...like staring into a scan of your own eyeball. Only because I love my sight so much, I was able stare into a disgusting red and green map of the inside of my poor, stretched ocular orb.

The good news - nothing much wrong!

The bad news - except that part where the inside of your eyeballs might rip off. But there's not a huge chance, just, you know, a chance!

...great?

Other good news - new frames! Now I have peripheral vision! (My old glasses were apparently teeny!)

So, I'm going to be at Wiscon next week!


I am not on any official panels, and will thus spend the weekend wandering around like a loon. I will, however, be singlehandedly moderating an ongoing panel called "The Asshole Beside Me," where I chill you to the bone with stories of my college writing workshops. Bonus: you can find out what the hell my writing group is named after.


(Please note that, if you were in my writing workshops senior year of college, "The Asshole Beside Me" panel might turn on a dime and become uncomfortable.)

For those who have no idea what I look like, this is it. I can practically guarantee that I will be making this face, since I make this face 90% of my life.

The other 10% of my life I'm doing a crazy Viking laugh with my head thrown back, so if all you can see is tonsils, that's probably me, too.

(Also, I look like I have a glass eye in this picture. That's not the case, though a glass eye would probably be just as useful as the 20/500 eyeball that's in there now.)

Yeah, I just walked in the door. It's 5:30am.

I'm not even tired.

That was some good dancing.

This is how last night went:

1. Went to the reading at South Street last night; had a very good time.

2. Raced home to finish Operation Not Bakula.

3. Finished.

4. Immediately queued up the whole thing and started again until I fell asleep at about 3am.

5. Woke up 45 minutes early this morning to watch some more before work.

I'm still on such an experience-high that I'm not even tired. I am a nerd beyond measure.

So, the Costume Institute Gala was last night.

You would think that, as a costume/fashion nerd, I would be all over it. And you would be correct, except that I've been to two, and I have a near-pathological aversion to the ENTIRE MET that I am only slowly overcoming.

I worked that event two years in a row with the event production company.

JESUS GOD.

( I drop names! I whine! I make my own dress! Details inside! )

Actual conversation over the phone. All parties are played by themselves except me; I am played by Walter Matthau.



Me: Hey, Mom! I placed a story!
Mom: Oh my god, is it a horror story?
Me: No.
Dad: [mumbled]
Mom: Your father wants to know if it's too weird.
Me: ...no?
Mom: Well, can Grandma read it?
Me: ...I guess.
Mom: Well, then that's great, honey!


I guess that's a temporary pass on changing my name.

So here's how my day usually goes:

( Enemies of freedom, biological modification, and/or numbered lists need not click. )

I lasted exactly 98 minutes in Comic Con. I am the worst geek in the world.

( When you start with a Stormtrooper blasting 'Come On, Ride the Train', there's nowhere to go. )

So I say, "Hey, I'm thinking about hitting Comicon! Gosh, I hope some people I know will also be there!"

About which of you awesome people would that be correct?

(Check that out! Never has "Who's going to Comicon?" been asked in such a convoluted way! Thank god I'm a writer.)

ETA: This one! In New York this weekend! THANK GOD I'M A WRITER.

The Bus Gods were kind, and it was a short bus trip with a nice seatmate who slept the whole time. Now I bgin my offerings to the Plane Gods that my seatmate on the plane to WisCon is as nice.

Spent the weekend thus:

1. Parents ask me to tell them what I'm writing these days.
2. I tell them in vague terms.
2. They ask me to change my name.

So, either I wait for that little furor to die down, or I'll have to change this blog title to Samantha Bustier. Stay tuned!

1. I ended up "striking LJ" only because I couldn't get to the internet until now. I am addicted to the Internet, you guys. Yeesh. I had a list of things to look up written on the back of my hand, I was so desperate.

2. I have looked up all items of interest, they are as awesome as I could have hoped, and now I just have to shove through this novel and start on the next one, which fills me with glee. (The second novel, not this one. This novel is a fucker.)

3. Wrote a short story last night, a prime example of letting my lack of internet work for me, and then had to make a ton of changes today when I actually researched the facts, a prime example of why I should never be without internet again.

4. Part Two of Fantasma is finished and coming tomorrow when I can fiddle with my USB drive.

5. The fam watched The Red Violin, which I remembered liking most of and hating the end of, and it was exactly the same this time. Why?

( Do you still LJ-cut for spoilers when it's a random movie from 1998? )

But, can't beat the violin music in that movie, and violin isn't even my favorite instrument. Dear Josh Bell, way to go.

Tonight I head home for a long weekend of being my family's personal tech support (a service performed in exchange for my dad shoving through my taxes for me, since I always end up with 785 tax documents even though I lead a ridiculously boring life).

It's the equivalent of a writing retreat in that I will have a computer with no wireless - ideal for writing! It's the equivalent of a Catskills retreat in that every minute of my time is already booked - ideal for learning a sensual dance at the hands of one of the dance staff!

I still hope to get some work done; it's been a productive week and I want to keep up the pace.

Headline event: watching Fantasma dell'opera with friends. It's going to be EPIC.

All that's left is to see what the Gods of Bus Travel have in mind for me. Somtimes they are benevolent and I get a nice person who sleeps for four hours. Sometimes I get someone who enjoys garlic fries, loud cell phone conversation, and, once, asking me if the Lord was my true savior. (My answer: "Oh, je ne parle pas anglais, je regrette!" Thank you, one sentence of French I retained!)

Said plans include: sleeping, cleaning, beginning to get my taxes in order, exercising, stuffing my face, finishing this short story, finishing the next chapter of the novel, dancing, more cleaning, and please please please some sleep.

