channonyarrow

Today, I vandalised a car. I'm happy to report that it's the first time I recall ever doing so deliberately (I don't think I did anything like that during my wild youth but honestly, I'm having trouble remembering entire decades at this point, I don't think I should claim to remember 13) and I also believe that Douchebag McCockHat had it coming. Parking so close to me that I can't get into my car with anything like ease and within half an inch of me ending that clause at "can't get into my car" is behaviour that I feel justifies me to some recourse. Normally, I would prefer to speak to the parking attendant to get the person to move their goddamn van, but that wasn't an option.

So I slammed my door into theirs. Fuck you, fuckhead. Sorry you wanted that space so badly (and apparently, that particular space, undifferentiable from any other on that level of the parking garage) that you felt it appropriate to park within eight inches of my car door. Also, I'm sorry that I kind of have, you know, a JOB that I had to go to, after the Appointment From Hell, so I couldn't actually wait around for your ass to come back out and MOVE YOUR CAR.

Although, the AFH may have had something to do with my utter rage. I mean, it may just be ME, but I don't actually think it's appropriate for the non-attending medical personnel to just walk into the room I'm being seen in (and am exposed in, thanks a lot, because I really want to be in a position to give an eyeful to any patient off the street, this is why I'm a part-time high-rise-based stripper, it is totally) without a) knocking and b) MORE THAN ONCE.

I will actually be filing a complaint about this, on the advice of my mother who is a (former) nurse for the same hospital.

I will also mention the timekeeping aspect of the whole thing. I mean, if you tell me to be there by 7:30 for a 7:45 appointment and I move heaven and earth to get there by 7:35 in surprisingly heavy rush hour traffic, I do actually expect to not cool my heels for another 29 minutes before I'm seen. And it turns out that $hospital has a policy of not making patients wait (at least without explanation) for more than 15 minutes. So, you know, THERE WE ARE.

Also, dear examining person whose name, rank, and serial number I never got because I don't routinely bring a car battery, ten feet of wire, and a pair of alligator clips to my cardiology appointments, maybe next time you do an EKG you'd like to actually EXAMINE your patient first? But I do realise that you were very startled by my yips of pain when you crushed the goddamn wand into extremely thick, extremely painful scar tissue. I tend to make loud noises when shit hurts. SORRY ABOUT THAT.

I am almightily pleased that my car has nary a sign of injury to show for my use of it as a crushing weapon. Not entirely sure what happened to Asshat McDickBag's car, but I did see paint loss. And I genuinely have no sympathy whatsoever. He (or she) chose to park in a space too small for his car (as determined by the giant, roof-supporting pole on the other side of the space) rather than looking for a better spot on another level ... I still need to get into my car. This parking garage is great and all, but I don't want to live here.

The irony is that the garage is one of the ones with those u-shaped double-line dividers with a shedload of room in them so you can't park too close to someone else without trying, AND it had the lines on the walls as well so you could aim your car appropriately. After years of trying to park at Westwood Village (motto: our parking places are 6 inches too small for anyone's car!) I sort of wanted to have sex with whoever designed the paint setup for this garage. And someone still managed to not be able to park.

Every day brings me one step closer to a cabin in the woods and a shotgun, it really does.

I'm thinking again about giving up social media. I feel totally alienated by it, honestly - I feel like I so rarely have something to say to someone else's LJ posts that I never comment, I've been slapped down one too many times by a fandom I tried to participate in to want to try to join in that conversation again, Facebook confuses me, and Twitter is composed of people who like everyone else more than they like me, so what exactly is the rush to beat myself up over social media? I can beat myself up over everything else I've ever done, including (but not limited to!)

