mariness

I've had to turn off comments on several previous posts and temporarily disable new anonymous comments for a bit thanks to a massive rush of spam over the last couple of days. I hate doing this, since I've had some great conversations that started with anonymous comments, and my policy here has always been to be as open to comment as possible, but....83 spam comments in one hour was just a bit too much.

You can still comment using your LJ account, Open ID, Twitter, Facebook and so on, and I will try reopening to anonymous comments in a couple of weeks. Also, the Dreamwidth account, which mirrors this one, is still open to anonymous accounts (probably because no one knows it's there). You should also feel free to contact me via email if you have any comments about any of my posts.

Back to your regularly scheduled discussion of entertainment things later today once I get a few annoyingly necessary things done.

So, since all the cool kids are doing it, here's my general note that starting tomorrow, I shall be flitting in and out of IAFA in a flitty sort of way.

Unlike all of the other cool kids, I shall not be doing any readings or papers (you can all sigh a deep sigh of relief now) but I suspect that some quality pool time might be coming. Note: I'll be ducking out of part of Thursday and quite possibly part of Friday (although these Hunger Games rumors are tempting, since certain other people not attending IAFA have emphatically said NO HUNGER GAMES because YOU WILL JUST MAKE FUN OF IT, which does rather seem to be the point.) It is entirely possible, however, that on at least one of my flitting moments I shall be flitting in with Settlers of Catan, to fulfill the requests of certain Brazilians.

I'll be bringing the iPad with me, but even with this, I suspect that blogging shall be light for the next few days, which...is kinda the same way it's been for the last few months, so most of you will probably not even notice the difference.

And now, back to resting up for the con, in between some last minute messing with dragons.

I know, I know. I have retreated to another one of those periods of tedious dullness again, where my sense of humor has tiptoed off to hide in a corner to avoid the risk of permanent damage, where my mind stumbles looking for words, where I am obsessed – obsessed – over matters that matter very little to the rest of you, like, can those kitchen cabinets be painted in time? Can they? Can they? The worst of it is that I know I've been dull much of the month, even before the house stuff. Especially for those of you who are just here for the movie/television snark, and you know who you are.

Part of the problem is that I find myself writing blog posts full of complaints, reading them over, and thinking, do I really want that out on the internet? And deleting a post. Exhaustion also makes me more rambling than ever: I had a post about the three Life Achievement Awards from the World Fantasy Convention this year which went on and on without making its main point: if this is a world fantasy award, why have we only nominated a couple of actual international, i.e., non English speaking writers? (Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, if I'm correct) Before realizing that there, I'm really part of the problem – I didn't exactly nominate any international writers either, which is going to change next year.

And I'm rambling again.

The second problem is that I have been fighting, very hard, against this turning into a disability blog, or a disability/writing blog, and yet, the overwhelming theme of the month has been, you are disabled and in a wheelchair, and, well, as I've mentioned before, this is something I'm still struggling to accept. Yes, you'd think that a year would have been enough, but not really.

And yet this unquestionably has had an effect on my overall attitude. On Monday, I happened to be passing a building in Orlando MetroWest that I'd never seen before, with a corner lined with magnificent stairs, and rather than thinking about most of the buildings, I found myself focusing on the stairs: where was the ramp? The wheelchair access? And, come to think of it, with that many outdoor stairs (a full flight) was an elevator anywhere? And so on.

These are not things I've had to think about before, although those of you who are wheelchair users are probably nodding along right now, but I'm finding that they've become an automatic part of my thinking. I'm spending probably more time

And there's other issues that I figure most of you probably just don't want to know about: I mean, did all of you really want to know that the kitchen cabinets were so covered in grease (and assorted other things) that not only was I becoming more convinced than ever that Cthulhu was trying to get in, but, the paint primer wouldn't stay on even after repeated cleanings. I didn't think so.

(Yes, cleaning/repainting is just a temporary solution for the kitchen cabinets – we just don't have the time to replace them properly just now, and that's something that should be done right.)

And the frustration that I wish I could be doing more right now.

Of course all this and the my low writing output in general has made all of those old fears, I think typical of writers, come creeping back: I don't know how to write anymore. I can't be interesting. I'm not funny. I'll never write again. I'll never write anything good again. (If it's not obvious, I'll note quietly and publicly that not surprisingly outside factors have got me down again.) It's insidious, and however much I'm trying to say, temporary, temporary more of me is noting just how often this sort of thing, creating writing issues, has happened this year.

So, yeah. Dull. Not funny. But hang in there (directed more at me than you, frankly): World Fantasy is coming up next week, some major things, not just the move, should be over by mid November, and also, I understand that a certain trainwreck of a movie is coming up rather soon, which should bring the snark back on.

This is my all time favorite call for submissions, ever. Even if you are reading this, thinking to yourself, why, mariness, I really wasn't planning on submitting anything to anyplace anytime soon, do yourself a favor and click through.

