Nom de Plume

Yesterday, I ran up to the house for 20 minutes. Came back, door had been broken into and laptops stolen.

Yes, these are adventures in shackitude.

I am deleting my Facebook account.

There’s been a lot lot of noise about privacy and what have you on the Web, and I really don’t feel the need to add anything to what anyone else says. They’re a company; they sell information–and that’s life in the 21st century. The myth of privacy at this point is just that: a myth. To be really honest, I don’t know how much that bothers me. What does bother me, however, is that I’ve noticed a huge surge in spam since I signed up for the service. Stupid me for not using a junk e-mail address. Now I’m not saying that they are the reason my e-mail address has been released into the hands of spammers–but I have noticed that in their Privacy Policy , they do not, at any point, ever, nowhere, nohow state, “We do not sell your e-mail addresses.” What they say is:

Facebook is about sharing information with others — friends and people in your networks — while providing you with privacy settings that restrict other users from accessing your information. We allow you to choose the information you provide to friends and networks through Facebook. Our network architecture and your privacy settings allow you to make informed choices about who has access to your information. We do not provide contact information to third party marketers without your permission.

What that says to me is that you have to jump through hoops to make sure your e-mail address isn’t sold. And I’m pretty sure I set my privacy settings at a high enough level–though it was long enough ago that I don’t remember.

And here’s the thing: I don’t like Facebook enough to deal with it. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I have, like, zero interest in being a werewolf or a vampire, I don’t want to fly some fighter jet, and I think writing on someone’s wall is a complete and utter waste of time. And trust me when I say that I’m really good at wasting time without someone else’s help.

it may seem like I’m a naysayer, but that’s not it at all. I love technology as much as the next person. Here I am, after all, blogging. I write about technology (granted for pay). And maybe that’s the point: I’m freelance, which means that I spend the majority of my workdays sitting alone in the shack in front of a computer. 90 percent of my communication during the average day is by e-mail. I work with people I’ve never talked to on the phone, much less met in person. I don’t complain–indeed, it’s a-okay with me. But free time? Well, I don’t want to write on someone’s wall.

Facebook puzzles me because it doesn’t have a clear purpose. I mean, linkedin connects business people; youtube lets you post videos; flickr is for photos. Facebook rolls a whole bunch of functions into one uber site, and while yeah, it’s the natural progression technologically-speaking, I think in some ways social networking has become a concrete example of the way technology has fractured interpersonal relationships. It’s bad enough when I tell Steve to e-mail me his racing schedule when he lives in the same house. It’s worse when the only time I hear from people that I’d like to hear from is when they invite me to plant a peapatch. Or whatever. The point is that yes, I’m now in contact with friends I haven’t heard from in a long time–but when it comes down to it, I’m not really in touch at all. Instead, I’m still sitting in front of my computer without any real connection to who they are as people.

I got cocky.

For a couple of months, it’s seemed like the area over my eyebrows is a little lighter again, and I have studiously been avoiding it–but dreading getting tan in the summer all the same. Now it looks like it may be getting worse, and to make matters even more distressing, there’s some hyperpigmentation above the lighter areas. It doesn’t look all that bad to anyone but me. With my hyphochondriac tendencies, however, I am stressed over it.

It’s also interesting because I’ve been very stressed and overworked for the past couple of months, and it seems like some of the spots (under my left arm, one spot in an unmentionable space) that were closing in have expanded again. Again, it’s not that big a deal, but I do wonder about the role of stress. I also have not been consistent with taking my supplements every day; I probably average about 3 or 4 times a week. So I need to be better about that.

I hate this thing. I keep telling myself that what I have is minor–and it’s true–but I still feel as though my body has betrayed me. I have always been a little bit of a hypochondriac, but I find that I’m really stressing out over pretty much anything that seems out of the ordinary. I wonder how much of the vit anxiety I’ve transferred to other things, and I need to redirect all this energy that I spend on fretting to something more productive. I just don’t know how.

Now doesn’t THAT sound all art gallery-ish.

I have a ton of unframed prints I haven’t posted up at the house. Those that come with frames, I lug down to the shack and put up on the many bare walls. Which is where I am, and where my digital camera is, so ….

Eichii Kotozuka. I’m not a huge fan, with the exception of a couple of prints. She looks so young and tense, and the way her kimono is depicted is lovely. That said, if this hadn’t been dirt cheap, I probably wouldn’t have bought it:

Another one I wouldn’t have bought if it hadn’t been dirt cheap. But I have another print with a girl and rabbit, and it appealed to my whimsy to have two. The frame and glass are terrible, but the print itself is in good shape, notwithstanding the fact that someone folded the margins to make it fit in the frame. It looks much better outside the frame–but I have other prints I would rather spend money on framing, so back in it went.
Oh yes, this is Shuzo Ikeda.

