zia_narratora

So, yesterday, I got to my desk and there was a small box addressed to me. ME.

I wasn't expecting anything. It clearly looked like an eBay sort of thing, and I racked my brains trying to remember if I may have bid on something I forgot about.

Then I opened the box and there was this:



I still couldn't figure out who sent it. Karen asked if there was a note. I said, "no, just the name of the...

OH."

calicomask, I adore you so.

So, for those of you who are interested, some developments:

--All the characters in the hotel must be characters from a classic song (folk, rock, jazz, etc). Still trying to decide what date is the cutoff for "classic" but it will be at least through the 70s. So if you want to write with us, start thinking about songs that you might want to use as your character's backstory. They should be actual people from songs with a narrative and characters. I guess the best way to put it is you can choose Jojo or Prudence or Jude or even the narrator of "Yellow Submarine," but you can't write a character based on "Let it Be" or "Revolution." There are some songs I'm going to reserve to use as framing storylines, so I might have to deny some of them, but for the most part, all is good.
--The hotel's calendar is perpetually set to February 3, 1959.
--I think I have a good sense of what the framing storyline for the first story will be.

Gauging interest:

--Collaborative fiction world similar to Shiver in re: group building of spaces
--Less intense, slower pace, potentially a few posts a day
--Transient characters
--Exploration of spaces as characters
--Based on Hotel California

(I can't believe I'm considering doing this.)

So much to say. The past week has been rollercoastery in all kinds of ways, my workplace has been hit hard, spent too much time at funerals and tonight, getting home at 10:15 is the earliest I've been home in a while.

Not complaining. Just in this kind of delirious sort of sleepy way. It's also been a week of really good things, amazing conversations in amazing places, new adventures, old friends and new friends, and incredible amounts of love from so many directions.

It's just that when life is happening so fast and hard and racing, is when you don't get to update.

( I had one of the most beautiful weekends ever.Collapse )

It was such a lovely, beautiful weekend, full of so much joy and excitement and wonder, and I am so grateful to have had it. And I'm really, really looking forward to the prospect of having Brenna close enough that we can see each other more often and go on more amazing adventures.

I have been having more dreams that are actually about me lately, as opposed to the kind of weird cinematic dreams I often have that are about fictional people.

The dream I had last night was about work. We were signing a cartoonist for a new development deal (which is what happens before a comic gets syndicated). He was a priest, named Justin, but his pen name was "Just" something. I forget his last name. His last name was in fact in the dream, because I remember looking at drafts of the promotional materials for the comic.

Anyway, he was a really attractive, young priest. He had dark, curly hair and green eyes and stubble.

I was sitting with him and Brendan, and he said he'd had a good idea for another comic. Brendan was telling him that getting involved in a second project while he was working on his first one was a bad idea. Justin said he knew that, but he felt like he could handle the art responsibilities for the second project if he had someone to write it, and he asked me if I would write the scripts for it, and I was like, um, YES.

And then somehow this devolved into me making out with a young, hot priest and waking up disappointed that that didn't really happen. I was disappointed with the lack of making out with a young, hot priest, the fact that I don't think the young, hot priest exists at all because he was also super funny and super talented, and finally, the fact that no one had actually asked me to write their comic. But that is okay. It was still a pretty cool dream. A++ would dream again.

I lived in Boston and Cambridge during two very tough years.

It was hard, it was cold, and for this spoiled New Yorker, things closed early and often seemed to take too long. I didn’t have a job, I burned through money, and I couldn’t make friends.

It was also a beautiful place to live. I found four-leaf clovers in your parks. I sat in the Prudential Center at four in the morning, eating Krispy Kremes as they came off the belt, hot and sweet and sticky with glaze. I meandered quietly through your cemeteries, looking at the epitaphs and the carved skull angels on red stone. I followed the red-marked path of the Freedom Trail, sometimes to learn and sometimes just because it was like following the Yellow Brick Road. I dressed like a pirate and got mistaken for Sam Adams. I sat in bars until (too-early) closing time, shrieking like a gleeful child through the 2004 MLB postseason, and sang Sweet Caroline with a brass band in Harvard Square.

I bundled up and walked through feet of snow to the Galleria. I peered at the lovers’ tomb in the MFA. I rode the Green Line just because sometime it’s fun to ride a trolley. I sat in South Station feeling the immensity of space; I cried on a bench in Harvard Square.

