klbowers

Writer's Block: Comebacks

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:24:10 GMT

Know any great comebacks?

Ooh! Just thought of some others: My mom's favorite, which is, "wrong, moosebreath!" and my aunt's standard, which is fairly common: "au contraire, mon frere!"

Writer's Block: Comebacks

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:17:58 GMT

Know any great comebacks?

View 500 Answers

To "How do you know I'm lying?" you might try the ever-popular, "Because your lips are moving." Makes you sound damned witty, as long as your audience hasn't heard it before.

I have been away for some time...

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:15:56 GMT

but can't really remember why. WisCon reignited my interest in LJ , plus my huz-bind is out of town at yet another karate tournament. As a result, I am kicking up my heels, going hog-wild, by...cranking the air conditioning and wearing my shoes in the bedroom.

This is what I call a wild time these days. Depressing, isn't it?

Having him out of town means too that he won't be interrupting my writing or looking over my shoulder for a whole three days. But there's a price; he wins, I believe, because Murphy's Law (the one that seems to rule my life) dictates that I cannot stand another trophy. He has 250+ of the fucking things. They fill every closet and are now spilling over into bedrooms and hallways.  When I scream and yell, he accuses me of 1. not being sufficiently proud of his win, and 2. Only needing the closet space because I have "too many clothes" *&^%$#!

Other interesting news:

Something has died in our wall. It reeks unbelievably, especially when it gets up to 95 degrees each day. The guest bedroom and 'my' bathroom are uninhabitable until whatever it is rots thoroughly away. Eeeew.

My brother in law has found a new low. He sent my sister's mj TO MY FUCKING PARENTS in the mail, and told them that Kate was a drug addict and was cheating on him. The first is sort of true, the second is not.
I try to avoid hate as a rule, but I hate this man with such force I feel at times my head will explode.

Or that may be because my sister still won't leave the son of a bitch. What the hell is wrong with her? If she screws someone, he will have to have her surgically removed. No amount of abuse will loose her from him. She becomes a creature of abject devotion, impervious to any and all slights. Infidelity? He didn't do it, and I believe him. Physical abuse? He didn't mean to / he felt really bad and apologized / cried / took 2 mg of xanax and slept for 24 hours, thereby indicating his profound remorse. Insults to her, her family, friends, and co-workers? Unsolicited verbal attacks on unsuspecting strangers? Unemployed for six months? No problem. This woman has raised self-nullification and denial to the level of art.

Sorry, but I really hate him, and I'm really angry with her because she needs to stop subjecting herself, and us, her family to his abuses.

Whew. I feel a bit better now.

I'm gonna go buy some champagne and go running, not necessarily in that order.

Best, and I'll be better this year. Hope to see you next.

Long absence

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 18:56:21 GMT

I'm sorry, Megan and Deanne. I know I've been silent for awhile, and I've neglected our friendship, something I value greatly. I've thought of you both often.

Just this past friday, I received news that I had passed my PhD comprehensive exams. The three months prior to that news had been, if I may whine, sheer hell.

The paper I presented at Wiscon in May of 2007 was all but drop-kicked by my committee. I waded through multiple conferences with my committee members, during which I was given conflicting instructions and much general criticism largely due to my subject matter, i.e.: feminist science fiction. It seems, unfortunately, that one of my committee members hates the stuff with a passion, and does not want me to write about it. I met with the Chair of the English Department to see if I could replace her; indeed, I could not. And my attempt to oust her has left her less than enthusiastic, to say the least, about signing off on my prospectus, which is the next hurdle I have to clear on what is looking like a longer and longer road to the PhD.

Having gotten the news that I passed, I went home and slept for two days, off and on. I hadn't realized how poorly I had been sleeping while all of this was going on.

There is much more to report, and not so much of it is terribly uplifting, so I'll leave it out. I'd love to hear from y'all, whenever you can spare a moment!

Kerry.

Dissertation, Marathon Training, Duh

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 22:27:38 GMT

Noos on 'Dis

Almost done with Native Tongue. I love the images of the female community of the linguists that Elgin creates: frail little old ladies sit in their two rows of beds (in two rows they broke their bread/and brushed their teeth/and went to bed) as one little girl after another visited each bed sitting holding hands and talking quietly before moving on to the next.

Lots of interesting linguistic threads woven through this text; don't think anyone but a linguistics professor could have written it. Elgin even includes an explanation of the difference bewteen a pidgin and a creole. There's the obvious NuShu parallel, the feminist-dystopia-as-negative-example-subtext. I now have about four 'chapter seeds' started, these ranging in subject and focus from sex-specific viruses to religion to more global, introductory, yes-but-what-is-the-purpose-of-feminist-sf-REALLY kinds of concerns...

and while we're at it, why is it the Lines of _Native_ remind me so much of Mormons? Because the men are such irretrievable assholes? Because they live in huge compounds, like the die-hard Mormons of Big Love? Hmmm.

