my heart is a glorious machine;

Reading sarahtales' fantastic essay Ladies Please (Carry On Being Awesome) and writing the Novel at nearly the same time has birthed a lot of swarming thinky thoughts. For one thing, yesyesyesyesyes, and a large side helping of "huh?" because, you know, I read these fictional girls who apparently have friends only so they can complain about them and compete with them and/or talk about Boys with them, and I guess those people exist (I started running into them a lot more in later youth groups) but that is so not the world I grew up in. Okay, the world I grew up in also didn't have schmaltzy Christmas music, kids embarrassed by their parents for no reason other than that they are Grown-Ups, people who don't like books, or public school, so non-fantasy YA fiction frequently depresses, irritates, or confuses me. But still. If I could exist, at least temporarily, in a world where being female is not some kind of contest, fictional characters can do this, too!

And awesomeness comes in many different flavours! Female characters do not have to have big weapons and fight everything to be awesome. Though they totally can. (C.f. Zoe Washburne, Kara Thrace, Sarah Walker, Buffy bleeding Summers.) I love that Fred Burkle gets to fight evil with Science, and Willow Rosenberg gets to fight evil with computers and magic, and Kaylee Frye gets to fight evil by being a mechanic (and with optimism!), and Hermione Granger gets to fight evil by being clever and a know-it-all, and Martha Jones gets to fight evil by telling stories*. I love that Lydia Asher gets to be a medical scientist at the turn of the century, but she's vain about her glasses and she likes pretty clothes and she's happily married, and she bloody travels across the world with a vampire and plunges into complicated spy politics to save her husband. I love that Meg Murry gets to fight evil by loving her brother. I love that Emily Starr and Anna Grazinsky and Cassandra Mortmain and Anne Steele and Molly Weasley and Jo March and Joyce Summers and Arwen don't even have to save the world to be awesome.

* Note: I still don't like that episode, or Tenkerbelle, but Martha walking the world and telling stories? Completely fantastic anyway.

Thinking about my own story in this context pleases me, because while I didn't set out to write Awesome Mutli-Faceted Female Characters, I am pleasantly surprised at how everyone turned out, and it's fun to play with them in that respect. Evangeline, the contentedly introverted but friendly older sister, is the one who gets to fight vampires; Camilla, the bossy, loyal, loving mother-of-the-family middle sister is, personality-wise, the more stereotypically ass-kicking one, but she gets to be awesome by being supportive and keeping the family together and making everyone food and knocking sense into them. Briony mostly gets to be awesome by growing up and being loving and optimistic at this point, but I really want her to do some amazing stuff in the second book that I am pretty much resigned to writing now. Lottie gets to be, well, crazy, alas, and I don't actually know how that's going to play out at all, so I can't really comment on that. I am, however, increasingly bothered by the fact that the girls' mother is completely non-existent, not only in the present but in the past. I've dropped mentions to her a couple of times, but I still have no idea who she was or why and why she isn't here anymore. And then that bothers me because what this novel and quite a lot of other stories in the universe at large are really lacking are Awesome Women Over Thirty. (Immortals do not count.) I mean, okay, at the moment I don't even know who many of the characters are besides the occupants of Evangeline's two homes -- her family flat and the library -- because the story hasn't ventured out into the wider world yet. Maybe women's roles are a little different in this 1912. Maybe there are some other awesome women in the Ministry of the Paranormal, or at the Noxes' church, or at Briony's school, or all of the other places I haven't explored yet.

I also had the brief weird thought of gender-switching Evangeline's father and having her mother be the reclusive, eccentric, but intensely loving dealer in rare books and magical miscellany, except that kind of turns a lot of things on their heads -- like, the colleague relationship between Evangeline's Parent and Mr Caruthers would be entirely different, and the Nox family would be entirely female, and I'm not really sure I want to do that, and then I'm still stuck on the question of Where Did The Other Parent Go Anyway. Not to mention the fact that Edwin Nox is, you know, in my head of his own right, even if he never seems to do anything. (You're all saying, It's obvious! BOTH PARENTS COULD BE ALIVE AND WELL and I say, Absolutely! Except I keep trying it and the story soundly rejects it, which annoys me a lot! Especially because stories really need more awesome married couples who love each other. Maybe the girls' mother is just Off Being Plot Pointy Somewhere? Only I cannot think of anything for her to do. But I also hate the Importantly Dead Mother stereotype...)

