at 6:59 you swore you would never love another band

Placeholder for my Dear Yuletide letter :D

I made a New Year's resolution to be on LJ every day. /o\

Well, at least I still read and comment off and on, I just can't seem to make myself post. It's this combo of writer's block and moderate stress--when I get 15 minutes or whatever, I mostly just want to mindlessly read. I've gone through about a trillion words recently; Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy (which I thoroughly enjoyed), a reread of the LotR trilogy (which I adore), a pile of Jennifer Crusie books, a massive LotR wip featuring my longtime OTP Legolas/Gimli omg favorites, and a lot of long Sherlock fic, which was mostly unsatisfying, sigh.

First semester was a success--4.0. \o/ I took a class over the winter break and got another 4.0 there. Very smug. Much self-satisfied. Wow. This semester I'm taking 5 more classes and I'm also back at my old job part-time, temporarily (15 hours a week/12 weeks), and it's a little harder to focus than I'd like, but it's not forever.

In more exciting news, my mom quit smoking after 40 years and I'm thrilled about it. She also got a puppy, a black/tan shepherd mix, who is an utter triumph of good-dogness; smart, obedient, sweet as hell, and looks up to her big sister the pupcake with adoring eyes. <3<3<3 I might literally die of jealousy, I want a dog so bad, but at least they're within visiting range so I can get some good skritches in.

Oogie and Sally sat close enough together on the bed today that their fur touched. !!!!! This is a shocking leap forward in feline relations, after six years of Sally desperately wanting to be friends and Oogie ranging from pissy to coolly distant. I maintain the hope of seeing them snuggle at some point in my lifetime. Their time of friendship will happen someday. Someday.

And a bunch of awesome things are coming up--we'll have fannish company next week, and Martha and I are going to the Night Vale live show in Boston at the end of the month, and an Old Crow Medicine Show/Avett Brothers show in March, and we're starting to plan a honeymoon trip to Europe for late spring/early summer! :D :D :D We're thinking we'll do a couple days in Ireland, long enough to see a bit of Dublin and some of the countryside, before heading to Paris for a few more days. I'm so excited I could barf, but that might just be the huge number of Girl Scout cookies I've eaten in the last hour and a half.

So that's all the news that's fit to print. I've vowed that at some point next week I'm going to post about the wedding--how was it already four months ago? omg--and then maybe I'll feel less blocked. In the meantime, I'm mostly caught up on y'all and thank you for continuing to post to LJ so that I can creep over your lives and interests in detail and at length. :D

Reader, I'm a dumbass. I forgot that my history class today was an optional exam for people who want a chance to bump up their grades, and since my grade is not-bump-upable, I didn't have to go. Normally this is not a big thing, but it means that I could have stayed home this morning and hung out with our delightful surprise guest bayleaf and eaten chocolate chip cookies and ranted about Person of Interest. Instead I am sitting in the commuter lounge, drinking water and frowning at the internet.

FROWN FROWN FROWN.

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I made bayleaf promise me that we could watch some Due South when I get home. I've decided I'm only in Due South and Big Eden fandoms now. Who's with me? ...crickets? Just crickets? All right, I can work with that.

Martha is making soup in the kitchen and there were onions involved, and my eyes decided to FLIP OUT, so I am curled up in the living room, on the apple green couch, a gray and white blanket with a wolf on it over my head like a blanket fort. The wolf is looking at my keyboard as I type. If wolves (on blankets or off) could talk, this one would probably say, "That's a pretty shitty way to start your first entry on lj after a long hiatus." Stop judging, blanket-wolf, where is YOUR lj entry?!

I was so excited to see more posting happening, and then I completely disappeared and missed most of it. :( I'm sorry--I'm going to try to do a better job keeping up. But in my own defense, it wasn't a tumblr thing--I haven't been there much either--it's just that I hit a wall of BUSY.

