kowndege of the basic maths,

slythwolf @ 2018-12-17T11:34:00

2018-12-17T16:34:57Z

quality of life improvements over time as a rogue man...who remembers when fall damage used to knock u out of stealth

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slythwolf @ 2018-12-17T10:28:00

2018-12-17T15:32:00Z

tumblr logout protest day!

im interested to see what the place looks like in The Aftermath but thatll have to wait for tomorrow

(gosh its weird to have to press enter twice)

l'anywhodle im doing laundry, wow dailies, and watching travis & brian play black ops this morning, ive never enjoyed fps-es but maybe thats literally because ive never played them with a friend

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slythwolf @ 2018-12-05T04:19:00

2018-12-05T09:20:16Z

SO there was a problem with one of the city water mains yesterday morning & the entire north half of town is under a boil water advisory, my dad keeps forgetting about it & cooking with tap water etc. so last night i duct taped a note to the toothbrush holder to remind him not to brush his teeth with tap water, & this morning im going to put one on the kitchen faucet that just says “NO.”

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slythwolf @ 2018-12-04T16:02:00

2018-12-04T21:05:21Z

listen im not gonna go delete old posts or anything but please dont judge me by the shit i was posting on lj in 2008-12 or so. some of the stuff i still agree with, some of it i dont, but regardless it turns out im much less of an aggressively self-righteous asshole when properly medicated

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slythwolf @ 2012-10-07T00:27:00

2012-10-07T04:27:51Z

Have picked up Homeland again. I can't stay away from these characters, as much as other things about the story piss me off. But I'm beginning to wonder: why is it that Salvatore's fans think he writes these great fight scenes? How can it be that someone can describe a fight scene in such exhaustive, boring detail and I still don't know who's where or what the fuck's happening?

And Mr. Salvatore? Love? You don't poke someone with scimitars. Scimitars are a slashing weapon, not a thrusting one.

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slythwolf @ 2012-07-25T15:24:00

2012-07-25T19:24:49Z

I have never had this kind of anniversary before.

I was never close to my grandparents. I couldn’t tell you when they died, except that for my mom’s parents I was in middle school and they went about six months apart, and for my dad’s mom I had to work so I didn’t go to the funeral.

It’s a strange feeling, for those of you who haven’t experienced it, to have another date added to the holidays and birthdays that you remember by default: my birthday is September 16th, Kate’s is September 20th, April’s is June 29th, Dad’s is January 20th, Mom’s is January 28th, Christmas is December 25th, Halloween is October 31st, Mom died on July 25th.

There will never be another, larger meaning to this date. If, G-d forbid, some national tragedy, some natural disaster happens on July 25th, if a war starts or ends, if I make a new close friend or fall in love with someone who was born on this date, or if someone I love gets married or has a baby on this date, it will still always be the day Mom died.

It was about now, I think, about three in the afternoon, that we came home from the grocery store, and we had had such a good trip to the grocery store, we had been in such a wonderful mood. Mike hadn’t been yelling at me, good things had been on sale, it was a lovely day and we were talking and laughing and she was already dead and I didn’t know it. I don’t know what time it was when I got the call. When Aunt Pam said, “I’m Mike’s sister,” I was so confused, I knew from her voice, in my gut, I knew something terrible had happened, but I thought she meant my husband mike, and not my stepdad Mike. My brain went, but he doesn’t have a sister.

And when she said, “Mike and Karen were killed in a motorcycle accident,” for a moment I didn’t know who she was talking about. I thought she had the wrong number.

I thought, “Who’s Karen,” for a moment, because of course in my head her name will always be Mom.

If any of you are wondering, it doesn’t go away. It gets easier but it doesn’t end. You still think to yourself, maybe they’re playing an elaborate prank on us, maybe there’s been a terrible mistake and the people on that bike weren’t Mike and Karen at all. They’re old hippies, they’re free spirits, maybe they fucked off to Machu Picchu or something and I’ll get a call tomorrow going, why are you selling our house. You know it isn’t true but part of you still thinks maybe.

I downloaded Twister because it was her favorite movie. I downloaded it that week. I still haven’t been able to watch it.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say, here. Maybe nothing. Maybe just to remember, to share a little bit of remembering with my dash. I’ve never done this before and I’m all alone right now and there’s nobody else to tell.

