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Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
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I Am A: Neutral Good Human Cleric (4th Level)
Ability Scores:
Strength-14
Dexterity-11
Constitution-13
Intelligence-18
Wisdom-17
Charisma-15
Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.
Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.
Class:
Clerics act as intermediaries between the earthly and the divine (or infernal) worlds. A good cleric helps those in need, while an evil cleric seeks to spread his patron's vision of evil across the world. All clerics can heal wounds and bring people back from the brink of death, and powerful clerics can even raise the dead. Likewise, all clerics have authority over undead creatures, and they can turn away or even destroy these creatures. Clerics are trained in the use of simple weapons, and can use all forms of armor and shields without penalty, since armor does not interfere with the casting of divine spells. In addition to his normal complement of spells, every cleric chooses to focus on two of his deity's domains. These domains grants the cleric special powers, and give him access to spells that he might otherwise never learn. A cleric's Wisdom score should be high, since this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.
Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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Lots of weird things occur to me when i'm particularly tired, and a recurring one is people who I have lost any hope of contact with through simple accidents of time, circumstance, whatever, and who I was close to and sincerely cared about. None were specifically romantic; or, I should say, even if a few had an undercurrent of romance, their sincere and firmer footing came from simple human friendship. Currently, there are five which stick out--
1. Jillian Schroeder, from Minnesota, a long-term e-buddy who I was close with for roughly four years, and who knew me when I was at my worst and most selfish. I always appreciated her friendship; there's been no means of contact for roughly three years (probably more).
2. Mr. Murphy, my AP English teacher (though I never took that goddamn AP), who served as one of the first (if not the first) serious positive male influences on my life -- someone who I could unabashedly look up to, speak frankly with, and who had no desire to mold me, only to encourage that which saw was good in me. Having become friendly with him junior year, talking about bipolar disorder and literature, our conversations and his warm and honest mentoring lasted till I left Bennington. Haven't spoken to since I was 19.
3. Saskia, the Franco-Dutch girl, from my Emerson beat literature class, six years my senior, who I went out with a number of times and, being the sort of person I related to more than I could express, we lost contact through a combination of my masochistic avoidance and her self-necessitated isolation, and quite possibly her visa expiring.
4. Patrick, another e-buddy, was one of the few males I felt I could relate to readily at age 17. With his philosophical and academic outlook on most things was a precursor to various incarnations of my own self (which came soon after -- he was a bit older, had finished college), he was someone who I could treat readily as a peer, who I could learn from, and who, despite being among the more intelligent people of my age I had known, perhaps the most intelligent, online or otherwise, greatly admired and respected what I wrote at a time when I needed just that sort of reinforcement. Someone never slovenly with praise, he was able to look at it with a critical eye, see it for its flaws, and still show a degree of jealousy, imitation, and terse praise, all of which (coming from someone you admit to knowing quite a bit more about books and writing than you do) is the most sincere and flattering sort of compliment you can be given. He was never didactic, either, and though both of us were consumed by our own disorders and female troubles, he was one of the few genuine male friends I have had. I haven't had a means of contacting him in three or more years.
5. Mary, from Lowell, who I met when we were both 16 on the train coming back from the Sonic Youth. We exchanged screennames (which actually came into Jenna's possession, which she lost, and then got them from her friend who knew Mary) and talked online for a month or two, exchanged some writing, and fell completely out of contact for three years, when we started up a conversation on myspace about Henry Miller, not knowing that we'd known each other before (in a past life, or something). Eventually we hung out, figured all that out, made plans to see each other again. It never happened, and we stayed in touch by phone for a bit, until eventually we made plans and I backed out, having at that point in my life become so reclusive and chickenshit about even meeting up with friends -- let alone girls in a possible quasi-date scenario -- that I dodged a couple phone calls and we didn't talk again, except maybe once or twice, in which case I probably made some sort of tentative agreement to reschedule and obviously never did. Regardless, she was of the sort who (like Saskia) I related to in such a way which was too hard for me to handle, and I'm a bum for tossing off some of the better and more genuine bridges to friendship I've been offered, either looking only for a linear relationship, or looking only to spend time in bed with a book and my dogs (not with the girl, of course, what an awful thing to insinuate!).
There are probably more. There are, in truth, a lot more, half of whom I've contacted, never getting a response, and the other half with whom I've done the same. There are people, too, good people who I've never stopped caring about, who I don't talk at all with anymore and keep their email addressed saved somewhere (as they likely have stowed away mine), both sides looking for a convenient time for the memory to strike them just to say hello. Despite the fact that I'm only twenty-three ("only", ha-ha), these ideas of memories and past people are incredible striking -- I suppose I used to think that I'd instead by pining over some long-lost teenage love, and here I am, still quite capable of gabbing away with Corinne, Tiff, and Maggie, ruminating instead over has-been friendships that sunk into the ocean somewhere along the way. I don't think the past is particularly frightening, but I am scared to think of how large mine will become in even another few years; as of now it could probably swallow a goat. (Woody Allen voice: "The past is an ocean? Even if someone's past was a lake, mine wouldn't be Walden Pond, mine would be Lake Baikal -- somewhere in Siberia, with its own functioning ecosystem...")