1. Sitting next to someone I find VERY unstable in Group tonight and saying that I had spent the last week being a giant ragemonster. That ended well.
2. Not being able to force myself to interact with family members and a former student when I want to, if only to try to pretend for ten seconds that the dysfunction in these relationships isn't me.
3. Being Judgey McDoucherson if left to my own devices but turning into Zen Master Cass when confronted with my father doing the exact same thing I would do if he hadn't done it first.
4. Needing to stop being Team Mom for 30 minutes if only to take care of myself, emotionally, because half the people I associate with regularly aren't able or willing to reciprocate the emotional support I believe I give them.
5. Not cultivating a better relationship with Sane!Coworker because emotionally supporting MentalIssues!Coworker (not the one I have dubbed Initial) is so much more rewarding to Team Mom Me.
6. Not getting off my ass and doing things I don't want to because I will be unable to resolve the problem and therefore why not just fuck it up more upfront, like paying the life insurance, contacting the car insurance, getting a new dentist, talking to Sallie Mae. Continuing to not pay any of those will end well.
7. Liking to talk so much that I interrupt people because they've made me think of something and I'm excited and want to share it.
8. Not extending to other people the possibility that they have the same issues I claim to have and that's the real reason why I haven't gone to lunch with Phil or Josh this month despite their promises that this was a monthly think.
9. Not being able to muscle past my issues by sheer force of will.
10. Having issues at all.

So with that kind of busy schedule, I should stop beating myself up over things other people are doing and just get back to home-grown crazy. Think local!

On the bright side, if the problem with the website that I've been trying to fix for months turns out to be application-pool related, I will consider myself the most brilliant networking motherfucker to ever network. And also, I still have to call Integra and let them know that one of their techs is never, ever to be dispatched to us ever again because I refuse to be treated like a not-very-intelligent dirty sock by someone who intends to keep me as a client, and also they need to fix what he fucking broke.

And if the problem does turn out to be that we have, essentially, two routers in chain to each other (I don't know why, don't ask me, I don't do this shit, I would question my life choices if I were treating a print server box as a second router and didn't have it hooked up to the printer) I will require that someone crown me god of networking, Integra fire the most recent tech, and Crystaltech fire everyone I have spoken to before today, and then sacrifice them on an altar to my awesome.

That, I look forward to. It shall be glorious.

Now I'm gonna listen to the crows pace around on my roof for a while (it sounds like Hannibal crossing the Alps if you want to know) and then go to bed.

Interactive preference sets creep me the fuck out. I only say this, of course, because every fucking time I go to YouTube, my "recommended" selections are a) boys in bands doing weird things; b) video of assassinations.

And it's never the right video.

I may have mentioned this before. I also may have started to mention it and abandoned it, so whatever. I remember the Sadat assassination, but I can't find the footage that matches up with my memory. And you cannot possibly convince me that, at a time when the head of Egypt was sittin' in a reviewing stand, chillin' out watching the troops parade, no one had a fucking camera on Sadat, only on the parade.

I know they did. I saw it. It's just not on YouTube, or the National Archives, or any of the other places I've looked.

I am highly peeved.

Also! This genuinely baffles me, it really does. You have a mission: you have decided, because God Said So, that you have to kill the Prime Minister of Malaysia.

You work to achieve this.

In the end, it comes down to you driving a two-foot-long spike into the Prime Minister's side, having leaped onto the podium from side-stage and tackled him. You are immediately lost in the scrum of bodies as people converge on the stage.*

Things to remember while you plan this:
1) You have one shot. You will not get a second one because you will be in prison forever, and also, he will be better guarded.
2) Aside from only having one shot at the Prime Minister, you have to hit exactly the correct spot so that he'll be killed. If you spit him through the arm, that doesn't really matter.
3) Famous people can be tricky to get hold of.

So, you go for the aforementioned leap from side-stage. Or you set up shop in the Texas Book Depository. Or you trust that security at the Atlanta Olympics will be so lax that no one will notice you sitting in the stands, rifle on your lap, moments before the President of the USA and several other world leaders are due to arrive for the opening ceremony.

Why - seriously - does no one ever just sneak up on their house at night and kill their target in bed? Does that not make it assassination? Is it just that the whole point of assassination is that it's done in public, sort of a citizen-sanctioned version of a state execution? (I need to work on that, but there might be something worth keeping there.)

