Hampden, hon!

Over the weekend, I moved to Baltimore. The general sequence of events:

Saturday, 9:00 AM: Pick up truck. Find out Rob is awesome at driving truck as long as I don't talk too much about the questionable racial politics implied in The Jetsons. Talk about it anyway because that's what I do.

Saturday, 10:00 AM: My parents and sister arrive from Uniontown, PA. My dad immediately made himself useful by managing to Tetris almost all of our belongings into a 16' Budget moving truck. Considering that we couldn't even manage to get everything into a 24' truck when we moved to Towson from Pittsburgh, that represents both an incredible downsizing of stuff on both our parts as well as some first-rate packing on my dad's part.

Saturday, 1:00 PM: Break for lunch. I ribbed my parents for a while about having to drive less than a mile to the nearest restaurant, but these are the ideological sacrifices that you make for people who are helping you out. Although I still maintain I could have biked there faster.

Saturday, 3:00 PM: Commence unpacking. Find that almost everything fits, and that unpacking is way easier when you don't have to move heavy oak pieces up and down narrow row-house stairs. Come to the conclusion with your significant other that stairs, while a useful invention of mankind, are best avoided in any apartments we may rent in the future.

Saturday, 8:00 PM: Break for dinner. Retrieve cats from old house. Are slightly amused that the cat that reacted the worst to moving last time (her behavior earned her the title "Queen of the Rafters") is apparently unfazed, and that old cranky cat is reacting the worst. He's still hissing and swiping at legs. Make a crack about how this will be the last place he ever lives and feel bad about it because that means he might die here and that's morbid, but REALLY, it's just that we hope to be here at least five or six years and he's already ten and cats don't live THAT long. Except for this cat. If Oxford turns out to be the feline Jeanne Calment he's gonna have to suck it up.

Sunday: Let's just not talk about Sunday, okay?

The apartment looks like this, except that there's all kinds of stuff in it now which makes it look like a hoarder house but we're totally not hoarders. Except of LOVE. And canned goods.

The many colors of our new apartment. Just add boxes.

So far Hampden is pretty awesome although we haven't really done anything here yet because we had to go back out to the suburbs for irony and necessary house supplies. I also haven't been able to do any exploring on my bike but SOON, hon, soon. Thanks to Rob (who will read this post) for agreeing to the move and being awesome at driving the truck, and my parents and sister (who probably won't), for being a major help! Even if they do hate to walk.

Also, I have a new zine! Well, I have a new zine PRINTED but not yet collated because of the move, and I don't know when it will be collated. By next week, definitely! It's all about bikes, suburbia, how to start cycling for transportation, fucking drivers, pet peeves, and more. Okay, not really that much more. It's forty pages, which is the longest zine I've ever written and it's even longer than that because for the first time I wrote it on a computer, not a typewriter, which means the words are smaller and closer together. Figures that when I decide to write a 24-hour zine, it actually turns into a week-long project.

In lieu of cover image, please accept this similar concept.

If you want one, it's $1.50 Paypalled to blacklightdiner at gmail dot com, or a trade. Trades are awesome! I haven't been reading very many zines lately besides the ones submitted to me for distro consideration. You can email for my address. That needs to change.

The Cat Days of Summer

Bikey news: One of the bike blogs I read, Let's Go Ride a Bike, is sponsoring a Summer Games for those of us non-athletic-type riders who nevertheless enjoy a bit of friendly competition. The challenges, intended to push one out of their transportation cycling comfort zone. Some examples of activities you too can participate in: ride on a bike path you've never been on before, ride somewhere new in your city, commute to work if you don't already, go on a group ride. As I'm moving into an essentially new-to-me area in six days (!), and plan to explore the hell out of things during the first week of August, I figure I'll have this one in the bag!

