After yesterday's post, I was asked for online links to speculative haibun. I did a quick search but didn't find any so here are a couple of mine.
Poems from the New Symbiont
Metamorphosis is gradual. First, the human victim craves unusual foods, tastes of a far off planet. A new entity emerges and personality fades to the stronger force, sometimes emulating historical figures.
another Bashō he sees the Milky Way from the other side
-Deborah P Kolodji
from Scifaikuest, February 2007, print reprinted in The 2008 Rhysling Anthology
Unknown Invasion
A 2005 university study published in February announced that perchlorate, a toxic chemical found in rocket fuel, was found in all thirty-six samples of breast milk taken from nursing mothers in eighteen states. In San Antonio, Texas, a three year old boy climbs to the top of the big slide.
daytime fireworks his mother doesn't listen about the spaceship
- Deborah P Kolodji
from Dreams and Nightmares #73, January 2006
The second one started out as a mainstream haibun. My first attempt at a haiku for this haibun was:
rocket fuel nursed at her breast his first launch
but this haiku was far too close to the prose. My next attempt almost went too far away from the rocket fuel, one of the strongest images in the prose.
first launch wind whorls of plum blossoms
Then the science fiction poet in me took over and I saw the spaceships...
Picked up taro popsicles from K&S (local international market) a couple days ago. They are awesome.
Cooked squid with mystery leafy green veggie (also from K&S) for lunch. Not so awesome - veggie was ok, squid was weirdly bitter. Tried squirting lemon over it. Still not good. Shoved it into the fridge, scarfed down the rest of my tomato soup, and got back to work. For dinner, scrambled the leftovers with a couple eggs. Now they taste fine.
When fresh peaches were delivered to Haynes Middle School last year, the students had one question: "How do you eat this?"
The kids had seen peaches many times, said Principal Robert Blankenship, but only the canned kind served in sugary syrup on the lunch line. They'd never tasted a fresh peach, or had the natural juices drip down their chins after taking a bite.
But through a federal grant, Haynes students were able to try the fuzzy fruit and a variety of other fresh produce, which was delivered to classrooms every day about an hour before lunch. Next year eight new Metro schools were selected to receive that grant, along with about 64 other schools statewide.
In last Sunday's NYT Magazine, Elizabeth Royte described Will Allen's efforts to educate city folk on compost and other elements of growing food. (Nigel Parry's photo of Allen holding a huge bouquet of earthworms is terrific - it reminded me of a recent conversation with my friend Joan about her own garden friends...). This passage stood out for me (emphasis mine):
He turned to scan the field, dotted with large farm-unfriendly rocks.
The rocks gave me pause: didn't millions of Americans leave farms for good reason? The work is hard, nature can be cruel and the pay is low; most small farmers work off-farm to make ends meet. The appeal of such labor to people already working low-wage, long-hour jobs - the urban dwellers Allen most wants to reach - is not immediately apparent. And there is something almost fanciful in exhorting a person to grow food when he lives in an apartment or doesn't have a landlord's permission to garden on the roof or in an empty lot.
"Not everyone can grow food," Allen acknowledged. But he offers other ways of engaging with the soil: "You bring 30 people out here, bring the kids and give them good food," he said, "and picking up those rocks is a community event."
Of course, if rock picking or worm tending - either here or in a community garden - doesn't attract his Milwaukee neighbors, it's easy enough for them to order a market basket or shop at his retail store, which happens to sell fried pork skin as well as collard greens. "Culturally appropriate foods," Allen calls them. And the doughnuts in his truck? "Iâm no purist about food, and I don't ask anyone else to be," he said, laughing. "I work 17 hours a day; sometimes I need some sugar!"
This nondogmatic approach may be one of Allen's most appealing qualities. His essential view is that people do the best they can: if they don't have any better food choices than KFC, well, O.K. But let's work on changing that. If they don't know what to do with okra, Growing Power stands ready to help. And if their great-grandparents were sharecroppers and they have some bad feelings about the farming life, then Allen has something to offer there too: his personal example and workshops geared toward empowering minorities. "African-Americans need more help, and they're often harder to work with because they've been abused and so forth," Allen said. "But I can break through a lot of that very quickly because a lot of people of color are so proud, so happy to see me leading this kind of movement."
If there's no place in the food movement for low- and middle-income people of all races, says Tom Philpott, food editor of Grist.org and co-founder of the North Carolina-based Maverick Farms, "we've got big problems, because the critics will be proven right - that this is a consumption club for people who've traveled to Europe and tasted fine food."
