Letterblade

...in the sense of communication fail. As in, I completely forgot to announce that I would be inCalifornia for a bit.

I am now in California. Gay Area, specifically. Mostly doing family stuff , but if I can sneak out for a bit...anyone know any good kinky stores, or other fun places to hang?

Posted from iPhone. Sorry for typos.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

I'd meant to post this for several months now. And I heard the last relevant bit of news several days ago, but I'm only just now getting off my ass and posting. Because. Gah.

Italics are excerpts from The Dark Side: The inside story of how the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals by Jane Mayer. Bold italics from A Question of Torture: CIA interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror by Alfred W. McCoy. And most of this post, really, will be excerpts, wholesale; because this thing stuck in my craw ever since I read the book four or five months ago, in a way that makes me want to stick it into everyone else's craw too.

On that day, December 19, 2001, Pakistani security forces, blocking the chaotic escape of those fleeing Afghanistan over what were called "rat trails" through the mountains, captured what was considered the first big prize in the war on terror. He was an alleged Al Qaeda commander by the name of Ali Abdul Aziz al-Fakhiri, better known by his nom de guerre, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The Pakistanis quickly turned al-Libi over the Americans...

At the FBI's field office in New York, Jack Cloonan thought they had a possible gold mine.... With the criminal justice model in mind, he advised his FBI colleagues in Afghanistan to question al-Libi respectfully "and handle this like it was being done right here, in my office in New York." He recalled, "I remember talking on a secure line to them. I told them, 'Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights. It may be old-fashioned, but this will come out if we don't. If may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the Bureau's reputation, if you don't. Have it stand as a shining example of what we feel is right.'"

Al-Libi was a small man who liked to smile a lot, in a way that seemed genuinely friendly, not malicious.... Once he got started, he just talked and talked. In fact, he talked so much that they had to keep pocketfuls of pens warmed by their body heat, because in the frosty Spartan cell they were using as an office, the ink kept freezing before he was done. They could barely keep up.

"He was expecting us to pull out his fingernails or something," a source familiar with the interrogation, who was not authorized to describe it on the record, recalled. "But when he found out that we were really there to listen, and that he was stuck, with no way out, he just opened up."

Amongst various intelligence al-Libi provided, it emerged that he hadn't actually liked Bin Laden, who had tried to force him to train only Al Qaeda fighters, not all Muslims, which was his preference. Most important, they claimed, al-Libi gave the agents specific, actionable intelligence--information that could save American lives. Defenders of coercion in the Bush Administration would go on to argue that the extreme urgency of getting such operational information justified their approach. But without coercion, al-Libi told the FBI team of an approved plot by Al Qaeda that was in the final stage before execution, to blow up the U.S. embassy in Aden, Yemen. A source close to the interrogation maintained that this was corroborated, averting what would likely have been a deadly attack.

Almost important as what al-Libi said was what he didn't say. Although Fincher reportedly pressed al-Libi hard on any ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the Al Qaeda commander told the investigators he knew of none.

In exchange for his cooperation, there was something al-Libi wanted.... He had a Syrian wife. He wanted for her, and her family, to be able to come to the United States. He was willing to be prosecuted himself if a deal could be struck.

The FBI wasn't the only agency who wanted to get their hands on al-Libi and the information he had. The CIA station chief in Kabul had problems with the way the FBI team was approaching things. He complained to Cofer Black at Langley, and that got Director Tenet going to the White House. And the FBI lost that fight, and found CIA agents barging into their office in the middle of their discussion.

Back in Kabul, Cloonan recalled, "CIA officers come in, start shackling al-Libi up. Right before they duct tape his mouth, he tells our guys, 'I know this isn't your fault.'"

That was the bit that stuck with me. "I know this isn't your fault."

Al-Libi was sent to Egypt under the extraordinary rendition program.

Cloonan retired from the FBI in disgust, after a twenty-seven year career.

In March of 2003, the U.S.A. invaded Iraq. One of the justifications used by the U.S. government was Saddam Hussein's support of the Al Qaeda terrorists.

