Oh, hey, here's that thing I was babbling about a while back.

I love wikis.

I wonder if I should just throw off the 10+ stories/fics I have open and write a matriarchal fantasy 'verse AU snippet or ficlet that just casually has a mirrored set of gender roles going on in the background of a fairly standard fantasy "epic".

• The male hero would get pissed off at anyone who questioned his warrior credentials, because goddammit, he doesn't need the "favor" of being left on the side-lines. Everyone always talks about women having the lock on reflexes and intelligence, but he has both of those plus muscles. Just because it's a lot rarer for men to have game-changing magical abilities...
• The male sidekick would be shy and reserved, attracting the attention of so many creepy chicks who want to wed him and make a brood of tiny blonde tots via surrogate mother grope him in bars, 'cause it's not like he'll say anything about it, right? He would also have learned from his books that there are equal incidences of male and female children being born with magical abilities, but in some places males have this power suppressed, and in almost every part of the world females are far more encouraged to pursue magical studies.
• They're more handsy with each other. It's fine for them, they're dudes. If women did it it would just look gay.
• Likewise, the female sidekick would get tons of high-fives for traveling with the pair of them. "So, do they -- y'know, let you watch?"
• The female sidekick would also get annoyed at her place in the world. If it isn't another woman making casually sexist observations about her friends and expecting her to nod along/laugh while the hero glares at both of them, it's the hero getting upset with her for getting overprotective when some bitch in a backwards rural town keeps eying the hero up like a piece of meat. Of course he can take care of himself, but maybe he'd be a little bit better off if they were both looking out for him, in a totally non-patronizing way? What the hell does he want from her?
• "Hey, sword boy -- it ever occur to you that you might be taken more seriously as one of the women if you weren't swinging that great big thing around?" "FUCK THE FUCK OFF."

From whirligigged:

1. What's a smell that immediately triggers a time/person/place for you? Cheap answers are old books and chlorine. Unhelpful answer is Neonatura perfume, which automatically puts me in the mindset of "highschooler walking barefoot outside through the summer mud to watch the moon rise and contemplate werewolves". The internet describes the scent as "cocoa, vanilla, and patchouli", which I cannot detect with my own nose, but the description will have to do until we develop a way to transfer scents online. God help us.

2. What song/album/artist have you listened to most often as of late? I... have not. Perhaps if we define "as of late" as "within the last half a year or so" I could go with that time I listened to "Bete Noir" about a dozen times within a twenty-four hour span, but otherwise: got nuthin'. Here are the stats for my most-used Pandora station?

3. What's the last thing you Googled? Since I have a tendency to Google search for websites instead of just typing in the URL or bookmarking them, the technical answer to that is Photobucket, Babelfish, and the SomethingAwful forums. But, if those are discounted, it is ~*The Spear of Longinus*~, because I saw it mentioned in a fic yesterday and thought it sounded familiar. Upon Googling it, I realized that I recognized it from another fic. Someday I will chart out the knowledge I have gained from college against the knowledge I have gained from fanfic.

4. If you could spend next week in any city in the world, where would it be? I have the most boring answers to every question. London? Cairo? Anywhere on this list with the possible exception of the radioactive one? Yours♥?

5. What's the first line of the book you're currently reading (or of the last book you read)? "Why was it, Tiffany Aching wondered, that people liked noise so much?" (A girl after my own heart.)

Doubtful anyone reads this anymore, but required meme propagation details:

poems are due tomorrow so that the rest of the class can read and comment on them before workshop day

self-indulgent sociopath poem has now reached 68 lines

and is on part two of three

threw together an eight-line poem in an hour in a futile attempt to balance the proportion of normal wordy pretentious poems to crazyfuck wordy pretentious sociopath poems

this did not have a significant effect

still have to finish part three before sleeping tonight

if you're reading this, send help

This week has been utter shit so far and it's my four-class day and I have a cold and my hair is messed up and I just woke up having bled all over the one fucking pair of underwear I own that actually fucking fits and it's eight in the fucking morning and I would seriously contemplate taking off from my first class except that it's too early in the semester and I don't want to waste my absences now when I'll be needing them on other days, like maybe a week from now when a modified snow day schedule has moved two exams forward to my birthday.

And my mouth tastes like something died in it.

I'm going to eviscerate anyone who so much as looks at me.


UPDATE ON THE SHITTINESS OF THIS WEEK (8:26 PM):

Credits
1) No longer eight in the morning
2) Hair is slightly less messed up
3) Salvaged underwear
4) One-class day tomorrow
5) Mouth tastes like Mountain Dew

Demerits
1) My body doesn't work right and I don't have a libido and an entire generation of sex-positive feminists hate me and I'm going to die alone because no man or woman will have me
2) Apparently hormonal

...Okay, so apparently this story I've been absently plotting out for the last two years is a possibly-warped metaphor for the history of gender issues and/or feminism.

I had not realized this.

