by Cayenne on April 2nd, 2011, 4:19 pm
Been a long time since I posted here. Got some things on my mind that I'm going to try to get out. I've also got something that has been eating at me since last night that I paced around thinking about, that I thought about when I went to bed, that I thought about this morning, and that I'm still thinking about right now. But we'll get to that. A few other things.
Before proceeding, I warn you all that are reading this that this scrapbook post contains the f-bomb. And there will probably be a lot of them. And while this is a long, rambly post, I promise you that I am sober, but the camel's back has been broken.
What's happening with me?
Gramps made it to a nursing home. But he is continuing to have these ministrokes, and he is getting further and further away. I had a long talk earlier in the week with my departed grandmother (laugh if you want to, but I firmly believe that the spirits are there) about him... and I basically begged her to take him home now. That night, she would not let me sleep. I got the impression that she was trying, and he was trying, but there's something blocking it, something he cannot let go of, and I didn't catch what. I think it's that he needs to see one of my cousins, or some more of his siblings (which is far more likely, if you ask me) before he can let go. The last time it was like this, my grandfather had his first stroke last spring that rendered him unable to drive. Then I had another dream a few months later, in September 2010, and my grandmother told me she was worried about my grandfather. Within the week, he had the stroke that ended his life as he knew it, and sent him to the hospital.
Most of you probably don't know this, but I have been going up after work every day to go help my grandfather with his dinner - some nights he doesn't need it, but some days he does -- like if they have lasagna... oi, it gets messy. I came down with the stomach superbug that's been going around my city on Wednesday, my day off, and so I haven't been able to go see my granddad for a couple days. I'm going to take the weekend off from going up there to make sure it's well and truly gone, and then I'll go back up on Monday. What does that mean in relation to this scrapbook post and what I've been thinking about earlier? I promise you there's a point. I'll get to it.
I work for a small business in Ontario, and the law here affirms jobs as rights - they basically say you can't fire someone without just cause. Just cause, here, means you must have three documented writeups of the same kind (like, say, someone loses their shit at you and storms out of the office, you can write them up for being unprofessional). Three shots at that, you can let them go and they cannot sue you through the Ministry of Labour. My parents, never saw the clusterfuck coming, and therefore, never wrote her up like they should have to cover their tracks.
Work has been this apprehensive mix of hell for the last month and a half with a coworker. However, I think it's going to get worse. Why? The security cameras are being installed next week. She is going to lose her shit, and she's going to lose it at me. Why at me? Because my family, whom I work with - parents and brother (although he's still in school, but he starts working full time at the end of June) - are going to our condo in FL for three weeks. They're driving. Essentially? They're gone for a goddamn month, and I am left in the lion's cage with coworker from hell. We're hoping that with the cameras, the fact that she is being told, FLAT OUT this year, that *I* am in charge, and my uncle, whom she hates and she hates him because he puts up with none of her bullshit whatever, will be coming in randomly to help me keep her in line, she is going to be on better behaviour than she has for past years. Time will tell. I'm not confident. However, I swear to god now that I am an officer of the company - I am through with her jerking my chain and treating me like garbage when my parents are not there. I will write her ass up every time she starts screaming at me, and we'll see how much she likes those apples. I'd REALLY prefer it didn't get to that point, because I am going to need her, at the end of the month, to start calling a greenhouse for me because I am not driving out on a daily basis to find out if they have my trees.
What trees, you ask? Because of consistent nagging from my mother, from Jen, who is a gardening fanatic, and from this new homeowner instinct to make my house look nice, I am going to try gardening. I do not like it. I have never had any luck with gardens or growing things in my life. My grandmother, who had the greenest thumbs in Canada (in my opinion... she could grow anything, seriously) is probably smiling and laughing about this (And telling me to clean my kitchen!), but I am trying to grow things. I baiscally have a plan to have a herb garden and some normal gardens, but I am not digging up my back yard, because I know my dogs. But what started this whole trainwreck of gardening was the fact that I have been lusting after a dwarf Meyer lemon tree. This has grown to wanting to grow fresh herbs so I can eat them whenever the hell I want, and some other things. We'll see how that goes when they get here. Now, about the trees. In North America, without specialized documents that get pricey, you cannot import plants, including fruit, across the borders. So you cannot take a lemon tree, for example, from the US into Canada, and you cannot take, say, raspberry cane from Canada into the US. Does that suck? Yes it does, but I understand why. It's also probably part of the high-technology border. Jen, I can hear you laughing across the damn continent. But anyway, my greenhouse/seedhouse where I put in my big order, and the produce markets around here, do not have my goddamn lemon trees. So I have to wait until the end of April, first of May, to start calling another place that should have them then, and then I will procure two of the damn things so I can be enroute to lemony goodness in my own house.
