I think you're confused

book meme!

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:24:13 GMT

Grabbed from deepsix and dine.

1. Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack?
Not any more than I usually do, really.

2. Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?
It used to horrify me (seriously, my first AP English class where I realized I'd have to mark up my book to keep track of stuff--traumatizing) but years of being an English major specifically and a student generally have made it much less so. I don't tend to mark books for pleasure reading, though, unless it's something I'm having a hard time getting a handle on, though.

3. How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?
I do all of these--I leave it flat if I'm just leaving it for a minute, bookmark it if I'm leaving it for a while, and dog-ear pages if I'm throwing it in my purse and I know the bookmark will fall out.

4. Fiction, non-fiction, or both?
Both, but fiction a lot more frequently.

5. Hard copy or audiobooks?
Hard copy. I'm thinking about downloading some audio books now that I'm working a job where I can listen to my Ipod, since talking tends to keep me interested but not distracted, where as music sometimes kind of zones me out.

6. Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?
I can generally stop anywhere, but I tend to re-read to find my place a lot.

7. If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away? Write it down to look it up later? Just try to infer what it means from the rest of the sentence, and keep going?
I always mean to write it down and look it up later, but I usually end up too wrapped up to actually do it. I'm pretty good at figuring it out from context, though.

8. What are you currently reading?
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, although only in very short bursts; JD Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction (I tried and failed to convince Telis that no, really, Salinger's other work is totally about how people totally missed the point of Catcher in the Rye, which was don't be like this, and it got me interested in re-reading the Glass family stories); and I just finished re-reading David Sedaris' When You Are Engulfed in Flames. I also have The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II next to my bed with a bookmark in the middle of "The Valley of Fear", but who knows when I'll get back to that. Same with Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, which I'm trying to re-read because damn, it was a nice idea to study it in a women's lit class, but a week is really not enough time to have any clue wtf Foucault is going on about.

9. What is the last book you bought?
I have no idea.

10. Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can read more than one at a time?
I'm pretty much always reading more than one.

11. Do you like re-reading books?
Yes! There are some books that I can only read once I can no longer remember every single thing that happens (I have a pretty good memory for books), but for the most part books, like movies, are better the second (and third and fourth and fifth) time, so you can catch what you missed the last time.

stuff

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:52:07 GMT

1) I'm getting a new laptop tomorrow! Right now I'm on my mom's laptop because she took pity on my cramp-ridden state and my desire to be on the internet flat on my back like god intended rather than crouching in an uncomfortable chair like satan desires, and sweet god have I missed this. It'll be nice to have my own laptop and my own data on my own hard drive again.

2) My nephew is staying with us for the weekend! And oh my god, he's a giant. Right now I have to stand on tiptoe to hug him, and every time I see him he's taller. Chris (nephew) and I will also be sharing sleeping space this weekend because my friend Kelly has been staying with us for about a week. She's been on the couch, but now that Chris is here we'll be playing musical beds--her in my room and me and Chris in the living room on the couch and an air mattress, since we both sleep with the tv on and she doesn't. I'm glad both of them are here because I love them both dearly, but oh man, I was really looking forward to a good night's sleep in my own bed tonight. CRAMPS, I HATE YOU SO MUCH.

3) I actually probably would have given my bed up tonight anyway because it's Kelly's birthday! \o/ And to celebrate, she's taking care of financial aid stuff at her school. Ugh, worst luck, right? Tomorrow she gets a birthday shopping spree (well, more of a jag, really. what is the small version of a spree?) courtesy of me, though, and I made her birthday blueberry muffins as per her request, so hopefully it'll be a nice night for her when she gets home, anyway.

4) Sort of out of place on this list, but I realized earlier today, on a break from work while I was outside smoking and reading David Sedaris' essay about quitting smoking, that one of the reasons this whole personal public LJ/my lj is my personal space/my lj is my house thing is so weird to me is because I'm a smoker, and especially because I'm a smoker who used to take public transportation all the damn time. Because for the majority of people, how you behave in public--the ways in which you limit your personal expression and inhabit your own personal space so as not to infringe on that of others--is pretty well trained into you from childhood. It's really only when you get a socially unacceptable habit like, say, smoking, that you really have to think about how your personal choices can infringe on that of other people in a public setting. (When other people infringe on your choices, it is, of course, noticeably rude. Turn down your damn ipod, kid sitting next to me on the bus, I can hear your music even though you're listening to headphones! And stop taking up so much legroom while you're at it, your dick doesn't actually need that much space.)

As a smoker, I'm constantly aware that my personal space isn't just my own when I'm in public--I share it with other people, and my personal space and personal choices can infringe on other people's. I'm legally allowed to smoke on a public street, next to a bus stop, but I don't--I find a reasonably secluded place and smoke there. Because not only is it kind of rude to inflict my personal choices on other people just because they wandered onto the same street corner that I'm standing on, even if I was there first and it was their choice to come stand next to me, but for all I know, that person giving me dirty looks when I stand close to her with my cigarette just doesn't feel like having an asthma attack today.

I'm not using this as a metaphor for warning wank. (And really, my feelings on public journals as part of public space extend to all parts of those journals, not just the fanfic section.) I'm just saying, personal (you) and public (the world) aren't discrete concepts--they intersect all the time, every time you go outside and interact with the world, and it's interesting to me that so many people in fandom do regard the two as discrete rather than intersecting, especially since so many of us do choose to air our personal opinions in a public setting despite the many options we're given to make our personal space actually private instead of just personal.

5) I know I still have comments to reply to--I'll be getting to them tomorrow. Tonight I'm going to take some midol and read some fanfic, because I think I just used up all the coherency that I have left. (And "coherent" might actually be a little generous for what I just wrote.)

ETA: Chris just brought me soda and a kitten. MY nephew is the BEST nephew. :D

UPDATE: My nephew just gave me a twenty minute long backrub. BEST. NEPHEW. EVER.

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:57:18 GMT

I am so glad that gabrielleabelle made this post so that I don't have to. I've been too tired lately to really frame my words well and to want to argue with strangers, so my post probably would have been basically:

1) YOUR PUBLIC JOURNAL IS NOT YOUR FUCKING HOUSE!
2) No, seriously, am I the only person whose journal gives her the option between Private and Public posting? Like, I mean, calling it that and everything, in very clear and specific language? Is everyone else stuck choosing between House and Mausoleum, or do they just think Public really means private, like the British school system or something?
3) Did everybody forget how the internet works?
4) Because seriously, YOUR PUBLIC JOURNAL IS NOT YOUR FUCKING HOUSE. I don't know anyone who would deliberately leave their house unlocked, knowing that a bunch of people are leaving fliers around town with their address listed as a cool place to party (fliers that are often received by the house-owner with great enthusiasm), and then act surprised and appalled to find a bunch of people dancing in their living room.

And then maybe a link I made to that other post I made about how no, really, Public means exactly what it says on the tin and so no, your public journal is not actually your secret diary OR YOUR GODDAMN HOUSE. I really hope I don't have to make one of these every year.

Sorry for all the caps, but holy shit does this "I refuse to take responsibility for the things I publicly post" crap piss me off.

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:03:26 GMT

So, in an awesome new iteration of my TOTALLY FUCKED sleep schedule, I've been going to sleep at around 2-4 in the afternoon, and waking up at around 10 at night to 1 in the morning. /o\ Tomorrow I have work, though, so hopefully having that structure back will get me back into semi-normal patterns because dude, this is just not working for me.

Also sweet lord do I miss my laptop. Last week it just decided, kaput, I am done working--hard drive's probably fine but the screen is dead, so my dad's friend is grabbing my data and then I'm probably getting a new laptop. For now I'm stuck on the main computer in the uncomfiest chair in the world, and since both my job and at least one of my leisure activities involve staring at computers and uncomfy chairs, I predict fun back problems in my future. If anyone's wondering why I've been crankier than usual this week, wank is not the only reason. (Although damn, has that not helped.)

And now, I'm going to read fic for an hour or so before I go to work. Oh, adulthood, why did no one ever tell me you'd be so much like my teen years?

warning: wank

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:58:19 GMT

So, for the past few days fandom (starting with bandom, but beginning to circle out) has been wanking about warnings yet again. (Context on how it started, with context for the wider argument. The majority of my post is in response to the comments here, although the same thing is popping up plenty of other places.) And here is my thing: it is completely insane to me that we even have to have this discussion at all, and it is deeply, deeply depressing that we are having in this particular fashion. Some of the arguments I’m seeing are frankly mind-boggling, and unfortunately really familiar.

I don’t know if I’m doing it right, and everyone will unjustly attack me for getting it wrong, so I’m just not going to do it at all.

It is your responsibility to tell me exactly what should be done in all situations, rather than expecting me to educate myself, exercise my own judgment, and deal with the consequences in a mature and non-hurtful way if I accidentally get it wrong. If you cannot provide me with a concise and eternal standard that will be agreed on by all, then clearly there’s no way of saying what’s right or wrong, and you telling me I’m doing something hurtful is just one person’s opinion.

In fact, isn’t this kind of a slippery slope? Won’t people just start telling me to stop saying anything at all if I indulge your demands? I mean, after all, everyone has their own opinion of what’s offensive.

And really, you might have been offended, but my friend who is also a member of the group in question wasn’t offended at all, so it must just be your problem.

How dare you tell me what I should write/how I should present my fic in my own personal journal (which is open to public view and comment).

It’s not my job as a writer to satisfy every single reader’s demands and it’s selfish of you to think it is. Everyone is entirely responsible for their own reactions to things, so if you are offended by something I wrote, it’s your own fault for reading it.

In fact, lots of offensive things are said on the internet all the time, so instead of trying to change that, maybe for your own mental health you should just read things that you know won’t offend you. After all, there’s no way you’ll make everyone conform to your standards, so there is no point in trying. People aren’t going to change their minds about topics like this, so you might as well stop talking about it.

Telling me that I am doing something hurtful and somewhat thoughtless is the equivalent of telling me that I am a despicable person. Let’s talk about how you’ve slandered me instead of how I’ve hurt you.

You're the abuser and you are oppressing me with your victim privilege.

I was going to be on your side, but you're being so mean about it that I'm going to do the thing you're saying hurts you just to spite you.

Presenting my story the way I want it to be told is more important to me than not hurting you.

(ETA: lcsbanana has compiled a list of some of the most egregious examples of these tactics, as well as general ass haberdashery. You can see it here. It's actually helped me pick out some more below. If you've noticed any more, please point them out and I'll add them to this post.)

I'm not going to play your game. (Because as we all know, discussions of racism and rape as just fun ways for the underprivileged to score points off of the privileged.)

It's a no-win situation for me! Nothing I do will ever be good enough for you!

Some people just really enjoy playing the victim.

Based on extremely limited evidence, I am going to make blanket assumptions about your mental/emotional state in a way that I believe discredits all of your logic.

Seriously, fandom. Didn’t we just go through several months of race imbroglios? Didn’t we all get a nice, helpful brush-up on common derailing techniques and faily arguments? Didn’t we address the fact that, yes, even if you’re ~just expressing your personal opinion/just writing your own fic~ in ~your own personal journal~, if you post publicly you should expect to get called on your fail because public means “other people can read it”, not “other people are responsible for ~just not reading it~ if it offends them”? Didn’t we talk about the fact that no, fandom isn’t your safe space, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to make it safer?

Didn’t we, again and again, address the fact that if what you’re writing is hurting people, it is your responsibility to stop doing something that’s hurtful rather than their responsibility to stop acting hurt?

How the fuck have we not learned this already?

These sort of derailing techniques come up in all sorts of fandom discussions. They are old, they are tired, and I am so fucking sick of seeing them. Please, if you must derail, at least find a new and interesting way of doing so.

