Old Lint
(Y'know, the kind that piles up in corners, and collects in pants pockets, and breeds under the bed, and you never really get rid of it all, it just hangs around and taunts you with your slatternly self-indulgent lack of discipline, and ... oh never mind.)

Current lint is here.  Or you can be afflicted by even older lint.
Who needs it? Take me back to the stories!
E-mail Kat.

 
 

Sunday 15 April 01

Welcome to Miriam, who's jumped in the blog pool (and with whose discouragement at teaching undergrads I certainly resonate).

It's felt like a busy day, much writing getting done (that is to say, maybe 15 minutes at a stretch, followed by a half-hour of Freecell, blog-surfing, pacing, cigarettes).  The shorter piece is getting close to the finish line, which of course means I'm suddenly struck by the realization that it's total crap, which is what always happens at this stage of the process.  Will soldier on, regardless of the metavoice sniping at me, hands over ears and going "na-na-na-na-na."  Managed to rebuild the transitional bit, and in so doing came up with some useful stuff I hadn't thought of previously.  Being forced to rewrite is not always a bad thing, I guess.  (Boy, there's a disgustingly Pollyannaish reframe.  Just smack me one.)
 

Saturday 14 April 01

Addendum:

Whoa.  Major attitude readjustment here.  Pissiness alerts have been cancelled.

After posting previous whine, I stepped outside, looked around, blinked, gaped.  Hey!  It's a freakin' gorgeous day out!  We have achieved 60 degrees, for the first time in --oh christ, I dunno, lots and lots of months.  Sun shining, blue skies, by-god birds singing.  Crocuses!  My neighbors have crocuses in bloom!

I celebrated three major vernal holidays all at once--Removal of Plastic Insulation From Windows, The First Bike Ride, and Leaving the House Without a Jacket.  Ripped plastic off with glorious rending sounds, hauled bike out of garage, biked to gym, worked my ass off (well, figuratively, not literally, alas), and biked home whooping and giggling, all giddy with endorphins and fresh air. 

Ladies and gentlemen, we made it.  Even if it snows again (which it may very well do on Monday, say the forecasts) we have officially snapped the spine of winter.  And so I lost the damn connecty bit, what the hell, I can write another one.  I'm going to make some iced tea, dig my deck chair out of the basement, fire up the laptop, sit down outside, in the sun, without a jacket, and crank that sucker out.

Who knows, I might even get my taxes done and the dishes washed.  Anything is possible.
_____________

Gahhhh.  Insanity.

OK, I can't find a chunk of the shorter WIP that I know, I swear, got written in the past few weeks.  It's not in the most recent saved version.  It's not in the truncated version I was going to send to AuKestrel to look at (but then chickened out).  I thought--maybe I did it when I was out of town, and it's on my laptop?  No soap.  And it's not written out in longhand in any of the seventeen notebooks I drag around with me, among the welter of notes scribbled during meetings and classes--mysterious stuff along the lines of "do something about the nonverbals, esp. after F moves in w/him," or "per convo w/SVE, realize R is kind of a passive char so far--give him smthg to DO, esp in re F's inner struggle after shootout."   Arrrgh.  At least I found that description of Stella that I liked and that I thought I'd lost somewhere.

It wasn't any great shakes, this missing chunk, but it was a functional connecty bit that got me through a gaping transition.  And now I'm not sure I can remember just how I was going to manage that particular jump.  Ahh, crap.  Maybe I only had it in my brain, and never actually got around to typing it out, decided to do something brilliant instead like read e-mail or play Freecell, with the blithe moronic conviction that of course I'd remember it later.

The upstairs neighbors have their 4-year-old grandson over to visit, and he's stampeding around and shrieking, and, from the sound of it, dumping gigantic buckets of Legos all over the wooden floor, directly overhead.  My apartment is filthy, and every dish I own is heaped in the sink and covered with grease. I have a huge guilt-bolus lodged mid-esophagus about e-mail I owe people.  I have not yet done my taxes.  And I lost my connecty bit.

I think I'm going to go to the gym for a while.  It's either that or break out the drink, and 10 a.m.'s a little early for that.
 

Thursday 12 April 01

My cat is giving me grief this morning.  She can sense spring coming, I think, and it makes her rather loonier than usual.

