the best imitation of myself

Last Thursday was a really good day! I had a little workout, I looked smashing in my suit, I rocked my job interview. I had a tickle in my throat, but I sucked on some cough drops and powered through. I babysat for the rest of the afternoon, and then I daaaanced for a whole lot of hours with silentfire and E., and we grabbed dinner and drank a bunch, nice job, good show!

In the early hours of Friday morning, I woke up with a fever, a wet, hacking cough, and what felt like ground glass in my throat. I spent the weekend buried under blankets, staring glassy-eyed at the television and not getting called back about the job. My lymph nodes were tender to the touch and my throat was swollen, and I couldn't stop swallowing. I took the cold medication I had leftover from a couple of weeks ago, but it didn't put a dent in my fever, which held steady at or around 101 degrees. I started to sort my laundry but had to stop and lie down halfway through. Saturday night Kansas and M. brought me extra-strength acetaminophen and ice cream and four kinds of chicken soup, i.e. the only things in life that I wanted at that moment, because they are angels, and my fever broke for the first time. Sunday my chest felt tight when I breathed, like I could really feel where my lungs were, trying to inflate, and the bits of phlegm I kept painfully gagging up were, oh, I haven't double-checked my Pantone colors, but I would call it mauve. Yes. Monday morning I took myself down to the doc in the box, where they swiftly diagnosed both bronchitis AND strep and dosed me up with a ten-day course of amoxicillin. YAY DRUGS YAY.

Hooray modern medicine and forcing fluids. My fever was gone by Tuesday, and after forty-eight hours on antibiotics, spent exclusively convalescing and expectorating, I feel loads better, though I'm still super tired, I have zero appetite, and my voice is shot to hell. I'm back at work today, and I've sent a follow-up thank-you email to the prospective employers with an invisible attachment that just reads PLZ HIRE ME OH GOD PLEASE over and over and over again. Perhaps by tomorrow I will be ready for dancing again!

a. I've been in my new place for almost two months, and they haven't even made noises about kicking me out yet! I call that SUCCESS.

b. Remember that time an adorable toddler tipped a glass of water all over my laptop and it stopped working, and then through a combination of seasonal holiday mall shenanigans, the Great Icing Over of 2011, personal transportation issues, and deep denial, it was weeks before I could get to the Apple Store for an assessment, during which I spiraled deeper and deeper into isolation and depression? Well, Apple told me they would happily fix anything that ailed it for a standard flat fee that wasn't necessarily unreasonable, but WAS more than a month's rent—and therefore prohibitively expensive—thereby knocking me out of the fourth stage of grief where I'd been stalled for some time; and THEN gjstruthseeker swooped in like the most bad-ass, technologically-advanced fairy godmother EVER and surprised me with a brand-spanking-new machine. I think I teared up a little as I took it out of the box. I HAVE JUST MET YOU, I told it, AND I LOVE YOU. We're going to be so, so happy together. I hope one day to be able to return the favor a thousandfold. <333333

c. I'm totally going to learn to vid on my new boss laptop, no really, seriously, this time I mean it! I've got a bunch of tutorials to sift through, but so far they all seem to go something like,

1. Acquire source
2. Convert to editing-compatible format
3. Clip
4. Import
5. ????
6. Profit! Export

Is it me, or is there an important part of the vidding process missing, i.e. THE VIDDING. D:

d. If I ever figure out iMovie, my first vid is PROBABLY going to be an ode to methodology and police procedure on Hawaii Five-0. NO, WAIT, I MEAN—what's the opposite of an ode?

e. Hawaii Five-0: I just. I have so many feelings.

f. So last fall I made some new friends (a hilarious story for another day), and one night after hanging out and drinking all afternoon, they were like, let's go to the 3-Legged Cowboy! which is a local gay & lesbian country-western bar in Midtown, and I was like suuuuure, sounds awesome, because I had been drinking all afternoon. And it turns out I LOVE DANCING, YOU GUYS. YOU GUYS, I LOVE DANCING. I didn't know how to do any of it, either the line dances or the two-step, but they gave me the Cliffs Notes version and told me there were free lessons during the week. So I came for the lessons (it turns out that line dancing is exactly like all those hundreds of hours of choreographed aerobics I adored, only WITH BONUS DRINKING; also it's HARDER, because you have to memorize the routines, and there are like a thousand fucking routines, this shit is hardcore), and sometimes silentfire would come too, and I would stay and drink and dance the dances I knew, even though sometimes I felt horribly awkward because PEOPLE OMG, and it's hard to be a human being, but I got to talking with a couple of people, and one of them was like, heyyy do you want to join our dance troupe? Because it turns out there is an actual thing called the International Association of Gay/Lesbian Country Western Dance Clubs, and they host dance competitions; and after being assured that I really didn't need any actual prior knowledge or dancing ability, I was like, what the hell, okay! And now I have paid club dues and everything, and we're learning ballroom dances and jazz choreography, and basically I love every minute of it. Dancing! WHO KNEW.

