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07.17.03 - The Management Would Like to Apologize For a number of things, but most relevantly the recent three-year hiatus So yeah, I'm back. I have no idea why or for how long, but I'm here now, and right now that's all I'm really up to being sure about. I am here. Now. Whether I will even stay here long enough to finish this entry is a question only time will answer. I may get bored or thirsty or overwhelmed or distracted in the course of typing this out and wander away to get some tea or pet a cat or whine that I don't want to go to work tomorrow and thereby sentence this entry to the same fate that has risen up and swallowed so many other attempts to get this particular monster truck kicked into gear again. However, I am here, making the effort, and at the moment, it's looking pretty good. Look at that, a whole paragraph, already! Didja see that? My first line break. Am I something or what? Way back there before I went all Cartesian and started wandering into the shadowy territory of metaphor, I said I had no idea why I am doing this. This is strictly an untruth, as I have, in fact, several. Ideas, that is. Several ideas. Sorry, I have been reading Neil Gaiman, and right now I couldn't construct a simple and easily-interpreted sentence if my life hung in the balance. In any case: Ideas. I have several of them about why I am trying to resurrect this particular monster, and they are as follows: A. I am getting bored with writing in my paper journals. I have filled three whole ones and started then abandoned a few others in the two-odd years that I have been away from the online journaling community, and am now finding it difficult to write for myself anymore. At some point I found it very captivating and I wrote every day. Now I have to force myself to sit down and write every few days, and lately I haven't even been able to manage that. B. I have started reading a few online journals again, after a long period where the only OLJ I read was Arendel's, and even that was sporadic. C. It has been mentioned to me more than once in the past several weeks that my friends and family miss my journal. D. Bill keeps pestering me to Do Something With My Talent, which so far has not turned out to be a good reason to do anything, as so far his only accomplishment in this vein has been to get me enrolled in a simply dreadful Creative Writing class where I sat for three hours every week writing amusing little fantasies about undead armies attacking our classroom and perhaps killing the young, vacuous and oh-so-in-love couple who sat at the side of the room and alternated between snogging openly for the entire class to see and interrupting the teacher at five minute intervals to offer their opinions on every statement made as if the class could not continue before everyone knew what They thought or felt on any given topic. But anyway, as I was saying before I got carried away on the river that is my loathing for that (thankfully completed) Creative Writing class, I was saying that Bill keeps telling me to get up and exercise my talent a bit. He is, as always, insufferably correct in that I am letting my writing skills wither to naught by using them for nothing more challenging than composing nasty notes to court clerks at work. Speaking of which, I suppose for the sake of those brave few who read this journal even though they are not related to me, I should give some kind of update about where I am right now, what my life is like after two-and-some years away. But I don't really want to. Honestly, the mere idea makes me feel all tired and overwhelmed and causes me to ponder exactly how much work this webpage requires to bring it roughly up to date. So, I will abridge the last couple of years and try to give a rough sketch of my life as it now stands in but a few quick sentences. I suspect this will be rather easier than it should be, owing mostly to the fact that my life is very, very boring. So here goes: I am still married, lets just get that out of the way. Still in love with Prince Alarming, and still enjoying a relationship that causes most people who see it up close to experience slight nausea and depression. 'S all good. I still have cats, but no longer own a horse. I sold Noah something like three years ago for various reasons, most of which centered around time and money. I am glad, because he now has a home where he is spoiled absolutely rotten, and I no longer have to deal with the unique form of guilt that comes from owning a horse and not having quite enough time and money for it. I work in an office that deals in public record retrieval, where I sit at a desk all day and talk on the phone to court clerks and the people who deal with them, or more often, sit on hold waiting for said court clerks to find some arbitrary piece of information, a phone number, or a clue. As much as I complain about it, my job is not half bad, has fair-to-decent benefits, and has improved my phone skills so much that there really isn't even a comparison between the girl I was, scared to pick up the handset and call anyone who was not