Not Sweetness and Light

Ever since the summer of 1996, the year I was 16, I've had problems with my ears.

Not bad ones, not really. Not constant, at least, and not really life-threatening. Back in the summer of 1996 (those on my friends list will recall a post about it) I was under a lot of stress, and developed a horrible earache in both ears. The outer part, the part you put the Q tip in. It got so bad that I couldn't even close my mouth to chew.

The doctor told me it was Swimmer's Ear, generally caused when there's water left in the ear and it irritates it and inflames it.

For me, it happens every so often, whenever I'm under a lot of stress and my immune system is fucked to hell. Every time, either I have meds left from the last time I had this, or I have to go to the doctor and get more the instant I realize what this is happening to me... or I have a really horrible time of it. It doesn't get better on its own, not with me.

At least I know what it is, and what causes it. Normally my ears take a lot of bashing around. But it's not from water in the ears -- I go swimming all the time and I have no problem... I haven't been swimming or had water in the ears from showering in weeks and I got this... it's the stress. Any time I get stressed out badly, it shows up in this form, and it hurts like hell.

Dream:

a trip to Europe, planning therefore: me and Sis and Darkside, but not Nephew or Dude, and the resulting misunderstanding about how many tickets to buy

a boat yard with runaway boats in a flood

Darkside as an insomniac

Well, looks like I've been hit.

So I commented in a friend's journal that the vast majority of livejournal users weren't complete creeps; that the person who'd added her as a friend and then made mean comments in her journal just sounded like a complete jerk.

So of course the jerk started pestering me too. "Get over yourself bitch. how old are you anyway, 16?" ... "we seriously don't care about your ear"

His user name is georgenyc1. I assume it's a he. I'm somewhat irritated, and in the deep dark depths of my soul (wrong technical term, but that's not the issue at the moment) I just want to reach out and smack him not for making snide comments in my journal, but for just not getting what Livejournal is really for.

So he doesn't give a fuck about my ear. That doesn't bother me. It's not his ear; he's not supposed to care.

Livejournal, in my eyes, is not just an online journal for you to put your own personal thoughts into, but a place where people who are actually your friends can read the journal and keep up on what's going on in your life. If you don't give a fuck, don't read my damn journal. If you don't think I have anything interesting to say, if you think I'm a sixteen year old with no life and delusions of princesshood, then pay attention to your own goddamn life and leave my lack of a life alone!

He can keep posting snide comments in my journal, for all of me. I don't even think I'm going to delete them. I noticed that already one of my actual friends has taken offense to one of this interesting person's comments. They can wage out their flame war, if they want to.

Interesting how I want to forget the Rede in times of stress and just reach out and smack someone. Poor girl. She doesn't deserve this crap. I don't mind this guy, but she obviously does. What a luser.

Goth Night for the Whole Family

Sis and Uncle Alan and I all went out to see Final Fantasy on Saturday night. Sis and I decided to dress up as goths, since we both usually wear mostly black anyway -- not out of any real special reason, just that it's easy to keep sorted in the wash, and we like wearing the color, and it looks good on us. I mean, she's got her whole hippy wardrobe, and she mixes that in generally, and I have a lot of science fiction and cartoon shirts, plus those random white shirts with logos from events and affiliations past, but tonight we went for the all-black look.

Next was the makeup. We both went complete whiteface. Sis did her own; Alan did mine. The paint was Halloween paint left over from a year ago. Black lipstick; black eyeliner. She looked awesome. So did I.

That was just your basic goth thing. Next we decided to personalize the look. She wanted to add a tear of blood coming out from one eye, very goth indeed, and some interesting-looking symbols below the other one. No one had fake blood. "Fake blood is for posers," Sis said. "Anybody got a lighter?" She scorched a sewing needle and soon had a real tear of blood dripping down her white makeup.

"Neat," I said, but got my own needle -- after all, weren't we taught in fourth grade health class that you can get AIDS from sharing needles? which was why I hated the idea of taking Home Ec so much -- scorched it, and pricked my own finger. It hurt at first, but it was the little kind of pain that you can ignore. I got a nice big drop of blood and let it run down from the corner of my mouth.

I painted my own symbol on my forehead with eyeliner. I won't attempt to describe it completely here; it's nice and geometric and looks like a diamond with some lines inside, and it stands for the elements of earth and air, earth below, air above, and me somewhere in between the two, interacting with both. Sis saw that, and painted a personal symbol on her own forehead.

We were good to go. The movie was great. People got out of our way: I held myself the way I hold myself when I'm holding a blade (maybe not quite as tall, but the same idea) and they sort of avoided me.

