fealty to the greater you

Happy Halloween, everybody.

I hate to do this to you, but as soon as I return, I go away for a time.  You see, tomorrow marks the start of National Novel Writing Month 2013.  You might recall that I wrote a book last year (which should be published very soon, I promise).  Well, tomorrow I start on my second full-length novel, Tithonus.  You can track my progress here.

I'm going to be very busy writing in November -- I've set a goal for myself to finish 50,000 words within the first two weeks of the month.  That's probably an impossible objective, but I'm going to try, and that means I probably won't have too much time to blog on the side.  What a change, right?

I haven't been blogging at all this month because I haven't been inspired to blog about anything.  In fact, I think I've been especially introspective...so much so that I've been unwilling to share my thoughts with just about anyone.  That's no way to live, so I'm making a conscious effort to be more out there with my feelings in this space.

I've also been kept really busy between work, working out, and getting through a daunting backlog of TV shows.  It's all too easy, with all this on my mind, to let the blog go fallow.  I hope I can keep you a little more informed, especially as I think my writing process this coming month is going to be much, much better focused than last year's.

Last year, I deliberately avoided any planning of my novel at all, outside the basic premise, before November.  This meant I hit the ground running, and wasted a ton of time that could have been used writing trying to figure out what to write.  This year, I've got a strong outline prepared in advance, so I know exactly what should happen at every point in my story.  I have a feeling this is going to make the whole process go a lot smoother.  And, really, I'm more excited about the book.  The things I enjoyed the most about my first book were somewhat incidental to the story -- with the second, I'm deeply involved with the story itself.  Heck, I've even caught myself thinking about the themes I want to examine in the book, which is pretty exciting.

If you look at the progress, you'll notice I've chosen to categorize this year's novel as Horror/Supernatural.  I don't think that's a perfect fit for my plot at all, but I had no idea what else to do.  It's set in the near future, but it's not sci-fi.  It has elements of spirituality, but it's not a spiritual book.  It's pretty thrilling, but it's not a thriller.  And so on...no genre explains it sufficiently for me to really feel comfortable applying a label.  Since the book definitely has supernatural elements, I went with that, but...it's not quite right.

Being impossible to categorize, however, is something that I have always sought to attain in my own life.  I'm pretty happy to be achieving that with my writing, too.  Keep a close eye on me!  If I don't get 50,000 words by the end of November, then you must shame me mercilessly.  Many of you will do that anyway.  As for the rest of you, here's your chance.

retrospection in a calculator

In case you didn't notice, I succeeded in my goal of writing a blog post every day in September.  That's thirty posts in those thirty days, and I only had one post that went up after midnight.  So I'd like to very heartily pat myself on the back, as well as thank you poor souls who stuck with it.

Mainly I did this to challenge myself to break through my own laziness, but I also thought it'd be interesting to see how it would affect my subjects and readership.  Not that I'll be incorporating any of these findings into how I write from now on -- this blog is about what I want to write, right? -- but it'll at least serve as a warning to the rest of you.

If you're interested, you can download the raw statistics of post day/view count/time here.

To begin, here's a chart showing how the month went:

As the chart shows, there seems to be such a thing as oversaturation,  It could be that my writing deteriorated, or people just got sick of seeing my links show up on Facebook.  Or it could be a coincidence, or there could be some external factors at work.  But there's a clear downward trend in views, even though we have that nice spike in the middle.

There were a total of 2,056 views in the past month; this is compared to an overall total of about 7,000 views since I began the blog.  For those unfamiliar with the terminology, a "view" is considered every page that a visitor looks at; in this case, each post counts as a page.  So there are opportunities for the same page being viewed twice to be counted in these scores, and although Blogger does include an option to not track the author's views, I had not turned it on.  I usually load each post at least once, just to be sure it looks good, so consider that.

So that's about 29% of my total views in one month, which sounds pretty good by itself; however, my blog has a total of 64 posts (not counting this one).  So that's 29% of views in 47% of the posts, which is...not great.  In fact, none of my September posts made it into my top-ten most viewed posts (#1 is my first post about my trip to Germany, which currently stands at 96 views).  My #10 most viewed post is my third post about Germany, which has 55 views currently.

My most viewed post from September is at 49 views right now; the least viewed post only has 17, and is, in fact, my lowest-viewed post ever.  I guess you guys don't like poetry as much as I thought, and like video games a whole lot.

Interestingly, there seems to be no connection between the likes I received on Facebook for a given post and the number of views I received:  the top most viewed received the most likes, but no comments, and the second top most viewed received the most comments, but only one like.  This isn't to say that no other posts had comments or likes; several did, but the correlation was low.

I only considered likes, rather than +1s, because Facebook is the traffic source of about half my traffic, which is as much as all other sources put together.

And here's a list of where in the world my traffic is coming from, sorted by number of views in September:

United States	1920
France	22
Serbia	15
Australia	11
Germany	10
Russia	6
Sweden	4
United Kingdom	3
Thailand	3
Japan	2

I can guess who my readers are except for France, Serbia, Russia, and Thailand.  Who are you guys?

I think I'll do another blog-every-day next September, for maximum control in the experiment.  It'll be awesome to compare the statistics next year!  Let me know if there's any analysis I missed, or if there's more information you'd like me to gather for analysis!  My blog turns six months old in ten days, and it's been a wonderful ride so far.

a path to many selfs

For pretty much the last time, I finished my book today.

This was the third draft, and I'm calling it the final draft.  I anticipate I'll be announcing the official (self-)publication  soon.  Then I'll be ready to do it all over again.

It's been a fun ride.  My writing process is pretty free-form, in that I just write whatever the heck I feel like.  When I'm feeling inspired, the results can be excellent.  But if I stop feeling inspired partway through...well, the results tend to be unfinished.  This book represents the greatest sustained outpouring of creative effort that I've ever accomplished, and I'm extremely pleased with that, no matter the reception.

Often when I start writing a blog post, I identify a central theme or idea, but usually it's something I want to work towards in the post.  I start somewhere a little smaller, and try to build it up to the really fun concept.  Half the time, I never even get there; I either lost interest or get distracted by something I find even more fascinating.  Theoretically, you get to reap the benefits of that.

But when I'm writing a book, I can't just do whatever I want.  My decisions need to fit within the structure and context of the overall story, which is frustratingly limiting.  Last year, I wasted entire days trying to force myself to focus on the book's plot, rather than whatever happened to be interesting me at the moment.  And I find so many different things interesting..my attention span is pretty long, but writing a book is much, much longer.

