Lissiel's Journal

...It's finals almost, I have one semester to graduation and no idea what I'll do then, the holidays and all their attendant craziness are fast approaching, and I have no programming skills whatsoever.

I totally want to spend the next however-many hours designing a flash! dress-up doll, y/n/mfn?

Also? All I have to say about Twilight is Thank you /b/, and WORD.

Or, more realistically, "non-denominational happy-it's-winter cards," except that sounds a bit silly.

If you want to receive a card from me this year, drop me a comment with your name-as-you-want-it-on-your-envelope and the address you want it sent to. Comments to this post will be screened, so you don't have to worry about random people seeing them.

I try to get them out so they arrive by the week before the solstice? Ish? But we'll see how well I have my act together this year. :Db

I thought I'd post some of my favorite veggie-friendly fall recipes. My family can't be the only ones going "oh no--what will so-and-so eat? D:"

Fear not, my friends.

( Carrot Casserole )

( Roasted Pumpkins )

( Veggie Stovetop!style Stuffing )

( 'Chicken' Gravy )

Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World has a delicious-looking but rather complex dessert up, too: Pumpkin Pie Brownies. I may make these this year, if I feel brave. Wish me luck. :Db

-Walked Finn around an increasingly-crowded local park. Christmas displays are A++. Cute construction-worker girl who petted Finn, A++. Creepy-ass hordes of drunk-at-10am businessmen? F-.

-Went to class. This should not feel like an accomplishment.

-Did not nap! (self, why are you so tired all the time these days, wtf?)

-Sat around on the couch for a few hours, vaguely screwing around on the computer and sulking for all the time that I wasn't napping.

-Did my reading for American Lit. :Db Poe is kind of fucking awesome; somehow, I always forget.

-Realized that filing my graduation paperwork meant I had to start figuring out wtf I'm going to do with myself after school. Since it looks like we won't be moving to Seattle after all--or, at least, not in January anyway--I get to start back at the beginning on this. Just as I had gotten accustomed to the idea, too. >:( Spent two hours or so crying/freaking out my dog.

-Half-way done with the AmerLit paper I was supposed to be writing yesterday. >.> This is...like progress?

-Lost two turns to re-reading bits of Z/C/S christmas-fluff. Did not pass 'Go'. Paper still incomplete.

-Moar screwing around on the internet, IJ not least. Sigh. Can I just hide now?

OBAMA WON!!!!!

I was linked to this from one of the election threads I'm following tonight and...I mean, it might be kind of late to say anything else about prop 8, I just. I got to about halfway through, when Rabbi Feinstein said, "My faith supports the right to marry, because as a Jew, I have the responsibility to fight for justice, to act towards righteousness, and to help bring goodness into the world," and I started crying like a little baby. I type this right now with a little white furry nose tucked firmly under my chin, because Finn hates it when I look upset.

You hear so much about people of faith fighting this, tooth and claw, about the depths they'll sink to in order to deny that LGTB people are people too...Hearing these ministers, priests, rabbis talking about a loving G-d, about faiths and communities that are welcoming and loving and supportive for ALL their members... it was powerful, ok?

It was powerful.

So, I'd guess you're all really sick of hearing me talk about the election, but... It's important. We'll be back to regularly scheduled programming after the 4th. In the meantime:

http://theremina.livejournal.com/224143.html
This link is a video by a woman who wanted to capture the behavior of Yes on 8 protesters. She didn't interact with them or go closer to them than four feet until they approached her. She was screamed at, verbally threatened, had her phone stolen, and assaulted.

We can't let this kind of person dictate our moral choices. We CAN'T. We are BETTER than this.

I'm going to be joining the protests against Prop 8 Sunday and Monday here in San Jose. If you live in California, you can sign up at this webpage to join a protest in your city. Please-- talk to people. Display a sign, if you can get one, or wear a button or post in your blog or join a protest. Fight this. And most importantly--VOTE. This isn't an issue you can afford to leave to someone else. It's really not.

OH NOES!!!!1 THAT POOR CUTE LITTLE GIRL FORCED TO SEE HER DIRTY LESBIAN TEACHER GET MARRIED!!!! WHAT DO HER PARENTS THINK?



...Er, wait. What? Yes on 8, surely you didn't just...

Protecting the children, huh? How 'bout protecting them from political exploitation first?

Also? This is fabulous. <3


/Edit: And WTF is this? THREATS now? Yes on 8 has to try and extort donations? ...maybe, you know, if you have to lie to and threaten people in order to convince them? Maybe you're wrong.

