I'll make the most of it-

I'm an extraordinary machine!

We tell our small troubles,
small sorrows,
To the man behind the counter,
To the woman serving coffee,
serving beer,
And receive sympathy,
A smile,
Small noises of agreement
and comfort
And we go,
Peace be with us,
All is forgiven,
All is well.

I knit, distracted
not watching the stitches
or my hands.
I turn the row to find it pulls -
I've knit my hair into it.
And of course
I think
Yes,
There must be some poem
in this.

At the end of the book
A blank page,
A blue ceiling of sky
to catch snippets of phrases
let loose on the wind like wayward balloons
A moment of silence
for unsaid thoughts
A libation of space
in memory of poems forgotten
at the edge of sleep.

Was there ever a time when I was content
With the pace of my own two legs?
There must have been, once -
When I was learning to walk
surely that freedom of movement was-
Awe-inspiring, liberating.
But then came the dizzy spin of bicycle wheels,
The exhilaration of wind in my face,
And ever since,
I have yearned for greater speeds -
The roar of the highway-
The bloom of adulthood-
The race of progress-
The flow of information-
Even sound
-sometimes-
is too slow.

On my own two legs
I stand still,
or not at all.
But at the speed of thought,
With the wind in my face,
I fall into the sunset
On the horizon.

Went to Ikea to get: cotton (knit) blanket, patio lights (strands).
Came out with: rocks, red glass tealight holder, wooden bowl (to put rocks and tealight holder in), pear-scented potpourri.

Went to Bed Bath & Beyond to get: cotton (knit) blanket, patio lights (strands).
Came out with: cotton (woven) blanket.

Went to GameStop to get: Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction (for XBox).
Came out with: disappointment.

Went to Office Depot to get: 9V batteries (lots).
Came out with: printer, extended warranty.

Went to Lebanese Taverna to get: Schwarma, Kibbeh.
Came out with: Schwarma, Kibbeh, San Pellegrino Limonata.

Went to Blockbuster to get: Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction (for XBox).
Came out with: The Outfit (for XBox 360).



And that was pretty much my day. I even worked, too! University of Maryland College Park is fucking huge. And San Pellegrino Limonata is amazing tasty. So is kibbeh. With cucumber sauce. Mmm.

Aw hell, that was a really bad poem. It's been removed until I can either polish it up to my satisfaction, or hide its existence entirely. Blech. Just because I've forgotten how to write doesn't mean I've lowered my standards so much that I'll post garbage that I know is garbage... or it shouldn't anyway.

Words are friendlier now, but the unity of phrases eludes me.
I have seeds, but where once a poem would bloom entire upon touching soil,
Needing only a prop here, a pruning there,
I grow dry, spindly sticks. I lack moisture.
A word floats up from my past - secheresse.
Ah, Valery. How appropriate.
I will write poems about learning to write poetry again;
You would be proud.

I wanted to write something, today,
About the stifiling, lecherous gaze of the sun,
But nothing comes.
Yet.

In my dream,
I stopped to look in the mirror.
I saw hair-
blonde, strawlike, matted hair,
not even mine-
and it hid my face.

I tore at the hair-
Tuft after tuft came loose
painlessly,
and I threw them away-
but I could not find my face.

How long has it been
Since I even tried to write?
Since words walked toward me,
smiling?
How can I find the world,
find my soul,
If I cannot find my face?

With such potential
I lay my pen to paper
And I get nothing.


A good deal of my dream last night dealt with my struggle to write a short story, as an assignment for some high school class which had been neglected out of mounting frustration with my inability to write anything that didn't sound like utter shit. I don't remember what any of my aborted attempts were about, but I do remember that there was a lot of dialog. I've always been terrible at writing dialog that doesn't stick in the flow of writing like an eyesore. Even now, the word dialog seems to be unwieldy, or perhaps misspelled in some way (it's not, I checked).

Anyway.

Mostly moved from old to new place, and am reveling in the difference that decent insulation and double-paned windows makes when attempting to cool a place to livable temperatures with minimal air conditioning. Have not really and truly begun unpacking, for two reasons: One is that Gill and Ian, though I love them dearly, left much of the house butt-ass filthy, and I really can't justify putting things into cupboards and drawers that will only have to be emptied and cleaned again, even with my tendency to laziness and ignoring dirt. The other is that I need a thing to put my clothes in, as my previous thing was a closet with shelves in the sides, and my new closet, though much more spacious, has no shelves in the sides (and that was a less than ideal solution anyway, as things kept falling down). Now that we have the room for one, I want a chest of drawers. All I have to do now is find one for the purchasing that doesn't break the bank.

Ikea seems promising. But since I went over to look at that in the middle of writing this, I've kind of lost momentum and interest... till later, internets.