My cat is the only living being I share the household with, apart from the occasional spider.  She is not a particularly easy companion, but over fourteen years we've become accustomed to each other's peculiarities.

She is, ostensibly, a lynx-point Siamese, but the breeding program that produced her was deeply misguided, and she would not stand scrutiny as a breed specimen.  For one thing, there's something wrong with her conformation, some skeletal misalignment that causes her to be cow-hocked and pigeon-toed.  This is not entirely unattractive--when she walks, her front feet cross over each other, so she moves with a sinuous undulating gait, like a fashion model swanning down a runway.

Beauty of detail is her chief redeeming feature.  Her eyes are enormous, an intense metallic cobalt blue.  She's also slightly nystagmic, so when she gazes at you the eyeballs quiver and vibrate, rather as if her neural circuitry was sputtering.  She has the most elegant feet I've ever seen on a cat--long, long bones, big elegant knuckles, all covered in silver fur like the fur on pussy-willow buds, and with plum-colored toe-leathers.  Her ears are a perfect taupe color, and very fine--you can see the veins standing out on them.  Her muzzle is white, but there's a little dark spot where every whisker is attached, so she looks freckled.

Her official name is unmemorable, a marker given to her by her first owner, but in this household her honorific is The Nake, a title bestowed by a three-year-old who couldn't pronounce his s's, and who was presciently struck by her resemblance to a snake--her sinuousness, and her remoteness, and her propensity for biting, in one swift lunging strike.  She is known as Nakester, Nake-o-rific, Nakeathon, Nakeorama, the Nake-ed and the Dread.

I've lived with Siamese cats all my life; they are, as a species, idiosyncratic, opinionated, and mouthy, and she is definitely a breed specimen in these respects.  She harangues me frequently, in an abrasive nasal soprano, and I talk back at her.  I call her abominable reptile, envenomed toad, hell-spawn demon-cat, serpent from the nether regions, the blight of my declining years, an affliction on humanity and a disgrace to her species.  She gives me a slow eyeball-quivering blink and cranks at me some more.

Her water must be kept on the coffee table, not the floor, and every time she drinks, when her tongue first touches the water, she appears compelled by some neural glitch to shake her front feet convulsively, first one and then the other.  Occasionally she gets cross-wired and shakes them both at once, and goes face-first into the water bowl. 

She likes to slap-box; she lies on her side and commands me to attack.  So I make quick feints at her head and ears, and she thwacks my hand with her paws, and lunges with her teeth, and purrs.  If I get slow or careless she chomps me a good one. 

Every once in a while, for no apparent reason, she’ll go briefly berserk, and race around the house making a guttural gargling noise that sounds for all the world like she's trying to say gorilla gorilla gorilla.

Even more than most cats, she's intensely domestic and conservative, a real Tory of the animal world.  Any change in her routine, such as my being out of town, causes major disruption in her emotional climate, requiring extensive commentary and a certain amount of vomiting.  A friend once said, "She's very attached to you," but I don't know if that's precisely the word; it's often hard to read affection into her behavior.  She hates being picked up and is not a lap-sitter, generally.  She will, however, spread out on my belly when I'm sprawled watching TV, and will tuck her head up under my right breast, as long as I'm willing to rub her ears.  And she insists on sharing my computer chair with me, taking up the left half, so that I have to perch with the right side of my butt hanging off the chair, which does nothing for my lower back problems.

With time, she's acquired a small pot-belly, and she snores softly in her sleep.  She and I are aging together, in these respects.  She sleeps next to my pillow, every night, and talks to me in the small hours about food and boredom.  I snarl at her then, tell her I'm going to trade her to the gypsies, I'm going to sell her for parts.  But the truth is I'll miss it when she's dead.  I'll sleep better, but I'll miss her.
 

Wednesday 11 April 01

Virtual bouquets and carloads of chocolate to xen and ZR, who are dealing with RL hassles of far greater moment than my self-absorbed writer-ego crap.  Take care, people, be well, and strength to your respective sword arms.

And I bow down, chortling, to Livia's kung fu.  Except--oh, girl, don't even get me started on the "originality" thing.  That's item 24d of Writer Ego Disorder, Fanfic Subdivision.  Y'know, the one that goes "If I were any good, I'd be writing original fiction, instead of this derivative crap!"  With sidebar mutterings about "Television shows, I'm writing about television shows, just kill me now."

