No, I am not going to be spamming you with a word every day, but this was the word of the day on Wiktionary today (Feb 1), and I got a real kick out of it.

ecdysiast
1. An erotic dancer who removes their clothes as a form of entertainment; a stripper.

The part that appealed to me was one of the quotations that they included to demonstrate the word usage:
I had never seen an ecdysiast before; toward the end she was wearing nothing but seven beads, four of them sweat.
--Kyril Bonfiglioli, Don't Point That Thing at Me, 1973

I wanted to write to tell you I'm still breathing,
To show you my fingers still bend.
I wanted to thank you for giving me something to be bitter about,
It's nice to be writing again
--Writing Again by We're About 9

---

I had an interesting experience today. I was shopping in the middle of the day at the store where I work overnights (had last night and tonight off so I was actually awake at 1pm). Now it was about the time I usually go to bed, true enough, but I had slept in and as actually feeling pretty good. However, I had three different people make remarks that amounted to "Good heavens, you look like crap." Not in those exact words, but things like "I hope your wife is driving, you look tired," said with a sweet smile on her face. Being me, I nodded and said I was just along because my sweetheart doesn't like going to the dentist and we had some painkillers to pick up at the pharmacy and sort of laughed it off, but I found myself taking stock of myself. Did I actually feel that bad. No. Then it occurred to me. These people usually saw me while I was actually working. Wound up tight like a clockwork doll.

One of the old Red Skelton bits I remember is a mime where he seems to turn his ear to make his tongue stick out and tighten the smile on his face. I have actually taken to exactly that gesture to paste a smile on my face before I go up to the registers when I clock in. It's sort of an inside joke for some of the folks that actually know more of the real me when they ask how I'm doing and I give my ear another crank and brighten the smile on my face a few more watts.

The folks that don't know me, of course, think I'm that freaking cheerful and energetic all the time. Extroversion is not natural for me, but I've been practicing for some twenty-some years. I went to school in a one-room school house in western Nebraska and, among many other benefits, everybody had a part in the Christmas play, no matter what your perceived level of "talent." And I discovered something interesting. I could do it, and I enjoyed it. I have been in one "customer service" job or another all my life and I do enjoy helping people. But the rest of the time? Let me curl up in a warm den (a good description of my work room) with a good book or a project and leave me the Hell ALONE

*smile* These folks at work don't know the me in dark glasses and my hood up, and as much as some would rage at a "world" that does not understand them . . . I think that comforts me somehow . . . .

Don't actually have much to share. It's been a very blah January, but I wanted to bump the old journal off the front page. Have been spending more time cleaning than creating lately. When you live like I have been, you have to start Spring Cleaning early 8P

I am excited to get at some other things, but I'm not even keeping up with reading the last 4 weeks worth of Thursday Prompts, let alone writing, and I have a lot of digging to do before I'll have a workroom to do anything else . . . . .

Somewhere in the misty past backlog of stories that wanders around in my brain, I recall a legend or story or some such that said humans could understand the speech of the animals from Midnight 'till dawn on Christmas morning. Somewhere along the way, that turned into a habit of mine to get up very early to feed the animals and do chores before we opened presents in the morning, instead of waiting until after presents, just in case they had something they wanted to say to me *sigh*

Now I've "grown a little meaner, and grown a little older" but I find now that I have animals again (two dogs outside, six cats inside) I am warming my hands and drinking brandy kissed cocoa after going out with a special batch of treats at whatever 10 degree pre-dawn hour it was. Still nothing special to say, but I can't help but be glad for simple thankfulness on this morning.

I am currently working overnights and I didn't have to work Christmas Eve (the only evening in the whole year the store closes) so I'm awake anyway. I'll crash after dinner and go back in to help put the store back together before the doors reopen at 6am for the day-after-Christmas. The twins will say think you when they open their gifts in a couple of hours because they know I'll play with them myself if they don't, but we both know how much they mean it. In past years we haven't even been clear of Christmas day before they were complaining about the game they didn't get with their game systems or the clothes they didn't get with their dolls.

I love them dearly, but I know they won't realize the depth of that until they are mature enough to love someone else like that. I know that material stuff is like crack, when you get a lot you just end up wanting more. They complain about minor wants because we have managed to live a life without most of the major problems; sickness, homelessness, hunger. I know their pickyness is, in a way, a sign of blessing because they have always had enough to be picky.

Still, it does my heart good to see true thankfulness in my four-legged children's eyes. The two-legged kids will take care of themselves in time. My New Year's resolutions my vary in the particulars, but every year the basics are the same. "I aspire to be the man my dog thinks I am."

If you made it this far, thank you for listening. May you hold good friends and family close around some warm hearth in this cold world now and into the New Year.

