It’s not enough that I have confirmed that I am, in fact, addicted to coffee again, thanks to the steady supply I had at my last employment; now I think I may be contracting a new addiction. Cello rock.

No, really.

Somehow, at the age of 23, I am already about as fussy about pillows as the average 75-year-old. Sometime in college I decided normal pillows gave me neck pains, and tried a little camp pillow I had, followed by a Bucky travel pillow. Call it genetics or bad luck, but at the least provocation my neck would knot up and start sending sorties up my skull to stab me with migraines. At some point I got a little foam dealy from my grandma that worked for years—a little tiny rectangular pillow with a swelling at the bottom for under my neck. When I ended up with a pillow-topped mattress, suddenly that no longer worked, and I settled for the dubious expedient of rolling up a hand-towel. As recently as last week, I have been, I kid you not, switching from the towel to the grandma pillow when I turn on my side, and back again when I flop on my back. This whole thing, doubtless boring as heck to read a blog post about, was annoying, back-painy, and generally make-me-feel-old-before-my-timey. And now, I think, it’s over.

When I was little, my mom insisted on buying hypoallergenic foam pillows for me, on the grounds that I would be allergic to down because I was allergic to [Dust, dust mites, tree pollen, grass pollen, flower pollen, cats, dogs, nuts, raw fruits and veggies, probably bees…|text|practically everything else]. This is the same logic by which I had no wool clothing until Mom’s fear of her daughter freezing to death at college in Chicago overrode her fear of her daughter itching; and the logic that made me incredibly happy that my wisdom teeth came in straight, as my mom said she wouldn’t let them give me general anaesthesia because “with your luck, you’ll be the one in a hundred thousand who doesn’t wake up.”

At my sister’s house in Seattle, I slept on a down pillow for three blissful nights. I can tuck up the bottom edge to support my neck, my head isn’t too far off the mattress, and the down on either side keeps my head from lolling about without my neck muscles doing a blessed thing. It’s glorious! I came right back home and bought a down pillow. I’m getting delicious, comfortable sleep, but it makes me laugh that after 23 years I have finally ‘discovered’ the kind of pillow everyone else in my house used when I was 2. And I haven’t sneezed yet.

Only the other day, my dear sister, moved doubtless by my peppering her inbox with maudlin wails about missing her over the holidays, bought me an Amtrak ticket to visit her in the distant land of Seattle. So here I am, tucked up under a homemade quilt in the golf-bedecked spare room of the house where said sister and her husband abide.

After the weariness of my travels drove me to an ‘early’ bed yesterday (read ‘decent hour’), I had hoped that perhaps this break in my routine might allow me to realign my body’s schedule with that of the workaday world. But no such miracle, I fear, shall transpire. Sister sledge, as she and her more sarcastic half left me and Puck in an oversized armchair and trickled off to sleep, leaned over with a kiss and a kind word: “Stay up as late as you want, and tell me if you need anything.”

“Don’t worry,” said I, “I shan’t be banging about here much longer.” And yet, here I am, some hours later, having slowly transitioned from armchair to quilt-piled futon, still awake and watching a DVD on my laptop.

I think I have somehow become addicted to this time, to the slice of the world that is mine alone. I try to walk and work in a perpetual hush as everyone sleeps, as the darkness dozes outside and the blue of dawn gathers itself in the unseen East. Somehow, no matter how I determine I will scoot quickly on to bed, I linger in the twilight for just one thing more, one task or amusement, one tidying or letter, one essay or one chapter. I hate to let the day die, when I am the only one awake in my world to sustain it.

I’m a bad girl. I figure you’d rather have blog posts than no blog posts, right? Don’t worry, I’m working on more Marika.

Every time I send my mom an e-mail in the darksome hours of morning, when I am the only soul awake except perhaps a prowling cat, I press send and immediately feel a wave of petty dread. What if she notices I’m sending her e-mail at 3:30 am? What if she doesn’t decide it means PM, or that my computer clock is off, and she worries about my getting to bed at a decent hour (or, as the case is, not doing so…)? What if she demands explanations and I must confess I wasn’t doing anything in particular, just writing a bit of thank-you note and dusting off my Starcraft skills? The dread passes, since, of course, the worst that can happen is my mom calling me all worried and my having to remind her I’m 23, or, alternatively and perhaps more likely (if she hasn’t read this post) having to feign innocence and claim the timestamp must be off.

So here’s the thing. I wish my e-mail client had a ‘Mom’ setting. Okay, it could be more generalized than that, with all sorts of custom settings—but basically, I want to check a box next to my mom in my address book and have my e-mail client automagically delay any messages I send her after midnight until eight, or a more plausible time, the next morning. That’s the kind of totally frivolous feature I want in my software.

