[Cayenne's Scrapbook] Into the Jungle

[Gossamer]

That's a lovely rose, Mish. I think its officially time to stop telling folks you have a black thumb. Because that lovely rose looks pretty healthy and happy and would not live in someone's yard who's got a black thumb.

[Cayenne]

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune--without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I've heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me. ~Emily Dickinson Bye, Java. Love you, pretty bird. Thanks for 11 awesome years.

[Irriari]

I'm so sorry, Mishie. *hugs*

[Cayenne]

Please note: this scrap contains a lot of swearing, especially the f-bomb. I also bash religion further down. If you don't like it, you have been warned.

I'm sorry I've been slow to respond, busy, and away - I want to thank anyone reading who's been wondering if I'm going to get to them for being patient and assure them that I am.

My last two weeks have been amazing, but busy. Busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, and it won't be letting up any time soon. Why is this?

THE BITCH FINALLY LEFT. The psychotic, demented, overpaid, underworked tyrannical IDIOT finally left. I am, by the way, for anyone not familiar with this saga of my life, speaking about a coworker of mine at my office.

For the last 12 years, we've had this woman working at the shop. Way back when, we were a lot bigger and busier, and we had over 6 people working in the office and as many as two dozen technicians and apprentices working for us. Times have changed, and we became much smaller as competition in our field (plumbing and heating) grew. Because honestly, it's really, really hard to beat the guys working out of the back of their truck. Slowly we lost marketshare, and then a few years ago, we started losing money. My parents were forced to throw way more of their own personal funds in just to keep the place afloat as the recession hit.

Last year, we lost somewhere around $50,000.

Yes, that's key to the story.

Anyway.

Over the last couple years, I've been working at the shop full-time, and uncovering more and more and more of her fuckups. My mother did not believe in covering her bases, because she never figured that the employee in question would come back to bite her in the ass like she did - so my mother did not do writeups. In Canada, it is illegal to fire people without just cause. You have just cause only if you have signed writeups of at least THREE separate types of incidents OR you catch them in the act of stealing and you have PROOF that they have stolen something.

We also did not have a violence and harassment policy in place - though they became mandatory in summer 2010 - because small office, never really any major problems, so. Continuing.

Over the last several years, this employee (we'll call her B for bitch), has become increasingly toxic. She is an incredibly jealous SHREW who is so self-absorbed it makes you roll your eyes. It's all about her. All the fucking time. If you do not spend your day kissing her ass when people weren't there to keep her inline, she got PISSY AT YOU FOR MISTREATING HER.

This came to a head earlier in the last year. My mother wasn't in that day, and for the life of me I cannot remember why, but she wasn't in. I wasn't in the mood to deal with her (and I was in fact FURIOUS about some of these constant fuckups that she made because honestly, she DID NOT CARE about her job, the work she was doing, and as far as she was concerned, was as pristine as new-fallen snow), because I swear to whatever spirits you believe in that I spend half of my time at work fixing, correcting, and uncovering her mistakes. Anyway, prior to lunch, I asked that she get the deposit ready to go to the bank afterwards. She shrugged. Okay, awesome, I figure. I go eat my lunch. We have an hour for lunch, most of which I and my mother tend to work through, where she sat there and read the paper. That's cool, it's her lunch break, IDGAF as long as she answers the phones.

Lunch ends. I give her an hour after lunch is done, and I'm ready to go to the bank because I have other chores I have to do, so I come out and ask her if the deposit is ready. She flips out and starts screaming about HOW DARE I TREAT HER THIS WAY and SHE'S DONE NOTHING TO ME and she WON'T TOLERATE BEING TREATED THIS WAY.

And then she threw the bankbooks at me.

They're not heavy - all in, they weigh maybe a pound. But they do, however, have sharp corners. I just let them hit me and strolled back to my little office - didn't pick them up as she picked up the phone, called one of her kids, and started ranting, raving, and screaming about me. I went back to work. Fifteen minutes later, she comes into my office, THROWS the bank books on my desk, and stomps off. I go to the bank and ignore her for the next week.

