I forgot to blog the St. Patrick's Day presents I got last week.

Maybe he didn't buy me conventional bling for Valentine's Day, but he did buy me an implausibly expensive irreverent stuffed animal.




I don't mind the lateness of the gift-- the stuffed Joanna doll didn't go up for sale until two days after the St Pat's ship-by deadline, and he figured it'd be best to wait and get both items, but then the shirt went backordered, so i got them just in time for Easter instead.
But you know, I'll wear it to all the seisuns i sing at.

(Have I pimped on here that I often sing at the traditional Irish sessions on Saturday afternoons [5ish-8ish pm] at Nietszche's? Free admission, Guinness on special, I sing you song, Kurt plays harp, Bill plays accordion sometimes, Ann plays fiddle, maybe a piper or two shows up, maybe someone with a mandolin, Patricia might bring her guitar and sing irreverent folksongs or really sappy Irish ballads in a perhaps-sarcastic-you'll-never-know manner. You never know who'll show up. It's a good time. I generally get tanked.)

Also I and many rollergirls will be attending the Dyngus Day celebrations in Polonia tomorrow-- hopefully, on wheels at the Central Terminal. That's the plan anyway. Also someone who doesn't sign a name has been texting me about pussy willows-- I know it's a rollergirl because they have my cellphone number which is only posted on the private Rollergirls Yahoo group. So I have 35 pussy willows and eight wheels. I am nearly unstoppable.

And oh!!!
Highlight reel of the March 31st roller derby bout. You have to watch the whole thing to see (e:zobar)'s costume-- he's in the closing credits. If you want to watch for me, I'm wearing the white-capped Pro-Designed kneepads and a pair of black and white striped tights, and matching armbands, so you can often spot me by the stripes glowing in the blacklight. The lighting's awful, sorry.

Dammit, I can't steal the video. I guess I have to just link to it. It's here. On Myspace. Sorry. :(




My team's in blue. Individuals and incidents to look out for include:

• #007, Supernova, has an awesome booty (in real life she's a model, a plus-size model, though there's really only one part of her that's plus-sized at all, as you'll see) and often makes entertaining gestures involving it.
  
• # 459, Janeiac, often skated as jammer, and throughout the course of the evening, fell enough times that she accumulated a 2nd-degree friction burn through her fishnets, so that the next day it looked like a truck had run her over.
  
• # RU486, Lizzie McFighter, gets checked into the chairs, on film (actually nearly right into the camera) by the Saucies captain Dr. Dementer. In that fall she injured her knee so badly she's possibly out for the season. But what the camera doesn't show is that she got up and skated through the pack one more time, getting 4 more points, before giving up and getting carried out on a stretcher (also on film).
  
• One of the Dollies, who skated as a ref for this bout (as the Dollies did not compete; we'll face them Apr. 28th), one Redfox, wore a crop-top halterneck shirt, a pair of striped spankies, and some Muppet-fur chaps that she made herself. Look for the cowboy hat and red hair, as if the striped spankies weren't enough to find her by... We all decided, in the Knockouts locker room, that we were gay for her. Just for her, in some of our cases, although others not so much. She found this hilariously entertaining. She really is that hot though.
  
• The girl in the gold sequined leotard and bunny ears, was briefly fired from her job for being involved in such a sexual and violent sport. She was fired, not for the video, but for the mention, of her pseudonym, in Artvoice. But the firing didn't stick so she's back at work now. (That's not an incident in the video, but it does add something, to know that.)

And yes, she did tell them all off on her way out, which made it that much better when they were forced to take her back.

There's one shot of me falling, dramatically from behind. There's another shot that apparently shows me going into the chairs, although I have no memory of such occuring. Actually I only remember falling once, in a pileup that didn't appear on the video-- a Saucy landed right on top of me and kind of squashed me but it didn't hurt much, so I shook her off and got up. But the video shows me falling all over the place. Which is probably a pretty good endorsement of my new equipment-- pads from Pro-Designed--

Anyway that's all for now.

