Wow. I keep meaning to update this blog but, well, I don’t know.
Let’s see. After I got my trigger thumb diagnosed, my dad ended up in the hospital. He and I disagree about what caused him to end up there, but I can understand why he might be in denial. He got diagnosed with the same thing that killed my mom.
So. Yeah.
Then I started a blog post in October, but abandoned it. I started working on my first novel and that’s been taking up most of my writing neurons. But now I’m challenging myself to write every single day and I remembered that this blog exists and so I can use this on days when I just am not feeling the novel.
Then I found out that my domain names expired on July 5, so I spent the next 24 hours getting that back together. Which brings us to today.
I also went through a dark night of my mental health about a month and a half ago and ended up calling 988 twice during that time. Maybe I’ll make that tomorrow’s blog post?
Yeah, I think I’ll make that tomorrow’s blog post.
I guess it’s time to return to the Gratuitous Amazon Links, isn’t it? I guess that today is the true-crime classic The Stranger Beside Me, by Ann Rule. When Ann Rule decided to become a true crime writer, little did she know that the subject of the case that was going to make her name in the industry was working with her at the crisis hotline. As a matter of fact, she was researching a local serial killer and discussing the work she was doing with the subject of the book she was writing — Ted Bundy.
I recently applied for an entry-level job at a law firm. It was for an intake person and/or receptionist and they wanted someone proficient in Spanish. I can only swear to being at Upper Intermediate level, so I didn’t even get a look-in. I also once got an interview for a paralegal job where, again, they wanted someone proficient in Spanish.
So, I guess I’ve gotta get proficient in Spanish, and fast.
Can someone hook me up with a training montage?
I’ve basically given up on my other languages for the time being (which sucks because October and November were supposed to be Italian and I’m actually leaning towards Italian for my graduate school degree. But once I have a paralegal job, my income should grow faster than it is now, and that will (hopefully!) lead to more money for grad school.
So what am I doing? Finally knuckling down and reading El Ladron del Rayo (The Lightning Thief** in Spanish), both in hard copy and as an audiobook. I’m going to do this until I have finished both and then go on to the next book. This means that I’m going to listen to it several times by the time I finish the hard copy, I expect.
I’m also rewatching El Internado: Las Cumbres every night while I purge weak pokemon from Pokemon Go. El Internado is a TV show from Spain, so it’s in Castilian, which will broaden my ability to cope with accents and usages and things.
I’m also focusing on Duolingo Spanish, rather than Duolingo German/Italian/Chinese, etc.
And I literally just realized that I need to change my phone back from German to Spanish. Pffff.
Why am I doing these things this way? I remember reading something on language development that said that proficient speakers have a sense of what words are likely to be used when discussing a given topic. And so I need as much exposure to the language as it is used as I can to help me build up that sense.
Fortunately, I have a lot of patients who will allow me to practice my Spanish on them. And boy will I practice my Spanish on them.
My goal, of course, is proficiency, especially what is known as CEFR level C2, in which I will be able to have free conversation on advance topics. The law is an advanced topic.
This also means that I will need to find, somewhere, law books in Spanish, because “here’s a list of legal terms; memorize them” is not going to cut it.
This is especially true because rote memorization has never been my strong suit. I need to actually use the information. This is why I didn’t become really proficient in math until I started knitting. I was multiplying and dividing and calculating repeats and increases and recalculating patterns to use other yarn that the yarn that the pattern was designed for.
So I’m going to need to do that in Spanish. Eek. Wish me luck.
*1. My deepest apologies for the lack of tilde on the “n” there. I’m typing on my laptop and haven’t figured out how to get the foreign characters to come out yet. 2. Slightly less deep (but still pretty deep) apologies for the liberal use of Google Translate. This is why I need Spanish Boot Camp.
**W00t! Two Germane Amazon Links for the price of one!
I know it’s not really a chronicle, since it’s just an update on something that’s been going on since July, but I liked the sound of the title.
Basically, back in July, I was awakened by a pain in my hand. I didn’t know what it was, so I went back to sleep. When I finally woke up for real, I couldn’t bend my thumb.
