Human Animals

Weekend Assignment #182: Compare yourself to the animal whose best-known traits are most like your own personality. Note this isn't "what animal would you like to be?" but is instead "what animal is most like you?" Also, don't be too worried if your identification is not totally biologically exact; listing your similarities based on the general cultural impression of the animal is fine, too. We're not doing science here, after all; we've doing end-of-the-week diversions.

Extra credit: Would you want to own the animal you identify with?

I'm not really like a tiger, not even Tony

Sometimes John Scalzi's Weekend Assignments feel like almost-reruns when they're not, because I previously wrote about a similar subject for the Round Robin Photo Challenges, or even just on my own. In this case, there was a Round Robin challenge a year and a half ago, called "The Animal Within." Over the course of two nights' entries, I wrote about a childhood fantasy of trying to communicate that I'd been transformed into a tiger, and how that eventually led to my writing about Rani Fost, a teenaged boy who becomes an animal called a tengrem. There are definitely times when I'd like to replicate Rani's experience, not in outward appearance but in truly knowing what it's like to experience the world through sensory impressions and instinct, rather than intellectualizing every moment.

None of this really answers Scalzi's question, though. It's one I find nearly impossible to answer, and a trifle annoying even to consider. It's always bothered me that humans insult or criticize each other using animal metaphors. I doubt that there's anything especially sleazy about a real weasel, for example. And women are objectified and debased under a bunch of animal names: cow, b-ch, fox, sow, nag, chick, hen, and so on. None of this has much to do with the actual animal, but in most cases it's an insult to both the animal and the woman.

Setting all that aside, though, let's try to do the assignment as written. Am I most like a dolphin, who is clever, friendly and highly verbal, but not so good on handling objects? A parrot, who can talk intelligibly and understand the words of others? A wolf, who sometimes travels with the pack but other times is alone? A mockingbird, singing all night? A tiger? A tengrem?

I suppose on the whole, I have to go with the obvious answer: a dog. Despite that maxim about old dogs, canines can learn a number of tasks, and are generally eager to please. Dogs are greedy for food and approval, keep irregular hours and are a bit lazy; but they usually get on well with people and are good at communicating with them. Check, check, check check check!

And of course, I've owned one or more dogs continuously since my senior year in college, and hope to do so for the rest of my life. Growing up in a house where at least one person was allergic to all the major kinds of pet except fish and possibly turtles, I always longed to have a dog. I collected bone china dog figurines, and planned a career as a dog breeder, whose specialty would be to breed purebred Pomeranians back up to sled dog size. I even remember petting dogs when at age 15 I toured Europe with my family, almost as pleased to do that as to step into the Louvre.

Really, though, the answer I want to give is that I'm most like a human, that fascinating, complex, contradictory animal which often tries to pretend, in its arrogance, that it's not an animal at all. Even when I'm writing about Rani at his most feral, chasing down foxes, grazing or growling, ultimately what I'm trying to examine is an aspect of the human condition. When we apply animal metaphors to people, what we're really trying to do is understand ourselves and each other, identifying traits and putting labels on them.

Ultimately it doesn't help much. Humans are too varied in their abilities and their reactions, their triumphs and their faults, their reasoning and their emotions, ever to be crammed into a tiger or a tabby cat, a pig or a pomeranian, a cow or a chicken. We are what we are: homo sapiens, that knowing animal that walks on two legs and thus looks down on other animals as something apart from us, or like us in a few handily labeled traits. Stuck inside our own human experiences, our unique way of viewing the world, we cannot truly know what it means to be a dog or a pig or a monkey. Heck, we don't really know what it means to be human; our own species continually surprises us with its brilliance and idiocy, kindness and cruelty, and any other behavioral continuum you care to name.

But it's interesting to consider, as Desmond Morris and others have done, how animal behavior works, and how some of those same imperatives underly our own behavior. Humans sometimes form packs of one sort or another, fight over territory, seek to protect our young, and on and on. Hmm. Maybe there's something in this animal comparison business after all.

Karen

One of those relatively perfunctory entries

I'm feeling just slightly unwell tonight, with a touch of "digestive inconvenience" that sometimes hits me when I'm under stress. Today has been a very good day, but a long one, and I promised to come in an hour early tomorrow. Tomorrow is also the day of my other interview with ARR! owners. I know it will be fine; I'm good at interviews, because I treat them as conversations. Still, the rest of my career could be riding on tomorrow, and my GI tract knows it.

