My mother lost her crazy expensive ring that her BF/fiance got her, so of course, after tearing her kitchen apart, she called me to ask if I had any psychic powers and could tell her where the hell her ring went. "Sorry," I said. "No psychic powers. Try looking in the freezer, though?" (Whenever I lose anything, it almost invariably migrates to the freezer. I can't explain this.)

Anyway, I did a quick three-card tarot reading for her which told her that:
A) she had lost something very important to her
B) she was looking for it
C) it would probably remain lost until it was found.
THE CARDS, THEY KNOW ALL.

I did also tell her that it would probably be in a significant place, and that finding it would probably also allow her to discover something important. So there you go. Anyway, she didn't find it yet, but she did go to a psychic fair this morning to discuss it with any psychics who might sense her distress. Apparently, she talked to a lady who told her to look at something that was orange (but sort of peachy-apricot orange, not orange-orange), and also showed her how to use a pendulum. She also told my mom that in order to assist in finding a job, I should get a whole unshelled pecan, tell it what kind of job I wanted and what kind of money I wanted to be pulling down, and carry it around with me when I turned in applications and went to job interviews.

I also need good vibes and good energy. That's hard. :( Unless I'm driving my brother to work or going out and submitting/collecting job applications (and I think I've exhausted most places within a five-mile radius by now), I have so little to get up and out of bed for. I probably should be writing or making jewelry to try and sell, but...oh god. Effort.

If you are a day person and are not employed or a housespouse/stay-at-home parent or in school, what do you do all day?

THINGS TO DO LIST FOR NEXT WEEK:
1) Get pecan
2) Work magic on pecan
3) Do laundry, shower
4) Take car in
5) Collect job applications
6) Fill out job applications
7) Submit job applications
8) Work on The Script Of Doom
9) Profit?

July 4th, my grandmother drove us home from a day of picnicking and playing with my little cousin. It was after sunset. In every direction we looked, fireworks were sparkling above the trees. We drove through hazes of smoke and under flowering explosions.

I'm listening to "Crow Jane," by Mamie Minch. There are many, many versions of this song; this version seems to borrow heavily off the Skip James version, although I particularly want to listen to the Nick Cave one. It's about a women who got murdered; the versions differ on who murdered her, why, and what happened to her body. In this one, she's lowered into the ground on golden chains, and every link calls Crow Jane's name.

I wonder if it's a ghost song, or meant to be? In my Folklore class, Ari Berk told us about ghost ballads and murder ballads: In the Old Country, wherever that may be (usually England, if it's a ballad), songs were about ghosts. In America, the songs are about murder; the ghosts have been taken out. No ghosts in America. It's a land of progress.

But of course there are ghosts in America. There are ghosts everywhere.

Holy crap, I didn't know Detroit had its very own metropolitan bad-luck faery.

I had a dream last night that fictional characters who got killed off were reincarnated as other fictional characters. There was a heaven of sorts, or at least an area where you could become adjusted to your new role, personality, and co-characters.

I was a mutant nerd girl from an X-Men-esque comic book; I'd been the "brain" of the group, and was very serious and good with computers. I think I had some sort of icelike powers. I was set to be reincarnated as a character from one of those YA books about teenage girls who drink and socialize too much and end up unhappy, which was something I wasn't looking forward to. So I stayed there and kept petitioning to be put into a more suitable fiction. Eventually, God gave me a fifth of cheap vodka and kicked me out into the new book, old personality and powers intact.

I woke up before I could find out what happened next :(

I went to see Star Trek in IMAX and hung out in the exhibit and wrote an article about it.

Also watched some of the original series with Boyd. I don't think I slash Kirk and Spock much, oddly enough. Maybe I've been spoiled for camp subtext by Man from UNCLE. However, I think "A Piece of the Action" is probably my favorite episode of almost anything ever. How classy is this? Oh my god.

oh god I'm tired. I'm so out of shape and I'm trying to remedy that with bike rides and that's just pointing out how very out of shape I am.

"Never let rightful ownership get in the way of a fantastic story."

Am I making this up? Is the person I learned it from making this up? That's the beauty of it.

edited: HOLY FUCK WE HAVE A/C. I thought we didn't. There's this AC unit on the wall of my bedroom that rattles alarmingly and gets hot if you turn it on, and Dad swore up and down that while we had central heat, that didn't include cooling, but that is such a load of crap. We have A/C. It feels SO GOOD.

It's 82 degrees, with fifty percent humidity, and it's too hot and muggy for me to do anything. The rest of the week is going to be even worse.

All I want to do is eat fruit and read William S. Burroughs books. I think my brain is overheating.

