You know you’re having a hectic holiday weekend when they capture Saddam Hussein on Saturday and you don’t hear about it until Monday morning.

So we had to do the second installment of the training today. We were assigned a session and instructor based on our which union represents our jobs, not what those jobs are. A lot of the people were sort of gruff and really seemed to expect that trying not to offend people was going to destroy any happiness they had at work. I was thinking about it, and I remembered how nervous I was when I started work that I would swear all the time. And you know how often I have sworn at work since entering the full-time workforce in July 2002? Once. No one heard me, and the wound that inspired it left a two-week-visible bruise. It’s not that hard to throw switches in your head to prevent from saying outré things. So I present a list of Felicity work-approved swear phrases and words. People may chuckle at me, but they’ve never looked askance.

Fiddlesticks (“fiddle” for short)
Heavens to Betsy
Heavens to Murgatroyd
Bright Havens
By the White Wolf!
Good grief
Oh my stars and garters!
Criminey
Criminentlies
Blast it!
Blasted fladderaps! (I don’t know, I got it from my dad)

The following are reserved for extremely trying circumstances:
God bless America and all the little ships at sea!
Blood and bloody ashes (no one in America seems to realize “bloody” is dirty, and I think it’s just “blood” as far as Matrim Cauthon is concerned)

Yesterday I went to “Appropriate Workplace Behavior” training (a.k.a. be nice to people different from you and don’t grab anyone’s bits) and today I read up on <a

href=”http://www.planetneverwinter.com/nwn/info/hotu/” target=”links”>Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark. This is the misbegotten result.

“Hi, my name is Kenny and I’m a <a href=”http://nwn.bioware.com/underdark/creature_drider.html”

target=”links”>[http://nwn.bioware.com/underdark/images/creature_drider2.jpg|image|drider]. Of course I wasn’t always this way. I was a Drow—used to carry big foreboding statues for the

temples of Lolth with my buds. It wasn’t great work, but when you live in a lawful evil matriarchy, you take what you can get. Then one day I drop a statue of Her Majesty the Spider Queen, and the next

thing I know, her livid eye is upon me, and I’m bustin’ out extra legs and all. I tried to sue for worker’s comp, but apparently the whole “evil” thing kinda drove that sorta thing outta society down there.

Meanwhile, the other Drow revile me as a "damned by the Creepalicious one" monstrosity, I can't get a new job, and my new carapace needs some pretty expensive moisturizer to stay supple and

strong.

“So that’s when I followed a slaving party to the surface and decided to find a place with better laws for workers. And here I am in the U.S. of A.! There was a little trouble with INS at first, but when

they finally found my embassy, that division of INS disappeared, and I haven’t gotten any letters from ‘em since.

“I got a job at Toys ‘R’ Us, cuz I am mighty on the high shelf restocking—but after they figured out why the children were running and screaming, I lost that job, too. I started proceedings for

discrimination - I mean, I thought America accepted you even if your skin was a funny color, and I hoped that extended to eight legs - but I started lookin’ for gainful employ in the meantime. I looked

into Wal-Mart but bein’ a paeon of an evil empire was how I got in this fix. So now I work at Home Depot—again, the restocking is a major advantage. I really like to look at it as “differently-abled”. I

mean, I know the humans laugh at that term when it means “ain’t got no legs” or “can’t smell”, but damn, boys, are you able to shimmy up a concrete wall in 10 seconds without equipment? That’s

differently abled.

“So on the balance, I do alright. I get a lot of discrimination, but mostly people don’t know enough about my people to stereotype me. I wish people would stop

tryin’ to test whether I got “spider sense” though, cuz that was old the first time someone dropped a box of hose fittings on me. All I really want is understanding, and the chance to make an honest

living, and thanks to the Equal Opportunity laws, being a damned and deformed eight-legged outcast from an evil subterranean race won’t stand in my way.”

a man listing 13 species of Christmas trees now available. I was put in mind of Cliff Claven, or possibly Bubba in Forrest Gump.

I receive a special, and often maleficent, joy from the word putative. Not only is it a good practical word, but it can also be used to subtly undercut almost anything. Observe!

Mr. Bush, the president of the country, fell off a Segway.
Mr. Bush, the putative president of the country, fell off a Segway.

Not only does it impugn the item so described, but it subjects it to the scorn of the elite by way of the meaning “generally regarded as such” - I mean, if the pleb I mean, the general populace—regards something as such, how can one fail to differ?

Once upon a time I mentioned in passing that Windows stopped bothering me much when I stopped using it, and that the results of having to start again as an employee of a largely PC institution were as yet undetermined.

It’s starting to bother me again. I spent a couple of hours this morning (as I did yesterday afternoon, come to think of it) dredging through old files of my predecessor and trying to determine what I needed, what I could delete, and how to incorporate it into a system that works for me.

My brain said “terminal” about 25 times. And I can’t use a terminal! If I want a new folder over there, I have to click there (losing my place in Explorer in the process), right click in the explorer frame, choose New in the menu, track up to Folder, and then type the name. Then click-click my way back to the actual files I want to move into the new folder. Alternatively, I can make the new folder in a second Explorer window, reducing clicks to focus-shifting between windows. Now, there may be keyboard shortcuts for some of this (apple-shift-N, my brain prompts) but they aren’t at all obvious. I really miss manipulating files at the speed of typing.

Cuz really, I don’t see anything right about this.

