Aspirant in Artemisia

I'm alive.

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:26:48 GMT

Sort of.

Things are very rough IRL right now in a number of ways. I don't really want to go into specific detail right now. I'm sorry for being away. I hope things will settle soon, but I won't count on that right now.

I apologize.

SCORE SCORE SCORE.

Fri, 30 May 2008 22:35:53 GMT

Ahem.

My mother has offered to spring for half the exam prep with Gleim.

And I think my boss is going to cover the other half. Or at least part of it, which will cut my out-of-pocket cost down to something I can actually afford.

Awesomeness.

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 03:40:13 GMT

Well, sort of. The down side was that, of course, I had to work today. I am starting to hate Saturdays, and that's not very natural.

The up side was that somebody pointed me to a free three-book trial of Audible. I have no intention of continuing it, but I've also been pointed to something that will convert Audible to MP3, which will allow me to split the files, so I am going to be downloading The Listener's Bible (NIV) along with two other things. Not sure what yet. I do wish these places would figure out that gigantic files are not always convenient, though. The whole Bible in only ten files? Each file 8+ hours long? I mean, it'd be nice if my player handled audiobooks better, but it doesn't. I guess this is at least not too hard a fix, although I hate having so much extra crap installed on my machine.

I am amazed by how big the kitten is getting, although her growth seems to be slowing now. I suspect she'll always be the smaller one; her mother was tiny. Which is good, we were kind of afraid that she might grow into her tail someday, and she would have been giant if that happened! I love my aunt's cat Jackson, but he had a tail like that and ended up *enormous*.

I am ridiculously tired for 8:30 on a Saturday night. I like that we're making enough money to live on now, I can't complain about that, but it feels like even when I'm well, my life is totally absorbed by this, there's no time for anything else. And that's just... sad.

Now, as long as we don't have an emergency....

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:10:36 GMT

The emergency fund is funded. I just put in the other $500 transfer this morning, so as soon as that goes through our ING account will have a balance of $1065.96.

I slept for more than ten hours last night. Went to bed at 9pm. And yet this morning I'm still feeling really... groggy. I don't know why. Probably due to lack of sleep on every other night this week, yet. And I keep waking up coughing, still, even though I'm usually fine for most of the day.

Yay for income taxes!

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 05:22:56 GMT

Bet you won't hear that one very much. Well, just filed, and thanks to my job troubles of earlier in the year, I got one more year of EIC out of our beloved government. So, while I made a grand total of ~$5000 last year, I'm getting $700-some back from them, and I paid less than $300 in.

The down side, of course, is that my "rebate" will be the smaller variety even though I expect to actually be paying income taxes next year, but I can live with that. I'm hoping that Carl may also qualify for EIC, but I'm not sure he will. I'm very pleased with the fact that both states had freely available online filing... I'm not sure why the federal government can't do that.

So, about $850 right now, with another $300 coming hopefully by summer. Can't complain about that, it will go a long way towards our debt and leave a little bit to cover some nice Valentine's Day and anniversary celebrations. :)

Reflections on today's reading.

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:56:58 GMT

I'm a little behind, but I expect to be caught up by tonight on my OT reading.

One of the things that strikes me as I go through this is stuff I didn't really remember from going over it before. All the slavery and the fact that this is considered perfectly okay. I came across that the other day, too, when after hearing about this "Titus 2" business I went and just sat down and read Titus. (It's short, after all.) And Titus 2, true to form, does tell women to submit to their husbands... and oh, by the way, slaves should also submit to their masters without complaint.

Which made me wonder. Why do we, as Christians, so often just *ignore* sections of the Bible? I don't mean studying things and concluding that they no longer apply to us for some theological reason... I mean just ignoring. In some quick Googling, I came across many, many websites which used Titus 2 as the model for what a good Christian woman should be... but from the descriptions in those places, you'd think the chapter says nothing except to women. I often hear Leviticus quoted on homosexuality, but never on shellfish except by the people trying to point out how ridiculous it is to quote Leviticus on homosexuality.

