The Want to Believe

During the second half of last week and first half of this week, I suffered from a pretty substantial arthritis flare-up. The pain was manageable. The fatigue…well, fatigue is fatigue. There’s no way to get around it. Coffee doesn’t work. Energy drinks don’t work. I can nap and wake up as tired as when I laid down. I can’t curl up with a book because I’ll just fall asleep and, unless it’s light reading, I probably won’t fathom what I read through the brain haze. Often, I’m left  mindlessly surfing the internet. My current surf board is Pinterest. I decided to see what RA pins there were and rediscovered one of the reasons why I stay away from RA communities: pseudoscience. Home remedies.  Wrong-headed theories about pain. Incomplete explanations about the cause of the disease.

Rum-soaked raisins: NOT effective relief for arthritis symptoms. Pic by Leif Parsons

I understand, somewhat. There are many aspects to RA that are not yet explained. For example, what sets off a fare-up? Just prior to mine, I was feeling great. So, why did it happen? Did I over-do the exercise? Between Feb 5th and Feb 14th, I ran twice, played disc three time, and generally worked out once. Alcohol-wise, I over-indulged twice.  I ate…what I usually eat with maybe a couple extra rice crispy treats added. The weather has been great; pollen counts are up. Stress from the whole car accident thing had lessened; I was mid hormone cycle. All of those things could be factors. Or none of them could be. And that’s the problem. Humans want answers. When there are none, we tend to look for patterns and often find them where there are none. We want to believe. It’s a scary thing to say, “I don’t know.”

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Writing-wise, Eric and I are tentatively starting on a new project. It’s been a while and I need a break and some distance from Luck for Hire.

January & Half of February

January was mostly taken up by the usual things. Taking down the Christmas tree, wincing at Nebraska’s in-conference losses, set-up for Spring League and New Year Fest, not writing enough. The end of January is when things got interesting.

New Year Fest is the last weekend of January. This year, I was helping out and Eric was playing with Quan’s team.NYF was held as a fairly new soccer complex in northern Phoenix. On our way there Sunday morning, a Toyota Tacoma ran a red light. Eric couldn’t stop fast enough and we hit them. Our front end to their back right side. Luckily, we were wearing our seat belts. Also luckily, we were only about 1.25 miles from home. But Hefty, our poor ’92 Nissan truck, was done in. The past two weeks have been spent, mostly by Eric, sorting out things between the police, the insurance companies (the driver of the Tacoma was unlicensed and uninsured), and vehicle lots. We rented a car for the weekends (which it turns out is a pretty inexpensive thing to do if you stay local and don’t care what you drive), but Eric found a “new” truck, an ’03 Nissan, on Friday.

Of course, temporarily being without a vehicle coincided with a couple of weeks of actually wanting to have a vehicle. We missed the second day of NYF (obviously). The next weekend was a Reif-and-Jeff-birthday-and-Super-Bowl party at Reif’s. The rental car came in handy for that. Eric missed the preseason game of league. I caught a ride to the game with Joanne, and a ride back with Brian after Joanne broke her nose during the game. We took the bus to one Friday afternoon of disc and the rental car to the other (before Eric bought the new truck). We walked quite a bit. We live close enough to restaurants, grocery and retail stores to manage. Eric takes the shuttle to class anyway. My one observation about being temporarily vehicle-less? It’s time consuming. To walk, to wait for the bus or light rail; it’s okay if you don’t have a particular timetable.

Other:

On one of our walks, we found a wallet with nothing but an ID and social security card. We tracked down the owner’s wife, since the address on the ID was in our neighborhood. Turns out, there had been nothing else in the wallet; he had only just lost it.

We ended up buying a digital camera to take pics of our very broken truck in order to quickly sell it to a scrap yard. In theory, I could include pictures of the damage and the new truck. Merely writing all this has been about as much effort as I’m going to expend at the moment.

Ran the Skirt Chaser 5K for the third time on Saturday. Ran it in 29:08, which is over a minute slower than last year. About half way through I suffered some pretty nasty lower abdominal cramps. This happens to me occasionally. Plus, I’m out of shape. I was happy to have kept it below 30 mins.

