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Catherine Rain

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[30 Aug 2004|07:49pm]
Events of the day...

-I felt water drip on me while I was going down the sidewalk, and it was definitely not raining. I looked up and saw window-washers above me. Ew! They had dripped dirty window water on me! And then they whistled at me. I wasn't even wearing anything whistle-worthy, just a t-shirt that totally covered me and jeans... you'd think they'd save the whistles for girls in short shorts or something.

-I went to go find the trash chute, and went out a door that is clearly not the trash chute, and accidentally got locked out on the fire escape on the other side of the building. I was one story up and there were no stairs or ladders down! It was hot outside and I was trapped on this tiny landing, and none of my keys fit inside the lock on the door-- it was this weird lock requiring some weird key I didn't have. Once you go out that door, there is no way back. I started yelling for help and kicking at the door to make noise, hoping someone would come see what the commotion was about. After about a minute, the girl who lives in the apartment next to the fire escape appeared and opened the door, and said it had happened to her too.

-I discovered that cashews make me sick. I never cease to be surprised by the foods that make me so ill I end up curled in a ball on the floor, despite my thinking they were safe because I used to eat them all the time.

-I received an amusing catalog, one of those things addressed to "Current Resident or..." with the prior resident's name scratched out. This catalog was for a company that makes blade weaponry-- fantasy swords and military replicas and whatnot-- only it seems to want to cater to the lowest possible price range, with huge announcements of "Why Pay More-- Only $19.95!" all over it. I find weaponry interesting, mostly for writing/rping purposes, so I looked through it.
This one was especially amusing, though-- the items had names like "Dark Demon Dagger," and there were some really funny typoes. The ad copy was also hilarious, with phrases like:
"Enter a World of Dungeons and Dragons with the Silver Dragon Sword,"
"Now the Royal British Commando can be your Ally,"
"Only Bud K (the catalog) Has This Perilous Skull Sword,"
"Slashing Into a Solar System Near You!"
and the probably-unintentional "Historic Viking Sword- Last Chance!"
On the back was a really cheesy fantasy painting including a dragon and a scantily-clad woman, titled "Sonja's Revenge." I'd like to think my Sonya has a little more class than that. XP

(Hm, interesting. An internet search brings up the fact that there's an old Schwarzenegger movie called Red Sonja which is basically about Sonja getting revenge. I remember having heard OF this movie, seeing the tape on my dad's video shelf when I was little, but I know I've never seen it and I had no idea that it was a revenge story. Well, that's kind of amusing... I didn't intend that reference; my Sonya is named for the Suikoden character.)
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[29 Aug 2004|06:49pm]
[ mood | pissed off ]

I have been in an almost unfathomably bad mood for the past few days. I'm going to go lie down with a book and pretend I'm done cleaning.

[29 Aug 2004|12:24pm]
In June, we went to a baby shower where they tied red thread around our wrist as a symbol of community, and we weren't allowed to take them off until after the baby was born. They were sort of annoying in that they would get wet whenever we washed our hands, and didn't necessarily match what we were wearing, and so forth... I felt like a little kid with a crappy string bracelet.

Well, the baby was born, and last night I finally cut off the thread. Now, however, I feel like something is missing, because I'm used to feeling it there. I keep checking my wrist in panic, the way I check when I'm not wearing my class ring. I have a phobia of losing jewelry (with good reason; it's the only thing I frequently lose, but I have a history of losing jewelry I'll really miss.)

It's like my wrist has post-partum depression. XP
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[28 Aug 2004|12:34am]
I was going to crash.

But, see, Powell's-- the "legendary" independent bookstore that takes up a whole city block with its coolness-- is having an essay contest, and I just looked it up and found out that the deadline is really soon.