It occurs to me that I'm now finding a kind of a 'pace' with the dissertation as well: read a little, think a little, write a little, repeat....All the reading is awsome, though. I love that my job, essentially, is also my leisure time. I didn't turn on the TV once while Dan was gone, a fact that seems to amaze him...

*****************************

Yesterday it rained for the first time in a long time. Today, we're back up to 93 F in the shade. Took some pictures of the Cardinal's nest when mom was away; there are two eggs now. She must be sooo hot. I'm trying to stay off the front porch as much as possible to keep from bothering her. Also took some pictures of my bluebird, but I don't have a zoom lens, so it just looks like a blue blob on a log. My bluebird will let me get within ten feet of him. I guess he knows me by now as the "meal-worm lady".

************************

Trying to figure out my marathon training calendar, I realized that I'm going to be a tad short of the eighteen weeks that is the optimum training period. Since the race is the first weekend in September, that leaves me with only twelve weeks of real training. Not that I'm starting from scratch; I've always managed to run around 25-30 miles a week. But I hadn't done any long runs until this past Sunday, when I ran twelve miles, most of it outside in 85-degree heat. And it HURT, I tell you. Thought I was going to throw up at one point. I didn't even think about how fast I was going. Monday I rested (and felt lazy for doing it), and yesterday I did my first long interval run: that's 2 miles at 5mph as a warm-up, followed by 4 x mile at 20 seconds slower than 10k pace (for me, that's 6mph) interspersed with 4 minute jog recovery (5mph) between each, followed by a 2 mile jog cooldown. Around nine miles total, counting recoveries. I did all of it on the treadmill with the air conditioning off. By the time I finished, it was 85 degrees in the workout room and my clothes, even my shorts, clung to me. Moisture-wicking, my ass... Eeeew.

As usual, I started the run in a self-pitying mood ("Why do I DO this to myself?"), and feeling sluggish, but by the end, I felt so good, I had to force myself to stop.

Today, I am sore all over, which makes me feel GOOD. I mean, in the sense that the workout must have worked out something I hadn't worked on before...heh.

Does this make me a masochist? Many would say that Marathoners are, by definition, masochistic.

I guess it's those mid-speed twitch fibers waking up. Today, I'll run 6 slow miles. Thursday, it's a tempo run.

Hubby's outta town!

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 06:34:28 GMT

At The Bluegrass, a karate tournament in Louisville, KY, which was also my first karate tournament. It made me feel wistful. I'd like to get back into it. *Sigh*
Since he left I've been such a rebel, pecking away at my dissertation like a good little academic drone.

My nephew turns fourteen tomorrow. I can't believe it. I sent him an ITunes card. I resisted the urge to be really predictable and send him a book.
I called my sister's house in Louisiana the other day, and when he answered, I thought he was his father, his voice was so deep. "Hullo?" he rumbled.
He's beside himeself with freedom. His little brother and sister are gone, his mother and father both go to work in the morning, and, he says, "I can sleep until three in the afternoon! It's awesome!" He stays up late, playing on the computer.

Yesterday, Jack-jack (above) went missing for nearly an hour. After much searching, Dan and I decided that he had gone to his portal, as Kelly Link and Laurie Marks so aptly suggested in their joint speech at WisCon. Jack-jack materialized, stretching and yawning, in response to my summons via the electric can opener.
Of course, then, as a compensation for his journey, for making him leave his alternate dimension and return to our own, I felt compelled to tuna-ify him.

The Great Frog Escape

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 04:29:17 GMT

Yard Daze.

It was 94 today, 36 for you celcius fans. The birds spent another day with gaping beaks; I put on the sprinklers at around one o'clock and watched them bathe and drink. When the water puddled underneath the shade of a lawn chair on the stone patio, a robin claimed the spot, submerging himself mid-wing, splashing and grooming. After a while, he just sat there in his puddle in the shade, fluffy and wet, blinking lazily.

You could almost hear him say, "ahhhh."

The other wonderful discovery I made in the backyard today was that my pool frog-stairs actually work!

I have rescued many frogs from our pool; often, I was too late to save them.  I found this extremely traumatic, so I made a set of 'frog stairs' out of the flattish rocks from my drystack wall, and hoped this would allow them to escape. I did this several months ago and haven't had any further casualties. While watching the birds today, I witnessed a frog leap straight into the pool with a plop. I was all set to run over and rescue him when I saw him climb up onto the rocks I had laid on the the top step, and boing! launch himself right out of the pool and onto dry land. I was so impressed I had to run out and take his picture. See above.

