Thought Parade

My mind's a jumble today, a mental mixer, to be sure. I have a lot on my mind right now and feel the urge to spill.

So, forgive me.

1. Seriously. It's snowing here, but it comes and goes. I'll look outside one moment and there's nothing and then a few minutes later it's snowing like crazy. It's sticking to the roof of the house, but our lawn only has a few spots of snow. The trees blocked most of it, but the little we got melted off earlier in the day.
   The stop-and-start reminds me of a game level I designed where the weather was snowy. Because I was designing it, I could move anywhere in the environment and not limited to the spaces where normal players would be confined. I could go above the visible "snow-line" and see the flakes just sit there, ready to fall when it was their turn. I wonder if the snow outside is falling like that whenever it starts up again?
   
2. Wrote a friend yesterday at the old office from Hell. I mentioned that I'd written emails to a few others and had no response from these so-called friends. She didn't brush off the comment or deny it, but just totally ignored it in her response. I just don't understand why some people ask my wife why they never hear from me then ignore any messages I send.
3. The game design stuff reminded me of a time when I was a kid and dreamt of creating my own worlds and everything on it. Now I can and for whatever reason, I choose not to.
4. My mother gave me a couple of boxes of my "stuff" from when I was growing up. They're filled with file folders for every year of my life. Kind of odd to see my entire life as a system of file folders (complete with tickets from every play, opera, and musical I've ever gone to). It also has my report cards from each grade. I never really tried until the very end. There's test results stating I was reading at a university level by the time I was 12, but my grades the next year in English were only Cs and C+'s. I never put the effort in. The next year was even worse because my teacher accused me of plagiarism. I refused to do any more work (not a stretch since I seemingly never did anyway) until she apologized. I went from a B to a D, followed by two Es to finish off the year. I wrote the final exam an got an A, so they were forced to pass me.
5. My Grade 12 exams, of which only one was "official," had a scoring system similar to the SATs. The document states that if I should accumulate a score of more than 1,000 points grand total in 3 or more final exams, then I'd be receiving a provincial scholarship. (If memory serves, 3 people in my class did receive those scholarships: $30,000 or more if I recall correctly). Because I only wrote the one official one (at the time, we only had to take a regulated science course to Grade 10 and Math to grade 11 --I did Math 11 twice), I wasn't eligible for the scholarship. My score on the one final was 497, which I'm assuming was out of 500 (so, 98.4%?). I know on one unofficial exam, I scored 98%.
   
6. Every report card makes mention of my lack of ability to complete homework and if I just "strive to work a little harder...). I wonder now, what life would be like if I'd ignored my social life (which I realized was a disaster much too late) and focused on school? Damn.
7. I've been reading a new blog about a woman who was in the comics industry and some of the obstacles she faced before she left. It's got me thinking about a bunch of things too.
   
8. I'm working on a story which is just a single chapter of a much, much bigger story (I'm sure I've mentioned it before). This part of the story is about a woman who is dying and reveals to her boyfriend that she was raped year earlier and it, ultimately, led to this very moment. Although the boyfriend reveals he already knew about it, there's a time for some healing and understanding about the rape. I don't write about it any further than to just mention it. There's no details about it other than that it happened. In a lot of ways, I don't feel I could a rape story properly by describing the event itself. I'm not sure right now if I can even justify any type of healing afterward, but I'm going to give it a try. This woman is strong and this is a hint at a moment where she wasn't in control of anything.
9. One of my wife's cousins was raped a few years back and the man who did it is back in the news right now (he'd escaped from prison or something and went on to rape 3 women before he was arrested again). "They" are trying to figure out if he should be considered a "dangerous offender." Why this process should take more than 30 seconds, I don't know. He escaped custody (he'd done it before) and goes out and does it again. Three times.