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Fritos, more Christmas, and German
I am in an unpleasant mood. After last night's Cat Burglar incident, I woke up with a headache and neckache which prevented me from getting any work done during the day. I wrote that entry and took delivery on my new, non-squirrel-powered computer (I've graduated to rabbits) and that was about it.
I took painkillers and a nap when I got home, and the headache went away, but not the neckache, which means I've basically idled the night away as well, because I can't write when my neck hurts. Back pain I ignore. Neck pain I can't.
I hate not being constructive. I think watching TV is about the least constructive thing to do in the world, and that's what I did tonight - watched TV and ate Barbecue Fritos.
I am not a "chip person" - I don't like most of those sorts of salty greasy things. Dips, to me, are for dipping raw vegetables in. Or pita bread. I don't even like pretzels. I like sweet snacks. Once in a while I'll buy a bag of the odd assorted things that Japanese eat instead of potato chips; and every so often I crave Barbecue Fritos. Not ordinary Fritos - I can't stand those. They have to taste like something else besides salt and starch.
The problem is, Nonelvis is incurably attracted to Fritos of all kinds and dislikes it when I bring them into the house, because I will eat a few and then leave them there, nibbling on them every now and again. It can take me weeks to go through a bag of Fritos ... and meanwhile, the bag is sitting there, calling to her. Tempting her.
Tonight she begged me to finish the bag, so I brought it onto the couch while we watched TV. And she kept sneaking glances at the bag. Eventually she had a couple and was pleased with her restraint.
Inu wanted the Fritos too, and insisted on licking my fingers raw after I finished. Later, while we were in the office, Inu sat in the doorway.
Nonelvis: What is she doing?
Me: She's licking the floor.
Nonelvis: Inu, why are you licking the floor?
Me: Maybe she thinks Fritos have been there.
Nonelvis (to Inu): There are no Fritos on the floor. Believe me, if there were, I'd have found them.
Nonelvis really likes Fritos.
I got a message from Mack today which said, in part:
You know, giving/getting is not a zero-sum equation, where what you get has to equal what you give ... I give my friends things all the time - and they do the same to me, but no one keeps count.
I replied:
See, normally I believe that. And I operate on that system, where no one really cares who's given gifts to whom. I think that's the way to go. It is only at Christmas that I feel the giving and getting game does turn into a zero-sum equation, where Value Received becomes paramount, and that's at the bottom of the things that annoy me most about the season.
I can always count on Aet to turn my perceptions inside-out. In the place and time when she was a child, Christmas had gone into hiding:
But Santa Claus, [and] reciting poems and getting presents on December 24th, was a tradition, followed with adults but never explained. Just like parades with red flags and huge portraits of old men, walking over the central square and shouting slogans to the people on tribune that always took place on November 7th and May 1st.
I never knew Christmas had anything to do with religion until I was ten. I did realize, though, that the old white-beard handing out presents was pro-communist (yes, all the good heroes, be it Cinderella, Ivan the Moron or brother rabbit, I saw as pro-communist, as who is not with us is against us!)
Every Christmas-time one was bound to meet some drunken oldster in communal transport, who bothered the children with speeches:
"Yeah, children! Do you realize, that Santa Claus has been deported to Siberia and the Russian usurper Father Frost has stolen his place?"
Just like Christians had done, assimilating the pagan holidays that refused to die, the Soviets tried to get over Christmas by moving all the habits the masses were bound to miss - the decorated fir, the festive dinner, the Santa (sorry, I meant Father Frost), the presents, sending out greeting cards - forward, making them acceptable to state as the New Year traditions.
After all, Father Frost is just like Santa, only he has a female helper Snowflake and they often prefer to wear blue, not red coats.
I replied to her:
And, do you know, Christmas has become so divorced of any religious meaning in this country that it stunned me momentarily to realize that of course there are other reasons a Communist regime might object to it besides bourgeois materialism?
So you see, I am not really the calculating b**ch I may have sounded. It is not a lack of sentiment that sours me on Christmas. It may, in fact, be an excess.
My aunt in Germany (she of the "Shalom, Y'all" tile) also included in that package some festive Ritter chocolate bars. Yum.
If you are not familiar with the Ritter slogan, it bears repeating:
Quadratisch. Praktisch. Gut.
Nonelvis: I don't know the first word.
Me (with glee): 'Square'!
Ritter Sport bars, you see, are square. "Square. Practical. Good."
This brings me to German, which is much on my mind lately ... and, in an odd way, to the Harry Potter books.
I read the first Harry Potter book - UK edition, thanks very much - after avoiding it for so long because so many people were raving about it so hard.
It's quite good. I enjoyed it immensely. I may not read the other ones, though, as I have looked them over and they seem to have the same formula - Harry is the only one who realizes what's going on and he gets himself in a lot of trouble as no one else will believe him until the very end, when he saves the day.
Why must Harry always be perpetually misunderstood and getting into trouble? Couldn't we have him solve it and be believed from the get-go? Even just one adult on the sympathetic side would be nice. If there were a scene early in book two where we realize that the headmaster is nobody's fool and believes Harry but isn't able to intervene for some reason or another, then I'd be more willing to keep reading. But I can only take so much of this spunky kid getting stepped on over and over, by his friends and enemies alike.
I'd also be interested in a book that concentrated on the everyday life in that school, on the culture shock of Harry finding out all the many ways it's not like a Muggle school. (Of course, I tried to write a book like that, and I was told 1. it wasn't alien enough, which is true, and 2. that it was tedious, probably because of #1. But is Harry more engaging than Aedie? Well, he's certainly a lot more cheerful - forgive me for believing that an angst-ridden teenager is more realistic than a Pollyanna - but as a character, neither of them is much more than a silhouette. Harry always Does The Right Thing, even when it's the wrong thing, and Aedie always Does The Wrong Thing, even when it's the right thing. Bah. No, no, just me being bitter, never mind.)
Anyway.
Since both the Aedie book and Quarter Moon are at an impasse right now - the former may take so much rewriting that it should just be totalled and the carcass scavenged instead, while the latter needs only minor rework, but I may not be able to fix the sole remaining gripe people have with it - I've been working on a useless little Web writing project in my spare time.
I am finally writing a story for the interactive text-adventure system I wrote almost a year ago, which has been sitting idle all that time. I wrote a full text parser - you could run one of the old Infocom games in it - and haven't had the time or energy to actually use it.
This one's smutty. It's going to be pretty kinky, assuming I can do it right (the world knows how rotten my sex scenes are). And it involves a lot of German, at the beginning at least. So much German that I may have to put up a warning for the reader: Don't worry about it.
Because the German phrases are there to make the characters sound right (it takes place in a remote part of Bavaria). If any of them are truly important to the plot, I manage to sneak in a translation; if they're important and they're not translated, then the protagonist doesn't understand them either and will figure out what they mean later, at the correct time.
And that's where Harry Potter comes in. (The rant about Potter above was just a digression.) Aside from the fact that I have no idea what sort of a food item "knickerbocker glory" is, and I can only guess that "sherbet lemons" are lemon drops, there were no other terms in the UK book that couldn't be deduced from context ... and the two that I've mentioned have precise meanings which are unimportant. I mean, so long as you can tell the knickerbocker glory is a food item (which you can), it doesn't matter exactly what it is - only that Harry got to have one, an unexpected treat, because of his cousin's greed.
I really don't see why they found it necessary to change the books for US release. I don't. And it wouldn't bother me except that I feel our collective intelligence is being insulted.
© Columbine
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