Heads-up

My friend Joshua Newman's production company, Cyan Pictures, is getting ready for the release of its first full-length feature film. I Love Your Work should be in a theatre near you soonish. Check out the trailer and see if it looks like your thing - initial reviews are positive, and the cast is absolutely stellar.

There is nothing I can title this post that does not smack of teenage angst

Well, that was ....

"agonizing," I believe was the word I caught our client using at the end of that conference call, not knowing that I had not yet hung up my phone.

So, yes, agonizing. The project I've been working on for the past year just went completely south. It's been horrifying watching it head that way, slowly at first and then gathering momentum as it went. It had picked up speed exponentially in the last month, with abusive emails, extensive edits, approaching deadlines, and now a cancelled meeting. (That's a cancelled meeting for seventy-odd people who were planning on flying in from around the state in a few weeks, not a cancelled meeting with my co-worker down the hall).

On the other hand, we have now hit bottom, and at least we did it before we went public. And this may give us the time and the resources to get back up and make this something really good, instead of the "you want what on what deadline?!" disaster that this has been developing into since August. We can pick up the pieces now. We can go on. We can do better.

I just.

I am really good at taking responsibility when things go wrong. If I screw them up, I am not afraid to say so. And I am not perfect, so I do screw things up, and hopefully I learn more each time about how not to do it in the future.

But I'm not so good at not taking responsibility, or I don't think so, maybe I'm fooling myself. We didn't have the time, and we didn't have the resources, but I can't help feeling that it's my responsibility that it didn't go better. I'm the project manager, for chrissake. If it's not my responsibility, whose is it? I'm sitting here in shock, trying to process or cry or produce or let go, and it's not happening. If only I had, if only I'd done, if only I'd been morebettersmarterharderworking. If only.

Random linkage and commercial mavening

Man, I can beat most of the people I meet at Boggle and Scrabble and such, but not the folks who play WEBoggle. I'm consistently wasting time scoring in the lowest third. (Also, SSCrabble, which I haven't played yet but which looks great.)

I haff Christmas lights up! *bliss* I took a picture but am too lazy to get it off the camera and into the computer and onto the web, so you'll have to take my word for it. My father put them up for me, and they make me smile every time I look at them. We also haff ants, which is less blissful. The Thanksgiving celebrations brought them out of the cracks and into the holiday cookies, grrr.

Since there are some of you who are not yet done with your holiday shopping, I thought I'd post links to a few places I love to peruse for gift ideas, and some weird stuff I've found over the years that's fun to give. No, this is not an excuse to bounce around the web looking at neato things, why would you think that?! NB: This is not a wish list.

• Uncommon Goods is the home of the ettiquette napkin, a great many funky recycled products, the disappearing civil liberties mug, and Freudian slippers.
  
• Infectious Awareables does scarves, ties, tees, cards, and more with actual scientific images of diseases, including ebola, breast cancer, anthrax, HIV, flu, and more. They donate a lot of their proceeds to medical charities.
  
• Similarly, Giant Microbes will sell you a cuddly plush toy Influenza or Smallpox; in my house, we own the stuffed Ebola and Black Death. Also available through ThinkGeek, which sells other awesome geek gadgets like a ring that is also a bottle opener, which I would have coveted like nobody's business in my heavy beer-drinking days.
  
• Urban Outfitters is very hit or miss, but when they're good, they're good - my past hauls there have included a set of bowls that exhort the diner to "suck it up", a sexual-position-of-the-day shower curtain, and obscene cookie cutters.
  
• Neat things I don't have particularly neat sources for: Scrabble tile jewelry, if you know an enthusiast. And another disappearing mug - this time, it's Henry VIII's wives. Taylor and Ng sell mugs with understated images of various copulating animals, v. klassy.
  
• For books, there's always the pop-up Kama Sutra, Lego™ Biblical stories, and a million more. Nick Bantock did a lovely pop-up Kubla Khan at one point. Those are all available through Amazon. I'm also a big advocate of giving stationery for gifts - more useful for many people than candles or soap, and a good impersonal-but-nice thing for people you don't know well. Pomegranate does nice sets, or there's always Fold and Mail stationery in a variety of themes.
  
• I love to do charitable donations through Just Give; they track your giving for tax purposes and will send email to your recipient, for electronic giving. If you want to leave the choice of charity up to your giftee, they do a gift certificate that the recipient can use with any of the thousands of charities in their database.
  
• Or, of course, for the Person Who Has Everything, there's always the Octodog. You can buy it through Stupid.com, a site with a godawful interface but that nonetheless sells a good variety of, um, the kind of "unique" products I am far too liable to give people as gifts.

Yes, I am totally swamped with work, hence the linkspam. I can't help it.

