Kithkatul's Xanga

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 08:41:09 GMT

Death has entered my life, and I feel the need to write flow through me.

An uncle, I guess, though with extended family, it gets a little fuzzy. Uncle serves as a description, though. Hit by a train, around this time last night. I saw him at Thanksgiving, while in Oregon, and I didn't know him very well, but family is family.
Odd, because I know his parents much better, and his sister and her kids, and I can only imagine what they must be feeling right now. Cousins to me, one of them wrote about the reactions of his mother and father when they heard, and its reading that description of her reading the note that sticks with me the most. Losing a child? My parent's reaction is enough for me try and grasp the immensity of that feeling, but I cannot fathom it. Losing a sibling?

That, I dare not try and imagine.

November, December, January, February, and three people I have personally known have died. And when the old die, it is sad, and I'm not comparing or rating anything, but it is expected. We all, eventually, accept the inevitability of death, whether as my grandfather, who fought till the very end, or my grandmother, at peace when she finally died. But we don't accept it to come quickly or suddenly. My friend's dad? My mom's age.
Expect it, even. Appropriate typo, anyways.
A train, a fucking train. Hits a man I know, utterly destroying him and tearing from his family a piece that will never be filled. Parents lose a son, a sister loses a brother, two nephews lose an uncle, and it goes on and on.

When did death become part of my life? When did people I know, people much too young for me to expect it, start to die? When did they start becoming so old that I began to expect it?
Cancer, old age, disease, FUCKING TRAINS.... the sheer callousness, the unbelievable power of all that is arrayed against this fragile little conceit we call life is so immense, so utterly uncaring.
It almost seems wrong that we ever get over it, but what else can we do? There's no lessons to learn, no mistakes to rectify, no vengeance to enact, no wisdom to be gained. People die. Life ends. So it has been, so it shall always be.
How are we supposed to accept that? How do we face the massive jaws of death and keep going? How can we, when you look, and realize that they are all children. Every single person is someone else's child, someone else's hopes and dreams and love, or the pure absence of, made manifest? And very child looks, and realizes this. Every child stares into that void, and the cold bites deep and does not let go, it will never let go. So we build a suit of armor and call ourselves adults, but the cold is still there, we just can't feel it anymore.

Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him.

How long till someone my age dies? And who? Its like a morbid guessing game that no one plays, but people get to the end regardless.

We remember the dead; they give us reason to live.

Let's play a game.
'Let's not.'
Among the Fallen, who-
'The answer is children, wind. More children than anyone else.'
Then where is your despair?
'You understand nothing,' he said, pausing to spit. 'For a man or woman to reach adulthood, they must first kill the child within them.'
You are a most vicious man, soldier.
'You still understand nothing. I have just confessed my despair, wind. You win the game. You win every game. But I will march on, into your icy breath, because that's what soldiers do.'
Odd, it does not feel as if I have won.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:36:21 GMT

Literally took me like ten minutes of staring at the Xanga screen to find the damn 'Add weblog entry' button. Back in the old days......
I keep saying that more and more and that kind of scares me.

Back!! AmeriCorps was...interesting. Word of advice to anyone: Don't sleep with your boss. Especially not if you have to live with them for 10 months come hell or high water.
But it was a good experience, though not one I'd do again any time soon. Maybe in a few years. Once was enough for a while.

Does anybody even read xanga anymore? More to the point, does anybody even read mine anymore (anymore...hah! did anyone ever?)? Meh, the reality of the situation is irrelevant, otherwise I wouldn't be blogging in the first place. What a comfortable little illusion.

HCC fucking sucks.
I need a job.
I need to find people who 'party', cause I haven't gotten drunk in a long time, nor been very social.
I need to go the beach, too...

On a different note, Coraline looks really interesting, and I'm eagerly anticipating The Watchmen.
Stephen Erickson is an amazing writer.
I'm obviously dreadfully bored.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:55:38 GMT

Life! Well, internet, actually, which is, perhaps surprisingly, no longer as necessary to life as it used to be.
Well. So, life is good. Beaumont, Texas is my next destination, and I've taken up running. Someone tell Steph, I kinda wonder if she'll actually die of shock or something.

