So you think you can tell Heaven from Hell...

NaNoWriMo 2009 - Chapter 1

2009-11-17T07:08:00.000-08:00

The girl behind the counter smiled at me as she asked me what type of day I was having.

“Hunh?” I responded very inelegantly.

“Well, the type of tea you want depends on the type of day you’re having. So is it a good day? A relaxed day? A busy day?”

“Uh, a busy day I guess.”

“Alright, then you probably want something with a little bit more caffeine in it. I recommend either Kuki-cha Supreme, which is a slightly sweet tea similar in flavor to Gyokuro but less expensive, or the Sen-cha Supreme, which is a more everyday type of tea that’s not quite as sweet as Kuki-cha.”

“Uhm, was I supposed to understand that?”

She smiled back at me although I thought that if someone else had said that to me, I probably would have been exasperated and contemplated various methods of murder, including drowning by scalding hot water.

“Do you want a sweeter tea or a more bitter tea?”

“Eh, I’m not so much into sweets. Listen, why is tea so complicated? I just want a cup of green tea so I can be on my way and get on with my day.”

“I am going to make you a nice cup of green tea, but really, tea is a complicated thing and shouldn’t be taken so lightly, although most people just assume tea is tea and leave it at that. However, tea can be compared to fine wine, or the variety of different coffees. Not everyone has the same tastes, and not all wines go with every meal and not every coffee fits a particular day.”

“Uh, okay then...”

She smiled again. “That’ll be $3.50 please.” I started to wonder if she was patronizing me, but I decided to leave it at that. She obviously cared very much about her tea, although God knows why. It was just tea after all.

I watched her as she started to make my cup of tea. First, she filled a teapot with a little bit of hot water, swirled it around, and then poured it out. Then she filled the teapot again to the brim with hot water, and poured this water from the teapot into a thick ceramic pot. She waited a few seconds before pouring the water into a second pot. She let the water sit while she measured out the tea leaves: one tablespoon of dark green leaves, which she proceeded to put into the teapot. Finally she poured the hot water over the leaves, put the lid on, swirled the liquid in the teapot for a second and then looked up at me and said, “I forgot to ask, is this for here or to go?”

“To go. I have to get to work soon. Is the tea ready yet?”

“Just give it another 30 seconds and it’ll be ready. I have to let it finish steeping. You wouldn’t want tea-flavored water now, would you?”

“Uh, I guess not.” I didn’t know what to say. I was getting a bit impatient, but at the same time, she made tea seem like such a ritual that I wasn’t eager to spoil the obvious great pride she took in making a perfect cup of tea. This was my first time at this particular teashop, and I wasn’t sure whether my experience here was making me want to come back or not. After all, I was usually in a hurry, and this was the first teashop I’d been to that hadn’t filled a paper cup with water, thrown a teabag into it, handed it to me and declared that it would cost me $1.50. However, a friend of mine had told me that I should come here. He said that he thought it would do me good to pause a bit on my way to work and have a decent cup of tea for once, that I wouldn’t regret it, and that the lady who worked in the shop was absolutely ‘charming’. Well, I didn’t know whether she was charming or just plain irritating, but I guess people varied in taste.

Finally, I saw her swirl the liquid in the teapot, grab a paper cup, pour a little bit into the cup, swirl the teapot again, and then finally pour the rest of the leaf green liquid out into the paper cup. Her eye for measurements was astounding: the tea ended just a quarter of an inch from the top, just enough to prevent me from spilling it while I walked on the way to work. She put the lid on and set the paper cup on the serving counter. “Here you go, sir. A cup of our finest Sen-cha. I hope you enjoy.”

“Thank you.” I grabbed the cup and hurried out of the store. By now, I had been in that store for a full fifteen minutes, and I was anxious to head off to work so as not to arrive late. I blew a bit into the cup, but the steam that came out wasn’t scalding hot, so I tentatively took my first sip. The tea was the perfect temperature for drinking. Not too hot, but not too cold. It tasted smooth going down: a slightly bitter tinge on the tongue, followed by the fresh taste of really expensive, new tea leaves.

I say ‘new’ because I’ve had old tea leaves before. I think that’s what you tend to get in most stores: old, stale tea. You can tell it’s stale by the fact that it takes forever to steep, it turns a deep yellow color, and somehow even though you’ve steeped it for ten minutes already, it never seems strong enough or the taste always seems a bit off, like the difference between normal carbonated Coke and Coke that has gone flat overnight. Technically it should still be just as good, but somehow flat Coke just doesn’t seem to cut it. I usually ask for two teabags to make this type of tea stronger, but that can make a cup of green tea almost undrinkable with bitterness. Most cups of green tea made from just one teabag are already slightly bitter, so adding another teabag just multiplies the bitterness by about twenty times.

However, the tea she had just made for me was smooth without the usual overwhelming bitterness that I had come to associate with typical green tea. I puzzled over how she could have achieved in making a cup of green tea that was not bitter while walking to work along with the other crowds of students. However, I didn’t pay them any attention. Most of these students were bleary-eyed, carrying heavy backpacks and some of them wearing sweatpants and frazzled hair as if they had just crawled out of bed. Even at almost a quarter to 9 in the morning, it was too early for them. I myself wasn’t an early riser, but I had gotten used to the early schedule so that by 8 AM I was awake and ready to leave the house. Since it took me about twenty minutes to walk to work, I was usually very early. However, today I was running later. It was already 8:41 AM and I was just now entering the main walkway to campus. I could tell it was later by the fact that the crowd of students seemed a bit heavier than usual this morning, like ants rushing towards a particularly big morsel of food that someone had dropped on the ground.

As I walked briskly along I ran into William, another student in my department. He saw me first and walked quicker, cutting through lines of students walking by themselves to join me. “How’s it going this morning, Taylor?” he said breathlessly as he walked up.

“Not too bad. How about you?” I took another sip of tea.

“Enh, running late as usual. I have a meeting with a professor at 9 AM, but I’m only just getting to campus. I was supposed to prepare a few things for my lecture afterwards, but well...” His voice trailed off.

“Heh. Well, I suppose you could always just wing it. You always look so comfortable in front of students that I imagine it doesn’t take too much preparation.”

“Yeah, well. Life of a grad student, eh? I don’t think anyone really ever prepares for their lectures except you.” He chuckled. “Always the organized one. It’s no wonder the profs fawn all over you.”

“Hah. Yeah right. You should’ve seen what Professor Krofsky wrote on my paper the other day: good effort, but could’ve used a bit more discussion of the theoretical implications of long distance tone spread on the theory of locality in phonology. Seriously though, the professors expect you to write a term paper for the weekly homeworks. It’s almost impossible to keep up with their expectations.”

“You got that right man...”

We stopped talking as we got closer to the department, and I sipped my tea more regularly. I swear the walls had ears here. You never wanted to say too much or you risked someone hearing you and passing on that information to someone else. Academic departments had more gossip flying around than most business offices. In addition, academics tended to be a bit more ‘specialized’ and more antisocial, so they often had less of an understanding of human interaction than the average person working in a business office. It wasn’t a good combination.

William got to the door first and pulled it open, holding it so it wouldn’t shut in my face. “Anyways, I gotta run to my meeting. See you later, Taylor.”

“Yeah, alright. See you.”

William went hurrying down the hall away from the rest of the offices. His office was technically on the first floor at the north end of the building, but he usually left all his stuff on an unoccupied desk in my office, which was on the second floor. He must have really been running late if he didn’t bother to drop his stuff on his desk before rushing off to see his professor. I glanced at my watch: 8:59 AM. Yeah, he was really running late.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor and walked down the hall towards my office. I was about to get my keys out, but then I noticed the door was open already. That was unusual. I was usually always the first one in in the morning. I peeked through the door. Mary glanced up from her work. “Heya Taylor. How’s it going?”

“Not too bad.” I walked to my desk and set my bright yellow laptop bag down on my chair.

“You’re late today.”

“Mmm,” I replied as I took another sip of tea.

