Along Came a Spider

Giant spider. 
Sleepless night.
From 10 to 7
I kept on the light.

Let's start at the beginning. I'd just returned from an exhausting day of group therapy (don't ask) and decided to take a nap. For context, I'm in Australia, living in a so-called "granny flat" in someone's backyard. So I turned out the lights, set a timer, and went unconscious. I reset the one-hour timer twice for a total of two hours. Like I said, I was exhausted.

The bed didn't help things. It's extremely broken down on one side, so I have to sleep with my head down at the foot of my bed to mitigate the feeling of sleeping on a hill. Not to mention the fact that it's criminally hard and also somehow lumpy.

Upon waking, the half-light revealed the wall adjacent the bed headboard, in which direction I was facing. And upon the wall, an eight-legged shape materialized through my groggy, day-napping vision like a specter through a veil of mist.

You have no idea how much I've dreaded the onset of the warm weather. It's just going into summer here, as I'm in the South-Eastern Hemisphere. Australians like to gleefully point out to tourists that's when all the creepy-crawlies come out to play. (They're cheeky, Australians. They'll also tell you one about the notorious "drop bears" if you don't watch out.)

I've spent hours googling methods of sending spiders packing. Better yet, not inviting them in in the first place. I have reasonable cause - I mean, I'm living in a place where basically every living creature wants to kill me. Best I could figure, mint essential oil, apple cider vinegar, and water in a spray bottle was my most cost-effective option.

Like an OCD maniac, I couldn't rest until I'd spritzed down my entire living area. Every single day. Multiple times a day. It may have been that the ritual comforted me, because at least I was doing something, rather than waiting passively for the spider epidemic to end me.

I may have forgotten to spritz down the living area on the day in question, due to a combination of exhaustion and being gone all day. Understandable.

I got up, probably looking more like someone about to face their literal doom than a spider, making slow, wary movements as I tried to get a closer look without getting too close. The spider remained perfectly still, probably eye-balling me with equal caution. It was a terrifying standoff. Neither of us seemed to want to make a move.

I didn't know what to do. I stood there for a remarkably long time thinking it over. I took a photo of my spider intruder, maybe so my family would have evidence of my killer in the event things went ill. The spider patiently watched me be indecisive.

Finally, I began pacing around the room looking for a weapon. A fly swatter or nuclear missile would have been ideal. But I didn't have either, and couldn't get them any time soon.

In the end, I decided to try using the bottom of a jar to smash the spider. That worked about as well as if I'd politely asked the spider to leave. Which is to say, not at all. Unless, of course, my objective was to have the giant spider jump toward me, no doubt laughing to itself, and proceed to crawl under my bed.

I may need trauma counseling.

Now the spider was decidedly out of reach. Lurking beneath the bed, it was waiting for me to turn out the lights and go to sleep so it could crawl up my duvet and sink its fangs into my unwary flesh. I was convinced of it, as I'm sure any reasonable arachnaphobe would be.

Few options met my desperate mind. Tearing apart the room in search of the spider didn't seem viable. My two-hour nap hadn't done much to remedy my exhaustion, and tearing apart rooms requires energy. Psyching myself out all night didn't seem like a particularly great option either, but under the circumstances, I didn't see an alternative.

I spent a couple hours googling, trying to see what other people had done in my situation, besides staying up all night crying, or burning down their houses. This led to my go-to comfort, distraction. Soon, I found myself watching YouTube videos about the Cambodians and their deep-fried tarantulas.

At length (roughly 2 AM), I became too exhausted to care any more. I decided to leave the floor lamp in the room on, in case that deterred my arachnid guest from coming to snuggle. Wishful thinking. Dreaming of creepy crawlies and many-legged terrors, I drifted into fretful unconsciousness. (More like, struggled, sinking in quicksand-style. "Drifted" sounds too peaceful.)

Upon waking, I was shocked to find no further evidence of arachnid activity. Against all odds, I had survived! The spider might have been dancing a jig on me in the night for all I knew. It might've invited all its spider friends and acquaintances to join in, and had a massive dance party on my reposing form, laughing all the while at its victory over the "crazy yank." (It's an Australian spider, so no doubt it also has the accent.) Whatever the case, I'd rather remain in the dark. 

It's a bit early to celebrate, though. Summer has only just begun. 26 days to go until I flee back to the United States, and the spider-free refuge of winter, leaving the Australians to have all the spidery fun.         