What will actually happen: two of those things. Probably not sleep. Probably MST3K in lieu of sleep.

Things I did this weekend:

• Continued to sound like Bea Arthur, to the amusement of many.


• Left the house for socializing purposes THREE TIMES! This is a miracle, you guys, for real.


• Danced a little tango. I'll have more to say on this later.


• Finished TIN MAN. I clearly have plenty to say on this right now! The cumulative word count for this review is shameful.


• Dreamed of going to London two nights in a row. My alarm went off before I ever actually land in London, but I got to hang around two imaginary airports!


• Wrote, like, ten words. I blame my cold, which was like balancing a lead balloon on my neck.

Plans for this week center around getting a state ID. Yay, queuing!

Coming down with your officemate's cold despite all your vitamin-y attempts to escape it: not awesome.

Waking up and sounding exactly like Bea Arthur: AWESOME.

Now all I need is a caftan...

P.S. If there's anything that makes you so sad/elated/emotionally slugged that you lose your shit, drop by this post and tell me about it! I like to know I'm not alone!

Also, apparently, The Iron Giant is the world's saddest movie. Who knew?

Thanks to the sickness, my taste buds are shot. My normally life-affirming soy coffee tastes like cardboard.

*falls to knees, shakes fists at sky*

Why, norovirus?! Why?!

I finally found an LJ layout I crave, and I'm working on a short story that had the most hilarious research process in the world (it involved home movies of Baptist church recitals, and there's nothing else I need to tell you about THAT). I was so excited about going home and making both of those things happen until I realized that it's Wednesday and I have to go work at the tango studio tonight.

I'm going to try to squeak out a few hundred words of the story at work while looking extremely helpful and busy.

For the LJ layout, I'm waiting until Thursday. In related news, expect every line of code in the world to break once I start messing with it. (You could look for someone who knows less about coding than I do, but man, that would be one long search, you know?)

* Not actually a stupid day - I actually love the tango salon - but man, LJ layout! Excitement!

My story "La Belle Dormant" is up at Byzarium; a nice start to the year. Also, it's only 350 words, so I'm starting the year with a little brevity! (Don't get used to it.)

Rang in the new year at a tango party with my laptop in front of me, which is pretty much how I'll be spending the year. I also got the unique thrill of seeing my program design for last year's party (which went unused) used this year, with design credit given to someone else - and with that someone else claiming to have painted the 1930s advertisement on the cover. I don't really care about the rest of it, but I'm looking forward to the day when that person is commissioned to paint another one of those 1930s ads.

Spent today tidying the house, which was productive and frightening. (I nearly threw out a $40 Starbucks card because I thought it was empty! Note to self: it's ALWAYS worth calling to check your balance.)

I'm writing now, with the promise of something awesome if I make word count - and I don't even know what it is! It's a blank DVD. I'm excited, except if it's Tin Man, and then I'm going to cry.


* Pavlov jokes are never not funny. Eddie Izzard is my bff.

...a year in review that is mostly about today.

January through July - not so hot.

August through December - much better!


Key moments of today:

Lipton boxes of teabags suggest you "Live better everyday!" Clearly there are no copyeditors left in the world.

Also, sometime in 2007 I crossed over the line from "I just don't get cucumbers, I guess" to "Cucumbers are disgusting to the point of inducing vomiting." They join the ranks of their compatriots zucchini, squash soup, and risotto.

I work near enough to Times Square that my walk to work at 8:45 this morning involved stepping over people who were ALREADY WAITING for New Year's.

My lunch today is cereal, because when you put rotten cucumbers in my salad and expect me to eat it you have another thing coming, Lunch Delivery Place! Ha! Showed you!

Back from the holidays, which were spent at my parents' house mainlining cookies at seriously unsafe levels. But they were homemade! Homemade sugar cookies from a 120-year-old recipe! There was no resistance.

I also watched insane levels of So You Think You Can Dance. It's my guilty pleasure show; I watch it in huge chunks when I come home, mostly because I am not very good with suspense, and can't stand waiting a week to know how it went and who's going home. Plus, when it's all TiVoed, you can watch a whole season in about two hours without listening to the judges, the commercials, or the dancers, who, for all their incredible feats of physical agility, can be dumb as a box of hair. I don't like knowing if they say "me and my partner"! Don't tell me they know where "the feeling is at"! Just shut up and dance, you guys! Damn!

/grammar freak

I followed up the danceitude with some MST3K. I'm convinced that "The Mole People" remains one of the top five MST3Ks ever filmed.

(Best quote: Anthropologist and/or archeologist John Agar falls into a Sumerian society of albinos that lives under a volcano. He ends up being gifted with a pigmented blonde chick-slave, and they have the following conversation in his quarters:

Adal: I will watch you while you are away, in your dreams.
John Agar: But what about you? When do you sleep, Adal, or do you?
Adal: I sleep, when my sleeping time comes.
John Agar: Your sleeping time? But how are you able to tell?
Adal: Here in my heartbeat. One, two, three...
John Agar: But you're not counting all the time, are you?
Adal: No. I just feel it all the time.
John Agar: What happens when your heart beats faster?
Adal: It matters not. It is my heart, it is my time.
Tom Servo: ...we've gotten off on a weird tangent here.

When I'm writing, "We've gotten off on a weird tangent here" is my rallying cry. Focus, Genevieve, focus!)


Holiday gifts included socks, Chapstick, and a travel clock. I am a woman of mystery. (Don't worry; all our holidays are like this. My mom got a label-maker.)

My hair is now about 10% grey. I'm hoping to hit 100% grey before I'm 30. (I'm weird.)