Absolut NaNo



I crossed the finish line, just barely, around 9:15 pm CST, with a few extra words to spare (to account for any word count funkiness). The last two thousand words were courtesy of Isobel Neville, who literally died for the cause. The novel has been validated and this trek is over. Until next year.

The days of yore

I'm always into neat Royalty sites and here's one on Romanov Russia, including pictures of the mysteriously gone missing Amber Room. It's a very complete site and very well worth pursuing, though I'm going to restrain myself, as the last time I ate up a site like this, I found myself sucked into the NaNo blackhole. No Romanov novels for me!

Tonight, btw, is the last night of NaNo. If all goes well, I will cross 50,000 words tonight. Only some 2,500 more to go...

Annoyed

'Crying' dogs at 5:22 am who keep on crying for literally hours (it was still crying at 8:45 am when I left for work). In case you think I'm heartless, I do feel sorry for these poor, poor dogs who have to sit at home by themselves while their owners go and earn the dog food for the day. But that doesn't change the fact I'm sleepy and cranky. I'm just sayin'.

NaNo update

The last 10,000 words are the hardest and don't let anyone else tell you differently. This is when contractions disappear, when characters are consistently referred to by first and last names, where flashbacks appear quite often, and redundancy is encouraged and necessary. I fear my novel. You should too.

Resolutions

Yesterday, at party number three of the weekend, I asked one of our guests, "So, how are things going for you in Denver?" She looked at me blankly and for a freak moment, I wondered if she wasn't the one who lived in Denver. After all, I'd just called a 17-year old girl by her 13-year old sister's name, so it was very possible that I'd gotten cities mixed up too. It turned out, however, that I did get the city right and therefore, I plunged ahead and said, "I was in Denver in May. I thought about giving you a call but there wasn't really time." More blank stares. So I skulked off to the living room where my brother and J. were hanging out.

"I think my conversational skills are lacking," I told my brother.

"Why is that?" he asked.

"Because I just asked S. about Denver and she looked at me as if I'd suddenly sprouted horns and had green skin. Lately, I don't seem to be able to talk to people properly."

My brother considered and then said, "Have you thought that maybe the people you're talking to aren't giving you anything to work with? Maybe they're the bad conversationalists."

My New Year's resolution, therefore, is to not automatically assume everything is my fault, that failures and mistakes can often be shared. That's not to absolve myself of responsibility, mind you, but often I kneejerk apologize and let the other person off easy because I'm so often falling all over myself to say sorry as many times as I possibly can. So maybe that's really two resolutions: 1) Fault can be shared and 2) Stop being the first to apologize.

As the blender turns

Last weekend, I decided to make soup. The weather was cold and gross -- think dark black clouds that just hung around. The soup started out well enough; I chopped green beans, potatoes, onions, carrots, and garlic and had them artfully arranged on a plate. Then came the sauteeing and taking jemima's advice, I used vegetable oil, instead of my usual olive, but I think I must have dumped in a gallon of oil because I swear, the onion slices started doing the backstroke. I kind of gulped and kept going, waiting until the onion was translucent, before adding the carrots, potatoes and green beans, in that order.

I then opened a can of stewed Italian-style tomatoes, which needed to be blended. I grabbed the blender and its assembly from the dishwasher, screwed it together and then put it on the blender stand, tossed in the tomatoes and hit the on button. The blender blended, but when I lifted the jug, the thing started to leak red tomato everywhere. I kind of shrieked and dumped the tomato puree into the soup pot, but so quickly that some of it actually splashed onto the stove and also into the grill in the middle of the stove. Note the jug was leaking the whole time. Distressed, I cleaned up all of the tomato puree and then put the blender in the sink, which is when I realized that I had destroyed the blender assembly.

Now, you have to know the history of the blender to understand how catastrophic this is. My mom's Osterizer came into my possession a couple years ago, on the basis that she would buy a new blender sooner if she didn't actually have one. Plus, I wanted a blender of my own to make soups (this was when I was still delusional enough to think I had culinary skills). So I ran off with the Osterizer, and my mom went on a quest for her blender. She bought and returned no less than five blenders before settling on her lovely, shiny blender. And now, after all of that searching and experimenting, I had broken her less-than-one-year-old blender.

