Another slightly earthy-crunchy town in Vermont.

The Mothership has landed at her quilting retreat, so my sister and I have the day up here free. Because of my sadness, my sister has agreed to go and see THE DARK KNIGHT with me later today. (JOY!)

The WATCHMEN trailer I've seen recently looks awesome, HELLBOY II is till in theaters and I will probably see it upon my return home.... All in all, for pure greatness this summer seems to be shaping up well.

I still feel like I should make a point of checking out all the superhero movies I can get my mitts on and doing a review/retrospective bit on each of them, maybe something for a paper like that would be great....

Days 19 and 20: Floating.

Sidney snuck back past the decrepit fencing into the vacant lot. In the half-light of the fading day, the shapes of his collection loomed like the skeletons of clockwork dinosaurs. He rushed by them with only a few exception- a strange apparatus there received a loving pat, another a cursory examination that yielded a few specks of dust. For the most part they went ignored, like shoes he had long ago outgrown.

An observer would note that he clutched something to his chest as he ran, that he was flushed and out of breath long after he had stopped running, and that his grin stretched out wide past the point appropriate for polite company. A careful observer would perhaps have noted the convulsions of his fingers and belly where his burden touched his body, as if it caused spasms. A very careful observer who looked in exactly the right place would have seen the blue glass eye around Sidney’s gleam far more brightly than the ambient light should allow. But Sidney was unobserved in the place he had constructed for himself, and no one could have seen from his actions whether those convulsions were a sign of delight or revulsion.

He slipped into the last inner circle of his carefully artless maze, which directed both the casual and the determined walker on paths tangential to the heart of the field. Only Sidney even noticed where the debris formed a pointedly solid barrier around the center, and of course only Sidney new where to press, push, shove and wriggle his way around them.

Sidney reached his goal and carefully lowered his burden to the table in the center of the labyrinth. His hands rested heavily for the space of a heartbeat on this, the altar to his mind’s inner workings realized, and he took a breath slowly. In. Out. In. Out.

He’d come so far and there was so much work to be done still.


***
Anyone could build an airplane or a hang glider in his spare time. Sidney had set his sights a little higher.

***
Sidney’s first breakthrough was, oddly enough, the night that he was attacked by a werewolf.

His various attempts to recount the story after the fact remained confused well past the point that terror and youth would excuse his inability to remember. Werewolves have however an inherent terror and confusion attached to them, and Sidney had so few chances to recite his tale to a believing audience that it hardly mattered.

The facts, as recounted by his mother to the priestess to whom she took Sidney to clean him of the taint of evil, were as follows: Sidney at age nine wandered out into a wooded section of a neighboring park on a night of a full moon. His mother was not a woman convinced of the truth of the things her grandmother had whispered to her in the dark of the night many years before, and it had been many years since she had tied holly above her door to keep out evil. She stocked her cupboards with Advil and cough syrup, not potions, and her garden grew only vegetables, not herbs. When Sidney protested against the need to wear the blue glass eye his great grandmother had passed along to all her descendants, Sidney’s mother did not insist.

Nevertheless when Sidney ran screaming from the woods with blood on his T-shirt, she recognized the creature that chased her son to the edge of the woods. She grabbed her son in a rush that belied her cold terror and carried him screaming into the house. She hid him in a closet and returned to the door of her porch. There she waited, clutching her grandmother’s silver carving knife in her good left hand and a flaming brand made hastily from gin and turpentine in her right.

The beast came. They fought. It was a hungry monster in search its rightful prey. She was a mother. She won, but it cost her an eye and her home. She fled that night before the firemen came to pull from the ashes her house the only corpse that they would find that evening: a mostly human figure with shattered teeth. When the blackened fragments of the canines were reconstructed, they measured half the coroner’s index finger. He quietly ruled the death an accident, and put a fresh bow of holly over the door of his own home that evening.

Sidney knew very little of the battle, but recalled the next night with great clarity: he had spent it strapped to a bed while a mixture of wolfsbane and rosemary was rubbed into the open bite wounds on his arms, over and over until the dawn brought him back to himself.

Sidney learned several things very quickly after that: always wear your glass eye and see that that you keep it clean and brightly shining, so that it can see evil far away. Keep holly fresh and green in your home, especially over the doors and windows. Never use your real name when a false one will do. There are monsters in the world and they will get you if you are not careful.

***
Sidney did think that merely flying was enough. Winds would eventually fade down. Planes would run out of fuel. Essentially, to keep absolutely sure of not touching the ground, one had to find something that would perpetually and eternally remain off the ground of its own accord.

