Love In The Asylum

Mental note: buying Avengers band-aids on a whim is apparently a good way to ensure that I will fall over trying to walk across a parking lot and actually need them.

On the bright side, I have Iron Man plasters on my skinned knees?

Oh, Arsenal. That was - I don't even know what that was. Aside from absolutely heart-breaking to watch. Pull yourselves together boys! You're making me and Captain Vantastic cry.

Barcelona had better clean the floor with Villareal tomorrow. I don't think anything less than a Messi/Villa hat trick and Pique and Cesc kissing on camera could make me feel better after today.

Apparently the universe doesn't hate me quite as much as I thought it did. I was panicking about meeting with my Stegner Fellow today, because I hit a massive wall with the story I'm working on and had no draft to give to her. But I just got an email from her saying she is cancelling our meeting since she has the stomach flu. I am sad that she is sick, but seriously, thank the goddess for temporary reprieves.

I don't know why I'm having such a difficult time with this story. Part of it, I guess, is the challenge of figuring out how to structure a plot and make it interesting when the body of the story is basically two characters sitting in a restaurant failing to have a conversation with each other. I am used to writing about explosions and ninjas and suspiciously handsome fox demons, but this plot has none of those things! And part of it is performance anxiety, because omg what if my Stegner Fellow hates it and wishes she'd never picked someone so faily to do the tutorial? Aaaand part of it is just that I'm having a hard time separating out what needs to happen in this story from my personal investment in it. I mean, a story about a queer liberal arts student in Albuquerque meeting her estranged half-sibling for the first time? That is totally not me projecting my own issues onto my fiction!

So yeah, I'm going to take a nap and keep my fingers crossed that when I wake up there will actually be some words in my brain, rather than the current haze of low-level incoherent literary terror.

I am home. Now let us never speak of this again.

Important fact learned: the smoke alarms in the apartments do not necessarily connect to the soke alarms for the whole building. In other words, you can set off the alarm in your room and that will be the only one that goes off (up to a point, I assume). Unlike the dormitories, where everyone has to leave the building if someone burns a candle in their room.

Thank goodness, or everyone on my floor would be quite put out with me for ruining their Sunday morning lie-in. Um. I got overenthusiastic with my fritters?

I'm done with all my exams, yay! And I did better on the non-Shakespeare papers - my American Lit final was only five hours late, and my short story final was only late by about twenty minutes, mostly because my printer tried to eat it. So that's...sort of like progress. *sheepish* Whatever, I'm just happy I didn't have a total meltdown in the middle and not get half my exams written at all, and grade-wise I'm not terribly worried. Mostly I just want to sleep forever. Which I can't actually do, because I have EPIC PACKING.


I'm sure most of the people I know who do the comics thing have already heard about Ian Sattler's racefail (the erasure of legacy characters of color by rebooting back to the white Silver Age characters isn't racism! DC is diverse! We have blue and pink and green characters!), but here's another winner from the same convention: Bill Willingham says he "wanted to gun down those girls who kept asking about a memorial case [for Spoiler]."

You know, I love comics, I really do. But stuff like this keeps coming up and I can't help but think that so much of the time, I'm reading books written by men who really don't want to be reminded I exist. Because then they can keep pretending it's okay if girls in comic books are treated like they are less interesting/competent/important than the men, if they are treated like nothing but sex objects, if they're depowered, if they're raped, if they're murdered. I mean, it's not like they're interesting characters in their own right. It's not like anybody in the audience is identifying with them. It's not like girls read comics.


I don't really want to end on something that angry-making, so have another link instead: WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN

Supernatural the anime? Who was on the executive board for this decision? And what were they smoking? OMG IT LOOKS SO AWESOME I WANT TO SEE IT RIGHT NOW

Turning on CNN and seeing your neighborhood: NEVER A GOOD THING.


One of the hazards of living in the desert - I am sure this is shocking to all of you - is that in the late spring and summer...things tend to burn. The brush gets dried out, the wind blows really high, and accidental fires start pretty easily and controlled fires get out of control very very fast. We don't usually get as much coverage as the fires in California (since usually a lot more people are threatened by those), but the Los Alamos fire when I was a kid was pretty devastating, and a fire a few years ago took out huge chunks of the Rio Grande Bosque. So, you know, after twenty years of living in NM summer fires are pretty routine - bad, yes, but not unexpected - and yet when it comes up on the news I still start going OMG WE'RE ON FIRE!!!

So yeah, my mom's neighborhood caught on fire last night.