Some years ago, one of my collegiate compadres made a D&D character who was a dragon and didn’t know it (dragons can and do assume many forms, including humanoid, in D&D). This struck a chord with me, because I am a dragon and do know it.

I cannot recall who precisely came up with the term “steam dragon” for the wet-headed girl-child I was, filling the tub with water almost as hot as the tap would give and soaking in it until my fingers were cratered and the rest of me lobster-red. However, I think it’s fairly accurate, if you assume a steam dragon to be a mythic beastie out of place in this clime. Every morning I shiver my way into the shower and almost climb up the bead-strings of water into the pipes in my eagerness to get warm. I wash, yes, but mostly I am showering to get a little core of heat inside that I can try to hold onto all day, until at last it dissipates and I shiver my way under 5 or 6 blankets. The last few days, I have actually put off showering so that I can go sit on a heating vent with a fleece blanket tucked around me to catch the delicious warmth.

The point is, I’m not from around here. I don’t know what my home dimension is like - maybe you get amnesia travelling betwixt dimensions - but I imagine it as a vast library full of magically waterproof books. The floor is entirely covered with cushions and blankets, except where the big bubbling bathtubs steam into the vasty reaches of ceiling. Heated towel racks disgorge huge fluffy towels, and every end-table has a fresh batch of hot cocoa. Did I not mention the end-tables? They go with the armchairs, you see, which have big overstuffed ottomans and oversized afghans. The world without is a snowy waste, to better accentuate the cosy joys within. You are so warm that your breath steams even in the comfort of the library, and you can follow its rising ribbons up into the ceiling vaults by unfurling your silvered wings.

Or else I’m just cold a lot.

I am rereading Neuromancer by William Gibson - which I must admit I have only read once before. It’s interesting rereading it with a good Shadowrun background - I keep thinking, Ooooh, so THAT’S why they have flechette guns in Shadowrun, et cetera.

At any rate, I am near the end of the volume, and, since I don’t remember the ending, have paused in my reading to consider my thoughts on the book as they currently stand. This next part may be rather SPOILY, so if you have not read Neuromancer, do go away. And read it.

One of the classic structures for a tale is, of course, the clash of champions. Two people are picked out, usually by two diametrically opposite sides, and they fight so that the conflict can be resolved in a microcosmic setting. Usually the fight is physical, which is jolly, because we like a good combat and there is emotional weight and consequence. The Belgariad and Malloreon of David Eddings are some of the more blatant books in this regard; for movies we have the Matrix trilogy and Highlander (the first one - I bain’t seen none o’ they sequels). Classically, the sides are Good and Evil, and the stakes are high - typically, the World! (dunh-dunh-DUH!)

I think in its own way, Neuromancer is a “clash of champions” book. The forces are represented by Wintermute and Neuromancer - and rather than Good and Evil, they represent Future and Past. Their champions are Molly and Linda Lee, and their battle is for Case, the everyman protagonist. Think about it; Wintermute says that part of it will still exist after the job is done, a sentient and independent AI, a future so inevitable that there’s a sweepingly powerful branch of government expressly to stop it. Neuromancer is a graveyard of collective memory, a land of the dead. It is explicitly of the past. This becomes clear when you consider Linda - the object and emblem of a bittersweet nostalgic liaison; the girl Case met in an arcade, for Pete’s sake, that bastion of childish joys and nostalgia. Wintermute speaks only through the living - the one time he tried to use Linda he failed - whereas Neuromancer likes best to speak through the dead. Wintermute manipulates people but admits “I am best at improvisation.” Neuromancer seems to do nothing but remind people of the past. Neuromancer chose an object; the helpless, almost passive girl from Case’s past - an emotional nexus. Wintermute chose Molly; strong, dynamic, surprising, loaded with technology, always in motion - a subject rather than an object. Molly is the future.

So by my model, the central conflict of the book comes when Case meets Neuromancer, when he is sucked into a simstim idyll with the ghost of Linda Lee. Outside, in the real world, Molly is held captive, in danger. Here, he has the last chance to live a simple life, to have Linda. Interestingly, though, he doesn’t really have to choose, as the simulation is eaten away by his friends on the outside—the past cannot survive the present. But I think he chose anyway, chose Molly.

A simulated Ratz tells Case that he is living the same story he was in Chiba, but there it was simple and clear, and now it’s cluttered with strange and outlandish props. That’s what the future is like. It isn’t predictable, understandable, or even necessarily believable. Maybe that’s what Neuromancer is really about—accepting the past and embracing the future.

So today in the pre-work chatter phase, my comrades-in-office were discussing the many joys of Costco, especially in what one might term the Festive Season.. I must admit, while my pals were rhapsodizing over Toys (one has grandchildren) and Wreaths, my mind wistfully pondered the mountains of bulk-priced paper towels and rice that store provides. Therefore I was quite receptive when asked to accompany the Costco-card-carrying comrades Costcoward during the chronoslot of comestibles - okay, giving up on that. Anyways, I went to Costco. I walked through the DVD aisles, past the best movie of the year on just-released DVD (buying it would be a crime against the people who have to think of Christmas presents for me) and the Indiana Jones boxed set for $43. I ignored shiny pens and clothes. I picked through the games and was disappointed to find Prince of Persia slightly more expensive than at Amazon, and finally, I emerged with only two things I hadn’t planned to buy - a pushbroom and a family-size bottle of shampoo. That’s what you call willpower.