beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Have moved living room around so new chair will fit. Means old chair is stuck in a corner where it cannot recline, which turns out to be pretty uncomfortable. Plus it's at right angles to the TV and my laptop only reaches if I'm very careful. Have already pulled the plug board enough to knock stuff off the shelves. Will have to find mobile phone and charger again later.

Chair was supposed to arrive today. Chair did not arrive. Probably I will have to go and collect chair tomorrow. Which will mean having no room for food shopping. Am short of food.

Today: Fired.

Today I dreamed I was scouting the location for my high school reunion, except in the dream this was on a boat, one with a bar and a food bit with salads and a regular schedule up a river to town and back. In the dream this had been the most convenient/only way to town when we were teenagers. So now it was full of all sorts of people, just hanging out having a lemonade on the way home. There was this tiny cute kid (kind of like the live version of the tiniest in Despicable Me, which I watched the other day), and my mum said something about keeping her, and she was all :-D adopt meeeeeeeeee!!! So I looked after her while mum went looking for who she should technically be attached to.

Turns out my life looks kind of awesome from a pre-schooler perspective. I have been dancing! And also dancing! ... there are other things, but she mostly wanted to know about the dancing. And even when I was actually epic bad at the dancing, as with ballet, which I went to for even more years than judo but endured a similar lack of progress, tiny cute kid wanted to hear those stories too. Ballet is hard, especially when you're knee high. It is heartening to find others have found it hard too. I could totally assure her of that part. Also, I was sitting and rocking, but tiny kid finds this a perfectly reasonable way to be because clearly you are for rocking her and it is cuddly and nice. And then she told me all about her life, including the bit where she wasn't adopted yet and where she probably came from originally and what she did all week and all her favourite things and everything I would need to know when looking after her for always.

So I dreamed I got adopted by a tiny cute Filipino kid.

... that was actually kind of fun.

But even in the dream the kid did not instantly go home with us because the world does not in fact work that way.

So then I went to have a lemonade, and there was a package waiting for me, that had apparently been there since high school. They'd stored it in a cognac glass, and it contained small amounts of money, a crumpled up note that may have been intended to be one of those question answer papers at one time, a fancy key ring with a street address on, and a key that folded over so it looked like a chunky credit card. The money was about right for a boat fare circa high school graduation. Or slightly less than a lemonade, now. The whole thing was a mystery puzzle, even in the dream. So I was trying to remember from the address who it belonged to, vaguely wondering if I should use the change for the lemonade I still planned to buy, and then I looked up and my high school crush was working at the bar. He looked heavier and had less hair, but it was definitely him. Distinctive scar pattern.

So then I woke up. But that's totally a set up for a story right there. It would be something about misunderstandings and missed messages and picking up where you left off after x years and how sometimes change means you drift apart and sometimes you just arrive at a point you can finally fit together.

It would so totally not be my usual genre. Unless I add aliens. Or immortals.
Actually if you add an extra century and make the message be stored in something slightly more enduring than a bar napkin then that's a perfectly respectable setup for Immortals stories.
But still, it was basically a story with no F&SF features whatsoever, so I don't really know what to do with it.

I'm also vaguely wondering how my subconscious thinks that particular guy would end up working the day shift at a bar on a boat. I mean, last I heard he was going to be an engineer, I think.



I'm finding the most tempting element of the dream to be tiny child. So cuuuuuuuuute. And she liked me!
I don't think I'd be sufficiently skilled in basic areas such as food preparation to add another human to the household.
But she was cuddly.

there seems to be ever less conversation around
so today I've been trying to make tumblr work.
any of y'all I should be reading over there?

I had mango carrot juice drink :)
it did not taste as good as usual :/
only after I finished the bottle did I think to check the best before date: 23 APR 2013

... it is June! I drank April! :-(

Also one of the other bottles has BB May. I only bought them today, they should not say these months. >:-(

So now I'm going to have to take my treats back to the shop and make grrr face a bit, instead of having lovely mango carrot treat. and I can't do that until next week because employee and a car is needed to get to the shop. and I have much less mango carrot than I wanted.