In 2004, after al-Libi was returned to the custody of the United States, he told the CIA that Egyptian security officials had threatened him with "a long list of methods that could be used against him which were extreme." He said the Egyptians pressed him in particular to admit to knowing about ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. This pressure occurred in the crucial months prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the Bush Administration was trying to substantiate the case for war. Al-Libi told the CIA that he "knew nothing" about the subject so he "had difficulty even coming up with a story." Dissatisfied with his nonresponsiveness, he said, the Egyptians locked him in a tiny cage for more than eighty hours. Al-Libi still didn't know what to say when they let him out. At this point, al-Libi said, the Egyptians knocked him over and punched him for fifteen minutes. Then, when again they asked him about links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, according to the report, he admitted to the CIA that he had made a story up. He accused three Al Qaeda figures he knew--using their real names--of going to Iraq to learn about nuclear weapons.

Al-Libi told the CIA that the Egyptians pressed him about Saddam Hussein supplying Al Qaeda with anthrax and other biological weapons.... Again he was beaten, this time, he said, "in a way that left no marks." He subsequently fabricated additional details, which were piped into the Vice President's office, among other places, and used by the Bush Administration to buttress its allegations that Iraq was on the verge of supplying Al Qaeda with potentially terrifying weapons of mass destruction.

According to two FBI officials, al-Libi later explained his subsequent lies matter-of-factly. "They were killing me," he said. "I had to tell them something."

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi died a few days ago in a jail cell in Libya.

It was reported as a suicide.

There are doubts. And not, the cynic in me thinks, merely because suicide is forbidden by Islam.

If this is an old story to you, I apologize for tying up your friends list with it. But if this is the first you've heard of this--please, if you have a moment and a few neurons to spare, think about this. Or go here, or here, and follow some links.

I wanted to post this partially for the political reasons, sure. One of those 'look at how this country has done business for the past eight years, now tell me why were aren't prosecuting these people' posts. Because I'm a dirty fucking hippie like that. But also, partially, for a purely personal, abstract reason--like I said, this stuck in my craw.

"I know this isn't your fault."

I'm sorry for the complete and total lack of posts. And for the fact that I haven't so much as read my friendslist in a month or two. Pretty much all my time and energy is going into the following things:

- Work, which has been extremely hectic and stressful as of late.
- Writing The Treaty of Pallas and Shebopaleileigh, both of which run in less than six weeks.
- Plotting and playing in a private LJ/LARP game which my local family has been doing. (The chosen kind, not the blood kind, of course.) Someday perhaps I will post more about this.
- Battling endless soul-sucking sick. I've had various colds for two months solid.
- Unit origami.

Obviously some of those are more relaxation things. But I sleep in because I'm exhausted, run to work and stress all day, come home wiped and try to drag more of my LARPs out of my brain, or try to relax with the private-LARP adventures or crazy origami projects.

Two small accomplishments:

I've been politically minded as of late. (Since I started following the election. It's carried over into the private-LARP.) It occurred to me, contemplating the hate-cult train wreck that is the Westboro Baptist Church (which I feel ashamed to have the name of my hometown associate with), that the following might make an excellent political slogan or bumper sticker, if it does not yet exist: "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from conscience."

Though it also occurs to me that there really cannot be a law in this country to prevent one from being a jackass; that's kind of the point. I just wish it was a less hateful culture, I suppose. Still proud of the phrase.

Accomplishment the other:

If one is coloring the edges of a regular dodecahedron with five colors, it is possible to arrange the colors so that no color is repeated around the edge of the same face. (The same pattern of colors cannot repeat on all faces, however.) I do not have the technical proof of this, as I am not that sort of person, but I fiddled with pens, made a hypothesis, and then tested it both on paper and with paper.

Any pentagonal face in a dodecahedron is going to have a third edge extending from each corner. Like, if one isolated one face and one edge, and pardoned the fact that ascii does not do small scale pentagons well:

 |
/ \
\_/

so.

The extending edge is the same color as the opposite edge of the original face. Like:

 |
/ \
\_/

so.

Following this rule throughout the construction will produce the afformentioned result. I have a rather large open-frame dodecahedron (the "little turtle" unit from Tomoko Fuse's Unit Origami) sitting on my dining room table in proof. (It also had to be held together with tape on the inside, as the unit gets floppy in large open constructions. But still.)

