Novel Eye

Is it just me or does everyone think that their house is not clean enough? I hate housekeeping. I really do. So I avoid it. So my house probably isn't clean enough, but even when I feel that I really clean, I sit down only to look over and see dust on some surface that I missed. Part of it is not maintaining. Part of it is living in an old house where there are uneven surfaces and cracks and crevices where dust can hide. I have white stairs--well, they were white when I moved in. Even getting down on my hands and knees with a bucket doesn't seem to make a difference. Part of it is having a dog and a cat and the slow detritus of hair and skin that makes up dust--but other people have children AND a dog and a cat and seem to keep up. Part of it is simply having too much stuff--too many books, too many figurines with tiny nooks and crannies . I can't dust them all every week, let alone take the books out and dust behind them, so the dust remains and contaminates my c...

Do you casually put up anything that comes to mind on Facebook /Twitter, Twitter being designed for this, or do you put some thought into provocative, humorous or controversial statements, hoping for comments or re-Tweets? I prefer Facebook because a) more of my friends are on it, and b) because it invites lengthier and more diverse conversation, sometimes between friends who don’t otherwise know each other from different parts of one’s life, between high school friends, college friends and Boston friends for example. I prefer the conversation. And find myself irrationally unhappy when I don’t get it. Do you also worry about when to stop commenting? If you have the last word have you been selfish, or so dull that you are conversation ending? If you do not leave the last comment, then have you been rude and abrupt? If no one comments then are you unpopular, dull or simply lost in the rush. Which leads to my own low-self esteem general question, “Do my friends really like me?” I find it...

Do other people have a music hierarchy? When listening to the radio in the car and you are faced with the choices of two acceptable songs or even two songs in general, what determines which one you stop on? For instance, for me from this past week, Muse trumps Red Hot Chili Peppers but loses to Death Cab for Cutie, particularly if it’s from the new album of both, but Red Hot Chili Peppers would come before Oasis, for example. Alternative 80’s (Cure, Depeche , Duran (of course), Human League (except for Human—God, I hate that song), etc. wins out much of the time except for really new songs that I adore. Between “Sometime Around Midnight” by The Airborne Toxic Event and “Little Lion Man” by Mumford and Sons, both songs that just slay me, the later would probably win because it is newer and I haven’t heard it as much. There are artists who, if they are the only choice, lose to commercials or even to silence. Coldplay , for example, or James Taylor or (shudder) John Mayer. And this isn ’t...

Last week's Law and Order broke my heart. I couldn't stop crying. I put it in my Twitter feed. It was about adoptees which is a hard place for me to begin with and then--I had heard of people adopting children to get servants, but the self congratulation of these "parents" as though they were doing a "good" thing and the place where it led took me apart. Ruth Rendell wrote a novel about the problem in Britain called Simisola and that one shook me too. Rather like the Elizabeth George novel "What Came Before He Shot Her." All we get is the result--child becomes murderer. Not the terrible whys that could take a sweet child there. How is it that we are so ready to inflict pain both mental and physical on other humans? That we spend so much time and energy planning it--we as a race--through out recorded time. We caught a show the other night on torture devices of the middle ages--and I thought, as I've often thought, who thought of those devices...

A couple of months ago I bought at Target a little shopping bag that folds up and fits in one's purse. My husband had been using canvas bags and a large cooler bag to shop for groceries for some time, but I kept finding myself at a CVS or Target buying shampoo or something and having to either shove the item in my purse, carry it out to the car in my hand, or take a plastic bag. For a little while I would forget I had it until the clerk had already bagged my item. Or I wouldn't say, "I don't need a bag," fast enough or loud enough. Sometimes I would forget to unpack it after buying, say craft supplies, and so wouldn't have it on the next shopping trip. But over time I've used it more and more. We reused our plastic bags as much as we could already. Using them to line small trash cans, pick up after the dog, etc. But that only postpones their deposit in a land-fill. It's not like I was rinsing them out. Likewise at my job (which does not recycl...

http://www.directcreative.com/blog/2008/02/15/the-dunning-kruger-effect-and-the-secret-for-coping-with-the-incompetents-around-you/ I've often encountered it, but I'm also afraid that I might be perpetrating it. I do remember a friend saying to me in high school though, "You're always afraid that you're wrong and you're the person who's most often right." I cling to that.

Got a bottle cap quote by Anonymous (he gets around): "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now." I waste so much time and energy regretting and even imagining those unplanted trees that I have too little left to simply pick up the shovel now. Why do we do this to ourselves?

