Making stuff.

My consecrated hematite Wealth bracelet broke the other week. It was just hematite chips on elastic and the elastic snapped when I was having a beer in the Placa George Orwell. (Remind me to stop consecrating cheap jewellery in future.)

I saved all the bits, but I'm not sure what to do with it next. I was just going to restring and reconsecrate it, but something stopped me. I suspect that it wanted to be free. Bloody iron ore-- these metallic doobries are a bugger for getting ideas.

So I plan to redesign the bracelet. I'm going to use most of the hematite chips and some other suitable materials and remake it from scratch. A few of the hematite chips will of course be incorporated into my next batch of beadwork, to be offered for sale on Sunday. So that's another chore to look forward to this week.

Stupid magick.

Mmm, swords.

Oooh, they're so shiny and pointy! I want all of them. Lovely lovely pointy swords. Mmmmmmmm. Swords. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Also I want a flowing cloak and a swordsman's shirt, and some nice pointy boots. Some personal mist that would swirl about me on demand so's I could always make dramatic entrances would be good, but the costume people don't seem to sell that. I already have a long-haired bloke to stand next to me and look all brooding, so that's a plus.

That's...

Countess Junior Grade of The Flobee Hair Suction System, Mordant Carnival, L.C.S.W, to you lot.


(Random name & title generator robbed off of Solonor)

Heh.

Quote:

It's like saying something like, "Well yeah, I sent that mind eating demon after that guy, but it's ok because I practice white magick and he practices black magick. He does bad evil nasty things and I'm a happy fluffy fairy bunny witch who does good deeds, like helping old women cross the street".

Trijhaos made me eject fluid from my nose again. It's not fair.

Another open letter to the Entities.

Okay, guys. I think I've finally got myself pointed in the direction that you want me to be pointed in. Doing the jewellery, check. Making the ickle pritty wire trees, check. Keeping my eyes open for cool stuff to nick from skips, check. You have my gratitude for helping me sell that necklace on Sunday.

No, I'm not being sarky. I didn't really expect to sell anything, so the necklace was a plus. Thanks. You guys have been great, and I'm sorry that I needed so much poking to get me on the path. What can I say? You knew what I was like when you took the gig.

Now then. In order for me to keep to the mission, I need a little more help. Obviously I need to sell more stuff than that, but what I need right now-- like, tomorrow-- is a hint as to what I can be doing money-wise for the rest of the week. Can't just sit around from Monday to Saturday, hoping that this Sunday will be the charm.

So I'm asking you ethereal types once again: Help me out. Introduce me to someone who can point me in the right direction, show me where I can set up shop. See if you can't find me a job that works for you. Above all: give me the gumption I'll need to make the most of the chances I get.

Throw me a bone, eh? I can't go on like this, no money coming in and all that. It makes my stomach hurt.

The lost afternoon.

Inbetween those last two posts there should have been a little something on how I had a really great time on Saturday. Lurid and myself went to the Parc Güell to meet a 'Lither and a couple of said 'lither's mates. We had a great time, eventually fetching up on the beach to drink sangria. It was loads of fun, and I really hope they enjoyed it too.

Sold out.

Got to the park about 5pm, stayed till 9. Sold one (1) necklace. Ho, hum.

It was nice in the park tho'. Sort of like a mini-festival. There were jugglers, loads of really good jugglers, people playing guitars, a human pyramid, stands selling burritos, lukewarm sangria, herbalized tortilla and suspicious chocolate cake, people walking round with cool boxes ("AguacocacolacervecaAAAAA!") , cyclists, unicyclists, bemused tourists who'd come for the geological museum, and drums drums DRUMS. The drums were awesome beyond words. There were little knots of drummers all over the place, creating this thick sonic tapestry. It drew you in, made you part of it. After a while I found I was humming happy little made-up tunes to the rhythm of the drums.

I really want a drum now. And a sword.

Anyhow. I'm not totally gutted about the whole "one necklace in 4 hours" thing. It was my first time out and I reckon that with better presentation and a wider variety of stock I could do loads better. Hey, if I can sell one necklace when all I've got's an old pillowcase with my stock Sellotaped to it, what couldn't I do with a proper display?

Been thinking about how I might vary my stuff a little. I reckon that I should try and go for the wannabe mage market; pentegrams, chaostars, planetary symbols, etc etc. Also, I'm really good at making those kitschy little wire "bonsai" trees, so I might do two or three of those. Then there's "found object" sculpture; I used to really enjoy making semi-arty stuff out of crap that other people had chucked out. Not saying it'd sell, but it might get people interested.

But this is only a Sunday thing. What about the rest of the week? Well, getting a licence to sell stuff here is pretty much a nonstarter, but there's still the street-theatre option. Admittedly I'm no good at juggling, unicycling, dancing, or playing music, but I'm really really got at staying dead still. No, really. I used to be a life-model for a beginner's art class. I can hold a pose for forty minutes straight. So I'm thinking, human statue. Hmmm. Of course one would need a suitable costume, but I'm pretty inventive in that regard.

I would like a costume with a sword. A big shiny pointy sword. Then all you sword-having people would have to stop laughing at me.

If I had a drum and a sword I would be invincible, and nobody would ever tell me to file anything again.

...mark out the losers in your office so you know whose opinions you can safely ignore.

fridgemagnet puts his finger on one of the main reasons why I really hate working with other people: you're all a bunch of know-nothing, style-over-content bozos. I hate working with other people because work, like justice, must be seen to be done. So what if you've been slaving in the file room since 7:30am? Your upline manager doesn't get in till nine-thirty, and she won't see you. Worse, if you're so busy trying to put some order to the chaos that her lousy management has created that you don't come up for air till 10:30, you'll have to put up with the smarmy bint asking you if your alarm clock's broken. Attempting to reason with her is a waste of time. She'll just nod and smirk. Most people grasp the concept of object permenance in infancy but not your upline manager, oh no. You don't exist if she can't see you. Someone who does no work but makes a lot of work-flavoured noise, on the other hand, will be showered with praise and get promoted over your head and then get the perm posting they've been fucking promising you for the last three months which is the only reason you've been coming in at 7:30am and RGHGGHGHGGGGGFUCKINGBASTARDS!

I really hope this fly-pitching thing takes off. Much as I want a job, the thought of working with you losers again fills me with nausea.

Yeah...

Still jobless and still broke. You got it.

Didn't go into town job-hunting yesterday. Thought I'd stay at home for once, give my Castillian some love. Spent most of the day going through this book of grammar excercizes and listening to Spanish telly. I prefer DVDs-- it's easier to follow what's being said if there are subtitiles because I read Castillian better than I speak it.

I think I'll do the same again today. I've got an SF novel which I keep meaning to work through with the dictionary. I'm going out later, but not till this afternoon.

Okay, post over. You can get back to making snide comments about people who whine about their lives and then don't try to fix them now.

I still don't have a job. Why don't I have a job? This is beyond merely depressing or annoying. This is Kafkaesque, is what it is! Give me a sodding job! I've lost count of the number of CVs I've handed out, calls I've made, streets I've walked down, temp agencies I've signed up with, and nothing. I don't even get a rejection letter or anything. Just... dead silence. It's not even as if I'm setting my standards too high. All I want is some crappy little minimum-wage thing, mopping floors or waitressing or machine-minding. This sucks. I go into town every day, I check the noticeboards, I check in with the managers of the bars that have my CV, I do everything I can think of to find work. And still nothing. Nothing. What the hell is wrong?

Having been denied legal employment, I've decided to try fly-pitching. No joy there, either. Went to the Parc but everyone there was asleep. Put my stuff out but nobody bought anything. Then there was this big police lorry driving around, and the park keeper kept wandering past, and I had to keep stuffing everything back in my bag. (If they catch you fly-pitching here they take your stuff off you and you have to pay €100 to get it back.) In the end my paranoia got the better of me and I went home. I'm going back on Sunday, because I've heard that everyone fly-pitches there on a Sunday. Nobody gets busted because there's just too many people: buskers, jugglers, traders, dope-dealers, all sorts. Sounds like fun.

Bloody furious again.

This time it's Magical Aqua that's got me all riled up. Not, I hasten to add, at the author, but at what she's being put through by her L.E.A. (Local Education Authority).

Magical Aqua's author, Lucy, is a teenaged girl who suffers from M.E. From what I read in her journal she's fighting the disease tooth and nail, but she can't really attend school. This is because her symptoms (which vary over time but often include severe pain, fatigue to the point where she can barely sit up for any length of time, insomnia and nausea) are too severe.

But physical disability should be no barrier to a young person's eduaction, right? I mean, there's laws and things, right? This is what you pay your taxes for, right? Wrong, according to the relevant L.E.A. They've been stringing this young woman along since 2001, failing to provide home tuition, failing to explain why. Same old story: "You're someone else's problem, we've lost your files, it's not my department, blah blah blah." I suppose they were hoping that the problem would disappear when she hit 18.

This is a disgusting way for a bunch of supposedly responsible adults to behave. I had a lot of contact with various L.E.A.s and their so-called education advisors when I was a kid and I have nothing good to say about them. I'm sorry to see that the callousness and incompetence that I recall is still alive.

The BabyInk thing was a hoax.

Whew. Now I don't have to go all the way to America just to kill them.

Just time for a quickie...

