things you should know if we ever get married for your greencard

I always wanted to marry a man named Jack. Partly for the fannishness of being named Sam & Jack, and partly because it's my favorite boys' name.

In the middle of the night, if I stay up too long after I know I should go to sleep, I get melancholy and romantic.

I want to go back to Scotland. Or at least find someone to talk Scottish at me.

I don't know how to use a blowdryer, how to whistle, or how to properly apply liquid eyeliner.

I'm pretty sure most things have individual personalities, and most of them have a perverse sense of humor.

My most frequent sudden urge is for chocolate, closely followed by the urge to slap a bitch. Really. I constantly want to smack people for being stupid.

I need someone to start paying me for writing at a rate where I can give up retail before I become an unfixable misanthrope and it ruins everything.

I am a founding member of Aveomas.

things you should know if we ever get married for your greencard

... I am a pro procrastinator. I know dozens of ways to waste time and get far less done than I should.

... I am addicted to lipgloss. I'm also very picky about the texture, so I'm constantly buying new ones.

... I refer to the cats as 'So Many Kittens', even when there's only one visible. Like so: "Hello, So Many Kittens! Where are the other ones?"

... I have at least two years' worth of pictures on my SD card at any given time. Before this, I had up to eleven undeveloped cameras hanging around at any given time, and before that, up to five rolls of film. I'm working on getting the leftover cameras from before I had a digital fixed.

... I go on tangents all the time. Usually for a week or two, I'll research the crap out of some subject or other, memorizing details, tracking down sources, finding downloads and pictures and what have you, incorporating the concepts into my brain and my life... and then I'll find something else to do.

... I am a perpetual work in progress.

... If reincarnation is real, and I have any choice in what I come back as, I'd choose a spoiled house cat in a nice home every time.

... I'm sure that delusions of grandeur are only delusions if you don't achieve grandeur.

... Shiny things will always distract me, and I'm really kind of okay with that.

... I never get enough sleep.

... I'm convinced that at some point in my life, I'll be distressed and out on a moor or some sort of moor-like location, I'll yell HEEEEAAAATHCLIFFFF!! and someone wonderful and meant for me will yell CAAATTHEERRRIIINNNNEEE!! and I'll know in that moment that it'll be all right because we've found each other.

things you should know if we ever get married for your greencard: my showering habits

Here's the deal: I'm not a quick-shower-taker. I know, it's horrible-- it uses so much water and the cost of reheating a whole water tank is probably most of our heating bill, but I just can't do it. I've tried. But I have skin that doesn't know how to exfoliate itself-- I can't remember the name of it, but my mom has it too, and it makes for rough, bumpy skin, and if I don't spend enough time exfoliating it for myself, it makes these ugly scratchy patches that don't go away unless I'm swimming in the Springs, which are an hour and a half away at best, and it makes the rest of my skin feel sandy. All the time. Especially across my chest and shoulders, and I just can't handle it. Add to this the fact that I have hip-length hair that's really frizzy and fly away unless I give it a deep-conditioning treatment every time I wash it, and a scalp that flakes off whole unless I'm soaking it in shampoo for at least five minutes, and there you have a recipe for, at best, if I don't shave and forget to scrub my back, about twenty minutes. When I take the time to do that, you're looking at more like fourty. So the last thing I need is a weekly olive-oil conditioning mask added to this mess, right? Only I totally do, because my hair is feeling the almost imperceptible change in seasons more than I am, and it's gone all dry and splitty again.

Another thing you should know: I've been told I have latent engineering talents (or, at least the ASVAB I took in high school says I do), and I've been thinking about this problem. See, so many of the things that green up a household are kind of crap on luxuries like long hot showers that force your pores open. That's why hippies are always kind of... well, let's not go there. But there should be a way to reuse water in a shower. Stay with me, I know it sounds a little gross, but hear me out: most of the water used in a shower is just keeping you wet, and isn't all that dirty or soapy. So if there was a holding tank-- and optional one, that you could turn off when you're coming in from twelve hours of laying sod or something-- that holds the offically accepted prudent amount of water under the drain, it could catch the water you use in the early part of the shower and recirculate it back to the shower head. There could be filters to clean some of the soap out, and one of those as-you-need-it heaters that's hooked up to a thermometer that you can set to the temp you want, and when the recirculated water falls below that temperature, it can turn on and reheat it. This way, when you feel like taking a long shower, you're only using a decent amount of water, and once the bugs in the design are worked out (I'm looking at you, German and / or Japanese luxury engineers), you wouldn't even really need to notice that you're reusing water! Then, when you're done, this thoroughly used water can go into a biodynamic greywater system, filter through the reclaiming swamps, and then water your garden (because we'll all need Victory Gardens of our owns soon enough, I think, and they may as well be integrated into the functioning of the home), then excess can go back into the municiple water system. Best of all, this can be a retrofit, like turning old diesel engines into biodeisel engines-- any house with pipes could be fitted with the recycling system.

