Today's cat picture: my cat reads Tomato Nation. (63k)

Heading on for 4am. I'm taking the drastic approach to reorienting my sleep patterns. From Monday I have to get up at 6:30, and I haven't been up before eleven in weeks - so I'm staying up all night tonight, and will reorient by getting to bed early Sunday night.

Harsh, brutal, yet short-term and effective. I doubt I'll be able to do this quite so comfortably ten years from now, but what the hell - in the mean time I can laugh in the face of sanity and abuse my body cruelly.

Speaking of my body and age, however - while I was brushing my hair a few minutes ago, I found another grey hair.

Grey hairs have been found amongst my rich brown curls before, but still scantily. I wish my hair would make up its mind. If I go grey in my twenties - hey, I can live with it, although I might dye intermittently if I start missing being a solid brunette. And if I don't - well, it's terribly cliched, of course, since most girls my age aren't going grey, but I could live with that too.

But I want decisiveness!

Warning: This post is gross.

What does it say about me (and my exposure to certain people) that I can have a conversation which involves the sentence: "Not bat CUM, bat NADS." - and not even worry about my sanity?

Phrases which still make me giggle:

Russian fruit bat nads (actually, just 'bat nads' will do it)

Roasted Albanian simian eyeballs

Moravian goat entrails

TOFU FLUFFPIE!

See link for the beginning of it, but there was oh so much more.

*laughing at the memories* Sheri, Kate, Bubbie, Zoinky, TR, and everyone else who was involved in all that - I love you all, because you rock.

Back from Oliver's birthday party. A question Davyd asked me - about whether the leavening of my depression had to do with having friends and such around me - made me realise that quite possibly a big part of it was how isolated I've been lately. All this staying-at-home stuff isn't good for me.

I had a good time tonight, and only had scant and short periods in which I was faking that. Of course, when I'm feeling low, I have a tendency to isolate myself even in crowds, but I managed to avoid that more or less tonight, and came away from the party feeling pretty good about myself and the world. I also realised tonight I'm over the crush I had on a friend of mine; it was never a serious crush, of course, just a "darn, that person is cool" sort of sentiment that I get quite often about a succession of people.

Oliver is the UberCool today because it was his party, and because it was good, and because he is a wonderful person whom I love, even if I tend not to tell him so. And even if he drew a smiley face on my forehead.

Other people are also cool, of course, but I shan't list them; you can guess who you are.

It occurred to me earlier that a certain interpretation of something is dodgy.

Conversation:

"This goes no further than this room."

Option a: Tell no-one the contents of the conversation. (This is the one I actually take.)

Option b: If choosing to spill the beans, do it only in that room. (This is the one it would be fun to take, but which would spoil all the joy I get out of being considered trustworthy enough to hear secrets. Those of us who are incurably nosy must make a point of being trustworthy, so as to get all the gossip.)

At present Tabitha and I have developed a game she appears to be starting to find bothersomely amusing. It goes like this.

Tabitha jumps up on my desk, and interferes with my working at it.

I lift Tabitha off my desk, and put her on my bed.

Repeat.

Argh.

Curiously, after getting most of a good night's sleep for the first time in several weeks last night, I'm feeling a lot better today. I'm choosing to think this is the end of a bobble in my general mood levels.

I've been laughing my fool head off today at this story on Tomato Nation. Also, continuing to read College Roomies From Hell.

Tonight I'm going to Oliver's birthday party, where condition of entry is bringing a stuffed toy. Should be fun.

I'm seriously considering going back on anti-depressants. I've been off them for well over a year, which I was very happy about, but since I'm getting into a really sucky depression mode, and don't actually want to repeat the complete mental breakdown I had two years ago, it might be for the best.

Oh, goody, the depression may be a recurring thing. I do feel slightly better about it if I think it as mental illness - sort of a neural flu - rather than gee, Rae, aren't you fucked in the head? Yes, yes you are...

Of course, it's a symptom of my own personal insanity that one of the things I get depressed about is the factors of my own neuroses. It makes it nicely self-referential.

I'm over my fit of David Eddings reading again. I've taken up reading history books again, because semester starts again next week, and you can never be too proficient at your units.