I still don't have a job.
I am sick of non-job-havingness.
If I do not get a job soon I will release a mutant strain of athlete's foot into the El Corte Ingles zapateria.

This is your last warning. Job me, you CV-eating gits, or things round here are going to get... itchy.

There was supposed to be a post here.

And the links had proper names and stuff. Then blogger ate them. Make up your own damn post and your own bloody titles. Then go and boil your collective noggin.

http://www.anotherealm.com/

http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/links/4zines.html

http://www.ravenelectrick.com/writersguidelns/index.htm

http://www.theroseandthornezine.com/

Search refrerrals: Yet another reason to hate your putrid guts.

"macaque choking pictures". I kid you not. Someone came to my blog and tracked stupid all over the floor again.

Oh, and the person who came here looking for "barcelona sex shops": did you find any and where are they?

More lousy parents.



Hey, mums! Is your offspring insufficiently adorned for your taste? Is slathering your kid with designer lables no longer doing it for you? Don't feel that Junior expresses your personality adequately? Never fear, Baby Ink is here! Real permanent tattoos for infants as young as 6 months!

(link via kookymojo.)

Come close, people, while I explain something to you know-nothing, more-money-that-sense-having, baby-torturing bloody morons: A CHILD IS AN AUTONOMOUS ENTITY! A person. A small, smelly, annoying, mewling, puking, noisy person, true, but a person nonetheless. Not a billboard, not a prizewinning extension of yourself, not a punchbag, not a bargaining chip in your mindless, pointless battles with your mindless, pointless ex. Get that concept into your self-absorbed brains before I have to come down there and SMACK it in.

God, I hate Homo Sapiens. Pollution, Boot camps, Guantanamo Bay, more pollution, nukes... you're a bunch of shaved apes who haven't leared not to shit where they eat and devour their young. No wonder I'm going bonkers-- I've had to share a planet with you freaks for nearly three decades. I wish you'd hurry up and kill yourselves.

More psi fun

Further to yesterday's entry: I will use the Recorded Experiment setting instead of constantly chickening out and using the demo setting just because I intened to make my scores public. It doesn't matter if this doesn't work. It's not like everyone's going to dance round me singing "You've got no psi powers! Nyahh, nyahh nayhh nyahh nyahh!

This is a game. Fun. Playing. You remember fun.

Psi fun.

Having been unable to climb up off my psionic plateu, and being eager to have some kind of external, non-subjective record of my acheivements (if any), I've dug up this site that I was playing with a bit last year. It has a number of retropsychokinetic games you can play, which also function as experiments. If you so choose, you can have your results included on their database. I'm going to try and do a little every day (mostly using the bell-curve game), see how I get on.

The RetroPsychoKinesis Project

More on Tranquillity Bay and sundry other kiddie gulags.

The more I delve into this subject, the angrier I get. It's a nightmare: unimaginable stories of brutality, physical, emotional, sexual and spiritual abuse. Nobody should have to go through these experiences, but these are bloody children. The worst thing some of them have done is talk back to their folks.

Please take a few minutes to visit one of these (especially grant's blog) and read the articles, comments and the court transcripts.

grant is collating links and info here

mudshow thread here, now longer, rantier and linkier

Barbelith Underground thread here

If anyone reading this can give me some pointers as to how I can get involved in fighting these places and the people that run them, if you know of a campaign or can tell me which authorities I should get all activisty towards, please get in touch. Email me, tag me, leave a Shout Out, or post to my board.

Rejection.

Got an email rejection last week, for a story I'd sent to Bloodlust UK. I mention this because it was a really, really good rejection letter. It was both helpful and courteous, explaining clearly and concisely why the didn't feel the story was right for them, what they liked about it, and what they didn't like. In my long career as a literary nonentity, I've recieved many rejections and I would give this one an eight, maybe even a nine. I almost wrote back to tell the editior how impressed I was with the quality of the rejection, but felt that I risked being taken the wrong way.

To give you some idea of what I look for in a rejection letter, here's a few pointers:

If you haven't read the story, don't pretend that you have. Create a standard letter explaining why you can't read new stuff at the moment.
Do not stick the boot in. You can ruin someone's whole day quite effectively with a simple "thanks but no thanks." You do not need to use profanity.
"We didn't feel the story was strong enough" is a lame comment. Make up your mind what's wrong with the piece and say that, or use a standard letter.
Above all, don't give up! Sure, you'll take a few knocks along the way, but persevere. Someday you'll be able to write rejection letters like a pro!

Tranquillity Bay

Lazy rich screwups farm our their child abuse.

Can't be bothered to physically assault and verbally humiliate Junior yourself? Don't worry! When you're rich, you can get other people to do it for you!

Lengthly rant over at thee mudshow, here.

(Link ponced from fridgemagnet).

Sun, sea, and salty goodness.

You should see the Med under the brilliant afternoon sun! Green-blue, almost glowing, sparkling, with tiny white boat sails off in the distance. It looks like a dream ocean, like something from the imagination. Beautiful.

Myself, Lurid Arcive, and M. all spent the weekend in Sitges, a seaside town round the coast from Barca. It was excellent. We arrived on Saturday afternoon and were lucky enough to find a room in a fairly pleasant little hotel (spaces are limited at this time of year). Having dumped our stuff, we had a slightly overpriced meal at the Pic Nic cafe and then went for a dip in the Med. Haven't been sea-bathing since I was a kid, so I had a great time, sploshing around and trying not to get my glasses knocked off by the more boisterous waves. The beach was crowded and there was quite a bit of litter floating around, but otherwise the water looked pretty clean.

After salting and sunning ourselves satisfactorily, we all sloped off down the shops and stocked up on beer and fizzy drinks. (Not touching the minibar). Then we adjourned to the hotel, where we sat around on the balcony, lolling on sun loungers and jawing idly as the sun got lower and the air cooled. Come the evening, we set off on a bar crawl. We started out at Parrots (gaybargaybargaybar), then just kind of sauntered up and down, stopping at various points for beer, food, and in one case a slightly disappointing ice-cream. The best part of the evening for me was walking along the rocks with an overpriced six-pack just after midnight, then drinking beers as we watched a little flotilla of catamarans set out onto the black waters, their white sails ghostly against the sky. I don't know what they were up to-- perhaps there was some kind of licence-related night sailing requirement being fulfilled. It was a rather poignant sight.

We passed a rough night, thanks to the minestrations of the local gnats, then got up and fought the other residents for scrambled eggs and coffee. Then we went and flopped around on the beach, chugging back fizzy water, lemonade and beer, and snacking on peanuts, cheese and brioche. Myself and M. developed a hopeless crush on one of the drinks sellers, a handsome fellow with long dark hair and muscular arms. Yum. (Can the self-loathing, XYers-- you blokes are nice to look at.) Swam. Basked. Re-applied sunblock. More swimming. More bask. More beer. More suncream. Zizz. More swim.

Eventually we decided to call it a day. We pootled around the town a bit, then headed back to the sticks to nurse our sunburn.

So long, Sitges. We'll always have... Parrots.

*Crickets chirp*
*Frogs croak*
*Tumbleweed tumbles*
*Bell tolls*

Aww, c'mon, guys.

And then Monday happened, and M. went to live somewhere else where she didn't have to sleep on the floor, and today I went into town, got hot and tired, completely failed to find a job, and somehow had a tenner nicked.

Bah.

Bars.

So one of my bestest freinds is in town-- M., who lived upstairs from me and Lurid Archive back in Dryrotsville. She's staying with us, which is very cool, and since she used to live in Barcelona herself she's been showing us some of her old haunts. Last night we ended up wandering the maze of tiny streets near the bottom of the Ramblas, looking for her old local. It was one of the coolest bars I've ever been in: tiny, with green paint on the crumbling walls and red on the low ceiling. The light came from dim lamps with red fringed shades, and from a bright red fluorescent tube overhead. The only consessions to the lush July heat were the open door and two oscillating fans. They were playing Bjork on the crappy CD player. It was awesome.

Not, however, as awesome as the next place we went. It was one of the secret bars that are apparently scattered all over town. I'm surprised that M. was able to find it, even after getting some vague directions off the barman; she'd only been there once before. We walked up and down the street a couple of times, trying to suss out which door to knock on, as guys in yellow overalls hosed down the narrow roads with powerful jets of water. There was almost nothing to indicate that this place was any different from all the other quiet, shuttered homes and businesses in the area, except for the very very faint strains of music coming from inside. We knocked tentatively on the door, and were admitted by the rangey blonde barwoman. Tracking water over the black and white tiled floor, we trooped inside.

The building smelled like Dryrotsville used to smell at the height of the Leaky Bath Catastrophe: damp and musty. We stared at the sculpture hanging over the bar, a three foot long tangle of chains, gas masks and other oddments, while the woman served us three sweating bottles of beer. There were only a couple of other customers. We brushed by them and went to sit in the back, a tiny snug with old, flyspecked mirrors on the walls. Not all the walls were plastered; one was still bare, the great rough stones gleaming with moisture. The light was so dim I could hardly see, coming as it did from only two fittings. One of the bulbs had been covered with streaky reddish paint to subdue it, and was further obscured by a lampshade that seemed to be made from an X-ray of someone's pelvis. The stools and tabled were all quite heavy, and mostly looked to be made of iron. (I tried to take a rubbing of the engraved metal rim of our table, but it didn't come out. Stupid biro. I'm getting some proper brass-rubbing crayons.) On one wall hung a pair of mannequin's legs, clad in black tights, clunky pinkish sandals and a length of (yes) heavy chain. A crucifix fashioned from a lifesize baby doll smirked in one corner, an inverted cross visible on its sooty babygro. We couldn't stay for too long, unfortunately; we left around half-midnight to get the bus home. I was by this time very tipsy and excited, in that jangly overtired way.