I think I might attempt Nanowrimo again this year. There's kind of a lot going on, and although I have a tentative timeline for things, I still don't have my plot actually laid out, and the chances of my actually making 50,000 are slim-to-none, but...

I have some characters I really like, male and female characters I think I can feel good about. I have a setting in the north of France in 1942-3, though I still need to narrow it down to a city. I have some idea of what needs to happen, and how it should end.

I think this year, though, what I'm going to do is set up a filter on this journal and post bits of the story to it as I write--character sketches, scenes, worldbuilding, etc--to see if having it collected will help. And since I'm going to do that, I'm wondering if there's anyone who'd like to see it? I can't make any promises on quality, since this'll be pretty hastily written and non-edited, but...If people are curious, feel free to comment here and I'll add you.

/edit: ALSO! If you're also participating this year and want to be writing buddies, I'm Mitsuhachi over there too. :)

Here's the deal: you give me a subject (character, object, place) and some sort of prompt, and come the end of December I'll give you something, without any promises about what it'll be. You might get a new icon, or a drabble, or a sketch or a full-out picture or story, but you'll have SOMETHING for your stocking come Yule-time.

If you are reading this, you are welcome to ask for something.

I'll leave this post stickied at the top of my journal until December too, in case you want to come back to it later.

I've been bad lately and either forgetting to eat entirely or eating a lot of rice-inna-box or pasta-inna-box, so when Michael went to the store the other day, he came home with THE WORLD'S MOST GIGANTIC BAG OF APPLES EVAR. <3

So today for lunch, I'm sitting here, looking around my kitchen, which contains:
One(1) left-over ciabatta roll from the mushroom sammiches last night,
Half a bag of cheddar/jack shredded cheese,
About a teaspoon left of a jar of crushed garlic preserved in oil, and
THE WORLD'S MOST GIGANTIC BAG OF APPLES EVAR.
And also is stupidly hot (wtf, it's October already, it should not be 86*). And I made the most delicious sammiches ever.

If you wanna make the most delicious sammiches ever, this is what you do:
Cut the roll in half, and lay it out on a plate you can microwave, cut sides up. If you have other kinds of bread, this is still probably good. Pumpernickle would probably be stupidly good.

Spread some of the garlic over one slice. If you don't have crushed-oil garlic, fresh chopped garlic and a little tiny bit of butter would probably be good too. I wouldn't use the powdered stuff though--that sounds like it'd be weird.

Cover both slices with the cheese. Next time, I'm totally making this with all cheddar.

Pop the whole thing in the microwave for a minute or so--however long it takes to melt the cheese. Meanwhile, slice up half an apple. Eat the other half, or hold onto it, or feed it to overly-pushy dogs whose favorite food is whatever-mommy-is-eating.

Take the plate out, carefully cause it's probably hot, and layer the sliced apple bits on one side, and moosh the other side over on top of them. This is probably good with a nice dark beer if you like that, or with cold apple juice if, like me, you don't.

Probably you all know about the pitched campaign that the Church of Latter-day Saints is waging on behalf of Prop 8. Maybe you've read news articles about it, or seen some of their adds. Lately, they've had a flyer--also used by other opponents of equal marriage rights--on the supposed consequences of not passing Prop 8.

This morning, a morman lawyer posted a memo on why this entire argument is "untrue" and "misleading". To those in support of Prop 8: If you have to lie to reasonable people to convince them to vote yes, then what does that say about your valid arguments? Lies and bigotry speaks poorly of ANY religion.

http://www.noonprop8.com/downloads/Thurston-Memo.pdf

I've been riding the buses a lot lately. Not to get anywhere, just to ride. Also, my sleeping habits are shot to hell; I keep sleeping when I'm not tired just to avoid having to figure out what to do with myself, and then not being able to sleep all night because of nightmares/worrying/my brain generally hating me. These are not good signs for me.

Michael is being really successful right now with his programming thing--he was in the print version of the Wall Street Journal for crying out loud!--and Popcap basically told him, "tell us what we'd have to offer you to hire you right now". Which, I mean, is a great opportunity for him, and I totally do support him in pursuing it and everything, cause I mean...who gets that kind of offer? But... I don't know. I'm going to graduate pretty soon, and I don't know what I'm going to do with myself at that point. I don't want to be that far away from my family and all my friends--that kind of isolation was 90% of why I hated Hawaii so bad, and it's like...now we're going to do that again? And also I'm starting to feel kind of like...not like I'm in competition with someone exactly, but like I have to keep up with someone really driven and successful and ambitious, and it's been pretty thoroughly demonstrated that I don't do well with that.