“Late night last night?”

“No, not really. A friend recommended I stop into this teashop, so I did, but it took a bit longer than my usual order at Starbucks.”

“Haha. Well, never get between a man and his caffeine.” She settled back into reading her article. She had a stack about an inch high on her desk.

“You going to read all those today?”

She barely glanced up. “Yeah, I kinda have to do a lot of research on my MA topic this week, and Professor Barkley recommended that I read these articles in preparation for our meeting on Thursday. I was busy working on the syntax homework until 1 AM though, so I didn’t get to start these over the weekend. I’ve been making notes on them, though, so I think I have a bunch of additional reading to do for tomorrow and Wednesday before my meeting. You know, work as usual.”

I nodded, but she didn’t see me. She had already gone back to her article. It looked like it was going to be another one of those days in the office. I took out my laptop, set it on my desk, grabbed the charger cord and plugged it in. Then I set my bag on the empty chair next to my desk and sat down. Some people, like Mary, liked to have hardcopies of everything. As for me, I hated carrying around all that extra paper, so I usually tried to read stuff I found online, or that I scanned into PDF form using the scanner upstairs on the third floor.

I settled back into my chair, sipping my cup of tea, while I began to read one of my articles related to my dissertation topic. I didn’t look up from my computer until the cup of tea had been gone for an hour, and I had made eight typed pages of notes on what I had just read.

Awesome, I thought. Even though I was late today, that’s still quite a bit of work for one morning, and it’s not yet lunchtime. I stretched my arms up as high as I could reach them and yawned while half-heartedly attempting to cover my mouth. My chair squeaked a bit, but when I glanced at Mary, she was still reading. She must have been really focused if she didn’t even respond to the noise of squeaky chairs. They drove me insane. I can never study while William is around since he is always bouncing up and down in that goddamn chair of his. Squeaka, squeaka, squeaka. I would describe it as the feeling you get when someone runs their nails down a chalkboard, but far worse.

“Taylor!” Speak of the devil.

I stopped stretching. “Hey William. How’d your meeting go?”

“Enh, you know. Same old, same old. I still have no idea what I want to write my thesis on exactly. No matter how much I read, it always seems like I’m just that far away from finishing it.”

“Mmmmm.”

William was the type of person who had a lot of natural talent, but usually did not capitalize on it. A lot of ideas, and no ambition. It made for a poor academic. I am not really sure if he enjoyed it or not. I don’t think William did either.

“So what are you doing right now?”

“Hm?”

“You’re staring off into space.”

“Oh. I hadn’t noticed.” It seems that I had spent too much time with my work today. That always happened. Whenever I spent too much time with my work, it always seemed like the thoughts in my head were more prominent than everything around me. It seemed like I was the exception, more than the rule. Most people I know spent too much outside their heads and not enough time inside. I suppose I was the opposite of that.

“So what do you think?”

“What?”

“God, you never listen. I was trying to ask you whether we should go out drinking or something right now because I’m done with work for the day and you look like you are too. So? What were you thinking about anyways?”

“Oh. Uhm...it really wouldn’t make sense.”

“You never do, man. You never do.”

“Wait, isn’t it only 11:30? Why do you want to go drinking at this hour? They’re not even serving $2 drinks yet...”

“Because, man. I can’t stand the thought of being at school any longer today. I feel like my head’s going to explode.”

“Maybe if your head exploded, then other people could get some work done around here.” We both looked up. Mary had been speaking, and she did not look particularly happy. Her lips were kind of pursed together in a disapproving stare that was wandering from one to the other of us in turn. It seemed that she did not really know who to fault in this instance: me or William.

Mary and William had never really gotten along. She was too serious, and he wasn’t serious enough for her. In some ways I thought that they would make the perfect couple because they obviously hated each other so intensely that there had to be some other emotion tied up with it that I did not see. Maybe they had had a past relationship that hadn’t gone well...or maybe Mary had gotten drunk during one of the department parties on the rare occasion that she let loose and William had taken advantage of it. Whatever the reason, I had never asked. Mary would have just scoffed at me, and William probably would have made up some story that turned out to be a relationship that he had with another girl just to make it seem like he had gotten her panties off and in a jumble. She certainly needed it, but I don’t think even drink would have convinced her to do it with William.

William stared back at her in disbelief. “Well, aren’t we Miss High-and-Mighty today. What’s the matter? You got an A- on your last assignment?”

“Shut up, William. I’m working and this isn’t even your office. Taylor, just go drink with him or something because I need to get back to work and I don’t want to head to the library every time I want some peace and quiet just because your idiot friends don’t know how to show respect for other people.”

I stared at her now too. She had never gotten this angry with me before. I wonder how much she thought her life and future career hung in the balance on a few articles that the professors told her to read, not because they knew she needed more to read, but because they knew that she would read them. She was the only one that seemed to live up to their expectations. I wondered if she ever knew how small she made the rest of us feel.

“I...why are you ordering me out of my office?”

“Why do expect that I should have to leave mine in order to get some peace?”

We glared at each other for a second, but my resolve was waning fast. I did not really care to get on her bad side because I knew she would make life a living hell if that happened. Besides, at this point I might as well go for lunch. I hadn’t eaten much today, and I noticed that my stomach had started grumbling while I finished the last page of my notes.
“Fine then.” I gathered up my belongings while she supervised, not daring to take her eyes off me unless I changed my mind. Charger cord, laptop...at least I packed light. It made it all the easier to pack up my stuff without feeling like I was taking too long. Under her gaze, though, you would have thought that I was taking twenty minutes to pack up two things.

I zipped up my bag and pushed my chair into my desk. I grabbed my empty paper cup that had held this morning’s tea and threw it into the trash can. There. Nice and neat. There were still stacks of books at the back of my desk, but most of them were textbooks that I hadn’t bothered to scan in since I mostly didn’t carry them home. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t stand clutter. My room at home was as austere and unused looking as my desk. Some people found it unnerving, but I found it enticing. A clean desk always made me want to sit down and use it, while a cluttered desk made me just want to run away and find somewhere else to work. William and I, obviously, did not see eye to eye.

I looked up and noticed that William was staring at me. I carefully avoided Mary’s gaze and I told him, “Come on, let’s go,” in very subdued tones. I crossed the room to the door as Mary scoffed and turned back to her article. William was still staring at me as we descended the stairs of our building, and turned to walk either towards town or food, whichever happened to catch our attention first.

“Would you stop looking at me like that? I can’t figure out if people are going to think that we’re a couple that just got into a fight, or if you’re acting like you’ve never seen a real human being before.”

“I just can’t believe you let her kick you out like that. I mean, what the fuck, man. Where’s your balls?”

“In my pants, like always.”

“I’m going to avoid the obvious virgin jokes here. But seriously, man, that’s your office too. You really should fight for your space. Establish dominance.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly see you standing up for me either.”

“Oh, come on. You know there’s nothing I can say that Mary will honestly listen to.”

“Yeah, well, I’d like to pretend that she’ll still listen to me on occasion instead of just shrugging me off as if I were the mud on her shoes like she does with you all the time.”

“Ugh. You just don’t have the balls to stand up to a girl.”

“No, it’s just I don’t see the point in starting a pointless conflict. The department is difficult enough without getting an officemate on my bad side.”

“Yeah, exactly. No balls.”

“Shut up, William. I think I’m going to go home.”

“Aw, come on. You said you would come drinking.”

“I said no such thing. I just got kicked out of my office, so I might as well go home for lunch and then maybe go find a café to study at later.”

“Bah, you people are no fun.”

“Grad school’s meant to be fun?”

“Any part of life is meant not to be?”

I could think of no response. William obviously thought I was more fun to hang around than Miss Goody-Two-Shoes in my office, but sometimes I wondered why. In some ways I wasn’t that much less serious than Miss Goody-Two-Shoes herself. There must be some subtle difference that he saw, but I did not. Anyways, I suppose it didn’t matter. There are some things that you should never question, and I think friendship must be one of them, otherwise who do you trust? There wasn’t much more to life than that. Sure, work is important and all, but at the end of the day, I don’t think it can make you happy. I don’t know that it made anyone happy. Maybe Miss Goody-Two-Shoes. I could see that. I wonder what she does for fun.

