Borrowed from Katemonkey as attributed to megolas, after which I just wave my hand in the direction of possible origin.

[current mood]: semi-drunk

[current taste]: Canadian, bittersweet, restless, tense, vinegar

[current hair]: I have a plastic toothy scrunchy holding back my hair--if you don't know what this is, just imagine it as the vagina dentata of hair accessories.

[current dress]: Spike tee-shirt. Friday, right? Unofficial casual day. Skanky end-of-the-week blue jeans. Matching socks--yay me.

[current grievance]: A Human Resources issue with my job classification, benefits, and compensation plan.

[current annoyance]: People who set tiny fixed fonts on their web pages. Who make frames but don't offer a no-frames alternative. Who don't grasp what 'high-contrast' means in terms of readability.

[current smell]: salt, fust

[current longing]: money, money, money--the root of all good

[current game]: Forever and always FreeCell.

[current thing I ought to be doing]: working on my next Buffy story

[current desktop picture]: Go to the Absolute Spike site and click on the James 3 gallery. Second row, first picture.

[current cd in computer]: In my CD player: The Book of Secrets, by Loreena McKennitt, who has a lot of extra letters in her name.

[current computer]: CompUSA. Stay with me, hard drive, stay with me...stop making that whiny noise, because you're worrying me, man.

[current worry]: Oh, you know. Life, the universe, everything.

[current crush]: Like a bug! No, wait...Spike. I don't care how he's written. Killed thousands of people? Whatever. He's stylish and mean and soft-hearted and confused. Wears leather. Dyes his hair, but can't see himself in a mirror. Preens like a peacock and doesn't understand women. Over a century old, and still dumb in the way that men are. Wise as a fool. A fool in leather who paints his nails black and lives in a crypt and says what he knows and kills demons for his beloved. Smoker, lazy plotter. Victorian by birth, Sid Vicious by nature, learned to drive, driven by nature. Grey in the dark. Has seen Europe, has killed Europe. Slays slayers, shags slayers. Lurker, stalker, liar, thief. A heavy, a lightweight. Jester and Jekyll. The trickster with cigarettes. Beautiful to look at, terrible to know. A Molotov cocktail, a cocktail in dead human skin. Indifferent to the world, spurned by it; a sensualist and a slave to blood; the ingratitude of dust. Metaphysical conundrum. Ex-parrot. Frustrated poet. Angry. Complex. Surface over depth. Fangs and poker and old loves. Dead man, babysitter, bad man. A man. A monster. A heavy drinker of humanity. Travesty of life in a human shell, sacrilege. Dead man walking.

[current hate]: Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

posted 3.15.2002 @ 6:25pm -- right-click here to grab a link

Blog recs--what is it if you rec the entry, and not the entire blog? If it's a rant, you could call it a rant rec, which has the benefit of alliteration; but "entry rec" or "post rec" doesn't sound quite right. Too generic. And "essay rec" almost never really applies. Hmm. Anyway, amusing tongue-in-cheek grumbles about "Normal Again" from Jemima, which I'd make a companion piece to some interesting Xander musings from Benaresq. And a rant on Buffy negativity in Almighty Gah!, combined with an affirmation for love of the show, makes Kita my hero of the day. Oh, and there's just a wonderful "I hate myself" entry (no, really!) from Lise, whose journal I just came across today via links. Twenty years old, and bright as a copper penny. I love fandom and all the little fangirls. Does that sound condescending? I don't mean it to be. It's just the equivalent of a shy squee.

I don't get the boyband thing, though, I admit it. I really don't. And, um, don't want to--I mean, don't try to convert me! So not going there. When I start to edge up to comprehension, I turn tail and flee. {g} But that's okay. The fans who are into *NSYNC ('N Sync?) are all so damn cute and friendly and upbeat, like the puppies they adore, that I just admire them from afar. They're sociable, which is nice to see. Certainly there seem to be no BOFQs ("Bitter Old Fic Queens") there. I wonder--is there a typical fan for each fandom? I kind of imagine the typical Buffy fan as over thirty, a college graduate, loquaciously intelligent, somewhat critical, and more or less dark natured. Typical Sentinel fan: late thirties, married, suburban, sneaky about her slash, feral, bunnyish. Typical X-Files fan: professional, infogeeky, Net savvy, science or tech oriented. Typical Stargate fan: repressed, neurotic, twitchy, and sci-fi rooted, or else lunatically mushy and bunnyish. Typical Smallville fan: heh--been around the fannish block ten times, fan slutty, busy, ebulliant, knowledgeable. All of these are being merely stereotypes or fanotypes (thus the title, yeah), imagined in my head.

