Update for 11/13/2016

For those of you who were disappointed by the shortness of last week’s update, I think you’ll be happier this week.

Project updates

• Ulcerative colitis – I went for my first Remicade treatment on Monday, and my next one for this initial period is in a week. I haven’t seen any improvement yet, but like with Humira, it can take a while to see results.
• NaNoWriMo – I’ve decided (1) NaNoWriMo doesn’t fit the project I’m using it for, (2) it’s too late to switch projects and hit the official word count, (3) I don’t want to put off my current project anyway, and (4) I’ve been a little distracted by current events; so I’m ditching NNWM this year. The issues with my current project are that (1) I’m writing a project map that I want to be fairly concise; and (2) since I decided to do NNWM at the last minute, I’m doing my planning while I’m writing; but (1) the emphasis of NNWM is on verbosity, and (2) you’re supposed to plan your novel beforehand. I’m updating the wiki article I’m writing with the parts I added last week, but from now on instead of trying to write constantly, I’ll take more time to think, and I’ll revise to cut out unhelpful content as I go. Dropping NNWM will also give me more mental space to write for my offline project, which I didn’t really want to include in the word count and which has an actual external deadline.
• Media
  • Books – The two books I’ve been reading (‘Salem’s Lot in audio, Less Than Zero in print) are both due on Monday, so this weekend I scrambled to finish them. ‘Salem’s Lot, along with the TV show Luke Cage, makes me feel like being more involved in my community, something I’ve done much less of in recent, well, years, and it reminds me that the arts aren’t just idle entertainment but can shape your life. Next books: 14 by Peter Cline and The Bug by Ellen Ullman, which was forcibly loaned to me by my coworker months ago, so since I’m into reading print books right now, I guess I should read it before I move on to another library book.
  • Movies – I want to see Doctor Strange and Arrival. I know practically nothing about either, but the little revealed in the trailers seems right up my alley–Arrival in linguisticness and Doctor Strange in weirdness. I was going to say Arrival‘s premise reminds me of “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, one of my favorite SF writers, but then I found out that’s what it’s based on! I guess I should finish reading it.
  • Web video – I’ve been continuing to explore the Internet’s weird media, mostly the ones Night Mind highlights but starting to broaden my net, and the catch is scattered enough that I’m creating a wiki page where I’ll collect links to the ones that interest me, once I figure out what to call this category. These series roughly fall into the horror genre, but not all horror appeals to me, so maybe think of these as some combination of the X-Files and Blair Witch.
• Politics – Like most of the country I was stunned by last week’s election results, and like half of it I was chagrined, but my initial shock has worn off, and now after some initial posts on Twitter and Facebook to get my basic thoughts out in the open, I’m mostly just collecting viewpoints to try to understand the issues, which I admit is fun for me, though in a serious and somewhat obsessive way, given the intensity of the debates, the complexity of the issues, and the real problems minorities are facing. I’m trying to use this election as a way to get back into the topic of politics, and links on these issues are going into another wiki article, which I wanted to do for Brexit but got distracted from, but I was less involved in Brexit. My overall theme is still the need to listen.

Life updates

• Work – At the end of last week the warehouse had a big order they needed help with, so some of us from my department went down Friday morning to pack books. This is the kind of help I’m reluctant to give, but it felt natural to join in when someone else said they’d go, and it ended up being a lot of fun.
• Hospital visitation – Last week I learned that after some surgery, a friend of mine, Ray, is in a coma, or something like it, and when I told Jeremy about it, he volunteered to go with me to visit him in the hospital, since he’s also met him, so we did that on Friday after work and then had dinner. We met Ray’s parents in the room, and at his mother’s suggestion I talked to him a little and held his hand, and she told us that he seemed to respond to music at one point by moving his head back and forth, so I’m deciding not to believe he’s gone yet. This is the kind of community involvement I had in mind, though in Ray’s case I probably would have visited even without the encouragement of Stephen King and Marvel. I wouldn’t have visited without the election, however, because the only way I knew about his condition was a Facebook post I saw while I was scrolling through for political posts.