( other months' notes ) ( last month: February 2001 ) ( next month: July-August 2001 )

Yesterday upon arriving at work I discovered we'd had a bit of a flood. The inch of water, caused by someone flushing paper towels down one of the toilets, had already been removed, but the water damage remained, including two banker boxes of photo materials sitting on the floor of my office. So most of the day was spent carefully peeling wet pictures apart and laying them out to dry, my sense of 'interesting! a different sort of drama at the office' leavened by faint professional guilt that I should have known better than to leave anything on a floor for just this sort of reason.

= = =

I got to the Neil Gaiman signing (at Vroman's Museum Collection) a wee bit early, despite leaving work later than I'd intended. Putting on my ego armor, my camera and I seized a small open space on the floor at the front. I got a good view, a good listening spot for the reading, and, wonder of wonders, when he got to the Q&A, I asked the first question!

It wasn't a very good question. I might not have asked it if the rest of the audience hadn't been tongue-tied for several seconds. But at least it was a question I was honestly curious about. "How much research do you do when working on a story, and what kind?" I'm not sure where 'what kind' came from. I was a bit annoyed at myself when I realized that question was a sort of cousin to 'where do you get your ideas?' though I suppose what I was really asking was both "Am I going about my own research the 'right' way?" and "Do you, as I suspect from reading your web journal and The Sandman Companion, approach writing in the same way, with similar attitudes, that I do?" I think the answers were 'yes'. What those questions, in turn, really meant were, "Am I a good writer?" Which no one can answer for me until I give them something to look at.

In any case, my subsidiary purpose was also served: he noticed me in particular, among the crowd, for a few moments. We observers like to be noticed, every now and then.

When I (at length) made it to the front of the signing line, I asked him my question about Thessaly, and he answered it, and was very friendly, as was his assistant who kindly took our picture -- two, since I hadn't stopped talking yet when he accidentally took the first one. And then, after taking a few establishing shots of the store and the remaining line, I wended homeward.

= = =

End of day, you would think, when I arrive home at nearly 11 pm. But no! Since I'd got to Vroman's only about 15 minutes early, I was rather far back in the signing line, and settled down to start reading the book (American Gods) while waiting for my group to be called. Naturally I was irresistibly drawn to finish the book before going to sleep. So I was still awake at about 2 am, when the yelling started. Not the occasional greeting calls and interactions of Homo sapiens fraternitas, but a serious-sounding "Where's my money!" coupled with screams, then moans, for help.

Short version: a woman was beaten up in front of my building. Alerted by a witness on the sidewalk with a cellphone, and my own 911 call, several cars of police arrived in minutes. Luckily she didn't seem seriously injured, although she had a wound on the back of her head sufficient to bleed on the pavement in alarming fashion. And the police caught the assailant about 10 minutes later, as he hadn't had time to get far.

So altogether, I went out Wednesday night to a movie, dealt with anxious work situation, went to a fun event that kept me up late, and partially witnessed a crime at 2 am, ending up with about three hours of sleep for the night. Go ahead. Ask me if I'm glad it's Friday.

One two-line note for all of May. That's pretty sad (even the content, such as it was, a downer). It's also sad that as soon as I decided these notes were escapism from real writing, and announced I would focus on the real writing, I promptly did little of either, though I have been reading, and fancying myself a carefully planning thinker. Can't write books on the think system (yet).

Let's try this again.

I just came in from standing on my balcony watching the orange and blue sky and its glowing golden clouds. The air is a perfect blend of warm and cool, and smells faintly of carnival (dinnertime cooking nearby). People enter and exit the front door of my apartment building, down below. It is a Thursday evening, hesitating on the edge of weekend, the first day of the rest of the summer.

All I need is for the leaves on my traumatized little elm seedling to stop turning yellow, and life will be beautifullest. or as beautifullest as it can be on a worknight when I have not yet won the lottery.

waah. Douglas Adams died yesterday. Of a heart attack. At age 49. Forty-nine!

That sounds like a setup for a bad "42" joke, but I'm not in the mood.

Yesterday (Earth Day) I came in late to a program on PBS that was explaining why preserving nature is important, aimed mainly at those who haven't thought much about it before, but still interesting to me. They talked with Edmund O. Wilson, famous Harvard entomologist ("the ant man") who noted that most people consider ants to be pests we could easily do without, which is not true; they perform important roles in the natural cycle of decomposition. In the wider theme of the program, every species on the planet is there for some special reason, some niche that it occupies. And humans, especially modern urban and suburban humans, often forget how dependent they are upon all the world's processes and cycles continuing to function as we are used to.

