burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

Friday I did lots of walking around and the air was nice at night, so there would be no good reason for me to not be able to fall asleep.  Eric was saying at work that day that he hadn't been able to sleep all week, that he'd even taken a sleeping pill the previous night and hadn't been able to sleep.  The insomnia is catching.  Hello, 100 Years of Soliitude.

And "www.athenewriter.com could not be found. Please check the name and try again." so I couldn't update my recs pages.  (Is updated now, though.)

But, um, someone had contributed Sam/Elena Without a Trace prompts to the femslash_today comment pr0n battle, so... yeah.  [717 words; posted at 3:33am]

I woke up around 9:50am and it was actually quite pleasant, so I put off my errands until tomorrow.  (I had expected the temperatures to be much worse and to need to maximize the time I spent in air-conditioning.)  And wrote more froplay f/f comment pr0n.  (Though I seem to be having more plot than pr0n -- which makes me a bit sad given this specific challenge, though on the whole it's an improvement from my past with ficathons when I often felt like I was having an easier time writing the pr0n than I was the plot to get them there.)

The fact that I am suddenly so prompt-inspired is extra funny 'cause I've been all swearing off ficathons 'cause I'm not in a space of wanting to do other people's requests.  So far I've written:

+ WaT, Sam Spade/Elena Delgado, 717 words [3:33am]
+ BSC, Mary Anne/Janine, 507 words [3:25pm]
+ HP, McGonagall/Luna/Hermione, 308 words [8:59pm]
Edit: + BSC, Stacey/Charlotte, 224 words [1:40am] (sineala, I swear I'd started this fic before we had our conversation about shampoo and fanon.) /edit

I'm actually rather proud of all of them, which pleases me.

(Insta!rec: Firefly, River/Kaylee, guns. by mosca)


I did go to this in the evening.  Didn't spend my whole day inside.  Eh.  The hair and the jacket reminded me of Mo.  I liked "Final Breath," "Remember Cedric Diggory," and "Maybe Tomorrow."  In part (but only in part) a function of my preference for mellower songs whose lyrics I can discern.  (Sidenote: website says there's a song called "The Ballad of Neville and Luna."  Now that I would pay for.)
Beforehand, I browsed the Cultural Studies section of the bookstore.  Mmm.  (gay) sex and monsters (I saw The Werewolf Complex but didn't see anything vampiric).  Interesting-looking books included:
+ Why The Novel Matters
+ The Modernist Madonna: Semiotics of the Maternal Metaphor (Ari, one chapter is: "Little Women: A Study in adolescence and alter egos")
+ What Else But Love?: The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison
+ Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination [an amazon search for the main title also gets me Mary Magdalene books]
+ The Virgin Text
+ Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body
+ Serpents in the Garden: Liaisons with Culture & Sex
+ Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic


In other news, I think I might be a little bit sunburned.  Which seems weird to me since I'm not outside all that much.  Though I guess I'm out walking 30+ minutes each way for my commute, so that's over an hour each day.  And on Friday we ate lunch outside (dunno how much protection the table umbrella offers) and I walked to Teele and back (~15 minutes each way).


Thoughts on sleep tonight? ;)

My brother and i went to church on Sunday and god, it was so gorgeous out -- everything covered in white, including fluffy trees. Yeah, this is so my season.

Clearly facebook is the answer to everything.
e-j: a commitment for change wants you...

Went to Kate’s Sunday afternoon. We started with the much-talked-about 10th Kingdom. I much approve. Plus, yay for more material for my seminar paper :)

Then we watched Legend. Um, yeah. Kate spent a lot of it thinking about German Romanticism, and i spent a lot of it thinking about C. S. Lewis’ idea that evil is only a perversion of good. The idea that the unicorns have hearts of pure goodness and light in combination with the absolutist yet ostensibly balance-driven world of the movie was also interesting. I thought about the idea that knowledge brings lack of innocence, that becoming an adult means losing your childlike connection with nature etc. and how that’s in tension with the traditional idea that unicorns are both pure and good and also wise and ancient, and i thought about Lewis’ idea (particularly as expressed in Perelandra) that one can learn about sin through sinning but there is also God’s way of knowing about sin which is beyond or outside or something of sin.
The dance scene is hott, but not necessarily worth watching the rest of the movie for.
IMDb Trivia: The sound of the unicorns at play is actually a recording of humpback whales.

The next day we watched Evita, which i liked a lot more than i had expected to. I was expecting a paean like unto Princess Diana and was much pleased at the undercutting. Narrative interloper! "Falling over ourselves to get all of the misery right." Yeah, i was in heart (with him) from early on. In the credits, he’s named Ché, which worried me, because he’s totally written so that you love him, and if he’s supposed to be Che Guevara, then that encourages you to automatically transfer your love of the character to love for the historical personage, which is troubling. Apparently in the stage musical, it is the famous Guevara, but not in the film, that in Argentina "Che" is a commonly used slang, so in the film he’s just an ordinary Argentine.

Kate says i’m a bad person to watch sad movies with. Dude, i’m That Bitch who hates everything, but i totally cry at the drop of a hat. I just didn’t cry at this. I actually was teary at the beginning, but not at the end.

Emma insisted that we watch a happy movie afterward. We were gonna watch the Faerie Tale Theatre Sleeping Beauty for the flamingly gay fairy, but Kate didn’t have it, so we watched The Emperor's New Groove, which i fully expected to hate, but which i actually ended up enjoying. During much of the previous movies, Kate an/dor Emma would say “S/he’s awesome,” and i would say, “But s/he’s evil.” However, in this movie, i was all, “Why do people have to be so damn moral? Please get rid of the schmuck already.” Also: “Dude, all you do is dance and be self-centered? Why not let her run your kingdom?” The answer was “Because she’s evil,” and i get that, but honestly, she’s just coded as evil by being (a) in opposition to the protagonist, (b) skinny and old and in dark clothes. (Why yes, i did retain things from my Grimms to Disney class ;) ) Yeah, she shows herself to be evil as it goes on, but at the beginning she’s just coded as “scary beyond all reason” and i was far more keen to get rid of the “annoying and obnoxious beyond all reason.” I did in fact cease hating him at some point during the movie, though, and i enjoyed a lot of the early movie because he gets what he deserves.
IMDb Trivia: According to the DVD Commentary, this is the first Disney Animated Feature to show a pregnant woman.

Kate says i’m “a movie curmudgeon.” :P

Hmm, i was gonna go visit the high school today, but now i kinda don’t feel like it. Think i may stay home and try to finish my ficathon fics (and figure out what i want for lunch). I’m probably going to go to Class Act tonight, and then it’s off to Virginia tomorrow morning, back late Saturday night.

"Is Hollins ready for hermionesviolin? :D :D :D Ohmygosh, I'm so excited. Yay for running with crazy whims on occasion. And for chaplain networking and, just, GLEE!"
-sk8eeyore