Had dreams not this just past night, but night before last...

...and it was the same universe from when it was the DeVry one, and it was merged with UAF and the trains. The college universe? Universityverse? Can't remember much now.

And last night, it was the crazy lady who was planning on making a musical assault with speakers and so forth. Nephew had a robot companion who had been the one who had initiated the calling him by a close variant of his name that ISN'T his name, and the robot also made household items disappear so as to make high-tech toy weaponry to sell.

There was a circus/renfair thing at Aunt Fran's house in the yard. We went over to the neighbors up the hill in the trailer, and they had bread and fruitcake and wanted us to adopt this bald-headed rooster who looked to have been the same breed of birdie as La Boca; I had been petting the bird, and he liked it, then he hopped out of my lap, stood tall (and looked like Xiao Ji as he did it) and bowed to me. He had some questions to ask me. The rooster thing was before the fair, and the fair was where the crazy lady was planning things.

There was something involving interstates and library security systems, I think.

The crazy lady -- or was it me? -- had been planning to kill her rival with the electricity from the cut and stripped four-strand wide white plastic cord thing, then kill herself. Instead, she opted for a duct tape belt to put the speakers on, and the cord to activate the CD player. Votania told me that the lady was going to be kicked out of the place by management, and I said I'd already taken care of that.

I was looking through my b: drive for posters to print out for Nephew when the alarm went off; I was going back to the nap and dream, figuring on another hit of the snooze to get me through it, when I heard Bad Noises, like a bowl falling to the floor, and it sounded like it was not in the kitchen. Grabbed nightgown, glasses, and Bonky Flashlight, opened door and turned on light --

-- spotlighting a very guilty-looking cat.

Flashed light around living room, saw no intruder, came back in here, said, "Fuckit", and got on computer.

Needing the clothing thing so I may tease the Darkside-thing.

I have two white bras of the same design.

Had, rather.

Now it's up to three.

I have no fucking idea how this happened.

One is in the laundry basket. I am wearing one. One is in the clean laundry pile on the floor.

...Right.

Morning.

Quiet breakfast with Darkside. He read; I tried to sleep. Ron thought it was wisest to leave us alone because we were tired.

Darkside's tired and less playful today; trying to play when he's not playful is a Bad Idea. I didn't stomp on borders this time; I nudged them, got a warning tone, and didn't step over.

Confusing, though, when he slips so easily between playful and not, and doesn't always respond well to my "not playful" signals. Not very fair, when he can make me playful, and I can't make him... He seems to see me as either me, or depressed. He's never really wrapped his mind around the concept of me serious, focused, unsmiling but all right.

Thing is, when he sees me serious, he digs. And sure enough, he finds things that I'm upset or unhappy over. But if he dug for those same things when he saw me happy, he'd get them then, too. He just doesn't see the need to, when I'm happy.

Speech class happened. I was the watchword. 'Unique' was the word of the day. Video camera and substitute teacher. Fun. Much less formal.

Test coming up in UML.

Have decided to take one or more unnecessary flights of stairs per day, to regain strength to the muscles that got killed by living on the first floor. Never knew what running up and down the stairs at home was doing...

Does anyone...

Have an official list of the books that the USA PATRIOT Act is looking out for when querying bookstores and libraries?

Failing that, does anyone have a good working list that ought to light some snoop heads on fire?

sos_usa proposed that people deliberately check out inflammatory books from their local libraries, to spam the report process, even if they're not interested in actually reading said book.

I want these posters.

http://homepage.mac.com/leperous/PhotoAlbum1.html

Bruno bookmark

http://www.brunostrip.com/20020311.html

It's a bizarre and totally cool comic about this chick named Bruno. She's got Issues. Lots of. It's cool. Dave introduced me to it.

Hee hee.

To two of you (you know who you are), I say: "Wooo! Woooo! Woooooooooooooooo!" and burst out into giggles, in the most irritating possible little-sisterly way.

If your response to this is "Huh?" even though I may be considered a little sister to you, then it would not be you.

Hee.

I continue to giggle like a maniac. Precognition is great, baby! Woo!

Library

Went to the DeVry library asking about books and law enforcement. The student library aides hadn't known that the USA Patriot Act could do that; the librarian wasn't very cool with it either; she looked to be generally spitting mad under the calmness. She didn't have a precise list of things that they might be looking for if looking, but suggested that material on making, say, suitcase nukes, bombs, and so forth. ("Chemistry, right down that aisle", the library aide said.) Not that this would be much of a problem at DeVry, as no one's tried to make one for a senion project yet.

I asked would any philosophical works be on the watch list. She said probably not; that would be more in the department of banned books, and gestured to the display tables featuring a very good selection of banned books. (I'd raided the library the day before for some Vonnegut; today I brought home Catch-22 to re-read.)

After much conversation with the student library aide who shares Darkside's first name, on the topic of where to find some Robert Anton Wilson books that Amazon.com wasn't carrying (I directed him to the New Falcon Publishing website), I went back downstairs.

Mmmm, books.

Mmmm, going to be at least checking out if not reading politically dangerous books.

I love my life.

Snickering like a sister, extensively

[Poll #60011]

Poll: Spam

[Poll #60022]

Writing: yaaaay!

Nephew is in the habit of repeating things. Since it's about that time, this time I decided to exploit that. He was saying, "I don't believe her" over and over again. Kids repeat things... *sigh* ... it drives me nuts, but I do my best. Gods know I must have yelled the same thing over and over and over and over when I was little...

So I found a writing tablet, wrote the phrase down, and had Nephew copy it before he watched Spiderman. It took about half an hour, but he finally finished it triumphantly, and I gave him a Spiderman sticker on it, and told him he could show it to his teacher.

I'm glad I have experience in tutoring kids.

Math: databases and empathy

Some things are mixed, when it comes down to labeling them 'blessing' or 'curse'.

Empathy's got to be one of those things.

Joy shared is joy doubled; pain shared is pain halved.

(In an amusing sidenote, I came up with a perfectly valid reason for having a unary relationship utilizing a weak entity, and was able to defend it to my database teacher: keeping track of my friends' relationships. "But you only use weak entities for many-to-many relationships," she argued. "Yeah," I said.)

That's usually only in minds that have learned what to do with pain, though. If you internalize the pain too much, and are unable to convince the mind that it's not your pain, that it's okay to not respond to it, to go to ease it but not make the physical responses yourself, it's going to probably be pain doubled.

People don't learn defenses against joy so well. Well, some of us do, and find ourselves unable to get happy over much of anything. But at some moments, extreme happiness can be as disruptive as extreme sadness.

I learned this early, actually, from a science fiction book. Marshak & Culbreath's ST:TOS fic Triangle, poly-friendly (as much as Trek ever can be, since the Fearless Leader can't keep a relationship past the end of the book), where the protagonists are attacking the compound of the unethical hive-minded creepazoids, and while the (telepathic!) unethical creepazoids can inflict pain directly to the pain centers of the brain, it is remotely possible for our heroes to struggle on against this -- but it becomes incredibly more difficult to continue when the creepazoids use pleasure as a weapon, flooding the brain with complete ecstacy, shutting down most rational thought.

Any emotion, sufficiently strong, may be used as a weapon.

They used to call this the Tragic Flaw: how something that could be a good thing, in moderation (in those cases, personality traits), was absolutely horrible when applied wrongly, and as that attribute was so integral to the character, there was no way to avoid the tragic downfall.