Writing Successes: Started the article, finally. Did some work on a help page.
Music Playing: Bing Crosby: 16 Most Requested Songs. It's even funnier if you know that they're all songs from 1920-1929.
Well, first, the teachers strike was averted for now. They'll do a final vote tonight that should seal the deal, but they're expected to vote FOR the contract. I also understand that Doonesbury has been covering this topic, thanks to Mollie. So, if you read that, you might actually have an idea what I'm talking about here.
I realized last night I'm just a total contradiction sometimes. See, there's this "sex offender" who is moving into a residential neighborhood, next door to two small children. This man spent 12 years in jail for sexually assaulting an 11 yr old girl and confessing to 49 other crimes of a simliar nature (is what the news said, I think). His backyard borders on a church playground, too. So, the community around where he will live is up in arms. Marching around with signs and stuff.
Here's where my brain goes haywire. One part of my brain totally agrees that the community should protest. I wouldn't want that guy living anywhere near my kids, that's for sure. I really don't feel I have a lot of tolerence for this kind of person, since I was abused as a kid myself. I'm pre-disposed to loathe him without knowing him.
On the other hand, he did his time for his crime. Shouldn't we be forgiving? I'm not saying welcome the guy with open arms, but surely he deserves a place to live without harrasment. He's a person as much as I'm a person, after all. I wouldn't like it if someone sent out flyers saying, "Deoris, an internet junkie, will be moving here!" and then be condemned before anyone had the time to meet me or view my actions. Snap judgements don't sit well with me. You never know what's lurking inside until you meet the person.
But that's the trouble. You already know what's lurking inside this guy. And LURKING is the key word. So, why not prevent what could be a serious amount of future crimes to your own children?
Round and round I go. Take the higher path, and err on the side of tragedy....take the baser path and err on the side of humanity. I dunno.
Maybe I just think too much about this kind of thing. I can do it with most things, in fact. Ask me about the current situation with Iraq, the teacher's strike, or whether or not to add bios to the Amazons pages before we have them or after. Heck, ask me about cleaning the sink.
Just don't ask me where my archives went. I've no clue. ;)
PS: And please, feel free to use the comments are and send all your hate mail....but *yay* for the Court of Appeals. This actually effects me as I live in Oregon, one of the states in the ruling. Not that my children learned the pledge in the first place, I don't think they teach that here anymore, really. But it's good to see the system working. As a pagan, I couldn't be more pleased. I know, hate mail away.
Writing Successes: I didn't do a darn thing in writing. Except the blog. It counts, it was nearly 2k.
Music Playing: KINK's Light's Out. It's over, however, so I think I'll pop in the Doors here. LA Woman, in fact. I'm in a Doors kind of mood.
In fact, the mood is so strong, the movie's in the video player, the music's on the radio, and the lyric book is under my elbow. Jadea posts lyrics quite frequently in her blog, and I felt like sharing some myself. I enjoy Morrison's work because its non-linear. It has to be absorbed, not understood. I like that in my poetry and in my music.
From: Texas Radio and the Big Beat #2 (From "The Doors: In Concert", the Celebration of the Lizard set) exerpt only
Children
The river contains specimens
THe voices of singing women call us on the far shore
And they are saying:
Forget the night
Live with us in forests of azure
Meager food for souls forgot
I'll tell you this . . .
No eternal reward will forgive us now
For wasting the dawn
Which about sums up my mood this evening. Hey, at least I'm not hostile. I'm kind of on a higher level than that now. I've moved beyond, past, risen above, and am lost in the heavens somewhere. Least for right now. I'm sure I'll be fine once I sleep.
That all said and done, here's the "ew" I wrote for yesterday's Sunday Brunch prompts. Just don't ask to see what I've done for my article. I think I wrote a title...
Write about something that happened to you, from someone else’s perspective. 10 min
She was so sad, he thought.
They sat in the darkness, the music playing the same slow music over and over. It was one of her favorites, a melancholy tune about the strength of love and the loss of it. He’d never really paid attention to it before.
He heard her sniffling. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her cry before. It was disturbing. She was usually stronger than this.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t find her,” he said as the music wafted away on a final note.
“It’s not your fault,” she replied, her voice raw with tears both shed and unshed. He saw her replace the needle on the record again, replaying the same song. “I just need to have my moment. I call it, living through the blues. You let yourself go through and then you come out the other side.”
He nodded, but doubted she could see that. “C’mere,” he said. He rolled a little closer on the carpet, gathering her into his arms. She snuggled down against his chest, her hair under his chin.
