Because my keyboard's getting kinda old and I've begun to notice the keys spazzing out. I think I can swing $20 for a replacement if I ever need one...


I had my first actual stint as a resto druid today, healing a 10m Obsidian Sanctum and then 10m Vault of Archavon. Since the new patch there's a new boss in the instance and my guild decided to try it. If you were to ask me the mechanics of the fight, or even the boss's name, I couldn't tell you. I was quite literally pounding my keyboard trying to keep Dellrias from dying. I didn't even have the right gear on; I had my boomkin t7 chest on instead of the resto chest, but I rocked [what felt to me] an insane amount of haste. My Healing Touches were a .6-second cast, down from 1.5. I can really see why healers enjoy haste. I think I could come to enjoy healing as a druid, when I have more time to prepare for it. I literally had 10 minutes to respec and grab my resto gear out of the bank before I was summoned away.

Lumizent is still 79, but I'm slowly working on getting her to level. Spending an hour camping Loque'nahak and/or Gondria didn't help, either. I'll probably never find the former, because Sholazar is crammed full of people all the time. I have a couple of pieces of gear for her to equip once she hits 80.


I'm going to NYC next month, on the 19th of May. :D and_be_blue and I [and her friend Steve] will be going to see Avenue Q on Broadway. I am endlessly excited. :D :D :D The last time I was in New York at all was in '02, and that was only for two days -- I'd gone up to the northeast to visit my dad in Providence and took the train up to visit MacKay. I'll be going up for a whole week this time, and I'll probably get to spend more time in the actual city. My experience with NYC as a city was spent walking down 5th Avenue during the St. Patrick's Day parade, and then a couple of hours spent fooling around in the Met.

School's out in ... about two weeks. Another semester over already!

Louisiana Protective Order Registry (LPOR)

Today the neighbor [who will be referred to as Hellbitch in this journal] is gone. She's been gone all day, so I'm assuming she's gone to visit family for the Easter holiday. Yesterday nobody seemed willing to come out of their house while she was screaming, so the street was quiet. Today, with her gone, people have been working in their yards or walking their dogs.

Last night around 7pm she was sitting in her house with her windows shut, blinds drawn, and her door shut, and she was still screaming at my mother. She said something about getting a "free pass," which I can only assume is because she has a son in law who works in law enforcement. Which is a little scary, but thankfully I have friends and relatives in law enforcement, the Louisiana judiciary system, Border Patrol, and a cousin who's a criminal defense attorney, so. Good will always triumph over evil, because evil is dumb.

Thankfully there's no court costs or bonds needed to file for a Protective Order. My google-fu is strong.

Today while speaking with Ms. Rihner [my Bible Lit teacher] in the Liberal Arts offices, amid some general conversation, another teacher came up behind me (well, us, I was with Cary) and asked, "I'm sorry, but did one of you say you were Kathryn Johnson?"

Normally this is a question that implies the named has done something wrong, so it was with some trepidation that I answered -- especially because I hadn't ever seen this lady before. But when I told her who I was, she shook my hand and was like, "I'm Missy Diaz, I was final say in the BHM contest, and your entries for Images are amazing! Both of them got put in, along with your BHM poem!"

So now I am all but cornered by two enthusiastic teachers -- Ms. Rihner's slightly wicked style of enthusiasm and Ms. Diaz telling me all about Images, when who should walk by but Dr. Brumfield. Dr. B is the most impossibly eloquent man I've ever met, and he was my teacher for English 101. He asked me "Did you write an Antigone paper at all, ever?" And when I replied, "yes, why?" he replies, "Well, I happened into the faculty offices today, and Dr. Choudhury had left a paper in the copier -- he was copying it for his class -- and I wondered if it was written by the same Kathryn Johnson. It only took me two paragraphs to tell it was."

