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A Handful of Buffy...
...thoughts. Was watching "The Yoko Factor" tonight. I've shared my thoughts already with a few folks who may be reading this but I'll share them again, because I just have to say: god, that scene with Giles singing Free Bird. Oh man. I've always loved that bit, so much, and I finally realized (yes, I really am that slow) that it wasn't just a gratuitous gift of song and color before the dialogue started; it had angst and gave character insight and had layers that may even be disturbing. This is Giles already thinking a year before the season five opener about leaving--specifically, leaving Buffy. He's feeling useless and unsure about his position--the conversation with Spike just confirms that. And the lyrics...man. You could make a serious case that there's some deeply buried thing there for Buffy, at least one thin layer in the cake of his feelings that's a bit ambiguous, not quite paternal. He's getting in touch with his roots here; not Ripper, really, but something younger and restless. He's a grown up and he's been living the life of a librarian, having to play the figure of wisdom and stability. But he's still got a yearning. God, I love Giles. I love the drinking and how out of the blue one day an old ladyfriend shows up, and the very adult relationship they have that has nothing to do with Buffy or the Scoobies--the fact that he has his own life and history and secrets--and not even secrets, just things he doesn't need to talk about with a bunch of oblivious kids; and that he's his own man, enough to do something different, play guitar in a cafe, and that he gets bored and cynical and may have some dark, twisted thoughts on things that he deliberately doesn't share, and I love his deeply simmering anger, and that when it comes down to it he'd risk his soul and conscience for Buffy. The sucky part of "The Yoko Factor" is realizing yet again just how much hash FX made of the show with their fucking edits. It just makes me weep. They cut this from the Adam/Spike scene (underlined): Spike: "Wow. I mean, yeah. I get why the demons all fall in line with you. You're like Tony Robbins.If he was a big scary...Frankenstein looking..." Pause as he reconsiders. "You're exactly like Tony Robbins."Bastards. Another interesting thing--and I'd already had this thread of thought in my head, and have been wanting to get it out, which TYF prompts me to do--is that I wasn't really the hugest Spike girl pre-Buffy. I mean, I liked his character. He was snarky and funny and a sweet bit of eye candy, but I wasn't particularly fixated on him. In TYF, he's devilishly manipulative, but he's...I don't know. He's not entirely there. He's subtle in his behavior--and James Marsters is subtle in his performance--but in some ways, Spike's still being written in broad strokes. He was comic relief for a long time. It was "Fool for Love" that changed that, and that started my downfall, because we got some new facets, layers; and that wasn't until season five. But with that ep, they started shading his character a lot more in ways we could empathize with. He had history, a human past and a homicidal past, and the two were blended for us so that we could understand him. FFL was when Spike really stepped into the place Angel had vacated, when he was positioned to become the dominant vampire figure on the Hellmouth, a figure of fascination, darker and not so comical. And the more he fixated on Buffy, the more I fixated on him. What he feels for Buffy sharpens and defines his character. Before, he was softer, out of focus. With Buffy, he's something else: edgier, more intense. It's interesting, because I remember in someone's blog a while back the idea that it's Spike--Spike alone as some vampy love-toy--that has reignited people's passion for Buffy (show or character, take that as you like), and that that was somehow a shame. And maybe that's true in a sense, though not a shame, because I know that Spike is my "in" to Buffy, creatively speaking. The fuse in the dynamite. But I probably would never have felt that if he hadn't been defined by Buffy. He's compelling vis-a-vis her. Without his passion for her, he's detached from humanity, a character interesting largely for his style, his violence, his isolation. A more hollow character, really. To me, I mean, and I apologize to anyone who fell in love with him well before that, via the whole Spike-and-Dru romance, or as a slash figure, or as a mythical force in his own unloving right. Anyway, those are my meandering thoughts tonight. My second story, episode one, is done. But I think I may want to print it out and look at it with some attempt at distance, so may wait another day. I can't see it as a whole thing, holistically. Only pieces. My car's problem was not the fuel filter and this is bad. Very bad. I won't share my inner rant and anxiety, which is a big swirl of what-in-the-hell-do-I-do? I'll just say, grimly, that I have to take the bus to work tomorrow and I have no money and it's sleeting and the supermarket is blocks away and I'm really not a happy camper. I meant to answer people's e-mails this weekend too. I own my suckage as a correspondent. For dinner...pizza by phone? I'm thinking, yeah. posted 1.26.2002 @ 7:49pm -- right-click here to grab a link Like a Crazed Wolverine I am at that place where every hour not writing fiction is a tedious, wasted hour. At work, I sneak quick fixes of dialogue, mental edits. After work I head home, knowing I should stop at the supermarket because I have no food in the house, but unable to prolong any further the release of writing. I sit at my desk, and I write for seven hours, with occasional breaks when my legs start to spasm and my neurotic anxiety kicks in. ("Oh GOD, I've been sitting here forever, and I'm going to die of thrombosis like those passengers on long airplane flights, GET UP GET UP GET UP!") Tonight, after a day off work, writing from sun-up, I went out to get food (not having eaten) and my car kept crapping out at every stop sign. Fuel filter, I'm thinking. Irritated, I stopped at the garage, and stood there foot tapping, waiting for the mechanic. Then I was like, fuck it, I'll leave it overnight. Why stand here? It's cold, I hadn't worn a coat, I'm hungry, and