*sulk*

went to the nsfg at the pub
which is still the same two guys
but at least is conversation.

the guy that watches Charmed is not a Piper/Leo shipper because she's bossy and pushes him around.
... pretty much why I am? I mean, she's the one that has a life and an agenda and makes decisions, and he's the one who backs her up. sounds right to me...

he did not phrase it that way though. shipping discussions are not the usual. is sad.



I had a pint and a half of lemonade. one pint costs £3.10 and half costs £1.65. Beer might be cheaper. Do not want beer. Do not much want lemonade, but it's what they got.
Maybe next time J2O or something.



tomorrow, 4pm, more shoppings. there's a sale at the furniture store with an Exclusive Preview with an extra 5% off voucher
and I need a new recliner, due to this one disintegrating.
... the sale is with same place I bought this one at. do I wish to buy another chair that disintegrates? but it was such a nice chair until it did that...

Since our building's front door got new and niftier door box you have to dial the right flat for, this conversation actually happens a lot:

"Hi, X, how do I get into your place? No, I know where you are, I'm actually there now..."

(and thank goodness for mobile phones, because the other way this conversation happens is at the top of their voice at the windows and/or accompanied by trying to kick the door in despite the shiny metal on it)

There's a thing, Are fictional people not real?
They reckon of course fictional people are real, "These fictional people are real because we all recognize them when we see them, and we make them even more real by constructing them and reconstructing them again and again, through reading and writing and talking about them, and then reading and writing and talking about them again, in an ongoing process."

Because I am a crazy person I sometimes freak out about real, and how many people do not appear to be it.
Like, am I real? Is there a minimum threshold of interactions that would keep me real? Can I stop being real while being physically alive?
(And I'm listening to Neverwhere at the moment, so I know it's not just me who wonders this. Writers are a special kind of crazy that has more real-to-them people inside than is generally recommended.)

Sometimes I feel like I'm surrounded by extras. ( Read more... )

Everyone has different story-of-you in their head, and it does not match the story-of-you you have in your own head, which if psychology has much of a clue probably doesn't match actual physical you that has done things on account of both Subconscious and Memory, plus Language and Discourse and Ideology and all the human things.



Even to ourselves, we are only the story of ourselves, retold and retold until we're fanfic of our own lives.



And despite our best efforts, that is true about every other person in our lives too. Even if we had watched all the moments of their life, the person we have in our head is a story-of-them that is not going to match their inside story or be an actual tape recording of what they did. And we can only infer who they are from what they did anyway.


It's all stories! Stories all the way down!

( Read more... )

But the other way to cope with things, the one that does not involve freaking out, involves celebrating the stories. Stories are how we set about being people. Sandman and Hogfather and Doctor Who.

"We're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?"

But the secret is, it's not just in the end, it is when you get down to it all the middle too.

And that's why it's awesome that we, plural, discuss the stories. We write them and rewrite them and bounce them around and crit and meta and just collaboratively make stuff up until we've made worlds. And if the worlds aren't so much good or fun or right yet, we keep going until we get a better one.

Which is pretty cool, really.

( Read more... )

Poisonous stories that don't leave room for all the people that actually exist to be people, they very badly need revising. Especially if they're being peddled by politicians. Especially if they don't leave room to continue to be.

People are not just stories, they have physical constraints too, but the stories do so much to the physical world they're really pretty key. Or ugly key.

And this isn't just true of political fictions like the dole skiver or the housing benefit mansion. Those are built in mind worlds patched together from plausibilities drawn from deliberate fictions too. Each particular story may be a tiny drop, but added together over a lifetime it's a waterfall, and reshapes the world around it.


So stories are real, because we make them real, we construct them by reading and writing and talking about them, and they shape how we act and react.


The thing where most people don't consciously think about or notice this stuff, and think there is only one real and true and facts and the world is just exactly as they experienced it and no other way, that would be the other bit that makes me worry worry.

... zombie shuffling forward in a story they don't even know they're writing...