But, consider:

The main character is a manly man with a large sword, which he does not like anyone else to touch (he gets over this). He has a fear of magic (he probably gets over this). Fortunately, his sword is magic-resistant and protects him from any spells that others may cast. He's also enthusiastically heterosexual, just to throw that out there, so it's not like the metaphor parallels his real nature. This is likely because I didn't do it on purpose

The other two characters are magicians. One is female (and prickly). The other is a very sensitive man of dubious sexual orientation. The earliest examples of magic we see from the two of them are shielding spells (anything bowl-shaped is a vagina, as I learned in Psych 101), nurturing/healing spells, and, oh yeah, the spell that sensitive-guy can use to drag another person within him so that they are of one body. This is either a metaphor for sex or pregnancy, obviously. Or maybe it's both.

I should probably point out that I counted it up just now and six out of the seven magic-using characters I've come up with within the last six or seven years were either female or ambiguously gay.

Now that we have established that swords are phallic and magic is yonic (what, spellcheck doesn't recognize the proper word for "vagina-related"?), I would like to build upon these concepts.

Both magicians start out as slaves -- sensitive guy as a willing one -- while the fighter guy is an unwilling prisoner. For a moment I was kind of worried about the fact that fighter guy breaks out both magicians, but then I realized that fighter guy and sensitive guy were prisoners together and broke each other out, so actually it is symbolic for how sexism makes prisoners of both sexes. And then, both sexes must work together to bring about the new generation's ideas of gender -- represented in the female magician who they set free later on, who is, y'know, female and a magician, but also uses giant phallic fire sword spells in addition to shield spells. This represents what critics of feminism have disparagingly referred to as "the unisex agenda", in which one individual can incorporate aspects of both gender into their idea of self.

I'd wonder whether it's sort of insulting that the female magician's most powerful spell is one she learned by copying fighter guy's swordwork, except that sensitive guy is probably the most powerful of the three, though he hides it. Then I would wonder whether it could be said that the two contrasting magicians and their focus on the fighter is a representation of the contrasting ideas of what a woman should be, with one docile and comforting and only wishing to make the fighter happy, and the other confident and badass and in control of herself and her surroundings. The wife/mistress dichotomy, if you will.

Clearly, the fact that the two magicians would be the ones hooking up if anyone did means that the story is actually a thinly-veiled endorsement of lesbianism.

Does anyone else add words to Microsoft's dictionary just to stop the red lines from appearing under them all the time?

I decided to check out my "custom dictionary" options to see what words I've promoted to legitimate status. The list, for those interested, is as follows:


ahaha
arcana
dammit
douchebag
dunno
er
Er
esque
Facebook
fanfiction
fuckload
Gah
GMail
goddammit
gonna
gotta
gropings
Hahaha
heh
hikikomori
humerus
ish
kinda
lol
lolz
mojo
Naaah
Owen's
pissy
preggers
somethin
sorta
spazzing
spellcaster
studmuffin
supervillain
wanna
wtfever
y'know


Which of these does Firefox count as words? "Arcana", "dammit", "dunno", both "er"s, "goddammit", "gonna", "gotta", "gropings", "humerus", "kinda", "sorta", and "wanna".

Why "gropings"?

Early Tuesday morning I dreamt I was riding shotgun in a car as it went over a cliff. I lived through it hitting the water, but knew that I couldn't push the doors open against the pressure, so instead I sat back and tried to wrap my brain around the fact that I was going to die.

Then I dreamt about pressing flowers.

I woke up and essentially sleepwalked through my first class. It was only sitting on a bench in the quad during "lunch" break, English book open on my lap, sky all grey and cloudy overhead, that I suddenly thought "Aren't I supposed to be dead right now?"

I sat staring at the walkway bricks for about fifteen more minutes. A breeze fluttered at the corner of my book. The noon bells didn't ring when they were supposed to. Interchangeable people wandered by, having interchangeable conversations. I contemplated in a Deeply Philosophical manner how perhaps I am dead and in Limbo, like that episode of the Twilight Zone with those dudes in the jar. No, wait, in that one they were dolls. My point still stands. And then I decided fuck it and went to English.

After Botany I was on my way to the dorms when I met up with three other kids from that class who were going down this road at the edge of campus to look for more flowers.

Half an hour later saw me walking on a shady cemetery-side trail with one hand brushing the hair out of my eyes and the other holding a bouquet of honeysuckle, berries, clover, and snakeskin. Good times, man. I wish I'd known that stuff was back there in my freshman year--would've been nice to get out of the dorms occasionally and hang out with some dead folk and snakes.

Tuesday night I dreamt about snakeskin and, again, flowers.

Nothing much has happened today.

Today I went hiking across campus to locate a trail I'd discovered on Google Maps.

( It was very perilous. )

Bonus:

I went to my great-grandmother's house this weekend to gather flowers for the project. The house is pretty old -- not sure just how old, but she was born in 1919 and I think that either she grew up there or her husband built it.

There's a lot of general dilapidation around the grounds. I brought a camera to take pictures of the flowers so I could better identify them when dried, but I got a shot of one of the little shacks that still litter the area. They used to be for housing hens or milking cows or whathaveyou, but now I believe they mostly store junk.

Check me out in that mirror at the top.



Have I mentioned I love October?

I went shopping today. I think I got a pretty good haul, considering that I usually come out of a day's worth of store-surfing with like three tee-shirts.

Most of it was from Target, but I went to Gordman's in search of a purple skirt to go with that belly-dancing costume. That was the only thing I intended to buy there. In this, I failed to consider two things.

