Regina Noctis

I was supposed to be finishing up what I needed to do around here, and then hitting the road for a week-long trip to visit friends in Arizona.

As of last night, the trip is cancelled. As is one of the friendships that I really valued.

Out of the blue, the friend that I was going to be crashing with while I was visiting him and several others in Arizona went nuts on me. He accused me of betrayals and lies. All because I didn’t tell him about something I’d only learned about two days before, and that should not have been an issue. I certainly didn’t see it as an issue. The guy I’m kinda-sorta involved with made decision to audition as a DJ, for the same online radio station as my now ex-friend. So what? I still don’t see how not bringing this up is in any way a betrayal. And in the course of his ripping into me, I discovered that he’d deliberately lied to me. So really, who betrayed who?

But my former friend’s definition of betrayal seems to include mistakes, or just not knowing that something would ever be an issue, rather than something deliberately perpetrated. So it was inevitable that he’d find some reason to decide I’d betrayed him.

During the course of this, he indicated that he knew who I was working for, and one of the dumbest things about this whole bout of crazy is that I dislike the person he accused me of working for to betray and hurt him. It’s someone I say hi to periodically, because I am civil and polite. But that is the extent of it.

And my ex-friend just kept going and going, with increasing vitriol. He said some horrible thing to me, and in the end I wound up crying… no, not crying, sobbing out loud, honestly… for about two hours. The only time I’ve been hurt so badly by a friend was years ago, when my best friend was heavy into crank and I couldn’t take the change in him. I tried to end the friendship with my best friend then, because I knew that if things continued as they were, I’d have nothing but memories of hurt and hate after all the years he’d been my nearest and dearest friend. I didn’t want to wind up at that point. This time, with this friend, it was even worse in some ways, because it wasn’t something I geared up for ahead of time. It was an unwarranted attack, completely out of the blue.

The worst of the hurt is behind me, but I’m still swinging between anger and hurt. I expect I will be for a few days yet at least. I’ll be fine, and then suddenly raging, or else find I’m suddenly crying again. I don’t deal well with endings, and never have. Losing a friend leaves me heartbroken in so many ways. I love my friends with great intensity, and that makes the hurt after something like this also quite intense.

Were it not for my other dear friends there - Sal, Iggy, Div, and Yar - I’d have just left SSW for good last night, rather than chance running into the friend who did this again.

Yesterday afternoon: Step into my room and notice a very unpleasant smell. Step outside to check if the same smell is out there. No, it’s just in my room. Run into both of the handymen, who are repainting the house. Determine it’s not the paint. They step into my room, and we all three recognize the smell as burning rubber. Turn off the cooler and let the room air out. Sure enough, it’s the cooler, which we’d just had worked on recently because the pump had died.

Yesterday evening: Broil in my room with only the ceiling fan running. Give up and go skinny dipping in the swimming pool around midnight to cool off. Eventually wander back into the house, fiddle around online for a while, then attempt to get sleep.

Dawn this morning: Still awake. Too accustomed to the white noise produced by the cooler after these months. With it turned off, can now hear every creak of the house settling, every sound from outside. Completely unable to sleep until sometime after full daylight.

Approximately two hours later: Woken up by new smells of burning rubber. The people are here to service the cooler, and in order to do so, it has been turned on. Wake up with massive headache, wander into the house, and attempt to go back to sleep. 20 minutes later, woken by my cat, who is feeling better after a trip to the vet and pain medication for feline acne. Cat now wants wuv, and is willing to purr frantically in my ear, butt my hand with his head, and sink his claws into my feet until he gets it. Give up sleeping and pet the cat until he calms down. Grab a couple mochas and a smoke, go out to my room where the cooler is again off, and fiddle around online until hammering on roof done and cooler working properly again.

