Eternal

The text was like a slap in the face, a punch in the gut: “You need to stop sending me creepy stuff. im tired of feeling bad and i just want to do my work.”

Creepy. I guess it’s official then, I’m a creepy ex.

My body was shaking, shaking, and that little luminescent phone screen blurred as I pulled it away from my near-sighted eyes. Creepy. So that’s what I am now, for asking, for wanting to hold you up to honesty and morality. A creep.

I started to hyperventilate, chest heaving and fingers twitching. Jamal sat up by me and reached out gently to touch my leg, but I jerked away, suddenly furious. “Don’t touch me,” I hissed, flinging open the garage door and slamming it behind me.

He followed anyway. “Meg, listen—“

“No, get the fuck away. Don’t say it to me. Just don’t.” Whirling back I ran back inside and closed the door again, but to my annoyance he slipped inside at the last second.

“Dammit, Meg—“

“No. Just…stop.”

“Meg, I love you, and you’re not a creep.”

I broke down in tears then. Why, why, why. How can you think that of me? How can you love me when the one person in the world who’s supposed to love me thinks I’m disgusting? Jamal, I don’t understand you. Don’t say that.

He sighed and leaned back on his legs, his face uncharacteristically soft. There was silence for a few moments as I stood, hugging myself and sniffling. He glanced out the window and then back at me, eyes deep as canyons, yellowed fur glowing in a stray beam of sunlight. I looked down at him, scared for eye contact, scared that this one part of me could have the courage to say "I love myself", scared of what I don't understand.

"I just do," he sighed. "Unconditionally. Objectively. Always."

It's funny how the little things can keep you sane, and Brero is definitely one of those little things. A lot of my friends know about him - in that I have mentioned him in passing - but I don't think they think about him much. When they think of me, they probably don't think about my imaginary dog friend that I call my "daemon". I myself sometimes have difficulty remembering him. Or, to be more accurate, I find it difficult to project him and concentrate on other people at the same time. It's something that we have decided to work on together, because I'd really like to see and hear his comments about what other people say and do to me. When I was much younger, only 14 or so, I could see him easily while going about school, and talking to my friends. As I got older, though, my imagination became less practiced and I see him much less. As it is now, I tend to only see him and speak to him when I am alone in a room, or at least when I am not interacting with anybody. Our newest project is for me to try and remember to work on projecting him during more difficult situations - when I'm talking to people or busy concentrating on something.

So I started a new job this week, and it is TERRIBLE. I am a veterinary technician, and I left a very warm and positive veterinary environment in Nova Scotia when I moved out west. My new job is the opposite of warm in positive. In fact, I was horrified by the negative staff atmosphere and the complete lack of quality medical care provided there. They are hideously disorganized - they actually spayed the wrong dog on my first day there - and there aren't nearly enough staff around. Most of the working technicians are not actually technicians at all. They are simply lay people who have been trained up by vets and other staff. This is like having a big hospital full of nurses who have never actually been to nursing school. It's not uncommon in veterinary practices, because there simply aren't enough skilled techs to go around, but it only really works when the veterinarians are there to keep an eye on the staff and make sure they don't do anything incorrectly. That does not happen at this clinic. In fact, one of the quack techs has worked there for 13 years, is convinced that she knows everything about everything, and is constantly doing things that I would have been flunked for doing at vet tech school.

On top of it all, this woman is openly rude to the veterinarians, sometimes refuses to do the things that they ask because she says she "doesn't have the time", and she yells at me if I try and do something right, instead of doing it her way. You can imagine what a hellish work environment it is, and the only reason that I haven't quit is because the veterinary corporation that hired me only JUST bought this practice. The guy who hired me assured me in an email that they have big plans for this clinic and encouraged me to "hang in there". So I am trying, I really, really, am. But when you spend your WHOLE day repeating x-rays because your evil coworker won't let you touch two of the most important settings on the x ray machine ("Those settings have worked for me for 13 years, so just don't touch them." Oh, yeah, you have to take the same x-ray two or three times before you get it right, and everyone in the clinic thinks that this is normal. Leaving the machine at 10 mAs works REALLY well) and all the time feeling SO homesick for your old boss, your old coworkers... you really just want to take off your iron smock, say "I've had enough" and just walk out never to return.

I had job offers from the local emergency clinic, who offered me more money and would practice MUCH better medicine, but if I took that job I would never see Benn again, because we'd be working completely different shifts, and I'd be going to bed just as he was getting up to go to work. Besides, if the guy who hired me is right, and they do have big changes planned for this clinic, they probably need a couple of trained technicians around to make sure things are done right. So I am trying. But I hate it.

In the midst of all the running around, and frustration, and despair, and homesickness, and busyness... I would suddenly remember Brero. And there he would be, sniffing at my patients, growling at the evil coworker, or simply pushing his muzzle into my hand in sympathy. It would be like a drink of water in the desert. It's hard to explain, but it's like... I would realize that my mind has a way of taking me out of all of this mess. I have my own self, and my own resources, and nothing that they say or do can change this or take it away from me.

Like I said, it's the small things that keep you sane. And just for a moment, pausing to pay attention to my daemon, would be that small thing.

Wet and Wild

Today has to have been the first field trip I’ve been on since…9^th grade or so. It was a queer feeling, waiting at the community college for everyone to arrive, to get in the cars together, that cramped, weirdly informal mix of school and socializing that I rarely experience these days. I suppose I must have missed these educational excursions, as I felt an inkling of an old excitement setting off.

