my heart is a glorious machine;

Let me see. My interneting has been severely lax. I wasn't on at all yesterday (by "on" I mean "anyplace further than my email and Twitter"), or the day before, and really ever since Christmas I have been absent either in presence or in mental state.

I rung in the new year playing poker -- or was it hearts by then? -- with friends, and having very good food (so, I like goat cheese. who knew?), and it was all very marvellous, even if I felt a bit odd not being with the family for the first time in all of my life. Mum and I made delicious calzones before I left, and there was much wonderful ice cream and toppings and things though I didn't get any of that till later. Jonathan and I walked to the Nielsons in the cold and snow and wind and I was silly and forgot a hat, so I had Anna's scarf wrapped all over my head (and was then Laughed At for my hair suddenly deciding to become more ridiculous than usual). We were greeted merrily by Victoria and Hannah (Sarah is in London!) and there were card games and rosemary olive oil bread and things. Later, very much later, when it must have been two in the morning, we finally went into the living room where Battlestar Galactica was being watched and ... it didn't really make much sense to me considering that it was the middle of the second season -- although Victoria and Mr Nielson tried to retell two entire seasons to the rest of us, and that was epic -- but the camera work was v. intruiging (... leave me alone, I am a film geek), and I think I liked it. Also Jane Espenson writes for it. I like Jane Espenson. I may have to watch more someday. In an order that makes sense.

We all stayed up very late talking, although I fell asleep for a bit and was making the sorts of odd pieces of conversation that you make when you are trying to convince people that you are really truly not falling asleep. I imagine they sound a lot like the things that one is sure make every kind of sense when they are drunk.

There was something very beautiful about walking home in the icy solitude of a snow-edged January morning. The sun was out, but in that odd, pale way it has in the morning, and especially in wintertime -- but I was so happy to see sunlight! I left very early, for me, so that I could get home by ten o'clock and spend time with the family until forced to leave for work; the walk did wake me up nicely. And Moony was so accomodating and made up one of the loveliest shuffle playlists I have ever had -- everything fit together so magnificently and fit the cold bright joyful solitude of the morning. (There was Abigail Washburn, and Sufjan Stevens, and Rosie Thomas, and Laura Gibson, and part of a Bach cello suite that seemed to shout "joy!" just as I was walking up the street to my house.)

It was a very lovely and quiet morning, and I drank an entire cup of coffee, because four hours of sleep is not a good way to go to work. It was gingerbread coffee and very good after I put a lot of milk and sugar in it. Someday coffee and I will get along, I know it. And I had cinnamon toast, and milk, and Madeleine L'Engle, to begin my year, and later Dad and I watched the Patty Griffin concert DVD he got my for Christmas, which we had already seen several months ago when he rented it off Netflix, but it is wondrous, especially the glorious rendition of "Top of the World" which concludes it and makes me cry.

The mall was a ghost town. It was terrible for business, but I was feeling strangely not-depressed, and sang a lot, despite having got back only about half of my voice, and wrote a little. And then a wonderful thing happened! The mall was closing early, which I had not known (it closed at the same time I usually get off anyway), and there were only two people up at the store, and apparently there was a lot of mess left over from the day before? And I cannot close on my own yet. So the bloke who usually closes for me came down early, and sent me up to work at the store. This was mostly vacuuming, and straightening very messy shelves, but I rung in two customers! And helped someone find a book! (Even if it did have to be Breaking Dawn. [facepalm]) And when I got out it there were still stretches of colour in the sky. And there was ham for dinner, with cranberries and apples and pineapples and some other things which made it delicious.

(Also, at some point, the VERY EPIC BOX from lady_moriel must be discussed, because IT WAS EPIC. ♥)

Today I have mostly not felt very good, which is unpleasant because it is my last day off for six days. But I have got new library books, and just finished a very beautiful and devastating film, and Patty Griffin always makes the world feel a little bit deeper and higher.

I was going to write about how (as is generally the case) I'm a bit embarrassed about being emotional, and I'm inexpressibly grateful for all of you, and then I was going to throw in something witty and exciting, but I feel wretched and am not very up to dashing turns of phrase. I've been under the weather most of the week, and it's decided to be tricksy and fool me into thinking I'm all right, so I eat a proper sandwich instead of toast or move about a bit too vigorously, and whoosh! -- here comes the nausea. Great fun, as you can see. It's pounding behind my eyes, too, now. I don't seem to get sick very often, but when I do it just clings. It's never very dramatic, just irritating and uncomfortable and lingering.

