Red Curtains and Falling off the Internet

So... instead of waiting for something profound to come to me in perfectly formatted and amazing blogworthy awesomeness, I have decided to just write about random stuff which is what I seem to do best. Right, so on the title... My dear readers (all 3-5 of you) probably already know as I have alluded to previously that I have had my working hours switched to what normal mortals term anything from 'pretty odd' to 'downright ungodly'. This has afforded me some unique opportunities, not all of which I have taken advantage of. But I have learned a thing that I am posting on here because I am quite pleased with myself about it, even though it wasn't my own idea and was in fact suggested to me by someone else but hey, it worked and it's awesome so I'm blogging about it. I'm talking about red curtains. I had a brief look around, not at all comprehensive, looking for when and where red curtains were first used by people who had to work odd hours and sleep during the day but I struck out. Svenska reliably informs me that this is a done thing in Scandawhovia, although she also is striking out on the historicity of it. Anyway. When you're on a ship the lighting in berthing (except for during clampdown/inspection) is red instead of white because there's always a day sleeper or two (trying to catch forty winks despite said clampdown noise, inspection noise, flight quarters/man overboard/general quarters being called). Your eyes don't process red light and white light in the same way. So at a tip from a saltier sailor than myself, I invested 20 dollars into red sheets that completely and utterly clash with the rest of my decor (which tends to be refrigerator white, haze grey and navy blue- and the saddest thing about that is that it's _voluntary_). These delightfully clashing red sheets screen my windows and permit me to sleep during the day without the aid of an eyemask/my pillow/pulling the sheets over my head and boiling. It's amazing. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I put them up with a quantity of packing tape which I figured would annoy my landlady less than nails although I've decided in the interests of keeping it up I will have to alternate packing tape and a few carefully placed tacks. So yes. That was not at all profound. The second half of my post title is not the same as the first. I am not referring to myself when I mention falling off the internet although I have done that in the recent past... I'm referring to a writer whose work I thoroughly enjoyed years ago when I followed every update s/he (it's the internet- I'm pretty sure it's a 'she' but not certain) made with bated breath. This author had read something I'd written and liked it, and then went on to write a long, incredibly awesome play and credited me with partial inspiration for it. I was amazed. And then I got too busy for many things that once held my attention on the internet and even though their project wasn't finished, I stopped checking for updates. About a year ago, I remembered this project and I had to check again. I did and I found that nothing had been updated, _and_ I found the link to the author's blog and started reading. I don't really know what to say. Their blog was a compelling, incredibly painful read. As I read it I felt as though I was reading something that I myself could have written had my life taken a different turn in my teens. I felt I had so much in common with this person who had a deep love for Tolkien's Silmarillion, and then that there was this enormous gulf between us where I'd chosen to keep the faith I'd been raised in _despite_ my parents, and this person had suffered incredibly and not been able to keep his/her faith. Not only had they not been able to keep it, they were going around attacking it for good measure. It was such a strange read. Anyway. Today I checked again for updates, no luck. Worse, the site that had originally hosted the project was not in good repair/recently updated. I found a mirror and was able to get some of the project and I'll be checking back until I can get everything that was up. And I thought about how you don't know what happens when people stop posting where you're used to seeing them. Sure they might be somewhere else, or using a different screen name or something. They might be just fine but no longer have the same interests. But not knowing and silence on the line can be a bit worrying. Why should I worry about this total stranger? I've read their writing, and that's more than I've done with the majority of people I work with or see eery day. It's a little different somehow than a total stranger. Even if the ideas I have about this person are completely wrong, I feel like I should pray for them and I hope they're all right (now would be a good time to point out that the artificial invention of single pronouns for persons of unknown gender is irritating to me yet I do wish that like some languages we had a nongendered way of referring to one person.. it would be handy in rare situations like this because saying 'they' and 'them' when I really mean just one person rather than more than one is driving me nuts). I know, I know how many people in Real Life who I'm praying for already, or should be praying for and haven't thought of it yet, and I'm going to add one more person to the list? Well. Yeah. And, dear readers, I would like to ask you to pray for this person too. We might never know who they are or what if anything happened with them, but that's life. That's something I'm working on, trying to realize that the small things count, and that it's all right if we don't know how or why that works in this lifetime.