Calamity Cove

I need somewhere to sleep the nights of June 25 and June 26. My original plans fell through.*

I don’t have a car, and I strongly prefer not to be late/miss part of the (expensive!) writing workshop because I screw up the bus schedule. So I need a place on Capital Hill–then I can walk there! If you live on Cap Hill, or if you’re staying in a hotel for the Locus Awards, please consider having me.

Reasons you should offer to house me for two nights:

1. I won’t get cooties on you or your stuff. I will bring my own bedding, and I definitely want the floor. (It’s possible I would even prefer your porch/balcony.)

2. You won’t have to see me, speak with me, or acknowledge me unnecessarily. I’ll either be at the workshop, or doing homework from the workshop for the entire weekend. (If you like, I’m sure we can arrange to have dinner and hang out a bit… after all, I don’t make a lot of social trips outside Bellingham, and whoever you are, I probably like you! I just mean you won’t be obligated to entertain me.)

3. I’m perfectly capable of wearing a pair of headphones as I sleep (or all the time) to tune out whatever it is you’re doing with that jackhammer and those aardvarks.

4. I don’t expect charity. I don’t have much $$$ left after the workshop tuition, but I can pony up about $30 a night. Or we can trade slave labor! I can brush your teeth for you or something.

5. Being in my near vicinity is scientifically proven to give you super powers. And not shitty Aquaman powers, either, but like, laser eyes.

6. You can gawk at my gorgeous new hairstyle/color(s). No, I’m not showing you a photo. That takes away incentive!

* A few people have already offered to house me, but I’m hesitant for various reasons–they live too far away, they already have company, etc. So I probably won’t have to sleep in an alley, but my options at the moment, in spite of the fantastic spirit in which they were offered, are less than optimal.

Photo by John Poor

I didn’t look much like Lady Gaga, but it was close enough for most drunk people to figure out who I was, and then holler encouraging nonsense at me from blocks away. They were only excited because they didn’t see this photo:

(You don't want to know. But you can probably guess.)

However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At the beginning of the evening, I looked like this:

Click the jump to see the rest of the step-by-step process! » Continue Reading…

I'm thoughtful. And CLASSY.

All joking cat sex aside, my mother is amazing. She’s good at anything she tries to do. She can craft, garden, cook, sew, sculpt, collage, paint, fix up old antiques to look less crappy than they really are, and she is an unending fount of intuitive patience for those she loves (and even those she doesn’t). There’s more, but I don’t want to make you feel bad about yourself compared to how great my mom is.

Here, let me show you a photo!

You can see where I learned my classiness.

All right, all right. Maybe this is a good time to show you this photo. You can see by the way she’s looking at me that she’s used to me posting those other things, and yet she still loves me. Best mother ever!

Classy women like this can easily pretend I'm not their least favorite child.

(BTW I took that photo of those cats last year and I’ve been waiting for a chance to use it. And no, they’re not my cats, who are spayed and neutered because I am responsible like my Mom taught me to be.)

Bandito’s Burritos is a delicious little restaurant located on W. Holly Street in downtown Bellingham, Washington. One of their major attractions is a well-stocked salsa bar featuring home-made toppings from 1 to 5+ stars, in flavors from savory to sweet. Today, they had this:

If I worked there, I wouldn't have written the "ha ha." Which is why I'm not allowed in the food service industry.

While so far this salsa is my favorite April Fool’s joke (that sucker was NOT one star), I keep seeing awesome contributions to today’s fun, so I’m going to compile a list. This will be updated throughout the day as I find more jokes.

Baby Skeksis born at Franklin Park Zoo
Unicorn Meat for sale on ThinkGeek
Changeable tattoo kit for sale on ThinkGeek
Man from future arrested at Large Hadron Collider (highlight: “It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.”)
Starbucks adds two new sizes of drinks
Unique colony of penguins (this probably isn’t April Fool’s, but it was sent to me today, so it counts!)
Entmoot convenes to discuss same-sex marriage

I haven’t been around lately. I lost my camera somewhere (I think inside my sty house, fortunately,) so I don’t have much to show you. The holidays bumped up my hours at work. I’m busily working on Christmas gifts. And my dog is really sick.

Usually if I put a camera in her face, she gets up and ruins the shot. But apparently just as with humans, she models her best when she hasn't kept down a meal in three weeks.

Skip this paragraph if you don’t want a summary of the problem: she vomits up everything she eats in spite of diet changes and four different medications. Both our regular vet and the second opinion vet had the same ideas about how to proceed with diagnosis, so I trust they’re doing the right thing, but it doesn’t put back the thirteen pounds she’s lost, or stop her from looking humiliated every time she makes a mess on the floor. She clearly doesn’t distinguish between urine and vomit, and of course, it’s not like I can explain to her that I don’t care, I just want her to get better so she can snap at hobos who menace me for spare change, and then we can laugh about it together while we eat cotton candy and ride the ferris wheel. And bark at fireworks.

I'm pretty sure that as with most things that move around out of her reach, she thinks the fireworks are squirrels.

Today, when I walked her to the vet, she was so weak I had to carry her a few times. Two good Samaritans in station wagons pulled over, one right after the other, and asked if we needed a ride, which was really awesome of them. I explained that Shai is sick, but her favorite thing is walks, so I was letting her walk as long as she could and then giving her a lift. She was just as happy to be carried today as she was last June:

The desert pavement was too hot for her feet. And that is how I became Jesus Christ the Shepherd, except with a slobbery, fat mutt instead of a cute little lamb.

We’re going to try a liquid diet in case she has pyloric stenosis. I really hope that’s it, since if this doesn’t work, the next step is an endoscopy, and after that, who knows. : ( This dog actually saved me from getting my ass kicked by some meth dealers (true story, ask me about it next time you see me), so I owe her a lot. I hate seeing her wasting away and miserable like this. I liked it better when she looked like this:

It only took two syringes of heroin to get her to sit still on that rock long enough to take a photo.