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In only mildly related news this week is shaping up to be busy in the most horrific sense of the word, with things flying in all directions (one reason why yesterday's hacking attempt was so ill timed) coupled with a decision by my feet to apparently grow two shoe sizes overnight and a severe attack of insomnia. (I blame insomnia for most of the contents of this post.) Blogging may be even lighter than it's been recently as a result, and I will probably be responding only slowly to email. And definitely not responding to the above call for submissions for some time.

In very unrelated news, I've just been informed that today is the day we celebrate the end of the Salem Witch Trials. Look, any excuse for extra chocolate. I'm just wondering how many more contemporary politicians will feel the need to tell us they aren't witches this week.

So both catvalente and zoethe have challenged us to blog, to write something substantial daily to keep LiveJournal alive and hopping with conversation. I approve of this; I agree with it. My few ventures on Facebook have not left me with the best impression of its signal to noise ratio and its constant pokes urging me to get others more involved with the noise part, and much though I enjoy Twitter, to the point of writing a little story using the format, it has an even more transitory, shifting feel, flickers of thought in an endlessly moving world. Which is part of its charm, but it's not blogging.

The problem is that it's June, and this is now.

When I started this blog, I had a car, and I was just about to start a job that required a lot of travel. I didn't blog daily or even frequently at first, especially because less than a year later I was involved in both a full time job with overtime and extensive travel and graduate school, which is not a combination that leads to long, thoughtful blogging. My posts shot up in 2005 after I left that particular job, when I was still doing things, which is the main thing, and have been trickling down this year.

Now, it's June.

Unless someone drives me around, I am restricted to places I can reach on my trike and the bus. In the winter, the trike and I can zip around fairly well, as long as sidewalks are involved. The bus...ok, this actually does deserve a separate, angrier entry, but let us just say that right now, it might actually be easier for me to reach a bus on the moon. As of Tuesday, we have been reassured that Lynx is diligently working on the accessibility issue (this is not actually a disability problem; this is a the bus can't stop at the bus stop problem and not incidentally keeps changing where it actually stops, which goes back to the current major irritation of my life: the state of Florida's inability to fix a road on schedule and without turning it into a scene from an apocalyptic horror show). A fix – for the bus, not the road - should be coming by September.

So, the trike.

In Florida's June, the heat always hits by about 10 am at the latest; the rain – a marvelous, heavy, thundering and blinding rain — usually hits in the afternoon. Neither condition is exactly optimal for using the trike. This sends me out me out at hours I'm unfond of, to run any errands I need, to be back before 10 am – assuming, of course, that the usual morning dizziness has not hit to put a bit of crimp on things.

Sometimes this conflicts with real life schedules – and by this, I mean the library, which does not open until 10 am, and does not have any particular shady places where I can sit and wait for the doors to open. In the winter, I combine a library visit with other errands or other explorations. Not so June. I watch the clock carefully. Yesterday was an absolute must hit the library day – I had a DVD that absolutely could not be renewed again – and although I could have left earlier, that wouldn't have allowed me to check out any new books or DVDs. And, alas, I need new books in my life; need to see them sitting there, tempting me with their words, even if they turn out to be really terrible or mildly disappointing books indeed. (But! White Cat, by Holly Black, was worth the read. I did see the final twist coming, but now I want the next one. Why didn't you horrible people tell me that I have to wait until next May for the sequel???? I hate you all.) So I waited until the right time, got on my trike –

to find that I had managed to get a flat tire.

The trike is a bit different than a car or a bike in this respect – I can ride it, even with a flat, as long as I ride it slowly and carefully, so I did until I got to an air station, pumped up the tire, and took a careful look at it. Then, library.

By the time I emerged – not too long after – the heat had arrived, in all of its weight, and I knew that would be it for the day's excursions.

June is also the month where most locals go into hiding into the air conditioning. Central Florida still bursts with Things To Do, but these are things many of us are avoiding until things are a bit cooler. Specifically, although yes, I'll be heading to the new Harry Potter Wizarding World at Universal, I will not be heading there in the next few months, in this case less because of the heat and more because of the crowds which have convinced me this is a place I can wait a bit to see.

By mid-July and August I become a little more accustomed to the heat, a little more flexible in my hours, a little more willing to go to see the zebras and the ostriches and the miniature horses, the lakes, the herons delicately poking about the water grasses, the hawks that watch the bike trail. By August, a few other Things Should Be Happening, and things Have Been Suggested in September, and we may well be moving by or in the fall. We'll see what that does to blogging.

I should note, also, that some of my comparatively slow blogging progress comes from spending time in my own worlds. I am working on getting Lindell and Portia – there, you now have some character names subject to extreme change from a work-in-process – to do something other than sit around and chatter endlessly over coffee, which is giving this work, I feel, a rather caffeinated waiting-for-Godot feel which is all well and good but not precisely what I was going for.

In the meantime, I may have some TV shows to chat about (once I get around to seeing Leverage) and some long delayed posts on other matters that I will try to stir into some sort of coherency. And who knows? Sometimes, my saying that I have nothing to blog about causes me to have lots to blog about.