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Weekend Again
I woke up from a long dream I can't recall, except for the last minute or so when it diverged off track and became populated with Buffy characters. I also woke up with a sudden, unexplained urge to seek out Spike/Willow stories. An urge I have not given into. Things I have done today: went to get doughnuts, bought groceries, wrote a bit, watched Josie and the Pussycats, ate a sandwich, listened to one half of "Fumbling Toward Ecstasy", lost time doing things I don't even remember. Things I haven't done today: my taxes, my laundry. I also didn't pay my bills, didn't exchange my broken fan at the store. What I want to do with the rest of my day: Nap. What I will do with the rest of my day: I have no idea but I probably will nap at some point, and eat another doughnut, and take some Midol, and drink some wine, and watch more TV, and write. Not necessarily in that order. I'd say more but my brain is tired. I almost wrote 'tiered.' That too. posted 4.14.2002 @ 5:35pm -- right-click here to grab a link Work Mind Today, my boss stayed home from work for the millionth time, and when we got the e-mail, we all looked at each other. And then I think we pretty much fucked around all day. Morale is low. My co-workers are reading Foucault. I should clarify: the particular two members of my team who are best known, off the clock, for breezy hilarity and beer-drinking, for their regular Jane and Joeness, are reading Foucault. They aren't in school or anything, either. They're just: Reading. Foucault. For fun of something. It was one of the History of Sexuality volumes, sure, but it was still a surreal moment. I used to do stuff like that, but I'm kind of a geek. No, I'm too lazy to be a geek. But I pretend to be. I'm bummed, by the way--someone told me that "fanwanky" doesn't mean fannish self-indulgence per se. Rather, it means (qualitatively) the nature of fannish spackling: when you fill in the gaps, inventing scenarios, occasionally very far-fetched, to make up for hole-riddled canon. Hmm. I like my defintion, though. Can't it be...extrapolatory? (Surely that's a word.) Chief way in which I hate myself tonight: PassiveAgressive!Anna. So, I'm talking about a hot-button subject on a list, and I sort of circle around one of my hot-button antagonists, deliberately not invoking any names, and I'm trying to be good and not stir up trouble, but I'm still fucked in the head, because I just shouldn't even have gone there at all. It came off as coy and divalike, I'm sure. And maybe it was. But I don't want to stir up trouble. I just have trouble separating my personal response--that process--from some Platonic ideal of "objectivity" on a subject. I am meta. I verbalize my own processes. I also poke at my own wounds, my sore tooth. Any pain is part of the response. Emotional and intellectual. I don't even know what intellect is sometimes--as a separate entity from emotion, or personal interest, or bias. I'm a fuzzy-logic thinker, a relativist, and I think the merit of anything, to me, is how successful it is as a fiction or a poem. How beautiful it is. Not how objectively "true" or "right" it is because of statistics or logic. I've used the term "lawyers" before, for a certain fanotype who reads to me as Autistic Intellect. And I find a lot of times that I don't like how the legal mind works, or its dry, agressive, absolutist rhetoric. Any of you actual lawyers can ignore me. It probably has nothing to do with the profession itself. And maybe lawyers isn't even the right analogy. Maybe "theologian" is. Except one of my best friends is a theologian. Heh. Logician? The weird thing is, that at work, I'm pretty much the total opposite. My Work Mind wants to make and use precise process maps, rational operational definitions, discrete categories, exhaustive lists. It demands that things make sense and hang together, and recoils from the fuzziness of management expediency and short-sightedness. I author the most definitive resources, will drill down from the surface of an issue to its root and then fishbone out like crazy to try and find out where all the other problems lie. I can't make a broad list if there are details that might qualify the data. I can't ask "Why did this employee fail?" without wanting to wade out and find the process indicators upstream that cause the problems downstream--technical functionality, validity of rep support resources, what training they might have had. Et boring business jargon cetera. These dry business geek things excite me. You now have insight into my little-delved alterate persona. The one that earns the money. Anyway. On the issue of edgy, passive-agressive grumbling--the sad thing is that once you fear you've exhibited those tendenices, they may in fact suddenly sprout and flourish like a psychosomatic rash, and you find yourself wanting validation, like: "Okay, now I've been bad, said these things, and I suck as a person, don't I? Except maybe not. I don't know, but I'm going to wibble and worry at myself like a dog with fleas chewing and macking on its own fur, and hope that you'll take pity and validate