I'm reaching a point in my life where I can see having children as something closer than "eventually."  It's real, and really approaching, and I feel like I'm frantically running around trying to cram in all the fun stuff I'm sure I won't have time for once I'm fully responsible for another human being.  I can tell, on some level, this is a futile effort; I'll never be able to satisfy all of my interests, and most of these things probably won't even interest me that much once I have a kid.  But on another level, I know that the tremendous changes in my life that a child will effect will alter who I am, deeply.  I won't be a different person, but so many of the things that matter to me now will stop mattering.  In a sense, I think I'm struggling to prove that my life has meaning now.  I'm building a case about purpose to be delivered to a future self, when I try to think back and justify the actions I take on a daily basis right now.

Was I just wasting my time?  I will come back and read this post, and decide then whether my frantic cries for meaning meant anything.  But I sincerely hope that I never come to think of this struggle as anything but desperately important; if I do, that means something I currently regard as fundamental to who I am will be gone, and who will I be then?

It's like a bread crumb trail leading back to my identity.  I just have to hope that nobody eats it, and that I'll always have a taste for bread.  That's all you can do.

definitely not foreshadowing

"The blood that soaks the ground, and leaves me weary on the floor."

I don't have any idea what that sentence fragment means.  It was a piece of a poem that I thought of long, long ago; the most I remember is that the poem was about a friend of mine, but I really don't have a clue what that line has to do with anything.  It was just a spare piece of inspiration that hit me and stuck, but I could never figure out how to work it into the poem, and the rest of that potential poem is lost to time.  This piece, though, remains.

How stubbornly it persists, refusing all attempts to use it, release it, or forget it.  How inconveniently it springs to mind at the most random times, interrupting my thought patterns and sending me scattering to understand it.  How frustrated I become, with this useless piece of nonsense verse careening through my mind like an alpha particle.

I've tried to insert it into any old poem, but it just doesn't go.  I've even tried to write entire poems around this specific line, in the hopes of removing it from my consciousness, yet it remains.  I suspect the problem is that the "me" who first thought this line up was a very different "me" from the one I've become, and our appreciation for and understanding of what makes a good poem have diverged wildly.  I suppose I could write a bad poem, but...that's not really what I do.

This is hardly the only meaningless phrase that springs from my brain, uninvited, on a regular basis.  I seem to slowly be developing my own nonsense language, meaningless phonemes jammed together by my capricious mind into a semblance of communication.  Some of it sounds like Japanese, which isn't too bizarre, but it is not Japanese; the rest is some weird mixture of what I think Russian sounds like and what I think Italian sounds like, and none of it is very pleasing to the ear at all.  And yet, the wife has taken to responding to my exclamations in this patchwork tongue with something bordering on comprehension.  It's advanced beyond the level of simply reacting to my tone; she seems to be able to glean some actual meaning out of these ululations of madness.

Sometimes, when we play games that require a level of psychological understanding of another (for example, Apples to Apples), it can border on the eerie how good we are at knowing the other's mind.  "Married person telepathy" is how it's come to be known by some of our friends, and I think that's an example of what's happening here.  Spend enough time with somebody, and you begin to be able to second-guess everything in his or her head.

All of which is to say that my brain's contents are too hush-hush to be unveiled to just any random person who happens to be married to me.  Something will have to be done about this, and soon.  I'll keep you apprised.

pre-hangover cure

Today, I went to a party held by one of my coworkers.  It was an Oktoberfest-themed party, and it took the notion semi-seriously; there was a lot of sausage to eat.  Not being much of a beer drinker myself, I was nonetheless happy enough to concoct a poor man's whiskey sour out of whiskey and Fresca, so I enjoyed myself immensely.

It wasn't a young-people's-party as much as it was a general-access party; the host invited many members of his family and their kids as well as coworkers and friends, so there were plenty of little scamps running underfoot.  I was walking around the backyard while two girls, ages 10 and 11, were tossing a tennis ball back and forth to each other.  They spotted me and started trying to toss their tennis ball into my drink, because that is what kids do.  I played along, holding the cup up high and daring them to sink the ball from across the yard.  I was fully confident that they wouldn't be able to come close, and gaily took a sip with every embarrassing miss.

They soon got tired of utterly failing; one of them distracted me with questions about robots while the other reached up and dropped the tennis ball directly into the cup.  I pulled the ball out and took another sip, and that is when things went nuts.

You see, this particular tennis ball had recently been in the mouth of a dog that had vomited up some half-eaten sausage about fifteen minutes earlier; in the minds of these girls, that meant the tennis ball was essentially made out of dog vomit (although it looked perfectly clean, and they were happily tossing it around).  They were absolutely appalled that I would drink from my alcoholic beverage after it had made contact with such a ball, even after I explained that alcohol is an excellent antibacterial agent (it helped that I played it up, saying stuff like "this tastes weird now").  Not just appalled, though -- they were impressed.

The girls immediately began running around trying to think of other gross things for me to do.  Then one made the fatal error of offering to pay me $20 if I would lick the tennis ball on camera.  She had just received that money from her uncle, the host, for her birthday, and I felt kind of bad taking it for such a silly stunt.  However, her dad was there, and he told her that it was her money and she could do what she wanted with it.  That stated, we set to negotiating terms.

She was trying to make it as gross as possible, and kept asking if she could smear the tennis ball in the vomit or some other unsavory things she'd discovered.  Ultimately I decided that it was getting a little too foul even for my tastes, and it looked like she'd be able to keep her money.  She and her friend decided that they would simply call me a chicken for the rest of my life, but I was unfazed.  Then they said they would tell everybody at school what a chicken I was, and I was sorely tempted to avoid such a disastrous blow to my reputation.  In the end, reason won out.  Almost.

After we shelved the tennis ball idea, one of the girls had an even better thought:  they would mix up a drink for me with whatever strange ingredients they could find in the kitchen, and if I could drink the whole thing, they'd give me $10.  I agreed, on the condition that I'd be able approve whatever they put into the drink before it went in.  I was feeling very sportsmanlike, so I promised only to veto things that would kill me.

A lot of people begged me not to do it.  They said I was crazy.  The dad asked if I was sure they weren't bothering me.  But no, I was having a great time!  Here's the final list of ingredients that went into my cocktail:

• Seltzer water
• V8 Splash
• Fresca
• Diet Coke
• Sprite Zero
• Vinegar
• Hot Sauce
• Chili Sauce
• Mustard
• Italian dressing
• Ranch dressing
• Almond milk

I wandered around the party with the drink in my hand, telling everybody what was in it and why I was doing it.  Most of the guests were disgusted, and were certain I'd just throw it up all over the place.  They even made me stand in the backyard to drink it.

I looked down into the cup; it looked like soupy, reddish ginger ale.  I made sure the cameras were rolling.  I asked for a countdown.  And I drained the thing in a single gulp.