1) There are not a lot of breezy summer skirts out in September, and even fewer that match dark-purple-and-silver, and even fewer in my size.

2) I am the biggest dork ever to inadvertently wander into ( the quasi-Victorian section of Gordman's. )

4) The convenience store, I have learned, stocks both the microwave pizzas I eat and those orange sherbet tubey push-up ice cream pops! Hot damn.

3) Might have got a little bit sunburned.

2) "You are really pale."
"Yeah, I'm thinking maybe I should have put on some sunscreen today."
"I'm thinking you should probably put on sunscreen every time you go outside."
"Now that's just not fair! I will have you know, I can be outside for up to forty-five minutes without suffering horrible burns."
"Oh, yeah, that's spectacular. God, your skin is like porcelain."
"Y'know, people say that, but I dunno what kind of porcelain you're thinking of, 'cause me, I've got freckles, and if your porcelain looks like this I think it needs washed--"

1) Also, this happened.

PROFESSOR: Now, we haven't got your special magnifying glasses in yet, but we do have these standard ones over here, if anyone wants to bring them out. They have a decent strength, and they'll make you look like Sherlock Holmes.
JADE: (readjusting course toward Box o' Magnifiers)

EARNEST ENGINEERING GUY: Oh, hello.
JADE: (pinning hair up) Hey.
EARNEST ENGINEERING GUY: ...Y'know, you do look like Sherlock Holmes.
JADE: askdjgadghg; --I. Yes. That's... unfortunate. (belatedly regains senses) Uh. By which I mean, that's actually kinda flattering, that you'd say that. Funny thing, I've pretty much totally had this huge fictional-character-crush on him since I was, like, twelve.
EARNEST ENGINEERING GUY: (default friendly-small-talk-with-this-girl-I-just-met-a-few-weeks-ago mode) Oh, really?
JADE: (default sarcastic/drugged/vaguely-flirtatious mode) Yeah, gotta love those tall, pale guys.

A moment passes.

JADE: Erm. Not that I'm--I mean, I wasn't...
EARNEST ENGINEERING GUY: ?
JADE: I've just realized that that could be perceived as me hitting on you, since you're--(handwave)--tall, and sort of pale, which was not, I think, exactly what I intended--
EARNEST ENGINEERING GUY: Oh, no worries.
JADE: ahaha yeah k.


I am just the best person.



Yes, I really said "perceived as me hitting on you". Yes, he really said "no worries". No, I don't have any idea.

Went to the Pirate Festival today. I would post pictures, except that I left the camera-to-computer cord up at the dorm. Also, basically every single picture I took is of the pirate belly-dancers who gave a show in the afternoon.

...I will have to go back and post those later.

Highlights! It was in a sort of wooded area with booths set up between, very RenFaire. Along with the people walking around in outright pirate clothing (bandanas, boots, leather and cravats), there were some (mostly women) who were wearing straight-out Victorian dress, petticoats and all. Which was very interesting! Albeit not as hot as the midriff-baring pirate-ettes who were walking around. (Not the belly-dancers, they're in a class all their own.) Aaand the guy with his shirt off and the leather straps/belt and yes.

I bought a $2 fan from one of the shops. Here it is via webcam pic.

( The fan. )

Oh, and, uh, I painted my nails gold beforehand. And wove a few gold necklaces into my hair on the drive up. Okay, why not.

Some of the stuff was kind of expensive--especially the well-made hats and leather clothes and whatnot--and some stuff was surprisingly cheap, like this kickass foot-long $20 dagger with a pretty metal hilt. I thought of buying the latter. I really did. And then I thought, do I really need to spend twenty dollars on a dagger that I'm never even going to kill anyone with?

So instead I went to the belly-dancing hut.

Ayup.

( START WEARING PURPLE, WEARING PURPLE )


So anyway, I went home, watched the Sherlock Holmes movie with my mother+her girlfriend, etc, and now I am back on my couch with the taste of popcorn lingering on my fingers and I think I shall read this crossover between the book!canon Sherlock Holmes and House of Leaves, because oh my yes.



EDIT: ( AS PROMISED. )

Just got off the phone with my mother.

 

MOTHER: One of my co-workers recommends watching the Sherlock Holmes movie. Your thoughts?

JADE: Allow me to pontificate for several minutes upon the significant differences in atmosphere and characterization between the many adaptations of said series (half of which you've never heard of), and also the fashion in which more modern versions have started to give our leads a chemistry which tends toward "bickering" or even "vitriolic", in line with the sudden rise of people being total assholes in modern media.

MOTHER: Allow me to augment your diatribe with commentary on Darcy's scathing dialogue within the modern work Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies.

Blame my upbringing, folks!

Today our Psychology professor explained to us how high levels of stress may cause the body to pack on abdominal weight even if the rest of a person's body is stick-thin--in fact, the stick-thin part is likely among these stressed individuals, because the body kills appetite when it's in an aroused (anxious) state.

This explains the entirety of my "why am I so effing disproportionate" teenage body issues.

Seriously, you know those marshmallow-and-toothpick models you'd have to make in classes sometimes? Stick four toothpicks into a marshmallow and you've got a building block? Like that, but with a little mane of red hair topping the central marshmallow.

