I decided to go ahead and tweak my blog in a wintry fashion. It better suits my mood, which is dark and dysthymic.

Yesterday in his Bleat, Lileks writes, "Today I spent the afternoon mashing hummingbirds into a thick paste, and then I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die! Then I watched Friends!" This seems to sum it up.

This made me laugh in admiration though.

Sometimes I think a what-if: what if Joss Whedon called me up and said I'd been chosen as the mopiest girl in all of mopey fandom to be the beneficiary of a Jossified Make a Wish Foundation charity. "Anna, Whedon here, calling from L.A. Sorry about the static. I'm on my cell phone, and the freeway traffic is hell." "Guh?" "So okay, I understand my admin has delivered the skinny. We want you to tell us--where do we go from here?" "Guh?" "Next season, all yours, baby. Plot, character arcs, sudden deaths. Whatever you want--James, watch that latte--whatever you want, just name it." "Guh..."

I have simple, sexy fangirl fantasies. Spike regains his soul, takes over as Buffy's watcher-slash-lover. Spike loses the chip and doesn't regain his soul and battles madly against his dark half, a vampiric beast to Buffy's beauty. Spike regains his soul, becomes William, Buffy falls in love with him, soul is lost, Spike returns, epic unhappiness.

I also have this desire to see the veils between dimensions actually collapse, and a season-long darkness fall over the earth, making Sunnyhell a place of noir chaos: gin joints, smoky bistros, demons and vampires walking freely. Sort of a Casablanca feel to everything, perpetually dark and misty, with a Naziesque regime, a human collaborative government a la Vichy France, and a human Underground, with some demon friendlies aiding their cause. Spike, of course, is a dark and gallant spy, working for the Underground while putting on a demonic facade for the Nazi bastards.

The demon regime is led by a race of nasties who haven't been on earth for thousands of years. They don't know Spike from Adam, so to speak, and he puts on a good front, makes himself useful. The demons who do know him whisper and sow distrust, but he stages a convincing repudiation of Buffy and humanity--in the show itself, we wouldn't even know right away that he was faking--then we later see him sneak off to meet with Buffy and the Scoobies in a secret bunker in the sewer tunnels under the magic shop.

The tunnels have become home to the humans. They live here, cramped, and make their base here, occasionally moving to avoid detection. Dark shadows in the corners, one bright lamp shining on the table where they've laid out their maps. A look-out posted in the tunnel--Xander, who has turned into a broodingly dark and rugged soldier ever since Anya was dragged off to the mines--ready to whistle if anything approaches. Buffy directing their sneak attacks, bombings of demon storage depots, assaults and prison rescues.

Spike has his own role. Spike, through a glass darkly: dressed in a sharp, black Demon-Nazi uniform with silver insignia, his white hair and icy blue eyes setting him apart as one of the elect, lending him a convincing facade of the perfect Nazi gentleman vampire, by all appearances ruthless and cold. He tries to go about his daily business, tries to hide his true feelings behind cutting mockery, a pretense of cruelty. But as he sits at the dinner table with its dazzling white cloth and platters of skulls, watching the demon soldiers laugh and drink goblets of human blood, his eyes fire and his mouth twists with a contemptuous rage he can barely keep in check. Later that night, he will hunt and kill their demon comrades, soundlessly cutting the throats of some, twisting the knife deep into others, no expression on his face.

Stolen moments between Spike and Buffy, enmity forgotten in this new era, passion igniting like a spark in a vast darkness, the only thing that keeps the both of them going. Ravishing kisses as Spike, still in uniform, steals away to the tunnels to meet her, commanded by the note that she gave to a servant. Reckless, hungry meetings late at night, in the small, dank underground room that Buffy--a Slayer in hiding--now calls home. The two of them in the aftermath of passion, Spike rebuttoning his uniform, Buffy drawing on her sweater. Every time they part, they kiss good-bye as if they might never see each other again. Sometimes Buffy's gaze is hard and resigned, grim. Other times, as they leave each other, her face softens and her eyes hold a clear regard.

To everyone else, their relationship has become commonplace. When they meet as a group to make attack plans, when Spike's long elegant finger is tracing out on the map the supply route between the train yard and the demon headquarters, everyone is paying attention. And when, afterwards, coffee is brewed and an effort is being made to keep Dawn's spirits up, and Spike and Buffy draw off to one side and stand close, heads templed and gazes rapt as they murmur, hands grazing each other gently, the others no longer notice.

My landlords are scarily nice, alarmingly sweet. They're friendly and chatty and helpful to a fault, and they leave pie and cookies cached outside my apartment on appropriate holidays, and tonight I found a fifteen-dollar gift certificate slipped under the door. Sure, it's for the Mongolian Grill, but even so. It's somewhat unnerving, but it also makes me feel all nesty and safe. Disinclined to move, despite the steep rent.

Saw Lord of the Rings yesterday. I could write a thousand words, but others have plenty to say and I really think my thoughts boil down to: CGI evil, men pretty.

So I stayed up late, fiddling with my blog page, and came up with a new depresso and perhaps pretentious color scheme, which I can't decide if I want to implement or not. And as a result of this nail polishing I've slept late. I should go to work today, make up some comp time so that I'm not using all my precious vacation hours to cover my ass. And I can't think of any compelling reason not to except laziness. I mean, I'm up and I have no clue what I'd spend my day doing other than scrounging for some food and catching up on this week's syndicated Buffy. Which...sounds rather nice now that I think about it.

I watched "The Body" again last night, in its proper serial order. It was much more affecting this time than originally. First time around, the episode had a distancing effect--almost as if the shock exhibited by the characters was something I shared. This time, I was right there in it: Willow's indecisive clothes obsessesion was as painful as having a shard of glass ground slowly into my palm, her tears made me blubber, Anya's grief-struck confusion ripped a small chunk of my heart out, and all of Buffy's responses, which I can't even put words to, just undid me.

"The Body" and "Forever" made me realize, as a kind of mild kick in the head, that I really, really like all the characters on the show--Anya and Tara and Dawn included. I had at least mildly ambivalent feelings about all of them. But on repeated viewing, one of two things happens with troublesome characters: you find that any annoyances are magnified and you can't bear to watch them a second time around, or annoyances melt away and you wonder why you were ever bothered. On this second trip through fifth season, it's more obvious to me how Tara blossoms as the season progresses; and her occasionally mannered stutter and self-effacement are less grating as I notice how blessedly sensible she is--and how firmly she holds to her Wiccan principles.

With Anya, I'm just liking her; she's grown on me. I said recently in a list thread that I thought her character had gotten short shrift in development, that the writers didn't seem to have conceptualized well how an ex-demon would acclimate to society. On the face of it, she seemed to regress as a character, blending well at first with humans, but becoming as time passed more obtuse, tactless, and confused by our world. My working theory for this was that as Xander anchored her to society and gave her a place, she grew more comfortable being herself and thus revealed what a cracked loon she really is. In truth, I think the writers fumbled a bit, but I think the end result is pretty cool and that Anya is much more than a cookie-cutter Cordelia. Her break-down in "The Body" really helped humanize her in a necessary way.

