This had BEST be the fucking Rapture.

Look, I understand completely. Any job in customer service involves people taking metaphoric (and sometimes literal) shits on you.

But today? Had best well be the fucking Rapture.
There was flooding bad enough on the tracks in and around Albany that everything got delayed by hours.
Which is fine. These things happen.
But when 84% of Rochester decides to evacuate to Chicago for the impending cleansing of the Earth at the same time, and they all seem to want to take all of their Earthly possessions with them on said trip....

This had best be the actual fucking Rapture.

If it's not? I'm getting the fuck out of this job as fast as humanly possible, because this is not how I'm going to spend every Friday night for the rest of my working life.

On that note, I feel like I've spent a very comfortable amount of time pantsless in this life, and that I'm quite perfectly happy with how not-to-Heaven I'll be going... and that while I have regrets in life, at least I'll go out with my pride.
If this is the Rapture.

If.

(I don't have a song epic enough to honor the Rapture, should the crazies be correct about today.
Sadly.
I like to imagine it would be like David Bowie and Iggy Pop backing up Nina Simone and Freddie Mercury with a good healthy dose of Tom Waits on the piano. Or something to that effect, anyway.)
(We should make it happen, though, should the world continue.)
(Hint: It's probably going to.)

Some thoughts before sleep, and that's about all I'm good for right now.

I've been working on legitimate writing the whole time I've been away from home. If anything good has come from all of this, I actually have managed to get a decent bit of work done on my book - there were fundamental problems with the setup, and I think I might have hammered them into something usable.

I can't even begin to explain how tired I am, mentally.
I'm ready to come home, patch things up where it matters most, sit down on my couch, dogpile with Ivan and Turtle, and watch movies.
I'm ready to have my car back, to get in and pump some music, and take everyone up to the beach.
(I don't even like beaches. I just know that that is where we need to end up.)
I'm ready to sleep with my own pillow, in my own bed.

I have some more pictures of the Casa to share with you tomorrow, as well as the rest of DC - I have been down here for a third (and, for this trip, final) weekend.

There's going to be a third music post up. (And, likely, a fourth and a fifth.)

I started this as a way to distract myself in Delaware. It'll likely continue once I'm home...
Likely.
I'm enjoying it too much to see it die.

On that note?

Massive Fucking Music Post, Part Two

Welcome to Part 2! The post can be found beyond yonder "Read More" link.

Fucking Massive Music Post, Part One

A quick note on the entry that's under the cut here:
I had wanted to arrange this so that each artist/category I was going to detail would have their own cut (like on LiveJournal), but I'm just not good enough at newer/different coding to get it to work here. Thus, for right now, everything is just as sectioned as I can get it behind one cut.
The lack of ease of navigation, therefore, frustrates me enough that I'm apologizing.
I imagine that nobody who's gonna read this is gonna give too much of a damn, I just figured I'd mention.

So now, on to what I came here to do tonight: ramble endlessly about music.

Problems, and general issues.

Here's the deal.
I wanted to make the music post tonight one massive, glorious monument to soundwaves - but one that wouldn't eat my feed page.
I just realized something completely fucking awful about Blogger code sets, though - there is no way to put more than one text cut in a single post without going through absurd amounts of html/css/things I simply do not know how to code, and I have not been able to find a reasonable way around that.
(I'd also rather not go back to Livejournal. It's a dinosaur at this point.)

I'll be making a big post later (after dinner) but it's not going to be quite as user-friendly as I'd anticipated.
It IS coming, though. Promise.

Some finishing thoughts before bed, and a preview of tomorrow:

Tomorrow (or the day after, depending on how tired I am), we will be featuring two different topics here at Pierre-Millay:
(1) Music
(2) Things that are actually interesting in Wilmington, DE. (This is the only one of the pair that's contingent on how tired I am; I haven't gotten out with the camera, and I feel like pictures can do more justice to some of these buildings than I can do describing them. For as tiny and boring as Wilmington is, there's actually some really nice architecture here.)

I would also like to welcome the Seattle contingency of my fledgling readership; you might not have commented, but I'm told that you're out there.

