Hmm. As addendum to the previous post, I should point out that Maelkann can not, in fact, prove that I'm mortal, even once. At this point it's just an untested hypothesis. And sure, he can test the hypothesis and probably eventually get a success, but before then he might well have it fail, and there's no way he'll be able to reproduce his results. How is that proof?

So I say to you, Maelkann: Nyer, nyer.

I have a vague headache. Last night I had very vivid, very odd dreams, which revolved around science experiments and little yellow balls that blocked up my drain and this alien system built into a courtyard at the university that, when the riddle was solved, opened up access to this chrome steel citadel underground, from whence emerged a guy called the Harper who was evil, but hardly anybody realised it.

One of those dreams that you don't really remember, but keep getting flashes of the next day. They suck all restfulness from a night's sleep, too.

These holidays I'm doing advance study for next semester, and reading some improving books. I recommend it, you get to feel all virtuous and clever. Also, uni semesters are far less stressful when you spread the work out further.

A quote, a quote...

<Maelkann> Rae: I hate to admit it, but you are mortal. And I can prove it, though only once.

It appealed to me.

I really need to come up with some kind of delineation system between blog/livejournal/weblog. LiveJournal is Fangirly is cool but low-traffic, yet kind of odd since LiveJournal has a lot to do with my uni friends, so why don't I do it as the uni friends bit... Whatever. Today, weblog post, because I found something that's just cool.

The Conceptual Metaphor Home Page, which is making me wish I'd stuck with my long-ago intention to study Cognitive Science. Didn't. Oh well. Can still read cool stuff about it.

The idea at hand is how conceptual metaphors affect the ways in which people reason about them. And, for example, if two people have different conceptual metaphors about love, can they ever understand one another or what motivates them in a relationship?

Think about it enough, and one can actually start making intriguing connections to one's own behaviour and so on. This appeals to me. Especially once I apply it to myself, since I have just realised that I don't presently have a conceptual metaphor for love. I used to. Right now I don't, but I don't think it means I don't love, I think it means that I'm just constructing love very simply these days. Love is love, and I'm no longer trying to define it or conceptualise it. It works for me, and works well, because part of what tends to be wrong with my emotional structure is that I overintellectualise like you would not believe (unless you have at some point been involved with me, and have seen my cerebral nature in action). I can be more honest in my feelings about people when I don't try to conceptualise it so much.

I will leave you with this final thought:

Did anyone ever say "Turn my crank, baby." in a sexual situation and mean it? Ever?

Really Very Sleepy

The time: 5:25am.

What did I just do: Get home from the Come As Another UniSFAn party. Jen, whom I continue to believe is just the coollest, is leaving, well, today for Vienna, and so when we finally got to talk, we ended up talking for hours - we were the very last people awake and so on, I think.

We talked of many interesting things, not least of which the notion that there should be a traditional Fresher Rep Axe handed down from fresher to fresher, which would be simply brilliant, I feel.

The party was fun, for all that during most of it I was fighting the edges of a general feeling of depression and self-loathing and unhappiness, all of which for various reasons is presently banished.

*yawns*

We did have some interesting first-time appearances at the party, such as Maelkann, who came as Chas, and was very quiet, and Mat Cole, who wanted to ride home with me until he realised I wasn't planning to leave by, say, eleven.

Note: Five. Also, he would have been bored rigid the last few hours of it, particularly the two hours or so when Jen and I were having a conversation to which no-one else was invited, and pretty much everyone else was asleep.

Max gets my prize for the most subtle costume; Chas for the most surprising; gothChris for the most accurate portrayal, and Jen/Pam for the most vindictive

Link Changes

Julie: Delinked. Until she has her site back up.
Matthias: Linked.

Meanwhile, I'm making spaghetti.

The Come As Another UniSFAn party is on tonight. I'm looking forward to it. I love the "Be there, or be yourself" slogan; and everyone should read this post by Chris, because it's brilliant and funny.

Subject: On offer, pending interest...
From: Rae Gunter
To: UniSFA


For Terracon:

A dramatic reading, conducted by yours truly, of:

"Picard's Illumination", by Lorelei MacKenzie: The Worst Fiction Ever Written.

Marvel at the imagery!

"As he pulled opened the rusty wooden door, he was confronted with the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen; and he'd been a lot of places."

