Thursday
4/10/2008 10:38:00 PM
The Answer

I was once again strongly, strongly pondering the removal of the blog. Then I came and poked it, found that I liked it, and prayed that the vast majority of people honestly just can't be bothered to look it up.

Thankfully, the language I used in the last too posts was actually convoluted enough to turn me off, so I'm not overly worried about the blogstalkers at this point.

For updates:
I'm at that natural point in which I strongly consider dropping out of school. I'm sick, tired, and slowly accepting the fact that I'm an adult. So, damnit, I just want to be irresponsible.

I've committed to starting Bubblegum and Cigarettes this summer. This is mainly due to the above sentiment. I've wanted to do comics, this comic, for years. It's time to see if I really can do it. If not, I take a much closer look at my major and decide if I still want to keep going. Hell, I can always switch to a GFA degree if I really don't want to put off the degree.

My painting has gotten really quite decent. As has my drawing. My dancing has gotten sloppy, but I'm feeling more comfortable with random wiggly partners, which is worth a little backtracking skillwise.

For the first time in a very long while, I felt utterly and completely unselfconscious in an unrepentant flirt situation. It felt really good.

I hate work. The idea of going is killing my soul. As much as this may be a bummer, I'm getting the hang of it. As long as I can get myself to work on art or dance when I get home, I do well.

All told, I could be doing much, much worse. I still have depression spells, and probably will for a good portion of my life. Right now I'm going on three months of being ill, mainly because I've been continuing to dance instead of resting. As a result, I'm spent.

This is the phrase my teacher used to describe my appearance today. I think he's worried, or is now expecting me to back out of the program. It's odd to want to pat him on the head and say it's fine, and I've survived worse. Kinda.

Not really. I've never been this spent and been supporting myself. It's scary as all hell. But I just had one of those happy little surges of, "I've work too hard to not make it," so yay.

There's never a guarantee of surviving. Might as well go down swinging.

I’m just really, really, really tired.

Friday
2/01/2008 11:58:00 PM
*blink*

It's official. After three years, my wow account is officially dead.

Let's just say that I worked really, really hard on my homework tonight.

It's been unsurprisingly easy to walk away. Most of what I enjoyed in the game has become too redundant to honestly keep playing. But I'm going to miss people. I contacted the people to whom I was close, and some responded while others didn't. A few others have tracked me down and passed on well wishes, which feels nice.

I'm not sure if I want to go back. I want to see the next expansion and keep up my armchair crit of the game. I still stand by my opinion that it's phenomenally well designed. I've also never found another game outside of the FF series that blends low-res models and an art style together to make something quite so aesthetically appealing. It's been hard to top when not even taking the digital crack content into account.

I also want to go drown myself in school work and personal projects, become a fantastic and sexy dancer, make a small circle of soul-mate friends, and fall so madly into mutual love that any horrendous hurdle will be not only worth it, but torn down and left in the dust. All while still making enough money to both live and buy art supplies.

I don't see being addicted to a video game fitting into that. I also don't see that as feasible reality, but I'm currently treasuring one of my rare sparks of hopeless romanticism and idealism.

Have you really moved on when you don't want to be ready to move on? I still want to pick up my cell phone and find that my east coaster has called. Thinking beyond that initial desire for contact never leads to anything remotely positive. This is mainly because, after getting over the initially shock of who was on the other end of the line, I'd probably hang up before I could start yelling. Still, I miss being in love and having hope. Those things don't always come in a pretty bundle, and it was nice to have the collector's set for a bit again.

And at the end of the day, I still don't want to go through it all again.

Monday
1/28/2008 09:55:00 PM
huh?

Well, it's been a bit, but that's the way of things with the blog.

Going back to reread my last post was interesting. I gravitated towards blogging tonight mainly due to a need to vent all of the silly depressed things to which another human being should not have to listen. Reading over the last time I did the very same thing lead me to realize that, to an outside observer, not much would have changed over the last five months.

Yet, in that time, I've survived my first semester at art school; I've made it through a breakless semester without getting too ill; I've had a tooth liberally worked upon and survived the near-death experience of really bad medications putting me out of commission; I've cancelled my WoW account; continued the never-ending healing process of this last relationship; taken up dancing again and slowly started to rock; and done a really very decent job of taking care of my material needs.

Problem is, I feel dead inside. Granted, I've always felt dead inside, but this sense of deadness comes from knowing, with absolute certainty, that I can be completely and utterly happy. I can't write. Drawing is like pulling nails. I literally find myself sitting in my apartment and staring at my wall while, for example, a song plays over and over again in my head. It's like my brain can't let itself think, and has now willed itself to not function. And I feel completely devoid of control.

The tooth issue broke me a bit, I think. I've never been so ill in my life, and I had one of those moments when I came to truly appreciate the vulnerability of life.

I was laying on my bathroom floor, having just thrown up for the second time in 14 years. My body hurt, I felt too weak to move, and all I could do was focus on the cold of the floor as it soaked into my body. I needed the cold, because it made me feel like I wanted to move once everything stopped being so fuzzy.

