Monthly Archives: February 2012

i hate macs, the pity party

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At school we use macs, where you save by hitting Command + S.

At home I use a PC, where I save by hitting Ctrl + S.

The mac’s CMD button and the PC’s Alt button are in approximately the same place.

So when I knew my hard drive was in death’s dooryard, I carefully backed everything up…except apparently I never saved the pages and pages of revisions to godlight‘s first chapter.  Except I suspect I did try to save it…by hitting Alt + S. 

Alt + S does not save anything.  😛

Then, I imagine, I closed the document and Word asked me if I wanted to save my changes and I hit NO because I hadn’t made any changes since the last time I saved, or so I thought.

Word is always doing that, and I always say NO because I imagine I’m saving some accidental keystrokes, or perhaps some touchpad shenanigans that I don’t want to save.  In Word, if you save, run a wordcount, and then close, it asks if you want to save your changes.  What changes!?

Anyhow, all those changes are gone, and have to be done over, and as I may have mentioned, I have zero time lately and I’m exhausted.

On one level I realize these are only a few pages of changes I’m talking about, but I am just so tired, and on the edge of despair all the time.  I feel like I will always be the B student in everything:  writing, school, housekeeping, dog guardianship.  I will never be a star at anything.

How can you be a writer if you can’t manage to do something so simple as save a document correctly?

Yes, I am feeling very sorry for myself at the moment.

I hate macs.

Also Word.

I’d give up, except I don’t know and can’t imagine what I’d do instead.

Blargh.

it burns

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money boothHave you ever seen, probably on television, one of those booths where the contestant gets in and then  money blows all around while the person tries to grab as much cash as possible?  That is how it feels inside my head a good bit of the time, with ideas and thoughts instead of money.

Lately, I have not been able to grab much.

There’s just too much in there.

No time to purge with morning pages.

Under the heading of IDEAS-GENERAL, there’s the new beginning for godlight, the work in submissions.  There’s the draft beginning for Seldom Untitled, the work — allegedly — in progress, although as for progress…ahem, mumblemutter.

Under IDEAS-SCHOOL we find the ideas for Digital Illustration class, where I am currently supposed to produce a series of zoo pictograms (icons).  There are ideas for Typography (which class I may be the first ever to  love).  There are the ideas for Drawing II.

Then we have RESPONSIBILITIES.  Under this heading find laundry, menu planning, shopping (what all did I forget last time and what all will I forget next time?) and prescriptions (human and pet) and cooking and cleaning.  Haha! if you could see my kitchen floor, you would be as appalled as I am ashamed; I should be in there mopping instead of in here blogging about how I should be mopping.  Also, maintaining relationships (phone calls, e-mails).  Feeding people and critters.  Cages, litter boxes.

I could really use a wife maid.

Up until about two weeks ago, I found myself thinking, in a recurrent way if not obsessively, that maybe I was done writing.  I’d told my one good story, and I had no particular burning drive to get on with telling another.  It occurred to me briefly that maybe, just as I only have seven hundred to twelve hundred good words in me per day, I might perhaps only have so much creativity in me per day.  Maybe, perhaps, I’m using it all up on school projects. 

After all, I did have a burning drive to finish that last DI project:

But no burn when it came to godlight or Seldom.  No particular guilt over lack of burn, either — which was the most disturbing aspect.  Can a burning desire just wink out like that?  If it does go, does it ever come back?

What can I do to make it come back?

Even if I figure that out, should I make it come back?  Because I really do not have time.

I thought it was me, my inner whiner.  This is all well and good for kids living at home and men with wives.  I AM the home, and I AM the wife!  And:    Nobody else spends this much time doing school work.  I’m only taking four classes!  WTF?

Last week my hard drive self-destructed and the youngest spawn fell ill, so on top of everything else, there was alla that there to deal with.  The inner whiner was on a rip, let me tell you.

Then I heard one of the young people, a second-year student say almost exactly the same thing about how much out-of-class time we spend on school work, and I felt so relieved.  It’s not just me!  There really is an exorbitant amount of homework in the graphic design program.  So. I could just quit, right?

Quit and do what?  Sit around having plenty of time to write but no desire to do it?

Well I could walk the dogs, there’s that.  And spend more time trying to not think of all the things I’m not supposed to eat, which is always a worthy occupation.

