Spontaneous ∂erivation

They say that sometimes dreams are the body’s way of communicating with you that something serious is wrong with it. I don’t know if this is really the case or not; “they” know a lot of things, and not all of them make sense or are even true.

Anyways, my dream was only scary towards the end and not because of my parents. I remember fragments, but a lot more than I usually do. For instance:

• I remember trying to buy this game¹ and all its only-imaginary-for-now expansions, only it had changed to also involve tile-laying and a big plastic dragon at the villain side of the board, for the shizzle.

• Somehow this lead to a restaurant I tried buying food from… either in another dream or from something I remember during my flight from some of the Nothing in the Midwest, a lot of which felt like a dream all by itself. It was a rather strange restaurant, one of those places where you get the food from a half-door “counter”.

• Somehow this led to me working at a sort of hospital for older people, or rather, people who are sick but considered “older” so they ended up there. Probably something to do with HCR going on right now, the gods only know why. Also, I was very concerned with how to store the many, many new plastic pieces from the above game (I decided on color, by the way, in special zip-pocketed clear plastic album pages).

• The guy I was assigned to, I think, resembled a sort of amalgam of all the looks-like-40 faces of people I’ve seen and, for some reason, I keep thinking that’s mostly from author jackets as well, you know, where you can see the picture of the author in the back and it usually doesn’t look like him right now. He was nice, but frustrated.

• He got a really, really crappy touchscreen computer assigned to him. I think it was just standard procedure in possibly The Future, everyone gets an iPad-like device, even if it sux0rs and has a really ancient Mac OS installed on it. I searched the Interwebs for instructions on how to install Linux on it, to make it somewhat better, if we possibly could. He politely turned this down at the end.

• Then I got sick. Really, really sick. Blackout (in a freaking dream) kind of sick. I ended up in the same hospital of minor, kind of negligent care, because… because… I don’t know… I might have lot my job in the dream, I didn’t remember having a job. The guy I had been taking care of visited me once during this delirium-within-a-dream, and I was horrified because he was out of bed and shouldn’t be.

Then I woke up, and as short enough of breath to be really scary. I do get asthma from colds and flu, but usually not that badly. Or has it been that badly? Anyways, I took some stuff from my inhaler and am okayish now, but standard procedure for me is to go see the doctor in case either bronchitis or pneumonia have taken up residence.

I was really quite scared I was dying for a few minutes after I woke up. It doesn’t help that I’ve been having a lot of trouble swallowing pills for my nightly medication. I’m going to be seeing the doctor this afternoon.

I’m fortunately not completely disabled, and damn it if this stupid thing is going to keep me in bed and away from work (though I am working from home). I hate being sick so much. It breaks a lot of my obligations and just…. oh, I hate it.

Anyways, I’ll see what the doctor says. My regular doctor isn’t in today, so I’ll be seeing one of the other doctors. I skipped over seeing the nasty one and went with the nice but yet overreactive one. I hope she doesn’t overreact too much, but I really don’t want to see the nasty one, who usually thinks I’m making up my symptoms. I am not completely sure how one makes up a constricted throat like I had last year, but that was her opinion, and maybe there’s something in that, because surely a doctor wouldn’t be really dismissive.

Or maybe they would. Or maybe they aren’t, and I’m really making everything up in my head. I’m pretty sure the last part is not true, but I’m not completely sure.

It’s hard to think sometimes about certain things, because I remember having had to believe some quite incredible things to survive a time with my mostly illogical father. As a result, the true relation of cause and effect in life outside of my job (programming, system administration) is at times only coincidental, and what people say cause and effect is takes precedence, even if it’s technically messed up and even if I know it is.

Gods I’m messed up.

And I don’t see my bartender for a while. He has a lot of cases to work with, most of them in jobs like mine.

1. Tom Vassel does awesome board game reviews. He’s reviewing Heroscape in a 5 part series right now. I so love that game. [↩]

I had to do a double-take on this news article:

The Itawamba County school board announced today it would cancel the Itawamba County Agricultural High School prom after a gay student challenged the district on its policy forbidding same-sex dates.

This, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to be a teenager’s overreaction, and does indeed appear to be the school board being… I don’t even know. They actually ban same-sex dates over there. It’s actually a school policy. The ACLU is involved.