I had tried calling my father, but he didn't answer. It was 3:00am, and I wanted more than anything to have another person there, but couldn't make myself call anybody. There was a part of me that knew, absolutely, that I would be fine, and waking somebody up for some sympathy felt rude and selfish.

And it occurred to me that if I was wrong, and I couldn't get up, then there wouldn't be anybody to come and find me. I don't go out often enough for anybody to notice when I'm not there. My father goes a month at a time without talking to me. Longer when I'm not dependent on his grocery runs. I have a couple of friends that might worry after a few days, and work would also try to contact me, but this is days. If I had been too sick too move, I would have needed medical attention right away, and I wouldn't have been able to get it.

Taking it out of the medication issue, if I fall getting out of the shower and hit my head, nobody will be there to help. That sunk home, and I've been restless ever sense. As if, in understanding my own fragility on a gut experiential level, I'm rabid to get away from the person I've been.

Dancing has been another experience that tears me up a bit. There's a great deal of baggage attached to dancing and relationships, and the one thing I've always wanted was to just enjoy dancing for the sake of dancing. Yet, there's a part of me that dances to hunt; I want a physical relationship, and this is how I seek it out.

I fight myself on this every time. Despite the predatory streak, I genuinely enjoy dancing, and I genuinely want to just dance, not be hit upon. I've always avoided casual physically contact with anybody other than whomever held my interest. Dance forms a nice bridge, as it allows for that comfort within the boundaries of a dance and the rules that come with that dance. When anybody crosses over those boundaries without my permission, I become defensive, and the dance is generally over. However, blues dancing, by nature, has a much smaller bubble of personal space, and that bridge of safety spans very little space.

For many of the dancers, that's the point. For me, that's a bit of the point as well. However, the baggage results in a discomfort regarding this side of myself. I want exclusivity in terms of contact, and knowing my predatory streak as I do, straying from that exclusivity feels variably like a violation of myself or my dance partners.

Convoluted way of saying that I sometimes feel like a tease, and I sometimes feel like a whore, when reality is that I'm neither and shouldn't feel like this.

Then there's the moments when I stop thinking and just enjoy the damn dance. They feel wonderful. I know, when I let go, that I'm a fantastic dancer, and that my partners are loving it just as much as I am. More importantly, I'm just a dancer. The flirtation or the passion that goes into it heightens the dance, rather than lessoning my experience. I come away feeling alive and wonderful.

Then, inevitably, my brain starts working again, and I wind up with songs kicking around in there out of a desperate attempt to shut it all down and just hang on to what makes me happy. With a brain so busy doing that, there's no room for anything else, and I just end up staring at a wall.

I'm fairly sure that this is my version of growing up and choosing how I will or will not live my life. I'm fairly sure that everybody experiences something like this. The more common versions being the basic drinking and party-style life that drowns out the pains of life in favor of the basic pleasures. Being sober, prone to not party, prone to not sleep around, and possessing what's really a fairly traumatic past, I just get to stare at walls instead.


Just to get it down, as I'm, here, and the story is haunting me.

When I was nine, I was diagnosed with diabetes. I was in the hospital for five days, and on each of those days I had to drink amoxicillin. I don't know why, I just remember that I was happy because it tasted like bubblegum and I could get it down as a result.

A few days after I came home, we discovered that I had inherited my father's allergy to the penicillin family. The next two weeks featured giant hives all over my body. I became so badly dehydrated that I couldn't move without pain, so I wouldn't. At one point, my mother had to hold a bucket under my while I urinated, because I couldn't get to the bathroom.

Shortly after this, my mother decided that I needed a hot soak to relive the pain. She prepped a scalding hot bath with Aeveno powder. She then had my father carry me down the hall to the bathroom, and put me in the water.

It should be noted that, when I've told this to people, they tend to say how bad hot water is for hives. Apparently, it irritates then by bringing all the blood to the surface, and the end result is a far more painful experience.

I can't say one way or the other. By the time my father picked me up, I was too weak to do much, but I was in pain, so I squirmed and yelled all the way down the hall. I don't remember being put in the water. I just remember that it hurt. I was wearing one of my father’s overshirts, and it bubbled up in the tub. I could see steam rising off of the water, and I couldn't get out.

Looking back at this, it seems that at some point, I stopped being able to feel anything. This would make sense if my body had undergone such trauma by this point that the pain of the hot water pushed me over some sort of edge. I just know that I stopped being able to feel my body, and after two weeks of devastating hives, not being able to feel was wonderful.

Ever since that point, whenever I'm in great deals of pain or stressed beyond my means, I make a scalding bath. I don't do it often. Two or three times a year at the most. This keeps it special, and not constantly scalding my skin means that every time I do it, it hurts.

I did this a few days ago by accident. I drew a bath and turned the water up higher than I intended, so when I stepped in, it was quit a shock. We're talking water so hot that after a few seconds immersed, you pull out a foot that's bright red, with a nice line that shows you exactly how much of you was in the water.

