Category: general

My plans were curtailed by not being able to get the car, so I walked and walked and walked around Providence. It was a good walk, and I saw some neat stuff…pictures are here. But ultimately I wandered too far–all the way to North Providence–and by the time I made it back downtown, my feet were killing me.

I’ve been back at the hotel since about 3:30, relaxing, resting my feet, eating hotel chocolate mints, and watching a movie called The Pallbearer, which is really amoral/bizarre and revolves around one of those characters who can’t seem to make a decision and who exudes a complete lack of confidence in himself. The situation is totally ridiculous and irritating…but I can’t stop watching it, it’s like a train wreck.

I’m on my own today. First priority: get cleaned up. Second priority: walk over to the convention center and get the car. Third priority: EAT SOMETHING.

After that, I’m going to head towards Boston, and see what I can see of Cambridge.

Wish me luck!

OMG.

Pictures.

I’ll write more later, but for now I’d like to get some shut-eye :) The guys are already conked out.

Or, more precisely, Providence, Rhode Island.

As soon as we get there I am going to invest in some serious mappage. ;P

We’ve purchased a wireless card for the laptop, so we may be able to get online more than expected. Either way, we should be online from the hotel room.

Ask and ye shall receive, apparently.

Central Anime is fansubbing Touch. The rip is direct from laserdisc; the font is the right color (yellow with black shading), size (large enough to see on a regular TV) and shape/position (it doesn’t trail too far to either side of the screen, or too far to the bottom); and the translation is superb. It looks just like a professional release.

I would be ecstatically happy with just the above…but on top of all that, they’re releasing episodes fast! (And with 101 total, speed is important…)

So go forth, my children, and download Touch as subbed by Central Anime!

(Hope someone out there hears my request for moolah, too!)

And damn it’s good.

That’s the gamble with non-revs/Buddy Passes. I spent the afternoon lounging around Blue Grass Airport (LEX, which I always knew as Bluegrass Field–guess they’re going for prestige, not that you can tell by their website).

So anyway.

Now I’m back at the parents’ house, and I hope to catch a flight tomorrow.

I’m not sure I would want to fool with sitting around hoping for a flight while I was on a regular vacation.

I got in about an hour ago from hanging out with AJ, Faye, Ben, Manda, and Dan. We played Cranium and sat around shooting the breeze for hours; it was great. I got back here and caught up on my online reading (webcomics and the AMRN, which Sam has just jump-started), and I should be going to bed, but I wanted to mention what happened today while I was at Wal-Mart shopping for the cookout we had this evening.

An older woman with yellowish-white hair and a calm, confident face said, “Heather?”

I stopped my cart in the middle of the row, looked at the woman. It’s Mrs. Braden, I thought. But I wasn’t sure, so I said, “Yes?”

“It’s so good to see you! I’m glad it was you; I thought it was. Do you know who I am?”

“Mrs. Braden?” By now I was pretty sure, but I was still relieved when she affirmed it.

Mrs. Braden was my AP English teacher, senior year of high school. I last saw her in 1997 I think, when I visited my high school to see all my teachers. Since then I believe she has retired.

“I wondered whether or not you’d remember me,” she said.

“Of course,” I replied. “I think about you all the time.” It’s true; Mrs. Braden was the reason I was able to write college papers without taking the 101s. She helped me to understand that you can write in any writing style you need to, and that you should tailor your writing to your subject and your audience for maximum effectiveness. This is a lesson that I think many people don’t learn; they’re afraid that their writing “voice” will be lost if they try to micromanage their style. By refusing to edit themselves, these people are holding themselves back, refusing to craft. I’m glad that I was brought to understand early what it means to write with a purpose–even if I was lazy and ignored the lesson for years afterwards.

“I was thinking about you just the other day,” Mrs. Braden replied, which surprised me, as she has had literally hundreds of students, “and that final portfolio of yours.”

Kentucky instituted a new standardized test system under KERA, the Kentucky Education Reform Act, in 1990, while I was in middle school. These tests, then known as KIRIS, replaced the old CTBS tests. Part of the system required students to compile portfolios of works in order to graduate from both middle and high school. When I was in eighth grade, KERA had only recently been enacted, so while I created an English portfolio for that year, it wasn’t as important as the one I had to make for high school. (I also had to put together a math portfolio for high school.)