Hobbies. Good topic, yeah?
When I first started working on Mizahar, I didn't really have many. I had school and work (and eventually just work when I finished school, thank fucking god), writing here, writing occasionally on another forum (which I happily gave up), writing my own stories, and writing in some real-time chats, both as a player and as the storyteller, once a week (sometimes twice), in addition to the dogs, the pigs, and the birds. I had lacrosse in the summer. That was really it. Writing, writing, and more writing. I wasn't really taking care of myself. I spent a godawful amount of time in front of a screen. I fell out of reading except that what I needed to read for the writing. I put on weight (and this, let me tell you, is a scary thing when you were already my size).
But the important thing is is that I was doing a lot of writing. A lot of people have their different theories on writing and how we do it and what works for them, but my theory is is that if I don't write a lot, I fall out of doing it, and then it is forced, it doesn't feel right to me, and I find other things to take its place that do feel right at the time. If I am not writing what I want to write, I am not going to write it. Oh, that doesn't mean I won't try - I'll sit there and stare at it, type some words, and try to force it out, and at the end of the day it's an alien bunch of crap that doesn't sound or look right to me, and I don't want to do any more writing right about then, even writing I wanted to do before.
So over the last year - it's been almost a year now since I bought my house, which is kind of freaking amazing to me - I fell out of the habit of writing. I got busy. I had things that were, quite honestly, more important that I had to get done before I could sit down and write. I had to go and walk the dogs, I had to get out and in the air. I had to put up drywall, I had to cook, I had to vacuum. I had to help clean my grandfather's once I finally got settled into my own house, and as a result, several months after I moved in, my own library is still not put together - the futon is still in the box, and I have probably twenty boxes in my library, in my bedroom, my laundry room, and in my front hall that still need to be unpacked. I used to be able to sit down and write, and write, and write, because I loved it and it was really all I did.
And at the same time, I don't think I was really, and truly happy with myself when that was all I did. When Jen did a spread for me the summer I visited her, I had ten swords stabbing, which is almost as bad as it can get, and that really kind of confirmed a feeling that I was not happy. Because I took a step back, I went outside, I put away a box of things, I took the dogs on a walk, I discovered beading from Jen when I went to see her and Gillar, and, quite frankly, I've discovered books again. Charles W. Eliot said "Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers." When I was a kid growing up, I preferred the company of books to the company of people. I had more fun in a corner of a library than I did being around other children. But I've gone back to m books, even if it's only a book here, or a book there. I'm going to learn chainmaille when my order gets here, and I am going to damn well have fun doing it.
What does my day look like?
Up at 6:30. Feed the dogs. Let the dogs out. Make lunch. Feed and water the birds and the pigs. Make breakfast. Go to work. Work for 8-9 hours. To up to the nursing home to help and visit my grandfather. Come home. Might be 6, might be later. Let the dogs out. Feed the dogs. Greet the birds and sing to the pigs. See about doing some stuff around the house that needs to be done. Eat dinner. Might be 7:30, might be 8 by now. Am braindead. Am tired. Am about ready to go back to bed. See about doing the dishes, probably put off until tomorrow. One person, no big deal. Sit down, with one or two parrots, and try to write if I feel like it, or just leave the laptop off and watch some TV. Sometimes I'll play a game on my desktop. Go to bed.
What does entertaining parrots have to do with writing? If you have never had parrots, you have no idea what they are like, particularly the macaws. They are not happy just being with you, they want to be doing what you are doing. Case in point: I was folding laundry this morning and singing country music, I had one macaw balanced on my left shoulder, humming and mumbling along with me, and my minimacaw hanging from the neck of my t-shirt, directly in front of my face. Mickey, on my shoulder, would go down to my wrist. Gabby would bite the t-shirts as I'm folding them. These are smart, intelligent birds that need to be engaged on an hourly basis, because if they are not, they will make their own trouble. Mickey, for example, is a shredder, and that comes from when he had to go into quarantine. If he feels I am ignoring him, he will take a feather, AND RIP IT OFF. Gabby just hates your guts when you put off spending time with her, and hell hath no fury like a macaw that is slighted. It has taken me months to get her to warm up to me again to the point where she will come out readily and often to see me. Her good graces are hard to get into, and they are harder to stay in. So if I leave her in her cage while I try to write, she gets pissed. If I have her out, she will want to be ON MY KEYBOARD, because hey, it's doing what I'm doing, no?
What's the point of all of this?