I want to be writing. Any other time, and I'd have been having a major freak-out. This is my car, man. This is my LIFE. Right now, it's a meaningless distraction from writing. Writing. Xanax for the unmedicated. Despite what I just said about tedium, I did go out with Sandy last night to see Mulholland Drive and it was not tedious or wasted. It was a fabulous night, and I was happy girl. The movie is wack. That's all I've got to say. Or, actually, I said a lot but I said it to Sandy. I thought it was pretty funny that for a movie that made no freakin' sense whatsoever, it generated about an hour's worth of chat between us as we said, "Oh, and that scene where--" Etc. Each scene alone is truly amazing; altogether, though...wack. Favorite scene: the early office scene, with the black book. I'll say no more. Just fucking hysterical. I really should not have found it so funny, but, oh god. Okay. I need to go write. Episode one (don't go there) is coming along (knock on wood, propitiate the demon gods who watch over authors with narrowed eyes) and I hope to finish it by the end of the weekend (knock, I say, you demons, knock knock). posted 1.25.2002 @ 6:09pm -- right-click here to grab a link 10 Random Things About Me 1) I am adopted. 2) When I was about nine or so, I got so angry at my mother that I swept out, heading to the garage in a furious stride, stretching up my hand to slam the storm door open, except the door was locked for a change, and my arm went through the glass with a powerful smack. Blood! Glass! Woo hoo! I had a piece of glass the size of a chiclet in my arm for about a year, just under the skin, and I used to make myself faintly queasy but fascinated (usually while distracting myself from class) by poking it around. Finally, one day, it hit my mom that I had a piece of freakin' glass in my arm! and she took me to the doctor and had it taken out. 3) Two things I have quit: I used to be a big Diet Pepsi drinker. A two-liter a day. Big Gulps a necessity for any car drive over thirty minutes. Then one day about seven years ago I just looked at the stuff in my fridge and went gah! And stopped cold turkey. I have a soda now maybe once every other month, usually when I get a root beer craving--except, of course when I cut whisky with soda. Which is another good reason to stop that too. The other thing: caffeine. Almost two years ago now. Went from quad-shot lattes to decaf. The first week: HELL ON EARTH. But that too shall pass. I only drink caffeine incidentally now, when I drink soda...with whisky. Which is another good reason to stop that too. 4) I read Sybil when I was ten. Three times. I wanted to be a multiple personality. 5) I learned how to hard-code html at work, about three years ago, not long after I joined the company, even though it had nothing to do with my job description. This guy Ashley ("Ashley is a boy's name") taught it to me in thirty seconds. He said, "Look, here: you make the html tag, you make the body tag. You type in a word: there's your text. You save the file in unix. Now you have an html file. And look, here's how you make that word a link. If you want to do more, check out this how-to page. Mess around. It's really simple." This man became a deity to me. He was self-taught. He wasn't paid to help; he just mentored by nature. He made difficult things simple, and made you believe you could do them. You'd come up to him with a question about how to do something, fumbling around, and he'd squint and question you back intelligently as he tried to cut through to what you meant, and then he'd utter the most beautiful catchphrase ever: "Oh, that's easy." And then he'd show you how to do it. Aside from all of that, he was a beautiful guy with a sneaky, wacky grin and holy-lunatic eyes; a cynic and a misanthrope and a long-haired shitkicker; and a gadfly whose on-the-job quest it was to educate everyone around him--both from generosity and from anger at how ignorance impacted our customers. I feel the need to say, "Dude." 6) I was a gifted child and skipped two grades, second and eleventh, to graduate at a young sixteen, after which I promptly began wasting my life. In my senior year of high school I spent a winter semester at an art program at Phillips Academy in Andover, a fancy prep school where they send Kennedys. I met a princess. My sophisticated housemates hated me. I sprained my ankle midway through the term and had to hobble around in three-foot snowdrifts on crutches. Blowing out of one world and into this other one, I felt very much like the protagonist of The Secret History. And then I went home to suburbia, to cultivate an envy of the rich who, oddly, even in Andover were sometimes crammed in four to a room on crappy metal bunk beds. 7) My first slash fandom was Star Trek. I had Kirk-and-Spock fantasies going from age thirteen. However, my first real story was a long, unfinished work in progress with Spock and a Klingon OMC, "Kev." There was sexual obsession, kidnapping, noble slavery, non-consensual sex, and the wearing of luxurious silks. It was all very tawdry and thankfully much has been lost to the decay of floppy discs. 8) My second boyfriend had a somewhat annoying laugh and little love handles, but he looked sort of like John Lennon at his cutest, and I told myself to ignore the flaws. I was such a girl. Once, for a date, I made a gift basket. It included his favorite German beers and cookies. Moving on now. 9) Jobs I held when I was a young slacker: Burger King drone, Crabtree & Evelyn counter girl, J.C. Penny's janitress-slash-stockgirl, short-order cook, night-shift diner waitress, pawn shop Jill-of-all-trades. I used to know how to give a rough appraisal of diamonds and how to determine gold karat. 10) I was born in the Year of the Rooster. "The sign of the Rooster indicates a person who is hard-working and definite about their decisions. Roosters are not afraid to speak their minds and can therefore sometimes come across as boastful. They make good restaurant owners and world travellers." That really says it all about me, I think. Restaurant owner and world traveller. Please take this insight into my personality and do with it what you will. posted 1.25.2002 @ 12:26am -- right-click here to grab a link
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