My rainy day craft box

We were supposed to know whether or not our contract would be renewed by the end of April... and we don't. Our district manager is acting like he could care less about the whole thing and is ignoring our account manager's questions. They are said to want a guard in the new building by May 1 and we have been given no other information about it.

These are bad signs.

We are apparently supposed to have until the end of June before our actual contract would end, so I don't have to find a new job tomorrow, but I'd damn well love to find one.

Anyway, that's enough of that.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

"Maybe we're not as brainy-smart as Lord Byron and Mary Shelley, but we can tolerate some shit to make our story work."

You are black metal. You're ultimate Saturday night
is spent wordshipping Satan. You turn every
cross you see upside down, you prowl around the
woods pretending to be a troll and you never
smile. Your either a paganist or a Satanist.
Act as if these 2 religions have something to
do with each other.


What sub-genre of metal (music) are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

*snerk* Yeah. That's me alright. A "paganist" who "word ships" Satan. Yeah. I'll get right on that.

Getting three hours of sleep then getting up to go take Mel's car for an oil change (she was at work, so couldn't go herself,) really did a number on me. I slept until 10:30 last night. Result is I'm feeling pretty wide awake now, for which I am greateful. After I get home I need to call the office and see about coming in to add some exemptions to my W-4. Saying so here is more a reminder for myself for after I get home.

I'm really proud of my use of my reading muscles lately. I finished Stephen Dobyns's The Church of Dead Girls in less than a week and I think it's one of the most amazing books I've ever read. Then I re-read Stephen King's The Gunslinger in one night. I have never finished an entire book in six hours before but it probably helped that this was a re-read. I figured I needed a refresher course on events in that novel since apparently some heavy revisions were added between my first read 14 years ago and now. Trouble is, I couldn't tell what was revision and what was my imagination remembering something from my first read differently. But it does seem a lot more consistant with the later narrative now just the same.

On a note unrelated to anything else in this post, I would like to offer a free piece of advice to writers of erotica: if you have not heard an anatomical reference since the 4th grade playground and hearing it now still makes you want to giggle like a 4th grader, then the word has no place in erotic fictions. Two of the most consistently used offenders in this regard are "willie" and "buttcrack." "Willie and Buttcrack" would be a fine name for a pair of shock radio DJ's, but I don't want them showing up in my lurid reading material.

Another piece of advice: British authors should carefully avoid using British colloquialisms in their erotic fiction. If you're reading a piece of erotica and you see the phrase "me mates and I..." Please, for your own safety, put it back on the shelf. Unless, of course, you found A Clockwork Orange to be adequate stroke fodder.

I might do laundry tonight. I just can't tell.

Just finished reading Stephen King's Wizard and Glass and boy, what a ride. It took me long enough, too. It was by far the slowest of the Dark Tower novels, but not for the reasons its detractors told me it would be. I was mostly putting off the ugliness I knew awaited, not so much lagging behind due to boredom. Now I need to find a copy of Wolves of the Calla. Although first I plan to read The Church of Dead Girls lent to me by cherith.

Coincidentally, at this same time I have discovered the album Touched By The Crimson King by the band Demons & Wizards. I bought the album because it's a side project involving the lead singer from Blind Guardian, but was then pleasantly surprised to discover it to be a heavily Dark Tower-themed album. Guess the title should have given it away, huh? Hey ksracxe, guess what? Blaine even gets a musical tribute in the form of the song "Terror Train" and if you slip off the cardboard cover you can find him immortalized on the back of the jewel case in all his pink glory...

I've got a big post in me wanting to get out about writing. Namely what I am writing, why I am writing it, what it means to me, and what's made it the way is. Partly, the words ellude me when I actually sit down to try and type it. Partly I can't decide if it's more appropriate for here or for my other journal, the one that actually contains my fiction. (Which, for those keeping track, will be updated again soon.) Maybe I'll write said post maybe I won't. Ka*. Like the wind.

*If you are rabidly against the idea of predestination or unchangeable fate as I am, you will find King's incessant blabbering about ka supremely annoying. Even if I didn't, I'd like him to stop mentioning it five times on every page. I'm starting to feel the same way about it as I did about Marion Zimmer-Bradley and her neverending "what of the old stag when the young stag is grown?" bullshit. Stagshit. Whatever.

