Tuesday 26 June 01

After dumping that big unfiltered guilt-spew here yesterday (which I'd be tempted to apologize for, except bleagh on apologia, and it was interesting to see how many other people also have such boxes, or steamer trunks, in their heads), I went off and had a pretty good day. This, which I discovered in Valeria's "friends" page, cheered me up a great deal, for whatever bent reason. Hallelujah and amen! And Rowan, yeah, it emphatically is a help to remember grisly secretarial jobs past, of which I've had more than I can count.

It's hot, hot hot HOT here, which usually makes me cranky, but I'm into enjoying every form of drastic and excessive weather lately, as long as it's not actually killing people. Heat makes me more random and non-productive than usual, though. I decided recently that I really want to get back into photography and put stuff up on my website, and frivolled away a lot of work time researching digital cameras and scanners. Also decided abruptly that I want to do something radical with my hair--I'm sick of my hair, this big blob of greyish-brown over-permed frizz. What I'd really like is to cut it off to about an inch long all over, bleach it white, and spike it. Think CKR in that godawful Viper episode, but shorter. It's be a gas, but I have to balance that against the fact that it'd cause P. the boyfriend to stroke out; he's one of those men who, whenever you mention cutting your hair, goes all spaniel-eyed and morose and petulant. Not that I live my life to make him happy, of course, but it's one of those choose-your-fights things. Anyway, I wasted some time in Photoshop, trying to transpose CKR-spiky-hair onto my head to see how it'd look, which was entertaining albeit unproductive.

So, today's mood: Shallow. Cheerful. Hot. Need to update links. Want to redesign page. Maybe later.

Monday 25 June 01

I am dismayed to realize that a dichotomy exists in my head which is just as harsh and rigid as any fundamentalist's Good/Evil split, or the Madonna/whore thing.

On one side are those phenomena in my life that are basically OK, in that I am keeping up with them, more or less, doing what I need to be doing, coping. And then there's everything else, all of which lives in the Giant Box of Guilt. The former category is very small; the second is damn near all-encompassing; it takes very little time of neglect for something to slide from OK into the Guilt-Box; and once it's in there, the odds of it actually getting dealt with diminish markedly, because even touching the box causes my stomach to twist up and my mind to blank out. Every so often I'm able to lift the lid and take a deep breath and haul something out and cope with it. But it takes huge effort.

Much of my e-mail correspondence is in the Guilt-Box. Many friendships. My writing, for the most part. Household tasks and responsibilities. Bill-paying. Physical self-care. Stories I'm supposed to be betaing. Paperwork at the office. And just this past week, this blog slid into the box, with a splat, and I haven't been able to make myself write here.

This is insane, yup. I have a good cognitive grip on the fact that the guilt is a self-perpetuating thing, that giving it space in my head is like inviting rats into the house, that indulging it simply guarantees that less and less and less will actually ever get done. I just don't seem to be able to get the fuck rid of it. Once you get rats in the house, they are tenacious little buggers.

Well. The blog, at least, is not so far down in the sludgy guilt-layers that I can't yank it out and rinse it off and try to get it back on the OK side of the ledger. Not like some things in the box, which are so deep down and wedged in so tightly and compacted so densely that they're in the process of turning into sedimentary rock and will never be dislodged. There are things in my life--jobs, relationships--that I've simply abandoned, because the accumulated guilt-shale was more than I could chisel through, and the weight was more than I could carry.

So, anyway. More later, of a more entertaining nature, I trust.

Monday 18 June 01

The first blog entry to be typed at the new computer, which I spent all weekend setting up and playing with. Ahh, what wondrous life is this I lead, ripe apples drop about my head, the luscious clusters of the vine upon my mouth do crush their wine, etc.

I'm not really a material girl--not all that much into new stuff for its own sake, or shiny new toys. But this really is a hell of a toy. Even better, the switchover finally spurred me to move my computer set-up out of my bedroom, where it's been as long as I've owned a computer, and into the main part of the house. It's curious, the interaction between writing and the locale where writing takes place. My bedroom, except for early mornings when the sun shines in, is a dark cozy stuffy little cave, and hunkering down in there to grind out words often felt rather like hibernation, going deep inward, and emerging hours later, blinking. Where I'm sitting now, though, is right in the middle of the living/dining room, with a whole wall of windows to both sides, and it's light and airy and open. I'm telling myself that the prose is now going to breathe a little more deeply, the stories are going to open up and move around more freely.