The problem with working in a small office is that it's very hard not to interact with people. It can't be done. Everyone really does need to coordinate to some degree, and quite frankly, as Jen has told me before, it's a waste of time and energy to stay mad and pissy and frustrated at anyone. When you are losing sleep over someone, they win. So I let it go.

A short time after that, my mother had to go in for a hysterectomy. That meant I was to be in the office, with B, alone, for four to six weeks. She has made it a practice to keep it quiet until my mother, the manager, wasn't there. We got into it again - because I wasn't rolling over for her any more, and I was standing my ground. And even sooner after that, she got caught in some of her lies from my father, and she started screaming at him because all of a sudden, it wasn't going her way. Finally, my dad had had enough of her screaming and ranting and stomping around and throwing things after ten minutes, and he SNAPPED, and started yelling right back at her. Finally, he told her to go home for the day. She started screaming again, "Am I fired?! Am I fired?!!?!?!" over and over and over... and he said, "You know what? If that's what you want, I guess you're fired."

And from there, it gets worse. She storms out, calls her lawyer, contacts the labour board, and files suit against my father for harassment. By the end of the day, she has started to panic - and offers to contact her lawyer to drop the suit if we'll give her her job back. We've decided no - we'd rather take the penalty (which is a week's salary for every year worked, which would have been somewhere around $15,000 once we factored in her banked hours and vacation pay), but we were willing to do it. The next day, we were working on B's separation papers, and in comes a representative from the ministry of labour while my mother's on the phone with our lawyer.

Things go from bad to worse.

We were asked if her papers were filed yet, and we had to say no, since he wanted a copy of them, which I didn't have. We were then informed if we hadn't filed them now, and filed them now that the rep had been here, the MoL (Ministry of Labour) would fine us $250,000.

In addition to what she would have sued us for.

There was nothing for it. We had to give her her fucking job back.

So she came back, and she was very much the cat that was in the cream. I came up with a violence and harassment policy and trained everyone in it (the look on her face when she was told she could no longer scream or yell at anyone, or use racist slurs and epithets was fucking priceless, by the way). In addition to this, Jen came up with a great idea - installing security cameras in the office.

Bingo. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

We bought a system, started setting things up on the sly, didn't tell her about it at all. My game plan was to have it in place before my parents left for Florida at the beginning of Florida.

It did not happen.

In fact, she found out about it, and she went fucking postal.

I came in, found her packing her desk, ranting and raving and screaming that she DID HER WORK, SHE WOULD NOT BE ON CAMERA, SHE WAS CALLING HER LAWYER, IT WAS ILLEGAL, blah blah blah blah blah. She called her lawyer - and found out that as long as they were not in the bathrooms or a changing area, an employer could put security cameras ANYWHERE they wanted in their place of business, and she could do nothing about it. And she talked and talked and talked and talked and talked about these cameras to everyone - customers, suppliers, friends, family, the guys, anyone and everyone who she could even get to listen to her for five minutes, she talked about it.

But there I was - locked in a battle I couldn't win shy of her quitting with no fucking support whatever besides calling in the cavalry of my extended family. I was forced to make a choice - either get rid of her or make nice, and because I had no way to get rid of her, I had to make nice.

Anyway, about a month ago or so, we finally got the cameras installed. And we cut her hours - we gave her 12 weeks' notice of said cut, which isn't required by law, but we did it anyway to cover our asses (rule of business, ALWAYS cover your ass, ALWAYS), which meant she was going to lose about 25% of her pay. She took it a little better than we expected.

And then she realized that the cameras were installed.

She went fucking apeshit.

She stormed out, claiming she was sick, and sent the technician who helped us install them a nasty, hateful text message. He refused to report it, no matter how much I tried to talk him into it, because under the policy, it needs to be reported for me to do an 'investigation' about it and I certainly would have wrote her up. He insisted on dealing with it his own way... and what he did was sheer fucking gold.