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Comments: Read 7 or Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
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i have so much granola is my mouth right now i have no idea how i'm supposed to chew it all.
fuck.
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
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Monday, December 17th, 2007
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i have managed a bizarre rearranging of my sleeping schedules so i can take my two consecutive 8am finals, as i am not used to get up at 7:30am, not two days in a row, and not while attempting to keep my wits about me enough to study for those finals and then the other two (the one after that is at 10:30am, so i will likely be trying to pull off some sort of 1:00pm - 9:00pm sleep time). as usual, i tend to find such strange shifts as more hilariously indicative of my aberrant schedule and behaviors than annoying or strange at all. the fact that i see falling asleep for the night at 11am as part of some holistic means of dealing with finals early in the morning instead of some radicalized behavior that needs to be adjusted to certain norms is incredible because it combines a realistic outlook of how i should live my life with something most people would just stare blankly at and worry.
my final today is economics and my final tomorrow is geoscience, and after that is media governance n power followed by world politics, both of which will be relief since they require an even lower bare minimum of effort than the former two classes. i will leave here friday and then go home and hibernate and hopefully write a book.
ps it is obvious that i am quite tired given my more labyrinthine sentence structures and hyperpolysyllabic word choices, which also, at this level of bored/exhausted, is very very funny.
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Comments: Read 3 or Add Your Own.
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Sunday, December 9th, 2007
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Monday, November 5th, 2007
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Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
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eerily aged truman capote
bob ross, painter of trees
really bad borat impersonator
vivien leigh
any preference, anyone?
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Comments: Read 3 or Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
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did you know that people actually drink glasses of milk? i really had no idea that this continued past elementary school, but a number of people here seem to enthusiastically down glass after glass of milk; i can't even begin to express how weird this seems to me.
also, i am thankful for this colder weather, as the cargo shorts will finally have to go back in everyone's drawers and the campus can look a bit less like a giant old navy catalog. it still amazes me to see people wearing them, almost as much as sweatpants. who the hell wears sweatpants? i mean good god people, sweatpants.
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Comments: Read 6 or Add Your Own.
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so apparently i cannot fall asleep without taking some sort of sleeping pill. i have been at school for roughly 35 days now and i've consumed roughly 85 sleeping pills, which is 2.42857 pills a night. this is obviously not good. i have attempted, again, to kick the mild-seeming dependence and cannot sleep (again). fuck fuck fuck.
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
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i was reading through a lot of my past entries today look for some old scraps of writing and i found myself actually enjoying a lot of the older entries, generally dating from march 2005 onward. this surprised me, because in retrospect i came off as much less of an existential asshole than i pictured myself appearing, and much less of an awkward commentator on my various real and philosophical quandaries...
in short, i realized that despite the numerous shit-trash entries carried herein, there were some things that made me smile or laugh or think about who i was without that feeling of looking back at a junior high yearbook. and that's good, i mean. and even things i'd written that i can still say i'm proud of, despite beings years old at this point. i know i've changed a lot over the past couple years, but it's nice to find out that the old me wasn't as much of a scourge to humanity as i'd remembered!
so, to all those who get this on their friend page (or if there are a stalker-like few who still check this despite nearly a year of solid inactivity), this is where i am right now:
- transferred to umass as a sophomore, living (thankfully) in a single
- switched majors to STPEC (social thought + political economy)
- single for over three months, which i think is the second longest i've managed to avoid serial monogamy
- vegetarian (again)
- still prone to weird depressive fits, but they now are quite rare and significantly better-handled
- trying my best to balance the usual precocious over-thoughtfulness with reality, and just generally trying to seem like less of a curmudgeon
i don't know what else to add, but i guess this should update some of you, given that you're interested, and if they're not, just take this as a vain and egotistical attempt to validate myself! take care all!
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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i am doing this sleep-schedule reversal thing to 'restore my circadian rhythm' so i basically am forced to stay up till 3pm today, 6pm tomorrow, etc, until it goes around the clock and is normal. anyway, i am trying to find things to do to eat up this morning time where i am extremely tired but cannot go to sleep, and i figured that i would try and come up with a definitive list of every concert i've been to. (i should stipulate that i won't list local shows-- i'm trying to keep this to stuff i went to because i had at least a mild interest in the music.)
this is pretty much for my purposes, but if you went to any of these and want to indulge me with some fond memory of high school or afterward, please feel free. (these are in reverse chronological order)
bon iver/elvis perkins
band of horses/wolf parade/modest mouse/the yeah yeah yeahs
vampire weekend/ra ra riot/tokyo police club
the arcade fire (with niko!)
joanna newsom
wolf parade
graham parker
the pogues
the rolling stones
rachael davis
phil elvrum/jason anderson
broken social scene/feist
built to spill
newport folk fest: elvis costello, gillian welch/david rawlings, bright eyes, m ward, that fat bearded jim james guy (also the one where i fell asleep next to a speaker mid-elvis set)
iron and wine
bright eyes/cocorosie(ugggh)
broken social scene
q and not u
the dresden dolls
bright eyes/arab strap
hot hot heat/the french kicks
cursive/minus the bear
bright eyes/arab strap
wilco
bright eyes/m ward
phil elvrum/jason anderson/calvin johnson
howie day
bob dylan
bright eyes/the good life/mayday
badly drawn boy
shane macgowan & the popes
mission of burma
pete yorn (i even got to introduce him, i felt so fucking cool)
the doves
the strokes
black rebel motorcycle club
the sheila divine
radiohead
travis
u2
sting (yes, i actually went to a sting concert)
sonic youth
jets to brazil
arab strap
weezer/the get up kids/ozma
thurston moore
godspeed you black emperor
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Friday, February 23rd, 2007
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Thursday, January 4th, 2007
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Today I ate:
2 bowls of cocoa pebbles
A reheated portion of pork fried rice
4 Trader Joes ice cream bon-bons
1.5 more bowls of cocoa pebbles
1 can of Wolfgang Puck's organic tortilla, with a 100-calorie package of Snyder's dumped in and made really soggy because I didn't eat the soup till about an hour afterward
2 spoonfuls of custard
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Comments: Read 6 or Add Your Own.
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Thursday, September 28th, 2006
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Monday, September 18th, 2006
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lately i feel as though my strong, willful desire for things is gone. i feel more resigned to being a human, and i guess more practical when it comes to accepting my own limitations. in a lot of ways i feel that the worst part of it all is the gamut of feelings i have, and how it's not a matter of changing my mind, it's just being possessed by a different instinct, need, or desire at a certain time which is tugging me to feel a certain way; i can respond or relate to anything, but i can't take ownership of any of it. i realize more and more how much of a chameleon i am, accept one who isn't necessarily responding to any outward stimulus-- i tear through colors, moods, emotions, ideas in seconds, and a minute later i am unaware of even having that feeling-- i am completely unempathic towards my different moods, that being the only constant. i have a lot of trouble reconciling various di- or trichotomies or whatever, like all those feelings exist on different planets only connected by the fact that they're part of this unintegrated mass, and it worries me to think that i can be so many different, so many polarized people. i realize that it's largely my borderline that's coming into play, giving me (making me, i guess) have these emotive quantum leaps.
when i was at ben's last night we watched "election", and one of the things that really hit me about the movie was how easy it is to kid yourself about something when you really want the best, or how it easy it is to feel these completely contrasting ideas and feelings and then be forced to choose between them, just for superficial or externally representative purposes. i guess i just feel a lot of frustration with that, and i guess the limitations that come along with having impulses and instincts and just generally being human-- it almost seems sad to give up the ideal of an autocratic self, and letting go of it (letting go of my own expectations/desires for myself) is more disappointing than i really would care to admit.
i am a lot happier, though, in general, and i have a richer and more enjoyable life than i can ever remember having-- i guess that idealism is the price i am paying.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Thursday, August 31st, 2006
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Thursday, August 10th, 2006
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electric lights fall over us and
wash the surface of the sea; what
colors now that we are seeing-- what
ocean breeze or undertow has
pulled the answer from my throat?
what's illumined is behind us-- broken
shells along the shore, all
smooth and thin and colorless, are
washed back in the sea
***
i believe the world has changed
between sunset and the dawn-- our
arms have disentangled, but we walk
slow and close along the planks and
gently through the sand--
this is how i hope to keep
the solace i had found asleep beside you
in the subway car, the slow dissolving
of your breath against my ear-- to
save it from the rocks and
sand we kick up by the water's
edge, unable to speak--
i have told manhattan goodbye;
soon the sun will rise and flush
the tide back to the sea, the tiny,
wilted monuments, lifted
from the dunes and surf, all
fall together with the tide
where lonely drifts we once had sought
would merge and pull away.
***
We wound up on Mermaid Avenue, walking
toward the surf. Heavy winds had
blown across the beach, silent all but
for our steps, walking toward the rising
sun--
to think the warmth we knew was
fading as we walked along the
surf--
like a flash, you say, it all
could end and take your hand from mine;
I have a seashell in my palm
I had hoped to show you
***
in the moonlight, i hope
you are waiting; i hope
to find you by my bed,
already warm under the
sheets. i know
the way you breathe
has kept me up for hours – and
the tangles in our legs, the placement
of our hands,
your shoulder barely bruising mine –
are all just ghosts parading by, swallowed
by the morning sun--
rising over drifts and fog,
to settle on some spot of sand,
wet and packed down by the sea,
wet and packed down from our feet
by coney island surf
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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lippincott's journal
