Pimpage!

The new issue of Antithesis Common is now available! You can read it here.

This quarter's issue has a lot of really interesting fiction and non-fiction, a lot of wonderful pieces--both traditional and experimental--that deserve a look. (See, as the one who reads all the prose I Know These Things. :^P) I haven't had a chance to read any of the poetry yet, but Sharon tells me that it's awesome. It's always a great problem for a literary magazine to have, when you have more wonderful works than you can possibly accept.

(At Bartleby, it was more an issue of coaxing the UMBC nerds out of their beakers and off of the chess board to admit that *gasp* they were also writers! That the right and left brains should so wantonly mix!)

And the artwork...breathtaking.

In other words, go read the magazine!

And for those of you out there who are writers *glances at flist*, remember that AC is always on the prowl for new pieces of original fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and artwork. Submission guidelines are on the site. So those poems you have lying around or that original short story you don't know what to do with...here's an answer. The works must be original, though, so sorry, no fanfic.

And it seems that Dawn Felagund was promoted this quarter. Last quarter, I believe that I was a "contributing editor." Now, it seems, I am an "associate editor." Guess they decided to keep me around. :^P

Am I Weird?

Okay, that probably provides a temptation that some of you, surely, won't want to miss. So yes, I am inviting myself to be called "weird"--and while you're at it, "evil" and "bad" can be thrown in there too, since I also call myself those things (as well as some of you) and you probably want the chance to call me them too.

The reason I ask, though, is because sometimes I think that I really and truly, in the deepest core of my being, am weird.

I know that a lot of the things that I do--like spending hours reading/writing Elf stories, for instance--are weird in the modern world. But when it comes down to it, I think that my life is pretty normal. I have a job and a husband; I'm not particularly scandalous or even interesting.

But the following things about me seem to get an overwhelming response from people, especially coworkers:

I don't eat meat. At all. No seafood, no chicken. As I was telling frenchpony earlier today, I've become more liberal with respect to byproducts with "Ewww...it has beef tallow!" mostly serving as an excuse not to eat things that I don't like now, versus my heady youth when the words "lecithin" and "gelatin" not prefaced by a "soy" had the power to send me into convulsions. But I haven't eaten meat in 12 years--except for a few accidental ingestions when restaurants made my food wrong--and I don't plan to start again anytime soon.

I don't watch TV. People find this weirder than the vegetarianism, I think. First they look at me, agog. Then they say, "You don't watch TV?" as though there was something incomprehensible about the initial sentence "I don't watch TV." Then comes the part that really confuses me:

"Then what do you do?"

Well, I read, I write, I make candy, I make gifts for people, I spend time with my husband, I go out to the movies, I go out on dates (with my husband...like I said, totally not scandalous), I paint, I clean my apartment, I beta-read, I make ice cream, I go to the library, I go hiking....

And so I am forced to wonder--and I often want to ask these people who are so mystified as to how I can possibly not spend a minimum of two hours per day staring into a box--what don't they do that leaves them with so much time?

Not that I have a problem with watching TV. Occasionally, I'll watch sports on TV--mostly football and figure skating, an interesting combination--or a documentary that looks interesting, but when someone says, "OMG, can you believe who won The Amazing Race?" my response is usually: ... o.O ...

So, am I weird?