Hear Her Rawr

I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek

And if I make him happy he will stay.

Whovian Anniversary

"Today, the 23rd of November 2014, marks the one year anniversary of the first local whovian gathering ever. 

We started out small, just a couple of people who like Doctor Who and were kind of hoping we'd find a bunch of people to talk to them about it. And here we are! Months later, and the community still grows.

We're proud of what we've created; this community has not only entertained people, but it has helped them. It brought out the good in people. Better yet, it brought out the good in good people, and that made for something pretty damn special.

We never thought so many people would come together. We never even knew so many Egyptians watched Doctor Who. Surprisingly, we ended up even rekindling old friendships and realizing that we KNEW people who watched Doctor Who all along, but never spoke about it to one another.

And unsurprisingly, it turns out all of us whovians have other things in common. Our fascination with seemingly juvenile tales of a Timelord isn't the only thing we share.

When this started out a little less than a year ago, we set out to have a Whovian group that may or may not evolve into something bigger. Now, we're sure it can be a lot bigger. And if the first Egyptian Comic Con happens thanks to you guys, we wouldn't be surprised.

This is a hidden message from the two who started it, a little Easter egg shall we say, and we won't tell you who we are because we are no longer two people. We are many.

We will tell you this though, you have inspired us to be better people, you have cheered us up when we were down in the dumps, and you have given us hope in mankind when we were hoping for an alien invasion."

I Am A Brave Hobbit.

Wish I Was Here

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, 

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes 

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, 

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, 

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, 

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, 

And seeing that it was a soft October night, 

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time 

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, 

Rubbing its back upon the window panes; 

There will be time, there will be time 

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; 

There will be time to murder and create, 

And time for all the works and days of hands 

That lift and drop a question on your plate; 

Time for you and time for me, 

And time yet for a hundred indecisions, 

And for a hundred visions and revisions, 

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Daughter - A Poem By Nicole Blackman

One day I’ll give birth to a tiny baby girl
and when she’s born she’ll scream and I’ll make sure
she never stops.

I will kiss her before I lay her down
and will tell her a story so she knows
how it is and how it must be for her to survive.

I’ll tell her about the power of water
the seduction of paper
the promise of gasoline
and the hope of blood.

I’ll teach her to shave her eyebrows and
mark her skin.

I’ll teach her that her body is
her greatest work of art.

I’ll tell her to light things on fire
and keep them burning.

I’ll teach her that the fire will not consume her,
that she must take it and use it.

I’ll tell her to be tri-sexual, to try anything
to sleep with, fight with, pray with anyone,
just as long as she feels something.

I’ll help her do her best work when it rains.
I’ll tell her to reinvent herself every 28 days.
I’ll teach her to develop all her selves,
the courageous ones,
the smart ones,
the dreaming ones
the fast ones.

I’ll teach her that she has an army inside her
that can save her life.

I’ll tell her to say Fuck like other people say The
and when people are shocked
to ask them why they so fear a small quartet
of letters.

I’ll make sure she always carries a pen
so she can take down the evidence.
If she has no paper, I’ll teach her to
write everything down on her tongue
write it on her thighs.

I’ll help her to see that she will not find God
or salvation in a dark brick building
built by dead men.

I’ll explain to her that it’s better to regret the things
she has done than the things she hasn't.

I’ll teach her to write her manifestos
on cocktail napkins.
I’ll say she should make men lick her enterprise.

I’ll teach her to talk hard.
I’ll tell her that her skin is the
most beautiful dress she will ever wear.

I’ll tell her that people must earn the right
to use her nickname,
that forced intimacy is an ugly thing.

I’ll make her understand that she is worth more
with her clothes on.

I’ll tell her that when the words finally flow too fast
and she has no use for a pen
that she must quit her job
run out of the house in her bathrobe,
leaving the door open.
I’ll teach her to follow the words.

I’ll tell her to stand up
and head for the door
after she makes love.
When he asks her to
stay she’ll say
she’s got to
go.

They will try to make her stay,
comfort her, let her sleep, bathe her in a television blue glow.
I will cut her hair, tell her to light the house on fire,
kill the kittens
when nothing is there
nothing will keep her
and she is not to be kept.

I’ll say that everything she has done seen spoken
has brought her to the here this now.
This is no time for tenderness,
no time to stand, waiting for them to find her.
There are nations within her skin.
Queendoms come without keys you can carry.

I’ll tell her that when she first bleeds
when she is a woman,
to go up to the roof at midnight,
reach her hands up to the sky and scream.

I’ll teach her to be whole, to be holy,
to be so much that she doesn't even
need me anymore.
I’ll tell her to go quickly and never come back.
I will make her stronger than me.

I’ll say to her never forget what they did to you
and never let them know you remember.

Never forget what they did to you
and never let them know you remember.

Wiggle Wiggle Wiggle

Chapter 30

Yossarian no longer gave a damn where his bombs fell, although he did not go as far as Dunbar, who dropped his bombs hundreds of yards past the village and would face a court-martial if it could ever be shown he had done it deliberately. Without a word even to Yossarian, Dunbar had washed his hands of the mission. The fall in the hospital had either shown him the light or scrambled his brains; it was impossible to say which.

