"Captain, we've got a coolant leak in the warp core!"

Shit. My car's got a coolant leak. Looks like a big one.

I hope to hell it's just a hose.

Yet more crap from my past.

Why don't I sing, you ask? Well, I'll tell you part of it -- where the neurosis started.

When I was a kid, my family was quite proud of my brother's sports acumen and my sister's voice.

There was nothing they were proud of in me.

Oh, sure, I was the smartest of the three of us. And I read more and understood more than either of them. But in the Davis household, that was as much a liability as an asset, and after a few years even my ability to read adult books and newspapers to my mother wasn't enough to protect me from the scorn and anger of her psychoses. Because in that family, only my dad respected intelligence, and he'd left.

If and when I sang, I was derided for not being as good as Veronica and told to stop so they could hear her sing. At family gatherings, Veronica was asked to sing, and Daniel was asked to show how he could throw a football, or something similar. I was actively ignored, because the best thing I could do was read and explain a story's plot, structure, and symbolic elements. And no one cared. "What's Michael doing?" "He's reading." "Again?"

In a family like that, no one cares if you can explain the point of Ahab's obsession, or explain that Arnold Friend in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is really the Devil, or make sense of 2001: A Space Oddyssey, or what-have-you. No one cares that, since 4th grade, you've devoured everything in your father's shelves, from Catch-22 to Zelazny's Isle of the Dead to I, Claudius. No one cares that even at age 13, you find beauty in the words of James Joyce, or that Yeats sings to your soul, or that your grasp of metaphor is far beyond expectations of your teachers. They only care if you can sing, or throw a baseball.

It's disheartening to know that you're still affected by crap that happened nearly 20 years ago. But I'm dealing with it. I can sing in a group more often, and I can sing for Elli in fits and starts now, and someday I'll make it through a whole song without feeling too self-conscious. Until then, bear with me, love.

(no subject)

I was going to do this until I realized the entry fee is $200.

Gimme a break.

Alyt Neroon as a Drag Queen?

AGH! Scared now!

(no subject)

I now know what I have to do to earn my BA and my teaching credential.

Looking forward to those will get me through the next two semesters.

Well, that, the help of every math-inclined friend I have, and a lot of hard, hard work.

It's time to get deadly serious about this education thing. No more pussyfooting, no skipping classes unless dead, no ignoring homework. Let's get this shit in the can!

Nifty Advice on relationships

goytoy wrote this for halycon_heist, and graciously consented to my quoting her. I've done a little reformatting, any yuckiness from that is my fault and not hers.

Advice on how to keep "the magic" in a relationship:

I think the first trick is to find a person w/ whom you love to talk. A lot of other stuff can fade a bit but a good conversation always does the job for me.

And don’t let them become wallpaper. When something doesn’t REQUIRE our attention, it’s easy to just let it slide. A relationship can stay on autopilot for awhile, but eventually, it will crash.

Don’t think that marriage (or whatever) means you don’t have to care any more about how you look or what you wear.

Do enough stuff apart that you always have good stories.

Take their hand in a crowd. Always be wooing them away from the imaginary stranger that would like nothing better than to run off w/ your jewel.

(no subject)

Mahdi's Word for the day:

( concupiscence )

Question: What is the thing Michael hates being called most?
Answer: Mike.

Don't. Do. It.

I'm serious. It grates on my nerves like you wouldn't believe, and I have almost no sense of humor about it. Unreasonable? Probably. But you'll live.