Holy shit, it's a new FFVIII fic from me, hot off the presses! Now friends, this is the first anything I have written in over two years, so do please read and review.

( In which Seifer and Ellone make blueberry pancakes. They totally make 'em. )

I just put together tomorrow's lesson plans while sipping hot tea in my pajamas.

I might be getting good at this teaching thing.

I hope the libraries and the art museums survive.

I hope Marcus Aurelius survives.

What is it you want? To keep on breathing? What about feeling? desiring? growing? ceasing to grow? using your voice? thinking? Which of them seems worth having? But if you can do without them all, then continue to follow the logos and God. To the end. To prize those other things - to grieve because death deprives us of them - is an obstacle.

I hope Simone Weil survives.

There are people for whom everything is salutary which brings God nearer to them. For me it is everything which keeps him at a distance. Between me and him there is the thickness of the universe - and that of the cross is added to it.

I do not hope for my own survival. I do not think of my friends' survival; that distraction would be dangerous. And of my brother's survival, what am I permitted to think? or hope?

)()(

He is asleep in the next room. I shall sit by his side through the night.

I shall wait as long as I can.

And then, as the sun comes up, just before he stirs awake, I shall decide -

Just before.

)()(

I was supposed to go in for a job interview tomorrow morning. I would have taught English and History.

zombies

LEIGH: I am suspicious of crustaceans.

LEIGH'S FRIEND: With good reason.

LEIGH: You cannot trust anything that wears its skeleton on the outside.

LEIGH'S FRIEND: Which is why you dislike most insects!

LEIGH: Precisely.

said the jongleur: "The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan" by Robert Kanigel

When everything else has crumbled and collapsed, so that the only thing left to do is ask why you have yet to obliterate yourself, and the answer comes as a very small voice from very far away, "Words."

I suppose that is when you know you must become a writer.

And I that have not your faith, how shall I know
That in the blinding light beyond the grave
We'll find so good a thing as that we have lost?

- W. B. Yeats, "King and No King"

)()(

Paddy Flynn is dead; . . . . He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination. . . . Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.

- W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

I have been fighting anxiety attacks all night long, I am horribly sick for the second time in a month, and I had to cancel tomorrow's hot date.

On the upside, squeemu made me a tribble icon.

Which brings me to: due to a recent meme posted by thebaconfat, I have realized there are on my paid account a full twenty (well, ninteen now) icon slots empty!

Comrades, will you help me fill these slots?

A simple way is to go through my interests list, find a topic I don't already have an icon of, and make one out of it. Serious. Wacky. Anything goes. Our computer lost its imaging software when it got reformatted, which is is a large reason for my dearth of icons. Behind the cut are concepts for several icons I've wanted, but always was unable, to make.

( Perhaps YOU can make them! )

Anything would cheer me up right now, icons and otherwise. Get on with the lovin'. But only if you want to.

Ganked from the fabulous draegonhawke:

( Visual DNA. )

So I feel less guilty about posting a meme, does anyone have some fine nonfiction to recommend? I'm up to my eyeballs in novels here - The Magus by John Fowles right now - and I need a change of pace. While I'm feeling natural history right now, I'll read anything as long as it's very well-written. Many thanks and air kisses.

A friend of mine is writing a paper on how people with obvious physical disabilities are often studiously ignored in public. She asked me for my experience as a Deaf person.

)()(

This happens to me often in elevators or on the metro. I will be standing or sitting by myself, minding my own business, and a stranger will lean over and attempt to strike up a conversation. As soon as I point to my ear and shake my head, their face falls. Their color drains completely. They look as if they've been slammed into a brick wall. They awkwardly disengage and spend the rest of the ride avoiding eye contact. I know what they're frantically thinking.

"My God, but she looked so normal."

They need to be able to see me coming. They need time to brace themselves. Otherwise, it's plain unsporting of me. I might as well jump out from behind a corner and yell, "Boo!" How dare I? How dare I look so normal?

