Another Quiz

I really liked this one -- lots of hypothetical situations, and some creative responses to choose between.

Your result for Reincarnation Placement Exam...

Tralfamadorian Messenger

We had trouble placing you, but finally found just the thing... for someone who adores technology and knowledge, but doesn't care for much else. Intrigue and adventure? Not important to you, evidently. The company of your fellows? Not to your tastes. The bustle and crowd of the city? Not for you. Were it not for your positive attitude toward modern technology, we would have made you a medieval monk and let you live out your days in a quaint little cell, with access to all the books you could possibly want to read. But instead...

You will be a mechanical being, born on a planet where machines have long ago taken completely over and organic life has become extinct. You will be sent as a messenger to the other end of the galaxy with a message of good will -- a journey of approximately 205,125 years.The message reads: "Greetings."

Hello. Goodbye. We hope you have an satisfactory journey.

Take Reincarnation Placement Exam at HelloQuizzy

Eddie Izzard

Okay, seriously, am I the last person on the planet to have seen any of his stand-up? If yes, why on earth didn't the rest of you tell me to watch him? And if no, Go Now! Rent, Buy, YouTube! Links? Glad you asked.

Dress to Kill -- I think this is my favorite. (Skip to about 4 minutes in, if you just want the stand-up.)
Unrepeatable -- Unless this is.
Definite Article -- Great outfit. I love that color on him.
Glorious -- I'm not crazy about the beginning bit on the DVD, but that's not in this clip.
Circle -- I love the elastic, stretchy things for the stage set. And the DVD extras on this one are great. (Although I haven't found them on YouTube yet.) Also a very good outfit. Although I haven't seen him in a really bad one yet, anywhere.

Warnings: This is not child-safe stuff. Language, sex, etc. And he is emphatically NOT religious -- I love the bits where he tries to figure out the connection between Easter and chocolate eggs. Oh yeah, and he's a transvestite. If you think you'd hate it, don't blame me if you're right. ;-)

Want a window into my mind? Absolutely nothing he says is too liberal for me. In fact, I'm a bit more liberal than some of his stuff. Although I'm still kind of feeling my way to exactly what I believe religiously -- something in the pagan area, but nothing's felt quite right yet.

Honestly though, watch his stuff. You'll thank me.

Edit: YouTube just took down Dress to Kill. I don't know if the others will remain available. If not, I'm sorry. But rent them!

"Nice" and "Ninety?"

No no no no no. "Nice" and "ninety" absolutely do not belong in the same sentence. Well, maybe if you're talking about a person who's ninety. Or a tree. Or ... well, I suppose there are a few possibilities. But I categorically refuse to concede that they ever belong in the same sentence that is describing the weather.

The weather guy on the radio this morning had the audacity to tell me, "It's going to be nice today, in the low nineties." On my way home from work, the weather chick was burbling on about the "beautiful" weather, and then read off a whole string of ninety-plus degree temperatures. I know that neither of them are meteorologists. (It's a dead giveaway when they can't pronounce things like "hurricane" or "cumulus" correctly.) However, I really expect more intelligence than that, no matter what their educational background.

You know, I'm as fond of alliteration as the next person, maybe more fond. But no one needs to natter on about nice nineties. Never.

Clearly I need to move farther north. That's not really an option at the moment, but it's definitely something I'm keeping in mind if the opportunity ever presents itself.

Ninety. Ugh.

NaNo

I've been thinking about NaNoWriMo lately. I won NaNo last year.

Oh, you remember me shouting about it at the time? Sorry.

Anyway, I've been thinking about doing it again, of course. Lots of people talk about a sophmore slump with it, and I'd like to be an exception. Then again, I don't have and idea that's quite so exciting this year. Perhaps that will make for a readable novel, instead of one that requires a dark, dusty attic with lots of spiders, so that anyone who thought they wanted to read it would get too discouraged or grossed out before they actually got to it.

However, what I've really been thinking about is trying NaBloPubMo (as I believe it's called). This one's scary though. There's no way to pull consecutive all-nighters at the end and still squeak through with a win. Which is very much my style. And yet, a couple of the blogs I read regularly are doing Blog365, and it's so nice to have new blog entries to read every day. If they can manage it for a whole year, surely I can do a month. I think.

Then again, this would mean that I'll need to write a blog entry every day, which is an entirely different animal from just enjoying others' writings. I'm not entirely sure what kind it is -- so far I can just feel that creepy, predator-type gaze nailing me in the back of the neck. And that's with just thinking about trying it. And yet, the whole point of NaNo is to challenge yourself. If I'm confident that I can write 50,000 words of a novel, is that still a challenge?

Or is the challenge proving that I'm not delusional? :)

I'm such a copycat.

Your result for The Director Who Films Your Life Test...

Kevin Smith

Kevin will take your slacker life and turn it into the cult classic it deserves to be --- like Mallrats (just kidding). If you can handle the menacing presence of Jay and Silent Bob all throughout your film, then Kevin is willing to oblige. Basically, he can take the lives of people who don't have much of a life and make it entertaining, so you're in good hands. Go watch your copy of Clerks, now.

