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10.25.03 ~ Angst! the Musical

Bark like a sheep

Bless me Father, for I have sinned. On Wednesday I had an idea for a journal entry and even had a rough idea of what I wanted to say. I pondered it for three whole days, thinking of how I planned to write the entry, what words I would choose. But in my weakness I did not write the idea down. After sticking in my head for three days, I thought I was equal to the task of remembering what it was that I wanted to write when the time came. Then, last night I sat down at my computer desk and opened a new entry and...the idea was gone. 

So yeah, I have committed the sin of Not Writing Things Down again. It's not the first time and it certainly won't be the last. The spirit is willing but the flesh is lazy and overconfident in its own fallible mental facilities.

And yes, the entry title is stolen from Pinky and the Brain. Little white mice with huge heads and cockney accents may come in the night and have their revenge upon me as I sleep if they feel so moved. 

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I hate Saturdays. I know everyone else loves them, but ever since school started up again, they have been a huge drag. I have very little time for homework and housework and writing journal entries during the week, so it would seem natural that I should do all these things on Saturday. However, all the things I need to do piling up only serve to make me overwhelmed and apathetic. Many a Saturday has been wasted just sitting and thinking of reasons not to go do everything. 

It doesn't help that Bill is gone all day tutoring and working for the school. When he is home during the summer, it is easier for me to be motivated for some reason. Being alone drains me of energy and willpower. 

Today is worse than usual because there are several fires going in the area, and the sooty sky is very dark and ominous today. The strained light and my feelings of being lonely and overwhelmed are all conspiring to make me feel very lethargic indeed, and I really don't want to be sitting here writing this now, especially after the disappointment of forgetting my idea last night. But here I am because I promised myself that I would update on weekends from now on since I've given away my Thursday evenings to choir practice.

I really wish that it would get dark and hide the horrible Mordor light of the sun glaring through ash and smoke. I have closed all the blinds, but the little light that creeps through at the edges is still orange and grey, making the world seem very post-apocalyptic. I dislike it terribly. I know I should thank God that evil-colored light is the worst I am suffering when one of my coworkers could not be at work yesterday because her neighborhood was being evacuated due to its proximity to the Rancho Cucamonga fire. I know this, but it doesn't make me feel any better disposed toward the  red-orange sun and the grey-orange sky and the general tense mood that it's putting me in.

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Went to Bakersfield last weekend to see Jess, Koala and their family. Took a few of my pen-and-paper journals with me because Koala has been saying she wants to read more of my writing, and that was all I had to hand. She is probably my most loyal fan, as she will read even the most inane brain-droppings if they come from me. I cannot explain this, as she normally has very good taste in literature, much better than my own, in fact. 

Anyway, I gave them to her, and she read the first one from front to back almost before we left on Sunday. I was completely astonished. I read a cute little Harry Potter fanfic once where Ron gives Hermione a box of Cockroach Clusters candy for Christmas as a prank and she takes them down to the common room and eats the whole box in front of him without saying a word. Ron is suitably both impressed and rather distressed by this, not to mention a bit green in the face by the time she is done. I felt a similar mixture of awe and pity while watching Koala devour my journal. I wanted to snatch it back and say "It's not really that great, it's just weird ramblings about nothing much, and it's mostly ego-centric whinging anyway! Don't read it like that, you'll make yourself sick!" But I didn't, mostly out of a morbid curiosity over whether she would really read the whole thing from cover to cover. Of course, if truth be known, I was also quite gratified that anyone was reading anything of mine from cover to cover. It was quite the ego stroke.

At any rate, this is all leading up to the realization that: Duh! Most of the people who read me do so because they love me and miss me and like seeing into my head. They don't read because I'm a genius or because I write well or whatever, they just like hearing from me. 

Which made me want to update more often and with more every-day-life material that would just not be worthy of a proper journal entry, to be read by all and sundry. To that end, I have procured a LiveJournal. I will try to update as often as I can, hopefully once a day. Obviously the entries will be neither as thought-out or as long as the ones on this journal, which will continue to be updated weekly. I am really kind of looking forward to having a more informal place to vent. Also, I will not have to bother about coding and ftp and so forth with LJ. Just type, press button, and blam! There is the entry! Will the fun never end?

Of course we all know I only did it for the LJ icons. Call me a sucker. All thanks go to Tiellan, who with her siren song finally broke my will and convinced me to start one of these things. She also supplied the code to start my LJ and in so doing has probably spawned a life-long obsession with making little 100 x 100 avatars out of everything. I am a complete sheep. Baah.

Because I am unduly pleased with the bio I put up for my LJ I am posting it here. No, there are no depths of narcissism I will not plumb, thank you for asking.

Since June 2000, my name has been Marie Anderson. Before that it was Marie Herring, and when people asked me how to spell my last name I always said "Like the fish." To which they usually responded "Oh, I don't fish," which always struck me as especially stupid.

Now I am married to a man with gorgeous blue eyes and a penchant for higher mathematics, and when I give my name I say "Anderson, with an 'o' not an 'e'". That seems to make sense to everyone, probably because it does not involve aquatic wildlife.

My sister and a few very old friends call me Ri, and I like that, so it shows up as my screen name rather often.

I like to write, at least in theory, but really when you get down to it, the fact is that I like the idea of writing better than I do sitting down and actually doing it. This is, I have come to discover, not uncommon among writers and people who want to be writers. So I set out to find a way to force myself to write whether I really wanted to or not.

To this end, I started an online journal. It can be found at http://www.ri-ality.com/journal.html

I like my "Real" journal, and I try to update it once a week with a more-or-less cohesive entry. The formality of a less blog-like journal forces me to make more of an effort towards each entry and I think that is good.

However, I think the addition of an LJ will be beneficial for two reasons:

1. Most of my readers are friends or family members who love me so much that they are willing to read almost anything I write. Some of them even remind me when I've gone too long without updating. These are brave, wonderful people, and I feel that they should be commended for their misguided and undeserved devotion to me.

2. A lot of odd things happen around me every day, and they strike me as the sort of thing one should write about, yet they are rather difficult to fit into the form of a proper journal entry.

I think that an LJ, with its relative informality, will provide a much better forum for such things, simultaneously giving me an outlet for them and giving my friends and family more opportunity for their "Ri fix" as one dear friend of mine put it.

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I have been trying to think of an official name for the room we keep our computers in now. We just call it "the other room" now for lack of anything else that fits. It's served a lot of purposes since we moved here over a year ago, and it doesn't seem to want to be named anything now. 

When we moved here, it belonged to the Cowgirl, and there were clothes everywhere, and it was very dark. I never felt like I should come in here, even though the Cowgirl told me I could whenever I wanted. Then after she left it was just an empty room with a few sticks of furniture in it, and I still never came in here because it made me want to cry. 

Then the Captain came back from school, and I had to come in here before he got home because she had left her wedding band behind when she left. It was the plain one that she wore for work and at the stable, she kept the one with the five clear diamonds on it. She left it, by accident or design, on the shelf by the door with some keys and oddments that she had kept there that also got left behind. I wasn't sure what shape the Captain would be in when he got here, and not at all sure that he would be up to seeing his freshly-divorced wife's ring sitting there empty and forgotten in the first place he would see upon entering the room. So I came in here and cleaned up a little and took off the sparkly frog stickers that she had put on the bathroom mirror, and took away the wedding ring. I put it in the box where I keep my great-grandmother's antique amethyst ring and my own promise ring that Dad gave to me when I was thirteen and which I save for my theoretical oldest daughter.

I gave the wedding ring back, just in case you're wondering. I put it back on the shelf, when I had assured myself that The Captain would be alright and that finding it would not hurt him unduly. I placed it in the soap dish that the Captain used to keep keys and jewelry and loose change in while he wasn't looking and then I asked him to draw me something to justify the fact that I had waltzed into his room unannounced.

While the Captain lived in this room, I occasionally entered it, usually when he was sitting with the door open and drawing at his easel. I usually sat on the floor just inside the door as if I would be less of a nuisance if I didn't come very far into the room. In those days I mostly sat in the door when I was lonely and Bill was out late tutoring or at class. I know I probably got on the Captain's nerves to no end, but he was always very nice about letting me talk at him while he worked or sit reading in his doorframe just because I needed company.

Then in February, a few days before my birthday, the Captain's father died of a heart attack at four o'clock in the morning, and a few weeks later the Captain moved back home to be with his mother and siblings. It was very right of him, but I missed having a third human occupant in the house. When he came over a few weeks later and asked how I was and I said that I missed him. He gave me the only hug I can remember getting from him, which was very gracious of him considering that it was he who really needed a hug at the time, and I was just pretending that everything was about me as usual, and didn't really need or deserve a hug to encourage me.

In any case, the Captain moved out, and then this room was empty again. We moved our computers and desks in here, along with three bookcases and several metric tons of books. We inherited a round wooden table from the Captain, who had nowhere to put it in his new room. This Bill promptly covered with pliers and wire cutters and beads and coils and coils of wire for making jewelry, not to mention a drift of papers. The floor is now home to my typewriter and Bill's stereo, as well as two or three pairs of my shoes and attendant socks that I was too lazy to go into the bedroom before taking off. The bathroom door is closed because in the eight months since the Captain moved out, I have never worked up the motivation to go in a clean it much. It is serviceable, but not pleasant, filled with dust and a drippy sound fro the bathtub. As it is very rarely used, it is actually cleaner than the other bathroom, which we both employ, however, it has a claustrophobic, forgotten sort of feel that makes me depressed. I wonder if it is haunted, like the girl's lavatory on the second floor corridor in Harry Potter. Though I think any ghost haunting our second bathroom would be far less humorous than Moaning Myrtle. 

This has shaped up to be a very long and mostly depressing entry. I was going to write about the different names we could give to this room and why it doesn't fit any of them, and then I was going to write with much attempted humor of Bill's predilection for spiders. However, I am not in a good mood right now (can you tell?) and that's just how journal entries are, I suppose. You can lead a journal entry to water, but you can't make it be funny if it wants to be filled with angst.

Yeah. I'm going to do homework now..