She’s also notably non-obsessed with the Internet and pop culture, an excellent reminder for me that it’s important to remain capable of having conversations that don’t begin: “Did you see that YouTube video I tweeted earlier today? It’s pretty great, yeah, I found it on some random Tumblr…”

Anyway, we had a fine, productive time, and decided to go out to celebrate said productivity. She made reservations at one of the fancier places in her neck of the woods.

(There actually are a lot of woods. I am not just using a hackneyed expression. See?)

She said the food was very good, but warned me: “They filmed scenes from some really dumb movie there, so now there are all these signs and things.”

“What movie?”

“Oh, I can’t even remember. The scene descriptions on the signs, they make no sense!”

They seated us on the deck, and I took the photos above, and this one:

Have y’all figured it out?

Okay, here’s one of the signs she was talking about:

Type too small to read? Please, allow me:

EXT STONE CLIFF INN

Edward, his shirt open, standing nearby in the shade of some trees watches her cautiously. She takes a step toward him, but he holds up a hand. She waits. Finally, he takes a deep breath, and steps out of the shade –

EDWARD: This is why we don’t show ourselves in sunlight.

As the sun hits him…EDWARD’S SKIN literally sparkles as if embedded with thousands of tiny diamonds. He is magnificent, shimmering, like a statue carved from glittering crystal. He moves toward her.

Yes. My small-town-living, non-Internet-junkie friend had managed to remain utterly oblivious to the Twilight phenomenon.

(I had to explain the Team Jacob shirt we saw at Goodwill, too.)

Yes, I am going to Boston for the American Library Association Midwinter meeting. Very early in the morning tomorrow. I’ll be in YALSA meetings most of the time while I’m there, but hope to see some fellow BG Literary clients as well.

And you, of course! If we see each other and we have not met in real life, please feel free to say hey regardless.

Additional note: I liked my recent social network hiatus so much that I’m doing it again! For the duration of the conference, I won’t be checking Facebook or Twitter. I know this is contrary to the backchannely spirit of Twitter especially, but I also know my own limits.

I want to maximize my capacity to concentrate on the experiences I’m having, as opposed to constructing performative reactions thereto. This is not intended to diss anyone else’s performative reactions, reportage, bon mots, slices of life, or toast, as the case may be — etc. I enjoy them very much, and will enjoy them again as of 1/20! (Plus, if I have any spare moments at all, I need to work on the graphic novel script. Ack.)

So today we’re in the airport waiting for our flight home, and a diffident soldier, foot in a cast, approaches. We offer him our seats, but he doesn’t need to sit down. He’d like to use one of our phones to call his wife.

As we fumble in our bags, he talks. It’s been, he guesses, the worst and best week of his life. He just had this surgery, paid for by the U.S. government thank you very much, for the plantar fasciitis that he got when the Army switched to suede boots. Didn’t look like much on the outside, just a little lump on the heel, but you step on a stone or a pecan (he emphasized the first syllable) and it’s so painful.

Yeah, it’d been bad. He’s just been realizing how much the PTSD and depression was affecting him. In fact he had an attempted suicide situation, and he was in a treatment facility for five days and they put him on antidepressants, he can’t believe the difference. He’s really glad we’re going to let him use the phone, it means a lot to make this call to his wife. Well, fiance, actually — they’ve been together five years, they have a three year old. When he had that mental breakdown, well, there was a gun involved, and the sheriff wanted to know if she wanted to press charges for attempted murder and aggravated assault, and she said Hell no! He had to go, though, they were living in a house her parents owned and her parents aren’t really supportive. He wants to get out of the Army. He’s gonna move back in with his parents, find a job doing something calm. Peaceful.

All this in about ten minutes.

Steve locates his phone and hands it over. The call is short, with a lot of I love yous. Then they’re calling us to board. He’s in first class. Gotta use those benefits while he’s got ‘em, he figures.

A short while later, we walk past him on the way to our non-first-class seats. He’s talking to his seatmate, and we can’t help but wonder if he’ll tell the whole story again.

On a semi-related note, I read another one of those “You Can Get So Much Done If You Don’t Get Online After Five P.M., Srsly” articles today. They always fill me with a mixture of hope and dread. I am aware, certainly, that deadlines concentrate the mind wonderfully. And I can see how Making Tough Decisions About How You Spend Your Time, To Increase Your Productivity, can be a Good Thing. (I have even written about it previously.)

But MAN, anything that is, like, a System just grates on me.

Even if I have set it up myself.

For instance: I schedule time to write using the alarm on my cell phone. Sometimes I am already writing when it goes off. Sometimes the alarm interrupts a conversation with a friend, or laundry, or looking at the Internet. Arguably, if it is laundry or Internet I should obey, and sometimes I do.

But sometimes I don’t.

What strategies do y’all use, if any, to psych yourself out to get more done?

