{look upon my works, ye mighty}

Seb (ryuutchi) came over last, last Sunday night after Intercon to hang out with me! Below the cut are photos of my room, which ohsnikt has been asking for for a while, my Green Lantern ring that she gave me, the evil things we did to the fridge in the common room, my standard 3-times-a-day meal, a seal cookie originally bought for pikachumaniac and assorted stuff.

And, of course, the obligatory pool shot.

( Place your bets which way the head will roll. )

I've got witchwillow and tes_aidan's vists to look forwards to as well, so expect more photos later!

Pretty Bird Woman House is a women's shelter on a Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota. Ever since it opened, it's been struggling to stay afloat but a few weeks ago, it suffered a fatal blow when it was broken into, ransacked and burnt down. Right now, they're trying to reopen it and any sort of aid is greatly appreciated.

For an example of why it's so necessary to have a women's shelter, and how the clash between the Tribal police and government police result in victims not getting justice, take a look at the following excerpt from the Daily Kos article:

Georgia Little Shield told me that when her daughter was beaten by her husband, the husband, remorseful after hitting her daughter, took her daughter to the hospital and asked to be arrested. As emergency workers rebuilt her daughter's shattered nose the police argued over who was responsible for handling the crime. Finally, the city police gave the husband - who was still wearing the t-shirt covered in his wife's blood - his car keys and told him to just go home, nothing was going to happen. And nothing has.

Georgia Little Shield is the Director of the Pretty Bird Woman House. Her dreams for the shelter are modest:

"I want to have a shelter and four paid advocates. Two advocates would focus on sexual assault - currently we must travel 120 miles to get rape kit. We need two advocates for domestic violence as well. Domestic violence calls make up most of our crisis calls, but sexual assault requires a lot of resources. I want to be able to teach women's safety classes, parenting classes, offer assistance in getting GED's, have a place for women to look for jobs on line. These are the kind of support services I want to offer."

This shelter is desperately needed. Because of the vulnerability of the women who live on that reservation, as well as how useless the police are, a situation has been created where non-Natives come to the reservation purely for the purpose of raping those women. It's getting called rape tourism, and the only people who really do anything about it are the three women who work at the shelter.

For $60,000, the Pretty Bird Woman Shelter could buy a house opposite a police station. An additional $10,000 would make the house secure, with proper fencing, video cameras, reinforced doors and other measures.

I know a lot of us don't have the resources to contribute financially to this project, but winter's coming and they accept donations of material objects, like towels and washcloths, toothbrushes and toothpaste, shampoo and conditioner, women's hygiene items, diapers of all sizes, baby wipes, first aid kit items, and analgesics such as ibuprophen and aspirin.

Anything you can send would be appreciated, but those items in particular. The address is:

Pretty Bird Woman House
302 Sale Barn Rd.
McLaughlin SD 57642

If you can donate, or you want to know more about the project, check out The Pretty Bird Woman House Blog, where there's a meter keeping track of how close they are to their goal as well as updates.

rayemars also has a post about the situation. Repost, people. Spread the word.

PaperBlanks official site.

I am currently madly in love with their products, having seen them in shops in Vienna and fallen desperately, unfairly, unstoppably in lust with the smoothness of their pages and the textured, magnetized covers.

I went shopping with Numa the other day. What I bought was this, in Noir (fourth from the top of the thumbnails on the left side).

The pages are unlined and a beautiful creamy shade. The spine is open and handstitched. The cover is silk, and my fingers have yet to grow tired of stroking it. I have calligraphy pens at home and a bottle of ink that I plan on using to inscribe little wisps of thoughts and lines that strike me as lovely and worth remembering.

It won't be a journal or a sketchbook. It'll be something beautiful that I possess; something decadent and different and wildly esoteric-looking, like a spell book.

Sometimes, your soul just craves beauty.

So, this morning, I heard a commotion in my sister's room, panicked, jumped out of bed and went to see what was wrong.

Turned out that one of the maids had varicose veins in her foot and one had suddenly POPPED, resulting in an actual pool of blood on the floor. Or, well, blood creating a huge stain on the carpet, anyway.