Dunbar seldom laughed any more and seemed to be wasting away. He snarled belligerently at superior officers, even at Major Danby, and was crude and surly and profane even in front of the chaplain, who was afraid of Dunbar now and seemed to be wasting away also. The chaplain’s pilgrimage to Wintergreen had proved abortive; another shrine was empty. Wintergreen was too busy to see the chaplain himself. A brash assistant brought the chaplain a stolen Zippo cigarette lighter as a gift and informed him condescendingly that Wintergreen was too deeply involved with wartime activities to concern himself with matters so trivial as the number of missions men had to fly. The chaplain worried about Dunbar and brooded more over Yossarian now that Orr was gone. To the chaplain, who lived by himself in a spacious tent whose pointy top sealed him in gloomy solitude each night like the cap of a tomb, it seemed incredible that Yossarian really preferred living alone and wanted no roommates.  

As a lead bombardier again, Yossarian had McWatt for a pilot, and that was one consolation, although he was still so utterly undefended. There was no way to fight back. He could not even see McWatt and the co-pilot from his post in the nose. All he could ever see was Aarfy, with whose fustian, moon-faced ineptitude he had finally lost all patience, and there were minutes of agonizing fury and frustration in the sky when he hungered to be demoted again to a wing plane with a loaded machine gun in the compartment instead of the precision bombsight that he really had no need for, a powerful, heavy fifty-caliber machine gun he could seize vengefully in both hands and turn loose savagely against all the demons tyrannizing him: at the smoky black puffs of the flak itself; at the German antiaircraft gunners below whom he could not even see and could not possibly harm with his machine gun even if he ever did take the time to open fire, at Havermeyer and Appleby in the lead plane for their fearless straight and level bomb run on the second mission to Bologna where the flak from two hundred and twenty-four cannons had knocked out one of Orr’s engines for the very last time and sent him down ditching into the sea between Genoa and La Spezia just before the brief thunderstorm broke.  

Actually, there was not much he could do with that powerful machine gun except load it and test-fire a few rounds. It was no more use to him than the bombsight. He could really cut loose with it against attacking German fighters, but there were no German fighters any more, and he could not even swing it all the way around into the helpless faces of pilots like Huple and Dobbs and order them back down carefully to the ground, as he had once ordered Kid Sampson back down, which is exactly what he did want to do to Dobbs and Huple on the hideous first mission to Avignon the moment he realized the fantastic pickle he was in, the moment he found himself aloft in a wing plane with Dobbs and Huple in a flight headed by Havermeyer and Appleby. Dobbs and Huple? Huple and Dobbs? Who were they? What preposterous madness to float in thin air two miles high on an inch or two of metal, sustained from death by the meager skill and intelligence of two vapid strangers, a beardless kid named Huple and a nervous nut like Dobbs, who really did go nuts right there in the plane, running amuck over the target without leaving his copilot’s seat and grabbing the controls from Huple to plunge them all down into that chilling dive that tore Yossarian’s headset loose and brought them right back inside the dense flak from which they had almost escaped. The next thing he knew, another stranger, a radio-gunner named Snowden, was dying in back. It was impossible to be positive that Dobbs had killed him, for when Yossarian plugged his headset back in, Dobbs was already on the intercom pleading for someone to go up front and help the bombardier. And almost immediately Snowden broke in, whimpering, ‘Help me. Please help me. I’m cold. I’m cold.’ And Yossarian crawled slowly out of the nose and up on top of the bomb bay and wriggled back into the rear section of the plane—passing the first-aid kit on the way that he had to return for—to treat Snowden for the wrong wound, the yawning, raw, melon-shaped hole as big as a football in the outside of his thigh, the unsevered, blood-soaked muscle fibers inside pulsating weirdly like blind things with lives of their own, the oval, naked wound that was almost a foot long and made Yossarian moan in shock and sympathy the instant he spied it and nearly made him vomit. And the small, slight tail-gunner was lying on the floor beside Snowden in a dead faint, his face as white as a handkerchief, so that Yossarian sprang forward with revulsion to help him first.  

Yes, in the long run, he was much safer flying with McWatt, and he was not even safe with McWatt, who loved flying too much and went buzzing boldly inches off the ground with Yossarian in the nose on the way back from the training flight to break in the new bombardier in the whole replacement crew Colonel Cathcart had obtained after Orr was lost. The practice bomb range was on the other side of Pianosa, and, flying back, McWatt edged the belly of the lazing, slow-cruising plane just over the crest of mountains in the middle and then, instead of maintaining altitude, jolted both engines open all the way, lurched up on one side and, to Yossarian’s astonishment, began following the falling land down as fast as the plane would go, wagging his wings gaily and skimming with a massive, grinding, hammering roar over each rocky rise and dip of the rolling terrain like a dizzy gull over wild brown waves. Yossarian was petrified. The new bombardier beside him sat demurely with a bewitched grin and kept whistling ‘Whee!’ and Yossarian wanted to reach out and crush his idiotic face with one hand as he flinched and flung himself away from the boulders and hillocks and lashing branches of trees that loomed up above him out in front and rushed past just underneath in a sinking, streaking blur. No one had a right to take such frightful risks with his life.  

