you said we are birds. or, i said something about a game. i could be a bird.
you said you were one, too, then.

maybe.

i recall that faint horror and the going around, everyone, as if they had a bubble around them. if you have a bubble, you can't invade anyone else's. but, not being prone to close talking, nor to that unconscious touch on the arm...it doesn't matter anymore. i was deliberate, and i know you saw that. i hesitated and saw you see that. and you did what i did. and those pops were much quieter than the ones the balloons made when they hurled scissors at those floating, stupid faces.   but they still popped.

maybe we are birds.
isn't that what everyone tried to say before? it had to be both of us? even yesterday, she said that i was almost you, which i can't wrap my mind around, but i guess...maybe i still can't see myself.

before, i would have panicked to hear and observe these things.

it was like a pair of thrown scissors. quieter, but down to the bone, which is, of course, the object of our deliberations, and is also itself a blade...
i am glad you shared your fit of plate-smashing. i have also done that.
maybe we are birds after all.

i was thinking also.
i dreamt it before she said i was almost you.

and i was thinking.
when she used to call me hers. and that i am probably crazy.
it's not such a terrible thing to be possessed. i think that sometimes. when people mean it.
whatever it is, it's never the same thing...but every time, it's so important to me.
she meant it. and he means it. and i am glad to know that you mean it, too.

A book review that sounds like I actually tried.

Selection: The Outsiders
By S.E. Hinton

Synopsis:

Ponyboy is a Greaser. He doesn’t have a lot of money, and his life at home has been rough since his parents were killed in a car wreck, leaving his brother, Darry, to raise him and his other brother, Sodapop. Pony does his best not to let crummy circumstances keep him from being a decent person. He’s the youngest in his circle of friends, and the only one who’s stayed in school and tried to get good grades.

But being a Greaser is dangerous, and Ponyboy’s chance meeting with Cherry Valance, the only Soc girl who’s ever treated him like he was even human, sets in motion a wave of violence that may cost him the only things he has left in the world: his brothers and their gang.

Reeser’s Opinion:

Like a lot of the books I enjoyed when I was in grade school, I found I didn’t really enjoy it as much on this last reading. But that’s not to say it wasn’t still a decent book.
Ponyboy is a very conversational narrator, telling the story as it happens, but sprinkling it with all the flashbacks and side stories you’d expect someone to tell you if you were hearing someone tell you all of it, rather than just reading it.

I am a little conflicted in how I feel about how the gangs are portrayed in this book…I’ve read some nonfiction about gangs, and it was loads worse than what we see and what Ponyboy tells us about in The Outsiders, but I’ve heard that this book is still challenged a lot because of the gang violence in it. And the violence is there…it’s just not nearly as bad as some of the other books I own, but then I have to take a step back and remind myself that this is a book for a younger audience—I read it in junior high—and that makes it a little harder to determine if the level of violence is bad or not.

The best conclusion I could come to is that the violence itself wasn’t terribly graphic, but the way Ponyboy talks about it is a little worrisome…like it’s normal. Although I know I didn’t think about that when I was in junior high, reading about these Greasers and Socs beating the crap out of each other.

If that was the aim of this book was to glamourize gangs, I think Ponyboy is not the narrator to do it, since he’s probably the least Greaser-like of his gang. But that’s just me.
Violence aside, the book has a lot of good themes of camaraderie and making an effort to find common ground with people who are different from yourself…it’s very touching at some points, and I think that sort of thing in a book outweighs violence.

There’s not a whole lot else to be concerned about in the book, either. Hinton doesn’t use very extreme language, although Ponyboy tells us a lot that his brothers or the other Greasers or whoever are swearing. There’s some alcohol, but there’s a lot more smoking, and almost every character at some point or another acknowledges that smoking is a bad habit…so I guess that could be considered questionable…but really, I have serious doubts about young adults picking up a cigarette because they read it in a book. Serious doubts.

And that about sums it up for me and The Outsiders…book has some violent and questionable aspects, but I’d say its sentiments make up for that. Which seems to be the point Hinton was trying to make about Greasers, and people in general anyway.

End

Reeser 

Body's solution to pain: sleep for 15 hours. Wake up at 1130 at night.

Not a very practical solution.

