MOOP!

( It's a little over a thousand words. Some of them are exceedingly important to me. )

~Sor
MOOP!

Sometimes you find lines, but don't have the essay to put them into.

I feel rather like it might be arriving in Oz just to find the emerald city to be made of cardboard and paint.

((And sometimes you have lines and the essay to put them into is not so good as to be worth the trouble of posting it))

~Sor
MOOP!

Today is awesome!

Okay, I didn't get out of bed until like half an hour ago, which is actually somewhat annoying --I don't like it when I start drifting west that badly, and knowing me, unless I come up with something spectacular to do at nine thirty some morning, it's not going to stop.

That's okay though, because today is awesome.

See, today is awesome because yesterday I made not one, but TWO new friends based on people who just wandered through and left comments, which is awesome, and the one who got me at four thirty in the morning and therefore got a comment that was ...well in all honest it was probably only twice and not four times as babbly, doesn't seem to have been spooked off forever, meaning I have successfully made an internet friend and therefore rule.

(well, okay, the other one isn't technically an internet friend yet, but I am following his blog)

AND EVEN BETTER THAN NEW INTERNET FRIENDS (sorry guys), Bethany, (who belongs in Cambridge so hard because she's compatible awesome with round there) is currently out in the land of not very much internet, but she made a post, and I commented, and she e-mailed her reply!! Meaning I have like...an actual e-mail from an actual person¹, with words and stuff that *I* can reply to.

This doesn't happen very often and it makes me happy --practically receiving-letters-happy, which if I had a consistent address, I could possibly manage.

So, I'm in a pretty damn good mood. I'm gonna go reply to Bethany, and give you lot some interesting questions. And by interesting, I probably mean *very* silly. YAY!!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Actually, Brenton's pretty good at sending drabbles, and Mek has always been one of the people who actually e-mails me the most, so e-mails just to me are not a rarity. But (probably in part because I'm shite at replying to them) I don't get real e-mails with lots of words very often.

Author's Note: This post was written a few months ago, before I left Boston for the summer. I am only just now getting around to posting it as I clean up my desktop and put things away on my computer. Enjoy!

There are a multitude of tiny ways that make me think I'm faking it, loving too intensely, caring too much, altogether certain that there is a correct way to live ones life, and I am doing it decidedly Wrong. This is not an uncommon thought, I suspect, though also not a comfortable one. Why can we not accept that maybe this uncertainty is such a crucial part of humanity already?

Of course maybe the secret is not that the uncertainty itself is human, but that aspects of the uncertainty are universal. Little scraps of the world, when two people gasp at the idea that they share their strangeness. A spark of connection, where it is revealed that, reassuringly, we are not alone.

That being said.

"Everything has its place," her father had once said to her when she was young, showing her the long cedar drawers of the card catalogue in the great library where he worked, the brass brackets on its face shining like a policeman's buttons. "But more imoortant, everything's place is labeled. Order is transitive: order one precious thing and order the universe."

"Do I have a place in there?" November had asked, peering over the rim of one of the long boxes.

"Of course, baby," he had said, and with his big brown hand cuffed in plaid and smelling of lemon rinds from her mother's morning tea, riffled through a drawer and pulled a card from the stack.

006.332. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. H. F. Weckweet, 1923. Gleiss & Schafandre: New York.

She had taken it seriously. Even then she had not known another way of doing things. The book was on the seventh floor and she had walked the steps, every one, knowing that this was the only proper way to proceed to her place in the universe -an elevator is cheating. The book was small, in a brown leather cover embossed faintly with a little girl standing naked on a raft, straight as a mast, her stance determined, holding up her dress as a sail. It was, at the time, the oldest thing she had ever seen.

November had read it exactly two hundred and seventeen times, not counting unfinished perusals, since that day. It was, in fact, a long series of novels for children, but November did not care for the others: her father had not pulled them from the great catalogue and called them hers. She had not climbed seven flights of stairs for them. She had spent her birthday this year, her thirty-first, reading it cover to cover, dawn to dawn/ The girl in the book was named September, and she had known that this was meant for her, a message from Hortense Francis Weckweet and her father. Perhaps if the girl had not been called September, November would not have read it two hundred and seventeen times.

Pgs 124-5, Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente

Oh I see. That entry I made a few months ago, babling about the silly little book with the pirates?

I am not alone.

~Sor
MOOP!