He felt her shake a little as she allowed a few more tears to escape her. “It’s okay,” he said. “Go ahead.”
She pushed away just a little and looked up. Her brown eyes were wet pools in the unlit room, full of the pain of loss.
Then something shifted. He felt something change inside himself just for a moment. A yearning for something he hadn’t realized he wanted. The music egged him on and he leaned toward her.
She leaned toward him ever so slightly in return, responding in kind to this unexpected pull. Her eyes lowered and closed.
Describe an everyday scene or event in an interesting way. 10 min
She picked up another paintbrush. It was wider than the one before, it would make bolder strokes. She pulled it across the canvas and watched as orange and blue and green melted like a cheese sandwich in a hot frying pan.
She smiled. This was getting good.
She changed the color on her palette. She went with a red, but a blood red. A bold red would be the perfect shade to swirl into this painting of a sunset.
The brush slathered the dark color into the picture, and the sky came alive with color. She added another few strokes, the brush shifting in her hand, creating different lengths and shapes of colors.
Too much! She thought in a panic. She switched to an off white and changed her brush to a flat and wide one, much smaller than the bold brush.
She created clouds of white to hide the bold of the red.
Describe the scene or setting for one of the two prompts above. 10 min
The long living room was empty, except for the stereo. The couch and chairs were in the family room in the back of the house, with the television and her mother. He could just hear the sound of the TV chattering above the music.
The darkness hid the dingy walls and the ancient pile carpeting they lay on. It was an old house, in need of much repair and renewing. But they were a poor family, struggling to get along on a weak divorce settlement and a paltry child support check.
He didn’t mind. It was part of her appeal, this money shortage. She was too proud to ask him for anything, but she accepted everything he had to give. And he loved to give.
The speakers loomed in the dark room, one on each side of the low, hand-made, wooden coffee table. The stereo system was at odds with the shabbiness of the room, being new and shiny, a bright spot in the dinginess of the room. It had been a new purchase of her father’s, a trophy for her mother.
A light flared on in the kitchen, the yellow glare making him blink and turn away. It illuminated the stairwell to his friend’s floor, a steep set of poorly carpeted stairs leading to two rooms and a bath.
End Hope you enjoyed. But hey, you can comment that you hated it, too. I think the last two sucked. And thanks so much to Kou for the reminder that got me going for the first one there. LOL.
Okay, so it’s been a long, long day. I’ve been hostile through most of it, but at least I knew I was hostile. Let’s see if I can start at the beginning. I’m also going to rant and rave, so back off if you don’t want to read long diatribes about me. I also should mention Blogger is down, so I’m doing this in WORD and will have to post it tomorrow.
Up until 3am watching Angel Season One. Wonderful time to be had by all. Loved most everything so far. We’re just past half-way, I think. So I go jauntily off to bed, full of Angel thoughts, and I think I did have a dream here and there about him.
Hard to tell when you’re up every hour. I have no idea what was going on. I mean, it’s not like I wasn’t tired. But I couldn’t SLEEP. I rolled and shifted and thought deep thoughts and went to the bathroom about a hundred times. I’d catch an hour snooze and wake up. It was so stupid. But I have a feeling this is where all the “hostile” came from.
Around 9am, I decide to forget it and just get up this time. Have chat at 10am anyhow, right? Right. So, I’m the only one awake, and debate about making coffee. My house is a pretty flat run through, and Kou was on the couch. Every noise from the kitchen would be instantly heard. But I bite my tongue and make some anyhow, real quiet like.
At 9:30, my husband wakes up. He never gets up this early on a Sunday. But there he is. Grumpy, too, lucky me. I probably kept him up all night. Who knows. So, he gets up, and he’s instantly bored. He gets HIMSELF a cup of coffee (never mind that my cup is right in front of the pot there…) and comes back here (Kou’s on the couch in front of the TV after all) and starts playing this car game we have, at his usual full volume.
I’m thinking to myself, that’s kind of loud, but I can deal. It’s not like he turned on the TV back here. Besides, he’s done that before, played that game at loud volumes, so it’s nothing unusual. Hah @ me. He turned it off about 10:05.
So, now its writing class and I’m being subjected to the life and times of the special endangered tortoise species behind me at this insane volume. (In his defense, my DH is deaf, so you never know if he’s got it too loud on purpose or not.) Needless to say, my second and third prompts sucked. I did manage to do a passable first, but man…
Writing class finishes and (of course) he shuts the TV off just about then. I haven’t had breakfast, did manage ONE cup of coffee, and am now bombed by Amazons on AIM. This is not really a BAD thing, unless one is having a hostile morning already. Then it’s just awful.