NaNoWriMo

It's National November Writing Month.

I've "won" (completed the 50k word count) in previous years, though last year was crazy busy and I only managed about 30k. The novel was set in the futuristic past and may or may not have involved a portal between pre-history and now, a Mr. Darcy-esque love interest, and houses with roof tiles that were solar panels in disguise. (Side note: few things annoy me more than little bugs flying in front of my computer screen while I'm typing. *swats at little bugs doing precisely that*) 

This year, as I'm currently enrolled in a film school in Australia, I've decided to attempt a screenplay instead. Possibly two.

Next semester I'll be making a short film based on a screenplay I've written (pending approval from Australia's film teacher equivalent of Severus Snape). I'm attempting a narrative based on the American Civil War, but set in a fantasy world akin to Tolkien's Middle-earth. I am confident that, whatever form my screenplay eventually takes, it will at least be a more interesting film to make than the three or four I've had to participate in recently, which involved drugs in the park, an eco-terrorist, and a gay couple interrogating each other over the breaking of a vase from Kmart. 

However, this particular screenplay has nothing to do with the one I'm writing for NaNoWriMo. For the aforementioned event, I'll be attempting a screenplay for a full length feature film. Not that it will ever be made, but a girl can dream.

I'll be writing a smaller amount per day than I would if I were attempting a novel, owing to the relative brevity of a screenplay, but this is better for me, schedule-wise. Updates may or may not follow. (I make no promises.) 

The Quiet After

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. Life has gotten very confusing all of a sudden, as if I've walked from the peak of the mountain, where the air is bright and clear, down into the depths of a thick and impenetrable cloud. I've lost focus. My path hasn't changed, but my motivation has.

Few people relish the thought of being abandoned by those they hold dear. But people must be allowed to make their choices, to stay or to go. Love means freedom, and true friendships - even the closest of them - are not cages. Those of us left behind must find the will to carry on, even when the footsteps we are used to hearing beside us have faded away into the distance. But we will hear the echo of them in our hearts for a very long time.

We wanted a simple life, free of the chains of working drudgery that promises happiness and delivers only dissolution and a wasted youth. We wanted a home of our own. A place that would welcome us no matter what, a home waiting for us at the end of all our adventures. But the adventures ended almost before they had begun. At least, the adventures that might have been shared, treasured, cherished by two hearts.

I'm sad. A bit broken, if truth be told. Many nights I don't sleep. Many days I stare at walls and think of nothing. At work, I function on autopilot, the perfect retail robot chirruping out cloying, high-pitched tones, no longer hearing the sound or meaning of my own words. Silence and stillness in a world of noise and movement. Like shadows of darker days, memories I've long sealed and buried.

Life goes on, and so must I. Even if I seem to have lost the map.

Remembering

I get so caught up in my life sometimes. I think I do it on purpose, and at the same time, without thought. People deal with grief in various ways. I deal with it by trying to forget about it, by constantly distracting myself. 

Today, I decided to remember, if only for an hour or two. It's amazing how quickly one can dredge everything up again after effectively expunging it from the mind for months at a time. 

The last thing my dad wrote. This was three days before he passed. Oddly mundane, and yet, I am somewhat comforted by knowing he was thinking about us so close to his death, and not himself. His final words to my mom and I were, "Thank-you for taking care of me." 

I remembered the last few days before my dad died, when I felt - nearly more poignantly than anything else at the time - that my dad very much needed to know his own father was proud of him, was satisfied with him. I urged my grandpa to write him a letter telling him what he truly felt, because he'd always been so reserved. He never verbally expressed his pride in his son, or his love for him, and I know it had an impact on my dad. He never felt he was good enough, and so he was always trying to prove himself. Always. He worked himself to death in his efforts to prove he was worthwhile.

My grandpa did end up writing a letter, which I read to my dad shortly before he passed. It started out a bit rough, a bit rambling, but the end of it got to the heart of the matter, finally expressing - after so many years - the truth my dad so dearly needed to hear.

I'm sorry if you felt that I was never satisfied with you. I guess sometimes I was measuring you against what I imagined to be perfection. This was wrong, because no one is perfect - especially myself.

You've truly been an inspiration, as a son, as a student, athlete, worker, builder, employer, musician, church member, husband and father. I'm grateful for the many times and ways you helped me...