Of course, I now have a zillion new cool ways to procrastinate writing, what with Photoshop, and the DVD player, and my unfortunate discovery that Microsoft bundled a bunch of new games into the ME version of Windows, including a 3D pinball game which is tragically addictive. I've been watching the first season of XF on DVD, which Carol kindly lent me, and while of course I have them all on tape (somewhere), it's amazing how much fun it is to sit in front of the computer and watch them again that way. There's something about the novelty of shiny new toys that clearly goes to some deep magpie-center in the brain.

I should probably finish this and power down--we've got yet another huge whacking thunderstorm rolling in, and the sky's gone all black. It's been the month of huge whacking thunderstorms, on a near-daily basis, and I for one am very happy, since I love fierce weather. But I don't want the new baby to get fried.

Thursday 14 June 01

Insanely busy this week, as I shall be from now till mid-July, since we have entered The Hell That Is New Student Orientation.

OK, it's not really hell--just busy, and draining, and tapping all my reserves of patience and good cheer. All week I've been swarmed with 18-year-olds who just graduated from high school a few days ago and who are suddenly faced with choosing college courses, and thinking about majors, and trying to deal with mountains of information about internships and study abroad and Leadership Weekends and study skills and time management and math requirements and You're In College Now, Dammit, This Is Serious Shit!

Some of them are coping just fine, but plenty are clearly feeling the waters close over their heads and thrashing around for a lifeline. I empathize with the latter group; at their age I didn't have clue one about a single thing in the cosmos. I try to soothe them, let them know that few things they do at this point are irrevocable, that it's just fine to not know right now exactly what you plan to do with the rest of your life. (I worry more, frankly, about the ones who are absolutely clear on that point now, who march in and tell me they're going to be neurosurgeons and major in biochem and do their med school at Johns Hopkins. Some of them will make it, sure, but I know that with a lot of them, a year from now I'll be cleaning up the mess when they hit organic chem or calc and go splat.)

High on the list of things that gall me are the twin convictions prevalent in our culture that (a) without a college degree you're nothing, and (b) you must get your college degree between the ages of 18 and 22. I was thinking about point (a) in light of Jane's fine rant about not wanting to have any job that couldn't clearly be described to a seven-year-old; although I'm an academic geek I have the deepest respect (and frequent envy) of the many tradespeople I've known, electricians and plumbers and builders, who live lives of dignity and purpose and who at the end of a day can put their hands on actual, tangible accomplishment. I have plenty of students who have good brains but who are wholly uninterested in abstract thought and book-learning, who'd be very happy in such occupations but who've been trained to believe that such lives are contemptible, meaningless. Class-based bullshit.

And regarding point (b)--y'know, later in life that plumber or carpenter--or for that matter, the degreed middle-management drone who made it through a B.A. on cruise-control--might indeed discover a compelling interest in how the economic system works, or the human body, or what drives people to behave as they do, or what literature is all about, an interest strong enough to propel him/her back into school. I've had those students, too, and they're my favorites, but god, the system makes it hard for them. I was able to do it, but then I had no dependents and no mortgage and a lot of familiarity with academia and plenty of people helping me along.

Kat's Plan: After high school, give people a choice--they can enter the work force; they can, if they demonstrate high academic interest and motivation, go right on to college (but this would be the exception rather than the rule); or they can enter a two-year program of public/national service--working on physical-intrastructure projects, tutoring in schools, helping in low-income clinics or nursing homes, building affordable housing. Give them a chance to get out in the world, do some different things, do a little growing-up, work with people very different from themselves. And in the process, they'd be banking credit in some uber-ledger that would, at whatever future point when they're ready for school again and really know what they want to learn, help defray tuition and living expenses. Like Americorps, but expanded, standardized, made a normal and typical course of action.

OK, so it's a dream, right, I know. But really, is it any goofier than the dream that the bulk of our 18-to-22-year-olds, immediately upon being sprung from the prison of high school and set loose in the world, full of hormones and curiosity and restless energy for life, will immediately be motivated to embark on a sustained, focused course of academic study?