“Taylor? Taylor!”

“Hunh? What?”

“There you go again.”

“Oh, uh, sorry.”

“You shouldn’t study so hard, man. It’s bad for your social skills.”

“Whatever you say, William.”

“Anyways, man, I’m going to head up this street. I want to go see if Miriam will join me. She’s usually bored, and hey, if I can get her to take the rest of the day off...woo! Awesomeness for me!” He pumped his fist in the air. I wondered whether he was still just an undergrad that had somehow been accepted to a university by mistake, a fault in the application. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but this application clearly says WILLIAM BRADY on it. If your last name is Bradshaw, then that’s not you.’ Maybe it had just been a mixup of two similar applicants with almost identical last names and the professors on the selection committee had forgotten which was which. Then again, maybe they just didn’t know and were now regretting their mistake.

“Alright, William. Have fun. I’ll see you later.”

“See ya!” He already had his back to me and was running up the street. Obviously his penis was on a mission today. I wondered if it ever gave him a break.

NaNoWriMo 2009

2009-11-17T06:56:00.000-08:00

Just as a short introduction, I've decided to participate in NaNoWriMo 2009! All the way from Kenya. I figured it was a good thing to do with my time, and it might help keep some of the boredom away.

Anyways, it is already the third week of NaNoWriMo (exactly 17 days in for me), and everyone should be at 28,334 words by now. I am awesomely failing at this, since I got quite sick (evidently Kenyan food is filled with either parasites or bacteria, and my body fails at clearing either). I hit the mark for the first day and exceeded it (something around 2,100 words), and then totally failed to write anything else until yesterday. So my total is standing at 3,997 words. Woo! *yay for failure*

Anyways, I'm going to try and finish the story over time, even though I know that it's not going to actually make the NaNoWriMo deadline. But I'll probably try to hit 50,000 words by about the time I get back to the States, which might be a reasonable goal for me. Even if I don't, *yay* for trying.

In the spirit of Paradox, who let me read his story last year, I think I'm going to post my story to this blog, as I can't think of another suitable place to post it. I'm only going to post when I think I've come to a reasonable chapter break, so it might take at least a week or so before a new chapter gets posted (I kinda write non-linearly, so sometimes I'll write a scene that isn't connected to anything else for at least forever, or maybe not at all).

Don't ask me what the story is about really. I'm making it up as I go, with very little planning and foresight. I don't even know the title yet, let alone any chapter titles (if I even decide to make any). Already, my main character has become the customer in the teashop (not the lady who works in it like I thought originally), and it turns out that two of the characters don't get along, although they got along fine as of 2,500 words ago. It's kinda interesting to write because I really don't know what's going to happen, although I have a few ideas about the direction I want it to go in.

Anyways, without further ado, this is my introduction to my story. The first chapter shall follow in a separate post.

If you want to follow and see if I'm still writing despite the lack of posts, please visit my page here: http://www.nanowrimo.org//eng/user/459169

Enjoy!

Cataloging my library

2009-08-08T17:59:00.000-07:00

I think I finally found a good system for cataloging my books! Goodreads.com :)

They *don't* import all the information from Amazon, and they allow me to create bookshelves. There are three automatic bookshelves: Read, Currently-Reading, and To-Read. A book can only be on one of these bookshelves at a time. I also have the ability to *create* bookshelves, and all my books can be in as many bookshelves as I like. So, for example, I have a "library" bookshelf, which will contain all the books in my library (so every book should be in here, unless I screw up), and then beyond that, I can separate the books out based on which bookshelf they're in, which is basically a reflection of how I have them organized at home. It's quite useful, and so far it has found a couple of my books that should be harder to find in that they came from out-of-the-country. But still, no problems!

Beyond that, it has options to export my collection in .csv and whatnot, so I'll easily be able to transfer it to my home computer. I'm quite excited. ^_^ Oh, and did I mention it's free to create an account? :D

So yes...if I figure out how to do it, very soon there should be a live feed on this blog of the different bookshelves in my collection. I'm going to try to go for one showing the recently added books in my library, and the books that I'm currently reading. :)

I like watching the colors gather rain...

2009-04-06T10:29:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write another post for at least a week or two, if not longer. But life gets in the way, and I always want to write at awkward times...like in the middle of class when I'm surrounded by students and all the things I want to say are very personal and probably things that you don't want your students to know about you (although, I guess the blank void of the internet is okay).

Life has been a little hectic lately, but a lot better than it has been since about the end of January or the beginning of February. I've been royally unhappy for about the past two months or so and I think I finally discovered what was wrong/fixed it unintentionally, and I'm extremely happy about that. A word to the wise: if you find yourself in a situation in which you are consistently unhappy, then maybe you either need to change that situation or get yourself out of it. Not that anyone ever tends to listen to that advice. I know I sure don't most of the time.

I've been doing a lot of discovering about myself in the past two weeks. I mean, they're mostly little things, but they're things that I'm glad to find out. First off, if I'm depressed or down, that doesn't always necessarily mean that it's a return of my depression...sometimes it's just the circumstances I find myself in. This one is honestly such a relief. You guys have no idea. I thought my mind must have been going crazy or something since about November last fall since I was so irritable and unhappy most of the time. First I tried to convince myself that it was just the stress from school. Then the stress from school went away and I seemed happier for a few weeks, and then it started up again. Was it stress from school? Unhappiness from my relationship? Was it just my mind going bad again? I had no idea...until two weeks ago when I unintentionally broke up my relationship and suddenly life became amazing and wonderful again. It was an almost overnight switch. I guess sometimes life needs something radical to happen in order to bring clarity. Thank you randomness that allowed me to suddenly have clarity. :)

Another thing that's been on my mind is that some of the most interesting people I've known in my life have been suicidal at some point. I'm not sure what that says about me or the type of people I'm attracted to. I sometimes get the feeling that suicidal/depressed people are more interesting than everyone else because they actually have to work at life. Nothing ever comes easy. And it's not that a suicidal/depressed person can't be happy once in a while. It just takes a lot to actually get to that point, and most of us are simply content to be feeling "okay" for once. It's a massively different perspective on life. Sometimes the thoughts in your head drown out everything around you until it's like you're looking at an impressionist painting and the only thing that's real are the thoughts in your head that you so desperately want to get away from. And then the ironic thing (for me at least), is now that I've gotten away from those thoughts, I miss them. They were like a comfortable pillow...that familiar blanket on your bed that you could just wrap yourself in. I know it doesn't make a lot of sense, but I guess old habits die hard.

I also get the feeling that suicidal/depressed people feel life more intensely than other people. This is probably completely wrong and the first thing that my psychologist would want to beat out of my head, but I just can't convince myself otherwise. That flighty girl at that party who is only concerned about getting laid or that silly, comedic guy who never seems to stop smiling and laughing and joking around (assuming it's not a veil of what he actually feels)...I just can't convince myself that those people feel the same things at the same intensity that us suicidal/depressed people do. And I think it makes us interesting. We can see the great sorrow that life is all around us, and yet, sometimes it just takes a close friend to make us smile and decide it's worth it to go on living another day. In some ways, through all the complexity, it simplifies life a bit down to the important things because a suicidal/depressed person can't just simply ignore the fundamental things in life like trying to find our own happiness or how we feel on any given day or just let the stress from life build and build until we finally snap. We can't ignore these things because we *will* snap. It's not a question, but a pure statement of fact. Life is hard, and we have to work at it to keep on living.

*shrugs* And anyways...who ever wants to read a book about someone's life who is perfectly happy and content with how things are going? It would make for a pretty boring story. There's a reason why all the classic authors were depressed/suicidal/committed suicide. <.< And there's a reason that the 27 Club exists. Sure, a lot of those people died as a result of accidental drug overdoses. But life is crazy sometimes, and drugs don't help smooth it out any except in passing or for brief periods of time.

