nor so wide as a church door

YAY IT'S UNDER 90F. \o/

Also, in case someone has managed not to see it, KORRA TRAILER OMGYESSSSSSSSS.

Ahem. Also, I went and saw HPDH2 on Sunday, with my family. ( Spoilers, of course. ) I enjoyed it very much; like GoF, which also makes me cry, I may not watch it repeatedly, but it is Harry Potter, and it's going to be a bit of me forever no matter what. Harry Potter is the reason I found fandom in middle school, which means I owe it more than I probably even realize. Someday I will finish that AU, dammit.

Also, I watched Burn Notice. ( Only a few things. )

And now I should get back to work. :D

So, I finished yesterday's post about two seconds before I flipped over to my reading page and saw the news/discussions beginning about FictionAlley and Pepsi Refresh, and I have basically been reading stuff about it ever since (in between bouts of work on my NaNo, of course), including posts by: seperis, here and here, schemingreader, melannen, futuransky, obsession-inc (with handy table, plus more links), justira, and katekat. Plus, of course, the unfunnybusiness post, and the update about FA withdrawing.

I'm kind of surprised my head hasn't exploded. :P Everybody has said just about everything; what it comes down to for me is that it was badly managed, pretty much. I'm glad to see the sort of counterswell of insistence that fandom has value be paired with not excusing FA's bad handling - I've been working hard recently on not letting myself feel ashamed of my fannishness, as exemplified by my arguments with M and my mother about it, and I think I'm getting pretty good at it. As for FA, mostly it makes me feel vague nostalgia; I don't think I was ever actually part of the site, but back in the day, I did visit it quite a bit, and F_W often had links to epic explosions that I now think of with a certain fondness. When I get home, I think I'll chip in a little to their actual donation drive, now that they've withdrawn. Oh, Harry Potter fandom. Even if I manage to finish the epic HP AU, I will never quite quit you.

More boringly, the end of this week is going to be hell at work. My supervisor is going to be out for the rest of today and all of tomorrow, and unreachable entirely tomorrow, which means I am left with the epic task of sorting out the proofs for the school's ENTIRE FALL MAGAZINE and getting them sent out, in addition to getting a Thanksgiving card set up and off to the printer's and attending a management meeting in her stead. None of which I have ever done before. D: She did leave me with a little handout/summary thing of the work that's been going through our office lately, so it's possible I can get away with giving that out, nattering about it a little, and leaving it at that. Still, these are not going to be the best two days ever. :P

Man, what a weekend.

Friday afternoon was lovely. The day was so beautiful that I took a walk down to the waterfront, which was spiced up somewhat by a small dog - hir owner complimented me on my skirt, which was very kind, and I guess the dog must've liked it, too, because zie tried to take a bite out of it. Fortunately, there was no damage to the skirt, so it all ended well (although the dog was sadly thwarted, I suppose). Then I sat on the rocks for nearly two hours, listening to music and enjoying the breeze and the view. Amusingly, when I was on my way back up, I ran into a woman who had been inside the salon right next to where the Dog Incident occurred, and she stopped me to tell me it had made her laugh - in a very friendly way, not, like, a mean way.

Unfortunately, Friday evening was ( somewhat less shiny. ) :P

Saturday, likewise, was shaping up to be a lovely day, as AT came by and we ended up going on another walk to the waterfront and talking for a while, and then walking back up, getting lunch and ice cream, and eating both while we watched more Burn Notice. (I've gotten her halfway through the second season, so far. \o/) And then I came back to the room, only for Bailey to turn to me, teary-eyed, and tell me that her mother had called to let her know that her cat had died.

Clearly, me taking walks to the waterfront is just a bad idea.

It looks like today's going to turn out all right, though. Easter mass this morning, and it was definitely more cheerful than Palm Sunday, which was nice; as a bonus, I actually knew one of the songs we were singing, which has never happened to me before. We sang much more than I was expecting, including some parts that are usually spoken, and I was also taken somewhat by surprise by the part where the priest came around and flicked water on everybody. :D Oh, Catholicism. Just when I think I've got the whole routine almost figured out, you throw me a curveball.