It tasted like oil, hot sauce, vinegar, and sugar water.  It was completely delicious.  Vinegar and hot sauce are two of my favorite flavors!  I was basically in heaven.  I immediately chased it down with a delicious piece of strawberry cake, and my $10 was in the bag.

Everyone kept asking me if I felt OK after that.  People, I have never felt better.  This is the magic elixir we've been looking for.  These girls are going to save the world some day, and I'm glad to have been their first experiment along the way.

feline feelings

I am not a cat person.

That's a good thing; my landlord doesn't allow cats, not since the last owners let their cat treat the entire apartment as a litterbox, completely ruining most of the carpet and even leaving a permanent stain on the concrete beneath the closet floor.  Absolutely horrid!  We were asked to swear that we would never bring a cat into the apartment before signing the lease, and I found it easy to do so.  Unfortunately, the complex doesn't allow dogs, either (but pet rats are fine).

I had a cat growing up (in addition to a dog), and it wasn't a very pleasant experience.  Coco (Cocoa?) was an unfriendly, boring cat, a tabby with the personality of a narcoleptic starfish.  He occasionally tolerated being holding and petting, but never really enjoyed it; the only fun I ever had with him was throwing him from room to room and the time I put him in the dryer (it was just for a minute, and I didn't run it).  But he made me pay for it.  Oh, did he make me pay.

Coco(a) was a very hungry cat.  He would eat whatever he could find, and then some. We had to hide his food in extremely sneaky ways, because he figured out how to open doors to get at his treats.  Even after being fed, he would meow loudly to be fed again.  He was insatiable, and this was an inside cat!  It was terribly annoying.

He never get morbidly obese, but he was chunky, and somewhere along the way he picked up feline diabetes, as well.  Somehow, I got stuck with the task of sticking him with insulin every day, and I resented every second of it.  I don't have a problem with needles or anything, but I never even wanted that cat to begin with!  I understood the fundamental truth:  cats do not love us.  They barely even like us.  We're just lucky to be bigger than them.

When I got home today, the landing outside my apartment had a calico cat sitting there.  My downstairs neighbor has cats (different landlord, so she is permitted), and I figured it had just been let out into the landing, even though that was a first.  The cat was lazily slumped in a sunbeam (as cats tend to be), and regarded me with vague disinterest as I passed.  But when I got near my own door, the cat suddenly leaped up and moved straight for my door, meowing to be let in.

I couldn't let him in, and I don't have anything cats like, anyway.  But I could still hear him meowing outside my door, and he managed to move my cold, empty heart in some small way.  Guessing he may have accidentally been locked outside by his owner, I filled a bowl with some water and put it out on the floor for him.  He didn't seem very interested, but it was better than nothing.

Then I went back inside and was shocked to realize what I'd done:  I showed some kindness to a cat!  My greatest foe!  But, even though I resented Coco(a) every day for how I had to take care of him, I guess some part of me fell into the habit of taking care of cats that's never quite left.

Of course, I still have the habit of tormenting my friends' cats when they get too close, as well.  Some things never change.  But they never let me use their dryers...

back in the saddle

Remember that poetry class that I took in the spring?  The one that sort of kicked off this whole crazy blog?  Well, a core group of cool people emerged from it, and we've resumed meeting as a poetry circle to give feedback on each others' work and encourage us to keep writing.  We had our first meeting tonight, and it was awesome!  Here are the poems I prepared:

Innocence

Our child was born; they said not to speak to her.

They said she would speak the language of God; she did,

A cruel, inhuman God, with a beast’s tongue,

Who visited her as she sat in the sacred dark,

Who gave her strange things she taught herself to eat,

Who addressed her not at all.

She grew and watched us in her natural state, filthy, gnarled,

Uncorrupted by the sinful educations of Man.

She spat and hissed like a tap, and we drank in the wisdom:

Our living sacrament, our wordless prophet, our daughter.

They bowed and trailed away,

Content they’d brought an angel down to earth,

While my wife smiled fearfully,

And changed another diaper

On our fifteen-year-old girl.

(this first one is about the Forbidden Experiment)

Cleansing

It’s a pretty pop-pop-pop, like rain against a plastic roof,

When the waters hit the shower curtain,

And run away, away…

Down and out of sight, as far out of mind

As the world outside, whose constant droning dulls and

Can’t be heard within this easy mist

That beads on my cool skin and makes me feel at home.

Lay body on smooth tile, for an instant I drift on infinite seas;

Trade myself for an unknown soul, and exult

In the ceaseless, cosmic beating of our hearts.

Eventually (of course) there comes a tapping,

A soft and hard reminder that life out there can’t wait.

The disappointed sigh of time and water running out,

But life is the price of peace.

So you can expect to see more poetry popping up here soon!

one's company

I am terrified of meeting new people.  You'd probably never know it, to see me interact with somebody for the first time -- I'm all smiles, politeness, courtesy.  I've absorbed well our society's norms for first-time interactions, and I generally get across the I'm-a-little-weird-but-still-sane vibe that I try to project.  Joke's on them; I'm extremely weird and totally crazy!  And you know, once you've gotten me in front of that person, it's not so bad.  It's the lead-up, the anticipation, the uncertainty that gets me.

A person unknown can be one of a billion different things, and I must be prepared to deal with any of them.  When meeting somebody new, I'm lucky if I even know his or her name in advance; that at least gives me a hint about gender, age, and heritage.  And every bit of knowledge I have about someone is slightly less anxiety for me.  Unknowns could be fatal!  I could make an offhand comment that turns out to be a terrible faux pas because I didn't know that somebody had grown up in a circus, or some such.  Carnies can be so sensitive.

I suppose I might be overly concerned with making a poor impression.  I'm just not sure if there's a better way to ensure you make a good impression than fretting maniacally over it.  And it seems to have worked pretty well so far, as people usually have a pretty good opinion of me!  Except...how many opportunities have I missed because I was too nervous to engage in this or that social interaction?

Then again, meeting people for the first time is hardly my only social issue.  Integrating myself into any established social order has also been a source of constant terror in my life.  The worst of it is that my definition of "established social order" is hideously amorphous -- I used to have to steel myself for the better part of an hour before I could walk into my own family's parties, because I was so afraid of interfering with whatever social dynamics were occurring already.

What is that about.

It's getting better; I'm closing in on that sweet spot where I'm considerate enough to try, but jaded enough that it wouldn't bother me if things don't go so well.  Also, my self-regard increases dramatically with each passing year, so I now believe that whatever social dynamic somebody is currently experiencing couldn't possibly be as good as talking to me.  I dare you to prove me wrong.

a cheesy sentiment

Let's talk cheese.

Today I am eating a French cheese called Douceur du Jura (meaning:  Gift of Jura, with Jura being a department in eastern France).