One had to defy gravity, really.

day 17
“What do you mean I cannot pass?”
“You cannot pass. There is just no getting around it, your grades are completely in the toilet. There is not a thing on earth you can do to save your grade at this late stage in the game. You quite simply cannot pass this class.”
“But that’s impossible. I got a B+ on the last in class quiz!”
“Those don’t count for anything towards your final grade. The only grades that count towards the final are the homework grades.”
“That is the exact opposite of what you said on the first day of class.”
“If you recall, this year the first day of this class fell on Opposite Day.”
“What? That was Opposite Day? Since when can you observe religious holidays in school?”
“This is not a public high school, this is a private university, and the dean of academic relations recognizes my right to practice my religion in the manner of my choosing as an Orthodox Literalist.”
“Well, yes, of course. I just mean, don’t you still have to declare that sort of thing beforehand?”
“I declared it oppositely by not declaring it.”*
“That’s insane.”
“Well! I have to say that I find your attitude towards my faith to be very offensive.”
“What? Look, I have nothing against your religion, but you can’t fail me just because I didn’t understand the practices of a religion that I don’t belong to! That infringes on my religious freedom.”
“And to just what religion do you belong?
“That’s just my point- it shouldn’t matter! I went into class expecting that I would be able to learn, and because I’m not a follower of Literalism, I didn’t know that I should feed everything you said through a reverse polarity filter. The facts of the issue were only clear to the Literalist members of the class!”
“If you’ll recall, the syllabus did say that students should check the dates on syllabus very carefully, because some of the class times had to be moved for religious holidays. You could have just checked the calendar.”
“My calendar does not have the Literalist religious holidays marked on it- it has the cycles of the moon! and the high tides! But you notice that I don’t tell people that I’m a sailor and then expect them to know that I will not be in classes on days where outgoing tide coincides with their lectures- I would still have to tell them for them to know!”
“Look, I am sorry for the miscommunication, I tried to be as clear on the subject as I could be within the confines of my religion, but I cannot change the fact that your grade is too low for you to pull it up. Even if you aced every homework, quiz and the final, your final grade would still only be in the forties. There is nothing I can do.”
“Fine. Fine! Then what am I supposed to do about this?”
“I would strongly suggest that you drop the class, and talk to any other professors who had their first day of class on that date and see if any of them were issuing instructions in compliance with Opposite Day restrictions.”

*As stolen from Bill Waterson's Calvin and Hobbes Rules for Calvinball, as collected from historical documents (AKA comic strips) here: http://www.simplych.com/cb_rules.htm. See Rule 1.5

day 16
“Is it okay to use normal hand lotion on the scars?”
“Huh?” I was startled out of my reverie. “Oh, yeah, it’s fine, the scars are all healed up nicely.”
“I was about to say- they look very clean and small for scars from a car accident. I have some uncles in a machine shop in a machine shop, when they lose a finger it heals up way worse than this.” She draws a fingertip gently down the pale line at the end of my knuckles.
“My fingers didn’t actually get cut off in the accident itself. They pinched between the door of my car and the car that crashed into us. The actual amputation happened at the hospital the next day, when they figured they couldn’t pin the bones together enough to fix them.”
“Oh, I see.” And she did seem to pick my hand up and look at it a bit more closely. “That would explain it. It’s really not a bad scar at all.” She seemed earnest enough about it. I don’t really want to think about what a machine shop could do to someone’s hands after a lifetime of working there.
“No, it’s not bad. It just rubs funny when I write.”
“You still write with your right hand?” She asked, and I resisted the obvious pun with some difficulty. She was starting to seem
“Yeah. You only really need your thumb and first two fingers for that.” My left hand was starting to feel soggy in its little bath thing, but she’s painting some sort of liquid on a tiny brush across the base of my nails.
“What is that?”
“Oh. It’s cuticle oil- that and the bath helps loosen the cuticle that’s attached to the nail. You need to push it back for the polish to stick on right.”
“Okay then.”
“It’s aaall part of the service,” she says with a smile. Her front teeth are a little crooked. She finished my right hand and stick it in the tub while she fished out my left.
“Alright, now I’m going to take this little stick,” she holds up a tiny lance, “and push back your cuticles. It might pinch a little.” She takes the pointy stick and starts rubbing in sharply in circles over my thumb. It’s rather strange and more than a little fascinating. It reminded me of a dentist scraping off plaque. It did pinch a little.
She moved on to my fingers, and when she was done on the left she moved to the right. Again she seemed to make a point of being delicate, but even going slower she was done more quickly. After, only three nails to deal with.

