Rapport mensuel: Mois de Novembre. · 10:05pm Nov 1st, 2013
Gratuitous french!
Hope you all had fun on Halloween, and didn't get sick from too much candy!
My voice in a Head: 2963 words, about 60-70%
Frequencies: 3034 words, somewhere around 80%
Getting kinda close, and a bit more in the writing mood. Yay.
And now to hopefully entertain you and make this worth the hassle of checking up on yet another blog post, and procrastinate from actually writing anything useful, let me talk about a nominally topical subject, slightly related to the holiday of fear that just passed:
Sometimes, facing your fears really does work.
When I was a kid, I was terrified of thunder, lightning and storms. And I do mean terrified: crying, hiding-under-the-bed, burying-my-face-in-the-couch-at-the-slightest-rumble-in-the-sky terrified. And why not? it's loud, violent, aggressive, you hear stories of people getting hit by it and dying, of houses ripped apart, of floods and tornadoes and all that crap! Of course I was scared!
You know what made me get over that fear? The biggest, most relentlessly loud and flashy thunderstorm I had seen until that point.
It happened when I was between five and ten, I'm not too sure of the exact timeline here. Anyway, I was woken up in the middle of the night by said thunderstorm, which was, of course, way too scary for me to get back to sleep. I tried to wait it out to no avail until I decided to get up to find anything better to do than cower alone in my room. I found the rest of my family in the living room. Everyone, minus my father (who somehow slept through all that) had been similarly woken up by the storm and had gathered there to wait it out. So we did, most of us looking out the window to watch all that lightning.
And boy was there a lot of it! The whole sky was lit up constantly by bright flashes in the clouds, lightning cracked the horizon every second; for a span of few minutes at one point, we could see at least one part of the sky lit up at any time. Every single second saw the birth of at least a few flashes. It never stopped, it never slowed down. The sound was muted, probably because the storm cell was already going away; although if someone told me that there was just so many shockwaves of thunder in the air that they collided and cancelled each other, I'd be inclined to believe it. It was absolutely relentless: It looked as if someone had lit a fire in heaven's giant fireworks-and-christmas-lights factory.
That, in itself, probably wouldn't have done anything to rid me of my fear, although the hour or so we spent just sitting there in the middle of a storm WITHOUT DYING HORRIBLY probably helped me realize that there wasn't that much to be feared about storms, I guess.
What absolutely did it, though, was the literal star of that show:
At one point, as we were just watching the raw display, the storm decided to liven things up: suddenly it took out the big guns and threw what is almost certainly the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
In an instant, while I was staring straight at the spot where it spawned, a colossal star of pure lightning appeared in the sky. There was a central core, like an aggressive balled-up scribble of crackling lines, from which five gigantic arms grew out and away in five different directions. It was a giant star made of giant trees made of giant lightning, just floating there in the sky, eating half of its visible area and staring right at my face for like two or three seconds. It might only have seemed that long because of the awe, I don't know.
And then it was gone. In a few seconds I saw the pure savage beauty that nature is capable of, and those few seconds of pure awe made me instantly switch from "Oh god make it stop" to "I'd give my arm to see more of that".
Seriously, I went from unreasonable terror to actively cheering at the thought of an incoming storm, and taking time out of my day to just sit down in front of a window to watch the show whenever one happens outside. I like storms now, and on the list of things I'd wish for, getting to see at least one other thunderstar like that in my lifetime would be pretty high.
Shit, just writing about it made me all emotional. How I described it here doesn't even come close to doing it justice. If that star isn't the single most beautiful thing I've seen in my life, it's pretty much in my top two.
Yeah.
Also, arachnophobia isn't that bad once you learn to channel all that fear into a violent spider-punching rage. Turns out spiders are pretty vulnerable to full-power punches from an adult. A stain of mush would have a hard time biting anything.
Well that's it, I guess. See ya!
I should really check fimfic more often
Ha, I know that feel. The one with the thunder then, that is. I still don't like spiders but hey, at least I don't live in Australia or something like that.
Anyway, years ago I've had something similar happen. Like, in the middle of the night, it was like the moon had suddenly become 10 times closer to earth, and was in a different spot than it should have been. I'm pretty sure it wasn't thunder/lightning related, and also fairly sure it actually wasn't really the moon. On the other hand, despite that I was a kid back then, I'm also fairly sure it wasn't just a (street)light. To this very day, I still don't know what it was...