directly related to her, living in fear of doctor's secretaries and telemarketers, and the girl I am now, who tells wild and unlikely tales to the salespeople who call during dinner and whips out the second-grade-teacher-aide skills and tells people off when they keep interrupting her on the phone. There, that wasn't so bad. Upon re-reading my little abridgement, I note that the shortest of the three paragraphs is by far the one concerned with my marriage. Hm. I think that's everything. Now that I sit down to write about it, it seems like not much has really changed. I mean nothing really essential is different from the last time I wrote in this journal. For a life that occasionally feels so busy, stressed and crunched for time, there is surprisingly little of note to say about it. What can I say? I lead a mundane existence. That, too, has not changed. Except that my existence really isn't that boring. In the past two and some-odd-change years, I feel like I've done so much. I've moved from my old apartment to the apartment across the way so that the Cowgirl could come live with us while the Captain was at school up north. I have sat in stunned silence as the Cowgirl announced that she was moving out, divorcing the Captain, goodbye, we'll talk more later. I have been unsure how to feel about it when there turned out be no later, and I discovered that my closest friend for two years had effectively divorced me, too. I have been out of work and looking feverishly but without much hope for a job. I have been to job interviews. I have been hired. I have learned how to live in an office environment, something I had never been in contact with before. I have been promoted, and I have spent quite a few lunch breaks crying in the bathroom because being promoted is very very trying. I have been upset when Bill quit his job to start tutoring math and physics full time, and have been surprised but pleased when this turned out to the be the best idea he's ever had. Except for marrying me, of course. And, no, I wasn't writing online at the time, so those of you who were fortunate enough not to be there at the time will probably never hear about any of it after this brief mention unless I am reminded of some random event enough to want to talk about it at some later date. To be fair, most of the events that have taken up most of the past two and a half years have been the sort of small, passing things which seem bigger than they are at the time, unless they really are something big, in which case I usually am not even aware of them at all until later. I have taken classes, most of them boring, and turned in enough homework to deforest a small South American country all on my own. I have written poetry (not as much or as well as I would like), essays (far too many of these for my taste) and tried to write fiction (Haha! Ha. Sigh.) I have met new people, made new friends, lost or forgotten old ones, and discovered the truth to the saccharine phrase "A sister is a built-in friend". (waves to Green Tea) I have gone on vacations, worked late, worked out, cooked and eaten several metric tons of frozen chicken, and frittered away a positively shameful amount of time doing absolutely diddly squat. I have had fun. I have read books, collected comic books, seen movies and discovered the pure, addictive crack that is Harry Potter fanfiction. I have done so many things that seemed life changing at the time, and maybe they were, but from here it doesn't seem as though my life has changed much. I still like most of the same things, see most of the same people (with the exception of work acquaintances), go most of the same places. I still buy books I never read, eat too much starch and talk waaay too much. I still love Bill, still lose my shoes every single time I take them off, still can't sleep, still read the "Ride of the Rohirrim" and "The Battle of the Pelennor Fields" chapters of Return of the King over and over just so I can get that chill all down my spine when the Riders of Rohan charge the fields singing in the morning sun, and then again when King Theoden says "A grim morn, a glad day, and a golden sunset". (shiver) But I guess a lot has gone on, even if it didn't make many changes that will fit neatly into a thirty-second rundown on my life as it looks today. Right now I am sitting in the computer room surrounded by books and papers and empty glasses. Bill and the Captain are sitting at Bill's desk swapping Austin Powers movie quotes when they should be working on the auctions for their Ebay side-business. I have dishes to do, lunches to make. I need to read another couple cantos of Dante's Inferno for the informal reading club that I'm supposed to be a part of. I should have been in bed 15 minutes ago. I sit here, writing mostly nonsense at a late hour despite the fact that I'm tired and have a dozen more urgent things to do before I go to bed, and despite the slight twinge of guilt over the sandwiches I should be making and the sleep I should be getting, I'm glad I'm here. Like I said, not much has really--really--changed.
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