Day 15 Abbreviated

She did grab my hand, eventually. She started rubbing much more slowly, and much more gently than on the other hand. It was appreciated, actually.
“This okay?”
“Yeah, it’s fine.” It was more than fine, actually. It was rather lovely. I’ve stopped shaking hands with my right hand for practical reasons since my accident. At first my hand was swathed in bandages, and any attempts were just too painful. After the bandages came off, I switched back to right hand shaking, but there were some… incidents.

Whether someone actually recoiled, or didn’t notice until they were already holding my hand and felt something was missing, it made for an awkward first impression. I am fairly certain it cost me at least one job interview when an incredibly inelegant young woman grabbed my hand, noticed the missing fingers, and knocked coffee over her laptop with her elbow on the withdrawal. A lefthanded shake was unusual, but it gave the other person a hint that there was something wrong. They tended to pick up on it a bit more quickly on their own after that.

While my mother berates Frank Lloyd Wright for his perfidious loins, my brother has arrived back from a trip into Boston. He is officially broken up with girlfriend, which is rather sad in light of their apparently recent cute three month anniversary.

He seems rather more chill, or at least centered, knowing that he is broken up than he did yesterday, when he was still deciding what to do.

As for me, I am deeply involved in writing nothing of importance, ignoring my studies for the sake of the heat, and re-reading novels I liked already. This means The Venom Factor by Diane Duane is making another appearance. I have to say, rereading this book is a pleasure overall and I am really quite pleased at the amount of detail and thought that goes into the canon characters and the ones that Duane makes up to flesh out the book. Duane is smart and likes her characters and it shows. I would highly recommend this series as a whole.

However, I finally saw "Little Miss Sunshine", and I have to say I am just so totally grossed out by it that I don't even want to wonder what the film makers were thinking. Up to the last twenty minutes, I was willing to consider the movie to have its good points and be worth watching, but I find the ending so off-putting and played so much for laughs that I can't really stand to even think about the good parts of the movie.

Day 13
“Low gravity,” Letitiana proclaimed, “has changed only two things in fashion: fake tits and beehive hairdo's.”

The table laughed uproariously as the tipsy fashionistas toasted themselves once more. They were well into the fourth bottle of champagne by now, and the Earth-born members were beginning to forget their strength in the lunar gravity. Letty grinned at them before she continued. The audience, captivated, sleek and well-fed, was lapping from the palm of her hand, and she was determined to bask in the pack’s approval as long as she could.

“No, truly! Remember the fad in Fall 2098 for the self-supporting gyro-tits? The ones built from recycled Segway parts?” Most of the table grinned, with only perhaps two or three lapsing into outright hysterical giggles as they recalled the extremes to which the trend was taken on the New York runway. At least one pair of breasts had malfunctioned and smacked a model in the face before making their antigravity getaway like a pair of lost balloons.

“One had to make an investment of at least half a million €¥RO just to make sure that the models didn’t all rush to get them done at one of those back alley wire-runner stations and end up with a set of laser cannons instead. So much cheaper this way- let nature do her work and then just bring the girls up sky-side and bid Nature a fond farewell!” Letty gestured with her still-full shot glass for emphasis. She was flushed from the heat and noise but not from drink, so even across the room she immediately spotted a curious piece of couture.

One of the models from a competitors show, a wirey thing with a conservatively colored Mohawk plaited sedately down to the waist, looked delicious in a suit jacket and kilt ensemble that she (or he, Letty was honestly not sure) had clearly snitched from Letitiana’s personal collection. Since Letty hired all her models personally, this was clearly a message or a very clumsy theft. Letitiana pantomimed a trip that let her dive graceful in low grav to sink into her neighbor’s lap.

“George” she hissed, “whose show was That One in?”
“Letty, you are melting the ice crystals in my waistcoat!”
“George, those are plastic shards that you hot-glued to your jacket because you didn’t have the money to get your personal coolant system replaced this month- you blew it all on vintage muslin, I was there when you got the bill. Now, you silly synthoid, tell me who that is!”
George grimaced and then swiveled his free-floating eye array towards the model.
“Huh. S/he was in Dolce & Gabbana & Clones Retrospective Show- the Androgen Collection. Isn’t that jacket one of your? S/he carries it off much better than that ginger tart you assigned.”

