I know I do have some marathon runners on my flist, but you don't need to be a runner to find this video absolutely hysterical: Marathon Thoughts. Aka, what goes through the mind whilst covering all those miles... *g*

Also: ( have a rainbow!Collapse )

Man, that new header with the black butterflies and the white sky is depressing. Bring back the peacock feathers!

Well, I failed miserably at the every day in August thing. Made the first week and then it died. August pretty much consisted of work, sleep, and porn. Of the written variety, namely Est RPing - yes, still very much active; if anyone's keeping track (aside from the people who also play!), I have three pups now.

I was on course for most of the second week of August, out in Highcliffe by the sea. Which was lovely - I always enjoy going out there SO much, but it necessitates adding a shitload of travel time to my day. Lunch at a beachside café doesn't *quite* make up for that (though it comes close). In fact, I have homework from that course, part 1 of which is due on Friday. I haven't had time to even think about it. I'm staring at it now and nothing is getting done because my brain is all, Are you serious??? You want critical analysis now??? *cue paroxysms of laughter* I did look at it at the weekend, but despite being the bank holiday weekend, it just wasn't happening.

Homework failure aside - and personal life failures too, because that hasn't changed much - sometime in the last two weeks I hit 'cope'. Everything got so overwhelming that I... got zen about it, I guess. It's weird and interesting, because by 'coping', I mean the kind of coping that I was capable of pre-depression. Everything changed after that and avoidance became my primary means of coping, really, with things I just could not handle.

So, these are skills I haven't seen since 1993 when I discovered that the final essay due date had been moved up two weeks in my Romantic Poetry class, which I hadn't been attending, and when I contacted the professor and tried to explain what was going on, he said he'd accept the essay the following day, but it would be docked by two grades, so it would have to be an A paper to begin with for me to get even a passing grade on it, and where I'd not done very well on the midterm paper, he really didn't think I'd manage that, so why even bother. Why bother, indeed. I'd been panicking but determined to pull an all-nighter, do the best I could, and then a teacher, in a subject I should have excelled at, completely failed at any kind of support or understanding and instead kicked me right down to the bottom, where I stayed for about the next ten years. (I have, upon occasion, considered writing both that essay, and a very pointed note, to that man, explaining just how badly that fucked me up. And that if his class hadn't been conducted in a monotone that would've made the teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off proud, I might have attended more often.)

To undigress, lol, it was either find a way to cope or bust, and I'm actually rather proud of myself, in ways that I can't really explain to the people I work with, without divulging far more information than I wish to. Yeah, there's all kinds of stuff that isn't getting done - hell, some mundane check-up type stuff I haven't been able to do for literally months - and some of it is important, but, I'm doing what I can, re-prioritising constantly (which I hate, for the record!), and if it's not enough, then too fucking bad. As my dad's co-worker friend used to say, Do your best and fuck the rest.

Words to live by. :-)

Aw, man. Had I had my choice of dates, I would have arranged for my trip home so that I'd be in Toronto at the end of May, because that's when my 10-year graduation reunion celebrations for U of T are. Unfortunately for me - yay for her, though! - my manager is getting married in June, so needless to say, anytime in May/June was simply not possible. I just got a reminder email about the session specific to my department, though (Linguistics), and it's entitled "The Grammar of Music": Professor Elan Dresher discusses how the structure of music parallels the structures found in languages. Talk and reception to follow. *whimper* Fuck me but I wanted to go to that.


Unrelatedly, the fact that Mari snuck onto Rob's Twitter to say hi to him and then he replied later with 'nite mari. i love you.' makes me a giant puddle of goo. I'm just saying. :D

White walls, utilitarian but for the built-in bookcases lining either side of the smoky brick fireplace - unused, its opening grated - and the African blood gourd and painted face mask hung opposite, the rich brown leather burnished in a way that suggests long hours spent in the sun hugged to a sweating body.

One, perhaps, like the boy laughing and dancing in the centre of the room, hips swinging as freely as any woman's to the blare of Bob Marley. One by one the rest push yard sale furniture out of the way and join him until we are all dancing and singing, the reggae beat pulsing heavily in the room - one man in a gaggle of girls, so sweet and gorgeous, smile bright as morning sunshine; and, ultimately, untouchable by any of us despite the Latin dance and language lessons, the skating lessons, the uncontrollable laughter at inadvertent airplanes.

It didn't surprise me, though, to hear that he married soon after graduation, settling into a family life in Malaysia. Sometimes, the pretty ones, all they want is a home.

There's a University of Toronto alumni gathering thingie in late October in London - actually, no, it's for alumni of all Canadian universities, interesting. Do I want to try to go??? Hell, I went to a gathering something like this in Halifax not long after I got there, but it was a complete and utter disaster at the time. (Me, not the event itself.) I knew there was going to be another one in Halifax, but it never even occurred to me that there might be one in England. It's a Tuesday evening, which is awkward, but I should be able to take the day off since there's lots of notice still. It's even at the Canada House, where the Canadian consulate is. I haven't been in there yet; I never did bother registering, since there are at least twenty people who know exactly where I am, lol. I just... wow. The anxiety over spending an evening with an entire room of strangers especially when the last time I tried this went so badly, is pretty much neck and neck with the longing to spend an evening with an entire room of Canadians. I should go, shouldn't I? Man, I kind of feel like I've been whacked over the head with a two by four!