But the David Eddings stuff has reminded me of some things that irritate me, because, hey, there's a lot to be irritated by in David Eddings books. (I'll get to my attraction to sincerely crap fiction shortly.)

One thing is ignorance strutting itself as superiority. An example of the ignorance: in Eddings books, you have certain peoples, such as the Mimbrate and Wacite Arends, who are, supposedly, "formal" in their speech patterns, and who speak in terms of "thee" and "thou" and "thy".

Of course, to those with any kind of education in archaic forms of English, this is either irksomely or laughably incorrect (depending on how tolerant an individual you are). "Thou" is actually the informal way of addressing someone. "You" is formal. It's just that in English, informal pronouns have fallen into disuse. In German, "you" is Sie and "thou" is du; in French we have vous and tu.

Accordingly, in a culture in which these forms are still in use, a man would only use "thou" when addressing a) someone to whom he was close, or b) someone he wished to insult. (Think about it - in modern English, the best approximation I can think of to using the informal pronoun set to insult someone is addressing them as "little bitch". But doesn't "thou loathesome cur" have a better ring to it?)

The other thing that's irritating about Eddings' usage of the informal pronouns is that he can't conjugate verbs with them properly. Honestly, if you want to use words like "thou", you have to know how to conjugate, or you just look silly.

The other annoying thing that struck me today was a passage in Polgara the Sorceress, where the Eddingses go so far as to have Polgara make issue of the fact that the local peasants pronounce the 'h' in herbs.

Since pronouncing the 'h' in herbs is correct in a strong majority of English dialects - and almost all the rest are American - it comes across as ridiculous, and actually breaks the characterisation of Polgara.

About that attraction to crap fiction I mentioned.

I've come to the horrified realisation that, in essence, I'm the kind of person who'll read romance novels with shameful abandon. It doesn't really show, as a rule, for the following reasons:

- Proclivity.

Now, if I'm going to get absorbed in the silliness of a romance novel, I'm going to want to have some measure of identification with the characters. And since I'm a woman whose romantic tastes run to women, I like the protagonists to be, surprise surprise, women. Which lets out most romance novels as it is.

- Aesthetic standards.

Since a lot of lesbian fiction is crude or stereotyped or generally not to my tastes, I'm wary of reading it. Instead, I run to fan ficiton - but a lot of that is just appallingly badly written, or ungrammatical, or the story is okay but the characterisation is bad, so I don't read that either.

And what's left tends to be the stuff that's just good fiction which happens to include a subplot in which two women fall in love. Really, you have no idea of the range of now-published ubers by Melissa Good and others I'd buy if I only had money.

So I do have this fondness for crap fiction, I just don't read it that often. It does allow me to do things like read David Eddings books and enjoy them - it's just the critical sense my education has given me now comes into play far more than it did in the carefree days of childhood, so not only am I reading the book, I'm critiquing it in my head as it goes - which is fun, actually, so the very suckiness of Eddings fiction increases my enjoyment of it.

I'm a sick puppy indeed.

Somewhat later

I had a terrible argument with my parents tonight. It started from something fairly minor - Dad's spurious accusation that Tabitha feels trapped inside my room, because it's a mess. (Which, by the way, I'm cleaning up tonight, for fuck's sake.) Tabitha feels safe in my room, not trapped.

Anyway. It got worse from there. A major sticking point is that my parents don't even begin to understand why I'm angry that Dad came into my room while I was away, and went through all my stuff.

He threatened me tonight - with violence, I mean. This is something of a first, and I was half-tempted to goad him into going through with it. I stopped because I'm not that nasty a person - quite. Dad would torture himself with it if he actually belted me across the face as he suggested he might. A little more provocation and I might do that to him, though. A punch in the face doesn't really register on the scale of injuries I've had and never even mentioned to my parents. It really would hurt him more than it would hurt me.

God, but I'm tempted.

Which isn't exactly an appealing sentiment in a young lady of refined sensibilities. Check it out, now my naked loathing for my own darker side can come out to play. Hide the knives, folks, I'm a danger to myself and others.

And earlier today, the world seemed so much better. Semester starts next week, and I always find the beginning of semester quite thrilling.

I hate living here. I need to get the hell out of this house, and soon.

I am reminded of a site I read a couple of years ago then forgot: Lileks. There's some fun things there. Go, view, find something you like.