A Candle for Mr. Rogers

Mr. Rogers has passed away at the age of 74.

His show wasn't my favourite as a child, but somehow I always thought he'd go on forever, being a friendly and gentle neighbour.

I watched his show so that I could see what happened in the Land of Make–Believe.



Heaven has gained a kind, peaceful soul today. I just hope that, wherever he is, Mr. Rogers will continue feeding his fish until the end of time.

Past noodling

Kay's latest post reminded me of something I wrote last year, before I even had a LiveJournal. Specifically, it remined me of the 9th paragraph, but I've decided to reproduce the whole Angst-ridden piece here. It's the kind of stuff that I swore to myself as a teenager that I would never, ever write, but here it is nonetheless.

I am a fragment. Never whole, but belonging to a greater whole; something larger than myself, it swallows me, and my utterances disappear into the white noise of the world.

I do not have a voice. I am an echo, unconsciously parroting the words of those who came before me. My voice, my words will never be mine, have never been mine. I am an amalgamation of fragments, but they do not merge or come together. I can feel myself floating in the interstices of all that I have learned, touching but not understanding, aware but not comprehending.

Who are you?

I look in the mirror and a stranger gazes out at me. I have become "Other," unknown and unknowable to myself. Self–awareness only shows my a void I seek alternately to fill or to escape.

Cut too deep and you will find there is nothing underneath. I am nothing but a bleeding shell.

I don't want to be alone with my thoughts. The very idea terrifies me. My thoughts are not my own, but those of someone else: the person I should be, the person I should have been, the person I should become. They taunt me, laugh at me while I drown... My conscience persecutes me, reproaches me for everything I haven't accomplished, for everything I've done wrong.

Who are you?

The question itself is a reproach, the cliché a reminder of my deficiencies.

I have never been myself. I am a series of personas, different for each person I encounter. It's easier to be someone else, or rather, variations of myself. Everyone sees a small portion of the truth, and yet if everyone I know put their portions of me together, they would not come up with the real me.

Fragments.

I am nothing. Emptiness, defined by the things that surround me. Take them away, and there is nothing left to see. A void, complete in its emptiness, as though the mind's eye had gone blind.

I am a shadow, visible but ignored, translucent and opaque, intangible but present. I can only be perceived out of the corner of your eye. I make no sound, I move within infinite possibilities but cannot exist without light, without someone to pull my strings, without a beholder. I am alone in the midst of multitudes, and vanish if the light shines directly upon me or too brightly. I grow in corners and flourish with little care, but wither and die if completely neglectd.

Put out your hands and I may vanish...

I still have too many days like that. I had hoped that that part of my life was over, but maybe it never will be.

Is it too much to ask?

( Unimportant whinge behind curtain number 3 )

I think that about sums it up

I am having a Bad Day.

Nothing bad has happened, mind you. In fact, I awoke around 10:30 and fed the cats and had a bowl of cereal and took my pills and have been puttering around on the computer ever since.

I just feel depressed.

How much does that suck?

Mostly I'm just kicking myself for having two days off and not having done a lick of housework. As David Burns would say, I'm musturbating: telling myself I must do this and should do that and ought to be doing that other thing. Bleh.

The more I tell myself these things, the less I want to actually get up off my duff and do them, and the more guilty and lazy and pathetic and useless I feel. Stupid spiralling vicious circle.

I think I'll go do the dishes right now so I don't have to beat myself up mentally every five minutes. I can at least say: "Oh yeah? I did the dishes, didn't I?"

In other news, I wiped my entire computer clean of all the old ICQ stuff I had on it and then downloaded it again, and it's now working! Whoo! So now I have ICQ, AIM and Yahoo!Messenger. Now all I need is MSN and I'll officially need a geek badge. See, the thing I don't like about AIM is that there's no "invisible" feature, so you can't hide from people. I get overwhelmed when I have more than three chat windows going at once, and so I only let certain people know at certain times when I'm online. It keeps me sane. It's not that I don't love you all, it's that I'm not usually able to multitask very well. ;)

Fairies needed, applications accepted at all Bookworm, Inc. outlets

Happy Industrious Fairies needed for light housekeeping duties. Work involves keeping apartment at reasonable level of tidiness, preventing me from going insane, and possibly subbing for me at work on a semi–regular basis.

Please send C.V.s and cover letters to mousme@livejournal.com


In other news, I did the dishes and put in a load of laundry. I'm going to wash my hair tomorrow morning, unless my father calls up and asks me to go there for dinner. Otherwise, no dice. I will stay at home with unwashed hair. All the more reason, as after the dishes and the laundry all my hot water will be gone. I have an extremely parsimonious hot water tank.

