come_love_sleep

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.

I've been eating right and exercising, but I still get so sick I'm laid flat. Maybe I am getting better, but I'm still not better enough for kendo--and I really should go to kendo, and I want to practice but am definitely too weak and ill; I need to talk about the Tekkoshocon demonstration with Eric, but I don't want anyone to get this. T_T Decisions, decisions.

The sky looks very bright and blue from my window. I'm half-sitting on my futon, still not dressed for the day(but I didn't sleep until five in the morning, this is all right), eating some of a breakfast experiment that I made last night (brown sugar, finely-chopped baby carrots, grated apple, cinnamon put into a basic muffin mix, came out as a soft, sweet bread), and coughing ceaselessly. My face feels tired. My hair needs washing (all of me wants a scrub, I miss being around someone who could sponge down a tired and feverish Genevra, condition her hair, towel her off, lotion her back...), and so do the dishes, so I will probably hie myself to the kitchen sink in a minute.

Finished Ayakashi last night, or rather the part of it that had the Medicine Seller from Mononoke in it. If you've not seen these things, I highly recommend them.

(Goes off, does dishes, has shower, back to futon.)
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Anyway. Time to see if I'm capable of moving outside the house today.

This week has flown by.
SO! Lessee. Kendo was last night. I feel that I've actually begun to learn something--came away with a blister on my foot but my hand was better because I wrapped it first. I have taken such pains in the last couple of years to have nice feet that it's funny how enjoyable it is to utterly destroy their loveliness. But I'll write about all that in my kendo blog over at ko_kissaki and not let it fill up the page here.

What else? Socks came in today, woo! Three pairs of thigh-high striped socks, three pairs of fishnet stockings of various really odd sorts, two garter belts, one pair of sock garters. I've needed a new garter belt for a long time, and I've never had a pair of sock garters before but have wanted some for ages.

Most of my textbooks are FINALLY in. Unfortunately, my Sociology book didn't come--in its place is a book about the art of the theater. Interesting, but it'll do me no good whatsoever when I need to have seven chapters read within the next twelve days so that I can take a test.
(I can read seven chapters in an evening, 'tis true. But I don't want to have to wait until the last evening to do so.)

(I think my reading speed inspires me to laziness. Why worry, after all, when I read ten times faster than anyone else in this class and can just flip flip flip to the right answer?)
(Bad Gen.)

Three Bio tests due by Monday, and I only just received that textbook. Just finished one test--it's for an online class, after all--and I'll likely do the next on lunch at work tomorrow, and the third tomorrow night, since I have to be up early on my Sunday off to go to a joint kendo practice in Ohio.

We're going to go to Tekkoshocon, in a couple of months--Jonathan is going as Hanazono Shizuma from Strawberry Panic, and I'm going as Tohsaka Rin from Fate: Stay Night.
(I have not seen the anime, or at least I have not seen more than a couple of episodes of it. I hear it is much less ero than the game, though. Not that the ero scenes in the game really were. Except for the little bit that she was in them, anyway. A very take-charge woman, Tohsaka.)

Anyway. I am going to go have some salad, and then maybe do the next Biology test. Wish me luck...

Ahem.
http://community.livejournal.com/lj_biz/242602.html
Opt out of datamining, anyone?

--Gen

All those "Glad you're all right" comments! Makes a girl feel loved. Thank you.

I have redoubled my efforts to find a good martial arts class. With luck my next paycheck will be large enough to support it. Between the application fee for Pitt and the fact that this time's paycheck was very small, I've pretty much nothing left at all.

Changed ten bucks into quarters so I could have four loads of laundry. That's sheets and blanket, one load of blues-purples-blacks, one load of reds-oranges-browns(the oranges being Julian's, as there is no orange I can wear)and when I get home, possibly some towels.
Wouldn't have done even that, would have hand-washed socks for the week, if Julian's mother wasn't taking him out for some food shopping tomorrow. I dunno if she knows that we still share food(and communication, she's been saying some rather awful things about me now that Julian and I are no longer lovers), and I'm not in a hurry to inform her, but if she helps him it helps me.

