#137: Invent your own alphabet (and write something in it)
This was a suggestion by a linguistically-inclined reader. After spending some time working on making new symbols, rediscovering phonetics, and so on, I decided to throw away the darn thing.
My new choice of language is an unwritten one. I’ve called it, “Girl Talk” and I think you’ll find it’s super useful in everyday life. Instead of sign language, it’s a language that relies entirely on subtle facial cues.
Here are just a few useful phrases:
1. Is today Monday or Tuesday? I hope it’s Tuesday. Oh, please be Tuesday.
2. I’m going to eat your braaaaaiiiiinnnnsssss!
3. Touch me, and I’ll punch you in the nose.
4. Ask me if it’s my “special time of the month” and I’ll punch you in the nose.
5. Chocolate? For me? Aww.
6. Take away my chocolate, and I’ll punch you in the nose.
7. Give me more chocolate, or I’ll punch you in the nose.
8. You’re looking at me. Is that because I look fat??? Wait. . . do I have a duck on my head??? I hate that.
9. Cower in fear, puny man-minions, for this planet will not be yours for long.
And here’s a simple translation of man speak, for comparison purposes:
1. I have a hat.
2. And a beard!
3. Ooh look! A shiny thing!
Play along at home: When in doubt, buy someone chocolate. Or a hat. Keep in mind that some will interpret it as an insult (“does this mean you think I’m fat???”) and punch you in the nose. C’est la vie.
And here’s today’s “Peace Hostage” companion picture, from flickr.com:
#180: Become an expert on something you know nothing about
This reader suggestion has been haunting me for weeks. How can I become an expert in a day (or perhaps a week), when becoming an expert takes thousands of hours?
Answer: specialise.
Originally I was going to become an expert on my tetras. I would be the Only One in the Whole World who could tell my four neon tetras apart.
Here’s someone else’s neon tetra photo, from wikipedia:
Unfortunately, after several months I still can’t tell my tetras apart (with one exception, because my pakistan loach bit that one).
So I tried to think of something else very specific – something that I’m obsessed with. Writing doesn’t cut it, because there are just too many writers more expert than myself.
The answer was so obvious: CJ.
I am the world expert on being married to CJ. In fact, since I’m the only girl he ever dated, I corner the market on dating CJ, too. That’s very cool.
So, as a service to you single folk out there, this is apparently how one finds and acquires the love of their life:
1. Dress up as Jack Sparrow and act like a drunken letch to a lot of your same-orientation friends (see picture at right).
2. Accidentally talk to CJ at pirate ball. Fall in love instantly.
3. Confirm CJ’s hotness by looking at photos the next day, because the only thing you remember clearly is laughing, and the feel of his arm (mmm. . . arm. . . )
4. Spend the next two months stalking him – personally, I visited a dance hall and two churches before I gave up and acquired his number off a friend of a friend.
5. Call him. Lure him to you with lies about how your writing group is desperate for new members. NB: Realise at this point that this has proven an excellent method for making hot guys become your bestest friend without ever noticing that you are, in fact, female.
6. Force your writing group to suddenly meet weekly instead of annually. Tell them to act natural. Watch as Ben takes a series of phone calls week after week, and says he has to leave. Immediately. End up alone with CJ each time.
7. Talk to CJ for hours in a series of cafes. Quickly cease bothering to pretend to write. Go to another ball together, wearing a dress this time (me, not him).
8. Stop inviting the rest of the writing group to the alleged writing days.
CJ: “Should we wait for the others?”
Louise: “Uh. . . they’re not coming. Would you like to have lunch here at the romantically-lit Pancake Parlour in a booth for two – and then walk over to Glebe Park and lay side by side in the emerald grass as a band plays love songs?” (I didn’t actually say all that.)
CJ: “Sure.”
NB: It was that day, Australia Day 2007, that CJ observed (after several hours) that Something Was Afoot. The euphempism “and then they lay down in the grass” wasn’t invented for nothing, kids.
