Chapter Eleven

[okay, so this isn't a very chaptery chapter, but i just realized it's been over 8 months since i posted a chapter! and it's been like, several years since i said i was going to stop trying to write whole chapters that were actually chaptery, and instead just blog along on the book when i could, and however much i wrote, i'd post. so here we go! links to earlier chapters are below!]

(Chapter One)

(Chapter Two)

(Chapter Three)

(Chapter Four)

(Chapter Five)

(Chapter Six)

(Chapter Seven)

(Chapter Eight)

(Chapter Nine)

(Chapter Ten)

That night, Bitsy sat on her couch and scrolled through her favorites list on her holo-projector, figuring she'd just watch a little HP and iterate so her mind wouldn't keep going back to the possibility that Cord might never sync up with her again. She had so many programs in her menu, almost all of which she loved and could watch over and over again, disappearing into a past when there for sure were Reals all over the place, whether the story came from a documentary feed and used vid from old-timey recordings or from a cmd+entertainment studio that spun hologold fantasies of torrent romances between start-crossed androids and the Reals they were lucky enough to bump into and have whirlwind affairs with.

But ...

For some reason, absolutely nothing on the list appealed to her.

I have his number. I could call him.

The idea made her sink down into the cushions. I'd look so desperate. Keep scrolling your favorites, Bits. Or go to Browse or Randomize and find something new to watch.

But she couldn't get over the energy threshold to do it. The remote in her hand felt useless ... empty. Hollow.

Wow. I really need to go to sleep and let the dream-feed patch me up. Or maybe even make an appointment for some theraputery.

For all the daydreaming she did about Reals, having those thoughts just then made her remember how dream-feeds and theraputery were one way androids supposedly had it better than their now-vanished, biological creators: programming wasn't always perfectly fixable, but it was awfully darned close. what the dream-feed didn't smooth out overnight could usually be taken care of in a snap with a visit to a good theraputist.

But I can't go to theraputery, she realized, with a sense of deeper dread booting up somewhere in her background processes. I'd have to say why I'm feeling so weird. I'd have to tell them I met a Real. They'd think I was having a major glitch or even a system crash!

Then she had an even worse thought: What if I am having a system crash?

and just like that ...

bam! 2022 pulls ahead of 2019 into third place for most blogging-est year ever!

i'm coming for you next, 2020!

2020: (shakes in its boots and tries to make me feel sorry for it)

2021: nice knowing you, 2020.

2020: *sniff* really? no one's ever said that to me before!

i really need to get back to writing my novel!

but instead, i'm posting about how i really need to get back to it. i told msg i thought this probably shows i'm not really serious about writing, and he said, "oh, no, honey. nothing says you're a writer as much as whine-writing about the fact that you're not writing."

i dunno if that was supposed to make me feel better, but he usually knows what he's talking about when it comes to writing, so i guess i'm a writer after all!

yay, claire!!!

on the wall

holy moley, what kind of star trek fan am i anyway?

we rewatched mirror, mirror today, and i loved it the same way i always do whenever i watch it ... and just now, sitting down to write this post, i realized:

wait, this episode is called mirror, mirror, and the evil kirk has a magical device in his quarters on the wall that he can look into and use to maintain his power.

i feel. so. dumb.

but even if i now feel like a big dummy, i have to say that in an episode full of great things, one of the greatest is how at the end of the episode, when evil kirk's gal pal lieutenant moreau spies on the good-guy enterprise crew and sees them being compassionate at the risk of their own lives, she's totally like, "holy shit that sounds so much better" and wants them to take her with them back to their universe. 

this is the moment we're in in the real world, people. if we can just open people's eyes to the value of kindness, there are plenty of them who will hop over to our side.

and even if we're stuck in the universe we're in ... we can make it a better place.

he always worries about the wrong things!

you've got to love this boy. i mean, i've got to love him anyhow.

he's been crazy busy with work lately, and with family stuff on top of that. plus traveling out of town on business. so he says to me, "claire, i'm worried i'm neglecting you and our other yams." (full disclosure, he did not say "yams." i'm just trying to use it more often because sasha really wanted it to catch on as a term for the members of our polyamorous partnership.)

and i say back to him, "are we having this conversation again?"

"i guess?" he says. "i just feel like i haven't been giving all of you enough time to stretch out and express yourselves and be vibrant within my life."

"dude," i tell him. "when was the last time you did any writing? you've got like four or five different books going last i counted and you said earlier this year you were going to get back to writing 500 words a day and you were all excited about that and about the stories themselves, and then, pfff."

"is this supposed to be making me feel better? because it's doing a terrible job at that."

"no, it's supposed to be showing you who you're really neglecting: you."

"well, but ..."

"uh-uh, no buts. you've been working, you've been traveling, you've been doing family stuff, but you haven't been doing that much you stuff. and that includes us, because we're you stuff too, but it also includes your writing, which honestly, you know is the thing you're best at in the world."

"i mean, i like to think i'm also pretty funny."

"you're very funny. and you're awesome in bed. you have tons of great qualities. i wasn't saying being a writer is the tippy-top of your many good qualities. i was saying you're the best writer in the world."

"okay, now that's ridiculous. you're just trying to flatter me or something. or i guess maybe you really think that, but --"

"name a single other writer who always writes exactly the kind of thing you want to read. i'll wait."

"well, there's ... no, he's dead. but there's ... no, he's dead too, and some of his stuff was good without being exactly what i'd want to read. why am i even trying to do this, though? just because i always write what i want to read and no one else does, that doesn't make me the best writer in the world. i think it's pretty obvious from my utter lack of fame and fortune that i don't write exactly the kind of thing a ton of other people want to read."

