eight things, sort of

so many people have tagged me on this that i feel i really ought to do my part and complete the meme. this is long, long, long, and in two parts, because while i haven't yet finished the full eight, i've spent long enough working on the first six that i really ought to just post something already. so here are the first four, though they've turned out to be more 'insight into my neuroses' than anything else. oh well.

The rules are:
-We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
-Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
-People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
-At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
-Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.


1. when i was a little girl, it took me what often felt like hours to fall asleep at night. this is not because i was plagued with worries or anything so adult as that. my mind was concentrated on the adventures of 'shadow jumper.' shadow jumper was part imaginary friend, part imaginary video game, part ongoing super-galactic story of soap operatic proportions. he had a purpose at night: to keep my mind off of the giant mirror with heavy, dark wood trim that hung ominously over my bed. see below for my stance on mirrors. shadow jumper also had a friend. his name was 'line skimmer'. shadow jumper and line skimmer had a dual purpose, you might say. yes, their conversations and struggles to escape the confines of various evil overlords' grasps kept my mind off that horrid mirror. but they also kept me entertained in the car.

cars cast shadows, as do light poles, tall trees, fences and the like. shadow jumper was as fast as he needed to be, but he could not step in shadow. so my eyes twisted themselves into knots tracing a safe path for him as our car sped down the highway. he wove in and out to avoid the shadows mostly, but on occasion, the shadows were too thick, and he simply had to jump over them like a runner over a hurdle. he could only keep himself up in the air for so long, however, and when we were driving so early in the morning that the entire road was shadowed from the hills to one side or the other, or when we went under overpasses, or through tunnels, shadow jumper was in deep, deep trouble, i.e. deep, deep shadow.

line skimmer helped him out. these two could carry each other for long distances if they had to, but it was a mental leap to change the mode of travel mid jump. line skimmer could travel in sunlight or shadow, and no problems there. but he could only travel on the painted street lines. when possible, he'd stay on the solid white or yellow lines to the far side of the road, but sometimes those veered off into new highways or left to join some little side street we weren't driving down. his other favorite was to hop along the dotted lines in the center, taking care, of course, not to get run over.

most fun was when they would both stay in the center, just in front of our car. shadow jumper would weave between the lines, staying on the unpainted area for the fun of it and leaping to avoid any shadows, while his friend would jump over him to land on the dotted lines. sometimes they got run over, and that was sad. when that happened, there was a memorial service, and the dearly departed's mantel was passed to another who then became the new shadow jumper or line skimmer. a succession of sorts, where whatever identity the new person had had was subsumed into the new identity.

keeping track of all this served several functions: it kept me busy when reading too much in the car would make me nauseous; it prevented me from ever memorizing a route since i was far too busy playing than observing street signs and the like; it quickened my visual reactions, though i'm not sure what practical function there is in being able to adjust one's focus so narrowly and swiftly in a car zipping down the highway; it gave me headaches if played with one or the other for too long, so i learned to take turns and shift trains of thought in mid-jump.

since number one started with these two figments of my imagination helping me sleep by distracting me, this next part still belongs in this section, even though i went on a bit of a transportation-y tangent to properly explain my childhood peeps. (in fact, maybe since i'm going so in-depth with this, i've only got to do four?)