ETA: Oh really? Blockquote won't do italics? That's curious. (and damn you society for ruining words I like --I would so rather be able to say "that's rather queer, isn't it?" but noooo.)

ETA2: No wait, I'm just an idiot who can't do HTML.

Okay, I'm at that point where I have sixty tabs open across seven browser windows, and that really means that I need to make a link post and get on with my life. So here, have some sundries!

*Boston folk, in last Saturday's flooding, Taza Chocolatier got hit hard. They are trying to convince people to buy their stock so they have money for repairs. Buy some chocolate for a worthy cause!!

*Also Boston Folk, today at seven PM there is going to be a recess in Davis Square. Bring your jump ropes and four square balls, and believe me, I would be there in a heartbeat if I was a few hundred miles north and east of here.

*Improv Everywhere's newest stunt: Recreating the beginning of "Star Wars: A New Hope" on the Subways!

*I'll be honest here: I really quite want this foldable bicycle. It's a neat design, and I emphatically want to have a bike to tool around with up in Boston, to the point where I'm gonna need to find a way to get mine up there *some*how. So yeah.

*"But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning." (A hilarious review of that terribly unrealistic show on the History Channel --"World War II" (I mean, could you *get* more melodramatic?). Read the comments. Sporfle warning.)

*I will unfortunately not be able to post this Girls With Slingshots guest strip by Erika Moen in my future classrooms, but I want to so badly!

*Locked posts, so no links, but I'd like to extend appreciation to chickenhat for "LESS COWBELL!" and to ncarraway for giving an earworm trigger warning when he mentioned GaGa's Bad Romance.

*ms_hecubus continues to keep a fairly funny blog (seriously, I should make the list of people who's journals are fun to read even if you don't know them¹), this time ranting about how "Every time I use a plastic bag, the terrorists win". (And hopefully she will not mind me linking her, as I was impolite and didn't ask permission this time)

*Oh, and her followup letter to Sears.

*Speaking of Racheline (You do read the footnotes when they come up, and not at the end, right?), she went to a conference recently, and made this post about secrets and exile that talks about coming out about various things. ( And then I babble about this a lot more, because I find it important )

*Oh look, another ms_hecubus post, this time Sensibly pointing out that boobies are both sexual and practical items, and to try and define them as one hundred percent one or the other is useless

*yagathai came up with a fantastic new portmanteau: Voluntarting. Please go use in a sentence.

*Look! It is A map of the creative process!!

*So, I follow the davis_square community because I like knowing what's going on in my world --signal to noise is high enough to keep me coming back. Most of the posts seem to get between zero and fifty comments or so. So when I see one that gets _253_, I pay some small attention.

It is, of course, a post on how to have good bicycle/car relations.

I love my hippie city and miss it dearly.

*Mel Gibson Rant Quotes Presented by Kittens. I don't even know how to react to this. Trigger warning: severely abusive misogynistic language.

*Animation showing all the nuclear bombs that have gone off from 1945 to 1998, including test sites and the like. Long, but neat.

*Want respect for bicycles as transport? Use them that way!

*ratatosk talks about a recent court decision saying that the FCC's current indecency policy is unconstitutionally vague. Go censorship fighting!

And that seems to be everything. Now I can go clear the two hundred or so items out of my RSS reader. WOO!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Also on that list is:

rm, who writes about dancing and fandom and gender and the whole racism-misogony-homophobia-god-society-sucks-thing and doesn't really take shit, and writes just *fantastic* stories about a life that seems very much to be a part of a different world and time sometimes.

kittikattie, who writes about video games and American Girl dolls and ponies and art and the whole society sucks thing and takes even less shit than Rach and has a constantly amusing slice of life journal thing going on with lots of pictures of interesting stuff and is the one who coined the phrase "black day"² which I use sometimes.

And ShadowCaptain would be if he hadn't left elljay for the evil that is Facebook, and Ms_Hecubus like I said, and there are almost certainly other people who have interesting and entertaining journals, in case you need more to read, which I doubt. Dan4th and Heptadecagram, when they post. Others. Whatever, maybe I'll make this into a post of sorts sometime.

2: Black Day: A day in which you put on your gothy best, because sometimes it is nice to be all black-clad and take-no-shit. She always has one on the fourteenth of February, as well as two or three others across the year, mine show up sporadically, but seem to be reoccurring on the fourth of July.