Sometimes, one (that is the royal one, one understands) does not pay very close attention to the size of what one is bidding on–and one ends up paying a lot for two little “nothing” prints rather than not very much for two prints one knows nothing about but likes.

Sigh. I love Toshi Yoshida’s less representational stuff. Pencil titled, signed, and dated 1954. It needs to be reframed at some point, but I rather like it as is:

Nor do I want to be a werewolf, a slayer, a fleet commander, or santa. I do not want to plant a green patch or get a free aircraft. I don’t really care all that much about six degrees of separation or solving other people’s online jigsaw puzzles. This is all to say that Facebook is great for getting back in touch with people, but I’d rather stay in touch the “old-fashioned way.” Yep, send me an e-mail.

She has the rather unfortunate name of Peaches, but she’s really a love.

Tramp stamp: This is what all the guys on Steve’s construction site call those big tattoos that cover a woman’s lower back. Sadly, this came about because of the “base girl,” a woman whose job is to install base trim, and who is obviously always bending over. The cause is not helped by the fact that she’s a retired stripper.

I was going to write a post about my adventures in shackitude, namely the 50 bazillion cars in front of the apartment building next door and the almost constant traffic. I think I’ll bypass all that for now, and cut a long story short. I wasn’t there–had left about an hour before–but there were shots, a police officer hit, and a hole in one of my windows that went straight through the curtain and straight into the opposite wall.

I have actually let a whole month go by without blogging. Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s longer than a month, but I’ve been focusing on the fact that my February 2008 listing in the archives will be … missing. Oh well, such is life. And life is good. The shack is shacky (more on that later). The kitchen is still far from being finished. Steve put two windows in my former office, but other than that, it’s still down to the studs. The dog is cute and furry. Steve is cute and furry too because he’s growing a beard. My soapmaking obsession continues, which means that my essential oil threshold (i.e., the most I am willing to spend for a single oil) just keeps increasing. Anyway, I’ve been working all day and my eyes are starting to blur; it’s time to rouse the snoring pug and go for a walk. Good night, sweet blog, good night.

(I hope not, but it seemed a fitting end.)

I slung my briefcase over my shoulder this morning, whistled for the dog, and commuted down the alley.

This white thing is the official Chez Munshi Shack:

Admittedly, every time I come to the front door, I feel like I’m being incarcerated:

But it’s not so bad when you walk in:

Hard at work:

Within 20 minutes of moving out of my office–and we’re talking about before my body heat even dissipated, Mr. Demo started his favorite thing.

I still have to get curtains up, finish hanging pictures, rearrange rugs, etc. But it’s starting to be quite habitable.

I read this while we were in Rockford over Thanksgiving, and to be honest, I can’t remember that much about it except for the fact that the protagonist’s aunt used laurel soap, which sounded lovely and refreshing, and reminds me that I want to order some laurel essential oil to make the soap for myself.

Now that I’ve refreshed my memory, I do remember this. It was your typical coming-of-age story, only it centers around a Syrian girl growing up in 1970s Indianapolis. She starts out as a strict Muslim, finds she needs to go outside her community and religion to find herself, and ends up striking a happy medium. Blah blah. Sections of the book were howlingly funny–I remember chuckling on the plane–but Kahf lost me on long passages of political and religious commentary. It was one of those books in which you ask yourself, “Okay, now that she’s written about herself, where does she go from here?”

Which is all to say that this was okay, but nothing spectacular.

Arthur Blume is a mediocre creative writing professor–and an accomplished serial murderer. The novel takes the form of his “true record” after he has been caught and is in prison; Blume is outraged that he is depicted as a monster even though he calmy states that he has killed 17 people and attempts to set the record straight. Alternating between his childhood with a psychotic mother and the story that precipitates his being arrested, it’s well-paced and thoroughly creepy. Blume is a cold, punctilious man, yet we still have sympathy for him. Ironically, it is Kinder’s success in depicting him that brings her into dangerous territory; it invites comparisons to that ultimate in sympathetic villainy, Humbert Humbert. And of course, one loses. His voice sometimes falters too, particularly when it comes to talking about women, and I couldn’t help but imagine the author sitting at a desk at a loss for words. Indeed, the footnote explaining the typical behaviors of serial killers shed a better light than his own explanation. But credit where credit is due: It must be hard to get into character, and 90 percent of the time, this is convincing.

I think this might be the year that I get back into blogging regularly. I kind of lost patience last year, for a variety of reasons. But now I have a new three-column template that I’m finally happy about (except for the fact that it has fixed columns)–and I’ve decided that I’m going to start posting book reviews again. And of course, I have this huge backlog that looms larger every week. So first, I need to play some catch up.

