Category: books

I am…someone I’ve never heard of

John just sent me a link to this quiz:
Which science fiction writer are you?

It was an enjoyable quiz, with a number of questions that made me laugh. But then my answer:

I am:

Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs)

A quiet and underrated master of “hard science” fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

Don’t you hate it when you get results on these things that you find disappointing? I mean, I appreciate the underrated, and also the evidence of great foresight. But why not somebody cool? I mean, John got Ursula LeGuin as a result. That is so cool. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to go back and change my answers. (Now what does that say about me?)

Okay. Here’s an update. My brother-in-law, who is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican with books on his shelf at home by Evil Bitch from Hell that Anne Coulter and Scary Dork of an Asshole Sean Hannity as well as other “authors,” just took the quiz and got the same frickin’ author as me.

What did I do wrong?

New Year’s resolutions for 2006

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve made a list of New Year’s resolutions. And here it is, the beginning of another new year, and it seems like a wonderful opportunity to set some goals. Having a new baby can lead to difficulties in getting many things done, so I’ve decided to set some goals that I know can be achieved. Namely, some that I’ve already reached.

A New Mother’s Retroactive Resolutions for 2006

  1. Personal appearance: Lose 10 pounds
    Physical appearance is important to so many people, and I think weight loss often tops people’s New Year’s resolution lists. I can honestly boast that I lost at least 10 pounds in a single night! While the process wasn’t exactly painless, it sure was quicker than dieting.
  2. Health and fitness: Exercise more
    Another common goal is to improve one’s fitness levels. And I did indeed “exercise more” in 2006. The trick to this one is to take advantage of the inherent ambiguity of the term more. Since it is necessarily a relative or comparative term (i.e. something can be/have/do/etc. more XXX than some other thing), I choose to leave out the specifics of the comparison. For example, if I wanted to say “I plan to exercise more than I have been exercising” my resolution would have failed. However, if I consider my resolution to mean something like “I plan to exercise more than various people who are a) comatose b) dead or c) of a more extreme couch potato nature than even myself,” I have achieved this goal in spades.
  3. Fine arts: Write a song
    Let’s not leave out creative and artistic growth. I actually wrote several original compositions, complete with lyrics. My greatest hits include “The Diaper Song” (We’re changing the diaper, and we’ll put a new diaper on…put a new, put a new, put a new, put a new diaper on.) and “The Bouncy Song” (I have a little girl, her name is Phoebe Lenore, and she likes to bouncy bouncy…bouncy bouncy bouncy bouncy bouncy Phoebe…)
  4. Feeding the mind: Read some books
    It’s always important to strive for intellectual breadth and depth. I’m happy to say that I’ve read quite a few books this year. Many of them quite thick ones. Well, with thick pages, at least. And I’ve even gone as far as to nearly memorize several of them, including: Goodnight Moon (Brown), Bear Snores On (Wilson), The Foot Book (Seuss), Quiet Loud (Patricelli) and The Going to Bed Book (Boynton).
  5. Home improvements: redecorate the house
    Let’s not forget the home. I can quite honestly say that there have been many changes to the appearance of our home. Not a single room looks the same. The new look is definitely more colorful than ever! The new palette includes a shift from earthy tones (mostly muted browns and grays, typically represented by wood and stone) to an array of chartreuse, tangerine, fuchsia, cerulean and lemon yellow. Mostly represented in plastic and some plush.
  6. Productivity and daily routine: Wake up earlier in the morning
    Who doesn’t want to feel more productive? I used to frequently waste the day away by sleeping until 8:00 a.m., or even snoozing in past 10:00 on weekends. I now always wake up before 7:00 a.m. There are even many days when I wake up before dawn: by 6:00, or 5:00, and sometimes even 4:00! And I don’t even need to set the alarm clock.
  7. Etiquette: write and mail thank you notes in a timely manner
    This one is for real, actually. Though the interpretation of “timely manner” may be subject to my own somewhat lax standards. I determined that I should finish writing thank you notes for the presents given for my daughter’s birth (in February 2006) within the same calendar year as her birth. I am bound and determined to achieve this goal. (Don’t quibble with me over today’s date. I will have those letters written in 2006.)
      8. our new living room decor
      Our new living room decor.

