Month: November 2011

So I disappeared there at the end of the Thanksgiving countdown. We decided at the last minute to go to an extended family thing out of town…and I ignored the internet and my phone all weekend. Felt good.

Today I’m finishing up some revisions, which are intimidating but going well, I think. Most importantly, they’re almost done. I’ll just stay focused on the work in front of me, and almost done will soon transform into completely done. That’ll be nice.

I’ve noticed this trend lately–people ask me questions for which I have no answers. Questions about my future book release, about my future writing, about my future child, about my future in general.

Guys, I have no idea. You can keep asking, but it’s not going to make me form any ideas. Why? Because I’m focused on the work in front of me. And it’s so absorbing that I can’t bring myself to think about anything else. I’m dealing with my life the best way I know how: do what’s next, and try to stay prepared for the future generally. I’m happy that way, because I’m not making plans that will inevitably not work, because the future looks different than I intend it to. I’m just going to stay flexible about it, which means not forming answers to those questions. I can’t predict the future, and I can’t control most of the elements of it. I’ll deal with it when it becomes the thing directly in front of me. Today? That thing is the end of my revision. I’m going to go work on that now.

This plant hadn’t bloomed in six years. This year it put out five flowers. Guess it likes its new window location.

I am thankful for miracles.

The way I see it, this world is full of entropy. The natural state of everything is to decay: homes, possessions, finances, relationships…everything.

And so we put in lots of work to keep things from decaying, applying our energy to combat all the entropy.

But sometimes there’s nothing else we can do. And then, sometimes, someone else puts in that energy for us. Someone else fixes problems we can’t fix. And sometimes, it seems no one’s applied that energy. The decay just reverses itself.

And to me, those times are miracles. The world is full of them, and I’m thankful for that.

Took the weekend off again, so here’s another group of related things to catch up:

I’m thankful for my friends. Because I have seriously awesome friends.

Until I was 23, I thought I was the only person in the world like me. And then I stumbled upon my school’s science fiction lit magazine, and into a roleplaying group I met there.

And I discovered this: I am a geek. There’s a whole community of people like me. I just didn’t know where to find them.

After a few years of hanging out at the game store, I’ve collected a group of what I consider to be lifetime friends. The kind of friends that can walk into your house without knocking–the kind you give your spare room to and are happy about it because you get to see them more. As one of them said last year, “I don’t think any of us can afford to lose friends like these.” And that’s the truth.

One of the major reasons Drew and I decided to stay in Utah and buy a house here was that our community of friends is so awesome. I’ve had a lot of geek friends in the community move away over the years…and most of them lament the community they lost here. No one seemed to be finding anything better. So we decided that, since we can do our jobs from anywhere, we’d very much like to stay here, thanks.

Of course, I miss all those friends who’ve moved away, but they’re also the kind of friends that I know are still my friends even if I don’t see them all the time. And when we have time, we keep in touch. And when we don’t, we catch up the next time we have the opportunity. And nothing changes. They’re still my friends, and I love them all.

And so we continue meeting with the roleplaying group we’ve been meeting with weekly for almost six years. (This is the group where we met, incidentally.) We have regular LAN parties. I have writing groups. There are too many wonderful friends around here for us to get together with everyone as often as I’d like. And for a person who didn’t find her tribe until she was 23, that’s a truly wonderful thing.

Relatedly, I’m grateful to live in Utah Valley. It’s popular to complain about Utah. But I find that people here are generally friendly, the economy here is relatively healthy, and the cost of living is one we can manage on our not-so-large artist incomes. The gamer geek community here is thriving; the writing community is flourishing. I don’t hate the weather, we’re close enough to Salt Lake City that there’s plenty of cultural things going on that we love. We’re close to Sundance, which has become one of the highlights of my year. Our local library has the best media section of any I’ve ever seen. We have two Universities within a ten minute drive, which means a local art museum and more theater than we can attend. In general, life here is really, really good. I hope to continue to enjoy it for a long time.

And lastly, I’m grateful for my church community. After years of being in congregations of students or post-students–transient congregations of people who moved in and out constantly–it’s so nice to be in a real neighborhood with people at a variety of life stages. This particular congregation is full of lovely, kind people, who are fun and interesting and treat each other with respect. I love that. I love how genuinely the people in this neighborhood care about one another. It’s wonderful to be in the company of so many people like that.

Apparently I am a slacker this week. That’s not true. I’ve gotten a large chunk of revising done. I now have the whole shape of my revision in my head as it applies specifically to each scene of the manuscript. That was no small undertaking. I’m working on translating that into actual changes to the prose.

But I haven’t done anything else.

So here are several short (er) things that I’m thankful for.

Medication: In the fall, more than any other season, I am aware that my body doesn’t work quite right. It perceives pollens and dust particles as dangerous and decides to react as if it’s being invaded. I don’t think this causes any pain for the pollens or the dust particles, but it sure does inconvenience me.