In Sunday school, they tell you the story of Abraham and Sarah. You *may* get to hear the part where Abraham lies on several occasions and says that Sarah is his sister because he believes that saying she's his wife could be dangerous. I remember that part of the story getting mentioned once. The one time I remember hearing this story, the part where it turns out he wasn't actually lying was most certainly not included.

Not everything in the Bible is pretty. And I'm not saying that we're supposed to keep slaves and marry our half-siblings now just because it happened in the Bible, because of course I'm not a literalist that way. But if you're going to use the Bible as a reason to insist that people ought to behave a particular way (rather than just behaving that way yourself), then it's probably a bad idea to pick and choose what you pay attention to. Let he or she who does not wear cotton/polyester blends cast the first stone, or something.

Yay, snot.

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:24:33 GMT

So, I have a cold, thus necessitating a day off work (so as not to scare the clients into thinking I'm going to give them pneumonic plague) and postponing my ortho appointment.

But I'm having a decent day regardless. Finally set up a sort of reading plan for the Old Testament, so we'll see how that goes. I've been looking forever for a decent reading plan online, but the primary problem with that is that I don't *want* to take a year to read the Bible. I certainly want to do an in-depth study later which will probably take that long or longer, but right now I just want to go over everything. So, I'm going to try to plug through the Old Testament in a month or so. This shouldn't be too hard, since I've found a way to read the NRSV online, so I can do part of it in the morning, part at lunch, and part in the evening before bed.

In related news: Evidently I am now a Muslim, to go from the number of times I've heard mentioned recently that Barack Obama must be. I don't know how I missed before that he's a UCC member. Makes me dreadfully miss my old church, now. There's no UCC in this area, so I'm going to a Church of Christ right now, largely due to proximity. I like the a capella singing, and it's interesting to be exposed to a different tradition. It helped that the pastor here was definitely an academic sort, but unfortunately he's since moved on. The guy filling in seems to be similar, at least, so the sermons are in-depth studies of things, not so much spewing hellfire about pop culture. (I don't care how satisfying a Ten-Minute Hate might be, I'm not going to participate in it.)

But I miss my old church. I'm starting to really hope that we do move back to Ohio, so I can go back again. I'm *pretty* sure that they haven't become Muslims in my absence.

More mundane updates.

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:50:54 GMT

Orthodontist appointment made for the 29th. I don't think they're going to rebracket at that appointment, so there will likely be another shortly thereafter. They've got my models now so they can see where I'm coming from... now I get to really find out if my old orthodontist screwed me up, or if it just looks that way because I'm in the middle of things. Hopefully now it'll be about two years before I'm done. For those keeping score at home, that will be about five years after I started.

I can't say I'm happy to be continuing with it this long, but I'll be happy when it's done. And in the meantime, come Tuesday I'll get to check something else off my 101 list!

A world gone mad.

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:05:43 GMT

Okay, let's start with this: It's not that I don't like Heath Ledger.

But, let's be serious here for a moment. Celebrities, like all human beings, are not immortal. They die. Sometimes from natural causes and sometimes not. Sometimes young and sometimes old. But the one universal thing is that it's going to happen to all of us.

This is not, I repeat *not*, a good enough reason to force all other news coverage to the back burner just to tell us about how much people loved the guy, or how much his autopsy *didn't* reveal. We're sitting on the verge of a recession, we're in the middle of an interminable "war", we have a presidential primary campaign going on. All of these things affect your life and my life and the lives of everybody we know far more than Heath Ledger.

The fact that people are interested in this is beside the point, honestly. A news organization has the responsibility to report what people *need* to hear most, not what they *want* to hear most. I'm sorry for the loss of his family and friends, but there's the key... the number of people in, say, CNN's audience who are in either of those categories is infinitesimal. The rest of us really need to move on.

Not my day... so why do I feel so content?

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:05:12 GMT

Oh, that would probably be the booze.

Lest anybody get worried, I've had about *half* of a Mike's Hard Berry, so I think it's less the alcohol than "mmm, Mike's Hard Berry." I love these things.

