alexandraerin

News For Today

Tentative WisCon programming stuff is out now. I am on the Shakespeare Got To Get Paid, Son panel on Saturday, one on self-publishing and one on cross-promotion on Sunday. I've put myself forward for the Long Tail panel, which was listed as needing volunteers. That's also on Sunday. If I'm not placed on that one I'll still use the SGTGPS panel to share my "there's more money for each individual writer who writes for smaller audiences" theories with the world. That's one panel on Saturday, two or three on Sunday. That's probably good. There are a lot of panels I might like to be on but these are ones that I feel I have a lot to offer on.

I also just scored my plane ticket to Madison. $79. Hell yeah. I haven't bought my flight back yet because I AM NEVER COMING BACK FROM WISCON!!!! No, actually, it's because I'm going to be flying out to Hagerstown for Jack and Sarah's wedding reception and since we're all going to be at WisCon together we're going to try to get the flights home coordinated.

Also: Volume 2 starts today.

Personal Assessment

Feeling okay. Slept six-ish hours. After reading a peer-reviewed paper in a noted medical journal this morning, I've decided to add deep breathing exercises to my repertoire of techniques for both diminishing anxiety and reducing bodily fatigue.

Dreams From Last Night

Very strongly inspired by Deathless (holy shit, Amazon's almost sold out... way to go, Cat!), involving Baba Yaga. Also, I was building and selling bicycles again. WTF? I think this is my subconscious's way of saying "Fuck you!" after all those times I said that I don't put much stock in the whole dream metaphor symbolism thing because after having a noticeable pattern in my dreams involving something so random and unrelated to my life or interests I can't help waking up thinking "BUT WHAT DO THE BICYCLES MEAN?"

Plans For Today

Obviously for volume 2 launch day that's my primary priority. I'll do the whole work days thing for the rest of the week.

A friend of mine is preparing to cut the umbilical cord of cable TV and go all internet, something that I did quite a while ago when I felt like my TV-consuming life was becoming unmanageable. I suppose it helps that I've never been the sort of person who needs (or necessarily wants) for something to be on "in the background" or just to provide movement and noise at the periphery of my consciousness (my consciousness takes care of that for me, happily).

At the same time, on yuki_onna's meditation on why she doesn't watch the Academy Awards (which is insightful in its own right), I stumbled across this gem of a quote from her in a discussion within the comments:

life is short--too short to force myself to watch things on TV that I don't find pleasant

I don't really have much to add to that, except that sometimes it seems like more people could stand to learn this. I'm not talking specifically about people who watch "so bad it's good amusing" fare, but people who watch things that frustrate and disappoint them. Some of the things that I do watch (The Cape) I have pretty low expectations of, but I wouldn't watch it if I didn't enjoy it.

This one's really not that easy to do. I have a pretty good life. There are parts of it that could use some improving, but they are by and large improving. Anyway, I'm sitting here typing this at the dining room table in a condo in a lovely little town outside of Tampa, Florida called Dunedin. I paid nothing to be here. Yesterday I was at Epcot in Walt Disney World with my parents. I paid nothing to be there, either. My parents are kind and generous with their time and the fruits of their own successes to their grown children, and that would leave me with precious little to be envious of even if they didn't have a place in Florida or regard Disney World as a sort of promised land.

I suppose I could take the description I copied for the day of "seven things [I] lack and covet" and make a list that's just seven things that I want. Wanting things is easy. As Jack Handey said, "It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money." But that's really not what envy's about... envy requires both a direct and an indirect object. If you covet money, the money is the direct object of that coveting. For envy, the money becomes an indirect object... the person who has it is the direct object of your envy.

A lot of the things that I want, I just don't envy anybody who has them, even in general. I mean, when I find myself wanting a good steak I'm not thinking "There are people out there eating steak right now and I'm not one of them."

This is not to say that I don't experience envy. The first two items on this list required no thought at all. I just have to really stop and think to fill out seven things. If this list has any purpose, though, maybe that's it?