I never knew that could happen, or that you could lose so much blood through your foot.

At any rate, my father's taking her to the doctor today, my mother's at work, and the other maid is taking care of my sister. My father, of course, is very annoyed because it's the maid he considers useless anyway and he's fretting about what could have happened if it had exploded during the night and she'd bled to death. It would have been a disaster explaining it to the Austrian police and to her family back home. My mother's more focused on the fact that this means we'll be short-staffed and I'm feeling kind of exhausted-sick-feverish though that really has nothing to do with Charndini being sick.

Moral of the story, kiddos, is that varicose veins are bad. Avoid developing them if you can.

So I'm maybe not the biggest music fan on my flist (abrandnewboom and fairly_grimm could probably duke it out for that title), but even I couldn't not go to the Donauinselfest, aka the Donau Fest. I was actually going to show up at 3PM today to see my cousin play with her band (Dinalie, the younger sister of the cousin that had her graduation ceremony yesterday that I attended), but she got moved up to 2:10 so they performed while I was still en route, unfortunately, so I went home to catch some rest instead since I'd been at a sleepover last night as well and am rather tuckered out.

Instead, I'll be heading over to meet Numa at 7PM at Kagran, and then we'll head over to the D-Fest.

If anyone feels like telling me what to see, click here. It's the website for the Donau Fest, in English, and sorted out by island since it'll have a lot of different stages in different places. *still tinkering with her outfit for tonight*

Oh, and in totally unrelated news, Brazil has some ads out that are causing quite a bit of discussion about whether it's sizeist or not. The comm is kissmyass_cosmo, and it's dedicated to fighting the beauty myth and pointing out ways in which the culture around us tries to force women to have negative self-esteem.

Someone ought to write Nohari/Johari fic. It's probably going to end up being me if nobody else does it.

Right now, I'm at Numa's (slept over there last night, taking a break from working on my last paper atm), and I ended up doing the Johari and Nohari windows. Do them for me, please? I'll do them for you in return if you do. ♥

Meeting Kathy and Numa tomorrow so that they can help me move into my new quarters and talked to Kathy on the phone yesterday with Numa. Soon the Eternal Three will be reunited! *getting plenty of hugs from Numa in the meantime which is good since she's been affection-starved at uni*

First of all, sorry about not replying to comments, I have only very little Net time at home so I'm going to respond to comments when I have more time to reply instead of just read.

Secondly, signed a lease for an apartment-type deal. It's the top floor of a house, so it has a bedroom, a study and a bathroom with a little bit of roof that's like a terrace where I can sun myself. The kitchen is on the ground floor but I'll have the house to myself between the 10th July and 11th August since the owner and her daughter will be away on holiday.

Internet-wise, which is the most important thing, she has Chello and unlimited Internet, but she doesn't have it set up for wireless yet. One of us is going to need to buy a wireless router so that I can get Net access -- assuming I move in on Monday as scheduled, I should have the wireless Net up and running by Tuesday. I still won't be around as much as I am during the uni year, since I'll be working most of the day but the weekends will definitely be my time for catching up on Net stuff!

Transport-wise, there's a bus that takes about ten minutes to get to Kagrannerplatz, and then I can take the U-Bahn from there to the UN. So possibly about twenty minutes to get to work, which starts at 8:30, meaning I should wake up around 7:30 in order to have time to shower, eat breakfast, get dressed, etc.

Parents are jointly giving me a lump sum of 2,500 Euros for my 21st birthday present (birthday is 10th July), and I'm supposed to pay rent and all other expenses over the summer from that. Rent for that place was originally 500 per month but I got her down to 350 instead, thankfully. Calculations for the next three months are under the cut.

( Fickle's math-fu is put to the test! )

Also, there's another protest-meme about writing sexy drabbles daily as a way of standing up for el-jay. Don't think that I'll be able to get steady enough access to actually do that until Tuesday, but I'm tempted to try. Flist, any thoughts?

