Friends

If it weren't so obnoxious, I would sit here and type out the lyrics to this one song over and over. Sometimes songs lift themselves out of the babble and become my theme song for a little while; they follow me around, their words define me, they play whenever the rest of the noise subsides even for a second.

When I go home and put them on, it's like peeling away an uncomfortable layer of my brain. I feel as if I've woken up, and things come out.

Last night I hung out with a couple friends; I ended up talking with Ryan and realised I probably have potential for a very good friend there, one of the kind who can fade to the background sometimes and come forward again cyclically: you know, the only kind of friend I can make? It's good to know.

I also remember (again and again and again, why do I forget it?) that social contact is so important to me. I need conversation. I need to play in the spaces of language and concept with people. I need to exchange stories. I need the sound of voices. I need to care about individuals, to exercise that whole range of emotion and expression we're granted as humans. And I do this best one-on-one.

Today was going to be a long day at work drinking mojitos and pulling up paving stones. Instead it involved getting sort of lost, getting stung by bees, and (get this) raking up leaf litter from a FUCKING PRISTINE PIECE OF HEMLOCK/CEDAR FOREST. I cannot believe this person got this house, built in such a way as to minimise impact on the steep, rocky, gorgeous hillside-- think this without a touch of interference or stairs or traffic:( Read more... ) and then didn't like seeing the leaves that fell from the tree out her kitchen window that looked onto UNDISTURBED FOREST WITH NO INVASIVES that climbed up to the top of a mountain, studded with lovely mossy granite blocks and chips.

And as we were raking up the leaves, pulling out fallen deadwood, etc (and here I am praying for forgiveness under my breath the whole time, not because I have a particular deity or anything like that but because what I am doing is in fact and in symbol so entirely profane and awful that the situation demands some ritual for acknowledgement and forgiveness) my co-worker (not the usual one, I was with someone else today) says brightly, "it's starting to look better, isn't it?"

Seriously, how can we do this to the world?

This link was sent to me by my boss.

Some of these are pretty creepy, all right.

Be sure to enlarge and read the copy on the Lysol ad. Your husband loves you so it's your fault your marriage is suffering...if only you'd doused your womanly areas with clean-smelling, non-caustic concentrated Lysol! Silly woman. Now go make me a sandwich.

I've been putting a few quotes and memorable things on facebook lately and I want to repeat them here (where I can return to it more easily someday).

"There are many kinds of silence--and they all sound different." -Me

"Love isn't a pie." -Me

"Sometimes asking the question is more important than the answer." -Me

"Without love, breath is just a clock, ticking... " -movie 'Equilibrium'

"Ultimately, we come to learn that knowing another person is not about the sheer amount of time spent with him, but about the quality of time, our willingness to learn about another, and another's willingness to share of himself." -modified quote from The Plot Thickens

"My needs are important. As a matter of fact, they are the most important set of needs I have to worry about."

(Then Erik inquires, what do I need? Erik is good at that--asking important questions.) My answer: A good balance of alone time and social time. And to stick up for myself more often. And good company without a lot of stress or pressure. To be in control of my life and what happens to me.

"If you hold on tight to what you think is your thing, you might find you're missing all the rest." -- Dave Matthews

"We can do no great things, only small things with great love." -- Mother Teresa

You should never have to ask, "is this good enough?". Instead, devote your life to always being able to say, simply, "This is good."
-Me

Then I added:

The point is that if you have to ask that question, you need to change something. If everything is as it should be, you never have to ask that question; you just have the thought, "man, life is good."

Been having a lot of "man, life is good" moments lately and have been comparing it to other times in my life where my main thought was always, "is this good enough?"

I grabbed this '101 things to accomplish in 1001 days' list-meme from steppinrazor. 1001 days is roughly 2.75 years, so I limited myself to things I could reasonably accomplish in that time. I also limited myself to things that depend very little or not at all on other people--meaning, I don't have "Get such-and-such published" because, after a point, that's in someone else's hands entirely. To me, the point of such a list is to think about what I can do in a set period of time.

101 things for 1001 days:

1. Completely for-real finish SCHISM
2. Completely for-real finish Zombies in the Spring
3. Build a functional bare bones Night City encyclopedia
4. Illustrate said encyclopedia
5. Completely for-real finish 31 Days and its sequel
6. Walk the distance from home to Helsinki
7. Have at least one manuscript in circulation
8. Do 200 squats in one go
9. Do 200 crunches in one go
10. Do 100 knee pushups in one go
11. Do 20 plank pushups in one go
12. Exorcise the weak and hedging phrases in my speech patterns
13. Get involved in a creative online community
14. Draw 52 strips of that comic I've had languishing
[15 is lost in a maze of twisty little passages, all Swedish]
16. Leash train the cats
17. Successfully train the cats to obey the three basic commands
18. Sew three boho-fabulous skirts
19. See VNV Nation in concert again
20. Hold an entire conversation in Finnish
22. Re-learn algebra
23. Re-learn geometry
24. Successfully gender and age convert a Sims 2 hairmesh
25. Make a custom hairmesh from scratch--with proper animations
26. Do a headstand
27. Go out dancing
28. Buy a buttplug
29. Crochet 3 animal-themed hats
30. Crochet 3 fancy scarves
31. Dress in guy!drag and successfully pass
32. Dress in girly!drag and successfully pass without looking like I'm going to die of discomfort or embarrasment
33. Perfect an androgynous look that works with my shape
34. Hold a fancy tea party
35. Hold another cheese party
36. Hold a rainbow food party
[37 is pining for the fjords]
38. Learn how to sing passably
39. Sing in public
40. Read Crime and Punishment
41. Read The Three Musketeers
42. Learn how to turn on the 'extroverted and happy to socialize' act at will
43. Learn to knit again
44. Try REAL absinthe
45. Redesign the Night City site
46. Redesign my personal web site
47. Catch up with, keep up on, and participate in Shadow Unit
48. Draw/paint the 7 SCHISM iconic portraits
49. Begin learning yet another language
50. Learn how to swim properly
51. Visit yet another country
52. Become comfortable drawing only in ballpoint pen
[53 redacted by Internal Security]
54. Construct a satchel
55. Read a children's novel in Finnish
56. Completely for-real finish Thorns and Blood
57. See City of the Lost Children again
58. Bake something I consider fabulously difficult, like puff pastry or angel food cake
59. Make a decorated layer cake with fancy decoration
[60-101 were eaten by a grue]

As per cz_unit's links here and here I seem to wake up at this time a lot, then go back to sleep for a little bit. This is when I tend to want to write.

A couple weeks ago during a particularly restless, sleepless night, I picked a book off of my bookshelf to read in bed--something I don't normally do. The book is titled "The Plot Thickens" and it's about plot development in creative writing. I started reading the book merely to assuage my boredom, but it turned out to be a perspective-changing, wisdom-granting experience.

As I read about character development, character journey, conflict, and suspense I realized how much it was teaching me about the real world. The chapter on characters taught me things such as new angles at which to view people, how better to know someone as a whole, how to predict what they might do (or notice how unpredictable they are), how multidimensional people are, what really makes a person who they are outside of conventional definitions such as career path, why certain things have value to some people and not others, and the difference someone's perspective can have on absolutely everything they do.

The journey chapter also really changed the way I look at things. The book describes two types of journeys: surface journeys and profound journeys. Surface journeys are things like travel, relationships, monetary gain or loss, etc. Profound journeys are changes of heart, learning about others or oneself, and general personal growth and change.

After reading this book, I realize that most of the ways we try to get to know real people (chit-chatting about surface journeys, careers, etc.) aren't very useful to get to know who someone really is. The things about someone that really shape who they are and where they are in life are deeper than that. What changes of life have they gone through? What personal growth? What profound journeys? Does how they see themselves reflect who they really are? What do they value? I feel like I find people even more interesting than before. I look at people in a brighter light. I better understand why people interact the way they do.

I better understand the type of people that I'm attracted to and why. I better understand my priorities in life.

It's weird that such revelations can come to me from such an odd source, a book about writing fiction.

I have also learned that my life makes one hell of a story.




I have since bought two more books by this author.

matociquala says it occasionally, and how right she is--suffering is boring, and it's the most intensely boring when it's your own. You get sick of yourself, tired of all this ouch and pain and suffer, suffer, suffer. Problem is, no amount of jollying or stern lectures to yourself or deriding yourself works. It takes trying new things, time, and patience. Lots and lots of patience.

O, I have the patience of saints, let me tell you.

---

One thing I haven't been talking about that has been working is my project to get back into shape. My progress hasn't been fast or dramatic--I've had a lot of starts and stops since last August due to various illnesses--but it has been steady. I'm still weak and without as much stamina as I'd like, but I'm doing far, far, far better than I was a year ago. My bad ankle is much stronger, as is the rest of me--I can walk nearly as fast as the average Finn again! I can also do knee pushups, which was a big milestone.