1. I envy Sarah for living with Jack and having known him longer. It is necessary in this case to quote a line from Cat Valente's The Habitation of the Blessed that stood out to me when I first read it (I love how easy Kindle makes it to mark and look up favorite lines): "Envy and jealousy are sisters, but not twins."

Envy is wanting what someone else has. Jealousy is not wanting to share. You can feel jealous of something that you have (i.e., jealously-guarded secrets or treasures) or something you only envy, but it's possible for there to be envy without jealously. I don't resent Sarah her seniority or proximity, and I would not trade places with her... wouldn't take away from what she has to enrich myself. I like Sarah. I admire and respect her. I hope that my happiness with Jack is able to increase the happiness in her own life. Polyamory operates on the principle that love is not a zero-sum game, after all.

But I envy her.

2. The hoopla that happens when trad-pub authors experiment with crowdfunding. This is occasionally somewhat or even very irrational, as among the reasons why I've forged the particular path that I have is a lack of desire/ability to deal with certain hooplae at the outset. There are good, solid reasons for me to move towards brighter spotlights at my own pace. But emotions are only ever reasonable by coincidence, and it usually only takes one or two Respected Names making a comment about how an experiment only worked because the experimenter had an audience, or it didn't work despite the experimenter's established audience and therefore crowdfunding is disproven forever, or invoking the need for gatekeepers to protect us from the 90% of everything that is crap* for me to start resenting how little attention is paid to the truly indie efforts.

(*How does the rest of the internet work, then? There are no editors and publishers overseeing the internet and yet we all find sufficiently entertaining entertainment on it.)

This shaded over into jealousy exactly once, and it felt ugly because it interrupted (if only for a moment) me feeling happy for a friend.

3. People who didn't inherit the hereditary hairline from my mother's side of the family. It meshes well with my already-established love of hats and it's inculcating in me a love of wigs that I'd probably keep even if I found myself the lucky victim of a drive-by scalp transplant, but it's decidedly inconvenient for someone whose womanhood is considered to be up for debate. This is envy and not mere covetousness because I really do envy people who have the kind of hair I would want.

4. Anybody I see using a smart phone with a full physical QWERTY keyboard. I used to resist the idea of on-screen touchable keyboards pretty fiercely. I got a chance to try one and found that it was easier to use than I'd expected, and I extrapolated from that experience that once I got used to it I'd be able to write on one as easily as I can with a physical keyboard. So when I lost my Pre... and wasn't interested in replacing it with another of the same for a variety of reasons... I jumped at the chance to get an Android-powered phone. The one I could get for free with an upgrade credit didn't have a keyboard. I thought it would be no big deal, I even considered it a plus since the lack of a sliding or flipping mechanism meant there's that much less that can go wrong with the phone, physically... but in the weeks that have transpired since then, I have found that no amount of practice makes up for the deficiencies of the on-screen keyboard and every time I see somebody sliding out a keyboard on a similar phone I find myself wishing I'd held out for that.

5. Visual artists. It might take a lot of practice and discipline to be a skilled artist, but no amount of either would be enough to make me even a serviceable one. I took elective art courses all the way through high school and learned quite a bit of basic theory and technique, but as for getting any actual physical results out of that learning I have some specific lacks that are at play here: fine muscle control, coordination, spatial reasoning. There are forms of visual expression that I could engage in, but in terms of using an artistic medium to visually represent something... well, my artist friends can count on me for commissions.

6. The freedom that comes with having (and being able to drive) a car. When I tell people that I don't drive, the most common response is, "What, you've never learned?" But it's like the art thing above. I've received technical instructions. I understand the theory. It's more a matter of ability.

I've never had a doctor diagnose me as incapable of operating a motor vehicle, but it's not something I'm comfortable with doing. There are certain things that are more apt to be unfortunate if they occur while piloting two tons of metal at speeds that are some multiple of 15 or 20 miles per hour than they are when one is walking. These things include: having a powerful spasm or tremor in the arm or leg (or the whole body), a loss of the ability to distinguish right from left, and just completely spacing out.

