Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Good: Went to Scarborough Faire today, and the kids had a ball.
Bad: It’s smaller and not nearly as fun as Texas Renaissance Festival.
Good: The Prius averaged 45.5 MPG for this tank of gas.
Bad: I had a stomach bug at the festival today and spent more time in the privy than anywhere else.
Good: The kind medic at the gate gave me 4 Pepto Bismol tablets.
Bad: One of the workers at the festival started telling a kid in line in front of us how we could all learn a lesson from Robin Hood, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor (what lesson? didn’t they try that in the USSR? and it failed miserably?)
Good: I think I startled said worker with my “From my cold, dead, manicured hands” shirt… he was so flustered he gave me back too much change, which I promptly told him and gave him three more dollars.
Bad: My firewire charger for my iPod is broken, and radio between here and Dallas sucks.
Good: We stopped at the Czech Stop on the way home and picked up a ton of kolaches.
Bad: I am going to gain 20 pounds from the ton of kolaches.

There’s an idiot insomniac mockingbird chirping loudly across the street. It makes a nice counterpart for the idiot insomniac human typing quietly on my computer.

I’ve been getting junk mail lately that has what appears to be rub marks on the outside of the envelope like there’s a credit card inside. There’s no credit card in there, though. It’s printed on the envelope to make you think there is. I grudgingly admit that it’s very clever… makes me open the letter to make sure it’s not a renewal for one of my cards.

I posted this on a message board a while back and meant to post it here too, but I forgot.

Okay, a lot of y’all have problems with spiders and cruelly, evilly, and with malice I post pictures of spiders in the threads discussing your phobias. Like kids drawn to a train wreck you click my links and I sit in my little chair and quietly giggle.

What you don’t know is the dark secret that’s been haunting me for years.

I have a desperate and mortal fear of roaches.

I don’t mind the little German ones. What I’m talking about are those big palmetto bugs, the nasty huge red ones that fly. When I encounter one, no matter how loudly the rational part of my brain screams into my ear, “It’s just a little bug and you are a big person and it’s not out to get you!”, the reptilian portion of my psyche is yammering away ten times louder in my other ear: “SCREAM AND RUN AWAY LIKE A LITTLE GIRL BECAUSE IT’S GOING TO FLY AT YOUR FACE, AT YOUR FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!”

At which point, even if I’ve managed to keep myself under control for 10 seconds and the roach has long since skittered away from the light, I burp out a little shriek and then spend the next 30 minutes shaking my head sadly at my totally involuntary reaction. I simply cannot help the screaming. I could be walking through a room filled with TNT and know that any loud noise would lead to my demise and I would scream anyway. It’s like closing your eyes when you sneeze. Screaming at the sight of a roach. Same thing. Reflex.

When I was a bachelorette I used to call my neighbors over to take care of roaches in my house. The guy in the garage apartment behind me was very kind. I’d tap at his door around midnight, ashy-faced and babbling incoherently. “Roach again?” he’d ask. I’d nod wildly. He’d drop what he was doing and come take care of it. He was a really nice guy except for his propensity to brandish a shotgun at the planes flying overhead.

Another issue is that I must never ever hear the actual squishing noise. When Hub goes to stomp on a roach, I run into the other room with my fingers in my ears and yell, “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA” until he says it is safe.

So there you go. My Achilles heel. I hate roaches. And I live in Texas surrounded by massive oak trees, which are the preferred habitat of discriminating palmetto bugs everywhere. And I scream a lot.

What IS it with me that I feel like I have to jump in at every opportunity and offer to help with anything and everything? Then I get overwhelmed and just… shut down. And I end up not doing what I said I would do and I feel guilty about it and it makes me feel even more overwhelmed. I’ve got three beta tests, a big shooting convention to plan for the fall, and a couple of other projects I’m working on, not to mention day to day life to deal with. Someone please stop me before I tell anyone else, “Hey, I can help with that!”

I am not awake. I am not asleep, either. I am in some weird waiting room for sleep central. I am a flat rock which skips across the surface of Lethe, leaving jagged little ripples in my wake every time I bounce. I can’t bounce high enough to hop out of the river, nor can I lose enough height to sink into the depths. Instead I drift along, tubing down my consciousness like I used to tube down the Guadalupe those years ago, where the water was 68 degrees year round and in the hottest part of the summer it was like floating in a refrigerator.

Finally I crack one eye open. It is a trigger, an on/off button which allows me to take action and step away from the paralyzed and non-sleeping state I’ve been trapped in for the last hour. I come downstairs and listen to the birds start to chirp, quietly at first so as not to wake all the other birds who have been sleeping since dusk last night. Other bird choruses join in and they crescendo into a symphony of avian gossip.

Human life starts to wake up. Planes start flying overhead. The newspaper boy drives by slowly, thwapping houses along the street with today’s missive. The school bus rumbles past. Where it was dark outside the last time I blinked, now it is drearily lit. It’s always cold at this hour, even when it is not. I wear a blanket over my feet and type and wish I could sleep. Sleep. Sleep, perchance to dream.

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause…

O sleep! O gentle sleep!
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hush’d with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfum’d chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lull’d with sound of sweetest melody?
"2 Henry IV" (3.1.7-16)

Bill knew his insomnia.

I don’t mean to be rude, but jeez people, use some common sense. Don’t put my email address in a huge list of “CC:” or “To:”. If I wanted those random strangers to have my email address, I’d write it on the fricking restroom wall. Your friends will now send me their viruses. Thanks.

Don’t forward me mail with random attachments of 500k or more. When I am out of town I use my cell phone for access and it runs at approximately 28kbps. If you send me a message with a meg of attachments, that means it will take me 5 minutes to download YOUR mail ALONE. Put them up on a webpage somewhere and forward me the link! And quit sending cutesy HTML mail with special backgrounds and fancy fonts and dancing kittens. I’m likely to send you back the code to show you what it looks like. Ugly, that’s what.

Oy.

Just watched Saw. Man, that is a seriously disturbingly good movie. It’s the bastard celluloid child of Se7en and The Game. Intelligent suspense. A little gory, but nothing too bad. I give it two thumbs and two big toes up.