Bleeding Fiction

I travel a lot less now than I used to, but in English that still translates to a fair bit of time on the road. The more complex travelling gets - especially in the holiday season, when travelling means checking in five minutes after your flight was due to leave, rushing through security and then dashing breathless down the concourse to reach the gate in time - the more I think that love is simple. I think love is as simple as someone waiting for you at the airport when your flight lands.

I had to take a shuttle bus home.

It was a good trip, all in all, though I couldn't help but feel... small... while I was away. School is part of that; the more time that goes on with me in school and unemployed, the more my relationships to people - my parents in particular, but most other people, too - shift back into the college frame of reference I thought I'd given up a few years ago. It's probably because I have the same lack of control over my ultimate fate now as I did then; I'm living in a microcosm of reality, cut off from what I view as the real world. It's not something that makes me happy.

To put it succinctly: The parents of a 27 year old guy should not reasonably expect that he'll call them to let him know his plane landed safely, nor should they reasonably expect that he'll go away on vacation with them. The guy should have his own money and schedule with which to go on vacation. He should have his own people to vacation with and should have other people to see that he landed safely. Which I guess touches on more than just school, but what can you do?

The other part of feeling small was that I told the same two stories over and over again while I was away; the story of my failing Japanese and trying to switch programs and the story of my failed relationship with Natalie. Leaving aside the little things, the day-to-day trials of a life lived, these are the only stories I had to tell. I feel bad about that; like I haven't done my part to keep my life fictional. Maybe I should take up decathalon sky-diving.

At least people responded well to my stories. I got wishes of luck on the former and mostly disbelieving laugher and teasing on the later; I guess dating a 19 year old wasn't as innocuous as I thought it would be. Which, it was pointed out to me as I was still struggling to understand what happened there, might be exactly the point. Tony East of Camp Winakuee told me Natalie's still young enough to be reading Cosmo and listening to the advice therein. Gailie Gail guessed that, due to our respective ages, Natalie and I were just looking for different things out of a relationship. I didn't really get it; I mean, I'm not looking for much more than a relationship that isn't screwed up.

It took Miriam to put it a way that made sense to me: at 19 years old a lot of people don't want to meet someone who's perfect for them. A lot of people, in fact, run away if they find that person. While most of my friends seem to thumb their noses at these "lot of people," I've seen what Miriam's talking about often enough not to discount it. This sounds more like the whinge of "why do girls always date jerks" than I'm strictly comfortable with; I've never liked that particular canard, and I can't remember a time when I seriously believed it. Still, it's broader in application and makes a bit more sense. So, in my mind at least, order triumphs over chaos.

What else can I say? Christmas and Chanukah are unimportant to me on a religious level and, related to things I discussed above (in paragraph 4), awkward for me on a present-receiving level. New Year's lost its luster when I began staying up until midnight as a matter of course and its placement in the middle of winter hardly makes anything seem new. Seeing friends is always good, except when I don't, as was the case with Doug, owing entirely to the fact that I'm a fuck up and can't wake up when I'm supposed to.

Classes start tomorrow, and I'm on the wait list for everything I want to take. Somehow, this seems perfectly fitting.

I got a letter via post today. It did not have my apartment number on it, only my name and street address. It came in a hand-written envelope with no return address. I don't recognize the handwriting on the envelope, which I guess isn't much of a surprise. The postmark on it is Seattle 981 and is dated January 4th. So, I know that the letter was sent yesterday and from somewhere near here, but I don't know anything else.

Curious, I opened the envelope. I did not put on rubber gloves first. There was no white powder inside, but there was a letter. The letter began, "This is not a chain letter." I, however, am not fooled. It most certainly is a chain letter.

I don't pass chain letters along. I'm superstitious about a few things, I guess, but this isn't one of them. So I don't really have a chain letter on my hands. What I have, rather, is a mystery.

Would anyone like to solve it for me?

Last night I went out to see Bloodrayne with but the smallest fraction of my usual Friday night movie crew. Wow. It was... Well, "wretched" doesn't even begin to cover it. There were a few parts that were (unintentionally) funny, but for the most part it wasn't even worth laughing at. It wasn't quite the worst movie I've ever seen, but it was as bad as anything that I wouldn't also expect to show up on MST3K.

