Names hold an awesome power.

I have this borderline-unhealthy fascination with names. "The name in itself is the thing in itself." Knowing the true name of someone or something, especially if it's important or meaningful in my life, gives me an emotional boost I can't define or explain in any logical capacity. To know the birthnames of my friends, to be able to say Yoshua ben Yosef instead of Jesus Christ, to refer to Samuel Clemens and Marion Morrison, these are
my weapons.

There is an intimacy in knowing the true name of a person. It's a level of assumed familiarity that can't be had in any other way. It's an unnatural one, too, for all that I hate that word. It doesn't actually guarantee any knowledge about a person, or any understanding, but it implies a great deal of both to the casual listener and it's almost always either an off-putting insult or a self-written invitation to company for those who do. Either way, though, it throws the other person just a little off balance. 

Almost everyone I know ends up with some kind of nickname. That may just be human nature, but I almost never use anyone's full name unless I'm feeling passionate about something. Angry, scared or intimate, but there's a level
of emotion I have to feel before I'll use someone's full name. If I'm really put out, I'll use an older variant of someone's name. If I want someone's attention, I'll use a middle name. My safeword in scene is almost always
my top's middle name.

Someone once very dear to me once threatened to call me Robin as my given name. I jokingly said I would call her by her middle name in response. In truth, I was secretly thrilled at the intimacy implied by the casual use
of my middle name like that. I took to calling her not just Angela but Anji, spelled like the Simon and Garfunkel song. I gave her the name, after all. At least, she took it from something I wrote.

I call her by her first name now. Maybe one day I'll call her Anji again.

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Today started off as TEH SU><0r, but over the course of the day it's actually become rather decent. Last night I had another one of those grand emotionally purgative events that happens when some painful truth about oneself comes to light in a way that one isn't really prepared to except but can no longer avoid. Relaying the whole story doesn't seem productive in hindsight, but the nuts and bolts of it is that I still have a lot of outstanding issues with my appearance, and so I end up spending a lot of time befriending people who're transitioning and unsure of themselves so that we all become a sort of mutual-support society, nobody really believing that zie's okay, but everyone believing everyone else is doing good and gaining confidence in zirself by belonging. It sounds very shallow, and it probably is, but I still do it and I think I've known I've done it for ages even if I haven't really been aware of why I did it. Last night, I admitted the why to myself and to Jessie, and it really upset me.

After an extended period of intermittant crying, I crashed in Jessie's arms and had a dream wherein there was a bunny, and a scientist. The scientist would show the bunny pictures of things like clouds and rainbows and stars
with smiley faces on them and ice cream cones and other happy things, and then whenever the bunny would hop up and down and lift her ears to show she was happy, the scientist would stick the bunny with a needle. After some amount of time doing this, whenever the scientist held up any picture at all, the bunny would go hide in the corner of her cage and whine and shake and shiver, no matter what was in the picture.

This did not leave me in a good mood this morning.

I started the dey with a phone call from the guy whose car I rear-ended, and he wants me to pay $700 for the repairs to his Acura. Now, I said when I left the scene that I would pay for any repairs, but I don't consider fixing
cosmetic damage to be "repairs", no matter how expensive the car may be. He admitted on the phone that there was nothing keeping his car from being roadworthy, but apparently he's also had the repair work done and now
he expects me to pay for it. I told him on the phone that if sent me a bill I'd reimburse him, but now I'm having second thoughts. He was the second driver named in the accident report, but he wasn't the one who was driving
when the accident occured. He wants me to pay for what amounts to a cosmetic patch on his bumper and a fresh coat of paint, and while I probably would be willing to drop $200 on the matter, $700 is a little much in my opinion for what he himself says is nothing but a matter of appearance.

After that literal rude awakening, I got a healthy dose of crow and humble pie from the events of the night before, and the dream really left me shaken. So, it took me a while to even want to get out of bed and figure out what I wanted to do with myself during the day. Jessie had to work, and we're both tired of spending ridiculous amounts of money going out to eat when I know how to cook and I have all this time on the weekend when Jessie's not home to do so, so I finally said I'd go to the store and pick up supplies for a few things to cook over the weekend that would last Jessie through lunch and both of us for dinner through the rest of the week, with the plan to go next Saturday to the store again for more groceries.

I wish I could've walked over to the Clemens near the apartment complex, but it was just too damn hot, so I ended up driving over there after taking Jessie to work. I bought another three canvas bags, which ran me just over twelve dollars but which will save me fifteen cents per purchase more every time I go shopping there. I'll have to inquire at Giant and Redner's how much they give for their bag reuse policy, too. It might benefit me to keep one in the car at all times just in case.

I picked up the ingredients for jambalaya, steak cobbler, chili and almond toffee cookies, then came back to the house, whereupon I discovered a dilemma: what's the best method of properly organizing these recipes in the database I decided I wanted to build.

Yes, sadly I cannot escape my geekery even on the weekends.

Putting all of the ingredients in one table along with the customary measurements is easy enough, but when it comes to building the actual recipes, I suddenly have an issue. I know how to make a number of varieties of certain dishes, depending on what meats and veggies I use. Meat Cobbler is the best example of this. I can make it with steak, mushrooms and onions. I can make it with chicken, mushrooms and peas. I can make it with beef
gravy. I can make it with chicken gravy. I can make it with cream gravy. Basically, I have a "meat and veggies" "super-ingredient," a "gravy" "super-ingredient", and then the crust. So, do I make a third table of "super-ingredients" for things that get reused regularly, or do I just make multiple versions of the main recipe with an
excess of redundant information?

It's hard to believe, but worrying about this has actually lightened my mood considerably, as well as made me concerned at just how much of a geek I really am. =n.n=