I've decided I want to let go of life. Stop fucking thinking about it and just fucking *live* it for once. I'm in my experimental mode, which in some ways means I shun closeness of any sort. It's hard to feel completely free if you have ties to the world or to specific people. But I feel like I need this right now. I feel like I need to feel like I can just do whatever the fuck I want without someone looking over my shoulder and telling me it's wrong. If it fucking feels good, then who are you to tell me no? I guess that could kinda classify me as a hedonist, but labels are labels. I've also been told that I'm an existentialist, but it wasn't because I read a bunch of existentialist literature and decided that's who I wanted to be. It was more like I thought and thought and thought and decided on my own philosophy of life, which just happened to coincide with all the existentialists, particularly in the early 20th century. Go figure. No one's thoughts are unique.

Hm...random thought time. Fuzzy kittens are amazing and my cat is the most amazing of all. :) Trance is awesome, yet it's not the soundtrack of my life right now. I keep getting progressive rock stuck in my head, which is quite amazing considering the unpredictableness of every song. Colors. Lights. Darkness. The moon. Twisty winding roads at high speed and falling asleep next to someone you care about with music playing in the background. :) Visual/tactile memories are awesome and evidently quite rare. I only know of one other person who has one (besides me), and it's fun to swap explanations of how it works. Mmmmm...long hair, you fascinate me. :) I am content with life right now. It better fucking stay that way. Lastly, the blog title is an intentional typo/reference to the song "No Rain" by Blind Melon. Cliche, but that song feels like my life and all my interactions with people over the years all rolled up into one little ball (down to the pouring tea for two and reading books because of the escape they provide).

:)

New Shoes!

2009-03-21T14:12:00.001-07:00

Whee, new shoes! Specifically, Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" Converse shoes! (I owe Squalls for telling me about these. Thanks Squalls!) :D

Whee...so tempting to put on that record and listen to it while I try to make boring graphs for this paper... :D

Why everyone should be a night-owl...

2009-03-10T15:58:00.000-07:00

Because I'm lazy, I'm pasting this directly from chat:

[vaaht] wow...I have a really bad picture of the fire last night <.<
[theclam] fire? :/
[wandering_nomad] munch!
[vaaht] not in my apartment <.<
[vaaht] outside
[vaaht] it was kinda funny actually <.<
[vaaht] I was sitting down to watch heroes at 4 am in-between working and I hear this weird sound and so I walk to my bathroom and look out the window and this huge palm tree at the opposite corner of the parking lot that's outside my bedroom window is on fire and there's flames rising up into the air and all the bushes are catching on fire <.<
[theclam] o.o
[vaaht] and these two security guys in the parking lot are freaking out not knowing what to do, so I yelled out that I had called 911 and the fire department was on the way <.<
[theclam] do you live on the pleasantville set or something?
[vaaht] and it took a couple minutes for them to get there (nm that the fire department is literally 3 blocks down the street) and then they circled around and completely missed the fire and kept going o.O
[theclam] haha
[vaaht] I think that might have been a different truck going elsewhere though <.<
[vaaht] I'm not sure how you miss a flaming palm tree on the corner of a major street o.o
[vaaht] but yeah...it was a two-alarm fire and they had it put out in five minutes and disappeared within 10 minutes <.<
[vaaht] and now there's just this charred palm tree and some missing bushes along that fence <.<
[vaaht] so yeah...I took a really crappy picture with my phone (didn't know where my camera was and the fire department was starting to put out the fire so I didn't want to miss it <.<)
[vaaht] so yes...these are the interesting things that life throws at you when you stay up until 4 am the night before a presentation that you have to give <.<
[vaaht] I'm just glad I wasn't asleep o.o
[vaaht] miss all the excitement :(

And finally, exciting picture time, or rather, really bad picture time because the only thing I had on me was my phone...

During fire:

To translate, that white rectangular object is a truck that was only about a car's length from the flaming bushes. The big light in the center and the smaller light directly below it are the flames (the top one is the tree and the bottom one are the bushes). The little red light off to the right is the lights from one of the fire trucks.

Better picture from this afternoon:

Just in case you can't tell, that big blackened tree trunk in the center is the burning tree from this morning. The big white truck is missing (but it does park there every night! ...well, except for maybe tonight... <.< ).

:D

GoW: New Members Not Welcome

2008-12-26T22:14:00.000-08:00

So, I tried to join a discussion in #writers tonight. I was invited by Nadnerb a while ago so that I could listen to the discussion, mostly because I've been planning to start modeling in Blender for a while now, and I finally have some free time. He invited me about 24 hours before the discussion in that I will talk about.

I heard in CC that there was an argument going on, so I dropped into #writers to listen (or rather, I unlurked). *argue argue argue* Not being affiliated with the GoW, or any other writing groups, I had never heard in detail and/or paid attention to the politics. Within five minutes I could tell that BAD was in charge and held his rule with an iron fist, and that hoikas was BAD's little sidekick. I could also tell that Paradox was on the opposite side of BAD (ie: not GoW, but I had heard vague mentions of this beforehand). Zrax also made it pretty clear that he wasn't in total agreement with BAD. I couldn't tell where Kato stood.

*argue argue argue point fingers call names Paradox how dare you bring in your little toadies to this chatroom (as if RIUM and I would come because Paradox called and not of our free volition)* So, me, being one who always speaks her mind, decided to pipe up. Essentially, it went something like this (not quoted): "Guys, knock it off...this is the exact reason why I don't do anything more than chat in CC with this community...none of you guys get along, all of you guys argue. BAD, you're being an idiot, knock it off for one second. hoikas, please knock it off. paradox, you too, shush. Can you guys all step away from your computers for 10 minutes, take a deep breath, and calm down? And then we can talk rationally about this?"

How did BAD and hoikas respond? Hoikas muted the channel. Everyone was given voice. *EXCEPT ME*. BAD told me to stay out of it because none of this discussion was of my concern.

Wtf did I do to deserve this? I was trying to calm people down, listen to a (semi-)rational discussion... And the channel was muted on me.

And how do they know this is none of my concern? I am interested in possibly contributing to the GoW someday. Or at least, I was.

You can forget me ever joining the GoW. I will never support the GoW. If this is how they treat newcomers, no wonder they are such a niche, elitist group.

For those interested in reading the full transcript, it's posted on Paradox's blog here: http://paradox22.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/politics/.

My New Blackberry Storm!

2008-12-12T22:02:00.000-08:00

So I just got a new phone and it's a Blackberry Storm (give me a break, I would get an iPhone if I had AT&T, but I like Verizon too much). Anyways, I am playing around with it and I had the bright idea to try and write a blog post with it! This will totally be the shortest blog post ever. So far it is surprisingly easy to type on despite the fact that I am using my thumbs to do it. My only complaint so far is that the Blogspot text box doesn't resize for me to view on this little screen. Ah well. Anyways, I should probably get back to working on my MA thesis that's due in a week. I'll hopefully post more updates later!

The Razorblade's Poetry

2008-11-15T22:41:00.000-08:00

No, this isn't referring to cutting. That's the description someone put next to the song clip from Youtube that I'm about to talk about. I thought it was an interesting description of the song, although I'm sure they meant it in a different way than I mean it...it reminds me of the aimless up and down picking of notes on the guitar.

I was thinking about life, and there's this one movie clip/song that reminds me of my life on a day-to-day basis. It's this clip from Pink Floyd's "The Wall". The song I'm talking about starts after the silence in the video when the boy stops running. It's called "Is There Anybody Out There?" You can start playing at 1:09 if you want to cut straight to the scene. At 2:18 the guitar starts playing two solitary notes, and at 2:29 it cuts to the scene from the movie that I always see in my head when I hear the song: a guy (whose name is Pink Floyd) is sitting on the floor of his hotel room obsessively arranging the broken pieces of his room into neat little piles and organizing the chaos into a weird pattern that would cause anyone on the outside looking in to think he's crazy. At 2:30 the guitar starts playing single notes from the A minor chord, first transforming it into an F major chord, and then an F# dim before going back to the F major chord, and finally the A minor chord where it strays for a little while, and then repeats. The scene ends at 3:31, but the song doesn't end until 3:52. You should at least listen until the end of the song.