ETA: If I can get the time off, I'm going to go.

Do those wiser in the ways of Yahoo than I have any idea why it's suddenly showing me how many emails are in the Draft folder? So weird. I know that there's a crapload but I don't need to be overtly reminded when I'm not IN the Draft folder, but my Inbox. *scratches head*

*notices that her icon has American spelling*

I am not quite ready to nod off yet. I put up some things on the wall and I think I need to move the design and go back to the way I did it in the first place before I moved furniture around. It looks funny as is. But I don't want to rearrange it all right this minute b/c I want to see if the damn things STAY on the wall this time before I futz with them any more, y'know? I did put up the Billie poster from Big Cheese, though. Hee. I can't tell if it's crooked or not though b/c there are three "straight edges" around it, and I don't think any of the three are actually straight. LOL. And I have more stuff to go on the walls, now, which I don't think is all going to go up, at least not if I want it to look decent. I was going to get the mother to send the rest of my posters - actually, I had thought that the tube was going to have been stuck into the box I picked up today, since it should have fit but definitely won't fit any future boxes, but it wasn't and now I think I won't bother. Most of the available wall space, I would need a ladder to put anything on!

I was looking at my calendar, writing stuff in, and thought that June 14th seemed like it should have meant something (last Saturday). I was thinking that last week, too, but figured that Father's Day was playing with my brain. But no, actually, June 14, 1999, was my university convocation, so I've been officially out of school for nine years. Which I guess is long enough to explain why I'm trying to get back in now, lol.

I had forgotten, when I posted Bent, to mention that a big part of the inspiration for it came from the song Drive by Melissa Ferrick - cheers to bjtp for reminding me. So here is the song, in case anyone would like it and doesn't have it already and below are the bits of lyrics that were the most relevant for me, though the entire song is glorious:
I’ll hold you up
and drive you all night
I’ll hold you up
and drive you baby ‘til you feel the daylight
*****
this is where I want to live
right here between your hips
where all the love you hold and hide
it’s where it lives
right here between your hips
this is where I want to live
it’s where all the love you give exists

I had the impressions of my teeth made at the dentist today and if I never have to do that again, it will be too soon. Gross. Ugh, the mould goop is by far the grossest stuff I have ever had in my mouth, and that is including the bucket of sand my five-year-old self ate and had to be forced to puke up. *heebie-jeebies* Just, ew. Ew, dude. I can't stress that enough. EW.

Less gross, if ultimately more painful, was fixing the cracked filling over my root canal. I am definitely going to need to put a crown on it eventually. However, this will hold for now, and since my dental insurance doesn't cover crowns anyway, it's not going to matter where or when I get it done as I'd have to pay for it out of pocket anyway. Using the bite plane while I sleep will at least give the filling some longevity. And, at least I also know for sure that nothing was missed during the root canal - it really is a properly dead tooth. So a big w00t for not needing to go there again!

Because it was at the back of my mouth, though, she used a dental dam, as is fairly common practice. As a patient, I like this for two reasons: one, it reminds me to keep my mouth open so I'm not listening to constant verbal reminders from the poor dentist; and two, I associate dental dams with a completely different oral activity and thus my mind wanders. ;) I'd never had a dentist use one on me growing up, so my first encounter with a dental dam was in a safe sex presentation during frosh week in university, by a gay man who was clearly a lot better at theory than practice, which is also when we discovered that the one girl on our floor who was in the concurrent education programme was extremely talented at putting a condom on a banana with her mouth. Because clearly this is a critical skill for a teacher, heh. Anyway, yes. The moral of the story is that oral sex > dentistry by a long shot. :P

Speaking of licking, I have had this definition browser window open for a week or something now and keep forgetting to mention it, because I can't remember who asked or where or what the context was. But, someone wanted to know if faire de la lèche was a fair translation of ass-licking. It's not a colloquial phrase I knew off the top of my head, but after poking around at some point or another, I discovered that it means to cozy up to someone, in the sense of ass-kissing. So not a direct translation, but it works for the original context, which IIRC was also meant in the ass-kissing sense but was expressed more explicitly. As for the French for actual rimming, I'm at a loss, man. We covered some interesting things in my small upper classes (and I wish I remembered the bazillion different ways to say "balls"!) but that was not one of them.

What else? Oh, there was a marked sale on memory cards this week, so I took back my two 1GB cards and got two 4GB ones for a paltry $20 more. Yay! I think that will do me for a verrrrrrry long time indeed. In fact, considering that I have several airport photos of mockingbird39 because neither of us remembers to take pictures, I think 8GB of photo memory is more than I will ever need, lol. But, I have it, and the price was certainly right. And I can squander it on little movies or something once I know how to do those.

