juushika

Devon and I have been rewatching Star Trek: TOS for no particular reason other than to gently spite Star Trek: Discovery; today was 1.9 "Dagger of the Mind." I like to imagine an alternate-Trek (aside from the always-superior DS9*) where all the throwaway arcs/reveals have lasting consequences, like a Voyager where Harry Kim has to process the profound trauma of "parallel-me died and then I took his place," facing his mortality, his sense of alienation—which would be significantly less fun than already questionably-fun Voyager, but would bring such depth to his character! Likewise, a TOS where Kirk is still and forever in love with Helen Noel, but she's lost to him in multiple ways: the implanted memory of losing her, but also the conscious knowledge that even his love was implanted. He's grateful when she leaves the Enterprise—it can't really make him more sad, and it alleviates at the least the awkwardness—but he never forgets her. He has many other relationships, some meaningful, some not at all; and his dedication to the Enterprise takes priority over everything, which causes no end of internal conflict; and his relationship with Spock is as profound and as conflicted, complicated here by Spock's Vulcan identity. It doesn't end his life or his relationships, but Helen Noel in the background of everything, the one that got away whom he never had in the first place.

An easy canon solution is that before leaving Tantalus V he has someone use the same machine to correct his memory, but my version has a lot more angst and self-doubt and questions of identity/memory/relationships and is therefore superior.

When I first watched TOS some few years ago, I read along with the rewatches on Viewscreen.com. I'm only glancing at them this time, but it was a fantastic experience then & I still enjoy them now. The mix of trivia/minutiae to summary/off the cuff reaction to social commentary/media criticism is strong, in a readable, casual way. Torie Atkinson's sections are especially fantastic, and helped me contextualize my complicated responses to dated-but-progressive media. To accompany TNG and DS9 rewatches I just read the Memory Alpha pages; that's also satisfying, but is a) way more spoiler-y and b) heavier on the minutiae. Glimpses into production/actors enrich the text in interesting ways, but it's not quite on par with that feeling of pseudo-conversation that comes with a watch-along.

* Although DS9 would also hugely benefit from this! Imagine Jadzia Dax in particular, and Dax in general, who's always willing to disregard convention and society to fulfill a strong personal desire, but in particular falls into "leave the rest of the world behind to live in a pocket dimension/go into exile" love multiple times. These all function as once in a lifetime romances, True Love, etc.—then 3.8 "Meridian" and 4.6 "Rejoined" are never mentioned again as per Star Trek's episodic tradition, and Worf becomes the One True Love. But imagine the Jadzia who not only carries many lifetimes of romances, and struggles with the reassociation taboo, but also is in love, passionate life-altering-love, with multiple people, some she marries, some she can't see again; a Jadzia grieving and loving and missing in overlapping and simultaneous intensity. Alternately: she doesn't change her life for these life-changing loves because the show needs more continuity than that. If not for that limitation, how does she pick—is it first come/first serve, pocket dimension/exile? is it wrestling with Klingon courtship practices while exiled from your homeworld? These are some great tensions & I wish DS9 could've had them.


* * *


Asides:

1) I'm trying to work on my Best of 2018 list with mixed results re: wowowowwww this year has been seven years long, and there was great media, and many forgotten media, at at least one favorite thing I forgot to review, and I want to make none of these trips down memory lane because it was also a phenomenally awful year. It's exhausting to write.

2) My sleep schedule has flipped around and/or is walking around the clock, external factors (like screaming cats/visitors to the house) excepted. I find it easier to stay distracted at night, and have more co-dependent anxiety when waiting for Devon to come home in the afternoon. Things are up in the air for us right now as he makes applications, and I dream of moving to Canada/Sweden/the Moon ( Read more... ) and we wait for the future to happen. And in the meantime, this between-time, the end of the year change-time, my anxiety is particularly bad. So in many respects this makes sense—waking at 5p is productive, even healthy/ier than alternatives! despite the forever-shame that comes with weird sleep habits. It's still surreal, to nap at sunrise, to sleep through the middle of the day. The cats don't enjoy or understand it, but then they haven't liked any damn thing about this living arrangement except that Gillian believes Devon many times more interesting and better for cuddles than I am.