Sunday 10 June 01

Oh joy, oh bliss. I spent yesterday cleaning out the basement, and, in a stack of ancient dusty miscellany (copies of my M.A. papers, and family Christmas letters from the early '60s, and the Mayor's Task Force on Neighborhood Development Final Report I co-wrote 17 years ago) I found the title papers for my dead car, which means I can finally get it towed out of my garage, where it's been peacefully rusting for the past three years. Now I'll have some place to put my current car come winter, so I won't get towed during snow emergencies. I'm as happy as a little girl.

I also found my tax returns from the '80s, which means I have some way to counter the Social Security Administration's apparent belief that I had no income in 1983 and 1985. I mean, I knew I'd had income those years--I certainly wasn't living on the beach, eating breadfruit and spearing fish. (For those of you not in the U.S., or too young to have encountered this, Social Security periodically sends out a form documenting one's earnings, year by year, and an estimate of what one will be getting from Social Security on retirement. For someone whose work history is as, uh, non-lucrative as mine, it makes fascinating and depressing reading. Let us just say that "retirement" is not in the picture for me. If I live to be 90, I'll no doubt be bagging groceries down at the corner store, with my trembly arthritic hands.)

I've added a couple of links to the list of journals and weblogs to the sidebar--one by the estimable Gemma Files, which currently features a very intelligent essay on Tobias Beecher (not that I know Oz well enough to evaluate the points made, but they sure as hell sound intelligent); and the second by Brighid, which I somehow never came across until today. (Well, "somehow," tchach--I missed it because I have the mental wattage of a celluloid ping-pong ball lately. A rather clueless, intellectually stunted ping-pong ball.)

I very much enjoyed Viridian's account of the MST3K reunion. I have a weird proprietary feeling about that show, partly because I began watching it Before It Was Famous, when it was a purely local Twin Cities phenomenon, and partly because I used to be good buddies with one of the writers, Paul Chaplin, who in his previous life was in grad school with me and was another co-author of the Mayor's Task Force report mentioned above.

God, I remember it well...we had a little office up in the rafters of City Hall, me and Paul and another intern, which we shared with the staff of the Twins Ticket Boosters, two painfully cheery young people I thought of as Brad and Janet, whose job was to try to give blocks of Twins tickets away (in those bleak, pre-World-Series-victories years), in a dogged effort to keep the team in town. We'd sit around, trading jokes and sneaking cigs and trying to sift through stacks of documents on the long-range fiscal implications of tax-increment financing. (It is a little-known fact that Paul Chaplin, MST3K writer, knows more about bank redlining and community economic development than--well, than lots of people who work in that field do.)

After grad school, we'd run across each other from time to time at the local Hot Stove League banquet, or at community development meetings, but eventually we left our respective jobs--he went off to be a comic, and I went off to be a psychologist, and we lost touch.

So, anyway. It's pretty paltry, as far as Brushes With the Famous go, but hey, someone as fundamentally asocial as I needs to cherish up her few stories. (Someday, if you're unlucky, I'll regale y'all with the tale of My Day and Night in London with Roger Ebert, back in 1976, when I was young and innocent and even more clueless than I am now, if such a thing is possible. Heh.)

Oh, and I should add that anyone who's both an MST3K and a CKR fan (enough of a CKR fan to have seen all his obscure early work) must--must--read Valeria's TV's Frank's Cock. Just--don't ask, go read.

Friday 8 June 01

A weird week, in which I have, even more than usual, gotten disconnected from myself, flubbed my responsibilities, and been obsessed with minor distracting trivialities as a way to avoid thinking about or dealing with anything of actual significance. The fact that this is a deeply, tediously familiar state of affairs, standard operating procedure in fact, doesn't make it any easier to tolerate or forgive. The self-loathing quotient has been peaking about a standard deviation above mean at Chez Kat lately, accompanied by that buzzing chronic anxiety that feels like a swarm of hornets inside the skin. The word "snafu" was originally an acronym, for "Situation Normal, All Fucked Up," and I live in snafu.

A long time ago I was reading through someone's commonplace book, a collection of quotations, and came across something that zinged me. I copied it down, carried it around with me for years, but I've now lost it, can't find the original book, and hence am reproducing it here from almost certainly flawed memory. It was attributed, perhaps erroneously, to Lao Tzu.

Always we think
someplace else will be better,
someone else has the answers,
someday it will all work out.

This is it.
No place else is any better,
no one else has any answers,
and it is all working out right now.

A couple of new weblogs have been added to the links--welcome to Jane St. Clair and Olwen.

