Damn Me For An Amateur
May. 11th, 2009 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianYesterday was all manner of fun, if vaguely painful. And even if there was a little bit of argument with my mother. At least it was good-natured. I keep forgetting how insistent my mother can be about things she wants to see me wearing.
There was lunch - I'm a little devastated because that place in Chinatown with the Best Beef with Black Bean EVAR closed down, but we found someplace nice with a good express lunch menu. Meet-ups with my mother are a lot better than they used to be because I can actually talk about stuff that bothers me; the vents and frustrations and stresses I've got at the moment are okay to talk about to friends sometimes, but sometimes you just can't beat mother-sympathy, especially when the said mother knows how to help and when to just offer some advice and back off. That and just under half a bottle of wine, and I felt a fair bit better. Yay perspective.
Then came the shopping - if there's one thing my mother and I do well together these days, it's shop. Really, it started with a trip to Boots - Mum needed a few things, and we picked up some bits for me as well. Nothing major at that point, but I got some new lip gloss (I have this thing for flavoured lip gloss, some of you may recall) and toothpaste and some cream for that itchy, swelling eyelid that kind of works, plus this stuff that's designed to hide the dark circles that seem to be perpetually under my eyes no matter how much sleep I get. Comes of being pale, I suppose. All in all, it was good.
Then, though, there was the more fun shopping - to a point, anyway. See, one of the things that tight finances has meant is that we hadn't been able to get a copy of the new Jim Butcher novel, and my Hoodoo deserved a treat as well, we thought. So we spent some time trekking all over the West End, looking for that book. Harder to manage than you think when Borders didn't even seem to have received a shipment and was waiting on one for next week. The man I spoke to at the info desk was disappointed, and it seemed he was a fan too, so there was a nice chat. I like being the Good Customer Asking For Info; beats the couple of Rude Stupid Interrupting Twits we got mid-search... Anyway, I finally found the book at the WH Smith in the Plaza shopping centre on Oxford Street and disturbed a fair bit of clientele with the squee. I've let my Hoodoo be the first one to read it; usually, I get first dibs because I read the quickest, but this is part of the gift. Yes, it pains me. I know I'll have to wait days. But hey, sometimes you make sacrifices.
Following that, there was a window-shop for shoes. Sometime in the not-too-distant, my mother and I are going to go on the day-long quest for The Perfect Pair of Funky Shoes. Personally, I have my eye on a pair of funked-up Victorian ankle boots, but The Perfect Pair of Funky Shoes cannot truly be found without a day-long quest or a lot of time spent browsing the internet. And I can't see myself buying shoes on the internet, as I have wide feet and what size I take depends on the design of the shoe. It's a pain. Anyway, then I just popped my head into H&M to have a look at a pretty top and next thing I know, Mum's decided that I need new summer clothes and I came out with four tops, a skirt and a cardigan, and narrowly escaped going away with a pair of hemp-heeled platform open-toe shoes that I unconditionally despised but that Mum desperately wanted me to have because she insisted they looked good on me. Maybe, but if you don't think you look good, it doesn't much matter. Cue five minutes of Mum saying, "I still think those shoes looked good on you..." and us finally having a fairly good-natured argument on the lines of, "I hated them, Mum; please stop!" Sometimes we shop well together, but there's always a sticking point.
Then I came home and made steak. I was too tired to work the HIPPIEcast last night, though I desperately need to re-record Chapter 15 after royally ballsing it up the other day. So I'll do it today, following a cheap n' cheerful treat-lunch out and doing the washing-up. I think I'm destressed enough not to rush the reading this time around. Also, at some point to day I need to email Mum and say, "Yes, my Hoodoo would like to be included in the trip to see "Waiting for Godot", thank you very much". Woo!
As an aside, I'm a little bemused about the people who end up following me on Twitter. I get a fair bit of spam same as the rest of the Twitterverse, but then I end up with fantasy authors I've never even heard of (how the HELL did these people find me?), Alasdair Stuart of PseudoPod and its related podcasts (that would be down to my Hoodoo; at least I know where that 'random' friending came from...) and just ... yagh. I've recently come to the knowledge that there are people I don't know - people who do this kind of thing, and do it a lot better than I do - listening to the HIPPIEcast at the moment and it's actually kind of nerve-wracking. I know that this is to be expected, but ... Steve Ely? Alasdair Stuart? Getting intoarguments debates with people who can write me into the ground over gender roles in fiction? What happened to my little amateur groove? AAAAAA!
Okay, I'm done with my panic attack. Now I go eat lunch.
