The Mirror and the Mask

Last week, or the week before, or sometime - now that I get to revisiting this, several months ago - I had indulged mightily in rum and gotten to conversing with a friend of mine and found myself explaining characters I'd written in my single digits and my late twenties, respectively, and then I realized:

They were near-counterpoint.

The first, a healer, self-sacrificing adjacent to Noble Stupid. Written for my childhood first foray into fiction, an obvious idealized authorial self-insert, a child's dream of being something stronger, kinder, more-connected, she could be described as a tree-shepherd or channeler or druid; something-like-elf and a bit serious at the point in my life and literary exposure when elves sang "O! What are you doing,/ And where are you going? ... O! tra-la-la-lally/ here down in the valley!" or, else, made shoes. Her reclusive, arboreal people had control of the flow of life, though vitality itself was a fixed quantity. Her entire purpose - so she believed - was to die that others might live; a heartfelt and terrified sacrifice for a world at risk of ending.

The latter, invented much later at the edge of thirty for a friend's tabletop setting (a presumably-voluntary gladiatorial match) which I interpreted as a naturally very undesirable environment, required the sort of creature willing that others might die that she should experience personal glory. Her people were an oligarchy of sorcerers, their craft necromancy. Though not a particularly specialized melee fighter, her weapon of choice was a mace, intending to preserve bodies intact enough to be animated into useful tools and weapons. Though her overall objectives were unclear, her path and methods were obvious: power, by any means expedient.

In this conversation I had begun to wonder what could lead the latter to such disregard for others, and for years I'd wondered how the first creature ever evolved past the end of the world - my entire living narratives series discusses this in detail. But then I observed the intertwined nature of the magic each used, and a link became evident. The latter could be the worst-case outcome of the former.

The "second book" for the former protagonist - measured by progression to the next character I lived in after her, in my teens and twenties - was not a bright or joyful one; survival was unhoped-for, and thus unplanned-for, and she finds herself alone and grasping in extremis; she meets with - could meet with - no gratitude or even real acknowledgement for what she has given up, and she found herself strong, skilled, but for a task she would never complete; utterly adrift in terms of how to relate to a life after. She is resentful, if she stops to think about it, which she does only rarely; the day to day requires much of her, and she has a tendency to live in the future, to plan, to quietly amass power and wait to see how it might be deployed. In that lack of clarity and potential for ill will, I suppose she does resemble the sorceress; I think of her differently, however. The sorceress is not, perhaps, past a turnabout, but is rightly past redemption - I don't know what could move her to expand her horizons beyond herself any longer. The "second volume" protagonist is a witch, a hedge recluse, but she has not turned on the world entirely - only withdrawn temporarily, moving to a vantage-point from which to observe and calculate. She is jaded, disapproving, has been disappointed by and is skeptical of others, but not malicious, and still composed around a moral core. Having lost much, including her purpose, family, and faith in the world's essential capacity for justice, she perceives a pragmatic ethical landscape of grays - although there is still a quiet, bruise-tender ache in her to feel as convicted and passionate about anything as she did when she was a young would-be martyr, which she thoroughly resents and despises as a life-threatening manifestation of weakness.

The creation of both "volumes" of the initial protagonist are self-reflective; the most recent figure was developed in contextualization of an external prompt. I don't think the spider-figure of the second "book" is likely to develop into the tyrant sorceress, but I could probably develop a catalyst for that. Sometime in the early summer I finally realized the way that the first "book" closed, to lead into the second, and as is typical of my writing it was existentially horrifying to the protagonist. The two thus became a continuous, single figure.

What separates those two is faith, but what unites them is hope, or something close. That subject is what brought me back to formulate this post tonight.

I stumbled over Vaclav Havel's writing on hope tonight, and the theme is one I've written on at length before. His summary that hope is not optimism - that hope is "not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." It's an aesthetic - as he puts it, "an orientation of the spirit," "an ability to work for something to succeed," that we set stock in and take action even ad absurdum, in the face of utter defeat.