Some great DS fiction has been coming our way lately and making me happy. I want to highlight three stories that do particularly fine turns on a theme of which I happen to be especially fond, and which I think slash gives us some particularly good ways of approaching--what I think of as "coming to terms" stories, in which characters are forced to understand some things about themselves, and work through the consequences of that understanding, in ways that aren't always smooth or simple or fluffy-happy.

The first is Speranza's Wildly Dangerous Ways, and of course anyone who reads DS slash at all doesn't need to be told "It's Speranza, for godsake just read it." The story gives us everything we've come to expect from her work--intelligence, wit, crackling dialogue, an actual case story to frame the character development, and a contextualized and intriguingly-detailed cluster of people, events, phenomena, that illuminate the internal evolution of Fraser and Ray. Anyone who wants to get a grip on what this "show, don't tell" deal is all about should read Speranza's work. This story does an especially good job of showing us two guys who are having considerable struggle coming to terms with who they really are, what they really want, in very distinct and accurately-characterized ways.

Hth's The Steadfast Tin Soldier rounds out a story arc begun in East o the Sun, West o the Moon, and takes it to some places I never imagined we were going in the beginning. And what I really dig is--after all, that's what life does, right? We do something, we take some step, with no idea of where it might really lead us ("I took this bus, I drove this car, I got on this train, I walked down this street, I turned this corner, I opened this door...")--and then we live with the consequences, however difficult they may be, we live through the ways they turn us into someone we never expected to be. We deal, if we are grown-up human beings. And boy, this story arc is full of grown-up human beings, complex and brave and terrified, and dealing. In everything she writes, Hth approaches the characters with a loving intelligence that is just luminous, that resonates in the deep places; in this story the glow of that intelligence is turned on Kowalski, and the results are stunning. Hth has said that she loves a smart Kowalski, and she gives us a RayK who is smart enough, and brave enough, to deal with the really difficult consequences, and to understand both the gains and the losses. I'm totally in love with this guy, and with these stories.

Otsoko's Homologated is shorter than the previous two, and, on the surface, more tightly focused--it's just RayK and his dad, working on the GTO, driving around the city, talking, and not talking. I've read a few comments by others on this story, and all of them have said, in effect, "Yeah, OK, Ray and Damian, but--that's me and my dad too! That's how it is for us!" And, yeah. In just 14K, Otsoko has managed to give us both this particular father and son, coming to terms with the closenesses and distances they've achieved, and also some damn universal stuff about parents and children--how we grow apart and grow together, the difficult choices about which chasms can be crossed and which are uncrossable, the difficulty of living simultaneously as parent-and-child and as two separate and different adults.

So, yeah. Coming to terms. As I said earlier, slash gives us some particularly clear-cut ways to explore that process, by showing us characters dealing with the realization of "non-normative" sexual desires. But what I love in these three stories is that the sexual/romantic aspect is just one dimension of fully realized characters, people with complicated lives, and that what they're coming to terms with transcends just "Gee, I'm in love with a guy!" I think all of us, no matter how "normal" our lives may be on the surface, have those moments when we realize--we're not the people we thought we were going to be, we're not living our lives the way we thought we were supposed to. This isn't what we expected. And how we deal with that is a huge part of what life is all about. These three stories are, in their various ways, wonderful companions for that journey. Go, read, enjoy. And tell the writers what you think.

Saturday 02 June 01

A lunatic day, in which--despite the fact that I have betaing to do and mail to answer and stories to hack at--I abruptly decided that my entire house must immediately be purged of old junk, comprehensively re-organized, cleaned to the baseboards, and substantially refurnished. The promixate cause of this manic spree was yesterday's purchase of a new computer, via the Dell Factory Outlet on-line, and a simultaneous realization that I am fed to the back teeth with the horrific squalor and slovenliness into which my household has lapsed.