He told the guys about it. And he didn't talk to her after that. As a matter of fact, neither did anyone else. She burned her last bridge - she had cost herself her only remaining ally in the shop, because HE was hired after all of that bullshit in the early spring/late winter, and was really kind of the new boy still, and she had been spewing poison about the rest of us in his ear for months. And she finally revealed her true fucking colours. With the cameras up, she could no longer get away with sitting there doing nothing all day. She actually had to fucking work, no one was talking to her, and because of her incompetence over the last several months, my mother and I had been taking away more and more and more of her stuff so that there just wasn't anything for her to do - and she couldn't complain, because we had mountains of evidence of her fuckups, fuckups that she had no excuse for, because she had been with us so long doing the same job, and she had been told over and over again about them.

So finally, she was going home early in the day, and on July 8th, she started to get into it with one of our other technicians, who simply walked away. Knowing that she really had no options, she asked to be laid off - she essentially quit, but wanted the records to show 'laid off' because if you quit, you cannot receive unemployment benefits here. (On the plus side, if they ask to be laid off, and we have four people willing to act as witness that that was her exact phrasing, we are under no obligation to rehire her if we ever become busy again.) She wanted to be laid off because she felt she could 'earn more on unemployment', which is funny... because you only get 25% of your average week's pay per week. Needless to say, lesson learned - I did her paperwork as soon as she was out the door.

The change in the office was incredible.

It was tangible, it was unbelievable.

No one had to walk on eggshells anymore. No one had to worry about the pot that was going to burn them at any chance she got. There were no more meltdowns because shit wasn't going her way. The stress dissipated - just two days earlier the four shareholders had a fiery shareholders' meeting discussing the cash flow, and lack thereof, and one of the conclusions was that the office was too expensive - she sat there and did fuckall, and between her salary and the additional costs associated with her, that amount was just about equal to the crushing loss we had last year. The toxicity was gone. We could joke and laugh and thank the spirits that she was fucking gone, and she would never be coming back.

It's been incredibly cathartic, actually. Even two weeks after Liberation Day (today was my two week anniversary of it), we're still working on getting rid of all traces of her shit and fuckups and everything else. I found a foot-high stack of old quotes that she has not been filing in the cabinets (quotes are jobs that we write for people for a set price of money, eg, you want to do a bathroom renovation, but you want a guarantee on price (because some of our materials are VERY volatile and subject to change, such as copper), for an exact job, we will quote that job for you and bill you only that (unless we have to do extra work), and if it takes less than the estimate, we'll like as not give you a discount), but had in fact BEEN HOARDING IN A FILING CABINET UNDER HER DESK for the last 6+ years, fixing undeposited funds (which means we record a payment, it goes to a specific account to be grouped to a deposit - this is undeposited funds. When you add a payment to the deposit, it is removed from that account... there were 20 payments in the undeposited funds since the last time I spent three weeks cleaning it up two years ago). Remember that 'not giving a fuck about her job' thing I mentioned? This is part of it. She entered payments wrong, she double-entered them, you name it, SHE SCREWED IT UP. Everything she touched, I swear to god, turned to shit. So I am fixing it.

But anyway.

So I've been busy. I've been working from 8-5 every day, five days a week. In the fall, I might well start working in on the weekends when it's cooler in there, because the air conditioner is shut off on the weekends, and we have had grueling temperatures for the last long while. I'm doing my shit, I'm doing her shit, I'm fixing her endless quantity of fuckups with no real relief in sight. And next week is inventory and triggers year-end.

In business, you always have a fiscal year-end which may or may not correspond with the calendar's year end. My companies run from August 1-July 31st as a year end. What happens? The guys count inventory, hundreds of pages of parts and quantities, and I have to price them by hand, INDIVIDUALLY. Then they must be tallied and added up. Then I have a ton of other things I have to do - reports have to be run, documents have to be found, new folders have to be made, files have to be transferred. On top of this, time cards have to be entered, the weekly pricing of jobs has to be done so we can bill people, invoices have to be keyed, bank account reconcilations have to be done. Computers have to be maintained, and a 50-pound box of documents and files is delivered to the accountant, the sooner the better.

End result, inventory is a nightmare.

