Moving

I just can't seem to keep this thing updated--maybe that will change at some point, but I don't expect it any time soon. However, I have been working on a new exhibitionistic experiment elsewhere: http://fourmilehouse.blogspot.com. Check it out if you're interested in our new environs and what we're doing with them.

Prodigal Writer

Egads. I almost completely forgot that I had begun this journal, which may explain the two-year absence. My apologies to those who are actually reading it--I wasn't aware that anybody was. Including people I haven't heard from in forever (hi Julie--my contact information for you is probably about 6 years out of date)! Must remember to update this more often.

In a nutshell, I've spent the last few years accomplishing such myriad tasks as *finally* becoming a published "author" (inasmuch as I write little sound-bite economics book summaries that are technically published in a periodical), working my way through grad school, and getting married. The blessed event took place in June 2006, and my husband and I have been trying to fit in little bits of wedded bliss amidst our busy lives ever since. He's a writer and an academic of the archaeologist sort; I'm a writer and an academic of the bookish sort, so we get along well. As of today, I'm approximately 24 days away from the massive comprehensive exam that is the final requirement for my M.A. in English Literature. The past three years have been a blur of Great Works and discourse, but an end is in sight. And after the degree is achieved? I have no idea. I've got a husband, I've got a job, I'll have all the education I want (at least for the next few years), and kids are still a few years in the future. Life is very soon going to get much less complicated and much more open. I might try out that writing thing again...my novels have been gathering dust for years. A new attempt at a social life might be in order too; graduate school is not always conducive to communication with the outside world.

So if you're reading this and you know me from way back when, or think you might want to know me, then feel free to comment or look me up on MySpace or something. I'll be a lot more accessible after April 13th.

Mutterings, Meat, and Memories

This is another one of those days where I kneel in effusive appreciation of feeling okay. Not good, not happy, just...well, fine. Conscious. In the state where Nyquil did its appointed job last night, and Dayquil is propping me up until I can collapse tonight after class.

Sometimes I think that if I were healthier, I would stop appreciating the feeling of not having a headache...I would take it for granted, and as a result wouldn't enjoy the lack of pain as much as I do now. My head started hurting on Tuesday morning around 10 AM, and didn't stop until about 10 last night. Adam spent the day asking me in worried tones if I wanted him to cancel the gaming session, but being that I caused him to miss the session on Sunday, I didn't want to be a complete bastard; I spent the evening muttering shut up shut up shut up! to the character I was playing, a disturbingly cheerful and strident 11-year-old, and caught 30-second naps on Dan's shoulder whenever I could. I understand that I may have been a bit short with people afterward in my headlong rush for bed, darkness, and silence, and I apologize for that. Yesterday at one point, I felt like someone was tugging on the outer edge of my right eyelid, stretching the skin tight like we used to do when we pretended to be Asians during my non-politically correct childhood. I've become a headache gourmet over the past few years; there's the sinus one where it feels like someone is very slowly scraping a groove in the notch at the top of my eye socket, and the migraine where I feel like the side of my head has gotten all squishy, and the pain follows this thin path down through my body, all the way down into my stomach, and the gigantic head-encompassing one that starts as a deceptive ache and stiffness in my neck muscles.

But the headache is gone, and the cough is diminishing, and my appetite's back, just in time for my anticipated Burger King meal tonight on campus. This wouldn't usually be cause for celebration, but it's not Adam's favorite fast food, and for some reason most of the ones in the Pittsburgh area have closed. A nice flamebroiled double cheeseburger is my reward in the two hours between when I leave work and have to be in class. I've always associated Burger King with college. When I was little and my dad was going to night school at Youngstown State University, we would sometimes go over with him when he had to do library research. The college was a magical place to me; there was a brightly lit pedestrian bridge that went over the road, and a huge library with 4 or 5 floors, and we always went there when it was dark. Everything seemed quiet and studious. There was a Burger King by the bookstore, and we ate there a few times; hence, the association.

Whenever I start thinking my current hectic schedule is tough, I think about my dad. He started out at Penn State back in the 60s, but had to leave when my grandpa got sick and the family business was imperiled. He left school just in time to get shipped out to Vietnam. When he came back, he got married, got a job, got a house, and adopted two kids. Eventually he decided to go back for his bachelor's degree in engineering. He spent twelve and a half years working full time and then driving more than an hour round trip to go to class--and in his free time, he and my mom raised two kids, something I can't even imagine doing now. I was 9 or so when he graduated, and I remember being so proud of him. Now that I have an idea of what it took to get that far--even a rudimentary idea, because he was still doing so much more than I am now--I'm even prouder. Twelve and a half years. That takes a level of persistence I can't imagine. And in that time, he even had time to spare to buy his kids Burger King, and raise a daughter who thought that both he and what he was doing were so cool that she fell in love with the college atmosphere in general, and to this day, is working as hard as she can to become a part of it.

