Travel travails

I still maintain, with the unchanging steadfastness of a novelty t-shirt purchased at the shore, that a bad day out of the office beats a good day in the office, but man oh man, yesterday was arduous.

In hindsight it’s difficult to make it out to be anything more than it was, which was just your typical commercial air travel comedy of errors. My step-father dropped me and my wife and the little guy off at the airport with ridiculous amounts of time to spare, considering the airport itself is not that big from one end to the other and a Monday mid-morning does not generally entail massive crowds in the security lines or anything. But this was by design, because we wanted to have a day free of even the slightest worry, one in which we could check our bags and then go through security and then grab a hot breakfast and then leisurely await the boarding call. Since we had a two-year-old to wrangle on the one hand and his awkwardly bulky car seat to tote on the other, padding the schedule seemed all for the best.

And it would have been, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids and their dog. And by “meddling kids and their dog” I mean “massive delays due to mechanical problems which no one could have foreseen or done anything about”. Well, maybe someone could have done something about it, maybe there’s a business plan somewhere in running an airline which has a 100% on-time rate because all the planes are rigorously maintained and replaced as soon as they’re two years old and armed with Destro’s Weather Dominators or whatever, but that does not describe Southwest Airlines. (Nor, for what it’s worth, does it describe an airline I’d be likely to fly my family on, because I imagine the tickets would be astronomically expensive.)


We had a connection in Chicago and at the start of the day it was a very manageable hour and a half between flights. But our flight out of Albuquerque was delayed 55 minutes, and then an hour and 15 minutes, so suddenly it seemed like the only way we could hop from one plane to the next would be if we were among the first six or so passengers off the plane in Chicago and just hustled like Charlie, and also if the jetway for the second flight were no more than three or four gates away. Getting off a plane fast of course requires sitting towards the front, and this might actually be possible on Southwest because of their bizarre free-for-all boarding/seating scheme, but you know what can really screw it all up? When you spot a window-and-middle pair of seats in Row 8, which would have been perfect for me and the little guy (federal aviation law requires the carseat get buckled into a window seat, and my wife could have found a singleton even closer to the front), and there’s a lady sitting in the aisle seat, and you ask if you can get past her to the two other seats, and she says she’s saving one of those seats for her husband. Does that not kind of violate the spirit and/or defeat the purpose of open, unassigned seating? Husband-Seat-Saving Lady, whoever you are, wherever you are, you pretty much suck. You may not have technically done anything wrong, you may have been within the letter of the law of Southwest’s A-group boarding policy, and you of course weren’t obligated to look out for anyone but yourself, but still. You suck.

We skipped the Emergency Exit row and tried sitting in Row 10, which is still at least in the front half of the plane, but were reminded by a flight attendant that it’s actually three rows that count as emergency exit for purposes of expressly forbidding carseats, so we ended up in Row 13. And also ended up wheels-down exactly when you’d expect, with 15 minutes ticking down until our connection. And also taxied to Gate A11 and were told by the flight crew that the flight to Dulles was at Gate B25. But in a mad frenzied burst we deplaned as fast as possible and I ran … no, that’s not the right word for it, but I think English may lack the specificity to describe in a single word the locomotion that results when an out-of-shape 36 year old with a large carry-on strapped to his back and a carseat hugged to his chest tries to get from one side of Midway to the other in seven minutes. (The German tongue might have it covered, but I think Babelfish has a character limit.)

The plan was that I would get to the gate first while my wife (who, let us not forget, is four and a half months pregnant) maneuvered herself and the little guy (who walks pretty slowly, or slows down whoever’s carrying him) in my wake, and if I had to lay across the cabin door I would keep the plane from taking off without all three of us. I got to B25 with two minutes to spare! And then saw that our connecting flight had been delayed half an hour and had yet to even start boarding. Which would have been nice to know when we landed. Also, once my bride and my heir rejoined me, we heard an announcement that boarding would be further delayed because another Southwest flight carrying passengers who were supposed to make the same connection was coming in late, and they’d be holding the plane for them. Which also would have been nice to know when we were twiddling our thumbs nervously in Albuquerque and trying to claw our way to primo seats on that flight. I really can’t decide after all that if I’m a fan of Southwest Airlines or not. On the one hand they seemed to be doing a lot to accommodate the repercussions of the screwed up schedule; on the other hand the schedule-buck does stop with them. They’ve got good prices; but the cheapness shows in the experience. And some other day I’ll describe the nightmare of the first leg of our flight out west, when the cabin pressurization system malfunctioned and I thought my head was going to explode, as did the little guy (thought his own head was going to explode, I mean, probably didn’t spare a thought to anyone else’s, understandably) and the little guy didn’t even know or understand what you’re supposed to do to alleviate the pressure imbalance in such a situation and therefore just SCREAMED BLOODY MURDER. Which I do, in a roundabout way, basically blame Southwest for in the same buck-stoppage way.

