Punishing.
There's really no other way of putting it. It is a persistent itch at the back of your throat,
and eyes,
and mind. It is there and it gets in and it swells when you do anything.

So naturally it is quite impossible for me to not be grumpy about it
when anything happens.
Walking, fr'instance, or the young man at Pla-za not knowing what the hell museumboard is. I should have asked him for masonite and then gone to Home Depot and actually gotten some masonite and come back to Pla-za and given them all a lesson in making chalkboards. Put that shit down and listen to me, dammit! Don't you take any pride in your shitty job?
Nothing better to take pride in, really.
He didn't feel very good about seeing me, you understand. When he said "can I help you find anything," he didn't want a braindump from me from wikipedia from God-knows-who, and he didn't want a holier-than-thou attitude from me. In fact he didn't really want to sell me anything. What he wanted was to be left alone, and to be able to say to his boss that he's super-helpful for everyone.

And I'll be damned if I stop typing until my fingers warm up enough to stop shaking. Hot air is supposed to rise, dammit. The top floor is always freezing, especially when I'm taking a hot shower. Not before or after, during. Now I ask you.

I really didn't need museumboard and I didn't need that one last person, friend or stranger, telling me with his living spirit that he wanted to be left alone. I got plenty and powerful enough of that last night while I was on the metro.
This deserves coherence, so be glad because the next paragraph is the only thing of this that will make much sense at all when you read it without the decoder ring.

I decided I wanted to play in this thing I had heard of called "Friday Night Magic." Perhaps you have heard of this. Sanctioned stores around the country hold standard legality tournaments every Friday night. There's an entry fee, prizes, and they keep track of your rating. The closest store that I've found that does this is called Dreamwizards, and is in White Flint, Maryland. Its right by the metro stop (ha ha!), and so I planned a route and took a deck with me that I had wanted to see in action and pilot myself. I left work at 4:30, as always, and took the reston limousine service to the Vienna station. I renewed a ticket and ferried myself by orange line to red line to White Flint. It was rush hour, so only half of the trains went past the stop just before White Flint, and I had to get off and wait for the next one. Hrm. I arrived at the station about ten minutes before the tournament was to start, and decided to pick the less busy of the two logical directions in which to walk, although I didn't recognize the road names at all. I called several people who usually have the internet in front of them. All in transit to more exciting places. I called Bonnie and she had the internet and told me what the google map of my six looked like. I had taken an unorthodox path, but a good one. I found the right street (a busier one) and had to cross some construction work across a bridge in order to get to the plaza that had the store. I was just in time to start the first round.
I ended the night 2-1 out of three rounds (I know, I know, small tourney big success) and won two packs for the effort. My last round opponent, a girl by the name of Ana asked how I planned to get home, knowing that I lived near GMU. I told her I took the metro in and would take it out, and she asked if I would like a ride to the station and I thought why not? Fabian was driving (I had met Fabian once before at a Regionals tournament), and their friend Will would be along in the front seat. The group was all charming, intelligent, liberal, and worldly. Will was British, from around Liverpool I would guess by his voice. Fabian was from the Ukraine. Ana was American but had traveled. I think what had finally made her decide to trust me was the fact that I had withdrawn an italian euro from my bag as a randomization device. Having such friends and seeing me with that made me somehow part of an esoteric order within the already esoteric fraternity that is Magic the Gathering players. We all chatted as Fabian drove us to a metro station on the red line (I forget what it is called at the moment and don't feel like looking it up, grump). Will and I got off, got on, and as it turns out, got along.
 

I took the metro from there to Franconia/Springfield, where I had planned to walk the thirty or so minutes it would take me to get from there to home at last, and arrive, from work, at just past 1 AM.
I thought better of that plan and recalled that Dan loves to rescue people from self-imposed nonlocality if he can drive ten minutes to do it. I called on my way in and he said that he wasn't raiding and that he would come pick me up, having done similar things for John and Lee perhaps fifty-thousand or more times in his life. He told me later that he would have dropped a raid if he had been in one, but what he didn't know is that I wouldn't have let him.
I know how inconsequential I am. I know that WoW should and will come first, which is why before telling him anything I asked if he was raiding. If he had said so, I would have waved it away and bid him good evening and hoofed it.

Sure enough, in getting home I found more than enough evidence, as ever, of how inconsequential I am. I had been home this week to cook and eat not at all. Each night I had found somewhere else to be, and something else to eat, so when I discovered this particular pile of dishes in the sink, larger than ever before, I knew I could eliminate myself as the dish-sullier. So who had it been? Josh was out of town all week adding weight to the chains that the Apple company has on his ass and pocketbook. Darryl had fled the country as he always does on weekends, to the point of passive-aggressively telling me to find something else to do about a ride home or evening activity on Friday night so he can cut out of work early (by a legit method) and jump traffic and even sometimes head directly to whatever coven he always goes to on weekends. So he wasn't out of it. It left him and Dan, and they likely were both responsible, but I knew who was going to be the one to clean them.

