On West Egg

So, my original plan was just to summarize the shocking and amazing discoveries that second_batgirl made while watching Dekaranger (and then Carranger) drunk, but the chatlogs are kind of a thing of glory so I might as well share the whole thing.

Just as a heads up: This is A LOT. Like, 60+ pages a lot. And it starts out clear enough but eventually devolves into ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME and less that perfect spelling. (I feel like that is part of its charm though.)

( Surely this will not make me look foolish in the least )

So! Who wants to join us next time?

(Also, TSB wanted me to include our tweets to Arrow, but there is already so much text and I have the Gokai raw waiting for me.)

That is why I have mixed feelings about National Coming Out Day.

Because you don't just come out and it's over. It's never over. You can only come out to the people you have met. Every time you run into new people, the "Is it worth it? Its it safe? Is it okay if they tell the people they know? [ad nauseam]" cycle starts all over again.

Or it's someone you know you will only see the once, and they make a heteronormative assumption, and you have to judge if a stranger's unknown response is worth correcting them.

Or people forget (or, more often, "forget").

So while I acknowledge the value of a day in recognition of the fact that coming out is still a Thing, and a thing that many people want to do and are comfortable doing, and might even, by existing, be the nudge someone who has been hesitant-but-not-afraid needs to just do it...

One day?

It's a pretty big lie.

GUESS WHAT, Y'ALL.

No really, guess.




Have you guessed yet? No? I guess I'll give you more time.




Oh, well now that's not terribly kind. But I guess it counts as a guess.

Well you're wrong. IT'S MY BIRTHDAY! I am now a quarter of a century old. It was a pretty uneventful day, though. I worked both my jobs, which didn't really leave time to do anything much else (I've been working part time at a college bookstore during their rush on top of full-time at my regular workplace, btw).

Oh, and I work eight hours tomorrow.

BUT THEN TWO DAYS COMPLETELY OFF FUCK YEAH. :DD

In other news, I have moved across town from the two-bedroom apartment I'd been in to a room in a townhouse that I moved into July 30th and has only juuust stabilized as far as residents overall go. (OMG SOON THE KITCHEN CABINETS WILL MAKE SENSE AND IT WILL BE GLORIOUS.)

So, my rent is up but it includes cable and heat and electric and internet and water and and and, so my bills are actually down. Working 40 hours a week (up from the 38 I had before getting the new position mid-July) has given a slight-but-noticeable increase to my income, and when I officially get the position in payroll, I'll be getting about $1.50/hr more, plus benefits.

OH HEY I FINISHED THAT PAPERWORK TODAY, HAPPY BIRTHDAY ME.

Also, last week the super uncompetent manager got fired, and while the new one is young and over ambitious and kind of on the fast-track to burnout (AND TOTALLY NOT KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT VENDORS AT ALL OMG, though he does at least outwardly acknowledge that I know what I'm talking about and if I say "don't do that again because" he probably won't do it again), his lofty goals are at least good goals, and he's still probably going to be better than the old one after burning out.

OH AND HEY. After like one-and-a-quarter years I have finally stopped being and Ohio licensed driver and got my PA one, and transferred the title and got a new insurance policy and everything.(Oh and I registered to vote, which I have been FAILBOT at for a while. Uh.)

I live here. With growing savings.

And I can probably go off food stamps soon! (Should, even. THAT IS MY GOAL FOR NEXT WEEK.)

(I set goals and follow through now. Soon there may even be lists. Because I'm a MOTHERFUCKING ADULT WTF.)

Oh hey, two days off. Maybe I'll finally get caught up on my currently releasing toku (well, the old stuff. I watch the weeklies and will miss OOO dreadfully) so that I can get back to the completed series I was in the middle of and last watched/live-tweeted at least like two months ago?

Or I could finish PONIES. They are starting up again soon...

(Also at some point over those days I intend to finish the scene where [redacted] from the ridiculous powerless HS AU Samurai fic I haven't worked on at all since starting. Maybe this time I won't get distracted by the internet.)

Sorry, you guys I just have SO MUCH to catch you up on.

...OH YEAH. I got (hopefully the last time ever) texted out of nowhere by Awful Ex about how he's so glad I'm still in this town and how he hopes I succeed at life and blah blah blah "I'm still in love with you."

I have two exes. How many "I'm still in love with you" messages have I gotten? TWO. WHAT THE HELL. :| At least Awful didn't wait THREE YEARS to send that one.

Also, he says he's deleted my number but AHAHAHAH EXPECTING HIM NOT TO LIE.

Oh, and he tried a "remember me by the good times" thing except the "good times" he chose were A)after he broke up with me B)a thing he was doing on his own that just happened in the same room I was in sometimes, and C)was a series he was marathoning six seasons of with the tv set loud enough that I couldn't sleep well. GOOD TIMES, MAN.

And then he misspelled my name. (And, correcting for spelling, used my birth name and not the one I go by, which is just a dick move.) (For those wondering, he didn't misgender me, I just... don't go by my birth name much anymore. It was still totally disrespectful and dismissive of my wishes, but there wasn't dysphoria or anything triggery. Just what would have been major annoyance if I had any fucks to give about him anymore.)