These portfolios were a collection of a student’s best work done in that segment of education (e.g., anytime during high school). Students compiled the papers, revised them, ordered them, created a table of contents, wrote an introductory letter explaining what the works were and why they were chosen, and handed in the final result in a professional-looking folder. I personally found the portfolio creation process to be a lot of fun, mainly because most of the work was already done (I’d done the research and the writing work for class, and revision wasn’t a big deal), and because the final product seemed so impressive.

For my English portfolio, I included a huge report on Benjamin Banneker that I’d labored on for my sophomore year social studies class–a report that my teacher, Mr. Galloway, said I should try to get published in a magazine; a grant proposal for an archaeological dig to find the burial place of Llewellyn ab Gruffydd, the last true Prince of Wales, which I had created for my senior year anthropology class; the beginning of Randes’ tale from my still-unfinished “Warrior” saga/novel/whatever, which I had been writing on my own; plus two other works–I remember there were five, but I don’t remember what they all were.

In the end, my portfolio was huge. Two teachers (I won’t say who they were because they weren’t supposed to do this) took me aside the day after I handed it in, told me it was amazing, and said right off the bat that I was obviously going to get a Distinguished for it. (There are four “grades” for portfolios, and for the standardized tests, too: Novice, Apprentice, Proficient, and Distinguished. If you’re interested, I got a Proficient on the math portfolio.)

“Are you still writing?” Mrs. Braden asked.

“Not really,” I said, thinking of this journal and how it’s all the writing I do at all anymore, especially now that I’ve quit the AMRN for good.

We spent awhile catching up–I assured her that I’m in remission, told her that I got married and about my job, and gave her my contact information, and she told me about her brother who is also in remission, and how she herself has been battling skin cancer–and then as we prepared to part ways she said, “You really should start writing again. You’re so gifted.”

I was sort of embarrassed, and looked away and said, “Well, I journal, but that’s about it.” I really wasn’t sure what to say.

I don’t know what to say, even now. I could condemn myself for being lazy, or for being afraid to try to write because of what I and others expect from my writing. I could complain that I have nothing interesting to say. I could muse that it seems like whenever I try to write something, it comes out terrible. But I don’t know, I’m tired of going over and over all that stuff. I want a better answer, like I don’t write because I don’t want to, or that I am planning to write again. Something that isn’t me sitting around in limbo.

Right now, though, I really need to get to bed. Gotta catch an early afternoon flight tomorrow. Hope I wake up in time.

I’m going to redo my journal, I think…break it up into a few different blogs, each accessible from its own area on pixelscribbles.com.  I may even password-protect one of them and leave it just for myself, so I can rant and rave and post it the way I’m used to posting diary entries without the danger of Too Much Information.  (I like the Blogger interface, and I don’t really care to keep a separate, local diary.  I don’t think breaking it up into different ‘blogs’ would be as annoying as having to deal with local files versus files on my webserver.)

I think that splitting things off would inspire me to be more careful about how I write.  For example, the post I’m writing now could go in a “site news” area; my long love letter to Fujiwara no Sai could go in an “anime” or “Japan” section; my daily workouts could go in a “health/lifestyle” area, and then I could have one or more blogs just for discussing my thoughts on things.  I think this might inspire me to take more time in crafting…what I do now is little more than a quick ramble and a tapping of the “Publish Post” button.  I would like my posts to be well-written rather than rushed and conversational (Goei showed me recently how beautiful a journal entry can be; when he visited my journal to return my compliment, I was embarrassed that there was nothing of note for him to see).

One danger of splitting things up would be creating too much fragmentation…then maybe one section would get the most posts, or each section would be updated but only once a month or two, etc.  Because of that, I’m going to limit the number of split-off blogs by coming up with very general categories.  A “Japanese Media” category can cover my discussions of anime, manga, j-drama, Japanese music, and more–or I could simply have a “Japan” area, or even a “Southeast Asia” category.  As you can see, I’m not quite sure yet how I want to break it down.