Every day that I work at the Library, I take fifteen minutes or so to read some poetry. Today's was from a book of "Little Geisha Songs," which despite the rather disparaging title was interesting. They're all full of a lot of pain, though.
(Almost all of them. There's one I liked that goes "I don't care what cherry tree blossoms down the road. I will stay with this tree. Petals scatter or stay--My chosen man." )
There was one in particular, though, about the circumstances around lovers, that made the flesh between my shoulderblades ache. "Cold water can't brew a fragrant tea," it says. "Still, let them think what they will--I shall never leave your side."
That sort of calm, despairing certainty shows up a lot in Japanese poetry and song. Knowing that she's not going to be allowed to marry the one she loves(and who loves her) she is still entirely willing to ruin herself over him, hopelessly. No room in her for hope, but she's full of stillness, she is nothing but her aim. Everything else has been abraded away. It's a shining thing, and terribly sad.

And then I turned the page and laughed as an irritable singer describes his or her lover as having a karakuri marionette for a heart, with someone in the shadows pulling the strings. Been there, thank you very much. A thousand years and complications of language between me and the person who strung those words, but I understand completely.



And it's time to go shelve some more books.

--Genevra

Well, last night was interesting.
Hung out at Jonathan's. Between the four of us--Jonathan, myself, Eric, and Emily Love--we bought four pizzas. Jonathan and I watched some World of Whorecraft(fantastically awful), and I studied for my motorcycle permit test, and he did his Japanese for the evening, and we mostly just were there. The hour grew late, Eric left to catch the bus, Emily went to bed, and I got up to leave.
Thought about my pizza. Thought But it's late, and it's not wise to carry anything that might cause trouble if I've got to run. I think like that all the time, which is probably sensible.
Said goodbye to Jonathan, left his apartment.
Halfway down the stairs, tired--which is not an excuse but an explanation--I thought I should have changed into my blue jeans again, instead of the shorts. But Jonathan was so sleepy that I didn't do as impulse demanded, which was to turn around again, walk back up the stairs, and ask to use his bathroom to change clothes. Just left.
Not as wise, perhaps, and it resulted in my causing him to have less sleep anyway.
Because.

I was about five minutes hard walking from his apartment when I noticed something odd. The street was fairly empty, normal enough for the hour, but in the middle of a parking lot--not in a space, just in the middle--just across the street from me there was a minivan. Its engine was on, but there were no lights on at all.
I got an instant sort of "Hmm" feeling, wary. Couldn't exactly say why. But as I passed it, the headlights came on, and very slowly it pulled out of the parking lot.
They weren't looking at a map, I thought, their interior lights were off. And there had been no cell phone glow on the driver's face, so it can't have been that. I paused, turned up stoop to an apartment building, feigned tying my shoe. Down on street level, they went by me at walking speed, then went to the next closest intersection and waited at the light.
Okay. They are just lost, or something. I dusted my knee and rose, stepped back into the sidewalk.
And they stopped, and turned around, and waited in the middle of the street. Just in the middle of a three-way intersection, with the streetlights flashing above them on all sides. Facing me.
Right. I took a single step back, considering. There was no one on the street. Two blocks or so up, long blocks, there was a bar; nothing else was open or had people, and it wasn't kicking-out time yet so I couldn't reasonably expect pedestrians.
Seconds passed, while they waited, and I thought. And then I stepped back up a few of the concrete stairs.
They pulled back into the road, facing me still, and came up a little ways, and parked. Headlights on, interior lights off, at a place where they could still see me.
I stepped back up a few more steps, now probably about thirty feet from the road, 'til I was fairly sure I was invisible to them.
And they pulled out of their parking space on the side of the street, and around a few parked cars, and parked again where they could see me.
Hmm.
I could have been overreacting. I am not the sort to leap at shadows, and I've made that walk a couple of hundred times, many of them in the dark, most of them alone. But. This felt way wrong, and even if they weren't paying any attention to me at all, even if it was all just coincidence(but once is happenstance, twice coincidence, and three times enemy action), I decided not to just step out into the road again.
So I called Jonathan instead.
And Jonathan came out and walked me home.

