Unsolicited Advice

The dance studio is closed for renovations right now. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing for my state of mind. I can't go down there and faff about in a rehearsal room if I really need to not stare at the walls in the apartment anymore, but all I ever do in the rehearsal rooms is faff about -- I stretch a lot, I do a lot of drills, and then I'm at a loss. It's choice paralysis in part; there are an infinity of things I can do, so how do I choose? But it's also a matter of cognitive dissonance. I used to dance a lot. My mother and her sisters took a lot of dance classes when they were kids, and it was one of the few after school activities whose cost she never bitched about. My sister and I had a long string of group, semi-private and private lessons while were growing up. My grandparents had framed photos of each of us in recital costumes up on their wall -- me in a star-spangled leotard with a foofy headpiece and an enormous tulle frill on my

Most of the best compliments I've gotten have nothing to do with what I look like. That suits me fine. I'll take credit for dressing myself well, but the rest of it is just groundskeeping on a very nice parcel of land I inherited from some people I no longer talk to -- my genes were an accident, yes I am glad I got some of them, less glad of others, but it wasn't really my doing. The ones that gush over how well I care for my hair are especially ironic. I have hair I can sit on because I'm far too absent-minded to book haircuts, even when I can afford them, and too lazy to do anything with it on a daily basis. Or, often, for formal occasions. It turns out that when you have three feet of hair, "loose" comes off as some sort of dramatic Boho fashion statement, rather than an admission that you have never once spent money on a curling iron, because you know full well you will never, ever scrape together the motivation to actually use it. I think have a trave

For all my facility with languages, I am not actually magic. There are a lot of tongues in which I know scattered words, some script, and some grammar, but not anywhere near enough to understand what's going on in, say, a TV show. Some of the music collection is in those languages. I find it annoying that I haven't stuffed enough into my brain to properly parse these things yet. My Arabic, for example, is wholly inadequate to appreciate the subtle beauty and poetry of the interlocking literary allusions in their surprisingly complex... AHAHAHAHA. Okay, no, I can't keep that up very long, not with a straight face. Pop music is just as stupid in Arabic, overall, as it is in English. Any time you hear someone say "habibii", swap in "my baby", and you get the gist. "Youm" is day, "layla" is night. "Wa'" is the root for 'love'. "Ana kan mali?" is something like "what have I gotten myself into?"

There's a thread running on the Straight Dope Message Board right now, asking people to rate their own attractiveness as honestly as possible. I gave myself an 8. I have absolutely no idea, and I said so. I have no other experience to use as a basis for comparison -- I've been treated more or less the same since the day I started looking like a grown-up. This was around age fourteen, so in retrospect, some of it was hilarious or creeptastic or both. In the defense of the guys who used to hit on me in the mall, apparently I didn't look sixteen at the time, and all of them turned right the fuck around and walked away when they asked where I was a student, and I named a local high school. One of the other posters said that this lack of comparative experience is true for everyone. Not quite true, I think. There are plenty of women especially who have undergone some sort of radical transformation in their lifetime -- a drastic change in weight, unsubtle plastic surgery, thi

Sometimes I forget to pay attention to what I'm saying, and I end up telling people things like, "Hang on a sec, I'm busy forging something." I'm a reasonably talented forger. I do not, I hasten to add, use this for criminal purposes. Well, not nefarious  criminal purposes; some of it's probably still technically illegal, but since it's done with permission, no one's ever going to prosecute. The secret is to practice beforehand, and scrawl with confidence when the time comes to lay it down for real. You've seen some of the mutations your own hand produces on those touchscreen credit card things; no one's going to question something that looks plausibly like it's been produced by a human unless the putative owner of the signature complains. How I acquired this skill is one of those hilarifying -- that's a combination of hilarious and horrifying -- stories, of which I have collected so very many. Natürlich , it involves my mother. 

Cracked ate my brain again today. http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-everyone-gets-wrong-about-introverts / http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-misleading-assumptions-you-make-about-quiet-people/ Periodically someone tells me I should get more friends. Usually a therapist, or an amateur who's trying to be one. Bollocks. I have plenty of friends. Squillions of them, ranging from the casual acquaintance level to people who should be my siblings, but technically aren't because of some gigantic cock-up in the cosmic paperwork. I don't stand in a corner all the time thinking, "Goodness! I am alone and unloved. I need to meet more people whose names will slip my mind, stranding my brain with the sole internal referent 'that one girl I met at the thing last month, with the shoes'." If I want to talk to someone, I just fucking talk to them. Most people are actually quite nice, or try to be. Mostly what they actually mean by this comment is that they think I nee

One of the side-effects of being hypervigilant all the time, however much I've managed to reform the meaner aspects of it, is that it doesn't take much for me to be able to make a decent guess as to why people do things. Most people do things basically just because. Even people who are being utter dickheads in all directions are usually doing it for a lot of internal reasons they don't understand or really care about, and it has nothing even remotely to do with you. You're not obliged to put up with it solely because "it's not personal", but for me, at least, remembering that makes it a lot easier to not worry about it once I've disengaged myself from the situation. One of the other desk clerks at the studio is apparently dedicated to being a suspicious, selfish, sexist cockbite -- the panoply of comments we've gotten so far is rather astounding. Isra and I have just been ignoring him, because it's not our job to teach him to be a functional

Magpie: A sort of small bird, known around the world for attending to, and often stealing away with, small shiny objects. The most common is the Eurasia magpie, Pica pica , which ranges from the Iberian peninsula down through southeast Asia; other species are known in China and Japan, including the delicate azure-winged magpie, Cyanopica cyanus , and the lovely antique blue Korean magpie, Pica pica sericea .  All magpies are members of the family Corvidae, a family of birds which also includes crows and ravens. Corvids are among the most intelligent of all birds, routinely beating out avians of such intellectual repute as parrots and macaws, particularly when it comes to having clever and rather juvenile senses of humor. Poe thought ravens were romantic; I think Poe was just never sober enough to get a good long look at them. We had enormous mountain ravens in Flagstaff that were basically raccoons with wings. They stole food, emptied dumpsters onto the surrounding sidewalk, had lou

Love is not the same as cookies. If you give someone else some affection, it doesn't mean you have less affection leftover for other people. Time and attention are finite, energy is, and sometimes opportunities are. But love is not. Nowhere does this interfere with my life more than in dating. I don't even have to be the one doing the thing people call "dating" for this to fuck things up right quick. I have run afoul of a lot of girlfriends over the years who think that my desire to develop an attachment to their (monogamous) boyfriend -- a platonic one, as I am not an idiot and not interested in hanging around anyone who would even  let someone be a homewrecker -- must mean that I have a vested interest in shattering his attachment to her. This makes my head hurt something awful. Why the hell would I do that? He's my friend, he likes you, I want him to be happy. This is a non-problem from my point of view, only people keep making  it my problem, and then blamin