I am particularly fascinated by this part:

School officials told McMillen last month that she could not bring her sophomore girlfriend to the prom and also told her she could not wear a tuxedo.

(Emphasis mine.)

I wonder what school officials were thinking to accomplish with the ban on tuxedo-wearing gals. Were they thinking, “If we let the gals wear tuxedos, then we’d have to let the boys wear gowns, and that’s wrong!”?

Of course, I remember my prom. There were a lot of things wrong with it, primarily involving my father, but one of the things wrong with it was that I hated gowns. I hated fancy dresses. I hated spaghetti straps and especially the kind of bra you have to wear with a spaghetti strap/shoulder-less dress. I hated pantyhose. I hated heels. I still hate all those, actually.

But you had to wear that kind of ensemble for prom if you were a girl. Back then it didn’t have to be a school policy, it was simply an implied, immutable law of nature: Girls wear dresses, boys wear suits. Girls could wear dresses that were only as long as their upper thighs, and boys could wear suits that burned your retinas, but as long as the clothing was correct gender-wise, that was okay. (Both happened at that prom.)

And that was that.

Things didn’t change for me in college, except that I learned a lot more about the kinds of people I was attracted to (both male and female, which is worrying to someone whose sex education came only from a special field trip made in high school¹), and observe more closely the difference between male and female clothing. Especially when it came to formal wear.

No, I never got involved with anybody; I just made a trip with a guy who needed to get a nice interview suit, and he had money, and needed shopping support.² I was impressed at how sensible men’s clothing tended to be, sizing-wise; actually measured in inches by inseam and outer seam, for instance, whereas with women’s clothing you could define a “size 10″ to mean almost anything.

And while men’s clothing tended to be more or less same-y, there was no pantyhose, and there were quite comfortable shoes. There wasn’t freezing your shoulders off with some paper-thin scarf that did nothing but set off your, your, I don’t know; there were jackets, which you could take off and fling over one shoulder to look cool, or at least attempt to.

And vests. Vests fascinated me for some reason, possibly in ways that bodices fascinate others.

Granted, men’s clothing could be rather over-warm, but there is such a thing as shirt sleeves. And ties, one could definitely do without ties, but there are such things as clip-ons (now, if there was a clip-on that actually looked like a real tie…).

I did not dare mention any of this to my parents. To tell the truth, this was little more than a minute side interest compared with trying to survive my parents’ controlling intentions and abuse.

Perhaps it’s telling that literally two days after I cut off all contact with my parents³ I bought a tux.

Well. Not really a tux. My friends wouldn’t allow me to go into the men’s clothing store. So I got a women’s knockoff, which was one step away from a tuxedo anyways. It didn’t matter that the only color it was available in was shiny powder blue. It was a tux. -ish.

But it didn’t really matter. I never got to wear the tux to any of the functions for professors/students. My friends strongly discouraged it, because it would attract ire from professors, and if you’re trying to hang onto a teaching or research assistantship, you do not want to do that. So I had to get… a short spaghetti strap dress. With pantyhose. And heels. I believe they’re the type of heels that are called “fuck-me heels.”

Eventually I lost the tux, along with a lot of other things. But hell. It wasn’t a real tux anyways.

These days I work for a dot.com, so suits and dresses don’t really matter in any way at all. Everyone is in some variant of a t-shirt and jeans (or kilt). Recently I also discovered that loose skirts are wonderful and I think everyone should try them.

But really… I still want my tux.

1. I know people like certain kinds of traits in other people they’re attracted to. I prefer people who look androgynous, and are as at home in a gown as they are in a tux. Still do, it’s never gotten “fixed.” [↩]
2. I love shopping. It’s the gatherer in me. In person. Via catalog. Online. Clothes? Books? Hardware? It doesn’t matter. It’s shopping! [↩]
3. And after an exciting weekend of my parents sending me a death threat, then my parents threatening my dorm’s clerk, then my parents showing up on my friends’ doorsteps! [↩]

I went into work yesterday and got sicker today as a result. Sigh. So this morning I cooked two cups of rice and made onigiri for breakfast and lunch. And possibly dinner.

But I got to do a little shopping in Seattle (for there aren’t any decent Asian groceries on the island)….

Yeah, baby! Furikake! That’s what I’m taking about! (Preserved bits of shrimp or salmon or egg mixed with salt and nori, goes a treat with the moistness of rice.) I ended up using twice the amount shown above.

