Regina Noctis

I think I can deal with this. *grins*

# 1 Inigo Montoya
# 2 Wesley
# 3 Buttercup
# 4 Max the miracle dude
# 5 Count Rugen (6-fingered guy)
# 6 Fezzik
# 7 Prince Humperdink
# 8 Vizzini (or short bad guy)

My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father…

What a weird combination I am… A veneer of Cowardly Lion over the Wicked Witch. Must be why I didn’t melt in the rain the other day.

If I only had the nerve, my pretty!

# 1 Cowardly Lion
# 2 Wicked old witch (watch out for water, ha ha)
# 3 Flying monkey
# 4 Dorothy
# 5 The Great Wizard
# 6 Tin Woodman
# 7 Toto
# 8 A munchkin
# 9 Auntie Em
# 10 Glinda the Good witch
# 11 Scarecrow
# 12 Uncle Henry

The Anne Rice vampire character selector was similar… a veneer of Louis over a second-place of Akasha. I think they’re trying to tell me something.

Just as I was putting on my shoes, sparkly faerie herself called me. We met at the Hong Sing Tea House for dim sum after all. Yay!!!!

I got their maybe five minutes before she did, and while waiting had to tell three different women with their little silver carts that I was waiting for someone. The very second that Camille got there, I think before she’d even sat all the way down in her chair, the carts laden with goodies were descending upon us. We loaded our table down with food in nothing flat. It turned out, as a matter of fact, to be more than we could actually eat. We managed almost all of it, but there was one lotus-wrapped rice and chicken thingie and two pieces of shrimp crepe that were just too much.

It was soooooooooooo great to spend an hour with Camille. I’ve missed her so much. I miss the days when we always got to hang out for a while, because we were roommates and our schedules at work agreed enough that we’d have an hour or three to sit and chat after work. Maybe even have dinner together. And we always had our Saturday late morning date. Granted, that was to clean the apartment, but I always looked forward to it.

Me, looking forward to cleaning. I must have been mentally ill at the time. Influence of living with someone who has mild OCD, I guess.

Nevertheless, I looked forward to it.

I was sorry to see lunch come to an end. Camille had to get back to work, of course. But I would have kept her longer if I could have.

I’ve been trying, off and on, to get hold of a certain pelican of my acquaintance to see if he wanted to get together for lunch. Probably dim sum. My treat. But there has so far been no answer at his place, just the looking-for-a-job style outgoing message on the voicemail. I haven’t bothered leaving a message.

And, by the way, no matter how often I hear it, I just can’t get used to my Goth Goddess’s real name. I worked with her at BlueSteel for a while, and I work with the same company as her now, and I have even used her real name myself in work situations.

Despite that, when I hear her real name on the current outgoing message on their voicemail, I have a brief moment of “Who??”

Anyhow, there has been no answer, and while I was hungry at the start of this two hours ago, I’m starving now. I think I have to give up on the idea of having lunch with the Pelican in Disguise.

Barring that, I tried to call my sparkly faerie on her cell phone, to see if she was willing/able to play hookie from work for an extended dim sum lunch, but that went straight to voicemail.

I wonder if Max likes dim sum…

If not, I’ll go stuff myself silly on it alone.

I fell in love tonight.

Too bad it had to happen at work.

What I fell in love with was the weather, as so many of the other Californians I know did. I just wish that I hadn’t had to watch the first thunderstorm of the season through the windows at work, while attempting to get things done.

I didn’t even mind that it was raining full tilt when I left for “lunch” at 7 tonight. By the end of the rainy season, I’ll be fed up with the run to the car. But tonight I cherished every drop that flattened my hair and attempted to make my makeup run.

For this area, it was an impressive storm. We don’t get that many thunderstorms around here. Usually it’s just rain. But a couple of the rolls of thunder managed to shake the building a little.

I couldn’t help but laugh at my boss. She likes to play that she’s tough sometimes, but tonight, she said she was just such a girl. The lightning and thunder made her want to run and hide. We were opposite extremes tonight. She cringed with every flash and every stormy grumble. I gloried in it.