I have been thinking that I would like to create Blogger blogs for all my original site sections, too…get my poetry and short stories up in post form (not that there is much to see in that regard, but it would give me impetus to add to the library).  I could also create one or more photoblogs, which would link to full images in my smugmug account.

The possibilities are pretty endless, but there are problems with this scheme too.  I can’t have subcategories, for one thing.  I was thinking that I could use meta tags of some sort to assign categories with HTML, and that is a possibility.  But that kind of leads into the biggest problem…how to present the blogs.

I was thinking it would be nice to have a main page (probably the root of pixelscribbles.com) where a user could define which blogs they wanted to have show up.  The posts would then all load in reverse chronological order (last post first, like a normal blog), all together and easy to read, with the title, date/time, and which blog they were posted to (e.g., “Sai~~~~ (spoilers, if you haven’t seen/read all of HnG) posted at 7:47 PM in Anime”, or whatever, where the 7:47 PM would link to the post, and the word Anime would link to the blog about Anime).

However, I don’t think this is possible with Blogger…or if it is, I have no idea how.

Blogger does have a tutorial on how to include multiple blogs on one page using includes.  As far as I can tell, though, each blog would load in a separate part of the page.  So I could have one blog on the left hand side and one blog on the right; they wouldn’t be all together.

The only way I can think of to get all the blogs together would be for Blogger to publish each post twice: once in its standard blog and once in the main blog.  But that wouldn’t allow users to pick which blogs they wanted to see on the main page (and plus, Blogger can’t do that anyway–I would have to publish each post to two different places manually).

It occurs to me that maybe, with some crazy coding sk1llz, it might be possible to use includes to pull all the blog content in, and then use Javascript or something to hide the blogs that the user didn’t want to see.  However, loading it all at once would bog down the server and be cumbersome for the end user, and it seems like a messy solution.  Maybe PHP can do it server-side so the user never sees anything but the output, but even then it might take a moment to pull in all the posts, order them correctly, remove the blogs the user doesn’t want to see, and then generate a page.  Plus, I don’t know how to code all that :>

Blogger could solve this problem for me if it had user-definable categories and subcategories for posts.  I wouldn’t even have to make separate blogs, if that were the case.

I feel like an answer must exist already, though.  Does anyone have any ideas?

My flights yesterday were all right.  I got up on time, got ready, and caught a ride with my coworker’s husband to the airport.  Augusta Regional Airport is very, very small.  I was thinking it would be comparable to Bluegrass Field, but…it’s not.  You go in one room and there are some places to check in, and then you go down a hall and through security, and then you end up going outside(!) to get to the gates, which are all in a row in the back.  (I think the outside area is more of a courtyard, but it was still weird.)

Atlanta was Atlanta.  I was sent to the wrong gate by the helpful woman giving directions as I deplaned, ran back to the proper gate, and was apparently too late to board.  I went back to the other gate to wait an hour for that flight, and discovered that the computer thought I was on the flight I was supposed to be on.  That was a little odd.  But they straightened it out and I got on the next flight just fine.  I sat in seat 1C, and there wasn’t room for my duffel so it had to be stowed, and I had to stow my laptop bag too because there was no seat in front of me to shove it under.

Our flight attendant, Penny, was a hoot.  She said things like “The FAA says we can’t have baggage sticking out from under the chairs, and the FAA is the law, so I’m going to check everyone’s seats” and “I’ve already checked everyone’s seatbelts, but the FAA requires that I demonstrate it for you anyway…now I can keep my job!”  And at the end of the flight, when she was debriefing us on flight procedures, apparently someone in the back stood up, because she cut off her droning-yet-pleasant speech to shout, “SIR, SIT DOWN!”  That’s not exaggeration; she really did shout.  I about cracked up laughing.