I don't remember too much of my dreams, because I kept waking up and really wanting to go back to sleep, but there was one bit about a tribe who had lost many of the skills of their forefathers (for instance, they could no longer make fire or shape tools from flint), but they could turn to deer or elk to run... I think there had been a deal in their past, that this loss of "man-knowledge" allowed them to have this animal form. The son of the chief, who either didn't know this, or did and wanted more anyway, found one of their ancestor's burial sites, who had his tools petrified into the earth beside him, and when the boy tried to chip them out to take with him to show to his tribe, so that they might learn/remember how to make them, he triggered some trap on himself... (I never found out what the trap did, I woke up.)

There was another one about a girl who was trying to hide the fact that she had let her grandfather's ghost loose upon the world, but this didn't work too terribly well, because her mother was a medium.

And there was another, much more jumbled one, with me in it for once... There was a disappearing beach, a new apartment in which I kept discovering doors that led to new rooms, an unfunny comedy act, and a run-in with some guys with a metal detector, in which they ended up giving me a handful of pulled pork to try make up for the misunderstanding.

I think I'm blaming that one on the tequila. (don't judge me, this is my day off...)


But yes, there was drinking and applied philosophy last night, which pleases me greatly, because I had thought that I was losing that part of myself, but no, it had just been silenced by necessity, and will probably be better once I get a new job. Once I figure out what kind of job I want.

Rowr.

I really do hate being up this early... I need to find a job which allows me to have a "normal" schedule. (/adnauseum)

Yesterday was sleepy and slow, as expected. It *would* figure that the one time I find cookies hanging stuck in the vending machine (paid for by someone else, failed to drop) and manage to get them down, they'd be peanut butter... I hate peanut butter cookies :-P

I want to go back to bed okaaaayyyyyy

It's been a good half a weekend so far. I say half a weekend even though it's well into Sunday already because, by some fluke, I'm scheduled to have Monday off as well. Unasked-for three day weekends = win.

I'm spiraling into WoW withdrawl pretty hard. After three sessions of playing my RP character (and noting the decline in quality of writing that went with each successive session), I decided that I probably need to deal with the addiction problem before I can make any healthy attempt at roleplaying. The fact is, I have too much "free" time in which I could and/or should be doing things like reading, sleeping, housework, grocery shopping, walking outside, &c. It's way too easy to spend ALL of my "free" time playing WoW if I let myself spend ANY of that time playing WoW. Then there's also the growling voice that makes me want to go back to my old character, where I already have friends and money and gear and such. It's been about two weeks since I really played that character... I still haven't told my guild (or my friends on that server) that I'm "quitting".

So I've been distracting myself instead. We went into DC yesterday, to see the Natural History Museum. Got off at the wrong Metro station, discovered another group of similarly lost folks, and found our way to the Mall together :-P Saw IMAX about the dinosaurs of Patagonia (in 3D! with appropriately goofy 3D glasses), got a butterfly in my hair, paid retarded amounts of money for lunch, spent most of the rest of they day marveling over fossils and shinies (homg I love their rocks and minerals gallery so much). It was a nice day.

The day before, we went out shopping for new pants for me, as I discovered after work on Friday that the pants leg of one of my work pants had shredded itself, leaving me with only two wearable pairs of workpants, and one wearable pair of nonwork summer pants. After I discovered that I was another size larger than I was used to thinking of myself as, I had king crab legs and long islands at Red Lobster in a determined effort not to feel sorry for myself. After that, we wandered around the harbor, and, having discovered it was some sort of block party for some sort of maritime festival, we ordered (spectacularly bad) drinks from the (not ordinarily open-to-the-public) Fleet Reserve Club and sat outside, sipping and talking in a wonderful early summer breeze (in my new pants).

The day before that, we made a tasty thing out of campanelle pasta, salad minishrimpz, and a sauce of butter and various spices, for dinner. It could probably be improved upon by adding zucchini and yellow squash, and now I have some to try just that. Though they might end up stir-fried with sausage instead. Who knows? Both tasty.

I have been, on and off, attempting to play Assasins' Creed, and on and off cursing at it. The controls are clumsy and sluggish, but "fortunately" the plot is so firmly planted on rails that it's rather difficult to fail at. I should probably go back and finish one of the two Zelda games I'm in the middle of at some point (Phantom Hourglass and Twilight Princess - I know, still!).

So far today has been slow and lazy, petting the cat, playing old videogames, determining that laundry can be put off until tomorrow, waiting to hear from Illian and Gian to see when BSG can be watched.

A lovely spring breeze
Through my open window brings
The smell of dog shit.


Hee.

