diary of a dialup dinosaur

It's July and my hockey podcasts are all on hiatus until September and the Mets podcast I listened to is kaput and I need something to listen to for the summer. Does anyone have something they love? 

For podcasts: I am not a fan of true crime as a species or political/activist stuff. I'm not looking to get mad about anything. I love food, history, hockey, baseball, Hollywood sausage-making (I have a subscription to The Ankler), and grew up listening to Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story and Car Talk. I love learning new things, I hate audience participation shows. I have my alarm clock set to Bloomberg Radio because I don't have any particular interest in the markets but it's important to know.

I don't have a great history with audiobooks, but I keep wanting to try again because maybe this time it will stick. I read a lot of nonfiction -- the top of my holds lists at the library are Maureen Ryan's Burn It Down and Alex Joske's Spies and Lies. I like historical fiction and have been told that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell gets better after the first third and might be worth it as an audiobook. I made it through the end of Dune, almost all of Neal Stephenson and Daniel Silva, and will read any good murder-mystery but you will have to sell me on fantasy and I generally Cannot with teen or younger protagonists no matter what the premise.

So now that I have established my bona fides as a Difficult Customer... anyone have recs? 

This seems to be "I haven't posted in forever" amnesty time on my flist, so I suppose I should sign up because it's been almost a year.

I have been busy. I've moved twice in fifteen months. I've bought a house -- an actual house; I've been a homeowner before but it's been an apartment. I drive in rush hour now after not driving at all two years ago, but still not at night if I can avoid it. I am not where or who I was three years ago and probably less of it is due to the pandemic than it should be considering I lived walking distance from all of the mobile fridges full of corpses in Queens.

My fannishness has been at low ebb for a couple of years now because of the tumult -- new job, new geographical region, new life -- and I wish that were not the case. I don't want to be too tired or too busy to be fannish, but I have been. I have the Disney Bundle not because I want to catch up on the several SW series or MCU movies I've been meaning to watch, but instead because ESPN+ is the only way to watch my hockey team now that I'm out of market and the pirate feeds are not always reliable. I would rather watch the Mets pratfall than try to get myself back in the headspace of picking up one of my massive WIPs. I miss it all, but the effort of trying to get it back seems enormous and anything I'm current in canon on (say, 9-1-1) I'm not the right kind of author for. I feel a bit like Wendy kicked out of Neverland. I've never been the kind of fanficcer who can stay in their little happy place and just pretend canon isn't happening around them and it's never bothered me before now.

And I've also never been the kind of fannish person to talk a lot of about what's not fanfic and this space has never been either diary or therapist, so I wonder if this post is even necessary. Is my absence noticed or do I just turn up on someone's cruise through their AO3 bookmarks and "oh, hey, I remember that author!"...

1) Sportsball! My baseball team is finally ridiculous in good ways instead of #LOLMets ways. They scored a touchdown in the ninth inning to turn a 7-1 impending loss into an 8-7 win and I'm glad I kept the game on while my attention was primarily on my hockey team. Which managed to win last night despite getting outshot because Igor was Igor and was dispensing indulgences for defensive sins like a Medieval pope with a cash shortage. The bookmakers still favor Pittsburgh in the series despite the Penguins needing to use their third-string goalie, so I'm not prepared to be optimistic, but it's been a few years since the Rangers were in the playoffs and I'm trying to enjoy it.

2) I have a car. It was a miserable experience to acquire except for the part where I have patient and generous friends who coached me through it. There was no haggling, no discussion of options or trims or colors or anything. There was instead a sticker that said "dealer profit markup: $1100" and I took what was on the lot that wasn't white. It's a Kona. I am not driving it as much as I should right now because I am still WFH and don't want to practice driving during rush hour, but I have gone out. And had a few misadventures because I'm still learning how to listen to Google Maps directions and Google Maps occasionally doesn't know where the hell I am. So I've seen a bit of Howard County that has a lot of farmland and golf courses and no place to pull over or turn around. And gone to Wegmans. I also finally went to the Maryland DMV... which is the MVA because DMV means something else here. And despite having an unrestricted NYS license, I had to surrender it in exchange for a Maryland Provisional License because I've been driving for less than 18 months. So now I have a clearly labeled teenager license, although I am allowed to drive after dark because I am not a teenager. I am not driving after dark because I am still a new driver and driving in daylight is stressful enough.

