I was unDecoratoring™ on Friday, and my main task was to take down and store the back tree.  (Yes, we have multiple trees—it’s the Decoratoring™ Way!)  I had successfully removed the top tier when I was struck with the image before me:

(Pro tip: leave the tree plugged in and turned on as you disassemble it; as you unplug each section, the extinguished lights tell you exactly where the joint is between sections.)

There was something about this that was kind of creepy, even surreal: a Christmas tree, fully lit, that just stops two-thirds of the way up.  So I took a photo, and then I played with it in Pixelmator, which everyone says you should own instead of PhotoShop if you’re just a dilettante, and I agree.

So one of my major projects for this week is to dig into InDesign CS 5.5 and relearn it from the ground up so that I can design/layout Marc Honea’s omnibus opus Another Farewell to the Theatre.  It’s a massive collection of essays, fictive works, aphorisms, and haiku, and I want it to look spiffy.  (That is a technical term.)

It must be understood that although I have used InDesign in the past with some success, my glory days with the program are all back when it was still PageMaker.  In fact, I have used PageMaker since version 1 and it was made by Aldus Corp and you had to switch out the disks on the Macintosh Classic to load the program into memory.

As the years went by and I had less and less call to lay out multi-page documents—and those that I did have to do were easily handled by the page layout capabilities of Pages—I lost my grip on InDesign.  I kept it updated because that’s what I do, but all the changes in interface and attitude slipped right under my radar.

Therefore, when Pages proved unequal to the task of making AFT3 look spiffy, I decided to retrain myself in InDesign so that I would not pull out my hair before I got past the Introduction. I started yesterday, and all seemed to be going well.  I retrained my brain to understand the “frames” concept instead of the old flow technique, and I thought I was getting somewhere fast.

But then things started going widdershins.

(Argle bargle alert: skip this next paragraph)

At first I thought it was just my not having read every single word of Adobe InDesign CS5 Bible, because I’m a skimmer at heart, but the more I worked with the file this morning, the worse it got.  The text frame on the master page wouldn’t accept text on the layout itself, and then it started telling me it couldn’t communicate with some “Rule Book” and therefore was not going to apply whatever I had told it to do—only it did.  And then I clicked to flow the text of the Introduction and it automatically started adding pages to the individual spread rather than going to the next page, maxing out at ten pages after which it stopped and complained—and it didn’t actually flow the text into those new pages.

(/argle bargle)

So something is corrupt somewhere.  I’m running tests on the computer itself, and when those are done I’m deleting InDesign and reinstalling it.

Argh.  And also Bah.

During the month of November, I was doing mostly nothing for one reason or the other [spoiler alert: it was the elections], but one thing I did do was go back and re-read this blog from the very beginning.

You know what, guys?  I’m a good writer, and entertaining, and often very funny.  So I’ve decided that I will be pulling nuggets of pure gold from my posts in the coming year and redisplaying them.  Not often, but enough to make you appreciate my wit.

For example:

Snark: in which I look askance at a public official who is caught doing the ridiculous and invents an excuse that is entertaining if not plausible in the least.

What, you were expecting some year-end meditation?  Pfft.  And also tut tut.

With the gift of an Amazon gift card, I was able to purchase two books I had on my wish list:

Both are studies in cocktail construction/deconstruction, and just with a cursory glance I can see how I am going to have to convert most of the rest of the house into a cocktail research palace.

After all, I don’t really have a place to store my liquid nitrogen now, do I?  Or vats for macerating liqueurs, or fermenting bitters, or any of the other cool stuff promised by these books.

I may have to start slow, like using boiling water to make crystal clear ice cubes.  More work is required.

So last night, I was reading a little Herodotus in bed—as one does—…

No, really, Herodotus is a hoot.  We’re still reading him 2,500 years later because he’s such a gossip.  He reminds me of T. R. Pearson and of Lawrence Sterne in that he is absolutely unable to resist a detour into whatever name/event/detail comes up in his narrative.  (Yes, I know that all three writers are doing it deliberately.)

The edition I’m reading is The Landmark Herodotus, edited by Robert Strassler and translated by Andrea Purvis.  It’s a beautiful book qua book, with copious footnotes, sidenotes, maps, illustrations, and a stream of info across the top of each page alerting you to where we are geographically and narratively.  There’s a timeline/outline up front, and a flock of appendices (22!) about various topics in Herodotous’s world.

Of course, none of this helps me to keep it all in my head.  If there were ever an example of not having the context necessary for understanding, this charming 700-page story of Middle Eastern politics and mores would be it.  But I plug away, enjoying the author’s wit and style and keeping up enough to keep going.

Why do I bring this up?  It has occurred to me that perhaps Herodotus—and this edition in particular—is the key to the structure of my putative A Perfect Life, the oversize blank book I bought six years ago (!) with the idea that I would fill it with a discursive memoir of what it’s been like to live my life, i.e., that of a more-upper-than-not middle class, educated white male in an undisturbed small town in the late-20th/early-21st century United States.  I should expect to wander from topic to topic, following the flow of thought that comes from realizing that the reader needs background on something I’ve just mentioned.  (Remember that this whole project sprang from my childhood curiosity about the details of private life in the past.)

Which is not to say that I think I should whip out the pen and ink and just start scribbling.  It’s probably vital that I give some thought to some kind of structure, e.g., what is it I want to be discursive about?  Do I want to get polemical?  Should I write as if I thought the book itself might be discovered in the rubble after the apocalypse, or am I writing for actual publication?  Do I want to explain what the “United States” “used to be,” or “electricity,” or do I presume the future reader still knows these things?

I think I need a Retreat to think about this seriously.