Anyway, my mom accepted the loss of her lovely, shiny blender with equanimity and I vowed to find her a replacement part for her assembly. The conclusion of the story is that Monday, when eating some of the leftover soup for lunch, my mom found a piece of the rubber ring in her food. ::headdesk::

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours! Let's hope your culinary delights are less adventureous than mine! Travel safely and be well.

Shoe fly job

My first job search took place during my senior year of college. I had a beautiful new suit (purchased at Petite Sophisticate; who knew this purchase would signify the beginning of a decade-long addiction?), resumes printed on cream-colored linen paper, and what I hoped were killer interview skills (which included staring very hard at the interviewer and hoping he or she would blink first). Since I was in the business school at the time, we had our own career center. To put in for a position, you would drop your resume into an envelope next to a job posting. If you were lucky, when you came back the following week, you would see your name listed on a new piece of paper, saying you'd be selected for an interview.

When I bought my suit, I'd traveled out to West Springfield, which is where all the haute-couture was. I hadn't thought, at the time, to purchase shoes. So on my first interview, I went all dressed up but with my black dress shoes on with the half-inch heel (most recently immortalized as the basket-weave style shoes here). I felt rather self-conscious, as all the other women who were lined up, waiting for their interview, were wearing shoes with heels of at least 3 inches or more. I had to console myself with the thought that at least my pantyhose hadn't 'run', like another girl's had at the knee.

Interviews came and went, and for a long spell, I got lots of first interviews and no second interviews. But I was optimistic. It was still early in the first semester and I still had a whole six months to go before I really had to worry about unemployment. I won't lie though and say it wasn't somewhat ego-shattering when I saw the same people over and over getting second interviews. One of them was a woman named Colleen, who was also a marketing major. She was tall, lithe, pretty, a sorority girl who always seemed to have her hair perfectly in place, in spite of the harsh western Massachusetts wind. Somehow she managed to avoid having white salt spots on her black pumps, and never ever did her lipstick smear off the corner of her lips. I also think she was immune to chapped lips. My friend Sarah and I -- blessed with unruly hair and an inability to apply make-up -- were irrationally annoyed with Colleen.

One day, I landed that magic second interview. I nearly flipped when the company -- a large semiconductor company -- telephoned. I called Sarah and she said, "I bet Colleen got an interview with them too." The interview was to take place at the company's headquarters in New Hampshire. It would be an all-day thing and I just knew that this was my job, and I decided I finally had to do something about the shoe problem, especially if Colleen was going to be there. We didn't have a whole lot of selection in terms of shoe stores in Amherst or Hadley, and I didn't have to time to bus it all the way to West Springfield and my friend was unavailable to give me a ride. So I ended up going to a Major Discount Retailer and purchased the only pair of professional-looking pair of black high heels they had; the only problem was they were a size 9 and my foot is a size 8.

It turned out that Colleen hadn't been granted a second interview with the company, and I thought I was doing well with the interview until the moment we were walking out from the Mexican restaurant where we had lunch and I realized that my size 9 heels were flip-flopping on my feet and I was in danger of tripping on the snowy pavement. I slowed my gait considerably, and for the rest of the afternoon, all I could think about were how obscenely large my shoes were and I was going to fall flat on my face. And I did, figuratively, because my mind wandered for the rest of the afternoon, as I wondered if the recruiter had noticed that my shoes were too big, and I kept worrying whether they would actually fall off. A few weeks later, I got a 'Dear Seema' letter from the company. It was the first of many rejections I would receive that year.

Incidentally, I ran into Colleen again about three years ago at Logan Airport. I had had a crazy day in the city, having been up since 5 am, and had just learned that my plane back had been delayed for hours and I wouldn't get home until close to midnight. I was a nervous wreck and as I slumped in my chair, the woman sitting next to me said, "You were at SOM at UMASS, weren't you?" And it was Colleen, wearing a nicely tailored suit, not a hair out of place, and writing thank you notes in her lovely handwriting. Picture me in my faded blue jeans, with the fraying cuffs, a purple t-shirt with a newly acquired oil stain on it (courtesy of lunch in the North End), and my hair going every which way. She was wearing shiny black shoes and I was wearing sneakers. I wanted to explain to Colleen there was a reason I looked this awful, that I'd started my day at 5 am at the beginning of the Green Line, that this was my second trip to Logan that day, that I'd gone all the way to Alewife, and then back to South Station, and to the North End, back to South Station, and now to Logan. But she spoke first.