3) I wrote another 911 fic. I think what I find most appealing about the show is that there are actual 'books' on the characters that the show writers consult, that these writers favor not only continuity but also thrill to callbacks to earlier seasons and creating symmetry with earlier arcs and between characters. I come out of comicsfic, SGA, and the MCU and none of these canons had any use or capacity for character continuity -- it's impossible in comics with a gazillion writers and books, the MCU didn't really do character development, and SGA reduced every character to a single trait and then re-set them when growth and experience threatened that trait and then pretended past events didn't happen. And here's 911 last week explicitly mirroring old tragedies for Bobby and Chimney (allowing them both to avoid repeating it/a better ending), putting another single brick in the rebuild of Eddie's foundations that they spent the first half-season-plus blowing up, and showing Buck reacting exactly as he said he would a long time ago when Bobby is in danger. I like that every character beat in the show is essentially Chekhov's gun -- it will get used later, sometimes a few seasons later. Also, family-by-choice for reals, not the way MCU fandom tried to fanon it with the Avengers, who barely knew or tolerated each other.

Anyway, the fic:

Paterfamilias
Bobby, Buck, Eddie | 2300 words ; 5x13-14

“Eddie isn’t someone we can save like we do when the alarm rings and we ride out,” he goes on. “He’s not someone we can decide isn’t making clear decisions and override them.”

“He’s not making clear decisions,” Buck bites out.

“He’s not,” Bobby agrees. “But we still can’t force better ones on him because they wouldn’t stick. He’s not ready to acknowledge the problem – he’s still looking at the symptoms and not seeing the disease. And until he’s ready to do that… We have to wait. And be ready to catch him when he falls.”

Buck fights his own frustration, shifting around violently in his chair as he tries to swallow down the futility.

“I fell so many times,” Bobby says softly and Buck stills. “I still dream of falling. But I know – really know – that if I do fall again, I have so many hands who will help me up and hold me until I can stand. Yours among them.”

Buck gives him a ghost of a smile.

“If Eddie falls, we’ll catch him and we won’t let him go.”

1) I wrote a fic for the first time in a year, in a fandom I'm not 'in' and with a topic that... The 911 fandom, near as I can tell, exists for one pairing and one pairing only despite having a really remarkable set of main characters. And here I am writing genfic that fandom can't squint and call pre-slash because it's also pre-series. It's a character study and I think I did okay because my goodness, if there's one thing I can do is write a military backstory that makes sense of canon developed without a military advisor. But it has a readership of six. I can write stuff that fandom will like and call pre-slash because if I can write Steve and Bucky as brothers I can write Buck and Eddie as platonic soulmates, but.. what do you do when you like a designer but none of the clothes fit? Or is it the other way around and I'm the designer without a clientele? 

But It Often Rhymes
2k | Eddie Diaz

He has no idea how to be a civilian anymore.  

During the day it’s trying to get used to being responsible for his own plans and actions – getting used to a life without a routine outside of PT appointments three times a week. He doesn’t have a work purpose anymore, a set of professional expectations, and it’s not freeing at all. He doesn’t see “possibilities” (his mom’s word) or “opportunities” (his dad’s), he sees a void where his sense of accomplishment used to be and no way to fill it. Trying to find jobs that don’t require a college degree or vocational training but that somehow still pay a living wage...  

It would be hard if it was just him and his failures, but it’s not. Everyone wanted him to get out, but now that he’s out the goalposts have moved and he’s letting them down all over again. He’s around but he’s not “present” according to Shannon and his parents. He’s out all the time for a patchwork quilt of jobs, but he’s still missing while he’s actually in the room. He’s not a father to his son even if he’s no longer a stranger to him. He’s not a partner to Shannon, whose frustration is no longer something she bothers to hide. She’s kind to him in the darkness of night, when his nightmares and flashbacks wake them both and he can’t hide what has been done to him by war, but her patience fades with the dawn.  

He can see the man she wants him to be, that his parents expect him to be. He wants to be that man, too. It’s not that he wants to be a selfish husband or a shitty father; it’s that he isn’t any more whole during the day than he is in the dark and he needs some time to get himself back in one piece. He’ll get there, he will, but it’s not fast enough for anyone including him.  

