dreaming on

Things I should be happy about:

• I finished and really liked a fic for Tales of Vesperia... First fic for a new fandom...!


• My new Nook color is awesome and I'm reading again. Free ebooks! New HDTV is also awesome.


• I had a job interview and it went pretty well. I feel good about my future prospects!


• Allen is getting a puppy in Marina. ♥♥♥ And kissing bots!


• Halfway through the fourth season of Supernatural. There are occasional shaky bits, but fun episodic horror comedy is fun.


• Flying in Azeroth proper makes me happy. The cataclysmic new world of Warcraft makes me happy!


• I might be getting a visit from fenrisulfr before the end of the year!

So... you would think I'd feel better...

I'm just possessed by this terrible ennui. I don't even know. My buzz has been pretty consistently ruined by various small events all month even though I'm in an otherwise good place. But now I don't want to do anything but zone out and read.

/sighs

So life is going good.

Awesome #1: The Guy In Our Living Room
There is a guy staying in our living room -- a potential for third roomie, who needs a place to crash while he shows up for a ten-day job a few blocks from here, so he's forking out $10 a night to camp out. The first night we have vacuum troubles for over an hour, so intense that libekory is reduced to snapping at people in frustration, but the guy staying in our living room goes, "Oh, a Kirby. I used to repair these." He then proceeds to fix it.

Awesome #2: The Warcraft Girl
I'm playing Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, again, because I don't want to level my 32 warlock until she can get a mount in the upcoming patch to WoW, when the second potential roomie shows up. We give her a tour, and then she goes, "Is that Warcraft III music I hear?" I immediately realize that this girl is a keeper. (Furthermore: Horde fangirl.) She also loves Kingdom Hearts, understands about our cats peeing everywhere, and wants to cook for us, as long as someone else does dishes. I don't mind being the dish girl.

Awesome #3: The Job Interview
After all this time, someone finally gives me a call back from the many resumes I submitted. She gives me a little phone interview, we both talk about graduating from SUNY Albany and NY weather, and then she tells me she'll give me a call next week about setting up an interview. Nice!

Awesome #4: The Free Furniture
The guy in our living room comes home from a bike-hunting adventure and says, "Did you guys want any furniture? Because, there's a Salvation army truck next door, taking away an entertainment center and a loveseat..." We have had zero furniture in our living room. Our TVs were on the floor, and we sit on the floor to watch them. (Guy in our living room sleeps in a sleeping bag on the floor.) Now we have a free loveseat in good condition, and a free entertainment center that is a perfect fit (34" wide) for our TV (33" wide).

Awesome #5: The Dragons
Okay I'm stuck on this Dragon Cave thing a little. But I'm raising dragons! And the cute one already has wings! "Aww...It's a cute baby dragon. It enjoys gathering pebbles and other small rocks and putting them in a pile." TELL ME THAT ISN'T ADORABLE. Grow up my little dragonets.

I hear that there's a lot of negativity on LJ lately. Not in my corner. :D

To Do Today:

     1. Feed the cats.
They need food to survive. Also water.

     2. Apply to jobs.
The ones bookmarked over the weekend, and any new ones that may have popped up on your favorite site while you weren't looking.

     3. Pay bills.
We'd like our new cable/internet provider to not think we can't pay our bills on time.

     4. Feng shui up the kitchen.
My mom has recently gone crazy, and swears up and down that feng shui works, despite telling me things like "If you put a mirror across from your bed, your chi will see its reflection while you're asleep and get scared." So clean up the clutter and put in the mirror to fix your financially disastrous stove location.

     5. Seriously consider going out to buy graph paper.
     5. Graph out the house using libekory's graph paper. Then graph out Merlin's house in Hollow Bastion for Another Side.
Makes it easier to, you know, graph out the house. But it involves riding my bike to Target, probably... Sigh.

     6. Reth Reth Reth.
I'm still in love with my guild name.


To Do Tomorrow, Or Today If You Are Feeling Industrious:

     1. Put up new ad for roommate.
Taha will be staying until July 15th instead of July 1. Ad needs to reflect that.

     2. Fix the tags on your LJ.
They're sort of half-done, you moron.

     3. Clean the horrible clutter from your room in preparation for feng shui'ing.
Yeah. And move that desk downstairs, while you're at it. Desks don't belong in the bedroom, it's terrible feng shui.

     4. Reread all of D. Gray-man.
...what?

Having just watched the X-men movie trilogy (verdict: good, good, what wait) my mind goes back to an inexplicable period of my childhood.

I don't know when I was into X-men. I'm sure I was never an avid fan of the comics. I feel like I may just have been a Gambit/Rogue fan. I have memories of searching for fanfiction about them. Why did I do this? What motivated me? How did I discover them? Was it the cartoon series?

I genuinely don't know. But it's so deeply ingrained as a piece of my history that I can't help shipping it, even when it's not relevant. It's just in the back of my head: I'm thinking about the X-men movies, and then I'm thinking about Gambit/Rogue. Kinda weird!

Six years late to the party, but today, I am finally a licensed driver.

My history with the DMV has been unpleasant. When I first went off to college I acquired my permit, took a driver's ed course, drove around some, and took a driver's test. I got a very scary woman who everyone later assured me was evil incarnate, and she was very rude. I got very nervous, hit the curb during parallel parking, and failed instantly. I went back to college for the next semester, sulking.