i never outgrew this method of falling asleep. yes. that's right. other people can't sleep because they're worried about a promotion at work, whether they locked the garage door, that big project that's coming due in a week, their insane fear of flying (insane in intensity... while i don't fear it, i respect the fears of others in that regard) the night before a flight, their sick child or spouse or friend or relative or pet or boss or etc..... when i can't sleep, it's because there was a raid on the camp and my guy is gravely injured in the skirmish and needs medical attention, but there isn't a medic or cleric or healer around, and he's bleeding out, and it's a sucking lung wound, and how in the world are they going to save him?!? or my characters are sitting atop a cliff observing the rising sun, and in the growing dawn, they converse about the various beginnings of time, and how each soul knows its own beginning, no matter how many times it goes through life, and the stavii guy keeps trying to get this concept across, but the fian guy is just having a real time of it, and can't keep from interrupting to clarify a certain point, and finally i either fall asleep or recognize that the dialogue's too good to be lost, and so i write it down and then keep writing, and look at that, it's already 3 a.m.!

~~~

2. i'm afraid of ants, which isn't exactly an unknown concept for folks who've been around me a while. i'm also afraid of wasps and bees. spiders are cool, snakes are cool. they bite and are poisonous just as much if not more than ants and wasps/bees. yet i will run wildly in circles, get on a bus to a place i wasn't going, and shake (and cry) for several minutes when confronted with a large among of ants or an evil flying menace. once, i called Ems to help me because there were ants from the outside that had been attracted to charlotte's cat food (this was before festus), and they were inside the kitchen in numbers i couldn't handle. i was still crying when she arrived, and only after she had saved my kitchen could i bear to be in that room. i've had fruit flies that hitched a ride in on a box of oranges. i've had roaches. good god, did we ever have roaches in austin. they flew around the bedroom at night and whacked into a person on occasion. neither of those bothered me. (well, it certainly bothered me at night, and the noises those things make are unreal, and the germs, and all that... but did i cry? panic? call someone -anyone- to rescue me? nope. a can of raid by the bed at night that accompanied me around the apt was about it.) but ants? in my area? this is an emergency. an all-out disaster. i can't even get close enough to the problem to use the raid.

these fears of ants and wasps/bees, however, fall under the category of normal. no, it isn't at all normal to hyperventilate and feel seriously faint after stepping too near a pile of ants. (my feet tingle just typing that, and i am now wearing shoes) but these items are normal to fear. insects of all kinds are perfectly normal objects of fear, as are the poisonous reptiles, bats, sharks if you're the beach type, planes, really tall places, etc. there's nothing about these types of fears that will make people stop, blink a few times, maybe tilt their head in disbelief, and finally conclude that you're fucking nuts.

and lest you come to the conclusion that that is an excuse of my anto-waspo-beezophobia, let me continue to say that i certainly have my fair share of the latter sort of fears as well. i know a girl who's terrified of clowns. on the surface, that's this sort of fear where it's so beyond rational thought that it's laughable. but think about it. those painted smiles and goofy antics... probably hide something else. various horror flicks aside, there's something creepy about a person who has painted emotions on his or her face that he or she doesn't necessarily feel. it's a sort of disconnect, where we, the audience, are put in a situation where our perceptions of the other's demeanor, attitude, emotional state, etc. are flawed, untrustable. we humans use facial expressions to communicate, and it is unnerving when people smile crazily not because of the crazy part but because we can't trust our perceptions to guide us anymore. so clowns.... i can buy that fear.

