Author: Melia

Road rage

I have… issues when I’m behind the wheel. People piss me off. Especially if they drive stupidly. And I can’t contain my anger at the abundance of stupid people allowed to get behind 2 tons of metal and propel it down a street at certain speeds. One day, my road temper is going to get me into trouble – well, it has already actually. I flipped off a coworker who cut me off. I have since learned to hold back on the gestures when I’m within a two block radius of the paper.

My town seems to have more than its fair share of idiots on the roads. People who do not understand the concept of a 4-way stop. Or ones who like to fly through that yellow left turn arrow after it turns green because they are far more important than oncoming traffic. Or the little-olds who drive about ten miles an hour below the speed limit. Or people who force you to slam on your brakes when they turn into your lane even though it’s clear for miles behind you. Or truck drivers who wait until you are just about to pass them before they decide to get in your lane and pass the truck in front of them.

I could go on. I’m getting angry just thinking about all these morons. But I want to learn how to not be angry. I don’t like losing my temper, and outside of the car, I don’t lose it very often. I’m a cheerful person for the most part. But when I’m behind the wheel and someone pisses me off, I lose my shit. Swear words tumble out of my mouth as if I’d been holding them back for months and I actually *yell* (if you know me, I’m often told to speak up. Voice is too quiet.) Sometimes I scream. Depends on the stupidity level I’ve just witnessed.

Of course, no road rage rant would be complete without the obligatory “I’m not saying I’m a perfect driver yadda yadda yadda.” I’m not. i’ve done my share of stupid stuff. But in general I try not to. And I’m sure some of the people I get pissed at are probably just having a duh moment too. But some of them are malicious. Like the ass in the fuel-sucking monstrosity of an SUV next to me waiting to turn left while I was trying to turn right, who kept inching forward enough so that I couldn’t see around his fecking bumper to see if I was clear. And he was doing it on purpose and laughing at me. Drivers like that I swear… Trying not to think about how satisfying it would be to whip out a baseball bat and play whack-a-mole with his headlights. It’s drivers like that that set off my road rage.

And I don’t know what to do about it.

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JK Rowling is my hero

JK just gave a commencement speech at Harvard and she spoke on the benefits of failure. The whole speech is fantastic but the failure stuff hit home:

The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure….I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. ,…Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way….Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned….

[Link to the full speech]

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Lazy Sunday

Do ant bait traps work? I’ve discovered that ants have been getting into my kitchen via a very small tear in the weather-stripping on the back door. I hate ants. Sure, they’re harmless. But they’re all buggy and twitchy and make me feel itchy and seeing one crawl across the kitchen counter makes me jump about ten feet. I bought some ant bait thingies, but I’m skeptical on whether they’ll actually work. We’ll see I guess. I fixed the weather-stripping hole so maybe they won’t be able to get in now and the traps will kill the ones who did make it. We rarely use the backdoor, so I never even realized the hole was there.

The weather’s been nice – a break from the storms – and I went for a walk yesterday with the cam. Didn’t take any stunning pics or anything, but just knowing that I *could* take a stunning pic while on a walk makes me happy 🙂 Shan’s had the car this weekend while she worked, so I’ve been stuck at home. I did not make any progress on CherryPop, but I’m okay with that for now. I’m not feeling the guilt just now. Some ideas are percolating in the noggin and I’m pretty sure at some point I’ll just have an uncontrollable, overwhelming urge to spew out volumes on the story. I’m looking forward to that.

I do have a new project for the summer that I’m very excited about. I hope it’s okay to mention it – not sure if it’s a big secret or anything. The Buffy Between the Lines folks, as I’ve mentioned before, have grand plans to produce Angel Between the Lines as well as Firefly Between the Lines. Apparently, planning has been underway on Angel for a fair bit now, but unfortunately (but fortunately for me) one of the writers had to drop out. So I jumped at the chance to write for ABtL when the email went out asking if anyone was interested. I will get to co-write the first episode 🙂

First drafts are due on September 1st, so I actually have a deadline to work towards. The Fabz Tabz (“The Joss” of this whole Between the Lines phenomenon) gave my writing partner and me a great outline to work with and I think this will be a very good learning experience. Seeing the outline and spending the past few days making notes and working within the confines of the storyline someone else made up is going to be a lot of fun. My writing partner had great notes herself and I think she’s going to be a lot of fun to work with. I just can’t express enough how exciting this is to me 🙂

And it just may stimulate the whole CherryPop storyline too, or at least give me new ways to work on it.

I think I had more to write about but I’m trying to fight on oncoming migraine so I’m not very focusy. Might go for another walk and see if the fresh air helps.

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I’m feeling Plurky

You read that right. One of my Twitter pals mentioned a new upstart called Plurk (I know, wtf?) that’s similar to Twitter. You get 140 characters, it’s sort of easier to follow convos etc. I joined (and if you want to check it out and sign up, just clicky, and you’ll automagically get me added to your friends list. Because I am that awesome.) and I’m still getting used to it. Not sure I like it as well as Twitter which I’ve come to adore when it works, but maybe once I get used to the weird timeline concept it will grow on me too.

Today seemed like I was inundated with social media tools and toys. It was almost overwhelming. Plurk, Friendfeed, widgets to display all this stuff… I love delving into social media because I think the more I learn about it, the better I’ll be able to help my newspaper, but there is so much out there. I think it’s possible to burn out on it. I mean, you need a MySpace, and Facebook, make sure you’re LinkedIn, if you’re in the media biz you need to join WiredJournalists, get Twittering (and now Plurk), use Friendfeed to let everyone know what you do online, learn how to make RSS work for you to manage the growing list of sites you visit, and don’t forget the old standbys like instant messaging, and for god’s sake would you blog already?

