The wonderful thing about the Internet is the ability to find people, quite easily, and be given the opportunity to reestablish contact after what might have been years of silence.

The horrible thing about the Internet, however, is the ability to find people, quite easily, and be given the opportunity to reestablish contact after what might have been years of silence.

I never know how to feel when people I knew from ages ago come up and throw me a “Hi, how’ve you been?”  My initial reaction is “what the fuck do you care, years after you slagged me off?”  Then I calm down and remember that life happens and the circumstances were rather unusual (as they tend to be for dropouts).  Sure, they could’ve picked up the phone, but what is there to talk about when you never shared anything but the daily experience?  With that gone, there’s nothing to talk about.  Give it a few years, and there’s bound to be something worthy of discussion.

But the awkwardness remains.  And I would much rather not be bothered by these people, just to avoid that awkwardness.

And now here I sit, looking up people from THE PAST on facebook, wishing I could get back in contact with them, but knowing I shouldn’t, considering just how damned awkward it would be after everything that has went down since last we spoke.  Awkward because they were his friends… and although I grew to genuinely like them in our brief meetings, regardless of who they were to whom, I don’t know if I was lucky enough to have that genuine liking returned.

But I miss them, and I regret not getting to know them better before.  And I regret the thought that I might never have that chance now, with all the bitterness that remains in THE END.  I hate the thought that his incessant whining and smack-talking and “I Can Do No Wrong” -isms may have blown whatever chance I had to still call them “friends”.  I hate to think that they might actually think that I’m the delusional one.

There’s no way I can just randomly say “hi, how’s life been?”

And so I sit here, their names and faces on-screen, wishing we’d all met in a different way… or maybe not at all.

And this little kid runs up and says “YOU HAVE GREEN HAIR”

I smile and say “yup”, which was a big mistake, because her two sisters proceeded to come over and talk my hind leg off for the next half hour.  Well, the one talked the most, in fucking spanglish, so I just kind of nodded and smiled when she rattled on about how my hair is a boy’s haircut, my pants are for boys, my shoes are for boys, and don’t I like being a girl? and do I have a Mom and do I have a Dad and do I have a boyfriend and what’s his name and does he have hair on his face and do you have a pool and and and and…

Kept trying the “it’s late, I need to go home” line (and all that accomplished was her telling me which ways NOT to go on my way home, because there’s “alligators and (spanish for spiders) and vampires”).  Which then drifted off into a one-sided conversation about dogs and cats.  And then, to top it all off, little miss spanglish belches some god-awful rankness riiiiiight in my face.

And the littlest one nicks my rubber duckie.  Now I have no duckie in my car

And strangely… when I DID finally escape… I just felt sort of lonely.  Got bummed about it for about two minutes before I realized that I should celebrate the lack of screaming hellians instead… and enjoyed a nice long drive home.  Just the smell of night, the haze and the lightning flashing ahead.  Uber Groovy.

Since those who replied to my LJ Poll with the answer of “no effing way chix0r” are spectacularly uber, and I would hate not having their input on things, I’ve decided to leave LJ comments open on these blog posts.  Ah well.  It was worth the shot.  Thanks for the input!

So yeah, in case you couldn’t gather from my Flickr feed, I have myself a car.  Nothing new.  In fact, it’s the same car I’ve been driving for years, but only because Mum was wonderful enough to share it with me for as long as I stayed under this roof, and all my activites were local.  With being a commuting student next semester, though, sharing would’ve been rather difficult.  So Mom bought herself a new 2008 Chevy Cobalt, and gave the ol’ Cavalier to me.
So that’s pretty damn nifty, if I may say so.  Now I just have to work on not wrecking it like the last hand-me-down Cavalier   Or, at least, wreck it with five gallons of something that smells better than milk.  *ribjab*  Then again, I’ve already wrecked this one once (Cockrell’s did a beautiful body job on it!), so maybe I’m safe.

Cleaning the damned thing was an all-day event.  Heh.

In other news, I think this might be year-two of being sick all summer.  At least I’m in brighter spirits this year… I just wish my guts would follow suit.

Therefore, I am IMPORTANT. I have a BLOG and EVERYTHING. I have screennames that are in no way related to my true identity, therefore I can BE AN ASSHOLE to EVERYONE. I can SCREAM at you from a distance, when I would never really do that in person. I can call you a coward, or an idiot, or a crazy-person with a false-sense of superiority, when in reality I’m just PROJECTING my problems on to YOU.  My banter is INTELLIGENT.  Anyone who disagrees is STUPID.  And you’re probably stupid because you’re CHRISTIAN, or maybe AMERICAN.  God help you if you’re BOTH, you sorry sack of crap.

People talk about the online community as if it’s the new reality, the better world, bridging gaps and connecting people all around the world, when in reality, it’s (in some ways) much worse than the reality we have.  And this really makes me all sorts of sick inside.  I hate how easy it is to get big-pants syndrome around here… and how compelled one feels to vehemently defend their entirely imaginary position in cyberlife.  This isn’t what it’s supposed to be, is it?  Or has my brain been entirely rotted by cyberculture idealism?  Because I used to believe in this place once.  I used to believe The Open Forum would be a beautiful idea, where we could meet and exchange ideas as mature people.  But all I generally see are immature fucktards with bad grammar, and the equally immature “educated idiots” flaming the hell out of them, laying waste to whatever claim to “intelligence” they may have had before.

God, I just want to punch you in the face sometimes.

…eh, see?  I guess I’m not much better.
Just a product of my (e)nvironment.

Sylver did indeed come over, and we pow-wowed on ideas on how to conduct the perfect handfasting.  Ideas in her head… I love them.  She’s always full of great ones.  So we chattered on that for about an hour and a half, where “ideas” would’ve turned into actual “planning”, which ain’t quite where we’re going just yet.  Just ideas and information.

