Chair's good call

The department chair made a good call. School was closed today. It was not, however, closed for my poor spouse, who is slugging away with a meeting at 10:30, followed by classes all day, including his night class. Roads have been bad, with many slide-offs and even some vehicles catching fire and burning. (I don't know why.) I hope he doesn't face much lake effect snow when he heads home tonight, but at least he has only ten miles or so, not the 66 miles I've got. If it's this bad tomorrow, I don't know that I will try to drive to Big Rapids.

I've forgotten what it's like to walk outside. All I do is go from my car to whatever building I need to be in. Each step is carefully planned in an effort to prevent a nasty fall. (Why are falls always nasty? Why can't they be dangerous or painful? Certainly, they are humiliating. But nasty? Not really. So why do people--me, included--say and write "nasty" as the adjective of choice?)

I'm still thinking of some topics for my blog novel. (Would that be a "blovel"? Yuck. That's not a good coined word. Maybe "novelog"?) At this point, though, the stress of the upcoming interview coupled with the weather has rendered me brainless. There are several ideas that I've been floating around in my head for some time, though. One is about a woman who suffers brain damage during a mugging. She's in the hospital in a coma, and the doctors keep telling her spouse that he needs to permit them to turn off life-support. Interspersed with those scenes, though, are scenes of stories occurring in this woman's mind. It's true she's not conscious, but her mind is functioning in a new way, allowing her to engage in adventures and travels and a rich world that will end if the "plug is pulled." I had that idea a couple of years ago, long before we watched the BBC miniseries "Life on Mars," which has a young police officer in a coma. He's hit by a car, but then wakes up in the same place, just thirty years earlier. At the end, he is able to return to life in the present time, but finds it so sterile and regulated, compared to the rough-and-tumble world of the 1970s, that he commits suicide by jumping off a building. He wakes up back where he was in the 1970s, at just the right moment to save his friends and to get with the girl he's grown to love. It was a marvelous series. The past (i.e., his mother's voice, the doctors' voices, the voice of his fiancee) kept speaking to him via electronic devices such as the old television in his rented room, an old radio, a walky-talkie, etc.

Another idea I've had (just watch BBC or Showtime or somebody do this one first) is that this middle-aged genetic engineer is able to take fertilized eggs that were going to be destroyed at a fertility clinic. He combines elements from four or five different eggs, along with some of his own DNA, to create a new person. (In my idea, the "mother" who carries the fetus to term is his unmarried sister, also a scientist, who works with him.) The child is born, unaware that she is a created person, with no single person as a mother or father. She is told that she is the genetic engineer's daughter, but that her mother is deceased, so her aunt is helping raise her.

One of the things the genetic engineer was able to do with the eggs is to separate and use the best traits--the keenest eyesight, the strongest, most coordinated muscles, the best immune system, and so forth. He's created a superchild. She never gets sick, she's extremely intelligent, she can learn music, art, sports, you name it, with ease. Because the man and his sister don't want the world to question how she came about and how she got these traits, they don't send her to regular school. But when the girl is about fifteen, the man dies. A couple of years later, her aunt dies. In an effort to control her own destiny, she hires a young lawyer to help her take charge of her affairs so she can live on her own and further her education. (She's already started to college.) She has inherited her father's journals and papers, so she is able to piece together how she came to be. Then she sets out to meet the other families to whom she is genetically connected. Some are open to her and willing to accept her into their lives, but others are horrified and want nothing to do with her. Her lawyer (who of course has fallen in love with her) helps her find these families and deal with them.

In a different version of a similar storyline, the girl has a peculiar trait: like some birds or crocodiles, her eyes have nictitating membranes, or second eyelids. Of course animals with such eyelids use them to prevent water and debris from getting into their eyes. But our girl is able to use hers to discern when she's being lied to. When she is gazing at someone with the membranes closed, she can see their auras, which change if they lie. A short-lived series on one of the lesser networks (Hallmark? Lifetime?) had a young FBI agent who was good at reading body language and could tell when people were lying, and a recent novel I read shared a similar plot. But neither had their protagonist possess alternate anatomy. I guess maybe the tv show Kyle XY is a bit like what I'm thinking about here.

So, if I'm so full of ideas, why I am writing about writing instead of writing?

Weather Interruption: the local weather forecaster just said that out of the last 40 days, we have had only 2 days without snowfall. He's talking about maybe another 8 inches tonight. Like Bartleby the Scrivener, I solemnly intone, "I would prefer not to." Actually, my real inner voice is not solemnly intoning. It's screeching hysterically, "NO!! NO!!"

To all my gentle readers who live in warmer climates: I just may show up on your doorstep in a few days, if this keeps up. The Weather Channel shows me all those 70s and 80s down in the Southeast and Southwest. Of course, I may have to wait until I can be sure there will be no flight delays due to icing on the aircraft before I can get out of here.

"Oh, give me a home where the kudzu grows long, and the possums and the armadillos play...."

I'm sleepy. Avoidance technique. Dr. S.