(He misses being around people who understand what slithers beneath his skin because they feel it, too. Who get that the bullets that hit him were merely an exclamation point on a statement that began with the first time he’d breathed in the talcum dust of Afghanistan. But despite El Paso crawling with guys who’d once had Property of the Department of Defense stamped on their asses, he’s cut off from the communion of faith. He’s out now.)

2) I am still living the car-free life, which is occasionally frustrating but honestly only really stressful when I consider how the hell I am going to get to work when actually go back to the office some time next month (they think). I live by good highway access, but Google Maps says it takes 2.5 hours and 3-5 buses to get from my apartment to my place of employ and that's... a lot. Speaking as someone who lived for a very long time in a Two Fare Zone in NYC. I'm good for food between delivery from Weee! and the supermarket because Giant is much more generous and available than Stop & Shop/Peapod despite literally being the same company, but I guess this is what happens when you live in car country.

I would like to get a car. I have money saved to get a car. But getting the actual car is proving to be the problem. Used cars are now essentially the same price as used cars -- a 2018 Kona with >50k miles is $2k less than a 2022 Kona, which is obscene and absurd. The local Carvanas don't have anything less than $20k for used vehicles. New cars don't stay on the lot a week and I've encountered one dealership that won't sell me a car at all without an MD license even though I am a MD resident. (And I need a car to go to the DMV to flip my NY license!) And I'm wary of ordering stuff online that I haven't at least sat in because this is a bit more expensive than risking a dress online from a place with a shitty return policy. But I can't get to dealerships without a lift. So exhausting.


3) It's baseball season! Well, almost because the Mets-Nats game keeps getting pushed back for rain. I find it deeply amusing that I am affected by the local weather delaying the game instead of turning on the game and wondering why it's not there. (The Rangers are playing, I can multitask, but it's Opening Day.) The Mets are starting the way the Mets always start, full of hope and also full of harbingers of what happens when you are Mets fan (hint: it's never good). I am paying for MLB Audio this year so I can listen to Howie and Wayne; I can *ahem* the TV side, but radio's harder and Audacy won't let me listen legally anymore.

It has been nine months since I posted here, apparently, and I didn't mean to make it such a hiatus, especially because I check in every other day or so and have kept up with all of your adventures.

(I post on tumblr because it's generally low-effort, but I also sometimes post meta and other stuff and it's the WORST environment for that.)

It has been a year, peeps. I've finished school, switched jobs, learned how to drive, and am currently failing spectacularly at moving to my duty station. Which hasn't mattered because we're all still WFH, but that will be changing imminently and I'm still hundreds of miles away.

I haven't had much of a brain for fanfic with everything going on, especially when all of my outstanding WIPs are over 100k words and rereading them to figure out where I was is so consuming. And I don't have an active fandom right now to spark a fic surge the way The Old Guard did last summer. I miss writing, y'all.

That said, I kinda did figure out what happens with Qui Habitat and have outlined it through Chapter 37 (it's posted through 28). I have to suck it up and start killing off meaningful people, though, and I dread that. The outlining is still work, though, and then I have to write the story. But someone read through the series on ao3 the other week and commented throughout and that felt SO GOOD. I don't get a lot of comments on any stories these days, let alone one like that.

Time has not at all healed my MCU wounds or revivified my fandom interest. It's not dead officially or intentionally, just... I come from the comics and I've had decades of being able to let stupid canon decisions roll off my back, but it's been hard here. Maybe because it's only one canon and not the "character appears in ten different books with eight different writers and some get it better than others" where I have options. And the end state of Endgame just pissed me off on so many levels, which does not play well with my Canon Whore tendencies. So returning to writing a Steve/Peggy story when I still feel rage at how canon handled that... I can't for more reasons than that time travel is now a completely different thing.

(I suspect the tumblr discourse hasn't helped, where everything is so politicized and it's Team Tony and Team Steve the way it's Team Democrats and Team Trump and each thinks the other is evil and perverted for believing what they believe. I filter proactively and excessively, but you can't keep it all away when sometimes it's not the tags it's the gif selection.) 