Firefly, by the way, is extraordinarily fun to write in. I'm, um. Still writing Christmas presents for my local friends (er, maybe they're very early Valentine's Day presents now?), and most of them are in the Firefly-verse, and -- it's delicious, really. I get a little drunk on words. I love the dialect; it reminds me a bit of the Elizabethan era, when everybody seemed to be so dizzy with wordplay. (Perhaps if I ended up seeing it first-hand I'd be disappointed. Perhaps they just had a disproportionate record of really excellent writings survive, I don't know. Shakespeare's coinages are enough for ten or fifteen writers, to be sure.)

take_a_sadsong commented on my entry of 31 December with, "I've decided that for me 2008 will be the year of doing, and not just dreaming of doing." Which I think is a brilliant sentiment and exactly what I didn't know I was looking for. It's how I spent most of my time, you know: dreaming of doing. Occasionally I have really extraordinary adventures, but mostly they happen because I have people to drag me along on them. I'm not forthright. I'm not in control of my own destiny. I'm like a character in a bad novel -- I don't act: I'm acted upon. And I remember how good and right I felt after my impulsive trip to Oliver!. I wanted something -- and I got it, because I tried hard and did things that don't come naturally to me. This should be a pattern, rather than an exception. I'm writing this here because I need someone to keep me in mind of it. I mostly forget to make resolutions for the new year (other than the age-old: stop biting my fingernails, and lose weight; for the first time in possibly fifteen years I seem to be making some headway on the former, so that's a bit encouraging even if it is something silly), but that's what I want to resolve. And I want to be better person, because I'm not much of one, really, but doesn't everyone? I just -- feel so tired all the time. And there are so many things I want to do -- learn to sew, write and write and write, work on projects -- and I know in ten years I'll be disgusted with myself because I never did them, and I won't have the time later. But it's so hard to -- do things. Ugh. I don't know. Rubbish to whinge about your own resolutions, isn't it? Bad form.

I think Moony and I are going to go off to watch Firefly together. Because nothing cheers one so much as vests with buckles on the back. (Well. Okay. There are other incentives, too.)

I was actually joking when I commented on

ressie_noldo's Happy 2007 entry (dratted Indians, getting to the new year before us), but then I ended up having a go at it, so, um, I welcomed in 2007 in probably-predictable Banui style: sitting at the computer writing ballad-fic (yes, ballad-fic, it's for 'The House Carpenter'/'D(a)emon Lover', if you're interested, because it's one of my very favourite ballads and one I've had a very long relationship with; also, ballad-fic, unlike, say, Potter-fic, has a possibility of maybe making me money someday, except hardly anyone wants weird short stories, I reckon) and listening to Deb Talan, with the Black Death and my pocket Eliot (which is currently in the stage of Falling To Bits, held together with a hairband) beside me. Hopefully this bodes well for the upcoming year. Like, maybe someone will discover an Eliot epic in the vein of 'Prufrock' that never got published. And I will write fic about it. And maybe go on to write about my other very favourite Child ballad, 'The Grey Selchie'. And eat--well, ack, that doesn't bode well for my weight-loss hopes. (I say hopes, not plans. Plans and I do not go together well.)

Speaking of selchies, the family and I watched The Secret of Roan Inish last night--before midnight; after midnight we were engaged in some very, very trippy early cartoons (some of them kind of reminded me of Terry Gilliam's animated bits in Monty Python's Flying Circus, except his stuff was better, and it wasn't supposed to, somehow, make sense, which meant that you weren't terribly, terribly afraid that everyone involved wasn't also heavily involved in, say, opium)--um, anyway, it's a very good film, and I really loved it, but the main point of talking about it is because it reignited my interest in the selchie legend, which I've always been fond of on account of being very intimately in love with Solas' eerie version of 'The Grey Selchie' since the age of twelve. Also, Jane Yolen's retelling in The Book of Ballads is rather good. What I'm saying is...actually, I don't know what the real point of this is. Selchies are nifty, and I want to write about them. Which sounds really shallow when you put it like that--the really interesting thing about the selchie tales, I suppose, is all of the motivations and reactions which are typically left out. Would a selchie-wife really love the husband who held her in thrall, and if so, how and why? What about someone attempting to gain control over a selchie for nefarious reasons? What sort of fellow would marry a seal-woman he knew nothing about, and what would village gossip say? What about the children of a selchie? I mean, really, what about them? It's all very fascinating, I think. (And, maybe this is completely out there, but are there any traditional ballads with vampires in? Not that I would want to incorporate one into a current project, mind. I would never do that.)

 

Well, yikes. Why am I suddenly realising that no-one is going to read this straight-through?