I ignore the hostility and continue on updating my voting links. This is important this week, because I’m in a special Member of the Month contest, and I seriously think I’m the only one voting for me. Anyhow, so I am busily updating those links and bombed by tales from the Amazon side of life. No worries, right? Wrong.
One of the gals has decided to make a card for another of the gals. “Well and good,” and “kudos for the idea” and “go, baby go!” It took her about…oh, under a half-hour…to ask ME to do it. Not help or advise. To do it. You know, cause I’m not doing anything just then.
I had someone else ask me to visit a site at like that exact second.
And seconds after that came the "blow of the day". Someone asked me to remove an insane number of graphics I’d spent an insane number of hours putting up. I’m sure she knows who she is. I mean, well and dandy that you don’t like the graphic. However, I feel compelled to point out that there was more than ample opportunity to speak up about that BEFORE I put them up. There were DAYS worth of time to say something, in fact. I spent 8 hours putting that up. And I just now spent four taking it off, too.
I don’t care that you don’t like it. I’m annoyed that you didn’t value my time enough to tell me before I began. I’m a pretty good professional. I enjoy pleasing the client. You don’t like it, no problem, I‘ll change it. I can take a critique, a harsh word, and even a “boo hiss”. I’ve done it with things a lot more personal than site graphics. To wait until the deal is done was just bad form in my book. And even though I know I'll still work hard to "do it better", I would have appreciated knowing it was BAD before I wasted my time. And you can be assured that I'll need a lot more approval before I put the next one up. If I even decide to create something "better". Cause that tweaked my cheese. As you can tell.
Just after this announcement, my son went ballistic here at home. So I took care of some of that. Somewhere along the way, the computer got disconnected. I think that was for the best. Everyone would have felt some wrath.
Kou woke up somewhere in there and took over my computer. For the rest of the DAY. I mean, from noon or so until 8pm. I understand. I do that all the time. Of course, I’m at my house when I do, generally. And she was the person LEAST annoying me.
Because in the living room, the DH has control of the remote. This is horrible for me. I can’t stand it. He watches anything! He flips the channels all the time! There’s no rest. You can’t get into a program because the next commercial, it’s gonna be gone. This isn’t a huge loss when its, say, the Subway Grand Prix (woo, excitement! Cars driving in a circle!) or the “McNeil-Lehrer Report.” But when it’s Andromeda, forget it, it’s the most annoying thing ever. Home improvement and gardening shows are the big orders of the day, of course, followed by … whatever is on PBS.
I slept a lot on the couch. Good thing I was tired. I wandered. I cooked lunch. I wandered. I stared at the TV and passed out. I wandered. I stared at what Kou was doing over here. I wandered. I made dinner.
Eventually I get to the computer. Of course, now I have to execute the command from before, of taking the graphic off. I’ll do it tonight, I thought, because tomorrow I need to work on a calendar, an article, and watch more Angel, and sign my taxes. Besides, I can rant in the blog.
Only the blog was down for maintenance, and when it came up, didn’t understand my template or something. Freaky weird stuff, but hey. I’ve other things to do.
Well, somewhere during that, my dog wanted in with the sleeping DH. This is a nightly routine, nothing new. I apparently didn’t get the door shut and the radio was up too loud. Remember, this is the deaf guy from this morning? He slams the door.
He was right here the whole day. I mentioned several upon several times that I was hostile. I explained several of the above events, to illustrate my frustration. I could have used 8x10 glossy’s with arrows and diagrams on the back and it apparently wouldn’t have helped. I don’t think passive-aggressive door slamming improved my mood. I mean, cause it’s so troublesome to say, “Dear, the radio is up too loud.” Or even just SHUT the door instead of SLAM it. Or “You were a little careless there, the door is open.”
Was it just me?
I’m a positive person. I LIKE being the calm, understanding, and patient one. But I just had NONE of that today.
But I’m not going to apologize for my comments in this blog. It’s how I feel. I didn’t attack anyone (except my DH) on a personal level, just expressed my thoughts and feelings. I’m allowed to have them, and to share them, and to write them down in my blog. That’s what it’s here for.
I’ll post the story tomorrow. This is already really HUGE. Wish I could do the article this fast. Plus, I found out some other closely-tied magazine did the exact same topic I was thinking to cover, so I might switch topics yet again. Man, I hate articles. But I digress…
