I always used to say that not writing semiregularly made me twitchy and strange. This time, I didn't notice any actual ill effects, but it does feel strangely good to be babbling at a keyboard again.

"But I have nothing to say..." That is, and always will be, complete bullshit. There is always something to say. The trick is making yourself actually put forth the effort to say it. Sometimes, I am bad at this.

Oh noes! The screen just flashed pink at me! I found a site called Write or Die and I decided it was as good an excuse as any to make myself do this again. I started it the other night, but never actually got any ill effects or any content beyond masturbatory bloviating, so I got bored and left. I must have forgotten to set some parameters, and now that I've actually got it functioning correctly, it seems to be getting very cross with me. There it goes again.

I told it I was going to give it 1000 words in one hour. I'm not even sure if this is physically possible. If I panic, and start reeling off all the two letter words I know, you'll know why.

I know quite a few two-letter words, actually. More than I did a month ago.

I started playing Facebook Scrabble with a college friend. When I knew him, he was almost eerily smart about math and statistics with a damn near photographic memory. I saw him play chess blindfolded once. I heard that he could also count up to four decks in Blackjack.

He's apparently spent the last 15 years getting even smarter. He plays tournament Scrabble now, so he knows the list of Scrabble sanctioned two-letter words. He also probably does crazy mind mojo, calculating triple word scores backwards or something, while waiting for me and my puny human mind to play something.

I found a online list of the two-letters. I consult it, but not as much as I used to. There are still a lot of words that I know for a fact should be there, and it angers me that they are not. RA. Why is RA not a word? I will accept that JA is not an English word, (though I should still be able to play it. ) RA, though. I talk about Egyptian sun gods basically nonstop.

Well, no. I never did this before the damn Scrabble game told me I couldn't Now I do it a lot more, even though every single use leads me to the same set of very angry thoughts: "See? SEE?? I just said it AGAIN! Do you hear this, ScrabbleGods? I say RA all. The. Time."

Huh. 513 words. 42 minutes left. Amazing.

Not even going to bother wondering if they're quality words. Don't even care about "That's not writing, that's typing."

No time to spellcheck no time to think even, the screen is flashing pink and I must make it stop.

(Actually, though, that's not very threatening at all, really. Pink is not a particularly scary color. I think it's more the sense of ohnoes something just happened, how can I make sure something worse doesn't happen. It's a warning, and because I don't know what might follow, I want to avoid it all costs.)
***
I went to Formal last weekend. I was dealing with a lot of really heavy thoughts about where exactly is the creepiness line in all of this, and just because I can clearly see that several other people have crossed it, that doesn't necessarily mean that I haven't. Then, I got drunk, and thought about it less.

I graduated in Dec 95. Even if you figure that the 96 formal was rightfully mine, and I was cheated out of it by inadvertently taking too many college credit courses in high school, that was 13 years ago. I have been to 12 Formals since graduation. (Is that right? Can't stop and do math right now...)

(Huh. Just paused the Write or Die for a bathroom break. When I started again, the screen was flashing red, and my computer was crying. It stopped as soon as I hit a key, but at least now that question is answered.)

Where was I going with this? Is Formal creepy, or no?

There were two people even older than me, and three people who I actually attended school with. (One of those people was in both groups. In college, Rico was "the old guy" so even though I count him as a contemporary, he is simultaneously way old.)

There were a decent handful of people from 2000-04, whom I met during my Taunie years. They're technically all call it 3-8 years younger than me, but they all seemed more relevant than the actual college students.

Thinking about them just opens up all sorts of unnecessarily complicated tangents about how maybe they're not really my people either, and probably never were, but dammit, if I discount them entirely, then I shouldn't even be with Jared so we'll just let that slide.

My main contemporaries mostly left way early, to go play Magic at Hans'. Hans doesn't do Formal at all anymore. I mention this in passing.

(Thinking is not at all conducive to Write or Die. Now I'm actually at a serious line of inquiry, but I can't pursue it, because the computer will get angry)

aa ab ad ae ah an am as at. Just saying. omg TOTAL PANIC with 5 words remaining. WHEW.
***
Total word count of 1001, with 18 minutes to spare. Now to clean up the typos. Also, I just checked, and I got 9 out of 16 of the 2-letter words that start with A.
***
So, I reread yesterday's stuff, and it made a lot more sense than I thought it did. Big thumbs up for Dr Wicked, and here I am again.