ETA: I don't think I'm working anymore, either, and I can't take the class I was going to take (scriptwriting). What should I do to occupy myself this summer?

after hearing the new Sun O))) album played at various volumes throughout the house for the past day or so i have concluded that

the new Sun O))) album is music which is designed to make you not feel good in any part of your body or brain or soul ever
the new Sun O))) album is the discordant, wordless wailing that emits continuously from the fires of a hell more horrible than we can ever imagine
the new Sun O))) album was made by lowering a microphone into the padded cell of a man who has seen the bottomless depths of eternity and whose mind has not survived and then you give him three electric guitars and tell him to just play whatever comes to mind
the new Sun O))) album is the three-dimensional echoes of the pleading of the angels who have been chained to the earth for all eternity. the kind of angels who have giant burning wheels for heads, i mean
the new Sun O))) album is the sound of the death of humanity as it is scooped into the maw of the apocalypse machine
the new Sun O))) album is the perfect representation of rage and frustration in musical form

it can make milk sour, make eggs explode, make bread crumble, and make rabbits die

the person or people who created this probably also enjoy electroshock therapy and derive sexual satisfaction from being stretched out on a rack

ANONYMOUS WRITING FEEDBACK MEME

I'm going to work now.

(Oh, and drworm recced my crazy acid spy story over at crack_van. La!)

(ps: I'm here, right under the "D" in "Douglas." With the fluffy hair and haunted-house shirt. Which drworm gave me as a present.)

I just got back from the book signing in Ann Arbor, whoop whoop.

( It was cool )

ANYWAY, I got Still Life with Crows signed, and one other one that I had in my room and wasn't buried under three huge boxes in the basement. I wanted to get Cemetery Dance and get it signed, but noooo money. I also want to get Monster of Florence, but noooo money. But I am still sending the other signed book to drworm, because it is his birthday <3

My little cousin's dance recital was surprisingly fun. She goes to a serious dance school, and all of the classes did a short routine for us. Some of them were amazing, but boring to watch. Some of them--the small children--were completely adorable, just because they were trying so hard, and you could see most of the girls watch the instructor or the most advanced student and do their steps a second behind. My cousin was actually very good for a seven-year-old, which was particularly cool because the routine her class was doing was very slow and graceful, and she is a most rambunctious child.

I babysat her for an hour or so while the adults caught up, and we talked of dinosaurs eating people, dinosaurs exploding, and how she wanted to be Peter Pan. Then we played the Alphabet Game. We got to "P my name is Polly and I live in Pittsville, and I sell pits!" before she burst out laughing. "What kind of pits do you sell?" I prompted. "Armpits!" she yelled! (My grandmother came over and said, "That story is the pits!" several times before either of us noticed her clever pun.)

*

Tomorrow I am going to a Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child book signing in Ann Arbor. I only found out about this today. I AM SO EXCITED (and I really, really want to ask them about whether they deliberately coded their main character as queer, but I am aware that this might make me sound like a weirdo and I don't want sound like a weirdo. I do think it's a legit question, I just have no way to word it that makes it sound like academic interest instead of prurient interest. Not that it isn't prurient, but it is also genuinely academic).

I have been so busy.

We've gone through all the phone numbers on the calling sheet at the jewelry shop and are now calling people who didn't answer or who left their answering machines on the first time, so the telephones are slow, and I've turned to other types of telecommunication as a way of earning my keep. I made the store a Twitter account, and I tried to make them a Facebook page, but it's not quite working out. The Twitter is a huge hit with the owner, who is using it to offer 25% off retail purchases to Twitter people and to tweet about the Red Wings.

Then tonight, I finally published my first article on the Examiner. It's about LARPing and it's here. I'm worried it's a little stilted and blah; I'm not used to writing in this format. But I will get better at it. GO CLICK. Journalism people, give me tips. Do I want to go for lush and descriptive or just plain facts? Isn't there some sort of pyramid format I should be using? I did not major in this. I took one journalism class that was more about social engineering through media than writing an article. This doesn't mean I can't write as well as or better than some of the other people on that site, I just need to figure out how to do it.

I am, however, leaving for Ohio to watch my adorable little cousin Makayla in her first dance recital in...2 hours. We will be driving for four hours to watch her prance around onstage, which I am perfectly happy with. I will be back on Sunday. wooo, road trip with Grandma and Grandpa.

Icon meme from serenaar. One is instructed to leave a comment in the meme-starter's journal, and the meme-starter will pick out six of the commenter's icons for them to post in their own journal and explain.


The text is from a little soundbite from a Chumbawamba album: "Just because you're wearing a tie doesn't mean to say you're bloody important." I mainly use it to discuss clothes, fictional characters who wear suits (like Agent Pendergast), and to passive-aggressively point out to people that their opinions don't mean dick.