Even though I know from watching the movie that the reason the guy is rearranging the room is because he just trashed it, and that the reason he just trashed it is because he's trying to feel something in the midst of his depression which eventually leads him to try committing suicide and thereby completing his butterfly-like transformation into an unfeeling shell of Hitlerian non-emotion, I don't quite see it that way. I see it as a lonely person coming home to a quiet house on an ordinary day, aimlessly tidying the place that no one but her will usually see, and generally organizing her life in pointless piles just for the sake of the pointless piles.

*shrugs* I usually interpret things in a way that no one else does.

As a side note, I think I finally figured out that my cat meows when she wants attention...not that she never gets attention; she's just the most needy cat in the world.

"Old School" by Tobias Wolff

2008-11-15T14:05:00.000-08:00

I bought this book a while ago. It must have been at a used book store because someone wrote on the inside in one part: a date for when Robert Frost died. "Born 1874 Age 87 1961". I picked it up off the shelf last night because I was drawn to it for some reason. My cat had practically knocked it off the shelf and it was lying askew, begging to be set upright. And it had been like that for days, but I chose to stand it upright last night, and instead, pulled it off the shelf and read the back cover:

"The protagonist of Tobias Wolff's shrewdly--and at times devastatingly--observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself.

The climax of his quest becomes intimately entangled with the school literary contest, whose winner will be awarded an audience with the most legendary writer of his time. As the fever of competition infects the boy and his classmates, fraying alliances, exposing weaknesses, Old School explores the ensuing deceptions and betrayals with an unblinking eye and a bottomless store of empathy. The result is further evidence that Wolff is an authentic American master."

I was drawn to the book because of its promise to be about a bunch of guys competing for literary greatness. Right now, I am in the midst of struggling against my own literary apathy, my feeling that I am unworthy to be at the grad school I'm attending, and the feeling of failure I have that I'll ever even finish my Master's thesis. Not to mention, it's November, which means that many people are struggling to finish NaNoWriMo. So, in some ways, it seemed the perfect book to read right now. I couldn't have been more wrong in many ways.

What I saw inside the book, is not a bunch of boys childishly competing for the right to sit with one literary great, but three: Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway. And what promised to be a book about many boys, turned out to be the story of one boy as he watched the others around him. He is on scholarship to a school which prides itself on being Ivy League: only the best of the best come there, and the best of the best is determined by name only. But mostly, it seemed like the boy was his own undoing. The rest of the boys didn't really seem to care about his name or his background, and if he was competing for anything amongst his friends, it was the right to be considered a good poet or novelist, nothing more. But instead of letting his own writing come from the heart, he wrote about things that weren't his. And he assumed his own literary greatness before ever setting a word to the page.

All-in-all, it was an interesting story and well-worth reading. I will decline to comment on the rest of the book in case anyone reading this blog also wants to read this book, but I'd be curious to know if anyone else has read it, and if they got the same feeling from the book as I did: that the boy was not as serious about becoming a writer as the back cover claimed him to be, and that really this was a novel about a specific person's thoughts and feelings, not about the whole school in general. In some ways, it reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger more than anything else.

As an aside, it also made me want to reread The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, although I am not sure if this would be a mistake or not. Her characters are so depressingly angular in their feelings, motives, and lifestyles.

When "no" means no...

2008-11-13T22:56:00.001-08:00

So, I was standing at the bus stop (my non-typical stop since I was heading to Scoops for some ice cream - I had a scoop of chocolate almond and a scoop of peanut butter cinnamon btw), and for some reason people were really talkative at the bus stop. It was almost unnerving. o.O First I had this *really* gay guy talking to me. And I mean gay. Like, stereotypical everything gay, who just rambled on and on about the fact that he was late to this "hoity-toity" party and how much it cost to get to West Hollywood from Santa Monica and the fact that he was 40 years old (but didn't look more than 30) and that he was the oldest person in his family, but his mother thought that he acted the youngest. On and on and on. I should've followed him onto the city bus...I would've gotten where I was going a bit faster, and hell, he was fairly pleasant to talk to, if a bit of a fast-talker who made you think "omg take a breath o.o ".

But compared to the next guy...oh man, I'd take fifty gay guys like that guy any day over the next guy. He was this black dude...walked a bit rough, so to me it seemed like he was from the ghetto. But his shoes were those shoes that'll cost you $200 or $300 and he was wearing a diamond earring in either just one ear or both ears (I don't remember) and he was well-dressed, even though it was a bit hip-hop gangsta to me. So, this guy only started talking to me because I glanced over when I was rocking out to Porcupine Tree's "Trains" and he asked what I was listening to. So I said Porcupine Tree, which I knew he didn't know before I even asked if he knew who they were. Then there was the inevitable conversation about "well, what music do you like?" I told him mostly rock (60s/70s, progressive, psychedelic, etc.) and alternative. He (big surprise) listens to hip-hop. So, blah blah blah...we chat a bit. Then just before the bus comes, he has the audacity to ask for my number.

Seriously, wtf is up with that? Why do guys always think that they can ask for a girl's number after talking with her for five minutes? Hello? Do you realize that I'm not some kind of object for you to drool over? Guys' intentions are rarely admirable, and even less so at a bus stop. Maybe if I met some guy reading very intently at a coffee shop or a library...but not a bus stop. How unclassy.

So, I told him no, that I didn't want to give him my number. He gets on the bus, and I think that is that. (I couldn't get on that bus because I had my bike and the bike rack was full, gee, what a surprise at 7:30 pm on a Thursday night.)

So I stash my bike on the next bus (which is right behind the first one), and happily get out my book ("Island" by Aldous Huxley) and start reading. My goal was to finish this book by tonight...I had no excuses with only 45 pages to go. Then, about 5 minutes later, when I am happily reading and listening to music, out of nowhere, here comes this black guy again. He switched buses claiming that the first one was too "full". I mean, it was, but still, wtf. That's a total lie. Go away I'm busy reading.

But no, he sits down and starts talking, blah blah blah. Worst part is that he lives closer to me than to my school, so he was on the bus for fucking *forever* preventing me from reading. Talking about how he liked reading stuff about dating for interracial couples and whatnot. Total BS. About how he was 24 (I doubt he was less than 30), from Memphis, Tennessee (dude, where's the southern drawl? I bet you grew up in LA...), blah blah blah. It was starting to just get annoying as fuck.

And then again, right before his stop, the inevitable question. You sure I can't have your number? How about I give you my number instead? Jesus Christ. I said no, did you not hear me the first time? Plus, it's fucking creepy when you're offering your number and you still haven't asked me for my name or introduced yourself. How many times do I have to say it? No, no, no, and NO. I am NOT playing hard to get. I really mean it when I say that I won't give you my number and that if you give me your number, I won't call. Gah. Fucker thought I was playing hard to get. You know, sometimes a no, really just means no...

Btw, yes I did finish my book (over vegan food). I'll have to post about it later (the tone doesn't seem to fit with a post ranting about commonplace things such as guys at bus stops).

Random Drawing

2008-11-13T08:20:00.000-08:00

So, a student accidentally stapled a blank piece of paper into their homework. After looking at it for a second, I decided to draw a picture. Here it is!

No on H8, Repeal Prop 8

2008-11-09T00:10:00.000-08:00

So, tonight I went to one of the many protests that LA has been holding which are protesting the passage of Prop 8. It was a very peaceful protest. Lots of general goodwill. Surprisingly, we didn't see a counter-protest, despite the fact that we circled the block right in front of a children's hospital. In fact, almost everyone cheered us. Cars honked and cheered as they passed (which ended up being quite a few since we walked from several miles away to the protest and back again). Even the police seemed to be supporting us (they had siren noises going off intermittently during the protest for no apparent reason other than supporting us). We were even cheered after the protest when we walked into this nice pizza place to get some food after the protest, which was awesome.

