rain

and when they're out for blood
I always give.
ani di franco, pixie

Listening to a playlist I made in April. Contains a lot of songs I was listening to very heavily then. I made the playlist for one of our many trips to Buffalo. We were looking at apartments then. We knew we were going to move. I had been writing the novel for three months and sort of knew I wasn't going to finish it as I had intended.
The playlist is 123 songs long and was meant to last the entire trip. Did I mention that we timed one of our trips to Buffalo, taking notes and recording the time it was at each landmark? I don't think I ever posted the results. I might. There was something epic and yet familiar about driving diagonally across one of the larger states on the Eastern Seaboard, and recording almost every street sign we saw on the way (mostly such notables as Fishs Eddy and Bridgeville / So. Fallsburg, and of course the ever-present Future 86 signs) lends it a certain intimacy I think. Do recall that while it's a gorgeous drive, through the heights of the scenic Catskills and through some beautiful Southern Tier farmland, we usually made the drive in the dark, and in the dark, scenery is fucking boring. These street signs looming up out of the darkness were our landmarks, pearls on a big long string of Despair. (I wrote about The Despair in my blog, but had to disable comments on that entry because it got comment-spammed so heavily. [Oh, maybe I didn't disable comments. Well, I disabled comments on most of that blog, and daily, comment spammers find entries I missed in my purge of the comment box. Joys.])

I was awoken by the rain. I had been snuggling in Dave's bed-- perfect for a chilly night in an unheated house, and I might mention that he has a lovely feather duvet (he calls it a comforter, but I am just pretentious and European enough to insist that it's a duvet-- in Northern Europe, most places I was, they didn't use sheets the way we do in the U.S., but simply had a comforter with a cover that matched the fitted sheet, and that was all. Dave has adopted that system, and so have I-- fewer things to get tangled, and it doesn't get tucked in in the first place so there's nothing to come all untucked and slide off the bed and leave you freezing). So, despite the lack of bulk of boy to cuddle with (bigger isn't better, anyway, and skinny little boys can generate heat well enough), his bed is exceedingly cozy.
But the rain woke me, and I couldn't sleep, so I got out of bed (I wish the floors didn't creak. Dave has to be on the road to Rochester by 8:30 tomorrow a.m., and I hate to wake him. But he's like me-- wakes easily, but falls back asleep easily-- usually) and puttered into my room. I wanted to go out onto the screened-in porch (they call it a Florida room here) to watch the rain by the neighbor's never-turned-off, aimed-into-our-yard porch light, but realized that I couldn't without waking Dave again, so I decided against it.
So I resumed work on what I was writing when I went to bed, instead. I put on the iPod to listen to music with headphones, and threw on the first playlist that came up, saying to myself that I'd just work until the playlist ended.

Ha. See the beginning of the entry. Whoops. I'll have to come up with another stopping point...

On the bright side, Éomer and Faramir are bonding over bad, raunchy jokes. Which couldn't have happened on a nice night wherein I slept well.

I don't have insomnia, I just sleep in strange patterns. Works fine as long as I'm not working 9-5 Monday thru Friday. Why on earth does the world run 9-5 Monday thru Friday? That's retarded.
Oh well.

sleep? bah.

I don't practice Santeria
I ain't got no crystal ball
If I had a million dollars well I'd
I'd spend it all.

Yeah, the playlist's still going.

what I really wanna say
I can't define.

(That's Sublime's Santeria, by the way, off their self-titled album. An excellent car tape because the bass is strong yet actually interesting.)

And I'm still going. I'm kinda sleepy but not sleepy enough to sleep.

I'm writing, but I'm writing stuff that I already knew I was gonna write. I even have first drafts of much of it. Some of it's even been posted before, in earlier draft form. And i doubt I'm improving it that much.

So I should go to bed.

But it's still raining, and I'm still not ready to sleep. And I'm not going to try, because I'd wake Dave up again.

