Thank you for following my blog – I appreciate each and every one of you, from the folks who don’t say much to the ones who chat all the time. Blogging is so much fun and I’ve met some of the nicest, most intelligent and passionate folks through this medium. I’m so glad I’m part of this community, and I’m glad most of all that people think enough of my posts to follow my blog. Thank you so much for spending a few minutes listening to me!
I’m slowing down on the film reviews lately and it’s because I’ve been working on fiction a lot more. I still watch movies and TV, but I don’t always have something insightful or interesting to say and I’d rather say something useful or interesting than just say ‘I watched this’ for the sake of keeping active.
I’m continuing with my Game of Thoughts coverage, because those are WAY fun to write and live-watching the show with everyone is such a hoot. We’re all in this together, to the bitter, bitter end!
Other than Game of Thoughts, I’m going to take the next two weeks off from writing posts – I’ll still comment and read other people’s posts, but going to take a small break from blogging. I’m volunteering at MegaCon 2016, I joined a local speculative fiction critique group, I’m knitting a blanket for a baby shower, I’m writing, cooking, and working out more, and I have some major deadlines coming up for my job.
So please, forgive a bit of slacking on my part! I hope you stick around for the new content, and take care of yourself in the meantime.
Work is participating in Red Nose Day for the whole month of May, and I am a Fun-Teer. This means that people pay me to perform certain tasks for their amusement, and the money all goes to charity. Never has demeaning myself for money been more fun!
And since we are all mature, we’ve already had the ‘No, you have to keep it PG’ talk from HR.
Anyway, good times have been had already. Someone paid me two dollars to climb up on my desk and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which I am embarrassed to admit I had to refresh myself on. Other activities include:
Someone being paid to go to the store for chocolate
Someone being paid to wear sneakers around the office because she hates wearing sneakers and only wears ballet flats or sky-high heels
Someone having to shout ‘HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO!’ at someone else
The someone else from the above bullet having to bark like a dog at the person shouting ‘HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO!’
Someone walking around the office announcing the hours with the suffix “…and all’s well!”
Someone singing The Lumberjack Song from Monty Python while drawing a happy landscape on the office black board
It’s all been good fun and delightfully disruptive to our otherwise boring work routine. And we’ve raised at least 50 bucks by now doing all these things. Yes, our Red Nose May has been going very well and nobody has hurt themselves or put themselves in danger…
…Until the Great Bean-Boozle Jellybean Challenge.
Someone discovered there are disgusting-flavored jellybeans: jellybeans drawn from the distillation of the tongue’s nightmares. Here they are, from the BeanBoozled Website and also Hell:
Stinky Socks – Tutti-Fruitti
Lawn Clippings – Lime
Rotten Egg – Buttered Popcorn
Toothpaste – Berry Blue
Barf – Peach
Canned Dog Food – Chocolate Pudding
Booger – Juicy Pear
Moldy Cheese – Caramel Corn
Baby Wipes – Coconut
Skunk Spray – Licorice
It’s an either/or situation – maybe that brown bean is chocolate pudding, maaaaybe it’s canned dog food. You don’t know until you’re chewing!
Basically, five of us sat down around a table. A jar was set down on the table, containing a mix of several hundred jellybeans in the above flavors. Feeling like we were part of a strange suicide club, we’d pick a bean, hold it until everyone had one in their hands, and then throw them in our mouths at once. We had to chew six times, and swallow. Spitting one out was an instant disqualification.
We went on a terrible flavor journey together. Faces were made. Words were said. Tears welled up and threatened to spill down our cheeks. The rest of the company gathered to watch and laugh.
Then, the game master upped the stakes – we started eating them in twos. That was pretty bad, especially if you got a pair of nasties like vomit and moldy cheese together. I still shudder.
But still, we spat nothing out.
Then we did threes, and things got poetic. As I ate I tried to summarize what was happening in my mouth for the audience. Observations included:
This is like throwing up bad nachos
This is like dying behind a bowling alley
This tastes like a Tom Waits song
From three jellybeans came four, and each handful turned the inside of my mouth to the hotel room from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Our eyes filled with tears. Our stomachs filled with Xanthum gum, sugar, and chemical additives.
Imagine the Smell!
Then came Sudden Death.
We divided up the remaining beans into cups. Each cup had sixteen beans, sixteen possibilities for pleasant or foul flavors, sixteen gambles. Hell, sixteen is a lot of jellybeans to chew up when it’s aflavor you like.
We each took hold of the cups. We wished each other well, like the aforementioned suicide victims, and knocked them back. Sixteen jellybeans rolled into my mouth. Their hard candy shells hit my tongue, hiding their flavor until I began to chew.
