This Conversation Seems Like A Dream

Should've known better.

I should have remembered that, for me, non-drowsy and pseudoephedrine are mutually exclusive concepts, no matter what the cold medicine packaging claims. Especially after only eight or nine hours of sleep over two days.

This ought to be an entertaining day--at work while trying to hang on to some thin scrap of wakefulness.

Wish me luck.

Catch me and let me dive under...

Come to me
Run to me
Do and be done with me
(Cold Cold Cold)
Don't I exist for you
Don't I still live for you
(Cold cold cold)
Everything I possess
Given with tenderness
Wrapped in a ribbon of glass
Time it may take us but God only knows
How I've paid for those things in the past

Cold is the colour of crystal the snowlight
That falls from the heavenly skies
Catch me and let me dive under
For I want to swim in the pools of your eyes

-- 'Cold,' Annie Lennox, from the Diva CD.

Some songs just speak to me, and I don't even know why.

And this song is absolutely phenomenal in concert.

Obsession.

How you turn my world you precious thing

I'm not sure what it is lately, maybe it's hormones, maybe it's the upcoming masquerade (eeee, I ordered my dress and got my wings, now I just need to find a mask!), maybe it's rediscovering a fandom that I loved and have sorely missed, I don't know, but I am seriously obsessed with Labyrinth these days.

I ought to watch the movie again, just to get it out of my head, but I'm not sure that will help. Listening to the soundtrack certainly hasn't.

Nor has reading fanfic--and...well, maybe this little facet of my personality isn't so well known as I thought, so I won't preface this with 'anyone who knows me very well,' and will simply say this: I have Issues with fanfic, so the fact that I'm reading any at all is strange in and of itself.

Why issues with fanfic?

Well, one reason really depends on the genre--I had to stop reading Harry Potter fanfic because I was starting to get the book canon vs the fanfic canon all messed up. If the writer isn't finished with the series, there's a big hazard that I'll get the worlds mixed up, and...yeah. I've tried very hard to stay away from HP fanfic, though for anyone who's interested in a Severus Snape mentors Harry kind of thing, I strongly recommend Aspen in the Sunlight's 'A Year Like None Other,' which is on skyehawke (archive.skyehawke.com, click on Popular Stories, hers is right at the top). But that one fic aside, I don't read HP stuff anymore--I can't. LotR is somewhat safer, as is Labyrinth, since the stories are finished, but...

The other problem I have with fanfic is that oh so much of it is written by either 15 year old girls who have no idea what life is really like, people who want to insert themselves into the story so make horrible Mary Sue-ish original characters, or people who have no command of the English language and refuse to get a beta reader so instead force their reader to try and figure out just what the fuck they're talking about because they don't know how to format dialogue and can't spell worth a damn and...arrrg. Yes, I am a self-admitted grammar nazi. Yes, I know I am not perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination, but if your summary is full of AOL or l33t speak, or if you misspell names of the main characters, or forget that there are supposed to be spaces after punctuation marks, well, sorry. I won't read your stuff.

ANYway. So, I've been reading a lot of Labyrinth fanfic lately--all Jareth/Sarah, of course--and have had to wade through a ton of CRAP to find a few of the jewels that I have, and none of this has helped me solve the obsession. Hell, maybe it's caused it, for all that I know. But if anyone's interested, I can make some recommendations.

But I'll be there for you,
As the world falls down

"But...can't someone fix it?"

Easy stuff first. Think good thoughts for my English professor, as she's in the running to be selected as a spokesperson for a political party (she didn't identify which one), and it's something that she's very interested in and would do really well at, so...yeah. Think good thoughts.

Geography yesterday was...entertaining. Right now, we're talking about east Asia, and spent most of our time talking about China. 1.3 billion people, most in the eastern third of the country, which is about the size of the US. Compare that with our 295 (I think) million, and imagine how bad the traffic would be.