‘Go up, go up, go up!’ he shouted frantically at McWatt, hating him venomously, but McWatt was singing buoyantly over the intercom and probably couldn’t hear. Yossarian, blazing with rage and almost sobbing for revenge, hurled himself down into the crawlway and fought his way through against the dragging weight of gravity and inertia until he arrived at the main section and pulled himself up to the flight deck, to stand trembling behind McWatt in the pilot’s seat. He looked desperately about for a gun, a gray-black.45 automatic that he could cock and ram right up against the base of McWatt’s skull. There was no gun. There was no hunting knife either, and no other weapon with which he could bludgeon or stab, and Yossarian grasped and jerked the collar of McWatt’s coveralls in tightening fists and shouted to him to go up, go up. The land was still swimming by underneath and flashing by overhead on both sides. McWatt looked back at Yossarian and laughed joyfully as though Yossarian were sharing his fun. Yossarian slid both hands around McWatt’s bare throat and squeezed. McWatt turned stiff: ‘Go up,’ Yossarian ordered unmistakably through his teeth in a low, menacing voice. ‘Or I’ll kill you.’ Rigid with caution, McWatt cut the motors back and climbed gradually. Yossarian’s hands weakened on McWatt’s neck and slid down off his shoulders to dangle inertly. He was not angry any more. He was ashamed. When McWatt turned, he was sorry the hands were his and wished there were someplace where he could bury them. They felt dead.    McWatt gazed at him deeply. There was no friendliness in his stare. ‘Boy,’ he said coldly, ‘you sure must be in pretty bad shape. You ought to go home.’  

‘They won’t let me.’ Yossarian answered with averted eyes, and crept away. Yossarian stepped down from the flight deck and seated himself on the floor, hanging his head with guilt and remorse. He was covered with sweat.

McWatt set course directly back toward the field. Yossarian wondered whether McWatt would now go to the operations tent to see Piltchard and Wren and request that Yossarian never be assigned to his plane again, just as Yossarian had gone surreptitiously to speak to them about Dobbs and Huple and Orr and, unsuccessfully, about Aarfy. He had never seen McWatt look displeased before, had never seen him in any but the most lighthearted mood, and he wondered whether he had just lost another friend.  

But McWatt winked at him reassuringly as he climbed down from the plane and joshed hospitably with the credulous new pilot and bombardier during the jeep ride back to the squadron, although he did not address a word to Yossarian until all four had returned their parachutes and separated and the two of them were walking side by side toward their own row of tents. Then McWatt’s sparsely freckled tan Scotch-Irish face broke suddenly into a smile and he dug his knuckles playfully into Yossarian’s ribs, as though throwing a punch. ‘You louse,’ he laughed. ‘Were you really going to kill me up there?’
Yossarian grinned penitently and shook his head. ‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘I didn’t realize you got it so bad. Boy! Why don’t you talk to somebody about it?’  
‘I talk to everybody about it. What the hell’s the matter with you? Don’t you ever hear me?’  
‘I guess I never really believed you.’  
‘Aren’t you ever afraid?’  
‘Maybe I ought to be.’  
‘Not even on the missions?’  
‘I guess I just don’t have brains enough.’ McWatt laughed sheepishly.  
‘There are so many ways for me to get killed,’ Yossarian commented, ‘and you had to find one more.’
McWatt smiled again. ‘Say, I bet it must really scare you when I buzz your tent, huh?’    
‘It scares me to death. I’ve told you that.’  
‘I thought it was just the noise you were complaining about.’ McWatt made a resigned shrug. ‘Oh, well, what the hell,’ he sang. ‘I guess I’ll just have to give it up.’

But McWatt was incorrigible, and, while he never buzzed Yossarian’s tent again, he never missed an opportunity to buzz the beach and roar like a fierce and low-flying thunderbolt over the raft in the water and the secluded hollow in the sand where Yossarian lay feeling up Nurse Duckett or playing hearts, poker or pinochle with Nately, Dunbar and Hungry Joe. Yossarian met Nurse Duckett almost every afternoon that both were free and came with her to the beach on the other side of the narrow swell of shoulder-high dunes separating them from the area in which the other officers and enlisted men went swimming nude. Nately, Dunbar and Hungry Joe would come there, too. McWatt would occasionally join them, and often Aarfy, who always arrived pudgily in full uniform and never removed any of his clothing but his shoes and his hat; Aarfy never went swimming. The other men wore swimming trunks in deference to Nurse Duckett, and in deference also to Nurse Cramer, who accompanied Nurse Duckett and Yossarian to the beach every time and sat haughtily by herself ten yards away. No one but Aarfy ever made reference to the naked men sun-bathing in full view farther down the beach or jumping and diving from the enormous white-washed raft that bobbed on empty oil drums out beyond the silt sand. Nurse Cramer sat by herself because she was angry with Yossarian and disappointed in Nurse Duckett.  

Nurse Sue Ann Duckett despised Aarfy, and that was another one of the numerous fetching traits about Nurse Duckett that Yossarian enjoyed. He enjoyed Nurse Sue Ann Duckett’s long white legs and supple, callipygous ass; he often neglected to remember that she was quite slim and fragile from the waist up and hurt her unintentionally in moments of passion when he hugged her too roughly. He loved her manner of sleepy acquiescence when they lay on the beach at dusk. He drew solace and sedation from her nearness. He had a craving to touch her always, to remain always in physical communication. He liked to encircle her ankle loosely with his fingers as he played cards with Nately, Dunbar and Hungry Joe, to lightly and lovingly caress the downy skin of her fair, smooth thigh with the backs of his nails or, dreamily, sensuously, almost unconsciously, slide his proprietary, respectful hand up the shell-like ridge of her spine beneath the elastic strap of the top of the two-piece bathing suit she always wore to contain and cover her tiny, long-nippled breasts. He loved Nurse Duckett’s serene, flattered response, the sense of attachment to him she displayed proudly. Hungry Joe had a craving to feel Nurse Duckett up, too, and was restrained more than once by Yossarian’s forbidding glower. Nurse Duckett flirted with Hungry Joe just to keep him in heat, and her round light-brown eyes glimmered with mischief every time Yossarian rapped her sharply with his elbow or fist to make her stop.  