Dawn always roused in me the strongest admiration even while provoking the biggest winces. I'm reconciling myself to this, because the character is meant to be an annoying teen-age girl, and my god is she believable. The way she handles Tara and Willow in "Forever" is with the clumsiness of youth: the aggressive challenge for help, the straightforward anger, the cold shut-out. And her relationship with Buffy as it crystallizes in that ep is raw and real. Everything done to build Dawn's character throughout the season is note-perfect for a teenager: she's a bitchy, resentful, clingy, awkward, angry klepto brat. I don't think we're supposed to find her that endearing. But she's recognizable and she serves a purpose: she helps Buffy bridge the gap between adolescence and adulthood. In earlier seasons, Buffy was the daughter, and she'd always be the daughter to some degree if the family dynamic had remained status quo; but killing Joyce and introducing Dawn are dramatic forces that bring Buffy to adulthood.

I suspect most of what I said above is boringly obvious or too simplistic in its brevity. But I like having a place to toss these thoughts on the griddle, since they've been sitting on a dusty shelf in my head for a while.

There are a fair number of street people in Seattle. I have an ambivalent relationship with them. Sometimes, strange men approaching me on the street just freak me out. I blow them off, glare icily, snarl at them. I vent my rage, because you can do that with bums. Even if there's no one else in your life you'll dare bitch out, you can tell a bum to fuck off, with only a half hour's worth of residual guilt and self-loathing. Cheap at the price. Angels unawares? I don't think so. Plus, you get to know a lot of them, so it's more personal. Like this one guy I used to pass on the way to work, he'd stand there, often drunk, more often just rude, and stick a huge flat cola box right out in your path as you walked by so you had to swerve widely. Man, I hated that guy. We got into it one day, and after that I had to take huge pains to avoid him, until I got tired of going the long way to work by the whim of his presence and forced myself to swallow my ferocious pride and make friendly. You want to talk self-loathing.

But a lot of the time, I'm actually pretty generous. I'm more likely to give if someone genuinely doesn't seem to expect it, though circumstances play a big role, too. It's true that if I'm in a bad mood, I can curse with little provocation, and am easily triggered to rage. But on the flip side of external circumstance, I become more focused on street people when it's cold and rainy, because I carry around my own pessimistic fear of future chill and think: what if that's my ragged ass on the pavement someday? I'm an indoors cat, and there's something especially pathetic about passing people--miserable, squatting, low of hope--in the rainy winter evening, knowing they have no place to go.

Beggars I hate:

The determinedly upbeat jerks who will ask for a quarter then forcedly bless you or thank you in a loud, carrying voice if you shake your head.

The ones who ask for a penny so that you'll admire their modest demands, and feel like a heel.

The ones--on the edge--for whom begging has become an aggressive charade. Who walk around angry, chips on their shoulders, just waiting for you to say no. Those people give me the creeps.

The ones who just become so familiar you know their spiel and want to shake them, especially when you know it's a line of crap.

Street donations I have made:

A guy is standing near a phone and is holding a few loose coins and asks for a quarter to make a call. Maybe he's lying, maybe he'll hit up the next person. I don't care. That's a valid request, and he makes it in a low-key, offhand way that seems to communicate he'd do the same for someone else if the circumstances were reversed.

A group of kids from Portland is stranded here; they're gathered up on the corner near the college. I can see them from across the street as I wait to make a left-hand turn. They've got crude signs asking for money to get food and to get home; they're making such a puppyish, energetic effort and so obviously doomed to failure that when I turn, I pull up to the curb. I honk my horn to catch their attention, because I can't get out of the car. They don't notice, they're a ways off and facing the cross street. I could drive on, but I persist, honking a few more times, and finally some passer-by directs their attention my way. One of the guys gracefully bounds over, all hippy-happy, face open and smiling, up to my car. I hand him out a five, and his eyes go wide. He's just blown away, agog, chokes out some effusive, wowed thanks, telling me what a great person I am. I drive off, full of myself. Huge kick.

Coming off the ramp, raining, dark. Bag-lady at the intersection. I give her a handful of money--three dollars, five, something like that. Her old face crumples in disbelief. She blesses me. It just kills me.

Edging on the ramp, another woman, some hand-lettered sign of woe that could be true, false, who knows. Says she has kids, I think. I hand out some money, edge my car on. Notice in the mirror that my gesture has prompted someone else to give. I'm amused, pleased. I kind of love that gesture--the window going down, the arm extending to give. I don't know why.

Guy outside a market, hunched down with a friend. Asks me for a cigarette. I say, sorry, I don't smoke. Go inside and buy my stuff, and while waiting up at the counter I look over the clerk's head at the smokes. Ask what the cheapest is. It's loose tobacco, and comes with its own rolling papers. I tell the clerk it's for a bum outside, and I'm wondering if he'll know how to roll it. Clerk assures me he very likely will. I buy it and go outside and offer it to the bum, still sitting there. He can't believe I'm serious. Not only does all conversation with his friend stop, but there's this silence of wonderment as if I'm holding out a shard from the holy cross. He looks up at me, looks at the smokes, shitkicker humanity showing through the grime all of a sudden--an almost charming disbelief. "Naw, wait. You aren't serious? No way, no way, man. You're serious? I can't belive this, man, I just can't believe this." He's got this dumbass smile cracking over his face as he stares, and you can just see him waking up into the best fucking moment of his day. Jesus Christ. Give a guy some cigs and feel yourself puff up like Mother Theresa...or maybe Ma "Enabler of Vices" Terry.

I am mad, dumb blog girl.

This simple entry by Jonquil sounds like poetry to me right now.

I have nothing to say tonight, because I am more than slightly drunk as I celebrate my return to wellness with an attack on my liver, and also I just watched "Crush" and if I allowed myself to post my thoughts right now they would probably spill out all Spike-y and ga-ga, like those little husky frantic noises your cat makes after you've given it the nip, which make you embarrassed for the cat. Except, can I just say, my god but the journey from evil to redemption is an invitation to mockery and misunderstanding in this day and age. This is why I don't convert to Christianity, right--because my friends would smile in a nervous rictus and cast sidelong glances at each other and snark behind my back. And, you know, I don't believe in organized religion. Or God.

But anyway, look, Spike's not brooding over good and evil all soulfully like Angel, and he's making progress only through the selfish, spiritual error of romantic love, but that's what should make his effort all the more familiar and sympathetic to the secular audience, right? You'd think. Ha. It's the same thing as if your best friend got born again: you'd shake your head and think she'd been brainwashed, even though underneath that abrupt decision may be a lifetime of thoughts and issues you've never been treated to, because it was too embarrassing for her to share--she had an image to maintain. Well, that's the way some folks seem to get about Spike, as if any development in his character along a spectrum of bad to good is an affront against some fixed law of absolute Buffyverse evil. As if we haven't seen a hundred exceptions to that rule. As if one demon becoming more human will suddenly invalidate every universal law and make vamp-staking Buffy a murderer of souls. Oh please. And it's not as if Spike's even gone through any abrupt conversion process, some wacky reversal of character--they've spent, what, three freaking years nurturing this little sprout of soul? Showing it, justifying it? But nooo, let's just cling to this little plastic Bad-Ass!Spike action figure forever, all fangy and tough and immutable.

Okay, wait. I have nothing to say tonight. And it's kinda hard to tell through the fuzziness and the lizards licking my eyeballs, but I think I sound really obnoxious saying it....