[Poll #994544]

Back up your journal if you've got the time. If I get booted from here, expect to see me hanging out at JournalFen or DeadJournal again. GreatestJournal = haaaaaaaaaaate because of all the ads everywhere, but journalfen is hard to get accounts for (unless you're a paid user who can get free accounts created and unfortunately, I'm still not allowed to buy stuff online otherwise I'd upgrade my account over there to a paid one) and deadjournal still works off the account code system, unfortunately.

Oh, and anyone with any interest at all in fandom or letting fandom have a safe space on el-jay should join Fandom Counts. You don't need to friend it, there are zero entries there, it's just a quick way of showing how many of the journals on el-jay are fandom related.

The deletions aren'ta specific targeting of fandom but fandom journals are getting caught in the targets and damnit, I'm annoyed that pornish_pixies got deleted because I had a great Regulus/Remus fic in my memories that was posted there and now I can't remember the author or anything that would let me find it again, just that the writing style reminded me of Wilde. When I've got the Net time, I'll join it with all my multiple RP journals as well.

You who wear my skin so carelessly/I am not the girl you were afraid to become.

I had a convo with Savior the other day about why I'm not attracted to Sri Lankan guys and basically, it came down to the fact that I'm not fond of the Sri Lankan culture. I don't like the way that girls are treated (we might be the first country to have a female Prime Minister but the guys are still arrogant assholes), and I don't like the double standards concerning female purity versus male purity at all.

If you tell me you know a nice Sri Lankan guy, my first assumption is going to be that he's either a traditionalist on the lookout for a girl he can show off to his parents as the femme he's going to marry, or that he thinks that Westernized Sri Lankan girls are easy, shameless whores. That's rather unfair of me because really, they could be Western-raised as well and not culturally Sri Lankan, but guys get doted on so much in Sri Lankan society that I don't think they have the same impetus to distance themselves from it as girls do.

See, if you're a girl, you're supposed to wear nice clothes that don't show flesh, be polite to your elders, not swear, get good grades and never, ever disgrace the family. Boys can mess up and all that's going to happen is that people will tut, shake their heads and say that boys will boys, ane, what's a mother to do? (Ane, incidentally, is an exclaimation that can mean nearly anything since it is basically just a space-filler, but usually signifies despair. Sinhala is great for space fillers.)

Being a girl in a traditional Sinhalese family sucks. It means that when I go to Sri Lanka and stay with my father's side of the family, they take all my shorts, put them to be washed, and don't give them back until I'm about to leave. That forces me to wear long skirts in the meantime, when I hate skirts, and especially hate the cheap polyster, pleated type that's appropriate for girls of my age. If I have to wear skirts, I want them to be flouncy and playful and cotton! And preferably make my legs look good instead of covering them up.

But at the same time, being in Sri Lanka for me means that guys will stare at me. All the time. It's not like 'Oh, she's so pretty, I want to check her out' but rather, just staring like they have every right to and I'm not even human. It feels invasive and what I actually tend to be wearing is a pair of jeans that go down to my ankles and a sleeveless top. Only skin that's exposed are my arms and my face and some of my neck. It really doesn't warrant the kind of attention that I tend to get.

I tried talking to my mother and father about it in the car one day, and my father said I was just imagining it or that they were staring at me because I look Western-rich and fair (fair in the sense of lighter skin color than people who actually live in Sri Lanka and are exposed to constant sunshine). My mother agreed with me, surprisingly, and said that the daughter of a friend of hers had said something similar about Sri Lankan men making her feel threatened just by looking at her.

I really hate that.

It's my body. Sri Lanka is my country too. I have the right to walk down the streets or sit in a van without getting stared at by every passing male. I have the right to sit in a car without guys trying to talk to me from buses, and yes, a guy actually did lean out of a bus window and shout at me while I was in a car, trying to get my attention. And I was only thirteen or something at the time!