Well, I could bend it, but it sort of clicked into place rather than bending smoothly. I did some research and found that the diagnosis closest to what I experienced was trigger finger (or thumb in this case), when the sheath that surrounds the tendon in the finger becomes inflamed and the tendon no longer moves smoothly through the sheath.
I remembered that my mom had something similar happen to her back in the 1980s. She went to a doctor who told her to wear a splint and it’d fix itself. So I got a splint and. Ow. Near as I can figure, the splint presses down on the inflamed spot and makes it hurt worse.
I got some accommodations arranged at work and hoped that it’d go away, since trigger finger in the thumb tends to be self-limiting, which means it goes away on its own.
It hasn’t gone away. So I went to the doctor and they took a few x-rays and it is trigger thumb, just like I thought. I also have mild arthritis in my left hand (probably also my right, but I haven’t had my right hand x-rayed yet). I got some prescription-strength anti-inflammatories and have been instructed to use diclofenac gel twice a day (speaking of which, I’m late for my second dose). If it doesn’t resolve after two weeks, I need to see a hand specialist.
Fun.
I can bend it better than I could last week, so maybe it will go away on its own. Or maybe not. We’ll see.
Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is for The Rose Code, by Kate Quinn. The Rose Code is about the code breakers at Bletchley Park during World War II. There’s a post World War II mystery involved as well. Just an excellent book.
So. Mila came to me needing a lot of training. Since my dad didn’t want a dog, and she came to me with no respect for personal space, I turned my bedroom into a little studio apartment thing. I don’t keep food or eat my meals in here, but I have an en-suite bathroom and storage space for food, treats, toys, etc., so that she won’t bother my dad.
Mila never had much experience being alone, so once she came to live with me, she’d bark and bark when I left the room. I couldn’t take a leave of absence (if I adopted a human child, yes; for an adopted dog child, not so much), so I had to leave her for a whole work day pretty much right off the bat.
So, since I knew she’d be stressed out and since there’s no point in getting a dog just to leave her in my bedroom alone, I spent more time in my bedroom, and none of my old computers were able to access any of the things I use my computer for — YouTube, WordPress, etc.
So I wasn’t able to commit much time to writing. A blog post takes quite a bit of time to write, and that was time I had to spend away from Mila. Now that I have my nifty new laptop, however, I can write blog posts while not ignoring my dog. In fact, she’s curled up on my ankles right now.
Now for the next big question. Can I do my Gratuitous and/or Germane Amazon Links on this computer? I’ve got my GoodReads page up. Let’s see. Fearless, by Francine Pascal (possibly ghostwritten? Fearless ended up being like a 40-book series). The Fearless series is about a young woman named Gaia who was born without the ability to feel fear. She has experience with a sort of social anxiety, but she doesn’t have any fear for, like, her physical well-being. Knowing this about his daughter, her father made sure she was well schooled in self-defense. I’ve been told that the series sort of falls apart eventually, but the part I’ve read (the first nine books?) are pretty good.
Is the series out of print? Wow. I’ll have to look into that. Well, at least it’s a recommendation. 😎
It’s been a couple of months. I mean, not just “Hey, it’s been a while; how’re you doing\?” sense, but in a “Wow! Things have been pretty rough!” kind of sense
So. In mid-July I ended up in a situation where the only ethical thing I could do was take Mila in on a permanent basis. You might remember Mila, the dog that I had on a part-time basis?
Her original mom couldn’t keep her, and I didn’t know what my dad would do if I took her in, so her original mom rehomed her. That new home didn’t work out, since in July, I get a phone call at work saying, “Your dog is here at the Humane Society.”
You see, when I had her spayed and chipped, they put my contact info on the chip. I didn’t, at that point, know how to take my info off of the chip, so when she ran away from/was dumped by her second person, I became her mom sort of by default.
I mean, I love her to death. She’s my bestest buddy. **However** my dad also forbade me to ever get another dog or cat and he said he’d move out if I did. I cannot afford this house without his financial assistance, and so in my mind, at the time it boiled down to her or my home.
