12 June 2001

Tim was talking about seeing mythical figures and characters on the street corners. I do that. It's odd out here, because I see weirder things than I'm really seeing, but they're not familiar weirder things. In Minnesota, I see gods I know, Tyr, sometimes, and Skade and Frigg and Thor, even, but then I blink, and it's just a serious, bearded man in a business suit, or someone's kindergarten teacher, or...you know what I mean. I know quite well where they got all the old gods. They were neighbors and relatives and friends, but...more so. Or else I'll see a flash of bronze at a sturdy, practical woman's jeans-clad waist, and instead of thinking "belt buckle," I'll think, "keys." That's where her ancestors would have worn them, and it still fits, symbolically. Whereas a belt just keeps her pants up. I like my way better.

It's the same out here, but I don't really know what goes with ancestral gods of half-Hispanic half-Korean girls, so the images are harder for me to make sense of. Maybe I should read Neil Gaiman's new book when it comes out next week. Maybe that'll help.

I have no illusions that this is a deeper reality I'm seeing. I just want that to be clear. It's that my brain jumps different places with incomplete data. Jumping different places is what I hope to employ my brain doing, so all is well with it. I hope.

Sometimes I get a little annoyed with people whose brain is intersecting reality at different points than mine. My aunt wrote a letter to me yesterday that started out, "So glad you wrote!" As if she'd gotten my letter and sat down to answer it immediately. I wrote to her in February. The second sentence was, "So you've moved to a new place?" We have lived here since before I started keeping this journal. Silly Aunt Ruthie. It's a good thing I don't expect coherence or time sense out of her (or my other aunt and uncle).

It wouldn't bother me, I guess, if she (they -- Uncle Pete does the same thing, but more so) had very few intersection points with reality, as long as the intersection points were interesting. But that's not guaranteed, certainly. At the post-wedding party, Uncle Pete asked my college friends if they listened to Britney Spears. I would have been mortified if I considered Uncle Pete to be representative of my family in any way. Or of anything besides, perhaps, classical guitar composers/instructors. You would think that music would be one of his points of intersection with reality. You would think wrong.

In high school, we used to ask, "What color is the sky in your world?" whenever someone would be particularly out there. "What color is the sky in Kristyland? What color is the sky in Bryanworld?" I'm glad we got over it as a verbal tic -- like most high school sarcasm, it can get pretty annoying -- but it comes up again.

They just came in to make sure that the appliances in our apartment were the ones they were supposed to be, serial numbers and all. In case we'd stolen the fridge, I guess, and replaced it with an inferior version. Strange are the ways of landlords.

Finnish folklore is really interesting. In case you were wondering. Some of the choices I made in ignorance for the world structure of "The Last Egg" and the Not The Moose Book fit in really, really well with what the Finns used to believe. This makes me a happy M'ris. I'd still like a book that goes more clearly into the deities commonly worshipped in and around Finland in the (long) pre-Christian period, but I can look for that later. In the meantime, I have copious notes. Sarah asked if I was going to enter in journal entries from the days I was gone. Nope. I wrote in my paper journal while I was gone, but half of it was excited scribblings about väki and etiäinen. This is kind of scary: I'm afraid that my book is going to be a royal PITA to deal with because of all of the ä's and possibly ö's. There was one hero who ought to be thankful for his e, otherwise all of his vowels would be dotty: Väinämöinen. I don't think Väinämöinen is going to show up much in my book, if at all, but it was just impressive to me that any people could pack that many dots into one word.

I'm going to get around to entering in some of my editing changes soon. Keep your digits crossed for me. Toes too.