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LJ Idol, Topic 8: What the New Year Will Bring -- Riverside in Ohio
I don’t know how or when this happened, but New Year’s Eve is my holiday of deep anxiety. Maybe it was spending so many lame ones around the TV with my parents when I was a teenager and everyone else I knew was out being fabulous. Conversely, though, it may be the legacy of one or two great New Year’s that I have felt a burden to recreate. Either way, despite being a huge believer in magic and serendipity and luck, it is only on New Year’s that I become hideously and mundanely superstitious – whatever you’re doing that night is what the coming year will bring.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to reason with myself about this. Failing to succeed in renouncing my aggravating spookiness about the day, I’ve begun finding weird, convoluted ways to avoid New Year’s – most notably when I left for Australia on December 30, 2004 and arrived in Sydney on January 1, 2005, leaving December 31st excised by the International Date Line. If such a yearly ritual was plausible in my life, I’d surely go for it.
This year, the impending New Year will also be bringing me places, although in this case, that’s Ohio, which can do me no such favors thanks to international time-telling treaties. It does, however mean that I will get to kiss Patty at the stroke of midnight (barring Greyhound mishaps, fits of sneezing or even sudden death), and that it gives me a delightful literary excuse to bring a basket of goodies with me for her and her family.
You see, Patty and I met through fandom. Specifically, er, writing porn about Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint. And while I’ve been involved with and have become life-long friends with people I’ve met through fandom before, there’s a certain hilarity factor here that’s hard to explain and mostly involves the fairly surreal reality of our lives here in New York from People We Know to Things I Do. You kids all know I’m a historical and classical fencer by now, right? Seriously, I keep swords by the bed, and this is probably only funny if you’ve read the book (read the book!)
In the most recent of the Riverside books (as the three novels and some short stories set in that universe are known) one character pays a surprise visit to another on New Year’s Eve, thus helping answer a question fans of the novels had been waiting for, for _years_ (this is me trying not to spoil you). He has a basket of goodies in tow, and hence, I’ve decided so will I.
So the New Year is going to bring me, and a basket of cured meats and local cheeses, pear or apple or cranberry champagne from a local winery, cookies and clemintines to Ohio. Lacking in fish and angst and involving modern clothes, transportation and a distinct lack of weapons, it won’t be anything like the book, but it will be exactly like us.
As for the rest of the year, who knows? As much as I love solidity and certitude and am given to prognostication, I have no idea. I could not have possibly guessed at this time last year that my now former roommate would have moved to China, that Patty and I would be both dating and shacking up (this time last year we hadn't even met in person), that I would get a principle role in a major motion picture or that I’d land a book contract. For that matter I couldn’t have possibly guessed my mom would get breast cancer, have surgery and then not need chemo – even when bad things happened in 2007, and they did, they happened well and useful.
I have had in the last year more moments of serendipity, of the truly fictional life, and of hope and absurdity than I could possibly count here. So despite knowing an inordinate amount of details about travel plans and book promotions and client obligations and grand adventures already on the slate for 2008? I’ve got no damn idea what the New Year will bring. And as long as that bus gets me and some delicacies to Ohio in one piece, that’s okay. We’ll work out the rest as we go.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to reason with myself about this. Failing to succeed in renouncing my aggravating spookiness about the day, I’ve begun finding weird, convoluted ways to avoid New Year’s – most notably when I left for Australia on December 30, 2004 and arrived in Sydney on January 1, 2005, leaving December 31st excised by the International Date Line. If such a yearly ritual was plausible in my life, I’d surely go for it.
This year, the impending New Year will also be bringing me places, although in this case, that’s Ohio, which can do me no such favors thanks to international time-telling treaties. It does, however mean that I will get to kiss Patty at the stroke of midnight (barring Greyhound mishaps, fits of sneezing or even sudden death), and that it gives me a delightful literary excuse to bring a basket of goodies with me for her and her family.
You see, Patty and I met through fandom. Specifically, er, writing porn about Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint. And while I’ve been involved with and have become life-long friends with people I’ve met through fandom before, there’s a certain hilarity factor here that’s hard to explain and mostly involves the fairly surreal reality of our lives here in New York from People We Know to Things I Do. You kids all know I’m a historical and classical fencer by now, right? Seriously, I keep swords by the bed, and this is probably only funny if you’ve read the book (read the book!)
In the most recent of the Riverside books (as the three novels and some short stories set in that universe are known) one character pays a surprise visit to another on New Year’s Eve, thus helping answer a question fans of the novels had been waiting for, for _years_ (this is me trying not to spoil you). He has a basket of goodies in tow, and hence, I’ve decided so will I.
So the New Year is going to bring me, and a basket of cured meats and local cheeses, pear or apple or cranberry champagne from a local winery, cookies and clemintines to Ohio. Lacking in fish and angst and involving modern clothes, transportation and a distinct lack of weapons, it won’t be anything like the book, but it will be exactly like us.
As for the rest of the year, who knows? As much as I love solidity and certitude and am given to prognostication, I have no idea. I could not have possibly guessed at this time last year that my now former roommate would have moved to China, that Patty and I would be both dating and shacking up (this time last year we hadn't even met in person), that I would get a principle role in a major motion picture or that I’d land a book contract. For that matter I couldn’t have possibly guessed my mom would get breast cancer, have surgery and then not need chemo – even when bad things happened in 2007, and they did, they happened well and useful.
I have had in the last year more moments of serendipity, of the truly fictional life, and of hope and absurdity than I could possibly count here. So despite knowing an inordinate amount of details about travel plans and book promotions and client obligations and grand adventures already on the slate for 2008? I’ve got no damn idea what the New Year will bring. And as long as that bus gets me and some delicacies to Ohio in one piece, that’s okay. We’ll work out the rest as we go.
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To a happy and healthy one!
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But seriously, thank you. Since you have read the books and know the full, larger story, how fucking funny, yeah?
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it makes me giggle all the time.
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I do hope you have an awesome 2008.
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CB
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Safe travels, and many happy returns to you and yours this New Year. :)
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Yup! I missed that one!
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I vividly remember my life being the same when I was a teenager, I suspect that might be fairly common among eccentric only children.
So the New Year is going to bring me, and a basket of cured meets and local cheeses, pear or apple or cranberry champagne from a local winery, cookies and clemintines to Ohio. Lacking in fish and angst and involving modern clothes, transportation and a distinct lack of weapons, it won’t be anything like the book, but it will be exactly like us.
That sounds absolutely marvelous, and definitely very much in keeping with your wonderfully fictional life. You are to be congratulated on making your life the way it is now.
I could not have possibly guessed at this time last year that my now former roommate would have moved to China,
What's she doing in China
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I currently actually can't add people that I don't know in person-- I'm under a fairly strict confidentiality contract, and people have already been put under fire for their various bloggings.
However, you can check out photos of my adventure on flikr under the username "megansarak" and I would be more than happy to add you there.
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Your New Years superstition is funny, the Australia thing pure genius. What New Years? I skipped it... IN THE AIR!
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Heh. I can relate to that.
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May your 2008 be an awesome one.
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My current daydream is to move to Thailand for a month at the end of all this and train to be a Muay Thai warrior and have mystical symbols tattooed upon my person. I could seriously do this for like USD$700.