Insanity Lurks

Over the past two weeks, I have started two different DW posts but have not succeeded in posting them. It's kind of frustrating how much I think about the DW posts I want to do versus what actually happens.

I would like to journal more this year. I have an internal dialogue in my head all the time and I think it would be helpful to turn them into actual written words in the hopes that I will stop thinking about the same things and maybe have room for new ones. What I can't decide is if DW is a good place for some of the writing about my personal life that I'd like to do, or if I should try to get myself to do physical journals. Or start another DW for it. Still mulling it over!

( musings )

MSV is going well! I am chugging along with modding. It did make me realize that I do need to try participating in another event that I am not running - I miss doing stuff like that.

Well, I meant to update much sooner than this, but life happened. I'm also learning that when I'm stressed a lot about things, I revert to 'hermit mode' and it's harder for me to communicate. :(

I trained the people who are covering me at work for my leave and tried to wrap up as much as I could for my supervisor. My mom had her surgery and it went well. It's not an easy recovery, but compared to her ankle surgeries, it is much better. The loss of Oshun was also quite tough. Sometimes I'm not very clear on the concept of an afterlife, but I do hope that she is somewhere where her eyes work again and she gets to read all the books she wants and have wonderful conversations with all her dear ones who have passed on before her. I like to think of her having coffee and cake with Kei and Rhaps.

My thanks to Dawn for the Gofundme. I knew her reach would be far better than mine as I am very quiet in the fandom space these days. I was always more of a lurker and losing Kei did not make it any better. I am cautiously optimistic that I might write again though. The past four years in particular have been so mentally crushing that I wasn't sure that I ever would again. I've also struggled with losing my friend who was always a part of my fandom experience from the very beginning.

But - I'm going back to South Africa in just over 48 hours. I had a nice little anxiety attack about it last week. But it's going to be fine, and I've had a lot of help from Anerea on trying to make this dream possible. I will be doing the Sanctuary road trip and I'll be able to see Anerea and Kei's family, and celebrate what would have been 20 years of knowing her. It feels almost surreal, I've spent two years trying to coordinate coming back to SA and now I'm almost there! Just absolutely surreal. I said I was going to do it, and I'm making it happen, not just wishing I did.

I'm coming to terms with how sentimental I am and always have been. I can move mountains, if it's personal, and I just need to lean into that a bit more.

Just going through all my check lists and my list of things to accomplish before leaving. I think I have just about everything wrapped up, and anything else must keep or work out along the way.

I did absentee vote, so I don't have to worry about that. It'll be weird to be in another country during election day, but it's probably better than obsessively checking news. I've done what I can personally do.

Just - glad this trip is happening. The last day I left South Africa, I said I thought it would take me two years to make it back. After a year, I had a hard time hearing planes fly above because I wanted to go back so badly, and now I'm almost there.

I checked when I last updated my LJ and I knew it had been a while, but I did not realize that it hadn't been since October - ouch. So this is long over-due. It was a rough end of year for me, which was partly why I was so quiet. It isn't that I want to disengage from here, but when I get overwhelmed interaction on LJ is usually the first thing to go.

Going to go ahead and stick this behind a cut as it's personal.
( work, health issues, religion )

But in other, brighter news - I am proud of myself - I did manage to write a story for the MPTT Yule swap called Salt. It was for Keiliss and featured one of her OTPs, Erestor/Gil-galad. I'm happy with how it turned out, but lord it is intimidating to write Gil-galad for her, the Queen of Gil fics. Now if I could just manage to write something this year, I'll be doing pretty good.

Sorry for the long absence! I will try to be better. My one and only New Year's resolution is to make my bed every morning. It's something I've never mastered as child or an adult. I'm proud of myself, I'm actually doing great on that score.

No talk about politics this round, other than to say WTF, America.

Another Valentine here and gone....Another My Slashy Valentine swap finished. It feels really good - but also so strange, because I don't have a story in with the rest this year. It was really hard to accept that I couldn't finish a story in time, but I've been working 52 hour weeks three weeks in a row, trying to prepare for an interview and another major visit and my uncle passed away this past week. After I worked a 17 hour day and then tried to work on my story with no success, I realized that I could only handle so many plates at once, between work, my family, the swap admin and a swap participant. One of them had to go. Thank God for ignoblebard though, who has to be one of the sweetest people I know; he helped me out in an impossible time. Please go and check out the stories - we had 50 participants this year and a treasure trove worth of stories. All the writers need some love in the form of feedback!