That one's big enough that I'm writing a whole essay on it.  So I'll shaddup about it for now.
________

The words started coming this morning.  I woke up at five, and for the first time in what feels like years (and was actually a couple of months) the guys were talking to me--quietly, hesitantly, but they were there.  Joy.

I think I finally figured out what's been blocking me for so long: nothing dramatic, just a bad case of unfinished-long-stuff-itis.  See, I don't know how to write long stuff, not yet.  I know how to do medium-length, 50 to 100K or so, and in fact I've got something half done that'll come to about that much.  I've been there before, and I know how it goes--a few more hard pushes and that baby'll be out.  Wipe it off, slap its butt, and send it forth. 

But there are also some long things sitting on the hard drive, in big messy heaps.  I've got chunks of each of them written, and pages and pages and pages of outline, but getting them moving forward has just not been happening.  I feel like someone who knows how to carpenter a nice little chest of drawers, and who's suddenly found herself in charge of building a bridge across the Yangtzee River gorge.  I've got, like, a couple of trestles hammered together, and some nice ornamental handrails, and some cool sketches and elevations.  I know what the thing will look like, eventually.  But ... um ... so, whatthehell do I do now??  I stare at the river, I stare at the piles of steel girders, I stare at my sketches, I hyperventilate.

Writing long is a very different thing from writing short/medium.  I'm accustomed to keeping the entire story present in my head, knowing how a tweak to this image down here is going to require tweaking that image up there, working with a wet canvas, as it were, writing all parts at once and moving the whole thing forward more or less simultaneously. Long is different--you have to be able to zoom in, and just take one scene at a time, and not stress constantly about what's going on seventy pages upstream.   You have to let go of perfectionism about each sentence and paragraph, and just keep hacking onward.  AuKestrel sent me a marvelous e-mail the other day, reminding me of these salient facts, which definitely helped.

But in the meantime it becomes hard to finish up the half-done short thing, because I've got that enormous bridge looming in my mind now and it makes the little chest of drawers seem petty and inconsequential.  (Except that I still don't quite know how to get the cables strung all the way across the friggin' river, or how all those girders are supposed to fit together.)

Ah well.  At least the guys are talking.  Excelsior, and all that good stuff.  Hacking onward now.
 

Monday 9 April 01

A year or two ago, on a Highlanders writers list I was on, we went on a little after-you-Alphonse round-robin; person A posted a "Sometimes I really think I suck" message, to which person B replied "No, no, you're great, I really suck," and then person C jumped in with "Stop! You're both wrong! I'm the sucky one," and so on all around.  From which experience, and from the current spate of blog entries, and from years of reading writers' journals and letters, I derive the following very profound and original conclusion:

Writers, as a group, have some major ego fucked-upedness going on.  A generalization, sure, and there are exceptions, but -- yeah.  We are not an entirely well bunch of people <g>.

There are numerous varieties of Writer Ego Disorder; the one I'm most familiar with myself is the two-step of grandiosity and self-loathing.  Flip sides of the same counterfeit coin.  I gotta be The Best, and if I'm not, then I'm The Worst.  Deeply unwell stuff, yes.  Anne Lamott has a great riff on this, in Bird by Bird (my one essential writing book), when she talks about radio station KFKD, or K-Fucked: 

"If you are not careful, station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo.  Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one's specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is.  Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn't do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything one touches turns to shit, that one doesn't do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on.  ... KFKD is on in my head every single morning when I sit down at my desk.  So I sit for a moment and then I say a small prayer--please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written."

Yeah.  That says it.

