Stuff and Moonshine

So, I’ve avoided posting about this, but just before xmas eve we discovered a bedbug infestation. It could be worse, I suppose—it’s pretty much localized to the bedroom, we threw out the bedspreads and a lot of stuff, and washed everything else, and have been camping out on the folding couch in the living room while we try to prep for the fumigators to come.

This has so far involved throwing out all the boxes that house Andrew’s comics collection—the comic books themselves seem to be ok, but the corrugated-cardboard boxes were definitely providing the ideal hideout for the disgusting critters. I bought thirty plastic bins and we’ve been transferring the comics and many of the books. Andrew’s been keeping it together better than I could have hoped, at least.

In order for pesticide spraying to happen, we need to 1. get as many of the shelves as possible away from the walls, and 2. to get the cats out of the apartment for 4-6 hours. This will be the hard part—Nana can be wrangled into a carrier, but in the five years since we brought her home, we’ve never been able to capture and hold Beatrice.

I guess, living in an apartment, it was only a matter of time. Meanwhile, of course, the wider world continues to be even worse.

In slightly better news, last week I read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. An SF novel about large intelligent spiders might seem an odd choice of comfort reading under the circumstances, but I’ve a feeling that in addition to watching a lot of David Attenborough nature films, Tchaikovsky has seen a lot of classic Doctor Who. His spiders are easy to root for, and his desperate human colonists fleeing a doomed Earth are somehow not quite as bad as real-life politics. I’ve also fond of Holsten Mason, the tragi-comic Classicist who, due to only getting woken out of cryogenic suspension when the crisis du jour specifically requires an expert on Old Galactic Empire dialects, is experiencing the whole multi-millenial epic as “a rough few weeks” during which most of the other crew outage him by decades.

I think my own writing is coming back after a rest following my Yuletide fic—I at least managed to make a bunch of notes today for Gentleman of the Shade, which for some reason has decided it needs another flashback, this one set in a 1970s supper club.

This evening’s migraine is being held at bay by rizatriptan, but it included, for the first time in my life, one of those zigzag rainbow auras I read about. Weird.

No word from the place that interviewed me, so I likely didn’t get it.

Went to a clothing swap today, this one in a David-Bowie-themed bar on Queen West. Brought in my khaki drawstring linen slacks (nice, but I have other pants now); my black jersey mock-turtleneck dress (haven’t worn it in at least a year); and my blue velvet cocktail dress (never worn, not likely to unless somebody I know gets married in the winter months and invites me to the wedding—which I can’t see happening any time soon); along with a few other things.

Got several items I’m pleased with, also a pair of grey nylon joggers I may use in a Hallowe’en costume, and a couple of t-shirts that amuse me. One has the MTV logo, though it’s almost certainly of recent vintage. One has a picture on it of Spongbob dressed as a vampire.

Speaking of pop-culture, I discovered yesterday that at least four productions of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play are viewable in their entirety on YouTube—thereby preserving on video ephemeral performances of a stage play about recreating and reimagining lost media in a post-apocalyptic world.
Studio Playhouse
Young Theater:
Harvard TEATRO: 
GHSTA: 

ETA: Here are some clips and interviews from the time of the original production, though I sort of prefer the way the subsequent versions costume Act III (75 years later) in a more stylized way.

Woke up early this morning thinking of The Wild Guys, a play from the 1990s that (fairly gently, iirc) satirized mythopoetic men’s retreats, which were a Thing at the time. Eventually I had to go look up Iron John: A Book About Men and Women Who Run With the Wolves to see who’d written them (Robert Bly and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, respectively).

As someone in SFF fandom, I don’t know how to feel about Jung-based movements. I get that some stuff is hard to convey except by analogy, or by constructing some kind of initiation ritual that puts people into a context where the thing you’re trying to tell them is more likely to make experiential sense. And of course I’m likely being unfair to Bly and Estes, whose writings may well be more down-to-earth than their popular image. Bly, at any rate, seems to have had a sense of humour, if this poem is anything to go by. 

The advantage of fiction, and art and music, is that you can explore and play with these same kind of potentially-useful ideas without asserting them.

Meanwhile in my own mythopoetic life, I’ve spent the past couple of days trying to figure out if I’m having those menopausal hot-flashes people talk about, or if it’s just the late-September weather—the temperature has been swinging between twelve and twenty-four degrees here. Either way, I’ve spent so much of my life too cold that this, whatever it is, kind of feels like unlocking superpowers. Flame On!