I am procrastinating, yes. And I should be going to bed shortly because I have an eye doctor appointment at 9 tomorrow. *groans* One of the reasons I'm not nearly as far along as I'd hoped is because I have had all of these external appointments to contend with. Which are ultimately more important because I absolutely HAVE to do those now, but it would have been nice to be able to better stack them on the same days instead of losing chunks of almost every day, y'know? Ah, well.

It's strange how much of yourself is seemingly contained in things, and music. So many "Oh, yeah!" moments, or "*cringe* OMG" ones. Heh. Part of why I've never gotten around to doing all this before is that I just don't know what to DO with the stuff that I don't necessarily want to keep, but also don't just want to chuck into the garbage, y'know? Some of it will be gifted - I've already started that, and I plan to give each of my team members at work one of the Starbucks bears I collected until fall '06, when I chose to quit. I think that will be a nice gesture, and there's certainly enough of them to pick something a little individualized for each one and still have some left over. (I collected them for almost ten years, and they came out with four or five a year - I have a LOT of bears, lol.) A few I'll keep and re-pack; Tuxedo Boy is coming with me. :D

Anyway, don't be surprised if some of y'all end up with wee packages in the mail. If I come across something that tells me your name, I'll send it off. Likely not bears, however; for all that they're relatively small for stuffed animals, they're a little bigger than I want to send!

( So, let me tell you about yesterday.Collapse )

Aaaaand back to work. :D

ETA: Forgot - a great bunch of icons here of girls in Converse. Kinda thought it might appeal to my flist. ;D

Got my hair cut today (hence the venturing out into the snow, as I'd already confirmed et al) and as the new phone has a camera function with slightly better resolution than the crappy digital camera I have (and how sad is that, really), I took a picture or two. ( Kinda blurry but oh well.Collapse )

Drinking coffee today, from an old Carnaval de Québec mug that's still a favourite. Bonhomme is just a face now, little more than wide eyes and a smile, his signature red toque having lost the battle against dishwasher detergent some time ago. It was a gift: the mug, a wee zipper pull, and a button for my collection that said World's Greatest Mom from my university residence friends. The Bonhomme keepsakes given because I wasn't able to go with them to Carnaval; the button because I was always the one with tissues and safety pins, who would set you up in the common room with my little coffeemaker when you pulled an allnighter on some project. My roommate pulled a lot of those and she didn't drink coffee so I figured out how to brew tea in there and she'd type away on her 'dinosaur' of a computer with tea and cookies and the beautiful wool Queens blanket her aunt had knitted for her while the rest of L'étage français - and Victoria Hall - slept.

It's a good memory. And that silly little button that cost maybe two dollars is one of the best gifts I've ever received. :-)

Blender.com has a feature on The 28 Most Recognizable Guitars. Yes, Blue is on the list. Hee.

my_own_beat_now found this info (bolding is mine):
"Two-time GRAMMY® Award winner Melissa Etheridge, five-time GRAMMY Award winner Faith Hill and nine-time GRAMMY Award winner Alicia Keys will host "My Night At The GRAMMYs," a new entertainment special celebrating the upcoming 50th GRAMMY Awards with the Top 25 favorite GRAMMY moments, as voted on by viewers. The two-hour special also will feature the stories behind the moments as told by the artists themselves, and will be broadcast Friday, Nov. 30, 8-10 p.m. ET/PT, on the CBS Television Network.

Christina Aguilera, Billie Joe Armstrong, Beyoncé, Mary J. Blige, Bono, Elvis Costello, Celine Dion, Alan Jackson, Elton John, Ricky Martin and Usher will join hosts Etheridge, Hill and Keys in remembering their own remarkable moments as performers and winners on past GRAMMY telecasts."

That's an interesting collection of people. It's unfortunately *missing* two of my favourite interesting people (aka the rest of the damn band) but still. TV appearance in two days w00t.

I am so tired today. Up early again, and again tomorrow. I won't manage wakefulness much longer, if that's what you could call my vacant staring right now, lol. Hot chocolate and bed, yisyis. It was very slow at work so I got a good chunk of decorating time and things are taking shape. Our 'theme' is the Ice Queen's Palace from Narnia, which was my idea and I'm nominally in charge. I've been making the deliberate effort to relax and have fun with it, and let other people have fun with it, instead of allowing my natural inclination to prevail, which would be to corral everybody into doing things EXACTLY LIKE I SAY TO OR IT'S NOT RIGHT, DAMMIT. *laughs* Oh my God I can get so anal and bossy when running something like this. Being able to let go of that mostly is one of the major signs that indeed, I have matured somewhat since I was a teenager!

It'll actually look better in the end than if it were done according to only my plan, anyway; J has an artistic bent and he's had some stellar ideas. I, on the other hand, am quite crafty but when it comes to real art I am a total loss. Art and gym were the only two classes I was exempted from the straight-A requirement for, because I am not athletic (love to dance though I do!) and I cannot draw. I always got an A for effort but was never able to achieve more than a plain B in an art class. I've often thought that some of my drive and talent in writing comes from being a frustrated artist. Incapable of painting with acrylics, I use the one tool I can wield well: words. All the images in my head have to come out in language if they're to attain any measure of external comprehension or beauty.