Since the last time I posted to lj, I left my job, had even MORE dental work done, went back to school full-time with a 5-course load, apartment hunted, saw Fall Out Boy for the trillionth time and adored them all over, moved Martha out of her condo and into our gorgeous new place, moved myself out my apartment, sprained my ankle REALLY BADLY, and got married a week later/two weeks ago.

(married!! the soup happening in the kitchen is wife soup! \o/ which, a post about the wedding later for the interested, but it's such a big thing that I can't start off there!)

Things are starting to ramp back down to the point where we have some free time. SOME. We've watched four entire hours of TV in the last two weeks, which is like a miracle. For a brief, shining moment, we were caught up with Person of Interest! ...and that was pretty much it; a moment on a Sunday night, soon to be tarnished by a new episode we haven't gotten to yet. *g*

Slowly but surely the cobwebs are being dusted off my fannishness, though--we filled out our Yuletide signups dutifully, the day after the wedding, right before the deadline. I was so worried that this would be the year I'd fail to live up to the challenge. But getting my assignment was honestly a relief; I could feel the gears working again, and it was very exciting! Then we went to go see The Heat again with fangirls at the cheap theatre, and it was like wiping away a little MORE dust. And then we went out to dinner with other fangirls and talked for just a second about the importance of lj/fandom in our lives and I was like, okay. This still works for me. I didn't somehow lose my fannishness in the whirl of planning ~stuff. THANK GOODNESS.

tl;dr HI. HI GUYS. HEY. HOW ARE YOU. I can't catch up on ALL the posts but I will start digging backwards. But I thought about my f'list at random busy moments, and I hope you all are doing well tell me all about it.

Yuletide author! I am very sorry to have given you so little direction in my signups--I'd had an absolutely hectic couple weeks and was signing up at the very last second. I'd hoped to have time to flesh my requests out a little before assignments went out. :( I hope that you were excited enough about whatever we matched on that a lack of specificity didn't worry you, at least!

Anything you choose to write about these characters will be fine by me, but I know it can be tough to write for someone else without an idea of what they'd like. So here's a bit of detail!

Overall I'm a terrible person to be matched with if you're hugely into angst. I'm a sappy sap mcsaperson in general, and also I recently got married so I'm in love with love etc. Things that are generally in: kindness, humor, being surprised by the depths of your affection, being oblivious to how much you are loved, and sexy boning. I like my romance tempered with sarcasm--too mushy and I'm out. Things that are generally not my preference: despair, physical or mental anguish, humiliation that isn't met with understanding, unconsensual or dubiously consensual boning.

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So that's that--I hope it is at least a little helpful. Mostly I just hope you have fun writing this story, and I'm super excited to read it. I usually turn off IP logging around Yuletide, so if you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a comment and I'll do what I can to clarify!

I love that no one in the media, or any fandom platform, spells NSYNC a) the same way b) one way consistently. We're all just throwing out letters and punctuation at random, it feels like, and I choose to believe this is because we're all so goddamn excited about a possible reunion.

If this is just internet-rumor mill, I am going to burn my laptop and go live in a cave. Sounds like hyperbole, I know. Probably it is? Probably.

It's not like my laptop is doing me all that much good lately. I barely see it these days. I'm digging back through LJ from work right now, which I try not to do, because I miss you guys and I'm excited by the idea of people posting more!

About 'nsync. In 2013. \o/

I am probably not going to post every day, but I will try to leave more comments--positive reinforcement? *grins*

Hey gang--any recommendations for a fantasy-type novel, slashy a plus but not required, more heavy on culture/politics/mythology? Like, if i hadn't read all the N.K. Jemisin, that would be a great rec. Available on kindle preferred. I have a flight tomorrow and I have books but they are not hitting that spot right now.

