To do list

Last night I dreamed I was lost in South Dakota and was attempting to get directions from a nanotech-embedded baseball and could not find misia. The sad thing about this is that if only it had been laurel instead of misia, I would have considered the whole thing to make sense, at least internally. It was not a restful night.

( Cut for those of you who don't care about what I'm doing today )

Oh, the glamour. Oh, the excitement

Hell or Jail or Canada

Sold a story today: Challenging Destiny wants "Heart-Shaped Hole," the novelette I wrote after wshaffer and Daniel gave me a book about Greenland. Yay, Canadians! Yay, sale! If it was cooler, I'd put on my Leafs jersey to celebrate.

(The title of this entry is from a Shel Silverstein poem called "Rudy Felsh." The line about how Rudy Felsh is likely to go to hell or jail or Canada struck me as silly when I was small and read it. When I got a little bigger, American history came down on my head with a thud again, and I realized why an American of Silverstein's age -- and the speaker in the poem's age -- would have going to Canada as an option with the other two. Sometimes I think my life is a series of history crashing in and me going, "Ohhhhhh.")

In honor of upcoming six years of lawfully wedded bliss, I extravagantly bought a new can-opener that is not the absolute cheapest model available, and also a new toilet brush. Some people say, "What would happen to our society if two men or two women were allowed to get married?" I'll tell you what would happen: five to ten years later they'd have to start replacing some of the stuff they'd gotten for wedding presents. Watch for it to happen in Canada. You heard it here first.

The hazards of being raised Lutheran

I was reading karentraviss's Crossing the Line, and the last line of a chapter was, "'Get up, Commander,' he said. 'I'm fully prepared to break the Sixth Commandment.'" And I went, "WooHOOOOO!" And then: "Oh. That Sixth Commandment. Darn."

So the necessary background for those of you who don't have it: when people talk about the Ten Commandments, it's not like the Bible sits down and says, "Number One: X. Number Two: Y." The numbering is up to the monkeys. It's really the Approximately Ten Commandments. In some traditions, idolatry and worship get more attention, while in others, covetousness does. So for someone who was raised, say, Lutheran like me, the Sixth Commandment is, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." But for someone who was raised, say, Calvinist like markgritter, the Sixth Commandment is, "Thou shalt not murder." Which is, y'know, exciting and all that, but not nearly the plot twist that the other would have been.

Sigh.