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Trivial Pursuit
I continue to worry my poorly capped tooth. The adhesive cement appears to be very strong, though, as it has not popped off. Interesting entry on point-of-view in Jintian's blog. If I recall, it inspired a few thoughts in my head around noon today, but now, at seven p.m., they seem to be gone. I think it was that nap I had. Two days to Escapade. But, almost more importantly (oh, who am I kidding: more importantly), one day to the new Buffy ep. Feral Anna growls at you as she paces protectively in front of her TV set and throws gnawed bones down as offerings before the Gods of Good Cable Reception. Good news on jury duty: I get paid for up to two weeks, and most trials are apparently no more than two days. Also, I never said, but my car turned out to be okay...for now. And my window even rolls down again. (I think that was a cold weather thing.) Somehow, despite sleeping almost all weekend I am nearing the halfway mark on my next story. It has felt like more of a struggle than usual, mostly due to tiredness, I guess. Weird, though, because it is the most completely plotted story so far--before I began writing, I mean. I am also starting to angst more about the backstory. This alt.season would have made more emotional sense if it had been season seven, I think. But I wanted a buffer of time, so that I didn't get caught up in trying to second-guess myself with the second half of season six. In my head, I fill in gaps, but the backstory hasn't been front-loaded yet--it's visible only to me here in my imagination; and even so, I'm not sure how well it works. Oh well. I'm kind of stuck with that aspect of it, even though it protracts the Spuffy relationship rather strangely. I have the vague feeling that Noxon, Whedon, et al, will rev up that ship in the next dozen odd eps, and skim ahead past my own slower craft. And some of the stuff I'm writing, I realize, feels right for where they are now, but maybe not eighteen months from now--like that whole (spoiler) beating (/spoiler) thing I wrote, which pretty much got Jossed that same night. It makes their relationship, as I'm writing it, seem sort of static and stalled, puts Buffy at risk for seeming less insightful, perhaps, Spike more of a masochist. I justify it to myself in my head by saying...well, different things that actually don't matter unless it works dramatically. And maybe would work best if someday I wrote the missing thirty-odd eps between "Gone" and "Lion Shall Lie" (HA HA HA) and made actual sense of things. We'll see how that goes. And, hey, if you agree with me that there's lameness, no need to write and mention that, by the way. We'll just take that as read, 'kay? Groovy. 'Cause. You know. I'm fucking fragile and all, and I've got at least twenty more stories to write. I can only accept the presence of huge honkin' flaws right now if I'm the one pointing them out to myself. And I'm putting my neck on the line here, I guess. I can't pretend anymore that I'm just talking to myself in my blog. I actually kinda miss that sometimes, narcissistic twit that I am. This is yet another one of our many trivial and self-asorbed broadcasts from Anna's brain, brought to you by Weetabix, Twinings English Breakfast Tea, and the American Red Cross. posted 2.11.2002 @ 8:09pm -- right-click here to grab a link notes from a grubby envelope intelligent thief & con
posted 2.09.2002 @ 3:57pm -- right-click here to grab a link "stiff foam, only more moo" I described to the barista how I wanted my wet cappuccino, and she wrote this on my sleeve. I was amused. Other trivia from this morning: made an appointment to get a pre-con haircut. Feel I'll regret it, but the poofy hair I'm getting...no. Just, no. And my landlord has not received my rent check, though it should've gone out Monday. I knocked out some things today that I said I would: confirmed with United that I do have an e-ticket, and not just empty pixels on a screen. Checked my credit cards, took some cash out of the bank. Realized, on the downside, how poor I am and how little I can afford this, especially this time of year when I have to go through car renewal, and the obligatory charade of emissions reduction work. Not to mention two expensive crowns that will probably be going on my Discover card, thus maxing it out. Fuck this shitty hand-to-mouth existence. Blog as behavioral mechanism: I said I wouldn't drink this month and sort of forgot about Escapade. I'd rather be the tipsy fun girl than the pre-menstrual psychotic. And yet having made the vow semi-publically, I feel more committed to it. Which I guess is a good thing. Despite my increasingly bad mood. Because I hate this time of year. Taxes and car renewal. Paperwork and the fresh realization of poverty. Or that precarious place between subsistance and poverty which is the life of so many single people. And oh, fuck. I just realized one of the bigger reasons for my mood. I'd been blocking it out: jury duty summons, for the Wednesday after my return from Escapade. (And thank god not sooner, because I hadn't checked my mail in weeks, and it so easily could have been this Wednesday. Shudder.) I knew I should never have registered to vote. Bullshit ten dollars a day. I don't think so. Current mood: stay the hell away from me. Save yourselves! posted 2.09.2002 @ 12:11pm -- right-click here to grab a link Escapade, Buffy, Yawp All praise the voice of Spuffy moderation--it's an almost entirely lone cry in the wilderness. I am using the divider lines because my thoughts are discrete, and very small. Went to the dentist yesterday to have prep for a crown. I zoned on OMWF through my headphones for the better part of ninety minutes. It was surprisingly effective, though achieved an ironic Little Shop of Horrors quality at times, as when I tried to listen to Spike's solo over the sound of whining drills. ("You can make me feel...") This temporary crown they gave me sucks. It isn't fitted quite right--there's a protrusion one side, and a tiny gap between crown and tooth that creates a ridge I'm drawn to run my tongue over. It's like having a piece of popcorn stuck in your teeth. I don't think I can take two weeks of this. The effort not to worry it and tongue it will drive me mad, if it doesn't just pop off. Escapade. I think everyone who's going should give a wave in their blogs. Some people did, but that was quite a while ago, and now I'm officially taking names and kicking ass. Or taking names, anyway, of