I was sorry it was over before my shift was done tonight. I wouldn’t have minded the chance to enjoy the show for a while, undistracted by refinances and sales and new homes.

Most of my clothing is fairly elderly. I’ve got some stuff that dates back 15 or so years. And while, in my mind, it’s all still pristine and beautiful, the truth is that it’s all gotten pretty battered.

I realized the other day that I have about six outfits or so that I wear to work on any kind of a regular basis. They’re fairly mix-and-match, so I can manage to not go to work wearing exactly the same thing over and over, but that’s still not much of a wardrobe.

This came on the heels of the realization that I’m paranoid about money. I manage to put away something approaching a thousand a month in the bank, and act like I’m going to starve if I ever spend more than $20 on anything. Leftover angst from the time, close to a year, when I couldn’t find a job and the money was tight. I guess eating one $5 meal every other day cause it was what I could afford has left some scars.

I forced myself out of that over the weekend, and bought myself three new outfits. Relatively simple dresses that I could wear to work, but easily dressed up with a little jewelry to go out in.

Of the three I originally chose, only one was still available in my size. Since they didn’t offer to let me backorder any of them, I’m guessing that they’re not planning to restock the ones that were no longer available in women’s sizes, but only misses and petites.

Fortunately, the one that I wanted the most out of everything in the catalog was still available. I’m right on that mystical border between sizes, and the size I normally would have ordered was out, so I had to get the next smaller. It should still fit. It goes up to a bust size of 52″ and I’m right at 52″ these days. (And that’s a huge improvement, since I used to be six inches bigger around.) So it will probably be right on the edge of too tight, but that should improve as I lose weight. And weight loss is going on, since I’m firmly entrenched in the breakup diet. (Fortunately not like the breakup diet I dealt with when asshole Fionn left me. I can manage to keep down what I eat. I just don’t have much of an appetite, this time around.)

Of course, having less of an appetite when you’re the kind who only gets hungry about once a day isn’t all roses and song, either.

But anyway, I’m getting off track. I wasn’t going to ramble about breakup diets, was I? I was going to ramble about spending money. A much happier subject.

The dress I wanted next was out of stock in women’s sizes completely, so I wound up getting one of my alternates. They’re not even a little bit like each other, and I’d have preferred the first, but the second is nice.

I couldn’t get the third dress I wanted, and I can’t even show you the picture since it’s not in their online catalog, just the one I was paging through that I got in the mail. The one I got in its place came in either eggplant (purple) or black. I tried for the eggplant, but they were out of that one in my size also, so wound up with black.

So that was a bit of shopping. I’ve got more to do. I finally found someplace that sells stockings in my size, and since all my old ones are full of runs, it’s time. Especially since I’m getting so many dresses, and dress code at work has changed so now we must wear nylons. Even if we’re wearing pants, if we wear sandles we have to wear nylons or socks, and that’s a look I’ve always disliked. I’ve grumbled a lot about that one. And made comments that one of these days, they’re going to insist on gloves for the women at work. And then maybe even full veils.

I was fooling around on Empiriana for a little while. Pete logged in while I was there, and I tried to talk with him for a little while. Not very long. It hurt too much. There was a time that he liked how I tend to be talkative. He used to tell me to never stop being chatty. But it only took a few one-word answers to make it obvious that he didn’t want to talk. He told me that he was watching something on TV, so I told him I’d let him, and I logged off.

And promptly burst into sobs.

God I’m tired of crying. I’m tired of hurting. I’m tired of being left. I’m tired of being in love with someone who doesn’t love me. I’m tired of being so eminently forgettable and leavable. I’m tired of finding someone and our relationship worth fighting for, but not being worth fighting for, not being worth a little effort. I’m tired of me.

I’m just tired. Of everything.

I wish I could install a switch in the back of my head and turn off the ability to feel. I think I’d just leave it off, for good.