In general, it was a very satisfying night. We made the news yet again (national and local!), so we are getting good publicity. The word of our cause is out there, and hopefully we'll see some change soon.

Finally, a few of the best slogans we saw on posters (at least, the ones I can remember):

When do I get to vote on your marriage?
Equality: No on Poop 8
Chickens: 1, Gays: 0 (something to this effect was carried by a guy dressed in a chicken suit)
I'm okay with straight people as long as they act gay. (btw, this sign was carried by a straight guy)

There were also bicyclists walking their bikes in protest of Prop 8. I'm thinking I need to make some signs for my bike to show my support for the repealment of Prop 8.

So remember!

Equality for All!
No on H8, repeal Prop 8!
Gay, straight, black or white, marriage is a civil right!

Isolation and Aloneness

2008-11-08T12:29:00.000-08:00

Funny words to say, but English doesn't really have a good equivalent to something that means both "isolation" and "aloneness". The Spanish equivalent is "soledad", unless I've misunderstood how it's been used. However, the related word in English "solitude", lends a feeling of tranquility, and not of isolation.

So, all of this came up as I was reading Aldous Huxley's "Island". It's a great book, and I highly recommend it. Evidently it is his last work, and the one in which he elaborates on most of his philosophy that he has developed through the course of his life. But in it, it contains this quote:

"In solitude, for of course nobody can help, nobody can ever be present. People may stand by while you're suffering and dying; but they're standing by in another world. In your world you're absolutely alone. Alone in your suffering and your dying, just as you're alone in love, alone even in the most completely shared pleasure."

This quote struck me because at once my mind is agreeing and disagreeing with it simultaneously. In the depths of my depression, this quote made absolute sense, although the reference to being alone in love while sharing yourself with someone...cuddling and caressing them while simultaneously feeling so absolutely separate from them, seems to me to be the saddest thing in the world.

You may feel alone while you're suffering and dying. This is completely plausible to me. No one can understand what it's like to feel what you're feeling when you're in the depths of depression and honestly wishing you had the courage to kill yourself. Only another currently depressed person can even remotely begin to appreciate what it is like to have your mind wish to be dead while at the same time trying to fight with itself to stay alive. Although I cannot fully understand what this is like, I also imagine that it is equally isolating to be diagnosed with a deadly disease or condition and know that you only have a few months to live.

In death, one is truly alone, and no one may follow you there. This was made extremely clear to me last February when my granddad (my mom's dad) was in the hospital because a leaky heart valve that hadn't been diagnosed for over six months finally burst, and he was essentially waiting in the hospital for his heart to finally give out and for him to die. Sadly, he also went into the hospital a few days before his birthday. I had already planned to come visit him that weekend for his birthday, but instead of visiting him just to celebrate his birthday, it was also to say goodbye. The hardest part about the whole thing was that he wasn't ready to die. If his leaky heart valve had been discovered six months earlier, then maybe he could have undergone surgery for it. But now, the likelihood of him dying on the operating table was extremely high. So we could only just stand there by him and watch as he struggled to breathe and as he stated that he wasn't ready to die and looked scared. Considering that I had only been feeling a bit better from my depression for a mere two months, I found it all extremely symbolic. It scared me that someone who was just turning 82 could be that scared to face death, and even more so that they had no choice in the matter. I couldn't even imagine what he was going through for those couple of days when he realized that the hospital could only do so much to support him, and that he was going to die whether he was ready for it or not. By the time he finally passed away, he was at least ready to face it, but I don't think he was necessarily ready for it.

That experience left me with a very non-peaceful view of death. Yes, maybe death could be peaceful in that if you are lucky, you will pass away in your bed while you are sleeping one day when you are extremely old. But I don't think it necessarily happens that way. And the knowledge of upcoming death is extremely scary and isolating. There is nothing that anyone can say or do to make it better. Things are not going to be okay. Nobody can follow you wherever you are going, whether it simply be the ground, heaven, or another life. Death is a stopping point at which the living must leave you be and only the other dead await you (at least, if you believe that there is a heaven and that you don't just get put into the ground to rot, or reincarnate as another person or animal).

So yes, death is a truly isolating experience. But love?

Love is the one thing which you can share with another person. So it is beyond me how Huxley can claim that love is an isolating experience which makes you realize how truly separate you are from other people. If anything, it should be the experience or act that makes you realize how truly inseparable you are from someone. In which all the world should suddenly align and just make sense. Or even if it doesn't make sense, at the very least everything should be at peace.

It makes me sad to think that someone should feel alone in love. If that is the case, I don't think that can be called love. Maybe a gross perversion of love in a world where there is so much hate and sorrow and too little kindness and generosity. But it is definitely not how love should be.

I joined NaNoWriMo!

2008-11-05T19:50:00.000-08:00

Oh god don't ask me why. >.< It's not like I don't have another NaNoWriMo project in the works (ie: my 50-page master's thesis due this quarter?). Ah well...maybe it'll help keep me motivated to work on my MA...

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/459169

Fun Stuff from XKCD!

2008-10-07T22:43:00.001-07:00

My linux cheat sheet shirt:

My regular expressions skirt:

My Sudo Make Me A Sandwich(TM) shirt:

Suicide, Depression and Other (Not-So-Fun) Things

2008-10-06T19:00:00.000-07:00

This is a blog post I've been thinking of writing for a while, and since I was just talking with someone about this, I figured what better time to do it!

So, probably everyone who knows me in Cyan Chat (CC) knows that I was pretty much suicidally depressed last summer. *yay fun!* And I got put on anti-depressants and whatnot *not so fun :(*. And I'm doing a lot better now, but depression/suicide still kinda fascinates me (probably always will because it's one of those things that I just don't understand unless I am in that mood).

So, I had it fairly easy, but there's this guy in my department who was talking to me today, and he basically said that he envies people who are not depressed because there has never been a day in his life where he has not been depressed. He was talking on the phone to his sister one day, and he was excited to tell her that he had spent the past four days *not* wanting to kill himself. I can't even imagine. I mean, I had those days last year, but the really bad days only came on the first two weeks I was on anti-depressants (I had a rapid-cycling mood to extremes of emotion for about two weeks) and the week that I decided to admit myself into the hospital a couple of months later so I didn't hurt myself. It's just about a year later, and I am proud to say that it makes me shudder that I would even *think* about killing myself. And I haven't had those types of thoughts since at least November or December of last year. Now, that was the first time *I* hadn't thought about killing myself since about sophomore year of high school, but I wouldn't consider it a daily occurrence. I only thought about it when I was feeling depressed, and my depressed periods would only last for a couple of months at most. So I was never even remotely as bad as the guy in my department, and thankfully I managed to get through it all and I'm still here.

However, the experience of being completely and utterly suicidally depressed has left me with some interesting views on life. (1) I guess I appreciate the good days oh so much more now because I can actually smile and say on some days that I honestly feel happy (today is one of my happy days actually...go figure that I'm writing a blog post about depression). (2) I think I appreciate my friends around me that much more because I wouldn't have gotten through those times without them. They helped remind me that things weren't always going to be like this, and provided me with moral support when I needed to heavily lean on their shoulder just to convince myself that it was worth living through another day. And finally, (3) I do not believe that suicide is a selfish act, nor do I believe that someone has the right to prevent another person from committing suicide if they are absolutely determined to do so, nor do I believe that someone has the right to say that you cannot commit suicide. It's the last point that I want to talk about because I think I differ dramatically from most people on this standpoint.

(In the following, I am using "I" as a matter of convenience, and not because I am suicidally depressed, nor is this blog post a cry for help of any sort, but a discussion on what my views are, and why I think they are so odd. I am sorry if this offends or disturbs anyone in any way.)

