The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I’ve recently had inspiration regarding the next poetry project in my head. Basically, I’ve figured out the plot.

It’s going to be tough to write.

The main character is still percolating in my head, but basically, she is going to be dealing with someone close to her transitioning. And then, because I’m fucking lame like that, I throw a few more wrenches into the works, namely “brother” and “lover.” I’ve got their relationship slowly building in my head. Key moments, and some of the key concerns that this character is going to go through. A lot more percolation, and I’ll be ready to start writing.

But goodness, the moment I realized that was what I was going to write this next book about, my stomach dropped out from under me, and I felt ill. I know you can’t see the whole thing from that bit of rambling up there, but give me a little credit: I know this is going to be something worth reading and looking at. I knew it the moment the concept hit my head. This is going to work, this is something I can write, this is something I am interested in, and this is something I have first-hand experience with. It’s doable, and it’s going to be good.
But I’m determined not to write about me, perse. I mean, I could write about my experiences. In fact, I’m sure I will write about them someday. But there’s not anywhere vaguely near enough distance yet to really do that. At the same time, I need to channel this stuff. I need to put my knowledge and understanding of such things to use. It works fairly well when I put pieces of it into short stories. I should use that here, too. I need to use parts of me. It’ll work.
Therefore, I’ve come up with this other character, and this other approach. But even just building this person (I keep calling her Jennifer in my head, so maybe that’ll be her name) makes me attempt to put myself in the other side of what’s happening, and that’s hard. It’s depressing. Though, I will admit, putting my head into the state of any character in the middle of as much turmoil as I envision for this one is going to get me like that. It’s just… really close to home.

I really know how to pick projects.

But, yes, I have a plan. I wouldn’t be surprised if I started to write poems soon for this book.

Apparently I am someone who writes books of poetry now.
Yep.

I mean, seriously.

I am just kind of going crazy with this Research class.
Yes, I’ll get everything done. Yes, I’ll survive and pass it just fine. I’m not going to let it hold me back or anything.

But DAMN. So frustrating.

The core of the frustration stems from the way the majority of the assignments are framed. I have these “research problems” with very, extremely open-ended questions that have extremely specific answers to them. I hate that. I need to find a “reputable source” for this or that, but what does that mean? I could find a reliable source for that information, but goodness, I used Google, so it doesn’t count. It just makes me want to punch something. It is a den of frustration.

Can you tell I’ve been working on this stuff all morning?
I’m frustrated.
Arg. Ugh.

It’s just frustrating because it’s been a long time since I had a class that made me mad. I’d kind of fallen in love with this class stuff. I’d really taken to it. Really clicked with academia, you know? But then this class.
Grrrr.

Okay, I’m done being angry now.
Okay, not completely, but I’m done being angry in my bloeg.

Kingdom of Loathing loves its Librams, but hey, at least it created a fairly new sort of Libram in the Libram of BRICKOs. This lets you summon BRICKO bricks, which you can then use to build various things. Some are equipment, like the BRICKO Pants or BRICKO sword, but most are actually monsters that you build, and then fight without taking a turn. Many of them take many, many BRICKOs to build, and have unique drops.

This really seems like an item for collectors. Granted, having a potential 10 free combats a day for getting stats IS useful, and you can do that with the BRICKO monsters, but you’ll never be able to summon enough bricks to keep yourself in high level monsters for most of a run. No, it seems like the overall goal of the Libram is to be something you spend excess mana on when you already have enough of the other Libram items. You build up a huge, huge collection, and use it to fight the high level monsters with the unique drops, doing things like building the gilded BRICKO chalice, which is basically another facsimile dictionary, only without having to ascend again, which seems like some people would find a use for. Of course, the main draw for most people would be the familiar, the BRICKO chick, which requires a combat with a Gargantuchicken and 6900 bricks to build. That’s a really long term goal. But it’s nice to have long-term goals.

That’s really what this libram is. It’s a bunch of long-term goals that you can slowly work towards with very minimal to no turn consumption. I like this, and I assume that many other players like it too, since it doesn’t mess with their runs like, say, working on the long-term stuff in the empty bottles and whatnot. Also, it seems like, since you need so, so many bricks, that BRICKO bricks will be a decent source of meat, if you just want to pawn them all off. For a few mana a day, you get 3 of an item that sells for 800 or more meat. Seems like a decent tradeoff to me, if you don’t want to jump on the building bandwagon.