So I told my dad about my info being on her chip and went to the Humane Society to get her. She had no sense of personal space and came back to me pretty reactive, so I cannot in good conscience rehome her at the moment.
My goal is to get her well trained enough to pass the canine good citizen test. Then, no matter what happens, we’ll be good. If my dad eventually puts his foot down and says she has to go, it should be easy to find a new home for her. Or even a fostering situation.
The items are accepting a friendly stranger (still working on that one), Sitting politely for petting (ditto), whether the dog will let someone other than the owner to groom her (I might be able to game this one by having her original mom be the other person?), loose leash walking (sometimes okay, mostly not), walking through a crowd (we go to the Riverwalk often, so she’s good with this one), sit and stay (meh . . . ), coming when called (she’s good with this one), reaction to another dog (erm. . . ), reaction to distractions (ditto), and supervised separation from the owner (I would walk out of sight of the dog while someone else holds her leash).
So I dreamed that I was going on vacation to visit family in rural Indiana. I have have had family girl Indiana. My boss sent work with me, in this case, he required me to take bottles of pills to count while I was gone. Though how that would work, I don’t know.
So I grabbed an armload of bottles to take with me and it turned out one of them had a controlled substance in it. When I went to count that one, something pulled me away before I could count it, and when I returned, the bottle was empty with only the little canisters of dessicant left.
I panicked and retraced my steps, wondering if I’d put the pills down somewhere without noticing, but it never turned up. Meanwhile, my cousin’s daughter became hostile to me, insisting that we weren’t even really related. At this point, I went through the family tree, attributing these cousins to my grandmother’s sister, even though we were mostly close to my grandmother’s brother’s kids in real life.
Eventually the boy who was the older kid, a teenager, came to me and confessed. He admitted that he was a small-time criminal and he had stolen the pills and sold them.
I knew I shouldn’t’ve taken the controlled substances at all, but the fact that I couldn’t bring them back to the pharmacy made it so much worse. I took him aside and told him that I was going to lose my job and that he’d better make it up to me. My suggestion was that we work together on a book blowing the proverbial lid off of the criminal group that he belonged to.
That wasn’t the book we ended up writing, though. The book we ended up with was the story of how I ended up in this situation and how I moved to and adjusted to the small Indiana town. Kind of a fish out of water story with a side order of the development of the fixer-upper house that was all I could afford.
I somehow got in with a traditional publisher for this and when I read the contract, I discovered that the publisher had the right of first refusal for a movie or television show based on the book. This means that if someone wants to make a movie or television show, the publisher gets first crack at it. My cousins and I got stars in our eyes for a moment but thought it’d never happen.
But then it did. The publisher (which turned out to be a subsidiary of Warner Brothers, since Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne showed up in the series) made a television series from it. There was a bit of conflict when my best friend (not someone I really know, btw) showed up convinced that she was going to play the part of my best friend in the series. Which, come to think of it, she actually did. She walked onto the set just before the actress who’d been cast in the role, and the director just let it go. That was odd.
Oh, well. Time for today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link. Let’s see. . . . City of the Plague God, by Sarwat Chadda seems to be up next. I really enjoyed this book, both as a book and in a sort of (insert Twilight Zone theme) kind of way.You see, City of the Plague God is the story of Sikander Aziz, the son of Iraqi immigrants, who runs afoul of Nergal, the titular plague god. Sik’s parents fall prey to a plague that threatens all of New York City and quite possibly the world. And it was just odd to have a book about a plague hitting New York City when Covid had hit New York City so hard and all.
Now, I guess it’s possible that this book went from idea to draft to publication in fewer than two years, but I just find it eerie when a book predicts future events. Another example is the Our Worlds at War Superman comic book storyline event, when an alien comes to Lex Luthor (at the time, President of the United States) and tells him to allow what is going to happen next to happen because, after all, all of the greatest presidents have wars to their name. And while I find it extremely unlikely that anything like that happened to George Bush fils, the fact remains that he was warned that 9/11 was coming, and he didn’t do anything to stop it. It was all very eerie as well, and one of my friends said that the storyline was a commentary on current events, and I had to point out to her that it was the storyline for summer 2001, before 9/11 even happened.