3) Via minutia_r, in one of the more delightful "I saw this and thought of you" that I've ever received: Okay, it's time to tell a Story: "how cannibalism was just a normal thing for Victorian sailors & how it was only in 1884 that it was made clear to everyone that it wasn't legal to eat people no matter what the circumstances, and how the Victorian public were Very Angry about it."

I hadn't heard of this case before and it's as fascinating as expected! Further reading via Wikipedia: R v Dudley and Stephens.

I went to another of the play reading with my folks last week, this time with preemptive intent and on an intentionally-purchased third ticket. It was a double bill of one-act plays: Aria da capo by Edna St. Vincent Millay and No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. Dad asked me to make a list of future play readings I wanted to attend with them; simultaneously, I had a catastrophic breakdown.

I acknowledge 1) that breakdowns are going to be par for the course—they always have been, even during my better periods, and this is not a better period; and that 2) hormones may have contributed to this one. But this felt so inexplicable, until I got the email saying he'd purchased tickets for all the readings on my list: this is a Thing we are doing Together to have Quality Family Time Before Dad Dies.

Which, to an extent, is what every social event in the history of family interactions is—all that sets this apart is timescale. My anxiety and introversion mean that I'm not good at "just hanging out" togetherness, so the plays are a great find: I love artsy fartsy shit, I write essays for my folks after the plays (sometimes literally: an email about the character of Joseph Garcin/Vincent Cradeau in No Exit, exploring adaptation, parallels to Sartre, and the Nazi occupation of France, all because my father wasn't sure why the character had been executed—my dad called it an "the extensive followup"! it was not! it was the highly edited version!), it's an engaging social thing. But the overt indulgence of it, of "we'll stand in line to grab you a third ticket," of "I bought tickets for all the plays you mentioned," was the reminder of why it's so important to capitalize on these opportunities.

Things are good, my dad's doing well. Treatment so far has had the best possible outcome, and they're looking at plans for what's next; he has symptoms and side effects under control; he's making longer-term decisions re: work, etc. Things are about as good as the could be, which, admittedly, is a low bar. But things are okay.

And I was okay, again by relative scales: I never forgot what was going on (how could I?). But I'm excellent at burying feelings under media consumption; I couldn't sustain that unmitigated misery into months and it became other major depressive episode; I was sleeping during the day so that I could wake when Devon got home—which didn't make him any less busy, but made the loneliness easier to deal with. The houseguests even left (although things are still set up for them to return, so I guess I just get to hang on tenterhooks re: that, indefinitely!), although this is counterbalanced by every fucking thing going wrong (my ereader cover broke! audiobooks are making my tablet crash! my life is a tragedy of errors outside my control!). But then my sleep started to degrade into three-hour snatches that made the edges of the days fuzz and blur; I hovered in panicked stasis until Devon came home, but then broke down or passed out as soon as he showed up—

There's no especial value in recording the sequence of a breakdown, and I'm not sure that doing so benefits me (what is the balance between self-knowledge and wallowing, between honesty and shame?); but things got bad and I didn't know why, until the email about tickets yesterday, and then I realized afresh that my dad was going to die. I had some more, big sad; I took my anti-anxiety meds and then slept for a really long time; maybe putting the pieces together has allowed me to go through and out of this particular episode. Maybe I'll relapse when this initial sense of rested relief passes. Absolutely things will get bad again in the future, because surrounding circumstances won't go away and can only get worse.

But right now, in a cold clear morning after many consecutive hours of sleep, I have a certain amount of closure about this particular episode.

It always makes me angry when the good things trigger bad times, It's frustrating and unfair. But the good things are still worth it—quality family time! the plays were good!—and the bad times are inevitable. (That's also frustrating; also unfair.)

