This year

After years and years of saying, "I want to be a writer!" in a stubborn, hopeful voice, I've decided (or maybe just noticed) that this is the year I sit down and do it.

I am two scenes down on a story called "Missing 9xxxx." I plan to be four scenes down by the weekend.

Ha!

After years of telling myself I just didn't have the right tools (laptop, perfect fountain pen, perfect ballpoint, perfect notebook, no, the other perfect notebook), I have settled down with a fully manual 1930s portable typewriter that is pleasingly noisy when I bang on the keys and pleasingly silent when I don't. More importantly, it bears no relationship to the computer I bang on for hours each day at work. It has no glimmering screen, and no mouse. And as such, it doesn't aggravate my tech-unhappy wrists. There's this to be said for doing it the hard way: muscles are designed to take abuse; tendons aren't.

Of course, there's the interesting fact that there's no way to back up, erase, or otherwise edit. Which is why I dumped four pages of manuscript into the recycling bin last night: each one of them bore a single sentence that just didn't work.

How pretentious is that? A single sentence.

But still . . . I'm finally doing it.

Again: ha!

English & immigration

This is a rant. I've been hearing a lot about immigration lately, and I just can't restrain myself. I can't believe that we're actually considering making illegal immigrants promise to learn English as a condition of becoming legal residents.

"It's necessary!" I hear on the radio. "People living here should value this country. Immigrants must become useful, producing members of society. And to fully participate in the American dream, immigrants have to know English!"

And okay, I totally agree with all that. The US is a great and valuable place, with a lot of good things about it (gotta say it, in spite of my left-wing nature & the complete screw-ups that are Iraq, Afghanistan, and our entire current relationship with Europe). And sure, people who live here should contribute to society (and by "contribute to society," I basically mean look after themselves and not just mooch off other people's taxes for years and years). And finally, it seems pretty obvious to me that living in the US is way, way easier if you speak English.

But. But, but, but. What does any of that actually have to do with illegal immigration? There are lots of US-born US citizens who don't value the country, who mooch off of various social programs for no good reason, and who don't speak English. We don't even have English (or any other language) fluency as a high-school graduation requirement. Arguably we should - but that's a separate debate.

We also don't apply these standards to legal immigrants. We only apply them, irrelevantly, to one small group. And arguably, it's the group who's worked hardest to be here. Illegal immigration isn't easy, after all.

Of course, that ignores the issue of whether we really regard illegal immigration as a crime. I mean, it's illegal, so yeah, I guess we do, sort of, kind of, in a wishy-washy uncertain way. But there are still benefits to getting here illegally - and as long as benefits outweight downsides, people who do the math and come up with "cross the border" are going to keep on crossing. We don't even seem to know whether we want them to or not - and as long as that's the case, we're going to keep creating inconsistent, illogical policies that half-serve both goals, and pull everyone involved in both directions.

And pretending otherwise is just dumb.

Silly kids - windmills are for grownups

One evening last week I found myself standing in the middle of the living room, arms extended, torso rotating, waist bending. "One!" I counted. "Two! Three! Four!" Bend, twist, stand back up.

"Why did I hate this so much back in middle school P.E. class?" I thought. When I got home that night, the very first thing I'd wanted to do was stretch and twist and generally work the kinks out of my back and shoulders and hips. And yet years ago, I loathed this. I loathed all of P.E. I dreaded Mrs. L, a perfectly nice brown-haired woman who nonetheless made me run laps around the gravel track next to the cow field that was my middle school playground.

I spent the hours before P.E. class trying to figure out how to get out of it - and now, years later, I can't wait for the chance to do the exact same activities. Sometime around 5 pm I start thinking about how soon I can get up out of my desk chair and away from my computer and start swinging my arms around. My guy is trying to teach me to throw a baseball properly, and I love every minute.

"What the hell?" I think. This person who's positively panting to go to the gym just isn't me.

And then it hits me: P.E. isn't for kids. Given the chance, kids will happily run up and down the outside stairs at their grandparents' house for hours just because their own house doesn't have outside stairs. No, P.E. is for the adult who's just spent five hours at a desk grading science exams. P.E. is for the parents in office buildings who just wish they were outside getting bonked on the head with a basketball.

Huh. It's a new and startling thought. All those years I never realized what was really going on.

What else am I missing?

Privacy & Me

I suspect everybody who ventures online wonders the same thing: just how connected do I want to be, anyway?

There are news stories about colleges using Facebook to investigate parties with underage drinking (oh, the horror!). There are news stories about employees getting fired when they blog inappropriately (try to get six people to agree on a definition of "inappropriate." Just try.). And I work for a search engine, so I'm fundamentally aware that if it's out there & it's a public page, it might get, well, found. That's what search engines do.

So what does that mean for my little collection of blogs, for linking to my friends' blogs, for creating a profile for myself? I'm not exactly paranoid, and no, I don't expect "the Government" to show up at my house because I'm interested in cooking and tech and travel. I don't expect any concrete negative consequences at all, in fact. But some vague & nameless concern nags at me anyway. Once the info's out there, I don't control where it goes or how it's interpreted, even though I created it. If you find my friends & my interests, you find me. . . .

Then again, I'm writing a cooking blog - and there's really not much point if no one finds it, or if I anonymize it so far that it puts everyone to sleep.

Oh well. In the short term, I'm just grateful that there's some grad student in Arizona who's got the same name I do. She's a geologist, and she's published so many articles that if you search for me, you find nothing but pages & pages of her. Clearly, rocks rock. (Yes, Mom, the pun is for you).

Cooking

In the interests of blogging about something I'm passionate about, I just started a second blog: Impatient Cook.

Grin. It's an experiment. Recipe for pear muffins, anyone?

I was sort of amazed at how easy it was. Domain registration of www.impatientcook.com thru Yahoo: ~$11/year. Blog itself: free. Time to set whole thing up: under 10 minutes. And now I have a website. I also have grandiose dreams of putting ads on it and making enough money to. . . Do Something With. I'm not sure how much money that might be. I'm not sure how feasible putting ads on my blog is, anyway.

But isn't "Impatient Cook" a great phrase? How is it that no one else snapped it up during the '90s boom of "I'm going to get rich off of registering domain names that people will want later on"?

And what will I do with this blog? Leave it as a welter of random chatter? Why, yes, that is exactly what I'll do. . . .

Re-start

I originally started this blog as list of bookmarks for myself - but in the couple of years since then, I haven't needed any of that info I so carefully saved (life metaphor, anyone?).

More recently, I find myself writing long, ranting emails about a variety of (mostly political) topics. I also find myself wishing I lived in the age of the Traditional Christmas Letter, when it was socially acceptable to write a multi-page "this is my life" document and send it around to everyone you knew. The people I care about are scattered across several US states & several European countries - if I don't do a Traditional Christmas Letter, am I reduced to really, really, repetitive emails?

Sigh. So I'm joining the information age (yes, yes, this is ironic, considering the whole I-live-in-Silicon-Valley thing) & restarting the *?!~* blog.

The greatest bed ever

. . . is in the art collection at the Getty: http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/objects/o6778.html