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Instaweeks

Recent photographic dispatches from my little crazy corner of the world….

Dog shadow.

Yeah, we really need to find a natural predator for these little bastards.

I don’t know what I was drinking, but it made me happy!
These are…OK. Not awesome. I don’t regret them, but one package is enough.
The sun coming up over Casa Jaquandor.
Nice doggie. Nice. (I’m still not sold on this whole “dog” business, though.)
Reflections of a writer.
When this dog gets up a head of steam, it’s impressive to watch. Interesting, he was apparently a poor racer in his brief career, never placing higher than 7th!
No, I have no idea what makes a normal battery a QUANTUM BATTERY. I used this one at work for a wall clock, which seems an inadequate use of a QUANTUM BATTERY.
Leaving a pen in the work pants turns out to have not been the best thing in the world to do. Luckily none of my shirts were rendered unwearable, but some of them do sport a few dark spots that weren’t there before. Luckily they’re already dark, and in some cases the spots will be hidden when I inevitably wear those shirts beneath a pair of overalls.
Peanut-butter-filled pretzels. These things are like crack to me. Seriously, they should be a controlled substance with a street value!
Another sunrise at work. Morning skies are always amazing there.
Two brothers, looking out the back door.
Still working….
Cane has to smell my car whenever he goes for a walk. I don’t know why, but it’s the first order of business whenever it’s walk-time!
I took The Daughter to our favorite local outside burger joint the other night. That little white light behind the sign? That’s the moon.
The WNY countryside as autumn harvest time looms!
At long last, sweaters-and-overalls-and-scarves weather has arrived! I rather like the way this outfit looks, if I do say so myself. (I bought that pair of Dickies overalls twenty years ago, and they’re still going strong!) This was my outfit for our annual day in Ithaca, NY.
A little writing while The Wife gets ready to leave our hotel room.
My PF Chang’s fortune cookie says that I will be a successful writer. (Of course that’s what it means! And yes, it’s right! Never question the soothsaying cookie!)
Driving. Lots of driving yesterday. Next year we try to book two nights in our Rochester hotel, instead of driving all the way from Ithaca to Buffalo.
I was taking a photo of The Wife looking at Taughannock Falls, but she turned and looked at me at the last second. Oh well! (Isn’t she pretty, though?)
Taughannock Falls.
Fried chicken and waffles at Waffle Frolic, one of our favorite places to eat anywhere. Just a wonderful, wonderful meal!
The Ithaca Apple Festival. It’s a bit screwed up this year, because Ithaca is rebuilding its downtown Commons. It should be back to normal next year, though.
Behind the hubbub of the Apple Festival was this church. This entrance seems to me like something out of a Stephen King novel.
There was a terrific jazz band playing yesterday. I could have listened to them a lot more, and we did linger over them! I very nearly took a candid shot of a young couple, two college kids maybe, dancing as if they were all alone with the band in the world. I decided not to, though. Some moments should be left as memories in the hearts of those who experienced them.
And then, during the band’s break, the toilet paper mummy wrapping contest!
On our way home, we crossed from the Cayuga Lake valley into the Seneca Lake valley, in time for the skies to clear and the sun to shine on the waters of Seneca Lake. I adore the Finger Lakes region.
Morning coffee as I start the back half of my vacation. Aside from finishing my proofreading, what to do next!

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A few things

I’m on vacation now, so I won’t be posting until Sunday at the earliest and Monday at the likeliest! Anyhow, a couple of things:

:: Hecklers can ruin comedy shows — but sometimes comedians get the last laugh. (Salty language alert!)

:: Inside Steven Spielberg’s JAWS vault. A look at ephemera from the making of the movie. Awesome!

:: Interesting video about hot sauce and hot sauce labels:




For the record, my favorite hot sauces are Franks, Cholula, and Sriracha with the rooster on the bottle. I have no use for Tabasco. It tastes funny to me.

:: All 32 NFL team helmets imagined as Star Wars-themed. I, for one, would proudly root for the Buffalo Banthas!