I admit I don’t know the other students in my Marine Biology class terribly well. Almost everyone is over 21, with I believe Audrey and I being the only 17-year-olds. Loud Jamie and her yappy dog daemon make everyone more comfortable, along with Jared’s big bear presence (I wonder – how does she fit into that car?!), and for the first time I actually conversed with some of the people who sit around me twice a week. They’ll never be friends, but it was nice to have some interpersonal interactions. Independent Studies combined with those rock wallaby mountains - it makes it hard to talk to people.

Anyway, the morning started here pleasant but mildly cloudy, and as we drove the hour-long ride to the coast it got progressively more overcast, finally beginning to sprinkle. Jamal sat on my lap and wrinkled his nose out the window at the droplets, not speaking but feeling disapproval; we’re both sun-creatures, not meant for wind and rain.

Unfortunately the drizzle turned into that misty, permeable fog of rain that manages to soak everything and everyone to the skin, except the harbor seals, who seemed to be sunbathing at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, here on the California coast. I was wearing rather crappy shoes for tidepooling and kept wheeling my arms to stop myself from slipping on all the algae (Rhodophyta, mostly). Jamal takes his incorporeality seriously and also had difficulty getting around; his clawed, powerful feet are meant for leaping on hot rock hills, not crawling about on slimy, jagged coastal rocks. He splashed in a small tide pool more than once, mockingly disturbing the anemones and hermit crabs.

Despite the wet and chill and my head cold, my mood remained at a pleasant curiosity, though Jam became progressively irritable and quietly peeved, so we headed back to shore after about an hour and a half. Wet through, both with our fur and hair plastered to our bodies, we hunched under Thui’s umbrella and wished the rest of the class would grow disenchanted with the sea stars and seagull shit.

We didn’t get properly dry until all the way home, after showering and cuddling in the clumsy humid warmth of the bathroom. My leg hurts deep in the bone and Jamal looks poofy, like he’s been freshly blow-dried, and Dad is telling me about his 5th-grade field trip to the tidepools when a kid named John Gilstrap pulled a moray eel out of its crevasse with his bare hands.

Badass, Jam says.

I just handed in my last ever high school assignment, and god damn did that ever feel good. I’m not going to school today but will have perfect attendance for the last week. One day of it’s a half day for the valedictory dinner, one day of it is taken up by an excursion, and one day of it lasts for less than an hour before our official graduation thing, this means I have exactly thirteen hours left at that hellhole. Makoma and I are celebrating by taking a nice, relaxing day off—a bit of a sleep in, a long bath, wandering around the house eating junk in my pyjamas—this is also helping to cure the mild hangover induced by celebrating the last ever assessment undertaken at SPS by the class of 2007.

Having realised earlier, with a sense of impending doom, that I would need something to force me into writing and socialising and generally making myself feel vaguely useful, Makoma (darling daemon that he is) conned me into starting up The Daemian Chronicles. I can’t guarantee they’ll be even vaguely interesting or insightful, but what the hell. Here we go, starting off with a bit of angsting about form crisising.

Form crisising is when someone has settled as a form, has been that form for a long time, and then… the form goes kaput. Something feels wrong, or doesn’t fit as well as it did, or your daemon just starts spastically changing. Or, if you’re like us, all three at once. Funfun.

Makoma settled on September 10th, 2006. We know this (or, at least, we know it was around that time—we’re so incredibly bad at remembering dates that we tend to pick them loooong after the fact.) This was The Time our personality stopped changing. Now, for a very long time we thought we were settled as an orca—it fitted us well, and it was such a big, comforting form that I honestly didn’t mind the perpetual fat joke supplied. Since about August of this year, though, we’ve been having some serious doubts about the validity of the orca as a form. Le sigh.

As stated in my profile, Mak’s been taking a crapload of other forms lately, but there are two that he’s been sticking with a lot—harpy eagle, and Korean kirin (also known as a girin.)

Now, the harpy eagle doesn’t fit us at all. I’m simply not an avian-soul. It doesn’t fit, but it’s a gorgeous form and we love it and we use it as a surrogate form in order to avoid stressing over everything else. Now, kirin, on the other hand…

Mak took the form once or twice before August, then he started taking it a lot of the time. It was a pretty stylised, silly-looking Guild Wars kirin at the time, but it gradually evolved into a more traditional, albeit really ugly, Chinese kirin.

I love mythology, so I did a bit of research, and found an analysis on the forum’s done by the lovely Li. “Huh,” says I, “This fits pretty well.” Mak gives me a look surprisingly disdainful for someone I can put my hand straight through. Anyway, I did a bit of research and eventually wrote my own analysis. The general kirin traits fitted pretty well, and I wrote a bit about the different nationalities of kirin and the bearing that would have on the form… then three days later I read over it again and went, “Ho damn, the Korean kirin is us.” And it really is. I could analyse it here and now and do a point-by-point, but that would be amazingly long and boring.

The main problem I have is that I really don’t feel like a mythic, I guess. I’m a very dominant person (kirin are top of the heirachy among mythical and/or real animals in most every mythology) and while I’m pretty calm and passive most of the time, I can get very angry very quickly if it’s something serious enough (Korean kirin called typhoons on people who wronged them.) I even fit most of the traits of lion and generic sociable ungulate, the two animals that make up the kirin form. But… mythic just isn’t something I associated more than fleetingly with myself. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a mindset thing? But the form fits, and it’s comfortable…
Now that the stress of school is over, we’re going to wait a bit—til Christmas or New Year’s, maybe—before we consider kirin as a potential settled form. But I have a feeling it’ll stick around for a while.