It was a great night out.

Stop shoving.

Further to my continual and ongoing rant about no job and crap job and why don't the Powers fix my life and whine and sulk et hoc genus omnes...

In a recent comment, angel said: "Have you thought of making creative/interesting stuff to sell at markets?"

And I said: "I've been thinking of making beadwork jewellery to sell. My freind is in town and she says there's an art/craft collective here-- could be just the break I need."

Her contact with said collective arrives in town in about a week. I shall be pushing actively for involvement in said collective. Unfortunately most of my art/craft stuff is in storage back in London, so I have a week to throw some bits together. Should be time enough-- my language course finishes today so I'll have rather less on my plate. I reckon I'll make a few pieces of bead jewllery, just simple stuff. If I have time I may whip up some small paintings, but that's less important.

I am starting to think this was the direction that I've been pushed in for the last few months, if not longer. Synchronicities abound. I've frequently considered doing something like this but didn't know how to go about it and lacked the confidence to really try. Also I generally don't meet that many arty-crafty people-- it's hard to do things in a vacuum, without input from others.

And yes, the writing is still my number one priority. But I need to find a way of earning some money, like, yesterday, and I'd prefer it if I could earn said money in a way that doesn't make me go totally mental please.

Bog off.

I'm getting rid of that stupid site tracker. There's never any good news there. Most of the people who come here are sad sacks looking for "some pix of a dog and a rilly rilly FAT CHICK like going for it", or "some pix of a CAR CRASH all with blood and dead guys and stuff". I mean, you want to look at that stuff, that's your wossname, fine, have fun, but learn to use a bloody search engine. You see, a search engine is not a person. It does not understand hilarious colloquial names for parts of the human body. Furthermore it does not respond to threats, or to repetition; typing the same query again but with capitals, exclamation marks, added profanity and/or extra instances of the word "beaver" will avail you naught.

And that's not the worst of it. Having polluted my referral logs with your fetid imaginings, you keep coming back. You run exactly the same foul and moronic search again and again, and you keep coming back to my blog from said foul and moronic search. What is going through your minds-- do you think a weblog will suddenly metamorphose into a bestaility and car wreck site if you look at it often enough? Are you doing this just to bother me? I hate, loathe, despise and pity you.

Except for the pity part. I lied about the pity.

I've changed my mind.

Things are fun, today at least, and I am appreciating every lucious moment and hurling my fun-having into your face like a big squishy Pie of Fun, but they (things) are not good. If things were good, I would have a job, and my job would be to write stuff.

I have no focus and I can't finish anything and right now I can't start anything and arrgggghhh. Argh argh argh. Why the hell did I decide to go into electronics?
Why, having gone into electronics and having found it impossible to find work in the field besides checking for shorts and dry joints, did I persist in banging my head against that brick wall?
Why am I here, now, in this life?
What the hell is wrong with me?
Why do I have writer's block all the time now?
How come it took me so long to get a grip on what I needed to be doing?
Why can't I come up with one teeny-tiny workable idea?
Why does everything I write seem so cheap and trite an derivative and somehow rootless, like bad fanfic in search of a fandom?
Why does everything take so damn long when the days go by so fast?
Why doesn't anyone tell me what the rules are until the game's over and I've lost?
Is my life really over, am I really washed up at 29?
What is it with people like me, why do we do what we do?
Why do we take the shit that we take?
How come, after a total of six years of studying (not to mention various short courses in this, that and the other), I can't earn more than the minimum wage?
How come it's still poxy jobs with poxy money and poxy H&S violations that have so far left me in near-constant pain, cost me much of the feeling in two fingers of my right hand and will indubitably cost me more the longer I keep doing jobs like that?
Should I just chuck it all in and join the Exodus Collective?
Where can I find a job doing what I'm good at?
Why, when I can paint, draw, write, sing, solder, read circuit diagrams, knit, sew, spin, dye, conduct minor household repairs, dig, plant, pot on, take cuttings, sweep (floors and streets both) and use many popular software packages, can I not find someone to pay me to do one or a combination of those things?
Why are half the things I'm good at several hundred years out of date?
Why aren't there any jobs out there where I can actually use the skills I have rather than having to learn a bunch of new and frankly very boring skills on the fly so I'm underperforming and I look like a moron and I never get promoted or even given a long-term contract?
Why does everyone keep telling me to go into IT?
Do I look like I'm going to enjoy a long and productive career in IT?
How come I'm still searching for work that is so far below my skills level?
How come I can't even get the work that is so far below my skills level?
What is my skills level?

Do I even belong in this world?

Where do I go if I don't?

Happy Deathday!
Your name:	mordant carnival
You will die on:	Saturday, December 13, 2014
You will die of:	Food Poisoning
Username:
Created by Quill

But I'm so young and beautiful!

Oh, no. Wait. That was some other chick.

acidexia is back.

And here, too.

I am pleased.

Busy, busy, busy.

Sooo....

Lurid's now been back from his travels for a week or so, and since the big 'puter is currently in an advanced state of fuckedness (the back plate is live and the hard-disk is dead) we're reduced to fighting over the laptop. Hence the bloglessness and the lack of Evil on thee mudshow. Sorry, guys; hopefully things will get back to normal soon.

Energy work: plateu-ed. Not a problem, though-- this always happens with any developing skill. Just need to work steadily on and not a) get discouraged or b) start imagining results where no results are.

Novel: bloodybuggeringbastardingnoveldamndamndammitARRRRGGHH.

Sundry other writing: Okayish.

Castillano: Fuego mal, arbol guapo.

Job: May be some reception work at a hostel in town. Or there may not. We shall see.

Went up Montserrat today. Was lazy and took the cable car, rather than walking. My excuse is that I sort of overdid it in the pool* yesterday and my legs were still a bit stiff. Didn't participate in any religious goings-on, but I did queue up for ages to see the Black Virgin. She is a very eerie icon; I felt some kind of energy radiating from her, not inimical or threatening in any way but completely unlike anything I've ever worked with. Didn't pluck up courage to touch her. Maybe next time.

Now I'm back in Bagsnatcher Central with L.A. Not sure what we'll be up to later, but it's certainly lively in Barça today. There are Harley Davidsons everywhere (it's the centenery, y'know), and we passed an embryonic Pride happening on the way here. Might try and hunt down a Goth club, or might just head on home and chill out in the pool** for an hour or so. Life is quite undeservedly gooood.




*The free open-air swimming pool for residents of where I live.
**Nothing to add, really. This footnote exists purely to rub in the whole pool thing.

Thinking aloud.

I finally did it. I shaved off the rattail. Never again will anyone (coughGaneshcough) be able to accuse me of having a mullet. I was shaving my head and it was taking so damn long, it was such a hassle, and then I got to the back. I was thinking about how I was going to have to shave round the stupid thing and what a fiddle that would be, and I just went rghghghghh. Sides which, I'm thinking of getting a tatt on the back of my neck, which would be hidden by the hair. The skin there has been asking for a tattoo, just like the skin on the side of my head used to beg before I got my rose done. It's a nagging physical sensation, as if someone was holding their hand out over that point, not quite touching it. When the ink is in place then contact will be made, the circuit completed. I belive the thing my skin requires is an angelic figure of some kind. I'm searching for the right image.

My novel is trying to kill me. This is the hardest thing I've ever done. I know it's all there, all the componants are in place, waiting within the empty page for me to find them, yet... I keep getting lost on the way. What the hell happened to my imagination? Why can't I think anymore? And then I want to abandon it, and I can't: it throws up some enticing image or concept, and I have to go back. This thing will have blood from me before it's done, you mark my words.

I love the view from my window. Just now I'm watching some people (an adult and a kid?) flying a big kite in the field across the way. It's one of those huge ones like a parachute; must take a hell of a lot of strength to hang on to it.

Sidebar issues and a terrible confession.

What with the move and various hard-drive crashes and the fact that it's cheaper to surf from Bagsnatcher Central than to use the dialup, my access to my bookmarks is somewhat limited these days. I find I actually need to keep my sidebar something like up-to-date if I don't want to spend half my time Googling stuff. Yeah, I know some of the links are dead. Sometimes it's just because I know that X has a link to Y's new place and I can just go via their blog instead; sometimes it's because I still feel sad and angry that Y got harrassed out of blogdom by some shithead stalker and can't quite bring myself to remove the link. Sometimes it's because I knackered my sidebar and had to go back to an old copy which had the dead link in it. And sometimes it's because the deadlinkee was a boring little erk whose site I never visited much anyway, so I haven't noticed the deadness.

The lack of reliable bookmarks also means that I now have to own up and link to Neil Gaiman's pointy pointy blog. You can all stop laughing now.

Your soul came from the Bowels of HELL! You're a
demon preying on the mortals of Earth. BACK TO
HELL WITH YOU!


Where Did Your Soul Originate?
brought to you by Quizilla

But then you already knew that.

Paper.

