Tuesday 15 May 01

In the category of insanely boring weather minutae of interest to no one but me: new record this morning, Highest Low Temperature Ever Recorded on This Day. Heh.

What that means is, I sat out on my back deck this morning with coffee and a cig, in tanktop and shorts, and watched the sun rise and felt warmth, soft warm air on my bare skin. This is an amazing and unearthly experience, fresh air on bare skin, not hurting, feeling good. (All of you out there living in the banana belt can just stop snickering, please.) It's so intensely sensual, and it makes me feel, briefly, that the cosmos can be a kind place, to toss me, however briefly, the pleasure of living in my own skin.

I'd woken up from brief and sweaty slumber with a...not a sex scene, exactly, an erotic scene, for one of the WIPs, lulling around in my head, and managed to get most of it onto the hard drive before it dissipated. Now I'm meandering through blogs, drinking coffee, and deciding to be a slacker and skip this morning's end-of-semester all-College get-together, which'll just be speeches and awards and sticky pastry and people I see every day anyway.

I was struck by Soo's comment about discovering she was the oldest person in the bar. I've had that realization often lately--in bars, in restaurants, at concerts, looking around at even fairly large crowds and knowing that I'm the oldest person in the room. I know I carry on a lot, boringly, about my age, but much of it is trying to sort out my confusion over just how old I really am. What that means.

I spent most of my life accustomed to being the youngest in the group, whatever group I was in. I was skipped through first grade (taught myself to read in kindergarten, which fucked with Der Program), and started college for the first time at 16, and for most of my life most of my close friends and lovers have been older than me, often significantly so.

But now...especially in my on-line life, I realize that most of the people I'm close to are (often significantly) younger than me. Chronologically, at least. Half my age, some of them. They've grown up in a different world than I did. We share a lot of the same interests and obsessions and jokes, but then all of a sudden I'll hit something that flips my geezer-switch, and I'll think--no, you're not a kid, Kat, you're pushing fifty. And that thought is--not bad, not upsetting, just--surprising. I'm not sure what it means.

When my dad was my age, he was a department chair with status and prestige and a big house and a family. When my mother was my age she had three teenagers and chaired the local League of Women Voters and ran a complicated household. They had retirement funds and nice clothes and hosted cocktail parties and watched Masterpiece Theatre and bought new cars every few years. That's what I figured middle age must be like, when I was a kid.

But now--I wake up alone in my messy little apartment and flick on the computer, put on some Liz Phair, shiver happily over Sheila's and Shrift and Nestra's Wesley/Gunn snippets, snicker at Kate sniping about Spike's sex appeal, and write a few paragraphs of obscure smut. Soon I'll pull on my jeans and a t-shirt, hook my bookbag over a shoulder and hop on my bike and ride to campus. I have no house, no retirement fund, I barely own a car. I have no idea what I'll be doing five years from now. Which is to say, I live like a college student (and a slacking, slash-loving one at that). It's what I know how to do, it fits for me. But I wonder sometimes how it'll be to be living like a college student when I'm--55? 65? 75?

I'm making it up as I go along, this how-to-be-middle-aged thing. Don't seem to be doing it the way that anyone I know did, the ones who went before me. The whole "Well, wait till you grow up, and then you'll settle down" thing never kicked in for me, and at this rate I suspect it never will.

And I have no problem with that. I don't need the status, the big house, the family, the security. The only thing that makes me uneasy, sometimes, is wondering what'll happen when the body craps out on me, if I get to the point where I can't support myself, can't live independently. (And I already know the answer to that one--if and when that happens, then that'll be a good time to die. One thing that does come with age is a better understanding of where one's personal lines are--which ones are provisional/flexible and which are absolute.) (Of course, I may feel differently about all this in thirty years.)

Late night, Monday 14 May 01

Late, but I can't sleep. It's a hot summer night. We're in the middle of a freakish heat wave--94 degrees today, good lord, when after all three weeks ago today it was snowing. (Three weeks? Four? Too hot and lazy to go check...)

Anyway, it's one of those nights when what I really want to do is get in the car and put on some good music, loud, and drive fast, singing along at the top of my lungs; drive till sunrise, and watch the sun come up over someplace I've never seen before. With Krycek in the passenger seat beside me (g).