About three hours later (now): Exhausted, but caffeine has kicked in and unable to go back to sleep. Cranky, eyes burning from missed sleep, still vaguely headachey as cooler blows the rest of the smell out of its innards and it is cycled through the room and out the windows, nose running in reaction to the smell. Considering attempting to sleep in the main house again, but will probably be accosted by the Kibbe cat again. Also unwilling to go in to get enough caffeine to feel more awake, as will doubtless run into grandmother unit and be completely unable to take her bitching and snide remarks with anything resembling civility or diplomacy. Vaguely hating everyone and everything at the moment.

This day had better get a lot fucking better.

I was playing one of the games I play. The game is full of secret societies, and one of the way to gain power within your society is to sex0r your societymates. (Yes, that is an option throughout the game, and not just with others in your society.) There are satellites - LuvSats - that increase power gains from clicking the button marked sex0r. I invited one of my societymates to a luvsat, because it would help him in the society. Not me so much, I’ve got the third highest power in the society already, and his power is so much lower than mine, the difference in power I’d gain from him and what he’d gain from me was well over 100 points.

Somehow, inviting a societymate to sex0r (and seriously, it’s all just clicking a button three times. Not something to even raise an eyebrow over, much less get all hot and bothered about.) led to me getting hit on by an 18-year-old. A very determined 18-year-old, who was not accepting any of my gentle attempts at deflection. Or the not-so-gentle ones, for that matter. Age didn’t matter. Weight didn’t matter. Distance didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Somehow, he’s going to make sure that I’m in the Bay Area soon and accessible, regardless of what I say, it seems.

Why am I only irresistible to the ones that are far too frigging young? And with the ones around my age, I’m entirely resistible? How do I manage to do this, especially when this is not what I’m looking for?

*headdesk*

And considering I have Swiss cheese for a memory, this is the best way to remember later.

“I feel like someone who’s given up gambling, but then stumbles onto a winning ticket. And who possibly doesn’t appreciate its true value.”

…my fury and my hatred for those little shits knows no bounds.

…I’m grateful that Iggy’s such a fantastic friend.

…I’m making some progress on what I’ve been pursuing fairly intensely in the last several weeks.

…I miss my pet fag.

Three hours after the two, and still grinning like a dope.

Butterflies!

A couple online friends are moving in together sometime soonish. It wasn’t sounding like they’d be able to get together very soon, but that has suddenly changed, as I was told. Ig and his pookie are really rad people, and I’m so happy for them that they could conquer the barriers in the way, including moving across multiple states.

I’m considering a late celebration dinner to cook for them, since cooking is often a gift I try to give my favorite people. Assuming I can get the money together to head out to MA someday.

I think mocha rum cake is a must.

The bronchitis was conquered, in much less time than it normally takes me to get over it. That surprises me, since it was also a much worse case than I normally get.

Since, I’ve been dealing with my cat getting sick. It was very mysterious, and of course had to happen while our local vet was out of town. I spent multiple nights at the emergency vet to make sure the Kibbe stayed hydrated, since he’d stopped eating or drinking, just so we could get through until our regular vet was back in town. All the tests and x-rays and bloodwork that they ran at the emergency vet were normal, yet my cat was lethargic, had been vomiting foam, would not eat or drink, his breathing was rapid and shallow, he was crying in pain if he was touched, and had gone very pale (which he always when sick). The only thing that showed up that it might be was a possibly higher white cell count in his bladder. The vet thought it might by cystitis, and gave us antibiotics for it. The Kibbe has a few more days of antibiotics to go, but he is already back to himself. He tried to grab the Alien in a Cat Suit by the throat and strangle her last night. This morning, he tried to beat the Demon away from all three bowls of food that were out so he could have them to himself. Typical Manx. As our vet says, they’re territorial and pissy.

It was pretty scary before he started getting better. Especially coming so soon after we had to have Whiskers put down. We were neither of us able to deal with the idea of another loss. We announced to the cats the other night that none of them is allowed to die. Ever. They have no choice, they have to go on forever. The Alien gave us one her patented “Go screw yourself, two-legged can opener” looks, and then disappeared into another room with the Demon in hot pursuit. They never listen.

What started off as a cold has now settled into an infection in my chest. I’ve got my annual bout of bronchitis.