I'm getting increasingly worried about the state of my writing. It's not so much of a problem on this thing, since it's basically just a braindump, and there's no problem with my technical/report writing skills. But the fact remains that over the last few years I've fallen into some bad habits (like starting sentances with "but", for instance). Or maybe I was just never that good?

Reading over those articles, as well as working on the dreaded Book, has really brought home to me how slack I've got. This is supposed to be my craft, you know? A thing which is honed and polised through out the years to become a big... uh... honed, polishy thing. It's not just style I'm concerned with, the ability to find the best turn of phrase, to avoid cliche, etc etc. It's basic stuff like grammar, spelling, proofreading. It's like I got as far as GCSE Eng. and then stalled; or, to be more accurate, degenerated. Can't seem to collect my thoughts anymore.

Don't really know what to do, but if I really intened to drag on with this thing then something's got to change. I've signed up for a writing excercise mailing list (my brain promtly went fzzzt in the face of the first couple of assignments, but hey), and I'm going to try and find some online lessons-- some in creative writing, some in English Language round about the A-Level mark.

Funny to think that the only actual writing-related qualification I possess-- the only one I ever tried for-- is the GCSE in English that I got when I was 15. (I got a B.)

More Work.

Today was less blah, but there's still a blah factor. I'm hoping that a good long work bashing sesh tomorrow will help put things to rights. Apparently it's not just me; a couple of folk on my language course are also bemoaning their joblessness. The bars in town go a bit quiet over summer, apparently; everyone's at the beach. If I don't get something soon I'm gonna end up trudging up and down the sand selling brewskis to the tourists. "CocacolaaAAA! AguaaAAA! FantaaAAA! CervezaaAAA!" Any work's better than no work.

Obviously I would prefer something writing-based, but I reckon that's a nonstarter. Still, maybe something voluntary in that field... we shall see, we shall see.

Trouble is... well, the trouble is that I don't know where to start. Unemployment here is pretty high, and most people seem find jobs through networking. Which is really, really bad news for me because as you may have gathered from the look and feel of this, my corner of the internet, little Mordant doesn't play well with the other kiddies. It's hard to schmooze when you despise everyone, especially people from the land which gave you birth. There's also the whole pervert mutant chaoette anarcho-someting-or-the-other issue; I somehow doubt I'm really going to fit in down the Let's All Sit Around And Complain Bitterly About How It Really Sucks To Voluntarily Leave Your Own Country For No Pressing Reason Other Than The Cheap Booze And Abundant Shiny Sunshine (Which Ironically Is One Of The Things We Bitch About) And Brag About How We've Been Here For 57 Years and We Still Only Know Three Words Of Spanish club.

I've looked into some of the expat women's organizations round here. They have coffee mornings.

And they play... bridge.

There are entities beyond our ken and the entities read my blog (coz I'm hard) and putting things into words = magick.

Okay, Powers that Be, angels, aliens, demons, whoever. I've been patient for long enough. Now I'm going to stamp my tiny foot and demand ACTION.

First off, let's ginger this old nag up a bit, eh? Been blah on an epic scale lately. Sick of BLAH. Not asking to leap out of beddy-byes every morning with a song in my heart, just give me a little get up and go. I feel like my pleasure centres have been replaced with bathroom sealant. I crave oomph.

Second off: Less of the no job nonsense. It's just getting silly. Even the thrift store turned me down. Yes, things have got to the point where people don't even want me to work for fucking free. I'm doing my bit, but-- a little mystic help? A little astral nudge in my favour? A shiny cloak of irresistable hire-me glamour? Anything, really. I will be all grateful and a better person and stuff.

Dream on.

For some reason I have been making cameo appearances in other people's dreams lately, mostly as a power/authority/leader figure of some kind. I'm up to three people so far, which could still be dismissed as coincidence but is verging on the fishy. We shall see.

I can't see you.

But I know yoyu're there. Staring. Always staring. Watching. I hear the sussurus of your flickering eyelashes as you blink, once, maybe twice an hour. Staring! What do you want of me? What do you want of me, you squamous, blasphemous creatures? Get away! Get awayyyyy!

Chafe.

You will have noticed a marked increase in bloggery from this quarter in recent weeks. This is partly to do with the fact that I don't have to fight Lurid Archive for the internet at the moment, but mostly it's because I'm having trouble writing the stuff that I want to be writing. (Yes, this is me with writer's block. Be afraid. Be very afraid.)

Aaaaanyway. I know what all you little fishies really come here for. You want to see the Fattest Woman On Earth, and her Dog-Faced Son. You want to see the Living Skeleton. You want to sit and watch the Amazing Geek eat a live chicken. You don't come for the inbetween days, you come for those too much info posts, doncha? And if you don't, well-- Browser. Back button. Fly, my pretties, fly!

So it happens that today is a hormonal kind of day, and I find that I am in full-on Ginger Snaps mode. An extraordinary, aimless rage consumes me, little tentacles of energy snapping out and snagging on things: my own flaws, all your screw-ups, life stuff, the horror of the world. Memories and newsfeeds. The images flash past my mind too fast to hang onto.

Rghghghghhgh.

I'm sick of sane people. I'm sure I've mentioned this, but it bears repeatin' now: sane people suck. If you don't have at least a few little warps in your record then I have no time for you, for you are a dead thing that walks among the living and your soul is like unto those gritty bits in an economy beefburger. How the hell can you live in this world and not be crazy? Just a tiny weeny bit crazy? What is wrong with you people? Escapism I get-- I totally get-- but don't live your life pretending there's nothing to escape from. You insulate yourselves, numb yourselves to everything that might chafe at your conscience, rationalise every action you take until your passage through life is so slick that you might as well be Vaselined all over. But you miss that friction, don't you? You miss having something to gmaw on. So you pick fights. You scavenge, you scratch around, you nose and snuffle and dig until you find someone with a raw patch on them, someone a touch less mean than you, someone who either can't or won't fight back. You find the chink in the armour and then you de-gut them. Can't find a real person? Fine! There's always a straw-man caricature you can kick around, a made-up bugaboo to get between your teeth and worry at. But don't let anyone criticise you!, oh dear me no. Don't let anyone suggest that there might be the teeniest little flaw in your approach. Don't let anyone suggest that the only pain you are capable of comprehending is your own. If anyone gets on your case, then anything goes. No holds barred. Be imaginative! You can always find a way to be the hero, to rework and rewrite the story until you're a brave little David to a big bad Goliath. Deny, demand, rationalize.

No, actually: I was wrong. We're all mad. It's just that the majority of people are mad in a certain, very specific way, and since everyone around them is mad in the same way, they assume that must be sanity and get very very cross with anyone whose madness doesn't mesh nicely with their own.

Stupid Homo Sapiens Sapiens. I'm defecting. I'm joining the People's Republic of Coffee-tables. With my brains and their built-in magazine racks, we shall rule the WOOOORRRRLLLDDD!

Your time is done, primates.

Gazpacho moments.

Added yet more links to my already elephantine sidebar. This time it's my stuff-- three things I've written and had published online. I've been wrestling with the decision for a while. On one hand, I'm not proud of any of them. The quality of the writing isn't really up to snuff, and the damn things are so riddled with typos and sundry glitches that reading them makes my stomach churn. Be that as it may, it's probably better to have a few peices out there, however flawed, and to make them easily accessable from my main blog. Most of my regulars will already have read the damn things, but if you missed them the first time round then you have only to scroll down to [ Typo Hell ]. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Hey la, hey la...

...My boyfriend's back. Well, almost. Gonna leave in a couple of hours to meet him at the airport. Which is, y'know, good and ungrimful and things.

This next part requires a little background. From a messageboard post I made some months ago:

The threads/paths... Some of them seem to be emotional narratives (which appear to me as thick ropes of plasticine-looking stuff) but a lot of them look like things I call probability strands. It's really hard to describe them since they aren't really three-dimensional shapes. If you can try and picture a long hollow cylindrical shape that's both convex and concave so that you see an inside and an outside at the same time, that's sort of how they look. They also have more colours than the Emotion strands.

(This, incidentally, is how I do a lot of my magick these days. I try and fix it so that events go down the right probability strand. Of course some events don't have a probability strand attached to them so I can't make them happen.)

Did a scry last night to find out about my chances of a job soon. Couldn't hold the trance for long becuase I was too tired but I definately saw quite a few probability strands connecting me to my desired short term future-state. They were nice and short, too, with few tangles. (The length of the strands tends to refer to time, the convolutions to difficulties encountered in achieving one's goal. Colours generally refer to the field of influence-- job-related probability strands generally show up yellow.) Some of the strands looked a bit stunted, though, and the future-state node was small and gnarly-looking, which means that my next job will probably suck. But hey, we didn't need to scry to find that one out, did we?

Beyond the immediate mesh of strands, I can see a large oblong mass, a bit like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssy. I think this might be the main career-node, but there's not enough detail avaliable yet. I can do these scrys without entering a trance, but there's less detail and it's harder to interact with the strands. The job strands are particularly unweildy, perhaps because my desire for a nice job has little to do with right action/Will/whatever you call it. Magick to get what you want is always a lot harder than magick to get what you really need. (Stupid magick.)