g. Today I spent several hours in the DMV sitting in a molded plastic chair with my crossword puzzles and some podcasts, along with what seemed like half the population of metro Atlanta, including A BABY THAT CRIED FOR AN HOUR STRAIGHT. I mean, that poor kid, Jesus, but also my nerves are never going to be the same again. But now I have a Georgia driver's license! My picture is totally horrifying, I look like I'm drunk, so I figure all is right with the world.

h. It's my birthday tomorrow! In my time zone, tomorrow happened forty-five minutes ago. :D

i. What would I do without lists? I would never post again, that's what. HI, INTERNET!

GOOD NEWS: Survived my nephew's bar mitzvah and all attendant family functions!

BAD NEWS: M. and I discovered that our parents are waaaay more passive-aggressive and otherwise emotionally dysfunctional than previously believed! Not to mention emotionally manipulative, and willing to drag us into manipulating each other for them. The details are too tedious to get into, but the most bizarre part is that just giving their honest reasons for their actions would be enormously less hurtful and dramatic (also less insulting, and infinitely less mysterious) than the nervous, clumsy, utterly transparent lies they tell instead, all in the effort to avoid confrontation. They're old and unlikely to change without therapy, and they're not likely to get therapy; I would settle for having an accurate sense of how their minds work so we can anticipate and react accordingly, instead of being blindsided all the time.

GOOD NEWS: Assuming I survive their vetting process (not actually guaranteed, my credit being what it is), I have found a place to live! I'm vacillating between being genuinely excited about it, regretting the few downsides, dreading the packing-moving-unpacking process, and freaking the fuck out. All things considered, it's probably the best deal out there for me, and I'm crossing my fingers that it goes through.

BAD NEWS: On Monday the adorable toddler adorably tipped a full glass of water right across my laptop while it was open and running. Having spilled water over my keyboard on two (TWO!) separate occasions while in college, I know very well that proper protocol is to drain, unplug, and allow to dry thoroughly. All of which I did. Except that I had a bad feeling about it even as I was draining it, when I heard the optical drive grind out its start-up sound several times; and when I went to power it down, I found it had already turned itself off. Seventy-two hours of immersion in rice later, I have a sleek, white, 2006-era brick. And rice all over the floor. It might be all the electrical components that are shot; it might just be the power supply, or the on/off button; if nothing else, the hard drive itself will probably be salvageable. I've been mostly numb about it, but every once in a while I'll suddenly burst into tears. I only use it for EVERYTHING.

a. I always find alphabetical lists are easier to read through than big bunches of unorganized paragraphs. They're at least more easily skimmed, amirite?

b. Have gotten my babysitting job back, which is fortunate, since I haven't got any other jobs at the moment.

c. A. has finally served me notice of eviction, in the kindest, most passive-aggressive way possible, so I will definitely be moving into a place of my own sometime soon, probably! Or else!

d. It really slammed into me tonight how much I miss gjstruthseeker. For years I had her within arms' reach (or at least within a stone's throw), and now for years she's been halfway around the world, not even a phone call away. I adore the friends I have here, and I know I need to get better at making and keeping new ones, but I miss her so much.

e. Chanukah came so early this year (and I am in such tenuous and sporadic contact with most of the members of my family) that three of my non-Jewish friends were the first to tell me about it. I should probably put that kind of thing on my calendar. HAPPY CHANUKAH, EVERYONE (WHO CELEBRATES IT). I hope you have all seen this. :D

f. Sometimes I download episodes of television from the internet, and then I watch them! And SOMETIMES I then read massive amounts of fanfiction about it, or about other things and/or people!* One day I will again post about these phenomena.

g. Recently I revisited the Enneagram online personality test and it SPOKE to my SOUL.** Between that and internet research wrt Avoidant Personality Disorder, I have gotten a much better sense of my actual current state of mind and being than therapy ever gave me. Not that it's solved anything, but then therapy never did either.

h. AM SO DRUNK RIGHT NOW WHAT.