The stack on my nightstand currently includes Alone in the Kitchen With An Eggplant. I'm about a third through it, and it's pretty fun, especially since the compiler is from Ann Arbor, so her intro pinged some now-distant memories...
Here's an axiom for you from Nancy Vienneau: "...the tastiest tomatoes also happened to be the ugliest."
[Catface Tomatoes]
1. I have been tagging lj entries a little at a time, in between typing revisions and writing new stuff and, y'know, the rest of my life. I find it a little daunting but gave myself full permission to be obscure when I need to. Which was a relief.
2. I have a theory now. I begin to think that many of the most useful conversations among working writers come when you can say, "How do you do such-and-such?" and you have a set of working writers who are clear that this question is not the same as, "How does one do such-and-such?" And then they can say, "Oh, I always X," or, "Usually I Y but this one time I Z and that was okay too." And then someone else says, "Really, Z? That almost never works for me, but what I like to think of is Q."
3. The revisions I am typing: they are pretty okay, I think. I am currently convinced that writing a book is like making lace: it's a whole thing when you're done, but you're almost certainly going to have a million holes in it, and you can only hope they're pretty. And work for them to be pretty. And not just pretty but in such a pattern that the reader can say, "Oh, of course, it's a shawl!" or, "How lovely, some gloves!" rather than, "It's...um...it's definitely...I like how you used a lot of thread here."
4. I have just finished watching S1 of Bones and boy howdy is that a Mary Sue. Fun Mary Sue. But uff da, the bit with her parents. Also, I am pretty damned sick of shows putting their thumb on the scales regarding their rationalist atheist characters to either force the rationalist atheist to admit that there are More Things In Heaven And Wherever or else show them as irrational for not doing so. Booth was raised Catholic, and the show does not demand that he detail how Catholicism, as a worldview, is not comprehensively successful in addressing his life situations, even though it almost certainly does have spots of being suboptimal. Nor do I want it to--I just don't want it to focus that way on Bones, either. It is okay to have characters with differing worldviews and not go out of your way, as a show, to undermine any of them, particularly if they're all fairly amiable and willing to accept new data.
5. Bones has given us a Geeky Little Brother character again. Are there no Geeky Little Sisters? Really? Or is it just that that social dynamic isn't particularly stable with our social mores? (That is, a younger adult geek woman is still likely to be parsed as potentially romantically interesting.) I would kind of like to see the Geeky Little Sister. Also, I suspect part of why we have a Geeky Little Brother is that Bones is a large enough presence that just adding Angela in makes it feel to the writers as though they have A Whole Mess Of Womens already. I may be wrong about this; we'll see. But it sort of makes me want to Take Action. And then I remember that this thing I'm revising features an older woman mentoring a younger woman as a pretty substantial character relationship. So okay then. Action Begun, at least.
Quite literally. And figuratively. If I don't finish tonight, it will be only because of this stupid earache making me go to bed early.
Not much left now. Would be done if I hadn't rewritten the last third of the book a second time, but it was mushy. Would be done by now, part the second, if I hadn't caught Ze Dread Earache. Would be done by now, part the third, if I had figured out how to rewrite the book about a month earlier. So, really, there's no one thing.
I was a bit daunted to jump back in tonight. The papers, the notes, the arrows, they are too much. So I took a picture of them:
Once I captured their soul on film, the notes became much less intimidating, and I dove in and fixed some problems in my last scene written, and starting porting over the last 5k of the book, plus connective tissue--basically, Chapter 40 on. I also hung a lantern on some boats. Literally--well, sort of--this isn't writer jargon. I went back in the book and noted the detail that there were lanterns on some boats. Because it came up that there would need to be.
I'M THAT CLOSE. And the scent of victory is making me a little crazy. Obvi.
1. If you want to write a memoir, write a memoir. If you want to write a book about something else with memoir bits in it, you have to make sure that the memoir bits are roughly on a par with as interesting as your topic, or else really really short. Or else I will run away and read some other book on your topic whose author is not convinced that their own life is the most fascinating thing ever.
2. I remember being a teenager. It was not a built-in excuse for being an asshole. So whining that your parents are mean because they're poor? No. Sometimes it's not enough that the narrative be aware that the character is an asshole--you're still sticking me with a big chunk of text all about this asshole, and if they're not an entertaining asshole, I'm going to read something else.