I mean, maybe it's that God Does Not Tell Me Things, but if I really, really, really wanted someone dead, I'd much rather try to infiltrate their home than shoot at them in a situation where I would have Secret Service agents coming out my ears seconds later. I do know that they're very well guarded, but there's also the possibility that they're not quite as alert, and other things good for the would-be assassin.

Then again, I've never been suicidal. Maybe it's the same thing. Assassination is the elimination of the possibility of your return; murder is the definite desire to come back alive.


* See also the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma.

EDIT: Okay, nope. I'm gonna have to break up this playlist. Do You Know What I'm Seeing makes me want to actually vomit. I am not even exaggerating. I hate this band so much.

ITunes deciding to "randomly" play Behind The Sea (also from the same playlist) next just cemented it. I AM STILL MYSELF IF I STILL HATE PANIC, THANK FUCK FOR SMALL FAVOURS, I WAS STARTING TO WORRY. I mean, I like The Only Difference Between Martyrdom And Suicide Is Press Cover...

Wow.

My life is not usually that surreal.

That's....yeah, that's really fucking creepy, is what that is. I'm going to go away for a while.

There's something deeply satisfying about realising that I am always and eternally attracted to people who are not attracted to me, nor never will be. Normally, I would not consider this satisfying, but in the light of my last post, I think I'll call it that this time.

I am, I hope, a pragmatist, most of the time. However, we might all be that, because I don't know any altruists and wouldn't trust them if I did. What else is left? Either you serve yourself or you serve others, and Mother Theresa is dead anyway, so there's that option out the window. In other words, the gamut of human experience is not that great - we all tend to be pretty much alike, and that's the realisation of your twenties that is so horrible. I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake, and neither are you. We're all pretty much the same, accounting for some high swings at either end. I want to go to a high school somewhere and tell every single student that, preferably quietly (remember the cockroaches in Bloom County? Like that.) and watch them all crumble. Because we wear our belief that we are unique little snowflakes on our sleeves. America is the country of I, of the individual, and it shows. We believe ourselves unique; meanwhile, I bet that statistically speaking most people in the McDonald's in Paris near Place de la Bastille are lost Americans. We believe ourselves unique and we conform on a level that, if we realised it, would make our national brain explode.

You are not special; I am not special. You have not felt something that I have not. My ennui is the same as yours. It's like we expect that being wrapped in different flesh, shaped in different ways, means that we're different, but we still speak the same language, we still have the same words, we still know the same concepts. It's merely pretentious bullshit to assume for one second that what you feel I don't, what you have experienced I can't understand, and most of all (most commonly of all, anyway) it's pretentious bullshit to believe that You Are Unique, because you're not. Our flesh shapes us, and we share the same flesh. People act as though explaining something that they feel is like trying to translate the mating call of the Wild Yak into Swedish via Korean, and it's not. There are words out there that we all know, and if you can't explain it with words, try finding the medium you can use, for fuck's sake. In other words, shut the goddamn hell up and learn how to communicate, whether it's through words or tempera paint or feces on a wall. Don't just sit there in your isolationist bubble and pretend that You Are Different, because You Are Not. You are still human, you have still done the things humans have done, you have still got the same tools to describe your life as any other American, and on a broader level any other human. Shut the fuck up. I'd rather hear the story of someone's life that I don't know, that I haven't lived before, than listen to everyone yap like fucking dogs about how they're Individuals. I always mentally add the really stoned "man" to that sentence, because it seems to lack it.

This is what I think.

I think that everyone needs to shut the goddamn hell up about the things that create barriers, not because I love my fellow human beings because by and large I don't - this doesn't mean that I don't want your body, though - but because I am really fucking sick of hearing about how I can't understand. I can't understand what it was like to be in Vietnam. I can't understand what it's like to be a man. I can't undersand what it's like to have a specific sexual definition. I can't understand what it's like to be a victim. I can't understand what it's like to not be a victim. I can't understand what it's like to be you.

Fuck that shit. My understanding is not fucking broken. You want me to understand, you tell me. You don't want me to understand, tell me that. It has nothing at all to do with understanding, and everything to do with the amount of work you want to put into it to make me understand.