Title: Travel Light
Author: Naomi Mitchison
Published: Small Beer Press, 2005 (1952)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 145
Total Page Count: 225,180
Text Number: 717
Read Because: multiple recommendations, including mrissa, here and a few mentions (of author and book both) by rushthatspeaks, ebook requested and borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A rescued child, fostered by bears and dragons, learns to travel light. The title is central conceit, character growth and theme: what we carry with us, physically, psychologically; what it means to keep or discard, and how it informs our experience—couched within a playful, flexible narrative that slides from fairytale to Constantinople. The changing settings and tone can be disorientating, even disappointing for becoming less fantastic, but it also allows for increasingly ambiguous thematic development. That Mitchison can do this all, can speak with humor and sympathy, can be frivolous and profound, is a sincere delight (and it makes me want to read more of her work). I wish I'd encountered this earlier, but better late than never.


Title: A Plague of Unicorns
Author: Jane Yolen
Illustrator: Tom McGrath
Published: Zonderkidz, 2014
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 190
Total Page Count: 225,370
Text Number: 718
Read Because: reading more from the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A plague of apple-eating unicorns forces a monastery to seek outside help. This is a historical pastiche, a coming-of-age, a fairy tale, slipping lithely between categories with no great depth or sense of investment. But the combined effect is charming. It has a playful, irreverent tone which does much to demystify unicorns, and then an evocative, beautifully imagined climax which puts the magic back in; sweet, accessible, but with satisfying payoff. I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I liked this, and would be interested in reading more of Yolen's middle grade fiction.

(The illustrations are adequate; decent atmosphere, but the technical skill leaves something to be desired. I don't find that they added anything substantial to the text, but they may work better for younger readers.)


Title: The Pride of Chanur (Chanur Book 1)
Author: C.J. Cherryh
Published: DAW, 1981
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 225
Total Page Count: 225,595
Text Number: 719
Read Because: fan of the author
Review: An alien stowaway thrusts one ship and crew into an interspecies conflict. The concept here—of human as alien, and as a secondary character—is fantastic, but not always fully realized: hani, the protagonist alien society, is insufficiently weird, insufficiently non-human; but other alien species are weirder, which is more intriguing and also convincing, and the approach to interspecies interactions, via cultural frameworks and linguistics, is a compelling addition to the space opera subgenre. This furthermore possesses Cherryh's hallmarks, the balance of personal narratives to larger plot; the distinctively terse but emotive relationships—functioning here across species lines. Cherryh has yet to disappoint me and this is no exception; I wasn't blown away, the ending action is a bit much, but the premise and sociological focus is thoughtful.

( A quote and very many feels about how Cherryh writes relationships )



I was going to write "sure is nice to have a good reading block!"—but I actually began The Pride of Chanur mid-July (then interrupted it to get through a bunch of things due back) and the further truth is that a lot of my recent books, including ones finished today/in progress now, have been fantastic. Out from under the shadow of The Martian and the good intentions of Trouble and Her Friends—and the endless audiobook which was The House of Shattered Wings.

Following up Travel Light with A Plague of Unicorns was fascinating. They're not especially comparable—Travel Light is all about the numinous, the thematic; A Plague of Unicorns is a more frivolous but then, that climax! (the image of a girl-warrior winding a labyrinth for unicorns is transcendent, and a pointed conversation on feminism and violence, and Alexandria is the true hero of the book). But I had a similar reaction to them both, to their language and accessibility, to how far they take their magics and morals. It made me write this post over on Tumblr, copied below for posterity:

( Read more... )

I've been reading an above-average (for me) amount of YA lately in my attempt to diversify my reading—it's so easy to find own voices reading lists for YA—and it's been occasionally spectacular (When the Moon was Ours) but, on the whole, has functioned mostly to remind me that I sure do hate the genre's standards. It's taken me a while to realize I tend to have the opposite reaction to MG.

My father has tried to make the attempt to get me health insurance as easy for me as possible, handing as much of it as a third party can and then finding me a professional to help with the rest, and I'm beyond grateful for it—because not only is it wonderful in its own right, it shows a knowledge and tolerance for my inability to handle ... well, you know, basic adult responsibility. That's not something he's had, at least not so explicitly, until recently—and while it's not something he should need to have, it means a lot to me that he does.