There are good things about not driving. Chief among them is that it means there is little to no point in owning a car. But it means I am obliged to rely on other people for some things... as we all are, but there are some areas where modern U.S. culture, by and large, expects us to be self-sufficient... and that I am unable to assist others in matters of transportation logistics.

My lack of driving ability is becoming more of an issue now that my knees have started to go. Walking at a moderate pace has long been the most exercise my body would tolerate, and I have enjoyed it very much. The prospect of walking five or six miles (or more) to get somewhere never bothered me, so long as I knew I had two hours to spare doing it. Now? It's considerably less of an option. Pain is fatiguing.

All in all, I don't know that I'd choose to change this one if I could. I mean, a car would be a lot of complication and expense to take on at this point in my life. That's why I'm specifying that I envy the freedom. I don't envy the financial burden/responsibility, the need for maintenance... the reality of car-ownership. All things considered, I'd rather just be able to teleport.

7. People who can sleep without trying... people for whom "going to sleep" is an actual thing that a person can do. Even during the incredible stretch from late November through a few weeks ago when I was reporting 7-8 hours of awesome sleep all the time, I haven't been able to "go to sleep", only lie down and wait to see if and when sleep will deign to come to me.

And that's seven.

...but in fact it's a few links that are related in my head.

Last May, I visited an art gallery in the awesome little community of Dunedin, Florida. There are many things that could be said about Florida, but among them is that there's a lot of passion for art there. It may not be uniformly represented across the state, but there are enclaves and communities and so on. One of the exhibitions there had to do with found objects, I believe, and one of the artists was Aganetha Dyck. I may have linked to her work before, back when I first saw it. One of her techniques involves using objects and beehives to create effects like you can see here:


(Click for source.).

Back when I first became acquainted with her work, it made me think of Cat Valente's Palimpsest (this is not a hard thing to do, internets). What's an interesting confluence is that when I left Florida, it was to go to Madison, for WisCon 34, which is where I first heard tithenai read aloud one of the entries in her book The Honey Month, which... if my brain isn't drawing the wrong connections in the wrong places... may have been inspired or gained impetus from Palimpsest.

If anybody ever asked the question, "Is blogging art? Can a blog book be an artistic work?", The Honey Month is the answer to that question, and that answer is: "Yes. Of course. What are you, ignorant or something?" I didn't think of it as a blog book at the time, or even until I started typing this post.

For one month, Amal sampled a honey each day and wrote her impressions of it, and a short piece inspired by them. And she blogged about it on her LJ, and those blog entries became a book, a rich and gorgeous and sticky-sweet book. This year she's re-blogging it, doing re-runs with extra DVD commentary.

So check out some more of Aganetha's work, and browse Amal's sweet and golden reminisces... and if they intrigue you, consider the book.

(It's worth poking around the publisher's website, too. Papaveria Press has some awesome people putting out material.)

...

Oh, and there's only a week to go, so lest I forget again:


Get your own valentinr

Yes, I have a Valentinr. I've always worried that these things would just be trollbait, but I'm learning to be open to good things looking for a way in.

News For Today

Well, the dollhouse is now down one human occupant, which means there will be more times that I have the house to myself, which is often nice.

When I finish and post chapter 476 today, that will be three chapters in one week, and they aren't even drastically shortened... one of them approached 4,000 words.

Personal Assessment

My back's been acting up since just before I laid down last night. I had a little bit of cruddy build up in my throat when I woke up. I slept fine, but don't remember any dreams.

Random link for the day.

The Onion AV Club's best books of 2010, where Jason Heller named The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne M. Valente.

Heller writes:

Tucked between her 2009 triumph Palimpsest—a kaleidoscopic fantasy about a sexually transmitted city—and her upcoming Stalinist folktale Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente quietly released a radically ambitious novel: The Habitation Of The Blessed, the first installment of a trilogy dubbed A Dirge For Prester John. As advertised, Habitation exhumes the medieval legend of Prester John, the apocryphal shepherd of a lost Christian tribe in the Orient. But as with Valente’s previous myth-spinning, she dissolves and reassembles the legend, drenching it in rich, shimmering prose and scholarly fantasy. Echoing between the 12th and 18th centuries, the tale exalts and humanizes John while casting him and his haunted quest for the divine against an epic backdrop of spirituality, historiography, monsters, magic, and Valente’s singularly blistering imagism. And things are just getting started.

