If there's one thing being sick does really really well, it's... well, actually,it's make me an emo, mood-swingy bastard, who has to blow her nose every fifteen seconds. It's like being a raging cokehead, except without all the fun parts. If there are two things being sick does, however, the other one is fuck up my sleep schedule. The boss-lady is also on vacation right now, so I've no pressing need to be up before noon at any point. I spent a couple days honoring my late rat, and all the pet rats that have gone before, by hiding under the blankets and eating macaroons. Believe me, it's the sort of thing he would have done. Now I'm just sort of tired of being up at 5am, when all the world is dead. Cramming things into my brain helps some. It also helps that Supernatural is made almost entirely of mood whiplash and plot twists, which means that if I'm watching one of the arc episodes, I can't tune out mentally, or I miss cool stuff. If I'm wa...
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I've been asked to write something on the topic of cutting off one's toxic parents. I'm not sure what kind of help I'll be. I didn't do any super-formal Not Talking To You Anymore ceremonial severing. I moved across the country and never bothered calling again. (Not that I was calling them much in the first place. I'd been in the same apartment for a few years at that point, and I'm not sure they knew where it was, because they had never been invited to visit.) I'm in the US, so "across the country" means "like five hours by airplane, seven if you have a layover", and none of them appreciate traveling much, so there's no real danger that any of them are going to try hunting me down in person. Plus I changed my mobile carrier and my phone number, and didn't bother to share that with them, either. I don't know how my parents reacted. I got one extremely vitriolic email from my sister, full of charming stuff like complaints...
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...
A little light forgery
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. ...