I usually get this during the fall, but skipped it altogether last year. Consequently, this time around it’s much worse than usual. I’ve got around another week, week and a half of this before it starts fading off, based on the usual amount of time it takes me to get over it. This time might be longer, though, because it’s so bad. I’ve only had this for a few days now, and already I’ve strained most of the muscles in my abdomen from the constant, deep coughing. Medication takes care of most of the symptoms, but not all. I’m left with just enough to feel miserable most of the time, plus the side effects from the medication that make me feel like a zombie.

At least it means I get lots of sleep, even if it’s only in 2 to 4 hour segments before the medications wear off and I wake myself up coughing and choking. With the insomnia, I’ll take any sleep I can get, even if it’s only because of a reaction to medication.

I can’t wait for this to be over. I’m sick of being sick, and tired of being constantly tired.

I was talking with a friend about Radio Free Xangaka. He’s trying out as a DJ there, and we were talking about making station bumps and the ideas he had for his show. It started off as joking, but it eventually became a plan that we’d start this pseudo-religion on his show. I was talking about writing and singing some hymns for it, since I have a decent singing voice. He wanted to hear, so I recorded myself singing a very short bit of Amazing Grace.

He told me that I have a gorgeous voice, that it was so good that it sent shivers down his back. And that I have the voice of a slightly rumpled angel. I thought that was the coolest thing that’s ever been said about my singing voice. It entirely makes up for the fact that I sound like a pond full of frogs at the moment, since I woke up with a sore throat and a cold.

Back home safe and sound from BayCon.

I’d forgotten what it was like to have a relaxing time at con. I ran night reg for seven years, which meant that my conventions have tended to be work, stress, and sleep. This year was very different, and I didn’t remember until I got to just enjoy the convention how much fun it is. And it was so lovely to catch up with friends whom I haven’t seen in a year or more.

I had an especially fantastic time for other, more personal reasons. I am currently a very happy Christophine.

Best. Weekend. Evar.

Okay, I’m in the last stretch of preparing for the road trip north. Got to finish up packing and getting ready, and then I’m on my way. So, effectively, as of now I’m offline until sometime Tuesday night or Wednesday. If anyone needs to contact me, I will have the cell with me (and charged for a change!). If you don’t have my number but are on the friends list of my old LJ, I have left the text portal there in operation. Anyone else, well, sorry. I’m incommunicado.

See everyone who’s going at BayCon. Anyone who’s not going, you’ll be missed.

Okay, I’m off. But we knew that.

And I’m pretty busy getting ready to head out of town tomorrow for the Bay Area. So today I meme:

Go to http://quotationspage.com/random.php3 and keep reading until you find five ten quotes that speak to your personal truth. (Couldn’t whoever wrote this come up with a less pretentious phrase?)

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.  –e.e. cummings

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.  –Thomas Jefferson

I have a right to my anger, and I don’t want anyone telling me I shouldn’t be, that it’s not nice to be, or that something’s wrong with me because I get angry.  –Maxine Waters

The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own. –Benjamin Disraeli

People often say that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared look, including inside ourselves. –Salma Hayek

Be a good listener. Your ears will never get you in trouble. –Frank Tyger

Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else. –Judy Garland

Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viabiliity at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships. –Harriet Lerner

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too. –Voltaire

Before I moved my blog here, I never saw what search terms any traffic I got from search engines had routed people to me. Now that I’m here, I’m kinda fascinated by some of the things that bring people here from search engines. One of the ones from yesterday, for example: “pet urinating on bed after seeing ghost”

I’ve never talked about any such thing. How in the hell do I get traffic from a search term like that?

Teh intartoobs are a very strange place sometimes.

Just got back from the dealer a short time ago. I have new car. PT Cruiser, Limited edition, loaded. Very, very pretty. :D

*happy dance*

I don’t usually say much about how I came to choose Christophine as my username in so many places. I might mention that I stole it from a book, but not usually much more. I don’t get into why that particular name. I rarely mention which book I stole it from. When questions about why everyone chose the usernames they have in the online venues I’ve frequented have surfaced, I certainly wasn’t going to get into all the why and wherefor. I usually don’t answer at all, or toss off the odd occasional comment about the book.