a good example of the 'gee, you're nuts' type of fear: mirrors. oh yes. these things terrify me. and when i try to explain it to people, all i accomplish is that they think i'm even more nuts than before. see, when i was a little girl, there was that mirror that was hanging above my bed. looking back, i really don't know why i didn't ask my parents to move it. that makes no sense to me now, though at the time, the thought just didn't occur to me. but if i had to get up in the middle of the night, i didn't sit up in bed, swing my legs over, stand, and walk to the bathroom, or wherever. no. that placed me in the mirror. i rolled to the ground and crawled or walked hunched over. when i came back in, i looked *only* at the carpet and *never* looked up until i was safely in bed, covers to my neck. i'd look to the left and right to be sure nothing had come out from the mirror, then i'd look straight up the wall at the bottom edge of that mirror. good. nothing ever came out of it, but there was a distinct fear that it might.

no, i was not afraid of 'bloody mary' or whatever is supposed to jump out and kill stupid little children who spin in circles and chant in their darkened bathrooms. those punks deserve whatever comes to them, and since i've never been one of those stupid little children, i knew i was safe from some foreign being in the mirror. what i feared as a little girl was more sinister than some long-dead queen who wanted to kill me. i was afraid of myself. or not-myself. i never had a good way to put it, a nice phrase to use. now, i'd call it my doppelganger, and i'd refer to the mirrorverse. i was afraid that i'd look in the mirror, and the figure i saw would not be me. not really. it would look just like me, but maybe it wouldn't move quite right. maybe it would move when i was still, blink when i didn't blink, raise the wrong arm, or smirk at me. or it would act just like me, but the eyes would be *just* the wrong color, a darker green or blue than mine, or maybe brown. possibly, the skin tone would be a few small shades different, or the nails longer than my own.

the worst fear was that if i looked too long, *all* of this would happen. it would be me, act like me, and then the coloring would shift slightly but significantly. then the mirror-me would smile wickedly at me, and maybe make come-hither motions. or i could be too close, and she would grab me, reaching through the mirror to grasp my arm in her hand. thus the fear that something might reach down out of that mirror and ruffle my hair, or grab a big handful of hair, or smother me, or snap my neck. not the sorts of fears that normal little girls should have, i know. i had an overactive imagination then, and it grew stronger as i grew older.

there was, eventually, a whole world inside the mirror that was exactly like this one, except for those few but significant differences. doors in the mirrorverse would be ajar where they were closed here. or they would creak/slam closed in the mirrorverse while remaining open here. or vice versa and the mirrorverse door would reveal something horrible and monstrous. note that the horrible and monstrous was never some green-skinned alien with a mouth full of fangs or anything bulbous growing out of its head. the horrible and monstrous was much closer to home. it was familiar people with glassy, dead eyes, or who moved wrong like tangled puppets or like there was something wrong with their joints. often, it was that mirror-me. everything was slightly different in the mirrorverse in a wrong way.

and as i continued to grow older, i could have lived with this. it's actually a freaking cool idea to have the mirrorverse and all that. but then when i was in high school, i saw a tv show that added a character to the mirrorverse: the blue lady. it was a show on fox, called 'fact or fiction'. during the hour, the show featured three stories that were utterly supernatural in many ways, and all of them creepy. at the end, the host/narrator would reveal which two stories were fiction, and which creepy story was fact. or maybe it was the other way around, and only one of the creepy stories was fictional. i don't remember. what i do remember was that the first segment was something about a coven of witches doing good in the world. they would seduce young teenagers looking to do all kinds of baby killing, but after the candles and chanting and initiation, it was revealed that, rather than selling their souls to the devil, they'd signed themselves up (in blood, mind) to do charity work or something. kind of stupid, and so i kept watching.

