Love In The Asylum

Redwall Author Brian Jacques Dies at 71

I saw this news making the rounds this morning, and it's made me surprisingly sad. I mean, everyone has that gateway book, right, the one you read at just the right moment when you are ten or twelve or fifteen or whatever that makes you realize that sci fi and fantasy is what you've been missing in your life. And the Redwall books were that for a lot of people, a lot of people I know even, but they weren't that for me. I only ever read one Brian Jacques book, and I don't remember anything that happened in it, so I guess it didn't make much of an impression.

But. One day in middle school this boy I had never spoken to before sat down on a bench next to me in the courtyard, took out a Redwall book, and started reading poetry to me. Odd, right? But strangely sweet. Nothing came of it - I told him it was pretty poetry, and then the bell rang and we left. I didn't become friends with him, I don't think we ever even talked again. But it's still one of the very few good memories that I have from that time, when I was mostly desperately unhappy. It's hard for me not to think fondly of Redwall, and of Brian Jacques, after that.

I assume most of us here are familiar with the theory of L-Space, that fluctuation in the trousers of space and time that forms around large masses of books and links all the libraries that are, were, and might be together. I would like to propose a minor addendum to that theory.

L-Hole: Hereby defined as a minor quantum event, varying in size from the width of a single paperback to the length of a full shelf, that forms in the vacuum left where the card catalog tells you insistently the book you are looking for should be found, if that book had not ceased to exist, or, one presumes, been checked out already by someone in the other trousers leg. The canny library patron can spot L-Holes by the gaps in the LoC numbers of the surrounding volumes, as well as the steady presence close by of other, less quantum-minded patrons grumbling about people who don't bother to put books back in the right place when they're done with them.

This information has been brought to you by The Department of Where The Hell Did They Put The Kate Chopin???

Someday I will learn how to use the bread machine to the point where the top of my loaves doesn't always collapse. Alas, today is not that day. Oh well. The bread I made still tastes damn good, even if it isn't pretty, and it's not like anyone will see it but me. I got sick of making the same three recipes out of the book that came with the machine, so I dipped into the pool of the internet to find some new ones that could be made with my dad's rather limited baking supplies. Ended up with buttermilk bread - simple and easy but so tender and delicious when it finished. I can't believe my dad the ex-chef didn't know that you can improvise buttermilk with regular milk and vinegar. I guess that's why my mom is the baker of the family.

Tomorrow I have an orientation/workshop thing for that jobs thing through the city. I am betting that at least half the people there (presuming people other than me show up because that would be just my luck) are going to be idiot teenagers, and hopefully I will be able to keep from killing anyone for two hours. There may be job interviews afterwards. I sure hope so. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

If I could justify the expense, I would totally buy one of these pony scrub caps. I don't even know what I would wear it for (I suspect it would be useful if I was running or riding a lot or working outside or something), but they are just so cute! I love the geta pattern, and the sushi, and the Japanese calligraphy, and the cupcakes. It's going on my list of hair things I would buy if I weren't poor, along with the ficcare clips and the nice Nightblooming hairsticks.

Dear self: Now is really, REALLY not the time to reread World War Z. I don't care that it's fascinating. I don't care that we're almost out of new books. You are not reading anything about 9/10ths of humanity being wiped out in an apocalyptic plague. NO.

...if anyone needs me, I'll be barricading the doors and stockpiling drugs and bottled water in the basement. Also looking into getting a shotgun and borrowing my cousin's extra machete.

I spent 6 hours straight on TVTropes last night (it's like a black hole of spare time, I swear), and my list of must read/must watch stuff has ben growing exponentially. I've got a season and a half of Supernatural to catch up on still, and about half a season of SGA (I am picking and choosing my S5 episodes carefully, because I am not interested in the McKay And Keller Show). 2.5 more episodes of Avatar and I'll be done with that. All four seasons of Due South. Four more seasons of Angel and five of Buffy. The Teen Titans cartoon - I watched it on CN when it was coming out, but I missed some big chunks of seasons 3 and 4, and I want to see it all through again now that I'm old enough to get what a creepy perv Slade is (also that Beast Boy and Cyborg are trufax luv). The Justice League cartoon, which I never watched except for the Booster Gold episode. The Legion of Superheroes cartoon, which I never even knew existed and now want to see like burning.