Colleen said she was on her way to Atlanta, that she had recently gotten married, and she was an executive with a start-up. Then she asked me what I was up to, and I said I'd been to Boston for a friend's wedding, that I had a job at an insurance company I enjoyed and I was looking forward to starting my MBA in the fall. She nodded and said, "I always knew you'd be successful." And I felt like telling her, "Don't you know I'm the girl who wore mismatched shoes to her baccalaureate? Don't you remember I'm the one who didn't wear high heels for her first few job interviews and I could never get my lipstick to go on right?" But that's not what Colleen remembered about me, so maybe the shoes weren't as big of deal as I'd made them out to be. I realized I was trying too hard and being hyper-aware of every little inconsequential detail, rather than on the big picture. It's a lesson I'm still learning.

I never wore those size 9 shoes again, by the way, and when the annual Christmas drive came around, I put them in a plastic bag and dropped them into the barrel, hoping they'd prove lucky for someone else.

All blogged out of a job

And yet another blogger gets canned for blogging however indirectly about her workplace. Another reason why anonymity is good and not talking about your workplace is even better. Theoretically, a company cannot come after you for your legal, after hours activities, but if you do anything that can put the company in a bad light, they can terminate you (after all, your employment contract is 'at-will', ie you can leave at any time and they can let you go any time). Another lesson to the wise in all of this is, if you're gonna sell ads on your blog, for God's sake, don't approach your employer.

Good day

This wasn't the blog post you were supposed to get today, but blogger decided to start its maintenance at the exact time I hit 'publish' and alas, that post was gone. It was of a highly personal, confessional nature -- not the usual type of stuff you see in this blog -- and I can't help but think that Blogger was giving me a sign of some kind.

I've had a good day today. I didn't realize how much I needed a 'mental health day' until I woke up this morning and realized I didn't have to go to work. It was also weird to be out and about with the other people who didn't have to go to work. I went to a yoga class, and it was not crowded, the teacher was nice, and didn't laugh when I finally, finally lost my balance on that evil pose -- the one when you balance on one arm and leg and hold the other arm and leg in the air; you try it, you'll fall over at first, I promise. Then I treated myself to a nice French lunch, because I had a hankering for potato soup. Then came an X-Files indulgence (g), and a nice nap, and then playing on the Internet. No writing got done, but that's okay.

Maybe another day, when I feel braver, I will reconstitute the post Blogger ate.

Oh for the love of Tom

It's good to have loyal friends, isn't it, Mr. DeLay? So much for 'hardwork, loyalty and perserverance.'

Live to eat

A few years ago, S. and I treated ourselves to an amazingly exorbitant dinner. We were celebrating her new job at an internet start-up and my promotion at Very Big Insurance Company. We went to an Italian restaurant which had only 14 tables and one 'seating'. We had no reservations and were in luck when we grabbed the last table. Dinner was very leisurely -- if memory serves, we spent about three hours at the restaurant, from appetizers to dessert. We also ordered a bottle of wine and they actually brought us two bottles and allowed to select the one we wanted. The waitress came by every 30 or 40 minutes and so we didn't feel as if we were being rushed at all. Due to the unique 'one seating' nature of the restaurant, the ambiance and pace was all very European. And despite the $120+ bill for just the two of us, we both thought that was a marvelous evening.

Work pressures are getting to both of us now, so S. suggested this morning we needed another exorbitant dinner out. I've spent the last 10 or 15 minutes going through restaurant menus and sending her IMs. "Is a restaurant with a $275 bottle of wine expensive enough for you?" I asked. She IM'd me back, "Getting mighty close." What ideally I'd like is an ambiance similar to our first expensive dining experience, with a slow, easy pace, and just really good food. Unfortunately the restaurant we dined at in the Big City to the West has closed and the restaurant that lives there now has bottles of wine considerably cheaper than $275.

I'll keep you informed.

Waiting for jemima

The NaNoing continues and I'm happy to report, despite taking the weekend off, I am on track to finish precisely on November 30. However, I've got to start thinking about upping the word count -- probably closer to 2300 or 2500 words a day so I can take two weekends off in a row. We'll see -- if I don't get there, I may have to actually fit in some late writing time amidst all the festivities.