I’m back to talking about the book Pep Talks for Writers (Germane Amazon Link!). I bet you though I’d forgotten. Well, actually, I kind of had.
Anyway, in this pep talk, well, Faulkner has some very good ideas with a side order of Kids These Days and Their Damn Tablets.
The focus is ostensibly on the power of boredom and how your mind trying to entertain itself will lead to creativity. And, yes, I agree that it can work that way. I did a lot of writing while riding the school bus or while standing at the photocopier or the fax machine.*
However, then we get an earful of how no one allows themselves to be bored anymore because we’re always tap-tap-tapping on our apps. Granted, Faulkner starts out admitting that he has a problem, but then he turns it back on the reader with:
When was the last time you experienced a moment of emptiness and allowed your mind to luxuriate in it without twitching to grab your smart phone or a remote control?**
This reads, to me, less like a confession and more like an accusation.
And, well, I’ve always been the type to keep a book on me. I specifically selected my current purse, which I’ve been using since before I got my first cell phone, because it’s exactly the right size for my wallet and a paperback book. I even took a pair of knitting needles and a ball of yarn and knitted while standing in line at the tax assessor’s office.
Actually, knitting is a great thing to keep my hands busy because I can do it without really paying that much attention to it. I have mulled over other creative endeavors while knitting because of this. I enjoy crocheting, but crocheting takes more attention, since I can’t always find the next stitch by feel, like I can with knitting.
But I digress. The fact is that technology has always caused shifts in thinking. I seem to remember a friend quoting some ancient Greek guy complaining about writing things down. He said that not having to memorize everything was going to make people’s brains soft and flabby or something of that nature.*** And, in fact, writing was the beginning of entirely new fields of thought and technology.
During my childhood, my teachers, who were my parents’ age and had grown up with radio, despaired because television was going to be the end of human imagination because we can *see* the action, rather than having to *imagine* it.
One thing about technology that is not germane to Faulkner’s point, but that I’ve seen over and over and am trying to kind of get in on it myself, is the lower barrier to entry in the arts thanks to technology. I have a friend who makes a pretty good living writing erotica. Her books have even been translated into other languages. And, so far as I am aware, she is still solely self-publishing.
Back when I was hoping to start a career as a writer, my mom would ask writers she met (she was a youth services librarian) how they broke into the field and the general consensus was that you first had to write short stories and get into respected publications enough times to attract the attention of an agent and then that agent would find someone to publish your book.
If you wanted to bypass that process, you’d have to go to a “vanity press” and pay them gobs of money so that they’d publish your book for you.
Nowadays it is a perfectly valid path to write a book, get a friend you trust to beta read it, and then to typeset it yourself and put it on Amazon. You can publish not just ebooks but actual physical books this way. If someone had told me that this would be possible 40 years ago, I don’t know if I’d’ve believed it.
Also, I could make a good argument that access to books, movies, television shows, etc., on our phones increases creativity. You read a book or see a movie or watch a show that you enjoy the premise of, but that you think the writer went the wrong direction with. So you sit down and write a similar story that goes the way you think it should have gone.
Just kind of spitballing here, looking for an example that is in the public domain, Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet runs away with Romeo when he gets exiled. Setting up a life in Mantua together (Friar Lawrence had, after all, married them at this point). Does Romeo need a job? Who do they meet? Do they grow together? Do they grow apart? I think one could do some interesting things with this.
*At an old job, our fax machine would do . . . something with the papers and if you didn’t keep an eye on it, the papers coming out of the document feeder would push out the ones that had come out earlier and you’d end up with a pile of disorganized pages on the floor. This did not take any actual brainpower, just moving the pages off of the feeder a few at a time so that there were never that many pages in there.