The other great thing about the ATL to LEX flight was the fact that they served…cran-apple juice!  (Brooke knows what I’m talking about…)

I got to AGS at around 6:20.  The flight was delayed until 7:40 or so, and I reached ATL at 8:30.  I missed the 9:08 flight due both to the woman giving directions and to the time it took to get from Concourse D to Concourse C.  I got on the 10:20 flight, meaning I finally got to LEX at 11:30.  Five hours isn’t bad; it’s three hours less than it would have taken to drive.  And since I used a buddy pass, I only paid $54, which is about 50% less than gas and food.  All in all, it’s a great deal, even given the waiting.  (I read Getting Things Done during the between-times…and you can’t read a book while you’re driving!)

I’m hoping quietly that my coworker will be generous again and offer me buddy passes next year, so that Sean and I can use them to get to Japan for cheap.  In the meantime, I think I can score one more for this year, to give to Dawn while she’s here in the States in September.  That would mean she could fly from New York to Atlanta instead of having to take the train.  We’ll see :)

I would probably fly a lot more if it was cheaper.  I’d love to take a hop, skip and jump around the country, to see friends and new places.  But actual plane fares are so expensive :X  It’d be nice if we could get those costs down, and if we also had a good passenger rail system set up between cities.  One like they have in Japan, that practically never has problems and is always on time :)  Oh well, man can always dream.

When I got home, Dad made me a “Vidalia Onion Burger”.  It was really, and I mean really, good.  I’m going to have to buy some to make for Sean.  Then I went over to AJ and Faye’s to see them and Connor and Logan.  Logan is growing up so fast.

AJ said that I shouldn’t feel bad if Logan was shy, because he is shy with everyone.  I started to play with Logan and tickle his feet while he was in his high chair, and Logan loved it.  AJ shook his head and said, “Okay, never mind about that shy thing!”  I know it’s silly, but it really made me feel good that Logan reacted that way.  I don’t have the relationship I would like to have with him, but knowing that he is open to it is really nice.

Meanwhile, Connor is still my buddy :)  He showed me his room–now sans the huge cardboard castle, meaning there is actually room to play–and his new toys.  Then we played with some plastic things that stick together, and Logan played too (mainly grabbing whatever I was making and tearing it apart ;D).  I took some pictures, which I’ll post somewhere at some point, maybe :>  Then we all went back to Mom and Dad’s, because Aunt Evelyn and crew were heading over.

It turned out to be Evelyn, Walter, Bertha (Walter’s mother), and two of the grandkids, Aaron and Sarah.  Sarah is seven months older than Connor, but she’s actually smaller than he is.  Aaron is something like thirteen.  The last time I saw him, he was like…four!  (His older stepbrother, Philip, I remember being around 12 or 13…and he just graduated from high school, and is now learning about detailing cars :>)

We all visited for awhile in the living room, then went out back, where Connor drove Sarah around in his little green car (he’s really good at driving it!) and then let her take a turn driving.  Meanwhile, the rest of us sat under the canopy and chatted.  At some point, Dad and Philip and Walter went to play pool.  Ben and Dan and Boone showed up for band practice, and we all went inside for a bit.  Then, finally they had to leave to visit someone else.

It was nice to see them all again :)  Evelyn told me to say hello to Sean for her, because “he’s a nice boy”.  ;>  Sean and Ben and I visited them in Austin once, back when Sarah was 13 months old (she was so tiny!).  Sarah is really grown up now–she’s five, and she speaks like an adult!  I was really impressed.

After the visit we ordered pizza for dinner and then I watched a bunch of Angel, Buffy, and Charmed with Mom.  It was nice to do that again.  I like being able to share that with her.  I remember when I was younger, she always got on me for watching too much TV, and now it’s totally the other way around ;>

Today I got up at 10:30 and took a shower, and then Connor came over, so he and Mom and I have been doing various things.  Now they’re taking a nap, and the boys are having band practice, and Dad is either watching TV or doing something in the workshop (he’s so quiet, I can never be sure, but he’s usually in one of those two places), so I’ve had some time to myself.  Being around Connor is sort of exhausting to me, because I’m not used to being around kids.  :>

I’m glad to be home.  I seem to have forgotten to bring a network cable, though, so I’m using the engraving laptop that AJ usually uses at work right now.  I won’t be able to use it tomorrow during business hours, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do about Internet access…I may have to set up a card table in the back room and use the cord back there.  We’ll see.

