updates!
just kidding.

"i have a dream ...
... that one day my four small children will be judged not for the color of their skin but by the content of their character." mlk jr.
i had no intentions of posting anything regarding the supposed holiday that today is, but i was hearing snippets of the speech all morning. that line in particular caught my interest. i apologize if i've misquoted. i'm doing this from a memory which is not functioning with the proper caffeine levels.
anyway. what got me about this is how far society has come in terms of this and how far away we are from the heart of those words. we are much slower to judge by skin color these days, although it does still happen and seems to be connected also with attitude and style of dress. it's unreliable. to look at me, you'd think i'm just a regular white girl. well, not really. i'm not all white, thank you, so don't lump me into that group. of course, when i say that i am filipino, that gets me a whole different reaction. none of this causes me much trouble. it's not worth it to me to deal with people who want to judge others in this manner. but the truth is, appearence is all we have to go by. not a soul wears the content of his character on his breast or pinned to the lapel of his suit or hanging like a diamond encrusted dollar sign around his neck. it takes time to learn the content of one's character, thus you can't make the kind of quick judgements we're prone to making. we are a society of "five minutes." we want it all faster and better. we don't have time to get to know people in order to be fair about what kind of person they are. we don't make the time. we don't want to. if it can't be done in a short amount of time, we move on.
i'm going to tattoo the content of my character across my forehead. "poor impulse control."
(some of you get that. if you don't, you need to read neal stephenson's "snow crash." don't argue with me. read it now. or my poor impulse control might do something you'll regret ... )

Cucumber

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Jack who tricked the devil into climbing a tree. When Jack carved a cross into the trunk of the tree, the devil could not get down. So Jack made a deal. He would let the devil down if the devil promised not to let Jack into hell when he died.

So Jack continued to live his life as he always had, and as all things do, Jack died. He had not been a good man, not even remotely, so his soul went straight down to hell. The devil kept his end of the deal and would not let Jack in. The gates of heaven did not open for him either, so Jack was doomed to wander the earth carrying his soul in a hollowed out turnip.

His soul inside the turnip made a nice light by which to travel his dark path, and soon he noticed that many people used turnips as lanterns and that they carved strange and scary faces upon the turnips at a certain time of the year. He learned also that he had been seen wandering in the dark nights and was called Jack O?Lantern. On the night when the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead was at its thinnest, the people imitated Jack?s turnip lantern, hoping that it would keep other spirits at bay.

On one of those nights, as the people reveled, Jack was confronted by a screaming banshee. She was very upset with him, and she tried to take the turnip from him.

?Pray tell me what the matter is, sweet banshee,? Jack said to her as he looked for some place to hide. ?Do I not deserve to know why you wish to steal my very soul??

The pale banshee considered this a moment. ?Nay, Jack O?Lantern. Ye need know nothing. Ye knew nothing before,? she said.

?I have wandered many years now. Knowing is not something a wandering spirit needs to do.?

The banshee hissed at him and resumed trying to snatch the turnip from his hands.

?Tell me your name at least, or I shall have to call you nothing but screaming bitch.?

?My name is Blinne, and if ye dare to call me anything at all, I?ll suck the eyes right out o? yer head.?

Jack spotted a well up on the crest of a hill and trotted to it with Blinne close at his heels, still snatching at the turnip. He leaped over the well. Blinne stopped and blinked at him. He held the turnip out over the mouth of the well. ?Now Blinne, kindly tell why you want this or I?ll drop it down this well so that neither of us will have it,? he said.

The banshee wailed. Jack couldn?t help but cringe. Over her shoulder, he could see the lights from the windows and the shadowed faces of the wary villagers.

?Come now, sweet banshee Blinne,? Jack said. He tossed the turnip into the air and caught it at the very last moment before it plunged into the unreachable darkness below. ?Whoa, there. That was close.?

?The last of yer descendants has passed, Jack O?Lantern,? Blinne said. Her desperation was clear in her voice as it verged on its warbling death cry. ?I called for her, and when she came to me, she asked me to bring her the soul of the rotten bastard who cursed her family.?

?Curse?? This genuinely perplexed Jack. He had heard of no such curse upon those who bore his name, and yet it seemed just that such a curse should be placed upon them.

?Yes, curse. Each of them has suffered the same fate ye brought upon yerself no matter how good or how bad they may?ve been in life. They wander not so aimlessly but searching for the bringer of the curse so that they might break it and go to whichever of heaven or hell has been set for them.?