And it felt good.

Burning myself in the water felt good.

That doesn't sound like it should be healthy at all.

Yet, I understand why. Feeling numb and empty, experiencing a sensation that you cannot deny or block out is liberating. It's the same logic that creates cutters, makes people become addicted to having an orgasm, and even makes you binge on chocolate. It's also not overly unhealthy provided that you are aware of what you're doing, and don't abuse yourself.

It's also a step on understanding that I enjoy pain. This is a part of myself that I have never been able to accept, mainly due to fear of what come at the extremes of such impulses. I'm not sure if I'm innately wired to take some pleasure out of discomfort, if experiences like my tub incident warped me, or if it's a side effect of the numb vs. sensation need.

I don't want to desire pain because, when I was nine years old, my parents trapped my helpless self in a boiling hot vat of water and left me there to deal with it. It breaks my brain to have to think that hard about it.

Sunday
7/29/2007 11:14:00 AM
AWWWWWWWW!

Tes lacets sont des fées, by Dionysos.

I pulled this off of DRAWN!, which is rapidly becoming my favorite blog. Definitely one of those sites that shows you just how much you miss by not actively seeking out artists.

Despite my usually address-style typing, I still don't hold any illusions that anybody actually comes to read this blog. However, if you're going to play the game, you might as well play it properly. If nothing else, I get to come back in six months and see this video again. And it's just so damn sweet!


I did get the Kinko’s job, so far as I understand. There were some delays getting me started, which have me worrying, but I think it’s paranoia.

I do, realistically, need to go out and get some food so I’ve got some variety in my diet, but there’s so little money left. It’s that hording tendency that makes you think, “but what if I need it for something!?” When the simple truth is that you do need it for something. Now. Food. Go buy it.

But! But… what if I have a medical emergency?

Then you’re screwed. $40 aint going to buy you anything important.

But…. Cwy.

Suck it up. Go buy noodles.

K

Friday
7/20/2007 08:47:00 PM
Yay For Naked!

I've discovered that the single best thing about living alone is being able to be naked whenever you wish.

I've never really been alone before, so far as housing was concerned. I never had a lock on my door when I was little, and my mother's constant attention has long been placed in the invasive category. After that, there was a few years of shell shock in which it still didn't occur to me that she might not burst in at any second. Then, living with my father and Sally, I got a small taste of appriciated privacy after the great relaxation of graduating from high school. That, however, was quickyl removed when my father lost his job and never left the house. Then, living in Brush Prairie with roommates, you understand that your room is your own and everything else is shared. Then, my month in the gorge was devoid of all privacy, as I couldn't even have my room to myself for more than a few minutes at a time.

Thus, my experiences with nakedness have predominatly been limited to time alone in my room, and time in the shower. Mainly because it just never really occured to me being naked and alone might be fun.

But yes, being able to walk around your house without fear of violating the rights of other people to not see you naked is priceless.

So we come to the inspiration for today's post. While skipping off to take my shower this evening, the phrase "Yay for naked!" popped into my head. My first thought was, "That would be a great blog name." My second thought was, "I wonder if anybody's ever thought of that before." So I googled it.

Apparently, the phrase is very common when placed before something specific. The results of reading through these made me laugh very hard, but that might just be the left over ice cream hyper.

Here, for your amusment and mine, I present ten random results. Porn sites not included.

Yay for naked rugby, mmmm muscles!
Yay for naked bike riding!
Yay for naked smart people!
Yay for naked little old men!
Yay for naked puppet action!
Yay for naked elves! (time about fifty billion)
Yay for naked men killing each other! (300, ftw)
Yay for naked baby-toe-eating-time!
Yay for naked Tuesday!
Yay for naked mole rats which can live for more than twenty years and sense things with its teeth!

Tuesday
7/17/2007 09:15:00 AM
You're name inside, don't forget to write

Death by sleepy.

With all the heat lately, it's been hard to get to sleep on time. I've done a good job of not letting myself life the nocturnal lifestyle. Better, in fact, than I've ever done. However, when you're trained to sleep when the heat is at it's odd little worst, it's frustrating.

Last night, I popped online to pick up some in-game mail and wound up chatting with a friend for a few hours. We were in the same boat of "too hot to think", so keeping each other entertained until sleep was possible rocked. It also, however, kept me up until almost four in the morning. Going Costco shopping with the father today, so my alarm went off at eight.

Now, waiting to hear word of whether or not he's here, I'm so close to passing out. I'm a wimp. :(

In other babble:
My group in game has had some setbacks progression wise. Mainly in that we have an unsteady number of people, so we've lacked the advantage of a stable group and class balance. Still, we've cleared through chess, grabbing Illhoof along the way.

Bigger news comes from the move into 25ers. We cleared all of Gruul's lair on the first night, which was nifty. The fights aren't overly hard, but they take some practice. The fact that they went down so quickly meant that everybody was paying attention and learning quickly.

In the kill video, you can even see me bouncing around after Gruul went down. :)