La Phalene

So I went out and bought a big sheet of red paper, the most economical way to cut out 13 paper hearts for the various folk in my building. As of the 14th I’ll either be adored or shunned. I’m hoping for immaturity- most people I know are delighted toget noticed, even trivially. The only thing I worry is that people will take it the wrong way.

That and my neighbour, who I share a bedroom wall with, is borderline homocidal from the loud sex noises. Correction- loud pleading for mercy, hitting -and- sex noises. There’s really no way to flog someone quietly, and I’ll happily listen to her play guitar round the clock is she forgives us for having kinky sex less than a foot away from her bed.

To facilitate better studying, I gave up web surfing. So far it hasn’t been so difficult, though I find I have more ways to goof off than just mindless clicking. On the other hand I’d rather watch episodes of “Sassy Girl” or write bad fantasy fiction, so it suits me even if I’m not the perfect angel one might hope.

Speaking of Sassy Girl, I’ve noticed that it tends to be an excellent motivator where noting else works. The sort of literature that espouses the power of human potential makes me feel bathed in glurge, and I’m naturally repelled by the genre of productivity porn, where if you just order your contact list the right way, somehow the magic zen wealth gnomes will give you the ability to achieve more than you ever imagined. But give me a happy over achiever story in fiction or some housekeeping books and I’m happily embroiled in my studies right away.

So, the inevitable has happened, and critter hats are invading. This generally proves my ongoing thesis that what shameless geeks are wearing will trickle down eventually. Critter hats seem to be part of a general trend towards stupid stuff on your head to keep warm, that’s also clustered around big parka frills and guys wearing those hats with ear flaps.

I’m of two minds about this trend. On the one hand, I’ve always wanted a kitty hat, on the other hand, I have a personal problem related to these hats- because of the size of my head, anything that isn’t over sized will be dispreportionate to my colassal cranium.

On the plus side, I believe I’m ordering this hat for my gentleman, since he agreed that this halloween we could go as bo-peep and sheep:

I’m under a lot of school stress, and I’ve been fairly sore with bodily tension since classes started. As of the third week of February, I finish my least favourite pat of the school term- midterms. Thanks to therapy and good medications, my strategy has adjusted from placing my head as firmly into the sand as I can, to neurotically trying to organize my tasks.

The other night (not last night, but the night before) my gentleman and I had an enormous misunderstanding related to acedemics. He found me curled into a small ball whining with stress and from my gibbering took the root of the situation to be that my midterms were next week, not that I’m a delicate flower with a low stress tolerance who weeps when things are going well. My lack of sleep and thus incoherence didn’t disabuse him of this notion and he proceeded to read me the riot act about working myself into a corner with procrastination.

Cue sobbing on my part, since I thought he was mad at me for being easily stressed. The next day I wandered off to class and while doing my usual between class studies, it occured to me why he was so upset. I came home to find him clad in clouds of steam, the last of the dirty dishes in his soapy dpaws, with a slightly guilty look and an apologetic declaration that if he was going to chew me up he’d better lead by example by doing all his chores, to which I casually mentioned that I in fact had two full weeks of study for my midterms, not the five days he had assumed and panicked over. There was a pause, and he became the gibbering one.

In any case, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the library lately, or curled up on a couch at school with a reading propped on my lap. I’m about helf done for the assinged readings for everthing up to the midterm, and my goal, which feels very reachable at the moment, is to finish the rest for Thursday. That’s about 5 chapters of Psychology (actually 1 in one class and 4 in another), 4 foreign policy readings, 6 chapters of foreign policy. There’s also a paper due on Wednesday in midterm week, which should be about 10 journal articles, as the page length is ten pages, and an idiot assignment on Freud VS evolution due this Friday, which I’m writing tonight after my voluntary french class.

Recently Apple got every nerd on the planet chirping about the ‘ipad’. their new touch pad product, and about for the past three years, kindles, and the future of ebooks have become a popular source of small talk debates, generally a divide between people who get excited over new tech for the sake of new tech and cranky purists who talk about the joys of a good old paperback. Ebooks are also at the root of a debate between a major publishing house, Macmillan and Amazon, where Amazon yanked all the works of the former from their store in a tiff over price fixing.

