I Am A Wiener!

Okay, I have three pieces of news:

1. I got iTunes and an iPod (which hasn't arrived yet), so I've been incredibly busy ripping every cd I have in anticipation of the iPods arrival. No longer will I have to lug my hard plastic 40-cd case around with me. Granted, the hard plastic case was cool and made me very happy, but this thing is (okay, will be) the size of a pack of cigarettes (and didn't even cost that much more!) and will hold every cd I own. This is cool.

2. I finished my Nanowrimo novel! At 8:50 this evening, I finished the last paragraph for a total of 50,049 words. Not nearly the length of last year's endeavor, but I'm really pleased. My husband is also thrilled to no end because this means that he gets to see me again. He was missing me, poor baby. I have already promised the baby that extra snuggles would ensue, and there was champagne and sparkling cider being uncorked as I was tapping out the last hundred-ish words. Huge thanks to all my fellow Nanos for being there for me. I need you guys, even if I never show up at your dos.I'm with you in spirit.

3. My younger sister is in town this weekend for the American Public Health Association Conference. She's a clinical psychologist in Chicago, but here, she's still my baby sister. We had some yummy birthday time with her last night and she took the girls out to Santa Cruz while the Pirate and I went to the opera (we went to see Don Carlos, got there late, I wrote 1500 words while in the opera, and we left before the last guy died). She and the Pirate are playing Scrabble right now. My sister rocks, kicks ass, and is the best, bar none.

I love everything right this minute. Everything.

In the Virtual Bank Line

Saturday night's dream:

I was at work and my boss called me into his office. And now, he had a real office with an actual door. And not just one door. He had a back door, which he opened to reveal a sort of back yard, full of piglets.
"Hey, you know what?" he said in that bright, enthusiastic tone that he always has when he's trying to sell me on doing some project. "Could you train these pigs? Like to sit, and fetch and stuff?"

"Jon, I don't know how to train pigs. I mean, are they like dogs? Can you clicker train them with treats and stuff?"

"Exactly! See, you know how to do this! Great. So, go ahead and go to a pet store and get everything you need. Can you have them all sitting by the end of the week?"

I told my boss about this dream and he laughed a lot. I told him that I feel pretty confident in telling him that training pigs is well outside my skill set, and I like it that way.

On Sunday night, I had this cool dream.

The seven who went on the Nano retreat were working on a tandem story. Each one of us had a sort of journal that we could look at and see the progress being made by others. We all knew that, when we got to critical points in the narrative, we would all be magically whisked away to some place where we would all meet and resolve the story problem. I was sitting in a class at a large univerity with Mike when I happened to look at my copy of the book and notice that we were coming to a critical point. I leaned over and said to him "If you're working on anything critical, you'd better wrap it up. We're about to leave." Seconds later the seven of us were running through a field in a big park, laughing together and generally being pleased to see each other.

Yeah. The retreat was sort of like that.

And I have no idea where last night's dream came from.

I was standing on a rocky hill. There is a large group of men doing battle drills because they are just about to fight some enemy. They're all really nervous because they know they are going to lose. Everyone who faces this enemy does. Little is known about this enemy, and at the time the dream takes place (let me place the time for you - everyone is wearing wool tunics under leather and metal armor, and sandals) there is no reason to expect that the opposing army has some superior technology. The best they can do is have some amazing new strategy that allows them to cut down their opponents like wheat, so this army feels that their time is best spent drilling.

I hear a noise and look behind me, but there is nothing to see. I look back, and suddenly the battle has already started. The enemy had materialized out of nowhere - but they are not ordinary men. They have the same uniforms (white tunics with black metal and leather armor) but they also have giant wings coming from their backs. Huge, glossy black wings that they beat in the faces of the opposing soldiers, terrifying them. There are winged men with swords and winged men with a sort of thing that looks like an eagle with its beak raised and its wings outstretched. They are goring people with the sharp beak tip, stabbing them with the razor-sharp wings, or bludgeoning them with the whole thing, which looks to be made of silver or steel and looks very heavy and lethal.

