Suburb of Heaven

So as I wait for my sleeping pill to kick in, a few thoughts about Castle! Two great things that go great together, right?

So this was the two-parter, and I had remained pretty steadily unspoiled about it by not reading the TWOP boards or what have you. The first ep (and the better of the two, I think) was just stellar - they let Nathan Fillion off his leash and he got to do so much incredible acting all over that show. The Castle family just works together so well as a unit - you genuinely believe that these two women and one man have an incredible bond - and it was interesting to see how Beckett may eventually fit into that dynamic, even if she's not quite there yet. (Of course if the creators would bother to throw people a bone and just show everybody spending some relaxing time in the apartment instead of constantly shoehorning emotional development stuff into the crevices of the mystery story, that would be good too.)

The second half had a little bit too much plot bubbling around. While I didn't like the idea of Castle having a Spy Daddy, it was played out reasonably well, with some good chemistry between Fillion and Brolin. But they tried to squish a lot of stuff into the episode - perhaps giving it another half-hour to allow for a little decompressing and a little more of a structured payoff to all the tension that had built up at that point. By the last twenty minutes, things were in such a rush.

At any rate, it was great tv, as is Justified (she said, segueing awkwardly. Seriously, though. Such an incredible, incredible show. High body count this ep. I like Boyd trying to outmanuver the fat cats even as his crew starts to fracture apart (and it's not much of a crew, is it? He needs to hire an extra thug or two.) And, oh, man. Raylan's relationship with his father is spectacularly crazypants bad in a way that you rarely see out of Greek Mythology.

I am talking about these things in part because I have had a stressful and slightly shitty day, even though things all came out well on the other end of things. But it's kind of been a Look At Your Life, Look at Your Choices sort of deal around here for the past little while and it makes me surly.

So meeting with supervisor is tomorrow morning, so at least I can stop angsting like an idiot about it reasonably soon. But of course, it's still in front of me. This is all just my big old Imposter Syndrome thing, which stands behind me and mutters, "Now they've found out, you thought you could fool them but of course you couldn't." I picture it looking a little bit like Mother Gothel from Tangled crossed with an Alien face-hugger. I hate being so thin-skinned.

In other news, aikido went really well this week (treated myself to a new gi since the old one was blown out at the knee). Work has been productive too. After a momentary scare, I think we have found a way to cope with a dept collector who has trawled up something from over a decade ago and is trying to harass Bemo about it. There's also a potential job that's swum up onto the horizon for him. We are doing our best to remain staunchly neutral about the whole thing, because if he sends his heart over the fence and they lob it back at him, it'll set back all the good work he's doing with the therapist. (How's that for a weird metaphor? Basically he sits on the razor's edge of hope and the fear of hoping, the desire to reach out and start work again and the fear that once again he will be rejected, or be found unsuitable, or disdained. Zen mind, zen mind. It would be a good job for him, we thing - part time in a field he's experienced with.

Am getting increasingly incoherent so we can take that as a sign that the pill is working. Goodnight all.

I've been wanting to update, but am going through one of those phases where I have things to say but they all seem to be locked up and lacking words. Everyone around me seems to be having a hard time with things. My sister is struggling with stuff. I'm struggling with stuff. Bemo's trip to the lawyer yesterday was not very promising - if we do get his disability through, it won't be for something like a year. In the meantime, he's fretting about his medication (which is being changed out right now) bringing him up to the level where he wouldn't be considered disabled but would still be unable to work. We're both feeling a little scared right now, especially since we're doing our best to commit to paying our student loans back but are not entirely sure if we'll be able to. Hopefully my job at crunchy organic granola coop will help.

Didn't go to aikido this week. Am feeling a little conflicted about it, because it involves various things such as my own desire to go, money (should I skip this month so I don't have to pay for it), general fatigue, Bemo's mental state, and a sort of underlying general crankiness that will probably dissipate once I start going again.

Am trying to get over my knee-jerk fatalism, which doesn't manifest itself in my day-to-day life much (charge ahead, we'll make it work somehow!), but is always lurking like a black spider in the crevices of my brain.

Here, have another nostalgia-laden photo of little me. I wish I could find now some of the peace I see in the face of myself as a kid...but I know that it's all an illusion anyway. Doesn't stop me from pursuing it, though.

You know, over the past many years, I've lived in a lot of apartments. I've finally come to the conclusion that it's really damn difficult to predict whether or not your experience with a rental agency or apartment complex will be a positive one, a neutral one, or a wildly negative one. Our apartment complex in Alexandria was, for us, great. A friend of mine moved in two floors above us and had a less-than-stellar experience. On the advice of a co-worker, we moved into the Chantilly apartment - same complex she lived in at the time. She had no problems with them - we had a carnival of bad experiences and still refer to the place as Amityville. We had, more or less, a good relationship with our current leasing company here in Lincoln (rec'd to us by a person who had also had a good experience with them) - to the point that, when we were booted out of our first place, we sought out another building managed by them. But I've just recently been told a couple of horror stories by people who had profoundly negative experiences with the same company.

This musing brought to you by the fact that we just had our walk-through for our old apartment, and we could tell already that the guy was going to be a genuine, class-A dick about some things that truly were there when we moved in. The ledge of the window is very worn and gouged in long parallel rows along the grain, and he clearly intimated that our cats were somehow responsible. Perhaps if we were keeping a lynx, or several small cougars, that might happen. We're crossing our fingers that we wrote down the wear on our initial walk-through form, but we might have made a $300 mistake by not noting it down, since we might have mentally written it off as wear and tear on an apartment that's forty or fifty years old that we didn't need to specifically write down, just like we didn't write down that the cabinets were kinda janky - usable, but janky.

We have to find our copy of the walk-through form from when we moved in, It's around somewhere, I just have to unearth it. But we can just tell this guy is going to do his best to not have to return our deposit, and I don't know if I have the wherewithal right now to take him to small claims court, or whatever would have to happen.

I hate this sort of petty bullshit. I know homeownership brings its own unique sets of problems and issues, but right now, I'd trade.