Typed up earlier today.

Just some brief updates.

The grackle migration must have been yesterday as a great deal of noisy birds passed over. I believe I saw an ovenbird some time back, and I'm fairly certain I've seen a group of white-crowned sparrows--it took me a while to identify them as they're immature birds so the stripes on their heads are rusty brown and gray rather than black and white, but that's the only bird that fits, and the picture of an immature white-crowned sparrow at Wikipedia fits what I saw. There are at least two or three. They too must be passing through. I also saw a tufted titmouse yesterday, which I haven't seen since last year. The grosbeaks seem to have gone but a group of what seem to be female purple finches have (has?) moved in, along with at least three bluejays, and it's quite frustrating trying to keep them away from the feeders. The bluejays are so annoying, all they do is scream and take over the feeders so little birds can't come in to eat. Irritating.

I Googled, "Where do chickadees sleep at night?" as I really wanted to know. I normally don't ask Google questions since it's a search engine, not an answering service--I usually just type in search terms, e. g., "chickadees sleep night"--but I had to try. And damned if it didn't give me an answer. I learned that, at least in winter, they huddle in groups inside trees (well, one site said groups, other sites said singly) and shiver all night to keep warm, then emerge during the day to eat a lot to make up for lost weight. Poor little things. The chickadees and the nuthatches, really, are the only reason I put out food at all. All these other birds are okay but I could honestly do without seeing them more than once in a while, especially the finches, they're such horrid pigs. That includes cardinals--just glorified finches.

A while back the pretty cat that visits our porch was joined by two others--three cats, including one black kitten that looked just like a younger version of Pepper--I was so overjoyed to see them until the next day when one leapt out of the bushes and possibly caught a nuthatch that went flying by. I was so furious. I did everything to keep them away from our porch after that. I haven't seen them since, though I wonder if they're still nearby as I found a lot of feathers scattered on the sidewalk this morning. I'm fairly certain the cats belong to the neighbor who just moved in across the sideroad as twice I've seen the main cat go off into that person's yard, including after I chased it off. God I am so frigging sick of people not caring for their pets. Unless you live way out on a farm, cats should not be allowed to run loose at night or even during the day. Keep the damn things inside, especially if you live on a highway, live near neighbors who have pets of their own, and live in an area with not only bird feeders but LOTS OF WILD ANIMAL ACTIVITY SUCH AS SKUNKS AND RACCOONS WHICH CARRY RABIES AND DISTEMPER! F**king morons in this neighborhood.

I'm glad that at least the chickadees and nuthatches stick around all winter since I need the company. Feeding them gives me a tiny feeling of doing something useful, especially since the chickadees have to eat so much just to stay alive in winter. I could do without the finches and bluejays. Seems every time one intrusive bird moves out, another one moves right in. I get rid of the siskins and end up with grosbeaks; I get rid of the grosbeaks and end up with more finches and bluejays. Ugh. I'm keeping the Feed & Seed in business.

I'm currently reading Teach Yourself Jung--I'm by no means utterly ignorant on the subject, but I've found that it's easier for me to read books ABOUT Jung and his ideas rather than books BY Jung. He's not a bad writer, he's just very longwinded and elaborate and repetitious and hard to follow. I read Aion some time back and I honestly don't remember what it was about. o_o I do remember reading the blurb on the back cover and thinking, "THAT'S what I read about?" Seriously, with most of his work, I'll have a spark of understanding here and there amidst a sea of "WTF?" I think it's just my slow literal brain, though. This book is very good at explaining his main ideas. It talks of course about the role of dreams and how Jung believed that thoughts and ideas have their own external reality apart from those who think them, an idea I myself have had for years, before I started reading his material. I'm trying to take a closer look at some of my own dreams. Reading this book has made me feel even angrier about those morons on the writing forums. How pathetically narrowminded can somebody be. It was even more infuriating as I know this person was not stupid--I'd enjoyed many of their posts before then--but on this subject, they were just so ignorant it was unbelievable. Saying dreams are nothing but "meaningless firings of neurons," so you should really avoid using them in writing, how lame. I wrote a personal essay I might post to my website sometime but haven't yet and here's a point I make:

I know that dreams have often influenced how I think and feel and act throughout the day. The key lies in making a dream an active, rather than a passive, thing. Of course a dream is useless if you just drop it in a story to look pretty or to solve all the problems and then leave it. You have to make it an active part of the story, the same as everything else, in order for it to work. Still, you never hear a newbie writer given the advice, "Don't use scenery/foreshadowing/symbolism/insert writing technique here as it's a weak character-illustration device" just because some writers don't know how to properly use it. Of course not. You hear those writers being advised to learn how to use such techniques properly. So why is it otherwise with dreams? If I use foreshadowing or symbolism or something lousily, would you advise every writer to not use foreshadowing or symbolism or whatever at all? Why are dreams the exception to learning how to use a technique well--why throw the baby out with the bathwater? (FYI, the same attitude prevailed regarding usage of prologues, flashbacks, and italics--just because many writers had done such things poorly, EVERYONE was urged not to use them at all, rather than to learn to use them properly. Strange. Does the blatant misuse of apostrophes in many people's grammar mean we should stop bothering with proper punctuation? The reason most frequently given for avoiding certain otherwise valid techniques was that certain publishers and agents--not all, just certain ones--claimed they despised these techniques--in short, "Some bigwig says they don't like this, so I won't do it." So, is that what all our goals should be aimed at, placating THOSE particular publishers and agents, rather than writing the best stories we can? People on the forum would say of course not, but then their actions contradict this. I'm sure most of them wouldn't advise that somebody who loves writing romance novels should abandon that entirely because a particular agent hates romance novels, but that's exactly the reasoning they're using.)

Honestly. I don't get why dreams are the big bad exception not even worth considering. I can't believe this guy was surprised that I make decisions (including the decision to leave the forum) based on dreams, like nobody in the history of mankind has ever done such a stupid thing. Somebody needs to get out and educate themselves. You know, when you get right down to it, ANY frigging thought that our brains generate, mull over, and then decide upon is just a firing of neurons. It's in what we do or don't do with it that makes it meaningful or meaningless. So some random guy thinks dreams are meaningless, but I think they're meaningful. Doesn't the mere fact that I find them meaningful give them some meaning?

It's like the idea of synchronicity (another Jungian concept). So many people misunderstand this to mean that "There are no coincidences!" That's not what it means at all, at least, based on my (possibly flawed) understanding. Jung states that these things are coincidences--they're not causally related. However, our own minds GIVE them their meaning and MAKE them seem related. Hence synchronistic events aren't related, they're just coincidences, but we ourselves give them their meaning, thus making them meaningful occurrences and taking away the "just." When you look at it just about everything in life is meaningless until we ourselves give it its meaning. Meaning is subjective. Last autumn I spent every day seeking feathers dropped on the ground in a desperate attempt to find some meaning in going on in life--whenever a feather would present itself, it had meaning, telling me it was worth holding on a bit longer. The one or two times I couldn't find a feather I was devastated. Before I left the writing forum for good, I went to sleep, and had a dream that nobody there would miss me. That decided me, and nobody has missed me. Do I believe the birds were dropping feathers for me on purpose, or that some divinely inspired dream told me to leave the writing forum? Not really. The mere act of finding feathers on the ground, or of having a dream obviously based on current events, are meaningless events in themselves, but my mind GAVE them their meaning, thus making them meaningful. So just about everything is a "meaningless firing of neurons" until we act upon it. Making this guy's argument incredibly ignorant.

The very phrase "sleep on it" is based on Iroquois tradition of sleeping on an issue before making an important decision.

Anyway moving on.

