Monitor Me

Monitor Me has a New Home

2010-04-23T10:32:00.003-06:00

I'm moving Monitor Me. Please follow me at my new site! Don't worry, all your old comments are in the new place, and all my old posts are there too. It's just nicer, and a lot easier for me to administer.

So, click on over!

The Ritual of Settling In

2010-04-21T10:05:00.005-06:00

It has been five days since we moved from our rental townhouse into our house, our house that we own ourselves. We still have several unpacked boxes, and we're probably not done rearranging the furniture, but it feels like home. This is an amazing thing, this process of moving from one home to another. A home is a sacred space, only open to those who are a part of a specific circle of friends and family. I've lived in many many houses, and most of them have felt like home. When I stayed with Kaz in a hotel room for two weeks while he worked in a different city, there was no way to make it homelike, even though I attempted to settle in as much as possible. There is something in the combination of putting your belongings in their chosen place, and in the innate knowledge that this will be the place in which you dwell, your habitat, that makes a place feel like home.

But the people in it make it a home too. What is a homemaker, if not someone who makes it their responsibility to make a place feel as welcoming and full of love as possible. Homemaker. What a weird concept. What a marvelous concept. Kaz and I have enjoyed being homemakers over the last few days. We put aside our jobs for a few extra days to settle in. There are few things more taxing than trying to move an aquarium onto a rickety middle shelf, so we have had our moments of frustration. Dismantling both the office and master bedroom after our first night here to switch rooms was also not the most joy-filled morning of my life. But there has been more happiness than frustration, and although I wasn't quite as excited as a toddler at Christmas, moving day will be imprinted on my psyche as one of the big days of my life.

Our things seem to belong here too. I'm thrilled to find that my trunk finally has a home where it looks as if it belongs. The window ledges are all of the precise height that I can slide it beneath any window and it will fit like a glove, a remnant of a culture that built homes, not with dressers and bureaus in mind, but instead a good solid, and easily transportable, case. Of course, this means that our dressers and bureaus aren't exactly easy to fit in here, but that comes with the territory of an old home.

Some day down the road you may read a grouchy post about the exorbitant cost of replacing windows that are almost a hundred years old. Right now I am aglow and falling in love with our home.

How Moving is Like Christmas

2010-04-14T11:23:00.004-06:00

It's two days until the big move, and I'm pretty much dying from the anticipation. DYING I tell you. I want to move right now. I want to have moved yesterday, or last week. I want to be moving as I write this... just pick up the keyboard and put it in a box. BAM. Done, let's go. Forget about the cords, they'll trail along behind and make their way to the house too.

I've never anticipated a move like this before. I've never moved into a house that I will OWN before, so it makes sense that this feels different. Generally, moving has been an enormous pain in my big ass. I hate the cleaning, the sorting, the putting things in boxes, but this time, all the irritation is completely dwarfed by the New House feeling. I suspect that come moving day, I'll be more excited than a toddler at Christmas time, and unpacking boxes will feel much the same as opening presents: "AHMAGAD, IT'S MY CLOTHES... I LOVE THEM... I'LL PUT THEM IN MY NEW HOUSE." or "HOLYCRAP, SHAMPOO! I CAN PUT THIS IN THE BATHROOM IN MY NEW HOUSE." So, basically, I imagine that I'll be more excited than I ever am at Christmas, but there will be plenty of unwrapping, and the living room will be covered in paper long after it should be.

Unexpected side effects from the impending move include: An attention span of a muskox, complete disinterest in doing any sort of work, and extreme giddiness.

Also, I got a hair cut. Here it is:

Em has kindly pointed out that I am more Velma'y than ever, but this is a trial haircut. I haven't had it this long in a few years, and I won't hesitate to cut that sucker off, should it disappoint me.

I'd also like to add that Velma's choice of orange is more of the pumpkin shade, while I like the rust colours a lot more.

Hey, if you'd like me to stay on topic, lend me your attention span. I'll ruin it for you.

Addition and Subtraction: Not Exactly My Thing

2010-04-08T10:25:00.004-06:00

So, on Monday when I said that we had nine days left before we moved, that was a gross miscalculation. There were approximately eleven days left before moving, and now there's eight.

In more exciting news, watch this video!

Joss Whedon fans are by far the coolest fans around.

Nine Days Left

2010-04-05T15:04:00.007-06:00

The basement is packed.

The Office is mostly packed.

Most of the toys are packed.

The crafts and gaming stuff are packed.

The cats are not helping.

Journals of Master Wu

2010-03-31T07:52:00.006-06:00

It's crazy. If you had asked me two years ago if I would be interested and passionate about a juvenile fiction novel about martial arts, I would be confused and think you were strange. I could imagine myself doing martial arts, watching martial arts movies, or perhaps interested in some crazy, relatively unheard of kung fu magic, but why would I get worked up over a "kids" book.

I'll tell you why: BECAUSE I'M SUPER PSYCHED ABOUT DOING ANOTHER JOURNALS OF MASTER WU BOOK. That's why.

Over the last several months one of my co-writers and I have been writing up an outline that we thought we could get excited about writing. When we finished Dragon Calms the Fire, we had a good idea of where we wanted to take the second book, and we had an outline in place, but as time stretched on from the development stage, the less I was enthused with our concepts. I was worried that Wu wasn't Wu-like and that there were parts that might be boring, so we started working on the weak spots and made an outline that I think is going to be really fun to write, and fun to read. The only problem was, we didn't want to imagine an ending without making sure that everyone on the creative team was there and also believed that the revised outline held as much potential as we thought it could.

So, early last week, we all sat down and talked through the new outline together. We changed a few things, making it even more awesome, and after a long long discussion, came up with an ending that we're pretty happy about, and a lot of possibilities for book three. Now I'm back to thinking about Wu when I can't sleep, and I had forgotten how much fun it is to imagine stuff for a living. It's liberating to have another person encourage you to play pretend and see what becomes of it. The secret world in my head has value! Value that I can take to the grocery store and buy food with! Or pay my phone bill with! Huzzah!

With the prospect of Book Two becoming a reality, I'm allowing myself a glimmer of hope. I'm allowing myself to hope that this can become what we dream it to be, and with that hope, I decided it was time to give the Journals of Master Wu a home on my blog.

While I was writing the first one, I was uncertain exactly how the project would proceed, whether or not it would ever get published, whether or not anyone would discover the unknown gem that we had in this setting. There were those uncertainties, and then there was the confusion of how I personally would or should be recognized for my part in a team effort. I didn't know whether the creative directors would even give me and my fellow writers a chance to say, "We did this! Look, it was us!" I didn't know what I was getting myself into, and I didn't know whether I should or could talk openly about it. So, most of my posts about Journals of Master Wu: Dragon Calms the Fire simply refer to what I was doing as "the job" or "the book." I have gone back through all the posts that I wrote about the experience of working on Dragon Calms the Fire, and given them a Journals of Master Wu tag, so you can see what it was like for me to take my part in this very cool task.

The ramp up to publishing the second book will be considerably slower than the first. Instead of having a six week period in which to brainstorm, write, and edit, we're doing it at a much more sedate pace, and so don't expect daily updates on what I'm doing for JoW. But, I will inevitably be writing about writing again, and I'm thrilled that I get to do that.

You can purchase Journals of Master Wu: Dragon Calms the Fire online from LuLu. If you live in Saskatoon it is also available at McNally Robinson. As it is carried by more bookstores, I'll let you know.

Last Time I Did This I Spammed the Hell Out of RSS Readers

2010-03-30T16:04:00.003-06:00

... so I'm warning you.

I'm going to be re-tagging a few things, and for some reason the last time that I did that, everyone got four million updates on their RSS thingamajiggers. I apologize if it happens this time.

I'm attempting to keep all of my posts about Journals of Wu a little bit more obvious because we're getting Book Two underway.

Nobody Can Police my Internet Use

2010-03-29T17:06:00.002-06:00

One: My brain is 87% devoted to grammar because of the editing job.

Two: I can go online whenever I want while I'm "at work" because "at work" equals me sitting at my desk, using my computer.

Three: I feel like I should be blogging way more because I'm here, at my desk, using my computer, ALL DAY.

Four: The 13% of my brain that isn't devoted to grammar, is squeeing over the new house and moving.

Five: Neither the grammar, nor the new house are offering particularly blog-worthy material at the moment.

Six: I do spend a lot of time online and I add everything that I think is cool or funny to my Delicious page, which is also linked at the top of my blog.

Seven: Clicking on any link on my Delicious page, guarantees you a window into what I read online when I'm recovering from grammarianing for a living.

Eight: Grammarianing is totally a word.

Speaking of Lunch

2010-03-24T12:09:00.005-06:00

I failed at soup... again.

On the up side, I think I succeeded at stew, but it wasn't supposed to be stew. It was supposed to be soup. Spoons are not supposed to stand up in soup. It's a rule. I know where I went wrong, though. I substituted a mix of grains where I was supposed to simply have lentils. I tried to compensate by adding more water, and less grains, but I obviously did not compensate enough. When it was freshly cooked, it was soupier, but after a day in the fridge... it's not soup no more.

MOVING ON!

I have been working from home for approximately a month and as such the rate that I burn calories has dropped to... oh, say, four calories a day. I sit at my desk. All day. Sometimes I sit on my couch and knit. Sometimes I watch a movie. It's a wonder I'm not losing weight like a fiend. On the contrary! This may come as a surprise to you, but a completely sedentary lifestyle is actually causing me to gain weight. I didn't think science worked that way, but I guess you can't really argue. Science won't have it. So I want a weight-loss buddy.

Wait. Let me clarify. I don't want to work out in the company of others... ever. I just want someone that also wants to lose some weight and we can compare our progress so that we can feel encouraged together. Perhaps we can set some collective goals and then work together to achieve them while never actually exercising together... or necessarily sitting down in a face-to-face manner to discuss things. Any takers? Don't leave me hangin'.

I Can Only Blog At Lunch

2010-03-23T12:25:00.004-06:00

This self-scheduling is a bugger. I've been swamped and it sucks because I know that it's entirely my fault. Boo.

So, I've been all proud of myself for getting my reading groove back...

How Rilla Got her Reading Groove Back, the most boring movie ever made. Still more interesting than the Stella one.

... and I've been making some good progress on the stack of books that I want to read. Remember? I talked about them when I found all those books that I stole? I have finished reading Bodies in Motion and at Rest and The 52nd Poem.

Bodies in Motion and at Rest, I started to talk about ages ago and then I got all distracted by Brittany Murphy. Long story short, I liked it. The subject matter has the potential to be really depressing, but I found it to be a philosophical and rather uplifting discussion of death, and poetry, but not necessarily death & poetry. One of the final chapters touches on the industry of funeral homes, and I suspect that Six Feet Under used it as inspiration. Anyone interested death and dying, should read this book... that sounds macabre.

I really enjoyed The 52nd Poem. I kind of expected to dislike it because the narrator keeps inserting all of these poems into the middle of the fiction, but it's all part of the premise of the novel, so I sort of had to go along with it. Then, once I was along for the ride, I was able to put aside my worries of unnecessary pretension and just let myself be carried away. You'd think that I would totally dig fiction and poetry combined, wouldn't you? I do, but I want it to be done right and not just throwing poems in willy-nilly because they have something to do with the theme of the fiction. The 52nd Poem did it right, so I would totally recommend it to anyone who also likes fiction and poetry. My only criticism is that I thought that the minor characters were a lot more interesting than the main characters, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Next up, Spook Country. I'm loving it so far, but I do have a fairly hefty bias when it comes to Gibson.

For What Was Lost, Now is Found... and Photographed... and Thrown Out

2010-03-22T09:30:00.007-06:00

Remember when I told you about my mixed tapes? I had made a terrible techno compilation called The Excel Mix: The Mix of the Future... ten years ago.

I found it.

My humiliation is now complete. The playlist reveals that most of this music cannot be classified as techno, and that this is just one more horrible demonstration on how culturally ignorant I was. (past tense applicable?)

Moving past the humiliation to the sentimentalism, I also discovered all the old tapes that Rob and I had made for each other when we first started dating. The exchange of music compilations between boyfriends/girlfriends is a decades old tradition that began with the invention of the cassette recorder. This is a tradition that is soon to be lost, through the rapid evolution of music culture and technology. Will couples of the future exchange music playlists?
Let's ask The Excel Mix: The Mix of the Future.

Excel Mix: Playlists? What's that?

Point taken, Excel Mix: The Mix of the Future.

I find it remarkable that I can look at these and still be flooded by memories of my early days with Rob. It's really comforting to remember that we started out in such a lovely way. It's easy to focus on shitty things when you've split up with another person. It's easy to list off all the things that we had done to drive each other apart. It's a lot harder to remember the things that we had done to pull each other together.

I briefly thought that I would recreate all the playlists on my itunes so that I could still hear those songs in that particular order, but it seemed better to let it go. Some things you've got to let go.

Purging in that Healthy Non-Bulemic Way

2010-03-15T09:27:00.004-06:00

Last Friday, Kaz and I went to the bank and finalized all the details for the purchase of our new home. We discussed sums of money that I didn't really comprehend until we did the break down of how much we would be paying per month, and then things seemed a lot more manageable. Anyway, even though we're not moving until the middle of next month, we've started packing up the stuff that can be packed. I kind of love sorting through my things and putting aside stuff that I no longer need to carry with me.

I thinned out my book and movie collection. I figured a woman who doesn't really believe in god anymore shouldn't have that many Bibles. I donated two and kept my study Bible which is an excellent reference source. It helped me through several Religious Studies and English essays. I also put aside a lot of the children's books that I had purchased in my late teens, that I had planned on reading to my children one day. These were mostly religious in theme, and I thought that perhaps some other family would appreciate them more than my bookshelf, which only receives looks of confusion and embarrassment. I kept all my Little Critter books, also purchased for unborn babies, but I feel better about justifying these as I still find them rather adorable and fun to read.

As for movies, we pared down a lot on the dark-but-brilliant genre because I don't sit down on a Friday night and think, "The Crow. That's the movie I want to watch to kick start my week-end." I had several movies that were either too violent or too creepy to warrant repeated watches, so they are also being donated. My donation box will represent the mess that is my psyche.

I've been dragging around a corpse of an afghan for eight years or so. My grandma had knit it for me in the year of declining health before she died. When Rob and I moved Caesar into our house, he destroyed it. He chewed and dug enormous holes in it. By the time we discovered what he had done, the blanket was gone. I'm a sucker for sentimentalism, and so it has accompanied me on three moves, despite it being a ruined rag. This week-end, I let it go. I did not, however, let go of the huge folder of Caesar's health records because that shit is sacred... despite his blanket-destroying ways. Dammit, now she's crying about the dog again.

The purging will continue for the next month.

For Every Roommate I've Ever Had

2010-03-10T10:29:00.002-06:00

Guess which character is me:

Hint: It's not BriaM...

Oh, Not Much... Buying a House, Got a New Job, Did a Book Signing... The Usual

2010-03-08T11:54:00.008-06:00

Kaz and I did our income tax this week-end and for the first year ever, I am above the poverty line of 2001. Kaz has pointed out that perhaps using 2001 as my point of reference isn't exactly a good way of judging whether or not I'm actually making enough money to live, but breaking the $16,000 is a big step up for me. The government loves me so much they're going to give back every cent of money that I gave them in the past year. I always imagine some government database responding, "OH MY GOD! HOW DOES SHE LIVE!? GIVE HER ALL THAT MONEY BACK RIGHT NOW." Government programmers, you should get on that. I bet you don't have nearly enough caps lock in your scripts.

(Speaking of caps lock: TOTALLY UNNECESSARY SEGUE. Last Wednesday I thought I was probably the most hilarious person on all of facebook when I made my status say: WEDNESDAY IS CAP LOCKS DAY. COPY AND PASTE THIS INTO YOUR STATUS IF YOU ARE A BIG D-BAG. I sat back and waited for the witty commentary and lols to roll in. I was underwhelmed by the three "likes" clicks that I got... until I saw a friend of mine had copied and pasted it into his status and then I felt a whole lot better about everything.)

To bring us back on topic: Rilla = not impoverished by standards set ten years ago. Therefore, we're buying a house.

No. The logic there is flawed. Kaz's job has been upgraded from a contract position to a permanent position, and so we went to the bank and we talked to his folks, and bam, down payment and mortgage all lined up. Because of aforementioned poverty levels, I am not actually a member of any mortgaging application process, but I will get to live in the new house anyway. Everything will be finalized around the middle of this week, and then, if nothing goes terribly terribly wrong, we'll be the proud owners of a brand new house built in 1912. Funny story (not really) 1912 is when Saskatoon implemented the "register your property" bi-law, so it's likely older than that (see, not actually funny). Then, we'll be able to move into that bad boy in the middle of April.

As for the new job, I'm not exactly sure what to say about it, or how to describe it. I'm working for an editing website where anybody can send their manuscript, article, poetry... anything really, and pay a professional editor to work on their stuff.

The good parts:

I get to work from home.
I'm using my mad English skillz.
I set my own hours.
I can continue to make enough money to survive in 2001.

The bad parts:

Anybody can submit their stuff to be edited.
I have already read two Twilight knock-off manuscripts.
Soft-core porn.
Bad, very bad, writing.

I've been kind of dying to blog about some of the stuff that I've been editing over the last couple of weeks, but I live in fear that the writers will actually track down my blog and sue my broke ass. I keep trying to remind myself that the writers really love the work that they've done and that I need to just turn off the critic in my head and just keep the proof-reader/editor switched on. It's not easy. There were moments last week when I rolled my eyes so hard I could see the inside of my head. It's dark in there.

The whole experience has made me extra proud of Journals of Master Wu: Dragon Calms the Fire because it is a billion times better than anything I read last week. On Saturday I did a book signing at McNally Robinson with one of the other authors and the illustrator. I spammed the hell out of everyone on facebook about it, and a few of you, loyal friends and readers, came out and supported me and the JoW team. It was a bit of a surreal experience and I was once again pleased with my time in retail because those talking-to-strangers skills are really handy. I don't particularly know what else to say about the book signing... maybe, "Thanks for coming out!" to everyone who stopped by the table. I do have a picture of the JoW team with the table display but we all look terrible, so I'm not posting it here.

In conclusion, here's a picture of the cutest thing I've ever knit in my entire life.

The end.

Knitting Olympics: Final Ceremonies

2010-02-28T18:44:00.004-06:00

And on the sixteenth day, the knitter, Rilla, knit like she had never knit before. Her fingers became chaffed and sore, her knitting needles became dulled, and the yarn flew into form. And yea, The Kaz was annoyed at the little free time his wife had. And yea, The Babies yowled with the impatience of cold, shirtless, babes. At least, Rilla imagined the yowling that spurred her on to even greater knitting heights.

And the first miracle of this, the final day of the Knitting Olympics was that the knitter, Rilla, did succeed in her task. She completed these two knitting projects. And lo, the ends have not been weaved in, nor have the articles been washed and blocked, but completed, they have been.