Last year, there was a plethora of books about England, starting with Edward Rutherford. He writes these long, sprawling tomes that span centuries. They’re a little like Valerie Anand’s Bridges of Time series , only in a single volume. I started with The Forest, continued with Sarum, plodded through London, and then lost all patience with The Princes of Ireland: The Dublin Saga (which I include here despite the fact that it’s not England). Reading these is fun and like a little history refresher–but they’re also disjointed because they consist of a story in this time period, then a story in the next, and so on. Some of the sections are really short, and I often felt that just as I was getting into them, they were over.

Anyway, I then read my way through a whole bunch more books set somewhere in the long span of English history. Philippa Gregory, Diane Norman, and so on and so forth. They were fun and entertaining, but not really much more than that.

Two stand out.

First, Tom Bedlam: A Novel (George Hagen), which tells the improbable, but no less compelling for it, story of a Victorian boy who starts out as the son of a factory worker who is plucked from obscurity by his grandfather, educated, sent to medical school, and eventually ends up in South Africa. I enjoyed this Dickensian story mainly because I really grew to like the characters. It didn’t even bother me that Tom’s later years aren’t nearly as informed by his early ones as they should have been.

Second, Mistress of the Art of Death (Ariana Franklin), which managed to be both a thriller and historical novel–as well as surprisingly literate for either genre because it starts off with a twist on the Canterbury Tales. When children are brutally murdered, people start accusing the Jews–auguring ill for the crown’s coffers. Henry II sends off the Salerno for the best coroner in order to determine who the murderer really is. And instead of a man, they get a woman. The 25-year old Adelia sets of for England under some duress, and she finds the place to be brutal. England is not sure what to make of her either. Of course, she solves the mystery, finds some love along the way, and pretty much every other plot point required–but this was very fun and truly a joy to read.

of my home office.

I’ve had such fun saying that with a pregnant pause and watching the perplexity on people’s faces because I sound so happy about it.

He’s been making this push for a couple of months, and I’ve been resisting. About a month ago, we were sitting in the hot tub, and he brought it up again. I, as usual, resisted. But he was getting more and more frustrated. First, our house is small and he feels cramped, because he really doesn’t have a place of his own. Which is completely fair. Second, his Mr. Demo-ness has been thwarted, because more than anything, he wants to start tearing into the walls in the bedrooms–and he can’t when one is a bedroom and one is my office.

The thing is, 90 percent about what I like about working for myself is being here–being able to work, then futz around the house, work some more, run errands, go to the gym, whatever. He kept on saying that I need to get over that … and drive somewhere. That was a complete non-negotiable for me. If I had to drive somewhere, I’d still end up working from home–only much less comfortably.

What to do?

I was driving home one day and passed the shack right around the corner that’s been for rent for ages. A light bulb went off.

Long story short, the owner has rented it to me. He’s thrilled to get someone with good credit who won’t deface the walls. I’m thrilled that my commute now consists of walking down the alley. It’s a great solution all the way around. And while the house is nothing on the outside, it’s perfectly functional on the inside. Nothing special, but I’m feeling pretty spoiled that I’ve managed to get a 770 square foot house for about the cost of renting a decent office somewhere (if not less). It’s a great solution on a variety of fronts. First, it’s an office space. Second, it has two bedrooms. I can sublet one if I want, and anyone who comes to stay with us can stay down there. Third, it has a kitchen that I can devote to soaping.

I’m in the process of moving this week; should be completely set up next. Will post pix soon.

NOOOOOOOO…..

Now I don’t sell soap, but wouldn’t these be great Pug Sudz product shots?

Mr Demo didn’t like the old windows he installed, so he put in new ones. It’s hard to tell from my pictures, but this is a huge improvement. I didn’t even mind the old ones, but then again, I didn’t have the vision. As I keep being reminded.

And while I’m uploading pictures, here’s a snap of Harry on Christmas. The ribbon traumatized him.

So, you want to start making soap? Well, here’s how NOT to do it. These poor, sweet guys are completely clueless, and I don’t know whether to just laugh my way through these or be scared by the fact that they lack basic safety precautions. Oh, what the heck, let’s just laugh … especially since they never actually get their soap to trace and all the effort was for naught.

The rabid (read: foaming at the mouth) soapmaking continues, and I have more soap than I know what to do with. I was thinking about selling the stuff, but have ultimately decided not to. Frankly, I can barely keep up with my accounting as it is; forget something where I have to track inventory and sales tax, too.

So what to do with all the soap?

Trade, that’s what.

I posted an ad on Craig’s List and got a bottle of homemade Kahlua.

Also, during the Georgetown Art Walk, I saw some lovely felted soaps made by Spiderfelt, and promptly contacted her to see if she wanted to do a trade: soap for felting for felted stuff. She needs more consistency than I can provide, but wanted to do a straight trade. Done. I loaded her up with soap today, and got this in return:

Funnily enough, I had fallen in love with it on her site, and she still had one. I’m so pleased.

Also, Becky, I haven’t forgotten to send you soap. I just haven’t gotten to the post office yet.