I won't, of course, because I have to be at work in the morning, and anyway Alex is otherwise engaged. But god, nights like this make me restless.

Monday 14 May 01

The blessings of all deities and carloads of chocolate go out to Cathrine, who generously gave of her time and smarts to fix my formatting woes. Many many thanks! 

I am also deeply grateful to LaT, whose new story left me in core meltdown. Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all the saints. Go, read, NOW. Except not at work, of course, unless your workplace is tolerant of pitiful whimpering moaning sounds of need coming from your cubicle. And it'd be a good idea to have a bowl of ice cubes handy.

The only other thing I have to say is that damn, I am still such a hopeless Krycek slut. Utterly hopeless. He was in fine, fine form last night, slicing through the muddled doughy inanity of season 8 like a stiletto. Left me all aquiver, and sent me to bed with resolve to beef up his part in the XF/HL crossover that's suddenly lurched back to life in my brain, after long dormancy. Methos and Krycek and Mulder, holed up together in an abandoned farmhouse, plotting mayhem ... ah, some classics just never go out of style. 

Sunday 13 May 01

Redesign day; this represents a first whack at a new look, and it's still subject to change. I've spent the afternoon wrestling with HTML, trying to figure out the rudiments of style sheets, and being frustrated with my inability to get things to go the way I want.  On top of which, I'm not sure I'm happy with the way this looks.  Oh to have good design sensibilities...

I have a query for anyone out there whose expertise in such matters surpasses mine (which would be, uh, almost anyone).  What I'm trying for here is two white blocks, on the swirly background, with the main blog text in one, and then the links in a smaller, shorter one to the right.  So I did a three-column, two-row table at 90% width. For the first column, the one containing this text, I used rowspan to combine the two rows and gave it a white background; ditto with the narrow middle column but for background I used the same swirly background as the page.  Then the third column I left in two rows; the top cell I gave a white background and put the links text in, and the lower cell I gave the swirly background.

But as you can see, what's happening is that the top cell in the right column expands, vertically, to run almost the entire length of the page, instead of ending where the text ends, so I get this long run of white stripe, which isn't what I wanted.

I keep thinking there's got to be some simple mistake I'm making here, with some simple fix, but I can't figure it out.  If anyone can help, I'd be very grateful.

And despite frustrations, it was cool to begin to figure out style sheets.  Especially since I was just klutzing along at home with Notepad and a couple of tutorial sites on the web.  Dreamweaver is fun, of course, but there's some Puritan streak in my nature that enjoys trying to do things the hard way.  I still don't really know what I'm doing, but I'm keeping amused.
 

Saturday 12 May 01

So I've spent the day coping with my own extremely perverse version of Seasonal Affective Disorder.

See, it's a perfectly gorgeous day out.  A Saturday in mid-May, brilliant blue sky, sun pouring down, just cool enough that the sun feels good, a mild breeze, crabapples and lilacs and tulips in full bloom, green green leaves, green green grass, birds singing like mad.  You could not ask for a more gloriously, ridiculously perfect day if you ordered it out of the catalogue.>

I know from long experience that days like this are almost guaranteed to send me into a tailspin.

This isn't biochemical, as classic SAD seems to be.  Rather, it's a cognitive artifact of living in Minnesota.  If you spend your life in a fairly harsh climate, the arrival of beautiful weather brings with a moral imperative of near-paralyzing intensity:  You Must Go Outside and Do Something.  Take advantage of all this gorgeousness. Live up to it.  If you are not walking around the lake, rollerblading, biking or hiking, gardening, playing golf or tennis, boating, kite-flying, doing something of an outdoorsy recreational nature, you are spitting in the face of a rare good mood on the part of the Weather-Gods, and furthermore proving yourself of inferior human calibre. 

I've spent such days, in the past, pacing in a tight little circle in my room, sobbing, because I just couldn't mobilize an adequate response to the challenge such days present.  Couldn't make myself go out and enjoy, dammit, as all the good normal folks were doing.  Whatever I might push myself to do, it could never be enough.

