Love In The Asylum

Signed the lease on my apartment today, hurrah! I am really locked into being an actual grown-up now - I have a ten-month lease, a two-year cable contract, and a 401k plan. I am shopping for coffee tables guys, that is how bad this is. To be fair, I mostly need a coffee table so I have somewhere to put my pizza while I'm watching cartoons, but still, the specter of responsible maturity is looming. There is something deeply alarming in the idea that I'm being trusted to pay my water bill and have real furniture that doesn't look like it was made out of industrial scraps - and somehow something more alarming in knowing that I had the sense to set up online billpay weeks ago, make a budget spreadsheet, and buy a vacuum cleaner.

Minor adulthood and furniture related freakouts aside though, I'm getting very excited about moving. I love my dad, and he's about as easy to cohabit with as anyone could be, but gods above will it be wonderful to have my own space. No more having to listen to his sports while I'm in the kitchen, no more feeling self-conscious about singing sea chanties in the shower, no more leaving for work two hours early. I can walk around in my bra whenever I want and blast opera while I'm baking! I don't know, possibly it's being an only child but I'm terrible at sharing my space - I try to be accommodating but deep-down I really want to be nit-picky and territorial and passive-aggressive over not being able to do things exactly the way I like them. I want the freedom to be unjudged and unobserved and private. This NYTimes article sums it up very well, I think(even if it makes us weirdo singletons sound a bit like an exotic alien species).

Other things I'm up to...I've been meaning to do a media recs post when I have a few minutes to spare (work is demonically awful this month, fuck earnings, don't even ask), but the short version is that I'm on a bit of a historical bent at the moment. Still working on my Templar project - the sourcebook I bought is proving more interesting than I expected (for a collection of clerical and legal records, seriously, why is this so fun) and has a decent biblio so my reading list is getting longer, along with the books I already need to buy about monasticism and that bio of Philip the Fair (he's a massive douchenozzle but he is pretty central to the whole affair, I don't really have a choice). I have pages of notes I've made on my lunch break, although they aren't very academic - mostly things like FUCK WILLIAM OF NOGARET and GOD SAYS NONE OF YOU SHALL WEAR POINTY SHOES. Because that's the most important thing to take away from the Latin Rule, obviously.

I've found myself in the mood for historical dramas, too, rather than modern rom coms. I have a pretty long list of series that other people have recommended to me - The Princess' Man, Sungkyunkwan Scandal, Queen Seon-Deok, etc, really anything where there will be period costumes and court intrigue and hopefully people sword-fighting on horseback. My current series is Warrior Baek Dong Soo, about which I have so many many feelings. But they mostly boil down to 1) wanting to hug Gwang-Taek, who has the saddest eyes in the world, 2) wanting to get Yeo Woon all the therapy ever, because that boy is pretty but so so fucked up and 3) wanting to smack Dong Soo in the head. At least the last one actually happens in the show with some regularity.

To end with, here is a link to a ridiculously catchy song about D&D I found the other day and have had stuck in my head since. Enjoy.

Three Things (The Pie-Making Thursday Edition)

1. Yay, fall TV season has started. Hawaii 5-0 continues to have plots that are too stupid to even bother paying attention to, but that's fine because following the plot would distract me from gazing lovingly at Daniel Dae Kim's exquisite cheekbones. He was so pretty in this episode! And Kono was so ass-kickingly awesome, and Steve and Danny were so totally gay for each other. I approve strongly of all of these things. And of the general existence of Max the Adorable Dorky ME. Meanwhile, NCIS has realized that the main reason I watch this show is for delicious Tony!angst and whumpage, and has provided accordingly. Good job, show.