::  Interesting article about near-death-experiences and what they tell us about dying. I’m not sure I totally buy into everything here, but I don’t know nearly enough to say one way or the other. I’d like to believe that something endures after death, but…well, there’s only one way to know and no way to report back, thus far.

::  The Baltimore Orioles are pretty cool in that when they do a post-game pie-in-the-face for the game’s hero, they don’t put shaving cream on a towel. A local bakery makes their splatting pies for them, out of real edible stuff. I respect that and partially root for the Orioles on that basis alone! (Although I think I’m rooting for the Royals now, since the Pirates got bounced by the Giants in the wildcard game. Get ’em next year, Buccos!)

::  Finally, speaking of pies in faces, you may recall from when I did the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that I expressed hope that a pie-in-the-face challenge would come around next. Well, a bunch of them have been going on, pertaining to a number of ailments: depression and suicide awareness, Huntington’s Disease, Parkinson’s, Childhood cancer, and even cerebral palsy. (Obviously that last would hit too close to home for me.) Well, seeing as how a lot of the good in these “viral” fundraising bits of goofery lies in the idea of “raising awareness”, I was fascinated to see a pie challenge for a syndrome I’d never heard of before: Porphyria. This thing is both nasty and rare, so I decided that’s what I was going to do. Yesterday morning I launched my vacation by taking the Porphyria Pie Challenge.




Pies and a good cause: you can’t go wrong with that. (Yes, I donated as well.)

::  Oh wait! Really finally: check out my Official Author Site, if you haven’t done so already! The ACTUAL TITLE is revealed!

That’s really it. See you all in a few days!

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From the Books: “Come Along With Me”, by Shirley Jackson

This book is a collection of stories and essays by Shirley Jackson, the great writer of often dark fiction, if not outright horror, from the middle of the last century. Jackson’s life seems to have been generally free of drama, which surely disappoints anyone looking for demons and skeletons in her personal closet to account for the apparent darkness her imagination often generated.

Jackson’s most famous works are likely the novel The Haunting of Hill House, one of the definitive horror novels of all time (particularly in the “haunted house” subgenre), and the short story “The Lottery”. This particular tale may not be as shocking today as it was when it first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker in 1948, but even so, I remember when I first read it, the mounting sense of dread in the brief tale, the disbelief of what it looked like the people in this little town were about to do. “They’re not going through with it,” I remember thinking. “Surely they’re not. They’ll turn back. They’ll stop before it gets to that.”

Reaction to the story was stunning and, often, angry: angry that someone out there might write such a thing, angry that so august a magazine as The New Yorker would print it. The reaction made its way to Jackson’s own mailbox, and she describes those reactions in an essay that is, in its way, maybe as disturbing as the original story itself. Here is part of “Biography of a Story”.

On the morning of June 28, 1948, I walked down to the post office in our little Vermont town to pick up the mail. I was quite casual about it, as I recall – I opened the box, took out a couple of bills and a letter or two, talked to the postmaster for a few minutes, and left, never supposing that it was the last time for months that I was able to pick up the mail with an active feeling of panic. By the next week I had had to change my mailbox to the largest one in the post office, and casual conversation with the postmaster was out of the question, because he wasn’t speaking to me. June 28, 1948 was the day The New Yorker came out with a story of mine in it. It was not my first published story, nor my last, but I have been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote or published, there would be people who would not forget my name.

I had written the story three weeks before, on a bright June morning when summer seemed to have come at last, with blue skies and warm sun and no heavenly signs to warn me that my morning’s work was anything but just another story. The idea had come to me while I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller – it was, as I say, a warm morning, and the hill was steep, and beside my daughter the stroller held the day’s groceries – and perhaps the effort of that last fifty yards up the hill put an edge to the story; at any rate, I had the idea fairly clearly in my mind when I put my daughter in her playpen and the frozen vegetables in the refrigerator, and, writing the story, I found that it went quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause. As a matter of fact, when I read it over later I decided that except for one or two minor corrections, it needed no changes, and the story I finally typed up and sent off to my agent the next day was almost word for word the original draft. This, as any writer of stories can tell you, is not a usual thing. All I know is that when I came to read the story over I felt strongly that I didn’t want to fuss with it. I didn’t think it was perfect, but I didn’t want to fuss with it. It was, I thought, a serious, straightforward story, and I was pleased and a little surprised at the ease with which it had been written; I was reasonably proud of it, and hoped that my agent would sell it to some magazine and I would have the gratification of seeing it in print.