By the time he arrived, the van was gone. I'd moved back, as I talked to him on the phone, so that I couldn't see them and hopefully they couldn't see me(If you can see the enemy, the enemy can see you; just because you cannot see the enemy does not mean the enemy cannot see you), and when he came up to me there was nothing there to see. So I felt a bit stupid.
Not stupid enough to not do the same thing again, however.

He walked me most of the way, and then I called Julian and told him what was up and why I was later than usual. I am very, very glad I finally buckled down and got myself a cell phone.
And God damn it, I'm going to start remembering to change into clothing that doesn't scream "Victim! Victim! Rape me now!" when it's dark out. I like having skin, I like wearing very-shorts, but it's not like I'm not aware of the effect they can have, and everything is different at night. Men aren't predators, but some predators are men...I used to keep walking-out clothes for this purpose, stuff that flattened what little bust I've got and hid my ass and made me--if I tucked my hair up, which I did--look like a boy. Perhaps I'd best consider getting some more.

--Gen

Wow, my back muscles got a workout today. Lots of shifting heavy, heavy art books up on Eleventh Stack--gorgeous view from up there.
And when I clocked out and walked outside, Julian was waiting for me. He's in a mood to cook, so dinner is to be pork chops and mashed potatoes--mashed by hand, as we've no masher nor mixer, so stand back and be impressed by his kitchen prowess.

I, pampered fox that I am, am sitting in the bedroom watching Firefly fanvids.
(There's a gorgeous Zoe/Wash one to This Woman's Work that Julian found. Nice stuff.)

It's snowing. We're supposed to get about an inch tonight, and I'd not be surprised if it all stuck--it's cold and a bit sharp, feels a lot like, oh, November. Early winter.

Walked into the building, and the landlord is installing a sink in the foyer. After a couple of moments of *bwuh?* Salem told us that Peter's moving the washroom up to the foyer, and putting the dirt-floored basement to an as-yet undisclosed use. I have no problem with this! The basement is...it's like a root-cellar, deliciously uninhabited by dark things, but I still don't really like hanging out down there.

Almost out of cat food, out of cat litter, garbage night tonight--but oh, oh, we've both got a day off tomorrow. That never happens!

My BN is changing its hours, opening at nine now instead of eight in the morning. I never really understood why we opened that early, but it's still a surprise. It's because of the payroll, trying to cut down on stuff, and thirty work-hours is a lot of man-hours to cut back. It also means that those of us that get to work at six in the morning might actually have enough time to shelve, for once.

Maybe tomorrow we'll bake? Julian's been poring over his Secrets of Baking book as though it were a holy tome. I would really like some brownies.

I am sort of quietly missing all my friends tonight. I just want a roomful of people not doing anything together, just sitting.

For now, though--Kingdom Hearts, and playing with the kitty(who has been sitting on the one or another of the boys' shoulders all evening as though she was a parrot, occasionally leaning around to brush her nose to his face like a kiss), and just being happy to be inside, home, and warm.
Thank goodness.

--Gen

I am feeling very grateful for Julian today.
When I woke up this morning, with the jackhammer and backhoe going loud outside, he cupped his hand over my ear until I fell asleep again.
And while I was at work, he went out in the wind and the cold, and got me more hair dye.
He was waiting for me at the stop when my bus came in.
And now I'm eating rigatoni, which he prepared--his spaghetti sauce is as good as mine, now.
I'm pretty lucky.

Julian is reading the first Merry Gentry book. For the last twenty minutes, it's been:
"Tentacles!"
"Who gives a damn about mixed blood, he's gorgeous--and since when are tentacles a bad thing?"
"Tentacles! Dammit, where are the tentacles! Taking too long!"
"...*sigh*...maybe I'm just not liking this because it's het? Because I should be really enjoying this, and I'm not."