Jack contemplated this for a very long time, and after a few seconds, he said, ?If you will do one thing for me, I will give you the turnip,? he said. He had no intention of giving up the turnip, but if he could trick the devil, he could trick a banshee.

Blinne cocked one eyebrow. She didn?t believe that he felt any sympathy at all for his descendants. She would have expected him to mock them for not being clever enough to get out of the curse. ?What is it ye want, Jack O?Lantern?? she asked.

?You must agree first.?

?I?ll agree to nothing until ye tell me what it is.?

?I would hate to tell you and then have you not agree to my terms. It is a simple thing. I promise you it will not hurt a bit. You want the turnip, do you not??

?Aye.?

?Then you must agree.?

?Aye, I must.?

?So you agree??

Blinne sighed. ?Aye.?

Jack smiled. He walked around the side of the well to Blinne and took her pale, slender hand in his. ?It has been a long time since I?ve known a woman,? he said. His voice was as sweet as honey and as soft as rose petals. ?And you are very beautiful. We did not come to meet this way for no reason.?

?Bastard.?

He laughed and put his arm around her waist, pulling her close to him. She opened her mouth to wail, and he kissed her. He took her down to the ground and removed her dress. He kissed her breasts and ran his fingers through the soft curly hairs between her legs. Soon his kisses and caresses had her panting for more, but he stopped. Dawn was drawing near. ?Meet me back here at dark, and I will have you,? he whispered.

Seduced by his charm and his touch, Blinne agreed and spent the daylight hours aching to be with Jack.

The next night, there was more of the same. He kissed her and stroked her until she trembled with pleasure, and as the sky began to grow light, he promised he would have her the next night. For seven nights, he pleasured her, always promising he would have her the next night and always leaving her at sunrise, wanting him so badly that she could only lay in that spot and pleasure herself until he came to her.

On that seventh night, Jack went to the well and found Blinne lying on the ground naked, writhing under her own touch, and he was only too happy to watch for a while. When she saw him watching, she said, ?Now, Jack. Take me now. I?ll not wait another night for it.?

And so Jack lay with the banshee Blinne, knowing that she had completely forgotten his promise to give her the turnip if she slept him with. He left her there by the well and continued his wandering.

~

Summer came in a flash of color and a rush of heat that Jack had not seen in many years, and he spent his evenings lounging in the cool gardens brought to life by the skilled hands of villagers and the kindness of the weather that year. Then one night in the month of July as he was lolling about in a patch of fresh cucumbers that were just ready to be picked, he heard the shrill voice of a banshee calling out his name. He recognized Blinne?s cry right away and looked for a place to hide. None was to be found and he was soon face to face with an oddly distended Blinne. He looked at her swollen belly with wonder. ?Dearest, you?ve ? grown a tad,? he said lightly.

?This foul thing in my belly is yer spawn, worthless trickster, and it?s to be born tonight,? Blinne said. The spite in her tone was unmistakable. ?I shall expel it into yer hands and be done with both ye and it.?

?But I ? I ? ?

Blinne howled in pain as the child within her let it be known that he was ready to come into the world. She clutched Jack?s shirt in her fists. ?I pray it?s a mite smarter than its sire, that I do,? she snarled. ?Else I might slit its throat even on the cord.?

?You?ll do no such thing, you spiteful whore!? Jack cried. He was surprised to hear his own concern. He may not have been a good father to the children his wife bore him in his life, but he had loved them.

?Then take yer bastard from me and never cross my path again!?

Blinne lay down on the ground, lifting her dress up over her stomach. She spread her legs open and began to push. Jack knelt between her legs and took off his shirt so that he might catch his babe with it when Blinne?s pushing and grunting yielded a new life. The hours wore on until the sun was just beginning to touch the horizon, and finally, a tiny being jumped feet first from Blinne?s womb. It landed squarely in Jack?s arms, urinated all over him and began to wail. Blinne pushed herself up on her elbows to look at the child, and for just a moment, she felt a touch of motherly love for the howling thing in Jack?s arms. But then she recalled how Jack had tricked her. She drew a knife, cut the umbilical cord and got to her feet.

?A pox on both ye rotten bastards!? she spat, and then she was gone.