Spent the morning measuring and re-measuring things, poring over furniture and office-supply catalogues, pondering furniture rearrangements, pacing, muttering, and dithering. Once I finally figured out, sort of, more or less, what I want in the way of new shelving and desk, I was already pretty exhausted--the mental strain was terrific, plus I kept misplacing the measuring tape--but I forged ahead and attacked the purge-and-clean-up project by (a) shovelling a whole bunch of old bills into the trash, (b) going down into the basement and attempting to stack things, so I have someplace to stash the overflow crap from upstairs, and (c) going to Target and buying some E-Z-Assemble-at-Home cheap steel shelving, upon which to stack basement crap. Like any well-trained American consumer, my response to the incredible physical chaos of my life (which is itself largely due to past purchases of useless crap) is to go out and buy some sort of organizational device, such as shelving, in the happy witless faith that this will somehow magically cause things to become organized. Unfortunately, I discovered there's no room to put up the new shelving in the basement until I throw out a lot more stuff (much of which consists of empty cardboard boxes--anyone who's moved as often as I has a terrible time throwing out a perfectly good cardboard box, besides which what I need to do is break them down and flatten them and tie them in stacks for recycling, except I can't for the life of me remember where I put the string). So the net result of my day's efforts is that I now have all the original mess, minus the old bills, plus the disassembled steel shelving spread all over the living room floor. (Of course, that means there's hardly any point in trying to vacuum, so the place is as filthy as it was this morning.)

Screw it. I'm cooking a pot roast, P. is coming over in a while and we'll drink red wine and watch Wallace and Gromit. The computer doesn't arrive until next week, by which time surely everything will have gotten itself organized. Of course. Without a doubt.

(And the new computer is a honey--Pentium III 1000MHz, 256MB RAM, 60 GB hard drive, CD read-write, DVD-ROM, mm-mmmm. Intermittent wracking guilt is being felt about the self-indulgence of it all. Then I think to myself, "Hey, if I just pop a few hundred more bills for a capture card and software I could do vidding." Which of course is exactly what I need, one more timewasting distraction for which I have no discernable talent. And then I muse that it's sort of stupid having that kind of horsepower and still using a dial-up connection, so I'm edging toward DSL-land, which means another $40-50 a month which, were I a better person, I'd be donating to Amnesty or Planned Parenthood or something worthy. I do wish I were a better person. But I'm not.)

Friday 1 June 01

God, I'm tired. I've been beat ever since I got back into town, that wet-cement kind of torpor that usually means I'm coming down with something. The only thing I think I'm coming down with, though, is past-due back rent on body-maintenance. Not enough exercise and sleep and green leafy vegetables, too much coffee and cigs and drink. It really annoys me sometimes how much maintenance the body needs; when I was a kid I used to daydream about having my brain extracted from my body, placed in a nice nutrient tank, and then somehow jacked into the Library of Congress, so I could spend my life peacefully absorbing words. It scares me a bit sometimes just how much like that my life has become. But then, I hated my body in those days in ways I can no longer afford to do. Must be nicer to the body.

OK, today's challenge for those U.S. readers playing along at home: try to find out what hours your local post office is open. Hah! Just try! I had a box of tapes to mail to a friend, which I was late getting off because it took me a couple of days to find my copy of Dr. Longball in the incredible morass of tapes that fill a bookcase in my dining room (due South and Homicide and X-Files and Highlander and MST3K and Iron Chef and Freaks and Geeks and Buffy, all mixed together, incompletely labeled, utterly disorganized...) Anyway, I finally found the tape, found a box, got everything lashed together, and then tried to figure out whether the post office was open early enough so I could swing by on my way to work.

Being the geek I am, I first checked the USPS website, which, it turns out, will provide addresses but not hours. OK, go to the phone book. Because see, in the old days (Kat slides into geezer-mode), in the good old days, like as recently as last year, you could go to the phone book, find the phone number for the local branch, call up, and get one of the nice postal employees on the phone, or at the very least a recording giving their hours.

But nowadays the only number given is a 1-800 one, which, sure enough, plunges the hapless caller into the trackless wilds of VoiceMail Hell. Get a menu, punch a number, get another menu, punch another number, finally discover you've taken the wrong turn and are sinking slowly into the muck, with no way to back out, and the saccharine voice of the VoiceMail lady smarming away in your ear, the last thing you hear as the waters close over your head--"If you'd like to place your mail on vacation hold, please press five ... for change of address please press six ..."

Finally, I just tossed the box in my bicycle basket, pedaled my way to the P.O., and discovered that sure enough they opened at 8:00, so I was good, and the tapes are on their way. But it seems more than a little weird that Technology's Relentless Advance has made it impossible to find out when the post office is open except by physically going there and looking at the sheet posted in the doorway. Progress, oh yeah.

Well, one thing that does constitute progress is Aral's new weblog, which I've linked to the right. Aral is someone whose comments I've always relished on various lists, and I look forward to hearing more from her.