Over the last decade I had been given cause and cause again to revisit the mythology of Scandinavia - though as a typical educated Westerner I was skewed toward the Mediterranean in my childhood, I had the very good fortune to run across Tolkien's Monsters & the Critics in my university library in 2008, and to purchase Kevin Crossley-Holland's Norse Myths in 2009 and devoured, cover to cover, with adoration for his annotations and scholarship. Then Skyrim in 2011 enforced a relearning, as - while I wouldn't play the game for another year - I didn't want to be left wondering whether any plot point or artistic device was or wasn't a reference or homage. In 2014 I began listening to Scandinavian and Finnish folk music, and then in 2016, after spending 2015's Halloween lead-up listening to, among others, Wardruna, I finally began translating and had to revisit the myths all over again. And the essential tension of the Norse cosmology finally sank in intuitively, courtesy Selvik's beautiful lecture and poetry in an acoustic performance of Helvegen, on the day I must have needed it. I had been working in my kitchen and garden (that, itself, being a life-death cycle of which I am acutely conscious), and listening to this music, and grasping just enough from the cognates and myth names to follow a lot of its meaning, and then I had to go and sit down and really read the translation, because it suddenly hit home in relation to my father.

My relationship with my father, our hunting, his profession, precluded death from being a shock. A blow, yes, but anticipated and prepared-for. Death is easy; it is life which is hard. But the realization of precarity, possible discontinuity - that I could not assure him that anyone would be there for me, as I was there for him - hit sudden and unexpected and took me off my feet. Who shall sing me, indeed - I have lost the family I had, and frankly have no one in my life I particularly expect to outlive me, and in the context of honoring a continuity of grief and love I felt this as tragic for the first time. To be grieved, and to be remembered, is to be loved, to have been meaningful. And while I could reasonably then and now trust that if I should die young I would be grieved, if I were to live to old age I had no reasonable expectation of being missed. I thought of how my father had wanted his children, and how I have never reached that same point - perhaps had not been given a chance to, amidst a recession and delayed entry into the adult world. It was a strange moment.

And yet the whole process is - at least in Selvik's conception - a ring, a cycle; to a man raised by a father with a penchant for spending time outdoors and passing old myths to his children, much like my own, the end is the beginning, so as one thing dies a new thing is created. Optimism always struck me as an irrelevance; when I heard people speak of pessimism, I never read it so much as negative as an acceptance of the simple fact that good things end; I always tried to stride the obstacles of my life as firmly as I could, the action being the significant thing rather than the sentiment underlying. People conflate hope and optimism, despair and pessimism; they would rather forget what they know if it displeases them. The ring turns onward, all the same. See it and honor it, and to quote my seventeen-year-old self, there is a fierce beauty in the brutality.

Since all of this, I was given to revisit my woods-flower, the kind and honorable and just creature I hoped once that my adulthood would resemble. Her symbol re-evolved, a ring and a bipolar axis, lightning from the sky to the sand, the trunk and roots and boughs of a great tree. She has learned to wither that which strangles something else. I do not know where she will go from here.

I was supposed to turn to introspection a bit earlier today, but found myself dithering over partitions on a hard drive and the use of Terminal to delete hidden partitions so my console wouldn't try to write to the 200mb EFP (for future-self, it's diskutil eraseVolume "Free Space" newvolumename disk#s#.)

I realize with some regularity that I have a firm mental block about enjoying myself too much - something about a fear that if I do, I won't be able to emerge from the flow of it and accomplish my duties, or that it might change me and make me unfit for those duties (you do not typically inhabit the same skills or headspace as an artist that one does as a specialist professional in information.)

I suppose I'll return to this subject later, as I'll have to abandon this post here.

I have discovered a pattern where I stay awake unproductive, unable to sleep and yet afraid to begin anything meaningful lest I find flow and put off sleep when it could come.

I seem to be always afraid of finding the right thing at the wrong time.