At the modesty!

Author's Summary: "A heartbreaking tale of love and sacrifice. Picard learns the true meaning of love, both with and without the doctor... and loss onboard the Enterprise."

The passion!

This woman, Lorelei Cordelia MacKenzie, was a Commander from Starbase 34 who had abandoned her post when she'd heard of Picard's accident. She gave up her command, and put her career at risk for a man she'd never met; but something within her screamed "Go after him! *FIND HIM*!"

The characterisation!

"Oh God!!!! Why??? Why Why Why???" Picard screamed in agony and fellbto his knees. "Why did she do it?" he was sobbing so hard that he began to hiccup. "I (hic) loved (hic) her!"

Indeed, who *can* resist? Who can resist the ammunition to claim that fan fiction is evil? The chance to see Rae at her most mocking and snide? The chance to mock pure dreck, and know true fictional suckiness?

Who?

WHO?!

Any takers?

Advanced Selfishness

I've always, in my way, been a very egalitarian person. Now, whether this means I find all persons equally interesting, equally tiresome or equally intimidating varies according to my mood and so on, but essentially I approach people as people. (Note: I'm an intense intellectual snob, but my prejudices are largely theoretical. I don't apply them to dealing with individuals, just to assessment of groups as a whole, and primarily I apply them to people's perceptions of me. It's complicated. I bring this up merely to make it clear I'm not setting myself as a great guru of left-wing ideals. I'm prejudiced as all hell, I'm just too well-mannered to show it unless the person's actively irritating them due to their own personal failings.)

This isn't a conscious thing. I was raised to have good manners, and part of the conception of my schema of manners is that you're only allowed to be rude to people if they've been rude first. It's unconscienable, for example, to be rude to a shop assistant who's been polite to you; nonetheless, I've seen people do this and tend to take an instant dislike to them.

So I do it because I feel really, really uncomfortable if I don't. Which is why I tend to say "thank you" politely to a bus driver as I'm getting off the bus - unless he's just given me a horrible ride, which happens occasionally, at which point my manners require only that I not hurl abuse at him for being such a godawfully bad driver.

(Note: This didn't apply the time I was in South Africa and had a very bad ride, because the driver's style had been modified by the fact that West Street was closed off due to a bomb threat. We thanked him anyway, because, well, he hadn't got us killed or anything...)

But the thing is, and this is what I want the world to understand in the hopes that everyone will take on good manners as a lifestyle, it gets you all sorts of benefits. For example, being polite to waiters gets you better service, and with a lot of waiters, a generally more enjoyable dining experience because waiters can be fun people to talk to. When I was involved with the Guild, a lot of Guild Councillors treated the Guild staff as, well, staff - as people who worked for us, and were therefore on a lower social tier. I treated the Guild staff as people, and got on very well with them, and had this fact be very useful on a couple of occasions.

Being friendly and polite to a bus driver once got me dropped off at Stirling Station when the bus went off service at Morley (after I'd been on when it was at Stirling anyway, but had been to absorbed in my book to notice). Had the bus driver not liked me enough to detour past the station on his way to the depot, I would have had to find my own way back via late-night public transport - not fun.

Being friendly to bus drivers also quite often gets you fascinating anecdotes, by the way.

It's very similar to etiquette. Some people get very tied up in false etiquette, believing that etiquette is all about knowing the proper form of address for the king's third cousin and which knife and fork to use - whereas the king's cousin, if he has a true understanding of etiquette, will not even blink at being addressed as "Er... you..." And if a guest makes an error in cutlery, a truly good host will smoothly copy the error without remark.

Because etiquette is basically formalised good manners, and good manners are about smoothing people's interactions so that we don't have to fight duels before the creme brulee, not about embarrassing people because they used the wrong fork.

Rant Ends.

I went to the optometrist today. I really like Ernie. He's been our optometrist for years - my whole family sees him, no pun intended - and not only is he very good, he's very cool. The first time we went he showed me amazing things about eyes; even had me looking into my sister's with his funky instruments, peering at her retinae and so on.

Today, he checked my prescription, just because we were cutting a new lens, and then cut the new lens for my glasses. You see, one of them disappeared on Tuesday. I have no idea where or when I lost it, but I lost it, and so had to replace the right lens.