You can mix in furikake (my favorite), roll a formed rice ball in it (certainly makes them less sticky on the outside), or use furikake as a filling.

Here’s my second-favorite rice ball mold, which makes three large cylinders all at once. ‘Tis awesome.

There are two “levers” at the sides of the mold (the pink tabs). After you fill and press the top of the mold down, you then press down on these tabs to help release the top of the mold again. Very nice!

Tada! And they’re actually pretty well separated into three rolls, too. Just remember not to pack the rice in too tightly into the mold, just fill it—the mold top will press the rice properly.

Then wrap in nori sheets! I’m so bad at wrapping things in nori. Even if the sheets of nori have perforations so that you can measure out appropriate widths for wrapping rice balls….

These two rice balls have tamago furikake in them (egg). The above rolls have ebi (shrimp) and salmon. On the left is my very bad nori wrapping.

I thought that the peanut butter onigiri yesterday were pretty good, so I did two more today. I didn’t wrap them in nori, however, because I don’t think roasted seaweed would go well with peanut butter. But I could be wrong. Nevertheless, I have one for breakfast, and one wrapped in plastic for later today.

I’m not putting this stuff in the fridge; I put the ones for lunch into a plastic container after letting them cool down so that condensation doesn’t form inside the container when I put the lid on. Standard obento procedure.

It’s so nice to get lunch out of the way, because I am so tired….

Ah, so that’s who Norman Spinrad is. Thank you, Wikipedia! I did like “The Doomsday Machine” (here’s Tor.com’s rewatch). I did not otherwise really remember him.

On the other hand, now I will remember him.

Jason Sanford has the skinny. You have to read it to believe it. It starts along the lines of “There is really no non-European SF”, then leads to “Mike Resnick is a better black writer than Octavia Butler”, and….

At the moment, the reaction is mostly tweets of anger, shock, disbelief, and HEAD ASPLODE. Just search Twitter for “spinrad”.

But Tobias Buckell¹ put it best:

Norman Spinrad. Tool.

And now, Mr. Spinrad, this is how I’ll remember you.

1. Tobias Buckell’s books are awesome by the way, and they are also all available on the Kindle now, as well as the ever-popular paper format! [↩]

I got forwarded from some ancient mail box a request from my former college’s liberal arts department asking for a donation.

It was on really nice paper. Quite upscale for a form letter. It’s a little too nice to recycle. And also a little too heavy to just throw away, though that would have been nicely dramatic.

So I shredded it.

I feel so much better.

Right now my stomach is still delicate, so I really need to make my own breakfast and lunch. Where I work is full of tech geeks, so we are surrounded by a variety of greasy fast food places. Not going to work well for me.

So here are some extra boring bentos. Although peanut and apple butter are used, so it’s not a totally lost cause. (Right now anything with real dairy cream in it makes me sick. I don’t know why butter is fine.)

My giraffe box, with table water crackers, the end. I put a dollop of peanut butter in later, though.

Next I wanted to make rice balls (onigiri if I’m spelling that right). It doesn’t take long to cook a cup of rice in an on/off rice cooker, and then let it cool a bit.

Usually you want something salty and not likely to go rotten in them.¹

Salmon (cooked, the kind you find in those packets these days) is a favorite filling. But all of mine had expired.

Next favorite is rolling or filling a rice ball in some preserved sprinkes of nori plus stuff like little bits of dried shrimp or egg (tastes better than it sounds). All expired.

Okay, next is pushing a preserved, tart, bitter plum in. Got none.

Desperate times call for desperate measures….

I use molds for my rice balls, because I am lazy. This is my favorite brand because it lets you do two triangular balls at a time. I half-filled each part with rice, and then used peanut butter for the filling! Preserves well, is a protein, yummy, a little salty. Works for me.

The little, ah, tits² in the top of the mold are there is you want a little dent to push the plum in. You can pop them out if you wish.

Fill up with rice.

Push the top of the mold down, which does all the packing and squeezing for you.

There are flexible triangles in the bottom of the mold. Remove the mold top, turn over, push the triangles to push out the nicely formed rice balls.

There they are!

I like triangles because they are flattish and fit into corners. I didn’t have any non-expired nori sheets to wrap the rice balls, so I used plastic cling wrap (the approved alternative in these modern times). Either option keeps them moist.