Now to make a seven-side box, purely for the Box of Babalon lolz.

Belated happy new year! I hope this one's easier on me than the last. Resolution-wise, well, I've failed every one I've kept in the past. Argh. Why can I never see anything through?

Radio silence due, to a large part, to a character and universe eating my brain which are only shared amongst a small crowd (me, mllelaurel, and nevacaruso, so far, with pookit just getting introduced.) May attempt to post character profile etcetera later.

It's 2009. This is bewildering. I've been feeling very meandery and out of touch with pretty much everything recently. Sheer amount of brainspace given to fictional people and stories is partial cause, hence copious daydreaming; as for the rest, not sure. Not dealing with responsibility well, continually reverting to the horrific flakiness I've had at earlier points in my life, which worries me.

A good friend and I wound up having sex for the first time and going out to dinner afterward. She borrowed my clothing due to her own being over-worn and smelly, so classic walk of shame, and we ordered almost exactly the same thing for dinner, which I've never done before. Embarrassing amounts of coupliness.

I now have a penis. It is shiny and white and lives in my closet.

Car unable to make it out of the driveway in this weather. As a result, it took me an hour and a half to get to work, and two hours to get home. Most of that time with numb feet and mind-hazing sense of commute panic.

I know I haven't posted here in an age and a half, and this is a hell of a way to start up again, but I had to relate my EPIC MEH.

Death Note, and bizarre relations to it, are eating my brain.

That is all. I've got nothing in me. 3.5 hours on the road for 6 hours on the clock, and that's not counting the extensive man-hours spent attempting to get the car out of the driveway. MOTHERFUCKER. Do not want to do this again tomorrow. DO NOT WANT.

But here it is--

I'm alive.

I am safe and warm and ensconced at the bottom of a lease, and not on the streets.

I am employed at a job I love, and not hunting or penniless.

I have a good car, a good computer, everything I need. I have my books on my shelves, and writing to do, and I've received a kind letter from my grandmother.

I know people who care for me.

I...have it good. There's been so much instability, so much depression, so much loss in this past year that this is remarkably hard for me to perceive.

This is why I often find Thanksgiving a rather jarring holiday. Not because of the inevitable drama over whose house I go to, not because I have to deal with my mother, but because--I have it really, alarmingly good. And I usually forget this fact. And I'm not always comfortable with the concept that I'm better off than some people I know. But...yeah.

Must finish coffee and head off to the family drama. Wry contemplative moments aside, HAPPY BIRD DAY, FOR GREAT NOMS!

Made it to Delaware, which was my longest solo roadtrip ever, by about five hours. Hung out with quigonejinn on the way down, which was awesome. Currently curled on my comfy air mattress on the floor of the con chair's extra room (crash space) snarfing hotel internet. Game pickings slim due to the registration foo--somebody who got here earlier yanked the last slot in two games I want to play, leaving me with one game I'm interested in and a lot of random crack--but company is good.

Squee.

For the first time since I turned eighteen, there is somebody I voted for, somebody I'm proud of, somebody I'm glad to accept as the president, heading to the white house.

I'm used to saying this conditionally. I'm used to saying this about once a year, when I'm high on fireworks and peppy music. But now I say this flat out. I love this country. I'm proud of this country.

To four years of awesome!

a.k.a., WTF I've had 2938479237 tabs up for months and it would be really nice to be able to clear them out and find stuff.

Ryohei Hase. Madly beautiful art, not always worksafe. The detail is mindboggling. Also, the fifth image in (from the left) on the Melancholy page...I almost cried when I saw it, with how much I identified with it.

Random Marvel feature: the psych ward profile of Tony Stark.

An open letter to all Republicans from a former religious right activist. I want to read this guy's books.

The Rolling Stone bio of John McCain. An honestly chilling look at a man who let others burn.

And it's been a while since I took this one. My psychodrama quotient seems to have gone down somehow.

