Why Can't I Finish This Damn Book?

 NaNoWriMo reminded me that I started my vampire book in 2011. 

Holy shit. 2011? 

And why, nine years later, haven't I finished it?

Because I don't love it? Because I don't quite know how? Because there is no point?

I think about plots for stories a lot. Like a lot. I think of stories I would like to read, and following the brilliant advice of my friend James, I am not a unique and special snowflake, and if I want to read something, there must be other people who want to read that thing, too. So I should just get off my ass and write it, right?

I bought a new MacBook with the scissor action keyboard, so no more annoying double letters and accidental periods and capitalizations, and it's GOLD for fuck's sake, so I should just write, right?

Right.

June Cleaver Was Better Equipped for the Apocalypse Than You

Feminist economics have long been saying that the entire economy rests on the unpaid "non market" labor of (mostly) women. And here as we enter the apex of the apocalypse, I sit smugly suited to dealing with the situation.

You say your rotten crotchfruit are driving you insane now that you actually have to spend many hours a day with them? Well, I spent seven years 24/7/365 with one or two tiny humans. When life returns to normal and you sigh with relief as you drop the little monsters off at daycare, don't ever again use the phrase "working moms," as if that's harder than either being a stay-at-home mom or a daycare worker.

You tired of all that jarred pasta sauce and canned soup? Well, I made pot roast and set up dough for fresh, yeast-leavened rolls for dinner before I left for my essential "work." And all the flour you panic-bought when you hadn't made so much as a boxed cake mix in more than a decade? I could make a sourdough starter from scratch for all the fresh bread anyone could want.

You think you need a face mask to do your grocery shopping? I can reach into my fabric stash and sew up three for you—one to wear, one for a spare, and one to share—so that your dumb, useless ass doesn't waste actual PPE that medical professionals need.

You're lonely seeing only your own family? Well, I spent 16 years with just my kids and husband, and nine months of "a real job" has me feeling overdone and wishing I were back home like the rest of you complainers.

All that "women's work" that society has denigrated for decades—thank you Betty Fucking Friedan—is suddenly quite valuable. Remember that when this pandemic ends.

My Plague Diary - Day 1

Big Daddy of the State of New York sent us all to our rooms, starting tomorrow at 8:00PM, so that we don't catch a social disease.

Well. I had missed being home...

Some Thoughts on Game of Thrones that Nobody Asked For (Spoilers)

After ten (or twenty depending on your canon) years, Game of Thrones is over. (Stop hoping. There is no way GRRM is ever going to finish The Winds of Winter, much less A Dream of Spring.) Like millions of other people, I Have Thoughts.

Many, MANY people are not happy with how the show ended. I think for most of us, this meme sums it up perfectly. 

So many people are unhappy that some genius made a petition online to have HBO remake the last two seasons of the show, and something like a million people have signed it. I would LOVE to see such a thing. I know it won't happen. HBO invested millions and millions of dollars to make the lush, beautiful drama, strangely to rush the final season so much that craft services didn't have time to clear away everyone's disposable beverage containers from the shots of Middle Earth.

What surprises me are all the people calling the disappointed fans "babies" and worse. The crotchety "Millennials need to get off my lawn" Baby Boomers say that it's just whining, you know, like those damn young people ALWAYS do when they don't get everything their way. Stephen King and Joe Hill and John Scalzi defended the show runners?!?!? Yes, I am definitely too invested in the story and taking this way to seriously, but that doesn't change the fact that the series became a dumpster fire, and I'm allowed to be mad about it. I didn't expect anyone to actually remake the offending seasons, but you'd think that some of these self-appointed defenders of authorship might recognize the rhetorical use of the petition to express our dismay and disappointment. 

The first seasons took some liberties with the books that I understood, and some that I didn't, but nothing terribly unforgivable. 

• Some of the thousands of named characters were compressed into a single actor's role for the show. I get it. It was overwhelming as it was.
• Some names were changed to avoid confusion, and thus Asha became Yara because they already had an Osha. It was questionable writing on GRRM's part, so a little tweak was useful.
• I didn't care for this change, but Catelyn Stark and Cersei were actually softened from the unmovable, power-hungry bitches they were in the books. (Imagine that, you illiterate masses! What you saw on HBO was a kinder, gentler Cersei.)
• In season five, one small and one HUGE branch of the book plot were pruned for simplicity. We take a moment to mourn Quentin Martell, may he rest in peace, and the wise but doomed leadership of his father Doran. And will the real Aegon Targaryen VI please stand up?