It was pretty good; a little sharp for my tastes, but it provided a pleasant contrast to the salty crunch of the pita crackers I ate with it.

The wife is a fiend for these guys.  I had to hide them from her.

My history with cheese is a little underwhelming.  I didn't even learn that there could be good cheeses until I was well into college (thanks, 57!); before that, I only knew that I was vaguely dissatisfied with the supermarket cheddars to which my family is partial.\

I would rather be set on fire than eat this.

No, I quickly learned that soft, spreadable cheeses are where the true delight lies.  How strange that I once thought brie was gross, but now, I can't live without it.

My favorite cheese is a triple-cream from Normandy called Brillat-Savarin, named after a French food essayist, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (great quote:  "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.").  Somewhat a traditionalist in this regard, I like to eat it with pieces of baguette that I've torn off by hand.

Behold the wonder!

The thing to note about Brillat-Savarin is that the slightly yellowish hue you see above is not what the cheese looks like when first cut; it opens up to a reveal a very light cream collor, and starts with a mellow flavor that's almost sweet.

However, after leaving it out for ten to twenty minutes, it begins to yellow and develop a slightly sour flavor.  If you're very careful with cutting it and cleansing your palate, you can enjoy the subtle transformations in taste over the whole period!  I served it at a party once, and people came up to me asking what the new cheese I'd put out was called; I was overjoyed to reveal that it was, in fact, the same cheese they'd had already.

Brillat-Savarin, like a person, changes as it's exposed to the world.  Some people like the change, and some  don't.  But then there are people like me, who are able to appreciate it no matter its state; people who enjoy the full spectrum of the transformation, people who take joy in the very fact of the change itself.

In the incredible book Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, there is a character named Mr. Motley whose body is composed of a dizzying array of extraneous parts which he has had grafted onto himself.  While that concept is fascinating enough in itself, what really grabbed me about his character was his stated obsession with the in-between:

“Have you ever created a statue of a cactus?” [he asked.]  Lin shook her head. “Nonetheless you have seen them up close? My associate who led you here, for example. Did you happen to notice his feet, or his fingers, or his neck? There is a moment when the skin, the skin of the sentient creature, becomes mindless plant.  Cut the fat round base of a cactus’s foot, he can’t feel a thing. Poke him in the thigh where he’s a bit softer, he’ll squeal. But there in that zone ... it’s an altogether different thing ... the nerves are intertwining, learning to be succulent plant, and pain is distant, blunt, diffuse, worrying rather than agonizing.

“You can think of others. The torso of the Cray or the Inch-men, the sudden transition of a Remade limb, many other races and species in this city, and  countless more in the world, who live with a mongrel physiognomy. You will perhaps say that you do not recognize any transition, that the khepri are complete and whole in themselves, that to see ‘human’ features is anthropocentric of me. But leaving aside the irony of that accusation—an irony you can’t yet appreciate—you would surely recognize the transition in other races from your own. And perhaps in the human.

“And what of the city itself? Perched where two rivers strive to become the sea, where mountains become a plateau, where the clumps of trees coagulate to the south and—quantity becomes quality—are suddenly a forest. New Crobuzon’s architecture moves from the industrial to the residential to the opulent to the slum to the underground to the airborne to the modern to the ancient to the colourful to the drab to the fecund to the barren... You take my point. I won’t go on.

“This is what makes the world, Ms. Lin. I believe this to be the fundamental dynamic. Transition. The point where one thing becomes another. It is what makes you, the city, the world, what they are. And that is the theme I’m interested in. The zone where the disparate become part of the whole. The hybrid zone."

Some days, I feel quite caught between two extremes myself.  It's nice to know that Mr. Motley and Brillat-Savarin are out there, reassuring us that there's nothing wrong with that.

fly the spirit unfettered

Some days the spirit sinks; some, the spirit soars.  Today was in between; like most days considered objectively, it had its good and its bad points.  However, even some days that are bad all over can be salvaged through one particularly excellent moment, and nothing delivers those moments quite like excellent music.


I can find my day lifted from the darkest gloom by music that pulls me out of myself and into something wonderful.  If you haven't had that experience, what the heck are you doing with your time?  While it's not always appropriate, that sort of music can bring about a really positive change in your life; it can help you see a situation in a better way.  It can make you happy in the long term.

It helps that I tend to take on the mood of whatever I listen to.  This works across all media, too; if I watch a TV show or movie, I tend to modify my behaviors and attitude to match the protagonist.  This means I have to be really careful about what I watch, because I'm naturally Machiavellian enough on my own.  If you add on another heaping helping, I usually snap and see the world through a Manichaean lens for the next day or so.

Manichaeism was a Persian religion back in the day, for those of you not in-the-know.  It went extinct in the 8th century, and was completely replaced by Islam.  In the centuries leading up to that, many people converted out of it, apparently deciding that they knew better.

In my high school sociology class one day, some of my fellow students decided to get off their chests the problems they were having picking a religion.  I was entirely unsympathetic to their plight, and one girl in particular became absolutely livid with me that I wouldn't take seriously her theological struggles.  But to me, the very idea of "shopping around" for a religion was laughable.  It rejected the very notion of theological truth that religion is supposed to grant you.  If you accord yourself the wisdom to correctly perceive the very shape of the metaphysical, then what the heck are you doing picking a religion?  You should be starting one!  And if you don't think you have all the answers, you're really going to entrust your entire framework of beliefs to something you're not sure about, especially when you think there are other options??

What that girl and her ilk were looking for was a philosophy, not a religion; religious doctrine and belief would never be anything more than a set of pleasing stories for her, and I think the concept of faith was utterly inaccessible to someone who approached religion so cynically.  But it's not really her fault; she had obviously never been educated on the difference between theology and philosophy.  She was just looking for the right way to live her life.  I only wish I had been articulate enough at the time to explain why I disagreed.

with flesh and without

If you have never been to one, I highly suggest you treat yourself to a churrascaria visit in the near future.  A churrascaria is a Brazilian steakhouse; this means their main fare is a variety of delicious meats served all-you-can-eat.  If you haven't been to one, here's how it works:  there's an expansive and fancy salad bar that you are supposed to ignore.  You have a plate.  You have a cardboard disc that has a GO on one side and STOP on the other.  The waiter walks up to ask you a question.  You wave him away brusquely.  You flip the disc from STOP to GO.  Immediately, men in gaucho outfits carrying huge skewers of meat swarm your table, offering you succulent morsel after succulent morsel.  They slice off chunks of whatever you want, throwing it on your plate in a deliciously bloody spray.  What might they give you?  Here is a small sample:

I am a big fan of tasty meats like that above (picanha, a cut of beef we don't have in the U.S.), but my carnivore status is nothing compared to the wife's.  She is a meat eating machine; she is a preternaturally ravenous beast, she is single-handedly responsible for the death of thousands of cows per year.  I'd say that there's no other factor that has drawn me to her more than her insatiable desire to consume the cooked flesh of animals.  When you see her in her element, elbow-deep in cow parts and just eating her way to freedom, you'll understand.