What I think this conversation does need more of is "sit down, shut up, and educate yourself." If you do not know what a trigger is or how it operates, please stop talking about it as if you do, or demanding that people with triggers give you a full and complete list of all triggers for everyone everywhere (as though the common three or four that everyone is listing is not sufficient) and interrogating them on how a trigger is different from a squick. I hear there's this cool new thing called Google (or this cool old thing called "libraries") that could help you out with your confusion.

Other notes:

Fandom is not a homogenous group. Everyone has different standards, both on an inter-group level and an individual level. (This is my way of saying, please do not derail this discussion by talking about how not all corners of fandom/individual fandomers are the same, rather than addressing my actual point.) However, in my experience there are at least two things that are commonly (not the specificity of this word, please) Not Done in fandom to other fandomers: you do not critique someone else’s fic, either in their journal or in a community, unless they have explicitly asked for criticism, and you do not write fanfic of someone else’s fanfic unless they give you explicit permission. These things, of course, are commonly done by fandomers to prowriters, which seems pretty hypocritical. Why do we treat each other’s creative works differently than we treat prowriters’ creative works?

The answer commonly given, of course, is that we are a community. We have direct access to each other that we don’t to prowriters, so we can directly say to those who might review or write fic of our fic, “Please don’t do that,” and knowing that it bothers us, they shouldn’t do it. We can, in fact, apply massive community pressure on fandomers so they don’t do that, while doing the same to prowriters is a trickier proposition because of the access issue. And the reason other fandomers shouldn’t do things with our fic that we didn’t directly authorize them to is because we don’t want them to, because they might hurt our feelings, and we all have to coexist in fandom, so we should avoid stepping on each other’s toes. We should extend each other courtesy that we don’t extend to prowriters, because after all, we are a community.

Except apparently, the community is only made up of authors. It is very important not to offend authors because they are part of our community, but if readers are offended by, say, a lack of warnings, they need to suck it up and realize that fandom is not their safe space, and stop being so entitled. Stop expecting special treatment. After all, proworks like books and movies don’t have warnings (although they do have trailers, and commercials, and summaries, and reviews/critiques like the ones that aren’t allowed in fandom, and well, okay, actually they do have warnings, albeit not as specific as those in fandom) so why should we have to? I mean, it’s not like we treat fanfic any differently than we do proworks in other situations for the good of the community…oh, wait.

Seriously, who is showing the bigger sense of entitlement here, writers or readers? Even if you disregard what I wrote above about fandom mores in general, in this specific discussion, I cannot believe that people are saying that expecting authors to spend two minutes thinking about what might be triggering in a fic and writing a warning is just to much to expect, and that people who are triggered are damned entitled for expecting it.

I can’t believe authors are saying that the artistic integrity of their fic demands that something like rape not be spoiled, and that it is somehow okay that this is more important to them than the feelings of an actual rape victim.

I can’t believe that people are saying that including a warning behind a cut tag or in white is in and of itself a spoiler that something is going on worth warning for, while simultaneously saying that everything can potentially be warned for, as though these statements aren’t actually contradictory.

I can’t believe people are making claims that if they warn for something but forget to warn for something else, they will be massively attacked, rather than asked politely to add a warning, and that the solution for this is not to warn for anything.

I can’t believe that people are saying that warning for something could trick people into thinking their fic is safe when they might have forgotten to warn for something else, and that the solution for this is not to warn for anything so that nothing is considered safe.

I can’t believe that no warning is somehow supposed to be the equivalent of a warning in and of itself, as though people commonly warn for fuzzy bunnies and hug times instead of, you know, rape, murder, and incest.

I can’t believe that people with triggers are being told that they should just box themselves into a safe little corner of the internet where they won’t be triggered, rather than try to make fandom a safer place.

(I'm not even getting into the implied victim-blaming in this proposition, but oh boy, am I aware that it's there. Maybe instead of the whole church potluck analogy we should go with drunk in a short skirt in a frathouse.)

It would be awesome if any of the people saying “so what should I warn for?” were actually looking to learn, but as far as I can see, they’re not. They’re trying to back people into the corner of “everything is potentially offensive” and “you can’t make everyone happy” and “but what if this extremely unlikely event happens? WHAT THEN?” and “but you told me this is triggering and someone else said it’s just a squick, so how am I supposed to know which is which?” They’re derailing the conversation away from warning for rape, an extremely common trigger, and towards how stupid it is to warn for cheating or someone being sad or people’s individual squicks, or for people’s individual triggers that no one is even asking them to anticipate. Seriously, nobody light a match--this room is full of strawmen.

And yes--you can do whatever the hell you want in "your space". No one is saying that you can't. But if what you're doing there is being a complete dick, and you leave your dickishness open to public view, then I get to call you on what a dick you're being. That's how the internet works. I've said it before, but your public journal is not your secret diary that the mean people found and rifled through and scribbled comments in the margins of. Your public journal is not your house that no one else has the right to come into and criticize how you raise your kids. Your public journal is your public journal, and by choosing to post publicly you have left yourself open to...the public. This is how the internet works.

End statement: It is just really, really amazing to me who is actually being massively privileged and entitled here, and who some people seem to think is being massively privileged and entitled.

ETA: I still think it's dickish to expect people with triggers to walk on eggshells around fandom, but at least some people are suggesting ways to make being in fandom slightly easier other than "just don't read anything". winterweathered created ficsafezone so that people can ask for a trigger read-through on warningless fics, and presumably so people can point out surprise non-con and such in fics without warnings.

Someone also created trigger_fence, which is intended to be a) a list of subjects that are the baseline of what should be warned for, and b) a list of authors who do not warn for those subjects. I'm somewhat leery about this idea because while it's presented as being a resource for readers, and could certainly be used in such a way, particularly at this stage when it contains only a few names it could be interpreted as a blacklist, which some people are certainly doing. But it is there if you're interested.

Also in the service of making things easier on writers, here is amadi's post on creating accessible hidden warnings.

have to find a middle way, a better way of living

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:31:27 GMT

I love looking at people's icons, but I don't always *get* them--I often wonder stuff like, "Who's that guy?" or "Where's that quote from?" but I tend not to ask, for various reasons. Here are my icons. Pick one (or more!) you're curious about, and I'll try to explain it. (stolen from my dear girlneedsagun)

I only have fifteen and I'm still trying to overhaul my icons so a lot of them are still bandom right now, but I'm sure there's at least one or two head-scratchers in there. Take a look.

Also, guess who has two thumbs and just made some delicious whole wheat blueberry muffins? This girl! They also have nearly a cup of sugar in them, but damn I love this recipe so much I don't even care. They're not quite as good as my first batch made with all-purpose, but I think that's mostly because I didn't have as much margarine as I would have liked to put in. Next up: more raspberry cake for my daddy, who thoughtfully bought me two cartons and whose eyes lit up when I said the words "raspberry cake". (Still the best damn thing I've ever baked, I swear. I ate most of that thing myself in like three days.) Still trying to un-fuck my sleep schedule, though, so when I get home I usually just scoop cat boxes, do dishes, vacuum and pick up a little bit, and then crash. I only gained the motivation to make muffins because otherwise my huge carton of blueberries was gonna go bad pretty soon.

Also, the new Placebo album has officially grown on me. I loooove it so and I've been pretty much listening to it non-stop for the past few days--very motivating for work, especially "Bright Lights". And I just bought tickets to see Tori next month! \o/ No idea what the seats are like since I've never been in the venue before, but even the cheapest came to 100 bucks after ticketmaster charges, so no way was I trying for better.

In other spending-money-on-myself news, I'm trying to decide whether to pony up for a Disneyland ticket so I can accompany Amber on her birthday. On the one hand: friend's birthday, Disneyland. On the other: I just spent 200 bucks in one day (Tori tickets, getting one damn half of my mouth cleaned and antibiotics squirted on my gums) and I'm going to be paying fifty or so for my dad's father's day present tattoo. (The father's day tattoo thing is also a strike against Disneyland: I haven't decided whether or not to go watch him get it. I'm afraid it will awake my craving for a new tattoo, and not only am I trying not to spend money on myself for a while, I also haven't decided where I want to get it yet.) So Amber, if you're reading this, I've been meaning to text you and I'll give you a definitive answer probably on Friday.

Um...the end?

Dream brother, my killer, my lover / There are some who give Blood, I give love

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 21:39:56 GMT

I got the new Placebo and Tori Amos albums!

1. So far I can't tell if I'm just feeling emotionally detached from it, or if Molko's voice actually sounds emotionally detached and I'm just reacting to that. Either way, I'm pretty detached. It took me a few listens to warm up to Meds, though, and now it's my favorite Placebo album, so maybe it'll just take a few listens.
2. I actually really loved "Battle for the Sun" on its own, but I'm not feeling it as much in the context of the album. :( I still like it, though.
3. I don't really know how I feel about the non-Molko backing vocals on most of the songs. They're just so non-Placebo-y--I'm used to much sparer vocals. Also, wtf, horns?
4. I can't remember what most of the songs sound like after listening to them. :/
5. Overall, it feels kind of like a step backwards in terms of lyrical and musical complexity--the extra vocals and instrumentation seems like a cover for that. They're still adjusting to their new drummer, though, and they're also consciously trying for a new sound and tone, so I'm guessing it'll take some time to fit it all together. Also, there's a decent chance that I'll be happier with it after listening to it more. I'm already pretty positive (with reservations) about most of it, and I didn't actively dislike any songs. It sounds a lot like an album that will play well on tour, which is a fine priority to have, if not necessarily what I'm looking for since I've never seen them live. :(
6. On a shallow note, wow, their new drummer is really cute.

What I like: Ashtray Heart, Battle for the Sun, Speak in Tongues, Julien, Happy You're Gone, Kings of Medicine
Middling: For What It's Worth, Breathe Underwater, Come Undone
Eh: Kitty Litter, Devil in the Details, Bright Lights, The Never-Ending Why

ETA: Okay, already on second listen I adore Kitty Litter and I'm much fonder of Devil in the Details and Bright Lights.

1. I like the way Tori plays with her voice usually, but damn is the vocal affectation on the verses for "Give" irritating. The chorus saved it, though.
2. Tori's songs in general have such internal variation that I'll be really irritated or kind of "eh" at one section of a song and then fall in love with another, which made it really hard to figure out how I felt about it overall.
3. Aww, we get a Neil shoutout! "Neil is thrilled he can claim he's mammalian / 'But the bad news,' he said, 'Girl you're a dandelion.' / Dandelion. hey I need to think about that. / Yeah, I thought about that and I said, / 'What the hell?' / He said, 'Nope, you are Earth bound, blow them seeds away. / Maybe one of them will make a sound.'"
4. I feel like I've heard "Ophelia" before. It sounds a lot like another of Tori's songs, but I can't figure out which.
5. God, do I want to see her play live again.

What I like: Give, Welcome To England, Not Dying Today, Fire To Your Plain, That Guy, Abnormally Attracted to Sin, Mary Jane, Starling, Fast Horse
Middling: Strong Black Vine, Flavor, Curtain Call, Police Yourself, Ophelia
Eh: Maybe California, 500 Miles, Lady in Blue

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Sat, 30 May 2009 03:51:17 GMT

Ganked from rhiorhapsody, because I'm boooored.

Name your 20 absolutely favorite couples (het/slash/canon/fanon) and ask people to see what trends they notice about your couples. Try to pick different fandoms.