I'm hilariously behind on consuming media there, too, despite the Disney+ subscription. I can't finish The Falcon and the Winter Soldier because it bores me and the early worldbuilding decisions annoyed me. Loki was good, although I have issues with the last episode -- nowhere near the degree that I had issues with the last episode of WandaVision. I haven't seen any of the movies despite wanting to. I watch hockey instead.

So that's me. How've you all been? 

I haven’t been around these parts for a few months because of ongoing Major Life Changes (all good, I assure, but all major) and I don’t have the brain to work on the WIP I’ve been WIP-ping on for the pandemic. But I had a moment and I’d just reread Freezer Burn (you’re allowed to reread your own stuff, right?) and there’d been that Ask about Tony and so…

I’m not sure where it’s going or if. Major Life Changes are going to be ongoing for a while. But…

___

Tony draws up a list for the therapist Pepper makes him go see after the alien guts are finally washed out of the carpet and the Loki-shaped hole in the floor is filled in. He's not oblivious to his own current lack of cope; he's been in and out of therapy for thirty-five years and he can understand the principles even if he thinks it's a quack racket. He's not over Afghanistan. He's really not over nearly dying alone in an alien galaxy. And Fury's version of the Traveling Wilburys is messing with his ego in ways he probably should have anticipated but are nonetheless being exacerbated by the first two things. It's been a really long time since he's been part of a supergroup and not the featured performer and so while all he wants is the spotlight on his pain, instead he's stuck singing harmony. The therapist tells him that it will take time to heal, which he already knew and nobody wants to hear, so he considers his obligation to Pepper fulfilled and resumes trying to buy Bruce Banner's friendship with the lab of his dreams.

Bruce instead offers his friendship for free, which is weird and Tony's not entirely sure how to handle that because being Tony Stark means nothing's free and friendship's usually darned expensive. The only people in his world who aren't on the grift are Pepper and Rhodey and that's why Tony buys them lots of things; absolutely everyone else is interested in the commodity of Tony Stark and he's had plenty of practice to make sure the exchange isn't too uneven.

"I'm kind of hard to deal with," Bruce tells him with a shrug when Tony asks about the freebie. "Even before the Other Guy. Being in my phone contacts is a mixed proposition at best."

( Tony! Toni! Toné! )

 * Legit and serious question: where do you gals buy jeans? I need to purchase a pair or two -- I have precisely one pair that fits me and winter is coming -- but it's proving all sorts of unintentionally hilarious. I've looked at Old Navy, Banana Republic, Gap, and Loft and my only options seem to be a laundry list of styles that I absolutely positively Do Not Want. I lived through the 1990s and refuse to experience high waisted anything ever again; I have a short torso and scars by my bottom ribs from the decade of friction burn but almost everything is now "extra-high waist" or "ribcage." I don't want jeggings or really even skinny jeans -- I suspect I'd look fine in them, but jeans are supposed to be an easier and more comfortable alternative to the tights I wear every day to work and I don't want to have to peel them off. (Also, I'm over forty.) I am not curvy by any brand's definition. I do not want ankle or cropped jeans or holes in anything and I spent my high school years doing the fold-and-roll tapering cuff and don't really have a desire to relive that with girlfriend jeans. And I'm snack-sized, so I can't go to most stores to try stuff on even if it weren't a pandemic because petites are increasingly online-only. (The pair that works now is Loft Modern Straight in petite, but they don't seem to sell that anymore.) 


* Our republic is stronger than most fannish people seem to think it is and while the 'shouting' part of the "all over but the shouting" will no doubt go on for a while, there will be a peaceful and orderly transfer of power and we will get on with our lives. There will be recounts, as there should be in states that have automatic recount triggers for very close votes, but there is clearly no appetite for anything disruptive. I honestly anticipated a much bigger shitshow with all of the absentee ballots, but I underestimated us. Except Nevada, which rightfully earned every single "all Vegas does is stay up all night and count things and yet here we are" meme. 


* Blow a click at the NYTimes for Why I love Women Who Wallop: For our film critic, watching actresses become action stars made her think differently about bodies and the meaning of representation.

And a happy 5781 to everyone. May you all have good inscriptions in the Book of Life. I think we've all earned a little bit of grace this calendar year. Not enough to cover it all, but some.