The Ultimate LiveJournal Obsession Test
Category	Your Score	Average LJer
Community Attachment	49.46% There's a party in your comments page, and everyone's invited!	22.89%
MemeSheepage	24.56% Only trendy when it's sufficiently entertaining	27.63%
Original Content	69.35% Newsweek, People, and your journal	38.1%
Psychodrama Quotient	22.89% Your dark side's safe with us	16.61%
Attention Whoring	29.55% You do a little dance whenever someone friends you	20.68%
Take The Ultimate LiveJournal Obsession Test and see how you match up! (By The Ferrett)

I am...doing better. I think working intensely on The Treaty of Pallas (the Escaflowne LARP) may be energizing me. Or maybe something just swung around. Worked nine hours yesterday and got home energized. I cooked a little something (half out of a box, but still) and tidied up and put away dishes last night, and felt very proud of myself. I splurged on a new, much larger external hard drive (640 gigs for $99 at Microcenter--hit that sale if you're looking for Western Digitals! 500 gigs for $92. Their terabyte drive was in the $180 range, I think, but I wanted to stay close to double digits.) So now I can actually use Time Machine and have a good backup of this poor little computer I drag around everywhere.

I hope I haven't jinxed it. I hope I keep doing better.

I have too much leftover booze from the Escaflowne marathon. Who wants to drink it with me?

I have gone to the Ikeaville and returned triumphant!

A lantern and some candles, an adorable little round table, shiny red cushions, a compost bucket, file boxes, a glowy-sphere table lamp, a screwdriver multitool, AND a new mattress and bed!

( Pic... )

(I need to get a decent digital camera so I can do proper pic posts, not this webcam crap! Anywho.)

BED. Full size, a bit big for my room but nice and sprawly. Super-comfy mattress--I mean, I lay down on this thing and there was audible crack of relief from my shoulders. And big metal bars for headboard and footboard.

And, yes, I tested it for stability.

I has a bondage bed! Squeeeeeeee!

I will now proceed to get into it and not come out for a while. Because I got this thing home and assembled it mostly by myself, after walking alll over the Ikeaville, and I am a tired and sore beast.

1. I now have multiple categorized costume boxes. There's a Goth Box, a Sparkly and Weird Box (some overlap there), a Relatively Normal Modern America Box*, and an Archaic and Miscellaneous Box. That's for actual clothing items; masks, gloves, etcetera, remain at present unsorted and filed, though I have obtained a cheapass bureau from Ikea for that exact purpose.

An even vaguely organized costume closet is something I've wanted for years, and folks are of course free to borrow from it for LARPage.

2. I have considerably more yarn than somebody who barely knits due to hand pain will ever use. Local knitting types, would you be interested in a Raid Tory's Yarn party? Some of it may be project-specific and something I would be reluctant to part with, but in general...too much. Mostly going to be wool, novelty, and random black crap.

*This particular box contains what is probably my VERY FAVORITE costume piece that I own. I've never had reason to use it; it's incredibly character-specific, one of those little things that speaks VOLUMES about the sort of person who'd actually wear it.

( Photos. )

Normally I have a strict no-LJ-from-work rule, but I need to FREAK THE FUCK OUT in some reasonably contained way RIGHT NOW.

I had gotten my weekends mixed up.

Event 1: Weekend-long-LARP, The Morning After, considered one of the defining examples of the genre, right in town so I don't need to travel or sleep over anywhere, and a lot of my friends are involved. I'm already signed up. I'm really looking forward to it. I don't know when in hell I'd get another chance to play.

Event 2: A weekend worth of dinner parties and gatherings at my parents' house, which I've promised my mother I'd go to, and which will be my first chance in a year or two, and probably my last chance for another year or two, to see my older brother and his wife, who life in CA, and my tiny adorable niece.

ARE THE SAME FUCKING WEEKEND.

FUCK. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK SHIT MOTHERFUCKING FUCK.

THIS IS AS BAD AS THE BLOGATHON-MYSTERIUM CONFLICT. WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THIS. THERE ARE THREE OTHER PERFECTLY GOOD WEEKENDS IN OCTOBER, ONE OF WHICH IS EVEN LONG. STOP DOING THIS TO ME YOU SHIT SCHEDULING UNIVERSE. STOP IT RIGHT THE FUCK NOW. LIKE YOU HAVEN'T DONE ENOUGH SHIT TO ME THIS YEAR.

