Love In The Asylum

I need to stop buying so many books.

Okay, now that everyone's done laughing, let me try that again. I need to get rid of some of my books. The situation now is just impossible - the bookcase in my room was already double and triple stacked before I brought 250-odd books home with me from college, and I have proved myself completely incapable of walking past the used bookstore without spending money. Just this week I've bought two manwha, a yaoi manga, 3 comics, a Terry Pratchett book, and a collection of Li-Young Lee poems. And they will just have to sit stacked up on my dresser until places have been cleared for them. But at least my dad promised to trade me some of his bookshelves when I move out?

It makes me a little sad how much I don't care about the new episodes of Torchwood coming out. I'm trying not to be one of the bitter, crazy, boycott-the-show-and-write-nasty-letters kind of fans, and I'm not even really angry anymore. I just can't seem to muster any enthusiasm for this show. It's clearly not my show. My show had a pterodactyl on it. (You know, I have Strong Feelings about Ianto Jones, and Owen, and Tosh, but when RTD said that Myfanwy died that is when I gave up on Torchwood for real.) And it's odd, but I think this is really the first fandom I actually broke up with. I'm not mono-fannish by nature - I'm usually into three or four fandoms at once, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and I drift in and out at will - but I've never before hit a point where I had to say 'no, I cannot do this anymore.' At some point, Torchwood the show, and Torchwood the fic, and Torchwood the fandom all stopped making me happy.

On the other hand, k-dramas are currently a fandom that is making me very, very happy, in a squishy, uncomplicated, let's have piggyback rides and make-outs and cross-dressing kind of way. Everyone who insisted I had had had to watch Coffee Prince: fine. You were right. I give up, it's adorable. I'm also in the process of rewatching Life Is Beautiful, which is just plain charming. I love that you can tell that Tae-Sub is the Serious Dramatic Arc character because he gets Serious Sad Background Music every time he appears on screen.

I hope everyone is watching the Women's World Cup? Because seriously, it has been amazing. I am so proud of my badass American ladies right now, they have been fighting so hard the whole series. I've even been getting my dad to watch the matches this week, and he's been pretty impressed. I'll be at my mom's during the final, but luckily they have ESPN, and double-luckily, they have a job to work so they are leaving me in the house by myself until hanjuuluver picks me up in the afternoon. So I will be glued to the match for sure!

Two things before I keel over in exhaustion, because this was the second night in a row I got less than four hours of sleep. And only one of them is about Torchwood!

Non-Torchwood: I think I want to get another tattoo. Actually, I've been thinking for about a year that I wanted another one, but I haven't been able to make up my mind about what design/where to get it, since I'm the kind of person who can agonize about that for ages. But yesterday my mom and I started talking while I was over there hanging out, and we sort of independently reached the same conclusion about what design I should do, which makes me think it might be meant to be.

I think for my next tattoo I'm going to get a tree of life, either on my shoulder or between my shoulder blades. Which sucks because I won't be able to see it as easily, but it means I can do a bigger tattoo than the one on my ankle, and the tree of life would be a little complex to do that small, so. I like it, as a metaphysical concept, as a symbol, and aesthetically of course. So now I'm looking for some suitable art I can use to work out a design with the guy at the tattoo place I went to last time. Fun times!

Torchwood: ( CoE spoilers under the cut )

I've followed the reaction posts very closely, so I more or less know everything that happened in Children of Earth. I'm not going to watch Day Four. I'm not going to bother downloading Day Five. Thoughts:

( Damn straight there are spoilers under the cut. )

In conclusion, Children of Earth was a well-written (until tonight), very well-acted, exciting, intense, gut-wrenching mini-series that I am now devoting a lot of energy to pretending never happened.

So today was Children of Earth Day Two (aka the day with less snogging and more ass-kicking). And once again I have thoughts!

( Rhys, you're not eating uncooked potatoes. )

In conclusion, this was a tightly plotted, well-paced action episode, and I can't wait for tomorrow.