I'm still waffling over whether or not to sign up for ladiesbigbang - I'm leaning toward not, because that way I won't have to feel disappointed in myself if I don't finish the fic, but if I do get it done on time, I can still turn it in. Plus I don't need to make anybody produce a complement - I have my sister for that, we've already started trading chunks of story for art. :D I kind of can't believe how quickly Avatar: TLA has taken me over. I mean, I'm still chugging away at the HP AU, albeit a little more slowly because there's some background work I have to wrangle; but the Dead Moms are now edging toward forty things, and I've already got over 2,000 words of the fic I'm considering doing for ladiesbigbang. The concerns I have about being able to complete it for the 'bang are in terms of story completeness - somehow I don't think writing 15,000 words is going to be much of a strain. /o\ And yet I can't say, in the end, that I really feel all that faily for wallowing so gratuitously in awesome ladies.

... A little guilty, maybe, for the (ridiculous) amount of effort I'm willing to invest in it versus the (miniscule) amount I find myself caring about, say, Biology; granted. :D

Looks like it's storydump time once again; my classes have picked up ever so slightly, possibly because the professors can all sense Thanksgiving inching closer, and combined with all the proofing of other people's papers I've somehow ended up doing (AT asks me to check over her Spanish papers! I don't even know Spanish!), some of my copious free time has started slipping out of my grasp.

Which is ironic, considering that I was bored in September, and now NaNo is coming up. Oh, life.

Anyway. In the category of Offensive Things B Has Said/Done, there are a couple new gems, including ( rape is funny! This movie might have a rape scene in it, but it's a comedy! ) Needless to say, I was not at all amused.

B laughed.

As has recently become my SOP, I let her know what I thought, although not with the kind of language or at the kind of volume I might have liked. Br came down very firmly on my side later, which was a relief, but B still insists the movie was funny, which kind of makes me want to cry.

The other one was the somewhat less distressing ( he sounds gay! ) I did not know it was possible to be "too PC" for Vermont, of all states.

The interesting thing is that I wasn't being PC. Perhaps this is just me, but that term tends to connote more calculation than anything else, when I hear it - you are being PC if you are careful or are telling other people to be careful what you/they say because you are worried that a member of some kind of minority will one day overhear and be offended by it. And I'm pretty sure that used to be what I was doing, at least in some cases. But somewhere in the last few years, I've managed to grow a brain, and now it's more about stopping things because they are actively offending me, not because they have the potential to offend somebody else. I mean, I still want to make sure that I speak up when I see something that might bother somebody who isn't me, because it's better than nothing even if it speaks to an enormous lack of empathy on my part, but most of the time, now, I am offended. That attitude toward rape bothers me immensely; and, yes, partly it bothers me kind of on behalf of anyone who has ever been sexually assaulted, but mostly it just bothers me, even though I am not a member of that group (... yet, I suppose I should say, considering the odds). That attitude toward gay men, likewise, bothers me, even though the odds are very long that I will ever be a gay man, and I am terribly lacking in gay male friends.

... And now I need to stop talking about this, because I'm getting progressively less able to communicate my point, and also if I don't stop I am going to be hugely grouchy and sharp with B when she comes back.

On the more amusing end of the spectrum of stupid I've encountered recently, there was a boy in my World Literature class who ended up taking control of the class discussion, and moved it kind of abruptly away from the Aeneid and toward the value of war. ... In a sense where he said, "I'm okay with America becoming a violent empire that takes over the world if it means I'm going to be wealthy and happy," almost verbatim. He quoted Sean Hannity on the matter of America being the greatest nation God ever put on the earth, unironically. He actually told the class that it was a good thing the French, the English, and the Germans had been such good "warriors" (yes, that is the word he used), because otherwise America wouldn't be here - they wouldn't have been able to clear out all those Amerindians who were in their way, after all.

It pretty much went like this:

CRAZY BOY: **talks a boatload of ridiculousness**
REST OF THE CLASS: ... there is not enough D: in the WORLD.
ONE AWESOME KID IN THE CORNER WHOM I NOW ♥: Well, he did quote Sean Hannity. I mean, what were we expecting, after that?