(This is a true haiku, our neighbor has an annoying habit of NEVER CLEANING UP after their damn boxer when they let it loose in their backyard, which faces 3/5 of the openable windows in our apartment, as well as the walk up to our door. It smells wretched on warm days.)


Despite this, I'm more convinced than ever that spring is a magical time. To hell with New Years as a time to make dedications to change - change in the middle of an unchanging winter is not only hard but stupid. Spring, though - spring fills me with positive energy, change unbridled and optimistic. If you're going to make huge lifestyle changes, why not do it at a time when you can't help but feel good about it?

I dreamed twice. The first dream was of a clever battle, where the rules were that you could only use something as a weapon to defeat someone once, and then you could use anything of theirs to further your cause. The game "board" was somewhat like a house, and the goal was to win as many rooms as you could by defeating their inhabitants. The first one I clubbed with a bat, and thereafter all opponents were immune to blunt force. The second I stabbed, and thereafter all were immune to being cut. After that I had to get creative. I tricked the opponents of the rooms to give me their loyalties using: a drinking contest, a cocktail onion, a peppermint, a caramel, a silk scarf. I really wish I remembered more of how that had gone, but all I remember is the things I couldn't use anymore, and the colors of the place: a jewel-toned nightmare of orange, purple, red.

The second dream was of children - a boy and a girl. Their world used to be magical, but since half their family had been lost at sea - literally, their home had been two halves of an island, and one half was no longer there - the magic was gone, and their huge mansion of a house was now gray and dead, full of traps and dead ends, and rooms which their father had walled off to minimize the number of exits from the building. Their mother had been in the half which had disappeared, and since then, their father hadn't turned so much evil as strict and paranoid. I've lost the middle of the dream, but I remember that it was a lot of running around in corridors of the mansion that the children were not supposed to be in, narrowly avoiding traps, walking through doors that had been hidden by making them appear to be walls, until they found themselves outside, for the first time in years. The half of the island that was left was almost entirely covered by the mansion, and what wasn't was barren sand. Another lost segment later, a lion appeared, large and impressive like Aslan, only with an air of danger around it, rather than acceptance. The boy approached it, and it stretched, lengthened, and whitened into a powerful serpentine white dragon, one to be feared, but the boy recognized it, and was desperate. He demanded of the dragon that he not be harmed. The dragon scowled and told him and his sister to stand on a particular dune in front of the mansion, while their father (who had been chasing them, and had by now found his own way out of the mansion) watched helplessly. "Now, I only want to do this once, and then I never want to hear from you again," the dragon scolded, and took a deep breath. The children braced for the impact of it, but the dragon's breath was a strong sea wind that would blow a lost boat back into their port, and when they could open their eyes again, the other half of the island was restored, and the dragon was nowhere to be seen.
Balance was restored. The children flew to their mother - for they could fly again, and their father was saved from his stifling paranoia, and went for a wild run in the woods with his best friend, who had also been lost. This wild run pleased the tree spirits so much that one reached out to flick the father in his back, propelling him with great speed back towards his house and his family, as his friend laughed. And here I found that the boy and his father were named Romeo and Romero, and his sister and mother named Julia and Juliet.

And then I woke up.

Ohhh, it burns me...

I really have no other comment than >.

Okay, so *bux really needs to rethink their chastisement system. Overwhelmed with energy from my changing lifestyle (or possibly the weekend, or a combination thereof), I found myself saying some perhaps a tad too sassy things to the shift supervisor (things that were clearly joking in manner, mind you), and I was punished by... getting to leave half an hour early?

Half an hour of work = $4.25 < half an hour of notwork.

I understand that they knew I was joking, so maybe that's why the "punishment" was token, but still. I feel more bemused and amused by this than reprimanded.


Whatever.


So I am quitting WoW, at least mostly. I've decided that I really can't continue in the lifestyle of a hardcore raider, which, despite the payoff in gear and respect, really does eat as much of my brain/life/time as I was afraid it would before I got into this raiding guild, and had since ceased thinking about, much less caring about. And that's got to stop. I need my life back.

However. I really really really can't lose this method of creating - and maintaining - friendships, even if they are situational. (call them friendships with training wheels on, whatever. I know I'm socially retarded :-P) But. After taking a careful inventory, I've come to realize that there really is only one person I would truly care to talk to outside of WoW on my server, and I've got little motivation to stay on that server/with those characters if I'm not raiding. AND that server's population is almost entirely geared on swift leveling for the sole purpose of endgame raiding/pvp, so if I weren't doing those, I'd be left out of most of the communities I could find.