Today

Two things you must know about my day today:

1. I had two cups of coffee in rapid succession
   
2. The city I live in smells like gym socks

I had two cups of coffee this morning because I had to be work at the ungodly, should be illegal hour of 8:30 for an orientation class. I dragged myself half-asleep into the conference room, equipped with coffee and a cheese-filled croissant -- by the way, these should also be illegal, just for the sheer goodness of them. During the first hour or so, I finished off my cup of coffee and all would have been good if the computer equipment hadn't chosen to fail right there and then. All of us made a dash for the kitchen and/or bathroom, and instead of going for the decaf like I should have or even a cup of tea, I poured myself another cup of coffee.

I was halfway through the second cup when the jitters hit; it was almost as if all of my red blood cells had decided to take on the white blood cells, and with the platelets and plasma hanging off to the side cheering madly, my arteries and veins were suddenly turned into the biological version of the Grand Prix.

People, you could have put me on one of those hamster wheels and I would have generated enough electricity to power this sprawling Hummer-inhabited metropolis.

After class was over, I thought the best thing to do to relieve the jitters was to head across the street to the Vietnamese restaurant which makes The World's Best Vegetable Spring Rolls (tm). As I stepped out into the gray, muggy day, I got the full aromatic assault: wet gym socks.

Think of your gym locker room. Think of the way it smells after an aerobics class lets out. Think of all of those sweaty people in their sweaty clothes and then imagine the air conditioning going out and then, for good measure, air circulation suddenly stops because your sports club is just evil that way. Think about that and now you know how this city smells.

To make a long story short, I did get my spring rolls, which tasted lovely, and I got rid of the jitters. But I'm afraid, given the current weather reports, the gym sock smell is here to stay for the next week or so. Oh, if there were ever a city that needed a Glade plug-in.

Linkage

Forgive me, for I am weak, but fellow 'blues', here's a Guide To Recovery 11/10/04 and a Winner takes all, to put it all in perspective.

Black shoes

Someone recently suggested I treat myself to a new pair of shoes. Whenever you get news, this person said, of a good nature, one should buy new shoes. I'm a rare species of woman: I'm not terribly into shoes. My shoe buying habits tend to be of the last minute, and only when my existing shoes have started to come across at the seams, and the big toe is sticking out the front end. Once, I wore a pair of loaters even though the sole had virtually separated from the moccasin and water was seeping in, soaking my feet. I also still have a pair of sandals that because of an incident involving gallons and gallons of rain and a plastic bag were nearly consumed by bacteria; I dropped the sandals into a bucket of bleach, scrapped off the bacteria, and voila, I can still wear them.

Added to my inability to actually stop wearing shoes until they fall apart, I also have a tendency to buy black shoes because I'm firmly of the belief that you can never go wrong with black; it matches everything and is mostly always appropriate. I do have one pair of navy pumps, but only because I have two or three navy suits. But everything else -- from loafers to dress shoes to high heels to sandals -- it's all black, baby.

Years ago, I read the poem Ithaka at my high school baccalaureate. I wore a new dress that day -- black with little pink flowers. It was my biggest public speaking gig ever. I was nervous. Yes, I'd recently graduated from the Dale Carnegie class, but I was still most happy when no one noticed me at all. And somehow, peer pressure did me in and I had volunteered to read a poem in front of my 200 fellow students and their friends and family. Before I left the house, I made sure my dress wasn't caught in my hose, that I had a copy of the poem, and in a moment of vanity, left my glasses at home; I wasn't driving, and I figured if I couldn't see the audience, I couldn't freak out. The last thing I wanted to do was freak out in front of 80 gazillion people.

The baccalaureate was held on the campus of a local college. As my family and I walked from the car to the church, I looked down and noticed, for the first time, that I was wearing two different shoes. On my left foot, I was wearing the aforementioned black moccasin that was falling apart and on my right foot, I was wearing my black dress shoe (basket-weave pattern, if you were really wondering). So much for freaking out at the podium -- I freaked out right there in the parking lot. My mother reassured me, saying that if I hadn't noticed that I was wearing two different shoes, no one else would either; after all they were both black, weren't they?