Until one such fine day, it finally dawned on me:  No one's keeping score here.  God is not following me around with a clipboard, frowning and deducting human-worth points for every springtime hour I spend indoors with a book instead of strenuously pursuing outdoor recreation.  And if I really prefer (as I do) steely grey overcast November days with a scouring north wind, then I should for god's sake go out and enjoy those days (as I do), and on days like this, leave the parks and the lakes to the happy throngs of the normal, and stay in and write something instead.

And I've actually made quite a bit of progress on a story today, which is a pretty reliable curative for mental fucked-upedness, and has kept me from more than a few minor twinges of racking guilt.  It's a good steely-grey-November kind of story, too, bung-full of emotional pain and thwartedness.  Cheers me right up .
 

Wednesday 9 May 01

Crankiness.  Crankitude.

See, last night's Buffy really bugged me, partly for reasons that I realize--heh--I can blame on the X-Files.   Long-term overexposure to completely senseless cosmic mytharcs have left me with a permanent allergic sensitivity, so the whole Key business makes me break out in hives and start twitching.

If you're trying to sustain a prolonged plot arc, it needs to carry conviction.  Especially if it's a serious type of plot arc, one that has actual consequences for the lives of characters we've come to care about.  And *most* particularly if the plot arc in question is of the myth/fantasy persuasion. This is one of those paradoxical truths:   To live outside the law you must be honest; great humor is rooted in pain; and fantasy/mythology requires scrupulous attention to mythic plausibility and internal logic.  Otherwise what you've got is some writer's arbitrary whim, duct-taped together to carry action sequences forward, and which never connects with the larger archetypal architecture that gives shape and meaning to events.  It gets to be like a ramshackle disjointed bedtime story told by someone who's too tired to think sequentially.

So the episode bugged me.  It's not just that, from a craft perspective, you know you're in trouble when you have to haul Mr. Exposition Man in, tie him to a post, and have him give the long "You don't know what you're dealing with" speech.  And it's not even just that Buffy (the character) is currently working my last nerve.  Or maybe it is Buffy herself, partly.  A hero, god knows, doesn't have to be infallible or always make good decisions; but in my book a hero has to at least have one eye trained on the larger picture, the bigger consequences of her actions for the whole group of people on whose behalf she's being heroic, which in this case appears to be all of humanity, at minimum.  And to decide and act with those consequences firmly in mind.

Ah well.  I *did* like Xander lighting Spike's cig for him .  Apart from that, though, there was a fair amount of teeth-grinding going on at Chez Kat.

And the other reason I'm cranky, I think, is that I was idly wandering around through a maze of Livejournals and discovered that a writer whom I admire, who's done fine work in a variety of fandoms I enjoy, is bowing out of all of them to focus exclusively on .... um .... N'Sync slash.

OK.  I don't get it.  I *so* do not get it.  Get it I do not.  And will not, even if I ponder it from now until the time the sun goes nova and consumes the earth.

I mean, of course people are absolutely entitled to follow whatever path their fannish heart leads them down.  It's just that this is one where I absolutely can't follow.  It's not the RPS factor--I don't have really strong feelings one way or the other on that topic.  It's just that I look at N'Sync and I echo Gertrude Stein: "There's no there there."

Maybe the appeal *is* precisely that, in character terms, you have essentially a blank slate to work with.  You can pretty much create character where none is given.  Maybe the N'Sync writers are just more original than I am . 

In any event, I know I'm being selfish and greedy in wanting good writers to write stuff *I* could enjoy.  People need to do what makes them happy, and I don't want to rain on anyone's parade or diss anyone's fandom.  I'm just being cranky and I need to snap out of it.
 

Monday 7 May 01

Catching up with a few people, after a day of trying to get RL at least minimally back on track:

LaT, new story?! Whoo-hoo, I am so revved! Can't wait to see this!

Shrift, major congrats on the whole tassel-in-the-eye thing!  It took me 13 years to finish my BA, so trust me, I know how good it feels to get the whole thing behind one.

Te .... god.  Just--god damn.  I wept, reading.  And you and Cecile will be in my thoughts today.

Anna, so damn good to hear your voice again.  And Maygra--hope you're back safe, you've been missed.

And Sheila--um, thanks! 

And in other thoughts....