Of course, you always have to skim the foam of bunnies off a fandom to find the brew. It's just when you skim off from Sentinel, you discover there's no beer there. Or, just...small beer. (Okay. I'm joking for the sake of a joke. Sentinel had way more than its fair share of brilliant writers. It's really amazing, actually, that a show so utterly pedestrian attracted so many stunning writers, almost all of whom migrated to Due South and Smallville.)

Belated waves of warmth to Maygra, who spoke of mortality and kinship. This has got me contemplating and riffing on different types of kinship. Getting a sense of kinship from someone we read may be different than what we get from her in person, when there's all that surface in the way. Static, interference. A kinship of language, verbal or mental patterns: I wouldn't automatically call this less real than then the interpersonal, but there are differences. I'm not entirely sure where the differences lie, but in person, it's perhaps more of an emotional, embodied resonance--a pleasure of company, grounded by laughter and voice. With the screen of language between two people, it's more mental--and you can't see the other person. She is only words. And even if you've met her (whoever it is you read) the vision tends to fall away, written over by the words on the page. The words are shiny, polished by their performative nature. It's more of a reflective surface, a mirror. There have been times I've read something personally essayish and thought: you are me. Another body, different experiences, but me. Eerie. Yet if I met the author in person I'd probably be thrown. Preconceptions and assumptions demolished; differences highlighted by comparison.

And damn. I'm just speaking abstractly. I wish I could find something as an example of a piece of bloggish writing that screams "Anna mind!" to me, something that I felt was uncannily a mental-to-verbal doppleganger of my own inner nature. And you could look at it and compare to what I write and say, "Yeah, that is eerie" or "They're nothing alike--where are those likenesses that she's seeing?" I also think it would be fascinating if others could do that, for my own amusement. Anyway, I'll keep my eyes open. I know I've read such stuff before. I just don't have any at my fingertips.

posted 3.15.2002 @ 5:20pm -- right-click here to grab a link

Spike Club

High farce in my dream this morning, but with disturbing twists. Can't recall all the details, which is tragic, but I am being stalked by a serial killer, a particularly creepy one who is some guy's double, with a pretense of amiability, washing his hands in my bathroom. While he's doing this I manage to send everyone away in my house who is in danger (I think I send my mom off to dance with some guy in drag) leave the guy in my house, run across the street, and convince a girl to let me inside. (She first staring out at me from her chair, big-eyed, as I bang pleadingly on the door, then finally nodding me in--I find the door unlocked.) I am wrapped in a big blanket, as is she. I get in, lock door behind me. She watches TV while I huddle behind a chair, watching the front door, and try to reach the cops. Yes. Yet another dream where I spend what feels like literal hours trying to dial 911 and failing. I dial 311, I get dead air, or I reach strange voice mail--once I reach someone and tell my entire story and he finally says, 'You know you have the wrong number?'

I begin securing the house--locking doors, pulling drapes shut, and as I do this the serial killer comes over and starts peering into the windows while I try to hide. I'm hiding on the floor of the kitchen, but it's window level, and I realize he's going to see me, this guy with his white face and dark eyes; he somehow gets inside--but then I take him by surprise. I stab him. I do a lot of violent things to him. I stab him, hack him, beat on him, tie him up, suffocate him. I stab him 20 times or so. Then I wrap him up in a blanket and sit on him and hold him by the throat, the other hand forcing down his chest. He's as small as a child now. Like a Chuckie doll. I refuse to let him go until the police get there and I can turn him over safely. I am rigid; it's like I'm in shock. They'd have had to peel my hands away.

Segue I don't remember. I'm in a place with rows of clothing on racks. Spike is there, and some other huge media star. I wish I could remember this better; it was awful in the dream, but in retrospect it's hysterical and very ironic. Spike is the killer, now wandering loose, and I'm trying to convince everyone of that, but no one is paying attention. Spike and Some Big Star start fighting. It's a knock-down drag out, up and down the aisles. In the hubub, I run away, slide under racks, among people's feet. There are suddenly huge crowds gathering to watch the fight; everyone very excited, and murmuring 'Spike, Spike'. They're all rooting for him. The combatants are tipping bookshelves over, flinging each other around. Robin Williams is also somehow involved.

