I live?

[domarzione]

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!"...

Comments

[wychwood]

Welcome back! The playoffs seem to have been particularly chaotic this year; do you have any investment in the remaining teams??

[domarzione]

Thank you! The playoffs have indeed been chaotic, but I am always on Team Chaos once my squad is out and this year they went out early and in embarrassing fashion.

Out of the four remaining teams, I don't really dislike any of them and generally spend quite a few evenings watching Dallas and Vegas during the regular season. But in the East... Keith Tkachuk was one of my all-time favorite players and Young Matthew spent the first part of his career honing his terrible skills in the other conference (and not pissing off my team), so I will always root for him until he plays the Rangers. But I also want Florida to have a great time this year because it's been such a long time since 1996. And because the NHL is a copycat league and I don't want a bunch of teams copying the low-event style Carolina plays.

[wychwood]

I would say that it was less embarrassing than my team, but in fairness they were trying to be bad and won the lottery against reasonable odds. The shame potential is more in their terrible off-ice choices.

Florida are definitely on a cracking run - I've been mildly enjoying the whole "Sunbelt Final Four" thing after all the years of moaning about how southern cities can never be any good (...although the Yotes do seem to be doing their best to revive that idea).

[domarzione]

Chicago should have been penalized much more severely for what they did off the ice and I am beyond pissed that the NYR are considering Quenneville and that so many other teams are when there's been no visible proof that he has actually come to understand the horror of what he did -- and that in the pursuit nobody else gives a crap, either.

Arizona has been a crisis since they arrived and if it weren't for Bettman's obsession with the Phoenix television market, they would have been relocated a decade ago. They still might not leave because Bettman is exactly this pot-committed. Next summer, it will be Mesa or some other proximate location.

[wychwood]

Yeah, it more-or-less feels like Quenneville doesn't really think he did anything wrong, and one suspects that much of the 1000-hockey-men world probably agrees. I'm sure a lot of other coaches would have done exactly the same; we know from the investigation that plenty of other people in the organisation ignored it quite happily, and I don't think the Hawks are going to be that much of an outlier within the NHL. It's really relentlessly depressing. On the other hand, at least this time the story came out (eventually)...

[domarzione]

Professional sports is amoral and a hundred series of Ted Lasso aren't going to change that. The NHL is better than it was in 2010, but they're still trying to draft Mitchell Miller and Logan Mailloux. They're willing to pretend Sheldon Keefe is absolved of his crimes because he said sorry when pressed on it. They'll take every abuser if he comes with title rings. Being a sports fan is learning to thread a needle between what you can stomach and what your heart wants to believe.