Promotional Site for the book by Sara Ryan
I quote myself: “As the child of two librarians, one of whom worked in rare books and special collections, I don’t have family stuff so much as a museum and archive.”
So when I’m at my parents’ house, I dig around. This time I found some scrapbooks. Steve wrote about the contents of one of them over at the Periscope blog. The other one was kept by my great-grandfather:
I just made this lady into a LiveJournal icon:
You can see more of what’s inside over on Flickr.
So yesterday I had the (not very earth-shattering) revelation that perhaps one of the reasons I run (more like jog) so slowly is that when I do it, I almost always do between 3 and 5 miles on the treadmill, and if I did a shorter distance, I might be able to increase my speed. Sure enough, after pilates yesterday I ran a mile in just over ten minutes, which is, I am sure, unconscionably slow for some of you who read this, but like, two minutes faster than my usual slow jog.
My question: so okay, now that I know this, how do I work my way up to running farther, faster? I don’t want to push myself too much and get injured, and I also want to keep weights workouts, the elliptical trainer (easier on the knees) and pilates in my exercise mix. So I probably wouldn’t be running more than, say, twice a week. Ellie? Greg? Mette? Other lurking runners? Any advice?
I’m still thinking about place.
Where I am now, the overwhelming majority of businesses are national chains. Their existence is described approvingly with definite and indefinite articles, e.g.: “We got a Target,” “The Wal-mart has the cheapest coffee filters.” To urbanite me, these businesses are uniformly bleak and depressing. There’s nothing unique, nothing local, nothing to tell you where you are. You could be anywhere.
But when I ride in the car with my mom, that same generic landscape is inscribed with specifics: “I walked to elementary school on this street.” “There’s your great-grandma’s house. We’d go there on Sunday afternoons and listen to One Man’s Family.” “That’s where the hospital used to be. When your great-grandpa had his heart attack, he could see the store from his hospital bed. Well, no one had opened the store by 8:05, so he got up and walked across the street to do it.”
It doesn’t make me like the chains any better, but it helps me see why Mom wants to live here.
1. Overheard in an elevator. Business casual woman: “Is this a Sci Fi Con?” Dealer wearing innocuous t-shirt and jeans: “No, comics.” Business casual woman: “Oh, comics…well, I just love the outfits!”
2. Speaking of elevators: there weren’t enough of them. After waiting for one for twenty minutes, at which point we took the stairs up to our room. On the seventeenth floor.
3. Man taking a doggie sticker: “That’s my lucky dog!”
I informed him that he was correct.
4. Woman taking a gun sticker: “That’s what my heart looks like.”
5. Best outfit on anyone during the whole show: the three-year-old girl in a Spiderman muscle costume. I’m sorry I don’t have a photo.
6. Sean’s latest genius object: Smokin’ Zombies!
7. Useful Tip: When there is a bottle of fancy water on the table at the hotel restaurant, do not assume that it is on the table because that is the only kind of water they serve. Assume that if you open it, it will cost you more than eight dollars.
7.5. Conversely, do not assume that just because a restaurant has a dumb name, that it will not be a good restaurant.
8. Admonition from a gentleman passing by the table: “Don’t let the loonies get you!” He paused. “Unless…they already have!”
9. Ninety five percent of the announcements made over the PA system, I completely could not understand, what with the noise in the room, the distortion, et cetera. Fortunately, the one that I did was about a gentleman who had lost a fanny pack containing pain medications. I’d been wondering whose fanny pack was underneath our table.
10. When you come to the end of an intense convention weekend, it’s great to have a task to accomplish.
It was a good thing we decided to check the tires while we were still in the parking lot.
I call it the Rockwell Deviance Quotient.
It measures how much one’s holiday experiences diverge from the media ideal.
I haven’t quite figured out the actual numerical part, but it might be like when you’re using a level and you assess how many bubbles off plumb something (or someone) is. So your holidays could be, say, four Rockwells off.
Like mine.
In other news: Steve and I are now in Columbus for the Mid-Ohio-Con, and we’ve already met some lovely people who totally know some of my friends at the Ann Arbor District Library, because as Steve says, all towns are small when you deal only with the literate.
Here at the Undisclosed Location (a.k.a. my parents’ house in Ohio), catching up on email, deleting comment spam (Why, why are the spammers so deeply attracted to the post about Rules being a Junior Library Guild selection? It’s harder hit than any other post, by far…) preparing for another small, low-key Thanksgiving, it’s hard to believe that I was at ALAN just a few days ago.