You are not special, I am not special, no one is special because we are all human, and we exist within a narrow range of personalities (because there are so many possibilities we don't use) and experiences. I can understand anything you can do, even if I all understand about it is that I had to have been there. But for fuck's sake, give me some credit and let me tell you that, don't tell me that. And quit pretending that you're standing on a ledge looking out over a sea of misery/love/success/virtue/non-virtue/soup and NO ONE ELSE is standing there with you. We might not be lemmings, but we're certainly not alone in the world or in our progress through it.

If you feel alone, maybe it's because YOU have stopped communicating.

Chew on that.

And all of this has gotten me angry again. Actually, I've been doing a slow burn for about four days. I will never have beauty, I don't know truth, I wouldn't believe in Justice any more if I tripped over the bitch with a broken beer bottle in my hand - but I know anger. And I'm mad again.

I will show all of you. I will be Someone. Not someone special, because that person doesn't exist, but I will be someone. I will be me, to the greatest and fullest extent possible, and you're invited along for the ride if you wish to come. I don't think that it will look any different than it did before (now I'll start posting all entries in rhyming quads and iambic pentameter sonnets!) but I'm angry again. I am going to be someone the world will not soon forget, goddamnit.

Just to show you that I was better than you ever thought.

Just to win. I always want to win. If I can't win, I won't play the game, and I'm still here so I must be able to win.

I do not, in fact, have a brain tumour. I DO have something called "Aide's Tonic Pupil", which is essentially innocuous and might make it hard to read at some point in life, but there may or may not be treatment for it. Apparently, this is why my left pupil is larger than the other. It might be an artefact from the pseudotumour I once had, given that lordjavac commented on the difference in pupil size after that and I haven't had THAT many optometry appointments.

I do not like having appointments where the doctor has the PDR open in front of him before he says things. However, at this point (and for someone who is basically healthy, this amazes me - it's not like I have some sort of weird chronic syndrome that no one has ever seen before) I am used to it.

I want to go to Jerusalem. BADLY.

*tries to decide whether to spend bonus on trip to Ireland or trip to Jerusalem*

I sort of live. OH GOD SO BUSY.

I would like, someday, to get an explanation for WHY I dreamt that safti had taken up modelling in Japan, and WHY mcmayhem was roadtripping in a Porsche with some friends from England, but I don't think explanations are forthcoming.

Yes, it's true. By friending me, you drop your name into the magical melting pot of Things I Might Dream About, even if I don't know you at all.

I feel guilty about everything at the moment, so this is par for the course. Maybe I can catch up with some shit this weekend.

And guess what, I've got no idea what the hell anyone's said, so if for some reason you think it's worth the labour to link it to me, I'll read it.

...I don't even know what my icons look like, any more.

I'm starting to realise why River Phoenix felt he had so much trouble after filming A Night In The Life of Jimmy Reardon, or whatever the hell it's called. He said, if I recall correctly, that for a while after, he found himself responding to things the way Jimmy Reardon would, he'd gone that far into character.

Only problem was that Jimmy Reardon wasn't a nice person.

I find myself facing the same situation.

For those that care/don't know, I'm in The Carnivorous Wardrobe, a Harry Potter online RPG, where I play far too many characters for any one human being. Right now the main story I'm in is Terry Boot's, who's gone from being a minor character set to fill out the Sortings to a character that's pulling quite a chunk of game time.

Course, I had to come up with a story. So, roughly, the story is this: Terry was the second youngest in a large Irish family that were Catholics in Belfast. His parents fight, his da drinks, cars get blown up. He goes off to Hogwarts but develops a healthy social life when he's at home. He's bisexual, but not out of the closet (the advantage to having Irish friends is that they tell you these things...) for a lot of reasons, most of them having to do with Northern society. He feels lost in his family and as a result turns to the street for friends and a place to feel safe, since he and his younger sister get most of the fighting, as they're the ones still at home.