It is astonishing how running across a so very random mention of something can bring memories flooding in. I was poking around Matt Good's site - magically hoping the Hfx show would be un-sold out maybe? lol - and noticed that the upcoming show in Kingston, Ontario is at Stages. Holy cow it's still there! I used to go there fairly frequently my first year at Queens University, which was '92/'93. It's set at the top end of the retail area of Princess Street, the main drag that ends at Lake Ontario, and across the street was AJ's Hangar, which we tended to eschew for it being a townie bar (as opposed to a student place). Stages had the best dance floor, closely followed the the Cocamo down on King by the lake, but my group kind of quit going to the Cocamo after the time Flori wound up in the hospital after some asshole whipped a beer bottle across the crowded bar. I know it's still there, too, or at least it was in 2002 because my work had a conference there and that's totally where I ended up. *laughs* And then on Thursdays, we went to Dollar Bill's (which is long gone), because bar shots were $1 between 10 and midnight. (Side note: I so would have had a fangirly field day with that name had I known then what I know now, lol. Though GD was still an indie band then, yikes. *feels old*) I wonder if Stages still does the birthday thing? We went there for my roomie's birthday and they gave her a T-shirt and a sharpie, so that anyone and everyone could sign her shirt - yes, while she wore it! - and our group got a free shooter each of the birthday girl's choice. I can't remember what it was, but I know Tanya asked for something fairly obscure because she'd recently gotten her bartender's certification (handy in a roommate, that) and it was yummy. :D

I cannot believe I remember that in so much detail! Hee.


And completely OT, matociquala posted a glorious example of what line-editing your story is all about. Wow.

Comment and I will give you 3 interests on your list, and 3 icons, for you to explain. Then you must post the answers in your own journal and allow others to comment. (2nd part optional, as always.) This one is somewhat less thought/labour-intensive than the last one where I had to pick out icons so it should get done faster, lol.

Anyway, joianoel asked me about ( these:Collapse )

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

ETA: And hored asked me about ( these:Collapse )

nene posted this new pic of Billie:



And also a source to go with it: Emily's Army, which is a group fighting against cystic fibrosis; he's listed as a "Special Agent" on the Supporters link. I think it's great, of course. It just took me by surprise, and for more than the obvious reasons.

I went to middle school with a boy who had CF. His name was Jason. He was in my 6th grade health class, and for his presentation he covered the disease. He made it very, very real by bringing the little container that held all the pills he was supposed to take at lunchtime - and just those from lunchtime, there were two or three more such piles in his day. He was quite matter-of-fact about it all.

I mostly forgot about it later, as twelve year olds do. We moved in different social circles and didn't have any other classes together. But he sat near me on the bus for the 8th grade trip to Quebec City, and I liked his voice. My friend sitting with me had a bit of a crush on him and so we whispered and giggled, and since we were all to keep to the same seats every time we were on the bus, I saw a lot of him that week and developed my own crush. He had a wicked sense of humour. The last day, he was joking around with one of the teachers about getting busted for drugs. I sort of had the impression that they actually *had* gotten caught doing something they were definitely not supposed to be, lol, but Jason had talked his way out of punishment. I suspect that the fact that he was also coughing up blood that morning assisted there. And though I knew it ended up making him uncomfortable, I basically stared at him for the entire several hours bus ride home. I can still picture his face clearly.

One of the things my friend had told me was that in the 5th grade - they'd gone to a different elementary school than I had - when it came time to do the endurance run in gym class (anyone remember that? Something like 1600m?), he got so winded that he had to stop at each corner of the track and puke up mucus, but he would not quit. It made an impression.

We went to different high schools, too. Someone - I can't even remember who - remembered that I'd had a big crush on him and called me halfway through the 10th grade to let me know that he had died. He was sixteen years old.

I made a promise to myself then that if I ever had a son, I would name him Jason, after one of the bravest people I've known, however peripherally.

Gacked from screwthedaisies and evaine.

My Birthday: March 8
Your Colour: Mauve Mist
My Attributes: Good-natured, productive, spiritually strong

You have a strong spiritual side that can be a great source of strength when channeled properly. You were meant to do something that has meaning and value. Try not to let material concerns bog you down. Focus your sense of responsibility toward high ideals and aspirations. Cultivate discipline and self-effort early on to avoid losing your footing later on in life. Your personal color resonates with your spiritual integrity. Wearing, meditating or surrounding yourself with Mauve Mist is uplifting and helps you sustain a positive and healthy outlook. (From here.)