Anyway, when faced with a bottomless supply of amazingly tasty meat, you tend to eat yourself silly.  That's what I did tonight, and I'm not only stuffed to bursting; I'm entering the early stages of a full-on food coma.  This might be a bad one, folks.  I might have to have somebody ghost-write my posts for tomorrow.  Oh!  GHOSTWRITER!

walking in place to music

I'm going ballroom dancing tonight.  I've written about some of my experiences with ballroom before, but that was purely in an observational context.  Today, I want to write a little about my own ballroom journey.

I never expected that I would dance beyond the requisite wedding dances.  Before I started college, dancing was just a strange thing that I had no context for.  School dances were always a pretty disappointing affair, as I had no interest in the more lascivious dancing and no context for the slow dances; it boiled down to swaying back and forth in a most unsatisfying fashion.  I walked away from those experiences assuming that dancing was simply not for me, but it was not to be.

The wife has, her entire life, been fantastically interested in dancing; when she started college, she followed her interests and joined her college's ballroom team.

The affect on my life was immediate.  At once she had much less time to talk to me (we went to different colleges, so this was long-distance talking), but she was also clearly enjoying herself in a way I'd never seen before.  And when I went to visit her, I found that our time was truncated so she could go to dance practice.  I wasn't upset; on the contrary, I was happy to sacrifice some time with her for a hobby she was so passionate about.

She took me to a few dance lessons, but I didn't do so well.  It was a frustrating experience for me.  In fact, most of my attempts at formal training in dancing have been painful exercises.  I'm not a bad student, necessarily; it's just that the traditional forms of dance education are not well suited to my needs.  I've found that, in any format other than standing in a line and going through steps without a partner in front of me, I can learn things pretty quickly.

Heck, you should have seen me back in the day.  I was a Dance Dance Revolution pro.  You'd think I'd have an easier time moving my feet!  But even when the then-girlfriend took it on herself to train me in private, I found that she was completely incapable of teaching me in any meaningful way.  I took our lessons as seriously as I am able (read:  not very seriously, but I tried), but she couldn't get past the mental block of seeing me as her boyfriend to instead see me as a student.  I could tell how eager she was to see me reach a level of being able to dance with her easily, and I felt an amount of pressure from that expectation that caused me to panic.  It was unduly stressful for us both, and eventually we agreed that she shouldn't give more lessons like that.

Seeing that, it was on me to learn what I could where I could.  I tried to sign up for ballroom lessons at my own college, but the classes were only offered on a night that conflicted with my orchestra rehearsals.  So the only way I could get any experience was by going to the occasional social dance with her whenever I was visiting.

I did my best.  I was terrible!  But I persevered.  I was paralyzed by the idea of dancing with anybody else; I was certain I was such a terrible dancer that I would ruin anyone's time by dancing with them, and that the girlfriend only tolerated it in the hopes that I would one day improve.  So I spent a lot of time at those social dances just sitting by myself, watching her spin around all night.  I made some great friends, and always had a good time talking to them, but the dancing didn't really take off.

Then, shortly before our own wedding, we went to another wedding, and while we were dancing there, something clicked.  I don't know what happened, but suddenly I was able to move fluidly and enjoy myself dancing in a way I'd never felt before.  The difference was immediately apparent to her, and she threw herself into dancing with me to encourage it as much as possible.

Since then, I've slowly but surely improved; interestingly, the majority of my improvement came after I began working out, and I realized that my own physical condition (especially the strength of my arms) had been holding me back in a big way.  The stronger I get, the better a dancer I become; it was a connection that I'd never made before.

Soon, the wife is going to retire from competitive dancing; her last competition will be in November.  She and her partner mutually decided that they need to focus on other parts of their lives, and that they've reached the end of their competitive career.  I'm pretty concerned about it; it's not that I think it's the wrong decision, but I know how gigantic a part of her life dancing is, and has been since before we got married.  I'm not sure what to expect from her, with a hole suddenly appearing in her weekly schedule the size of her heart.

I know that it's going to fall to me, in a large way, to make up for the lack of dancing in her life.  And I fully intend to take her out dancing as much as possible.  That means, oddly enough, that her dancing less means I'll be dancing more.  I can feel a lot of improvement in my own dancing coming, as well, as she focuses more on my improvement and less on her own.

But that's part of being married to someone:  it's learning to make their passions your own.  And dancing is more fun for me every time I do it.  I'll be sad to see her not dancing competitively anymore, but that's just more incentive for me to start competing with her.  So if you see a lot more posts about dancing, don't get worried.  It's still me -- just a me in a new phase of my life.  You can't hold it off forever, no matter how you try.

shady dealings

Most everybody in the English-speaking world, and especially those of you familiar with Downton Abbey, knows about the law of primogeniture.  That would be the one whereby the eldest male child inherits the family's property and titles, and the other children basically get bubkes.  Sounds pretty unfair, right?  Say you're a second son who feels so slighted by this terrible system that you're determined to switch to something, anything, that doesn't reward somebody so much just for being there first.  What would your other options be?

Before the Franks came along and conquered Europe, whatever lands a noble had managed to acquire during his life would generally be split up among his sons on his death.  In some cases, these lords would appoint a specific son to be the heir, sometimes even having that son crowned while his father was still alive.  Anything, it seems, to ensure a stable succession.  However, it rarely worked; generally, on the death of a father, all his sons would fight over his possessions (often going to war or assassinating each other) to decide who would rule.  This system was done informally for the most part, although same places actually formalized it (most likely to avoid the bloodshed); that would be called gavelkind succession.  The downside of this method of succession is that it makes it very difficult to concentrate power over time, since every generation the holdings of a lord get fragmented once again.

Sometimes, it was considered the height of foolishness to risk a child rising to an important title; children are foolish and easily manipulated!  To avoid that, some families instituted seniority succession, in which the oldest male in the family would take over.  The chief downside to seniority is that the rulers are unlikely to live very long if they get the job later in life, so there's not as much stability and continuity in the leadership.

In general, I think the idea of a birthright is pretty dangerous.  It seems like it would be very difficult to have anything other than a selfish sense of entitlement if you live expecting something to come to you for no other reason than your order of birth.  In olden times, though, there weren't really better options; gavelkind was the closest they were able to come to a merit-based system, and you showed your merit there by murdering your brothers.

I have the same concerns about inheritance in the modern age.  I can't understand why we bother to respect the wills left behind by the deceased; why should they have any say over the world after their departure?  Aren't the living, we of society who are around to be affected, the best choice to decide how someone's legacy should be used?