So I’m glad that there are these magical pills and sprays and things that I can put into my body to compensate. I know they aren’t really magic, but when the doctor says “let’s try this,” I can’t help but feel like this science isn’t as exact as it’s cracked up to be. But I’m glad that I don’t have to be sick all the time, and that all I have to do to stay reasonably healthy is swallow a pill.

Medical Insurance: This is one of the things I was afraid of about self-employment. I think a lot of people are. But it turns out that for two reasonably healthy people, getting good individual insurance in Utah is really easy. (Note all the caveats in that previous sentence. I really wish it were easier for people everywhere regardless of health, but that’s not a thing I’m thankful for, so we’re going to move on for today.)

We’re with Select Health, which is a division of IHC, who own most of the hospitals in our area. And they are fantastic. I really never thought I’d say that about a health insurance company, but this is the first one I’ve dealt with that always bills us for the right amount the first time, always covers what they said they would, and gives excellent customer service over the phone. I’ve also had a great experience at all of their contracted facilities. My life is made so much easier by knowing what I’m going to have to pay for medical services, always, and not having to put up a fight over it after the fact. Plus, they do this awesome thing where they limit the maximum allowable charges on every medical expense, so that even when we pay a bill out of pocket (rarely), we usually end up paying only half to a third of the original bill.

They’re not perfect, and they don’t cover some things I think they should cover, but I’m so, so grateful for my medical insurance.

Being two reasonably healthy people who can get individual coverage: That said, I am so very aware that coverage like I have is not possible for a very large number of people in my nation. And that medical care and medication are not available to an even larger amount of people in the world. I am so grateful that we happen to be pretty healthy people, and that we happen to have gotten the coverage we have when we did. If we weren’t, we literally could not have the lives we have. If one of us had major, pre-existing medical conditions, one of us would have to have a job with good benefits. Period. I feel guilty for being so lucky (because there’s nothing we did to deserve it) but I’m grateful that we happen to fit into the group of people for whom good, affordable, individual coverage is possible. I hope in the future that window of opportunity will open for more and more people, because good medical care is pretty basic for good quality of life.

I am thankful for my camera, because it is awesome.

Apparently I took the weekend off. I took it off from just about everything. Played a lot of Oblivion.

Which brings me to today’s point.

I’m thankful for video games.

I came to gaming late. We had an Atari 2600 when I was a kid, and I suffered through Kings Quest V in the mid-nineties (or the beginning of it anyway), but I was never what I would call a gamer.

Then came Easter 2006. Some friends sat me down to play Halo. One of the selling points for this friend of mine was that the campaign has an awesome story.

Wait, what’s that you say? Video games have stories?
This was news to me. Exciting, enlightening news. The kind that opens up a whole new world.

It turned out I really sucked at Halo. The two-thumbstick orientation was really disorienting. But over the next few years I played anyway, mostly with friends. And then, when we were engaged, Drew brought over his X-box and ran me through Fable.

Since then, we’ve played dozens of games. I’m proud to say that I have gone from sucking at Halo to holding my own in Halo 2 Legendary. My favorite genres are the JRPG and the FPS…though I really can’t handle any game that doesn’t have a really good story. I hold my video games to as high a standard as my movies and books in that regard. And a lot of them hold up.

Mostly, I’m glad to be able to consume a story in a way that doesn’t feel like work. (I love books…but I feel like I’m on the clock when I read fiction. Occupational hazard, I guess.) I’m glad to be able to get together with friends and hook our boxes together and fight aliens. I’m glad to be able to hang out with Drew for hours and work our way through epic stories, and less epic ones.

It’s fun. And I love it.
And I’m thankful for that.

I am thankful for taxes.

No, seriously, I am.

I’m even thankful to pay them.

I know that it’s popular to be down on taxes these days, too. But I’m proud to be able to contribute to funds that help people who are unemployed feed their families, and people who can’t afford it to have health care, and people who live under tyrannical governments to not be totally slaughtered by their leaders. (Yes, I am thankful that there are thousands and thousands of people in Benghazi who are not dead, and that my tax dollars contributed to that, in some small, small way. Among other things.) I’m thankful that we pay government leaders to do things like make it illegal for insurance companies to deny coverage to sick children. I’m grateful for regulations, and for the government-imposed consequences that enforce them. None of that would be possible without taxes.

I’m also grateful for all the ways in which those tax dollars bless my life. I’m thankful for roads. (Even though my neighborhood is currently inaccessible except at the whim of construction workers.) I am thankful for police officers and the fire department. I’m thankful for my public education and the public loan funding that helped me to get a graduate degree.

I am so grateful for taxes, and to live in a country that does so many wonderful things with them.

Seemed like a good day for a yellow flower.