The non-winged fighters are frightened, confused and losing. They have no idea where these men could have come from or how they just appeared out of nowhere right in their midst. I look behind me where I heard the original noise and I see the answer. They are phased. Another column of the warriors is materializing, already in formation, all ready to relieve the winged men who show no signs of fatigue, but who allow the new group to take over anyway. Wave upon wave of the winged men is materializing and I see something odd. There are two kinds of men in each column. There are men with two swords crossed over their heads as they march, and there are men with the giant eagles held over their heads as they march. But now I see a third kind.

This man has the head of a dog (he looks very Anubis-like) and holds no weapons, but both hands are raised in clenched fists. As the column of winged warriors passes me, Anubis looks at me and winks, giving me the sign for "I love you" and keeps marching by. None of the warriors notice me, and I know that after the other army has been completely decimated, they will just leave.

And that dream had a bitchin' soundtrack too!

What A Weekend

Back from the SoBaNaNo retreat, and I have some amazing gratitude to unpack:

THANKS to everyone who showed. Together, we were all a force of nature. My hands-down favorite part of the weekend was the Saturday night reading. You are all geniuses and I feel honored to be in your company.

SUPER THANKS to Cliff for his unfailing positivity, support, good humor and curiosity. I feel like I don't see nearly enough of you, and time in your company is always a treat.

SUPER DELUXE THANKS to Rob for his forebearance. Your restraint was both remarkable and appreciated. We know that you are capable of the kind of puns that leave the hearers unable to blink both eyes in unison and hemorrhaging from most orifices, and I feel fortunate to have gotten out in one piece.

DOUBLE BONUS THANKS to Mike for his amazing mastery of both fire and popcorn. And I don't even like popcorn. That's how good it was.

ASTRAL MEGA-BITCHIN' THANKS to Lynn for a tarot reading that didn't tell me anything new, but helped me to focus. Your willingness to do a reading even after I had another reading was greatly appreciated. And thank you for sharing such personal things with us. It was wonderful and moving.

SUPER MEGA DELUXE UBER-THANKS to Stephanie for yummy cookies, a fabulous tarot reading, being the designated extrovert and dishwasher and being my biggest cheerleader. Even introverts need luuuv, and I'm no exception. Thanks for being a bud.

And finally,
ULTRA SUPER MEGA GIGANTIC BONUS DELUXE THANKS WITH CHEESE to Ian for organizing the whole thing. The venue was wonderful, the company was inspiring, and it's always nice to have one guy in the group who's guaranteed to be shocked.

I'm already looking forward to next year.

Retreat! Retreat!

Went to go see Matrix Revolutions on Wednesday. Disappointed in that the potential of the original remains unrealized.

There were several previews, one of which was very alarming
There were several previews, one of which was very alarming. The Alamo. I see our country becoming increasingly jingoistic, isolationist and xenophobic, and it frightens me. The lines between "us" and "them" are being continually drawn in narrower and narrower circles, and while ideologically I'm quite happy to be outside that circle, it appears to be an increasingly dangerous proposition. I can hardly wait to leave.

Off to a three-day retreat to see just how many words I can write when I've nothing else to do. If I'm very good, I'll make a sizeable dent in the book this weekend.

In the Virtual Bank Line

My husband and I are going on a trip with a bunch of people. We've just bought a house and as people are arriving, getting ready to take this trip with us, I'm paging through catalogs looking at trees, ground cover, etc. There are duffel bags and luggage stacked in the driveway, and people are gathered in the living room.

There is a very angry-looking young man who is pacing back and forth with his hands shoved into his armpits. His face is sweating profusely and his hair is disheveled. He keeps stalking over to the kitchen counter, pouring himself shots of whiskey, tossing them down, and stalking off.
Sitting on the couch are a man and woman in their early 30s. They're smiling, chatting, having a good time. They are obviously old acquaintances.

A truck drives up and a smiling woman lets two children, a boy and girl of about 10 and 12 respectively, out with their luggage. They throw their arms around me and tell me how glad they are to see me. They keep referring to me as "Lily." The woman who drove the truck says with a very warm smile "Isn't that cute? They think you're Lily. She was their sister." The past tense doesn't even strike me as ominous.

