Walls Inside My Head

Day 10

12,859 / 50,000 (25.7%)

Yesterday was mostly a normal day – I played Morrowind in the afternoon, but I left around 6 to go out to dinner with my friend Rach at Not Your Average Joe’s. We had a good time; she just went through a totally BS break up and is at the phase where she’s realizing she had totally handwaved a bunch of awful things (never calling back, never calling in the first place, being totally ditched after dinner for his friends after she had driven an hour on a weekday into the city to see him) about him, just because she really liked him. Since she’s at a lack of guyfriends, she wanted me to tell me about all of my guyfriends, and also Gabe’s – she wants to be set up, but I’m of the opinion that set-ups never work. I usually can tell who would be good together, but you can just throw two people together and say “hey, you’d work out, TRUST ME” and expect them to act like normal people. It’s a lot of pressure.

I’m a fan of the more natural “let’s put them in a box and try to get them to notice each other” idea. Interest can’t be faked or manufactured, so it’s sort of a long waiting process, with an exceedingly high OBSCENE FAILURE rate. Since you can only do so much, you just have to put them in a group of people until they notice each other. It helps if you’ve given them ideas of mutual interest before hand – yeah, this guy, he LOVES MUSIC, and so do you. Not that I’m saying anything. Nope. But then again, the party atmosphere is risky – some people are in their element in parties, and people gravitate towards them, not realizing that, hey, this might be them at their best. This person you are talking to – they may not actually exist.

I’m not quite sure when everyone decided that your friends are the dating service of your SO’s friends, but this seems to be the way things go, at least for girls. When you have a boyfriend, suddenly your friends want to know if he has friends. Nice friends. Cute friends. Preferably both at the same time, but you know, they only actually need to be cute (okay, so people say nice instead, but this is a lie. I have shown people the nicest of his friends. They just want the cute ones. They’ll manufacture a nice personality in their head for them if they have to). Then you should set them up. Set you up? What is this, the 50s? Can you not make yourself attractive enough if you meet them? I have to throw you together like rats in a breeding box and see if it works? This is like if you asked me for a reference for a job – if you turn all crazy pants on him, I can never introduce him to another girl, no matter how much more compatible she is. Even if you get together in a natural way and break up, I’ll still get blamed by both of you for the heartache you made yourself.

So no, I won’t ’set up’ anyone. Not even if you ask nice. You’re on your own. I can give you the opportunity, but that’s it. In fact, I can give you multiple opportunities. But set up? Listen, I like my friends and his friends too much for that sort of thing.

I got back late from dinner – we went to her house to hang out, ended up watching tv for a while and then I got home around 10:15. I started writing just about then, and it went pretty well – I got over my daily word count done, and made some good progress on the words I need to make up. I finished scene 4 last night, which means I am technically half way done. The chapter looks like it will be a beast of a thing; as of right now it is 9 pages, and I still have three more scenes to go. This scene and the next are in the original draft (well, the next one is half of a scene from the original draft, and the other half appeared earlier), so I writing went far quicker, though there was still a lot to change. The girl in the scene is supposed to be the elf equivalent of a 12-year-old, but in the original she acted like an 8-year-old, which needed to be fixed. Knowing quite a few more 12-year olds now, I was able to really get that thin line between childhood and adolescence. Well, more accurately, young adulthood, since adolescence is a relatively new concept that they would not have had in a medieval society. In any case, I’m hoping to finish this chapter by next weekend, and hopefully be all caught up on my word count by the same time next week.

Snippet:

Arduus’ heart thumped loudly. He has not previously known of his aversion to cats until he had worked on Caelan’s farm and been swarmed by the many ratters that holed up in the barns. He had petted them liberally the first few hours he had met them, only for a large red rash to appear everywhere they and his cat-fur covered hands had touch. His eyes had swelled – not as much as Caelan had seen on some of the other men though – and she had banned him from the barn ever since, handing those jobs off to other men less bothered by cats. He had thought himself safe on the high seas, but as the small thing padded towards them on its big paws, he suddenly recalled Bryok’s outburst months before, about a furry dark omen aboard the ship, and the subsequent conversation with Branor about his daughter’s new kitten.