3: In watching Clueless the other day, I remarked that "only to a sixteen year old would "and you're a virgin who can't drive" be seen as such a slur".

In Indianapolis. Will make it to Chicago sometime this afternoon. Ambiguous when I get proper internet again, but then again, the advantage of being an adult is that I can take off and find a wifi enabled coffeeshop if I have to.

Really really really exhausted. Note to self, if ever mum suggests a road trip after two weeks of day camp without at least a day of rest, smack her around a bit.

Went to Young's Jersey Dairy, which is a memory from so far back I didn't even have a livejournal last time I passed through. Got "trash" as my ice cream which was vanilla died a *vivid* purple, with chocolate cups with assorted interesting fillings in it. The raspberry filled ones were my favourite. Also played on tractors and chased cats and admired goats. Was a good stop.

I have been reading in the car, which is one of those sentences that the majority of you probably looked at and went "so?". But let me emphisize my point here --I, for the very first time in my entire life, have been reading in the car. I have been reading, and not feeling queasy and puking. Oh frabjous day, the whole carsick thing that has plagued me my entire life has finally ebbed!

So pretty much as long as I had daylight yesterday, I was tearing through books --a couple of KoDT collections, "Autobiography of a One Year Old" (which I had read before and heartily enjoy) and a collection of Cory Doctorow's short stories called "Overclocked".

The Doctorow I had to put down halfway through --I was enjoying them, and from a relatively uninformed perspective, I seem to largely agree with his open-source ideals. But *man* is he militant about it. Sometimes I just want to read a stupid sci-fi story without any serious message about how OH NO THE WORLD IS GOING TO BE RUINED OH NOOOOOO!

(This may be why I read a lot more fantasy than sci-fi)

At any rate, I am currently reading "Alcatraz and the Evil Librarians", which is totally fun so far, and very silly. AND, might I add, mindless fantasy without any great message to it. Based on the first sixty pages, I recommend it, especially to currentlee, who is not a thing like any of the librarians in the book, and who I am now of course totally suspicious of, as all librarians seem to be evil.

And now I think I go drive us most of the way to Chicago (Chitown? Chi-town? Chee-towne?) so I'll catch you lot later. Bai!

~Sor
MOOP!

On the plus side, I finally managed to get my zen garden perfectly balanced in Plants vs Zombies



Yep.

~Sor
MOOP!

So, the other day I was going through old 750words posts and stuff, and pulled out a bunch of things that I thought were worth saying in public.

A lot of them are kinda depressing, because I think words often flow better when they've got a pinch of melancholic to them. But here. It's like a sundries post, only just with things I've written.

Author's notes are in italics

---

There is a boy.
Who likes me and other girls.
And likes me more _anyways_.

***

Being loved by someone sweet and devoted to me is nice, and I love them all for it.

But being loved by someone sweet and devoted to me over other girls is just a whole different realm of exciting. And of course, we don't actually have much of a romantic relationship at all, but still.

I've never been the girl who wins before. It's the scariest damn thing, but gods help me, I like it.

Yeah, this was really startling when I realized it for the first time, and I still kinda refuse to believe it's true.

And of course, there is no "winning" in poly (except maybe making everyone involved in your relationship scheme happy) but there's also not quite a word to express what I mean here. I am perfectly content to be right where I am in all the relationships I'm in --hence the reason I'm in them-- but sometimes it's nice to realize all a sudden that someone thinks you're special enough to set aside a girl who is clearly hotter and more interesting than you are.

---

...then it just hurts more and I am tired of it hurting _more_. Things aren't supposed to keep hurting more. Shouldn't pain level out at some point?

Yes. Yes it should. I think this particular pain might've gotten close to level for now, the problem is just that level is a lot of pain, and so I can only lock it away for so long before it rages at me again.

What, no, I'm not emo, nope.

---

I hate because the only other option is to hurt, and this hurts so bad I'm not sure I can deal.

I don't remember who or what I hate here. Very plausibly myself.

---

And really, if you don't have all your words sorted out beforehand, if you don't know what you're going to say, what's the point of trying to say it anyways? I'm a fucking writer, if I can't put a problem into words, there's probably not much of a problem in the first place.

...and even if I can put it into words, I'm a cynic, and a victim and extremely clever. If I can put it into words, I can figure out arguments against the problem until it no longer exists, or boils down to just me being a tiny idiot. And no one but me can fix me being a tiny idiot.