Yeah, I like this one. It’s different. Unique. And, like the best IoTMs, it gives you something else to do, to extend the life of the game. That’s the main reason I pick these things up. I want to switch up the experience so that I have more fun. That seems like what this is doing. I’m down with that.

I’m pretty sure, if I write another book of poetry after this one, it’s going to be all Oasis song titles.

Why? Fuck if I know. I mean, I still have a very unclear idea why every poem in Why I Am Here, Even Today is titled after a Presidents of the United States of America song.

But yeah, that’s probably going to happen. I don’t have a good idea for a plot, perse, but I’m sure if I start writing some poems, it’ll slowly form, and then I’ll throw out all those old poems, and write new ones…
You know, maybe I shouldn’t try to mimic my process on the last one and be more efficient.

Anyway, it kind of occurred to me that I feel like Why I Am Here is pretty done in my head. I mean, it’s not. Plenty of revision and stuff to come. And the Deleter could probably use a few more poems. But it FEELS finished. So it’s probably going to be really close to finished. And so my head moves on to other potential projects that I don’t have time for.

Huzzah.

Keeping the poetry hits rolling! I read The Wild Iris, by Louise Gluck. This one won a Pulitzer prize!

I didn’t get much out of it.

Okay, that’s not completely true? There were three poems that really, really spoke to me. I stuck pieces of paper in the book to save them for later, for rereading and re-thinking. The title is the final lines of one of those poems, which seriously was like a big explosion “woah!” kind of moment when I read it, and I had to go back and re-read the entire thing, knowing what I now knew. Those sorts of poems in the book were fantastic. The rest, the vast majority, were… okay? But also very confusing. Mostly because of the use of the word “You.”

One thing I tried really hard in my book to do is to make sure that the reader always knows who “you” is referring to at any time. In the first half of the book, it is always the Deleter. In the second half, it is always the Repeater. The idea is that this builds up the idea of dialog I am going for, and also keeps from confusing the story.
There’s none of that in this book. I kept being very confused. Was “you” the gardener? The gardener’s wife? God? The flowers? It changed from poem to poem. Every one used “you” and the “you” seemed very different in each one. That’s not depth to me. That’s just confusion for no reason. There is a plot arc of sorts going through the poems. I know it’s there. I can feel inklings of it. But it simply isn’t clear, because I just don’t know who is being spoken to at any time.

This is only compounded by the fact that I also don’t know who is speaking at any time. Many poems have the exact same title. I deduced at some point that these were less titles so much as the names of the speakers in the poems. This would work, except that there are other poems that seem to be by other speakers than who is named. I’ll read a poem, and think it has to be by the wife, but it’s not titled with the wife’s name. I’m just confused even more.

I must also admit that, since this is a very nature-oriented book of poetry, I also got lost in the nature imagery quite a bit. That just isn’t my bag. I am all about humanity, fabrication, and artificiality. I am not one that walks out and enjoys the splendidness of nature. Those images just don’t move me as much as the true, human sort of conversation like I saw in Enough Said.

I feel like I can take something away from this book, but it’s mostly a list of things about how not to set up my narrative. I don’t want my work to be this obtuse. I’m sure it’s a great book, and as I said, there were some amazing poems in there. But this just isn’t for me, and I don’t want my own work to turn out this way.

Sunday night, I got home late, and I was greeted by my dog bounding out of the parents’ bedroom, dashing down the stairs, and jumping all over me excitedly. She was so happy to see me, and we sat down and played for awhile.

And this made me very sad.

I called up Brer, and I told him his, and he was confused. “That’s a good thing.”
“I know. She’s happy to see me. She wants me here. She’ll always want me here. Maybe… others won’t.”

It’s stupid, I know. I have my parents assurance that they’ll always love me, and be there for me, and I know they weren’t lying to me. I know they’ll be there. At the same time, it’s that idea that, once things get into fuller swing, they won’t want me there… that idea is upsetting. I thought it had gone away once I told them, but it hasn’t.