The democratic response is that we have decided, through our legislatures, and we've decided to honor the wills people leave behind.  But there's a concept in property law known as the Rule Against Perpetuities (cue a shudder of dread from all lawyers and law students), and that rule is in place to prevent the deceased from having too much control over the future.  To grossly oversimplify it, the Rule Against Perpetuities, prevents wills from having provisions that will affect people who haven't been born yet after they've reached adulthood (and if you disagree with that interpretation, read it really closely and tell me why I'm wrong).  It's pretty confusing when you first learn about it, which is why law students hate it.

But I hate it for another reason:  it's completely arbitrary.  I, for one, don't trust the motivations of the dead in the slightest; it's like the people who wrote these laws never read As I Lay Dying.  It infuriates me that a dead person could have any measure of control over my life or the shape of my society.

Perhaps I'm a little too harsh on dead people.  I also think that burial is a waste of important land, and that all bodies should forcibly be cremated.  Some people claim religious reasons for needing burial, but that's nonsense; nobody would say anything negative about the prospects for resurrection of somebody who was burnt to ash in an accident.  And if you claim that you need a burial site in order to grieve properly, that's also hard to argue; many countries in the world practice cremation exclusively, and those nations have no trouble with the grieving process.  There's plenty of room for markers without wasting space sticking entire bodies in the ground.

I suppose this post is lacking my usual compassion, but think about it like this:  everyone understands why primogeniture is unfair.  In fact, everybody understands why any system of noble succession is unfair, because titles of nobility that pass along dynastic lines, rather than by merit, are naturally unfair.  So why would we pass modern regalia of the upper class, in the form of money and property, by similarly non-merit-based laws?  Why not let the things unearned by their recipients go to the public good?

I realize that there are some strong arguments against this.  First, you might say that it sounds socialistic.  Note, though, that I never advocated taking money from the living; it's only the dead who've lost their right to control the wealth they had in life.  My theory is that our concept of the natural right children have to their parents' wealth is less of a reflection of "what is right" and more an obsolete notion inherited (hyuk) from the obviously unfair laws of succession of past times.

Second, you might say that parents would just give their wealth to their children while they live, thus skirting the problem.  And so they might, but perhaps they'd be less inclined to enrich their shiftless children if our society was less accepting of the idea that the children would have received it eventually anyway.

Third, you might say people would be less motivated to accumulate wealth if they had no assurance their children would benefit from it.  But this is ridiculous; of course the children will benefit while their parents are alive.  And perhaps people would be upset by the uncertainty of the childrens' future should the parents die unexpectedly, but in that case, I'm certain society would have the resources to care for them if we distributed the wealth of the dead in a way that's fair for everybody.

And if people are driven to just spend all their money before death, well, at least it gets put into circulation.  I don't really see a downside here, other than a bunch of people whining that they won't be able to affect the world, like ghosts, after they've passed on.  And who cares what a bunch of dead people want?  They're no longer participants in this journey.

(Naturally, peoples' estates should be settled before their possessions are confiscated for the public good.  That guarantees stability while still avoiding the unjust enrichment of rich peoples' kids.  The modern world has no room for dynasties.)

stranded in the past

Hair and I have a storied history, as far as boring stories go.  Let's get this out of the way:  the song above is far, far more interesting to me than my own hair ever has been.  I have so little interest in my own hair that I was 16 years old before I learned that its color was, in fact, dark brown, and not black as I had always believed.

When we were growing up, our mom did everything she could to save money.  That extended to cutting our hair herself instead of taking us to get it cut, which actually went really well considering she had no experience as a stylist.  Sure, some people accused us of having bowl cuts, but our mom never actually used a bowl, which I consider to be pretty impressive.  There was that one time she nearly cut my brother's ear in half, but looking back, it was pretty hilarious.  Well, it was pretty hilarious for me at the time, too.

So hair was a small part of my life.  I just had it, it had to get cut sometimes, and that was really annoying.  I used to fight and fight and fight my mom about it, since I absolutely hated sitting still with nothing to do but feel blades take parts off of my scalp.  She did her best to be quick about it, but you can't rush art.  So I would just gripe and moan forever.  I'm surprised she put up with it as long as she did.

Eventually she got tired of cutting my hair, and I got a job, so it was on me to get my hair cut.  But I never liked going to the stylist because I have so much trouble finding things to talk about.  Remember when I said I was one of those people who isn't good with silence?  Usually I'm great at finding things to talk about, but for some reason, most stylists don't want to discuss all my crazy ideas.  It got even worse when I started law school, because all of a sudden I understood why, exactly, some of the stylists were wrong about every single idea they attempted to articulate.  It was tough to resist explaining that.

Nowadays, things are better.  I've found a local stylist who watches a lot of the same TV shows I do, so we always have plenty to talk about.  But that's not what I want to go into today.

I lived in Japan for four months as a study abroad in college.  I got my hair cut exactly one time while I was there, and I was pretty concerned about finding a place.  Luckily, one of my friends said she knew a good place, so we went as a big group from our dorm to get our hair cut together.

My stylist was this young guy, probably about 24, and he was just awesome.  I can't remember his name, sadly, but boy, did he know his way around the human head.  He gave me the best haircut I have ever received, like so:

The face of a young man excited about seeing his first bullet train.

You know, while we're going through pictures from Japan, here's one from about ten minutes after I got engaged:

Relax.  It's a video game.  Where you shoot marmosets out of pure spite.

Now, as you can see, the wife has some pretty lustrous locks.  Her hair is one of the first things I noticed about her when we first met, way back.  She always kept it in a pony tail or bun, and I would always stick pencils and other knick-knacks in it.  Pretty Freudian, I suppose!  It's just that kind of juvenile flirting that draws women to you in droves, fellas.  Take notes.

But my hair is just...there.  And I'll never find somebody who can do it justice the way that Japanese stylist did.  In my idle hours, I occasionally consider flying back to Japan just for that haircut.  But what if I couldn't find my stylist?  It'd be a wasted trip.

I wish that I could find the ambition to do something interesting with my hair, but I think I'm doomed to have the kinds of jobs where my hair can only exist in a few very specific configurations.  My professions will probably have more to say about what my hair can be than I ever will.  But do I really want to go through my life that way?  Do I really want the kinds of jobs that dictate something so fundamental about the way we choose to present ourselves to the world?  It's true, we can use our hair to send a variety of messages about the kinds of people we are, if we have that luxury.