Basically, the AKitC (Awesome Kid in the Corner) saved the whole incident from being something that it would make me sad inside to remember, and turned it into a reasonably amusing anecdote to tell people. ♥, AKitC. ♥.

I'm still going to mass on Sunday afternoons - I really, really enjoy the singing, although I'm still a little nervous that somebody's going to get weird about me being in the choir, and it's interesting to listen to the sermons. Sometimes I almost feel like the sermon ruins the day's reading, because the passages from the Bible are so eloquent they pretty much speak for themselves. And there is always the occasional awkward moment - last Sunday, for example, the reading was from the end of Mark 10, the passage about the blind man named Bartimaeus asking to be healed. The ... priest? I am still not sure about my terminology - went a little overboard in imagining the awfulness of being blind; I was with him on it being something of a shame to never see the faces of your parents, but the look of love in somebody's eyes strikes me as kind of take-it-or-leave-it (wouldn't the sound of love in somebody's voice, or the feel of love in somebody's touch, be pretty amazing?), and he totally lost me on the blind missing out on the "fullness of being a human person" [sic]. I was expecting him to go on to something like never seeing the colors of a sunset, not, you know, somehow not being a complete person. o.O

Also, I still have trouble not laughing when the bells ring during the transubstantiation (and why do I know that word and not what the guy who talks is called?); I know this is awful of me, but it seriously does sound like the background sound effect for a moment of truly terrible SFX from an old episode of The Twilight Zone, or something.

The HP AU is ever so slowly inching its way toward completion. I'm trying to get a decent chunk of it done before NaNo starts, but it is dawning on some part of my subconscious that when I finish it - well, when I finish it I'm going to edit it, natch, until it is less awful, but at some point after that, I'm going to ... post it. Probably on the Pit, first, although I'd like to have it here, too, just for the sake of having all my fannishness in one place (with tags!). Other people (besides M and my sister) will be able to see it. /o\ I ... I don't know about this whole "writing" thing.

And, of course, it doesn't help that NaNo is starting to take over my brain. The odds are on a sequel to last year: this time, instead of thwarting the massive evil plot of a clockwork company in AU!Britain, my dwarf airship pirate captain and her trusty crew will most likely be fighting demons in AU!India. And possibly borrowing a goddess's hammer to do a little smashing; we'll see.

Aaaaaaaand now that I'm done with this giant wall of text, I should go get dinner. \o/

My birthday was Monday; sadly, it was not wholly stress-free, since I had to do an interview, but it was pretty close. I got an early present over the weekend, so that some birthdaying could be done while my dad was still at home - it turned out to be an absolutely gorgeous antique typewriter, whose only flaw is that its spacebar is a little bit overenthusiastic. (Also the part where I can't save anything is very weird. There's no Ctrl key! I am so lost!) Bonus: I now understand why the Shift key is so named.

On my actual birthday, I got only one more present - my sister's present for me hasn't arrived yet, but that just means when I do get it (this weekend, I'm hoping) I'll have plenty of time to watch enjoy it. Whatever it is. Because I don't know. **cough**

Anyway. I got a Polaroid camera - the sort I remember from grade school, where the teacher took pictures and everybody fought over who got to wave it around 'til it developed. My mom went all old school on me this year. :D The cake was awesome, as always.

A few more wildlife encounters to document, also. The fuzzy cheerful one would be a very close pass by a deer in the car, going up the lower curve of the road my house is on; it was standing right by the guardrail, staring over it at me with its enormous eyes. The somewhat less pleasant one would be the one where Calvin caught a squirrel at the end of the walk, and, well. Suffice it to say that it did not end especially well for the squirrel, who now presumably roams the Great Pine Tree in the sky.

( A little fic chatter. )

Also, this song has been dogging me recently, so.

( J'ai compris que les années se passe vite ... )

And, of course, the translation - again, the work of my fading high school French.

( Translation! )

A BAFA is not quite a diploma, if I'm remembering correctly; it's more like some kind of youth leadership certificate. A ZUP is a zone à urbaniser en priorité, a "priority urbanization zone", which doesn't really condense to any succinct English phrase I can think of ("slum" has something of the same feel to it, the same sort of connotation, judging by the way one of my French teachers explained it, but it's not the right word - and, of course, the denotations are totally different).

