Useless?

Went to take out the trash from the little bin that's in my room by my computer, and was suddenly struck with a wave of feeling particularly useless.

I'm cleaning up a little, you see, and I'd put on the really pretty ring that I'd gotten at the Faire -- I really should take a picture of it and put it up on Petri -- and I was thinking about holding it in trust for Naomi --

-- and I got the most bizarre image of being, ultimately, obsolete.


I've been pondering, a lot, lately, the phenomenon of body-age and mental age. Kimmiebeth ponders gender; I ponder age. It's just something that's been sticking with me for a while; I suppose it's my thing to look into this time around. I think I've probably already studied gender, because it's one of my of-course things.

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And today I got this feeling that it's her ring, very much, and that I'm just keeping it in trust for her, as if I'm her mother or something, and that one day, when she grows up, I'll be obsolete. Like it's her body, like it's been hers all along, and I'm just the caretaker.

I got that feeling when I was thinking that perhaps I should separate out the jewelry, since this ring is hers, and I suddenly knew that the blue topaz and rose quartz and faux-silver necklace with the wedding bead will someday be hers, will be set aside for her until that day.

It made me sad, and happy, and all odd.

Logically, I know I'm not useless. I know that when Naomi grows up enough, she'll probably be able to merge smoothly, become a true part of the working collective, and may even come to manage the merge, may even be the primary personality. I feel as though primary personality is her birthright.

It just feels odd.

I know that the 'I' continuity will continue, even though it probably won't always be this immediate personality filtering it primarily. I see my whole collective self as braided, processes threaded and bundled together, wrapped around each other, each with their time in the foreground. At fragmentation times, different threads are bundled in different places. Sometimes threads end, sometimes new ones begin.

And someday, Naomi will manage it all, I think. Birthright. Destiny.

Game plan for Thanksgiving:

3:15: Put clothes in dryer.
3:20: Shower.
4:00: Bring clothes back to apartment.
4:10: Collapse.

9:00: Be wakened by (choose one)

• Cats


• Roommates


• Phone

sometime after awakening: Perform morning cleansing routines. Don clothes. Make with the makeup. Vacuum. Hopefully put away laundry. Tidy. Tidy hard. As if your life depended on it.
sometime before noon: Greet Dawn, and make merriment with her. Confirm that CD full of incriminating photos is readable by your machine. Possibly be faced with a chock-full-o'-holiday-cheer-edition Darkside.

12:00 noon: Commence with the typing. Possibly pause for meal. Suggestion: Jack-in-the-Crack.

sometime: Bid farewell to assorted roommates as they parade on their merry way, to work and to the big dinner.

sometime in the evening: Welcome home assorted roommates and possibly Little Fayoumis.

sometime in the evening: Crash. Hard.

Housecleaning

Darkside was dragooned into housecleaning, or rather, helping out his mother, today.

It's so very weird. I'm hearing it from him, as he sees it through his eyes, and I'm getting the sudden double vision of what his mom is thinking.

I haven't had anything this trippy since high school when I could see it all from the teachers' perspective when the other students were complaining to me. (Now, I have to sit very still and sit on myself to keep from trying to take over my teachers' classes, sometimes.)

Still close friends. Still great with each other. I've been spilling a lot more out to him, just because he's the ... well, right now, since I've gone into isolationist mode, he's the only one I've been really letting my hair down to much. Not that what I say to him is any much more that immediate, vital, and intimate than what I say here, because I know I say that and a lot more here. But what I say to him is stuff that I only really say in person, sometimes. It feels cheap to repeat it here in public.

... I'm glad he knows what I mean about Alaska, though.

...
Me: "Speaking of which, do you know--"
Him: "I already told you, I don't know yet!"
Me: "...Actually, what I was going to ask is, do you know what day of the week the seventeenth is?"
Him: "I don't know that. :-P"
(Incidentally, it's a Wednesday.)

Flaws in the Master Plan

Am not crashing right now. Am staying up until 2nd iteration of drying finishes. Put coins in and pushed button for wrong dryer first time. V. embarrassed.

Up, up, up and awake!

Dawn called at about 11:15. I popped out of bed and started cleaning. Now I'm surfing the 'interweb' a bit waiting. Maybe I'll go back to cleaning in a bit. But I found this chair out in the recycle zone... and it's one of those ones with the leg-structure shaped like a squared-off C, and it's a little tattered but not so much that it's unusable, and anyway, I have a nice soft afghan to drape over it...

But yeah. I cleaned the catbox in my bathroom, tidied up a little, put away some of the items into the Big Grown-Up Box, closed the cats out of the west bedroom (when they hide in there, they're unretrievable, and I want Dawn to meet eris_raven).

It's not Thanksgiving unless some little kid barfs, in some families. Heck, it's not a holiday unless some little kid barfs. shammash took that honor this year. Last year, he chose to do that on Halloween. Nice, tomcat. Very smooth.

Have discovered what the untraceable wind chime sounds are from. They're from -- gasp -- a wind chime! I never really was able to figure out which one, though, until early this morning with the laundry, when I saw that it was the wind chime with the failed burn as a dangly that was making all the noise. It was slightly alarming when I thought I was hallucinating it because I couldn't see the wind chime.

Everybody else has departed, so it's just the critters and me. Yay?

Things I am doing/not doing today:

Doing: spending quality time with my computer.
Not doing: spending any sort of time with the TV, unless I decide to break out that anime I treated myself to.
Doing: snuggling with cats.
Not doing: stressing out over cooking stuff.
Doing: eating something delicious.
Not doing: seeing people I hate.
Doing: seeing a friend I haven't seen in nearly a year.
Not doing: getting super-stressed about the state of the apartment.
Doing: writing.
Not doing: going out of my way to pound my head into things.

All in all, I think I'm getting a really good deal here.

The things we learn from spam.

I never want to see the names Jenna Jameson or Paris Hilton again. Why? Because they mean 'spam' for me. Same with J.Lo, help with my mortgage, help with my car payment, firing my boss, almost anything involving 'sperm'...

Novel note

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Happy day...

Woke up. Dawn & husband stopped by just before 1. She dropped off disk of photos. I tried to introduce eris_raven, but she was skittish and afraid that she was going to be eaten, and did not want to be introduced.

I wrote about 2,000 words, then got some lunch, or something like that. Mr. President was driving by with a friend and enthusiastically hailed me. Then I knocked off and read some more Memory.

I found a recycle chair, a nice one. I may have already mentioned this.

marxdarx got back home. He came bearing leftovers. Oooh.
Little Fayoumis came back home. He came with Grandma, who was bearing leftovers. Oooooh.

Mama called, to say that all was well, she was at Guide Dog Aunt's and they were headed off for Thanksgiving dinner, but the turkey wasn't done yet, so she was snagging time to call me. Of course, she picked the moment when Little Fayoumis started wailing about something to call, but Marx was on that, so it was all good.

I'm not really sure where I put Memory again, so it's probably time to start cranking out another 7,000 words or so.

Happy-ish, book

Am up to 22,270 words. This is up from 19,5xx words when I started this morning. Am hoping to drive it up to 31,000 or so words by the time I crash out.