But I’m still pretty sure about Husband-Seat-Saving Lady. She totally sucks.

Anyway, we’re all home in one piece, all back to our beloved routines of work and daycare and whatnot, and all’s right with the world, or close enough. I’ll dole out a few more Thanksgiving anecdotes in days to come. Right now I’m just thrilled to be home.

A comic character rebus

It Girl, from The Atomics (AAA Pop, Dark Horse Comics and Image Comics)


Supergirl, from the Superman family (DC Comics)


Arizona Girl, from Wild West (Marvel Comics)

IT + S + A + GIRL

Or so we think! My wife went in for the 20 week ultrasound this morning and the results were semi-conclusive. The umbilical cord running right between the legs prevented a clear and definitive imaging of our baby-to-be's sex, but on the other hand, there wasn't a "check it out I'm totally a boy!" moment like we had with the little guy. The sonogram-operating professional in attendance said she was inclined to believe it was a girl (which my wife's maternal intuition is beginning to suggest more and more as well), and offered to check again at a future appointment. I'd put the odds at about 75%, which means that if I'm going to include three pictures of girls I should include a fourth to represent the 25% uncertainty. Preferably something androgynous with an air of mystery about it.


You guys, comics are awesome.

The Stuck Record

An atypical Tuesday, too? Oh, yes, believe it.

I made it home last night without too much difficulty, although it was slightly nerve-wracking simply because the whole process was generally unfamiliar to me. When I drive I almost always go in and out of the DC area using 66 as a straight shot, so not having that option due to HOV restrictions meant I had to get creative. And I may have been a bit overconfident at my ability to wing it, and by just kind of following roads I sorta recognized the names of in the general direction I thought I should be heading, I probably didn’t make headway as straightforwardly as I could have. But in the end, door-to-door, it took just about exactly as much time to get home as the combination of mass transit and driving commute usually takes.

Also working in my favor on the way home was much more favorable conditions, both external and internal. I didn’t bring this up yesterday, but the most trying part of the morning commute was the stretch getting from Megabus to M Street, not only because I was winging it but because my car was running on fumes and I was overdue to relieve myself of my morning coffee, ahem ahem. Fortunately when I re-oriented myself on M I quickly found a large gas station with not abominable restrooms, so I solved those problems and made the rest of the trip without incident. This also meant that I had plenty of gas on the way home, and I made a conscious effort to visit the restrooms at work before hitting the road, and the morning fog obviously was no longer a factor in the evening, so all in all it was an improvement.

But by not following my usual commute habits, I set off other cascading effects. Usually when I settle down in my seat on the bus or Metro, I unclip my building security badge and put it inside my work bag so I can’t forget it the next day. But yesterday evening I left the office and by the time I was sitting down again I was operating a motor vehicle, and didn’t realize I still had my badge clipped on until after I had gotten home, dropped my work bag, and taken off and hung up my coat. So the badge ended up on the kitchen counter, right next to my cell phone, which I was sure would remind me to grab the badge as well in the morning.

Needless to say the badge is still sitting on the kitchen counter as I type this, because I am a dingus. Hence today’s completely different flavor of atypicality. I had to stop at the security desk for the building this morning and get a visitor badge, which also means I’m not allowed to wander the building on my own. So I’ve been shackled at my desk all day without so much as a mosey down to the fifth floor vending machines, because the hassle of getting someone to escort me anywhere isn’t really worth it. This is what I reap from being ultra-orthodox in my dedication to keeping my head down and not socializing much at the office.