)()(

This also happens to me often. I will be with a hearing friend, and people will talk to my friend instead of to me. Salespeople, waiters, even other friends. In a social setting, I become a human lava lamp. When I hold a pen and notepad out to someone in the group, they almost always will give me either of these two reactions: 1.) the taken-aback pause, as if I am a leper, or 2.) the overly-earnest look, as if I am a charity case.

On the bright side, this method weeds out a lot of idiots. The ones who don't give me either look are worth becoming friends with. But this method also reminds me why most Deaf prefer to stick with other Deaf.

I've gotten to the point where I hold the pen and notepad out almost apologetically.

Tags: angry deaf woman

The uplifted sword has no will of its own, it is all of emptiness. It is like a flash of lightning. The man who is about to be struck down is also of emptiness, and so is the one who wields the sword. None of them are possessed of a mind which has any substantiality. As each of them is of emptiness and has no "mind" (kokoro), the striking man is not a man, the sword in his hands is not a sword, and the "I" who is about to be struck down is like the splitting of the spring breeze in a flash of lightning. When the mind does not "stop," the sword swinging cannot be anything less than the blowing of the wind. The wind is not conscious of itself as blowing over the trees and working havoc among them. So with the sword. . . .

Therefore, do not get your mind "stopped" with the sword you raise; forget what you are doing, and strike the enemy. Do not keep your mind on the person who stands before you. They are all of emptiness, but beware of your mind being caught up with emptiness itself.

- Takuan translated by D.T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture

Tags: commonplace book

LEIGH: Hey, this guide to cult fiction is full of little tidbits of information. One author I know, John Fowles, was born in Leigh-on-Sea.

LEIGH: I wanna be called Leigh-on-Sea.

LEIGH'S FRIEND: Then we'll go boating.

LEIGH: I should just move there. Then I'd really be Leigh on the sea.

LEIGH: Your idea is simpler, yes.

LEIGH'S FRIEND: Hehe.

Either way, The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction is a fun read. My brother and I made our usual trip to Borders today and as he caught up on his manga, I stumbled across this book while looking for Milan Kundera's The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts in the literary criticism section. The guide holds about as many authors I know as ones I don't, but its real appeal lies in the capsule biography of each author, each of which contains something that surprises and amuses me.

On his first - and last - day as a Walt Disney writer, Harlan Ellison (1934- ) suggested Disney make a porno movie. He did more than suggest it - acting out scenes in the voices of favourite Disney characters, not realising that Roy Disney and various studio heads were sitting at a nearby table. Ellison has also allegedly had to sign a non-aggression pact with a critic he may have assaulted and has, since the 1970s, been working on a third anthology of sci-fi stories, The Last Dangerous Visions, which, due to its continued failure to appear, is one of the great lost books of American publishing.

At the end of each capsule is a bullet list: Influenced By, Influence On, Essential Reading, Further Reading. I'm already a fan of Viktor Pelevin, having read his The Helmet of Horror (a retelling of the Theseus and Minotaur myth for the Canongate Myth Series) and given it to Russell for Christmas, and this guide has him. His capsule biography is full of summaries of his other works, and now I've just pulled up online library holds on his Buddha's Little Finger (The Clay Machine-Gun outside the States) and The Life of Insects.

If you read as much SF as I do, you'll find some strangely obvious authors in here like Ursula K. Le Guin and J.R.R. Tolkien; but there's also Mervyn Peake and his brilliant, baroque Gormenghast. Similarly, I'm already a fan of Yukio Mishima and Haruki Murakami, but I'd never heard of Kobo Abe before picking up this guide. In other cases, such as Tadeusz Konwicki, I knew the author's name but never had any inclination to try out him or her until now. This is a snappy little book, and I look forward to other discoveries that lie within its pages.

At the end of Peake's capsule is a quote by him, "Life is an effort to grip before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination, before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever . . . "