Hunger Games, naps, feeling old, job apps, and draw something

I wish I was at The Hunger Games right now. I got into the series a while back when my yoga-librarian-book club friends were reading them. Then recently, with all the hype, the kids started reading them. We’re all really looking forward to the movie; I would have loved to be the first to take the kids. But I’m still not feeling that hot and standing out in the cold somewhere for hours, when it’s a school night for the kids, did not sound very enticing. So, I’m sure they’ll go see it this weekend at their mom’s and I’ll just have to be content to see it on the 2nd go-around. I feel old.

Today, I had a nap in the morning after dropping the kids off {this is getting old, and again with the feeling old}, and then submitted another job app this afternoon. This evening, I met my co-host at the studio to work on cutting a very wordy but interesting interview that is way too long. After all of this time, it’s still hard to cut good content, even when it makes a tighter interview!

I also downloaded this new game, Draw Something, on my Kindle Fire. ‘Cause I’m trendy like that. {Not an early adopter though, as apparently the game has been out for 6 weeks already.} Since I can’t draw, I imagine I will suck at the game. But there’s only one way to find out.

Thursday Nextisms are Inflectious

Today was another day of rest, so I finished One of Our Thursdays Is Missing. Some of my favorites:

• “The taxi was the usual yellow-and-check variety and could either run on wheels in the conventional manner or fly using advanced Technobabble™ vectored gravitational inversion thrusters.”
• “Technobabble™ Swivelmatic vectored-ion plasma drive.”
• “Verb-Ease™ for troublesome irregularity.”
• Malapropism: “The average working life of a Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals was barely fifty readings. The unrelenting comedic misuse of words eventually caused them to suffer postsyntax stress disorder, and once their speech became irreversibly abstruse, they were simply replaced. Most ‘retired’ Mrs. Malaprops were released into the BookWorld, where they turned ferrule…”
• “‘Now, then,’ I said, using an oxymoron for scolding effect, ‘it is totally unproven that malapropism is inflectious, and what did we say about tolerating those less fortunate than ourselves?”
• “Large sections of dramatic irony were hacked from the books and boiled down to extract the raw metaphor, rendering once-fine novels mere husks suitable only for scrapping.”
• TransGenre Taxi {every time I see this, my brain first thinks TransGender taxi}
• Dark Reading Matter (DRM). “The hypothetical last resting place of books never published, ideas never penned and poems held only in the heart by poets who died without passing them on.”
• Metamyth
• Narrative Clunker Unit (NCU)
• “Distilling metaphor out of raw euphemism was wasteful and expensive, and the euphemism-producing genres on the island were always squeezing the market. Besides, the by-product of metaphor using the Cracked Euphemism Process liberates irony-238 and dangerous quantities of alliteration, which are associated with downright dangerous disposal difficulties. – Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (9th edition).”
• “Don’t anyone move… I think we’ve driven into a mimefield.”
• “I was reminded of Clark’s Second Law of Egodynamics: ‘For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.’”
• “Plot 9 (Human Drama) revolved around a protagonist returning to a dying parent to seek reconciliation for past strife and then finding new meaning to his or her life. If you live anywhere but HumDram, ‘go do a Plot 9’ was considered a serious insult, the Outlander equivalent of being told to ‘go screw yourself.’ – Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (3rd edition).”
• Antikern: “What this does is remove the white spaces entirely – within an instant this entire boat and everyone in it will implode into nothing more than an oily puddle of ink floating on the river.”

Also, I learned a new idiom—“Wheels within Wheels”:

“Complex interacting processes, agents, or motives, as in It’s difficult to find out just which government agency is responsible; there are wheels within wheels. This term, which now evokes the complex interaction of gears, may derive from a scene in the Bible (Ezekiel 1:16): ‘Their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.’ [c. 1600]”

and a new word—Epizeuxis

“Repetition of words with no others between, for vehemence or emphasis.” Example: “O horror, horror, horror.” (Macbeth)

What’s Next?

Last night I not only finished Thursday Next: First among Sequels, but I got well into One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, the last of the series available (in the U.S., anyway). What’s next after Next? {I’m sure that’s not an original.} I also read the entire All About Emily “novelette” by Connie Willis. I liked it, but didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Blackout and All Clear. But generally I prefer novels to short stories, so it’s not too surprising.

I spent half the day in bed again trying to get over this bug, but dragged myself up this afternoon and evening to pay a few bills, and to work on a job application which is due tomorrow. Funny that this job sounds the most interesting, and requires the most application effort (essay type questions, online examples, etc.), but pays the least of any of the three jobs I will shortly have apps into. But, you never know. I’m trying to, as they say, “keep my options open.”

Missing things

I finally finished Something Rotten tonight. I can’t believe how little time I’ve spent reading over the last few months. Very uncharacteristic of me. But there is a lot of stuff going on, namely 3 new people who need attention and shuffling around. I have to figure out how to give myself that reading time again. First Among Sequels is the next one in the series.

But before I start that, I’m going to start on Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar/Apr 2012, which just appeared on my Kindle a few days ago!

Obsessing and reading, in that order

What I’m reading this week:

• Fantasy & Science Fiction Jan/Feb 2012
• The Eyre Affair. I’m hoping that I’ll start clicking with the principal character, Thursday Next, so that I can go on to read the next 5 novels in the series. So far, I’ve liked Shades of Grey a lot more—I’ve seen rumours of a sequel, but can’t find it anywhere… Fforde has a few other series that I can check out as well.

What I’m obsessing about this week:

• What’s going to be economical and practical for vegan school lunches for two 11-year-olds and a 15-year-old? Are the other kids going to think they’re weird? Thankfully there are plenty of good resources available on healthy vegan kids, like Vegan For Life.
• Getting my step-kids settled. Kid #2 arrives tomorrow. The twins start their new school Monday.