The men played cards on a towel, undershirt, or blanket, and Nurse Duckett mixed the extra deck of cards, sitting with her back resting against a sand dune. When she was not shuffling the extra deck of cards, she sat squinting into a tiny pocket mirror, brushing mascara on her curling reddish eyelashes in a birdbrained effort to make them longer permanently. Occasionally she was able to stack the cards or spoil the deck in a way they did not discover until they were well into the game, and she laughed and glowed with blissful gratification when they all hurled their cards down disgustedly and began punching her sharply on the arms or legs as they called her filthy names and warned her to stop fooling around. She would prattle nonsensically when they were striving hardest to think, and a pink flush of elation crept into her cheeks when they gave her more sharp raps on the arms and legs with their fists and told her to shut up. Nurse Duckett reveled in such attention and ducked her short chestnut bangs with joy when Yossarian and the others focused upon her. It gave her a peculiar feeling of warm and expectant well-being to know that so many naked boys and men were idling close by on the other side of the sand dunes. She had only to stretch her neck or rise on some pretext to see twenty or forty undressed males lounging or playing ball in the sunlight. Her own body was such a familiar and unremarkable thing to her that she was puzzled by the convulsive ecstasy men could take from it, by the intense and amusing need they had merely to touch it, to reach out urgently and press it, squeeze it, pinch it, rub it. She did not understand Yossarian’s lust; but she was willing to take his word for it.  

Evenings when Yossarian felt horny he brought Nurse Duckett to the beach with two blankets and enjoyed making love to her with most of their clothes on more than he sometimes enjoyed making love to all the vigorous bare amoral girls in Rome. Frequently they went to the beach at night and did not make love, but just lay shivering between the blankets against each other to ward off the brisk, damp chill. The ink-black nights were turning cold, the stars frosty and fewer. The raft swayed in the ghostly trail of moonlight and seemed to be sailing away. A marked hint of cold weather penetrated the air. Other men were just starting to build stoves and came to Yossarian’s tent during the day to marvel at Orr’s workmanship. It thrilled Nurse Duckett rapturously that Yossarian could not keep his hands off her when they were together, although she would not let him slip them inside her bathing shorts during the day when anyone was near enough to see, not even when the only witness was Nurse Cramer, who sat on the other side of her sand dune with her reproving nose in the air and pretended not to see anything.  

Nurse Cramer had stopped speaking to Nurse Duckett, her best friend, because of her liaison with Yossarian, but still went everywhere with Nurse Duckett since Nurse Duckett was her best friend. She did not approve of Yossarian or his friends. When they stood up and went swimming with Nurse Duckett, Nurse Cramer stood up and went swimming, too, maintaining the same ten-yard distance between them, and maintaining her silence, snubbing them even in the water. When they laughed and splashed, she laughed and splashed; when they dived, she dived; when they swam to the sand bar and rested, Nurse Cramer swam to the sand bar and rested. When they came out, she came out, dried her shoulders with her own towel and seated herself aloofly in her own spot, her back rigid and a ring of reflected sunlight burnishing her light-blond hair like a halo. Nurse Cramer was prepared to begin talking to Nurse Duckett again if she repented and apologized. Nurse Duckett preferred things the way they were. For a long time she had wanted to give Nurse Cramer a rap to make her shut up. Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him. She loved to watch him taking short naps with his face down and his arm thrown across her, or staring bleakly at the endless tame, quiet waves breaking like pet puppy dogs against the shore, scampering lightly up the sand a foot or two and then trotting away. She was calm in his silences. She knew she did not bore him, and she buffed or painted her fingernails studiously while he dozed or brooded and the desultory warm afternoon breeze vibrated delicately on the surface of the beach. She loved to look at his wide, long, sinewy back with its bronzed, unblemished skin. She loved to bring him to flame instantly by taking his whole ear in her mouth suddenly and running her hand down his front all the way. She loved to make him burn and suffer till dark, then satisfy him. Then kiss him adoringly because she had brought him such bliss.  

Yossarian was never lonely with Nurse Duckett, who really did know how to keep her mouth shut and was just capricious enough. He was haunted and tormented by the vast, boundless ocean. He wondered mournfully, as Nurse Duckett buffed her nails, about all the people who had died under water. There were surely more than a million already. Where were they? What insects had eaten their flesh? He imagined the awful impotence of breathing in helplessly quarts and quarts of water. Yossarian followed the small fishing boats and military launches plying back and forth far out and found them unreal; it did not seem true that there were full-sized men aboard, going somewhere every time. He looked toward stony Elba, and his eyes automatically searched overhead for the fluffy, white, turnip-shaped cloud in which Clevinger had vanished. He peered at the vaporous Italian skyline and thought of Orr. Clevinger and Orr. Where had they gone? Yossarian had once stood on a jetty at dawn and watched a tufted round log that was drifting toward him on the tide turn unexpectedly into the bloated face of a drowned man; it was the first dead person he had ever seen. He thirsted for life and reached out ravenously to grasp and hold Nurse Duckett’s flesh. He studied every floating object fearfully for some gruesome sign of Clevinger and Orr, prepared for any morbid shock but the shock McWatt gave him one day with the plane that came blasting suddenly into sight out of the distant stillness and hurtled mercilessly along the shore line with a great growling, clattering roar over the bobbing raft on which blond, pale Kid Sampson, his naked sides scrawny even from so far away, leaped clownishly up to touch it at the exact moment some arbitrary gust of wind or minor miscalculation of McWatt’s senses dropped the speeding plane down just low enough for a propeller to slice him half away.  

