Cauldron burn and cauldron bubble

I'm so depressed. And dehydrated. I'm feeling oddly resistant to drinking even though my throat is closing up because it's so parched. Being a housewife-in-training doesn't suit me. I hate being stuck at home with a trip to the dry cleaners being the highlight of my day.

I love cooking but the joy's going out of it; I feel as though everything I make is a test. There's talk of me needing to learn how to cook this and cook that and I just want to scream, "Leave it the hell alone! I don't want the one thing that makes me feel competent, confident and relaxed corrupted. I mean, yes, I'm a competitive cook. If we're having a dinner party I will spend days deciding what to make for dessert, but that's MY business. If I want to turn cooking into a bloodsport that's because of my own damned competitiveness so let it be. Don't turn this into yet another arena where I feel pressured to make you proud and justify my apparently worthless existence. Don't belittle me, don't criticize the lack of salt in food you KNOW was made while fasting, don't pat me on the head like dog when you approve of the results. In short, leave it alone. It's mine. I let you eat the results, be content with that."

So yes, I have issues with food and food preparation.

Pyromaniacal

It's autumn. Green burns to red fades to brown. A thoroughly depressing time of year, (even if it can be bracing and beautiful), because it's the precursor to winter. Con Hall looks wonderful all lit up by those old-fashioned lights if you walk past after dark, crinkling through the dry leaves.

I'm a summer child; from the desert to the tropics, bone-dry or humid, I love it. I still haven't got the hang of winter though. I was half-heartedly cleaning my room today, sorting through the piles of paper and folders most of which will just get moved to another location in my room and I found scribblings on my dislike of the next season. Like a lot of my scribblings, it's on the back of someone else's poetry. For some reason inspiration seems to hit me in the middle of my English classes, maybe that's why I haven't written anything decent since the end of the last course I took. I fully expect to lose this scrap, or at least lose track of it for a few years as I did with my desert poem so I I'm going to include it in this entry, slightly edited:

In the winter all I can think of is the cold that envelops me and the warmth I'm missing. Just think, right now, at this very moment, while flurries mist the night, elsewhere there are sandstorms and a scorching sun. I wilt here in dragging February days; painful leap year.

I miss the old greenhouses by Queen's Park, the slick humidity inside that presses like an embrace as I peer at the labels; Latin names on pots and stakes. Summer used to rustle there, the city sliding away as I'd close my eyes and taste the earth on my tongue through the air I breathed in.

When I sleep, I dream of heat.

To Northern Manitoba

I want to write something light but the creative juices aren't flowing. I looked at my writing portfolio from last year and I was surprised by some of the pieces, they were quite decent. I can't seem to be able to write anything these days, everything seems empty and cliche. There was a time when I wanted to be a writer but that was a long time ago. I just don't have the drive to do something like that; I think you've either got to have a great passion for it or a great ability. Unfortunately all the passion seems to have burned out of me a while back and I mean passion for anything. I feel broken inside and I don't know what happened to the person I was and if I can become that person again. I know everybody changes but I don't feel like I've changed so much as lost entire pieces of myself. I don't even try to fill the gaps anymore but sometimes, when I'm with certain people, I feel as though I'm the person I want to be again, just by talking to them or being held. Unfortunately that doesn't happen at home. Home is where I feel more broken than anywhere else, more of a failure and a disappointment, more alone, lost and hopeless. I need to find the strength in myself to be happy and self-sufficient, to make my choices and live with them instead of worrying about what my parents will think of them. I don't need to defy them, just to not be so horribly destroyed when they put down my ideas or aspirations. I need to be my own person but I don't think I can. At least not here and now. So I need to run away....

On spell check and my future without shoes

I'm too awake to post properly today.

I'm feeling contemplative. Thinking about my life and how much I've fucked it up. It feels like I'm stuck now, grades not good enough to get into grad school, not enough experience to get the kind of job I want, not enough guts to defy my parents and move out so as to salvage the last dregs of my sanity.

I think I've always felt ugly or at least nondescript but there was once a time when I at least had confidence in other areas of my life. Ah, the glory days when everything seemed doable and it felt like it was only a matter of choosing from amongst the possibilities.

On another note, spell check is working now though it didn't recognize "color" as being misspelled despite being set to Canadian English. It also doesn't recognize "fucked" as a word. I think that's sweet. I just noticed it took out the second space after my periods!!! Sacrilege!!

So Sheepy

Baa...

I think I should only update in the middle of the night when I'm all sleep deprived and incoherent and perfectly capable of telling a waitress that my friends and I need to find a different restaurant because we just wouldn't feel comfortable having an orgy on the table in the one we're in (the place is just that nice). That way I can blame any stupid things I write on my brain not working right and being hyper-paranoid because I can feel every last loose thread or stray hair brushing my arms like little evil eight-legged creatures out to devour me.

I am so sleepy now but I'm not in bed because going to bed would require digging it out from under all the junk I dumped on it this morning in my frantic rush to get ready for my interview. As for the interview, the person grilling me expressed interest in eating cake. Damned cake. I'm starting to resent cake now and that's just wrong. My mother thinks that it's more important for me to learn how to decorate a wedding cake than to get a job. Bah!

I bah a lot.

Pepperminted

You know what I want? A decent nickname. People constantly mangle my name to the point where I have to wonder if it's intentional and I end up repeating it myself so many times that I begin to doubt my own pronunciation. Sex Kitten is the closest I've ever come to a nickname. It's entirely inappropriate in that I'm just such stone-ground wheat wholesomeness it's funny. All saccharine and sunshine. Or strychnine and UV. Bah. Anyway, Sex Kitten doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. And it would horrify everyone who thinks I'm a Good Brown Girl. Well, maybe that's a plus.

Good Brown Girl deserves to be capitalized. In my world it's an archetype just as much as the Imprisoned Damsel or the Sexually Aware And Therefore Dangerous Woman in the fairy tales. Of course what exactly constitutes a Good Brown Girl (GBG) is variable. These things are always variable or the stories get stale but there are a few constants, for instance she is Virtuous and should be coupled with her counterpart, the Nice Brown Boy (NBB).

In order to scramble any flow I may have here, I'm going to end abruptly by complaining about the spellcheck on here. It doesn't work, just makes a "sweek!" noise. Damned annoying. I had to copy and paste into Word and check it there. I still can't remember, after 15 long years here, whether it's a "z" or an "s" in Canadian spelling. I guess even if the spellcheck did work it would be stuck on American Spelling.