And a couple of small messages:

Livia:  I hope that at some point you struggled far back enough upstream in this blog to find all the envy I aimed your way, back in March.  You can self-deprecate all you want about your collab stuff, but hey--The Longest Weekend is yours, solo, and it's pure gold (not to downplay your other excellent solo work), and you went down into the mines and dug it out and polished it up yourself.  Gold, I'm telling you. You call yourself a hack again, and I'll have to track you down and … and ... well, I'll make you read all of Baccarat Figurines, is what I'll do, and then you'll regret it.  Now, and for the rest of your life.  So there.  (And.  Um.  Thanks for the nice words.  <blushing, fidgeting>)

And Shrift-- the John story you mention is Abnormal Integrity, right?  I tell you what, that story rocks--I was reading and nodding madly, going "Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes yes yes."  It's a different John from the one in Xeriscape, but it's him, absolutely, and you've taught me things about the guy--and about Billy, and Joe, and how they all came together--that I had no idea about.  I know, trust me I know, how painful it is when you're trying to do something with a specific character or situation and someone else gets their version out first.  (That's part of what torpedoed that Mulder/Krycek novel of mine that never got finished.)  So I'm incredibly damn glad you finished this and took it public.  I'm so grateful to have had the chance to read it.

And Maygra--honey, any time you want to come do my laundry and housework in exchange for anything whatsoever, believe me, the plane ticket will be Fed-Ex'd your way pronto <g>.  But only on the condition that you do more writing, not less.  And trust me, we want to see your "fluff and fucking"--nay, we need to see it.  The premise sounds fascinating.

(Actually--no joke--I have thought seriously about hiring someone, by the hour, to just sit next to me and nag me mercilessly until I do something about my e-mail inbox.  I'm up to...uh...<peeking nervously>... 6,631 messages, at least two dozen of which must be answered, like, last week.  Stealing from Anna:  "Oh, blessed bloody inbox. Inbox of death. I raise my hands to shade my eyes, squint into the distance, but the trail of littered e-mails stretches back too far and I cannot see its point of origin..."   I'm still trying to conceptualize how to present this job to a temp agency, though.)
 

Sunday 8 April 01

Have cut out of yesterday's entry stuff that reflected my misunderstanding of what went on with the Slashcity outage--the accurate version can be found now on ZR's blog.  Again, heartfelt gratitude to those whose hard work keeps us up and functioning.

I should've spent all yesterday writing.  It would have been a perfect day for it--blustery and wet outside, quiet inside, lots of free time.  (It was so blustery, in fact, that the neighbors's seven-foot privacy fence started to blow over, and I went out and helped them nail everything back together.  It was pretty cool, actually--the gale buffeting us all around, the fence swaying wildly, rain driving into our faces.  Sort of a mini-Perfect Storm moment, and  I got to feel all macho and rugged, which always lifts my mood <g>.)

But I didn't write. I started yesterday by reading Speranza's amazing new story Scrabble, which is, as various folks have already pointed out, a tour de force of content and structure; then I reread some great older stuff by Anna and Hth and Helen; and then Resonant's new story appeared; and I ended up sitting and staring at my computer wondering why in the hell I even try to write.

It's a moment of total internal fracture, when I read wonderful new work, especially in a fandom I'm currently working in.  On one side is pure joy--yes! beautiful! the world is a good place! I am blissed!  And if I were a better person that side would prevail. But on the other side is the despicable little egomaniac who immediately starts brooding about how mediocre my own stuff is in comparison, how leaden and clunky and doughy.  I turn from someone else's glittering prose to my own crap-in-progress and the words plod across the monitor in heavy boots.  Thud.  Thud.

The big challenge of middle age, I think, is reaching that point where you decide which things about yourself and your life are still capable of change, are worth the struggle of transformation--and which you are simply going to make your peace with.  Which dreams to hang onto, and which to let go of forever; which imperfections to keep fighting, and which to accept and live with until death do you part. 

I haven't worked through these decisions yet about my writing.  There are things I'd love to do, that I'm not ready to give up on, but that scare the crap out of me because I'm not at all sure I have the chops to carry them off.  Humor, for example.  Or really long hot sex scenes, or really long plotty narratives, or snarky dialogue.  These are not my areas of strength (ahem) and I still haven't decided if I should keep pushing on them, keep trying, or if I should let go and just focus on doing what I can do reasonably well.

When I read work that achieves, with ease and grace, things that I can't manage at all, it makes me despondent about my shortcomings.  Which is perhaps an argument for the "let go" side.  Give it up, adjust attitude, quit whining and plod forward on comfortable paths; despondency is a sucky place to be and produces nothing.  But then I think, hm.  I'm still new at this.  Maybe some of this stuff is learnable.  Maybe if I just keep at it I can stretch those ligaments and pick up those moves and dance with the masters. 