I just finished reading the Harry Potter series all the way through, and don't regret it a bit. Tomorrow I dig back in on Chapter 27 of Mages of Mâvarin, with no distractions from someone else's fantasy world. Well, almost no distractions. Knowing myself and my Inner Weasel, I predict that I will be comparing and contrasting my saga with Rowling's, questioning whether someone might think one borrows from the other, even though I know it doesn't. Mâton isn't Hogwarts (if anything, it's Harper Hall), and anyway there are only a few scenes take place there. No, I'm not worried about it, but I hope I can use what I know of the works of Rowling and McCaffrey and L'Engle and Wrede and Duane to help me judge what bits from my own writing may need tweaking (or cutting; that's what worries me).

Vintage chairs in the front room


The Green Woman over the new couch

But that's tomorrow night. For now I leave you with a few new photos from the Museum of the Weird. The chartreuse chair is a favorite of mine, a surprisingly comfortable divan or lounger or psychiatrist's couch or whatever. It needs recovering, unfortunately; after 50 years or so the vinyl has split in several places. And tonight I noticed that John put our green woman print (sometimes I know the name of this once-famous painting, but not tonight) over the new couch. I was moderately pleased until I realized that he's taken down the Eighth Doctor's portrait, which I bought at TusCon a decade ago. John! What did you do with it? I don't mind it not being up on that wall, but I want it up somewhere.

That's not tonight's problem, either, however. Tonight's problem is getting as much sleep as possible and calming my digestive system, so I'm ready for another good, long day tomorrow. Good night!

Karen

P.S. I have now received a third nearly-identical solicitation from that same cluster of scam companies. I thought about telling them how transparent they are, but it's probably best not to tell them how to scam more effectively!

Minor Victories; the Enchantment of Books

I would probably have more to say tonight if I hadn't spent the entire evening rereading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I'm on page 597, and finding it hard to stop now. But I do have to work in the morning, so soon I will have to overcome the lure of the story, which pushes me on to the next bit, and the next. I hope that someday a number of you will pull all-nighters yourselves, wanting to know what happens next to Rani and his friends.

This afternoon I met with one of ARR!'s owners. It turns out I was right the first time: I have two job interviews this week. This one went very well, and I hope to be an official ARR! employee rather than a temp in the next week or two. Hooray! I've said it before: every day at this new job is better than the last. I told R., truthfully, that I can see myself spending the rest of my career with this company.

John had his own triumph today while I was having my interview and catching up on some work. He reorganized a bunch of boxes and furniture, and finally brought the couch we bought a year ago into the den. He's covered it with throws, which is a good idea but makes it less photogenic, so instead here's a picture of two vintage chairs, artfully arranged in front of the fireplace John painted years ago, and the mantle John redid at about the same time. I can't really disguise the fact that the carpet has seen better days, but it will be replaced eventually by something else.

Earlier today I was asked where I see myself in five years. I said that I'd like to see this house in better shape, all the renovation projects finally completed. I said I would still be here in Tucson, with the same husband, fewer debts, and probably a different dog. Sorry, Tuffy.

Am I settled for good? Is this our finally home? Is this my final job? Dunno, really. I think ultimately, when our debts are paid down and the market picks up, when this house is no longer a fixer-upper by anyone's standard, it would be nice to find a better, larger home, maybe closer to work. Really, though, I'm pretty content at the moment, although my back hurts from hauling in boxes from the storage space into my car, and on into the house.

And the book is under my arm, calling me.

The heck with it. I'm going to bed anyway.

Karen

Here

This is True

When I was in the local Star Trek club STAR Syracuse over 30 years ago, there was a member who liked to say, "This is true" rather frequently, with the result that it because a bit of a running joke with us. I don't remember for sure whether it was Will or the Doc Smith fan with the basement full of model trains, but whoever it was may also have come up with the fun guideline that "the Stop signs with the white borders are optional."

Anyway.

It's still Monday here, and my Linksys connection to the cable modem is all set up. My computer is back in my office where it belongs, and John is back in his office where he belongs. So now I'm free to do the reveal on that Weekend Assignment Scalzi set on Thursday. You remember, this one:

Weekend Assignment #181: Present three facts about yourself. Have two of them be true. Have one of them be false. Encourage people to guess which one is the false one. When do you reveal the false one? On Monday, in a new entry (I'll be linking to your original post). You'll get two visits for the price of one!