Jack looked down at the child he held. It was a boy, and his skin was a pale pearlescent green. His eyes, when he finally stopped crying and opened them, shifted through colors so quickly that Jack couldn?t tell which they started on and which they stopped on. He had a patch of thick black hair upon his head and was as lovely a newborn as Jack had ever seen. The baby smiled up at his father, reached his arms up and cried, ?Papa!?

Jack laughed, delighted. ?That screaming bitch doesn?t know what she?s missing,? he said to his new son. ?I shall name you after me, then. Jack. Come, little Jack. The sun is almost up.?

Big Jack and little Jack slept away the day hidden in the garden, and when big Jack awoke, he had an idea. Little Jack was already crawling his way around the garden, playing with the bugs and the worms and gnawing on the leaves to see what they were.

?Jack, come to your papa,? big Jack said. ?There?s something I need you to do for me.?

?But Papa, the worms want to play,? little Jack said.

?The worms will wait. Come here, son.?

But little Jack could tell that his father?s intentions were not quite good, and he crawled into the cucumber patch. ?Play hide and seek with me, Papa!? he called out.

?Oh, all right.? Big Jack wandered the garden, searching for his son. He was becoming terribly frustrated at not being able to find the boy when he entered the cucumber patch and saw little Jack sitting in the middle of the path with a cucumber in his left hand and a big grin on his face. ?Jack, you naughty boy. You had me worried there for a second.?

?Trick!? little Jack said, laughing.

?Yes, indeed, a trick. Now, your game is done. Come.?

Little Jack crawled over to his father who bent down beside him and showed him the hollowed out turnip he carried.

?Do you see this, son?? Jack asked.

The boy nodded, his eyes shifting from white to green to blue and back to white. His father?s tone was very serious. The turnip was terribly important, and little Jack listened closely.

?When I was a boy, not as young as you, I tricked the devil and got myself banned from hell and heaven so that when my time had passed, I was doomed to wander this land carrying my soul in this turnip.?

?It?s awfully small for a soul.?

?Yes. It?s cramped and damned uncomfortable. I would love to be able to take my soul out of this turnip and stretch it. If you could take my place in the turnip just for a little while, I could do that. Come on, son, into the turnip with you.?

?No. I don?t think so.?

?What??

?It looks dark and scary inside the turnip.?

?It isn?t, I promise. Do as Papa says.?

?But I?m afraid, Papa.?

?Now, Jack. It?s not so bad. Be a brave little man.?

?I?d feel better if you got into this cucumber and made a light for me to have with me so I could see where I was. Just in case it is dark and scary.? Little Jack held up the cucumber he had in his hand. ?See, I carved it out and made a hole so the light will shine through and show me where I am.?

Touched by his son?s ingenuity and not wanting the boy to be afraid, Jack agreed, but no sooner had he gone inside the cucumber light than he realized he had been tricked by his own child. Holding his hand over the hole in the end of the cucumber, little Jack ran down to the nearest cemetery and buried the cucumber deep in the earth, trapping his father inside the vegetable in the hallowed ground.

Little Jack ran back to the garden and grabbed the turnip, which still held his father?s soul. He cut open the turnip and watched the soul dash to the cemetery where it tried to dig up the cucumber. To this day, a small light can be seen on some nights in that graveyard, hovering above a certain spot on the ground. Later that evening, little Jack had a turnip stew for supper.

let me get back to you on that ....
i am tired.
my back is spasming.
i have a gazillion loads of laundry to do.
it's fucking cold.
i just downloaded yahoo IM, but i have no friends. so i will probably go uninstall it soon. i do strange things when i am bored.
i was going to post some fiction i've been working on. something new i started today that has nothing to do with any of the things i said i was going to work on. but it's kinda creepy and i think i wanna finish it before i go sharing it. but finishing it requires getting off the damn internet.
overloaded, creatively.
desperately in need of a change in pace.
three day weekend!!!!
mood: psychotic knife weilding homicidal maniac. ^_^

