For those of you not my immediate family, this will probably come as a surprise: Shan and I moved last weekend. We’ve been apartment hunting for several weeks, since Shan’s mother violated my privacy and life in that house became truly unliveable, and last weekend we not only saw our first apartment, but the man that showed it to us was Shan’s high school electronics teacher (his very presence was a huge coincidence - his wife, our kinda-landlord [her father is our actual landlord, but she does all the work] had a headache so he showed the apartment instead of her) so he could vouch for Shan, and I talked to the landlord on the phone, and two hours later we signed papers and had a new place to live. So, that final hurdle has been crossed. I have graduated high school, gone into college, gotten a liscence of sorts (so it’s a learner’s permit, big deal), am holding down a full-time job, and have an apartment.

Shan and I are doing very well for ourselves - a year together in an 8*10 room has more than prepared us for a year together in a 20*15 room, I think. (Yes, it’s a studio, with a seperate teensy bathroom and kitchen.) We have a strange relationship, I think, that kind of comfortable familiarity you get with a close friend. It works well for living in close quarters, and for a lasting relationship, I hope. You know how they say that a couple should be friends above all else? They’re right. I mean, really, what is love? What is romance? It’s just friendship, true friendship, when you boil away all the trappings that novels and gossip have added on over the years. No one’s ever going to sweep you off your feet. Love happens quietly, when you laugh and bump shoulders and linger in a convenience store in the middle of the night and trade tattered paperbacks that you’ve read a hundred times.

Speaking of books, I started reading The Stand in the laundromat, and it’s so utterly terrifying. I get plagues. I understand how a highly contagious disease will be uncontrollable in the modern world. How we’re setting ourselves up for the first 150 pages of The Stand, word for word. Tinkering with the bird flu - “To better understand how it became communicable to humans”, of course. Making it more deadly. So I finally have the topic for my research paper. Still no thesis, but that will come. I like confronting myself in these papers, for whatever reason. Challenging my own beliefs and fears. That’s why the book report is coming along so slowly - there is absolutely nothing I can do to make it interesting, worthwhile. But I will perservere - one slightly poor grade on a minor paper won’t kill me, and considering the dreck my classmates put out and get Bs on, I am not concerned.

I want to sit on a beach for days on end, watching the changing intersect of shore and waves, feeling the solid earth wash away into solution under my feet, listening to the territory-calls of gulls and the wind curling around grass and leaves, Navier-Stokes vacuums tugging them this way and that, feeling the winter roll in damp and chill and tasting of seaweed and ozone as it paints the sky and sea the same shade of gunmetal.

I smelled the lake today. It was cold, air rolling hard off the cold water, equalizing with the pavement-warm fall around it. It was damp, so faintly wet that you can only taste it, the thick taste of things wriggling deep into mud to sleep. It smelled nothing like the ocean. It’s almost close enough.

It keeps coming to my attention that my brain works very differently from other people’s, and that I am just very good at acting like I know what normal is. Also that I self-diagnose too much, and that I need more sleep. And Atlantis. Always need more Atlantis. I feel much better now that I’ve talked with Ally and read some nice, soothing fic and messed with making my money look pretty and ignored my insurmountable paper. I’ll write some crap tomorrow, fail it, and then I can have the whole rest of the semester to rewrite it. I love this teacher. So, good thoughts about Atlantis and sleep, and all will be fine tomorrow. No more crazies and paranoia.

WEEKEND. I have had a productive day of Final Fantasy, followed by some 400 words of fic, followed by half a paragraph of my paper. I have no idea what my paper is about, really. But it has a cool title: “The Beast Mechanical.” I’m getting better at this naming stories thing. It’s still so weird to have two days off from work, though. Weeeeird. The lemon pie helps. My thoughts are so disjointed, man. I’ve been so tired this week.

Busy week. Today I had the dreaded exam - which was actually not so bad, yes I know everyone told me that, but I’m still shaking. It’s just - mortifying. At least it’s a whole year until the next one. But ew, they have mirrors so you can look at your own cervix. Ew. Ew ew ew. I am also compiling a list of Things I Wish Sex Ed Had Taught Me. Just stupid things that no one bothered to mention, but oh hey it’s totally normal. Which is unusual for me, because I used to think my freakish bursts of bleeding out the crotch were normal, so normal is novel. ANYWAY.

Tomorrow voting! Yay voting! I have a tendency to not know what office people are voting for and to just choose candidates based on their character and ad campaigns (Tarrant, for example, is a resounding No. His campaign has been slander from day one, the fucking multi-millionaire liar. Oh yes, he made up half his slander. That’s the guy I want in office.) so as a result, I only have two strong opinions, and I think one of them is a Republican. The other is an Independent, in the grand history of throwing off the shackles of oppressive partisanship.

Wednesday and Thursday class (must remember to return library book and write paper), and then Friday the sorta-in-laws come up for dinner, which I did not know before ten minutes ago and got glared at for not knowing. Yus, I am telepathis. Grgh. (No, it wasn’t Shan that glared, jeez. Why does everyone assume that if you have a boyfriend, he’s abusive? Maybe I stay with him because I love him and he loves me back. How novel.) And then Saturday, oh, Saturday. I probably have something to do on Saturday. I dunno. My memory doesn’t work that well. Oh! Also Wednesday, signing up for registration in new classes. Nooot quite sure what classes I’ll be taking yet. We’ll see. At least the next level of Algebra.

So~! The mess with my time card got straightened out, I got paid, all is well. Holy shit, weekend. These days off keep throwing me for a loop.

I’m in a new department at work now! I got moved over to Scales, originally temporarily, but uh. The woman that had to go away for a month because she was sick? She. Uh. Has lung cancer that’s metastasized. So uh. I’m kinda staying in Scales. They keep telling me I’m doing well and going fast, but I’m not. D: They’ve been there for years, every other person in the department, so they whip through this shit at something like 300% of rate, and I’m making, uh, 110%. And they want me to keep up with them. I keep stressing out about it, and about how I’m apparently not allowed to claim anything (and thus my rate is technically 0%, which means BAD THINGS) because uh, they don’t trust me to put in the final screw on these plates. So I peel the plates, put together the fiddly metal bits, screw that together using two different screwdrivers, super-glue the pointer on (WHEE GLUE), and stack them up 300 at a time - and then someone else goes through and puts a single screw in each and claims them all. I just - I don’t want to be bitter about it, because hey, not in Packing, but. Rate is a huge deal. And mine is zero. And that’s freaking me out, even if the supervisor knows I’m working hard and almost keeping up and doing actual work. On the plus side, I like doing these plates. Even when I superglue my fingers together. And get high on the glue and then have to go to class.

Speaking of class. Heh heh. Oh man. I am doing so well. I almost don’t want to give it away, but - my Algebra midterm, the one I was so freaked out about? Oh man, this is hilarious. I got one hundred and ten percent. Hee!

P.S. Wow, hanging, huh? That won’t make him a martyr at all. (Also I got Final Fantasy BAJILLION because I am helplessly ensnared by the brand. SAVE ME.)