touch. But that last scene of the family walking off went on a bit too long-- as Beth noted, you sort of just expect the house to blow up. But maybe the joy of that ending was that it didn't, that house-explosions and it's attendant destruction of safety and security are over.

Overall, it was nicely psychologically resonant, particularly for our key players: Sydney, Jack, Irina, Sloane (though the idea of him trapped for eternity, alive, was more rightful and horrifying when Jack said it than in the last scene we received with Sloane and Nadia). Sydney's ending was properly happy; Jack's ending was properly just and right, concluding with him making up in a way for all his flaws as a father and person; Irina's ending was properly tragic, retreating from the picture we received in season two of a woman who had grown beyond her own limitations to one who was too thoroughly shaped by her own past, in order to really make way for Sydney's triumph; Sloane's ending was properly ironic and painful, giving him what he wanted with all its attendant unwanted consequences, a rightful echo of all his other bad decisions over the years.

And now it's over.

And shallow as it is, I'm just glad Vaughn let Sark go. :)

fyi

2006-05-17T21:38:52Z

Back from New Mexico; leaving for BEA.

positive reinforcement

2006-05-17T21:36:32Z

Talking to my boss a week or two ago, I was expressing some frustration with constantly fighting to higher our standards-- with always having to be the person who says, "No, that's not good enough, we can do better," with being the person who makes all the picky comments on circulated copy and covers, with battling uphill on things we should do not because they're the most cost efficient but because they're just right (funny, for someone as morally relativistic as I am). "But," my boss said, puzzled at my frustration, "you almost always win." I replied, "That doesn't make the fighting any easier."

He thought the point was winning; for him, winning validates the struggle, and being deemed right by the people you're debating validates your struggle. But for me, it doesn't-- winning doesn't make the process of fighting any easier for me, any less exhausting, and it doesn't make me feel any more appreciated for doing it.

I used to argue with Chris, sometimes, about things-- we'd debate for extended periods, usually over the phone, and I'd try and try and try to convince him of something I cared about, and the valid points I made were met not with an acknowledgment that I might have a point, but a slightly moody silence and a reason why I could be wrong. We'd hang up, and I'd be exhausted, frustrated, wound up from being at odds without any kind of resolution. And then half an hour later, maybe-- via phone, via email-- or maybe just the next time we talked, he'd tell me he'd thought about it some more, and I was right. During our conversations he'd fight me to the bitter end, no sign that anything I said was affecting him at all. And then this. Every time. And it was more frustrating than it was gratifying: because what was the point, the value, in being right, in convincing him, if the process was so hard?

I believe in what I'm fighting for, but not more than I do keeping my relationships with the people I'm fighting with safe. And I realize that, however pathetic it might be, I need reinforcement to keep it up. I need to know, from the people I'm pushing against, that they're appreciating the fact that I'm pushing. That they are truly happy with the end result, too. Because if they're giving in just because they're tired, because I keep at it until they just don't care anymore (my passion for the subject thereby proving itself oddly superior), then really, no one wins.