me as still cool." And even worse, is when you don't quite make an ass of yourself in this way in one venue, but then you go off and do it elsewhere, say in your blog where you know people will see it, ha ha. Because it's like a sodding itch that needs to be scratched. It's a compulsion. Some infinite recursiveness of the tragically flawed meta, crypto-diva personality. Lameness. Bored now. What is that personality type where you kind of make a fool of yourself, but you can't let it go, so you call attention to it hoping to be charming, but the other person just grows uncomfortable, so you over-compensate wildly, digging yourself ever deeper, revealing more and more with every passing moment your inner loser, and driving the other person away with the very attempts you're making to try and attract them, to explain and justify yourself. "No, no really! I'm endearing! Right at this moment I'm an idiot, but that's just because I didn't do laundry and I'm wearing my red sweater that doesn't flatter me and it makes me self-conscious--I'm much cooler normally, and I know you can't believe that because here I am rambling away and annoying you, I can see you're annoyed, but I'm sure that if I continue on in this self-deprecating way like a bad Woody Allen homage that you'll eventually smile and our wavelengths will collide and you'll be like a soulmate to me. No, don't run away!" Run away. [This was actually 4.12] posted 4.13.2002 @ 12:45am -- right-click here to grab a link Freaks & Geeks Vonnie had a cute entry about fungal feet and disposal cameras, which made me think of my own geeky work-group. Today, my team talked for a good forty-five minutes about "cousin couples." Which is to say, first cousins who enter into romantic relationships. We are a loud, insane group of freaks, and we kept cracking up over--and obnoxiously quoting from--this site. Be sure to check out the bad poetry message board. It's in the "Lounge" menu. Apparently what prompted my co-worker to actively solicit (I mock her) this URL is a recent wire story, which reports scientific findings that first-cousin reproducion is not as genetically risky as was once thought. So, ponder on that. I'm going to bed. Hopefully, I will not dream about my cousin J. Who was half-Indian and lovely, and on whom I once had a terrible crush. posted 4.11.2002a @ 11:25pm -- right-click here to grab a link Fanwanky I saw that on a discussion board. Fanwanky: fannishly self-indulgent, is how I read that. It cracks me up. I want to use it as often as possible. So I stayed home yesterday and diddled around, wrote, got fanwanky, and went for lunch at Stella's Trattoria. Fantastic marinara. They had a picture hanging behind their hostess podium, of a baby sitting in his high chair. It said "Bambinos eat for free!" The baby had unnaturally enlarged arms and hands like lobster claws (though it might have been photographic distortion), a small head with dark hair plastered down to the scalp, and spaghetti sauce smeared all over his mouth. Except that the sauce resembled blood. I swear it looked as if he'd just gutted and chowed down on his good twin. I couldn't tear my gaze away. Coconut-headed gore-faced bambinos eat for free. I see a lot of people around Seattle who remind me of celebs. One time in the co-op, I saw a guy who looked uncannily like Daniel Jackson. He was so beautiful I...well, I couldn't tear my gaze away. He had that particularly lush and muscled body type I love (Duchovny, Shanks), and one of those head scarves like Daniel wears, and a peculiar mix of military and scholarly garb that I can't really describe. As if Daniel on his day off somehow couldn't entirely shed his acquired military persona. More recently I saw a Spike clone: perfectly sculpted white hair, with subtle shadings of silver-grey--I saw him from a great distance, but it's important to note the hair wasn't bleached white or freaky white. It was elegantly white. And he had little wire-rimmed glasses (Williamy), a lean, Spikelike body, and a long overcoat. Maybe he was actually trying to look like Spike. Last night I read the coolest stories--two crossovers of West Wing and Buffy. The first was "Donna the Vampire Slayer," the other "Samwolf." Ignore the titles. They give no insight on the quality of the fiction--though there's certainly a breezy style evoked which is fulfilled. I just loved these. Hmm. Just as a quick note, I've been posting a lot of comments "offblog" that I nonetheless want to post here too, both because I want other people to read them and from the lazy disinclination to write the same thing twice. I know it'll be the equivalent of cross-posting for a lot of people--undoubtedly annoying. So I'll try to mark that stuff with blockquotes, or maybe even do cutaways, and anyone about to read it twice can scroll on. So...here's what I said about these stories: The snappy style and pacing, and the dialogue and the characterization descriptions--they are all of the quality that nearly make me question whether the author is a pseud for a WW writer. I'm sure the answer is no, but still. And the author has a few sequels--I've read the second, "Samwolf." I