Nov. 4th, 2003

katallison: (Default)
I am feeling rather aged and grumpy and out of swing with the hip kids today, for several reasons:

(a) I'm not doing the Yuletide Treasures/Obscure Fandoms thingie. For a variety of reasons, most of which have to do with my writing-brain's apparently implacable powers of resistance to doing anything to spec. There's a whole ancillary set of ponderings here (which I'm too tired to play out at length) about how fanfiction and the writing thereof often serves as a sort of social currency--writing a nice bit of smut to cheer someone up, or as a birthday present or return for a favor or something--and while I quite like it that people do that, it's not something I can really do myself. Because, ultimately? My writing is all about me me me me me, not that I necessarily like that fact, but I've learned that to pretend I function otherwise is fairly unproductive.

(b) Also, though I'm delighted everyone is getting to have great fun with scads o' new icons, and I'm enjoying seeing the results, I really am not a prolific icon person myself, and am perfectly content with my measly ten. I like having a single signature icon that I use on most occasions, and whipping out a few alternates only in particular situations or moods. Then too, making really good icons requires skills in compression, selection, and brevity--rather like writing haiku, or witty postcards--and that's never been my forte.

(c) Nix likewise on the audblog thing; a bunch of years ago I was doing an internship in a mental health clinic, and my supervisor was determined that I'd learn how to dictate my case notes instead of writing them, and I discovered how hellishly difficult it is for me to produce orderly, well-composed sentences when I'm simply talking into a machine. I ended up having to type out my notes, edit them, and *then* read them into the recorder, and that's what I'd have to do with an audblog entry, which would kind of defeat the purpose.

So you kids, y'all go on and enjoy yourselves, I'll just sit here on the front porch, rocking and clacking my dentures and taking a nip out of the brandy bottle from time to time.
katallison: (Default)
November is the strangest month ...

During the day, or at least during that endless succession of short grey dank days we have in these parts during November, the world seems very closed-down and compressed; the sky is never *lower* than it is during November, with the heavy grey clouds just inches, it seems, above one's head, and the darkness closes in early, and the raw chill sends one scuttling back into the warm den of one's home.

But at the same time -- I just stepped out of my own warm den, and went out on the back deck for a smoke, and there's a *huge* wind blowing, lashing the bare trees and dead leaves around in the darkness, and the sky is enormous, full of shifting scudding murky clouds. It's an absolutely magical night, full of portent and weirdness, and one can feel the season turning toward winter, and winter whooshing down out of the north.

I wrote something in a story once about how at this time of year the change of season is like the swoop of a clock's pendulum, when it's rushing down toward the nadir of its cycle. And, yeah; infinite suspension, in the sense that November is a sort of ultimate statis, grey and still and leaden. But at the same time, there's this great sweeping rush downward toward the deep cold and the *real* stillness of winter.

Age is like that--one the one hand, the sense of lowered ceilings and dimmed expectations and hopes, and the yearning only for simple comfortable warmth. But also the awareness of the huge wind-raked night out there, dark, raw, comfortless, inexorable, and so very beautiful, in a harsh relentless sort of way. I'll die, we'll all die, everything will die, and that's *all right*.

At some point I'll be ready to let myself get swept away in that black cold wind, but not quite yet; going now to wrap myself up in blankets and sleep, and get up tomorrow and go to work, under the heavy grey skies of another day.

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katallison

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