My agent did not care for the story, but – as she said in her note at the time – her job was to sell it, not to like it. She sent it at once to The New Yorker, and about a week after the story had been written I received a telephone call from the fiction editor of The New Yorker; it was quite clear that he did not really care for the story, either, but The New Yorker was going to buy it. He asked for one change – that the date mentioned in the story be changed to coincide with the date of the issue of the magazine in which the story would appear, and I said of course. He then asked, hesitantly, if I had any particular interpretation of my own for the story; Mr. Harold Ross, then the editor of The New Yorker, was not altogether sure he understood the story, and wondered if I cared to enlarge upon its meaning. I said no. Mr. Ross, he said, thought that the story might be puzzling to some people, and in case anyone telephoned the magazine, as sometimes happened, or wrote in asking about the story, was there anything in particular I wanted them to say? No, I said, nothing in particular; it was just a story I wrote.

I had no more preparation than that. I went on picking up the mail every morning, pushing my daughter up and down the hill in her stroller, anticipating pleasurably the check from The New Yorker, and shopping for groceries. The weather stayed nice and it looked as though it was going to be a good summer. Then, on June 28, The New Yorker came out with my story.

The letters, as Jackson reports, are almost entirely full of either confusion, distaste, or outright vitriol. Jackson rather drolly notes that one of the most terrifying aspects of writing is “the realization that they [stories] are going to be read, and read by strangers.” The people most moved to comment, in that day by mail, are almost always those most incensed by the tale, and Jackson also notes her relief that the volumes of mail she received, though large, likely did not constitute a reasonable survey of the opinion of the reading public. Small consolation, I suppose, when you’re the one whose mail is overflowing and whose own mailman isn’t speaking to you. But at least Shirley Jackson kept on writing. Her best work was likely still to come.

Oh, and if you haven’t read “The Lottery”, please do. If nothing else, it shows how effective a horror tale you can craft without one single hint of the supernatural. That’s quite a statement about human behavior and human nature – and maybe that’s what Jackson intended all along, when she tossed off this little tale which occurred to her while pushing her kid in the stroller.

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Something for Thursday (the late edition)

Oops. In my defense, I’m on vacation now. Yes, that’s lame, but I’m sticking with it.

When in doubt, it’s best to go with something nicely, easily familiar. Like the “Light Cavalry Overture” by Franz von Suppe, whose overtures have long been a staple of concert repertoire even if the operas themselves likely haven’t been performed in many, many moons.

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At Last! The ACTUAL TITLE Revealed!

Well, folks, the day has come.

When I started writing Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title), I started talking about my writing progress on Facebook and Twitter and on Byzantium’s Shores. This was mainly a way of claiming my writing life for my own, after years of thinking about writing and occasionally writing and putting writing off for another day. I had a story in mind, a story idea I’d been nursing for almost ten years (if not more), and it was time to get going.

Problem was, I didn’t have a title. Just a story.

This has never dissuaded me before. I know writers who can’t even begin the first sentence of their first draft without a title, but for me, stories suggest titles eventually. It’s the kind of detail that takes care of itself, so I never worry about a title. One will come. It always does…and so was the case with this one. I was probably about halfway through the first draft when I figured out what the title was. Meanwhile, though, I found myself wanting to talk about my writing process and progress on my various social media sites, which meant that I needed a working title. Kind of like how Return of the Jedi was code-named Blue Harvest. I started referring to this book as Princesses In SPACE!!!, noting in parentheses that this was “not the actual title”.

