Another Cold

I have caught another cold. Sux.

But I just ate an awesome chicken and mushroom brioche! (I won't blog about it though.) ;-)

I feel absolutely awful, which is a shame because I've been enjoying a somewhat drawn-out celebration of my birthday, which I've perhaps enjoyed too much.

Anyway, more once I'm on the other side of this cold.

Happy Holidays, everyone!!!

Things I Don't Get: Food Blogging

Why do I care what you ate for breakfast? Or how beautiful your pancakes are? Or what you used to glue together your Holiday Gingerbread House?

People taking pictures of their food before they eat it... Nope, don't get it. I'm a firm believer in finding the aesthetic joy in places unexpected, but I don't think fried eggs make great art.

Not that blogging is art.

But isn't it?

Talk amongst yourselves...

The Galileo Year

Okay, so it's not officially called "Galileo Year", but it should be. In commemoration of Galileo's lodestone that he pointed at the heavens in 1609, 2009 is going to be the International Year of Astronomy.

How do I know this?

Through the wonders of the streaming Internets. I still listen to KQED in San Francisco via their website, which is rad because WHYY in Phila... well, they can throw all the Marty Moss-Cowain they want at me, but give me Rachel Myrow and Michael Krazny over her any day, and twice on Sundays.

But back to the subject at hand: the International Year of Astronomy.

Astronomy is fascinating to me, ever since I learned about the 1919 eclipse experiment by A.S. Eddington that confirmed the theory of relativity. Matter really distorts space! Light bends according to the shape of space! Wacky! Wild! Awesome stuff!!!!

My Old bf in SF gave me a lovely book by Einstein that gives a popular recounting of the basics of relativity. How I miss him! (Einstein and Old bf, both. I haven't read any Einstein in maybe a year now.)

I ask myself, what should the International Year of Astronomy be? Shall we look for little green men? Shall we point the entire VLA in New Mexico at the North Star and see what we find?

I've always wanted to see the Southern Cross. I imagine people from Down Unda want to see the Big Dipper.

So strange that our skies look different above and below the equator.

What does the sky look like at the equator?

Random musings to start out this, the Galileo Year.

R U INSANE????

I just read a post of a former schoolmate in which she actually listed all of her former addresses. The real deal. ON THE INTERNET.

What a doofus.

The SCOTUS Does Something Right, For Once

I'll have to say, the Supreme Court of the United States does know a nutjob when they see one. I found this very brief article illuminating about the lengths people will go to to see that our President-Elect doesn't take office on 20 January 2009.

What a doofus.

A World Populated by Snotty Writers

Disclaimer: I didn't read the entire post, because I got too annoyed to finish it.

****

So, big pet peeve of mine: Open Salon. Oh, how I hate Open Salon, and let me give you a snippet of it just so you can taste the Bitter Bitter Princesses for themselves

I don't want to compete with all the Internet for attention—I can already do that by just posting to any of my several domains. I want the one thing that makes Open Salon different—a personal conversation with intelligent people who are actually committed to being here and chatting about important things. What a special thing.

But once people who are posting elsewhere can dump their stuff here as an extra offload point, I expect you to continue the already annoying trend of featuring people with offsite blogs as editor's picks because I sense that you mistakenly seek to create the cyberspace equivalent of a kind of metropolitan cachet.

What, the rest of the blogosphere isn't good enough for you "real writers"?

Eat a dick.

Snobbery. Elitism. The Ivory Tower and the Benign Dictatorship of the Intelligentsia.

EAT. A. DICK.

By opening up Open Salon to less worthy writers, perhaps you could engage not in a community, but in a true plurality of voices. Yes, it's true, very rarely can you have both quantity and quality, but c'mon, people, Teh Interwebs are for everyone, and lets not forget that. (And let us not forget that they are also for everyone who is lucky enough to have a computer.)

It's this prima donna attitude that I find so offensive in writers like Augusten Burroughs and Elizabeth Wurtzel, but at least I can leave them on the shelf at Borders. You're telling me your prissy asses are going to be following me all the way home?

Screw you.

I'll stay with my pedestrian blogger site and try and remember that the world doesn't revolve around me or any imagined online "community". I suggest, Writer Dear, that you do the same.

My Birthday Draweth Nigh

I love December. Why? Because of the birth of ME! My birthday is sometime around mid-month, and this year I've got some stuff on my mind because it will be what some in the blogosphere have called "The Jesus Year": I'm turning 33.

It's not what you think.

The Jesus Year, as I understand it, is a time to reflect on your accomplishments, see what you've done with your life so far, and think about what you want to do with the rest of it. It's a time to be grateful, NOT a time to contemplate horrible death, NOT a time to get religion.

It could be that I'm interpreting this all wrong, but I like my way of seeing the Jesus Year. And so I'll just keep thinking that's what it is until somebody tells me differently... and then I'll still think of it the way I do!

I won't list my accomplishments until I get to my actual birthday, and then I'll post one accomplishment per post for the rest of the year so that I can really see what I've done so far.

Obviously, NaNoWriMo won't be on that list of accomplishments.

But there's always NEXT YEAR!!!

Holiday Winter Tea: MMMM!

I've discovered something great: some brand of tea that comes in a wooden box with a blend called "Holiday Winter Tea". Oh! I just Googled it!

Culinary Teas' Holiday Winter Tea

Yum, yum, yummilicious! It is perfect for these cold, damp days of early winter.

Speaking of which, my doldrums are still in effect. I try to raise my spirits with writing, but tea actually works better. It gets dark so early! I barely feel the day has begun when I start to see the day end. So strange, every year, stranger still.

Back to my tea now. Seriously. Order some. C'est si bon!

NaNoWriMo: FAIL... and, yet, NOT.

No NaNoWriMo winner badge for me. I got seriously distracted by life and just couldn't put it together enough to write the G.A.N. I couldn't even cobble together an aesthetic manifesto that would vindicate Modernism in this Post-Modern age! I didn't even get to 7K words. Dammit.

DinerGirl = FAIL.

However.

I finally, finally, finally got started on a project that I *like* and that has a voice that I can't believe is actually mine, that doesn't sound like the novel I wrote when I was 13. (It was only 50 pages--typed, single-spaced--, but that's pretty damn good for a tween!) I've "found my writer's voice", as it were, and that means NO FAIL. Means PASS!

I'll write sometime about the dramas that I got caught up in that prevented me from reaching 50K. But not right now, 'cause I have a head cold and am really tired.

In the meantime, shout-out to Tiara for getting past 12K and for starting an awesome project that I hope she's really proud of, too.

Onward, WriMos! Onward!