Yesterday, I hung out with Lewis until late. Got to talk about this and that, visited a secret pinball club full of beautifully-restored machines, had a beer. I got home around midnight and couldn’t sleep; I finally made it around 3 or 4 AM.

Which was a problem, as my mom and I were going to have breakfast with a friend of hers around 9AM.

We both made it out there on time – a little early, even. I really didn’t participate in conversation much because the place was incredibly noisy; every single surface was hardwood or tile, and the place was fairly full, so there was a constant din of people talking that covered up the conversation at my own table. It was another of those “big piece of white paper over the tablecloth” kinds of places, so I pulled out a pen and did unflattering caricatures of people at other tables. Including a dude who I swear was a dead ringer for Andy Capp.

After that, we dropped off a ton of slides at a photo shop to be digitized. Two big boxes full of carousels of slides my dad took. It’ll cost about $950 to digitize them at $.50/slide, but I kinda felt I needed to – there really aren’t many links to my father any more, and the idea of just pitching them all felt wrong.

And then we went back to my mom’s place and basically slept half the day away. I got up for a while and poked around the net, then decided I wanted to play some Monaco, so I bought it on Steam. I realized that I can’t use the combat weapons, as I’m playing with keyboard; they get aimed either with a mouse, or the right stick on a controller, and I had neither. Which kinda suited me just fine; it just pushed me to be stealthier and more cautious, which is how I like to play sneaking games anyway.

Then I slept some more.

I was hoping to get the next page of Rita in the queue but I seemed to have absolutely no energy. My mother and I both seem to have crashed our energy levels by going out so damn early.

In my inbox today:

Dear Margaret:

With unlimited reward seats and no blackout dates, Rapid Rewards® makes it easy to use your points. Since Southwest Airlines® merged with AirTran® Airways, you have over 95 destinations to visit.

To help you start crossing off those destinations, we’re going to give you 1,000 bonus points when you complete your next reward flight!

[…]

Where will your points take you?
Whether you’re dreaming about the beaches in San Juan, seeing the sights of New York, or climbing mountains in Denver, your next trip could be around the corner. Explore your possibilities with our Destination Finder.

Ooh! Wow! I must finally have enough frequent flier points to go somewhere! I’m excited; this is the first time I’ve built up enough for that. Let’s see what’s available!

Yeah. Um, maybe I’ll hold off on using those for a while yet.

I think I became a role model today.

My mother and I went to visit some old friends of mine who live across the lake. Their daughter, who’s normally pretty shy and retiring, ended up talking to me a LOT; she’s started to become interested in art, and I was lazily doodling on the paper tablecloths at the place we went for lunch. I let her use my cool fountain brush pen, I talked to her about monsters (she is currently fascinated by them), and stuff like that. She showed me her sketchbook and I showed her some drawing tips. And a tiny fragment of Rita though not enough to really read it since I didn’t want to explain some of the adult themes. Her parents were all “holy crap I’ve never seen her talk to someone like that”. She also showed me her recent acquisition of an authentic feather quill pen, which I was told is a mark of high acclaim in her eyes.

I think I am going to visit the art store when I get back home and send her some more really interesting drawing tools, and a couple books. Just kind of gently offer some direction, if she wants to stick with this “draws stuff” path.

They live out in Abita Springs. Arguably, she needs role models of crazy artist ladies with hair the color of fire and opinions about mythical beasts. I’m pretty sure she’s been lacking in them beforehand.

(Also on the drive out there I (a) told my mother the precise details of how many psychoactive chemicals I’ve done, and (b) went on a comic rant about getting all the right-wing Randroids out of everyone’s hair by shipping them all to Texas, shipping the sane people out of there, and letting them make their own little nation-state of ultimate capitalistic dog-eat-dog dreams. And when it collapses in on itself we just laugh and tell them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. I may have been riding a sugar high from a snowball during B.)

All the travel I’ve been doing for cons this past year has turned me into a packing expert. I’m going off to my mom’s for a few days, and packing feels super-simple when I don’t have to hassle with all of the stuff I bring to a con’s table. I just grab a few days of clothes, roll them up, and stick them in a duffel bag; put the computer, an iPad, and my pills in the computer bag, and I’m pretty much done. A day or two before the last minute, even – I did most of that last night.

Of course, it helps that “putting an iPad in the computer bag” is substituting for “go to the bookstore/library, get enough books to amuse myself for the plane trip, put them in carry-on bag”. That took a lot of time and space. Nowadays I tend to do my book shopping sitting in the departure lounge via Amazon.Though I think I’m gonna poke at Amazon now while I’m thinking about it.

oh god Amazon’s recommended list has Iain Banks’s book about a guy dying from cancer on it. The one he started writing before he knew he had terminal cancer. I do not think I’m ready for this one. Not on the airplane.

Once upon a time, an artist made a very serious bet with a king. The stakes: if the artist could draw a perfect fish in the span of one year, she would be given enough gold to fill three swimming pools. If she could not, she would be killed.

A year and a day after the bet was made, the king came to the artist’s studio. She sat in the center of a bare room lined with cupboards, with a blank page before her.

“Where is my fish?” the king said. “Have you forgotten our bet? Do you forfeit that easily?”

The artist smiled, and picked up her bush. She made three simple lines in as many seconds. And there, on the paper, was the purest essence of Fish the king had ever seen.

The artist was duly rewarded with her life and her gold.

As the last of the gold was being brought in, the King turned to the artist. “I’d like to know one thing,” he said. “If you could draw a perfect fish in three seconds, why did you need a whole year?”

The artist laughed, and opened one cupboard after another in her studio. Thousands of drawings of fish fell out, each one different, each one beautiful, some of them densely labored-over, some of them dashed off, but none of them as perfectly a Fish as the one she’d given the king.

“I needed a whole year to learn what to leave out,” she said.

I really wish I could remember enough details to find a better rendition of this story on the net, but sometimes you’ve just gotta tell a story yourself, I guess.