Um, What?

For at least a couple of years now, I've seen a super strange term. Vegan Leather.

Vegan leather? Do you mean plastic?

I know it's salesmanship. Vegan leather sounds so much better than plastic, but the term is so odd and it legitimately doesn't make sense. It sounds like the marketing department of some manufacturing company had a brainstorming session and this was the best idea they could come up with.

Then there's the sister phrase to Vegan Leather. That would be Vegan Cashmere.

Um, do you mean polyester? Or some other synthetic material?

These terms are used prominently, too. I'd prefer just not calling out what the product is made of in the headline for the listing. Put it in the details section. Instead, the sites where I'm seeing these terms are putting them in the most noticeable place.

Maybe I'm the only one annoyed by this. Maybe I shouldn't even be annoyed because I know what I'm buying when I see vegan leather or vegan cashmere. For example, vegan cashmere means the sweater will be soft and snuggly.

Ultimately, I guess the terms are doing what they set out to do--explain to the consumer what they're getting, but it still irks me.

Generations Huh

I've been thinking about how generations are separated. Why? I don't know. I just have been.

My first thought is how artificial the generational divides are. In fact, the dates are different depending on which source you consult. One place says Gen X starts after Kennedy's assassination, another says 1964, and yet another one cites 1965. If the people labeling the generations can't agree on basic dates, I think it calls the entire construct into question.

Second, the generational stretches are far too long and they're inconsistent. Again, with the caveat that the actual years of a generation are fluid, the Boomer generation is 18 years, Gen X is 14 years wide, another generation is 10 years.

I can see a ten year swath of time for a generation, that seems reasonable, but 18 years? Really? Does someone born in 1964 have anything in common with someone born in 1946? They don't share the same cultural references, they don't share the same growing up experiences, in fact, I'd argue that they have so little in common that it's ridiculous to lump them together.

Maybe back in the 1800s when life changed slowly, an 18 year stretch of time would work for a generation, but in this time of technology, things change too fast to group that many years together. Just look at how life has changed since the advent of the smart phone.

While doing some research, I discovered that Japan does break generations every 10 years. That makes a lot more sense to me.

My third musing point was what it really means. Can a decade (or double that) swath of people really exude the same vibe? Are there that many similarities in behavior at a macro level to validate generation labels?

This one I'm less sure of. People are so individual and a lot depends on where they grew up, on how their parents raised them, on their life experiences.

I grew up in Minnesota, and while I was raised to be polite, using "sir" and "ma'am" are foreign to me. Now I live in Atlanta and I get ma'amed all the time. (I do not like it! Ma'ams in Minnesota would be like 120 years old.) But I keep hearing that it's a southern thing.

Another thing that's interesting is that I was raised by parents who were a generation older than the parents of my peers. (I was adopted.) My dad tells stories of people thinking they were my grandparents. Their style of parenting was definitely different than what my peers experienced. Believe it or not, my parents were more laid back, less strict, although there were definite lines and expectations.

Overall, I think the generations thing is interesting, but as a macro view of a large group of people, mostly useless except--maybe--for the people who are squarely in the middle five years of the generational divides. Still, I'll probably muse over this some more.

Don't It Turn My White Chair Blue

I had a really weird thing happen with an article of clothing I bought. Let me preface this by saying that I always wash clothes I buy before I wear them, so this happened after a run through the washer and dryer.

Okay, now the story. I bought a pair of jammies with navy pants. And the first time I wore them, I noticed my fingers were taking on a navy tint.

There must be extra dye, I thought and changed to a different pair so I could run the pants again the next time I did laundry. Only they were still tinting my fingers blue even after I washed them two additional times.

And then I caught sight of my faux leather kitchen table chair. You know, the WHITE faux leather chair. It was tinted navy blue, too. And the cleaning products I used didn't get it all out. Gah!

I immediately did some online searching. I can't be the only one this has happened to. But the instructions I saw for salt and vinegar only applied to things you self dyed. It was a waste of time to use either item on a manufacturer dyed garment.

When no better solutions turned up, I took matters into my own hands. I washed those navy pants in hot water, trying to forced the dye to bleed out.

I've been too afraid to wear them since I did this. My chair still makes me cringe. Yikes!

The University of Weird

I've had people ask me for updates on my move. I'm still unpacking boxes and I still need to make a claim for all the furniture that got wrecked by the movers. I'll give an update when I feel as if I have more control. Right now, I feel like I'm living in chaos.

Instead, I want to talk about the weird thing that happened today and it concerns my move.

My dad called from MN today--it's the normal day for me to talk to my parents. And in the conversation he says to me that the University of Minnesota called (I've never given them any number except the one for my parents' house because I hate the phone and don't want to get calls). I didn't think much of this. They're always calling either for donations or for me to rejoin the alumni association.

Then my dad said they'd called to tell me they were sending me a letter at my new address in Georgia. They wanted to make sure it was correct.

I immediately went, WTH? I never gave them my address. I haven't even finished doing my change of address for important things yet. My dad anticipated my response--probably because he had the same one--and asked how they got it.

Apparently, my university has a special program they use to "keep up with their graduates."

Seriously.

WTF? Is the University of Minnesota taking a page from the NSA? Not only is it weird, but it feels kind of stalker-ish. I'm not feeling all warm and fuzzy about my Alma Mater right now.

