Jesse Hajicek

Twas recently pointed out to me that HSFC (Have Some Fucking Class) is quite a handy potential internet acronym. I can think of a number of places where it would be even more expressive than STFU. Or, naturally, the heinous TL;DR, which says more about the commenter than the post.

I went out with Spider. I am full of sushi. I wanted to be asleep hours ago, but I made myself stay up to take my meds at what I want to be my regular meds-taking hour. Now I zonk.

I need to get out of Frogtown.

How am I supposed to work when every time I get in the groove some screeching, rumbling truck or some moronic teenager trying to deafen himself with his car stereo or some shrill woman tirading at her boyfriend snaps me out of it? Maybe I'm too white, maybe I'm too suburban, but I persist in thinking that making that much noise is FUCKING RUDE. This neighborhood doesn't feel lively and vital, it feels chaotic and trashy. Why can't these people shut the fuck up? Ever? For one fucking second? What's wrong with everybody?

I want to start a neighborhood renewal project, and I'm going to call it STFU. I'll print posters and buttons and everything. I'll even have a little checklist.

Hey Neighbor!

Are you the one whose car stereo rattles windows as you drive by? SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Are you the one who parks outside his friends house and honks the horn instead of walking twenty feet to the door and knocking? SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Are you the one who has a screaming fight with your sig-other at the bus stop and stomps off down the block still shrieking obscenities at the top of your lungs? SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Are you the one who runs your gas-powered leaf blower at 9 on a Sunday morning? SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Are you the one who roars up and down Western in your beat-up Mustang with the glass-pack muffler all night? SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Are you the one who lets your children set off firecrackers for hour after hour in the middle of the night? GET OUT THERE AND SHUT THEM THE FUCK UP BEFORE I DO IT FOR YOU!

And to all the other noisy, thoughtless, selfish people who make this neighborhood such a shithole: Christ, what is WRONG with you people? HAVE SOME FUCKING CLASS.

THANK you.

Oh yeah, I'm totally gonna do it.

Of all the places to find one of these, one's pillow has to be among the most alarming. If I'd known it was a stinkbug, I probably would've pitched it outside when I saw it sitting on my bookshelf. But I just thought it was... well, pretty. And it was nowhere in evidence when I went to bed. An hour after I fell asleep, I was awakened by a loud, angry buzzing. When I lifted my head to try to figure out where in my room the noise was coming from, I got hit with a reek of armpit-and-gasoline.

So of course I did what any self-respecting jello-eyed uke would do: I bolted out of the room and demanded that Seebs come find the damn thing for me and get rid of it. He found it marching across my bed like it owned the place, popped it in a vase, and took it outside. But my bed still sorta smells.

...

It feels like I ought to say something about how I'm dealing with my family's loss, how I feel about it, something anyway. But I really can't. There aren't words. I don't know how I feel. When it's fully sunk in that it's real, maybe then I'll have feelings I can name.

For now, I'm just living on this planet, breathing air and eating food. Interacting in limited ways with other living things, like roommates and crocuses and stinkbugs. We are all very small.

The world is full of horrible things and awful people and terrible misfortunes. And what do I do about it?

Make soup for sick roomies.

So now there's a big battle in my head between the faction that thinks my life is too comfortable and wants me to do charitable works for strangers -- ideally, smelly and incoherent strangers who will throw up on me -- because it doesn't COUNT if you're nice to people you LIKE, and the faction that wants me to recognize that I'm frequently one cigarette or quiet half-hour away from BEING that smelly and incoherent vomiter, and should be glad I can do anything to help anyone at all.

Currently, the winning team is a dark horse contender who pwned the first two factions by noting that it's deliciously absurd that I'm having this kind of philosophical debate with myself at 5:30 in the morning when I can hardly keep my eyes open. And also that I like making soup. No judgement there either way. I just like it.

In a future chapter of Metanoia, Zander points out to Star that 'even the smallest fraction is infinitely greater than zero.' I got that from Seebs. Star has trouble believing that, and so do I. But that doesn't make it any less true.