One night, during the summer before the Trio's sixth year (so end of OotP), Terry goes to a club and runs into a former lover. (As you can see, not so concerned with realism. Or at least not MY realism). They go back to the friend's house, where Terry rapes him, then, when the guy resists, winds up beating him and ultimately strangling him. He is never taken to account for this, as he's never suspected. This spurs him to return to the streets, where he's soon involved in heroin (had fun tweaking that for magical chemistry, trust me) and prostitution, along with his two best friends/lovers, Caoilfhionn and Declan.

This continues for over a year, with Terry there at every holiday from school, every weekend he can get away, and leaving occasionally, saying that his mum's sick. (Dumbledore's a right bastard and probably promoted this) It finally ends with Caoilfhionn's death and Terry's decision to go straight as he can. Also his desire to kill Declan for causing her death.

Skip forward to seventh year now. Terry has just shagged Oliver Wood, after starting a more committed relationship with Harry (although he did at least warn him that might happen.) Terry winds up confessing that he killed his lover to Oliver when Oliver says he's going to tell McGonagall what happened, as otherwise they'll both get into quite a lot of trouble. (She's the Headmistress, as we killed Dumbledore right sharpish.)

I am now in the middle of the week in which, following this confession, Terry has taken off for Dublin and is up to his old tricks - so far heroin, drinking, and prostitution. I did not plan this storyline - this literally came about as a result of a hurried ten line conversation trying to figure out why Terry didn't want Oliver to talk to McGonagall - I was originally thinking he would be a sociopath.

So, that build up over with, the point.

This is, quite frankly, some of my finest writing ever. I fangirl it in all its angsty/horror/romance. I fangirl myself freely, I fangirl the people who've written with me, and I don't fucking care what anyone else thinks, it's damn good. (And I apologise for dragging the group, especially Jason, through the mud with me!) I have spent hours researching Dublin, male prostitution in Dublin, Irish slang, and heroin. I know I'm wildly inaccurate in a lot of places, but I'm not bothered by that.

What I AM bothered by is that I am now speaking with a heavy percentage of Irish slang words and phrases, with Terry's pronounciation of contractions, and with Terry's actions (or at least desire to perform Terry's actions).

I am also starting to think like Terry as he goes through this. I've considered myself a sociopath for a long time (It's great in casual conversation - "I came out as bisexual when I was nineteen and as a sociopath when I was twenty four") and I quite frankly do not give a damn what most people think, but you know, even I think it's a bit odd when I'm sitting on the bus, with three children under the age of 10 and their father sitting around me (unrelated to me, I hasten to add) having a nice chat with another person and I'm practically chortling with glee because I've just figured out exactly how Caoilfhionn died. Then I realise that it sort of bothers me, which is worrying until I realise that actually, what bothers me is that I think I will get comments from people telling me that I've squicked them because it is so INCREDIBLY HORRIBLE. I mean, this is a BAD death. Yurgh.

It's also NOT the sort of thing one should be able to come up with when you have a four year old humming the Superman theme for an hour. Or maybe it is, but some part of my brain thinks that it was very wrong that I came up with it then at all.

Then I realise that I'm thinking with the Terry part of my brain again. And that's at least a bit disturbing. I've joked before about having characters take over my brain, but when you're playing four characters, three canon and one OC, and they're having conversations in your head that you find yourself basing plot points off of (and indeed, entire plots), that's a little weird to me.

I'm starting to understand, at any rate, why River Phoenix was so bothered. Much as I like Terry, and much as I like what I'm doing to him, I really DON'T want to start thinking like him.

Yet I want to keep up the writing, because it is fucking brilliant work. I scared the crap out of Gwen last night - to the point that she commented it was my fault if she had nightmares. I think I've really worried Cheeky Boy with my propensity for evil angstitty angst angst angst.

I've got until Saturday, I think, or maybe Sunday, with (ideally) an RP every night and an IC post every day. And it's going to get worse. And I'm going to get more Irish the longer this goes on.

Hopefully at the end of it, I'll be standing there with a pile of writing that I can do something with and will not have had my brain taken over totally by Terry, but if I start saying that someone's on the gear or on the game or snared rapid, please worry for me.

It's half one, and I'm going to bed.