Infecting you with music...

I'm going to put some songs in your head, and you may or may not like it.

1. Remember that Madonna song "Justify My Love"? I used to love that song when it first came out, back when I frequented dance clubs. I just listened to it this morning. It's not as cool as I remember. I think the only reason I liked it was because I had a version of it where she recited parts of Revelation. I thought it was clever back then.

2. Last week when I was getting tattooed a friend of Jeremy's came in and played this song (see below), and it has plagued me ever since. Now I'm infecting you.


3. I talk about Japan a lot here. I like Japan. I also like the band Japan from the late 70's-early 80's band headed by David Sylvian. And here is one of those Japan songs that really makes me happy because it's so...I'll let you fill in the rest. This song reminds me of a fabulous orange shirt owned by Joshua. Remember Joshua, if you tire of that shirt, pass it on...

The Courtship of Parthenia and Primo Ellingsgard.

Part One: Housemates Hook Up

I don't think the husband ever reads this, so I sometimes bitch about him. But not today. This is one of my favorite stories to tell: how the husband and I lived together longer than we've actually been a couple. Th husband once asked me not to post photos of him, or reveal his name. So I call him the husband. It sounds a little cold, and I worry that when I write about him, a mild complaint will sound much bigger than it actually is.
Since this is meant to be a happy fest about the husband, let's warm it up and give him a name. We'll call him Primo. [Tengetical anecdote about the name Primo: When we were thinking of baby names for Bea, the husband--Primo--said he wanted to call our baby "Primo" if it was a boy. It became a joke between us, and perhaps there was a little poke at some of the kooky (to him) names I was thinking up. Like Jedediah. Only thing is, I was serious. Or maybe he was, too. I never could tell.]

Anyhow, Primo and I met in 1995. I was living in a house with 3 other roommates, and my roomate Frank went to Amsterdam for a semester, and needed to sublet his room. We placed an ad in a few papers, and got a few calls. One was from a UMASS student named Primo Ellingsgard. He sounded nice enough on the phone, so we invited him over. The very first time I laid eyes on Primo, I sat on our porch and watched him walk from the corner up to our house. He had shoulder length curly blond hair that bounced with each step of his very distinct walk. Primo has beautiful, touchable, soft hair with these big curls. It almost breaks my heart when he cuts it. As he got closer I saw that he was really cute. If I remember correctly, he wore black Converse hightops. I don't know what else he wore.
Needless to say we picked him, and he moved in at the end of August. First we hung out as friends. All the time. I think around December, I admitted to myself that I has a crush on my housemate. By New Year's Day, it was clear to me that there was something there. Several near kisses, extended snuggle sessions, and tickle fights later, on January 13, I asked him if he wanted to make out, and we did.

Stay tuned for more Primo Ellingsgard happy fests...

