The Po Show

30 Years of SciFi Geekdom

Though that's *SF* to you! Most people who are true science fiction aficianados abhor the term "sci fi" and prefer "SF." Whatever.

Yesterday I received my copy of the 30th Anniversary issue of Asimov's Science Fiction in the mail. I've been a subscriber almost from the beginning. In fact, I have been a subscriber for as long as one could be a subsciber, from the second issue.

It was early 1977, and I was 10 years old. My school was doing one of those stupid magazine subscription fundraisers, and I was combing through list looking for more magazines to force my mother to buy, so that I could "earn" some stupid worthless prize. I lit upon the word "Science Fiction" in the title of one of the mags, as in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Oooh, science fiction. I had started reading science fiction at age 8, when my brother gave me an old copy of Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy. Not your typical 8 year old reading material, but I wasn't exactly a typical 8 year old (geeks go into training very early in life). And Isaac Asimov! One of the grand masters of science fiction, as I already knew! I had my mother cough up the money for a one year subscription.

And that was that. I have been reading it ever since, first quarterly, then bi-monthly, then monthly, for the last 30 years. It seems crazy to me that I've been reading anything for 30 years, but there you have it. And I still have almost every single issue. In the beginning, I didn't realize that magazine series were potentially valuable (and more importantly, as potentially worthy of respect as books), so I just chucked the issues after I read them. And there were a couple of issues lost in various moves. And, and this is very sad, I lent one issue to a friend in high school, who was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident, and I never got it back. I even remember which one it was: it was the issue with Barry Longyear's story "Enemy Mine," which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards (and was later turned into a very dumb movie with Dennis Quaid).

All the other hundreds of issues are boxed up at my mother's house or here in the pile of file boxes in the corner of my livingroom. About a dozen are lined up on the bookshelf next to my computer. A tribute to my years of fandom, my love of a genre so deeply associated with geeks. Which is really funny, since I know at first blush I don't seem like a geek. I'm a math-phobe, a technoweenie that has to cry to others when things go wrong with my computer, and oh yeah, female.

But at heart, by intellectual bend, I am a true geek, and proud of it. And Asimov's, which I used to call IASFM, probably played a large part in my development, so I salute the mag on its 30th anniversary.

Stay at Home Mom

In the most literal sense.

We have been more or less housebound for nine days now. Tessa first got sick on Saturday, the 10th. I went out briefly the following day, but then we were all home, all day, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. On Friday I took them to the doctor to make sure they didn't have any type of infection (since if I hadn't, it would have been certain that one or both of them would have developed some dire condition over the long weekend). Then we went home again.

On Saturday, Ross was home so I got to go out shopping, feeling like a prisoner released on furlough. It was lovely, but soon enough I had to return. Yesterday, Sunday, we went out to ToyRUs so the kids could buy something with their giftcard my mother sent for Valentine's Day. Tessa was so tired by the time we left that she didn't even want to go out for lunch. I guess she's still recovering.

Today is President's Day, and the beginning of Midwinter Break, also known as February Break, also known as "Why the hell are they taking a week off from school now?" Ross went into work to do some things he can't get done when people are there, like look for job listings on the Bloomberg terminal they have.

I'm here, staying at home, being a mom.

Wow

I just reread my extremely short last entry. And noticed this incredibly GLARING error: "I can't believe how many winters I suffered with that Passat, which never would have an inch down the driveway."

That should have been "...which never would have MADE IT an inch down the driveway."

Amazing how all my much-cherished editing skills went out the window with a glass of wine and a week of overwhelming exhaustion.

I Heart My Car

My Suburu Outback wagon got put through its paces for the first time this week. And man, that all wheel drive kicks some major ass. It backed over the two inches of solid ice on the driveway like it was nothing. I've been driving over patches of icy snow, black ice, slush, and it hasn't slipped once. Hills only partially salted, and slippery as hell? No problemo!

It was so worth the money! I can't believe how many winters I suffered with that Passat, which never would have an inch down the driveway.

Happy Valentine's Day

Wasn't St. Valentine martyred through considerable torture? Some really bloody stuff? Wasn't there a horror movie in the 80s called My Bloody Valentine?

I'm rambling, yes. I'm tired. There's an ice storm outside and I have two sick children. We've been riding the rollercoaster of high fever/malaise and Advil/Tylenol/brief recovery for four days now. Between two kids and coughing and Tessa huddling and pushing me practically off the bed for two nights, and getting up to dispense water and fever reducers, I haven't gotten a lot of sleep lately.

So with the ice storm and school being closed and the kids being so sick, it's not going to be much of a Valentine's Day. I'll have no chance to go out and get myself and Ross something nice for dinner, and I don't think we'll be drinking the lovely bottle of champagne I got last week. Romance is a bit curtailed when sick children may be waking and needing something at any moment.