My sister arrives and she's showing me emails from a band who is also coming on the trip. They've just cut an album, and the emails are from a few weeks earlier asking for feedback on the lyrics/music they had mailed out to a small list of people. And hmmm...my name also appears in that list of people who received the email.

The angry man is drinking again, and stomping around. I briefly have a vision of him arguing with his landlord the day before. The landlord is upset about the state of his house and the fact that the man has dug up many parts of the yard, and the man proceeds to pour a glass of red wine on the carpet while staring at the landlord. The sputtering landlord leaves. Then it's night, and the angry man is dragging the limp body of the landlord to yet another hole dug in the yard. Hmmmmm....I am not upset by this revelation. I feel like you would expect to feel if you found out that an acquaintance is from your home town and his parents know your parents. Hmmmm...how interesting.

The happy couple are chiding the angry man. They tell him to lighten up, for crying out loud. He's ruining their good time. I have a vision of them at a party some nights ago. They have played a joke on another woman at the party, exhorting her to try an "invention" of the man's. The woman whispers "it's just a stupid hat - go ahead, make him happy." But it electrocutes her. Blood is pouring from her eyes, nose and mouth as the couple giggle to each other. The woman's hair is singed and steam is coming from her mouth. They drag the body carefully (since the head is now cooked) into the host's bedroom closet and rejoin the party, looking as though nothing happened. Hmmmmm...how interesting.

The children are crowding to sit in my lap. I find it touching that they are still calling me "Lily." They have brutally killed both their sister Lily AND their mother. Hmmm....how interesting.

I am driving to a large building, something like TRW. Outside a main entrance to the building are lockers. I open one of the lockers and place a space suit into it along with a note and my address. I'm inviting someone else on the journey with us, and this spacesuit is both the invitation and the garb they will wear on the spaceship that's leaving soon. Hmmm....interesting. I guess I recruited all these people. I wonder where we're going, and what we'll do when we get there.

And then I woke up. Darn. It was just getting good!

Memories of Random Meat

Several years ago I took my daughter and my nephew for a walk in a park in Chicago. The park had a pond in the middle, and we decided to walk around the pond.

We passed what looked like the remains of a picnic. Someone had dumped most of a bucket of fried chicken on the ground, and it was covered with ants and flies.

We walked on, and passed the remains of a barbecue. Someone had dropped a large piece of raw steak, and it was covered with ants and flies.
We walked on, and passed the remains of a fishing trip. Someone had left two fish without heads, tails or guts, and they were covered with ants and flies.

We fled for home, where we had cheese sandwiches.

A couple of days later we went for a drive and while we were sitting at a stoplight near downtown, we watched a man unload eight or ten pig carcasses (two at a time, one over each shoulder) into a laundromat. They were not covered with ants or flies.

I moved to Berkeley, and caught BART into the city one day to go to the Buddhist community center in SF. I had to take a bus from the station, and after I was done, I was waiting for the bus home when I looked down and saw an entire fresh package of balogna, exploded in the gutter at my feet. It was so fresh that the ants and flies hadn't heard about it yet.

A few months later, I was in Chicago again, and had to take a cab from my hotel to downtown. As I got into the cab, I noticed a neat row of three eggs in the backseat. The one in the middle was cracked, showing a portion of the white and revealing that these eggs had been boiled. Or perhaps they had just spent WAY too long in the back of a cab.

I'm beginning to fear that I'm due for another sighting.

Toilet Humor

I'm not talking about us laughing at them. I'm talking about them laughing at us. Or am I the only one who's noticed? Every place that I've worked has had toilet issues. I'm deeply suspicious.

The first place I worked out of college was in one of those industrial strip malls that invariably congregate near freeways. For the entire three years I worked there they were constantly doing some sort of ductwork. That meant that there were workmen crawling around in the ceiling, and it happened more than once that you would be in the stall attending to business only to have plaster drop on your head, followed by a voice from above saying "Oh, excuse me."

Another company I've worked at had an entirely different phenomenon for the men's room as for the ladies' room. In the ladies' room, about once a month, the water in the toilets was boiling hot. I'm talking about coming into the room and immediately feeling the change in both termperature and humidity. The minute you sat down, you could feel the tingle of your pores opening up. I'm sure it was very therapeutic. In a really disquieting way.

