Andee from the internet.

some essays I may need to write in the future/think other people should make their thesis topics or something:

• the influence of new electronic media upon verbal and written communication. Specifically want to concentrate on the relatively new phenomena of e-mail, instant messaging and text messaging and how each of these have influenced language use. A narrowing of the topic would be a concentration on the origins of l33tspeak and other internet-based variations of language.
  
  
• a long rant along the lines of How Do I Hate the Telephone, Let Me Count the Ways. Seriously, I just realized and codified that I revile using the thing in just about all capabilities, with some exceptions. Seriously, one of the primary components of most of my bad dreams lately have incorporated a ringing telephone. I seriously hear it ringing sometimes and want to either smash it or melt it into some sort of cheery plastic donut type thing. (yes, extrajoker, that was purely for your benefit.) I think most of it stems from the fact that 99% of the people I want to hear from communicate with me via $COMPUTERY_THING anyway, which leaves most of the calls I get that I don't immediately recognize as being "safe" (generally accomplished via ringtone) as being stuff I don't really want to hear about or deal with at that second, and/or work related acalls, but I repeat myself.
  
  
• Arbitrary measures of success do not equal happiness. But this one I think is stating the obvious, so I probably won't write an essay on it or anything.
  

I wrote Dad another long ass letter last night (which is why I couldn't sleep, and some of the above points were touched upon in its six page scope). It's interesting that I find that Saturday has inspired a floodgating of letter writing suddenly... it's like once the fighting was done and I said what I had to say, I'm no longer concerned with keeping his good opinion of me enough to censor myself beyond keeping the tone of my letter formal, and one of the things that he said had been bothering me a lot and I needed to address it. I'm sure some percentage of it is a passive aggressive way of getting him to recognize that I am an individual with a mind not exactly subjugated by his will or influence, which I'm sure will frustrate him beyond belief... which actually might snap him out of his depressive funk. Goodness knows he's had no one to fight with since Mom died, and I swear sometimes those fights were what kept them going. Most of it is good for me though - I feel like a plug's been pulled, so a lot of the family related crap I've been storing up for years is finally coming out in various forms, which is good, cause it's about damn time I dealt with it.

In other news... there is one lingering bit of painful scheisse left over from the fight, which is the fact that I'm somewhat depressed about the reception to our theme. There's a very stiff divide broken down by generation over who is excited about the idea versus who is not. I'm mostly trying not to let it bother me that all of the proper "grown-ups" that we've invited have pretty much all been rather forcefully dubious about the idea, and I'm trying rather desperately not to let it bother me, as damn it, it's our party and we will swashbuckle if we want to, but now I have this pervasive vision of a group of grown-ups at my party dressed somberly and looking down at the ridiculousness of the kids having a good time and privately thinking that we should all grow up - those of them that deign to show up anyway. I won't go so far as to say that this reception has completely ruined it for me, but it certainly has made the planning more stressful and my enthusiasm for the project dull a bit. I'm sure I'll get over that in a while, but right now it's very much bugging me. Especially since all I think is "for fuck's sake, athene's dad dressed up for hers, why can't mine?" and of course I hear my dad saying things in response that involve jumping off bridges and my personal views on that matter, in which case (and I wish I'd thought of this response when I was twelve) I would say "That depends. Are the bridge jumpers doing it for Jesus?" And the thing was that I was determined not to let him ruin it for me after seeing one parental unit steamroll all over sydmor's and the lasting effects of THAT ungodly mess, but apparently I failed somewhere. So right now I'm waffling between thinking maybe this was an awful idea and being enraged about it enough to think whoever wrote Logan's Run might have been on to something about a society that cuts you off at $YEAR. $YEAR of course, being the whole dignity vs. treeclimbing threshold. I know I'm just being pissy at this point, but it probably is going to take a little while for me to adjust to the rage/sad storm going on right now.

I need to stop writing about that before I start crying at work. Goddamn I hate everything today.