come_love_sleep

Yesterday was the promotion test for kendo.
Late late hours of just before yesterday was the muffler falling out of the car.
Got to bed at one; got up at five; rode to Columbus, Rob driving and considerably more tired than I; and then I did badly at my test. Much angry at myself for the height of how bad I was. All of my usual flaws were magnified, and even while I was performing the test I was frustrated with myself and couldn't get loose. So I didn't go from 3kyu to 1kyu, but I did earn 2kyu, which indicates I'm a bit better at least than I was at the beginning of the year.
Sigh.
The thing of it is, I *know* I am better. I am much, much better usually than I was yesterday. But I wasn't good yesterday, and that's what they look at, so such is life. I can test again in a few months.

And now, still flat-out exhausted and at work, trying to summon the strength to go to practice in a couple of hours...

Aten't dead.

Dreamed of people like dark spiders, soot-skinned and with eyes like flashes of milky lightning, all sclera. Woke gasping, or was woken by quiet reassurances; this happened a couple of times. But I am told that by morning, I was instead giggling in my sleep.

I really am not updating very much at all these days, am I? I had a lovely, quiet birthday. Met my companion's beautiful daughter Blue, who is nine and about as timid as I was at that age, and who lives with her mother. Had a lot of cake. Was generally quietly content.

I was pretty sick for a couple of weeks but am better now and glad of it. It was nice to be very well-cared for. I'm pretty well-used to having to be sharply perceptive of my partner's moods; one wrong word and who knows how angry/moody/depressive he'll get, and so often the 'wrong word' is just me expressing emotion of any sort but chipper. It's refreshing to be dating someone for whom this is not so. I feel sometimes like I am tiptoeing on bedrock; I catch myself speaking sometimes with extra care where none at all is needed. It's neat to be able to start programming myself better.
(Though. It is just a little bit odd, sometimes, to walk past Taesoo's apartment to get to Rob's house; by odd coincidence they live on the same street. Taesoo, still quite far from generally sober, has gone more than a bit batshit, accusing me of being crazy when I've not spoken to him in weeks, and ignoring the fact that he's the one who suffers from alcohol-induced hallucinations where I've borne a child of his, where he is being pursued by shadowy government agencies. Says he'll beat the hell out of me in kendo, which I would welcome, considering that would mean he was attending kendo, which could only be good for him. I don't even want to be around him right now as a friend, not that he's offering that at this point, what with the abrupt--not unexpected--heel-face-turn from kind to vicious. But when he sobers up, if he sobers up, that may change. I miss my friend Taesoo.)

Nice out today. By which I mean, still getting colder. But at least there has been sun.

There is so much going on, but it doesn't summarize well. I'm practicing as often as I can, and yesterday was Rob's (my Rob's) first day at practice. Rob-senpai also came, to my extreme delight, for the first time in some months; Deanna joked that I need just to refer to them as "Rob-senpai" and "Rob-kohai." Ken-senpai, watching Rob (kohai), said that he could tell I'd been showing him stuff outside of practice, which amuses me...I'm so far left in the lineup now, even when lots of people attend, when I'm still mentally much further down on the right, where all the newbies are.

Got my hands on a copy of The Language of Bees, by Laurie R. King. She is a mystery author who I have been reading for nearly a decade now, since eighteen-year-old me encountered The Beekeeper's Apprentice at my hometown library on Christmas Eve, and lacking a library card at the time and had to leave it where I was when the library closed; this series in particular is a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes, told from the point of view of a much younger woman. Mary Russell pleases me because she is not remotely a Mary Sue; she gets things very wrong, sometimes to great detriment, and people who see her around Holmes are generally suspicious of her. Her family is dead, true, but while she knows it keenly, she still has a rewarding and fruitful life. And there are many things she can't do. I'm quite infatuated with the character, and the pairing.
Anyway. Got to read The Language of Bees. Rob drove me to pick it up from work, where it had been shipped to me, just before kendo yesterday; I read twenty-five pages on the very short ride from there to the dojo, and then left it in the car so that it would not distract me before practice. Read a great deal more of it last night before bed, and then finished it upon waking today, savoring it, reading it much more slowly than I read most things.
It ends with the line, To Be Continued.
Dammit.

I loved it, but it's interesting to see how King seems much more willing now to show tenderness in her work than she did as a younger author. Holmes is very believable and in character; Conan Doyle has shown that the Great Detective was well-capable of rage, and sometimes of startling kindness. But neither thing have been shown quite so plainly in any previous Russell/Holmes book as in this one. At any rate, I recommend it if you've read the previous ones, and if you haven't, I highly recommend them too.
But I kinda wanna shake her for that entirely unexpected To Be Continued.


My new apartment is pretty great, though I admit I have spent very little time here, and considerably more time at Rob's house a few blocks off, where it's always warm enough and the hot water seems endless. I like my roomies quite a bit, though I don't know them terribly well yet, and I like my sunlight bedroom, and oh, god, I love my new comforter and pillows and flannel sheets and cozy heathery-pink blanket. Deep and soft and warm and enveloping in a way not at all claustrophobic.

Will admit to missing Leah a bit here and there. Of course, the incredibly passive-aggressive "She didn't understand me, I'm glad YOU understand me" sort of Facebook updates--have unfriended her, don't wanna deal with it--do not really make me kindly inclined toward her. If she hadn't lied to me, she wouldn't have this problem; there's nothing I 'don't understand.' She lied, and then tried to cover it up, and then suggested that as I am close kin to one liar it shouldn't matter if she was one too, and when I 'changed (my) mind I should call (her).' It's a pretty simple situation from where I am standing, ignoring any other tawdry frankly-quite-disgusting bullshit she might currently be involved in. She fucked up, and the consequences were worse than she expected (if she expected any consequences at all, plainly thinking me considerably more stupid than I am). And she was not as interested in mending it as in feeling self-righteous, so. Life, as it stands, is that she is not my friend, and will not be so again, and since currently when I see her walking down the street I want to slap the shit out of her, it is not much bothering me that I'm hanging out in Oakland less these days.
Though I wish I could talk with her about Rob, and introduce them; I think she'd like him.

Wow, I'm tired. Was up stupid late; am shortly to be joining Rob and Blue for dinner at his place, bringing along my size 39 shinai for him to keep as it's too large for me.
(Also, I'm getting a size 36 for Blue, which makes me kinda grinny. Little kendo girls are adorable--hope she likes it.)

Aaaand there's the text message summoning me to dinner--I'll turn off Hana Yori Dango and grab my coat. Hope all's well, my dears.

So tonight is the first night I'll be spending in my newly-refinished bedroom. In fact, tonight is the first night I've even stayed home in the last sixteen; I've been staying a couple of blocks off at my boyfriend's place.
(I do not really like the term 'boyfriend.' Very high school. Suggest a better one?)

Said fellow is named Rob, somewhat my elder and a bringer of delightful conversation and invigorating company. Were he younger than me I think maybe 'boyfriend' would fit better, but he's not a boy, so. Words are clumsy. Let me simply say that he's...there is a *fit* that I am not used to, there was an instant sense of recognition and a sort of comfortable 'Oh, hello again!' that still on occasion takes me by surprise, and being around him, doing stupid necessary things like going out for groceries, just feels good..
(And no; this is not one of the other Robs that I occasionally speak of, my previous acquaintances or my senpai in kendo. This is someone that I did not know before we met for coffee.)

I like my room. It's really a bit big for me, bigger than any room I've had before, and it is in the third storey of the house that I share with three younger roommates. Bright sunfacing windows, creamy carpet inexpertly installed, very white walls as yet mostly bare.
My futon is now deep with pillows (four, three of them new) in new pillowcases, a new soft heathery blanket, a new down-imitation comforter in a pleasing purple, and new flannel sheets (dark grey with light grey intersecting bars; Rob picked them out). It's a danger, having a bed this delicious to lie in; I shall be hard-pressed to get up again.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I have no plans at all. But the last few weeks have, with the exception of Rob, been stressful enough that honestly I don't mind that. I have a birthday cake sitting in the fridge, cheap store frosting congealing in a manner that my uneducated tongue finds heavenly; I have my internet at home, I have Japanese to study and a Zelda game to pick up and maybe finish for the second time.
The house is quiet, and I am quiet too, and for the most part content. A little more dinner now, and some cake, and then sleep and sleep and sleep, and all is well.

In my dream I am the eldest of several foster children, or nearly the eldest. I am blonde and tall and beautiful in a lanky, strong-muscled fashion.

Our house is beautiful but cluttered. Our mother--there is no father--is often sad, and cries regardless of whether or not she is seen. One of my sisters, the youngest, has a birthday today; I'm thinking about making her a cake.

Two of my foster brothers--braids to their waists in white and blond, one of them looking athletic and the other somewhat bookish though really quite muscled--are sitting around talking to me about things they want to do this week. One wants to go get a new camera, his has died and he heard that someone is growing a patch of really good ones, high-powered things that don't automatically send to the grid. The other brother wants to go roofjumping and wants me not to tell Mom. He's good at it, never gets hurt, and the courier work he does during the activity earns enough extra money that the kids always eat well, but Mom would worry.

There's a box on the table, addressed to the youngest sister. It's wrapped in shades of blue, and she says "I like blue the best!" as she opens it. Inside is a doll, with pale blue skin, dressed mostly in loops of gems, looking elegant and not much human, and expensive. I get a thread of anxiety pulled through me at the sight of it--how could our mother afford something like that? We all make our own money, we all help out, but we know she doesn't have much.

And then my middle sister comes racing in, shaking, terrified. She looks at youngest sister, and grabs me by the arm and drags me outside. "She's gone, she's gone! She joined the sun!"
I'm so afraid I want to throw up. "What?"
"Mom! She was tired of being here, she couldn't handle hurting all the time, so she had them make her a bird body, and she's gone! I followed her as long as I could, but there are so many birds, the city's so big, it's been so much time now we'll never find her."
We're outside on a balcony, and the city spreads out under and around us, sunset-lit and liquid gold, miles in any direction. There's a canal far below and the water is darkly reflective, far enough away that it can no longer catch sun. I know my sister is right. Mom is gone, there is no way that we could catch a bird out of a thousand birds, and even if we did, by now her body has been destroyed--and nobody usually comes back, once they've met the sun. Why would they want to? Being a bird or a deer or a dayfly is all-consuming and their human hearts don't fit, entirely; there's not too much soul to put back into a person-body.
I look through the porch window at youngest sister. I have to tell her. I have to tell her quickly and kindly as possible, on her birthday, that our mother is dead. She'll spend the rest of her life looking at birds and wondering if her mother is behind those tiny dark eyes, and she'll never know, because there is no way at all to tell if a bird is a was-person, or just a strangely quiet, oddly graceful bird.
I go inside, and I put my hand on youngest sister's shoulder, and my face is enough, and she starts to cry. Her hand is wrapped around the doll's waist, and the gems rattle as she shakes.
And then I wake up.

In my dream, I'm in the back yard of the Yellow House. I am not yet ten years old.

That house had a half-acre yard, a (to us) massive brushy tree at one end (which all of us kids called the Totoro Tree, and occasionally tried to build forts in, though the children of the drug dealer across the street would always jump the fence and tear them down once we'd gone to bed)and a garage beside the mother-in-law house that was behind the house. This house didn't have much in the way of bedrooms; one room for the five of us kids, one room for the parents that was actually the living room, partitioned by a bookcase. The bathroom was off of the kids' room, which had wooden floors that would splinter despite my mother's efforts to sand and varnish.
The front yard, directly in front of the house, was all juniper bushes and zinnias and marigolds, and I remember crushing the petals of the marigolds up by my face so I could smell their spiciness. When we lived at this house, we still had Shotgun and Buford, our Rhodesian Ridgeback dogs.
In the dream, it's all very clear, and today the memories are about an inch in front of my face. Kind of unpleasant.

Shotgun had had puppies, and already they were succumbing to parvo, bleeding and wheezing and lying around in little furry piles, whimpering. In life, all told, she lost somewhere around thirty puppies that way; a litter of eleven, a litter of fourteen, and I believe an early litter of somewhere around three or five. In this dream, there are only three, three that survived and were given other names and handed off to people who would care for them better than we would. They're sick, bleeding, lungs bubbling, and I don't want to look at them.
And then I do the usual head count--I'm 'one,' the other kids are numbered to five, and suddenly 'four' isn't there anymore. Nicole's gone. I look under the bed, and she's not there; I look in the bathroom behind the shower curtain, and she's not there. So I go outside, where she knows she's not allowed without permission. I am almost ten; Nicole is four.

