8 June 2001

Morning, everybody. I'm going to keep this pretty short, I hope, since we're going to the airport this morning. Thankfully, we get to leave after rush hour and arrive in Milwaukee in time (I hope!) for dinner and shopping with my sister-in-law. The last time I went shopping with a girl friend just for fun was with Jen my junior year of college. I ended up with my slinkiest dress ever, and Jen got gold lamé pants, and I think we spent less than $40 between the two of us. (I really hope that accent mark shows up, or else Jenny's gonna get mad at me for telling everybody her pants were lame.) Twig, while being a fabulous guy to buy dresses with, does not count as a girl friend at all. So I'm really hoping our plane is on time so that Sarah and I can do this.

But I have faith in Midwest Express. They serve you mimosas at breakfast. I mean, how can you not like that kind of airline, even if you don't like mimosas? (We had some really nasty mimosas in Hawaii. The moral of the story is: if you have bad champagne, don't ruin your orange juice with it.) Midwest Express has never failed us yet. Unlike Northwest. Unlike United. Unlike TWA. Unlike Continental. Oh, it is to shudder, Continental. Mayonnaise and bread does not make a sandwich, folks. This is just a fact. You can put as much mayo as you like on the bread, but if you then do not add anything else, you don't have a sandwich.

Mark and I were in a bookstore yesterday, looking for a book for me to review for the issue of Speculon that comes out on the fifteenth. (Guess what Timprov is doing while we're gone?) And I came upon Ken MacLeod's new book, which I did not buy for Speculon review purposes. It has a jacket photo in it. Once again, I was inordinately pleased to see that he is a geek just like the rest of us.

This first time this happened was with William Gibson. Gibson's prose gets described as hip and edgy and other things like that. So I had this mirrorshaded mental image of Gibson himself. And then I bought one of his books that had a picture of him on the back. Oh. And I was so happy. He looked like someone's English professor! Do you understand why this makes me so happy? It does. Gibson, Mr. Hip And Edgy Cyberpunk, is really a geek like the rest of us. I went around telling everybody I knew who'd read Gibson. Some of them thought I was really nuts. That's quite all right. Any time someone's books are "Edgy," I really, really want that person to look like a geek. And in science fiction, they never let me down!

So I said to Mark, "Do you think people are going to be looking at my cover photos someday and saying, 'Oh, cool, she's just a geek like the rest of us?"

He says, "No."

"NO?" (I am proud of my geekdom, people. It is good to be a geekchick.)

"No. They'll say, 'Wow, she's some kind of hippie or something. Look at the hair. Hey, did you hear she lived in San Francisco? I bet that's why.'"

I sigh. Perhaps people will be astute enough to recognize that one can be a geek with hippie hair. And don't even suggest that I should cut the hair off. If I don't do it for 110 degree days with a broken AC last summer, I sure won't do it just so that some un-astute reader won't assume I'm a hippie.

Okay, all-y'all with journals, you have to update this weekend. Compulsively. All right? So that I don't come home to find that Tropism has become a series of "I have nothing to reeeeeeead" whines. I've got family stuff to do. I'm counting on you.

I really like the collective pronoun "all-y'all." I think it's the one and only good reason it would be good to be Southern. Jen insists that "y'allses" is the proper plural possessive of "y'all," as in, "I had problems with number 8 on the E&M homework. How'd y'all do y'allses?" This does seem, well, a bit much. But sometimes Southern literature seems to make the point that being a bit much is what it's all about. As opposed to Minnesota.

Hey, hey, ooh, ooh, I might get a Perkins muffin this weekend! If my in-laws really love me....

It's good to have goals in life. An edited book. A Perkins muffin. Yeah.

(Psst. Happy birthday, Curtis!)