I guess I know what I'll be doing this summer.

There is a good chance of scans later - I got my Cable & Deadpool with Cap! comic this afternoon, and I really want to put it up. Mostly it depends on my being not!lazy enough to move my computer across the room so I can use my scanner. So even odds, I guess.

My room smells like weed. Which is quite odd, since neither I nor roommate smoke it. Dear Other Person In My Dorm: if you are making other people's rooms smell bad, you are SMOKING TOO MUCH WEED.

Just found out that roommate is not going with her parents to China for a week, and I am very disappointed. It would have been nice to have the room to myself - and even nicer not to have her friends coming over all the time and bugging me.  But hey, what can I do? I can hardly kick her out and shove her on a plane just so I can get a little privacy.

Bah, I think I've got some kind of virus or something - I don't feel bad so much as off. Just...headachey and wobbly and really worn-down and just not right. I decided last night I was feeling bad enough to skip class today, which was probably a good choice, because I ended up sleeping for fourteen hours - went to bed at 10.30 and got up at 12.30! - so I think I maybe needed the sleep. And I didn't do anything at all today - just went to lunch and then bummed around reading all afternoon - and I still want a nap. D: I think I'll go to bed early again tonight, maybe that will get me back to normal.

Today I had a conversation. Which, you know, not much of a statement; I have a lot of conversations, all the time, with my friends and my classmates and my professors and my family and my roommate and the cashier in the dining hall who keeps flirting with me. But you know those conversations you aren't expecting, when you start talking to someone and you just click, and the next thing you know it's hours later? Yeah.

While I was eating lunch after my writing class this guy I knew from my dorm last year came up to me and started talking. We weren't that good friends last year, event though we got on pretty well, but today I ended up sitting in TAP talking to him for more than two hours. He told me about what he was going through; he's out of school right now because he joined the Marines, and he's waiting to be deployed to Iraq. He told me about his training, what it's like in the military, the guys in his platoon. We talked school, classes, music. We talked about our jobs. We talked about political philosophy and Aristotle. It was really hard to get up and leave, even though I had a class I had to go to.

All things considered, it's been a very strange day.

This came up in a conversation I was having with telyanofcelore  , and the theory was interesting enough I thought it might make a good post, so here ya go!

So, one of the things I do, as a Wiccan (although I did this before I was one), is use divination tools. My tool of choice is the I Ching (which involves casting coins or yarrow stalks and then interpreting the corresponding reading in the I Ching book), in large part because that's what I grew up with. My mom likes to tell the story that when she was trying to decide whether or not to divorce my dad, she did a reading and ended up with one that said "get rid of your old goat." I've done I Ching readings before I applied for jobs, when I was deciding what college to attend, even when I was trying to figure out if I wanted to go to China. As soon as I find my coins, I'm going to do one about my major, because it's something that's been starting to freak me out a little (okay, a lot). Other people use tarot, numerology, or runes with great success, although none of those ever really clicked for me.

But what's the point of divination? What do I actually expect to gain by flipping a couple coins and reading what some Chinese guy wrote 2000 years ago, or by picking stones marked with funny symbols out of bag, or laying out sets of cards in a pattern? I mean, as a modern, enlightened, science-oriented person who believes in evolution and global warming and genetic engineering, do I really trust my fate to divinatory tools I bought at a used bookstore?

Well, no, not exactly.

See, I don't invest my divinatory tools with any extraordinary power. I don't believe, honestly, that if I can just find the one right method, I'll know every pitfall awaiting me in the future, every potential wrong turn I could make, the name, career, and physical description of the guy in the queue who is going to be my soul mate and eventual husband. I don't think divination works that way. I do believe that it is possible to see the future - I've seen enough of my mom's extremely specific hunches turn out to be true to know that when she says something is going to happen, it is going to happen - but I don't think it's something you can do sitting on your living room floor with a pack of tarot cards and a guide you bought at Barnes & Noble.

