bodlon | This is My Raygun. (Reply)

This is my raygun. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

This has been an interesting week. DST is still the enemy, though I think I've finally cleared the hump. Trying to ease in last week by getting up at 3:30 instead of 4 for a few days did basically nothing on the getting to sleep on time front. If anything, it may have just prolonged the agony. By Sunday night, the body was not even remotely interested in going to bed. At all.

It wanted to go onto its own native schedule, which looks a lot like what I do anyway except it wants to do it in GMT. Late nights and even later mornings, you know? Especially since the weekend is the only time during the week that I nap freestyle (i.e. "Oh, it's mid-morning and I've got free time...") and so by Sunday I was well-rested and didn't even twig that I should be considering losing consciousness until about two hours after I should have.

Basically pain.

Combine that with a weird burst of impostor syndrome and the way my current writing-related projects are not playing well with one another at the moment, and I hit a serious low around Tuesday this week. Doubt, frustration, anger, depression -- really every negative feeling I could be having came to a head in the most miserable way.

For my birthday, my friend Chloie (who is a hell of a writer, and has amazing taste to boot) gave me a Mystery Box. The Mystery Box lives on my desk, and is full of odd trinkets and packets of tea, most of which are wrapped like wee gifts. I am allowed to use the Mystery Box as I see fit, obviously, but in general I use it as a reward system when I feel like I should get a treat, or as a kindness dispenser when I need something wee and shiny to improve my life.

Not that I really believed it would help on Tuesday. Which was ridiculous given that I'd not only sold something in the night from my Etsy shop, and I was doing paid work and blah, blah, blah. Feelings aren't rational. But any port in a storm, right? Plus, the fun thing about friends and gifts is that they seem to derive enjoyment when they give you things, and I derive enjoyment from my friends' happiness. So. Mystery Box it was.

I was not expecting something as perfect and ridiculous as the ray gun. It is so tiny as to be unweildy in my adult-sized human paws. It makes little noises. It lights up.

In a culture that can't decide whether it wants to buy all the guns and take them absolutely everywhere or punish anyone who so much as considers simulating a weapon, it feels subversive in my pocket. It pushes all the buttons in my head where my not-entirely-factual idealizations of classic sci-fi tropes live, and gives me the same tingle I used to feel when I was very small and playing Star Trek out in the yard with my ~~cassette recorder~~ tricorder, or running around with the glow-in-the-dark She Ra sword the neighbor kid eventually broke because he was a jerk who broke everything, or the toy lightsaber I had that went "vwoom" because it was open at the end.

Oh, and I can use it to shoot doubt in the face with extreme prejudice.

It could not be more perfect. The more I think of it, the more sure I am that even the timing was perfect. I'd be enchanted by it, sure, but getting it in precisely this way at exactly this time?

That's what makes it a talisman. That's what makes it magic.