Love In The Asylum

I've been busy this week getting ready to start the new job, which mostly means paperwork and shopping. SO MUCH SHOPPING. The office dress code is smart casual+jeans, so it's not like I needed a whole new wardrobe, but most of the clothes I got last spring are either a little too dressy (more for job interviews than day-to-day) or more summery (sleeveless dresses, mostly, and it gets way too cold here for sleeveless dresses in February). So Monday and today my aunt and I did a tour of all the near-by thrift shops, which, trust me, is a lot of thrift shops. Especially when shopping with my aunt, the pushy and endlessly opinionated.

But, even though my aunt was very slightly exasperating, it was pretty productive. I spent about $30 and got four office shirts, a pair of slacks, a pair of jeans, a skirt, a t-shirt I just liked, and 3 books (shut up). Not bad at all! I am also, slowly and painfully, starting to shape my complete lack of natural dress instincts into something resembling a personal style. It's still in its infancy - actually, maybe still in the fetal stage - and given a choice I am pretty much always happy in jeans and shirts-that-say-stupid-things. I still have no eye for color or making things match. But I have discovered I like a kind of faux-layered effect - knit shirts with a camisole under them, sweaters over a button-down shirt, that kind of thing - and managed to shop accordingly. Mixed with my standard knee-high socks and combat boots, it creates a look I'm thinking of as punk librarian.

My other goal for the week is to finish my first playthrough of Dragon Age before I start work. I'm almost there! Last night I did the Landsmeet, and got Alistair married off to Anora so they could rule together. I wasn't expecting him to be quite so mad at me about it, but he'll get over it, and I really do think it was the best of all options. My City Elf Warden knows that Alistair doesn't have enough sense to rule on his own, but after seeing his family sold into slavery, he doesn't really trust anyone else on the throne to care about the alienage. Hard to forgive Loghain for that bit of viciousness. Although I still kind of teared up when he died. Not so much for him - although there is something admirable in his willingness to die with honor - but just because I felt so terrible for Anora. Apparently the fandom doesn't like her? IDK, I really kind of adore her, and I just want her to have something in her life that doesn't end horribly for once. And maybe a hug.

So, I did not actually get to see Harry Potter today. We had plans - very elaborate plans, because that is the kind of people we are - but we were foiled by the snow. All half an inch of it! It really was just poorly timed. hanjuuluver and I had agreed to meet up at 11, and about 10 the sky stopped looking grey and ominous like it had all night and morning and actually started snowing. It lasted less than an hour, melted immediately, and didn't stick at all where I was, but hanjuuluver's mother didn't want her out driving in it. So we reconvened after noon when it had stopped and tried again, but by then we'd already missed the only showing at the local theater.

So instead we went out to lunch and did a mall run. Which was fun, even if the baby punks in Hot Topic make me feel old and I got seriously weirded out by the five twenty-ish guys in identical track suits watching us laugh at sex toys in Spencer's. I let myself be talked out of buying suspenders, a fedora, and sparkly cupcake earrings at Claire's, which was probably a wise choice.

I did not, however, let myself be talked out of buying new (well, "new") boots! OMG, last week when my mom and I went to Saver's they had a pair of 8-eye black Doc Martens for $10 - half a size too small for me. Heartbreaking. But I talked hanjuuluver into stopping there on our way back to my mom's, and they had an awesome pair of brown boots that actually fit me. Not as nice as Docs, but I am fucking willing to settle to finally have a decent pair of flat boots. Not that I don't love my other boots, but I can only wear three-inch heels for so long before I want to cry. So yay boots!

I have now seen the Doctor Who Christmas Special. I feel like I should have some opinions on the problematic gender and class issues going on there, because yeah, that was a thing, but...THE DOCTOR IN A FLYING SHARK POWERED SLEIGH. I feel like the entire existence of television as a social medium is validated by that scene. Unbelievable. Eleven is, as always, my one true bow-tie love.*happy sigh*

I was woken up this morning at 3 am because the kitten found a bottle cap and was chasing it around the living room, and at 7 am because my mom wanted to drag me outside to see the three inches of snow we got last night. Oh New Mexico, how did I ever live without you?

Yesterday hanjuuluver hauled me off to the mall for an afternoon of mocking the tweenagers and flailing around the Disney store in glee at all the Princess and the Frog stuff, and then my mom and the boyfriend and I met my grandfather and his girlfriend for dinner. Not only awesome food (grilled shrimp stuffed with crab and covered in parmesan, I thought I'd died and gone to seafood heaven), but wonderful conversation - his girlfriend M is one of the most charming, entertaining, and fascinating people I have ever met. When I told her about some of the readings I did for my anthropology class, she countered with a story about the four months she spent living with a hunter-gatherer tribe in Peru. She and I and my mom spent the rest of the evening discussing alloparenting and marriage structures in different cultures, like the enormous sociology nerds we all are, while my grandfather bonded with the boyfriend over having no idea what any of us were talking about.

