Have had a full weekend already and it isn't even finished yet. Friday night I went to the Simchat Torah service with my roommate. This is the holiday that ends Sukkot and celebrates starting over in the Torah readings, from the end of Deuteronomy back to the beginning of Genesis. For this service the big ritual is to carry all the Torah scrolls in the house around the sanctuary seven times, singing a new song each time and learning a new lesson about the Torah. I'm told that the Hasidic Jews make a dance out of this process, which would be fun to see; but it was fun even in a Reform temple, because the kids got involved. For Sukkot the children had made Israeli flags on dowel sticks, and they were given these to wave around while the adults paraded around with the scrolls. (I got an Israeli flag too, but did not circle the temple.) By the end of the first hakafah, everybody was talking so loud you could hardly hear the guitar player singing the song. The rabbi was being very patient as she read the new lesson over the din (the paper flags were making the most noise, the adults the next most, and then the kids). Somewhere around the second or third hakafah, some kid got the idea of pulling the fire alarm out in the hall, which he did. The procession bravely continued while one of the adults went to disarm it, and the din increased. By the final hakafah I was saying in a low shout to my roommate, "For a holiday that celebrates the Law, this is the most lawless service I've ever seen!"

I've visited Temple Israel enough times that I can say it isn't like that the rest of the year; it's usually pretty sedate and informally decorous.

Then Saturday morning we got up early to go to the campaign headquarters to volunteer to drop Jean Carnahan literature at designated addresses on precinct maps. This is the second time I've done this, and it teaches you something about the process of getting the word out about a candidate. Anytime I've gotten literature, even about the candidate I'm voting for, I get irritated because I've pretty much made up my mind already. But how are the campaigns to know that? And what other ways do they have of telling the public about their candidate that aren't equally annoying? But a lot of the people who were actually at their doors were very gracious about receiving the broadsheets. "Well, I'm on her side," said one older woman as I poked the literature through the cracked-open screen door over a yapping dog. I'm thinking about this weirdness of American election processes, but I've come to no conclusions as yet. I've always been registered Independent, but have never voted for a Democrat yet...this might be the year, now that I've established that it isn't against my religion to vote Democratic. Anyway, I'm rather bewildered that my roommate has inveigled me into actually campaigning for Democrats...but it's actually been fun.

Then we went to the play at Drury -- Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin. One of Jessica's students is playing the title role. The play was very good, and quite amusing. Jessica had promised her two theatre students that she would tape the West Wing premiere for them, and it ended up that the whole cast was dying for a tape of the West Wing premiere, including Dr. Schraft, the director. So she's taping next week's episode for them also, and will give it to them to circulate amongst themselves. If next week is anything like the premiere, it would be entirely worth the wait.

I wonder what the next few hours will bring.

Well! This was an interesting expenditure of adrenaline, to say the least.

I get a call at 9:40 this morning, and yes, I was asleep. It's the county library, wanting to know if I could interview at 11:30 this morning for the copy-writing position I applied for Wednesday. So suddenly I'm -- not tense, just very, very alert -- and I pop out of bed and start pacing about thinking how I'm going to put together a writing portfolio in 30 minutes. So, I call Milissa long distance, and she answers, thank God! and I tell her I need a huge favor. Can she email me the files of that brochure I put together for the Special Collections department? I tell her where they are, and she says she'll do her best. She comes through for me while I'm taking my bath. Jessica checks my email and prints them out. I get dressed and made up. Then I print out a few other samples of my writing and put them into the smooth fuschia folder that Jessica has found for me. Then Jessica drives me there: "I'm still not awake. Are you okay with that?" "Listen, I think it's better to have you driving while slightly somnolent than to have me driving while freaking out and not knowing where I'm going." "Yeah, that's what I thought too."

So we get there early, and I go in and it's not too long before they call me in to the conference room: a woman and a man, looking rather glassy-eyed. He has a salt-and-pepper goatee and very dark eyes behind wire-rims; she is in black with long curly flyaway hair. They ask me questions off a stapled packet and write things down in the blanks below each question as I talk. They discover as I narrate my experiences that I'm trying to start a career as a writer, though I've always been one unofficially. I don't know if they are willing to take a chance on me -- young, inexperienced, though a quick study -- but I hope as I hand them the portfolio that my writing will convince them. Then they tell me I should hear back about the middle of October. Oh, God. SMS is supposed to let me know their decision next week. So by mid-October what will I be doing? Supervising workstudies at the SMS music library, or writing blurbs for the Springfield-Greene County Library? Either is nice, because I get paid; the copywriting would be great, because it's what I actually love doing. Oy. Oy. Oy. Think happy thoughts for me.

The West Wing premiere totally ruled. It's going on my list of Favorite Episodes Ever.

I loved the part where Toby and Josh threw that fit in Indiana. And the interview the President did with Debbie. And when Charlie set his new Little Brother straight. And when Josh woke Sam up. And pretty much the rest of it; I just loved the whole thing.