Christmas, Cake, and Castigating Counterfeit Constantines

The weather has been having a strange effect on me lately. The combination of an unseasonably mild early winter, followed by lots o'Arcticness starting this week, has fooled me into disbelieving the calendar date. Now that Pgh is covered with a nice thickening blanket of snow, I've caught myself hearkening back to the 40-70 degree days of a few weeks ago, and thinking, Ah, how nice...this kind of weather really puts me in the Christmas spirit. Then I remember that Christmas was three weeks ago. These past few years, in which I've consistently forgotten to get good snow-walking shoes, had worse-than-usual ankle and knee problems, lacked the time and green acreage to go out and play, and had to drive in the accursed stuff, the association with Christmas has really been one of the only things that gives snow a positive connotation in my mind. Getting it now, after the holidays are over, is like going to work and being told that your mandatory overtime is going to be unpaid after all. It would have been worth it with the extra money, but that won't be happening. You're already there, and you can't very well just leave; you just have to slog through until it's done. I don't want to wish the rest of the winter away. I have too many school projects due in mid-February to do that, and Adam and I have a lot of wedding plans to consider making. But I fear it's going to be a long season if this weather continues.

One thing I'm most definitely including in the wedding plans: a cake from some sort of baker who is not me. I realize that Adam and I could be perfectly happy with a homegrown cake; it seems that our nuptials are shaping up to be a low-budget, low-pressure affair, and I'm cool with that. I'm fairly certain we're going to be making our own invitations, head table place cards, etc. (Adam's had to drag me forcibly away from the "Make your own Veil/Cake Topper/Bouquet/Unity Candle!" section of the craft store several times already.) I also hope to mobilize the oven-friendly members of my family to make a million and a half homemade Italian cookies for the reception. But we won't be making our own cake. I can't frost them. I'm utterly incapable. No matter how cool the cake is and how warm the icing is, no matter how cleverly I ply the little rubber spatula, I always, always end up tearing up the top layer of the cake, getting it mixed up with the frosting, and leaving behind a wasteland of craters, bald spots, and jagged hills of frosting that will not be smoothed. The gaming group last night assured me that it tasted okay, but I'm certain they were secretly horrified by the blasted appearance the cake presented. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I have the same problem when I try to work with spackle (which does not bode well for my hopes to perform feats of Interior Decorating in the future). But, yes...this is why I am perfectly willing to spring for a professionally made cake. Even if Adam has his way and we do end up using Star Wars figurines as a cake topper.

(Warning: comic book geek content below!)

One more random thing that I hope will horrify my friends as much as it did me: last time we were at Barnes and Noble, we came upon something that Should Not Be. What we found was a graphic novelization of a movie. The movie in question was Constantine, that ridiculous, misbegotten mess of a film that stars Keanu (insert profanity here) Reeves as John Constantine THE DARK-HAIRED AMERICAN WITH A LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES.

*twitch*

Yes, I know I've only read Original Sins and can't call myself a Hellblazer fan by a long shot. But still. Keanu Reeves. Los Angeles. No. Even in my relative ignorance regarding the series, I already know that the city of London is just as much a main character as the man himself is. It's like taking Lestat out of New Orleans and putting him in Miami. Oh, wait, that eventually happened too. Well, it's like...it just doesn't work, and I predict that the movie is going to bomb. I may ultimately be wrong about that, but I won't know, because I'm not planning to see it. But back to my previous rant: yes, this was a comic book novelization of the movie. Which was, of course, adapted from a comic book so it didn't NEED a comic book adaptation. It's one thing to see Keanu Reeves pretending to be John Constantine onscreen. It's quite another to see him in the pages of the story's formative medium, usurping the word-bubbles and the mood lighting, and just...pretending. On the plus side, the editors of the book decided to give us a helpful object lesson on how much their movie and tie-in product sucks; they also included the first three volumes from Original Sins, just for comparison.

If I ever publish anything, I'm going to do it on a hand-cranked printing press that I hide under my bed. I am never, never going to sell any kind of rights to someone who will hurt my work in this way.

That's probably a lie, but since I'm not even published at all yet, I can still afford to be idealistic.

There was going to be a long and thoughtful post here, about my weekend and what I've been thinking about lately. Unfortunately, all thought-like activity has been subsumed by the sullen but insistent broadcasts thundering up from my primal subconscious:

Getting sick. Yep...definitely getting sick.

Had a day off from everything yesterday. Felt fine yesterday.

Getting sick today.

