R U INSANE????

I just read a post of a former schoolmate in which she actually listed all of her former addresses. The real deal. ON THE INTERNET.

What a doofus.

NaNoWriMo: FAIL... and, yet, NOT.

No NaNoWriMo winner badge for me. I got seriously distracted by life and just couldn't put it together enough to write the G.A.N. I couldn't even cobble together an aesthetic manifesto that would vindicate Modernism in this Post-Modern age! I didn't even get to 7K words. Dammit.

DinerGirl = FAIL.

However.

I finally, finally, finally got started on a project that I *like* and that has a voice that I can't believe is actually mine, that doesn't sound like the novel I wrote when I was 13. (It was only 50 pages--typed, single-spaced--, but that's pretty damn good for a tween!) I've "found my writer's voice", as it were, and that means NO FAIL. Means PASS!

I'll write sometime about the dramas that I got caught up in that prevented me from reaching 50K. But not right now, 'cause I have a head cold and am really tired.

In the meantime, shout-out to Tiara for getting past 12K and for starting an awesome project that I hope she's really proud of, too.

Onward, WriMos! Onward!

Found This Lying Around...

I bought this software *ages* ago, and thought that it wouldn't be compatible with XP, but it is! And last night I spent a good deal of time plotting out a story that seems to have all the right stuff.

My friends can never be allowed to see it though.

I just don't like other people reading my writing, especially since I'm looking at this as my first real go-round with the novel genre, and therefore this one's just for me.

More about the Writer's DreamKit soon.

Thoughts at 2 a.m.

It's really fucking cold here tonight, yes, really fucking cold, below freezing even. Not cigarette weather at all. ::sigh:: I really have to quit.

I've got my insomnia on again, although I admittedly induced it by going to the 7-11 tonight for my 20 ounces of Obama. (Someday SpellCheck will recognize the word "Obama" and not underline it in red dots... Huh. It recognizes McCain. Odd.)

So other than screwing around with spell-check on Mozilla, what else am I doing? Well, principally I'm thinking about how lonely it is here now that I've alienated most of my old (former?) friends. Interesting to see my home town with eyes unencumbered by old alliances. But still very, very lonely.

So, I'm thinking about loneliness.

And then I start thinking about G., my ex, who lurks somewhere along the DC Beltway. Should I email him? I wonder. Or would that just be inviting Hell into my kitchen? I haven't heard from G. in close to four years, he may not even have the same email...

What's the policy on gratuitously starting shit up with ex-boyfriends? Do I get bad karma points for that?

Even-Keel Girl

Been a little off-balance lately, not good. Taking on too many projects... my participation in this NaBloPoMo thing is probably due to things being a bit off-kilter. Too much energy, probably just a cyclothymic thing. I'm feeling better, although now I'm finding it hard to motivate for NaNoWriMo. When I'm off-balance I am (somewhat paradoxically) super-productive. I'm also super-irritable, as the email to my HS friends displays...

...but with regard to that, my goodness! Some people have responded to me telling me to just chill, and some people have responded with "It-wasn't-about-YOU" logic, which is in essence... telling me to just chill. Which actually has succeeded in pissing me off even more.

Can't win with Off-Kilter Girl, it seems.

Even-Keel Girl, however, now she is not rattled by stuff like this.

I still think I did the right thing by sending the email, even if it was generally dismissed by my friends. My evil exbf from North Jersey who hates my HS friends with the fire of a thousand suns even told me to back off. "Take it easy on your friends," he said. "They're just kidding around!" And then he added as a p.s. "Besides, nobody's ever moved to Canada based on an election!"

Well, I just might! I think Canada would be good for me.

As it's shaping up, this place might not be...

Cackelacky Logic

I talked tonight with a former friend/lover, all now tucked away in North Cackelacky with two kids, a wife and a house--a total amnesiac about our affair, too, (which, BTW, happened long before he was married) and which is probably better for him in the long run, but hangs like a white elephant doing the merengue on the telephone line between us.

We talked about the election. He's voting for McCain, because he thinks he's straightforward and won't "Rob Peter to Pay Paul", as he thinks Obama will do. So even if he agrees with Obama on social policy, apparently owning a house will make you vote for, essentially, the perception of better financial security.

As I don't own a house, I couldn't jump to the defense of Obama's economic policies. That and I know squat about economics in general.

Shamefully, especially since my friend lives in one of the most hotly contested battleground states in the union, I did not try to turn his head with my Most Heated Liberal Arguments. Instead I just kind of lay down and let him turn traitor. Why? Because I didn't want to push him any further to the right. It seems these days that that's all arguing over politics does--entrench people even further in their beliefs.

I went to hippie-dippie Montessori school until I was seven. In my hippie-dippie heaven, there was no gender, no race, no religion. It was *so* late-'70s nirvana. I have carried all those teachings with me ever since, and the school remains my imagined "happy place" when I see what's wrong with the world. I fit in well in San Liberal, where it seemed everyone lived in a hippie-dippie bubble.

Now that I'm back here, in the Red Part of a Blue State, I cling vehemently to my past, to my liberal views, but I've stopped trying to convert the McCainiacs. They'll just call me Pinko Commie Liberal. And I'll just call them Redneck Xenophobes.

God, I miss my friends in San Liberal. Not that they were open minded. They were not. It's just that their closed-mindedness I understood and agreed with. San Liberal is a bubble, though, and I'm learning more about what it *really* means to be an "Amercun" here in SJ.

I don't like what I see.

It's very lonely here these days. Just the writing and the working and the 'rents. Very little in the way of friends. And even less by way of dating.

Maybe I should call an ex-boyfriend or two. One is lurking outside of D.C. and another outside of N.Y.C.

Consider yourselves warned. ;-)

Breeders!

Weird about being home again: all my old HS friends are still around, and that's cool, but now they've got their brood in tow... not cool.

I know that it's very common for women in their 20s and 30s to be breeding out the wazoo, but, wow, I really did not realize that it was expected of me to have some little larval creature cooing in my arms before I got my first gray hair. (In that case, I would have had to have had a baby before my 26th birthday, when my stepmother noticed a streak in my locks, pointed it out to me over my birthday cake and cackled.)

Here's how I feel about children, after 7 years in San Liberal, where also, breeders abound, but so do greeners: Not having a baby is the Greenest thing you can do. Think of all the diapers, the bottles, the nappies, the binkies, all the things that can't be recycled that come along for the ride, and anyone has to admit that there's a lot of stuff going into the ground that won't ever, ever lose its form and return to the earth.

So I stay righteous about my decision not to have children. But...

Then I see the happiness (and loving exhaustion) in their eyes and I wonder if I'm not missing out on something. Of course, not being married, or having a partner, having a child would be a little, shall we say, exotic at this point, if not plain stupid considering my salary at the moment. And the fact that I'm an unstable writer chick who can't even care for a pet fish! (Gotta go to Fish 'n Stuff and get a new one. I like having another consciousness around me, even if it is a simple Betta consciousness.)

But anyway, babies. I was raised to feel that I would be incomplete as a woman if I didn't have babies, and no matter how strongly I feel about not bearing any children from my own womb, I still feel its emptiness from time to time. Don't know what that's about.

So I'll enjoy everyone else's children, even though kids make me nervous as hell--what if they don't like me? What if I break the baby???" Dunno what that's about.

Maybe I should write a story about this choice I've made, and about being around people I love who have made the opposite choice.

Or maybe I should write about how, even though I'm here, back where they are, none of them choose to call me... at least not a lot.