Want to hear the stupidest part? This is turning me into a superstitious idiot. The only time she went a whole day without puking was right after I caved and put down plastic everywhere. Irony temporarily cured my dog! And I was going to buy her one of those little coats that protect their fur from rain, because she likes to go on walks even in the winter, but now I’m avoiding it. Because I just know if I go get her fitted and buy a nice, durable jacket that specifically fits her, irony will come back.

On a less depressing note:

Pyu pyu! Pyu pyu pyu!

I’ve never been trained as management. I’m learning by watching my boss. Who has ALSO never been trained as management. You’d think this was a recipe for disaster, but for some reason our store has the lowest turnover rate in the company. (Knock on wood!) Most of our employees have been here for four years or more, at a retail position where we routinely field more sexual harassment than a really hot prison guard. When and if our employees leave, they do so reluctantly, because they have to move or they’ve finished their degree.

While I’ve never been taught how to hire for a job, I was taught how to apply for a job while I was in high school. I learned that:

Your resumé should be as concise as possible. Managers are physically incapable of turning pages because they have giant, curved claws instead of fingers like normal humans.
You write in blue or black ink. Graphite will smudge on the manager’s wings and prevent it from lifting into the air properly.
You fill out every field. A manager’s CPU is confused by blank spaces in a query string.
You should dress slightly nicer than you would at the job. Managers should see you as a potential mate, but not a potential rival. Once you’re hired, you can dissuade them with the same bottled fox urine that gardeners use to keep away rabbits.
You never run from the interview. Managers will always pounce on a moving object and disembowel it with their powerful hind legs, even if it’s a Volkswagen or a tornado.

My manager Nicole is not a highly educated woman. She says things like, “volumptuous” and “would of,” and I tease her about it with all the ceaseless enery of a younger brother who found a juicy diary hidden under her mattress. But while Nicole isn’t highly educated, and that might cause some people not to take her seriously, she is by far one of the most competent human beings I’ve ever met.

When she hired a guy who filled out the application in pencil and wore blue jeans to his first and second interviews, I was understandably apprehensive, but he turned out to be great with customers, and just as good with the employees. He’s the kind of man who will drop what he’s doing to cover a shift or who brings coffee or little presents to the people sharing his shift. He even engages in low-stakes prank wars with me. (If you don’t know me well: pranks are my favorite social activity.)

Nicole wast taught in school just like I was, but I guess because she isn’t an evil, winged, predatory robot who has a deathly fear of fox urine, she has a different way of doing things. She recognizes that not everyone had the same opportunities in school. If they grew up in an area with poorly paid, poorly trained teachers, they might not have been properly warned about managers the way our more privileged applicants were. That doesn’t mean they’re less intelligent or less able to be personable and knowledgeable.

While I was weeding through the applications for really bad ones, my co-worker came up and pointed at how the applicant had included their references. “You’re not supposed to do that,” she said. “You’re supposed to say they’re available upon request.” She’s a very literal person, and it’s not surprising that she paid attention to what she was taught in school. But if she was doing the hiring, I wouldn’t be there. I wasn’t taught in school that managers are threatened by the proof that people respect you.

If you’re ever responsible for hiring someone, don’t let your CPU be confused by someone else’s search parameters. You’ll have less claws and disembowelings. And I’m sure you’ll find you can still fly.

A few weeks ago, I started writing a near-future science fiction story that explores what might become of Ushahidi and crisis reports via text messaging in the years to come.

A few days ago, I started seeing parts of my story unfold before my eyes every time I refreshed my Twitter account.

I live in the United States, where it is generally safe to have opinions, even loud ones, even unpopular ones, simply because you’re a human being and here we consider that a right. It means that when I see people’s opinions being ignored, crushed, or brutally silenced, I’m angry. And I’m five feet tall and my grandma can benchpress me, so what would I do about it?

Years ago, I could travel to the location of injustice and try to help with my hands–costly and dangerous, and I could never travel everywhere. I could petition my government to get involved. I could peacefully protest to encourage my fellow citizens to help with the petition. Or I could pray, which I’m sure has its internal uses, but frankly, I’m not convinced it has any immediate external power.

But the world has shifted, while and because we’ve been building technological toys for ourselves. We’ve accomplished powerful handheld computer/phones. We can instant message friends, play Tetris, download music, take pictures and shoot video. They’re pretty fun! And with Twitter, and later with Ushahidi (mark my words! and my fiction!), they’re going to change the world.

The streams in which our daily activities flow have shifted, subtly at first, but they’re beginning to pour into rivers, and those rivers are heavy with potential, heavy enough to carve canyons into the way things were. People are connecting, networking, coordinating, and preserving, and they’re using these Tetris-playing, photo-taking toys to obtain an audience.

As long as you have a phone, there is no longer revisionist history to erase your voice, to stomp out who you are and what you stand for and what you do about it. The Internet collects your Tweets, your blog posts, your YouTube videos. The Wayback Machine saves them for sweet eternity. You are immortal. If you have a phone and you’re close enough to a cell tower, you cannot be erased. You can die, but how many of us can suffer and die from one entity before the rest of the world will feel threatened by that entity and bitchslap its in its vile face? That is where this can go. Right now, injustice can be reported in real-time; some day, we can fight it in real-time.

The terrible things man does to man will never disappear, but we’re fumbling with a new way to fight it. Activism is as simple as changing the settings on your Twitter account to say you live in Tehran. It’s as simple as sharing this link:

Iran Election Cyberwar Guide for Beginners

…and letting other people decide whether or not they want to be a part of history. I hope you do.  I am.