bazolomew

It's been a while again.

I moved from that terrible place in Casmalia sooner than I thought I would thanks to my landlady letting me know 4 days before her final day that she (ergo "we") was (were) getting evicted. She also didn't have enough money to pay me back the $400 security deposit, nor the pro-rated rest of the month money that I was losing out on. If my mother hadn't been able to put a quick couple hundred in my account I seriously would have been homeless. I'm looking into either pressing charges or suing her to get the money back, but I learned I can't sue her without her address and all I know is that she's living at her mother's house. And I don't know her maiden name.

Since then, I moved into the place where a co-worker and friend lives with no problems at all. She was a life saver in asking her landlord if I could live there. This place is so much better based on the people who live here as well as the room. I have a queen sized bed for the first time ever! It's also a really nice house in a very nice neighbourhood. The only downside is my cats have to stay in my bedroom with me, but it's a fairly large room so they're doing fine.

Pride and Prejudice build went really well, and I've recently been on a turning kick. Our Master Carpenter tried to raise shop morale (which had been down in the shit hole thanks to a series of dumb decisions from above for 2 weeks) by teaching us how to use the lathe. So far I'm the only one who is really truly into it. I've made 2 bowls and a goblet so far and I'm planning on making more whenever I have the chance. I love turning so much... it's fun and addictive. I'm not looking forward to the time when I leave and am forced away from Bart, his incredible knowledge, and his awesome tools.

At the beginning of April we went hiking at this place off the CA 154 called "The Playground". It's really just a wide open area full of rock formations and boulders. We essentially were bouldering the entire time. Even though the weather was pretty terrible, it was absolutely fantastic. My sense of direction prevailed and we went through rocks for a time, then decided to go back a different route and got ourselves deep into a lush bushy foresty area and had to climb ourselves out and back up to where we began. It was all about teamwork and so much fun.

The other thing I've done this month was have a mini-vacation down in Long Beach. We went to a Gay Bar (the first time I ever have) and I felt so much at home. I think I've decided, in a way, what I'm looking for in a relationship, and was pleased to see that it might even be possible. I've come to accept that I have had significant gender dysphoria my entire life and it has deeply affected me and how I live. Society has been forcing me to put labels on myself, which I try to resist and hate, but last year I felt like the closest way to describe me is as a gay man in a woman's body. That's not entirely accurate, as I am attracted to women as well, but it's the closest to what I truly desire in a relationship. I've also come to realize that almost all men are not looking for that sort of relationship with a biological woman, which is why all my heterosexual relationships have been disastrous. Thus, I think I've decided that my ideal person is another woman with at least a certain amount of gender dysphoria of her own. That way we can be men when we want to be and women when we don't and be relatively on the same page. (Which is, incidentally, why I've always been drawn to people I meet through fandom. When I'm roleplaying a male character with another male character, that's essentially what I want to be able to do all the time in real life as well, thus why I repeatedly attempt to turn roleplaying relationships into RL ones. Not that I'm judging that, though. Some of my best and most honest-to-myself moments have been in those type of relationships. I just wish I could meet someone who isn't already married, lol!)

I've been doing a bit of thinking over the past couple months, if you couldn't tell.

Anyway, I'm about to go to the Doctor to have the whole shit ton of bug bites I've somehow acquired looked at, but I may post more later. I'm sorry I'm so wishy-washy on posting.

Still no news on the housing front. The two places I emailed from craigslist haven't gotten back to me. :(

Yesterday I played WoW for about 13 hours, increasing my iLvl from about 320 to 339 in one day. Not half bad, if I do say so myself. Unfortunately now I'm stuck in that point of having shitty gear in heroics, with the only way to get better gear by doing heroics. Thus, I lose groups faster than dead skin cells cuz I can't heal all that great with this shitty shitty gear. And I hate healing 5 mans anyway. I've been tempted to just queue as Shadow, but I did one like that last night and my DPS sucks as well. Basically, I'm already depressed about WoW because I suck and my friends are never on when I am.

I've been having fun through the TARDIS RPG, though I changed characters. I'm now playing Post-Utopia Jack Harkness, currently chained in the bottom of the Valiant. My Jack!Muse is being hyperactive, however, as I had to check myself during work last week when I realized I was making far too many inappropriate jokes. Ah well. My co-workers (and even bosses) are really cool about that type of stuff. We even have a running joke about "Sexual Harassment Friday" where inappropriate jokes are allowed on Fridays... and if they're made during the week you just have to say "Oh, oops, it's not Friday, is it?" and that pretty much makes it okay. I love my workplace sometimes.