I wrote a novel, a novel about cities and home and wandering and places as characters in their own right. A story I would never have written without Boston.

And Boston is the place where I really began to learn to be myself. To be strong against odds, to love and forgive and forge ahead even when it feels like the world hates you. I would not be the person I am today without Boston.

Scary things happen. Painful things happen, and while they’re happening, you’re stuck between numbness and denial and tears. I’ve been there, in that place where you want to claw someone’s eyes out and ask them why, why my city? This is my city. Why are you cutting it open and making it bleed? It feels raw and makes your eyes burn. It makes you realize how much passes between you and the city every time you take a step, how interconnected your bloodstream is to the pavement, how permeable your skin is and how much of you is made of the air and water and dust and stone that surround you. You feel cellular, as if you are just a tiny thing that is part of this larger organism that is under attack.

And I thought I would only ever feel that for New York. This place was my home before I chose it. I didn’t expect that two years of being comforted by the skies over your city would make me feel like a small part of my heart was left there. From far away, I feel myself straining toward you in my mind, feeling my blood wanting to run northward.

Love you.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

I'm bad at listening to music.

( Music in my headCollapse )

I've been writing a lot of song lyrics lately.

This one is actually one I've had in my back pocket for years and finally finished, taking a divergent direction from the Elvis Presley song. I had the rhyme scheme and the first four lines of the chorus worked out for the longest time, but hadn't quite fleshed out the rest of the lyrics.

( Don't Be CruelCollapse )

And the two are variations on the same basic musical theme taken in two separate directions. The first one, all I had for a long time was the "...in the summer" bit. Like, I would have "in the summer" pop into my head all the time, and knew that there were words that were meant to precede those ones, but not what they were supposed to be.

( SummerCollapse )

( OceaniaCollapse )

So, as many of you know, last summer I took up hula hooping in earnest after many, many years of absolute failure at this endeavor.

I am not an absolute failure anymore! I am able to hoop consistently at my waist, hips, and thighs, and I'm starting to get the hang of knee hooping. I'm also just beginning to learn to over-arm hoop, and I can do a ton of off-body tricks.

I kind of hoop like a stripper. Which, you know, I don't really know of any strippers who hoop, but I can successfully take my shirt off while hooping, and I mostly do it in my underwear, and, well, I kind of dance like a stripper to begin with, so it seems natural. I've been avoiding watching tutorial videos apart from when there is a trick I need tips on, so that I develop my own style and hoop the way that seems right for me, rather than trying to emulate what I see other people do. It's already meant that I've figured out some tricks that are more like derivations of Cyr Wheel tricks than typical hooping tricks, and I'm really excited about that. It's a shame Cyr Wheels cost in the $900 range; I kind of want one hard at the moment.

Anyway, the spring is coming up and it is the perfect time to hoop! kandigurl is doing an indiegogo campaign to raise money to make some new Polypro hoops. Polypro is a lightweight PVC that is perfect for the kind of tricks I've been learning.

It's not perfect for beginners though, because lightweight materials require speed that most beginners don't have. BUT if you donate to her campaign, you can totally get a discount on one of her regular hoops. SO, if you've been thinking about learning to hula hoop, this would be the time to consider investing in a hoop! Jess' hoops are lovely and she is awesome.

That's it!

So, I don’t do this as often as I used to, but this one has really given me some food for thought. Eug and I went to see Oz: The Great and Powerful on Friday night.  And while overall, I liked it, and thought it was a well-made movie, there were a few things about it that distressed me.

Elizabeth Rappe over at Jezebel already wrote quite a lovely article  about this already, but I feel like while she set up the history and talked about Baum’s own political leanings, there’s a lot of individual points about this new movie itself that don’t find their way into her piece.  Which is good: she’s working with a very specific thesis.

The short version: Baum was very much a feminist, his stories all focused on strong female characters and gender identity in a way that we would probably find revolutionary even today.  Oz: The Great and Powerful ignores all of that to make a movie about a man coming into his own in typical hero’s journey fashion, in a quest that requires him to overpower women who are much more powerful than he is.  It’s like the Grendel’s Mother of twee fantasy, here.  The scariest monsters are always ladies, gentlemen.

I mean, now I’m getting off the trajectory of Ms. Rappe’s argument, but that’s fine.  That was my point here.

So, let’s talk about OZ.  And let’s talk about OZ in the context of modern children’s fantasy.

( (Be warned:  There are spoilers.  And lots of ‘em.)Collapse )

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.