I miss my brother. I want to see my niece. I feel like I'm closer now to my family than I have been in a couple years, and I'd like to keep that.

Either way I decide, I'm betraying a batch of people. Even if I try to do both--bug out on the game for four or five hours Saturday evening, which will probably be when the most important bits are happening, drive the hour to Westborough, attend for just a few hours, drive back and get caught up on the big revelations--I'm going to piss everybody off.

I'm just going to go off and scream silently and incoherently now. FUCK. THIS IS NOT HOW I NEEDED MY MORNING TO START. I hate decisions like this. I know it's a comparatively little thing, but it tears me fucking in half, undermines my already incredibly unstable social life, makes me seem even more flakey...

IOASUEEEEFJDLKFJO:WEJHIFO: UIHO)Q#R YEF J

It's seven-something on a Monday morning, and I just put the coffee in the bag in my mug, instead of the coffee in the pot.

After wiping the grinds out, I took the mug to the fridge for the milk.

And had to remind myself, out loud, "sugar first, then the coffee in the pot, then milk."

Meh.

I worked both days this weekend, though fortunately not for very long--things went faster than I expected. The highlight of the weekend was an excellent Rosh Hashanah dinner, hosted by my housemate, and get bit in the ass by an old LARPbunny; other than that, work and FFXII.

Current status of...

Soul: Eaten by FFXII. (Soon I'll actually get to the interesting part of the plot, that I don't remember that well. Soon. I swear. Only ten more hours of grinding to go...)

Creativity: Still burnt the fuck out.

Sex drive: Maybe in a box somewhere? It's gone missing since the move...

I must to work. Aaaagh. I want a day off this week, but I'm not sure I have the time. :(

Probably close to a year ago, my grandfather died.

Not my blood grandfather--one is still very cantankerously kicking, and one died when I was very small. But my grandmother on my father's side--the nifty branch of the family--remarried, at quite an age, after her husband's death, and that was the man I remember as my grandfather. He was a very old, slightly wry, good-humored WASP gentleman. And I do mean gentleman. I remember his very shiny shoes, and the way he'd dance very gently with people, and smile.

I did not see them often--probably about five or six times a year before they moved permanently to Florida, and only briefly a few times afterwards. At the time he died, peacefully in his nineties, I'm not sure I'd seen them in several years, and I'd fallen very out of touch--very guiltily out of touch--with them.

This came up because I just sat down, almost at random, finally, for the first time in more than a year, to write to my grandmother.

I barely knew what to say of her. I was terrified of this. Her second husband has died, and my other siblings flew down to Florida for the funeral--I could no more have afforded that, at the time, than I could have afforded Tony Stark's house--and she didn't hear a peep from me. The crazy homeless fantasy-hacker grandchild who never writes. All my communications issues, my correspondence blocks--they're at their absolute worst with her, particularly since my mother constantly nags me to write to her, particularly since his death.

I miss him. I see him in family photos and tear up. I was crying just now, at the end of a long rambly letter, writing about him.

I don't know if I ever even told anyone.

So my new crack these past few days--besides, of course, the FFX replay, which is to the last save point--is reading the archives at, say, Feministing. Or this crackin' blog (that particular link is image-heavy, maybe NWS, but I love it for containing the line "[I'm] wondering if fangirls are the future of feminism.")

I have never really considered myself a feminist. More of a of-course-men-and-women-are-equal-now-let's-get-over-it-and-talk-about-new-stuff-ist. And, yeah, I've lived in enough of a privileged liberal bubble for my entire life that I could get away with it. Hell, I've barely experienced any discrimination/hostility/put-downs for being queer, never mind female; it's one of my basic assumptions that the answer is always "yes, I can, and should," or "yes, women can, and should." I entertained presidential fantasies. You know.

And I never really had any direct interest in feminism or women's studies or that general intellectual area. (Which I would now, after extensive study reading two blogs, categorize as "what this world, as it is, does to women--who, btw, do kick ass, thank you--and how we can go about making things better in that regard.") It was pretty much a "you people and your quaint little categories" reaction.