But anyway, this is the main reason I haven't been around. I have been working in ridiculous temperatures and heat (I finally cracked and told my mother to start bringing her own tea, because fuck if I am walking 20-25 minutes through 115 degrees Fahrenheit to get her her tea every day), and working hard from start to finish. I go see my grandfather twice a week, I spend time with my family, and I've been trying to attend to some of my other hobbies that I've been neglecting, like my health (I like yoga, I'm horrible at scheduling time to actually do it) and beading and just plain reading. After spending 9 hours at a computer desk working, my brain is tired. 2-3 times a week, I try to have dinner with my family. Speaking of my grandfather, for anyone who is wondering, he continues to lose a bit every day. The filters between what he thinks and what he said are totally gone - he just says what comes to mind no matter what it is. His most recent outburst was actually against my cousin, A, who I've spoken about before on here. Suffice it to say, she has not mentioned my grandfather on facebook ever since. My Great-Aunt, my father's favourite aunt, also passed away last Saturday at the age of 92.

So that's why I haven't been around. I have had so much trouble sitting down in the evening and looking at another screen that all I want to do is curl up and sleep - but I can't do that, because I have this mental issue about napping during the day unless I'm sick or dying. I can't do it, because one half an hour nap leads to my being awake for 3-4 hours at night. It drives me crazy, but there it is. I also had to take Mohawk, my grey and white pigglebutt, to the vet's - he had to have dental work done, and that was very unnerving - simple procedure, right? Not, because when guinea pigs get anesthesia, they have a VERY high chance of dying from it. VERY high. I was on pins and needles all day waiting to find out if my darling piggybum was going to be okay. He was. He's now much happier and he's eating properly once again.

In other news, I was in a car accident today.

I am fine. The people in the other vehicle were fine. He cut off traffic at a red-light to turn left as I was moving into the intersection to turn right at a curved turning lane, and we collided. I was very lucky that I was in my mother's tahoe (those things are fucking tanks), because if I had been in the same collision with my little red corolla, I wouldn't be here typing this right now. Or maybe I would - the only reason I took that damn intersection is a) I didn't have my car which needed gas so I would have pulled into the gas station at the intersection and completely avoided the guy, and b) it's a lot harder to park at another direction in that truck than to go that way. But long story short, I am okay, I'm alive, nothing's broken or twinged. Vehicles can be replaced. Human lives cannot. Thank you to everyone who checked in with me to make sure I was okay - you touched my heart and made me feel far more relieved about the fact that at the end of the day, I was okay. You know who you are, and thank you all very, very, very much.

On another topic, gardening and plants. I have decided I've gone from a black thumb to a grey one - the Eyktoli-temperatures in my sunroom fried some of my seedlings, no matter how much I watered them, and they didn't make it. I've got the rest in the counter and ready for transplanting. That will likely be done this week. I have spent the year in pursuit of the one plant that really sparked this gardening adventure (with Jen's dumping a tanker of gasoline on said spark), which is a Meyer lemon tree. People have been kind enough to call greenhouses in my area on my behalf (my hearing=sucks. Terribly), and it turns out that not only does Canada not have a citrus industry (which does not surprise me), the import season is actually at the height of the Florida-California citrus seasons... which, by the way, is January-February.

By the time I was looking for the damn things in March/April, THERE WERE NONE TO BE HAD. ANYWHERE. None. I was devastated. But I put a note in my BlackBerry for January 1, 2012, to start looking for the Meyer lemons at different greenhouses.

All 20 of my strawberry plants failed to take and as did one of my raspberry canes. So those are guaranteed, and I will be collecting on those. A front bed was built and an entire truckload of dirt loaded into it.

Tonight, I went with RONA to my mother (they're like Lowes/Home Depot), because they advertised Pineapple Plants and assorted Succulents. I wanted both, so we hurried to RONA, and were informed that not only did they not have any, they weren't getting any because they didn't think they'd sell enough to put in an order. That is illegal in Canada, is called Fraud, and in particular, bait and switch. A livid Mish sent RONA's corporate headquarters a nasty message about it. And I will not be shopping in there, no matter what they do, ever again.

