elf | Entries tagged with self

Welcome to my journal. I've had one of these things for over 18 years, so I suppose it's time to put up one of those "About Me" posts.

Short intro bits:

Jump in anywhere. I don't care if comments are off-topic; I don't mind getting comments on incredibly old posts. You don't have to introduce yourself first.
Strangers: please be polite. Excessively rude comments may be mocked or deleted at my whim. Or both. I will decide what's "excessively rude." Anon comments are screened to allow me to decide without stressing out my other guests. If you're not sure what the standards are, feel free to browse the archives first.
Contents are random. This journal doesn't have a theme; I don't stick to specific topics. However, I often post about copyright activism, fandom, gaming, and religion. (Not all the "religion" posts will be labeled as such.)
CNTW ("Choose not to warn") - I often don't keyword-tag for triggery topics, although I try to put anything too intense inside a cut tag. I try to be mindful of what shows up on people's read lists but my own space sometime has graphic talk without warnings.
Links are okay. Anything public is okay to link to; asking is not necessary. (For that matter, private posts are okay to link to, but I'm not opening it up because someone wants to see it.)

General remix permission (from my AO3): I grant blanket permission for my fanworks to be used transformatively, interpreted broadly: remixed, sequeled, translated (although I'd really like to be notified about this), podficced, fic'd, filked, artified, vidded (is that even possible?) or otherwise used as a base for other fannish works, as long as no money is involved. If there's money involved, please contact me. I'm not going to fret over podfic-for-charity or fanart being sold, if any of my works managed to inspire that; I'd mostly just like to know.

( My specific interests and so on are inside )

I've been here forever. Like, pretty much literally forever, for Dreamwidth; I got my seed account in the first wave because I knew I wanted Dreamwidth to be my Permanent Online Home Forever, and it still feels that way.

I'm slow to follow people, because I generally like to read everything in my readlist (that's equivalent to the dashboard in Tumblr) and because I check DW at work, which means I'm not likely to follow anything that posts NSFW content outside of a cut tag. I'm even more selective about granting access, because I post sensitive info under lock - family health details, financial info, jobbish things that I don't want visible to potential employers or current coworkers. But I'm always happy to see comments and chat with people.

I never mind being followed, or having my public-visible content shared elsewhere. I don't mind comments from random strangers, and that includes off-topic comments that don't match the current discussion. Right now, anon comments are turned off because of spambots; I'm hoping to change that in the future.

My profile is accurate but outdated. I keep thinking I'll be more active in the communities I theoretically manage; maybe this is the nudge I needed to do that.

HELLO AND WELCOME; I hope you love it here as much as I do! If not, I'll understand; I do know that DW's features aren't what everyone needs, and I hope Tumblr refugees can find places that work for them.

From

jjhunter, because I need to start posting again, and a set of "who are you"-ish questions seems like a good starting point.

This meme began on tumblr, and involves "answer the questions, here or in your own space, then make up more questions for other people." I'll do those in another post.

1) What do you have in your pockets? / What stuff do you carry with you?
Right now, nothing; I'm wearing a grey fuzzy bathrobe and I tend to keep the pockets empty. Normally, I wear a belt-thing with pockets, something like this one (a google for [renfaire pocket belt] turns up similar images but no official sales site), only with more purple. I carry a *lot* of things in it--my Blackberry, my ereader, ID cards, money, BART ticket, keys, etc. (It's a pretty big etc; I carry a lot of tiny things.) I like having a purse that can't be yanked off my shoulder and doesn't unbalance me when I walk.

Because I wear that, I keep pretty much nothing in my normal clothes pockets anymore.

( 10 more, because Glitchen like doing things in elevens. )

Q is for Quit. In any endeavour, especially religious ones, it's easy to give up, to decide that the ends aren't worth the continuation of the means, that there's no *purpose* to going on. This is especially true in religious devotions that are mostly solitary, where there's no feedback, no checklist to confirm that we're doing it right, no sense of impact on the world around you. If we can't tell that what we're doing is changing anything, why bother? None of us have infinite time and energy and spoons to spend on acts that just leave us exhausted.

We sometimes build tricks for ourselves to distract us from enervation. We focus on the turn of the seasons, mention the importance of the fallow time of winter; we build rituals that are comfortable and enjoyable even we don't find them meaningful. But in the end, the drive to continue must come from within. Paganism is too amorphous to build large communities that provide the kind of support that can pull someone through depression or ennui, and too individualized for small groups to reshape their members without being changed as well.