Wow. I learn a great deal from a war story, and I'm always a sucker for a dog story. This is both.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22361394/?GT1=10645

I am glad that his partner in combat can offer some comfort to his family.

Trying to keep a Christmas candy aisle stocked right now and what do I now have in the back room to trip over . . . 3 pallets of Valentine candy . . . so far . . . . *twitches*
My new goal is to get out of retail before the seasons loop and our backroom stocks Christmas all year long

Laughter is the best medicine, especially if the affliction is taking yourself too seriously . . .

If anybody in the sound of my voice hasn't already, listen here http://www.furaffinity.net/view/922720/

take a swig and pass it along . . . .

I was rereading All I Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten today. (I was supposed to be cleaning and organizing this chaos in my workroom before it starts eating small children, but I stumbled across this book and . . .) Robert Fulghum mentions in the introduction that a friend gave him “an official Storyteller’s License,” which gives him “permission to use my imagination in rearranging my experience to improve the story, so long as it serves some notion of Truth,” and the Storyteller’s Creed, which follows:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge.
That myth is more potent than history.
That dreams are more powerful than facts.
That hope always triumphs over experience.
That laughter is the only cure for grief.
And I believe that love is stronger than death.

I kind of got lost in that for a while, especially after reading a bit of a discussion elsewhere on this site about the merits and worth of happy endings or “if you can’t leave them happy at least leave them hopeful” ( poetigress ) although I don’t remember exactly what page was being commented on . . . . :P

I was reminded of something else that I remember from one of my mother’s Tom Cruise movies (Cocktail I think) The older and more bitter barman says “Nothing ends happily, otherwise it wouldn’t end.” I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle. No single story holds it all, and our point of view is necessarily only of one side of the whole thing. Every artist around a still life has a different view of the same stuff, and I’m sure some of the views are less “pretty” than others. That said, there is a balancing act if I actually want someone else to read what I’ve written. Even in the tragedy and “unhappy endings,” some sense that Life isn’t Fair, but if we follow threads beyond our narrow lives far enough, Life is Just.

I’ll stop talking to myself loudly enough to bother other people now, but share a poem that I learned as part of a poetry program I did for competition in high school. I adore Shel Silverstein poetry and this one will probably be the idea I hope to leave in stone when I go . . . .

– "Invitation" –

If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!

. . . .

Sometimes all I can do when faced with some of the lunacy of humanity is shake my head. There was a district big something-or-other supposed to be coming to the store where I work this morning. I work overnights so I had already put in my 8 hours (and change) before the sun even came up, and I was watching managers run around the store looking for something to spit polish so they could look like they were accomplishing something. I find this amusing and a little sad because everything had to look so good for the big wig visiting. Yet somehow the store manages to function the rest of the year as well . . .

I find this a little annoying as well, since I do as well as I can every night, thank you very much for noticing, and I'm not someone that is sandbagging most of the time and just does the best when the boss is in the room. As Snoopy might say, "Blech."

I actually voiced an apparently radical notion of mine that it might do us some good if we left the buckets and "Wet Floor/Piso Mojado" signs out so he might see how much the roof leaks when it rains as much as it has here in the past couple of days. Perhaps property maintenence might get to be a little higher on the priority list if he had some idea just how much of the roof is leaking. The Assistant Manager I spoke to said "I'll have to get with someone on that." For those of you without a Universal Management Translator, that means "Whatever."

This will be my fifth Christmas at this store and the roof over the grocery addition has leaked in several places since I have been there, at least. Not that it should surprise me. The roof of the lawn and garden greenhouse addition has leaked since it was built 3 years ago and that was under warrenty for a year. They could have had it fixed for free if the store manager had "gotten with them on it." :p

. . . save me from idle critics. Not that criticism is necessarily a bad thing in itself, of course, but why are some so negative? :( I have nothing against the profession. Hell, in another path I would probably be a movie critic or some such myself, but the expectation of writing a critique and/or recommendation for a viewing audience is one thing, and claiming to offer feedback to the creator is something else again.

Sometimes things work out especially well, and sometimes, as often noted elsewere "Started as a quickie, stays a quickie." In either case, if I knew how to make something better I would probably do it. If something needs improved, by all means let me know, but without some idea of how to improve, I have pretty much the same situation I had before, but more bitter and bitchy . . . . Anyway, I do want to throw out a thank you to all those who have been so kind to post tutorials and detailed discriptions of the "hows and whys" of some of their work. I have been doing a great deal of gallery mining of folks whose work is interesting to me, because there is so much to learn here and I try not to ask too many stupid questions of busy people . . . the best advice on the internet may still be "read the f**king FAQ, then ask stupid questions." ;)

Not that this is entirely related to art . . . I have been having some issues with supervisors at work too. I am doing the best I can, people, with the best ideas I have. Often I know the stopgap measure is just that, but until I get a better suggestion, I work with what I have . . .