Thankfully I now have exactly the proportions of a withered once-human husk.


I've been writing more stuff lately! Uh. Sort of. A teensy bit. Mostly just snippets of stuff when I'm procrastinating homework. It's kinda nice though, as long as I don't start thinking about what I am or am not going to do with it when I finish. Really, do gardeners wonder what they're going to do with a garden once they've finished it? You leave it where it is and sometimes you show it to people and they are like, "That is quite nice!" and then you feel proud. This is what hobbies are. Perhaps I am just not used to having them.


EDIT: Also this day, in French, we play a Bingo game wherein we have to search out someone who does or has done something indicated within the box. I sit down with the girl next to me and quickly blow through the first four boxes going up one column ("Quelqu'un qui n'aime pas un film que tu aimes?" "Uh, tu aimes Monty Python? Shaun of the Dead? Screw it--Pokemon the First Movie? ALL RIGHT THEN, moving on!")

Then we hit the last one, and as I'm trying to decode it, she says, "Quelqu'un qui souvient l'endroit ou on a embrass--Oh, I remember where I first kissed someone!"

"Uh," I say, as she looks up at me expectantly. "Well."

In the end, I send her off to find someone who has--ahem, who does remember the first place they kissed someone, much to her annoyance at my apparently terrible memory, and I myself cross off the last box and sit back down, the first to accomplish five-in-a-row. Sucks to be you, chick with a social life!

I was reminded of this because I've just looked at the 21 Questions app on Facebook and one of the recurring questions that people will answer in the positive for me is "Do you think _____ has ever kissed anyone?" I doubt it's something people think through or otherwise contemplate--more one of the gimme questions that they can click a fast "yes" to and go on to get more points--but it's still, like... there are other responses like, oh, of course she's never lied to get out of a date, or yes, she's fairly socially awkward, but there's the kissing question from at least three different people who sort of know me a little bit and it's unanimously positive, which. Is odd. Since I'm fairly blatantly an isolated misanthrope.

This Japanese duo came into our French class today to do a survey on foreign languages. For participating, we all received five bucks! I maintain that they should have brought along yen--it's still money, and some of us might have found it cooler.

So anyway, I have certain cultural issues to deal with.

JADE: Hooray, going to go score some green from the Japanese dude! Merci, Japanese dude! Or--arigato, I guess?
JADEBRAIN: Jade, do not drawl "aree-gat-ooo" at the native speaker like the sonuvabitch Midwesterner you are.
JADE: Fine, fine.

I therefore simply exchanged "Thank you!"s with said Japanese dude, him nodding as he spoke and me bobbing in gratitude/acknowledgement like a maid from a Victorian novel... as I do. (Seriously, my mother has mocked me for "curtsying" to people behind counters in shops.)

And then I got five steps out of the classroom before slapping my hand over my face and muttering "oh god I just bowed to a Japanese person fuck me."

On to English!

Zweelum: ...I don't know why I'm telling you what my hair looks like when I posted pictures on LJ like a week ago. ANYWAY.
whirligigged: Still charming! The hair sort of just continues to confirm my impression of you as more of a fey woodland creature than anything.
Zweelum: Hahaha, what, because of the length?
whirligigged: Yes, and the vague messiness.
whirligigged: ( Like twigs and leaves caught up in it charmingly would not be amiss! )

Botany was pretty fun today.

The objective of my annual and/or biannual haircuts: several inches off the bangs, a few off the body.

( Before. )

( After. )

You be the judge. It's mostly just so's I can start growing them back out again anyway.

Okay, new problem.

Between this, in its entirety, and a few... suspect lines in I Can't Decide and Culling of the Fold, it is entirely possible that I'm developing some sort of fetish for jaunty melodical sociopathy.

It probably does not help that this kink seems somehow and for some reason to be tapping my reserves of latent bisexuality.

WELL, BACK TO THE WONDERS OF THE INTERNET

My relationship with the better class of cheesy song has come to the point where I will either defend it outright, albeit in an over-the-top and facetious way ("your simple mind comprehends not the utter MAJESTY of this piece"), or claim that I "appreciate it ironically", a statement which is usually made likewise facetiously because appreciating things ironically seems to be played out.

So when I say that I appreciate songs like "My Best Friend's Hot" ironically, but am clearly enjoying the song on its own merits, am I appreciating it ironically ironically, or am I saying ironically that I am ironically appreciating it?

...Am I beginning to appreciate irony ironically?

And now that I am awake, a recounting of my morning at the zoo!

( Jade enjoys taking pictures of bored animals. )

In an effort to start writing anything again, I may have just spent a month scrawling out/tweaking a prologue which turns out to be sort of redundant and unfitting to the rest of the unwritten story, which could easily start more in medias res and be better off for it, and which additionally falls smack in the middle of my semi-plotted (and likewise unwritten) series continuum.

On the bright side, when I say "a month" I mean I wrote like 3000 words in one slacktastic week, took a break for about two weeks, and then wrote the next 2500 over the last five or six days. So if I actually put my mind to it, as I have not been doing, there's a chance it could go a lot faster.