Another common problem cited with ebooks is DRM, which is a sort of single person liscencing from a product that is a built in self destruct in computer programs, music and other media which limits their use and makes a property vulnerable to suddenly becoming unavailable to the owner when the DRM owning company folds, allow unexpected liscencing yanking and so forth. Understandably this gets people irked. However without protection, all digital media is basically free to copy and share, making piracy extremely easy. For example gigapedia is an enormous search archive of pdfs of books, most of which are still within their copyrights.

I actually don’t mind pdfs that much. Most of my classes’ journal articles are found online through my University’s library, making paper writing an exercise to be conducted in my pajamas. I think ebooks have an important place and are not inherently bad. For example the attempts by the Gutenberg Project are comendable. Classics and out of print lit that would otherwise vanish off the shelves is preserved for free download.

Instead, what concerns me about switching to a new electronic book format is the trashy books. I really like stupid regency novels and historical romances. These are not good books, except that they make me giggle like a hyena on nitrous oxide for the time it takes to consume them. These books are published by the wagon load, formulaic crap that gets dumped into supermarkets and the back shelves of book stores and then forgotten.

I can’t afford to buy these books new; however I get a lot out of second hand shopping and libraries. Lately, living in a big city, I get a lot out of free book heaps When I buy these books second hand, many are outright unreadable or only useable once, so I cycle them back out, leaving them in cafes and Laundromats and other places. I also recycle any other books I’m bored with, from knitting guides to great lit.

Because of the sheer volume of these books I can easily steal enough to feed my reading habit, often nicely formatted into PDFs, but unless I want to actively participate in something illegal, I’m not in a position to pass books along anymore, or participate in bottom feeding from second hand book sales.

I’m also concerned what this will do to text book sales. Regularly updated, specialty books cost an arm and a leg. I understand some of this is evil on the part of publishers and some of it is the nature of the market. Right now, I can survive by buying second hand text books and professors who are lenient enough to permit using past editions, where it’s a new textbook. I am deeply pessimistic about the possibility that this will appreciably lower the cost of text books, just make it hard to get more uses out of your ‘book’.

I’m having one of those fuzzy evenings when my brain isn’t feeling like it wants to move in step with my body. I’m not sure why- I think I might not be sleeping enough because I’m having these very vivid dreams. They’re all very lurid and odd, one part from things I’ve seen during the day and one part something absaloutely absurd. I’ve had two dreams involving white supremacists (I mean skin heads). Maybe American History X made a big impression on me I didn’t know about?

Today, instead of class the professor showwed a video on Jung, who was deeply interested in the archeytypes that show up in dreams and fantasies. The video was terrible, taking a psuedo mystical direction with bad kabalah paintings and crappy synth clips, along with random 60’s stock footage and grainy sound. I wonder what he’d make of my often violent, gender swapping, disjointed narratives? My sense of ‘me’ is always very fluid, so at any moment I can snap to a portly middle aged politician trying to escape out a broken window, a man trying to survive in prison, me as I am, a princess… My dreams are the landscapes I spend the most time in or fantastic recombinations of things I’ve seen during the day. Last night I dreamed we were escaping through a city that looked like a several story shopping mall while a matriarch ruled government was trying to catch me and my plucky band of rebels. Reality was proving fairly coherent despite several casual gender swaps, and the male in the group (who I’d been, only moment ago) was trying to shoot an inflatable survey drone with a machine gun, when suddenly we introduced an inflatable helicopter. Like, with seams, life sized but made of vynil.

I get the sense that my brain is making up an explaination for a series of random images which are being generated by free association- there’s no story, just creation that explains my motive for them moment.

According to research into dream imagery, once black and white television stopped being the norm, people’s common black and white dreams stopped happening. My mother, the writer, used to dream in story voice over narrative and my brother dreams in video games. My dreams wander all over the place, but I think I’m going to be in the camp that believes that Jung is full of it, and doo-dads in my dream are personal brain randomness.

Somewhere along the way, I became a fairly good cook. Not a ‘carves shapes out of radishes’ sort of chef, or the kind that whips up a batch of lavender and liberian anchovy cupcakes on a whim, but the kind of cook that can go into a pantry full of assorted raw ingredients and come out with something ediable and a dessert.

Recently, someone gave me one of these doohickeys

Four apples of the cheapest, mangy end of season macintosh, a tiny pat of butter, two spoonfuls of brown sugar and I have an on-demand baked yummy that’s probably less than a dollar for two people. it’s even alterable- health nuts get theres without butter and sweetner, and purists get honey instead of brown sugar.

