It's not a cry you can hear at night, it's not somebody who's seen the light...

Birthday party with a 3-D TARDIS cake is awesome! This entire year was a Doctor Who year. I got a pen with a floating TARDIS, a TARDIS mug and a sonic screwdriver flashlight. The ninth/tenth doctor's of course. While Three is my favourite, his sonic screwdriver was this weird thing with red and yellow bits and it whirled and I did not love it. And Eleven's is wanky-doodle-dandy.

The most impressive part of this though is that I just lasted from 7-11pm at a party. Being social. And I have only retired to my room because I am tired now. But I talked and I was SO charming. Hurrah!

TARDIS cake!

(All my Doctor Who icons have been deactivated because my subscription to extra userpics ran out dammit!)

I just cleaned...so much. It turns out my vampire fang box fell off my bookshelf and I probably vaccumed up one of the fangs. Darnit. But you know...they were expensive things but not entirely practical. So I will live.

Now I am so tired and zoning out to As It Fades by VNV Nation which is like what floating through the Aurora Borealis must sound like.

( Have some photos of today, including my awesome room and Leah's creepy costume )

So I watched the season 7 premiere of Supernatural... Spoilers below the cut.

( Who else thinks the SPN writers read Forgotten Gods? )

I have been so productive the last few days. I did my meeting, shopped, got my hair cut, contacted Petersgate for counselling, went with Alison to take Helios to the vet, finished over half of my essay BEFORE the day before it's due (I know, right?! and I am pleased with it, too!), did some work for my mom, did some dishes, and dyed my hair. I am about to go shopping again for other stuff we need. And wine glasses, since I broke one the other day and now we have only two (I think...) Then I will make chili and cupcakes. And the day before that I did a million errands as well. And not a single bit of it made me anxious.

Awesome.

I don't know.

I posted a thingy on Tumblr last night which was metaphorical of how I'm feeling inside, even though I was talking about something else. It's here in case you feel like reading it. Behold how goddamn deep I am, you guys, omg.

I just feel really fragile. I managed to actually write something I didn't hate. In fact, I really love it. And that made me want to watch Michael Collins so I could Irish!historygasm. Yeah. If you're feeling fragile, watching Michael Collins WILL make you sob for two hours straight. Just, you know, FYI. But GOD that movie. I love it. It is so well done. And it amuses me to see Jonathan Rhys Meyers in one of his first film roles. Where he gets to use his actual accent!

I'm just worn out. And people keep asking me questions I have no way of answering and it pisses me off when it shouldn't. But I don't know when my course will start again and I don't know when my placement will start again and I don't know when real life will resume. We only just got water on at full strength and considering the way it's been going on and off for days at a time, who knows if it will stay that way. Some of the city is still without power and water at ALL, let alone the people who lost homes and families and lives. So yeah, I don't know when classes will resume again.

Stop asking.

Still no running water, though people on this side of town are starting to get it back so this gives me hope we'll have it soon. Our stores are still going strong though. We even have five bottles of our original stash left, and we've been boiling up the stuff we got from across the road. I am so glad it's there so we can replace what we've been using. If this goes on much longer we would have run out and we stockpiled water like mad. It just goes to show that even when you do prepare, sometimes it's not enough.

So. Guys. If you can? Have emergency kits. Even if you live in a place where you think they won't be necessary. We used to think they weren't absolutely necessary here even though we had one, because the dangerous fault lines were in Wellington and on the West Coast, not in Christchurch. And then a previously unknown fault ruptured. You just never know. If you're someone who can afford an emergency kit (and please know I completely understand that not everyone can), it's responsible to have one. It means emergency rations of food provided by whatever disaster relief happens to be around can go to the people who can't afford to have an emergency kit in a disaster and who need it far more, instead of getting used up on people who should and could have been more careful. It's just goddamn socially responsible, okay? It's caring about your fellow human beings while taking care of yourself too.

Put some tinned food and toilet paper and no-wash anti-bacterial hand cleaner and batteries and flashlights/torches and candles and matches and blankets and anything else you think you might need (including pet food) in your kit. And keep clean water around and replace it often (use the old stuff to water the garden or wash the car or...something). Hell, in Melbourne a couple of years ago, some kind of plant exploded and it left part of the city without electricity and running water for days and that was just a random malfunction without any natural disaster cause. So be prepared. Please. Be as prepared as you can be. The ability to have extra food lying around in case of an emergency is a luxury and if you can, please just do it.