Walking has been a big part of my recovery, as has the hundred pushups challenge. I did it last year, starting off with wall pushups. I also incorporated squats and crunches using the same chart. This year, the same people have made seperate-but-similar programs for squats and crunches, so I'm using those charts instead.

My progress has been slow--I keep getting knocked on my ass by my medical issues and having to restart again--but I'm finally on week 3, and intend on proceeding through the entire program this summer even if I have to claw my way through my health issues to complete the sessions. Then I'll start it all over again, this time with plank pushups, which I haven't been able to do since I was a child.

As it happens, all this progress means my clothes fit me much better, but I've always been ambivalent about talking about my fitness in those terms. The whole anti-fat prejudice really gets my goat anyhow, and it drives me even more nuts considering the lies spun around it. I recently found out about the Minnesota Human Starvation Study and what I read about it blew me away. It ran totally contrary to everything I've heard pushed, yet echoed what I've seen happening with my own body.

I mean, sure, my body fat is inversely proportional to how physically fit I am, it's influenced by what and how much I eat. But... not in the ways most people think.

I will only lose so much of my body fat and still be healthy. The only time I did not have a bit of a gut was after I grew two inches in a week. I will always have extra around my hips, and if I ever can easily discern my hipbones under my skin, I will be the kind of thin that comes from being well on the way to dying. At the thinnest I've ever been, I was also the sickest and weakest, sicker and weaker than I was last year, not able to walk more than half a mile without resting (but everyone but my mom liked to say how good I looked... as long as the ignored the waifish, starved look of my face).

The only good measure of my physical fitness is, in fact, by my muscle mass and endurance, not by what the scale reads.

I need to stay away from eating much in the way of processed foods and refined grains, otherwise I get crashy and overtired easily and pick up every bug that comes along, and thus can't maintain my muscle mass very well. It isn't, however, about calories; one of my big struggles in regaining my fitness has been to have the appetite to eat enough. All the calorie restriction and careful balancing of foods in the world does for me is make me horribly cranky, exhausted, and neurotic about the numbers. Yeah, I'll 'lose weight'--at the expense of my fitness, and once that's used up, I'll gain it all back plus extra, as I did.

When I told myself I'd stop counting calories, I became much less neurotic about food. I've started to blow off the measuring sessions I had been doing, because I have more days when I think I look good and hold my head high when I don't have my measurements (and the knowledge that once, they were smaller, and I was deemed more acceptable to look at by the world in general) lurking in the back of my head.

So I eat a lot of real food, the total calories and fat grams of which would make dieting gurus faint in horror. Oh, the amounts I eat, especially on a strength workout day! But I have to eat that much so I can do two hours worth of workouts a day (which I do by choice, I like using my body for something other than to hold a chair down), and being able to exercise that much means I build lots of muscle and rarely get ill.

Funny, innit.

This is hard for me, because I grew up around a very weight-conscious extended family. Being thin is a big deal--so big that my grandmother, who has never been rotund in the least, fussed about her hips being too fat when she was 72 and had all the health issues plus some of being 72. I bet she still fusses, even though she's nearly 79. I got constant hints I should think about getting thinner when I was a fat kid, because it had to be all about willpower, not that I hardly had any friends and was rarely encouraged to do anything active, and was shamed into staying in my own yard by the neighborhood shitheads. At least they didn't convince my mom to do anything horrid like put me on slimfast, as one poor boy in my class had to suffer through.

So not talking about my progress in terms of pounds lost or inches trimmed is really weird to me, because that seems to be all anyone cares about. Do you look culturally acceptable in a bathing suit? No? Well, who cares if you can do 200 squats if you're fat, amirite?

Well, wrong. It's bullshit. BMI is bullshit devised by a Victorian era statician and has been ramped downward to 'account' for the smaller, lighter builds of Asians--but not, apparently, the taller, bulkier builds of non-malnourished northern Europeans. Thinness as the panacea for all ills is bullshit. The things that have affected me the worst--my hips, my back, and my mental illness--did not get better when I was thinner. People come in different heights and builds and girths and we, as a world, need to get the hell over it.