(Re: unitalicised section: Oops. So thaaaaat was the problem. *snerk*)

----------

Not entirely unrelatedly, I got my university alumni magazine in the mail today and I always feel weird reading through it. For all that I graduated from U of T, so much of that time is a total blur that it doesn't feel like my school. Queen's still feels like my school. (For those going WTF, I went 2 years at Queen's, got married, transferred. Hence, blur.) I don't do anything to take advantage of being an alumna, and there are some perks associated with having attended one of the largest schools in the country. Mind you I don't need health & dental insurance atm since I get that at work, but I will when I leave. Which process would be facilitated by the mail I was supposed to get today and did not: my passport. Though I am not at all surprised by the delay as I indicated I would not be travelling until 2007, and there is a MASSIVE demand for passports right now due to the restriction being implemented on January 23rd that Canadians must possess a passport in order to enter US airspace. Ground and sea entries will require such come 2008. I can't say that the institution of the requirement surprises me; indeed, I think it's a good idea. But it saddens me a little that the camaraderie and understanding that had existed between our two countries when I was a little girl has eroded so greatly. Somewhere, I have a photograph of me on the bridge at Niagara Falls, in my mom's way oversize sunglasses, with one foot in Canada and one foot in the United States. It's yet another innocent pleasure that has fallen prey to the modern world.

I am spamming, but holy FUCK everyone decided to talk today!!!!!! I'm gonna be so behind...I wanna write, dammit. Gah.

And I'm annoyed b/c I didn't read all the way through the tv guide last week and thusly I missed the airing of the documentary, Sluts. It won the grand prize at the Atlantic Film Festival in the summer, and I wasn't able to go then but I read all about it and wanted to see it, and now I've gone and missed it for fuck's sake. It's basically about the stigma of the word "slut" and how that's affected the lives of the women who were labelled as such, primarily in high school.

It's an interesting concept in and of itself, but it'd be fair to say that I was extra intrigued because I think I'm the only woman I know who's been able to pretty much shrug off said label. Which isn't to say that it didn't affect me at all; it wasn't a lot of fun at the time, and it was partially responsible for what I now recognise as the first major depressive episode in my life, but it wasn't the total destructor that it is for a lot of girls. Maybe b/c it was in middle school and I went to an out-of-boundary high school, although I didn't entirely escape it there, either. *shrug* I've always talked easily and openly about sex, and I've long since discovered that for the most part, people assume that if you can talk about it that easily, you must be fucking everything in sight. That's actually part of why I freaked out so badly when I met your table at the FF party, cookie2697; I'd finally found Carol and she was telling me while she dragged me over that the group had been discussing my threesome/slash fic the night before, and I had more than a few people email me during the course of posting that to ask if such and such an act/position/what-have-you really worked. Because of course I went and tried everything before writing about it, right? *rolls eyes* LOL. I always wanted to write back, "If I had two gorgeous boyfriends willing to do whatever I wanted, do you think I would EVER be at the computer????" Anyway, that was all running through my head at the time and well, yeah. Freakout, lol. And then piper47 in shining tiara to the rescue. xD

It's funny, really, how I've never quite fit into any category. I suppose dork is the only thing that's stuck, and that's partly b/c I deliberately cultivate it, lol. I *like* being a dork. But I was a freak AND a geek, and supposedly a slut, all at the same time, and then a nerd in a preppy high school who occasionally hung with the so-called cool people and insisted on wearing my silver shoes with the Ralph Lauren Polo shirt I begged my mom for. (I still miss those damn shoes.) Nobody knows what to do with me now, either. Hayley, my coworker whose birthday was last week, has never come out with us before b/c that was her 19th bday. And we were talking about that, thinking of where we might want to go on Friday night, and she thought I was younger than Christine - who is 24. My closest friends in RL are 22, 24, and 42. My 'net friends run between 16 and 52. I essentially missed almost a decade of my life happening, so I might as well be 24 but I'm not. It's quite fucking confusing, LOL.

I think Cass had the funniest way of putting it. The first time I wore all black to work after I got my hair done, she came up behind me and said that with the black clothes and the red hair, I looked like a punk rocker from a distance. I had to sit down, I was laughing so hard, because it was sooooo true. The hoodie might have passed, but over a lace-trimmed shirt, dress pants and boy's oxfords? Not so much, LOL. I dress way too eclectically and semi-dressy for that no matter what my hair looks like. I just like it b/c it's fun. :-)

Someone in favorite_son posted links to a whole bunch of streamable/embeddable Green Day vids, most of which are really, really old. There's one that's a full set from McGregor's in '92, long enough after Kerplunk came out for the audience to know the words. Actually, they close with "Road to Acceptance" and Billie Joe needs to fiddle with the cord to his amp at one point, and the audience keeps right on going when it's time for the next verse, lol. It's so cool. He picks the guitar back up and just laughs and listens to them finish the verse. :D And then the bar manager brings out Beth from the kitchen and presents her with a male stripper for her 21st birthday. O_o And then GD come back on and do Dominated Love Slave & My Generation, which is the same performance as the vid snippet that I've seen passed around before. Although, I do not remember Tré yelling in the snippet, "Fuck it, this is for Dimitri," (the stripper's name) before starting into DSL. LOLOLOL

