cough hack wheeze

All existential angst aside, I feel like crud. It's the quarterly "You're not gonna have any fun at the beginning of break" malady I always seem to get at these times of year. It can't be at a time when I have time to waste, oh no... Gotta be compounded with finals and scheduling and moving and all that. Joy of joys.

Good news though, I do get to schedule. And I'll get a W instead of an F (hopefully) for my oft-neglected German class. Dr. Chalupa is awesome. And she gave me an A- on my Nietzsche class. Thus ends my foray into grad school. Things, once again, work out for the best. At least until the next crisis rolls along. One more year to go... thank the gods. Jeebus. Something. I've made it this far.

For the summer? I want to make a biodiesel refinery. I will make many tacos, play some video games, drink some beer. Likely no vacation. Oh well.

For right now, Mythbusters and Stephen King-iness...

whot then?

Finals suck. The Silent Hill movie is the shit. And I like Slim Jims and Mountain Dew.

That is all.

A week and a half 'till the real world again...

questions

Do facts and behavior patterns make up the entirety of a person? Everyone gets a piece of the story, no two alike ever. Are these pieces adaptations to the person at hand, or actual fragments of a whole?

What do you do when you realize you don't exist?

I would add to that a question as to whether or not I'm a placator, a yes-man, but I'd just get placating answers in return.

You're blind and talking to a wall. You memorize every detail of that wall, each whorl and crevice in the wood, the smell of the paint. Do you know the person behind that wall?

It is you who I think does not understand. God help me if I'm becoming a teenager again.

april showers bring end-of-semester panic

So it seems that the lovely folks at ResNet have decided to block the profile.myspace.com and myspace.com domains for no real reason, which doesn't prevent access to any of the other subdomains but removes any of the useful ones. Just when I had some work to do there, as some "friend" of Bunnyman's has decided to post a profile of him (badly spelled) with a photo of him in another "friend's" lace teddy. Then proclaim that he's a lingerie model and announce it to people at his workplace. Which is pretty damned funny until you consider that things on the internet never go away, and his bosses don't have much of a sense of humor, and people in Elkins are all a bunch of gossp hounds. So I found a proxy that works. Yay. I don't get it, they don't block facebook, which puts up significantly more of your personal information, and yet myspace is horrible and must be stopped. By people who have apparently never heard of proxies. Eh.

Serenity is almost done, the paper macheing has yet to commence. Good, considering it's due tomorrow. The end of the semester is slipping faster forwards and I've only been attending two classes with regularity. I also have no classes for next semester yet. I think I need a vacation. Or something. Eek.

covered in glue

I am building a model of the Serenity ship from Firefly for my sci-fi writing class, and I think this would be going a lot better if I had bigger images on card stock. Fiddling with half a million little tabs and glue stick is a chore. As is decyphering the Spanish instructions. But I persevere.

If you want to try, go here.

I should be going to bed. But I shall continue to cut things.

Ow.

The vampires call me three times a week, and I go finally to placate them, and what do I get? Some bastard nurse guy (who looked younger than me) manouvering a huge needle around repeatedly trying to hit my vein. Guy almost blew the thing. He did tell me he was an idiot, which I guess is okay. Unprompted, no less. The other nurses were trying to figure out if they'd be able to use my blood or not. Vampiric bastards took more than a pint of it, they'd better at least ship it off somewhere to do something useful. Thus I am granted a three-month-or-so reprive from their harassment. And my arm hurts. Still. Bastards.

Now I am on my post-vampiricizing drunken binge. And still managed to get Japanese done. In kana, no less. I say huzzah for drunken language skills.

I ran the booth for most of the day today. Tomorrow comes my panel, which I hope maybe someone shows up for, and the Gay-La, which I have promised to do some form of entertainment I know not what. I suppose I'll bring my notebook and we'll decide when the time comes. I could be singing a capella with lyrics from a placemat. This seems to be the general theme of this year's Pride Week --- wing it and see what happens.

Gumby gives an excellent impromptu back massage. Just place yourself in front of him and if you've got vag he might start rubbing. It'e better than Gibran's, and he hasn't been trained. The straight boyfriend can't do it when asked, but the flamer does it well umprompted. I reccomend.