Got up at 7.30 to exactly no purpose - the woman who gave me the referral at the orientation on Tuesday specifically told me I had to apply for the job in person, but this proved not to be the case - according to Front Desk Boy, I can only apply online. And when we got to my dad's office, his partner wasn't there, so there wasn't any work for him to do. We went home at 11 having accomplished precisely nothing. Needless to say I am both tired and severely pissed off. It does not help that applying for the job gave me a huge freaked out existential crisis sort of thing - lots of me hating myself for being useless and angsting that I'm only ever going to work at stupid call centers for the rest of forever because I have no skills because I suck. Yeah. Annoying and pointless. I finally distracted myself with Justice League cartoons and Star Trek porn.

I think I let colourofsaying  talk me into actually writing the Due South/Torchwood crossover fic where Jack Harkness is Benton Fraser's father. Um. It has a plot! And emotional arcs! And alien drug-dealing gangsters with laser-dillingers. And Margaret Thatcher being awesome, because I kind of love her. We decided that she's secretly an ex-Time Agent who used to be bestest drinking buddies with Jack and John - the three of them hung out, got drunk, and slept their way through the agency, but they had a rule to never sleep with each other. When Jack and John hooked up in the time loop she was pissed enough that she quit the agency and disappeared off to Canada (which is why she is still alive, until the rest of the Time Agents). Jack is very very surprised to get an email from her.

I have serious plans to go to bed early so I can get up in the morning and work on it, and colourofsaying  is already plotting the sequel, where Fraser goes to Cardiff and tracks an alien fugitive and finds out Jack is immortal. Fun times!

colourofsaying : Did you notice that Fraser looks similar to John Barrowman?
masterofmidgets : JB from, like, way back in S1 DW, maybe
colourofsaying : *nods*
masterofmidgets : that provides some very strange mental images, and also a crossover where Jack is his own great-great-great grandfather somehow (and by somehow I mean fucking someone he shouldn't)
colourofsaying :  *grins*
...wait, were you thinking of Jack as a Mountie in a threesome with the Rays?
masterofmidgets : um, no?
colourofsaying : ok, that's probably a good thing
Jack as a Mountie is a scary scary thought
And he probably couldn't carry caribou either
masterofmidgets : more like Jack making an unexpected trip to Canada in the 60s and then one day he and the team are in Chicago and he meets a Mountie who looks suspiciously familiar
colourofsaying :  *grins*
Somehow Fraser procreates eventually?
masterofmidgets : or at the very least jerks off into a cup for science
colourofsaying :  *raises eyebrows* Somehow the phrase 'jerks off' and the name 'Fraser' sound very odd together
colourofsaying :  I just - do you think he ever did?
masterofmidgets : I...god
I actually imagine him having a very strict schedule for it. Like, once in week, in order to stay in top condition and good spirits.
very businesslike
colourofsaying : *giggles*
With Mountie-approved pinup posters?
masterofmidgets : he lies back and thinks of Nova Scotia
colourofsaying :  *dies*
YES
He makes Diefenbaker go in the barn.
masterofmidgets : this is not a sight appropriate for young wolves
colourofsaying : Nope
Although Diefenbaker is apparently quite the Casanova
He has puppies!
masterofmidgets : awwwwwwww
I am dead from cute
colourofsaying :  *grins*
masterofmidgets : ...and also picturing Fraser very carefully staring straight ahead, back perfectly straight, while he gives Diefenbaker The Talk.
colourofsaying : ...yes
masterofmidgets : I feel like I have to post this conversation now

ETA: this conversation continued on to Jack trying to initiate an orgy with Fraser and both Rays, John Hart's attempt to seduce Fraser into his spaceship, Fraser's identity crisis, and the founding of Torchwood Chicago. Go us.

Don't feel like sleeping yet, since I didn't get up until 3.30 today, so I started making icons. Icon making is harder than it looks, if not as hard as I expected it to be? Hopefully will have a chance to make some more Lost Souls icons once I listen a few more times and decide which bits I like best (but certainly "My bicycle has a bell!" and "You love coffee! Coffee and Jack!"), and some Superbuddies ones once I get some scans where you can read the speech bubbles. *grins*

Icons were made using textures by yunhe . Pictures and quote are from Stargate: Atlantis and Torchwood: Lost Souls, respectively. Up for grabs, but please comment and credit.

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*makes face* Today I had to be at work an hour before my shift started (due to lack of ride), and then we were dead dead dead all day. Sooooo boooooored. Especially because I finished Anna Karenina (!!!!!!!!!) yesterday, so I didn't really have anything to read during all the downtime. Instead, I ended up spending several hours writing extremely bad Torchwood haiku. Enjoy!