I finally couldn’t take it anymore, and took down the love letters Pete sent me that I’d hung up. Every time I’ve looked at them since he broke up with me, I started crying.

Now I wish I’d left them up. Taking them down caused a huge, major meltdown. I’ve been sobbing for some time now. I’m not even sure how long, at this point. Time got to be rather on the meaningless side. Something on the order of 2 1/2 hours though. I vaguely seem to remember starting to take the letters down around 1.

I’ve cried my way into a migraine. I’m going to go lie down and be miserable now, and hopefully eventually sleep. Journalling about it isn’t helping to relieve the tension that began it in the first place.

Night two since Freakboy’s weirdness Sunday night/Monday morning. Quiet last night and tonight. Hope the quiet continues.

Of course, on the other hand, it inspired me to look for accomodations and a roommate elsewhere. The Hapless Child may be a self-admitted looney bird, but it’s the kind of looney I really enjoy being around. I identify, and it matches my personal lunacies so well. And after 15 years of friendship, I’d say that if we haven’t killed each other yet, we’re not gonna. She indicated Monday when I was at work that she’d like someplace other than where she is since there’s a distinct lack of heat during the winter. So, perhaps we can find a place. Maybe even for less than what I’m paying now when split between us. The prices in the rental market have started dropping, after all…

I’m off to surf through rental ads and such for a while, then bedtime since I’m still trying to turn my schedule around. Not that I’ve been very effective with that of late. There have been too many things that have poured on the stress lately. It makes my sleep disorders decide to act up at once, instead of only one to three of them at a time. I can fight my way through some of them… but all of them acting in concert makes sleep pretty impossible before the sun is up. And that’s in spite of being constantly exhausted since I’m hauling my butt out of bed far earlier than it wants to be hauled. The sun goes down, and I wake up, regardless of how little sleep I’ve had of late.

I will do this. I am determined.

Well, like I don’t want to go home.

We’re getting close to done at work. I’ll have to figure out something to do until deep enough into the night that Ian’s asleep.

For whatever reason… shock, denial, disbelief… I wasn’t too scared last night. Just a little bothered.

I’m scared now.

While my roommate has been, up until now, very quiet, tonight was apparently the exception to the rule. And what I was hearing was pretty freaky.

Starting at midnight, he was talking very loudly. It was just barely quiet enough that I couldn’t hear what exactly he was saying through the wall. But it was loud. He also blasted about two minutes of some heavy metal song or other that I didn’t recognize offhand, then turned the volume way down for another minute or so, then turned it off. He then went back to the loud talking. It began to take on a kind of singsong quality. It was still obviously speech and not singing, but it almost had the qualities of a song. And it got louder, so I could catch parts of words blurred by the wall in between his bedroom and mine.

Then the loud singsong became interspersed with something loud enough that I could hear it. One sentence, a question, repeated several times, sometimes three or four times in a row before a brief silence or more of the singsong I couldn’t make it. That one question was, “How do you feeeeeeeeeeeeeel?” He drew out and kind of squealed the last word every time. About the fifth go round of “How do you feeeeeel? How do you FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEL? HOW DO YOU FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEL?” I started getting really bothered. I knocked on the door, but got no answer. He just kept on. There wasn’t even a pause. I retreated to my room, and got a little freaked out by it all, and called Sylvan just so I could have someone to talk to.

The weirdness from the other room went on for about two minutes of the call. Then it got silent in there, and I wondered if my freak of a roommate was trying to hear what I was saying on the phone. I could almost picture him with his ear pressed against the wall or something. I was real careful what I said on the subject of the roommate from then, and Sylvan and I changed the topic to other things pretty quickly.

Right as I was hanging up the phone with Sylvan, after agreeing to come over to his place for a while, I heard more noise from the roommate’s room. It wasn’t more of the weird singsong or the one question I was able to make out. Now it sounded like he’d taken a stick or something and was hitting things in his room, for different tonal effects. He kind of worked his way down a scale. Reminded me of hitting water glasses filled different amounts with a knife. But this was more like paint cans with a broom handle, from the sound. After a minute of that, his door crashed open, and then I heard the front door open and shut and footsteps running down the stairs.