And the second miracle of this, the final day of the Knitting Olympics was that she did not run out of yarn for the sweater, even though she had a mere scrap of it left after she completed it. For the Rilla had seen the quickly depleting supply of wool and adapted the sleeves, shortening them, apparently just the right amount to make the most of the resources she had. Behold the little pile of wool beneath the sweater. Witness the miracle!

And the third and glorious miracle of this, the final day of the Knitting Olympics is that she still has a giant ball of wool, despite the pattern's recommendations for the blanket. Like the loaves and the fishes, there seems to be a never ending supply of this damned wool. The Rilla has cursed and sworn at this, the fluffy wool, for it is difficult to knit with, and drops off the needles, and seemed to actively thwart the efforts of The Rilla to complete the blessed baby blanket.

Let The Knitting Olympics be over. Let The Kaz celebrate the return of his wife! Let the cold and naked babies embrace their new source of comfort!

So say we all.

About Me Again

2010-02-25T13:58:00.008-06:00

What should you know about me that would make reading this blog more coherent. That's a tough one. How about this: I'm flighty. I'll get all worked up about stuff and I'll write about it a lot for a few days or weeks, and then I'll have it out of my system and you won't read anything more about whatever it was that got me all worked up in the first place. If I tried to explain every aspect of my personality that shines through here, you'd probably need an Encyclopedia of Rilla instead of just an About Me page. So, that's the first thing, I guess: There are times when I have a very short attention span.

This summer (2009) I was married to a fellow whom I refer to as Kaz here on the bloggeroo. We've both been married and divorced once before, and that's not so bad either. I don't think I'm the type to carry around all my failed relationships in my back pocket and bring them out to examine all the time, but if you want to know about me, then you should probably know that lots of my previous marriage to Rob is chronicled in this blog too. There's all sorts of depressing, sad, posts about how we split up, but then there's all sorts of lovely, hopeful posts as I fell in love all over again. There's nothing I love more than love.

I'm a little fucked in the head. That's another thing you should probably know about me. I've had problems with depression, and then anxiety, and even when I'm feeling perfectly sane, I'm not exactly perfectly sane, if you know what I mean. Luckily, I seem to react well to treatments, both medicinal and conversational. At the best of times, I try to channel my oddness into my various creative outlets. I take photos, I write poems, fiction, and I do a lot of blogging, particularly when I'm feeling good about my life. All those long periods of non-postings that you may find in my archives, are usually during a not-so-good time.

What do I do for a living? That's a very good question. I've worked a lot of crappy jobs over the last few years, but I've also had a few jobs that I really loved. In University I was a Tutorial Leader for first-year English students and that was pretty much awesome. I also got a contract to write and edit a novel with a few other people and that was also pretty much awesome. I am currently trying to make a go of it as an independent contractor, providing editing work. It's a very early stage to tell you how it's going, but I'm hopeful. I'm looking forward to working from home again.

I write about my friends a lot. My cats show up in all sorts of pictures. I have a smattering of hobbies that rear their ugly heads every so often. My family lives a province away, but I write about them too. In other words, this blog lacks any sort of thematic focus. You can't categorize it under "literature" or "photography" or "humour," although you'll find a lot of those things here. It's just about me and the things that I like, and the people whom I love.

Here's my old About Me page, for another snapshot of my life.
Here's a collection of what I consider to be my best posts.

I'm leaving comments open for this version. If you've got questions "about me," ask them and I'll answer.

BLOGS BLOGS BLOGS BLOGS BLOGS

2010-02-24T11:35:00.003-06:00

In the last few weeks I've been updating, revising, and adding to my blog and comics lists. Several of my friends have come out with new blogs, and they are extremely talented and interesting individuals, so I think I'm going to enjoy reading what they have to say. Here's the rundown of the newest additions:

Alana's World of Wonder, written by the lovely and talented songstress, Alana Levandoski. We grew up together and she is very much like a little sister to me. She recently put out this fun music video:

I'll Take You is written by Adrienne Gruber and the blog is all about Six Feet Under, which is a fantastic television show. Adrienne has a book of poetry called This Is the Nightmare which I've read and loved.

O.T.S. is written by Matthew Levandoski, whom I also grew up with -- coincidence? No. He's an incredible photographer and a somewhat psychotic film buff... as in he's psychotically buffed about film, not necessarily psychotic in general.

We Are Amused is written by Jeremy Cook, screenwriter and musician. He is also a friend of mine and comments here every now and then as Cheruby. His post on The Arts has been seen on Five Star Friday! Go Cheruby!

As is often the case with first-time bloggers, some of these blogs may peter out in a few weeks, but I hope that they don't. The internet demands more blogs. All ye, bow to the internet.

The comics that I've started following regularly are A Softer World, Hark! A Vagrant, and Moose Head Stew which is written by Alina Pete, of Weregeek fame, and also a friend of mine.

Knitting Olympics Day 11: Everything's Tiny Except my Giant Balls

2010-02-22T14:06:00.007-06:00

If this were a seven minute Olympic Story used as filler between events, the pitch would be something like this: Our Knitting Olympian today is Rilla, who believed that she could compete and win without checking her gauge and reading instructions properly. Will she finish, and what will the finished products actually look like? Will the sweater be big enough to fit a barbie? a Cabbage Patch Kid? We'll have to watch this competitor closely to see just how screwed up things will get.

The blanket is going along so well, that I'm almost done it. See all that wool there? That's practically two whole balls of wool. That's supposed to be in the blanket, making itself into the blanket through the clickity clicks of my needles. Why is it all rolled up so nicely sitting outside of it then? I DON'T KNOW. According to my pattern, I've got seven more repetitions of eight rows to do. Each section of eight is approximately an inch of the blanket, so we're looking at a blanket that will be seven inches longer than this when it comes across the finish line. To give you an example of the scale, here's Starbuck making herself useful. This is the solution as I can see it. I just keep knitting. I just keep repeating my pattern until I get through more of those giant balls. I recognize that what I'm going to have here will resemble a flag more than a blanket. It will be a lovely rectangle, not a cozy square, but it's too late. It's just too late to make it anything else.

As for the sweater, well, that's a whole other sad story of incompetence. I have these really small circular needles that I thought would work for the bulk of the sweater work. I looked at how many stitches I needed to cast on and thought I'd be fine. I didn't read through to the repeated increases over and over and over again, so that roughly eight rows in, I can't keep the thing on the needles anymore. There's no way to knit through this problem, I can't just keep going and see what will happen. I've got to go to the Wool Emporium and say, "I NEED TO FINISH THIS BEFORE THE OLYMPICS ARE OVER AND I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT SIZE OF NEEDLES THESE ARE." Yes. That's right. I didn't even know what size of needles I had when I started casting on. So, I'm hoping that the lovely Wool Emporium ladies will know what the fuck to do, because I'm at a complete loss.

Is it Racist if You're Eight Years Old? Probably

2010-02-19T11:33:00.004-06:00

The first story I ever wrote was about a plantation in the deep south. It centered on three kids who lived there and made friends with those wacky black slaves and they had wonderful adventures.

It makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little.
My parents had taken me on a vacation to Louisiana and we had toured several austere, beautiful plantations. They were glamourized and anesthetized and the tour guides talked about slaves as a necessary part of plantation life, like it was no big deal. The shanties in the woods off the main grounds were romanticized. I imagined these happy communities of people camping together and singing songs and basically having a fantastic time while they did their work.

I had heard stories about whippings and murders, the continual defilement and debasement of human beings. I just couldn't process them. They didn't have a place in the gorgeous homes that I had been in. It could not actually have been so terrible because they were surrounded by wealth and luxury. Surely it must have been enjoyable, right? More like an extended family situation, instead of this owning human chattel.

I was an idiot. A romantic idiot, but an idiot nonetheless.

I stumbled across my story when I was seventeen years old. I had hidden it away in a drawer in my bedroom, embarrassed of it with my little child's brain. I was embarrassed because I had dreamed of writing something at all. I was embarrassed because it didn't feel true, instead a perpetuation of a terrible lie. My seventeen year old self was a little impressed that I had written something at all, but terribly terribly ashamed that it was such racist bull shit.

That story haunts me. I worry that everything that I write will later be looked upon with revulsion, that I will allow my ignorance to show in appalling ways.

I can look for excuses to stop writing everywhere I turn. Most writers I read about will talk about the first time they wrote a story and how marvelous it was to take something that was locked in their imagination and make it just a little bit more real. Their anecdote gives them an excuse to keep going, to keep finding those treasures of their psyche and give them form and function.

I need a better story than "when I was eight I wrote about how awesome living on a slave plantation was." I need to exorcise that demon somehow.

Suggestions?

Knitting Olympics Day Three

2010-02-14T12:03:00.005-06:00

What used to be a scarf is now a few inches of a blanket. I had no grief ripping out the stitches of the scarf, but the bit of progress that I've made on the blanket has been frustrating, to say the least. I cast on Friday night, and I was all anxious to get it going, so despite my earlier statements that I wouldn't start it while I was out playing werewolf with my friends, I decided I'd do a row or two and see what it was like... which was a mistake. I realized a third of the way into the first row that I needed to be giving my attention to my pack, so I put it aside and when I picked it up the next day I had no idea what the hell was going on with the pattern.

This stuff is really hard to see. I mean, I can't easily figure out which is a purl and which is a knit. It all looks like lumpy stitches. Plus, since I was learning the pattern, I didn't particularly know what it was supposed to look like. So, I ripped it out and started over. I got a few rows in and was consistently ending on the wrong stitch, so I counted my cast on again, and I was seven stitches short. Seven. SEVEN. So I ripped it out and started again.

I finally got a good feel for the pattern and how it was supposed to work and then I got to Row eight, the last row of the pattern and it said, "Row 8: p2, k3, *p5; rep from *, end p1" and I was all, "Okay, I just purl through to the end... what a weird way to say it."

And so I did. And then I thought, "That's fracked. Why would it say p5 to the end." So I whipped up an e-mail to Amy with my hypothesis and she quite rightly pointed out that if I just did the same thing throughout, it would look like the pattern regardless of a typo.

I did change the incorrect pattern to go as follows:

Row 8: P2, K3, *P5; K3; rep from *, end P1

Just in case anybody else is trying to work on the Bebe Brillant Boucle Brillant Blanket (forgive the lack of accents), I think that correction makes sense in the scheme of the pattern.

I gave up ripping out my mistakes because this wool is nothing if not forgiving. If I can barely tell the difference between a knit and a purl upon close inspection, then nobody is going to tell the difference upon completion. So there is one row in there that is pretty much all purls, but I'm willing to live with that.

I tried to get a close up of the pattern as well, so that you could get a sense of what the thing is supposed to look like. The pictures provided with the pattern show fuzzy blanket number seven, for all I can tell. Diagonal Stripes! Huzzah!

Knitting Olympics Prep and Plan

2010-02-12T12:02:00.007-06:00

I've spent a lot of time scouring Knitting Pattern Central for some patterns that would suit my needs for this round of the Knitting Olympics. I wanted to find patterns that would help me use up some of my stash because going out to purchase new yarn during my extended period of unemployment isn't necessarily going to fly. I also wanted to make something for a baby boy and a baby girl, born of two friends of mine. The girl is going to be moving into the 3-6 mo period right away and the boy is just three weeks old. So, this is what I came up with.

I'm going to make a baby blanket for the fellow out of the green yarn, pictured to the right.

"But that's a scarf," you say.
"Au contraire!" I say, "That's the beginning of a scarf that I'm going to rip apart and make into a blanket."

I have three skeins of that wool, so I'll have enough.
It came with a pattern from the manufacturer, so as long as I don't screw it up, I'll be able to make a blanket that will compliment the wool.
The pattern from the manufacturer looks interesting enough that I won't want to poke out my eyeballs with my knitting needles, but it looks easy enough that I... won't want to poke out my eyeballs with my knitting needles.

There's only one small hitch. The needles that I need are currently occupied.

That lovely purple thing, underneath my saucily posing cat, was supposed to be a bunting bag. It's not going to be that, though, because I realized as I started doing the decreases into the hooded area that I was going to run out of wool, and with no income to purchase that little bit, especially before the deadline of the Olympics (TONIGHT!), I was left with a bit of a quandary. The thought of ripping out all of that knitting just about made me want to cry. I started that particular pattern, like, four years ago. I'm so freakin' tired of it I'm not going to transfer it to another set of needles, transfer it back to the rounds, and then continue on after the Olympics. I'm more likely to tear it off in a fit of rage and throw it into a snowbank. So I decided to rip out the decreases (fortunately only about six rows of knitting) and continue it as a small, car-seat appropriate, baby blanket. That also means that I've got to finish knitting this beast today, so that I can use the needles tonight to cast on my Knitting Olympics blanket.

"Uh, Rilla. You've knit that thing for four years. How are you going to knit an entire blanket in the two weeks that the Olympics are on?" you ask.
"I'm not! I'm going to make a blanket and a sweater!"

The sweater looks like a very easy thing to do, and I wanted two projects to come out of this whole challenge. So, I plan on using the pink wool (pictured to the left) as the primary colour and the blue for the decorative embellishments.

The plan is to cast on the blanket this evening. I won't be watching the Olympics, I'll be playing Werewolf, and I don't expect to get any significant progress done because I'll want to pay attention to the game. My goal is simply to get it cast on because I don't want to learn a pattern whilst visiting. I'll cast on the sweater when I've had so much of the blanket that I want to scream. I predict that will occur sometime around day four.

If you want to play along with me and the rest of the strange knitters, it's not too late! The Yarn Harlot has a sign-up link in this post. Let me know if you're involved so that I can be encouraged by the progress of others!

Once I Start I Like to Stop

2010-02-10T16:07:00.005-06:00

1. I started working on a novel idea that I played around with about a year ago. I say, "played around with" because I never got serious about it. I didn't really figure out an outline, although I had a vague idea of a beginning, middle, and end. I wrote a couple of chapters, was dissatisfied with my love of melodrama and the pacing, and thought, I'll work on it later, and then later, and then more later. Two days ago I figured I'd start with a character sketch and then post it to textFIGHT and open it to critique/suggestions. But then as I started I realized that it wasn't really a character sketch so much as a beginning, an intro not only to my heroine, but to the world, and I easily dissuaded myself from continuing.

"This isn't a character sketch," I told myself, "it's another lame attempt at a beginning. Don't show it to anyone and just stop typing."

So I did. I wrote two paragraphs and convinced myself to quit writing because it wasn't what I meant to write.

I also, literally, had the shakes. It was as if my body was holding up its own stop sign because the one in my brain wasn't effective enough. Who gets the shakes when finally sitting down to do the thing that I keep telling myself would be fun and rewarding to do? Me. That's who. Maybe in another year I'll talk myself up to an outline and then I can find another excuse to stop again.

2. I've been thinking about doing the knitting olympics this year. I enjoy knitting but I don't usually do it unless I have a good excuse to. When I first started learning to knit I would sit and knit for the fun of it, for the joy of seeing something being made from my own effort. I haven't sat down to knit for knitting's sake for a while, and I think it might be a fun challenge. Plus, the nature of the "competition" is that you challenge yourself to a task that you think will be difficult but manageable for the length of the Olympics. That little fellow to the right, not the laughing mother but the smaller one, will need handmade baby things. I think it's a good combo: knitting olympics + baby stuff. I think, too, that the focused time line of the Olympics will help me with this start/stop habit I've got going on.

I don't know, it feels as if I'm able to justify putting things off that are hobbies, or things that would require time and effort for the sake of time and effort. It's different when I'm working because then it's work. I think I transfer this idea that time and effort = work and therefore not fun, even though I know through past experience that this is not true, that I will always be rewarded by results of my labours, regardless of work or play.

Caffeinated

2010-02-05T11:50:00.004-06:00

AJ invited me out for coffee yesterday, possibly sensing that I was feeling a little down, and it made a crappy day into a far better one. I suppose, though, that I should not have had that much coffee late in the afternoon because I was buzzing far past my scheduled bedtime. It made me a little silly, I think:

Conversations with Kaz and Ril when we're supposed to be going to sleep.

Ril: Tomorrow's Friday. Do you want to do anything in the evening?

Kaz: Dunno... what did you have in mind?

Ril: We could rent some movies for the week-end. Anything you want to see?

Kaz: *shrug*

Ril: I've only seen League of Extraordinary Gentleman once. I'd like to see it again to see if it's really that bad.

Kaz: ok

Ril: Or! We could rent Chronicles of Riddick because we just watched Pitch Black. Do you know what my favorite part of that movie is?

Kaz: "Keep Moving."

Ril: That is a good part, but my favorite part is when he kills that guy with his teacup. Remember?

Kaz: *buries his head in his pillow*

Ril: Remember? He's drinking from this metal cup thing, and the guy is all, "What? Are you going to kill me with your soup cup?" and he's all "It's tea. I'll kill you with my teacup." And then HE DOES! It's awesome. OR! We could rent The Terminator because I don't think I've ever seen it, but I've heard about the plot so often I'm pretty sure I know how it goes. The Terminator comes back from the future to prevent that kid from being born BUT IT'S TOO LATE. He's already been born.

Kaz: *head comes up from pillow* WHAT? No.

Ril: That's not how it goes?

Kaz: No. It's not.

Ril: Oh... Does the terminator come back from the future then, to stop himself or something?

Kaz: *sigh* *head returns to pillow*

Ril: Well, I know that the kid's important because he's going to start a robot revolution or something. Or lead a robot army? It's something to do with robots...

Kaz: Yes. It's something to do with robots.

Scattershot

2010-02-04T11:21:00.006-06:00

I found this painting this morning, during my regularly scheduled internet loafing period. It's from David Graeme Baker Painting, and he has several more that are worth the click through. That painting, though, the one up there, feels like it could be from my youth. Maybe because we had a truck like the one in the painting. Maybe because my mom had a jacket like that one, or because we would tow our boat to a beach like that one. I'm rather smitten, and a touch melancholy too.

Melancholy keeps getting all over everything. It's like touching clothes with chalk dust on your hands. You reach out to experience the feel of the fabric, and you smear white powder all over it. It's soiled from your own impression of it.

AJ and I once had a conversation about the Smashing Pumpkins and I was wondering how the hell they managed to pull off an album title like, "Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness." First, I'd say that it takes some cajones to even make that as your title with a straight face, and then to just have everyone take it seriously and not go, "Wow... lame." Maybe it was the right time for such a title. Anyway, that's some pretension for your day.

Edit: Feb 5 ~ Clark sent me this quote on Facebook, and I thought I should include it:

"A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that."
— Herman Melville

The Book Thief

2010-02-01T11:09:00.011-06:00

I decided last week that I needed to organize my books. In light of what I found, I suppose I should have tasked myself with organizing the books, because there weren't very many that were actually mine. I have this habit of leaving books lying around the house, in cubby holes, in various bedside tables, in stacks on the dressers. You get my drift. In all my various hiding places, I found a nice stack of books, and I was faced with some bad habits.

I have library books that a professor let me borrow years ago. I have books that I was supposed to review years ago. I have books that my family has lent me because they thought I'd like them, some of which I also acquired years ago.