* Most of them I bookmark here, though I'm dreadfully behind.
** [Unhealthy] Type Four.

In no particular order:

a. HIPSTER DINOSAURS. This is my new favorite thing in the world. "I remember when this volcano was dormant. This volcano used to have integrity."

b. I have had the most amazing tension headache all day today. The muscles behind my ears are so tight and tender they feel like twin goose eggs.

c. I saw Inception the week after it was released, because I was so excited about it and the cut tags were so full of exclamation marks; I think I can sum up my feelings about it by saying I immediately went home and wrote up four thousand words in reaction to it, but I didn't actually care. I.e.: ambivalence.

d. My main fandom at the moment is Due South. I know, right? This is something like my sixth Due South personal renaissance since 2001. I've just re-watched the entire series (most episodes for the very first time!), and I'm reading (and re-reading) what feels like ALL the fic. Those guys! I have a vid idea that I want to make so badly, I can actually listen to the song on repeat and watch it in my head. Though if it's like every other vid I've ever wanted to make, it will never make it out of my head. :/

e. I don't think I've mentioned the job I've had since April, which is babysitting a (now) 17-month-old during the day while his parents are at work (and their three dogs, whom I loathe; but the kid is great). A partial list of things I have successfully taught him to date: his first word ("hi"); where his nose is; The Itsy-Bitsy Spider; The Wheels on the Bus; how to high-five; to pick things up when he drops them; to cheer for Roger Federer.

f. I'm in the middle of one crochet project and three knitting projects, with half a dozen more in the pipeline.

g. In the space of about two weeks I went from "I still don't get this podfic stuff!" to being OBSESSED with podfic—both the listening to and the recording thereof. I've already begun systematically ransacking the audiofic archive, but is there a good source of podfic meta/discussion anywhere handy? I have so many questions!

h. silentfire and I are playing late-night trivia again tonight, having taken second place three times in the past few weeks. Last week's was a thrilling come-from-behind success story, in which knowledge of—yes!—the names of all the presidents of the United States was the crucial bit of knowledge we had to call upon.

i. It's U.S. Open time! FEDERER OR BUST.

j. I'm meeting up with gjstruthseeker and her husband in Orlando in a few weeks, which should be extremely awesome; and I'm almost definitely going to North Carolina in October for the SAFF with, like, all of my female relatives, about which I am considerably more ambivalent.

k. I don't want to jinx it, but it's been a few days now, and I'm starting to believe that summer might actually be almost over. Oh god, this summer has been so wretched. And that's only taking into account the WEATHER.

l. White Collar! How is that show even REAL?!

m. This morning P. (the father of the kid I sit for) and I were discussing revenge narratives in the literary and cinematic canons, as well as in real life—specifically, ones in which the seeker of revenge is consumed and ultimately destroyed by his own obsessive quest, e.g. Moby Dick. I pointed out that we were finding it harder than expected to come up with examples because we currently celebrate and privilege that kind of story, and it more often ends in triumph than tragedy. I explained the concept of ~manpain. Any suggestions?

Thank you to everyone who came by to take the poll about your fanfiction saving and storage habits! It's taking a little while, but I'm working my way through the comments, which are all AWESOME. Feel free to come by at any time and fill it out or add your two cents, as I have no plans of closing it down until I grow weary of discussing these matters at length and in excruciating detail, i.e. NEVER.

Speaking of adding one's two cents. This most recent iteration of "fanfiction is an abomination and you should all be ASHAMED of yourselves" is just as baffling and hilarious and offensive as all the previous iterations, and everyone has already lined up and knocked down all the responses, including:

• Fanfiction is not illegal;


• Even if fanfiction were determined to be illegal under current copyright laws, that would not make it immoral;


• Fanfiction is unstoppable;


• Fanfiction is not: stealing, trespassing, plagiarism, or rape. That's why there are words for all of those things! (You know what is rape? RAPE. The end!);


• Fanfiction is a compliment to the author (people love your books! YOU'RE WELCOME), authorial intent is dead, and authors need to let go of the fantasy that they have any control over how their audience engages with a text once it's been released into the wild;


• Fanfiction (and the community from which it springs, fandom), brings a lot of joy to a lot of people while bringing harm to no one;


• Fanfiction is not (at least, not necessarily) merely a means to an end (where "the end" is one day becoming a "real" writer of original works), but is in fact an end in and of itself;


• Fanfiction can and often does (though it doesn't have to and doesn't always) take as much or more time, effort, research, skill, and imagination to produce as "real" fiction;