Friday 25 May 01

Immersed today in life's pleasant small mundanities. I got up early and went in to give blood, got my three-gallon-donor t-shirt and pin, then sat in the recovery room and wrote a few lines of mediocre Methos/Mulder dialogue while drinking cranberry juice and pigging out on the free pretzels, enjoying the usual rush of post-bleeding lightheadedness and smug altruism. Then took the car in to a Rapid Oil Change, which was staffed by three young men without much to do on a quiet weekday morning. One looked a bit, although not enough, like Gunn; the second was a fashion-forward youth with a ponytail and piercings and many tattoos; the third was a dim weedy Kallikak-looking kid with bad skin who was having immense difficulty with the computer database this particular chain uses to track its customers. He kept entering my vehicle ID and it kept bringing up the name "Ben Dover," and after a while he began mumbling, "Ben Dover? Ben Dover?" at first in simple befuddlement, and then suddenly shifting to the suspicious tone of one scenting a prank. The other two guys were making smothered guffawing sounds, as they went through their oddly military drill of cross-checking the stages of the oil change ("Topside, tighten filter!" "Bay one, filter tightened, check"). I wondered if they get through their days by imagining they're commando boys, stripping and rebuilding their field artillery. I wondered if next week they'd wait till weedy-boy's back was turned and program the computer to bring up, perhaps, "Mike Hunt" for all the accounts.

Finished at last, weedy-boy took my money with embarrassed dignity, and I drove to the gas station to fill 'er up. I like it that I live in a city that's big enough so that the drive to the gas station takes me past the all-gay books and paraphernalia store, but small enough so that I can drive up to the pump, fill the tank without prepaying, and write a check for the whole thing.

And on the drive home, the radio was playing "I'm only happy when it rains," and I sang along. It's been raining for five or six days here, which is making some people peevish, but not I, now that I've finally managed to fix my windshield wipers so they don't make that horrible screeeeching noise. I'm happy when it's complicated, yes, but the simple things also give pleasure.

I'm going out of town for the long weekend, so there likely won't be anything more here until Wednesday, unless I manage an upload from my guest suite in the House of Slack, where I'll be spending some time.

Wednesday 23 May 01

Buffy spoilers ahead, so let's toss in some space here . . .

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So. I'm happy. Very happy. I hope this doesn't sound too cold-hearted-bitch to the folks out there who are truly attached to Buffy (the character) and who are in shock or mourning just now. But I'm happy. As far as I'm concerned, Buffy's death was exactly what was needed here.

Not just because she's been annoying the everlasting crap out of me the past few weeks, and not just because for the first two-thirds or so of this episode I was loathing her with the white-hot hatred of a thousand burning suns--for her selfishness, her myopia, her apparent inability to think beyond her personal attachments.

I'm happy because, if we accept that Buffy was not going to kill Dawn or let Dawn be killed, this was the only other resolution that would have worked for me emotionally, that let me see Buffy as at least something of a hero. What I could not get past in this whole story arc was that--OK, I get that Buffy's suffered a lot, she's lost a lot, she doesn't want to lose her sister too. But Buffy, girl, take a memo--there are many, many, many people, past and present, who don't have super-Slayer-powers, who don't come back next week all healed up and bouncy, who aren't TV characters and have no reason to believe that Joss will pull some magic fix out of his pocket--people who have suffered mightily and given up everything they loved, in order to save and protect something larger than themselves. Heroes. They're out there, if you take your head out of your navel and look around.

Being a hero means knowing that the price tag is going to be higher than you can stand to pay, and going ahead regardless. If they'd fudged that here, I'd have bailed on the show. As it is, I'm happy. (Although I'd be happier if even a moment's glancing recognition was given to the fact that during that interlude of the portal being opened--which happened because Buffy was unwilling to take heroic action earlier--some unknown number of people did suffer and die, people who were just as precious to someone else as Dawn is to Buffy.)

Anyway. Beyond all that, there was a lot to like in this episode. Such as, intelligent attention being paid to the rest of the characters. (CC, were you watching and taking notes? Nah, didn't think so.) God, I could not love Spike any more, and I am so freakin' glad they didn't kill him off (which is where I was afraid they were going, and losing two of my pretty boys in one week would've pissed me off mightily). I could not love Giles any more--I was cheering like a mad thing when he yelled at Buffy in the first scene, and when he appeared looming over Ben. I dug Anya trying to deal constructively, dug Xander with the wrecking ball, and even Willow and Tara and Dawn didn't get on my nerves (apart from Tara's daftie schtick, which thank god we've seen the last of). And did I mention loving Giles, and Spike? And (on a shallow note) we got a whole episode with the Spike Messy!Hair, yay! (And Spike talking about blood ... "It makes you warm. It makes you hard." Heeee. "We few, we happy few, we band of buggered...")

