Rebecca

Living situatuon: BATS. We have bats. Arabian Flatbread says he saw two of them when he went down to the basement for some laundry. I love living in Mirkwood.

Personhood progress report: I have finally learned to tell left from right without touching my earlobe. Granted, I still have to look at the tattoo on my left wrist, but a quick glance is way less disruptive to most activities than a full-on ear fondle.

This... this is huge. It means maybe I'll learn to drive one day.
I've needed manual confirmation of my left/right suspicions for years. I wish I'd only needed visual confirmation back when I took the Stupidest Driver's Ed Class Ever. It might not've helped much, though. Because. Um. Here is a brief summary of the lecture portion of driver's ed:
Don't drink and drive, kids! Also don't do LSD and drive or snort cleaning solution and drive. Hallucinogenic mushrooms + driving = unfortunate combination! Lets watch an episode of Oprah where drunk drivers apologize to the people they accidentally dismembered. Then we'll all sit in the corner and weep. P.S. Don't steal stop signs it is bad.

Then on the last day of class we got into some cars. Everyone else magically knew how to drive even though it was never covered in the class and I was all “you want me to WHAT? But all I know about driving is how to not do drugs. You mean the act of being sober will not magically teleport me to... oh. Damn. Okay, does this thing have an on button?”
The look of sheer terror on my instructor's face was kinda priceless.
It only got worse when we encountered an intersection.

INSTRUCTOR: Okay, now turn left.
LEX: What.
INSTRUCTOR: Left. Turn left now.
LEX: Um, which way is...
INSTRUCTOR: Left!
LEX: Is that toward the tree or...?
INSTRUCTOR: Oh my god.
LEX: *reaches up to grab earlobe*
INSTRUCTOR: HANDS ON THE WHEEL HANDS ON THE WHEEL PAY ATTENTION WHAT ARE YOU DOING.

Needless to say, I didn't come out of that class with a license. But maybe one day I'll have one. I don't want to own a car and the idea of driving still terrifies me, but this whole right/left thing brings me a definite step closer to functional personhood.

Groanworthy thing that happened just now: I needed a fuzzy hat that would cover my ears, so I bought the cheapest black one I could find. It had a ridiculous giant pom-pom on top. I cut the pom-pom off and threw it at Arabian Flatbread's head and ran back to my room.
Arabian Flatbread tracked me down and stood in my doorway, glaring at the offending orb of fuzz.

LEX: It's okay, you're not a klingon. I just had to check.
ARABIAN FLATBREAD: You, my friend, are in deep tribble.

Then he threw the pom-pom at my face the end.

You never realize just how much space the dead chipmunks take up in your freezer until they go away. Seriously guys, the freezer looks so huge now. We could make a snowman and preserve him in there all winter if we wanted.
We'll most likely do something boring with the space instead though, like fill it with food. It's probably a good thing. I mean, it's not like there's any room in the fridge, what with it being full of half-thawed dead chipmunks and all.

In other news, SNOW DAY SNOW DAY SNOW DAY. Oh man yesterday was full of win. All the Mirkwood residents had off from work and school so we made a huge pancake breakfast when we got up and then we went out for a snowball fight. Oh, except I took the most ill-advised shower in the world between these two things. Here is a picture of my hair demonstrating why it's probably a good idea to not spend a lot of time outside in freezing weather when you're soaking wet. Well, at least not unless you're all out of reasonable weapons and you need to stab people with icicles attached to your head.



( Here are some more pictures, mostly of stuff covered in white stuff. )

Oh hey, you know those RenFaire people sleeping on my couch? One of them (the ever-fabulous oarlock_queen) made me AWESOME.



It's a watchmaker's magnifying glass. Man, if only I had two fully functioning eyes I'd wear this thing all the time.

P.S. She also gave me a dead fish to stick in my ear. <3
Laura, please feel free to crash at Mirkwood anytime. I promise it wasn't some kind of passive-aggressive stunt when I drove you out of the house with the fire alarm that made a horrible noise for half an hour or when I allowed my drunk neighbor to almost puke on your coat. I am just somewhat incompetent when it comes to being a host. But that should improve with practice, right? And I had someone else sleeping over last night and I didn't maim or poison him or anything. Coooome baaaack!

I saw a sticker today. It had some wings on it and glitter and it said “believe” in swirly purple script. I picked it up and had this moment of disconnect – like, what was this sticker asking me to believe in, exactly, and how was it supposed to accomplish its mission? I guess I believe in glitter; I've got a vial of the stuff in my backpack and I'm pretty sure it's not a hallucination. But I don't think that's quite what the sticker is going for.

We've got a couple Renaissance Faire people sleeping on the Mirkwood couch this weekend, and it brings me back to the year I worked at Faire. I'm not sure I ever fully connected with my purpose there – I guess I was supposed to be like that sticker, but I just didn't get it. The patrons obviously knew that our small group of faeries were people painted to look like not-people, but we were somehow supposed to inspire belief anyway.
And for some people, I did.
For others, I'm sure I looked like an awkward girl chewing on sticks.
Can't please everyone blah blah blah, but it never even occurred to me to emulate that sticker.

'Cause for me, that's not the way irrational belief works. You can probably tell by looking at my religion – I'm an atheist, but I worship Loki because a deep, irrational part of me believes that a Loki-like force exists in the universe and it's out to get me. My religious acts are more about avoiding a divine ass-kicking than about currying divine favor.
When I was little, I was afraid of ghosts and monsters in the dark. I didn't believe in them, but that wasn't enough to stop my fear. I couldn't just logic them away. I finally learned to sleep at night when I made friends with the monsters.

And I guess that's the kind of belief I reached for when I worked at Faire. I took my inspiration from old poems and ballads:
Up the airy mountain
down the rushy glen
we daren't go a-hunting
for fear of little men
I was a monster, but the sort you could maybe make friends with if you tried hard enough. People took pictures and gave me flowers and I didn't care. I kept a scream count in my head, and lived for gasps of shock and surprise and then the moments when they'd melt away. The boy who hid behind his mother's leg to escape me at the start of the day, and ended up following me around and refused to leave my side by evening – that's the magic I understand.

The most successful faerie that year wasn't a monster at all. She was clean and beautiful and parents handed her their babies and she'd smile at them and they'd all be completely entranced and I found the whole thing utterly perplexing. She wasn't dangerous, and how can you inspire irrational belief without a glint of danger?
It's a kind of magic I can't see.
I can't connect with a benevolent god, and glittery stickers only serve to remind me that glitter exists.
I wish I could see it. I like my kind of magic, but I want to understand this other kind too. WITNESS MY GREED. YAHAR. BLERG FLARUM. AND OTHER SUCH NOISES.

In unrelated news, I think I've forgotten how to use furniture. I started this post in a chair, but it was all... chair-y and intimidating so now I'm sitting here on the floor of Steep and Brew, getting weird looks from the other customers. This is downtown Madison! I'm not supposed to get weird looks - especially not for something as mundane as sitting on the floor with a cup of tea. Hmph.
At least nobody looked at me twice when I took my shoes off in the snow so I could climb the lamp post outside Kanopy. I'm... uh... I'm really bad at that. Froze toes froze toes. I want to take my shoes off now so I can wrap them around my teacup, but I'm afraid that'd push me over the line from “odd looks” to “getting thrown out with a severe reprimand and possibly a dose of the ol' stink eye.” Stupid health regulations.