I dreamed that my sister Pookster was married to a woman. And, although apparently she had been for several years, it just struck me during the course of the dream that my mother was accepting and friendly toward them, and therefore unlikely to freak out when I told her I was also gay. Hah! What a nice and improbable dream.

OK, time to complain about customers and my tattoos.

You don’t get kanji tattooed on yourself without being prepared for a certain amount of “What does it say on your back?” from random strangers. But I’ll tell you what I was not prepared for: ever having a job where I’m allowed to wear tank tops and where customers that don’t at all care what it says on my back will still ask because they’re trying to come up with something to say while I fetch their orders for them. And obviously it doesn’t bother me to tell people what my tattoos mean, but, as I mentioned, these customers don’t actually care. They give me the most idiotic blank stares in response to my answer, and I’m tempted to ask them why they bothered asking in the first place.

One lady today asked for elaboration on the “Aku Soku Zan” concept, and in response to the brief explanation I gave she agreed heartily and started talking about Jesus. I was like -__- Really? You know, lady, not all morality is Christian.

Another great thing is that, though they usually only ask what the kanji say, occasionally they’ll ask about the whole thing — and in those cases, they never seem to recognize Tolkien’s name when I mention it. I don’t expect everyone (hell, most people) to recognize the symbol, since it’s not exactly universal, but the name? He’s not that obscure…

A very similar circumstance arises when I wear a shirt that says practically anything — a band name or the title of a series I watch or a video game I play… anything whose meaning is not readily obvious to the average bear. Customers will ask, not really wanting to know, and then stare at me blankly when I answer. Fortunately, I can choose which shirts I wear, so I can avoid the ones with anything cool on them for work.

So as long as I’m complaining about customers, how about when ten of them come in to drop off shit during the last five minutes we’re open? Aaaargh. Also, we have three identical tables; if another customer is being helped at one of them and the other two are empty, you really don’t have to stand there looking gormless holding an armful of shirts. But, OK, enough about customers for now.

I got my birth control refilled, and discovered that Safeway has switched to a different generic version of the drug that costs $20 less. Wot about that! I will not complain! Also money-related, and more or less happy: I’m almost done paying off my hospital bill from a million years ago that I’ve been paying off forever. Then I can start saving up for a car. Not that I in any way even the tiniest bit want a car, and I really need and would greatly prefer a new computer first, but I… need a car. For driving and stuff -__-

If only there were some kind of vehicle that could carry lots of people to and from various places around town… you know, something that could, like, stop at designated places in every neighborhood, and, I dunno, you’d pay some money to get on it and it would take you to work or something? Wouldn’t that be cool? I should invent something like that.

So remember a few weeks ago when I was like, “Oh, I’m doing so well on this chapter; I think I’ll skip treadmilling today so I can keep working on it?” Well, my daily treadmill walking died that day. Completely. I haven’t done it once since then. And while I still can’t say I really regret not having done it that day, because good progress on a chapter always means more to me than… pretty well any alternative… I should really get back into the treadmill habit. Better health is not going to appear on its own. I JUST FUCKING HATE IT SO MUCH.

On a betterer note, and speaking of good progress, a lot of that has occurred lately on various projects related to Saitou and Sano. The last few days it’s been ASZz — I’ve mapped out the next four or so chapters and figured some things out, and the very next chapter is maybe a third done — but Blood Contingency and Seeing Red have been quite cooperative lately too. No GW story has shown any interest in my attention in recent days, however, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that there will be no MoR entry from me this time. This is annoying, but what can you do?

Lately I’ve been craving the music from the original Castlevania, and to a lesser extent the game itself. So the other day I played through it and recorded all the music and created for myself a nice little homemade soundtrack (which amounts to eleven tracks lasting approximately seven minutes XD). I know there’s an actual soundtrack out there, and I will probably look for it someday, but for now this is making me quite happy.

We got an NES when I was maybe six years old, and one of the games we got with it was the aforementioned. As a six-year-old that wasn’t (and never became) very good at video games, I thought it was the longest, most amazing, most complex, awesomest game in the entire world. I would play it for days (assuming it didn’t freeze up when I left it paused), and occasionally make it all the way to the end.

This was back in the day when my mom was willing to play video games because she hadn’t yet decided that they were the devil. She could play all the way through Castlevania in about ten minutes if it didn’t freeze up, and we thought this marked her as spectacularly talented at video games. These days, about ten minutes is how long it takes me to get through also, so that childish belief was not entirely accurate XD But it was cool that my mom ever played video games at all.

Pookster and Mostle and I used to have a variety of framing games (“activities” or even “dialogues” might be a better word for many of them) for movies and video games. The premise we usually used for Castlevania was that we three (or sometimes just we two; Mostle was quite young at this point) had been captured by Dracula, and the hero of the game was making his way through the castle to rescue us. Dracula had set up some kind of magic viewing screen (XD) on which we could watch our hero fail, in order to demoralize us. So we’d sit there while I played the game, and we’d all cheer the hero on and gasp like stupid OoT Zelda every time he got hurt.

Usually, eventually, because this was really quite stupid, Pookster would get attacked and swallowed by a slime monster (a pink blanket), and I would have to rescue her from that. Hero-man (not to be confused with the guy Toro addresses by that title) rarely actually saved us, since the game almost always froze up at the Grim Reaper, the last boss before Dracula.

So, anyway, yeah, Castlevania musics. They’re great, and I love them, and nostalgia.

I forget whether or not I mentioned that Lesta has started working on top of Pike’s Peak. I’m sure it’s not nearly as cool as it seems to those of us down here at the bottom of the mountain, but, um, it seems really freaking cool. Meanwhile, Zombie Girl has started working at Safeway, in the deli as I used to (which does not seem cool at all). So now she has busytimes. If I’m interpreting correctly the card I pulled on the subject, I won’t be seeing much of her anymore. This is sad, but nothing unexpected (though a trifle earlier than expected).

OK, I think that’s about all I had to say. Well, no, that’s a total lie; I’m sure there’s more I had to say, and I just can’t think of any of it. Also I’m tired of making this entry. The End.