That's okay. We'll take a raincheck. And though I got Ross a box of chocolates and the new Beck CD, I think my real present to him was getting up at 6:20 (when school was cancelled and I didn't have to get up) and walking out into an ice storm so I could drive him to the train station. That's what you do for your valentine, and I was glad to do it.

How Do You Know?

It's such a fine line, between being a touchy, hormonal, get-upset-over-nothing bitch, and someone who is being put down. I'm not sure which one I am, and it's difficult to ascertain. How do you know which one you are? You certainly can't ask your husband, who has done the things that make you feel like shit, but doesn't understand why you're upset over such trivial bits of nothing.

Case 1: The other day I was relating over dinner the funny and weird story of how I was doing laundry and when I went down to put the wash in the dryer, I saw that the lid of the washing machine had somehow been lifted up, so the machine shut itself off. It was in the middle of the cycle, and had been rinsing, so there was water in the drum, and the lid was up, so it shut off. I said, Isn't that wild, somehow the wind [which was gusting over 30 MPH that day] must have blown the lid up somehow. Ross looked at me like I had grown another head and said that that was impossible, so I must have left the lid up when I put the wash in.

I know I did not, plus there was no soap in the water in the drum. The soap must have been at the bottom where I couldn't see it, he replied.

It was in the middle of the cycle on the dial, not the beginning. The dial must keep moving even if the machine isn't going, he replied.

The machine had "walked" itself over some, so perhaps that's what made the lid pop up, I say. That's impossible, he maintains, it must have walked itself over some other time and I just didn't notice it. You only notice things when something out of the ordinary occurs, and then you attribute it to whatever occurrance you believe happened.

I start to get agitated (no pun intended) because I KNOW I did not leave the lid up. He wants to know why I'm getting upset, it's no big deal. I know it's no big deal, but I KNOW I did not leave the lid up, and I don't know why he feels the need to keep coming up with reasons why the only possible explanation is that I am too lame to remember to put the lid on the washing machine down, why it's so impossible that the lid popped up on its own, or that the wind blew it up (our basement is drafty as hell and you can feel the wind blow in through the walls).

Case 2: I say yesterday evening, when he asks what I did that day, and I'm recounting the fascinating details of my day, like going to Trader Joe's and the post office, that I mailed 12 packages for my eBay sales. Instead of saying "That's great that you're selling so much!" he feels the need to say YET AGAIN, "How much do you have listed right now?" Again totally putting down my ebaying, making it seem like a negative rather than a positive that I'm listing and selling and MAKING MONEY at it. I can NEVER say anything about my ebaying without him finding something negative to say about it. I say "I had a great auction today and made X profit" and he replies "But how much did you have to pay in fees?"

Case 3: Today as we were watching the UCLA game he got the mail and there was a credit card bill. I opened it and was pissed to see that we had been charged a late fee on an account we almost never use anymore. It's a MasterCard that we've had for 11 years, and you're supposed to hang on to at least one long-term credit card, so we keep it though we almost never use it. It used to be an MBNA card, but it got bought out by Bank of America, apparently, a few months ago. Ross used it while we were in CA, and I swear I did not see a bill for the card last month, so we got charged $15 for a late fee on the $33 he charged in Jan. I told him this, and he looked at me with that LOOK that says, "What's wrong with you?" and he asked, "Didn't you check the card online? Don't you check ALL our cards every month?" Then he gets that look that says, "How fucking stupid ARE you?" and he says, "No, you don't check, do you?"

We have three credit cards we use every month, for various reasons, and I don't have to check those, because I pay them when they are due. Every single month. I didn't check the BofA card because we just got it in Dec., and we never used the account when it was an MBNA account.

I went in the kitchen and cried for 15 minutes. Then I went in the bathroom and cried some more. Then I went in the bedroom and cried some more. He watched the game all this time and didn't even notice. Total time, about 40 minutes. Finally he came back to the bedroom to turn the heater off and noticed me. He said he thought I'd gone back to the bedroom to lay down. He asked if something was wrong.

Um, yeah. I know guys hate it when we think that they should know we're upset, when they don't. I know the whole "I'm not a fucking mind reader" line. But at a certain point, I believe things should not be quite so opaque.

Tessa came in at that point and said she didn't feel good. She had a fever, which later in the evening turned into a 103 fever, so my whole deal of course took a backseat as usual. He still doesn't know what is wrong. He's sitting on the couch watching TV and laughing at Sarah Silverman, oblivious as usual.

How do I know if I have the "right" to be so pissed right now that I have to blog about it?

Hibernation

Man, those bears sure have the right idea. (Sorry, Stephen Colbert. I love you with a white-hot passion, but I just don't see bears as godless killing machines.)

After the week I had, with dealing with Matthew, and with Tessa's incessant whining (we made a fun game yesterday afternoon of seeing who could whine in the most annoying pitch. It hurt my ears, but it made her giggle and eventually pulled her out of her daily funk that includes non-stop whining), and this FREAKING FREEZING COLD weather, I could stand a nice nap. One that lasts two months or so.