By the way, if you're an engineer and you want to build this, go ahead, but you'd better give me credit and cut me in on the patents and such. This is a dated entry-- it's proof I thought of it! ~;)

Also, I can't wait until houses have designs like this all the time.

things you should know if we ever get married for your greencard: personal saints

I'm not Catholic. I'm about as far from Catholic as someone can get, being of the general polytheistic heathen persuasion, in a really non-religious and barely-practicing sort of way, but I do believe that when someone does something special for the greater good of the species, that something should be rewarded in some way, and so for the last few years, I've been collecting up a list of what I call Personal Saints.

And most of them are food-based because that's how I roll / that's what's important to me.

Currently, the list stands like this:

Saint Whoever First Burned Sugar and Convinced People To Eat It (patron saint of caramel, toffee, caramelization, hard candies, creme brulee and butterscotch)

Saint Ancient Chinese Emperor Who First Made Tea (patron saint of tea in all it's forms)

Saint First Chick To Make Bread (matron of all breads, yeasts, doughs, baked goods and baking)

Saint Whoever First Though Bad Milk Might Be Good For Something (patron saint of milk, milking, cheese, yogurt, kefir, butter, sour cream, and lacto-fermentation)

Saint Aztec Guy Who First Tried Chocolate and Brought It Back To Town (patron saint of chocolate, chocolate-making, enrobing, moxing weird things in chocolate, Cadbury's, Kinder, Ritter Sport, and cultural misappropriation)

Saint First Person To Eat That Weird Thing And Not Die (patron saint of pineapple, durian, catfish, rambutan, sea urchin, taro, and anything else where you just go "How did anyone even think to eat this?")

Saint Whoever First Thought It Might Be A Good Idea To Drink Things That Had Been Sitting Around For A While (patron saint of fermentation, wine, cider, perry, beer, pickel-making, saurkraut, kimchee, and anything else that doesn't start as milk)

Saint Inventor of Custards (patron saint of flan, cheesecake, Byrd's, pudding, half the ice creams, and several sauces)

Saint Hey We Can Preserve That In Sugar (patron saint of jams, jellies, preserves, sugar-sauces, syrups, Aunt Jemima, chutneys, pate de fruits, turkish delight, sugared-fruits and flowers, candied fruits and peels, and anything else saved in sugar, including when it's used to disinfect wounds and save lives)

things you should know if we ever get married for your greencard 2

I write because I have stories to tell, and because I'm a picky reader and no one is writing the stories I want to read. I write for myself, for the voices in my head that have as much right to live as real people, and because if I don't write, they torment me and it starts feeling like schizophrenia.

I want to publish because I want to shop at Anthropologie and Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma and Urban Outfitters.

Yeah, I'm totally planning to be that woman. I already am, I just can't afford it.

::sigh::

things you should know if we ever get married for your greencard

I've been reading Dooce alot lately, and it makes me want to be more open, and to Air some Neuroses and Strange Facts. So that's what I'm doing.

1. I consider myself to be actively exogamous.

I want to breed with someone from another country, someone outside the genepool of the cultures / communities I was raised in. I want them to be taller, healthier, stronger and smarter than I am, and especially than the average person I meet is-- maybe it's just that I work foodtail in a tourist town and people think it's okay to be horrible to someone you're never going to see again, but I don't want my kids to not know what coconut is, or to think that strawberry ice cream has to be neon pink, or to scream and scream and scream because they're too dumb to know how to do anything else. Currently, I'm all about Swedes and Scots, with the added benefit of a Swede being that I could possibly get to live in Sweden, which is quickly starting to sound like some sort of promised land. I also have an enternal attracktion for Asians with English accents, and Native Americans who have that on-the-res way of speaking. That last one might be Racial Guilt, but they're still hot.