Heh, what's funniest is that I can't view the video I posted. It doesn't load in my browser. I've already forgotten what I posted. I am sure it's dumb.

I have been involved in a horrid and stupid and messy flamewar for the last two days, over on Myspace, about roller derby. I am exhausted, but somewhat proud of myself that I have actually managed to largely get the thing to remain on-topic, and actually managed (this should go down in Internet history) to wrestle my way through and, within the comment thread, convince not one but two of my flamers that the thing they were freaking out about had not in fact been what I meant by what I posted.

The only person still flaming away is someone only peripherally involved, which is kind of funny. He seems to think he's still going to beat me somehow, even though I finally got him to paraphrase what he thinks I said (it was a two-paragraph post, and the first paragraph was a sentence and a half), and his paraphrase is not what I said, and thus renders his entire argument unusable.
I still haven't won, because he's apparently too stupid to give up even in the face of that logic, but I'm not really overly concerned, because he's not even involved in this, he's just some idiot who seems to think he is. So...

• dances a bit*

My Internet flaming kung-fu is massive!!

That said, I'm not ever ever linking to *this* blog from there. Good Christ. Well, not for a while anyway. It's bad enough that some of them know where my Livejournal is. It's not my fault-- I knew some of them before I joined roller derby. It's too late to swear them to secrecy, I guess.
It's just... agh, I have been blogging publicly on the Internet for six years now, I will not be deterred by something so small. But when it's people you know in real life, it's a lot higher-stakes. I had planned on just walking away from that blog post, but then I realized, I'm going to see these people at the meeting on Tuesday, and if I don't go to that meeting, they'll think I'm running from them. And...
Bah.

Anyhow. I posted the photos of the bout on Flickr, so that I could link to them from any of my blogs without putting in a direct link to another blog. There might still be like one or two people on Myspace who don't know my Livejournal name and if they're that oblivious I'd prefer they stay that way. Also I'm not giving Myspace more page views than I have to-- those ads are fucking annoying.

So: bout photos, and detailed captions are here:


If anyone's curious, I also posted a recap of the bout as I experienced it here:

(e:zobar)'s dancing rabbit is traumatizing me.

He traumatized a lot of little kids too. That was pretty priceless. I am now filled with a perverse desire to breed. I can't explain it.

I've been trying to post stupid videos and cellphone-camera pictures because I now have a phone that does photos and video, but I can't seem to make the moblogging feature thing work, so you all are denied my cellphone-video directorial genius for now. We'll see if I can manage to figure it out. If so, I now will have tons of content for my (e:strip) blog, because I am trying to use my stupid expensive cellphone enough to justify the expense, and this will make me feel better about it.

Also my life is so fascinating it needs to be chronicled, hopefully in multimedia.

So, stay tuned, folks, for stupid grainy videos of pointless mundanity. Yay! I'm psyched.

(I'm uploading this video from my computer, but that's not really moblogging. I am determined to become a moblogger. it would help if I could actually type on a cellphone. Perhaps I'll learn.)

::DOWNLOAD MEDIA::

See poster, previous draft. I suppose it would be gauche to post it again. Nickel City Knockouts vs. Suicidal Saucies, 7 pm Saturday, Rainbow Rink (just off the Twin City Hwy).

The Knockouts got our team uniforms tonight!!! They are HOT. I am not just saying that. Dave from Jackdaw did the design and the screens, and some of you may be familiar with the caliber of his work from the Jackdaw merch: Our uniforms are beautifully screenprinted, impeccably designed, and absolutely gorgeous.

Much of the team will be out tomorrow night in uniform at the Jackdaw show at Mohawk Place, so if you're curious, you know where to find us. I hear that Jackdaw inspires spontaneous dancing and also spontaneous makeouts. I hope not to be disappointed. I will be wearing a very, very, very short skirt with a set of brass knuckles screenprinted on the ass, so I should be easy to find for the aforementioned spontaneous dancing.
I am kind of getting over a cold so maybe you might want to hold off on the spontaneous makeouts. But we'll see. Alcohol kills germs, after all.