So why the hell do I keep watching the X-Files?  I really don't know.  At this point, it's like sex with the ex--under all the pissed-offedness, there's lots of nostalgia and sentiment, all these yearning memories of how good it used to be, and still, every so often, little sparks of that goodness.  But afterward one feels tired and stupid and vaguely ashamed.  One feels one should be getting on with one's life in a more constructive way.

I like Robert Patrick, who I think has done yeoman labor with some truly thankless material.  My admiration for Gillian Anderson is directly proportional to my outrage at a good deal of what's been done with or to Scully in recent years.  And any excuse to look at David Duchovny is--well, excusable, I guess .  What can I say--he was my first fannish passion, and he's still a damn fine-looking man, and I am capable of being a sentimental fool.

But not enough of one to be taken by all the crypto-cutsie references to the past that Spotnitz saw fit to litter tonight's episode with.  I'm sitting there thinking, "Yo, Spotzie?  A glimpse of Queequeg's collar tag is not what we have in mind when we talk about continuity.  Don't do us any favors, OK?"  And being annoyed that naming a ditzy incompetent agent after a deceased fan--who likely could've written a much better episode than Spotzie pulled off here--is seen as some kind of huge honor. 

I'll soldier through the next two weeks, feeling like a cheap slut because the promise of even the briefest appearance by Krycek is enough to glue me in front of the set.  But after that .... well.  I tell you what, watching that show has started to feel like reading bad fanfic, the kind that usually sends me back to rewatch source material to scour my brain.  Now the source material is sending me to the good fanfic for similar cleansing.  What's wrong with this picture?

I marvel sometimes at the amount, the sheer tonnage, of human talent and ingenuity and care that fans have given to that show, over the years.  The fiction, the list conversations, the Usenet debates, the vids, the web shrines, the timelines that attempt to make some sense of it all...  If it could somehow be quantified, concretized--the person-hours, the quantity and intensity of care and thought--hell, it'd probably equal the gross national product of some smaller countries.  And it just stuns me sometimes that the frail vessel upon which this huge superstructure rests can be jerked one way or another, seemingly at random, by one person's whim.  I'm not really meaning to rag on CC here, that's been done better by others in any event and I get tired of it.  And I know that any unhappiness I feel is utterly negligible, dust in the wind, compared to the genuine material suffering of people who've devoted a lifetime's hard brutal work in service to some corporation, only to be thrown aside when the market winds shift. 

We aren't in this for the money, of course; we're fans, we do it for love.  But it grinds me sometimes to know how little valued that love is, in anyone's eyes but our own.  My mother's generation was filled with women who spent decades of their life, in the name of love, working to sustain all those elements of life that don't show up in the profit/loss column--the household, the children, the aged parents, the volunteer organizations.  The ironed shirt and the scrubbed floor and the baby shower and the hot dish at the post-funeral supper.  When they ended up in divorce court, it was often a hell of a shock to them to realize that the work they'd given their lives to was, essentially, valueless.  Didn't show up on the ledger. 

It's not like I want what I do as a fan to show up on any ledger, god knows.  I'm happy being invisible, except to other fans.  It just bothers me, on some deep irrational level, that all of us, the huge collective mass of fandom, seems to be viewed as so essentially invisible.  Negligible.  It bugs me that the collective power of our sustained care has, in fact, zero power at all over the show itself, while Chris Carter's whim of the week has plenty.   And I can't help but notice at times that so much of fandom, at least in my experience, runs on women's effort and women's time--which, historically, has been similarly devalued.

I don't know where I'm going with this.  Just griping, which is silly.  I know I'm damn lucky to have found fandom at all, and if it makes me a little insane to witness the long slow death of XF, well, all good things must end, and what really matters is that there are plenty of folks out there I can trust to redo it, and get it right, and that I get to read them.
 

Saturday 5 May 01

OK. Whew.  Story's up.  I'm sitting on my hands trying not to type in apologia for how much better it should've been. 

No matter how many times I do this, I still have to spend about five minutes with my finger hovering over the Enter key, muttering "Hit the button, Frank," before I can actually make myself post something.