In any case, unable to sleep this evening after four episodes of an old TV show and having - just - started a movie and finding I don't have the attention span to read it, I'm turning to a bit of writing.

It occurs to me that this may be the first time in some while I expect any of this read at any particular point. I've had the occasional comment from a friend which will remind me that I do in fact put this up for the world to read if it happens to care - read or not, that's not the purpose. But I've been saved so many times by the trivial action of someone leaving their own story open for others to stumble over - the co-humanism of being not alone in an experience or perspective - that it seems almost selfish to keep it closed. It doesn't require ego to think that everyone has something to offer, so if by no effort of my own I still help someone, so much the better.

Strange feeling when it's not functionally anonymous, though.

Still trying to discover what meaning is. I suspect I'd find it in harder work, but I give so much during my hours of employment I have very little left for me. I don't think it's just laziness, as I'm hardly lazy in any other part of my life. I think I've burned the candle at both ends for too many years, and that even the time off I did have always featured a dreadfully unhealthy environment.

The little things are going along as I would hope. My progress on independence inspires a tiny glow when I look at it, which isn't as common as it was, which is probably good. Being not-singleminded about it is healthier and probably happier. I have gotten to a point where I don't need things anymore, not often. I spent a giftcard on birthday coffee for myself - an Ethiopian with complex citrus-berry-smoke notes that is almost too good to drink on regular days. I'm trying to learn to let regular days be special sometimes, especially when I don't have a choice in the matter. I certainly am no good at letting special things be special. I had a hard time convincing myself to get lunch with friends on my birthday, so much so that I didn't announce anything until I had just hours to go.

Tomorrow I am allowing to be special-just-because. I have to turn in a rent check - I've been waiting days to do it, as every time I'd mean to swing by I'd either be too pressed for time or they wouldn't be office as expected, and the change in management has meant that their website portal is down. So I'm going to get up early. Damn the dishes and the other chores I usually leave for morning. I'm going to go down as soon as the office opens, and get it taken care of. I'll go back and sit on my balcony in the unseasonable warm sunlight or maybe just open all the bedroom windows and continue the process of letting old things go and when I feel like it I'll go pick up a courtesy fancy coffee and spend the day on our chat system and in a company meeting I'm looking forward to.

Things outside my tiny fragile self-world are changing rapidly. I'm not sure how to approach any of it and for the most part I have been leaving it alone. I come by and visit. I don't ever quite know what to say.

Even that took the wind out of me for over an hour. It's really true - I have no idea what to say. My life is so divergent from everything in their sphere - I go to work, I kill myself, I go home, I sleep or fail to sleep. The time I spend not doing these things is almost universally spent with my partner. That's not an ideal state of affairs, but it is good company.

I run simulation after simulation trying to pin down freedom, like I could press it between the pages of a book for safekeeping, to be called upon preserved and pristine when later desired. I feel for no reason comprehensible to me that if I only stare at the data long enough, wiggle and juggle and tweak the numbers in some arcane method, I will find answers, in particular answers which I like.

I distrust it when I find answers that I like. Statements like "Failed 1 times out of 105 cycles, for a 99.05% success rate" excite fantasies and deep skepticism as inseparable as two faces of a coin. I cannot trust that things will go my way - I have to find action to take as a talisman against the possibility of failure.

Exhausting.

Meanwhile - where is the now? What have I done with it that I've hidden it from myself?

I finally caved and paid for email forwarding on my domain so I could receive my login prompt.

We're back. Hopefully that won't signal the last Lj sees of me.

I think I finally clicked together something that I haven't been able to most my life.

When I was young I held myself to an absurd standard in my entertainment. I demanded everything be intellectually engaging at the highest level and balked from anything less, lest I succumb to base popular pursuits and all discipline fail.

As a result, I have had few guilty pleasures in terms of entertainment - someone once described them as mental twinkies - and those I have had all been in the last few years, really. But recently a bout of illness landed me on the couch, stunned and miserable and at half-capacity, and I picked up a temptation that had been making rounds among my (intellectual! loud! feminist! - in short, admirable) high school friends, rewatching Gilmore Girls from the start.