But there were other things. Like, WHAAAAAT?

• In Braavos, ok, ok, they liked Jaaqen Hagar's actor, so they kept him instead of replacing him with the Kindly Man. Fine. But dude, the House of Black and White was a place of mercy. It's right there in the Kindly Man's name. So why was the Waif a vindictive, evil, jealous bitch? Yes, they were testing Arya, but it should not have been a personal vendetta. Their whole deal was you had to let go of your personal feelings to serve the Many Faced God. You had to be No-One, and No-One should not have had such a hard on against my girl Arya.
• Which brings up the thing that most irritated and enraged me: ALL THE FUCKING SMIRKING WOMEN. First it was Cersei. OK, we hate her. Then Margery. She was borderline, but OK. The Red Woman. Yeah, she's awful too. Then the Waif. So we are supposed to hate her too. Then by season eight it was the constant expression of EVERY WOMAN ON THE SHOW. Sansa, Arya, Dany, even lovely Messandei. EVERY GODDAMN WOMAN ON THE SHOW WORE AN EXPRESSION OF ARROGANT CONTEMPT. I wanted to smack them all. 
• And while we're at it, yeah, Jon is always brooding over the edge of the Wall, brooding over the ocean, brooding over the snowy plains. Cersei stares off the balcony of the Red Keep. (You just know if this were real life, she eventually would have drunk-stumbled off the battlements.) But OMG, all the people staring off into the distance...indoors?!? SMDH.
• As we rolled toward predictions for the ultimate fate of the country, suddenly Sansa is the smartest person in Westeros? Where the fuck did that come from? At the end of Book five, she was still a moronic child, a pawn of Littlefinger, and she had not been married off to Ramsey and sex-tortured. (A moment of silence for poor Jayne Poole, please.) And even if Sansa experienced a great deal of personal growth—something the writers don't believe in for ANYONE ELSE in Westeros—as Ramsay was raping and beating her, to say she's the smartest person in Westeros...because she was wise enough not to trust Littlefinger? Well, that is one stupid continent. 

Which brings me to the worst sin of the end of the show: character development that all falls back to nobody ever growing. 

• Daenarys: No, I'm not mad that Dany went nuts and burned King's Landing. It was in the cards from the beginning. She birthed her dragons by burning a woman alive. It was kind of bound to end badly. But babe, we were ROOTING for you.
• The dragons: how is it that two of them were felled by single shots, then dozens, if not hundreds, of scorpions suddenly got Storm Trooper syndrome? 
• Jaime: In the first season, we hated Sister-Fucking Prince Charming. Then he lost a hand and grew as a person. We saw how he had armored himself against two decades of whispers and judgement and condemnation over the noblest thing he ever did. He saved the lives everyone in King's Landing, and they called him a betrayer, and he carried that weight for decades. He learned to respect and love Brienne. (I'm not at all happy that he bedded her, but when he knighted her? Those tears of joy were the highlight of the abysmal final season.) And then, after seven seasons of personal growth...he went back to die with that evil cunt Cersei because nobody ever changes in Westeros. Of all the of the betrayals inflicted on me by the show runners, this one is the most heartbreaking.
• Cersei: A stone cold bitch for eight seasons, she dies begging and weeping because everything is about her loving her children? Please. Just like her father, she loved the idea of her children as an extension of herself.
• Bronn: It's a little thing, but why did Bronn have to be a total dick to the Brothers Lannister when he went to betray Cersei. It was out of character, like everything in season eight, but in the last scene, he's still just thinking about brothels. Because nobody ever changes in Westeros.
• Tyrion: I SO wanted Tyrion to get the throne...until he turned into Fox Mulder, wanting to believe Cersei had changed because she SO loved her children and wanting to believe that, with his brilliant counsel, Dany wouldn't become her father. Dude, the REST OF US saw the signs. How could someone so smart have become so abruptly stupid? Only to end with the show asking us to believe he is smart again? I have some serious doubts about just how wise the Three-Eyed Raven could be after handing him back that lapel pin.
• Bran: Yeah, yeah, he wasn't ready to become the Three-Eyed Raven, and he had to have been totally overwhelmed learning to sort out all the information he had access to. But at SOME POINT, he might have started piping up with all this knowledge and wisdom? Instead of just being inscrutable and emo. All the information in the world doesn't do Westeros any good if it's locked under his dumb bowl cut. (Also, the Citadel has some 'splainin' to do. They've been pretty useless too.)
• Arya: Maybe work to change the patriarchy so that a lady is more than her needlework? Rather than sailing off the end of the flat earth because nobody in Westeros grows up beyond who they were at nine? And yes, I'm just mad because I shipped her and Gendry for seven and a half seasons only to have her take a boat to her stupid, pointless death.
• Jon: brooding in Winterfell, brooding at the wall, brooding at Dragonstone, brooding in King's Landing. Well, I suppose he was consistent, but a little growth might have been nice.