The party is not over, but sometimes, you just need to step out for air on the porch.

So to speak. But life goes on.

I spent the weekend in DC - a much more action-packed weekend than last weekend was. Aparato came down with a headcold during the week, so he was a little bit laid up, but it was still a good time.
When Mačka got home Friday night, he was... far more chatty and animated than I'm used to from him. He was trying to talk to the cat (they have two), and he was quite giggly about everything. We got a pizza, and he insisted that we watch Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus - an inspired choice, if I may say so myself.
(The pizza choice was, if I may say so myself, was INSPIRED - I'd been praying for a hangover-curing quesadilla, but a pizza with chicken on it was JUST AS AMAZING.)

Saturday, Aparato and I went museum-hopping finally, Saturday afternoon. The National Gallery (West Building) smells... disturbingly like sunblock. The building itself reeks of sunblock. It was making me laugh uncontrollably for some reason.
The museum actually closed soon after we got there, so we went across the street to their outdoor sculpture garden - which also promptly closed. (I didn't manage to get any pictures there, though - I finally had a goddamned camera with me in DC for once in my life, and I forgot it on the god-damned coffee table. Unbe-freaking-lievable. I should have good pictures of the sculpture garden next weekend, though.)
We then ended up, successively, at the Museum of Natural History and then the National Museum of American History, which were... well, okay, those two were kind of boring. I don't know. I like museum-hopping, but there's something about overloading on them. I prefer art museums to history museums, for some damn reason.

We then ended up at Legal Seafood for dinner, and as we're standing there on the sidewalk, I look up at the advertisement board for the Regal across the street. I mention offhandedly, calmly, as we wait for Mačka to show up, "...You know, I heard Thor was supposed to be decent."
But I didn't push the matter. I knew he had a head cold, so I wasn't gonna ask him to sit through some loud-ass movie for two hours or so.
Mačka shows up, and the only words Aparato can get out is, "What would you think of going to see Thor aft-"
"There's a 9:10 and a 9:50 show."
(MAČKA, WHY ARE YOU AMAZING AND PSYCHIC, I LOVE YOU.)
So we went in for a wonderful dinner at Legal. Can I just say that if you ever have the chance, go to Legal Seafood in DC if only to have the opportunity to experience the bathrooms there.
Pictures would not do it justice.
The hallway that the bathrooms are in is partitioned by a mirrored wall down the middle - the ladies' bathrooms are on the left, the mens' on the right. Each "stall" is actually an individual bathroom, walled off with a full door, and each has its own toilet, sink, and hand-dryer.
AMAZING.

Having said that, their food also amazing beyond belief. If nothing else, the crab cakes. Good lord.


Thor was also pretty fucking good.
I will admit that the story got a little muddy and over-jumbled because there was too much attempt to give equal screen time to Earth and Asgard.
I like Chris Hemsworth - he has some pretty good comic timing. He kind of looks like he got hit in the face with a cement block, though.
The guy who played Loki looks like a young Data (don't be a plebe and act like you don't know who Data is), but I enjoyed his acting for the most part. (I'm still not entirely sure what they were doing with fucking around with Loki's backstory. I'm not going to spoil it if you haven't seen the movie yet, but suffice it to say that if you're familiar with the traditional comic canon, you're gonna be a little thrown off.)
To quote the good Turtle, "Anthony Fucking Hopkins was Odin Fucking Allfather", and... well, I mean, what more can I really add to that?
Aparato and I geeked out like nerdy, nerdy children during Hawkeye's twelve seconds in the movie. I can't speak for him, but on my end, it was not only for the character, but it also means that I get to have a good ogle of Jeremy Friggin' Renner once The Avengers finally gets made. 
(Contrary to my thoughts on Data, I won't consider you a plebe if you don't know who Hawkeye is.)
(They really need to stop cockteasing us with these setup films and just MAKE THE FUCKING AVENGERS ALREADY, OH MY GOD.)
(I also like how I'm judging Chris Hemsworth for looking like all smashed-faced, but I'm a Jeremy Renner fan. I don't even know.)