And this is why I am not very good at speaking up when there is something wrong in one of my relationships. If I can sort it out on my own, because I was just being silly, why would I bother my partner?

Yeah, I'm _really_ not good at this relationship thing. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

---

And when the going gets tough, I am presented with one option -to overwhelm myself in sensation.

Tense certain muscles past any reasonable point, shut my eyes tight, or stare meditatively into something lovely, or run and run until the body runs out of energy, or most used of all, drown my internal monologue in music.

I drown myself in music all the time. Hell, let's be honest here, it's one of the most useful coping mechanisms I currently have in order to fight bottom. I get sad, I pump on the Next to Normal, or s00j, or Vienna, or whatever else I've got, and I make the sad, if not go away, at least have to struggle past the noise to actually get to me.

It's a really really nice coping mechanism. It also means that I'm going to be deaf before I turn thirty.

My made up mind was not put here for you to try and change. Cheers, s00j.

---

But the best part of today is that I've hit upon two separate things that make me incredibly _incredibly_ happy.

The first is pretty logical. Giving Blood. Me donating a pint makes me both incredibly pleased with myself, and punchy as fuck due to the light-headedness. I am okay with this state of affairs, especially if it makes me unlazy enough to go give blood more often than the twice yearly I've been doing.

Speaking of which, I'm almost eligible again. Anyone want to go to the red cross with me this weekend?

---

I am amused by Hyde, protecting me from the ghosts that lurk for hours after I read anything creepytastic, no matter how far I remove myself from the immediate.

"Don't worry dear. There is nothing in this house as scary as I. Except maybe for you."

Oh, excellently played you delightful fucker.

y'all do know who Hyde is, right? He lives in my head and gives me not terribly good advice. Because I am, say it with me folks, a little bit broken.

---

I am, for the first time in my life, willingly sitting out while actively at dance.

I just...don't feel like dancing. I'd say maybe I'm tired, except I know I've danced in physically worse shape before --and that's not even counting on the sprained ankle!

No, I just can't cope with the idea of doing more dances tonight. There is apparently a point where the pain of dance overtakes the pleasure --I know, I didn't realize it could happen either. But there is, and I've finally hit it.

***

I don't want to sob in the middle of the dance hall, in the middle of a waltz. I don't know that I could explain why if I did. I do know that I don't ever want to have to. I hate crying, I hate the pain, and I hate people giving me sympathy, because I hate being weak enough to need other people.

All I want is to just be strong enough to survive independent of outside forces. Maybe that means I need to break up with everyone, not have outside forces that affect me any longer. GO LIVE IN A CAVE AND BE A HERMIT, SOR!

I am such a whiny cunt¹. It is beyond me why anyone at all gives a damn about me in the first place. :P

Cunt explained below. No, you don't get an explanation for the rest of it. But this is a pretty common mental path --emo -> yelling at myself for being emo.

---

Dog and I get along well, and that's really really important.

I need to remember that having friends who I can bitch about the odd parts of my life to are a really crucial thing for me to have. I also need to remember how much I appreciate having friends who will slap me down when I am using inappropriate language, or otherwise being an elitist jerk. (see also, Jesse glaring at me when I used bitch. I want to give him a cookie and a hug for that alone)

Dog is awesome. I really want to hang out with him more this fall, when I'm back in Boston.

---

(I don't know how to feel about the fact that I'm using Amanda right now for a little extra bit of stability. She is a fucking idiot. But her art, when it's good...

It's good. It's the best. Right now I am angry and hurt and sad and scared. And that is the perfect mood for listening to Amanda, because she will reinforce the parts that are okay to be reinforced, and she will eradicate the parts that need to just Go Away.

I use music to blank myself out. She's really really good at that.

Hate the artist, love the art? I don't even know anymore. It is so hard to be a good person sometimes.)

Can we have an Amandadebate-free space in my journal comments? I'd appreciate that.

Yes, this is all just because I handle arguments extremely poorly, and I can't freak out and walk four miles in this state.

---

I find it telling that I've had two boys in a row who were just for sex. And I'm in love with both of them.

Sex is a bit of a misnomer --I have what the Shakers² call an "unsullied cunt", which is apparently terribly valuable and should be protected at all costs. But boys who I am into with the kissing and such, and not the romantics. And...yeah. My traitor of a heart has started to sigh wistfully, and doodle our initials together on my school notebooks.