I think that's everything but IDK.

tl;dr: Life has been steadily improving. With health care in three months! \o/

I intend to expand on this later but the short form is that after all the shit I've been through since moving to PA, life is now going pretty AWESOME.

Possibly the awesomest it's been since I was living in Oxford, which was 2008.

(I've been sitting here going "why is that plane taking like 20 minutes to fly past?" before it went click and the sound changed and I realized it was the dishwasher in the apartment above me.)

( In other news, MONEY MONEY MONEY )

Winter Adventure:

So I went to mail my municipality tax form in (I don't get a refund since I only had an extra cent come out of my pay ;_; ), and oh hey it's snowing. Cool. In fact, I can feel the snow landing on me even though there's no wind, because it's clumping. On the way back to my building (There's no way to indicate that mail in my mailbox is outgoing, not old, so I walked out to the mailbox out by the bus stop to drop it in), the snow is clumping even MORE. It was glorious. My footprints on the way out were already snowed over.

Kitchen Adventure:

I decided to make some butter chicken from the paste my parents got me as part of their FOOD FOR CHRISTMAS :DDDD gift. I didn't realize until I was cutting it up that I'd gotten thin-sliced chicken breasts, so I've got slices of chicken more than pieces. Oh, and this particular brand has the vaguest directions I've ever seen on a product that didn't involve translation issues. It's simmering right now, and the apartment smells awesome, so it'll probably turn out fine, but IT MIGHT NOT OH GOD.

At least I know the rice will come out of the rice cooker fine.

ETA: SUCCESS! OM NOM NOM. Plus, I am so awesome that about half a second after the timer for the chicken went off, my rice cooker clicked over to keep-it-warm mode.

Just got hired by a bookstore, so I'll have about three weeks of additional income, and the guy doing the hiring was fine with the idea of me coming back for other busy seasons. Kind of... permanently seasonal, I guess you could say?

Plus, my six-month raise at the grocery store kicked in this paycheck. It's only fifteen cents an hour, but it's still money. And income tax is supposed to come down some? (Local paper reported on it, don't remember if it's fed or state tax doing that) So.

I might actually get some savings going on, woooo.

I finally got back to importing entries from when I was on Blogger to this LJ, in part so they'll get archived offline with the rest of my LJ posts (ljArchive is a nice little tool), but largely so that all my online journaling will be in one place. (Once I finish with Blogger, I'll move on to the Xanga I had.)

OH MY GOD DOING THIS SUCKS. I have to open up each Blogger post-in-edit-mode in it's own tab in order to copypaste it over (because I'm not going in and hand-inserting italics tags and so on if I copypasted from the blog itself), but also have the blog open since the edit windows don't show the date of the post anywhere obvious, nor the time, and I need to properly backdate these things.

Plus, I have to do a month of posts at once or else I'll never remember where I left off, which means doing this SO MANY TIMES IN A ROW. I posted at an incredible rate back then compared to what I do now, and so much of it was UNIMPORTANT SHIT. There's a reason I have a "why I regret importing everything" tag, and it's only going to see more use as I go on. At least the frequency with which I have to use the "gratuitous Japanese" tag is going down already, and I'm only five months into a good few years worth of posts. (Thankfully, I do have a dead spell in early college, and I don't get back up to my ridiculous posting frequency until after I already was on LJ. Less thankfully, that ridiculous posting frequency continues past where I've imported to for some time.)

Did I mention I started this importing old posts project in 2008? Yeah. Still going to finish... someday. At least the "read through everything in one go" project that will follow will be significantly easier.

(Mostly I'm just making this post so everyone will go to my archives and lol over how ridiculous I was in 2001. Because oh god, was I.)

So today was The Day of Presents. It was a good one, because MONEY AND FOOD. In more detail:

-Money from grandparents
-Money from parents
-Borders gift card from my little brother
-FOODS (A couple curry pastes for chicken, a couple kits for Asian dinners, and Thai curried rice that, if it turns out as shit as the curried pasta my dining hall once served, I didn't pay for
-The traditional underwear from the parents
-Infinite Jest
-Money from my older brother and sister-in-law
-A towel/washcloth set. :|

So yeah. MONEY AND FOODS. Pretty sure I'm going to be checking ALL THE STORES around here to see if they have early-release Samurai Zords. Even if the Bandai of America ones are stupid and lack emblem mode. (Zord spoilers: I would wonder how Pink and Yellow are going to attach to the final combination, but BoA has changed-for-the-better how the first set of aux zords attach to the Megazord individually, so if they don't have their PASTEDE ON YAY status in the BoA toy version, I won't complain.)

I totally didn't realize how insanely depressing my life should have been lately until I typed all that out. I don't care, though, because I wasn't depressed during, and I've no reason to be depressed now.

Anyway, I now have all the furniture in place (except for figuring out what the hell to do with CJ's twin-mattress-onna-twin-mattress ('cause he didn't have a box frame) and the TV, TV stand, and the couple other random things on it (probably gonna shove it all to the bedroom wall and ignore it). Now all that's left is sorting through all the shit that's going onto the shelves of the shelved furniture and so on and figure out where it all goes. I can do that tomorrow.