But in NY, you are required to have a driver's ed certificate that's less than six months old in order to take the driver's test. So when I got back from college, I had to take another driver's ed course, and when I had a certificate I scheduled another driver's test. I got the same very scary woman. It turns out they ask no questions if you ask for a different tester on the basis that you've already been tested by a specific one, but I didn't know that. I got very nervous, hit the curb during parallel parking, and failed instantly. It had all taken so long that I was unable to schedule another test before summer vacation was over. I returned to college sulking.

The next year we hired a tutor. He came to my house and we drove around for hours. He then took me to the driver's test, at a different DMV location. And that woman was there again. I didn't get her. I didn't hit the curb while parallel parking. The tester failed me because she just didn't think I was "ready" to drive.

I gave up in frustration, because like fucking hell I was going to take another goddamn driver's ed course.

Now, years later and half the country away, I took a brushup test yesterday. The instructor praised me, said I was a very good driver, and advised me to take a driver's test ASAP, since I have no access to a car and no way to practice until the test.

So I took my exam 24 hours later. And I passed.

And there's no parallel parking on the Colorado driving test.

Fuck you, NY, I'm a driver now. Mwahaha!

So hatefully busy. But don't worry, I'm writing that Luke/Natalia fic~

I bought passes to Penny Arcade Expo. I hesitated, but I was full of resentment for my lame job and when I saw that the first day of PAX this year is my birthday, I said, this is a sign. Screw work.

Is anyone else going to PAX?


Also, MEME FOR NO REASON, stolen from green_and_warty: Comment with a character or pairing, and I'll write one sentence of fic for them.

Maximum of five requests per person, you are encouraged to submit prompts but I suppose not required. I also reserve the right to write more than one sentence if my ideas get too big.

+ theeternalmind will win forever for her answer to the question of how Jade reacts to having a double: 'Oh dear. Am I going to have to kill myself?' Excellent use of canon A+.


+ I've taken to playing internet radio at work; it helps me find new music. Unfortunately, then I also get angry at musicians. Stop using "Shorty" to refer to women of your acquaintance!! As far as affectionate nicknames go, I am very quickly coming to despise this one as I hear it like in four songs in like an hour and a half, and frankly, it wasn't that great a nickname to begin with.


+ Buttercup Festival makes me happy. It's as simple as that. The last two comics haven't been especially amusing or entertaining (although the first two of the new "season" were) (okay, maybe not to you, but you don't "get it" okay?!) but they're always -- beautiful, poignant, nostalgic. I look at them and I think that the world is an okay place after all, even when work is sucking.

Someday when I feel crazy, I'll dump all my awesome fandom icons and just make a hundred Buttercup Festival icons. See if I don't.

Okay. I've thought about it, and I can now explain why I like Peony/Jade, Aizen/Gin and similar pairings. ("Similar?!" you might be saying, if you haven't heard my explanation yet.)

It's because I have a button. To put it verbosely, this button is, "A person who is powerful and in control, in his or her own right, who still willingly chooses to serve another person for unselfish reasons."

(Tales of the Abyss pushes this button a lot.)

( A little more explanation. Absolutely ZERO of this has to indicate a PAIRING, I just like to pair them because they have this dynamic. )

Final Fantasy XII has some of this (Fran->Balthier; Basch->Asch?) and those relationships I liiike. I see it in Nash->Sasarai in Suikoden 3 (at one time, that was about a debt that Nash owed Sasarai, but that was years ago -- why would Nash still be willing to risk his life to protect Sasarai from Luc?) and Tactics has it, although it's fucked up (Haruka->Kantarou).

*ponders others*

I have not fallen off the face of the planet, despite any internet hiatus you may have noticed. I have performed an Emergency Move (we found out we had to move about 48 hours before we actually did) and the end result is that I now have a longer/costlier commute, but I live in a beautiful 3-bedroom 2.5-bathroom house for the same price as my dinky 900-sq-ft 2-bedroom apartment. Our internet should be hooked up tonight, at which time I will promptly resume playing Tales of the Abyss fixatedly. I'm 40-something hours in and the prodigal princess is returning to Baticul and if I don't write Asch/Natalia it won't be for lack of daydreaming about it.

Also, something I forgot to post over the holidays:

Fact: After tens of thousands of my parents' dollars went to my sister to go to an out of state university so that she could dither around indecisively for two years before finally deciding on an education major, my sister has decided that she doesn't want to go to graduate school, essentially making her education major pointless. She confided in me that she would like to have kids and then stay home and raise them instead of working.

Fact: I sat around for a half-hour during Christmas listening to my sister and my aunt gush about their Coach wallets like they were auctioned off by the Louvre. And you would think they were, from the prices. My sister wants to spend $700 on a pocketbook. My aunt admitted that this was more than she paid on their new refrigerator. When I expressed disgust disbelief, my sister said, "Kim doesn't understand because she doesn't have any friends," then after I stared her into shame, clarified that she meant friends who indulged in Coach merchandise obsession.

Conclusion: My sister had better pray she meets a millionaire.

Secondary conclusion: I don't think I need friends like that.

Tertiary conclusion: I feel much better about my spending habits. Oh noes, I want to buy a PSP so badly?! Well, I could buy myself four PSPs for the pocketbook my sister wants to buy. One PSP, please.

Well, now that my day is already, absolutely, 100% ruined.

At least my bagel is still warm.