So I’ll tell you how easily she laughed, how much she snarked at everything, how she smoke like a chimney and drank like a fish and maybe her cholesterol was a little high but she didn’t have any other health problems, she was fit and happy and living the life she loved. I’ll tell how proud she would have been that I’ll have my associate’s soon, and that I’ll be going back to a four-year school in January, ready to get my bachelor’s and move on to grad school. How proud she’d be of me for leaving this marriage even though it’s hard. For taking care of this dog even though it’s a lot of work. For figuring out who I am, even though nobody is here to tell me how.

How proud she was already, of my sister and me, just for living grown and mostly happy in the world.

I’ll tell you how she is the only person in my family I ever came out to, and how she said she didn’t care if I was holding hands with a boy or a girl as long as I was happy. How she always had advice even when I wasn’t looking for any, and how she was usually right even when I didn’t want her to be. How fully she lived, how deeply she loved, how bright she burned when she was with us, how bright she still burns now that she’s gone. How, in some ways, she isn’t really gone at all.

I carry her heart with me (I carry it in my heart). And on my back as I prepare to leave this home I’ve spent three years making, I carry her love and her paintings and her stand mixer and a lock of her hair, I carry them into my new future and she comes with me. So maybe I’m all alone right now, and maybe I’m not, and maybe I never will be.

So maybe nothing will ever be the same again. And maybe that’s okay.

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Mackinac Trip Journal Entry #3

2012-06-18T16:50:05Z

The bakery here in Mackinaw City is open. I told the girls that if I was up super early again I would bring them coffee and donuts, so I've texted Molly to get her and Cheryl's drink orders. They are probably not up yet; I'll just sit here and wait, and if I don't hear from them by the time the donuts are up, I'll bring back four mochas.

( I've picked up a copy of the Fort Michilimackinac Pageant Gazette for the 2012 season. )

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So this happened.

2012-06-01T02:11:31Z

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For Those Who Have Fallen

2012-05-28T16:22:31Z

For the kids who deployed just after high school, ready to give their service to pay for a college education, who never came home.

For the sons and daughters whose parents had to get the phone call, and the parents who had to answer it.

For the parents who will forever miss birthdays and holidays, who didn't see their babies born or didn't see their first steps or didn't see them off to kindergarten.

For the brothers and sisters who will always be missing from family reunions; for the spaces left by silent agreement in wedding photos.

For the empty chair at the table and the empty side of the bed.

For the extra drink at the bar that friends order in solemn tribute, to pour out or drink as is their tradition, one for me, one for you.

For those who are gone, and for those left behind. For those who know this day is about more important things than parades and a day off and a sale at the store.

For your service.

For your sacrifice.

Thank you.

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Oh, I should mention.

2012-05-22T03:35:14Z

I made the dean's list this spring.

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Thoughts on the Sha

2012-05-20T22:41:36Z

Beta spoilers, because that's how I roll.

I get that we are limited by the genre of the game, but I really feel like we should not be able to fight the Sha, or at least the Sha of Anger and the Sha of Hatred, by actually...fighting them. Or, I mean. Maybe we try it once or twice and it just feeds them.

It shouldn't work, is what I'm saying.

It should be like in You Awaken in Razor Hill: "You can't possibly stop this with more violence."

I could see it working on Doubt, but there should be some kind of tie-in with that in the later zones where we find out that by using violence to defeat the Sha of Doubt we have strengthened Anger and Hatred. Because that's how that would work. We are failing at balance and I get that this is Warcraft and that there's really not another way they could go on this, from a gameplay standpoint, but storywise it just feels wrong.

Anyway. I'm not posting this in the Beta Feedback forum because there would be no point, but that's my take on it.

Incidentally I really love the Sha as the focus of the expansion, especially against the backdrop of a bunch of haters blathering on about how this expansion is too lighthearted and "should be rated E" and whatever-all. Because yes, on the surface, this expansion is about happy bouncy pandas who like to get drunk (but are always happy drunks, they don't get maudlin or go home and beat their families or anything), but if you look just a little deeper, this expansion is the darkest yet.