Well, while megiloth and thanis_bloodsto are enjoying tasty eats at yaqui's house, I am stuck here at work. Perhaps this can be to advantage, for maybe this time they will have manged to learn the rules to Lord of the Rings Risk and can thus teach me.

Schedules have worked out the past two days that Mel-chan and I have been able to enjoy much quality cuddle time and we have needed it. It also looks like we'll have the pleasant treat of being on the same schedule together for the next few days as some last-minute shuffling at her work means she'll be working nights. Although it complicates our weekend plans a little bit, it is still a pleasant change from our usual routine of one of us getting home from work as the other is getting ready to leave.

I wish L5R Lotus Edition would hurry up and come out already. The previews of the new cards have me writhing in anticipation. I could mock up proxy cards and use them until Lotus is actually available, but I'm too lazy. Just release the darn set already and give me toys to play with!

*ahem*

( Some thoughts on books I'm currently reading, in case anyone cares. )

So that's what I've currently got my nose burried in when it's not burried in the Whedonverse. I've got to say, whoever thought of that Firefly quote meme needs to be kissed and pleasured. Scrolling down my friends list today and seeing it glowing with Firefly quotes like, well, like so many fireflies just made my day. Friday cannot come fast enough. I'm pretty much just killing time until the Serenity premier. I can't recall the last time I was this excited about a movie premiere. I think The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was probably the last time I was this into the whole experience. That experience was marred by personal unhappiness. I'm looking to Serenity to make up for it. And make up for it, it shall. After all, they can't take the sky from me :)

I don't often talk about books that I read here because no one here has read them and no one cares. But every now and then a book affects me enough to make it worth it. I just finished reading Them by Joyce Carol Oates. I make a point to read a "literary" novel every once and a while to keep my horizons broadened and I read a few pages of this one over at A&A's one day and wanted to know more.

All I can say is I cannot remember the last time a novel plunged me into a mood this black. If you want to read a book where, for 478 pages not one person has anything good ever happen to them or ever does anything nice for another person, then this is it. By that I don't mean to say it's a bad book. If it were a bad book I could dismiss it. But it's not. It's an amazing piece of literature and it's a book that makes you face everything about mankind that you'd rather not think about. I just barely keep those thoughts at bay much of the time as it is, so this novel's really done a number on me.

Right, so yeah. Enough of that. The play nearly met with disaster last night when our Lysander was in a car accident. I guess he has diabetes and passed out behind the wheel. He was unhurt and made it to rehearsal for the final act. Glad it wasn't worse.

I think another thing that's got me down is that LJ as a whole seems to be in one of its periodic upswings where everyone is venting their spleens of how Christians are the Bad Guys, or more often and even worse, the Stupid Guys. I don't know about you, but I would much rather be the Bad Guy then the Stupid Guy. And it's troubling because when you're raised a Christian, you get taught all your life that you're one of the Good Guys. Then you get out to find that no one sees you as the Good Guys; that you're viewed with suspicion at best, or at your best moments, as well-intentioned but clumsy children who don't know their own strength and "don't know any better." And it's not like we shouldn't see it coming. Christ said no servant is greater than his master, that the world will hate you because it first hated Him. But no one ever really prepares you for how to deal with that, day after day, year after year, for the rest of your life. Because that is what it means to follow Him.

Follow Him... yes, that is what I do. Haven't followed the other Christians for about ten years now and still fiercely hesitant to do so. Yet I still feel this overwhelming need to protect them, to speak up for them when no one else will. Because that's what Good Guys do for people, even Bad Guys and, as much as it may pain us, Stupid Guys.

Maybe I need to just not care as much.

Last night Mel and I talked about how people tend to focus on the negative in their journals and that's not what I want to do, so I'll conclude by focusing on the positives. I have love, I have friends old and new, I have roleplaying games, I have acting, I have writing, and a woman who makes wonderful tacos. Her tacos are fucking metal \m/ \m/ Put in that perspective, all the bleak prose and the snarky hatred of the computer world don't really amount to jack squat. And our Shakespearean comedy did not become a tragedy in the very real sense when it very easily could have.

For a fun time, try walking around a grocery store at night still wearing your costume from Shakespeare while the piped-in muzak is Avril Lavigne sneering about how "she don't wanna read Billy Shakespeare." I think it was Avril anyway. Sounded like her voice and the lyrics bore the sparking resonnance typically seen when her two brain-atoms collide inside the vacuum of her skull.