An unrelated note: I forget what they say about people on vacation. Is it that they aren't themselves, or that they are their true selves? I've also forgot who says this. Probably some philosopher douchebag.

Perhaps this is merely a symptom of my somewhat-recently acquired excessive misanthropy, but I have to wonder, why are all the notifications on my Facebook's news page from college people who have befriended me rather than from those high school friends who I actually like, if not respect?

Also, how come all of the other Honors students are jetting off to foreign countries for the summer? Am I the only one whose big summer expense was a $250 membership to the local pool (which I am squandering)? I spent my last weekend taking an abbreviated tour of the trailer courts of my youth, you bastards. And it was nice. You've really gotta go international to get your jollies? I've taken like four vacations in my life to states that don't border mine: New York when I was three, New Orleans when I was eight, Connecticut when I was like twelve, and Florida a year or two later. Or maybe earlier, I don't remember well. But anyway.

...Admittedly, I'd sort of like to go back to New Orleans. Maybe next time Mardi Gras is on my birthday.

Which would appear to be my 30th. Hmm!

I am sitting awake alone in the dark in my living room and listening to 90s rock in order to counteract the fact that I went to sleep at 7 AM last night--or this morning--whatever--and am now awake at 1 PM with my mother planning to drag me out somewhere after a late lunch/early breakfast.

She is not sure what we are doing yet (possibly genealogy work, dropping me off to swim later) so I told her to get back to me on it.

But "Blue Monday" kind of makes me want to dress in drag and go dancing at a gay club.

Except they'd probably just play Lady Gaga instead of 90s music that sounds like it wants to be 80s music.

Feast your eyes upon this message, which I have received pseudo-anonymously--for some reason the Honesty Box people decided to sort replies by gender and put the ones from dudes in blue and chicks in pink:

One of the most intelligent people
Conclusion: male who fancies himself intelligent (and feels the need to use it as a compliment, unlike the "lolwtfever"y of my likewise intelligent high school friends), which basically narrows it down to two people I've met in the past year.

that is actually the same age as me,
And is my age, which narrows it down to one.

and you are very interesting.
And uses unstandard but familiar syntax, which reaffirms my suspicions. Checkmate in three clauses. Let's continue anyway!

I think I might possibly want to get to know you better,
A phrase construction and sentiment which I have seen used publicly (i.e. non-anonymously) in reference to a fellow intelligent freshman on her Facebook page.

almost certain, but in my world certainty is impossible.
Philosophical rhetoric of the sort which leads to my news feed having about a dozen "heavily-researched and verbose ponderings on the state of the world" posts per week.

I only know either were I am or how fast i am moving, but I can not deduce both...
Paraphrased Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (did I mention he's an engineer?)

I need to learn how to not ramble.
Cherry on the sundae of blatancy.


Are we supposed to believe that anonymity actually helps, or is it just meant to be a security blanket of plausible denial?

On the other hand, pretty sure I know people who could be taken in if I modified my typing patterns a little bit. Mostly I've used the HB to make joke-comments, but hey, a chance it'd work if I ever had something to say.

Nooo I spent too long thinking about my story with the smartass narrator and now my stoic soldier guy won't stop snarking!

He is supposed to be laidback and open-minded yet focused and confident and strong despite being homesick and weary

not fed-up and slightly pissy and basically the smartass narrator just with a roughneck accent.


ngggh


Anyway I am like five hundred words behind my own schedule so I will be going back to writing this now!

Fixed my v. few sparse and undescriptive LiveJournal tags!

Dream logs outstrip everything else as far as quantity goes, of course.

As of late, though, I haven't been lucid enough to have awesomely coherent dreams, and I can hardly remember the boring ones I do have. Though last night I remember having mild sleep paralysis and telling myself "wake up wake up move move move" over and over, to no effect. I would guess that most of it wasn't even actual eyes-open, muscles-paralyzed sleep paralysis, just me dreaming about it.

I seriously feel like I need to be writing but I think that overthinking every new 'verse for this last--what? Year and a half? Without writing any of it? Yeah, that might have killed off some of the enthusiasm.

I would prefer to believe that it's just a right now, things suck issue, especially with the proof that I have been engaged in/excited for these 'verses in fairly recent times. Having something to refresh my enthusiasm would be nice, though...


EDIT: I think the proper term for this current state of being is "dead inside".

At least the last time I was depersonalized I had some pretty kick-ass dreams. I ought to try going for that again.

The sum total effect of a year's worth of college essaying and zero creative writing: prose is harder to throw together than I remember it being, but four hundred words is a lot less than I thought.

Oh, and my cat masterfully captured a mouse the other night. This has nothing to do with college but I am very proud of him and would like to share his achievements with the world.

Y'know, I never believed the talk of "oversleeping", but now that I'm getting a solid ten hours instead of the four hours; six hours; twelve hours; repeat college method, I think I'm less aware and less awake than I was when I was sleep-deprived.

...

I also have nothing else to say.

EDIT: Actually, no, I do.

This thread reminded me that I'd done this before, so I decided to do it again! To mark my improvement at drawing cats with my eyes closed over the last year and a half, like.



Improvement: ACHIEVED

I wonder if I have some kind of dietary imbalance which makes me lethargic or if I'm just naturally a lazy, unmotivated ass.