Including me, about myself and others. I hate that I get into mental "At least I'm not as fat as her" games, because I don't know that that 'her' couldn't walk twice as far as I could or pick me up and carry me around. I can't measure everyone else by the same yardstick I measure myself with, because they're not me; I certainly can't measure them by the bullshit yardstick I'm consciously rejecting.

When I do talk about my fitness progress, the numbers you'll see me write about will be how many squats or pushups or crunches I can do, not tape measure numbers or numbers on a scale. Those numbers are irrelevant. My fat tissue is irrelevant; I'm not on this world to be decorative. If anyone who reads these posts or sees photos of me wants a number to attach, they are free to make up what they like, as it'll have exactly as much bearing on my fitness.

Speaking of tattooes, there are two more I intend on getting: my season tree and ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (note for later consideration). Piotr was the first person besides myself I ever heard verbalise the connection between a nature religion/pagan/Demeter stuff and the cyclic nature of everything from circumstances to emotion and thought, but that concept has been absolutely central to my intellectual and emotional being more or less since I achieved the ability to worry about my mental/emotional survival. Season change, or more accurately the growth/decay/humous cycle, is such a solid and overarching metaphor in my mind that it can hold me all by itself when things are bad, and it can tether me when I start to fly too high. Experience informs and strengthens this lifeline of mine.

Having said that, I've just finished with a lot of bad patches lately, and blood days are just over, and I realise I need to start keeping track of these things again. The move disrupted my calender on which I'd been marking my period because the damned thing wasn't on the wall where I was, my cycle itself got badly disrupted a couple of months ago and is perhaps just stabilising now, and in that time of chaos things slid a bit: I contemplated the murder of my coworker (shouldn't there be a name for that, like matricide and infanticide? I spend more awake time with her than even with my boyfriend, it is a special case), I moved three people (myself and my freeloader roommate in to the new place, and my disappearing roommate out after she left with only what she felt like taking) with all the move-out cleaning that entailed.

I'm looking forward to some good bits-- to some more intense socialisation (more intense than seeing each friend once every three months if at all), to money and work and enjoyment thereof if I can insist on a day or two a week working either alone or with someone else in the company, to writing a little and fucking some and doing a little cooking. Basically, I'm looking forward to not being too stressed out to keep my head on straight.

That's all.

It's -pretty- but the colour hasn't settled into my brain yet. But it is PRETTY.

The tattoo on the front of my thigh got colour today. It's fascinating how ink settles into my mind and body-- it really makes me revise my idea of self-image. This is not something I have done that I've put on myself and it hangs out there. This is first an idea, then a collaboration, then a physical process as its put on, then a point of attention on my body where it hurts and requires care and looks like an alien. After a week or two or three there's a visual process where the ink settles-- right now everything is raised where the needles freaked the skin out, and the ink appears to sit on the surface of those raised lines. The ink migrates down inside the skin visually over the next few weeks, and the raised areas subside. Redness fades. And then there's this thing, a tattoo sitting inside my skin.

At some point my brain switches from 'there's this thing on your skin' (which is where I expected it to stay) to 'this is part of your body'. This piece on the front of my thigh is something I can see every day, very different from the one on my ass, but with the outline there was this same process. First I'd look at it (pretty often, cause it's cool) and think, 'that looks nice' or 'that has a weird texture' or 'what do I think of that shape or line?'. Then the mental settling happened, sometime after the physical ink dropped visually inside my skin, and the artwork mentally became a part of my body. I admire it sometimes, like I admire the tendons in my hands or the musculature of my body or anything else I happen to notice, but I admire it from within, as an extension of myself (my arm, my leg, my tattoo, my bicep).

This leads to some kind of interesting complications - not serious ones, but I do have someone else's artwork on me, and I feel a responsibility to keep that artwork in reasonable condition and not, for instance, sunburn it a bunch which would age it prematurely. I feel a little more protective of it than I would my ordinary skin, even though I'm really quite fond of my skin.

I also think of my body as something of a canvas now, instead of 'only' my body-- when I think of the other things I want on it, or whether I do, I think in terms of positive and negative space on my body and whether things will go with other things in the required fashion.

So in short, the tattoo feels more subsumed into my identity than i expected, and my self-image has expanded to include myself, not as a tattooed person specifically, but as an artistic whole with very specific visually artistic aspects.

Anyhow, rambling.

To all my American friends:

Happy Independence Day! And happy Saturday, for the rest of you! :)

I have Monday off, so I'm very excited. The last 3 hours of work yesterday seemed to drag on and on, as half of the office was taking the day off.