So I guess that all I can say as you (and the rest of us) face a very uncertain future, is that I love you very much and plan to enjoy you as long as I can. 

Love, Dad.

I guess if there's a lesson to be learned from all this (and I'll allow there isn't always, nor should there always be), it's that you shouldn't take it for granted that everyone knows your heart, or knows how much you love them. Be forthright. You can never tell someone you love them too many times.

My Writing Process

I've always wondered how other people write. What goes on inside their brains before words leak out of their fingertips. Because I've often thought that I approach writing weirdly, and I have a strange, masochistic desire to remove all doubt so I can be more justified in beating myself up over being peculiar and eccentric. This preface out of the way, I thought I'd share a few quick insights into my writing process.

Firstly, I sit staring at the screen. I spend a lot of time doing this, actually.

Then my brain starts making weird combinations of words and phrases whilst I shoot them down one by one, for any odd reason, like targets in a silly carnival game. (Sometimes the same sentence might beg to be given a second chance, and occasionally, one might escape without me knowing.) Then I happen upon a sentence that may or may not work, and I start to type it. Once I see it in print, I know straightaway whether or not it's working for me, and I generally end up deleting it and starting over.

Rinse and repeat, until I don't hate the sentence and I can stand to let it continue existing. Occasionally, the realization that what I've written is abysmal will come after I've strung several such sentences together, at which time I go back and delete them all and start over.

Then, once I've written something that fulfills the requirements of being a substantial block of text, I read back over it with a fairly ruthless eye and weed out the words, phrases, and sentences that don't work for me. If I hate everything, which has happened, I start over. (I start over a lot.)

When I have something that constitutes a "finished" piece before me, which means it's run the entire gauntlet of abuse to which my editing habits can subject it, I often go back and edit it again. I've been known to delete "finished" pieces because they weren't working for me. And start over. (You totally saw that last part coming, didn't you?) No piece of mine is safe. Ever.

It bears mentioning that all of the above steps hinge, somewhat, on several factors. The first factor is how exhausted I am. If I get really tired, I begin to cease caring which words and sentences escape my brain. Sometimes I become really, really formal and fancy and lofty and begin utilizing grandiloquent verbiage. Other times I struggle a single sentence put to together a in way meaningful. It's always a surprise, really. A veritable piñata of possibilities.

The second factor is how much time I have to complete whatever it is I'm writing. You give me a minute to write something, you are going to get something that looks like it was written in, well, a minute. Which, in my case, means it will be coherent and error-free, but unimaginative and quite possibly trite. Like this blog post, for example, which was written in one sitting and was not edited at all. Because I'm feeling particularly exhausted and lazy today, and don't care to waste unnecessary time writing blog posts.

The third factor is whether or not I'm being distracted. If there are people in the room distracting me, or people chatting with me, or the Internet grabs me and forces me to distract myself with distractable thingamabobs, then my writing turns out as you might expect. Distracted. Distracted writing, like distracted driving, often results in something of a wreck.

The fourth factor is whether or not whatever I'm writing is something about which I'm reasonably knowledgeable, or something that is meaningful to me. In either case, the end product generally turns out much better if I am invested, to some extent. If I don't know or care anything about what I'm writing, then why the dickens am I writing about it?! (Good question, Loki. Good question.)

And that, noble readers (you must also be long-suffering readers, if you've made it far enough to be reading this shameless attempt at flattery), is the long and short of my writing process. I hope you've found it, if nothing else, amusing enough that you'll not yell abuses at your computer screen and then demand I somehow become a magical being who can reverse time and return the roughly three minutes you wasted reading this.

Nicknames

Nicknames. I didn't get my first one until high school, a fact I find rather tragic. Then again, considering the way my siblings think, perhaps I should be thanking my lucky stars. It helps that my name isn't one that's readily convertible into a shortened version of said name.

My first nickname doubled as a pen name. My high school best friend and I often wrote stories together, most of which (at least initially) we rather didn't care to ascribe our real names to. Therefore, after a brief dalliance with a name generator, I came up with the somewhat ostentatious-sounding name, "Alassë Elensar," which the site assured me was my name in elvish. I was skeptical of this from the first, but too lazy to do any real digging. "Alassë" served its purpose for awhile, and featured, unfortunately, in an abysmal self-insertion fan-fiction entitled, succinctly, "College Students Can Be Heroes." (Forgive me if I cringe a little. Some rather painful memories are rolled up in that lengthy saga of two teenage girls who get sucked into Middle-earth and proceed to "fix" everything. Kind of like every other Lord of the Rings-corrupting Sue out there, actually.)

