Zut!

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.

Who's Your Inner European?

Heat!

Such warmth, of a sudden. From where? Sure, balmy days have been had of late but this stifling, stickysweaty heat? Any activity incurring perspiration on a day like this ought to be if not criminal, then at least wholly optional. Sex included. Maybe breathing, too.

Caliente! Porque!

Work and weddings

An English wedding, ten siblings for the bride and groom -- each -- and attendant grandfolk and nephews and nieces. A very good church service, modern and old-fashioned in equal measure, emphasizing that love is more than just the warm fuzzy feelings, that it is the dedication to another person even when the fuzzy feelings subside, the decision to care for them and make them happy even when you don't feel like it. The bride and groom exchanged not "I do", but "I will". Marvelous.Church had a retro feel, as the bride's family was seated in the left pews and the groom's on the right making for thoroughly un-modern white-black separation, which was quickly remedied when, outside the church, the alcohol started flowing and bonds were forged in the fires of rum and whiskey.

Good party afterward. I admit to, perhaps, a stray thought in the direction of a nephew I hadn't seen since he was eleven and has turned into a very handsome and rather camp and very very obviously queer young man.

Only my third wedding ever, and it was a doozy. Good weather, the rain waited till we were all seated for dinner and stopped after the speeches, leaving the lawn outside the hotel reception fresh and sweet-smelling. No fights, loud conversations, and not too much singing.

Good dancing, too, though the respective families tastes were very different and the white and the black side took turns to the dance floor as upbeat britpop for the billion or so twelve to twenty-four year olds on the white side of the family was alternated with smooth reggae for the black. So smooth, those Jamaicans, even the elderly and rheumatic.

Returned to the homestead today and as I crawled, bleary-eyed after a flight that was less flying and more standing in un-airconditioned queues like cattle, I was ready to start working on FANG some more. I fired up the mental processes, trying to realize what I had to do and suddenly remembered -- nothing. It's all done. I'm just waiting now, waiting for the (hopefully) last proof copy to turn out to work right.

It was rather alienating. I wracked my brain for anything I'd forgotten, but no. With gladness in my heart I started browsing for Maranatha, to put up a fresh chapter for the eager readers who've had to go without for over a month, now, and realized that tonight, I didn't feel like it. Not in the slightest.

Weeks and weeks of reading, reviewing and editing erotica of various bents has rather dulled my delight in it. Imagine!

Not one to mope, me. If not Maranatha, then something else. Something else entirely.

http://www.osfer.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=83&Itemid=242 <= Listen Now to hear me crooning the story.

The result is what one might call a beginning. It isn't much, but it's something new regardless.

In defense of my timbre, it was very late and i couldn't raise my voice for fear of incurring the wrath of neighbors. Perhaps I'll retry this when I have my full volume at my disposal!

It's just... boats.

Three days in a row, eight hours a day, boats, boats, boats. Remote-controlling seven cameras in a poncy VIP lounge with the same choirs, clowns and organist/whistlists playing four times a day for different groups of VIP's. Never leaving your chair except for quick rushes to the bathroom or stuffing a banana in your face to quench the dread gnaw of hunger. Trying to keep the feed intereesting, even though it's just boats seen from seven different cameras.

A very interesting experience.

Back in the groove.

So, what have I been up to that’s dragged me away from my LiveJournalling duties? Fuck all, is the answer.

Every three weeks or so I play Werewolf: The Apocalypse (soon to be The Forsaken) with the gang, which is an exercise in snack-munching coke-swigging comically violent geekery and always good fun. Intrigue, danger and romance! I shoot crime on a regular basis. I’m far less crap than I used to be. Speaking of geekery, I helped out a friend by volunteering to play an NPC in a Vampire LARP session he organised (if you don’t know what those acronyms mean — you’re way cooler than me) and, while I felt silly, it was a surprising amount of fun once all the players got into the same celestial groove. I yearn for theatre.

Writing, writing, writing. That is, I should be and today I am. Somebody wrote to me in response to my pennings and gave me the best compliment ever — and I quote:

“I fanboy at you.”

The fact that Google lists no occurrences of those four words in thar order makes this compliment extra special to me and anyone who dashes that illusion I will repay by dashing his (or her, one never knows) skull in.

————

Johnny and Jotun visited this evening so I didn’t get a whole lot of writing done. Nor did I get a chance to play World of Warcraft. Curious thing, my mum has recently lectured me on my addiction to that game because she happened to see me playing it on four or five separate instances. Fact is, I can barely scrape together the time to play it at all, between work, school, friends and — here’s a word Orrin hates, kiss kiss — hobbies I just can’t find the time. I’m lagging behind my fellow gaming chums by a substantial degree and that’s demotivating. Plus, lately I’ve rarely had the opportunity to play for more than half an hour without at least a five-minute interruption, which is hamering my progress as well. Also, I’m really crap at this game.

 

 

Hopping on the bandwagon.

1. As a child, got burned by hot tea — but for reasons as yet unexplained, the tea spilled over my side formed a steam bubble under my skin which exploded  so instead of becoming a second or third degree burn it ecame simply a patch of bare muscle where the skin could regrow, rather than a dirty scar. Score.

2. Wrote and directed a play for twenty 12 to 18–year-olds using no sets and hardly any props, with a technical manual that turned out to be twice as thick as the already hefty script.

3. Co-scripted, co-directed and co-wrangled a shor film in Belgium located on a small abandoned trainyard owned by a supposed former Nazi war criminal (this is pure speculation).

4. Spent twenty-two and a half hours editing and colour timing said film in order to meet self-imposed deadline, only to realise, when watching the results after ten hours of not working on it, that it isn’t funn and doesn’t make sense.

5. Taught an insightful and popular writing workshop to people who uniformly had far more writing experience than I did and yet ended up worshipping me as a god.

6. Lived in Holland for twenty-four minus one half year without ever, ever smoking weed or trying any drugs of any kind. Not even aspirin, till I was twentyish.

7. Made no spelling mistakes in English or Dutch at all, whatsoever during exams until puberty.

8. Upon waking up and being handed the phone by my mother, I managed to tell my friend Bart that, no, he can’t come around because I’m not at my mother’s place, I’m at Dad’s, so convinced of this that I convinced him. I noticed that I wa s in my own bed, my mother was talking to me and Bart didn’t have my dad’s number, but by the time this information eased into my brain I didn’t connect it with what I said to Bart and I didn’t call him back to tell him I was at mum’s place after all.

9. During school camp, on the last night, when everybody had decided to party through the night and not sleep, left the dormitory where everybody was screaming and talking and laughing for thre minutes and roughly twenty seconds, only to return to find everyone asleep. All other dorm rooms were filled with people asleep in attitudes of misbehaviour. I went around the farmstead where the camp was organised, turning off lights and alarm clocks and spent three hours doing dishes and making breakfast so the morning crew wouldn’t have to get up so early.

10. Screamed so loud when Wolfie, who is a shit-fucker, sent me a link to a truly heart-stoppingly scary Flash movie in the middle of the night that I woke not only everybody in my house, but also set four dogs in the neighbourhood to barking — while I know for a fact that nobody in half a mile of my house owns a dog.

AND YOU.