And in either case, "quit whining" would be a good first step <g>.  So I shall.
 

Saturday 7 April 01

Annnnnd -- we're back!  Or at least, as of 4:30 CDT, the mrks.org contingent seems to be mostly back, after a day-long outage.  ZorroRojo and Robin worked feverishly, over long long sleepless hours, to fix glitches and get all sites back up as fast as possible.  Big bows to them for all their good efforts, and many many thanks.

In other news....
I almost never remember my dreams, and I never have cool fannish dreams like some other people do <pout>, but last night I dreamed I was watching some cheesy TV show that Paul Gross was guest-starring in.  Except--it was PG about twenty years from now (although I, watching, was my current age), and I was shocked to see him.  He had grown a huge potbelly, and pendulous jowls, and an enormous beaky nose; he was chalky-white, and damp with sweat, and had unhealthy-looking flushed cheeks.  Worst of all, he was staggering around the set, stumbling and fluffing his lines, and I suddenly realized that he'd become a terrible, hopeless alcoholic, had lost all of his ability to act or write, and that he only had this gig through the kindness of an old friend in the business and was in the process of blowing it.  I felt a terrible deep sadness--if someone with all PG's gifts and abilities couldn't make it, couldn't come through life intact, I thought, what the hell chance do any of the rest of us have?

It was a relief to wake up from that one, but it's kind of haunted me all day.

Thursday 5 April 01 (continued)

In which Kat blathers ill-informedly about brain chemistry and psych meds (bouncing off Livia's and AuKestrel's and Rowan's and ZR's and WQ's recent entries):

You don't need a graduate degree in psych to understand how arbitrary is our prevailing system of classification of mental disorders.  I mean, we can group the schizophrenias over here, and the mood disorders over there, on the basis of various shared symptomologies and the efficacy of certain classes of drugs in ameliorating those symptoms.  But we're still a long way from really knowing everything that goes on at the biochemical level.  And just because we can list out a spectrum of feelings and behaviors that are commonly shared by people classified as "depressed" doesn't mean that everyone who has some of them has all of them, or even that there's some unitary phenomenon "depression," in the way that's there the phenomenon "measles virus."

I have a vague uneducated hunch, based on nothing more solid than personal experience and anecdotal evidence, that there's some meta-connection, some chemical concordance, among:
a)  that part of the "depressive" spectrum that has to do, not with low mood per se, but with paralysis of will, the inability to mobilize the self into decision and action;
b)  that part of the "obsessive-compulsive" spectrum that has to do with the inability to prioritize, to sort through everything that's going on in one's head and life and separate the essential from the nonessential and sequence one's actions accordingly; and
c)  that part of the introverted temperament, or in more extreme cases "social anxiety/phobia," that has to do with inability to cope with large amounts of external input or sensory/social stimulation.

I've known people with one or two of these three who have experienced some marked changes when taking SSRIs (the Prozac et al. family of antidepressants)--including people who'd never be diagnosed as classically "depressed."  And these changes have been experienced by them as improvements, not necessarily in mood per se, but in the ability to think clearly and cope with external stimulus calmly and set priorities rationally and act purposefully and effectively.

I speculate--and this is sheer speculation--that there is some fairly common chemical imbalance that affects whatever part of the brain handles the management of input (conversations, bills to be paid, work tasks, demands for attention, loud noises, whatever) and the sequencing of output (carrying out required activities in order and on time, producing all the behaviors to keep one's life moving forward in a productive fashion).  For those who have such an imbalance, I speculate, it's very easy to get "stuck"--to be overwhelmed by pressures internal and external, to feel chronically chaotic and disorganized, to be unable to mobilize an appropriate response to life's demands--and to believe that if we could just for chrissake deal, get a grip on ourselves, apply the lash, try harder, we could get things under control because ... after all, it's not like anything's really wrong with us, is there?  We don't get the "I'm sick" excuse.  We're just--bad.  Fucked-up.  Lazy. 

And I think that sometimes (not all the time, certainly, not in all cases, but sometimes) the low mood and self-loathing of "depression" is a secondary symptom, the result of our repeated failures to cope with life and do what we're supposed to be doing.  When the meds kick in and the logjam breaks and action--calm, coherent, one-step-leading-to-another action--becomes possible, we start in fact acting differently, and as most therapists will tell you, acting differently is a powerful engine for change in self-image and mood. 