A little taste of writing was actually enough to trigger The Need again. After weeks of barely thinking about it, I'm back at omg must type all the things in my head RIGHT NOW or my head will explode. Strangely, this is preferable to realizing I haven't felt like this for more than a week.

I'm thinking a bike ride today, but I'm going to wait til Jared leaves for his monthly work meeting. Outside looks sunny, but it can't possibly be more than 50 degrees yet. I don't work til 4 today, and here I am, awake at 7:30, so I have all kinds of free time.

(I really should be able to pause Dr Wicked more than once. I just played my one pause, because of a coffee emergency. I know for a fact I'm going to desperately need coffee again as soon as this first cup is gone. I should have used a bigger mug.)
***
So, let's talk about Formal, and History, and all those other things I touched on yesterday. It really is all Facebook's fault. Reconnecting with all those Taus I haven't thought about for 15 years has really raised a lot of questions. Questions like, am I doing well? How do we eat? Why do we eat? And where will we go for lunch? (Rereading Hitchhikers trilogy this week. This is also because of History, kind of. I spent most of Saturday rereading Hans' copy of Salmon of Doubt, and it triggered all kinds of nostalgia urges.)

Passing thought: Look at this. How can I possibly think I'm a sane, functioning member of society when I don't write. All thinking in circles, only able to express myself in Grade One Crazy now that I finally am letting some of it out.

Jeez. Pick a line of thought, and stick with it.

Jared and the car. Jared borrows my car, sometimes. I assumed that because I'd seen him drive my Saturn with about a 70% success rate, he could more or less drive a standard transmission. He's having all kinds of problems with the Golf, though.

First, the only times I saw him drive the Saturn were when we were going to visit his parents. LONG stretches of highway driving. In town, the shifting becomes much more important, and it's much more obvious when you suck at it.

Also, the Saturn had a little light that flashed when the car thought it was time to shift. This light had only passing relevance to every other sign that the car actually wanted to shift, but Jared really relied on it. The Golf has no shift light. I've explained that you listen to engine, you look at the tachometer, but he doesn't really seem to have grasped standard transmission in that instinctive way that is of course the only real way to do it. I know he can do this. He's basically more dexterous and mechanically minded than me in absolutely every other way. He just needs to stop thinking about it so hard.
***
I'm out of words now. And coffee. Damn and blast.

I read several scary as hell articles in the last few days. I can't actually leave Dr. Wicked to find them again, so links will follow and I will tell you about them from memory.

First, Toxic Plasmosis. I can has brain damage! A disease, carried by cats, that makes rats want to be near them? That's messed up. And humans can have it too? And it may lead to schizophrenia?

Dude. I'm seriously pretty sure I've got this. If nothing else, it explains my unhealthy obsession with looking at ungrammatically captioned photos of cats. Cuuuute cats! omg there's Dr Tinycat again I LOVE HIM soooo much!

Ahem. And then there's the zombies in London. WTF. Zombies. Reanimated corpses. Attacking people. And it's tied into swine flu, somehow, maybe? Holy shit. The article didn't mention any actual problems taking out the zombies, so maybe they're more wussy than pop culture would have us believe. Or, maybe the article just didn't mention any details because They're trying to avoid a true global panic. I reiterate: Holy shit.

***
Man, so close. One more good paragraph even, and I can have some more coffee. I'm less panicked about his whole writing on a timeline thing today. I'm taking the time to fix most of my typos as they come up. "Delete" is a viable keystroke that makes the computer not angry with me, and now that I know my word count is basically ok for the time I allotted myself, I can be a little more sane about this entire process.
***
I work at 4 today. Did I mention that? I'm not about to waste time checking. I hate the closing shifts. I hate being awake and knowing that I really shouldn't make any longterm plans, because I have to go to work in 8 hours. Eight hours is a long time. But having work hanging over my head all damn day really sucks.

I'm not complaining too hard, of course, because it is Sunday hours. I didn't get those for a long damn time. I get time and a half when I work on Sundays. I'll take any Sunday hours they give me.
***
Goddammit. Now I want coffee AND a bathroom, kind of. Also, this sweatshirt needs to go. 30 more words.

I think 1000 words/hour was a good place to be. This 1500 in hour and 15 minutes nonsense isn't doing anything but annoying me. Oh goddammit. I did say 1500 didn't I? That means I still have 500 words to go. D'oh
***
Approximately 470 particularly crazy words deleted here. It's better this way. Trust me.
***
omg 30 words in a minute i'm so close i know i can do this if i just make it all one long runon sentence run on sohuld be 2 words woot 34 seconds to spare. :)

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