And now, dear f-list, an excellent example of How I Suck At Essays. Note the lack of coherence, the digressions, the change in topic, the total lack of cogent point... and now I have to go do the dishes write about Briony crushing on Mr Caruthers' coat, just for lady_moriel.

Tomorrow seems to be my birthday, oddly enough. I was hoping to discover something Fantastic to do as celebration -- last year I explored Pittsburgh and strange places full of bits of houses with Mrs Nielson, Victoria, and Hannah; the year before, when my birthday fell on Father's Day, Dad and I spent the afternoon at the Carnegie Museum of Art, also in Pittsburgh. The year before that was The Year From Hell and doesn't really count, although lots of nice things happened for part of it. My fifteenth birthday I remember as sort of weirdly magical for no particular reason; Kyra sent me albums by Eisley and October Project and I got Solas' then-latest from Dad, and wandered about barefoot in a long skirt in our wooded back-yard listening to them, and there was a splendid misty rain, and come to think of it I don't remember anything else that happened that day; just that it was quietly beautiful in all of the right simple ways. (Well, and then that weekend Dad and I drove to the nearest large town to spend the afternoon wandering around a large bookstore and having Starbucks and Panera and listening to music and having good conversation.) 

As the day has continued to approach and no brilliant ideas have come forth, I have decided to try to spend the day quietly and magically as I did for my fifteenth: reading, picnicking under the backyard apple tree, lighting candles, sitting in the book closet, perhaps putting candles into glass jars and hanging them on things if I can find any. I am also thinking a quiet tea in a week or two for those of my compatriots as still remain in this town. (If only you could all come! It would be marvellous! Of course this town isn't very marvellous, but we'd picnick, and I'd take you up to the hill, and we'd dance round the glade in a ring like fairies and sing old songs and watch the stars come out; and I'd bake you delicious things, and we'd go to Hockman's for delicious homemade sweets.)

Anyway, today I've been cleaning, because my bedroom likes to be clean on holidays, especially beginningsy ones like birthdays and new years. I've vacuumed and everything -- and when I say vacuumed I mean I also vacuumed my desk and the top of my dresser which were atrocious and have been for some time. Having my desk all tidy and my dresser actually look-at-able again is quite nice, I must say. Want to go hunt down some used tea cannisters to put my makeup things in, though (Mum says she sees them at Goodwill fairly often), and something to hang my necklaces on so I don't have to untangle them from a nasty snarl every few weeks.

Speaking of birthdays and of pretty things, yesterday there were parcels in the post from bornofstars and barefoottomboy! Miss Anna's parcel was already under STRICT INSTRUCTIONS not to be opened, so it is sitting on my bed taunting me, especially because Anna sends the most amazing things (for Christmas she knit me a Ravenclaw scarf, which goes to my ankles and is the most delightfully warm scarf ever). And taped inside of Ren's charming home-made card was the charmingest bird-and-birdcage necklace, which I am wearing just now. My f-list is marvellous, thank you!

I am currently ordering the weather for tomorrow: I'd like sunny and warm, but not humid, and later a bit of rain and wind, and a thunderstorm after about ten o'clock.

Nicked from wanderlight (whose birthday it was yesterday: happy birthday, Rita!), as I am eager to write more entries that do not fall into the categories of Angst! Angst! Angst! and Stuff That I Did Today. Reading habits meme! Rita told her f-list all to do it, and I extend the same eager curiousity towards you lot as well! I love hearing about how other people interact with books.

( erm, this somehow became spectacularly long. )

...And now to bed! :/

Feeling mostly less horrible today, although physically it has not been good at all. Hurrah, more random nausea! And a headache, which hasn't quite gone away yet. I don't mind headaches so much, though, as I've been dealing with them for years, and anyway the caffeine in my headache medication makes me clear-headed and rather cheery for a while. (This also means I will be up late. How unusual.) Mum has been shopping, so there are chocolate chips in the freezer. I dropped off a couple of job applications this afternoon, tried on a dress I may purchase (it is blue-green and knit with buttons and pockets), bought a pair of orange button earrings, and dropped by the Nielsons, where I hung out with Victoria and Jonathan, and received word that there is indeed hope for my computer.

Eventually I need to post about SPN and why I heart it. Er...I could open the floor for Sam-and-Dean-related questions? (That is half serious, mind you.)