In real life, I heard her crying and looked over the shaded alley behind the garage, to find her trying to climb a fence that was laced with barbed wire. She was wearing a bathing suit--we hadn't had clean clothes in some weeks, and it was hot outside anyway--with a little frill around the hips, and it caught on a spike. She stumbled and one of the barbs carved through her leg, a wicked scratch that had her bleeding from calf to thigh. Heart in my throat, I climbed onto the barbed wire fence, rested my arms along the barbs and lifted her over the fence in one quick movement. I stumbled back, caught myself, holding her under the arms, her crying in frustration and discomfort, me just about crying in a different frustration and in fear (what if she'd run off? What was she doing in the alley, and how had she gotten there?). I shouted at her. "Why'd you do that? What were you doing? You could have gotten really hurt!" and she just cried at me, brown wolf eyes huge and sparkling with anger. "I was looking for something!"

In real life, I walked away from that with scrapes along my arms (penance, maybe, for nearly losing her), and grounded her. But she couldn't tell me what she was looking for, and when she was inside causing quiet havoc in the kids' room, I went back outside, around the shaded end of the garage, and climbed onto the fence. The alley was cool and green, at least green for our dusty town; trees stretched over it, grass grew at the foot of the garage and in a strip down the middle of the road, thick and sweet-smelling, and from here I couldn't recognize our house at all. From here it could have been another world, with no dying puppies, no quick-fisted fathers.

In the dream, Nicole is struggling at the top of the barbed-wire fence, and every time she struggles she pierces herself more deeply. Her legs are dripping with blood, her face gets angrier and angrier, but she keeps struggling, instead of holding still so I can free her. My feet make the wire of the fence sag, and it cuts into my tennis shoes (with smileys drawn on the inner sides, so that I know which shoe goes on which foot), and my elbows slam against the dry and rotting wood of the fence's top runner. Nicole's feet are bare, toes dusty, and I'm crying because there's nothing I can do to free her, and I can't walk away; we're both going to be tangled in this wire forever.

And then the dream changes. Nicole's screaming, and then I am at school, my high school, in front of the big glass windows that look in on the basketball gym. Standing across from me is a character from a series of Japanese stories, Ginko the Mushishi, a sort of medicine man and cataloger of monsters and scientist. "There are no Mushi here," I say, and he shakes his head, white hair falling over blue-green eyes. "There are Mushi everywhere," he says, and he is also saying "There are ayakashi everywhere," and I shake my head right back at him. "This is real. This is physical. There are no Mushi here."
My sister Nicole is racing around in clothing that belongs to other people, and she's older now--six, seven. The dream starts to break up a bit here, and for a moment my hair is black and to my ankles and I'm shrouded in something dark and cold; and for a moment my hair curls to my hips, brown as it was when I was a child, and I'm wearing something complicated and white, and I can feel lipstick on my lips.
Ginko is looking at me out of his one good eye, steady. "There are ayakashi here." he says, deliberately, as if he's afraid he'll startle me.
I shake my head roughly, the way I used to shake it and shake it when there was a thought I didn't want to look at. And I'm wearing Japanese-beetle green, taffeta skirt to my toes, heavy black leather boots laced to the calf, tight vest and men's shirt rolled up to the elbows. I rattle the bangles on my wrists at Ginko. "Mushi and ayakashi don't stay here."
Ginko goes still, shoulders not even moving with his breath. Very, very quietly, he says "No. They don't."

My sister is on the other side of the glass. I set my jaw. "Give me a minute first." I say, and I open the double doors. "Nic, lemme show you something," I say, and I scoop her into my arms. She's a baby; she's ten and throwing her arms about the back of my shoulders. "Hold on." I say, and she laughs into my ear as I take a running start across the basketball court and jump, bounding into the air. I'm aware of the weight of her but still, I can give her a good run; I'm in the air above the basketball hoops, and then I kick the doors open and fly down to get through the doorway. I can't keep much airtime, maybe five or six seconds at once before the balls of my feet touch down again and I've got to take another couple of steps, jump up again. Nicole is laughing and my heart is breaking because I can't stay in the air, all I can do is give her this little thing. I can't even get us both outside.
"All right. That's enough."
His voice is soft, but it's commanding, and I stop. It's enough. Finished.

I settle, let her slide from my back, squeezing her hand once. She runs up the hall, laughing, and I turn to face Ginko. He reaches out one pale hand, and I'm fourteen years old, he's so much taller than I am but I'm not afraid. He rests his palm on my head for a moment. "I'm ready." I say. "Don't bother with sympathy." His mouth twists a little bit in a grimace, and he sighs. "Right." he says. He takes his hand off of me.
And then there's a storm in the hallway, screaming wind, light and pandaemonium. The school rips away like crepe paper in a hurricane, and Ginko vanishes into it too, the sympathy I didn't want quite clear in his single visible green eye.
And I wake up.

My god, I have no idea whatsoever how to sum up the last two weeks.

Um.
Okay.
*cracks knuckles*

Met a person. This sentence is a novel. You don't get the rest of it today, though, just the cover blurb; I met a person, and he is interesting and fine, and by the thought and form of him I am pleased.

Said goodbye to a person. You don't get much detail here, either, but for me to say--do not lie to me. Do not lie to me. Do not lie to me. Particularly if I love you. Particularly for no reason. Particularly if you are an eyelash's breadth from being family, from being my lover, from being my sister. Particularly if you are also hiding something else. Do not lie to me.

Finally, finally got my bedroom finished at my new place, and it is high-ceilinged and bright and fine. Haven't slept in it yet, to be honest, but it is there and tomorrow I'm going to finish unpacking and putting together Dave's old futon frame which has languished at Kate's for the last almost-year, and the desk that I carried home from Best Buy on the bus, and hanging the pictures cut from artbooks and printed from the internet and the numbers worn in kendo tournaments, finding a place for my ancient fox tail, arranging what of my books will fit on those two poor bookcases, making the rest into a dragonskin of stories across my walls and floor...

Have taken up slacklining for fun, with a group that a friend of mine from online goes to. It's delicious. Slacklining is like tightrope walking on a loose-bound ribbon, and feeling it stretch and sway under my cautious bare feet is satisfyingly meditative. It is one of those things where everything goes away.

Am training now to test for Ikkyu. Sensei's eyes widened and sparkled when he said "We will get you to Ikkyu," and I know I am in for a hard ride, and it delights me to know it.

And now, books, and work.

Woke up cold, in a cold, cold room, under an insufficient blanket. Stretched a bit but decided to forgo real stretching for a walk, instead; then caught a bus in to Oakland, to my library, where I am currently sitting at a computer on the cold second floor. Fingers are too stiff to type fast enough to suit me, whine complain whinge. The price of being a narrow-boned, lightly-fleshed woman is nonstop shivering from October to April.

Anyway.
I only get to check my mail once a day or so, since I don't have internet access at home yet, and when I opened my Gmail today there was a letter from my father. Another one of those nearly-textless missives addressed to a woman named Gemma who may or may not exist, once again full of photographs of a beautiful Filipina with hair like my sisters have, knife-straight and river-dark, though this is a different woman than before. He does this sometimes, my manipulative genius father, so used to being smarter than other people that he perhaps thinks I am fool enough to believe that he'd accidentally click on the wrong contact and send it to Genevra instead of Gemma. But this is not the first time he's sent me photos while pretending to send them to her, nor even the third, and he has more than once before invented people who do not exist and had them send letters to me or mine. He is not to be trusted.
All I could think, seeing the pictures of this dark-eyed slender woman, was thank god, this time it's not photos of children. This time I won't have to spend several hours online trying to pinpoint his physical location, in case I need to go and have a quiet word with someone regarding his previous (and presumably current if the situation allowed) tendency to kick seven-year-olds down flights of stairs.
A weird thing, to be more of an adult than the man who sired me.
(Three weeks until my birthday. I remember my father at that age. Generally, I remember him from the vantage point of hiding very, very quietly under the bed. Or of sitting seiza in front of the bed, the blankets pulled down behind me to hide one of the littlers--room for them, no room for me, gotta look normal, gotta look chill, gotta not make him suspicious. Play at playing and maybe he'll just go back to his computer.)

I will never be thankful for what he was to us. But without that, perhaps I'd grow up to be him? We're so very similar, after all, and had I not begun to meditate, had I not taken up kendo, perhaps I'd still be prone to the absolute cold rage that held me so tightly in teenhood? In him it's ever been lava instead of frost, so maybe not. I am not what he is. And I will never be what he was. And there's no anger left in me toward him, he's a thing that happened to me that sometimes twinges (like my shoulder, which aches today), and the people around me now are full of light, and there's much more of light in me as well. But sometimes I do wonder. The choices we don't make change us just as much as the ones we do.

(And I do keep a list, in my head, of the things he gave me that brought joy; one afternoon playing tag in the park. A house full of books, even if some of them were poisonous too. The ability to put myself entirely aside to care for someone else, though that's a blade with more than one cutting edge. Three musicians I will love until I die. The ability to be humble; the ability to not be humble, the impetus to finally stand up and make someone else back down. He helped me with this even if it was as the aggressor. What touches you is what you touch...)


And now, I'm going out to join a new friend at something vaguely acrobatic. Looks like fun; we'll see if my shoulder will allow me to participate. I think it should.

I keep getting to the 'post entry' section at LJ, writing for a bit, and then going 'hmm, that's not right' and scrapping it.

It's too cold for me here already. But cold or not I have had some very good walks in the last couple of days, and I'm wearing my great green coat again, though it wants mending. And maybe this winter I will take the time to bring it in a little bit in the back so I look a bit less like a bag lady in it.

I think it's funny how, when my life is unpleasant I often write about it in detail (though just as often I never put that writing where anybody can see), but when things are good I can't bring myself to write through some superstition that if I speak on it it will go away. This seems to be more true the older I get. I should really stop that, since I do occasionally go back through this thing to see who I was a year ago, two years ago (or I'll read my other, dead blog, to see who I was five years ago, seven years ago...)

So here are some good things, that I can look back at in five years and go oh, yes, I remember that:

Having coffee at Kiva Han the other day, there were a pair of Japanese gentlemen sitting at the table just past my friend and I, and I could understand half of what they were saying. Well, almost half.

Have had some really, really interesting synaesthetic reactions lately. The people-smells are in some cases stronger than I am accustomed to; I walked into a room with Harold in it and the scent of cloves was intoxicating. And the whole thing seems to be evolving, though almost always it still takes a couple of weeks of seeing someone before they get a smell.
(Almost always. One notable instance recently, it was a matter of hours.)

Had a nineteen-hour coffee date. That was entirely delightful. Behaviour somewhat unlike me, perhaps (stop laughing, Dave, I can hear you from across the Pacific) but just...many many hours of engaging, relaxing conversation spread out over two coffee shops, two nice walks, and a restaurant. Once or twice I have met someone and already known them (Katie, when she was eleven and I was twelve; Dave, when he was eighteen and then again properly when he was 21 or 22) but it's such a rare occurrence that I treasure it. And it was very nice to put everything down for a moment, not stress about getting my room in order, about finding another job to supplement my dwindling hours, about study or training or any of that. This was just entirely good, and it's been a while since I have had an experience like that.

Speaking of training, kendo goes well. It's neat how when I came to it, I thought it impossible to love it more than I did, and now I know for sure that I do. Maybe my appreciation of it will just increase for the rest of my life, though at the same point I am finding comfort in it too, it becomes more usual and less the blazing-bright exciting thing it used to be. I like the appreciation better, I think. I remember getting my hakama and feeling incredibly weird in it, and now I can tie it correctly in the dark and in a very short amount of time, and wearing it is as natural as wearing a pair of jeans.

Last night--I really need to sit down for a week and write some massive updates for my long-untouched kendo journal--I told Emi-senpai that I wanted to test for nikyu, and she tilted her head. "You should test for ikkyu."
So I am talking to Sensei when he returns from overseas, and to the people hosting the test at OSU, and I am going to see if I can test for ikkyu. Which is considerably more scary than testing for nikyu, as the ikkyu test involves kata and jigeiko, and, well. I feel like I can comfortably test for nikyu. I do not feel comfortable for ikkyu.
Which means, of course, that I must just work harder.