Let's explore my three claims, one at a time:

1. I'm scheduled to interview with two people next week, for the same job I already have.

True, although I had to update this claim on Friday evening to keep it accurate. Originally I said I had two interviews coming up this week, but on Friday the company president told me she couldn't make the Tuesday one, and would therefore sit in with her daughter on the Thursday one. Just as well, probably. As I believe I mentioned before, my position with Anonymous Regional Retailer! is currently on a temp basis. I'm on an agency's payroll instead of ARR!'s. Still, I'm being trained and treated like someone that my immediate boss expects to have around for a long, long time. I just have to continue to do my best, and trust the wheels will keep turning toward my being officially hired. I really, really, want this, and I'll feel much better when it's done. So far I've filled out an application and passed a credit check; C. didn't remember offhand whether my criminal background check was complete yet or not. Since my law enforcement background consists entirely of minor motor vehicle violations, I'm not worried about it.

2. Peaches frighten me, because of the cyanide in peach pits. I won't even eat the canned ones.

False, more or less. I do have a healthy respect for peach pits, ever since learning what's inside them, and would not want to suck on a pit that broke open. But I do eat fresh peaches from time to time, and canned ones occasionally.

3. There was a time when the greatest pet I'd ever had was a kissing gourami named Kisser. Runners up included a kisser named Gommis and a plecostomus named Mr. P.

True. My dad is allergic to dogs, while I'm allergic to cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, horses and feathers. What does that leave available to a sixth grader to have as a pet? In my case, the consolation pets were tropical fish in a ten gallon tank. I had some success breading mollys and swordtails, but the only fish that were at all interesting, with even a trace of personality, were pretty much the kissing gouramis and the plecostomus. Kisser even "kissed" my finger a few times, hoping it was fish food. Kisser was slightly more aggressive than Gommis, and eventually I became a little disenchanted with him for bullying. He wasn't nearly as aggressive as the angel fish or the pearl gourami, though. As for Mr. P., he didn't get inviolved in fish tank politics. He was just kind of fun to watch as hung from the glass by his sucker mouth, eating algae.

Years later, I briefly had a gerbil named Eowyn, but that was a disaster. She kept escaping into my dorm room closet,. It was a while before I discovered she was eating my prom dress.

Meanwhile, on the Monday Photo Shoot...

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Present a picture that clearly shows a particular emotion. Happy, sad, thrilled, bummed, anything in between.

Here in the house, I really only have two possible photographic subjects for this: the dog, and me in a mirror. John won't allow photos of himself online, and I'm having acne issue right now, and the dog has been drooling recently. Besides, Tuffy only has one expression except in rare circumstances. This is it:

Anxious

If I dig through my files, though, I can find some photos from church. This was taken on Good Friday 2007. Left to right: Father John Smith, subdeacon Howard, um...Something, and Rev. Angela Emerson. And they're all...

Happy.

Ah! That's better! And here's one of my former co-workers on the field trip to see the company planes. Anyone can see that this guy is kind of

Mischievous.

Scam Spam

I'm still getting solicitations for jobs, despite having taken my resume off Career Builder. I got a phone call this morning, purportedly from a bank. I say purportedly because the hangup when I said I'd already taken a job was a bit rude, and because one of the two other solicitations I had today was highly suspicious. Can you spot the red flags?

Dear Karen ,

The resume you posted on the Web caught my eye recently, and your qualifications mark you as someone who has the potential to excel as an Accountant. Too_Spoiled, a new kind of social networking site that offers the opportunity for models and actors to network with each other and with talent scouts, is currently looking for a candidate like you to fill one of our positions.

We are seeking candidates to fill this position immediately. In addition to maintaining records of routine accounting transactions, responsibilities include assisting in the preparation of financial and operating reports, including trial balances, adjustments and closing entries. Accountants may also assist in analysis and interpretation of accounting records.

The salary is very competitive, ranging from $55,000 to $70,000annually. Also available are medical and dental insurance, a 401(k) plan and tuition reimbursement.

Karen , if you feel the Accountant position is right for you, visit the link below and fill out the online application. (If the link does not work in your e-mail you may copy and paste the address in your browser.)

http://t00sp0iledjobs.com/careers.aspx?id=AccTing2_ts_accounting_08262007_0903&email=mavarin@aol.com

You can expect to hear from me one or two business days after I receive your online application. I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Regards,
Brian Egelton
Too_Spoiled

First of all, the blank space after my name before the comma was a dead giveaway of a form letter. Second, the business model of models and actors on a "social networking site" sounded like an attempt to prey on people trying to break into those fields. Third, why solicit an accountant from Tucson for a business that should be based in NYC or LA to be effective? And fourth, the salary range was considerably more than anything I've seen elsewhere in my job hunt - and the missing space after the $70K seems like another cut and paste error.

Still, it could have been legit. Even though I'm not looking for another job at this point, I was curious. So I Googled "Too Spoiled models." The first page of results screamed "Scam." Googling "too spoiled scam"--one of the suggestions in the search box helper--is even more instructive. I was going to past in some of those results here, but instead I think I'll just recommend that you do your own search. It's not hard to find the info. No, not at all.