World inconsistencies, and I don't mean the water bottles and Starbucks cups and spontaneously regenerated hands

• First and foremost, what happened to winter? Was it canceled?
• Virtually ALL the Dothroki died in The Long Night. We saw the lights go out. We saw, like, six break and fall back from the army of the dead. How were there so many Dothroki left to sack King's Landing? And how did they not become a HUGE problem after Dany was killed? The Khaleesi is dead; long live the crippled kid? From the Dothroki? Yeah, no.
• The Island of Naath must be really imperiled if they need all the Unsullied to go protect them. And really huge to sustain all the Unsullied. But frankly, I doubt the Naatheen are gonna be safe from the Unsullied. Did you SEE what they did to King's Landing? Because nobody changes in Westeros.
• I suppose it's not entirely inconsistent that a group of (male) lords who would laugh at the idea of democracy would ignore how totally CREEPY Bran is. Dude, even his own sister wouldn't bow to that skin-crawly fuck. Bran has no empathy, no moral grounding, no administrative ability. And really, what proof do we even have that he knows as much as he says he knows since he clearly doesn't feel like sharing most of the time? And somehow, in a world that respected Aegon and then Robert as rulers because they took the throne by force, yeah, let's make the emo guy in the wheelchair king.
• Podrick deserved his knighthood and maybe a medal. But making the novice knight a king's guard? In short, the Game of Thrones will resume shortly.
• How did Sam get a maester's chain and not an execution? He broke his vows, fathered children, disobeyed the archmaesters, and stole books. If there is still a Night's Watch for Jon to abandon (again), Sam should be right up there in the cold. Or headless. Instead he is initiated into yet another order that requires him to set aside his girlfriend, which he said he'd never do? Yeah, neither the Starks nor the Citadel are that forgiving.
• Speaking of which, what the fuck is Jon doing going north of the Wall with the Wildlings? 

Professional Writers™ may defend the right of the show runners to do whatever they will, but the rest of us can sit and point out that without the flawed richness of a foundational text from George R.R. Martin, Dan and Dave totally fucked up the end of A Song of Ice and Fire.

You Look Nice. I'm Sorry I Said So.

One of the problems with people today (yes, feel free to groan) is our collective refusal to take context into account in our seemingly irresistible desire to feel offended. To whit:

People got mad at President Cheeto this week because he "complimented" the first lady of France for not being fat, saying, "You're in such good shape...beautiful."

The Reebok meme is amusing, and I love corporations standing up and trolling Trump, but DUDE! The "compliment" was skeevy because TRUMP is skeevy, not because there is NEVER a context in which is acceptable to compliment a woman (or man) on physical fitness. It would depend on who said it, how, in what context, what else was said, the expression on the complimenter's face, his or her body language. I can remember (and at this point it is quite distant) being in the gym and being quite pleased that a guy whose ass I had just kicked "racing" on the treadmill next to me said I was in great shape. I felt strong and tough and like all my hard work was paying off. (I can also imagine being creeped out beyond comfort if he'd said it in a different way. Context is everything.)

But now according to this meme it is never acceptable to comment, even positively, on someone's appearance, and I think that is so unfortunate. I was at the grocery store last week, and I told the girl bagging my produce that she had a beautiful smile, and she seemed genuinely pleased to hear it and thanked me. Was the exchange deeply wrong?

It's a particularly unfortunate bitter twist that this position is being taken as body-positivity and inclusive ideas about beauty are becoming more widespread. What if I want to tell a curvy stranger that she's rocking an outfit at the mall? Should I not?