1. Pete/Patrick (Bandom--come on, you knew this one would be on here)
2. Pete/Ashlee (Bandom--this one also had to be on here)
3. Corey/Shawn (Boy Meets World)
4. Roger/Peter (Dawn of the Dead 1978)
5. Nikki/Pamie (Times Square)
6. Willow/Oz (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
7. Zoe/Wash (Firefly)
8. River/Simon (Firefly)
9. Britney/Christina (Popslash--yep, I still maintain fantasies of Christina swooping in and rescuing Britney in her white limousine)
10. McClane/Farrell (Live Free or Die Hard)
11. Dom/Brian (The Fast and the Furious--I still have not seen the new movie and it hurts me inside)
12. Megan/Graham (But I'm a Cheerleader)
13. Richard/Justin (Murder By Numbers)
14. Pauline/Juliet (Heavenly Creatures)
15. Rynn/Mario (The Little Girl who Lives Down the Lane--no one will know this one, but I love them really a lot)
16. Sawyer/Juliet (Lost--;__;)
17. Connor/Murphy (The Boondock Saints)
18. Brian/Curt (Velvet Goldmine)
19. Heroin Bob/Trish (SLC Punk)
20. Jackie/Hyde (That '70s Show--they're syndicated a lot and I don't have a job right now so I've been watching a lot of this show, and it's reminded me of how much I adored them as a couple)

Damn, this was harder than I thought. I'm such a multishipper, or at least not a die-hard OTP-er. There are only a few couples I can think of where they must be a couple or else there will be problems, so rather than my "absolutely favorite" couples these are "a bunch of couples I love a lot right now because I've been watching/thinking about their source texts". Also as my own observation, it's weird to see how much being in LJ fandom has changed my fic-writing habits, if not my pairing preferences--when I was still a "feral fan" and in my early days of LJ, I wrote a lot more het and femslash than I do now, even though I'd say I still love just as many het and f/f couples.

Bonus! Favorite threesomes:

1. Harry/Ginny/Tom Riddle (Harry Potter)
2. Isabelle/Theo/Matthew (The Dreamers)
3. Amy Blue/Jordan White/Xavier Red (The Doom Generation)
4. Gary/Valentino/Mary Carmen (The Velocity of Gary)

In other news, my kitten had her first visit to the vet! Poor thing had her claws clipped and came home shaking and hungry and very, very freaked out, but she's curled up in her habitual position by my knee now so I'm guessing she decided not to stay mad at me. She has really runny eyes, which was the first symptom of my cat Nermal having FIV, so I was very DDDD: about the whole thing and kind of freaked out as to what we would find, but apparently she's FIV-free, which means her mom and her sibs are as well! \o/ She did, however, have ear mites and apparently had a pretty bad liver infection (which is probably why she didn't eat anything for the longest time), but we have vitamins and medicine for her so she should be okay. Also I am down $285 bucks, so we'll be taking our other kitties to a much less expensive vet for their vaccinations (she cost extra because she had blood work done, of course, but it was $95 just for the office visit. Gah).

Sorry for their gigantic blurriness--I tend to just upload with changing their default size. D:

Zucchini, the kitten who just went to the vet.

Zucchini eating her namesake--she had literally no interest in food until I had some fried zucchini one night and she snatched it out of my hand like she was starving. We started giving her mashed up zucchini (not fried, just lightly grilled) with rice and turkey and kitten food piled up on top of it before gradually switching out to nothing but kitten food.

Lando/Punkin, the cat found in the car engine:

I had one of the black kitty, too, but I don't remember if I tagged it and I don't feel like uploading it again. Rest assured, he's adorable.

ETA: Oh, and I forgot to say that even though I rarely see movies in theaters because it's damned expensive, man, I'm really fucking tempted to see the new Terminator movie even though I'm already pretty sure that:

-I will come out of it slashing the shit out of John Connor/robot dude (thanks for this useless and creepy kink, Sarah Connor Chronicles!)
-I will come out of it slashing the shit out of John Connor/his future dad (I don't really know who to blame for this--possibly SCC, too)
-I will come out of it angry at the way women are marginalized (from what I've heard there are two women and one of them is John Connor's pregnant girlfriend who obviously has to stay out of the way of all the actiony stuff)
-I will come out of it missing Sarah Connor like crazy
-I will come out of it pissed off that SCC was cancelled and that we didn't get a SCC movie, instead, and now never will

And yet...Terminator. Robots! Explosions! Action and adventure! I'll probably end up waiting until it's on cable, but still. I waaaant. :(

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Mon, 25 May 2009 20:23:13 GMT

Here is a list of fandoms I've been reading fic for over the last, say, three days: Supernatural, Heroes, Veronica Mars, The OC, Star Trek (reboot and TOS). Not even really a lot, but dude, after being in bandom and pretty much only bandom being polyfandom again wears me the fuck out, especially since I still have monofandom tendencies--I marathon fic from one fandom, and then either find an author I like has written other fandoms or find a link on my flist to a fic from a different fandom and then switch tracks to marathoning that instead, and holy fuck, have I read a lot of fic lately. (Side note: there was never enough VMars Dick/Cassidy fic, man, never.)

In other news, last night I went over to my friend Shaunna's house to have dinner and play games with her, her boyfriend Sorin, and our friend Amber. You'd think a bunch of eighties babies would be at least semi-okay at 90s Trivial Pursuit, and yet you would be wrong--I'm pretty sure that game took three hours or so. Admittedly I'd been awake for 29 hours by the time we ended the game, Sorin didn't emigrate to Canada until the late 90s, and Shaunna and Amber both worked through the week and so probably weren't all that brain-awake either, but damn, man--that's some sad shit. Also all of us except Sorin turned 15/16 in 2000, so most of that shit, especially politics and technology, went right over our heads. Of course we all knew each other's questions, though. That's how it always goes in Trivial Pursuit--everyone else's question is always the question you totally would have gotten, while your own are completely incomprehensible.

Also I'm apparently going to Vegas for two days in June. /o\ I'm not even sure how it happened, really--Shaunna gave me the big puppy eyes that I thought I was immune to, and my mouth somehow said yes against my will. Apparently I can crash in her and Sorin's room, though, and they're just planning to hang around the pool at the hotel all day, so hopefully it won't end up being too expensive since I don't have a job yet. (I do have a possible, job, though--a friend of my parents recommended a position at a book store to me! I just need to give her the application, which can hopefully be done without me traveling down there.)

I also made a delicious raspberry cake--it was supposed to be blueberry, but the little store down my street for some reason doesn't carry them, so it ended up raspberry and so fucking delicious. Betty Crocker, you are my savior and my love. (Sidenote: I love my little grocery store down the street--12 oz. of raspberries and two mangoes for three fucking dollars. Om nom nom nom nom.) Of course, I didn't remember until after I left Shaunna's that I'm pretty sure Shaunna doesn't like raspberries. /o\ Oh well, at least my fam can have some nice cake for a few days. It's a really dense cake, since it would have been cake bars if I'd had a big enough baking pan, but sweet and soft and bursting with raspberries. I have no idea how I can make cake turn out this good, and yet consistently fail it up with cookies.

I've also been planning to treat myself with a 20 dollar Amazon used book shopping spree, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to be spending my cash on the new Tori Amos and Placebo cds instead, since I am SO FUCKING STOKED for both of them. Especially Placebo, since I've been mainlining all their cds for the last few weeks or so. Some day, I swear, I will see them perform. I'd like to see Tori again, too, the next time she tours, since I haven't seen one of her shows in probably...five years? Six? IDK, but way too long.

And that's the end of my babbling. :D

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Sun, 24 May 2009 09:55:54 GMT

I had a fit of nostalgia and decided to watch S2 Veronica Mars again for the first time since it aired. And

Just as a sidenote, the whole plotline with Wallace's girlfriend is still really stupid, mostly because he just didn't have any sort of chemistry with Jackie (and she also was kind of a crap actress, though VMars never really lacked for those what with UPN's ridiculous casting decisions--for every Joss Whedon and Kevin Smith there was a Naima and a Paris Hilton. And also that gay cheerleader.). Also making Wallace into a jerky, ladies man, doesn't-know-what-he-wants cheater made me really annoyed, even though it was only for a few episodes. And he had so much chemistry with his cute girlfriend Jane who sneezes when she laughs! Also Wallace and Veronica are my best friend OTP forever and ever and ever--her au dream where she never became friends with Wallace made me so sad, I can't even tell you. They should be friends in every universe ever so she can make him secret spirit cookies and she can lean her head on his shoulder when she's sad.

The finale is still pretty gut-wrenching. Aaron going free, Veronica realizing that she was raped, Woody's creepy admission that he was the boys' "friend", the flashback to Cassidy talking to Marcos and Peter about being molested, Veronica's face when she thinks her dad has been blown up, the whole torture scene, Veronica almost shooting him in her grief and anger, "My name is Cassidy", Mac wrapped in a shower curtain on the floor and "He took everything". ;__; Like a knife in my heart, you guys. Mac and Veronica should never have to cry, ever.

Seriously, VMars was so good at racking up the emotional hits, and good at some interesting twisty logic stuff on an episode-by-episode basis, but for some reason when tying up a seasonal arc it just went increasingly off the rails, and a lot of that has to do with turning every seasonal criminal into a ridiculous mwa ha ha villain. Because seriously. SERIOUSLY! A lot the villainy stuff they were doing with Cassidy could have worked. Could have, but really didn't, to the point where I had to write a seriously convoluted au/not au to make sense of it for myself. I mean, these are Cassidy's crimes in order of how much they make sense to me:

1. Blackmailing Woody to gain money for his real estate company
2. Blowing up Woody Goodman and whoever else was in his plane
3. Blowing up the bus to keep Marcos and Peter from bringing Woody's molestation to light and murdering eight people (and almost Veronica) in the process
4. Running over Curly with his car because Curly figured out that he blew up the bus
5. Raping Veronica to "prove his manhood" (to himself, although not to Dick, because "Dick still thinks I'm a virgin")
6. Killing a dog, Sally, pre-series (not strictly canon--reported by Rob Thomas in a chat)

And while doing 1-4 and covering up his crimes, he also managed to spend a lot of time with Dick, go to school, do homework, run a company that made 8 million dollars, keep himself fed, and presumably shower often enough that he managed to keep Mac attracted to him. Damn, Cassidy, give me your time-management skills! (Cause you're dead, and also fictional, so I need them more than you do.) And the rape and the puppy-killing are just totally gratuitious bids to make Cassidy both a full-fledged villain and a total sociopath, neither of which are particularly convincing.

The rape thing actually makes a certain sense on a character level--I can buy Cassidy raping Veronica to convince himself that he's "normal", and it's believable for a victim of sexual abuse to become an abuser. But the way it was done was such an obvious retcon after "A Trip to the Dentist"--I'm sorry, you just cannot convince me that Veronica Mars was raped without a condom (which we know because Cassidy gave her chlamydia) and yet didn't get herself tested every six months for the rest of her life. Frankly, even if she was raped with a condom (and she probably thought she was, since I think Duncan used one and she saw the wrapper), I'd still expect her to get tested, because she's Veronica--even with her avoidance issues around her rape, I just really can't believe that she would go to the cops, and yet wouldn't get herself tested. She's Veronica freaking Mars. (In related news, believing that Veronica would meet Mac on the roof without confirming that it's actually Mac when she knows Mac was making time with a murderer who can read and could easily get his hands on her phone require so much "she's not thinking straight because she just found out she was really raped" handwaving that it really annoys me. People do illogical things for emotional reasons, but when they do it on a tv show it needs to be more backed up than that, especially when she dicey situation she's going into involved putting herself at risk at the hands of her rapist. Veronica Mars is smarter than that.)

And beyond making Cassidy totally reprehensible (as though blowing up a bus and running over a man in cold blood and blowing up a plane weren't enough) it was pretty blatantly a way to make it all about Veronica, as though her personal investment in the students on the bus (and her dad) wasn't enough. (Also, obviously, the key to her figuring out the mystery, but she could have figured it out just as easily after seeing the picture without the chlamydia plotline if she interviewed the other boy and realized it wasn't him, so therefore it must be Cassidy. Or some other way. Just...it was really unnecessary. I realize it also gave them a segue into the rape plotline of S3, but that plotline sucked anyway and I could have happily lived without it.)