I waited a few minutes before I got my purse. I didn’t want to run into him on the stairs or something. Then I hurried down the stairs to my car.

The light in the laundry room was off. It’d been on earlier that night, but I didn’t really think anything of it. Just figured that whoever was doing their laundry had finished and switched things off. The door was partially ajar, and it’s right next to my driver’s side door when I’m parked down there. I suddenly had the feeling of being watched, and not benevolently, from the shadowy laundry room when I got to my car. I didn’t want to turn my back on the door while I opened the car door, so I pressed myself against the car, facing the laundry room, and opened the door. My keys were protruding from between the fingers of my other hand, ready if I needed to defend myself. Strange rattling and banging sounds started coming from the darkest shadows in the laundry room, and I backed quickly into my car, slammed the door, and threw the power lock.

I got the hell out of there.

I spent two hours at Sylvan’s, calming down. I didn’t let on, really, how upset I was about it, and I didn’t mention to him the laundry room incident while I was there. I don’t know why I didn’t. I think I was still too disturbed by it and was putting it out of my mind, or at least trying to.

After I left Sylvan’s place and headed home, I went up the stairs as quietly as I could. The light in the roommate’s room was off, I could see that from the front window of the apartment. And I could hear him snoring from there, before I ever opened the door.

Which is another odd thing about tonight. Ian has never snored before in all the months he’s been living here. Certainly not at the volume of the snores from that room now.

So now I’m hiding in my room, and I’ve pulled my chest of drawers in front of the bedroom door, since it doesn’t have a lock. I ain’t leaving here until he’s gone to work tomorrow. And I’m damn well keeping anything even vaguely resembling a weapon at hand.

This is going to be a fun night, I can tell. I’ve about given up on the idea of any sleep.

I’ve been listening to some music to try and relax. I’m obviously far too stressed, and have been for too long. A week and a half of my heart going spastic on me is way too much.

Then Winamp, on random play, started playing ABBA. Specifically Take a Chance on Me. And now I can’t stop crying.

You see, early on, when I knew the direction my feelings were going, but Pete wasn’t comfortable with a relationship that was more than friends, I used to find myself humming this song. All the time, anytime I was talking with him, this song would go through my head.

If anyone had ever told me I’d cry because of an ABBA song someday, I’d have told them it was time for them to check themselves into a place with padded walls.

But here I am, weeping over ABBA because of its association with Pete.

I’m pathetic sometimes.

I’ve had a few moments, since Pete left me, of the stress-related arrhythmia I sometimes get. I know it’s the combination of the strain PCOS can put on my heart in the first place, plus stress. And since things have not been terribly pretty since then, it’s been happening more and more often.

It’s going on right now. My heart’s in the beating-3000-miles-a-second stage at the moment.

This time around, it hurts.

I hate this shit.

It’s like some horrible nightmare. I keep expecting to wake up from it.

Or else I expect some latter-day Orson Welles to come forward and make apologies for for a TV show gone wrong. Something like the events around Welles’s War of the Worlds.

Even after being immersed in the news of it, large chunks of my mind are still unable to accept it. Or even to grasp it, really. It’s all so surreal. My first reaction, when I saw the footage of the plane hitting Trade Two, was something like, “This isn’t real. It can’t even be a special effect. This almost seems like it has to be… animated somehow.”

I later saw other footage, and that began to bring home the reality of it all. But when I look back on the first video clip I saw of it today, in my mind’s eye the image has even taken on some of the aspects of something animated. The colors no longer jibe with life.

Strange, some of the tricks shock combined with memory can bring.

Despite the feeling of unreality to my rational mind, my emotions knew that it was true. Though I only got two hours of sleep before I was woken with the news about the WTC and the Pentagon, I have been wide awake since. I’m running on stress and adrenalin.