I am shutting these thoughts up in a box for a later time when I can maintain the pretense of coherency, a cool shell of professionalism hiding my febrile Spike adoration. But I want to post so I'm going to post Pessoa quotes, randomly pulled as I flip through The Book of Disquiet.

None of us, I suppose, truly admits the real existence of another person. We might concede that a person is alive, that he or she feels and thinks as we do; but there will always be an anonymous element of difference, a materialized disadvantage.

---

I like those soiltary plazas, interspersed among lightly trafficked streets, and they themselves with no more traffic than the streets. They are useless clearings, things that wait among distant tumults, pieces of the village in the city.

---

The principal error of the literary imagination is to suppose that other people are like us and that they should feel as we do. But happily for humanity, every person is only who he is. To genius alone has been given the ability to be others.

---

There is too much lividly dark silence. Nearby, between the bizarre and rapid wandering of the cars, a truck thunders in its fashion--ridiculous mechanical echo of the real thunder taking place in the near distance of the skies.

---

For a long time--I don't know if it's a matter of days or months--I haven't written down a single impression; I'm not thinking, therefore I'm not existing. I have forgotten who I am; I don't know how to write because I don't know how to be. Because of an oblique sleep, I was someone else. Knowing that I don't remember myself is waking up.

Preternaturally vivid dream.

The scene is a bay and a bridge, similar to a famous shot often used in movies, of San Francisco, I believe. It is night and the bridge is vivid black sketched across a charcoal sky and glittering with pure white lights, all of this sharpened to precision as if by a camera. On the far shore is a city, grey towers against a grey sky, lights spangling. The waves of the bay are etched, thin lines running through them, scrolling, curving like the fine grain of old lithographic engravings. In them is a sea monster, like Loch Ness, its back a series of perfect curves, half-links of a chain, as it swims through the dark water. Dark against dark, moonlight barely gleaming in the scales. Close up view, as if from a few feet away, of the scales, and the undulation of the back as it lifts and descends in the water like a snake, smooth, barely breaking the surface. Barely a ripple.

On the bridge, Spike and Buffy are walking along train tracks, one level below the passage of cars. Impression of looking up at Spike--my point of view that of Buffy at his right shoulder--as sharp wedges of moonlight fall through the criss-crossed beams of the bridge, triangles of heavy steel, rivets. Dull pewtered moonlight saturates the air itself, to a bright grey twilight, but when it touches Spike, he soaks up the light and radiates it. His face dusted with moonlight, ashen. Moonlight catching his hair, etching it silver and white. So incredibly vivid I could reach out and touch it and I would feel that gelled crispness, like ramen noodles. Impression of his profile, defined razor-sharp and pale against the sky, impression of his temple and lidded eyes as he half-turns to look at me. He is silent and has his hands in his pockets, the pockets of his duster. At this moment, I know with the lucid apprehension of dreams that he is the most ensouled man in existence. He is utterly real, utterly tangible, and I feel a love of it, this embodied and undeniable existence we share.

We are walking toward the city for some reason. It's where we live, it's home. It's not San Francisco, but some cleanly swept concept of a city that only exists late at night: buildings like canyons, empty streets, the city as one big sleeping machine. We live in a tenament, and I have memories of cooking dinner, floorboards, shabbiness--bright interior light of a square window at night time, like in an Edward Hopper painting, with us inside, moving around a kitchen, Spike in a red shirt, me--Buffy--holding a spaghetti pot.

There is a sense of Matrix-like unreality, and we half-know that despite the solidity of our bodies, this is a waking dream, that our lives are phantom shadows cast against a movie wall. In the dream, some part of me splits off to self-referentially think, "This is not a dream because dreams are flat. This is real."

Spike says something about a chaos demon, very intensely, or maybe with aggravation. Then we are on the far side of the bridge, by the water. A bar is by the water's dark lapping edge, on a cobbled street at the bottom of a cliff, one about thirty feet high that looks as if it has been scraped into existence by a bulldozer--abrupt, clean dark dirt, looming over the bar. Very clear visual of the dark earth above the bar roof, up to the point where the ground begins--turf's edge, beyond which lies the unseen city. The bar has a kind of foreign air, as if exists in a fairy tale place, a myth of Switzerland, even though all around is industrial rubble, emptiness. It's self-contained, out of place. But it belongs there.

We go in to get coffee and it's nearly empty. More floorboards, big square room. Willow is sitting at a table, and Giles and a few of the others. Anya. We've planned to meet. We talk, I forget about what. Xander's face across the table from me looking serious. More talk, about some new battle or mission. The last thing I really remember well is Spike next to me in a straight-backed wooden chair, twisting to the side and raising his hand to the bartender to signal for a drink. The drink is for me. He is holding a glass of blood in his other hand, the left. I have that exquisite feeling of hanging precariously on the edge of something, a dream story that could continue to roll out forever, and as is always the case the alarm chooses that exact moment to interrupt and I wake.

Fuck!

Distracting bits I didn't include above are about how the dream sort of reminded me of that Madonna video, the one with the guy in chains--Express Yourself? More about the city and how it's vaguely futuristic. And when I was thinking about how dreams are flat and reality is not, it was this whole conceptual thing about dimensions--flatland versus existence as a kind of pop-up book. Sources that may have fed my dream: (1) I've been thinking a lot about how some people feel that Spike's chip--or more so, his whole, long character-softening arc--has been The Worst Thing Ever. And (2) thinking before bedtime of Pessoa's dreamlike cityscape.

Moving on, but still on dreams: my first memory ever of a "dream" is when I was three or so. I was in my bed and I asked my mother what dreams were and she described them to me as a kind of visualization. She went away for a minute, I think, and in her absence I sat up in bed and stared at a spot in the air a few feet away and effortfully visualized something colorful--some scene from a Disney movie, I think, a projected still shot. My mom came back and I told her about it, that I'd made a dream.

I'm having sudden flashes of my childhood--the house in Maine, my bedroom, how I moved rooms at some point and my dad told me that alligators were under the new bed (I think to keep me from wandering), and I really believed him, and thought of the floorboards as water. I'd jump from the bed to the door, as near to it as I could, to avoid the alligators in the water. It was a kind of game between us, I think, but as a child it was also very real to me. Memory of stepping on a tack on the front stairs, maybe my first recollection of pain. Memory of a party I wanted to stay up for, mom dressed up, a plate of cut vegetables, me wandering up to the table through the party guests to eat from the tiered plate. Me in a big antique cradle, which rocked.

Kit returns with an entry that makes me cry, Beth makes me cackle, Viridian responds to my Angel Noir broodings, Sara writes a meta mission statement, Tomato Nation snarks Tom Cruise, Lileks does not write "another goopy hymn to spawnhood," and Omar is a very endearing sandwich-loving fellow.

I sacked out for several hours and dreamed something too embarrassing to relate--how weird is that? That something you did in a dream should be TMI? It's not as if I really...did that thing I'm not going to mention. Other parts of the dream, though, involved me serving as the night-shift manager of a bookstore, where the day shift employees didn't know me. I went into the shop during the day and bought a book, staring at them pointedly, but they failed to acknowledge my status. One asked me, "Are you Ramone?"

