Daily Archives: January 9, 2012
The Whelming Process
A lot of people have been asking me if I’m nervous about my writing conference next week (!!!). I’ve mostly said no, and that’s mostly true.
However, the closer the 20th comes, the more I find myself swaying toward the side of the fence where saying I’m not nervous is mostly a blatant lie. I’ve also managed to contract bronchitis and a sinus infection (also known as The Snot That Wouldn’t Stop), which has left me mostly dead all week.
I've been mostly dead all week. Image via paperdragonartwork.com
I don’t have a friendly giant to haul me around, either. Pooh.
The closer the 20th ventures, the more I want to deny the fact that I am overwhelmed. And yet…I am totally overwhelmed. I’m sick, tired, full of snot, and let’s face it — the last thing I feel like doing is sequestering myself in our chilly spare room so that my constipated dinosaur of an iBook can stay connected to its life support and I can work on my revisions.
This conference is one of those Life Things — a Life Thing that is Really Quite Large and Imposing. It has the potential to nudge the trajectory of my path in a new direction. And I’m spouting snot.
It seems appropriate — if not ironic — that today I caught up on the newer lessons in the workshop I’m taking from Kristen Lamb, and she talked about her experiences blogging about being overwhelmed. I have an awful lot to do and less time to do it in.
I have several necessary and preparatory appointments for the conference this week: haircut, headshot photoshoot, doctor’s appointment, massage. (Yes, the latter is necessary.) None of that helps the whelming process here.
Today was Doctor Day. And you know what happened there? I coughed on a nurse’s face.
She was in the middle of swabbing my throat with a strep culture stick, and she tickled a tonsil and HACK – right at her. Face. Not only that, but my throat launched something phlegm-like in her direction, and judging by the horrified look of shock she wore immediately after, it made contact.
She proceeded to punish me by sticking what looked like a dental floss/Q-tip hybrid up both sides of my nose until I began to turn into the mucus monster. There may have been some accidental tearing as well. She left the room with the swabs, and when she came back, I was coughing and oozing out of various facial orifices. All in all, this was an unpleasant experience for my day off.
So I had that adventure, but I can tell you what didn’t get done: any little bit of work on my novel. The time is getting closer, and I’ve busied myself by coughing on nurses and oozing.
I’m sure many of you can relate to this predicament (even if you’ve yet to catapult phlegm at a nurse’s face) — the trepidation that arrives as an Important Life Thing approaches when the world seems to conspire against you (and the nurses, it seems).
What do you do to get yourself on track? How do you take your Whelm-O-Meter from “OVER!!!” to just plain, normal-y “whelmed?” Have you ever known something important needed to be done but obstacles kept piling up?
Please, O Sagacious Gentle Viewers, share with me thy wisdom, for I am poor and weary in spirit, and in my nose too much snot abounds.
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Like this:
Monday Man: Xander Harris
The last few days have seen me curled up in bed alone after long days of work with only a book for company. I’ve been sick and sniffly and generally full of snot, so my husband has opted to sleep in the living room, where it’s more quiet and he doesn’t have to wake up with his face in one of my dirty tissues — the living room is also free of the pirouetting raccoons that live in our ceiling.
I’ve taken three books to bed with me this week: Kushiel’s Dart, the Buffy Omnibus, and a deliciously sturdy hardback compilation of Tales of the Slayers and Tales of the Vampires, just called Tales. The latter two are graphic novels, so I’ve had Buffy on the brain.
Which brings me to today’s Monday Man: Xander Harris
There's two of him. But only sometimes. Image via Wikia.com
Xander is the very first of the Scoobies that Buffy encounters at Sunnydale High. He subsequently sticks his foot in his mouth, where it remains on and on for the next seven years. Xander’s character has always fascinated me. Of all the characters on Buffy, he is the one who most noticeably lacks any superpowers. It rankles him that he gets told to stay behind when Buffy and Giles and Angel (and progressively, Willow) go off to fight the baddies, and for much of the first few seasons, you can see him poking around looking for a place to call his own.
Xander is that awkward guy with an uncomfortable home life who the cool kids like to pick on, then pick on more when he stands up for himself. In other words, he’s me at age 13. He’s not super-student, nor is he into sports or anything that might make him stand out. The one thing that does make Xander a cut above the rest of the guys in Sunnydale though, is that he is an intensely loyal friend.
He saves Buffy’s life at the end of season 1, and he defends Willow when he thinks anyone is putting her in danger — even herself. He does discover his strengths later in the series and puts them to use, settling himself nicely with a career and a new home even though he didn’t go to college. He slowly evolves into a patient sort of person you want around after a crazed monster attack.
Xander also has some serious weak spots. He loathes Angel (founded a lot on jealousy), and he has a few big hypocrisies that he somehow manages to keep a blind spot about. (No pun intended.) Though he dates and almost marries Anya, an ex-vengeance demon who murdered hundreds — perhaps thousands — of people for pleasure for a thousand years, he remains staunchly critical of Buffy’s choice of men, to the point of insulting her about it and bringing it up whenever he has a chance. When Anya turns demon again, he berates Buffy for the choices she has to make until she has to remind him of the massive sacrifices she made to protect the world from the people she loves. It’s a fun little irony, his griping about Buffy dating demons — because throughout the seasons, it’s Xander who’s the real demon magnet in Sunnydale (in one episode, literally).
In spite of his prejudices, Xander sticks by Buffy and the Scoobies to the end, risking more than the rest of them because he lacks the power and experience that his friends have. In one of his shining moments in season 7, he tells Dawn that he sees more than everyone else does because no one is watching him. He is the heart of the Scoobies, and that’s why he is today’s Monday Man.
Xander: Yeah, I get that. It’s just — where else am I going to go? You’ve been my best friend my whole life. World gonna end – where else would I want to be?
Willow: Is this the master plan? You’re going to stop me by telling me you love me?
Xander: Well, I was going to walk you off a cliff and hand you an anvil, but it seemed kinda cartoony.
Xander Harris, I salute you.
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- Wednesday Woman: Dawn Summers (emmiemears.com)
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Then and Now (omg.yahoo.com)
- Thrilling Thursdays: A Buffy Halloween (thedilettantista.com)
- 30 Days of Buffy Day 6: Favorite Male Character (essaysonbuffy.wordpress.com)
