"You know what's even sadder? Her hair."

[hermionesviolin]

Yeah, that was Eric.  Complaining about the straw-haired ABC announcer, after 5 minutes of reportage on the the Entwistle murders.  He loses so bad.

One of the stories I had sort of seen on my way to work.  Corner of JFK and South, right across from the Kennedy School.  I wondered what had happened to take a chunk out of the corner of the house as I walked past and then noticed dirt on the sidewalk, stepped back and realized it was from tire tracks and oh there was caution tape where there should have been part of a fence.

Yesterday I called him at noon.  "Thoughts on lunch?"  "No."  "Does that mean you're not having lunch or you don't have thoughts on lunch."  "I'm not going to lunch.  Because I came in late today."  "Okay.  Should we get you anything?"  "No, I had an orange earlier."  "Oh-kaay.  Well I guess I'm glad you ate something."

So today he shows up at my desk at a quarter to noon and says, "So, lunch."  He has 4 slices of pizza (in the takeaway individual boxes).  "Well I'm glad to see you'll be eating something today."  (Yesterday he had two oranges and a bag of chips.)  "They had buffalo chicken today.  My favorite.  And anything I don't eat I can put in the fridge and have for lunch tomorrow."  The real motivation for the early lunch was the fact that his e-mail still wasn't back from the maintenance that was supposed to be done at 10am.  This does not bode well for my scheduled maintenance outage tomorrow morning.

wisdomeagle linked to this MSN article on bad V-day gifts.  (I seem to recall seeing something similar in the Metro or something recently.)  The first item is red roses -- on the argument that they're cliche and impersonal.  Dude, I have gotten roses once in my life and they were yellow roses for my 16th birthday. I would love to get a bouquet of red roses from a romantic partner. I feel like that item in particular is aimed at people who have been doing the dating thing for a long time. And what if your honey loves roses? (Alternatively: "order up a monochromatic bouquet of various blooms in your honey’s favorite color"? what if your honey loves multi-color?) Really I think the article could be summed up by, "Get/do something thoughtful that reflects the individuality of the person you love," which, um, should be obvious?

ABC News was all "Boston is one of the best cities for dating," and I laughed when "one of the top ten" turned out to be "rounding out the list" (i.e., tenth out of ten).

Dude, I've barely even looked at metafandom in a long time, but there has been plenty of discussion on the flist alone.

• the Matilda/Miss Honey relationship in the Matilda movie (comments include discussion of the book, HP house sorting, and the Dahl oeuvre)
  
• in defense of textual ambiguity (examples from BtVS primarily)
  
• Why the aversion to ficcing canonically gay characters in het relationships?  [Which is a discussion I have seen so many times before, but it still comes under the category of recent discussion on my flist.  And hey, it certainly didn't stop me from chiming in like a bajillion times.  Plus, these debates are recurrent because not everybody has in fact already had/seen them a million times before.  Though sometimes I wish there existed compilations of the most insightful points on all sides for any given issue -- complete with links to the full discussions for anything quoted, of course.  Oh, and the examples are from BtVS primarily.]

Yes, it is much easier for me to engage with other people's essays and conversations than it is for me to get my own essays formulated.

And damn, I owe people icon drabbles, don't I?

And yes Cat, I will do tv reports before I go to bed.

Comments

[marauderthesn.livejournal.com]

Ack, Matila/Miss Honey? *is scared*

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

The post mostly talks about it as romantic rather than sexual -- talking about their points of connection and how Miss Honey reads as peer rather than parent and yet it's still different than the relationships Matilda has with her actual peers and the mutuality of the relationship and so on -- but yeah, Ari totally pervs on agekink :)

[laynamarya.livejournal.com]

I actually asked for roses.

And actually, I HAVE been dating for about ten years. And actually, I DO love roses.

I got my boyfriend white chocolate cause he likes it better and I am making roast duck for dinner, and we are staying home cause he likes staying home, and watching a movie that I actually approve of.

Buy yourself roses. I did that, a couple weeks ago, and they made me happier than almost anything a romantic partner has ever done.

[(Anonymous)]

Why the aversion to ficcing canonically gay characters in het relationships?

For the same reason that there is an aversion to talking about black racism alongside a desire to talk about white racism. An aversion to talking about ways men are "better" than women alongside a desire to talk about how women are "better" than men.

To do the one and avoid the other seems to move history in a better direction.

RAS

[(Anonymous)]

To het up a gay character is to deny an important part of his or her being. And since that bad thing has been done to gay people for ages, that's bad.

To gay up a het character is also to deny an important part of his or her being. But, hey, it would open them to new experiences. And hets rule the world, so they should be able to take it.

It's a principled double standard :)

RAS

[escritoireazul.livejournal.com]

Though sometimes I wish there existed compilations of the most insightful points on all sides for any given issue -- complete with links to the full discussions for anything quoted, of course

Me, too. I was actually going to ask you if the discussions you'd seen before were archived anywhere I could go read them, because I found it so interesting.

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

You could try the archives of metafandom. I don't think I Memoried any of them. It seems like the commenters on Amberina's thread are covering all the arguments I can think of and some I had forgotten about. (The subthreads about het that feels like slash remind me of the queer het discussion a while back.)