Everyone is fine, thankfully, and their side of the neighborhood didn't have to evacuate, although they thought for a while earlier in the evening they might have to. Which would have...really, really sucked for everyone, because horse-moving is not a fast job at the best of times, and my mom and the boyfriend wouldn't have had anywhere to go with the animals. The fire's still only about 15% contained(!), but according to her it isn't spreading and if it doesn't shouldn't go toward them. So that's okay, I guess?

But seriously, this has been the weekend of never-ending family drama. Topping it off with a forest fire really doesn't surprise me in the least. :/

Things that I have not done in the month good god since I posted last:

Saved the multiverse from the dread might of Darkseid using only my wits and the power of Freddie Mercury

Founded an order of suburban ninjas pledged to avenge themselves on anyone who breaks the noise restrictions in the dormitories

Won a Pulitzer Prize for my scathing yet poetic post-structuralist novel on the lives of itinerant canoe-ers

Things that I have been doing:

Watching the first three seasons of Highlander in the span of a week and a half in a fit of adolescent nostalgia. And subsequently realizing that while my appreciation of Adrian Paul's aesthetics is undamaged by time, I now have a much deeper dramatic and flaily love for Richie and his adorable puppy-ness.

Alternating between spending obsessive amounts of time playing D&D Online and spending obsessive amounts of time playing Dragon Fable.

Having very angry feelings toward DC about events in a certain comic that shall not be named because just thinking about makes me shake with indignantly disgusted bitterness all over again

Making slow but steady progress on my Help_Haiti story on the rare occasions I surface long enough from under a sea of classwork to do creative writing (now ~2000 words and Chekov is about to throw a bitch-fit and start stripping).

Writing a truly ludicrous number of papers on the use of social media technology in contemporary/near-contemporary cyberpunk fiction, Gawain and the Green Knight as a morality play on keeping your word as a chivalric virtue, veiling by women in Bedouin tribes, and Torchwood.

Honestly, this quarter has been...well, really good in that I adore all my classes passionately and I'm reasonably sure I'm going to pass everything (my big hurdle is always that point where I get all AAAAAHCAN'TCOPE and just don't turn any of my final papers in at all, but I turned my last paper in today so no matter how I do on the actual exams I made it through that), but's it's just like things got incredibly hectic around midterms and then never let up at all. Tons of reading, lots of non-paper assignments amidst the big couple of papers, and very little free time for me to do anything that required my brain to be on. So I am sorry for dropping off the face of the planet, my dear flist!

Next week I have every single final exam on the same day. Two in-class written finals, one take-home final, and a writing portfolio, all scheduled for Wednesday, which is going to suck brass monkey balls. But then I will be done and then I will be home and then I will have a whole week and a half to sleep and read and get caught up on writing and the other non-urgent stuff I've been ignoring. I am very much looking forward to it. Especially the part where I will be asleep.

You've probably already seen this on the rest of your flist, but in case you haven't, Livejournal is implementing a change to make the gender field a required fill on new account creation, and limiting your choices to male and female. No other, no unspecified, just the binary points. If you are trans or genderqueer or intersexed, or if you don't want your gender out there because you don't want to be judged/dismissed/hit on/assaulted, or if you don't want to be targeted by intrusive, sexist ads, well, that's just too bad for you. Because Livejournal has advertising to sell, dontcha know.

synecdochic has a much better post here about why this is stupid and offensive, and how you can contact LJ to register your protest. I'll...just be over here, wanting to punch the whole world in the face.

AND THEN MY COMPUTER REFUSED TO TURN ON.

*HEADDESKS*

I...don't even know what to do about this. Technically Max is turning on, I guess - all the lights flash, the fans start, and I can hear the harddrive engage. I can even charge my mp3 player through the USB port. But after a few seconds the lights go off (except the on-light) and the screen stays totally black. It never starts to boot and nothing else happens until I turn it off. Two hours on google has turned up nothing much, aside from some vague murmurings of 'faulty battery' and 'motherboard failure'. My warranty expired last year, so Dell's not much help.

At this point I'm wondering if it would just be less trouble to try and talk my dad into buying me a mini to get me through the next year and a half (I've already been planning on saving up for a new laptop for when I graduate), and paying him back in installments. It would certainly be less stressful than having to deal with some new failure every week. But I don't know if he has the money, and I hate asking.

At least I did a back-up earlier in the quarter so I won't lose any of my files (minus one or two downloaded tv episodes I hadn't watched yet and maybe a couple pictures). I even have a word doc with a list of every program I have installed so I can redownload them. It's not much help now, since the computer cluster Macs don't have anywhere to plug in my external drive, but in the eventuality of a new computer/reinstalling my harddrive/whatever, I won't lose much.

Although: colourofsaying , when you get up, could you please please please email me the paragraphs of the fairy story I sent you last night? I have the rest of it backed up in my email, but I didn't get those. Thank you!