I figure I’m allowed one non-Marika post between Marika posts.

As I picked up some curling ribbon at Target t’other day, my attention was attracted by a piping voice repeating, “Happy Hanukkah! Happy Hanukkah!” behind me. Turning, I saw a South Asian boy of perhaps 6 years reading the festive greeting off candles and other items in the Hanukkah display. As his mother hailed him impatiently, and he wended momward, he turned to his little sister and said, with all the assurance of Lucy telling Linus about snow and sparrows, “Only Hawaiian people celebrate Hanukkah.”

Part 1
Part 2

He was dead. That much was obvious, after the first panic of helplessness had ebbed away. Marika swallowed her retches and looked up, cautiously. He was not a nightmare or a hallucination. He was still there, inert and horrible. She stood up in the cramped space of the shuttle and reached out to put her hand against the cold port, near his little brown hand, twisted awkwardly towards himself on impact.

“What happened?” she said, almost by instinct, and immediately wished that she had not. Her brain was more than willing to leap on the chance to act, to unravel and infer and answer. Her father had done this. It could not have been an accident, either. The men wriggling between the pirate ship and its prey, snug in their space suits, had been ready for the vacuum of space. The people aboard the freighter had not. Her hand shook as she kicked the shuttle a few meters sideways, and confirmed her fears with a look at the long, barbed claws that jutted from the Jewel of Hades and lodged in the scar on the other ship’s side, holding her fast.

Marika collapsed into the pilot’s chair, suddenly noticing how large it was for her. She felt small and laughable and foolish. No wonder the pirates so seldom trained, and yet sustained so few losses in their valiant escapades. No wonder they could barely conceal their amusement at her romantic zeal. No wonder they didn’t want their families to see what they did.

She thought of her father, broad and powerful, cruel and thuggish. She thought of her mother, pretty and capable, materialistic and willfully blind. She whispered a verse of blessing and farewell to the little dead boy and spun away from the silent carnage. Unnoticed, her shuttle faded into the dark.

Part 4

Part 1

Marika didn’t care much for birthdays. Everyone seemed to use them as an opportunity to remind her what she should be, what some nebulous shadow-Marika was doing or feeling or wanting. Every year she opened package after package of pretty silk robes, cooking spices, and the latest romance novels pilfered from the best cruise ships; every year, with the same fixed smile. This year, her fourteenth, the mendacity of the whole ritual was too much for her. She only smiled at one present, from her cousin Lubi, a fine new rope-toy for Pakriti. Lubi’s brown eyes lit up when he saw her real, honest smile of thanks.

Lein’s face contracted with disapproval and she headed to intercept Marika as the whole merry mass of pirates, piratelings, and piratewives moved to the dining area for sweets. Marika braced herself for a maternal barrage on the topics of sullenness, ingratitude, and unseemliness, but before the words could be fired, the attack klaxon screeched from every speaker on every side.

The pirates, to a man, made for the armories, birthday forgotten. Marika and Pakriti swarmed along with them, but were stopped at the door by the thick, ink-traced arm of Marika’s father, Captain Darelm. Wordlessly, he shook his braided head.

“But father, it’s my birthday!” she grinned bewitchingly, and, as he persisted in impassivity, went on, “I’ve been training and training to be able to fight… and it’s my fourteenth birthday, when a child becomes a pirate!”

That did get a response, a sneer. “A boychild becomes a pirate. A girlchild becomes a wench. So get ye to the women’s quarters and lay low ‘til the all-clear. Ye’ve nothin’ to do in the men’s world, so best go cower in the women’s.” He stepped back and punched the door closed, nearly clipping Marika’s nose.

The common quarters were empty, all the families already taking cover in their own rooms. “Father! FATHER!” Marika hollered, pummeling the door. “Darelm!” she added more audaciously still, for none aboard the ship dared drop the ‘Captain’. No one opened the door, or even admonished her over the speaker. The hollow thrummings and rhythmless percussion of ship-to-ship coupling and combat ran tantalizingly through the hull under her feet, and Marika looked at Pakriti. It is a measure of the depth of her rage that she thought Pakriti looked angry, too. “Cower indeed! I’ll…” Marika trailed off. The same rage and the same ebbing powerlessness had flowed over her many, many times. There was nothing she could do. The tinker-pirates had gamely thwarted every bit of progress she’d ever made towards opening the docking sections, and there were no conduits or back ways. There was no way she’d ever get to the battle to prove herself.

