I was trying to write to the calm floaty sounds of Eno's Thursday Afternoon, but all that silence was way too distracting to my brain. So now I'm listening to Oingo Boingo, music which always makes me want to mud -- well, to roleplay, but mostly instantiated as mudding, the full-immersion experience of creating another person, and not just the reality of that person but the meta-reality, the atmosphere and ambience and evocation that real people and the best fictional characters carry with them. It's not just about pretending to be someone else, it's about creating a small world in which that someone else is connected to other people, and there are shared memories, and a handful of black sand from a beach that never existed except as a few lines of text becomes the catalyst for a cascade of memories. I miss that so intensely, sometimes. I still remember telling Mark, six years ago, that roleplaying with him was so very intense due to how he (well, his character) remembered things and brought them back into play again, so that our character's fictional lives become as multi-layered and filled with symbols as real life can be. Or better, as real life hardly ever is but all the really good fiction -- and even more, the really good serial fiction, like comics and manga and anime -- always are. Here I'm thinking about how towards the end of the very last season of Sailor Moon there's this beautiful moment when a red rose appears at the feet of our heroine, and that one rose symbolises about two dozen things, and you only know what all of those things are if you've seen the previous one hundred ninety-three episodes. Having those moments in roleplay is sheer miracle magic.

Oh, and when I raved at Mark he just grinned (virtually, remember) and said "Reincorporation." Which became my big online buzzword for a year or so, until having a job and an apartment and in general a real and non-horrible life dragged me further and further away from mudding, and by the time I started again I had some other new buzzword.

There were no washer and dryer, much to everyone's puzzlement. We showed up at the old house around eleven last night, exhausted from the long hot crowded day of IKEA shopping frenzy, wandered to the laundry room, stumbled around in the dark, and eventually realised that there were no lightbulbs anywhere, an enormous amount of cobwebs... and no washing machine. Nor dryer. Nothing except for dark and cobwebs and old lint that'd missed a trash can. We scratched our heads in confusion, then I took Trip and Chrisber home and went to the U-Haul place and waited for Jim and then drove home and collapsed. There was a nice hot shower and bath gel and some fluffy towels, and warm microwaved food, and then going thump into a splooshy waterbed and hugging my new sheep (IKEA has sheep!) and cuddling Jim and falling asleep.

So there was all that, which wasn't bad. But no washer or dryer, which means that instead of watching Lain at Kirby's tonight we need to go appliance shopping. I haven't done laundry in about three weeks, and I'm about to hit the point where I've worn everything vaguely workday-normal and start showing up in fancy dinner dresses, old LaRP costumes, and so forth. I am nearing the point of obsession with my need to do laundry, and even if we do manage to shop tonight (yes, I know I said we need to, but whether or not we manage to is in doubt; Jim is feeling tired and sniffly, and we had a twelve-hour day yesterday) the appliances won't appear at the house for a few days yet... must launder. I applied to Dave, who agreed to let me use the machines in his apartment complex, so by Wednesday I should have something to talk about other than non-symbolic dirty laundry. Clean laundry, probably.

While on this practical but somewhat obsessive note, I mention that I submitted this site to open pages again. Well, not again for this site, but I did that for my last journal too. The desire to be read is a powerful one. It sort of surprises me, too; last time around I was deeply into reading a bunch of other journals when I started doing my own, and there was some amount of competition in it, at least inside my head -- could I get a lot of readers, could I be as cool as all the other people I found cool, could I avoid the things I disliked in other journals? Now I'm reading again, which is definitely fun, but I'm so utterly not having all the competition stuff... I started writing again because I really like to write. Isn't that amazing?

Seeing Andrea's show I thought to myself "I could do that." Not that, of course; her show is absolutely hers. But I could do something like that with what is mine... and just as Andrea's show helped me to understand some things that I hadn't before, maybe my show (if I did one) would be able to explain to people some things about my life I've never found words adequate for. Oh, that's a big deal thought. I don't think I want to keep going there, right now. I'll just summarise: solo performing of your own writing is a marvelous chance to put 'show, don't tell' into practise. If one is both brave enough and good enough to do it.