Later, I had to clean out a hotel room. As with many dream chores, this was all too detailed and seemed to take place in real time--sopping, inadequate kleenexes, me on my knees near the tub. I recall a disturbingly vivid patch of carpet that had become threadbare; strips of pink rubber were showing through. As I was cleaning, a bellhop ushered in people who were going to stay there. So I cleaned while some hick leaned back in an armchair nearby and waited me out.

"On certain days, at certain hours, brought to me by I don't know what breeze, open to me by the opening of I don't know which door, I suddenly feel that the grocer on the corner is a spiritual being, that the stock boy, who at this moment is at the door bent over a sack of potatoes, is truly a soul capable of suffering."

Went to work, came home from work. Since taking Monday off I've been feeling progressively more unwell. There's some mind-body connection working against me. The headache I have right now is slowly expanding its tentacles through my head, thus bringing to mind the brain worm conversation we had at the Seattle bash on Saturday.

I remembered bits of another dream from this morning, where Francesca and I worked in an office together and my desk was in front of hers, and I had never--in all our online correspondence and chat--turned around to see what she looked like. She was amazingly pretty when I finally saw her, which is while I climbed in the window to reach my seat. Not a very coherent dream--something about a passenger van arriving with a gas leak, and a spider covered in lint which was crawling along the walls. I wanted Ces to kill it for me.

I read an amazing Buffy/Spike story last night. (I really do want to write "Spuffy" all the time but I stop myself.) I found it through Jintian's rec page which along with her blog is quickly becoming a one-stop shopping point for all things intelligent and Buffy--which can be mutually exclusive, she talks and recs other good stuff--but the two combined are a lucky find. Stop. Rhyming.

The story is Miranda's "Adversaries," which is archived on the amusing little site with other stories that I'm only just beginning to work my way through. My brain worm hurts, and I can no longer recall everything that I wanted to say about this story when its aftershocks were sizzling through me late last night. But it's a stunningly canonical-sounding, stunningly fabulous story, with bang-on-target voices and dialogue and plotting and...caboodle. Yeah, it has caboodle.

Anyway. Aside from the simple-minded delight I took in reading it, it made me think about the differences between writing for a show that has a brilliant, planned universe and writing for a show where the universe is flimsy, perfunctory, insufficient--like Sentinel, where with every story I have to force-grow a "canonical" universe as I write, spackling the gaps and fleshing out the crude props they've given us. But in Buffy, you need only match the brilliance of the existing universe.... Right. That's all you need to do, she said ironically. I didn't mean that to sound like a lesser achievement. In fact, that's what has always scared me about the prospect of writing a Buffy story. The cold-sweat idea of trying to work in someone's universe where the bar is set so damn high. It just amazes me to see people dare that, and then accomplish it, with such success you wish Joss would fucking hire them.

I noticed the Queer Buffyverse entry has been threaded in a few places. Disagreement. Conversation. Very cool. It could maybe go without saying, but my reading isn't meant to be in any way a one-facet assertion--and I read all responses in the same light. No harm, no foul. Melymbrosia made the good point that while queer always equals transgressive, transgressive doesn't necessarily equal queer. But though that's logical if you're trying to codify definitions for the terms, I think "transgressive equals queer" can work fine as a critical reading, as a metaphor. A lens, a layer. Cultural impressions--readings--aren't necessarily based on air-tight logic or statistical representation but on a kind of associative thought that is actually more poetical, I think. Which is perhaps why people--myself included, god knows--sometimes rebel when trying to parse the language of cultural studies and pomo theory. If you don't read it associatively, it reads like a load of crap. And then of course, much of it is.

If one doesn't like poetry either, though...eh. And people don't! I always find that surprising, when the topic crops up on list threads. That people actually dismiss the entire body of poetic writing for thousands of years. "I only read prose." Funny.

Wow. My brain worm is really making me ramble.

Maygra: hugs, hugs, hugs. It's so ironic to hear Maygra mention insecurity about other people's blogs, writing, the presumptive level of intelligence, because it was reading Maygra's amazing Smallville stories, which I recced here recently, which got me in such a tizzy of authorial envy that I whined at length to a good friend over dinner about my lack of authenticity as a writer.

Maygra, I feel like that all the time. Insecure. It used to be the chief reason why I never read blogs at all. I can still get thrown if I read some particularly kick-ass piece of writing. Makes me wonder why I bother. I get back on the horse though. Even when it's a dead horse.

Um, okay, wait. I'm not sure that's very inspiring. In fact, it makes no sense and it's kind of gross.

Two men are planning a trip by motorboat. They're out in a sculpted river that winds around their house. One is trying to get the boat started, the other is asking questions. They've collected peanuts or some kind of small fish and they are motoring off to sell it. As the boat pulls out, the identities of the men firm into place--they are Jim and Blair. Jim communicates that this will be a three-day trip. Blair asks why they don't sell their stuff in Richmond where they always do, which is closer. There is an anxious realization that the house is being abandoned without any real preparation for the trip.

From Jim's point of view, his thoughts, we learn that this trip might be permanent--he's going on the lam and taking Blair with him, but hasn't told him. He is making up reasons about why they're taking a longer trip. There's this whole impression of him--thought or conversation, I'm not sure--where we flash back to Jim's past and learn that he was actually a criminal. Picture of him wearing comfortable Cuban mafia clothes, smoking a thin cigar. He joined the police force to be their man on the inside. His whole life has been a lie. He's never told Blair. But this trip may begin something radically new. And then in the dream, I narrate a line exactly as if I'm writing a story: "Jim tested his influence with a first experimental pressure against Blair's mind."

I just rewatched the Buffy episode "Into the Woods" and had reaffirmed by all that is strange and holy just how much I love this goddamn show. For Buffy I am a soap-opera junkie with permanent PMS, sobbing prostrate in front of the television set.

Several trains of thought that I've been tracking recently have just crashed in my head: about Riley, about Xander, about gen and slash, about the show's gay sensibility, about "hetslash." I'll try to make the smoking rubble cohere.

I'm slashy by nature. I get into shows because of slash, I get fannish because of slash. Slash is my raison d'ecriture. And yet, as a show on its own merits, Buffy has for several years dominated my affections. I never really asked myself why, because duh: the writing, the actors, the characterization, the dramatic arcs, the heartbreak, the continuity, the geeky and witty and self-referential humor. The writing. And those are still some of the best reasons, but I also think the show has, as I recently mentioned, a subtextual--and textual--queer (gay) sensibility. Maybe it doesn't permeate everything, but it's there. And I don't think I'd be quite so hooked if it wasn't, because I need to identify with what I'm watching.

So, queer can mean a lot of things, but what I mean is that the show deals with issues of romantic and cultural transgression. The metaphorical equation between Wicca and lesbianism is one textual example that conflates both counter-cultural choices. But other romantic relationships have similar subtext: human/ex-demon, human/werewolf, human/vamp. Vamp/vamp adds another angle to this, but it's actually the human/monster dynamic that's queerest, because while these are hetero pairings (in most cases), the coded message is what strikes to the heart of homophobia: that monsters will "turn" straight folks abnormal. In the Buffyverse, oddly attractive monsters or witches (Anya, Angel, Spike, Tara, Oz) woo humans, (al)lure them away from the straight and narrow. Nearly every single serious relationship on the show has been, by that definition, transgressive. This then is my premise.