I've been meaning to get to a Jackdaw show for over a year, so, I guess that's a minor indicator of just how extremely lame I am. Nevertheless, I am excited. And also will be wearing an exceedingly hot uniform. So consider the excitement exponentially increased. I can't sleep because I can't wait to skate. I can't wait. It is going to be AWESOME.

But I made a vow to avoid capslock, so I had better stop squeeing now.

I don't know if that's legible but it's the poster for the upcoming bout. Which will be awesome. I am not kidding. I'm not even talking about (e:zobar) in a bunny suit or any of that-- I'm talking about the sport. I'm saying, if you saw the last bout or if you didn't, we are so much more confident, competent, and fast now, we are a vicious unstoppable force of awesomeness, and anyone who takes sports in Buffalo seriously shouldn't miss this.

Tickets are available online for a fifty-cent surcharge. You order them there, they get your name, you can pick up the tickets at the will-call line. Get there at 6:15 to get in line! We're getting everyone in the door this time. Halftime show by Blue Rocket Trio.


But there's another event that some of you might be interested in as well, which is somewhat roller-derby related:

On the 30th, the day before the bout, Jackdaw is playing Mohawk Place. Their piper (Dave Moore, roommate of one Holly Lulu, outside blocker for the Knockouts) did the graphic design for the logo for the Nickel City Knockouts, and we owe him a few drinks, so the entire NCKO team is coming, in our brand new uniforms (which we're not getting until the day before......), to rock the fuck out with Jackdaw.
So anyone's up for that, it should be a good time.

I've still never seen Jackdaw live, so I'm really looking forward to that.

Our bout afterparty is at Mohawk Place too, so there's a reduced admission with one of our ticket stubs.
Never been to Mohawk Place before, so twice in two days will be pretty interesting.

I'm about to get a new cellphone with video capabilities.
So I hope I'll use it and blog here with it. I'll find out how. Somehow.

I only ever post bitchy rants on here, but hopefully once I can video things, I'll have more amusing things to post.

I mostly just wanted to post that (e:zobar) has, in fact, actually gone out and rented himself a pink bunny suit. He is entirely not kidding.
Anyone who wants to see (e:zobar) in a pink bunny suit should hie themselves to Rainbow Rink on the 31st because he will be wearing it there, then.

Also this bout is going to be awesome.


Otherwise I have little to say, except that I finally went to the doctor after like five years of not having any medical care, and I remember why I never go to the doctor.
I went because my knees have been really bothering me this past week. They've just been super sore, to the point that i was limping, and after limping for a 6-hour shift, my back and my sciatic nerve have been giving me all kinds of grief. So I figured, I'd better get a medical opinion.

The doctor said it was probably overuse and I should cut back on my exercise.
Then she glanced at my chart, saw how much I weighed, and asked how tall I was. When I answered, she said, 'You know you're overweight so you should diet and exercise more.'

I ask you this in complete sincerity: HOW am I supposed to both cut back on my exercise, and exercise more?

And how come she had to find out how tall I was before she could decide if I was fat or not? She'd just been examining me, right? Am I fat, or not? It seems like you should be able to tell on sight whether someone's really obese or not.

I'm sorry to rant about it, but I'm really upset now, because it's taken me a long time to become comfortable with myself. The Internet informs me that since I'm five feet seven and female, I should weigh 150 pounds, or somewhere between 120 and 166, depending on the chart.
By those calculations, the fact that I'm 190 pounds means I'm grossly obese. (As an aside, I can assure you, with complete horror, that I would be DEAD before I was 120 pounds. I have not been 120 pounds since grade school.)
But then other handy dandy online obesity calculators, upon hearing that my waist size is 33, tell me I'm only borderline overweight.
(They only want my waist measurement, though. They don't care how tall I am. Which makes me suspicious of how they could even tell anything at all from that number.)