So, I've decided to give roleplaying a try. My thought is, roleplaying takes more effort, so I wouldn't be as tempted to stay on for hours and hours unless I were having an incredibly interesting/meaningful interaction with someone, which is what I've claimed to care most about in WoW, so it would be worthwhile to do so at that point. Also, roleplaying will get my creative brain grinding its gears again - and to ensure this, I'm going to try, as I level, to write a novella about the development of my character. Hopefully, this will also keep me from falling back into mindlessly grinding levels.

I'll be on Feathermoon, if anyone's interested - and yes, this is a tendril in your direction, Liv :-)

I'm coming to a crisis point in my life. Not a crisis in the way you'd typically think of one - there's no emergency, no drama, no yelling, no death, doom, or destruction. But I have come to realize that I am dragging my feet to avoid getting to a time in the near future where Things Must Change. And therein lies the crisis.

I want to change. I hate how my life is right now. I'm overweight and largely vegetative, I hate my job, I don't write anymore - hell, I hardly *read* anymore, save for feeds and webcomics.

But I don't want to change. I'm comfortable with how little responsibility I have, and I like being able to exist in a state some might call happy with so little effort. I have Sam, I have videogames, and I have my cat.

Change is hard. Change requires effort. I have not, historically, been good at expending energy to do things for myself. I will and have lied to everyone (up to and including myself) to disguise the fact that I would much rather prefer to do absolutely nothing at all. I am good at reacting, but terrible at taking action.

I need to change before my life can change, and in order for me to change, I've come to realize, I need to stop waiting for something to change me, and change myself. I realize that this is circular. I realize that this is stupid. And yet, I haven't changed yet.

I'm stuck. And I have no reason for being stuck except that I am. Occasionally I wonder if there's some drug I should be on, some anti-anxiety or antidepressant that would "solve" my problems, but I won't go to see a psychiatrist because I don't want to find out, on one hand, that my problems have all been purely chemical and who I am *has* to be changed with drugs in order for me to function, or on the other hand, that there isn't and never has been anything wrong with me except for my attitude.

I feel like I've written this entry before. If I haven't, it's certainly been floating around in my head enough that writing it down causes deja-vu.

Regardless.


One of the things that I know will have to go ifwhen I change is WoW. It takes too much time, especially as a member of a raiding guild. But I don't want to let it go. Less for the aspect of playing itself - that I know is just mindless filler which keeps me from thinking about the fact that I don't do anything else with my life. It's the people that I will miss. There are people in that online world who know and like me, appreciate my presence (such as it is) and miss me when I'm gone. I never have been good at making or keeping friends in the conventional sense. If circumstances didn't cause people to be around me on a regular basis, I would drift away from them. Even the internet doesn't supply that circumstance, because I'm terrible at starting (ha, again) conversations, and the longer I go without having one with someone, the more assumptions I make about how much of a terrible person they must think I am. Here in LiveJournal land that's happened too - I'm a ghost on the friendslists of many people who I dearly wish I had the balls to call friends. I read your journals with as much care as I would listen to any RL friends' words (if I had any).

Yes, you,
The Dreamer,
The Survivor,
The Artist,
The Wanderer,
The Teacher,
The Broken Heart,
I care for all of you deeply, even if I've never so much as commented on your journals. If you don't think you're in that list, you're wrong. I mean all of you.


Maybe ifwhen I change, I'll be able to claim you as friends? I can only hope.

Begging for help here -

So there's this book that I read when I was much too young to think I'd ever have to bother with remembering things like titles and authors, and I can't for the life of me remember what it was called, and can only remember vaguely what it was about (not nearly enough for google to help me find it >.<). It was a fantasy, set in a world with a cold, distant sun, so that coal must be burned at all times to sustain life. There was a servant/slave race whose job it was to mine the coal, and an upper class whose job was... to be served? And there was some sort of holy man whose job it was to light a certain fire on a certain day of the year, or bad things would happen, and this holy man had to be born on this one specific night (maybe not the same night of the fire, I don't remember). Anyway, there was a girl born into a slave family on that night of the year, and when she was branded at about 11 years old or so (did I mention that all of the slaves had to have a flame-shaped brand on them? I didn't, but I remember that now), she moved, so that her brand was blurred. A bunch of stuff transpired and she got out of the mines and into the apprenticeship of the holy man, and eventually ended up breaking the class barrier by lighting the holy fire herself and tearing some terribly symbolic curtain and learning some method of meditation that warmed from within, so that people would no longer have to depend on coal for warmth.

Sound familiar to anyone? I may have misremembered some details, because I know I have a tendency to do so, so anything that sounds remotely similar could be it :-P

Sam and I celebrated the new year by going to bed early and being woken up (briefly) by the Naval Academy's fireworks at midnight. Then I got up at 3:30 am and went to work.

We are party animals.

My laptop, Vista, and the combination thereof make me want to hit myself in the face with a brick.

That is all.