Now, I don't know if this'll win any prizes, but they did say that for each essay they received they'd donate a dollar to children's literacy, so I figured no matter what, my effort wouldn't be wasted. So I just spent two and a half hours writing a 750-word essay... and it still feels like the kind of thing people always say, especially at the end, but whatever; I meant what I said and if the judges don't like it then I guess... they don't have to. (Though it sure would be awesome if they do.)

The topic is: "What was your most memorable reading experience of the last ten years?"

And I wrote about Speaker for the Dead. )
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[27 Aug 2004|09:22pm]
Eeee, I'm tired.

[info]tilotamma's friend Megan came to stay with me yesterday, because she needed a place to crash while she did advisor stuff for school. It was ok, except that I got really nothing done until she left this evening, between waiting for her at home, waiting to meet her at other places, and going various places with her... plus it was just kind of stressful, because I don't know her that well, and it's always a huge mental drain for me to be around people I don't know well. Even if I'm not going far out of my way to be extra-social, just the effort of being my public self is exhausting. ^^;

Plus, it's tiring just getting used to moving in... I still don't know where everything is, I never remember to prepare meals far enough in advance, there's not enough counter space or table space to do anything and half of it is taken up with stuff that wouldn't normally be there but isn't put away yet. (At one point, I turned around while carrying my lunch and discovered that Megan had completely covered the place I'd cleared on the table with her junk, and I went, "AAA! Where am I going to sit?!" She moved her stuff, of course, but this is just an example of stress caused by this situation.)

After she left, I wrote about 2,200 words on my story. This included one of the more exhausting scenes, something I wasn't sure how I was going to actually put onto paper, but I got through it. One concern is that the whole story might not stretch to salable length. I tend to write works that are long, okay, novel length and definitely not capable of being cut down to short stories, but possibly not long enough for publishers to consider buying them. I don't know what to do about that.

And now, I need to go crash. ^^;
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[25 Aug 2004|01:47pm]
*phew*

I'm in the computer lab. Am very busy, have filled out oodles of applications and have oodles more to go. Have been cleaning like a madwoman all morning. The closet is sparkling clean; the rest of the apartment is... well, at least only the kitchen actually smells like dirty apartment.

I ♥ you all and hope I can sign on the internet at home soon. (Actually, it'd be nice if I could at least find the phone...)
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[20 Aug 2004|11:57pm]
On Sunday I'm going back to Portland to look for jobs. The beach has been really fun, and I wish I could stay... I'm going to miss [info]tilotamma and [info]aya_silverberg and their mom, and also miss this place, which is really nice and laid-back and pretty. But I need a job, and have been totally incapable of finding one here within my transportation means... so it's time to go back to our still-somewhat-dirty, wholly un-arranged apartment, try to unpack the essentials of our stuff, and do the job hunt thing before my savings get too low. Sigh...

So in case I'm not online tomorrow, I won't be on until Wednesday-- the phone company is going to take several days to set up the account. I'll be pretty busy anyway, between trying to get the apartment unpacked to a livable level and hunting around for a job. I guess it's going to be pretty lonely, though.
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[19 Aug 2004|10:20pm]
I hate having tendonitis issues just when I REALLY want to be writing. I still can't type for too long at one time, until my hand recovers more... I ended up sitting out on the roof thinking about my novel and saying, "Sonyaaaa." (No, I was not being the Suikoden 2 cat. Sonya is one of my viewpoint characters.)
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[17 Aug 2004|08:01pm]
Hi, I'm dictating to [info]tilotamma. We went to Portland yesterday to clean up our apartment because the managers didn't get it cleaned in time for us to move. We had to move anyway because the people at the old apartment wanted us out by a certain date, so we had our stuff in there but it was all filthy and really horribly disgusting! XP

So we went in and scrubbed it clean (kind of,) but in the process my tendonitis flared up and now I can't really type. I'll be okay after some rest, but I won't be online for a little while. I'll steal a line from [info]seirai and say, "Don't have any wild parties in my LJ while I'm gone!"
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I should be asleep at this hour... [13 Aug 2004|04:29am]
I remember taking this quiz long ago. I'm glad I'm not The Last Battle anymore.