Our first regular season league games were Monday night. Eric and I are on different teams. His totally squashed their competition. Mine, despite being generally awesome and James Bond themed, was down a women due to Joanne’s injury last week and lost a man during the first point. Alex stepped wrong, presumably into one of Diablo fields’ many pot holes, and tore something in his leg/knee. We lost an achingly close game by one.

2011 Summary, Work Edition

I’ve been reluctant to look back on 2011. Lately has not been my finest hour, and I’m tired of rumination. But I do want to know where my starting point is for 2012. So, this is it. This is what I did in 2011, and what I’m doing now.

I miss LiveJournal and its user icons...

Added 50K to Luck for Hire. I sent a less-polished-than-should-have-been version to beta readers last month. I’ve been hearing back from them and mulling over what may need to be changed. We settled on a timeline for the plot, and found that I need to squeeze two days together to get the story to play out correctly. I’m working on that currently.

Did a 10%-cut-edit on Divine Fire. We need to get a synopsis and query letter worked up for it and then I need to start sending it out.

Finished posting Pas de Chat. Haven’t done anything with it since. (I would link to it, but my website seems to be…hinkey.)

Secured my rights to Lucinda at the Window. Tessa completed cover art for an ebook release. I did some research, but haven’t done anything else with it.

Sent Model Species to 30+ agents.

Sent five different short works to 17 markets.

In both of those last cases, I need to go through and decide where everything stands, and where to send to next.

It’s 2012. When did *that* happen?

I’ve spent the last couple weeks of 2011 in a haze of reading, EverQuest2 playing, and movie watching with a notable breach for real-world socialization.

Nicole, one of my beta readers for Luck for Hire, was in town. We had dinner with her last Tuesday at Four Peaks in order to better pick her brain. Poor Nicole. I don’t think the interrogation wasn’t too traumatic. She still invited us to pub quiz. Betsy was in town too, so it was an extra big quiz group.  Both came out to Wednesday disc as well and then Eric and I had lunch with Betsy, her man Chris, and Casey at Beaver Choice.

My reading escapades are covered over at Reading Notes. I have a tendency to make a big reading push at the end/beginning of the year. It’s nicer to read when being cozy on the couch is an option.

Watched:

Crazy Heart (2009) – The music was not annoying and Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhall are good in it. A solid, but  predictable, movie.

The Counterfeiters (2007) – Very good Austrian movie about the Nazi counterfeiting operation. Full of ambiguous characters and moral quandaries; not an uplifting Christmas movie.

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010) – I didn’t have high expectations for this movie. It didn’t exceed them.

The Last Enemy (2008) -  I’m suffering from a bit of a Sherlock Holmes infatuation at the moment. With the movie  out and the BBC series back and my natural predilection toward the material, it’s not surprising. The Last Enemy is not Holmes, but it is Benedict Cumberbatch. Close enough. It’s also a five hour miniseries that I blew through in one go during a Netflix Instant windfall. It’s alright for near-future dystopia.

And of course, I’ve watched Sherlock. All this Holmes-ness is going to wreck havoc with my nice tidy to-be-read pile.

(Furry) Feets Don’t Fail Me!

The run to Mordor begins with a step! Or a couple steps. I ran Monday and today for a total of 6.65 miles. This puts me in Tookland. It should probably be noted that Bag End to Rivendale is an estimated 458 miles. My best year total for running (in 2008) was 221.26 miles. It’s possible that, if I disregard running while playing ultimate, I’ve barely run 458 miles in my *life*.  But, it’s the gimmick of it that will me interested. I have set up a Spotify playlist to keep track of the tunes.

A Game of Shadows

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

I’m a Sherlock Holmes fan. Have been since I read Doyle’s stories when I was pretty young. Sherlock Holmes is one of the most recognizable characters in fiction. The sheer amount of Holmes parody and pastiche is staggering. Just writing that makes me want to try and embark on another Holmes-a-thon. Like comic series readers, fans of Sherlock Holmes fiction need to be flexible. Honestly, all I require is that Holmes always be a bit of a bastard and that crimes are solved by observation and ratiocination.