And another thing that irks me is that I know my boobs weigh at least 20 pounds (don't ask how I measured that). The smaller my waist gets (and it has gotten a bit smaller these last six months as I've upped my exercise although my weight hasn't changed), the larger, by proportion, my boobs get-- that overbust measurement just won't budge no matter what I do. So I'm sliding from a 38DDD to a 36F to a 34FF/G, with no increase in actual breast size, because as the band size decreases, you have to raise the cup size in order to contain the same actual volume of breast tissue.
(If I exercise more I'll become a complete and total freak and won't be able to buy bras anywhere AUGGGHHH. I am a G now! Do you know what that means! It means only bad things! BAD THINGS!)


But nobody, not calculators, not doctors, not nobody, wants to take into account 20 pounds of boobs or a pair of heavily-muscled legs, in determining whether I'm overweight or not. So I'm stuck with the label now of Clinically Fat, and am still trying to work out how I can simultaneously exercise more <i>and</i> less.

I admit it, I let (e:strip) fall by the wayside. As it is I have the Livejournal I've had for almost six years, and the community of people I only interact with online through it, and now I have a Myspace (oh Christ) because my team captain for roller derby made me get one. I don't' use my real name on it and don't mention any of my other online identities; it's just for roller derby. And it takes me so long to write these long entries because I don't know when to shut up...

But that doesn't leave much time for (e:strip). I tried to set it up so I could read (e:strip) via an RSS feed on Livejournal, but that silently broke, so I just thought everyone had been being unusually quiet. I was just thinking I should come back here and see what's up and bug Terry for IRS advice.

I don't really have time for much nowadays-- either I'm at work, I'm at roller derby or in meetings for roller derby, or I'm online, mostly emailing about goddamn roller derby. Or I'm asleep; I've been sick all winter and have been constantly trying to sleep my way free of some illness. (Remember the last house party? How I was getting sick, all snuggly in
my bathrobe and whining about not feeling good? Yeah I'm still not better all the way.)

I was exceedingly pleased to find out that (e:zobar)'s been blogging about me. I was glad to hear he had pimped the roller derby match-- it was very nice of him. (Redfox's husband, by the way, has declared that "derby widow" is politically incorrect, and he prefers the term "derby groupie". I dunno man, whatever empowers him.)

I also was totally psyched by this entry
and how it was decided that I am hella needy and whiny and need to back up off him. Yes. I am a terrible person, in fact, and none of my complaints are in any way valid.
He can compose all the essays he wants but if he doesn't post them then I don't get to read them. Also if you want to celebrate a holiday in an alternative way that takes the emphasis off the traditional way and makes more sense to you, that's fine, but you have to do it, and if it's something that involves two people, it really helps if you tell the other person about it.
I was very pleased to come home and find that he had made me dinner on Valentine's Day-- it was quite nice. Unfortunately i was ill and had been unable to taste food for about three days, and I'm still recovering from that, so I couldn't appreciate it as much as I wanted. At least it was a strongly-flavored dish with a pleasing texture.

I know I haven't been as appreciative to him as I should be. He made dinner last night and I was so upset that he didn't use half the ingredients I'd asked him to incorporate into it because they're about to go bad and we'd have to throw them out, and it made him super angry because he'd bothered to go ahead and cook dinner even though he was tired. But I'd told him that if he was too tired, we had perfectly adequate leftovers.
And I'm still trying to figure out how to apologize when I am still annoyed. I told him where the things were that I wanted him to use up! Does he not listen to me? Now I have to think of something to do immediately with all the ingredients I got for that dish, because they'll go bad, but I'm not going to be home for dinner for the next two days. [I was planning on taking Z out on Friday; does that ruin the surprise?]
But, of course, I'm in the wrong. He went ahead and made dinner. Which was nice of him. And lovely. And wonderful. And all that. And I'm ungrateful, but I can't help being pissed that he didn't listen to me.