Although I'm remaining fairly well grounded I am spending less and less time in what I might call normal human consciousness. When I do pop back, it's uncomfortable; restrictive. (How ya gonna keep them down on the farm, now that they've seen Paree..?) The trouble is that when I do go back, I forget there's any other way to look at the world. I get trapped in my old, linear/paranoiac/negativistic mindset, and all I can see is rejection, prejudice, obstacles. Every time you see me getting all mizogged about everyday things, that's me temporarily forgetting to be a magickian.

I almost never perform rituals now, preferring to potter around in my little string garden. I mean to get back into that again. Should I ever misplace my ability to see and interact with the probability web, it would be a real downer to have no fallback position. You can never rehearse the basics too much. You can never build too sturdy a foundation.

Nope, it's gone.

Lucky I write all my posts in Notepad, eh? Let's try that again...

Stupid Blogger.

Hmm. That last post seems to have gone byebye. Maybe a quick bump?

I am losing what little patience I had.

Right. I'm officially fed up and desirous of my life back.

I was absoultely determined that this week I'd get a firm job lead of some kind or another, but the cupboard has remained bare. I've already tried a lot of places and been turned away, so I'm having to look further and further afield. Extensive perusal of the job boards confirms that the Spanish electronics industry is just as dead here as everywhere else. Still and all, I'll see if I can't find a few companies in want of assembly staff.

On the voluntary front, I'm going to see if Humana need any staff in their thrift stores tomorrow. Unlikely that they'll have paying work, but that's not the point. The point is that a person needs a bit more shape to their day than two hours of language school in the arvo.

Am I really that unemployable? Seriously. Am I going to spend the rest of my life scratching around for crappy little jobs everywhere I go? I know my CV is a bit patchy, what with the discrepancy between my electronics quals and the kind of jobs I've been doing, but I'm getting turned down by burger bars, FFS. How can anyone be too shit to work in a burger bar?

I'm really starting to worry that I've blown it, that because my emlpoyment history is all this minimum-wage stuff nobody's ever going to consider me for anything else. You're only as good as your last job these days, and fresh starts get thinner on the ground the older you get.

This is ridiculous. I mean, me! Mordant Carnival! Turned down by purveyors of rancid lard and BSE! They should be kissing the hem of my combats and begging me to flip their bits of dead cow! Filthsome snitticles.

So I've been googling for, uhhh, adult emporia and events and so forth, where I might actually be appreciated. Should've tried the scene in the first place, but I came over all shy for some reason. Jeese, it's hard to find listings for s£x shops on the internet, particularly when you don't know how to say "s£x shop" en español. You think you have to wade through pr0n to get to an ordinary site? I can't even turn on the content filter; that would sort of defeat the object.

Being boring.

One of those days. Meant to set off for town early and sniff out some job leads, but what with one thing and another I didn't get moving. Then I had a phone call from the language school telling me lesson was cancelled on account of staff sickness. That depressed the heck out of me for some reason.

Been too much of a shut-in lately. When I'm not at my class or surfing from bagsnatcher central, all I do is sit at home and study Spanish-- plus the odd break to play Icewind Dale. It's starting to mess with my mind. The other night I dreampt about a two-headed giant that wouldn't let me go past him until I'd conjugated several irregular verbs.

I reaaaally need to get out more.

Maybe getting out and about would be easier if I lived in town, but that's by-the-by. What I need is work, any work.

Trouble is... I'm all wrong for this, d'you see? I disconcert people. Too old to be a traveller scrounging for bar work. Not old or rich enough to be an expat looking for a place in the sun. I had this problem back in the UK, of course, being neither one thing nor the other, but here it's slightly worse because of the language barrier.

I'm going to redouble my efforts to find a job, be more assertive and imaginative. Besides all that, though, there's always voluntary work. Something I can fit around a paying job; half a day here, a couple of hours there. I'm not really sure where to start, but hey-- this is a university campus, there'll be something I can do. Maybe the SU needs something typing, or one of the thrift stores in town needs una dependienta? To recive, you must have your hands open, blah de blah de blah. Whatever.

Bored now. Job please.

Incomiiiinggggg!

Got sick of the psi site I was working from. Just too daft, you see. I realised that I've just had enough of a certain kind of daft. 'Scuse me, I feel a Bruce Banner moment coming on...

I'm getting more and sick of the denial-of-science crud that seems to infest everything these days. Don't like the scientific method? Don't think science has anything useful to say about the way the world works? Fine. Only do me a favour, yeah? Get the hell off the internet. That computer you're tap-tapping away at as you write yet another of your smug, pompous, reflexive diatribes is a product of the system you're so keen to denounce. In fact, get the hell out of modern civilization. Go and live in some desert place or a jungle or something, try and scratch a living in a hunter-gatherer stylee. Possibly you'll get some hideous disease, or something big and ugly will pass by and eat your legs; however, this shouldn't phase you at all because (as you keep telling me) we all create our own reality, maaaaan. I'm sure a clever little person like you will just whip out your copy of Solipsistic Wankage For Dummies and rustle up a new one.

See, if these jerks had an actual real Zen Master instead of a headful of skindeep Little Book of Po-mo slush, the Zen Master would have bonked them on their big stupid heads multiple times until they stopped coming out with this "reality isn't real" guff every time they opened thier mouths. There should be an emergency line where you could phone for an irate Zen Master to come round and bonk heads with a stick. Dammit, there should be some kind of Zen Fairy, some little sprite that appears whenever a nincompoop comes out with that "well, reality is, like, a mental construct, yeah? So we all create our own reality, you see? There is no spoon-- no, no, listen-- there is no spoon!" bilge, and whacks them repeatedly over the head with a really really big whacking stick. "Deconstruct this! BONK ON HEAD!"

See, as long as stick go BONK against skull, one needs science. As long as we are confined within the cloven pine of cause and effect, we shall need to understand the nature of the physical universe. Just trotting out stuff about how we shape the world with our minds and blah-de-blah-de-blah doesn't make the world disappear in a puff of special effects.

Don't tell me we can escape our linear, 2-and-a-half-D world when you don't even know what that means. You haven't escaped. You haven't even sorted out conjugal visits and a place on the prison's adult literacy programme. You haven't done squat except read the Illuminatus books, take very weak acid and then talk everyone's ear off. You are boring and repetative and need BONK on HEAD.

Also: Magick not parapsychology, fool. There's a certain amount of overlap, but it's not the same bunny. Not at all.

Also also: You do realise that the oh-so-liberating "all history is fiction!" thing you keep trotting out could be employed to bolster some verrry dubious political stances? Not going all Godwin's Law here, just sayin'.

Aaaanyway. What were we talking about again? Psi. Right. Having given up on Wingmakers, it's back to The Playful Psychic, where they at least pay lip service to the concept of reproducable results. Just going over the basics for now, psi-balls and the like. My psi-balls feel pretty good, firm and springy. I love playing with my psi-balls, squeezing and rubbing and... okay, okay, I'll stop. Seriously, there does seem to be a bit of an improvement, but it's hard to say. Could just be playing head-games with myself. We shall see. In any case I belive I shall stick to this excercize programme for now.

And in other news:

Book: Fine-tuning alphabet. Must have started it over at least a dozen times now. Working on humans-only scenes while the alphabet takes shape. Two characters keep wanting to cop off with each other. I don't want them to cop off. Mucks up plot. Will chuck a bucket of water over them in a minute. Also, I've developed a frankly bizzare crush on one of the bad guys. Stupid characters.

Spanish: Having trouble committing irregular verbs to memory. Stupid irregular verbs.

Job: No job. Fed up. Too old to waitress, apparently. Will poke agencies harder, but I fear the real answer is to call upon the Powers to aid me. Which I hate doing because every time I do it they send me something utterly FOUL, like litter-picking or whatever. Joke's over, guys. Whatever I was supposed to be learning from this-- graduated! Want nice happy job now. Go on. If you're going to play fast and loose with my metabolism and sleeping patterns, you can at least help me with the job thing.

I know you're reading this. I can hear you breathing.

Stupid Powers.

And the fun just keeps on leaving.

Turns out that the webzine in question is down. When I checked yesterday there was just a placeholder where the site should have been. Now the site's message board is back up, but nothing else is working.

Thing is, the exact same thing happened last summer. I sent off a story and the webzine disappeared due to hosing problems. I am a webzine jinx.

Bleph.

Decided to dust off the prehistoric animal story. I submitted it to another, unrelated webzine before leaving London, but since they haven't done me the courtesy of saying yea or nay in the nine or ten months that they've had it, fudge'em.

Lost.

You know I sent off that story the other day? Still haven't heard back, or even had an acknowledgement from the webzine. Don't know if a) the submission form thing I used isn't working, b) I somehow managed to mistype my email address, or c) the story was so poor and so far from what they want that they're just ignoring me and hoping I'll go away. Not the first time that's happened. I do make a point of reading a few issues of a zine before I submit anything, and these guys have bought from me before, but it's still entirely possible that I misjudged the market with this one.

Don't know whether to email them and find out what's happened, or just leave it alone and see if they get in touch. Feh.

Blair on those dodgy dossiers: "Mistakes were made".

%Gosh, really, Tone? You don't say.%

In which the diarist rails against the Powers.

Right after I got my Sekhim and Reiki attunements, I noticed an appreciable decrease in my tolerance for such things as alcohol and caffine. (Not that I was ever particularly good at holding my drink, but still...) So I cut down, adjusted, reflected on how it was probably for the best etc. Then came the sugar crashes; no longer could I relive my PMS with a surfeit of fudge. Well, not unless I wanted to spend the rest of the day struggling to keep my eyes open, anyhow.

