maybe goodbye

I've moved here.

And since I now have a real name

and smaller more busy font

and a slightly more adult-looking theme

I have all I need to shame

me into trying to be a little less absent.

Not that it's enough shame to stop me from drawing the weird paintbrush animals and making you all look at them or anything.

gritty

So I've been reading George R R Martin's series (its called A Song of Ice and Fire, if you're feeling masochistic) and the rant demon has possessed me. Since my rage is of an orderly compulsive sort,  I have decided to vent in numbered points.

I should add here, that for all its faults, the actual plot of the series is quite excellent. I know I will keep reading it obsessively just to know what happens next. And when Martin forgets to make people thoroughly miserable, all kinds of exciting things happen, mainly involving Daenerys and her dragons, and Jon Snow and his awesome friends. Which makes the rant slightly redundant, but who cares.

1. I don't mind grittiness, in a general way, when it consists of a lot of non-bathing and death, but when it starts rolling around in the mud with torture and ruthlessness, and the writer in question starts making a game out of how much he can torture a character before they disintegrate, and then goes on to torture disintegrated people, it makes my head hurt. 

Murders are fine. I just tend to like my deaths clean. And quick. All this four-book long, excruciatingly drawn-out torment really gets to me after a while, and I start thinking wistfully of my thesis. For future reference, GRRM, when all your main characters are hardened murderers and your readers just feel relief with every new death, soon enough no one's going to care enough to read further. Also you might run out of characters and that would be unfortunate.

2. Note to Sansa Stark, aged maybe twelveish, if that: Your life sucks. I've watched you get sold off to a louse by your oh-so-honourable father, I watched you sell out said father, I skipped horrifiedly through your endless list of beatings and strippings, I read on through your family dying/allegedly dying in awful ways, I even kept going when you were married off, and then kidnapped and then attacked by your mother's creepy sister and her obsessive and dreadful husband. And I've had to leave out a lot of the comparatively minor stuff, for brevity's sake. Stop being polite. It's driving me insane. Yell. Get up and leave. Set things on fire. Kill someone. Just do something about it. Please.

Perhaps you could consider moving to a Georgette Heyer novel? I can promise you no one will try and marry you for another 2 years, at least, and what with your good breeding and wonderful politeness you will probably get a Happy Ending, and I can stop cringing when I see you in a chapter. 

3. And while I'm giving advice to fictional people:

Dear Brienne,

You are a girl. You're also large. However, since you are also terribly capable of killing anyone you happen to dislike, please deal with facts a and b; the rest of us are managing quite well. Stop making me have to blush for your issues. Also, keep away from Jaime Lannister, who is a sister-doing, child-killing, lying, all-round louse. Now go kill some more people.

4. Resurrections. I just don't like them. And resurrecting Catelyn Stark, was just low-down and stupid. She was pretty much played out, and honestly? I was relieved when she and Robb just died so I wouldn't have to watch her agonise over Dead Ned anymore. Beric being brought back to life was, since it was a novelty then, cool. Bringing Catelyn back to life just trivialises a) her b) Beric and c) all the other people dying in the series (which is a LOT. See point 1 on grittiness).

5. GRRM: Child marriage is just plain creepy. Please stop it. You world is harsh and cruel, we GET it. Now stop with the paedophilia.

6. And Eddard Stark? Is not the paragon you seem to expect me to think he is. He was stupid. He knew almost everything we knew in Book One, and watching him passive-aggressively ruining the lives of a) his wife b) his children c) his stupid dukedom d) poor moronic Robert and e) the whole goddamn kingdom only served to convince me of this. An actual genuine good person, even if he had a death wish for himself, would've at least sent his daughters home and away from all the machinations in court, before he begged the evil people to destroy him.

If you look carefully, you might notice that almost everything horrible that happened in book two (and even some of book three) happened because Ned Stark spent book one busily navel-gazing, and whining about his honour, and refusing to actually do anything. Except scattering his family around the map in convenient bite-sized bits for anyone at all to attack.

Having relieved myself of all the rage, I feel obliged to say, again, that for all its many faults the series is thoroughly exciting. A lot of the characters is actual real fun people, some are dire wolves (wolfs? Probably not) and I live in hope of meeting an aurochs. 

More extinct animals and less torturing of sad people, I always say.

(Irrelevantly: it is very sad that the blogger spell-check cannot spell aurochs)

whinging

Notice how there would be no whinging without hinging? I have a gross new shit-coloured door. It clashes with every single thing in my room, in addition to everything outside it. Clashing, thereby, with a universal set. My door is clashing with my universe. Clashing, smashing, clanging, hanging. 