I just browsed the prologue and first chapter of Angels & Demons and it is frigging scary how similar my style is to Dan Brown's. I'm not flattering myself, because honestly, it's not a fantastic literary style. In fact it made me want to laugh, it was so goofy. He used an exclamation where there "should" have been a question mark. There were lots of exclamation marks because there was lots of exclaiming! And italics. And a silly melodramatic prologue--cripes, the whole first chapter was melodramatic. And a character being a bit dense (Langdon having to turn the "Illuminati" sign upside-down and rightside-up several times and gasp over it in astonishment, it's the same both ways, ZOMG!). And the mere fact that there is a prologue in the first place. And the first chapter--get this--STARTS OUT WITH THE MAIN CHARACTER DREAMING. ! No wonder the snobs on the writing forum hate Dan Brown so much. I have yet to see if the dream has any bearing on the actual plot and won't find out for ages as I have other books to read, though honestly, even if it has no relation to the plot, it doesn't bother me enough to throw the book down in disgust, and apparently, all this stuff didn't bother the publisher, either. No, Dan Brown is not high literature. But he got published, and got movies of his work made, and other people wrote books about his books, and scads of people enjoy his work, even if, like me, they might be thinking, "ZOMG this is goofy!"--because some of us really don't care if not everything we read is high literature. Sometimes people just want something fun and goofy to read. I make no pretenses of being a fantastic literary writer. It'd be great for my work to become literature someday, but face it, how many people like to relax by settling down with a good juicy copy of War & Peace? I want to be entertaining first off, and if that means being goofy and melodramatic, then so be it. Browsing Angels & Demons made me nearly laugh as it looked like I could have written it in my D4D series, honestly. And yes, my D4D series, though intended to be serious, on the inside makes me giggle because it's so silly. Reincarnated saints! Necklaces with healing powers! Evil nationwide Satanic cults! Come on. Seriously.

I had a dream a while back in which Dan Brown (a sort of imaginary stand-in for him, at least) was agreeing on the similarity between our works, ha ha. http://www.dreamjournal.net/index.cfm/do/journal.getdream/dream_id/137191

So...I can't think of a concluding comment for all that. I guess it all speaks for itself. *shrug*

My issues haven't been acting up as much lately, but that usually just means they're going to come back even worse than before. Seeing as the last time they really acted up it lasted for like 24 hours, I take it this time will be a particularly bad one. -_- Even when it's not "really" acting up I'm still putting out more fluid than I'm taking in, without losing weight (and still seeming bloated--maybe I've just gained some real weight, though I'm not sure how or why). E. g. the other day I was putting out about a third of a cup of fluid every hour--to me, around 1/4 cup seems most tolerable--when as you already know I only drink about 3 cups of fluid at most a day--so I should have lost ALL the fluids I took in within nine hours, yet I didn't, it keeps coming. And I know there's water in the foods I eat but it's not like I'm sitting here eating soup all the time--in fact, I've been avoiding liquidy foods. I'm back to taking sleeping pills like I did in college to try to make it through the nights better though if my bladder fills up too fast, it still wakes me up or keeps me awake, at best I can just hope to get so tired I manage to doze off for a half hour or so. And now I even dream about urinating all the time. I have an appointment to see a urologist on the 14th. I'm pissed (eh, no pun intended, Jeez) because I went to the trouble of picking a female doctor in case I needed an examination, then she does the barest amount of work before shuttling me off to a male doctor. What was the point of that? This is so stupid. I filled out a list of questions he sent me and mailed it off (including, "How would you feel if you had to live with this urinary problem the rest of your life?"--I circled the answer, "Terrible") but know he's not going to find anything wrong either. I just hope it gets over with fast and I maybe get shuttled along to somebody who CAN find out what's wrong...though probably not...I imagine I'll be shuttled to a gynecologist next, then maybe somebody who studies the kidneys, then maybe an endocrinologist or something, whatever. If there are even such specialists available in northern Michigan, which there probably aren't. I fully believe this is a glandular problem so nobody will find out anything looking at my bladder or kidneys or female parts. So frustrating. I feel like I've jinxed it just saying this much and now nobody will find out anything at all. -_- I hate the thought of my parents having to take me to, say, Traverse City or Detroit or Chicago just to figure out that nobody can figure it out. God I hope it never gets that bad. We can't afford to go that far just to find out what's wrong with me.

Holy crud, the sun actually came out a little bit today. Amazing.

Looks like I spoke too soon on two matters. It's starting to act up, and I just had to go out and scare the black Pepperlike cat away as it started slinking into our yard. It went scurrying right back--into the neighbor's yard. F**king a**holes, why do you even have cats you neglect so they have to come over here and eat my birds.

Have to go now, tar.