... *blanket* ...

I have been looking into options for moving house again. I've been thinking about what I would want to get.

( Read more... )

I need to move somewhere in walking distance of the Forum library so I can go to book clubs and also lots of other things. There's nothing here, I need to go to Norwich for the social. Everyone agrees except the Norwich housing people. *sigh*

In terms of actual house I need a room for the washing machine, a room for the TV + computers, and a room for the bed. No two of these sets can share a room. Wet things do not go with complex electronics, and neither goes with sleep.

The flat of my dreams has ( Read more... )

I've seen places advertised as 1 bed open plan flats, or studio flats as they ought to be called but don't always bother, and sometimes they're just a bed in the kitchen with a toilet behind a door. Granted that has your basic survival necessities, more or less, but it's not a home.

My flat is pretty good in lots of ways. If I was better at going places it would maybe be better.

Change is difficult and I fear getting somewhere that goes worse. But there's so much that could be better.



I don't feel greedy, wanting this much stuff, place for my books and somewhere safe for electric and quiet for sleep. But government rules seem to reckon this is greedy. Like, for people any younger than me there's only money for a room in a shared house. I couldn't share. I don't know anyone. People are scary. I can't sleep in hotels, let alone places with no locks. But I can see how people might not want to pay for all everyone to have their own box.



If I was dreaming big I'd buy a sharing place but all the parts would be big and pretty much self sufficient and people could use the communal areas for social and fun and religious ceremonies and role play games.

Or I quite like the Ponds place with the two bed flat and the two display window shop and the basement. I don't know what I'd do with the shop, I think it would cost more in business rates than I could possibly cover, but in theory it would be neat to have shops made of big windows and put art things in the windows and have dress up competitions and put cosplay up on dummies and have story workshops with artefacts and to sell crafts and shiny things and invite people to do interesting stuff with the space. ... beyond my ability to control or cope with, but, you know, interesting. I don't much want to make a profit, just get along okay, and do something fun sometimes. The Forum has fun things happen, and the Castle. Maybe I could think of things and make them happen there?

My big dreaming quickly founders on the difference between 'someone could' and 'I could'.

I still like the vegan Quest Tavern that organises superhero teams to practice being a space colony.
... vegan food, community notice board, encourage skill swapping and cooperative work on things like sustainable self sufficient food and other necessities.
... only with more imagination and a story wrapped around it.

I went to the supermarket. on my own, because brother is ill. and late, because I phoned mum to see if she was going and then there was talking and some talking.

I sent mum the link to http://826national.org/stores/ and she's like *lightbulb* Quest shop! So that's what you meant!
... yes. Lots of explainings, but that's one of the ideas, yes.
so now she thinks it's an awesome idea that I should send my brother who worked at a library.

Morrisons is changing so things were all in different places and some things I couldn't find. I did find a Black Widow Avengers toy again but I still can't convince myself that I £8 of need it. But Avengers!

I didn't get breakfast while I was there because lateness. I bought pancakes to eat at home. Hopefully they will turn out to be good to digest.

... I need more interesting things to do.
That's why I want a Quest Tavern, so other people might want to play and it could be interesting more often.

I want to get a phone that can tell me where I am and how to get where I'm going
and also take photos, and remember where it took them,
and stick them to the map so I can show people the interesting things.

since currently all I do with my phone is send texts to my employee and my mum
this would require new knowings.

is it simples? the guy in the phone shop says I just need an android phone. my employee reckons we should look them up and compare features but really, I wouldn't know from features.

Today started at 10am. Blergh.

( Read more... )

That's a busy day for me that is.

Sleepy now.

I went to the Norwich Science Fiction Group
and so did the organiser
and the person who drives me.

... yeah, slightly small social this time.

upstairs there was ale and cheese tasting, and also morris dancers.
on the floor above our head.
so that was... interesting.

there was talking and then there was going home at 10pm.

now I feel like I was not very interesting.

:eyeroll:

see this is why is hard to get out and be social. finding people to be social at: not simple.