Advent, Christmas, Fimbulwinter, Epiphany

Where to begin? Not with another apology for letting my blog languish so long, I hope.

Immediately before I left for a long Christmas vacation, my trusty laptop went kaput. I ordered a new laptop, which I had shipped to where I would be on Christmas Eve, and alternated between packing and file recovery the next day. Everything important was saved, I'm pleased to say. What wasn't important wasn't lost--I just haven't bothered moving everything off the old computer because the process is a pain. But all my writing and work files are here, and I didn't have to worry for very long that they were irretrievable.

Since I had just wrapped up a big project that had to be out before Christmas, and I hadn't lined up any work for the week I would be on vacation, being without a computer was almost relaxing. It gave me more time to relax and really focus on the things that are important in life, like food, naps, movies, and presents.

I came home with a supply of good literature (Stephen King's special extra-long edition of The Stand), good games (the first season of Telltale Games' The Walking Dead, as well as the lost trove of my Super Nintendo titles finally uncovered by my dutiful sister in exchange for custody of the N64 and its games*), good music (Florence + the Machine's album "Lungs," which provided the soundtrack for the drives between New York and Philadelphia), a great movie (Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai), good chocolate, and two bottles of Sky River mead, one of a handful of Pacific Northwest beverages that I miss almost as much as my friends who still live there.**

If you've read the news about as much as I have, you've probably noticed that it's cold all over the place. That includes here in Maryland, and although I don't claim to be nearly as hard off as folks in the Midwest, or the folks who recently had to get rescued off an Antarctic research boat, or the people who just had to be rescued off the boat that rescued those people. But it's pretty cold here, and by "here" I mean "inside."

As it happens, my contentious downstairs housemates moved out on New Year's Eve. And it turned out that they called the gas company as they moved out and had the gas shut off. Do I know why? No. Am I going to speculate about their motives or possible negligence in a public forum? Heck no. Can I see my own breath in the dining room? Yes.

If Pepco is as good as its word, this will be sorted out on Monday, which will be very nice. In the meantime, Girlfriend and I have been keeping very close to our favorite space heater.

Not that I want to complain, or, more correctly, not that I want to complain any more. I am not nearly as miserable about the situation as you might think I have right to be. But a maxim I'm coming to believe--and one I beg everyone not to abuse--is that if a situation must be bad it behooves it to also be interesting. It also helps to spend the time in good company, and I suspect I would be a great deal grouchier about this if the school year had resumed on the second.

* If playing Dungeons & Dragons has taught me anything, it's that people will delve for your lost treasure and fight the necessary monsters for you if you let them in exchange for a share of the loot.

** Hey, I said "almost."

Oh, Christmas tree

There is a tree in my living room because Jesus. Sometimes the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Atonement seem a bit distant or abstract, but I have a pretty tree with lights on, and I can be thankful for the excuse to have it.

My favorite phase of the Christmas tree life cycle is actually when the lights have gone up but the ornaments haven't. That's the phase we are in right now here: the lights went up the night we brought the tree home, but except for the star on top, there are no other decorations. Not that I will regret when the decorating process is finished, but there's no rush.

Because our living room window is perpetually foggy at night, the view from outside is blurry and lovely.

I like the cold months at the end of the year. November is November, and even before the invention of NaNoWriMo it was always (for me) the month of my birthday and then Thanksgiving. Then December is Christmas, aesthetically if not strictly temporally. Yes, screw Black Friday, shopping season, and aggressive holiday creep. That stuff doesn't come into my living room, though.

I've gotten to the part of my 12 Dancing Princesses retelling where I describe the wondrous underworld (which comes later in the story than usual), and the Christmas aesthetic has definitely influenced that. (Aw, now I've gone and spoiled all my imagery, says half of my brain. You can't spoil imagery, you idiot, says the other.) It's funny how things come together that way--I needed some seed. I wonder what would have filled the spot if it wasn't December. Maybe nothing. My underworld would have been all the blander in that case.

Speaking of bland, I started playing Skyrim again the other day, after talking to friend who enjoyed it more than I did. I realized that I had somehow gotten sucked into spending all my time in-game doing the things I found most boring. Inventory management, clearing out generic bandit strongholds, trying to distinguish between grey-and-grey moral quandaries--screw it all. I'm playing at an entirely different pace now, and I'm finally seeing why people like the game.

Part of the trick is more deliberate characterization. My original character was too much like myself, and too much of a blank, for me to make him sufficiently amoral. But moral paragons don't belong in a game where you can rob someone blind by putting a bucket over their head.

In RPGs I do recreationally some of the same things I do pseudoprofessionally as a writer, namely characterize. In both cases, I apparently need to be repeatedly reminded of the importance of distancing myself from my characters.

I really thought I was better than needing to be reminded of that, but maybe that's something else I need reminders about occasionally.

How about that weather?

It's strange what specific memories can be called up by an exact feeling you'd forgotten ever having before. I'm going about my business when a place or a desire comes into my memory, apropos of nothing. I walked to the mall today to get myself out of the house, get some things, and treat myself to some food-court teriyaki.* (Sarku, incidentally, became a favorite commissary of mine back when I worked at the Northgate Mall. I definitely never expected one to turn up in Maryland, any more than I would expect to see a Taco Del Mar in Florida.** It feels like the Seattle embassy in Hyattsville.) Wow, I lost my train of thought. So, I was coming back from the mall, and as I was coming in the door I had the sudden urge to play a rented copy of Earthbound.

