RL: What a Day!

It's been a while since I've spent so much of the day running from one thing to another: from TEFL practicum to office hour (I had to cancel the first half hour of it, but sadly the fellow who got my office hours from the department office wasn't on my email list and had been waiting for me for a half and hour), then to class, then student needs taking 20 minutes after class, which made me very nearly late to the orientation computer lab for my afternoon shift. After that, I was "off" for the day, which means home to grade papers and do lesson plans. It hasn't been a bad day, just the kind that makes you feel tippy on your feet.

30 Days of Fan Fiction Meme, Day 27

27 – Where is your favorite place to write, and do you write by hand or on the computer?

My very favorite place is sprawled with my laptop on my sofa bed in front of the fire, but this only works in winter. Most of the time, I write at my desktop, which is not exciting but is where my main resources are (my laptop being somewhat old and broken). These days, I only write poetry/song by hand (and I do that rarely). I did write by hand from about age 13 or so when I seriously began writing up to around 23, when I started to transition to composing (vs. transcribing) on my computer. It was a hard transition. I still have many of my old notebooks, and sometimes they are valuable for checking old story ideas and Continuation canon. It makes me realize the dangers of digital ephemera. I have notebooks from when I was 15, but I've rarely managed to hold onto computer files that date from younger than 25, and those are fairly few, the big ones, like my novel that I keep saving and re-saving. Something's lost, quite literally, in moving to the computer.

( Small Remainder of the Questions )

So Much for the Free Market

Today Moveon.org said to me, "Some of the biggest Republican donors are AT&T, Verizon, Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan Chase. Can you tell these companies, 'You could lose my business if you keep funding Republicans as they crash our economy'?"

Well, Moveon.org, no. At least not in any way any of these companies would believe. As far as I know, I don't do business with Verizon and Chase, so no business to lose there. As for AT&T, well, it's about to buy out T-Mobile, which is my cell phone provider, and my only other option for cell phone service, realistically, would be Verizon, which I categorically refuse to do business with until they are they only monopoly left given the way they used contractual small print to charge me more than twice as much as I have ever paid from any other equivalent service for crappy "high speed" internet that froze routinely several times a week, despite the fact that my use of the service was pretty minimal: email and casual surfing really, no major downloads or uploads.

You see, in the US, it's virtually impossible to tell both AT&T and Verizon you won't work with them unless you're willing not to have a cell phone, and your not having a cell phone will hurt you significantly more than it will hurt them. (I guess Sprint might be some sort of option maybe?)

As for Bank of America*, I've spent years trying not to do business with them, only to have my "socially responsible" credit card company, Working Assets, bought out by them. I suppose I could do a massive search for other credit card companies and try to ascertain which of the two or three mega-conglomerate banks own their various front organizations, but I even if I found one, I have no say in whether B of A or Chase buys them out the day after I sign up.

So, no, Moveon.org, I can't really tell them they'll lose my business. Furthermore, for all the folks who do, I think they'll understand well enough that those folks, of necessity, are lying.


*In the interest of fairness, though, I will say that when my credit card showed a suspicious charge recently, B of A was absolutely professional, efficient, and user friendly in handling the problem. I have to give them full marks there.