After the movie, though... oh, I don't know. Being away from home for so long is just... stressful, no matter how good it is to be able to be in DC every weekend for almost a month.
Make of that what you will.


Today was pretty uneventful. I had to buy a new backpack before I left DC - one of the straps was fraying pretty seriously on the one I had.

We had dinner before I left - chicken and rice and corn), and dinner was just so... hilarious.
We were sitting at the (what I assume to be IKEA) table, listening to a Cure station on Pandora, eating a good home-cooked meal, and they would not stop arguing about the best way to cook rice. They're such bickery bitches, I love it.
(I've got certain proclivities of my own, I'm not judging harshly. Their bickering is just fucking hilarious, I can't even handle it.)



I'm sitting here watching Netflix, and all I want to do is drop out of training, quit this job, go home, and fix my life.
I don't want these past few weeks to have been wasted, though, so... looks like I'll be in class bright and early tomorrow morning.

I'm just so done here, you guys. I miss all of you.

(Even though I prefer the old music video for this song, have the song anyway.)

Things You Should and Should Not Do On Cinqo De Mayo

DO:
Agree to not be a Debbie Downer, and just go out for Thirsty Cinqo De Mayo Thursday with your classmates.

DO NOT:
Forget to eat a good meal beforehand.

DO:
Have a marvelously witty toast (TO HONOR!) to recite before commencing the eight-person 1800-shot wave.

DO NOT:
Get slopness too quickly in front of people you barely know.

DO:
Shock everyone present with the fact that you're able and willing to hold conversations when you're not stuck in a corner classroom for eight hours.

DO NOT:
Try and explain sarcastic witticisms to that one lady in your class when you're three shots down.

DO:
Make that one French dude in your class laugh at your butchered, half-remembered French language skills.
He'll let you have the rest of his nachos.

DO NOT:
Try and explain how amazing Cat Stevens' music used to be to certain plebians.

DO:
Refuse to take your shirt off when people ask to see your tattoos, for once in your life. Good job!

DO NOT:
Try and ostracize that one dude for refusing to participate in Hugfest 2011 At Bar #2. He's just a germaphobe.

DO:
Realize when you've had quite enough, and make sure not to attempt to walk back to the hotel by yourself.

DO NOT:
Try and have conversations roughly equivalent to emotional landmines via Facebook chat while you're still bombed. That's not going to end well for anyone.

DO:
Hydrate very well before bed, get to sleep at a reasonable hour, and maybe have a sandwich. You'll wake up refreshed and in better shape than people who had significantly less to drink than you did.
Pussies.

Quick Thoughts On Cultural Oddities, and also, The People In My Life.

(1) Joey Comeau, the writer (of the text) for A Softer World, also writes short stories. I am both enamored with and jealous of his skill when it comes to "writing stories about cocks", as I have previously described my own attempts.

(2) Turtle recommended that I watch RoboGeisha, and if nothing else, the hilarious dub work is worth it.

(3) It's about time I told you a little bit more about the people I have written / will write about.


***

I currently live in Rochester, NY. I'm not from there, though.
I live with two other people - Ivan, The Boyfriend, and Turtle, The Roommate. Turtle's cat Archie and her rabbit Jackie also live with us.

Ivan is about seven months older than me, from the Rochester area, and a wonderful person. That's not to say that our relationship is perfect. We're human just like everyone else, and there are things we have to work at on a regular basis to keep it going, but there's nobody else I'd rather come home to every day. (Unless I could have him as part of a live-in harem of super-hot people. Ivan, if you're reading this, can we turn the attic into a harem of super-hot people?) He's very good at drawing, he's very understanding, he's not dumb, and he has good personal hygiene. He covers all my baseline requirements for long-terms relationships, and he finds me the best youtube videos. (Example is seen here.) (Actually-well-sung versions of that song can be found here and here, with due respect to Bea Arthur.)
He is the Pumpkin to my Honey-Bunny, the Morticia to my Gomez, and one hell of a guy all around.