So what happened today? I woke up this morning and promptly spilled juice on the carpet. Red juice. The kind that stains. I have successfully used laundry detergent before to clean carpet, so I got that out and set to work, and then remember that we've started buying ultra-ultra concentrated laundry detergent lately, and I haven't taken that into account in how much I'm using. So I spend the next half hour trying to squeegee out the detergent from the carpet. It was, at least, the Tide Free no-perfumes no-dyes kind, so all we've got now is the potential for future bubbles. I am now late and must wake up Carl to drive me in, which I hate doing, because he looks so cute when he's asleep.

Then, off to work, to spend almost nine hours solid just doing glorified data entry. The up side is that I get paid a very decent hourly wage for this. The down side is that no amount of money can keep you from wanting to bash your head into the wall at hour 7 when you discover that this company has stopped even making the pretense at recording the withholding for all these paychecks, and you basically have to make educated guesses about how much the federal withholding was, especially as it seems to bear no resemblance to what federal withholding should have been. I just about cried when it was all over. I wonder how people can manage to do this sort of work their whole lives.

I walked home and talked to my mom most of the way, since it's been awhile since I called her. She never says a whole lot when I call, but whatever. I try to fill her in on everything that's going on in my life, she makes me feel guilty for moving and asks for the umpteenth time if we have a wedding date yet... the usual. (Her: "Nobody knows what's going on!" Me: "Well, neither do we, so they're in good company!") So now I feel justified in taking this time to relax and recharge. I finished the first half of Writing Alone and with Others, so now I'm starting the "with Others" part, which I hope will be of some use with the Cruces folks.

More checked off!

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 04:29:43 GMT

I have a new bike, hurrah. Took a ride on it today, and... well, it kicked my ass. Which is funny, because I can do fairly well on my stationary bike, but I got out into the somewhat-chilly very-dry Las Cruces air this afternoon and very shortly in (like maybe ten minutes) I was wheezing so hard I had to stop and head, much more slowly, back home.

So now I have to figure out the time and money to go to the doctor. I've had breathing problems before--for yonks, I don't remember a time when colds didn't knock me down--but never "Oh my, I'm going to pass out," kind of moments, especially not while doing something that wasn't particularly strenuous. I wasn't *tired* at all, just so out of breath that I was literally wheezing.

It'll be awhile before I can bike to work, but at least this is progress.

Continuing the story of our intrepid heroine...

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 05:34:02 GMT

I don't even know what intrepid means, honestly. I'm sure I did, once. I think I've lost some brain cells along the way, which is a difficult feeling to say the least.

But, anyway, here's the problem: Perfect is obviously impossible, and yet it always seemed like everybody thought I *could* be perfect if I wanted to. When perfection eluded me, I settled for laziness.

Laziness turns out to work surprisingly well if you're a smart cookie, in most respects. I passed classes in high school that I slept through. I played video games through classes in college. It was awesome.

Laziness only works, however, with things you can pick up like breathing. I could spew all manner of bullshit about management theory and financial statements on command, but writing isn't just a series of facts to memorize... it's a craft, a process to be honed over time. And let's be really honest here, I haven't done a lot of honing, for someone who claims she wants to have a novel published someday.

But it always comes back to perfection. Things that I write are, by nature, imperfect. And when I write, I hear those voices again, feel the disappointed looks. My inner editor works overtime, triple time, works 72-hour shifts like an ER resident on crystal meth. This sentence would sound better another way. Is this word spelled right? It looks wrong. Look it up. Both valid spellings, so which one is *better*? Who would ever want to read this? You're so boring.

And then it collapses in some kind of grand mal seizure and my writing self is forced to stop writing to tend to it, usually with vast quantities of sugar.

And speaking of which... yeah, more later.

Do you think I am asking too much?

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:03:03 GMT

I still chide myself for missing it, because that's how my childhood was. We weren't poor, no. Those children on the television with the ribs showing and the great big eyes, they were poor. Never mind the reduced lunch, never mind the home-made clothes and the hand-me-downs, we weren't poor. And in the same way, I was not allowed to miss praise. Some children were horribly abused, how dare I feel unsatisfied for the lack of a "good job"? Such a small thing. Such a very small thing. I could live without.