And suddenly, I get it, in a way I didn't then.

Leaving aside the eerie familiarity of some of the family structure and intense kinship with the younger of the protagonists... I suddenly get what it is to crave catharsis through fiction, what it means. It's not that I've never had the urge to go find a friend - what is fiction with a likable protagonist but a demi-friendship? - going through something comparable to my present situation before, but I've never been able to see the reason why it should be necessary.

For all my reflexive, self-reflective analysis, I discount my own feelings and problems. I elevate those of others. Characters are others, and the most cherished sort moreover, from the genre of friends who we carry with us for years and years and who we so often pick right back up with just where we had left off.

My own feelings aren't important enough for me to give time or mental space to, often enough, but these fictitious friends are precious and cherished and real to me in a way I sometimes am not. I will defend their right to be weak or vulnerable or needy in a way I could not possibly ever justify or see as conscionable in myself. They are beautiful in their foibles and petty concerns, and I waver between feeling distastefully excessive, emotions spilling over the tiny acceptable vessel hopelessly set to the task of constraining them - precisely the same social connotations as the idea of what it is to be fat, rewritten in an emotional context - and feeling rightfully overwhelming, as if perhaps I was not born to be so small and footling as I have been so often told, that the tiny vessel set aside for me to inhabit is worthless and useless and irrelevant, as if the wave that rears up and threatens to engulf me is a flood tide and I am a mountain to have withstood it so long and it is no small marvel that I have managed to brace and shield the world from obliteration under its crashing.

I am still too tired to write.

I may have lost my password. I'm still logged in on a handful of devices due to the magic of the cookie - but due to an old email registration and the inability to update my information without my current password, and an inexplicable and infuriating lack of current security question, this may be the end of my journal. I changed passwords around the time of the Heartbleed fiasco and I cannot locate my password log from that time. I've managed to guess back into everything else, but if I go silent, o dear friends, this would be why. I'll try and post a link to my new journal if it turns out I have to make one.

We'll see.

“My ambition is to have beautiful encounters, not to make money.”
- Juliette Binoche

I was reading not so long ago a journal belonging to a person who felt we are becoming incapable of enjoying anything except voyeuristically - thorough the lens of how we feel we might be perceived in that moment by others. The rise of selfie-culture, of blogging, of crafting an artificialized and idealized angle on our own lives - becoming curators to our own museum of existence. When I was first confronted with this idea, I wanted to call bullshit - people always wanted to be perceived as their most ideal selves. That's what fashion has always been about; it's what propriety and breeding and manners were about. We've always been very conscious of what is called impression management. But there's a certain increase in my own experience of this.

I have friends who maintain active Instagram accounts who are posting little more than images of themselves and what they're eating or otherwise consuming. On someone with a strong sense of identity this would just be a brain dump space; in most cases I see this from people with little to no sense of identity, trying to craft a sense of self. This is increasingly, yes, a matter of impression management. Rather than journaling, rather than writing down life experiences, consuming stuff, or images of stuff consumed, has become the autobiography.

I understand it on some level; I like talking about food, I do see part of my identity in relation to what I eat. Given that I grow or kill a good portion of it myself, it seems unsurprising, although I probably self-identify less in terms of my consumption than most people in spite of that. It's not that I've never had a crisis of where I fit in the world, I've just always known who and what I myself was despite not having any idea where to fit in. I never tried on identities, trying to see who I was; I tried fitting a fully-formed me into places I often didn't fit. (Culture's answer, most of the time, to not fitting is that there is too much of you and the answer is to be less, to change yourself. This answer does you no good and can do tremendous harm. The real answer is to find a place big enough.)

Back to topic - Juliette's comment above really got to me, given that her life's work has been in crafting the IMPRESSION of beautiful things, encounters, lives, onscreen. She's well-aware of the imaginary nature of it; she wants to live the reality. Obviously much further out from personal control, I do consider this highly ambitious, in a way many people would not dare dream.