For most people, I think, it's not a luxury that's worth sacrificing very much for.  And there are certainly plenty of other ways to communicate your identity besides hair (not that I've ever been big about broadcasting my identity to the people around me, anyway).  But you know...there's another element to hair.  There's liking the way it looks, even if I often forget it.  There was one time in my life that I really liked the way it looked; everything else was just dictated by circumstance.  And every time I look in the mirror, I miss the way it once was.  I miss that piece of who I wanted to be that I found, and lost, in Japan.

But I will go back someday.  I just hope it's someday soon.

ここまではできた BUT WHAT NOW?

This is going to be a short one.  My attention is nearly 100% diverted by the pop culture touchstone of Grand Theft Auto V.  Because I don't want this to be a purely game-focused blog, I'm not going to talk about it today.  Instead, I'm going to discuss Japanese.

Did you know that I speak Japanese?  I totally do, and fluently.  I first started learning it in my sophomore year of high school, and I went on studying it in one capacity or another all the way through high school and college.

Before I started with Japanese, I studied German (which I've mostly completely forgotten, outside of the basics).  In seventh grade, like many Americans, I was given the choice of studying Spanish, French, or German.  The scuttlebutt around the school was that Spanish was the easiest, and German the hardest, which made it an easy choice.  I wanted to be challenged, darn it, not mollycoddled!  And I did really enjoy learning German, but I learned it in kind of a strange way.  After a year of studying it, I realized that I had more of a feel for the language than any real understanding of its grammatical structure.  It seems that I was learning the language as a child does, naturally and through simple immersion; this made me pretty good conversationally, but pretty terrible when it came time to explaining things on tests.  I could conjugate in a sentence without thinking about it, but I couldn't actually tell you the proper conjugations of a verb without the sentence.  It was kind of a mess.

Still, I soldiered on, and my special memory for vocabulary meant that I was able to very well in class (and German's modal verbs meant that I only really had to learn three or four verbs' worth of conjugations to get by).  But by the end of ninth grade, I was looking to the future and realizing that German just didn't interest me enough anymore.

High school offered several more linguistic options:  Latin, Japanese, and Chinese were all on the list.  However, I had little interest in Latin, and Chinese only offered one year.  Japanese, on the other hand, had a full two-year program; in addition, I had always had an interest in Japan.  In first grade I did a book report about the Japanese train system.  For some reason, what I learned from that report always stuck with me, marking Japan out as a fascinating place.  Big Bird in Japan didn't hurt, either:

That's the whole movie.  Have fun.

And, of course, I played a lot of games made by Japanese companies, and I was beginning to develop an interest in Japanese cartoons, and several of my friends were already into Japanese stuff and planning to take it as well.  And, most importantly, everybody said that Japanese would be extremely difficult, perhaps even the most difficult language on offer (that was wrong, though; Chinese would have been way harder). AND I NEEDED THAT CHALLENGE!  So there were a lot of good reasons to leave German behind.  But none of those are what convinced me.

I was wandering through my house once, some time in ninth grade, just thinking about where I was going and what high school would be like.  Suddenly, I heard a voice, quiet but insistent:  Take Japanese, it said.  And I decided to listen.  When you hear a voice like that, why not listen?  How bad could it be?

Well, it turns out it was awesome.  I was great at Japanese, all the more because I fell in love with the language.  Any interest I had in Japanese culture was utterly dwarfed by how entranced I was with the fun of speaking and writing it.

I still love Japanese, although now that I'm fluent, the burning drive to get better has mostly faded away.  Now, I spend most days idly trying this or that, hoping to find a hobby that will rekindle the spark that once set my soul alight, quietly but desperately seeking some interest that will instill enough passion in me to send me all the way around the world in pursuit of a goal.

Perhaps that kind of motivation and energy is something we are only permitted when we're that young.  With my life mostly settled as it is, I simply can't drop everything and pursue whatever dream I come across.  But I can't stop looking for dreams.  What will I do when I find one?

Nuts.  This wasn't that short.  Sorry for missing that target.

fortune's favors

Domerun Claggan raised his knife high and brought it down with all his strength, enjoying the satisfying feeling of the blade slicing neatly through the flesh, sliding just shy of the bone, and coming to rest against the battered cutting board below.

He flipped the meat over with an efficiency born from years of practice and raised his arm for another cut.  Steadying the bone with one hand, he chopped again, but this time his aim was less true; he missed, chipping the knife off of the bone, and watched as it sliced a layer off of the top of what would have been a perfect cut of meat.

The cut wasn't ruined, but it would only sell for a fraction of the price now.  He threw down his cleaver in disgust.  It was this part of it, when he silently prepared the next day's cuts in the late afternoon, after the shoppers were finished, that he hated the most about being a butcher.  He was a talker, through and through, and he delighted in sharing stories with his customers and making the big sale.  That had been his job in the shop growing up, and he'd always been great at it.  It was his brother who'd inherited the talents with the knife, but of course Jove just happened to love the knife a little too much, and now he was rotting in jail for it.

With their father in the grave for over six years now, that left everything in the shop up to Domerun, and he  was hard-pressed to think of a part of his life that wasn't a complete shambles.  He calmed his furious breathing and stared down at the bad cut before him, muttering a quiet apology to the cow that had taken much better care of its muscles than he had.  Sighing, he fetched a carving knife from the wall and tried to salvage what he could.  Inventive, clever cuts of meat with colorful stories behind them -- that was what Claggan's Meats had become known for, since it certainly couldn't be known for the quality of the cuts anymore.

As he cut, he spun a tale in his mind about the cow, and how its eccentric owners had taken it to see dancing.  Yes, ballet dancing!  And the cow had gotten it into its head that it could be a bovine ballerina, if only it practiced enough.  The rancher and his family would get up in the morning to find the cow spinning in slow circles in the field.  A strange sight, but seemingly harmless, and the cow never did much more than spin around.  And when it came time for the slaughter, what did your humble butcher discover but that the cow's senseless rotations had developed these odd grooves in the muscles -- yes, just so -- that would enhance the flavor of any sauce by distributing it in a spiral pattern through the meat!

Thirty minutes later, he finished his work and packed up the strange meat rosettes for the next day's display.  The bone went into the stew bin and he stripped off his spotted apron.  He mused about how he should relax for a few minutes before heading upstairs for dinner, then paused.  His wife, Rita, should have been home already; he hadn't noticed because he'd been focused on fixing his mistake.  Then again, they'd had a fight that morning, and she'd likely be out sulking at the bubble shops like she usually did.  Either that, or visiting that mad fortune teller woman she'd grown attached to.  Claggan didn't like to think about how much money she spent following the senseless whims of the stars, as communicated to her by her batty soothsayer.

From the beginning, money had been the cause of all the problems between him and Rita.  She felt slighted by his modest butcher's income, and why shouldn't she?  When he'd been courting her, he'd promised her the moon and more.  He'd done his best to convince her that his bold new ideas in meat-cutting would pay off big, and she'd been naïve enough to believe him.  Once the honeymoon was over and she got a closer look at the finances, she soured quickly, and when his brother went away, it seemed to be the last straw.