In the men's room, usually at the same time as the ladies' butt sauna was going on, there would be the men's cattle-call. Every time someone flushed a toilet in the men's room, the sound of a 100-foot cow mooing at the top of its cow lungs could be heard all over the building. If I saw one of my male cow-orkers heading in the direction of the restroom, I would know to brace myself for the coming roar. On the other hand, several times a day I would be jolted out of my concentration by a sound alarming enough to precipitate a trip to the butt sauna.

In the place I work at now, they squirt some sort of lemony liquid in the toilets when they clean at night and then just leave it there. By morning, the toilet is fresh-smelling, lemony yellow, will foam when flushed, and is full of flies who have dived to their death, attracted by the lemon smell. So, you come in after your first few cups of tea and you have a choice. You can either waste a bunch of water flushing these guys away, or you can endure that skeevy feeling knowing that you are, in fact, pissing on someone's grave.

A person just shouldn't have to deal with this kind of thing at work.

I Finished!

Yesterday, I finished the short story I've been working on for the past few weeks. I'm very pleased with how it's turned out, although I know that when I give it over to someone for editing, I'll become deeply self-conscious about my choices. The Pirate read it and told me that he thought it was every bit as good as "A Poor Aunt Story." High praise.

Monster

I wish that I had a tiny little monster that went with me everywhere I went.
And that monster would be my friend and fetch me a cup of tea and maybe a biscuit and bite people on the ankles when they pissed me off.
And he would have shiny scales of all different colors and needle-sharp teeth and a forked tongue, and he would tickle my neck with it as he rode on my shoulder. And buggy eyes and blood-red claws.
I wish that I had a monster. Everyone needs a monster.

Oh, The Things You'll See!

This morning, I was suited up and ready to go, but I needed gas first. I stopped at the light right before the gas station as a Buddhist monk wearing a leather baseball jacket over his saffron robes crossed the light. I've seen a few in this neighborhood before. I don't know where they live.
As I pulled the bike up to the pump, a little old lady clutching a big vinyl purse walked across the blacktop. As I turned from the ATM kiosk, she was walking back because the doors of the mini-mart weren't open yet. She proceeded to station herself in front of the tattoo place next door, pacing back and forth in front of the door and clutching her big vinyl purse. I looked up, and the monk was pacing back and forth in front of the dry cleaner's place. They were both walking back and forth and stopping occasionally to look up and down the street.
As I left, they were both walking down the same little side street in the same direction. Toward my street.

Stepping Into the Void

I've been kinda down lately. For six weeks, I've been watching what I eat and running most days. On the days I don't go running, I ride my bike or do other things. And yet, the pounds refuse to budge. I feel that all of the effort is being wasted, and it's depressing.
Similarly, every night, I sit down at my computer and I write. I write articles, essays, short stories, etc. I am currently being published in an online magazine, but it's not paying anything. I'm waiting for the day when I receive an actual check for something I've done. In the meantime, I feel that I'm just putting all this energy into the void.

In the Virtual Bank Line

In my dream last night, the Pirate and I were going with JeebusGeek to a wedding. JeebusGeek's boss was getting married in a very large, ritzy resort right down the street from my parents' house. Everyone showed up four or five hours before the wedding was to start in order to have cocktails and socialize.
Alcohol was being served, but I had to go down into a small room several floors below where the festivities were taking place. There was a woman at a desk near the door who asked for my name and address. She asked what kind of car I was driving, and if I had a cocktail, how I planned to get home. I told her that I was staying less than a block away, and that I hadn't taken a car, I had walked and planned to get home the same way. I was given a martini, but I had to drink it there in the room where I was then lectured on the evils of drink.
After the ceremony, everyone just lay down on the ground and fell asleep. We woke up the next morning when a grandfatherly-looking man came along in a little trolley and handed out food to all of the children who had attended the wedding. I decided to take a drive with my sister-in-law to go visit my best friend The Third.
Magenta and I were in a car going to see The Third, but we were in a horrible inner-city neighborhood - the kind where everyplace is strewn with garbage and all the doorways have big iron grates across them. We parked several blocks from where The Third lives, and Magenta said "Oh, let's go into this building right here. I have a friend that lives here and he can go with us." So we pushed open the broken security door and found ourselves in a long, dimly-lit hallway with no doors. The walls were not perfectly straight, but broken up by ornamental columns protruding from the wall, and little niches with nothing in them. The whole place was done in a very Moroccan plaster-and-tile sort of way and while nothing was in disrepair, the whole thing was absolutely filthy. We walked down the hallway a little ways and Magenta pushed at one of the niches which turned out to be a hidden door. We went down a dark, narrow hallway into a small plaster-and-tile room with no furniture in it. Two young, bearded men stood as though they were expecting us and led us into another room with a little battered furniture in it.
There were a few other people in the room, including a friend of mine from work, Djibouti. Everyone was going to come out to dinner with us, and it's been decided that we're going to a Moroccan restaurant down the street. "But first," Djibouti says, and he whips out a few filled syringes. Everyone crowds around him and he starts injecting them all. I am feeling vaguely put off and don't want to participate. Djibouti lifts his shirt and then brandishes a knife. He inserts the knife at least a half an inch, parallel to the surface of his skin. He pulls the wound open and then sprinkles cocaine into it. "Are you sure you don't want any?" he says, laughing. I am now officially horrified.
I look up and now the room is full of children ranging in ages from a tiny infant who's in a backpack slung over a chair to a seven- or eight-year-old. They are all staring at the grownups with wary eyes. I ask them their names, but none of them speaks. I ask them where their parents are, and they point to the people who are going to the Moroccan restaurant, who are all filing out the door, unconcerned. "Have you eaten?" I ask the children, who all shake their heads.
I tell them that I'm going to stay and make them something to eat, and they all crowd around me, suddenly excited and chattering. I start opening doors, looking for a kitchen, but all I find is a family living in one of the rooms who looks as damaged and wary as the children. I invite them to join me, and they were coming out of the room as I woke up.
I have to stop watching scary science fiction and reading up on poisons before I go to bed. It's just not a good combination.

Help, I'm Deaf

Went camping this weekend.
It dumped rain, so the entire thing ended up being the Hemingway camping experience where we all stood around the lake with our grim faces and ropey forearms wearing thick sweaters and acting like it didn't bother us that we were wet and cold and being eaten alive by mosquitoes because we were alive and it was more than we could say for the mosquitoes as we swatted them from our ropey forearms with our sinewy hands and looked out over the picnic tables piled high with soggy food and dripping dishes where we had just eaten dutifully but without relish because we had forgotten the relish and the mustard besides. The women kept their strong silent backs to the men while the men stood around the fire ring feeling hopeless because not only could they not get the fire to light but they had forgotten to bring any wood which didn't matter anyway because the wood would have mouldered away with the passage of the time that it took the women with their strong silent backs to finish the dishes and make the coffee which they poured into cups and let go cold before bringing it out to the men who stood in a circle reveling in their shame. And back in the tent we lay in the darkness listening to the rain and the acorns and the squirrel turds hitting the top of the tent and wondered how long it would be before the water began creeping into our sleeping bags and wondered whether the children really did not notice that they were wet and cold or whether they were just trying to put a brave face on it so as not to remind us of our failures and thereby to make us feel them much more acutely even though they were not really our failures so much as the failures of a God who never seems to take into account our vacation plans.
Man, I love camping.

What Exactly DO You Do With a Drunken Sailor?

On Sunday night, the Pirate dreamed that my father had given him a credit card and told him to buy us a house with it. The Pirate was so overwhelmed that he cried. And at the same time, somebody gave me an ancient 78 of "Tubby the Tuba."
Last night, without having heard about the Pirate's dream, I dreamed that I was visiting my parents in the house that I grew up in (which our family hasn't owned for more than 20 years). And the girl who lived across the street from me when I was a kid was still there and she was coming over to spend the night. I don't know how I knew that she was coming, because nobody had talked to her. I didn't even know what she would look like as an adult. My parents went to bed before it even started to go dark out, and I was wandering around the house waiting for this woman to show up. I kept looking out the kitchen window to the house across the street, but I didn't see her. I thought "I'll just call information" so I picked up the phone and dialed 4-1-1, and without my having to say anything at all, a voice said "Chapman, Fletcher. Floorgen obble wardin neeble hik bippus. Phone numbers for Tubby the Tuba are not formatted like regular phone numbers, so please write it down." And then the line went dead and I had no idea what to do. I didn't have the faintest idea how to dial "floorgen" on a regular telephone.
In the cold light of day, I think that I could have just walked across the street and knocked on the door, but it just didn't occur to me at the time.