I'm re-working my portfolio slowly, but next weekend is the So-Cal USITT job fair, so I need it done by then. I don't have any worries about that though, especially since I have tomorrow off as well thanks to MLK day.

I watched the 2005 version of The Producers yesterday, and mostly liked it. It was odd seeing Will Farrell in a movie that wasn't a Will Farrell movie, but he wasn't completely off-putting. The best part, though, was definitely a bleach blond John Barrowman singing Springtime For Hitler. That made me laugh so hard. I love that man.

I've also been reading everything on the Torchwood_Kinkandseek list for impact play. It's an AMAZING list of as many spanking Torchwood pieces as they could find. It hasn't been updated since November, 2010, but it's still amazing. The link for the list is here.

Other than Branwen Blaidd's stuff, which is always amazing, the one I just read yesterday was a piece called "Green" by wired_lizard. It is SO HOT.

So I'm back home again in CA. The flight wasn't completely terrible, but the drive back was ridiculous. It took me 5 hours to drive from LAX to Carpinteria, which should normally take 90 minutes. I was in traffic that wavered between stopped completely and 3 miles per hour the ENTIRE way between Oxnard and Carpinteria. I ended up renting a motel room there and spending the night because I was going to pieces in my car.

Since I've been home, I've been enjoying myself by roleplaying as Ten II (John Noble) in a InsaneJournal based Doctor Who RPG (at least until it went down yesterday...) and playing WoW. I also met up in person with a woman I met through a website yesterday and we spent the whole afternoon together. It was fantastic. I hope to see her again. (Unfortunately she's not looking for a LTR, as well as being quite a bit older than me, but I figure I'm moving away in August so us just spending innocent time together now is probably better for both of us.)

I still have a list of things to do before I go back to work Monday, which I'm also really NOT looking forward to, but I'm procrastinating. Meh. It's only Wednesday.

( Icon Meme )

So I've not been away from LJ, really... I just haven't been posting.

Mostly because I'm tired and don't really want to update. And probably partly because I'm a little depressed in general, thus lacking motivation.

I'm still in my Doctor Who phase and the story I was writing is now several parts over 25k words total. I didn't exactly make NaNo, but for me that's damn good. Unfortunately I also haven't finished the first long story and probably won't for a while. See: Depression/Motivation issues above.

I'm also almost finished with my portfolio that is due on December 20th, but going for a trial run this weekend (!) at a Film and Television Expo in LA. A group of us are going down and attempting to network. We'll see how that goes.

Work is going ok. After two weeks of literally nothing to do, we're now swamped. >.< Poor poor planning due to bosses and designers.

Also, my landlady has decided she likes having me live here and is not requiring me to move. There is another girl interested in the other room, but no word on if she's planning on accepting it or not. We'll see.

Basically I'm depressed because I'm homesick and starting to worry about being jobless next August. Which is silly... there's nothing I can do about that right now anyway. Everyone is hiring for the summer season right now, which I already have a job for. But it's still a stress in the back of my mind. This is one major downside of my field... you never have constant work. I'm only starting to realize just how much of a stress bucket that is. ("Stress bucket" is now my new term. Spellcheck didn't like "Stressor" so I was forced to come up with something new.)

Yeah. Sorry I'm so down in all my posts. It's that time of the season, I guess.

I resolve to post good things next time.

Oh, one good thing right now. Thanks to This Karen Gillan picspam I am now doubly in love with that woman. I have never crushed on anyone younger than me before. It's a little weird for me. But she is GORGEOUS. Unf.

Tech week blows. It's not even real tech week... this week is the week they're teching the flying choreography and such with all the hoists, harnessess and other such stuff. Next week is real tech week.

I'll probably describe this week in more detail later, but I'm on day 13 of 14 days working in a row, and most of the past 5 days were 12 hours or more. I also have to work tomorrow, then I might get Sunday, depending, then I get to work all next week as well.

Tech blows.

Also, my roommate told me yesterday that she's moving out tomorrow. I guess I'm getting my wish of living alone. LOL. I don't think she's even told our landlady. I'm not mentioning it until she comes to pick up the rent check on Monday.