Beans are worse than meat when they go bad. I'd rather deal with rotting beef, to go purely by the smell. For one thing I'd have recognized and located it sooner. It's also more cohesive and thus easier to clean.

I'm trying to pare down my stuff collection. Thinking of it as buying back the space the stuff occupied helps just a little, but it's difficult for me even when all I'm doing is getting rid of recyclables. "Wait, I've used those before! They have utility! What if I recycle all my flyers and don't have anything to clean mirrors with? What if I need to plant basil cuttings!? But I know how to make a really useful tiedown out of this plastic!!"

I'm rolling my eyes at myself and yet it doesn't quiiiite seem to sink through and become emotional reality that this is patent nonsense.

I wonder why it's been so long since I wrote here. I'm going to have to upload it a couple of days late since I'm out of data right now - maybe that's why I'm generating content, because I'm not reading it right now.

I suppose the purpose of a journal is for airing ideas that you aren't convinced others would want to hear, or which aren't yet refined or polished sufficiently to inflict on company just then. I've been spending so little time socially around people, despite my work, that I don't have time for those thoughts in the first place - unlike every occupation I've held to date I have absolutely no time at all to think outside of getting the job done. Fair enough given the way it has to be structured.

We found a Chinese app that's basically a direct rip of Duolingo and I cannot cannot wait to get to a wifi connection and download the thing. If I were smart I'd have sent my laptop as a vanguard of my digital life to download it ahead of me and bring it back to the Wastes of the North.

We got to discussing my apartment tonight. I'm still of conflicted feelings about it; I know I oughtn't spend so much on a routine expense. I know I could go on whole international vacations for what I spend in excess rent every quarter. (I also know that I know how to shop for most things, so that's not so severe as it sounds at first; more in terms of the average person's groceries. But the principle is the same because it is the same measure of power for me personally.)

When my friends moved me in at first we joked about its remoteness, a whopping sixteen miles from the social hub of my boyfriend's place. We said it was in Narnia. I laughed about my Palace-in-the-North, the height, the gates, the grand bright windows. I regretted not being HOME for it more often; still working two jobs and six days most weeks at that point, though that ended quickly after.

More recently I've stopped mythologizing it thus - the palaces of Snow Queens, whichever ones we're discussing, were always the essence of alien remoteness, the more real counterpart to fairylands: the sort of place you might encounter a speaking reindeer or lion and then be obliged to ride them into or out from danger. These were not my native grounds, these wastes of lowland pines and higher barren tundra plains. They didn't feel natural to me, and I didn't realize until now what I was doing when I created it so in my head. I didn't feel welcome to this place, although for the time I knew I held it in my power. I felt I had intruded, boldly, and would before long need to leave, and I less mourned the loss of this particular extravagance than the loss of a sense of haven which I somehow associated with it and it alone.

I've only ever had a few safe spaces in my life, and almost each one I was forced from in some way or another. It seems plausible in retrospect that I would feel confident of being forced from this one, too, before I was ready to go.

But it is a haven for more than the mere absence of malefactors, and is finally becoming valuable to me in an increasingly near, intimate way.

A friend joked about my aerial hobbit-hole tonight as we planned for a party, and I realized it: I have begun to perceive it in line with one of the Tolkien paradigms for "home," albeit not that one. I sense something more grand but less earthy, a bit of a surprise given what I thought I wanted for so long. This is more Imladris, more Rivendell - a lovely place, not a private, personal estate, but an open house. It is not fixed to my precise self, because my precise self is not yet fixed. I am not yet so old or far along in my years to know who that will be or what life she will choose to lead. It is merely a very good place, whether one likes food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all; and merely to be there becomes a cure for weariness, fear and sadness.

The best and most beautiful thing about this sense - this feeling of home - is that it has no real relation to the physical place.