That started changing--because you will never escape fandom with me!--when the idea for Stars bit me in the ass. Because--I've rambled about this extensively before, but will condense--what drove me to write that thing was not just "oo, shiny" or "oh fuck, Stella's HOT" (well, some of the latter), but the fact that this fic, rare for me, seems to be Saying Something. And the ideas and the characters started catalyzing when I stopped and thought, "wait a minute, how would people react to an independent female superhero at X time? Or to a woman beating up Nazis/being a doctor/running an international munitions firm in 1942/1966/1972?" And the answer was generally "not well."

And that started me thinking--mostly at the hindbrain level--about how society shapes women as opposed to men. Which I'd never really thought about before. And then it kind of all exploded to the front when I randomly clicked through to Feministing from a general political blog, and...

...now I find myself sitting here thinking, "I'm a feminist."

That's new.

I have always had a vague aversion to the word. Mainly because I vaguely associate it with female chauvinism, which is one of my major pet peeves. I happen to like men; of the people I've known personally, I've had far more quarrels and abuse issues with women than with men; and my general goal with this sort of thing is equality. I get pissy when either primary gender treats the other like second-class people who think only with their dicks/uteri/wallets/cars/mall gift cards. It strikes me as defeated the point.

And that association--is the sort of thing one just sort of osmoses from the culture. Along with the idea that feminism has done its job--hey, look, we can vote, we don't have to take our husband's name, there are ovaries present in sports and politics well, sort of, and we're all over the workplace making less money.

So, yeah, I didn't consider myself a feminist, because the culture has tacked a miasma of "radical man-hating" around the word. (I did know enough to know that there's sex-positive feminism, versus the old all-sex-is-rape trope that gets trotted out now and then by people who don't like Firefly, but I admit that that was pretty much it.) And I like my bras, because otherwise they bounce and it hurts; and I have a decent prospect in life; etcetera. Mostly you'd just hear me ranting from time to time about how I believe in equal-opportunity consensual objectification, thank you. (Which I blame on reading Elfquest at a young age, where all the hot elves of both genders are half-naked and horny.) Or the bits of annoyance that, yeah, it's not exactly fair that possessing one set of genitals gets you held to a beauty standard that entails spending massive amounts of time and effort and money, not to mention starving yourself and wearing uncomfortable shoes, while possessing the other set of genitals entails you to shave only the visible bits. Especially the starving yourself bit; that I get cranky about, especially after reading another blog. But.

I think my train of thought has--not quite derailed, but has paused at an intersection of several tracks and is sitting, mulling, and sending the people out with the blankets for the sleeper cars. But at least it's acquired a shiny new label to add to its collection: feminist.

On an irrelevant note (B-flat!), I give you the "501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to toasters - yes, that's correct, the kitchen appliance."

On a Stars related note (A!), I need to reboot my writerbrain. (kink_bingo fucking exhausted me.) I've been poking at it. Brainstorming. Got my hands on the scans of the old origin stories for Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Hen's past and inner life is finally coming together in my head. And it's also become clear that this fic is spawning sequels. God help us all. Mostly the Yellowjacket arc, which would need to be in a separate thing for timeline and tone issues, and which I'm, frankly, fucking terrified of writing. All issues of huge sprawling writing projects aside, I know how it should go, and I don't know if I can go there.

