I’m tempted to declare Wordpress bankruptcy. I have 5 drafts sitting in my queue, one of which has been there since December of 2010. Pro: I can move on, and actually maybe be productive. Con: I actually have things to say in those drafts, and deleting them will destroy any memory of the words already accumulated. So they sit and stink up the queue another week.

This won’t be an omnibus post, only because it’s going to be short. In fact, it’s over now.

Not giving up, though. I have several hours before class still.

Already we’re caroming toward final exams. I have been squeezing what I can from the last handful of doses left in my med stash, and then I’ll be in free-fall until I can afford to go back to a psychiatrist to get a prescription. Last year I tried to go without meds, and it got me not much. This year I employed them strategically, and it has made all the difference in the world in my academic performance. But the comet I spoke of last semester is not nearly as strong, its mass sapped by the sun’s heat. It’s still there, but I’m not screaming right now. I’ll take it.

My personal goals have slipped somewhat in pursuit of success in my graduate work. I’m still reading Pride and Prejudice, though my friend Fox was kind enough to send me another book to read once I’ve finished it (Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttock’s, Brontë’s Grave, by Simon Goldhill). I have written only two letter since my last post. But I did manage to knock out another beer today That write-up must wait as well, for I have work that needs doing for my last project of the semester. I took pictures to accompany it, though!

I filled out a bracket for the NCAA tournament, and then actually managed to get excited about the games themselves despite myself. My NC State Wolfpack did well, but not well enough–Kansas bounced us out of the Sweet Sixteen after an exhilarating upset victory against Georgetown. That game was made especially sweet because in 2008, my alma mater UMBC made it for the first and only time to the Big Dance, and Georgetown took them out in the first round. I consider myself avenged! And surprisingly, my bracket did not fall completely. I correctly predicted 11 of the Sweet 16, 5 of the Elite 8, 3 of the Final 4, and both teams in the championship match. Update: And I picked Kentucky to beat Kansas. Winner, winner, chicken dinner! All told, I had a 77% success rate. Not too shabby. Now if only Michigan State hadn’t choked…

Grad work has been like pulling teeth. I have been loathe to medicate, but it’s coming down to brass tacks, so I am finally back on board for one final push. In addition to the inevitable work I must catch up on (yes, I have fallen behind), I have two papers to write before the end of the semester, and two monster exams. But I can do this. Here comes the comet again…

My motivation for the next week is a visit north to Maryland. I am helping my sister with a stream cleaning project in her neighbourhood, mostly by being the guy who makes the power breakfast before and the victory beer after. I’ll be bringing up a case and a half of springtime treats–an IPA, a blood orange hefeweizen, and a dunkelweizen, all made with love. If I can finish all the work that is due by Weds. night, I can head up to MD with zero nagging doubts and no work to try to bring with me. If you want to spend the day before Easter in lovely Ellicott City with a bunch of fuzzy hippies cleaning a stream, let me know and I’ll get you details.

I want this blog to be more than just my doings–I want to write about things that matter. I have so much to say that just doesn’t make it to paper. I will try harder.

In the run-up to the movie, the twitterverse was abuzz with the…lack of buzz about John Carter. The prevailing sentiment was that Disney must be afraid that it’s terrible, so they’re not marketing it. And my friends (one in particular) were somewhat skeptical that Disney could do it proper justice. Fortunately, the lack of hype is very much undeserved. You don’t need to know anything about Barsoom to get into it, but Disney still did a bang-up job of not insulting the audience’s intelligence along the way. It is an SF romp of the best sort–pulpy, full of character, and exploratory in that brisk, keep up or get left behind pace that is a hallmark of the genre.

So the venue we took it in was the Six Forks cinema, a fairly old-school movie house (by modern lights). No stadium seating, and the theaters only seat, like, 150 people. But–and maybe this is a North Carolina thing–they served beer on tap! And it wasn’t just AB-InBev/MillerCoors swill, either! Seriously. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale AND Yuengling! They were out of the SNPA, so I went with Yuengling. $6 for a proper pint, but I’m not complaining in the least. Final words about the venue: they were clean, and didn’t run stupid slides in the theater while we waited for the show. And hooray beer!

I jotted some notes down while watching. Amidst all the other thoughts that rise up when trying to sum up the movie, the best word to use is coherent. Its narrative structure is solid, and it retains forward momentum at a freewheeling pace, characters coming and going, without blundering about. Things are thought of that should be thought of. And for that I am supremely grateful. So many movies fail that test–many of them aimed squarely at me. No seams show, and perhaps that’s just my lowered standards that allow me to derive pleasure from such a simple fact. Moreover, its plot is far from straightforward, though it does have its boy meets girl/boy gets girl/boy loses girl/boy wins girl arc that is classic Disney. Lots of moving parts in this flick, both metaphorically and literally. It’s set in a fairly standard trope–hey, look, I found this book written by my mysteriously-dead uncle, wherein I can relate to you what he experienced. And it all resolves nice and clean; it’s not what some people might call gripping or complex. But within and without the confines of the story’s frame, there’s twists and turns that keep you guessing.