I wish that I had learned to say no earlier. I wish that I had the skills to follow through with my intentions. I wish that I was just... more organized. I think that if I had those qualities, I wouldn't be faced with a stack of books, most of which should not be in my house. Faced with them I am, and this is more about who I want to be than what I need to do with all of these books. I'm at that stage (again?) when I want to be so much more, so much better than I am. I look for excuses to believe bad things about myself, and I find them everywhere, even in harmless stacks of books, because I'm looking for them.

But this is what I have learned, in the many years that I have gone through these cycles. It is easier to mope and pout and look inward at my ugliness, to label it, categorize it, scrutinize it, and be completely unchanged. It is harder to look at what I'd like to be, to strive towards action and leave behind the inaction of reflection. It is harder yet, to take that first step, to make some real effort to become the person I long to be, but steps must be taken, otherwise when I reach this stage again in the months to come, I'll look at the same little flaws, the same shit, every time. I'd rather find something different to dwell upon next time. Maybe even something that doesn't make me feel so terrible.

And there I was looking at this symptom of myself. This stack of books. I put away the ones that I had read and came to grips with the fact that they will go unreviewed, and that's what it is. I put aside the library books, so that I could return them when next I go to the University, and the ones that I have borrowed and already read, so that they can go back to their own libraries. Then I divided the rest into two stacks: Books I should read, and books I want to read.

You know, this word, should, it always makes me feel ineffectual. Do you have the same issue? You hear the word should and you think, "Why haven't I done that already? If it were something that I really should be doing, why aren't I doing it right now? What is wrong with me that I keep putting it off?" Well, that's what I think, when I hear should. I've been trying to eliminate it from my to-do lists. Much like Yoda said, "Do or do not. There is no should... I mean try." I've been working on the should problem for about three weeks, and yet there it was. A whole pile of books I should read.

I used to love to read. I'd read anything I could get my hands on, and then I'd read it again. And then I spent eight years reading things I should read, and it kind of sucked the enthusiasm from me. So, I put the should read books aside. My stack of books that I actually want to read, is quite big. I'd like to give myself the chance to enjoy the process again. I'd like to be able to disassociate my sense of responsibility from my sense of enjoyment, to read for the sake of reading. There are several books in both stacks that don't belong to me, and I think next time I go home, I'll just take all of the should books to their home too.

Miss kitty there is Starbuck. Yes, she is on the table. Yes, she knocked the books over once or twice.

This Sucks

2010-01-30T12:37:00.003-06:00

I didn't know that Salinger died this week. Frankly, even though he was in his 90's, it still really really sucks.

The Onion says it best, I think: Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger.

I don't think I can properly articulate what this means to me.

Lists

2010-01-26T16:05:00.003-06:00

No, not Liszt, although he and I go way back. Just regular old lists, itemized details of stuff. I have had friends who swear by lists. They couldn't make it through their workday without elaborate ones that have every little thing that they want to do on it. I've never been a list person, but lately I've been giving it a try. It's one aspect of my anxiety management that has been working out pretty well.

Em finished her M.A. and PhD totally on time, none of this two years extra business for her, by following lists every day. When we shared an office I got used to it, but I was always of the free spirited acadame. You know the kind: I'm just here to read and write and hopefully it will work out with that twelve essay a term schedule that you'd like me to follow. You can spot these particular kinds of students by the cup of coffee in one hand, a book in the other, and they are generally surrounded by four other people who follow the same philosophy and they're probably discussing something that has absolutely nothing to do with school -- something like the glories of 2012 and what else should have fallen down in that movie. I was one of those students, and the non-list, slackadaisy work ethic didn't exactly serve me well. It served me. I finished all of my work with limited extensions and I think I may have even written one or two brilliant things. So, when Em and I rubbed elbows in our closet of an office, I scoffed at her lists.

"They don't work for me," I said, over my cup of coffee.
"I'd never get anything done without lists," she said, crossing off something on her list -- talk to Rilla, it said.

But, then, there she was being extremely efficient and productive, and there I was, pounding my head into another theory book that I hated... gods, I hated theory. Just let me read some more damn novels... I digress.

I've got an unprecedented amount of free time, and about four million projects that I could be working on, but I found myself kind of lazing around, reading, eating, playing video games. So much unstructured time was making me a little stir crazy, and I started to beat myself up for not making the most of this period of unemployment. When will I ever have the opportunity to devote myself to my creativity without time constraints again? And then I started getting anxious about how I wasn't spending my time well, which triggered the anxiety attacks all over again. It's like a sick joke:

"AAAaaah, I'm anxious because I hate my job and it stresses me out."
It's okay, Rilla, you'll find a better job. Let's focus on getting your head fixed in the meantime.

"AAAaaah, I'm anxious because I have free time and I'm wasting it."
gods, somebody get this chick a shrink already.

So, I started making lists. This serves two functions in the crazy reduction plan.

I do it right before I go to bed and then I don't spend forty minutes planning out my day while I try to go to sleep, thereby robbing me of sleeping time.
I feel like my free time is being spent properly. Even if it's just a list of housework, I'm doing something... something that I can then cross off my list.

This is a new thing, this list plan. So far, though, I do feel better about my time and productivity. I'd also strongly recommend it to people who dwell on stuff before they go to sleep. It really cuts back the worry time.

Anxiety Girl comic from Natalie Dee.

The Truth in Lies

2010-01-25T11:04:00.002-06:00

PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death and God from Frank Warren on Vimeo.

Fifty People One Question is one of the most beautiful video projects online right now. The one I've included above is my favorite one, done in conjunction with the PostSecret people. I love it. I think it's amazing and it usually makes me a little teary. My favorite secrets are from the couple at 3:35. They are lying. I can tell. I can tell because I've played that particular game hundreds of times in the LARPs that I've done. You establish a past together by making it up on the spot, and you always begin with "you know."

Me: You know that time I fell down the stairs and broke my leg?
You: Yeah.
Me: Thanks for waiting with me until the ambulance showed up.

The context of the imagination defines your past together. I was in pain. You comforted me. The truth in the lie? I want you to be there for me.

Me: You know that time I was pushed down the stairs and broke my leg?
You: Yeah.
Me: If that was you, I'll break your leg right back.

I was in pain. You caused it. The truth in the lie? You are bad for me, whether or not I allow myself to acknowledge it.

"You know your cat that disappeared? I ran it over."

I hope you will never push me away. Even when I'm an asshole.

"You know all those books I have that I won't let you read? It's just all these love poems that I wrote about you."

I love you, but I'm afraid to tell you.

Is there a cat? Are there poetry books? I'd bet good money that there isn't.

It doesn't matter.

Above Zero

2010-01-18T20:49:00.005-06:00

It's the middle of January and I have gone for walks thrice within the last week. What insanity is this? Oh weather gods, why dost thou tease us?

The unseasonably warm weather is making me a little loopy. I cleaned my house. I washed the floors. I want to spring clean in January, and I don't even like to spring clean when it's Spring.

Pics of the weather.

Starbuck and Boomer want to go outside, so I tease them by opening the window and giving them a chair. There's still a screen, so it's extra mean.

Some foolish child has thrown away their useless gloves. It will get cold again, little one.

There was no apple juice today. FALSE ADVERTISING.

Vidja Games

2010-01-14T20:20:00.004-06:00

I kind of went obsessive insane over Dragon Age: Origins. I gave it to Kaz for Christmas because he asked for it, and I wanted to add it to our video game collection. I was all sneaky and I wrapped it up with a new shirt -- with wrapping paper and all that -- so that it didn't look like a video game, so I think Kaz was actually surprised. Since it is his present, I had to wait until he beat it before I had dibs, but I did manage to start up a game of my own while he played other things.

I made a Human Noble Rogue and that's her on the left. This is the only good shot I have of her and Alistair, and it chafes me because they were sooooo in love that I almost cried when I started a new game and broke up with him with a different character. I know, I know. There's rilla getting all overly emotional about stupid things again, but seriously... that was some excellent characterization, there. I think the writers went out of their way to make a completely adorable romantic interest, and it's spoiled me for all of the other possible romances in the game.

So, I beat the game with that human rogue woman there, and she and Alistair got married and he was the King and they lived happily ever after. It was pretty much the most awesome thing ever, and Kaz was starting to get seriously pissed when I started doing touchdown motions when I finally finagled my way into the engagement and Alistair's kingship. I might have been singing, "I won! I won! I won the game! Who won the game? I won the game!" Now why would Kaz be annoyed by that?

I started a new game with an elven mage, and I've been a little disappointed. Mainly because I told Alistair to take a hike and started up a relationship with the beautiful Leliana. Not that there's anything wrong with that option, but it's not nearly so heart-wrenching as the options available with Alistair. Since this new beginning, I haven't been as addicted to the game either... maybe because I know what my basic options are for the completion of the game, or maybe because the feeling of the story unfolding in front of me, is no longer the same.

Genre Shift: I'm waiting for my download of Star Trek Online. They began the open beta for the game earlier this week, and I had to wait a few days to pick up a beta key. Their site has a list of places where you can get your own key if you're so inclined. I've had a few problems downloading the game client from various websites, so I'm currently waiting on the torrent. I'm hoping to be inside the game by this week-end, and I'm pretty excited about it.

Genre Shift: I got Harvest Moon: Magical Melody for Christmas from Kaz's family, and that was pretty much taking up all of my free time, especially when Kaz was playing Dragon Age. It's one of those games where you set up a farm and you make friends and you woo some other character by giving them stuff until they finally give in and marry you. In the original Gamecube version of the game you could play a male or female and so I was pretty psyched (I know... I'm lame) because in the original Harvest Moon you were a dude, and you had four girls to choose to woo. In this one, there's, like eight or nine, and there's bachelors and bachelorettes. But it turns out that when they remarketed it for the Wii they decided to just give you the boy character to play and so, here I am, being a dude and chasing down women. Today I finally got married, which I announced to Kaz as soon as he got home, and he said, "I bet we had better pictures," and I said, "I bet we had better everything." So, if you're a Harvest Moon nerd, I married Dia, because I figured it was cathartic to marry the girl who's living in the village because she is seeking mental health help. Things are looking up for the both of us, babe.

The Comfort in Numbers

2010-01-12T10:18:00.004-06:00

Since I quit my previous job, my anxiety has diminished to a minuscule speck. I am, though, somewhat concerned that it will rear its ugly head when I start another job. With the Christmas season past, my anxiety diminished, and a dwindling bank account, I've been looking for something new that won't make me miserable. Nay! Something that I may even like!

In an effort to figure out what the fuck to do about anxiety attacks, why I get them, how to stop them, etc., I started seeing a very nice counselor, and part of my homework this week was to read some things and fill out some tests and stuff. One of the tests was the Burns Anxiety Inventory (PDF) and it helps to rate the severity and frequency of many many symptoms of anxiety. So, yesterday I scored an eighteen out of a possible 99, where a lower score is a healthier score. In that case, it's mild anxiety.

I finished doing all the reading and reflecting that I was supposed to do, and I was feeling pretty good about how much I had progressed since my last day of work. Two months ago, I was a pretty big mess, and I felt crazy. So I went back to the Burns Anxiety Inventory and did a little reminiscing and did a quick tally of what my symptoms would have been while I was working over there. The total: 56.

FIFTY-SIX. Extreme anxiety. (I always do things to the extreme!!)

I never really needed any extra justification for leaving a job that was making me unhappy, but it kind of was a big, why-would-you-ever-feel-bad-for-quitting smack to the head. It also made me feel a whole lot healthier. My meager current score of eighteen, seems downright marvelous.

Regardless of the numbers, which do make me feel better, my counselor is very confident that I can learn how to get my anxiety totally under control, and that makes me feel a lot better too.

Let's Talk About Death, Baby

2010-01-07T11:11:00.002-06:00

Rob sent me a book for Christmas called Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality by Thomas Lynch. I know. Nothing says, "MERRY CHRISTMAS" like a book of essay on what it's like to put the dead to rest. It fits my mood at the moment, though. I hate the hype and exploitation of celebrity deaths, but Brittany Murphy's recent death has been much on my mind of late. I think it's because she's the same age as I am, and because it feels as though she's been a part of my life. Watching Girl, Interrupted was somewhat of a ritual for me in my mid/late-twenties, as was watching Clueless in the years before. She did the voice of Luanne Platter in King of the Hill, and I watch and re-watch the seasons I have of that.

So, it feels weird. I feel some sort of need to mourn her, but at the same time, I've always looked snootily down my nose at people who get all emotionally attached to strangers, who happen to be famous. I've been re-watching those movies I have of hers, as a means of letting go, or whatnot, but it's a changed experience. Daisy's suicide in Girl, Interrupted, seeing her twisting from a noose in her bathroom, has always been horrific, but now it's almost... I don't know... sacrilegious? to see the dead pretending to be dead. And in Clueless, the makeover montage set to "I Want to be a Supermodel," just seems like cruel foreshadowing to the transformation of an actress who was healthy and curvy, to the emaciated figure she is now.

And I feel ashamed that I want to talk about her because her death should belong to the people she loved.

I've had loved ones die, and I used to get so angry when other people would talk about them with that sad note of regret in their voices. That voice in my head, the one that you're not supposed to say out loud, it would yell, "You didn't love them as much as I did, so what right do you have to pour your sadness out to me." And grief would quickly turn over to silent fury.

But this was supposed to be about the book that I'm reading, and I just went and got my neuroses all over this blog post, but this needs to come out too, so here it is.

Three Reasons Why Yesterday Rocked

2009-12-22T11:01:00.003-06:00

1. Schooners.

2. Em and I exchanged little gifties and I gave her a bird Christmas tree ornament, and she gave me a bird Christmas tree ornament.

3. Hanging out with Brennan.

This is not Brennan. This is my new ornament. The cats are gonna go nuts on that feather if they ever manage to get it.

Better Ways

2009-12-17T11:06:00.003-06:00

Writers, if they're at all philosophical, will eventually ask themselves why their characters are able to withstand all sorts of shit that would have driven a non-plot driven person off the deep end. I mean Frodo and Sam should have said, "Fuck this," about four hundred times before they actually made it to Mount Doom. Tolkien took a pretty legit route and made their struggle as real as possible, continually voicing their doubts and their fears, so that when they succeeded the reader can believe that their strength of will and the support of their friends is what carried them to the edge of the volcano.

There are lots of ways to justify characters doing the unbelievable, mostly in the fantasy and sci-fi genres. I personally think Robert Jordan did a pretty brilliant thing in The Wheel of Time by inventing ta'veren, people in his world who force the story (the pattern) to adapt in unexpected ways when those characters are near. It's a perfect way to explain why people go out of their way to help them, why they're able to find hidden things that nobody has ever found, and why these characters, of all the hundreds that he's introduced, are more important to the real story. Something weird happens to Rand? ta'veren. A ship comes up at the exact right moment when they need to escape down the river? ta'veren. I like it because the characters know that this is what they are, and that they have no way of knowing what sort of things that the world will throw at them that may help or hinder their progress. It's built into the belief system of the world, so others can try to befriend and use these important characters, or instead be caught up in their plot without understanding why.

He also uses Prophecy, which is a great way to explain why characters do stuff that shouldn't be do-able. Readers get all wrapped up in trying to decipher the meaning of prophecy so that they don't usually stop to say, "tsk, he could never do that." Instead it invites the reader to wonder, "How is he going to do that." Kaz and I just finished reading The Belgariad by Eddings, and I found that to be a rather brilliant use of prophecy in fiction. Garion, a scullion boy from a farm in the ass-end of nowhere, is destined to kill a god. Did I go, "Yeah, right. As if." No. Partly because it's a fantasy book, so that's kind of what goes on in those sorts of books, but also because there was a prophecy that was intricate enough that I wanted to figure it out, but not so confusing that I was left wondering wtf. In essence, it helps a skeptical reader suspend their disbelief and move past the problems that occur in all fantasy and sci-fi plots: How do they keep doing that (the ridiculously, epicly difficult) without dying/leaving/giving up. Or, simply, How did they do that (the impossible) at all?

Obligatory Spoiler Warning: I'ma talk about BSG again, specifically the final season, so if you haven't watched it, don't read this.

BSG relied heavily on prophecy for the first three seasons. The president and her priestly advisor used their sacred texts to figure out where their people had come from and where the thirteenth tribe may have gone. Rosalin herself was "the dying leader," who would lead them to Earth. I think it was a pretty good prophecy, made more interesting by the fact that we could actually see and believe the fulfillment of it. So, when it turned out that Earth was destroyed by yet another Cylon war, their prophecy, predictably, fell to complete shit.

I thought this was pretty interesting, and it made me ask a lot of questions about where their strength of purpose was derived: Did they search for Earth because they believed they were destined to do so, or did they search because they needed a place to live. Rosalin's nervous breakdown was pretty understandable, but it also pissed me off because, obviously, she was mourning the loss of her role in a prophecy, her loss of faith, and she stopped helping the fleet find a place where they could settle. While Adama, once again, kicked total ass, and came up with another plan and tried to give a crumbling fleet a new purpose. That tells me that he's more interested in survival than in playing roles. That also tells me that he's totally super awesome, as usual.

Given the choice between unraveling a centuries' old cosmic puzzle and randomly searching nearby star systems, I'd obviously choose the first option, and so it's really no wonder why morale went totally down the drain.

I liked the twist in the prophecy trope. I liked that it was fulfilled, but everything turned to shit anyway. I thought it was a fantastic way to move away from the super happy, everything's perfect ending that really wouldn't have fit for BSG.

The difference between fantasy and sci-fi, really, is that in fantasy when you want something totally crazy to happen that would not exist in our world, you use magic and in sci-fi, you use science.

Frodo and Sam have elven cloaks of super stealth.
Romulans have cloaking devices.
(Magicians = the most powerful characters on Earth, but Engineers? Not so much. What's up with that)

In BSG, we've got Science coming out the wazoo. We got robots that look like people. We got robots that look like robots. We got robots that look like hot chicks in dirty bathtubs. We got spaceships that look like crooked asterisks. We got spaceships that look like fighter jets.

So what's Kara Thrace. Is she a person who is able to do everything whenever its necessary because it has to get done? Yes. She gets the arrow of Apollo from Caprica by using a Cylon ship, which she used to escape her death on a planet with no air. She comes back from the dead to find Earth, just because she thinks she knows where it is, and she does. She knows all sorts of crazy shit from her childhood that only cylons had known about.

I figure, after that episode with the piano, when she plays a song that her father taught her that happens to be the very same song that switched on the four hidden Cylon skinjobs... I figure that she's the son of Daniel, the only cylon/human model that had to be totally scrapped. This, makes some sort of sense in the grand scheme of things. Daniel would have known all of the Cylons, he would have known about what they were like and what would be meaningful to them. He would pass it on to his daughter just because he loves her. Plus you can do some hand wavines about genetic memory if you really want to mix things up.

But what about the coming back from the dead thing? I ask myself. Well, she's a clone. A clone with her own memories? Maybe she was resurrected, like the cylons, even though she's only a half-cylon (remember her dad's Daniel). There. That's probably what happened.