But neither he nor the professional helping us can do everything, and the little bit that still falls to me has me tied up in knots inside. I need to contact my old doctor to try to request info they probably don't have* in order to give one insurance company information they don't actually need**, and it's been weeks now and I just ... can't do it. It means making a phone call, to talk about my health, with an old doctor because I haven't seen a doctor in years, because being a grown up and doing grown up things is literally beyond my abilities—and once that's done I have to do more paperwork, and send it in, and then wait to hear what else I need to do before this business is finished—meanwhile both of the other people involved with this keep sending me emails checking in and asking for updates. It's like a checklist of things of things that make me anxious, and would you look at all those tick marks. Instead of being grateful about the enormous kindness my father is showing me, I'm failing to do the few tiny things I do to repay him and I have no excuse for it other than lalala I can't hear you.

It came at a bad time, at the end of a busy month when all I wanted was just to sleep for a week and do nothing social for two more. I don't even know. When I write it, it sound small and I sound irresponsible, but there we go. This is the sort of thing that keeps me up nights.

I mean literally. I'm trying to right my sleep schedule after spending a few days in reverse: sleeping at dawn, waking an hour before dusk. I sleep better during the day (read more) and like shit at night (read more) and for those reasons among others I do this sometime, wander around the clock. I'm lucky that I can, no responsibilities or schedules, but it's not a good thing, no matter how peaceful it is to sleep in sunlight. It means that I'm worn so thin, that the anxiety is worse than usual and sleep is even more inaccessible, and that I have to go into full isolation- and indulgence-mode to get by.

So I stayed up a day and a half and took a nap and stayed up some more, eking out half hours of waking daytime, half-lucid and very tired—and then as soon as nighttime proper rolled around and it was okay to sleep I didn't want to. And here it is at 3a the next day and I'm doing the same. It's not even a present sort of anxiety—I've been procrastinating this so long that I honestly am forgetting to call instead of thinking about it all the time and trying to make as though it's slipped my mind. It's a background thrum, a general depression, a desire to be not here and not me for as long as possible—but not via sleep, now now, not while it's not safe to sleep.

Every time I write a post like this, I end by saying: I have no big conclusions. It sounds pathetic when put in words. I'm writing for my own records. And each time I find myself in this cycle I feel betrayed anew: by my body, for creating the problems that need doctor's signatures; by my brain, for finding every reason—the problems, the signatures—to be upset about it.

My sister comes back from studying abroad in Italy on Saturday. My parents are picking me up, then her, and we'll go out to dinner and then take her home. We'll decorate the tree while I'm in town, and Hanukkah begins on Tuesday. My father's birthday is on the 21st. There are many reasons why I need to be rested up and sleeping nights; reasons why I want to be happy. Instead, I'm still not sleeping.

* I have minor scoliosis and major lordosis. Scoliosis is frequently diagnosed and, when diagnosed, measured in degrees of curvature. Lordosis is a rarer diagnosis, has more complex points of curvature, and as such is rarely diagnosed with a degree of curvature. ** One insurance agency wants the degree of curvature for my back, by which they assume scoliosis, which is basically asking the wrong question: that number alone doesn't warrant a diagnosis; it's that it aggravates a more severe back problem that makes it an issue. In other words: fuck you.

The house smells of smoke today. Some of the neighbors must be burning yard waste. To my surprise, it's quite lovely.

Despite a trend of continued improvement, I've been all over the map lately. I had a night of horrible sleep, Devon and I both did—but the difference is that when he sleeps poorly, Devon comes home and takes a nap as any reasonable person would; when I sleep poorly, I develop a grudge against sleep, I avoid it, and things get much worse before I finally collapse, and sleep again, and they can get better. (ETA because I forgot to mention: I've also been frequently shaky, which makes me think I haven't been getting enough protein—I always need more than most people, but these days I feel like I can never get enough.) I've been feeling—ah, well, exhausted, sometimes in the literal sense, but more in a cumulative sense: I want to be out of this rut, already; I want to disappear until I am. There is so much that I should be giving to others, but I just don't have it in me right now. I feel guilty about that; I feel that if I can't give I shouldn't take. Ironically, this means that I've been a bit more engaged with the "real" world—so much of my social interaction is online that for me, introversion and escapism can actually mean avoiding the internet.