In true New Mexico form, the snow was melted by lunchtime - not that I expect my mom's new (well, "new") truck would have had much a problem with it. Since it was L's birthday last week, we picked her up to take her out to lunch (reasonably okay Chinese food, although they did excellent dumplings and some halfway decent hot-and-sour soup), and then to Mama's Minerals, a huge rock and bead store in Albuqerque, so she could get her craft geekery on.

My attempts to gather supplies for the Boostle Hairstick Projects met with disappointingly little success - oddly enough, I found a very nice blue scarab bead quickly enough, but an hour of searching and hitting up the sales clerks exposed not a single gold star bead in the entire store. I don't understand it at all! I think I'm just going to have to give up and invest in some polymer clay, honestly. On the bright side, I did get a lovely spiral goddess pendant made out of bone; some cord and a few spacer beads and I should have a new necklace to wear on the once in a blue moon days I take my pentacle off.

Having impressed upon my father the extreme lack of need for us to go anywhere or do anything the next few days, I now have Very Srs Plans to spend the rest of my weekend sleeping and playing computer games, like the properly useless bum that I am.

TOO MUCH SHOPPING I AM DEAD FOREVER. (Note: my standard for too much shopping is anything that takes more than half an hour. Or six hours if it's a bookstore)

The shirt and pants my aunt in California sent for my birthday were totally cute, but unfortunately two sizes too small, so my aunt took me to Macy's today to exchange them. Sadly, the store here didn't have the style she bought me, so I ended up buying two completely different shirts and a(nother) pair of regular jeans. The jeans are a nice fit though (and don't even need to be hemmed, which is a fucking miracle), and the tops are nice - a grey and white striped shirt with a fake camisole, and a brown t-shirt with flowers and a hood. There were a couple of skirts I really wanted, but the ones that were on sale for $12.00 didn't fit me and the one that fit me, lovely as it was, was $90. And, just, no. We're going to see if it goes on sale. And then she made me go to Sears so she could shop for pants for herself, which was boring beyond belief.

We picked my mom up at the apartment and my aunt dropped us off at Sunflower Market, and that was fairly awesome. I think we spent about an hour checking out all the neat lotions and soaps and oils and crazy hippie stuff they had there (they had an entire section just for Dr. Bronner's, it was amazing). We got the essential oils section all mucked up, and I demonstrated my amazing ability to knock something off the shelf every time I moved more than an inch, because I am the world's biggest klutz. I managed not to spend my money too stupidly, though, and walked out of there with orange essential oil, organic deodorant, vegetable glycerin(actually that was my mom's, but it's nice stuff), sunflower and lavender votive candles, and dark chocolate orange candies. And lemonade, they have great lemonade. I did not buy the expensive leave-in conditioner, the lotion I would probably be allergic to anyway, or the pretty soapstone oil burner.

One of the horses in the back pasture on the farm has a baby and it is pretty much the sweetest thing ever. I really wish I had brought my camera when we went out to visit them today, because she is so cute it hurts. But we did spend about half an hour out there feeding them and petting them, so that was neat.

OMG I HAVE CHOCOLATE PUDDING.

I am so excited about having pudding - real, good-quality pudding, not that horrible dining hall pudding that makes me fear for my life - it's a little sad. I've been eyeing it for ages and never quite made up my mind about getting it, since it looked so good but it's extra money, and it's junk food I don't really need. But today when I went grocery shopping I didn't get any new hair toys at Wal-Mart (even though they had a few really cute hairbands and barrettes) and I didn't spend 10 dollars on organic body lotion (even though it smelled fabulous) and I didn't stop at Sally's, and as a reward I decided to buy myself chocolate pudding. I'm now I'm almost scared to eat it because it looks so delicious.

I also have Canadian cheese, pita crackers, mac and cheese, pomegranate soda, and some ice cream bars so awesome the cashier complimented me on my choice of junk food. And apple cider vinegar - I always have to wonder a bit how that looks to the checkout guy. I mean, here I am, buying what is basically a long list of Foods For Someone Who Never Cooks, all snack foods and microwaveable junk, and then there by its lonesome, a bottle of vinegar. It is a bit odd! Though probably I'd get odder looks if he knew I buy it to use on my hair.

Even though I resisted temptation today, I really do need new hairtoys. I am getting bored of my scrunchies and terrycloth hairties and the flower pattern is almost worn off my plastic hairsticks. DDDD: But as soon as I get home I am dragging Hanjuuluver  to the Cool Awesome Rock Store - seriously, this place is the coolest ever if you an enormous dork, it has a bajillion kinds of rocks and beads and shit - and buying some neat beads to make Booster Gold/Blue Beetle hairsticks - I'm betting I can find some blue beetle and gold star beads pretty easy, and then I just have to get blank sticks and mount them. It should be a neat summer project. Neater would be Cap/Iron Man sticks, but those would be a little harder if I wanted to do more than just match colors. Although a set of red and gold and red white and blue sticks would still be pretty neat. *ponders*

In a fit of "OMG I must do something besides sit around being a lazy bum!", I went to Wal-Mart thi afternoon to pick up some minor, non-essential things I needed that I couldn't get at Trader Joe's (including scrunchies, a tape measure, nail clippers, and blue duct tape). Well, that was a mistake. Normally when I go to Wal-Mart it's just to get one or two things, and I'm in and out in ten minutes, but this time...it took me awhile to find the things I wanted to get, long enough that my weird store allergies started to kick in majorly. I had to call hanjuuluver  to talk so just I would have something to think about besides how much I wanted to pass out/throw up. Not fun! But I survived, and I got my shopping done, and now I'm home and won't be going back for a good long while.

The only upside to the whole thing was a quite lovely conversation I had with telyanofcelore  on the bus on my way there. It was definitely one of those 'right, this is why I'm an English major, because I am ENORMOUS DORK' moments. It involved a theoretical AU about a celtic rock band composed entirely of Romantic poets - I believe this train of thought started because we agreed Tennyson would have been a much better lyricist than a poet. So he does that. Arthur Hallam, Tennyson's dead gay boyfriend, would be the lead singer. Byron is lead guitar, as if there were any question. Yeats is on bass guitar. Percy Shelley plays the drums, and he always brings his girlfriend Mary to the practices, which everyone bitches about until they find out that she's been secretly writing songs and then they are all impressed. Whitman writes all their music. Oscar Wilde is of course the scathing music critic. BEST AU EVER, Y/Y?

Because of that, today's poem is Yeats. Because Yeats is made of win!

When You Are Old   by WB Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Argh, I am useless. I was going to go shopping after I got off work today, since I'm almost out of groceries. I don't know why this is so shocking to me - I went five months with no groceries at all! - but suddenly the idea of not being able to nom funky cheese and apples and Japanese ice cream is just appalling. Appalling, I tell you! But I was up so late last night, and then work was boooooooring (except for an odd but interesting conversation on regional accents that got very loud very quickly), and I didn't know when, if ever, the bus was going to come, so I just said fuck it. I'm going to try to go tomorrow after brunch though, because I really want to have some food around, and it's not like I ever do anything productive on Sunday afternoons.

Does anyone know where I can buy hairsticks that aren't terribly expensive? I figured out how to do a wrap bun this week (holds well and takes five seconds to throw together, LOVE), which brings my repertoire up to 3 and a half (braided, wrap, Chinese, and baad cinnamon bun), and if this is going to be a regular thing, I'd rather use something that looks less lame than a pencil.

I promise I'll stop talking about Scans_Daily soon (I promise, really!), but I have one more thing that's on my mind right now, besides the shock of losing the community and my frustration at a generation of writers that just don't get how the internet has changed writer-reader interactions. But first, here's a story about  me.

When I was seventeen, my mom and me got kicked out of house because the owner wanted to sell it. There wasn't enough time (or money) to find a new place, so my mom moved us in with her boyfriend. I was out of the country at the time; I came home to find all my stuff in storage, waiting to be moved into my new room in the apartment of this guy I barely knew. Still, I'm pretty easy-going, and I usually like her boyfriends, so I was ready to make it work. Anthony...wasn't, so much. He got this idea in his head that I was a lazy little punk, and nothing I did could convince him otherwise. He treated me like a kid, he ordered me around, and he yelled at my mom when she didn't discipline me like he wanted.

One day she and him got into a fight over something she did, and because he thought I was involved somehow, he forced me to give him my housekeys. He said he or my mom could let me into the apartment; he didn't want me there by myself. I was, understandly, freaked out - what if I came home late from my dad's and they were gone, or asleep, was I just supposed to sit on the front step and wait for them? So not cool. But then a few hours later my mom came back into my room and gave me my keys back; I figured she'd talked some sense into him.