My gift story this year is by keiliss and is called the Pink Flamingo. It's E/G brothel fic, and I'm thrilled to pieces to get the first chapter with a promise of more to come. (I told her I wasn't worried about her not delivering on it all, I know where she lives :) ) Seriously, go check it out. It is so cool and so much fun!

Work is absolutely crazy right now, the billionaire owner of the franchise is visiting our store and the others in the area at the end of the month, and we've been short staffed for a really long time (and still are), so there's a whole hell of a lot of work happening right now. And our store is on the razor's edge - we have a really good team, but we are all exhausted and I think if someone quits, we'll all collapse and quit too. It is that bad. And through it all, I decided to try for assistant manager (because I am doing so much already) and was meant to have an interview last week, but so far it has been delayed, delayed and then delayed again. At this point, I almost don't even care. (almost)

Personally? Really rough to watch my mom grieve her brother. Through a lot of circumstances (namely him being a workaholic), I didn't get to spend much time with him, and neither did my mom. She cried at the funeral and said she had hoped to see more of him after he retired, but he died before he ever did. On the other hand, my cousins talked about how with his heart problems, he had been so scared of dying slowly and painfully - and this was so sudden and quick that he didn't suffer. Hit home too, because he wasn't much older than my dad at all, who has had such health problems for almost two years and only within the last three weeks has been anything like himself.

Also - since this is yet another Valentine's day with me being single, I bought myself pretty yellow roses with a hint of peach to them and Godiva chocolates. Half off, of course.

Hope everyone else is having a better month than me, lol. 

Thought I would do something strange and unusual tonight, so here's a LJ update *g*. I started this LJ as strictly a fandom journal and now that my corner of fandom is a lot quieter, I haven't really been sure what to do with this space. I like the idea of blogging about my life - mainly as something I can read back, but I came into fandom when the attitude was mostly (though not always) that you did not share much personal information about yourself at all - RL and fandom squee was pretty separate, so the trend of linking together all your accounts and using your real name, and being quite, quite open about liking and reading fanfiction is kind of weird to me still. Slash fanfiction in particular. I'm still adjusting to the fact of how much that's in the spotlight now.

But I'll share a bit. I bought a car this month, which makes me very happy and full of squee. ( Car picture, clothes shopping and travel plans )

I've loved this poetry month and all the people posting poems. Thank you all. Some I've known and some I discovered so it's been really special. I've discovered Mary Oliver (her collected poems are in my Amazon wishlist right now), and I thought I would contribute one that is especially poignant to my life right now.

( The Journey by Mary Oliver )

Say “Me please!” and:
- I’ll respond by asking you five questions so I can get to know you better.
- Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
- Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.

These are from Steph. I resolved I'd post them today. :D

( got long so behind a cut )

For future reference:

I am not keiliss. I am not some extension of her personality, we are not a packaged deal. We are good friends, we beta each other, that is all. If you want to talk to me, my email addie is red.lasbelin(@)gmail.com and red_lasbelin(@)yahoo.com. I'm on yahoo IM as red_lasbelin. I am not always around, but leave me an offline and either I'm there and will talk, or I'll get back to you as soon as possible, I promise.

You want to nudge me for a rp game, pm me. You want to say something and be sure I hear it, try contacting me. You want to have an argument and unfriend me, fine. But please tell me in person why you did, instead of it falling out of the blue for no reason that I can tell, and also have some reason for it biased on my own damn merits.

This is not complicated or difficult. I know I don't talk to as many people as Kei does. And I know that some people use Kei as a means of passing on information to me. I never minded it much, but then I thought that I would be contacted personally over the important things, regardless of how the little things were handled. Obviously not.

So - from now on, please don't use her. Tell me.

Thank you, guys. You're an awesome f-list.

I was playing with my profile - doing some spring cleaning for this side of the world - and I noticed a V-Gift from someone. I have no idea how I missed it, though for what it's worth, I'm sitting here smiling over it. So lovely. I have no idea who it's from, and I wish I did - I would give them a big hug.

I'm in such an awesome corner of the online world, I know some truly great people.