The first book written, you're perhaps the most well-known of the Chronicles. From Mr. Tumnus to Turkish Delight, statue people to Aslan's resurrection, there's nothing not to like here.


Find out which Chronicles of Narnia book you are.


Oddly, I feel as if I've gone the other way-- but the quiz only measured my liking for spring.
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[13 Aug 2004|12:30am]
I hate MS Word. I hate how it auto-corrects things to be capitalized when you don't want it. I hate how it automatically puts in paragraph indents, not all the time but just sometimes, so that you get in the habit of pressing "tab" and then suddenly "tab" is not necessary and you end up with two tabs. And then you copy-paste the text into something else, or HTML format it, and you end up with no tab at all, or two, where you had finally corrected it to look okay. I hate all the dumb little things that it does that you can't find anywhere with an option to turn them off.

I hate MS Word. But I like saving in MS Word format because it's so universal.
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[12 Aug 2004|08:05pm]
Pictures of what our apartment complex looked like after it caught on fire.

Scary, isn't it? )
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24601~~~~~~~~~na! [11 Aug 2004|05:45pm]
[info]tilotamma is reading Les Miserables (since I bought the book and have been waving it around and talking about how good it is recently.)

She looked up from her book and said, "I want Jean Valjean to be my dad!" and I was like, "Me too!!"

It was funny because it sounds like something you'd say when you're a second-grader and envisioning some Really Cool Parent who would, of course, not make all these annoying rules or be strict or anything. Mostly, you'd have to admit that having that other person as a parent wouldn't necessarily be any better-- they might be a really crappy parent, or might have even more rules for you, and they won't necessarily let you do all the things you want to anyway. But in this case, it was kind of true and we both recognized that fact. It would be superawesome to have Jean Valjean as your dad.

I wouldn't be like Cosette, though, really... I'm not constituted like her. I'd just end up idolizing my parent, and it is kind of creepy when people do that too much.
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[10 Aug 2004|11:24pm]
In Read or Die, they call it a "book draft" when you open a door and books come tumbling out in a big pile. It's nice to have a word for this phenomenon.

I had a moment today when all of my library books came tumbling out of my arms because I was trying to carry too many, and I wonder if I could say I was having a "book draft" when that happened, too.
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[08 Aug 2004|05:54pm]
[ mood | amused ]

[info]tilotamma is looking through her bead box to make something for a birthday present, and [info]aya_silverberg just picked up a thimble and said, "Ooh, this reminds me of Monopoly."

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[06 Aug 2004|07:20pm]
We played Twenty Questions, but I suck at it because I always want to give out nonessential hints, especially if the person isn't getting it. But I also end up blurting out TMI when I'm faced with a question I don't know how to answer. ("Is it a person, place or thing?" "Umm... well, it's a species!")

I do much better with Hangman, because I'm not as tempted to give extra information by way of clarifying my responses when just yes or no won't work well. (Also, I guess at Hangman much better because I'm verbal and the labels of things stand out better in my mind; and I can see the patterns more easily in words than in the nonrestricted domain of All Kinds Of Stuff.)

Once I get into the mindset of "thinking of obscure-yet-fair things to make people guess at," though, both can be fun. It's kind of amusing to watch the other players squirm and try to recall things that just aren't coming to mind, particularly if you're doing stuff from fiction. And really, there are few things I like more than a good puzzle which I know it's possible for me to figure out, but seems at the time really baffling.
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[06 Aug 2004|06:31pm]
The soundtrack albums for my novel are VNV Nation's Praise the Fallen, half of Kill Bill vol. 1, and Les Miserables. Unlike most of the CDs/songs I end up associating with my writing, you can actually kind of tell what the themes of my story are from my soundtrack ("kind of" being the operative words, there. I realize that probably makes it sound like a pretty weird story.)
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Do you wish to know the status of our Einherjar? [05 Aug 2004|12:04am]
...I had typed up a huge post full of things that seemed really amusing at the time, but as I tried to put them into writing, I realized that most of them were only funny if you were actually there. The sorts of things that I'm accustomed to noticing and posting in LJ are under my radar, now, because I'll just say them to [info]tilotamma or whoever's around and then forget them.

