for updates & short takes

Well, THAT sucked

I went to sleep at seven this morning. Let me never have insomnia again, okay? I'm very bad at it.

Those of you on my notify list were treated to a cheery long email from me, and I read it again this morning to verify that I didn't completely lose my shit there. Instead I lost it offline at around six. I'm better now, though I feel like I've been washed ashore.
pounded out by Wendy at 1:34 PM

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De heilige drol, die grappig is

According to an online translator here's what this Dutch site has to say about my FOX news appearance:

"And new item with FOX TERRIER on the American TV over the phenomenon weblogging. Apparently little 'usual' men know it, to bath. Wrapped for the mad that this photographed and overgetypt, fixed a blogger."

The best site in the world

is Big Happy Funhouse. All found photos, all the time.

Also, it goes without saying that I need the phrase SEVEN HOMESCHOOLED CHILDREN embroidered on a cross-stitch sampler.
pounded out by Wendy at 9:52 AM

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Meet My Seven Homeschooled Children

I haven't told you about My Seven Homeschooled Children. My Seven Homeschooled Children are of course metaphorical children, but in my mind they're quite real. They became a part of my life after I'd found a couple of Mormon teen romance novels a few months back. It would take too much time to explain how these books even came to my attention but I was fascinated with them.

I started looking on the internet and found the Mormon teen romance novel author's webpage. She had a FAQ section, which included something like this:

Q: What is your writing process like?
A: Well, when you're raising seven homeschooled children it can be hard to find time to write! But I manage to fit it in somehow!

I was instant-messaging with a friend while I was reading this page and I sent over the link. "Read this," I said. "Does it say 'seven homeschooled children'?" My friend wrote back: "Holy crap, it says SEVEN HOMESCHOOLED CHILDREN." Seven homeschooled children!

Sometimes I think I don't have enough time to write but obviously I have no fucking excuse, seeing as how I have no quantity of children, schooled or otherwise, at home or elsewhere. It's become my mantra for when I'm feeling sorry for myself for having to juggle writing and the rest of my life with a full-time job. I'll think, how the hell am I going to get these pages done? and then I'll think Seven homeschooled children. Can't I just blow off finishing this piece tonight? Seven homeschooled children say no! And as much as it makes me lonely and sad and resentful to have to turn down social stuff when I have a deadline, it sort of helps to say, "I'm sorry, but I have to stay home and feed My Seven Homeschooled Children tonight."

I have yet to actually name My Seven Homeschooled Children, though. I'm too busy for that shit.
pounded out by Wendy at 7:25 AM

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How weirdly synergistic that the New York Times has a piece on the new American Girl Place in Manhattan. (login: poundy5, password: poundy) Do you understand my obsession with this place now?
pounded out by Wendy at 3:32 PM

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It's Friday already?

Oops, but I've been home all week trying to stay off the internet.

In case any of you have been wondering about my skittish trackpad finger, my solution was to get a cute little optical mouse for my iBook. I'm sure that in time I'll get used to feeling up my computer, but since I'm switching back and forth between a desktop machine and a laptop so much right now, I'm sticking with the mouse.

Over at Gapers' Block you can see what my friend Shylo and I did for kicks a few months ago, which was go to the cafe at American Girl Place with a tarted-up knockoff doll we got at Target. Ever since American Girl Place opened and I heard that the cafe serves dolls I've been fascinated with the place.

They are pretty hardcore about the cafe reservations there. When I called they asked for my credit card number and my daughter's name. "Uh... Shylo?" I said. They requested her date of birth. I couldn't think of the appropriate year. "She's uh, seven," I said. "Now when was that? They grow up so fast." I actually thought we'd get in some kind of trouble for showing up childless and with a fucked-up doll. It turned out fine, though. The waitress said that women come in for lunch all the time, and they borrow dolls that have been set out in the cafe for that purpose. No, really, they have private dancer dolls.

I still have the doll we brought, by the way. I bring her out at parties, and guys confess to being oddly attracted to her.
pounded out by Wendy at 8:46 AM

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Mama's lap(top)

I bought a laptop this weekend; an iBook. It's my first ever laptop. I still have my G4 with the gigantic monitor that's basically a screen attched to an anvil, and that'll still be the mothership, but I got the iBook so I can take it places. I guess I can leave the house with it and everything. So far it's gone from the kitchen table to the coffee table several times. I keep opening it and closing it. I told you, I'm new to this.

I do not think I will ever be able to get used to the trackpad. How do you people do it? It's sort of like driving a stick shift except instead of the stick there's a... finger. Seriously: a finger. It doesn't matter that it's MY finger; it actually makes me squeamish. It seems sort of unsanitary. I almost want to put the eraser end of a pencil to my computer's little tickly area instead. I would rather use a mouse and keep a safe distance from things.

(Don't even get me started on trackballs. Using one of those things is like climbing stairs in roller skates. It's reckless and unnatural. Also the ball is in a socket. I don't know if I can convey how gross this is to me. The ball is in a socket and anyone could just pluck it out, and roll it around all disembodied, or even stick it in their mouth. No.)