Yes, we've fought deeply evil things before. We've fought characters who were created to be good but got twisted into evil, who want to blacken and destroy everything their hands can reach, but those characters have always been outside us. We were always the good guys, and maybe once in a while we got manipulated into doing something evil and had to atone for that but at the end of the day we were the heroes and they were the villains and there was always that line of demarcation there.

(My deep and abiding love for death knights comes mostly from the fact that death knights, more than any other class, blur that line.)

But this time, this time, it's not some Big Bad trying to destroy the world, it's not about some evil master plan that we're being manipulated into furthering. The evil comes from us. We brought it with us to this new land that we've discovered and we didn't do it because somebody wanted to use us for their own evil ends, we did it because we're a bunch of petty squabbling assholes who hate each other for no better reason than that we're different. And because of our stupid, self-centered, ignorant, violent bullshit, we have made manifest the Sha to destroy homes and lives and families across a continent of people who offered us only friendship and booze.

We are the bad guys this time. We have to take down the evil not because we're heroes and that's what we do, but because we caused it, it's our fault, and we have to clean up our mess. Because nothing will make up for what has already been lost to our shortsightedness but we have to stop the destruction before it's too late.

Because whining that we didn't know, that we didn't mean any harm, accomplishes nothing. Because intent is not magic. We have to fix it. We have to roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves. Are we the heroes who have saved Azeroth so many times before? Time to fucking act like it.

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More MoP Thoughts

2012-03-27T18:30:03Z

I really hope they put Asric and Jadaar in Pandaria. I doubt they will, but I want it anyway.

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Guys

2012-03-25T08:57:00Z

Guys I'm having a Pandaren existential crisis.

I've had the name Tophbeifong reserved on my server for months for my female Pandaren monk. The trouble is, now that I've seen the model with the long tail¹, I can't get Ty Lee out of my head.

I'm compulsively drawing pictures of red Pandaren women in acrobatic poses with cheerful, mischievous expressions and long braids.

And I keep telling myself, it'll be okay, I'll have another character slot when the xpac goes live, I can roll them both, but then I start worrying someone else will get Tylee as a name before I can. And so I think, what other character can I delete to make room to reserve the name, and I don't know and just ugh what do I do.

Intellectually I know I am not going to level two Alliance monks. I'm just not. I need to get over it, really. As much as I love Tophgod (because who doesn't) I am not going to play her. I need to delete her placeholder and make one for Ty Lee and get over myself. The longer I dither, the greater the chance someone else will have the name on my server.

1. People keep saying the red females are the only Pandaren with tails, and this is simply not the case. All Pandaren have tails. The black-and-whites simply have the little teeny round short tails.

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Notes From the Wandering Isle

2012-03-24T20:16:17Z

I'm not in the beta (yet), but I'm watching everybody's livestreams like a mad fiend, and I bring you news of grave importance.

New favorite NPC: Jojo Ironbrow.

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Female Pandaren Thoughts

2012-03-19T14:26:50Z

Here's WoW Insider's article, including pics.

1. It comes in red! I'm super excited about the red panda option. SUPER SUPER EXCITE U GUISE OMG. I'm not sure if I'll actually play one or not, but I think it's awesome regardless.

2. Fat-bottomed girls do make the panda world go 'round. When we got the silhouette, there were a lot of people saying she was still skinnier than they'd like, and I would have thought it was cool if they had gone fatter with her as well, but compared to the male model I call her just fine. WoW female characters are always skinnier than the males; her slenderness in comparison can, I think, be attributed to compacter muscles underneath her padding, which is fine with me. And do I spy a bit of a belly? I do! I do! Love.

3. HAIR TOYS Some of the hair options are going to have hair sticks. YES PLEASE. Is it wrong to hope we'll see one or two of those in the barber shop for other races?

Tophbeifong is gonna be the coolest looking toon on my character selection screen, you guys.

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Okay

2012-03-13T15:53:29Z

It's possible I have basically abandoned LJ for Tumblr. I can't help it, it's just so instant gratification!

Anyway, what has the Wolf been doing over the past month and a half? Let me explain. No, there is too much; let me sum up.

I got into the octet so now I'm enrolled in two choir classes both of which my ass is gonna get As in. I am at least going to pass all my other classes. My weight training class ends next week but I intend to keep going and working out.