Not that I've been doing a lot of riding lately. Today's temperature clocked in at 102 degrees, and I don't know what a heat index is but it can't be helping anything. I am, in general, a huge fan of hot temperature; my ideal temp is around eighty degrees, with just a slight breeze. But this triple-digit crap that's been going on for the entire past week is a different animal. It's not as bad as winter because nothing is as bad as winter. Yet it's still weather that keeps me indoors when I'd prefer not to be, which is crazy-making even without all the white shit on the ground. But it's supposed to be down into the nineties next week in Maryland, which will be a relative relief.

Non-bikey news: As previously alluded, Rob and I are moving from the suburban college town of Towson to the neighborhood of Hampden in Baltimore, to a lovely first-floor apartment with multicolored walls and a tree in the backyard, and from which I will have non-trivial access to public transportation, independent non-chain businesses, and other things that make life worth living. But before the moving comes the packing, and wow, I really hope we stay at this new apartment for years and years because the process of packing to move is one of the most miserable things of all time.

We have a lot of books. I mean, a LOT of books. Lots and lots of books. So far, we're up to a mighty thirty-four boxes and while mostly done there are a few stragglers which I'll just throw into crates or something because we're out of damn moving boxes. I'm pretty sure that if I piled all the moving boxes on top of one another and jumped off the pile that would be a stupid idea. In addition, there's the furniture and clothing and such to deal with, but those aren't beyond what most "normal people" have in their houses. And no, an e-reader wouldn't really help matters, since 80% of the books are comics. At least the situation is improved from the last move, though, when we had probably over fifty moving boxes for books alone and also a dozen long boxes of single-issue comics. The latter is gone almost completely, and there's a significant dent in the former. We're also both becoming a lot pickier about what we bring into the house, too, which is going to cut down on the accumulation while we continue to chip away at what's already there.

Just in case there's anyone who reads this blog and also orders from Black Light Diner Distro, I'll be boxing up zines (both my personal collection and distro zines) around mid-week, and unboxing whenever I get around to it, so if you want to order anything (and help me lighten my load) then do it now, now, now! Also in zine news, I'm seriously thinking about doing a 24-hour zine for International Zine Month, since I've never done one, aside from a comic flipbook in 2008 that I promptly put out of print because I didn't like it. I have so much packing/moving-related stuff to do, though. It will probably come down to whether I feel like I can justify squandering a few hours to work on a zine. But as I've already spent most of this afternoon sitting in a blissfully air-conditioned Panera doing nothing... maybe my time isn't as precious as I think it is.

And--out!

What I've Been Doing

So, I've been pretty busy for someone without any real responsibilities, so here's a list of some of the shit I've been up to.

• We are moving into Baltimore City! Not only that, it's to the best apartment in the world! This apartment is really huge, at least 1.5 times bigger than everything else we saw. The living room is painted the exact same color of mint green that I would have painted it, if I'd chosen the colors of my walls. The dining room is bright blue, and the bedroom is reddish fuchsia! The kitchen is a yellow which I can only describe as "kitcheny," which is apropos. There is a dogwood tree in the backyard (yes! in the city!) and a small plot of land which I might use for a garden. There are tomato cages which I'd like to use because tomatoes are one of the few vegetables I actually like and the only one that would grow well in a backyard garden. There is a basement where I can park my bike and where we can store excess books. We are almost certainly inheriting a fourth cat from our landlord for convoluted reasons to be explained later.

Needless to say, I am stoked. The last year has taught me a very valuable lesson: don't live in the suburbs. As a non-driver (and one who is increasingly uninterested in getting her license), I can't handle it: the monotony of only being able to shop at chain stores and eat at chain restaurants, the utter meanness of townies who assume you're a student, the impossibility of getting a job because interviewers assume you're unreliable simply because you don't drive. (I've never had to call into work because I had to take my legs into the shop. Just sayin'.) When we moved to Towson, we thought it would be a lot like State College, PA, which is also a college town of approximately 50,000 people. Except that it's a lot easier to get to a big city from Towson vs. State College. But State College is very walkable/bikeable, and to some extent so are smaller PA college towns like Indiana or, hell, even California (which is where I went to college), and I don't think I would have had a lot of problems making friends or getting a job there. Towson is more like Monroeville, except with two colleges lodged in its bowels like nuclear bombs in a mixed-metaphor word salad. Also that reference will not make sense to you if you're not from Pennsylvania. Sorry about that.