I am not joking when I warn you against seeing this movie. The good company aside, I really wish that I hadn't seen it myself. The part I regret most of all is that I paid money to see it - that, on some level, I've contributed to its potential non-total failure and that Uwe Boll might get to make more movies. That simply must not be allowed to happen!

I woke up yesterday morning to rain. This isn't so unusual, what with my living in Seattle and all. What was unusual was that the rain was pouring on me while I was still inside. My bedroom window had sprung a leak. I have a big bedroom window and it was a leak to match. Water came in along the entire length of the wall, and even in a line on the ceiling, and dribbled down on my bed and dresser.

It took my landlord maybe two hours to show up, climb up onto the roof, apply liberal amounts of caulk and leave again. By that time, of course, the rain had stopped. So, in theory, no more leaks. The next time it rains we'll see if that's really true.

ADDENDUM, 1:27am: It's raining again. (Yes, I do live in Seattle. How ever did you guess?) The problem has not been solved. The window is leaking less now than it was yesterday, but it's also raining less. No way to tell, in other words, if the landlord's intervention did any good at all. I should really call him and get him to do something but, fuck it. It's the middle of the night and I'm going to sleep. I'll worry about this shit tomorrow.

I'm listening to Hawthorne Heights' album, The Silence in Black and White, right now. It's pretty good stuff; post-punk with melody. Even though they're less pop-y, they remind me a bit of Good Charlotte, which is sort of odd.

Anyway, I'm listening as I read and the chorus for one of the songs sinks into my head: I know I'm outside your window with my radio. "That's a 'Say Anything' reference," I think to myself. "There's nothing else it can be."

So, I hop to the liner notes and, sure enough, there it is: commentary from the band's frontman, who wrote the song. "I included this in the lyrics, because my favorite movie of all time is Say Anything by Cameron Crowe. My girlfriend and I... watch this all the time. I was pretty much letting her know that no matter what happens, I am not afraid to stand next to an old Malibu holding an old boom box. (If that's what it takes.)"

Awesome!

Today is the second time I've taken the GREs. The first was early in my senior year in college, back in 1999. I've come a long way in the six years since. A long way down.

You don't need to know my exact scores. It's enough for you to know that I dropped 30 points in the Verbal section and 80 points in the Quantitative section. They've changed the way the Analytical section works entirely, replacing the multiple choice with an essay question, so I've no idea how new stacks up to old. Essays take a little while to mark, after all. I guarantee it's worse, though.

Losing points from my Quant. score doesn't surprise me; I haven't taken a single math class in six years. Of course, I hadn't taken a single math class for five years before I took the last time, so... I'm not so bothered by my expectedly poorer Analytical grade, either. I did well last time. Really, really well. So losing a few points isn't that big a deal.

But verbal? I was disappointed with my verbal score last time around. To lose 30 points from that really turns my stomach. I'm half-tempted to go take the test again next month, when it'll be long after I've sent off my Evans School application, just to see if I can do better.

None of this aggrivation, by the way, is to say I did poorly. I'm probably in a high percentile bracket for Verbal and Analytical. Quantitative... eh, not so much. But, then, I never expected to be. I'm bad at math. But it just pisses me off; I feel like I've gotten stupider in the past six years, rather than smarter.

I'm awake right now, at nearly six in the morning, which I both should and should not be. Should because I have homework due in fewer than five hours and that homework is not yet done. Should not because I'm tired enough that small currents of white light periodically crawl, worm-like, across my vision and, startled at how close they are, I jerk back violently before I realize that they're just side effects of my randomly firing optical nerves and not actual photonic annelids that traverse the empty air as if it were soil, seeking to burrow into my flesh.

I thought it was raining when I started this post, the constant, medium-speed rain that falls in heavy, fat drops and sounds like nothing so much as a pot of water boiling steadily on the stove. Then I heard a car engine turn over in the driveway and rumble into quiescence again and the boiling noise stopped; it was only coming from the car and the sky is nothing but the morning color of charcoal and same weak, phlematic drizzle it's been all day.