I think that divination, when you use it correctly, lets you see what you already know. Which, hey, sounds a like a bit of a let-down, doesn't it? If you already know something, you don't really need to get out the runes to figure it out. If I want to know what my homework is for my contemporary lit class, I'm not going to do an I Ching reading; I'm going to think about today's class and remember the professor told us to finish reading Jane Eyre. But it's a little more complicated than that.

Divination lets you figure out the things that you don't know that you know.

Nine times out a ten, when you are faced with a given problem in your life, I think you know what the best or the right solution is. But our brains aren't very straight-forward places, and just because something is the best choice doesn't mean it's the easiest, or the most fun, or the least painful. So it's pretty easy for it to get bogged down in what we want to do, and what we think our spouse wants us to do, and what we can afford to do, and what will give us the easiest out, and what will keep us from having to confront someone, and what the neighbors will think, and what our parents will think, and before you know it things are so muddled that we can't begin to figure out what we should be doing. It's really easy to get lost in that headspace.

Which is where divination comes in. By introducing an element of randomness, whether it is the turn of a coin or the drawing of a card, you clear through all the junk that is stopping you from making a decision, and get a chance to really listen to yourself. In a certain sense, I think critics are right when they say that divination is just you projecting your own thoughts onto an objective and unrelated text (a text being anything you can interpret in this case), but that ignores the real value of this process. I've never done an I Ching reading that wasn't unnervingly spot-on to my situation, and I've never regretted a decision I made as a result of my readings - because every time I did one, I was forced to face the facts I already knew, deep down, about my situation and my options.

I don't use divination as a means of telling the future; I use it as a means of deciding, given my current circumstances, what choice is most likely to have positive effects for me in the long run.

Of course, your mileage may vary.


ETA: Wow, I really love this icon.

Does everyone remember a month or two ago, when LJ first moved over to the new profile layout, and in standard Livejournal fashion, everyone completely flipped their shit? It even made fandom_wank, the level of self-entitled bitching over how OMGUGLY the new layouts were. I stayed far out of it, because a) I almost never look at anyone's profile, and b) I didn't really give a fuck.

But you know what? 

I LOVE THE NEW PROFILE LAYOUT. I LOVE IT SO MUCH. WHY? BECAUSE I FINALLY FOUND THE LINK TO scans_daily'S TAG LIST. THEY HAVE MORE THAN 5000 TAGS. THERE ARE NO WORDS FOR HOW MUCH EASIER THIS MAKES MY LIFE.

ETA: Quote from Secret Files: Teen Titans/Outsiders:

Starfire: You could say goodbye to your teammates.
Nightwing!Dick: They're not my teammates anymore.
Starfire: They noticed. That became obvious when Donna died and you ran off to New York with Bruce's checkbook in one pocket and Roy in the other.

Uh. Is there any way to read that sentence that isn't "Yes, Dick, we all know you dragged Arsenal off to New York for your fucking gay tryst, you asshole"?

ETA2: Sometimes when I haven't been reading his books for awhile, I forget how incredibly gay Tim actually is. :)

Best sentence of the night:

“Three, you remember that New Year’s weekend? When we stayed awake for three days and lived on beer and that cheese in a can? You swore up and down Johnny Cash was living under your bed, man. Sleep deprivation doesn’t agree with you."

Work was not too horribly awful tonight, which was a nice change. Finally got some fucking pledges, at least. And there was cake. Really amazing chocolate cake.

So incredibly tired right now. That is what happens when you stay up until 6 in the goddamn morning writing fic, I guess. On the bright side, the Steve/Tony fairy tale fic is, at completely and utterly done, and almost 6000 words of pure, undiluted crack. Will post tomorrow.

I've been having a recurring dream (well, twice so far, but that's a lot for me) that I am Rodney McKay. Trapped in a small room with a tiger.

Seriously, WTF brain? Can anyone tell me the psychosexual interpretation of dreaming one is a middle-aged socially-inept genius astrophysicist about to be eaten by a large jungle cat? Or am I just too weird for words?