This Week in Sniderville: 9

Stefanie Snider

I’m not a virgin anymore!

Last night I went to a special screening of Rocky Horror Picture Show, hosted by…PATRICIA QUINN! It was part of Shock Stock, an annual local horror convention.

I bought my tickets online, thinking how AMAZING it would be to watch RHPS with Magenta herself, and brought a friend along for the midnight screening. What they didn’t tell me on the website was that not only was Magenta there, but so was a live shadow cast! I got rained on, I got rice in my hair, and I fulfilled my decade-long dream of seeing Rocky live! My face hurt all night from smiling so hard.

Patricia was lovely during the Q&A, genuinely funny and sweet. When someone in the audience asked for advice for aspiring actors, Ms Quinn looked her dead in the eye and said “Don’t dream it, be it.” I may have teared up a bit.

I wasn’t allowed to take pictures, and I didn’t get to keep my ticket stub. But today, when I attended the convention proper, I got something so much better:

pquinn

I’ve never had a fangirl moment like that before. She spoke to me! She knows my name! I managed to carry on an actual conversation, instead of squeaking unintelligibly like I worried I would. I carried the picture into the crowd like it was made of fine gold, because to me it might as well be.

I’ll show off the other stuff I scored at Shock Stock when the light is better. But I couldn’t wait to share this one with you.

How was your week?

How to Confuse a Bank Teller

Stefanie Snider

It’s fun! It’s easy! Let’s play!

1. Pick a bank with branches in your city. Open an account in your native currency. Let’s say, oh, Canadian funds.

2. Write. Sell writing.

3. Receive payments by cheque, in foreign currencies and from foreign lands.
3b. Bonus points if they’re also written in a foreign language.

4. Take said cheques to your bank.

5. Stand in line behind a man who coincidentally has the same uncommon type of account as you do. Wait while he asks the teller to perform an intricate and complicated dance routine of withdrawals and deposits all to that one rare account. Pray quietly that the voice box of the customer complaining loudly at the next wicket will magically snap in two, rendering her silent and the bank much more peaceful. Wait until the teller manning your line’s wicket is thoroughly flustered and unable to concentrate.

6. This is the step that makes it or breaks it, folks! Hand the teller your bank card. Hand the teller your cheques (in Euros! With commas instead of decimals! Ho-ho, what fun!). Ask politely to deposit these cheques into this account.

7. Watch her struggle with the currency conversion. Agree that no, the comma is not our country’s common delineating punctuation w/r/t which is the dollar and which is the cent. Yes, how very strange indeed.

8. The game is almost complete, wait for it…

9. Sign the deposit slip, noting nothing amiss, since no one in their right mind memorizes their account numbers and since deposit slips show only amount deposited and not total balance, and…

10. You did it! You won! Through no doing of your own, and after having signed your acknowledgement of the deposit of said funds into said account, watch in delight as the teller realizes she SOMEHOW PUT YOUR CHEQUES INTO THAT LAST CUSTOMER’S ACCOUNT! Whoo! Exhilarating!

You’ve won! You’ve confused the teller! You have to share the points with the other customers since, let’s be honest, the game would have been lost without them, but between the three of you you played a good game out there. Keep your chin up, kid, it’ll only take another ten minutes to straighten out. And sure, you’ll lose another smidgen of your somewhat depleted trust in the banking system, but hey! Everything’s fun if you play the game right.

This Week in Sniderville: 8

Stefanie Snider

I came here to update about what I did this week, then realized: I didn’t do anything.

I mean, I went to DayJob, I came home drained from DayJob, I camped out on the couch in front of Netflix and I just sat, like a zombie, and not a cool gore-covered-horror-zombie, but a half-asleep vegetative zombie in coffee-stained corporate clothes.

It’s times like this that I remember: this is not who I was cut out to be. I’m not the corporate type — I don’t find fulfillment under fluorescent lights. I don’t find joy in obtuse lingo, or pleasure in progress reports. I’m not big on meetings or memos on company letterhead.

I don’t want the carrot.

