Kathryn Hogan

Hello, internet!

Just over 5 months ago, I was in a car accident and injured my brain. For that reason I haven’t been able to write in my blog much, respond to emails, etc. It looks like I will be out of commission for several more months at least, but in the meantime, I want to tell you some Positive Happenings so you don’t start thinking that I am a big mopey downer.

1. I have awesome family and friends. They don’t mind that I am brain injured, and aren’t bothered when I forget what I am doing mid sentence and drift dreamily from the room. Also they are very good looking.

2. I have been working on a reallllllyyyyyy fun project in my favorite computer game, The Sims 3. The doctor said I should set small, achievably daily goals for myself and because I am able to pace myself and take lots of breaks playing this game, it lends itself nicely to the purpose. So, I’m making a small island world called Rainbow Cove that is RIDICULOUSLY COOL* with a detailed backstory and everything. I just do a little bit every few days and it helps keep my mood up!

The story is: on an isolated island in the pacific, a thriving fairy community has been having more and more trouble staying hidden from the modern human world. One day, a plane crashes in the ocean nearby, and the fairy villagers rush to aid the passengers. Many of these passengers are permaculture gardening enthusiasts who were on their way to a conference on natural building and homesteading. Together with the highly talented fairy craftspeople, they build their own paradise with the fairies!

So there!

*unless you define ‘cool’ as ‘cool’.

It’s like your mind is a library, and all of your memories are books. Someone has come in and stolen a bunch of the words from the books. You are reading along and then – Blank. Something is just gone. A memory – an event that you know happened and you know that you should know the details – is gone.

Only that someone did something to the new words you are writing, too. So that you look at the book titled “Last Week” and it’s got moss growing on the pages and mold in the bindings and the words look like they’re at the bottom of a lake. If you focus reaaallly hard or if they are written in Big Letters, you can read them. Otherwise the words are as good as gone.

The library used to be a nice place. Now it’s really drafty and way too bright and way too loud. I have no idea how I used to exist in the word with all this goddamn noise and so many things to look at. It’s maddening. Like all of the input is just banging away at my senses and my consciousness. I took the bus the other day and it was torture. It made my entire body physically hurt. I used to like taking the bus.

Conversations are hard. I can’t remember the right word very often. I get totally exhausted from doing nothing at all. I wake up tired. I am weepy. I’m frustrated. I don’t like this.

I’m in constant pain. The whiplash is getting slowly better – sure, my muscles are still hard as rocks from my neck right down to my elbows and hips, respectively, and my whole body is sore – but it’s still getting better. The headaches are another story. I wake up with a headache and it gets progressively worse throughout the day no matter what I do. Some days it gets so bad that I am nauseous and my vision is blurry from the pain.

I spend the majority of my time sitting in the dark doing absolutely nothing. It’s called Brain Rest. It doesn’t seem to be helping. I’m still totally exhausted after I do it. Sometimes I nap during brain rest. Mostly not – I can’t sleep. I’m exhausted and I have insomnia. Lolz.

Enough complaining I guess. Silver lining: at least I am going to get an insurance settlement, and my dad helpfully pointed out that investing it wisely now could cover up to 1/3 of the money I will need to retire! He is a thinker.

Well it’s been exactly 1 month since the seemingly minor car accident that was destined to change my life.

You see, my whiplash has gotten much better. I can turn my head almost as far as I could before the accident, and the pain is much improved.

The post concussion syndrome, on the other hand, has gotten much worse. The foggy-headedness, the poor short term memory, the feeling of being generally impaired mentally, and worst of all, the worst-hangover-of-your-life typed headache have all become severe and constant.

The doctor has prescribed ‘brain rest’. For the majority of every day, I have to sit (or lie down) in a quiet, dark room (or, ostensibly, outside on a cloudy day) and do absolutely nothing. No reading, writing, tv, radio, music, talking to myself, computer, texting. Nothing.

If you are thinking, “Hey, brain rest sounds just like solitary confinement for especially bad prisoners”, you are right.

I’m taking Tylenol 3 and serious muscle relaxants for the pain. it’s pretty intense.

In the meantime, I will be unable to write on my blog very much until further notice. Stay classy, internet.

You have probably been wondering why I am not a contestant in numerous beauty pageants. I base this statement on the likelihood that you have seen me in a bikini, or streaking in a public place.

You haven’t?

Seriously?

Where have you BEEN?

Anyways, I am of course (mostly) joking. The fact is that no human women actually conform to the bodily standards associated with beauty pageant individuals. Still, there is some merit to the idea of actual human women taking a shot at ‘The Big Time’ to prove to all the little girls at home that you don’t have to shave your armpits to be beautiful!

Or have big boobs!

Or long legs!

Or be taller than the average 10 year old!

Etc!

Yes, it is an inspiring message for the youth of today: beauty is still all important, you silly fool, but there are different TYPES of beautiful!

However, I will not be that person, and here is why. There is simply no way that I could handle the question section. Strutting around in an evening dress? OK if I’m allowed to wear flat shoes or go barefoot. Bikini? We have previously established that I am comfortable in said garb. Talents?

Forget about it.

But the part where they ask a question about current events… sheesh. I would get into all kinds of trouble and end up on Maury.

Example:
Miss Utah was asked what it says about our society that 40% of families have women as primary breadwinners, but women still make less than men. Here is her exact response:

“I think we can relate this back to education, and how we are … continuing to try to strive to [epic pause] figure out how to create jobs right now. That is the biggest problem. And I think, especially the men are … um … seen as the leaders of this, and so we need to try to figure out how to create educate better so we can solve this problem. Thank you.”