And now in less shoegazy news: I cannot bring myself to really prank anyone, so Rah and I are doing some silly outtakes for Metanoia. And I'm thinking about April Fools Days when I was a kid, like the time my mom really got me by waking me up to come see all the little green caterpillars all over the deck. She had me standing there barefoot with the door open, blinking owlishly, trying to see the caterpillars she could so obviously see, until she finally took pity on me and announced, "April Fools!"

The next year, I had my revenge: I dyed an entire gallon of milk pink. Everyone but me could taste the dye, so they wouldn't drink it. I'd hoped they'd be too groggy to notice until they'd already put it on their cereal, but I ended up being the one with pink milk in my cereal, and pink milk in my glass at dinner... allllll week.

Which, I decided, was even funnier than if I'd got them with it. They all had normal white milk, and mine was Pepto-Bismol pink. What a weird picture that would've been if someone who didn't know why had seen it! I found myself hoping the Jehovah's Witnesses would drop by so I could see the looks on their faces. They already thought my dog was possessed.

So you know the cat that keeps getting stuck in my ceiling? Seebs may have solved the problem. No, we didn't skin the cat and eat him. Seebs is a hacker, his solution was bound to be more elegant than that.

See, the problem is that my bedroom is only about half the attic, and the rest of the attic is unfinished. The end that has my bed in it has only fabric for walls, stapled to bare beams. And there's one spot where Maya (the kitty what is mine and nobody else's) insists on making herself a little door into the unfinished back part of the attic. Every time I re-stapled or pinned that spot, she'd pick at it until she got it open again. While I didn't like the draft blowing through the hole, I recognized she'd won the argument, and usually just propped a pillow over it whenever I noticed it was open.

Then Hermes (the kitty what is Rah's) discovered it. He both fears and idolizes Maya. He runs away whenever she gets too close, but he likes to do whatever he sees her doing. So he'd go back into the raw attic-space behind my fabric wall, and presumably found some way to climb up on top of the finished part, between insulated ceiling and peak. I know Maya has done that; I also know she can get down. But he never could. Apparently he didn't trust the squishy fiberglass insulation he was standing on, and wouldn't jump down or cooperate in any way. At least, that's Seebs's theory: he was skittish because he didn't trust his footing.

So Seebs removed the insulation from the alcove I keep my TV in, and now Hermes will happily jump down from there. No more cat-in-ceiling. No more piteous yowling at 6 am. No more wincing while Rah climbs up there to fetch him down and my ceiling creaks and showers plaster on me.

Naturally, Hermes, being a cat of naughtiness, could not let us get complacent. So he found an entire container of catnip and scattered it all over the bathroom and rolled in it until he was coated from whiskers to tail in the stuff. He was very popular with the other cats until I caught him and brushed him. *rolleyes* Cats are such attention whores.

EDIT: I just read Poppy Z Brite's journal, and maybe I'm being an asshole, but: Christ, lighten the fuck up already! You know that old saying, "You have to either laugh or cry"? LAUGHING IS BETTER. And for fuck's sake, being angry at the rest of us for not 'understanding' is plain retarded. I do not need to understand how unpleasant New Orleans is right now, because my understanding will have no effect whatsoever. You want to have a 'my pain is worse than yours' competition? You WIN already, now STOP. Before someone from some African country that just had a machine-gun genocide decides to step up to your Katrina wreckage and raise you some mass graves.

I actually got shit done today. My hair is no longer emo-shaggy, I have groceries, and I am clean and wearing clean clothes.

I blame the roomies. Luka did my laundry, since it was just sitting there in the basement looking forlorn. Rah kept me on target today. Still, even though I can't take much credit (and even though I forgot my wallet and had to drive back home for it before I could get my hair cut), I do feel something of a sense of accomplishment.

Oh, and I remembered to buy condoms. Seeya! *zoom*

Today was a big fat waste. Here's what I was SUPPOSED to do: Make studio store business cards, do laundry, shower, get my hair cut, go grocery shopping, make dinner. Not a real grueling schedule, is it? Here's what I ended up doing: Freaked out, kicked some boxes, made amusing gorilla noises, took out the kitchen trash, loaded the dishwasher, and made studio store business cards.