We lack a talent for inertia, which means we have a great many people who start enthusiastically and drift away slowly, and many more who practice erratically. We start, and quit, and start, and quit, over and over.

( I'm never sure if I should consider that a strength or a weakness. )

I've pondered and worried, I’ve tightened the ropes
Feasted on sorrow and starved out my hopes
Now I come like a lover, my heart in my throat
Give me water, fire, and smoke

--from "Water, Fire and Smoke," by Betsy Ross

So many end-of-year posts. So many retrospectives, so many hopes and plans for the time yet to come. I get caught up in it too, until I start to compose my thoughts, and realize this is not end-of-year for me. That's in October, when the veils are thin and my nation begins its explosion into two months of frenzied parting with bizarre costumes followed by garish decorations and disruptions of the normal TV schedule for cloying messages of FAMILY and THE IMPORTANCE OF GIVING and GOOD CLEAN FUN. (I like a good-clean-fun movie as much as the next fangirl, but the winter-holiday-season ones tend to go overboard.)

Wouldn't it be easier to think of this frantic spend-and-celebrate season as the beginning of the year, rather than its end? As a start, followed by that January slump where it seems everyone is hung over for a few weeks, rather than that crash-and-waken period being the beginning? Do we *need* to begin our year with a post-holiday hangover? I dunno about the rest of you, but this, retroactively, marks the year I begin my personal calender for the year the day after Samhain. (Is Samhain Oct 31, or halfway between Fall Equinox & Winter Solstice, or when sun & moon are conjunct in Scorpio (i.e. new moon after ~Oct 21)? I haven't decided. I'll get back to you on that. Maybe.)

I'm getting off-topic. (Inasmuch as I've got a topic here.) ( I'm really trying to ponder my plans for the coming year, which may include a couple of months of already-done. )

Current Mood: contemplative

Husband has expressed some dismay that I am not comfortable using the iPhone, which he apparently thought would be "phone for him and nifty computerish toy available to more-or-less the whole family when we're all home." The kids play games on the iPhone; husband pokes at the internet (in limited ways, because despite the ads, there's only so much you can do on a 3" screen with built-in autocorrect interfering with outgoing messages.

I handle the phone as little as possible. When I need to make an outgoing call on it (because mine is low on battery or minutes), I hand it to him & have him navigate to whatever it takes. Sometimes I click the final "call now" button. Sometimes not. When I want to show him a website, I can generally get as far as "find the browser"... he has to open up something that lets me type in the URL. Which I do with incredible sloth, because the touch-keypad and I are not friends, nope nope nope. (I miss Graffiti. A lot, sometimes.)

I don't like all the little icons. I don't find things quickly on a screen full of decorated squares. I prefer to navigate computers by text. Which, um, considering I never learned DOS or command-line activities, is probably more than a little weird.

( Symbols don't come easy to me )

I am looking forward to being old someday. I am aware that, to many kids, I am "old" now, for some value of "old." That part's irrelevant. I am talking about the time when everyone, even your peers, agrees that you are old. While I'm in no particular hurry, my aging--inasmuch as it includes the possibility of being an "old woman"--is one of the things that makes life worth living, worth putting up with the stupid inefficient rat-race bureaucracies and all the interpersonal drama hassles.

I want to be one of those ladies who walk half-bent over, not because of pain or back problems but because it's just more comfortable to lean forward a bit, especially if one has a stick to bear some of the weight. I want to wear multiple clashing scarves, one on my head and one across my shoulders and maybe a couple more tucked into my belt like a skirt. They'd be over another skirt, something that flares out into a circle when I spin. I want this even if I can't spin anymore, in which case, I'd want the skirt to be shockingly red with black lace trim so that people know this is supposed to be a sexy, active bit of clothing, and I have appropriated it, stolen it from its rightful place in the heart of a twenty-something would-be dancer and forced it to trudge along at an old lady's pace.

( I would be a curmudgeon, only old ladies aren't called curmudgeons so I will have to settle for being a crosspatch or a bitch. )

It's my 10 year anniversary today.

I don't post much about my husband, except the occasional "here's a cute story of what happened to him today," and almost nothing about my marriage. Not planning on making any notable changes to that policy.

I have Important Activism Thoughts I want to post, which I'm not going to, because at some point, my personal relationships have to be more important than near-strangers on the internet. So instead of arguing (more), I'll be going with him to the flying field (cliff, really; RC model gliders), telling his friends that no, the Geico Cavemen/Most Interesting Man In The World noncon orgy slash is not yet finished (not yet started, and gods, how do these people come up with these ideas? This is an actual *request*), and eventually, going out to A Nice Restaurant.