Turtle is about eight months younger than me, and she's a fantastic person, and even though she's only our room mate, I miss her. (If by just our roommate, I mean JUST THE BEST ROOMMATE, then that's 100% accurate.) She is my partner in the law firm of Ziggy and Turtle-Derby, Attorneys At Funk. (We are not actually lawyers. We're just funky.) She's the best baker ever, she's a pretty good cook, and she can enjoy a good shot of tequila just as much as I can. She also has impeccable taste in music.
She got me my job (the one before this one), and then we actually met and became friends.
People who don't know us mistake us for siblings (or at least relatives) from how stupid we act around each other.
Archie, her cat, is ADORABLE, but fatally stupid. (She may also be the Antichrist, but that's another story for another time.)
Jackie is Turtle's rabbit. She doesn't venture out of her cage much. That's about all we have to say about her.

Tami is my best friend in the whole world, even though I don't see him often anymore. (He lives in Buffalo, where I'm from.) (Yes, Tami is a he, and is not a drag queen or a transsexual. Yes, it's pronounced Tammy.) I miss him terribly, and we have the weirdest inside jokes ever. During the year I lived in Michigan, we would talk on the phone and watch Conan O'Brien every night. I used to stay at his house practically every weekend when I moved back to Buffalo. If I ever get married, he will be my best man. Yes, I'm a lady, and he will be my best man. There are certain songs that I like because they remind me of driving around in the car with him.
Aside from Ivan, he is probably my absolute favorite male person.

Mom and Stepdad should be fairly self-explanatory names. They currently like in Michigan, where Stepdad is from. She's an esthetician, he's going to school to be a teacher. He's an only child, she's the third of four children.
They have one daughter together, my sister Bug, who is one month less than seventeen years younger than I am. She is probably the most adorable child on the planet.
I miss the three of them awfully, but I ended up hating living in Michigan more than I miss them.

Dad and Stepmom live in Syracuse. We don't have the best relationship. I'll get into it if I feel the need, but I won't bore you with it here.
They have two children together - A.L., female, nearly 11 years younger than me, and A.W., male, nearly sixteen years younger than me. (I could be doing the math wrong there. I don't know how old my brother is exactly, because I'm a bad person.)

The Baron and Lady Baron are two of (our?) best friends - they live about four blocks away from us in Rochester. (They are my friends, they are Ivan's friends, they are Turtle's friends.) He is in IT work, she is a stay-at-home girlfriend (who should not be judged poorly for that choice). They are both completely fucking awesome people.

Turtle-Boyfriend is.... Turtle's boyfriend. He's part of a theater company in Pennsyltucky who also does carpentry work. He's one of those disturbingly thin people who isn't actually anorexic. He likes Zelda games and certain forms of LARPing. (Turtle and The Baron are also members of his LARPing group.) He has fantastic hair. This is all that I know about him.

Tío Aparato is my father's youngest brother. He lives in Washington and struggled for a number of years with the fallout from a back injury, but that seems to have been improving recently. He has always been one of my favorite people. 
Mačka is my uncle's... gentleman friend? I don't know. 'Boyfriend' sounds juvenile, 'life-partner' sounds robotic. I've never really asked them what label they put on it, as such. He's a cool guy, even though he's really quiet. He's also insanely smart. His quietness can be intimidating, unless you know that he's just usually like that.


Ma Cousine is my father's younger brother's oldest child. (There's three brothers there. Dad, Père Du Ma Cousine, and Tío Aparato.) She's got pretty much a full ride to AU, because she applied herself in every way that I managed to slack off in highschool. She's one of the coolest people I know.




These are all of the people that I might post about in the foreseeable future.

In less serious news altogether...

They're... re-booting The Crow? Well, much like the sequels and tv show, I find that fact... unnesseccary.
It could end up actually being good (I've been surprised by things like this before), but the original will have a place in my preteen heart forever.

And yet I'm excited for On Stranger Tides.
(Look, I can't help it. It's a Pirates movie minus Bloom and Knightley, with the added bonus of Swearengen and more gloriously piratey wisdom from Keef. I mean... how can I just reject that idea out of hand? I can't. I don't have it in me. Disney knows how to grab 'hold of my heartstrings with its casting choices, I'll give them that.)