First of all, suicide is not a selfish act. If I am suicidally depressed, don't automatically assume it is because of you (my friend, my relative, my mom or dad, whoever). It is within me, and there is nothing you can do to change that. Most people (my mom included) have this idea that suicide is a selfish act. How can you be so depressed that you would want to kill yourself? And what about your friends and family that you leave behind? At that moment, I am not thinking about the friends and family that I might leave behind. I am concerned with the fact that living is so painful that I don't want to go through another day. I do not want to live my life feeling like every day is so painful that I just want it to all be over. It is torture to feel that. The worst thing in the world. Would you like me to torture myself just so that you can feel better about yourself?

Second, do not belittle my depression by asking me if it is a chemical imbalance or something wrong in my life. It doesn't matter where the depression is coming from. It is there. Whether it is my fault or not, I can't do much about it other than try to live through today and hope that I make it through tomorrow and slowly start to try to fix whatever may be the underlying cause. Likewise, do not assume that I am automatically irrational just because I am talking about killing myself. You'd be surprised at the rationality that is behind my mind keeping me alive while you stand there thinking that I am off my rocker and unable to deal with myself. You need to trust me sometimes that I am not going to kill myself if I say I won't. But likewise, do not assume that I am automatically okay if I say I am. It is a very fine line to walk.

Third, it is not your fault if I commit suicide. Suicidal thoughts are a cage from which the mind cannot escape. You cannot show me the door or hand me the key and expect me to unlock it for you. I have to do that for myself. Remember, I am the one who is depressed, not you. You can only be my moral support in a hard time and be there for me when I need you to be there. If you know someone who is depressed, this is the best thing you can ever hope to do for them. Show them that you care by just being there, and listening with an open mind no matter how much it hurts to hear them say how much they would rather not be alive. They need to talk about it. Keeping it bottled up is the worst thing you can do to them because they are already bottling too much up if they are as depressed as that. Make them feel as if they can tell you anything because that is the only way you will maintain an open dialogue with someone who is depressed.

Fourth, most people do not actually want to commit suicide. A suicide attempt is very different from a completed suicide. A suicide attempt is most likely a call for help. So is a suicide threat (saying that "I'm going to commit suicide if..." or "I want to commit suicide"). I need your attention, and I cannot figure out how to get it, so I try to kill myself. Do not automatically assume that I actually want to die. Maybe I do, maybe I don't. If I am telling you about it beforehand, it means that I really don't want to kill myself and I just can't figure out how to get through the next couple of days to a week or more by myself. Likewise, if I tell you that I want to commit suicide, take me seriously. The worst thing you can do is assume that I am joking. Suicide is never a joke.

As a random aside, you may hear someone who is suicidally depressed talking about "succeeding" or "failing" at suicide (or other things in life for that matter). If you are depressed, success and failure is everything. Accidentally forgetting to turn the stove off and burning your food is a huge failure. Having a cat who decides that the screen in the window is fun to play with and having the cat tear it down is a failure. Being late because you slept in too late because of your medication is a failure. Being late because there was an accident on the freeway that is out of your control is a failure. Very little is a success. One thing that can make you feel successful is actually completing a suicide act. Still being alive at the end of it is a failure. My psychologist and the people at the hospital tried to correct this belief of mine that killing oneself is not a "success" if you are attempting suicide. Honestly, I fail to understand why this should be a "failure" to commit suicide if killing yourself is what you are determined to do and you actually end up doing it. Maybe someone else can enlighten me who sees things from a non-depressed/never-been-depressed standpoint.

Fifth, you do not have the right to prevent me from committing suicide if that is what I have decided. If I find that life is too painful to continue, who are you to tell me that I am wrong? Would you like to be me for a day and discover if you can keep yourself alive if your mind is constantly telling you that you are a failure, that life isn't worth living, nothing is fun or even mildly enjoyable or tolerable, you don't want to eat, you don't want to drink, and you very simply don't want to exist? If I ask for your help directly by telling you that I need help, or indirectly by telling you that I plan to commit suicide before I actually do it, then by all means, please try to stop me. I want you to, underneath it all. If I didn't, I wouldn't have told you. If I just go ahead and try to commit suicide and end up failing because you walk in and call the ambulance, you are being almost cruel. I mean, it's possible that I timed it so that you would come home at that exact moment and prevent me from killing myself, but you shouldn't count on that being my intention. Shit happens.

Sixth, you do not have the right to tell me that committing suicide is wrong. My morals are not your morals. Maybe your religion tells you that suicide is a sinful act, or maybe you just plain think that no one should have the right to kill themselves. Who are you to tell me any different? You are not God, my Savior, my belief system, whathaveyou. You are just another asshole trying to tell me that my beliefs are inferior to yours. It is possible that because of your disapproval and others like you that I can't handle this world anymore and want to kill myself. (When you are depressed, it is impossible to see the good in people, and only possible to focus on the bad. The more bad things that you see, the more depressed it may make you feel, and so the cycle continues.)

With that, I end my exposition of why I think it is wrong to prevent someone from committing suicide, and my general advice for other people who know a suicidally depressed person. The following notes are for those people who are suicidally depressed coming from my experience of being suicidally depressed and some of the only things that helped me get through it:

(1) Hold onto your friends and talk to them as much as possible. Just knowing that someone is there can be a tremendous help.

(2) Find one thing that you can live for, no matter how small it is, and hold onto it with as much force as you can. For me, it was the guitar. When I sat down to play the guitar, no matter how I was feeling, it would usually make me calmer. And it was one of the few things that I honestly enjoyed doing somewhat, even on my worst days. (Although, I must admit that even the guitar couldn't help me sometimes...that is why you need to have other people.)

(3) Make a list of things that you resolve to do before you commit suicide. Believe it or not, delaying the act can sometimes work just long enough to make you change your mind.

-Go out and get some tea or coffee.

-Go visit some place that you've always wanted to go to and never have been to (after all, once you're dead you won't be able to do this anyways, so you might as well do it while you can).

-Stay away from home and in a public place if that is what it takes. Cafes are awesome for this, plus, what better way to spend a suicidally depressed day than sipping hot chocolate and listening to live music or watching random people work around you. If you're daring enough, you might even start up a conversation with someone to take your mind off of things.

-Try not to be alone. I know depression and suicide make you want to be by yourself, but it is one of the worst things you can do to yourself. Yes, sometimes you honestly need some time to yourself, but having company is never a bad thing.

-Resolve to never commit suicide at night. That is usually when I am the most depressed, so I figured if I wanted to commit suicide at night, then it meant nothing. If I still felt like that in the morning however, then I was in trouble.

-Resolve to always ask someone's permission before you actually commit suicide. As stupid as it might sound, this actually worked for me and it's the reason I didn't actually attempt suicide on the day I checked into the hospital. As contradictory as it might sound from my previous statements, no one is ever going to *let* you commit suicide. I don't care how busy they are. If you say that you want to commit suicide, then they will come over right away. If they don't, then why are you friends with them?

-Make a list of the people who love and care about you. If nothing else, it'll make you cry and if you can still feel anything, then you will feel sadness at the thought that you might hurt someone else. As odd as that sounds, I didn't give a crap about myself when I was depressed, but I couldn't bear the thought of hurting someone else like that.

-Make a list of things you can live for, or a list of things that you used to live for. Try to do any one of them, and see if it helps. If it doesn't, don't worry; just keep trying. You can never fail if you just keep trying.

-Anything else that you can think of, please try that. Even the smallest things can help.

(4) Smoke some pot. It almost always puts you in a good mood. Or at the very least it makes you eat. If it doesn't do any of those things, then you should probably get some help.

(5) If you have a pet, as morbid as this sounds, you might want to consider what would happen to you if you committed suicide and left the pet without any food or water. <.< They might love you, but they don't love you that much if they're starving to death. If you're absolutely determined to do it, at least put the pet outside or give it to a friend or call a friend to come over and get your pet later (after you're done killing yourself) and leave the key outside the door so they can get in. (Heh, sadly, this was one of the other main thoughts that kept me from trying to commit suicide. Go figure. I have a really morbid mind.)