I finally watched Jurassic Park for the first time this week because it's leaving Netflix. I'd never seen it, although I'd seen the memes and the Chris Pratt movies. It wasn't as wonky as finally watching Star Wars after having memorized Spaceballs, but it was a little weird. It's held up really well, though. The dinosaurs aren't bad! Laura Dern is still awesome! Jeff Goldblum is still ridiculous but also with a heart! And was this the last movie where Samuel L Jackson could be killed offscreen?


Dallas vs Tampa Bay for the Stanley Cup Final and I have no dog in this hunt. Tampa's not as chock full of ex-Rangers as they used to be and I have much fondness for the Dallas color commentator and that's it, that's my rooting interest. I watch with fascination but no investment.


I'm writing a The Old Guard story, despite my last one sinking like a stone fannish reception-wise, and futzing with Qui Habitat and I dug out one of the old files for the latter that had obsolete outline notes and found this. It's spoilery, perhaps, but...

( disappeared character speaks! )

I was writing something more serious last night when the Chadwick Boseman news broke and it put a wet blanket on both my story and my baseball team having a day of ridiculous glory.

Today I am not yet ready to return to introspection, nor is my baseball team returning to glory, plus it is damp and gloomy out and so... more crossover silliness.

I got a prompt for The Old Guard in Atlantis and while I'm sure Andy versus the Wraith would be a battle, I went in a different direction:

( Someone's inability to stop dying and also to stay dead seemed a likely place to start )

* I took requests for fic over on Tumblr and there weren't very many but gosh I needed to write, apparently. I left it open to SGA, MCU, and The Old Guard and it was primarily the last. 

* I am a year older since last we met. I was in the 18-44 census demographic when I filled out my census form, but now I am not. I still don't feel like an adult half the time and the 'age is just a number' thing means more to me now than it did ten years ago. I suspect it helps that I look a fair bit younger than I am, but it's also really realizing that the aging process is a lot slower than we're told it is. 


* All of my meta and fic from The Old Guard posted to tumblr, some of which reflects that I have a dusty-and-worthless MA in history of science. And one of which has a body count of traumatized souls because I mentioned a joke about academia that one of my professors made twenty-someodd years ago. It's "racist" and "fascist" and the OP contacted me to... tell me she was distressed it was being reblogged by other people because it offended her? I'm not sure. There's literally nothing I can do about that even if I were inclined, which I am not. I'm sorry you're the living embodiment of the That's Not Funny meme, honey, but there's nothing offensive about it as-is and even less so when you have the context that it's about WASPs. And it's an actual mirror of the plot of the movie you're being fannish about. I don't feel old, but I am definitely too old for this shit. Also, I post a lot of original content to tumblr and I've been on the receiving end of plenty of Death of the Author hijacking of posts and it's a hazard of the medium. You live with it or you find somewhere else. 

That aside, I'm kind of enjoying having something to say about anything fannish again. It's been a while, even longer if I discount that a lot of what I had to say about the MCU was gripey the last few years as the narrative got warped by non-narrative forces. I would like to say much more about TOG but probably need prompts. 


* My workload has gone from OMG! to Manageable for the next couple of weeks and I don't know what to do with myself. I've gone from needing to backburner anything with a softer deadline because I've got hard ones I'm crashing into at highway speeds to... sitting on the couch watching hockey and playing Township and feeling like there's a whole lot else I could be doing and possibly should. 


* My lockdown exercise regime has crossed the 500 mile mark, so now I am living in a Proclaimers song. 

* School continues to kick my butt because of the time-suck, not because of the difficulty. And I voluntarily agreed to vaporize the intersession break between summer and fall by becoming a peer mentor, so instead of No Sleep Til Brooklyn it's No Break Til Christmas. I am looking forward to the peer mentorship, though, because I'm a huge fan of passing on the benefits of experience. And I wish I'd had someone when I'd started this program to be that for me instead of the one I got, who was half my age and unable to process the concept of a returning student on top of being primarily concerned with her own grade. (The program has a significant number of people who have decades between their undergraduate degree and this and the utter lack of support I felt was cited in my application.) But the summer semester is halfway done, so... yay.