I get out of the clothing market and run out into the street, down which police cars are barrelling, lights flashing. I dart in front of the cars and toward instead another row of cops coming down the cross-street, led by two policewomen on foot--one black, I'm pretty sure. The one in front is getting an update on a walkie-talkie. I start breathlessly trying to explain what is occurring, get my story out, point back to the fight, and emphasize that they have to take Spike out. Kill him. They at first seem to be taking me seriously, but when I describe him, the woman cop says, 'Spike? Blond hair, that one? Mmm, girlfriend.' And she turns to Woman Cop Number Two next to her and they walk on together, blowing me off and discussing him like he's some big film star--he's been in the news, he's infamous and gorgeous, and everyone is smitten. I want to howl. And as they head off down the street to the fight, I turn left instead on the cross-street, and along with another huge crowd of people, I explode into dust, forced into non-existence by the believers (the Spike Believers). Because, I understand in the dream, the universe can't be sustained--it explodes if you believe in Spike. But it's actually the believers who go on existing, and those who know his 'reality' who fall away to nothingness.

First, I want to know what it signifies that in all my dreams lately I'm trying to call the police, and failing, and can't make myself heard. A cry for help, fumbled and unanswered? That's just lame. And who is this black woman cop who keeps turning up? But also, now, why do I have a dream about Spike that exactly contradicts everything I've recently espoused here in this blog?

Damn my sieve-like brain for not remembering more of my dream. Like the part where I was trapped in a moving truck-bed with the killer, and two other guys tried to make time with me, and he shoved them off the back. How does that fit into the narrative? And who was Spike fighting? In the dream I knew.

Grrr, arrrgh. Off to work.

posted 3.15.2002 @ 7:36am -- right-click here to grab a link

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Poet with an MBA

By company-wide e-mail today, of a car in the parking garage:

"Your lights are on and slowly dying."

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Queer thoughts today: Yay to Mely's crypto-queer characterization of Buffy/Spike. I was thinking about this the other night, talking about the queer Buffyverse with Sandy. I don't know for sure that Joss or ME have this as a conscious, broad-scale metaphor in mind for the show, but it's a trope they aren't afraid to use. I have always weighed that fearlessness against the almost total lack of homovamping, and wondered. Why do they play gay figuratively but not literally? Why not make vamping a homo act now and then, have male-on-male, female-on-female feeding and turning? I mean, it's really noticeable in its absence, and in terms of casting and scripting has to be deliberate.

And it finally occurred to me that this deliberateness might be erring on the side of political correctness. Because the risk of conflating vampirism and homoerotics is to place in the minds of unsophisticated (or even sophisticated) viewers the equation of "vampirism = homosexuality" and "turning = infection of blood, contagion, conversion." I.e., a really wrong, ugly AIDs = queerness conflation.

Which means that all that gay, subversive metaphoricity seeps into the narrative in other ways, which works fine for me. If I had to choose between seeing a bunch of male-on-male vamping between grunting, game-faced walk-ons and unnamed lunchables, or a dominant, queerly charged Buffy/Spike relationship, I'd pick the ship. But I love that something was surfaced, namely Willow/Tara. I'd love a textual male/male dynamic somewhere, I admit; the slasher in me would be happy. But there's enough subtext to give me occasional amusement--early Xander, Giles/Ethan, Angel/Spike, even a smidge of Giles/Spike.

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Another shout-out to Jess, whose review of "Normal Again" makes me very happy. I am a simple creature.

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Saw "Brotherhood of the Wolf" tonight with Sandy. My comment during the closing credits: "Now that's mainstream, baby." If, er, you define "mainstream" as the confluence of queer, crackheaded, chopsocky, fetishistic fangeeks, that is. What a great movie. What an insane, over-the-top, jaw-droppingly shameless movie. It's kind of like some lunatic Highlander epic penned by a romantic goth tripping on peyote, set in the eighteenth century but serving up Matrix-style martial arts (delivered by some real dishes). Unlike the many movies that have tried ripping off those FX, though, this one actually makes it work. And... and... and it's just fucking loud and lyrical, and gorgeous and grand, and vicious and violent. And French. If you write, read, and/or love dark fan-fiction, you must see this. Must, must, must. And ideally in a theater.