Even people who were not there remembered vividly exactly what happened next. There was the briefest, softest tsst! filtering audibly through the shattering, overwhelming howl of the plane’s engines, and then there were just Kid Sampson’s two pale, skinny legs, still joined by strings somehow at the bloody truncated hips, standing stock-still on the raft for what seemed a full minute or two before they toppled over backward into the water finally with a faint, echoing splash and turned completely upside down so that only the grotesque toes and the plaster-white soles of Kid Sampson’s feet remained in view.  

On the beach, all hell broke loose. Nurse Cramer materialized out of thin air suddenly and was weeping hysterically against Yossarian’s chest while Yossarian hugged her shoulders and soothed her. His other arm bolstered Nurse Duckett, who was trembling and sobbing against him, too, her long, angular face dead white. Everyone at the beach was screaming and running, and the men sounded like women. They scampered for their things in panic, stooping hurriedly and looking askance at each gentle, knee-high wave bubbling in as though some ugly, red, grisly organ like a liver or a lung might come washing right up against them. Those in the water were struggling to get out, forgetting in their haste to swim, wailing, walking, held back in their flight by the viscous, clinging sea as though by a biting wind.  

Kid Sampson had rained all over. Those who spied drops of him on their limbs or torsos drew back with terror and revulsion, as though trying to shrink away from their own odious skins. Everybody ran in a sluggish stampede, shooting tortured, horrified glances back, filling the deep, shadowy, rustling woods with their frail gasps and cries. Yossarian drove both stumbling, faltering women before him frantically, shoving them and prodding them to make them hurry, and raced back with a curse to help when Hungry Joe tripped on the blanket or the camera case he was carrying and fell forward on his face in the mud of the stream.    Back at the squadron everyone already knew. Men in uniform were screaming and running there too, or standing motionless in one spot, rooted in awe, like Sergeant Knight and Doc Daneeka as they gravely craned their heads upward and watched the guilty, banking, forlorn airplane with McWatt circle and circle slowly and climb.  

‘Who is it?’ Yossarian shouted anxiously at Doc Daneeka as he ran up, breathless and limp, his somber eyes burning with a misty, hectic anguish. ‘Who’s in the plane?’  
‘McWatt,’ said Sergeant Knight. ‘He’s got the two new pilots with him on a training flight. Doc Daneeka’s up there, too.’  
‘I’m right here,’ contended Doc Daneeka, in a strange and troubled voice, darting an anxious look at Sergeant Knight.  
‘Why doesn’t he come down?’ Yossarian exclaimed in despair. ‘Why does he keep going up?’
‘He’s probably afraid to come down,’ Sergeant Knight answered, without moving his solemn gaze from McWatt’s solitary climbing airplane. ‘He knows what kind of trouble he’s in.’

And McWatt kept climbing higher and higher, nosing his droning airplane upward evenly in a slow, oval spiral that carried him far out over the water as he headed south and far in over the russet foothills when he had circled the landing field again and was flying north. He was soon up over five thousand feet. His engines were soft as whispers. A white parachute popped open suddenly in a surprising puff. A second parachute popped open a few minutes later and coasted down, like the first, directly in toward the clearing of the landing strip. There was no motion on the ground. The plane continued south for thirty seconds more, following the same pattern, familiar and predictable now, and McWatt lifted a wing and banked gracefully around into his turn.  
‘Two more to go,’ said Sergeant Knight. ‘McWatt and Doc Daneeka.’  
‘I’m right here, Sergeant Knight,’ Doc Daneeka told him plaintively. ‘I’m not in the plane.’  
‘Why don’t they jump?’ Sergeant Knight asked, pleading aloud to himself. ‘Why don’t they jump?’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ grieved Doc Daneeka, biting his lip. ‘It just doesn’t make sense.’

But Yossarian understood suddenly why McWatt wouldn’t jump, and went running uncontrollably down the whole length of the squadron after McWatt’s plane, waving his arms and shouting up at him imploringly to come down, McWatt, come down; but no one seemed to hear, certainly not McWatt, and a great, choking moan tore from Yossarian’s throat as McWatt turned again, dipped his wings once in salute, decided oh, well, what the hell, and flew into a mountain.  

Colonel Cathcart was so upset by the deaths of Kid Sampson and McWatt that he raised the missions to sixty-five. 

A Day To Remember

Right In The Patronus.

"Truth is, you can't help who you love. It's a lot like apparition; even if we've come of age, most of us still get splinched."

T - 13 to Yara's Wedding

Of All Things Haunted.

I've been having nightmares a lot recently. Started out with a recurring nightmare, that lasted for a week and a half, then moved on to the same nightmare with different variations each night. This has been going on for almost two months now and it's thoroughly pissing me off. But it got better, at first it was the kind you'd wake up from in cold sweats which threw a disoriented hue of sadness over the next couple of waking hours, which I tried to escape by not sleeping as much, then it got creative. I don't wanna go into a lot of detail about the actual nightmare, but I will mention the interesting bit. Drum roll please. The nightmare is a good memory.

Yep, you heard me right. It's the exact replica of a good memory I had irl, only it's somehow rendered into a nightmare by my psychological V-RAY engines. I talked to a couple of people about it, and they mentioned that a recurring nightmare is usually an unresolved issue that I'm repressing, and it'll only go away if I somehow work it out. The usual scenario, the only way the ghost will walk into the light is if he gets closure. Since it is a matter that I have no control over, I assume I will remain haunted for a while. It took a while to get used to, considering that I didn't dream before. Or what people keep stressing is "You dream, you just don't remember it." Fact remains, I didn't, so the change is unwelcome and inconvenient. However, I'm pointedly being a doll about it and having tea with my monsters, so the nightly change in scenario is a welcome reprieve.