As I went, I eventually came up with THE ACTUAL TITLE, but then it felt like Princesses In SPACE!!! had taken on a life of its own, so I decided to hold that title back until I knew the book was going to be published. So it was that I chronicled the whole process, from completing the first draft to editing it to submitting the book to publishers and querying agents and then finally to starting the path toward going independent.

Now, at last, here we are.

And that’s just this book! The overall title for the entire series went through a lot of permutations before I finally settled on it, and I didn’t get that figured out until just the last round of serious edits. I finally got there, though, and it’s time for the big reveal, here, as I unveil my Official Site.

So, without further ado, here is the video trailer for the book. Stay tuned to the end for THE ACTUAL TITLE!!! (Embiggening the video and watching it in higher resolution may be a good idea.)

Thank you, Princesses In SPACE!!! (the stalwart and trusty working title). You served me well!

Tune in next week for the next big reveal: The COVER ART!!!

 

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Being Positive, and all that rot

A friend posted this image on Facebook yesterday, prompting several interesting responses, mainly from folks who disagree with this notion. “Life isn’t a test,” the refrain goes, which naturally leads to the suggestion that it’s all a matter not of how you look at life, but rather, how you choose to look at life.

This sounds to me an awful lot like the idea that you can choose to be happy, that you can choose to react positively to any situation. Stiff upper lip and all that, lads! Buck up, it ain’t that bad! Cheer up! Look on the bright side! Life is so beautiful, how can you not be positive! How can you possibly feel that life is a test!

To which I say, Bollocks.

My argument with such thinking isn’t so much with the notion that life is often beautiful, because it often is. There really is wonderment to be found in this Universe, and life offers many amazing, fantastical moments that I would hate to miss. But life also tests us, sometimes unforgivably, often cruelly. My mother-in-law only got sixty years on this planet. My son got fifteen months.

Life gives one test after another, and eventually, we all fail. There’s a popular saying out there that “God never gives us more than we can handle.” I’ve never believed this, because it seems to me that there comes a moment for each and every one of us when God most certainly does give us more than we can handle. We call that moment death.

But all that is tangential to my main point, the annoyingly pervasive notion that we can simply choose our way to happiness. I had a boss once who liked saying “You can’t choose what happens to you, but you can choose how you respond.” And sometimes, many times even, that’s likely true. But it’s not nearly as true as a lot of positive thinkers like to portray. Choosing happiness over sadness isn’t like choosing steak instead of chicken, and I’m uncomfortable with the idea of putting the responsibility for sadness on the shoulders of those who are sad. It isn’t that simple, and implying that it is seems highly disrespectful to me — disrespectful of other people, their lives, their struggles, and yes, their choices, inasmuch as they have power to make any.

Life is a test, sometimes. And if you don’t see it that way, I wonder if it’s not because you’ve chosen to be happy, but because maybe you haven’t really been tested yet.

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Sunday Burst

Odd and amazing stuff!

:: This is really cool. I wanted to embed the video, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it without also embedding the entire post, which I didn’t want to do. Anyway, it’s a performing artist whose medium is…bubbles. Seriously.

:: The CIA has its very own Starbucks. Working there is weird.

:: Good piece by Emily Gould on the act of quitting your job on the spot. Salty language alert, because Ms. Gould’s jumping-off point is an Alaskan teevee news person who decided that it was time to quit, so during her segment, she literally said: “F*** it, I quit.”

Editorializing a bit: What a self-centered jerk (the teevee lady, not Ms. Gould). I’m sympathetic, really, to the fact that lots of times, people are in jobs that push them to a breaking point, but it’s my view that quitting on the spot is rarely justified (as opposed to giving respectful notice). Quitting on the spot only screws your coworkers, and it’s an indulgence of self-pity that’s almost narcissistic. Plus, by saying f*** on the air, this woman put her station in a very troubling spot, through no fault of its own, as regards the FCC coming knocking on the door with a couple of buckets and saying “Fill these with money, please.” It was a jerk thing to do.

