10 August 2003

Last night -- probably less than an hour ago, at this point -- I dreamed that knee pants had come back into fashion for men, and my mom and I were dubiously examining a pair of black velvet breeches and matching coat for Mark. We decided to get him Legos instead. Good call, dream-self and dream-Mom.

Yesterday...oof. There were redeeming features -- some more things got cleaned, I made pepper beef, wrote a few lines on "Heart-Shaped Hole," read a bunch, talked on the phone a bit -- but mostly yesterday was no good. Nobody here was mad at anybody here, so that was a good aspect, too, I guess.

Sometimes it's very hard to live in a holding pattern. It helps a bit that we're leaving to look at houses in less than two weeks. (It also terrifies me: I fear that everything will come off "pause" at once and drown me. But one thing at a time.) We've started to think in terms of more than one area, because while I adored the Nokomis region, I'm not convinced it's a good idea to limit our looking to that small an area. And there are plenty upon plenty of other livable areas in the Cities. It's a matter of choosing which ones we're willing to consider.

The rest of yesterday's problems, besides living in a holding pattern...eh. I don't really want to go into it here. It was no good, it's mostly over for the time being, and it wasn't particularly external. So.

I finished reading Travels in Hyperreality and read most of Nancy Kress' Crossfire. I'm not all that impressed with Crossfire so far. It seems like a lot of the elements of it beat the reader about the head: "Look, here's the part where I'm introducing the characters and how they get along!" And there are times when she tries to mitigate it by acknowledging she's doing it -- having one character as-you-know-Bobbing away and another thinking, "What the heck is he on about? We've been over this a million times already." Which is somewhat better if it happens once, but repeatedly throughout the book...eh. If she's perfectly willing to tell us "X detested Y" without having to show that, just give the infodumps, for heaven's sake; don't play coy.

Also, I respect what she's trying to do in terms of the SF tradition (that is, make the less humanoid aliens more sympathetic), but I wish she'd just do it. Instead, she has the characters explicitly pondering it. Sigh. Maybe it'll end well.

Short entry today: Mark and I are heading down to Carmel for the day. Should be a good time -- and it's one more thing from the list of stuff we wanted to do before leaving Northern California. If we get any good pictures at Point Lobos or the Carmel Mission, I'll post them here tomorrow (or Tuesday if things get crazy).