it's all so magical

I used to like alcohol a lot more. I mean I used to like the taste. Now it just makes me sleepy. I see no reason to waste my time with beer, so I normally head straight for the vodka. But it's just making me tired and vaguely dissatisfied with life in general. Guess I'm done with all this.

Did some more dreaming up of my story world. I think this is going to take longer than I thought. At this rate my writing process is dreaming up the whole world via freewrite before I ever write a sentence of the actual story. And I think I'll write the end first, because it's what I'm feeling the most powerfully. I only have the youngest son's name. Everyone else is only defined by their relationship to him. I've always hated naming. It's so final. I did decide to give them astrological signs as well as relationships. So far I have a 3 kid/2 parent family, a babysitter, and the girl who meets the oldest son on page one. But I guess that oldest son needs a friend, and so does the sister. And I need to know what the deal with the babysitter and her husband is first too. Basically she was the babysitter years ago, not anymore. In order for her to have babysit both the youngest son and the girl who meets the oldest son, I'm going to have to do the ages carefully. I think before I'd put him at 8 and the girl at 12, but then I put a 10 year age difference between the two brothers, so that might not work for him and the girl. Although I guess she should be younger than the sister to establish the power dynamic. Magical realism takes more attention to detail in that you must carefully explain the rules of the world so that you don't betray your readers. This is a mistake that dramas make all the time.

blah mess blah

Lots of paperwork this week. Benefits switching. Blah mess blah.

I'm going to not bring a book to work to see if it will force me to keep imagining the world of this story I'm thinking up.

i think i watch too much tv

I am scarred. Mentally. I cleaned the bathtub and then decided to clean around the faucet. But I couldn't get to the area where the faucet meets countertop so I decided to pour hydrogen peroxide there and then clean with a q-tip. It started fizzing and bubbling. And then whatever that is came right off in such a gross disgusting way that it almost triggered the gag reflex. If I see a spider, I'm going to gag. I might throw up. Save me. I should just go to sleep before I see something I don't want to see and I puke all over the carpet. How am I going to get that out?

I can never regard that bathroom as clean again. How can I get the mold out? The trouble is that the stuff you put to seal the gap between tile and tub is peeling off. It needs to be redone. What is that stuff called? I used to know back that one day when I helped redo that house for a whole Saturday in April, but now I don't know. And I remember that it's no use putting that stuff down unless the area is clean, so I'd have to scrape away the bad stuff first and then put the new sealant on. Anuksunamon, sebowei (I had no clue how to spell that).

Bought the tickets for the PR trip in December with AC. Oh yeah! It's going to be a fun 4 days of joy. You can't know when though because it's a well known fact that someone will come and rob my house if I post the days I'll be gone. If they do come, they'll be real disappointed because the tv is super small. It's like 15 inches. The blu-ray player is new though. It's probably worth the most besides my laptop. And I don't think my laptop is worth all that much because I've had it since 2008. Oh yeah, 6 years now, baby! I just Googled my laptop - Dell inspiron 1525 - and the most expensive one was $230 on eBay. Psst - you're ripping yourself off if you buy it for that much. Back in 2008 I paid $500 for it, it runs Vista, one of its screws is forever lost, and it has a crack on the left. But it still works! It's never given me any hardware problems either, unlike my first laptop, which had to get a video card replaced before I'd had it a year.

Watched 5 episodes of Cantabile Tomorrow, so I clearly have a problem. I only stopped because there aren't any more yet. It's Joo Won's new drama. This is only my third Joo Won drama. The last time I saw him was a few years ago when he was the star of Gaksital. Before that was Ojakgyo Brothers, which I quit watching at ep45 because that was right before the makjang set in. Anyway, I like Cantabile Tomorrow, mostly for the music. I saw the Japanese drama years ago, called Nodame Cantabile. All I remember from that is Chiaki Senpai, haha. That's a testimony to the drama because I usually never remember the character's names, only the actor names. Same with all cinema.

Other shows I am watching -
Three Musketeers, a Kdrama with Lee Jin-wook, who I know from Nine is a stunningly good kisser, which I wish I could experience, but I'm not really into this show yet. And Jung Yong-hwa is lucky he's such a good musician because I never enjoy seeing his boring face in a drama - he has about 2 expressions.
Grace Point, a FOX miniseries that stars one of the guys who played Doctor Who, the weird looking one with the crazy eyes who I can never find attractive. I'm halfway through and I have a character I hate with a vengeance. She must go down. The dad is dumb and easy to manipulate. I like the mystery.
The Mindy Project, because Mindy Kahling is awesome. Can I read her memoir again?
Brooklyn Nine-nine, not that I particularly like Andy Samberg, but I like this type of humor.
Modern Family, I also like this type of humor. It's mostly sarcasm. Hola hola!
Sleepy Hollow, but only while I cook or do something else that means I don't have to actually watch the tv or fully pay attention. I wanted this show to be so much better than it is. And I will never like the evil witch wife. Or that they wasted John Cho.
The Big Bang Theory, because a long time ago my mom got me addicted, and I like being able to talk about a show with her because I love her.
Haven, because Audrey from season 1 was so badass that I respected her, and I will keep on respecting her until this show dies.
We Got Married (Song Jae-rim/Kim So-eun), because Song Jae-rim is a hilarious cute flirt with no shame. I first saw him as the pen killer in the Lee Jun-ki drama Two Weeks. He didn't impress me at all because his character spent all his time looking steely and killing people in efficient ways with the pen his father gave him. But then he was funny in Surplus Princess and he has a lot of hilarious fan girls, so it got me interested enough to look up the half hour episodes and they are the most hilarious reality tv I have ever seen. I think there's going to be something like 40 episodes and I am in this one for the long haul. I smile and laugh every time.

relive a memory; story brainstorm 2

Story brainstorm one is when I wrote the dream into a notebook the moment I woke up feeling blessed by it. I'm going to turn this dream into a story. Light and memory and sadness. It's beautiful in my head. I know the ending. I know the reason the parents travel away from their oldest children, that they're closer to the youngest, but I don't know why they were driven to leave and search for the youngest in places he's never been. The oldest son, he's the one left behind to take care of the grey building by the ocean. Is it always about to storm there? He seems like he's always the root of it, like Calypso, controlling his small slip of ocean. And the girl, I don't know what made her come to stay. Nothing to do with the oldest son, something to down with her own problems, although she wraps herself in his family after a while.

On a more practical note, since I'm returning to my first real love of magical realism, I need something else to be out of the ordinary or the parents coming in the end will be out of left field, like a deus ex machina, and I definitely can't have that. I mean, the parents are there in phone calls and skype calls and emails because they do love their other children very much. But they (parents and siblings) all loved the youngest so they understand the need to search. So the parents are present, so it won't feel like them coming in the end is weird because they'll have been there all the time, if not physically. And then they have this gift, this trick. This community trick.

And what does the sitter have to do with it?  Hmm. Maybe she's the rest of the magical realism? Maybe she's found the opposite of what the parents go looking for, so there's an absence in their lives where she used to be, which they can feel, but can't know? And this sitter, she knows the girl. She's in the girl's life, didn't consider that important enough to be wiped, or loved the girl and couldn't bear to be forgotten somewhere in the girl's neural network. Love, the motivation for all the characters when it comes down to it, love skewed by money and by loneliness and by all the other things that can skew it, which are:
fear
desire
opinion of others
self-image
body-image
goals for self
family ties
past experience (both good and bad)
relationships with others
time
work
obligations
alcohol
other drugs
age
perception of the person/thing loved
obsession
any of the 7 deadly sins

comfort

I bought a comforter. Those things are more expensive than I thought. I walked into the store and a down comforter costs $400. Yeah, I went with the faux-down on clearance. The pattern was my second choice, but who cares. I saved $214 on that thing! Next in my step to make my apartment warm near the windows: curtains. Another day.

My friend's 30th birthday Puerto Rico trip is in motion. It's going to cost more than I'd hoped, but whatevs. Like I told my friend, I really don't buy that many things, so I can afford it.

Dinner was a turkey patty, broccoli, and cauliflower. Tiny bit of that soju I bought weeks ago. The novelty wore off. I think soju is an acquired taste that one bottle didn't make me acquire. Same as with coffee - in undergrad I kept ordering a white chocolate hot chocolate and the baristas kept giving me a white chocolate mocha and one day instead of telling them their mistake, I just drank it. And thus I was converted to coffee. Now that I'm in my advanced 20s, my body has decided to reject concentrated amounts of caffeine. The coffee phase didn't last long.

Yesterday, I finally walked my giant bag of plastic recyclables up the hill. My apartment looks like it has more space, but I have more recyclables (cardboard) taking up that same space, so it doesn't really look any better. Maybe if I could get rid of that crappy TV my dad shoved at me... I'm really not a fan.

Watched the last half of the NYC Marathon. Those people are fast! Still addicted to Prada Candy and to Sam Smith's In the Lonely Hour.