Anyway, I am awake now. Ish. Awake-ish. Don't feel very functional.
This is the mode (the only mode) in which I would watch television for hours. Because reading is hard, and I can't focus.

Was thinking about music yesterday. Can't post my year's playlist this time because I can't find most of the songs on the internets. Listened to a zydeco band on repeat with some goth tracks thrown in to jar everything. And that song by Gotye? Yeah. Apparently I listened to that more than anything.

Don't judge me.

There isn't a lot to say when you've slept that long.
Nothing I did, nothing I thought that was noteworthy enough to pass along in digital text.

Putting words in a line is hard.

I just stumbled across a book for kids. It's called "All My Friends are Dead", and has a dinosaur on the cover.

...

I hate to admit it, but maybe I am a hypocrite.
I am all for acknowledging that life isn't all roses and unicorns (and that, in fact, both of those things can stab you), but I am not a fan of the disturbing children's books that I keep running into. I keep thinking to myself that I had a natural inclination to be morbid and dark, and I read books about talking animals and kids and their pets...so...what kind of person I would be if, added to my natural inclinations, I had been given these really disturbing books about creatures whose friends are dead, and kids whose mom's turn into zombies? (featured on the same page is a book called "That's Not Your Mommy Anymore", with that plot)

I don't know that kids should be encouraged to be morbid.
If they decide later that this is their thing, well...so did I. But I wasn't thinking that way at age 7, even if I did pick bats when we did reports on our favourite animals. (Really I would have picked the narwhal, but my 3rd grade teacher had never heard of them and thought I was making it up...yeah.)

Ever remember things...little moments where things are so vivid and you know you were there and then, BAM. You are here? Where did all that intervening time go? It makes me wish my memory were worse, in a way. Less certain, so that I wouldn't feel that unnerving sense of a time jump when the memory ends and I am suddenly here.

I don't know what I will do now. I'm not tired, of course...but I don't feel like I could pay attention long enough to read or do anything that might actually be productive, like clean my room a little bit...feel too feverish for that. And I can't keep writing this post...I sense already that I am getting to the end of what I could possibly write today...

I don't know.

I guess I'll figure out something.

This makes two times ever that I have dreamed, and in that dream, not been myself, nor an unnamed presence, nor something ridiculous like Sebastian the Nutcracker Prince, but been instead someone that I actually know. Creepy stuff.

In this dream, there was a girl who I thought was a princess, and her maid. They were sitting on a lawn as the day passed, and it passed abnormally fast, and worrying because they knew that as the shadows grew, that a creature was going to come after the princess, and the only thing they could hope for was that I would be able to distract and wrestle and otherwise slow down the creature until it was light again and he would be forced back into the shadows.

Princess and maid were meh. Kind of had a vaguely Disney-plus-anime thing going on...not that they were cartoony...they were real people...but...idk...weird.

The creature though...was a dog shaped thing that sort of...had a pulsing reddish glow.
At the beginning of the dream, I saw it in a shadow of the trees, and it kept coming closer until I could hear it growling, and i told the princess she had better get going...and they did, but in the dream world, the sun doesn't take it's time setting. It's like, BAM! Dark. And here comes this rocket-propelled monster.

I spent the rest of the dream running over grassy lawns and through a palace populated primarily by velvet drapes and baroque furniture, throwing things at the creature, hurling myself at it and knocking it down, hiding and making little sounds to trick it into following me, and then tumbling down a flight of stairs, grappling with it and hoping I could hold on long enough for the princess to get some distance away...and...as I wrestled with this creature, which suddenly had arms and walked upright, I had an unpleasant sensation that I knew that shaggy, wolfish face, and the hot-coal pattern of light...

And he seemed to know what I knew, and laughed at me. He told me that for all my efforts, he was winning, and that he had never been trying to catch the princess at all.

And I knew he was me.

And he sprang away from me to chase the princess he wasn't even trying to catch, and I bolted around the corner after him, only to be confronted with a tall mirror in a golden frame...and I am not me.
I could have dealt with that. But I am also not a stranger, which I would have expected.

No...the face I see belongs to someone I know, and the shock at seeing this face reflected at me was enough to wake me up.

I should make friends with someone who's really into dream interpretation.
They could spend forever on my dreams.

!

That is what comes to mind.