Chew, chew – Skunk, pear, popcorn
Someone mentioned ‘they should do it like baby birds in each other’s mouths’ and I almost lost it.
The guy to my right spat his mouthful out. The others in the group were struggling. Video shows us all with our heads down, jaws grinding away like we’re devouring sins in order to save the mortal soul of a child.
Chew, chew – Skunk, pear, popcorn, coconut, baby wipes, canned dog food, lawn clippings, lime, rotten egg, moldy cheese, toothpaste, BARF, OH MY GOD THE BARF BEAN—
—SWALLOW.
Once I swallowed, the other people either swallowed or spat their mouthfuls out. I opened my mouth to show everyone its vacant interior, and claimed my prize – 25 dollars for Red Nose Day.
I kept burping weird flavor mixes. Worst of all, the spoiled-dairy haze of moldy cheese lingered in the back of my mouth, even hours later. My friend suggested I try drinking milk and I nearly erupted like a broken garbage disposal.
Let me say there’s a school science fair experiment waiting to be done about how the flavored/scented jellybean chemicals don’t disintegrate in one’s stomach, but lurk in the kidneys until the following morning. And then the body releases a torrent that smells like a dumpster fire in hell. I thought I was dying. I have researched and confirmed that the others experienced the same terrible moment.
But I did it! I ate about fifty jelly beans of varying flavors and held my gorge.
And I did it for the children.
EDIT:
WE HAVE VIDEO! – I’m on the far left with black glasses, waving my arms wildly.
POWER THROUGH IT GUYS, POWER THROUGH.
Are you or your office participating in Red Nose Day?
“But the internet is full of assholes,” people will say. “If she didn’t want negative attention she shouldn’t have put herself out there,” others say.
I need to tell you about my friend.
My friend is:
Employed full-time
A hockey blogger who has been blogging about hockey and covering games for almost two years, and only recently started receiving a tiny amount of money for all that work
Possessed of a Master’s degree
Half-Thai
An amazing parent who makes huge sacrifices every day
A woman
Here is a video that someone sent her.
This is a very evocative video. It starts out kind of funny, and the men and the journalists laugh a little bit. But things devolve, as they do. The men start sweating. They can’t say the words out loud, and they can’t make eye contact with the journalists, all of whom have already read the ugly words. Heck, they read them when they opened up their email a day or so after publishing a post. As bloggers, we all open our emails after a post wondering what kinds of comments we’ll get (if any), and who’ll stop by for a hello and offer some insight. It’s why we blog! Opening your inbox to find a big steaming mass of hate is not something I’ve ever experienced, but I’ve had a teaspoon’s worth now and then. I can only imagine what it’s like.
This video particularly struck my friend because she has received similar comments. These comments do not just call into question her journalistic ability or knowledge of the game; they call into question her intelligence, her dedication to the sport, her usefulness to the species in general, and go on to suggest that she should be raped and left for dead.
“But the internet is full of assholes,” people will say. “If she didn’t want negative attention she shouldn’t have put herself out there,” others say.
For Love Of the Game
She didn’t put herself out there. She writes about hockey because she loves it. She covers games because she is passionate. We went to see the hockey documentary Red Army last year, and afterward she lit up for an hour, describing play positions, strategies, and filling me in on some of the current controversies surrounding the game. She was radiant.
She has a press pass, and she talks and Tweets about hockey with thousands of other fans (she has a huge following on Twitter). And yet, she receives vitriol and scorn from a few unbalanced individuals who are unable to accept that she loves the game, that she has channeled that love into something productive that gets her to press conferences, into games, into locker rooms to meet players, and worst of all, that gets her attention. She has worked tirelessly for love of the game and no other reason, and in her wake she has left amazing and insightful articles, intelligent discourse, and insightful discussion. She didn’t set out to do this, but it happened and journalism is better for it.
My Hero!
In many ways, my friend is my hero. She has fought some personal battles unrelated to hockey in the past few years that leave me in awe of her strength, patience, and compassion. Escaping into hockey keeps her sane, she says.
It is ridiculous that people cannot write about what they love without those open forums being poisoned by shitbags. Sure, the Greek philosophers speaking in the agorae of old expected to be catcalled or made fun of. People speaking against the Emperor in China were banished to death. People speaking against Popes have been excommunicated, if not straight up burned for heresy. If they were speaking against the current political climateand threatening the status quo, they expected to be threatened, and maybe even killed. But are we saying that this is the same thing? That sports journalists should expect death threats from irate readers? HOW IS THAT THE SAME THING? People are passionate about sports – I’ve seen my Dad lose his shit over the Miami Dolphins for going on 30 years, I know fans are passionate, it’s the root of the word ‘fanatic.’