Do you see my problem? I keep looking to the Science to fix things up, when the writers were looking to the Magic. They really did a number on me because I had my heart set on things being really science fictiony, but it was too blended. They had all of these aspects of fantasy included that I kept discounting as being real because of all the shiny shiny robots. They had the religion, they had the prophecy, they had invisible imaginary people talking about religion and fate to other characters.

I just really wanted Kara to stick around.

The Battlestar Galactica Post

2009-12-15T11:11:00.004-06:00

Obligatory Spoiler Warning: I'ma talk about how the series ended, so if you don't want to know about it, don't read this. I'll be surprised if you haven't seen it yet, if you like BSG, because it's taken me a ridiculously long time to get through this show, in the grand scheme of release dates.

I've been stewing on this post for a couple of weeks now, and here's why. I'm dissatisfied with the final season of BSG, and it took me some time to figure out exactly what it was that irritated me. I've decided to blame it on God.

Let's take a look at the religious mythos of BSG for a second... or a few minutes. The human population of BSG are organized into twelve "tribes," one for each planet that they settled upon after the twelve gods left Kobol. Kobol is the planet of the gods, where the gods themselves presumably lived and died. Those gods are, conveniently, the popular Greek gods, Zeus, Athena, Apollo, etc. Now here's the twist. When the tribes left Kobol, the thirteenth tribe, which are Cylon, went their own way and inhabited Earth I. The Cylons evolved, took human form, and were able to reproduce and thrive. These Cylons were godless.

And then they blew up, except for five survivors, who were brilliant enough to discover resurrection technology so they went off looking for the twelve tribes to say, "Hey... Cylons can get violent, so... head's up."

But back to the gods thing. Monotheism is not born of human culture, in BSG. It was a programming glitch in the Cylon Centurions, the primary soldiers of old-school robotic Cylons. So, then the Brilliant Resurrectors stumble across this idea of a monotheistic structure from a Centurion and decide that this is the solution to a cycle of violence.

Buh?

Seriously?

That's the plot you're gonna stick to?

"Hey guys, this Centurion thinks that there is one God that takes care of all his children. Should we deactivate it?"

"I've got a better idea, let's include that in the programming of all the new Cylon/Human hybrids that we make so that they can believe that they are chosen of their own special god, so that they've got an even better reason to hate humans."

"PERFECT!"

"Wait, weren't we supposed to be helping these two races figure out their problems?"

"Ok, ok, let's make some of them missionaries so that they can convert humans who are amenable."

"Sounds like a fine compromise. I'll start programming right now."

Okay okay, that's not how it went down. Instead Ellen Tigh, gods help her, thought that if they instilled an outside source of love, ie god, the Cylons would logically end their own warring ways, and humans would just convert gradually, over time, to a more peaceful existence because of the possibility that the one god is better for them.

And that's what I really don't buy. At all.

But the icing on the cake for BSG is that "god" is real, although it/he/she prefers not to be called that. It has agents who were actively helping the struggling human and Cylon population to get to Earth II and allow the continuation of a combined human and Cylon race, which is what we are, of course. So, Kara Thrace, Imaginary Baltar, and Imaginary Caprica were angels. Kara, unknowingly, and I. Baltar and I. Caprica, knowingly.

Imaginary Caprica and Imaginary Baltar had always been up front about their agenda, to get Caprica Six and and Gaias Baltar in the right spot to save humanity when the time is right, because it is god's will. The phrase, "god's will" is said by Imaginary Caprica dozens and dozens and dozens of times. The thing is, Imaginary Caprica shows up when the show is so new and shiny that a smart viewer isn't going to assume that she's an angel, a smart viewer is going to assume that this is some sort of Cylon trick, some new software or implant or something that just allows them to seriously mess with people.

A big part of me wants to say that the writers just couldn't figure out how to tie up all of these loose ends they had created, so they said, "god did it," but I know that's not true. They knew that god did it from the very beginning, and they were winding up/down to it from the first time that Imaginary Caprica showed up to confuse the hell out of Gaias Baltar.

So, if this was really the plan, if the writers decided that this was how they were going to allow the human/cylon race to survive in peace, they effectively gave up on the good of humanity as its own. That humans and cylons are not capable of being peaceful, without some other figure telling them they should be.

This is not in the spirit of the character of BSG at all.

Helo, everyone's favorite Cylon-lover, repeatedly places himself in danger at no other prompting than the fact that he thinks he should to protect those he loves. Billy, the original aide to the President, was a good person, in every sense of the word. He believed the best of every person, even Tom Zarek, the terrorist. He too was willing to sacrifice himself to protect those he loves. How many characters on that show were truly good, without any sort of religious prompting: Apollo, Adama, Dee, Kat, Doc Connell, to name a few.

So, I'm a little miffed. To me, it seems like they've given the short end of the stick to the potential of the human/cylon race. I'm also a bit miffed that I didn't put the pieces together sooner than the final season. I mean, Imaginary Caprica showed up in the second episode. I had plenty of time to see where the writers were going, but maybe I was just in denial about how far they'd take it.

I gotta talk about Kara Thrace, Baltar, and Caprica more, but I've run out of steam. Maybe tomorrow.

Welcome Back, Christmas Seacow

2009-12-08T13:37:00.008-06:00

My tree is up. I am most pleased.

And, my favorites, in greater detail:

The noble manitee asks, "What's not Christmassy about me?"

Christmas kitty says, "I wish I were a real cat, so that I could smash all these pretty balls. You there! Cats! Smash these balls."

And elsewhere in the living room, Ugly Santa says, "I still smell like tobacco! Thanks, chain-smoking Grandma!"

Squee!

It's Blogapalooza

2009-12-03T10:25:00.004-06:00

On the main stage we have Rilla, who is quickly transforming into the crazy cat lady. When I let the cats out of the basement in the morning I have an extended coo-fest over how cute they are and how much I missed them. I can hear myself talking and there is some sliver of academic in my head that's saying, "SHUT THE FUCK UP, LADY," but I don't respond well to swearing. Take that, inner Acadame, once again, I shun you and your ideals.

On the bandstand we have my happy place, which I discovered the other night when I refused to spend hours hyperventilating. I'm on a roll, kiddos. We're going on three nights without panicking before falling asleep. My happy place, by the way, is my dog when I was a kid. Can you have a happy place that's not really a place at all? Descartes, get on that. Laterally, I have not had an anxiety attack since I went to pick up my things from the former office. I secretly hope that my anxiety has left me, but I'll give it some more time before I decide that's the case.

Poets don't pull crowds, but I've been stewing over a few poems that I found during my reverie with my dead dog. I have some concerns over the quality of poetry that's all about childhood and family. Whenever I read those kinds of poems by other people, I kind of get all judgmental about having original thought and then I rant about recycling your memories into something meaningful, when sometimes they should simply remain memories. The meaning of family is too tied up in each person's past to create clear symbolism. Ah, but what's clear symbolism anyway. Perhaps it's time to give birth to these baby poems.

Whoever heard of a three act palooza. This show sucks.

Sit Rep!

2009-11-24T15:45:00.003-06:00

We are nearing a full week of my time away from work, and I'm sure you're all dying to know what's going on with me.

1) I'm postponing my return trip to the office to pick up spare shoes and the book that I am in the middle of reading. The book that I would have dearly loved to read while in the midst of dizzy fits. Reason for postponement? Only my psyche holds the answer to that.

2) I've recovered (more or less) from the dizzy fits. Now it only really strikes me when I'm in super busy places, wherein I usually get disoriented anyway. Coincidence? Probably not.

3) Kaz and I have been watching season four of Battlestar Gallactica. We still don't know who the final cylon is, but I have a few theories. Frankly, this seasons (thus far) has been pissing me off. Most episodes entail me yelling at the screen, "WHO IS GOING TO KILL BALTAR!? WHY IS HE STILL ALIVE!?"

4) I am dreaming up things to do with my spare time: roadtrips, knitting projects, writing drafts, organizing my archives. Mostly, I play computer and do housework. It's a weird combination of nesting and self-insulation. Ask not what the Rilla can do for the house, ask what the house can do for the Rilla. (of course that made sense)

5) The cats have taken to my additional time at home like flies on shit. No matter how often I swat them away, they always come back. They seem a lot less bad than they did when I wasn't at home, though. So, perhaps their desire to snuggle all the time is taking away from their desire to wreck stuff and eat things that ought not to be et.

6) I've been writing letters again. Don't be surprised if you get one.

7) "The world has turned and left me here, just where I was before you appeared, and in your place an empty space that filled the void..." I've been listening to music a lot too.

Naming My Aches

2009-11-20T10:40:00.003-06:00

I had my first massage this morning. It's part of my whole let-go-of-my-stress plan. It hurt, but it hurt in a good way. She found some pretty tense muscles in my jaw and neck and I had a little flashback to the first time my jaw locked. I was 21 and it was shortly before Rob and I got married. I was eating those little baby ritz crackers with cheeze goo, and all of a sudden my mouth wouldn't open.

I can't remember why I would have been feeling tense, besides the fact that I was sitting in a car for several hours, but when the masseuse started working out those aches and pains today, I wondered if I was worried... if my twenty-one year old self was feeling alone on a long journey, but was not yet aware enough to understand deep-seated loneliness and tension. Feeling those pains so precisely agitated and soothed, it was as if my body was trying to let go of an old emotional wound.

So, I started naming all of my knots and specific pains. My masseuse relaxed my fear of writing, my feelings of inadequacy, my over-reacting tendencies, my divorce. She found all of these spots that I could tie memories to, and then, slowly untie them and let them leave me.

Of course they're all still there, but I'm trying to help my body let go of them. Help my mind un-dwell, if such a thing is possible. I feel stretched and tired, but I feel a little more free too.

Into the Light

2009-11-19T09:40:00.004-06:00

In a good way... not in the I'm dying and floating into oblivion sort of way.

Yesterday was my last day at work in the Optometrists' Office. For a variety of reasons that job, more than any other, caused me extreme anxiety and stress and the combination of feeling like an overwhelmed piece of crap every day was pretty much making me a depressed lump.

My last day of work was supposed to be today, but like so many things with me and that place, it didn't go quite as planned. I had had vivid dreams of snapping and telling people off and storming out, but in reality I was going to go along until my final day like a civilized and worthwhile person. Instead, I got so dizzy yesterday morning, I practically blacked out sitting in the staff room. Just sitting. This was not a normal symptom of my anxiety attacks, nor was it standard every day occurrence, and frankly it scared the shit out of me. So, Kaz took me to the hospital where a kind Doctor told me that I needed a week off to recover from Benign Positional Vertigo, which is a fancy way of saying I get dizzy when I move around because a tiny little hair inside my ear canal calcified, broke off, and is now bouncing around in some fluid in there.

So, I'm done work, and it wasn't on the terms that I wanted, nor does it make me feel very proud of myself to be beaten by a workplace where I am fully capable of performing the tasks set out to me, but I'm tired of being unhappy, and this seemed like the logical first step towards improving my state of mind.

My schedule has opened up, if any of you want to get together, I'm free... all the time.

Of Course You Need to Know This

2009-10-28T15:33:00.005-06:00

I'm listening to my itunes list, and I had it sorted alphabetical by song name, and I just now realized that the shuffle setting is still on. It's been a couple of hours, and it struck me that I had heard "Rain King" by the Counting Crows from two different albums, one forty-five minutes ago, and one two minutes ago. And I thought, "Wait a second... how am I already on the r's, and why didn't I get two Rain Kings in a row." And then I thought that I have too much Counting Crows in my itunes playlist, and I was reminded that this is the exact reason why I don't organize my songs alphabetical by artist... because I'd get about three hours of Counting Crows, roughly 1/10th of that taken up by the Rain King himself.

I get more comments on my blog from facebook than I do from my blog and this somehow angers me. It's not like I put a little tag at the bottom of each post saying, "Listen facebook friends, just navigate away from your precious facebook and justify the existence of my blog." I don't do that because it seems foolish, and because I know nobody can justify the existence of something, unless they are justifying their own existence. In which case, this blog can never truly justly exist unless it justifies its existence on its own. Blog. I'm waiting.

Chest Pains Shmest Pains: I've been getting anxiety attacks every now and then, and I've even gone to my fabulous doctor to say, "hey... my heart occasionally feels like it will explode out of my chest. What's up with that?" Long story short, he prescribed me some stuff that I've had in my purse for about a month now and I haven't taken a single pill. At first I was all, "Oh good, I've got an emergency plan if I can't calm the fuck down on my own," and this actually helped me calm the fuck down. And then I started reading all of the potential side effects of said pills, and I started to get worried that if I took any, I'd pass out and forget who I was... since then I've had anxiety about my anxiety medication. And no, I can't seem to calm the fuck down. The other night I had an attack that lasted, oh, around fourteen hours, but I was all, "I'm sure it'll stop on its own, la-de-da~ I'm not gonna take my crazy pills." I didn't. Take that prescription drug companies. But seriously, it sucks. And no, I'm not exaggerating. Fourteen hours.

The cats puked on my bra in the middle of the night on Sunday. It's not the only bra I have, but it's my favorite and I feel like it's the only one that actually supports me and keeps my enormous nipples from poking through a dress blouse and a suit jacket. That's about fourteen smarties, FYI. I had to wear my strapless bra all day, and I had to restrain myself from fishing my hand down my shirt and readjusting that bad boy right at my desk for pretty much the entire day. I'm pulling out an old school idiom here, bear with me: We can send a man to the moon, but we can't make a decent strapless bra? For that matter, why can't we breed cats that don't get hairballs already? Scientists, get on those two things.

This Helped

2009-10-23T15:02:00.004-06:00

I got a new camera a couple of weeks ago. It's one of those fancy Digital SLR thingamajiggers that I'd been putting off getting for a while because I rather like the sorts of pictures I get from my automatic/manual/no flash dealy. Anyway, the camera folks at the local camera store explained how I could still get blurry, out of focus shots with my brand new Nikon D60, so I was persuaded. I told myself that on days when I don't feel like blogging, but I still wanted to post something I could take a walk with my camera and take pictures of things that showed how I feel.

What I really really wanted to take a picture of TODAY was this totally bad-ass guy wearing a black leather jacket and a bandanna with super long 80's hair walking his little white puppy.

Not that I feel like that... I just saw him walking his dog and thought sweet! But I'm not up to the photographic stage of taking pictures of strangers, especially when they look completely bad-ass despite the cuteness and smallness of their pets. I'm not about to get my camera smashed on the sidewalk for that sort of visual oxymoron.

Anyway. This is how I feel today.

The Other Kind of Colon

2009-10-13T10:55:00.002-06:00

Well.

About two weeks ago I got a little phone call from Rob, remember him? The fellow I used to be married to? Yeah. And he was all, "Why aren't you blogging? Is everything okay? Are you alright?"
I poo-pooed him and told him I was fine and that my life is a little dull right now and I don't really like my job, and henceforth and therefore I hadn't been blogging much.

And I thought, "Huh. If it's getting obvious enough to Monsieur Robert that something's not quite right, then it might be time to give my head a shake and figure out what the fuck is going on."

And then I ran into my friend Alli in a restaurant, and I used to see Alli every few weeks, and then I realized that I hadn't seen her in, oh I don't know, a year. And she came up to me and hugged me and told me I looked fabulous and asked, "Why aren't you blogging?! I check your blog a billion times to see what's going on?"
And I poo-pooed her and said that my life is dull and I don't like my job and I haven't felt like blogging.

I went through the same sort of thing that I had done after chatting with Rob; I tried to consider just what the hell was going on with me, and tried to convince myself that something should be done because sooner or later I wouldn't really be able to hide the fact that I'm pretty much miserable 90% of the time, and that even though I'm not writing about how I'm freaking miserable about 90% of the time, eventually everyone's going to figure it out anyway, even if I never see them... because I have the best friends in the world, and that's just what you get when you have friends who really care about you.

SO! One day I was on my way home from work, and I was taking a short-cut through the mall so that I didn't have to walk outside as much, and I passed by an enormous inflatable bubble-gum pink colon. It was made of that same stuff that those jumping fun-houses are made out of, and it had all these fans hooked up to it keeping it puffy and, supposedly inviting. There were these people giving out brochures about colon health, or something, and they were standing by the entrance to the colon asking people to go in and take a look around. And I wanted to go in it and look at what sort of display they would have inside a colon the size of a train car, but I thought, "Why would I choose to go inside a colon. That's idiotic." And I started to laugh a lot, and the brochure people gave me a funny look because I was laughing alone in a public place, but I would hope that they get a few people laughing as they walked by their display because it was absurd in every sense of the word.

But I was laughing because it struck me, finally, exactly why I've been feeling so unlike me. I'm in the colon, whatever that means, and I've gone in there because I thought it would be a good idea, but now I realize that no matter how pink and puffy it looks, it's still a colon. Sooner or later life will shit me out of here, and Things will be Better.

Anyway, I've felt better ever since I've been able to look at my circumstances with some humour, and I'm certain everything will turn out okay. I even seem to be able to enjoy myself at work more now. The idea that this is not a permanent condition has cheered me considerably.

This Update is Too Long: Part II

2009-08-21T07:39:00.002-06:00

Wow. I just hit enter accidentally and published this post before typing anything. Talk about your ironic post/title combo.

I went out to Ye Aulde Mexican Bar last night, and surprisingly I'm sick today. Or, maybe not so surprisingly as we went around the table giving yea's or nay's about whether we had ever gotten sick from eating there before. Why do I keep going back? Because it's delicious, and the atmosphere is fabulous. Besides, this feels more like a why-did-you-eat-that-many-nachos stomach ache instead of a we-never-wash-our-hands stomach ache. Nacho consumption was inspired in part by catching up with a grad school friend who ran away to Ontario to take a PhD, Deaner. Em, and I try to see him whenever he's in town, and what better way to remember him as he leaves again, than gut-wrenching pain. It's like a haunting memory of grad school compressed into one day.

By my troth, I once wrote a whole eighteen-page essay about how many times "by my troth," or "my troth," was spoken in The Paston Letters and then discussed what it might mean. Memories better left repressed. So, by my troth, I've been doing my best to hang out with friends in my evenings and week-ends because I'm attempting to reverse the damage to my self-esteem that I occasionally experience at work, which, by the way, is improving steadily. Thus far, I've gone with Em to see A Midsummer Night's Dream, at Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan, gone on a girl-date -- complete with a trip to the Art Gallery -- with my gal Nana, and rented various terrible movies with Kaz to cheer me up and spend important snuggle time together.

The whole co-worker stress at work is getting better as I feel more confident in my job, and I think they've seen that I'm not an idiot. The days when I have to ask someone how to do every single thing are ending, and I think I'm not really a thorn in anyone's side at the moment. My 3-month review is next week, and I'm debating whether or not I'm nervous or looking forward to it. Probably a combination of the two. I still have days when I feel incompetent and confused, but I'm getting better at figuring out the questions to ask that will actually help me to understand stuff. The human eye is a complicated things, and spectacles aren't exactly easy either. I'd wager that Progressive Lenses have been invented specifically to piss me off.

And that's about what's going on in my life right now. How are you?