We went to Denny's for coffee after the movie. The other goths were in the smoking section. Denny's is used to people who look like us. There were some small children there, though, and while I'm generally liked by kids, Sis scares them even without goth makeup. With ... well, she hopes she didn't cause any nightmares.

(Interestingly, Nephew thinks it's supercool when Mommy wears makeup. "It's Halloween!" he was shouting in delight, before Uncle Dude put him to bed.)

After that, we went for a cruise down Mill Avenue. This is the place where Alan and Sis hung out back in the Day, and they were reminiscing about all the places, and oh, that's where such and such happened, and do you remember the shooting there? oh yeah man, I saw it, there was this one guy, and boy was he pissed, oh wow, I'd only heard about it...

We found a drum circle there, and stood there for a time, soaking up the sound of the drums. I'd been pissy just a few minutes before, since I had to go to work at eight that morning, and it was now past three, but this ...

"We're coming back some other night when you don't have work in the morning, and we're bringing drums, and we're Circling," Sis promised.

It was a good night. I started trancing out on the way home, and pulled up some old memories, of Darkside and me driving home from the ren fair and not knowing the way home, and debating violently about the correct road to take... it was good. It was a good night.

Cat vs. Door

So it's lunchtime, and since Dude is eating his lunch at the computer on the floor in the computer room, and Nephew is bothered when the cat bothers him when he's eating, the cat got locked in my bathroom.

Now this was all well and good, and the cat is willing to share the bathroom -- well, he sort of cries and paws at the bathroom door whether you're in there or not -- and I was sitting in there saying "I understand you perfectly; you're in here because Dude's eating lunch out there, and so's Nephew," and then the cat tries to fit his head underneath the door!

I'm just sitting there watching in amazement as the cat tries his head in a variety of positions, and finally finds one that slides his head all the way under the door! Our bathroom door is maybe an inch and a half, two inches tops, off the floor. As I watch, he gets his shoulders out.

"Dude! Check this out!" I call.

Dude watches from the other side of the door "Oh my God!" as Shammash slowly squiggles his way out.

We've got a towel under the door now, and he still seems to be contained. Good. It's nice to be able to keep your cats contained. He'll be let out after Nephew is done with lunch.

Wow.

All that cat, under that door! Wow.

Darkside's Haircut

Well, damn.

I was just getting used to Darkside's hair in its new morph, kinda short, but enough to be a little wavy, enough at the back to curl up a little (Darkside has the loveliest hair and should be encouraged to grow it whenever possible, which I do, and which he prefers) -- it wasn't the best, but it still looked like him . . . and I show up at school this morning to find him shorn.

Surely your school had one of these boys:
He was skinny and the height of a slightly tall girl, which meant he was short for a boy, and he was in the school's math club. He had no social skills. He walked slightly stooped over, and wore a pocket protector with far too many pens in it. He carried a great huge calculator with him wherever he went, and a pad of graph paper, and a slide rule just 'cause. Thick glasses, huge on his scrawny little face. He always looked clean-shaven, until you realized that he would have no facial hair until he was thirty, if not after that. He shaved anyway. His light brown or dark blond hair was in a conservative cut very close to his head, trimmed every two weeks and held in place with insane amounts of hair styling product, even though he didn't need it. He most likely had braces and spoke with a lisp.

Darkside has this haircut. Darkside now looks exactly like this guy. His only saving grace will be if he grows a mustache (but not a beard). I told him exactly what I thought of it, leaving out no portion of the unflattering picture of the stereotypical nerd he now looked exactly like. At each word he cringed more, obviously thinking the same.

"It'll grow..." I said encouragingly (or at least I hope I did).

Darkside's dad decided, with a whim of steel, that if Darkside was going to be doing job interviews for a new job to go with the move, then Darkside should cut his hair for the job interviews, and ordered that Darkside go out and get his hair cut.

"I wish I'd gone in there and told them to take off a millimeter," Darkside mourned over his Mountain Dew and doughnuts. "Then I could have gone back to my dad and told him, 'See? I got my hair cut!' . . . Dammit. I should have thought of that."

I wish I could have told him it looked okay...

Darkside's got social skills, though, and he hates math, and he's a martial artist, and he could kick the butt of any football player fool enough to mess with him... or any nerd, for that matter. Geeks, nerds, and weirdos are my kind of people... it's just sad to see someone who's finally started to look like himself shoved back into the mold.

FUCK YOU, MISTER EX-CAPTAIN GUY!! WHAT KIND OF ASSHOLE ARE YOU?

Scary thing is, Darkside's dad isn't even abusive... he's just a callous religiously intolerant brat and doesn't want his little boy to ever grow up.