Let's review: I did 1 (one) item from my to-do list, and two things that weren't my job. I'm sure the people whose chores those were are glad I did them, but mine are still not done. Also everyone had to scrounge their own dinner, because the bacon quiche and spinach salad I promised n'existe pas.

Tomorrow, I make another attempt at laundry, shower, haircut, and shopping, with the addition of a mail run. But unless the headbugs decide to leg it for Belize, I have no hope whatsoever of achieving these immensely complex and difficult acts of heroism.

The worst thing about ADD isn't the way my brain explodes if two people talk at once, nor the way I can't complete a sentence if there's a TV in the room. It's the way I look like a complete retard when I try to do the simplest things. It must be so nice when the steps of a task remain in chronological order in your head, instead of all jumping up at once and biting your face off. Actually, every task on my list, and everything else that wasn't on the list, and all my story ideas, and a whole bunch of unrelated shit, swarmed me and crawled into my ears and stung me all over in a raging buzzing horde.

And that, my darlings, is normal for me. It happens every time I try to get anything done. *headdesk*

So why, you ask, do I not gas the bees to death with medications? Well, you know how I write stories occasionally? The story bugs live in the same hive as the ADD bugs. When I kill the ADD bugs, the story bugs die too. If I let the ADD bugs have their way, I'm a useless pathetic git, but I can write Metanoia and Kastor and GDS and a bunch of little side comics all at once. It's the same process, really. If I could deal with the ADD bugs by writing them down as they dive-bomb me, I'd be hella productive. But writing about my laundry doesn't get it washed. I have to run all over the house trying to actually /do/ it, which generally ends up with me standing in the bathroom with a sock in one hand and a fridge magnet in the other, trying desperately to remember where my car keys are.

Anyway, here's hoping tomorrow works out a little better.

You know you're over 30 when 'buy condoms' has been on your to-do list for three days and you haven't done anything about it.

Okay, it probably has more to do with everyone having the achy sniffles. But still. A little respiratory virus never kept me from getting laid when I was 25. :(

In other news, I've resisted animated icons thus far because they distract me so much I can't read the post they're on without covering them up. But this one was just too bloody funny.

I got back Tuesday night, but I didn't feel like communicating yesterday. The trip out to Michigan was pretty harrowing; thanks to five jacknifed trucks on the median, it took three hours to go the first 40 miles. Then pretty much the entire tollway is under construction, so I made shitty time through Chicago. And after that I started hitting snow. Like, whiteout, 45 mph feels recklessly fast, big wet flakes so heavy they go thump when they hit the windshield, serious snow. So, having set out from home at 3 pm, I arrived at Rah's house at 5:30 am.

The way back was smooth sailing, though. A little dry snow in Wisconsin, nothing worth turning the wipers on for. We hashed out story plots pretty much the whole drive. I now know how the Kastor stories end. I mean, how the entire 9-book series ends. And oh gawd is it gorgeously inside-out and intense and perfect.

Rah is drawing the rest of the current chapter of Metanoia. If she finds she still likes it after that, she's going to become the main artist. It's such a load off my mind not to have to do art on a schedule. I might even be able to keep up with my other work under those circumstances.

Now all I need is warmer weather, and life will be pretty fucking awesome.

It snowed. And I'm gonna drive to Michigan anyway. Hell yeah I'm hardcore.

Actually it's no big deal. The blizzard's done its deal, and the plows have done theirs, and the highway's probably not only cleared and salted by now, but dry. Nevertheless I'm making sure I've got extra wiper fluid.

Rah, I'm setting out right about now. Expect me at ludicrous o'clock in the morning, and please apologize to your folks for me, cuz I'm sure I'll wake you all up.

( Venting, not trying to fix things. Comments are off because I dare not risk reading a piece of well-meaning advice and exploding on someone. )

Blarg! I dreamed I sat down to see if I could do at least the roughs for the next bit of Metanoia, and ended up with six beautiful pages all pencilled and ready to ink. Six! I was very impressed with myself. Then I woke up.

Somehow I managed to sleep 13 hours. My neck hurts. I think I'm fighting off a virus or something. Seebs was feeling feverish yesterday, so he decided the answer was an epic quest for fuzzy slippers. I told him I'd like a pair too, but I didn't feel like going out. So what did he do? He checked like three or four stores to find the ideal fuzzy slippers in both our sizes. We now have matching fleece-lined leather slippers. I'm not sure why they had to match, but they're very comfy. I suspect the reason for the matching is so that whenever we're both wearing them he can declare "Footie twinsies!" or something of that sort. It's the sort of thing he does. :D

This absolutely delights me. Article; video available, but it doesn't auto-play. I love funny pranks, but unfunny ones make me furious. It's unfunny if anyone is hurt or seriously scared, or if they truly believe for even one moment that something horrible has happened. This one is just plain funny. People were a little creeped out, but in a silly way. Congrats to these jokers for how well they coordinated it, too, that took some doing.

I was up until 6am banging on Metanoia script. I feel like I'm flying blind and I'll pay for it later in tangled plot threads I don't have the skill to terminate. But I can't wait any longer for my confidence to come back. It might not ever. I may be doomed to spend my life as a professional with the ego problems of a schoolgirl. The things that have been happening in my head don't make any sense, and I've analyzed them down to exactly what kind of no-sense they're making, and still can't change them. When you hit that kind of wall, you have to let it go. Just do the job anyway, no matter how hard it got nor how easy it used to be.

At least it's not as freaky cold as it was a couple days ago. When it's 25 below outside, it's about 50 in the attic. Brisk fall weather temperature. Brisk fall weather is lovely for taking walks in the sunshine; not so great for sitting in a chair typing. My back feels weird from having a heating pad on it so long, I think I cooked my kidneys. And I drank a LOT of tea. I'm actually sick to death of Earl Grey. I didn't think that was possible.

For some reason I feel as if it's required to post about my Valentine's Day, even though it was nothing out of the ordinary. We get a little blasé about it, after so many years together. Almost skipped it, but as I said to Seebs, "If we don't even go out for coffee, we're going to have this nagging feeling there was something we were supposed to do."

So we hit the Outback for steaks and giggles. I was so tired I couldn't string two thoughts together, so our conversation was a bit disjointed, and I don't really remember what we talked about. I remember he gave me an insight on the structure of the relationship subplots in Metanoia, and said something insanely funny about bank alts on WoW. And we got a loaf of bread with a hole in it, so we just stuffed the butter in the hole and let it melt. We were pleased with ourselves all out of proportion to the achievement. ^_^

All told, Valentine's Day wasn't particularly special this year. But that's just because hanging with Seebs is always special. He makes me laugh, he's full of unexpected truth, and he's pretty like a really pretty thing. He puts up with towering mountains of crap from me, and ends up helping me a better person. Did you know his real name's Peter? He really is a rock. So I kinda feel like every day's Valentine's for me.

<3 -> Seebs.

Soooooo dehydrated. *crawls*

The electric blanket felt so nice when I fell asleep under it. Now my spit feels like paste. Ergh.

I usually like revisiting old favorite movies, but sometimes they turn out to be a disappointment. I remembered 'The Lost Boys' as being deep, sexy, and scary. I discovered yesterday that it would only be deep, sexy, or scary to a 14-year-old. In particular, I remembered Michael as a tormented soul who was victimized by both circumstance and David to an epic degree, and was saddened to find that he was just a spoiled, sullen dickhead who boned a retarded girl and fell out of a tree. Hell, even David wasn't as cool and evil as I remembered him, though Kiefer Sutherland did bring some quality evil even that young.

Now I absolutely cannot watch any more movies from the 80's until I've cleared my palate with three or four movies in which no one has scary self-conscious hair. Yikes. I may, in my misguided youth, have worn a suit jacket with the sleeves rolled up, pegged pants, dock shoes, and tropical pastels, but not all at the same time, and I never gelled my hair into a cresting wave on my head I SWEAR.

Pain releases endorphins. This is well known. It's why people cut when they're depressed. Well, there are sub-reasons, like self-hatey that makes you want to wreck yourself, but basically it's for the endorphins.

I needed some endorphins BAD today. So you know what I did?

40 MINUTES ON THE TREADMILL, BITCHEZZZ.

Catch me choppin myself up with a razor, hah!! I am not bananas, I am not pie! Choppies are not for Jesses! Runnings and stompings are for Jesses!

Ow ow feets pain ow.

I need better shoes.

ETA: SPLODEY! autodidactic always links to the coolest videos.

Oh wow. The sky is SO purple.

The character-notes meme is turning out to be hugely entertaining. I don't have enough clue right now to go answer all the most recent ones, but I'm looking forward to doing so. They're almost all from OC's, which is awesome -- except there was one from Spider Jerusalem, which was a different kind of awesome. A crackinated gonzo-journalist ranting kind of awesome. There's just so much wow going on over there, I can't even begin to find the adjectives.

Now I have a dilemma. Stay up, knowing I won't get anything done but may well enjoy my schmappiness, or go to bed, knowing I'm going to have trouble sleeping? You see, I think the depression's finally starting to lift. I'm still waaaaay down there, but the reeking certainty that nothing is possible or worth doing has finally gone away. Now everything only looks too complicated and I don't have the energy for it. That's just normal depression.

Maaaan, did that suck for a while, though. I hate being suicidal. There's too much meta. I don't know how to explain this. I know full well, while I'm down in it, that I won't feel like that forever. That, in fact, it never lasts for more than a handful of days. But from inside it, every other perspective looks false. While I'm in it, I honestly believe that everything I produce is crap-hackery, a waste of time and energy, and I'm a drain on everyone's resources, and living is just too much trouble for too little reward -- but at the same time, I know in my clever brainparts that it does not, functionally, matter whether this is true or not, as long as I do not believe it to be true, which I don't except for those few bad days.

Fortunately, I'm the classic Immovable Object. It takes a lot of dynamite to get this boulder rolling, and spiritual explosives are precisely what I lack when I'm down. So I do nothing stupid. Not only do I not cap myself, I don't even wreck my plans or my relationships anymore. I just put everything in a holding pattern, ask people politely (if distantly) to be patient, and wait it out.

It was only two days. I distracted myself for most of that with character-messages and WoW, slept a lot, and generally tried to keep myself from sitting around stewing in the self-hatey. When all else fails, there's always porn. :D

Anyway, cross your fingers for me and hope this is a for-real upswing, and not just a flatter bit of valley.

What happened?

I opened my eyes and it was 9am. Closed them to wallow in waking up slowly, and the next time I opened them, the sun was going down.

I probably needed it, but it's still damned disorienting.

I'm pondering on all the responses I got to my last post. Thank you SO much for all your thought and verbage, this is going to be really helpful. It was surprisingly easy to take, too. I didn't feel angered or hurt even a little bit by any of it. I did have a few hours of feeling pretty discouraged, thinking about what a lot of work I have ahead of me, and how little energy I have to do it with, but I was able to reason with myself that the hill didn't get any steeper just because I'm making an effort to look at it straight on, and I went to bed, and when I woke up I didn't feel nearly so discouraged.

I responded to some of them right away, mostly asking for clarification or brainstorming. Then I stopped answering, and I won't get back to those responses for a little while, maybe a few days. If you didn't get answered, it's a function of time, not content; I ran out of steam and had to let the rest sit. Nobody screwed up, everyone was thoughtful and helpful. Fresh lemon custard lurve with sprinkles to all y'all.

If you still have thoughts on the topic, by the way, it's not closed or anything. I'd love to hear what you have to say.

So here's the state of the Jesse at present:

I'm going back to the most basic life skills, building from scratch. I was saying to some people that I don't want to have to start over, and then after thinking a while, I realized... I already am. I got squashed. I am working from FLAT. So I have to learn how to crawl, and it would be dumb to try to tapdance.

Seebs has put two new items in his PDA: "feed spouse" and "water spouse". Once a day, he'll check with me to make sure I've eaten, ideally that I've eaten more than once. Every other day he'll check and make sure I've showered. I'm not even considering the question of whether it's ludicrous to need someone to remind me to eat and shower. I know damn well I need it, and who cares if it's stupid? I was going two or three days without eating, and you really did not want to stand downwind of me most of the time; that's the sort of thing that gets people institutionalized. Far better to have somebody check me.

This loose, minimal structure already has me feeling more secure, more in control. I know I have a safety net. I'm not going to starve to death or succumb to some hideous third-world disease while I work on the rest of it. It's amazing how much of a difference that makes.

I'm also in the tentative first stages of a plan where I proactively take on the tasks that are easy, pleasant, or theraputic for me. For instance, taking the store mailings to the UPS store. I'd forgotten how good driving is for my head, because I never go anywhere alone anymore. I've been saying for quite a while that I need to do this, but somehow every time an errand needs running I end up taking the whole crew. Today I said to myself, "I know that Luka and Rahn want to go to the art store, but hell with it, we can make a group trip later; today, I go solo." Went to drop off mailings and pick up my ink order, sang along with music, drummed on the steering wheel, grinned at a college boy and made him blush, came home feeling like a real human being for the first time in months.

I'm making no effort whatsoever to draw. I had a pile of pens on the arm of my chair, mocking my lack of mojo; I put those away. I'm writing. I'm not writing anything that I'm going to show anyone for a long time, and I'm not going to talk about what it is. That's another thing I used to do, which I've fallen away from: going into my writing world and pulling the portal in after me. The most private place I know is inside the words as they patter onto the page like rain. I'm not opposed to continuing Summerlands, but writing in public is a completely different experience, and it has to be secondary. My real writing has to happen in the place where no one can follow.

So yeah. Still pretty squished, but inching forward. I'm not asking myself when I'll get back to work on Metanoia or my commissions. It's not EVEN time for that. I have a lot of thinking to do before I can start considering any kind of long-term action -- and by long-term I mean 'next week'. One day at a time is too big a bite for me to chew. But one hour at a time is going kind of all right.

I'm so depressed today that if I were 21 I'd be writing a cryptic cry-for-help entry that might or might not be a suicide threat. But since I'm a grownup, I'm just going to have some vanilla tea and play WoW.

Life is so much easier to take since I realized that depression is not the same as sadness. In fact, while I'm frustrated about my lack of energy, mojo, and clue, I'm pretty damn happy about a number of awesome things.

I showed Rahn how to process store orders -- and by 'showed' I mean did it once in front of her and she just grokked it -- and now she's dealing with it. The single biggest stress nexus in my universe just... went away. Thank you! *sobs of joy* I will, of course, help if asked, but it's far easier to help than organize. Even though it's fun to play at being power-mad, I really don't like being manager guy. Also I'm not very good at it. ;p

I made spaghetti sauce. It's a little traumatizing to have three people link hands and dance around you in a ring cheering, but it's awfully nice that the roomies like my cooking. Seebs was particularly smiley, and the timing worked out just right, because he was going to pick up burgers on the way home but decided instead to stop in and see what folks thought, and discovered the spaghetti plan already in progress. So that worked out.

Last night, he and I went out to IHOP for a long story-plotting session. It's hard to persuade him to focus on it very often, but when he does get into it, he cuts through bullshit and confusion like a chainsaw through chutney, and my plot ends up clean and pure and punchy. I ended up setting aside the undead pirate Arvane for a later story; sorry, San. Seebs pointed out, quite correctly, that Arvane is a very poor challenge for Kas. Kas, being a cunning but simpleminded predator, could kill him too easily, but if asked to do anything /but/ kill him would be entirely stumped. So I'm saving Arvane for Niles.

Oh man, I can't wait to bring in Niles. Just thinking of how to describe the look on Kas's face when he finds out he has a little brother can occupy me happily for long stretches of time.

Anyway, I'm not saying what I decided to do instead, but it's good. It's solid, it's smooth, it's fully in character for everyone involved, and it goes back to the story's roots, which I was wandering away from. That is to say, the Kastor stories are supposed to be classic fantasy. Sword and sorcery. Adventuring party heading to Teh Ebil's castle for a bloody showdown. Done fresh, if I can manage it, but I want to keep it a little bit old-school no matter what twists I drop in. And fantasy arose out of fairytales and myths, and those have a certain balance, a certain rhythm, which I want to harmonize with. The ideas we hashed out last night do just that.

So thanks, Seebs, for helping me plot, for liking my spaghetti so much, and for wearing tight jeans. Depressed I may be, so much so that I'm not sure I can get out of this chair again now that I sat down, but I'm definitely not sad.