And while we're being juvenile, I feel a bit depressed that nobody comments on this blog except my mother. She's my mother, she's supposed to love me. Sigh. It's like when you're, like, telling a joke, and you start, like, laughing -- and then nobody else laughs, so then you're like, "HA, ha -- ha-ha...ha...." This is one of the recurrent themes of my life. I think I'm frickin' funny, but that doesn't always translate into other people laughing. It's like Bruno Kirby in Good Morning Vietnam saying to the General after being fired from Robin Williams's old job: "In my heart I know I'm funny." Lieutenant Steve, Lieutenant Steve, of course you are (squeekie, squeekie).

It's very, very rarely that I can get out of that mode where I want to be Something Hugely Important. What usually jerks me out of my Childe Harold-and-Childe-Roland self is when I throw such a tantrum that I hear God start snickering. He's probably snickering more often than I hear, but I'm usually all Prufrocky and don't take the hint until I throw a big fit, and then even I have to laugh. Don't you think it's funny that the great literature of the last two centuries is mostly a celebration of this feeling that I'd rather not have? It's like a story my roommate told me about a little girl who stamped her foot at her folks and said, "I'm cereal!" and was enraged when they laughed all the more. I imagine God reading all our angsty postmodern books with a finger over His grin.

Speaking of angsty postmodern books, I need to be working on mine. But not during the West Wing premiere tonight!

Well, I finally had an interview this morning at SMS for the library job. I think it went well, but then that's no measure of how likely it is that I'll get it. I'm supposed to go back for a departmental interview this Friday. So I've spent the entire morning talking about myself in detail, and then spent the next hour or so reading some of the personal narratives my roommate was grading at St. Louis Bread, so I feel my syntax growing more juvenile by the minute. I was going to talk about how this morning I found my roommate's cat Katrina lounging in the tub this morning when I went in to take a bath, and how she likes to supervise baths, and how she's rarely affectionate with people except in the bathroom, and how my sister calls her "perv kitty", but it all sounded like "How I Spent My Summer Unemployment", so I'm not going to tell you about it.

Yippee skippee, my story's up at The Sugar Quill! If you want to read it, here's the link:

A Conversation

Please R&R!

Well, I went and signed up with Spherion yesterday, and they seemed impressed by my typing skills. I scored 60 wpm on the typing test, including errors, which is very cool. I always have this insecurity about my typing skills, because when I took typing in high school, I got a B the second semester and therefore had to settle for being salutatorian of my senior class. I mean, I'd rather be salutatorian because I got a B in physics or something that really challenges the brain -- but typing??

No more plaster has fallen from the ceiling in our room, which is a blessing. Dad H. came up this morning and put up brown paper over the hole, to keep the coal dust from sifting down over everything. I helped him, though I was a bit leery of the electric staple gun. I am always leery of dangerous machinery that I'm not operating myself. If I'm using it, what could possibly go wrong? ;-) Though I did hear this story once about a construction worker who had a nail gun and fell off the roof -- and as he did so he inadvertently discharged the gun and nailed himself to the wall by the arm. So instead of getting his neck broken, he was half-crucified, and survived.

In other news, I typed up my little story and submitted it to The Sugar Quill, and got back an email last night from my new beta-reader. I have been very impressed with much of the fanfiction I've read there -- I was most recently wowed by Teri and Alec's Young Tom Riddle series, though I haven't read Imperius Quidditch yet. And of course, I went through agonies last summer waiting for Rebecca to finish If We Survive. So I'm not sure what's taken me so long to post anything to such a good site as the Sugar Quill. Oh well. I'm looking forward to seeing my story up there soon.

For anyone who has not yet read it, I have also written a crossover HP/West Wing fic, archived at my website:

Teamwork: Or, To Conjure a Fire

People have told me that one doesn't have to be a West Winger to understand the story, which pleases me.

Comments are very welcome.

Okay, here we go now:



Is this picture of Colm Wilkinson? Because if it is, that makes me happy. Colm is the best Valjean, though there appear to be a number of good ones. I like this quiz, but don't intend to take it again, as the last time I retook a quiz I was Count Rugen, and who knows, maybe Count Rugen will somehow find his way into the Les Mis lineup, and that would be bad. "And remember, this is for posterity, so please -- be honest. How do you feel?" I mean, I feel cruel sometimes, but Pits of Despair are really not my thing.

In other news, I have been dealing with insomnia this week. Last night I beat it by taking some medicine, and slept 11 hours (paying down my sleep deficit) -- and was wakened not by the alarm clock but by a large chunk of plaster falling off the ceiling onto my roommate's bed. So then neither of us were asleep anymore. I said, looking at her dust-covered pillow, "That almost hit your head!" "It did hit my head," she said. So I gave her my bed and went downstairs to read the Sugar Quill boards. And then later she got up with a migraine (if I had migraine, I'd have a headache too after that), and we had to tear up the whole room to clean all the plaster and coal dust off the floor and the books and the walls and everything else. This is a 90-year-old house, and was recently (badly) re-roofed, so that's why there's plaster falling in the upstairs rooms, and why there's coal dust under the plaster. When Dad Hyatt told me that, I was momentarily relieved that the black stuff wasn't mold -- momentarily, because then I remembered that coal dust gives people lung disease too. Greeeaaaat, I thought, that's good news for my asthma. Oh well, life does go on.