Now, I have something for all of you still reading this. Way back almost two years ago when Mizahar first opened, I remember being in chat once, and someone asked the lovely Colombina what the different Founders liked to write, and what they could expect from us in terms of what we liked to do, what we wanted to write. And I remember that she told them that when it came to Cayenne, you could always expect strong female characters. I thought about it, and I still do, and you know, she was right. She was really right. That is a trend with me and what I write and do - I like to write strong female characters. They don't have to be physically strong, or particularly strong personalities, but the important thing is that they are not butterflies to be crushed on the wheel. They have to have strength somehow.

Why is this, I've been asked recently. Why did I write what I wrote, what inspired me. What inspires my characters, my NPCs, my races and cultures?

It's very simple.

It is my way of fighting against the inherent misogyny that I see every day in real life.

On my mother's side especially, I come from a line of strong women - women who held jobs, supported their families, worked hard, fought for equal pay for equal work, demanded the vote, supported a woman's right to choose about her own body, and were very much feminists. That has influenced me so much in my life. The idea that I didn't have to just give in because it was, and is, a man's world, was something that was imparted on me from a young age. I was taught that girls are capable of doing whatever boys can do. My father always treated me like a son - I was not daddy's little girl until much later - and I think he was honestly disappointed for a bit that I wasn't a boy until he decided he had a lot more fun teasing other fathers that his little girl was kicking their sons' collective asses.

It's my way of saying a big, fat 'FUCK YOU!' to organized religion.

Misogyny is humanity's oldest prejudice. It predates antisemitism, (despite what Hesh from the Sopranos said that 'Jews have been history's whipping boy'), black-white relations and the exploitation of other cultures. Humanity has fucked over women for far longer than they have anything else. From Pagan times to the rise of Christianity to now, women have been blamed for the 'downfall of man', denounced as witches, tortured, burned, beaten, killed, assaulted. In our every day culture, misogyny is so inherent and internalized that half the time, people don't really see it, because they became used to it, they accepted it as normal, and they don't see anything wrong with thinking about it. Why is it so prevailing?

I blame organized religion.

I blame Christianity, I blame Catholicism, I blame Judaism, I blame Islam. I blame it ALL. Every single bit of it denounces women, makes them out to be inferior, and those teachings, those beliefs, became mainstream. Look at the stories of Eve and Pandora. They are blamed for the cause of man's suffering, this fall from Perfection and divinity... and ever since then, women have been paying for it. In traditional marriage vows, it is not 'man and woman', it becomes 'man and wife' - indicating that the woman has become something less, the property, of the man. It's not 'husband and woman', is it? No, it is not. Women have to hide themselves, because dressing in certain ways in certain cultures can get them killed. Women are property. Women can be bought and sold. Many places are trying to outlaw abortion, the right of a woman to control HER body. Let me tell you something - if MEN were the ones who had to carry the babies, there would be publicly funded birth control, free condoms and pills for all, and there would never have been any question about abortion rights.

In some ways, Mizahar and my contributions to it with the female aspect, are one way I try to make sure that The Handmaid's Tale never comes to fruition, even though it's working on it. If you have never read that book by Margaret Atwood, please do. It's a chilling tale, and one of my favourites because of that fact. It is a horror story for someone like me - an independent, childfree woman. But it reminds me that every day, that's what we sink closer and closer to. That the subjugation and enslavement of women is a goal that has never gone away. Why? Because of resentment. We have moved into spheres that some men really and truly regard as theirs.

Don't think it's possible? Look around you. I promise you that it is, and is far closer than you might ever think about it.

Here's another example. On January 24th, 2011, a representative of the Toronto Police gave shocking insight into the Force’s view of sexual assault by stating: “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized”. This came from a member of the police service, who is supposed to protect us. Instead, he perpetrated the myth and stereotype of 'the slut'. It is victim-blaming.

And sadly, it's a widely-held thought. That comment was enough to spark SlutWalks all over the world, one of which I attended in my own city, and I plan on going next year again. It was a protest against those comments, against those beliefs, against those who say we are less than they are, that we are inherently inferior in character, spirit, and body because we have the "misfortune" to be born female. It's one of the reasons I don't find jokes about rape, date rape, getting a woman drunk and taking advantage of them even remotely funny. At all.