9. Decide it’d be “cool” to have a night-time picnic on Mount Roger the day after Valentine’s Day.
10. When he asks you out and is so nervous he gets your name wrong, don’t tell him until after the kissing.
And voila! Marriage and babies, here we come. Here’s a photo taken a year after we met (at another pirate ball):
Play along at home: Err. . . no guarantees regarding the ol’ success rate of this method.
But in the meantime, here’s today’s “Peace Hostage” rainforest pic from flickr.com (the narrator’s body is buried near the stump on the left):
Coming soon: Experiment on a pet, three-ingredient thursday (dinner), that alphabet thing (for real this time), make music, etc
S#54: Clothing Attack
My heart is racing, I’m out of breath, and my torso is strangely constricted.
I’ve been a-sewing.
Warning: If you don’t like Hollywood blood and/or you’re under 12 years old, this is probably not the blog entry for you.
Many years ago, I acquired this shirt due to winning the youth section of the Sisters in Crime Scarlet Stiletto awards (you can read the story if you don’t mind blood, murder, and terrible formatting – it’s at http://home.vicnet.net.au/~sincoz/stories02/death.htm). The other story I mention in the video (again, blood and murder and so on) is at https://felicitybloomfield.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/murder-story/. Both are under the name “Felicity Bloomfield” because they’re not child-safe.
I’d have preferred a shirt in my size, but that’s just not the way it works in this mixed-up world. Today’s awesomeness was suggested by Steff Metal, who as a metal chick is constantly forced to wear the XL shirts female metal fans are so often reduced to. So Steff, this one’s for you.
I’ve cut the boring bits from the video, but didn’t stop the timer. That whole adjustment really did take exactly five minutes, including putting it on at the end – and cutting off all the dangling threads.
For those of you who either don’t have video, lack psychic powers, and/or genuinely want to try this, here’s how.
You need:
1. A fully threaded-up sewing machine (with long dangling threads at the needle every time you start a new seam). Alternatively, try hiring a roomful of seven-year olds. I hear they’re good at this sort of thing.*
2. A good pair of scissors – ideally fabric scissors, but seams hide all manner of sins.
Here’s what you do:
1. Lay the T-shirt flat on a table and cut off large chunks from each side, including the entire sleeves (I realised later that it might have been good to allow a teensy bit extra for my womanly curves). These are the bits I cut off (the pins are strictly decorative – I almost never use pins or measurements, and I don’t own an iron):
2. To make a sleeve, pick a spot along the recently-cut line that’s roughly where your armpit should eventually be. Fold the material over along that edge and sew the fold in place (that’s your seam). You need to fold it so the rough edge is inside the shirt, and sew upward from your armpit, past the top seam, and about the same length down the other side (make the sleeves big, because you can always make them smaller later).
3. When you’ve done two sleeves (and the shirt is flapping open like a poncho), turn the shirt inside out and sew along the sides from the bottom end of the shirt to the armpit spot (your sleeve sewing and side sewing will overlap). Your aim is for the shirt to end up closed and the arm-holes open. When you start your side seams from the bottom edge, you know it’ll at least appear to match up. In the video, I did one whole side before starting on the second sleeve, and I’m pretty sure I failed to begin from the bottom of the shirt, too.
4. Cut off all the dangling threads. Warning: do not cut off your fingers. Fingers are useful.
5. Your XL T-shirt is now a S/XS/M tank top. Congratulations. Advanced players, unlike me, will end up with a shirt in the correct size, rather than the too-small variety. Ah well.
Alternative ending – a piece I’ve entitled, “Oops. Was that meant to happen?” or, “Boy, those scissors sure are sharp.”
Play along at home: Hey kids! Ask an adult for help before slicing up your wardrobe (or theirs).
And here’s today’s entirely unadjusted rainforest picture, from Flickr.com:
* But you may not want to give them sharp objects. Your call.
S#35: Recreate your food lust
PS oops. I meant to post this on Saturday. You kids will just have to wait extra long for the next piece of awesome.