2. Fun with role-playing group this week! We spent the whole session making character sheets - I don't know if they are all like this or Eclipse Phase is just unusually complicated, but damn. I need to re-do mine this weekend, since I'm pretty sure I screwed up the math on all my character stats. But I like my character! I'm playing a woman who ran away from life in an ultra bioconservative cult in the outer planets to become a cynical gun-slinging mercenary. Her hobbies are gambling, not trusting people, and bouncy hypercorps pop music. Anyway, it seems like we've got an interesting range of characters, so I'm looking forward to seeing how things work out once we start actually playing.

3. It is David Bowie Week at Casa de Midget. I don't know why it's David Bowie week, but it is. So much glitter! And somehow, even though it's glitzy 70s glam rock, so many songs that make me cry. I cannot stop listening to this cover of Space Oddity, or this one of Ashes to Ashes. And I just discovered Bring Me The Disco King, which is amazing.

Three Things (Ugh, Why Is It Wednesday Edition):

1. I hope all you hoopy froods had a happy Towel Day! And remembered to wear your lilac to commemorate the Glorious 25th of May. I celebrated by letting the English Department feed me. The senior dinner was mostly boring because none of the faculty/other English majors I really know were there and I was making awkward small talk with semi-strangers, but hey, live music and free food-onna-stick, what more can you ask for? I want to know who they found to do catering that would serve mini beef wellingtons wtfsogood.

2. Have been sucked into Hawaii Five-O. I honestly don't know how or why this happened, because it is a deeply silly, stupid show and I spend half the time bashing my head against the wall and going YOU ARE THE WORST COPS EVER STOP DOING THINGS. Of course, I spend the other half of the time going HOW ARE STEVE AND DANNY THIS MARRIED, so, you know, fair trade-off for the dumb. I have a working theory right now that the reason NCIS has been less slashy than usual this season is because CBS blew their gay budget for the year on this show. After Hawaii Five-O, there was just no gay left. It is really kind of amazing, like I'm watching a show that was demographically planned out to appeal specifically to the slash fen. Although honestly even without the gay I would happily watch the Chin and Kono Are Awesome All The Time Show. Daniel Dae Kim ♥ ♥♥

3. colourofsaying and I, because we are obsessed weirdo freaks with too much free time, are plotting out a Euro football AU where all of the players have superpowers. This is not, to be clear, a superhero AU, although that would still be neat. Everyone in this verse still plays soccer, it's just that the game now involves a lot more fireballs and mind control. Zlatan is an earthmover and immune to other people's powers; Alex Ferguson can control people with his voice; Yoann Gourcuff is an empath with terrible shields; Pep Guardiola can fly. Bojan Krkic has jailbait pheremones. And Cristiano Ronaldo, of course, has the power of Bitchface. The game is much more exciting in this universe! And being a referee involves a lot more hazard pay.

I'm alive! More or less! Geez, what a week though. I've been - okay, a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was really stuck on my first story for my Levinthal tutorial? I finally got a draft done YESTERDAY. So the last week and a half has been an ongoing drama of my tutor sending me increasingly pointed emails asking if she's ever going to see this story, and me staying up all night to write and still, somehow, not producing any actual words. I don't actually remember much of anything that happened since Tuesday (aside from brief flashes of Margery of Kempe, which would be hallucinatory on a good day), and I'm now in that post-writing stage of obsessive "oh god this was the worst, most pointless story ever written, my tutor will hate me"-ness, but! The important thing is that I finally got it written. And I've taken today off to recover from the whole mess.

Here are some things that are making me happy today:

1. This part of my story where I got to make up an anecdote that was not in fact directly inspired by anything my family has ever done but still sounds perfectly like something my father would have done. I may hate the rest of this story passionately, but I do love this whole paragraph.

“The summer I was seven,” she says steadily, “Dad decided one day he needed to teach me how to fish. So he stole his buddy Charlie’s extra rod and threw his tackle box in the back of the pick-up and we drove up to Cochiti. Dragged me out of bed at three in the morning, drove 50 miles to get to the lake, and we can’t catch a damn thing. He’s sitting there, pounding back Coronas and getting more and more pissed, and I’d rather be playing in the mud, but he’s going to teach me to fish, damnit.”