This Autumn is lovely. Cold and rainy, and the trees are turning very quickly indeed, but I am enjoying the odd speed of it, some days so slow and others scorpion-swift.

I am happy in my body, for the most part. It is a joyful thing to have muscle and strength, and cleverness-of-foot, and training hard is giving me all three of these things. I do not tire so easily, now.
(Though it must be said that I am not sleeping enough of late. Once my bedroom is finished, and I have a couple of new blankets and a horde of new pillows to curl up in, I'll doubtless be sleeping easier and more deeply.)


Well, time for me to get up and out and make my way off to do the stupid stuff I have to do. If I can remember the stupid stuff I have to do. :P

And so it begins.

I have already been looking for more work to supplement my very few hours at the Carnegie, but. Sigh. Not like we didn't all see it coming.

I hate the whittling down of any library. They're vital. But the most personally important line is in this article, where they discuss cut hours and staff. Mykal says we're not likely to personally suffer too much as--mice in the walls--nobody wants our jobs. But the cut in hours will affect us for sure.
Well, gotta keep running, ne?

Found a place.
Room's not finished; I'll be sleeping on the couch, which is tiny and of creamy leather, for two weeks.
Roomies seem nice. Very different from me, which is just fine. No massive poetic melancholia here!
(I think.)
(Still haven't met one roommate, who will not be here until the 17th or so.)

Tired. Cold. Aching. But good right at the moment, at Kate and Kerry's, where I have consumed a prodigious amount of Becca's birthday cake and barbecue chips. At my own place I will not have internet until my room is finished at the earliest, in all probability.

But things are okay. :)

Happy holiday, to all those celebrating it.

--G

(Also, you should watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc)

It's sunny and a bit brisk, and Leah is standing there ready to leave, all my stuff in boxes, my futon thrown casually on the floor. Harold puts his hands into his pockets. "There's this thing we do, in the Philippines," he says "where--well, for luck and good fortune." He snaps his hand out and change flies from it, scatters all over my carpet.

Julian's in his boxers, and I'm in my sleepy shirt, and we're both up against the wall with thin paintbrushes, covering my bedroom with trees. The room seems to echo less, now that it is becoming a forest. I look over at him and think--it's weird maybe that my ex-boyfriend is sleeping over, but my place is warm, and I worry so for him in his unheated bedroom, and this is *good,* painting here like this.

Taesoo is asleep on the futon, all the lines in his face smoothed out for once, fingers only gently curled. When I lie down next to him, still sleeping, he pulls me close and throws one leg over both of mine.

Dave is leaning against the wall--just to the right of the biggest tree--smiling at me.

Leah is playing with a piece of ribbon, idly, as we're up talking the better part of the night.

I wake to the sound of fireworks; I wake to the sound of laughter from the bridge overhead; I wake to the sound of apples tumbling, bouncing from roof to grass. I wake to Dave squeezing me, to Julian snoring, to Taesoo grinding his teeth, or speaking soft Korean to the cat, to the sound of Natalie getting ready for work at five in the morning, the jingle of keys.

I write, and I chat, on my little silver laptop, curled up under my vblanket and my sleeping bag, chatting with Taesoo until very late, talking to Dave across the ocean, giggling with Gin.

In the kitchen--I make pie, and Taesoo's eyes light up. I make pork gravy and he has to turn away because it tastes so good to him that it hurts his heart. I make dinner for Dave, I make a chocolate cake for Natalie's birthday, I eat an unnatural number of Asian popsicles, I practice footwork on the crooked linoleum tiles.
I look up more than once to see that Leah is being sneaky and washing my dishes again. Or that Taesoo is, I begin to wash dishes and he gently takes my elbow, steers me away, says "please, let me do this" and scrubs them clean. Or I sit and talk to Nat as she's putting pictures up on Facebook, or laughing at FML.

My back porch is covered with fallen apples. Or Taesoo is on the rocking chair, smoking, and I sit on the railing with my feet bare and talk to him, slapping mosquitoes. Or Natalie is out there with her laptop, shouting to me through the kitchen window...

In the living room, I serve dinner parties on the two cramped couches. I play Zelda for forty hours. I lie on the floor to be able to use my desktop computer, once my laptop dies. I listen to people going by on the street below, all that life so close to me, and it's soothing even if sometimes it makes me sad.



I moved out of the only apartment in this city that I have ever loved today. I painted over my trees and I packed up the last of my books and I threw away my computer monitor because I could not carry it, and now I am out of there and I am so very sad it's stupid.
Tonight is the first night since he left, but for a couple of times when I stayed elsewhere, that the back porch light has not been on so that Taesoo could see it on his nightly walks, and know he had a warm place to come home to if he needed it.
I don't have a warm place to call my own. Tomorrow I will know if this will still be true tomorrow night; but for now, I am couch surfing, and until I can find a place very close to or within Oakland it's going to be that way, and I am *sad.* I am tired of being sad but today I had to kill my trees, run white paint over them until they were only shadows and ghosts and then gone entirely and I just don't give a damn about putting on a brave face. Tomorrow I will wake up and be exhilarated because walking a knife's edge is okay, I've spent so much of my life doing it, but tonight I want my futon and I want the sleeping bag I gave to Taesoo and I want warm arms around me and I want to not feel so fucking untethered.
But tomorrow I will wake up and it will be different. I'll sleep, then, so that tomorrow will come.

Pausing for a moment and taking a breath.
Thanks very much to everyone who is helping me to secure a place; emails and replies to comments are forthcoming. For the moment, this is a post with little substance.

Today I'm really thoughtful. This often happens on days where it rains and rains and rains; I slept last night in Regent Square, not trusting that I could make it home through the army of police and rioters, and I dreamed nothing bad. I woke and was already thoughtful, and that hasn't changed.
Sat and talked to Kate for a good while, shared a breakfast-lunch meal of noodles in a cream sauce. I laid around on the foof and read a bit, a few stories, wrote some emails, checked my FB, was generally deliciously lazy. Showed Kate this song in Chinese which is still stuck in my head.


It does nice things with my synaesthesia, feels a lot like climbing somewhere high over something intricate. I wish I could explain it better, it's a really beautiful sensation. Like a crystal walkway over something bright.

The ( lyrics are beautiful, too: )

I walked to Squirrel Hill from Regent Square, and then caught a bus the rest of the way to Oakland when it appeared beside me. I had dinner at Lulu's Noodles with Harold, and we talked about boxing, and I tried food I'd never had before. When our check and fortune cookies came, I grabbed one without deliberation, and cracked it open; the fortune read something like You take a long time to really reveal your true self to others which is flatly untrue of me. I showed it to Harold, and he grinned. "Oh, that one was probably for me." He popped his open, and slid the fortune out as he ate the cookie. His eyes snapped wide and he laughed around the mouthful he was chewing, and turned the fortune around so I could see. It said "Cleaning up the past will always clear up the future," so we decided we'd just grabbed each other's cookies by accident.

Dinner consumed, we went to the Hillman to study for a bit, and instead talked about language and the vagaries of fluorescent protein. But the Hillman closed early tonight, so I walked Harold to Halket street, and then walked home.

I still love the walk over the Birmingham Bridge, particularly in the dark. The silverdark water below, the wind curling and uncurling my hair around my face and shoulders, the glimmer of the sea-green steel above and surrounding me, the brightness of the city lights and the blue neon clock that marks where my home is, the distant-but-nearing sounds of merriment from Carson...
...I will miss being here.

It seems that life is forever a road that takes me away from things I love. This is doubtless true of everybody, but still I keep reaching and saying "This will last, this will last, I will do all in my power to make this last," and human power is not necessarily enough.
Still. Sweet while it lasts. Good not to hunger for more than is there.

*shiver*
Cold tonight. Nights like this, the wet-cold sort, are for curling up next to a body that makes heat more easily than mine...nights like this are for giving back-rubs and telling stories. Instead I'll curl up on my deep soft futon under my much-abused comforter and read articles about fluorescent protein, and play Scribblenauts, and hopefully fall asleep smiling.


I'm really tired, but not quite ready to sleep. Where Dave is, it is noon now, and I'd like to be able to talk to him just a bit, see that all's well with him and his lady--I had a feeling earlier of terrible trepidation and could not figure out why. It seems that all is well but still I want to touch base with those I can. So I think I'll put on an episode of Babylon 5(oh, comforting campiness!) and chill some more.

Tired today. Worked; hung out with Harold at a fundraiser for the Korean Heritage Room at the Cathedral of Learning (saw very attractive dancers, heard sweet music, was surrounded by the sussurous of many voices in Korean and was not much pained by it, it was just sweet in itself) then went to dinner with Harold, and Leah, and Harold's girlfriend Liv. Dinner was nice, it was good to have company and I managed most of the meal, an achievement.

Just tired, though, so I think that soon I'll sleep. Yesterday was nonstop work from waking 'til very late indeed, and though the payoff for it was good I think it's not a day I will repeat.

Daydreaming, now, about a set of bogu that belongs to only me, never worn by another body and fit to my measurements; daydreaming about new socks and a well-stocked liquor cabinet by which to learn how to mix drinks that will get me hired at a place where I can make monumental tips. Stability.

Today I miss having a tribe. It was...soothing, being surrounded by Asian folks today, even if they are not the same sort of Asian from which my blood comes; just felt nice, and right, so many slim frames, so many dark heads, so many flashing eyes. Like family again, the delicate motions and sudden startling grins. But they are not my people, and I miss having the sense that there was someone I could point to who was.
Still. Life, isn't it...just gotta keep walking.

I have "Rang wo duan zhan kuai le hen gan dong" running over and over through my head. From this song, which has been stuck in my head for five days:


( Lyrics translated from the Mandarin )
Let me have a fleeting happiness and I'll be deeply moved.

So I got a shot back from one of the sillier modeling gigs I've done lately, in this case a kinda racy Christmas card. The photographer wrote me, saying the work was just back from the retoucher, and he really liked it, and what did I think?
I'm fucking pissed, is what I think.
The retoucher made me white.

He made my eyes smaller, and changed their shape; they're oddly round now. He changed the angle of my cheekbones, much more round. He slimmed my lips(why, why, my lips are the best thing about my face, Filipina lips are the most beautiful in the fucking world and I got a fair variant of them). And oh, yes, he changed my skin color, oh, did he ever change my skin color. It's incredibly odd to see myself with a pink basetone instead of gold.
Let me tell you, I make a freaky-ass looking white woman. I look--just--well, I've shown it to a couple of friends and they've both recoiled in horror, which made me feel a bit better about thinking it looked really wrong.

I just. *sigh* I KNOW that I am selling my body, here, and what they choose to do with it is their business. But it makes me sad, and a bit sick to my stomach. I'm not a bad-looking girl. And photo retouchers are cool, they make the fantasy more real. But why make the fantasy more white? If he'd wanted a white woman for the gig, he should have hired one.
Fucking depressing.

Should not nap. Too tired to stay awake, but when I nap I have dreams.

In my dream, Taesoo has injured his thumb. Just a nick, a gouge the size of a pea taken off of his knuckle, and he's covered it in blue tape. We're hunting something through a city whose streets slosh with filthy black water; I think this is probably part of the war dream.
I will not give detail--that nasty, for once--but as the dream progresses, his hand grows increasingly gangrenous. He keeps saying things like "Just cut that bit off and keep going," until finally he's removing fingers, he's got a slick black stump where the right side of his hand should be, it's swollen and putrescent and beginning to climb into his arm.

The soundtrack to this dream was Sufjan Stevens' "The Predatory Wasps of the Palisades Are Out to Get Us," which is a song that strikes my synaesthesia particularly powerfully; a single hearing of it can make me nearly suicidally depressed.
And it gets stuck in my head, slightly mangled in lyric, for *weeks.* Now I have that smooth, sad voice repeating over and over "Oh, how I meant to please him--Oh, how I meant no harm..." which is not correct but won't go away.
Sigh.