Letty squirmed out George’s lap and slunk behind his chair, to the amusement of those at the table who were still sober enough to notice she was no longer toasting. She emerged from behind the chairs coif first, but still managed to take the model by surprise as s/he walked by. She sprung out and spread her arms for a giant hug before air kissing both cheeks at dizzying speed. Suitably bamboozled, the model stopped and then blushed like mad. There was no escape, and s/he knew s/he was caught.

“Now, then, darling,” she linked armed with him/her as s/he tried to walk around her. “ You must tell me where you got this fabulous coat!” Letty smiled, slowly revealing a set of chrome dentures, spiked like a shark’s happy dream. “Or I just might have to beat it out of you.” She cooed.

So, those of you who have watched any Star Wars with me will recognize me in the last posting for the 365 days writing thing. Oh, hell, anyone who has watched any movie with me at all, ever, will recognize my constant jabbering and pointless banter.


Smadar of Swelles came to visit me for the Fourth- it was really low-key and relaxed and made me happy to be at home and have a lot of time to visit my friends. But it also made me wish I lived in Boston, not out here in the boonies, so that a forty minute commuter rail ride was not needed if I wanted to get to Swelles.

My parents are following a minor quest to figure out my father's genealogy using public library resources online. I kind of wish that we could all just enter a drop of blood into a USB port and find out everything that our DNA has gotten up to in the previous editions, but I will save that kind of shenanigans for the later generations.

In other news, I need to poke some of my people to figure out what we are doing with our lives...

Day 11
“You knew?”
“Yes, of course I knew. Your mother was already pregnant when I met her- I mean obviously pregnant. We dated a little, but after you were born things just fit into place. Your mom was… she was just wonderful, you know that…” My dad starts to tear up again, and even knowing that he’s not really my father doesn’t change the fact that I’m still watching my dad cry- it’s like watching the moon fall into the sea. The world is broken.

When my dad starts crying, you know someone is dead: he only cries at funerals. And I cannot express accurately how angry I am at him for lying all these years when he tears up like that. It gets mixed up with how much I love him, and how much it hurt watching my mother die, and how utterly unjust it is that he’s not related to me by blood. It’s all still there, but all I can do is hand him a handkerchief and stare at my knees until he’s composed again.

He catches his breath. “It was perfect. I walked right into the family I had wanted, and it was just after I found out I couldn’t have kids- you both needed me so much. It was like God planned it out exactly just for us to fit into each others’ lives.” I nod. He’s a great dad- he just puts everything into it. I can’t imagine the waste it would have been for him never to have children of his own.

“I did not know she’d put it in her will. I didn’t know that. We’d talked about telling you, but she’d asked your biological father to stay away- she still loved him even after she had you and she met me. She still loved him.” He clutches the hankie and for just a second he grimaced like he was in pain before going on. “He did ask to see you- he wasn’t a bad guy, kiddo, but she just couldn’t stand the idea of you and him meeting.” Like I wasn’t really your father, he does not say, but my dad can’t lie worth a damn and he can’t hide either.

It’s not fair, but it’s how my mother would have thought of it. I’d grown up used to obvious adoptions and Asian schoolmates with white parents, but she was always shocked to see that anyone would do something like that. She thought adoptive parents were good people for taking in a child in need, but she never seemed to accept that they were family in the same way as blood parents. That she was just so much of a hypocrite, to tell me that my dad was really my biological father when it was a lie, never crossed my mind.

My dad was crying again. My mother was dead, and my dad was crying but he wasn’t my real father, and there was some stranger in California whose name and face I knew from billboards and he was my real father. It was like someone was granting every hateful wish I’d made at seven years old, fourteen years too late.

Being home at the moment entails the application of motherly affection through sponsored shopping. I now have brand new undies of wonderfulness and some very pretty eyeshadow, as well as one of those highly useful little eyeliner brushes that make it so that you can forego the use of pencils. Oh, and a blush that looks rather light and natural-I've got something like it already that has no staying power at all and disappears after an hour.

It also entailed a nice dinner at a new restaurant that I have not seen heretofore. I rather shocked my mother by leaving one of my little cards for the waiter with the tip. I have to say that these little cards are really convenient for this kind of thing. I don't anticipate anything coming of it, but at the moment I'm just kind of enjoying how shocked my mother and family are by my apparent "make-over" in Europe. I got a haircut and learned to apply eyeshadow properly- this is clearly cause for celebration.

I should get some stuff today for the July 4th of hanging out with Smadar.