I got this from daedale. It's Stephen Colbert holding a sword! You just know that thing has an advantage against dire bears. I mainly use it in silly political arguments or for D&D or role-playing discussions, because I respect Stephen Colbert's complete nerdiness and his level of dedication to being a real-life troll.


Napoleon Solo dancing with a dude in a gorilla suit. He looks sort of desperate there, doesn't he? I can't imagine that was much of a life-affirming day for Robert Vaughn.


Illya flippin' the bird. Euphemistically, the text reads "Stick it where the sun don't shine." elefwin informed me that it literally means "take a cock with vegetable oil" (presumably up the ass). Most of the Illya icons I have are somewhat confrontational.


A graphic borrowed from an enigmatic website. It is a door. It invites you to go through, to not go through, or to simply contemplate where it may lead. It could lead anywhere.


From iconomicon. Just a nice picture of the solar system. There's something comforting and homey about looking at all those familiar planets so close together.

I have a Dreamwidth account. I didn't think I was going to get one, but...here it is. Yo.

I had this dream where my TV suddenly started getting a "Fondest Memories" cable channel. The theme of the channel was "TV shows that everyone else forgot...but you remembered!" and when I watched it, it was mostly showing reruns from the 70's and 80's. (I live in hope that it will return and show me some good 50's-60's bizarreness.)

The shows I watched included:

--"Supernatural," the original. It was from the very early 70's, and chronicled the (generally funny and cheesy) adventures of two brothers who ran an occult private investigation agency with help from their aunt and uncle. The older brother (still Dean) was this genuinely dumb redneck slacker who had lots of skanky girlfriends and vague psychic powers that the younger brother (still Sam), who was very smart and ambitious and a little uptight, resented and felt inadequate over. Both brothers were middle-aged and not all that attractive. The aunt and uncle were the best part; the uncle was a little old Jewish man who was into the ~*mystical powers of the East*~ and knew kung fu, and his wife was this little old Chinese lady who was into Kabbalah and knew Krav Maga. They ran a wizard supply shop that moved around from town to town and always used a different front.

--A show about five Olympic athletes with superpowers who teamed up to fight crime. There was a little German gymnast who could read minds (and later in the series, learned how to telepathically hypnotize people), a Kenyan runner who could speak with all animals, a Russian weightlifter who had superspeed and was invulnerable (but normal weightlifter strength, oddly enough), a Bangladeshi archer with pyrokinesis, and a Brazilian figure skater with precognition. The show was fairly serious and the characters were all pretty well fleshed out, because the characters were based on real athletes who got together one day in the Olympic village and decided they wanted to have their own television show.

--An "afterschool special" show from the 1980's about a high school where the GSA and the Special Ed Department had to be consolidated for budget reasons, so all the queer kids and the disabled kids spent the day together in a trailer and learned Very Important Lessons. It was full of horrible stereotypes and incredibly dumb lessons, like "Strangers with Candy," but it was serious. I've never actually managed to be offended in a dream before.

--A cute kids' show about a little boy with Asperger's Syndrome who created a different imaginary friend each week to help him solve a problem or work through an issue. It was specifically for children with Asperger's and parents who wanted to understand what their aspie kid might be feeling or thinking, but it ended up being a huge hit among adolescent girls as well.

I hate, hate, hate not being able to sleep on a normal schedule. I couldn't even when I was a kid. I would stay up late and play with my Barbies or read by my nightlight or just lie under the covers and tell myself stories for hours on end. I invented dramatic narratives, sadistic fantasies, and alien worlds just to pass the time while I waited for my brain to shut down enough so that I could drift off. (I did go through a period where I woke up at 5 in the morning, but that didn't last very long.)

When I got older, my mom and dad started to tease and nag me because, left to my own devices, I would stay up until 5 or 6 in the morning and sleep until 1 or 2 in the afternoon. It wasn't that I was trying to catch some sleep on a schedule I could handle, they decided, I was just lazy. "Don't you feel like you're wasting the day if you don't get up early?" my mom asked me once. I told her that from my point of view, she was wasting the night.

Every night, I try to get myself to sleep at a decent time. And every night, I either happily stay up until I don't realize that the sun is rising, or I toss and turn and fret in a darkened, silent room for hours. The only thing that will make me sleep is a huge dose of melatonin, but it makes me incredibly groggy when I wake up and I'm hesitant to add that difficulty to my day. The only other thing I can think of is to go to a psychiatrist and get a prescription for sleeping pills, but I don't even know that those will work on a regular basis; other people with Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (what I most likely have) have said that even those don't work for them.

