Royal Run Around

Education is an absolutely wonderful thing. Don't get me wrong - I believe everyone needs to continue their education long beyond the end of High School. I also believe you don't really have a choice - if you don't learn from life alone, you aren't LIVING life. However, colleges, while absolutely wonderful institutions of higher learning, are a bit wrapped up in red tape and hoops. Here's the fun issue I've been dealing with the last few weeks and why I've been so quiet lately.

I'm two classes away from my Anthropology AA, according to the RSCCD (Rancho Santiago Community College District) standards. Those classes are Anthropology 103: Archaeology, and Anthropology 104: Language & Culture. If I could, I'd take them both, in one Semester, and be done. Here's the issue - in the last 3 years, the colleges haven't OFFERED these two classes. Due to financial aid rules, I can't attend any more classes except the ones required for my degree, and still get financial aid. And I need the financial aid in order to afford the books for the classes, therefore I haven't been able to attend any classes for the last two semesters. This isn't a problem except for the fact that they marked me as a "non-attending/abandoned student", even though I was in contact with my advisor more than once throughout the last few semesters. Therefore I was unable to register for the class this semester when it was finally offered. I had to reapply to the college system, wait for that approval. By the time they let me back into the system, the class was full. There was no waitlist. So I figured, fine. I'm not letting them stop me. I'll leap through this hoop, and go in on the first day of class and talk to the teacher and petition to enter the class.

This morning was the very first class. I got up early, and Lona drove me up there so I could talk to the teacher before everything started. We got there an hour before the class started, and I went to find the classroom. I was shocked to find it full of people. I managed to get to the teacher, and was told that roll had already been taken and all 45 people who'd signed up for the class were present, and as I knew, there was no waitlist. I explained to the teacher my situation, and after some thought, I was sent to Admissions to ask if they had any suggestions, because there was no way the teacher could allow me into the class. Apologetic or not, it still meant I had no class.

I went to admissions. What it comes down to is that because the inability for me to get into the class on time was their fault, and that the school hasn't offered the classes in so long, I have a chance to petition or challenge the school to just GIVE me my A.A., without actually taking those last two classes. The catch? I have to wait until next semester to do it because in order for the challenge to go through, the school can't currently be offering the classes I need. If they ARE offering, I have a chance to get in again.

Another catch? This is all assuming I still live here by next semester. See, Lona and I have finally decided on an area. We're moving up to Washington, the Seattle area to be specific. So when I got home today, I emailed the South Seattle Community College to see what they could do to help me if we move up there before the next semester (that's more of a when than an if at this point, though). I got a response that they were very encouraging. It looked like, according to my unofficial transcript, I've already satisfied their requirements for an A.S. of Anthropology. She couldn't tell me anything officially without me applying to and being accepted to the college and providing them with an OFFICIAL transcript from RSCCD, but what it looks like is that we move up there, I apply, I get accepted, they take my transcript, and I get a letter in a month that says "Hey, you've already fulfilled our requirements for an Associate's degree." Basically, I'll end up graduating from a college that I never actually physically attended. So while this is an amusing outcome, the hoops I've had to jump through to get to this precipice are very frustrating - and I still have to jump off the ledge and hope I can fly.

So that's why I've been so quiet lately, and now you know what's going on in my school life. :P Yes. Hoop jumping abounds. So I maintain, college and education are wonderful things. But sometimes I just get really tired of this royal run around.

Blog Fail

I need to be actually writing blogs more. It's not that I have no idea what to blog about - it's the opposite, actually. I keep having great ideas, not being in a place where I can start blogging about them right that instant, and when I get home I've either forgotten entirely or the meat of the post idea is just gone.  This has resulted in me only doing little stupid link blogs in the last month, and I feel horrible about it. So here's my attempt to throw an update blog with some actual meat to it.

So, let's go into some personal updates! For the first time in several years, I have short hair! I need to take some new pics for Facebook and stuff. It isn't overly-short. Just a little less than shoulder length in back, and I have my bangs again. Lona and I went and got our haircuts at the same time, so that was nice. I've gotten back into going to the library and picking out regular books rather than just doing the ebook thing through the digital library because, well, let's face it - unless something drastic changes soon, the e-libraries will never have the full selection of the physical ones. And sometimes it is nice to just hold a real book in your hands.

