Dry Ice Factory

The year is drawing to a close, and I am succumbing to the urge to look back. The calendar year is an arbitrary unit for contemplation, but it's also a handy way to parse things into intelligible chunks. As such, 2014 doesn't seems very remarkable in any way, but maybe I'm just in a jaded mood.

In many ways the highlight of the year was the trip I took to Europe in August. It's hard to overstate what an acre lot of fun that was. The first part of the trip, in which my sister and I treated Mom to a visit to Amsterdam and ancestral lands in eastern France was definitely one none of us will ever forget. My sister's French friend, Kelly, opened up doors to our past that we probably wouldn't even have noticed if we'd been on our own. Then for me it was onward to London for beer tourism and the mighty Worldcon, which was almost fannish overload. Well, no, it was definitely fannish overload. There's a part of me that doesn't enjoy overseas travel as much as I once did, but it's hard to remember why while I'm in the middle of it having so much damned fun.

Other than that I traveled to San Jose for Potlatch in February and had a splendid time there with exotic foreign visitors (the Fishlifters) and various other well-memorized faces. This was followed by another of my retreats to Astoria and the Olympic Peninsula, which have rapidly become one of my very favorite things in the whole wide world ever. The other relatively long trip was the drive to Southern California with my parents in November, and I once again really enjoyed the scenic drive along the Sierra Nevadas on Highway 395. Other than that there were several trips to Oregon to visit the family, including the big pig roast family birthday party at my brother's place in July and another family birthday party at Waldport on the coast. Now that my parents' Oregon abode is back in Portland, I've really been enjoying taking the train from Seattle. It's a lot more relaxing than driving or flying.

A lot less satisfying in some ways was my year in writing and publishing. We only got out one issue of Chunga, and that was way back in January. We had been getting out two issues a year recently, so this felt like a step backward. I also felt like I didn't do much writing for other fanzines. I had pieces published in John Purcell's Askance and Pete Young's Big Sky (thanks, guys!), but the more major piece I wrote about 30 years living in Seattle was rejected by the fanzine that solicited it. Even worse, I had to agree that it wasn't a very good piece and thus not worth submitting elsewhere, and this failure has had me contemplating my navel a bit. Have I gotten stagnant? Do I have anything left to say? Why do I want to write? Sometimes I think I just write from reflex now, but then again, maybe that's the best reason to write. I just don't want to get rote, right?

The bulk of my writing was on the internet. I still feel very ambivalent about my (mostly) film blog, Dreamland Cafe, but it does give me a reason to write, even if I'm not sure of the reason why I write. Do I really have anything to say about film? Wouldn't I be better off to just write about science fiction, where I have twice as many decades of experience and knowledge to back up my analysis? Perhaps the most striking thing to me about the blog is that the two most popular articles in the past year have been one I wrote in 2013 about slavery stories, which keeps getting found by people using search terms like "plantation sex stories," and the piece I wrote in February about the French film The Ring Finger. Considering the fetishistic sexual interest that seems to be driving the readers of the slavery post, it's hard not to assume that people are searching for the piece about The Ring Finger looking for nude screencaps of Olga Kurylenko or to contemplate the sadomasochistic bent of the film. Nonetheless, that's probably the best thing I wrote for the Dreamland Cafe last year.

Meanwhile, my LiveJournal plugs along as a repository for trip reports, convention reports, book reports, and memorials to dead friends. I think I'm still writing some good things here, although since I outed my true identity it feels as though I'm writing less personal stuff. Not sure if that's actually true. Is this post personal?

The biggest surprise development this year came on the job front. After years of stasis partly caused by reduced budgets in the aftermath of the Great Recession, we were finally given the funds to hire two new reporting positions. Since I'm a "super SME" for student data, it will be my responsibility to train these two new people in the mysteries of student data, which means a lot more work is being put on my plate. What is perhaps most surprising is that one of the key figures behind the allocation of funds for these positions also pushed heavily to give me a significant raise commensurate with my new responsibilities (and my old ones too). That's all still being negotiated, but the tea leaf readings are positive. What I take away from this is that after 25 years of working here, I have developed some powerful allies. I still worry about what's going to happen when one of my biggest long-term allies and mentors retires next year, but it's encouraging to know that I'll still have people who might be able to help me if I need it.

Finally, there's my health. Three years after getting a wake up call about growing insulin resistance, which caused me to make fairly significant dietary and life style changes, I developed a nagging pain in my right shoulder that was diagnosed as rotator cuff tendinitis. This put me on a course of stretches and exercises that have increased my upper body strength. Between the recent weight loss, eating better, getting more cardio, and now putting on some muscle in my shoulders, I'm feeling unexpectedly fit. At the same time, at age 54 my body is definitely showing its age, and while I may have built up my shoulder muscles, I'm losing muscle mass elsewhere. Part of me wonders whether the tendinitis, which is caused by impingement, was the result of losing muscle mass that had previously been keeping the impinging bones at bay. In any event, I'm feeling pretty damned good physically right now, but the slow slide is in progress.

Well, no doubt I could natter on some more about various projects and plans and desires, but I won't. I've been feeling slightly blue today, but I think it's just a random existential mood. I remember when I broke up with Sharee back in 2005 I felt that I'd probably reached the pinnacle of what I was going to accomplish in life and it would be all downhill from there. Two years later I'd somehow finagled my way onto some Hugo-winning coattails. The thing I ask myself more and more these days is how can I help younger people face their challenges in the way that I was helped as a young man. My goal for a long time has been not to be a burden on anyone else, even if I'm not strong enough to carry anyone else's burden. But can I do more? Can I help to lift other people up? I really don't know, but it's been on my mind.