Unless I move to New York City or to another time zone entirely, I am probably doomed. It makes my family think I'm lazy, makes it impossible to take early classes, and might make it impossible to hold down a 9-to-5 job. The only thing it's good for is helping me stay up to talk and collaborate with people who live exactly halfway across the world and letting me catch the very late and very early shows on cable channels.

I totally want this, I'm pretty sure I have this, and you should all listen to this.

*

The weekend was unexpectedly really nice. On Saturday, I slept for most of the day, then drove my steaming car over to my aunt and uncle's house so my uncle could take a look at it and convince my dad to pay for the repairs, then partook in their dinner of barbecued chicken and helped cuddle the cat and walk the dog. Then I managed to get the house clean in time for Dad to take Brian and I out to breakfast this morning and for my lovely aunt Dolly to come over with my adorable yet rambunctious little cousin Simon (we spent a lot of the visit informing Simon that Brian slept in the closet and was a vampire. And I wonder why my family turns out such weird kids).

Also, I got a message from one of the temp agencies I applied to telling me to call them back about a job. \o/


Then we took a trip to Whole Foods to see about replenishing the kava. The bottle I bought last time was the least expensive one, but it was still embarrassingly expensive and there wasn't very much of it. I was hoping they'd sell just the plain kava powder, a half-pound of which costs about as much as the tiny bottle if you buy it online. Of course, they don't have just the plain powder :( Of course.

So I hung around the vitamin department until one of the clerks, a nice older lady, came up to me and was like, "Hey, what's up?" I explained about the stress and anxiety thing and the kava, and she asked me, "When is your birthday?"

"August 23rd," I said, and she nodded knowingly.

"A Virgo, yeah. The last three years have been hard for you, huh? It's okay," she said, "it's been hard for all of us. It's all karma. You'll be through it in a year."

Then she gave me some Rescue Remedy stress formula to try. "You seem pretty anxious now," she said. "Kava's great, but it makes you feel druggy." (The stress formula worked, although it wasn't any less druggy--it made me feel a little stoned in a way the kava didn't, although it didn't have the sedative effects of the kava.)

"Meditate," she told me. "Meditate. You need to get in touch with your inner goddess. I know it's hard," she said. "It's okay to be socially anxious. It's okay not to have a lot of friends."

"Yeah!" said another clerk, a lady who'd originally shown me the kava. "It's okay! I don't have any friends, and I'm okay! You have a beautiful nose," she added.

"She's a beautiful Virgo girl!" the first clerk said. "Remember, no matter what happens, the sun will keep shining."

Seder was wonderful. Good food, good wine, family bonding time. Got to talk college and cats with Cousin Becca, learn some intriguing family history, & hear about the time Uncle Jeff brought an actual Egyptian princess to Passover dinner and things were very awkward. I'm pleased I finally managed to go this year, because I haven't been for a few years and it is really my favorite holiday. I love the Haggadah. I love going around the room and reading paragraphs, having everyone tell the stories and jokes they do every year that have become as ritualized as the Haggadah itself. I swear the Seder has gotten shorter over the years, and I sort of miss the way it used to seem to take hours.

Just got back from World Inferno/Friendship Society concert in a little upstairs venue in Pontiac. Went with Brian and a couple of his friends; we all dressed up for the occasion. Managed to miss the first opening band, but not the second, which was too bad because they sucked.
Concert was amazing. I've never been so tired after being entertained before. They didn't have the full orchestra (which was OK because the stage was tiny), but that did not detract at all from the sound. I hovered in the back of the crowd and clung to the wall and danced like a maniac to every song. They did "Just the Best Party" and "Tattoos Fade" and "...And Embarked Upon a Life of Poverty" and "Addicted to Bad Ideas" and "All the World is a Stage Dive" and a bunch of other fucking awesome songs and it was absolutely fantastic.
Jack Terricloth is fucking pretty, in a slightly unhealthy Peter Lorre way. He's suave and expressive and has excellent stage patter and wears eyeliner and nice suits without looking like some dumb emo kid and basically was born to be a cabaret emcee, except that he's playing in venues with people slam-dancing and stage-diving and bouncers with cowboy hats. He kept ragging on the techno show downstairs, and told a story about living with a guy from some punk band everyone in the venue seemed to know back when he was in Brooklyn, and having the guy ask Jack to get his car when he was in jail for a week, and taking the poor guy's car to Atlantic City with all of his friends. Then he sang a song he wrote about it. I'm very, very tempted to go to New York in May for the special show he's doing with his wife. (At the very least I'm going to get his book when I have the dough.)

Definitely going to Birmingham Temple on Friday. Planning to go to Detroit LARP on Saturday (if not this one, next time), over in Rochester; I'll know at least one person there (Jen!), which will make things less nerve-wracking.