Your Favorite RPG Character

I'd like to know, gentle reader, if you have a favorite RPG character of your creation. Last night I found mine, Shizuka from our Sorcerer game.
It doesn't take much for me to cry at movies or in dramatic moments on books or TV, so it's no surprise that I'm really sad for my Sorcerer character Shizuka. At first I thought she was just a nervous wreck, near a breakdown, but I realized this morning, after pondering what transpired last night, that perhaps she just enjoys pain, arguing, and being unhappy. That really sucks for her, because her demon's need was that he needed to make her happy. And we all know that not even the funniest clown can make someone who wants to be unhappy become happy. She wasn't feeding his need, so her homicidal demon husband left her. The last straw was that after he admitted to killing their children, she asked him to get a demon vasectomy, which seemed to be a logical request at the time, but probably not something one should ask if you and your partner are not getting along, or when you're both high on opium. After I said it, Vincent, the GM, flipped through the book to clarify demon rebellion and unbinding. I thought, aw, crap. Shizuka is screwed. Even my husband, who has very little to say about my gaming experiences because I tend to talk to him about it when I come home and he's geekin' over his Think Tanks game quickly chimed in that it was a bad thing to say. It's a bad thing to say when I mention the V word between us. But every time I say "let's have another baby", he gets all prickly and grimacy, too. I don't get it, but I digress...
The kicker started out as something just to be scary: She finds a dead baby in a beautiful wooden box. But her reaction to it was the kiss of death for the marriage. She didn't trust Tai (demon husband) anymore. She thought he had something to do with the appearance of the box (I'm still unclear of how it appeared), and that maybe he put it where she would see it to be cruel. She's touchy about babies, having had 5 that just disappeared, and she overreacted.
Speaking of babies, at first I thought she was all about having the babies, but also came to see her mother wanted grandchildren much more than Shizuka wanted to make them.
Her price is that she has large gap memory loss (and I play it that she conveniently forgets painful things as well, and remembers things incorrectly, or just enough not to have an accurate account of what happened) So all these years she's relied on Tai to tell her the truth about what's happened, since she can't or won't remember. She doesn't trust him, and her denial and desire to forget a succession of traumas (the husband killing all 5 of their children mere weeks after they were born, year after year), caused her not to ask the all-important "why?" When she got the answer (they would have turned into really horrible demons) Tai was on the way out the door. Sad. (And still the Shizuka in me thinks, would they really go evil? Tai's not that evil and he's the father.)
I love it when you think you've formed something about your character that ends up only being true on the surface. While your initial statements about your character may be X, their reactions and expereinces show that Y is truer. Like the baby in the box thing. Since her cover is that she's an ethnobotanist, I've explored that maybe she tends to abuse opium, which can also account for a lot of memory loss, mental confusion, hallucination, delusions, etc.
I've found it great fun to play characters whose inspiration comes from a part of me I'm not comfortable with, and I had to get past the fact that I was exposing my own bad sides. I got inspiration for Shizuka from me....
~Ages 19-22, when I not-so-secretly enjoyed being unhappy.
~Ages 22-24, when I was very unfortuneately romantically involved in two toxic relationships and cared very much for both people. (one of whom I'm still friends with, but the toxicity is all cleaned up)
~On those days when I wake up in the morning and am just looking to pick a fight with anyone who crosses my path (and it tends to be the husband)
~That phase before I met the husband when I loved the Bad Boys.
~That part of me that can be really passive aggressive to the husband, even though I know it's wrong.
~The part of me that has nightmares of the husband leaving me without any explanation or contact afterwards. And that came through in play in an eerie scene. Shizuka tried to summon Tai. She wrote in her own blood a long letter of contrition [My beloved Tai, I'm sorry I've been such a bitch lately...Perhaps a vasectomy is not a good idea at this time...If you come back, I'll laugh at your jokes, praise your superior cooking, work at being a better wife who is attentive to your needs...], begging for forgiveness, did her ritual summoning of placing the letter in water, chanted, burned inscence, surrounded herself in Tai's possessions. Due to my crappy roll of the dice, the summoning failed, and Tai did not show. That he did not respond in the least was beautiful. Horribly beautiful. I've had that nightmare before--where the husband and I have a fight, he walks out, and I can't talk to him. That scene gave me chills.
Everyone else's stories are intense and depressing. There isn't much of an emotional reprieve, except for the fact that Shizuka has only interacted with Harriet, Meg's character, whom Tai tried to brain with a hammer. I get to sit and listen to Joshua and Emily do their story-telling. Amazingly, Harriet agreed to help Shizuka locate Tai. It could have been a light moment in the whole game, but Shizuka willingly cut off the tip of her pinkie to feed to Harriet's knick knack making, bone eating well demon, as retribution for Tai's attempted murder of Harriet, and clogging her well with 6 yen pieces. We've stayed consistently dark, even darkly funny.