I also can't really believe that Cassidy, supervillain extraordinaire, wouldn't use a condom while raping a cop's daughter (or anybody else), especially since in the flashback we saw Dick leave condoms right there for him. The retcon actually makes a certain amount of sense if you interpret him vomiting on Carrie's shoes afterward as a response to what he did, and him saying he wouldn't rape Veronica not for moral reasons but because it would be "stupid" makes sense if he realized that he screwed up, but then that doesn't gel with him being so goddam proud about it when he was taunting Veronica, or with his sociopathic lack of caring (and even joy in tormenting people) that he displayed with the rest of his victims and with Veronica on the roof, or with the fact that he was so good at covering up the rest of his crimes that Veronica wouldn't have figured it out if he hadn't given her chlamydia while raping her.

And that's kind of part of the problem--they couldn't decide whether he was a broken victim committing crimes of passion because he was in denial about being molested and trying to get revenge/cover up the tracks, or a cold-hearted sociopath calmly and logically committing and covering up his crimes for his own profit (psychological and financial). They went for a weird mix of both, and it just. Doesn't. Work. GAH. It makes it seem like they didn't trust the audience to go "Well, yeah, he was molested and that's horrible and awful, but that doesn't excuse, you know, murdering a bunch of people," and so, boom, suddenly he's a sociopath so then we don't have to feel bad when he dies.

Which, of course, makes the whole episode sort of an anti-climax because, you know, we don't care. I mean, I'm seriously overinvested in Cassidy, and his last line broke my heart, but for most of the roof scene he's so awful that Veronica shooting him would be a-okay with me. Me, the person who's invested enough to write this rant (twice! because really this is mostly a retread of my first-watch rant) and a 10,000 word fanfic trying to explain Cassidy's actions! I would have been cool with him being shot in the head (or the balls) by Veronica! Because that dude on the roof wasn't really a character, he was a smug villain stereotype, and I don't really care about smug villain stereotypes get shot or jump to their death from buildings. And I don't need my villains to be smug stereotypes to find their actions reprehensible--really, a character can do awful, horrible things that they deserve to be jailed for and still be sympathetic, or at least have some sort of human feeling. I swear it can be done, Rob Thomas--remember how you did that with Logan, sort of?

I dunno. It's all just half a step away from working--if his performance on the roof had been less smug and sociopathic, it would maybe would have. Or if his plan had been less damn complex and far-ranging, so that he wasn't responsible for almost every awful thing that happened throughout the season. Or if his insanely complex plan had less loose ends, because seriously, all the red herrings that popped up weren't arranged by Cassidy, and he should have had at least one that he set up to take the fall. For a sixteen-year-old smart enough to murder a bunch of people and almost get away with it, that's pretty dumb. The whole plan was just so convoluted and unnecessary and destined for failure, and also fairly unbelievable for me as a viewer because all the different threads of characterization and motivation (sociopath? victim becoming victimizer? molestation victim seeking revenge? beat-down kid making a bid for power and reveling in his secret badassness?) don't all pull together to account for all of the crimes, or at least not all of them at once.

And there's also the whole thing of having all the victims of molestation a) be gay, b) be psychopaths, c) end up dead, or d) combine a, b, and c as needed (and c actually applies to all of them, leaving Veronica standing as the One True Rape Victim to lead us into the awfulness that was S3). (And as a note on that, I haven't rewatched S3 since it aired and I'm pretty cool with the idea that other VMars fans have, which is S3 AND HALF OF S2 NEVER HAPPENED, but man does it bug me that the show went from being so good at treating issues of rape and sexual abuse in the first season to that utter awfulness in S3, and S2 was really the midpoint for sexual abuse-related badness.) It's slightly mitigated by making Marcos confused about his sexuality, not just gay, and by making Lucky's mental problems partially caused by his time in the war, but still. REALLY, VMars, REALLY? All the molestation victims on your show are gay or psychopaths, and all of them end up dead? REALLY? Just, oh, VMars. So much possibility for awesomeness, and yet so much fail. D:

update on my degree situation!

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Tue, 12 May 2009 19:55:07 GMT

So, my prof very kindly gave me a B- instead of a C because my general performance in his class was so good, even though he was kind of disappointed in my final paper. (I mean, I had an extra month to write it, so it should have been awesome, but it was a difficult topic and I wrote most of it while panicking and going "oh my god, I can't do this" so it's not really surprising that it's not my best paper ever.) \o/

So I called my degree auditor who told me what to do, and also informed me that also apparently I'm missing the writing composition 3 requirement, which was fucking news to me because my counselor never told me. So I called my department counselor who told me that they only received one of my AP scores, which was the problem, since it was standing in for that requirement in my IGETC. Luckily I've taken a fuckton of English classes at UCLA (almost all English classes, really, except for a few LGBT Studies classes and a Comp Lit class) so she subbed one in, which should clear it up.

So now I just need to fax my degree candidacy form in and wait for them to bill me. That's kind of a problem because I don't actually have access to a fax machine--some of my friends do through work, but it would be kind of awkward asking them to do this for me on work time, and my mother does, but, um, she doesn't actually know that I screwed up this badly. There's a library in Azusa, but I don't know that they have a fax machine and I don't know if they're accessible by bus. I could mail it in, but that takes more time and I need to get this shit sewn up as soon as possible. Confessing to my mom may be my only option. DDD:

But, I'm getting my fucking degree, and that's the important thing. \o/ Yay for fixing my innumerable mistakes!

So, stuff!

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:39:36 GMT

Baking

Let's see, in the last week or so I made another batch of chocolate chip cookies (still flatter than I'd like, but delicious and soft and chocolate-melty), a blackberry cobbler that I think is more cobbler-y than the first one I made (that is, the topping is soft and biscuity rather than more pie-crust like), and buttermilk pancakes. Apparently you can simulate buttermilk by adding milk to a tablespoon of lemon juice until it adds up to a cup, and then letting it sit for five minutes. They were a little burnt, but really really good. I kind of want to try more things but for a lot of them I'd need other ingredients, and I don't really want to walk down to the grocery store down the street, especially since it's starting to get hot.

Jobs and School

I just got two automated "we'll contact you" responses, and one "we'll keep you on file" from three different jobs, but all from the same employment recruiter. LOL. I haven't heard back about the two library jobs I was hoping for, unfortunately. :( Maybe it'll be Walmart for me after all.

In terms of school, my prof said he'd have my grade up by Monday, and it's now Thursday and I'm still waiting for it. I emailed him a few minutes ago to ask him to email me the grade directly if he's already submitted it, just in case there's something wrong with the grading website. I keep getting myself revved up to call the school and deal with whatever forms I need to fill out to (hopefully) get my ass graduated, but I can't do that without knowing whether I've passed his class.

Kittens

Pumpkin (the kitten my mom brought home) has been completely adopted by both the mom cat and her litter. He runs around with the black kitten and is getting nice and chubby. Pics as soon as I get new batteries for my camera.

I'm actually kind of worried about our gray stripey kitten. She's having some wicked diarrhea, and despite being almost eight weeks old, she's surviving entirely off her mom's milk, which she has to share with two other kittens. (My mom claims she's seen her eat kitten food a few times, but if so, it hasn't been lately.) She's also way thinner than the other kittens, even Pumpkin who's younger, and while she still runs and plays a good bit, she's starting to nap a lot more too and just doesn't seem very happy. I noticed the diarrhea but figured it would go away, but when she started getting more lethargic I checked the internet and it told me diarrhea in kittens is a big fucking deal and she needs to go to the vet immediately to be checked for worms. Unfortunately my parents are going to be in Vegas until Sunday. D: I'm hoping my little sis will be able to give me a ride to the vet today or tomorrow, because if not we'll have to wait until Monday. I'm keeping a close eye on her and making sure she drinks lots of water, though.

ETA: Possibly part of the "hot happy" thing was not getting enough attention, since the other two kittens tend to play more with each other. I've got her on my bed right now, happily attacking a little toy mouse and my fingers.

ETA 3: So, after examining the poop (yep, this is what I do with my days, people) of the mom cat as well as the babies, they definitely have some sort of worms. Possibly the "healthy" belly I'm seeing on two of the kittens is a potbelly from roundworms! Oh, joy. So I'll probably take in the black kitten and the grey stripey kittens, as well as poop from both of them and their mom, and then ask if they can give me a treatment for a mom and three kittens.

ETA 2: Jury duty

Dude, I totally forgot to talk about this! So I've been called up for jury duty next week in fucking Whittier, a city almost twenty miles away that I have never been to (and thus am almost guaranteed to get lost in). I called like a month back to try to get out of it, because hi, I do not drive, but I was told that I could only get out of it for extraordinary travel circumstances if I had to take three buses, not two. And I was so sure that I'd only have to take two buses (yep, "only" two and "only" a two hour trip--meaning really a three hour trip because local public transit sucks, and also I'd have to go early to compensate for late buses and getting off at the wrong stop) but looking at the trip planner right now, I would definitely have to take three buses. /o\ And of course it's too late now to call and go, "um, actually it is three buses, can I please not have to go?" All I can do is hope I don't actually get called in.

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:47:46 GMT

So, we have another new kitten. /o\ Apparently at my mom's work, some guy found a kitten in his engine block, and Mom decided to bring him home rather than entrust him to Animal Control because she was afraid he might be put down. He's probably five or six weeks, just a little younger than the kittens we have now, and he's the cutest little orange thing. Poor baby's totally starving--he's eating wet kitten food on my bedroom floor right now and pretty much stuffing himself.

I was hoping the two siblings would be adopted together, just because kittens are supposed to have other cats around in order to be well-socialized, but no chance will anyone take all three, unfortunately. Hopefully we can get someone who already has a cat to adopt one, at least.

In other news, my newest baking project was a cranberry-orange cake. It came out kind of bland at first because I didn't add as much sugar as the recipe called for but I made an orange juice and sugar glaze and it's really yummy now, at least I think so. According to my little sis, my cookies were "too floury" so I'm going to work on that this weekend. Anyway, I really need to figure out what's up with my camera, both so I can post kitty development (both the new little guy, and the big ol gamboling things the babies have become) as well as my pretty, pretty cakes.

Oh, and in school news, my graduation will officially be spring, rather than winter, so I'll have to pay an extra $120 to graduate as a non-registered student and to graduate in a different term than I said I would, and also have to turn in some paperwork since it's so late in the term--hopefully I'll be able to mail it in. Of course, all this is IF my prof passes me--I sent him an email asking him to please give me a grade soon so that I know whether I can just graduate late, or, if he fails me, if I need to re-apply. All for one damn credit. (His class was four units, but I took it anwyway because it was really cool. One is all I need to graduate, though.) I'm hoping he'll give me a grade soon and pass me, though, because it's a miracle I've managed to keep my massive failure from my parents this long. If I have to do another quarter, no way can I hide that. :/

Of course, right now I have a tiny orphan fuzzball curled up on my neck and purring, so it's hard to be too depressed at the moment.

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:09:52 GMT

I just got home from a surprise concert! \o/

My friend Tyler decided to surprise me with tickets to see Ben Lee play at the Glass House--he actually didn't let me know who we were seeing until about ten minutes before the show started. Apparently it was the first show on his tour, and it was kind of a sad little turnout. I'm gonna say there were about fifteen people there for the first two openers, including me and Ty, and maybe about thirty, forty at the most, for the Ben Lee. I mean, the Glass House is small, but it's smallness only emphasized just how few people were there. That had to suck for everyone performing (especially the second performer, Annie Stele--not only did she have a cold, so she was reaching for notes she couldn't hit, but it was also just so obviously not her crowd) but it was such a nice little intimate gig for the audience--half the Ben Lee songs were audience sing-alongs, because hey, why not? Also it was Ben's first time performing with the band backing him, so it gave him a chance to try out some stuff, which was awesome. Ben Lee puts on a pretty awesome show, dudes. Also I've dug his songs for a few years now, but hearing his new stuff about undermining the patriarchal system and "boys with their barbies and girls with toy armies, we don't have to play by their rules" made me love him really a lot. I've heard the new album kind of sucks, but I might check it out.