So anyway, I got all of my stuff done and think I might have straight As again this semester, unless I've done something terribly horribly wrong in my Cult Trad II class, an unlikely possibility which I choose not to contemplate.

I didn't manage to get all of my college account drained--despite going so far as to actually take a forty-minute walk to the U-Mart across campus in order to spend $50 on their wider variety of wares. I think I had about $70 left, which, considering that I had like $300 ten days ago, is not as bad as it could have been.

My basement-suite kitchen is now full of chips, candy, and the energy bars my mother likes, but not much in the way of meals. Or vegetables. I think I have an orange and some juice (both cran-grape and orange), so perhaps that could cover the fruit requirements.

I also have several cans of guy-smelling generic shaving cream, which I am more pleased to have purchased than the only-somewhat-necessary snack food. I don't even own shorts, so I always feel like I'm wasting money when I shave my legs--but this time, since the money needed to be wasted...

Now I just need to find some things to do over the summer. Judging from what I've read on Facebook, among others of my age this seems to be hang with galpals/get a job/go to pretentious indie concerts/angst and bitch.

...Maybe I should stay off of Facebook for a while.

All right, I'm writing this paper on Japanese recluses and it's going way faster than I thought it would--I mean, it's due by midnight, I get out of a history final at 4:30 and start work at 5:00, and now it's 7:45 and I've got 3/5 paragraphs, 4/7-10 pages--so I'm thinking, hey, I'm starting to get a little bit of a headache, why don't I take until 8:00 to putz around with something else? Not like studying for tomorrow's French final, god forbid, but something to loosen the old brain veins, or suchlike.

But fanfiction would be a very bad idea, because it is A) time-consuming, and B) to be savored, and if I go into fanfiction-savoring-mode it will be difficult to switch back out to essay-writing-mode. A better option, I decide, is to check up on Facebook and see if there's any healthy debate going on re: whether what'shisface's girlfriend is a devil woman or whether so-and-so's new haircut makes him look like some derogatory thing or other.

There is, sadly, nothing--just college people stressing about finals (in a way which makes me think that I ought to be even more stressed, like since I'm not guzzling caffeine and pulling five all-nighters in a row and barely holding on to a 3.2 GPA maybe I'm doing something wrong or should have a larger workload and now I am going to fail at life), and posting poetry or their thoughts on the universe or how they are morose over Very Adult Things like bills and taxes and housing, AND SO ON AND SO FORTH. But no high school friends being bitchily sarcastic at one another. No place where I can connect. It makes me feel very... cut off.

It is actually somewhat possible that part of me is now trying to prolong the work I have left because I know that after Thursday there will suddenly be nothing, nada, zilch, and at that point I may or may not come slightly unhinged from hitting that brick wall of "I have finally built up my motivation and am an essay-writing machine--oh wait summer break wat".

It is also quite possible that I am experiencing (i.e. repressing) a general melancholy over drifting apart from old friends, of whom I had few enough in the first place, and for whom I have thus far acquired no replacements, because I have spent my freshman year of college alternating between doing schoolwork and procrastinating schoolwork by messing around online.

Seriously, the list of friends now runs something like guy I haven't seen in a year and talk to once every week or two, girl I've never met and talk to once or twice a month, and two guys I haven't seen in a year who I bicker with on Facebook occasionally, all of whom I've nearly never done anything with outside of school and/or the internet.

And last summer I spent three months straight indoors and online, only going outside at night and never within view of neighbors.

This essay is, therefore, becoming... tedious.

Of course, I'm pretty sure I picked it on the basis of relatability. Would have been far less interesting, personally speaking, to have to write 7-10 pages on Japanese baseball or some such.


why am I still talking about college to the exclusion of all other topics I have become everything I haaaate

Finals week! No classes, >9 pages worth of essaying, one Retrospective Meeting of Writerliness with my freshman comp teacher, and two exams, which I keep saying as "examens" because thus far I have only had these examens in French.

One of the interesting signs I saw on the way to my dorm earlier this evening: Puppies on the Quad. Apparently some enterprising party is renting out puppies for stressed college students to play with--$3 for five minutes, $5 for ten minutes, etc. This... looks a bit interesting. I think my strident Non-Dog-Person-ness may have been fading as of late.

Another thing the college has done, although I wasn't aware of it until about ten minutes ago, is to let the parents send in little finals week care packages with food and toys and notes of encouragement. There are advantages and disadvantages to this.

CON: Was reading fanfiction when package was delivered; had to tear self away from computer and put on pants in order to answer the door.

PRO: Am now proud owner of one (1) mini-box of Cheez-its, some sort of fruit which looks like a large, malformed orange, and a tiny Slinky, among other things.

CON: Am now feeling guilty re: not doing anything for Mother's Day except cleaning basement slightly when asked, and after complaining that I was attempting to write an essay at the time.

Her birthday's in June; I may have to see if I can't sneakily find something good to purchase. Shouldn't be that hard to do the "sneakily", despite not driving--just means having her drop me off at the mall for an hour and not mentioning, when she picks me up, the smaller gift hidden inside my bags of clothing for self--but I despair of my ability to purchase jewelry which she might wear. Might could go for flowers instead, I suppose.