Surfing Safari

I blogged a while back about how I develop the same interests my characters have and that my obsession usually leaves shortly after the hero and heroine do. I've got a new twist on this now and I'm not sure why it happened.

You see, I have this hero and heroine and the heroine's father is really into competitive surfing. As a young man he competed and now he just watches others compete.

In some odd quirk of osmosis, I've developed an interest in surfing.

Oh, believe me, I'm not getting on a surf board myself. My water phobia is a little too deeply ingrained (and I recently read about the surfer in Australia killed by a Great White while on his board). But I've found myself watching surfing videos and pinning surfing pictures. I have a whole board on Pinterest dedicated to surfing called Hang Ten. And right now I have a surfer as the wallpaper on my laptop.

I've kind of been shrugging it off. I'm a writer--weird stuff happens in my brain all the time. This is just a little bit stranger than usual.

More Weirdness

The other thing that's weird about my brain is the things it finds interesting. I'm pretty sure in this case that other writers do the same thing, so it's writer weirdness rather than maybe just me weirdness.

A good example is the evening I flipped through channels and found the Discovery Channel was doing a show on container ships. Who has any interest in container ships? Not me, that's for sure, but I was looking to kill time so I figured I'd watch a few minutes, get bored and do something productive.

That didn't happen. Instead, I found myself riveted on the world of container ships and how they're loaded and unloaded.

This has happened to me too many times. I did research on nanotechnology years before I wrote The Power of Two because it caught my interest. Remember the atom smasher and the wormhole from The Troll Bridge? Yeah, that started when I was researching string theory for a story idea. From string theory, I went to M theory. M theory led to reading about particle accelerators which led to learning about the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, black holes, and worm holes.

I guess no knowledge is ever wasted because I never know when it's going to fold itself into a story somehow. The idea that I researched string theory for was an idea I shelved, but a year and a half later, I needed time travel and I didn't want to write a magic necklace story, so it came in handy.

In a way, it's kind of cool, you know? I know a little bit about stuff most people don't care about. On the other hand, it can also be frustrating because I know just a little and there are times I really need to know more. It's also kind of frustrating because of how much time it takes. It's like falling through my own personal wormhole because I can lose an entire weekend reading just one more thing about the topic of the day.

Unlike the unanswerable questions that I mentioned on Tuesday, this particular quirk doesn't really annoy me that much. I love learning and I'd be doing this kind of research even if I wasn't writing. Remember nanotechnology? Yeah, I read on that at a time when I wasn't writing.

Weirdness

I don't know if it's just me or if other writers have weird brains, but I can find myself asking the strangest questions for no particular reason other than curiosity. For example, since I've moved to Atlanta, I've noticed some things. Like there are a lot more rubber pieces from semi-truck tires all over the road down here than in Minnesota.

This is enough to get me to ponder the reasons. Is it because there are more trucks going through Atlanta than Minneapolis? Is it the difference in temperature? I don't think so because I was seeing this when it was 60 and 70 degrees and Minneapolis stays at that temperature or higher, too. Is it something in the roads in Georgia? Do the trucks passing through here have less maintenance work done on them than the trucks that go through Minneapolis?

Then there are all the cars I constantly see on the sides of the freeways here. In Minneapolis, it was maybe a few a week, but certainly not a few every single day. Which led me to run through a completely different set of questions.

Also, why do southern states have counties on the license plates while northern states do not? Why do northern states have front and back plates while many southern states have only the back plate? I can't conceive of any advantage to the one plate with county on it system, but certainly there must be, right?

I have no answers to any of these things, but my brain does this to me all the time. The smallest thing can send me spinning into a tornado of questions. At times, I try Googling some of these things because it would be nice to have answers and be able to put them out of my mind for good, but these aren't the kind of questions on which search engines can find relevant information.

The sad thing is that questions like this often pop into my head when I'm writing a scene, too, and again, the search engines fail me. I've tried emailing people who might have the answers, but with mixed results. This means my brain will spin back to the questions again and again.

Why do trucks lose more rubber in Georgia than Minneapolis???

Sometimes the Weird Is In My Head

Sometimes the weird stuff just happens. This one came from a conversation at work. Sort of. :-)

I was talking to one of the guys last week about how I'd only had one hour of sleep and complaining about how I always start the week sleep deprived because I can't sleep on Sunday nights. He suggested melatonin. Hmm, I thought. It might be worth a try.

So Sunday night, I took a melatonin, went to bed, and fell right to sleep. I was only a little groggy on Monday morning. Here's the weirdness part of the whole thing.

I get up and as I'm walking out of my bedroom, I think, I know Google Images will have pictures of the inside of a NASCAR race car. I'll have the information in no time. And then I had a few sips of coffee (still groggy from the melatonin) and thought, What story am I writing that I need a picture of the inside of a race car?

The answer was I'm not writing that story. I have no idea what I was dreaming last night, but apparently it involved me working on a NASCAR story. This isn't going to happen.

Not to offend any racing fans, but I find auto racing to be almost as boring as golf. Driving around in an oval? Um, okay. If I ever wrote a sports story, it would involve baseball, something I enjoy and know a lot about. But I would like to know what my dream was.