* I've had to slow my roll with the fic writing in general because of the previous, but I'm also at a point where I need to pause and re-read the last chunk of QH because I need to find dropped threads and other things I've left in unsatisfactory condition. The problem with a story that's 200K words and nowhere near finished is that you can't start at the beginning, you have to find a point and go from there. Doing the big edit on the 2007-2012 chunk of QH, which was eighteen chapters, was enough to propel me through another ten but it's time for a small strategic pause to figure out where the hell I'm going and what happens before I get there. (I have the end state, for the record.) I have a few bits in the QH Scrap file (hi, Sam!) that I ponder posting somewhere  but don't because I fear it might give too much of the game away. Also, I'm totally open to requests/suggestions/questions because I do miss stuff even with an outline and what's in my head isn't what's on the page. If you're reading and there's something/someone you want expanded upon, speak up! 


* Tumblr's redesign means that Tumblr Saviour is working again but almost nothing else is including XKit. Gosh, I want 'post block' back again. Also 'tag viewer.'


* I have misophonia, which is when noise becomes intrusive to the point of making you lose your shit, basically. I'm an urban child and city noises don't bother me at all and I've lived most of my life under airport landing patterns, so I don't even notice the planes/trains/sirens/traffic. But human noises are a problem for me and I live in a building with thin walls and facing other buildings with backyards. The apartment above mine is a rental and the current tenant is a couple with a 3-year-old, which is as hellish as you imagine. I've written them politely (and vetted by a parent of young children) to please be mindful of the noise because I work from home and am a student and they were initially very receptive and wrote me back saying they'd bought mats for the purpose -- I saw the box when it was delivered. But today I went upstairs to ask them to take away the electronic piano because the kid bashing on the keys is making me anxious in a way that the running around has ceased to be. I was expecting a little Casio keyboard, but when they opened the door I saw a gigantic keyboard on a fancy stand at toddler height taking up significant real estate. Who does this for a toddler? In an apartment? I got a few hours of peace, which allowed me to get some work done, but a keyboard smash late in the day says that they haven't even unplugged the thing and my anxiety is not handling it well. 


* I am not a 'trash tv' kind of person, but I will shamefully confess to watching the first couple of episodes of Roswell, New Mexico. I never saw the original, but I'm aware of it and aware of the ways that this reboot is a significant upgrade in terms of reflecting the actual demographics of New Mexico as well as more general cultural progress. But it's totally trashy and I am trying not to wince too hard at the military ignorance or the way they are trying to wedge 1990s references in everywhere. I blame tumblr, but it's really only me. 

 It has been a week, peeps. It's been a couple of weeks, but this week has been a week. A week of anger and frustration with the world at large and the way even in this we have to be absolutist and you must embrace everything one side or the other believes or you are The Enemy. A week of curfews and sirens and helicopters not because of righteous anger at a murder, but because of all of the opportunistic shit that comes with protest. A week my union decided to fuck me over gang-style because now is exactly the time to arbitrarily change standards and what was good enough before is no longer so and we're gonna belittle you in the process. A week I lost my volunteer position of a decade because I wouldn't sign a waiver exempting them from liability for anything (illness/injury/death) even through their own negligence. A week of emotional and physical exhaustion because it's been three months of quarantine lockdown and a week of a curfew that managed to stop no looting but did ensure that I had to cut my exercise walks short and couldn't treat myself to takeout (haven't since this started) because everyone's gotta be home by eight. A week when school started and I had to introductions and there's no way to say "I have many interests and also relevant work experience, but it's all been stripped away from me and so I go walk around the edges of cemeteries and pretend not to notice the open graves" and not sound like you're having a breakdown. A week I didn't have a single drop of alcohol because I want booze to remain a pleasure and not turn into a coping mechanism. I don't think I've been this close to the end of my cope in a while. 


I didn't get much writing done. I didn't get much work done, either, but I tried hard with both. 


I did start watching The Expanse, which has been a good distraction even if I have to avert my eyes during the protomolecule stuff. I'm somewhere in the middle of Season Two, after Eros has crashed into Venus and right after Bobbie Draper gets told to go to Earth. The worldbuilding and details and politics are fascinating to me, but the characters are so comparatively underdeveloped and I don't know if this is also true in the books. I don't know if I should stop watching and go read the books instead or if the show developed book ideas to the better. Anyone? 