And can I just add that I’m sure being a security guard at a government office building is a challenging enough job, and my problems caused by my own negligence do not automatically become their problems, but would it kill them to be a little bit sympathetically helpful? Even to get to the elevators with my visitor badge, I needed to call someone for an escort from the lobby. I started scrolling through my cell phone contacts looking for my boss and was surprised to find I’d never saved his number. Another of my co-workers, whose number I did have, is already on vacation, so I was at a bit of a loss. I asked one of the security guards if they had any kind of directory, explaining my phone predicament. The security guard sighed and said “All we have is that directory over there between the two columns” and pointed across the lobby. I figured it was worth a shot to look and see if maybe my office had a main number and maybe I could prevail upon the administrative assistant who manned that phone or whatever. I would not have figured it was worth a shot if the security guard had said something like “The building directory doesn’t have any phone numbers on it” which was, in fact, the case. I mean, seriously? If I tell you I can’t find a phone number and ask if you have a directory, why in the world would you even bother mentioning (and implying even the longshot helpfulness of) a floor directory which only lists which agencies are in which suites? How hard is it to realize that the most helpful answer would actually be “No, sorry”?

I’m mostly mad at myself, I guess. One more day to go and I can’t wait to see what kind of curveball that’s going to entail. Probably thunderstorms and a fire drill and I’ll forget my umbrella.

Rainy daze

This has been, in many ways, an atypical Monday.

For one thing, I know I kvetch all the time about being tired but seriously you guys, today I am exhausted. In large part I can attribute this to the visit my internet buddy paid to our humble home. We did, as predicted, engage in some hardcore dork-blathering (which sounds way more double entendre than I intended, ah well) but I still managed to resist the temptation to keep the open-ended conversation going until 2 or 3 in the morning. In fact, we were saying good night and respectively turning in by a little after 11. But still, I was probably overly wired, and we altered certain nighttime configurations (my buddy is allergic to cats so my wife and I made sure to shut up the cat with us in our room, and then since the door of our room was closed we turned on the baby monitor in our room to listen for the little guy, who was a little under the weather all weekend, and the baby monitor was as usual picking up Spanish radio broadcasts, faintly but enough to intrude on my ability to drift off) SO … very little sleep for me.


I got up at the usual time today, got myself mostly ready and then woke up my buddy so he could get ready, and that meant I had time to savor my cup of coffee and read some of the Sunday paper and whatnot, and then we left the house about 35 minutes later than I normally do. And instead of heading to the local commuter bus lot or the Metro station, I got on 66 in the HOV lane and drove all the way into DC, so my buddy could catch the Megabus back to NYC which was supposed to leave at 8:30. This morning was obnoxiously foggy/misty which, as you can imagine, has nothing but deleterious effects on the general traffic congestion. So, backed out of the driveway a little after 6:30, got to the Megabus departure point (H and 10th) at about 8:15. At which point, after my buddy bailed out and I wished him a safe trip, I had to navigate up and over to M street so I could take the Key Bridge into Rosslyn. I got to work at 9, which is acceptable but, again, pretty atypical. I can’t remember exactly the last time I drove into work, but I think it was last winter one day when the offices were finally re-opened but the snow was still making the Metro and the VRE really hit-or-miss.

I’m dreading the commute home tonight, because I won’t be able to retrace my steps and head west on 66, now that it’s just buddy-less me and 66 is HOV only between here and the Beltway. I’ll presumably end up on 50, which has an annoying abundance of traffic lights.

Of course another prominently atypical aspect of today, as Mondays go, is that it’s the Monday of a short week, with the offices closed for Thanksgiving and the day after. That should be a silver lining I could latch onto but the fact that Thanksgiving is so imminent only serves to remind me that we have quite a bit of packing and preparation to do before we fly out west to see my mom for the holiday. I am looking forward to the visit, but getting the tri-part family unit through the multi-airport gauntlet on Thursday, less so. Although, man, if we make it through the whole trip without major incident, I’m going to run a serious risk of getting a little bit cocky.