And I drempt last night that the 10th Doctor was accidentally merged with my body somehow, so I started wearing his suit (!) and managed to save a bunch of people from certain death. After I saved them, the power of my goodwill was enough to release the Doctor from inside my conciousness. As thanks for being a good person while he was trapped inside my brain, he leaned over and kissed me. My evil cock-blocking subconscious finally allowed me a kiss, with David Tennant no less. It was so vivid, I even remember the softness of his lips upon my own.

Then he got in the Tardis and disappeared, leaving me on the sidewalk with an exciting adventure that no one would ever believe, al la Sally Sparrow... but oh well. I got a kiss. Sometimes I do actually like my dreams.

In other news, stolen from insaneboingo.

List 20 things that you are, starting with "I am a ...".
Do not leave out the "a" or "an" in your statements.

( I am a very tired theatre technician. )

My lovely cats woke me up at 4:30am this morning and for some reason I can't get back to sleep. So, instead I watched part 2 of Single Father and am now in a funny mood.

( Single Father talk with some spoilers )

Edit: I forgot the other thing I wanted to mention. That self-indulgent fic I was talking about last time? It's up to around 7,500 words. 17 pages in MSWord. This is officially the longest thing I've ever written, and I'm not even halfway through yet. It's so strange to me as well, because I'm just letting it flow. I have everything worked out (more or less) in my head and am just writing it all down as if I'm dictating. I've never written like this before and I think it's because I've never LET myself. Either way, I'm very pleased with how it's going.

In other news, I looked into getting a work visa for the UK and learned that I'm probably not going to qualify. It's a point-based system that you have to answer questions for, and I only made 80 points. Granted I didn't fill in the question about the money I've earned in the past 15 months, but that's because technically, according to my government, I've really only made about $2000. The rest is in a non-taxable scholarship form... which I don't think counts. I haven't added it up, yet anyway. Also, they require a sum of about $5000 to be in my bank account for a period of no less than 3 months and not dropping below that amount. Which I don't have... though I could potentially dodge that hurdle with my mom's help. She said she'd be willing to help with that, anyway.

This is seriously depressing me though, because if I don't qualify, I don't go. While it's not a firm block right now, it's enough to make me realize that I need to start thinking about other things as well, instead of only planning for this. But I'd really sorta placed a lot of hope on this move, it feels like now is the right time, and being denied of completing a life-long dream only because of the concept of money is very sad. The thought of staying in theatre in America is so less appealing now... especially because it doesn't feel like it would be nearly as big of an adventure.

I even looked into the fact that I have English blood in my heritage to see if I could qualify for something different like that, but that only counts if it's a parent or grandparent. I guess John Alden of the Mayflower is a bit too far back, huh.

So my last post was a downer and I never posted the upper that happened after it. It wasn't an actual event or anything, just an attitude shift.

I realized that the reason it was feeling like high school was because I was acting like high school. Instead of approaching him with interest, I was being shy and stupid in the distance. I learned once again that I have to pursue what I want, instead of sitting around and being disappointed that it never happens.

I don't really know why I reverted to that mentality again after a year of being proactive, but I've learned my lesson at least. Instead of being disappointed and grumpy about this co-worker, I've started up a really good friendship with him instead, which I'm really happy about.

Work has been going better. I've been told I actually make more than the other interns... it's just weird with how they do checks. I don't know whether I completely believe them, but I'm holding onto the idea so I don't get angry again. I've also finally been given a scenery project instead of random things so I'm incredibly happy to be finally building something that matters. Plus we finally got music in the shop!!

And I've managed to get both my roommates deep into Leverage with me. I'm enjoying every moment of that, and they're watching Buffy and Angel for the first time, so I get to enjoy rewatching those too.

Things have basically just been going better... though my money has gone for the month, which explains all the ads on my journal. Oh well. Next month I get two checks in the space of one week which will help me quite a bit. :)

Stupid cats woke me up at 3:30am for food and I can't get back to sleep.

Played Dragon Age for the first time in a while yesterday, which renewed my love for it a bit. I beat it with my Evil!Dwarf and got to finally read what terrible things I had caused the world in the epilogue. It only covered my choices and Morrigan, as I killed/ignored everyone else. I was surprised to see Dog at the coronation, as I never saved him in Ostagar and assumed he had died. My favorite epilogues were the Werewolves and Redcliffe (or Deadcliffe, I should say :P), followed with my end story. I loved the idea of my surly angry evil!dwarf becoming a Paragon. I killed half the surface world!