Plenty of I Love Lemon for my throat. More water crackers. The little sauce container has apple butter for the crackers.

And that’s lunch. And probably tomorrow’s lunch. Although by then I may have new packets of cooked salmon.

1. Although for some reason mayo is a hit with the Japanese. It doesn’t make for a well-preserving meal without insulated cold storage, though, which Japanese bentos did not, until recently, have. So. Um. [↩]
2. Not an official term. [↩]

A very nice lady was just in this afternoon to close my mortgage refinance. We talked and joked and I signed a zillion sheets of paper and handed over a scary amount of money (but I’ve done worse over the years; buying a house on the island with 20% down takes a lot out of you).

The previous night, though still sick, I cleaned and vacuumed but it probably wasn’t enough after two weeks of being poorly. Still, it had a purpose, and so wasn’t bad.

After she left, I realized that I’ve never had anybody else but me sit at that dining room table, which I bought in the overexcitement of having my own place. It’s been a few years.

It’s a perfect size for most board games. It can, if you extend the wings, almost fit most of Arkham Horror on it (which is a long way to go to set up a solitaire game, but oh, so worth it).

It was strange, having another person in the house, sitting there. I have to start inviting friends over, once I’m well enough to clean like crazy. Although I am, as you might imagine, a bit short on friends due to my general paranoia.

But it felt good to have someone else there. And I wasn’t scared or nervy, which tends to happen when I’m around people. Especially people I’m familiar with—they see a flirty ditz, but my pulse is through the roof.

I wasn’t scared. I didn’t know her, of course. But still.

How strange.

I’m sure the feeling will go away.

On the other hand, maybe this means I’m starting to go native, in this strange land where it’s impolite to hit someone, even in private.

But I’m so not letting anyone else in until I’ve cleaned the kitchen counter and vacuumed the sofa and dusted everything, omg.

And additional songs that aren’t available in the Amazon MP3 store, but are available on CDs:

Lemon Tree by Fool’s Garden (Dish of the Day)
Help! by the Beatles (1)

Only available on CDBaby:

Agni Pariksha (Sita Sings the Blues)

Jim C. Hines, who is awesome, has a blog post up about reporting rape, and how fucking hard it is to do so, and you have to go read it, because it is all true. Even if you’re someone relatively sympathetic who keeps jumping up and down on the victim’s feelings by saying, “You have to press charges! Sorry, I won’t be there or otherwise support you and will advise you against your will even though I don’t know anything! But you hafta!”

I also have a couple of long comments, I don’t know entirely why, semi-on-topic about violence against women (or whoever) and stalkers and the awfulness of court and how many things fall apart there, and you don’t get good results for rape trials most of the time, or even restraining order trials (the latter of which I’ve experienced; not the former, but I can somewhat imagine how much worse the former is, and it’s likely worse than what I can think of).

And yeah, I talk about changing identities. I know how to do it across a couple states even! And even that is horrible and painful, and automatically disqualified me from quite a high-paying government job where I could just code all day on really neat projects.¹

And I also reveal that I have not always blogged under this name. And to tell the truth, the electronic trail isn’t perfect, and the paper trail is less so, because the law requires you to put your name change in fucking papers. And you can’t change your SSN, so my parents could always commit fraud (and the federal government doesn’t allow SSN changes unless you can prove fraud has been committed).

Really, a lot of the law is not about protecting victims, but protecting the possibly guilty. Arguably it should be that way, but I wish it wasn’t quite so harsh on the people who did get hurt.

I was raised to be honest, even if it was in a household where all kinds of abuse was regular (and I was even beaten for lying even when I told the truth). And everything in the past years since I separated from my parents makes me feel worse. Like, I can only tell people so much truth, and so much of it is now basically lies, because I can’t tell people who I really was, all those years ago. And even now. Even now.

I realize that blogging about this may lead to some smartass or private investigator or friends of my parents (yes, they have born-again Christian friends, ye gods) or whoever to find out who I am, because I can’t obscure the trail completely.

But I’ve been not myself for so long that it seems pointless to try to hide (much), and if a final stand happens, let it happen, because it’s been over 30 years now, and I can’t take it anymore. I’m not completely stupid, but then again, I sort of am right now.

And anyways, the people I’ve been don’t live here anymore. That hurts the most. Who am I, really? At the moment, I’m the person who started this blog 2.5 years ago. I am only that old. I plan to get older for the rest of my life, even if it eventually kills me.