Plans For The Day

Finish and post chapter 476, ring in the new year.

So, tonight I attended a panel on finding online business models for writers that work. Sitting in the front row of the audience were Cecilia Tan, of Circlet Press, a former failing trad publishing small press that is now a growing e-publisher, myself, and a woman whose name I did not get who is making some very respectable money writing fiction with male/male pairings for e-publishers.

On the panel was a woman from Book View Cafe, a collective of authors who, as she put it, "feel that someone's going to make a lot of money off writing on the internet and want to get on it." They're kind of in the "try a bunch of stuff and see what works" phase of things, which in some ways we all are. I loved hearing what she had to say, and I had a few things I wanted to tell her... in fact, we spent over an hour after the panel ended trading ideas and I hope to have much more correspondence with her in the future. Networking and marketing are among the things I need to learn. They don't play to my strengths, but they're the frontiers I need to conquer.

The other panelist (not counting the moderator) represented a much more traditional point of view. He requested he not be identified so I'm not going to say much more about who he is or what he does, but I really hope everybody who listened to his spiel took it with a grain of salt, because he seemed very invested in protecting that traditional model. It seemed like he wanted to control the terms of the conversation, by trying to take e-books off the table and declare them as part of traditional publishing, not "an online business model". I think that they can be part of a trad pub company's business model, but e-books are a medium, not a business model in and of themselves, and they fit nicely into an online business model.

I don't do enough with e-books, myself. I could be on Kindle. I could be in more formats and more stores. Any new revenue stream improves your business model, which makes it more viable/successful... so if we say you can't count that as part of an online business model then it's harder to describe an online business model that works. It knocks Cecilia Tan and the other author out of the conversation of online success entirely. It makes their successes invisible. Because I don't do as much as I could with e-books, most of my success is still not discounted, but he didn't let the fact of my existence alter his conclusions.

There were also points where I felt he was misrepresenting what people in the audience were saying in order to more easily dismiss our experiences. He also played the "Cat Valente is the exception that proves this stuff doesn't work" card, which really irks me. I don't like to keep invoking her name in these discussions because I know where we agree and where we disagree on things, having had this conversation with her, and I feel like when I give the conclusions I draw from her experiences too often or too strongly it might sound like I'm trying to speak for her, or speak over her... but the "well, she's an exception" argument needs to be addressed.

Not because she's not an exception. Any successful author is an exception. She's an exception in the trad world, too. She's an exceptionally talented author, and an exceptionally successful one. The vast majority of authors will never be published, the majority of those who are published will never see what you might call "good money" from it, and the majority of those won't make a living from it, and the vast majority who make a living won't ever live the life that many people think of when they think of the people they think of as "successful authors".

These things are true are about both worlds, traditional and online.

So how many people need to try to break into trad publishing and fail before we start saying it's a failed business model that doesn't work and that people are foolish to try? There are enough people trying that there are enough exceptions to create a glittering constellation of shining stars and we think of that, the successes, as "the book industry", but just like the actual universe, there's a lot more dark matter than stars, and even more vacuum. We judge the trad world by its successes, and the online world by its failures. We compare what a successful established author like Cat Valente can accomplish to what an untried, unpublished author can accomplish and then blame the medium when the latter doesn't measure up to the former.

So really, all of this underscores the fact that I need to do more cons and put myself out there for programming. I want to do a panel like this next year, I would love to do it sitting between the two women I was sitting between in the audience at this one. If I'm not doing this, then people are going to keep talking about what I'm doing and what I see other people doing as if they're purely theoretical, hypothetical things.

• Finish history lesson chapter.
  
• Write a bit of flash.
  
• Do some more SHN reruns.
  
• Work on hook for next Tribe chapter.
  