I mean, I have plenty of support. I have plenty of people that love me. Hell, even Ian left me a message of support out of nowhere, which was kind of shocking, but nice. I have people behind me, and I will survive.

But it’s always been about my parents. It’s always been about worrying about my parents. That’s always been what’s holding me back. And even though I’ve taken control, and I am not going to give it up, it’s still where my problem lies. I need to start getting electrolysis and stuff, but I’m worried about freaking them out. So I stall. It’s still the same damn thing. Same worries, over and over again.

Comparing that unconditional love of a puppy to the love my parents have for me is unfair. They have their own hopes and dreams. They have things that are important to them. They’re people. They do love me, but they’re going to have reactions to this stuff. They aren’t going to be jumping up and down, happy that I’m doing this. It’s normal. It doesn’t mean they don’t love me. I understand that. Sometimes the voice in the back of my head doesn’t, I guess.

Karen gave me a list of books of poetry that may be relevant to my interests based on what she knew about my own book I was looking at. I didn’t really know what to expect: she hadn’t really see the fairly… sexual side of the book yet. However, if I was going to make this my thesis, I needed to be able to place it in the conversation of poetry. I needed to read more, and her list seemed a good place to start. I ordered up used copies of the more interesting ones on Amazon, to check them out.

Well, I just finished reading Enough Said: a Poetry Dialog Between Father and Son by Michael and Kiev Rattee, and it was pretty fantastic.

There are definite things about it that make it very different from what I am trying to accomplish. My book is two characters, and these are two actual people. This works in a back and forth style, and my book gives all of one side, and then the other. But when I opened up the strangely-built book (the back says that only 250 of these were created, by hand, with a weird printing press, and I would believe it. The texture of the pages is really weird and wonderful, and you can see where it is actually sewn together in the middle. It’s pretty cool.) and read the first poem, “Big Things,” I completely saw glimmers of what I was trying to do in it. It was filled with direct conversation with the other party spliced with poetic images and ideas, and it was just fantastic. I was in love.

From there, the book deviates from that feeling. Michael and Kiev seem to play off of the key image or idea in each other’s work, giving their own spin, and keeping a conversation going. It’s really interesting, though I admit that I missed the direct contact between the two after the first. The conversation turned almost completely to poetic metaphor, with figures standing in for the authors and whatnot. There was nothing wrong with that, really. Many of them were completely excellent poems. But the ones that resonated more with me were poems that more directly expressed their connection, such as “The Sky Is Full” which ends with the lines “as I should have said / I guess at the beginning” which just feels so… real to me. It establishes a connection that I just love seeing, and also works with the theme of the poem, which is talking about how the sky tricks, and Michael is admitting that how he lays out the poem also tricks away from the real meaning. It’s very open and heartwarming. It’s a real emotion there. It means a lot. I loved seeing that throughout the book.

It also spikes near the end, where Kiev apparently was slow in responding, and we get a gentle poetic prod, followed by a lovely poem by Kiev called “Silence,” which is just a perfect end to his side of the conversation. “I’ve talked all evening / with it caught in my throat” Fucking perfect. You can fill the air, but it’s not necessarily with substance. It’s the silence that’s important, at times, and you can’t get it out in the right way.

I feel like I need to read it again to really “get” everything completely? But good poems work that way. To really dig into them, you need to read them multiple times. But the truly good poems still leave you with a strong feeling that first time, and most of this book does this. It’s pretty great.

Makes me look forward to digging into what else Karen suggests for me.

Yeah, okay, so it’s a month away. Yeah, so it’s kind of self-serving. But man, sometimes these birthday things require strategy. Especially when your family has absolutely no clue about the things you are into.

If you remember how much I hate March, the month of my birth, you’ll recall there are many key titles that I have to acquire during that month. (Okay, I don’t HAVE to, but I will.) Many of these would make wonderful birthday gifts. However, accessibility is important. For example, I would trust my parents or grandparents to be able to find Pokemon anywhere. I mean, it’s fucking Pokemon. Same with Final Fantasy XIII. But with things like Chaos Rising, it becomes a tougher sell. Are they going to be able to find such things? Should I put them through that? Probably not.