Speaking of questions, a meme from lightofjudah

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you 5 questions of a very personal nature.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed you will ask them 5 questions.

1. Do you prefer being called Banui, Jo, or Jolene?
Honestly, I don't even know. I could probably make a long meta-tastic post about the psychological implications of my name juggling.

Well, it's over. Roscoe died around noon today. We were all with him when he went, touching him and loving him and we knew he was loving us. He's always been an astonishingly loving cat -- even when he could barely stand these last weeks he made a point of coming to sit by the table while we ate dinner every evening. We discovered that last night he crept into each of our bedrooms to sleep for a while -- I know he cuddled with me on the bed for half an hour before he moved to the foot of the bed, then to the floor. He must have known he didn't have another chance and wanted to say goodbye to his family. (He didn't want to be an invalid, either -- after I cuddled with him on my bed for a while this morning, I brought him down to be with everyone else and put him on his favourite chair, the one he and Bart -- mostly he! -- have rent to bits with their claws. He lay there for a while, but after about half an hour, when our backs were turned, he tried to stand up and tumbled limply off the chair. After that, we filled his cardboard box -- he's always loved cardboard boxes, and laundry baskets, and other things he's not even supposed to fit in -- with soft cotton from the chair, as it's all tumbling out the back, and settled him down in there.)

I must have sat with him for three hours -- Mum woke me up at eight this morning to tell me that she thought he didn't have very much longer, and we all gathered around and stroked him, but after everyone else drifted off for a while to attend to general morning needs, I didn't leave -- I couldn't, I suppose. He was always my cat, by and large. He picked me, as we often say. Later Mum and Dad and Timmy and Heidi drifted back (Leandra too, after a while -- she was sleeping upstairs but later she wanted her breakfast so Mum went to get her and brought her down), as he worsened -- started gasping for breath, and twitching every now and then. We stroked him and stroked him; every so often we might stop and he would lift his head to look at us. That would drain all of his strength and he'd flop down into his box again. He loved having us near, I know. I'm so glad -- we're all so glad -- that he died in the morning with his family all around him instead of in the middle of the night, or outside someplace where we mightn't be able to find him for a while (he loved hiding under the house, for one thing). Dad was home, too -- he wasn't supposed to be, but his morning school client called in sick, so he didn't have to go in. We held our darling kitty and loved him and reminisced and wept, and took one last photograph of the family -- Dad, Mum, I, Timmy, Heidi, Leandra, Roscoe, and Bartholomew.

Finally, he started gasping for breath urgently -- that went on for a while. He'd gasp and then subside for a while and then give another great gasp. His legs kept twitching restlessly and spasmatically. He hadn't seemed to be in much pain before then -- he'd just been very solemn and sad, as he'd been for the past several weeks. Grotesquely, tufts of fur fell off in a few places -- his skin was seperating, or something; there was blood and it was horrible. There wasn't very much of this, thank God. We kept feeling for his heartbeat and it kept beating more and more faintly until finally there wasn't anything to feel. Mum had shut his mouth, which kept lolling open as he tried to breathe; Dad shut his eyes; Timmy and Heidi and I each held him one last time, and then we straightened his box and later put a cloth over his body. 

I feel very queer; I'm not quite sure what to make of all of the things going on my head and body just now. As I said, I've never watched anybody close to me -- anybody at all -- die before, and even if he was 'only' an animal, he was a very dear friend of our family, very kind and loving and giving even to the end. He was alert almost to the point of death. He just wanted his family with him. I've never seen death before, and I don't know what to make of it. I feel a bit numb, I suppose -- very, very odd, full of things I don't even know how to put names to. Sort of shaky, and quiet, and pulled into myself a bit, I suppose.

