you'll always be a stranger in a strange, strange land

[walkingshadow]

being an ordered list of some of the things i have been doing since last i posted to livejournal, though the items in the list are themselves in no particular order:

1. so after a long and drawn-out agony of angst and overthinking, i got my statement of purpose written and my letters of recommendation all in a row, and i submitted my application, on-time and everything. this was back in the middle of january already, and until or unless i hear shockingly good news two months from now, we will never speak of this again. well, possibly i will speak of it with my therapist, but until then it's avoidance and denial all the way!



2. . . . i'm seeing a therapist. it's very stressful. HA HA HA. at least i showed up a second time for this one, which in itself makes this a more successful outing than my first aborted attempt a few years ago. i like her; we're still in the getting-to-know-you phase, where each session is a lovely continuing enumeration of all the ways i am twisted up inside. sometimes i list my OCD rituals and she draws my family tree and i feel like, "hey! i am articulating things well and we are really getting somewhere!" and i go back to work humming and happy; some days i end up crying through the entire hour, and i'm wrecked for the rest of the day, dazed and brittle and headachey. she's suggested medication to supplement our little chats, but it involves picking up the phone. so far therapy has involved zero telephones, and that's been a big part of the appeal, i won't lie.



3. injury update: last week my heel slid out from under me and i went sprawling on my belly on the file room floor. i got tangled up between my bag and my coat when i tried to break my fall and ended up wrenching my left shoulder; also feeling like an idiot. \o/



4. a while ago i started teaching myself how to type using the dvorak simplified keyboard layout because it sounded geeky and cool, and though i was already a pretty competent typist, i was lured by the prospect of typing at preternatural speeds. or, as kansas put it, "you were bored, so to challenge yourself you decided to switch all the letters around on your keyboard?" essentially, yes. i've gotten pretty fast, but i'm much more inclined to make mistakes, especially a bunch of mistakes all in a row trying for a single key—sometimes i've just forgotten where the damn letter IS, and sometimes i reach for where the key word be in the QWERTY layout, but the latter happens very seldom now; there was a really interesting transition period at the beginning, where i'd assimilated half the dvorak layout and was trying to type with some amalgam of the two; that was pretty slow going.
   
   what i'll do more often these days is reach for the key that's in the same place as the one i want, but in the opposite direction (i.e. up from the home row instead of down, or vice-versa), or on the opposite side of the keyboard (i.e. with my right hand instead of my left, or vice-versa)—sometimes BOTH—and it makes me wildly curious as to what is actually going on inside my little brain. in the meantime, i've installed the addictive typing lessons extension in firefox, which i recommend for anyone who's learning to improve their typing skills in any layout.
   
   BONUS: typing with dvorak adds an unintended layer of security, in that any password you choose will essentially be gibberish on input to anyone who doesn't know dvorak. you know, for those times when you worry that you're just not quite paranoid enough.



5. my brother implemented scanning for the database around the beginning of january, which at first meant i had three times as much work to deal with, but now that we've phased out hard copies of the mail, i have a fraction of the work to do, and our new world order is truly a beautiful regime to live under, as regimes go. granted, i'm still swimming in paper, but i hack through the piles to find a little more counter space every day, and in the future the file room will hopefully be a well-oiled bastion of minimalist efficiency. i mean, i have no control over the actual lawyering that goes on, but at least our trains will run on time.



6. over christmas and the new year, silentfire FINALLY pimped me into supernatural. HI, GUYS. everything's so shiny here! and yeah, at first it was pure candy—i mean, sugar-rush, rot-your-teeth, spoil-your-appetite, zero-nutritional-value, convenience-store-road-trip-snack-food, checkout-line-impulse-buy BRAIN CANDY, with that one guy who is really, really, ridiculously good-looking, and that one guy who is really, really, RIDICULOUSLY tall, and that one guy who is jeffrey dean morgan—and that would have been enough for me! but it turns out that IN ADDITION to being 100% emotional pornography with a rockin' soundtrack and a hot car, it can be actual quality television, with continuity and plots and mad acting skillz and character development! it's terrifically exciting. and PRETTY.
   
   . . . and of COURSE i'm also eating up the RPS. together the fandoms are like the post-halloween ten-bags-for-the-price-of-one CANDY SUPER-SALE, where you take home roughly your bodyweight in fun-size snickers figuring it'll last you into the next decade at least, when in reality you're ready to stock up again by the weekend. mmmm, candy.



7. my favorite thing in life is the new lj feature that allows you to add friends by hovering over their userpic or userinfo icon and clicking "add friend" instead of it taking eight clicks and four pages and then being asked if i want to read my updated friendslist instead of returning me to whatever page i was on before, because that was like stepping off the trail and wandering lost in the woods with no water and no compass and no cell phone reception, until night fell and the wolves ate me. hikers stumbled over my bones years later; the closure was important for my family. the new method is AWESOME and i have been randomly friending people all over the place, in torchwood and supernatural and just in general. if you are one of those people, hello! i think you're keen, but i probably haven't told you that; see [b], above. but i'm just shy—not antisocial (you can talk to me!)™



8. and if you've read this far—or if you've skimmed over the cut tags and skipped to the end to see how it all turns out—perhaps you are a person who would be interested in playing the questions meme! ask me some questions about anything at all, and i will answer them.

Comments

[claire.livejournal.com]

The boything types in Dvorak and he's really fast. He loves to turn our server onto the Dvorak layout and then laugh hysterically at me when i try to type anything ;)

[walkingshadow.livejournal.com]

that gets my brother every time he goes to use my laptop! it never gets old. of course, the reverse is true when i have to use any one else's computer these days; luckily for me, the letters are written right there on the keys—i'm still conceptualizing what it would mean to be fluent in both at the same time (mostly it makes my head hurt).

[tenebris.livejournal.com]

You're into Supernatural? YAY! For some reason, I had you down as a watcher already, so I'm really glad you got pimped into it. It is VERY shiny. And both boys are, really, ridiculously good looking. (points for a quite appropriate Zoolander quote there.) And yes, there is Jeffrey Dean Morgan. (for whom I watch a five second clip like, four times last week. What can I say? It's DADDY.)

[walkingshadow.livejournal.com]

i can see how you would have come to that conclusion, seeing as how three-quarters of my flist have fallen like dominoes over the past year and a half, and i've had an icon for a while, and i've watched the odd vid and i'd read a couple of strongly-recced stories on a whim, but no! in fact, i tried out an episode of it last year (http://walkingshadow.livejournal.com/231551.html#cutid8), but it didn't take. but i was ready this time! and i am VERY HAPPY to be here. :D

(RIDICULOUSLY good looking. god bless the CW. and if you don't love jeffrey dean morgan? honestly, jed, i don't even wanna know you.)

[leksa.livejournal.com]

re: h.

1. If you had to choose between being a delicate flower, FOREVER, or John Wayne, FOREVER, which would you choose?
2. If Torchwood and Supernatural got it on, who would be on top?
3. What do you look forward to (apart from things related to your point a.)?
4. What kind of whether are you having over there? Why is it so goddamn cold over here?
5. Which song is like you?
6. Are 1-5 appropriate questions? What should I have asked you instead?

[walkingshadow.livejournal.com]

6. if by "appropriate" you mean "awesome," then i would say, yes. yes, they are. look for the answers in a post coming soon to this livejournal (these answers have not been rated).