The plan I am undertaking is just keeping Chaos Rising and Strange Journey to myself. Those are going to be hard to find, and I can handle them. Plus, if I preorder Chaos Rising on Steam, I get a free copy of Saints Row 2, which I’ve been told I should play if I liked Red Faction: Guerrilla and which supposedly has co-op and is a game that Brer already owns. I’ll also score any preorder bonuses that Atlus packages with Strange Journey, which is a benefit. As much as I’m interested in XIII, it can wait, and it will be everywhere, so it won’t be an issue for anyone to pick up. Pokemon, especially, is at the bottom of the list. I love Pokemon, and I want to Pokewalk up a storm, but I don’t need that day one. This is how it works out, and it’ll work out fine.

I sort of wish I didn’t have to do these sorts of things. Being surprised is nice. But I am just so, so far away from what my parents understand in regards to these things. It’s better to be on top of it, and plan, than it is to get things I’m not really into, as that is a negative to both me and the gift-giver, you know?

Planning it does feel kind of selfish, though. Eh, whatever.

Because of some footing-ball event that may have happened this month, the IoTM in Twilight Heroes was the Insanely Super XL Bowl. Now, this is an item I get behind. Not only is it mechanically interesting (and also a bit telling about where TH is going to go in the future) but it’s also just got flavor that, for whatever reason, I find pretty hilarious.

Basically, this is a set of four items, one for each of the character classes. Or, at least, each class gets a special benefit from one of the forms. How do you change between these forms, you ask? Well, you rotate the bowl 90 degrees, and, magically, it becomes a Breastplate! Or a Helmet! Or a shield!
I don’t claim to understand why I find this so hilarious, but I totally do. Mostly because it’s such a mundane way to do such a complete and total transformation. Just the idea of my character casually rotating it a little and then going “WOAH,” just… man, I don’t know. I’m easily entertained, I guess.

The stats on each version also seem very useful. The main bowl itself, with the additional item and chip drops, are something that everyone is going to get a good use out of, especially Elementalists, with the spell damage boost. All of them, though, seem like they would be very relevant to their respective classes, and have their uses outside of them, though perhaps not as something you equip all the time.

What interests me the most, though, is that this really, really seems to indicate that you will be able to cycle through the classes much easier in the future. Retcon? Something like that. There’s just no way that these class-specific bonuses make sense unless you have a good way to switch between them from time to time, and transmogrifying just really isn’t a good way to do that. I look forward to that kind of stuff! I know it’s hard to do, and it’ll probably still be awhile in coming, but I do look forward to it. I’ll hold onto this bowl until then.

I once suggested, casually, that Jonathan try League of Legends. “Oh, it’s like DotA,” I said. “You’d probably enjoy messing around with it.” He said he’d try it.

Now, basically all of his free time is spent playing it. He’s dropped a sum of money on new Champions, and plays at least a game every day, if not more. He’s having a great time.

And I’m along for the ride.

He keeps asking me to play, and I’m more than happy to. Especially when we get on voice chat through Steam and play, it is a ton of fun. I’m finding Champions that fit my play style, and really getting good with them. Just the other day, I went 3/3/5 with Twisted Fate, which I just find completely awesome. (That’s three kills, three deaths, and five assists. I had the lowest death count by a big amount.) I also really have gotten the hang of Taric, who I enjoy every much, even if he has some of the stupidest things to say as he moves about. He fits my play style perfectly, being a strong, heal and buff-based tank.

Every other day or so, Jonathan and I will play a match. We’ll stick together on one lane. Jonathan will give me play advice coming from the fact that he plays all the time, and I’ll play a good game, though certainly a more simple game than some who teleport around the map all the time. It’s… pretty great.
One thing I missed about Jonathan moving out was the fact that we had less time to do things like this. It became a serious schedule issue, and it sort of killed our “us” time. He’s my brother. I want to do this kind of bonding with him. Playing this with him all the time is really doing that for me, and it’s pretty fantastic. Hell, I even re-came out to him while playing LoL. It’s just a great medium for that kind of thing. The fact that it’s fun is just a side benefit.

I have a feeling we’re going to keep playing matches for quite some time. Eventually Jonathan will move on, and I’ll not be interested without him to constantly talk about it and draw me in. But you know what? That’s okay. We’re having a great time, and that’s the important part.