• 3:00 meeting
  

To-do tonight: Get to bookstore and scope out Player's Handbook 3.

In other news: yuki_onna's Palimpsest has been selected as a finalist for the Lambdas. Today's playlist consists solely of Quartered in her honor.

Valentimestines is an interesting time when you're in a long-distance relationship... the distance between you seems so much further, but at the same time there's an opportunity to draw closer together.

A while back, Jack sent me a package which due to snopocalypse only got to me on Friday. I chose to open it at just after midnight his time, Sunday morning, even though it wasn't yet Valentine's Day in Omaha... I did this for symbolic reasons, because I wanted to celebrate Valentine's Day with him, where he was, where I know that I belong.

I opened the package (a long bubble envelope with several smaller items in it) while on Skype with him. I wanted him to hear me open it and get my response in real time. Of course, I actually started opening it while waiting for him to log on, because it takes me a really long time to open a well-sealed package. Fortunately, Jack likes the sound of me struggling.

Inside were some relatively simple things. There was some candy: conversation hearts in English and Spanish, and a heart-shaped box of chocolate truffles that were both peanut free and delicious. And there were a couple of small antiquey looking heart lockets from a craft store.

The lockets were a huge surprise. He'd told me about the lockets when he got them, but that was a while ago and so I was surprised to find them in the bottom of the envelope. I remembered after I saw them, and after he said something that jarred my memory. I'm really easy to surprise, it turns out.

He'd actually picked them out with a specific purpose... he wanted to give me something I could put on my collar. It's his collar, actually. I just wear it. Since he didn't have the collar with him when he got the lockets, though, he couldn't work out how to attach them, but he trusted that I'd be able to. There were two of them of differing sizes... I picked the smaller one because the larger one was big enough that it would kind of steal focus, make it look more like I'm wearing a heart choker thingy than a collar that has a heart on it.

With the smaller one hanging from the front of the collar, it looks very... pet-like.

<BLUSH STYLE="MACKENZIE">Which I like. A lot.</BLUSH>

Simple things, but very full of meaning. For reasons beyond our control we didn't get to spend as much time online with each other on The Day In Question as we might otherwise have liked to, but we both count the day a success... and it can really only get better from here.

---

The Conversation We're Not Having Here: How much it sucks, how much it's a fake holiday, how much Hallmark invented it. See Cat's eloquent rebuttal to all this.

I'm having an interesting sort of roundtable discussion via email with my sister and one of my brothers, about reading and literature and the state thereof and where it's going. This made me look up my previous post about narrative and the increasing complexity of literature, where I noticed that syphilis_jane made an observation I didn't catch the first time around about how Homer's epics were shaped by their medium, which was originally oral.

She's right, of course... I was approaching the subject primarily from the viewpoint of how increasingly sophisticated art begets a more sophisticated audience which allows for even more sophistication in art, but it's important not to neglect the technical side.

I think it's important to stop and clarify that there are two or three distinct "Homers" involved here. If we're discussing the works that we know and have today, then the "Homer" we're talking about is the person who set them down, whatever his name was. There is also the legendary Homer of muse-like stature, who may or may not have existed, and there's the poet who popularized the tellings that were eventually written down, whose name may or may not have been "Homer".

She was talking about the last one. This ancient poet did not create the characters or the stories... in fact, The Iliad in particular is very obviously only part of what would have been a stock story familiar to then-contemporary. It contains a lot of what really amount to "Now, As You Know..."-type references. As syphilis_jane pointed out, the narrative structure is simplistic in part because it was an oral art form. In order for it to be effectively transmitted from person to person, it had to be memorable and memorizable.

Thus it consists largely of short, punchy hooks that are easy to remember and allow for improvisation. Actual tellings probably varied considerably in complexity... a gifted teller would be able to "zoom in" when he sensed his audience was interested and skip ahead when he feared he was losing them. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the figures who made it into the version we have today were originally ad-libbed in to a specific performance where they were locally-revered heroes.

