Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

I Don't Know How To Party
November 01, 2006

The kids went out with Berta for Halloween last night, two of them all dressed up. Abby wore a mermaid outfit (rather than the Abby-sized peasant outfit we spent too much money on at the Renaissance fair) and Berta wore her peasant outfit. No… Riley refused to wear his knight’s plastic armor, shield, and sword, so he toddled around with them wearing just the gray sweatsuit I bought to put on under it.

While they were off collecting candy from our neighbors, I was doling it out myself to our neighbors’ kids. The kids started coming early - around 5:30pm. One of our neighbors from up in the cul de sac came by with a retinue of kids from that end of our street. He reiterated what another neighbor had told me a few weeks ago.

Most of the residents of our street apparently congregate at the cul de sac to hand out candy, rather than giving out candy from their houses. In this way, they can save the kids the trouble of trudging to each house, but it’s really just an excuse to gather and be social.

So after a few neighbors popped by with their kids, telling me to head up with a lawn chair to the cul de sac, I bowed to pressure and lugged my zero-G chair from the family room up to the patch of shrubbery at the other end of the street, and sunk into my typical quasi-social mode - the one where I don’t feel like I fit in and am not quite sure how to act.

You Don't Know What You Want
October 31, 2006

I’ve been talking to some clients who ask some interesting questions. They’re akin to this analogy:

They’ve got spirit, but I guess it’s just knowledge that they’re lacking; knowledge that I shouldn’t assume that they already have.

Something's Up with Gas
October 27, 2006

I’ve been to the gas station three times this week. Maybe you have too?

The prices seem like they’ve been going down, but I feel like I’ve been spending a lot more time filling up. It just doesn’t seem like a tank goes as far any more.

Thinking About NaNoWriMo
October 27, 2006

November is National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in a single month. You may not start wrting the novel itself before November 1st, and you must be done before December 1st.

I’ve had weeks and weeks to prepare something for a novel, and I’ve really done nothing with it. I’ve had a few passing ideas. My first idea was to rewrite Sleeping Beauty.

In Sleeping Beauty, if you recall from the Disney film, Princess Aurora is boen and betrothed to Prince Phillip of the neighboring kingdom. An “evil” witch casts a spell on her because she was not invited to the birth celebration, cursing to prick her finger on a spinning wheel (huh?) and die on her 16th birthday. The good fairies protect Aurora as best they can, and hide her away so that the witch can’t find her to make the curse come true. Certain things happen that cause Prince Phillip to need to save the day.

What I was thinking about was how to translate this into a modern tale. These days people aren’t betrothed to anyone at birth. So it would be difficult to translate. I had some interesting twists to add to the story. What happens during those sixteen years that Briar Rose is stuck in that cottage inteh woods? What does she learn of her destiny?

But I don’t want to rewrite the original in the same setting, so I’ll need another idea.

Just More Evidence That the World Is Deeply Screwed Up
October 26, 2006

Almost every morning I ride to work I’ve got the radio tuned to CNN and Fox News, switching betwene them when commercials come on. This morning, they both quickly reviewed certain political topics that they believe will influence the upcoming election. Among them, the recent New Jersey court ruling about gay marriage.

What was interesting to me was not the court ruling itself, in which the court said that homosexual couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples. The court left to the legislature the responsiblility to decide how this recognition was to take place.

What did interest me is that this court outcome is perceived as a rallying cry for homophobic conservatives to head to the polls to quash any pro-gay-marriage candidates so that no gay marriage laws are formed. In essence, liberal courts have wrought doom on the election and gay marriage by half-sanctioning it.

This is what I was telling Brian before about Bush’s marriage act. Sure, maybe it leaves open loopholes for the states to define gay marriage, but in the end it draws attention to itself in the same way the abortion issue does.

You can easily stand on a street corner and protest the innocent killing of babies, which everyone abhors. But it’s much more difficult to appeal to the public for women’s rights to choose, which requires reasoning to understand, not simple visceral empathy for dead babies. In the end, the reactionaries end up voiding something positive that there aren’t radicals to defend.

But there’s plenty around in the news that doesn’t relate to dead babies.