Posing a question

My Dungeons and Dragons character has the opportunity to ask a magical dragon born a question.  Any single question.

I thought I might meta game the system, but that feels a bit unfair on the DM.  I have a suspicion the character and mine share a trait, but if I'm wrong in that assumption, it’s a waste of a question.  She also super does not trust this guy, so I also want to ask what we owe him in return, just to double check on the bargain made upon entering his home, but, on the other hand...  She's got a problem to solve, she doesn't really know where to start, asking his advice may be the most straightforward choice, but doesn't take in to consideration that she doesn't trust him much at all.

I think she'll ask what advice he would give himself in her place.  I've found most people show you more about themselves in the advice they give than anything else, so that'll tell her what she wants to know about him and let her sort herself out, too.  Or, she could just ask him if he can read the language in her letter that she can't, he'll say no, question wasted and she'll be no worse than when she started.

It’s set me wondering, if I could ask any question, and be reasonably certain of getting at least a halfway decent answer, what would I ask?  Am I going to be OK?  No, because of course I will.  Until I'm not.  That’s how it works. Which choice is the best?  I worry enough weighing my options that the path I take is the one I'm convinced is right.  Even with the multiverse of possibilities stretched out ahead and behind me, this is the universe I've chosen to create.  I don't believe this is the best of all possible universes, but why would I make one that isn't?

Separate question.  Also, mixing Candide and quantum physics is possibly not the best choice, philosophically speaking.

Forgetting to Breathe

I'm holding tension literally everyplace.  I stop at traffic signals and tell myself to relax, that's how bad it's gotten.  My jaw clicks, I'm holding my breath, one night of bad sleep will be all I need to screw up my neck again (I pulled a muscle in it years ago and re-pull it on occasion).

What am I looking forward to?  Not enough.  Not enough to outweigh what I'm dreading.

A friend started a Dungeons and Dragons game on Facebook.  I've never played, but I like it.  I could definitely move in to that world and never leave.

I have friends to visit this summer.  Their son is almost old enough to be awesome.  (Well, he's pretty much been awesome forever, but in a social-with-grown-ups way.)

I'm directing a show, which is good, but I'm uncomfortable about it.  Hooray for self confidence!  I used to have that, but then it turned out that people like to tell you anything you do is fine, but not that, and not that, and I can't cope with that.

For the foreseeable future, that's it.  I cease to exist in August.  At least until the high school work starts up again.  And then the little community theatre.

I think I'll take a nap and hope I dream.  I like it when I tell myself stories.  I wish I could let myself do it when I was awake.

The Alpine Path

Whenever I finish a book I was very attached to when I was younger, I don't feel any older than I was when I read it.  I feel older while I read it, remembering who I was the last time I turned the pages.  Perhaps it's transformative, as though a little part of me got sealed up inside that story and I can take it out and be her again, for a little while.

I'm feeling awful lonesome this week.  Last weekend I saw friends and talked to people and almost, briefly, felt whole and normal.   I miss too many things that never existed in the first place.

It is a strange fact that the girls in LM Montgomery books don't often love anybody until they find out they do.  The boys love deep and longingly and forever, but the girls mostly find out what they could have had when it was gone.  I wonder the truth of this.  I worry a little about the influences archaic heroines have had on me.  Anne, Laura, Caddie, Jo, all these intelligent, outspoken girls who grow up getting in and out of trouble but are morally sound and turn in to ideals from an age that no longer exists.

Where's the modern series?  The little girl who grows up and becomes an ideal?  Maybe we can't have heroines like that anymore.  Maybe since the ideal doesn't exist to grow in to, it doesn't matter so much how the little girl gets there.

Or maybe I'm just not reading them.

I discovered reading that I don't currently burn with ambition.  Or hope of it.  I never had specific ambitions, or when I did, they were never plans beyond vague understanding that someday I wanted...  Now I'm not sure what I want.

Seventeen year old me hates me.  She thinks I made some very silly choices for some no so very good reasons and found myself in a bigger mess than I can handle.  As usual.  She doesn’t care how I do it, but I need to fix things and quickly. I agree with her, but I don't know what I'm willing to lose.  I don't have to walk away, but since I don't know what I'm left with.

I assume the reader with Chrome on a Mac is a bot, due to the promptness with which they read my updates, but, hello to you, if you're a human.

She Needs to Sort Out Her Priorities

I'm doing the opposite of coping. I'm forgetting things, not paying a lot of attention to the things I am doing and doing them wrong.  I spent five minutes crying in the bathroom at work yesterday.

I don't want to do anything.

I have rehearsal tonight.  I'm sure it will be fine but I'm not ready for it.

A friend's coming to town tomorrow.  I'm not interested in telling her what's really going on in my life, but also fed up with hiding everything.  I'll just keep hiding.  It’s too hard to explain the situation, anyway.

I've got no motivation.  I have an interview for another box office position.  I don’t want it, but it’s twice as many hours as the community theatre, and if I can fit it in to my schedule, it'd keep me alive.  But it would probably screw up any flexibility in my schedule, too, meaning I can't just take off for Canada when I want to.

I need to figure out what I'm doing with my life and if what I'm trying to do is worthwhile.