• In fact, ALL art is an ongoing conversation between artists both living and dead; all art draws from the same communal well both within and (with caveats) across cultures; and all art is therefore always essentially derivative, the only difference being one of degree and deliberateness. Fanfiction (along with the larger modern-day transformative and remix culture) is merely the latest incarnation of storytelling traditions that are as old as culture itself, and it only seems weird because never before have so many people had access to writing and publishing tools, and this era of rapidly expanding (N.B. not universal) access follows right on the heels of ANOTHER anomolous era, one characterized by 1) very limited access to—and very tightly-held control of—the tools of writing and publishing, not to mention 2) restrictive laws governing who can do what with the finished product (with the advantage almost never going to the creator of OR the audience for the work, but to the handlers, gatekeepers, and middlemen), to say nothing of 3) largely unspoken rules governing who is allowed to write and what they are allowed to write about. As is always the case when a culture or some aspect of it undergoes unrest and transition, one age didn't smoothly begin just as the other ended, and instead they are currently overlapping and generating incredible friction because of it, like tectonic plates sliding against each other;


• Fanfiction by any other name is written by professional authors ALL THE TIME, and THEY get to be lauded as literary lights! HYPOCRISY.

Regarding that last point: Whether or not you subscribe to the theory that all art is derivative (as I do), I think almost everyone will allow that at least some art—that is, some published, for-profit, critically-acclaimed art—is derivative. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, for example, or Wicked, or Girl with a Pearl Earring. bookshop has a great big list of them right over here. I'm going to paraphrase what I said to leksa when she asked whether collating these lists was even a good idea, let alone a convincing argument*:

See, whenever this issue comes up (every six to twelve months?), I just want to yell, "RICHARD III, THE END", and have it actually BE the end. But it doesn't work like that, because I don't think the problem is selective memory. I don't think anyone who believes fanfiction is a scourge and a crime ever looks at those lists in this context and suddenly realizes, "My god! Richard III was a real person, I forgot! That makes Richard III fanfiction! And if Shakespeare did it, it must be okay!" I think what they almost always say instead is, that doesn't count. That is, that what Shakespeare did in Richard III (and, you know, ALL of his other plays) was fundamentally different from what fanfiction writers on the internet do when they write stories about Harry and Draco, or the characters in Diana Gabaldon's stories (whoever they may be; I swear I had never even HEARD of this woman before this week), or celebrity figures in our contemporary culture.

So through a combination of goalpost-moving, equivocation, and good old-fashioned double standards, they wind up with a fallacious line of argument that goes something like, "what you (fans on the internet) write is horrible, because it is fanfiction; what I (the respectable, published, critically-acclaimed author) write is not fanfiction, because it is good."

Implicit in this reasoning is not only the premise that fanfiction can never be "good" and will never be literature; but an even deeper contempt for fandom in all its forms, and for fans in particular (or at least for fans as they are imagined to be), variously women, teenagers, nerds, losers, amateurs, and plebs—the pathetic, the shrill, and the common. It's a righteous, elitist fury directed at the seething masses who are daring to do something they have no business doing, something above them. Well, fuck that.

The reality is that at least some art is derivative; some is posted by amateurs on the internet, and some is published by respectable publishing houses and printed in books; and some of it is good, and some of it is bad, for whatever values of "good" and "bad" you want to work from; but you can't change those values to suit your argument. And every time you try, those losers on the internet are going to be more than happy to explain how ridiculous you sound, using very small words that hopefully you can understand.


* To clarify, and to hopefully better represent leksa's original thoughts on the subject (see her comment below), obviously these lists are a) true!, b) satisfying and gratifying to those of us within fandom, and c) sometimes genuinely effective in changing people's perspectives wrt fanfiction; but they're limited in their efficacy when people can dismiss those parallels between fanfiction and original fiction (for which I discuss at least one motivation above), OR (as leksa pointed out) when people accept those parallels, but dismiss and disparage those professional derivative works as much as the amateur ones.


ETA: Thank you for making my point for me, Jasper Fforde!

My thoughts on Fan Fiction are pretty much this: That it seems strange to want to copy or 'augment' someone else's work when you could expend just as much energy and have a lot more fun making up your own. I feel, and I think with good reason, very proprietorial about Thursday and all her escapades; clearly I can't stop you writing and playing what you want in private, and am very flattered that you wish to do so. But anything published in any form whatsoever - and that specifically includes the internet - I cannot encourage, nor approve of.