I grabbed the ep of the first opener, Janu and the Watersharks, I think? And I would have liked to have heard more of Low vs. Diamond (they were an opening band and also backed Ben) because they had a good sound, but they had their shit turned up so fucking loud, and since there were no bodies to absorb the sound it was just bouncing off the walls and becoming totally distorted and hurting Ty's ears, so we sat outside for most of their set. I didn't grab their album because they already seemed to have a semi-decent fanbase built. I would have liked to have gotten Annie Stele's album, too, because she has a lovely voice but her songs were just deeply, deeply uninteresting--she seemed pretty young, though, so I'll probably keep an eye on how she develops.

Also since we showed up an hour early, and there was no point in hanging around the empty venue cause it definitely wasn't going to fill up, we wandered over to this awesome little used book store--I got a Henry James novel I've never read (The Other House), Pnin by Nabakov (1st edition paperback!), Ringworld by Larry Niven (Telis introduced me to him, and I've been wanting to read more) and a book for Tyler for twenty-five bucks. Also since a lot of the bands at the Glass House go over to the bookstore to trade signed cds for books, I heard a new band I'm digging a lot, Grand Ole Party.

And in other news, I finally managed to make a chewy, delicious chocolate chip cookie. All in all, an awesome fucking night.

Stuff I've been doing lately

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:37:14 GMT

Baking!

I am really, really not a cook--I can make grilled cheese sandwiches, eggs, omelets, and pretty decent crepes, but I don't really try to make much of anything else because my teen years were full of burnt rice and failed cakes. Lately, though, I've been compelled to bake for some reason. I made two horribly failed attempts at chocolate chip cookies (the first time, I had no eggs, which resulted in tasteless dried out disks, and the second time I wrote down the recipe wrong and put in a cup of baking powder, which resulted in two cookie tins full of disgusting burnt slop) before making some very crispy, but actually cookie-tasting, double chocolate chip cookies. I also made a blackberry cobbler that turned out totally delicious, to my complete and utter surprise. Thank you, Betty Crocker!

I'm pretty sure my next attempt will be some better chocolate chip cookies, and a blueberry cobbler.

Making an effort to see friends

After a month of avoiding all humanity, I spent this weekend watching Battle Royale and playing Rock Band at my friend Shaunna's house.

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 07:06:12 GMT

So, I've been kind of avoiding LJ and people in general because they sort of expect me to, like, talk about my life? And I haven't really wanted to because frankly, I'm kind of fucking up right now. During finals week I had three papers to turn in, didn't finish one of them, and basically freaked out and froze up and couldn't write it. I finally got it turned in and my prof has promised to give me a grade, but the fact that it's a month later and I don't have a grade yet means that when he submits it, I'll probably have to negotiate with my college to get them to give me a degree, since I already got a letter warning me that I might not be able to graduate. When I fuck up, I do it with style. /o\

So I spent a month trying and failing to do that and basically decompressing from the six or so years I spent in various colleges, and now I'm looking for jobs and trying to write a half-decent resume, which is fairly daunting considering how little work experience I have, especially in relevant fields. There are a few library jobs that I'm looking at, since I'm contemplating whether I want to do grad school for library science or english, or just enter the job market head-on, so I'm hoping my minimal customer service work will persuade them to give me a chance. If not, entry level clerical work it is.

In other news, I spent three hours at the emergency room with my sis last night because she had a high fever that wouldn't break, and she ached all over so much that she was crying, and all they did was take her temperature and give her tylenol. She went to the doctor today and apparently she has ear infections in both ears--pretty sure she's getting an antibiotic or something, but at the moment she still has a fever. Also my cat Baby has a big hole in his neck that we keep filling with ointment the vet gave us, and he keeps getting into fights and opening it back up. Stray cat Ugly got taken to the vet and had his teeth cleaned, so hopefully he won't be growling at his food from mouth pain and drooling brown crap anymore. Another of my cats, Brownie, has some sort of stomach problem--he flinches away when you pet his belly--but after taking the other two in we can't afford to get him to a vet for a little while. As for me, we switched dentists yet again because our new one was impossible to get ahold of, so now I get to wait until May to get the broken one yanked and just hope the rest don't fall out of my mouth before then.

And that's why I haven't been on much, because I would either be posting panicky entries about how I fail at life, or else telling you all about my exciting adventures cleaning my parents' house (I organized our linen closet! Good times, man) and cooking eggless chocolate chip cookies that predictably burned and tasted like ass, or talking about my ten thousand kitties and their various maladies. And I hate being all negative like that, and I don't really have a steady fandom right now so there's not much to post about there, so...yeah. I'm trying to get my shit together, though--writing my resume, contacting friends after my month-long hermit phase--so hopefully I'll be back to babbling at you soon. <3

And to make up for this post, here!

Staying up til dawn won’t take its toll until we’re old
And drinking is just the way we keep away the cold
And you, you know what it means
To be true and searching just like me
~Ben Lee: Birthday Song

For his sixteenth birthday, Shawn decides all he really wants is to get trashed. His dad is back but not there half the time anyway, he’s living in a trailer park again, and his mentor was in a fucking bike crash—he sort of figures he deserves a drink or six.

Besides, Corey and Topanga are at an ‘off again’ part of their relationship, which means that Corey can hang out with Shawn without Topanga tagging along—without Corey dragging her along—and also that he’s feeling ‘independent’ enough that he’ll actually drink just because Topanga wouldn’t like it. Shawn may never get the opportunity to do something like this, alone with his best friend, ever again.

Corey without Topanga spends all his time either moping or bitching about Topanga, but Corey without Topanga also drinks and watches action movies and does other things that Miss Priss doesn’t approve of. And even though Shawn’ll probably have to sit through a few hours of maudlin drunken ‘why doesn’t she love me like I love her’ crap, at least he doesn’t have to drink alone like (his dad) a loser.

Shawn wants beer, or whiskey, something that’ll get them drunk fast, but he knows Corey—he’ll want something sweet and girly. So he slips the guy outside the liquor store twenty bucks and tells him to get a big bottle of vodka, and another of cranberry juice. That way Shawn can have his harshness and Corey can have his sweetness, but really they’ll both be drinking the same thing.

2

Corey shows up late, edging through the space between the trees to the spot Shawn has staked out for them. When they were kids, this spot in the woods was their secret place, and they could pretend they were explorers in a previously undiscovered land. When Shawn first got there, the ground was covered with condom wrappers and drug baggies—evidence of invasion from foreign enemies—but he managed to pick up all the trash and lay a blanket down on the dirt before Corey gets there. It’s almost like it was when they were kids.

Because Corey is, as previously mentioned, late to Shawn’s birthday, probably because he was on the phone with Topanga for three hours, begging her to take him back.

When he walks through the trees he’s already talking a mile a minute. “I can’t believe you wanted to meet all the way out here. I mean, hey, it’s your birthday, happy happy birthday, Shawnie, but we couldn’t celebrate indoors? Someplace with a heater or a fireplace or, you know, walls? Why did you—” He stops cold when he sees Shawn leaning against a tree, already drinking vodka out of the open bottle. “Oh, no. No, no, no, Shawnie.”

“Yes, yes, yes, Corey,” Shawn replies. The vodka’s making him warm and happy already, and he’s barely had any. “It’s my birthday, and I get to choose how we celebrate. I went to space camp for your birthday, now you have to sit in the woods and drink with me for mine.”

Corey sits down gingerly on the blanket across from Shawn, pouting. “We went to space camp when I turned eleven, which I’m pretty sure means you should get over it by now. And it was cool. And you got a badge.”

“Corey, it was a sticker that said Junior Space Pilot. And everyone got one.”

“It was still cool.” Corey takes the cup of vodka and cranberry juice that Shawn hands him, sniffing it and wrinkling his nose. He sighs one of those long-suffering Corey sighs. “How exactly are we supposed to explain to my parents why we’re crawling in my bedroom window drunk?”

“An, but that’s the engineness—ingeniuses—smart thing about my plan, Corey.” Whoa. Shawn’s mouth is starting to make shapes he doesn’t mean for it to. “You told your parents you were sleeping over at my place, right?”

“Right,” Corey says. “But even when I say that we’re sleeping over at your place, we always end up sleeping over at my place anyway.” Well, yeah, cause Shawn’s ‘place’ is a shithole. “So they’ll expect us to come home.”

“Okay, sure,” Shawn admits. “So they’ll call my dad. He’ll probably already be drunk, or at least he won’t bother to check on us, so if your parents call thinking we’re there, he’ll just assume they’re right and tell them we’re already asleep in my room.”

“Great,” Corey says.

“Uh-huh. Great.” Shawn swallows a mouthful from the bottle and grins.

“And in this really smart plan of yours, did you happen to work out where we’ll actually be sleeping?”

Oh, right. That. “Right here,” Shawn says, patting the blanket beneath him.

“Right here?”

“Yeah. We’ve got blankets, we’ve got stars, we’ve got booze to keep us warm.”

“Right here?” Uh-oh. Corey looks like he’s out of ‘worried’ and edging into ‘full-fledged panic.’ And Shawn’s starting to get a little annoyed at this echo thing.

“Come on! We used to go camping all the time when we were kids!”

“No, we didn’t. We used to sleep in my backyard in a tent, not out in the forest in the cold, waiting for bears to eat us.”

“There are no bears, Corey.”

“There might be. Big man-eating grizzly bears, just waiting around for some delicious teenager flesh. First they’ll just kind of nibble on us, soften us up a bit, and then they’ll chop us up into pieces with their big grizzly teeth and carry us to their cave for their young.”

Shawn rolls his eyes. “Just drink your damn drink, Corey.”

Corey looks down at it and sighs. “Topanga would hate this.”

And it starts—the Topanga litany. “Then isn’t that a good reason to do it?” Shawn says wearily.

Corey opens his mouth, plugs his nose, and swallows down his drink.

3

As predicted, once Corey finally starts drinking (Shawn mixes his drinks sweet and light, so it doesn’t take much to convince him), every sentence that comes out of his mouth has Topanga in it. “Why did Topanga break up with me” and “Topanga’s hair is so soft, and in the light it has this, like, glint—you know, a glint, its amazing” and “I didn’t think I’d like soy-burgers, but when Topanga made them…” and on and on and on till all Shawn wants is to go over to Topanga’s house and throw a rock through her window.

If he wasn’t drunk, he would maybe feel tempted to think about where this feeling towards Topanga is coming from. Right now, though, all that’s running through his mind as Corey talks is, “I hate her, I hate her, I hate her…” Finally, when Corey pauses to breathe in the middle of his Topanga-babble, Shawn just exhales loudly and says, “God, I hate her.”

Oops. He hadnt actually meant to say that.

Corey freezes. “What? Shawn, you do not.”

Now he’s annoyed at Corey, too. “Why are you always telling me what I do and don’t feel? If I say I hate her, I mean I hate her.”

Corey looks bewildered and hurt, like Shawn has hit him in the face with a shovel. “Why?”

Suddenly, Shawn doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t want to think about it. Not about Topanga, and not about his reasons for hating her, whatever they are. “I just do,” he says huffily, and shivers deeper into the collar of his jacket.

“No. No, no, no,” Corey says slurrily. “No. You can’t just come out with the fact that you hate my girlfriend and then—”

“That. That right there,” Shawn says, stabbing the air in front of Corey. Well, sort of in front of him. “She’s not your girlfriend. She’s your ex-girlfriend, but whether you’re together or you’re broken up, you can’t stop talking about her. Not everyone is as interested in the many wonderous delights of Topanga as you are, Cor. Honestly, I get really fucking sick of hearing her name after a while.”