A teddy bear's exploding on the TV. And I think we're going to Ozzfest this year. Lacuna Coil will be there. Yay!

Sorry, there was more I wanted to say that was a bit more pertanent and included links, but I've forgotten. Blame the teddy bear. I shall finish my beer, set my alarm, and read Solaris until I fall asleep.

memory

Sometimes people tell themselves a story so often that it becomed ingrained in memory as fact, and they believe it unless proven otherwise. Sometimes that happens in reverse. So many things happen in a person's life that it seems natural for us to forget things over time, even if they remain in us in other ways. They're never forgotten entirely, just dormant. The major things we remember aren't always the most important.

I have flashes every now and then of things that happened to me that I had almost forgotten entirely, and usually those spur whole trains of insight into why things are the way they are. Usually they happen during some mindless activity. Like just now, I remembered just how often my dad used to say to me "Children should be seen and not heard." I was quite a loud and boisterous child, to the extent that some called me a ham or a show-off. This is why my parents initially got me involved in the theatre. Thinking about this, though, just like remembering being locked in a closet and realizing why small spaces make me feel safe and comfortable, made me realize a few things.

I don't think my dad likes kids. Really, he doesn't much care for people in general, but kids specifically get on his nerves. He never treated us like kids, and expected his rationale for things to be transparent from an adult point of view. Whenever I'd start acting like a kid, I'd get the seen-and-not-heard line. When you're told something long enough, it starts to shape you. I'm a lot quieter than I used to be. A lot more reserved.

The anti-socialization thing seems to have affected my ability to work like other people. This got me thinking about flirting. Maybe, in some normal universe I'm not a part of, people feel comfortable flirting and recieving flirtations. Being flirted with makes me really damned uncomfortable, to the point where I'll actively avoid the people doing the flirting. Me flirting with people never happens, despite what anyone might think. For some reason I end up holding to a more polite and structured social decorum than is typical anymore. It's when I try to make an attempt to loosen up and fit to more relaxed norms of socialization that I end up making a gross faux pas. Very few other people hold to this structure, which usually results in placation and imposition. So I sit in someone's house feeling very uncomfortable that they're not making just the right degree of accomodation, and I'm worrying that I'm imposing on some scale I can't comprehend. Yet another complex justification as to why I'm not good with people. Maybe it's hereditary.

I've given up hope, too, that you're going to get back in touch with me. It probably won't happen, and thus the natural order of things has been restored. I don't do the opaque thing anymore.

So that's my semi-daily attempt at self-psychoanalysis. Oh, and this is really cool.

One down, four to go...

The first day of pride week went as well as could be expected, if not a little better. If it weren't for Lora and William, both of whom were there out of personal sacrifice, I don't know what we would have done. So we might not have gotten a huge response, and the weather might have been less than desireable with the wind turning everything into flying projectiles, then rain soaking everything, but I think we did relatively well.

I have no clue what we're going to do about the reat of the week. We'll have events. But there's only so much mass organizing that six people can do, especially when they have classes and jobs and other commitments. Argh, tons of butchness today, and I got interviewed and photo-shot by the Dominion Post. The article'll run tomorrow, I hope. (sidenote: It's not hard to be butch when you're surrounded by queens. Just sayin'.) Still have so much more to do... and I have to suppress violent killing desires until then. Grr.

And Neil Gaiman has a lovely full-length Q&A thingie from The Guardian on over at his blog. It's like one of those dumb time-wasting internet surveys, but done by Neil Gaiman. So it's good.

La.

emptying my browser tabs

The Very Secret Diary of Ringwraith No. 5

"Life is so still, so quietly trapped inside them, they give the impression that they’ve already died and are just waiting around to make it official."

For bored people who are good at Jeopardy.

Whoa, sweet car. Er, cathedral. Whatever.

Japanese podcast lesson thingies. No, you don't have to have an iPod. It's like free language lesson tapes.

It's like American Idol, but homemade and more tragic. Why watch reality TV? TV should be for real entertainment. The internet is for mocking people. And porn. This is funny.

The screens are built. I am crafty, despite my clumsiness. And, thanks to Sara, the Side Pocket is minus one neon sign. The faces of people trying to figure out something completely unexpected, like eight-foot tall pvc structures, are priceless.

Sleep now.