There was lunch - I'm a little devastated because that place in Chinatown with the Best Beef with Black Bean EVAR closed down, but we found someplace nice with a good express lunch menu. Meet-ups with my mother are a lot better than they used to be because I can actually talk about stuff that bothers me; the vents and frustrations and stresses I've got at the moment are okay to talk about to friends sometimes, but sometimes you just can't beat mother-sympathy, especially when the said mother knows how to help and when to just offer some advice and back off. That and just under half a bottle of wine, and I felt a fair bit better. Yay perspective.
Then came the shopping - if there's one thing my mother and I do well together these days, it's shop. Really, it started with a trip to Boots - Mum needed a few things, and we picked up some bits for me as well. Nothing major at that point, but I got some new lip gloss (I have this thing for flavoured lip gloss, some of you may recall) and toothpaste and some cream for that itchy, swelling eyelid that kind of works, plus this stuff that's designed to hide the dark circles that seem to be perpetually under my eyes no matter how much sleep I get. Comes of being pale, I suppose. All in all, it was good.
Then, though, there was the more fun shopping - to a point, anyway. See, one of the things that tight finances has meant is that we hadn't been able to get a copy of the new Jim Butcher novel, and my Hoodoo deserved a treat as well, we thought. So we spent some time trekking all over the West End, looking for that book. Harder to manage than you think when Borders didn't even seem to have received a shipment and was waiting on one for next week. The man I spoke to at the info desk was disappointed, and it seemed he was a fan too, so there was a nice chat. I like being the Good Customer Asking For Info; beats the couple of Rude Stupid Interrupting Twits we got mid-search... Anyway, I finally found the book at the WH Smith in the Plaza shopping centre on Oxford Street and disturbed a fair bit of clientele with the squee. I've let my Hoodoo be the first one to read it; usually, I get first dibs because I read the quickest, but this is part of the gift. Yes, it pains me. I know I'll have to wait days. But hey, sometimes you make sacrifices.
Following that, there was a window-shop for shoes. Sometime in the not-too-distant, my mother and I are going to go on the day-long quest for The Perfect Pair of Funky Shoes. Personally, I have my eye on a pair of funked-up Victorian ankle boots, but The Perfect Pair of Funky Shoes cannot truly be found without a day-long quest or a lot of time spent browsing the internet. And I can't see myself buying shoes on the internet, as I have wide feet and what size I take depends on the design of the shoe. It's a pain. Anyway, then I just popped my head into H&M to have a look at a pretty top and next thing I know, Mum's decided that I need new summer clothes and I came out with four tops, a skirt and a cardigan, and narrowly escaped going away with a pair of hemp-heeled platform open-toe shoes that I unconditionally despised but that Mum desperately wanted me to have because she insisted they looked good on me. Maybe, but if you don't think you look good, it doesn't much matter. Cue five minutes of Mum saying, "I still think those shoes looked good on you..." and us finally having a fairly good-natured argument on the lines of, "I hated them, Mum; please stop!" Sometimes we shop well together, but there's always a sticking point.
Then I came home and made steak. I was too tired to work the HIPPIEcast last night, though I desperately need to re-record Chapter 15 after royally ballsing it up the other day. So I'll do it today, following a cheap n' cheerful treat-lunch out and doing the washing-up. I think I'm destressed enough not to rush the reading this time around. Also, at some point to day I need to email Mum and say, "Yes, my Hoodoo would like to be included in the trip to see "Waiting for Godot", thank you very much". Woo!
As an aside, I'm a little bemused about the people who end up following me on Twitter. I get a fair bit of spam same as the rest of the Twitterverse, but then I end up with fantasy authors I've never even heard of (how the HELL did these people find me?), Alasdair Stuart of PseudoPod and its related podcasts (that would be down to my Hoodoo; at least I know where that 'random' friending came from...) and just ... yagh. I've recently come to the knowledge that there are people I don't know - people who do this kind of thing, and do it a lot better than I do - listening to the HIPPIEcast at the moment and it's actually kind of nerve-wracking. I know that this is to be expected, but ... Steve Ely? Alasdair Stuart? Getting into
Okay, I'm done with my panic attack. Now I go eat lunch.
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no subject
Date: 2009-05-11 11:36 pm (UTC)You do realize that being an "amateur podcaster" really
only means that you aren't so self-absorbed that no one
wants to hear the drivel you put out, right? Because if
you are any sort of functional podcaster, then you have
a following (check), which spawns wandering curiosity from
others (check), and before you know it, you have ppl
*SQUEEEEEEing* over the mere mention of little things like,
I don't know...your characters randomly appearing on Twitter (CHECK!).
8D