Better Than Dead

Random quote of the day:

 

“Adam cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human; he can approach him through becoming human.  To become human is what he, this individual man, has been created for.”

—Martin Buber, as quoted in Dan Avnon, Martin Buber: The Hidden Dialogue

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

 

“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.”

—Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

 

“Technology changes; humans don’t.”

—Deb Schultz, deborahschultz.com

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Why is it always 3 a.m. when the smoke detector starts beeping for a battery change?

And it’s not like you can ignore it. The sound isn’t as skull-numbing as the actual alarm, but it’s shrill and persistent. It keeps going and going and going…like the battery bunny, only it wants its fix, damn it. You better give it to me or else.

Min goes under the bed to hide and I stumble into the hall where it’s shree-peeping. I lumber out to where the batteries are kept, rummage until I find the right ones, then shuffle over to the step ladder. If I’d been fully cognizant, I would have gone for the step ladder first and just pulled the old battery out to shut it up, but my mind isn’t really functioning. I climb up, yank the old battery out, put the new one in and the damned thing still peeps several more times, as if giving me one last neener-neener-neener before I can go back to bed.

I fall back into bed, Min comes out of hiding, and we drift off again, feeling virtuous for accomplishing a mission even in 3 a.m. sleep-bedraggled state.

Until 4:35 a.m. When the @##$$%^&&&^!! thing starts peeping again. Min goes back under the bed.

Okay, this time I’m just mad. I am not a pleasant person when sleep deprived. I get the step ladder, I crawl up it and yank that wanker right off the wall. I’m standing in the hall and I’ve got it in my hand and I’m thinking of chucking it out the front door onto the lawn when I hear the peeping again.

From overhead.

It’s the carbon monoxide monitor which resides about five feet away from the smoke detector. I stumble back to the battery stash, get another battery, get back on the step ladder and, see, this is where things go seriously into the hash. I’ve got enough brain cells firing that I remember there’s a certain trickiness to changing the battery on the carbon monoxide monitor. The smoke detectors are easy. You just click the door open and the battery is right there, but pull and prod and poke as much as I can, the CM monitor will not open.

It does not cease from peeping though. Fool, I’ve beaten you. Hahahaha. And, btw, neener-neener-neener.

So I rip it off the wall. This time I seriously am going to throw it onto the lawn because I know I haven’t got the brain power to deal with the bastard. A tiny bit of adultness still left in the raging plain of blankness that is my mind persuades me to unlock the garage side door and place it on the workbench where I won’t have to listen to it. I go back to bed. When my alarm goes off at 5:45 I hit it several times before I manage to get out of bed. In the shower, when sufficient quantities of water have revived at least some of my higher cognitive abilities, I remember that you don’t open the CM monitor. You slide it up off its track to take it off the wall, flip it over, slide the panel off the back to reveal the battery compartment, and uh…

In the sitting room, the closest room in the house to the garage, I can still hear that piercing peep, and when I open the front door it’s screaming like some demon bird to be fed. Min has gone back under the bed. I go outside, make my apologies to the monitor, and change its battery. The peeping ceases. I now have two monitors which will have to be reattached to the wall, and while I’m at it, I think I’ll change the batteries in the other smoke detectors. Just in case.

You know, they encourage us to use the battery operated detectors rather than the hardwired ones because if there’s a fire in your electrical system, they’ll never go off and you’ll die a horrible death. So batteries are the logical way to go. But at 3 a.m. in a sleep-bedraggled state, that logic is a very hard sell indeed.

Random quote of the day:

“Nothing is irrelevant.  The strongest temptation is to think, Oh, but they wouldn’t be interested in that.  But the most ordinary parts of our lives are the very things that tie us to the human condition.”

—Barbara Scot, interview with Linda B. Swanson-Davies, Glimmer Train magazine

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

I hope to return to real blogging soon, but it’s been hella busy. In the meantime, here’s another one of those numbered thingies:

1. Listening to the graduate students around here make excuses to their professors as to why they haven’t completed their coursework, it strikes me that not much has changed since elementary school. They’ve just found more sophisticated, elaborate, and convoluted ways of saying, “The dog ate my homework.”

2. I’m on chapter eleven of the read-through of Venus in Transit. I should be much further along as I hadn’t intended to do any restructuring or heavy editing, but you know how it goes. A couple (or more) scenes that just had to be rewritten, language desperately needed de-clunkifying, things had to be looked up and pondered… There’s still plenty more that needs fixing, no worries, but it’s amazing to me how many of the smaller threads of plot and characterization got left untied. I’ll definitely deal with those in the next draft.

3. I’ve acquired a sudden re-fascination with cunning folk, witchery, and folk medicine, et al. lately. I’ve been reading books and scouring JSTOR for articles. (I love JSTOR. Thank goodness for institutional subscriptions.) If research interest is an indicator of which novel my right brain next wants to write, things are looking good for my proto-novel, Time in a Bottle, the idea based in part on my novella, “Sealed with a Curse.” That novella involved an 18th century cunning man, infidelity, wastrelism, and a witch’s bottle. The novel version carries forward to the 21st century descendants of some of the folks involved in that affair. And maybe time travel. Or maybe not.

4. I’m wondering if a subscription to Netflix would be worth it to me since I rarely am in the mood to watch a movie at home more than once or twice a month? I used to devour movies at a massive rate, but I lost the love somewhere along the way. The $8.99 one would definitely be sufficient, but I’m not sure I’d get my money’s worth even then.

5. Come the Singularity, I suspect I will not be allowed on the lifeboat. I suspect I will be okay with that. Utopian visions rarely turn out well for humanity at large. I have zero confidence that techo-utopians will be any better at it than every other millennial movement that has wrecked humanity in the past. I am not a Luddite. I really do enjoy living in the bright, shiny techno-age—but sweeping mass social engineering never works. That’s the lesson of history. That’s the lesson of any close study of human nature. Power corrupts, even utopian techno power—and besides, these yahoos aren’t even trying to be egalitarian. This is all about ego and rich mostly whitefolk trying to escape the filthy masses.