The old ones like that always feel weird to watch, b/c they make me think about what I was doing at that time and it's in another realm entirely. Like, I turned 19 in '92. That's when *I* started going to club shows like this one. Except, not so much like this one, lol. I honestly don't think I've ever been to any show quite so informal, which is a damn shame. But I was also living in Kingston and going to Queen's University at the time, and it ain't a big city, so you work with what you've got. And by the time I was actually living in Toronto, I was much too fucked up to be finding and attending indie shows anymore, unfortunately, aside from the odd thing with the Celtic Society. It's really something I've only picked up again recently. I just wish I had more money for it, and friends who wanted to go with me. Cuz while I certainly have enjoyed the ones I've gone to, they still would have been a lot more fun if I hadn't gone alone all the time. :-/ But hey, baby steps. At least I have friends again, lol. Eventually I'll meet someone, probably *at* one of these things, who wants to go to more.

Speaking of baby steps, I don't think I posted that I'd decided not to apply to grad school for Sept. '06. And neither the fact that things are going exceptionally well at work with taking on extra responsibilities et al, nor the fact that I probably didn't have enough time to finish everything I needed to get done before the deadline (Jan. 15th), really have anything to do with it. It's more to do with the way I continually had to back away from the process because it was inciting literal panic attacks. Somewhat of a psychic newsflash that I'm obviously not ready for that step yet, and that's okay. Really, at this point? Another year makes no fucking difference whatsoever, lol. I've pushed myself a LOT this year, and I'm rather pleased with the way it's all gone (if my bank account disagrees!), so I don't want to mess it up by pushing too far. (And *smooches* to beelzezuk for helping me figure some of this out. :) )

I can't remember what else I was going to post about, b/c my cat is a freak and I had to go take a picture of him snoozing on the wrapped presents under the tree, LOL. Silly kitty.

So at 11:59 pm tomorrow night, I'll be in the IMAX movie theatre about to watch Goblet of Fire. xD I'm so excited! I was able to get a ticket still for Julie, so it'll be the 4 of us. Which kind of goes to illustrate that my life has changed rather a lot in the last couple years, since I went to see PoA 3 or 4 times by myself. I didn't really know anyone here yet then. I have trouble keeping up sometimes with what's going on and who I am these days, lol.

Relatedly, there's a whole buncha my flist talking about classes et al for the upcoming semester/year/etc. and I'm still frozen on that front. I haven't really done anything about getting my application for grad school done and the deadline is looming ever closer. (As deadlines are wont to do, damn them.) Every time I get into looking at it, I get panicky. Not nervous butterflies panicky; curled up in the corner rocking mindlessly kind of panicky, which is not high on my list of favourite ways to feel. Not a fan of panic attacks at allllll. Maybe I'm just not ready. I keep telling myself that applying is not the same as getting in is not the same as accepting, but it doona seem to be working. Meh. This whole habit I've developed of freaking right the fuck out when I want to do something totally new is annoying the hell out of me (among other people).

And to conclude this highly schizophrenic post, I wrote another drabble tonight: Laid Bare, posted in gd100. It's more of an introspective little thing, in Billie's POV.

I hate dissolving stitches. It feels like I'm constantly on the verge of swallowing something I'm not supposed to be. And get yer minds out of the gutter on that, b/c post-oral surgery care dictates no hot liquids *or* straws, so there sure as hell ain't gonna be any of THAT any time soon, lol.  I'm very tired of lukewarm tea already, though.  It's just WRONG on so many levels!

I still feel like lead weight too. :-(  It doesn't usually take this long for drugs to pass out of my system. And I'm tired, but it's like I'm overtired - listless and energyless but can't sleep. Fucking annoying.

therealltf has been listening to me rattle on about Green Day for a while now, which is only fair as I listen to her rambles about Jason lol, but he's not doing anything right now so she made me a huge batch of screencaps just for me from the AOL concert stream and from the Jesus of Suburbia video.  If anyone's interested in seeing them, I posted a bunch on favorite_son, here (AOL) and here (JoS).  I actually have a whole bunch more AOL ones to go through but I abandoned them yesterday in favour of JoS, lol.  What a fucking brilliant video, and we've only seen the supercondensed 6:29 minute one!  I can't wait til they decide what to do with the full-length 14 minute version and we can see that, as well as the full song 9+ minute version

Need to spend some time writing today, as unenthusiastic as I feel about it.  I'm behind in my self-set deadlines.  Actually I'm pretty much behind in everything.  It's October 16th which means in 3 months the application deadline will have passed for the grad program I'm supposed to be looking at, and I haven't done anything; I'm not sure why, other than fear.  But I'm so tired of being afraid.  I'm just tired of everything.  Everything takes so long and I've already wasted so much of my life.  I feel like I'm at a big crossroads and every direction has a deep chasm waiting for me, and I'd be perfectly happy to take a leap of faith if I only knew which fucking way to go.