I can't even imagine how I did, for so many years. I have talked to my early teachers more recently and they have mentioned how smart I was, how high their expectations were, how they thought I would do great things. At the time, however, I knew only this: Perfection was required of me. My mother complained to my teacher when I was in first grade because I was given a B on something... I don't even know what, now. The grade was changed--it was wrong, it had to be wrong, because Susan didn't get B's, not even in first grade. I felt horribly inadequate on a daily basis, only because I wasn't the smartest person in the class. I couldn't be the smartest, because Bertram Yu had been skipped forward after kindergarden, and I hadn't. Six years old and I already felt like I wasn't good enough.

All of elementary was like that. I had to have the highest score on the spelling quiz or else something was wrong with me. I would get scolded for anything that wasn't an A, but there was nowhere I could go from where I was that would elicit praise. Perfection was simply required. As one could not get better than perfect, one could not exceed their expectations.

What I loved, even then, was writing. I wanted to be a writer from the time I was little. Second grade, maybe third. I read everything. I wanted to create, to produce something that other people would read. But when I wrote for class, there was simply nothing there. As long as all the words were spelled right and the cursive letters perfectly formed, it was an A, no matter what I had written. I got no feedback past that point. There was no reward, no encouragement. The only feedback that I would ever get would be on my mistakes.

So I stopped. Just stopped. My grades slipped in middle school, by senior year of high school I was barely passing. So, people were disappointed with me. I had always presumed that they'd been disappointed with me when they didn't say anything, anyway. A 98% might as well have been failure, so why try for that 98%? Why make the effort to write something if nobody seemed to take any pleasure in reading it? Everything less than perfection was failure, and perfection was impossible, so...

Well, more on that later.

Well, we now know one thing.

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 04:02:02 GMT

Or, well, I know one thing.

Or, well, I know a lot of stuff, if you want to get technical, because one doesn't tend to receive a Master's degree without proving that one knows at *least* three or four completely distinct things, but I now know one thing that I hadn't really been sure of before.

This job track is really, really, really not for me.

Which isn't to say that I'm not surviving, it's more a question of where I go from here, now. And whether I have to revamp my 101 list at that point to remove a couple of the very career-track-specific items and replace them with new things. Hmm.

The Marriage Dilemma

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 03:15:21 GMT

We've been talking lately about the possibility of going back to Ohio, which raises more questions about getting married. I'd rather do it sooner than later. Well, I would have done it the week after we met, but that's beside the point. ;) But there is something inherently ludicrous about living with this guy who you adore, who you are going to marry and have known that for ages, and who you could not possibly be more committed to, and still be calling him your "fiance" two years into the relationship.

Also, the engagement ring is driving me crazy. I'm ditching it when we get married--it gets caught on everything. I want a plain gold band, something that I'm not going to have to worry about taking off before I do dishes (lest it puncture the cheapo rubber gloves).

But I also don't want to have my one-and-only Wedding (caps required!) with none of my family here, and my family members have been... questionable on the subject of coming out here for our wedding. Airfare is expensive, I realize that. So are weddings. So, if we're moving back to Ohio, we could do it then, and all would be much better. I could get married in the church I grew up in. That would be a dream come true on all counts. The only fundamental problem with this is that it's two and a half years from now, at the earliest. That would also be about the same point where we could afford to do one here (or elsewhere) if it came down to it, though.

Ideally, of course, I wouldn't be *cough* dollars in debt and could afford to have a nice wedding with no parental help, and just tell everybody that their presence is their gift and help those who can't afford it. But I can't do that. And I can't bring myself to go further into debt to fund this. Nor can I bring myself to just take off work and run to the courthouse some afternoon... I'd never forgive myself, and I don't think my grandparents would ever forgive me, either. Which leaves waiting. But I try to remind myself that this will definitely be something worth waiting for.

When did bike riding get so expensive?

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 18:19:20 GMT

And complicated. This is why people drive to work, honestly.

You don't just need a bike, anymore. Although obviously you do need a bike. And a helmet. And a lock. And, if you intend to commute and your office is not inclined to let you out at 4:30pm in the winter, lights. And, if I want to be carrying my purse and my lunch and such back and forth, something in the way of a rack to secure things to.

Not to mention that I haven't been on a bike since middle school and was most certainly never allowed to ride in the street at that point, so this will be a brand new adventure.

