This apartment seemed really small when I moved in.

I have the feeling that when the desk taking up space in my living room leaves that it will feel quite large. Too large, in fact. The kitchen already feels like a grand expanse of linoleum.

I utilize the area in front of the new desk, the futon, the bed, and then parts of the kitchen and bathroom. There is a large amount of wasted space in the living room and bedroom. The bathroom, in fact, is the only room in this apartment that is a decent size. Everything else is just too large.

How does it go again? 20% of the space is utilized 80% of the time. I would much prefer to only have that 20% of space. I would also like an LCD monitor that has RCA cable hookups so I can lose the TV.

Even the cats don't utilize the entire space. Well, Jiji does, to an extent. He'll lay in the middle of the floor. Zoe either sleeps on the desk, under/on the futon or bed, and then on the chest of drawers. Only when they're struck with the crazies do they use the full space. The only reason they're not toilet-trained is because I'm afraid of what I would find if I left them alone for three days, as I do on occasion.

There's a whopping two feet between the end of New Desk and the space currently occupied by Old Desk. Enough space for me to roll the chair around and to walk through to get to the kitchen. I could remove a good sized chunk of this living room and be happy about it.

All I need is 50k and some RV hookups. Although I'm sorely tempted to buy a cheap used RV off craigslist and live in that for a while, until I could afford to buy a tiny house on wheels. First, though, the car and student loan must be paid off.

Plotting out my future 37-gallon (40 inches of fish) aquarium.

Right now I own:

3 gouramis (8 inches currently, 12 inches, eventually.)
1 red-tail shark (4 inches)

I want for sure:

2 O-cats (4 inches)

Total so far: 20 inches

I've decided against going with just gouramis. I like them, they're fun, but I want something else in the tank as well. Yes...dundundun...I've turned into one of Those Damn Community Tank People. I do hear mixed reviews on blue gouramis in community tanks, though. Mine tend to be assholes. I have some time before I get this hypothetical tank, though. Snakeskins are supposedly peaceful, which means I only have to watch out for TweedleDee and TweedleDum.

Yea, so I fell hard (if belated) for those little Harlequin Rasboras at Aquarium World. They're neat little fish. I'm probably going to get a small herd of them, and I'm deciding if I want to crowd the tank and find a bottom-dwelling swimmer that isn't a catfish.

Just musing.

And now it's time for...

KATAMARI SOUL THEORY! (NaaaananananananananaKATAMARIDAMASHII)



Seriously, though. If you're not familiar with the game Katamari Damacy, check out the wikipedia page. Or search it on YouTube. It's not hard to grasp the concept.

So, the Katamari Soul Theory.

It can be summed up quite simply: soul = Katamari.

To explain in more detail... All living things have a soul/spirit/essence/spark/fuckwhat. When you're born, you start off with a tiny bit of soul obtained from your parents. As you go through life, you pick up other bits of soul, adding them to yours, until finally you die and the soul bits you collected eventually get picked up by other soul-Katamari. (Insert bardkris's comment about running into objects larger than oneself and having bits fly off in a comical manner.)

The easiest and most common way to pick up soul-bits is through ingestion and digestion. You are what you eat, as the saying goes. There are likely other ways to pick up soul-bits, but this is by far the easiest and most efficient. And yes, eating a nail clipping from a still-living person would count as picking up a former soul-bit of theirs. All that shit about locks of hair and "voodoo dolls?" Yea, runs along those lines.

There's really no competition...having a larger soul-Katamari will do nothing for you. Nor really can you attempt to collect only certain types of soul-bits...sure, you may spend the rest of your life eating apples, but those apples contain soul-bits that have been recycled from pretty much all other soul-Katamaris...eventually. There's no "type" of soul-bit. A soul-bit is a soul-bit. They're all the same. Even saying "Be more mindful of what you eat" is probably a moot point.

Hence why I show absolutely no interest in past lives. In a past life, I was everything on this planet. More recently, whatever naturally-derived substances eventually formed that Dr. Pepper I drank at dinner.

So there was a post in debunkingwhite I was reading through on if it was possible for whites to have a positive racial identity. Excellent discussion, I highly recommend it.

Needless to say, it got me thinking about stuff. In particular, another person from Texas commented, and mentioned how ze crigned at the thought of identifying as a Texan.

As some of you know all too well, I identify as Texan. I do it succesfully, even though I disagree with pretty much the entire state in a big way. A very big way, sometimes.