3. Hockey is not everything. I mean this in a philosophical sense, but also in a very literal sense: hockey is not the building of Hadrian's Wall. Hockey is not the Silk Road. Trying to argue that various historical events were the True Beginning Of Hockey is likely to make me roll my hockey-loving eyes and move on.
4. Unrelieved doom. Next.
5. I know and care about several people who stammer. They do not go, "Th-this s-sentence is s-stupid." That is not how it works. It's not cute, it's not funny, quit doing it.
6. If your entire plot/premise is predicated around someone learning not to worry their pretty little head about big hard questions, go directly to hell and take your book with you.
7. If you have convincingly portrayed a protagonist everybody hates, you may consider that there's a good reason for this.
8. If you're going to compare your parents to Hitler--as an adult writing nonfiction--you need to be aware of the scale differences. No, seriously. Unconscious hyperbole is not our friend.
9. You had no respect for yourself, your reader, or your characters. Next.
10. Women do not constantly think of ourselves as though we were describing ourselves for phone sex purposes. I promise. Even lesbians and bisexual women, who may quite rightly be assumed to be fonder of women's bodies than the average straight gal, do not get their Rice Krispies while thinking of the pertness of their own breasts. In fact, I am a bit skeptical that any woman ever has gone around thinking of her own breasts as pert. Or lush. Mostly I think of mine as...mine. Like my ear or my elbow. Because...follow me carefully here...when you've had breasts for decades, you sort of get used to them, almost like they're a body part a person might have.
11. If you're going to hit a dozen genre conventions on the first two pages, you need to do it in a way that tells me that the story will not simply be a string of conventions. Three pages later, you still hadn't left the stencil. Fail.
This is an edited and updated interview with Lois McMaster Bujold for any fans who happen to stop by here. Very interesting ideas on a variety of subjects pertaining to writing.
Completed the second week of the Clarion West Write-a-thon, and found out I have four sponsors I never even knew about! Thank you, Phil, Debbie, Tricia! And thank you, someone who goes by the mysterious sobriquet of "C. Trooskin." This in addition to Sara, Gaiya, Caren.
Four more weeks of Write-a-thon. Four more sponsors to make my goal of eleven. You can do it.
Published my last guest post on the Angry Black Woman blog. This one's called "What are you?" a question I've had to hear more than a few times. It has been so good to clear the vents there a bit, and acquire some tasty comments, too.
This is one of those young adult novels that straddles the border of fantasy and science fiction. I think some of the ending is supposed to tip it over into definitely SF, but I'm not completely convinced and am much happier if I just think of it as an inhabitant of border provinces.
It's also one of those young adult novels that is explicitly, completely, for people who love books passionately. While the overarching message seems to be that literacy is good and that sharing knowledge is good, it's very much a book for preaching to the choir--I can't imagine someone who isn't already fascinated with books attaching to this one with any enthusiasm. It's not a book for conversions. And the overarching message is very strongly present. There really isn't much book there without message. I also thought the two sides of the story were too carefully balanced for believability.
I liked what North (which is a pseudonym for--well, her agent's page comes right out and says it's a pseudonym for the person who writes SF as Anne Harris, so I don't think I'm spilling any big secret, but if somebody knows otherwise, please stop by and say) did with the idea of the chosen one, though. People who like playing with fantasy tropes in that way might well enjoy what happens with that at the end. In fact, I thought the last third of the book was much stronger than the rest--I preferred Haly's insistence that she was a clerk, not a full libyrarian, to her somewhat formulaic interaction with the libyrinth bullies.
The title word bugged me some. It's clearly Library + Labyrinth, with a hint of Liberation as well, but like most portmanteau words--see Anathem over and over again for other examples--it struck me as not really as clever as its author had hoped, and having the libyrarians of the libyrinth made me feel like I was dealing with a 4-year-old who can't say "librarian" properly--the lie-buh-rarians work at the lie-berry in my head. Meh.
I am also frustrated that the ad copy seems to be focusing on only one of the plot threads, when I liked the other character better. But my favorite bit with her is a spoiler, so...yah. I have a favorite bit completely not hinted at in the ad copy, is what, down to which character it happens to.