Today started out okay-ish. Woke too early; can't seem to sleep more than six or seven hours at a stretch, these days. But I wasn't too tired. Cleaned the house a bit, wrote some emails, forgot entirely to eat.
Had a modeling gig. My bedroom has amazing light, one of the reasons I love this apartment so much, so I didn't have to go anywhere; the photographer came here, set up his background, and I spent an hour or so Being a Model, makeup and sultry facial expressions and 'could you jut your hip out further, please? Quarter turn toward me. Angle your elbow down?' and all.
That finished, (small amount of) cash in hand, feeling incredibly dissatisfied for some reason, I returned to the clammy bosom of the internet, and read the latest issues of some of my favorite manga, downloaded some DS roms, caught up on the news, chatted with Dave in Japan and Harold three miles from me, waited for my roomie to come home.

I don't ever talk about my roomie, do I? Or her lovely beagle puppy, or her overweight, eating-disordered cat Alex? My roommate, Natalie, works with horses for a living. She's fierce and bright, and I've loved living with her. Lately I've been a bit concerned, because she's been feeling trapped by circumstances; the idea of staying in Pittsburgh has begun to smother her. She loves the South Side, and our apartment, and just being here. But it's not enough.

So anyway, she got home tonight and announced that she's moving to Cranberry next month.


I make chocolate chip cookies a lot. I've learned a lot about the vagaries of flour and butter, in the years I've been baking. And one thing I've learned is that if you put in a bit too much butter, what you get are cookies that are soft and chewy in the center, but the edges of them are flat, pocked and crunchy and the color of dark caramel. Very brittle, and sometimes they taste like caramel, too, sugar gone thudding/pushing/dark. I don't like that synaesthetic reaction, so I don't make them that way. Another interesting bit of...of whatever this thing is, that my brain does, is that just right now it feels like my mouth is full of that sweet-bitter brittleness, or maybe it's my shoulders, or maybe it's the ground underfoot.

I had been writing an entry, this morning, on how often lately I've had to close my eyes and do fifteen seconds of Zazen when in the grocery store, when out with friends, when walking down the street and suddenly a thought turns all to corners in my head and everything hurts. Deep breath, close eyes, 'feel' the solid reassuring foot and a half of ground before and behind, the space that holds me, and let the world go all to silver and perfection for just a breath, two breaths, three, because if I do not I am going to start screaming.

(A text message from Taesoo, saved many months ago; I'd asked if he'd be online tonight, or something like that, and he replied Dunno but please tell me youre smiling before i deck everything and everyone and in this, too, we're similar. Deep breath. Close eyes. Center. Open eyes. World goes on.)


Nat is taking the dog, and the cat, and the couches, and most of the furniture, really. I'm happy for that; what would I do with a cat, she's had him forever, and decorating a place always makes me a bit happy. So she's taking a lot, and I'm left with a decision to make; become head of household, if the landlord will allow it, and hit Craigslist and friends up for a new roommate, or move.
Again.
I am so very tired of moving. It's with some startlement that I realise I have been here very nearly a year now; I still don't have my breath back.

I keep wondering. How much until it's too much? It's like balancing stones on a board, one more, one more, here's being assaulted, here's not having enough work to pay rent, here's being sick, here's one meal a day, here's the guys on the street getting in my way six inches from my face to tell me how fucking sexy I am every single day, here's being stopped by strangers who want to know 'what are you?' because my eyes are too big and my wrists are too small, here's on and on and on and
how much is too much? It's almost scientific, my somewhat detached interest.

I am feeling trembly at the moment. I have brownies in the oven, I have an anime to watch that I've never seen before, I have new Japanese books to study. Kendo tomorrow. Another modeling gig the day after that, this one with a photographer I am really looking forward to working with. A foot and a half of solid ground, before and behind.
Close eyes.
Center.
Open eyes.

I'll make it work.

Everybody knows the story.
You're told it as a child, and then you stop thinking about it; the message is to linger but the tale is simple.

Sometimes it is a scorpion and a turtle; sometimes it's a fox and a snake. But the story is the same, and goes like this:

The river was swollen with flood, all normal places to cross lost underneath feet of raging water; and the scorpion lingered on the bank, uncertain. He darted out to the very edge of the water, watching leaves spin past at a dizzying pace, and then he backed up a few inches, turning this way and that to try and find a way across.
A fox came to the bank then, and shook herself, prepared to climb into the water and make her way across. The scorpion called out with his golden voice, "Sister, sister, let me between your shoulders, and take me across." The fox eyed him suspiciously. "You are a scorpion, and will sting me." she said. He performed an eloquent semaphore with his claws, danced to and fro on delicate needle feet, protesting. "Not you, sister. Never you. Your eyes are so brown, and your fur so luxuriant. How could I poison something so lovely? I would not sting you."
And she studied him a moment more, then touched her nose to earth before him so he could climb between her eyes, cross her skull, sit just-so at the scruff of her back. His toes prickled across her as he climbed. "Hold tightly." she cautioned, and made her way into the river.

And at first, it wasn't too deep for a fox. To her knees, then to her ribs, and then oops! The riverbed fell away under her feet and she had to trust to the river to hold her, tail flagging out behind her under the quickmoving rush. The scorpion turned this way and that, never having seen the river from this aspect, his legs buried in her thick fur, his many eyes full of light.
And then, at the halfway point, he skittered up onto the fox's face, right onto the tender part where the fur was thin and fine as silk, and glancing once at her expression, stung her.
Her veins filled with fire, and her tireless legs thrashed, and the river seized her. "We'll both drown now!" she said, choking, knowing she'd never reach the other bank. "Why did you do that, when you swore not to?"
"I am a scorpion." he said. "It is in my nature to sting. You should have known better."
And the water closed over the both of them, hiding them from sight.


Everybody knows this story. We get it with our mother's milk, almost; that this thing, which you know is dangerous, should not be trusted regardless of how mellifluous his voice, how shining his carapace. That even if he does not want to, he will sting; and the pair of you will drown.
Knowing this.
Even knowing this.

If the river is swollen, I will always offer my back.
Sting me. That is an acceptable return.
You may be what you are, and see no choice but to never change; I can not blame you. You are what you are. But I am what I am and I will always offer my back.
To think less of me for that is...foolish.

SO in the last very-nearly-two-weeks-now I have

• ★Read books, when I was able to think again. A treatise on mononoke, and four books on Go, one of them a hundred years old and as delicate as onionskin; five or six novels, a couple of biographies, a history or two. Lots and lots of manga. One American graphic novel, "Livewires," which despite being in the Marvel universe I highly recommend.
  
• ★Lost ten pounds--well, that was in the first three days actually. This takes me down about to where I want to be, and I am happier with my form, but what a stupid way to lose it. I keep tying my hakama too loosely, having become accustomed to the way I've been the last eight months.
  
• ★Almost finished Zelda again, and we are talking complete this time, something near forty Poe Souls now, got nearly all the way through the Cave of Ordeals tonight before I decided enough was enough, have collected all of Agitha's Golden Bugs, etcetera.
  
• Been--I guess--sexually assaulted by someone I had thought was a friend. That one doesn't get a star. I am still uncertain how I am reacting to it.
  
• ★Gone running. Running is hard. But it gets easier, little by little.
  
• ★Practiced kendo with Sensei; with kohai; and on my own. My footwork slowly improves. I had a moment, yesterday, practicing by myself in a nearly-empty gym, where the motions made sense and though I had no opponent I could play like I did, moving from kamae to kamae, from strike to strike. It was play, and it was earnest, and it was me skating across the top of that glorious silver space where there's nothing at all but the right action; I've never found that on my own before.
  
• ★Had a modeling shoot, short but okay, which has given me enough money to apply for the JLPT if I don't mind not eating this week or next.
  
• ★Thrown away almost all of my clothing. Some of it I have had since I was sixteen or seventeen! Much of it I have had eight years at least. It belongs to a dead girl, and I'm not a revenant. I won't wear a dead girl's skin.
  
• ★Considered dyeing my hair peacock-blue; for the moment decided against it
  
• ★Considered simply dying; for the moment decided against it. Though every time I cross the Birmingham I want to leap from it. This would probably not kill me, as it's less than a seventy-foot drop; and it's not death I want, I just want to fall and fall and fall, wind and water and knifebright sunlight and nothing else. Outrunning everything else.
  The drop wouldn't be long enough for this, of course.
  
• ★Seen a truly gorgeous thunderstorm, brief but beautiful
  
• ★Been teaching myself Go, or Paduk; it goes slowly but it's perfect and thus more than worth my time
  
• ★Reformatted my shitty horrible desktop--put together from parts I found on the sidewalk--twice in four days.
  
• ★Picked tomatoes from my roommate's tomato plants; they're fat and firm and smell like a summer storm
  
• ★Read rather a lot of Rumi. Rumi comforts me, as in love with the world and living as he was. "A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself / That's how I hold your voice..."
  
• ★Arranged all my books by colour, with Leah's help. My room starts with reds and oranges, and wraps around with browns and greens and blues, and terminates in black and white.
  
• ★Been asked out repeatedly. I haven't answered a one of them with yes.
  
• ★Practiced Japanese; looked into books on Korean. Korean is beautiful even if I can't make heads nor tails of the sounds, even if it sounds like something I hear in a dream. Mandarin makes a lot more sense to me, but I don't know if I think it as beautiful.
  
• ★Defended Taesoo. Endlessly. I am not angry with him, and I don't want to hear words against him; he's in a hard place. Yeah, he hurt me. And? Am I not ever-so hurtable?
  
  
  
  Ehhh, it is now after four in the morning. I should sleep, I should sleep, I should rid myself of the last of this damnable fever so that tomorrow I can get up and run. I have no idea when the next time I'll update is; I don't like vomiting in public.
  
  
  So have something beautiful instead.
  ( Buoyancy )

So yeah, Taesoo dumped me. Over AIM.
Gonna be out of ambit for a bit.

Title: Butterflies
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Link/Agitha
Notes/Warnings (if any): Cross-posted to Zelda-Smut. Un-betaed! Please forgive any ugliness in the text. Very up for concrit.
Mostly in my personal journal just so I don't lose it.

( He never asks why she likes insects better than people. )

A lot has been going on, and I've not really had the ability to post. I suppose that most of it is not really that important, but here's a bit of it.

Laura came to visit for a week, and it was excellent and not at all weird! She is quite beautiful, and very much in person as she is online, and I am pleased to have finally met her after a decade of knowing her. We didn't get to as many things as I would have liked, as my wisdom teeth were killing me much of the time ("Two Advil and two shots, and you'll be fine!") but we did get to one of the parks, to several bookshops, and I introduced her to fireflies. Next time I drag her out here there will be more!

Dave came to visit for a few days, and it was like taking a deep breath and settling in. He's become so much of what is normal in my life that the very brief times I get to see him--maybe not again until a year from now--are really relaxing. And better still, he and Taesoo really got along. I had been worried one or another of them would just froth, but I should have expected better. Dave had good things to say about Taesoo, and Taesoo, in private, said "You guys--it's like you're bros. I'm not worried now."

Kendo goes well enough. I'm learning, I think Titus-Sensei is a little bit happier with my pace these days. I finally got my menjo, and I think I'll put it up on the wall. I has really forgotten about it...I tested what, six months ago?
(Jeez, was it that long? I should go in for my 2kyu test, then, at the next opportunity...)

Monday, Taesoo and Sensei finally got to practice together. I am very glad that Titus-Sensei is home again and practice can take up something like its usual rhythm. I've missed him a lot. Dave drove Taesoo and I to practice, and got out his fencing kit so he could practice on his own for a couple of hours. Aside from Sensei, nobody else showed, so Taesoo and I got a very intimate practice. Afterwards, since it was pouring, we gave Sensei a ride down the hill to the restaurant where he was to be meeting his wife, and he asked us along; I finally got to meet her! She's beautiful and fiery. All of us talked about travel and kendo and the trouble that comes with groundhogs in the garden, and Sensei described the snares he's taken to using to dispatch them, all else having failed. I had a very sharp moment where I realised that most of my very favourite people in the world were right there with me in that instant, and it came with a rush of such gratitude that I had to close my eyes for just a second. Here and now, I am alive...

Right now I am using Nat's laptop on the back porch, watching butterflies, noting that one of her tomatoes is starting to turn a delicious-looking amber, and enjoying what little bit of cool there is to be found in the shade. Still not dressed for the day--wearing glasses--just sort of relaxing to the sound of cicadas...life is good. I'm worried about a couple of things that should not worry me, not worried about a couple of things that should, but life is good.
And I still have leftover lasagna in the fridge for breakfast, should I desire to eat.