My job just made me cry. That is just so wrong on so many levels that it makes me tired to think about it. One more year, and I will never take on anything like this ever again. One more year.

Social life

I've gotten out a lot more since the depression lifted, and I have to say, I get tired of being the loudest, most talkative person in a room. Of course, if I got tired of it while I was doing it, that would solve the problem, right? But I keep driving away from gatherings with the sound of my own voice ringing in my ears and wanting to sort of bang my head against the steering wheel a bit.

It's not every occasion that does it; the fewer people and/or the more at ease I am with them, the better I behave, for the most part. I feel I'm probably at my best in groups of four or less, or in gatherings of people I've known for a long time. Groups who are connected to one another in other ways are easier than groups where we are equally unfamiliar with one another, too, for some reason. But when it goes beyond that, it's like I've got two settings - "off" (me knitting over in a corner, or working on something I brought with me) or "on on on on on".

It's exhausting. I'd stay home this weekend, but I'm already committed to a housewarming party in the City; luckily, I think that after that November is mostly family commitments.

I voted in every election since 1994, and all I got was this lousy President.

Remember this, from about a year ago? (GAO to investigate election complaints - CNN)

Well, the report is out (GAO - .pdf doc). And it's confirming a lot of the problems with the new voting machines that I'd heard noises about in 2004. I find a lot of people blogging about it, but not one peep from larger news sources - am I Googling the wrong terms?

I'm not much of a consipracy theorist, but I do believe there was something wrong with our last two elections, from the serious questions about Florida practices and the whole Supreme Court partisan debacle of 2000 to the freakish anomalies reported all over Ohio and other swing states in 2004. We don't have much time to resolve these issues before 2006 rolls around, and not that much more before we're back on the Presidential campaign trail. So where is the public discussion? What do we need to do to get some action around here?

Speaking of elections, yesterday's was a total waste of time and money, out here, with everything at the state level shot down in flames. However, California aside, I was glad to see that Virginia and New Jersey gained Democratic governors, and that Maine (god bless 'em) defeated an anti-gay initiative. It gives a girl hope for the future, despite Texas.

Specifically, I keep hoping that the level of muck the GOP is wading through right now (Plamegate, Iraq, Bush's approval ratings in the wake of Katrina and Miers) will tar them with a lasting effect that will see a nationwide Democratic backlash not unlike the post-Starr Republican roar of triumph. Maybe 2006 will give the Dems enough seats to take away Republican control of Congress, wouldn't that be lovely?

Finally, I think I have a political crush on Barack Obama. So smart! So well-spoken! So charismatic! I'd pull the lever for that man any day, you bet.

Squid update

20 week ultrasound last week, and sure enough, there's the squid, almost sucking his (yes, his) thumb there, curled up comfortably. I can feel him move around now, and the doctor says that all his measurements and his tests have come out "perfect." The only thing they're worried about is my weight, since I haven't gained any; I'm not too worried about it, since I eat well, and I eat whenever I'm hungry, until I am full. But it's just incredibly odd to be an American woman, pregnant or no, and have your doctor tell you you need to gain weight.

Actually, it's pretty odd to be pregnant, too. I mean, I was thinking about this the other day, and as a feminist (of whatever wave), pregnancy just feels...weird. Unfeminist, somehow. I mean, maybe not in terms of how I consciously construct feminism, but at some subconscious level, it seems odd to suddenly give so much of my life and attention over to a biological function. All my life, the message has been that I have choices, I have options, I have abilities because of who I am, not what I am; I can take charge of my sexuality, my career, my fertility (where "taking charge" is generally used to mean "not getting pregnant") - biology is not destiny, & etc. To consciously choose to do something that is so fundamentally gendered and biological is strange and disconcerting, particularly as it means choosing the historical/cultural "default", the very thing liberation gives us an option not to do. Or, yes, to do, but the choices still feel weighted.

I'm also glad to report that I'm feeling much better physically and emotionally. The depression was pretty severe there for a while, but it seems to have cleared up, in large part, and my appetite is back. I'm enjoying the "eye" of the pregnancy now, the time before I get really huge and uncomfortable and after the part where I felt really sick and miserable. May it last a long time. And I'm excited, now, more than I was before - my thrilled-to-terrified ratio seems to have taken a flip-flop now that we are past the halfway point and going strong.

I spent yesterday in San Francisco, visiting friends both with and without small critters of their own, and it was wonderful to reconnect and remember that I exist outside my work and my home and the internet. I'm also feeling the holiday spirit come on early, so there has been much wrapping of presents and suchlike; soon both our families will descend from all over the nation to share a turducken with us (did you know that you can also buy duckens and turchickens?) on Thanksgiving and then after that the playing of carols and baking of cinnamon rolls will commence. I love this time of year.