But the underlying structure of the story was simple because it had to be in order to last. Writing changed that... its proliferation as an artistic medium changed that. The written versions of Homer's epics are identified as belonging to a specific person where "the story of the fall of Troy" or "the story of Odysseus's voyage" weren't because it contains a number of personal embellishments and unique touches that were never part of stock stories when they were a purely oral form.

There is dialogue in Homer's Iliad, but it's not exactly conversation... it's more just a bunch of speechifying. Achilles says a speech and then Agamemnon makes a speech in answer. It's all very parliamentary. Why is this? Because the lines were written for an orator and because changes in which character is speaking had to be clearly identified in the text. When poets became dramatists and started writing lines for multiple speakers they moved away from this... there's still a lot of speechifying in Greek drama, but there's also more give and take, something more like an actual conversation among real people. This was a huge leap forward in terms of the art form. You won't find characters like those of Sophocles among the works of Homer because Homer had less room for characterization.

These sorts of advances aren't limited to the interconnected world of literature and drama. Music has undergone a similar evolution... much of what we know of vocal music, in fact, grew out of the need for orators to be able to project their voices in a pleasing fashion. That the word "music" refers to the Muses demonstrates how little divide there once was between what we now regard as the separate worlds of drama, literature, and music.

Have you ever bought sheet music? Or looked up guitar tablatures online? Chances are if you did, it was because there was a song you liked that you wanted to know how to play. Once upon a time, though, this was how music was recorded and how it was broadcast. It was the MP3 player. It was the compact disk. It was the radio. In its absence, musical arrangements still had managed to travel far and wide and to last for ages, but musical notation simplified and codified a means for this to happen and thus helped bring about innovation and increasing complexity.

In 19th century America, people would buy the latest and most popular tunes from traveling salesmen who would demonstrate the pieces (some carrying miniature pianos for it), or they'd order it and the first time they heard it would be when they successfully played it. This, of course, meant that simple tunes that a person of modest talent could pick out on a piano could travel faster and further than complex arrangements for multiple instruments... and the only way to hear a band play (for any value and size of "band") was still to go see a band.

The advent of audio recording and playback meant that the only place where complexity was a barrier was at the production end... once a song was recorded, it could travel anywhere that there was a suitable mechanism for playback. New tools are lowering the barriers at the production end of things all the time, too.

Now, there is certainly something to be said for live theater and live music. There is also something enjoyable about getting together and making music with a group of people if you all have the talent for it (or if none of you do... your mileage may vary considerably in a mixed group). An interesting side note in all of this is how none of the newer forms have ever really supplanted the older ones. But innovations in an art form lead to new art forms, which lead to further innovations... such is progress.

Aside from sophistication begetting sophistication and innovation begetting innovation, there's a third element at work wherever those two are in play, and that's democratization. Innovation involves breaking with convention, which means it requires people who are willing to Do It Wrong. Insiders can innovate, and they might find less resistance to their innovations than outsiders will, but innovation is often the result of a horde of barbarians successfully knocking down the gates of culture and taking it for themselves. Anything that throws the gates open wide is going to lead to further innovation.

It's fashionable to focus on how much "unfiltered crap" will also be produced by such openings, but the cultural trends that allowed Shakespeare to produce his plays weren't unique to him. We can assume that 90% of everything played upon Elizabethan stages was crap, too.

Innovations in technology lead to innovations in form, which leads to further sophistication in art. Sophistication in art leads to sophistication in audience. Both technological innovations and audience sophistication lead to democratization of art, which leads to further innovation and sophistication.

Progress, progress, progress.

Related: I haven't had the spoons to keep up with my own work, mush less someone else's, but as I recover myself I'm looking around the net more again. yuki_onna has written some interesting things about her experiences self-publishing. I've got a bunch of long blog posts half-written on various topics but I'll probably have more to say about this in the next week or so. There's a lot I agree with in it, but also places where we're looking at the same set of facts and have different conclusions... one thing that was interesting to me is that in reading her point of view, I realize some interesting things about my own. More on that later.

s00j concert was perfectly lovely. s00j was perfectly lovely, as well.