I'd be happy to watch an ongoing show with these characters and sans Buffy, although I'm not thinking ahead to next season at this point. On the few discussion boards I've read, there's a lot of speculation as to whether and how Buffy will get revived, the prospect of which annoys me somewhat, since I can't imagine it occurring in any non-cheesy way, but I'm not stressing over that now. Much to my surprise, I've sort of got that trust-Joss thing going. Not that I really trust a television producer, mind you, but this episode did a lot to get me started down that path.

Monday 21 May 01

In a weird backhanded way I'm grateful to Chris Carter. In the way I've been grateful in the past to old lovers who finally did something godawful enough to force me to pull the plug on a relationship that had long been circling the drain.

Yup, it's over between me and the X-Files, or at least the "official" version, the one that makes it onto the screen. Divorce final.

In actuality, it's been over for years; I've been running around behind its back, carrying on adulterously with all kind of alterna-universes. In the thing I'm currently writing, everything that's happened in the show since, roughly, Gethsemane, is right out the window. Never happened.

I realize that coming into fandom and fanfiction via X-Files has given me a rather cavalier attitude toward canon altogether. Canon's a starting point, that's all. I try to have at least some fidelity to canonical characterization, insofar as it makes sense internally (yeah, I know people who wildly disagree with my versions of Methos are shaking their heads here). But events, timelines, episode details, and so on--eh. ::waving hand airily:: Use 'em if they're useful, ditch 'em if they're not. And the last few seasons of XF I'm ditching like a bad date.

I'm not as sad as I thought I'd be, or even as pissed. I think I burned all that out a while ago. As much as anything, I'm relieved. I have my Sunday nights back now. Don't have to brace myself for the weekly bout of close-your-eyes-and-think-of-England bad sex, endured in a stupid effort to try to recapture some whiff of something that was once so hot, that used to mean so much to me. Just a memory now.

Saturday 19 May 01

Shoulder still hurts like a bastard, intermittently. It's probably a repetitive-motion overuse thing--my desk is an ergonomic nightmare, entirely apart from having to share my chair with the cat. I must get new desk, yes. But this launches a whole chain of irresolute thoughts--should I also then move the desk and computer out of the bedroom into the dining room? If so, should I then shift the bed around to the other wall? And that would mean moving the bookcases, so if I get a new cabinet for the stereo and put the bookcases where the stereo used to be... and actually, I also need a new computer. Well, want more than need; it's really self-indulgent to fling money around just to get something faster, with more memory, when this one is perfectly functional for basic needs. But if I were to get a new computer, should I pop for one that would also allow me to do vidding? Because I think vidding might be a lot of fun, although I should probably fergeddaboutit because I have no discernable talent in that direction. And if I'm going to get a new computer, I should get the new desk first, and decide about relocating it, which means deciding something about the bookcases, and really I should look into DSL, and... it's at about this point that the circuits frizzzz out, and I end up doing nothing. I've got the money, actually, for all these upgrades. What I don't have is the capacity to make decisions. Buying shampoo takes me half an hour. ("What the hell kind of hair do I have, anyway? Dry? Damaged? How damaged? Is there really any difference between the salon stuff and the generic glop I can buy at Target for half the price? They have the same ingredients for frap's sake. But maybe if I bought the salon stuff I wouldn't look like the freakin' Witch of Endor all the time..." Then I have to open all the bottles for a furtive sniff, so I don't accidentally end up with cheap-perfume-stinky stuff.)

Whoa. A rather large spider just descended from the ceiling, right between my eyes and the monitor. Wrapped it up gently in kleenex and took it outside to release. I approve of spiders but not in the house.

I started writing a long ponderous blog entry yesterday in response to Sheila and WQ's responses to my reluctance to rag on Buffy and Angel here. It got so sweatily self-serious and quasi-profound that I can't bear to look at it now. Maybe another time.