Working in restaurants and retail, I’ve seen my share of people quit on the spot, or simply stop showing up for jobs. It’s not hard to give two weeks, people. One boss of mine once told someone who announced that he was quitting that night, “You know, we’re closing tonight at the same time as always and we’re opening tomorrow at the same time as always. Same thing the day after, and the day after that. You’re not hurting the company at all, you’re only hurting the people you work with, and you’re only hurting them temporarily.” Another boss of mine responded to a guy who announced he was quitting because he wasn’t getting enough hours, “Well, if you’ve convinced yourself that working zero hours is better than working twenty-five, be my guest.”

Anyway, I’m not thrilled that this lady has become something of a folk hero. It’s kind of like a video that went viral of some high school student getting up and walking out of his class after lecturing his teacher on how she should be doing her job. That video got a lot of praise too, but I always wondered, What kind of student was that kid, anyway? Because he struck me not as a guy standing up for himself, but as more of an attention-whore.

More next week!

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My Birthday Number One Song List

So today I turn 43. Yay. Let there be dancing in the streets…and for the street-dancing, I can provide a handy songlist!

SamuraiFrog and Roger both did this, and I’m never one to let something like this pass, so here’s a look at the songs that were topping the Billboard charts on each of my birthdays, starting with Birthday Zero, September 26, 1971. Roger and SamuraiFrog did a more extensive thing, looking at the songs on either side of their birthday chart-topper, but I’m just going to list the ones that were Number One ON my birthday. It’s just easier.

1971: “Maggie May”, Rod Stewart. (I’m not a huge Rod Stewart fan, but I don’t dislike him, either.)

1972: “Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me”, Mac Davis. (This does not ring a bell at all.)

1973: “Delta Dawn”, Helen Reddy. (My main familiarity with this song springs from its use on an episode of Friends.)

1974: “Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love, Babe”, Barry White. (Barry White falls into the same general category for me as Rod Stewart: singers I never go out of my way to listen to, but whose appearance on the radio never makes me want to change the channel, either. This is a good song, anyway.)

1975: “Fame”, David Bowie. (Nothing to add here.)

1976: “Play the Funky Music”, Wild Cherry. (Heh! I actually do like this song.)

1977: “Best of My Love”, The Emotions. (I missed, by five days, having my birthday’s Number One be Meco’s disco rendition of the theme from Star Wars. Can you believe that!)

1978: “A Taste of Honey”, Boogie Oogie Oogie. (Huh?! Never heard of this.)

1979: “My Sharona”, The Knack. (This song had some staying power, didn’t it? It was number one starting a full month before my birthday that year, and stuck around for ten days or so after. As for the song…not a favorite of mine. I find it kind of annoying, actually.)

1980: “Upside Down”, Diana Ross. (Don’t know this one. The next Number One, a little over a week later, would be Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”, which is classic.)

1981: “Endless Love”, Diana Ross and Lionel Richie. (This was Number One for even longer than “My Sharona”, from August 15 to October 17. I don’t care for this song.)

1982: “Hard to Say I’m Sorry”, Chicago. (I have never liked Chicago.)

1983: “Tell Her About It”, Billy Joel. (Not my favorite Billy Joel song, but I do like it. It’s catchy and fun.)

1984: “Missing You”, John Waite. (I shrug my shoulders, as this rings no bells at all. A couple days later, “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince would take over.)

1985: “Money for Nothing”, Dire Straits. (Oh yeah! I love this song. In fact, this whole album is fantastic.)

1986: “Stuck With You”, Huey Lewis and the News. (I am just fine with this. In fact, I’ve always kind of felt that Huey Lewis’s bubblegum-for-the-1980s act has been underrated for years.)

1987: “Didn’t We Almost Have It All”, Whitney Houston. (This became Number One right on my birthday that year. I guess it’s OK. I was never big Whitney Houston fan…she’s in the Rod Stewart category for me.)

1988: “Don’t Worry Be Happy”, Bobby McFerrin. (Oh God, this song was so irritatingly ubiquitous that year. I can live out the rest of my days and never hear it again, thank you very much.)

