More awesome.

I thought I'd do another post about things that are awesome, because I'm in an appreciative mood. Okay? Okay.

So I had a seizure on Monday (not the awesome part, obviously) which was the third in two and a half weeks. I went to the hospital afterwards, which I don't usually do, but both the frequency of them up until that point and the fact that I couldn't focus my eyes for, like, two hours combined seemed like it was a good idea. (My film studies professor came with me and stayed for an hour and a half until she had to pick up her kids, which WAS awesome. She kind of made me tear up a little bit. Really really moving and wonderful. Seriously.)

Another truly awesome thing was the fact that my ER nurse for real looked exactly like Project Runway's Leanne Marshall:


Seriously, they look like twins in that picture. I am pretty sure that the nurse was wearing that same exact shade of lipstick. She was totally indie-nerd-glam-hot. She seemed really witty and cool, too. Swoon. Call me, ER nurse. I clean up nice!

You know what else is awesome? Ally McBeal. Various seasons have just been released on Netflix, and my mom and I have been watching the fourth season. It is really and truly hilarious, and a bit surreal at times. Sure, Ally can seriously grate on my nerves, especially since she has the qualities that I deplore in myself (neurotic, self-absorbed, emotionally fragile, indecisive, overthinks everything, slightly unbalanced etc., etc.,) but these are minor complaints, since the show is generally fantastic. Also, the current season includes Robert Downey, Jr.:


Who is totally wonderful. Charming, smart, sexy, and troubled. And looks killer hot in glasses. When gorgeous men don glasses, I lose it. See Hugh Laurie:


I think Hugh Laurie is positively delectable all the time, but whenever he puts on glasses on House, I melt into my chair. I am such a fangirl and I don't give a crap. I love the guy.
Speaking of sexiness being enhanced by nerdy accessories:


I don't really like Olivia Wilde, and I hate her character on House, but I won't deny that she's scorching hot, especially when she puts on suspenders. Chicks in suspenders just do it for me, really:







Hot.

I also dig dudes and dudettes in vests. Not sweater vests (never sweater vests, unless it is Lisa Meyers or Robert Sean Leonard as James Wilson) but buttoned-up, tailored vests.





I don't even find either of them all that hot. Just in vests. A tailored vest is even hotter on a woman, in my opinion, but those are harder to find pictures of.

Hey, you know what else are hot? Saddle shoes!

I'd love a pair of those for Christmas, along with the numbat from yesterday.

Sherilyn Fenn wore a lot of them on Twin Peaks. David Lynch called her "five feet of heaven in a ponytail":




To that I can only say: signs point to yes.

More awesomeness to come, obviously.

Weird animals!

I'm in the mood for something extremely random. It's Thanksgiving and I'm home and happy and glad to be with my cats and my mom and so forth. So I'm going to post some pictures of strange animals. Because that's how I roll.

The narwhal!


The wombat!


The Tasmanian Devil! This is one of my favorite animals, ever. I think it is all kinds of awesome.


The platypus! The weirdest thing I ever done seen!


The numbat! Anyone want to get me one of these for Christmas?


The Tasmanian Tiger! It's extinct, but it's still awesome.


The echidna! (Boy, Australian animals certainly are weird.)


The komodo dragon!


Happy Thanksgiving, y'all. May your dreams be graced with bizarre animals. Hope for my good health and I will hope for yours, as well.

I'm taking the plunge.

No, I'm not getting married. (Not that I really thought anyone would actually think that but...)

No, I've decided to do NaNoWriMo, a.k.a. National Novel Writing Month, which takes place over the course of the month of November. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel (although I'm doing short stories), not worrying about the quality, just forcing yourself to get it all down and not second-guessing yourself. Since I'm such a goddamn overthinking perfectionist that my creativity has been severely stunted for a couple of years now, this seemed like an ideal opportunity to try to counteract all that and just force myself to get it all out...not to mention that I've had this short-story collection idea in my head for years now. It's my baby, and I've hesitated to get much work done on it because I didn't want to fuck it up.