the next segment was the blue lady. they didn't call her that. i don't think they had a name for her. but there was this unsolved murder years and years ago, and this couple moved into the house where it happened. and there was this upstairs portion where the bedrooms were. and a mirror at the end of the hall right after you come up the stairs, so that you have to pass right by this mirror to get into the bedroom. anyway, the wife keeps saying that she sees movement in the mirror when there isn't anything to be reflected, like shimmering or something. so the husband finally shakes his head and they drape a sheet over the mirror so she doesn't have to see it.

the husband goes out of town on a business trip, and the wife is sitting downstairs reading a book. there's a storm, and the typical stormy stuff: tree limbs banging on walls and windows, lightning, thunder, power flickers, etc. the wind gets to the point where it rattles the sliding glass door behind her that leads out onto their patio. they've got a very nice house, actually. well, she gets up to go to bed, because it's late, and the storm is too loud or something. and there's this guy who is busily trying to open the door. she sees him, and runs upstairs, because that's there their phone is. what kind of idiots only have one phone in a two story house, and keep it in their bedroom up the stairs and down a hallway, i don't know. but that's where she runs, because that's where the phone is.

well, she gets up the stairs, but he's broken the glass, and he chases her, and catches her, and they scuffle, at the end of the hallway. he's seriously hurting her, bending her arm back, yanking hair, threatening her, etc. and the sheet falls off the mirror. there's this chick in the glass, she's grey and blue and pallid, and stares like a corpse. in fact, she looks like a corpse, all dirty and matted and just *dead* looking. and the chick in the mirror strangles the intruder's reflection, and the intruder himself lets go of the woman and holds his neck like he's being strangled, and he dies. and the wife stares at the chick in the mirror who vanishes again, and she runs in to call 911. later, it's revealed based on her description of the chick that the intruder had killed the chick in the mirror however many years ago, and she'd been haunting the place since, waiting for him to come back.

well. let's see. my overactive imagination, paired with a fear of the doppelganger in the mirror and having vivid and inescapable fantasies of mirrorverse... i turned off the tv. it didn't matter what the third segment was. the first hadn't mattered either. all that mattered was the possibility that the chick in the mirror, the blue lady, i named her, was real. there was the possibility that that was the segment that was fact, and the other two were fiction. i could not handle it if that were the case, and so i doomed myself into never knowing and always fearing the blue lady.

but it gets better. i took a creative writing class in my undergrad, and wrote about it. a girl writes in this diary of hers all the time, and so the entire story is has these diary entries embedded in it. well, she buys this book, reads it, and decides she's afraid, so she'll sleep with the lights on. (i owned that book at one point, and it freaked me out at every turn... i can't find the title, but it was huge, hard-back, and had a glowing green swirl on top of a black background; it dealt with unsolved supernatural mysteries like the bermuda triangle, mermaids, etc. in fact, i've been searching for it since, and if you can help, leave a comment.) she wakes up at 3:30 am according to her bedside alarm, and has to pee. but there in the bathroom, she looks at the mirror too long, and the blue lady reaches out of the mirror and grabs the girl. they exchange places, and now the doppelganger gets to really live, and the girl is trapped in the mirror and can only write messages in the form of smudges her mother continually cleans but can't fathom where they're coming from. the last diary entry is in a completely different voice, and all kinds of spooky.

and because i wrote it, i am incapable of going to the bathroom, or even of walking in front of a mirror between 3 and 4 in the morning. i can't make myself do it. it doesn't matter how urgent my need, i will wait. up to an hour. because of the blue lady. in fact, when it's dark at any time of the day, i can't walk in front of mirrors. the mirrorverse is closer to the surface in the darkness. my roommates have seen me snake an arm around an open doorway, flip on the light, and then wait several minutes before venturing into the bathroom. the light needs time to do its work, after all. and before strong young men in white coats knock on my door to take me to the padded and mirror-less cell, i'll move on to number 3.