The little details are just as coherent as the larger scope. The machinery is rife with steampunk motifs that gel very well with the movie’s American post-Civil War historical setting, and the flying ships evoke humanity’s early designs while still seeming incredibly more advanced. My favorite design is the helm of the larger ships. They have not just a sailing ship’s wheel that the helmsman would turn by means of handles on the outside–but a truly great wheel whose circumference the helmsman stands inside. It gives you the sense that the wheel is connected in a very physical sense to the workings of the flying machine, but in a manner far beyond our feeble efforts. It is simple and grand and wondrous and alien all at the same time. So, too, are the ethnic differences of the non-humans in the film. Perhaps a little too pointedly, the ways of the Thark people are, well, not John Carter’s. And somehow, they’re still sentient, organized, and believable. Even the other “humans” aren’t a culture John Carter can blend in with–a misread offer of a handshake yields unexpectedly rich humor.

The film’s mood, if not its plot, has surprising depth. Its brooding tone (with a score to match) is not completely heavy-handed, but loss is a major theme for every character, and their responses to it as the plot rolls on are telling. I confess that the strings of my heart were pulled at a number of points! There’s so much I want to say about it, but ultimately, it’s worth going to see for yourself. It’s gorgeous, like a gem, formed whole and then carved into crystalline brilliance by a watchful eye and a careful hand. There are some criticisms to reckon with, most prominently an utter lack of ethnic diversity in the cast, but that’s a meta-quibble that I do not feel detracts from the movie’s main purpose. It’s spectacle, lovingly rendered on the big screen. The production is top-notch at every angle. It makes you want to just drink it in from the word go, a fitting metaphor for the parched planet that is the setting for most of the movie. And then it lets you.

A few more spoilery thoughts follow.

No, really, we’re talking multiple SF story spoilers below, so stop reading if you want to watch the movie without an overlay set in place.

Last warning. OK, here we go. Highlight to read:

This movie has Vorlons

You have just witnessed the death of a joke by its explanation. But it still tickles me and many other silly people, so that’s all that matters. So, set forth bravely today, remembering that Xenophon did as much, even when faced with certain death at the hands of a king with literally hundreds of thousands of warriors at his disposal. Take heart: you, too can make it out alive with a whopper of a tale! And I just sneezed, so it must be true.

Exelauno Day!

Write, edit, and submit one novel OR three short stories
I have written some, but mostly on actual paper, and not enough for a single short story yet. I’m developing a period in my current setting’s history, but it’s been stolen between moments of procrastination and terror. My progress: D+

Read 25 new books
I have only finished one book. I have two that I’m juggling right now (GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy & Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice), but they’re on my smartphone, which has fallen out of use of late. I need to grab paper copies, or print them, and just finish. My progress: C-

Brew 12 distinct styles of beer on my stove
Two beers are bottled (a special bitter and a sorghum ale), and a third (an American IPA) is in secondary for dry-hopping. No trouble there, though I predict a slowdown, as a few brewing minions have stepped up to join the rotation in our little homebrew circle. My progress: A+

Find paying work in the teaching/tutoring field
I got word that a classmate was leaving a tutoring gig, and I leapt at the chance to fill it. Scored a phone interview right off the bat, but I got bogged down in paperwork and school deadlines loomed. So I cut bait and hunkered down. Not ideal, but it was good practice. (Also nerve-wracking!) My progress: B-

Volunteer 50 hours in the local community
I had opportunity to help with a community yard sale, and grad school ate my free time that week. I should have stuck it out, but let’s just say I suck and move on. My progress: D-

Write 50 letters
I got a good start–I have sent five letters, and written a sixth. Two have even been replied to, but I have been less vigorous this month and not gotten on maintaining the dialogue. Must do better. My progress: C+/B-

Overall, I’d say I’m rating about a C- or a C. Not very inspiring, but not altogether hopeless. Grad school is the chief priority, and my progress in these things illustrates this, but it is also an easy excuse for why I fail to make progress. (I have somehow managed to fall into the trap of new grad students the world ’round: procrastinate until the last possible moment.) I must do more, in every way. I must be more for the world. I owe it to everyone around me, even those people I have not met.

How have your new year’s resolutions progressed?