I’m fond of speculative haibun. When speculative haiku fails, it often fails for being too cryptic. On the scifaiku list, there are wonderful long links of scifaiku, where each poem links to an overall theme known by all who are participating. But sometimes, a speculative haiku that causes me to sigh “ah” on the list will lose some of its sparkle and genius when the poem is lifted away from the chain and shown to a non-participant, who has missed all that has gone on before.
A speculative haibun can solve this problem, because it allows some space to set up the universe the scifaiku resides inside.
Several years ago, I used to lament the fact that not enough speculative haibun is being published. This is rapidly changing, and several examples have landed in my mailbox over the past several months.
First, the March/April 2009 issue of Star*Line contains three, including one of my own. The prose in Terrie Leigh Relf’s “The XenodateT Center for Physical Enhancement” reads like a lively advertisement aimed at intergalactic singles unlucky on the dating scene. Even though my haiku editorial eye longed to rearrange the haiku so it had only one cut, ultimately Relf’s combination of prose and haiku works effectively and it's a fine piece.
I like Shawn Bowman’s “Layover” even better. In his prose there is little to clue the reader that the scene is anything but an airport, train station, or bus station, but the haiku makes us realize it’s a teleport, along with the reason for the layover. It links to and shifts away from the prose, leading the reader smoothly to the element of surprise.
As to the third, I don’t feel comfortable reviewing my own “Falstaff Revisited” but I will say that it probably works better for fellow fans of The Bard.
The May 2009 issue of Scifaikuest has seven haibun, poems by David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Greg Schwartz, Thane Thompson, Terrie Leigh Relf, Tim Conally, Fonda Bell Miller, and John J. Dunphy. David K-M is the featured Scifaijin for this issue and his section includes another haibun and a piece of tanka prose.
My two favorites are Greg Schwartz’s “Alien Seed” and John J. Dunphy’s “The Illegal.” Although the title clued me that Greg’s climatic haiku was coming, it still left me satisfied. Greg’s poem is a story about a pick-up bar in an area plagued with UFO sightings and a resulting one-night stand. The half-alien child in the speaker’s womb puts her through agony. It would seem that not all half-alien/half-humans are as easily carried to full term as Spock, which makes a lot more sense if you think about it.
Dunphy has perfected the art of “alien” scifaiku and speculative haibun. Even when I think I’ve read all he could possibly write, he surprises me again. “The Illegal” starts off describing a very earthlike scene, an illegal immigrant working hard to make ends meet, in the face of hostility from legal residents. Like Bowman’s piece in Star*Line, there’s little in the prose to indicate to the reader that the poem’s about an extraterrestrial until the haiku. If there’s a weakness in this fine piece of writing, it might be that the political message is a bit too transparent. Yet, when I reached the haiku and saw the alien’s four hands, I knew that John had done it again.
There are other haibun here I could wax about, but perhaps I’ll leave a few for you to read in case you decide to get your own copy.
(gesture towards the universe) - a stage direction from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
The Godot Variations, consisting of three short parodies of mine, Whining for Godot, Waiters for Godot , and Call Waiting for Godot, will be performed as Preludes for select performances of The Orfeo Group's production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) later this summer.
I'll be reading at the University Bookstore in Seattle tonight, for anybody who wants to stop by. WHAT will I be reading? Well, there's been a request for a preview of Shadow Unit S02x07, "Smoke & Mirrors," so probably that.
What with starting a pretty diligent writing habit pretty much concurrent with the onset of puberty, that's... a lot of years of practice. It's not all been to the good, I'm sure; I resisted instruction at many points, for a while feeling that if I couldn't get it by intuition, it wasn't worth getting. Maybe five years ago, I started to diligently suss out techniques and to consider my craft. To the point that, you know, I couldn't look at a piece without book-reporting it, per sartorias's entry linked above. I also, for a while, couldn't look at anyone else's work without book-reporting it--critiquing it on the fly, and thinking, "That's not how I'd do it!"
Various folks assured me that this can (and does) go away, and it has. In fact, I can turn off book-report-head at will, most days; that's why I could enjoy Twilight, frex. And turning it off is how I get that energetic first draft down on paper, and theoretically, turn it back on to examine structure and character and rising action and all the rest and attempt to make sure I've written a satisfying story.
Lately, though, I've not had to think as hard about things, even in the rewrite. I can do more and more of it intuitively. Every leap forward is a leap backward. There was a joy in learning the craft, of course, but there is far more joy in having long, immersive moments of writing by intuition.
To the point where my general feeling is "Oh, THANK GOD."
