October 7, 2010

Today in UK: / National Poetry Day! / Celebrate your way.


From the brits and insomniacs -

10:39 OldMiner What celest'l body / have we found? Sun? Moon? / Not yellow nor silver / Blazing blue, tis grundoon -- I got the syllables right, someone else will have to fix the emphasis if I totally botched that.

...
10:50 grundoon Gnarl, snarl, cuddle and croon/ under a crinkling sea/ the (something) tosses his silver net, fashioned of sunbeams three.
10:50 cassparadox Triton.
10:52 gnarl SKELETON
10:54 grundoon Oh, obviously. Gnarl, snarl, cuddle and croon/ under a crinkling sea/ the skeleton tosses his silver net, fashioned of sunbeams three.

10:55 gnarl or Tri-skel'ton
10:55 grundoon Then it had better be moonbeams he's tossing, though.



11:27 grundoon And the waves roll out, and the waves roll in, and the noders come and go, but why the grundoon fishes the sea, only the grundoon knows.


11:47 grundoon I plagiarnze everyone. You haveae few choices. Stay in a tradition rhyme form but make up new words, and you become carroll. Use limierikcs, and you are either Ogden Nash or Ed Gorey...
11:47 grundoon Use song lyrics or tempos, and you will be flanders adn swan or tom lehrer.
11:48 cassparadox Sirens three, of wind-tossed sea/ Songsters bright of abyss dark/ Sing the wave and sing the tide on/ Bones to waves and dreams to dawning.
11:48 cassparadox pillages ruthlessly.
11:49 cassparadox Bones to depths and dreams to dawning, along with killing the comma in the first bit, would be better, but eh.
11:49 cassparadox Sure.
11:50 gnarl Frito-lay change back most of thier completely-degradable snack bag due to complaints by secret snacker that the bags were too noisy.
11:50 Cuh-thoo-loo How about both? "There once was a man from ziffleeber / Who wrompled too oft of the xeeber / His wife, quite concerned, plaughts him not to get burned / But alas, one sad day, he'll kazheeber."



12:47 grundoon Cassparadox, she's not a hag,/lays eggs inside a paper bag. The reason for this, there's no doubt / it serves to keep the lightning out. ///But what this tempramental bird / has failed to notice, is that herds / of wand'ring bears, they come with buns / and steal the bags to hold the crumbs.


Later...bu bu bu buuusted

and way to get it in under the wire - I think that's a GMT time stamp 23:52 Kizor There will come soft rains
23:53 Simulacron3 To relieve hard pains
23:55 doyle From misspent youth on bowling lanes
00:04 Kizor Balsam hemorrhoid cream -
00:04 Kizor for the discerning athlete.
00:04 You realize that I must never let grundoon see this.


Feel free to ask an editor or admin to add yours if it's from that day; please keep the time stamp.

Something funny happened to me recently, something that made me realize that sometimes things aren't as bad as they seem to be. I once had a roommate that screwed me over financially and this past week, we ran into each other for the first time in years. It's not a large amount that she owes me, but it's not the money that pissed me off at the time. It was her attitude that I couldn't stand.

We had no problems with our bills until after we moved out and the final hydro bill came in. I had contacted her to ask for her half of the money. She told me that she wasn't willing or able to pay me the full amount of her half. She claimed that she shouldn't have to because she was hardly ever home, never mind the fact that she was the one who cranked up the heat before leaving. I noticed this when she asked me on several occasions to feed her bunny that was in her bedroom. The thermostat happened to be right above his cage. She had been gone almost all month, and the heat was cranked to the max. The heat in my room was off. Our hydro bill consequently was higher than average for that month. Hmmmmm. Of course she had nothing to do with that. If I had known that she would refuse to pay her half of the bill, I would have had a little chat with her regarding her heat usage, but of course it was far too late for that. Coulda, woulda, shoulda.

Anyway, she refused to pay her half, and she did not apologize or even agree to compromise despite much arguing between us. Since the hydro bill was in my name, I had the great pleasure of paying it off myself. A few weeks after our argument, I found out through a mutual acquaintance that she bought her boyfriend a $300 entertainment unit, for no real reason. That certainly explains why she couldn't afford to pay her bills. She had higher priorities.

It has been over two years since this happened and despite having mutual friends and acquaintances, we had not seen or spoken to each other in all this time, until last week I mean. I have spent those two years hoping, in the back of my mind, that I wouldn't have to see her again. On top of the money that she owes me, she also decided to treat one of my friends like total crap, which has lowered my opinion of her even further. I'm not good with confrontations. I don't think I could pretend to be nice to her if I had to, and she could probably kick my ass if she wanted to. Yeah, I was afraid of her, just a little bit.

Last week, the moment I was dreading finally occurred, and it was completely unexpected. I was sitting on the back of the bus around 5:00pm, on my way downtown to meet a friend. It wasn't very crowded, as there were plenty of empty seats. We pulled up to the university bus station, which is only one stop away from where I was going. There was only one person waiting to get on the bus, and I recognized her right away. It was her. She was alone, and the passengers were utterly silent.

---

She climbs on and walks down the aisle slowly, apparently oblivious to my presence. I pretend to look out the window, not sure if I should look at her or speak to her. I can sense her movement from the corner of my eye and, from what I can tell, she isn't looking in my direction. I don't want to provoke an argument, but I don't want to hide my eyes from her like a helpless mouse. She's getting closer to me, almost close enough to reach out and touch. I shift my attention from the window to the aisle where she's standing, carefully keeping my facial expression neutral. I'm curious to see what she'll do. She stops where she is. She frowns. She doesn't look very happy. Without meeting my eye or saying a word, she turns her back and sits in the nearest seat, presenting me with a view of the back of her head. I smile and look out the window again. A few minutes later, the bus pulls up to the shopping mall and off I go to meet my friend at the coffee shop, feeling as though a weight had lifted from my shoulders.

---

I don't know what she was thinking when she saw me, but she's clearly not someone I need to worry about. I will never get an apology and I will never get my money back, but every time she sees me she's going to feel uncomfortable like she did on the bus that day, and that's enough to make me smile. That's what happens when you're rude as hell to someone on purpose.

You ought to feel something when someone you know dies, but tonight I read in an acquaintance's LJ that somebody I knew in Minnesota fandom had recently died in her sleep, and it affected me no more and no less than reading about the floods in Vietnam. Which is to say, not at all. I wasn't very close to the woman in question; we only met a few times and probably "talked" more on LJ than we did in real life.

Which was fine with me. She wasn't all there, probably as a result of doing seriously excessive quantities of mind-bending chemicals in her youth, and had some ideas about family and relationships that, frankly, creeped me out. That doesn't happen very often, but she managed it, all the while smiling and thinking she was making me happy with the suggestion that we were related through my ex-wife's new husband somehow. (Ew.)

I doubt I'm going to lose any sleep over this, or even think about it much once I close this writeup, but I thought I ought to make this note for myself. Just in case.