1989: “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You”, Milli Vanilli. (Huh. Wouldja look at that. You know, I’ve always wondered, if the songs were good, they didn’t stop being good just because it turned out that the guys we thought were singing them weren’t, right? Why didn’t the world just track down the folks who actually did the songs and make them the New Big Thing?)

1990: “Release Me”, Wilson Phillips. (Unfamiliar with this, and given my personal history with popular music, I expect that to be mostly the way of it from here on out.)

1991: “I Adore Mi Amor”, Color Me Badd. (Yup. No idea at all.)

1992: “End of the Road”, Boyz II Men. (I couldn’t hum a note of this if you held a gun to my head.)

1993: “Dreamlover”, Mariah Carey. (I think I can name two Mariah Carey songs. This is not one of them.)

1994: “I’ll Make Love To You”, Boyz II Men. (If by some miracle I managed to hum a note of the last Boyz II Men song on this list, this one would get me killed. I’m noticing by this point that songs stay Number One for a lot longer, so I’m wondering how the metric changed. This song would be replaced by another Boyz II Men song, by the way, which marks the first time in my life that my birthday’s Number One was replaced by a song by the same artist.)

1995: “Gangsta’s Paradise”, Coolio. (Wow, I know this one! Huzzah! Incidentally, it was replaced a few days later by one of the two Mariah Carey songs I can name, “Fantasy”.)

1996: “Macarena”, Los Del Rio. (This was Number One for three months, starting August 3 of that year. Wow. This was probably because of the dance fad, I’m assuming. The song itself has this odd earwormy thing going on.)

1997: “Honey”, Mariah Carey. (No clue.)

1998: “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”, Aerosmith. (Yeah, I know this one…and yes, I kinda like it. It definitely belongs in the pantheon of arena rock band power ballads.)

1999: “Unpretty”, TLC. (No idea. The only TLC song I’m familiar with is “Waterfalls”.)

2000: “Music”, Madonna. (No clue whatsoever. Aside from her much-derided cover of “American Pie”, I have no idea what Madonna has done musically since she starred in Evita.)

2001: “I’m Real”, Jennifer Lopez. (No idea.)

2002: “Dilemma”, Nelly. (I have no idea who Nelly is.)

2003: “Shake Ya Tailfeather”, Nelly, P Diddy, and Murphy Lee. (??? Although this is the first repeat artist from one year to the next on my birthday.)

2004: “Goodies”, Ciara. (???)

2005: “Gold Digger”, Kanye West. (??? I sense a theme forming here….)

2006: “SexyBack”, Justin Timberlake. (Now I’m wondering at what point this exercise becomes a waste of time.)

2007: “Crank That (Souja Boy)”, Soulja Boy Tell’em. (An artist who topped the charts less than a decade ago. I’ve never heard of him until now. In fact, is it a “him”? Or is this a woman, or a group? I have no idea whatsoever.)

2008: “Whatever You Like”, TI. (???)

2009: “I Gotta Feeling”, the Black Eyed Peas. (Wow, one I’ve actually heard. Kinda catchy, in the “I can take it or leave it” category. This song was Number One for over three months, starting in July that year.)

2010: “Teenage Dream”, Katy Perry. (This isn’t leaping to mind, but at least I’ve heard of Katy Perry.)

2011: “Someone Like You”, Adele. (Holy shit, a song I’ve heard from an artist I like! Adele makes me happy.)

2012: “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, Taylor Swift. (I don’t know this song, but I do like Taylor Swift, believe it or not. I like her voice.)

2013: “Roar”, Katy Perry. (Not familiar with this one.)

2014: “All About That Bass”, Meghan Trainor. Yeah…who’s she? Never heard of her. The number two song this year is by Taylor Swift. Come on, Taylor. If you’d worked a little harder we could’ve had another year of confluence. Oh well, maybe later I’ll track down this Meghan Trainor’s song and see what it’s all about.

Well, that’s that, folks. We’ll check back in a year, and in the meantime, as Mr. Kasem always said, “Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars!”

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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