Guy Ritchie put forth an interesting version of Holmes in 2009′s Sherlock Holmes. Bit of a bastard? Check, though maybe occasionally a regretful one. Crimes solved through observation and ratiocination? Check. Also, fist fights resolved by observation and ratiocination, a pleasant hallmark of Guy Ritchie’s Holmes. Holmes as man-of-action is doable within Doyle’s guidelines and the 2009 movie has a plot reminiscent of Barry Levinson’s 1985 Young Sherlock Holmes. Good stuff, all around.

But could Ritchie do it again? When I saw the trailer for A Game of Shadows, I was worried. The trailer heavily featured Holmes in drag and our heroes fleeing through the woods in front of some very large pre-WWI artillery. This didn’t seem like Sherlock Holmes to me. Unfortunately, many of things I liked about the first film relied on a gimmick. Let’s call it Holmes Vision. In Holmes Vision, fights are played out in step-by-step detail before the fight occurs. In Holmes Vision, details are noticed and, if not explained, given a moment of highlighting. On one hand, how interesting could a sequel be if it’s all a rehashing of the gimmicks the audience knows? On the other, how satisfying could a sequel be if it strays too far away from those gimmicks? International intrigue leading to Holmes dodging bomb shells isn’t exactly a problem that will be solved by ratiocination.

Fortunately, Ritchie and writers Michele and Kieran Mulroney know what their doing and pull it off smashingly.

There are two things to learn from this sequel. First, if you have a gimmick, you’re going to have to change it up to keep it fresh. Holmes is not infallible. He’s going up against Moriarty in this story, his equal in every way. Noomi Rapace’s Gypsy character is another seeming blind spot to Holmes Vision. Both offer foils to the status quo. Second, if you’re going to go afield, don’t stay there too long. The movie starts firmly in the quirky Victorian London of Ritchie’s making. The audience is comfortable here. The movie ends at Reichenbach Falls (though in a lush Swiss chalet of Ritchie’s making). If you know your Holmes, you know the Falls and what happens there. You may not be comfortable there, but it’s a satisfying place. The middle bit, what’s highlighted in the trailer, is not the whole movie. While Robert Downey Jr. is funnier in drag than the trailer lets on, the escape through the forest is still too big and out of place. (A little like the shipyard sequence in the first movie.) The tree splintering effect is very pretty, but at least we’re only subjected to it for a few minutes.

The plot is quite good, though perhaps Moriarty could have used a little more subtlety. Or maybe not, since Moriarty is not only the equal of Holmes but the black chessmen to Holmes’ white. In all, I enjoyed it very much. I’ll own it one day and might even go see it again this weekend.

Year 37

Wednesday was my birthday. The commemoration of it has been spread out over the week.

Tuesday night we went out for dinner at Thirsty Lion. It’s a relatively new place at Tempe Marketplace. I had a very good large salad, which marks the first time that I’ve eaten jicama, and a Rogue Dead Guy beer. The Dead Guy was okay. Maybe a little too bitter on the front end. And the back end. With a sweet middle taste. I had been very much looking forward to playing my favorite pick game of ultimate on Wednesday. Alas, born in a blizzard, the weather has never treated me well. It had been raining since Sunday and, while Wednesday was partly cloudy,  our newly relocated field, in a drainage basin, was underwater. Instead, I played lots of EQ2 and we had take-out from Beaver Choice. Today, or possibly Monday, we’ll be headed out to see the Sherlock Holmes sequel.

There is a theory in evolutionary psychology that finds benefit in the rumination caused by depression. This may be true, although I find much of my ruminations lean toward thoughts and attitudes which aren’t particularly useful. Maybe, in the land of tooth and claw, I’d be the equivalent of an injured antelope, or rather the antelope that stayed at the safe watering hole, never encountered the cheetah, and therefore ensured the survival of the depressive characteristics. Anyway, my point is, year 37 hasn’t been a particularly good one. I’ve let many things pass by. Hopefully, some of those things aren’t irreparably lost to me. What have I learned from my rumination? I need to stop doing nothing. I learned this months ago. Actually implementing is the difficult part.