Whoever introduced the idea of insomnia to the universe is a very cruel individual or group.
I'm so tired I can feel it in my hands, so tired that the burnout in my eye--held so long now that it's rarely noticed--is getting in the way of my viewing the room. Tired enough that I can see my pulse.
A glass of whole milk, a calcium supplement, and a multivitamin really are probably not enough breakfast for today.

Taesoo, who surely must be more tired than I though he probably got two or three more hours of sleep--which would bring him up to a total of four or five hours--is at kendo, and because I wanted to take the bus in with him, I am at work an hour early.
I'd be just on time if I'd slept half an hour more. The tradeoff, being lucid on one of his last mornings in my house, was acceptable.
(I know, I know, he's only moving three blocks away. Shut up.)

Laura-Lockheed gets in from England today. So that she will recognize me at the airport, I am dressed as I was accustomed to dressing a couple of years ago; massive lavender taffeta skirt with a bit of a train, slim dark lace-backed vest, white men's dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, hair held back in a prim braid. I haven't dressed this way in long and long, that was another person, and it feels just a little strange; but I look good, and am easily recognizable, which is important when meeting a sleep-deprived far traveler.

I am going to fall asleep right here. I envy those who can ingest caffeine! A rarity, the wish I could drug myself into sprightliness, but urghh, I want to go to sleep.
(And I envy Taesoo, who is training while I sit in this blue basement room with its hissing air ducts and sleepy rumbling.)

Aaaand, the first of my co-workers has arrived, so time for me to close this up and attempt something approaching intelligibility. Be well, my dears.

In my dream, I am a refugee on a low ship, full of people bandaged and splinted. I'm exhausted, and the rocking of the deck makes me sleepier, though I know that I have to stay awake; as one of the very few people without injuries that would get in the way of being agile enough for for defense, I need to be conscious until we're out of sight of land.
The land is a thin silvery cloud. Not long now.
Behind me, the others that are well are talking in low voices, leaning on the railings and eachother. Everyone is tired, grateful to be away from whatever it is we are outrunning. I have the sense that we've escaped a place not our own. Dave is there, dark hair falling just a little loose. Taesoo is twenty feet off, sitting on the deck with one knee pulled up and the other long leg shot straight out in front of him, eyes half-open, hands still. There are people that I do not know in waking life scattered here and there among the wounded, talking, feeding them, making them comfortable. One of them is dressed in pale,expensive clothing, barely lighter than his own pale hair, and his fingers are like a harpist's. He moves like he's been stabbed.

Someone by the door that would lead down into the belly of the ship looks up, unsettled. I track their eyeline, and my throat closes up. Coming up on us, fast, is a skin-and-wood catamaran, fanciful with carvings. It bears shining, slim people with narrow chins and sharp teeth, several of whom smile at me in a familiar fashion.
The catamaran catches up with us easily, and then slows to hold our pace, and one of the people on it rises to his feet. He's beautiful. White hair, cloud-coloured, almost a hint of grey, pale, perfect skin, slitted peridot eyes. He holds out one slim hand, and I can see that its fingernails are short but sharply pointed.
"Your craft is ugly." he says, and he might not mean our ship. His voice is unsettling and delicious at once, like shrugging naked into a warm robe. I can see scales on the back of his hands, faintly silvery-lavender and green. "Above the water, we are not beautiful." he says. "Come below, where you can see our skins as they are meant to be seen, not as that one" he gestures with that elegant chin "would have you see them." He turns his hand over, and the faint pearly cast of the skin of his palm fascinates me. I feel myself taking a step forward, another, studying the dusty glitter of his face, the perfect shade of his hair, fascinated.
"Gen. Gen, what are you doing." I know it's Dave, his voice a bit sharp, but even realising this is like thinking through treacle. I flick my eyes back, in the direction that the beautiful man had gestured. I have to shift my weight to look around Taesoo--he's only two or three inches from me, his hand on a long knife at his waist. Dave's eyes are wide and unhappy, and the man beside him--white-haired, slim, exhausted, bandaged--rises and walks across the deck, showing no notice of the way that it pitches with the waves. He says nothing, merely looks at the man that looks like him, below the edge of our ship.

He won't stop me, if what I want is to go. And the man with his hand outstretched croons, and I'm losing the words now, something about poetry, something about fine things to see and to be. The hull feels too dry under my feet, I can feel my teeth drying out in my mouth and some part of me worries they'll crack like old bones do under too much sun. My skin feels like sandpaper rustling inside of my clothes. Another step, one more step, and I'll be over the side--will Taesoo stop me? His hand is off his knife, he's balanced on the balls of his feet just a bit, hands out a little, not quite down at his sides. He's absolutely silent and his face is unreadable. It hurts to look at him, his face so flat he could be screaming. I turn and fling myself at the white-haired, bandaged man behind me, and the one in the catamaran makes a noise like a wet cat. "Distract me. Do anything. Distract me, please." His arms come up around me like a brother's, like a cousin's, and I hear a curse from the one I turned from. They can't come up and touch us, they can only convince us that we want to come to them.
I notice, head clearer, that the people physically able to move have tied eachother together with rope, and that to the mast or the railings.
Arms around me, hands running down the back of my head like they might to soothe a child to sleep, my compatriot starts talking. It doesn't matter what he's saying, just that it's blocking out the hideous charm of the one below. I close my eyes, let out a deep sigh.
And then I wake up.

I write and delete, write and delete. Many musings on the last couple of weeks.
(shorthand: I will never let myself date a coward again, the rate of radioactive decay of these things long outlasts relationships. I need to stretch more often. I need to sleep more cleanly.)

Things with Taesoo go well, aside from the very occasional oh my god what the fuck are you DOING bump on one end or the other.

I'm eating ridiculously well, and yet the scale at the dojo says I sit at 128 pounds. It would make me happy if I could believe it were true! I am much likelier to be six pounds above that, and the scale suddenly broken. But I'm healthy, and doing well in kendo, and very much enjoying playing against Taesoo, when he can bring himself to actually hit me.

Taesoo got himself a place, near to mine. This gives me the edge of worry--what if he up and vanishes now and I get to see him like once every two weeks and he stops paying any attention to me and whiiiiiine--but that's all utter bullshit, of course. I gotta chill the fuck out. Funny how experiencing a couple of bad relationships sets you up for MASSIVE UNCERTAINTY, isn't it?
*deep breath*
Yeah.
Anyway.

Laura gets here tomorrow! I will bus to meet her when I am off work. And then, after she is gone, Dave will be here. Delightful, the company I am having this summer.

I guess what I am trying to say is--while I am uncertain as ever about some things, still I am surprisingly happy.

I think I'll post the dream I had last night, and then I will hunt sleep a little more.

Anybody who was on the good old BBS in the golden days of Before, who is in, near, or willing to visit Pittsburgh, who would be interested in meeting Lockheed?
She's coming to visit on the First of August, and staying for only a few days.

Let's talk a bit about pain.

Under certain circumstances pain is delicious. Being stripped to the waist, hands against the wall, the sting of soft leather on bare flesh, is something like penitence, and also a challenge. Fingernails along thighs, hands harsh in hair, the slap of an open palm, the gentle nuzzle and then fierce clamp of even teeth--applied properly, pain is a delight.

Under other circumstances, it clears the head, acid-etches sharp situations from fuzzy ones. A cold knife cutting through a hip pocket, a piece of broken glass gripped too tight in white-knuckled hands; cold concrete floor meeting face, crushing muscle between itself and bone; the instant after the blow before the fist at one's sternum becomes white-hot. Pain can make you fast, if also a little bit crazy.

When I was about eight years old, I read some article about neurology, about how pain and pleasure are both only messages your body is sending your brain. I became preoccupied with the thought that pain, then, could naturally be very pleasurable; that pleasure was mostly unnecessary. I was a very suggestible child, and the idea seemed to make sense to me; and from then on out my senses got a bit muddled. It wasn't until I burned myself taking muffins from the oven, and the holler of the burn couldn't decide if it was a great deep satisfying happy or a fierce weeping sickening pain, that I decided really I had better just let my body get about its business and stop giving myself chains of logic that remapped my brain. It took a month of careful work to bring me back to the point where slamming my elbow by accident didn't make me gasp in delight, and to where the sun on my face, my mother's hand brushing back my hair, were nice again instead of annoyances.

Aches from a job well done are still intensely satisfying to me, like the last second of a deep yawn, like the long slide down after an orgasm. Footwork-strained legs aching so fiercely that it makes me wince to walk down the stairs, deep kendo bruises that make co-workers glance over with concern, new callus, stiff shoulders, lightly bruised thighs, all are murmurs of good, good. The slow, liquid, almost langorous pain of it is a happy voice in the back of my head.


I wish I had that kind of pain today instead of this.
My right top wisdom tooth is shifting, and the tectonic motion is jamming all of my other teeth around, too; the effect is rather like my right canine has been immersed in lava. To my synaesthesia it's kind of like having classically-trained a soprano singing in my right ear, all of the time; the sound is actually quite lovely, but my tooth throbs with it, screams with it, hot and angry and neverending. This has been happening for two or three days at a time, every three weeks or so, for the last couple of months; the respite is only ever enough for a breather.

Tooth pain is very intimate. It's such a different thing from, say, a missed tsuki in kendo, a stubbed toe, an oven-burned wrist. It's inside, and there's no way to force it out.

If I have a migraine, if I've hurt myself terribly in some way, then I can meditate it into vanishing, but only for as long as I can concentrate on the image I build. I imagine I'm letting myself sink into dark, clear water. It rises around my sides, curls up over my ribs, fills my ears, my eyes, tapers off my nose until I am entirely submerged, and as it does so, the pain peels off of me like oil and rises to the surface. I can see it floating on the top of the water, and I have to concentrate on holding myself underneath it, breathing water into my lungs at a slow and measured pace, pushing myself further into the dark, cool, safe space, until my back rests on the sandy floor, my body rising and falling a few inches with every breath. I make myself feel the water under my fingernails, across the undersides of my feet, anything that makes the image more true as I try to get more and more distant from the pain that waits. The pain isn't malevolent, it's just a thing that is happening and it's part of me, so I can't hold it off for too long; a few hours, generally, before I have to come up for air, blinking stupidly, and it settles back around me like a damp piece of cloth.

With this--I'm typing this at work, actually--it doesn't work so well.
Have to empty book drops, push book trucks, shelve, smile at patrons, at my co-workers (though they're being very kind today, and understanding) makes it so that the ocean can't stay above my head. I can put it there--hold the pain above me like a balloon, like a tent roof against rain--but it makes me dozy and stupid to always be using a mental hand to push it off.

I have four Vicodin from an old prescription, sitting in their bottle in a suitcase in the back of my little closet. Never threw them out; they're just-in-case pills, though presumably they might have gone bad by now. When the pain is worst, I think about taking half of one; Vicodin is so nice, it pushes any pain to cloud-level, distant enough that it's only a dark speck like a passing plane, but oh, it's also pretty unsettling stuff. I don't like false joy, and Vicodin is fairy food to me. So when I was awaiting dental surgery a couple of years back, in agony that merited the having of it, I took a few as directed, and then decided the agony was better; better to be in pain, and me, than free of pain and something else.
I keep thinking about those four little white pills, and at this point? Honestly? The only reason I haven't taken them and gone to happy, happy sleep for a while is the frightening thought that if I do, I might need them more later than I do now--the thought that this might get worse.

Dreamed that Taesoo and I were walking down my street, somewhere near twilight, deep in discussion, and we were set upon by a handsome, young blond man with a massive crazy smile. He wrapped a speaker cord around my throat and pulled it taut, screaming that unless Taesoo could get the people from some organization off of his back, he'd kill me. I gestured wildly, swallowing, and Taesoo denied having any current connection to whatever organization it was, and in bemusement the man let the cord loosen a bit. I said that Taesoo had been out of the thing for years now, that we lived quietly, that didn't the blond man have a handsome smile? Wasn't he strong-looking, and such fine hands? I smiled, no sign of shaking, just determined to get through one more minute, keep his eyes on me for ten more seconds. Madly, he watched my lips moving, and I kept my hands from my throat, kept them folded in my lap, kept his attention on me long enough for Taesoo to reach over and in one motion, almost delicately, take the man by the chin and the back of the head, lift a couple of inches and twist neatly, the crack barely audible over my own crooning.

