ugh

i don't feel good.

i tried to go to bed at midnight, lay awake for an hour, got up, and made myself lj icons i'll never use instead until 3am.

Now it's 8:30 and I don't feel good. What an astonishment.

I really ought to figure out how this 'sleeping' thing is done.

whee

am trying to be energetic and productive and clean the house today. only just noticed that the rugs need vacuuming, the floors need sweeping, the rooms need dusting, all these things i never ever remember to do, and it detracts quite a bit from the charm of the little house if it's, well, grody.
Since we're having a party on Tuesday (a Political Party, actually) then we really ought to get the place looking decent.

So, that's my goal for today.

I've spammed every writing community I'm in with this short story I wrote to warm up for NaNoWriMo, but I haven't put up a link in this journal. Amazing.
It's posted friends-locked, as all my stuff is at this juncture, so to read it, go here and add treigylgweith as a friend. That's my story journal. I'll add you back. Then you can read it. Cumbersome, but it's all the rage this season-- apparently everyone thinks they're going to get published on paper, and if you've already published on the publicly-available Internet, then no publisher will take it. (I have my own ideas on that, but no time or energy to pursue them right now.)

The story, once you're signed up, is visible here:
The Last Test (the working title changes every time I post about it).


So, there you go. I haven't been entirely idle all this time, but have been working. I actually wrote several drafts of that story and practiced my exceedingly rusty editing skills. I don't know that I'll have any time to edit for NaNo, but I hope to spend December editing if all goes well, at which point I'll have finished. The. Stupid. Thing.

But I digress. Yes, I do feel this is 'finished'. :) It's a nice feeling, if a bit miniaturized beside how a finished novel would feel.

sentiment

If anyone wants to see pictures of Dave's Gram's funeral brunch (warning: ADORABLE three-year-olds), those are online here.

It struck me recently that of all the lovely hymns I learned during my brief sojourn among the Protestants (of which "Jerusalem" remains my favorite, no fear), the following is the one I want performed at my funeral. I cannot deny-- the various Protestant sects have far better music, on the whole, than the Catholics. That is a part of my heritage I don't mind getting in touch with (being a half-breed Catholic and an unorthodox-raised one at that [dad thinks you should be able to have an abortion up until the 'fetus' is 20 years old; my mother is Dutch Reformed, similar to Methodists but with different church administration structures]).

I'm not a particularly religious person (see above paragraph); I like going to church because it was always something lovely I did with my father and sisters (we would all put our arms around one another's shoulders during the homily and feel very close, regardless of what the priest was going on about), and I have a sort of unexamined simple belief that sure, God must exist, and I should respect that. Sometimes I am deeply filled with a sense of the spiritual, and I devote considerable thought to it now and then, but it's not something that I worry deeply about. But, what with all the funeral business of late, I remembered this hymn, and revisited it, and thought I'd post it.

The words and lyrics are on this site, which is totally weird, but also accurate. (No, I don't know why the writer of the site writes all syllables separated with a dash. No idea. Crazies.) The MIDI is awful but also accurate. Fiona sent me this site so we could learn the hymn we had to sing at Katy's wedding (The Gift Of Love, if you were wondering, in a three-part arrangement).

The song is "Abide With Me". The words were written in 1847 by a minister dying of tuberculosis; he died three weeks after finishing the hymn.

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day;
Earth's joys grow dim; its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless;
Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.
Where is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

The third verse quoted (the seventh of the full version) is my favorite one, I think. I don't know quite what moves me so about the song. I like the idea of the deity as a comfort to the faithful. I like the thought of the deity as the only constant in a changing world. I like the courage that can be derived from simple faith. And I like the continuation of that idea of change to accept that the diety remains an unchanging, comforting presence even through the frighteningly unknowable, ultimate change of death.

Amazing Grace is another wonderful song that I have always loved, but it's not so funeral-specific. And everyone always has Ave Maria at their funeral, and honestly I don't like that song that much. I totally dig on the weird semi-pagan cult of the Virgin, sure, and I am as big a sucker for Latin as anyone, and really the Hail Mary is a beautiful prayer that I do like, but it's just not... as beautiful, as immediate, as intellectual, as comforting as Abide With Me.

I have an mp3 of the tune (far better than the awful MIDI on that site), performed by an unidentified military band with Highland bagpipes. It's lovely.

Abide With Me, 1.3 MB, duration 1:53



So, I suppose I'll stop talking about death and funerals now. That's probably a suitable punctuation, there.

(no subject)

In the days after 9-11 I often took comfort in thinking of this man and the ideas he represented. When asked what I thought the United States would or could do in response to the attacks, I surprised friends by saying that I believed the US military's intelligentsia already understood the true nature of the conflict better than the enemy did.

And I still imagine that I was right in that. But the creative intelligence of my friend from the DoD, and so many others like him, prevailed not at all -- in the face of ideology, cupidity, stupidity, and a certain tragically crass cunning with regard to the mass pyschology of the American people.

One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has since been made to be.

From William Gibson's blog.
Yes, William Gibson. From Neuromancer. From... Yes. William Gibson. That one. Has a blog.
I heard about this years ago, but when I went, it had just been started up, and there was almost nothing in it.
Since then I've always meant to check it again, but never really got around to it. So I did, tonight.

Dave came and lay in my bed and bit my ankles, in an amusingly sleepy imitation of my sister's puppy Scout. It was surreal. He then fell asleep in my bed. Sadly, I am not sleepy. So he is sleeping there, and I am on the couch with his laptop, reading blogs.
Why not?

I am sleepy now, though. :)