I See a Red Door and I Want it Painted Black

I just changed the ring tone on my phone to the opening strains of “Paint it Black”, and now I laugh every time every time someone calls. The melodrama! I have always taken issue with Trent Reznor and his brand of manufactured teen angst, resenting him for what always seemed to me to be little more than coldly capitalizing on the misery of adolescence, but I never saw “Paint it Black” that way. In fact, I wonder if this song wasn’t a joke. Were Mick and Keith making fun?

Anyway.

Hello, by the way. I’ve missed you. Pledge is finally over, and may I say this has been the roughest stint I’ve ever had. Why? Because I’ve been sort of promoted, and can now beg for money with the best of them, on any program, at any time. And I even had to pinch hit as a producer for a while, which means that I have truly arrived. Pleased with myself? Why, yes! Pitching is a lot of fun sometimes, and a big change from sitting in front of a computer. The downside, though, is that it SUCKS THE LIFE OUT OF YOU. I know it’s small potatoes to the world at large, but pitching really is performing. Live. And there’s no real script. And the people you work with change with every show. It’s exhausting.

Add that to the pledge work I normally do, which often involves being at the station at 5am, and put that on top of my normal work, and you can see why I’ve been absent from Behind the Stove for a while. I’ve been absent from pretty much everything else, too.

I’m back now, though, after a peaceful Sunday filled with naps on various couches and chairs, and a day off yesterday that allowed me to tackle the mountain of laundry piled in my basement and catch up on some neglected school work.

And reading! I finished Mapping the world of Harry Potter, which is a collection of essays (mostly by other fantasy writers) about the six existing books. If you like Harry Potter at all, this book is worth a look, if for nothing more than the Joyce Millman essay about Snape. Did you know the Internet is rife with “adult-oriented” fan-fiction starring none other than Severus Snape? Naughty!

I read a lot of comics through the drive, and I finished with a re-reading of Marvel 1602 and then bought its sequel. I only mention this because the sequel, written by different authors (Neil Gaiman wrote 1602) was the first comic I chose on my own—everything else I’ve read has come through friends who are huge comics geeks, or Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin), and it’s total crap. Not only is it hard to follow, but it’s not at all compelling. I’m sure under Gaiman’s hands it would be just as interesting and exciting as the first, which goes to show that good writing is good writing, whether the novels in question are graphic or not.

Speaking of writing, I’m still working on Middlemarch. Does anyone else think Eliot hated Dorothea Brooke?

Teddy is really enjoying The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle. We took our books with us when we went for a snack at Ryan’s Pub the other day, and my boy sat in a bar with his book, reading and laughing aloud. Am I growing a proper little nerdling, or what? Add to that the fact that we’re reading Harry Potter books aloud to each other—complete with accents!—and the boy has no hope for ever being cool. He could shave a Mohawk into his blue hair, slap on a leather jacket, buy a motorcycle, smoke unfiltered Camels, pierce himself until he's sieve-like, and do time in the stony lonesome, and STILL not be cool.

That’s about it for me. I roasted a lovely rosemary-lemon chicken yesterday, and made soup, and baked cookies . . . comfort food, comfort reading. Regular working hours. Clean laundry. My happy, dorky kid. And lunch with Val. All is right with the world.