Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

I went hunting for a journal entry from ten years ago, and to my shock, I've been keeping a journal only since 2003, when I could have sworn I'd kept a journal online since 2001. But! I found an entry from two years later:

http://mtrxrefugee.diaryland.com/Remember.html

Our town dedicated a new memorial at the library today, namely, a chunk of iron from the World Trade Center towers. We haven't been to see it yet, but I'm planning to go to the library tomorrow and possibly leave some flowers there.

I'd post more about the ten years that have passed, about how the world has felt a little less safe, how people seem more divided than they ever were before, how I wish that the feeling of closeness and unity that we felt in the days after 9-11 had endured longer, but that's probing a bit too much into wounds I'd rather not touch. I would rather remember the bravery of the men and women who gave their all to help their brothers and sisters...

Not to say that I'm above snerking and shaking my head over this entry from Neil Gaiman's blog, where he shakes his head and snerks over a strange email he got after 9-11:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2011/09/memory.html

A week when everything that could go wrong went wrong. Getting chewed out by a bossy co-worker when I couldn't hop fast enough for her. Bought a new alarm clock to replace the one on which the alarm will not work and then not five minutes after I got it working, it gets knocked off the shelf and breaks. Missing the same bus *twice*, then getting chewed out by a bus driver (do those people have some clause in their union contract where they agree to be as nasty and bigoted against people as they can possibly be or something?!). Customers being generally whiny babies due to the hot weather. Having to pay a library fine from *January* that I hadn't been told about and said fine came to five dollars due to them raising the cost of the fine and not telling me about that, either. And some fannish things I'm not going to get into in order to avoid wank.

The Rei/Lilith icon is used with good reason. I'm rather hoping the loon in Florida is right and the world really is going to end in October

I...have not been feeling well physically or psychologically either. I don't want to go into detail, because I don't want to come off like some whining whiner. I don't want to burden any of you with that kind of crud. My customers have been doing that to me all week and I don't want to be guilty of that.

Had a couple bright spots today, though: picked up the second book of Patrick Rothfuss's "Kingkiller Chronicles" today. I think it is officially the second thickest book in my possession, after the Overlook Press omnibus of Gormenghast! Also, had to pick up extra tax forms at the library for my mother, and lo and behold, but they were holding their Wednesday book sale. I found the sixth of the Dark Tower books, which I've been looking for. I got the first four (as a boxed set), the fifth and the seventh at various book sales, but the sixth kept eluding me. Till now!

I've been somewhat AWOL from this journal, and for decidedly personal reasons. I'm going to express them here, but first, I feel the need to post a bit of a disclaimer.

The views expressed herein are extremely personal, and of a very sensitive nature, since they are expressed by a very sensitive person. People are free to disagree with them; I only ask for a certain level of respect and politeness toward them. If you feel the need to comment on something therein which displeases you, please stop for a moment and think about what you are planning to say. Please step away from the keyboard, if necessary, and get yourself a glass of iced tea or chocolate milk or your beverage of choice to refresh yourself. One thing that is not allowed here on this LiveJournal, are keyboard smash disagreements. It makes the poster look like an angry gorilla, and it makes me feel like a bad person for upsetting the poster and I start to question if I belong in this world.

Okay, that said...

( Cut for content )

Which means I can at last wear the Fangtasia tee-shirt I got just before this maddening heat wave we've been having. I'm trying not to grumble about the weather, or grumble about people grumbling about the weather. Or about people whining in general ( :: Glares at people commenting on the LJ News comm:: ). There seems to have been a rash of it lately and it's wearing on my nerves as much as the weather is. I don't know what the cause behind it is, but it's caused me to be a bit more hermetic than usual.

Did a little retail therapy to ease my frazzled nerves: went to the Burlington Barnes & Noble for the first time in a month and picked up a couple of odd volumes of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series (aka "Iskierka's canon" to the carpe_ho_ras crowd).

Still watching "Dexter" and I'm on the third season already. For a series that has plenty of Nightmare Fuel, it's got it's share of Crowning Moments of Heartwarming, particularly this season. Gotta love how Dexter proposed to Rita. He's not just asking her to marry him, he's asking to be a dad to her kids. Awwwww!!!

I'm also taking tentative pokes at another Showtime series, namely, "The Tudors". I blame the red-hot shortfic that one of the Carpe folks wrote for it, as well as a certain headspace-dweller's fondness for Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. :: Glares at Muraki:: I'm well aware that it's a highly romanticized view of history, but I'm a little leery of it: my biggest concern is how Sir Thomas More gets portrayed. He's one of my heroes and I'd hate to see him get warped into a sanctimonious jerk or something just as tedious.

And it is rather starting to get on my nerves, though that likely has something to do with missing a bus as I scrambled to get back to the library in town, which is just a mile from home, and thus pretty much in walking distance. :: Sighs:: I'm keeping this short and simple since I still have tags at carpe_ho_ras to catch up on and I want to be back home at a reasonable time so I can call Verizon about this. I ran a diagnostic last night and the thing told me something about an IP address needing to be renewed and that I would have to contact my ISP to resolve this. Oy...

Maybe my mom is right and I am addicted to the Internet, not that I see it that way: it's a means of communication. One might as well accuse me of being addicted to talking or writing.

Family drama. Sinuses acting up. Absolutely no energy to write or type the fics I've been working on.

Somebody give me a new real life, because this one is cramping my fannish life.

The debit card incident turned out to be a bit of a false alarm: turns out something did try to jack the account, but they kept it out and they wanted me to make sure that several recent transactions were legit. Whew. Glad to know they're vigilant about this.

However, the day wasn't the best anyway: mom is having some major emotional issues due to mail harassment from her relatives. I know this is a deep-seated issue for her and it sets off a lot of triggers, but I wish she wouldn't get so worked up about it. Thus, I'm still feeling some of her pain and it's making things hard for me. Things like writing and RP tagging and reading.

I did manage to get most of another story_lottery story written today. For "Home Sweet Home", I somehow got the inspiration to write an alternate ending to Joanna Harris's "Chocolat". I love the rich, redolant style of that book, but the condescending sneers directed at the Catholic Church was a bit much, even if some of it was marginally justifiable (the parish priest bordered on being a bit of a Manichaeist and I kept wanting Vianne to give him a big ol' smooch to soften him up and remind him that he's a *man* as well as a priest). The movie toned that down considerably, but I didn't like how Pere Reynaud pretty much got run out of town. I mean, can't Christianity and "the Old Ways" coexist?? For someone of the Old Ways to sneer at Christians, that to me is simply doing what too many Christians do to said followers of the Old Ways, and shouldn't someone be the one to be the bigger person and not stoop to that? So I decided to write an epilogue with a forlorn Reynaud coming back and having an interesting confrontation with Vianne, in which she helps him to see where he belongs in his self, as well as in the world. "Home Sweet Home" isn't just a place, it's a part of your self, too...

Removed one entry due to whining.

All I'm going to say is, did a crankiness virus escape from a CDC lab? I've been seeing a lot of whininess around and it's starting to wear down the Zen-like calm I've been trying to cultivate. I know I shouldn't let it get to me, but it is making it hard to type up some of the Valentine's fics I'm working on.

I won't say more about the whining: I'm going to talk about the cosmic irony that is a girl who hated Valentine's Day with a vengeance, due to a bad relationship and a horrible dust-up that happened on Valentine's Day due to that bad relationship, even has an Anti-Valentine's Day icon on her LJ (which I'm trying to find a more positive replacement for. Any suggestions??), who is now writing Valentine's Day fanfics! (Well, ficlets...) How did I get from there to here...? I credit it to the fact that among the collective of characters I have "living" as it were in a big rambling Queen Anne-style mansion (think along the lines of the house in "The Addams Family") in the creativity centers of my brain, I have more than a few hopeless romantics (including, but not limited to Frank Sweitz, my "A.I." OMC, and to some extent, a certain bouncy shinigami with violet eyes). I guess they finally won the battle for my sentimentality. Re: the headspace-dwellers, I'm tempted to put together a weekly rundown of some of the craziness they seem to come up with which is too silly not to post, but which will never make it into a fanfiction:

--Hal McGeever trying to find out who keeps eating his chips
--The day we had Soul Reapers running down the hallway for some inexplicable reason
--Frank running out of clean shirts and stealing/borrowing shirts from other guys' rooms (including the Merovingian's room... Eek.)
--Fuyutsuki's abortive attempts at finding a quiet place to read his mail and drink his tea in the morning
--Hal and Muraki "not flirting with each other"
--Enniel Prussot deciding to trim his hair, thus making him look even more like an Expy of a certain crooked energy vampire

The plan for the day was for the three of us to go to Salem. But then my mom had a crying jag out of the blue, so she told my dad and I to go without her... But we just couldn't. I was worried sick that something might happen to her while we were gone, plus I'd started feeling depressed myself, so we decided to wait till next week...

So now, I am trying to do what I would have done if we weren't going anyway, which is working on writing my current magnum opus... only to find the computer ate one of the files, which I'm trying to restore, but that's not working, so now I'm feeling worse than before. Never mind that I can't remember exactly what I wrote, so I can't even rewrite it, which is just making the depression escalate even more. I'm about ready to stop writing the damn thing and delete everything I've posted. I haven't had any feedback on it in a while and I just feel like I'm boring you all to death with it. The temptation to start begging for reviews like a tweenager on fanfiction.net is eating at me, but I'm not about to annoy you completely by doing that. If you want me to stop posting it and just save it for my own private consumption, just let me know.