Kyriacities

Circumstances brought us to 5wits adventures yesterday. In a nutshell, it’s kind of like live-action role-playing where you play through a plot in fairly realistic settings and puzzle-solve your way to the end.

What was awesome:

The settings were amazing! Truly — they were very atmospheric, especially the ones for 2000 Leagues. Most of my fun was had wandering through, looking at all the little details that they put in. The rooms even smelled like what they were supposed to, which I found interesting. There was a mainframe room that definitely smelled like all the server rooms I’d been into and the Nautilus had a distinct scent of water, metal, and just a bit of musty old stuff. The special effects were also a lot of fun and were pretty impressive in how they made it more realistic.

The good:

I liked the guides. They played it up just enough to be fun and entertaining, not cheesy.

The bad:

Group sizes of 15 as a limit is way too high in my opinion. There weren’t really enough puzzle stations to go around and usually that means the less assertive members of the group will get left out. Even if you take turns, there’s not often enough turns to go around before the puzzle is solved and some of them really don’t lend themselves well to collaboration. — although the bomb defusing puzzle was definitely one that required collaboration and well-designed in that sense. Also, the elevator and one of the chambers of the Nautilus is fairly limited in size and our eleven was an ok fit, but I really didn’t want to think about having more people in there.

The puzzles were also fairly simplistic, which means that it’s not really something that you’d want to do more than once as an adult. I’m sure that kids would still have fun multiple times, but we might have aged out of the demographic for repeat playings.

Verdict?

I don’t regret going, but it’s definitely not a repeatable sort of experience.  Anyone who is interested, however, should definitely go.

 

I got this idea from Chuck Wendig’s's blog.

Usually I don’t do flash fiction, but these were some pretty kickass opening lines and they definitely grabbed my attention. In fact, not just one spoke to me, but three — so here it is.