So we spent the rest of the night doing energy work.  Sylver had the idea of working with vortices, so we grounded and drew up a basic energy vortex.  Dropped it, and started drawing elemental vortices, and we both found a very strange thing… our weakest elements were the easiest to draw, and our strongest elements were the hardest.  I can draw water and fire very easily, but when I drew a fire vortex, it was very, very hard to control.  Water didn’t want to come up at all… one side kept falling, so I had to strain to pull it up and keep it all level and cycling.  So it was very interesting, but very frustrating to have my “easiest” elements be such a bitch to control.  But rather cool that ones I have the hardest time connecting with were the easiest to work with.  I’d always been kind of skittish with air energy, and earth was next to impossible to tap… now that I know how to tap them, I feel much better about them.

There are more parts to the exercise that we didn’t even get to try… gonna have to keep working with those difficult vortices before we even dare attempt step-two or step-three.

Now that we have a newer level of work, I really need to finish writing up our first set of exercises.  I’ve had step-one of exercise-one written up for months now, but never started writing step-two, or exercise two.  Work work work.  I might have to consider putting those up here somewhere, once I get them finished.

Well, that was an interesting night.  Not only did I have a round of sleep paralysis, but I also had a dream that one of my good friends committed suicide, I was thrown out of my home, and also chased and shot in the back by a pack of angry young neds.  I’ve sorted out what the last one means (I’m still more terrified of my ex — his influence over mutual friends, and the ability to misuse things I’ve told him in confidence — than I’d like to admit… not that he’s a ned or anything).  And the first one is just anxiety about the friend’s situation (they’re okay!).  I can’t figure out the second one though.  It was the most unsettling, though.

Fun night.

To brighten the mood for today, however, I had been having loads of anxiety about my financial aid situation.  I knew being an independent-by-age would help land me some extra money for tuition and such, but I wasn’t sure if it would be enough.  I thought that maybe I was putting too much stock into the whole idea of “finally being 24″.  I come on to check the system for which awards were available now that I got the last of my paperwork turned in… and I landed a big, fat, juicy grant (enough to make up the bulk of my fees), and enough in loans to cover the rest with maybe enough to cover books.  So it is a very Good Thing™ I changed my mind about campus housing, because I wouldn’t have had enough to cover that anyway.  But I am rather pleased that the tuition itself is covered… especially pleased that most of it is in grants.

So… yes.  Project Transferring-to-UK is a success.  Education is go!

Finally got someone to answer their phone today, and it seems I have somewhat of a consultation tonight.  Sylver is dropping by to help me with information on handfastings.  I have a book, Handfasting and Wedding Rituals by Raven Kaldera and Tannin Schwartzstein, and it is a really good resource so far, but real live advice from a real live person is always helpful.
And can I just say I’m still amazed that Project Handfasting was green-lighted?  I had resigned to the idea of only being allowed a handfasting if I were stuck with some spacey pagan nutjob who hadn’t touched on reality since reading Buckland’s Big Blue.  But no… here’s yet more proof that I am The Luckiest Girl On Earth.

…is how much I’ve walked today, according to my w580i.  That’s 4.2mi, translating to a total of 407 calories burned by moving one foot in front of the other all repetative-like.  And I thought my mad-dashes across airport terminals were impressive.  Didn’t want to believe it til I sat down with a campus map and realized how ass-tastic my routes were today.  From #5 to Memorial Hall to POT to B&E to the Student Center to Funk and back to #5.  Next semester’s routes aren’t looking much better.

Sorry, I know “how much I walked” isn’t really blogworthy news.  I’ll get the hang of this again, I swear.

Anywho.  Got all registered for next semester.  My advisor gave me the lovely news that I do indeed qualify for SW322, which saves me 3hrs in the long run… so I opted to take my (bonus) lazy-semester this go-’round.  So basically, I’m taking one course that really matters, two courses I should’ve taken in clown college, and (finally) German.  Yes!  I can finally do more than get a train ticket! Or inform people that my hat is black and white!  Or tell people to hurry the fuck up!
[I'd like a ticket please -- and hurry the fuck up!]

I’m also pleased to report that my student ID photo doesn’t look like ass.

Came home to find my books finally came in from half.com.  I finally bought a copy of A Field Guide to Otherkin by Lupa, and Witch School: Lessons for the Second Degree by some cheesy looking fucker with a gnarly beard.  I really shouldn’t talk about the leader of the trad like that, but my elementary school teachers always told me that I shouldn’t tell lies, so there you go.  But don’t let the cheese fool you… you wouldn’t think that anything called “Witch School” would be serious or valuable, but I really love their approach, and their First Degree program was pretty much awesome.  Nothing I didn’t know already, but you have to go through the motions.
So I flipped through both.  Beelined right for the Angels section in Otherkin… just to see… and yes, I’m in there!  Looked at the TOC in Second Degree and saw there is a section on sex magick.  As always, they have a very solid and mature approach… but I couldn’t read it without flailing (I have a habit of flailing whenever I have one of those overwhelming in-love moments).  Sex is sacred, a union of the God and Goddess, a union of… flail… God… flail… union… FLAIL.

On the subject of sacred sexual symbolism, my lilies opened today   I don’t know if they opened this morning and I just didn’t notice (I was in a sort of rush), or if they popped when I was off burning calories, but it was a very nice treat to see that on returning home.  Ahhh, flowers.  Aaaaahhhh, guys that actually buy you flowers.  I always laughed at the idea of getting flowers, until I actually found someone who believes in ‘em… and they really are special.  All I have to do is look at them, and my face busts.
All I have to do is look at him, and my face busts.
All I have to do is think about him, and my face busts…