time warped

I seem to be having trouble accurately perceiving the passage of time lately. Just a couple of weeks ago (or perhaps it was months), I was in a meeting at work. We were discussing the agenda for the day, and various upcoming scheduled events of the day. I looked at my watch. (A normal thing to do when talking about times.) However, my watch did not have the answers I sought. While it is quite a nice watch, with hands and numbers and well-crafted internal mechanisms, it had not been wound, nor the time changed, since some time in February. It was, in fact, the first time I had managed to wear my watch in many months. It seemed like a great accomplishment, a step towards recapturing the structure of my previous life. When I grabbed my watch, in a fit of inspiration, I figured I would “get around” to setting the time before heading to work. Well, hours passed (I presume), and there I was, sitting in a meeting looking at watch that reflected the time of some moment from my past. A metaphor perhaps?

Time has been racing by like you would not believe. (Just now, since writing that first paragraph, I’m pretty sure I lost at least half a day.) There have been a number of times when I’ve thought “I should respond to that email from [insert name here] that I received a couple days ago.” When I actually then dig up said email in my inbox, it is often weeks or even months since I received it. Yes, send me an email, and I will get back to you right away. Within the year.

And then there was this whole bizarre time warp I experienced shortly after my daughter was born. The first few weeks absolutely crawled by. Every day felt like a week. It was a haze of feeding and comforting (lots of bouncing) with not much sleep or much of anything else. And then at some point, vroom, time took off. The first 6 weeks and the subsequent 6 months seem of approximately equal duration in my mind.

So now, in spite of looming deadlines (the damn Incomplete is due next week), I am compelled to put together a small collection of stories (TV episodes, movies and more) reflecting my sense of the world passing me by.

Movies, shows and other stories of warped time:

These further seem to group into 3 main chunks.

1. I overslept.
Comas and long naps. In the tradition of Rip Van Winkle and Sleeping Beauty. (Wikipedia has some great lists of other takes on these tales.)

  • Dead Zone (book, movie, TV show)
    A guy wakes up from a coma. Has special powers. (Where are my special powers?)
  • Kill Bill, volume 1 (2003)
    Woman wakes up from a coma. Pissed off.
  • Bear Snores On
    This is a book I read to my daughter. Bear in hibernation misses out on a party.

2. I was a popsicle.
Things in the tradition of Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.

  • Forever Young (1992)
    I’m not actually sure I saw this whole movie. Mel freezes, Mel melts.
  • Late for Dinner (1991)
    Only vaguely remember this one, too. I seem to remember it was cute. Had Peter Gallagher. (Strange, he was in another coma movie.)
  • Futurama (1999-??)
    The whole premise of the show. Fry freezes, unfreezes.
  • Austin Powers (1997)
    You know this one.

3. I lost track of time.
Miscellaneous time warps.

  • Blast from the past (1999)
    Brendan Fraser grows up in a bomb shelter, and emerges decades later in complete ignorance of the progress of time.
  • Buffy, season 6 “Smashed” (2001)
    Having been a rat for several years, Amy comments: “I felt like I was in that cage for weeks.”
  • Buffy, season 6 “Life Serial” (2001)
    I’m thinking of the part of the episode where Buffy is taken out of time, and what seem like seconds to her translate to hours for the rest of the world.
  • Stargate, season 2 “A Matter of Time” (1999)
    A black hole messes up the passage of time.
  • She’s had a baby (2006) A grad student suffers from baby-induced time warping, and falls even further behind in her school and work obligations by blogging rather than doing things she’s supposed to be doing.