It's not all bad, though. I tried the cocoa cappuccinos at Starbucks and I think I'm developing a preference for them—the foam isn't as travel-mug friendly, but the texture is delightful (and soy holds foam very well, so the texture is maintained through the whole cup). This seems small, I know, but: Devon and I went out to dinner at a local Thai restaurant (ever since century_eyes introduced me to truly remarkable Thai outside of Seattle, I've been in search of somewhere to scratch the itch for more of the same) and then we walked a couple of blocks to the local used bookstore (where I actually found something, which is a pleasant change) and then we went across the corner to Starbucks where I tried a cocoa cappuccino (and the barista recognized me and asked if I wanted my mocha, and then we talked about John Ajvide Lindqvist, and it's so cute when strangers try to give me book recommendations!), and then we walked back to the car through the cool fresh air of a spring day turning to evening. It was a marvelous day. It is small, it is all small, but it can be wonderful.

I got sufficient sleep yesterday, and though my day was hit and miss I noticed that as we were starting to get ready for bed, I didn't want to—and not for my usual reasons, not because I was afraid to try to sleep, but because I was feeling remarkably content. Content is remarkable, right now; I didn't want to sleep through the moment. So we put on Practical Magic and watched that instead, and it was perfect—perfect for sustaining the mood, the moment. (Except that that sort of story inspires a sort of regret in me—it's the sort of thing that I aspired to as an adolescent, doing magic in my bedroom and sneaking out the window at night, and can't believe in now, because all my best attempts at faith have never lead to belief. I have a mixed admiration and condescension for people that do believe—in magic, in the divine, in much of anything—because I see them as my adolescent self: hopeful but ultimately deluded, immature, but I envy them for finding the belief that eluded me. I want to carry Tiger's Eye and know the natures of the moon—to do so, and believe it means something, even if I can't blow a candle into flame. Yes. It's silly, it's longing and regret and a bit of bitterness, and it taints things).

But this beautiful spring, and the smell of smoke in the air, and a good book to read, reminds me that ... that I can still liveblog the weather with over-eloquence and mythical allusions: I have my own bits of wonder, even if they're ultimately mundane.

I make no point by all of this. I've been avoiding almost everything, lately. I'm sometimes not doing too good, and it's frustrating that that's still the case. But in bits and pieces, things are okay. That's the usual, I suppose. But sometimes it feels worth writing down.

You know what would be awesome? If I could sleep reliably and easily. That'd be great. It would also, it seems, be a goddamned miracle.

Yesterday Devon and I went out and finally bought awesome headphones, another belated birthday gift (we've yet to order BPAL, too—I've been half off smellies for the last little bit because I seem very sensitive to them right now, so there's no real rush I suppose). I long grew sick of the over-the-ear pair I use when I go out for Starbucks/library trips, and these sound much better, and I've been eyeing a certain headphone-wearing video game character with envy for a fair bit now, so they're a wonderful buy. I'm so enamored that I sort of want to wear them all the time now, except that—well, there's hardly any need at this particular moment. But they're just what I wanted in both form and function: flattering, black, portable, and the sound quality is fantastic.

I only wish I could paint the red parts green, but that may not work out so well given the warranty.

My head's been in a dozen places at once, lately. It rained yesterday, the first rain of the coming autumn—on the same day that we went out for dinner and shopping, no less. I wore long sleeves, walked through the dark and the mist, and I could not have been happier. I'm reading a book right now which, although it's still too early to tell for sure, I think I may love. But I'm not in my quiet bookish phase—I'm still playing Persona 4 and I've also taken up old school Harvest Moon, Dev's playing, oh, half a dozen games at once, and we're watching anime together for a change—all about as geeky and fangirly as can be. Moderation or, I guess you could say, multitasking like this is not my usual way: I am a creature of extremes, drowning in books or playing video games all day but rarely doing both at once. In a way it seems healthier to spread out my interests like this—I have more freedom and variety, I get a little less obsessed (and I do hate how my brain operates when obsessed), so on, so forth. But there's a certain cognitive dissonance in the variety. I'm fangirly but intellectual, hyper but subdued, talkative but quiet, and—relatedly or not—often cheerful and melancholy in alternating phases, sometimes in the same contradicting phase. For all that it may be healthier and can be quite nice, it's also confusing and fucking exhausting.

The inaccessibility of sleep doesn't help.

I don't exactly want the alternative, the extremes—but I would prefer some stability, or in the very least the ability to do a little more with both sets of moods. I have letters to write. I have posts to write, books to review, reviews to type up ... so much goes undone, and that's beginning to bother me.

I would also like to sleep.

I am finally feeling better. There was a turning point last night so distinct that I could almost mark the hour—and it came not long after Devon brought me orange juice and a brownie, so I am now convinced that this is the cure to all ills. I'm still coughing, still a little snuffly, but this is my body shedding the last of its illness—rather than wallowing in the production of more. I even slept well and had good dreams, a rarity at the best of times but particularly impossible as of late. I am pleased, because it's about damn time: I started noticing my first throat-itching symptoms one week ago come tomorrow. Apparently, that's my version of a "little sick." Do I feel like I'm being punished for the fact that I'm getting out of the house more often? A bit.

Jumping back to the subject of sleep: I've been thinking on the disconnect between my self-as-human and self-as-cat again, this time as it relates to sleep—and to obsessive thought. Thinking on—and bemoaning, to be honest, this last week while I needed sleep to rest and heal but found it even more cruel and fleeting than usual.

And so I'm going to talk about (among other subjects) my therianthropy. Confused as to what the hell I'm on about? Review my first post on the subject and/or my therianthropy tag. Think this stuff is just too weird? Feel free to skip this post.

I've had issues with sleep since middle school—I used to sleep as little as possible, as self-punishment but also to avoid dreaming. These days I'm more at peace with the need for sleep and the nature of dreams, although my dreams are more often than not nightmares, but these days I'm also plagued by problems with sleep. My sleep is never predictable—I get it in three hour cycles, sometimes as few as one cycle a night for weeks on end, sometimes sleeping half the day away although I tend to wake every three hours for a little while.

Getting to sleep—at the end of a long day, but also after each mid-night wakeup, is the hardest part. Some of it is physical, the simple discomfort of a bad back and a curvy body that demands an artful arrangement of pillows to keep everything aligned and unstressed. Much of it is the fact that I'm prone to obsessive thinking.

I've mentioned my obsessive thought before but I don't know if I've ever tried to explain or describe it. It's an aspect of my anxiety, but it's also a simple part of how my brain works—an aspect of my nature that sometimes causes anxiety. It's like having a song stuck in your head: a phrase set on repeat. It can be anything, hurtful or harmless (I obsess over sour memories, troublesome conversations, problems which are huge to me but would be foolish to another; I obsess over video games, over sentences, anything at all, though I've particular fondness for that which contains repetition or rhyme). Sometimes it's a small annoyance at the start, but after hours (sometimes years; I still obsess over mistakes I made as a ten year old) of incidental repetition or minutes of unremitting repetition it grows tiresome—moreover it's so resistant to change that it grows stressful: I can't stop obsessing. That's a simple statement with a vast import: I cannot stop obsessing. I can't think long, coherent thoughts. I can't concentrate. As a result I can't enjoy, engage, even distract. I am stuck obsessing—repeating a sentence fragment, rearranging letters, hating myself for an offhand remark—indefinitely.

It's painful. And that's what I go through most nights when I try to sleep—and that's how it's been this last week when I was more-than-usually physically uncomfortable and found it that much harder to fall asleep, and so had that much longer to wait for an obsessive thought to arise, settle in, and keep me awake.

The only cures I've found are to stop thinking or to intentionally pick an obsessive thought. This is why, in the worst of my depression, I sometimes do nothing but watch Law & Order reruns and why I often watch movies as I fall asleep: if I can clear out my brain and replace it with the passive occupation of consuming familiar media, I can smother obsessive thought under a blanket of white noise. The problem is that as soon as I stop, as soon as I free my thoughts, the anxiety can return. So I have obsessive thoughts I turn to intentionally. I sing Donna Donna to myself half a dozen times in a row. I go through the alphabet, alternating English and French, over and over. These are repetitions too, but they are familiar and sometimes comforting, and because I chose them I can control them—so that they are not negative, hurtful thoughts; so that I have a calming illusion of control over my own mind. If my obsessive thinking hasn't kicked in yet, I sometimes plan my dream house, tell myself short stories, or visit my meadow*—familiar but longer meditations which keep my thoughts focused so there's less chance that a pause will open the door to obsessive thinking.