Ever see a dog dancing all around and getting excited over something like a treat or a walk or a food bowl or you walking in the room or seeing a bird outside or something? That is Wolf. Except while dogs are going OMYGOSHOMYGOSHOMYGOSH, all I can get out of him is an exclamation point. Triumph over the creepy voice of the leopard seal? (I swear, I have heard the voice somewhere before...in a movie, perhaps...but I can't think of what movie, or when)    I am just getting concerned that, for all the voices he hears, Wolf never utters a sound.

But...triumph.
That is what matters.
Offensive, the way I keep letting it slide from my mind.

Also offensive, the symbols my mind latches onto for its personal mythology.
The Winter. The Dark Depths. The Seal.
The Eye. The Fire. The Wolf.

I thought I was done with it. That the continuity would break off at some point. And maybe it did (myths do that), but I have it again. And it's concentrated in this right now, but...it's there.
I just don't like that when I try and look at the pieces as though they could complete a picture, it looks like something is trying to get me. I don't like that. It's the whole reason the Wolf exploded into my mental landscape...so I could beat that sort of thing down. But...what exactly is trying to get me?

Maybe it's nothing.
Maybe it's all my own idiocy.
The seal didn't bring all that icy sea to me.

Unthinkable as it is, I must've ventured out of my own accord. Not thinking about the hypothermia, or the fact that I can't swim, or the fact that the seal might outweigh me by a crushing 1220lbs. Foolish wolfcreature.

This is why I keep having dreams about being semi-trapped in cold, dark, deep water, where all that stands between me and drowning is a sinking jet, or a dog-dolphin. Unreliable, at best.

And the voice on the edge of my hearing...

Do you ever think about a sound--voice, music, etc--so intently, that you'd swear that there's almost naught keeping other people from hearing the sound in you mind?

I do that.
Except I'm the only one who hears it.
And it's that voice.

Today, I went in a place I never go in. Found an amusing thing I did not know existed.
Then I went in another place and bought deodorant.

Before that, I was reading.
No. That is a lie. I don't know why I just typed that I had been reading. No; I have not read anything of substance today.
What I was really doing was sleeping. I slept a lot. Partly because I do. Partly because I slept poorly the night previous, because I kept waking up and trying to scratch my skin off. To make up for the sleep I lost, I took medicine with an antihystamine in it so my skin would not itch so much. Or so that if it did, maybe I would just sleep through it.

But I came home. And I had some pizza. And there were dogs. I didn't really watch Up, because I think it is a terrible and depressing movie and I hate it. But it was on the tv anyway.
That was after I bought deodorant.

After I woke up, I took a shower and was thinking about fish noses. I was thinking a lot about sharks and pirahna and things. How they have noses, but don't inhale. I could not think of how a fish's sense of smell worked. Unless it was something like in cartoons, how the image of the scent wafts through the character's nose. I read up on it and I guess that is really the case.
That was after Up went off.

I have been thinking about leopard seals again, too.
They are the scariest thing I can think of.

I can think of lots of potentially scary animals, but with most of them, I could also say I wouldn't be petrified to see a wild one. Except maybe a wild boar. Those things strike me as being pretty terrifying. But at least baby boars are cute.

I tried to see pictures of baby leopard seals, and now have doubts that there are such things. My searches kept turning up pictures of baby harp seals

And baby waddell seals

And baby fur seals (which are the CUTEST THINGS EVER)

But nothing much of baby leopard seals. Except one where the baby was practically as big as its mother already, and already looked like a water dinosaur with big, dark, soulless eyes.

I don't like them.

And I saw an orange eye that would not look at him, and under the shaggy fur he wears, Wolf was starting to shake. All the old outrage that is new every time...but no screaming...only a gurgling sound...all the response he can find for the voice, cold and high and slow that laughs quietly and tries to say why the eye does not see him...

A leopard seal would have that voice.

*shiver*

what it was   a sound
white and nothing     was not awake thinking about being awake and asleep
dream with no ride home. promised a ride, but the best they could do was ride the buss and i never        stop talking to me. they are my dreams. i forget i am trying to not talk, and watch jester, two seats ahead, skype chat with my sister
her hair     peppermints

dolphins now riding dolphins and can't swim        looking
sharks
          water in my mouth. breathing.