Turns out that this is the latest incarnation of a (probable) scam company that's gone under a variety of names and opened offices in several states, only to steal away in the metaphoric dead of night. I'm not going to go on about it, but you may find a few of the links in the Google search rather interesting, particularly the ones about the multi-aliased man behind these online companies. One or two of the links I tried failed to open, but another site explained the problem. Apparently a few of the anti-scam sites have been targeted for electronic mischief of one sort or another. Anyway, bottom line: don't apply for any jobs online without first making sure the company is legitimate!

Update: I awake this morning to an extremely similar email from "John Chapman" of WorldVoiceNews, another entity of this cluster of almost-certainly-fraudulent companies. Some of the text is identical, including the space between Karen and the comma. Same pay scale, too.

Karen

In case I don't see you later...

...this will probably have to stand as my blog entry for tonight. See, John has been battling for hours with command prompts, MAC addresses, unhelpfully labeled screens, competing connections and none-of-the-above options. In short, he's been trying to get my computer on the cable modem that his Mac uses. He's finally done it, after hours of frustration. But that's only half the battle.

What we're trying to do is this: there's a Linksys wireless router that I bought at least a year ago, that theoretically should enable us to create a wireless network inside the house, so our computers can talk to each other and, more importantly, the cable modem. This would mean that I would finally be able to dump the excruciatingly slow dial-up connection and its attendant problems, and cancel the paid AOL account while retaining the Mavarin screen name.

Thing is, though, this is proving exceedingly difficult to do. The CD that came with the router had no interest in running on John's Mac, for one thing. For another, the various bits of equipment expect the user to know all about PPP and other protocols, how to find all the settings and configure them with no guidance whatsoever. At one point John crashed my VAIO, ejecting the Linksys CD during an attempted shutdown. The computer refused to turn on again no matter what I did. It eventually turned out that it wasn't quite turned off, and holding down the on/off button for a long time finally got it off. Once it was off, we could turn it back on.

Anyway, he's finally got the cable modem working on the laptop, but not wirelessly. That's the next step, and he probably won't tackle it tonight. So the VAIO stays in his office instead of mine for now, and chances are good that he plans to plug the cable modem back in to the Mac overnight. If I want to work on Return to Mâvarin, I'll have to do it in here after John goes to bed. And John himself advised me to get my blog entry in now, in case I can't do it later.

I'll let you know how it goes from here. Meanwhile, I'm most of the way through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which means I'm most of the way through my rereading of the saga. And I'm now planning to back through Mages of Mâvarin from the beginning as soon as I get to the end of the current edit, this time for the specific purpose of deciding whether each scene is really necessary. The characters certainly have to think about and talk about what's going on every step of the way; it is their reactions in such situations that determine my plot, not any cleverness on my part. But there's no reason every one of these conversations and soliloquies has to be reported verbatim in the books themselves. Each scene needs to accomplish something that is not covered elsewhere: a bit of character, key info, action, conflict, something. If Rani spends 1100 pages just talking (which he doesn't; I'm exaggerating), then it makes for a dull and redundant story.

Unfortunately I have a bit of the writer's disease called Every Word Is Golden Syndrome. I love these scenes, and I will probably feel that they're all important. Will I be able to get past that, and make a good determination which scenes should go and which must stay? I have no idea - but I expect I'll find out before the autumn is well advanced.

Karen

Who Has Time for Web 2.0?

After 11 1/2 hours of glorious sleep, interrupted by an hour of blogging, I read some Harry Potter and the latest First Magnus news from my Google News search, and headed off to Sears for new tires. Two hours and a couple hundred dollars later, my car had decent tires with no nails in them, plus the alignment Sears and One Stop Automotive have been recommending for years.

Tonight I've mostly been working on Chapters 26 and 27 of Mages, mostly clearing out some outdated and wordy speculation by Fayubi about the spirit attack. Incidentally, the page count for the overall trilogy went back up to 1176 when I recounted Chapter 26. Evidently I'd moved a scene into there from an earlier chapter. Mystery solved - the old page count was 1177. Oops! Now I've recounted 27 and the page count is up to 1180. Mystery unsolved. How can I cut so much text and end up with a longer book?

I also wrote Part Two of Later This Somewhere, finally, in the form of a letter from Jace back to Sandy about the weird theatre Sandy found. Aside from that, I spent some time messing around with a few social networking sites for no good reason.