The cat doesn't do this. My self-as-cat can feel anxiety: mistrust, skittishness, fear of stranger and of dangers. But as I've written before, my self-as-cat doesn't feel the sort of anxiety that my human brain is prone to, these obsessive rounds of thought. In fact, my self-as-cat wants to spent hours and hours doing nothing more resting. That's another simple sentence with great import: The desire for rest and sleep, for thought-empty stillness, is a vital part of my therianthropy, and that's a vital part of myself. A cat that can't catnap hardly feels a cat at all.

Madison has a sweater, a red chenille business which no one would wear but she loves to sleep on, and since it got put down within her easy reach she's done little but lay on it. She purrs and kneads, suckling the fabric; more often she just sleeps, curled up nose to tail in a neat small round. As she did when she discovered the guinea pigs's bedding, she's been forging her usual outside excursions just to stay there, comfortable and pampered and often asleep.

I have a passion for modal which rivals my passion for chocolate—there is no fabric softer or smoother, and after I fell in love with it Devon got modal sheets for the bed in a subdued spring green. I have a pillow-top mattress and a down pillow, I have A/C to keep the room cold, I have a little den of comfort which I rarely leave. But when I pass Madison in her curl of sleep I still envy her, because I can't do that. I need to wrangle pillows into a back-pampering pile to be comfortable for long, but more importantly even with every comfort arranged just for me I need a book, a film, a conversation; I need a b c d running repeats in my head or "on a wagon bound for market" for the fifth time—I need these things because if I don't have them, instead I have a word, a sentence, a "should have said," a "can't believe I did," a "do they remember?" in a loop so endless that running it has fatigued my thoughts, a repetition so insistent that the trap of it frightens me. In the middle of the night, when I've slept for three hours and wake again like clockwork, if I immediately try to go back to sleep it's even worse—because on the liminal edge of dreams the repeated thought is even more immersive and I can have mental images (which, at other times, escape me) and so I can also obsess over that sight, that action, as well as those words. At those times I can find myself trapped in obsessive thought for a solid half hour, which ends only if I get up for a while or if I finally fall into dream—a dream more often than not tainted by some obsession.

I know that there are far greater complaints out there—I'm not the most miserable of the miserable. I know that I'm not the only one that wishes: oh, for the simplier mind (and life) of a beast! This is not about my status as a special snowflake. It's not even entirely about my obsessive thoughts—they can be hellish, but ever since I discovered the little tricks that help me deal with them they've become a more manageable evil.

What pains me is that how my brain works defines me-as-human, and it separates me from me-as-cat. My self-as-human and self-as-cat are not separate identities, but sometimes there is a wall between them, sometimes they are at odds. I wrote before that "in order to be myself, I have to move beyond myself"—that I have to overcome some aspects of myself-as-human in order to be myself-as-cat, and there's a certain pain in realizing that, in experiencing the disconnect within myself; there's more of a pain in the long nights of sleeplessness and anxiety where I'm not only suffering from those miserable repetitions, but also because I am not myself, you see; because I cannot be who I ought.

* The comfort, sometimes the saving grace, in all of this is that my meadow—an open field with a single large tree and a single small house where a single 60-some woman resides—is the realm of my meditation and where I let my mental self-as-cat run free. It's the most difficult of my mental distractions because there's so many levels of complexity (immersing myself in cat-body, trying to imagine the meadow when I can't image images, etc.), and I can't indulge it unless I'm in a pretty healthy mental state; if I'm not, it soon disintegrates into obsessive thoughts. But when I can manage to run there, it's a blessing: an escape from the troubles of my human brain, and a chance to experience a more complete version of myself-as-cat.