um, oops....
okay, so more oops than i thought. i hit enter instead of tab and so posted only the title. OOPS.
the green bay philly game started at 4:30 or something like that so i missed all but the fourth quarter before i realized my error. OOPS.
as for the game itself, favre and sherman are going OOPS. lot of stupid calls in that one. how the fuck do you let a team covert 4TH AND 26!!!!!????????!!!!!! i mean come on, boys, play some damn defense. 4th AND 26! that means they've got 26 yards to go and if they don't get it, you get the ball! you see that little orange plastic thing over there? DON'T LET HIM GET TO IT!!!! i don't think i've ever seen that long of a fourth down converted. and that pass ... brett, what were you thinking? were you thinking? i really wanted to see favre win a superbowl this year. i've always thought he was a bit of a jerk, but i love to watch him play. guess that wasn't meant to be. but now he can grieve for the loss of his dad and start over next year with that behind him. it would have been harder the longer he put off dealing with it anyway.
and the evil empire has fallen! the st. louis rams lost to the carolina panthers in a game i thought was gonna suck. i couldn't stop watching it once i sat down and got into it. it was nice to see jason seahorn miss that tackle that allowed the game winning touchdown in double overtime. seahorn = OVERRATED! he might be cute and all that ... well, not really. cut, but not cute. sorry, angie. (cute football players are hard to find. {donald driver} that's why i like hockey better! okay, no, i just like the high speed hits and the fights. cute players are a bonus. who am i? what am i doing?)
superbowl match up = philly and new england. winner, new england. they got it together. consistant on both sides of the ball. not spectacular, but hard working, mindful and they are a TEAM.
hockey news! brian boucher, goaltender for the phoenix coyotes hold the record for consecutive shut out minutes -- 332 and one second. that's five games and six minutes or so. wow. and he's the backup!
oh, and did i do any writing yesterday when i sat down to do it? no. i made a map of texas. hey, it was important to know where they would be doing and all that stuff! it's because my muse hates me, i swear. i've been listening to johnny cash's last cd, "american iv: when the man comes around." great cd all the way through. "when the man comes around" was the song that kicked started the idea for the raven and the apocolypse story. but there's another song on there, "give my love to rose," that's begging for a story. basically, the singer comes across a man who just got out of prison and is now trying to get home to see his wife, rose, and their son. the dying man tells the singer, "give my love to rose, please won't you mister, take her all my money, tell her buy some pretty clothes" and so on. don't know how much money, don't know what the singer does after the man dies. could be he's telling this to rose already, but even so, there's a bunch of things that could happen. and of course, my mind goes for the more twisted story line.
if you want to know what my muse looks like, go to the mega toyko website. there's a cool pic of the two main characters above the artist's rant today, apparently a new tshirt design. my muse is the one on the right with the spikey red hair. he would be a redhead, wouldn't he? although my muse is not named largo. my muse insists he doesn't have a name, which is fine, because i tend to call him all sorts of deraggatory terms when i'm mad at him, which is pretty much always.

amuse the muse
well, i've successfully avoid my muse up until today. i spent friday night with a bottle of wine and the last four episodes of the second season of 24, which isn't nearly as good as the first season but still has its moments. it doesn't matter really. it's all about keifer sutherland. i don't usually go for blondes, but he's just too cool. i'm curious to see what they've done this season, which i've heard mostly sucks, but the guy that played the pretty principal on buffy the vampire slayer is in it as the president's brother. *wipes drool away* sorry about that. anyway, one glass of wine for each hour, fours hours, and then i was asleep. muse, i mock you! ha ha! yesterday, we spent money on things to try to get our apartment organized and cleaned up to make it easier to move into a real house. and then i spent most of the day roaming the internet and writing scenes in my head. but not on paper, damn it! no, i refused to give in! then we installed the CD burner i bought and watched hockey and football all night. muse is mocked again, mwaha!
today, i cleaned out the office closet. that was scary. i'd forgotten about some of the notebooks i'd kept. the very first journal i ever kept, circa fall of 1988! i was too frightened to read them. trust me, it would be terrifying. these are not typical teenage girl journals, no "i love so and so" or "so and so has a crush on me! he's so cute!" oh no, none of that. this is scary girl in the corner wearing black with a razor blade a match book and scribbling in a notebook ... in blood. this is "heathers" worthy shit. really, really scary. and one day when i'm dead and gone, someone will find these and read them and wonder why i was never locked up in the state mental prison.
anyway. muse has calmed down and agreed to stop pestering me. so i've been able to narrow my work load to three. "the church," "texas," and the raven thing that doesn't have a title yet.
after researching hypnosis and posting a question on the nanowrimo forums, i've decided that i need to redo that whole scene so that either hayden realizes while it's going on that the priest is trying to hypnotize him but isn't successful OR hayden realizes this but is for some reason convinced there's a hypnotic suggestion planted deep in his head, which leads to him hesitating, conrad doing stupid stuff and the conversation that hayden has with taren about getting rid on the suggestion, except that taren is talking about the bottle of bourbon in hayden's desk drawer while hayden is talking about the hypnotic suggestion. it's an amusing scene and i hate to cut it or change it, but we'll have to see what happens after the rewrite of the hypnotizing scene.
duncan and jake just refuse to stop, so "texas" gets to stay on. of course, it needs a better title than that i think. or not. i kinda like that. it works for them. until i come up with something better.
the last needs a title as well. i was thinking for some reason "raven and the red dawn," but that sounds like ... i don't know. something it isn't. "raven's dream" is probably what i'll end up using, since i've decided that's the basic premise. raven has a dream of the apocalypse, tells everyone about it because he believes it's an important dream, but no one believes the dream has any merit; they all think it's some kind of elaborate trick. but it's not, and so raven sets out to prove to them that he's not trying to trick them and maybe find a way to stop the world from dying. i still need to reread the book of revelations and skim through some more of my research stuff, so this one will stay on simmer rather than full boil.
hopefully this will get me through march or so without any hitches. and then i can worry about the rest of the detective stories and all the other bits and pieces of things i've got floating around. but i'm still left with a problem. where do i start? better think of something because the football game starts at eight or something like that. and this is a game i don't wanna miss!