Anyway, one of the things that was discussed was their 'one child, one family' policy that has been in effect since 1980. The only exception to this is when two only children marry, then they're allowed to have two kids. It's a pretty hefty penalty if you have more than one, in fact--the fines are two times a person's annual income. Amazing. But the birth rate is still fairly high for the 'one child, one family' rule, mostly because the country is 70% rural, people in rural areas are less educated, and less educated people have more babies--a worldwide truth, which I found interesting.

And thus, their population continues to grow (though India is estimated to outstrip China's population by year 2025), and the gross domestic product is around $324 US per *year*, and people commit infanticide, and selective abortion is not only popular but is government funded, and and and.

One of the girls in my class asked, "But...can't someone fix it? Give money or something?" The implication is, of course, can't the United States fix it, by throwing money and social programs at it?

I guess this is one of the things that makes me something other than a democrat, because I sat up there in the front of the class, shaking my head. Sorry, but no--I am not going to let the government raise my taxes still further to throw still more money out in foreign aid, and by the way, we already DO send aid all around the world. If you're that interested in making a difference, join the Peace Corps.

It shows my age, I suppose, that I am not the idealist I used to be, that people who *are* still that way just...make me shake my head.

I really love the class, though. Makes me wonder how I'd use a dual degree in psychology and geography, if there's even any way for me to do it.

But then I remember that it's bad enough to deal with *one* major. Two would probably be the death of me. :)

Utterly mundane.

This entry is pretty much devoid of any real content.

I'm amused, though. Last quarter when I registered for classes, my registration date was they absolute last day possible for returning students. My summer registration date, if I choose to take classes for the quarter, is three days earlier this time.

I guess I'm moving up in the world.

See? I told you it was devoid of real content.

Names.

On the first night of my English class, the professor asked us all to make name tags to wear, to help her not only learn our names, but to make sure she called us the right name until that happened.

I should add in here, this woman apparently really likes me--this is what the other two people in my group have said. Example, with explanation: She's focusing a lot on the classical definition of rhetoric, and on giving us tools to make us rhetoricians in our own right. (Heh. We'll see if that ever works.)

One of the assignments was to analyze the second part of Odysseus' plea to Achilles in Homer's Illiad. Tag each appeal into one of the three categories, emotional, ethical, or logical, or identify whether multiple appeals were used. Explain why, blah blah blah. So, since my group-mates and I didn't get together to work on it, we all worked individually, and they decided that mine should be the paper that was turned in.

She loved it. Like...a lot. Wrote several very complimentary comments. Asked for a copy that she could use for next quarter's class. Which...kind of shocked the hell out of me, but okay, there are worse things than to nail an assignment so well, I guess.

So, anyway. She knows my name, I know she does, but over the past couple of days, she has started calling me Patricia. It's really disconcerting, not because the name's wrong, but because Patricia was my grandma's name. When I mentioned this in class last night, she paused for a minute, looked sideways at me, and said, "Huh. That's interesting."

Now I am filled with burning curiosity about why that was such an interesting thing. Maybe she's a lot more...'with me' than I thought.

Dispatches. Again.

I haven't written much recently, since the events of April 13th are still sort of burned into my head. I'm a lot better now than I was then, but there are still days when it creeps up on me without any sort of notice.

On one hand, I feel like an idiot--I didn't know the guy, I didn't witness the accident, so I'm kind of baffled that it still has a hold on me and my daily life.

On the other hand, that's not the kind of thing you see ever day, and not the kind of thing that you can just shrug and forget about.

Either way, that's been part of the cause behind why I haven't written all that much. I'm also up to my ears in dealing with classes--for all that most of the work in the English class was supposed to be *in* class, that hasn't turned out to be the case.

Today, though, I felt compelled to write, because in remembering what a friend of mine wrote not long ago, I had a good experience at lunch today.

When I walked into the Subway, the guy behind the counter looked like I feel at my job--bored, tired, ready to go home, not really caring about what was going on in front of him. I smiled at him anyway, and I think it startled him a bit, but he smiled back. I kept on all throughout the time when he was fixing my sandwich, and when he passed me off to the cashier, he wished me a good day and went on to help the next customer--all with a smile on his face.

As for me, I walked out feeling a lot better than I felt when I walked in.

Now if I could just *keep* that smile going, I'd be in business.