My husband is going to have a drawing room of his own in this new place and so many, many books will be stashed there. He hasn't finished upacking/sorting them. So I realized I was missing a few of mine and since he wasn't going to be finishing his part anytime soon I took a look at all the boxes... AND found all kinds of books of mine/ours that are supposed to fit in bookshelves that I have carefully ordered to fit the books I had!!!! I was most annoyed and asked why he can be so organized and logical at work and not at home. Because he opened all of these boxes and didn't give me mine even though I asked him to pull out all of mine. And we're talking things that are clearly mine like books on sewing and cross-stitch, not things that were open for debate like children's and reference. It's a question we've touched on many times in the past. I also know that I am more focussed at work and would never say waste an hour playing a video game or blogging be...

Something unpleasant happened while we were riding to the airport on the T. First, the website didn't tell us that they were busing from downtown to the airport, or that the buses were running from a different station--that we could have accessed by changing at a different station by walking across a platform, but instead had to schlep a suitcase above ground for 3 blocks. So we were a little tense when we finally got on the shuttle to the airport. Across from us was a guy tapping an empty water bottle against the arm rest of the bus. It was annoying and my husband turned to him and asked him, quite politely, to stop as we couldn't hear each other. The guy became belligerent and said that he was happy and he had a right to do whatever he wanted to do, and that we could talk louder. I told my husband to ignore it, and we kept talking, when suddenly in one smooth motion--so fast it startled me--my husband stood up, stepped across the aisle, grabbed the bottle and tossed it to th...

Sorry about the title. I had a better one in my head earlier, and now it's gone. Anyway--I had a terribly productive weekend. I did all my laundry AND all My ironing (not my husband's) Finally filed my own bills, papers and whatnots . Brought down my box of Halloween decorations, split it into a pile for home and a pile for work and put the house things around--even decided to weed some of it by passing it on to other people. Tidied other bits of the house not involved in the above, including my poor neglected sewing room. Wrote all those blog entries AND modified a graphic for work. I felt very powerful and excited about things and made plans for all sorts of things I could continue to do in the nights and weekends ahead. Oh, and went out and enjoyed sushi and Indian Summer with my husband. Tonight I worked until 6:30, came home and went back out to drive around a house (may go back to look at it on Wednesday). Washed the towels we dirtied cleaning on Sunday, changed t...

Red Queen recently won a rather amazing prize from her job where she gets to go to a spa with a few of her friends and she has graciously chosen me as one of those friends. I'm very excited. It's October 14 th , so one week before I leave for Nashville and I'm sure I will need the facial, back cleansing and massage and that it will help me gear up for the trip. Here's my dilemma: Do I really want people to look at my skin that closely. I don't like my skin very much. I had bad acne and have lots of scars and gunk in the pores. I don't like to have bare skin in public. Isn't that silly? Musing has explored this question recently, here and here . Why do we worry about what total strangers think of us? As if we are somehow abnormal? As if they (the viewers) are not also plagued with body odor and excess hair and gunk in their pores. As if they are not worrying about how we view them. I have felt obliged to use my skin lotion more religiously to try and...

I bought a fashion magazine this week. The big, fall issue of Vogue. There have been times in my life when I've subscribed to fashion magazines. Other times when I've bought them off of the stands, different ones at different times. I used to love fashion--the designers, the creativity, but somehow, this time I didn't enjoy it. I don't know if it was because of my mindset this week, or the stresses going on, but it just all seemed absurd. These things that 99.9 percent of the world will never be able to buy. All that money being spent by absurd people who should be doing better things. And it all seemed old and boring. I thought, "I've seen these clothes before. I've seen these layouts before, this make-up, these hairstyles." I've collected fashion magazines for nearly 25 years. I have files of garments I admired, things I wanted to wear, or to try to make. What's different now? Is it because I now know that I won't have a future...

I'm really, really close to finishing Moby Dick, really. I'm also reading a book by Elizabeth George. In a post that I can't at this moment find, I talked about not liking her last book and this is a sequel. I was also afraid of reading it. The last book featured the death of Inspector Lynley's wife, shot on her doorstep. The perp . turned out to be a 12 year old boy. The police force wants to throw the book at him--one of their own, yada , yadda . That's about where that one ends. This one is exactly as the title says. I knew it was going to be sad and hard, because the ending is known. The sweet, sad little boy of the first chapter is going to end up shooting someone and facing a life in prison. Destroyed in some way or other. I'm a little over a third of the way through and it is sad and hard, because this is such a doomed little boy, and George, whom I've criticized for the distance she places between the reader and characters has done a very good job ...

I was thinking this as I read Harry Potter (and I'm not giving anything away here), as a follow up to seeing Last King of Scotland a while a ago: Why do people follow madmen? It's seems to be an unanswerable questions, or rather there are a multitude of reasons but it doesn't explain why some people do not follow and some do. Now Voldemort is fictional, and Idi Amin was all too terrifyingly and tragically real, but in the fictional account of him, it seems that anyone with half a brain could see that this person was out of their mind, paranoid, delusional, sociopathic , etc. AND therefore know that their own lives were precarious with such a person. My husband and I have discussed this at length, and come up with a small list: a) We make excuses for people's behavior until it's too much b) The possibility of power is tempting enough to ignore the possible dangers c) The basic human inability to ever really believe that it will happen to us. Yes, this person slaugh...