 

~~~~~~~@~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~@~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

The ghost of a sparrow flitted through one wall and out the other.

 

The courtyard was silent and still, carpeted in verdant green, a single cherry tree in full bloom standing in the center, no other movement before that apparition save the graceful billow of the priestess’s robes in the breeze.

 

He started as another sparrow appeared, flitting right before his face. The hunter glanced in her direction, caught himself before he met her gaze, his lashes falling to hide his eyes.

 

Her one and only command ran through his mind, “You must walk three paces behind me, and never raise your eyes to mine.”

 

Not yet ventured forth and already slipping.

 

It was a fool’s errand and he knew it, knew that taking this job would more than likely get him killed, but there was no help for it. He owed the Maiden a favor and the Maiden didn’t deal in anything less than death.

 

His wife’s face drifted through his mind, serene and calm in repose, and he tightened his jaw. It was worth it. Even if it cost his life, it was worth it to ensue that she didn’t rise again to become one of the unholy revenants, fated to wander the earth plaguing the living until they were dispersed, never to reincarnate, never to know peace.

 

“We go. Do not forget my warning.” Her voice was low and calm, but there was an edge to it that let him know she hadn’t missed his near slip.

 

“Yes, my lady.” He loosened his axe in his belt, his hand closing upon the handle in a firm grip.

 

The cherry blossoms started to fall, spiraling, fluttering, drifting, mimicking life in their demise.

 

She glided forward, her bare feet barely making an impression upon the grass.

 

He kept his eyes lowered, focusing on the sweep of her robes after her, placing his feet exactly where she laid hers. Her steps grew slower and slower, her movements languid yet with an air of concentration and force, as if she were pushing through a barrier with every inch gained.

 

Twenty paces in, droplets of red glimmered in the grass.

 

Thirty paces in, her footprints started to be limned in red.

 

Forty and only halfway to the tree, she coughed up blood, a deep glossy black and not crimson.

 

“I will take your energy now. Brace yourself.” Her tone held no inflection to tell of fear or horror, her voice dispassionate as before.

 

He’d been told of what to expect, but nothing could have prepared him for the wrench in his solar plexus, the sharp tearing pain that felt like someone gutting him slowly, yanking out his intestines inch by painful inch, the slow drain of his blood and chi, the way it felt too much like dying.

 

She moved forward, and part of him was glad that she did not seem to find it easier.

 

Stupid of him, since he wouldn’t survive if she didn’t, and if this was taking such a toll on her already, his energy barely lessening the burden — it didn’t bode well for what had to come next.

 

He grimaced, focusing on each single step forward, the pain dizzying, thinking wryly to himself that he’d never been accused of too much intelligence. After all, see where he was now. Hardly the sort of place an intelligent man would find himself.

 

They moved forward, step by aching step.

 

The energy drain intensified until it felt as if the only thing keeping him upright was the tether of energy from him to her, the incredible agony the only reason he stayed conscious. He’d been gored by a boar, had his ankle broken by a steel jaw trap, fell into a bear trap and impaled upon a stake and none of it even began to compare to this slow shredding of his innards. The pain transcended the physical and if he weren’t a deeply pragmatic man, he could imagine it was his soul being slowly unraveled.

 

Moments, millennia, hours later, they finally reached the tree. Cherry blossoms drifted down around him, spinning lazily in the air, covering the grass with a layer of white and pink.

 

She sank down on the grass, nestling into the roots of the cherry tree, her face turning towards him.

 

“You know what you have to do.”

 

He hefted the weapon in his hand, careful not to raise his line of sight beyond the curve of her jaw. “Yes. When the last cherry blossom falls, so will my axe.”

 

She leaned her head back, exposing the slim white line of her throat. “Make it quick, hunter. Do not fail me in this.”

 

His grip tightened. “Yes, my lady.”

 

He shifted his stance, moving to stand at an angle, mentally calculating the trajectory and force of his swing to cut her throat without fully severing her head, without harming the tree.

 

“Watch the blossoms, hunter.”

 

He raised his eyes. There were only a few left on the branches, the rest in what looked like snowdrifts on the ground, a layer obscuring her hair and face. He shuddered, cursing another near slip, and lifted his gaze again. He wondered briefly about how not a single petal touched him, shrugged away curiosity, knowing that way was madness, and searched the branches above.

 

He saw nothing but sky against the branches for a moment and his heart hiccuped, thudded once against his ribcage in terror, his breath caught in his lungs until he saw a a spot of white against the deep blue.

 

There.

 

That lone blossom clinging to the highest branch.

 

He stared at it, willing it to fall, willing it to linger so he could stay his hand a moment longer, not daring to blink.

 

A breeze whirled around him, teasing.

 

His eyes stung with the need for moisture.

 

The flower shivered, once, and fell.

 

He gritted his teeth and swung, praying to all the dead gods that his aim be sure and his hand steady.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was reading this piece about finding your voice on Litreactor and found myself  intrigued.

Obvious, isn’t it, to think that what you consume will end up being what you become, but I oddly never quite thought of it that way. You are what you eat.  What, then, am I eating?