I used to feel slightly embarrassed that when I thought about my favorite ones of her songs (and it must be plural, because with a body of work that has as much breadth and depth as Ms. Tucker's, it's difficult to have one single favorite), my mind invariably goes to songs that are at the very least co-compositions of stealthcello, (Alligator In The House, Tough Titty Cupcakes, and I believe The Notorious Salad of Doom) or are the songs she's written as companion pieces inspired by the work of yuki_onna ("Taglio!", the entire Palimpsest album, "City of Marrow"... really, too many to name).

But of course, this is silly. Art cannot exist in a vacuum any more than fire can. Musicians know this. That's why they jam, and why they cover, and why they share. It's why it's important that authors read for pleasure, and that we experience stories in other media. Cross-pollination. Hybridization. Good stuff. The way Cat and s00j play their creativity off each other has got to enrich them both immeasurably. s00j has been premiering a song she wrote based on a painting by this artist as part of kylecassidy's massive collaboration meme. Every song she writes has a seed somewhere. Whether it's in a random phrase someone said ("Ravens in the Library"... which just might elbow its way into a top slot in my head if I can hear it enough times for it to stick) or a painting or a book, it's still her creative genius that's grabbing the reins.

As s00j herself said of one of her songs that has now become a Tricky Pixie song, "it's like my little song is growing up."

So, yeah. Creativity good. Collaboration good.

Anyway, on the subject of things that are slightly embarrassing... I may have said this a few times before, but since it came up again tonight, it bears repeating (or possibly saying for the first time). If I meet you somewhere, and then you see me again, please introduce yourself and remind me where I know you from. I'm not pulling a e-celebrity diva thing, I swear. It's an "everybody's brain is wired different" thing. I honestly don't remember people very well. It isn't personal. I know s00j and omnisti when I go to their gigs because they're always doing s00j and omnisti things when I get there. If they hired a couple of other skinny white people to mess around with guitars and speakers before the concert, I'd never know. At family gatherings around the holidays and such I end up doing a lot of smiling and nodding until I catch on to who it is I'm talking to.

Knowing I am going to inevitably make a giant fool out of myself has generally kept me away from large public gatherings as an adult, once it was in my power to avoid such things. But as I learned from one of my beloved train family from back in March has taught me, it's far less embarrassing to just flat out be honest about it. So, I re-met a very nice person whose name I think she said was Aggie (that could be wrong as I didn't think to write it down until I was in the car, sadly) who was at the concert at bryirfox's and I met another person named Lora (I think for the first time) who heard about the concert here because she is a gamer and she reads my blog, and now that I've written about them I'm much more likely to remember who they are, though I still probably won't recognize them on sight.

This is not a judgment on anyone's relative worth as a person. It's not something I can just "try harder" and overcome... believe me, I've tried, and I'm learning tricks to get better at it. It's just the way my brain works, and the way it doesn't work.

The phrase "admitting you have a problem is the first step" is a bit trite, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. It doesn't always accomplish anything on its own, but it's necessary... you can't come up with plans to tackle a problem if you don't recognize its existence. I'm learning to use reminders (via my computer and my phone)... tonight, for instance, I had one set up to tell me to thank s00j and omnisti for bearing some wristbands to our folks at WisCon, and one to ask them to convey my personal thanks to Betsy Tinney for supporting me.

Well, actually, the first one just said "Thank omnisti". I spent a good portion of the concert trying to figure out what I was supposed to thank him for and wondering if he would find it weird if I told him thanks for whatever he did for me and asked him if he remembered what it was. Still learning how to make the most of this reminder thing. Getting an unrelated text message from popelizbet is what jarred that memory loose, since she was in charge of wristband distribution.

You folks who read this know how much I value popelizbet. When next we meet in person... and we will... if she's not already wearing a nametag, she's going to have to remind me who she is. Likewise with Cat Valente, who I mention roughly a million times a day. So it really is nothing personal. That's just how it is. I can be slightly embarrassed and admit it or I can live my life in terror of being terribly embarrassed by not recognizing dear friends and end up hiding from them, and by extension, life.