2. There is a mole on my ankle that I catch every time I shave, and I use it as an excuse to not shave.

I really don't like shaving, though I do like hairlessness, and don't like the feeling of wind through my leg hair. I keep telling myself that when I get my second book published (the first one will pay off debts), I'm going to use the advance to get my whole body lazered. Anywhere there's hair I don't want, which is more and more frequent as my hormonal imbalance gets worse, I'm going to get it zapped. But until then, I'm stuck with shaving alone (Nair doesn't work and makes me break out, Smooth Away only works on the straight parts of my legs, I can't figure out threading, and waxing hurts too much), and I always hit that mole and get blood all down my foot. I'm pretty sure it jumps out at me. I'm also pretty sure that more than half of it's mass now is scar tissue, since I've been shaving and cutting it for... sixteen years. God, as long as some of the kids I work with have been alive.

3. I have a latex allergy, and it makes things awkward.

Most obviously, and probably the first thing that came to mind when I said 'latex' and 'awkward', there's the sex issue. Uncomfortable doesn't begin to explain it, and it was many a year before I figured out why it was so awful sometimes. And suck it, whoever decided that non-latex alternatives have to be so damned expensive. But less obviously, there's all the other little things that latex is in, like, say, underwear. Sometimes, in the summer, especially, when my skin is extra tender and all my pores are open, I'm alergic to my underwear and my bra, and wearing clothes is a horrible punishment that I've sort of gotten used to but still don't like. This is probably why I spent big chunks of my childhood in the smallest amount of clothes I could manage, and why I'd cry until my mom cut the elastic out of all my dresses. And other things: I can't wear the gloves at work, so I have to wash my hands at OCD levels, which damages my skin in other ways; If I leave even a covered hairtie on my wrist for more than a day or so, I break out and itch so bad I can't think; band aids eat away at my skin and are used only when the bleeding won't stop; Ace Bandages don't help at all, and give me exema on top of sprained limbs.

4. I'm half-convinced that the world is going to end while I'm here to witness it.

The other half is convinced that I'll live through it and I'd better have some survival skills so I don't die of my own stupidity after surviving the apocalypse. Because how lame would that be? I've got mental lists of everything I should stockpile, if only I had the money for it (I want to rent a storage unit and fill it up with camp cots, army rations, chemical heating pads, water, shampoo, feminine products, soap, toothpaste, canned goods, waterproof matches and so on). And the result is that I've been learning basic cultural things that we've almost lost, things that actually aren't that bad an idea for people to preserve: things like making jam, saving seeds and sustainable gardening, generating power off the grid, crocheting and weaving (and I'm trying to learn how to spin yarn), papermaking, sewing, canning, wild plant identification, and things like that. I'm comforted by the fact that I watch all the post-apocalyptic movies and have frameworks to work around in alot of circumstances, and that I've watched enough Discovery Channel to have a basic to fair understanding of how to canabalize tech to make anything I need made.

5. I'm addicted to roses.

I finally got one to grow, and better yet, to produce flowers, and now I want a dozen more plants, a hundred more. I want a whole rose garden, and a retirement spent breeding new rose varieties that I can name after science fictional women (Aryn Sun would be a kick ass rose, hardy and adaptable, while Chiana would be nearly colorless, but almost impossible to kill and Sam Carter would be unassuming, a blonde-yellow, and very dedicated to being a rose (and being secretly dangerous wouldn't hurt the namesake either)). I wear a wonderful rose-scented perfume. I eat lychees because they taste the way roses smell. I spray my face with rose water, use a rose-water facial soap (which gets bonus points for being from Sweden, see how this all ties together?), I bought rose jam and know how to make it, and I love turkis delight because it's rose-flavored. I make my own rose-scented tea. I'm considering naming a kid Rose because it's not already in the family, it's not very common these days, it's my favorite flower, AND it's my favorite companion on Doctor Who, so it has alot in it's favor. I'm obsessed. But I hate that dusty, soapy sort of roseness that's associated with old ladies, and I hate the color that's called 'dusty rose' and is actually the pink version of beige, and I hate things that are decorated with masses of roses in an attempt to be 'romantic'; all these things are insults to actual roses, and I'll be happy if I never see any of them again.

And I think five is enough for now. This will likely be the first of a series of five random neroses and facts and details, as I build this wayward blog into something all about me. Everyone should have something devoted to themselves; it's amazing for self-esteem.