So the test:

Pick up a pencil and write down your five favorite authors. Write down your five favorite books. While you’re at it, write down your five favorite movies. And add to that your five favorite television shows.

 

Authors:

Anne Bishop, Anne Stuart, Anne McCaffrey (do we see a trend here?), Nora Roberts, L.M Montgomery.

Favorite books:

Dark Jewels trilogy, Home Cooking, More Home Cooking.

Five favorite movies:

Much Ado about Nothing, Cloud Atlas, Ponyo, Rise of the Guardians, the Avengers

Five favorite television shows:

Babylon 5, Farscape, Seikon no Qwaser, Gensomaden Saiyuki, Star Trek Next Generation

 

What do I see here?

Strangely enough, it appears that my consumption of media almost tends toward self-contradiction. For a writer, I read a lot of fluff, which makes it hard to find favorites. Not enough substance results in not quite being able to find anything to latch onto. I rarely venture into deeper books, something my friends laugh at me for, but the reason being that all too often it either twists one way or the other, either fluff or angst, and not much in between. If I had to make a choice, and I do, then I’m going to go with fluff. Perhaps this limits me as a writer, just as it limits me as a reader.

Movies go much the same way, it appears. Nothing too dark, nothing too gritty, and all of them happy endings.

TV shows, apparently, is where I go darker. Perhaps because having my angst and tragedy packaged in 30 minute sections is a lot more tolerable than spending an hour or so immersed in someone else’s pain. Books, are by nature of narration, that much more unforgiving. Either you dive in and experience as the characters do, or you float along on the surface, never getting to the heart. Movies can be similarly relentless, pounding their message in over the course of 3 hours, and not necessarily giving you respite at the end.

Common threads I see involve social justice, the concept of being responsible for the world you live in, sacrifice, love, and the pain of birthing a new world from a fragmented, broken one.  Home and hearth, witticisms, sarcasm, and family thread through the darker material,  creating a bolt of a night dyed fabric shot through with gold.

We’ll see if I succeed in replicating that.

 

It’s near 6am. I’m staring at the screen ruefully, wondering why the heck I am awake when I need to be up for work  – oh, later today.

It was my own fault. I picked up the book of my one of my favorite Chinese authors, 席绢 (Xi Juan), right before I was about to sign off and go to bed, and went from possibly sleeping at a not-so-great-but-still-not-that-crazy 3am to being awake three hours later. Speaking of Xi Juan, I’ve been reading her since about 1997, and I’ve been following her ever since. I’ve slacked off on reading every single one of her books since I left China eight years ago, mostly because I discovered English fantasy and sci-fi novels and because language really is something that degrades the more you don’t use it. Also, hard to buy Chinese novels when you’re no longer in the area.

However, I found tonight that Xi Juan has grown with me. Her books have more depth than they did before. She’s moved on toward new and interesting concepts, not content to rest on her laurels. As she said in an author’s note at the end of one of her books, she gets fans who ask her to go back to writing the stuff she used to, but that’s not what she wants to do. She wants to challenge herself, and if the book isn’t well received, then it’s because she didn’t execute the idea well, not because the idea wasn’t a good one to begin with. The only reason why I’m not clapping right now is because my boyfriend is asleep and I think he’d be pretty peeved if I woke him up.  Someone remind me to write Xi Juan and tell her that she’s my role model forever and that I love her challenging herself, and me by extension, and that she should never stop.

Tangent? I love that Chinese romance novel writers almost always have a foreword or afterword by the author where they just talk about their life, their writing process, the novel, what went into it, etc. It’s lovely, intimate, and sometimes heartbreakingly inspiring. Like when they tell you that they are challenging themselves to write better books because writing formulaic stuff is dumb and retarded.

But back to why I’m awake at 6am in the morning.

The question that she spent an entire book asking, and answering.

What is love?

I love this book because it makes me think, and it’s such a good reminder to rethink what love means and how one enacts love.

Love isn’t a soft thing. It’s not made of words. It’s not a thing with feathers.

But it’s also not a weapon. It’s not cruel, or hard, or passive aggressive.

I think, too often love is about what the other person can do for me, the narrator. Love isn’t and shouldn’t be unconditional, but I think sometimes it’s too easy to wander a little too close to the other extreme, where we start thinking about if the reciprocity is balanced enough.

Love, right now, for me, is about being courageous. It means being strong, but willing and able to bend if that’s what is needed. Because sometimes the strength to bend is much, much more than the strength needed to stand firm and be broken. Because anyone can be broken, but not everyone can bend till they cannot even recognize themselves and still come back to being them. It means tenderness, soft words, an encompassing embrace. It’s also about protection, about the grit needed to go to sleep every night exhausted and still wake up the next morning ready to fight for a better tomorrow, about pushing yourself to the outer limits of your ability because it’s what is needed at the moment. It means not wondering if there is going to be a good return on investment (ROI).  It means that I’ll love until I cannot love anymore, but until the day that I don’t, I will do everything in my power to give as much, as freely, as unconsciously as I possibly can. It means that if my heart should ever be broken, that I should never consider myself a failure because that chapter of my life ended, because I will have done nothing to regret, either in giving of myself or in how much I chose to give.