My mum makes a dish called “coq au vin” (which is to say, “chicken in wine” – you can imagine how the French came up with THAT one). I really like it. So a few things happened lately:
1. When I cleaned out my email inbox, I found a list of my mum’s recipes.
2. As I shopped for groceries, I saw one of those “Feed your family for $10” things – for coq au vin.
My mum’s recipe had things like:
“Ingredients. . .
Enough bacon
enough mushrooms
some onion
red wine”
which was helpful – up to a point. For one thing, I’ve never cooked with red wine, and I have noooo idea how much to put in (a bottle? a cask? a teaspoon?) For another thing, “enough bacon” is an oxymoron.
So, with the less delicious but more informative recipe from the supermarket, and the bacon and mushroom recipe from mum, I made a wonderful wonderful thing.
Here’s roughly how it went (and yes, as you can tell, I’m my mother’s daughter):
Cook one chopped onion, a dessertspoonful of minced garlic, a few rashers of bacon (chopped), and three chicken pieces in a wide frypan until the chicken is brown on both sides.
While that happens, stick 400mL red wine in a microwave safe jug with about half a cup of flour (to my surprise, cornflour worked fine – it just took a lot of stirring), stirring every minute until it suddenly goes thick. Add some thyme and bay leaves and two cubes of chicken stock along the way.
Stick the chicken mixture in a casserole dish, and pour the wine mix over it (it doesn’t matter if it’s gone cold). Cook it with the lid on at 150 degrees celsius for anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour and a half, depending on when CJ gets home. Cook rice.
When you have about fifteen minutes to go, mix a handful of fresh chopped mushrooms into the casserole and take the lid off (NB: take lid off first).
If you feel like it, fry some sliced zucchini in the pan and add some chopped fetta just before serving.
Voila! Je suis riche!
I was psyching CJ up for this all week (the word “bacon” was all he actually needed), but both of us were surprised and delighted when we first tasted it.
Nostalgia = win.
Tomorrow’s entry includes a photo CJ described as “horrific”. If you don’t like seeing a lot of blood in the movies, tomorrow’s entry is not for you.
And from flickr.com:
#179: Play with a pirate ship
This was a recent gift from a good friend. It has working winches, a hold cover, and fully functional cannons with TINY plastic cannonballs.
Naturally, every so often it catches my eye and I move the captain into the crow’s nest, or send the rowboat over the other side of the room, or arrange a sailor’s meeting inside the captain’s cabin.
Immaturity = yay.
Land ho!
Yep, that’s Optimus Prime in the captain’s cabin.
Okay guys, you’ve had your fun. Now let me back up.
. . . guys??
As always during August 2010, here’s a rainforest picture for your enjoyment. It’s from Flickr.com.
Three-Ingredient Thursday: The Dark Dinosaur
You can argue the case that this has only two ingredients. I would.
NB: The zombie cat is not an ingredient. She is cunningly hidden on a chair underneath a glass table.
Method: Break orange intense Lindt into squares. Make sandwich with a dinosaur (or several snakes). Eat before CJ comes home and find a suspicious depletion of the chocolate I bought for him.
I’m particularly proud of the way the snakes glisten ominously in this photo.
Now I always knew this would taste good. It wasn’t a difficult thought process to walk through. But to be honest, I thought it was a little bit of a waste of fine chocolate and natural brand confectionary, since the consumption speed is vastly different and (I thought) non-complimentary. However.
The Lindt chocolate is thin enough and dark enough that it more or less dissolves in the mouth, but fills the senses with dark chocolate goodness (the orange intense flavour removes the usual bitterness of dark chocolate, FYI). The dinosaur takes more time to chew, but that is fine because the flavour of the chocolate remains in the mouth. Thus, the symbiotic relationship makes this dish awesome.
QED.
In other news, I helped prevent a high-speed crash today.