Well, fuck that. I can revise later.

I doubt I'll make it to 50,000 words, but I'm going to do my best. I signed up on the official site on everything. Now let's just hope I don't get felled by some wasting disease in the middle of it. (And even if I do, I'll try to push through it anyway.)

I'm excited, y'all. Wish me luck.

So, it's been like a million years since I wrote in this, right? (Or six weeks or so, but hey, close enough...)

I'm well into my semester now and overall it's going pretty well. Classes are pretty great for the most part, and my health is...well, it's been worse. There's definitely been some sick badness (nausea, stomach pains, headaches, body aches, chest pain, heart palpitations, a seizure the other day, and even some weird new shit), but hey, at least I haven't gotten the swine flu, right?

I have been really homesick this semester though, worse than it's been in awhile. I always missed my mom really badly, but never "home" so much, and it sounds silly, but honestly I think a lot of it has to do with my missing my cats. Seriously. I am having serious cat withdrawal and it's a problem.

Also, a piece of awesome awesomeness that I forgot to put into my last entry and clearly have not put in since, as I have not updated and all and blah blah blah: The day before moving all my stuff in, when my mom and my brother and I were hanging out on campus, we went for a long walk on the Smith trails. A little dog ran up to us, and as I was, you know, talking nonsense to the dogs and so forth, the dog's owner came over - who happened to be Thurston Moore, of Sonic Youth fame. I looked up (way, way, way up because the dude is TALL), and there he was. With his dogs. I mean, I knew he lived in the area, but seriously, that was about the last place I would expect to run into him. Go figure. I basically squealed my face off.

But enough of this. My mom sent me some pictures of the cats and I'm gonna post them now.

Mabel in the cabinets:


Cuddling cats:




More to come, as always.

This is basically "Why Cassie shouldn't listen to the Counting Crows when already in a melancholy mood."

"A Murder of One," to be specific. Beautiful song. One of my favorites, ever. And depressing as all hell.

I was thinking about things that cannot be forced, partially in connection with my own creativity. I used to write all the time. I started writing stories when I was four and could not yet even physically write, but dictated stories to my mom. From the ages of, I don't know, four until about eighteen I have notebooks upon notebooks upon notebooks filled with stories, attempted novels, poems, songs, even an aborted screenplay. And of course the vast majority of it looks obviously like it was written by a child/teenager/young adult, there's definitely some profound stuff in there and I truly don't know where that creativity went. All of those urges. I thought that once I was in college, with my creativity and intellect nourished, it would flourish more than ever, but instead it's gone downhill.

I was also inevitably thinking about love, in terms of things that can't be forced. You can wish all you like. You can manipulate, cajole, trap, seduce, rape, intimidate, demand, cripple and brainwash, you can kill someone with kindness and be selfless or appallingly selfish and in the end it will not matter, because all the yearning in the world simply will not make someone love you. It's something that can only be willingly given.

I've been in love with the same person for so long that I start to wonder sometimes if it's even him I'm still holding on to, or just the idea itself of the love. If it's just stubbornness and an unwillingness to let go of something that I've wanted for so long. I haven't seen him in so long now and there are no new memories to make. Nothing new to go over. And it'll seem like more of a longing for the past than a longing for him.

And then I'll get a sudden flash of a memory, something so sharp and potent that I can actually almost feel him next to me and I'm left gasping and reeling from it, suddenly missing him so much it's like a physical ache in my chest.

I didn't grow up dreaming of getting married. I never envisioned myself in a wedding dress, even as a little girl. I dreamed of true love, but getting married was never something I particularly cared about. I never even really understood the point of getting married. It never even seemed necessary until I met him. And then I understood why people do it. Because I wanted so much to stand up in front of all the people I cared about and profess my love, and tell the world that he was mine and I was his, and - it just all clicked into place for me then.

He's long gone and I don't know what to do with all this. I've often frightened myself a little with how deeply and quickly I fall in love. I can imagine myself with someone else, but I can't imagine how I could ever let this one go. I'm not even sure that I want to.