Stay classy, world.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:35:51 GMT

It was warmer in Maryland than in Oregon.
What the hell.
First substantial post on LJ. Whee.

Snow!!

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 19:25:23 GMT

So my sister comes into my room this morning, says: 'Look out the window.' The blinds are drawn, so I kinda look out, and I see light. Meh, so its already late in the day. Whatever.
I grumble.
'No, seriously, look out the window. When did we move back to Pennsylvania?'
I begin to grasp what it is she means, and rip open the blinds.

SNOW!!! Glorious snow!!
Four inches of it, and counting. Perfect snowball weather, too.

Pictures on Facebook.

Paprika

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 08:45:39 GMT

Awesome movie. And awesome music, as well (current song being the best song from the soundtrack).
Weird movie, too. But that comes as a given when its a movie about dreams.

I wonder why it is that I find most anime horrible and overly dramatic, but full-length anime films (no doubt there is a proper term) great. Anything by Miyazaki...and a host of others as well (Appleseed comes to mind).

I take that back. There's a lot of anime I like. But most recent stuff is just...stupid. Like Death Note. Or...Yu-Gi-Oh, and Fuushugi Yuugi was hilarious, thought it wasn't supposed to be.
Yer.

Last Exile, Cowboy Bebop, Gundam UC (Seed, Wing, and most non-UC stuff is crap), and Hellsing (possibly the most awesome anime ever) are great, though.
Its probably as that much of a mystery as I think/hope it is.

The Gay Agenda (que ominous music)

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 04:08:21 GMT

Its everywhere! I have proof!
My cousin Sam was watching one of those strange kid's shows. And know what was running around from pair of pair of kids, getting them all excited? A ball of light, with a RAINBOW trailing it.
Boobah's...the very name evokes notions of gayness.

But yeah. Actual point of this entry. Blogging on LG to report my AmeriCorps stuff. Guess the name.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:50:39 GMT

Xanga is proving difficult to load pictures onto, so they go on Facebook. It would've basically been a parallel entry anyways.

No longer stranded on Maui

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 02:59:12 GMT

I spent Christmas day almost throwing up on the superferry (there must be some sort of diety or otherworldy being watching out for me, or there would be no 'almost' in the previous sentence), driving around Maui up to Haleakala, taking a lot of pictures, hiking a short trail, seeing a fogged out sunset that got unfogged (and thus astoundingly spectacular) as we headed down the mountain, and finally camping out in 40-degree weather on the slopes of the 3rd highest mountain in the world.
Hard to top that, I think.
Then it turned out that seas were too rough to travel, so the Superferry wasn't running. Which wasn't so bad because we hadn't planned to leave yet.

Middle Class America scares me. There is an entire resort town/village that theoretically contains everything a tourist family/couple/generic humanoid unit could want to see...a way of sort of 'mixing' or 'living' with the upper class.
And to some, that is all that Maui ever is. Or Hawaii ever is.
It rather repulses me. The hotel wasn't even that nice. I almost preferred the camping, save for the cold and the whole sleeping on the ground thing.
And biking down Haleakala was quite an experience. There's really not much to say about it, although the words 'terrifying', 'exhilarating', 'bloody cold' (at first), and 'what-a-view' come to mind.
Kind of a you-have-to-do-it-to-really-experience-it kind of thing.

And still the ocean was being rather adamant about not letting us go home. With our car. Damn, can't fly.
More hiking, this time through mud. I'm apparently much more nimble than my brother and father, as I slid down the steep path on my feet, while Alex tended to use his backside. And then I fell.
Curses.

So eventually a solution to our high seas dilemma showed itself in the form of quick and desperate adaptation by the Superferry company. They hold the car, we fly back, and when the seas calm themselves someone (with a license ((read: me D:)) ) goes back and sails it back home.
I bet I throw up this time.

Pictures of the stunning Valley Isle forthcoming.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 02:50:57 GMT

Another reason I so love this island (or rather, this group of them. Whatever).
In the Honolulu Advertiser, Island Life section, I was reading an article on being single during the holidays.
About halfway through I came upon this paragraph.

'After a bad breakup with his boyfriend two years ago, Young said he found satisfaction in writing and hiking...'

I so hope that wasn't a typo.