( cut to spare you my bored versifying )

The Good

Weekend was really a terrible amount of fun. Yesterday hanjuuluver, diamminesilver and I went up to Santa Fe for our long-planned and now apparently traditional mid-summer onsen trip. The bathhouse out there is so lovely - it's up in the mountains, and all the baths are outdoors, so you're soaking in the water looking up at the trees and the sky and hearing all of the birds and the wind and everything. Hard to imagine a more relaxing experience, really. We did the women-only bath for awhile, and then the sauna, the cold plunge - well I did the cold plunge, they were wimps - and back in the baths, and by the time we left I was so relaxed I almost fell asleep in the car on the way home. I can't wait for next year.

After we got back to town, diamminesilver's dad took us into Albuquerque for dinner and music, since there was an R&B band he wanted to see playing at this winery. I was a little wary, since R&B isn't my scene, but the food was fabulous (Kobe beef burgers and sweet potato fries, OMG, plus two plates of cheese and salami and crackers and bread and a brownie so big the three of us split it and still barely finished) and the band was pretty good, so we had a really great time. All in all, a wonderful day.

Today, the three of us met up again so we could go book-shopping, since Border's was having a sale. Once again, a good time was had by all - read a bunch of new manga and all of Trace Memory, freaked out passers-by with our habit of having very little respect for each other's personal space, and bought new headphones and the next volume of Yellow (SO SHINY). Also chocolate. Yay.

The Bad

Man, I keep trying to post about this and dissolving into incoherent shouting and crying and wanting to hit people with baseball bats. To make a long story short, I've been planning for about a year to go to Yaoi-Con withhanjuuluver, and making serious plans, of the "paying for tickets and making hotel reservations" sort, since April. Her parents are kind of overprotective, so we've been making sure everything gets cleared with them the whole way, and when we told them our plans in April, they said she could go and they would pay her airline fare.

This week, they decided she couldn't go, mostly because they are pissed off that she didn't place into as high a math class as they thought she should have. If she doesn't go, I can't go either - I just plain cannot afford the hotel room.

I am so fucking pissed off at them right now.  Not because they told her she couldn't go - as her parents and the people who are paying for it, it's their right - but because they are fucking jerking us around. They told her she could go in April, and they knew when they told her that that both of us then started to spend money - MONEY I DO NOT HAVE TO SPARE - on it. Letting us do that, and then suddenly changing their minds, isn't fair to her, isn't fair to me, and is in all truth just generally fucked up. Not to mention that in the whole fight they've said some incredibly insulting and offensive stuff about me to her, treated her like she's five, and that her dad did what I think was a horribly manipulative thing by saying he would not pay for her textbooks this year if she went. I just. God. I hate them so much right now.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do now. We aren't going to be able to talk them around, so at this point I'm trying to find another roommate, but I don't know - if I can't find someone I trust pretty well, I don't know if I want to do it, since I can't spare the money if they bail on me. I might ask her parents to refund me the money that would have covered her half of the hotel room - I think they owe me that - or at the very least the money I spent on registration - that I'm not compromising on. But all in all, it's a bad situation.

The Genderswapping

The Amazon blurb on the 9th Torchwood novelization, set to come out later this year:
   
    "The ninth novel in the bestselling Torchwood range from BBC Books. Emma is 30, single and, frankly, desperate. She woke up this     morning with nothing to look forward to but another evening of unsuccessful speed-dating. But now she has a new weapon in her quest for Mr Right. And it's made her almost perfect! Ianto Jones woke up this morning with no memory of last night. He went to work, where he caused amusement, suspicion, and a little bit of jealousy. Because Ianto Jones woke up this morning in the body of a woman! And he's looking just about perfect! And Jack Harkness has always had his doubts about Perfection..."

Holy fucking hell I love this fandom so much.

TITLE: Musicology
RATING: PG
PAIRING: Tosh-centric, featuring Jack and Ianto
SUMMARY: "I didn't know Tosh played the flute."
AUTHOR'S NOTES: getting frustrated with my recent lack of productivity, I asked telyanofcelore for drabble prompts. She is awesome, and provided.
DISCLAIMER: Do not own, make no profit, etc etc.
WARNING: Exit Wounds spoilers