And now it's not just sugar, but large portions of anything starchy which have this knockout effect. It's okay if I have lots of veggies and fiberous stuff with it, but a few slices of white bread or similar seem to put me out like a light. And I can't offset the effects with a swift jolt of coffee or gallons of cola, because the gnawing pain behind my eyes kicks in a lot faster these days.

I am not impressed. Spirits, angels, higher self, whoever's responsible for this: You spooky perverts have a lot to answer for. First my already laughable drinking legs are swiped from under me, then you force me to ration my espresso, then you fix it so I can't eat obscene quantities of sweeties anymore, and now I can't even fill up on bread when I'm peckish. I feel emasculated! Okay, so I didn't eat that stuff all the time anyway, but at least I knew I had the choice. Cheap lager, junk food, crisps, chocolate-- these things were part of my IDENTITY, dammit! You won't be happy until I'm living on brown rice and beansprouts! I demand to be able to shovel vast amounts of utter trash into my body, as and when I feel the need!

Well, you haven't won yet. I defy you. I'm having this beer. And that processed cheese sarny. And some crisps and a mars bar. You can't stop me, y--

*thunk*

ZzzzzzzZZzzzzzz....

Kicking.

Began my new Spanish course yesterday (Monday). They're starting from a very basic level, which means it's a bit boring at the moment. However, it's a fairly intensive programme and I'm sure I'll be glad of the revision when we get onto the harder stuff.

After class I sauntered off to the beach to do my homework, then went to see The Matrix: Reloaded. I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun it was. Yay! Kicking! P.V.C.! Motorbikes! More kicking! XPLOSHUNS! Hot'n'cold running Hugo Weaving! Endearing attempts at plot-twistyness which wouldn't have surprised a crosseyed two-year-old! Keanu's muscles! And other bits! Which in no way diminished my L.F. crush! Much more kicking! Yayyyy!

The Matrix = kicking movie. Damn, it is such a relief that most people have finally got over all the quasi-Bhuddist mystical crap in the first film and stopped touting it as a radical brainscrunge. Reality might not be real, and could concievably be constructed by a big 'puter? Gosh-a-roonie. Being lied to by our authority figures, you say? Well, I never did. Use your consciousness to affect the world around you? Have a marzipan petit four. Have two. And the spoon thing-- Gordon Bennett. I thought people would never shut up about that bloody spoon! The number of times I heard that stupid phrase trotted out, often by people who were simultaneously demanding that I unquestioningly accept the existance of a whole canteen of monogrammed stainless-steel cutlery, including grapefruit-knife and melon-scoop. No, you jackass, I'm not hidebound by my rigid scientific background, it's just that you're full of horseapples. You're so spiritually bankrupt that you're looking to Hollywood blockbusters for enlightenment. Now shut up and go away-- I'm trying to watch the kicking movie.

Finished the re-write on my latest short story. I have a terrible suspicion it might be utterly lame, but I'm going to punt it out anyway just as soon as I sort out my PayPal ishoos. I may just set up a new account, since the old one hasn't got any money in it and I messed up the credit-card thingy anyway.

Soul.

Go away. I'm having an identity crisis.

I wish magick worked like on the telly, where you go off to a cave or a desert or a haunted house and spend a night or two undergoing hellacious trials, after which you emerge irrevocably altered but chock full of powers. Instead it's like building an actual size model of St. Paul's Cathederal out of legos. Stupid magick. I want my powers.

Missing.

At the risk of losing all my hate cred, I have to say that the current period of extended Luridlessness is grating somewhat. I'm not pining away or anything, but when you're used to being around a person a lot of the time, adjusting to their abscence is... odd. You do stuff like going to make a cuppa and asking "D'you want one too?" then realising you're talking to an empty room. Doing stuff without them seems thin somehow. I'd been gagging to go and see The Matrix: Reloaded for ages, and now it's been out here for more than a week and I still haven't gone because there'll be no one next to me to nick jelly-babies off of.

I could buy my own jelly-babies, of course, but it's just not the same.

And I know it's daft, because he's only off doing safe academic stuff. I keep thinking about how I'd feel if my fella was on an oil rig, or out in the Gulf. Or worse, if he was missing. I think about all the people out there who are missing someone who's taken away, kidnapped by some bunch of bandits or disappeared by their government. I think about people who can't be with the ones they love because their love is proscribed by law. I think about how lucky I am that I know where all my special people will be tonight.

Throat

Since finally clawing my archive links back from the maw of oblivion, I've been doing some idle cross checking between my blog and my various other journals. And I found out something very interesting.

See, I like to sing. I'm not bad at it, either. And every so often, I will go on a bit of a singing jag, during which my voice will improve to the point where I start thinking seriously about recording summink or finding some other peeps to sing at. And every time I have got to that stage-- every time I have said to myself "Right! Now's the time to get the tape deck out and show some tonsil!" I have come down with a nasty oozy infection of the throat and/or lungs which precludes me from taking things any further. Every time, without fail. More telling still, every incidence of such an infection has coincided with a singing jag. I never, ever get one without the other.

Which means that some part of me has decided it's a good idea to be scuppering my vocal cords.

Right then, mush. You are BUSTED! You've had things your way for years, but the party's over. I'm coming for you. Those are my vocal cords and I'm having them back. Put down the wallpaper paste and STEP AWAY FROM THE VOCAL CORDS!

Stop. Laughing.

In a lurching, desperate attempt to stop my Castilliano sucking quite so hard, I have begun a Spanish weblog over here. I'll be mostly using it to corral my language-related links in one place, since my sidebar is now getting really silly. I've cheated with that first entry by running some of the verbs through a translator, but I'll try harder to work it out myself in future.

The new Blogger templates bite, BTW. I hope to hell they add some more soon.

Under construction.

Still not a superhero. Stupid magick.

Been conducting an audit of the dreaded book, sussing out what I've got so far.

I have the first chapter, which is set in our world, pretty much done. The first draft of the first chapter anyway. ('Course it'll need extensive re-writing; my stuff always does.) I have the human characters, their personalities, names, and a brief bio for all but two of them. I have a large chunk of the second chapter done too. I have a good outline of the beginning of the book, and a very rough notion of how the rest of the book is going to go. Several scenes from later in the book also exist in one form or another.

The world: I know pretty much what it looks like and how it works.

As to the peoples of the other world... I have a general outline for one of them, the civilization that the story will be about.. I know roughly who they are and what they're all about. I know pretty much what their dwellings are like, the sort of societies they have, what standard of living they're at. I have some of their alphabet done and in my mind I can hear how they speak, even if I don't know what the words mean yet. I can see how they dress, how they move, how they carry their babies, how they eat and sleep. I've begun making a few tentative pencil drawings that will help me later on.

I have purposely stopped trying to write the story until I have their language, history and religion down pat. Fortunately they're a patient lot, good at explaining things to the newcomer. Hey, here's one of them now-- I think he wants to tell me something...

Fix.

Realised today that when I fixed up my sidebar I inadvertantly left off my link to Happy Coconut. Didn't notice till now because I've been getting my political jollies over at ZNet for the last week or so. Remiss of me. Never mind; it should be back now. You can all pop across and read what fridgemagnet has to say about current plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, where people could be tried, convicted, sentenced and executed without any of that pinko appeal nonsense screwing things up. Sorry, did I say people? Silly me.

Bagsnatcher Central

That's what we call this internet caff, which shall remain nameless. (It's the big cheap one.) I come in here because you can buy a 24 hour pass for €1.40. Trouble is, it's chock full of villains. There are warning notices hither and yon telling everyone to watch out for theives but every time I come in here for any great length of time I see some poor so-and-so getting turned over. I was sort of hoping to see a chair fight today, but so far there's been nothing but minor beer-related squabbles. This might seem callous but since the chair fights are going to happen anyway, you either go somewhere less skanky but more expensive or learn to treat it like street theatre. 'Sides, people hardly ever get hurt, they just play who's-got-the-biggest-Chair-Antlers until someone backs down.

Signed up for an intensive Spanish course today. Two hours a day, five days a week, for four weeks. I start on Monday. Should be enough to let me function adequately. I'm not doing too badly working on my own, but I want something a bit more structured. I've been toying with the idea of starting a Spanish blog, which would give me much-needed practice and also provide innocent amusement for passersby. Hmmm.

After a desultory sniff round Temp Hell (no dice) and signing up for my course, I decided to treat myself. Bought the book on Spanish wildflowers that I've been promising I'd get for months now. The plan tomorrow is to go temp-bothering in the morning and then take a stroll round by the Uni, check out las flores, write it up. Good excercise.

The alphabet? Ah, yes. The alphabet. Goddamn the alphabet. I spent about three hours last night redesigning the letter A. Maybe 40 years was a bit optimistic. But I can feel them, y'know? The imaginary people, I mean. Leaning over my shoulder, murmuring: "No... not quite like that. Bit more round, and that line should stand up more." They're never satisfied, I tell you. Never! I think the best thing to do might be some trance work. Pop into mindspace, find one of them and slap him around till he shows me how it's supposed to look.

Scene.

WRITER: I'm so fed up and cheesed off and things. The world seems full of people who are both younger and more accomplished than I. Why do you, Fragile Grasp On Reality, and you, Twisted Self-Indulgent Resentment, think that is?