I read the Hunger Games trilogy and it was incredible. I have a mockingjay pin which I now wear everywhere, and aprilmayinjune and I are going to see the first movie on IMAX next Friday. The midnight showing was sold out, but as a relative newcomer to the fandom, I don't begrudge that to the die-hards. I'll make it happen next time.

Next month, Dad and I are driving down to Nashville to spend a few days with my sister. During this time we'll be going through stuff of my mom's that she has at her house, and she and I will be going and getting tattoos for Mom together, although not the same one. Next summer, we, as well as one or two of Mom's cousins and possibly some of her friends, are taking her ashes on a cruise to Alaska and scattering them on Mt. McKinley.

I'm gonna take a full-time schedule for summer semester, including Special Topics in History: Michigan and the War of 1812 which is taking a five-day trip up to Mackinaw/c in June. I'll also be taking human anatomy for my science class with a lab, even though I fucking hate anatomy, because I think it will be relevant to my anthropology plans. In order to facilitate kicking the summer semester's ass I will be putting in my notice at work in May. After the summer semester I'll either be able to graduate or I'll be able to take what few credits I'll still need online from my dad's house, so I will be moving in with him probably in August. Then when I have my associate's I'll be transferring to Central Michigan University and commuting from Dad's to Mt. Pleasant, and hopefully I'll be able to find a roommate or otherwise afford an apartment by my second year there so I can move closer to campus. I have about $2k in my secret bank account, which I don't want to use until I absolutely have to.

After that, I'm strongly considering Western for my master's, but also MSU and U of M, and I'm willing to branch out all over the country depending on programs and funding. I'm also considering getting two master's degrees, one in archaeology and one in linguistics. If I could swing it I'd really love to do the taught programme in archaeological research at one of the UK schools I was looking at (gut says it was in London but I don't fully remember), but that would be less necessary if I could get into a field school during one or two of my summers.

Ideally my PhD will happen at the University of Sheffield. They have a ridiculously extensive and awesome archaeology program.

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So I was just thinking.

2012-01-21T03:46:09Z

In my twenty-nine years I have encountered five stories that have changed my life and the way I looked at the world. The first was Lord of the Rings. The second was Harry Potter. The third was Women On Fire. The fourth was Discworld. The fifth was You Awaken in Razor Hill.

If you play WoW, and you haven't read it, you need to follow that link right now.

If you don't play WoW, I really recommend that you read it anyway, although it may make you want to play WoW, so fair warning on that.

If you are a Supernatural fan, I can tell you that SPN gives me the same kinds of feelings as reading this story, so check that out.

I don't have a lot of homework this weekend, so I'll have time to reread it. And then I'm going to go in-game to pay my respects to certain NPCs and a certain grave site.

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An Open Letter

2012-01-20T01:01:30Z

Dear elected officials, lobbyists, various studio execs, and sundry corporate assholes,

I am slythwolf. I have been on the internet now for over seventeen years.

These past few months, mine has been one of the four or five million voices you may have heard shouting about SOPA. The thing is, something very important about the kind of political protest you’ve seen from us is that for every person who participates, there are about ten more people who don’t participate but who still agree with the aims of the movement.

We are legion.

We are your constituents.

We are your customers.

We are your audience.

And we are pissed off.

The thing is, you can go on as much as you want to about protecting copyright and stopping piracy—which, by the way, guys, if you wanted to demonize us, you probably should have gone with calling us something less self-evidently awesome than pirates—you can couch it, I mean to say, in as much sanctimonious, self-righteous, faux-noble language as you want. But what it comes down to is, you’re trying to shut down participatory culture, because participatory culture is owned collectively by the participants, and you can’t turn a profit on it.

And what you don’t understand is that if you shut down participatory culture on the internet, not only will participatory culture find another way to flourish (you can’t stop the signal), you will also not make any additional money; you may, in fact, make less money than you’re making now, and I’ll tell you why.

Fangirls and fanboys spend a lot of money on their chosen fandoms. As much as we download things you don’t think we should, and as much as we “violate copyright” by making fanworks out of our deep and abiding love for our fandoms, we spend a lot of money on official merchandise.