The Most Anal-Retentive Editor on Earth

I just sent back a 19-page short story that my friend and editing partner JeebusGeek sent me. This is a story that he and I had discussed several weeks ago and I encouraged him to "write it, for cryin' out loud!" So, he handed it off to me for my once-over. Two weeks and four pages of single-spaced notes later, it's done. Nothing has been overlooked from the tiniest grammatical or punctuation error to the largest plot hole. It's all been noted, suggestions have been made. I'm tired, but I know that when all is said and done, his story will be very publishable.

Any Minute Now, I'll Be Awake

Okay, so yesterday I was at work at five-ish. Today, a slightly more sane 7-ish.
I left work yesterday with the Pirate, who came to pick me up. We went to go see League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was one vast, unrelieved landscape of puerile plot, horribly bad cinematography and characters that, despite the fact that they are all previously-realized literary characters, were barely more than innacurate stereotypes. It's disappointing that the writers had Captain Nemo, Alan Quartermain, Dorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll and the invisible man, and they couldn't scrape together a better story than they did. Ah well. Ours is not to question why. Ours is but to get revenge by writing something WAY better and then selling it for fat wodges of cash.
I have signed on to write both a gardening column and an ongoing children's story for a local guy. That'll be good. The children's story is one that I had been writing for my daughter a long time ago about an adventurous woman who loved to explore the world via food. The woman's name is Philomena Hogg-Wahfles, and at the end of every story is a recipe for little kids. The garden column is going to be pretty much how to garden with children. That should be easy. Children should be planted early in summer (pretty much the second school's out) head-down in well-aerated soil. Keep moist, not wet. Fertilize no more than once weekly (any more and they grow too quickly and you end up replacing their entire wardrobe several times during the course of the summer). Planting head-down is vital as it keeps the whining to tolerable levels. Plant them wrong-side-up and you're in for a summer of whining.
Having said that, I miss my girls. They're still at my folks' house having the time for their baby lives and I'm unable to go for more than about twenty minutes at a time without thinking about them. I have that feeling that people have about their favorite relationships, where everything you see you want to share with that other person, every thought you have you want to give to that person, and even if you have nothing new to share, you'd just like to be able to look across the room and see that person's face. The little one will be back Sunday, the older one not until the end of August. I just keep reminding myself that they're having a great time.

What the Hell?

The clock just turned around to 6. The moon falls from horizon to horizon and I've been at work for nearly an hour.
My sister was in town for the weekend going to her transsexual former roommate's wedding. The outstanding comment was that out of the 10 people in the bridal party (bride, groom, 4 attendants each), a total of 1,000 pounds could easily be shucked. My sister's escort was one of a minority of man-born men at the wedding. She said that it was a once-in-a-lifetime event. I'm sure it was.
So, my sister hung out at my house yesterday. I made corn, chile and hominy-stuffed red peppers and we watched "Waking Life," which, the more that I think about it, the more I like. Before bedtime, we were all sitting in the hammocks out in the garden and my sister was telling me about having an amazing meal at Burger King. I'm dubious. Then she asked the Pirate and I what our top 5 candies are (mine are Almond Roca, dark chocolate-covered bridge mix, Baby Ruth, peanut M&Ms and Mike&Ikes). My sister is a very strict vegetarian, but will be the first to remind you that Milk Duds are vegetarian, as is chocolate.
We all had to go to bed, but the Pirate and I stayed up late talking about the process of becoming the people that we are and talking about parts of "Waking Life" that were relevant to that. But then I didn't sleep. I never do anymore. I'm going to be one of those old people who never sleeps, and I will never die again. I'll just become paler and paler and fainter and fainter until I'm 92 and fade away entirely.

I Wanna Be Them

I just read an amazing short story by Haruki Murakami called A Poor Aunt Story. I love Japanese stories, but I can't always get a grip on why. I'm surrounded by Japanese culture all the time. The sect of Buddhism to which I subscribe is Japanese, so many of my friends are Japanese, and I never tire of hearing them. The way they talk gives a tiny hint to me of a culture that is entirely different than the one in which I was raised. One of my best friends from high school went on to move to Japan and has written a wonderfully funny book called "White Gold" where he talks about being a gaijin in search of medicine.
This particular story, though, takes as its central point the concept of the "poor aunt," which sounds like a thing that any Japanese person would be able to recognize as a type, but not necessarily anyone here. He is evoking a very specific set of traits that tease the outside edges of my understanding. There is enough in the story to make it tantalizing, and yet I feel that I am left without the facility to grasp its essence. I don't have any internal concept of "poor aunt," so I can only extrapolate from the clues given in the story.
I wish I could write that poetically. I can't think, off the top of my head, of any American writers that do. It's a layering of surreality on top of the mundane. Anyone who has a chance to should check the story out. It's brilliant.

Why is my Life so F*****g Inconvenient and Where is My Personal Jetpack?

This morning started off really, really well. Any morning where you've gotten it twice before 9:30 a.m. is okay in my book. And he made me breakfast, to boot.
So then I'm using my leftover brain cells to figure out what I'm going to do today. I had a wonderful meeting with a friend who's currently helping me edit my book, and the takeaway from that meeting is that I have to raise the stakes for at least 3/5 of my book. Okay, that sounds tough, but in fact I'm grateful to hear it. But the thing that annoys me is that the Pirate thinks of this as a step backward, as though everything up until now was a waste of time, or that I had been pursuing something that hasn't paid off.
I've tried to tell him that this is not programming. I do not have a "desired end state" in mind, and then a series of logical steps to get to in that desired end state. I've told him that once I had actually finished writing the novel, there would be several rounds of edits, many probably substantial. I think that the outside world thinks of the editing process as one of taking out all of the extra words and correcting the spelling. He doesn't get the part where I have to do a "vacuousectomy," wherein I remove the parts that suck, and hopefully stop the suckage. It's a delicate process.
But where do I get the time for this? Tomorrow is father's day. Tonight I'm supposed to cart my younger one off to her father's house an hour away, and then make the trek back, so that's two hours out. I want to speed up the process of getting this novel sold so that I can make huge flipping wodges of cash, so that I can quit working so that I can sit home and write more. It's a viscous circle and I'm stuck in it.
And to top it all off, technology is NOT making my life any easier. I spend half an hour yesterday morning formulating my grocery list on the Household Management Console, then transferring it to Safeway.com so that my groceries could be delivered to me whilst I spent my valuable time transforming my garden into a weed-free, well-fertilized productive earthly Eden. But NO.
Safeway (once again) screwed up and delivered only half of my groceries, which means that if I'm to make Bulgarian Red Pepper Stew for dinner tomorrow, or soyrizo and jalapeno jelly crepes for breakfast (the Pirate likes the spicy foods), I have to haul my sorry kiester down to the store. And in return for screwing up my order, they offer me a paltry $10 off A FUTURE ORDER. No. I'm sorry, this is not acceptable. My enemies do not get to delay their demise. They must pay now.
On the other hand, I'm doing research into the life of Mary, and one of the sites I found is just chock-full of incredibly fascinating historical information on daily life around the time of Christ, all laid out in a very non-mystical sort of way. The whole incident of the boy Jesus in the temple was laid out as "they went on vacation every year, and one year they accidentally left for home without him." And the words of Mary were quoted as being "Do you not see how worried your father and I were?" When I was thirteen, we went to Lake Tahoe on vacation and I fell asleep before we left and got left behind, and my mother blamed me for it too. I wonder if Jesus was as pissed off as I was not only to have been left behind, but then to have his mother blame him for it. Some things never change, and if they can happen to the Son of God, apparently they can happen to anybody.
Okay. Now I'm done bitching. I'm going to go and cook some sole and herbed rice and whatever veggies we still have in the kitchen. And then I'm going to spend a whole lot of time tonight re-packaging the 3/5 of my story that need help. Wish me luck!