He then took me to the little workroom and showed me the machine that cuts the lenses. It's a really cool robot, essentially; first it runs a little wheel around the inside of the frame, learning the shape, and then grinds this disk of optical plastic to the right shape. (Which Ernie had to resize slightly, finishing with doing it manually, but as he said, it's better to cut slightly too big and trim down than cut too small and have to start over.)

He even let me press the buttons to do it. It was fascinating watching it work, and meant that I had my fixed glasses there and then rather than having to wait. If I had a more complicated lens requirement, like bifocals or multifocals or other tricky things, apparently it would be a much more complicated process, which doesn't surprise me. But mine is a standard prescription, which means that the lenses are mass-produced and just need to be cut the size and shape of my frames.

Ernie really was unsure how the lens came out. Even examined the frames, and remarked that they are not an abused child; they're in good shape, and he should know, as he sees many frames that have been cruelly abused. Nonetheless, a lens was gone, and so today I acquired forty bucks' worth of new lens.

But at least getting to watch it be cut was really, truly cool.

Well I guess what you say is true
I could never be the right kind of girl for you
I could never be your woman.

This afternoon I turned on the radio largely on impulse, and was just in time to hear Your Woman, by White Town, a song I rather liked when it came out and hadn't heard in years. This I found a pleasant bit of serendipity in a day which otherwise lacked it.

A conversation on IRC:

<sonnlich> Maybe he should have been Librarian.
<Vegeta> He's not evil enough.
<sonnlich> Hey, we're not evil.
<sonnlich> Just, um...
<Vegeta> Good-impaired?

Heh.

(Idle note: Vegeta is no longer Sandwich Spread Man, because Tieryn found Vegeta Chicken Stock Cubes. So he's Chicken Stock Boy. But he's still the coollest boy in school.)

Meanwhile, that story I'm working on, I'm starting from scratch with. This is not surprising - I've been known to write half a dozen different versions of the beginning of a story, each time adjusting the characterisation, scenario etc until I'm satisfied with it. For example, I just changed Ash's career, lifestyle, home situation, background, appearance and sexuality completely. Fun.

Oh, and: No Swearing Week 2: The Return starts at midnight. Wish me luck.

I'm still pondering the story below somewhat; it's going to need some revision, and there's a lot more still to write, but I'm happy because it's working and I'm writing again, and suddenly I feel like a human being again. There's this weird, important part of me that's shut off and weird when I'm not able to write.

I was thinking about something last night.

For a long time, when I was younger, I visualised my psyche as a fractured crystal. Because I remember, dimly, what my mind felt like when I was a kid, when it really, truly worked. Before the head injury I had, the one that gave me a temper I'd never had before, and a permanent blurred feeling in my brain. After that I couldn't read as fast, or remember things as well. I lost the ability to do algebra - that took me years to get back. I went from being the kid who derived the existence of negative numbers from first principles when first learning to do single-digit sums to being... blurred. And later, fractured.

Now I haven't been fractured for a while, although I threaten it occasionally, and I've realised, of late, that I'm not blurred any more - at least, not the same ways, and I'm used to it now so I notice it less. I'm different. I used to be able to grasp maths and programming and science without even trying - I was writing and coding my own text-based adventure games when I was seven, but nowadays I have to work at it to code simple programs well. Well. When I last coded I did, since I haven't done so in a year and a half.

On the other hand, I rock out at History completely. Different view. I'm more humanities than sciences now. And yeah, I'm not as bright as I was before intracranial bleeding nearly killed me. I'm no longer the amazing child genius, I'm just someone who's fairly bright, you know. But I can adjust to that.

And I can write again. So I *am* a happy puppy indeed.

I have my soul back, apparently.

Entirely beta, and still untitled:

"Are you kidding?" Ash asked incredulously. "You want me to interview the most reclusive businesswoman in this city."

"It's topical," her editor answered reasonably. "CMC just swallowed Shirer Corporate. A month ago Shirer was untouchable. The most carnivorous corporate shark around is a cute blonde under thirty. Everyone wants her story."

"And no-one gets close to it. What do you expect me to do, stalk her?"

"If necessary." Roger handed her a manila folder and turned to leave. "That's what we have so far. Good luck, tiger."

