Most of this page is outdated and I have not yet had the time to rewrite it.  The rewrite is coming!  For the moment, if you want to read what I said about myself, the incoherency below will do.

 

Various random facts about Tsukiryu:

- I love rollerskating, been doing it since I was six, and my school has a thing called Rollerama every term.  For that event, most of the students dress up in various strange garbs - usually as little as possible, sometimes less - and come to the main auditorium to skate around the huge wooden floor in a big circle listening to 80s music.  I love 80s music, too.  And I love dancing.  The past four years, I've been combining these loves, and now I know how to dance on rollerskates.

Oh, and when I say "dance" I don't mean the polka.  Makani reported at one Rollerama that she saw a fellow almost skate into a wall because he was watching me so intently.  Since most of the people there are either drunk or don't know how to skate very well, I generally take these reports with a grain of salt, though.

- I love reading, I read like I breathe, read the Hobbit when I was about six.   I didn't make it through the Fellowship for a little while after that, though - too dark and ominous for the kid I was.

- I ran into drawing and anime at the same time, and became vastly interested in both.  A fellow freshman girl in my first term at college had a habit of doodling anime-style in the margins of her paper, and I was determined to learn to do the same.   Anime, for anyone who doesn't know, is Japanese animation.  I can now draw to a certain extent, both in anime and my own style.  It'll be a while before I'm satisfied with my progress, naturally.

- I learned to sing harmony somewhere around the age of five or six.  My mother sang to me since before I can remember, and she loves music.  Never think that I'm talented; my mom can play the guitar, the autoharp, the piano, the dulcimer and the recorder.

- I hate having my eyebrows rubbed backwards.  This has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but since my love has the opposite reaction, I thought it was interesting to include.  She says it feels nice and scratchy.  Gih.

- I love the books The Legend of Nightfall, Falcon, Deep Secrets, Fire and Hemlock, the Miles Vorkosigan series and The Last Harald-Mage series, as well as J.R.R. Tolkein.

- I listen to Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, Patty Larkin, Stan Rogers, Semisonic, Pink, No Doubt, Evanescence, Marilyn Manson, Type O Negative, some NIN, and Simon and Garfunkel.  And a bunch more I can't all write down here.

- I have the Lord Chancellor's pattersong from Iolanthe memorized, and can sing it at full speed on request.

- I can steal headaches.  I used to think it was a psychosomatic thing - I tell a friend I'm going to try to help her headache, and after I do something, she feels better because she knows she's supposed to.  Then I tried it on a total stranger without telling her what I was doing.  She'd had a raging headache all day long, and I moved around behind her, swept my fingers through the air above her head, where she couldn't see, and took the nasty dark gunk out of her head.  She looked quite surprised when I asked how it felt now, and said it was better, sounding very startled.   When she asked, I just shrugged a little and said that I can steal headaches, it's an energy thing.

I may be a crackpot or crazy, but I'm a crazy nut who can make migraines calm down.

 

Warning:  Babble off the top of my head becomes more noticeably blithering once out of bullet format.

 

I'm a college student in the winter term of my senior year.  What am I doing after I get out?  Why is that the first question on everybody's mind?  See, I haven't exactly cemented my ideas about that just yet... 

I might go to Japan to teach English for a year.  I might leach off my parents, except I couldn't deal with the guilt for long, so I'd have to get some kinda job to help pay groceries and bills, and the only jobs around where my folks live are maybe a long-term at a bookstore.

Of course, now I know a little bit about html, there's the barest chance that I could support myself doing webpage upkeep and design, even in the Shenandoah valley, which is not exactly at the leading edge of technological advancement.

Moving on.  I made the mistake of taking Japanese for two years at school.   It's not that it's insanely hard, although I won't get the particles wa and ga figured out if I study to the end of my days.  It's that now I can't stop speaking pidgin Japanese all the time.  I don't tend to say thank you, I say domo or arigato.  When exclaiming in excitement over something, I say sugoi or yosha.   I sound like an otaku fangirl.  (Otaku means someone who watches a lot of anime and tends to be something of a geek.)  Arrrgh.

I'm a Quaker.  Most people, if they know anything about Quakers, think they're something like the Amish.  We're not.  Actually, we're a lot of different stuff, depending on what kind of Quaker we are.  We're as diverse as Christians.  Many of us are Christians.  I'm not, exactly.  But I do share a couple of beliefs with all other Quakers, which are that everyone has a piece of the devine in them, and that we should not kill each other.  Quakers are not pacifists, in the passive sense usually meant by the word.  We're peacemongers.   We act on the behalf of peace, at a time when many barely know what it means.

Eh, on to less serious, much fluffier topics.

Like I said before, I'm in love.  As it happens, I'm in love with Makani, who not only has the Suntemple website, but is beautiful and steadfast and bright.  It still amazes me that she was in love with me for three years before I found out.  She hid it so well I never guessed, and she never told me because by the time she realized she was in love with me, I was with someone else. 

Like the self-sacrificing creature she is, she kept silent because she didn't want to complicate my life, and stayed my best friend through my two-year first relationship, which was... complicated.  It was, according to most of my friends, (and family, etc.), a hell of a lot harder than first relationships are supposed to be.   On the other hand, it was loving and non-abusive, I learned a great deal from it, and it left no lasting scars on me - I can only hope my partner in it escaped as close as I to whole and unscathed.

Amusingly enough, in the end it was another friend who ended up telling me about Makani.  He got sick and tired of keeping her secret when it wasn't doing anyone any good, and might actually work if let out in the open, so he broke it to me.  After I'd gotten over the disbelief - how the hell did she hide that from me all that time? - I confronted her with it.  Grinning like a fiend, according to her.   Being Makani, she thought I was hiding anger or playing with her, but I eventually managed to convince her otherwise.  Heh.

Since then it's been a steady fall deeper into love with her.  Rather an amazing feeling, if you haven't experienced it so deeply before.

This past winter, I lived with her family for two months, doing upkeep on the other website she's webmaster for, scanning pictures and learning html.  She was gone for twelve hours a day at her other job, so we got roughly three hours together, weekdays, but weekends we got the whole damn day, and it was the most time I've spent with her since she graduated. It was really nice.

The really funny thing is, I was practically her roommate when we were both in school.  Long before I knew she was in love with me, I spent all the time with her that I wasn't sleeping or in class.  Just because we got along well and we both liked company.  And that was for an entire school year.  So you could say that we already know what it's like to live together, and we know it works.

Admittedly, we didn't have to cook, and she did all the cleaning because we spent the time in her room...

But we'll get that stuff figured out.

Because I love her.  What else is there to say?

Oh. And we're engaged now, too. Can you see the happy clouds?