Sorry. Preachy. But I can tell you first-hand how important this is. Never assume this doesn't apply to you. Be safe, lovelies. Gosh, this isn't even what I came here to do. I was going to talk about how I can't write fiction because it feels so utterly useless at the moment. And I got on my soapbox instead. Oh well.

I used to spend my life in my high school theatre. There were days I could be at school from 8 in the morning until 9-10 at night. I didn't drive until I was 21 because instead of taking driver's ed, I was doing everything I possibly could in that theatre. I ate, slept and breathed that place.

When I was in my final year of high school and I was on my way to rehearsal when I saw a little girl in the hallway behind the theatre, crying. She was about eight and I went over to her to ask what was wrong. She said her mother was supposed to pick her up a half an hour before that (why she was being picked up at a high school when she was 8, I still do not know) and she was scared that her mother had been in a car accident. I asked if her mother had a cell phone and she nodded, so I led the poor girl through to the speech office so she could try calling her mother.

When there was no answer, and the girl started crying again, I told her we should go out to where she was supposed to be picked up and I would wait with her.

I ended up waiting with her for nearly 45 minutes. I kept her calmer than she probably would have been by talking about stupid things and telling her ridiculous stories about myself and my very strange friends. Her mother eventually came by and the girl hugged me and they went on their way. I have no idea why the mother was late, or what happened, but I never saw the girl again and I don't remember her name.

What I do remember, was that I was late to my rehearsal. I knew I would be, and since one of the advantages of my crazy brain is that it traps things inside its cage of memory, I had the entire play memorized already so I figured it would be okay. The director wasn't pleased however, and he informed me of this. I told him I had been waiting with a scared, little girl, and he asked me why that was my responsibility.

You know...if that's how you think, then I guess it wasn't. My responsibility was to my cast mates and my director and despite the fact that I was never late before and always went above and beyond to help and be do whatever I could to move the production forward, I was still late this time and that had inconvenienced people. I still feel like the right thing to do was to stay with the poor girl. What about my responsibility to help out another human being; to care for someone who was scared and alone? If I had been that scared little girl, I would hope someone would have extended the same kindness to me. I just apologized and we got on with it, but I never really forgot that.

I'm not someone who can pass people by. Which is why I am the one who ends up sitting with the homeless person on the street who passed out and hit their head on the pavement so hard they are bleeding into their eyes, while they wait (for over an hour) for the ambulance to come. The amount of people who walked by that day, averting their eyes so they didn't have to see, makes me feel ashamed. I don't ever want to be that kind of person. It's why I'm doing what I'm doing, despite the fact that I am not okay. The helping people is as natural as breathing. It's not going out of my way, because helping people is my way. It's everything else that's the problem. Forcing myself to leave my home, when it's the only place that I feel safe. Forcing myself to talk to people, even though I'm terrified of it. All that functioning as if I don't panic about every little thing, that's the hard part. It makes me feel like I have no right to act like I could actually help. I feel barely human. Sometimes I feel like giving up. But I won't. I can't. I'm taking responsibility. I just wish it wasn't so hard.

Alison was supposed to go to bed but she just came out here to get a drink and there is no way that we could possibly ever explain the conversation that just occurred between us, but it was epic hilarity though it was the kind where you had to be there and now my stomach hurts from laughing. It was pure ridiculousness and we both laughed so hard, and I feel like I might vomit.

And then I thought, "you know what? I think I feel like this at least once a day." I think living in a house where you laugh so hard you think you might vomit at least once a day is pretty damn awesome, no matter what else is going on in my messed up little world.

Long live the LFoD and all it's denizens, past and present!

EDIT: For more examples of why the LFoD is the greatest place on Earth, I present Alison's Overheard in the LFoD tag in her journal which is chock full of hilarity and quotes.

My head hurts from laughing.

I missed a courier today so now I'm just waiting up so I don't miss it again. It's either my St Patrick books or something else I'm expecting.

So I am watching old episodes of Supernatural. Look at me be distracted, woooo.

Oh my god. JDM. Big Papa Winchester, I love you. This show has brought EVERYONE ELSE BACK (and gotten beyond stupid) why can't you bring him back so it doesn't suck any more?! Oh right, JDM is off doing more awesome things than SPN. Oh...oh John. He's crying and that always gets me. And now he's gone, grrrargh.

I miss the first two seasons of this show. I miss when it didn't make me want to scream at the screen in frustration.

But my toothache went away! Hurrah!

/pointless entry