Canberra basically has one 100-kilometer zone: The Tuggeranong Parkway. I was driving there this afternoon, between heavy bouts of rain and mist, and observed a car attempting to change lanes. They clearly hadn’t head-checked their blind spot, because there was a truck exactly beside them in the right hand lane. The truck immediately noticed the Honda Jazz moving toward them and swerved away, but they couldn’t go far because of the concrete boundary in the centre of the Parkway
The Honda Jazz driver was clearly still oblivious to the truck – there was no sudden swerve back into their lane. So I beeped my horn. Most of us have a guilty conscience, and immediately assume a beeping horn is someone telling us we’re being stupid. It worked. The Jazz immediately did that classic over-compensatory swerve back into their own space, and then corrected themself.
All of which happened in moments, on a wet road with low visibility, at a hundred kilometres an hour.
That’s right: I’m a freaking hero.
Also, if they had collided, I’d have probably rear-ended both of them and died horribly.
To celebrate three lives saved, here’s a flickr.com picture of a rainforest.
#178: Kick your life goal in the eye
Sometimes, having a grand life dream just sucks.
Here are two simple stats I wish I’d known fifteen years ago:
1. Only 1 in 10,000 books gets published via the slushpile (ie, by just sending it to “sir/madam” at a publisher who seems to fit).
2. Authors who are doing pretty darn well – ie they’re published, and selling well enough to continue selling one or two books each year (and to have the time to write them) – generally earn around $10,000 per year. Many of them write full-time. That’s about $5/hour – not counting expenses.
And maybe I’d have benefited from some other stats about the rate of mental illness and/or divorce for writers.
Don’t get me wrong, though, I’d still write. If I spend more than a couple of days without writing, I miss it badly. And I was lucky enough to know from an early age that writing doesn’t make you rich (okay, there are perhaps ten fabulously rich writers IN THE WORLD, and another hundred earning a respectable amount. You’re more likely to win lotto than be one of them. There are a LOT of writers in the world, and not enough readers to go around – I recently heard 87% of Americans want to write a book some day, and only 50% have actually read a book in the last twelve months).
I’ve mentioned before than Ian Irvine says it takes 10,000 hours to get good at writing. I also mentioned that I was halfway – I’ve been writing to a self-imposed quota since 2006.
Lately I’ve been taking (another) hard look at my writing “career”, and realised it could easily be five more years until I’m accepted for book publication. I wrote myself a five-year plan (with “actually get published” at the very end) to try and teach myself to accept that this is how it’s going to be.
Fail.
Ever since realising statistic # 1, life has looked a lot darker. I temporarily lifted my mood by signing up for two more conferences (a rational thing to do after finding out how important contacts are, however scary and expensive the experience), but why would I go to so much effort when nothing’s going to happen for so many more long and soul-crushing years?
So I made a new plan. A better one. One in which I manipulate mathematics for personal gain.
I re-counted my writing hours. Here’s the breakdown:
School English classes (uni is part of school): 2000 hours.
School projects (practising written expression): 650 hours.
Quota hours: 5000 (by end of this year)
Stories written in my own time: 100 hours (primary school)
160 hours (high school)
200 hours (Year 11 and 12 – I wrote over 50,000 words in just two manuscripts, and entered a LOT of short story competitions in order to take advantage of being able to enter youth competitions).
Gap year: 400 hours (I hand-wrote a 200,000 word book)
2001 (first year of uni): 210 (among other things, I typed and edited that hand-written book. And wrote another 50,000 word book.)
2002: 130 hours (I wrote most of my first fantasy novel)
2003: 50 hours
Two National Novel Writing Months (I don’t remember which years): 200 hours
2004: 700 hours (I became obsessed with finishing the fantasy trilogy, and at the end of that year I sat down and estimated how much time I’d spent writing)
2005: 200 (I did fifty hours editing for the National Novel Editing Month, and wrote another 50,000 word book, plus short stories).
Well! Wouldya look at that. Turns out I’ve ALREADY done 10,000 hours of writing – or at least, I will have by the end of this year. So I’m probably pretty good by now.
And we’re back to the manic-depressive state of, “Are they gonna call me today? How about tomorrow? Any second now. . .”
Which is horrible and unhealthy, but better than despair.
TA DAAAAA!!!
Play along at home: Spend just one hour pursuing a dream (however big or small). If you’d like to be a writer*, write something!
Personally, I’m going to go and check my email. Perhaps that six-book deal is sitting there waiting**.
Coming sorta soon: The Dark Dinosaur (tomorrow)
Experiment on your pet *maniacal giggle*
Clothing Attack
In the meantime, here’s your Flickr.com photo for today:
*you poor sad schmuck
**It wasn’t. But maybe NOW!!!
#97: Cancel Fu
These days, everyone is running around, stressed over this and that and “I said I’d get right on to such-and-such”. We hold on so tightly to our plans. So, when we let something go, it’s a wonderful feeling.
That is my awesomeness for today – not doing anything awesome today (whoaa, what a paradox). Personally, I’m going back to bed.
What are you going to not do today?
And here’s a true story (published in a “Short and Twisted” anthology a few years ago). It happened to Ben.
Naked Man in the Bushes
There’s not much to do in Canberra.
I walked home from Belconnen Interchange on a Wednesday night. It was ten o’clock, so there were no more buses. Drunk men were everywhere, and they all seemed to be stalking their ex-wives. They talked to contacts on mobiles. ‘Yes, she’s going toward Ginninderra Drive now. See if you can head her off.’
My concern rose significantly when I noticed an adult male crouching in bushes by the roadside. He was nude.
I kept my eyes forward and debated whether or not I should call someone. Unable to remember the number for the naked stalker hotline, I walked by on the other side of the road. A second naked man burst from a tree immediately in front of me and sprinted to the traffic island splitting Belconnen Way.
‘Marco!’ he yelled.
‘Polo!’ came the reply.
THE END
And here’s today’s Flickr.com picture:
S#67: Make someone’s day
Yet another friend had a birthday on the weekend, and a bunch of us went out to dinner. I managed to manipulate events to get almost all of them to come back to my house bearing ice cream, chocolate, and assorted candy. We made our own fantastic creations with (among other things) mint chocolate sprinkles, maltesers, honey nougat chocolate, mini M&Ms, flake bars, and so on. It amused me how pathetically grateful the birthday boy was, considering I’d been scheming for hours for some way to make dinner segue into a house party.
People eating:
(If you look closely, you can see: Someone dangling from an anchor; a camel; one extra set of hands; two clocks; just one person who actually noticed the camera.)
And this is what I ate (you can tell I’m a little stressed about two upcoming writing conferences – the ice cream is the healthy part):
Coming soon: Some stuff, probably. Not really sure what, to be perfectly honest. More flickr.com pictures, in any case:
Incidentally, if you’re wondering what the “S” stands for in the title, it’s Steff Metal – http://steffmetal.com/101-ways-to-cheer-yourself-up/
#177: The Piper
A scottish-born friend of ours celebrated his 50th today, so his friends were all summoned to celebrate – as Scottishly as we knew how.*
One five-year old took a look at him and said, “Hey look! He’s wearing the same dress I am!”
Awesome.
Due to a tug-of-war gone horribly right, I also finally saw what a Scotsman wears under his kilt.**
I was also pleased to observe an elderly lady who’d obviously been as stumped for Scottish-ish gear as I was. She’d found a tartan pencil case and wore it proudly on her head. Another lovely old lady brought out a set of electric bagpipes and the sunny Canberra day suddenly sounded like rain-swept plains on an isolated headland.
And then, during afternoon tea. . . the piéce de resistance. We heard the drone and pipes approaching from outside, and paused with half-eaten shortbread en route to our mouths. There’s no mystery when you hear the skirl of pipes – no wondering, “Is that what I think it is?” Short of the yowling of angry cats, there’s no sound like it.
And in came the piper, in full regalia (including a beard that he assured his many groupies was once red). At the doorway we all gasped in wonder and delight. As he entered the room the sheer unmistakeable power of bagpipe volume FILLED THE ROOM.
One forgets how loud pipes can be.
Not sure how.
All up, a freaking brilliant afternoon.
And, as usual, here’s a nice bit of forest to feast your eyes on (thanks to Flickr.com):
*ie, not very.
**shorts.
Felicity Banks 