In lighter news, today I found out two interesting bits of information. There's a forest being grown in Norway set out to print an anthology of books within a span of a 100 years (Read more here), Margaret Atwood is its first signed author. Beautiful initiative. And in an attempt to revive tourism in Boston, they're planning a literary district that maps out dead authors' haunts. That one's definitely going on my bucket list.

Read the full article here.

For a book nerd, this is definitely good news, although I would imagine the aforementioned dead authors wouldn't take lightly to plebs treading their hide-outs. When I put myself in their shoes, I shudder at the thought. 

But I'm not a dead author, so this is going on my laminated itinerary. By the time I can afford to travel recreationally, I'm going there with a camera glued to my hand like a proper Japanese tourist, and by god I will eat every tribute hotdog there is.

I Made Pancakes Without Dying

They're edible too.

To Live & Let Diorama

I keep coming back here from all sorts of places then promptly shooing myself. It's not that blogging has become cumbersome, somehow I still believe that some sort of answer, revelation or relief waits for me at the end of this post, but that's about as much hope as I would millennially allow myself.

My life has taken on an odd sort of pace. I've been avoiding human contact for the most part of the last two months, spending time reading, working, watching stuff and occasionally learning a thing or two. It's a lot easier that way, eliminating the element of surprise is one of the luxuries of the bat cave, a luxury I intend on milking dry for the foreseeable future, until a more seemly option presents itself. A friend smoked me out of my foxhole for an event she was covering for the daily news; a comic book panel earlier this month, and it was bittersweet. I regret missing the workshop, that could have been an interesting experience, although I blame that on Goethe Institut's tendency to frown upon social media exposure. Idiosyncratic of my Rory-ness, we ended up in the wrong panel and missed the first 15 minutes. Silver-lining; I got a baby plant out of it when it turned out that we had been rubbing shoulders with environmentalists.

We looked like tinmen ditching the green event mid-intro and bolting for the right hall, but luckily by the time we made it to the bibliothek, we found out we hadn't missed much because the translation equipment was down and it had more or less turned into a grade-2 cultural soup. The debates were humane and choked with passion, and the artists twitched and convulsed like proper introverts in the eviscerating spotlight. As tempted as I am to record every little detail of the evening, that evening is too special to me to include you all in so I'll stash the particulars in my personal Pandora's box and stick to the bit I fuzzed up to most. The panelists were asked by a workshop participant to share the first job they ever took before they became nationally-acclaimed illustrators in their own right, and the jobs they took were these: A garbage collector, a dishwasher, a waitress, a kindergarten teacher and a museum watchman. I could try to tell you what that made me feel, but assigning adjectives to this memory would be like putting sticky notes on a Rembrandt sketch; no adjectives could do it justice or be worthy of its complete momentum. I was moved, the same way an unstoppable force would move an immovable object if it could. That memory will cozily snuggle up in the back of my head and magnetically gather dust bunnies until I turn gray, along with other cherished memories of that evening that include the  senior polyglot, the ginger that tumbled out of the wardrobe with the lion and the witch, the Jane Eyre ghost that tried to start an underground publishing revolution, the skeletal chocolate-coffee gifter, a trip down a namesake street in a district I've renounced and the illustrator who owns a sketch of us that we'll never see.

What else is new and worth a cyber smudge? I'm now a Redditor. I've more or less given up on Facebook for a real-er alternative. People on Reddit still hold on to their genetically assigned predilection to saying what they actually mean, as opposed to Facebook's current livestock show. I also made an account on Medium in case I have something to say to the world, that I don't reckon I'll be using anytime soon. Oh! And I made my first professional logo, which didn't completely suck. Logo design is one of the trickiest specialties in the field. In layman terms, corporate identity is mafia work; it takes a godfather to make a proper logo and god knows a decade can only squeeze out a handful of don Corleones at a time. Many a designer took on that intimidating challenge only to wake up with a severed horse head in their bed or have their knees crippled by the unforgiving sledgehammer of analytics, but I'm proud of my progress, especially that it entailed my taking on a new program on the Adobe creative suite. I'd upload it right now if it didn't compromise the integrity of my assignment, but I will as soon as I can. Milestone!

Oh, and I started regularly meditating. For a skeptic, it took more than a couple of researches on the effects of meditation on the Amygdala, a comparison chart between the Buddhist and Hinduist practices and a plethora of guided meditation recordings that subliminally sold hot dogs and promoted child labour to the unaware to find my beat. Mindfulness meditation took home the lottery money, with a pinch of imagination thrown into the mix. After all, who can say no to daydreaming? It's been helping with my anxiety attacks and overall stress. It's been a while since I found a practice that relaxed me so completely I couldn't make a fist for 15 minutes afterwards, especially since they installed a goddamn corn dog stand smack in the middle of my jogging route. THIS IS NOT FAIR GAME, PROVIDENCE! But fear not, dear readers, I will not turn into a hippie.

A friend is starting a Ballet club on campus and I got dragged in as an organizer. If I recall correctly, she needs me to write a proposal for the project and help her fluttery pink-shauled self fight off the iron-clad fists of the administration with my experience as an ex-activist and charm them with my unicorn glitter tits into approving our leasing out the gym twice a week to the tight-sporting public. Other than that, uni hasn't changed much, I've antagonized two professors already, the junior workload has proved to be a Thai-food generated diarrhea compared to the sophomore and freshman ferret-sized loads, but it's nothing I can't take on with my waking hours. Oh, and the students are still barking mad.

