Putting it Out There:

Oooh, wook at deh pwetty babies! They wuv ooo, pet them wif deh mwose! (Translation: Click, please)



Husband - what are you in there, playing a game? Me - Uh, not exactly, why? Husband - All I hear is click, click, click. Me - Oh, yeah, I was saving dragons.

Oops, I picked up more eggs. Click for me and I'll click for you!

Current Mood: cheerful

My first egg hatched! I'm so excited, and that's really silly, but still how cute is my baby dragon! (Silly, I know this is silly, but still, cute, cute, cute!)Of course now there are those other darn stubborn eggs to work on.

Can anyone tell me how many clicks will ensure that my eggs don't die? Also, why is this so addictive? I keep picking up eggs!

I can't help myself, I just keep clicking on them.

Current Mood: grumpy

I did this thing:



Go there and click so my dragon can be born.

Sad...

Current Location: Next to my empty bed
Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Some Unholy War by Amy Winehouse

Ok, so I really suck at updating. And maybe this is because I've gotten more interested in another blog...but there's no excuse for not posting for eight months. Quick updates:

1. December 12th House flooded. 2 feet of water in the basement. That sucked.

2. December 25th Had crazy Christmas party, despite flooded house. Lots of folks, food and fun. That rocked.

3. December 28th Grandma's 80th birthday party. All seven of her children were there, and so was I. No major fights. Miraculous.

4. December 31st Fell down, went bump and broke 5 bones in my food. Really, really sucked.

5. January 7th to February 21st Missed six weeks of work because of the owie. Sucked less thank you'd imagine.

6. April 8th Finally got the bad tooth pulled. Sucks now, but will rock later. (Put it this way - it BETTER rock later, or someone's gettin' hurt.)

7. April 21st Got new job, jury's still out on whether this one sucks or rocks, or is just waffling in-between.

8. April 22nd Foreign exchange student is staying for one more month. Definitely rocks.

Throw in some really good sex, and high gas prices, and we're running about even for the year, I think. Or maybe the year has sucked so far, and we're looking for things to turn around. One or the other. But there has been some really, really good sex, so things can't be all that bad. Right?

Current Location: Bedroom
Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: Buzzing after pain meds

Ok, so I suck at blogging. But I'm not interested in self-flagellation right now. Here's news. I've started the Shangri-La diet as of last night. Here is my baseline:





The biggest issue may actually be to remember to weigh myself. But still, I will be able to tell if my clothes are getting too big, and I will report on that. For more about the diet, go to Google and type in the name of the diet. If you can't figure that out, I can't help you.

More this evening.

Current Location: working class hell
Current Mood: indescribable

But I've decided that it counts towards the word total:

(Click here to post your own answers for this meme.)

Current Location: I'm on BREAK
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Hum of computer

Literary Addiction


Ok so first of all, yes I didn’t write yesterday. But in my defense, it was a really, really horrible day. I started out by having to get blood drawn (never a favorite activity), and ended by losing both my wallet (possibly permanently) and my kid (thankfully temporarily. I think that qualifies me for a pass on self-discipline. Frankly, I’m kind of still a wreck from the whole horrible series of events, but really how long can I allow the wallowing? And anyway I’m going to try to write a thousand words tonight, although that doesn’t exactly count, since the goal is five hundred words a day, not a sum total of fifteen thousand, five hundred, and I’m actually pretty tired.

So on to the subject at hand. I have always been a reader. And usually my choice of reading has been quite eclectic, to put it lightly. At any given moment I am thoroughly engrossed by a biography, a trashy romance novel, a serious anthropological study of the history of a food, a supernatural, futuristic mystery and a couple of books on tape, of one flavor or another, all at approximately the same time. If I were forced to confess, I’d have to say that I don’t really prefer scholarly novels, but then I just read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, and found it thoroughly engrossing. I also just finished listening to just about everything that Sophie Kinsella has ever written as books on tape and found those thoroughly engrossing too. I couldn’t get through Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, but then, that might actually be a pretty good indicator of my good taste, right?

What I was thinking of though, isn’t so much what I read, as why I read. And today I came to a conclusion that I’m not particularly pleased with, but that I have to give the attention due it. Reading is my addiction. It is. It’s just as bad for me as cigarettes or alcohol are to people who chose that as their poison. And I know what you’re saying. How could reading be equated with smoking or drinking too much? Well, let’s think about it:

An addiction can be defined as

NOUN: 1a. Compulsive physiological and psychological need for a habit-forming substance: a drug used in the treatment of heroin addiction. b. An instance of this: a person with multiple chemical addictions. 2a. The condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or involved in something. b. An instance of this: had an addiction for fast cars.

(Thanks to the American Heritage Dictionary)

So with this definition, I absolutely fall into the second category, as in I have an addiction to books. But maybe I fall into the first category as well. I know that if I don’t have a book with me, I start to feel jittery and sick, and more than once I have purchased one, because I couldn’t stand the idea of not having something, even if all common sense was telling me that there was no reason to have one, and that there was absolutely NO WAY I was going to get any quality reading time in because I was too busy doing something else, like oh say driving maybe.

Of course that’s why they invented books on tape, right? Right?

So, what am I reading right now? I’m glad you asked. Currently I’m reading a book by David Eddings called The Treasured One, a book about clearing clutter called Put Your House on a Diet, a mystery set in China called Snake Agent, I’m listening to a book from Lillian Jackson Braun’s ‘The Cat Who’ mystery series on cd with my son (to whom I have clearly and generously passed on the reading addiction), also, at work I’m listening sporadically to Stephen King’s From a Buick 8. Because I’m getting tired of trying to hide the books I’m reading instead of working on my lap under my desk whenever someone comes into the office.

I can’t afford my addiction anymore. I’m racking up a national debt’s worth of library fines, and I keep buying stuff I really want right now retail from Amazon.com. I also do a brisk business in used books. More buying than selling, but you know, a little each way. Because I really don’t have any place to put all the books I have. Many, many boxes of them are in the basement of my mother’s house, where they are quite probably damaged beyond salvage by mildew. The most recent couple of hundred acquisitions are sitting around my house, some in boxes, some on shelves in no particular order, and no particular direction, sometimes two or three layers deep because I don’t have any more room for them.

I love my books. I love to buy them, and read them and have them afterwards. I also love to give them away, but not as much as I love to have them. I love to talk about them. Recently, I gave a friend of a friend the first four books of David Drake’s ‘Lord of the Isles’ series (I only had the first four, because I didn’t know there were more but I will be buying the rest, 'cause really who can resist an author who title a book Men Hunting Things and then writes as a sequel Things Hunting Men), and I don’t feel any particular need to have them back. I have so many others to read, what difference does it make? I’m poor at the moment, so mostly I’m getting my books from the library. I’m not a religious person, but gods bless whoever came up with the idea of the library. Actually I have a book on my list about the history of libraries, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.

And that reminds me of another thing. I have lists. Everywhere. Lists of books I want to read, lists of books I want to own, lists of books I want to write, lists of lists. Lists and lists and lists. I even have lists of the things I want to write about on Livejournal.

Here is a sample:

Lice and Fleas
Losing my wallet
Losing my kid
Exercise
Hezbollah
Catherine De Medici
The Declaration of Independence
My Car (More specifically the fear of it being reposed)
The Step by step Guide to Ruining Your Credit
More about Medical Studies
Making Money from Writing
Carnivale (the HBO original series)
Rome (both the series and the actual place
Religion
Gray's Anatomy
My Back Problems
Weird Diseases (both as a subject collectively and a couple of particular ones)

There’s other stuff on the list, but if I told you all of it, you wouldn’t have any surprises. Actually that’s a lie. Because as I know from finding half illegible lists of books I wanted to read at some point and discovering that I don’t have any idea why I wanted to read the book when I made the list and furthermore discovering that I now have absolutely no interested in doing so now, just because I make a list doesn’t mean I’ll follow it.

That’s it for tonight. Sorry about the no LJ cut. I’m feeling lazy.