The key point to keep in mind was, I was not wearing my glasses and I was assuming the 80 gazillion people in the audience all had 20/20 vision and instead of listening to my reading of "Ithaka", they would all be pointing at my mismatched -- albeit black -- shoes and laughing; you know the old adage: You can learn a lot from a person from her shoes. I could just see us all at our 25th high school reunion and the class president saying, "Remember Seema? She couldn't even match her shoes for baccalaureate, is it any surprise she's matching David Hasslehoff's record as the world's oldest lifeguard?"

I'm happy to report I got through that incident without anyone noticing -- or remarking, as the case might be -- on my mis-matched shoes and I didn't faint or freak out at the podium when I read the poem. Also, I stopped lifeguarding after my sophomore year of college, so David Hasslehoff never had to worry about competition from me. Now, I never, ever leave the house without giving my shoes a once-over, because just like people wake up in a cold sweat thinking they've missed an important exam, I always think of myself as the girl with two different shoes on.

Linkage

While I'd vowed to set this blog 'politics free', I couldn't resist this particular site: Sorry Everybody.

Nothing to see here

NaNo is one of those brain-eating endeavours and I'll be darned if I have more than two brain cells to rub together at this point in my word count (not to mention, time of the evening). My current word count is just over 16,000 words and I'm pushing to hit the 20,000 mark by Thursday (Friday/Saturday are definitely out writing-wise). To remain on schedule, I need to hit 25,005 words by Monday. It's around this time when Stuff (tm) starts happening to your characters, when descriptions become curiously long, when people suddenly go around calling each other by their full names (by 35,000 words, you start inserting middle names as well). There are plenty of ideas in the forums for those of you interested in just how nutty this project can get.

Some other time, we'll talk about the psychology.

New music

I picked up some new tunes over the weekend, including Yash Chopra's Veer Zaara, Devdas (aka the most expensive film ever made), and Kabhi Khushi Kahbie Gham. I've been pretty happy in general with the selections. "Veer Zaara" is excellent -- somehow, Lata's 75-year old voice seems to fit the score well. I also picked up a compilation of A.R. Rahman's hits (includes selections from "Rangeela" and "Bombay", among others), but I haven't listened to it yet. I've got "O Mere Sona Re" in the car, which was packaged as a 'revival' of some classic duets, incuding the title track (which I think I actually prefer the modern version of) and one of my all-time favorites, "Sawan Ka Mahina."

My fingers are tired



I am caught up. For those of you wondering, that's 8,000+ words done this weekend, many of them used more than once, especially the word 'countenance'; it sounds very 15th century, doesn't it?

In the kitchen with Seema

Today's lesson: Charcoal pancakes in 9 easy steps

1. Use leftover pancake mix, if you have it. Ideally, the mix should have a gray tinge to it. If it doesn't have a gray tinge to it, let sit for a week -- covered -- in the fridge and come back to this recipe next Saturday.
   
2. Put stainless steel pan on stove, turn burner up to HIGH
   
3. Find olive oil and don't measure the amount needed to grease pan because the pan is very, very HOT. Dump in liberal amounts of olive oil.
   
4. Stir up the batter to make sure that gray mixes with the beige colored part of the mix so that everything is gray
   
5. Dump batter into stove. Watch in fascination as olive oil bubbles OVER the edges of the batter.
   
6. Try to flip the pancake over. Realize that the oil is keeping the pancake from solidifying. Fight with the pancake until you manage to somehow peel it up off the pan and realize it's kind of flat and fried. Realize pancake has absorbed a bottle's worth of olive oil. Remember olive oil is good for the heart.
   
7. Drink a bottle of red wine while you make the second pancake. This time, turn on the fan over the stove just to avoid setting off the fire alarm (unless, of course, you are wondering if the batteries in your detector are still good, in which case, this step is optional. Not the red wine though -- it's good for your heart*).
   
8. Struggle to flip the pancake again. When the burner is on HIGH, you see, things cook faster than the speed of light, especially gray pancake batter. Panic when you see the charcoal, flip into a plate. Burn fingers pulling off the burned bits. Realized it's neither cooked nor fried all the way through.
   
9. Eat anyway, dosed heavily with Vermont maple syrup, with a side of orange juice. Serve in front of the television, preferably in front of an episode of the X-Files you haven't seen before. Think, "This is the worst damn breakfast I've ever had," but keep eating anyway because of children in Africa and all that.
   

Tune in next time, viewers, when we talk about how to make absolutely tasteless Indian food!