First of all, you’re welcome. Second of all, here is what my response would probably look like, especially if I had to come up with it on the spot:

“It shows that our society is intent on further impoverishing the lower class and eliminating the middle class through a concerted effort to disenfranchise women, Bob.”

(Assuming the guys name was Bob.)
(Actually, even if his name WASN’T Bob.)

Or, an even MORE likely response, because that question would make me see red with rage:

“It says that our society is a backwards sexist classist ass-hat, Bob, you patriarchal son of a bitch, and stop staring at my tiny bosom.”

Needless to say, that isn’t exactly “Miss Universe” talk.

I hate to be a jerk, but I don’t care about the Government. I don’t care if it gets its feelings hurt or doesn’t get what it wants for its birthday. And I have a good reason for this:

The Government Is Not A Person.

This is a verifiable fact. But wait: there’s more. There are actually MANY governments. There isn’t even just one. True story.

As an individual who is grimly awaiting the end of society as we know it, I do not have much faith in any government except to provide me with useful grant money for being generally awesome (until society collapses). It should be noted, however, that many people believe Various Governments to be actually responsible for the smooth functioning of human society and therefore of significant concern.

Now, let’s say that we were writers / editors at Vanity Fair and our job was on the line and all we had to turn in was a REALLY LONG story about cyber-warfare and it is the day before our deadline and WE ARE GOING TO GET FIRED IF WE DON’T PULL SOMETHING VERY EXCITING OUT OF OUR METAPHORICAL BUTT.

That is the only possible explanation I can see for this article, which actually has the audacity and butt-headedness to say that cyber warfare is scarier than nuclear warfare.

Yes. Let me restate that for the readers in the back:

Vanity Fair actually comes out and says that having a few banks hacked and having governments send each other viruses IS SCARIER THAN HAVING YOUR ENTIRE PLANET BLOWN UP, resulting in LITERALLY COUNTLESS human deaths, animal deaths, plant deaths, eco-system collapses, and possibly, the end of life on Earth.

Of course, any kind of warfare is bad news. And, as mentioned, some people are Seriously Concerned about The Government. But the kind of war that deletes files from computers (aka: invisible things that exist only in the ether) or monitor information (they don’t need cyber warfare for that! The government is watching everything you do online already!) or cause a few banking websites to crash (oh no! they will have to buy more bandwidth! That is clearly worse than dying a slow and terrible death and knowing that all of life dies with you in a barren post-nuclear wasteland in which the very rain burns your skin!) IS BETTER THAN ANY OTHER KIND OF WARFARE.

It truly must be a slow day in journalism.

In one of my courses to become a certified horticulturalist (which I finished! Finally! This weekend!) we were taught about some of the more common processes by which plants go from regular plants to GMO plants.

This is what my official courses through a world-renowned agricultural school, funded at least in part by the GMO Giants, taught me:

They make a bunch of tiny baby plants and expose them to xrays, radiation, and other fairly-toxic things that cause mutations. Then, they wait for mutations. Once a mutation comes along that they can use, they breed that mutation back into the population so that the plant looks normal and conforms to market standards.

For Round-up Ready and other Pesticide Tolerant plants, they examine natural plant mutations caused by ‘excessive levels of the pesticide in the environment, for example in the vicinity of the pesticide factory and around streams leaving the factory’. They look for plants that have mutated to survive, take the mutated genes, and insert them into regular plants.

Now, first of all, I’d like to point out that there was NO discussion about how fracked up and wrong it is for known cancer causing toxins to be ‘accidentally’ dumped into the environment. There was also NO mention of the fact that, clearly, this was NOT AN ACCIDENT AT ALL. This was an intentional part of product development.

Given that, what are the chances that the DOZENS of oil spills happening lately are actually on purpose?

Today I am doing research about funding possibilities in the form of grants for my Limber Pine Press (my publishing house) as well as myself as an author and my books, as books.

The good news is, there are many, many grants out there for young and enterprising people… and I will work hard until some of that sweet moolah is mine.

The bad news is, much of the available funding for authors and publishing houses comes from the Canada Council for the Arts, an antiquated institution whose policies about eligibility make sense… if the year is 1995.

I believe that self-publishing is the way of the future. If you publish ‘the traditional way’, you are literally signing away 90% of your rights to your book: intellectual AND financial.

Sounds smart, right?

Then there is the fact that publishing books and sending them to book stores – the traditional way – is terribly, soul-crushingly wasteful. There is this thing called RETURNS. Returns are what happens to the majority of books ever printed. Here is how it works:

Chapters orders 200 copies of a book. That way the store will have lots of copies in case it sells well, and they wont’ have to worry about lost potential business.
People buy 50 copies.
The other 150 copies are destroyed, and the book store is given a full refund.

Yes. This really happens. It is industry standard.

It is also why small, independent publishing houses are so poorly represented in book stores. How many small businesses can afford to give a refund on 75% of their products sold… while still paying for production costs?!

Thus, self-publishing, using print on demand technology, individualized order fulfillment and ebooks, is the way of the future.

The Canada Council for the Arts will not fund you if you are self-published.

Period.

There is a way around this: build your own publishing house, have it publish at least some titles by people other than you (ie do not sleep because you will have so much work to do), and then your house will qualify as ‘professional’ according to their arbitrary standard, and therefore your book will count as a book.

Then, you and your publishing house are eligible for promotional grants for your writing!

Unless you actually wrote your books! In that case, while you are eligible for some piddly grants to cover your living expenses while you write NEW books, you are certainly NOT eligible for grants to cover promotion of your EXISTING books.

So, you’re allowed to write them, but they won’t sell.

Sounds like a smart investment, Canada Council.