She pauses. It’s always hard to get the inflections right on this part of the story, to convince whoever she’s telling that it’s actually supposed to be funny. She’s had a lot of practice at it, though.

“So finally he just loses it. He stands up and looks at me and says “fishing this way is for pansies,” and takes Charlie’s pellet gun out of the back seat of the truck and just starts shooting into the water, at all those fish he’s sure are right there. And that’s how we got banned from Cochiti Lake.”

2. The Sherlock/Tumbling fusion AU colourofsaying and I came up with the other day. In which John is the captain of the boys' high school rhythmic gymnastics team, Sherlock is the anti-social but gifted ex-thug/newcomer to the team, Lestrade is the well-meaning coach, and Mycroft is Sherlock's mom. TEEN!SHERLOCK IN A SPARKLY PINK LEOTARD, TELL ME IT WOULDN'T BE AWESOME. Or, you know, made of crack, which is almost as good.

3. Everything about this post on arsenalbbs. This shouldn't really come as news to anyone, but Thierry Henry is pretty much the most flawless human being on the planet. I am constantly amazed that the universe has been able to fit that much sexy into a single Frenchman in a suit. Of note in the comments: crazy!Jens Lehmann, Leo Messi running into a tree branch, and a Pepsi commercial where Cesc Fabregas blows Thierry Henry a kiss. I swear, sometimes I love this team so fucking much.

4. As soon as I post this, I'm making double fudge brownies. :)

Five AUs I Wish The Universe Would Write For Me:

1. BBC Sherlock

The one where John Watson is a college professor and Sherlock is a...uh...well...no one's really sure what he does (or which department he works for), but he brings in a lot of grant money so they don't ask too many questions. Lestrade is an assistant professor of criminology and Sherlock likes to show up at his lectures and correct him in front of his undergraduates. Mycroft is a dean of something at a rival university and doesn't understand why Sherlock insists on working at an undefined position at a different school. And Moriarty, of course, is an evil biology researcher who has very questionable standards about what you can do with your animal test subjects (and your graduate students). He and Sherlock are constantly publishing academic papers that are mostly full of bitchy comments about each other's research, and neither of them are allowed to attend academic conferences together after they got into a slap fight at the last one. Look, this mostly exists because I want John Watson in tweed, alright?

2. 19th Century Literature RPS of Extreme Crack

The one where all the great English poets of the 19th century are in a boy band together. I cannot even explain this one except to say that is the product of a three-year-ongoing joke with colourofsaying and has only got more elaborate and silly the more 19th century poets we've read as good little English majors. It also completely ignores a) all question of period (Yeats plays back-up, Percy Shelley is on drums, Byron is the pretty-boy front man and Tennyson writes all the lyrics) and b) good sense in favor of ridiculousness, boykissing, and stupid literary jokes. Oscar Wilde is a music critic who's had sex with almost everyone in the band at some point. Wordsworth tried to start his own weird acoustic folk-psychedelic thing with Samuel Coleridge to compete with them, but it didn't really catch on and Coleridge wandered off to be a solo artist. MY GOD WE ARE DORKS.

3. Due South/Torchwood Crossover of Doom

The one where Jack Harkness is Ben Fraser's biological father and they accidentally found Torchwood Chicago. I know I've posted about this before, because it is one of my pet not-remotely-related-to-canon-in-any-way crossover theories (like Lord Vetinari being the Master's older brother), because John Barrowman just looks weirdly like Paul Gross from certain angles. This one actually had a plot! Which is mostly about Team Torchwood going to Chicago to hunt aliens and running into a guy who looks suspiciously like their boss. And then the Fraser and Ray and Ray have to help them fight the alien mafia while Fraser comes to terms with being related to Jack and Jack deals with having a kid he didn't know about (we're still pretending CoE never happened) and Ianto quietly loses it because wtf is his life, seriously? At the end, Fraser and the Rays start Torchwood Chicago (I guess it is sort of a side department of the Chicago PD?), and everyone has plenty of sex, which is how every Torchwood story ends, I suppose.