I’m not unique: I’m sure most of us probably don’t really dig working for The Man. I’m not trying to paint myself as special. I just find it frustrating, to be so completely in love with writing, and then for something that I… don’t love (is that PC enough?) to use up so much of my energy. It’s exactly like that Onion article: the thing I want to do most in life is being hindered by the thing I like doing least.

I have a plan in place for working at home, as a full-time writer. It’s something that could happen in the next few years. I just have to push through this slump, to not let office politics wear me out before I can make the rest of my life happen.

I wish I had something more interesting or lighthearted to write about this week, instead of a whiny tantrum. But honestly? Sniderville posts are for recapping the week, and this week was pretty much a write-off.

Sorry, dudes.

Here’s to a better week, next week.

This Week in Sniderville: 7

Stefanie Snider

My family rules.

My husband’s Great Aunt Sharon posted the following to her Facebook:
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…with the caption: Little Stephen King reads his 1st story in class — we have a budding Stephen King in our family — Stefanie Snider. I can’t tell you how that made me smile.

Sunday we visited my brother- and sister-in-law, the ones with my adorable nephews. The littlest nephew will be three in June, and has a baby monitor in his room. Turns out that the new monitor my in-laws bought doubles as a two-way speaker. My nephew was chilling in his room when his Mommy picked up the parent-end of the monitor and made the Grudge noise into it: “Aaaahhhh-h-h-ahhhhhh…” Cue the kid flying down the stairs, wide-eyed, and a lesson in silly jokes. Nephew pulled me upstairs to his room, pointed at the monitor, says “Makes a scawy noise, Ahhhhhhhh,” giving me a perfect rendition of the demon-noise from the movie, then giggling. This is how I know I belong in this family.

Music Video: “Yes I Know” by Memory Tapes

Stefanie Snider

Memory Tapes “Yes I Know” from Najork on Vimeo.

This is stunning. The song is good, but the video makes it.

Horror Comes to My Hometown!

Stefanie Snider

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A section of Highbury Ave. was turned into a giant accident scene on Saturday night for the horror film Kingdom Come from London-based Matchbox Pictures.(HANK DANISZEWSKI, The London Free Press)

THEY’RE FILMING A HORROR MOVIE HERE!

Here’s the interesting part: there had been road-closure warnings on this road for a while, saying that the road would be closed from yesterday afternoon until early this morning. However, it seems that none of us outside the production knew it was for a film; most assumed it was for construction. Cue panicked Facebook updates about the 30-car pileup on the road, body bags in the street, requests for prayers for those who perished…

Nope, just a movie set. It’s called Kingdom Come.
From IMDB: “A group of strangers wake up in an abandoned hospital to find themselves stalked by a supernatural force with sinister intentions.”

I’m not sure exactly where the highway scene fits in, but according to our local paper, some of the movie will be filmed in an abandoned Victorian mental asylum located on the grounds of our current Psychiatric Hospital.

I can’t wait to see it all come together. This makes my haunted little heart very, very happy.

Read more here, here, or here.

This Week in Sniderville: 6

Stefanie Snider

This week was a quiet one.

I released a new story.

I worked long shifts at Day Job, until all I wanted to do was get home and crawl into bed and consume worrying amounts of Netflix.

I wrote. I wrote more than I have in a long, long time. The novel is coming along.

I held onto the belief that someday I will write for a living.

I made lazy-person crab soup:
Chicken broth: boil. Pad Thai noodles: boil in broth until delicious. While waiting: chop up obscene amounts of cilantro and green onions. No, that’s not enough. More. Then more. Throw fake-crab chunks in the pot. Throw green onions in the pot. Cook it for like another minute, until the crabby chunks start to fall apart. Slop in a bowl, add so much cilantro that you can’t see your soup anymore. The end.

I went to have the car serviced, and found out that some part I didn’t even know existed needs replacing, and they pretty much want me to pledge them my firstborn child. I signed happily, because I’m not having any children. Joke’s on them.

Tonight I’m going out drinking with my girls; tomorrow will either be very productive or very slow, depending on recovery needs.

How was your week?