A musical moment for you lovelies, as a retrospective on the fact that I was madly in love with this song for about a month once. (Excuse me while I go play Vampire: The Masquerade and cry bloody black tears as I bleed to death in darkness.)

And, in a musing that is linked to both The Crow and Pirates in a rather vague sense (and I'll give points to anyone who can point those links out), I ask myself this question: How in the name of heaven is there no Blu-Ray copy of Conquest of Paradise? That movie was, if nothing else, SHEER CINEMATIC BEAUTY. Ugh.

How I Spent Easter

Not that I'm Christian by any long mental stretch, mind you, but I did almost twelve hours travelling last Sunday, and it had nothing to do with visiting family members.

On the leg of the trip between Rochester and New York City, I was stuck in a four-seater on a train with a snotty teenager, a rank-smelling old lady, and some film school douche who insisted on practically draping his arm over my chest to record footage of the Hudson River out the window. (Despite numerous attempts to at least switch seats with him, he refused - I just don't like strangers' arms being all over my rack, I don't know. Maybe I'm the weird one out on this.)
I will say that the trip along the Hudson was actually very nice to look at. You can see all of these trees growing straight up the sheer rock face on the other side of the river, and... if I were the sort of person who were inclined to enjoy boat rides, it would probably a lovely place to take a boat trip on in the summer.
Actually being on boats tends to send me into a panic more often than not, though, so I don't think that anyone has to worry about me trying to foist that sort of vacation on them.

Penn Station is a hole in the ground. A hot, cramped hole in the ground. My Easter dinner was a falafel-hummus pita from Chickpea.
There was a pigeon trapped in the waiting area while I was eating, too. That threw me off a little bit.

I can't remember precisely what time I got in to Wilmington, but I was immediately struck by two things - one, I was hungry. Two, the apartment/long-term hotel room I had been set up in was a cavernous, barren box. (Much like your mom.)

The people in my class are alright, and the instructor is an okay guy, I just feel like three and a half weeks is a little bit excessive for this job. Now, I'll admit, some people really do need to learn basic computer functions, and I respect that they need all of this training. I learned how to do my job in two days in real time, though, so... why isn't there some sort of aptitude screening test for people who take this course? Maybe some of us could have just shown up for the last week or so of training and gotten caught up on more advanced skills that would be useful.

On the other hand, though, I decided midway through last week that I would use this paid, unneeded training to get some writing done, so I bought a cheap notebook, and ended up writing... and honestly, I've been bored enough that a lot of it has digressed into hilariously bad pornography. I can't help but wonder what repercussions, if any, would come of me noting on the final course evaluation that they paid me to sit around writing about cocks for a month.

In the mean time, though, I took the train down to D.C. this past weekend, and will be doing so again this weekend, and likely the next.
I'll detail those shenanigans in a later post - for right now, though, I think it's high time I had a nap.

Oh! - a quick thought while I'm at it, though. The landlord's sole response to my renewed request that the bathroom mold be taken care of - 'Not a problem I wil[sic] send him back over'.
Thank you for that eloquent and detailed response, Sir Landlord. That was, however, a shockingly immediate response given your prior track record in that department.

In the next edition(s): Things that I've discovered in Wilmington, last weekend's trip to D.C., and the art of maintaining communications with Ivan and Turtle while I'm away.

For now, though, I leave you with Serge Gainsbourg, who was completely awesome before he got really kind of creepy a number of decades later.

Well, here we are, I see.

My job sent me away for a month of training in Delaware. This is silly, as I've already been trained to do the job that I'm... being sent away... to be trained how to do.

So. A month in a strange city, three states away from where I need to be (read: home) as I'm trying to hold my home life together. (Read: our landlord refuses to repair our apartment the way it needs to be repaired. More on that later.)

It's currently 1:40 AM on the Eastern seaboard of the United States, Osama bin Laden was confirmed dead a little over 24 hours ago, and I have a whole lot to vent about in a more organized manner than Facebook updates are capable of handling. I'll break down Current Problems into later, individualized updates. For the time being, I leave you with the music of Adele, who is part of this week's general soundtrack.