There is just so much clamoring irritation built up inside me right now. I'm just pissed off at everyone (and YES, I'm on the rag; WHY do you ask????) and I hate feeling like this. I try to do things that bring some joy (like I started a new short story, and I bought a bunch of Gymboree stuff at great sale prices, and I have eaten Valentine's Day chocolate), but it feels too ingrained, this feeling of ick. I need to sleep it off, like a great odious drunk, and cleanse from the inside. I'd like to stick little nano-cleaners, tiny little robot scrubbers, into my ears and have them scurry around in my head and scour away all the acculmulation of sadness and anger and impatience that's built up in there.

Alternatively, I'd like to sleep till spring.

For Life

I had to pick up Matthew from the office after school today.

I stood with Tessa in the cafeteria at pick-up, watching all the kids file in and out, past the time when Matthew should have shown up. I felt an increasing sense of foreboding; I knew something was wrong. Sure enough, when I asked one of the aides if all the classes had been dismissed, she got on her walkie-talkie and was told that I needed to pick him up at the office.

He was waiting there, tears in his eyes, with his teacher, who tried to smile at me, but she looked stressed. We walked back down the hall to speak privately, with Matthew pulling on my arm and trying to drag me back the other direction. He was crying, tantruming, hitting the walls.

It seems that he got very upset during OT, and the OT had had to bring him back to class, saying that he wasn't able to continue in small group. He was out of control, and his teacher didn't feel it was appropriate to dismiss him with the rest of the class to the cafeteria, so she tried to talk to him and calm him down. He got more and more upset, so she walked him down herself.

He got increasingly upset as his teacher tried to tell me all this, and I finally said that I'd talk to him and try to find out what happened, but we had to go. He screamed, cried, threw his scarf and gloves repeatedly, kicked the carseats in the car, freaked Tessa out completely. It took a long time for me to get him calmed down at home, and I realized that what had happened was that he got into an escalation loop of frustration at OT, and he spiraled out of control. He became upset with being upset, and with the teachers working to get him to act appropriately. What upset him most was having to hear the OT tell his teacher what had happened (a negative account of himself) and then hear his teacher convey that to me. I've seen it a million times, but it hasn't happened to this magnitude in many years.

And I'm struck, that it's never going to completely "go away," his inability to deal with his emotions at times. It's better, everyone talks about how much better he is. But it's part of him, this scary loss of control. It's much harder for me to deal with both emotionally and physically now that he's nine years old and almost 5 feet tall. It's much harder than when he was 2, or 5. Today, when he refused to go to his room after school, I realized that there wasn't much I could do about it. I couldn't force him to go. He's too strong for me. All I could do was say, "No videogames," but someday that's not going to have any effect.

What's going to happen when he's 13 and taller than me, and much stronger? I hits me again that Asperger's never becomes "outgrown." It's for life. I try not to think of it as a prison sentence, but it's feeling like that now.

Other People's Blogs

I'm sitting here at the computer, at 11AM, having accomplished nothing this morning. Oh, I did get the kids ready and off to school. I took a shower. I made and drank coffee. I heated and ate one Divine Beyond Description almond croissant (an aside: I love my husband so very much. He showed up at the train station last night holding a shopping bag, with a bakery box in it. "Happy Valentine's Day," he said. I thought it was a cheesecake he picked up at Grand Central. No!, it was a box of half a dozen of the most wonderful pastries known to humankind, the almond croissant from Claude's on 4th St. Ross had to go to a talk at NYU, so he stomped over to Claude's to get me one of my three favorite foods in the world. I was so touched, and thought, wow, when was the last time I was so surprised? At this age, how many truly *happy* surprises do you get anymore?)

Anyway, yay me. I'm procrastinating. I worked like a maniac cataloging my eBay inventory yesterday, including Tessa's used spring and summer stuff, prepping for my final weeks of selling. I don't want to do it anymore (prep, that is, though I also don't want to be selling on eBay anymore, which is why I'm preparing to sell off the rest of my inventory).

So I did something I never do, which is click on the blog link for someone who posted a comment to the blog of one of my friends. I only read 2 blogs on a regular basis, and as you can see I don't post to my own all that often. I never ever ever surf other people's blogs. But today I did.

And I was struck by how clever and funny some people are. This woman was just really funny, and her writing style really appealed to me. She wasn't posting about anything earth-shattering, and she talked about the banality of her topics (which is part of what was funny), but it was just so well-written and so good.

How many millions of blogs are out there, written by people who are smart and funny and whose writing I would enjoy? It's a rhetorical question, of course. I need to get off my ass and start packaging up my eBay sales from yesterday and this morning, so I don't have time to endlessly seek out amusing bloggers.

But I'm reminded that there are a lot of gems out there (in addition to a lot of crap), in other people's blogs.