Fam-wise, what's with grandma calling at 10 in the morning one day to invite us over for a fatta and kaware3 lunch only to greet me by shoving a beer in my hand and an ashtray full of Hershey kisses because "You deserve a break dear", to throwing a dinner party in place of a wake in the honor of a deceased relative and demanding that I undo my dreads, they can never really stop surprising me. I love grandma, she shows me that aging has nothing to do with getting old. Oh, and there's a day in there I spent with dad book shopping, then combat boot shopping, then chain smoking over Turkish coffee in the back alleyways of a bookstore while talking about life till 3 in the morning that I can't leave at the mercy of my goldfish memory.

In line with these updates, I may be getting my long-coveted graphic tablet before the year is done. Fingers crossed, that one's been in the works long enough. I'm looking forward to Halloween, although I might have to start costume shopping a little early since a denim jumpsuit and a velvet top hat might take me a little farther than the good old shop around the corner. I'm working on a design project for a pub owner and it's driving me crazy. Although the bright side is that if freelancing for a pub can't turn you into an alcoholic, nothing will. I'm also planning a 500 miles music video with the local whovians around mid-year break, although locations might be a hassle since it might be a difficult to pack 249 whovians into one hatchback, but we'll figure it out, we always do, it might prove bigger on the inside!

Update: Mute Man

Remember the deaf mute man I keep blogging about on and off? I saw him a week ago. He was hanging out with a friend, and they were engaged in a gesture-rich conversation. They had an understanding that I'm yet to see in people that aren't plagued with their handicap. It made me think about how hard it must be to lie with body language. Is it possible that deaf mutes are more honest by default? Interesting hypothesis, albeit gullible. I'll believe it.

Oh My Gosh, Look At That Banjo!

This song is making me wanna wear a frilly dress and dance around the room with a needlessly long cigarette holder.

Natalie; the Melbourne Piano Street Performer.

Sep 6th, 10:08

Dobby gave Dobby a sock. Dobby is free.

"Normally heaven or hell spotted the prophetic types and broadcast enough noises on the same mental channel to prevent any undue accuracy. Actually, that was rarely necessary; they normally found ways of generating their own static in self-defence against the images that echoed around their heads. Poor old St. John had his mushrooms. Nostradamus had his ale."

Platform Nine And Three Quarters

Goodbyes aren't my forte.

Came back to the office, for what will be the last time, to pick up the recommendation letter. Got out on the right subway station without counting stops or second guessing.

Doormen let me in without asking for identification. Got assigned three tasks by different women in stilettos before explaining that I don't work here anymore.

Wi-fi automatically connected.

I snuck in on the country director who scared me out of my wits, and thanked her for scaring me out of my wits. She unfailingly yelled at me, I unfailingly giggled back at her. I said goodbye and she refused to say it; she wanted me to keep working there, and demanded that I sort out my schedule around it. She asked me to recruit an army, I promised I would. She wasn't scary, not one bit.

Ran into the nice lady who saved my wet butt the first day, she said mine is a face she'll never forget, although I know my face is not what she'll remember.

Funny, how things wrap to a close. It all ends where it begins, leaving us just a scratch smarter.

Round and round and round we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin.

I'm going to miss this place.

Rust Cohle: I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Goodbye And Thanks For All The Fish.

Fuck you too, Kit Kat.

Alright here's the deal. I've been having trouble people-ing this week *surprise surprise* and thought I might as well come here and share my little revelations with y'all, since y'all don't exist and I don't really like people, or sharing. Shut up, reddit users aren't people; they're advanced aliens from a Utopian dimension on community service.

Bitches be cray cray, that's a fact. It ain't just a brofact, it's a Newton fact, despite the fact that Newton was a bro. It's hard to scale things down to perspective when the world is proportionately gracious to your cup size. Your heart's just gotta go out to Brienne, you know? It took a little getting down and getting my hands dirty to ultimately crack the code, but it's just one of those things you gotta go through to crack, while owning a vajayjay. Okay, the pun was totally NOT intended, I'm not that street smart. Anyway, there's a very thin line between being rational and rationalizing. Hard enough as it is on average homo-sapiens, that line's made microscopically thinner if you're a woman. And I don't mean sitcom-level hard, I mean a professional tap dancing amoeba could trip and fall to its forever single cellular death if it took on that line. Don't get me wrong, I'd donate my coochie to the ARC if I could, but by the time that's made technologically possible, I don't think any of the futuristic droids would be dumb enough to take it.

More on this week, I cut a deal with an old war veteran to buy a beach bucket when he made me realize I've been to the beach and didn't build a sand castle. I found out I don't need an internet degree or to be the captain of my own ship to marry two people - IN YOUR FACE, JOEY TRIBIANI - and that all it took to get on a scary boss's good side is a good old heart-in-a-mug coffee trick, and you don't even have to give the coffee away. You could just drink it, because the heart was totally meant for you.

Growing up sucks, I don't even remember where I stashed my good old beach bucket. Hell, it took me two weeks and a break-down-induced full on nerd-out to realize I turned into one of those grownups who were all icky about sand and didn't make any sand castles. That's another thing you gotta get down and dirty for, and it ain't half icky, dammit! They didn't tell us that shit when we were kids, that's one thing I could have used instead of a singing purple dinosaur. Who the hell needs a singing purple dinosaur? You gotta invest in the right things for them to turn out sweet, and I cross my heart and hope to die if I don't invest in a solid beach bucket before the year is done. Scout's honour.