I've been trying to find time to work on my own books again. So far I've been only moderately successful, as my writing muse is a fickle thing and at the moment we seem to be having a lover's spat. Much like my talent for blog writing, it seems to only be showing up when I'm actually incapable of acting on it - utterly frustrating.  My artwork is the same, though I'm having a bit more luck with that and getting old owed commissions out. I am open for commissions again, as well as having my <a title="SALE! $5 Therian Icons!" href="http://www.tygerwolfe.com/?page_id=863">$5 Therian Icon Sale</a> still going on.

In gaming news, the release for World Of Warcraft: Mists Of Pandaria is a month and a week away as of today. I'm excited, and also looking forward to the patch next week, even though it'll completely change the talent system, the glyph system, and quite a few stats as well. I haven't been playing much with the exception of doing Argent Tournament dailies on Kalitri and earning more mounts, looking forward to when they go account wide, and sometimes bumming around on Ionaria, my troll druid. I've been playing a bit more of Zynga games, mostly on their site, though I play on Facebook from time to time as well. And I've gotten into an Android game on my phone called Dark Summoner that's a bit like a cross between Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh. I'm enjoying that.

Lona and I are currently car-less, having sold the Jeep when costs of keeping it running outweighed it's usefulness in a massive way. I was very sad to see it go, but it really was for the best. We're still looking into moving, though now our sights are set a bit higher than the around-the-corner apartments we'd been looking at. I hesitate to say more for risk of accidentally putting a universal kibosh on it, so just send us good thoughts and we'll be on our way eventually.

I think that's about it as far as personal updates go for now. No, this wasn't a particularly massive update, and it did draw my attention to the fact that I need to trim my fingernails, as my fingers keep typing the key above the key I want to type. So I'm going to do that soon.

Storyteller's Howl: Blank Page Syndrome (BPS)

Writers, have you ever stared at a blank document file, or a blank pad of paper, and felt your mind seem to sink into  the blankness of the page? Have you ever felt that you were personally becoming one with the nothingness of the virgin writing surface beckoning you to fill it with prose? If you have, then you're experiencing something I call BPS - Blank Page Syndrome. And there is help for you!

It's a horrible thing, to be unable to write when you want to. You have the drive, the inspiration, but you're lacking something that will make you actually start typing or get your pen moving. The page might as well be made of molasses, for all the good trying to type on it will do for you. So you tab away, go on the internet, try and distract yourself from that looming blank page in the background. But every time you go back to it and think now, NOW is the time for you to put pen to paper, you find yourself stuck yet again.

What causes this? This isn't a lack of inspiration or a drive to write. This isn't writer's block. You KNOW what you want to write, but you just can't seem to make it come out. You have the drive but seem to have lost the ability.

Now, I started this by saying that there's help, and there is. My personal method relies on the fact that I know how to touch-type. STOP staring at the blank screen. Close your eyes, take yourself to the beginning of your story - and honestly, just start typing. (It's important to make sure that your fingers were on the home keys before closing your eyes. I've made THAT mistake before.)

After you've written a few paragraphs or even sentences, open your eyes and look at what you wrote. The page isn't blank anymore! And suddenly what seemed insurmountable a few moments earlier is now a story that's gotten rolling, and you can just keep going as long as inspiration maintains.

I've actually done this for school papers as well as personal fiction, and even the occasional blog post. Breaking that blank page is the first step to creating something amazing. If you have other ways of getting past BPS, please share in comments!

Two Years...

(For ease of reference, "mom" and "dad" referred to in this posting are Lona's biological parents.)

Today is the two year anniversary of dad's death.

I read back over all the posts I made over the last two years about mourning and his illness and everything. One line stuck out at me. I wrote in an earlier post, "A year from now, this house won't even be recognizable." It took two years, but that's happened. With this latest rearranging of the house, the conversion of the former living/dining room into a full time office with five desks, the den (dad's former office, and after that Kata's for awhile) into the living room, and me and Lona taking the bed that used to belong to mom and dad and moving into the front bedroom - what was formerly Lona and Claudia's office while the rest of us already were in the living room.