I never wished I was a boy. Never, not once. I shunned, and still do shun, a lot of what society demands of females - that we stress out to hell over our appearance, torture ourselves physically to conform to some twisted, sick idea of beauty, that we get married, settle down, pop out sproglings, keep the house, look after a family. HELL no. Absolutely not. Not ever. Not in this lifetime. If that's your cup of tea? Great - if it makes you happy, then that's your choice, isn't it? But it isn't mine, and I won't do it. I cut off someone who was a good friend until recently because he, despite being four years younger than I am, said I "would change my mind" about having children, because it was what women did. But it was totally okay if a guy decided he didn't want kids. In fact, he'd probably be praised for it - but when a woman says she doesn't want kids, people tend to go, "what the hell, why not?"

By now, you're probably thinking I'm one hell of a misandryst - but you're wrong. I don't hate men - I hate everyone who feels I need to conform to those misogynistic beliefs about women. I've had the pleasure of meeting men who don't subscribe to those views, and I love them all the more for it. And at the same time, I see so much internalized misogyny that comes from women that I can honestly tell you that some of the worst hatred I have ever seen spewed came from females - my dislike is aimed just as equally at them.

I can be friends with people who are antichoice like I can be friends with people of different political views from my own because we get along great in everything else. It's actually why I am very fond of Canada's current prime minister - his own personal belief is that abortion is wrong, but he also believes women have the right to control their own body. Basically, it all comes down to this:

I am very much a live-and-let-live person, a libertarian at heart (yes, you may call me a lolertarian like most of the internet, but I don't care), someone who is content to follow the basic 'and ye harm none, do what ye will' without breaking the social contract. I can generally get along with most people with an agree-to-disagree. One of my best friends is antichoice, but that is her choice - it's not my place to force my beliefs down anyone else's throat any more than it is their place to shove theirs down mine. All I care about is that I have the same rights to autonomy of person as everyone else.

So after that tirade, how does it all link in?

I like strong women because I feel they make great role models. They conform more to something I find ideal in our world. Yes, in both Myrian and Dhani cultures there is an incredible emphasis on rebirth and childbearing, which is actually something alien to myself personally, but in terms of the setting, it worked. The Myrians are led by Myri, who was actually inspired by one of my very first PbP characters from another board over 10 years ago. The Goddess of War takes no shit and she takes no prisoners. My other Myri was exactly the same way. Males may disagree with it - but Myri made the laws she did as according to her own experience. Those experiences have shaped Myrian culture, for better or for worse.

In the Dhani culture, females are revered because only they can bear the eggs to produce the next generation. And with their high death rates, just trying to rebuild their numbers is a difficult task. The males know this, they have accepted this, and they have accepted that their Mother-Goddess decided how it was going to work, and there's really very precious little they can do about it.

Are there problems with both of them? Absolutely. They were designed to be - I don't believe that there is such a thing as a perfect society. It's impossible to ever achieve that utopia because everyone wants something different. Everyone has different dreams and hopes and goals. I have a shirt that says "I can only please one person a day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either." Yep. Sounds about right, doesn't it?

And then on the other hand, you have Charbosi and Black Rock. Both of them consider males and females equally important because they understand that both must coexist for the benefit of all. Charbosi accepts the cycle of life and death and celebrates it, because the Charodae cannot mix with anything else. Black Rock is very live-and-let-live, if you don't bother us, we don't bother you. In a world of uncertainty, one constant is death. It's always there. It's always going to come to you. You cannot avoid it. You accept it and carry on.