I was thinking of this in the shower, and wanted to write it down. It's funny; it doesn't look like much when you add it up, but I often think that a fair amount of why I'm so fucked up goes back to her.

~~~

~ When I badly strained my hands playing piano, she assumed nothing was wrong and told me to just keep playing. At the time, I had no independent insurance or transportation; thus I was effectively denied treatment. They've never improved, and have in fact continually gotten worse; I've had to quit a job because of it at least once, for example.

~ When I brought my first serious girlfriend home, she freaked out and told me to my face that I was immoral. It wouldn't have been as frightening if I had expected it, but except for that incident and one offhand comment when I was quite small ("I hope you don't grow up to be a lesbian and pretend to be a man," or something to that effect), she has kept her homophobia in the closet.

~ The family was playing Dictionary once, and I came up with what I thought was one of my best submissions ever--the word, which I now forget, had reminded me of Thermidor, which I knew of courtesy of our friend Mr. Gaiman, and I defined it as a month of the French revolutionary calendar. My mother, being the judge that round, received the submission, recognized my handwriting, and exclaimed aloud that she didn't think I'd know about that. Thus making her low opinion of my intelligence quite clear and blowing an excellent play, all at once.

~ The fact that she's informed me several times that my siblings all receive X amount of money (it involves multiple zeroes) for Chrismukah every year, but I have received nothing close to that amount myself, despite spending several years dangling off the poverty line.

~ Every time she's dissed my writing or my wish to write, blatant or no, for whatever reason.

~ Every time she called me "stupid" or "ding-a-ling" as a small child.

~ I distinctly remember several times, when I was little, when I was crying, usually as a result of her getting angry at me about something, and her response was just to snap "stop feeling sorry for yourself." In fact, I can't think of a time when that wasn't her response, though my memory is so ungodly fuzzy that this doesn't say much. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that I never felt comfortable crying around other people; my first serious girlfriend thought this a big deal, as she liked seeing me cry (at least when she wanted to; when she wished to air her own baggage, god help me if I cried or expressed distress); and the parenthetical issue was even worse with Cyn, who would often go into seizures if I was in a bad way. (In fact, the only person, dating or no, who I have ever cried on and felt okay and loved doing so was ineffablewombat. But she now thinks I'm a psycho killer, so that's gone.)

~~~

* Unless she actually, y'know, apologizes** and admits that these things have hurt me. But that's never going to happen. She probably doesn't remember any of this, and probably wouldn't consider it wrong if she did. She's very self-righteous, and hypocritical.

** She did apologize for the Dictionary incident. But that was a good one, damn it!

This is my last day of being twenty-four. Twenty-four was one hell of a year.

The short version:

1. Some parts of it were awesome, mostly things involving boys.

2. I learned a fair bit, I think, and am on my way to being a slightly more responsible person.

3. IT'S OVER. THANK FUCK.

Mostly to explain why I've fallen off the face of the internets: not just recovery from move and kink_bingo writer-exhaustion, but sick. Stiff, sore, bloated, nauseous, headachy, constantly exhausted, brain-shutdown sick. My accomplishments of the day were calling in sick, cleaning the air filter on my air conditioner (made it easier to breathe, at least), watching Labyrinth, and finally getting around to posting some of my kink_bingo stuff to relevant comms.

And you know it's a bad day when watching Labyrinth is an accomplishment.

And sleeping. Slept a hell of a lot. I count that as an accomplishment too.

Tomorrow must do my best to haul my carcass to work. And I have more posting to do. And more writing. And if I don't manage to get the last few bits of furniture moved out of my storage cubby on Saturday, I'll owe them another month's rent.

I want a massage.

Today:
- got a fair amount of books onto shelves (though no ordered, just stacked by section)
- bought and assembled and loaded a nightstand/toychest (because it's about time I had one)
- did some laundry (only some though)
- cleared up and organized some of my room (sooo many boxes)
- had an abrupt and inexplicable dizzy/nauseous/overheated/pale/sweating attack, after which I passed out for a couple of hours
- didn't think much

Mostly relaxing, all things considered. Unbelievably tired and a bit out of focus. My feet hurt.

Tomorrow I go back to work. Aiii. I want another day of recovering and unpacking, but.

My brain, it is tired. Sleep time nao.

Where a) IT is the move, which was, IMHO, a grand success, and resulted in everything except the big furniture being moved, most up three flights of stairs, in under four hours. THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH.

Where b) IT is the kink_bingo entry, being five fics of highly varying quality, in three fandoms, two femmeslash, two het, one slash, totalling about 15 k, mostly written this past week. Also a WEBSITE UPDATE, which includes those five plus the two Steve/Tony fics I finished for the Fourth.

Cross-posting the kink_bingo post below, with notes:

Card (unmarked, as I lack a graphics editor at the moment) viewable here.

