There's a picture on a bookshelf in this house that shows my mom and dad in April 1976 ("Easter at Cami's", says the note on the back, Cami being my father's older brother's wife). That makes my dad a few months from 36 and my mother a few months past 32. It's been there for-ev-ahhh and is one of the major images of my parents I have in my head, besides the "live updated" ones.

I passed by this tonight on the way back from the kitchen and went whoa. That's right: I'm older now than she is in that pic.

enotsola says I look younger now than she did then, which may be true; I wondered aloud if it helped that I would never wear a hideous pink pantsuit like she's wearing in that pic, and he said yes. Still, though. It's... very weird.

I used to feel proud to be a paying user of LJ.

Now I feel embarrassed at least, and sometimes guilty.

That ain't right, yo. I don't like that I feel the need to feel that way.

( navel-gazing about features )

esmestrella says:
next gen really ended when i was in high school?
did i really watch "all good things..." like, "live", first broadcast?
I AM OLD?


(no offence to the various friends I have who are older than I am. this is just one of those "wait... WHAT? when did that happen?" moments.)

I have not been anything even approaching a (Catholic) Christian since I was 11 years old (when I did my own Masses in the back yard -- no, rly), but I still love Advent calendars. Pictures only, no chocolate, even. I've even troubled to make my own on a couple of occasions, I love them that much. My mother, who has similarly not been anything approaching Christian for years, appears to have finally cottoned on to the idea of buying secular ones, rather than ones which have Bible verses and reveal a baby Jesus on Christmas. (Yes, I know how ironic it is to say "secular Advent calendar" and complain about Jesus appearing in something so intimately connected to Christmas.)

Really, I should make a "Solstice Advent" kind of thingy. I mean, it's hard to argue with greenery and presents and warm cookies and candles and fires and eggnog and plum pudding and shiny ornaments and all. Who cares why? Not to belittle anything -- though I've done Solstice vigil on more than one occasion, the idea of Midnight Mass is still very attractive to me. It's that Pagan lust for fancy robes, pompous speechin' and candles, I tellya (not that I would dream of trying to take Communion; that's someone else's sacred mystery, not mine).

'Course, on that logic, there should be eggnog year-round.

...Who's with me?! ;)

It is okay that I find logic sexy even if I don't really understand a word of it Y/N?

In other news, I keep mixing up Marcel Marceau with Marcel Duchamp. These are not the same thing. That's on par with the way my brain constantly swaps around Bob Denver, John Denver, And Bob Dylan.

someone said:

To be able to hear the speech of the trees is a gift I've always treasured.

I said:

You mean the Murmur, the Leafwhisper, the Song of Amber Blood, the Grumbling Grandfather Bark, the way the wind is a free and gleeful messenger?

I realize, saying this, that I can sketch my neighbourhood in trees. ( Read more... )

I'm not sure how many you're supposed to come up with -- I've seen both five and seven. I'm getting stumped, so have five.


1. I frequently reach out and touch whatever inanimate objects I happen to be passing as I walk by them. Walls, lamp-posts, trees, windows, benches, fences, whatever. I just stick my arms out and run my fingers over them, sometimes tapping or flicking them to see what sounds they make as well.

2. I only like mushrooms cooked, but I only like salmon raw. I acquired my taste for mushrooms rather unexpectedly, when one time I ate them and they had randomly transformed from "icky fungus, but I'll eat them in a mixture" to "hey, these are good" (Sam I Am, and I would eat them ... uh.. with your sister?). I acquired my taste for sashimi on purpose, trying to see what all the fuss was about, but it took my stomach a few tries to get over the "OMG I AM EATING RAW FLESH" idea.

3. I don't react well to unsolicited compliments (especially on my physical appearance) or praise for doing something well. If I post something where people will see it and they say "hey, I like this", that's okay, because I started it, but if you just walk up to me and say something like "I like your haircut", I will sputter and try to deflect it. Comments like that read to me as "unexpected attempt to engage with me; this person is now expecting me to do something", which I find threatening.

4. I occasionally chew on scraps of paper, although I rarely swallow anymore. In third grade I had quite a habit of actually eating it (come on, I was seven, what do you want? it beats eating dirt), and in eleventh grade I was still doing it often enough that on one occasion with a certain green-tinged notepad, my friend Bob remarked on it wryly, "Lisa eats green paper. This is proof that you don't need brains to get an A in Spanish class." (Which I did eight times in a row, and high-mark As at that. :P )

5. I am obsessive about crossing off the days on my desk calendar with parallel diagonal strokes, and get a little annoyed if people cross off days on the other calendars in the room before I get to them, as though they are invading my turf.

elseNet I said:

Kindred spirit indeed. Even one is usually enough for me to feel "ok, if I am crazy, at least I'm not alone in it." I know, in some sense, this is silly, and there are people out there who would laugh. But dammit, I feel it. And I don't want to be ashamed of feeling compassion, love, sorrow, grief, even if they are about a fictional character. They are not destructive emotions, dammit. They are ones that contribute to the human experience.

Why am I defending myself to an apparent compatriot? Probably because I am defending myself to myself.

DAMMIT SELF STOP FEELING BAD FOR THIS. It might be foolish. Emotions are foolish. It is certainly irrational. Emotions are irrational by definition. People who are in a more intelletcual space may make fun of you. They aren't in the right space to judge.

I(N/S)TJ shut up shut up shut up!!

(if you're not in the HP filter you didn't see the fanfic where I just mentioned "House at Pooh Corner", though I was referring to the book, not this song. not required reading, though --)


Christopher Robin and I walked along
Under branches lit up by the moon
Posing our questions to Owl and Eeyore
As the days passed away all too soon

But I've wandered much farther today than I should
And I can't seem to find my way back to the wood

So help me if you can; I've got to get
Back to the House at Pooh Corner by one
There is so much that is still to be done
Counting the bees in the hive
Chasing the clouds from sky
Back to the days of Christopher Robin and Pooh

Winnie the Pooh doesn't know what to do
He's got a honey jar stuck on his nose
He came to me asking help and advice
And from there no one knows where he goes

So I sent him to ask of the Owl if he's here
How to loosen a jar from the nose of a bear

So help me if you can; I've got to get
Back to the House at Pooh Corner by one
There is so much that is still to be done
Counting the bees in the hive
Chasing the clouds from sky
Back to the days of Christopher Robin and Pooh

...

There's apparently another verse after that, given a Google, but I didn't learn that at summer camp. I'm starting to get a little annoyed at how many of my "camp songs" were actually just somewhat aged ("aged" vs. late 80s to early 90s, when I was there) pop songs. This particular one was enhanced by the fact that of the various summer camps around the lake, one had a sort of glen that was actually referred to as "Pooh Corner".

Apropos of nothing, I also remember falling in love with Genesis while on a lakeshore sleepout -- someone had a battery-powered boom box, and this is the song that has stuck in my head among the cattails and the boathouse ever since:

Tonight I need your sweet caress
Hold me in the darkness
Tonight you calm my restlessness
You relieve my sadness

I asked myself why I almost always try to make anything I write distill down into a drabble and got a surprising answer.

Partly it is just a thought exercise, and sometimes you hit on a better edit for something that you can keep. That is not the surprising part.

The surprising part part of the answer, and the bulk of it in fact, was "guilt/shame".

Ashamed at needing more words? Ashamed at wanting to? "You spend too much time thinking about this"? ("If only such people would apply their minds to, say, the depths of magical theory, he thought with chagrin.") Fear of reprisal for taking up too much of people's time? Fear of ridicule? (a lot of things in my life come down to that one.)

This reaction does not seem appropriate to the situation...