I’m still sick with a cold, and I’ve got a big blemish on one side of my lip that hurts a bit. My gentleman figured out what was wrong with his thesis, and I’m home with puffy lymph nodes, but much more perky than yesterday. I think I’m going to try to get this place somewhat ship-shape again, since my linens are over due to be changed and the place is piled with clutter.

One of these days I have to post pictures of thep place- for now I’m wrestling with the usual storage dilemas. My gentleman has been responding to thesis stress by complaining about how messy I am, which, given his usual habits and the state of his corner of the room, would make me raise my eyebrow if I was actually capable of that trick.

Me, I’m being mildly amused by the way my mind handles having to clean up the mess around here.

I’d be a perfect service sub, if only the darn dominant would do everything I want. You know, hot tea, obsessive table settings, research, sending me on top secret missions. Instead it’s all about this obedience crap, and people who want to shave my head and put metal things in my bits. Don’t you understand? You just exist as a means to fantasy fulfillment and making me feel less silly about my obsessive compulsive tendencies. You’re supposed to be vaguely interesting in the background, not trying to whip out that kajira bullshit or intervene with my carefully ordered schedule.

You see, I have plans, you know. Saturday morning I’m going to slip out of bed early and wake you up with tea and homemade pancakes. Then you’re going to take a shower with towels I’ve warmed on the heater and put on the clothes I’ve picked… I mean laid out for you. Then piss off and go do some work in your study, I don’t want you traipsing around getting underfoot while I wash up the breakfast dishes. I’m gonna go study now for a few hours, with a snack, and then you’re allowed to see me again when I bring a tray to your desk with lunch. Eat it and appreciate the simple luxury of a home cooked meal. Okay?

Got that? Okay, now I’m going to get dinner on so it can cook all afternoon and putter around with gardening and getting the laundry done. I’m going to bother you about what socks need doing. But don’t bother me, I have more important studying/art/whatever. Get back in your study. Shoo.

Okay, it’s dinner time. I don’t care if you hate fresh flowers and fussy table linens. Go put on a nice shirt and use the napkins I put out. Okay, good. Hey, stop having seconds, I’m saving the leftovers for another meal! Go retire to your comfy chair with a book, and I’ll give you some more tea while the fire… um… heater makes crackling noises. You can have two cookies, I’d like to think of you as having severe restraint. Not the whole batch. Hey! Put that tin down!

Okay, off to bed. On time. We keep strict bed times in this household. I’ve warmed the bed, get into your spot. And stop trying to snuggle, you’re squooshing me flat. Shhh. Oh… Sex? Nevermind, yes. Of course. No, I like this position better. Yes, like that. Mmm. No, do it the other way and you sleep in the wet spot, I’m not –that- submissive.

See, aren’t I good at serving you? Sleep well, because I decided you’re taking me for a crack of dawn jog tomorrow.

I think I’m not the only one who tends in this direction either.

I have another cold, which means I spent the day mostly in bed watching my gentleman go completely to pieces over a thesis problem and making whiny noises. I did get up the energy to make banana bread, but not to do laundry.

Right now I’m feeling much better and listening to “Romantic Death” on repeat, probably until my gentleman starts flinging potted plants and other kitchen table detrius at the back of my head.

Also I’ve set up a small camp in H&H just for the heck of it- eventually my goal is to tame some animals and have a nice little farm. Sadly I’m lacking in metals, though, so important homestead essentials like sausage grinders are well beyond my means unless I mysteriously find a mine or someone lets me freeload.

Yesterday I finally got around to watching Avatar in theater, and since it was Imax, my hearing is still really painful. It was as advertised, basically a kid’s movie with profanity, computer game style combat and pretty visuals. It was fun to watch, and while every step of the plot was predictable and the science wasn’t anything to write home about, the writing was tight. It basically tapped into what a big screen with good colours can do, by giving you silly escapism.

My gentleman also managed to have a huge fight about the mess in our apartment, and I dealt with my damaged boots, exchanging black boots with a busted zipper to deep brown boots. I’d rather have more black boots, but they didn’t have any and brown boots are pretty too.

Since I’ve stopped writing about my sex life I think that my readership has proably returned to the trickle of family members it was before I made kink the focus of my writing.

I’m going to Florida at the end of February, lucky me, where I will stay with my grandparents for a week. They usually take me to see various sights, and buy me an enormous amount of clothing, most of which is too big, too old or both. It’s one of those awkward situations where I’m getting a gift, whether I like it or not.