I also read a couple of amazing Dragon Age fanfics on fanfiction.net (!). One is an AU what-if if Ostagar had succeeded. It's only starting but promises to be interesting. The other was a detail fill for the end-game between F!Tabris and Alastair and completely heartbreaking. You can find them and one more Here.

I managed to attend most of Polycon in SLO and met a bunch of people. I played Apples to Apples and Gloom Friday night, followed with a California Version of Are You A Werewolf. In Ohio, we would do multiple games of 8-10 people. In CA, they do ONE game of 40-50 people. It was intense, fantastic, and hilarious. I managed to make it down to the final 7, talked my way out of a lynching, and then we correctly identified the Werewolf and the villagers won.

Saturday the power went out at work so we were sent home before we really began, which allowed me to make it up to SLO in time to play the Serenity:RPG. I was the last to sign up, so I got the final character- Serenity herself. I made the best of it though and had fun. After that I went outside and talked with the SLO chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism. They convinced me to start training with their weapons and in no time I was learning my first combo with a really awesome older man. We couldn't stop laughing, he was great. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to continue with them in lieu of Dagorhir. SLO is only 30-40 minutes away, as opposed to a three hour drive to Los Angeles for 4 hours of Dag, then three hours back. I'm pretty excited to get back on the field, though, even if it's with SCA instead.

After that and the BBQ they provided, I went to a LARP that was really more of an improv televison episode. There was no system, just a GM and a backstory for each character. It went really well and was pretty much what I crave in LARPing anyway. Not much politics, just roleplaying. Our group ended up going kinda evil in the end, releasing something like 100 demons into the world, but it was a blast.

I miss gaming. And my friends. Tried to call my best friend but he was busy with his own gaming and a battle today, making me that much more sad that I'm not there. I'm excited to get into SCA and make new friends but it's still hurting. Does that ever go away?

So my apologies for my extended absence. The past month has been spent doing as much hanging out with my friends as humanly possible in anticipation of my move to Santa Maria, California.

( ZOMG Life Happens )

Well, that's been life. I'm planning on rejoining the interwebs, especially places like charloft once I get too over-socialized, but for now it's going to be an on/off situation. Good night!

Still working in Cleveland on an Overhire basis, thus why I have not been online in some time. Working 50-60 hours a week makes me want to just play Dragon Age for a couple hours before I conk out.

I've also been catching up on my reading. I finished another Drizzt Do'Urden book, Siege of Darkness, and really enjoyed it, as I always do with those books. The only thing that pissed me off were my friends, who ruined the surprise in the Epilogue. The Epilogue mentions a way for the evil demon Errtu hold some sort of power over Drizzt, and my friends hinted at what it was, enough for me to guess with a good amount of confidence that I'm correct. Stupid friends.

Currently I'm reading the Dragon Age novels. I'm about halfway through the first one, The Stolen Throne. Going from R.A. Salvatore to David Gaider was a DRASTIC change, and with 2 typos in the Acknowledgements alone, I was pretty bummed in the beginning. However, the story managed to catch me and even though the level of writing reminds me of a moderate to good level of fanfic, I've actually started really enjoying it.

It's mostly the personalities of the characters. The story is pretty meh so far, but his characters are SO interesting that they keep me reading. King Meric reminds me of Alistair in so many ways (on purpose, I believe) which at first bothered me, but as we progress, it's gotten to the point where I'm just excited to see what he does next. And Loghain, who I HATE, is in the book, but it's interesting because he's managed to walk a fine line of giving backstory that makes me sympathetic, while still doing dick-moves, making me continue to feel justified in hating him.

So yeah, that's what I've been doing and what's keeping me off LJ- work and books. I also have discovered Dagorhir through my friends and though I've only been to one practice, I truly enjoyed the experience and am dying to continue. It mixes my love of fantasy with my desire to exercise and learn combat. The only problem I have with it is that I'm moving to California in May, and the only chapters in the state are 3 hours away from where I'll be... thus making it difficult to continue once I'm out there. I'm kinda bummed about that.

I hope you all are doing well!