Author: Letterblade (wired_lizard)
Fandoms: Marvel Comics (3), Revolutionary Girl Utena (1), Fullmetal Alchemist (1)
Kinks: Mirrors, Bondage (held down), Silence, Rough Sex, Bukkake

Cat's Eye
Mirrors, with extra dubcon, pseudo-knifeplay, and general fuckiness.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Sloth/Lust. (F/F)
Sloth reaches round, slides two damp fingers along her collarbone, slick over her skin, to circle the ouroborus high on her chest, red stamp on white skin.
Note: IMHO, this sucks.

Submission Hold
Bondage (held down), no particular extras.
Marvel Comics: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark. (M/M)
But then Steve pounces and brings him down to grappling, and it's all muscle and grip, and Tony doesn't stand a damn chance.
Note: Really not sure about this one.

Telepaths Don't Need...
Silence, with extra caning, breathplay, forced masturbation, and general heavy kink.
Marvel Comics: Emma Frost/Tony Stark. (F/M)
You don't go calling out a Queen of the Hellfire Club unless you know exactly, exactly what you're asking for.
Note: dafnap and quigonejinn would like to warn you that this might melt people's faces from how psychotically hot it is.

Antique and Breakable
Rough sex, no particular extras.
Marvel Comics: Steve Rogers/Sharon Carter. (M/F)
There's a war on, and she has the link to give away his location to his enemies in her boot, and she's pressed to his chest like he's the only thing in the world, kissing him hard with his hands in her hair, hard and hungry. Last meal.
Note: Meh.

Black and Blue
Bukkake, with extra strap-on and a dash of spanking.
Revolutionary Girl Utena: Kaoru Kozue/Takatsuki Shiori. (F/F) (Shut up, girls ejaculate too!)
All of which goes to say, I met somebody just now who has exactly this same problem. Not the brother. The memory. The elevator. Pink-haired creep, butterflies, revolution, the lot. And here I thought I was eight years out of this shit.
Note: I DONE GIRLPORN. This and the Emma/Tony are the ones I'm really proud of out of this bunch.

Fic: Three done. (Messed FMA homunculus femslash on draft filter.) Last two are each more than half written. I maintain optimism, damn it.

Move: Expecting a magnificent turnout for the moving party, and should be able to get all my crap down from Salem in one trip, which will make tomorrow easier. (Ahhh, moving out! I'll miss this place. But at least this time I've got a real place to move IN to. I haven't really moved IN anywhere in, um, more than two years? And I've moved OUT too many times recently.)

Car: He passed inspection! So I can ignore my rear view mirror for another year. Or until it falls off. Or until I get annoyed about taping it on and replace it. (Parenthetical remark!)

Edit: Note to self: nomming a few dozen cloves of roasted garlic may be yumtastic, but your gut will regret it later.

*curls up groaning* More writing tomorrow. Tomorrow, not tonight. Ow.

One of my longtime mottos has been sadly disproved: there is, in fact, such a thing as too much garlic.

On the car front: on advice of People Who Know Things, will get him inspected, worry about mirror later if he doesn't pass.

On the moving front: yay for moving party people!

On the porn front: two down, three to go, finally wrestled one that I'd been arguing with for two days into completion.

(Read my friendslist, including the kink_bingo comm, AND I WILL NOT BE THE ONLY PERSON POSTING EMMA FROST CANING THE CRAP OUT OF SOMEBODY AGAINST A WALL. WHUT. MY PORN IS NOT A BEAUTIFUL AND UNIQUE SNOWFLAKE WOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEEE.)

(I still think Tony is more likely to want the crap caned out of him than Scott.)

(Crap metaphorical here. Not my kink.)

No internet access since Friday morning, hence the not existing.

Accomplishments and squees of the weekend:

- absinthe and takarazuka

- did laundry

- wrote several hundred lines of PHP code and managed to get the basic structure of a database-driven version of the site down in ONE DAY

- housing craziness is solved, unless something untoward happens

Now I must go to bed so as to get up butt-early so as to drive to work so as to go to family-obligation gathering.

Two capslocks:

1. SO MUCH TO WRIIIIIIIIIIIITE.

2. PHP >>> VBA.