When I went on Zoloft, a few years back, the first things I did when it kicked in were to clean out the refrigerator and organize my sock drawer--and damn, doing that made me feel better about myself.  There was doubtless some effect of the drug on mood--causation here, as in many things, is probably circular rather than linear--but I believe that what really helped me to feel that I was out of the pits was that I was doing things, things I'd long felt utterly incapable of doing, and I don't think I was doing them because I felt better; I felt better because I was doing them, because I could do them.  And I've heard similar accounts from people I know who really aren't depressed in any clinical sense of the word, but who, on SSRIs, start functioning better.  They were functioning before, they weren't crazy or sick, they were coping, but with the meds they find it so much easier.  I didn't have to flog myself to clean out the refrigerator, I didn't feel the chronic, life-long guilt or self-hatred or paralyzing indecision over whether to toss the six-month-old mayonnaise, I just ... did it. Action flowed through me and out, like water through clean pipe.  No effort.  It was a Yoda moment <g>--"no try, just do."  (Well, that's less barfsome than quoting Nike commercials, isn't it?)

So, anyway.  I think there's something there.  I'd be interested to hear if others' experiences jibe with mine, and I'd love to hear from anyone more up on the research than I.
 

Thursday 5 April 01

<clickclick, static noises, throat-clearing>  Good morning.  On behalf of everyone here at MoodAir, I'd like to apologize for the recent turbulence.  We did  encounter a small air pocket, but we have now resumed normal cruising altitude and should experience a smooth flight from here on.  We would like to offer you a complimentary beverage of your choice, and the flight attendants will be coming around shortly with the drink cart.  The captain has turned off the seat belt sign, and again, our apologies, and enjoy the rest of your flight on MoodAir.

~~~~
Some very nice things happened yesterday.  My good buddy Jill defended her dissertation, kicked ass, and we went out for happy giddy drinks later to celebrate.  I'm delighted for her, while realizing again that I'm utterly at peace with my decision to flush my own Ph.D. 

I got a marvelous e-mail from a woman who'd attended the writing workshop Mairead Triste and I did at Escapade, saying that for years she'd struggled unhappily with her writing, and that the workshop opened some doors for her, gave her some tools, got her going, and she's about to finish her first story that she really likes.  And thanking us.  It left me just glowing, not that I take any credit for what's entirely her own hard work, but it reminds me that one thing I love about fanfiction is the way it pushes back against the cultural myth of the Solitary Isolated Artist, alone in the garret, locked in a death-match with the muse.  I mean, yeah, ultimately it's just you and the keyboard, but acting like Gary Cooper in High Noon is not useful and not necessary.  We help each other.  We can do that.  We do do that.

And I also got an e-mail from an advisee of mine, a problem child who's finally managed to transfer to another school, saying in part, "You do a great job and seem to sincerely care about your advisees, no matter how big of a slacker he or she may be."  I so want to write back and say, "Kid, the reason for that is that I'm the biggest slacker of 'em all."  It's so true; the slackers, the underachievers, the screw-ups, the rule-breakers, these are my people.  My job is supposed to be to make them toe the line and follow the rules; but in fact a big part of what I do is helping them figure out how to fuck with the system to get what they need.  I mean, the only reason I survived academia at all is that I had people who did that for me, so it's a privilege to be able to pass that along.  Good karmic payback.

And (insanely irrelevant and yet unavoidable weather note) it got above 50 yesterday, for the first time in 147 days, which is, do the math, five months.  A little floating holiday, and from here on there'll be a string of others.  The Taking of the Plastic Insulation Off the Windows.  The Taking of the Bicycle out of the Garage.  The First Day of Windows Open and Fresh Air in the House.  The First Day of Leaving the House Without a Jacket.  OK, so it's pathetic, but I figure hey, you take your celebrations where you can find 'em.  And it's been a long, long, cold winter, so with its passing, celebrations are in order.  November'll come again soon enough.
 

Wednesday 4 April 01

Number 7,392 on the list of really stupid things I've done lately:  for no good reason, I stopped taking the SAM-e a couple of weeks ago. 

