Fatigue

My apologies for not updating the blog yesterday. Yes, my string of one-post-a-days has come to an end. Two days ago - Saturday - we drove about 300 miles to my mother's house, and on the exact same day drove 300 miles back, so that the cats would not get lonely. (Or at least, wonder where the foodbringers went?) That's 10 hours in a car, ladies and gentlemen, and the next day neither of us were good for much of anything.

As my pillow hit the bed, I told myself "You know what? I owe a blog post." But I was just too damned tired. I cursed fatigue and went right on to sleep.

The fatigue is not merely a product of the long trip. In my present weight-loss regimen, I've been trying to work out about five days a week or so. One of the devices I use is a treadmill at work. This treadmill has an aerobic setting where the goal is to get one's heart rate up to 140 beats per minute. The first week I worked with the machine, it wasn't a problem - I did this for thirty minutes. The next week, I increased the time to 35 minutes, also with no problem.

However, last week I set the machine at 40 minutes - and could not get my heart rate about 140. The two days I managed to contribute 40 minutes with a (mostly) 140 beat/minute heartbeat left me wiped out for the following days. I only worked out 20 minutes on Wednesday and Thursday, with nothing at all on Friday. I felt like a dead man walking during the latter half of the week.

As for mental fatigue, well, I have HHoF to provide some respite. But not recently. I'm about four or so installments ahead of my beta reader, and I've been working and revising various parts. I have a loose outline with which I work - keeping in mind certain things I'd like to see happen in each chapter. Generally, a chapter takes about 13-20 K as a text file.

The biggest a story has ever been is 39 K. The visit to the Fielding campus for unforced labor was that big. The trip to Atlanta was that big. And now, I have a story that is 74 K. And it is still not finished. What the hell? What am I thinking? The only person who writes stories that long is TAG, and I'm not as good as TAG is. Who is going to sit through 74 K of something?

Spanish women's basketball starts on October 10th. College ball starts in November. It's going to be a busy winter.

By the way, about "True Prep?" I read that - out loud - to Ruth to and from my mother's house. It's about 250 pages, and around 230 of them were read out loud. If you want to know my list of HHoF reference material, that list would include:

The Official Preppy Handbook by Lisa Birnbaum
True Prep by Lisa Birnbaum
The Debutante's Guide to Life by Cornelia Guest
Class by Paul Fussell
The Prep School Cafe at College Confidential

True Prep is scary, particularly given its list of prep school grads. Did you know Barack Obama and John McCain both went to prep school? You couldn't swing a stick in Washington without knocking someone's class tie off.

There! I think it would be easier to build a prep school from pine and twine and attend it for twelve years than to commit all that to memory. Although, reading me botch it up shall be hilarious to one and all.

Les Sabots

I was talking to someone upstairs at work today, in the search for diet soda. Right now, my work uniform is a decent looking short-sleeved shirt, a pair of khaki shorts and a pair of flip flops. My biggest concern is that sooner or later the winter moratorium on short pants will be declared and I'll be consigned to long pants before the weather forces me to.

As I waited, this other person - similarly dressed except for the flip-flops - pointed out what he thought was my faux pas. "Last year, I wore flip-flops to work and they sent me home and told me to get another pair of shoes."

This has never happened to me for what I suspect are a number of reasons. The call center is the part of the business that is located upstairs, which is where the non-salaried employees work. Having worked in something like a call center before, I suspect that life upstairs really sucks. You're on the phone X number of hours a day, the bosses monitor both your time and your calls, your breaks are strictly regulated and you're made to feel small and insignificant in a number of petty and mindless ways.

Think about it this way. Imagine an economist at the University of Chicago having to check in with his department chair before he can go to the bathroom.

And yet, here I am, flouting the dress code and getting away scott-free. There could be many reasons for this:

1) No one knows enough about me to really care what I'm wearing. I'm the man with the red stapler.
2) I'm so vitally important that I can get away with various violations of the rules with a wink-and-a-nod because I'm so necessary, or....
3) ...I'm a salaried employee. Who works downstairs, with the bosses. Who only has one direct supervisor, who is off-site. And the flip-flops rule - either de jure or de facto in its enforcement - is a way to make one group of employees feel one way about themselves and the other group of employees feel another way about themselves.

So, given the choice, do you flout your comfortable flip-flops or seek other adornment? Can't throw the flip-flops away. Too pricey. If you stop wearing them, your wife asks "Why aren't you wearing those flip-flops? You like them so much!" More likely, you take the coward's way out, continue to contribute to class inequity by wearing the flip-flops of oppression and resolve to wear closed-toed shoes next summer.

HHF 59 is done, BTW. Actually, everything up to HHF 63 is first-drafted. (waves)

Trade-Offs

Here's a problem. Assume that the place you work has an IT department. In order to get certain information from IT, you have to request it. This process can take a long time. Let's also assume that you feel fairly confident in your ability to handle and organize information. IT, frankly, would like to give you access to its inner workings so that instead of you coming around and pestering them every two weeks for something big, you would simply create it yourself.

Question: Do you take the access that IT gives you?

Answer: It depends. If IT is offering you access so that you could do the hours of work that they used to do on your behalf, then no, you reject it. The entire purpose of having an IT department is so that you don't have to do that crap yourself. The purpose of a business being split up into different departments is so that odious tasks can be distributed appropriately to specialists. If IT isn't going to volunteer to take crap of your desk, why should you volunteer to take crap off theirs?

However, if what you're asking for is the kind of stuff that you could probably put together in 15 minutes - but stuff IT doesn't want to give you because it doesn't want every Tom, Dick and Harry poking around in its databases - then, yes, you do want the access that IT gives you. You don't want to have to wait for IT to get around to doing a simple task on their clock instead of your clock. If it's just a case of IT not wanting to give you the widget you need out of some sense of territorial tresspass, then yes, you do want that access.

This is the kind of trade-off I have to deal with every now and then. Out of everyone who works in this building, I have more access to IT stuff than anyone else does. And so far, I've been able to make it work.

(* * *)

There are two things that are taking up my creative time.

First: Hallowed Halls of Fielding. If I told you how many parts I've planned for this story - and yes, that number of parts does not equal infinity - you'd shit a brick. This work is going to be novel length. So why am I writing it when I could be writing an actual novel? Madness and boredom, mostly.

Second: A timeline of future events that I might use as a sort of pre-written alternate future history. Do you have a story set in 2025 but don't want to have to generate the technological changes that correspond to 15 years from now? No problem, baby. I've got it all under of control. Only up to about 2019 so far.