Watching "Into the Woods" pulled all this together for me. I'm looking at Riley first. I have no Riley resentment: I think Riley is a great character, more so as his arc progresses, and that he was there exactly the right length of time. For someone who is supposedly so bland and ordinary, his relationship with Buffy actually develops into something complex and disturbing. In fact, I think it may be the most complicated relationship that Buffy has had so far in six seasons--more so than what she had with Faith, because she never let Faith in that close--and perhaps more so than with Angel, because with him it was usually binary: on or off. Good or bad.

With Riley, Buffy tried to be normal. She hooked up with a human guy and spent an entire year fooling herself into believing that she could give her heart to him. And in the end, it all falls apart. The accusations made against her by Riley, Spike, and Xander in this episode are pretty accurate: she needs a little monster in her man, she's been taking Riley for granted, she doesn't really love him the way he loves her, he's convenient. We can see the truth in this. And her anguished belief otherwise when she hashes it out with Riley is true for her at that moment, and wrenching--but it's a smokescreen between them. She doesn't give any ground to his pleas because she doesn't have the depth of need or passion that would make her truly desperate for him, and she's not able to let herself admit that. It doesn't make her a bad person. It would be a hell of a hard thing to admit. It would take a difficult level of objective insight, and she's too close to it, and still very young, and the confrontation came at the worst possible time.

And in the end, Riley goes, and she belatedly follows--impelled by true feeling? I think she wants to want him. But it's too late, and that's as it's meant to be.

Woven into the degenerating Buffy/Riley relationship is a contrastive strengthening of Xander/Anya--but it's the strengthening of Xander himself which makes that happen. Xander kicks ass in this ep. This is, even more than "The Replacement," the episode when it all coalesces for him, when he grows up. "Replacement" was his maturing of circumstances--job, money, apartment--but "Into the Woods" shows us his emotional maturity.

Xander has always played the role of Buffy's occasional confidant and big brother; his antagonism toward Angel, his actions and behavior toward that relationship, demonstrates that best. In this ep, he goes after Buffy when she stakes the vamp gang and confronts her, tells her she's running away, that he's noticed her relationship with Riley imploding--insight which dates back to the brutal end of "Replacement" when Riley reveals that Buffy doesn't love him. He starts off by saying now, "The guy would do anything for you," and Buffy tells him about the vamp-sucking whores, and then I've just got to transcribe the rest of this conversation because it's so amazing:

Xander: You gonna let him go?

Buffy: It's not my decision to make.

Xander: Of course it is.

Buffy: Well, it's not fair.

Xander: Who cares if it's fair? In about twenty minutes, Riley's going to disappear, maybe forever. Unless you do something to stop it.

Buffy: What am I supposed to do, beg him to stay?

Xander: Why wouldn't you? To keep Riley here--

Buffy: I don't even know who he is anymore. I mean, I thought he was dependable--

Xander: Dependable? What is he, State Farm?

Buffy: You know what I mean.

Xander: Yeah. I think you mean convenient. I think you took it for granted that he was going to show up when you wanted him to, and take off when you didn't.

Buffy: Look who's talking. Look who has Anya following him around like a lovesick puppy.

Xander: Oh boy, is this not about me.

Buffy: Is she more than a convenience? Cause that would kinda be a surprise.

Xander: If you don't want to hear what I have to say, I'll shut up now.

Buffy: Good, cause I don't.

Xander: I lied. See, what I think--you got burned with Angel and then Riley shows up.

Buffy: I know the story, Xander.

Xander: But you missed the point. You shut down, Buffy, and you've been treating Riley like the rebound guy when he's the one that comes along once in a lifetime. He's never held back with you. He's risked everything. And you're about to let him fly because you don't like ultimatums? ... If he's not the guy, if what he needs from you just isn't there...let him go. Break his heart and make it a clean break. But if you really think that you can love this guy--I'm talking scary, messy, no-emotions-barred need--if you're ready for that, then think about what you're about to lose.

Buffy: ... Xander.

Xander: Run.

Okay, so...what kind of straight guy talks to a female friend like that? One with a big gay subtext. We've always known about it--Xander and Larry, Xander and Super Jonathan, Xander and Spike, Xander and his extreme twitchiness about all things manly and gay. With Riley, I don't even go to a traditionally slashy place, really, but boy could you take the passage above and make a case for a repressed crushboy. What kind of straight guy says about another, "he's the one that comes along once in a lifetime"? Yeah.

And it's not just the script--the actor's delivery isn't to be slighted either: intense, sharp, fueled with some of the most serious feeling he's ever shown on the show. His portrayal of passionately repressed closet case is so texty, in fact, that it feels like a Joss set-up, and it is. Xander pours his soul into a defense of Riley as the perfect mate, and then goes home and confronts Anya...and tells her he loves her.

Now, you can get a lot of readings from this scene. You could say he means it, you could say he's self-deluded, you could say he's redirecting his romantic energies. But you don't have to read Anya as simply a heterosexual replacement for someone else; she herself is coded queer. As in White Palace, the famously subtextual Sarandon/Spader flick, the relationship between Xander and Anya is gay, gay, gay.

Simple list: Anya is capital-D Different. The relationship develops from sex first, then intimacy. Xander's friends don't really understand. He's hidden the seriousness of his commitment from them (and continues to do so for a long time). He doesn't accord her the full respect of a traditional socially-scripted union. He's been reluctant and conflicted. He is tense about their relationship around his friends. He constantly monitors and molds Anya's behavior to make her more "straight." He carefully makes sure she never discusses their sex life in front of others.

In a slightly different reading, consider this: she's an ex-demon. In this twist on the human/monster pairing, she's gone to the Ex-Demon Ministry and now, freshly converted, ruthlessly pursues normalcy. With Xander. So, encoded, we're given ex-gay Anya and subtextually-gay Xander as the perfect crypto-queer match.

Everything I've written above follows on some thoughts I've written on list about "hetslash." This isn't an ideal term, but it was a convenient handle in the thread to describe certain heterosexual pairings that attract fans who are normally slash-pure. Spike/Buffy for instance. In talking it through, I moved from considering the appeal as something dark and perverse to something more I'd more broadly identify as transgressive. I think that's the characteristic that appeals to me, and why I dig all the relationships on Buffy so much--I'm as happy with Willow/Oz as I am with Willow/Tara because both pairings are askew, not molding to the dominant social paradigm (heterosexual equals normal).

Buffy and Riley--they failed because Buffy'd bitten the gay apple and tasted transgression. She needs something, someone, who lets her break free of her social straitjacket of perfect Slayerdom. She needs, of course, Spike...ouch! Hey, I'm just telling it like it is. {grin}

Anyway. I cried big tears just now at the end of "Into the Woods." The Riley/Buffy break-up was no less brutal to me than when Buffy had to let Angel go--both times. And I cried when Xander told Anya he loved her, because it was like seeing him acknowledge at last this pathetic boyfriend who'd never expected it, never dared hope, had always let himself be strung along because femmes will always build a nest for a strong straight-acting man. A femme doesn't deserve to be loved because he's not a real woman. Not really human. So when we find out that Xander does love "him"--her, Anya--it's like, whoosh. Right in the solar-plexus.