After a week and one day, which isn’t quite my all-time record. As usual, the explanation is “we feel you wouldn’t be a good fit.” I wish I could understand exactly what I did wrong—talk too much? Not enough? Look nervous? Look unserious? I feel like I go through life with a neon sign hovering above my head that says NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE and no clue how to turn it off.

Thursday’s interview (car dealership) was followed, that evening, by a flurry of calls regarding a different job. Three people from the same agency were all calling me on behalf of the same client (insurance company). Eventually they assigned just one guy to be my point of contact, and I sent him an updated version of my resume and completed a test. None of this has led to any followup in the week-and-a-half since, although when I phoned the guy on Friday he said the client (insurance company) hadn’t given the agency a reply yet.

On a happier note, the Bus Stop costumes are coming along, in spite of the theatre sewing machine, which has defeated all our efforts to make it work. One of the other volunteers says she’ll bring her sewing machine. In the meantime I’ve been hand-sewing the first waitress uniform, have got it to the point where it can be tried on, and both the actress and the director seem happy with it. I’ve embroidered little fake pocket-squares with the waitresses’ names—will pin the pockets in place at final fitting.

I still kind of want to put white cuffs on the (short) sleeves, but Livia (head of costuming) has pointed out that they won’t be visible—the actress playing Alma has a lot of arm tattoos, and I’d already suggested she wear a cardigan over her uniform (justified in-story as the play takes place during the winter); and apparently the other actress has one as well so she’ll be covered-up too. We’ve got a large box of cardigans.

Fun things I found on YouTube in the past few days:

Another episode of Detective: Ngaio Marsh’s Death In Ecstasy, featuring Joss Ackland, Roger Delgado, and Ronald Lacey among the suspects. I was pretty sure none of them were the murderer because they were all too obvious, but the ending took me by surprise. I’d actually noticed the clue earlier, but (rot-13’d spoiler) gbbx vg sbe n zvfgnxr ol gur fpevcgjevgref, orpnhfr zl snvgu va gur novyvgl bs ‘fvkgvrf Oevgvfu gi gb trg Nzrevpna qvnyrpgf evtug vf cerggl ybj.

I didn’t even know there’d been a Sonic the Hedgehog tv show in the nineties, much less that singer Long John Baldry voiced the main villain and that at least one fanvidder has taken full advantage of this: Dr. Robotnik Sings ‘It Still Ain’t Easy.’

We’re at the mall getting eye exams (I already ordered new glasses from Zenni last month when I mislaid my regular pair, but I plan to get new prescription sunnies (also from Zenni) and Andrew should get new glasses too.

The optometry place is decorated with whimsical paintings of animals and celebrities wearing glasses, including portraits of Bea Arthur and Rue McLanahan. The manager must be a fan of The Golden Girls—there’s also a Pop!(?) figure of Estelle.

A large glass nazar hangs up in front of one of the cupboards, which seems appropriate.

My office periodically gets calls where I can’t hear anybody on the other end, and the screen just gives a town name rather than a caller ID (I hate our phone system). But a bunch of them are from Anzac, AB, which is an unusual enough name that I finally looked it up just now. Turns out it has a population of 506 people, as of the last census.

Who the hell is calling us from Anzac? Which of its 506 inhabitants is so desperate to talk to a hardware-supply company three provinces away? And why can they never get through?

Checked the date for Nuit Blanche this morning and found out it was this past weekend. I haven’t bothered going in ages—after the first year or two it got too crowded to navigate—but I’d bought a Hallowe’en mask on Sunday that really cries out to be worn to something urban and nocturnal. It’s a cat mask of cheap plastic, but with pink pseudo-neon tubing that outlines all the features. It looks like a cyberberpunk bakeneko.

I don’t dare wear it around Andrew as even when the lights are set to steady they make a faint high-pitched hum that would probably bother him, which rules it out for Hallowe’en. In any case it doesn’t really give Hallowe’en vibes; it looks more like something you’d wear to a rave (says the woman who’s never been to a rave in her life). I’ll see if I can take some selfies with it later-- might at least make some good icons for this blog.

Andrew’s home, the cats are readjusting to his presence, things are basically ok.

We had lunch downtown with my mother and brother.

It’s coming onto a year since Dad died, and Mom’s been stressed this week since a lot of the activities she’s been doing to keep busy have gone on hiatus for the summer. They’d been married for over fifty years, so apart from grief she’s also dealing with the unfamiliarity of the situation. She said a couple of times that it was like being reset to 1968, except she’s not in her twenties.

She gave me a black wool beret that Dad had had for years (I’d painted a portrait of him wearing it). I’m pleased, not just for sentimental reasons but because a proper beret is always good to have.