Do you know how much I paid for official Harry Potter candy? I still have like twelve little Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans bags floating around in my apartment somewhere—you’re damn right, I kept that shit. I bought official ties, official wallets, official T-shirts, official keychains, the list goes on. I bought two copies of each of the seven books and then? I bought two additional books, I bought Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, both totally unnecessary to read and enjoy the main story but both invaluable to a writer of fan fiction. Why do you think I wanted two copies of each book in the series? I wanted an American and a UK copy of each so I could see the differences between them; I wanted a hardcover and a paperback copy of each so I could highlight and underline and dog-ear the crap out of the paperback for fan fiction research.

Why did I buy the Harry Potter books in the first place? You’ll never guess.

You see, one summer afternoon, almost eleven years ago, I was reading fan fiction. I got bored of what was available for fandoms I was already part of and I started reading fanfic for things I hadn’t read or seen. One of those things was Harry Potter.

The fanfic was so good it made me go out and buy the books.

That wasn’t the last time it happened to me, either. At least 75% of the books I buy, the movies I see, the TV shows I watch, I spend my hard-earned green American dollars on those things because of fandom.

Because of participatory culture, which terrifies you, I spend money on your products. If it were not for participatory culture, you would get at most 25% of the money you currently get from me.

Not that it’s about the money. Of course not. It’s the principle, right? Your intellectual property, your rules.

Participatory culture spits on your rules.

Everyone who loves a story owns a piece of that story. What lives and breathes about a story does so in the heart of the audience. You can’t give us stories to love and then dictate how we may love them—and I don’t mean that it’s wrong or cruel to do that, although it is; I mean you can’t do it; I mean it doesn’t work. You close a door, participatory culture will open a window. We’ll go back to zines if we have to go back to zines. Hell, we’ll go back to telling stories around a campfire. Participatory culture is universal to the human condition. There is nothing you can do to destroy it. It arises spontaneously and it cannot be stopped.

Not that we’re gonna let you pry our internet from our cold, dead hands in the first place.

Yours sincerely,

Wolf A. Woman (Slytherin)

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Friday Morning State of the Wolfcave

2012-01-13T10:26:07Z

Good morning, friends, and happy Friday the 13th!

It's the last Friday before the spring semester. Well, technically they call it the winter semester--whatever, I don't even, it doesn't matter. It ends in spring, and I like spring better, so I think of it as spring.

I have a number of strategies in place to ensure this semester goes better than last semester. I am going to email my dad my syllabi and all my homework assignments and I'm going to talk to him every night before I go to bed. That way someone is there for me to be accountable to and I won't have the leeway to bullshit.

I've got the debit card for my new bank account. It's sitting in my wallet and I hope not to have to use it until I actually move out, but my paychecks are going into its checking account so there's money there if I need it. When I get my financial aid refund this semester that will go into savings.

Nigel is being a jackass about his plans to grow medical marijuana for money. He seems to think we are going to use our tax refund as a down payment on a house where he can set up a grow room. He is mistaken. I am perfectly happy to put it in a savings account and play along with whatever house hunting he wants to do, because there is no way we'll find something he's happy with in our price range by the time I'm ready to leave. Then when we get divorced I will take my half of the money in that joint account and he can suck my entire ass.

The dent from my wedding ring is almost gone, and I have stopped reaching over to adjust the ring. Meanwhile not wearing it has begun affording me opportunities to practice being hit on, which is fun. I'm not stupid enough to cheat but it's nice to get attention.

Nigel, meanwhile, may in fact be stupid enough to cheat. Last weekend he made a mix CD for someone at his work, but he wouldn't tell me who or why or what was on it and when he played it to make sure it had burned correctly he plugged his headphones into the CD player. When I, in completely casual I'm-just-making-conversation tones, inquired as to why he was making it, he got extremely defensive.

Which is hilarious.

As of tomorrow it will be eleven months since we had sex.

In not-my-fucked-up-marriage news, I have been doing some cooking. The other day I made chocolate ganache for hot chocolate purposes and today I'm going to make a chocolate pound cake to drizzle some of it over. I've also been doing things with the crock pot that result in deliciousness with very little effort.