In a panic, I helped him carry the body into the house--which was the house I lived in when I was four, the view of the driveway through the living-room window was the same, but also the house I lived in at nine years old, cobbled together--and then decided, too late for wisdom, that we should call the police. We'd moved the body, it would look like murder for sure, but what else could we do? How could we ever hide it effectively?
The police came, some of them armed with swords and dressed in grey tabi, and immediately split us up, hands held out placatingly as I came toward them, asking that I move slowly so that they could be sure I had no weapons...

I woke up shouting and scooting away from Taesoo on my heels and my butt, until my back slammed into the corner and his hands were on my shoulders and my face. And then I burst into tears. Sleep-brained me knew I'd ruined his life by being weak and slow, that if I'd been able to avoid the man getting his cord around my throat then Taesoo could have disabled him instead of killing him. The thought of all the trouble to come--visits to the station, police interviews, eventual court dates and prison time (Taesoo is Asian! Our attacker was golden-haired and tanned, a handsome California boy. Those kinds of court dates do not usually end in favour of the defender)...my chest swelled with despair. Still only half-awake I made Taesoo promise not to kill anybody for me, never to ever kill anybody for me. Better far to let me die than suffer a destroyed life, I said. Don't kill anybody.
"How about brutally maim?" he asked, voice level, no humor; he meant it.
"That's fine, that's fine, just don't kill."
"I can do that."
And he pressed my head to his chest, and murmured some rhythmic lullaby in Korean until I dozed.

Woke again just a little bit before my alarm was scheduled to go off for work. And now I'm checking in books, and I still can't quite manage to shake it. The really stupid thing is, Taesoo would have a situation like that well in hand; I'd never make it to the choking and gasping part before he'd have the guy on the ground with multiple broken bones. I wonder what it will take for my dreaming-self to believe that he is more able to defend someone than I am?

That's a strangeness, I suppose. Typically in a fight, my lovers stand behind me, taller and physically stronger than me or no.
But typically I am also the one who makes the meals, and typically I recommend books, do not have them recommended to me. I need to start forgetting the typical for a bit.


Today on my breaks, I read Michael Marshall Smith's The Servants, which I liked well enough. Much less gory and disturbing than his usual fare, very tame, a children's story. Probably the only one of his books I would leave within grabbing reach of anyone younger than twelve.
(And that's even taking into consideration my own precocious reading habits at a much younger age; Michael Marshall Smith makes Palahniuk look tame, sometimes.)
Still, it's no Only Forward, not so fierce nor insanely emotional.

Ten minutes and I can go home...I suppose that I shall post this and pack up for the day. Be well, folks. Don't kill anybody if you can help it, it's not likely worth the outcome.

My computer died!
I am typing this on Taesoo's computer, which is a bit like wearing his underwear would be, I think--the familiarity doesn't bother me but it just doesn't fit right.

And now we are going out so he can buy a pillow, and we can go to a massive pillow fight at the park this evening.
Sometimes I am seven.

My life is full of new things right now.

I'm enjoying myself. While happiness generally feels precarious to me, still my life is sweet and full of fireflies and interesting food and...well. I am delighting in Taesoo's company. He reads at least half as fast as I do! Probably more like three-quarters. And he reads many of the same things, too. I'm actually a bit excited, I keep giving him things from my shelves, shared context is delicious. He's pretty much delightful, and learning him is proving fascinating. A lot of it is the whole fifth-degree black-belt thing; he moves like a light breeze, cutting through a crowd or striding through an empty space with the same ease of motion, and he dances disco-style in the kitchen while he cooks. A strange combination of goofiness and dark-eyed stillness.

We went to the Strip so that he could buy Korean food, with Leah being kind enough to drive; I haven't been seeing enough of Leah of late. She and I looked at pretty summer dresses, and I got a bag of gourmet gummi bears that are surprisingly good. In a little Asian market Taesoo started grinning, and nodded sidelong at the shopkeeper, murmuring 'she was born in the same part of Korea as I was,' though when he checked out and spoke with her for a minute I couldn't hear the accent he was referring to, as Korean still sounds like a dream-language to my ears. I suppose this will come in time.

I'm reading a lot, studying not nearly enough. At last it feels like summer, all my restless waiting having held it off until now. There are strawberries in the fridge waiting to become a pie, and last night I made lasagna for the first time in...it must be nearly a year. Lasagna is a food I make for loved ones, not on my own. It's nice to have an excuse for it.

I take photos, but mostly they turn out like ( this: )Scarred knuckles, narrow wrists, wolf-pelt hair, and no sense at all of who you are looking at.

This is turning out to be a very scattered thing, and I find that I am sleepy. So perhaps I will nap (he's filling out job applications online, and the sound is like rain, he types in the same odd fashion I do, a flurry of fingers and then silence, a rush of falling clicks and then a pause.)

Sleep, with the fan pointed at my legs...life is good.

This waking up screaming thing is a lot more rude when someone else is in the bed.

Stayed up until six AM watching Top wo Nerae! 2, slept until one. Got up at two. Ate apple pie for breakfast (I do a fantastic apple pie, my pie crust is legendary and I use three kinds of apples and very little cinnamon or sugar), then had a shower where my back was scrubbed by another person (when is the last time that that happened? Dave. July. A year ago now) and then, instead of going to the grocery store and getting Nishiki rice, I gave a foot rub and discussed how wonderful skin is. This of course resulted in one climbing back into bed.
(I love my bed. A deep, not-too-firm, not-too-soft futon, Queen sized, a light comforter, the window above barely covered with a reed curtain, just outside the window a very green back garden)
It's ten minutes to seven, and I am only now awake again.

The question in my mind is--why is it that an activity I have been well-known to partake of on my own, in an empty house (anime until stupid o'clock, waking late, leftover pie for breakfast, excellent shower, nap) becomes so much more delicious when experienced with company?

I still have a massive entry to finish about New York. Not the tournament, but everything else, Chinatown and the Empire State building and the subway, being surrounded by people with faces like mine in the opposite direction from white...many interesting things. Much interesting food, as well.

And now we will get up and get rice.

I promised I'd write, and now that it comes down to it, I find that it is hard.

The kendo tournament was in a much smaller space than I was expecting. I also recognized almost no one at all; this was not a bad thing, but considering that every joint practice and tournament I have ever been to, I've seen some familiar faces, it was certainly a little strange.

There were a couple of massive teams, and some very small ones, but ours was one of the smallest. Some of the dojos sent eight teams worth of fighters! That's forty people. I can't imagine regularly practicing with forty people.

I spent a good deal of time watching a bunch of fighters from a kumdo dojang who had come to participate. Kumdo is not kendo, even if it is the Korean analogue; there are differences, and I was looking for them. I think I am not well-trained enough to truly see, though. I did notice that they seemed to favour many quicker strikes over one perfect one.

I must admit that I got a bit of a swordsman-crush on a fellow named Jinwoo Jang--I think it was him! I am looking back through the booklet now and might be wrong, but it sounds right--who was very beautiful to watch. His movements were not flowing, not liquid, they were sharp and almost abrupt but somehow he was always precisely where he needed to be right in the instant he needed to be there. And he had a very good sense of the space; bowing out after a win, he took his steps back, bowed to his opponent, then pivoted on one heel and bowed also to the guy coming in to take his space for another bout. Very classy.

It's hard to write about my bouts! Hm. Okay. I entered the tournament feeling loose in my shoulders, easy, comfortable. I was not keyed up. I was not anxious. If I am being entirely honest, I went to sleep the night before thinking "Tomorrow I will bring a medal home for Sensei." It wasn't ego, my kendo isn't that good, it was just--a decision I made.

I looked my first opponent up in the booklet, and it said she was ikkyu, a step down from her first black belt, a couple of kyu past me in rank. There was a half-second frission of unease at that, and then it was just like well, Rob is ikkyu, and I fight him all the time. The unease dissolved.
Got in, started the match, and pretty much immediately took men. When I get into it, there is nothing but the bout, and sometimes it is hard to remember what happened, afterwards, but I won by men also. Two points.
Shook hands with her and she was beautiful, a very lovely, sincere smile.
My second bout, a little bit later, was more fierce. I took her men, and when she was expecting me to try for her men, I took her kote. She was grinning after that bout, I think she enjoyed it, which always makes me happy.
Afterwards, I went up to the table for that court. "So--ah--when is my next fight, then?"
And the man sitting there blinked at me. "Not for hours. You're in the finals now."
O_O
"Ah? Oh. So." and I turned, walked back around the court to my team. Steve Perry, from Ohio, a very sweet fellow who had come to be part of our team for the tourney, smiled broadly. "Finals, huh? Cool!" I was more than a bit disbelieving--usually the women's bracket is not separated into kyu and dan, and usually it's considerably longer to whittle everything down, so I had expected four or five fights before I got a chance at the finals.
Eric came walking up as I finished flipping through the tournament booklet, thinking perhaps there was a mistake. He said "So! I missed your bout. How'd you do?" I tilted my head and said "I won. In the finals now." and his eyes widened a fraction, and his mouth opened just enough for a small breath. He was easily as surprised as I was.

And then came waiting. Every other tournament I have ever been in so far--I say every other like there's been many, ha--I have fought and eventually lost and then spent the rest of the day watching my teammates and beautiful people on other teams. But to be in the final? That meant that I couldn't let myself get into that sort of pleasurable drowsiness that comes on me, where I am enjoying but not sharp. I do not think I did so well at that.

Team bouts, I got knocked out immediately. I gave the woman fighting me a good go; she was nidan, though I didn't know that going into it, and it made me feel a bit better about losing to her.
She also gave me one of the most magnificent bruises I've ever gotten from kendo; as long as my hand, nowhere thinner than an inch and in one place two inches wide, and some of the skin is rubbed open as well; she went for my men but was unbalanced, and stabbed me in the arm instead, and her momentum dragged the tip of her shinai down and into my bicep for several inches. Hurt a lot even then, and usually I do not notice pain at all during actual shiai.
(Evidence of this is that I have a very deep bruise just above my left elbow, and no memory whatsoever of receiving it. Hurts! Is surprisingly ugly, going black now. There''s a hard knot in the centre of it, it must have been delivered with some force. But I have no idea when.)

I lost to a men, and we bowed out and shook hands, and she was radiant. Kendo just makes people beautiful. "That was good, that was good!" she kept saying. "Thank you!"

And then there was more time to wait. My wisdom teeth were singing, and I was worn out and tired, but still very happy to be there. I practiced for a bit with Eric, sat outside in the sunlight and had an interesting discussion with a massively muscled bicyclist, ate a banana. Texted Gin over and over. Talked to Taesoo on the phone just a little. Went back in, and had my final fight. It was against Adriana Ariga, Ariga-Sensei's daughter, and she owned me, but it was enjoyable and I think I figured something out about a personal flaw in my kendo, right in the last second.

It's really hard to sum up a tournament. There are so many little things that add up into so many big things. I need to work on, as Eric put it, 'maintaining intensity.' I'd never had to worry about it before, but I intend to have to worry about it many times in the future. Getting knocked out in the morning makes for an easy ride, but won't likely improve my kendo. And--I've come to the realisation that I really like fighting in tournaments. A lot. It used to scare me, the very thought of it unsettled me, but now I have a strange sort of hunger for it. Pitting myself against strangers is just fun! Throwing myself out there against an unknown opponent, a three-minute test where I don't know all the variables. Exciting. And I always learn something about myself, and I learn about how to do better. It's intense and just enjoyable.
I don't mind losing. But I really want to win. I don't like losing, to be sure! But if my opponent is much more on than me at that moment, if I simply am not giving it my all, then maybe I would feel bad if I won. I like earning my wins, I think.
Though--there's something deeply satisfying about knowing something like "She thinks I am going to take her men. All I have to do is reach out, and--"
and taking kote.

Anyway. I am not summing this up very well, perhaps...as I said, there is always so much. But I learned something, and I know how it feels now to really *want* to win, to make that decision and follow through with it. It's a different feeling, and I like it a lot.

( I did well. )
Thank you thank you thank you for your well-wishes. :)

Wish me luck!