~~~

3. i am continually amazed and overawed by the fact that living, breathing, creatures live with me. i catch myself watching my charlotte, admiring her grace and beauty, the rippling of fur and muscle. the thought occurs to me out of the blue: this is a living being. this creature is three square meals away from a feral feline. there's a near-wild animal stalking not three feet away from me, and i have no real control in the situation. she'll do what she wants to do. what comes instinctually to her. look at those paws. they're so delicate and when she spreads them to bat at something, they are so big. so lethal. those claws are lovely and sharp, and their curve is so natural. nothing i do is as natural as she is.

i don't see festus the same way. he's a tiny ewok. he makes the same gurgling chirpy noises, he's fuzzy, he's borderline stupid. i love him to death, but he's not a sleek killing machine barely harnessed by the power of free-flowing food and love. he's a little kid, a furry baby incapable of making it on his own. he's a living, breathing, warm lump. and he's every bit as amazing to me as charlotte, just in a different way. he has separation issues. he needs to sleep on a person, or right up against a person. he will follow me from room to room to be sure i'm always in sight. strangers are scary, but often, it's worse to be alone than it is to be around a stranger.

~~~

4. i see shapes. everywhere. this ties back to that overactive imagination, really, but it is often a thing of fun instead of fear. growing up, i traced shapes i saw in the spackled wall, where patterns of raised and depressed paint became dancing ladies, elvish faces, wings, clawed hands, a variety of dinosaurs, etc. always traced in pencil, but i'm not sure we got it all erased when we moved. in the old apt here in dirt town, the area of wall in my bathroom right under the towels and smack dab in eyesight from the toilet were a slug, a mermaid, an ogre eating ice cream, and a poor, poor human figure in an unfortunate and probably painful position. i called that last one a ballerina to put a positive spin on it. once a shape is seen, it cannot be unseen. even if it isn't traced, it will be there waiting for me when i barely glance at that area of wall. there's a princess in a ballroom gown or an figure skater (depends on how you look) just to the left of my desk in the new apt. i haven't decided yet whether the thing below her looks more like a broomstick or a belly dancer. you can imagine that plopping my ass down in a corner didn't do much to me as a kid. the corner was alive with new shapes to be found and old shapes to be reacquainted with. those hours i stared blankly at walls? i was hunting shapes. or the shapes were talking to each other and i was supplying their conversation and motives.

my family has this painting that i both love and loathe. it's probably got a title and an artist. but i call it the ship painting. when i was growing up, it was at the very end of the hall, facing from a great distance the fiery eye of the pot-bellied wood stove at the other end of the house. the painting was huge, with the same sort of heavy dark frame the mirror above me bed had. it was in tones of green and brown, and featured an old-style ship, sails billowing, tilted dangerously on an exquisite swell of waves and blown by the thick bank of windy clouds. if you look into the waves too long, you can see things in them like you were actually looking into real water. sometimes, the glimmers of highlighted paint would be fish, and sometimes hints of previous ships that didn't make it through the storm. you could get the same thing if you looked in the clouds, or in the rain that slanted down.

when we moved to the texas area, i asked that the ship painting be put in my room, and it was hung above my bed. i really should have known better, but there it is. i don't learn from some things. one night, at around midnight, i was reading ... one of the old testament prophets, i can't recall which. he had lovely poetry, so it might be jeremiah or isaiah. i like those two especially. but i saw the devil in the ship painting. there was a definite eye in that windy swirl, and the rain formed a kind of a nose, and in such a position that the entire point of the painting was no longer a ship struggling to perservere, but instead, a ship beset by satan himself, chasing the sailors and peering out of the canvass and into my room. just above my bed.

but there was nothing i could make myself do to remove the painting. it's one thing to deal with something like a mirror that you're afraid you might come out of. it's entirely different when satan himself has a good view over your sleeping body. the painting had to go. that night. and i couldn't do it. so i woke my mother up, explained it to her, got the expression that says clearly that there's something wrong with your brain chemistry, but it's late and you're clearly terrified, so i'll humor you with this face in the painting thing. it might help clarify things to know that i was a high school senior at this point. we got the painting off the wall and put it in the living room for the night. since then, it's been in my brother's room, and i've never mentioned the face to him, because i know logically that it isn't there, and that if i show him, he'll never be able to not see it again. the shapes don't ever go away. they're permanent, and so you've got to be careful when finding them, because there are shapes you don't want to find.

and it's true what i said before about my abysmal learning curve in these areas. i have a poster of the drowned ophelia that i love. it hung on the wall above my bed in the old apt, and i loved to look into the water and see the shapes. until it occurred to me that her eyes, closed, might also be open and staring blankly, the irises and pupils a milky, watery white from death. every time i looked at the poster, i saw her looking back. it terrified me to the extent that i couldn't take it down until i moved out of the apt. i just lived with it every night and morning for a little over a year, because i couldn't get close enough to remove it. i still have the poster. i really like it. but i can't hang it anywhere because there's a dead woman looking at me through the paper. sometimes, i think my imagination needs a shut off switch.

~~~

yeah, so that's the first four. no telling when the next four come out, though i've got two of them already written up. they'll probably be as long and rambly as these, and to be honest, they'll probably showcase the overactive imagination and all the problems it sometimes entails. ah well. as for tagging, i've only got to tag four people this time, since i've only written four of my random things. so, because it seems as though everyone has already done this, i'm tagging eeny, meeny, miny, and moe. just know that you can safely put my name in the slot for 'person who is least likely to respond to this' when you get that type of email.

love and peace