I like this apartment with its beautiful light, but I know I am unlikely to stay here when I can eventually move somewhere more practical. Closer to work, if I have it; closer to the market, closer to the ground. Always where there are trees. Always near running water. But the feeling of home that is beginning to creep into me is intrinsic to myself.

I can carry it with me, and less and less do I need any particular thing to summon the presence of it. A full spice rack the height and breadth of a pantry door helps, as does the fully-stocked pantry, and freezer, and growing, twining, fragrant things in the windows and just outside. But the heart of it is with me. I still 'need' my sketchbooks. I still 'need' the tools of an artist. But less and less do I fear the loss of the little things. Perhaps this is because I am increasingly able to replace them?

There are days, now, for the first time, that if I had to walk from the flames of my former life, there are few things I would carry with me. Records, mostly, of my life and history; my artwork, my pictures. Not possessions. And I could start all over again with fresh new belongings on what I live on in a year, and frankly that's not bad at all.

This is why it surprises me that I am reluctant to give things up. I know increasingly that I shouldn't mind if I lost them, but there's a sense of profligacy that comes with disposing of anything of my own volition, I suppose left over from an era when I was always afraid of not having enough. I still fear that from time to time; I am not SO well off as that.

But a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he is able to let alone.

I have found I can live quite comfortably on very little. Reading, and employment, have led me to realize that a majority of the population spends nearly everything they earn in a year. Given that it is not abnormal for a person of middle income in their prime to make fifty thousand in a year, this means they are spending fifty thousand in a year also, and I have no real sense of where that goes. Rent aside, I can make do quite happily, even luxuriously, on a tenth of that.

(I say this as someone comfortably running a ceiling fan, not having used any air conditioning all year, in mid-July, in north Texas. I recognize this is not considered expected. But I still think my electric bill is high and I suspect my refrigerator is an egregious spendthrift antique, so I have to make up for it somewhere, and it won't be a cold stove.)

Possessions mean less and less, and power means more and more. Low needs mean agility of lifestyle. I could move, if I needed. I recognize the strongest holdovers to this are books. I just finished, finally, my father's ancient copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I would be lying if I claimed it would have meant as much to read an ebook as this yellowed, still-crisp paperback with a ghosted Ex Libris bookplate in the front cover. His copy of Life, the Universe and Everything is priced in British pounds. These things bear significance to me. (For contrast, his copies of The Lord of the Rings are tattered, frayed, and generally much-loved, which I think says something about what we have in common. Though enjoying both, we each tended to prefer solemn, lovely things to silly, clever ones when young.)

These are the things I would strive to preserve. But I'll keep my copies of The Names Upon the Harp and The Song of Mu-Lan if it doesn't pain me to do so.

When home could not be people - most of my life, in fact - home was the things that reminded me of when home had been people. Childlike, those important people were not me. I am, slowly, learning to make home where I am, instead. I think that's why the sketchbooks still matter.

Divorcing identity from possessions is slow and strange, and I keep drawing parallels to giving up a body held too long. Although of course this means something other to me than it might on first glance, in a society that renounces nature for an artificial ideal of humanity. I am not looking to move past physical presence; I'm looking to inhabit it fully, as what I am most fundamentally. Everything right down to clothing is petty superfluous possession. I am an animal with senses and wants and the primary animal ability to take from the world around me all I need, for all animals are predators in honesty.

Increasingly unlike past years I am losing territoriality. I am possessive of things, in the short run. I will snap if my meal is threatened when I am hungry. But I am no longer fixed as I was as child on preserving the exclusiveness of my space. I've given the woods back to the trees, so to speak. The walls around me will not come with me when I leave, and this no longer makes me sad. I just picture the new walls. I picture windows full of light and edged in climbing vines. I see trees outside and roots in soil and think of the garden I could plant and how quickly I could get the basil to overtake a window box and whether there is enough room to try for sweet potatoes.

I think of myself ten years on painting in the light from my bedroom window. Bedrooms are good places for a studio, because then you can keep all your dreams in one place.