And I am glad he made dinner on Valentine's Day, but then he left every dish in the sink and i had a nervous breakdown the next day [really, I was crying for 20 minutes while I was trying to do something else] because I had tried so hard to catch up on the dishes the previous day, because he sort of doesn't do any very often, and while I accept that I can't bully him into doing dishes every day, I have so little time and the skin on my hands is so badly affected by washing dishes that I can't keep up with them either, especially since I already damage my hands doing laundry and have never asked him to do a load of laundry in 3 years, blah blah blah whine whine piss piss moan moan.
So there you have it: I'm a needy bitch. I threaten and bludgeon him and demand unreasonable things of him, and mope and whine and cry and leave messages for him to find in a passive-aggressive manner. Because Valentine's Day should be, as he says, all about celebrating the special people in your life, by treating them the way you usually do, and it is unreasonable for them to expect you to tell them that they are important to you to their face when you can simply tell your journal about how little they appreciate how you feel, especially if you've never told them how you feel.
[Which goes both ways of course. I do the same. Turnabout is fair play. It also solves nothing. And I have been trying to make an effort to say out loud to his face that I appreciate him and the things he does.]

Amusingly enough a girl on my livejournal friendslist posted about how much she admires the relationship (e:zobar) and I have, how well I cope with having such an emotionally distant lover. [Her words.] Gosh, she said, I could never spend five years with a guy who had never even said "I love you" or anything remotely similar to it, and who didn't buy me things for Christmas or Valentine's. [Her 'emotionally distant' boyfriend bought her a rose, cheap candy, and a bust of her favorite DC comics character, and told her that while it wasn't easy for him to do mushy things, she was important to him. I cried when I read that entry, I'll admit it, but I didn't tell her that.]

I laughed and breezily told her that it's not always easy. And no, it isn't always easy.

I don't need the conventional mushy bullshit, I know I don't. I shouldn't need anything. I don't' want to be a needy, whiny person. It's not what I want to be. It's only so hard right now because I have so little time. What we have is that we enjoy one another's company so much. I never get to see him. We never get to talk. When we do we're so tired and have all these little irritations in the way that we can't really talk seriously.

I miss you, (e:zobar). I miss (e:strip) too. I wish I didn't have to spend so much of my life doing things I don't want to do, because now that there are things I do want to do, it leaves no time for the things I ought to do and squishes out the things I need to do.

I know! I'll become a webcam whore. Here are my boobs: Happy Mardi Gras/ Valentine's Day!





It would be a lot easier with a camera remote, though. Which I suppose I'll have to buy myself, but I don't have time to shop. I don't really have time to do anything, and I was just going to come here to make a quick post about roller derby and taxes, but then I got distracted.

I missed roller derby practice this morning. :( I feel fine, but I am too sleepy to actually function. Also my legs are as sore as if I ran ten miles yesterday. Of course, I can't go back to sleep either. How annoying.

I should do a big update. I do daily updates at my LJ, and I just haven't found a perfect niche for my (e:strip) to fill in my life yet, but I like this community. Apparently I party harder than I blog, in Buffalo-centric situations.

Last night's party was lovely. Happy birthday, (e:enknot)!

I'm going to continue with my webcam idea. I do periodically take pictures of myself with my iSight and I don't know why but it seems amusing. Here's one this morning, waking up:



Note the little 16-ounce Nalgene. That thing is great. It is my new party friend. Since I carry a giant purse it fits inside with no problem and it is perfectly sized so that I can say to myself, Self, we need to be more hydrated, and then I can drink it all in a reasonable amount of time before my attention wanders off, and then I can hang onto it and eventually say, Self, we need more water. And everywhere I've ever partied except one place (ugh) has water, so, it's usually feasible to refill it. So it's better than the 32-oz Nalgene which is too heavy to carry around like that. And I stay hydrated for real, and then, no hangover!

Although what with this weather, I'm always bordering on dehydrated. Some days I drink and drink and drink water and I still pretty much never pee. It's annoying.

Oh, here's a bonus picture: this is me taking the bus to work last week or a couple weeks ago.



Yes, I was playing with my webcam, on the bus. I am a spaz.