To Have Fun, and To Learn Things

I'm reading an amazing book, Come As You Are, The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, by Emily Nagoski.  I kind of don’t want to shut up about how great the book is.  It’s accessible without being condescending and, unlike my college Into to Psych class, actually seems to know what it's talking about and back it up.

A lot of the science isn't new to me, some of it is, but what is new are the specific interpretations of this information and how they apply to actual humans.  The author says in her classes, most of her students come away saying, "I'm normal," and, yep, I'd say that's the case here, too.

I've been fretting over when my marriage went wrong.  It wasn't the marriage, it was the first time I allowed myself to be deceived and lied to and tried to make it OK.  It wasn't, but because I thought it made me a better person to be accepting of what he'd done, it set a pattern in place.  So now I know, I spent a very long time being unhappy.  And he’s actually more fucked up than I am, because he can't (or won't) examine his behaviour and try to change.

I wondered the other day if I even know the difference between love and Stockholm Syndrome.  I do.  I just have a long way back to look, and I need to remember that I can demand that from a relationship, and if I'm not getting it, leave. It just took me years and good advice to figure it out.

Haddaway

I've been re-playing my relationship in my head, wondering why it seemed like a good idea ever.

I glanced through old diaries filled with statements like, "I don't know what this is, but I suppose it's the best chance I'm going to have," and "nobody's ever shown the slightest interest in the way I look before now, so what if he’s the only one?"  I remember the words I thought when he asked me to marry him, "I should ask to think about this. Why, you're going to decide to do it anyway, just agree now."

And at the time I thought it was love.  I don't know if it ever was.  I've never really cared enough for anybody else to see the difference.  I mean, it wasn't indifference or hatred or coercion or anything else, but, if that's my capacity to love, I guess no wonder things went badly.

Ghost-Kin?

I've been reading about body acceptance. 

I think one of the problems I personally have to overcome with Other-Kin is that my personal point of view is, "Nope, you don't have a tail that no one else can see.  You are not a wolf.  This is what you've got, you're stuck with it just like the rest of us."  Because I've never thought that I had body image issues, I accept that this is what I have to work with, but I didn't think it was necessary that you had to like it. 

That's not to say that I despise people who do feel that way, I just don't quite understand the motivation.  Since I was a little kid, I've occasionally, fervently, wished I'd been born a boy.  I never thought that I actually *was* one, just that if I had been, I would've gotten the better deal.  I still kind of think that, but I don't want to be a guy, I just have days where I really don't want to be a girl. 

It's also fair to say that I have a physical body, but I don't inhabit it.  It's mostly beyond my control and ability to work with, so I don't worry about it.  I don't like it, but I don't spend a lot of time hating myself or wishing I was different.  This is, apparently, Not the Way It's Supposed to Be. 

I frequently joke that I'm a brain in a jar, and said to a friend recently, "That's not a joke, I think I'd be better off.  That's either a total lack of body problems or an unprecedented amount." 
He kind of thought that maybe it was an unprecedented amount.  But the thing is, I don't care.  I don't (apart from this) spend an abnormal amount of time obsessing over the way I do or don't look, I look the way I look, and the way I look is not great, but there's nothing to be done about it, so, it is what it is.  If I could swap it out, I totally would, but that's not going to happen, so, here I am.

This is what I mean when I say I'm not a physical person.  I know what I'm comfortable with and what I'm not and it has nothing to do with anybody else and everything to do with me. 

I listened to a kid give a speech last month where she claimed that *everyone* dances when they're alone.  Oh, sweetie.  No, no they don't.  Because I don't. 

I took gymnastics, and I was terrible at it.  I liked doing it, and I didn't care that I was terrible at it.  When I stopped going, it was because I was too busy. 

I have poor hand-eye coordination.  I catch with my face and can't throw.  People have tried to teach me and failed. 

This is me.  If I wanted to do something about it, maybe I would, but I don't really want to, because that's more work.  It's not my priority to become that person. 

But I read about loving your body, and how you're supposed to want to wear clothes I don't want to wear, and dance and that's not me.  So I wonder, is this the same thing, or a different thing?  Should everybody WANT to go skydiving?  Or is it maybe as normal to want to go skydiving as not? 

"Women have something they want to change."  No.  I don't think I'd be "better" if I had a different body, I don't think a full swap for another body would do me anything different.  I do sort of think I'd be better if I didn't have one at all, if I existed as a series of words on a page, created and processed as quickly as my brain could spit them out.  *That* would be me, that's what I'd swap for if I could.  The rest of this is just a thing. 

Maybe it's because I was so into ghosts as a kid, the idea that your body and whatever a ghost was were two different things, and the body's the part that winds up in the ground and the ghost is the thing that is capable of making the body live.  So maybe I don't want to be a brain, maybe I'd just as soon be a ghost?  Or, maybe it's the way I reason with the reality of life, the body is the thing that's going to die, and whatever happens afterwards, you've got this other thing?  So, maybe don't get too attached to the body part? 

I don't know.  I hadn't considered the ghost option before.  Well, whatever it is, I have to go clean it and dress it so it can take whatever I am to work in the conventional method.