Don't Wanna!

First thing in the godsdamn morning...

I just don't wanna go to work today. I'm surprisingly not that tired after a late one sceneing with Drop (I am jonesing for RP a little, okay? I miss my Restart campaign...) but I just don't wanna go. The Mondays after a Bank Holiday weekend are the hardest.

Well, never mind. I picked up the Mirrormask soundtrack on my various trawls and it is now loaded onto my iPod (it's so much nicer when I have the USB 2.0 ports - everything goes so much faster) and now I'm going to unplug it from my machine and head for work. Even though I don't want to and in fact would much rather stay home and faff about all day. Well, never mind - there's chat from work so I don't get unspeakably bored.

The Crocodile Hunter

Sooooo ... given how these things spread, I should do my part and spread the geek-word: Steve Irwin got a stingray barb through the heart and died. And everyone's going, "OMG WTF?" and I'm sitting here thinking "...But why are you all so surprised?"

Yes, I know he's an institution and everything. I know that we now can't even see crocodiles without thinking, 'Crikey!' I know he's a freakin' celebrity and all, but for pity's sake, I personally would have been surprised if he hadn't died by animal-related means. What would have really shocked me? Natural causes. Heart attack, random stroke, cancer. Either that or urban accident - being hit by a bus or a bad fall down a flight of stairs. That would have been a huge surprise. But animal-related death? It's how he would have wanted to go. Particularly given how rare a way it is to die. If Steve Irwin had just kacked it like a so-called 'average' human being, then I'd have been shocked. But he died as he'd lived. It was kind of a foregone conclusion.

As for his family ... well, yes, death is never an easy thing to cope with, but surely all but the youngest must have come to terms with the fact that Hubby or Daddy was one day going to go out to look at that one 'little beauty' and get his damn fool head bitten off. And I notice that no one is remembering the fearless Crocodile Hunter holding his infant son in one arm while feeding one of those crocs? It's amazing how everyone can sort of forget something like that when someone dies. Of course, I suppose they forget that kind of thing anyway, and that's part of why Michael Jackson got away with dangling his infant off a fucking balcony. It also amuses me that few enough people bring up the fact that, soon after the dangling-son-near-crocodile incident, he got investigated for 'getting too close to' Antarctic wildlife. On the one hand, this is your 'keen conservationist'; on the other hand, what did the authorities expect from Steve Irwin? Overall, people remember the best things about everybody when they die, and casually gloss over the worst. No wonder the suicidal consider death the better option.

Anyway, the fact remains that everyone talks about his 'freakish' death. I still say the more freakish death for Steve Irwin would have been dying of a coronary in an nursing home, age 97.

Actually, the more freakish death for Steve Irwin would have been drowning in boysenberry pudding. But you can say that for everyone.

The Random

Every so often, I wind up checking my LJ 'Friend Of' list. Why? Because ... well, sometimes there is random friendage, and they don't all tell me they're doing it. Now, please keep in mind that I do not mind this. If I minded this, I would not have a public journal. But sometimes really neat people randomly friend me and don't tell me about it, and if I don't look, I may miss out on someone really cool. So I check.

Today, I found three. One I think was Russian, and seems to be friending the whole godsdamned world, so I didn't bother. One had only one LJ friend (me) but I friended him back anyway because, what the hell. The third is a friends-only journal and seems to have friended me for no reason, but at least I have some clue where this entity got my name - we're on a few of the same webcomics forums.

A lot of my random friends are people with whom I share communities. fan_dancer, I think, friended me after encountering me on bad_rpers_suck. nadriel was ... I think through the Something Positive community. dis_connection appears to be someone from the NaNoWriMo communities. bibliogirl, and a few others, I met on customers_suck. Overall, my random friendings seem to be half community-based and half "friend of friend" - mostly through nadriel. A couple, though, are a total mystery: live4lyfe, par example.

It does make me wonder, though: why? I mean, unless there was a specific comment or post that made some of these people think, "Hmm, she sounds interesting", the random frienders would have had to seek me out, read my journal and decided to friend me. And me being me, I am dying to know why. I mean, I just write this thing; I have no true perspective on how interesting it may or may not be - mostly it's good venting space and a way of getting information and such to my far-flung friends in the US and such so I don't wind up spending all my time on IM answering a simple 'How are you?'.

So, those of you who have randomly friended me, either recently or way back when, I'd really appreciate knowing why. What drew you to this journal? Why do you stay friended? What's the draw? I'm not writing for an audience here, but I'm dreadfully curious.