So I got this bar though my ear... Musing wrote to say she thought it cool and her daughter is planning on getting a ring on her face at some point. JT said that it reminded him to make sure that his earring hole was still open because he hadn't done it for some months. I hadn't noticed he had one until he pointed it out. Recently Dress A Day (who is also some sort of Lexicographer) posted how she was appalled and upset by what people wear on airplanes. She dresses for comfort, but never below business casual. I wrote that I too had been dismayed by the dress on airplanes not only for the sensibilities of fellow travellers, but for safety as I had always heard that you should wear comfortable (and now easy on/easy off) but safe shoes that stay on your feet, clothing which does not restrict your movement but is not too flowing, etc. for safety reasons--as in escaping the plane. A staggering number of people wrote to add their two cents varying from support to outright hostility ...

Just a follow-up. Neil Gaiman's daughter is writing his blog. She's on the set of the latest Hellboy being cosseted by Guillermo del Toro and Selma Blair. She's clearly quite precocious . On the one hand--how cool is that--I'm jealous. On the other, having been a precocious and cosseted child, I wish that people had been more honest with me. There comes a point when you will not be clever for your age--will not be the kid it's fun to humor, but just another adult. I think the whole self-esteem movement is actually making kid's self-esteem worse. I think I would have been better off if more people had said, "You aren't good at this--you have to work at it. This is good for a 12 year old but next year you'll have to do better." I got to rest on my laurels and I never learned to work hard or to fail. This probably won't happen to Gaiman's daughter, but I see it happening to other young people I know. Or I'm just blam...

While in Canada we bought a copy of Esquire. As it says on the cover, "Some Angie, a little King..what else does a man need for summer?" So yes, we bought it because of the photos of Angelina Jolie and the short story by Stephen King. We bought it in Canada because my husband was worried that it might actually be sold out by the time we got back (it's not). The three photos of Angie are awesome but the article is terrible. The King is good, but not great. Anyway, there's an article in it about the concept of Radical Honesty. I think I had vaguely heard of this, but not really looked into it. Basically it's a system /movement started by a guy named Brad Blanton who proposes that we would all be happier if we just stopped lying. All together. Completely. Not even little white lies to make other people feel better. He says all lies are designed to disguise ourselves. In theory it sounds great, but then, so does communism. A little warning light goes off i...

There is a Simpson's episode where the school closes (again) and Lisa starts to hyperventilate because she hasn't been graded (validated) for 12 hours. Her mother quickly draws a big A on a piece of paper and gives it to her. I know how she feels. So, it's been quite a freelancing week. After the disaster with the monster costumes I put together a newsletter for a company I used to work for and did some pick-up lines for the voice-over job I'd done in March. I was thanked and praised repeatedly for both. Now, here's an interesting point about me--I take criticism less well than I'd like, but I also take praise badly. My urge, even here, is to downplay it. Well, yes, they like the newsletter, but really anybody could have done it--I used a Publisher template for heaven's sake and well, it's definitely better than what they used to have, but it would probably embarrass a real graphic designer, etc. I managed to simply say thank you to each of the congr...

Weight is steady, maybe a pound down, but the measurements are better which they always say is a better indicator of progress. Broke down and had ice cream out on Sunday after stressful meeting with costume commission. Did skip dessert for rest of day(and lunch) so not too worried about it. Also drank soda on Saturday working on costumes as it WAS SO HOT! Busy, busy weekend, busy day. Had brought work home--did that for several hours (preparations for leaving), put together half a newsletter (waiting on pictures), tidied though dust still lies heavy on everything. Even sewed a little. It's daft, that I put off doing things because I do feel so good once I've begun them, and often think, "Gee, that was easier than I expected. Why did I wait so long." Unfortunately it also makes me think of the million things that I wish were done and organized--the "how did I let my life get into this state," syndrome. I could work on projects for days and days and ne...

So I have a new job--Marketing and Coaching Coordinator at an Independent Financial Firm, starting at end of June. It's a very good salary. It's got the potential to be anything I can make it (there is NO marketing department now--I'm creating as I go). It has the potential to be a train wreck. It's funny, because it's the kind of job that I sort of expected an Amherst degree to provide me when I graduated. Not that I expected this salary straight out of college, but I expected to be considered for this kind of renaissance position, a little writing, a little design, a little management, a little planning and coordination--liberal arts, in other words, and of course, there really were no positions like that going or company's willing to take chances on untried talent--at any salary. Or none that I was able to find. Of course, I'm over 10 years out of school and I've done lots of things that give me added value, but I'm actually not that "...