Buuut at least I don’t have tantrums!²

Yrs,
S∂

P.S. scrapers and sploggers: there is fucking nothing here you can use for ads, so don’t even fucking try.

1. Although that would probably all get funneled into weapons anyways, so… yeah. [↩]
2. RAAAEEEGGG!!!1!!1!! [↩]

I started trawling through my college past, looking for moments like this one. And… yes, there are moments of wandering through some beautiful, often fanciful, halls and campus and libraries. Driving to farther off places than the small patch of island not covered by trees. A little main street full of cheap restaurants for students. Bookstores, how I loved the bookstores, which were huge and full of strange nooks and crannies. And the used bookstore. And a little restaurant I loved.

They were beautiful moments. Well, perhaps only to someone who had spent much of her life until then locked up in a small, cockroach-ridden apartment.

But over all that, the years I remember as being the best, overlaying the good memories was the constant fear. I already knew I wasn’t completely safe—the betrayal by a friend just after I got my information suppressed by the college, and even moved secretly to a high-security dorm building…. the constant stalking by my parents, which surfaced even after escape by the harassment of friends and professors… never knowing if when you walked at night you might run into your parents.

You are never secure in your first new identity, I find. Nor your second. You have to go down a ways, move around a bit, and suchlike. It’s hard, when you grew up thinking that honesty and truth would automatically give you immunity—you know, bad things don’t happen to good people. But it had been happening anyways, all the time I was growing up. I just was in denial.

I looked for good bits in my previous life (lives?) and found them… packaged in the fear. Always the fear. I never realized how thick it was, how almost every memory contains it, with rare sparks of freedom when I didn’t think about the fear at all. Really, really rare.

I’m trying to stay in the present at the moment. I’m not sure if I managed to bring on a small episode of PTSD on myself. I feel like I’m getting dragged into the past—I have pushed away the memories for now, tantalizing as they are, because I was not as alone then (and then everyone I knew was gone… graduate students are never constant for the long term; I was the very last to leave, and only because I got forced out of my job with the University when the delayed economic storm hit it).

And, my gods, I can’t push away the feelings. I can never quite remember my PTSD episodes. It’s like how I don’t remember how badly I react to holidays, even though that’s obviously been happening for years now. I vaguely remember a friend years ago saying that this kind of thing probably was…. whether it is or isn’t is kind of moot right now, because whatever it is, it’s here.

I am trying not to cry right now, and all that, and I’m trying to sleep, because I have meetings in the morning (um… okay… later this morning) and I need to be able to operate. Needing to get into gear should help, although sleep deprivation won’t. I’ve had really awful dreams all weekend, so I’ve been afraid to sleep, which isn’t helping.

So now I’m going to have my Kindle read the Agony Booth’s Star Trek V recap in its pleasantly monotone, often indiscriminate, voice. The Delta Sleep System is just freaking me out right now, for reasons I cannot ascertain, except that it might resemble the subtle acoustics of either computer labs or my dorm room when the wind blew across the flat, flat plains.

Trying not to freak, trying not to freak, trying not to freak… ARGH.

I’ll be okay, it’s just that I can’t find the ropes to tie the goddamned corner of the fucking tarp down right now. Eventually I will. All the raining sucks in the meantime.

Ah, found another sparkly no-fear moment: watching The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on the big screen in the fancy lecture hall with comfy seats. We didn’t get that place in CS 101. After that, everything tended to be in that room or the one next to it… comfy. Better than a theater. So lovely. And the stair sequence dropped my jaw. And all my friends and their acquaintances watching with. We did some group hacking to, ah, get the movie showing, but then it was amazing.

Then I walked home in fear.

Sigh. I feel a bit tired right now, and the blogging has helped quite a bit. I will sleep now to the really not at all dulcet tones of my Kindle.¹

The half-tab of Ambien is having its effect now. I just hope I don’t have bad dreams. I want some frakking dreamless sleep, and I can’t do the thingy, you know, dream control.

1. Really, guys. This is NOT going to take over audiobooks soon. It’s got a serious problem with enunciation, and gods help you if your characters are not named “Bob” or… well, Bob. It’s that bad. It murders Leonard and Picard quite badly, I didn’t think you could even do that…. [↩]