I will in a few short minutes' time e hanging up the fresh load of laundry in all available spaces, and then tonight I might even iron it. Go me!

I also washed the stovetop, which was in dire need of it as it had KD stains on it. Yuck.

George has twice in as many days fubarred my computer. For those of you who are new to my LJ, George is my younger, unneutered black male cat. Yesterday he somehow changed the settings on my keyboard to some weird European setting, and it took me twenty minutes to get it back to normal so I could type.

Today he actually pulled keys off the keyboard, and while I have put them all back, the "b" still sticks and makes a God-awful clicking sound whenever I use it.

There is a reason I call my cats the Feline Forces of Entropy. I kid you not. Someone posted a very amusing list of Cat's New Year's Resolutions which I will attempt to find later and post here. It's for all cat–owned people: you'll recognise your cat immediately.

If I still feel all hyper and productive later I might even try my hand at *gasp* organising my bookshelves! I've been meaning to do that since I moved in here last May. :P Wish me luck!

I'm never entirely sure how my apartment gets to be such a mess. It's clean for the longest time, and then one day I turn around and it looks like the Tartar hordes came by for tea. Yet I don't actually make a huge mess in one day, so it must accumulate slowly without my noticing. It's a rum one, I tell ya.

Spam and a few resolutions for myself

Yes, I'm spamming LiveJournal today, much as I did yesterday. I will shortly be buggering off into the kitchen to make dinner (Hah! You thought I'd be going further away and not posting, didn't you? Well, more fool you! ^_-), but for now I'm going to post.


I have decided that I no longer want to be a financial mess. This comes from not managing my money properly, obviously, as I earn more than enough to get me by. I'm doing something wrong, or many things wrong, and thus I'm going to start managing my money more actively.

Actually, I think my main problem is impulse spending, the way it is for most people. I don't spend money on what most people spend it on: clothes, shoes, jewelry, what have you. No, my spending is more insidious, as it goes in small amounts here and there, on books, stationary, pens, etc. Twenty dollars here, ten dollars there, another five dollars into the mix, and suddenly Phnee is broke.

Well, I'm putting a stop to that this week. Tomorrow I get my Christmas bonus (yay!), and I'm going to use it all to put a big dent in my credit card debt. I'm also going to clear up the mix-up that's taken place on my credit card, in which all the charges went through twice *beats head against wall*.

I'm not counting on it, but I might also be getting a raise soon at work. Probably not much, but it's still a raise, and it still adds up.

I'm also going to switch the two automatic debits from my credit card onto my bank account. It's better that way as I won't have to worry about *regular* charges to my credit card and can use it for "emergencies" only.

Somewhere along the way I began living beyond my means, and I'm not sure where that happened. I think it might be partially the car's fault, and yet the car has simplified my life in so many other ways. *sigh*

Off to make dinner. At least I have clean dishes to eat from now.

I knew it!

Heh heh heh...

Okay, so I cheated a bit to get the "not girlfriend material" result, but I was so appalled by this quiz that I had to do it.

Besides, since when does being a lesbian mean you're not girlfriend material? Of all the questions in that quiz, most of them seemed to me to apply very well to lesbians, too. *scratches head* Obviously this person is privvy to some kind of secret knowledge about lesbians that I'm not.


-Not- You're...not girlfriend material. Not because
you'd be a bad girlfriend, but because you're
not in the mindset to be one. You're childish
and silly. Also, you might not necessarily be
attracted to guys. ~shrugs~ whatever.


What Kind of Girlfriend Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

That cat list I was telling you about earlier

( A Cat's New Year Resolutions )

Living is easy with eyes closed...

... Misunderstanding what you see
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out
It doesn't matter much to me.

The Beatles really seem to have a song for every single conceivable mood.

I made myself a small bowl of noodles for dinner, and upon discovering that I'm still extremely hungry I am making myself some tea with Social Tea biscuits. I don't know how widely available these are, but they're certainly an aquired taste, much like those rice cakes everyone insists are tasteless.

I like them, in any case. They're not too sweet, and they become all nice and soggy when you dip them into your tea. Not something you can do in polite society, of course, but I don't care when I'm all at home in my apartment, and my cats don't give a rat's ass either. They put all sorts of things into their drinking water.

If I feel especially spam-y later I might do that 15 memories meme. I don't know if I'll have the wind to do it though. I've been spamming this LJ and other communities like mad all day.