Man, I get such a nerdtastic thrill out of translating things. :D

First, a little lyrics spam - I have memorized this song, and have been singing it to myself in the car on the way to and from work for the past couple of weeks. I figure I might as well preserve it for myself, in case I ever forget it.

( Lyrics to The Laughlin Boy. )

There's a chorus - listen to me, children, well, I wouldn't tell a lie - but I'm not super-fond of it, and also I don't remember between which verses it repeats, so. I'm fond of this song partly because it's the only one I can think of written in this story-of-a-hero kind of way about a conscientious objector, and partly because Tracy Grammer's voice is fine. I have got to get my hands on some more of her music, because, damn. There's something about the tone quality of her voice that I just love.

The second ep of Warehouse 13 was ( overall probably not as good as the pilot - teeny spoilers, probably no one cares. ) I think it's possible that they're trying a little too hard to be ~original~; I want to say, like, guys, it is srsly okay if you pick well-known or obvious or predictable artifacts, I am here for partner dynamics and banter. Still, I can't convince myself to drop it; I have already written snippets of ten (TEN! AUGH) Cliché-Bingo-based fics about Pete and Myka, and at least five more are trying to get out. My life is so hard.

BURN NOTICE. YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. That is pretty much all I have to say about that. I know it's maybe a little silly, but I kind of love the ones where Michael wins people over through his noble refusal to leave them behind/let them get hurt/what-have-you - and also I am a sucker for Sam and Fi coming to the rescue. And his mom, OMG ♥. Madeline is MADE OF AWESOME. \o/ If I love this show any harder, I'm going to break something.

Tonight is Harry Potter Night, pretty much; my friends and I are all getting together to see HP6 this evening ... in costume, because we are all GINORMOUS DORKS. M is going to be Professor Trelawney, with scarves and bracelets and big glasses; J is going to be Tonks - she is for serious dedicated, she will be dying her hair pink; K is going to be Luna, because she pretty much is anyway; and Ka is probably going to be Narcissa Malfoy, as she is tall and pointy and blond. (Q is in Boston, doing an internship.) I was briefly contemplating being McGonagall, as I have a plaid nightgown (she totally had a tartan dressing gown on for about a page of OotP, okay, it is a TTLY VALID COSTUME), but then I had an apostrophe epiphany, and decided to be Irma Pince instead. I can totally rock a stern librarian outfit. And also I'll feel like not too much of a weirdo if nobody else besides us is dressed up, which is something I could probably not pull off in the nightgown.

In thesis news, I finally got the whole IRB thing sorted out, and made my first four calls to prospective interviewees today; I've got one set up for next Wednesday, and left three messages. \o/!

So. Yesterday was quiet; I decided not to go to work, because it was raining and I just plain didn't want to. I did go out, though, to help my sister check out an apartment. She's in the beginning stages of the process of moving out, which I don't even want to think about (the short version of this episode of My Issues: I have a lot of trouble accepting change, sometimes).

Today was similarly unexciting. However, SciFi was showing a new show today - at least, new in the sense that I haven't seen it anywhere before. I'm pretty sure All Souls was first produced while Angel was still on the air, and not in reruns, because I think I heard somewhere that it was on opposite, but I haven't actually looked it up yet. Its CGI certainly suggests late nineties/early naughts. :D

( Thoughts! Because, let's face it, I have nothing else to do. )

So that was fun. The Irrelevant Relationships are up to twenty-seven pages; they just can't be stopped. I'm hoping to do some slightly more relevant work on the HP AU tomorrow, and I also want to get down the bare bones of a Hellboy fic that won't leave me alone - ever since I wrote down that stupid little dishwashing thing, I've had Hellboy on the back burner, simmering along, with bits of scenes bubbling to the surface intermittently. Sometimes the way my brain works is really annoying.

My thesis proposal has been successfully resubmitted! *does a little dance* I drink from the keg of glory; bring me all the muffins and bagels in all the land. [/West Wing]

Man, that is such a weight off - I mean, until they reject it again, and I sink into angst and despair, and the long dark teatime of the soul comes upon me, of course. But until then, the world is AWESOME. \o/!