Anyway. Just wanted to document that. I'm sure I'll forget all about this moment in a few years.
penknife has written a gorgeous piece of SGA OT4 fic called Satedan Bridge. "In which the team learns something about card games, and other games for four people to play." Delicious and snarky and hot. If this sounds like your cup of tea, run, don't walk. :-)
I said this over on Facebook, but I will repeat myself here:
markgritter and I are going to the Gilbert & Sullivan Very Light Opera Company's performance of H.M.S. Pinafore on Saturday at the Lake Harriet Bandshell. We'll be bringing picnic for ourselves, which will probably include enough bars and/or cookies to share with a few people if people turn up. The performance starts at 7:30. We will be picnicking somewhat in advance of that. If you're around and going to be there, look for us. We're likely to be on lawn chairs on the little rise behind the benches.
GSVLOC generally puts priority on music first, costume second, and dance third. That's for their stage productions. At the bandshell it's not a fully enacted performance, it's mostly just the music, possibly some funny hats. (For those of you who like dance a great deal, this may actually be a good thing: no need to worry that anyone will butcher the choreography.) They really want to get you out of there by dark, too, so the intermission is short and the pacing moves along at a really good clip.
This is my section of a sermon consisting of three spiritual autobiographies (complete version archived at FUUN's sermon blog): the first speaker was Shirley Ryberg, who's in her 90s; the second speaker was Jan Robinson, who's in her 60s. And then there was me:
My name is Peg Duthie, and I've been a member of this church since 2000.
In the spring of 1987, I was about done with high school. As is customary with many schools in Kentucky, public as well as parochial, our commencement ceremonies consisted of two parts, the first being "baccalaureate," which is essentially a Christian religious service with a graduation theme. It was taken very much for granted that everyone would attend, and when I said that I would not, I received quite a bit of flak from assorted classmates and teachers, ranging from "It's really just a social occasion" (translation: you are being such a party pooper) to "I don't see how anyone can not believe in God."
There was one other student who skipped baccalaureate. His name was Rusty, and you could say he had fundamentalist leanings. He was the guy who, during sophomore English class, drew a coat hanger on the chalkboard and started talking about the evils of abortion. The thing is, Rusty and I actually got along quite well, and never more so than when we ended up talking about why the whole tradition of baccalaureate offended us both. In his case, he was disgusted at what he saw as lip service to God from people who ignored His commandments the rest of the year. In my case, I was severely allergic to group prayer in secular settings, and I still am, even though I now identify as a theist rather than an agnostic. Whether it's before a banquet or a road race or a charity event, one-size-fits-most public invocations generally make me feel more isolated from the other participants rather than more connected; it tends to remind me that I didn't grow up as a Christian, and that I don't do things in the name of Jesus, other than when I'm really upset and cussing up a storm.
My extended family is a mélange of Taoists, Buddhists, Methodists, Catholics, and nonbelievers. My upbringing was predominantly secular, although there were a couple of years Mom took us to Baptist church for social reasons, and I did a fair amount of reading on my own. My college adventures included singing in a gospel group called "Choral Thunder," showing up to Episcopalian roundtables because of the free meals, and an ongoing lover's quarrel with Judaism too complex to squash into this homily. During my twenties, I lived primarily in Michigan, and when I stepped inside a house of worship, it was almost always for a rehearsal, a concert, or a wedding.
In January of 2000, I moved to Nashville because of my husband's job. It was great to get away from Detroit's ice storms and gnarled-up infrastructure, and I wasn't worried about my ability to meet new people. About nine months in, however, several incidents took place that made me realize that everyone I'd met outside of work knew me mainly as Mrs. Duthie - that is, as Andrew's wife. That didn't sit well with me, so I started to think about who I might want to meet on my own and where to find them. I'd known for years that my beliefs were compatible with Unitarian Universalism, but I wasn't sure I wanted to risk getting involved with a church. I was afraid that I would hate the music of any church contemporary and inclusive enough to welcome a mouthy heretic like me. I didn't want to be pressured into fundraising, or to end trapped into attending countless committee meetings.
[At this point, a number of people burst out laughing, and one guy during first service called out, "Sorry!"]
Around this time, I ended up with a Sunday free during a business trip to Denver, and on a whim I decided to visit First Unitarian there. Two things stand out for me from that morning. The first was suddenly feeling homesick for the Midwest: there were several older women in Guatemalan sweaters and hippie sandals at that service, and they reminded me so much of the outspoken liberal activist tree-hugging women who had been among my friends up north. The other was singing "Dear Weaver of Our Lives Design" for the first time. I thought, I can go to a church that sings hymns like this.