snow sucks
and that's all i have to say about that!
in other news, if it were any other day but friday, i'd be whackin' people right about now. the moron contingent has been strong, and though i've fought gallantly and held them at bay all week, i'm losing strength and am badly wounded by their sheer moron-ness. please send reinforcements. or several bottles of wine.

a ha! i did it!
they said i couldn't change the color of the links. bullshit! all i had to do was scroll through the code in the style, figure out which line it was and what color i wanted it to be, and tada! black instead of that eye aching red. if i really wanted to, i could probably make more changes in the code to suit me rather than dealing with their stupid templates. bastards.
anyway, work sucks. it's supposed to snow. and i'm making something interesting. no writing, oddly enough. or not. this seems to be the way my brain has been going. i spent last night gathering more raven information. i specified a little more what i was looking for and still got over 12,000 hits, several of which were useful, but still a majority were crap. i figured i'd be reading through that stuff and maybe starting to write. but no. i got to thinking about the icky things in mike's fridge and the comment i made about cthulu like things oozing out of tuperware. so i'm making CTHULUWARE!!! there will be pictures when my creature is complete.
and the hurricanes just scored a beautiful goal to tie up the rangers. thanks to jessie boulerice and chris simon trying to beat the shit out of each other. i think jessie won. i love hockey.

what if ...
i actually had something to say?
i'd be damn dangerous.

i just lost an hour and a half...
okay, so the story that wrapped itself around my head yesterday (not about duncan, unsurprisingly) decided to come to a screeching halt and i declared research was in order that would consist of finding more information on native american mythology and rereading the book of revelations. like i said with the cucumber thing, DON'T ASK. it will make sense when i am done. maybe. however, i did learn a valuable lesson. never go to any search engine and type in raven. over three million hits, and of the six hundred or so i had the patience to get through, only one -- ONE -- had anything to do with the raven trickster figure of the pacific northwest peoples. and oddly enough, only one had anything to do with professional wrestler raven. i don't know if i showed up in there anywhere. when i looked at the clock and realized what time it was and how much time i had lost, i kinda didn't care. i might have had better luck with a narrower search like "trickster figure" or something, but the only one i care about is raven because raven did many things that are key to what i'm trying to write, and he is my main character. no it's not my REAL name, not the name on my birth certificate or the name on my social security card, but it is somehow the name that best suits me. getting a legal name change would probably be too much trouble, so i lurk the net under that guise and am considering a 30th birthday gift of a second tattoo. not that hubby would like that, but so far, everyone i know has rung in their 30ths in the most unimaginitive ways. i've got two years to plan. i don't think of 30 as the end of my youth or being over the hill. i don't at all dread it. in fact, i can't wait. a woman hits her sexual peak in her 30s, supposedly. but that has nothing to do with what i started this entry about. a testament to my wandering mind. ideas are flowing like wine .... or blood. hmmmm, more like blood, actually.