My friend and I (she had another equally ostentatious-sounding elven name) decided we needed a secondary pen name for stories that we thought were stupid, but we still wanted to post just to get a rise out of people. Yeah, back then, we didn't know that was basically the definition of trolling. I selected "Saraman," and she went by "James Norrington." Throughout high school, she and I would head to the church basement after school on Wednesdays, where we'd spend three or four hours scheming about stories, re-enacting scenes from our favorite movies, drawing, and generally having a blast. At one point, we discovered a fanfiction site that hosted strictly Lord of the Rings slash. Graphic Lord of the Rings slash. Horrified, we decided we'd write a parody story and post it on their site, just to show them how ridiculous their pairings were. Wonderfully logical, we were. We settled on the worst pairing of all, Saruman and Wormtongue (WormUman?), and wrote an abysmal slash story based on the pairing, signing it "Saraman and James Norrington." This ill-conceived piece was typed up on the pastor's computer in the church basement. I kid you not.

Eventually, my nickname went through another cycle. I dub it, fondly, the "Troy Era." My friend and I became obsessed with the 2005 movie, Troy, starring Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, and Orlando Bloom. I'm not entirely certain why, in retrospect. There wasn't all that much to like. We hated Pitt's and Bloom's characters, and the only character we liked (Hector) died. Nonetheless, after our little world had revolved around the Troy planet for some months, we decided we would be known, from then on, as "Achilles" and "Hector." I had to be Achilles. This was around the time my friend and I made our Junior year film project: a reenactment of the climactic duel between Hector and Achilles. That was a rather amusing experience, filmed in the seasonally flooded Alvord Desert. I recall that, as we walked out to the sandy plain standing in for the Aegean coastline, we passed several people bathing, nude, in the hotsprings. Bearded and in full armor, we attracted some amount of attention, though, in retrospect, I find it rather ironic that we were self-conscious.

Sometime following this era, my friend and I decided we needed Narnian nicknames, as well. My entire (very small) circle of friends had a part in this. I was "Froggy" (what one of the giants called Puddleglum in The Silver Chair) because I tended to be a wet blanket and a pessimist, my best friend was "Rilian" because she liked the color green so much, and my other friend was "Sulky" (what Pug the Pirate called Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) because she liked to sulk a lot. Dreadfully fitting, I'm afraid. These persisted for a while. There was generally quite a bit of overlap between sets of nicknames.

When I began studying the elvish language, I decided it would be fun to find out the real translation of my name, which turned out to be "Aranel Carnilino," as my actual name, Sarah Martin, means, literally, "Warrior Princess." That name has stuck with me. I consider it my current pen name, and I've been using it for more years than I'd like to admit. 

Toward my latter years in high school - and I'm not sure I recall the exact events that led up to this - my friends and I adopted new Lord of the Rings-based nicknames. I was Elrond and my best friend and another good friend were Elladan and Elrohir, respectively. They enjoyed plaguing me quite a bit, since that's in the Twins' job description, and more than a few times after I'd gone off to college, I would receive interesting photographic evidence of their latest mischievous escapades. These generally included signs slandering their ever-loving father. At one point, they altered the main high school signboard to read "Elrond doesn't wash his socks" and sent me a picture. That was rather entertaining. We also sent in-character emails to each other.

Just recently, a really good friend of mine with whom I write and roleplay on a regular basis suggested we come up with new nicknames for each other. The selection process was thorough and rigorous, though we drew our candidates strictly from mythology. I ended up "Loki," and my friend "Juno." I've always appreciated the character of Loki in the recent films Thor and The Avengers, so imagining myself as the tall, svelte, pale, dark-haired villain with a penchant for throwing a monkey wrench in his older brother's plans quite appealed to me. Though I still answer to Elrond, Loki has definitely cast his charms over my personal nomenclature.

And that is the inspiring tale of how I amassed such an impressive collection of nicknames. More than many people would acquire in a lifetime, and none of which are cutesy corruptions of my actual name. Thank goodness.

New Year

Yay, a post. Happy New Year, peoples! End of post.