But, hopefully soon. If not this next paycheck then maybe just the bike and helmet then and everything else after that, have a couple weekends to just do some leisure riding to get used to it again.

In other news: Woke up this morning to see both cats cuddled up at the foot of the bed. Neither chewing on my feet. Yay! And the dream journal has finally yielded something which might make an interesting short story.

Have I complained enough about my sleep habits yet?

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 03:58:01 GMT

Probably. Suffice it to say that it isn't getting better, which makes me tetchy.

I am doing amazingly good at keeping stuff out of my pockets. I'm not counting it as a fail if it's just one thing for a short period, obviously, because that's what pockets are for--quarters when I'm running out to the laundry room, my MP3 player while I'm listening to it, etc. But they are no longer serving as long-term storage. My purse is now even more of a mess than before, but that will be step 2 of that project.

It probably doesn't help that when I try to sleep in on weekends, the kitten wakes me up by trying to devour my feet. I get the impression that she thinks breakfast ought to come a little earlier than 9am. We can't leave food out for her because our once-bone-thin adult cat will eat them, and she doesn't need any more kitten crunchies than she's already sneaking. She's getting pretty hefty, but they're getting along beautifully now.

I have laundry in drawers now. The cat isn't terribly pleased with this... she preferred it in baskets. There's definitely a lot left that needs doing at any given time (especially given that the dryers in the laundry room gave out the other day, I hope they're fixed now since I'm going to work on it tomorrow) but I think this is good progress. The apartment in general is already a lot tidier than it was at the end of December, so I'm very proud. Carl's been helping a lot, hopefully he'll be able to keep that up, since his classes start again Wednesday. Hopefully, the second semester of teaching will go better than the first for him.

Work for me is still, well, work. This may be my last full weekend off for awhile, but I'm looking forward to the extra hours. I want to get a bike with this next paycheck.

Routines.

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 04:07:40 GMT

I'm working on trying to establish routines for myself. This has been really difficult for me. I spent five years in college. I was, as recently as August, a graduate student. I never knew what time I'd go to bed at night or when I'd get up in the morning, and it didn't matter. But now it matters, obviously, and I spend far too much time having to think about things. Do I need to wash my hair today? Do I have clean clothes? I don't have a set schedule for when these things happen because I always just did them "as necessary," but now I don't have the time for that.

With a routine, there's no thinking, you just do it. I think it'll be wonderful once I reach that point, but in the meantime, trying to figure out just what needs to be done when after so many years of being a free spirit is more complicated than I thought it would be.

These dreams...

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 03:45:08 GMT

I'm going to try to find a notebook to keep beside my bed tonight. The dreams are getting... trippy. I wish I could lucid dream, really, because at least then I could enjoy it instead of being totally confused when I wake up. They're very long, elaborate, storylines that make total sense when I'm asleep, and when I wake briefly but go back to sleep they start right back up again. This has to be hormonal or something. But I can never seem to retain anything about them when I wake up, and as a writer this disappoints me because I'm sure they'd be a gold mine.

The cat and the kitten are getting along really well now, and I'm so pleased. They're playing now on a regular basis. The cat still doesn't really want to cuddle if the kitten is around, but this might have something to do with the fact that the kitten thinks that the cat's tail is the best toy ever.

I'm working on goal #73 tonight. I think I've got a real crack at it. Carl's off with friends and I'm listening to audiobooks while I work on it. I'm on load #3 right now. The dishwasher is still on hold, and dishes are just a nightmare in this apartment. No garbage disposal. The sink is on the far left side of the counter, so there's no space to stack things on that side. Our counter space in general is almost nonexistent, basically with only enough space for a rather small dish drainer. And since it's so miserable trying to navigate where to put everything, we put it off. We have no kitchen table, but today I'm using a card table, which is helping. (Usually the card table in question is Carl's desk. Versatile piece of furniture, that.)

Improvements all around.

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:53:56 GMT

The car is now running great. Just the battery, no other problems, and it turned out to not even cost that much to fix.

I'm making good goal progress so far, better than I thought. The online tracking program helps a lot. I've managed to get everything out of my pants pockets already for the past two days, although I've still had things in my coat. One step at a time, I figure.