Mostly for my own records: ( my mood has been particularly bad as of late. )

Moods aside, not all is lost. For one, I'm slowly resuming some of my CR religion studies. I've been hesitant to say as much because I hate falling through on the things that I announce publicly, which I did with exactly this announcement about a year ago. I am, unfortunately, much more of a flaky person than I intent to be. The depression and anxiety get to me, laying waste the very best laid plans. I get overwhelmed, I have a breakdown, I give up, and then I'm too ashamed to try again. But here I am, trying again—because I miss it, and because it is important enough to me to try again. So I'm (re)reading The Tain and The Mabinogion, to get started, as well as the Scottish-specific books that I bought last year (The Gaelic Otherworld, Carmina Gadelica, and The Silver Bough), to get my groundings. I plan to look into ogham a bit more this time, for want of a divinational practice. My greatest fear is changing book knowledge into life practice—building rituals, devotionals, and altars. The process of moving from theory to action has never been my strength. I hate doing things unless I am certain that I shall do them well—and there's no way to know that, with religion, especially with a reconstrutionist faith where so much of the wheel has to be reinvented. The thought scares me silly, but I shall try to press on anyhow.

If none of this is making sense to you, some background into may be useful. Last year, I began a study and practice of Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism, specifically focusing on (the highlands of) Scotland. CR tries to reconstruct pre-Christian pagan Celtic faith, taking into account how it would change in the modern world (read: we do not collect the heads of our enemies). For more information, feel free to check out the CR FAQ (which was my first introduction and is an amazing resource) and my LJ tag on the topic, which will take you back through my studies last year. Also feel free to check out cr_r, the LJ community closely affiliated with the people that run/wrote the FAQ above.

And now having said as much, I shall proceed to worry myself silly about the doing of it all. Gah. But do wish me luck. This is as important to me as it is utterly mystifying and terrifying.

For another—in other "not all is lost" news—I've come up with a starting place for that book genome project I was contemplating earlier. This starting place is basically the relevant information to input into the program so that it could churn out useful results. In other words: the genes that make up the genome of the book. I tried to select information that would provide useful results: books with similar characters, settings, styles, genres, publishing dates, ratings/intended audience, and key characteristics, all in a simple fill-in-the-blanks schematic that would be easy to put into a database and simple enough to categorize.

( The format I'm looking at follows. ) But there's still a major bug to be worked out: what the categories are, how many to have, and how to structure them. This is particularity relevant for genre, setting, and keywords. With genre, it probably comes down to creating a finite hierarchical list. For example, urban fantasy would be on the list, as a subgenre of fantasy, as a subgenre of nonfiction (which is implied, as I have absolutely zero intent of dealing with non-fiction at all). When setting is selected, the most accurate subgenre(s) will be selected, and the parent categories will be taken into (weighted) account when the genome spits back results. A set list of genres will make labeling easier and make the system function better by providing more (and more accurate) results. Keywords are not as easy. These are incredibly important—if I'm looking for more books like Season of the Witch, I'm probably far more interested in finding something with alchemy in it than I am in another 30-some male protagonist. As a result, these keywords need to be diverse and specific—enough that I can find another book on alchemy, not just magic, and that a book on prophecy can turn up appropriate results too—but they have to have some order to them, or the results are useless. What the author calls remote viewing may be too minor a term—is psychics better? Will the categorizers (me!) forget what term they went with before and therefore invalidate the search process? I think keywords are probably the trickiest and the most important part—after all, they are what makes the Amazon system start to float ... and then sink like a stone.

With this system mocked up, what comes next is implementing it. I plan to make an table (Excel, probably) and start categorizing any books that I can think of, and am sufficiently familiar with (read recently or read many times) to assign genre and keywords too. After I build up a big enough database, I can start searching it and seeing if I can con the boy into mocking up a system for it—and see if it's any good. I have four books labeled so far. So... that's a start? Ask me again in a few months if this brainchild should have been aborted or not.

The other tiny bit of good news is that I have book reviews (three, including Lane Robins's Maledicte, a title which I plan to repeat until I drill it into every readers brain and convince them all to check it out) and BPAL (a bottle and another half-dozen imps) on the way. The reviews are getting written about now, and the BPAL is in shipping and should be here any day now. Yay.

(I should totally have a tag that reads "one more tag" for posts when I write a short novel and cover enough topics for a dozen tags... just to drive the point home, yanno.)