Two things today. First, I finally bottled the sorghum that I took so many pictures of. I waited a full four weeks before bottling it, even though I wanted to bottle at three, but the gravity was not quite low enough yet at two. I got a chance to employ my swing-top pint bottles that originally held mediocre Trader Joe’s Italian beer. (These days, I mostly buy new beer for the experience and, really, the bottles.) But it’s sitting in the closet, and should actually be fully carbonated by now, but it’ll be green if I open one, so I’ll let it nap for a couple more weeks to fully bottle-condition. The advantage to bottling is that you allow the yeast to naturally carbonate your beer instead of spending $150 on a kegging setup. The trouble, however, is that you subject them to the fermentation process all over again, and so you must wait a couple weeks until they’ve cleaned up their chemical mess. Yeast are very polite little machines–they micturate alcohol and fart CO₂, and then defecate by-products like acetaldehyde, which leaves a green apple-like taste. But if you give them time, once they eat up all the available sugars, they’ll start on the acetaldehydes. Yes, they’re very polite, eating their own waste.

The other is that since I was bottling the sorghum, I wasn’t about to waste the yeast cake. But I still don’t have pint jars or tongs, so I couldn’t just wash them and store them. But I had enough supplies to make an IPA, so that’s what I did the same day. When I first started drinking serious beer, I was the opposite of a fan of the hoppy types. I would go around saying I hated hops. And, truth be told, I’ll take a nice malty pint any day over these hop monsters that so many American craft breweries are kicking out. But hops make beer. So for my third of 12 in 2012, I went for a nice, low-end IPA. (By low-end, I mean 55 IBU, 6% ABV.) It was my first time brewing in the monster kettle I acquired–5 gallon capacity! So now I can brew 3-gallon batches without needing more than a quart or so of top-up water.

The brew went very well, and racking onto the well-established yeast cake meant that fermentation was done in 2 days flat. I gave it a week total to condition, and today’s gravity sample was right on the money. Oh, heaven! One of the major reasons I didn’t like “hoppy beers” is because for quite a while, American beers have been heavy on hops–but as much in the back end as anything else. A new technique is gaining ground to put the focus on the flavor and aromas of the various hops in play, called late-hopping or hop-bursting.And hop-bursting is what I tried with this beer. It worked beautifully! Bold Cascade hop flavor up front, only a hint of bitterness from the very small amount of Centennial added at the beginning of the boil. But I was planning to add aromatics a new way, rather than just addng hops at the end of the boil. Instead, I am building in an unmistakable spiciness from Chinook whole leaf hops by letting them soak in the beer after fermentation is complete–it’s a technique called dry-hopping. I could have just tossed them into the primary fermenter, but I have never done a secondary, and it gives me a window to brew another batch later this week in my 6-gallon again.

It’s a madness, this brewing thing. It eats at my mind. But it’s a trade, and something worth a good deal of money to the right people. So I guess it could be worse.

12 brews of 2012: Special Bitter, Sorghum Pale, American IPA

Which means I’ve had to embargo thoughts, put a stop to the free-wheeling bubble machine that it my brain. And that’s no good, because they’re still here. I still dream of the worlds in my head, I still dream of the things that might be. Not getting them out on papaer is driving me crazy. Focus on any one subject feels nigh impossible, and yet that’s what I’m supposed to do. So I have a black market of ideas. I write little scenes in my notebook while the professor is lecturing in my class. I think about the necessities of history when I’m staring at my online class Web site, and every time I read about a new exoplanet I get a little thrill from the denizens of the one in my head. I need to get it out, and I don’t know how I’ll find the time. I thought I would have more time when I left the clinic to write and do other efforts of the mind, but it seems that is a delusion.

Still not giving up.

Renewing the commitment here and now. I’m not giving up–I’m staying on fire. Pass the kerosene, please. This bonfire ain’t over till I croak. If you get a wild hair and feel like sending me a letter (and are not already waiting on a reply), do so. I shall respond. Hell, even if you’re waiting on a reply. One thing I don’t get is silence. I try to at least reach out to people, and sometimes all I get back is crickets. What’s the limit? How many times do you reach out to silence before giving up? I have lost contact with some of my dearest friends simply because I never hear back from them. And that tears the shit out of me, because I have no way of knowing if I’ve done something wrong or if life is just eating them up or what.

It’s funny–part of this is self-inflicted. I have purposefully left facebook, for instance. The light’s on, but I don’t log in unless someone prompts me to. I don’t read it. I don’t use it. And the reason for that is partly because it ended up being me just watching other people, and posting meaningless things that got ignored. That, or the format constrained any attempt at serious discussion to sound-byte levels despite its attempt at threaded topics. At least on Twitter there are the virtues of concision and direct address, and the built-in glibness of the whole thing means that if you want serious discussion you must take it to a better forum anyway. I am finding fewer and fewer reasons to use facebook. It’s now one of my many address books.

My family has a communication problem in general. Mother won’t talk to father, sister won’t talk to mother, brother only talks to me and mother…it’s ridiculous. But I suppose my communication difficulties should, then, come as no surprise.