Dumb.  Very very dumb.  The bill for that particular bit of idiocy came due yesterday, when the little guy in the back of my brain got the gag worked free and started right in telling me, over and over, in precise dispassionate tones, just how entirely hateful I am.

So.  Had a little Oxenberger moment <g>, went back on the pills, and am much better already--luckily, SAM-e kicks in in about 24 hours for me.  So this isn’t a cry for help or for petting or anything,  just an apology for not having anything entertaining to say.  Will be back tomorrow with diverting blather, promise.

And damn my fucked-up brain chemistry anyway.  Can I get a cerebellar transfusion anywhere?
 

Monday 2 April 01

Tired.  Very very tired.  The usual post-con crash, plummeting back into the tediosity of real life, compounded with sleep deprivation. 

I made noises about doing a con report, didn't I?  Heh.  Teach me to open my big mouth.  A legit con report requires one to have actually gone to panels, and retained some memory of what was said, and I'm forced to admit that at Connexions I went to a grand total of one (1) panel, the due South one, and retain next to nothing of what was said except a vague general memory that much of it was quite cool. 

But for me Escapade is the big going-to-panels con; Connexions is more an opportunity for low-pressure hanging-out with friends.  And this year, I mostly hung with a small group of DS people, almost none of whom I'd met before, all of whom were wonderful company.

A few impressionistic snapshots of the group:

Beth: an Elizabethan figure, bawdy, exuberant, unabashed, hilarious, savory like a well-aged port.
LaT:  whip-smart, razor-sharp, like a perfectly made martini sipped in a Manhattan penthouse at midnight while conversation scintillates. 
Rowan:  elegant in the way that a deer is elegant, or a stand of birches in a clearing; fine-boned, fine-brained, soft-spoken, clear-eyed. 
AuKestrel:  like her namesake, a creature of the air, more at home (one senses) ahover in the clear cold pure sky than plopped down on earth.  And yet very endearing as well; up close, one can see both the sharp talons and the soft feathers.  For reasons I'm not clear on, AuKestrel puts me in mind of Jane Austen, or how I imagine Austen to be.
Kit:  like a fox, bright-eyed and alert, brisk and purposeful, cheerful, inquisitive, practical, equable and sociable.

And there were people I didn't see nearly enough of--Carla, for one, and Miriam.  I only got to exchange a few sentences with my cherished friend MacGeorge, and although I got to have breakfast with Shoshanna there's never enough time for us to say all the stuff we have to say to each other, and I did get to meet WitchQueen very briefly but it was Sunday morning and I was brain-fried by then.

Things I recall:  Friday night in the bar, analyzing other people's stories, and bemoaning our own stuckness in various WIPs.  The Saturday night dinner--a hoot, with nine of us confabulating ever more bizarre and tantalizing DS AU story premises.  Watching the Hugh Dillon interview tapes--oh my god, I mean, I always dug him, but oh my god, what a charmer.  Watching My Life as a Dog tapes--I hadn't thought CKR could be any more knee-weakeningly beautiful than he was in Hard Core Logo, but, y'know something?  He can. 

Also, the vid show:  much Starsky & Hutch, a series of which I've never been a fan, but dear lord, those guys sure were all over each other a lot, and you gotta like that.  Also, a lot of vids to boy-band songs, which put me off a bit, since I've never liked boy bands, but to each her own.  Vidders often distinguish between con vids and living room vids, and I really got a feel for the distinction, watching this show (heavy on con vids) so soon after Escapade's (heavy on living-room vids).  I can enjoy the former, certainly, but I really love the latter--the ones you have to play over several times, with careful attention to lyrics and clip choice and editing, to really appreciate.  Carol's Faith/Buffy vid to A Girl Needs a Knife--definitely a living-room vid--was a standout, and by great good luck I have a copy to rewatch.  There was an intriguing Brimstone vid (god, I loved that show) that I'd like to watch again on my own.  Most of the other vids, though, were of the kind that are at their best when seen in a room full of whooping fans, which is no slur on them; it's a fine thing and one of the pleasures of fandom to whoop along to bouncy music and the sight of pretty men smoldering at each other. 

 And there's a million more things I could say about the con, and about seeing Zen and nancy in Chicago, and about the pleasures of road trips, but this is too long already, and I need to go crash.
 

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