I have a really funny blog I've been saving to write here rather than Livejournal. But I'm not coherent enough right now to post it. So instead I'll briefly sum up all I've been up to since my last post here:

1) Roller derby. We've picked teams. I'm on a team with the league founder, Sweet Pea [erroneously referred to as Sweat Pea in the Buffalorising article, which they have never corrected despite our pointing out their error], and the team captain is Mia Mauler who is a fitness instructor for World's Gym I think? Anyway. Everyone else on the team is like super-cool, and I've never been cool at all, so I have this terrible insecurity that I was picked last just to sort of even things out since the idea is that the teams are equal, not that one is just super-cool! So I'm all, man, I gotta get a lot better so that even if I am the uncool one, at least I'm not some sort of incompetent.
So.
Our first bout is Feb 10th at Rainbow Rink in North Tonawanda, so if you want to see real live roller derby action, I will post back here with the time and the price. The rink will have a liquor license!!!
We're also having a dance prior to that, Jan 20th I think-- I have to go to Goodwill and find an old prom dress I can wear to it. It's our Coming Out party-- a Derby Debutante B(r)a(w)ll! Rent a tux and rent some skates! More details to follow on that as well.

2) NaNoWriMo/ Noveling in general:
My final total for National Novel Writing Month was somewhere in the 60,000 range. I set Barbarians Novel aside and started in on a brand new one. For a while now I've been wanting to write something set in the contemporary world, because I keep getting little snippets of ideas about modern objects and things, and also i'm tired of how sometimes, when people read my fantasy novels that are set in pseudo-historical settings, they say the language is too modern and jarring. But it's not really a historical! It's not like there's any historical accuracy to maintain in the language! Bah.
So the new one was about a roller derby girl who is also a porn star and she knows magic and there's a bit with another person getting trapped in her body and then there's time travel, and that's about as coherent as I can be. Take my word for it that it was fun to write but doesn't hold together well and needs some major plot assistance-- but in the act of finishing it I know I'll come up with something and the second draft will be great. I just wish I had the time for that.

This upcoming week I'll be going to visit my parents' house, and spending some time with my grandmother, who fell the other day and now has two cracks in her pelvis. But, she says, it is tremendously good fortune that she did not break her hip. Cracks in her pelvis hurt terribly, and indeed she can't try to walk without fainting from the pain, but it's not like she needs a hip replacement. She's had two knee replacements, so she knows of what she speaks. Hip problems SUCK. Especially when you're 87.

If you type "dragonla" into the search box above "Read The Latest" it suggests "visit dragonfire1024's journal". Even if you type my whole name in, it never suggests me; that other dragon person stays there. I am terribly insulted. I guess it's because I am after him alphabetically. (I don't really know this other person so I am not making any comments upon his character.)

I am gearing up for National Novel Writing Month . It'll be my fourth or fifth year doing it. I win every year, not that it's difficult... I mean, it is, but, a lot of people manage to do it.
I always mean to get to more of the local meetups than I do. I have been meaning for two years now to find a local writing group. I need some kid of feedback on my writing, the closer I get to being publication-ready, and while I know there are several groups like that in Buffalo, I have yet to actually get out and find any.
I blame working nights.


My iSight doesn't seem to be working today. I leave you instead with a better picture of (e:zobar) (not by much), taken with me in a bar one night. Why did I have my laptop in a bar? It is best not to wonder too hard. Trust me, it made sense at the time.

Yesterday after I posted, (e:zobar) and I sat for like an hour in our living room, just instant-messaging photos of ourselves as we sat there taking them with our iSights. It's sort of disgusting that we have twin Macbooks but it's also darned amusing.

He sent me this:



And I retaliated with this:





It's good to know that technology is being put to constructive use, making the world a better place and all that.

I also took this picture of myself: I am holding my camera because I took pictures of Z making faces at his laptop. Those are still on the camera, though.



I spent a lot of yesterday laughing so hard that my abdominal muscles hurt today. Which is always a sign of a good weekend.