"Rog..."

"I have every faith in you." He walked away rather quickly, leaving Ash to scowl in solitude.

--

Catherine pulled into her parking slot underneath her office building. Or one of her office buildings; she owned several more like it. Most of her money came from owning things. This, however, was the office building that actually contained her office. She didn't bother to lock the door of her imported Rolls-Royce. More than one job was at stake if it was touched - not least that of the security guards who monitored the surveillance cameras, one of which overlooked the boss's slot.

Though the elevator was crowded on the ground floor, there was a little gap of space around Catherine. Because everyone knew who she was, and who she was was the Boss. She almost wished they'd stop putting her picture in the company newsletter. Crowded elevators were about the only chance she had these days for actual human contact.

The wry smile at the thought became a reasonably warm one aimed at the people who were, by various degrees, her employees, though obviously uncomfortable in her presence. She had no idea where her reputation for iciness came from, but it stuck like hell.

Finally, one young man next to her cleared his throat. "Good morning, Ms. Christian." There was a chorus of the box's other occupants echoing the sentiment.

"Good morning," she replied, and silence returned. She noticed the visible relief on people's faces as, floor by floor, they escaped her presence. The young man who had briefly broken the silence was last to leave. He shot her a grin as the doors opened at his floor.

"You know, you're shorter than I thought you'd be," he told her amiably.

"I'm taller than I look," she answered drily, before the doors drew closed again, then shook her head as she progressed alone to the very top floor.

--

The first thing Ash found in the file about Catherine Christian was a four-year-old archived story from the Business section. Apparently there had been a furor when Jason Myers, who with Catherine's father Eric had founded the Christian-Myers Corporation, had died. It appeared that Eric Christian and Jason Myers had elected to ease their children into their inheritance, and willed a third of their holdings each to Myers' two sons, and Christian's daughter Catherine.

Eric Christian had died first. Tom and Eric Myers had unsuccessfully contested the will. Catherine Christian had never commented publically on the subject, then or later. On Jason Myers' death, four months later, it was revealed that the his sons' actions had offended him sufficiently that his holdings were willed entirely to Catherine, who was left with a controlling interest in CMC. About the young woman herself, the article recorded only that, at the age of 23, she had recently graduated with a degree in Commerce.

Ash leaned back, gazing at the grainy photo of her quarry. Christian looked tense, and not a little aggrieved - it had been taken as she made her way through a crowd of reporters, demanding statements in the wake of the court battle that had unsuccessfully contested Jason Myers' will. Since then, for all her reticence, Christian had run CMC with no uncertain brilliance.

Well. An interview would be no easy task - but Ash was confident she'd find a way, and it should at least be interesting - which would be a nice change.

--

Catherine Christian rubbed at the back of her neck irritably as Eric monologued interminably. The muscles along her spine always began to ache after a long day. As tiresome as he could be, however, Eric wasn't as bad as Tom, who thought he could increase his share in CMC through marriage.

Finally, Catherine's patience ran out. "Shut up," she said, in a tone devoid of inflection. Eric did. "You may not close down a four thousand employee subsidiary and contract the work to one of your own companies, Eric," she continued in the same flat tone, summarising the proposal in a way he probably wished she hadn't. "Even if their profits are down two percent, they're good enough. Now get the hell out of my office."

Scowling, Eric stalked out. Catherine could dimly remember playing with Eric and Tom when they were children.

She hadn't liked them then either.

--

Ash parked her motorbike near the entrance to the executive carpark at CMC's main building. Still sitting astride it as she removed her helmet, she idly calculated the odds that loitering here would be a successful technique for finding Catherine Christian, and decided they were pretty slim.

Still, she was here, and may as well take a look around.

She had to lean right back to see up to the top of the CMC Tower.

The last thing she was aware of before she heard the squealing tyres was the beautiful way the sunset glowed on the windows.

Comments?

Please?

Today I went to MLC, which is a Perth school (sorry, college) which wants to be an English boarding school. (It even has boarders.) Jen was performing with the Chorale - and also the Barbershop Septet - and proved herself to be a stunningly good singer, for which she was the UberCool despite the fact that their dance moves... needed practice.

Random quote. Pam: "Ix-nay on the esbian-lay."

Context is superfluous.