I'm going to spend my time and energy on schoolwork and taking care of myself and Chromie to the exclusion of dealing with Nigel's bullshit and in order to make the time pass quickly so that I'll be graduating and moving out before I know it. I'm going to get my 4.0 back, get/keep myself and my dog healthy and happy, rehabilitate my wardrobe so that I have things to wear that I like that actually fit me, and "get organized" (read: subtly pack all my shit so I can move out while Nigel is at work when the time comes).

I really really hope someone buys Mom's house soon. The real estate market in Florida is not great but if it sells I can just move out basically right then and not have to wait until I finish my degree.

Meanwhile I have some vacation and personal time at work that I need to take by the end of the month or it goes away. Basically it's about nine and a half hours of free money, so I'm going to stick that in the book and receive a paycheck while sitting at home on my ass doing schoolwork. Fun times.

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slythwolf @ 2012-01-02T05:52:00

2012-01-02T10:52:45Z

Sitting rocking in my computer chair and knitting Estonian lace out of a recycled cashmere sweater, listening to pretty pretty music someone posted on Tumblr, some things in my life are just the same as they would have been a hundred years ago and some are so different but what matters--what matters lasts.

Things worth having in this world you can only get two ways. You can get given them as a gift, or you have to make them yourself, with your hands.

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Moar Progress

2011-12-21T07:59:52Z

I got my financial aid refund, finally. (It had been returned by the post office because, apparently, at some point over the summer, the college knocked the second digit off my apartment number in their computer system.) That went into the new bank account as well.

I now have over $1300 in savings and my paychecks going directly to the new checking account. If I can make the household expenses work without dipping into it, I'll have at least $2600 in the checking account by the time I'm ready to leave, unless Mom's house sells before I get my associate's and I move out early, in which case I'll have more money than that anyway, from the estate.

If Mom's house doesn't sell by then, I'll just transfer most of that money into the savings account where it can draw interest, since I'll be moving in with Dad and won't have to pay any major bills for a while. Need-based financial aid will cover most of my expenses while I'm working on my bachelor's.

Although what I will probably do in that case is close the account and open a new one at the credit union Dad uses, since it's not very practical to have to drive the two and a half or three hours down here if I ever need to do any business at the branch.

Meanwhile, I made a huge batch of chili the other day, and Nigel is now passive-aggressively asking me if I'm going to "blame" him when I finish eating it. I can't tell if he actually doesn't get that when I "blame" him for my not having any food, it's because he's eaten all my food, or if he's just fucking with me. Either way, he's a jackass.

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Progress

2011-12-18T08:21:23Z

Tonight at work I submitted the form to switch my direct deposit to my new bank account.

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The Story of How It Ends

2011-12-14T10:06:07Z

You don’t feel bad, but you don’t feel good, either.

He tells you that you are fine. He tells you to stop worrying. He tells you everything is great, anyone would be happy with what you have, he tells you he is the one with the problems.

He tells you what a bitch you are for adding to his problems with your pointless, petty complaining.

He asks you where his dinner is.

He asks you why is the house such a mess, why don’t you have a job, why don’t you cook more often, why don’t you do his laundry, why don’t you suck his dick, why don’t you wipe his ass. (Those last two are figurative and sarcastic and happen inside your own head.)

He asks you why are you cleaning when you could be job hunting, why are you job hunting when you could be cleaning, why are you wasting your time organizing your things, why are you cooking so much food when you know you’ll never eat it all before it goes bad, why are you wasting your time doing laundry when there are so many other things to be done first and is that load all your clothes and what do you need clean clothes for when you never go anywhere.

He asks you if you seriously think he has time for sex when he has to be up at four in the morning. If you seriously think he has the energy when he worked ten hours today. If you seriously think he should still find your body interesting when you walk around naked half the time anyway—he sees it so much, it’s gotten boring.

When he does feel like it, “I’m getting tired” is code for “your five minutes of foreplay are up; I’m going to roll onto my back—put the condom on my dick and hop on for a minute and a half and then I’ll fall asleep”. You hope your vibrator has full batteries.

You get a job. You like it; you’re good at it.

He asks you why don’t you quit and find a different job where you could have more hours. He asks you why don’t you temp full-time in a factory like him.