Current Location: My room
Current Mood: virtuous
Current Music: Book - Sabriel (with the kid)

I really, really want to go back to school. The list of reasons I can’t is long and complicated, but boils down to:

1.I owe the school I want to attend a fair amount of money and they won’t let me come back until after I pay it.
2.I owe the government a substantial amount of money and they won’t let me go back to school until I go through some esoteric set of steps that I can’t comprehend. (They also won’t give me any more money, for which I can’t really blame them.)
3.I have no time in my life to attend the classes I need to take to finish my degree because I have children that need my attention, a job that demands my attention, and a significant other that refuses to pay me any attention.
4.I don’t even know if I can back into the school that I was in before, even though I’m close to graduating because my GPA is too low.
5.I can’t afford to be a student because the rest of my life is too expensive.

I don’t care what anyone says, everything in life boils down to money. Either how to get it or how to live without it. And the people who say they don’t need it are just liars. They are getting the net benefit of someone having it, or are ignoring the discomfort of not having it, but there has never been a lottery winner who gave all of his or her winnings directly to charity and went happily back to some shitty wage slave job.

I don't even know if I care about the degree beyond being able to say that I finished it. I just really want to be able to say that I finished it.

And this is not the 500 words I promised. On the other hand, it's not August yet.

Current Location: wage slavery
Current Mood: discuraged
Current Music: Piano in the next building...not bad

Ok, so I decided to go back to school full time for a semester, because I'd been laid off and didn't really feel like looking for another job right after 9/11. And one of the things I decided was that I was going to work more exercise into my day, because I had to pay for an activities membership as part of my tuition. (Another fine example of academic extortion, IMHO.)

The exercise I decided on was swimming. Why? Oh I don't know, perhaps so that this story could find expression.

So I owned two swimsuits, one newish and the other oldish. I decide to use the oldish one so I could leave it locked to my locker (An extra $7 a quarter ABOVE extortion, but I'm not bitter) and not have an excuse to not swim. It had a small hole in the back, and also another thing going on, which will soon become more relevant. But mostly, I thought it was decent enough for "I'm swimming laps and don't want to be picked up, thanks anyway" kind of activities. So one day, about a month into the swim routine, I put it on and am heading to the pool when a girl stops me. She says, in an embarrassed fashion, "Uh, I think you have sort of a hole in your bathing suit." Remember the other thing? It's coming up.

I breezily replied, "Oh I know, I'm going to bring in another one when I think it's a problem." And headed out the door to the pool, with my towel over my shoulder. I got into the pool, and there were a couple of guys in the jacuzzi next to my lane, who I ignored. I did my laps. I did flip turns at the end of each lane. (Do you know what's coming? Too bad I didn't.) I swam for, oh, let's say 45 minutes. When I got out, the same guys, and some more guys were in the jacuzzi and they were all smiling at me. (Which I found annoying because why does every guy I see have to try to pick me up and oh god I am so sick of not being able to just get in a swim without all this attention. Right.) I headed back to the locker room with my towel over my shoulder. It seemed a bit cold in the hallway.

When I got back to the locker room and took off my swim suit I discovered that the entire back half of one leg of the suit had unraveled and basically I was baring my bottom to the jacuzzi guys with every flip turn. I sat on the bench and wondered if the girl who'd tried to warn me thought I was an utter freak. And threw the suit away.

Awkward? Yes? It's not over.

The next day, I screwed up my courage and went to my Anatomy class. Who was sitting there? One of the jacuzzi guys. Who said, "Hey I know you...." And then, thankfully, nothing.

Then I made the mistake of telling this story to my aunt. Who has been blackmailing me with it ever since.

Now I can tell her LOTS of people know it!

