Realising that the Courage Campaign has sent me an e-mail announcing yet another terrible thing being proposed by Congress, and it is being proposed specifically by one of the men who technically is supposed to be representing me.

It doesn't stop me from sending e-mails, but every time I get a form letter back that says something along the lines of, "I respectfully disagree with you, and am going to do the exact opposite. Thank you for sharing your opinion."
Homophobia makes me sad. SAAAAAAAAAAAD. Especially in my own family.

WTH, seriously, you'd rather they were drunk than dancing with each other shirtless? CLEARLY they were joking, for one thing, you idiot, and you KNEW they were joking, but it's worse for them to be violating a stated rule than for them to skirt the edges of the appearance of something that might turn into violating a rule?

Also, I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure drunkenness is worse for people's health than a little shirtless dancing.

I really desperately want to kick him. He's not stupid. He's not so old that I can chalk it up to the culture/time period he was raised in. He is CHOOSING this.


And I said something, and got all flustered and turned around the way I always do, and part of the problem is that he never does this when we're having a private conversation, he always does it when we're in public and around small children and I can't say the things I really want to.


What makes me really sad is how everybody else was nodding along to his little diatribe. Wth, family. I can make a few more excuses for you, because of the aforementioned time period thing, but even with that, you are all thinking, generally sensitive people. Most of the time I am genuinely fond of you. What is this HUGE and APPALLING blind spot in your awesomeness?

It makes me a little sick to listen to one of the women I admire most in the world talk like that.
Okay, so I've just--rather abruptly--been informed that my parents are in dire financial straits--like, a zillion times worse than the impression I had been under--but in the next two weeks there is a chance that a grant the company has applied for will go through and everything will be all right.

We will have three kids in college next year; we have a weird insurance setup and a lot of people with expensive medical problems; we are a family of seven semi-dependents, which is a lot to feed and clothe. I try not ask often, but, for the next couple of weeks:

If you believe in prayer, please pray for us.

If you believe in the power of good thoughts, please think some for us.

If you believe in fairy godmothers, loan yours.

If you believe in luck, send some our way.



Please, y'all. I never feel more loved than when in contact with you, and I am asking as somebody you love: use all your influence with the universe. Please.
OMG YOU GUYS I JUST KILLED A BUNNY.

*mildly traumatized*
Kim Manners, you did amazing work, and were an amazing person.

Rest In Peace.
I've never been even remotely tempted to take up smoking. They caught me young and trained me up and it's never been something I found appealing, as an idea. But today I was walking across campus, trying not to die of the cold, and I saw this guy raise his lighter and light up, and I thought--hey. Excuse for warmth up near my face. I SHOULD TOTALLY TAKE UP SMOKING!!!

I apologize, but this is not only becoming a theme, it's going to be a theme. I have whined, I am whining, I will whine.

SO. COLD. O. M. G.


On the plus side, today I remembered my umbrella.

On the minus side, I have to switch to a backpack for my laptop and school supplies, as my little roller case that could...can't. Not with this much snow on the ground. *GROOOOOOAN*
I can't focus tonight.

Well, okay, properly, I can't focus on anything except my SAD CASSIE STORY. And that is mostly because it is sad, and when I am stressed I write sad things. Which is not helpful to the whole last-week-of-school thing. I have several papers to write. But. ARGH.

See, the thing is, this week, at some point, I get my evaluation from my education advisers. And they are--awesome, awesome people. Who I really respect. And there are some parts of this semester which I have irrevocably screwed up, and I have to hear about it, and it makes me unhappy. And I'm nervous, which is stupid, because hey, guess what, it's too late to fix...any of that. At all. In ANY WAY. So I should just shut up and stop fussing and write my damn papers to make things work. BUT I CAN'T FOCUS.
I DON'T KNOW WHAT I WANT TO WRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITE.

My mood keeps changing!

I want to write the hallucination-boyfriend fic and I want to write the faily middle school fic and I want to write the girlfriends fic and I want to write the Mormon picnic fic and I want to write the documentary of their seekrit luv fic and I want to write the faily flirting-with-Greta fic and I flipflop so quickly that I can't manage more than like, six sentences in any of them before I want to change channels again.