...I was even younger, maybe seven, when my mother tried to get me to go out with her in the dark so that she could buy something for her mother. I was terrified of the dark, but she said that she needed me to come with her so that she'd be safe. I went with her, but I remember clinging to her hand all the while and wondering what exactly I was supposed to do if we were attacked. I was seven and tiny. These days, I could pull out kickass self-defense skills but back then, all she did was scare me by saying that even the neighbourhood we lived in wasn't safe for a woman to walk during the night on her own.

Nothing happened, thankfully, but I still remember very clearly how I felt -- it was a combination of fear, helplessness and anger that I was directing at my mother just because I didn't know enough back then to understand that her fears were justified and that it really did help to have a small child who could at least be a witness or scream for help. I understand it now, but that's at least partly because an aunt of mine was recently attacked in broad daylight while walking home from the grocery store.

A man assaulted her, tried to pull off her gold chains and this happened right outside her house. Her family was in the house, and she was screaming, but they didn't hear her because they had the TV on. Some guys who worked as mechanics a few houses down heard the screaming and came to rescue her, chasing the guy off and then following him. A crowd of people apparently swarmed him as the two guys were yelling 'THIEF THIEF', and then they beat him up, and took him to the police station where he got beat up some more, with my aunt being told to not say she got the chain back because the police wanted to get heavy charges laid against the guy because this wasn't his first offense.

She ended up in hospital and needed surgery. She couldn't talk for ages; he had knocked her unconscious to stop her screaming and her head was bleeding.

This happened right outside her house.

The thought of ever going back to Sri Lanka terrifies me sometimes.

The district of Colombo that my father's side of the family lives in isn't as good as the distract my mother's side of the family inhabits (my father's from a lower-caste, oh noes!), but it really just re-emphasized the fact that Sri Lanka is not a good country in which to be a woman. And although there are good guys, like the two men that saved her, Sri Lankan men, overall, do nothing for me between the sexism and distrust of Westernized women.

I feel like a bad patriot. Or more accurate, I feel like a bad Asian chick but honestly, all those complaints (usually from Asian guys) about why Asian chicks prefer white guys? They're not necessarily trading up or trying to get rich quick, thanks. They might just like guys raised in a Western culture that they empathize with better than they like guys raised in a straitlaced society that they are trying to escape.

Is it possible to love your country without loving its culture? Captain America got blasted in the Civil War comics for not knowing what MySpace is, but I don't think that I need to love MySpace to love the ideals of America, even if I don't like seeing them be ignored. Sri Lankans are supposed to love cricket just because we won the World Cup back in '96, but I refused to watch it and read instead. As for Austria, I hated taking German classes and I still don't like the language.

They called it being a global citizen at the international high school that I attended but mostly, it feels like I don't belong anywhere.

My identity is fluid/I am a citizen of the Net.

Question: What happens when you take a sleeping pill but pull an all-nighter anyway trying to get a paper done, pass out at the keyboard and then wake up, realize that there is no way you can get the paper done, and collapse into bed?

Answer: You wake up feeling like hell, absolutely starving and you have a headache that feels like someone set off an atomic bomb in your head.

Ow fucking OW fucking OW.

On the fucking wow side, I got a letter from the IAEA saying that I have an internship there for the summer. Exact paragraph that you'll be interested in goes as follows:

I am pleased to inform you that you have been awarded an internship in the Nuclear Power Engineering Section, Division of Nuclear Power, Department of Nuclear Energy, from 1 June to 31 August 2007. Under the guidance of Mr. P. Wincze, Quality Assurance/Management Engineer, your work assignment will be to review documents being prepared for publication, editing and correcting the text when necessary and maintaining the following databases: (a) Document tracking system; (b) e-Glossary; and (c) a clickable map.

Of course, problems are that I don't want to spend my summer in Austria and that my college starts before my job ends, but hey, look, shiny internship that involves maintaining a document tracking system and THAT sounds scary. Everything else sounds doable.

....Annnd the Internet just went down all over campus. FUCKING PERFECT. Savior, I'll probably be on MSN again by the time you see this, but I'm sorry about disappearing like that.

( Fickle killing time by talking about random stuff while waiting for Net to return. )