The book was Electric Forest by Tanith Lee. I discovered it when I was in high school. I had zero self-esteem at the time, but lots of intense self-loathing. Much of that was directed at my appearance. I was a bit chubby, but saw myself as disgustingly fat. I referred to myself many times as a land-whale. My friends and family never realized. I always made it sound like a joke. I was good at concealment, as many children of addicts are. I bought into the mindset that losing weight would somehow solve all my problems. If I just lost the weight, I’d be interesting and smart and… well, you get the idea. Diet and exercise did nothing. This was long before I was diagnosed with PCOS, so I didn’t know that I had even more factors acting against my ability to lose weight than many overweight people do. I just thought that it was another failure and hated myself more for it.

In the middle of this cycle, I read Electric Forest. One of the characters in it was a scientist named Christophine del Jan. When I read the physical description of the character, I could see her clearly in my head, and she was everything I felt I was not but wanted to be. I carried that image and name around inside me for years - the impossible, fictional person I wanted to be instead of myself.

It wasn’t until a few years later that I first used the name, as a character in a Vampire: The Masquerade game. The character looked and acted nothing like the Christophine in the book, but was in some ways another version of her anyway. At least, this was true inside me where I was carrying this baggage.

Christophine didn’t surface again until I’d been online for a while. I had reason to drop nearly all association with some people I’d met online. I stopped going to the site where I’d met them and stopped using the names they knew me as. I wandered from name to name for a while, but nothing stuck with me. Finally, I decided to go back to Christophine. It was not a name that the people I was disassociating myself from knew, and it had more personal meaning than the random names I’d tried and discarded as not quite right.

What surprised me when I thought about going back to the old baggage-laden name was that the baggage was diminishing. I’d grown some self-confidence and self-esteem along my rocky path. I’d had my trial by fire, which is a story for another time, and had grown strong because of it. I no longer had this horrible yearning to be someone other than myself. Christophine was just a name with a pretty sound.

Today the name has become a badge of honor. Today I am comfortable in my skin. I have a bad day now and then when I struggle a little with those issues, but they are very rare and becoming rarer still. Most of the time, I can see myself as attractive as I am, and not just physically. Today, Christophine reminds me of who I was and how far I’ve come.

I encountered a different take on this same line of thought during the middle of the semester. We had to make two self portraits in photography. One image was to show how we thought others see us. The second was to show how we see ourselves. What I really wound up creating were how I used to see myself (it fit the assignment as well, because lord knows there have been enough people who have been down on me because of my weight) and how I see myself now. I used tricks of angle and lighting to get the effects I wanted, and then further tweaked the “how I think I’m seen” picture in Photoshop. The result looks very nearly like two entirely different people, though I used the same background to help tie the two images together. The huge difference between the two felt entirely right and true. I’m a completely different person from the hurting and self-loathing girl I was. I don’t need that fictional Christophine as a repository of all that hatred I held against myself.

Christophine as I constructed her was everything I wanted to be. She was everything I thought I was not. She might not have been everbody’s idea of perfection, but the Christophine I carried inside was nearly a perfection to me, one that I didn’t think was within my reach.

But today, I am myself and happy to be so. Today, I am Christophine.

I’ve got a little bit of a crush. I can feel the butterflies of the early stages of infatuation. Gotta be careful about that. If it stops there, that’s fine. If it starts building too much too quickly, I’ll need to back off fast and get it under control. I am not doing the stupid unrequited thing. Not if I can help it. Nor the rush in blindly thing. I’m a little old to be acting like a teenager. It’s just that it’s been several years since anyone has caught my interest this much, and it’s nice to be able to enjoy the positive feelings for a while. So much of my living situation is, at the very least, difficult. It sometimes heads directly into insanely high levels of stress. Too often, really. It’s so nice to feel this good for a while.