So okay, these social networking things have their uses. People like connecting with each other through sticking virtual pins on a Google map, browsing each other's photos, seeking out other fans of Inigo Montoya's speech to Count Ruger, checking out blogs at random, and on and on. But really, I don't understand how anyone can follow more than one or two of these online services. Heck, I can't begin to read all the blog entries by online friends whose blogs I consider well-written and enjoyable, no matter how much I cut back on that list. Who has time for blog jogging and also Twitter and Flickr and Frappr and Flixter and MyBlogLog and BlogExplosion and the school reunion sites and MySpace and whatever sites are out there? Add the quiz sites and the wikis, the personality tests and the dating sites, and it's clearly possible to spend eighteen hours a day, every day, just playing around with Web 2.0 time wasters.

Nevertheless, I signed up for MyBlogLog, on the basis of a widget on Carly's blog Ellipsis, which lists recent visitors. I hope that those of you who are signed up with MyBlogLog will join the Mavarin community, if only so the widget on my page doesn't continue to show nothing and nobody. I'm very interested in seeing who stops by, even if you don't feel the need to comment.

This MyBlogLog also connects to Twitter, something a few of you use, and the site I understand the least. Twitter wants to know what we're all doing every moment of every day. Whatever for? I don't find my own actions all that interesting on a moment to moment basis, let alone everyone else's. I posted eight updates on the thing tonight, basically just so my most recent was no longert several months old. Really, though, who cares? The only news of significance on there was the new Jace and Sandy entry on Messages and tonight's writing update, both of which I've mentioned here.

Yow, it's almost 2 AM. Despite this morning's lie-in, I'd better start heading bedward.

Karen
(listed as Mavarin on a social networking site near you!)

Sleep Trumps Lameness

After dinner, clearing out about 50 emails and some work on the first two chapters of Return to Mâvarin, I went to bed at 11 PM tonight without writing a blog entry. Chapter 26 (Chapter 2 of Return) is one of my favorite chapters in the whole pseudo-trilogy, but even that could not keep me awake for my traditional Friday late night internet session. And oh, yes, I forgot: I spent a little time fooling around with a badge generator Scalzi mentioned a few weeks ago. I was not impressed.

The plan was to sleep for a few hours, get up and post something, and possibly go back to bed afterward. I woke up at 3 AM from a dream I was enjoying but can't remember now, and here I am. I suspect that the dream involved the Anonymous Regional Retailer (ARR!).

I hoped that the resulting entry would be less lame than this one is turning out to be. Ah, well. At this moment I would rather write something less-than-fascinating and go back to sleep than labor for an hour or two on something better. The beauty of this is that I may be able to get some outrageous amount of badly-needed sleep, something in the double digits. It may not work, but it's worth a shot.

Friday morning, John woke me early with the news that I had a flat tire. He took my flat spare to be filled with air. Then he came back and attempted to raise the Eagle on the cheap folding jack that came with the car. The car kept slipping off the jack. Not good. So John had to drive me to work instead.

Meanwhile, I used my Sprint phone to call John's office and let them know he'd be late. Somehow, though, I hit the wrong speed dial, and called John Anthony Blake instead, known to Doctor Who fans as John Levene, known to me and a few friends as John Manynames. He played Sergeant Benton on Doctor Who in the 1960s and 1970s, and he's a great guy, funny and friendly, energetic and interesting. I recognized his voice immediately, and ended up chatting with him for five minutes before excusing myself to call the other John's company.

So that was my introduction to the day. After that I put on that new red top with the open neckline, but clasped it shut with a pin I inherited from my mom. (The shirt isn't roomy enough to look good with another shirt on underneath it.) This actually worked out well. Husband John drove me in, and I had my best day at work yet, working on several tasks I knew how to do. I didn't get them all done by the time John returned at 5:20 (I made him wait ten minutes before leaving for the weekend), but that's okay. Nobody really expected me to get through it all in one heavily interrupted day. Still, it's progress.

I also met some people from other parts of the company in a monthly meeting, with pasta. And I was able to introduce John to my boss and a few other people. This really isn't something John enjoys, but Anonymous Regional Retrailer! is a friendly, people-oriented company, and I knew it would go down well. Besides, I'm proud of John and like showing him off occasionally, even if John himself doesn't care for it.

Another milestone of the day, the end of my first week at ARR!: I faxed in my first timesheet to the agency that placed me, having first called for a few instructions. This will certainly do for now, but I look forward to being on ARR!'s payroll instead. Two of the emails I read tonight were follow-ups from the agency's recruiters, and I'll check in with them after the holiday.

Meanwhile, I do believe I'm going back to bed. Mmmm...sleep!

Karen