everybody gets presents
Wed 2014-04-23 23:10:02 (in context)
I've been saying "I'm 38" pretty much since the turn of the year--not, "I'll be 38 this April," because that sounds like trying to draw attention to when my birthday is and then expecting people to remember it, which I'm not; and not "I'm 38 and three-quarters" because that sounds like something little kids do when they want to sound older than they are and still get credit for being scrupulously accurate, which I'm not; but just, "Meh, I'm 38." Or "I'm about 38." Or even "I'm almost 40," which is kind of like the little-kid-trying-to-sound-older trick, but it's more like what a grown-up with a touch of impostor syndrome and too much baby-face does to try to get taken seriously by the 40-something set.
But today I am actually 38. At 4:15 a.m. Central Standard Time, however that translates to timekeeping in the United States 38 years later, I was exactly 38. Huzzah for completing another lap around the sun!
Since 2007, April 23 has also been celebrated amongst us online writer types as International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. In honor of this, I humbly link you to several early, early online publications of mine--really early, like, "I'm not sure I actually want to try to get this reprinted" early--whose original homes have gone the way of late-90s websites and remain with us today by the grace of the Wayback Machine (in two cases) and of someone who decided to mirror the entirety of the old Geocities website community (in the third).
"Deadline Performance" (the ink blotter, ed. Chris Donner, 1999)
No, that's the right page. It's after Claudia Carver's piece, "Is It Writing Yet?" Which you should also read.
"Twice Told Conspiracy Theories, or 'Look at the cute little kitty!'" (The Raven Chronicles, July 1997)
Errata: Cats generally only have 18 claws, not twenty. I hadn't lived with one yet, so I'd never had occasion to count their toes. Also, the sentence about dandruff lost a clause and a half but I'm not sure what it originally said. My own file is in WP51 format and I haven't enabled this computer's copy of MS Word to translate it yet, or I'd check.
"A Mirror's Lies, A Moment's Rainbows" (The Raven Chronicles, Spring 1995, print edition)
Tonight being my birthday, John and I went out to celebrate at the Melting Pot in Louisville (that's "Lewis-ville, Colorado" not "Louie-ville, Kentucky"). We had a fantastic bottle of wine and a decadent four-course meal, three courses of which involved dipping things into delicious, delicious molten lava. John's favorite lava is chocolate-flavored. I'm partial to cheese lava, myself, although I think my favorite is filet mignon cooked in that spiced and seasoned lava they call "court bouillon."
While we were enjoying this, a mother and very small son duo gently interrupted our meal, conversation, and game of Ticket To Ride (the card game is compact and can be played almost anywhere) in order to give us a copy of Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters. This is a book that sounds right up my alley. From its back-cover blurb to its choice of front-matter (the paragraph from Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales that ends, "Would you like anything to read?"), it sounds like it might, alongside books such as Jo Walton's Among Others and Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, stand as a novel-length praise song to books and the love of books. I look forward to finding out for sure by reading it. Ravenously. Possibly without sleeping.
So I got a birthday present from a complete stranger. Thus was I reminded that April 23 is also World Book Night in the U.S..
April 23 is truly an auspicious day for a writer to be born on! Obviously. I mean, it worked for Shakespeare...