The next day, as I was cleaning the dishes, arranging my room, folding my clothes and vacuuming, I decided to try and figure out what had been eaten, and who had used these dishes to do it. Since it was perfectly pointless to try and figure it out, I did. About the time I got to the dishes that I had sullied myself that morning (a wrought-iron pan, spatula, and plate), I gave up figuring out who had dirtied what except for two items:
One, that obnoxious and impossible to clean chopper device that only Darryl uses, and
Two, the red tupperware case full of soup old enough to have a mold colony growing there large enough to cause me to cough when I opened it so I could rinse. Darryl owned both of these in mess and in fact.
And let me tell you why I hate the chopper thingy:
It replaces the knife in utility, or tries to. It does nothing that a knife plus some minor skill with said knife cannot do. It makes an unsatisfying plastic clunking noise when in use. It needs the choppee to be somehow pre-sliced or prepared by an actual knife before you can even use it. It has several moving parts, making complete cleanup impossible. The blade is honed but flimsy, and has too many angles to ever be sharpenable, so tough shit if it breaks. In addition to the moving parts, it has several modular-like attachments to make it safe for storage, including a faux-rubber topper that you put on the bottom that for some reason absorbs filth and won't let it go. It claims to be dishwasher safe and isn't. In my attempts to secure the device so that no one gets cut, the topper invariably slips off and the jagged-ass blade plunges into me as though it longed for my embrace (and for the record, please decide beforehand if what you want to do is hug me or cut me as it will save me some time if you do).
I want this device to burn in a fire. I want to destroy the blade and make a birdhouse or book binding out of it. I want people to use knives to do things that knives do. It is the one dish I refuse to clean, and so I have to stare at it on the counter all weekend, or maybe even after.
It is torturous to do so.
And I did all those other dishes because I understand that as the only person in the house who ever gets bothered by the presence of a mess, physical or otherwise, I have to find a solution. So I go for my old standby solution when I find anything in life wrong, amiss, or problematic. I fix it myself.
I realize the paradox in being an empath and not trusting people to do things for me, or for themselves. I realize I'm a hypocrite while I clean someone else's mess, physical or otherwise. I know that I make myself less happy and more right when doing so.
But at this point its all I can do.
Because beyond being bothered by a mess, and being the only one, I'm also the only one in the house who is lonely.
Because no matter how good I ever get at fixing problems by myself, that is the one problem that, by definition, I'll never be able to.
Darryl skates off with Olga every weekend, and in effect, every night of the week as well.
Dan, during the few waking hours that we share (and how the hell he does that, I'll never know) is doting on Alix, virtually or otherwise.
Josh is dating the Apple company, prove me wrong.
And I have succeeded in my systematic dismissal of everyone from my life who may have risked treating me like a human being. Now I am either a worker, or a board to bounce ideas off of, a cleaning drone, a hopeless reclusive craftsman, or an annoyance. I know you feel that way because your feeling so makes me feel that way, and because at this point it has begun to blurry my judgement.

Just this week Lady Miranda suggested that we watch a movie she had found about a family who adopts a zombie. She had been thinking of me, and for two days in a row was pleased to see me and unloaded on me about the pressure of being treated like the only attractive girl at a table full of young nerdy guys, which she is, despite Carolyn also being around. Sorry but I know better. She thought Friday would be a good night to do it, and by gum, the only reason I had come around in the first place was to trade magic cards so I could have the ones I needed for this coming Friday when I was going to run off into another state and practice being estranged from human existence. Put that way I hope she's not upset at my choice. Put another way, I only have myself to blame for this gigantic hole I'm in (its a pigeonhole, by the by, but if you've been reading you knew that). I gave her a rain check. I should call her tomorrow to see if the pressure of being attractive and the pressure of being a student hasn't diamondized her by now.
And I keep collecting little things I'm going to give people I'm never going to see again. Weird, right? A book. A note. Reams of paper. Icosahedral dice. I can still smell the breadedness.

And you'll piss it all away, and it will be glorious. I don't like where I am and want to change it and I can't on my own. Its terrible and I'm bored and lonely and cold all the time. I can't stop feeling everyone else's pains no matter how far away I am and can't ever decide how much of it is really mine. How much I own. I want to own the pain, and so it all becomes mine anyway because I take it on myself. I can't help it, so I'd really like to know where the fuck this is all coming from while the mission reports from all my ensigns keep coming back "clear skies" and all the monotonous, uninteresting nonevents that have been the past month of human life. You're not happy and I know it and I can't stop knowing it because every time I make myself forget (an excellent skill to have, by the by) it comes back almost immediately. So let me tell you a little story.

I am thankful for every minute of this. This life of mine, and all those lives of yours that you're leading out there are all glorious and radiant and brilliant and bold and beautiful. Between each beating of your hearts are the common threads that tie humanity to greatness. There is no such thing as making the most of your life because you will have done so no matter what you ever do. No matter what you do, you lived. Nothing I type or say will ever adequately describe how wonderful it is that I am right now alive, and that you are all also alive. Your music together, your compilation works and solo beats. Nights alive with passion and days of standing tall. All creation is your playground and every human your ally. Until the day you die you will revel in the victory of Grace that is your birthright, and then, perhaps,
even after. Just laughing.
I remember his horrible and wonderful laughter. I knew then what a frightening thing awe can be, and why fear is the reason to not be afraid at all. That laughing. It is, in a sense, the last thing that I remember.

I suppose I should forget all this and spend some more quality time with my pokemon. They'll always love me. Then again, perhaps my spending time with them reinforces negative images of relationships, them being my unquestioning slaves and all. Meh.
My pokemon will always love me.

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