4. German Football RPS

The one where Marko Marin is a spy and Denni Advic is the double agent with the tragic backstory assigned to work with him on a mission. I don't even like Werder Bremen, but Marko Marin is made of adorableness, and this is an awesome noir AU where he is a sweet, innocent guy being blackmailed into crime in order to rescue his evil ex-boyfriend from certain death. Denni Advic shows up to take the package Marin's supposed to drop off for the bad guys, and when he tries to leave Marin makes him take him with him, because he thinks he'll lead him back to the guy holding his boyfriend. And then explosions! Gun shots! People chasing them and trying to steal back the Macguffin! Advic falling for his naive charm and crack marksmanship while Marin is won over by his tragic backstory and unbelievable cheekbones! Eventually, they defeat the bad guys, Marin realizes his evil ex is evil, and Advic reveals that he was a double agent actually working for the government. Yay happy endings.

5. Tumbling (J-Drama)

The one where the boys are slightly older and supposedly don't know each other, except they are actually all superhero crime-fighters together. Yuuta is a quiet, super-organized, king-of-the-file-folders kind of secretary, and everyone at the company he works for is very confused when Wataru, motorcycle thug turned manga kissa owner, starts showing up at their office to bother him in the middle of the day, and Yuuta has to make up stories about how they are best friends from high school and not guys who spend their free time in tight spandex and body armor fighting supervillains. Tsurumi is a kind of sort of mostly reformed supervillain, and he and Yuuta share an apartment. Kiyama is a broody anti-hero that Wataru bribes into fighting on their side via sex. Basically, everything is the same, but with more transformation sequences.

Not all bad, for a Monday! Granted, a bit of a rough start, since Apartment Roomie did not bother to tell me the electrical outlet in the kitchen was broken, which I only found out when I tried to make breakfast and my toast failed to be toast in any appreciable way. Great start to the morning, really. Apparently in addition to being The Person Who Cleans I am now The Person Who Gets Things Fixed, since she didn't bother to put in a repair claim either. Ah, well.

But! I also met with my Stegner Fellow for the first time this afternoon, and she is interesting and awesome and full of good ideas. And oh god, I have a story draft due in two weeks. So much writing to do. So much research about obscure New Mexican culture. So many calls to my mother for fact-checking. Exciting, in a terrifying sort of way. At the very least, I have a general idea of what I want to get out of this project, and what stories I want to tell, so I have somewhere to start.

Also, this conversation happened. Because I was reading de-aging fic (shut up), and sending colourofsaying bits of lines about baby!John playing with Sherlock's fingers and baby!Sherlock totally being a biter and a hair-puller and a shiny-things-grabber and, well, where else was this going to go?