Tomorrow morning I leave for New York.
Tonight I could go to one last practice, if I cared to. I am having trouble deciding which would make me more uncomfortable; missing practice immediately before a tournament, or getting to the tournament with damp kote. Emi-senpai gave me a tenegui that does not suck, so I can get my hair as sweaty as I care to and not worry about needing to run a load of laundry with my tenugui in it; I can wash my gi when I get home and tumble it cold all night if necessary, I can take an hour and iron the pleats knife-straight in my hakama before practice or before sleep, it doesn't much matter which.
But urrgh, wet kote. Nothing like sticking your hands into clammy leather.
(I think I complain so much to shame myself into going.)

Regardless, though--I am looking forward to this. I have never been to New York, and this will only be my third tournament as a participant, and I am feeling much better about my kendo than I was for the first two.
Plus, wahey, road trip.

Life is complicated,, increasingly complicated, right now. Things which seemed more certain are precarious, and it's taking its toll on the space around my eyes. I should not be awake--I did not sleep until after four, and I've been up since nine, same as yesterday.

So, distractions!
I am reminded that I never showed photos from the Tekkoshocon demo (did I? Maybe I did?). Have some random ones, and a few photos from my last two tournies, too.
( Read more... )

So I was lying in the park, in the breeze, my laptop lying open beyond my head so I could hear if Taesoo came online, Yukio Mishima book in my hands, when a shadow fell before me. "Hare Krishna." said a male voice. I twisted on the cloth I'd thrown out on the grass, squinting up into the sun to say hello and no thank you I don't want a vegetarian cookbook, but before I really even get a chance to get a good look at him--Caucasian, early sixties, smiling, swathed in some pale fabric--he interrupted himself. The words about the books he was holding stuttered out, replaced by "Where are you from?"
sigh
"Here, sir." The 'sir' is reflexive. I very often use it when I want to say 'you asshole,' or when I am trying to distance myself from the person I am speaking to.
The corners of his lips twisted. "But what nationality?"
"American, sir."
"But--but what ethnicity? You're Native American?"
"No, sir." And then he finished offering me the book, and I declined, and he moved on.

I was cranky. I have long since tired of being asked that question. But he saw the narrowness of my eyes and walked away, so at least--I thought--he was more alert than some who have pestered me about it. And then, not ten minutes later, as I was starting to be less irritated, he came back. "Look, can you just tell me--what nationality are you? Where is your family from? Because I have traveled all over the world and--"
And I got pissed. He'd read my body language correctly before, and left me alone, so why did he come back?
"I am many things, sir. And I would like to tell you that I find that to be an offensive question."
"Normal people don't! I've been all over, asked a lot of folks, and they just tell me. I've traveled the whole world and--"
"Many multiethnic people that I know consider it to be an offensive question, sir."
"It's not offensive!"
"Look. I am a person before I am a Rottweiler, okay?"
And he grinned at me. "Oh, that's cute. That's nice."

I drew myself up, and one of the women with his group, a sweeet-faced young thing, came up behind him smiling nervously. "Oh, don't mind him." she said. "Don't mind him. It's not offensive." And he walked away, without apologizing.

I am sick of being told what does and what does not offend me.
I am sick of being asked what I am. I'm a human being, and I chose to be so. I'm an adult, an atheist, a skilled copyeditor, a relatively amateur martial artist. But as for the rest of it? I just--I can tell you what I am not but it is not anybody else's right to ask or tell me what I am.
I am not one of those flip-books where you section out the animals to make something monstrous. I am not a 'mixed-breed,' a 'mixed-blood,' or an 'exotic.' I am not a puzzle to be figured out! I am not here so that you can page through my blueprints--oh, look, Filipina jawline, oh, look, Italian hips. Yes, my eyes are massive and dark and bafflingly, slightly Asian. Yes, my wrists are thin and my waist is narrow but my hips curve out. My skin color could be filtered from anything but white, it's true, but I have an Irish chin. And? It is not your innate privilege to take me down to my composite pieces like a Lego set!
I'm not your fucking game! Don't look at the bits, look at me, or better yet don't. If you think that it's acceptable to ask who my ancestors were before you even ask my name, like you would with a dog, like you would with a horse, you should just walk the fuck away.
'Cause one of these days, somebody's gonna ask me that question while I'm holding a shovel, and I don't know if I can be trusted in that situation.

Things which please me this week:

I was at the grocery store, looking at yogurt, when three children--siblings, I think, the oldest of them perhaps seven years old--came racing up, grinning, and decided they would pick out my yogurt for me. "Do you like Key Lime? No? Okay, how about Blackberry? No? Which do you want?" Upon my deciding, as usual, that I wanted Strawberry-Banana, one of them reached out and grabbed one, placed it into my hand with a great deal of pomp, and then they all went racing to the other side of the store at breakneck speed.

Last night, Titus-Sensei brought in a carefully-folded square of fabric cut from an old hakama, for Emi-senpai to use to mend her kote. As he handed it over, he smiled in that quiet way he has, and said "This is like--as if I am giving you a piece of my medicine. Use it wisely."

Gin texted me me the other night to tell me he could see fireflies.

My roommate came home at midnight, soaked to the skin and grinning as she shivered--she'd been at a party at a bar where they turned the sprinklers on and left them on all night, simulating rain inside the building.

Taesoo will be here in nine days. He'll be waiting for me at my apartment when I get home from New York.

I leave for my tourney in seven days, and for once I am not feeling as though I have been slacking off in my preparations. I have been practicing hard, and I am feeling pretty good; not as though I've made any great leaps, no major room for braggadocio here, but I can feel the ground under my feet.

That was a hell of a storm last night. I particularly was interested by the bit where the neighbour's trees started dropping limbs, and we got hail the size of robin's eggs.
And the bit where the newscasters were like "If you are listening to this broadcast, please, take shelter."
Tornados, huh? Clouds that come down out of the sky and eat your house?
What the hell?

Flash floods, those make sense. And fire--whoo, boy, does fire make sense. You don't grow up in the desert and not have a really healthy respect for fire. When it rains, you get to the high ground and when there's fire, you go into the wind, not away from it. But. Uh. What do you do about clouds that want to eat your house?

I don't know what to say.

We live in a world full of people. I forget that sometimes.

Mmmn, oooh, wisdom teeth.

I'm lying in bed in my silly/wonderful pink fluffy bathrobe, the fan going, the curtains lowered. It's languid and if it weren't for the constant ohgod pain it'd be lovely.

Still haven't put my eyes in for the day, wearing my clunky glasses. Of course, I have only been awake for a little while.

Had two dreams that I can remember; first involved someone setting off a bomb in a football stadium, and I woke up with the words "there are pieces!" on my lips, images of torn up footballers vivid in my brain; and then against my better judgment I fell asleep again, and dreamed a beautiful thing.

It's mostly gone now, but some of the things I do remember--I was a servant, I think, to some terrible desert lord. I was new-come to the stone city I served in. I had a friend outside the walls, a long-haired young man who I think perhaps was a herdsman; and I had a friend inside the walls, son of the lord.
His mother was dead. And reviled as some sort of witch.
The desert lord was feared, a shape-changing sorcerer who often looked like a kind of raven/griffin thing, heavy with jewels and casually vicious.

I was conscious, at the same time, of an analogue to this world--somewhere more technologically advanced--that I might be returning to.

The friend outside turned out to be conversant with spirits (in particular, it seems, those who had cared for the maligned lady), and he turned them on the griffin-lord, who fled, or was killed, and with the lack of him the city transformed. I remember wandering through the terraced palace with the young lord, marveling over how the walls had abruptly been covered in murals of green-growing things, and of women who were also flowers, depending on how you looked at them. The one that sticks in my head most clearly is a painting taller than I, of women flying in a great candle-lit marble and rosewood ballroom, their skirts flowing around them. The angle at which you see them is below; their ruffled underskirts, and golden shoes, and brightly coloured outer dresses conspire with the point of view to make them into flowers with slim, stem-bodies and arms thrown out like leaves, hair whirled out like roots.
I would very much like to paint this picture. It has been a long time since I have had a clean canvas, though.


I think the dreams were inspired by the following; the first by a discussion I had with Alex last night about John Dee, the sinking of the Spanish Armada, and how magic would be more elegant a weapon of war than an A-bomb; I don't much see the need for elegance in war as it is entirely horrible and making it more beautiful does not lessen this, but I do see the need for a lack of waste and civilian casualties. War is a gobbler and a messy eater.
(And there is something to be said about the idea that if John Dee was this tremendously powerful fellow, who destroyed that many men on his own, it was a hell of an act; most men in war will never have that power. But the weaker side can still possess bombs, which would, one supposed, assist in keeping powerful men in check?)

The second dream--when I woke from the flying-body-parts dream I needed to get my brain onto a different track. So I picked something random to read, followed some links. I ended up reading about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, built for a heartsick queen, and about various 'confounding of tongues' myths, and about an Eridu king, so plainly there's some relation to that. It's not often that I can point to the genesis of my dreams, so this is kind of neat.

And now...time for day clothes, contact lenses, to draw a comb through this tangled hair and to run to work to get my paycheck. Mortal cares, and all of that.
I'll respond to everybody's comments on the last one when I get back, my apologies for being so lazy about it...but if I don't get out of the house now I never may. The thunderstorms are magnificent of late but I do not appreciate wet socks.

I can write about the thing I have been not writing about! I have been not writing about it the way that, starting a fire on a windy day, when the first flames start finally to lick at the tinder, one holds one's breath and crouches very still.


At the end of June, Taesoo is coming out to Pittsburgh to live, and to study at my dojo.


Shin Taesoo is my friend. What else he is, I don't know yet; I do know that I care very much for him and he for me. Taesoo is Korean-American, a chef, a martial artist with many years of study behind him (though not so much in kumdo, Korea's analogue of kendo, but rather in Taekwondo). He speaks English, a good deal of Korean and some Japanese; he's quite a bit taller than me, slender and muscled and has that way of being very, very still that is common to hardworking martial artists. His eyes are a (synaesthesia demands I say 'creamy' but maybe 'smooth' makes more sense) very dark brown, much darker than mine. His skin is paler, and he has hair like a wolf's pelt, black and thick and a bit coarse. He has high, sharp cheekbones in a broad face, and a well-defined jaw; a bit unusual-looking but quite lovely. His hands are long, his fingernails neat and short, his wrists narrow but his arms well-muscled.
(I asked him, once, what part of his body he likes best; "My nose, I think." he said. "Because it has never been broken. It's still straight." I think this covers a lot of "Who is Taesoo?" ground in a very short space.)

Taesoo knows a lot that I do not know, about cooking and martial arts and some rough stuff; about language, and doubtless about many subjects that we have not discussed. And I know much he does not know, about other things. But walking into my room for the first time, the first thing he really did was look at my bookshelves; and he grinned at me and said "You have a copy of The Last Unicorn? You rock." He'd read it already, and he was the first guy I had ever been interested in for whom this was true; most guys write it off as dumb girl fantasy without ever cracking the cover and seeing what an elegant thing it is. He also reads Pratchett, and I sent my copy of Kage Baker's Anvil of the World with him when he went home.
(Does anything say so clearly that I hold him in my affections? I gave him my books.)

What else can I say? He's been through darkness and he is much like me, capable of true anger, and he is surprisingly kind. He says he doesn't like kids, but if he's smoking and there's a kid in front of him on the sidewalk, he'll stamp out the cigarette or cross the street to prevent them being affected by a moment of his smoke; he seems to be endlessly patient with the very few people to be in his inner circle, and patient enough with those outside it. He asks me every day if I have eaten well, and he says laughingly that he's going to make me fat when he gets here; like me, he makes food to say I love you; you matter and like me he spends maybe a little more time worrying about others than he should.

Meeting him at all was pretty much accidental, online, and the whole situation thus far (like very nearly every other relationship I've ever been in) is cobbled together from happenstance, coincidence, and lightning from an empty sky. I can say that talking to him is...like talking to myself? Were I just a bit more dark, still? And the two year age-difference might account for that, actually. I can say that being around him feels peaceful and good.

I can say that--considering it's been a year and a half since I went on a date, really--I'm...a little wary. He is not moving out here with nothing in his eyes but me, everything has sort of lined up; housing, job, and his dislike of Boston have all conspired to make Pittsburgh seem a shiny place (which, let's be honest, it is). But while I am not the only reason, I am certainly the catalyst for the move. He is moving here to be around me. That's kind of...humbling? To choose me as the direction he'd walk in, when his time in Boston was done...
Scary, maybe? Is that the word?