can't believe a story with a title like that is so good, but it is. The premise isn't handled with as much depth or even plausibility as in story one ("Donna the Vampire Slayer"), and there's almost no BtVS presence, but it doesn't matter because it's clearly just an excuse to play with Josh/Sam slashiness. It's just *lovely*. I laughed all the way through; I couldn't stop. And then at the end I teared up a little. Just like with a real WW ep. {g} posted 4.11.2002 @ 7:21pm -- right-click here to grab a link Mad Weasel in the Brain Fucking birds. They do not understand time changes. I don't know what these are, but they're so loud they're practically barking. Yeep-yeep-yeep outside my window at four a.m. I tend to wake up in the middle of the night--it's usually the heavy drinking--and once I hear the birds it's hard to get back to sleep. I have to turn on my space heater, sans heat, to white the noise out. I used to have a floor fan for that, but I thumped it one too many times to kill its weird rattling, and it finally died. I've been too lazy to go get another, and have been substituting my bathroom's ceiling fan instead. White noise versus noise--an important distinction. I have noise issues. Like a sentinel. I had a horrible thought this morning. "Babies are cute," I thought as I lay in bed, trying to get back to sleep. It just popped into my head: "Babies are cute." Along with a picture of a blue-prize-winning baby lying on its back, grinning and gurgling and grabbing its toes. Sort of jouncing there, all spittled and happy and crowing. The toe-grabbing was especially cute. You know how babies do that. The baby was actually born of another thought, about what I wrote in my blog last night--comparing coffee cake to a baby's flesh. "Why the fuck did I write that?" I thought. (This was what started it all.) "How utterly disgusting." And then I thought about the line from "Pump Up the Volume" where Christian Slater asks the call-in girl, "Was it [some guy's dick] bigger than a baby's arm?" That line has been stuck in my head for years. Because: penis. baby's arm. Think about it. It's just wrong. But anyway--I'm thinking this, and then I segue to contemplating roasted baby flesh. Just because. The mind goes there. And then I thought about how I'd once seen a movie, I think, where someone is rubbing their face all over a laughing baby, saying, "Mmm. Baby. I'm going to eat you up. Yummy baby. Good baby." Just, you know, macking on the baby with perfectly innocuous and acceptable parental love, but with weird undertones, when you think about it. I wish I could remember where that scene was from. So I'm having this thought, and my mental camera pulls back and all of a sudden there's this cute baby. Ack! I thought. I wanted to go back to the disturbing baby-flesh place quickly, so I imagined Angel cooing, "Mmm, yummy baby, I'm going to eat you up!" And then I thought, oh wait, maybe that was where I'd seen that scene. But still, the cute baby was stuck in my head now, and I had this sudden horrible fear that two or three years from now I'll get hit out of the blue with the biological clock--can't you just picture it, you're walking along the street, whistling, and all of a sudden this alarm clock flies threw the air as if thrown by some unseen hand and beans you in the head, and it's buzzing madly like one of those fat houseflies, and whammo, you want to have a baby. It's a disgusting thought. Because. Babies. I don't want any. Looping back a little, on the subject of drinking: I shouldn't be near a computer when I drink. Because somehow I managed to move the "My Documents" folder into the "MS Office" directory. How the holy hell did I do that? I vaguely remember messing with the folders by accident, but I thought I'd fixed whatever I'd fucked; and yet when I started up my computer this morning and went to write in this blog, my file was 'not found.' Not only was this file gone, but my entire documents folder was empty. Pause for cold chill. Or tepid chill, if you want the truth. Because obviously they were somewhere, just not where they were supposed to be. Still, it was a moment for mild self-disgust. Oh hey. Another thought I had this morning. Angel. Vampire. Angel of Death. Huh. I'e never gone there. But is it just me, or should they have named Spike Angel? And Angel something else. Because consider this: Giles: There's mention some two hundred years ago in Ireland of, of Angelus, the one with the angelic face.And, okay, he's attractive and all, but it's Spike who has the angelic face. Butter couldn't melt in his mouth, Mister Charming. Seducing mothers and waitresses and the pants off slayers. And he must have looked even more fetching in his post-thug, pre-punk days. Well, maybe not. But I'd still say he's far more deceptively naif looking than Angel, who I wouldn't call 'angelic' looking at all. He's big and hulking and broody, and when he was Angelus he had a way of looking at people from under his lowered brow that was intimidating. But I only entertain this quibble in an abstract, disinterested way. Because Angel's a stupid name. Spike is better. Neener neener. Yes, yes. I'm