You have to cause a little pain to shed a little light.

Life...up...date?

I finalized my flight to Japan on Wednesday, which just seems completely insane when i think about it too hard, and have made loose moving arrangements. The whole 'packing to move' process is starting again. It doesn't seem like i've only been here since August, that everything changed so much in that time. It's even crazier to think of how much more there is to do. In a very literal and exact four months from now I'll be in Osaka dying of jetlag before starting teacher training.

In other my-life-is-ridiculous news, i landed the temp job that could turn into a real job that i'd wanted so damn badly just a few weeks too late. This kills me in so many ways. Everything is feast or famine with me. Going to Japan is absolutely what i want to do, but i'd be living a very different life if i'd gotten this position in October or November. So it goes, right? But i have to wonder about my karma sometimes. If i make it past the first round of JET screenings now i will just laugh and laugh and laugh. In the meantime, i've revamped their filing system, am completely redoing the executive dean's calendar, and am being trained for things i won't be around long enough to really need to know how to use. Life's funny little tragedies. I think they will be legitimately disappointed to lose me, which is strange and gratifying and sounds really egoistic, but you wouldn't even believe how bad the guy was who had the position before. This university has repeatedly refused to hire me, but the general competency level of people in similar positions doesn't seem to be high.

There was more ridiculousness over christmas, but i don't even know where to begin with that. suffice to say that i'm glad i went, because there'll be nothing to regret on my side later. But i think my grandfather may feel differently. Or maybe he won't. That said, it was good to see my grandmother, and i was regaled with stories of her time in Japan. She was stationed near Shiga Kogen in Nagano during the post-WWII occupation in a secretarial capacity for the army, and was very happy there during her service. There were souvenirs and cards and even a womens' magazine from the time, all of which were fascinating. But certainly the best part was when we got out of the limo service when we first arrived, just after midnight, and she looked at me and grinned and exclaimed Ohayou Gozaimasu! and i just about died.

and...there were other things, but i just spent an hour and a half in a meeting, so I've totally forgotten them all.

Things:

• Signal boost for a really awesome and potentially helpful post: what do you need?
• I am still selling smelly things.
• Oh god i am moving in four days holy fuck augh.
• Hahaha my meds they do not work but it's a little late to worry about that now isn't it.
• Someone actually emailed me about a job interview. Granted, it's a phone interview but holy fuck i actually heard back from someone who might want to pay me money for doing things for them. (Given that I have probably applied to a hundred administrative positions, these odds are shit, but the timing is great)
• I hate packing. No really, I hate it. 

Good news! I finally ordered my new iphone. Bad news! In order to save myself money by being on my parents plan, i have to change my phone number. This is both deeply inconvenient, as i've had my phone for years and will now have to change numbers all sorts of places and learn a new one, but also sad. I liked having a number from Florida. It was sort of my last thing i was carrying from my life there. This isn't even happening for a few weeks, but i hate this sort of changing. Imagine if i actually had an address book full of contacts!

Anyway, people that i call/text/whatever often enough, i've already sent out a mass text. If you want my new number and/or i failed at texting you, drop a comment and you too may know how to contact me in a few weeks.

So every few months i seem to get a tattoo itch. I try to resist for awhile, but in the end, i always give in.

( here it is )

Wooo sick. A round of antibiotics, some mucinex and delsym later, i'm probably working my way into bronchitis, yay. Apparently woke both my parents up last night with bouts of ridiculous hacking wheezing cough. It's so good to be me.

Had job interview yesterday. Cannot for the life of me tell how it went, because the one girl who was interviewing spent the entire time with her eyebrows up and that fake anxious grin that makes the cords in your neck stand out. Health insurance would be nice though. :/

O rite also anon meme. if you have anything terribly pressing to say. All i ask is that if you do respond, plz to pin your comment so that we can possibly have a dialogue or somethin'. :Db

I'm cleaning. I hate cleaning. It makes me feel completely lost, buried in all these things i have accumulated. And worse, i'm not even cleaning because i want to, or because i feel overwhelmed by my mess, or because anyone i care about is coming.

I'm cleaning because tomorrow people are going to come and invade my space and tear out the old rickety window by my chair to replace it with a new one. It's not that it pisses me off that we paid the heating bill for an apartment full of drafty windows through a cold winter. And it's not that i like my old rickety window or its accompanying rattles and drafts. It's that my room is so small and there's a chair and a lamp and an ottoman between the window and the world, and all those things will have to move to accomodate a workman. It's more like i like my space, and i don't like people coming into my space and tearing it up, even for what should eventually be counted as an improvement. For that to happen, i have to clean.

Not sure how tomorrow's going to go, really. They're supposed to replace windows in all the bedrooms, the kitchen, the livingroom and bath. Every room in the house, essentially. The part that worries me is that the bathroom window is in the shower, and we are all pretty fucking sure that the shower wall is entirely rotten beneath. So i have a rather justified fear that they're going to try and take out the window and half the wall will just crumble beneath the stress, leaving a gaping hole in our apartment.

Of course, my roommates have thoughtfully left me here alone to deal with it. Oh how i don't want to live here anymore.

On another sort of cleaning note, thinking of changing some of my lj icons out to match my dw set, which i overall like better.

People have been posting entries lately about why they're moving to dw, about the differences between dw and lj. For the most part, these are all things i've been feeling. Somehow this time it's different than the migrations to ij or inksome. I did migrate all my old entries here, not because i feel like this is the same as lj in any way, but because i don't want to lose the record of myself. Am i proud of those things? Hell no. Reading through my old journaling is a bit like a walk of shame--i shake my head at that person, wonder how anyone put up with her. But that was me, and as much as i'd like to forget that i was ever that whiny and ridiculous, it doesn't work that way. What i would like to do, though, is possibly go through and mass-lock things. Does anyone know if dw or an external piece of software (preferably mac compatible) can do that for me? A fresh start without losing anything, so to speak.

Why rui? Short answer: don't quite know. It's an rp character name, which sounds so lame, but it's a name i've become very comfortable being called in the past year. As a girl's name, the internets tell me it means either tears or affection, babelfish translates the kanji used in Hanazawa Rui's name as 'type'. Either way, something in it pleases me. It's a short name, easy to say, to type, and to remember. And, like everyone else, it's sort of shedding a skin. I've been alioth for going on ten years now, the first name i ever chose for myself online. In a lot of ways, it still stands, a gender-neutral star reference that calls back to a character i loved in a book i haven't read for years. It's not that it doesn't fit, precisely. But i'm not that same girl, not really.