(6) Don't try to commit suicide unless you actually plan to kill yourself. I think the worst thing in the world would be to lose the mobility in my hand because I cut my wrists, but didn't cut deep enough to bleed out before someone found me. Or to lose the functionality of my liver because I took too much tylenol, but not enough to actually kill me.

(7) If you're going to commit suicide, look up the right way to do it. Believe it or not, a bottle of Advil won't kill you, but a bottle of Tylenol just might (after a very lengthy, painful hospital stay of about two weeks). If you want to prevent yourself from committing suicide, then don't find out how to do it properly. You will most likely fail just by not knowing how difficult it is to actually kill yourself. If you already know the way you would commit suicide, then try to rid your house of those objects: the gun in your closet, the knives in your kitchen, the scissors in your desk drawer, the pills in your bathroom, etc. Whatever it is, give it to a friend and tell them to keep it. Or throw them away. It's amazing how much depression and listlessness can do to prevent yourself from killing yourself. Having the right tools on hand to do it, makes the process seem a whole lot easier and more inviting. Also, keep in mind that it's not when you're the most depressed that you're the most dangerous to yourself. It is when you are fairly up and active after being severely depressed that is the most dangerous time to watch out for.

(8) Don't count on someone finding you right away. Please don't time your suicide attempt to coincide with someone coming home and calling the ambulance, thereby preventing you from actually dying. What if they're delayed at work? What if they meet up with a friend to have drinks? Then you die, and they come home, realize that you meant for them to find you before it was too late...and oops. It's too late. You can't take it back, and they will feel guilty for the rest of their lives that they didn't just come home when they usually did.

(9) Don't be an asshole and take other people out with you. If you want to die, just kill yourself and have done with it. Leave life to those people who want to live it.

(10) Suicide is permanent. You cannot take it back. One of the worst things that could happen (in my opinion), is you attempt to commit suicide and realize halfway through that "oh shit, I don't want to die". But at that point it is too late and you pass out and die anyways.

(11) Remember that life isn't going to always be like this. One day it will get better, and you need to be prepared for it when it comes. (Unfortunately this last statement may not apply to everyone, but I think it can help most people in the short term. It was one of the other things that got me through some days.)

Anyways, that is my thought on the subject. I am sorry for disturbing everyone, but this blog post needed to get written at some point.

Biking and whatnot

2008-09-27T20:10:00.000-07:00

I just rode my bike for the first time. I biked ~1.5 miles to the nearest Starbucks and back (I didn't get a drink because I didn't feel like one/didn't bring any money). It was immensely tiring getting there because there was a minor grade going uphill, but going back was super fast and easy because it was a minor downhill grade. It was also awesome because a random guy on the street talked to me saying how awesome bikes were and congratulated me on recently getting a bike (I told him this was my first trial run on my new bike). He told me to watch out for crazy drivers. : )

In other random news, my cat is sitting on my lap while I am typing up this blog post, so I have to lean forward because I can't put my laptop in my lap. However, she hasn't really been this cute and purring and loving recently, so it's awesome. : )

And this morning was awesome. I woke up still kinda sleepy, and instead of falling back asleep I decided to get up and read. Reading is something I used to do a lot more when I was younger, and not so much now even though it's still one of my favorite activities. I find it's hard for me to concentrate on one thing for such a long time...there's the distraction of the computer and people on AIM and me wanting to talk to people in general, so very rarely do I shut everything down and go have some time to myself to go do my own thing without someone else's input...like read. Well, this morning I did for about 4 or 5 hours or so (I was reading a book by P.G. Wodehouse called "The Code of the Woosters" that Nisan recommended to me). I don't think I was reading completely consistently because at some point I got up to make breakfast and do other things, but it was still awesome and it started off my day completely right. Afterwards was when I decided to go ride my bike around for a little bit less than an hour and now I'm sitting here sleepily wondering what I should cook and thinking I should work on my MA. Although the sleepiness is making me want to put it off. *shrugs*

Anyways, my rambling means I don't have much else to say, so I should probably stop.

*waves hi to the MystBlogs people who are seeing her blog for the first time*

Climbing trees and other things

2008-09-22T17:51:00.000-07:00

So, yesterday I got to visit a couple of friends of mine, and we decided to go spend the day wandering around doing whatever we felt like and wherever the day happened to take us, which was absolutely awesome. It's been a while since I've just hung out with people and wandered around all day like that. It started off with going to a bookstore and buying four books: two recommendations that one of my friends gave me ("The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco, and some book by a guy named Wodehouse, or something like that), one replacement for a book I used to have ("Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel García Márquez, in Spanish of course), and a book of short stories called "Ficciones" by Jorge Luis Borges. The Borges book was something that I should have had in my book collection, but for whatever reason I didn't (I discovered this recently while organizing and alphabetizing my library for the first time), nevermind the fact that I read lots of his short stories in high school for the Spanish AP exam. So I'm very excited to have new books, although I know that I don't have any bookshelf room for them since 7.5 40" tall bookcases evidently is barely enough room to house my book collection.

After the bookstore, we picked up our other friend and wandered over to the coast and found a straw maze to wander around in, which was kinda fun. It wasn't incredibly hard, but we had fun screwing around in it anyways. There were a couple rooms in the middle that looked exactly like another room further towards the edge, so that was confusing unless you noticed that there were either more doors in the side or purple flowers in one room but not the other. We even discovered a rotating door! And we also kinda scared this little kid by sticking our hands through the hay bale really quickly from the other side.

Then we wandered down the coast, stopped on a beach and watched the parasailors and continued on towards a local college that had this climbing tree. It's this tree that someone tied a rope and a rope ladder to and so you climb up this rope ladder and keep on going up the tree until you reach the top, about 300 ft up. Only one of our group went past the rope ladder (my other friend and I are scaredycats :( ) and he ended up climbing all the way up to this natural chair formed from the trunk and 7 branches extending outwards like a spiderweb. I've decided that one of these days I need to get up the nerve to go up that tree because it sounds amazing, especially if you go up around sunset so you can see the sunset from above the trees while the forest gets increasingly shadowy below you.

All-in-all it was an amazing day and it makes me miss living up here. :(

In other news, I got an early Christmas present today! Mostly because I decided I couldn't wait until Christmas, so I decided to go buy it now. It's a bike! I asked my mom for one for Christmas, but we're going to be up at my parents' retirement home during Christmas and I'm flying up there because there's going to be snow on the ground and it's going to be too hard for me to drive up there. So my mom was just going to give me money for it, and I decided that I'd rather have a bike now so it'll make my commute to school easier. So whee!

Life is good and very exciting. : )

No one ever takes "vaaht" when I sign up for things...

2008-09-21T02:37:00.000-07:00

Did you ever have a name that is never taken when you sign up for things? Well, I do. "Vaaht" is available on almost everything, unless I've signed up for it and forgotten the password (like on Skype). It's actually quite awesome, as a consider Vaaht as good as my real name.

Anyways, I have a blog! As if I didn't have one before...but I have a blog! And hopefully it's much cooler than my old Xanga blogs which I refuse to update anymore. Hopefully less whiny as well.

Anyways, I figure I should write a first post so something comes up when you click on my blog. I really don't have too much to say right now...

I've been working on my MA and generally off the computer lately, partly because I've been at home, and partly because I've been so busy. School starts this week, so that should be cool. I'm TAing Intro Linguistics (whee! students who don't care about linguistics, or in general give a shit about anything!). Ah well. I'm also taking a guitar class (this week is the third week of class), so that's awesome. I'm also currently in the market for a bike, and I think I found a cheap one at Target that I want to get. I also discovered that I have a new love for sewing clothes, so with any luck I will be wearing the dress that I made to school on Thursday. So things are going fairly well, and hopefully they stay that way. My apartment is all clean for school starting, my kitten is appropriately attached to me enough that she'll hate it when school starts because I won't pay much attention to her anymore, and I've just spent the past week having fun with some friends of mine and in general trying to relax. In short, life is good. :)