It's a rainy day, the sort I like best. Funny, this would be a beautiful, near-perfect day, I think, if Roscoe hadn't died. Dad took Timmy and Heidi and I to the library a while after lunch (I was hungry and yet I couldn't stomach much, so I had toast and orange juice and felt a little better), and that was nice, even if I can't get anything out that Dad does not charitably check out on his own card for me. I am reading one of my books now, another book by Madeleine L'Engle about life and love and living and God and ourselves. (I wish I could meet her. I feel like I know her, a little, and I think we would like each other. We think the same ways about astonishing little things -- about words, about writing, about love, about art, about God -- so many little things, the little things that turn out to be the big things. There are some writers, you know, whom you love to read, and maybe you live in their books sometimes, and maybe they mean something -- but then there are other writers whose writings are bits of you -- they're writers of your heart and they get into your soul and take roost there gently and irrevocably, and something about them is like being home, except it's a home you didn't know was home and it turns out it's more widely and fully home than the house you're living in, or the last house, or even a succession of houses. I've been feeling a lot of that, lately -- finding vivid familiarity, a sense of having been there before, in unfamiliar places. I'm trying to understand what that means, why it is.) All of the books I got were unfamiliar books by familiar authors, which is nice when one needs comfort -- there's always a risk with a wholly new book. You mightn't like it at all. It might offend you in some way; it might present ideas that are much too alien to the way you see the world. It might even, heaven forbid, turn out to be dull. Unconsciously I think I must approach most books this way. Some authors are like friends, though, and with a new book by an old author, you have both the sense of familiarity and the sense of discovery, which may amount to the best of all worlds.

We also went Mother's Day gift-shopping (what, really, Mum, don't look surprised; you know that's why we were gone so long and why we hid those bags straightaway! :D) and Timmy bought all of us chocolates out of his own pocket, which was incredibly sweet of him, and outside smells like rain and green things and there is still a bit of hope glimmering in the corners of the world. I know this, because when we were driving home in our great hulking monster of a van, the sun broke through a cloud or two and streamed down on the road like a benediction.

I am reading A Circle of Quiet (as I said) and it is exactly the sort of book I need right now -- quiet and reflective and serious and tender and wistful and loving. Bartholomew is very nice to have about, too; I can't imagine if we hadn't got him -- imagine a house with no cats at all! He's curled up in one of my dresser drawers now, being obstinately difficult to see in his blackness until he opens his startlingly golden eyes and regards you with the particular sort of haughty hubris that can only be found in the visage of a cat.

The world is very quiet. It's astonishing and odd and terrifying and fascinating and horrible that there was someone who was alive and breathing and moving this morning and now there is nothing left but a shell of flesh and bone and fur. Another mystery of life and time and death. The world brims with mysteries that cannot be solved or really understood, though they've got to be so commonplace that we don't often remember that they are questions without answers.

I'm glad my bedroom is clean, for once, with the bed made (it had ceased to be a suitable atmosphere for reading; I had to clean it, and I have spent the past three days doing a lot of daydreaming, thinking, listening, and being -- it's been oddly solemn). Outside is grey and also bright; I have the windows flung open and the breeze comes in and wends its way around every now and then. I have pale light coming in the window onto my pillow (I moved my pillow from one end of the bed to the other, so now I wake with the sun on my face, and when I am lying on my back I can see the other window with all the brilliant green of tree curtaining it) and onto my book. The world's shifted position. (A thunderstorm has started; the world out the window is a frightening, manic shade of green. Thunderstorms always seem to me like the world cracking and crumbling and remaking itself over again.) I'm not quite sure what to do about that, but I am feeling as if someday everything's going to be all right.

I happened to skip over to the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack on iTunes, which hasn't got a proper listen out of me for--a year, likely, and suddenly I am twelve years old again and, inexplicably, feel a little bit like crying. I remember the exploding wonder of Tolkien, and reading the books thirteen times in a year, and counting down, and translating lyrics and having my go at epic (and thoroughly tripe) fanfiction, and translating terrible pop songs into Sindarin (NO LIE: I AM ASHAMED), and parodying, and quoting, and theorising, and going to the films in costume, and--it. Tolkien was such a huge part of my life, and then it sort of...faded, and I miss it, terribly. Which is all very silly because the book (and The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales, and half of The Histories of Middle-earth--our nasty, smudgy little copy of The Hobbit is either packed, disintegrated, or otherwise hidden) are on the shelf over my desk, and the Extended Editions of the films are sitting in a neat if dusty row not ten feet away from me, and...I'm really not sure what I'm saying, actually. I remember it being magic, unexplored territory, something new and terrifyingly magnificent, and maybe it's been long enough since I've been in that world that I can find some of that again...er, watch me disintegrate into pretentious metaphors.

Um. However, you haven't lived, really, until you've seen the brilliantly awful Engrish subtitles for the films. No, seriously, you haven't. I've been quoting 'toast me' for years.