I refuse to let writing consume my life any more. I refuse to let the dramas, which seem enormous and all-consuming at the time, but are in the grand scheme of things small and petty and just fucking stupid leave me a wreck that has me laying in bed, staring at the ceiling going "Oh. My. God. How did it get to this? How did this HAPPEN?" It's not just on Mizahar - my weekend roleplaying group imploded because of a ton of bullshit that is neither here nor there. I don't think I've done any personal writing in my journal in a very long time either.
So here's something that's going to probably piss people off: I, and the other founders and moderators, are not someone's personal fucking robots that mindlessly churn out posts. My time is limited. I, and everyone else, has a life, and chances are, they are busy. I do not have time to take on EVERY SINGLE THREAD idea that someone brings to me, and I have told people, flat out recently, that no, I do not want to write out a thread idea they have, and I explain why. Maybe it's not up my alley. Maybe it's not my thing. Maybe it's just something that's not going to work. I have had people on more than one occasion, tell me that they want to bring their brand-spanking new character with a few points in combat, none in survival, wants to come into Falyndar, thumb their noses at the Myrians, and get away unscathed. Some people would say that a really good moderator could come up with a way for that to work in this setting. Divine intervention. Dhani hunters form a distraction. Whatever.
It doesn't work that way. And when I try to explain to them it doesn't work that way, that's when they tell me that I don't have the power to kill their character.
I don't have what?
I don't like moderators who go on a power-tripping frenzy just because they can. I would really hate it when moderators go totally apeshit on my character(s) and rain down an epic shitstorm on me that was unprovoked. But for every action, there is a reaction. I made Falyndar this way, this way that apparently so many, many people think is unfair and difficult for people to access because that was my original vision. We wanted a post-apocalyptic world because we were tired of people taking a dangerous setting and watering it down so that you could basically sing and dance along the roads and not get jumped by someone desperate enough to kill you because life is hard and there are less fortunate who understand people think the roads are safe. I made a dangerous jungle that is also dangerous for the people who live there because that is what I wanted to write. I wanted a wildlife that is dangerous and will fucking eat you because you were careless. This is fantasy, and this is one of _my_ fantasies. The only thing that keeps me from being a player in my area is that I do not have time right now. Otherwise I'd make a nasty Constrictor after I flesh out Zinrah and go on a bloodthirsty rampage. (Why a Constrictor? Because my Myrian NPCs sometimes seem like limited PCs to me, and I enjoy them very much when I get to use them. Love my Myri, I really do...)
Furthermore, with an election going on right now in Canada (which really brings all the crazies to the yard), I really am hating the culture of entitlement that I'm seeing in the world today, where people want everything for nothing. It's this 'gimme gimme gimme, I don't want to work for it, just gimme' attitude that bugs me to death. I went to school. I went into something that a lot of people cannot understand or believe that someone would willingly do it. But I was smart enough to know that my career choice was something that would always be usable, no matter when the economy tanks, because economies always tank, and that I was fucking good at it. School isn't the end-all, be-all any more - universities and colleges are fast losing credibility because of these 'jobs of the future' crap. My brother is going into the trades, and it's a good choice for him. He's good at it, he's got a business to walk into, but the point is, we have to work at it. We work, and we don't complain about working, because, like it or hate it, that is the way the world works.
You can't escape the culture of entitlement, even online. Some people expect moderators to read their minds and get what they want out of having left the most cryptic or no clues. If someone sends me a PM and says, "Hey, can you run a thread for me?" and I ask them what they have in mind, and they do not get back to me on that, I am not going to chase them down about it. The place in the queue is forfeited. I'm through with doing that. I reserve the right to pick what I want to moderate, because it's not fair to the player (or to myself, or to the other people who patiently (you know who you are, and I love you for it) wait for me to post,) for me to say yes to something I don't want to do, am not going to have fun doing, and find more of a chore that is going to sit on the back burner and is going to, as I said before, turn me off of writing.
So now, I am slowly, slowly getting back into writing. I am getting my character(s) caught up, though one only has one thread, and the other is almost caught up (ha, almost. By almost, most people haven't been waiting for a post from her for over a month), and so I am slowly getting to my moderated threads, and I am being choosy about them. I will take my time at it, and I will write what I want to write when I want to write.
I don't rant much. But what most people don't see and don't know is that I have this nasty, volatile temper that comes from both sides of my family, but I really take after my dad. We will put up with vast quantities of bullshit, and we will be calm about it and keep a level head. And then all of a sudden, one more piece of straw goes on the camel's load, and the poor bugger's back breaks. This is my temper. I will explode.
Busy day planned, so long as the weather holds. My grandmother was not impressed with the state of my kitchen, and I am going to rectify that... Time to do some dishes.