I don't know what the hell I'm doing, and I'm really sick of losing everything and having to start over from the beginning precisely as soon as I start to feel like maybe I've got my shit halfway together.

Today is mine and Michael's anniversary. We've been together for five years. O.O It...both seems entirely impossible that it's been that long and odd in that I keep thinking it's been longer. Oh, brain, you just keep on failin' ok? <3

He got me a pumpkin shaped, pumpkin pie scented candle about the size of two fists, and an adorable pumpkin shaped candy jar. My boy, he knows me so well. I'm taking him out to dinner at the fondue place he likes, and then we're going to go see quarantine tonight, which we've both been looking forward to for a while.

Five years. Damn.

It's been a good ride, so far. <3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbiO5qDfGS0

My capstone class is doing a student-led writing workshop tomorrow, for which they've asked us to bring a page of fiction that we've written. Ok. So I am going through my documents folder, looking over the stuff I've written. And I've come to something of a conclusion.

I CAN'T BRING THIS SHIT IN. D:

I have:

1. Ridiculously old things that make ME cringe to read, much less allowing anyone else to see.
2. Weird romance-bits--queer things, polyamourous pairings, really broken and unhealthy relationships. Just. No. Not in a class where I have to convince people I'm not a creepy perv for the rest of the semester, thank you.
3. Fanfiction. Right. Because that's a good way to get people to take your writing seriously. But that's the thing! *I* don't take my writing seriously anymore! And I don't even think I have anything where I could file off the serial numbers and have it still make sense/have a point.

*cries* I'm going to die. T^T

Edit: In case anyone wanted to know how my trip down south with the GPS worked out...

Took Michael to the Airport this morning, to make sure the GPS worked before I headed down south this weekend.

Have named GPS "Cobalt", because it gives me orders and makes me cry.

Me: This is a parking lot. THIS IS A PARKING LOT, why do you want me to turn into a parking lot?!

Cobalt: Calculating new route. :D

Me: *cries*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKAqbQlWQhc

It is really not helpful for you to spend the hour-and-a-half before aikido class fighting with yourself over how much you don't want to go, and you really could just skip just this one time.... No. If you skip again, you might as well just withdraw. AND YOU LIKE THIS CLASS, remember? WTF? Really very fail.

No love at all,
Me

Went to con this weekend. It was pretty fun. I got to hang out with L and Kiwi and Cadence, who are awesome and with whom I had a lot of fun. I think L telling me about discussing whether she'd published any novels with her grandfather was kind of hilarious and one of the highlights of the con for me. I also attended a couple of really interesting panels--the ones on internalized misogyny and classic plot structure stand out in particular as really entertaining. Probably would have been more fun if I'd gone with a friend, but T mentioned she might be interested in going next year, so... hmm. Pond put up her writeup already, with a pic of the four of us in P3 cosplay which--wow, I look really fat next to kiwi. I'm kind of weirded out by that. But we look awesome as a group, so. :D

Er. What else? It's kind of a blur for me, to be honest. There was a lot of sitting up in the video room/library until roughly four and then getting up at seven for early panels. (I finally saw a bit of the live-action Antique Bakery, which apparently aired in japan and then fell off the face of the internet, too, which was exciting.)

My puppy spent the whole time I was gone, according to mike, curled up in his little nook by the door, making the misery face. And then FLIPPED OUT when I got home, spinning in circles, knocked me down and sat on me until I'd pet him for like half an hour. It was pretty cute.

Now I'm home safe and have only the absurdly huge piles of homework I didn't do last friday. *grin* Laters, all.

/edit: There are moments when I love my generation. Truly.

I can't remember the source, but there's some sci-fi story I've read where the conclusion reads along the lines of "They could withstand the fiecest of our weapons, they could defeat us intellectually, but in the end, I think they died of sheer culture shock" - the looks on the faces of the scientologists when faced with a crowd in which a lone voice shouts:

"I HEAR TOM CRUISE HATES MUDKIPS!"

(all) "NOOOOOOOOOOO!"

... how do you fight that?

How do you, ideologically speaking, defeat a crowd that is enthusiastically demanding that you "DO A BARREL ROLL! DO A BARREL ROLL!!" ?