If dad were to walk around this house physically today, it would drive him nuts. He wouldn't know where anything is, and there are a couple of places were egress (one of his big things) is severely limited.  My thoughts have been drifting to him more and more as we've come up on this anniversary, and earlier today the only way I could stop reliving that day two years ago was to allow one of my bonds to be in control while I was out with Lona. But that only stopped the grief from weighing down my body - my mind is still swimming.

In this new configuration, physically, I'm actually the closest to dad. His urn is in the breakfront directly behind me, with the urns of Squeak, Flake, and AJ, our kitties that have likewise passed on. But one thing that hasn't changed over the two years is that my feeling of safety and that he's still somewhere in the house hasn't gone away.

A couple of weeks ago, Lona put a kleenex down on an empty part of her desk. She left her desk. She came back. She moved the kleenex - and underneath it was a pen with the Marriot hotels logo on it. It hadn't been there before. In fact, we hadn't SEEN any of the Marriot pens for a long time before this happened. Dad used to work at a Marriot, years before I met him, you see...and he brought home quite a few of their pens in the years his band played there. It's little things like that, that let us know that dad's still around and wants us to KNOW he still is. It's odd things like that, that make me feel safe still.

It is true, I suppose, that time heals all wounds. This year has been thankfully free of "a year ago, dad....", which haunted me for the first year after he died. Knowing we've now been through two years without him and we're all still here, and we're all still ok, does make things a bit easier. But I still laid awake last night at 2am, remembering dad saying he couldn't breathe...Mom knocking on our bedroom door and saying she was calling an ambulance...The ride to the hospital, the interminable waiting...Dad's shallow snoring....and the presence of Death, which still makes my heart constrict and my blood chill when I think of it.

The days and weeks following are a blur now. Reading over my past journals I was surprised how much I'd written about then that I didn't remember now. I'd forgotten that when dad's urn first came home, he sat on the dining table for three days, and I did my homework and ate with him. I remembered that I'd been the one to put him into the breakfront, though. Still, that night keeps coming back in horrible clarity today...and I just can't shake the sadness.

I cried this morning over something stupid. And it wasn't the tears stinging my eyes feeling that I get sometimes and shrug off...I had trouble fighting this off without sobbing aloud. And I realized as I was doing it that it wasn't just about what had happened - it was a grief release as well. Two years later, and while I can identify and tell you about how I've gone through all the stages of mourning, I can also tell you that just because you've reached acceptance doesn't mean you won't still cry.

I miss you, dad. I'll probably always miss you. Thanks for sticking around.

I am Annoyed - at my own Eye...

But let me explain.

A few years ago, I had an eye infection in my right eye. It was, to say the least, disturbing. It resulted in that eye being closed a lot of the time, and me having to put drops in it (I don't like eye drops at the BEST of times), and I came out of it with what my optometrist says is permenant scarring on my cornea.

The result of this is that sometimes my eye works just fine, but other times...like when it's hot, or when I slept oddly the night before, or when venus and mars decide they don't like me, or whatever...I'll wake up and put my glasses on only to notice that I feel...lopsided.

The first time I noticed the lopsidedness, I thought I'd somehow lost the lense out of the right side of my glasses. The difference in my vision is that stark. There's almost no difference between how I see the world through my right eye without my glasses, and how it looks with my glasses on when I'm having what I've come to think of as a "blur attack." A quick tap of my finger proved that the glass was still there and hadn't somehow leaped from my frames (inside their glasses case) in the middle of the night. So the next thing I did was go in the bathroom and wash out my eye (another thing I strongly dislike doing - the pattern here is that I don't like things touching my eyes, thank you very much), which would usually fix this for awhile when I was in the worst part of the eye infection.

Washed my eye out, put my glasses back on...nope, still looked as if I didn't have a lense on the right side. I took the glasses off and leaned in close to the mirror to try and see if there was something in my eye....Nope, nothing. No visible evidence of why it was blurry.

