picked a handful of violets in my name

No pictures today; my outfit was kind of boring. Pinstripe pants and a Threadless shirt. (I will try to get up a picture of my jacket, though, because it's fucking cool. Black, with larger versions of these clasps.)

The good news is that the next few days may be warm enough for me to wear some of the cute stuff I picked out. And I have actual reasons for leaving the house, which forces me to put clothes on. \o/

Plans! I am having a busy weekend, it looks like. Friday night is Slutbutter, because Cameryn Moore (most of my weekend is because Cameryn Moore). Saturday, I want to go to Sowa Open Market, and then Ellie and I are heading out to Wilmington again for roller derby. Sunday is the Flea at MIT again (note to self: visit ATM beforehand), and then Phone Whore, and then Fuckbucket.

My Monday is currently 100% empty, and I am going to nap hard, motherfuckers. I will have earned it.

Daily Song (right-click): Cobra Starship - Move Like You Gonna Die

1. history: Another book, and a consideration of a historiographical problem

2. jjhunter: dreamsheep poem

3. trascendenza: On Cantonese tones.

And since it's now technically Friday... boston (which I co-mod, as of recently). And unfunnybusiness_dw exists. I love reading steampunk_nusantara.

I'm actually pondering pruning my dreamroll... so I suppose this would be a good time to declare amnesty: if you're tired of my face or my links or my frequency of posting or my whatever, you can unsubscribe!

Daily Song makeups (right-click):
Veruca Salt - Seether (May 8th)
The Pipettes - One Night Stand (May 9th)
Goldfrapp - Slippage (May 10th)

Daily Song (right-click): The Dollyrots - Because I'm Awesome

synecdochic: the ghost in the room, or, why modesty is a dirty fucking word

There are a lot of things I am good at, and a lot of things I do that are awesome. I feel no particular need to list them, and at least a few come up in general blah-blah-this-is-my-life (I am good at my job, for example, and the stuff I do generally isn't done by people with my level of education - there's a reason I call myself an apprentice archivist). I write well. I'm making an effort to contribute to my online community (having - I think - accustomed myself to frequent and at least moderately meaty posts, and having always been pretty zealous about replying to comments, I'm now pushing myself to comment more on other people's stuff).

As far as I can tell, the main limit right now on my level of kickass-doing-of-things is... depression and the learned procrastination, apathy, and lack of action that go along with a lifetime case of dysthymia.

( blah blah depression not-so-yay )

Basically, nobody worry! I'm just feeling less happy/content than I think I should be - for no apparent reason, which means it is cyclical brain chemical shenanigans.

Today's Daily Song is not a single song! I have zipped eight songs from the supplementary playlist for And In Darkness, Light, the name I use for stories about Marcus (currently in progress: a trilogy plus some other stuff).

And In Darkness, Light (Supplementary Soundtrack) 47.2mb

( tracklisting )

( how the music for AIDL works )

If I post about the actual content of AIDL, in terms of themes and plot and everything, that'll probably go in auriel, but I'll link to it the next time I update my journal.

( links )

Daily Song (right-click): Escape the Fate - Cellar Door
This may have to go on certain of my writing playlists. (Not playlists I listen to while I write, mind you. More like fanmixes I make for myself.)

Academichic: Dress Your Best Week
I'd like to participate in that, but IDK whether I'll have the spoons.* I could try picking out my clothes ahead of time and writing the entry in advance, I guess. I've been meaning to assemble fabulous outfits more often (inspired partly by one of my coworkers and partly by the underutilized parts of my closet), but, ugh, effort. This kind of thing is usually the first to get pushed aside.

When it comes to picking out clothes in advance, there's also the problem of Boston's highly fickle weather. I can't just glance at a forecast and create five outfits for a work-and/or-class-week! I have to have backup outfits: what if it rains, what it it's suddenly and briefly hot or cold, etc?

* I'm still trying to figure out the extent to which I'm comfortable with conceptualizing my depression as a disability. I often feel like I am too functional to really count. :\

( dreamwidth linkery )

Yesterday's concert was great (even though I had the nagging remains of a headache), and Thursday played some of my favorite songs, including the one I uploaded yesterday.