You decide to go back to school. He asks are you sure it’s not a waste of time and wouldn’t you rather just work more.

He says you need to make more money so he can pay his student loans.

You tell your friends some of the asshole things he does but you say “my ex-boyfriend” or “my friend’s roommate” or “this guy I used to date”.

You don’t feel good.

You tell him you think you should go to couple’s counseling and he asks you where the hell you think the money for that is going to come from.

It starts out as I made a promise and I’m gonna keep that promise for as long as I can. It starts out as maybe he will change, maybe he will try.

He eats more than twice as much as you do. He complains about his gut, but more often he complains about how fat you are and tells you you need to eat less and exercise more. He starts complaining about how much and what kind of food you put in the cart at the grocery store. He starts complaining about the grocery budget. You start eating only one or two meals a day because you don’t want to have the fight.

You need new clothes, so you buy some. He asks you why you think you need anything other than jeans and T-shirts and says you can’t afford to care what you look like.

He certainly doesn’t. He has a nasty, scraggly full beard and walks around in old, stained, holey clothes that don’t fit.

You feel like shit.

You stop asking him to change the big things that are problems in your marriage because you know he never will. You stop asking him to go to counseling because you know it’ll never happen.

You tell him about your plan to move to the UK for grad school and ask him isn’t he excited, hasn’t he been wanting to get out of this shit hole of a country, and he says it seems extreme, he doesn’t think he wants to go.

You tell him he doesn’t have to come with you. Suddenly it’s all about how he doesn’t think you can make it happen.

So it turns into, well, I can’t afford to leave. And this is what you tell your friends, and this is what you tell yourself, even though you know people who have left with less money than you have.

Even though in your heart you know what it really is is that he can’t afford for you to go.

Your mother dies.

When you tell him, he says what does that mean, and then he says are we getting any money.

Then he goes around telling his family and friends about it, calling her roadkill, saying he is going to get money from this thing with your mom and he is going to use it to pay off his debts.

When you start to come out of your grief a little, some things are clearer than they were before.

She would never have put up with this from anyone.

You shouldn’t either.

As you wander around the apartment you start to notice certain things.

Like: most of the furniture is yours. Including the bed.

Like: most of the cookware is yours. Including all the dishes.

Like: he put you in charge of the finances and say you were to take the little bit of insurance money you’re getting from the estate and put it in a brand new account with just one name on it, say you did that and you started having your paycheck direct-deposited there, he would never know the difference.

And one day your father calls and you say it out loud.

You say, what if when the money comes I tell him we’re not using it to pay off his student loans because I’m using it to leave him.

You tell your friends when they visit. You tell your sister when she calls.

When you get a dog you put all that paperwork in your name.

You think about leaving him here in this shitty apartment with almost no furniture, leaving him to sleep alone on the floor. You think long and hard about it and you don’t know if it makes you want to cheer or cry.

You think, I made a promise.

You think, he made a promise too. You think, he promised to love me forever and he doesn’t even like me.

You think, I am too young and hot to feel this old and ugly.

You don’t know how you will tell him. You wish it was just a button you could push on a computer: Are you sure you want to end this marriage? Okay

You think what it boils down to is this.

The two of you are crabs in a bucket. You are trying to climb out. He is on the bottom pulling you back in.

You are going to leave him here to wallow since that is so obviously what he wants.

It hurts to think about leaving him down here where he can’t reach the edge by himself. It makes you feel guilty.

But feeling guilty makes you feel angry, too.

You can see sky from here. Over the rim of the bucket, you can see a slice of sky.

You’re not going to let him stop you from climbing.

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Bee Tee Dubs

2011-12-03T08:45:24Z

I did win NaNoWriMo. The story itself is not quite finished. I am beating it into submission.

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NaNo Update

2011-11-25T17:08:35Z

The cushion I built up in Week 2 saw my handily through the Week 3 slump. I am treading water at just about a day ahead of schedule and expect to finish sometime between Sunday and Tuesday.

I am really having a wonderful time writing this totally shameless Mary Sue. Allowing myself to write just for me, with the absolute guarantee that no one else ever has to see it, has been very freeing and a great stress reliever. I think I will do some more of these for some of the other characters I have crushes on over the next few years.

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