My head is full of bees.: seanan

"Why do you have that look on your face?"
"My head is full of bees, and the turtle cannot help me."
"...huh?"
"Ignore me, I have the dumb."
"Will do.

(Actual conversation with an actual human. Names omitted to protect the innocent, but I bet you can guess which one was me.)

So I am made of fuss and flail today, which basically means I'm totally unfocused and just want to go back to bed. As this is tragically not an option, I'm guzzling Diet Dr Pepper like a stretch SUV guzzles premium unleaded, and praying that dinosaurs attack San Francisco, forcing an evacuation and allowing me to, yes, go back to bed. Plus, people would probably get eaten by dinosaurs, and that always puts me in a better mood. (The 'always' in the following sentence may not apply when I'm the one getting eaten by dinosaurs, as I have yet to really enjoy any of the various reptile bites I've received, but hey. Maybe it's different when it's a velociraptor.)

Kate informed me this morning that we are now living in the future, as she has all these cool technological capabilities that seemed totally outside the realm of possibility* even ten years ago. I agreed that this was probably true, but the fact is that I'm currently living a little bit in the past, which probably accounts for some of my internal bees. See, a year ago, I hadn't...

* ...finished Newsflesh.
* ...finished Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues.
* ...even thought of the InCryptid books.
* ...rebooted Rosemary and Rue, and hence the entire Toby universe.
* ...signed with an agent.
* ...sold a book.
* ...gone to New York to visit a major publishing house. Especially not one where I belonged.

Basically? I'm not ready for the future that actually exists, because I'm living in the future that I dreamed about when I was nine years old. I have a bright orange bedroom. All my bedding is a) orange, b) green, or c) Halloween themed -- hell, one of my pillowcases is bright orange and covered in little white ghosts that glow in the dark. Brightly enough that I can use them as a nightlight, no less, which is really convenient for the hour or so after I first go to bed. I have a Siamese that is so ideal to my conception of The Perfect Cat that I may as well have designed her in a genetics lab. Horror movies are popular again. I can stay up as late as I want (even if I'm almost always in bed by nine-thirty). There's good stuff on TV, and my stepdad never turns off the movie when the scary parts make me hide under my sleeping bag. I'm sorry, but I'm quite prepared to sign up for the future that's happening to everybody else. I'm still enjoying the one where having an orange ceramic octopus and a plush velociraptor creates an ideal world.

In other news, I've started receiving edits on the first three chapters of The Brightest Fell, thus proving that my personal reality show is continuing to pull good ratings. ("Well, Barbara, they're in their fifth season, with countless spin-offs, and still going strong...") Recording for Red Roses and Dead Things is totally done, and my cover art is so awesome it makes me want to scream. Safeway has two-liter bottles of Diet Dr Pepper at buy three, get three free. And my head remains full of bees.

Bleah.

(*You think I'm kidding? Go back and read some of the really classic whizz-bang-pow science fiction from the 1950s to the 1970s, back when it was all jut-jawed heroes, pneumatic blondes, and phallic rocketships. Did they have Tivo, text messaging, downloadable libraries, terabytes of data-storage in an easily handled medium, reality television, blogging, or distributed informational hyperspace models? No. They had plastic spacesuits and freeze-dried ice cream. The world has changed so much, on such a mundane level, that we totally forget just how far into the future we actually are.)

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keristor

December 18 2008, 20:29:15 UTC 8 years ago

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Yes, terabytes were something mentioned on Star Trek (the original series) and even then only Really Big Computers (the sort which Kirk blew up) had. Floppy disks> Hah! I remember when the only disks were things which looked like top-loading washing machines, and computers cost hundreds if not millions of pounds (and even more dollars, at $2.40 to the pound) -- and I was using some of those computers. The box sitting under my desk has 20,000 times as much memory (that's RAM, the hard storage is even bigger), a CPU speed measured in fractional nanoseconds rather than milliseconds per instruction -- and cost me under a hundredth of a percent and for that I got a high resolution display as well. And it doesn't need another room full of air conditioning equipment.

Walkman -- I remember confidently predicting that no one would use the new-fangled cassette tapes for listening to real music, the quality was so bad. Carrying a tape recorder around was silly, they weighed the best part of 50 pounds and needed to be plugged into the mains.

Are we "in the future"? Too right! But where are my holidays on the moon (or at least a space station) and my flying car? Let alone my robot servant and interstellar travel. OK, so my GPS (that's another thing which wasn't imagined) talks to me (and I talk and argue back) but it's not the same as a car which drives itself.

The future isn't what it was. In some ways it's better, in some ways worse, but it isn't the same...

seanan_mcguire

December 23 2008, 02:41:42 UTC 8 years ago

I think there's always got to be a 'better' future that we're waiting on, because otherwise, we'll just give up trying.

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My head is full of bees.

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