Now that that's done, I still (a) need to update the links on this page,  (b) want to redesign the whole page but don't have any bright ideas, (c) have a stack of dirty laundry the size of Mount Denali, and (d) am faced with the rather terrifying concept of launching back into either of the long WIPs. 

So what I think I'll do is go to the gym.  Kickboxing class starts up again today, and the idea of punching has appeal. 

Thursday 3 May 01

Whoo.  Tired.  This is the week that the Gods of Having a Social Life, for some inexplicable reason, decided to swing through these parts, and every night I've been busy in either RL or chat.  (Most of the time, outside of work, I have slightly more social interaction than a Trappist monk.  But only slightly.)  It's been good, because I really like all the people I'm getting to spend time with, but being a hard-core introvert I need plenty of down time to replenish the aquifers, and I haven't been getting it.  This weekend, though, is marked off for laundry and long walks and solitary story-brooding.>

I tend to forget how unstable I get right around the time I'm finishing something.  Even more than usual, I mean.  Earlier this week I had a late-night brain spasm that what I really needed to do with the almost-finished WIP, the one that I'm about ready to post, was to rewrite it and take out the sex scene.  Because I became convinced that the sex scene sucked profoundly.  Speranza, bless her, talked me down off that particular ledge and I ended up confining myself to just minor twiddles of rewrite.  (Jesus, I hate writing sex scenes.  Arrrgh.)

But anyway, when a piece is almost done--that's the moment I really have to confront how far it always falls short of what I'd intended it to be, what a flawed and compromised version of the original vision has managed to make its mangled way into actual prose.  When I say this to others, it tends to come across as whinily self-deprecating or unduly self-critical, I know--but that's because no one else, not even the best and brightest reader, can ever see what I originally had in mind.  They're not psychic.  All they see is the story as it stands, and because I work hard at my writing, the results are usually at least competently crafted, certainly by fanfic standards.  Pretty good, even, sometimes.

But never really what I'd dreamed of. 

This is inevitable, of course--life in the real world is about compromise and imperfection and falling short, and pushing on regardless.  What keeps me writing is really the hope that, with each new story, I'll screw up a little less badly, get a little closer than I did the last time.

The danger (and not just in writing) is the temptation to give up the struggle of action and simply live in my head, happily confabulating perfect fantasies that I'll never go through the hassle of turning into inevitably-flawed reality.  The corrective for this, of course, is the realization that amongst the wreckage of the failed dream are some truly wonderful things that sprouted up in ways that I never could have planned or imagined.

Gardening is a constant reminder of this consolation; one begins with a glowing vision, hatched amidst piles of nursery catalogues and graph paper in January, and by July one confronts what is in fact an actual mess--the phlox have got the mildew, the astilbes died a week after planting, the daylilies are the wrong color and clash atrociously with the roses, and the whole plan has basically gone down in flames.  But by god, over here in this corner is a whole platoon of volunteer poppies, utterly unexpected and glorious, and they are much more beautiful than anything one could have planned, they salvage the entire enterprise.  One feels both elated and humbled.

But still ... I remember a bit from a gardening book by Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts (which is a fine read for those who like opinionated cranky garden writing), about her dream of replacing a shabby trellis at one end of her property with an espaliered Belgian fence--a tightly-spaced row of miniature fruit trees, pruned so as to make a kind of lattice.  Espaliers are beautiful and elegant and also a great deal of work, and as Perenyi says, "I ask myself if I really care to cope with twenty-five little trees eager to start a new life under my aegis, needing to be pruned, supported, and no doubt mended after a bad winter storm.  And I guess I don't.  But in the meantime, a curious thing happens whenever I look at that space.  I seem to see the Belgian fence superimposed on the existing trellis, like a double exposure.  Another step and the trellis would disappear, leaving only the fence in my mind's eye.  And that would be perfect, better than the real thing."

Yes.  Perfect the way my unwritten stories are perfect, shimmering in my mind.  Better than the real thing could ever turn out to be.  It's a temptation at times to just leave them there, and not screw them up the way I inevitably will trying to hammer them into words.  But for now I guess I'll keep on trying.  Not ready to give up on it just yet.

So--back to grinding out the words, making a hash of things, and waiting for the poppies to spring up somewhere unexpected.
 

 To the older blather.

Current lint is here.