gender genie!
i found this is the nanowrimo forums, which i still lurk from time to time in search of interesting things to read. i'll have to find the one on people who hate nano. that was a hoot.
anyway this cute little tool can tell your gender by the way you write by analyzing certain key words. there's a definite difference in the way men and woman communicate, for instance, a woman might say, "it's a nice day, isn't it?" whereas a man might say "it's a nice day." women, it may be infered, are looking to engage in conversation, be agreeable or have the assertion affirmed by a second party for a variety of reasons. men don't tend to mince words nor do they seem to care about getting their buddies involved. can you imagine the sports bar conversations they'd have? i have one running through my head right now. it needs to stop.
anyway, i stuck in four pieces of fiction. and it told me the writer was male every single time. the most overwhelmingly male piece was "a whisper in the ghost," a short story that can be found on my website, talon's tall tales (link over on the side there), under the "BONUS!!" section of starbursts and shadows. why is it so overwhelmingly male? i don't know. it counts certain words as male and others as female. it's a usage thing. maybe because a majority of the writers i read are men, i've picked up on their usage. if i'd been reading nothing but danielle steele and the like, i'm sure it would have been a different story. of course, the fact that the first person narrator of "a whisper in the ghost" is male may have influenced that just a bit. but this just reaffirms my belief that i'm a man trapped in a woman's body. writing isn't the only thing i do like a man.
go to http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.php to try the gender genie on your own writing.
happy holidays to all. i wish you all peace both in your hearts and in your homes.

take 2
tried to do this earlier but had nothing to say. just one of those days where i feel all my energy fading into the shadows, as if part of me has left with out saying goodbye or at least leaving a note. i feel like a jangled ghost of myself sitting in the middle of a dark graveyard, all the headstones and bare tree branches scratched out in grey and white and cold but not because it's december but because of absence. and i read all these things other people write and wonder why i bother writing anything at all. i will never be a published author. never. even if i had the balls to submit stuff, nothing is good enough for publication, despite how much i liked writing it or like rereading what i wrote. sometimes i wanna take down my website out of embarrassment and vow never to write again, but i've felt that way innumerable times in the 18 years i've been writing, and i always come back to it. i'm in the middle of something of a block. after nanowrimo, i wrote two short stories, cucumber and indian summer halloween, both of which had been bothering me all november. then i put this year's nano crap on my website. since then i've been writing bits about a story i've wanted to write for over four years now and just never felt comfortable enough with the characters to write. now i know what i'm doing, since parts of the story have been told in the derelict ship episode and in brain damage. and a little bit in samurai star. but the problem is that i've still got a bunch of other stuff to write. i have six folders of notes and scenes plus a short story i've been writing to keep myself sane at work. i hate telling any of my characters to wait because i love them all so much. but my muse seems to have passed out in a drunken stupor (again), and they have no choice but to wait. if i could take a whole month off to write (not november), i could make some headway. i put everything on back burners for so long that i can't get the front burners fired up again, and of course, there's that sneaky little old story that i adore that needs a little tlc which is a simple thing of cutting (at least) two scenes and getting the passage of some time a little clearer. of course, i'd be better off without distractions like the internet, hockey and books to devour.
oops i forgot to do the christmas cards. i knew there was something i was supposed to be doing other than reading neil gaiman's journal.

boredom
I should probably use something a bit more legible as a font here. But I like this one very much. I've used it extensively in creating cover "art" in photoshop for a series of detective stories. I just like the way it's all broken. It makes me think of very old newspapers or dusty books you shouldn't read, and my detective stories defintely count as that latter.
Of course, as far as I know, only one person is reading this crap I'm putting up here, so I'll worry about legibility later. I'm already not liking how very few changes I can make on this thing. But just like with hotmail, ya get what ya pay for. In both cases, I ain't paying nothing, so that's what I get.
Like I care.

