Because I can't be the only loser out there who clings to balls of fluff still. TELL ME WHO YOUR STUFFED ANIMALS ARE.

Baby is, as you'll know if you've read my last post, the polar bear I've had since birth. Baby's been through a lot; one of his legs seems to not have any stuffing in it anymore, though it hasn't been torn or anything like that. He's been a very much not white shade of grey for as long as I can remember, and he has a chip in his eye that I don't remember him getting. I used to rub his plastic nose on my lips all the time, an indicator of future habits, to the point where it actually fell off. My mother stitched him a new nose with red thread, since red was my favorite color at the time and it went quite well with his grey-and-black color scheme. Baby got me extra credit in art class one year.

And this is a photo of Baby with a stupid title, stupidly placed on DeviantArt. Appropriately, in that picture he is on my pillow!

Lieutenant Cuddles was a dog I bought from Duane Reade, intending to give it as a Valentine's Day gift to my parents. Unfortunately for them, I fell madly in love with Lt. Cuddles's cuteness and squeezability, which was far superior to the squeezability of most stuffed animals. I took the heart from his mouth (it was hanging on by a thread anyway) and kept him for myself. Unfortunatley, he is currently missing in action. I do hope I find him before the year's out, but a part of me worries he's gone forever.

Buddy was bought from a craft fair I went to with part of my mother's family. I don't remember much else about the fair, except that it was in a hockey arena and my cousin Justin got a little gecko he named Dexter. I wasn't interested in anything until, on the way out, I spotted a vender with stuffed dogs. As I've always loved dogs, I took a slightly closer look. Each dog had a scarf proclaiming its name around its neck.

If I were there today, I'd obvious have customized one to have my own dog's name, but I quickly saw a Dalmation named Buddy, which happened to be the name of Justin's Dalmation! I had to have it. Kevin then got a Dalmation with a customized scarf that read Riley, since that was the name of Justin's sister's Dalmation. Even though I never really spent very much time with Buddy and Riley, I liked them, but Buddy the stuffed animal has wormed his way into my heart beyond that. Besides, if I don't have Lt. Cuddles, I need some kind of dog in stuffed animal form. Buddy's place is just opposite Baby on my bed (on the other side of my decorative pillow, that is).

Chippy is a chipmunk. That's pretty much his appeal. I like Chippy, but there's just not much to say about him; his size, which is small, does not lend itself to squishability. He sits in front of the pillow.

Serena used to have a much longer name, but I've forgotten it. Unsurprisingly, I got Serena in my Sailor Moon days. Serena is a white horse with a halter, and is the largest stuffed animal I have. She doesn't stay on my bed, and though she's soft she rarely gets squeezed, but I do love her. I actually only originally got her because Jessi had two similar stuffed horses, though hers weren't white.

Auntie Lope was my oh-so-gosh-darn-clever name for... a stuffed antelope. I came across it when my brother and I ransacked a stuffed animal stash from the basement. I actually don't know where she is now; I presume she's still somewhere in the house, but she might've been donated to Goodwill or something a while back without my knowing. In any case, I mostly liked her because she was the most interesting stuffed animal ever seen. She had neat legs that didn't flop around but weren't stiff or uncuddly, though they did make hugs a little ungainly.

I've also still got my fairly massive (fairly because, hell, I know that an assload of other collectors had a fuckton more than I did) collection of Beanie Babies. There's a dog with two puppies reclining on a pillow in the corner of my room at home as well, and a white teddy bear my mother got from our neighbor Georgia before she died on my bed, but that one's never felt like mine (and is also a teddy bear, which I rarely find very appealing... and it's not very huggable). I've probably had others in the past, too, but I don't remember them anymore. I know there were Care Bears in the house at some point, and yeah, those probably were mine, but they never stayed in my room that I could remember. Oh! And I had a pink stuffed rabbit that probably had a name at some point, but which I don't remember anymore. It was the first thing I ever won in a crane game, and also won completely by accident! I don't know what's happened to that rabbit.

Recently — that is, in the past few weeks at least, but possibly since I've started taking my new anti-depressant medication — my sleep has changed significantly. Aside from issues of insomnia, I've been sleeping longer when I don't have to get up. That might just be run-off from the energy lost during the insomnia periods, but I don't know for sure.

In any case, I recently went home for the weekend after a week of struggling to sleep. I have unfortunately misplaced Lieutenant Cuddles, so this provided one significant difference for me to see how my sleep's changed: I have something to hold on to, that something being my most treasured stuffed animal, Baby.

Yeah, I know, it's stupid for a twenty-one-year-old to still have stuffed animals, blah de fucking blah. I don't care. I love soft things and cute things. Stuffed animals are soft and cute. A few have sentimental value. I actually happen to be fairly selective about mine, even; of all the stuffed animals that have gone through my parents' house, maybe five of them were important to me. Maybe ten were interesting enough to get named. Serena was important because she was big; Auntie Lope was the most interesting animal I'd ever seen in tiny stuffed cloth form; Buddy bore a resemblance to a dog I knew; and Baby was the best damned stuffed bear ever. See, Baby isn't a teddy bear. Baby's a polar bear, and shaped in a much less annoying, much more soft and cuddly way. Baby's also been mine since the day I was born (thus the rather simple name). Baby's stood up to a lot with me, which is why he still sleeps in my arms at home. In fact, the only reason I didn't bring him to college was because I was afraid I might misplace him. Yeah.

Anyway, enough crap about stuffed animals. The point is, I tucked Baby under my arm when I went to sleep, as I've often done. I was exhausted, as the week before had been a constant fight for sleep, and it happily didn't take me long to drift off.

When I was little, I was known for moving around a lot in my sleep. My blankets often got kicked to the floor, even in winter, resulting in my waking up cold. My pillows would end up on the floor even up until last year. A couple of times I even woke up with my feet by the head of my bed and my head at the end; it's kind of amazing I didn't fall out of bed in my sleep more often than I did. That first night back home, after a week of insomnia, I didn't budge. I woke up, and there Baby was, tucked under my arm in the exact same position. I hadn't even moved from the side I fell asleep on, but— Baby. Baby had never stayed in my arms through the night before. Most of the time he didn't even stay in the bed, winding up on the floor with the blankets and pillows.

I'm not exaggerating. It was out of place enough for it to be something I noticed immediately upon waking up, and it gave me more of a sense of displacement than waking up in a hotel or someone else's house. It was weird enough to mention to my mom, who just said it must have been because I was so exhausted.

Eh, I've been exhausted before. On top of that, it happened every night after that I was there, and I've noticed it now here at school, too — though I have less proof, having nothing to cling to at night.

And I've been sleeping on my left side too, which is strange. Not as strange, as I'm sure it's happened before, but when I got back from home it seemed like I couldn't fall asleep unless I slept on my left side. Usually it's been the right; of course, when I moved more in my sleep I'd wake up in any number of positions, but now that I'm still it's more obvious. It might just be something with my mattress pad, I guess, though, since I did sleep on my right side at home. The only correlation between sleeping on my right at home and my left here is that both ways put me facing the closer wall, but... eh. I don't know that that could really be significant.

The not-moving thing, though, that seems significant, somehow. It's a little bit worrying, actually.

But my dreams are going pretty well!

( It gets long, as they do. )

It wasn't last night's dream, but I forgot to write it out yesterday. SO.

The other night I dreamt that I was living back home post-college, still working at the movie theater. My hometown had become a crime hotspot, and murders were becoming disturbingly commonplace. It seemed to always be night there, too, though it could be that I just kept working nights. I also worked sometimes at another theater, though I don't know which one — still the same company, and still small, but neither of them looked like the real theater I work at.

One of my coworkers had been killed, in fact, shortly after graduating herself. Nicole — though everyone called her Nikki in my dream, even though we all knew she was Nicole... maybe it was a college thing — and maybe also some other people; I think Jessica, who doesn't actually work there anymore, might have been murdered as well.

Homes all over stocked up on weapons: guns, knives, crossbows. My house felt like an arsenal, and I got the feeling that that was fairly commonplace in the neighborhood, which is sort of funny, since most of my neighbors are elderly. And no one really knew how to use the stuff, or at least not the crossbows; the guns they knew how to use, and the knives, but they didn't go out and practice with them, because people just tried to stay home as much as possible.

One day I was walking along a dirt road somewhere, through some field. I have no idea where that was meant to be, since it was close to my home, and I got the impression that I was coming home from work. (Walking?!) I stopped, and saw this pile of red rubber balls in a ditch. I held out my hand and tried to will one of them to come to me, as if I had telekinetic powers, but the one I was looking at burst into flames instead.

Then this guy appeared from nowhere, a total Asian Movie Martial Arts Teacher type. He was tall and wore a green and gold robe, and had a pointed, long white beard. He told me that he was trying to find eleven people to grant eleven elemental stone powers to, and I had been the one to fit to the Fire stone. He told me what a few of the other powers were, and one was something like Speech. I guessed, somehow, that it was Cheyenne. He told me I was right. I laughed about that a little when I woke up, honestly, since Cheyenne is the one who thought I was insulting her when I called her charismatic.

I went home, and when I got there I found that my dad had hired a woman to teach me to use weaponry. Apparently, being young and pretty much a freeloader at that point, I was to be the neighborhood's designated superhero sort, and patrol the woods (which had expanded in my dreams, and were creepy and dark enough that you expected Ichabod Crane to come galloping through followed by the Headless Horseman at any moment) when I wasn't working. Possibly I was not meant to be the only one, but in any case, I had to learn to use some weapons. The crossbow I learned quick enough, which was good, because NO ONE KNEW HOW TO USE IT. I just don't get why we had so many if they were useless, man.

In the midst of a training session, a madman (we knew he was mad, and dangerous, automatically; he was bearded and wearing something like pajamas, but he didn't seem outwardly dangerous) ran into the yard and started running circles around my father. I shot at him, then ran out of bullets and picked up a crossbow; one arrow skimmed his shoulder, and then he turned to run into the neighbor's yard and I shot again. I hit him in the ass, and he ran down the street with an arrow sticking out of his left cheek.

The fire thing never came up again, even though it probably would have been PRETTY DAMN USEFUL THEN.

So the past twenty-four (well, twenty-five now) hours have been pretty much amazing.

( Eddie Izzard and Mika )

I really, really miss my old building right now.

I woke up feeling strangely down (strangely given my medication; I've felt much better most days) to begin with. Possibly it was because I'm on my period. (Now you know!) On top of that, it's been raining since just after my first class.

But I thought, hey, it's gonna be okay. Eddie Izzard tonight. I'll get my prescriptions and take a nap and all will be well. Also, at some point, food.

So I went to drop off my prescriptions. The pharmacist was a little short with me — not saying anything directly, but kind of acting like I'd done something stupid. No big deal, though. It was supposed to take "at least an hour" so I went back to my room to nap... and, okay, I delayed the nap a bit, but I figured it'd be all right anyway.

At 4:15PM my phone alarm beeped, and I hit snooze, as I tend to when napping; before it could go off at 4:20PM, though, the building fire alarm started blaring.

Fantastic.

Since I had just been asleep, I didn't think too clearly when gathering stuff before leaving. I grabbed my purse, ID, key, and phone, and at least thought to put on shoes and grab my big red hoodie, but completely forgot my umbrella.

Faaantastic.

So it was time enough later that I figured I could check in to see if my prescriptions were ready. Yay, they were! And for some reason one of them was twenty-eight more dollars than it'd been every other time I'd gotten it.

Fuck.

Turns out the insurance company decided the pill is now a luxury, at least in the form that I'm taking it (which is a fairly specific form, since I need a certain hormone to balance my fucked up system out). There are alternatives, but it might've been nice to know that before I went to get it, so that I actually could have asked about those alternatives with my doctor.

And did I mention it was raining, and that I had no umbrella? I did? Did I also mention that I was wearing tattered pajama pants that I'd put on because my jeans were soaking? No? I was. And they aren't in great shape. They are not fun to wear when wet. This whole time I couldn't stop my legs from shaking — not hurting, at least — because, yeah, twenty flights of stairs. So much fun.

I went into a deli (for shelter, and also because I thought it was a doughnut shop, but that was the next block down), and finally started to feel better around the staff there, because they were ridiculously friendly. It was the kind of place where you want to go and be a regular and greet everyone by name because they're so damned nice. Given that I'd just spent more than I'd thought I'd need to on my pills, I only got a hot chocolate, but they were still so damned nice — "Tell me if it's strong enough. Is it good? Don't stand, come on, sit, sit, dry off a little!"

One of the staff was stocking a fridge with drinks and dropped one, and it didn't break everywhere but it started leaking. Nobody got mad, though, the woman who'd got my hot chocolate just said "dame lo" and disposed of it and the man who'd taken my order (if you can call it an order) asked if he was okay, then another guy came by and laughed and said "suavemente" and made the woman laugh. It was just a stupid little thing, but it made me smile.

Still, I miss Water Street. There were never fire issues there, and the pharmacist at the Duane Reade around the corner was so nice, too. I mean, not overly nice, he didn't know me all that well and he obviously knew some people very well, but still — warmer at least than the people at the CVS I go to this year.

I'm still tired.

I've actually managed to sleep well these past few nights, and dreamt fairly vividly, but not well.

The other night I dreamt that I had come home for the weekend (which, in my dream, was October 6) and found out, after I'd already been home a night, that Kevin had leukemia. No one saw fit to tell me, except by e-mail — my dad had sent it two days before and got mad because I hadn't checked my e-mail that day. Kevin was going out with his friends even though he said the doctors told him he had only thirty hours or so left to live.

I woke up and went back to sleep, and I dreamt that I had woken up from that dream but Kevin still had leukemia. Then that happened again.

Last night I dreamt for the first time that I can remember that I was pregnant and I wasn't blissfully happy about it. I'd already been pregnant once, at seventeen or eighteen — like I usually am in the dreams where I'm pregnant and blissfully happy about it — and when I'd given birth I had realized I had no idea what I was going to do then, so my parents took the baby from me and I never saw it again. I never even knew if it was a girl or a boy. So I was pregnant again, only this time the father was at least around and not running away — and I kept thinking, "Man, and we didn't even really have sex. We were barely even touching. I should serve as a warning: I only barely had sex twice, and both times I got pregnant." It was last summer and I was twenty-one, and I was working at the movie theater and someone else was pregnant (not Christine, possibly Crystal, even though that was two summers ago) and I was horribly afraid I was going to do something that would cause a miscarriage. One day I slipped on a rug at home and freaked out, but my mother didn't even care. My hands were always on my stomach, and I didn't know how, but I knew I wanted to keep this baby, or at the very least know what it's face looked like before I gave it away of my own accord. (I hoped that was what my parents had done with my other baby — adopted it out.) Really, I wanted to keep the baby.

Then I dreamt that I was part of a movie like Dodgeball, with Ben Stiller as the antagonist and someone else famous (possibly Jim Carrey, possibly someone else) as a man who had recently returned to his hometown, a small mining town that was being crushed by corporate fists and general economic collapse. There was some strange competition involving something that looked like a giant blue-and-white roulette table, and the winner would get some ridiculously large sum of money, and of course Ben Stiller's character wanted it not only for himself but to see the mining town fall apart, and the other man vowed to start a new town for the miners if he got the money. He won, and then there was an Earthquake that swallowed the whole gaming field and Ben Stiller's character willfully stayed behind while everyone else got out, except his servant sort of guy, who said he had nothing else to live for anyway. By this point it wasn't a movie anymore, it was real (in my dream, of course).

So he built a new town where no one had to mine anymore, and strange complexes of buildings. The space between the buildings seemed more like halls than roads, except they weren't covered. Everyone lived connected to someone else. I started a restaurant with a few other girls who could cook and bake, and we tried to convince an elderly woman to make pies for us but she just wanted to boil salt and yell at people through her window.

Then I started to hear screaming one night from a farther-out building, and ran to that place. In one room a little girl was screaming that her hands were burning, but several other people, including the guy who'd won the competition (and was more or less the mayor), were already there and told me not to worry. They said it happened a couple of nights a week — the girl would fall asleep and wake up screaming that her hands were burning, and it had only started happening since she got this new plush toy (it was pretty much a fuschia face with a big grin, with tiny horns, arms, and legs sticking out) and it only happened when she slept with it and touched it. Any place she touched him would burn. And it wasn't just the little girl being strange, like kids can be, or dreaming; they'd touched her hands and felt them burn, and felt strange heat come from the toy. They called it Mr. Evil. The girl didn't want to let go of Mr. Evil, though, even though she knew he burned her hands. I was really unsettled, and believed, like everyone else did except the girl, that the toy was possessed. One night I took it from the room while she screamed and her mother tended to her hands, and I passed the mayor. He looked tired, but he didn't get up; he just asked me what I was doing.

"I'm going to burn it," I said, and I told him it was what he should have done a long time ago. But when I got outside, in the desert-like place we lived in, I was afraid. It was dark, and the toy was demonic and I was pretty much alone there. I thought I'd wait until day to burn it, and then bury the ashes far away so that if they were still possessed nothing evil would grow too close to town.

Then I had to talk to a woman who had been something of an outlaw and who was in love with the mayor. She had wanted to be with him, but he got the girl and all after the competition and the girl wasn't her. She wanted to kill the woman he was with, but I told her I couldn't let her do that, but that she could change things and be happy anyway. Basically, we — one other woman and I — gave her a goth makeover. She was happier then.

Then I woke up.

So last night I had trouble sleeping once again. I did manage to sleep easily this afternoon for a bit, but I couldn't sleep long.

Anyway, last night I was at least asleep once long enough to dream and remember it... aaand I dreamt that I'd run out of Brita filters and cans of Coke, so I was telling Eunho we'd have to drink all the bottled water I bought instead.

So crazy!

I'm heading home today for a looong weekend. I'm kind of looking forward to imposed relaxation, but also kind of DREADING THE FUCK OUT OF IT but, hey, the dogs will be there.

I miss them. A lot.

Also I'll get to see my friends. And see True Blood and Hung. And Dollhouse starts tomorrow!

Hopefully I can placate my parents with this cheap delicious* sake I bought for them!

*Disclaimer: I am not sure if the sake is delicious. It remains unopened and forever outside my belly.

I AM FEELING THE FEAR GUYS.

Edit: Oh, and I've made an appointment... not with a psychiatrist yet, but with Tisch counseling. Looking at the Social Worker made me want to cry, because she seemed so damned CONCERNED and I just wanted to go, "Fuck it, you work at NYU. I'm pretty sure you see cases plenty worse than slouchy little me every day. Stop pretending to care." Or maybe she just looks permanently concerned, and figured the best possible way to use that deformity was to become a social worker and make young patients burst into tears.

I also felt a little like she was trying to trip me up, for some reason. "OH ON YOUR IN SHEET YOU SAID—" I know what I said! I also know you've asked me questions that are on that thing like a dozen times, and that an individual's issues are not something that can just be written out in a form. Unless they're crazy, in which case the patient (IE, me) is not the one who should be filling out said form. I can see it now...

FORM OF MENTAL ILLNESS: I CAN'T GET NO SATISFACTION

That sounds like a genuine mental illness to me! Dissatisfactia. I suffer from it.

And the entire day I've had Mika's song Lollipop stuck in my head. IT HAS THE BEST VIDEO EVER MAN.

I really just need to see a psychiatrist.

I don't want to, but I don't have a lot of other options anymore.

I feel like I'm back in freshman year and that was not a good time. My mother actually suggested I take a year off for mental health. For mental health! I am not going crazy yet, I'm just fucking depressed. I need something that will just get me to stop hating everything all the time without making me so tired it doesn't even matter. And man, like that wouldn't derail everything anyway and cost so much fucking money. Uh, yeah, I'll take a year off for mental health when I start seeing the walls leak blood and talking about my buddies in the Civil War or something.

It's the goddamned tortured artist thing anyway. How can I write well if I don't hate myself and everything around me? IF TV HAS TAUGHT ME ANYTHING, IT IS THAT I CANNOT. Although clearly I'm not trying hard enough. My writing is not at its highest potential level. I need to start spray-painting hookers with my Zorro symbol or something. A big ol' letter, or maybe my initials. I'm not sure that's really fucked up enough, though. Maybe I'll never be fucked up enough, unless one of my brothers goes mental and kills the rest of my family or something.

Or maybe I should take up drinking and become a certified alcoholic. After all, what famous writers weren't alcoholics? None of the good ones, that's who. Even though I hate Hemingway. But given that I hate everything, that's pretty much par for the course! Ha ha! GOOD TIMES.

Or maybe I can go the kinda-gross crazy route and paint some parody of "REPENT" signs with my menstrual secretions. Something catchy but dumb. "REPEAT" or "REPOSE" or "RE-RENT (YOUR SPARE ROOM)".

I'm really fucking tired!

One thing I did not miss in the least while at Water Street (among many other things): the building fire alarm going off. The smoke/particle detector is annoying, sure, but it doesn't mean "OH GOD GET YOUR ASSES OUT NOW." And given that we were back in the building in less time than I would have though it would take to even climb the stairs, much less check each floor, I'm guessing there was no fire and that it was caused by either some idiot opening his door when his detector went off (one of the number one things we're warned not to do at the first floor meetings — but some people skip them) or some bigger idiot smoking in the building and then opening his door. I would guess something like what happened in Rubin, except those actually needed attention and meant a hell of a lot more time stuck outside, and we don't have a big kitchen here.

Sigh.

Twenty flights of stairs is a lot, even going down. I did grab some knitting before getting out though, so at least there's that.

Also, several times on the way down people stopped completely. Fire hazard much? I mean, sure, we all were pretty certain it wasn't a real fire, but that doesn't mean you should be a dick and stop up the entire line of people waiting to get out. Assholes.

Temporarily, anyway!

I uploaded this icon last night after bidding my Miyavi icon a sad farewell. I never used it anymore, so it needed to step aside and let a more useful icon take its place.

And then the first time I use the damned thing is in a moment of mixed embarrassment, fear, and glee.

( If my talk of fanfiction is not to your interest, don't bother reading on. )

I'm a little Twitter-obsessed at the moment, thus the lack of posts here. Well, okay, that and the lack of anything really worthwhile to say!

I mentioned it on Twitter, but on Saturday I went to see Inglourious Basterds again, get Adrienne's pizza, and finally to stop off at La Bella Ferrara's for cannoli. MOST AMAZING DAY EVER Y/Y?

( ...This got pretty long. )

In other news, I appear to have become a yarn slut. I blame KnitPicks.com.

The strikes were precise, but not always in the same place.

The strikes were precise, but not always in the same place.

The strikes were precise, but not always in the same place.

The strikes were precise, but not always in the same place.

Precision: it does not mean what you think it means.

Or did I learn the wrong definition of precise? Because as I was taught it, precision means not that the result is correct, but that it is consistent. As in, it's not good, but it's always the same.

Am I crazy? Stupid? Thinking about this too much?

(Otherwise it's a good fic!)

I have gotten pretty frustrated with people for a few things re: age gaps and dating. For example, my neighbors have a fifteen-twenty year age gap (...I don't know their exact ages) and my coworkers think that's disgusting. Even though she's over thirty, and it's not as though it started when she was a minor or anything. And then there are the people who think Hugh Hefner is, at the worst, just a normal guy, but "ew" at the first mention of "cougars."

On the other side, I get frustrated by the people who start calling other people small minded for being uncomfortable with the idea of dating someone much older or younger than themselves. And I've just come across a few who got upset that a person would suggest a guy search his own age group, give or take about twenty years, instead of anonymously contacting someone less than half his age on a dating site when he couldn't even be bothered to personalize the message (it was something he copied and pasted, talking all about himself).

For all the times I've been frustrated and arguing for those who date outside their age group, I'd still be pretty damned creeped out if a guy my dad's age came up to me out of the blue and made a pass at me. Even if I knew the guy, I don't think I'd be open to a relationship like that — I just wouldn't be comfortable. I'd probably feel stupid and inexperienced, or afraid of what his age would do to him, or — perhaps unjustly — like I was being taken advantage of. Not to mention the fact that, okay, yeah, thirty years older than me would mean he'd be succumbing to the physical affects of aging... and unless he looked like Robert Downey Jr. or Johnny Depp, I can't imagine I'd find too many fifty-year-olds all that attractive. And, sure, maybe there'd be some guy I'd make an exception for, but, again, I'd have to know him, to at least have spoken with him before I'd be comfortable with it at all.

But maybe I'm just weird, or maybe the above makes me a hypocrite. So, you know, comments — if anyone reads this, what's your take on it?

I have just realized that lopi is not, as I previously thought, a single brand of yarn, but rather an entire type, compromised of any and all Icelandic wool. D'oh.

Well, it should make finding the yarn for my Jayne's hat easier, anyway. (And my reverse Jayne's hat. I am going to call myself Cayne Jobb.)

These last two years (sophomore year specifically) I've been completely spoiled as far as dorms go. Although the building I'm in now was supposedly meant to be "luxury apartments," it's a lot fucking smaller. Don't get me wrong, what there is is pretty nice... but there's not a lot of it. The room's smaller than last year's, the view is... obviously nowhere near as good, and even the lobby seems tiny. (The elevators are also small, and given the flow of people I've seen just today... getting out of the building in the morning is gonna be interesting.)

But, oh well. I have a great roommate, I have a very nice bathroom, I have a melter (no candles allowed, so I cheated with Soy Beads*, and the melter's wolf-themed), I have a TV and some nice new stands. There aren't any posters up yet, so it still looks kind of bare (but the walls are so nice I don't know that I want to hang things up — I'll confer with Eunho about it),and it's definitely got a dorm look. It's also got some odd proportions — the cabinets in the bathroom are so low the shortest soap-pump we could find barely fit under it, and the hooks for the shower curtain are right on the ceiling, so my curtain is still like two feet off the ground.

Eunho said she wants to make a children's book with me. We'll see! (Maybe the one about Santa's reindeer?)

I was some dogs in the elevator. I'm guessing one of the FFiRs owns them (probably the woman I saw with them). Their names were Huckleberry and Beckett, and Beckett looked freshly washed and was very interested in sniffing me. Huckleberry sniffed, too, but Beckett didn't want to leave the elevator he was so intent on it. It made me miss Benny and Bo all the more.

My mother has been getting better since last night; at the ER they gave her an IV for antibiotics and some anti-nausea medication, and she actually ate today. The swelling went down; at the first rest stop her lip still looked big, but by the top we got in it was normal-sized (though her jaw is still quite swollen). Her headache even went away with over-the-counter painkillers. Huzzah!

Tomorrow classes start. I'm a mixture of excited, nervous, and annoyed that I can't visit the yarn store I want to yet. Drat! Well, I'll do it Wednesday. I'm trying to see if there aren't any open today, because holy crap, yarn has become like crack to me. (Actually, I really want to look for needles — the needle's I'll need for Jayne's hat and just some smaller ones so I can knit tighter.)

I know this is all kind of boring, but... I felt like writing. I promise to be marginally interesting again some day!

*Oh my God, these things have so many warnings about eating them! They don't look at all edible to me. I mean, I know it says they're made of soy, but not everything made of soy is edible, and these are so... waxy. They're meant to be like a candle (I think they use the same material to make their candles, actually). What the hell, people?!

After seeing the dentist today, Mom went to sleep and Dad said we might not be able to leave, either with her or at all. When she told him she didn't feel like she could go, though, he threw a fit - for which he eventually apologized, but let me tell you, it was not a fun time. We stayed home, because Mom didn't want to be alone feeling as awful as she did.

She slept a lot. Her infection, which the dentist had drained and initally made smaller, was returning. She couldn't keep down any food or even liquids, so she couldn't take the pills she'd been given - they just came right back up. Obviously that wasn't helping her feel better or actually get better.

Right now my parents are on their way to the ER, which is what the dentist recommended if the swelling didn't go down. I'm really nervous about this. I don't think tomorrow's going to be a good day.

I was supposed to be moving in right now. Or, you know, in the car all packed up and on the way to the city.

Unfortunately, a few days ago my mother's jaw started to hurt. Yesterday her mouth started to swell, and today she had a swollen lump the size of a golf ball on the side of her mouth. It's enough to prevent her from talking normally now.

Of course, being that it's Labor Day weekend, and just the weekend in general, there are really any dentists with open office hours.

Yesterday our own dentist was nice enough to prescribe my mother antibiotics from his vacation in Florida. The only other option anyone gave us was going to the ER, where they'd probably do the same thing. Unfortunately, they didn't help (obviously).

Luckily, one of the dentists that my brother interned for was willing to see her today. That's where they are now. This, of course, means that we are not yet leaving. The front desk at my building is open just until six.

As if more could go wrong — my mother felt sick after taking the pain medication our dentist prescribed yesterday. She took it on an empty stomach, and by the time breakfast was ready she felt like she was about to vomit. My dad started getting angry and tried to make her eat anyway, but she was feeling bad enough that she started crying at the nausea. My brother and I were of the opinion that she shouldn't eat, at least not just then — try to get it to pass, first. Eventually she went to lay down until she felt like she could eat. So while my entire family is fuming or crying, I was trying to eat breakfast and spilled orange juice all over myself, which just set me off. After minute or two I went back to breakfast, and then Mom and Ken joined us eventually.

Mom said she felt okay to eat then, and Ken diffused the situation by doing a victory dance — "Sometimes I do the moonwalk when I'm right! Yeah! Uhn! Watch me! Don't tell me Michael Jackson's dead! Watch me spin!"

Mom couldn't help but laugh and call him an asshole, so it was at least a bit better then.

I just have this whole combined thing of this being so bad for her and not really wanting to leave. I'm going to miss Benson and Bo a lot. My family, too, for whatever reason, but at least I can talk to them on the phone and online. I can't cuddle with Benson from four hours away, though. I can't watch Bo race around the yard, or help calm him down when he's scared.

I know things will be okay, but I'm sad to think this was my last summer with my dogs. It probably seems awful of me to some to feel my strongest sadness about them, but I can't help it. I'll miss them.

All summer long I've been trying to push the dogs toward water — for swimming and bathing. Swimming because I think they might enjoy it (Golden Retrievers are bred to swim, after all) and bathing because they really needed it.

Since Ben gets carsick, getting them to a spot where they could swim was difficult — but he showed interest in the neighbor's pool, so I was more pressed to get him in.

Bathing, on the other hand, just kind of... didn't happen. My mom wanted to do it on a warm day since we can't get warm water from the hose, but every warm day with good weather saw her over at the pool or me at work or a combination of the two, or some other obstacle.

Today, we finally tried to get them into the water... but made the mistake of not checking out our location before getting there. We found a spot at a nearby lake with no one in it — but there was a reason for that. Aside from the trash littering the area (luckily all harmless to us and the dogs — just paper cups and containers) the area was pretty much a bog. My foot sunk three inches into mud before I even reached the water's edge. The dogs didn't mind much, but they never got to the water. I'm kind of sad about that — I really want them to have the chance to swim — but at least it got them muddy, which forced the bath issue.

So now they are bathed and in the process of being brushed. Aside from an unfortunately placed pile of poo, it went mostly without incident in spite of Bo's raging fear of all forms of grooming. They'll smell like wet dog, sure, but that is preferable to how they smelled before, believe me.

Last night I dream that I was visiting a small hospital sort of place that was both a psych ward and a long-term care unit. Leonard Nimoy was there, as he'd been sick for a while, but was eventually released. I was free to move around and easily hid from nurses, which allowed me to plan for a guerilla documentary on the place. (I do not know why I would think such a thing was a good idea, because I don't think at that point I suspected them of doing anything wrong.) I went back with Nimoy (WE WERE APPARENTLY BUDDIES <3), but we realized something was amiss; it was suddenly harder to navigate and to escape from the prying eyes of the nurses. I was caught with my camera, and they "diagnosed" me as having something wrong... though I wasn't sure whether it was physical or mental. I ended up strapped to a bed and tormented.

By the end of it I was nearly crazy, but Jessi came along and got herself caught up in it too. Before anything could happen to her, she told me that if I sold myself as a wife to any visitor, he could release me from the hospital. I did, to someone surprisingly young, handsome, and kind. (Because that's surely the kind of guy that would buy a wife from a mental hospital.) Jessi was bought by his brother, but he didn't make her marry him.

I wound up returning with a girl who had also been made aware of something awful going on at the hospital, presumably through a relative who was there. She looked like Dichen Lachman, and when we wound up huddling beneath a table in one of the curtained-off rooms and I started sobbing, afraid I'd be caught all over again, she yelled at me for being weak. I woke up shortly after that.

Remember how I said alpaca yarn is awesome?

I retract that statement.

Maybe it's just the hank I got, but it has been nothing but frustration since I removed the label. No, I'm not knitting with it yet... because I can't. The hank is littered with knots, and any attempt to remove them seems fruitless, especially since it breaks extremely easily. Plus, there were these little bits woven in only a foot long that were separate from the rest. Every time I think I'm getting close to fixing it, I run into another impossible knot and have to cut it and see if I can't approach the knot from another direction. Ugh.

Bored by what you read at VZG's LJ? Tired of nattering about emotional issues and daily minutiae*? Sick of short, rapid posts?

THEN TRY VZG AT TWITTER! Prepare to be annoyed by VZG like you've never been bored by VZG before! It's a whole new level of VZG-suck!

Seriously though, I'm not sure anything I could write in one hundred forty characters could be remotely interesting. I'm trying, though!



*WORD OF THE WEEK

also I fucking love this icon