---

The emotion involved, this is more than sex. Sex is just endorphins and dopamine. Waltzing is...joy.

So, I almost just wrote "fucking _this_" as my author's note. Which means that I just tried to emphatically agree with something I wrote. So, uh, yeah, I'm a bit of an idiot.

---

~Sor
MOOP!

1: This is not a word that I should use. It's a slur, flat and simple, and I should not use it to refer to myself (which I do, occasionally), or any other woman (which I don't.)

That being said, there are a lot of things I call myself that no one else may touch, and yes, cunt is one of them. There's a hardness to it, all edges and corners and sharp, and in some moods, the words I feel that fit best are the words that fit this hardness.

2: See also, Shakesville here, and the specific origin of the term unsullied cunt here.

Origins is essentially done for me --Mom hopes to leave in about two hours, and all I have left to do is buy one game from the dealers hall, and say goodbye to whoever I see.

I have absolutely no voice, have to work at day camp tomorrow (just as a floater, which I have never even once done before and is going to be Weird As Fuck), and should probably sleep at least twelve hours before then, at least, say, eight of which should be in an actual bed.

I was the only person in the IIT to not win a medallion of any sort, which is okay, because it was an amazing tournament. Hopefully next year it will have more than five players, even if that means my chances go down again. Hopefully between now and then I will actually practise some of that restructuring that's, you know, half the game or something.

It was a GREAT year for Werewolf variants. Peter did not manage to get his vampire game (with infections) in a state he was willing to run it, but Ross ran an incredible daytime only game on Friday night, that became the first of five or six (and the only one actually modded by him), and Sparr invented a double-village variant, where each player got two role cards.

Also a great year for me getting to know more werewolf players --closer to Ray, definitely closer to the younger Bobek (who is like...a month and a half older than me, grr!), a little bit closer to Ionnis (who is insanely hard to read), closer to Peter (who I will hang with when I'm in Chicago) and Ross (who I will try and hang with when I can) of course, closer to pretty pretty David (which is fantastic, and I CANNOT WAIT to see one of his Dragon*Con costumes), and lots closer to this cute guy called Brad who lives something like two miles from The Empty City. So YAY!

(And if the above sounded in part like personal reference to you...good catch, well done.)

I did not go and cry in the bathroom even once. This, plus the fact that I was not put into the Icehouse during the IIT means that I pretty much achieved my Big Origins Goals.

(Yes, I *am* so pathetic that those were my only real Big Origins Goals. Sigh.)

My hair is still the longest. I almost walked away with both the longest and the female runner up medallions, since I was almost the only girl. Rad, dude.

I did not play any Black Ice, which makes me a little sad.

Andy vs Everybody went well, much better than last year. Except for the part where Andy got annihilated. Thursday he scored about 18.6% wins, Friday 32%, and Saturday...well...I haven't done the percentages, but he got three wins, against Everybody's 25. Yeeeeeah.

This seems to have inadvertently turned into my con report, which is alright by me. So yeah, that was my Origins. I'll try to write something more coherent sometime, but I had a really *really* good year this year, marred only by losing my voice faster than usual, and the notable absence of this boy I met one Origins who I seem to have first described as "beyond awesome, he is VERY cool".

(Which, let it be noted, is an amazingly noticeable absence. The number of times I caught someone out of the corner of my eye and whipped my head around to see if it was him was staggering. And it never was.)

And I still need/want to make a really big werewolf post/thread talking about some thoughts and some strategies and stuff. Also, one of these years, I want to get a suite to myself, identify fewer than thirty people who are allowed in, and have crazy exclusive yet deeply awesome games of werewolf while lounging about in our pyjamas on beds and while eating food and being chill and incredibly relaxed. That is a beautiful pipe dream, my friends.

Gonna go pack now. Ta!

~Sor
MOOP!

Things that I have determined:

*They found a self-replicating design for Conway's Game of Life, something that they weren't expecting to achieve for another decade or so.

*Seanan McGuire's Red Roses and Dead Things is one *hell* of a good album. (Yes, my music is rapidly approaching a type, shuddup)

*Girls wearing labcoats and little else are pretty hot, just on principle.

*I might be boy-crazy

*Being hyper-flirty-silly is an awesome mood, especially when I can actually get things done through it.

And now I go sleep, so tomorrow I can accomplish things for mom and drive to Origins. BYE GUYS, BE GOOD WHILE I'M GONE!

~Sor
MOOP!