I rented Earthbound several weekends in, I think, the late summer and/or early school year of 1995. It's one of the games I just loved, and if it hadn't been for the hype around the Nintendo 64 I probably would have asked for it for that Christmas.***

I don't know exactly what brought this up. There are two sets of stairs between the street and my front door, now, just like there were then. Coming inside I felt a very particular change in temperature and odor. A specific, faintly musty smell on cool air always makes me nostalgic for my parents' basement, and that was some of it.

You might have noticed that the weather outside elicited my sense memory of a summer day on Long Island. I'm not a fan of the weather in Maryland right now. Today would have been a very pleasant day in late May, or a welcome reprieve in July, but on February 1 of a winter that's had approximately one inch of snow, I kind of resent it. Not least on Girlfriend's behalf--shouldn't she get a snow day or two. I don't think getting your third day of school off for earthquake repairs really compensates.

Until next time.

* Firefox's spell-check doesn't seem to recognize "teriyaki," but it suggests I change it to "sukiyaki." What an odd lexical phenomenon.
** There are those, too. Seattle's not that special, apparently.
*** I did get it for Christmas eventually, with Chrono Trigger. A very good year in that regard. This was back when there was a place called Funcoland, and before I realized that the price of a video game can go up as it gets older, otherwise I would have produced a more merciful Christmas list.

Merry Belated Christmas

Christmas has come and gone. Parents and friends visited, extended families seen. Tree acquired and decorated. I enjoyed both Christmas dinner with Girlfriend's family and post-Christmas brunch with my own. Christmas remains my favorite season. I know that doesn't make me particularly special, but I'll add my voice to the chorus.

I had the opportunity to observe some of the family's newer members, and I noticed more than I think I ever had before how simultaneously jading and heartwarming a child at Christmas can be. I witnessed true, unvarnished joy, elicited by the satisfaction of un-self-conscious greed. We grown ups know that there are right things and wrong things to be happy about, and that interpersonal duties require that we never become fully absorbed in our own pleasure. Contrast with a five-year-old, concerned with nothing beyond what else he gets, at the moment he gets it.

In terms of my own haul, this Christmas has given me cause to reconsider my original plan of getting a job. It looks like I'll actually be needing that time to give adequate attention to the things I got. The acquisitional highlights of the season include another year of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Ip Man, Ip Man 2, Batman: Arkham City, and freaking Skyrim. Preliminary assessments estimate these items to comprise approximately two zillion hours of media. Also, my parents gave me a Kindle, which contains a theoretically infinite amount of text. I started down that road by acquiring Alexander Pope's translation of The Odyssey for free, and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for 95 cents. That strange little device has revived my likelihood of reading books that I had previously written off as just too big--not in terms of length but in terms of weight. I certainly would have re-read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by now if my neck didn't cramp at the mere thought of carrying it to and from work every day.

But, since neither Skyrim nor indiscriminate reading comes with health insurance, I grudgingly retain employment as Plan A.

I spent some time this week watching the meteoric collapse of Ocean Marketing, but I think that affair actually merits a separate post, and it seemed appropriate to do the Christmas post first.

Two blog-related items of of minimal importance:
1) This blog is approaching its 1,000th page view, which is both neat and pathetic.
2) I've decided to experiment with labels. It sounds like fun, and what's the worst that can happen? It might even make the blog more organized to future readers.

Post-Christmast Post

Still winding down from a long, eventful Christmas vacation.  The blizzard which hit the east coast was impressive, and nixed plans for Broadway.  My own little neighborhood was plowed out fairly promptly, which made me glad I wasn't still in Seattle (assuming the same snow, of course).

There has been plenty of Christmas media, even if Phantom of the Opera wasn't in the cards.  From Girlfriend, I acquired Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Of this I have read a bit, but not gotten into the meat of it.  It's on the stack.  As are several books by Connie Willis, author of the amazing Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, which I actually got for my birthday.  But all this goes on the same docket.

Also received Machine of Death, a collection of short stories with several interesting things about it.  First is that it is largely the product of the webcomic community, specifically the axis of Ryan North-David Malki! et al.  Driven to vanity-publishing by the collective obscurity of their contributors, they decided to ask as many people as possible to buy the book the same day, to see how high they could get on Amazon's bestseller list.  It turned out that they hit #1, and stayed there for more than a day.  After that, naturally, publishers took notice.

The names I recognize from this endeavor are all very clever people, and I expect to enjoy what they've written.  Moreover, stories of obscure authors suddenly selling large numbers of books warm the gelid cockles of my heart.

Speaking of "gelid" (and also, "lambent" and "incondign"), I finished The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever the other day.  While I enjoyed it, I'm left with the odd sense that I have very little to compare it to, other than The Lord of the Rings, which isn't really fair.  Apparently I just haven't read much epic fantasy.  This dismays me somewhat, but I don't know how or how vigorously I should set about rectifying it.  Lately I began to wonder if there is a convenient place to jump into The Wheel of Time rather than starting at the very beginning.

My general exposure to the world of speculative fiction should be improved by my new subscription to the appropriately-named Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Other media includes Halo: Reach.  I haven't played very far into it but I've always appreciated Bungie's approach to storytelling, getting interesting stories told without losing sight of the peculiarities of their medium.  If anything I'm a little disappointed by what looks like a shift in this game toward longer cut scenes and more breaks in the action to focus on characterization.  But at this early point I will give them props for one thing: Reach is the only game I can think of that makes dramatic irony a cornerstone of its feel.  Specifically, in the first 15 seconds or so of the game its established that your character dies at the end.  Surely this has been done before, but I can't remember it.