The theme of the workshop was about finding a sense of self and place in young adult literature. Our panel was about place in different genres within YA, and I’m still thinking about it. We each had about five minutes, and I’ll give you a tiny snippet of what we said. Cecil Castellucci talked about how a scene (punk, movie monster-making, etc.) can be a place, how a city can be a character, how art itself is a safe place for a lot of us. Holly Black talked about how description in fantasy needs to suggest, even before any fantastic elements come into the story, that the reader is someplace unexpected, where anything might happen. Garret Freymann-Weyr discussed how inextricable place is from memory. I talked about how in Rules, Battle adjusts very quickly to Portland, and the very ease of that adjustment to a new place underscores how hard it is for her to connect with and understand her brother. (I also told everyone about the anxiety dream I had the night before, appropriate for a conference full of English teachers: that all of us had to relate our own work to the Great Gatsby.) Jo Knowles talked about how an abuser can make every place feel unsafe, but also how places can, eventually, be reclaimed. And Ann Angel did a search for all the places mentioned in the anthology she edited, Such A Pretty Face, and saw that the places mentioned most often — bathrooms, locker rooms, bedrooms — were all locuses of anxiety about where the characters fit in the world.
I was so glad to have the chance to be part of the conference.
More soon, but right now, it’s sunny and I’m going for a walk.
…and it was a good thing, too.
I thought I was going to take public transportation from the Newark airport.
I waited for the bus to Penn Station.
For a while.
Some other busses came.
Finally the bus to Penn Station arrived and I was climbing the steps to get on it and I must have looked more than usually bewildered/worried, because the driver asked, “Do you want Newark Penn Station or New York Penn Station?” “New York Penn Station,” I said. “Oh,” he said, “you need to go over there and wait for the [indecipherable].”
So I did that.
It didn’t work.
Long story short: I got one of those shuttles that goes to multiple destinations within a certain (extensive) geographic area. The driver had been working since 5 am (it was about 5:30 pm when I got on), had a cold and was sneezing and coughing, and kept getting texted by his girlfriend. Finally he called her back and said, “Baby, now is not a good time, I got a bus full of people here, I’ll get with you later.” He also kept getting harrassed by one of the other people in the shuttle who’d waited a long time for a pickup and who got progressively angrier as other people’s stops came up before his. And did I mention the traffic?
Meanwhile, I am calling my delightful hosts ellen_kushner and deliasherman at intervals to update them upon my whereabouts as I am now two hours later than I thought I would be and we are allegedly going to a play at 8 pm.
Fortunately, at 7:35 when I relayed my 20, it was conveniently close to Lincoln Center!
So I got out of the shuttle and gave the driver a big tip, because he was having a way worse day than I was. “I hope your night gets better,” I said. “Oh, it will, it will.”
I started laughing when I was halfway across the street, contemplating the spectacle of myself and my luggage going — more or less — straight from the airport to a show. We all got there just in time.
It was a good show, too.
Next post: will be actually about the conference!
Today I woke up at 3 am, convinced that I had booked my flight to New York for the wrong day.
I hadn’t, but I couldn’t get back to sleep, either.
So it was a good thing I had an audiobook. A LONG audiobook. I’m currently listening to George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, in part to see how someone who’s incredibly vicious to his characters does it. I’m really glad I’m enjoying it, because it means that I’ll have listening material for months to come.
Now I have three suitcases of differing sizes laid out on the bed, and I am torn between the desire to be fancy and the desire not to take so damn much luggage for once.
Also I am seized with the irrational fear that if I pack my favorite fancy clothes in the giant suitcase, it will get lost and I will never see said clothes again. Maybe I’ll just take a few fancy items and stuff them into the little carryon.
In sum, Internet, I am very excited about going to NCTE/ALAN (it will be my first time!) but also, I am preoccupied with the trivial.
Back from a fabulous weekend farther north in the Pacific Northwest. I have four (now three) days until I head East for the National Conference of Teachers of English and the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents, and that panel I’m on with my awesome partners in YA novel crime.
One of which is my birthday.
I am suffering again from an attack of Too Many Open Tabs. Heading home in the Now It’s Really Winter darkness on the rain-slick road, I start listing all the tasks I have to finish before I get on the plane Friday morning. “Don’t talk about them while you’re driving,” says Steve.
About the weekend: once again, thanks to everyone who came to my writing workshop on Saturday, and thanks to the Lynnwood Library for hosting. Like I said, the library did great PR for my appearance. I’d seen the website graphic, but it wasn’t until I got to the branch that I saw the fliers and bookmarks. Very cool, but somehow disconcerting to see my own face smiling out at myself.
It was such a quick trip I didn’t get to see everyone I’d have liked to see (although it was excellent seeing everyone that I did) (but some of you were out of town). But I wanted to get back home as fast as possible since I knew I’d be leaving again so soon. I’m sure I’ll be back up there before too long. For Emerald City Comicon if not before.
Back to the tabs. I was writing that list of things I had to do, and then the list expanded to multiple categories, with multiple items under each one. I didn’t even have that much coffee today, but the little hamster in my head was running running running in its wheel, and I didn’t know how to slow it down.
Then I remembered I had some reading material that had just come in on hold. To wit: I’m A Lebowski, You’re A Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski, And What Have You.
I did not pour myself a White Russian. I poured a different beverage. But I stopped scribbling furiously on my to-do list, and I started reading. Didn’t stop til I was done, with many pauses for cracking up. It was exactly what I needed.
And now, in not especially Dude-like fashion (maybe more like Maude? Or Brandt?) I can cross an item off my list. Because one of them was about how I should blog.
At our house, we all watch The Wire.