Slept better last night than usual, though still not great. I'm having a lot of very vivid dreams--some of them nightmares, but not always--and I wake up in the morning feeling somehow less rested for it. Hopefully this will pass soon, because I'm starting to spend my days in a sort of giddy exhaustion that doesn't lead to my doing very good work, and I'm increasingly forgetful.

Tonight's the night the world begins again.

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 05:20:45 GMT

I've started a 101 in 1001 list, which has been posted to mission101 and jan1_2008. And I'm doing goal tracking through Joe's Goals which looks to be a really good tool for all the "do x for 30 days" bits of it.

Life is really good. Okay, it could be better--our car battery died today--but overall, I'm happy. The kitten and the cat are finally starting to really snuggle up and play together, work is going okay and the money situation is going much better than it was for a long time... great stuff. Now, as long as it's just the battery on the car, we'll be able to swing a dishwasher soon and everything, and then life will be amazing. (Though I guess it's a little sad that something like a dishwasher could make me so happy.)

And this is journal entry #1 of 365. Onward!

zzz

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 23:26:36 GMT

I've been sleeping exceptionally poorly of late. I don't know why. I have awful dreams and wake up feeling like I was run over by a semi in my sleep. This has, needless to say, made writing considerably more difficult. And everything else, honestly. C is being a dear and generally keeping caught up on dishes... he even did my laundry for me the other day. I swore I'd feel better after the two days off for Christmas, but here it is and no improvement.

The up side is that I have an income now, as long as it took to get it. I keep telling myself that work is just a matter of collecting information for my book. Really.

Unprepared.

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 19:18:18 GMT

I get really angry sometimes at the world. Well, not really angry, I'm not a very angry person by nature, but definitely heavily peevish.

I'm all for women's lib and whatnot. I like having career options. Those things are good.

But why, why, why is it that with the advent of women working outside the home, rather than teaching homemaking to *both* sons and daughters, parents seemed to stop teaching it to them entirely?

I just ruined two perfectly good potatoes because nobody ever told me they needed to be kept in a dark cabinet. How was I supposed to know that? Once they turned green I looked it up online and found it out, but why is it that I have to look on the *computer* to find out something so basic? This isn't esoteric information, like how to bake bread when most of the American populace just buys it at the grocery store, this is the completely and totally bog-standard baked potato.

And as I said, this is no longer a women's issue. Carl doesn't know how to sew a button back on and couldn't until recently make grilled cheese. Grilled cheese! I hear stories of little girls in times past making breakfast for their families (real breakfast, not dry cereal and milk) at the age of seven or eight, and I wasn't even allowed to touch the stove at that age. It seems like the better part of my generation has been raised to believe that the only way to obtain a meal any more complicated than spaghetti is to go to a restaurant.

There's something not right about that. It's no wonder we're all in debt up to our ears and unable to take care of ourselves. The only solution I hear to things is to pay somebody else to do them. People who can barely pay their own bills take their shirts out to be laundered because they don't know how to iron, or just sacrifice their whole security deposits rather than make any attempt to clean an apartment before they leave.

What is wrong with the world? How much progress have we actually made to reach this point?

The best thing about being jobless.

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 20:42:42 GMT

Okay, so I'm having to force optimism here, as we are almost out of money and I'm not sure what we're going to do when my bank account hits rock bottom. But, in the meantime, I pulled almost 3000 words yesterday and have done more than 2000 today, so I have crossed the 10% mark and it's only day 2.

The story is coming along surprisingly well. The only problem, I think, is that I don't know if I can really write for my target age group. But, not a big deal. Either I'll settle more into it as I go and fix it in editing later, or next time I'll go back to grown-up books. ;)

64 hours and counting.

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:07:19 GMT

We didn't get a lot of folks yesterday but it was nice anyhow.

Still too much planning to do. I'm feeling a little out of control, still not knowing where I really want this thing to end up and knowing that this was my problem last time. Getting word count won't be an issue, but I"m trying to work on producing readable fiction besides. I know, I know, that's not *really* the point of Nano, but.

Much more work ahead, and my sleep schedule is now royally mucked up. I woke up at 3:30 this morning. There's something unhealthy about that.