Dropping the thing off, in and of itself, was actually the least terrifying part of the whole bit. See, I had to go by my advisor's office again, because I needed her signature on the resubmit, and the door was closed. At first I could not decide whether this was good or bad: if she wasn't there, I didn't have to meet with her, but I, uh, also wasn't going to be able to, y'know, resubmit my proposal. And then I heard her voice from inside, and realized two things: a) she was on the phone, and b) I was totally going to have to knock on the door.

I'm irrational about these things, I know. But I get the same kind of visceral DO NOT WANT reaction in situations like this as I do when I find a spider on the wall next to me. Actually knocking on the door was like going to get a cup, and catching the spider by getting my hands reeeeeeally close to it, having to resist the urge to yank them back and run screaming every step of the way; it took me a good twenty minutes to work up to it. Thank god there aren't a lot of people wandering through the offices of the CMSI department.

But eventually, I did convince myself to knock, and got inside, and got the signature. She also let me know that it would probably be best for me to go by the library and try to take out recording equipment for the summer, since she's been having some problems with hers, and she doesn't want to give them to me if they aren't, y'know, working. Which is gonna be a whole new level of terror, I'm betting - I'm going to have to go into the library and ask somebody who I should talk to about it in the first place, and then once I find that person, I'm gonna need to have a full-on conversation about recording equipment and the logistics of taking it out for the summer, and AUGH - but I'm going to try not to worry about that 'til tomorrow.

Aside from that, I did a little prodding to the actual main story in my HP AU 'verse, rather than the side character shipfic; it actually went rather pleasantly. I also wrote a couple of teeny snippets of Merlin fic - nothing that's ever going to see the light of day, or anything, because pretty much nothing I write ever does, but it was fun. Sooner or later, I should probably ... actually watch the show. :D It's so nice, not having to put off fic for the sake of schoolwork; I can get struck by an idea and actually stop whatever I'm doing to go write about it for an hour or two, instead of just wishing I could, or maybe scribbling down a couple sentences so I don't forget and then getting back to work. Yay summer!

It's always so much fun to go back and watch PS/SS - Harry and everybody are all so tiny! Dumbledore is so twinkly! Snape is so DRAMATIC. And oh, my god, the line delivery of all the tiny child actors! It is so ADORABLY BAD. ♥! Neville is still totally my favorite, although tiny!Ron is almost as awesome.

And, of course, all the little things that niggle at me, I can now accept with peace in my heart, because I get to repair them in my massive AU 'verse. (McGonagall "Transfigured" the chessmen to "make them alive"? Really? An acceptable detention is taking students into the forest to go look around for something that's killing unicorns? REALLY?) Even if I never manage to actually finish that darn thing, it will at least have given me that.

I was trying really hard to watch it without getting all meta about it, but, ( as per usual, that's pretty much impossible for me these days. )

Anyway, it was a lot of fun to revisit, and I'm glad we watched it. It makes me all nostalgic - I actually remember being in elementary school, and having a friend tell me that I was like Hermione, and having no idea what she was talking about. And now at least a tenth of my total brainspace is involuntarily devoted to All Things Harry Potter. Not to mention, of course, that I would never have discovered online fandom without Harry Potter: HP is the reason I first ventured into the Pit, which is the place I found my first slash fic (Harry/Ron, and very explicit, since this was before the removal of NC-17 fic from FanFiction.net - I was shocked! Shocked!), and, well. It's been a pretty constant slide into iniquity since. :D

... This is making me start thinking about just what effect fandom has had on my life, but I should save babbling about that for tomorrow, because it ... it is tomorrow, actually, and I need to sleep.

I should be working on my paper. I need to finish this paper, this paper is very important. And yet what have I spent this morning doing? Sleeping, almost an hour later than I usually do; writing more Significant Moments in Insignificant Relationships (it is up to TWENTY-ONE PAGES now, no lie); and stalking people on the internet.

Which leads me to a quick repost, simply for my own future reference, of the poem musesfool posted today: ( The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart )

Pretty obviously an awesome poem, and especially so for me, given my twin loves of languages and ancient history. ♥.

Okay, self, paper time. *resolve face*