I thought it might clear up, so I worked around it for a day or so. The down sides of this quickly became apparent. It started with a dull throbbing centered behind my right eye that eventually evolved into the feeling like my eye socket was rocking out to some rave I couldn't hear. I needed to be able to keep working, so I did what most people in my situation would do - I closed the eye, kept it closed, and continued working with just my left eye.

The headache eventually faded to a dull throb, then left entirely with the addition of some pain medication. However, every time I opened my eye, it was still blurry. So I closed it again. This was the beginning of several months in which I would keep my eye open as long as I could stand it every day, and then close it. Some days were worse than others. Then, one morning, just as suddenly as I'd woken up with the blurriness in the first place, it was just gone. I still have no idea what happened. But I could see normally, and there was no more headache. I was thrilled.

Until I noticed that my right eye seemed to have developed a mind of it's own in all that time it was closed.

All that time when I wasn't using my eye, it got lazy. Literally. I'd be working, both eyes open, and suddenly notice that everything in my vision had gone weird - my right eye was crossed, my left eye was still focused on what I was doing. Or sometimes I'd become aware that my eye had drifted off to the right somewhere, and it took a lot of work for me to focus the right eye back where it was supposed to be.

Genetically, I'm prone to lazy eye. My dad had to have surgery for it before I was born - and as I mentioned earlier, I hate the idea of anything going in my eye. I sure was NOT going to be happy if I had to have SURGERY on my EYE. So I began the painful process of forcing my eye to focus properly again. I had to monitor it very closely. And for quite a few weeks, I would keep getting eyestrain headaches after I'd been up for about five or six hours. Dull ache behind my eye as I worked muscles that had been allowed to atrophy over the previous months - nothing like the pounding rave that the blurriness had caused. I delt with it, though - like you do when retraining any muscle that's lost functionality for whatever reason. Eventually, the headaches stopped, and my eyes behaved normally and worked together like they were supposed to.

A few months later, I woke up with a blurry right eye again. This time it was gone in a few days. The next time it came back, it didn't even last a whole day - the next time it took a week or so to return to normal. It became clear that this blurriness thing was an intermittent problem that I would probably be dealing with for the rest of my life - a result of the scars on my cornea from the infection, perhaps. Annoying, but I'd learned how to deal with it, right? Just close my eye until it goes away.

The first time the blurriness lasted more than a couple of days, though, I started to recognize the subtle tug of my closed eye - it was trying to drift again. I forced it to move with my other eye - but without the eye open to be sure I was focusing on the same place as my left eye, I couldn't be sure I was keeping it trained properly. So, once again, I started keeping the eye open and trying to work through the blurriness. This resulted in my old friend, the pounding rave, having a return engagement in my eye socket by the third day. Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow...

But then, eventually, I would wake up and the blurriness would be gone again. It was a constant cycle. Recently, I've gone the longest I've GONE since this started happening without a blur attack. Several months, actually most of this year. The last attack I remember was in late January, so it's been almost six months.

Which brings me to the reason for my annoyance and this post today. See, I woke up this morning to a blur attack - one of the worst since the actual eye infection. I tried closing my eye, but it's been so long since I've schooled my eye muscles that I felt my eye start drifting almost immediately. So I snapped it back open again. I need my depth perception. I need my eyes. I can't work on art, I'm having a lot of trouble reading and writing (primary focuses of my JOB), and even looking at my computer screen for something like WoW on my lunch break gets painful quickly.

I can already feel the beginnings of the rave starting up around my eye, and this is only the first day of the attack. I hope it's the last, but for right now I'm stuck in the absurd position of being very annoyed and angry at my own eye. Yes, I understand, you had an infection. Yes, I know you carry scars - I have scars all over my body from various things. You are part of me, eye. Deal with it. Deal with it without having a freaking "oontz-oontz-oontz" RAVE in my EYE SOCKET.

I feel like an old guy telling annoying kids to get off my lawn, except that I'm talking to a piece of my own anatomy. That's all. Just needed to vent about that...Now I have to go take some pain medication and try to get through the rest of the work day without banging into walls from lack of depth perception and/or snapping at people because my head feels like there's a frat party going on in my eye.

Quiet down in there!