I miss him every day.

There was a friend I had for many years. Self-destructive, angry, careless. He treated me badly and I treated him with a ridiculous amount of kindness. And he's been through so much in the last couple of years, and I've been wondering lately if I even still care about him all that much - and even if I ever really did, or if it became about stubbornness once again. Like if I admitted that he just wasn't worth it, that there wasn't much in my heart for him anymore, it would void all the time I spent trying to help him, all the tears I shed when I didn't even know if he would live out the week.

I don't know how to answer that question, and I worry that it was just stubbornness. Because I don't know what that says about me - that I would hold on to something for so long, not to mention giving that person hope that I cared more than I really did, simply because I was unable to admit to myself that I was wrong, that my affection was misplaced.

I don't know. Things are really strange right now and I really don't know how to answer these questions. And I'm afraid of what I might see in myself if I do.

And may bunnies and cats and ferrets and washbears be had by all!

Just dropped in to wish a very happy 33rd to dear Jenny, writer, screenshot artist, heartstring-puller and procrastination assistant extraordinaire. It's been delightful chatting about all subjects important and trivial, bouncing ideas off of each other, and above all, avoiding work together. Thank you for sharing your work with all of us who read it and for being a valued friend these past couple of years. Also, I am very pleased to have been able to impart you with the terms wubby, ooky, catbear, and the exclamation "good gravy!", as well as a generous helping of of ridiculous ideas for your poor characters.

It's been a pleasure. Happy birthday and enjoy the candy!

Well, I'm back at Smith. Moved in yesterday. Classes haven't started yet but they do tomorrow and I just saw my mom off. I'm going to miss her terribly but it's much better than last year, when I was moving into a new house and had very few friends, or my first year when I was totally suspended. This year I know and love my house and I know I have friends (even though Lisa is abroad this semester and I already miss her dreadfully) and I'm fairly well settled. I know my majors, I've declared, I have a better idea of what I want to do with myself, I'm working on finding a work study job and I'm a little more confident that I know I can handle things. I'm just going to miss my mom terribly, that's all.

And the kittens! I'm going to miss them awfully, too. I spent almost all day every day with them this summer and it's going to suck not having their screaming furry little faces around all the time. They got fixed and declawed this past Monday and we got them back Wednesday (Abbey, aka Princess Bitchcat, was VERY happy with the two-day vacation she got from them), and so it was a lot of antibiotic-giving. Those two just don't know to take it easy. Poor Duncan's front paws swelled up to nearly twice their normal size because he got cat litter in them AND is apparently not smart enough not to figure out that maybe he shouldn't be jumping up and down such high surfaces. Mabel, for her part, is a little bit OCD and would not stop licking and picking at herself. I now have cat blood stains from her feet on the surface of one of my notebooks, which is just LOVELY.

Plus they're going to be going insane without the attention and affection to which they've grown accustomed. My mom joked that she'd have to get a baby sling and hold Duncan in it while she cooked and cleaned and went about her evenings.

She also says that if she does that, that's the moment that she officially becomes a crazy cat lady and I am inclined to agree. Still, I can imagine doing that myself. Duncan in particular is my baby, after all.

I also left my computer charger at home - of all the things! so my mom is going to next-day it to me and in the meantime, I'm trying to limit my computer time and I'll try to borrow a charger from someone who has the same computer. It's hard, though. What am I going to DO with my free time??

It really is good to be back, though. I'm a little worried about how things are going to go, but there's no doubt that this is where I'm supposed to be right now and I'm sure I'll end up having a pretty good time. I'm excited about my classes and really excited to be back in Northampton. I want to try to start working out again (which I say every time a season starts or ends, I know), if only for my energy level, which seems to be decreasing quite a lot over the past couple of years. I don't have the same level of energy that I had even a couple of years ago, at all, and I want to try to make that a little bit better if I can. And I want to try to write more again. It's something that I've missed and I have a feeling I'll feel more like myself again if I can figure out how to get that going.

Till then.