So there's mine. What's yours? What was (even if so far) your favorite scene? What inspired their formation? How did they evolve? Where did your characters end and you begin, and round the other way?
I've only been doing role playing games for less than a year. I have been really lucky to have played with wickedly imaginative GM's too! Growing up I played lots of pretend, and in high school I had a couple of friends that I did a free form kind of role playing-story telling thing. In nursing school we did lots of role playing to gain perspective on patient/nurse relations. And I do SCA here and there, love to dress in Renaissance and Faire garb. I like to play pretend, but my "formal" role playing experience is pretty limited. (Shhhh....I've never played D&D, and don't really plan to...) I'm amazed how drawn into a story and how attached to a character one can get. So I'm curious to hear other people's experiences with characters that really stuck to them or haunted them.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The Good : My mom had the cardiac catheterization done, and everything went well.
The Bad (but not so bad): She does have some blockage in her arteries, but she won't need really bypass surgery, or an angioplasty, just drugs. She said she's also going to work harder at keeping her blood pressure down, and will try to lose some weight. Good for mom.
I just noticed I look just like my mom in the picture to the left. Same facial expression and everything... Not a bad thing, just an observation.
The Ugly: Speaking of weight loss and exercise (okay, I didn't talk about exercise yet, but I saw a theme and I ran with it), I noticed some very interesting dynamics in the Nautilus Room at the Y yesterday. There appears to be a self segregation between the men and the women. If there are more men in the weight room, the women all go do the cardio machines, and vice versa. I never really noticed this until yesterday when I was doing the Nautilus machines and there were two men (among many men, mostly regulars) there who were grunting really loudly. Loud enough for me to crank up the iPod (Grateful Dead, "Tennessee Jed" to start). It was distracting. I just wanted to yell "get a freakin' room!" So you can imagine what it sounded like, if you're not one to hang out in fitness centers. The husband tells me this is a fairly common thing, and on the list of rules in the free weight room it says something like "No Loud Grunting". I also looked around to see if there was anyone else with a visible WTF or amused look on his face. Nope, just me, and I was the only woman there. Then I looked into the cardio room, and there was not a single man in there. I wasn't about to change my workout and join the herd, so I just tried to ignore the grunters, and then did a quickie cardio. (Later that night I had a funny dream about self segregation, which would only really be funny to someone else in the dream, so I won't share. Sorry.)
I am now fascinated with this phenomenon. I've never really heard women grunt like that while working out. I don't grunt loudly while working out, even when I up my weight level. I made crazy primal grunty sounds when I was giving birth to my kids, but can we really equate birthing a baby to lifting weights? I'm not convinced that the workout grunting is necessary. Amusing and somewhat disturbing, perhaps, but not necessary. There's a time and place for grunting, and working out in a public place may not be it. I don't think my being the only woman in the weight room had any impact on the volume or frequency of the grunting, as no other men joined in. Now that would have been really odd and distrubing. I would have gone to the cardio room, and joined the ladies if I suddenly found myself in a room full of loudly grunting, sweaty, middle aged (and a few adolescent) men. I shudder to think.

Anyone out there, please share. What's the workout grunt all about?
Here's more information about No Grunting Policies in gyms. I really feel bad for the guy who was kicked out of the gym for grunting. OTOH, the sign said "No Grunting".

Ahhh the Pain! The Glorious, Colorful, Pain! (But don't tell my parents!)