I have felt as if I could burst into tears for the horrible acts, the pain and suffering they caused to the victims and the families of the victims, the brave men and women who went in to rescue and wound up victims themselves in the collapse of the Twin Towers. I have compulsively tried to picture the New York skyline without those matched shapes in it. I have seen images played over and over in my head of the aircraft ploughing into the buildings, and never without a deep chill running down my spine. I couldn’t help but think of the terror of the people in the Twin Towers. And even more, the people on the airliners. I think I imagined it too well. Every time I saw footage, or my mind would bring up a memory of the images, I wanted so much to cry for their anguish, their terror, their pain, and their senseless deaths.

I have felt as if I could burst into tears, but I haven’t let myself. I don’t know if I could stop once I started.

And in the midst of all this insanity, another kind reared its head yet again. My cousin goes rolling along. While I was speaking with my mom about the horrors in the east, John showed up at my grandmother’s. He tried to force Becky and the kids to come home with him. My mother left in the middle of our conversation, and she apparently faced him down again. When he’d backed down from that position, he started attempting to get her to loan him money. $1200. He eventually admitted why he wanted it. That was apparently the price his “friends” were asking for the contract he wanted to put out on my mom, and he didn’t have it so he was asking her for it!

And the cops are still being useless. The family has not heard from them again, though the supervisor said he’d be back in contact asap.

Mom thinks she can handle John. When he’s gone for Becky, if Mom grabs him by the arm to stop him, he stops. If she faces him down, he backs down though he threatens. I keep telling her that he’s 5150, and just because he has balked at crossing that line up until now, she can’t keep counting on that.

One time he’ll cross it. I know he will. And I can’t convince her of that, and I can’t convince the family to get their asses out of town or get a restraining order or SOMEthing.

He still is out on bail and has not yet come to trial for last time. But what I was told today is that even when he does come to trial, it won’t be much of a relief. This is considered a first-time case of spousal abuse. It apparently doesn’t matter that John’s been arrested for other things, among them abuse of my grandmother. According to Becky’s council, John will likely get two weeks jail time.

I’m beginning to feel that, between the family’s willful blindness and the way the justice system is moving in this case, everyone’s just going to shrug their shoulders until John snaps completely and someone winds up dead.

All through this awful day, I ached for one thing. One thing that would have been impossible, even had things not been changed by one particular email last week. All I wanted was to hold and be held by Pete, and know that he loves me as I love him. It would have been imossible to be held by him and hold him, even without that email he sent ending our relationship, of course. We can’t stretch across 3000 miles distance to give each other a hug when we need it.

Even so, despite the distance, had all the rest of this occurred last month instead of this, I’d have felt differently about it all. It would still have been painful and horrid and tragic, but I’d have known that the man I’m in love with was still in love with me. That makes all the difference. A kind of feeling that, no matter what else occurred, this was real and true and it wasn’t going to just up and disappear. I had been able to keep some part of myself in a measure of control last time John went psycho, because I knew that whatever else happened, the man that is so important to me considered me just as important to him. Whatever else happened, I had an angel that mattered more to me than pretty much anything.

I don’t have that now. Through all of this today, and everything this past weekend, I have found myself time and again emotionally reaching toward him, as if he was still the safe harbor he used to be. And I realize it, and stop it, and catch myself doing it a few minutes later.

So, when I got home from work and couldn’t stand to be alone with the silence and the thoughts of all that happened with my cousin and all the events of today, I ran to my only other safe harbor.

I love my friends, and there are many that I would share most things with. But my “safe harbors” are the ones that I trust and love and feel so comfortable with that I can share absolutely everything. The only people that I can feel I can truly open up completely with.

That second safe harbor is Sylvan. I spent a number of hours with him and his Wolfie, sitting in front of his TV and watching a recap of the events. I managed to relax enough while there that I actually began to feel a little bit tired for a while, something that only happens if I’m in the company of someone who has become that kind of safety for me once stress and sleep disorders kick in.

Of course, this last place of safety is moving to Seattle by the 1st. I guess I’ll just have to learn to cope on my own after that, in those times when I need something more special than one of the friends I love.