Marika blinked, her unshed tears pulling at the image of a romance novel her Auntie Nuna had given her. A golden-haired man in a Fed uniform dipped a purple-haired beauty over the words The Cruel Cold of Space. Probably Nuna had only parted with it because the hero was a Fed - no pirate would approve of his wife reading such a thing, and most piratewives had their own prejudices - but Marika stared right past the blue and gold uniform, to the fiery space battle forgotten behind the torrid kiss.

With a shriek of glee, Marika leapt down the empty hallways, feet tingling from the vibrations of the fight and her pet loping along behind her. She skidded to a halt in front of the shuttle airlocks. “Pakritums Pakritiwikins Pakriti the Glorious and Fearsome!” she trilled, scooping up the monkat and poking his nose at the computer screen, “What do you want to bet me they never made ANY security tweaks to this lock?” Pakriti didn’t seem to want to bet anything, and she let him fall into a taut, ready crouch on the metal plating. She ran the very first, most facile of all the cracks she’d written and hidden in the main data banks, and the screen shimmered into a green glow of acquiescence.

Five minutes later she was moving a shuttle away from the docks and preparing for her first glimpse of real piracy.

She had never seen the outside of the Jewel of Hades, and of course it was a good deal more pitted and dull than she had imagined. But just around the curve of the jutting hull would be the boarded ship! She would dock and force their locks and be in the thick of battle, watching the pirates, consummate fighters all, best all the thuggish mercenary guards the shipping companies could buy. And surely there would be some fallen weapon…soon she would be proving her-

The shuttle slid silently around the curve of the Jewel, and Marika’s grin faded into incomprehension. The shining blue bows of the freighter were not encrusted with pirate docking pods, but rent by a long trailing gash. An aimless stream of flotsam issued slowly from the tear, and little suited figures swam from the Jewel to the merchant vessel with quick, capable movements. As she sat, without action or understanding, some figures started to thread their way back to the pirate ship, pushing cargo before them. The flotsam, still dissipating slowly into the black, began to reach Marika. Before she could take any action, a small shape floated up and bumped against the shuttle’s main port. It was a boy, no older than Lubi, blood bubbling from his eyes and saliva still boiling fitfully from his gaping mouth.

To be continued

I wasn’t going to blog again until Marika 2 was out of the oven (currently at paragraph three, I believe!) but after all, rules are made to be broken, and the ones you make yourself you can pre-forgive yourself for breaking.

SO. I was reading a fawbulous book my fawbulous sister gave me, and it was very late at night, and I decided I wanted to see if I could install Starcraft on my Mac, and, if so, play it for a bitsy.

A little inner voice said “Irresponsible!” (okay, so it’s not little and she sings it to the tune of “Under-standable” in ‘Both Reached for the Gun’ in Chicago). And that’s when a little phrase my sister introduced to me came in handy: I’m an adult, and I can do what I want! Now, of course, there are limits to the scope and applicability of this, but I felt a great weight lift as I plugged in my laptop, and I realized, being an adult is freeing.

I don’t know about YOU, but when I was little, I REALLY didn’t want to grow up, no way, unh unh, no sir. And you know, I still don’t want to. Grow up? Up to what? To where? Is the air thin up there? Will the altitude cause strange mutations in me, a calcification of the laugh, an agglomeration of cheap falsities used to interact with others’ pretense? Will pretending life is no fun and behaves according to simple rules really fool anyone, or make life any longer? No.

So why does that word…adult...mean something else? Maybe it did even then. “You might not like coffee, Felicity, it’s an adult taste.” I pretended I liked it, to be adult. It had a frisson of the forbidden; the exotic; the nebulous beauties of life which, like flying cars, would surely materialize in time.

So, everybody, please, don’t grow up. There’s a word for what growing up makes you—I got it from an old Star Trek. Grup. Don’t be a grup. Grups are grey and stiff with should-haves and normals and what-will-the-neighbors-say. Be an adult. Stay up past your bedtime. Buy yourself a present. Order the expensive thing, and get dessert, too. Sing in public. Because no one can tell you not to.

P.S. This blog entry brought to you by SARK. And possibly by ELOISE.

Marika wanted to be a space pirate when she grew up. While such an ambition is not unheard of among seven-year-olds, it distressed Marika’s mother, Lein, far more than it did the doting parents of any number of lads and lasses laying waste to their living quarters and threatening to space mutineers. Lein’s anxiety was quite natural, as she knew Marika would never be let into the family business.