Entering another minefield, there is a young man at the same store with hair that I absolutely love, but I have hesitated to say so because he is African American, and I don't know whether I am "allowed" to have an opinion on his head full of wild, utterly gorgeous natural curls. Would that be seen as racist? (And, oh no! Is it racist to NOT comment because he's Black? Shit! What do I do???)

I know I have no right to tell people how they are permitted to dress or wear their hair, and I never would. Wear skinny jeans, let your pants hang below your panties, sport a mohawk, don a cowboy hat. I personally don't care for those fashions, but I keep my mouth politely shut because "you do YOU!" But it is so very sad that my small attempts to make strangers' days a little brighter by saying something nice about them are now evidently against the rules of intersectional feminist (but genderless!) political correctness.

Too Old for Rock and Roll?

Now that my kids are teens, or nearly so, we suddenly have an interest in going to rock concerts. Yay!

Unfortunately, I'm feeling horrible sticker shock. Despite Pearl Jam's best efforts in the 90s, ticket costs have gotten even more crazy than they were "back in MY day."  *grumble grumble grumble*

To whit, I bought tickets to Green Day for this summer, and in addition to the five hour drive to the middle of fucking nowhere plus the overnight stay that necessitates, I paid $89.95 per ticket plus a $19 PER TICKET "service fee." Dude, my bank prefers it when I use computers to do my transactions! So why am I being charged 20% more for buying online???

Wondering if I'm just that old, I used the math we've been doing in Antonio's algebra class to check whether the price increase is a natural result of inflation. I remember paying $30 for the ticket plus $7 in "service fees" for seeing Pearl Jam in 2000 or 2001. If I remember the price correctly, that would mean that the ticket price and service fee have increased at an average of over 6% per year. For context the CPI has averaged about 2.5% per year since 2000.

But Green Day is my kids' favorite band, and I like them too, and it's a good day at the end of summer, right between the kids' birthdays, so OK. I bit the bullet and bought the tickets.

Then today I got an email saying that the Goo Goo Dolls are playing their nearly-annual summer concert here at Saratoga Performing Arts Center. At least it's a short drive home from SPAC. I tried to see how much tickets cost because I would love to go. Not only are they close to that $89 Green Day price tag—plus "service fees" of course—but they are currently "pre-sale" only. WTF? They're on sale before they're on sale? They are only available to special groups who have paid for the advantage of getting tickets early. I could join the GGD fan club (for $29.95/year plus tax) in order to buy tickets today instead of waiting until they are available to buy tomorrow. (Head still wrapping around that.)

Keep in mind, I'm not talking about going to see some spectacular Beyonce and Katy Perry choreographed dance and multimedia extravaganza. It's just a couple of plain old rock concerts with aging musicians standing around singing and playing guitars and drums. Maybe colored lights and a big screen that's there at the venue anyway.

So it's not just that I'm getting old. We ARE getting screwed on ticket prices and service fees and gimmicks to separate us from ever more cash to see live music.

New Feature: #OFFS

I'm starting a new hashtagged feature: oh, for fuck's sake!!! It's kind of my own version of "Getting Irritated with Nadia G," but with a less affectated accent.

#OFFS

The inaugural edition is in response to the Spring 2017 Shen Community Education course list that came in the mail today.

Let me start by saying that I love education and I'm all for using the school resources in the evenings for classes for the community. Math and science help and SAT prep for students is great. Seminars on accessing Medicare and Medicaid benefits and caring for the elderly are truly a valuable public service. Swim lessons, conversational Spanish, and digital photography classes are just peachy. Heck, Aqua Zumba has the distinct advantage that nobody can see what a goof you look like doing Zumba!

But for fuck's sake,

• Introduction to Tarot
• Introduction to Essential Oils
• Explore the Chakras
• Messages from Beyond

Are you motherfucking kidding me? THIS RIGHT HERE is part of the anti-science scourge that is eroding our republic, and it's going on in my own school district!!!

Tarot cards and fortune telling are a low level con, essential oils have no proven health benefits, there is no evidence of the existence of "seven major energy centers in your body" that can become blocked, unbalanced, or otherwise troublesome, and your dead relatives are not trying to contact you from the "Other Side," seeing as how there is no data to suggest that there is ANY other side. 

And to think that this is being given a platform in the very classrooms where they are supposed to be teaching our children critical thinking.

Just say NO to supernatural bullshit and pseudo-science!