mastermidgets: god, Mycroft hated him SO MUCH
mastermidgets: I mean, he had not been sold on the idea of a little brother in the first place - why does he need a tiny inferior clone? - but. Shrieking and grabbing and drool all over his science equipment, WHAT
colourofsaying: And his hair is such a mess
colourofsaying: From the minute he was born he was all tangly
mastermidgets: and of course he screams when anyone tries to comb it
colourofsaying: And it's just like 'what is this horrible thing?'
colourofsaying: And Mummy is all 'oh, you were much the same, darling. Perhaps worse. So /finicky/. At least Sherlock doesn't begin screaming when he makes a little mess, does he, Sherlock?'
mastermidgets: And Sherlock looks as smug as a baby not in full control of his eye muscles can look
colourofsaying: Which... is pretty damn smug in Sherlock's case
colourofsaying: Mycroft goes stomping off to his Little Scientists lab table.
colourofsayingr: Naturally, it is very well augmented.
colourofsaying: And Sherlock, as soon as he learns to crawl, hauls himself after and babbles at his feet and when Mycroft doesn't pick him up he bites Mycroft's toes.
colourofsaying: Which is one of the many reasons Mycroft began to wear shoes all the time, except in bed.
colourofsaying: And even then he tends to wear socks.
mastermidgets: and, you know, he still maintains that all the times Sherlock spit up on him were entirely intentional and planned
colourofsaying: which might actually be true
colourofsaying: And he secretly dotes on Sherlock and has a little case file on him.
colourofsaying: Which is like a baby book only a bit creepy.
mastermidgets: he totally puts hits out on the other children who pick on him
mastermidgets: tiny primary school hitmen
colourofsaying: And fetches him from school and dusts him off when he gets dirty and fusses over him when he rips his clothes and when he finds 'experiments' in tiny!Sherlock's pockets and scolds him when he fails to do his homework.
mastermidgets: none of which Sherlock appreciates, or even seems to be aware of
masterofmidgets: but, you know, little brothers, what can you do?
colourofsaying: He seems to resent it, generally speaking.
mastermidgets: he doesn't like fussing
colourofsaying: Especially when Mycroft plops him in the bath and scrubs out his skinned knees.
mastermidgets: or Mycroft tousling his hair
colourofsaying: Mycroft doesn't /tousle/
colourofsaying: Mycroft /combs/
colourofsaying: Vehemently.
mastermidgets: while Sherlock tries to bite him
mastermidgets: he...never really grows out of that

(This is true. John has taken to keeping a bat around for when Mycroft comes to the flat, because inevitably he ends up having to pry Sherlock off him. He really does not get how this family works at all.)

Done: my presentation and write-up for the Big Indian Drumming Project (which went surprisingly smoothly), the make-up assignment for the all the readings I couldn't go to for Non-Fiction, the first half of my poetry paper

Still to do: the second half of my poetry paper (due Friday but really Thursday because I'm leaving Friday morning), my 10 page paper on spy fiction (due Wednesday), the rewrite of my football story (due tomorrow) and a short concert report (due ASAP).

So of course this is a perfect time for my brain to decide I need to write Jeeves and Wooster fic.

I just...I...okay, I was on the way to work and talking to colourofsaying about Jeeves and Wooster and Bertie meeting the Lost Generation ex-pats in Paris while he was on vacation, as you do, and one of us brought up Jeeves getting into an allusion-off with TS Eliot over Bertie's affections and look, all of a sudden all I could think of was one of Bertie's friends seducing him at Eton by reciting Greek drama at him.

Because, well, all of Bertie's friends in school had a bit of a crush on him, because he was all wide-eyed and innocent and what is same-sex boarding school for if not awkward handjobs? So they're studying their Greek - and you know what the Greeks are like - and one of Bertie's friends get it into his head to convince Bertie that he's developed some passionate love of amateur theatrics and desperately needs someone to read lines with him from the classic plays to help him get ready for a performance.

So they're in Bertie's room, ties thrown carelessly over the bed rail, collars loosened, reciting romantic Greek poetry at each other, and Bertie doesn't really notice that they're getting closer and closer to each other until Bingo - let's say it's Bingo, because why not? - is close enough to kiss him. And then he does - very gently, like, because this is still a little scary and liable to go wrong - and Bertie kisses him back, and neither of them break scene because Greek poetry is so much better for this than anything they could say on their own, and the next thing Bertie knows he's sprawled on the bed with Bingo's hand down his trousers while he mouthes frantic Greek into his collarbone.

...I need to learn some Greek so I can write this.

This has really been a deeply baffling week - not bad, not enough is going on for it to be bad, just...baffling.

Aside from all the pie-baking and bathroom cleaning I did this weekend (the pie, by the way, turned out marvelous, and I got to invite Freshman Guy over and feed some to him while we argued about world domination, so that was fun), I was very busy getting my Levinthal Tutorial application together. Which, as it turned out, involved taking one of my stories from last year, ripping out the entire last third, and rewriting it into a story with an entirely different and vaguely more depressing point. I'm a lot happier with the story now - I don't know what I was thinking with that original ending, it was dreadful - but it was pretty crazy trying to fix it in time for the deadline without falling behind on all my other work. And I won't even find out whether I got into the Levinthal thing until the beginning of next month. Yay nail-biting anxiety!