In any case, in spite of my weird, sleep-deprived feelings of discontinuity, really all is well and good and normal. (Oh, and thank goodness, absolutely nothing new to report at work - still waiting on a bunch of stuff from other people and unable to move my projects forward due to circumstances beyond my control!) I just don’t have enough coherent thoughts to hang much of a blog post on – which, of course, I feel bad about because it’s a short week and I certainly won’t be posting on Thursday, Friday or through the weekend. Silly, sure, but that’s how the whole blogging thing has insinuated itself in my brain. Here’s hoping that maybe tomorrow I can manage one scintillating essay to prevent the entire week from being a loss. We shall see!

Scanner Sunday - Goofy, goofy comics (2)

That fanfic buddy who's coming to visit me today? He recently admitted there's a certain comic series he's never read, which is one I happen to both own and love. It's a six-issue miniseries from the mid-80's called LEGENDS and it is one of the last gasps of a comics industry that was still essentially making silly stories for children, but casting a hungry eye on an adult audience that wanted more mature themes and (quasi-)realistic depictions of costumed vigilantism and so on. The Grim-And-Gritty movement would hit its stride in the late 80's and early 90's but LEGENDS pre-dates it enough to have some utterly awesome goofiness to it. And since I dug out my issues to loan to my buddy anyway, I thought I'd share one of my personal favorite moments:

I would set up the premise of the miniseries in detail (short version: an evil godlike alien tries to soften Earth up for conquest by manipulating the media and making the people of the world lose faith in superheroes; chaos ensues) except the sequence below is almost completely random in its minimal bearing on the overall plot. It's just a scene of the "chaos" where super criminals are running wild because superheroes are otherwise occupied not getting curbstomped by angry mobs of civilians (seriously). Thus, the following nefarious caper unfolds (feel free to click each scan for a bigger, more legible version, but you'll probably get the gist at a glance):


OK, hoity-toity clock auction is gatecrashed by an attractive woman in a bikini. Arguably more of a prank than a felony, but then, the plot thickens:


Ah yes, Chronos, of course, who has arrived to steal the rare and valuable clocks because that's his thing. And Chronos has what is inarguably one of the goofiest costumes in perhaps all of comicdom, but that is actually completely besides the point here. What delights me endlessly about this whole scene is its intricacy, especially when you mentally reverse-engineer it. Chronos figures the easiest way to waltz in and take the clocks is to incapacitate everyone in the room, hence the robo-girl (whose name, it is later revealed, is "Tikki") and her deafening bong-screams which knock out everyone who hears them. Although presumably those bong-screams could have been emitted by any electronic device at all. So of all possible delivery mechanisms for said nefariousness, Chronos chose a sexbot over, say, bribing a waiter to carry the emitter in on a tray or any number of other possibilities. Granted, the sexbot provides other benefits as well. NO NOT LIKE THAT. As the caper continues, Chronos pulls some insta-inflatable packing crates out of the robot's abdominal storage space, and when the Blue beetle finally shows up to save the day, Chronos makes use of the bot's self-destruct to mask his getaway. But still, all of those gadgets and gizmos were incorporated into a lifelike automaton capable of walking into a room unassisted, and also scantily clad yet bedecked in clock-themed baubles. There can only be one possible logical explanation for why Chronos would accrue that kind of expense in the front-end of a plan to yoink some old timepieces:

PANACHE.

And frankly, I do lament sometimes how a lot of comics today are all about villains who murder indiscriminately and heroines who are survivors of sexual assault and on and on with the real-life horrors, but when I get nostalgic for the comics of my youth, it's not because I think they were simpler. They were, as I think I've made clear above, absolutely byzantine sometimes. But it was a joyful kind of elaborate mess, and just trying to keep up with it was fun. I admire a career criminal for whom the trappings and calling cards of his schtick are obviously more important than the loot itself.

SatOrSunday Grab Bag - Fanfic Week Edition

On Thursday night my wife fired up her netbook and surfed over to my blog and read the title of the post and said "Fanfic again, huh?" All I could do was smile sweetly and say "What part of 'fanfic WEEK' did you think I was joking about?"