And did I mention the dishes? Oh, dear god. Dear GOD. Mark Dacascos. And, you know, those other people. Yes. Pause to fan self while thinking of Dacascos. Because. Semi-nakedness. Tattoo. Eyes. Long dark hair. Eyes, eyes, eyes. Lithe, liquid. Lick. Just this serious presence that stares at you until the little hairs stand up on the back of your neck, and then kicks the shit out of you. But seriously, Samuel Le Bihan and Jérémie Rénier--they were great too; manly and endearing, respectively.

It also has: great women, a monstrous beast, twisted politics and a lot of darkly magnificent rain and trees and mountains. And exquisitely beautiful violence and pain and vengeance. And it's slashy, if that's a selling point for you--but still fabulous even if you don't swing that way. Its slash quotient actually made minimal impact on me; I was too caught up in the movie itself. But of course I noticed it, with an aficionado's eye. {g}

You should go see this. You should not read anymore about it, at all. Don't seek out any further details. Just go.

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Listening to: Nick Drake, Pink Moon

posted 3.15.2002 @ 1:00am -- right-click here to grab a link

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Cloud Cuckoo-Land

Tonight you could say of the sky that it was almost literally painted by light. Heap big cloud: those huge ones--cumulus?--that only appear over the ocean, or over an ocean of prairie, clouds like a land that exists above the earth, in the sky. No wonder people invented heaven. It looks as if you could live up there. Cloud City. And tonight the clouds were grey and heavy, and the sun was illuminating one patch to a fierce white glow. Everything painted with its light, wide tactile brushstrokes, light which was the texture of the clouds; the sun itself obscured. And the clouds had silver linings--really. Silver, glowing edges above the grey. It was El Greco's "View of Toledo" but in Seattle. Not that alike, really--the skies, I mean--but that same weird godlight shining through.

When I came in from the car, I stood on the back stoop to unlock my door and the air had that crisp late-winter precision that makes you think about your life for a moment. No--makes you feel your life for a moment, as a comprehension of how you breathe and exist in the world. And then you go inside, and your apartment building smells slightly of undumped garbage, and you lose that moment of airborne insight.

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Things I am in denial about:

• my dental bill
• a particular social convergence that makes me uncomfortable
• the fact that I have to get my car tags updated and my emissions checked--in, like, the next three days
• the repair I can't afford to my car which will very likely cause my front wheel to eventually lock up or spin loose, sending me careening into a traffic accident
• everything I have to do at work this week
• how I hate a few of my lists but if I unsubbed it would drive me mad not knowing what was being talked about
• the act of paying my bills this month
• the failure of my monthly drinking plan
• my issues with a certain person who hits all kinds of buttons
• my credit cards, my debt, my life

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Thoughts on "Normal Again" here.

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You know how you listen to one song, and it begins to remind you of another, and you're like, fuck, what is that song? And you know that (1) continuing to listen to song A will probably erode the likeness from your mind, but (2) if you don't listen to it, you won't figure it out at all, and (3) if you don't figure it out at all, you'll go insane? Yeah, well, that happened to me today, and I was shocked as hell when I stopped and played it in my brain and managed to figure out what the song was. I was listening to a Lori McKenna CD that someone lent me and it brought to mind the Alison Krauss song "When You Say Nothing at All." I gotta get that song on CD.

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Meta note: The new gif header--the ocean. Yeah, you may have noticed that if you're reading this page on a tiny monitor like I am, there's not much else above the fold (visible on your screen at first click), and if you have a slow connection, it takes lots of time to load. Which sucks. I've been trying for months to figure out a way to improve the header, though. The two gifs--blog, trees, whatever--they look great on my tiny monitor at home, but at work they are swimming in a sea of empty space. I wish there was a way to code so that you could have an image expand or contract to fit the monitor. If there is a way, it's probably beyond me. Lacking that, I will probably continue to futz around.

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Oh hey, Maren gave me the link to her entry on Buffy love and fan angst--the one I'd mentioned a few posts ago but could not match with an author. Yay.

posted 3.13.2002 @ 6:49pm -- right-click here to grab a link

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Hollow Laughter

Right. So I'm writing noir because, what, the show's not dark enough already? Ha ha...DEAR GOD. Choking now. How can I ever be as dark as The Powers That Be? Cruel, playful bastards.

Buffy is the fish in their fishbowl, driven around in frenzied circles by their batting paws. And we, we are their cat-toys.

Cat-toys of the Gods. Yes.

posted 3.12.2002 @ 9:06pm -- right-click here to grab a link
 

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