I shouldn't complain, because at least I have things I want to write! But--arggghh.

Okay.


[Poll #1302946]


I swear I will finish at least the listed scene by tomorrow morning--voting closes in about an hour and a half, when I've eaten and showered.
I have just private-locked a long and whiny entry, sorry for any confusion.

I figured I'd better not wear out anybody's patience with my whining too soon...I have a feeling I'm going to need to do a lot of it. ^_^
Last day at work today.

I--I'm just emotional. I can't even name everything I'm feeling--sad, and relieved, and gypped, and appreciated, and just a little bit hysterical because one of the biggest annoyances of that job (a manager with no clue what she's doing) was fired TODAY. Which makes me laugh at the sense of humor of the UNIVERSE, aight?

I won't miss most of the people I worked with, or the problems I had that nobody would address, or the constant beating my head against brick walls. I won't miss the ugly metal walls or the cheap apple juice concentrate.

But I'll miss my director, whose husband (when he came to pick her up today) told me that half her stories about work ended in, "but thank goodness for Lu, she..."; I'll miss the parents who made sure to stop by the classroom so I could get a last hug goodbye, who've taken the time over the years to include me in their childrens' lives and listen to my suggestions; I'll miss my bright, impossible children, with their twisty logic and determination and wholehearted living.

It's an ending, and I don't have a beginning to begin yet.

Wow.
Tonight I'm supposed to be writing my letters of leaving for my preschool job: requests for recommendations from a few select parents, my official resignation for my director, my thank-you letter to the general population of parents and kids...

but I'm sad. I'm sad and I'm tired and I love those children dearly and I. Don't. Wanna.

As much as I've whined and ranted and resented this job, as much as my coworkers have been incompetent or my management frustrating or the curriculum horrendously laughably bad, this is the end of a period of my life that will always be important to me. It's the time when I figured out what I want to do with my life; the time when I figured out the cause of my depression; the time when I learned about my flaws and my strengths. I've done a lot of living and a lot of loving in that building, with all those kids around me, and just--I'm going to miss them so, so much.

One little girl I've been caring for almost four years--she was six months old when I started. I've seen her learn to walk and talk, coached and coaxed her through her divorce tantrums, taught her to write her name and help others climb the ladder to the slide. She's bright and quick and lovely, and I'm a part of that--I helped to build the person she is, the person she's going to be. And she won't remember me at all--she's only four years old! Right now she runs to hug me and it's me she cries for when she falls and it's me they send her to when she can't be handled--but in another six months I'll pass her in the street and she won't even know me.

Her mother is one of the parents who've agreed to write me a formal recommendation, and I just...I can't make myself talk about how much I love that kid and how much I'm going to miss her. Not in the formal, bullshitting way I write my official letters.

All I really want to do is hold her close and cry.

It's sad, y'all, and I need time to wallow before I go all bright and cheery to say goodbye.
I so badly want to go to Duckon.

One of my favorite authors in the whole wide world and one of my favorite musical guests and one two of my favorite online people in the same place, just for me to enjoy them?

JIM BUTCHER: TALKING ABOUT WRITING. SIGNING THINGS.

SEANAN MCGUIRE: SINGING LIVE. SIGNING THINGS. INCLUDING HER BOOK.

[livejournal.com profile] cadhla and [livejournal.com profile] knitmeapony: RIGHT THERE CAPABLE OF HAVING CONVERSATIONS INVOLVING OUR VOICES.

Why am I broke?

My life, it is hard. *pouts*
Oh my god, Anj

I...I barely knew her, really, you know? We were at the Leaky together and we met at TWH--and oh my god, she was one of those amazing people that I'm still looking back and going "they were so nice, even though they hardly knew me at all"--and like, you know, right-thinking people the world over, I was a huge fan of her writing and followed her Leaky storylines like a very respectful stalker...

God, what am I even saying?

She was an amazing person, is what it comes down to. She was beautiful and bright and so, so talented, and I am so sorry to hear that she has left us. I send my love to those of you she called friends.