I am intensely uncomfortable whenever I hear the phrase "So-and-so is a UU and just doesn't know it." The term "convert" likewise makes me grit my teeth. For me, being a Unitarian Universalist isn't only about what one happens to believe, but about intentionally choosing to become affiliated with a faith community. When people find out that I'm a lay preacher, they sometimes feel compelled to explain why they themselves don't go to church, and I end up having to reassure them that I do understand. That I've been there myself: Congregational life isn't for everyone. Unitarian Universalism isn't for everyone.
And as it turns out, I was right to be apprehensive: since Christmas Eve 2000, when I signed the membership book here, I have attended more meetings than I can count, I've been involved with multiple fundraising projects, and there are certain frequently-programmed hymns I viscerally loathe. But this church has also connected me with incredible role models and supportive friends, and being a member here has ultimately propelled me into becoming a better person. Being among you has helped deepen my faith, and expanded my awareness of the many ways we can help and encourage each other to become and stay true to our better selves. In the course of delivering nearly forty sermons over the past eight years, I've learned that there's no telling what people actually hear of what I say - never mind what they remember, if anything - whether it's here in the pulpit or next to the coffee pot or out in the wider community. But I have also witnessed and experienced how sometimes simply showing up and being present can be exactly what is needed to help someone stay the course or work up the nerve to try something new. I have seen how small, local acts of hospitality, friendship, and faith can turn the world around.
7 a get up, check email, shower 8 a go eat cheerios w/students, hang out 9 a crits start 10:30 a potty break 10:35 a crits resume, eat small bowl of organic tortilla chips for strength 11:40 a finish crits, break for lunch, chicken taco calad w/home-made guac nom 12:30 p commence student meetings (INSERT TEA HERE) 3:30 p end student meetings, hang out w/ students 5 p eat dinner, fried chicken, brownies, nom! 5:30 p class (5 basic PLOT STRUCTURES w/bonus "build a hollywood blockbuster" game.") 6:30 p commence reviews for tomorrow 8 p check email, lj, facebook, twitter 9:15 p find glass of OMG TEH SEXX amazing blackberry wine, wander back over next door to see what students are up to and if it's fun....
Today lydy came over to help me clean the basement. She did the stuff I couldn't do with the vertigo, and she did a fair amount of the stuff I could do but would have taken immensely longer to do, or else could do but would find my head spinning for days after. And the bits that I probably shouldn't have pushed were certainly all my fault and not Lydy's.
Still! Basement is clean! My head is weird and I feel very funny about the whole thing, but the basement is no longer a source of mental grimness. I hadn't been down there since the vertigo got bad, more or less, so it had sort of grown in my head until it was something like the underground bits of Paris, except instead of Renaissance skulls it would have things of immense personal significance, jumbled together in water-damaged boxes with dead bugs and all manner of unpleasantness. In reality it was a great deal more straightforward, and while we have a big trip to the charity people ahead of us (or a big visit from them, not sure which), and while there are more boxes to break down for the recycling than you would believe (oh seriously, the boxes), it is now a basement and not a pit of woe. And in fact it is a basement the furnace people can work in on Thursday without me fearing they're going to accidentally set the new furnace down on my grandfather's compass set or my glass Aslan or my old copy of Peter Duck. Or even a saxophone catalog from 1997 or a Gene Autry songbook.
One of the purposes of sitting in the library with the dog and a book nearly every morning is that it is good fun and the dog likes it. (This is the opposite of "a waste of your time and annoys the pig.") But another is that we are periodically reading books and adding the new ones we've just read to the shelves, and I like just sitting there getting the feel of my books around me, so that I know how the whole of it goes. And I feel like it's going to be impossible to do anything like that with the basement for awhile, because there are so many steps to go before it's done: the plumbing and the electrical and the, y'know, walls and stuff. But once we get there I think it will be immensely satisfying to have gotten there.
My friends have learned not to believe me when I say my house is a mess, and in turn I have learned not to apologize for the mess that is my house because it really isn't very messy, all things considered, and they will become intimidated and refuse to invite me over. But trust me when I say that this basement was orders and orders of magnitude messier than I am comfortable with in the rest of the house, and I am so happy that it has been brought back into the fold.
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