Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

1. When you overhear someone saying, "So, you're right wing, right?", you know they are not talking about conservative politics.

2. When a very, very, very drunk woman stumbles into you at a concert and you murmur, "Excuse me," it becomes extremely and sincerely important to her to correct this: "Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Excuse me."

The dog thinks it is time for me to go to bed now. The dog is wise.

Okay, brain, I know you're throwing out ideas, but --

Why did the phrase "hockey tarot" just pop into my head and lodge there? What are you doing up there?

Also, I have decided that "He's an [x]. She's a [y]. They play hockey fight crime!" is clearly not suitable for children's books. Why? Because children's books must include A Clearly Identifiable Valuable Lesson, or else they are pointless escapist trash and must be roundly condemned by all right-thinking people. Children, you see, are not actually people, who might like to read a book for its own sake, who might even pick out books on their own, who might read books regardless of category if they were voracious enough little readers. No. Children are not like that. They do exactly what we want! They learn exactly what we say! All opportunities must be taken to teach them A Clearly Identifiable Valuable Lesson! So. Examples of good Valuable Lessons immediately popped into my head: "They learn the true meaning of Christmas," and "They learn the true meaning of friendship." The Simpsons had a good series of these when they were indicating the passage of time: "And then we learned the true meaning of Flag Day." etc.

Of course, what popped into my head was, "She's a peewee hockey player who was born to save her father from being the Queen of Air and Darkness's tithe to hell. He's a kid inventor who's just discovering his true powers. They play hockey, fight crime, and discover the true meaning of NP Completeness." This is frightening me a little, and if I wasn't so hungry, I think I'd have to go have a lie-down over it.

(Also, if someone would write a piece of music for strings called, "Air for Queen and Darkness," that would be awesome. It's what I originally typed above.)

But anyway. Now I'm having a contest! What you win is a really cool postcard and the accolades of the other readers of this journal! You should come up with the best "true meaning of" for a children's novel. Bonus points for a good "She's an x/he's a y" to go with it, but what we're really going for is, "They discover the true meaning of flax harvesting!" "They discover the true meaning of Charlie Chaplin's birthday!" sort of thing. Go! Give me true meanings that will be Deeply Powerful Lessons for Today's Youth!

(Anyone who uses the phrase "today's youth" and is not joking bears watching closely. I'm just sayin'.)

We have a hockey team in Minnesota after all! After the first three games of this playoff series, I was starting to wonder. It was like watching a different team out there this game. Intensity, coordination. Beautiful.

Also, I <3 Derek Boogaard. The little self-deprecating grin he gave the crowd when they called him out for the last two minutes: beautiful.

Other things I <3: hockey fans. The whole stadium chanting, "Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!" always makes me obscurely happy.

(The refs and the Ducks, on the other hand, have exactly none of my respect. I am not anti-fighting in hockey -- it's a full-contact physical sport. But there are limits; there have to be. And the refs -- utterly ridiculous. They may as well have put on Ducks sweaters in the first period and worn them throughout. Honestly.)

Okay, people, what is the first rule of living in Minnesota?

No, it's not "do not make the women angry at you, for they may be smaller than the men, but they're meaner."

No, it's not "if you can't get it at Byerly's or Target, you may not need it."

No, it's not "indirection is the best rhetorical/interpersonal device ever."

No, it's not "respect the designated weirdos."

If you guessed, "DO NOT RUN OUT IN FRONT OF CARS IN AN ICE STORM, YOU STUPID, STUPID PERSON," you win the prize!

Thirty-eighth had some pretty treacherous spots. Lots of ice, when I was driving on it. I did not kill anyone driving home tonight, but that is entirely my doing and none of hers.

I am just now calming down.

I'm a little amused at myself that when I was pumping the brakes, steering into the skid, and trying not to hit this person, I didn't honk because I was afraid someone that dumb was dumb enough to stop in surprise. Instead I shrieked, "Wa! wa! wa! wa!" at her. Apparently in moments of crisis I become Charlie Brown's mom/teacher/etc. Then when the car had stopped and she was not dead, maimed, or in any other way in contact with my motor vehicle, I shouted, "Dumb stupid stupidhead!" at her. (She could not hear me, having continued trotting along the sidewalk.) There was no one to impress with the cleanliness of my language; heaven knows I've called people worse. But apparently I am Robin's age in the privacy of my own head.