This Antigone paper was one I wrote waaaaaaay back in Structure of Western Thought and which that professor still uses as a teaching aid about two years later. I will never be able to get away from this paper [or the fact that I got a 12 on my 101 Exit Exam, which was graded holistically and was the first 12 Dr. B had seen in about five years]. The infamy of this Antigone paper is such that when Dr. Choudhury discovered that perfectcherry is a friend of mine, he made her read it out loud to her class [which I'm still sorry for, Jackie].

My literature-fu is strong. *yawn*

ps.
Hopelessly addicted to Klondike, which is the solitaire game on my iPod. if I don't come back, send help.

My iPod is now sitting in my backpack! (!!!)

I made it to the Office of Student Life just as the woman in charge of the contest was walking out the door -- I squeaked in just under the wire! I now have my fancy-schmancy iPod Classic, which will be filled up with all the music I have on my compy when I go home. I am SO excited about it! The best part of the entire contest process was hearing the congratulations from Dr. McArthur and Ms. Rihner when they saw me -- after having kind of a shitty start to the week this was DEFINITELY something to pick me up and make me feel that this, too, shall pass.

I spent a very nice Monday evening with my friends setting up characters [and, in one case, npcs] for a few games we're going to be running. With the help of Jackie and Dave, I/we helped Germaine set up an Abyssal character for the Exalted game I'm running, and I looked over Dave's 4e DnD book to decide what race I'm going to be playing for his campaign -- I chose to play a tiefling. And no, the name is not because they have big "teef." (Thanks, Cary.)

It was nice to see my friends, the cats, the dog, and especially Miranda. I don't know what I'd do without our Monday night RPing sessions. Cary will soon be joining us, too, so that should be fun. I'm always all for inducting newbies into the ways of the nerd. After all, I did get her to come back to WoW.

(The rest of this week has, in a word, sucked, but it's nothing that can't be overcome. It's embarassing, yes, but something that can be fixed. And I've decided not to dwell on it any more than I absolutely have to, because it won't do anything but slog me down and prevent me from helping things move forward. That is all.)

Some things in the life of Kat the Dargonslayer, practicioner of Literature-Fu:

• At work we have a huge table set up with all of the Watchmen stuff, including a pretty true-to-life-size cardboard cutout of Rorschach. I watched a guy brush past Rorschach, tell him "Excuse me," and keep walking.



• Urban fiction -- especially the urban erotica that's mixed in -- is always funny. It's good for midday lolz when they're few and far between. Especially when passages of said books contain things like "Aw hell na, let me see them big ass titties!" and then, in another one I reshelved later, something the male character said sent "a tremor straight up her vagina." Not pussy. Not cunt. Vagina. I didn't know you had to get technical.



• I fell halfway down the first flight of stairs (about six steps) and was caught by the homeless lady who tends to live in the store by day. She smelled kind of musty, but she made sure I was okay.



• At various points in my work so far I've encountered people reading Forgotten Realms books, or at one point someone asked about the WoW atlas, and I almost asked them what server they played on, or what they thought of FR/DnD, but I stopped myself. I've decided I'm just not going to bother, especially since both customers were wearing wolf shirts. Is this a trend I don't know about? As a nerd, do I need to get a wolf shirt?



• Asking me for "the book about that bus crash" probably won't get you the book you want, despite the completely overwhelming number of books about bus crashes. At least know the title or the author. Also, asking me about "the sixty-dollar Shakespeare book," when searching the inventory for "Shakespeare" brings up THIRTY TWO PAGES of inventory (and six or eight books around the sixty-dollar price range), won't get you very far.

I've been feeling much more creative lately and I think that being able to express all of it satisfactorily has really been helping my mood. Winning the Delgado BHM contest certainly didn't hurt, but even before that I've been almost constantly fiddling around with making earrings, or attempting to draw in my various half-finished sketchbooks, or working on poems. Having been out of work for about two months* (I'll get to that in a moment) has definitely helped by giving me lots of free time, but I still kind feel like part of me came back to life just because I've finally gotten my groove back.