There are many more France pictures, and I will no doubt post more as I get them organized, but I thought I would also put up a few lists that I made as advice to myself for future trips:

Things I Didn’t Bring That I Should’ve

• A watch. Knowing that my phone wouldn’t work in France, I left it behind, but neglected to take into consideration the fact that my communication device is also my habitual timepiece.
• T-shirts. I read a book that was very cautionary about the high level of formality in French fashion, and so I packed a more businessy selection of clothing than I would have otherwise. I did not think about the fact that we were going to a comic convention. I doubt there is anywhere in the world where comic conventions require formal dress (unless you are a serious cosplayer) and really, my opinion now is that when traveling, unless you know that by doing so you’ll violate cultural taboos and/or local laws, you should dress more or less in your usual style. Everyone knows you’re a tourist; don’t try to blend in.
• A book. I know, can you believe it? I did have audiobooks, but it would’ve been nice to have something on paper. (On the plus side, my lack of other reading material led me to the discovery that French shelter magazines have it all over their American counterparts. Maison Française! Marie Claire Maison! Much more interesting photography, and I can get the gist of the articles.)

Things I Brought That I Shouldn’t Have

• Phrasebooks and travel guides. I just didn’t use them. I resorted to a lot of Je suis désolée.
• Jewelry. Too much trouble to carry.
• Hair gel. Several ounces of weight, and I only used it once.
• Two suits. One would have been fine, or none.
• Voltage converters. So heavy! So unnecessary! We were fine just using adapters for European plugs.
• Multiple notebooks. My standard operating procedure is to carry both my journal and a writing-ideas notebook, but the writing-ideas notebook is heavy. If I really wanted to stick to the multiple notebook scheme, I should’ve gotten a second small Moleskine.
• Vaguely formal shoes. They were my most comfortable heels, but a trip that’s mostly about walking and taking public transportation while schlepping suitcases is not the trip for heels.

Things I Brought That Were Totally Perfect

• An HP Mini. About half the size of my laptop, and much cheaper to replace if it had gotten stolen, which it thankfully did not. Fine for getting online, good size keyboard, all-around useful piece of technology. Cute, even.
• My oldest, most broken-in pair of Fluevogs. (The late, lamented “Sara” style — seriously — I wish they would make it again!)
• A wallet big enough to zip my passport into.
• A waterproof coat.
• An iPod with lots of Mountain Goats on it.

So instead: a picture, then Nyquil.

More beach glass than I’ve ever found before. Are people in St. Malo less obsessive about picking it up than the beachcombers of the American west coast? Is there simply a greater quantity to be found?

Here I am on the street near our hotel in Paris.

View from our hotel room.

Detail from one of the pillars at the Musee Cluny.

Sundial designed by Salvador Dali.

Stickers Soup.

We saw several of these seriously tagged white vans.

This past weekend was the first time that I’ve had a being-an-author gig so close to a hosting-an-author gig, and the experience was exhausting but excellent. Thanks again to the Washington Library Media Association, specifically Elaine Harger, for inviting me to speak, and thanks to Mr. M.T. Anderson for being a delightful guest.

A few things about my two days in Yakima:

• Got a nice high-school era flashback crossing the street, when a carful of dudes yelled out: “HEY! WHAT’S UP WITH YOUR HAIR?”
• Found out that a long-dormant project may yet come back to life, hopefully not zombie-fashion.
• Marveled at the predominance of Spanish speakers in the airport, and eavesdropped to the best of my ability. Pretty sure I heard “No hay trabajo.”
• Learned about the existence of the Rainbow Girls, which are apparently sort of the Masonic equivalent of Girl Scouts.
• Was asked why I write about gay characters. I might have surprised the questioner when I responded matter-of-factly that I’m bisexual. I elaborated: of course I don’t think you have to self-identify as queer to write about queer characters, but I do think there’s an added incentive to write about a community when you’re in some way part of it.

And a tiny anecdote re: hosting M.T.A.:

• Had the bright idea to get the car seriously cleaned before picking him up at the airport. I am, to put it mildly, not assiduous about keeping a clean car interior, and between the bike grease and that one time the peanut sauce spilled, the cleaning was long overdue. Unfortunately I neglected to take into consideration the fact that when you get car seats shampooed, they stay damp for a long time. Days, even. So I greeted the illustrious Mr. Anderson with the reassurance that the car was not actually a crime scene, despite the sheets of plastic.

Tell me stories about being a guest, and/or a host?

(Not actually a gravestone. Part of a fountain.)

It is an exciting month, is October, so this post will have a lot of exclamation points. It’s a good thing I am fond of Portland International Airport (PDX), as I will be there more often than usual.

As I have previously mentioned, I’ll be speaking at the Washington Library Media Association conference in Yakima on Friday, October 9th. Still taking advice about what to include in my presentation!

Shortly thereafter I will come back to PDX to retrieve the esteemed M.T. Anderson, who’ll be speaking Monday, October 12th — get your tickets now!

And then a few days later, I’ll be returning to PDX yet again, this time to spend a very long time in the air in order to get to France, where Steve and I will be attending the Quai des Bulles convention! This is super cool, but also nervous-making, as I have never been to France and speak no French. But since the trip is really about Steve’s work, not mine, I plan to spend most of my time pretending it is the twenties and I am an expat: aka sitting in cafes and writing.

I know some of you have been to France — advice about how not to be an annoying American, other than very quickly learning French? Recommendations of where to get international adapters for electronics? French artists whose work I shouldn’t miss at the show?

And, tell me about your Octobers!