My little Scandophile hockey-loving heart is very happy this afternoon. I don't even know who I want to win the gold medal game.

So, greykev's five questions:

1. If you could start a story collaboration tomorrow with any living author, who would you choose? (aside from Timprov, though I do hope he gets to feeling well enough to write again soon)
2. Same as above only with dead people. (and yes, you'de get to finish the collaberation too)
Well, here's the thing. I don't want to write books and stories in general. I want to write that book there, and that one, and that other one, in specific. So I wouldn't want to do a collaboration with Person X in general. I might want to write Story X with Person X, if we got to talking about Story X and it seemed like a good thing and fun and all that. But I couldn't just pick someone based on characters or prose style or sense of humor or work habits or anything like that. It's got to be for a story that's worth the time, or it's not worth doing. And as I don't really have those stories now, I can't say who would have come up with them with me.

Some of the people I like best both as people and as writers have work styles so drastically different from mine that I'm not sure it could work to write stuff together. I think we may be best keeping our distance except for squeeing.

3. You can go hiking anywhere in the world, where do you choose?
Iceland. Probably in the northwest.

4. Worse plot: 'magic goes away' or 'magic is really technology in drag'?
Umm. I can actually think of decent ways to handle each, although it's fairly rare. The latter would generally be my choice as a stinker, but then I read [naming the title would spoil the book] and enjoyed it very much.

For myself to write? I'm not really interested in either, much. "Magic goes away" is much less fun than "magic goes awry." Also, the things I'm interested in doing with systems of magic almost never are the sorts of things that can just up and disappear without divine intervention, and then it's a matter of figuring out which gods to kick. I also think that the subtext of "magic is really technology in drag" is often a fair amount of contempt for humanity or at least the society in the book -- not always, but often -- and that's not really what I want to do, and it's particularly not what I want to use the idea of magic to do.

5. What can random strangers do or not do to cheer you up?
That's very context dependent. I'm assuming we mean truly random strangers, not people whose names I know but whom I don't know very well. Some guy in Byerly's, say; some lady in the doctor's office; some person on an airplane.

Usually the best they can do is ignore me. I don't want to be asked what's wrong unless I know the questioner. I don't want to be chattered at extensively, particularly because I then feel that I have to cheer them up. I don't want to be touched by people whose names I don't know (and, "hi, I'm Paula, tooooouch," is not what I have in mind). The kindest a random stranger has ever been was on the plane back from getting engaged to markgritter, knowing we wouldn't be able to see each other very often or for very long over the next two years. I was sobbing my eyes out with my head up in that "I just dare you to stare" mode. The woman in the seat next to mine looked at me for a long moment, and then without saying a word she got out a tissue and set it on my knee. I thanked her. She told me I was welcome and went back to her book. Another example is when I was caught in the airport in an ice storm. I had too many bags and was feeling the hypoglycemia pretty severely. Some guy carried my biggest two bags to the taxi stand for me and stayed there until I had a taxi and had found the fruit in my bag. Then he wished me a better evening and left. This is the general approach: practicality and detachment. Do I appear to be in need of some concrete assistance that J. Random Stranger can provide? If so, good, thanks. If not, JRS should let me be.

Which of you was talking about Nightwish/Oceanborn such that I put it on my Amazon wishlist? *squints suspiciously eastward*

Also, this is why I'm going to sleep now:

Me: [little hand gesture]
timprov: Was that supposed to be a tyrannosaur putting?
Me: Slapshot! A tyrannosaur making a slapshot!
T: Well, you can see where I would get confused.

sosostris2012's pretty sparkly necklace arrived in the mail: thanks! The candy is on the way as of Friday.

I watched the mailman skate from the first house in the circle to ours to the next. He didn't hit a mailbox, but it was a near thing. I think we made a good decision not to go out running errands today. It looks like there's a fine layer of snow, but in fact it's ice. Wheeeeeee.

I'm going to have to go out tomorrow, but maybe they'll have put down salt by then. Also maybe I won't have such wretched cramps by then. It's a thought, at least. In the meantime, the presents are all wrapped, and I've been poking short stories with a long stick and reading The Scholars of Night. So that could be worse.