Also, on the topic of my mother, with her assistance (I signed her into the campus as a guest so that she could help me clear out my dorm room last Thursday) I have reduced my account balance by $80 (of health bars, tea, and batteries, which she says are useful for the giant flashlights she insists on buying). This purchase involved several bags' worth of items. Now I have $170 left to spend in a week. Gonna have a lotttt of shopping to do.

EDIT: Also, I took my old Koosh ball out from yon not-quite-as-old backpack in order to keep the Slinky company.



Why no, I didn't choose to get up and go all the way across the room and turn on the lights to take the picture. What a ridiculous and fanciful notion!

Just as it did last semester, the air conditioning system in the dorms has broken.

Of course, during last semester's final week, what it did was to start billowing out hot air--really hot air, way too hot air, without stopping--around the middle of a not-too-cold December. And it may or may not have been confined to my suite. Now the air conditioning is just out, kaput, for the whole building. And since it's May instead of December, opening the window does not help nearly as much as it should.

I can't really shower until after the sun goes down, 'cause otherwise I'll be sweating again just as soon as I get out, and I can't really start in on my homework for tomorrow until after I shower, 'caaaause I'm a lazy procrastinating bum and also the heat makes me not want to work, especially in the sense of slaving over a hot laptop, so I'm pretty much just exhausting the wide world of fanfiction and hoping that I am so bored with it by later this evening that I will welcome the change of pace of having to do a rough draft + presentation.

Speaking of presentations, we finished 'em off in Japanese today. Aaand speaking of fanfiction, one girl did her topic on comparisons between Japanese and American fandom. Which. Chica, I am sitting here in class trying to act like a normal goddamned human being who doesn't read stuff about gay angels, and you're standing up there talking about tentacle porn and yaoi and effing Wincest and this thing I think I read about on fandom_wank a while back wherein Naruto fans got into a snit over how slashed pairing names ought to lead with the dude who tops, and so on, and it is making it very difficult for me to pretend that I have no idea what any of this strange, depraved internet stuff is, especially when I'm sitting right next to this girl who also watches Supernatural and I find myself busting out with "Oh, Jesus, not Winc--I mean, uh--oh, wait, they talked about that on--ah. I mean. Eheh. What'cha wanna bet she's gonna be talking about that whole online fangirls writing incest thing like, like y'know, er, they mentioned on the show one time, which was weird, and yeah, the Supernatural fandom is crazy and stuff?"

Fangirls, stop waving your goddamn flags, the rest of us are trying to pass as sane.

Ten Steps for a Simple Monday:

1) Wake at 8:30 AM on roughly five or six hours' sleep.
2) Finish half-bottle of Mtn Dew left over in mini-fridge from last Thursday.
3) Go to Writer's Comp. Get bonus points for being the only non-presenting student present for class presentation day (part 1).
4) Skip French. Purchase and chug new, full bottle of Mtn Dew while cramming for Japanese presentation.
5) Go to Japanese class, shaking slightly. Twitch at sudden movements and loud noises. Motor-mouth way through 10-15 minute presentation in 6-9 minutes, mostly by negation of fillers such as "um" and through forgetting on several occasions that it is necessary to pause and breathe in order to talk. Finish class and exit for dorm room.
6) Attempt to take nap.
7) Fail to take nap.
8) Read Mountie porn for several hours while completely neglecting the option of a potential headstart on the rest of this week's homework.
9) ...
10) Profit! with 60% possibility of "suffer" in the next few days

I could go on about how I've got presentations on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday next week, and how I was planning on at least doing a bit on the Monday one, since it's ten minutes of I-haven't-even-put-anything-together-to-talk-about-yet and I've got plans tomorrow, and how I ought to be trying to get ahead of things anyway if I want to have the time to write my 7-10 and also 4-5 page essays for Cultural and History classes on Thursday and Friday, respectively.

But I won't.

Instead, I will mention that my Cultural teacher has sent me an E-mail saying I ought to submit my "Thoreau discusses natural rights with Zombie!Hobbes" essay to some sort of Honors contest. Unless I have something more interesting from another class which I would like to submit. No, sir, I'm fairly certain the dialogue between a zombie and a hermit encompasses the heights of "interesting" present in my Very Serious College Essays this year.

Je n'even sais pas.

...but I'm sure as hell not starting tonight, because tonight there is pizza and television. Homework can go hang.

I don't have classes on Fridays, so I catch a ride home from my mother's girlfriend on Thursday nights and crash in my basement suite for the weekend. I'm back home now, sprawled out on the couch with my feet up on the pillows. Well, metaphorically speaking. At the moment they're tucked under me. But, y'know, there are pillows piled in front of me and my feet could be up on them. (Though I usually use them to keep my feet warm.)

As I was saying, Thursday afternoons. These generally involve some waiting before I can be picked up. This is because when my mother says "at the usual time", she means "will be five minutes late", and "five minutes" means "fifteen", and "fifteen", which I got today, was actually a half-hour to forty-five minutes.