I know they told you to stop taking advice off the internet, but they also told you bad things don't happen to good people. If you gotta take advice; google that shit, reddit it to threads sweetcakes. Forums are great; it's that shady place in a dark internet alley where people go to secretly be honest, away from judgmental eyes. Strangers have got no reason to hurt you, just as they've got no reason to be nice to you, and you'll learn to be grateful for both - equally, might I add - when you learn that's about as fair as it gets out there in the big bad world. After all, Brutus would have had no reason to kill Caesar had he not been his friend. Well, there WAS a conflict of booty interest, but that's irrelevant to my argument, so I'll go ahead, be an Egyptian and just bleep it out from history altogether on account of the 'bros before hoes' charter. You get the point.

What else did I find out this week? Oh, doctors are idiots. Most of them. Hot doctors exist off-set, they usually have legible handwriting and normally pop out of the grid every once in a blue moon just to mess with you, then turn into a grizzly werewolf, probably.

At the expense of sounding like Ted Mosby, I'll just go ahead and say it. Kids, there are no rules to this thing. And believe it or not, there will come a time when even Will Smith can't cheer you up. That's usually the time when YOU gotta cheer you up. Question is, can you take on Will Smith?

Of Anchors, Introverts & The (Not So) Wonderful Wizard Of Oz

I should probably change the header of this blog to 'The Woes and Mischief of a Confused Humanoid', but that wouldn't be fair because that would imply that I'm at least part human (humanoid) who knows what she's doing (mischief) and knows how to react about it (Woes.)

A lot has been happening recently. And I figured out that part of the reason why I'm not coping as well as I should is because I haven't been taking enough alone time. You see, us introverted people have to learn how to be around other humans; it's a process that's not autonomous and as easily acquired through social osmosis as those of other people.

You spend enough time on your own and you get used to handling everything on your own, which makes it a lot harder on us to include people when they're eventually there. A simple change as spending more time in the living room than you're used to, not having enough time to read as much or having to deal with people on a more regular, and increased, periods of time could throw us off balance.

We're aliens, we'll always be aliens. When aliens lose their privilege of being alienable they start losing themselves. Even using the 'We' pronoun feels all snuggled up where it shouldn't.

I ran out of the office for the first time since I started working there because the kingpin (Or shall I say Queenpin?) professionally smack-talked me. I got assigned a bigass project that will have me shooting caffeine up my jugular vein to perform. And the other game-writing job I became too attached to has been put on hold till September for creative reasons. I see the big ole warlock swisheddy flicked the rugs right out from under me, yet again.

I think the reason people started coupling up or tribing up was because they got seasick. Life's all variables, nothing stays where it should. You start depending on one thing and you be sure it'll be taken away one way or another, so people started grabbing each other at a desperate attempt to have landmarks. Floating anchors, all over the place. That's all there is to it. That's also how it shouldn't be. We're not built for what we're built for, not all of us.

I sometimes wonder how people do it, ones with human anchors. I mean, the woman starts talking and the man starts packing, haven't you watched enough chick flicks? Everybody's got their own problems, and everybody's eager not to have you as one of them.

Funny how everybody wants an anchor to blame.

I'm gonna go read. 

I'm this close to ditching a big job (that I care about) because I'm a runner. What's your poison?

Carla's Cat Heaven.

Something happened last night that shook me up pretty badly. You know what they say, time changes people and what not. But you always think you'll be the exception of that rule; you cast yourself as the hero of all your fantasies, you help old women cross the street and save four-eyed pizza-faced nerds from the big bad bullies, then you get bite-sized surprises as you go along about who you really are as a person.

Yesterday I watched a street dog get whipped and I did nothing about it because of the consequences. There were a bunch of puppies too. They were beaten up pretty badly by some vagrant, so badly you could still hear the wails and the whips at the back of your head and wince recalling the memory. Growing up turns us into cowards. Of course, it's easier to generalize. I guess what I'm trying to say is that growing up has turned 'me' into a pussy.

It's also easy to rationalize, after all it's not that big, it happens everyday right? Worse things happen everyday. If I had done something about it, the guy could have physically attacked me. But that doesn't change the fact that I didn't do anything about it. I stood there and I let it happen, and I could have stopped it. It's easy to think you have no choice when the consequences aren't in your favour, but you do. That's the truth of it. I had a choice and I chose to let the man beat up the helpless dog because I didn't want to get hurt.

Here's the shitty part - not that the last part wasn't shitty - but I'm not sure I'd react differently if I had the chance. I have zero shots against the guy in physical combat, not to mention the fact that this country fails to maintain the most basic of human rights so that says enough about its animal rights policies and pretty much rules out the safer choice of pursuing legal action.

A younger me wouldn't have had the sense to think it through before bolting at the guy with flailing knuckles. That's where the growing up part comes in. We do this everyday; we let go of things we believe in and we become shittier people as the day progresses because we don't want to get into trouble, be it in the workplace or over a nasty argument with friends. We all go through life wanting nothing to do with life, and we sit back with clear consciences because, after all, 'there was nothing we could have done about it' when the truth is this: You're a shitty person and you've been perfectly rinsed into the socially acceptable moral grey we all like so much.

Let me take it from the top. Yesterday I stood by and watched a helpless animal get tortured when there was a lot I could have done about it because it was more convenient for me. Yesterday I took a glimpse at how much of a shitty person I've become, and it's making me wonder what else is in store.

Don Draper, pitching the new Kodak wheel projector: Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.