Sis should be back home now...

Well, she should be arriving there in an hour-ish, anyway.

I'm a lil' melancholy, but I'm also happy to have my creative and web work time back. I can't function without enough alone time for my projects and games and stuff, any more. And I'm still kinda agoraphobic... I was starting to get tense and cranky and overly self-critical (especially about my looks, but other things too) because I've been outside around people every day.

But, I felt kinda bad seeing my sis off. She kinda strikes me as feeling rather lost and lonely lately. I don't know if being around us did any good, though it did show her that life can be very different if you move away from the Bay Area, with all the competitiveness, high cost of living, overworking and overachieving.

But I don't think she'll move because she's worried about her cat (who has FIV, think HIV but for cats) and about meeting people in a new place. I don't blame her... moving to a whole new environment is hard. I'm not very good at meeting people myself. Too much anxiety, too much second guessing myself, too much self-consciousness, too much fatigue and wanting to be alone. And the language barrier doesn't help, though more and more I am trying to practice my French pronunciation. I'm almost feeling up to actually taking classes, so I'll probably do it when I'm at the university.

Jon says I actually sound quite good, despite my paranoia, and even I have to admit that 3 years of hearing French pronunciation pretty much constantly have helped me pick up on it better.

So what's left is to just conquer my anxiety.

*sigh* Yeah, "just"... as if it's ever that simple.

I get this feeling sometimes that I'm a burden to people because of my depression and anxiety problems. I mean, it's not a lot of fun to deal with a someone in the middle of a depressive episode. They'll vehemently resist any compliments or positive thoughts you might have to say, to the point they become completely unresponsive or outright hostile if you disagree with their self-loathing. And dealing with anxiety isn't much better -- you might find your plans ruined because an anxious friend or partner is having a panic attack and needs to go home.

I would have liked to go out more with my sister while she was here, but half the time when I was out, I felt like I was in some sort of nightmare I couldn't come out of. I just wanted to hide away at home and not have to care about my hair looking ugly or my body looking thick or what people might think of me, for even a little while. I don't really want to *encourage* this -- I mean, I WANT to get better, and go out more and all that -- but right now, it's hard. It's been a long, long winter and I'm still used to being cooped up inside.

I have other things to think about for now, though. ED tomorrow, and I have a character sheet to finish by Thurs. For now I'm just going to fire up some Sims 2 and try to relax. I'm a little tempted to mess with Ruby on Rails some more, though... right now I'm poking at Mongrel and figuring out what it does that Apache doesn't, and how I can fit it in between Apache and Rails. Really, I think I just need to find a few good Ruby on Rails examples to work through and get running on the lil' Rails app I've set up.

I should probably rest my head a bit, though. I'd like to be rested for STing again, since it's been a little while since I have. ^^; Actually, speaking of STing, I DID end up running a short game for my sis while she was here. I don't remember if I wrote about it. I did a really crappy intro for her Ex2 Solar character which she is not-too-subtly nudging for me to include in Soul Collectors. I'm a little bit iffy having a first time player in a AU Exalted game though, and my sis is kind of unreliable in terms of finding free time to play. Admittedly, though, I only plan for Soul Collectors to run every other week.

So maybe it'd work... I dunno. Even if I did have her in SC, she still has to play through her Exaltation, since she opted to start as a heroic mortal. She's actually *quite* well statted for a HM, though. I might've given her a few too many points, even, but I was just kinda making up her character creation as I went. I'm not very good at running games in person... I had a hard time describing things well in speech, I guess, since I'm a much better writer than speaker. That and I was running Ex2 for the *first* time, so I didn't even remember to have the Dragon-blooded in her scene use his Charms. Heh, good going, me!

I was thinking about it and I realized that Dragon-blooded are actually more powerful in Ex2 than they are in 1. And mortals are more survivable, too. Interesting side effect of the rules changes, I guess! Though I was amused at my sis thinking 9 dice were too much to roll at once... I was thinking "wait till your char Exalts and you're rolling 20+" ^^;

Bah! I should stop babbling for now. Sometimes I just have so much to say that I can write and write and write for hours. Anyway, I'll be back around tomorrow afternoon. :O