For a while we had an attorney who would sit in one of the secretaries’ offices chewing the fat all day. And that attorney had the gall to accuse me of goldbricking when I was watching the fax machine. She demanded that I go back to my desk and work while the fax fed into the machine. So after explaining why I was standing there, she basically accused me of lying and demanded that I go back to my desk. So I did. Once I heard the machine stop dumping the pages on the floor, I got up, picked up the pages from the floor, and sat at my desk putting them back in order. This attorney was not happy that I once again didn’t have my nose to the grindstone, and asked me how I was shirking now. I just told her that since the papers had dumped on the floor, now I had to put them back into order.
You could have knocked her over with a feather. She was really stunned that the fax machine actually did dump the papers on the floor and that I had actually been doing my job when I was standing at the fax machine. That woman was a total pain in my neck for the months she was there.
**Grant Faulkner. Pep Talks for Writers (Kindle Locations 535-536). Chronicle Books LLC.
Okay I’m walking later than usual tonight. It was really hot out today, and well, with Mila living in my bedroom now, I was using my phone as a computer and my battery ran really far down. Then I had to wait for my battery to recharge. So now it is 930 in the evening and I’m just getting around to doing some writing now. I may not have much to say because, well, it’s late and I’ve been writing pretty steadily lately, so my topics are kind of running thin.
And this is now much I was able to comprehend on this blog post. And thus, we learn that there is a time limit to how long I can let a blog post sit between dictating it and editing it for publication.
I guess it’s kind of like Gregg shorthand in that way. I took two classes in it and never *was* able to make sense out of it. I spent too much time thinking of what I was writing, and didn’t just let it flow, but even for people who could successfully Gregg, I was told that only the person who did the Gregging could read it and after a short time it would often become meaningless even to the person who Gregged it.
Gratuitous Amazon Link time! Today we’re back to an old favorite author, Jenny Lawson. I think I’ve already posted this, but I don’t think I can post it too often. Today’s book is Broken (In the Best Possible Way). Just an amazing book about mental illness and thriving despite it.
I don’t have anything really booky or travely to say today, so I will cover a content creator. This time time it is Jonathan Decker. I feel bad for not mentioning Alicia Decker (cohost of Mended Light) or Alan Seawright (cohost of Cinema Therapy) in the title, but Jonathan is the common thread between the two channels I’m going to talk about. Alicia and Alan are extremely important on each of their channels, however.
I mentioned the Mended Light channel an earlier post, and Alicia is the CEO of the company. She is also Jonathan’s cohost in a lot of their videos. They’re adorable together.
On Mended Light, they talk about all sorts of mental health topics. Mended Light also has a staff of therapists that one can hire to work with.
Along with Alan, he does the Cinema Therapy channel. Alan is, as they say in their intros, a professional filmmaker. Alan had a job in Los Angeles lined up, but then Covid interfered and he had to move back to Utah. He and Jonathan were college roommates, and together they came up with the Cinema Therapy YouTube channel.
Like Mended Light, Cinema Therapy has a theme of psychology and therapy. This time, Jonathan and Alan talk about the psychological and filmmaking points of the movies they cover.
Unfortunately I don’t watch as many movies as I kind of probably should to really devote myself to the channel. I’ve watched a lot of movies, don’t get me wrong, but not recent movies. A lot of the movies they talk about are things like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (“MCU”) and things. I had other things going on when the MCU started. The first movie, from what I can tell, was Iron Man, which was released in May 2008. I don’t know exactly what was going on in my life that month, but my marriage started really cracking and was causing me to slide into a depression that I would stay in until late 2009. Oh! I just found that the spoon analogy applies to people in depressions. Basically, at that point in my life, I couldn’t remember the last time I smiled for no reason. I used to smile just because. That was long gone and by the time I realized that Iron Man wasn’t just a one-shot action film thing and that there’d be a whole mythology, the opportunity to get into the series was basically gone.
Spoon Theory is an analogy comparing the energy those with chronic conditions have for daily activities to spoons. Every time you do an activity you lose a spoon. Eventually you’re out of spoons and have to give up and recover.