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But I missed yesterday, and the reason is because I spent the vast majority of it (when not toddler-wrangling which I assume almost goes without saying) tidying up the house because we have a guest coming to town today and spending the night tonight. That might seem like mere excuse-making but it is actually relevant insomuch as this friend is one of the people I mentioned during the course of the week - a fellow fanficcer who I now consider a friend, despite only ever communicating via e-mail and reading one another's stories. There are odder things in this modern age to base a friendship on besides the common ground of being copyright scofflaws. Anyway, my online acquaintance lives on the west coast but came east for Thanksgiving and I suggested we get together, so he's riding the bus down from NYC to DC today and will spend the night on our sleeper sofa before heading back tomorrow morning. We both tend to write fairly locquacious e-mails so I suspect there's a strong chance we'll both just chatter dorkily most of the night and I'll be hoarse tomorrow. Fun stuff.

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Speaking of fun stuff, like the much anticipated (in this quarter) Green Lantern movie, they released the first full trailer online this week and you may be wondering if I saw it. I didn't interrupt Fanfic Week to talk about it but OF COURSE I SAW IT. Actually that's not as much of a gimme as you might think because I tend to get most of my online time in logged while I'm at work, but I don't have speakers at my work computer so one area I fall behind in is online videos. But I made a special point of clicking over to the trailer at home on Tuesday evening. And I realized, strangely, that although I was curious to see the trailer I might have let it go a couple of weeks nevertheless. It wasn't so much pure desire to see it that drove me, as it happened, but a desire to meet other people's expectations - I assumed other people who know me would ask me what I thought of it and I wanted to be ready. Then of course I got together with my friends on Wednesday evening and none of them asked about it at all. Such is always the way.

But bottom line, the trailer has not diminished my enthusiasm for the movie. It looks keen, and also seems to have a good sense of humor about itself. Come on, Summer '11!

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One last thought about fanfic, specifically the research part, which I avoided the temptation to tangent into earlier: yet another reason why the internet so strongly enabled fanfic as part of the 90’s web ascendance goes something like this: fan sites devoted simply to chronicling every line of dialogue and every plot development for various cult tv shows and sci-fi movies and whatnot make great resources for determining the correct backstory for fanfic writers to draw upon in fleshing out their own ideas, and the fact that those fan sites were online put them at everyone’s fingertips. Not to mention that if you want to include more exotic, pulpy elements in your stories, be it the inside of a nuclear missile silo as a setting or poisonous spiders as murder weapons or whatever, the vast resources of teh interwebs make that info easy to find, too. Anyone who might have fought the urge to contribute their own ideas to semi-official canon because they lacked confidence in their own expertise pretty much couldn't use that excuse one the information age really boomed.

Also incidentally, sometimes I think I should start my own comic book reference site collecting all the information I was never able to find easily online when doing my own fanfic research. That's ideally how the internet Web 2.whatever is supposed to work - everyone contributes and the whole ends up greater and all that. I do have a scanner now, after all. It's probably only lack of time that holds me back. If I make it that far, I'm going to be the least bored retired person EVER.

Fanfic Week - Part 5

V: Shame Laid Bare

So basically there’s two big reasons why I don’t like talking about how much I really do like writing fanfic.

The first one is because, although I talk a good game about keeping things in perspective and according hobbies their proper place in the grand scheme of thing and maintaining balance and all of that, I sometimes fall a little short in following my own advice. I have never spent time on fanfic at the expense of real deadlines at work, or devoting attention to my wife or my son or truly necessary housework or anything like that. Having established that, I will say that I do spend a lot of time on it, and that’s just counting the actual writing process; I spend a mind-blowingly inordinate amount of time thinking about it. I cannot honestly claim that it’s just a lark for me, something I do when I’m dead bored or fleetingly inspired. It’s more or less always there as mental background noise, and even when I turn the volume way, way down so I can focus on something else, it’s still on to fill the silence when things inevitably quiet down.

See, I didn’t just get sucked into a comicbook fanfic community loosely defined by a bunch of people reading each other’s work. I got sucked into a community where groups of writers band together to essentially form their own versions of the Big Two comicbook publishers. I found a niche for myself as the Green Lantern guy (sorry, should have warned you to hold on to your hats before dropping that stunner) which meant not just writing a story here or there that happens to star Green Lantern, but acting as if I were writing prose versions of monthly comics, where every story I wrote was a continuation of everything that had gone before, basically on and on without end, while another guy did the same for Batman and another did the same for Superman, and so on, with all of our stories theoretically taking place concurrently and able to influence one another, just like in the real DC Comics.


And on the one hand, that’s an interesting and challenging project to be a part of and it kind of raises the imaginary stakes of the performance that each story I write represents, but on the other hand it takes the jaw-dropping geekiness that fanfic starts out with and atomic-rockets it to the next level. It also means that in addition to writing stories and thinking about what other stories I’m gonna write and reading other people’s stories (all of which, not for nothing, starts to feel all the more obligatory when it’s part of a group effort) I also spend even more time e-mailing the other people who are part of the group so I can coordinate things with them. AND, because everyone else in the group is as big a comicbook obsessive geek as I am (if not moreso! It is possible!) and because each story I write not only builds off what I’ve already written but also builds off everything DC Comics had themselves published before I started pretending their characters were mine, that means I have to accommodate and be sure not to contradict impossibly vast swaths of canon, which in turn means I spend yet more time clicking around on the internet. Doing research on old obscure comics. So that my personal amateur stories starring comic book characters will have that much more verisimilitude to the source material. Is that, in and of itself, fun for me? Clearly it totally is, or I wouldn’t do it (or not only do it but have gotten addicted to it). Fun notwithstanding, is it embarrassing that this is something I expend so much time and energy on? Yep. My face burns a little even just typing this.

Which is kind of a segue into big reason number two. Since I am someone who bitches all the time about how there just aren’t enough hours in the day, or days in the month, it is doubly shameful to admit to something I know without a doubt I already spend a disproportionate amount of time on. I can rationalize it all day, with all the same arguments I touched on yesterday, and say that I gravitate towards it because it’s simultaneously fun and undemanding, and I could be more productive but productivity is often more demanding and less fun, sooo …

Further complicating the whole matter is the fact that writing fanfic is in a weird way a mockery of my dreams. Suppose I were out of shape and watched too much tv. (Feel free to mentally eliminate the subjunctive since this is far from contrary to the truth.) You could make the argument that, while it’s all well and good that I love tv and derive great pleasure from watching it, I should take better care of myself and maybe work out at the gym some. And if I have the time to watch hours of tv, clearly I have the time to work out. But, fair or not, I could argue against that. Now suppose further that on certain evenings I cleared my schedule, changed into gym-appropriate attire, got in the car, and drove myself to the gym … then spent an hour hanging out at the front desk of the gym watching tv with the kid swiping membership cards. And then came home without working out. SO CLOSE! COME ON!

I think of fanfic like that sometimes, because I really do want to write. I want to publish a novel before I die. I wouldn’t mind selling a few original short stories between now and then, either. I’m not one of those people who doesn’t think much of his own writing ability and scratches out fanfic just for love of the characters. I do it because it scratches that itch. Sitting at a computer, opening a Word doc, stringing together words and sentences into paragraphs and dialogue and character development and narrative arcs, clearly I can find the time and energy to do all these things which is like, GAH, 90% of the way to writing my own stuff free and clear? 95%? But almost every time I go the easier way, and that is humiliating. Ten, eleven years ago it was the easy fix I needed to give myself a mental vacation from bad-bad times. And I could even say it was practice, sharpening certain skills in a risk-free, reward-rich environment. And I don’t regret any of that, I’ve even made a couple of genuine online-only friends in the deal. But now, life is good, and I’ve written like 750,000 words of fanfic in the past decade and I still get a lot of the same geeky joy out of it but I feel like I either need to cut back on it or do more original writing to counterbalance it. I need to take more risks and be a little less comfortable.

I think that might have been a subconscious reason for starting this blog, so that I could have a daily writing outlet that wasn’t just further entrenching my fanfic addiction. Of course blogging has its own comforting limits and inherent easiness as well, and I think I’m starting to feel that too, which might be why I’m bringing things full circle and finally marathon-blogging about fanfic. So maybe changes are starting to rumble underfoot. One never knows. What I do know is that at least now, when my quotidian geeking-outs include ventures into the fanfic realm (as they’re bound to now and then, even if I suddenly and drastically cut way back), I can make passing reference to them here and feel like it’ll be placed in the proper context. Except of course for the people who skipped this week once it started piling horrifically high and deep – they’ll still be totally baffled.