Thinking a lot about Narnia lately.
I watched the Narnia movie in the theatre with Julian, when it had only been out a little while. I enjoyed little bits of it, was of course in love with Tilda Swinton in all her scintillant majesty(she was the reason I went), but mostly was disappointed. Aslan was not frightening. I found him less scary than Henson's beautiful old white lion-muppet. He was just a lion, like you see at the zoo.
And then there was the ending.
The look on his face before he killed Jadis, the look of "At last" on hers...it did not sit easy with me. Sitting in the dark as people cheered her death, I thought Well, this is a very America-Right-Now sort of movie, isn't it?

I quite liked the actress that played Susan. She was lovely, and all the while I ached for what Lewis did to her character, at the end of the cycle. It ruined the series for me utterly when I read it, and I saw the rest of the week through a cloud of venomous thoughts. Susan is denied heaven for what? Puberty? Liking boys? Were I shown a perfect world, given respect and challenges and surrounded by people who were intelligent and heart-whole, and then plunged back into post-Blitz England where I was expected to be a good housekeeping girl and not race alongside the boys--and were this to happen not once, but over and over--I think that I'd want to forget the bright world, too. I think I'd bury myself in 'lipstick and stockings and invitations.'
I think I'd become a scientist, or society wife, and build what brightness and take what control I could. It's like outside-engineered manic-depression, the flickering of good-bad-good-bad that is her situation as a child. Easier, to have contentment in great long streaks than to have everything right for little, tiny bits, and then to be pressed back into a container that is increasingly miserable.

Also there is the problem that C.S Lewis really does seem to have hated women. Married women were good, little girls were good. But women on their own? The only strong woman who did not have a father or a brother or a husband to guide her actions was Jadis.

Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series is written in direct opposition to Narnia. Pullman has called the Narnia books "(some) of the most ugly and poisonous things I've ever read."

(It is at this point in the writing of this update that I fell asleep. I will probably pick up this subject again later...it just surprises me what the combination of stress and medication can do to a girl. I stood up, walked three feet to the bed, sat down between Julian and his laptop, and fell asleep for about two hours. Just like that. How very weird. I was going to talk about my day, but I simply haven't the energy--I am going to try and take a sedate little walk, so that I sleep all right tonight, rather than being awake and worried about tomorrow until the wee hours of the morning. Jeez.)

--Gen

The stress and overwork have caught up with me rather dramatically--I was up until three AM, and now I am sick, sick, sick. Just a cold, I think, and a mild one at that, but atop the exhaustion it's really something.
Also have done something incredibly uncomfortable to my left foot. Hope that sorts itself out.

On the other hand, all the muscles in my back feel fantastic. Like I just got an hour-long massage. Why? Dunno. Won't knock it, though.

So basically I'm sitting around laughing at the Den of Demons dollboards and occasionally falling sound asleep in the middle of it.

Part of the reason I was up so late was because I worked a close--the other part was that Julian made Challah bread from scratch. The lad has talents, people.

I am going to fall asleep now.

The other two shelves are up, wonderful wonderful. We managed to find the two-prong/three-prong plug converter, and with judicious use of extension cords Julian got it all looking wonderful. No more Gen-sized piles of books on the floor!

We repotted almost all of our plants, and they are looking relieved. Julian's big frondy thing was terribly rootbound, and the tiny palm tree in the Mountain Dew can was awfully compressed. Also, Nicole's sharp long-leaved thing now has a few more inches to grow in. And yesterday we bought a coffee plant and a sort of palm that looks like a stand of tiny bamboo--I want a tiny happy panda.

Today I've been reading Stephen Fry's biography. Funny man. Finished Tong Lashing and hated it, so this is good to clean the taste from my brain.

Had disturbingly violent dreams last night. Dreamed Emily said something rude, so I said something biting, so she slapped me, so I punched her once in the stomach, so hard she vomited blood. I do not fight like a girl even in my dreams. Do wish I would quit dreaming about her, though. I am less and less sure of what she represents to my sleeping self. Many things, I suppose. Also, the noises she made were taken straight from the bit in Dragon Century where someone's mother explodes into a giant mankilling spider-thing. Whatever.

It's sticky-hot today, makes me very tired. Wish there would be a thunderstorm.

I think I'm going to set up my old blog with ads so that I can have a place for photos. Yes.

Later.