This Update is Too Long: Part I

2009-08-19T20:04:00.006-06:00

Since I posted last I have turned 32, began exercising regularly, had various ups and downs with my job, had a poem accepted to a journal, gone to plays and movies, and I haven't written about any of it. That's just wrong.

The whole 32 thing is about the same as 31, except this time school is a distant memory. If you had told me when I was 18 how long I would go to University, I would have laughed in your face, and then maybe I'd ask if I went to Medical School or something. Honestly, sometimes it's weird to think about the investment I put in my education. The time and relationships that were sacrificed to get a piece of paper. I don't feel bad about it, exactly, but I don't always feel good about it. There are even days that I miss it, mostly when I hang out with Em, though. It sucks to think that we used to hang out together pretty much all the time because we were both in the Library for pretty much our entire lives, and now we see each other once or twice a month. I blame life. "Life," I say, "You and I need to talk about this."

The whole poem being published thing is by far my most uplifting part of my world right now. I had sent out a package of poetry in October of last year, and I got my acceptance letter two weeks ago. TWO WEEKS. The Prairie Journal has accepted one of my poems, and I don't know what issue it will be in yet, but I'm assuming that will all come in good time. I haven't had the gumption to write poems for a long time, but I'm uplifted at the moment. We'll see how seizing the day goes. P.S. Gumption is a fantastic word.

The Journals of Master Wu, the book that I was working on last summer, has a pretty spiffy website, and they've linked an entire chapter for you to sneakily preview. I'm tempted to be all apologetic about the book, in case you don't like it, or in case you think it's stupid, but I was intensely proud of our effort when we finished, and I'm not letting go of that pride. May I just say that writing was much easier when I was unemployed, or rather, may I say that writing was much easier when it was my sole duty to write. I want The Journals of Master Wu to be wildly successful so that I can just keep doing that. If that's not enough adverbs for you, you're surprisingly unperceptive.

My birthday present from Kaz and my in-laws was a Wii with the Wii Fit, and I haven't missed a day of "exercising" since I got it. Every few years I go through a fitness spree, and I suppose that I've reached the next stage of said spree. When I was in high school, my quad-mate (it's a dorm thing) and I were total exercise freaks for a semester. We went jogging, aerobic-ing, we did reps of stuff, and were often heard saying, "Feel my stomach. Feel it. It's hard, right?" Then I relaxed and dwindled to jogging a few times a week, and then it dwindled more to every now and then, and then it was like, "Why the fuck am I running around. This is lame." Then years later, I started my M.A. and we had this beautiful new physical activity complex, and I started doing the exercise thing on a regular basis and I shed pounds and I felt pretty awesome, and then school kicked me in the box and said, "Who do you think you are to have a life outside of school," and that pretty much ended that. I'm about four days away from the twenty-eight day mark, which is supposedly a benchmark of routine, if movies have taught me anything. I really fluxuate with my attitude towards exercise and health and self-image. I generally feel pretty kick ass about myself, and I've often admired Jack Black's character in The School of Rock who is all, "I like to eat, diet's are for chumps," and I don't know how this really fits with the weird 18 year-old me, and the now Wii-Fitting me. I suspect that I'm a slave to the machine and now that I have a computerized-home-invader trainer, I'll feel obliged to do as it says. Yes. It trains me on home invasion. What does your Wii Fit trainer do? (Thought you were so clever, didn't you)

Holy Crap, there's a metric boatload more for me to update you on, but this is turning into uber-post. I'ma stop now.

I May Not Be the Craziest Person in my Family

2009-07-26T21:10:00.002-06:00

My nephew's wedding went quite beautifully and it was a little bit frightening to look at how adult-like my young kin have become. As the only one of the siblings who doesn't have children of her own, I've kind of had to see what this whole growing up process is like through my nephews and nieces. My siblings' heartache at seeing their children grow up is a very dim echo in me, I'm sure, but it was still pretty much a tear-fest whenever I saw baby pictures of the handsome groom. They followed the popular trend and had a PowerPoint presentation of pictures of the wedding party, both in their childhood and adulthood, and, I for one was relieved of the near-dark of the wedding hall. The presentation came on the heels of my brother's speech to his son, and goodness me, was it a doozey. He had to stop halfway through to collect himself, so tear-filled was he, and I, knowing that if I dared make even the hint of eye contact would only make matters worse for both of us, kept looking directly at the ground beside my chair. So, I did weep buckets all over the table and my make-up was severely damaged by the whole emotionality of the day.

When I finally had a chance to meet the bride, after cakes were cut, and speeches were given, the groom introduced me as Auntie Rilla, and she got a pleasantly surprised and happy look on her face, which was pleasantly surprising in itself, since I wasn't sure she'd have the presence of mind to have a clue about who I was, given that she had just been wed, which is usually a somewhat surreal experience in itself. (Check out how long that sentence was... eh? EH!?) So we had a few uninterrupted seconds to go over the niceties of the day, and I realized that perhaps she hadn't been warned about my oddness, and that meant that perhaps I wasn't as strange as all that, in the eyes of my family... and I'm probably not. It is sad? Maybe a little.

Then I got to thinking on the events of the day: I have a picture of my niece with a screwdriver up her nose, and the screwdrivers were chosen by the groom himself to be decorations on the tables. I have a brother who cries more than I do, and a sister who tells stories about making out to "The Rose" in Grade 11. And a nephew who can bluff his way through a singing of "The Rose" even when he has no clue of the words, and just makes it work because he's standing in front of a church full of people at his brother's wedding. So, all in all, maybe I'm just part of the family, and not exactly the odd woman out.

The Closest I'll get to Summer Holidays

2009-07-23T11:20:00.003-06:00

My nephew is getting married this week-end. My nephew. Dudes. How did he get so old.
That's the fellow right there, the one in colour, about fifteen years ago or something ridiculous like that. Naturally, I must fulfill my role as the crazy aunt and go to observe the nuptials and weep buckets all over everyone involved.

Kaz and I are attempting to make the most of the trip, and are stopping in to crash with Bne, who I fully expect to not read this blog and thus will not know that I expect him to take me to see the Threshing Machine. I'm going to show up at his house and say, "Ready to go?" And he'll be all, "Sure. Where?" and I'll be all, "Dude. I totally wrote about this on my blog," and then he'll go, "I DON'T READ YOUR BLOG."

And my heart will break and I'll die right there. He'll have to deal with the mess. It's his own fault really.

Stat Shuffle

2009-07-12T21:03:00.006-06:00

I've been thinking about what to say about work for a while, and I've come up with a theory. I've definitely increased my dexterity stat because my skills with a screwdriver and those tiny little screws are way better. I think, though, that instead of just getting free stats, I've taken some sort of hit to my charisma because I'm having a hard time befriending my co-workers. It's the only thing that makes any sense.

Check it out. Here's an estimation of my stats before I started at the Optometrists' Office:

No warrior am I. If anything, I could possibly be a half-assed wizard, or bard maybe. Now, here's my estimation of my stats after I started at the Optometrists' Office:

So, I figure that the improved dex and heat resistance has somehow sucked up some aspect of my personality that makes me just a touch more likable because I'm having the damnedest time clicking with... well... with the clique that has worked together for a while before I came on the scene. On the plus side, I'm now a little more suited to being a Rogue, which may make my Money situation a little easier to handle. I'm sure I can afford at least a few ranks of pickpocket.

To be honest, I'm not sure whether it's a fair trade-off. I have been able to repair our coffee grinder, my hanging flower bed, and been unscarred while holding the pizza pan still while trying to use those little rolly-cutty things. On the other hand, I've been developing a growing dread of going to work and attempting yet another awkward day of social interaction.

Let me cut to the chase: it's been pretty freakin' stressful and I've already taken the appropriate measures of having multiple anxiety attacks, two weeks of loose bowel movements (you read it YOU CAN'T UNREAD IT) and then finally breaking down and crying in front of one of my bosses, which at least happened over the phone so I didn't have to suffer the indignity of my insta-red nose. All of which resulted in a sniffle-fest in front of one of the Doctors who took it upon himself to attempt to reassure me, during which I did not escape the indignity of my insta-red nose.

And that's what's been going on at work. On the upside, my boss who was on holidays during the week of breaking down will be back tomorrow, and I think that will be a relief to my psychosis. I hope.

The Fitting Room Crap

2009-07-07T10:11:00.000-06:00

In my six months of working retail I learned one important lesson: You Look Good.

This isn't a trick, or some cheesy line. I'm serious.

I had women of all shapes and sizes come in and try on clothes and, as long as they fit, they looked good. Chubby women, skinny women, curvy women, pear-shaped women, busty women, hippy women. All women look good -- if they feel good.

The opposite is also true: You Look Terrible.

A woman who comes out of the fitting room wearing a gorgeous outfit, but fees like crap in it, will look like crap in it. She'll hum and haw and look in the mirror about four million times and will not accept that it looks good because she doesn't believe that it does. That's the only thing that separates the two viewpoints -- for real, state of mind controls how good you look. Regardless of how beautiful they look, how lovely the clothes are, how flattering they are, if she doesn't believe that her body is right, she won't accept that she looks good.

I could go over the types of clothes that look best on whatever body types, but there are millions of stylists with millions of different opinions about that. So, here's my tip: Get over your body issues. Totally. Find clothes that fit you, regardless of what sort of body you have, and feel good in them. If you feel good in them, you'll look good in them. I promise.

Conversations Between a Toddler and her Dad, Upon Recovering from a Fall

2009-07-06T20:35:00.005-06:00

"There you are. See?"
*sob*
"Look, here's your sticker. Better take it."
*sniffles*
"Hey, where'd your other sticker go? Where is it?"
"I... I ATE IT..." *SOB*
"You ate it?"
*sniffly nods*
"Why'd you do that?"
*sniffly giggles*
"Let's get some ice cream when we get home, okay?"
*giggles*

Head Trip

2009-06-30T09:44:00.000-06:00

I get into a bit of a daze when I walk the ten minutes from the office to the truck. As much as I love this city, it's not the most beautiful walk. I get off the elevator and pass the shoppers, consuming. Out the doors, pass a busker or a panhandler, and the day drifts away from me as the noise of the city washes away whatever stress is making a colony in my shoulders. It feels like a baptism of off-key harmonica notes and I shrug it off, and I'm at the intersection where I saw a really overweight guy on a motorcycle that one time. And I wonder for a minute whether or not it's wrong for me to be so amused by his girth rolling over the sides of his little machine. But I'm already in the enormous parking lot that I have to cross. I weave my way between parked cars and my mind has to stay focused on staying clear of the exodus of workers, who are more like me than I'd probably care to admit, and I get to the post that has "fuck composure" graffitied onto it. I remind myself to bring my camera to take a picture of it, but the setting seems wrong, somehow. Wouldn't it have been more fitting to post it outside of a funeral parlour or an opera house or some place where emotion is evoked more often. Why a parking lot? And I've already waited for the crossing light, and I turn the corner into the alley that leads to the truck, the gravel crunching beneath my off-work shoes, when a really big, mean looking guy walks across the lot in front of me, and I walk a little straighter and try to give the impression that I'm never intimidated by huge fucking guys, and that I'm able to walk in an alley without worrying about whomever happens to be in the vicinity. He whistles the same discord of the harmonica and doesn't bother giving me a second glance, and I'm at the truck where I wait for Kaz to finish his own workday. I fiddle with the cd player until I can find the Cantina song from Star Wars, and let the day drift.

Dazed and Confused

2009-06-29T21:13:00.003-06:00

I love watching movies that have famous people in them before they were really famous. Milla Jovavich has -- as far as I can tell -- one word to speak in the whole thing; she also sings a weird druggy song. Yet, whenever she's in the frame, she is somehow the most important figure in the frame. Ben Affleck plays a total loser/asshole. Matthew McConaughey is the skeeziest of the skeezes. Rory Cochrane acts stoned for the entire movie.

I guess my point is, these are roles that they would likely say no to in a heartbeat now. They've made it; they have their pick of roles in their own chosen genres. At the same time, this really lame script about rebelling against football coaches is made pretty freakin' sweet by actors who actually act.

I remember having this conversation with some friends from home about it. Nadjay was saying how it was a really stupid movie with no real point, but Lou made the argument -- and I tend to agree with her -- that it's a significant movie about independence and sticking it to the man. They fight for their right to do drugs and not sign waivers... there's also something about neo-mccarthyism, or somesuch.

It's weird. I wonder whether the actors in our current teen flicks will turn out to be (somewhat) respected actors in the future.

Photography

2009-06-25T21:37:00.005-06:00

I have been taking photos of my various adventures throughout the months, but until the job switch I was both too busy and too broke to really invest in getting everything developed. Plus, when you don't get to have as many adventures, you don't take as many pictures. At Easter Kaz and I took off to Drumheller and then Calgary to hang out with some friends, and I went a little gung ho while exploring the badlands around the dinosaur museum. A few of the shots turned out pretty good.

Cool rock formation that I liked.

Cheruby playing with stones in the dirt.

Crocus.

It's Not Rocket Science

2009-06-24T09:33:00.000-06:00

Remember Drunk Baby? The (now) former co-worker that came over and passed out on my couch at 11:00 the night we got together and played Rock Band and drank.

Well here's another awesome moment brought to you by the same group of friends. We decided to catch up together over supper, and 8:00 pm rolled around which signals Drunk Baby to take her birth control pill. Tragedy strikes, and she dropped it.

Now, I myself have done some pretty despicable things to make sure that I get my pill at the appropriate time on the appropriate day. Once I dropped my pill on a port-a-potty floor. I closed my eyes and swallowed that sucker, and have, thus far, avoided any disgusting illnesses. This is the length that I go to, people.

So, Drunk Baby starts to get freaked out and she and I start crawling around on the floor at Moxies, and I'm all, "I didn't hear it drop. Are you sure it dropped?" And she's all, "Why the fuck are there so many crumbs on the floor? This is impossible."

Logically, we do what any sane young woman does, and we recruit our two other friends to get down on their hands and knees and then there are four people crawling around on the restaurant tile, amidst mutters of other restaurant patrons. Finally, we convince Drunk Baby to give up, and we retake our seats and I convince her to take her pill for the following day until she can open up her spare packet... but it turns out she doesn't have a spare packet and she has no idea what I'm talking about, and I come about this >< close to having to draw her a diagram of how she should know which pill to take if it doesn't match up with the day of the week written on her prescription packet. I explain it a few times, sans diagram, and she thinks she's got it figure out.

Everything is settled, or as settled as it can get with those friends, but she's still freaking out about the missing pill. So, one of the others says, "Maybe it fell down your bra," which is a really good suggestion because she's wearing a shirt that I have affectionately dubbed, the boob shirt. And she does what any young woman wearing a ridiculously cleavage bearing shirt would do, she starts fishing a finger around inside her shirt, inside her bra, inside the restaurant, proclaiming loudly, "My boobs barely fit in this bra as it is! There's no more room in here... I FOUND IT!"

Seriously. She yelled. Which broke me completely. The whole thing was so ludicrous, I did the silent, side-shaking, gut-busting giggles for about ten minutes.

Everyone in that restaurant hated us.

My Two Brennans

2009-06-23T10:39:00.002-06:00

Remember when I used to be flatmates (I like flatmates more than housemates... it just sounds better) with a guy named Brennan? Yeah. We lived together for like, five years, and I blogged about our shenanigans quite often. I called him BB because he hates nicknames and I wanted to preserve his identity. The only problem is that now I'm getting comments from this totally other Brennan, who is kind of like bizzarro Brennan.

So, I wanted to clear things up, for those of you who are ever wondering which Brennan is commenting. I've got a trick for you to figure it out without my explanations. Ready?

This is Brennan -- my old flatmate:

There on the right. He's the one who just smacked my ass, and is looking really gleeful about it. Here's the trick: It it doesn't sound like something that someone who gleefully smacks asses during photographs would say, it's posted by the other Brennan, the bizzarro Brennan.

So, this comment here:

Heh.

I loved the wedding pictures and I'm sorry your cats made a huge mess in your house. If it makes you feel any better, my roommates dog once peed on my bed after a long daty at work...and this was AFTER I had taken her for a walk that day, and she didn't feel like going to the bathroom at the time.

I used to have a blankie as well, but it got so used that it was thrown out because eventually it was just a thread of cloth.

Sorry to hear you're sick.

Is not from flatmate Brennan (BB). If it were from him it would be more like this:

Rilla: Your dog was the only dog that I ever liked, but don't tell anyone that. If it ever peed on my blanket I would have made you wash them yourself... after yelling about it a lot. Also, I'm sick of hearing the dog whine. Let him out more often.

I can't believe you had a blankie. Don't tell me shit like that, if you want me to take you seriously. I mean, we're friends and everything, but you're making it too easy for me. Really.

Sorry to hear you're sick. Please stay away from me.

So, old flatmate Brennan (BB), I'd like to take this opportunity to say that if you could ever bear a nickname of your own, you wouldn't be in the position of people wondering why you're being all weird on my blog. So, nyah.

Bizzarro Brennan, I'm glad you comment. Keep it up. You should also try to be as polite and nice as possible so that nobody will mistake you for the old BB.

P.S. BB, I miss you like crazy.

P.P.S. I won't tell anyone that you liked my dog.

My Security Blanket is Annoying Me

2009-06-22T10:12:00.002-06:00

I called in sick today because I have a good dose of general malaise with a healthy side dish of going to the bathroom too much... which likely came from a side of some Chinese food that we had for supper last night. All of which means I'm mopey and feeling sorry for myself and basically dragging Boomer around with me wherever I go because I need cuddles when I'm mopey and feeling sorry for myself. Except that Boomer has lost patience with me and she keeps trying to crawl onto my desk to get the pen that has a big feather on it, and I keep pushing her down and saying in a really whiny voice, "stoooop iiiitt." Because behaving like a four-year-old is about as good as it gets today. And then I try to make her sit with me some more, and it usually works for about three minutes until she gets annoyed with my squeezing.

I always knew that putting my blankie in the trunk when I was fourteen years old would come back to bite me on the ass. So thanks, mother.

Wedding Photos

2009-06-19T08:29:00.000-06:00

In no particular order, a few photos that I like from our wedding.

Why Yesterday was Awesome

2009-06-18T22:24:00.000-06:00

I got the afternoon off by surprise, and the weather was gorgeous. Gorgeous! So, I tracked down Em and distracted her from her work. We drank iced cappucinos outside and watched the construction on campus where the grass used to be. We traded tales and laughed and chatted until she finally had to drag herself back into her office. I made my way home and got comfortable on the deck with a beer and book. It all felt so sweet because it was spontaneous, and I felt like I was escaping a day of pleasant drudgery. Not like my job is so boring, but it was the most beautiful day and it was absolute perfection. And for once in a very long while, it felt like my life was bordering on perfection too. The weather and the day were a nice reflection of how good I feel right now.

so sweet and so cold

2009-06-17T22:03:00.003-06:00

From Married to the Sea.

Yeah, take that WCW.