I was kind of manic yesterday, which gifted me with zombie insomnia. Today I feel like crap on toast. I am staying home again. Before I sink back into bed for a while...uh, something something. Oh yeah, Livia's blog entry from yesterday was just the funniest thing ever and I think you should go read it and love her too. If I were reccing it as a story, which it really kinda is, I'd say, "Why you should read this: zebra slippers, the structural failure of burritos, the gayness of Smallville, cat mites. And it's pimpariffic."

You come to my blog, you blink, you swear it was just a day since your last visit, not a week. And yet she has seven new entries, you notice. Will her wild yawp never cease?

Yeah, but I had to provide a link to a snarky, funny recap of "Wrecked" by Joseph Conat and maybe--I wasn't too clear--by these feisty Buffistas I keep hearing about, who are also responsible, I think, for inventing all the endearing Buffy lingo whose meaning totally eludes me, like "anvilly anvils." I get "Spuffy" though. Like "Clex." Heh. (If we'd had that shorthand a few years ago, we'd have said Muldcek. Hey, maybe y'all did.) Anyway, the post is from an anti-blog called the Almighty Gah!

I've been wondering why my blog doesn't have a cool name. Like "A Hideous Mystery" or "tympanic membrane" or "Argyreia Nervosa" or "crazy monkey face" or "A Conversation Over Saucers" or "Bounded in a Nutshell" or "every day a wilderness." I wonder indeed. Gah!--whose name I can't winkle out from the site--also has a sharp little mini-rant about Angel that makes me sigh kinda agreeably. Sadly but agreeably. Though Cordelia as the "shallowest cunt" ever, I'm not so sure about, because what they've actually been doing to her character, I think, is trying to pass her off as this wise-eyed earth mama which she's so not meant to be. The vision thing is obviously a plot convenience, but her straight-talking pocket insights are beginning to rub me the wrong way. She used to say things that were true and tactless, and deadly accurate in their apparent shallowness. Now she's all, "You need to get your shit together and here I am to tell you how." Yeah, yeah.

So when I was randomly yanking blog titles from my ass, or my ass disguised as a book, I found this quote: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." Nabokov. The dude rules. One of my favorite books ever is Lolita, actually, and Pale Fire cracks me up.

Ten readable things in a basket by my bathroom door: American Poetry Review, Temp Slave, Cometbus, Too Much Coffee Man, Strangers in Paradise, Beer Frame, Bitch, Infiltration, Super-Mini American Idioms Dictionary, and Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For.

My inbox is not feeding me today, I notice. This is karma for my inability to answer e-mails. And, clearly, everyone else in fandom adhered to the capitalist imperative of Monday and went into work instead of slacking around the house. But I feel less guilty now, because a few hours into my day, I began bleeding. And bleeding women should get paid to take a day off once a month.

Had one of those dreams last night that made me sit up and turn on the light. Just the standard "someone's in the apartment with me" horror, but served with the syrupy panic which comes from trying to take ineffective action. In the dream, I got up out of bed and went around checking the apartment. No one was there, but I couldn't get the lights on--I'd flick a switch and it would stay dark, because I'd never replaced the bulb, or the bulb blew, or the lamp just wasn't working for some unclear reason. I tried six or seven lamps. It was horrible--my skin was crawling, and I could not summon light. The last lamp, though, was plugged in and turned on while I was messing with the bulb, and I felt the electricity start pouring through me and I was certain that I would die like that, alone, electrocuted by a lamp in my apartment. In the dream I was thinking that it would be one of those, "Jesus, this is a stupid way to go" deaths.

When I woke, I checked the apartment just as I had in the dream, but the lights worked and I was alone. I left the lamp on for most of the night after that, though.

I've decided to stay home today. I need a day. As payment for this day, it is my goal to answer mail. So far, I've answered...list mail. Sigh. And the thing is, my wrist and arm already hurt from typing and "filing" my e-mails away. I did, however, manage to post on list a mini-essay about e-mail and my psychological block against answering it. So I feel I've accomplished something, in a meta way. And there's still time....

I have a lot to say tonight, mostly because I'm distracting myself from the lateness of the weekend, the fact I haven't eaten dinner and have no food in the house, and the mild misfortune of missing the first twenty minutes of O Brother, Where Art Thou? when I've been wanting to record it.

Now I'm thinking about Angel. Beware--I'm going to bitch a bit. I borrowed a tape from a friend to watch "In the Dark," an early ep I'd never seen where Oz and Spike visit L.A. On the tape were also the first two eps, and I skimmed through some scenes--I hadn't seen them in ages. And I was struck by how different the tone of the show was then. It was truly noir--the characters, the clubs, the constant police presence, Angel's desolate digs, the ratty apartments, the skewed street shots. There was one scene where Angel was walking home along the street in the early dawn, everything a washed-out grey, and it was stunning. Cheating death in the half-light. It almost came off like a violation of canon, but it had a stark, dreamlike quality that fit. A rightness. Other details I'd forgotten were also great, like Angel's strap-on wrist spikes. Killing gear is sexy.

The camera work seemed different too--different angles, more close shots; once, in a bar, the camera lingered on Angel's pale hands, flipping through the pages of a telephone book, and then we pulled back in a rack shot to see Kate watching him. It looked like they'd cut away, but I'm pretty sure they hadn't--same shot. Very clever. I don't know how much I'm generalizing from a few scenes, because I don't have the eye for detail that my vidding friends do, but the eps did seem to have a distinctive feel.

There was some bad stuff: too much time spent on transient guest characters; Kate herself, who was never as interesting as she should have been; blah blah. But when I look back, I realize how much the series has changed, and not all for the better. You can tell they were testing the waters at first, trying out a new spin with the premise that L.A. was an entirely different universe--not the Buffyverse, but something darker and grittier. I think that experiment must have failed. Nowadays, Angel feels much more like Buffy, but a paler imitation. It has a steady, ensemble cast, a weaker version of the trademark humor, myth arcs, et cetera. The characters, instead of living hand to mouth in seedy dives, inexplicably manage to eat and pay rent for well-kept apartments, despite spending almost all their time on non-paying slaying. Even the villains are upscale--yuppie lawyers with a view. And Angel no longer broods; he mugs for the camera.

A good example of the change is Gavin's recent introduction of red-tape paperwork as a method of bringing Angel down. Angel just shrugged it off, and no one else even gave it a mention. In a grittier universe, we'd have taken a break and allowed a nice ninety-second scene to let the gang dwell anxiously on the possible repercussions of their oversights. (I bet Doyle would have yipped a bit.) And even if this arc loops back later, which I'm sure it will, I suspect it won't carry that much punch. Wolfram and Hart aren't as menacing as a Sunnydale mayor and their fuck-ups aren't as easily played off, at least not since Lindsey left. (The Mayor had a devil-may-care attitude to his schemes that made it seem like he was cheerfully playing dice, and Lindsey was conflicted, whereas the current W&H players seem to truly want success, yet fail ineffectively, making them the worst kind of talking villains.) Add to that, the Angel gang isn't the Scooby gang--they never seem surprised by much, or terrified about their futures. They angst a bit, but they don't angst deep.