I love the primalness, the raw beauty of the jungle. I can imagine the sensory overload and transport myself there in my dreams. It's beautiful but deadly. The weak feed the strong. I love the variety, the freedom of it, the colours, the sheer amounts of life to it that I think is missing in the concrete cities we live in today. We tear up farmland, forests, rip up the ground, pollute the water... and for what, really? I'll be honest with you - when I went to visit Jen and Matt, they showed me most of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my life (Niagara Falls is one exception that I hope to one day show them, though knowing Jen she's probably already seen it). Sitting out under a blue sky surrounded by fields and dusty roads and horses and dogs and cats and birds, reading, working with my hands, interacting with animals, visiting the volcano, driving along this beautiful stretch of water where I lost count of how many bald eagles we saw, wandering through a quiet, massive nursery/greenhouse, hiking and visiting the ape caves... The sheer natural wonderment of it all had a profound effect on me. Sure, we went into town and the city, but they showed me how much sheer, wild, raw beauty there was in a landscape untouched by human hands. It left me speechless, and even now as I write about it, it makes my heart twitch with longing and the memory and sometimes in all the stress and hustle and bustle of daily life, we forget to stop and smell the flowers. Sometimes I find myself just wanting to be sitting out there again, drinking iced tea out of the same glass I used possessively all day, every day, for the better part of two weeks (I kept using it and I think I did wash it once or twice, but only to rinse it out, dry it, and refill it). There is a magic in nature, a resiliency, an ability to come back from the brink of disaster. I believe we can, too.

Black Rock, in the meantime, is this quiet, austere, bleakness in a sea of life. Here, everything and nothing changes all the time. It is an antithesis of nature in a way that it is deeply unnatural. Nothing really grows in Black Rock - oh, you can get potted plants from the Myrians, and those are the rare exceptions, but nothing normal really grows there. There is the grass in the cemetery, a few trees.. but otherwise, it is empty, barren rock but for the city itself. That represents another part of me - how I see things in black and white and grey. A simplicity, a quietness, where one can truly be alone.

Charbosi represents this fantasy world of mine under the sea. I had a few people offer to AS it, but when I asked them how they saw it, it was totally different from what I had in mind, and they couldn't work their heads around it. Charbosi, when it opens, is going to be a living city of coral way below the surface beyond the Faleyk Gulf. Its lights come from the coral and plants itself, these beautiful mazes built and maintained and cared for. Pet fish, seahorses, aquiculture, it's kind of hard to explain this singing city here without being able to show it to you, but Charbosi is the last on my list of projects to open and develop in terms of cities.

But at the end of the day, like they say, don't take life too seriously - you won't get out alive.

[Bolden Denusk]

Hi Cayenne,

This is Silvy/Lisa, I'm under Bold's PC atm, but your scrapbook caught my eye.

Wow and double wow on your most recent entry. I do not know you personally, but from what I read, you have my complete and utter respect. The co worker crap, bureaucracy, car accident, gardening, your take on stereotypical repression and depth of true feeling is stunning. I admire your strength--not as a woman, but as a fully actualized human being. The epitome of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's rare to see a fully actualized person who not only reaches that plateau, but stands on it proudly.

We've never rped together and I don't think I've met you more than briefly once or twice in comments under Silvy. However, your attitude despite the rough times and shit that life throws at you, is phenomenal. You're truly an inspiration and thank you deeply for sharing this. I hope others read your scrapbook and take courage from it.

[Cayenne]

Lisa,

Thank you so much - really and truly. *HUGS TIGHT*

[Cayenne]

In light-hearted news, pizza is so fucking awesome.

Today has been a day of delayed, but epic fooding. Pad thai for lunch, two hours late, and pizza for dinner, nearly two hours late.

And a donut.

I need to reiterate that dear god do I hate coffee. One of the guys got my brother an iced coffee, but my brother left without grabbing it - so he gave it to me. I drank it. I regretted it.

Because coffee sucks.

That being said, I think some form of baking should happen this weekend, but it will not, not at my parents' house. My brother used to mock me about how it looked when I was in charge and my parents were on vacation, and there were two of us. Now? There's beer bottles everywhere, the sinks are full, there are fruit flies in the wilted, beginning to mold bowl of tomatoes that my parents left for him to eat. There is garbage everywhere.

Now... hahaha, revenge really is a dish best served cold. I don't think my brother anticipated my being here tonight, but it works for me, because I now have a couple hours to grade threads. So if you'll excuse me, I have that to do.

PS. Leftover pizza or Chinese food for breakfast the next morning is officially known as the breakfast of champions. IDGAFC what anyone says! IT IS!

[Gossamer]

You are so entertaining at times.

[Cayenne]

I merely speak the truth. Pizza = Ambrosia. Period.

[Verilian]

My Favorite Pizza The Sicilian From California Pizza Kitchen