One thing I didn't know, that Wilson stated: the combined weight of all the ants in the world (I think just ants, not all insects) is roughly equal to the combined weight of all humans. oof!

But if you look at the current state of the planet, it's easy to tell which of the two species is more of a burden on the system.

Just watched Frontline's "Medicating Kids," about ADD/ADHD diagnoses/drugs. At one point a woman, who is opposed to the existing wide use of Ritalin et al, asks rhetorically, 'What is so different about kids now from kids in the 50s and 60s? What has changed? '

"Both parents work now, in the majority of families," was my reflexive response.

In the Frontline program at least, the two main camps of opinion seemed to be "ADD is a condition that has always existed but has only recently become recognized and treated," versus "ADD is a mirage created by self-interested drug companies, doctors, parents, and educators." I am left with a sense of frustration that a third possibility should be considered: what if the incidence of a true medical condition has increased due to a change in some aspect of our culture?

A doctor interviewed in the program who has been studying CAT scans of ADD patients for five years has tentatively concluded that a certain small portion of the brain is smaller in ADD patients than in others. I think of unrelated articles I have read in the past on the mutability of the brain in responding to outside stimuli, or the lack of. And they say in the program that the drugs used to treat ADD/ADHD are stimulants. What if that brain segment (its name I can't remember) is not stimulated enough for sufficient growth in some children because both their parents work and do not spend enough time with them?

I have no concrete basis for thinking so. I am neither a biologist nor a psychiatrist. That might be completely wrong. But it would be nice if someone could say so, and tell me why. Otherwise I get a bit agitated that people may be missing the truth, or at least _a_ truth. If no one wants to consider the possibility because people wouldn't like to hear it, that's even worse.

In the last moments of the Frontline program, they hinted that at least one family might have thought the same way. The parents of a hyperactive four-year-old strongly opposed medication; they decided that the husband would quit his job and stay home with the boy and his baby brother. I hope things work out for all of them. I can't help wondering if more parents will start thinking that way in another decade or so. The "latchkey kids," foci of much talk in the 80s, are now in high school, college, twenties. What will they do as parents?

[my telephone rings]

"Hello?"

[older woman's voice] "Hello... do you speak Armenian?"

"Nnooo..."

"Ah, I have a wrong number. Sorry."

"'s'ok."

-

5 April 2001: fandom fanfare.

Neil Gaiman has a new book coming out! And the tour dates have been announced! And I have two choices of where/when to catch him:

6/28/01 - 7:00 pm - Los Angeles, CA

Vroman's Books
3405 Lake Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91101
1-800-769-BOOK

6/29/01 - 8:00 pm - Los Angeles, CA

Book Soup
8818 Sunset Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA 90069
(310) 659-3110
1-800-764-BOOK

I wonder if I'll get a chance to ask him my question about Thessaly.

I was trying to think of a good April Fool note to write here. But I didn't.

I did decide that I'm no longer going to let myself off the hook on the writing resolution. To mark the start of the second quarter of the year, the arrival of spring, the great leap forward, I must write at least a few words, every day, of a story or poem. Still a weak resolution by some standards, but... small moves.

Sun through clouds. Puccini's La Boheme, thrown through space to my ears and eyes from the evening of a city on another ocean. A mockingbird in the morning. Princess Mononoke. Steam rising from an empty jacuzzi in the patio behind my apartment building, as I pause in my exploration of the building while waiting for my laundry. All this and more in only the space of yesterday and today.

There exists also ugliness. The screen that last night brought me Mimi and Rodolfo today reminded me of the enslavement of women in Afghanistan. But in the words of one of my favorite literary characters, "they cannot conquer forever!" The beauty of the stars will always be, for those who choose to look up.

Well, maybe more of a blip than a blast, but in trying to clear my old mail off the medianstrip server I noticed one from Oct 1998 (!) that still entertained me: a report I'd sent to Stewart describing something I'd heard on KROQ earlier that evening.

DJ Sluggo: "Hello, K-R-O-Q."

Teen or preteen girl: "Hi, do you guys play Hanson?"

Sluggo: (pause) "Only in our worst nightmares."

Girl (sounds of other girls squealing in background): "Eeee! You don't play Hanson? Why not?"

Sluggo: "Hm. Let me think... because they SUCK?"

Girls : squeals of shock and protest "eee! hanson is so cool! eeee!"

Sluggo: "They're all fags, you know."

Girls: squeals intensify

Sluggo: "The fact that you can squeal illustrates why we do not play them."