Not that I mind, because today is a nice albeit windy day, and I made a chain from the clover flowers outside the nursing center. I look kind of bored and depressed, ignore that:



After which I braided my hair, tied a three-leafed clover to my purse, sat cross-legged on the bench and stared up into the sky for several minutes like some sort of stoned hippie douchebag, and ultimately pulled out the laptop in order to camwhore. And here we are now!

There's something I find strangely romantic about clovers. The leafy parts moreso than the flowers.

So it would seem that my fellow collegiates (lol so not a word) are using this strange and mysterious internet device called a "tumblr" in order to record their significant thoughts and pictures and non-rhyming poetry et cetera.

Much like Twitter, I am going to assume that this is something best left alone in my case. Since the alternative is Step One: create an account; Step Two: spend a few hours trying to tweak together a profile and a design scheme that doesn't look like crap; Step Three: slowly come to the conclusion that page looks like crap anyway; Step Four: inevitable capitulation.

If I really wanted to waste some time on fiddling with a layout in a vain attempt to make it not be shit, I could probably be doing that with LiveJournal.

I mean, obviously I think this page is quite lovely, but "lovely" does not exactly have to coincide with "easy to read" or "aesthetically pleasing" or, really, anything other than my main requirement for stuff lookin' awesome, which is "has absolute shitloads of greengreengreen and possibly some cats somewhere".


Also, I've been thinking (in part about how everyone else is using college as A Time of Great Creativity and Hobbying) and I have decided that this summer? Is a good time to be writing stuff.

Because, uh. My words: they suck.

Even this LiveJournal entry is like a far greater challenge than it should by rights be. There is something just wrong about that. It's a journal entry, I'm not even using actual words. ("Collegiate"?) Am I that out of touch with how to work with writing in a non-essay setting? Is it just that I was up until five last night pounding out a 5-7 page essay and now I'm all written out? Or is it the fact that I, um, heh, how about that, don't think I've eaten since last night, and my drowsiness from a recent nap might just be masking a latent hunger which might just be masking the fact that my stomach is slowly stealing sustenance from my grey matter?

With this entry it is not even so much the fact that my individual sentences have no lyrical merit or flow as it is that what I am saying sounds quite irrelevant and circuitous and repetitively repeatedly redundant and immensely boring and I am v. tempted to just wipe this entire entry and start over. Except that "starting over" would here mean staring at a blinking cursor for several minutes, and then deciding that I have no pertinent information to relate (and I should be using a better word than "relate" here, since that has the potential to cause a minor stumbling block upon re-reading; if I hadn't written it I'd have a 50/50 chance of parsing it as "to relate to" the first time around, and the message I am trying to convey is not that I can't relate to pertinent information, as if it is or is not something which appeals to my demographic, but rather that I have no, that I am not in the possession of any, that I am lacking in relevant discussion topics)...

( FUCK IT ALL SIDEWAYS, LET'S TALK ABOUT STORIES. )


P.S. Google kindly informs me that "collegiate" is, in fact, a word. It just does not mean what I think it means. You keep using that word...

You do not actually need to persist in shooting me mostly-sly, somewhat-guilty glances after every off-color "lol women amirite?" joke you make. While it is true that I am the only girl in your group for a certain value of "girl", I am also the one who made the "Oh, broads love romance" remark at the top of the hour. I will not be moved to righteous feminist fury by a couple of dudes crackin' wise.

In conclusion, get your whore asses back into the kitchen and make me a sammich.

Love,
Jade

Now that I've done my preliminary research for an essay on the evils of hair removal techniques, I have come to the conclusion that I might want to try buying waxing stuff over the summer to see if that "up to four weeks without hair" thing is actually true.

Also, it kind of bothers me that I'm just phoning in the "omg, arbitrary beauty rituals are ruining our society" while the other humanities majors of my acquaintance are actually outraged on the behalf of ~*Victims of the Patriarchy*~ and are speaking out by, for example, writing non-rhyming poems on, like, The Crimes of the Media and Weight Loss Companies.

Also also, it has been a v. long time since I've updated this. Dammit, college.

If I falsely came out, would it forestall the sudden rush of people who have taken it upon themselves to assume that I am interested in playing the dating game?

Well, no, because I assume that then they would just start trying to set me up with chicks.

Upon attempting to reclaim some semblance of a social life by discussing plans to go out (as friends) with one of the two people I occasionally talk to nowadays (and pretty much one of two or three people in the world I can carry on un-self-censored conversations with), I found that apparently his girlfriend has been seeing me as a potential boyfriend-predator (guy-nivore, if you will) for quite some time. Despite the fact that he's like one of four or five guy friends out there who I'm not in the least attracted to. Despite the fact that he and I can and do go for months without talking.

But she manages to be perfectly polite about it, even though the two of them have just broken up about a week ago and are still on rocky terrain, so she sends along her best wishes via said friend:

i hope you fall in love with her and fuck and have babies

Fucking high schoolers.

So basically this is my reasoning behind taking "Interested In: Men" off of my Facebook account. I've been wanting to for a while anyway, because it has long seemed like some kind of blatant lie. "Interested In: Books", maybe. "Interested In: The Internet". "Interested In: Men, Once In A Blue Moon, When The Planets Are Properly Aligned And The Ritual Incantation Hath Been Incanted", or something. No check-boxes for those, though.