It's not just the teen versus adults thing, either--where everything seems so much more terrible when you're young. I hate to blame the actors, but while Alexis Denisof and Charisma Carpenter leavened Buffydom, they seem like lightweights in the Angelverse. I don't want them gone. I like Cordelia and Wesley. But they're secondary characters being asked to carry a show, and I've never given my heart to them the way I have to Willow and Xander--even Tara. Gunn I have trouble relating to except on a scene by scene basis; I just don't have much interest in the street-gang backstory, maybe because the story was never more than sketched out predictably. And Angel? He's no Buffy. He's monochrome to her rainbow.

I'm not even sure now that building a show around Angel could ever have worked. I'm not sure Boreanz has the chops or the range. But I would have liked to see him try, given different elements to work with. He could have fitted that monochrome into a hundred shades of darkness, and it might have been an interesting foil of like against like. I'd be happy to see them take a page from the book of Forever Knight, which though often cheesy, nailed the milieu of the urban vampire.

When I think about what's bugging me most about the show now--there's that lack of true darkness, and there's also a sense of claustrophobia. Not a good noirish claustrophobia, but the stale claustrophobia of a closed set, outside of which the city of L.A. may as well not exist. The Angelverse feels very small. Same sets, same shots, day in, day out. When it's funny, I enjoy watching it in a vanilla way--fun, ice cream, yay. But I don't get even a tenth of the suspense and enthrallment I get from Buffy.

Just finished reading some of Te's stories, and am in a happy Te place. Bless the Te! Bless the Te! And can I just be selfish fangirl and say that I'm most happy when the stars are in alignment and Te and I happen to be in the same fandom at the same time, and she is being her prolific self on my readerly behalf. Heh.

I have my bunny side. I slid into Sentinel, for instance, and got all domestic and mellow. But I have dark roots. And no one does dark kink as ruthlessly as Te. I've been reading her Vision series and discovering my toes can curl for incest fic, and I hope you don't mind me mentioning the premise, but you either don't want to read it and are thanking me for the warning, or you're open minded, and you're clicking the damn link like a good girl, right? Okay then. Also read Te's Smallville/BtvS crossover with Lex and Oz, "High Corn Drifter". Just. Yum. An Oz with a voice very in character, and a face painted darkly.

Buffy is one of those fandoms where, going into it, the show was sufficient. I've always considered it a non-slashy series with a somewhat gay sensibility, and for a long time fan fiction was not just gratuitous but a distraction, something I didn't seek out. But then I reverted to sluttiness, went through a period where I hungrily sucked up Vamp!Xander fic, sniffed the slash, and so on. And then Buffy/Spike came along and my tongue lolled. And now, when I read something like Te's story, I realize with certainty that I haven't totally dismissed Buffy as being a gen fandom, because the Oz she writes is very plausible, despite his indulgence in darkness and hot man love. That may in part be the nature of Oz, though. Laconic Oz allows a lot of leeway for interpretation and layers. I like that in a guy.

On a different fannish note, I was reading Jintian's blog entry where she comments on one of her own stories, and I found it a very interesting read. I'd do that to one of my own stories, but they're all so old that my insights have crumbled away to dust. My memory doesn't have a long shelf life. Hmm, and if you read Te's stories and then want to dwell on incest and sex a bit, Thamiris has some thoughtful thoughts in her blog.

God, I just saw one of the most unintentionally funny things ever--a Starz! advertising tribute to the spectacle of movies, built around Phil Collins singing "True Colors." Ah, let us bask in the heartfelt groove of top-forty, while watching inappropriately matched clips in which glamorous Hollywood feebs emote to newer, more banal heights, and stunt doubles take our collective breath away. Angelina Jolie, express those true colors of yours, honey, cause that's why I love you.

While I was afk, I composed in my mind a corollary to my first rant below, which covers troll-driven threads. Like, some troll comes on list and does a little jig guaranteed to cheese everyone off, and some laudable person--let's call her La-La--composes an ass-kicking response, and the troll replies, and La-La replies, and the troll replies, and La-La replies, and on and on. And you want to be on La-La's side, because she's defending all that's good and pure--except that as the thread degenerates La-La, who is normally intelligent and witty, starts to annoy you as much as the troll, because she won't let anything go. She doesn't know when to stop engaging, and she winds up looking like an idiot. She's feeding the troll. Don't feed the troll!

Another rant that lately keeps revisiting my thoughts, braiding between my (mental) legs and biting me, is about FX and how they're chopping up Buffy. I keep thinking I'm resigned to it and then they do something un-fucking-believable like cutting Spike's leap from "Fool for Love." Pause to contemplate that. Pause to consider for a moment one of the most exquisite scenes ever created in six years of Buffy. We're watching the triumphant expression on Spike's face as he comes into his vampire own at last after killing his first slayer, his face covered in blood, a cruel, small smile playing across his mouth--and then we cut away from this close shot to a long, wide slow-mo shot showing the vamps in their power line-up, striding through the chaos of the Boxer Rebellion--and before you can take a breath, Spike hops light-footedly onto a short barrel in his path and leaps from it--and in slow motion he descends, coat flaring, flames roaring behind him, as if he were briefly flying and falling back to earth. The symbolism here is dense and significant: Spike taking front and center position among the vamps, the subtly distanced body language of the others, his lift into vampire flight, the power line-up as a recurring action motif now rendered darkly, the majestic and leonine pace of the vampires, the panoply of devils reigning in hell untouched by human tragedy, the threat of flame looming behind them all, the metaphorical demonstration that Spike will now go over or through anything in his path, rather than around it--even the crucified way in which he lifts out his arms as he descends says something about his character.

So by all means, let's cut THAT and show instead several minutes of the back of Riley's HEAD in an action-packed sequence as he creeps on little cat feet through the same fucking GRAVEYARD that we've only seen a thousand times before. YOU FUCKING MORONS.

Am I angry? Just a tad. What makes me angriest is thinking of the friends I've sucked into the fandom who are watching these eps for the first time and who are going to miss so much because of FX's butchering.

There is nothing so annoying to me as seeing a good thread start up, and then become dominated by someone who feels it necessary to respond to every single post disagreeing with her. Do you own this thread? No. Let it go, just fucking let it go. Let people express their good, well-written opinions without feeling the need to counter them, just because you're in the holier-than-thou minority. Maybe a certain kind of person thinks that responding to every post fuels invigorating debate, but it's embarrassing to watch the unconscious ego trip of someone who constantly tries to puncture everyone else's posts and get the last, "authoritative" word in.

Such a thread follows this pattern: A B A C A D A E A F A G.... Every time someone new posts, "A" hits the reply button. Bing, bing, bing. Be selective, for crying out loud.

A certain type of author does something similar--when a critical thread starts up about her story, she has to reply to every single criticism and explain why it's invalid, what she was really trying to do, what her high school English teacher taught her, how she actually knew someone who once was in this highly implausible situation and so it's by definition realistic and plausible if she uses it in her story, and blah blah blah, even though no one has asked her opinion. It's almost always inhibiting and annoying, and it's almost always a bad author defending her honor, which makes it all the more teeth-gritting.