My homework is to write a memo describing something of statistical interest in the most recent Washington State Population Survey, using a particular set of software to give fancy graphs. When I began this assignment, long hours before now, I did not know how to use the software. I now know, vaguely, how to use the software, but I've forgotten the something that my memo was to address. I'd made it up, earlier today, but all of my ideas have crawled away from me, like tiny little worms of light.

I can't focus my vision properly, but I keep looking around anyway. I hurt myself, sometimes, when I'm too tired not to. I find things that hurt me to look at, mostly happy things, and I forget to look away. There's something satisfying about a bitter, ironic fish-hook smile that comes with that hurt. It's like eating week-old stew; it tastes foul, but it'll still fill your stomach.

The car's back outside again, or maybe the sky's started boiling. Either way, the worms are getting worse. My homework won't get done tonight; I think I have to close my eyes now. Maybe tomorrow I'll have control of them again.

I just watched what, I'm told, is the last episode of Teen Titans. Other than the very beginning and the very, very end it didn't feel much like a last episode to me. Hell, it didn't even feel much like a season finale. Why? One word:

Terra.

Actually, let me add another two words on to that:

and Slade.

If you've been following the Titans at all before now it's worth your while to check out this episode. Even if even if you missed this entire season you should check it out - the season honestly has no bearing on this episode other than what the Titans themselves say in the opener ("Boy, we sure have been away for a while."). Cartoon Network's supposed to broadcast it this Saturday at 8pm, but you can catch a BitTorrent of Monday's initial broadcast at mininova, among other places.

Stop back here after you check it out and tell me if it feels as non-over to you as it does to me.

Charles Fort is basically the patron saint of unexplained phenomena. How influential was this guy? Well, he invented the word teleportation in 1931, so I guess that ought to tell you something. He wrote seven books, four of which survive and are collected in a fairly weighty paperback, but I suppose you could thumb through them in digital form.

Fort's fun to read, but his style's a bit hard to follow. He doesn't so much consider normal English sentence structures or, you know, grammar, all that important. He doesn't offer serious explanations so much as he catalogs information and calls into question the existing answers. There's a line towards the beginning of the first book, though, The Book of the Damned, that isn't about the unexplained and makes a little more sense than most. "By 'beauty,' I mean that which seems complete," Fort writes. "Every attempt to achieve beauty is an attempt to give to the local the attribute of the universal."

So far I'm about 70 pages in and I've been mostly reading about things falling from the sky; things like oil, maize, pumice, worms or fish, which may not have been oil, maize, nostoc, worms or fish. I think he's about done with animal and vegetable, though, and is moving on to mineral in the next chapter...

Some monkey societies are advanced enough to have police. What I want to know is, do they still call them pigs? Is there racial profiling of orangutans? And why do monkeys need cops if the monkeys won't steal for you to begin with?

Things, or so I've read, fall apart. The center cannot hold. Nor can my jeans. Time passes, wear and tear sets in and after a while I've got a rip. Torn out knees I can deal with, but a big hole in the butt isn't a pretty sight for anyone and worn-through seams are just weird.

So I bought more jeans, a few weeks back. The value of "bought" under discussion here is "ordered from an online store," because stores with actual locations in time and space don't carry jeans that fit me. This leaves me to conclude that I'm strangely misshapen and should probably consider a career as a mad scientist's lab assistant. Though I suppose that since the deformity would be leg-based, I could always change my name to Torgo...

But I digress. Two weeks gone and my new jeans have arrived. Only they haven't arrived at my house. They were "misrouted by the shipper" and signed for at 5:50 in the morning, a week ago yesterday. Which leads me to believe both that the US Postal Service works longer hours than I've previously thought to be the case and that the folks at JC Penny can't read my typing. I called technical support today, because technically what I need right now is some goddamn support below the waist, but they refuse to help me until 10 working days have passed, since the shipper is supposed to correct the problem. I assume this means that the Post Office will send its contracted ninjas out to retrieve the pakage and deliver it to me, along with the heads of those impertinent enough to have falsely accepted it in the first place.

I mention all this in case you see me wandering around without pants over the next few days. You may be horrified, but at least you'll know why.