F.G.O.R.: Those people had more initial talent then you, and they've worked harder. They also have something resembling focus. And they don't keep dithering over finishing stuff and punting out stuff they have finished. Oh! And when they do find themselves on a roll they don't shoot themselves in the foot by downing tools and playing Icewind Dale. They want to polish stuff off and show it to the world; you want to crook your arm around your paper and lean over it and mutter "not finished yet!" until everyone gives up and goes away. You continually punch below your weight because deep down you're terrified that you're not really that good.

T. S. I. R.: Those people had more luck than you. They had more support from those around them in their formative years, better teaching, better advice, and a magic draw with an unlimited supply of those nice pencils that you like-- y'know, the green ones? Nothing that's happened is your fault. If you'd had all their advantages, you'd be as good as them. Better, in fact.

WRITER (schnoogling up to T.S.I.R. like a rhesus monkey clinging to its fake cloth mum): I wuv you, Twisted Self-Indulgent Resentment. Don't ever weave me.

T.S.I.R.: Of course not, sweetie. I'll stay forever and make everything all right.

F.G.O.R.: I'm going out to shoot myself. It's urgent.

WRITER: 'Bye then.

Ancestral voices.

With vague memories of a telly prog I saw once stirring in my brain, I've been looking at proto-world language as a possible starting point for my new language. If you're not familiar with the concept, the proto-world languge hypothesis says that all languages evolved from a single ancestor language back in the mists of time, and that by looking at similarities between languages it might be possible to reconstruct this ancient tongue. I find the idea strangely moving.

Random

Results of random Googlege while I wait for my Windows updates to finish downloading...

The BBC actually went to the trouble of making a homepage for Gareth Keenan, the lanky creep from The Office. Man, I can't belive they've stopped making that show after two series. It ws so horrible and funny. Everyone recognises someone from that show; David Brent is definately the bastard son of my old job-club leader, and there's this one person I used to know online who was just uncannily like Gareth.

Typing orange monkey flower picnic into Google gets you this (aw, blessssss), whereas green panda wobble ankle noise gets you neuroscience and Digimon fanfic. Meanwhile, over at blue ox strangle television we find Dragonball Z fanfic. It's not that I've got anything against fanfic per se but... Am I the only person who actually makes up stuff anymore? I'm too frikkin' mercenary, that's my trouble. Just can't imagine putting in the effort if I don't own the copyright.

More Oooh.

Or possibly just Hmm. We'll see.

How to Create a Language

Reasons for abandoning this whole twisted scheme before I expend any more time or energy on it:

1) It's not like I don't have other stuff to do. Including learning a real language.
2) This whole thing is, quite possibly, just an attack of toxic perfectionism. I'm probably just being anal-retentive about this whole language thing as a stalling technique; the longer I spend writing the damn thing, the longer it is before I have to show it to anyone. Fear of faliure/rejection, et hoc genus omnes.
3) Let's face it, my English grammar could do with a wash and brush-up before I go giving myself glossopoietic* airs.


Reasons for seeing twisted scheme through to the bitter, bitter end:

1) I always have other stuff to do. Big central project that I really graft away at (currently learning Spanish) plus three or four little side-projects that I ditch and come back to as and when, thus keeping BRANE from seizing up with panic if the Big Central Project stalls. That's how I work. That's how I work best. This would mean less screwing-around time, but there you go.
2) I really and truly belive this is a necessary part of the novel. The more I flesh out my imaginary culture, the more detail I put into my backstory, the richer and more beliveable the finished article will be. And I've been doing much better with the avoidy/not-finishy/got-to-be-perfect thing. That last article I punted out? Chock full o'typos.
3) This will probably help with my English grammar rather than hindering it, since checking out grammar and language resources is an intrinsic part of said plan. In fact, it'll probably do my language studies in general a bit of good.
4) Language is very important to me, and the thought of creating a new one makes me all tingly with Nerd Joy.
5) There are already half-baked, bitty, dashed-off-on-the-back-of-an-envelopey, weak, derivative, and downright shoddy fantasy books enough and to spare in the world. Why the hell would I want to add to the heap?

Okay. Glossopoiesis wins. At my current rate of progress I can expect to finish my novel in, ooh, a little under 40 years.

It really had better not suck.


*Yes, I know that's probably not a real word.

Oooh.

Ooh, would it be bad and wrong of me to use this handy Alphabet Synthesis Machine to help things along a bit? Oooh.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Dan has contrived five ways to improve X-Men 2. (The permalink is buggered so you'll have to scroll down.) Contains spoilers, and the term "veiny bangstick". May cause liquids to be ejected through nose.

Oh, for the love of Mike.

I seriously need to hurt whovever came up with this idea. Where do I start? Where do I even start? Whoo, filing your nails, wehey, pink shirt, 's a bit, uhh, camp innit? Cor, you want to watch it, mate! They'll think you're batting for the other team!

Killkillkillkillkill.

(Via plasticbag.)

*Sob*

Finally fixed the almighty mess I made of my sidebar the other night. My looker-uppers are back. Yeerrrs. At least Solonor made my site his aortal thing of the whenever before I knackered half my links, which was nice. Ahhh... ego-stroking...

The thought occurs that I should really dust off my writey blog, which I've allowed to languish in limbo for months on end. All that stuff last year (dropping out of the University of Fishpacking, sucky jobs, mad packing scheduals, etc) was no good for my noggin at all.

An update on the progress of That Novel, for anyone who's still even remotely interested.

To Beelzebub with backstory! Vaya al Diablo, research! Screw you with a large vegetable marrow, linguistic invention!

Why? Why am I doing this? Why can't I concentrate on churning out some unassuming little potboiler? Why did I have to get all fatbeardy and start drawing maps? Oh, sure, that's where it starts. Let's just have a cute little pointy pointy map to go in the front of the book, shall we? There, isn't that nice? But wouldn't it look even better with a few runes? Only we can't use runes, really, because they're so old hat. So we have to invent our own alphabet. Only we can't just invent our own alphabet, can we; we have to make it convincing. Which means looking at lots and lots of other people's alphabets, taking carfeful notes in our special shiny Novel Notes book. And then there's the actual language! Don't forget that. You can't just shove in any old mumbo-jumbo, oh no. You've got to sit down and devise a passable grammatical structure and about a thousand words of vocab. I'm a huge, huge nerd, aren't I? I'm a collosal and irredeemable geek. A stunningly handsome, charismatic and edgy geek, but a geek nontheless.

Oh, and I've lost all faith in my grasp of English grammar and puctuation and of course I've always spelled for shite and my dialogue still bites; everyone talks like an instuction manual. I've been writing up lab reports for too bloody long. And I know, I just know, that after all this I'm probably just going to end up with some gawdawful sub-Mercedes Lackey drivel that'll just rot on my hard drive forever and ever, Amen.

I loathe writing. Writing sucks. Books suck. All written matter is corrupt and evil and foul foul foul.

Goats.

Damn, I love the veiw from my living-room. I mean, I hate to gloat but... what am I on about? I love to gloat! I could run the 600 Yard Gloat. I could Gloat for my country. I could be the Girl Who Won The Gloating Match Despite Her Broken Leg.

So anyway, the sky is a hazy perlescent blue, and there are just scads of swifts swooping and gliding through the air. There is enough birdsong for 53 standard dawn choruses. Also, there are lots of really dolly yellow light aeroplanes flying around for some reason. No goats this morning, sadly, but they were here yesterday. I dig the goats. Some guy herds them in the field down the ways; I can watch them grazing from my window.

Been a bit under the weather the past couple of days. Some viral thing, not quite worthy of the 'flu title but yecchy enough to keep me indoors with my Spanish lessons. Since I haven't been able to enroll on a course yet, these still consist of doing the excercises from Spanish for Dummies, watching Spanish telly, and translating H***y P***er back into English with the aid of a dictionary. Have you any idea how fed up it's possible to get with H***y P***er? And I haven't even worked my way through the first book yet (groan). I got a Barbara Vine novel in Spanish the other day, but it's a complete non-starter. My vocabulary just isn't wide enough to lift me from the vale of Kid Lit. yet. Gahh. I feel like I'm stewing in juvenility, y'know? Today I was slogging away at H***y P***er and I found my eyes straying towards the Noam Chomsky books. I'm sitting there thinking, "Oooh! I'll just finish this chapter and then I can go and re-read Manufacturing Consent!" What is this-- Bizzaro World?

The only really ungloatworthy thing in my life at present is a slight dearth of Lurid Archive, who has beetled off on one of his maths-related jaunts and won't be back for a few weeks. Blah. Oh, well-- at least I'll have the internet connection to myself. My messageboard has been looking decidedly more healthy since I did away with the Gawdawful popups but it really deserves more time than I spend on it.

BAMF!

Okay, further to my X-Men triggered return to psi excercises: In order to overcome my ingrained scepticism and self-doubt I have been searching for the maddest, most out-there New Age nutsack psi sites I can find. This looks like just the thing: Wingmakers, the Official Site of the 21st Century. If you dig your looney fluff, this is a primo slice thereof. They have helpful hints on everything from levitation to invisibility. Should be interesting. I'm going to start working through their site; I'll keep y'all posted as to what happens (or maybe just BAMF! on over and fill you in in person).