I'm not surprised at all. It's gone from 70 to 2 degrees in the past week or so, I've been wandering around outside not only without a hat and scarf but without even drying my hair a few times, and our apartment is one of the more humid levels of hell lately. Our steam radiators have finally gone completely mad. They will no longer obey commands to turn off, unless it is their whim to do so; I have burned my hand on one whose valve was entirely closed. The one in Adam's room has now begun continuously venting steam; the only way to stop it is to turn it all the way off (if it's on) or on (if it's off). Either one stops it from hissing, until it starts again, at which point the only solution is to turn the valve completely the opposite way. Last night, both ends of each radiator started leaking boiling water; the only way to stop the bucketfuls of water from coming out was to turn every radiator on full blast. To avoid dying of heatstroke, we also had to open the windows. The wind chill was well below zero last night, so we spent the night being alternately blasted by scalding and frigid air, which unfortunately did not mix to create a comfortable temperature. Our apartment is also uncomfortably damp; the carpets around the radiators are soaked, and we have hanging up around the apartment a profusion of towels meant to soak up the water until we realized we had to resort to buckets instead. But we only realized that once the towels we'd put down were also soaked (and in many cases, now stained with rust and copper deposits). I'm fairly certain I'm allergic to mold, and nearly positive we have a lot of it in the walls right now.

God, please let it be August soon. With this and the return of the Upstairs Hellbeasts' party season this weekend, I'm seriously considering breaking our lease.

So, yeah. Not surprised I'm getting sick. Just wish it were a time when I could actually afford to be so.

Random Movie Recollection

I'm blogging this, because this completely tangential fact keeps going through my head and I have no idea what else to do with it.

I went to a Catholic school between kindergarten and 8th grade (as opposed to high school, when I went to a Catholic school, and college, when I went to a Catholic school, and grad school, when...) As expected, we were exposed to blood and gore a great deal as a result of this. Lent was always a very uplifting time of year; I think I saw just about every filmed account of Jesus' short life and horrific death in existence, sitting in uncomfortable wooden folding chairs in the cafegymatorium. Lots of flogging, lots of thorns being pressed down on heads, lots of graphic depictions of the martyrdoms of saints, all before the tender age of 14. I even recall going to a performance of the Living Stations of the Cross one year, where we watched a half-naked, rather handsome high school lad, painted all over with lurid stage-makeup welts and bruises, stumble through the aisles of the church while another kid enthusiastically pantomimed whipping him. Suffice it to say that to attend a Catholic grade school was to become somewhat inured to violence.

This still doesn't explain why, when I was in seventh grade or so, Sr. Helen (still one of the coolest and down-to-earth nuns I've ever known) rescued us from our usual curriculum and let us all gather our chairs around to watch a movie on the portable audiovisual cart. The only reason I can think of is that I think it was around Easter time, and maybe they just felt like giving us a fun activity. What they did, though, was show us a movie called House of the Long Shadows. I know more about it now; apparently it's a decent example of Gothic horror from 1983, starring Vincent Price. Back then, all I knew about it was that I would rather have had teeth extracted, without novocaine, than watch it. Even now, at 25, I'm not a fan of horror movies. I stare in confusion at people who think Nightmare on Elm Street is funny, and I can't even watch the trailer for The Grudge. So I sat there, trying my best to meld with my plastic chair, as I watched people get strangled with piano wire, worm-eaten corpses fall from the ceiling, people catch battle-axes in the stomach, and a women wash her face in a bowl of water that OMG TURNS OUT TO BE FLESH-EATING ACID INSTEAD AND SHE RUNS AROUND SCREAMING AS HER FACE PEELS OFF IN BLOODY CHUNKS AND THEN SHE DIES!!! I sat there and stared while the nun cheerfully told me that it was just a movie, and I'd feel better if I just refrained from suspending my disbelief.

For days afterwards, it was by god an epic struggle for courage to step into the shower and let the water hit me.

I'm still not sure why she decided to show us this movie--even this particular type of movie--when, the same year, we watched National Lampoon's Vacation and our teacher very carefully fast-forwarded all of the parts where there's nudity or where Chevy Chase uttered swears worse than "damn". I'm also not sure what I'm trying to say about this event. Maybe it's that during the 80s, people saw no problem with randomly exposing children to really ugly horror movies (I experienced the same phenomenon very often at sleepovers, where I had no choice but sit through Puppet Master and the aforementioned Mr. Krueger franchise, or risk being ridiculed by a bunch of girls who were only tenuously my friends in the first place). Maybe it's that it seems like a double standard that they were okay with showing us scenes of Gory Death, but wouldn't dream of allowing a single moment of the sh-bomb or Christie Brinkley skinny dipping in the hotel pool. Maybe it's just that I have an extremely overactive imagination, and am glad that Adam has other friends to go and see scary movies with, so I don't have to.

