Love In The Asylum

For two days in a row we've been having major internet outages - going out around 1 or 2 in the afternoon and not coming back until after 8pm. Really massively tedious, and there isn't anything we can do about it. My dad's already called the cable company, and it's not our house specifically, they are having service problems all over our area. Just one of the hazards of living out here in Nowheresville, I guess. I'm hoping it won't recur again tomorrow in the middle of the football match, but I'm not holding my breath.

At least it's given me plenty of time and motivation to read real books. I'm halfway through a collection of Lovecraft shorts, started a Neil Gaiman collection, finished vol 3 of the Justice League International trades, and finished Unseen Academicals. For the third time. I know it's not everyone's favorite, and I can admit that it has serious structural and pacing problems, but I am just completely incapable of being objective about that book. I read it for the first time last year just as I was getting seriously into football, and I have so many emotions tied up messily into it that I cry big soppy tears all over the ending every time. Also, Glenda/Nutt=OTP forever.

I have also been using all of this unanticipated free time to think about Oscar Wilde. It's interesting - out of all the characters in the Poetsverse AU, I think he has the most character growth built into his story arc. Aside from a little will they-won't they, Mary and Percy Shelley are on a pretty straightforward romantic trajectory. Tennyson and Hallam get together, break up, and get back together again, and hopefully get a little less co-dependent, but their relationship is essentially the same at the end. Wilfred Owen made most of his mistakes before the story starts, and his arc is about following through on the character growth that he's had already. Byron...is always Byron. By we're starting Oscar Wilde out as a dilettante playboy, throwing him into a disastrous affair with Bosie that almost ruins his career and his life, and then, once he gets out of prison, giving him a long and arduous redemption arc in the form of courting Robert Ross. This is the storyline that colourofsaying and I have been talking about nonstop this week, because the idea of Oscar Wilde struggling through a serious romantic relationship for the first time is really fascinating. He really wants it to work! But for Ross to trust him enough to even start a relationship, Wilde has to be a completely different person that he was at the start of the Poetsverse. It's a good thing we love him and want him to be happy, or this could end really really badly.

I spent my entire snow day curled up in bed watching Marble Hornets and reading Slender Man blogs.

Why was I daft enough to let someone link me to these? I don't think I'm ever going to sleep again. I should know better than to trust the internet with my sanity. *pokes nervously at the curtains*

Oh my god, INTERNET, I MISSED YOU!!!

I have had zero internet access since Tuesday night - Wednesday the guy we are borrowing the broadband modem from needed it back, so I spent my night watching DVDs and making icons. And yesterday and today, I didn't even have my computer, let alone internet, because it was off at the shop getting optimized. It was horrible - no internet, no computer on which to game/read/watch stuff, no books I haven't read a million times because all my stuff was in storage, and to top it all off, they were supposed to come hook up our cable, but they totally and completely failed to do that. IT HAS BEEN A LONG COUPLE DAYS, YOU GUYS.

What I Have Been Doing, In Absence of Internet:

Wednesday: went to the high school with hanjuuluver . A worrying number of our former teachers are now teaching in prison.  But we hung for ages in the library, and saw Ms Davy, and also Tiny Francesca, so it was awesome. Then we met my mom at Pei Wei, where delicious Thai food was had by all. We went to the bookstore and I bought one of the new Torchwood books, Pack Animals, which was as slashy as all the reviews suggested. And then my mom took us to one of her clients' to play with the miniature horses. Cute!

Thursday: read Pack Animals, which went rather quickly. Waited around for the cable guy to show up and be useless. Then helped my dad set up the TV and spent the whole evening watching Firefly, which were literally the only DVDs I had on me.

Today: hanjuuluver  responded to my desperate plea for something, anything, to do by dragging me out of the house again, thank her psychotic ass. We got fast food, and then did shopping. I bought the Dark Knight special edition DVD for my dad's Christmas present, a 30 dollar JoAnn's gift card for my mom's, and a copy of Son of a Witch just for me. We also went to the mall, which was unsurprisingly horrifying this time of year. This evening I went with my dad to a hockey game, where we were humiliatingly crushed by Colorado. And now I am catching up on my flist and running scans with my expensive new virus scanner program. Good times!