music memory

Adobe *hates* me. I can't figure out what it with it, but it just won't load right. Grrr. Stupid imagemapping. I will never do it again. Ever, ever, ever. After I get this one *fixed*.

Anyway.

Sidenote: I talk too much about work. Because it is like, this impossible to get away conversational topic. Anyway, SuperI called me into her office to discuss my surprise absence on Monday and Tuesday last week. If I want to go to MediaWest, I cannot miss a day in February and probably March, or she's pulling my leave.

That pissed me off, even though I see the logic with the new hiring and the entire being experienced and all.

Of course, that's when everything went *odd*. She called me up that afternoon and while I was about to break a client over my knee for being such a *brat*, she told me the supervisors and PM (Big Cheese) were having a meeting in San Marcos on the eighteenth. Huh, I said, marking it down, as I try to keep track of planned absences from the office of everyone so I don't page someone who isn't there for hours and hours and hours (and fucking *hours and hours and HOURS*). She says, we can take one Worker IV or a clerk. Oh, I said, not getting it. Would you like to go, she asked.

I'm telling you, these people are *scary*. So I'm all weird again. *sighs* I may never have a good emotional snit again. They always, always *get me out* of them.

Music Memory

I have this collection of MP3s that, among the first things I downloaded, were all these songs from Roxette. Don't say a word. I'm serious. It's music memory. More than anything I can think of, music reminds me of being in love. Or whatever it is when you're seventeen.



Not that I have been in any meaningful way, but I did that romantic love thing a couple of times. I *soundtracked* my passion, which any self-respecting teenage girl does. But it was accidental. I love the songs, but that's because they make me remember the boy who gave them to me.

In college my first year, I brought all the tapes he copied for me and played them with headphones when I was unhappy. As a coping mechanism, it worked pretty well. It was the best kind of falling in love, the absolutely hopeless kind that you grow out of and still feel really good about. We were in different countries and would probably never meet again, so...you have all the pain and the hurt, but then it mellows out and becomes sweet and something you savor when you're alone. And God, we were *innocent*, in that way that makes me think of Hallmark cards and undriven snow, or something equally cliched and silly, and I still like remembering. Not just him, though he's wrapped up in it all. Everything.

I remember when the leaves turned, brilliant in red-gold-orange everywhere I looked, and I'd never really seen that before. These huge, towering evergreens beside all the cliched colors of the fall, but they weren't a cliche to me. Big winds would sweep along the streets and carry the leaves with them, and I was walking to the bus stop after school one day and stared at them skipping across the street like a thousand insects on forced march in all these colors and promised myself that if I rememembered nothing else, I'd remmeber that. I'd never been so drenched in all the colors of a real fall before then.

I remember the first time I went to sauna and realized these people expected me to strip naked and sit on boards with them in the equivalent of a closet in a Texas July. Yeah. That was--new. And jumping in an almost-frozen lake after in the middle of the night, because that's what people *did* and hell if I was scared to leave nice, safe land at below freezing temperatures to jump off a perfectly acceptable dock into water so cold I forgot to breathe. I remember that it was so much easier to jump than I thought it would be.

I remember that it was the first time I ever saw snow like that, and standing on the balcony out back and just *feeling* it fall all over me in this perfectly monochrome night surrounded by evergreens and bare limbs and the coldest air I'd ever felt. I was seven the last time snow fell in Texas that I could touch, and I was seventeen the last time I saw snow fall at all. It amazed me and woke me up to go outside the next morning and just roll in it and wonder at how the world looked like something on television, that this was *real* and *cold* and *weird* and so fucking *cool*. I skipped through drifts and everything had become normal, from the fact I couldn't understand what people said to me, to the fact that I rode a bicycle or a motorcycle or the bus to school in another town, but the snow was always new and always white and I always, always loved to watch it, walk through it, feel it against my face and between my fingers and jumping through it and remembering that every time I fell over something it was hiding, I'd start to laugh.

And I remember my second kiss almost as well as my first, because we were out under the sun surrounded by piles of snow in the backyard and I was seventeen and falling in love for the very first time, with someone who looked at me like he might be falling in love with me, too.

So yeah. I really like Roxette.



I'm self-indulgent tonight, I suppose.

Fandom

Set my budget and ordered season three of QaF, which won't be here until MARCH, but that gives me about a month to dither and freak out. Also, read through gradiva, who is really to blame for my mood, because her Shadows just always runs through me like water--that beautiful, flawless use of second point of view and the sheer wonder she can give something so simple.

You should read her. If you haven't. Like, now.

I'm going to go bliss myself out again, I think. Adobe and I are going to fight again later.