They painted this office the last time I was here, and it still looks good.  It had turned horribly tan/yellow from all the cigarette smoking.  AJ has quit smoking–he stopped on his birthday (which was five days ago, so we’ll see).  I’m not sure if Ben quit too, but I know Dad hasn’t.  It would be nice if they were all able to quit for good…

That’s pretty much it.  Before I sign off, I wanted to mention that I love flying.  The thrill of taking off and landing hasn’t dulled for me yet.  It is just so…awesome.  It’s amazing that we can force huge metal devices filled with people to soar off the ground.  I love it.

It occurs to me that in the rush of preparation, I may not have actually informed everyone of what I’m up to.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Lexington, Kentucky to spend a week with my family.

On August 4, Sean and I are flying to Boston for a convention and to meet up with some online people.  I plan to check out Harvard and MIT while we’re there, if at all possible.  I also heard rumors about going to the beach, but the chances of that are slim considering that Sean hates the beach ;>

After that I’ll be home for awhile until we go to AWA in September.

So, there you have it :)

I may have linked to this MSN article before, but I think it’s really interesting.  To an extent, you can choose to be happy.  That’s something that I feel like I know instinctively, but I didn’t know it when I was younger–especially when I was a depressive teenager.  I think it’s something that everyone has to learn.

The steps to getting to happiness are: 1) nurture your relationships; 2) exercise; 3) be more extroverted; 4) nurture your spiritual side.  Also,

happiness is associated with characteristics like autonomy, competence, close relationships, and high self-esteem.

One part of the article in particular warns against buying things to be happy.

“The route to sustained happiness is not to change the static circumstances of your life, but rather to change the activities that you’re involved in,” says Sheldon. “This could mean committing to a new vocational plan, pursuing a new set of goals, or joining a new organization.”

One more interesting quote:

One way to steer your life toward happiness is simply to count your blessings, and perhaps even create and make regular entries in your own “gratitude journal.” Myers points to research showing that people who pause each day to reflect on the positive aspects of their lives (for example, their health, friends, family, education, freedom) are more likely to experience heightened well-being.

I think that this journal is something like that for me.  I write about my triumphs and feelings of happiness.  I write about bad things, too, and I think I need to work on being more positive here.  But it’s a start.

The last paragraph of the article is great.  Check it out.  (I was going to include it here, but I’ve quoted enough already…)

I really felt as I was reading this article that my opinions on happiness were reaffirmed.  I have thought for awhile now that the happiest people are those who are working towards a goal.  It’s not enough to just have a goal.  You have to know that you are doing something every day that will help you reach it.  Working towards a goal makes you feel good about yourself because you are accomplishing something.  In other words, you like yourself more, and liking yourself is absolutely necessary for true happiness.

But you can’t be single-mindedly devoted to a goal and be happy.  You have to have relationships, friends.  My husband is a pretty happy person in general.  He spends a lot of time on his computer, but he has really good friends there.  He takes care of those friends, and they take care of him, and seeing them and working with them each day is very important to him.  Sean’s goals aren’t to start a business or land a high-paying job or what have you.  He seems to know instinctively that working towards something, whatever it is, is the road to fun and happiness.  The things he works towards are for him and for the online communities he is a part of.  It’s a different, rather social kind of achievement.

(Sean is the only “gamer” I really know well, so I’m wondering if this is true for other people who play video games.  When playing a game, you’re working towards a goal, and when playing online or a multi-player game on a server, you have to work cooperatively.  It gets the social aspect and it gets the working towards a goal in one fell swoop.  And I do think that, in general, gamers are happy people.  I’ve never met a gamer like the ones you see portrayed in the news.)

For me, the times when I’ve felt the most unhappy are when I’m powerless to change something that I’m willing to work my ass off to change.  And lately, now that I’m doing workouts and things and taking better care of myself, I’ve felt better–I’m working towards the goal of a healthy me.  Soon I’d like to start working on the goal of getting proficient in Japanese.  I have lots of study materials.  I want to start saving up to buy those Pimsleur tapes, because hearing it and practicing it is important, but in the meantime I’ve got books and plenty of online resources.  It’s been nagging at me that I haven’t done anything, and I think I will be even happier if I start up some self-study.

In a nutshell, it’s productive people who are happy.  If you just fall into the status quo, get complacent, and sit around all day doing passive activities like watching TV, then you’re not bettering yourself, and you’ll start to lose respect for yourself.  But if you work to improve yourself and do the things that you like with people you like, you’re on the road to happiness (and possibly other successes, depending on what your goals are).

At times like these, I feel so optimistic :)  I just want to go out and make my mark on the world.

I spoke with a good friend last night, someone about whom I care very deeply.  I left the conversation feeling, well, upset.

I don’t mind if she sees what I think about it, because apparently I haven’t been able to present my thoughts coherently in person, but in order to protect her privacy and the privacy of other parties, I won’t use her name.  (This secrecy stuff is really annoying…)

My friend’s best friend, her closest companion, is a guy who broke her heart.  For months she pined for him.  She still says he is the epitome of attraction, a great guy, that she is so similar to him and that she can understand him so well, that he has taught her so much about herself and how to love herself…so that even while she’s joking that he’s trying to find her a boyfriend, you get that sense of unresolved feelings.  She will deny this; she says they are best friends.  Back when she made her decision to stop wanting him as a lover, she insisted that she was not going to stop seeing him or being friends with him, because he was too important to her, too big a part of her life.

So, in other words, she consciously chose not to move on at all.  She chose to stay in limbo, to pound her feelings down, to relegate herself to second place in order to be near the guy who won’t have her.  It’s like saying, “I’d rather have him this way than not at all.”

And subconsciously, it’s like saying, “Maybe someday he’ll see what I’m worth and change his mind.”

I won’t pretend to understand his side of all this.  He dated her, he broke up with her, he continued to have sex with her after the fact because it was convenient and fun.  And from what I hear, he does care about her.  She seems to think that I think he is evil, but I don’t.  I’ve said numerous times that I think he is human.

The reason I don’t think she should spend time with him is not because I think he is a bad person.  I have no data on whether or not he is a bad person.  And, frankly, I don’t care whether or not he is a bad person.  What I know is that it is horribly emotionally damaging to cling to someone the way she’s doing, to absolve him of all guilt (which she does, even though she claims not to, simply by allowing him the pleasure of her company), to pretend that her strong, overwhelming feelings of a few months ago have suddenly turned off like a light switch.

She’s subconsciously leading herself on.  She may have even subconsciously decided that as long as she can be with him this way, she doesn’t need more from him–and that she doesn’t need any romantic relationship.

She is letting him abuse her by staying near him.  It doesn’t matter whether he means to abuse her or not.  That is the end result.  She loves him, she wants him, he won’t have her, she lets him have her friendship anyway even after all that happened.  He will never know from this the depths of her feelings.  He will probably assume that she is fine, that they are friends, and everything is hunky-dory.  So he will treat her the way he’s always treated her, the way that made her love him in the first place.

They’re together, and yet not, by his choice.  Every day is a torture chamber for my friend…one that she jumps into eagerly, because he’s there.  It may be beautiful outside, a wonderful world where she can grow and learn and find love, but that doesn’t matter because he is down in the torture chamber.  She’ll stunt her own growth–and she is stunting her own growth–simply in order to keep him near.

It’s not like no one has told her this, either.  But she denies it, vehemently.

Last night she said she felt bad because he felt out of place during a recent get-together with “the group”.  I was extraordinarily annoyed by this, though I held myself in check.  I calmly explained that anyone who isn’t part of a group will feel left out.  But it seems to me that she wants him to become part of the group, or something.  I’ve already told her that if he’s there spending time with us regularly, then I will have to opt out of those meetings.  I refuse to watch her destroy herself.  She can do that on her own time.

What right does she have to expect us to accept him?  I don’t care what kind of person he is, or if I would have liked him in another circumstance, or whether or not he chose to hurt my friend the way he did.  What happened happened.  To me, he isn’t a person.  He is a part of my friend’s life that she needs to walk away from.  He will never be a person to me.  He will certainly never be my friend.