Coda: In which Rilla Talks about Buffy

2009-06-17T09:24:00.001-06:00

I just finished watching the final season of Buffy for the second time. Aside from the final episode, I’m actually a little disappointed in it. The last episode is really fantastic, and I love how all potential slayers become true slayers. It’s beautiful and empowering, and it gets to me every time I think about it. My real beef with that season is Kennedy. She is extremely annoying, and she’s nothing like Tara, which is good, I suppose. It wouldn’t make sense for Willow to just start dating some other Tara replacement. I just don’t really get why Willow needed a love interest at all in that season. It felt way too soon after the big love of season five and six.

Aside from the whole Tara/Willow/Kennedy thing, it is a season of speeches. Not very compelling speeches. It kind of felt like the writing fell apart for several of those episodes. Even if the uninspiring speeches were supposed to be exactly that to lead up to the eventual mutiny of the potentials, it doesn’t make for very good television. I have this suspicion that Joss sort of checked out of things for a while as he started ramping up for Firefly.

And why is Spike shirtless every ten minutes? I mean, I know why James Marsters is shirtless every ten minutes because he’s freakin’ hot, but I don’t really get why they play up the sexual tension/attraction as much as they do. That was fully explored in season six, and season seven is supposed to demonstrate the intimacy that can be accomplished without physicality. It’s like the writers got confused halfway through and decided that we just haven’t seen enough of naked Spike.

I know that season seven is old news by this stage, but there was so much that was irking me about it, I had to get it off of my chest... which isn’t naked.

Verse Two: In which Rilla Talks about the Cats

2009-06-16T09:23:00.001-06:00

The day that Kaz and I returned from the honeymoon, we were gifted with a rich bouquet of shit and piss. The cats were locked out of the basement for a couple of days while we were gone. Since their litter box is in the basement, they just went in the living room. Which really sucked. We spent the rest of the afternoon spreading the carpet with baking soda, and washing the floors and other various hard surfaces. It was gross, and not the most pleasant thing to come home to. Then, during the scouring we knocked over the backpack that had our PS3 in it – what, you don’t honeymoon with a gaming consoles? – and the game controller busted, which also sucked.

Chorus: In which Rilla Tells You about Her New Job

2009-06-15T09:23:00.001-06:00

Training is going slowly, and there are days when I’m so freakin’ bored I think about scratching out my eyes just to go to the doctors and learn something about treating grevious eye injuries. I don’t do that. It’s not even part of my job to know that kind of stuff. Mostly I’m learning about how to use the software that they’ve got to order lenses. None of it is very intuitive, but I usually enjoy each day. Plus, on days when I’m bored I just remind myself of the last six months and the process of being run off my feet continually. Boredom is a wonderful change of pace.

Fingers to the Keyboard

2009-06-14T21:17:00.001-06:00

It was easy to make excuses about why I never had time to blog when I was working shift work. Get home late. Get up early. Rarely more than one day off at at time. There just seemed to be other stuff to do all the time. When I had time off, I needed to do laundry or sleep for fourteen hours straight. Plus, my creative juices were seriously drained.

So, it’s been three weeks since my last shift in the retail world. My creative juices are slowly refilling and I miss blogging. I miss writing all together, actually, which seems to be my same old song. I’m trying to sing a new tune.

Verse One: In which Rilla tells you about her week-end.
My old roommate from high school came in to the city with her family, and we met up for lunch. We did a little mental math and the last time we saw each other was 1996, which just seems really unnecessary. It was nice to reminisce and catch up on all the millions of things that have happened in the last thirteen years. THIRTEEN. Insane.

I was supposed to meet up with a bunch of people from the old work, but they changed the venue at the last minute. I could have sworn we were supposed to meet at a restaurant that had “Joe” in the name, so I spend forty minutes driving around the city going from one “Joe” bar to the next. I never found them and couldn’t find my little friends’ cell number. In the end, I looked like a jerk for ditching everyone.

We Got Married in a Beaver

2009-06-08T08:44:00.006-06:00

When I was a kid, my brother was a big fan of Johnny Cash. It was before the days of liner notes and google searches, and he was convinced that "We Got Married in a Fever" was really "We Got Married in a Beaver," which, really, even if you try to make it as kinky as possible doesn't really make much sense at all. Maybe he thought that they wore beaver hats and coats, or perhaps it was a make of car or plane. Logic has no place in misheard song lyrics.

The moral of this story is that Kaz and I got married and we took a week off to "honeymoon" as they say, which (among other things) consisted of not paying attention to the internet in the least.

I'm anxiously awaiting the wedding pictures, but suffice to say, the day was beautiful, the ceremony was moving, the company was exceptional, and everything was about as perfect as I could have hoped. In the week before our day, I was getting crabby and nervous as I worried about things that I would have no control over. So I took a little reality check and decided that stressing about things was more likely to ruin my state of mind than any other little thing that I could worry about, and that the best thing to do was to let it go and accept that what would be would be. I suppose the amazing thing is that I actually managed to talk myself out of anxiety mode and into relax-and-enjoy mode. By the time Sunday rolled around, I only had the happy nervousness, not the worried nervousness... if that makes any sense.

Ye Rilla Knowers of the blog will be happy (and surprised?) to know that I did not weep torrents of tears through the whole ceremony. I had two or three moments of quelling the storms, accompanied with wobbly chin and bright red nose, but I was determined not to bawl through the wedding, and I persevered. In truth, I was much more smiley than weepy, and that made me pretty happy too.

Glorious Time

2009-05-27T21:47:00.002-06:00

For the first time in my adult life I'm working a fairly straightforward nine to five job. Except that it's not really nine to five. It's earlier to earlier, if that makes any sense. I'm home every day before that little hand even reaches the five and I'm pleasantly surprised at what a difference this has made in my general well-being.

I've actually had the freedom to sit outside in the sunshine; that means I have free time while the sun is in the sky. Really. And because I'm coming off a job when that was not the norm (I'm all about the italics today), I'm fully appreciating every moment. It's like some marvelous gift.

I keep thinking that somehow this will encourage me to blog more, since I've been pressed for blogging time. And yet, I am a little infatuated with the idea of enjoying the weather while it's nice. So, it might not actually turn out that way.

The Drunk Rules

2009-05-21T10:27:00.004-06:00

When I was much younger and learning how to drink, I did so without the help of more experienced boozers. As such, I had to find my way through a middle ground of drunkenness, finding that delicate path between happy buzz and alcohol poisoning. When I discovered something that helped to guide me along that path, I labeled it a Drunk Rule and I repeated it to myself a million times so that I'd remember when I sobered up.

Really, I only remember one drunk rule. I think there might have been more, but they were always lost in the sobering process.

Rule One of the Drunk Rules: If you think you're going to puke, go to the bathroom.

There may have been another rule about making out with strangers, but somehow as that rule became less relevant, it got lost. There was also, briefly, a drunk rule about hot tubs and Hot 100, but again with the relevancy.

Because of my efforts to remember Rule One, anytime I get slightly tipsy and my stomach is at all acting up, my brain starts screaming at me, "REMEMBER THE DRUNK RULES" and I start to reminisce and see if I can remember anything besides Rule One. Then I go to the bathroom because it's a good rule.

All this is on my mind because my young friends from work came over the other night to play Rock Band and get drunk. I realized that they, like I was, were learning how to drink because one of them instantly passed out at 11:00. Like a lightswitch. One minute she's laughing and singing (terribly), and the next she's asleep on the couch like a baby. A drunk baby.

Then, as I was making my way to the bathroom (see Rule One) at around 2:00, I had some quality time remembering all of the terrible drunkenness I survived when I was their age. Really, passing out on a friend's couch and driving home the next day is a better way to learn.

Good Things Come in Threes!

2009-05-15T21:17:00.002-06:00

Yes. I've added an exclamation mark to the end of that title. Want to know why?

Because Kaz got a new job!

No, wait: KAZ GOT A NEW JOB!!

That's better.

He's been going through this ridiculously long application process since January. It involved writing logic tests and writing essays and meeting a panel of interviewers. This week, it all bore fruit and he'll be starting his new job once we get back from our honeymoon. To say he's excited is an understatement, and I'm happy that he's happy. He hasn't liked his current job for a very long time, and I'd like to think that my persistent (yet endearing) nagging has played a role in this step forward.

I've been a little stunned about things. We've been talking about all these exciting changes a lot, and I'm just so overwhelmed by everything happening at once. My new job. Kaz's new job. Our wedding. The timing is bizarre. I don't know whether the whole good things come in threes is true, but it feels like it. I also wonder whether it's the beginning of summer transition trend. Last summer I quit one job and started a better one, and this summer I'm doing the same. It feels like my self is more ready to accept big changes at this time of year. Perhaps it's psychological conditioning from decades of being in education systems that break during the summer months.

Well, that got weird. Mostly, you should all say congratulations to Kaz, and if you know him, drop him an e-mail or call him and he'll be pleased. He might even give you some details.

Sometimes I Hate my Sense of Responsibility

2009-05-14T09:49:00.004-06:00

Dudes.

Now that I know that I've got another job and I only have to work at the store for another two weeks, my desire to go to work has shrunk to the size of a dime. At the best of times it was the size of a loonie, so it's shrunk a lot.

For some reason I thought my bosses would be all whatev's about my shifts at the store, but they expect me to do all the same shit that I had to do before, and it really sucks.

Rilla: Managing to feel sorry for herself even when her life is improving a lot.

The Story of How Rilla Accidentally Got a New Job

2009-05-12T10:28:00.002-06:00

One day Rilla was working at the clothing store when a woman came in to purchase dress clothes. This was an every day occurrence, and Rilla was already quite good at finding women clothes that they'd like to wear. So, when she bought first one suit, and then two, and then extras besides, Rilla knew that she'd done a good job.

Then, as she was helping the woman pay for her purchases, they started to make small talk. You see, the stack of clothes was so large that it took a little bit of time to complete the transaction. Rilla talked to the woman about her job in an optometrists' office and asked about the classes she had to take. Rilla asked about concave and convex lenses and then the woman started to ask Rilla all kinds of questions.

She asked Rilla about whether or not she was in school, and whether she was a manager at the clothing store. Then she told Rilla that she was really the office manager at the optometrists' and that she was doing interviews the very next day. She told Rilla to come to her office at a certain time and Rilla diligently wrote down the information about where and when to go, and pondered her options.

That night, Rilla went home and printed off her resume and wrote a cover letter, and decided to get up extra early the following morning to get to the interview on time. She had a little sad moment to herself as she thought about how much better her quality of life would be if she never had to work week-ends and evenings again, and had a little cry and felt sorry for herself.

The next morning, Rilla put on her best suit and drove downtown for her interview, during which they asked her the standard questions, and Rilla gave her well-practiced answers.

Then they called her the next day and told her she could start working there if she wanted.

So she will.

The Voice Crying in the Wilderness

2009-05-08T10:35:00.000-06:00

I always thought that was such a poetic idea. In practice, it's a lot more rewarding to have someone listening to you. The wilderness seldom responds. I mean, that burning bush thing only happened the one time. And I'm pretty sure Moses was seriously freaked out about it.

(I'm mixing my Old Testament and New Testament metaphors. Oh, ye heretic)

Give me a cigar and a martini glass please: Yesterday at work I said, "Marriage is always a mistake, and I'm willing to make that error twice." Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

It got a good laugh in the back room.

I Know You're Curious

2009-05-07T09:46:00.000-06:00

I realized the other day that, even though I'm at work for a large percentage of my current life, I don't talk about it that much here. In part, it's because it's not a job of which I'm proud, and in part it's because it often depresses me and makes me feel like a poop.

But there are good things there: I'm slightly smitten with my co-workers at times. At first when I started there, I thought that they were embarrassingly young, and they had the nerve (THE NERVE) to be stand-offish because I'm older than they. But, as I've worked there longer, and we've all gotten past each others differences...

"You're in high school!?"
"You're divorced?!"
"You have a fake ID?!"
"You've gone to school for how long?!"

...they've turned into one of the reasons why I look forward to going to work. Well, perhaps the only reason. I like to think of myself as their weird aunt or older sister who gives them terrible advice on everything...

"Date them both for as long as you can."
"Go into Arts and Science."
"You should eat cookies for lunch."

...and hence, they think I'm sort of cool at times.

In Which I Find Inappropriate Things Awesome

2009-05-06T08:30:00.000-06:00

I saw a little Cree kid smoking cigarettes at the bus stop and sharing them with his taller, young girl friends, and all I could think was "Fuckin' A." It was such a weird response to something that I should probably think is inappropriate. I just thought it was the best thing I'd seen all day.

When Marc posted about his son making a popsicle stick crucifix and insisting that he have his name written on the top of his cross, I thought it was the best and most amazing kid-like response ever. "No! I want my name on this crucifix and I won't be happy until you accomodate my unreasonable wishes." You go, Luke.

There was this annoying child in a stroller at the store the other day and he kept trying to crawl out of it and get to his mother, who was in the changeroom. (He was being monitored by his father). When he finally got his way, he fell inside the changeroom and I could hear his small child's (impervious) head hit the floor. When he started wailing, I thought, "Stoopid Baby," and I felt pretty smug.

On My Mind

2009-05-05T09:00:00.000-06:00

I've always been a drifter. I drift in and out of friendships, out of jobs, out of interests and passions. Maybe it's because of this lackadaisical (directionless) approach I've never really gotten what the big deal is when things change: Best friends one day --> Coffee buddies the next day --> Haven't seen you in a year, "Oh hey, how's it going."

But crap, man, there are a handful of people out there with whom I'm locked in an emotional deathgrip, and it is a small handful.

So, I just wanted to tell you guys, "Don't make me stalk you."

WTF April?

2009-05-04T13:32:00.002-06:00

So, it looks as if April totally disappeared and I wrote to all you all... four times.

P.S. All you all is fun to say and write. All you all.

P.P.S. April kind of sucked. May is going to rock. That is my decree.

The Book

2009-04-24T09:56:00.002-06:00

Yesterday one of my co-authors drove me to a school where another of my co-authors teaches. There they were having an author's showcase and since one of the writers of that book that we worked on last summer works there, she had set up a booth and had a lot of information about our little project available for the students.

So, two of us manned our little table about our book and talked to kids all day about writing and what it was like to write with other people and how it takes a lot of time to read it over and edit it so that everything is clear and smooth.

I saw a prototype of the book for the first time.

I also saw the illustrations that are included in the book, and they're amazing.

It all feels real again, and I'm heartened.

But it was a long day and it ended with the crabbies, despite all the magical and wonderful things that I experienced.

A small girl asked me for my autograph. Wasn't that nice of her?

The Cliffs of Insanity

2009-04-20T09:02:00.004-06:00

The Past: My dreams have been dragging me down lately. The worst are focused on high school in some way. There was one in which our high school Tour Choir had prepared for the Easter program in the previous summer. Nobody remembered the songs, the lines, the music, anything. Yet, we were getting ready to get up and go and I was freaking out and nobody could even recall enough to practice with me. Another dream had me in a job interview where a friend from high school, who is dead, was there. Just unsettling and weird. I'm pretty sure these are anxiety dreams in some form. I hate anxiety dreams.

I'm not even sure what I should/shouldn't be anxious about.

In a weird turn of events, the morning after the Tour Choir dream a girl I knew from high school came into the store and I told her all about it, and she looked at me funny.

The Present: I'm kind of bummed out lately. Hence the lack of blogging. It seems that on days when I'm feeling a little blue it's harder to be creative in any form, even here. I'm quite sure that it is a causal thing though: I'm bummed because I never write anymore, and I feel like my creativity is sitting inside of me slowly dying --> I'm bummed so I don't write. One of those circle thingies. Yes. A vicious circle. I blame some of the death of creativity on work as well: My work-approved creative outlet is putting together grad outfits for moms and aunts. Whee.

I'm reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I've been nagged about reading this book for years and years now. Call me obtuse, but if someone encourages me to read something I usually avoid it, as if it is somehow less valid as a reading choice because I didn't think of it or find it myself. So, you can say I-told-you-so because I love it. I've been gobbling it up in my spare time, and admiring his writing a great deal.

My creativity is leaking out into conversation. Kaz asked me a question about why one of our cats didn't like going outside, and I waxed poetic all over it. It was this work of beauty about how the outside world was like a moving picture to her, and it was there for her entertainment. I was a little impressed with myself and Kaz looked a little stunned too. Possibly because it was a rather long answer for a somewhat unanswerable question.

The Future: Kaz and I took a roadtrip to MB, a one day gas-guzzling adventure, to pick up our marriage license. In case you missed it, we announced the whole getting married thing a while back. I got in grief for not telling more people, and I was all "Dudes. I did a post," and they were all, "I didn't read it." Then I died a little on the inside.

I had an embarrassing little kid moment in the jewellery store when we picked up our wedding bands: When you were a kid and went shopping with your mom, did you ever start following the wrong "mom" around? The Wrong Mom was someone with a similar build or wearing the same colour of shirt or something. Then you start to pull on their pantleg, or take their hand and you look up into the face of a stranger? I did that when I was a kid... and I did that the other day with Kaz. We walked into a store together, and I started following the wrong figure wearing a black coat. When the body language of this person started to say, "Why the hell are you so close, lady?" I realized that it wasn't Kaz at all and I turned about fifteen shades of red. She (it was a girl) got a laugh out of it when I explained the whole Wrong Mom thing, and she said that she'd done it when she was a kid too.

Eff'd Up

2009-04-02T10:04:00.002-06:00

At work yesterday, I saw a girl around 10 or 11 doing the entire "Single Ladies" routine.

Beyonce - Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It) [Official Video]
Uploaded by Yannicklord

I was disturbed.

A New Stage

2009-04-01T10:07:00.002-06:00

Okay, so I've comfortably slid past the "I Can Do That" stage of applying for jobs. This strategy did get me a job interview (which was terrifying) and a series of tests (I was good until the essay questions). The upside of the I'm-your-gal-I'm-great-at-everything attitude is that I was throwing resumes and applications into the world at a steady clip.

I've hit the backlash part of the plan, though.

There are a few jobs that I may very well be qualified for on my to-apply-for list at the moment. But I'm tapped, man. I'm done. I'm tired. I'm weary. I'm feeling pretty much at an all-time low, and I want to explain everything with overly-complicated-and-hyphenated descriptions. That's how lazy I'm feeling. No, not lazy. Just burnt out.

Dude. Looking for work is exhausting.

Is it the constant self-evaluation, the imagining of dozens of potential realities, the research and preparation? Or maybe it's the continual revision of the same two pages of text -- rearranging, editing, adding new content, taking out old content, reviewing for the umpteenth time for typos. I'm so sick of my resume in all of its incarnations that I kind of want to punch it.

Let me check something...

My folder of resume stuff has 52 items in it: cover letters, portfolio tidbits, writing samples, and dozens and dozens of drafts of my resume each highlighting different skill sets.

Stop the car. I've had enough.

Supplements

2009-03-31T08:20:00.002-06:00

When I seriously start craving some scripted entertainment, the internet has done well in a pinch.