“But Topanga—”

Shawn groans and takes another swig from the bottle.

ETA: Oh, I forgot to add that I got new bookshelves! I had three already, but they were really, seriously full and the books were infringing on the tops of the shelves, the tops of my dresser, etc., so my dad bought me two more to replace my crappy desk. All the shelves are now full (though four on one case are taken up by my lamp and various papers) and I spent two days rearranging them--now I have one full bookcase of non-fiction and graphic novels; one full bookcase of classic fiction, literary biographies, poetry, and lit analysis; one bookcase made up mostly of children's lit and YA with a shelf for horror; and one bookcase of contemporary lit and scifi/fantasy, including an entire shelf of Pratchett. It took forever, but I fucking love organizing my books and looking at the nicely defined categories afterward, dude. Such a nerd.

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:01:00 GMT

Hi everyone! I'm not dead, just chronically lazy. Thanks to everybody who commented on my last entry re: being done with college! Sorry I didn't comment individually--I decided to give myself a break from the computer, and then it kind of lasted longer than I expected. :/ Mostly I've been lying around the house watching movies, attempting to clean my pit of a room and doing chores around the house, and for the last few days, looking at job postings, which has convinced me that I'll probably be doing the first two things for a good long while. /o\

But, in happier news, addictedkitten asked for kitten photos, which inspired me to actually get off my ass and take my camera out of it's packaging.

First, the new babies:

They're about two weeks old now, and just starting to open their eyes. Technically in that second one they shouldn't have been out, but I wasn't lying about my room being a pit--I really needed to vacuum, which would have been a little loud for them, and I also needed to clean out the closet where Salt (the mom cat) decided to give birth.

Also, remember the little kitten whose pictures I posted here about six months ago? Look how big he is now.

He's been really jealous since the babby kitties were born--he went through a period where he just wanted to hang out with all the male cats, but now he wants to curl up and cuddle with me all the time. He's also developed a habit of hanging around the kittens, and occasionally stealing one to use as a toy or just stare at creepily.

This is ugly brown cat. He's an old grumpy stray who just kind of wandered into our house, and now he kind of lives here because we feel sorry for him. The reason his skin's showing is because he had these huge, rock-hard mats in his fur that I had to slowly cut out with scissors--seriously, I wish I'd taken a picture of all the fur I cut off, it was truly epic. I was hoping it would reduce the smell, yet sadly, no; especially since underneath the fur was a ton of gross skin flakes.

My efforts to clean my room have not been aided by Stripes, who enjoys sitting in my broken drawer and getting my clothes all furry.

And in non-cat news, this is the pile of books that I had to try to put away in my completely full bookshelves:

Some are recent gifts, some are school texts that I decided to keep, all of them are too awesome to give away. They live on my shelves, piled up in front of my others books, now.

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 02:26:10 GMT

I'm done with college! \o/

I mean, okay, I still have a paper to finish that's two days late, so I need to write that and beg my professor to take it, but other that that: I'm done with college!

Also, apparently the cat we thought was fixed was...not, actually, so I also have surprise babby kittens yipping away in my closet. So, does anybody in the vaguely LA-ish area want some adorable kittens? No? Oh, fuck I'm going to end up having 12 cats, aren't I? /o\

THAT IS ALL!

(Why yes, I am very very sleep-deprived. Why do you ask?)

Hi, have a crazy student post!

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:07:17 GMT

Oh my god, guys.

So, I meant to sleep last night, and then I didn't. D: So I decided to stay up and try to write some of my paper that's due on Monday (which, btw, she said I could turn in through email \o/), and I did brainstorm a little about the quotes I want to use, but I didn't really end up doing that either because I don't really know how I want to address the topic question yet.

Instead, I inexplicably have a flood of ideas about my crazy complicated medieval lit paper that's due on Monday. I've written four pages about the interrelation of themes between The Book of the Duchess and Troilus and Criseyde, and I think it's actualfax quite brilliant.

However, there are problems:

A. This is not the paper I should be writing now. This paper is due on Thursday, and I have two papers which are due before this one.
B. I have already written four pages just about themes in BD and TC, and I'm not done yet. Except that the paper is supposed to be 10-12 pages long, and also cover the interrelation of themes between Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and also cover the relationships between structure and theme for all four of the works, and also somehow and for some reason relate them all to each other? IDK. (Side note: I suck at writing about structure so bad. So bad.) So basically I've already written like a third of this paper, and yet I still have a shitload more to cover and I have no idea how I'm going to fit it all into this paper. Or what the hell I'm going to write about the Pearl Poet works. DDD:
C. I am severely sleep-deprived, so it is quite likely that my brilliance will turn out to be blathering in the cold light of morning. /o\

I hate it when my brain turns against me and does shit like this, but otoh, I'm really really enjoying what I'm writing right now, and hopefully this will get my writing juices flowing for the essay I have to write tomorrow.

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 03:09:39 GMT

Finals are next week! I'm really, really fucking glad that I only have two "real" finals, where I have to actually go in to class and write crap in a blue book and such.

Of course, I also have three essays to write and turn in, so I will probably be dead by Saturday. One of them will be fairly easy because our prof had us write abstracts/thesis paragraphs, so I already have a lot of my ideas for it outlined, and I also really enjoy the topics and the class which always makes writing easier; and one of them will be completely ridiculous and difficult because the topic is huge--it covers four seperate works, their interrelation, and theories on authorship--and also because the prof is difficult (he's the homophobic Medieval Lit prof who loves to blather on forever about the mathematical structure of medieval works and his own theories about meaning and doesn't really understand or respect other people's theories).

The first one I have to turn in, though, is kind of in the middle. It's a difficult topic, kind of broad and focused at the same time, but otoh, my professor trusts my writing enough that if she likes my paper, she wants to submit it to an essay-writing contest at my school! This is both totally awesome and flattering, and simultaneously anxiety-inducing because it puts more pressure on me to write an awesome paper. I'm really hoping she'll let me submit it through email so I can spend more time editing instead of traveling for five hours.

So basically I'm going to be spending the weekend writing the paper for Monday; spend Monday night and Tuesday writing the paper for Wednesday; spend Wednesday writing the paper for Thursday and studying for the final on Thursday; and spend Thursday studying and writing an outline for the essay portion of my final on Friday. /o\

And now I'm off to brainstorm essay ideas, answer comments on my last post, and read porn to distract myself from the fact that I'm not going to be able to do anything but study and write for the next week. (Okay, this is a lie--my essay-writing strategy tends to involve plenty of time spent reading my flist and following links in order to create that burst of creative panic that leads to writing frantically at the last minute, so I'll probably be online, but I'm going to try to limit my procrastination habits so as not to stress myself out too badly.) If I don't post an exuberant "yay, I survived finals!" post by Saturday, you'll know that I, you know, haven't. Or I've called up one of my friends to kidnap me away from my computer, since I'm sure my retinas will thank me for it by then.

I am not the moderator

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 03:13:06 GMT

I've been reading pretty much everything posted about RaceFail'09 and making the occasional comment, but I haven't actually posted anything, both because this started out about scifi/fantasy fandom, which I'm not involved in (although it very quickly became about a lot more than that), and also because after a few years and some education I'm well aware that I failed it up big time during the last Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM. I didn't want to fail it up again, and I didn't want to talk about my last round of fail (which is, in and of itself, faily). Elizabeth Bear's latest post, as well as some of the comments I've seen around, are reminding me of my own fail, though, so I think it's time to revisit it.

So, what is my specific failure, and how does it relate to Elizabeth Bear's? Well, lets take a look at this comment thread and this post. There's a lot of stuff that's fucked up there—I brought up larger issues of culture and appropriation that had nothing to do with the explicitly defined topic at hand, which was white people appropriating from racial minorities; I understood perfectly well what oyceter was saying in her definition of dominant culture, but I still tried to excuse all the white people who were derailing the conversation by arguing that they might not have understood; I further derailed the conversation by posting my “but what about the white people?” bullshit; I asked oyceter to reconsider the terms of the discussion that she had set, thus drawing blame away from white derailment and towards her own framing of the terms; I revealed my own ignorance of racial debates by saying “but maybe if you just talked about it using different words, they would have reacted differently!”. (At the time this was genuine ignorance—I’ve since seen that no matter how you try to frame the discussion, white people will still find a way to talk about white people and whiteness and all the different ways that they think they are absolved of their whiteness. So it came from ignorance, not deliberate misunderstanding, but talking about shit like I knew about it was still privileged and stupid since I was coming from a place of ignorance.) I stopped the conversation by not responding to oyceter when she responded to my post (because at the time, I didn’t think I was wrong in some ways, the ways in which I knew I was wrong, I didn’t want to admit. I now really, really regret how rude I was by not responding to her).

I’m sure there’s more, but that’ll do for the moment. Oh, and I also consistently misspelled privilege—I have since decided that if I can’t spell something correctly, that probably means that means I am arguing about it incorrectly. And yeah, I owned up to my white privilege and admitted that maybe I was wrong because of it, but you know what? I have also since realized that saying “I realize that I’m speaking from a position of privilege so maybe I’m wrong here but [I really think I’m completely, unassailably correct and here’s why]” is also a good way of saying, “I’m going to pay lip service to the idea of privilege while simultaneously manifesting it”, which is something coffeeandink and oyceter both rightly called me on.

The thing I want to focus on, though, is the role I tried to place myself in. I said in a comment to someone that “I'm not saying that I'm the lone wise person who does see both sides”, but that was exactly what I was saying. I was trying to make myself into the arbitrator, the unbiased moderator of the discussion. I didn’t find oyceter’s definition of dominant culture to be particularly useful, but I did realize that the definition wasn’t the point, and that the point was perfectly clear from the rest of her post; I also realized that the white commenters were derailing the conversation by (willfully, although at the time I ignorantly thought it was genuinely) misreading her post. I thought that I could see clearly what was going wrong in the debate, and that I would somehow come in and clear up all the misunderstandings so we could all talk nicely.

I thought I was above the debate, rather than a part of it. Instead of saying, as I would to the same discussion now, “Well, maybe those white people need to read a little fucking closer and figure out what she’s actually saying and then talk on her terms,” I told oyceter that she could change her terms. And with that, I pretty clearly demonstrated that I was not above the debate. By trying to excuse all the white people, and by telling oyceter that the derailment was her fault because her definitions were being “misunderstood”, I was displaying my white privilege. I was part of the debate because not only can I not escape my white privilege, I wasn’t even trying to. My wise, unbiased words of wisdom were in fact profoundly influenced by my privilege, and I was too blinded by the sun glaring off my shiny white ass to see it. My belief that I could raise myself above the debate, ignore my own racial bias and somehow put myself in the middle, was influenced by my privilege. My belief that somehow a moderator was wanted, or needed, when nobody asked for my ignorant-ass opinion, especially oyceter, was privileged as fuck.

In her latest post (linked above), Elizabeth Bear says:

This thing is my fault, but not in the way you probably think.

It's my fault because I accepted criticism of my book that I knew to be untrue, that I knew to be based on a shallow and partial reading (a reading of the first chapter of a 160,000-word novel), because I felt it was important to serve as an example of how to engage dialogue on unconscious institutional racism.

I wanted to be part of the solution, and make it a teaching experience, rather than responding with hurt and defensiveness. I wanted the dialogue to be about racism and how to combat it, rather than about me…

Why don't we all just let it drop for a while? Call a cease-fire. Internet-wide. Starting, oh, Friday at 12:01 am? Let's just all shut up for a little bit and think about what we've learned--those of us of good conscience, anyway, those who really are insterested in productive dialogue, those who care about social justice and making sure all voices are heard.

Let's call it a two-month cease fire. If we still want to, we can pick this up again in May, and have plenty of vitriol stored up for WisCon.

...or maybe, we can actually have a conversation then.