You and she are in my thoughts.
Then again, sometimes my dreamscapes suck, and involve people profiteering off the death and kidnapping of my kids.
So the thing with the insomnia is that in order to avoid KILLING SMALL ALMOST-INNOCENT CHILDREN at work, I drink caffeine (not normally a part of my diet, but desperate times...) Then I have caffeine in my system and it won't let me sleep until, oh, four in the morning.

This is the kind of cycle that makes people take lead bats to their washing machines.

ETA: I just remembered the errands I have to run tomorrow. I think I may cry.
*sad*

The man who brought us DEATH, and Susan, and Vimes, and Esme, and Sybil, and Havelock, and...

It just makes me unhappy that the place where so many of my favorite people live is going to slowly fall apart. I'm just sad that such an awesome person will go through something so awful.

I'm just...sad.
Okay, y'all--

I'm scared.

Everybody will go different places and I'll have to check four flists (which I will never, ever remember to do) and I'll lose people. And communities. And--holy hannah, have you any idea how anally my memories are organised, and all that fic and beautiful, beautiful commentary will just disappear.

*sends hate, hate, hate, hate, hate in the direction of the senders of the apocalypse*

THERE IS A WAY TO DO THIS WITHOUT BEING ASSHATS, YOU KNOW.

Tell us, specifically, what you have a problem with, and ask us to take it down. We will. We're eager to comply, LJ. This is our home. This place contains our family. We are trying so, so, so hard not to leave our home and scatter to the four winds and forget to keep in touch like my Aunt Nancy who moved to California and never got her invitation to the grandparents' golden wedding anniversary. I grew up here. I like it here. I love the people here. The only site I am reliably on, every single day, is LJ. And I am very, very far from the only one. But if your home is having its foundation washed out from under you, and you aren't allowed to try to fix it, you gotta move. Into a cruddy apartment when two-thirds of your family are going to Asia without you.

Let us fix it. We want to stay where we are.



I'll go back and re-check the flist for who I need to add, y'all. Fortunately, everybody I've seen point has referenced GJ, where I already have an account.

You can find me there under elucreh. Damn it all.
Home web out of commission--I should be back tomorrow or Tuesday, y'all!

In the meantime, I wanted to post the entry I typed up last night after seeing Hairspray:

The short, nonspoilery version? It’s FABULOUS. RL folks, we're definitely going next weekend.

It did what I hadn't dreamed it could—was as fabulous as the play and kept the good points of the original movie )

But okay—in case you didn't know, Hairspray is about fighting prejudice—against size and skin color, specifically. I went to see it with my sister, my stepgrandma, and my grandfather, who is seventy-nine. He's very old and slightly senile and dying of three different kinds of cancer—all of which are very sad, but not quite as sad as the next part of my story.

His first words when we got out of the theatre? "Well, that was a good bit of propaganda for Them." Capital-letter Them, the Them that have black skin and/or don't think there's anything wrong with having it.

A little later, when he was telling a story about the way he, as a member of the staff of his university, helped to shoot down mixed casting in a college play, my stepgrandma interrupted him. "Well, we've made a lot of progress in fifty years."

"Well, this is going to sound racist—" ya think, grandpa?—"but I think we haven't so much pulled them up to our level as let ourselves be dragged down to theirs. You wanna call that progress…"



No, seriously.

I got out to my own car and had to laugh. Had to laugh or I woulda cried.

Yeah, okay, he's a product of other times.

But to think of those times makes me sad, and the fact that he hasn't changed between then and now makes me even sadder.

At least there are now two-hour romps for people to watch that will help to fight against those times being any more influential than they already are.
So I was flipping through my delicio SPN recs, because I thought of a new tag I wanted to add to them, because there was this INSANELY AWESOME fic I found that really just didn't adequately fit any of the categories I already had. I was just flipping through them, re-reading the ones I didn't remember well enough, and I came across my favorite story about spoiler ), which gives the most awesome backstory ever and totally makes you curious and forces you to fall in love and everything, and I was smiling because I love this fic so much and then SPOILER )

AND THEN I STARTED CRYING ALL OVER AGAIN.

DAMMIT.

Profile

elucreh

April 2017

S M T W T F S
      1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30      

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags