And now, to put aside personal pride, and wallow in shame.
I have completely lost track of the date and the days of the week, and therefore I missed Talyesin’s birthday.
Mea culpa, big brother. So…
I promise to grovel more later. Maybe at Hurley’s, so we can all buy you copious amounts of alcohol over a long period of time, while still drinking responsibly.
Ever feel like you’re racing to catch up with everyone else’s opinion of you?
I do, all the time. Skippy got me thinking about it this morning. Some of it is, “Why do they like hanging around with me so much?”, and some of it is, “I can’t possibly charge that much for my time.”
My husband sat me down last night, took my hands, and said, “Darling, I want to tell you something, and you have to promise to listen. You’re an awesome, awesome person. Far more awesome than you believe yourself to be. You can perceive the awesome in others, so why can’t you perceive it in yourself?”
Well, it’s embarrassing. As kids, we were mostly taught that to accept a compliment was to be selfish. It’s more modest to demur, to protest politely. We were also schooled to believe that pride was a bad thing. So if you were good at something, you weren’t allowed to appreciate your skill, or to even really have fun at it in case you made other people feel bad.
Then, of course, there was the geek factor. If you enjoyed reading, liked to be alone, had any interest in music other than the mainstream, films other than action or comedy, or technology other than a phone and a vending machine, you were uncool, and you resorted to lurking and not calling attention to yourself.
What has all that socialisation produced? A generation of people who have difficulty understanding that they’re cool people. What, me deserve something? (Praise, money, social interest, whatever?) No, no. Please, stop. It’s not just that you’re embarrassing me, you’re actually making me uncomfortable and self-conscious because like so many others, I can’t truly understand why you think I’m so great.
Argh. Scores of us are out there. Scads. Bushels.
It’s probably all connected to how incredibly bad some of us are at selling ourselves. Almost everyone I know hates writing a cover letter for a CV, because it feels like exactly that: selling yourself.
A healthy dose of pride in the self is a good thing. Now, if I could just cultivate it…
The skies darkened; I looked out a window.
It’s snowing. Again.
I’ve been meaning to post this for a few days now:
Tom Stoppard is adapting a script for Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass for New Line Cinema.
How cool is that?
(If you’re as cooled out by this as I was, and you’re wondering how on earth they’re going to pull it off, there’s a rather amusing ‘what-if’ scene about the pitch etc here. And the fan site Bridge To The Stars is pretty decent all around.)
I’m a geek, which is hardly news to you. I’m a geek who has actually built starship models in the past. Nothing recently, alas (although I have a Lego X-Wing in a chest just awaiting the day I throw off the covers and know deep in my bones that it’s a Star Wars Lego day and nothing can stop me!), because I just don’t have the time or space these days. My Excelsior and X-Wing models have survived three moves in the past seven years, and have always been on top of my bookshelves or on windowsills somewhere in my apartment.
Well, during this move, they finally broke. Not into little bits, either – big breaks that really can’t be fixed without a lot of epoxy, prayers, and about five hands to hold it as it dries. So the Excelsior got tossed last week, and this week when I came across my poor shattered X-Wing, I sighed, said good-bye, and placed it right on top of the box I’ve been using to collect further rubbish.
Well, yesterday as I worked on my article about Disney’s use of SF in Lilo & Stitch (yes, I’ll let you know when it’s published on the fps site – remember fps from its print days?), my little black kitten was sitting on the desk, watching me. I was vaguely aware of her presence — one cannot ignore relentless cuteness — but I suddenly snapped into reality when I heard a soft grinding noise. I glanced sideways and saw Nix, her amber eyes on mine, dreamily chewing on an S-foil, with the occasional delicate nibble on an engine casing.
I yelped and waved my hands, and she leapt away, startled. Then I realised that my fierce protection was unwarranted, since it was in the garbage anyway, and I began to laugh. I could almost hear her wail as she streaked under the dining room table: “It’s only a little more carbon scoring, Mummy, and you did such a wonderful job on the carbon scoring….”
Every time I break my own rule of Never-Compose-A-Blog-Entry-Online, my computer crashes. Thus, you are deprived of a deep, intelligent examination of the television phenomenon 24, which my husband and I began watching this weekend. The highlights were basically as follows:
– Who says the first episode absolutely must be immediately followed by the second? It was a forty-five minute meet-the-characters, these-are-the-environments bite with no cliffhanger.
– We watched six straight hours of 24 on Saturday night, until we hit the end of the two DVDs we had borrowed. Needless to say, as of Monday night, we had the rest of the set in our possession. Damn, this is addictive.
– We’re starting to see how the first eight episodes are nice and tight, operating on the potential reality of ratings not meriting the second half of the season. By episode eight, it is completely possible that all ends can be tied up in two more episodes. Then, things change and become even more complex, presumably because ratings secured the last twelve episodes.
– The only thing better than seeing huge billboards with Keifer Sutherland on them along highways last season is actually sitting in the comfort of my own living room and watching Keifer Sutherland do cool stuff, and being able to select the next episode from the DVD menu to watch him some more.
More good job news: I have been contacted by a woman who took a handful of my courses last fall, who has booked me to do a private seminar for seven women at her home in early April. I’m thrilled that she asked me, and I’m really looking forward to doing it. The only problem? She asked me how much I would charge for such an evening, and I had to admit that I had no idea, and that I’d get back to her. I shouldn’t have been so proud about being able to quote my rate for writing services last weekend; evidently that gets filed under ‘Hubris’, and the universe feels obliged to present me with a situation such as this one to return me to my properly humble state. Normally I’d charge $25 per head for this particular seminar if I taught it in association with the business I usually teach through, but it doesn’t seem fair to apply the same rate, somehow. I want to charge less, but still not sell myself short. (Look, Mum, I can be taught!) I can’t apply the obvious solution — namely, using my writing services hourly rate — because that pretty much equals the average of the per-head fee of my regular seminars, which would mean that I’d be teaching seven people for the price of one.
Grr. My time is money. This was my mantra for a while in January while I worked out that hourly rate, and it looks like I’m going to have to chant it again for a while until I figure this out. Anyone have any ideas? What do companies pay outside specialists to come in and present seminars for their staff – say a three-hour seminar? There’s a huge range of potential fees according to a variety of factors, I know, but anything would help at this point.
Oh, I’m just livid.
My student loan payment goes through on the first of the month. Since the first of March was on a weekend, it went through on the Monday instead.
Turns out that I was fourteen cents short of my payment. Fourteen cents.
They NSFd me to the tune of $25.
I’m livid because in the past, internal transfers like this have dipped below the zero mark with no penalty, up to about five dollars in the negative. It hasn’t happened with any kind of frequency, because I’m really careful with my loan payments; maybe twice. This time, though, for some reason, for fourteen cents, they decided to penalise me for $25.
Livid, I tell you. Livid.