I've been watching The Rick Mercer Report whenever they upload the latest episode, and I'm always entertained and a little more in love with Rick Mercer after every clip. He did this bit with baby bears, and I had to keep pointing at my monitor saying, "Look how cute they are. LOOK!" The cats weren't that impressed. The Mercer Report online is a pretty good substitute for watching television because it's television programming... Rilla's brilliance shines through once more.

Moving on.

Every now and then I watch The Guild, which is particularly funny if you have friends who obsess about MMORPGs, or if you've obsessed about them yourself.

This is the first episode of the first season. It's well into season two now, and it's remained consistently funny throughout. Those of you who watched Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, will recognize Felicia Day.

P.S. Joss, I knew you were going to do that to her, and it still pissed me off.

The last little non-television online entertainment thing that I watch is this thing called Momversation, which I've been watching since it started, and guiltily avoided blogging about it. It's geared specifically for moms, but the panelists are fairly intelligent and humourous folks. So, even though I'm not a mom, nor planning on being one, I've been enjoying it. It airs three times a week, and is usually thought provoking and interesting.

Once more, the call goes out: Does anyone have any recommendations for online video programming?

TV, How I Miss Thee

2009-03-30T10:51:00.004-06:00

Let me start by saying that I'm glad I don't have cable, or even peasant vision. When I do have tv at my fingertips, I waste too much time sitting on the couch watching programming that I don't really care about anyway.

Lately, though, I've been having cravings for 22 minutes of highly-scripted and well-performed entertainment. My desire for television programming has me skimming through old episodes of King of the Hill and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but since it hasn't been that long since I've watched through all of the series that I own, I'm being pretty blase about it. An episode here, an episode there, skipping a bunch that I don't really like, picking up a season later, etc. It's kind of like watching tv, except that I actually get a choice of what I want to watch... from within the limited confines of my collection.

AJ lent me the first season of NCIS, and although it was off to a rather troublesome start (TERRORISTS! BLAME TERRORISTS!), as we watched through the whole first season, I was entertained. They added a little more variety in the collection of villains (drugs and spouses... still lots of terrorists), and the character dynamic is strong enough to keep me into it, even through its more hackneyed moments.

It was kind of the perfect show to watch that made me feel like I was really watching tv instead of a DVD of a series: It was enjoyable, but not amazing. I wanted to watch it sometimes, but I wasn't so crazy into it that I wanted to watch it all the time.

Which is the problem with getting a series that I really really like. When we borrowed the previous season of Battlestar Gallactica, I would force Kaz to watch two or three episodes a night, and the week-ends were awash with Cylon hyjinx. And that doesn't really feel like watching tv either. It's more like reading a really good book that you don't want to put down, so you read it in obsessive bursts.

That reminds me, Internets, please stop talking about the finale of BSG until it has been released on DVD and I've watched it. Thanks.

So, I'm looking for suggestions: I want to start watching a series that is entertaining, but not amazing. I want to be able to throw in an episode, enjoy it, and not feel compelled to begin watching the next one. Anyone have an enjoyable show in mind?

Arts and Crafts

2009-03-27T10:13:00.003-06:00

Yesterday was a good day. I spent a lot of time writing and reflecting about my poetry, and I finished up my mix(ed) CD. While I worked on the CD cases, I watched some episodes of Buffy, and generally felt quite content. I ended up arranging the songs in semi-chronological order, and I just remembered that part in High Fidelity when the main character rearranges his record collection in "autobiographical" order. So, it's a combination of autobiographical and chronological, in that the song that was released most recently won't necessarily be the last song in the mix, but it will be the most significant to my life at this point.

It's actually Mushaboom by Feist and I'm a little bit in love with that song.

Revisioning

2009-03-26T13:48:00.005-06:00

Ever since my first rejection letter, I've been questioning what it is I want my poetry to be. What I want it to say. What I want it to say about me. So, I started to answer those questions:
Forgive the blurry nature of this pic. I tampered with an old scanner and it nearly crashed my computer, so I had to settle with a picture of a bunch of pictures, and it's not fantastic. There are five collages, each representing something that I want to see in my poetry. Like my last collage project, I spent a lot of time brainstorming and freewriting before I settled on five concepts, then I started leafing through magazines, picking out images that called to me, and felt appropriate to the concepts that I had decided upon. The collages above represent me/mine, spirituality, sensuality, evocation, worth.

The last batch of vision cards have been sticky-tacked to my office wall, and they have been silently encouraging me since I put them there. The ones I made this morning, had a more particular destination:

A gift from a friend at Christmas: it's been sitting empty since I received it. Now, I'm thinking about what sorts of things I should put in it. Jamie, the woman who gave me the idea for the original collage project, has an encouragement box. I think I'll do something similar, but keep it focused on my writing so that I don't get downtrodden by the rejection letters I get, and the negative feedback that will inevitably come my way.

The image that I am particularly pleased with, from the whole set of collages, is the one that represents me. I unwittingly made a collage self-portrait that I really love. I've tried to enlarge and clarify it.
The text says, "Leo: Fate offers you a free ride, but you're so independent you'd rather steer yourself."

I'm always a little bit surprised by the outcomes of my collages, by the combination of images I put together and how they end up being more than the sum of their parts.

Blort

2009-03-22T17:19:00.005-06:00

I tried talking in rhymes for a little while yesterday. It was moderately successful, but I felt I reached my peak when I sang, "I don't want to go to work today / I'd rather stay home and play," from the toilet. I think singing and rhyming every day would lose its luster.

I sold some jeans to a poet the other day. He didn't confess his poetry or speak in any particular way, but he was a poet and I knew it. As he paid, he asked me, "Are you a Leo?" (he had a French accent). And I smiled and said, "Yes."
"Ah, me too. And my friend is an Aries. We are all fire signs here."
The air felt hot.

Boomer faked an injury or a sickness in order to stay out of the basement the other night. We were going through our usual routine of chasing the cats out from under the bed, and she just flopped down in the middle of the hallway and refused to move. I checked her paws for injuries, and worriedly decided not to put her in the basement in case she died in the night -- the guilt would have overwhelmed me. As soon as we turned out the lights, she and Starbuck began fighting and playing like they always do, and I knew I'd been had.

Since it is now officially Spring, I have refused to put on my winter coat. I'm surviving thus far with a hoodie and a scarf. If it gets cold, I may freeze to death on the way to the bus one day. Nevertheless, I'm tired of wearing four million layers every day. Spring, I am your faithful companion, even if you're not here yet.

I went on a "friending" spree on Facebook after my little Care Card revelation. The whole episode reminded me of a few friends that I'd almost completely forgotten. I'd even gone to weddings and such of a few people that I rediscovered. It made for a bit of a surreal week. I've beligerently chosen to make my facebook picture my smoking self-portrait, to be a little bit in your face. Call me cautionary, but I'm trying to avoid getting invites to religious groups and weird Apps.

There was a rather lengthy discussion on The Eagle & Child about whether or not it was appropriate for Marc, as a future/present pastor, to post a poem that had the line "son of a bitch" in it. I've been watching from the sidelines, and I'm a little disturbed the tendency of repression that has been cultivated in Church culture. Don't have a sense of humour. Don't express yourself. Don't behave in an interesting manner. Don't stir the pot -- all in the name of being a good example. At what point does being a good example turn into comformity and repression? It makes me nervous.

This week was the first week in a long while that I didn't go out and do a lot of socializing. I've been enjoying the freedom of having some spending money, and I'm getting used to visiting around shift-work. I've been drained this week. Weary. I expect it to pass.

Care Cards

2009-03-18T10:22:00.002-06:00

This is going to be one of those things that will seem perfectly normal to about seven of my readers, and the rest of you will be raising your eyebrows and mouthing, "wtf?" at the monitor.

I've talked before about how I went to a private high school that was a little eccentric in its religiosity. I wonder whether this is just the norm when it comes to schools affiliated with a religion, or whether The 'Port really was a bit over the top in a lot of ways. Anyway, the administration had put together an elaborate note-passing system, and provided little postcard-sized multi-colored notecards with Care Card printed at the top. A google search doesn't show any images that I can share, so maybe they've been discontinued, but while I was there they pretty much were the number one source of litter on campus.

But back to the system: On top of the pre-designed administration-approved note of choice, each student had a mailbox, so you wouldn't have to worry about going and actually giving it to someone during or after class. You could just find their mailbox, slip it in and if all went well, you'd be receiving a response Care Card in your own mailbox. For your convenience, they usually had giant piles of Care Cards, choose your favorite colour (mine was blue), right next to the mailbox area.

It was kind of like texting, except with paper and pen, and your phone was a tiny little cubby-hole that was stationary... and held stationery.

Now, you might be wondering why this whole system exists at all. The name of the notecards might give you a bit of a clue: The Care Card. Since going to private school, moving away from your family and friends, can be a bit of a daunting and lonely experience, the system was in place to help people feel a connection with other students. The administration encouraged the use of note writing and sharing because this was a way of demonstrating care for another human being. And, in an environment where that care was hard to come by, a note actually did help a lot some days.

As a student, I loved the Care Card. I wonder, though, how the teachers and professors felt about it. I know I wrote dozens and dozens of them in class and chapel, and I remember seeing other students doing the same. So, it wasn't as if this was some sort of well-kept undercover time-suckage thing, this was an out in the open, I'm-not-studying-or-paying- attention-to-what-you're-doing thing. If I were a teacher there, I probably would have gone a little mental about the Care Card thing.

Anyway, the whole Care Card situation was brought to mind for a couple of reasons: Mom and dad came through town last week-end and mom informed me that I had the most stuff in storage at home, and a good chunk of it is letters and notes from high school. I can guarantee you that 3 out of 4 shoeboxes will be filled with Care Cards, and I'm a little curious to know what they say, and what I wrote when I was a teen. I imagine that they are all embarrassing in their own little ways.

The second reason is that an old friend from The 'Port came to the store the other night when I was working, and the next day that I came to work there was a little card stuck on my locker. It was a regular little card that you can buy at any store, but the content had Care Card written all over it. Immediately after I read it, I thought, "she sent me a Care Card at work? Weird? Nice?" So, now I have this little card on my desk and I keep wondering where her mailbox is so I can send her one back.

I'll try facebook.

Bleargh Rah Pbbbth

2009-03-14T21:40:00.002-06:00

This year marks the 8th year in a row in which I have not crossed the poverty line. This year, more than any other, I really thought I'd make it because I'm no longer in University.

Do you have any idea how much I hate money sometimes?

Here's the silver lining: my impoverished self has helped Kaz get a bigger tax return, so there are a few bonuses to having really low-paying wages for a long period of time.

And I wonder why I always feel such a connection to Cat and Girl.

Good Days

2009-03-12T17:59:00.002-06:00

I've got to say, it's pretty awesome to have a day off. I'm not just talking about a day that you don't have anything to do. I'm talking about a day that you look forward to because you usually do not have days to do nothing. Yesterday I was at work for the sixth day in a row, and I could feel my stupidity rising the longer the day went. Man, I needed a day off.

Since I started working a lot more hours, I've really been loving these one-day windows. I know it sounds weird, but I love it when I don't have commitments on a Thursday or a Tuesday. Week-ends are gravy and everything, but since Kaz has the week-ends off, if I've got time off, I want to spend it with him. During the week, I can't spend it with him, and so I make my own fun.

So far my days off have been spent doing the following (feel free to be a little envious):

Going for long walks in the city.
Going to art galleries.
Getting my hair done.
Meeting friends for coffee.
Going for coffee by myself.
Catching up on my blog reading and writing.

I'm a little bit surprised at my desire for activity, actually. I usually love to veg out and nap, and generally do as little as humanly possible, if I have a day to myself. I wasn't even close to this active when I had free time all the time (during the great days of unemployment). I think it's because I know I have a very limited window and I really want to make the most of it. I'm loving it.

It's Not Me, It's You

2009-03-11T08:33:00.001-06:00

I got my very first rejection letter this week-end. It was over e-mail from a journal that I had sent some poems to, back in October. Five months isn't bad turnaround, actually, so it's not so much about the timing of the matter. The letter didn't tell me to stop writing, to give up now, to quit kidding myself, etc. It did tell me that none of my submission would be published, and it made me a little sad.

Okay, it made me a lot sad.

The hardest part of reading criticism is that usually the best criticism is pretty accurate, and it's painful to see your weaknesses all exposed and vulnerable. I'm not so full of myself to think that the reader "didn't get it" or somesuch, but it's a little tempting to elevate myself at the expense of the editor -- to tell myself to damn the man and all of that great antiestablishment stuff. I just don't think that would actually be all that helpful, especially considering that I'm waving at the establishment yelling, "HEY! ACKNOWLEDGE ME!"

So, I'm left with these wobbly feelings about my capabilities and my voice. And, how silly is it that I'm tempted to complain about having to work harder at something that requires so little actual work. Remember that Oscar Wilde quotation?

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

That's not too much of an exaggeration. Except that I feel so attached to the works that I had submitted, it's like taking whiteout to those little inked footprints in a baby book. It's a record of a beginning, it's beautiful in its tiny-ness, and it feels sacrilegious to mess with it.

All this is to say that I haven't decided what to do with the feedback I received, and I'm half-tempted to put those particular poems on the shelf and let them be. Which is not to say that I'm simply going to put away my notebook with my very first rejection letter. I just have to learn how to translate rejection into encouragement, if there is such a way.

It's Not You, It's Me

2009-03-10T19:52:00.002-06:00

Holy crap! My life lately has been a textbook example of shift work: a schedule of seemingly random hours during which an employee is expected to be present and efficient despite lack of rest and/or downtime. There was this huge event in the store on Sunday, and it was actually busier than Boxing Day, a day that I remember with loathing. I've been meaning to sit down and write, not just because I feel a little bit of obligation to the bloggeroo, but because I really want to sit down and write. The times, they are... not mine. Last night, I fell asleep on the couch right after supper and slept right through to the next morning. I'm a little glad that I was able to get so much rest, but I'm also a little miffed that I completely let my night slip out of my hands.

Bleargh. Moving On.

I'm putting the finishing touches on the CD. The playlist has changed subtley about fifteen times now. It was a little tough to make a mix of music that was themeless, but will also work together as a whole. So, I kind of did a sort of autobiographical mix, which makes me a lot more touchy about the thing as a whole: Are these songs really dumb? Am I the only one who finds them meaningful? Can I really put bluegrass and pop on the same mix?

Trippy Music Experience: I was doing an iTunes search for a bunch of Beatles songs, and they only had covers of the songs that I wanted. No matter how much I refined the search, or tinkered with the word order, actual Beatles recordings were not there. So, I figured, "Hey, I'll just search for the frickin' White Album, and be done with it." No White Album, and no "The Beatles" album. It doesn't even exist on iTunes. So, I was left with the disconcerting question: Does The White Album exist if it doesn't exist on iTunes? There is a whole generation of music lovers who will never have access to it (legally). It kind of freaked me out, so I reassured myself and checked Wikipedia. Thank goodness somebody made an entry there because I was this close to losing it. It felt like a bad X-Files episode: Aliens have conspired to make us forget about the best of the Beatles.

Back to the CD: Thus far, AJ, T., and Deb have expressed interest. Anyone else care for Rilla: The Musical Autobiography? I'm still working on the title.

It's Pretty Out Today

2009-03-05T15:34:00.002-06:00

I wonder whether other climates have versions of pretty days. Today, I'm a little in love with this place. The trees are frosty and delicate looking. The river is foggy and mysterious. I went for a little walk to the art gallery and I was very tempted to hug something just to show the world how much I like it right now.

Yes, it's quite pretty out today.

And You Can Quote Me

2009-03-03T08:30:00.005-06:00

Ages and ages ago, my old office mate Ky adapted a movie meme and I loved it. She made a list of ten quotations that she uses in regular conversation, and then opened the floor to guessing. So, now I'ma copy her. So, go ahead. If you think you know what the quotation is from, leave it in the comments.

1) "Eat recycled food. It's good for the environment and okay for you." Judge Dredd

2) "Get your ass to Mars." Total Recall

3) "Keeep Moooving!" The Chronicles of Riddick

4) "Do you know him? Do you call him at home? Do you have a dorsal fin?" Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

5) "Let's locomote." Reality Bites

6) "I will keep dreaming. I will keep dreaming, my friend. And when I wake up, you're gonna wish you were asleep." Mystery Men

7) "Dang. We're in a tight spot." Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

8) "I love lamp." Anchorman

9) "LOUD NOISES." Anchorman

10) "Nobody's hearin' nothin' " The Princess Bride

It bears saying that several of these quotations require funny voices, hence my enjoyment of including these in regular conversations.

Only four left that haven't been identified, and I'll admit I'm surprised at number ten.

Now only three: I'm pretty sure that the only other people who will recognize the rest of the quotes are lurkers around here. I'll give it a day or two and then reveal the answers.

Building Narratives

2009-03-02T09:12:00.004-06:00

The same day that I wrote up my rambly post about what it means when we spin stories of our lives, Kaz rented 50 First Dates and my mind was full of connect-the-dot goodness. If you aren't familiar with it, it's basically about a girl who has no short-term memory, but is able to build herself a life, get married, have a kid, and basically move forward by telling herself the story of her life every morning. As a movie premise, it's pretty cool and I was into it. It's kind of like what would happen if Memento was a love story.

I had a point somewhere, and I think it was this: Our ability to tell stories about our lives is more important than simply weaving activities into a narrative. It shapes how we understand ourselves and how we want our lives to move forward. If we are incapable of putting ourselves into the context of the moment, by building it into a story, we are likely incapable of absorbing the reality around us.

I wonder, too, are we the hero/heroine of our tales, or do we cast ourselves as the accidental fool. I've always been fascinated by the concept that each character in a novel would play a different role if it were told from a different perspective. Great Expectations when told from the perspective of Pip, casts Miss Havisham as a looney, hurtful, busy-body. If it were told from Miss Havisham's perspective, she would be a different sort of tragic figure, perhaps one who chooses loneliness for herself because she has loved and been loved more profoundly than she ever believes possible again.

Some people don't tell stories about themselves. They're quiet and private, and they'd rather listen to the stories of others instead of put the focus on themselves. I imagine when they think of their day they centre the story on other charcters, and not on themselves... and I wonder whether this is part of how my best friend excelled at storytelling. She had the ability to take events that were peripherally part of her life, and bring the focus on to herself. Part of the humour was in taking the starring role, when that wasn't truthfully the case. And yet, it is truthfully the case because she is the one who was experiencing the story firsthand.

So, I guess you could say that I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

Telling Stories

2009-02-27T15:50:00.002-06:00

In high school, my bestest friend conjoined at the hip used to tell amazing stories. They were funny and witty, long enough for you to be entertained, but not too long that it felt like it dragged. She told stories about every day life, things that happened to her on the way to the store, or while she sat in Church. Occasionally, I would be present at an event that would later work its way into her stories and I was always surprised that things had happened so differently than the way I remembered happening... because she was a big lying lyer girl. But, it was all part of weaving an event that had funny moments, into one big hilarious mishap. And, to be fair, she never really lied, but she embellished a lot, and her descriptions of things like facial expressions and tone of voice were gold. Pure comedy gold. I think, sometimes, that she made me into a better storyteller because for three years of listening to her go on (and on) I learned a few things about being funny, and about making a story out of something small.