Because love is a gift. It is a gift to be able to love. It is a gift to be able to give within the confines and in the name of love.

I do not mean that love can never be twisted. That love cannot spawn terrible, tragic, breathtakingly bad things — but love, true love, isn’t that. It’s never that.

Love isn’t perfect. It isn’t perfect because no one is perfect.

I also happen to believe that our current media obsession about how one person is supposed to be the plumber/chef/CEO/CFO/therapist/masseuse/handyman/maid/babysitter/sexpot submissive/ alpha male dominant/ ALL THE THINGS in our lives is completely crazytalk, but that’s another post.

It’s not about perfection.

To a certain extent, love is something you do for yourself, and not necessarily for the object of that love. Take writing for example. It’s one of the loves in my life that really make me think I must be a masochistic pain slut.

On that note, I got to thinking about it the other day, and ultimately Estyria is about love.  I suppose it’s why I think about it so frequently now, the various meanings, iterations, and enactments of love. It’s what drives her. It’s what drives me to write her story.

What is love to you?

 

Month of thanksgiving and also, month of madness: the vaunted month where authors everywhere try to churn out a novel of 50k words or more.

I’ve tried it twice now, and I don’t think it’s for me.

I have at least two friends-in-Boston who might be doing it this year, and at least one friend from my crit group who is interested in doing it — I have to admit, the temptation to start up again is strong. But as my boyfriend says, “Nano is that abusive boyfriend who is no-good-very-bad for you and who you keep going back to anyway”, and I’m somehow oddly uninterested in being known as “that person” who cannot manage to learn from past mistakes.

It’s started me thinking, though.

Sometimes there is just a lack of perspective and far, far too much hubris involved.

Last year, I got terribly discouraged because it seemed like everyone was easily whacking out their word count within an hour and I was struggling with a wordcount in the low hundreds. Everyone, including the writers who are multi-published and do this for a living (which wasn’t too depressing); the college kids who flood the chatroom come NaNo (not that depressing either, considering I could have written ten novels in my college career instead of leveling up a character in World of Warcraft to max level as a hobby); and what was truly last-vestige-of self-esteem-killing — the under 18 teenagers who were tossing out words in the thousands that were good.

So I quit.

Clearly, it wasn’t healthy for me and I wasn’t actually going anywhere because I spent more time being terrified of being behind than actually able to write.

Not that I’m proud of quitting.

The spectre of quitting, of being lesser than haunted me for quite a while.

It was hard, terribly hard to admit that I have a horrible issue with stress. That I was under-performing by my standards to everyone, in all age ranges, in all stages of life.

Not to be overly dramatic, but it made me question just whether or not I was actually capable (or deserving? I don’t know) of being a writer. It made me wonder, if it took me ten hours a day to painstakingly etch out less than two thousand words — was it actually even worth it for my time investment? Put another way — was my world and myself benefiting more from my taking that time out to write, or would I just be doing everyone a favor if I cleaned the house, cooked more healthy meals, and volunteered in that time instead?

I had sort of the same reaction when I started reading all my food bloggers who started getting married, had babies, had cookbooks and memoirs out and had this visceral gut reaction against being left behind.

To a certain extent, I blame our society. Everything in media fills us with horror about growing old, about under-achieving for our age range, about the terror of being overtaken by the young nipping at our heels. Popular culture expects certain things of us, and if we haven’t managed that by the age that it deems proper — nothing can save you from the scorn, the disdain, the vaguely caring, mostly catty implications of being too old to have that sort of pipe dream.

Well, screw that.

I’m twenty seven this year. That’s a respectable number. I won’t care if there are 18, 17, 14 year old publishing books and becoming famous. I won’t care if other authors are juggling a day job, a husband, and three children. I won’t care for the stupid siren catcalls of popular media telling me that I’m just a washed up old nag gone too many times around the block with no new tricks left to learn.

Twenty seven. That means at least thirty, if not forty, fifty, sixty more years to live. Seventy and eighty more years if I’m lucky and if medical advancements and money says yes.

I have plenty of time.

This year, maybe I’ll do it differently.

If I do head back into NaNo madness, I’ll have a safe word.

I’ll remember that it’s a personal journey and the only person I should legitimately be competing with is myself, and perhaps not even then.

My day job right now is grueling in ways both mental, social, and physical. To compare the word count I have when I drag myself home from work after a confrontation-laden day to the word count I get when it’s the depth of summer, there’s no work, and I can just heat up pizza for dinner is complete folly.