Maybe it's just that I wonder what ever happened to the kid who played Beaten Jesus. He was really cute.

Tuesday Pleasantries

Sometimes, very rarely, I give a brief thought to the possibility that I might be bipolar, not just depressed. There are times when the fog lifts and I'm suddenly capable of great feats of concentration, productivity, and cheerfulness for a while. I fly through my work, get creative ideas, and have the urge to stay up very late accomplishing the things I generally let lie around. Occasionally, as part of this, I get jittery and have trouble sleeping; otherwise I wouldn't even consider the possibility of these times being manic. The more I think about it, though, I suspect that when I feel like this, I'm not actually experiencing unreasonable peaks and hollows; I'm simply rising to the baseline level of awareness and comfort where most people spend their lives. It happens seldom enough that it feels damn good when it does. Today is one of those times, amplified by the fact that I felt bloody awful this morning; along with the ubiquitous tiredness and stomach problems, I seem to be breaking out in hives again, like I did last April. No big worry. I'm either mildly allergic to something or it's just stress. The former I can ask about when I go to the doctor, and the latter, I can deal with, because it's all in my head. Lately I've been realizing the benefits of sitting down and taking a few relaxing breaths. It works wonders for my stomach problems, too. A quiet command for my vitals to calm down and behave themselves has prevented several episodes where I would have gotten sick otherwise. I'm sure improving my diet (when I get around to it) will help too. Until I'm seeing a counselor and on antidepressants, I'm going to see how much I can do to make things easier for myself.

Despite the health talk, this really is going to be a happy post. Part of the change in emotional altitude I'm experiencing today is a feeling of being comfortable and well situated. Regrets and negative things from the past aren't bothering me--I'm even seeing bad experiences with mixed appreciation and understanding of what they taught me, I'm happy with and thankful for what I have right now, and I have a good idea of the path to where I want to go in the future. The recent religious debates among my friends have helped me find an understanding of and satisfaction with my paradigm that I haven't had for a long time. Food tastes good and sleep makes me feel better rested in the morning. I can hold a conversation with an acquaintance or coworker without stumbling over my words or closing up. I'm okay with it being a cold, rainy day in January. Everything is just going well, and the things that aren't...well, they're staying in perspective and not threatening to eat the entire world and plunge existence into the Darkness Beyond the Stars.

Last night's class probably contributed to the feeling of well being. I've decided to drop all pretense of becoming a Serious Literary Theoriseur and admit that what I really want to study is fantasy, sci-fi, and smut. I admitted it in class last night (okay, I did fudge it a bit by throwing in some rhetoric about allegory and myth)--and the professor and other students thought it was a great thing to study! I learned last night why most people think of the eighteenth century as such a dry and boring literary period, stuck between the Renaissance and Romantic eras as it is: it's because most survey courses on the Restoration concentrate on the men. Turns out that the women were where all the action is. This class is going to center mostly on the E!-worthy theatre of big pimpin' Charles II's era; the glamorous life of the actresses; Aphra Behn, who was a spy and (if I skimmed this right) wrote love letters to women; and the Smut that The Victorians Tried to Kill and Couldn't; interspersed with a wee little break for a bit of serious proto-feminism. I started the class exhausted; ended it exhilarated, two and a half hours later. That's what I call an evening well spent. Can't wait to go back. Don't even really mind that I have to spend my birthday in class.

I wasn't expecting this, but both of my classes this term are sources for prime gaming/fiction research. The theatre portion of the Restoration class is going to give me all kinds of ideas for my bawdyhouse actress, Kiana.

Let's see, what else is good...well, one of our summer pilgrimages is now in the serious planning stage; we bought our badges for the Origins gaming convention in Columbus yesterday. I haven't had all that much to look forward to these past few summers, but Origins and Otakon are definitely filling that role this year. Now I'm obsessively checking the website for signs that events are being announced, and just slightly beginning to wonder about where we're going to stay. I'd love to be able to stay at one of the hotels within walking distance of the convention center, and on my current wave of semi-manic optimism, I'm saying, "Yeah, hell with the price! We can afford it, whatever it is!"

The thing that's slightly sobering (in a very happy way) is that this might somewhat be true. Since my last pay raise, I've had the pleasant experience of being able to pay bills whenever I feel like it, knowing that I'll have enough money to cover them without having to do some clever maths first. I have to remember that there is a wedding happening in a year and a half. Even though I'm becoming more and more okay with it being a low-budget affair, Adam and I have both agreed that the honeymoon location is not negotiable. And it's quite the expensive destination.