One thing we have in common. Breathing. Not swimming. Okay. Two things.
She said she would teach me. We don't share that.

again
         dolphins. except with fur. her dog with a dolphin tail.

blues and darkest blues              shiver    rather talk to you on the buss and wonder why we are always so ridiculously close and why he is so far away and wonder in my waking life and wonder if i am awake because i think i am      smell hand sanitizer      and find out

                                                                                                                                      sleeping. hope i am sleeping.

Currently A Glory Of Unicorns see related

A very lame book review.

Selection:
A Glory of Unicorns
Ed. By Bruce Coville

Synopsis:

In this collection of unicorns, there are stories about magic wallpaper, portals to other dimensions, and blind girls getting poisoned, dancing unicorns made of fire, mangy and malnourished unicorns hiding in closets, or donkey-like unicorns with crooked horns.

The stories may not be as rosy as we expect, and the unicorns may not all be sparkling and white, but each of their stories show the unicorns’ unwavering ability to love and to teach others to do likewise.

Reeser’s Opinion:

One of those books I was given as a child.
You know how it is.

On one hand, I’m not overly fond of most of the stories, or even the writing…but there is one story that I’ve remembered now and then, about a boy whose parents covered his room in wallpaper with a forest scene on it, and the unicorn that steps out of the wallpaper one day…

I often wondered if I only imagined having read that story, but I guess I didn’t.

The rest of the stories are fine for kids who like horses and fantasy stories, but I didn’t particularly care for them. I will probably still keep the book though…it’s one of those books I read and say to myself, “aha. If I ever have a small Reeser, I will read this book to it”.

It just underscores my idea that there needs to be a seriously evil unicorn that takes a sharp departure from these kiddie unicorn stories. :P

End

Reeser

Eek...I should be sleeping. So I can go to work tomorrow. In the morning. :O
(I almost always close, so it's something of a shock...and YES, movie theatres really are open 365 days a year.)

But instead I am awake. Battling the tireds so I can have dry, clean laundry.

But, you know...at least I have a job.
One that I can go to and have conversations like this--

Josh: Can I borrow your keys to open the storage room?
Luke: Sure.
Josh: Is it this one?
Luke: Yep. Key gets me into everywhere I ever wanted to go...storage, offices, liquer room...*Josh leaves* Your house.
Me: I beg your pardon?
Luke: Yep. Didn't you know? I had the locks changed.
Me: And a pack of screaming dogs didn't chase you off?
Luke: Nope.
Me: I see. So. Are you trying to get into my house, or keep me out?
Luke: Well, I was trying to get in, but I guess it won't be as fun to sneak around your house now that you're locked out.
Me: ...
Luke: What?
Me: Creeper.

And this--

Erin: Are there two Ewok movies?
Me: That's what iMDB said. Except I forget the title of the second one.
Erin: Huh. Maybe I can look it up on my phone...
Me: Maybe. I just wanted it to look like I was doing something more producive than looking up movies about...space teddies.
Erin: *laughs* Space teddies? I guess they do look like fluffy little bears--
Me: --with scary faces! I would not hug that teddy bear.
*pause*
Erin: Now I have the Gummi Bears theme song stuck in my head.

Yeah. We listened to the song. So much for productivity :P

I love music.

My arm? Not so much. It's still sore and stiff feeling from the shot yesterday, although there's no bruise and it's not all red or anything. But the skin where the bandaid stuck to me is still red. Apparently I am still allergic to adhesives.

But I love music.
So many good songs in my music library that I forgot all about...I think it's because they were all ones I listened to when I was dead and dying. I have a vague recollection of thinking that if I put the sounds away for a while, that would help. What a stupid thing to think, that I should put away such good songs! Agh...the very idea...! *offended*

Oh well. I got it back now. And I'm not dying (although that one song...I swear...I can't listen to it without crying) or anything stupid anymore.

Saw Wreck It Ralph with my sister today. I enjoyed it. I recommend.
We went to get pet food and talk with people in the cookie store, who have apparently seen me so many times that they can recognise members of my family when I bring them in... I like cookies too much?

OMG. THANKSGIVING IS NEXT WEEK.
And here I was all excited to have a hunk of turkey for dinner tonight...whoops.

Really I have nothing to say right now. I get boring like that sometimes.
Not ready for Twilight tomorrow. Ugh. Vampires. (Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy me some vampires...)

I got nothin else right now though. I go now.