I can only seek to live my life in a way that makes me happy and satisfied with myself at the end of the day instead of wondering where the hours went to. And I should gag and quell that stupid little voice that nags, incessantly, about how I haven’t found a way to cure cancer through my writing yet.

This time around, it’s about the journey, not the destination.

 

A conversation with C the other day unearthed some things that I had not previously been aware of.

I can sometimes be defensive about my lack of appreciation for a certain person(s). This defensiveness can sometimes venture forth into the realm of absurdity, even to myself.

Why should I care whether or not some of my friends enjoy the company of someone else?  Why should I feel compelled to defend the fact that I don’t find someone congenial or desirable company? Why in tarnation should this even be an issue?

Part of it is because I buy into, or used to buy into the geek social fallacies.

Another, larger part of it is that I have been internalizing the viewpoints of one of my close friends for a long, long time now, and been completely unaware of it prior to this.

Z, who used to tell me that she wasn’t sure if I could find anyone else who would be willing to live with me for a variety of reasons. My foul temper. My slob nature. My general untidiness. The way she framed it, it was almost as if I should be grateful that she was willing to put up with me. Often, she would casually toss down comments starting with: “I don’t know if I can keep living with you because ________” or “I just don’t know who else can put up with your _____”

The same Z who would tearfully tell me I was being a dramatic attention seeker who dished out ultimatums just to see people jump when I would say that I couldn’t live in a house with wall to wall carpets because of my severe allergies. Who would tell me she didn’t think she could live with me if I continued to put out ultimatums to upset people when I said that I had severe issues with housemates not doing their chores.

Who used to berate me because I didn’t want to go out on a whirlwind of social activities the way she did. Who, on at least two occasions, made a big fuss about how not going out with her to various social events that she wanted to go to meant I didn’t value her as a friend. Who implied that my lack of  friends was both something that would come back to haunt me in the future and something that was inherently wrong with me. Who insisted, every single time I didn’t like someone as much as she did, that I give a comprehensive and reasonable list of reasons. Who would ignore my stated dislike of someone and my need to have advance warning before someone came over to the house or sleep over unless my reasons satisfied her — which of course they never did. I was always considered to be irrationally judgmental, always the weird anti-social person who had issues.

Z, who told me that she was afraid of my ending up homeless and starving on the streets when I told her that I wanted to quit my day job to write. The implications of that didn’t strike me until recently, when I realized that for me to end up homeless and starving would require losing all my friends and family’s support in every way — which turned her fear for me into yet another oblique commentary on me.

Z, who told me she’d be pissed off if she were C if I took money that I’d earned through my job and put it towards paying a cover illustrator and editor so I could self-publish. Who then clarified that this was because she didn’t think I could make any money off my writing.

Z, who once accused me of exploiting my friends; of purposefully using my face and acting “cute” to take advantage of my friends and inveigle them into doing things for me.

This woman who blamed me for being a bad friend. Who blames me for her depression, her anxiety, her melancholy — because I didn’t give her enough love, support, or help after the dramatic explosion of her relationship.

This after she dismissed my needs to wake me up on more than one occasion to cry and rant at me about everything that was going wrong. After she called me at work, after I devoted hours to listening to her vent, after I tried my best to give her objective advice only to have her blame me for everything going wrong after she refused to take my advice.

Z, who judging from all the dirty looks I get from her friends and cut direct from her mother, has gone around bad-mouthing me and my actions.  Who took an email I wrote out of desperation, telling her I couldn’t continue to be friends with her if she continued to guilt trip me, emotionally manipulate me, and blame me for everything in her life — and promptly turned that around into a “poisonous, hitting-below-the-belt, unwarranted attack” on her to her therapist, family, and friends.

 

Why bring this up now and here?

I debated keeping this on a friend-locked, private post on my personal blog rather than posting it here, on what is supposedly a more professional portal onto the world, but ultimately I thought that this was something that was worth sharing. I aimed to give enough detail to give my side of the story, how I perceived what was going on, because it’s important that it be clear when I say: this is what hurt looks like to me.

Some people may say that I’m over reacting. That I’m being over sensitive.

But I have a very real reaction to all of what she did and said over the years. I find myself doubting how lovable I am. I find myself wondering if I am going to end up friendless, destitute, with no one to turn to because of my poor personality, my bad temper, my terrible habits. I get defensive when people ask me why I don’t like someone because I feel like I have to justify myself, that I have to somehow prove to them that I’m not insane, that I am still worthy of being liked even as I don’t like someone else they do. I feel like I’m perpetually under scrutiny, constantly under surveillance, always being tested and found wanting.

Loving someone doesn’t mean you get carte blanche to constantly try to re-make them into someone better.

