agnosticprophet

3:25 AM Today I thought I might do a Ray Bradbury thing. I looked up a random word or two, and thought about them, which caused a problem, because the first random word I found I did not know the meaning of. Luckily, this was a dictionary I was looking at, so finding the meaning was easy, needless to say (have you ever noticed that when someone says "needless to say", they say it anyway? I guess that if they didn't, they wouldn't need that particular phrase.)

"contumacy: a stubborn or willful disobedience of authority."
Right this very minute, a homocide may be brewing. Bryan needs a bathroom break, and is getting irritable. One of our co-workers has playfully moved another co-worker's chair and belongings down the hall. For the second time. I think I'll stay in my little corner today, and not bother anyone, 'cause I want to be the one who lives... I don't cause trouble for petty things, which means that when I do occasionally throw a fuss over something, people usually pay attention. Bryan, who regards complaining as just another form of exhaling, rarely gets listened to unless he starts really yelling, which he does usually on a monthly basis at work. He says he has problems with inept male authority figures, and that's scary, because if our supervisor ever decided to leave, it's pretty sure she'd be replaced with a man, and he'd either be very authoritarian, or (due to our "if you can't train them properly, put them on night shift" attitude here) an idiot. In the worst possible scenario, he'd be authoritarian AND an idiot. I can't say that it would be Bryan who'd finally blow his top, because since I've gotten to be a little bit less repressed with my aggression, I have a whole new problem. It's not that I don't get angry anymore, but more that I just don't see it coming until I've already gone for the throat, and all I can do is apologise for the attack. Oh well. Yep. Back into the corner. The safe little corner...
"Monarch butterflies"
When I was a kid, there was a lot of crap around. Literally. There were cows everywhere, and other animals, and one of the things that comes from that is having to watch where you step when you're outside. The only real bright spot to this was the butterflies. In the summer, it was fairly common to be walking somewhere and come upon a cluster, maybe twenty or so, of Monarch butterflies. Usually, they were on something unmentionable, but since they were clustered so thickly, all you could see were wings, fanning gently, until you startled them, and then they'd flutter around in a big cloud of yellow and black, like papery tigers. Sometimes you'd see them in clouds over the creek, and the reflection would double them. Huge gatherings of them around mud puddles, looking that much brighter on a drab surface, and I started taking them for granted, because they'd always been there. Now when I see a Monarch butterfly, or even any butterfly, it's pretty, but it still reminds me of those big fluttering clouds that I don't see anymore.
3:42 AM Well, it's been about fifteen minutes, and I don't hear any screaming, so maybe the situation has settled. Unfortunately, my co-worker has not seen his chair yet, or his special spectrum light bulb which has been neatly unscrewed and placed in the aforementioned chair. The night is not yet over.
Well, we went to OutsideCon this past weekend, which was fairly quiet, since almost everyone there was still a bit worn out from DragonCon, which was the week before that. I had been to OutsideCon before, but it was in '94, I believe, and that was a long time ago. They are calling the state park in Burns, Tn (why can I not ever remember the name of that damned park?!?) the new site, but when I was there this weekend, I realized that that was where they had it in '94. I don't remember there even being water there, but there was some, in the form of a lake, which had a rather scummy area where one could theoretically swim. I realized that I didn't want my bikini to dissolve, so I wasn't going swimming.
Ah. Time's up. More later....