And to think, two weeks ago, I was planning to do something a little special to celebrate my nine month’s anniversary with Pete. A day of disaster and horror instead.

Happy anniversary.

The world went crazy during the two hours I was asleep.

I can’t get hold of some of my people in Washington DC, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Jesus God, let them be safe…

# 1 Anarchist
# 2 Progressive
# 3 Marxist
# 4 Leninist
# 5 Socialist
# 6 US Liberal
# 7 US Libertarian
# 8 US Conservative

Somehow, I’m not terribly surprised that Anarchist came out number 1.

Shoulders and ears have managed to become one unit.

Showering, letting the hot water pound on the exact spots where the knots are the worst, helped. But only for as long as I was in the shower.

Now I just have to work out a way to be showering, with hot water pounding away at the knots, and still be at my job.

Or else I could be too stressed by the whole thing to be able to even attempt to sleep.

I have got to get some sleep. I’ve used half of my sick days this year, and there’s still more year to go. I don’t want to have to call in sick due to lack of sleep yet again, like I did last week after being awake all night crying over Pete.

In about ten more minutes, it’ll be time to try again. Ah, all the lovely little games I get to play with myself in the middle of the night, to try and circumvent sleep disorders…

…cause things just keep getting better and better. *sighs*

Against all common sense, my mom, grandmother, and Becky bailed my psycho cousin out of jail so he could have some time with his family before he gets put away for a few years.

Supposedly, John and Becky reconciled, and he calmed down, and was being human again. I didn’t put money on it lasting. It never has. Everyone down there seemed optimistic about it. How can they forget so easily all the other times he’s gotten better… just to swing back the way he was before, or worse?

He’s back there again. Just got this email from my mom…

I’m really tired, so I’ll make this short. Cousin John got back into about the same mode as when he hit Becky. He wants her to submit to him completely – his biggest demand is that she quit her job. I tried to talk to him about the fact that there would be no money to feed anyone if she did that, but it didn’t make any difference. Later, he asked Janette to come over and get something or other and held her hostage. I went back and faced him down to the point that Becky could get Janette out of the house. Poor Janette was crying so hard.

And I’m going to bed.

I’m supposed to be able to sleep now? I’ve been trying so hard to turn my schedule around… and then made the mistake of checking email one final time before going to bed. How in the hell am I supposed to sleep now? That psychotic is actively threatening my family again, the cops are being useless again.

I can already feel the tension tightening my shoulders. They’ll be mated to my ears by morning.

The last time this happened, Pete was out of town. Just as he was this weekend. One big difference was that I knew that Pete would be there when the weekend was over, and I could cry on his shoulder about it all. I knew that even just spending time with him would help me to get into some kind of rational state of mind, so I could stop reacting and start thinking. That’s no longer the case. I don’t have that in the back of my mind to give me some form of relief to look forward to.

And to think, this coming Tuesday would have been my nine months’ anniversary with him. I know, not a big deal. Not even a year. I had plans to celebrate it anyway.

Good ol’ Murphy. If anything can go wrong, it will.

The addendum to that should be that if it’s possible for everything to go wrong at once, it will.

I’m going to go climb into bed and alternate between crying over losing Pete and going nuts from the combination of worry about my family and anger at my cousin.

Night.

Hmmmm….

Woman-at-arms of Things That Go “Bump” in the Night, Christophine Noir

Or maybe…

Director of The Ancient Order of White-Collar Crime, Scrumptious Christophine Noir

Perhaps this one…

Countess of Kicking Oprah’s Ass, Christophine Erin Noir V

ooOOoo… here’s a good one!

Director of Haunted Houses, Sister Christophine Noir

Yes!

Viscountess of The Black Army of Christopher Walken, Christophine Thanatos Noir

Somebody stop me now!

Or join me at Flywheel’s Random name and title generator. Take your pick.

Oh what the hell, one more for the road…

The Great Winged Goat Person of Bitch Slaps, Lady Christophine Noir