And on that note I wish you bottoms up for the new year.

Sorry if that last post was a bit raw. Feeling clearly is hard work, and I didn't put in the work on that one.

So let me try to take this deeper. This is actually something I was thinking of writing a year or two ago but decided was just too much navel-gazing. Maybe it can be therapy instead. Or therapeutic navel-gazing, or something.

( Cutting to the quick )

I mowed half the lawn yesterday, and it was the back half at that, so the neighbors still have to look at a jungle out front. I'd already spent an hour pruning the raspberries and rebuilding the raspberry frame, so just half a yard of mowing heavy, wet grass was enough for me. It feels as though this was pretty late for raspberry pruning, and I'm not sure if that's because I've been so busy doing other things or because it really has been unseasonably chilly this year. I just have not felt like getting out into the yard this year, whatever the reason. On the other hand, this is not at all late for the first mowing of the year. I think it almost always happens in April, because it's too wet before then.

I also got a lot of writing done this weekend, both on my blog, on LiveJournal, and on the trip report, which I finally got back to after two weekends off. It has been very interesting working on a longer-form piece (circa 15,000 words at this point), which is not something I've done much of. I've been making notes in the manuscript of places where I want to expand or add more detail, and indeed yesterday was spent expanding on what I'd written the day before. It feels like I'm composing both forward and backward -- that as I move forward I'm changing my idea of what I've already written. There's lots of anxiety around the process, but there's also a lot of feeling of discovery, which is the fun part of writing. I've also got a lot of thoughts about the blog-so-far, but I think I'm going to resist analyzing for a bit longer. Perhaps needless to say, my thoughts about why I'm doing it are changing.

I went to Vanguard Saturday night. I hadn't been planning on it, but Craig Smith asked if I could give him a ride, so I thought what the hell. Turned out to be a relatively big Vanguard, perhaps because it was also Andy & Carrie's 25th wedding anniversary party and Julie & Luke's 5th wedding anniversary party. It was fun, even with the traditional ritual where Victor tries to talk me into buying an Apple product. Even Jane showed up, which was good to see. I drank a series of beers from Russian River Brewing tracing my spiritual path: Redemption, Damnation, Salvation. Out of order, but that's the story of my life.

Yesterday I went back through my 2010 posts on film -- and I didn't make it all the way, because I wrote a lot about film in 2010. I liked a fair number of my more ambitious posts, and it got me thinking -- again -- about trying to make my film writing more accessible. I block search engines on my LiveJournal just to make it slightly harder for the uninitiated to find the personal writing here. Mostly I'm not eager for my family to find this. I prefer to interact with them on Facebook.

So how do I make my film writing discoverable by search engines but not my other LJ writing? I could start a separate LJ dedicated to film writing (and maybe other non-personal writing too). I could Friends-lock all my personal writing on this journal and unblock the journal as a whole from search engines. One problem I have with the latter solution is the amount of work it would take to go through my whole journal Friends-locking personal posts. The problem I have with the former solution is the amount of work it would take to transfer my past film writing to a new location. On the other hand, I could just start a film journal from scratch and forget all my fucking-brilliant past work. But then I also worry that if I started writing about film for an anonymous (i.e., open) audience, I would start over-thinking it. As I am probably over-thinking this whole issue right here, right now.

And so once more inertia wraps me in its ample arms.

I suppose another option would be to Friends-lock all my past posts in this journal (there's a way to do it globally, isn't there?), unblock the search engines, and then write unlocked posts going forward that I don't mind being searchable. I could unlock past posts on film as I had the time and interest in doing so. Hm.

It strikes me that perhaps what I want from a girlfriend is less a lover or a companion or a partner than a muse. I want someone who inspires me to write the best that I can. That's something that Sharee was very good for, even after we stopped being a couple, but I need a new muse. Which amongst other things means I need new passwords.

This is part of a recent reflection that I'm still digesting my experience with Sharee last year and will probably never really understand it, but at least I got a good fanzine article out of it.

Cf. also Hazel, who was only ever a muse, never a girlfriend -- but ten years a muse.

Muses are less messy than lovers, and Ramdu abhors a mess, unlike Nature.

So I'm in the final stages of writing my Worldcon report. This is always the most difficult part of the process for me, because at this point it looks like a barrel of unappetizing sludge to my eyes. The sentences are awkward, the paragraphs are incoherent, and the arguments and observations are, frankly, stupid and reveal me for a self-centered, self-deluded, and altogether clapped-out fraud. Now, I've been through this process enough times to know that at least part of it is just psychological flak and failure of self-confidence, but of course that doesn't help me to see what changes might actually improve the damned thing. Fortunately this is intended for publication in a fanzine, and the editors of said fanzine will give me feedback so that I'm not just stuck with the confused messages from my nasty-ass backbrain.

But I really hate this part of the writing process, and I'm struck by how different it is to write for my LiveJournal. I almost never suffer this level of self-doubt when I write here, because I'm not writing for publication. It's just a fricking LiveJournal, so who cares how incoherent it is? Roll your eyes and move on to the next post, right? Which isn't to say that I don't fuss over my writing here. I frequently revise my LJ posts, even after it's not likely that anyone else will ever look at them again. But I never get to the stage of thinking, "This is just crap, and I have no idea how to fix it. I stink."

Is this why some people give up writing for publication and just blog instead?