So she didn’t think the criticism was valid, but she pretended she did in order to “serve as an example”, to “make it a teaching experience”—make it something not personal, not about what she was doing wrong (because of course she wasn’t doing anything wrong), not about her. She tried to put herself above the discussion—to be the moderator. (I could discuss here how she literally failed to moderate the discussion in her own journal by letting white commenters get away with saying wildly offensive things and criticizing POC for saying far less offensive things, but I’m talking about a more general moderator-failure.) If there is a way to moderate a discussion that is all about you, I am unaware of it. In this case, it was literally about her—her work, her writing—so trying to set herself up as the unbiased moderator who is removed from the discussion and from personal bias is completely ridiculous.

In the case of the larger debate—about white people appropriating from minority cultures, about the racist statements made by various commenters—there is also no way of making oneself above the debate, because you cannot make yourself “above” your race. You cannot decide to make yourself temporarily un-white in order to judge what is going on in an unbiased manner. Something that I’ve seen not only from me in the past, but also from Elizabeth Bear and others in this current go-round, is the observation that “people on both sides are behaving badly”. Oddly enough, it is generally white people who make this observation, and who say that they don’t want to take sides, and who nevertheless try to convince POC that it is in fact their “bad behavior” that is bringing down the level of debate and that the white people who are making racist comments are really nice people, actually, who are just misunderstood. In trying to put themselves in the middle of the debate, or above it, they only reveal the extent to which such a thing is impossible.

And to go back to Bear’s post: she is still trying to be the moderator by trying to set the terms of the debate—like, “okay, I can see what nobody else is seeing here. Things are getting a little too heated, so everybody needs to be quiet and go to your corners and think about your bad behavior here, and then we’ll come back to the next meeting with clearer heads, all right?” But it was never her debate to control or to moderate. When it was going on in her journal, she moderated badly and in bad faith, so the debate moved outside of her journal. Now that it’s out, she does not get to set the terms, and she does not get to set the timetable. She does not get to tell everybody to shut up. And she does not get to remove herself from the debate, her race, and her privilege by making herself above all of them, because it’s clear from her many posts and her many comments that she is deeply, deeply entrenched in all of those things, just like all of the rest of us.

She is not the moderator; I am not the moderator; the various commentors who observe that “both sides are behaving badly” as though yelling “Get the fuck off my foot” is the same thing as deliberately stepping on somebody with a spike heel—they are not the moderators either. If there’s anything that I’d like to accomplish with this post, it’s just that—when you’re reading these posts and these comments, look at yourself. Think about what your point of view is. Think about the fact that you are part of this debate whether you comment on one side or the other, whether you try to separate yourself by making yourself the moderator who “sees both sides” and “judges in an unbiased manner”, or whether you don’t say anything at all. Realize that you cannot remove yourself from your race or your privilege.

What you can do is “see both sides” and decide where you want to stand, while being aware of why exactly you stand there. Realize that you are biased, and fucking own it, and if your bias is racist, try to change it. Sitting up on high and deciding that “both sides are behaving badly” is not a “get out of having an opinion free” card, nor is it a “blame the POC for being meanies while absolving the whites” card, nor is it an “ignore the points that are actually being made and the issues that the debate is actually about in favor of pointing out that one POC called a white person a mean name” card.

If nothing else, ask yourself, "Hey, did anybody ask me to moderate this discussion and display my dazzling insight into 'both sides' of this crazy situation?" Unless the answer is unequivocally and explicitly yes, you should probably reconsider posting your totally unbiased and utterly illuminating comment.

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 04:46:18 GMT

So, I've been mostly reporting crap in my life lately, and that is boring. I'm still going to report crap (because I don't really keep a paper journal anymore and I need to vent somewhere) but I'm going to try posting more positive stuff, too, and also doing some unfinished fic amnesty. So here, have some semi-self-contained Veronica Mars fic!

This was originally supposed to be a five things fic with a femslash ending, but idk that it'll actually be finished. I started writing it during first season when Lilly's death was still unsolved, so it doesn't quite work out as well as it would have, but eh.

1

Veronica sighed as another spitball hit the back of her head.

“Why does she hate me so much?”

Logan picked the spitball out of her long hair, flicking it in the general direction it had come from. “It’s not really about you. It’s about me. I’m like the toy she got for Christmas in fifth grade—she doesn’t really want me anymore, but she doesn’t want anyone else to have me, either.”

“And in this little analogy, I’m the girl who picked you up at Goodwill?”

“If the second-hand shoe fits…” At her look, Logan covered her hand with his, squeezing gently. “Look, she’ll get over it. Lilly can be a bitch sometimes, but she has a short attention span. By next week she’ll be writing notes to Dick in study hall and throwing spitballs at Madison.”

“So when she gets over it,” Veronica said slowly, “what if she wants you back?”

“She won’t,” Logan said bitterly, then, as if he’d just realized who he was talking to, “and I won’t. I wouldn’t be with you if I didn’t want to be, Veronica.”

You wouldn’t be with me if Lilly Kane hadn’t dumped you, she thought, and then did her best to shut up her tongue with a mouthful of diet coke.

*

She didn’t know what Lilly Kane had against her, but it didn’t seem like it was just about Logan. Lilly pushed her in the halls, tripped her during pep rallies, made sarcastic remarks alluding to Veronica in class. It wasn’t just pure meanness either. Lilly tormented her with a twinkle in her eye, like she was egging Veronica on, encouraging her to fight back. Sometimes she’d say something insulting to Veronica that left Lilly herself wide open for a comeback, and then she’d pause expectantly, as though she was waiting for Veronica to fill in the blanks.

Veronica never did, though. She bit back the comebacks as soon as they came to her tongue, because she wasn’t going to stoop to Lilly Kane’s level.

*

When she walked out of the bathroom stall to wash her hands, Lilly Kane was there, applying lipgloss in front of the mirror. Veronica gritted her teeth and walked over to the sinks. She wasn’t stooping to Lilly’s level, but she wasn’t going to back down, either.

Lilly just looked at her while she washed her hands, not saying a word. Just when Veronica was finally going to ask her what her problem was, she said, “You know, I expected you to have more spunk. I thought you’d be more like me. But instead you’re just like Duncan, all boring and nice.”

“So what, because I’m dating Logan, I’m supposed to be just like you? He’s over you, Lilly. He’s moved on.” It wasn’t exactly true, but it was true enough. He still said Lilly’s name bitterly, like tasting lemon juice, but he didn’t look over her shoulder to watch her at lunch anymore.

Lilly raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “Now, Logan—Logan has spunk. Which I’m sure you already know.” She made a jerking-off gesture and Veronica grimaced.

“You’re disgusting.”

“Maybe. But I know something you don’t know, Veronica Mars.”

“What, about Logan? I know everything I need to know about him, thanks.” Another lie, but still an acceptable one.

“Nooooo, not about Logan. More…about me. And you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You figure it out, girl detective,” Lilly said with a smirk. She put her lipgloss back in her bag and walked out of the bathroom.

The next day, Veronica started investigating Lilly Kane. Lilly knew something about her, some secret, and Veronica was going to find out what it was.

2

Veronica wants to feel sad for her dad, or angry at her mom, and she does, underneath it all. She really, really does. But once she gets to the Kane household, so the “adults” can discuss extramarital affairs and blood tests and what they’ll do if it turns out Veronica actually is a Kane, what she mostly feels is swept away by Hurricane Lilly. Almost as soon as they show up, Lilly grabs Veronica by the hand and pulls her into her bedroom, Duncan slowly drifting behind them.

Lilly’s bedroom is white and pink and huge, filled with stuffed animals and CDs and posters for boy bands. She wants to look at it more, examine the ballerina figurines on the shelves and scan the bookshelves (which are, admittedly, a little bare, mostly filled with movie star biographies and romance novels) but Lilly pulls her over to the bed so she can stare at Veronica’s face, not even trying to veil her fascination.

Veronica just hopes she doesn’t have anything stuck between her teeth.

“I think we have the same chin,” Lilly finally announces, “and your nose is kind of like Duncan’s. Why the hell did you two get the lucky genetics? My nose is all weird and bulbous.”

“It’s not,” Veronica tries to reassure her, but Lilly’s already onto another topic.

“I wish you’d been here when I was growing up. I tried to play dress-up with Duncan, but he always ran away when I got to the eyeliner.”

“You always poked me in the eye,” Duncan protests.

The side of Lilly’s mouth tilts up, and she leans in closer to Veronica to whisper, “He looked good in the lipstick, though. Pink. Brings out his eyes.”

Veronica tries to swallow her laugh, but Duncan just raises his eyebrows, obviously used to it. “I’m a summer,” he says dryly.

“I…used to play cops and robbers with my dad?” Veronica offers, but Hurricane Lilly is hurrying ahead.

“I can’t believe I have a sister! Seriously, this is like the best thing that’s ever happened to me.“ She grabs Veronica in a hug and holds on so tight, it’s like she’s trying to push her blood into Veronica’s body.

“We don’t know yet,” Veronica says into Lilly’s shoulder, looking into Duncan’s eyes. She’s trying to be cautious, not to get her hopes up, but she can feel it, too. She barely knows Lilly and Duncan, just from reputation and from seeing them around school, but she knows this. This connection, with them, her brother and sister.

She can’t wait until they get the blood tests back.

3

Veronica hears about Lilly Kane’s death on the news, like everybody else.

She’s eating Cheerios in the kitchen, ignoring her mom’s complaints that cereal is not dinner—“That’s opinion, not fact, Mom”—and wondering whether she should paint her nails pink or blue. She’s finally decided on blue, and is trying to choose between aqua and metallic when she hears a crash from the living room.

Her mom’s sitting on the couch with her hand over her mouth, and there’s a broken porcelain figurine on the floor, a little girl in a ballerina costume.

“What happened?” For a split second she has that fear, that fear that every cop’s daughter gets, but then she realizes no one’s at the front door, there aren’t any cops or flashing lights, there’s just Mom on the couch, with the news on.

“Lilly Kane is dead,” Mom says, and sure enough there’s Lilly Kane on the TV. It’s a school picture, and someone tried their damndest to make her look demure in a pink cardigan, but her sloe eyes and the wickedly upturned corner of her mouth ruin the impression.

“She goes to Neptune,” Veronica says, and sits down on the couch. Veronica doesn’t really know her—they have English together, and also Bio but Lilly never shows up, Mrs. Siegfried just calls her name everyday and nobody answers, and Veronica wonders what it’ll be like on Monday when she calls Lilly’s name into the silence—but everyone knows Lilly Kane. She’s rich and loud and gorgeous, and Veronica can’t imagine someone so alive being dead. “What happened?”

Veronica’s mom shakes a little bit, like she’s coming out of a trance. “I think—I think they said it might have been a murder.”

“Do you think Dad’s investigating?”

“Probably.” Mom’s pulled herself together, her smile tight, her eyes unreadable. She’s been weird lately, distracted and edgy, and Veronica wishes she knew what was going on with her. “He’ll probably be getting home late tonight. I’ll go fix dinner for the two of us.”

Veronica thinks about reminding her that she already ate, thinks about asking her what’s going on, but decides against it as her mother slides a hand over her long blonde hair, blonde like Lilly’s. That couldve been me, Veronica thinks. (If I was the slutty daughter of a rich software designer, anyway, that smirky, mean part of her mind adds, the part she always tries to ignore.)

Veronica hears a bottle clink in the kitchen. Mom’s drinking again, she thinks, and sighs. She looks down at her nails. Lilly Kane would’ve known what color to paint them.