holiday cheer
Got up early do to Christmas shopping today since I hadn't had a chance any other weekend. I don't really like Christmas for a number of reasons, but I can't bring myself to boycott it. Because I like the essence of it. I like the idea of giving, not just material gifts, but the gift of love to friends, family and fellow humans. There is no holiday that isn't a commerical specter of itself, and of course, you have the invented days of mother's day and father's day. But I try to see past all that. I don't need to spend vast amounts of money to get meaningless shit for people. I still spend more than I should, but who doesn't. But it's nothing lavish or special. It's just something I want to give to someone I love. That's all it needs to be. But when I got home, my husband had to go and taunt me about how he loves me more than I love him because he spent more money on me than I did on him. He claims he was joking, but that kinda hurt my feelings. Okay, not kinda. That hurt a lot. For the record, I spent 52 dollars and 98 cents on his stuff. I got him a new pillow and a new quilt. Not what wives get their husbands? Yeah, well, that's what I get mine because that's what I want to give him. Because his pillow is flat and his quilt is old and falling apart. We sleep with separate blankets because I get cold easier and we're both too twitchy to share.
But the money shouldn't matter. It's the love that comes with it. I don't wanna say it's the thought that counts. It's not. It's the love.
I continue to try to celebrate Christmas for the love, joy and peace that it should represent and because I think that when I stop trying to feel that and share that, I will have become too cynical for this world.

a threat of snow
it snowed for two seconds today around 1:45 or so, and the people i work with lapsed into a strange psychotic episode. i have witnessed this phenomenon before. (whoa, i'm impressed. i can spell that word while drunk!)
i think i am going to establish a center for the study of snow psychosis, concentrating on just such behaviour as was displayed this afternoon, all day really, that was just the peak of it. and there may be a subgroup devoted to insane bad weather driving behaviour. provided i get adequate funding that is.