Lately, though, I've been thinking about the whole problem with turning things into stories. When I was wrapped up in trying to figure out how to heal myself faster (which, by the way, doesn't work. There is no faster when it comes to the heart), I read this article about how people who suffer from depression can sometimes make themselves feel better if they write about their lives for journal exercises. I get that. I can understand how it would help your psyche to put the events of your every day life into a larger context, and to see how your own choices have brought you to where you are. It's empowering not only to create your own story, but to turn your attention to yourself in that way.

But, I wonder whether it's true. A story needs a beginning, middle, and end, right? Something to get us interested, something to move us to a conclusion, and then the conclusion itself. What happens when we turn our lives into a million little stories, though? We are then wrapped up in various beginnings, concurrent conclusions, and then there's always the denouement. What if my whole life is the denouement? As in, the true ending actually happened years ago, and this is all a long, drawn out, tying up of loose ends. Or, do we accept that every morning is our opportunity to make a new story out of our lives, and it ends when our head hits the pillow at night?

This is all very rambly, I recognize that, but what I've been thinking about, dwelling upon, etc., is this: why do we make meaning out of our lives in this way? What is comforting about placing beginnings and endings on a larger timeline that we have no way of knowing. Is it a way of micro-managing the what-ifs? For example, if I tell a story about my ride to work on the bus, and how I was surrounded by people who smelled terrible and were generally rude and I felt out of place, is that my way of expressing a very basic fear about my life as a whole -- a fear about poverty and sanity? Or, is it just a funny story about weirdos on the bus?

This doesn't particularly make a whole lot of sense...

Dead in my Head

2009-02-26T11:23:00.002-06:00

It's a blessing of dreaming that I get to spend time with those who are dead. So, what does it mean when they're not there anymore. I feel a loss all over again.

Other Thoughts on Music

2009-02-25T08:30:00.001-06:00

I think I might be fixing to do another compilation CD. My last experience with making a CD to share with my friends went really well. Not only was I pleased with the songs that I chose and the order they played, I got a lot of really great music in return. Several (that's three) of you made a CD of songs that you liked to give to me. I've been listening to them and enjoying them, but I'm ready for something new.

My last disc that I made for sharing with others was thematic: Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. This time I'll veer away from a hard and fast theme and go for a more me theme, songs that I really dig, regardless of what they're about. I'm thinking a bit of a "Best Of" of the mixed CDs and tapes that I've made throughout the years.

Funny Story (to me): When Rob and I were first dating I had this mixed tape that had a lot of electronica on it. It was a very brief phase, only made worse by the fact that electronica in the mid-90's was pretty terrible. I don't know what the hell I was thinking, but I thought it would be super cool if I made the cover out of an excel gum case. Then, I called the mix: The Excel Mix: The Mix of the Future (patent pending). The whole thing was so very foolish. Whenever Rob wanted to listen to it he'd say the whole bloody title each time: "Can we listen to The Excel Mix: The Mix of the Future. I like that The Excel Mix: The Mix of the Future," he'd say. Oh, I can be a tool sometimes.

Sad Story (to me): I made a couple of mixed tapes that I listened to pretty much religiously for the first few years of Rob's and my relationship. When I finally went ahead and sold that crappy car that was falling apart, I never cleaned out the glove compartment or anything. I was mostly happy to get it the frick out of my hair. I think those tapes are forever lost to me now, as they are not in my stash of old tapes, which is shown to the right. Several of the tapes (shown to the right) haven't even been recorded yet, and I wonder whether it is safe to throw them away. I dug through the whole thing looking for The Excel Mix: The Mix of the Future, to remind me what the playlist was, but I'm afraid that too is now lost forever... which is probably for the best.

I have yet to decide what to put on this new mix, but let me know if you want a copy. It will add to my motivation to find cool music that I love, and that I think you might love too.

That Music Thing - I'm Not Sleeping

2009-02-24T14:12:00.004-06:00

This is another of those facebook things that I've been tagged for a bunch lately. It's that one where you put your music player on shuffle and then the titles of the song answer questions about your life. I've put my own interpretations of the answers in italics. I promise real posts will be coming soon. I feel all unstopped now that I've let the cat out of the bag, so I think I'll feel like writing more.

My favorite one is number nineteen.

1.What do your friends say about you?
If You Don't Love Me (I'll kill myself) - Pete Droge
That's right. I provoke fanatical and unreasonable responses from my friends.

2.How would your coworkers describe you?
Friday I'm in Love - The Cure
... and from my co-workers.

3.How would you describe yourself?
Scarborough Fair/Canticle - Simon and Garfunkel
I'm a sexually ambiguous hippy.

4.What do you like in a romantic partner?
Prairie Sun - Alana Levandoski
Reminds me of my youth.

5.How do you feel today?
Frenzy - Scremin' Jay Hawkins
I'm in a frenzy. You probably should have been able to figure that one out.

6.What is your life's purpose?
The 59th Street Bridge Son (Feelin' Groovy) - Simon and Garfunkel
To feel groovy. Again, use your heads, people. This isn't rocket science.

7.What is your motto?
Raining in Baltimore - Counting Crows
This is a perfectly legitimate motto. No, you shut up.

8. What do you think about the most?
Angels of the Silences - Counting Crows
Yes, I think about weird poetical things a lot.

9. What are you going to do on your next vacation?
Bring Me on Home - Alana Levandoski
Literally.

10.What do you think of your first love/date?
God Part II - U2
Don't get a swelled head, Benjamin. No, not that Benjamin, the one from high school.

11. What is your life story?
Sullivan Street - Counting Crows
Dammit. How much Counting Crows do I listen to? Apparently my life story is about finding weird routes home, repeatedly.

12. What did you do yesterday?
Anna Begins - Counting Crows
I listened to my favorite song.

13. What do you think of when you see the person you like/love?
All I Want is You - U2
Apt. True.

14. What describes your wedding?
Shiva - Cracker Cats
Hindu, apparently.

15. What will they play at your funeral?
The King of Bedside Manor - Barenaked Ladies
Everyone will finally stop lying and talk about how rude I was all the time.

16. What is your obsession?
Down to the River - Cracker Cats
Water. I do have a bit of a weird obsession with water, actually.

17. What is your biggest fear?
King of Comedy - REM
Fame.

18. What is your biggest secret?
Puffy Little Shoes - American Presidents
Shoe fetish.

19. What is your biggest turn-on?
Mahna, Mahna - Cake
Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.

20. How do you describe your friends?
Freedom for my People - U2
We are a rather free bunch.

21. What would you do with a million dollars?
Everybody Hurts - REM
Keep it to myself and screw everyone over.

22. What is your opinion of sex?
World of Two - Cake
Apt. True.

23. What is your biggest regret?
Help! I'm a Logo - Plaid Tongued Devils
Selling out for all that money. Wait... what happened to the money?

24. What would you rather be doing right now?
Daydream - Serena Ryder
True dat.

25. What is your biggest turn off?
The Bear Song - Green Jelly
Bears turn me off.

26. How do you start your morning?
Half Acre - Hem
I farm. What do you do?

27. What Describes your birth?
Raspberry Beret - Prince
Ew.

28. What is a typical weekend for you?
The Star Spangled Banner - U2
Flag burning. Everyone's invited.

29. What do you do at work?
Just Another Day - Serena Ryder
The same crap I do every other day.

30. How would your significant other describe you?
Mercury - Counting Crows
I'm magic: Am I metal? Am I liquid? Am I poisonous over a long period of exposure?

31. How would your parents describe you?
The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine - Simon and Garfunkel
I know I'm entertaining, but I wouldn't say I'm a machine.

32. What do you think about in the bathroom?
War Pigs - Cake
Screw you, politicians. I crap on your violent ideals.

33. What would be a good theme song to play whenever you walk into a room?
Have You Seen Me Lately - Counting Crows
Why, yes you have... 'cause I just walked in.

34. How do you like to end your day before bed?
Who Knew - Pink
Nudge nudge. Wink wink.

35. What will you post this list as?
I'm Not Sleeping - Counting Crows
I need to listen to more artists. This could easily have been a list of Counting Crows and Simon and Garfunkel songs.

Surprise!

2009-02-23T10:09:00.004-06:00

Click to Embiggen

That's right. It's true.

Now, where to begin and what to tell. I've been putting off doing the post for a few reasons: I wanted to make sure moms and dads knew first, and I wanted to keep it to myself for a bit. I know I generally have "bloggorhea," but I've been hesitant to let this go, to release it into the world.

So, be free happy news: Kaz and I are going to get married.

And, I think that's all that I'll release. If you want the story, you can ask me sometime and I'll probably tell you.

My Week

2009-02-21T11:52:00.003-06:00

So, it's been a little longer than usual, and it's not that I haven't tried to sit down and blog. There was one day this week when I got home from work two hours earlier than I was supposed to, and I browsed through blogs and youtube videos for the entire two hours. Supposedly I was looking for inspiration, but nothing came.

Some basic news: I'm going up to full-time hours at work, getting a raise and a promotion. Huzzah! Huzzah? I've been there a grand total of three months, and this just puts me in general fear of the retail world. Drew from Toothpaste for Dinner has said often in interviews that the very fact that he's lauded for posting a webcomic every day just goes to show how shoddy the webcomic industry can be. I feel similarly about the situation at work. Like, if all of a sudden everyone else at the store quit (hey, it could happen. One week we had two people quit over the phone), I'd be there holding the keys. Don't worry, all you Rilla-Knowers, I'd just put down the keys and walk away slowly. I'll save the ulcers for something important to me.

I had two opportunities come to a smashing conclusion last week. One of the jobs I applied for in November sent me two essays to write on topics on which I knew -- nothing (to very little). I wasn't shocked when I didn't hear back from them. I suspect my essays will be put up on their hiring website with a little warning: If this is your level of knowledge, please don't bother. Then I had a very good interview (no sarcasm) with a person that I had met in the beginning of my grad program. If I knew how to use Microsoft Access, I would have had a rather interesting and fulfilling part-time job to enjoy. Alas. I'm tempted to download Access (of course legally, Mr. Microsoft) and teach myself to use it so that this won't be a problem in future job applications. It's on my mental to-do list.

I have a three-day week-end, presently. Kaz exercised some forethought and took an extra day off, so that we are luxuriating together. Also, my favoite band's name is Mittens!

Retrospectives Kind of Suck

2009-02-11T22:18:00.002-06:00

I don't know if you noticed, but I added another tab up at the top of the blog. It's got a bunch of posts that I liked in a big long list of links. Last week-end when I was finished applying for jobs, I took a few hours and skimmed my entire blog. You know what? That year that Rob and I separated really sucked. A lot. I found myself jumping over many many posts, not because of the content within, but because I could remember things like, "this was the week that everything fell apart" or "that night I cried a lot," or any number of really terrible emotional-gut-ripping episodes. When I wrote, I mostly tried to keep things light, both for my benefit and for yours.

But, the posts that had nothing to do with what was going on in my heart and were simply me recounting how busy I was keeping myself, mostly in an effort to not think about what was going on in my heart, really had no impact on me on a re-read. That's convoluted, but basically what I'm trying to get at is this: There was more me in any post in which I was admitting to having a difficult time than in any post in which I was forcing myself to write in denial. The denial laden posts kindled emotional responses in me, only because of the memories that I had tied to them, and not because of any news within. When I actually found the courage to say the sad things that were on my mind... well, they made me sad all over again.

Rereading the painful posts was hard, but it felt true. Honest. I guess it's better to honestly tell a sad story than to pretend that the sad story's not there at all.

The Twenty-Five-Things Thing

2009-02-10T10:00:00.003-06:00

If I started writing facebook notes on top of my blog, the other blog, the other blog, and my creative writing, I might lose it. All the same, I've been "tagged" a few times for this on facebook, so this is my compromise.

1) I think that those internet tagging games that encourage you to give out information about what street you live on, what your mother's maiden name is, what your pets' names are, etc., are pretty much designed to aid in identity theft. If you really want to know what your stripper name, gang name, nerd names are, ask a stripper, ganger or nerd. Mine are Clumsy, Four-Eyes, and Four-Eyes.

2) I like the meme in which you put your Ipod on shuffle and the name of the song answers revealing questions about your life. For instance, what's the meaning of life? "Lemon Meringue Pie." Hard to argue with that. I don't have an Ipod, or any sort of portable MP3 player, so I never feel like I'm truly embracing the spirit of those sorts of memes.

3) I think about the internet too much.

4) I wish I were in Mexico, California, Vancouver, Chicago, anywhere my friends have been/are going, right now. I have a bad case of vacationers' envy. It feels like I've been in one place for far too long, though. I have ants in my pants to travel, preferably someplace warm, but I really want to travel.

5) When I was four I almost drowned. I was saved by my friends' mom. The experience did not instill in me a fear of water, instead it kind of made me feel more at home there, like I'd escaped the worst and it would be fine.

6) When I was seven my mom drove our truck into the ditch. It was a fairly controlled crash, no rolling, no hard impacts, etc. Unfortunately my brother had left a hunting knife on the dashboard and watching it fly around the cabin was terrifying for both me and mom.

7) When I was eight I decided to play with the weight set of one of my uncles. I laid down on that contraption and took the weight off the handle, and promptly set the heavy bar down on my neck. One of my cousins came and saved me. Unlike the swimming thing, I've avoided exercise. I'll pretend it's because of this. I was too embarrased about my stupidity (my neck? come on) so my cousin and I never told anyone. It's okay, mom. I'm fine.

8) When I was nine I was playing in a swimming pool with my dad. I was trying to do sumersaults under the water and I got disoriented, thinking that up was down and down was up. When I tried to go up for air, I found the bottom. Dad fished me up before I started to choke. Then we kept playing.

9) When I was twelve I was having a nap on the floor of my best friends' van. All the seats had been removed to make room for these giant metal "bolt bins" because her dad was selling bolts and other parts out of his van. We were driving to Riding Mountain National Park via a very curvy road. The bolt bin tipped over and landed square on my back. Through some miracle of even distribution, I was totally fine and didn't understand why everyone was freaking out.

10) When I was seventeen I drove home from private school in a blizzard that was so bad that I couldn't see the road. Not any part of it. I had to listen for the sound of tires meeting gravel and then steer slowly away from the sound. Luckily it was night, so I could see headlights and avoid oncoming traffic. Five miles from home, I turned onto a gravel road and realized that steering by ear would not work. I called home from a neighbours' and we formed a caravan to get me the last five miles.

11) I think that makes six near-death experiences. I can't remember anymore.

12) This one time I was wearing a dress and going from the cafeteria to the dormitory and I slipped on some ice and it felt like I was going to freeze to death. I over-dramtically announced to my friends that if we didn't get inside soon we'd die. I believed it in that moment. I don't think it was true. I think I was a bit of an idiot.

13) Oh! When I was sixteen I had a tabagonning accident that knocked another kid into unconcsiousness and gave myself a concussion. So, that makes seven near-death experiences. I haven't particularly warmed to tabagonning since then.

14) I had a blankie when I was a kid. I slept with it until I was fourteen. Sometimes I still miss it.

15) Mom and dad gave me a more socially acceptable teddy bear that helped with the transition away from the blankie. I slept with it until I was twenty. Sometimes I still miss it.

16) It took me a long time to get used to sleeping with a small dog entangled in my legs. I wasn't used to having to be still. Sometimes I wake up and wonder where he is, then I'm sad. I still miss Caesar a lot.

17) The cats suck at sleeping in bed. They're restless and annoying. It sucks.

18) I've been writing this post for an hour. I hope you appreciate this level of dedication.

19) Sometimes I get ideas for radio programs that I could host. I'm rather lazy, so nothing ever comes of them.

20) I'm rather proud of my Rock Band drumming skills. I'm often reminded of a dude who lived at my house for much of my youth, who loved to drum on things. I don't know if he was actually a drummer, but he'd play percussion in the table, on the grain bins, on the cultivator, on the wood shed. He liked rhythmn.

21) We had weird boarders a lot when I was a kid. There was the drummer guy, and also his cousin (I think) who were living in a terrible shack a few miles from our house, until mom and dad realized that there were two guys living in a shack a few miles from our house. Then they stayed with us and did chores for room and board.

22) I got married too young.

23) There's an Oprah magazine in the staff room at work. I read some of it and felt ashamed. It's just that there was an interview with Tina Fey, and she's hard to resist.

24) Sometimes I miss having TV. There are a lot of programs that I think I would like to watch on a regular basis, like anything that has Tina Fey in it.

25) I don't own a bathroom scale. I think this makes me a much healther person (than anyone else who owns and uses a bathroom scale regularly (that's right I'm judging you)).

It's Late and I'm Chatty

2009-02-07T23:34:00.002-06:00

Today has been a good day. I have a lot of good days, honestly. It just seems like a blog is a great place to vent when I'm frustrated, etc. Call it cheap therapy, call it emotional purging, but writing out my annoyances and concerns usually makes me feel a lot better about my life. Sometimes, though, I worry that I write too much about the negative stuff, and not enough about the good stuff. So, since today has been a good day, I'ma write about it.

I spent a good chunk of the morning reading in bed with Kaz. We're onto the second Wheel of Time book, and I can sense a growing hesitation in him about the length of this series. I'm having such a great time going through the first books because I'm remembering things that I had forgotten by the time I got through the most recent books. Kaz is way better at recognizing the significance of characters, and he's making connections that I missed my first time reading these books. A nice way to describe Jordan's style is that he creates a rich world. You could also say, he creates plots within plots within plots, and if you're not astute about it, you miss the plot until the hammer comes down, which leaves some readers (myself included the first time through) a little confused. Enough about the book. It was lovely to snuggle in bed with a good book and Kaz.

I had an appointment for a leg waxing this afternoon, and I've been going semi-regularly so the waxing has moved from "AAAAAAH!" to "warm wax, nice. Ouch." It's a pampering thing for me. I don't really dig manicures or pedicures, but I really enjoy nice smooth legs for weeks at a time.

After the waxing, I met up with a friend of mine whom I worked with at that Testing Centre all those months ago. She always tells me these great stories about how work has totally gone to pot since I left, and I feel very important and special. There's probably a little bit of spite in there too. Sort of like a "see, you should have tried paying me more," kind of vibe. Anyway, she and I ate lunch, went shopping, and had great conversation for pretty much the whole afternoon. I even purchased a new vest (not an 80's vest, it's this cool halter vest thing, that makes me look quite slick, I think) that I can wear to work, and for semi-dressy occasions. I've come to learn, though, that I have little call for semi-dressy outfits. Hopefully an interview will pop up soon, and I'll be extra spiffy.

When I arrived home, Kaz was just pulling the ingredients out of the fridge to make a chicken stirfry and we cooked together and watched some more Planet Earth. Since dinner, we've been relaxing together and enjoying our computers.

It's kind of been one of those perfect days: socialization, recreation, and a bit of a treat thrown in. Days like today make me feel very full and happy. You can absorb some of my joy, if you want.