I have some big plans for this weekend, most notably 1) Vacuum, 2) Homework, and 3) Veg.

I have the feeling 3 will be the easiest to accomplish.

Summer was up for quite a while last night, as some people in the neighborhood decided to start the celebration early by setting off bottle rockets and poppers in the street. She disappeared around 10:30; I believe she was huddled in the bathroom, as that seems to be where she goes when she's freaked. But when I woke this morning, she was stretched out beside me on her blanket, dead to the world.

She's going to be even more distressed tonight. Poor baby.

On Commercial Drive there is often a homeless man with a pigeon on a string. I have spotted him on many occasions.

During Car Free Day I was on the Drive taking pictures of all the interesting things going on and all the interesting people, and I saw the pigeon man again. While I was taking his picture, he started to scold me. He says he normally asks for money from people who want to take his picture. I was a bit stunned and didn't know how to react. I apologized and then sat down on the curb next to him and started asking questions about his bird. His face immediately changed and he happily went on and on about his bird, Pudge. Pudge apparently fell onto him (literally, out of a tree) when it was a baby and he adopted it.

Turns out Pudge is not a pigeon at all, but a spotted dove. He told me about how recently the bird laid eggs on his friend's pillow in a hostel and Pudge became a mommy (he in fact didn't even know the bird was female). One of the chicks died but one survived, and his friend adopted it. His friend's name is Jill. She is also homeless. He told me about how she normally sits on the other side of the street and stood up to spot her. He pointed to a doorway where she sat and told me I should go over and see Pudge's baby. The baby's name is Chicklet.

Before I left to go see Jill I put some money in his hat (a couple dollars I think) and he showed me his rat, which he had been keeping in his bag. He let me hold the rat, but it climbed off of my hands and back into his. Yes, I held a homeless man's rat... I think it's okay. It's been a while now and I haven't contracted anything. It was clearly a domesticated rat anyway. He says he saved the rat from being eaten by a snake and the snake bit his hand instead of the rat. I wish I would have asked where this happened (a pet store?).

I asked if I could take his picture and he happily said sure. I asked him his name and he said George. I shook his hand and told him it was nice to meet him. Then I went across the street to find and talk to Jill.

Jill had a very depressing cardboard sign about how "You're right, I'm worthless. Just walk away." or something. She was staring at the ground, half asleep. The sign was so startlingly pessimistic that at first I passed her by. I stopped a ways down the sidewalk and turned around, dug around in my purse for the rest of my change (probably several dollars in quarters) and walked up to her. I sat down next to her and put the change in her hat. "Your name is Jill, right? George sent me over here to see Pudge's baby."

She perked up a little and I noticed the tiny baby bird in her hand. I started a conversation with her and she told me all about the baby bird and about how it keeps her up all night, how much money it costs to feed it and how she goes without food some days for herself so she can feed the bird. She talked about how she had taken the bird to the SPCA for advice and things like that. She seemed fairly knowledgeable (at least a lot more than I would have expected). The baby bird was sleeping on a balled up sweater in her arms.

Then she talked for about 30 minutes about how mean people are to her, and about how people treat her like she isn't human and make fun of her when she cries. She said people accuse her of being on drugs because she's tired all the time from being up all night taking care of the bird. Someone almost kicked over her sign while I was sitting next to her. She said that was typical. She seems pretty smart, but very depressed. She says she knows she could get somewhere to live and a job, but she just doesn't. She said she hadn't had a shower in a week because there's no one to take care of the bird while she's in the shower.

She kept apologizing for ranting. I told her it was okay and that it probably made her feel better. She said it does, it really does.

I consoled her the best I could, telling her that people were moronic in general and didn't know any better. They don't know her and she shouldn't take what they say to her seriously. I told her opinions were like assholes, everyone has one and they all smell. She smiled, apparently had never heard that before. She said she liked that.

I asked her if I could take a picture of the bird. She was trying to wake it up for me but I said no that's okay, it can sleep. I took pictures and then told her I was going to blog about her and George and the birds. She liked that very much. She turned to the chick in her arms and said, "Did you hear that, Chicklet? We're going to be in a blog."

By the time I left she was smiling, awake and alive and seemed a lot happier than when I first walked by her. I hugged her before I left.

Pictures here

Greg: If there's anyone you should talk to about zombies, it's Rachel.

It's good to have my expertise recognized.