thoughts on ice
these are some things that were going through my head monday after sitting in traffic for about an hour and a half on my way to work. orginally posted on another message board preceded by the lyrics to the beatles "i'm so tired" because i was so tired ...
there was just something wrong about the silence and gloom last night. i laid there for an hour. okay, so what? that's normal for me to take an hour or more to fall asleep. but i could not close my eyes. i got up. trundled down the stairs, in the dark, went to the kitchen, got a glass of water, lugged myself back up, in the dark. it was so cold, and i could smell ice and smoke in the air, that rich, tangy smell of wood smoke rising up through sooty chimnies. i hate cold. i hate the ache in my hands and the gloom, even on the bright days like today ended up being. winter never used to be so harsh on me. wonder what it's had against me these last few years. must be the tropical blood in me -- my grandfather is filipino. but i wrapped myself up in a blanket and poked my nose into another world until about two thirty when i decided getting through the work day on nothing but caffeine was probably not a good idea. things still felt wrong. my husband was sleeping in the bed for the first time in three days, and he had flipped and flopped himself into a little ball in the middle of the bed. how a six foot three man curls like that, i still can't figure. but at least that part of the bed was warm.
woke up to my 6:00 alarm thinking i ought to give myself another day of bedrest, just to make sure whatever pet virus i had was really dead and gone, but by six thirty i was dragging my ass out of bed going no can't miss any more work. damn my sense of duty.
shoulda listened to that bad omen feeling of after midnight silence creeping up my back like that. looked like a light snow had fallen over night. stuck to the cars and the tops of the buildings, and that was about it. had to gently gently coax my key into the lock and turn it carefully so as not to twist it like i did once before. thought the door handle was gonna break off i had to yank so hard. my hands, bundled up, were already hurting. gah, i wanna go back to bed. to make matters worse, i gotta feed my power steering leak. stupid piece of shit. i pop the hood but it doesn't pop very well. great. i had to take my gloves off to get my fingers under the hood to pry it up enough to open the damn thing. and that leak is so fucking thirsty i could stand there and give it a whole bottle and it wouldn't stop squealing. so now my fingers are killing me. one of ems got little red welts under it from touching the icy metal. have i mentioned i hate winter? i wanna move to phoenix. or new orleans. i can handle hurricanes. ice, not so much.
gloves back on i gotta scrape my damn windows. but the air is so still it doesn't feel so cold. then i realize what that bad feeling was. my tires slip a bit as i turn out onto church street. oh great. drving will be fun today.
i was fine for the first fifteen minutes and then all the cars stopped. shit. i saw five accidents and one TTA bus with a blown tire. i saw morons rushing up the shoulders on the over passes where all the ice was. fucking stupid. i just hung back, let em go. i'm not in a hurry. at least the heater in my piece of shit works. and the tape deck, sort of. i'm listening to the las. you know, the brit boys who originally did there she goes. good good stuff. that started at seven thirty. i got to work at ten to nine. yes, i was in traffic that long.
and all day, i sit there thinking about wrecks. and i'm so tired i can't tell how i've done the amount of work i've done. i think about my car spinning out, flipping over, breaking my bones, crushing me. unpleasant. i'm tired i want to go home. i eat on my 20 minute break so i can skip my lunch and work until five to get eight hours. fuck overtime today.
the worst one was at duke street, about halfway up the durham freeway. a car was upside down on the hood of another car. no ambulances. i don't know if anyone was hurt or killed and i don't wanna know. i don't wanna look. i hate car wrecks. i will always avert my eyes. always. i just wanna drive, get where i'm going. i don't understand why people gotta stop and stare. i guess it's just a "glad that ain't me" kinda thing.
well, one time it was.
i was fifteen. i hadn't even learned to drive yet. i think my mom was terrified of trying to teach me, since i was the oldest. she'd never taught a kid to drive, and i don't think she had any confidence in my ability to do so. we had gone up to annapolis maryland to watch a navy v. air force academy football game. my clearest memories of the game are the fly over of f-16s before the start -- i love airplanes, love flight, was in airforce jrotc at the time, wanted to a fighter pilot -- and the falcon that was the air force academy's mascot. didn't get to have him on my wrist but i saw him close up. fucking beautiful. i loved his eyes.
we were cruising down i-95 on the way back home. it was dark, i was half asleep. long day, long drive. suddenly i hear my step dad say oh shit.
you know those whirly kind of rides at fairs and stuff, the kind that spin and gravity pins you to the side but its all fun and games so you scream in glee? this felt like that. spinning, pinned in place by gravity -- pulling g's, like a fighter pilot. but those screams weren't glee. i wasn't even sure i was screaming. i felt air passing over my vocal cords, heard distant voices. what i really heard was glass breaking, metal crumpling like christmas wrapping paper, my mother screaming.
for me, it was impact that was the worst. i didn't feel any impact whatsoever, just the sensation of it. for years, in my nightmares, i felt the sensation of impact, heard glass crashing around my head, heard everyone screaming and yelling except me. i was an ineffectual screamer. just air over impotent flaps of tissue somewhere in the recesses of my throat. one night, i lay awake in my bed and listened to a car crash that i knew was not happening anywhere but my head. i was awake. i know that because it was a night i couldn't close my eyes like last night.
none of us were hurt, thank god or whoever for that. the really creepy part happened while my mom, my brother and i were sitting in the ambulance while my step dad talked to the cops outside. a volvo full of college students slowed down to take pictures of the crash. and they got rear ended for their trouble. that sound ... i went hot and cold and quivered.
so i don't wanna look, okay. nothing to see here move along.
and then there was the shape.
the afternoon that i graduated from college in may of 97 ended kinda overcast and humid as all fuck. 460 turned into a parking lot. there were helicopters, cops, ambulances, tow trucks, flat bed wreckers. took over an hour to get by that wreck, and when we did, i saw on a gurney at the back of an ambulance, a white sheet pulled up over a familiar shape.
so no, i don't wanna look.
i don't have crash dreams any more. i'm not skittish in traffic any more, unless i'm a passenger in a car being driven by a maniac, as my husband sometimes is. bastard he knows i hate that but it's like it's some competition. it's not fucking nascar, okay. if someone passes you, who the fuck cares? you are not safe at speed, no matter how taut you feel and wide open and reflexes on a hair trigger. no no, dear speed wants to kill you.
i'm so tired ...
i'm gonna go watch football.

this is ....
... interesting, I suppose. It was there. I was there. That excuse didn't work with the incident involving the sheep, the duct tape and the dynamite. But maybe it'll work here.