So, stuff that's been going on lately:
-I went to see Fired Up! on Saturday with Telis. It was way more lulzy and homoerotic than I expected it to be, and I always love hanging out with Telis. So double yay!
-My cat Baby's paw swelled up to twice its original size, so he had to be taken to the vet so the abscess could be drained. He's okay, though! Also I didn't have to pay for it, which is a good thing because it was $280. Gaaah.
-Although, side note: my dad took him to the vet early in the morning, and when I woke up the first thing my mom said to me was, "He had to be put down. :( Just kidding! :D" ...Too fucking soon, Mommy. Too fucking soon. DDD:
-Since last Wednesday I've had a hard time swallowing and now my throat has started getting scratchy. Worst. Possible. Time. To get sick. I only have two more weeks left! Luckily I'm scheduled for a pap smear with my GP this Friday, though, so I can get him to take a look at it and tell me what's wrong with my slowly-falling-apart body.
-I have a paper that I can turn in on either Wednesday or Friday, and I haven't even chosen a topic yet. On the upside, though, it's only 5-6 pages instead of 10 like I thought. \o/

Aannnd, that's it. I got no sleep right now so short bullet points are my only way of avoiding endless rambling. Just wanted to let you guys know I'm still around. <3

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:37:24 GMT

I swear to god, I will post something at some point that isn't just endless complaining. But for now,

So, I think I said a while ago that I was eating some really hard chips, and part of my tooth (I think it's my bicuspid) just broke off all the way to the gum line. No pain, just a big hole (at least it feels big to my tongue). I went to my dentist first thing in the morning for an emergency visit, he looked at it and was going to send me away without doing anything, but I convinced him to put in a temporary filling so the edges wouldn't cut my tongue.

He couldn't reschedule me any sooner, so a month later (today), I go in and be told it'll either be a root canal or an extraction. He takes some x-rays, numbs me, and then comes back to tell me it needs to be extracted, at which point I freak out, tell him I want to see another dentist, and leave. Which, okay, yes, I am a pussy and I didn't want my tooth pulled if at all possible (my not wanting to have a big ugly hole in my mouth also contributed), but the thing is:

a) I guess I trust him to know what he's doing, because he found decay between my teeth that all my other dentists have missed, but I'd still like a second opinion just in case it can be saved.

b) I don't trust him at all to take care of me irt pain. He's the dentist I had a panic attack with last year because it was hurting and I was raising my hand to indicate pain like he told me to and he kept ignoring it. The internets tell me that tooth extraction should be painless, but my dentist has a habit of going, "okay, that shouldn't hurt at all!" and then it fucking hurts because it's not numb enough.

c) I don't trust him to inform me and ask my opinion about what needs to be done. Looking online, I found that after an extraction you should avoid exerting yourself for at least 24 hours, and just because of pain I'd imagine that I wouldn't want to talk too much afterward, so I'd probably want it done on a Friday rather than in the middle of the freaking school week, especially since I'm a commuter. He didn't tell me any of this at all, or ask me if I wanted to reschedule.

So, now we are in a desperate search for another dentist asap. We were actually supposed to switch dentists months ago, after my panic attack, but my sister had a cracked tooth we were told was supposed to require immediate work. Except apparently he hasn't actually worked on that tooth at all, and my sister hasn't even been going because she hates this dentist. My entire family (and I'm including myself here) are seriously so faily. We all have crap teeth, but it's a miracle that they haven't all rotted out of our mouths yet.

For the time being, I have a big hole in my tooth, about seven months left to stay on my dental insurance, and a raging ulcer over the idea of either having a big visible hole in my mouth or expensive bridgework to cover it. /o\

Aaand, we've switched to a new dentist, but it won't go through until April. Joy. It'd take about the same amount of time to reschedule with my old dentist, though, especially since it would have to be on a Friday. Hopefully this chick will work out better.

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:35:01 GMT

Oh, god, people, once you start exercising never ever stop! I was never super hardcore with it but I pedaled a stationary bike at least a few times a week, did crunches, and stretched, but for the past few months I've been doing nothing except all the walking I have to do around school and my body is falling the fuck apart. My back's been hurting more recently and last night it just decided to crap out on me, so now I'm walking all bent over like an old lady. And my leg hurts from the stupid weather, and also probably from my back being fucked up. I've got a heating pad on and took some Excedrin, but please suggest suggestions if you know any good ways to fix an ouchy back. (Unless it's a hot bath. Or a hot shower. Our landlord's been building our shower over from scratch for months now and it's still not finished, so our bathtub now has a shower nozzle attached to it and the plug ripped out. No way to have a satisfying bath or shower.)

You should also probably never sleep on a folded-up futon for weeks at a time, either. :/

Anyway, good stuff! I spent Friday night traveling with theaerosolkid to pick up scientistsheart. I hadn't seen either of them in a while (especially Kara! it'd been way too long, kiddo!) so the four hour drive gave us plenty of time to talk. LOL. And then we came home for cookies and Dollhouse (more on that later), and when Kara went up to bed Telis and I enjoyed some Tarantino/Rodriguez crime drama/vampire comedy/excuse for Tarantino to lick Salma Hayek's feet action. (Sidenote: I really need to write that vampire!Seth/Ritchie vs. zombies story at some point. They would be so cranky!) And we made plans to see Coraline at some point, so much yay there.

It's not the strongest pilot ever. A little heavy on the expositiony dialogue ("As you know, she won't remember anything after she's wiped!" is pretty pointless when we can, you know, see that she can't remember anything after she's wiped) and a little hand-wavy on the world-building (the chick who runs it got access to Echo's records and has the power to pardon her somehow for whatever she did, but they're not part of the government?) and occasionally nonsensical (yes, let's wait until after we install a personality to find out if the person who provided it killed herself or not). But still, my interest is peaked! I find the premise really, really interesting, and I think it'll get more so once they start exploring Echo as a person instead of just a blank slate. And I like what I've heard Joss and Eliza say about how they plan to explore the creepiness of the whole situation (kind of started off on a bad foot with the opening scenario being portrayed as a perfect experience that it's sad Echo had to lose, rather than what's essentially a rape scenario, though). So I am optimistic! And I'm a total Joss-girl, and my crush on Eliza Dushku is fucking epic, so I'm pretty sure I'll watch to the end regardless of the quality.

And now I'm watching Mumford. I love this fucking movie, man. It's so weird and sweet without being irritatingly over-quirky. I've also managed to get to the castle of level 4 in the original Super Mario Bros.! Although I keep repeatedly dying there, so essentially I'm worse at video games than I was when I was 10. Haaa, oh, self.

ETA: Oops, I mean the castle level (which is sub-level[?] 4) of level 7. So I'm not quite as crappy as I originally seemed.

bruised_britney@hotmail.com — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:17:57 GMT

Thanks to everybody who commented on my entry about Nermal. I really appreciate all of you guys so much. *hugs* Kelly reminded me that Nermal still sloves me, which made me feel much better. (Explanatory story: I got Nermal when she was a kitten from a woman Kelly was living with at the time. She had both a small daughter and a big dog, so naturally the kitten, who was probably a month old at most, was terrified and constantly trying to hide under the couch to get away from all the scary dogs and children trying to lick her or sniff her or pick her up. But I picked her up and calmed her down a bit and she snuggled right up to me, so the woman's daughter Emily said in this adorable, awed little voice, "She sloves you, she sloves you!" )

Also, I'd like to send my own sympathy out to everyone affected by the bushfires. I hope everyone on my flist and everyone they care about is okay.

And now, complaining about my professors.

UGH. So, I'm taking Later Medieval Lit, and my prof is this incredibly faily dude in his sixties or so. And he's very, very proud of his readings of Chaucer's works, especially those which deviate from the majority of scholarship. And that would be fine! I like hearing new and interesting readings! Except he acts like his reading is the only interesting one and the only one worth hearing, and then wonders why nobody wants to talk in class. That would be because every time we do, he sort of chuckles and goes, "Well, that's certainly, uh, one reading, but the way I see it... [insert long reiteration of his reading that completely ignores the evidence for an alternate reading that was presented by the student.]"

Not to mention, he is absolutely trapped in his conceptions of gender and sexuality. He's reached the point where he's figured out that women can have sexual desires, just like men, oh my god! (I know this because I challenged his reading of a certain section, and he said to me, a twenty-four year old woman in the 21st century, "Yes, but consider the possibility that women can have sexual desires, just like men. :D?" as though it were some sort of revelation), but then he just sort of froze there. And of course he attached this to the idea that all women crave protection, and that if a woman can have a relationship, she will immediately and always desire to, even if it's with the friend her creepy uncle is trying to pressure her into hooking up with despite the fact that she's never even seen him.

Any time I or the only other woman in the class willing to challenge him brings up the manipulative and coercive elements of Pandarus' relationship with Criseyde, he basically goes, "But doesn't Pandarus embody the desires of Troilus and Criseyde, so isn't he really forcing her to do what she really wants to do? :D?"

And the homophobia is even more infuriating. The same day that someone brought up that it seemed a little odd that Pandarus and Troilus sleep in the same bed and frequently express love for each other (something he brushed over with the same, "But Pandarus really represents Troilus, so he was actually in bed with himself! :D?" argument), he made a point at the end of the class of saying, "I think there's something very special about love that isn't between parents and children, or siblings. Isn't there something transcendent about love between two people? Uh, of the opposite sex?"

And then TODAY, (or, well, actually yesterday) we were discussing the midterm essays we turned in, and I talked about how one of the topics I wrote on was the way that the heterosexual romance of Troilus and Criseyde allows for the homosocial bond between Troilus and Pandarus, to the extent that they're free to express love and use extremely romantic language to each other because their masculinity and heterosexuality is established by Troilus' love for Criseyde.

Now, I thought the word "homosocial" was self-fucking-explanatory and also well-known enough that I could say it to an established scholar at fucking UCLA and be understood, but apparently he just heard the word "homo" and thought I was doing a queer reading of the text. (And pointed out that before the advent of Queer Studies, that's not a reading anyone would have made, as though the fact that it's a more recent theoretical framework completely discredits it.) So I explained that homosociality just refers to non-sexual relationships between people of the same sex, and the way that frequent discussion of heterosexuality and the accepted bond between warriors often allows men to express affection for each other in socially acceptable ways, and he goes, "Now I think you're getting into something that's imaginary (!!!)", because "just like masochism", homosociality was a word that didn't exist in Chaucer's time, and thus it didn't exist in actuality (!!!), and he wasn't too sure about the existence of homosociality today (because, of course, he didn't understand the concept).

I hate this class so fucking much. And now I'm going to have to write him an email explaining homosociality in very small words so that he doesn't misunderstand my paper through his fog of gay panic. DDDDD:

Oh, and something really nice happened today, too! So, a while in my Ludology and Lit class (actually, it's called "Language as Gameplay: The Spirit of Play in Literature") we were discussing various ways of "playing" with literature, and someone brought up fanfic, and I admitted that I wrote fanfic because I didn't want to do the whole faux-detached "people who write fanfic might think that..." thing when I was actually discussing what I like about fanfic. After class, one of my classmates, a woman in her forties, approached me and asked me to explain fanfic to her, and gave me Harry Potter as an example of a book that she liked. So I gave her a short example of what fanfic about HP would be like (and oh man, was it hard not to just go, "porn! and lots of it!"), for example, an imagined story about Remus and Sirius' schooldays that isn't actually present within the books themselves.

So, today she came up to me and was like, "I want to ask you a favor, and it's kind of...strange." So I'm sitting there going, "oh god, does she want me to read the fanfic she just wrote? Does she want to read my fanfic? Does she want to discuss all the Voldemort/Harry necro rape porn she found after doing a search for Harry Potter fanfic?"

But it turns out that she actually wanted me ask if I'd consider leading a discussion of Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler for her book club, because she likes the contributions that I bring up in class and especially the things I had to say about that particular book. Seriously, that's so incredibly flattering and awesome! I probably won't be able to do it since they meet on Thursday nights in LA and I'd have to worry about bus service and possibly being stranded, but it was just such an awesome thing to be asked, especially after all my worries about how much I've actually managed to learn and apply even after all my time in school. So that was a nice counterpoint to my medieval lit prof.