The next night, I came home from visiting my dad and let myself into the apartment with my keys. Anthony was sitting in the living room, and he immediately started asking me where the hell I'd gotten the keys. Then he accused me of stealing them. I told him I hadn't, but he didn't believe me.

This is a guy I had known for three fucking weeks, and in that time I had done absolutely nothing to make him think I would ever do something like that. I was LIVID. I moved out the next weekend to live with my grandparents, and for the rest of the time my mom was dating him (about another three months, all told), I made NO effort to get along with him. I didn't listen to him, I didn't respect him, I rolled my eyes at everything he said, I picked fights with him every chance I had. I hated him so much that thinking about him still pisses me off, and I made that blindingly clear to him.

Because, see, here's the thing. I'm a good person, I think. I don't drink, I don't use drugs, I don't steal or hurt people. I'm nice and polite and I hold doors open for people. I get good grades and work hard and all my teachers like me. I call my mom everyday and my grandmother every few weeks. But I have this knee-jerk reaction when I get accused of doing something wrong that I know I didn't do. When I do the right thing, and you still treat me like a criminal, like I've done something wrong, my automatic reaction is to say, okay, screw you. If I'm going to get into trouble for it anyway, I'll just fucking do it. I might as well. It's maybe not the right reaction, but it's how I react.

So Peter David, or Marvel, or Livejournal, or whoever holds the ultimate responsibility for pulling the plug on Scans_Daily, they're really pissing me off because they didn't give us the benefit of the doubt. They didn't give us the chance to fight for Fair Use, or to delete the post someone complained about, or change our rules (which the mods were doing anyway), or to explain ourselves in any way. They just decided to shove their way in and destroy a wonderful community that made hundreds of people happy and probably provided more free, positive marketing to comics publishers than any other site on the web. So you know what, to hell with them. If they're going to treat me like a thief, I'll be a goddamn thief.

All of which is a long and convoluted way of saying I need to find some illegal comics files to torrent.

I am beginning to believe that the piped-in music they have at Trader Joe's is secretly transmitting subliminal mind control messages intended to make you spend obscene amounts of money. It is so hard to resist! Take today - I went shopping this after with the goal of buying bobby pins (so I can stop roommate's), purple hair dye (doing that again this weekend or next), and apple cider vinegar (experimenting with a vinegar rinse on my hair). I came home with:

• a 42-pack of small terrycloth hair ties. They are too small to use as ponytail holders (I don't think I could get a third of my hair into them!), but I have a lot of taper, so they should be fine for tying off my braids, and gentler on my hair than the ones I have. Also they are bright cheerful colors!
• 3 large claw clips. I bought these before I realized I don't actually know what to do with them. I FAIL GUYS. Any tips?
• ridge cut red bliss potato chips (with olive oil!). All natural chips are SO MUCH BETTER than Lays. It was a difficult choice between these and the popped potato chips, which I've had before and are delicious, but I was swayed by the temptation of eating communist chips.
• old-fashioned salted blister peanuts. OM NOM NOM. I love peanuts, enough to ignore an (extremely mild and usually only when they come in candy bar form) peanut allergy, because OMG SO GOOD. These remind me of the tins of Virginia peanuts my grandpa Jenkins gets sometimes.
• Refresh Citrus conditioner. Silicone free, full of essential oils and natural ingredients, cruelty free, and IT SMELLS SO GOOD. I'll see next wash if my hair likes it - it's a little more expensive than Suave, but not unreasonably so, so if works well and I can make a bottle last more than a week might switch over. We'll see, yeah?
• tangerine juice. Mmmmmm. I've never had before, and it's great - similar to orange juice, of course, but without the flat, kind of bitter aftertaste that makes me really dislike orange juice. Just nice and crisp and tart and light. I wish I'd bought more than just a single drink bottle.

And the vinegar, hair dye, and bobby pins, of course. I think I will have to abstain on any more shopping trips for a few weeks so my bank account can recover.
Also, on second thought, I probably won't be able to dye my hair tonight. That would be because our sink is nigh-on inaccessible. And that would be because there is a GIANT-ASS COUCH IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR ROOM. Roommate was supposed to get exchange student a sleeping bag last night, since she didn't bring one with her, but roommate failed to do this. We didn't want to make exchange student sleep on the floor or whatever, so. We went down to the lounge and stole a sofa. OH THE DRAMA.

Okay, first the happy part of the post: I have a job! At the movie theater! Working concessions, and possibly the ticket box at some point in the future. Orientation is tomorrow, and I'm, like, embarrassingly excited about what I'm reasonably sure is going to turn out to be a kind of unpleasant job for not much money. But hey! Job! Income! Hopefully being able to continue to pay to go to school! Yay!