Ugh. It’s hard to stay on top of all that. I have a Myspace and Facebook, but I rarely use either because Facebook is annoying and I already have my own site/blog. Don’t really need the tools MySpace offers. I love Twitter – and I figured out why. On an old telnet chat I used to frequent, we’d pretty much keep the convo going by randomly blurting out what we were doing, from the mundane to the crazy. It was fun. Twitter is a perfect outlet for that sort of thing. Once you start following people you know, or would like to know (yes, Wil Wheaton tweets all the time and he’s just as funny there as he is on his blog) and you read what they’re doing throughout the day, it’s quite a valuable lesson in human dynamics (ooh! That sounded stuffy 🙂 ) sort of like sitting in a crowded area and people-watching. Only more intimate.

Anyway, so I tweet, and I’m checking out Plurk. And I’m employing lots of widgets on my various blogs. I would not be able to function without my RSS feedreader (at last count I had over 70 site feeds which means Before the Feedreader, I was manually clicking around 70 sites all the time watching for updates. Yikes! Now my feedreader does all the work, runs in the background, and notifies me when one or more of those sites has posted an update, then I can read them at my leisure. It’s teh awesome.)

And I’m on Yahoo and MSN messengers. I’m LinkedIn (and thank you Tonga for the wonderful recommendation). I’m on WiredJ. And I definitely blog 🙂 Also, I’m trying to make Friendfeed work on my blog (having css issues with it).

So I do my best to stay wired and up-to-date. But man, it’s a lot of work. Now I just need to find a way to motivate my newsroom as well as find ways to get some of this integrated into our site. It should be a blast.

Getting late. before I go though, I just want to throw out some good luck wishes to my sister. She’s written a script for a movie called, “Orientation” and Friday, at 2:30pm EST that script will be pitched to a couple of producers (one was a producer for “Michael Clayton” and the show “Rescue Me”.) She’s very excited and very nervous and has no expectations of ‘being discovered’ but she believes the feedback these guys can offer her will be extremely valuable.

Secretly, I hope she gets discovered 🙂 It’s an awesome script.

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Storminess and Geek Chic

Took some video of the oncoming storm tonight. Nothing dangerous and I was safe inside when it hit, although again, my town fared well when all was said and done (though this seems to be the storm that never ends. It hit here around 6-ish, and it’s after 9pm and now we’re getting hail.)

Anyway, here’s the vid. There’s nothing sexy in it – no funnel clouds or whipping wind. Just some incredible looking cloud formations that I liked.

Neat eh? There are also some pix of it over on Snaps.

In other news, I’m doing something kind of fun with the Snaps site. I’m calling it Geek Chic and it’s sort of like what Dooce does with her awesome ‘Daily Style’ section of her site. It’s a separate section of Snaps and these photos won’t show up in the main blog area. I’m going to try posting daily(ish) pics of some of the geeky, chic-y stuff I own. While I’m sure that doesn’t sound very exciting, it’s actually fascinating. I never “got” much into Dooce’s style pix, but the more I looked at those pix, the more I got hooked. It’s kind of a glimpse into someone’s house when they left the curtains open at night. Which I totally love doing. My theory is, if you’re going to leave them open and lights a-blazing, I’m gonna peek as I drive by.

Anyway, you can get to know a person’s tastes and interests through images, plus it gives me another excuse to practice with the cam 🙂 So check it out.

I’m off to get the kidlet who spent most of her shift huddled up in the bathroom with her coworkers during the storm. I don’t like it that she was at work during the blowing of the sirens. My instinct on the way home from Walmart was to stop and get her. But I wasn’t sure if I should or if she’d get in trouble or what. We’ll discuss what to do from now on when she gets home though.

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Pretty in Pink

I’ve never been a “pink” person, but on a website it can be fun. I was going to stick with the blues, but I never really warmed up to it.

Anyway, yes I did some rearranging around here. Again. I got a wild hair last night around 9:30pm and decided that I needed more than one sidebar for all my junk. Since this blog is serving as my website, I needed a place to put all this stuff. And I’m sure no one really gives a toss but me, but I felt I needed to ‘splain.

So last night around 3am I was rudely awoken by the sound of hammers and rocks being chucked at my bedroom window which is right above my head and I was forced to flee. I don’t know who decided 3 o’clock in the morning was a good time to have a hailstorm, but who ever it was, I’d like a word.

I’m having mucho fun with the new camera that has so many settings I’ll never use them all. I took pictures of stuff in my house because I’m thinking of replicating (which sounds so much better than ‘stealing’) Dooce’s Daily Style posts. Not only can I practice macro photography, but as I was looking around last night, i realized, Hey, I have some neat stuff. Ok so I have some geeky stuff too. The up close and personal pic of a toy Dalek on my bookshelf may only interest Who fans, but I could also showcase a lot of my mother’s artwork I have hanging around.

If anyone’s wondering how I’m doing on the whole CherryPop story, I’m not doing so hot. I’m having motivation issues. I’ve written a few more ficlets and several attempts at starting the story (one of which is actually working for me) but I let myself get distracted. I’m wondering if I should just force myself to write. No internets, put the new camera away, unplug the Wii, no swimming (see? I do get out of the house on occasion) and write. Maybe start with 1 hour of writing and work up if I get on a roll. I keep thinking I’ve got to do it, and how cool it would be to actually finish it and the great sense of accomplishment I’ll have whether I publish it or not. And yet, something, some kind of block is going on in my head that won’t let me dig in and do it. I don’t understand it, and it’s pissing me off too.

So that’s where CP stands. I haven’t blogged as her either. Feeling guilty about that. Argh.

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