If you don't have recs but you want to talk to me about how great N. K. Jemisin is, feel free! ;-)

I don't know what happened but I appear to have had a Star Trek-related breakdown of some sort? Like, I went to STID, I enjoyed it but not as much as I could have, it's a good thing the cast is charismatic as all get-out to make up for JJ Abrams. I went home thinking about how much I love Kirk and Spock, although I never think of myself as being more than a casual fan, and I should rewatch the original series, it's been a while, but I won't have time until like July, which is fine, I'll survive, I'll reread some fic--

And thennnnn a double black hole of nuTrek fic-reading and originalTrek pining opened under my feet and I fell in and now there is a gravity of feelings that I can't escape.

Not to be melodramatic about it or anything.

So at 1 this morning, I was trying to fall asleep and failing because I kept thinking about that whole Vulcan-hands-kissing trope and that scene in the Wrath of Khan. And a lightbulb went off that literally everyone has already seen and I don't know why it was such a shock to me, but I thought, their hands on the glass, fannishly why haven't I been looking at that as not just salute/blessing but also a desperate kiss goodbye?



And then I thought, the glass; all that glass between a touch telepath and a true expression of his feelings while he's dying, that was already devastating, and thinking of it as a kiss made it worse. All of a sudden, this is the cruelest death scene ever. Who needs gory torture porn, right, when you can put Spock behind glass and make Kirk watch him die. And suddenly it was 1982 and me from an alternate timeline needed fix-its real bad.

In fact, I needed at least 400 fix-it stories about it, I still do, bring me that; at 1am the internet should totally have brought me that, that would have been a great idea for me and my life; the movie has been out for 30 years, I've watched it several times, but right now I'm having all the emotions about it, what are my choices.

No, it's fine, I'm okay, there's no reason to be afraid, I'm totally sane right now, it's fine. Just. If you have old-school fic recs for dealing with specifically that incident, gimme. Gimme now. Gimme please. I said please, that's how you can tell I'm in control of this need I have. Please. See, doesn't that look reasonable?

I'm being reasonable, you guys. Just gimme the thing and I'll go away quietly. To die. In a glass case of emotion, to mix my medias for a moment. Reasonably.

Ahem.

I'm okay. Yes I am. :D

One thing I will say for the LJ slowdown: I managed to improve my ratio of posts read to comments left. Like, I always read everyone's posts, I don't filter my friendslist, but I guess I was always trying so hard to stay caught up that I was bad at letting people know I was paying attention? And I'm still not stellar about that, because things have been really busy and I might go four, five days without any significant time for fannish stuff, but. More comments was always a goal and now it is happening, so \o?

I'm still really bad at replying to all comments I receive, though. Team NE was mocking me recently because I am weird on the internet--related to LJ, I shuffled all notifications into an inbox that I don't really check anymore, and I never set it up so I got notifications for being friended/defriended. They were like, how do you know when someone replies to your comments? And I was like, I check back in on the post later! I know it's not the easiest way, but that's the way I like it!

Sometimes I do miss out on conversations that could have gone further and I kick myself later, but notifications, idk. They feel like you have to do something about me to my brain, and I'm lazy and avoidant and get especially contrary when I feel like I have to do things. If fandom had ever felt like a pressure-filled, obligation place, I'd have dropped out right quick.

Anyway, so I miss people who aren't posting anymore, and I do miss conversations and longform squee, although I know I can't complain when I'm not posting a lot either! But I hope that them which would move primarily to tumblr have already done so (and feel free to come back) and that the rest of you are sticking around. <3

In other news, I saw/adored Iron Man 3 on opening weekend, with fangirls, and also with teenaged boys who were expressing the same opinions as the fangirls. Martha was cracking up at the boys sitting next to her--they just had so many feelings, it was adorable. What a fun movie. I was reading an article on Cracked about how the superhero movie bubble must burst eventually, and I hope that doesn't happen anytime especially soon--I just enjoy the humor and explosions that the Marvel universe, in particular, is bringing to the screen right now.