I'd try sleeping in my own bed, but there's too much crap on it from me rearranging my room today and not finishing putting everything away. My room may never be clean. Yes. I was just using Dave for his not-covered-in-debris bed.

I don't think too much
I been drivin' all night long.
(Driving All Night Long, Ryan Adams (written by Bruce Robinson))

I can't update this; livejournal is down, status.livejournal.org is down, and when lj is down it makes my MovableType blog choke and die because the crosspost function has no error tolerance. So, I guess it's a sign. Bed. Fictional characters might let me sleep now.

can't stop laughing

from the Queen of the Wild Frontier (lj user qowf):
She linked to this, and I can't stop laughing. political fanfic: the Cowboy and the Soldier.

Gasp. Wriggle. Awesome, man. Awesome.

confused

slept so poorly last night i passed out today.
woke several times to various events-- totally disoriented-- phone ringing, took a message, can't remember whether it really happened... doorbell rang, ups had left a package for dave, opened side door and the ups guy wasn't there so i ran to the front door and saw ups leaving and was all upset, but then went back to side door and realized they'd left the package and i hadn't noticed it there-- fuzzily remembered that he had told me to open any package that arrived, to check on it, wondered what package expected-- camera not coming until next week(?), hadn't ordered anything else-- so disorientedly stumbled around the house, looking for scissors, found them, opened package-- Dave had bought two DVDs, the first two DVDs we actually own: Tampopo and The Price of Milk-- both movies we've rented and coincidentally both loved though i dunno what he saw in PoM because I was mostly there for Karl Urban's ass-- and New Zealand scenery, how lovely-- we watched that thing like five times before returning it and i love the soundtrack, and the naked-milk-wrestling scene--
dreamed that dave's cousin had come over to drop off mail, not sure whether she came or not, but thought probably not-- i had been in a sea-foam green/blue kitchen with weird counters, and as far as i know there is no such kitchen (though counters like that are in our basement)...
got up and am trying to deal with the world, and the surreality continues.
his cousin really did come over to drop off some mail, which was nice. The sun also came out, adding to my disorientation-- I haven't seen that big white ball in the blue thing in days now, and when did that happen?
So i have returned to my desk, seeking sanctuary, hoping to organize my thoughts.
The desk is a shambles, covered in things I have flung out of boxes because they struck me as being vaguely "desk"-y -- office supplies, notes, books, stuffed woolly mammoths--
Among the artifacts upon the desk I found a very small notepad made of scrap paper. I carried it around in my purse for a while, months ago. So it had some notes in it. One was a list of things to put in a care package for my sister when she started college. That was a while ago.

But there was also a little sheet almost entirely filled with the following note, in an exceptionally messy version of my handwriting (distinctively spidery, if you've never seen it), in blue ball-point pen such as the one I carried in my purse around that time.
It reads, inscrutably,

' dave wouldn't make out with me-- said only if Barry White or Marvin (scribble) Gaye. I told him they were both dead, & you were alive, & we should take advantage of the moment, but he still said no.

adding to the inscrutability (what on earth was I doing with those pronouns?) is the fact that the phrase 'to Nova Scotia' (I am not sure, the handwriting is bad-- it might say 'Nora Scotier') is written between the line that says 'make out with me' and the next line, where it says 'Barry White'.

Huh?

This is not helping me collect myself for the task of making dinner. I think I ought to have either slept a shorter time or a longer one. Dave studied that in psychology-- sleep is in three-hour cycles, I guess, so if you sleep less than three or six or nine hours (roughly-- it's often a little shorter, so an 8 hour span is enough for three sleep cycles for most people), you end up being really disoriented.

Well, I am. I've been awake an hour and a half now and still have no freaking clue what is going on. I am going to ask Dave about that note but I know damn well he'll have no idea either.

My life is so damn weird... but it's not even interesting. That, my friends, is cruel irony.

Also, the fact that i have indigestion and am hungry at the same time. Yes! apparently i have simultaneously eaten both too much and too little. Y'know... I dunno.