Current Location: almost home
Current Mood: caffenated
Current Music: vague strains of a piano sonata

So here’s the first thing: What does 500 words look like? And do they have to be 500 different words? Or can I just repeat the same sentence over and over and over and over and over? There have to be ground rules, right?
The truth is that when I’m writing, I really do like to write. It’s just that getting started is like pushing a boulder uphill. A heavy boulder. So it’s not that I can’t do it once I start, it’s just that I always have to start. And you’d think that once you got into the habit of doing something, it would be easier to do it all the time. But writing isn’t like that. At least not for me
It’s like… exercising. I have no problem dropping that either. And so consequently I’m not a best-selling author, or even a worst-selling author. Or for that matter a Harlequin Romance author. Nope instead I’m a wannabe sorta author. And I’m fat. And I have back and neck problems.
Which brings me to the physical therapist. When she pokes my sides and says that the fact that it hurts means that I’m tense, I want to say “Oh bullshit lady, I’m not falling for that old hat trick.” But I want to not be tense. I want to feel good when I exercise, and if haranguing by the doctor isn’t working, maybe a little bit of therapeutic magic will.
But it doesn’t matter. Because what I really want is to be happy. And I don’t think that getting thinner will do that. Well…maybe I’ll be happier, but not the all out insane delirium that I’m really hoping for. Because it’s unrealistic. And I know that. Even though I still want it.
Mostly though, I want to feel like I did when I was twenty. God, that was a great year for me. I had so much fun, and I felt so alive and so competent. I thought I could conquer the world. I thought I was GOING to conquer the world. Now I just feel like the world is sitting on my back like that statue of Atlas. How do I get back that old verve? (How do I stop myself from using words like verve?)
This is a total non-sequiter, but I wonder why my brother is so fearless about launching into new business ventures? It doesn’t seem like it occurs to him that there’s anything hard about what he does. But then I suspect he’s more organized than I am.
Ok, back to the thing about being old and fat (and depressed, apparently). God, I bore myself with the whining. I know what to do. I really do, but how do you just do it? How do you make yourself? I guess if I knew, I could call my brother and tell him, and he could start selling it, and make a fortune!
By the way, if you’re curious, this is what 500 words looks like.

Current Location: Astral projection is so imprecise
Current Mood: I can fly~!
Current Music: Tinkling of the heavenly spheres

So next month I'm going to try to write at least 500 words every day. I know this might be well nigh impossible for me, but I'm also starting ADD medication, so we're all going to be optimistic that this can be accomplished.

In other news, I'm having a terrible time on this planet, and I wish that my real people would return for me.

And I haven't done anything with my website.

How many words is this entry? I'll give you a hint. It's less than 500.

Off to the physical therapist now.

Current Location: lost between the moon and New York City.
Current Mood: dismal
Current Music: some guy cutting down the bushes

I saw it in there, lurking amongst the perfectly regular colored ones. I'm going to pull it out when I get home. And be sad that I saw it at all.

Current Location: Just leaving
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: hammering down the hall

So I have to tell people whether or not I can make something on May 20th. The thing is, I can’t remember if I made any commitments for May 20th or not. I think I did, but I can NOT remember. It’s frustrating. My mind used to work so much better than it does now. Maybe this entry should have been titled "I Miss My Memory." I was going to write about something else, too, but I don’t remember what it is any more.

See what I mean?!?

Current Location: Headquarters
Current Mood: working
Current Music: The clock is ticking, does that count?

Now that my dad is dead, I no longer have a much of a desire to live in California. I understand that the nostalgia that I feel for that part of my life has more to do with where I was at the time I lived there than anything about the place itself. It was such a limitless time for me. I could have done anything, or been anything. I was young, and thin, and sexy and unfettered. And I didn’t really understand it then. I just squandered all the opportunities I had. And worried about money. Which is silly if you think about it, because I had more than enough to meet my immediate needs, AND build a fairly spectacular wardrobe.

I should have been an actress. Really the opportunity was staring me in the face, and I just wouldn’t take it. I don’t know why. I think I would have loved it.

My brother wants to be a loan broker. He’s really excited about it. I don’t think it’s the kind of dream you have when you’re a little kid; but then how many of us do the things we dream about? Sometimes they’re unrealistic. I was never going to be a ballerina, for instance, because I’m just too clumsy, or a firefighter, because I’m too short. But there were so many things I could have been that I’m not. I’m not even sure that I know all of them. I can think of dozens, though, that would have suited me better than what I’m doing.