• Working on short stories! I have two in the pipeline right now: one about evil cars, the other a Machine of Death story. I had been working on a novel in progress, but sort of abandoned it when my computer crashed and I lost the last five pages of writing. Maybe that doesn't sound too tragic, but it was only eleven pages overall. Perhaps it's for the best, I don't really have the attention span for novels. I've said it before: if I only ever write one novel in my life, that is totally fine with me.

• One of our cats was turned into a lamp by an evil sorcerer:

Rob wouldn't let me put the sweater on her. "It's too hot, she'll roast."
So you can blame him for this picture not being as awesome as it
might have been. It would have been on for ONE MINUTE
and cats are hardy little critters. Simply elucidatin'.

• Selling shit on Amazon. Now, it will be no surprise to people who have been to our house that we own A LOT OF BOOKS. (Although not an alot made out of books.) But we've been practicing Discardia, which means getting rid of many hundreds of our books. In the past, we'd always take the books to a used bookstore, which would maybe give us thirty bucks for four bags of books, if we were lucky. But then I had a brainstorm: why not Amazon? I've bought things off Amazon Marketplace in the past, because used CDs are usually much cheaper than new or digital download. Probably because hardly anyone keeps CDs anymore (although I do!). And yes, putting up hundreds of superfluous books is sometimes tedious, and sending them out is definitely tedious, but I've made several hundred dollars on there already, including over a hundred bucks for an out-of-print expansion board for Arkham Horror, the game of mind-numbingly banal Lovecraftian terror. While I don't want to bad-mouth my "customers," it constantly shocks me what people will buy, and for what prices. Granted, I am not into the mangas that the kids are reading right now, but $40 for a comic book? However, as this is the closest thing I have to a paying job right now, I am going to continue doing it until all the books are sold, or I get a real job doing something exactly as tedious for slightly more money.

(Aside: before beginning my extended period of unemployment, I don't think I realized how utterly useless I'd feel. I am someone who crashes and burns without a schedule, and while I do try to write lists to structure my days, it's easier to follow a schedule when it's imposed from without by someone who's paying you. I feel guilty for doing things that I don't consider my "job," i.e. putting items up on Amazon, going shopping for basic necessities, cleaning the house like a motherfuckin' adult. I don't consider writing my job even though I've been paid for it. It's hard for me to talk about this because it's such a first world problem; we can get along fine on Rob's income and I don't NEED to work. But I've realized that I WANT to, especially if I can get back into the only jobby thing I've ever been good at, medical research. Hello, Johns Hopkins University, soon to be within my reach/clutches.)

• Riding my bike, natch. As cycling has turned out to be the loose focus of this blog, I feel obligated to mention that, yeah, still at it. Last night I abandoned my old, broken BSO in my front yard for the first taker, because even though I did have plans to fix it up and teach Rob to ride on it, we all know I wasn't going to do that before moving and it would have just become more moving clutter. Also, it would have been way too small for him, and also a girl's bike. I feel guilty about this, even though I know that's dumb. I'll probably feel better when I see a lady riding around on my old bike, all fixed up shiny and newish. But right now I feel like a consumerist jerk.

Book reviews on THIS blog? Seriously?

I almost never read non-fiction, for the probably-dumb reason that it's really hard to maintain interest in the same subject for 300+ pages. (Hell, I don't even read that many long novels anymore; I'm a short story person.) However, right now I'm in the middle of two very interesting non-fiction books, which I might as well talk about!