I will bring laptop to the field. So maybe I'll write about cavemen, and maybe I'll work on filk, and maybe I'll finish the six books of OCR I'm actually being paid to do. Maybe I'll just read. The ebook reader has a much, much longer battery life than the laptop.

Ten years. Wow. It's been a bumpy ride in spots, but I don't plan on stopping it. Part of me still can't believe I'm married, I have a husband. It seems like such a weird, mainstream term, fraught with connotations that don't apply to our relationship.

I have a full-time day job. He's a stay-at-home Dad; he cooks, takes the kids to school, talks to their teachers & counselors, gets them to do their homework. Helps them understand... kid stuff. Teen stuff. (Occasionally, pushes them at me while saying "you need to have The Girl Talk about this subject. Today." And I flail, 'cos I never did figure out how to do The Girl Talk. I mostly got that info from books. Dad, who had custody, thought it'd be a bad idea for him to discuss Girl Stuff with me, and Mom freaked out at the word "vagina" and there would be no discussion of Those Things.)

He takes care of the kids. I pay bills. Grandpa--my father--lives with us & takes kids to the park sometimes. We've pretty much got the classic 50's nuclear-family-plus thing down, except for the gender role reversal. It all seems so ... normal, when I describe it that way.

So today? Tonight? We go celebrate surviving ten years of each other, and wanting more.

I've gone quiet. Not sure why, exactly. I read lots of meta posts & don't say anything, especially about the ones that hit me hardest. I compose replies in text files at work and never post them. I have "The Story Of Deathtongue," Bloom County comic strips, condensed into <user name="scans_daily"-able size (1/3 of the story, taken from the Billy & the Boingers book), ready to post (erm, except that I haven't uploaded the images anywhere yet, and I'm still waffling between which of 2 or 3 strips to include), but haven't posted it, or moved forward on choosing between those last few strips. Just kinda letting people know--I'm reading; I'm thinking about you; I'm just not saying anything right now. My hair's the wrong color again. And we won't be able to fix that until later this week at the earliest.

Wow, new watchers! And new accessors. (Accessories? Accessibles?) From, presumably, the giant non-fannish friending meme (see subtle hint that existing friends/watchers/accessors should go check it out, 'cos 5-page comment memes are even better when they hit 10 or 20 pages.)

I keep thinking I should make one of those "this is how my journal works" posts, but I survived 6 years on LJ and one year here without one, so it's probably not going to happen anytime soon.

( But here's some thoughts in that direction anyway. )

( My current obsessions )

Ummm.... hi! And now I'm gonna send this off, and then go to work where I won't be able to reply until this evening.

1) Main computer is working again. It works fine, I suppose, but the "on" switch seems to have a problem--if it shuts itself off, the on switch only works when the room is hot enough. It's like there's a wire that's too short somewhere inside, unless it's heated. We need a new computer soon. With ethernet card, this time, so we can get wifi. In meantime, have copied majority of contents of main computer to portable hard drive so when we're using the laptop, we still have access to files, if not all the programs.

( 4 more beneath cut )

Current Mood: exhausted

The Meme: Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

The Post:

cordelia_v gave me five words (and apparently triggered something; I haven't been writing much and I suppose I've been missing it). ( Like a good little blogger, I'm hiding it all under a cut tag. )

I wake up almost every morning to Oliver singing "Good Morning, Starshine." (Well, more accurately, I wake up to him singing "aaaaaaaaaaah... la da da da, da da da, da da da, da da da da," because my husband can barely tolerate the song and I try to jump out of bed and turn it off before he notices it's playing. But sometimes I get through the entire first verse.)

This feels like waking up. I've been "elfwreck" for something like eight years online... and here, I'm just elf.

Elf is me. (Elf is I? Elf am I? Shaddup, grammarfreak. Elf is me.) Elfwreck is me and my husband.

( Let me 'splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. )

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Remember:

The hidden stone ripens fast,
  then laid bare like a turnip
    can easily be cut out at last
but even then the danger isn't past.
   That man lives best who's fain
to live half mad, half sane.
—Jan Van Stijevoort, 1524.

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The Elf Half

Everything in this book may be wrong.

Entries tagged with self

Obligatory Pinned Post

Hallo tumblr-y people!

Questions Meme

Questions of Purpose

Song for the new year

Non-iconic

Growing old fiercely

10 year anniversary

Quiet

Hi new peoples!

Catching up

That Words Meme

Good morning, starshine