I also saw a squirrel crawl into the pool, take a drink, and crawl out.

I have fresh water set out all over the place. I don't know why he would drink pool water. Can't be good for him. Thoughts?

Northern Cardinals have made a nest in a small tree just off my front porch. I crept over and peered into the nest and there was just one tiny blue-speckled egg.

Now I'm reluctant to go out onto my front porch for any reason, b/c every time I do, missus Cardinal cheep-cheeps hysterically and bolts.
I've set out water and sunflower seeds nearby so she doesn't have to go too far away to refuel.

And the bluebirds are back.  The other morning I pulled up the blinds just in time to witness daddy bluebird stuffing a worm into his fat, brown, wall-eyed baby. Baby gulped down the worm and continued to flap and gape at his father.
I swear daddy bluebird looked annoyed.
"Damn kid. Whyantcha' move out already? All your brothers and sisters have.  Your mother's already sitting on a new set of eggs, and yet, I'm still feeding you. Why is that, eh?"
He flew off to find more worms for slacker bluebird baby.

They've moved out of the birdhouse gourd and into the bluebird house proper. They're using the nest built by a sparrow; he was there, the sparrow, staking his claim from the birdhouse roof, when I left for Wisconson. When I came back he wasn't there. But there was an empty nest left behind. The bluebird family showed up a week later. Odd.

What else. Am loving Ammonite. Loved Raising the Stones. Many possibilities for dissertation chapters there. I often begin with titles.

Such as:

"Bad Religion: Femicidal Faiths and Feminist SF"
or                                                       "in Tepper and Tiptree"

Both writers employ this theme: Tiptree most notably in "the Screwfly Solution" (Can I use Sam Harris? It fits so well. I would get into such trouble in MS for my heresy...) Tepper with the badlanders in _Women's Country_ and in _Raising_ with the Voorstooders.

Charnas? Well, no, the brutality against the fems is more cultural, somehow, than it is steeped in religion.

Also, again in _Ammonite_ (I just loved the way it began---hit the ground running) here's this mysterious virus that oops, just happens to kill all the men before our story begins, thereby allowing the women in this book to be...people instead of women...Griffith seems uniquely able to extricate her female characters from the confines of gender limits.
Men aren't an evil, yet absent, presence here, they're just not around, and we don't seem to need to miss them much.   No veil of darkness has been cast off with their absquatulation; it's just a curiousity: hm, why do you suppose this virus kills men? Dunno. Let's find out.

Etc., etc.,

Since I've been gone

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 01:06:09 GMT

When I got back from WI,
my bluebirds were gone.  Now I have a shitload of mealworms and noone to feed them to.
I have started to feel sympathetic towards my mealworms.
They're actually kind of cute, they way they suck on the wedges of potato I feed them to keep them healthy in preparation for their final doom.
I have to feed them to SOMEthing; they can't live in my refrigerator forever. Should I let them molt, or pupate, or whatever the hell it is that mealworms do so that they're no longer mealworms?
They will become some kind of black beetle, I believe. A pest.
I'll feed them to the robins instead.

We have a family of little brown bunnies living under the bath house. They huddled beneath it during a rainstorm; when I peered under, I caught the profile of half a dozen twitching noses, a few terrified red eyes:
is it over? Can we come out now and resume our consumption of your pole beans and lettuce and squash?
It's yummy.
Oh, I don't care. I don't even plant them in rows. I throw seeds into the flower bed, and whatever lives gets watered. Or eaten.
I'm sure I've carefully nurtured the growth of some opportunistic weeds. I know I'm growing tons of birdseed.
I don't mind the sunflowers, though.

Ran a 5k race, Running with the King, at Veterans Memorial Park on Saturday June 2nd; my time wasn't sooooo bad---29:43 or thereabouts. Pretty far from my personal best which was 27:03 at the Celtic Clanjamfry in Memphis in 2005.   But I wouldn't be surprised if the clock had said 33:00, I felt so sloowww...Even though it was overcast and not too hot at 8:00am. Later that same day, I ran another six miles, for a total of nine or so. That is the farthest I've run in a while.
I have told enough people I'm going to run the marathon so that I HAVE to do it. It will be good for me, the discipline.
As long as I don't get heatstroke and DIE, which is a distinct possibility.
I want that medal, a skull and crossbones. That says it all. That and the slogan, "Trample the Weak, Hurdle the Dead"
It starts at 4am to beat the heat. I ran the half a couple of years ago; I was late and wound up chasing the tail-end squad car for miles and miles. I had to hide my keys behind a drink machine and untangle my headphones in the dark.
Oh well. At least I know now where the start is.
Three months to train. I hope it's enough.
Just writing about it is wearing me out.
YAWN.

But now I'm going to go run.