I have a unfinished half-sleeve dragon on my left arm that goes over my shoulder to just above my left breast, and on Sunday I whiled away the afternoon and early evening in the tattooist's chair, as he added more color to my arm. Now the dragon has blue scales, and a blue face ("sick" blue, as it has been dubbed. "Sick", as in "bad" or "dope" or "vivid and beautiful"). Next Jeremy will finish coloring the dragon (a bit more shading and depth), then the underbelly and fin-like apparata and tail will be colored orange, then he'll color the water sea green ("sick" green, of course, but not the green you might see on someone who is actually sick), then he'll do the final touch ups, then it will be done. Then perhaps we'll go on to octopuses, and just do the rest of my arm.
I forgot how much I really enjoy getting tattooed, and enjoy even more getting tattooed by my friend Jeremy. We don't get to hang out as much as we used to, so we had much catching up to do. The days before the appointment, on top of being grumpy for no discerable reason, I was a little anxious about getting tattooed. I'm not sure why, but a night of dancing and hanging out with just Bea helped that. It's definitely not about the pain. Well, it kind of is. My endorphins seem to flow fairly easily and quickly, and after about 20 minutes of tattooing, I was pretty high. But before hand, I think about the less pleasant areas to be tattooed, like right across the clavicle and under my arm. By the time he got to those areas, I was floating on my body's version of opoids (naturally, of course), with not a care in the world. I even developed an appreciation for the band Clutch. I love tattoos, especially really big ones, I love getting tattoos.
To my parents, this penchant for tattoos is very un-ladylike, and possibly indicative of a greater psychological problem. And even though I'm 36 years old, have two kids, am happily married, have steady legal employment, went to a good college, don't do drugs or smoke cigarettes, own a house, and have never been in trouble with the law, I can't bring myself to discuss the whole tattoo obsession with them. I think they just noticed that I have a tattoo on my chest, and possibly on my arm (I started getting work on it about 5 years ago). There's at least one other they don't know about (completed in 1993). And for now, I'm really content not to go there, and they seem to be too. There are lots of other cool things I talk about with my parents. They don't know about my blog either.
Maybe when it heals I'll put up some pictures, but don't count on it. Just in case someone in my family stumbles on this site....

The Alpha Bitch De-Bitches

Okay everyone together, deep breath. Inhale.......and......exhale. One more time. Inhale.....and.....exhale. Ah.
How could I forget that dancing makes me irie?
I took Bea to Dance Spree this evening. It's amazing what a little movement can do for your mood. Miss "Ha ha! The dog pissed on your gym clothes" Grumpy Pants boogied her grumpy pants right off. It was just what the doctor might have ordered. Bea and I got to hang out and have fun, and I got some exercise, which I need on a daily basis in order to maintain a reasonably sunny disposition. I didn't make it to the gym yesterday.
And I had a little taste of the proveribal karmic crow before I left. Jeddy got a little excited and, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, he pissed on my bag. I'm sure he did it not because he just adores me, but because he got excited and pissed all over the place, as young dogs are apt to do. Just a little dribble got on my bag, but enough to remind me how much it really sucks to have a dog pee on your stuff.

The Universe chastened me by way of the Dog. Thanks, Universe. Thanks, Jed.

So why all the pee in the house? Jed never lived in a house before he came to us, and we've had him for about 3 weeks. He's about 95% house trained, and Dec 1 was his 5% day.

My Dog Speaks for Me When I Must Hold My Tongue

The crap of the week:
I discovered my frog tank is infested with planaria.
My mom is having a cardiac catheterization and I had a dream about her telling me she was dying of a heart illness.
Work just plain sucked.
My older daughter tested my patience at every possible moment, and showed me just how similar we are.
The husband's schedule allegedly required him not to be home before 8 pm Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and on one of those nights he chould have called, but he didn't because he never calls to say he's late, and I was in a bad mood, and I would have liked his company and help earlier in the evening, so I've been a little annoyed (pissed) at him all week. But what do I say? "You can't go out"? I can't say that. I'm going to be gone most of the day on Sunday, and the shoe has been on the other foot before--many times. So I didn't say anything. I just gave attitude here and there, enough to let him know I was annoyed about something that may or may not have had anything to do with him. He probably thought I was just menstrual. And yes, I know my behavior was wrong.

Maybe Mississippi Jed picked up on the last one. Jed adores me. I'm the alpha bitch in the pack. This morning, he peed all over the husband's mesh gym bag that was full of his freshly laundered exercise apparel. The husband didn't notice until he got in the car to go to the Y after work, and noticed his car smelled like dog piss. (I guess he wasn't going to tell me he was going to spend the whole evening at the Y tonight, and not come home before 8 again.) So he had to come home to wash his dog pissed clothes and actually tell me of his plans to work out all evening. I said, (paraphrasing) "not so fast, dude, I'm going out tonight with Bea, and you're staying home." And I laughed.

Thanks, Jed.

Note: This isn't how the husband and I normally communicate. Our communication is mostly healthy, but we all have our days, and today apparently was not mine.