Living alone was more conducive to having things to post about, even though it sucked in most ways. Whenever I thought of something I really wanted to share, there was no one around to tell it to, so I carried it in my mind all day as something I wanted to post about when I got home. Since my days would be so boring, if one or two interesting things occurred to me, I would hang onto them all day and try to get lots of thought and enjoyment out of them; but now that I've always got someone around who will appreciate my observations, I just share them right away and get them out of my brain.

On one hand, it's much more stress-free and releasing this way, because I can de-gunk my mind of all the random notions that aren't very deep, things that are just good for a quick laugh or fleeting consideration. Otherwise even small matters tend to build up in my mind as this thing I have to keep thinking about because there's nothing else to think about, or because I haven't shared them with anyone else and they're not going to leave my mind until I do. But on the other hand, sometimes the instant gratification of the release gets in the way of any serious reflection—- I'm too busy with the next diversion to think deeply on matters, or I'm in a fun mood rather than a thoughtful one, and so I don't consider anything much.

I definitely do like the non-stressful feeling of being able to share and process my notions instead of stacking them up like a big mess on my mental floor. But I think I'm also going to have to make myself more time to deliberately think about things, listen to some music and write things down. I'm used to being way more introspective, to pursuing whatever topic I run into and having an essay prepared about it in my mind—- whether it reaches a conclusion or just searches for one. When I plow through ideas this way, like a car through puddles, I feel like nothing I think about really sticks to me or really even matters at all. It's a kind of emptiness to me, lots of fluff but nothing thought about deeply enough to be solid. When I complain about "not having anything to write in LJ," it isn't really that I care what’s in LJ, but that I care about the state of my mind... if I don't even have anything to ramble about in here, that means I'm not sufficiently mentally occupied.
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People are dolls tired of dancing [04 Aug 2004|11:24pm]
We watched the end of Noir last night, and...

Noir spoilers )
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[02 Aug 2004|05:16am]
Oh, my. I seem to have awakened extremely early. Go me.

We finally moved into our new apartment-- but it's a big mess, and it wasn't cleaned or painted beforehand like the managers promised it would be. They seemed to have some miscommunication about the time we were moving in, because even though [info]tilotamma said we'd be moving yesterday, they weren't there yesterday morning, and they grumped about "if you'd told us you were coming that day, they'd have been ready." That's just lovely... so we'll have to clean it all up ourselves, and it won't be freshly painted as they'd promised us it would be. Bleh.

I've been writing pretty fast this past week, whenever I've had the time. I think the biggest problem with this story is that I'm always anxious to write the stuff up ahead before I forget the detailed plans that I have for it, so I feel like I'm really rushing through. This is something that I always do (except in fanfic, for some reason)... I feel like I skip over too much to get to the end quicker. It's not that I don't want to be writing the scene I'm writing now; it's that I feel alarmed that I won't remember all the tiny details of the next couple scenes unless I hurry up and get to them. (And no, it does not work for me to write anything out of order and/or take notes for later scenes-- it just doesn't work that way with me.) It's just something I have to learn to grapple with.

The big frustration for me isn't so much this one problem that I'm mentioning here and now. The frustration is really that it's part of this huge pattern wherein I can write extremely good fanfic, and then, when I turn my hand to original stories, I suddenly have all these problems with my writing that I don't have when I write fanfic somehow. I'm not talking about things like characterization that would make logical sense to be easier in fanfic; I don't have problems with that kind of stuff. I'm just talking about unrelated problems that, for some reason, only plague me in original stories. Sigh.
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