When someone claims to love you, that doesn’t mean they get a free pass to constantly criticize you.

I think part of why I stayed on so long in that friendship was because I’ve always been taught that being a good friend means sometimes telling your close friends something they don’t want to hear. I’ve always operated under the assumption that when you say something potentially hurtful to someone, you do it with a balance of care and love to offset the pain, and you do it because you have their best interests at heart. So I never questioned Z’s constant barrage on me.

This isn’t to say that I think Z said all that she did out of malice. Perhaps, in her own way, she thought she was being supportive and helpful as a friend.

The more important takeaway message from this for me is that sometimes it doesn’t matter the intention — it mattered that she was hurting my self-esteem, that she was making me feel undesirable as a friend, housemate, and significant other, that she was making me question my own personality, sanity, and mind, that I was being made to feel like I was a hopelessly flawed person.

I was taught to never take the sort of treatment I received at her hands from a lover, a husband, a significant other. The role I cast her in, that of a friend, almost a sister — blinded me to actions that I would never have accepted from my boyfriend.

Ultimately, love shouldn’t hurt.  Someone who loves you, be it parent, lover, teacher, sibling, or friend — they should never make you feel constantly belittled, constantly on alert for an attack, or that any love came with strings.

Even if someone claims daily to love you, to only be doing something that hurts you for your own good, that hurting you hurts them more — examine it. Look at it hard. Ask for a second, third, fourth opinion. It doesn’t matter from whom the hurt comes from, it should always be questioned and scrutinized. There is no legitimate abuse. Ever.

 

 

 

 

It sits in the corner above the cat scratching post next to the bathroom, slightly beaten up and deflating by the day. It’s one of those metallic foil balloons, the ones that I lost interest in as a child when I realized that once you got them, they only got more and more boring as time went by. No way to re-inflate them and of a texture that discouraged playing with the way a normal balloon could be — I thought they were a bad deal.

It was brought home after the wedding and since then moved from one place to the other as it inevitably got in someone’s way. First beside the front door, then to the dining room, then to the door of the newlyweds’ room, then back down to the front door, and finally to that corner where hopefully, probably, it will stay.

But just how long will it stay?

The thing is, there’s no good way to get rid of a bright red heart-shaped balloon with the words “I love you” on it past the wedding day.  Once it’s been brought home, back into the feng shui of a newly wed couple’s primary residence, it can take on a certain sort of meaning that wouldn’t be there if it had just been cavalierly handed off to someone or tossed the day of the wedding when everything was getting packed up or thrown away. Now it’s almost a symbol of the wedding, or perhaps even the marriage itself.

While it’s still floating, it seems a wanton act of destruction, even prophetic perhaps, should one just pop and toss it. So it stays, in the corner by the bathroom, taking up the airspace above the cat’s scratching post, gathering dust and dubious glances as it awaits becoming too decrepit to keep. Perhaps even once it’s slowly wilted to the point where it succumbs to gravity and flops onto the cat’s scratching post, it will be just one of those things hanging around the house that wouldn’t survive a move, but somehow just huddles in the corner because no one has the heart to put it out of it and other people’s misery.  Or, depending on sentimentality, it might get dusted off, folded up, and saved as a memento somewhere deep in a box deep in a closet.

But why bother? The mistake was in bringing it home, because ultimately it’s just a sad, dented, deflating metallic foil balloon that will only grow worse with age — better to have just let it go when it was still a happy memory and a cheerful reminder of happiness rather than what it is now and will be.

Next time, someone should be so brave as to simply pop it and toss it.

As can probably be guessed from the complete lack of posts since the 17th — evil day job struck again.

The plus side is that evil day job involved going to Monkey C Monkey Do yesterday, which almost makes up for all the hellaciousness that came before. If you ever get the chance to go to Monkey — do.

At first glance, I think almost everyone was disappointed at how small it actually was in real life. What we didn’t realize was that it is built vertically rather than horizontally. So we had three levels of rope and challenge courses, just all stacked on top of each other. The 2.5 hours that they allot to you is actually not quite enough for a not-quite-fit pair of people to work their way through every single challenge. I skipped some of the tier 3 challenges in favor of using the Big Swing and the high zipline.

Both of which are amazing. Let me emphasize that again: AMAZING.

There are other, closer, rope courses in MA and so I was contemplating not going 3 hours to Maine for this sort of thing again until I  experienced the Big Swing. Essentially, you’re about three floors up, they hook you in, and you sort of lean over to the left until you topple off the ledge into a swaying, soaring, twirling, diving sequence of motions.

It’s not like bungee jumping at all, where from what I can tell, you just go mostly vertically up and down. In this, you really feel like you’re soaring, gliding, then suddenly diving to ground and back up again.