In the category of My Brain Fails At Having Priorities, I pulled a completely and utterly unneeded all-nighter on Monday, because I decided that Sherlock fic was, like, totally more important than sleep. Sleep is for chumps! Chumps who don't realize they could be reading about Watson freaking out after Sherlock fakes his own death. And even after I read All The Sherlock Fic in the World I still couldn't find the one thing I'm really dying to read, which is the one where pre-series Sherlock thinks he is control of his habit and using cocaine in a sensible, reasonable, rational manner and is really, really wrong about that. Which, Lestrade explains to John, they realized when Sherlock ODs in the middle of a crime scene. Man, why do I always fall for the terminally fucked-up characters?

Semi-relatedly, this weekend I re-discovered BBC Radio 7, and I think I'm in love. Police dramas! Stupid British sit-coms! Vaguely creepy horror stories! Dramatized classic literature! CRIME-SOLVING WELSH MONKS. It's like everything I love on television, but I don't have to try to pretend I'm paying attention to the screen, which makes it ideal for a) studying and b) playing Dungeons and Dragons Online. Both of which I do a lot. I foresee a lot of my time in the near future being given up to radio dramas. Especially since they are dramatizing What Ho Jeeves this month.

And now back to work! SO MUCH WORK.

Just home from celebratory Hey You're 21 Now drinks with hanjuuluver. And by drinks I mean, like, less than half a beer each because the local microbrew does a sample tray and we are the most boring college students ever. Conclusions:

1. Turtle Mountain does a very excellent rosemary, caramelized onion, roast chicken, and goat cheese pizza. No regrets about that part of the evening at all. Or about the part where they were showing clips from the World Cup of footballers hugging on one of the TVs, or the part where we talked about zombies. However,

2. Beer is disgusting. I tried, I really did! We got a bunch of different kinds on the sample plate, and I tried them all, and I kept drinking them in the hopes that my initial impression would be wrong. But it wasn't. Even the less awful ones still tasted of piss and misery. World, I am unimpressed. I guess there aren't very many keggers in my future.

...I feel like this entry is not nearly as interesting as it should be, given the subject matter. I'm sorry that I fail at having crazy drunken hijinks! To make up for it, here, have some cute Korean guys hugging.



(see? I told you that you should be watching this show!)

Nickelodeon has greenlit a new series for 2011 - Avatar: the Legend of Korra. And I am flailing around in unbelievable amounts of glee.

Things about this that are awesomesauce:

1. FUCK YEAH AVATAR. There were episodes of the original series I liked less, and episodes that weren't as strong, but I can't think of any that were actually bad, or any that didn't fit into the series arc in some way or another. And it's the same creative team, so I have no doubts this will be as well-done. The promo shots I've seen so far are gorgeous.

2. FUCK YEAH STEAMPUNK CITY. Best idea ever, especially if it's going to be paired with cross-cultural tensions, secret plots, and steampunk urban warfare. OMG.

3. FUCK YEAH FEMALE HERO. One of my favorite parts of the original series (closely competing with Zuko's Face of Angry Woe), was the fact that it had so many strong female characters - characters with different personalities, motivations, desires, and strengths - and that they had relationships with each other, not just the boys. Katara and Toph's uneasy but solid friendship is pretty much the best thing ever, and Azula/Mai/Ty Lee is crazy crazy love and I'm pretty sure I ship Suki/Toph at least some of the time. Seeing the writers turn that respect for their female characters and their female audience to a full-on series protagonist fills me with so much joy.

That is so much combined awesome I can't even be sadface that a new Avatar means Aang is already dead at the start of the new series. Well, maybe a little.