Shrift, thanks so much for the boot porn! ::happysigh:: Sheila, keep right on with that Wesley/Gunn, I'm digging it mightily. Likewise digging Maygra's comments on critique--right before reading that I went to a staff training on how to deliver corrective criticism to students in ways that'll get heard, and it gave me some stuff to mull over that I may lintify here someday.

And Anna....god, I used to take those same long nocturnal walks, when I was a kid. Remembering, now, how the air smells different, when all the lights are out and the sane folks are asleep. The quiet, yes. The streetlights, illuminating Hopperesque still-life street scenes, no one around to see them but me. Mmm.

Thursday 17 May 01

Just a quick addendum to yesterday's entry--I want to add that comments there were not aimed at any specific individuals, lists, or recent conversations, but were mostly the discharge of some stuff built up over the course of a year and a half in DS fandom. My god, it's been a year and a half? Amazing.

I have some spelentic thoughts anent this week's Buffy and Angel, but will refrain from getting into them here, because I know other people are much deeper into those shows than I am, liked the eps, and I don't want to crap in anyone's oatmeal (to borrow Shrift's crisp turn of phrase). Oh, and, uh, Shrift? The boot porn? Do keep it coming, please. Please. (I mean, it's not like you've got papers to write any longer, you should have scads of free time. Right?)

I've done something to my right shoulder which makes it very painful to hold my arm at mouse-using angle, so I'm going to stop trying to type now. Will take coffee and some of Roger Angell's old baseball essays and sit out on the back deck. (Yes, the Twins have been dragging me back into baseball this summer, damn them, even though I know the pitching isn't going to hold up and they'll only break my heart come July.)

Wednesday 16 May 01

Recently there's been--well, not a reopening of the Ray wars, I would say, but a reexamination of them, their causes and effects, in various fora I frequent, and some minor flare-ups.

I should note at the outset that I wasn't around for those wars. I came on board with DS after things had mostly calmed down, and although I came in as a pretty single-minded Kowalski-lover, I've never personally encountered the kind of rude or angry behavior from hard-core OTRistas that friends of mine describe. I also got into the show after it had ended, and hence didn't have the experience of watching a character I'd come to care deeply about be replaced. I hope that what I'm saying here doesn't sound prissily self-righteous to those who went through either experience, and have scar tissue that I don't.

With that said, what baffles me in DS fandom is the way that discussion of difference seems to slide so quickly into right/wrong fights. How quickly a stance of "I like X, I don't like Y," or "I really see X, but boy, Y just doesn't make any sense to me" becomes "X is right, Y is wrong," and then in reaction "No, Y is right, X is wrong," and in short order, from both sides, "I'm right! You're wrong!"

I'm really pretty much a moral pragmatist. "Right" and "wrong" are to me labels that only really apply to actions (speech being a kind of action) and their effects on others. If someone believes that, say, Vecchio is Fraser's true love, that seasons 3/4 never happened, hey, no skin off my nose ::shrug::. If someone says to me, or posts to a list, "I just can't believe in seasons 3/4, I don't like what they did with Fraser's character, and I really prefer seeing Fraser with Vecchio," that is likewise OK by me. I don't agree with these views, but at most I might want to have a conversation, to get a better understanding of how this person sees the DS universe. (And to get some Vecchio pointers (g)--now that I'm trying to write the guy, I realize I don't have the best handle on him, and am always looking for pointers.)

As long as it stays at that level, interesting stuff can get said, even if things get a little warm sometimes. But the minute it slides over into "You people who prefer RV are wrong/you people who prefer RK are wrong," then I'm outta there. I can't see that such speech has any discernable purpose other than to give offense and deepen divisions, since clearly there's no provable "right" or "wrong" in this situation. I can't see how a preference one way or the other can be right or wrong; but I do think that speech which gives offense and deepens divisions is wrong, in this case.

I understand that there's a history of pain on both sides. People have felt hurt by things that happened in the show, or things that got said by other fans. But making that history, that hurt, the lens through which one perceives everything that's said or done in DS fandom really leads, I think, to a lot of distortion. It can lead one to see insult or enmity where none was intended. Scar tissue needs to be stretched and flexed, or it constricts and cripples. Living in the straitjacket of past hurt cramps up the mind and the soul.

And, as Hth notes in one of her fine essays, it's especially ironic that this tradition of wound-cherishing exists among fans of Due South, a show that is so essentially focused on forgiveness, on achieving reconciliation with past hurt. And on human connection, across the divides of belief and custom and experience.
 

 To the older blather.