I have an unholy fear of heights. I really do. I don’t visit “highest building in the world” type tourist places, flying in planes is a nightmare, and I probably will never understand the appeal of something like sky diving or even something as tame as eating in a restaurant with a glass floor balcony on the top of a skyscraper. For the first part of the tier 1 to tier 2 challenges, my boyfriend looked at my set face, my shaking limbs, my hands cramping from gripping onto my harness too tightly, and asked me with all seriousness if I needed to stop because it didn’t look like I was having fun.

I was and I wasn’t.

I love rope courses. I love proving to myself that I can do highly physical things like that. But my fear was overwhelming, the sweat sliding down my spine cold from fear and not hot from exertion. My mind was clouding and blanking from stress, anxiety, and just sheer terror.

But then I did the lower zipline once, trusted in the harness to keep me safe, and it did. Things got better after that. Better to the point where I could go through to the end of the course.

Yesterday I proved to myself that I am more than just someone who reacts to her fears, rational or otherwise. I got to the top of the course, where it was 50 feet up in the air, with nothing between me and the air but a harness and a small wooden platform, and stepped off. I sat on a ledge, feet hanging in air, and let myself tip over and off into a gutwrenching, ecstatic experience where I could almost believe I was flying.

I’ve always been a fearful person, and I hated that about myself. I don’t walk alone at night. I quit figure skating lessons when we got to the jumping and spinning because I had an unholy fear of breaking something, anything. I didn’t say yes to spending my first year in Italy when NYU wanted me to attend, but wanted me to go to Florence first, because I was terrified of going alone, to a country where I didn’t speak the language. I’ve missed so many opportunities, so many possibly amazing experiences and people — because I’ve been so afraid.

You know what? I’m still afraid. I still won’t go walking alone after dark. But next time, when I have the chance to do something like stepping off a ledge into thin air with the promise of an exhilarating journey — I’ll trust that I have a safety harness in place in the form of my family, friends, and boyfriend — and take that step.

If you’re ever in the area, try Monkey C Monkey Do. Roland and all of his staff were amazing, supportive, and enthusiastic about being encouraging. Not only were they truly friendly, kind people, but I also appreciated that even though our numbers dropped from 35 to 15, they still gave me that group rate they quoted me. I felt terrible about our numbers dropping like that and I would have been completely willing to pay normal prices, but they didn’t even mention it. Stunningly lovely experience and if they weren’t shutting down for the year next week, I’d love to make the trip again.

I will definitely go back again, because I want to learn again that feeling of soaring, of flying, of being much more than I thought I could be.

So evil day job kicked my butt last week.

There was an over-protective father who dragged my agency’s name through the mud in a misguided effort to save his child from being kicked out from the school he currently goes to. There was a suicidal man-child of 18 who is engaging in self-mutilation because he was spoiled silly by his parents and never managed to grow any emotional calluses or developed the ability to handle stress. There were two school officials, who bought the father’s victim story hook line and sinker, who then proceeded to punch me in the face repeatedly albeit figuratively about how much we failed at being the kid’s agents and legal guardians. There is the host family of the kid, who don’t believe the kid is suicidal and who are hounding me to prove the kid is suicidal and is deserving of another chance as a result and also to fix the kid, now now now.

…that’s just the short version. I don’t even know how coherent that paragraph is for someone who didn’t live last week with me. But a long version doesn’t belong on this blog. Perhaps another blog, at another time, at another place.

Today boss-man and boss-lady implied that I might get canned. Despite the outrage, I almost believe that might be the best thing for my writing right now.

Despite all that, I got 3k+ words last week.

This week, I’m going to set the goal at 1k/day again and see how it goes.  Hopefully things will calm down enough (or I’ll get fired) and I can blog a bit about the phoenix books and why I changed it so radically from the original version.

I made my goal of 500/day for the last week.

Today is Monday and I’m already behind on my 1k/week goal for this week. As in 1,000 words behind. No matter, the week is young and I have plenty of time to catch up.

Ultimately, to a certain extent, it boils down to time management and choices made. I will be away from home for the next three days, so it’s going to be a bit of a struggle to find the determination to continue my routine in a different place.

I liken it to my goal to lose 50 pounds by this time next year. The calorie counting is tedious and can often be frustrating when I can’t see the results — sort of like writing, where you build step by painful step at times, only to delete it all in a fit of pique because the writing went somehow awry. But you can only continue, even when you cannot see the point of the pain, because the alternative is unthinkable.

So, that 1k/ day. And the 1.3k cal limit per day. And the 30 min of exercise that I should really try to work in despite the evil day job kicking my caboose. And my goal to actually do something with my blog. And the reminder to tweet something useful or interesting or promotional  or anything, really.

If I manage all that, maybe I’ll reward myself with a 800 calorie triple chocolate meltdown this weekend.

I’ll try to post some sort of plan for my blog tomorrow. Or later this week, if we’re being honest.