Perhaps I am just being naive. I realize the world can be quite ugly, but it’s the only one we’ve got so we’re stuck with each other.
Let’s Do Something About This
Anyway, some fuckstick made my friend feel bad about herself for being a female hockey journalist, so I am trying to cheer her up. He has apparently been following her for some time, and left some highly personal observations in the comments about her. He seems to live in Canada, which is fortunate for my friend as she doesn’t have to worry about some nutbag showing up on her doorstep with a weapon, and yet that is a thing that worries her. Gamergate showed exactly how shitty and dangerous things can get for female journalists, no matter what they’re writing about, and I worry about my friend’s safety sometimes. But I’m only one Jen – I can only do so much. This is where <3 YOU <3 come in!
PLEASE retweet the video to raise awareness about the anti-bullying initiative!
In Which The Author Recounts The Thrilling Tale of Illness, Recovery, and a Visit to Target
Ever since I changed my eating habits and got healthier, I noticed that I also got sick a lot less, being down to only about once or maybe twice a year. And when I do get sick, I am REKT.
The data checks out.
I have been really, really sick before. I have a fond memory of being in fever-induced delirium in 2003 when my room mate was out of town and my then-boyfriend was spending time with his parents shopping for a weight bench. Why he left me at home sweating, insane, and alone I can’t say, but I remember the time period quite vividly because I was very excited about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix coming out and I couldn’t wait to come back down in order to read it.
Another previous illness led to my Dayquil Hoedown post, wherein I wound up emotionally compromised after watching the The Fox and The Hound for the first time in 27 years.
But friends… friends.
I have not been this messed up from an illness in a long, long time.
Read on for the hallucinatory play-by-play, and if nothing else to help convince you to get that flu shot all the cool kids are getting these days!
Some of these are things I can do something about. Some of them are things I must accept and deal with to the best of my ability. As anyone who has read Slaughterhouse-Five or been through recovery knows, the important thing is knowing the difference.
I had not intended these check-ins to become a regular feature, but life piles up and here we are.
Here is the Current State of Affairs in the Benevolent Dictatorship of Jennsylvania.
The Good:
I have been writing almost 3k words a night for the last week, not including blog posts. I also have some places I want to send my fiction and nonfiction writing. I attended a cool spoken word performance Saturday night, am going to a writer’s group with friends Tuesday night, and to another writing group Wednesday night. Writing and I have our teeth in each other again, and neither is backing down.
I am working out with coworkers in the parking lot after work. I forgot my workout clothes but don’t care, I’ll do it barefoot in my work capris and blouse. We do calisthenics and kettlebells like the wild savages we are, and it’s AWESOME.
I am going out of town this weekend for my family reunion. I’ve made Herzog’s appointment to be boarded at the vet, and must remember to pack his favorite toys, something to snuggle, and a bag of spinach as a treat because he is a very strange cat.
I have to make something to take to the reunion, so I am making the Pioneer Woman’s Green Bean Casserole recipe. I made it a few years ago for the holidays and it was a big hit.
I have a new blue dress for the reunion and it is cute. I am excited.
The Bad:
Some fucko stole some personal information and tried to use to it to file a false tax return. This is coming JUST as I have paid off some major debts and a light appeared at the end of the tunnel. So help me, the light will not turn out to be the dumpster fire of some jackwad ruining my credit. NO SIR. I put fraud alerts on my accounts.
This might be the tip of an iceberg of a bigger problem. I am being VERY careful.
Because of a snafu with my insurance, I may have to find a new therapist. I go to a therapist once a month to check and make sure my head is staying on straight, and now I must either change after 3 years and get a referral, OR I could keep going to her and paying her whole fee out of pocket, which I can’t afford.
I have been loaned to another project at work, so I have two different projects to keep up with right now.
The Ugly:
THREE separate friends are battling cancer in various forms. All I can do is be there for them, cook them healthful meals, and offer them rides and a shoulder when they need it, but what I wish most fervently is for cancer to magically take human form so I can take it apart with my bare hands. THE THINGS I WOULD DO TO IT.
The news is depressing as shit and I have all but given up on keeping up with it in depth, and just follow sound bites which is the worst way to follow news.
How We Do
Some of these are things I can do something about. Some of them are things I must accept and deal with, to the best of my ability. As anyone who has read Slaughterhouse-Five or been through recovery knows, the important thing is knowing the difference.
I am strong enough to weather the things I cannot change.
And as far as the things I CAN change…
… Around here, we take those problems One. Hit. At. A. Time.