This is what happens when you neglect your stalking duties.

I admit it, people. I haven't been reading your weblogs with my usual sticky mouth-breathing compulsiveness. So I missed the news that Mr Coates is Between Jobs again, and accordingly strapped for cash with which to maintain the 'Lith.

See, this is why I need to sell more stories. My Paypal account has about US 50c in it at present. Bleph.

Sidebarred

For those of you who can actually read my sidebar, I've added a new section for mental health type stuff: suicide prevention, eating disorder support and self-injury support. I know that some of my regulars have ishoos with this kind of thing. There are a few links there now and I'll add more as I get around to it.

If you have any links you think would be helpful, tag me or leave a comment.

Edited to say: If you know a support group for people who are daft enough to try to update their sidebar at 12:30 am after a couple of shots of Jim Beam, pleeeaaase contact me. I need help.

Light is poison.

The rain in Spain has played a low-down, dirty trick upon yours truly. Yesterday I was in town having a brewski at Cafe Zurich, and it started to chuck down in that special vertical ocean way. So today when I woke up and it was a bit cloudy, I assumed that more rain might be on the cards. I went out sans sunblock, sans shades, sans everything but a knockoff Cure tee, jeans and army boots. Mistake. For it was all sunny by the time I got into town, and it just kept getting sunnier. Reeeeallly sunny, y'all. Yep, this is one sunny old part of the world, alright. And just because I know that many of you are reading this from London and other wet soggy places where they see the sun so rarely that its appearance can trigger mass hysteria and human sacrifices to the Fire In The Sky, I'm going to bitch about how I got wayyy too much sun today and it's made me feel a bit foggy-headed and my eyes sting.

I did mention that I'm here till August next year, right? Not just on my hols here, oh no. You can't comfort yourselves with the notion that in a few short days I'll be back and soaking in the drizzle, just like you only more miserable because one long weekend every year-and-a-half is just enough to let you see what you're missing without taking the edge off the SAD. Nuh-uh! I'm here for another 17 months, baby. Choke on it.

Oh, no.

Oh, no no no. After everything I've said, everything I've done-- you're back. Why? I thought I'd finally weened you off reading this thing. What's it going to take to make you get over this FREAKISH OBSESSION? You are a sad, sad person who repeatedly comes back to read the online diary of an unemployed failed electronics engineer whose last job but one was cleaning toilets.

Look out of the window. Do you see all those people walking by, those teeming multitudes? Don't you ever get the urge to go and join them, instead of frittering away your precious life like this? Think of the time and resources you've expended to get where you are today. Think of the new and wonderful experiences-- eye-opening, mind-expanding, life-changing experiences that await you if you'd only STOP READING THE UNEMPLOYED CLEANING LADY'S DIARY AND GET A LIFE! Museums, parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty, sights you may never have the opportunity to see again. Look, there's a guy over the road selling banana pancakes! Wouldn't you just love a banana pancake?

No?

Okidoo.

Anyway, job-hunting. On Wednesday I managed to meet up with the friend of a friend of a friend who might possibly know something about getting an English teahing job. On the down-side, she told me that as it's summer I probably won't be able to get anything like that for a few months. On the upside, she was really cool and very keen to socialize, which I could do with right now. Going stir-crazy. On Friday I went and tried my luck at a temp agency, with predictable results. Didn't quite get everything that the pink fluffy creature behind the desk said, but the basic thrust was that they couldn't take me on because I don't have a work permit. I pointed out to her that I didn't need a work permit as I'm an EU citizen. All I need is my NIE. But she wasn't having any of it. Not sure if this was one of those "make something up to get rid of the no-hoper" situations, or if she genuinely didn't know the employment legislation. No reason she should, of course, except that IT'S HER GODDAMN JOB. Left feeling deeply discouraged and fed up with things, especially little blonde people who wear fluffy pink cardies and pearly-pink nail varnish and pearly-pink lippy without any shred of irony. (I'm sorry, and I know that as a pointy pointy goth I'm in a sartorial glass house here, but if you're going to wear that kind of ensemble in public you'd better be RuPaul.)

Weekend rocked, though. Had dozing panther over for a few days, which was great. Went out for a picnic, went to the beach, saw X-Men 2 again, went to the Parc de la Ciutadella , went up in the cable-car, ate out, did loadsa fun stuff.

Games.

Spent most of Saturday trying to get to grips with Flash, with patchy success. I've gone through all the tutorials, but they're not that great: there's all this basic stuff that you have to do and it's just not covered properly. The books I've got are a bit too advanced, really. Also had a bash at the Heros IV campaign editor, but I can't make the quest huts work properly. Gahh.

Went out for a meal on Sunday, to this cracking little veg/vegan restaraunt/juice bar called Juicy Jones. Had a mean thali, then went off to the flicks again to see No Good Deed, which is based on Dashell Hammet's The House On Turk Street. It was okay, but... Look, it's a Hammet story, okay? And I know how things work in the Hammetverse. I realise that you have to suspend disbelief a little. But the whole premise of the film seemed to be that there's this woman whose sex appeal is so intoxicating that any guy within a five mile radius falls under her spell and will do all manner of dangerous/unpleasant/foolish things if he can only bump the lala with her. All she has to do is flash some thigh and they'll risk their lives, their fortunes, their careers to get on her good side. And this is a completely instinctive thing for her to be doing, BTW. She doesn't appear to think much about what she's doing or what the consequences of her actions might be, she just does it.

Not buying it. Sexual manipulation of men by women does happen, of course, but not in the ham-fisted way portrayed by the film. Unless you belive that all women are weak, manipulative, irrational succubi intent only on reducing the male brain to sago pudding and sucking it out along with the contents of their wallets and that men are powerless to prevent said suckage occuring, but I don't think Dave Sim reads my blog so we're probably okay on that score.

Glorious weekend, weatherwise. Gone a bit cloudy now though.

Money.

I think you should just buy $75 theremin kits and assemble them, then sell them for $150 on eBay. -- grant b.

Not a bad idea. But I had this dream about selling vandalized zombie dolls imbued with dangerous and unpleasant magick on e-bay, so I might do that instead. I don't know how to sell things on e-bay though. I shall have to find out more.

Beltane aftershocks.

Couldn't handle a demonstration yesterday (asthma) so went to el cine instead. Saw X-Men 2 (and yes, I am aware of the irony, trading real part in possible change for change-flavoured corporate bromide. I couldn't bloody breath. Really not up to marching. Okay?)

Anyhow, X-Men 2: I wannabeamutant. Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! Iwannabeamutant! IwannabeaMUUUUTAAAAANT! I'm going to be on Ian McKellan's team and we're going to titter at you and bitch about your hair! MUTANT!

Don't know if it was the oxygen debt, but somehow the film got my magickal muscles all-of-a-doodah. I felt all juiced and evolvey (and yes, I do know that's not how proper evolution works. I read Dawkins and Pinker, me. It's as good a metaphor as any). I sat in the cinema and made myself a little energy tent, like a wire-frame model made of beams of light coming out of my hands. I really opened myself up to the feeling. I could visualise universal energy pouring into my crown chakra which got all tingly (it hasn't done that in a while). It's strange but fun when a piece of featherlight entertainment can have an effect like that. I know I was definately meant to be in that cinema watching that film at that time. I needed a bit of a boost, you see; I'd been a bit slack on the old magick, what with the move and having a crisis of faith and stuff, and so I asked my (guides? Angels? Those spooky dudes that have been hanging around since my attunements, anyway) to Give Me A Sign. And Lo, the was a Sign.

I think they know me a bit to well.

Anyhow, I came out feeling like doing something impressive. Have decided to re-start my aborted psi excercizes. The attunements really shook me up in all kinds of ways: my tolerance for drugs like alcohol and caffine has dropped through the floor, my dreams have become more vivid, my memory attacks more frequent and more uncomfortable, my synasthesic experiences more pronounced. Oh, and I've only had the one fit since, which is some kind of record. It feels like things have started to settle down a bit now, though, and I'm ready to get back on the psi. I doubt very much I'll be floating pencils, you understand, but when I was doing the excercizes before I was having all sorts of interesting little experiences. I don't care if it doesn't do what it says on the tin, it does something, and that's the whole point. Trouble is, the work is all very repetative and you have to keep doing it every day, like sit-ups. And I'm already doing so many little bits and pieces every day that it's easy to conveniently "forget" some. It bugs me, though: my lack of sticking power, the way I get discouraged and let the rot set in. What I would like is someone who's already good at that stuff to poke me along, badger me to keep on with the exercises when I get slack. However that's unlikely to happen. Certain incidents over the course of the last year and a half have made me extremely distrustful of magickal alliances, especially over the internet.

A big prob is the restrictions I place on my own mental processes. "Oh, you can't write/think/say/do that! I doesn't look like the things that everyone else is write/think/say/doing! Do what that guy's doing, over there! Quick, before someone sees you!" No more of that. If it's the same as the other guys, fine. If it looks like a turnip, fine. If it's a fetching shade of lemon yellow, fine. If it goes CLUNK boink .vwzzzzzz SPROINGGGG then that's fine too. Everything is fine.

I'm definately an October-December person but I love the way that something shift-y generally happens to me around this time of year. Last year it was deciding to be a writer, and things are gradually shaping up in that department. This year it's been deciding to go full-on magickal freak.