I already want to redo my BHM poem -- Dr. Cook suggests that all good poets should regularly run scissors through their work and cut out unnecessary words, and I definitely agree with that -- but I have a couple more in my head. Unfortunately, since it's after midterms now, we're going to move on to fiction, so if I want those workshopped I'll have to meet with him [or my friends, IRL] privately.

Recently I've re-affirmed that I'm much more a poet than I am a fiction writer. Fiction writing is fun, and after all I completed NaNoWriMo way back in 2003, but I'm so much more satisfied with my poetry, and I feel it on a deeper level. When I write a good poem, I really know it and I enjoy it down deep in my soul. Fiction writing is kind of like scratching an itch. It's much more transient a pleasure than writing a really good poem. I just wish I had more of the poetry I wrote at NOCCA, but a lot of that was a casualty of Hurricane Katrina. Some of it may exist on my dad's ancient computer, but I'm not holding any bets on that.

Anyway, less navel-gazing [haha] and onto more worldly things. *After not hearing from Borders for awhile I got a call today from Travis, one of the assistant managers, who informed me that just after he got off of the phone with me he was going to have the GM put me back on the schedule for next week. I don't really expect to be working 30+ hours -- I should be so lucky -- but some work is better than no work at all. I need to have money to do the daily/monthly things that need doing, as well as having some stored away for my NYC trip, as well as Dragon*Con ... and maybe a few bucks here or there to splurge on iTunes now that I'll have a giant-size iPod to store things on.

School's going swimmingly, but that's because I'm a huge nerd. I just finished up midterms. I only had one real midterm test, and that was in Bible Lit, which I enjoy. In Creative Writing, the guy who I referred to in some previous entry as Skinny McDouchebag actually came up to me and thanked me for leaving him several paragraphs of constructive criticism on his workshop poem. It's just that hardcore NOCCA training coming back! Math is faintly overwhelming but I like the rigidity of Logic, as well as the vibe of the classroom; since it's a night class most of the people in it are around my age or older, and since we're all tired and all trying to help one another do well, it's a pleasant way to end the day.

Aaaaand finally, Lumizent is almost level 79, which means that I'll have two level 80s soon in WoW. /o\

The Black History Month contest finishes judging tomorrow. :o I'll know by Thursday if I placed at all. Woo!

I don't really GET how I understand converses/inverses/contrapositives/negations so well, but I do -- so I'm not going to question why. I'm not that good at math, but I am at logic, because [and this is going to sound dumb] it makes sense. It's a concrete thing. If this means THIS, then that means THAT. And I know math and numbers should do the same thing, but -- logic is words. This math course is doing MATH with WORDS, which I think makes all the difference.

Whatever -- at midterm I have a high B, I think, so it's all gravy to me. The teacher, while teaching about converses, pointed to my shoes and said, "see, she has Converses on." And I thought I had a dumb sense of humor.

My internet is behaving terribly so I'm not in 25m Naxxramas like I should be. Instead I'm sitting here listening to what loot drops, and the worst part is that I've already DONE all my homework, because I thought I'd be raiding... oh well. At least I did something constructive.

Might be getting a new job soon since Borders has effectively ceased to be/matter. And I've had a headache for two days. /o\

Morning and Night

In the morning,
when she makes the bed
so we line up,
when we lie
in perfect symmetry,
the hours pass with the fan
a quiet circle overhead,
spinning us to sleep.

During the night, we are apart.
You crumple--
exiled to the foot of the bed
in a furious tangle,
cocooned into yourself.
I lay taut, heavy with loss,
and wait
for the gray flush of morning
and you to spread over me
so we can fall into place together.

Exercise in Voice
English 251-101

Write a poem in the voice of one of the following:
-Count Dracula's wife
-Clinton's dog
-Cop busted for a drug heist
-Traffic light at Causeway and Vets [lol]
-Owner of a nail shop
-First-timer in a casino
( -Housewife who has just shoplifted a lipstick )