Being around Taesoo makes me quietly and fiercely--and sometimes, loud and laughingly--happy. He understands when my eyes get dark and my hands get still and I'm not here anymore but seeing something horrible. And it does not scare him; and he does not need to coddle me. He simply understands it.
But I have not yet gotten that much of a chance to be around him at all. For all our hundreds of hours of talking on AIM and Skype and on the phone, I have spent three days only in his presence; three very good days, but I am not fool enough to judge the shape of a relationship by so little. So as I said--I do not yet know what he is to me. But I care.
And I am going to get a chance to find out.

Crossposted to fanfic100! Maybe I should get a fanfic journal?

Title: Poetry
Fandom: Hellsing
Characters: Walter C. Dornez, Seras Victoria
Prompt: 065, Passing.
Word Count:3038
Rating: PG 13 at worst
Summary: Seras hardly knows what to do with herself on a night when she doesn't have to go out hunting--but Walter knows how to relax.
Author's Notes: My first fic here! I hope you like it. :)

( Seras paced. )

I might be able, soon, to talk about what it is that I've been keeping so quiet about the last couple of months. I hope so! Were I less superstitious or more certain I'd be talking already.

I spent today cleaning, sleeping, and studying Japanese. There's been a subtle click in my brain, and little things begin to make more sense.
I will spend tomorrow sleeping and studying.
My sexy pink-haired roommate installed a screen door on the back porch! It's fantastic. The noise of it slamming shut is very soothing.

What else? Things are going on. Mostly good. Been under an intense amount of stress, but, well--when am I
not, and all. Taking time to meditate, and taking my vitamins, helps a lot.

I guess my sister must be writing about me again, since people off of her f'list are looking at me. Hi, people off of my sister's f'list.
(That's a pair of words that lose their meaning very easily on repetition. Ssisster'ss F'lisst. It sounds like those wasp-women from Tanith Lee's 'Night's Sorceries.')
("It iss CHILD!")

Tonight Natalie made venison burgers for dinner. My friend Aaron came over by surprise, bearing five Dresden Files books that it has not yet been my pleasure to read, and he stayed over for dinner, and we talked about movies and comics.

Watched some Top wo Nerae! 2. I had forgot how much I delight in the protagonist's voice. High and sweet and candy-flavoured. I downloaded it so I could work back through and maybe make an AMV; am downloading Paradise Kiss and Gankutsuou for the same reasons.

Edited more for Narumoto-Sensei. Have been editing for him quite a bit; woke the other day to thirteen passages in my inbox, some of them a couple of pages long (but most of them quite short). Gave me a bit of a start of dismay, quickly dealt with. It's not enough; for all the hard work he does with me, it's not enough. I'm glad to have the chance to repay him in some small fashion.

Wow, I am tired. Evidence of this is my increasingly simple sentences. Time to make my way to sleep, I think. And tomorrow, more kanji and grammar and endless head-paining study of a language that fits into my brain all as angles.

I keep dreaming about the desert.
Not the desert I grew up in. Deep, midnight, silvery sand dunes, peaked by wind and constantly shifting.
I wonder if this means that I am done dreaming of the sea.

I am typing this from the front steps of the library that I work at, or rather from the low marble wall that encloses a statue in front of those steps. It is lovely out today but I can't quite seem to get comfortable--
--ahah, free bench and table, woohoo!--

--I am typing this from one of the fairly-comfortable picnic-style bench-table conglomerates at the very edge of the yard that houses my library. The breeze is up today, and in a few hours I have kendo; I am sitting here ostensibly to study but no study is happening. Instead I have been chewing gum, reading webcomics, and looking at helicopters as they flitter over. All in all, satisfying. Feeling a vague sort of peace, though it is not contentment because there are things that I wish were happening which aren't, and people I wish were here who are far off. But things are basically okay.

(*moves to an even better, shadier bench-table*)


So--yeah. Life.

The dead-looking, wrist-wide treelets emerging from the base of the prolific apple tree in my back yard, which I had taken to be a pair of suckers off of it, burst into blossom. They are not, in fact, suckers off of the apple tree, they are woodbine, or European honeysuckle, and now my bedroom smells of honeysuckle every time I open my windows. It is glorious.
(these are the honeysuckle that I grew up with; these are the honeysuckle that one of my senpai smells partly of, to my oddly-perceiving brain; and in researching what they are actually called, I found that traditionally they are symbolic of love that does not damage, that holds but does not strangle, and does not injure on the release of it, because a honeysuckle vine does not damage tree or building that it climbs. This pleases me.)

In the tree across from me, fifteen feet off and twelve feet up, there's a knothole; and from the knothole there are emerging cranky paper-accordion cries. It's a starling's nest. These are *not* the starlings that I was raised with, which are small and black and star-shaped; these are larger, and while the males are black widh deep, deep blue heads, the females are a gorgeous brown-to-purple-to-green, and in the summer their feathers take on creamy flecks; they have their stars on, Julian told me.

Today I am going to be hanging out with Leah; she will come to practice with me, and then home with me to hang out and watch bizarre Japanese TV dramas and maybe make brownies or something. We can be twelve.

(I am much looking forward to practice tonight. Kata practice after normal practice, now, on Thursdays; and oh, I do love kata. Like the best kind of dance.)

I suppose I am just re-arranging my life at the moment. Makes me a bit dozy.
But! Leah will be here any moment--I'd best go.


ETA:
And then my computer refused to post this, and then Leah showed up, and we walked to the dojo and I had practice, and I got to see my beautiful, beautiful senpai, and then Leah and I came back to my apartment, and as soon as I was in the door I smelled something gorgeous--my roommate had put a vase of lilacs on the kitchen table, and it was just...so good.
Leah and I made dinner, watched the first few episodes of Hana Kimi, had some popsicles (thank you, Taesoo! I had never imagined a honeydew-flavoured popsicle, it was delicious!)and now she is sleeping and I am listening to a winebeetle buzzing against my wall as it considers whether or not my laptop monitor is the Moon. Sleep, I think, would be best.




--G

*deeply tired*
Stayed up until stupid o'clock last night, feeling ill. Chatted on AIM a good bit, which was nice; it's good to have conversational company at least when the world is insane.

Work today is work, much as the usual. Everyone is here, though, for the first time in many weeks, so at least no one is bogged down with too much to shelve.


Missing my friend from Boston. Missing Katie a lot today, bizarrely...haven't seen her in five years! But ah, well, this happens.
At any rate, time to shelve. More later.

--G

"Do your people ever write songs about anything besides love and death?"
--Willy Silver to Eddi McCandry


I'm very, very tired.
At the beginning of the week I lost two friends to stupid, pointless deaths. Thank you very much but no I do not want to talk about it. Probably ever.

I cleaned my house from top to bottom; I made banana bread for my kendo team; I walked a lot and thought a lot more.

On Friday, my friend Taesoo came to visit me from Boston. We have spent the weekend doing nothing in particular, wandering around the city eating gelato, laughing quietly at loud delighted drunks; and I've had Kate Bush stuck in my head since I walked him to the Greyhound station and saw him off.
("It's in the trees--it's coming!")

But damn, dozens and dozens of hours of online conversation, and when I finally get to meet him it's--my friend Taesoo, not a moment of awkwardness, saw him across the bus terminal and it was just oh, hello!
So my life is more complicated than it shortly ago was.

Waiting is hard. Love and death are hard. And I have a fever now, so I suppose that I shall go to sleep, which should in theory be very easy.

here is an interpretation of a poem that I simply can't stand behind--but I don't know whether or not my interpretation of it is right.

The poem itself is here. And every interpretation of it that I can find is all about temptation; that if God is hid it's because one is being tempted, and that in passing separate ways the two of them avoided the dire temptations of the flesh. Everyone seems to think that this is a poem about sex.
I can't agree.
I can see where the idea comes from; being caught in the teeth of something that denies Reason could certainly be explained by repressed desire shattering Victorian restraint. But it just doesn't taste right.
And mostly for the last stanza:

Let her go and find a mate,
As I will find a bride,
Knowing naught of Limbo Gate
Or Who are penned inside.
There is knowledge God forbid
More than one should own.

I have a friend who was raised in a similar situation to myself. He calls himself a stray, and says the same of me; he recognizes things in me that unsettle other people as simply being things he carries, too. It's...restful.
He says "What I want more than anything is a world where people like you and me don't exist." It will never happen, but it's a pretty dream.

It's soothing that he understands me, horrible as it might be that he's had to climb through the same shadowlands. But for me, in the past, loving people who had no comprehension of real evil was kind of like allowing myself into a world I'd been denied. It doesn't last, of course, because one never gets entirely clean of this. We turn to people who don't understand because it means that we can forget, but eventually we remember, and those people, lacking all context, are generally helpless in the face of it. It is perhaps cruel, even if no cruelty is intended. There's part of me that never has managed to crawl out from under the bed, face pressed to the floorboards and bags and bags of dirty laundry pulled in after her so that she's invisible as a little mouse. But mostly she's quiet, and for that I am lucky.
There are those of us who, upon remembering, wear the darkness like a cloak; to stand next to someone who has seen them in it, traps them there. To see the reflection of it in someone else's eyes blinds them.
Many kinds of darkness you can't climb out of alone. But too often, having reached the lip of the well with another's help, neither of you can be around the other anymore; not without holding each other in the dark.

I've thought that--the sun marks you, but dark things do much the same. You carry it around under your skin, and it's visible to people who can see in the dark. And if they can see it, you have to see it too. Some disfigurements are imperceptible to the blind, and though it doesn't make them vanish, it makes them...smaller, somehow.

I can't see this as a poem about temptation. What do you think?

Just home from tournament. Sensei sent out this email, which sums up one angle of the weekend quite neatly:

"Please join me in congratulating the members of the University of Pittsburgh Kendo Dojo on the following achievements during the 21st Annual Cleveland Kendo Tournament and promotion test:

Eric Gildea - 1 and 2 Dan Division - 2nd place
Mifune Yutaka - 3 Dan and up Division - 2nd place
Keiichiro Narumoto - 3 Dan and up Division - 1st place
Team A (Gildea, Jeong, Narumoto, Yutaka, Schleyer) - Team competition - 3rd place

Vincent Lee - 4 kyu
Emi Iwatani - 2 Dan

I consider this an outstanding accomplishment for our dojo. Omedeto!"

You guys. You guys. Seriously.
*can't stop smiling*
If I could sum up this weekend...I mean, I *can't,* but if I could, there would be a lot of happy adverbs.

I personally had three bouts and lost all of them; but oh. The woman who beat me in women's went on to win the tourney for that bracket; the man who beat me in my last bout was so...it was just so good, we both couldn't stop grinning, when we shook hands he looked like he wanted to hug me.
(Expect essay forthcoming on kendo as an act of love.)

And if I hadn't known already, I would be quite, quite in love with my team. Such good people.
Still reeling. *massive grin* I mean--you guys...

This is not a game. Here and now you are alive.

Guess it's been a bit since I updated with anything of meaning, huh?
My fingertips are lavender and magenta and the precise same blue as my hair has been, dark and promising. And so is a shirt which heretofore had been white but rather terribly stained; I've tried over and over for six months to clean it, and finally counted myself the loser in that battle. So now it's purple and magenta and dark blue, and dripping dry on the back porch. I stepped out in my bathrobe, and the porch creaked under my bare feet, and it was raining; my breath steamed though it's not that cold, and when I looked out at the apple tree it had exploded into leaves, though this morning they were only tight nubbins of greeny-gold. Some of them are as long as my thumb, now.

I broke my shinai in practice last night, so I've spent some time this evening putting staves from one and leather from another together. Seems it'll work, though the length is a little different than I am now accustomed to, which might make Thursday's practice problematic. Better that I get it all worked out then, though.

Anyone who has read this journal for sufficient years may have noticed that I get quiet when something serious is going on. The fact that the last several posts have been about dreams or kendo, but nothing about life might be a good indicator; so I'll come out and say yes, something is going on.
Not bad. Complicated.
I never want to talk about anything while I'm still uncertain of it. So I won't. But I will say, to any who may have wondered, that life is well, and I am working hard.

I've also been made challenge-mod for psohdrabble ! What fun!


And may I say that this melody, at four minutes and forty seconds or so, when all the musical uncertainty comes back to one main path, does delicious things to my brain? Just--good.