And it has allies. 

Accompanying the door are the huge pits that are the remains of some nice shady trees (and the foundation to some new hell), and a tooth-gnashingly loud drill that smashes my brains to smithereens every time I dare have a thought. 

I also have shiny white floor tiles that my hostel seems to have stolen from either a) a hospital or b) a bathroom. Either way its moderately reprehensible of them. 

Ugh.

I tried to lighten things up a bit:

But you can tell it's intimidated by the door. Piteous. Piping. Pipsqueak. Pathetic. Piqued. Pachyderm.

I hope the drill and the door die a thousand gruesome deaths, but mainly I wish they'd just go away. Especially the drill. 

tagged by benny

Ok. So some of this will be in pictures, partly because thousand words blah blah blah, but mainly because its more entertaining for me this way.

1. If your lover betrayed you, what would your reaction be?
Complete erasure. Or so I like to think.

2. If you can have a dream come true, what would it be?
Being able to fly. I tend to have a lot of falling down dreams. They would be improved if my dream self knew it could save itself without waking me up.

3. Whose butt would you like to kick?
If I'm only allowed one I need some time to decide.

4. What would you do with a billion dollars?
Be indecisive. As with the one butt. Act furtive. Make a big shiny pile and hoard it.

5. Will you fall in love with your best friend?
No idea.

6. Which is more blessed: loving someone or being loved by someone?
Loving someone, probably, but it might depend on who's doing the blessing.

7. How long would you wait for someone you loved?
I might wait a fair amount of time if I had other things to do. Lots of exciting other things to do.

8. If the person you secretly like is attached, what will you do?
Go far away and then sulk and wish I were less wimpy.


9. If you could root for one social cause, what would it be?
Environmentalism.

10. What takes you down the fastest?
Headaches.

11. Where do you see yourself in 10 years time?
BLINDgeranium. Some things, I really don't want to see.

12. What’s your fear?
Lots. Illnesses, being run-over, cockroaches, big fires, some heights, large amounts of people, big red chillies, giant Sringeri fish, and many other things. If I were not an atheist, I would be a very god-fearing person.

13. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?
She's a mushroom! (This is for tagging weird fruit and calling them me :P)

14. Would you rather be single and rich or married and poor?
Single and rich. Easy peasy.

15. What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?
Wonder if I can go back to sleep.

16. If you fall in love with two people simultaneously who will you pick?
Will they also love me? If yes, then I shall taunt them with impossible tasks involving dragons, sorcery, deep chasms and other dangers too terrible to mention here. Then my hoarded gold and I shall live happily ever after.

17. Would you give all in a relationship?
Who knows?

18. Would you forgive and forget someone no matter how horrible a thing he has done?
Depends on what they did. Probably not if it involved mass murder.

19. Do you prefer being single or in a relationship?
Dunno.

20. List of people to tag:
sancho-panza, ., d, roh, A.

one of my turns

Or not.

Some days, moving looks too hard to try.
And thinking gives you a headache.
All the last straws weigh you down.
Like the chicken whose nose
Has been shoved into the ground
Whose beak has been rubbed in the mud
Til it thinks that the mud is the sole,
The only world it has.

Some days I'm a chicken.


But warm-blooded.
A donkey. Or a mule.
A beast of self-imposed burdens.
Some of which are purely imaginary.

And sometimes by lunch-time -
When the mud begins to get to me,
Making me sneeze ands sneeze and sneeze -
I may even look at the sky.

Tirra lirra by the river sang sir lancelot

She's go-ing home bye, byeee

Sung to the tune of The Beatles' She's Leaving Home.

Notice how my feet are six inches off the ground, like Yudhistra's on an honesty spree. Since the last time I was here I have burnt bridges and boats and written almost 15,000 words of fiction, only a record-breaking 50% of which has since been deleted. My non-fiction score is a happiness-inducing 300 words.

All is well in my patch of mud.

beheadings

I have had a recurring headache for three days now.
It makes life very unpleasant.
Saridon provides a spurious and fake relief that lasts a couple of hours and is then replaced by the usual pounding when I have finally managed to drag myself to dissertation-land.

A few more days of this nonsense and beheading will begin to seem like sweet sweet release.

Of course, when I do go on my rare and brief visits to dissertation-land I am quite sure I can hear the Red Queen yelling "Off with her head," in the background. So it should come as no surprise to the universe if I am found headless.

I can only hope my afterlife holds a horse.
The Headless Geranium Horseperson, striking terror into the hearts of the innocent, the Headless Horsanium Scourge of the Land.

I can't wait.