The first is At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson, in which his curiosity about some of the features of his English country house led him to questions like "why do we use salt and pepper?" and "what does the board refer to in 'room and board'?" This is the kind of stuff that basically preoccupies me all the time. I love history, but I couldn't care less about battles or presidents or dates. I care about the history of common people (like you!). What keeps my interest throughout this book is the sheer amount of subjects covered: paleo-biology, materials science, economics, agriculture, medicine, and my favorite misunderstood discipline, evolutionary psychology. It's like a linear version of my Wikipedia jaunts, and in fact it's taking me a long time to read this book because I keep having to look things up on Wikipedia, which leads to even MORE interesting facts. At Home is currently my "at night" book, which is probably a bad idea since I either feel compelled to jump on the Internet at 11:30 (and stay on until one), or pepper my husband with factoids.

"Did you know that a third of English people in the 1800s were servants?"
"I don't care, go to bed."
*continues reading* "This is so weird! Did you know that in medieval times, tables were just long pieces of wood that diners kept balanced on their knees? And that they carried furniture from room to room?"
"SLEEPING."
"Well, fine. I won't tell you about the surprisingly astonishing feat of the human domestication of corn, then. You'll just have to endure the rest of your tiny, incurious life not knowing about it. I hope you can live with that."

So basically, if you're looking for a book to irritate your SO with, you should probably pick this up.

Book #2 is Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee. Hoarding shows are a guilty pleasure of mine; yeah, I know it's basically misery porn, but as I'm not out ridiculing hoarders in the wild I think I'm okay with watching from the safety of my own cluttered home. Exploring the various reasons why people become hoarders, Frost/Steketee devote each chapter to one hoarder in particular, with various side stories thrown in for added clarification of points/misery pornlets. Before I started watching Hoarders, I thought that I might be a hoarder, but I'm not. I'm just really disorganized. And there is a difference: True hoarders agonize over whether to throw away a piece of junk mail or expired food, disorganized people just tend to not notice the crap is there, because there's always something more interesting than cleaning. Always. Sure, sometimes the mounting piles on my flat surfaces tend to overflow, but throw away everything on the table and I won't cry. (Actually, I've lost important things this way, because I got overwhelmed and said "okay, everything out!" and it turned out there was something I needed in that paper pile. Whoops.) The tone is more Slate than "dense psychological case study." The only objection so far is that all of the hoarders featured are women, even though hoarding is largely evenly split along gender lines. It couldn't be because men's hoards (tools, computers, car parts) are considered useful and women's (clothes, shoes, magazines) are considered frivolous, could it? But I'm only a little less than halfway through, so, maybe there are more men later on. And the featured patients are the responders to a survey, and of course men would be a lot less likely than women to admit they have a mental problem. Recommended for everyone who enjoys prurient peeks into someone else's messed up life to distract them from how messed up their own is.

(Incidentally, there's at least one person who's been featured on Hoarders who probably belonged more under the category of "tragically disorganized." It was some woman in her twenties whose house was buried in paperwork. She's notable because whenever the cleanup crew asked her if she cared if they threw something away, she said she didn't care. Usually, hoarders care a lot. She didn't show any anxiety or even interest throughout the cleaning process. I remember this mostly because it reminded me of myself if I were even a hair more disorganized, glimpses of my possible future and all. It was kinda funny to see the therapist ask her about her anxiety level, all concerned, and her being all "yeah, whatever, it's just junk mail." Although maybe that means she's actually more screwed up. Hrm.)

Finally Loathing Yourself

So I am a person who needs a to-do list to survive. Without my to-do list, I have a tendency to flail randomly through my day without much plan at all, considering that I don't yet have a job here in Maryland yet. I'm pretty crap at structuring my own time, due to my ability to get distracted from my "goals" by pretty much anything: a shiny rock, the antics of cats, rainstorms, the Internet the Internet the Internet.

Having a to-do list, though, helps a lot. But there are a few issues. One of my problems with writing to-do lists has to do with the time of day when I write them. I usually write my lists at night, when my motivation and ability to follow through on things is basically shot. Night-self can't accomplish shit. But night-self also sees all the things that day-self has accomplished, and comes to one conclusion: day-self is a genius.

So night-self loads day-self's list with stuff that she thinks day-self will be capable of, and she is very optimistic. Night-self has complete faith in day-self, the confidence of the half-asleep and therefore only semi-conscious.

Day-self, of course, is not a genius. Though considerably more productive and organized than night-self, the fact is that these lists would be impossible for almost anyone to complete fully. Like you'd have to bend space-time in order to even physically complete all the tasks, even if you were a first-class multitasker wearing amphetamine-powered rocket skates which sad to say I am not. A lot of the time, day-self looks at the gargantuan to-do list that night-self has cooked up, shakes her head, and winds up playing Puzzle Quest until noon, when she decides it's probably time to tackle at least SOME of the list.


Generally, the easiest tasks get done first, with "harder" tasks shuffled to later and still-later slots in the to-do list. Normally, if something has been shunted every day for a week, it drops off the list entirely and is either completed by my husband or reappears much later.

In my quest for guides to writing the perfect to-do list or learning how to clean my house (because I don't ever actually notice the house is dirty unless it's really, really bad), I came upon a website called Flylady that promises a simple, structured routine for cleaning your home and keeping track of chores, designed for easily-distracted "home executives." Flylady is written by a real-life Jean Teasdale, and it is hilarious. Take a look at the website, which hasn't been updated since, I assume, 1999. (It is, however, sadly missing an animated construction worker GIF.) In some ways, I feel like a jerk for laughing at this website because it does help a lot of people, but in most other ways... come on. If you don't have the knowledge to do it yourself, it costs maybe $1000 to create a well-designed, accessible, attractive website, which a best-selling self-help author could easily afford.

But, seeing as how I truly AM in need of someone to tell me how to clean my house and run my life, I hung up my poor-web-design snobbery and decided to give it a shot. I signed up for the email list, which is even more hilarious than the website, but also sad. (Sadlarious!) In one email, "the Flylady" says that women never deserve physical or sexual abuse, but that if you're experiencing emotional abuse, it's probably because you're a shitty wife. Or you have a bad attitude. Let's turn that frown upside-down! There are emails about the ways in which "flybabies" pamper themselves, which for one woman means spending an extra dollar on dishwashing liquid that contains aloe vera. Man, what a selfish harlot.

One of the starting "rules" of Flylady is "dress to shoes." The rationale for this, according to the official website, is that "you are more professional." As it stands now, I'm not exactly a captain of industry, so I figured I'd give it a shot. This lasted a month.

With my shoes on, I'm always on edge, which I guess is kind of the "point." I certainly wasted less time. But it also made me sort of anxious; I could never relax enough with shoes on to read a book or work on creative projects. (Although considering that the creative projects of "flybabies" begin and end at non-ironic needlepoint portraits of Jesus, perhaps I was not intended to factor this into my decision to stop wearing shoes 24/7.) My husband also said he found wearing shoes in the house to be "creepy" and after some thought I had to concur. Although perhaps it's not as creepy as trivializing emotional abuse.

In addition to self-help tips, Flylady also hawks quite a few very overpriced cleaning tools on her website, including a $10 lanyard, $15 kitchen timer, and perhaps most egregiously, the "Rags in a Bag" set of purple microfiber cloths that "make you feel like royalty" whenever you use them. And clearly, people do, according to the many glowing "testimonials" sent in by her legions of readers, who count themselves so blessed to be "brainflywashed" (the site's term, not mine).

To be fair, the site/emails do have a few good tips, like cleaning in fifteen-minute increments to avoid distraction, and designating certain days of the week for certain chores. But, like the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, the wisdom is buried deep in a pile of sour-tasting confection that makes you fling brown spittle everywhere if you talk while you're eating it, and you can't take it out of your mouth because there's nowhere to set the thing down, and you can't bite down on it because you might break a tooth and man, you really don't want to go to the dentist because he'll yell at you for going three years without a cleaning. And then when you get there, it's an anticlimax, because the Tootsie Roll isn't even as fresh as the individually-wrapped ones, and you're not a fan of Tootsie Rolls anyway.

But do keep a to-do list. Because nothing makes one feel more accomplished than drawing a line through all one's accomplishments and then visualizing The King of All Cosmos praising, yet also denigrating, your efforts for the day.