She herself had never been past the bulkheads of the training quarters and into the docking pods and armories where the work of the family was done. Captain’s daughter or not, she knew that Marika would get no further, would marry one of her father’s men and spend her life in the quiet of the women’s quarters and the bustle of the training and common rooms, like any pirate’s woman.

Marika was not the sort of child to accept unpleasant facts, if there is, in fact, such a sort of child. She was charming and wild, an impetuous dimpled thing of green eyes and tangled mahogany hair, who ranged the common areas freely and scaled the walls and furnishings of the ship with nearly as much ease and grace as Pakriti, her monkat.

“Pakriti,” she would say, in the midday quiet of the children’s bunks, “we are going to get into the docking section someday and be brave and dashing space pirates. And I will wear a scarlet sash and a fearsome grimacing boarding mask, and you will wear long golden fang-tips, and we shall be feared throughout the shipping lanes of Noomed.” Pakriti mewed his sweet assent, and scratched between his shoulderblades with what Marika generously interpreted as a look of wistful anticipation.

However, Marika and Pakriti never seemed to get past the common areas, where the pirates’ women prepared the meals and the pirates lounged or used the training areas to hone their muscles and fighting skills for greater, richer, and more well-guarded prizes. No matter how they begged, the Captain laughed at the idea of a woman pirate, and the ship’s computer would NOT be convinced that Marika had any business in the masculine stronghold. And so the years wore on, with Marika begging, pleading, demanding and challenging, all the while trying to break into the docking sections and training herself with more vigor than any three of the actual pirates. Despite all her mother’s best efforts, she read nothing but romantic tales of piracy and derring-do, and even in her dreams she was the scarlet-sashed scourge of space, engaging five guards in combat at once, transferring thousands of marks of merchandise to her pods and sending the fat, bewildered merchants off on autopilot to the least luxurious parts of the galaxy, laughing as they shook their fists helplessly at her speedily escaping frigate….

To be continued…

My home at the moment is the house of LadyLong, in a cozy room brimming with my clothing and a few thousand of my favorite belongings in bags and piles. I have adorned every available surface with photographs of my lovin’ family faces. Despite what that implies, it’s actually the tidiest room I’ve had since…well, probably since sister sledge was 14 or so and thought a fun after-presents Christmas activity was making space in my room for my gift haul.

The other night, as I lay slumbering under four family-made quilts, I heard a light thump-thump-thumpetty at my door and awoke. Listening, I heard the slight sound again. At length, I concluded that some window was open somewhere and some wind or pressure change was stirring my door. I went back to sleep.

But in the morning hours, when peaceful sunshine began to slink in the window and put the lie to my gusty assumptions, the sound came again, more insistent this time. A rapping, one might even say, as one tapping, tap-tap-tapping at my chamber door. In bewilderment, I padded to the portal, and discovered the yellow eyes of Elliot the cat turning on me in equal confusion. He was curled on my threshold and I had disturbed his ablutions, which had in turn been disturbing the door he leaned against. Offended, he made his way off, and I returned to sleep the sleep of the unemployed.

Last night, again, it came, at three or four of the clock. This time the dark gentleman was not so easily swayed by my glowering visage, and I had to push him gently off with one magenta flip-flopped foot. Tonight, I came home and began my leisurely progress toward bed, and the tapping started. What did I care? I wasn’t trying to sleep yet...but it did occur to me that the sound might be disturbing the others who had more dutifully sought their beds. So I opened my door and confronted the cozy cat. He budged not. I mouthed silent entreaties, made wild gestures, and he budged not. Finally, I pushed him gently off with one Doc-Martened foot (please recall, members of the audience, that with one exception, cats and I make beautiful sneezing together). Rather than obligingly shifting himself down the hall, he looked at me curiously and waited for me to close the door.

No sooner had this been accomplished but I heard the clattering of the door in its frame as my devoted friend once more settled down to guard my threshold. Again I opened the door. “Elliot!” I whispered, “This will not do!” The performance duly repeated, and my natural guilt at rudely shooing the poor creature exacerbated by a number of throaty purrs, I decided to obstruct his place of repose with some towels that were sitting beside the door in the hall. He settled down, if anything, with more rapidity. I arranged the towels more annoyingly, and he settled down just as happily as soon as the door was closed upon my wrath. Finally, I concluded the towels had become part of his royal divan, and shifted them accordingly, and him, scooting along before my worn black toe, with them. He seemed content.

As I typed the last sentences above, I heard a thump. I oonched open the door, and there was Elliot, the greater comforts of laundry abandoned for the inexplicable joy of lying across my door all night. Very well, then, sir. I shall attempt to ignore your rattlings just as doggedly as you have ignored my hints. Good night.