I reinterpreted myself in myth and I no longer saw the desperate, peace-loving, forced heroine I always did when I was younger. I never understood why she was what she was. I was too close to my situation to realize that that story was about knowing intuitively what is good and worthy in life and fighting with all one's soul for it, holding out only the barest flickering hope to light the way, and that is what it was to grow up when and where and how I did. I dreamed of dreaded wars and impossible odds and the best of humanity as demonstrated by virtual self-sacrifice for only the chance of salvation for the rest. Nothing beyond that story; the world is given back to itself, and nothing expected to be left of its hero.

I still love these stories, but they are changing in me.

There is something - the story itself - after the noble charge, the grand battle, after the obscuring dust settles on the field, when the sides are not so clearly won and lost, but go back to their plows and mills. It is not simple. This was Morrigan's lesson: First, you must survive.

First, she said. And then what?

First means something follows.

It is not right, but neither entirely wrong, to say this diminishes the intensity of the first arc. The tale of sacrifice and The Hero, Alone, has to be given its own volume and treatment. The rest MUST follow after, a little ways behind, a few short years hence.

The first protagonist must be an innocent in order for the sacrifice to be fit.

Who comes in her place later is someone older, altered, brooding. She has measured the ways of man in the aftermath of the initial sacrifice and is calculating her position accordingly. She is not remembered, if she had a place in the grand battle; she is not recognized as sacrificial or innocent, because those are traits which are solely for benefit of others, and that is not who or what she is, if ever she was.

If the first story was about sacrificial valour for the succor of others, the second tale is about the discovery of one's own values, considerate weighing of one thing against the next: the price of caution, the meaning of ambition, the dearness of self. Not here, the high tales of heroism, but perhaps intrigue. Battles are to be won in the realm of word and principle.

This can be darker or more subtle, depending on the protagonist. She will certainly be seen more powerful if she is willing to be seen as dangerous, which she may be; she is certainly amassing power and resources in quiet ways, not demanding attention but increasingly capable of commanding it all the same. She would have as soon have an army hanging on her word - but will she ever give an order?

Talking into a journal is not as natural as it used to be.

I went shopping with a friend today. The results were encouraging. I'm apparently feeling pretty good about myself given what I bought. I keep having double-take reactions when I see a full-length mirror - while I'd like to drop maybe another three pounds of fat and put on a good five pounds more muscle, I think I look better than I have in quite a long while.

Along with the financial hemorrhage at the mall, I've been buying decent food for a change, and this is probably influencing the aforementioned physical status. Quinoa, coconut chicken and asparagus last night at the cafe looked like not much but was immensely satisfying - I'd forgotten how filling calorie-rich foods can be when they have flavor. Surviving on bland carbs (and not many of them) has really gotten old.

I miss exercise. I'd just gotten good about occasional weightlifting and some basic stretching again, due to the potential I might have a major cosplay going on, and everything fell apart with the last few weeks between work and home and losing out on the chance to do the cosplay. Meeting a new friend was somewhat inspiring - I'd love to take on a shape anything like that, and I know more muscle would be flattering as well as useful. If my work becomes more sedentary it's going to only be more important to keep it up.

I need to get back to a predictable sleep-wake cycle so that I can walk in the mornings and do weights at night again. All this comes back to the need to move, however - I'm not going to get far unless I can manage my own schedule.

I've seen two of the three major films I was looking forward to this summer; just Dark Knight Rises left. The invitation to go make an appearance in costume at the museum was a little heartbreaking and I wish I'd had more time, but it'll happen one way or another.

I need to keep drawing. Sketchbook's on the shopping list - I'm almost out of pages finally - and I'll hate the empty feeling of it so much it'll hardly take months to have a collection again. I need to get on that but quick, though; I can sense my aesthetic changing yet again, craving more powerful figures (I was so glad the All-Orc game was postponed), revisiting my historical love of irritable brunettes. I look forward to picking up a copy of Hiketeia sometime...