I Speak With the Tongue of a Thousand White-Hot Lies!

I feel like Garfield today: "I hate Mondays."

Part of it is that I don't feel like I got much of a weekend during my weekend--lots of cleaning Saturday, and most of Sunday spent with Scott and my mother trying to decipher his accounting homework and Spongebob as its background music. (shrugs) I can set things up so next weekend isn't like that, but it doesn't really help me with today.

Part of it is that it's the start of another week. Just the start. And Mondays are usually really busy at work, for me.

But, whatever. I shall get through it.

The spinach in my frozen meal is really gross.

It's raining. (Thank you, weather, for trying to prepare me for Michigan, but I'm willing to be rudely shocked when I get there.)

Out of printer ink, and I could really use it right now.

I'm not sure which shirt to wear today. On the other hand, I don't want to go to work because it's raining and I really want to nap. For the entire day.

The only chips we have are plain Pringles! Plain! Oh, and Doritos. Okay, ignore that one.

I have too many books to read!

There's no bologna in the house!

(You know, this is getting funny. Which is making my blah mood lighten. Wait, there's one--hang on ...)

HOW CAN I BE EMO WHEN I'M CRACKING MYSELF UP?

I can sort of see the end of the tunnel. I have one big pile 'o work, then two more to come tomorrow, and then one more Monday. But I have a plan, and this part, at least, I have done before, so I know I can do it all.

Today was long and tiring--magic show with Z., which was okay except he didn't get chosen as a volunteer, and he took it a little hard. His allergies are also acting up, so he's been tired, too.

I just wrote a paragraph that made no sense. Clearly I need a shower and some Glee. I've been avoiding the last two episodes of Parenthood because the last time I watched it, I wound up totally depressed. I'll save them until I'm not quite so easily influenced. :)

Oh, and the MacBook gets dirty faster than the iBook did. Just saying.

I've been thinking about Myth lately.

I dig Myth. It's something that I always come back to, the idea that ideas/stories/constructs accrue to people all through their lives, and some of them are accurate and some of them are not. And then Elizabeth Bear wrote a journal entry about the fictional constructs of famous and semi-famous people that we, as fans, carry around in our heads,* and so I kept thinking about it.

Mostly it's because of the Zweeble. I post about him, and I send out cute stories and Zweeble quotes, and people think he's awesome and amazing, and he is. But he's also a real little boy with a normal, non-Frank-Zappa's-kids name, and lots of stuff going on in his brain and elsewhere ...

... and absolutely none of this is changing the Zweeble Myth at all.

Because the Zweeble Myth would happen with or without the internet. In my family, there are epic myths (my father running away from home at 14 to go west and become a cowboy), traditional myths (my mother beat up every boy on the island)--all sorts of things that define who we are within the family. I will always be the First One To Go To College, and the European Traveler, and the Spleenless Wonder, and the Girl Who Fired Her Mom When She Was Seven. Those are integral parts of the Myth of Laura. Are they all of me? No. But they are there. Sometimes I do things that sort of crack the myth of me, and boy does that confuse people, but then those things get integrated (or ignored).

So far the Zweeble Myth has a rough pregnancy, lots of vocabulary, and a love of Queen in it. :)

The other thing that struck me, as I've been mulling this over the past few days, was seeing jkason in Falsettos on Saturday night.

See, Jason is one of my very best friends. I've known him for ... fifteen years now? I have a lot of memories of Jason, and we've been through a lot in our friendship, and probably because of that I have a hard time watching him on stage and seeing the character and not the person. (I think if Meryl Streep were one of my best friends, I'd have the same issue; this is not a question of talent.) He manages it a lot more now than he did when he started doing shows, actually, but I always find myself wondering how he ... I don't know, exactly, but how he looks to the other people in the audience. How they're reacting when he sings, how they see his body language, all that stuff. What sort of construct they're making in their heads of Jason the Actor and Jason the Character.

So, yeah. Myth (I suppose you could also call it Narrative--the Narrative of Zweeble--but that implies more control of it by the subject than I intend).


*which reminded me of the weird feeling I got when I found out Neil Gaiman was divorced (or getting divorced, I'm not sure which)--I realized that I had this idea in my head that he was writing away in his big old house in Minnesota while his wife was doing her thing, peaceful happy marriage ... and I sort of went, Um ... I don't know these people, this is really weird, I feel like a stalker.

My writing style is "simplistic"? I use semicolons, fer pete's sake!

So, stotangirl, your LiveJournal reveals...

You are... 17% unique (blame, for example, your interest in the zweeble), 17% peculiar, 8% interesting, 8% normal and 50% herdlike (partly because you, like everyone else, enjoy writing). When it comes to friends you are normal. In terms of the way you relate to people, you are keen to please. Your writing style (based on a recent public entry) is simplistic.

Your overall weirdness is: 35

(The average level of weirdness is: 28.
You are weirder than 74% of other LJers.)

Find out what your weirdness level is!

So I'm 50% herdlike, normal with regard to my friends, and keen to please. And yet, in the top 26% for weirdness. I want to know how they figure their results. Because, frankly, I am much weirder than that.

I have a really long to-do list of stuff I need to get done by tomorrow night, when we leave for North Carolina, but I am tired and lacking all motivation.

Here I go, though. Once more unto the breach and stuff.

So when I was in junior high and high school, wearing green on Wednesday meant you were ... er ... kind of randy.

(Looking back, this is hilarious--we were teenagers; if green were an indication of such things, we ought to have all just been green.)

So it's St. Patrick's Day, on a Wednesday, and you are "required" to wear green, and I just find it funny.

I have a bunch of things I want to get done today before I go to work. But I don't think I can get them all done, so I have to figure out which ones I'm going to do and which one, when my mother arrives to babysit and asks, "What can I take care of for you?" I can ask her to do without feeling like a total doof.

And the Zweeb is calling me.

Specifically, ordinal linguistic personification: Holy cats, that's me!

One and two are parents--one is mom and two is dad. Three and four are siblings. Three is a girl, four is a boy. Five is a bit of a loner, but he yearns toward six in an innocent, crush-like way. Six and seven are in love, and eight is always chasing after six, but she doesn't really like him at all. Nine is older, and she's above all of this. I think ten is a guy. After that, the rules don't really apply, though some numbers seem more feminine and some more masculine than others.

I have known this since I was a kid. It made learning the multiplication tables really complicated, because there was all this interpersonal stuff going on between the numbers--at least in my mind. But man, I know 7x6 and 6x8 off the top of my head. :)

Looking at other kinds of synesthesia, numbers, days of the week, months of the year, and years do all tend to have a specific place, in my head. The week is straight, then the weekend curves and links the days back together. Linked to that whole multiplication table thing above, different times tables have different locations. The threes are closer and easier to get to than the nines.

(This is the first time I've ever articulated this. It's just ... weird. I feel like a poseur or something. But it's just how numbers are, in my head. I always figured it was because I'm more verbal than mathematical--I was keeping myself entertained with stories because I hated math so much.)

Grapheme-color synesthesia, which has a tendency to go along with OLP, isn't anything I've ever really thought about, so I'm thinking that's not something I have. But certain things are colors for me. Some music--the Sisters of Mercy and Nine Inch Nails are dark colors, always--maybe with splashes of white or silver?--but Green Day depends on the song. The Futureheads version of Hounds of Love tends to be reddish-brown. Some smells have colors.

That's just so ... whacked out. There was a post on Robin McKinley's blog about it, and I found it interesting--I'd first heard of synesthesia in grad school, but I always thought it was sounds and colors, and more ... I dunno, intense or something. Not day to day. And not love stories about numbers. :)

The new iTunes visualizer is really, really gorgeous and cool, but it's distracting as hell.