(I'm kind of glad the Miller arc is resolved for now. I liked Miller as a character a lot, possibly because I share his cynical 'a pox on all houses' approach to politics but also because he was such a classic noir character in a space opera and Thomas Jane playing just slightly off-kilter is what he's best at. But I'm not a fan of the 'detective falling in love with the missing woman' trope in general and the tendency toward stripping the woman's agency. Julie herself was a fully-formed character, a girl with daddy issues who did much and endured much and in the end just wanted to go home where it was safe. Miller's Julie was a fantasy who rewarded his inexplicable love and that's the one we spent more time with. She was already objectified by her father after her infection, that is enough.) 


It's after five on a Friday, I can cocktail if I wanna... 

 * May the Fourth be with you... I suppose I should finally watch The Rise of Skywalker. It wasn't on my to-do list when it was out in the theaters after the lackluster previous installment. I don't hate The Last Jedi; I think it did a tremendous disservice to Luke and the Rose-and-Finn parts were in desperate need of editing to give them some zip, but it had some good parts. I just wasn't super-excited to plunk down $20 to see the one that came after it and cry about Carrie Fisher. 


* Food: I made sweet potato patties with ras el-hanout and without a recipe and they came out splendid. I made masoor dal with coconut, apple, and ginger from a Bon Appetit recipe and it came out okay with enough lime; it may improve tomorrow. I'm not a fan of coconut milk-based curries but it's a 'make what you have' kinda time and my Imperfect Foods box comes tomorrow and I'm low on produce. I made pink lentil soup with harissa last week from the Telegraph's food section and this is how I go from having an unopened two pound bag to wondering if I have enough to make anything else. I probably have fifteen pounds of beans, so I'm not running out of the genre, just the quick-cooking stuff. But that's what the Instant Pot is for. 


* I have been proceeding with Qui Habitat and now I'm mopey that (almost) nobody reads it. There are a thousand excellent reasons not to that don't involve the canonical respiratory pandemic in the middle of it and you don't need to explain which one is yours, but I also think I'm doing really good work with it. It's my fannish curse; I can't even get my friends to read my stories because they're long and porn-free and not their current fandom. Although, really, at this rate, QH is so close to original fic that I'm probably doing myself a disservice by not filing the serial numbers off and writing it as a straight space opera. Which I have also failed to turn into a marketing tool -- you don't need the source material! 


* I got the sticky tape you're supposed to put where your cats scratch so that they don't. Mine now don't... but the one who was scratching is now licking it all the time. 

* This honestly feels like the end of a work week in a way the last several have not. Zoom meetings I had to set an alarm for! Director micromanaging a project my own supervisor can't be arsed to bother with and asked my old supervisor if I wanted to do! (Why is he lurking on the document? Why is he PM-ing me about changes?) Gruntwork project "you are totally the best person for" not because it requires my advanced skills, but because the person who should have done it is an arrogant bint who can't be trusted not to eff it up! Being lied to by upper management about our safety! TGIF. 


* I know the miserable NYC spring is undoubtedly helping things, that when it's 49 and drizzling nobody's going out, but can we just have one week of normal temperatures, please? I haven't been out of the apartment since Tuesday apart from a mission to Walgreens and I'm going bananas. The cats want open windows. I want open windows. I want to stop nursemaiding the humidifier filter because the heat is off and I can put it away until the fall. 


* I go to graduate school remotely and said school is in Northern California and there is such a disconnect right now between what the school considers important messaging and what my daily life does that it gives me whiplash.


* Positive things: I made a pretty darned good dairy-free lemon tart and a kickass Aviation cocktail with my own luxardo fruit. I am continuing to write Qui Habitat and enjoy myself. Imperfect Foods delivered essentially twice what I ordered and I was able to give my elderly cousin several pounds of produce when all she'd asked me to order was salmon and pears. (Side note: so far I am totally in love with IF, which appeals to both my 'reduce food waste' ethos and 'I want to try all of the foods' magpie tendencies without being either a budget-buster or a ballbuster. Looking at you, Misfits Market.) I donated to a GoFundMe that is set up by Asians in America looking to feed the first responders and staff at besieged local hospitals here in Queens.