After that, misspamela, Martha and I went down to NYC for a night and got to hang out with a delightful group of fangirls! Many thanks due to eleanorlavish, who found out that MissP and I had a bumbling, half-formed plan to 'see people? probably?' and managed to organize a really good day. We hung out on a patio drinking and eating delicious burritos (my cosmo came with a bottle of Corona tipped into it--ANOTHER!), and then decamped to EL's place to watch the 21 Jump Street remake, which was the 3rd time I'd watched it, and the 3rd time it made me laugh so hard it hurt. Adoooooooore. Channing Tatum is the most best and I would watch him in every action/comedy (or stripper movie) that he felt like gracing with his presence.

How did we all fail at nominating that movie for Yuletide last year? This is a serious problem! You go to the AO3 and there's like, such a sad number of stories. I get that a lot of people who were opposed to a goofy 21 Jump Street remake (or any 21 Jump Street remake) didn't see it, for valid reasons of DON'T RUIN A THING I LOVED, but surely ONE of the rest of us COULD have remembered? Ugh, terrible. This Yuletide let's all just read/request that one thing and make up for the lack, okay. I can't think of any other new tiny awesome fandoms that can be the breakout, so far at least--Vikings? Isn't everyone mad at Vikings? I feel like that's an accurate statement--why not fluffy fun with dudes who say nice things to each other?

Anyway, tl;dr: hi, IM3 good, 21 Jump Street still good, fangirls great, the end. :D

Guys, I super intensely want a Very Harlequin Romance with two ladies. Like, the cranky firefighter and the lady who is trying to live in her old family home and run the old family antique business after her great-aunt dies and leaves it to her, and it's nothing but code violations and musty old fabric and the firefighter-lady would just like to not have to rescue her and her seven dogs, and the great-aunt would never LISTEN about FIRE SAFETY, and the antiques-lady is like, HUBBA HUBBA, WHY DON'T YOU COME ON IN AND SHOW ME ALLLLL THE VIOLATIONS, and then they have sex, and they have a fight, but then they make up and get married. That. I want it. Like now. If you have a rec for an original fic/e-book/fanfic, gimme. *grabbiest hands*

I had too many things going on last week to have time for the internet, so I am a bit behind. I did catch up on LJ, and left a lot of tabs open to leave comments--but I won't have time to actually leave the comments until Sunday. /o\ So if you get a hug from me well after you needed it, or a congratulations, or a long ramble about Person of Interest--it'll be two weeks late but heartfelt?

Martha and I did our engagement photos on Sunday! I do not like to have to be serious and have my picture taken at the same time--I just feel this is asking a lot. Fortunately our photographer is very nice and was willing to work with us even though we can't hold hands and walk towards a camera without tripping all over each other, and my serious/relaxed face is kind of a sad face (I said to Martha, I just feel like I have an angry nose and it's hard for my face to look pleasantly relaxed, and Martha pretty much said ........), and also I talk a lot always. It's a good thing that Martha is an attractive, agreeable person who is easy to work with in general, is all I'm saying, because otherwise we'd never get anything done.

We got a sneak peek at a couple of the pictures and I think they came out really nice, will have to share a few when we get them all.

Tonight we go to our first cake tasting! I sent Martha a picture I drew in MS Paint earlier, which I have included under the cut tag because I am super proud of myself, I am clearly an MS Paint artist. ( Collapse )

Next weekend, we will be road-tripping to NYC with misspamela, and I am a) very excited!!! and b) planning to listen to FOB's new album the entire trip there and back. I think it seems like an excellent road trip album (a very solid album overall; there aren't words for how into Young Volcanoes I am, or how disappointed I am that the videos so far are so bloody and disturbing that I can't rewatch them--I mean, I realized the other day that Patrick STUMP and--anyway, no rewatching, yay songs). c) can I repeat the part where I'm very excited? Road trips and fangirls and time with MissP <3<3<3

So that's that--one day I'll do a post that isn't five random mostly-unrelated things, but not today. :D