Take The Director Who Films Your Life Test at HelloQuizzy

I saw this on one of my favorite blogs and had to try it out. And I'm pretty happy with the result. :-)

Being More Vocal

Well, I just posted at the Hope Is Kindled blog, saying that I've been talking more over here. So I'd better start talking, right? I'm actually typing this up in the wee, small hours of the morning, and we'll see if I post it in the light of day.

(pre-publish edit: I'm posting it. We'll see if I delete it later.)

Part of the reason that I rarely posted here in the past -- and wasn't terribly talkative on any of the Shieldmaiden boards, either -- has been that I've spent most of my life trying to fit in, be liked, and not piss people off. I'm getting increasingly sick of those past-times, and the gloves are coming off. (I might knit myself mittens instead. We'll have to see how that goes.) Many of my opinions and positions (notably political and religious) are, or certainly seem like, minority opinions when I'm with the Shieldmaidens, or my family, or my co-workers, or classmates, or just about any gorram place in my life. Since I do not seek out or enjoy conflict, my answer to that has been to keep my mouth shut and try to stay out of any lines of fire.

Shockingly (or, you know, not), this has led to me feeling very isolated and ... not exactly misunderstood, but not understood either. I'm tired of it -- feeling like that. I can't really be more outspoken with my family; I need to keep living with my mother. Can't piss her off so badly that she throws me out. And if she ever got that mad, my sister would probably already have tried to kill me or have me exorcised or something (and she's not even Catholic), so moving in with her would be right out. I'm not able to support myself right now, and I don't expect that to change. Hoped for years that it would, but things have been getting worse instead. Since the pneumonia, even if I magically got my head fixed up, I physically wouldn't be able to hack it on my own.

I could try to be more myself at work, but no one would notice -- they're a pretty oblivious lot. I say this with confidence because I've been speaking my piece more and more over the past year, and it hasn't really made any impression at all. Part of that, probably a large part, has to do with the extremely high turnover rate. Another large contributer is that I'm stuck in the office, by myself, and only get to talk to customers who come to the window. They don't really care what I say as long as I get them processed quickly and with some level of professional courtesy. And really, it would be incredibly unfair to target random strangers with my accumulated frustration. Classmates? All of my classes are online this semester; that's a no go as well. So my blog readers are elected. Don't you feel lucky?

You may notice that I left the Shieldmaiden boards out of that list of explanations. I think that's one of the places that I feel most isolated, really. People in my "real life" who know about the Shieldmaidens think that it's this huge group of women that I'm really good friends with. But I don't know if that's actually true. I've never really been willing to put enough of myself out there for people to know me, and if they don't know me, how can we be good friends? Friendly, sure. Even friends. But good friends? And yet I've been part of the group for nearly 6 years. It seems a little late to be introducing myself around.

I tried to talk this through with a close friend once, and she insisted that the group does know me, because just being around for so long makes it impossible for others not to see who I really am. Maybe she's right. But if she is, then lately some people have decided to try to determine exactly how pissed I need to be before I explode. (If you're wondering if I'm talking about you ... I'm not. I have spoken and/or e-mailed directly to the people involved. If you're not sure, clearly you're not them.)

Possibly my friend is entirely correct. The Shieldmaidens do know me. Maybe it's just that I'm feeling the need to reinvent myself, and they don't know who I want to become. Maybe it's one of those post-near-death reevaluations or something. Except the pneumonia wasn't really near-death. Hell of a lot closer than I wanted to be, but probably not really Near, given modern medicine and all. And if this is a reaction to that ... well, it's really belated. And yet the frustration has been building for a while. Who knows?

No, seriously, who? 'Cause clearly I don't. Someone must.

This whole post could probably be condensed into something like "General angst and stream of consciousness rambling. No resolution." And I don't even know what sort of resolution I would choose, if it were some sort of multiple choice exam. Future posts may have a lot more in common with this one than with other stuff I've posted in the past. Well, except for the knitting. That will stick around. It may even be an indirect cause. You see, I've posted and commented in a few knit-related places that link back to this blog. And I'm not interested joining another community just to feel stifled in exactly the same way. You might want to be careful -- I'm getting more outspoken just as I've started carrying pointy sticks (and yarn) around with me wherever I go.

Elephants on Parade!

Or, you know, on Knitting!

My stitch markers have arrived! The other winners in the contest posted yesterday that they had received theirs, and I was so disappointed. But my elephants are here now, and I'm so happy. I immediately popped one onto the second Coronet Hat that I'm making, instead of the loop of yarn that I had been using.


(The obsevant and/or knitting-savvy among you will notice that the right side of the cable band is facing the same way as the knit side of the stockinette. Yes, that was deliberate. I was goofing around with the yellow Coronet during the photo shoot, and I liked the way that it fit better inside out, so I have flipped the band on this one.)


And then the other two elephants felt left out, so they're helping out with my Steam Scarf, for the Red Scarf Project. It's not really hard to count to 16, but it's easier if you don't have to. ;-)



Thanks again to MyOwnIgloo and mkvral on Ravelry for running / inspiring the contest.