I don't know if I think often enough about how lucky I am to have landed in the family I did. Not only do all the various in-laws not hate each other, we actively get along and are eager to see each other at the various family holiday functions. And the immediate families get along so well amongst themselves that (for example) my mom and aunt spent today at my grandma's, drawing and trading lots to decide who will get which furniture and objects after my grandma doesn't need them anymore. She's very chipper for 85, but just wants to get everything squared away, make sure everything's all taken care of and no trouble.

Setting goals means I have to check every so often and see how i'm doing. Let's see... from that list at the beginning of feb:

I am pretty sure that only in Los Angeles would I find myself sitting in a left-turn lane next to a white stretch Hummer.

While we're waiting for the good Lord of the Rings movies, take a moment to fondly (in the MST3K sense) remember the bad one.

Not if you haven't read the books yet, though. If this is the case, you are hereby charged to do so beginning today. Even if you must work, eat lunch and dinner, buy the books first, etc., you ought to be able to squeeze in the first several chapters of the Hobbit before bedtime. Or, if you think you won't have the patience for a children's book (adult-quality writing notwithstanding), I guess heading straight into Fellowship would be ok, as long as you read the Prologue first to get the backstory. Get to it! Where there's a whip there's a will, my slugs.

During the news story on the San Diego school shooting, I saw an interview with a boy, a friend of the shooter, one of several people the shooter had told of his intentions over the weekend. But none of them believed him, or wanted to believe him. "You're joking, right? we said, and he said, yeah, just joking. any of you want to do it with me? and we said, you said you were joking. and he said, yeah, i'm just joking."

And the boy on tv started to say, "Cause he wouldn't -"

pause.

but he went ahead and finished the thought, "he wasn't the kind of person who would do something like that."

Why didn't you tell anyone? asked the interviewer.

"I didn't want to get him in trouble. if he wasn't going to do it."

People don't like to adjust their personal universes to allow for possibilities that do not comfortably fit.

"My friend wouldn't really kill people."
"I spend and have spent enough time with my son."
"I do not need to work to prevent my students harassing other students, because it's just harmless growing-up behavior and I couldn't stop it anyway."
"My product does not affect anyone's behavior in even the smallest, incremental way (though I will spend money to advertise it, in order to influence people to buy it)."

All the people in the family, the school, the neighborhood, the city, the country, the world: butterflies individually flapping their wings, creating many small storms of which one, every once in a while, given enough careless butterflies, grows into a hurricane.

The butterflies I consider most important, parents, seem to be the ones least talked about. But the others are all part of the same universe, whether or not we can see ourselves, or anyone else.

Yesterday afternoon, while I sat at the bottom of Janss Steps on the UCLA campus, waiting in vain for the sun to escape the buttermilk clouds, I observed a young family playing round about: parents, young girl and younger boy (ages 3 and 1, perhaps). The kids were adorable, with the open confidence of well-loved children, and the parents were encouraging, and watchful, and happy. Mom took up post at the midway landing, giving each child a hug or kiss or cheery word as they reached her (the preferred route was to clamber along the rounded top of the low wall at the side of the steps, though the steps themselves had some charm). Dad remained at the bottom, on the grass slope to the side of the steps, where the kids would run with gleeful speed downhill. The boy had a bit of trouble controlling his descent, and Dad would catch him (once or twice before he was about to run smack into a tree).

You're thinking that "universal language" is referring to love and family. Partly, but something else tickled me. At one point dad called to daughter, as she began her umpteenth ascent, and she stopped and turned around and they talked for a moment, in an Asian language. (You would think I, growing up in California schools with lots of Asian friends, could tell my Asian languages apart by now. All I can say is if I had to guess, I think they might have been Korean.) The girl ended the conversation with a casual "OK" and resumed climbing. To suddenly hear that, at the end of a string of words I hadn't understood, amused me. What is it about the flavor of certain syllables that makes them catch on, and spread over time and place and culture?

-

ARGH. The Taliban began yesterday to destroy all statues in Afghanistan, an ancient center of Buddhist culture, because they are graven images, potential heathen idols. Today they started firing mortars at the 165-foot and 114-foot statues carved out of the cliffs at the Silk Road town of Bamiyan, the first known Buddha statues of that scale in the world (so the articles say). Those statues had already lost their features and some other fragments through the passage of over a thousand years, but it looks as if what remains will soon be dust. Not to mention all the other statues in the country, in the museums, everywhere and anywhere the Taliban can reach. All doomed.

Nobody else in the world thinks this is a good idea. Even Pakistan is pleading with them to stop. Iran thinks the Taliban is giving Islam a bad name.

Somehow I doubt the Taliban will care.