My train back from Worcester got in a little past two in the morning, and Ellie still came and picked me up.

I slept really really really late, and then Ellie and I went to Fourburgers (as Cambridge seems to be the only nearby place not getting its water from the "no srsly boil this" backup reservoirs). We attempted to figure out what Ellie should do for a cheap vacation, since she has this week off before summer term. Finally decided that maybe a day trip to Northampton was in order.

Then we tried to go to a grocery store in Cambridge but got lost, considered going to the one in Dedham we usually go to and rejected that idea except in case of emergency, tried to get on Memorial Drive but wound up on Storrow instead, decided to try the grocery at Jackson Square, and then actually went to one near Fenway because we wound up driving right past it.

So we have a case of bottled water now, and Ellie wants to go out to some lumber yard out in the middle of nowhere tomorrow, so she can get more if we need it.

Daily Song (right-click): My Chemical Romance - The Jetset Life Is Gonna Kill You
Since that's what Ellie asked to listen to in the car today. (She only seems to request MCR when we're going to be driving for a while, so I just start with Bullets and keep going until we get home. This is as far as we got today.)

If you want to vote for ideas I've already had or make topic suggestions, I'm going to begin work on those entries ASAP, probably later this evening.

Still sick, I guess. I came home from work and took a three-hour nap. Or it's like the summer after my freshman year, when I rolled off the airplane in New Orleans, ate dinner with my parents, and slept for eighteen hours.

Today is Dreamwidth's first birthday! A year ago, the service entered open beta; I was lucky enough to have received an invite code during closed beta. Denise and Mark have of course made posts for this momentous occasion.

Daily Song (right-click): Sleater-Kinney - Youth Decay
Always one of my first ideas when Ellie and I are going to be in the car for a while (my ipod freaks out periodically when its volume is up all the way, like when it's plugged into her stereo, so it's best just to pick an artist with enough songs to last the whole trip and then not touch the thing).

Follow Friday: followfriday | Latest Things
I love accessibility_fail and beginningcocks (NSFW) and dreamsheep and fucking_meds and shareandsharealike and three_weeks_for_dw and tickybox and transfic.
I would love to see bdsm and boston and camberville and davis_square and factfinding and history and leftoverresearchquarterly and polyamory and simmonscollege and style_salon become more active.
And as for people: ajnabieh, anchises, azurelunatic, charmian, damned_colonial, dingsi, eruthros, eumelia, heartequals, impertinence, languisity, lauredhel, marina, niqaeli, oursin, rydra_wong, stepps, synecdochic, thingswithwings, toft, trascendenza, trouble, zorkian, yasaman, yvi.

( Let me talk about clothes for a minute! )

Daily Song (right-click): Mindless Self Indulgence - Shut Me Up
Okay, at this point, it's looking like Daily Song will be a tour of my 25 most-played songs. So here's number three. I listened to this whole album a lot during my first year of college. (Relevant icon is relevant.)

And here are the links I had kicking around my Dreamwidth section of TooManyTabs (actual, organized link roundup soon, I hope):

charmian: recent LJ controversies, Three Weeks for DW and Active comms? And, is growth a problem? (maybe not)

holyschist: A totally non-scientific poll about blogging focus and Dreamwidth

heartequals: "How does one go about changing their internet name? People's internet names are so fascinating to me."

Ellie is watching Top Gear and laughing so hard it sounds like she's weeping in agony over her linear systems final.

In my enthusiasm for this whole enterprise, I'll be continuing the daily link roundups. I never thought I'd be that kind of blogger, but I seem to have developed the habit, even before I was doing a specific kind of link-gathering. But while link-collecting is a useful service, I also want to be making other posts, especially in the context of three_weeks_for_dw.

One thing I'd like to do is provide a new song every day!

Daily Song (right-click): Hole - Celebrity Skin
Within the first week this song was on my ipod, it went straight to the top of the most-played list. It remains in the number one spot, with almost three times as many plays as the next song down.

blnchflr has asked me to write about unreliable narrators, although this will take a few days. (I shake my fist at the end of the semester.) I am still accepting prompts, questions, et cetera, via comment/pm/email/carrier pigeon.