- Jasper Fforde (emphasis mine)

In the world of Thursday Next, literature is a much more popular medium than in our world, and Thursday is a member of SO-27, the Literary Detectives or LiteraTecs. Her work is centred on Swindon, where she, her husband, infant, and mother live. The importance that literature has in this alternate England is reflected in the fact that so many people want to change their name to that of famous authors that some must be numbered, by law- e.g. John Milton 432. 'WillSpeak' machines are often to be found in public places, such as railway stations- these contain a mannequin of a Shakespearian Character and will quote that character's most famous speeches upon payment.

In addition, the line between literature and reality becomes increasingly thin, allowing characters in the books and those in 'real life' to jump in and out of novels. This leads Thursday to change the ending of Jane Eyre; the joke being that the plot we know in our reality is the far superior change caused by Thursday. This also happens to other classic novels- Uriah Heep becomes the obsequious, and generally insincere character we know, due to an accident inside the book-world and Thursday's uncle Mycroft becomes Sherlock Holmes's brother.

- Wikipedia

There is some Olympic-caliber mental gymnastics going on here! Obviously when Jasper Fforde copies and augments someone else's work, that is not "Fan Fiction". I can't help but wonder how he would feel about a published writer, a fellow author, incorporating Thursday, et al. into their own work. If, say, Neil Gaiman wrote a story that took place in the Socialist Republic of Wales, would Fforde feel just as "proprietorial"? Or would that be an entirely different proposition?

/ETA

Via porntestpilot, Diesel is releasing a limited edition Iron Man version of their Only The Brave cologne. BEHOLD:



silentfire: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
walkingshadow: :D :D :D :D
silentfire: ONLY THE BRAVE
silentfire: . . . would want to smell like tony stark
walkingshadow: . . . are willing to smell like someone who has spent the last eight days locked in a garage welding things to other things?
silentfire: oh god, why?
silentfire: also, that's a fist, right?
silentfire: the bottle is shaped like a fist?
walkingshadow: it is shaped like a fist!
walkingshadow: i'm sure it's supposed to be manly and menacing and not in any way crazily kinkily sexual!
silentfire: yeah, all i get from that is scary/bad porn
walkingshadow: oh god i just got a vision of someone using it to check off their "object penetration (unusual objects)" square for the next round of kink bingo
walkingshadow: WHY BRAIN WHY
silentfire: lolllllll
silentfire: well, it looks like a fist! encased in latex! clutching a sex toy!
silentfire: i don't blame you
walkingshadow: i mean what are we SUPPOSED to think?
walkingshadow: it's bondage iron man all over again!
silentfire: really, is there any other kind?
walkingshadow: no, bondage iron man is pretty much the only iron man

SOMEBODY WONDERFUL sent me a giant box full of my favorite LUSH products, oh my goodness. But all I found inside (I mean, APART from all of my favorite and most delicious-smelling things) was a short, cryptic, and utterly anonymous note, so I don't know to whom I should direct my thousand thank yous! Was it you? Was it YOU??

I know I've been utterly silent on the internet and living inside my own head again, etc., etc., I am working on that. Things about which I have not been posting include: a host of fannish meta (including—but by no means limited to!—lurking, appropriation, racism, intersectionality, the Holmes/Watson dynamic, characters of color, the broccoli test, and the state of the fandom), Avoidant Personality Disorder, the fourteen television shows I am following, doping in tennis, current issues in delicious bookmarking, human-computer interface design, and this absolutely asinine article in the Economist that pissed me off really bad three months ago. In the meantime: when you see this, post a poem. Right?

( You Can Have It by Philip Levine )

On the glorious occasion of the anniversary of her birth, silentfire and I went to see Sherlock Holmes.

( spoilers will spoil you )

In conclusion: A++ WOULD WATCH AGAIN

❧ I'm back in Atlanta! But my luggage is still in Fort Lauderdale! Hilarious!

❧ marythefan, thank you so much for your gorgeous Chanukkah card! It was buried for a time under a mountain of everyone else's mail, but I have FOUND it, and it has brightened my evening immeasurably. ♥

❧ Had a great and only slightly weird conversation with my mom last night re: whether or not Sherlock Holmes was gay, and whether or not characters can be gay without their creators knowing it; did not mention the words slash, Star Trek, or fanfiction on the internet even once! Maybe next time.

❧ Cannot WAIT to see Sherlock Holmes.

❧ YULETIDE :D