In addition to this, there was a funny growly humming noise going on in our bathroom upstairs, which I noticed when I was in there to grab my shower things to go downstairs. It sounded like it was coming from the toilet water line. Like there was air in the pipes or something. Jessica was concerned about it too, so I asked Dad H. to come up and look. So he did, and I told him my theory, and he said, "Well, it shouldn't be doing that unless the toilet's running." So we decided to flush the toilet, and as he did that, he put his foot out and stepped on the massaging bath pillow on the floor, and turned it off. So there you are.

Well, I spent my September 11th avoiding the TV and helping to organize the library at my roommate's synagogue -- a fitting activity, I thought. We did, however, go to the ecumenical service at Drury during the noon hour. It was very good; I've been to too many such services that were, well, not good. This one was meaningful, and the words of the chaplain were wise and comforting. They had the stained glass windows open onto the cool air.

I feel at home.

Well, okay, moving a bit slowly on the job search thing. I'm making plans though...does that count? Will be up tomorrow morning to finish what I started. Anyway...

I wrote a whole long thing comparing HP and the problem plot of Measure for Measure just now, and it sounded a lot better in my head. I'm going to have to think about this some more, and write a longer mini-essay. Sigh.

Today is my first day doing a concerted job search in Springfield. We shall see how this works out.

In other news, I've updated this page by adding a link to my website, which I think has not been updated for more than 9 months now. This is a bad state of affairs. I'm going to have to remodel the whole site soon anyway -- :-P. Plus, I've written more, including a mini-fic about a GoF conversation between Ron and Hermione which I had been thinking about sending to the Sugar Quill, but.... And there's the pastiche on Pride and Prejudice which I wrote earlier this year and haven't done anything about publishing yet. Hmmm...I feel the old creative juices flowing. It's time for another fic. Stay tuned!

Oh, and it's time to come out of the closet...I'm an R/H shipper. Not Russell/Holmes, that ship has pretty much sailed anyway, but Ron/Hermione. I haven't come out on any of the boards, because I've read all the arguments before, and never felt like rehearsing them, nor did I wish to give anyone a Bulveristic opportunity to discredit my defenses of Ron's character ("You only say that because you're an R/Her!") I've always been an R/H shipper, and didn't even know H/Hers existed till I found the HP boards on the web.

However, the various shipping wars I've bothered to read have made me think over the months and I have a small theory as to why some people are dissatisfied with the R/H ship. So tune in next time, same Snitch time, same Snitch channel, and I'll tell you a little story about HP and William Shakespeare.

Am currently rereading my novel, and feeling the sort of attitude swing that happens when I read my own stuff. Sometimes while I'm reading I think, "Damn, I'm brilliant! This stuff knocks it out of the park!" And then maybe even ten minutes later I'm thinking, "This sucks! My writing sucks! The whole thing sucks!" while reading the exact same material. I expect that the truth is somewhere between the two. Anyway, last night I felt my novel sucked, or parts of it anyway. I think I said in an earlier post that I like all my characters, but that's not true, because one of my minor characters has never failed to make me want to gag. I'm either going to have to find some way to like her or I'll have to write her out. I feel a bit tenderhearted about doing the latter. Take that, Grisham.

I always get slightly irritated when I tell people I'm writing a novel and they ask me, "So what's it about?" The only way I've been able to deal with this question is to rehearse the plot. I don't want to rehearse the plot; it's complicated and long-tailed and defies genres ("well, it's kindof a mystery-suspense psychological novel about friendship and forgiveness and redemption" -- urk). So one time I went to this Mensa meeting with my roommate and I went on a mini-rant about how I'd rather be asked about the characters of a character-driven novel, and the guy I was talking to said, "So what are your characters like?" Which I welcomed gratefully, except then he started "mackin' on" me in a Mensa-type style and I had to not go to Mensa anymore. *sigh* Oh well.

Well...okay, did I say Kingdom Come? I'm actually done with my laundry now, unless I want to wash all my scarves and sweaters. And I have my car back now, with a new timing belt and radiator hoses and gasketing. I'm developing an intense love-hate relationship with my credit card.

Well, I have officially moved now, and am in Springfield -- along with all of my stuff. It took my mom, my roommate's mom, my friend, my sister, my brother, and me to pack all my stuff, load it into the U-haul, and drive it here. And then it took my friend's roommate as well, to unload the truck into the storage space. I don't know why they make those ramps so darn steep. And why they put climate-controlled spaces on the second floor -- is there a rhyme or a reason to that? But I have very little to complain about. As moves go, it was pretty smooth. And my car didn't break down till I got here, so that's a plus.

I went digging about in a million boxes (okay, maybe seven) and finally found my manuscript binders, so maybe while I'm between jobs (which will not be too long, I hope) I can get in some writing on my novel. Though I think I will probably be doing laundry till Kingdom Come!