But...although I identify more with the land than the people, it doesn't serve me well to forget that this place has a history of atrocities against people of color. I'm guilty of forgetting that in the past and I do not doubt I will forget it again in the future.

Texan is really the only cultural identity I have. My ancestors are Irish, German, and a mix of others, but I know nothing about those cultures, and have no connections to those places. Texan is all I know.

So can I maintain a positive identity as a Texan?

Sometimes I swear to [insert deity here, if applicable] that the people I knew back in Tyler (aside from angeljapan) just haven't moved on. It's like they're stuck in high school. Even the ones that have gone places and done things. They still try to talk to me about a time in my life I don't particularly care for. High school wasn't horrible, no, but there's so much MORE going on now. Fuck, talk to me about what I want to do, what you want to do, what your major is, where you've been since then, anything. There are new things to talk about, and all they want to talk about is old stuff.

And yes in one case it may very well be that the army has fucked his head and isolated him and that's the reason why he hangs on to me, or his memory of me, anyway.

But it's like neither of them realize that shit's changed. I've changed, in a big way. Hell, I'm not the same person I was, at all, when I moved out of my mother's house. I'm not the same person I was when I started this journal. Tyler was years and years and years ago. Some of me is still the same, I still have some of the same tastes, but I've done 180's in other areas.

And brief conversations on AIM haven't allowed me to see how much they've changed. The other one is a history major now. That surprised me. Other parts of him, the parts that I've liked least, haven't seemed to change much.

I'm not that cute, naive, little Catholic girl anymore. And for fuck's sake, I hope they're not the same as they were back then, either.

Now only if I could turn this one sided conversation into a REAL conversation, instead of me just asking him questions...

***

Neko's getting a new cat carrier. That big one drives me nuts. He needs a large one, yes, but that one's just too awkward to carry. Mom will probably love it for kittens, though.

"You want to put distance between the recent dead and yourself because, apart from the fact that they need to [unintelligible] to where they are, one wants to get on with life and not be drawn away by those whose attachments here are still too strong... And this is where having ancestors, working with ancestors, for a while after they've gone, rather than immediately, is an important thing. They need time, just as you do."

~Hoodoo Rootwork Hour - Ancestor Work and Altars

I think that this is a very good thing to remember, especially when working with spirits that one was close to in life, or spirits that have a few unresolved issues. I'm just now going to start visiting and cleaning my grandmother's grave/tombstone, and she's been dead for three and a half years. It was months before I cleaned my late pet rat, and it will be a while yet before I clean my dog. You can't rush these things. Even with wild animals, and animals I'd never met in life, they need some time, which is why range-cleaning bone, to me at least, is so important. Not only does the flesh go back into the cycle the way it is supposed to (through vultures, maggots, dermestids, etc), but it gives the dead some privacy and time to be, well, dead.

The older they get, the more stable they are in death, and the less "vocal" they are. They've moved on, you've moved on, and it doesn't mean they or you don't care anymore.

You know, actually rolling up your sleeves and doing the work yourself is half of it to me. Hell, more than half. Almost all. It's a dedication, a ritual. It sets the stage for the rest of the relationship.

That's not saying that buying skulls is bad. It's not. I've bought skulls, on many, many occasions and have had several given to me as gifts. I've bought from other people, both cleaned and uncleaned, and from professional cleaners.

Sometimes, cleaning the bone yourself just isn't practical. Roommates/family being an excellent reason. Other times the critter just isn't in your area. I suppose there are some that just can't stomach it. It can be pretty nasty work. But that's also part of it.

Ultimately, given a choice, I'd much rather do the cleaning work myself. Or at least by someone I know, because it's knowing and dealing with the death of that animal. Cleaning bone isn't sanitary. You don't pick them up in a box, neatly packaged for your convenience. It's picking up a kitten on the side of the road with a leg hanging on by a mere thread of flesh. It's a opossum, flattened beyond recognition. It's an armadillo in the woods, almost skeletonized. It's dealing with maggots and flies and dermestid beetles. It's having a pot of nasty boil over onto your stove. It's squatting in a muddy ditch looking for teeth. It's not pretty, nor should it ever be.

It's working hands-on with Death. And when you live in a culture where everything comes ready-made and pre-packaged, hanging on to the experience is very important.

( Another one of those days when it seems that hellhounds/black dogs/ferals/pariah dogs/etc have decided to take over my head again. )