Although I don't actually have a copy at home so can't show it to y'all anyway, lol.  But, I had my photo taken at work yesterday.  With everyone on vacation and such for the summer, they combined July and August and so Kelly and I jointly got named the Associate of the Month.  Which pretty much entails having your photo and a page-long write-up about you stuck on the wall where everyone can see it for the month, plus a gift card.  No idea how much is on it, lol.  The recognition is nice, though.

It also, however, underscored something rather pointedly for me: I've pretty much reached the limit of what I can do/learn in this position.  There are small things still, of course; there always are; but overall, that "award" just illustrates that I've hit the peak there and there's nowhere left to go, at least not while remaining in my same division.  (And I would shoot myself before moving into the Customer Service division!)  As much as I love the people I work with, especially now that I'm developing real friendships, it made me realise yet again that this is not a longterm solution or position for me.

While we were out on Wed. for the karaoke, I spent a fair amount of time picking Christine's brain about student loans and life and that.  She had some really good information and advice.  And I drove Jeff home afterwards and had a wee chat about the whole concept of me going back to school.  Y'all may have noticed that I haven't really said much about it since I "announced" that I was going to do it.  It isn't so much that I'd changed my mind, but I did originally post in the first flush of excitement, almost as a way to put it out there in words so I couldn't take it back, you know?  I've since had a few discussions with my mom about it and it's just been something I've been thinking about.  Well, actually, it's something I *was* thinking heavily about, and then avoiding thinking about, and now it's fucking September already somehow and I need to REALLY start thinking and doing more than that about it, lol.  Anyway, one of the main things I said to Jeff was that I wasn't entirely sure that putting my life on hold to go to school for the next 3 years and then dig myself out of debt for another couple after that was what I really wanted.  I mean, by the time that's all done I'll be 38 for chrissakes!  And in the back of my mind is the thought that by going back to school, committing to that, I am essentially giving up on another dream, that of being a mom.  Plus, I'm whining now about being broke all the time - being a student definitely ain't gonna improve that situation!

But Jeff said something very interesting in even that brief convo, that kind of turned things on their head: did I want to put my life on hold and NOT go back to school now?  It's the opposite of how I'd been looking at it.  School isn't necessarily life interruptus the way I was thinking; instead it actually is life, in a sense.  Or part of the process of living it.  It's why I really wanted to talk to someone who knows me fairly well who isn't my mother about the whole thing, because she influences me far too much.  Whatever she's saying makes perfect sense while we're talking, and I can't figure out how *I* really feel about it after.  Her thing the last time we talked about it was that she thinks I might be using the whole school thing as a way to avoid life.  I can't even truly dispute that, because there is something kind of comforting in the notion of being in classes again, but that isn't the point of why I wanted to do this.  It's not to hide, but to further my education so I can reach a goal and a place where I don't need to hide.  I am honest enough with myself to admit that the social aspect is also appealing.  Not that I expect to have a huge amount of time available for socialising then, but I will meet a lot of people, and I'm at a personal stage where I am comfortable doing that now - where I can make friends.  Hell, where I could date if I ever meet someone!  When I really look at it, it's more about me trying to embrace life than escape it.

I guess the main reason I didn't discount what my mom was saying is that Nicola gave me some contact info about the SLP programme at Dal before she left at the end of July, and I've done nothing with it.  Six weeks, and it's still squished in my wallet.  I'm not sure why exactly, except for me being afraid, but even then I don't know what it is that I'm afraid of.  Other than random cold calls to people who don't know me from Moses, LOL.  I freely admit to a ludicrous phobia about that shit.  Or possibly the mere fact that this is going to turn my life upside down again, even if it's in a good way and of my own initiative.  All of that is hard for me.  My job right now is safe...and that's the problem.  I know that I personally need a certain amount of safety and stability, but for me to stay in this job longterm would be to deny that I am capable of far more, and to atrophy into just another generic worker drone.  Maybe it's totally snobby of me - no, not maybe, it is snobby and arrogant, but I'm better than that.  I'm worth more, and I have more to offer than I can give in what's basically a grunt job.  So fuck being safe, and fuck being scared.  I'm putting y'all on notice that I might need some hand-holding and some ass-kicking in the time to come, and I'm confident and comfortable enough in you as friends to expect to get it. :-)

Or, well, what passes for morning in my world these days LOL.  Although I was actually up quite early and had my hair cut.  Nothing different really, just got about an inch or so taken off and shaped.  Alas, that inch contained most of what was left of the blonde highlights, lol.  It looks so dark now!  And wrong!  My self-image is blonde and man, it looks so weird when my hair doesn't match at all.  I mean the rest of my body hasn't matched up with the me in my head forever but at least I was still blonde.  Definitely must do something with it now.  Not really wanting to shell out the 80 bucks it would be to get two-toned foil highlights done professionally, though.  I'll have to think about it some more.