only kidding. Just teasing the cheesy poof. I think I'm going to stay home today and get stuff done. The reorg and lay-offs and forced-attrition crap yesterday at work put me in the frame of mind to say: "Life's too short." I mean, yeah, fine, my team escaped unscathed, but you can just feel the scythe whistling through the air above your head, lifting your hair gently with its breeze. And the relocation shit they pulled was so...argghhh. There was no reason for the relocation, except to force people to leave. It's that kind of weaselly manipulation that kills trust. posted 4.10.2002 @ 7:00am -- right-click here to grab a link Things that Go Yum in the Night Just caught the last act of "I Only Have Eyes for You." When I realized what was on, I immediately wanted to watch the whole ep, but though I love all of it, it's mostly the last act that clinches this one; do I need to rewatch the rest again right now? Not sure yet. Buffy as James, Angel as Grace--amazingly brilliant gender-bending possession there, which turns the whole ep on its ear. And can I just point out: writer, Marti Noxon. Nyah. The woman proves herself. Add into that the very ending of the ep: Best. Ending. Ever. A total steal from Bob Roberts of course, but stealing is of the good. And if you've never seen Bob Roberts? Rent it. Now. Incredible movie. And it has Alan Rickman. You cannot lose. We had a 'Black Tuesday' at our dot-com company today--a bunch of people in our department were relocated. It's forced attrition. They either move to a branch office with a two-hour commute or take a severance package. Yet again, my own team escaped the guillotine. But with every passing month, year, I get more and more nervous. Weirdness all day, no one really able to focus on work. Me and my co-workers slunk off a few hours before the meeting, fleeing the building to hit Starbucks. Earlier today I briefly entertained the idea of making this an "All Buffy, all the time" blog. You know, nothing but my witterings on episodes, stories, the fandom, etc. But I do have other thoughts. In my cranium. I am writing. Today I wrote: "You on the rag, girl?" asked the purple girl-demon. "'Cause that attitude's just harsh."And some other stuff. Ahem. I vaguely feel I want to rent movies, but that would involve...going to the video store. And renting movies. Which is a commmitment to watch them. I also want to eat things. But I don't know what. I love food. But when I try to decide what I want tonight...I'm flummoxed. (Flummox. Oxen. Never mind.) Do I want shrimp? A burger? No. A salad? No. Something chickeny? No. Hmmm. Does this ever happen to you: you live somewhere, and discover the Perfect Food: a pasta dish or a particular coffee cake, at some specific restaurant which is not a chain. And then you move 3000 miles away. And you are fine, until you CRAVE that particular pasta dish or coffee cake, and you have no fucking access to it. And you go absolutely mad with longing, about three or four times a year? Some things I long for but can't have:
I need to lose weight, I know this. If I lose my job and have to go on interviews, I want to be slimmer. Slim girls get the jobs. This I believe. But I am lazy and love food. Favorite food things off the top of my head: Bread. Tomatoes. Potatoes. Garlic. Cheese. Pasta. Basil. Olives. Onions. Spinach. Beef. Chicken. Butter. Chocolate. Salt. Rosemary. Almonds. Bacon. Did I mention tomatoes? Guh. I think I'm toasted for tonight. But I'm still hungry. Maybe I'll rent a trashy movie and go get some overly priced pasta. Credit cards. Enablers of the American dream. posted 4.09.2002 @ 7:56pm -- right-click here to grab a link Spike and the Refrigerator I dreamed that I was curled up on the couch with my brother. He was listening to a CD and singing along, a song about money. I made a mental note to borrow the CD from him, then got up to make a salad. After I'd finished, I tried to put the lettuce away in a set of cabinet drawers. I couldn't quite get them open because the fridge was in the way. Then I realized I was trying to put produce in the cupboard (d'oh) and turned to the fridge, only to find I couldn't quite get it open because the cabinet drawers were in the way. Escher would be proud. When I did get the fridge open, Spike came over and complained about it. He pointed out some dirty water condensing on the back panel. I thought he was overreacting, and/or on crack, the big whiner. I wiped it up with a paper towel--it was pretty dirty--and then I guess I flicked some of the water on him or something. I'm pretty sure it was just an accident, but he was disgusted and ran off like a finicky cat to the bathroom to groom himself. When he came back he was holding a full ashtray, and I realized he intended to retaliate. The weird thing was, I let him--I let him pour the ashes and butts all over my hair. It was disgusting as hell, but in the dream I thought: it's part of his trademark scent, though. And we tumbled to the ground, me with ashes in my hair, and began kissing--and then the alarm rang. posted 4.09.2002 @ 7:41am -- right-click here to grab a link
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