When I write I'm a pretty compulsive cutter and paster and dragger-rearranger, and as far as I can tell I can't do those functions on a trackpad unless I use several fingers all at once. As someone who couldn't even snap her fingers until age 12, this is asking a lot from me. The most I've ever been able to accomplish with several fingers on one hand is playing that little opening ditty to Depeche Mode's Just Can't Get Enough on my brother's Roland keyboard. And even then I think I got it wrong. Anyway, I understand the rest of you can handle your laptop trackpads and your New Wave just fine, but I'm just telling you here.
pounded out by Wendy at 5:51 PM

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More crazed blogging

Wow, so in the past couple of days Metafilter has picked up on the Fox News recap; Anil Dash and the Chicago Tribune's Eric Zorn have mentioned it, too.

Just to clarify: I don't think the Fox Chicago story was awful. I didn't watch the segment with horror; mostly I was happy that my quotes made sense and that I didn't look too puffy and mealymouthed speaking them. Before the interview I'd tried to come up with an articulate answer for the question "What is a blog?" because I suspected it would be one of the first things they'd ask. I was right, except the question was "What is a blogger?" which is slightly more roundabout, unless you happen to think that bloggers are a curious species, and I suppose we are. (But hey, so are American Idol fans, and there was way better coverage of their cultural phenomenon on the newscast that night.)

No, the story wasn't terrible: it was just...typical. It's true I have a pet peeve about human-interest news coverage of weblogs, and while I felt the segment could have been far worse, it still had a lot of textbook examples of the things that annoy me, and I couldn't resist pointing them out. Here, thanks to a Metafilter contributor, is another TV news story with perhaps an even goofier introduction. My God.
pounded out by Wendy at 9:05 AM

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Hey!

Congratulations Pamie!
pounded out by Wendy at 7:07 AM

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buh-LOGGING

I put together a little recap of the news segment that aired last week. For those of who missed seeing it, I tried to simulate the experience of viewing this piece in all its half-assed but generally good-natured glory.

During the interview they'd asked a lot of questions about my book, but they never made it in. Since the book's not going to be out for another year, though, I'm not surprised. I'm also not too surprised they didn't give my site address, since this week the word fetus appeared on the front page about a dozen times, along with the more typical potty-mouth stuff.

Anyway, enjoy. My favorite is the part about the "experts" at the end.
pounded out by Wendy at 9:35 AM

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This TV thing

So I'm going to be on the news tonight: the FOX local news here in Chicago (WFLD?) at 9pm. I believe the story is something like "Bloggers: they blog! But what is a blog, anyway? Could blogging happen to you?" I agreed to do it yesterday. What? I'm easy.

So FOX news came to my apartment to interview me and observe me doing bloggery things, like sitting down at my computer. I mean the act of sitting down was carefully recorded. I was instructed to walk across my room and sit down at my computer, and here is where it got complicated.

"Can we see you logging on?" the camera guy said.

"Um, well, I have cable, so it's always on," I told him. My browser window was open on the desktop.

The reporter looked worried. "Can't you... you know," she said. I began to sense they wanted to see something that said AND NOW HERE IS THE INTERNET or THUS WE GO FORTH INTO CYBERSPACE or whatever.

"I could close a browser window and then open it again," I said. They didn't say anything. "I could... put my computer in sleep mode, and then when I sit down the screen comes on... or--"

"Oh yeah. Do that," the reporter said.

So I walked across the room and sat down and hit a key on my machine. I stared at the dark screen. I hadn't realized how long it takes for my Mac to wake up, and I forgot that the screen fades up slowly, which made the whole thing appear way more dramatic than it ought to be. Maybe you'll get to see for yourself.
pounded out by Wendy at 12:31 PM

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Heads up

Maybe if you're in Chicago you'll want to watch FOX news tonight at 9. No reason.
pounded out by Wendy at 10:28 AM

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The last I'll say about Curves (I think)

I was glad to come across this Curvers for Choice blog in my referral logs, because the woman who started it is not only willing to take up the disscussion of What to Do Now That You Know Your Gym Franchise Was Founded by An Anti-Abortion Creep, but also recognizes this news could do a lot towards raising funds for pro-choice organizations. She also clears up a few inaccuracies in the press accounts (and oops, I did pass along a couple of those) having to do with Heavin's association with Operation Save America and the nature of the funds donated. In the end I don't think there's a right or wrong thing to do about this, as long as it's done conscientiously and not with a "oh well," kind of shrug.

And memo to Dawn Eden: that's right, I said "cuddly fetus puppets". I'll say it again: CUDDLY FETUS PUPPETS, and what makes you think I'm talking about dead fetuses? Just because I advocate WANTON BABYKILLING doesn't mean I think dead things are cuddly. Please, I'm not that goth. I don't want dead fetuses like the dead fetuses in the decades-old pre Roe v. Wade dead fetus pictures the anti-choice movement has reproduced several thousand times for the purpose of showing WHAT DEAD FETUSES LOOK LIKE any more than you do, Dawn Eden. And yes, "cuddly fetus puppets" happens to be my cynical-young- whippersnapper-with- the-infernal-ironic-humor- style satirical catchphrase for the sort of tactics that are practiced in anti-abortion clinics like in this story. (You want a recent link? There's one.) I know the pro-life movement doesn't actually think that what's inside a woman's womb in the first trimester is a living Precious Moments figure, but so what if I like to joke that they do? Really, it's just a matter of my sick fetus hyperbole versus theirs, and I'm not trying to pass mine off as the truth: the truth is somewhere in between. And frankly, the truth doesn't make me "tremble inside" as Dawn Eden insists. Though who the hell is she to think that what goes on inside me—or any woman—is any of her business?
pounded out by Wendy at 10:07 AM

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