Anyway, the hysterics part was when I got to work.  I wasn't even on the clock yet - actually, I nearly missed clocking in because I was laughing too hard to get up and walk over there, LOL.  And I really don't know why it was so damn funny, but I tried some Oatmeal Cookie body lotion on my hands when I was at the salon, and I held my hand out for Jeff to smell it.  She has a lot of scent sensitivities like I do, but food smells tend to be pretty safe.  Well, she accidentally smushed her nose on the back of my hand and must have gotten some lotion on it, because when she leaned back her nose was twitching like mad and she looked like she was going to either sneeze or puke.  I started to giggle, she started to giggle, and that was that, man.  Next stop: gasping for air, LOL.  And btw, I do not recommend bedhead for body's body lotion unless you absolutely adore the scent you pick.  I washed my hands a bazillion times today and I could *still* smell traces of it.

Must try to get to bed at a reasonable time tonight; I'm tired after not being able to sleep until late and then getting up a couple of hours before I usually do.  OH!  And Nicola totally came through on the information from her friend who's in the Speech Path program at Dal.  I have a few names and phone numbers to go over, plus her friend's email in case I have questions about anything.  How sweet is that???  I need to look at it really soon, especially since her friend's main contact is apparently quite pregnant and will be on mat leave soon, lol.  There are a LOT of pregnant women around, actually.  I seem to recall that they predicted a mini baby boom due to the NHL lockout. :D 

I've been waiting a lifetime
For this moment to come
I'm destined for anything at all
~Waiting, Green Day

That kind of sums up how I'm feeling - well, that and fucking petrified, LOL.  I did manage to get the majority of my vacuuming/dusting done and cleaned the bathroom, oh joy, but that was only part of the productivity today.  The rest of the day, we spent mostly sitting outside enjoying a beautiful day, and discussing the future.  More specifically, my future.

The interview question I've always hated the most is, "Where do you see yourself in five years?"  Largely because life has taught me the hard way that no matter where I think I might be, I'm virtually guaranteed to be somewhere else altogether.  But what I've come to realise more and more lately is where I don't see myself: doing the same thing I'm doing now.  I like my job mostly because of the people I work with, and because it's been a safe, stable environment and I've needed that.  I needed a place like that where I felt comfortable, that didn't have any stress or frankly, any challenges.  I needed some space and time to just breathe, and not go under financially while I did it. 

But I've been there for eight months now, five as a permanent employee, and I'm bored.  Beyond bored: I'm craving something that will actually require thought on my part. Effort.  I've been poking at this idea in my mind for a while now that won't go away, and it started to take more shape last week when I was talking to Nicola at lunchtime about various things and she was telling me that her friend is in this program at Dalhousie, that they only turned into a full program a few years ago.  And then today, while just generally talking with my parents, the subject came up and we went through it - what we'd need to do, what kind of timeline it would mean; whether or not this is what I really want to do.  I hemmed and hawed a little at first (if you haven't figured out by now that I'm not the most decisive person around, you haven't been paying attention, lol), but in the end, it really and truly is what I think would be the absolute best course of action for me.  No, it's more than that: it's what I want.  It's what I meant to do, or a version thereof, the whole time I was growing up.  I chose a path when I was six and I kinda got lost on the way, but if I sit here and really look inside myself, it is still what I want.  It still means something to me to reach for it.

*deep breath* So, I'm going back to school.  Dalhousie University has a 3-year Masters program in Speech Pathology, which is the type of graduate program my Linguistics degree was originally designed to feed into, and will qualify me to work as a speech pathologist.  I don't know anything about it yet - hell, I don't even know if I have all the specific prereqs, or if I'll qualify for the program because it'll for damn sure have to be on more than my grades.  The fact that I graduated at all considering my state of mind at the time is a minor miracle.  And I have to look at acquiring a student loan, since I haven't any idea how that process works in Nova Scotia.  There are so many details that my stomach is fluttering just trying to think of them all.  But at the same time, I'm excited, and getting more so as I think more about it.  I'm scared as hell, too, because it WILL be a challenge and I don't know if I'm ready, but I'm not going to get any more ready, and I'm never going to know if I don't try.  The only way is to throw myself into it heart and soul and see what comes through on the other side, and that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Ah ah ah - not drugs, lol.  Green Day!  I forgot to take my CD to work today and I missed it terribly.  How crazy is that?  I'd moved it on Friday so that I could play Anne's and make sure it played okay before sending it to her, and then forgot that once it was mailed that left me high and dry.  Hee.

Had a decent day, not stellar being that it was Monday and all lol, right up until Lindsay brought up this topic/article:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=519&e=7&u=/ap/20050403/ap_on_re_us/no_more_red

The article is about parents objecting to the use of red ink to mark their kids' papers, citing the colour as "stressful."  Now, I could totally go on at length about this, because it completely gets my back up, but the main issue is that these parents are missing the point.  If their child's papers are all marked up, it's because the kid is not learning what they're supposed to be learning and that's when you bloody well step in and help with homework and all that kind of thing!  What COLOUR their mistakes are highlighted in is irrelvant.  The point is that if there's enough of that colour to be stressful, it ain't the ink that's the issue.  Gah.

I have completely forgotten everything else I was about to say, after reading that damn thing.  LOL.