Now I know there are lists where give and take between author and readers is encouraged, and freer discussions of this kind work particularly well on smaller lists, and sure there are times when it's interesting to find out what an author was thinking. I mean, I like to talk about my stories once in a while, especially those I'm working on, or have just finished. But at its worst, when this kind of thread plays out on one of the big free-for-all lists, you have the spectacle of an author who, getting critical feedback, is clearly putting her hands over her ears and going "la la la," while doggedly defending her every flaw with a blithe, misplaced confidence that masks her insecurity.

Except in lists where the terms of author-reader exchange are clearly defined, and excluding small lists where everyone knows each other well, I'd make the following netiquette rules if I were queen: Authors should be receptive but quiet, ignore comments by fuckwits, take plausible critiques to their betas on the next story ("Do my characters really all sound alike? Can you look for that as you're reading?"), ask an occasional question if a piece of public feedback is unclear, give a thank you now and then ("Thanks for everyone's thoughts on this"), and offer brief explanations of points they're invited to clarify--and that's it.

I'm ranting, clearly. These are just pent-up opinions of my own, and generalizations at that. And these merely continue the ranting I've been doing the last few days. Maybe I'm getting more thin-skinned the longer I'm in fandom, but certain personality types always rub me the wrong way. For instance, just as the most extreme type, of which there are thankfully few: arrogant, take-no-prisoners people who have no saving graces--who never show a moment's vulnerability, whose discussion style is like that of a shark zeroing in on chum, who respond to other people's comments only to refute or relentlessly challenge them, who never qualify or soften their language a whit, and who accept their own opinions as absolute fact no matter how they try to disguise this. I used to work with someone like this. She's gone now, and the sense of blissful uplift I felt at her leaving reflects how happy I'd be if I never had to deal again with one of her rigid, socially autistic, lawyerly kind.

Sigh...I feel myself slowly deflating as I release all that hot air.

In other news, I feel very proud at having skipped a day in my blog. And during that missing day, the globe on my ceiling lamp fell to the floor of my kitchen--a loud, amazing sound. When I went out to look at it, I assumed for a few minutes that it had exploded. I don't know why I thought that. What would make a light explode like that, I wondered with alarm. Defective, extra-hot bulbs? Defective glass on the globe itself? And then I realized, duh, that I had recently changed the light bulbs and must not have put the screws back in tight enough. That old standard about changing a light bulb seems darker and less humorous right now. I used an electric screwdriver--what the hell? What if I'd been standing there, cooking? As it was, I spent a while like Cinderella picking seeds from the ashes, picking shards of glass from the fine nap of my carpet, and then sweeping up the rest.

Got my hair cut this weekend, which was like some life-saving operation because my god, for a few weeks there I was looking so horrible I don't know how I braved myself to go out of the house every morning. The bangs...the spiky bangs of mutt and death. I feel almost normal again.

The haircut helped prep me for the Seattle bash yesterday, the last one before Christmas. I had a nice time. Much food and fannish chat, and some drinking, which got me giggly. Watched the "gay episode" of The Tick and laughed so hard and helplessly at the part where the Tick meets up with the street hustlers that I fell over on my side, vanishing behind the coffee table, wheezing and thumping the floor. Everyone laughed at me and with me, and then someone kindly rewound and we kept watching.

On a boring meta-note, I've been struggling to figure out how best to archive my blog as the new year approaches. It dawned on me only this weekend that as I've been rolling old entries off this page, the original entry-specific links have become invalid, making my whole effort in that direction pointless. I realized that for next year I'll have to do one of two things: set up nearly identical blog pages for defined periods (one week each, say), or archive individual entries. The goal is (was?) to have links to each entry that were stable fairly quickly. But the whole thing seems complicated and stupid to organize. I'll probably do it anyway. I'm just not sure I'll be perfectly happy with any solution. I'm almost tempted to go to frames for the blog, even if I abandon them for the main site.

So my options this morning converged in an interesting way: I went back to bed, slept very late, defiantly detoured to Starbucks anyway, found a great parking spot once I arrived on the hill, then realized I'd forgotten my new CD.

After going back to bed...god, I'm so predictable. Had another dream. Dreamed that I was late for work--it was three in the afternoon! No, wait, eleven! Cue Cathy-like "Ack!" of anxiety. I head into work and there's a team meeting. We're all sitting around the conference table, and my manager is talking and gesturing at a blackboard, and I'm staring at the table thinking about something else and frankly not listening to any of them. But I think I know what we're talking about, so when someone suddenly nudges me--my turn--I make this long speech about our customer service and internal policy, blah blah blah. They all stare at me for a moment, and then give these vague murmurs of assent. I say abruptly, irritated, "Well, what are we talking about here?" No response from anyone at the table. I get pissed off--like the sudden snap before the disgruntled employee starts wielding automatic weaponry--and snarl, "I wish for ONCE that we would know what we're TALKING about before we start TALKING about it. Just ONCE, that's ALL I ask."

And then I realize that we haven't been talking about anything work related and that my co-workers are, in fact, playing some kind of Christmas party game.

Then I wake up. And I am late for work.

I recounted this to my team in an e-mail and, at the end of the message, asked my manager--purely as comic punctuation--whether I could have a day off. Ten minutes later he popped his head around my cubicle and said in awe and amusement and earnestness, "Anna. Why didn't you take the day off?" I'm beginning to like this guy a lot.

And so I left work early. Not the "all day" kind of early, but a few hours early. Nice.

In other breaking news, I went no-mail on Prospect-L (the pinhead quotient is very high right now, despite best efforts of list admins) and joined a few new lists, glass_onion and ClarkLex. I am getting lots of e-mail. There is a thread on the oniony list about online journals and I have a lot of thoughts in my head, but the idea of getting all meta here bores me. I don't want to talk about why I talk, I just want to talk. On list, though--I could go meta. But I haven't psyched myself up to post yet.

Let's get this bit out of the way first. Dreamed I was crouching in a dark street at night, waiting for my old co-worker T. to drive by in her car. She was just down the street revving her engine. Near me was L. He was watching me, trying to psych out my next move. We were both scheming to get to T.'s car. He was closer, but he crept my way, and I crept his, so I ended up switching places with him. Closer now, I waited until T. drove by, then I grabbed something protruding from her trunk and swung myself up to sit there as she drove off.

I leaned in her window. She was unsurprised to see me. She had a kitten called Naked Butt with her, dressed in little clothes that showed off its wee ass. (Um, just imagine the old ad, the Coppertone girl with the dog yanking down her swimsuit, but with kitten butt. And no dog. ...Ahhh, shut up and leave me alone.) It crawled around, then edged its way up above her head, adhering to the, you know, sun-flap--that thing you pull down to block the sun whose name I can't think of now. Grrr.

So, you know, T. was going to New York, and I was headed to California, and I realized that this hitching thing would not work out. A shame.

God, I'm tired this morning. Slept about seven hours--that's really not enough. But I'm up. I just can't decide if I should stay up. Coin toss. Stay up: Starbucks, good parking spot, leave work early, tiredness. Back to bed: no Starbucks, bad parking spot, leave work late, less tiredness. Gah. Too much to think about. Brain sleepy. I really want a day off to redesign my webpage and answer my mail. Reminder to self: be damn grateful you even have a job, and get your ass to work.

Bright spot of the day: Sandy burned a CD for me of Buffy songs like "Wild Horses" and "Lucky" et al. Yay, yay. More music to listen to at work.