Anyway, I’ve always been a DC Comics girl rather than a Marvel Comics girl, and action movies really aren’t my thing. I like a good romcom. Animated features, mystery/thrillers, sure. Action movies? Not so much. So there really wasn’t much to tempt me into watching an Iron Man movie. And what little I knew about Thor and the different worlds: Jotunheim, Midgard, whatever, was just confusing to me. So I wasn’t really enthusiastic about that movie, either.
So now there’s like 12 million movies and television shows in the MCU and I just can’t. I don’t have the time to get caught up. I also don’t have Disney Plus.
Sorry. Got carried away. Just. I don’t watch many current movies.
But the channel has lots of great psychology stuff. In the most recent one, they talk about the appearances of Harley Quinn in the Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey movies. I know some of the comics canon for Harley, so I felt at least a little tuned in there. Jonathan talks about how Harley has histrionic personality disorder, which leads her to want to be/think she is the center of attention.
I find both channels really enlightening though Mended Light tends to be actually easier to keep up on because again I don’t necessarily know the back story stuff of the episodes of Cinema Therapy.
I feel I did most of my movie watching in the 80s and 90s when these two men were like tiny. They’re, like 15 years younger than I am. When I entered my real movie-watching phase, around 1986 or so, these men were in elementary school.
Alan and Jonathan are Mormons. Have I mentioned my interest in the Latter-Day Saints? I have a family history of alcoholism, and so I believed that all gatherings of adults included imbibing. When I discovered that there was an entire subculture in the United States in which (theoretically at least) no one drinks, I was thrilled. I learned a bit about the theology, and I was young enough that Christianity was Christianity to me, so I figured I could work with that.
Is there such a thing as a whining font? I feel like I need a whining font here. The main sponsor for Cinema Therapy is Lisa’s Popcorn (nothing like an affiliate link; I just am linking the site because of what follows). I can’t eat popcorn. It just tears up my digestion and is not worth the trouble. I can eat puffcorn products, like the Beaver Nuggets at Buc-Ees, but not whole popcorn.
Now for a real affiliate link. Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is The Throne of Fire, the second book in Rick Riordan’s Kane Chronicles series. It will be a while until I can plug the third book, The Serpent’s Shadow, because I’ve lost my copy.
You know how I’m always saying “this will be a short post” and then it never is? Well, I dictated this while being dragged at a run around the block by an anxious dog. So it probably is very short.
Not much new going on my life just dog. Oh, and reading my traditional three books. My current audiobook is A Crown of Swords by Robert Jordan. My ebook is The Murmur of Bees by Sophia Segovia and my physical book is Florida Woman by Deb Rogers.
I’m really enjoying all three of these books. Well, of course I’m enjoying A Crown of Swords (Germane Amazon Link #1). If I didn’t enjoy the Wheel of Time, I wouldn’t’ve read it so many times. I mean, I know what all of the surprises are and everything.
The Murmur of Bees (Germane Amazon Link #2) is from Amazon’s annual World Book Day giveaway in . . . 2019? It’s a book about the Morales family and their foundling child Simonopio, who was found as an infant abandoned, covered in a blanket of bees. Simonopio has a cleft palate and a purpose in life that he knows but that he has to wait and prepare for, all while basically incapable of communicating with the family thanks to the cleft palate.
Florida Woman (Germane Amazon Link #3) is about a woman who committed a very fantastical crime. Rather than going to prison, she is sent to a sanctuary where they are rehabilitating rhesus macaques. Strange things are going on there. She hears the monkeys screaming at night, even though the three ladies who run the sanctuary say that no such thing is happening. I hope we figure out what’s going on. This was the July selection for the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club and a lot of Jenny Lawson’s choices leave you with a lot to think about. I’m heading towards the halfway mark and I really enjoy it so far.
Oh, and I was just called for jury duty. Thanks to Covid, they’re doing jury duty remotely over Zoom, and the only Zoom-compatible computer I have is my phone. I don’t think I should be doing jury duty on my phone, so I’ll have to see if Alex has a laptop with a camera and microphone that I can borrow for that day/trial.