The really sad thing is that in a sense I am living one of my dreams. I dreamed of being an accountant. In high school, I told my accounting teacher that this is what I wanted to do with my life. And now every day I wonder why. I should be in sales. Or marketing, or public relations, or something else. Anything else. I should be doing something creative and exciting that makes me want to get out of bed in the morning. I should have changed my major. But I liked accounting for a long time. I just don’t like it any more. I think it’s really true that the only thing worse than not getting what you wish for is getting it.

I don’t want to do this any more.

How do you step back and change gears in life? Other people do it. They have the missing piece in their psychological make up that I don’t have. The piece that let’s them go back to school or learn a new skill or do something else. I don’t know how to do something else. They should teach that skill in high school. It’s much more important than trigonometry, or how to dissect a frog. It’s a life skill that could be taken out in the world and applied by every single person who learned it. And if I had the slightest interest in dealing with posturing adolescents in the first rush of hormonal idiocy, maybe I would consider trying to teach it. But I don’t.

So here’s the thing. What do I want to do with my life. Maybe the real problem is that I don’t know. Or maybe the real problem is that I do. I want to spend money. All the time I just want fat wads of cash that I can walk around with, buying whatever my heart desires. But I don’t want to ‘product test’ and write articles about the money I’ve spent, and I don’t want have to marry some puffed up asshole to get the money (and I don’t think I’d know where to find one if I did want that). I just want it to fall out of the sky into my lap. I want to get up in the morning when I feel like it, wear whatever I feel like wearing, go anywhere my fancy takes me, and when I get there, I just want to buy stuff. I don't even necessarily have any idea WHAT I want to buy (well, ok, books for sure, whole truckloads of books, mountains of books!) but I want the pleasure of the purchase. I just LOVE to shop. Really I do. It doesn't even have to be for me necessarily. But to do this, I need money.

My conclusion about my future? I don’t enter enough contests.

Current Location: Samsara
Current Mood: hallucenogenic
Current Music: Just the overture in my head

Why am I so compulsive about raising my hand to volunteer for various crap. I just don’t really want to do this stuff, and I end up being terrible at it, and making people hate me, so why can’t I just keep my hands down. I think it has something to do with bitching and credibility. I want to bitch about how fucked up things are. I enjoy it. But then when people say ‘well you do it then!’ I always say “ I WILL do it, and better than this crap!’ And then I do an even crappier job than the last crappy person. It’s pitiful, really.

Current Location: take two steps, turn right and go up the stairs
Current Mood: defiant
Current Music: crash! crash! and some weird bonging noises

I bought this domain name!
www.DIABLOKITTY.COM

... so now I have to build a site, right? Or maybe talk someone else into doing it! Cause I am lazy. Yes, oh, yessss.

In case you were wondering, yes I DO have pictures of my cat (somewhere), which I will put up on this site. But there will be no pictures of my children, because I do not want any disturbed psycho pediphile pervs coming across them and saying "hmmm, this looks like a tasty morsel...mmm, yes, mmm, what a pretty mouth, ahh, ahhh, ahhhh!" I think you get the picture. So if that could be a description of you on a lonely Saturday night, forget it weirdo, there will be no titillating pictures of the kiddies running through the sprinkler on a hot Saturday afternoon for YOU! Go away! Shoo!

If you are cat perv, well, ok then. Check back in like a month. For the record, I do not want any emails about how lovely he is and how good he makes you feel when you look at his picture, but the cat has been dead for years now so, whatever. If you are a dead cat perv, I am sorry for you. And no I will not tell you where he is buried.

Also I will be putting up pictures of my cellulite soon, so if you have a fat fetish, come on down! Unless its a post lipo fat fetish. If that happens to be the case, YOU can go hang out with the other creeps mentioned previously.

Also I do not normally sound like this. GoDaddy will not support apostrophes, so I end up sounding like a robot. What fun!
******
So that was what's on the site.

If you want to see it for yourself, it's at http://www.diablokitty.com. I would put in the HTML but I don't feel like it right now.

Which doesn't bode well for the future of the site, does it?

Current Location: if I tell you, I'll have to kill you
Current Mood: swishy tailin'
Current Music: clickity clickity click click click