For now, my writing goal is to finish typing in the changes to godlight‘s beginning.  When that is done, I’ll submit both visions* for critique and see what they say.  While that’s pending I can go back to work on Seldom in my — ahem, spare — time.

Meanwhile I’ll keep thrashing out the school projects unless or until it becomes more pain than pleasure.  For instance, I needed an idea for a surrealist drawing yesterday, and the girls in the basement are simply not cooperating.

nothing much interesting

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That’s what’s going on here, nothing much interesting…a whole lot of nothing much interesting, which is why I haven’t blogged for a while.

I can’t recall if I said before, but I’ll risk repeating myself. I’m taking four courses in school this quarter, Digital Illustration I, Typography I, Drawing II, and Organizational Behavior. That last one is about human relations and is eating my brain. The first one is eating my life. Drawing is interesting, but I’m so slow! I wonder if I’d be faster if I were younger.

Yesterday I was in the Mac Lab working on the Godzilla Galapagos Guava project. There was a second year class in progress, so I had my earbuds in, but I heard the instructor say, “You all grew up with computers.” He’s about–guessing–ten years younger than I am. I tried to shoot daggers at him with my eyes, but apparently the eyedagger quiver was empty, or else just old and too decrepit to fire. Well that, or he just couldn’t see me all the way in the back row.

Dude. I grew up with three black and white tv channels full of snow, and a bakelite wall phone with a three foot cord. Nary a computer in sight. In fact, they put computers in my high school the year I went to JVS, and they were installing the computers at the JVS as I graduated. And honestly, having come to my smallish quantity of geekery late in life, I don’t consider missing out on those dinosaurs to be all that much of a loss.

Ok, so swamped with school work, and taxi work. I’m going to try to send (my youngest) Zor to driver’s ed next summer, so she can occasionally free me up by transporting herself places. Next year the school goes from quarters to semesters, and I’ll have to take five classes instead of four, so I anticipate everything that’s overwhelming this year to be even more so next.

Next up, hamsters. I had originally kept one hamster, Dmitri. When he died of old age, I let myself be talked into getting two, because dwarf hamsters are allegedly so social. And thus I ended up with ten. Two of the babies didn’t survive, but six did, bringing the total to eight. After much angst, I rehomed four, and kept four. The parents Zandy (male) and Lita (female), and two babies, Algernon and Rocky (both female.) Algernon and Lita co-habitated in the nursery bin, and Rocky and Zandy had their own cages. But Algernon had developed a habit of chasing Lita around the cage, which was bizarre in my opinion, because Zandy got his own cage because Lita was beating him up. (Rocky got her own cage because one of her siblings gave her a bloody nose.) Anyhow, on Saturday I ordered two more Dmitri-style cages from Amazon. And on Wednesday I found Lita dead under the bedding of her cage.

I have no idea why; there were no signs of injury.

On that day there was also an outbreak of excruciating personal drama I don’t feel right sharing (which might tell you something right there, since you may have realized I am the Empress of TMI.) And I received a rejection letter.

I know we’re not supposed to blog about those, but I mention it because, unlike other rejections I have received, this one stung, and I’m not sure why. No one rejection has ever hurt my feelings before. This was a form letter; it even said in the body of the letter, “This is a form letter.” There was nothing hurtful about the phrasing. I’m not sure if the sting came from the fact that this was an agent I particularly hoped to land, or from all the other events of the day, or because it was a camel straw, but it knocked me for an emotional loop. I found myself relieved to bury myself in my drawing class project.

…

So this blog entry has been open on my laptop for three days, and I have no idea how to close it. I finished my drawing project and my exam, but missed the quiz by forgetting what day I was supposed to take it. The new cages arrived, and the rodents are installed therein. There was another minor disaster (by which I mean a loss of time) when two of the new water bottles leaked and both new cages had to be changed again the day after the new residents moved into them. I have two extra cages now, and the inner voice that whispers, “HOARDER!” can just shut up, because I didn’t need cages until I needed cages.

These are the sweetest, mellowest hamsters in the history of hamsters. They are like powder puffs with faces. Pygmy tribbles.

So. My thoughts are distracted and fragmented, and I still haven’t figured out how to end this. I’ll just say, til next time, later, taters.

Yum. Taters.

With a side of commas…