If she'd had any other prospects, he was sure she'd have left him by now.  As it was, she just soldiered on, making his life a daily trial.  He wasn't sure there was anything he could do about it.

*********************

Rita hustled down the rapidly darkening alley, pulling her overcoat tight as though it were armor.  She had come this way many times, more than she'd care to admit in polite company, but each visit was just as unsettling as the last.  The old witch-woman, who seemed to never leave her third-story apartment, had been especially generous today, keeping her entranced in reading the future far longer than she'd paid for.

And what glorious fortunes they'd been!  Today was the first time the future seemed to hold nothing but good, and Rita was desperate for a turnaround in her fate.  With the butcher's shop suffering daily from her husband's mismanagement and incompetence, she was sure they were about to enter into a spiral that would result in bankruptcy, debtor's prison for him, and a life on the streets for her.  The idea made her shiver, although the air held no chill.

Happily, she knew that there would be no reason to fear anymore.  The witch-woman had told her that her life would filled with joy, with all the good food she could eat, and that nobody would ever think she was ugly.  She didn't like to bother her husband with it, but she found it so difficult to keep up her looks without the regimen of treatments she'd grown used to in her parents' house.  She bought as little as she could afford to, knowing their finances were tight, but even so she saw that he had lost the gleam in his eyes he'd had when he first courted her.  With the witch-woman's prophecy, she now felt confident that she could win back her husband's love, just as he must be about to find a way to turn the business around.

There was just one catch -- the fortunes, she had been told, would only come to pass if she would make a sacrifice directly after leaving the reading.  The witch-woman had given her directions on a filthy scrap of paper torn from some yellowed grimoire, and Rita tried not to look at the arcane runes scrawled around the edges, focusing only on the path she must take.  The directions listed no roads, but merely distances and turns, which she followed as precisely as the night would allow.  The gas lamps hissed and sputtered as she passed, but provided enough illumination for her to make out the characters on the paper, although they seemed to dance perversely before her eyes.  She hoped fervently that optics might not be in her future, breaking the lines of the face as they did, but she supposed she could always have a servant read important documents to her, were her fortunes to be as good as she expected.

She took the last turn and found herself staring into a dirty canal.  A pair of cats seemed caught in a permanent growling match on the far side, adding an eerie timbre to the night.  She looked down into the murky waters, then came to her senses and drew the little vial of ochre-colored liquid the witch-woman had sold to her.  She gave the vial a little shake, seeing its contents came to life with a light all their own, then swiftly popped the cork and poured the vial into the water below.

The liquid continued to glow as it hit the water, then snaked beneath, leaving a phosphorescent trail tracing its way to the bottom in broad, concentric curves.  She breathed out.

Immediately, a pair of strong arms closed around her from behind.  She jerked, more in surprise than in fear, and felt hot breath on her neck.

"My dear, you are welcome to our fellowship," intoned the man holding her, in a voice like molasses-covered pebbles bumping together.  "We are so pleased you decided to join us."

Something soft covered her eyes, and her fortune came true.

*********************

Muttering grumpily, Claggan scooped up the preparation knives, washed and dried them, and set them on their hooks for the next day's work.  He grabbed his mop and moved from the preparation kitchen to the storefront.  He was growing a little concerned that Rita was out so late; he was sure she'd still be upset, but maybe if he showed her he'd been waiting, she'd be touched by his concern and forgive him a little.  Gloomily, he began mopping the tile floor, which was already mostly clean from the water he'd splashed at the close of business that day, but could always use a little extra.  He didn't like mopping much, but at least he wasn't bad at it.

The repetitive nature of the work numbed his mind, and he became lost in thoughts of how to save his business and his marriage.  He was so engrossed that he didn't register the ring of the bell when the door swung open, and didn't look up until he heard a soft sigh that was unmistakably his wife's.

When he saw her, his eyes lit up.  He couldn't understand how, but she looked ten years younger.  She looked just as she had when he'd first laid eyes on her -- that same defiantly jutting lower lip, those fiery eyes, the hair pulled back tight.  There was a smile in her eyes that he was far from used to, but somehow she had managed to make her face look just as thin, her skin just as tight.  He found himself unable to speak, just drinking in the sight of her in the prime of her beauty once more.

She looked back at him expectantly, and when he said nothing, slowly raised the corners of her mouth into a tight-lipped smile.  On a woman he didn't know, he supposed it would be alluring, but his Rita had never smiled like that; her smiles were full of teeth and wonder, and that had never changed; they had just gotten rarer.  This smile was entirely new, and it unsettled him enough to make him step back.

She looked hurt, but in a petulant way, and cocked her head at him.  He abruptly realized that she was looking at him like some of his hungrier customers looked at the meat in its case.  Then, he noticed blood on the floor behind her, where he was certain he'd already mopped.  His eyes widened in terror.

Agile for a man of his size, he leaped over the counter and snatched one of the serving knives from its resting cloth.  He raised the knife and pointed it at her.  Some distant part of him proudly noted that the knife didn't waver an inch.

She looked at the knife with a bemused expression, then opened her mouth, revealing several rows of splintery fangs.  From behind the horrible, crooked maw, a freakishly long purple tongue, covered with irregular tiny warts, uncoiled itself and spilled down her chin.  Then, from somewhere deeper than her throat, she began to sing, an impossible three-note harmony that seemed to shake the room.

From out of nowhere, his hand began to burn like it had been dipped in scalding acid.  He dropped the knife and watched as angry, red blisters formed all over the clenched hand and fingers.  He groaned and almost collapsed, but caught himself with his left hand.  The blisters swirled with color, yellow and then red again, and he felt himself beginning to black out.

Summoning the last of his strength, he steadied himself and, with his left hand, grabbed another serving knife from the counter and flung right at the monster's heart.  He had never thrown a knife before, least of all with his weak hand, and he watched in despair as it fell to the floor several feet to the side of its target.

The tones in her singing changed, and this time he felt something snap inside of his body.  He fell to the floor, hitting his head against the counter on the way down, and lay there in agony.  Whatever she'd done, he found he could barely breathe any longer, and didn't have the strength to lift a muscle.

His wife -- was it his wife? -- climbed over the counter, slowly but with arachnid grace and purpose, and lowered herself to his broad stomach.  He felt her sharp fangs pierce his skin, but the true pain didn't begin until she began to remove his entrails, piece by piece. His screams were almost loud enough to block out the clicking, smacking noises of her mastication.  His last conscious thought was that, with the care she took in removing his organs, he could be satisfied that she had at least learned something from being a butcher's wife.

He continued screaming well into the night.