In the meantime, I’m most definitely in lust. And that’s perfectly okay. Especially if I can get out his way soon. If I can swing it, this weekend. If I can’t, immediately after BayCon. It’s only an 8-ish hour drive. We’re down to one car again, because the psychotic cousin has taken the van. But we’re so fed up with that that we are probably going to be getting a new car. One that isn’t in the crazy grandmother’s name, so she can’t prevent us from calling the cops if he steals the car like he does the van. And as soon as I make sure everything here is taken care of, I’m heading 8 hours southeast for a few days.

We’d better get the new car soon. BayCon’s not far away, and there needs to be some form of transportation here before I can leave. Otherwise, no BayCon. No trip to visit my lust object. And I will be very, very unhappy.

C’mon, universe. I’ve been a good girl for a very long time. Give me BayCon and my other trip, and I’ll settle into another year of the crazy shit and deal with it.

I won’t get into the details of the long phone conversation, nor who it was with. But it was nearly 12 hours long, and quite an amazing, revealing, sometimes intense, sometimes funny conversation.

And then, this: If I hadn’t found you in this life, I’d have to be reborn and find you in the next one.

I could NOT talk. I was grinning a goofy grin from ear to ear, yeah. But I could not speak one word for a moment there. You people who know me, how often has that ever happened? Maybe a couple times in all our acquaintance? I don’t run out of things to say. That’s not me. But that, it stopped me. The most romantic thing that’s ever been said to me.

It was a lovely moment. Even if nothing else comes of this, that moment was worth it.

Had a hacking cough this morning. I figured I’d smoked too much and talked too long, since I had a fantastic (and very long) conversation on the phone.

I didn’t manage to get any sleep until around noon thirty. I woke up about three hours later, coughing and clogged, but still figured I’d smoked too many cigarettes during the conversation.

Aunt Demon Dog has been here for a few days now. She’s been here to celebrate her birthday. I managed to make it through dinner, but then the lack of sleep and general ickiness caught up with me, and I went back to sleep for another four hours.

When I woke up this time, I was not only coughing and clogged, but sneezing and aching, stuffed up, hoarse. I’ve dosed myself with cough meds, which will soon knock me out. Since I appear to be working on getting sick, I hope I’m over it for BayCon. Bad enough I get to spend finals week sick. I don’t want to also wind up being Patient 0 for Con Crud.

*grumble*

Sitting here quietly farming blue pills for one of the Illuminati knights in Secret Society Wars. Nothing much going on, just relaxing and doing something mindless while I think about what I’m going to do for my final project in photography. The house gave a sudden creak and lurch, followed by the hint of a gentle roll, like a small wave moving beneath a boat on a calm day at sea. I paused, glanced over at the still-sleeping cats, who hadn’t so much as twitched an ear. “Huh. Probably 4-ish. Somewhere in the 3 range if the epicenter of the quake was close.” And then I went on with what I was doing.

Once I finished the farming I was doing, I checked out the recent earthquake maps. Sure enough, it was a 4.4 quake SSW of Lake Isabella at 1:11 am. Glad to know the time I lived away from California hasn’t completely dulled my ability to ballpark them.

It reminded me of the 2-something quake that hit NJ when I lived there. I don’t even notice something that small. My friends, who’d been born and raised in New Jersey, had minor panic attacks. Even a small quake can be dangerous there, since buildings aren’t designed to earthquake codes. Even new construction generally isn’t. Not a terribly bright idea, since there is a major fault that runs through NJ (at least one that I’m aware of) and quakes do happen there. Maybe not as often as they do here, but quakes do happen. If I remember right, small quakes happen every 2-3 years in the New York - Philadelphia - Wilmington Urban Corridor. The area includes most of New Jersey. Yeah, it’s not a daily event to get some sort of quake activity. But you’d think that at least on new buildings they’d build to better survive an earthquake and not have to go back and do repairs each time something so small a Californian wouldn’t even notice it hits.