"but honey, f*ck those other people. like, don't literally f*ck them, because you've got a house full of yams here who could use the f*cking, and i know your f*cking time is limited in availability. but just imagine all those other people f*cking off, because they don't matter when it comes to your writing. no one else is better at making you happy with writing than you."

"okay, i guess. as usual, you're right about that. but if i start writing more, that will leave me even less time to spend on you and our yams."

"el wrongo to the bongo, dear boy," i say. "you know how the writing game works for you. the more in the groove you get, the more creative mojo you have, and that means the more brainpower you'll have available to hang with us."

and this completely shuts him up. because he knows i'm right. the more he does what he's best at, the more of him there is to do everything else. it's just how he works.

when he's not worrying about everything else in the world, that is.

goofball.

we were giving the boy a hard time last night

(no, not that kind of hard time!)

he's a grumbler, but the worst kind of grumbler -- the kind who grumbles inside and lets his grumbling bring him down. from the outside, all you notice about it is a bunch of heavy sighs and the occasional "dammit" when he realizes there was something he was supposed to do or "had" to do but he'd forgotten about it.

this guy! smh!

i mean, he's a great guy. but he thinks his problems are a big deal. i kid you not, he has sometimes talked about how maybe it would have been better to be a medieval peasant because even if it was miserably hard work, you wouldn't have to navigate nearly as many angst-inspiring decisions.

i'm like, "dude. do you know what your life would be like right now if you were a medieval peasant?"

and he starts trying to answer something about a lot of hoeing and harvesting, and i stop him and say:

"you'd be dead."

seriously, he broke his collarbone in middle school for crying out loud. would that have healed? if it healed, would it have healed well enough for him to use that arm for hard manual labor?

the other girls chimed in too, with stuff like, "plus, your eyes suck," and "you have depression. you would literally be crying over spilled milk if you were a peasant."

we ended up kind of giving him a "stop that!" ultimatum. from now on, if we see him heaving those gloomy sighs or acting like it's godawful he has to clean the toilet or open up his work computer, he gets  a thump on the head.

sometimes you've got to put your foot down!

whacka-do

okay, so i've decided that one reason the world is such an effed up place is that way too many dudes have just not properly learned to masturbate.

i'm not saying masturbation would solve all dudes' problems or all the world's problems, but i am saying that if you do it right, you should be like, "holy sh*t, this is f*ing awesome! you're telling me i can basically feel like this whenever i want to? oh, and it probably means i'm less likely to get prostate cancer? why is everybody not always talking about how great this is?!?"

so many dudes are frustrated by how hard it is for them to hook up with the ladies. and then so many of them who do hook up with the ladies are frustrated by how bad they are at relationships (probably because all they were interested in was the hooking up part, not the being with part).

so many dudes are driven crazy by being trapped in jobs they don't like, or not having a job at all, or not having the house or truck or car or boat they want ...

masturbation is like, totally in your control zone.

"but claire, once i'm done, i'm right back where i was. it was just a few minutes of (admittedly pretty f*ing great) pleasure and now my life sucks again! sure, i came all over the place, but i still don't have my boat. wah!"

no, you dope. that means you're not doing it right.

doing it right includes taking the f*ing credit for how good it feels while you're doing it, and being proud of yourself for being able to do such an awesome thing once you're done. it includes being motivated to do it by wanting to be good to yourself, not by wanting to escape from your life. it includes thinking, "yeah! i totally freakin' deserve this."

i mean, maybe you deserve a boat too, but dude, are you telling me if you had that boat, you'd never want to masturbate in it?

if you can learn to satisfy yourself with masturbation, you get to totally chillax about whether or not you've found that perfect woman (or man, if that's how your boat gets floated). you can be patient looking for the one who really fits with you as a person instead of settling for the first one you can fit your ding-dong into.

dudes being frustrated, and then trying to find ways to make other people change to fix their frustration, cause probably 90% of the world's problems.

so quit it already! learn to own the awesomeness of masturbation!

seriously, i'll bet a big problem most of you out there have is that you don't want to admit even to yourself how great you really think it is.

get whacking, guys.

the world needs you to!

delving

as those of you who keep up with the way-too-complicated network of blogs from my polyfam know, we've been playing a d&d knockoff lately. it's called "old school essentials," and it's very old-school ... basically the rules from the old basic/expert editions of d&d.

that means if you get into a fight that's any kind of dangerous at all, it's going to tear your characters up pretty bad. this is super-different from the other games we've played, even dungeon crawl classics, which starts of deliberately killing off the majority of your 0-level party in a "funnel" dungeon. once you hit first level, playing it safe in dcc can keep your characters alive a pretty long time unless you just get unlucky.

this game, though ... we had a couple of characters who started off with 2 hit points each, and the "tanks" of the party had maybe 5 or 6. there is no healing available to 1st level characters, either. that means if you get hit once and you're not outright dead, you're pretty close to it. one or two battles go down, and the party's going to have to leave the dungeon and get back to a safe town to heal up.

"seriously, claire," some of you are now thinking, "why do you think normal people would want to hear about your weird nerd games?"

well, here's the thing. we all delve into something. sometimes it's something positive, sometimes it's something negative, sometimes it's in the middle.

but if there's something you delve into that beats you up, you need to step back out into the sunshine and  treat yourself right, or you're going to have a problem. whether it's a positive thing that beats you up because it takes a lot of energy, or a negative thing that beats you up because it's stressful, you've got to come up for some air and sunlight now and then.

maybe not my most brilliant metaphor, but blogging it did take me away from the gaming table for a bit!