people I might want to meet for five minutes or more. Put faces with names. (And, sadly, allow people to put my dazed, puffy face with the Anna S. brand name.) Quote from Rollo May, "Psychotherapy and the Daimonic," in a Joseph Campbell anthology, "Myths, Dreams, and Religion": "Eros is a daimon," said Diotima, the authority on love among Plato's banqueting friends. The daimonic is correlated with eros rather than libido or sex as such.... When Freud introduced Eros as the opposite to and adversary of libido, i.e., as the force that stood against the death instinct and fought for life, he was using Eros in this way which includes the daimonic. The daimonic fights against death, fights always to assert its own vitality, accepts no 'threescore and ten' or other timetable of life. It is this daimonic which is referred to when we adjure someone seriously ill not to give up the 'fight'.... The daimonic will never take a rational 'no' for an answer.... When I am in a rage, it couldn't matter to me less who I am or who you are; I want only to strike out and destroy you.And: ...[I]t is the woman he goes to bed with who is the evil one, the devil who would castrate him. So he is thereupon impotent, thus castrating himself.And finally: You take in the daimonic which would possess you if you didn't. The one way to get over daimonic possession is to possess it, by frankly confronting it, coming to terms with it, integrating it into the self-system. This process yields several benefits. It strengthens the self because it brings in what had been left out. It overcomes the 'split' which has consisted of the paralyzing ambivalence in the self. And it renders the person more 'human' by breaking down the self-righteousness and aloof detachment that are the usual defenses of the human being who denies the daimonic.Yowza. All within two or three short pages. posted 2.09.2002 @ 8:37am -- right-click here to grab a link Ice Cream It is raining and cold and I went out and had ice cream. And visited a bokstore with many cats, all curled up like furry potato bugs, who sleepily let me pet them. I am just going to be lazy for now and say nothing myself about the recent Buffy ep, except that there's some brilliant commentary out there on "Dead Things," in Vonnie's blog and in Melymbrosia's. And probably elsewhere, but those two stuck in my mind. Wrote a longish entry today on blogging, and list posting, all meta and tedious. Decided not to post it here. Luckily I had a sanity period between the time I wrote it and the opportunity for posting. I will include one of the paragraphs, though: I've actually seen this trend lately--some bloggers right now seem to be riding this high wave of articulate analysis, and others are mentioning that they feel dazed and enfeebled by the wordiness of it all. I'm with the feeble. Even when I natter on about an ep, it's very easy for me to end up feeling that my words were inadequate, because my vague attempts to grapple with ideas are so easily punctured. (Can you puncture a grapple? Yeah, whatever.) The rest, still in the vein of 'my inadequacy,' was even more self-indulgent. And then weirdly, in coincidence, a long thread on blogging started on a list I belong to, breaking down very typically into bloggers versus 'I just don't get it' camps. I shouldn't say 'versus' in perhaps that sense, but there's definitely a lot of resistance and confusion out there--sometimes peppered with paranoia that bloggers are siphoning off fannish energy, a lot of the time mixed up with privacy and TMI hot buttons. I can actually understand the buttons, but not the siphoning. Moving on. Was browsing back through Maren's blog, which I just found, and adore it. Plus everything she writes reminds me of me. Does that make me a narcissist? Yeah. Sure. Speaking of me. My next story does not want to be written tonight. It's gripping the inside of the womb, planting its tiny feet on either side of the exit chute and resisting birth into the world. I have the plot outlined, I've just been unable to get started--in the available period between four-thirty p.m. and now, that is. I think I'm just tired. It bugs me though. I don't want to be tired. Don't want to slow down. My body and psyche are saying take a rest, but because my creative will hates that idea, I don't really get any rest. I get restless. Books I bought tonight: a few on magic and magical creatures, and one on the Holocaust. The latter was a mistake, and I realized it as I sat here and flipped through, reading passages and then stumbling across a horrifying photo that nearly made me cry. There's no way in hell I can use any kind of material like this to creatively inform a Buffy storyline. It's huge and grotesque and inhuman--and all too real. Whatever Naziesque trappings I use for Noir will have to be severed almost completely from historical reality; and I realize now what I want is a mix of pre-war Nazi Germany atmosphere and Vichy France, both safely romanticized for fiction. A delicate balance of demonic evil and stable 'televisual' storytelling. I mean, I knew that already, but I thought I could turn to the source material (notice how euphemistic that is, like 'work camps') and get some ideas. So wrong. I feel unclean now. Somewhere around here on my desk I had a scrap of paper where I'd jotted down blog entries--there was a period of a few days where everyone was just so fucking funny and brilliant I wanted to put up, like, seven or eight links. And now that paper is gone. But I wave to you guys, whoever you were, and strew kudos in front of you. The chocolately kind. posted 2.07.2002 @ 9:35pm -- right-click here to grab a link gah I truly am...horrible. I mean...just a horrible, selfish, lazy excuse for a person and a fan writer. So...I finally felt some volition deep down below the earth's crust tonight, some subterranean stir of focus and will, that made me sift through my inbox for all of the feedback and personal messages I've gotten and never answered. And they date back to late 2000. And...it's just horrible to face up to the fact that I've never answered these. Dear fucking Christ. All those times I zoned on FreeCell when I could have been taking five minutes to answer an e-mail. I just SUCK. Answering them now will be a grindingly painful process, I feel. All these people never getting a reply. And I wonder how many people have written me off as a stuck-up BNF. I was already tired today. Now I feel very much like a catatonic. I've always said I owned my suckage, but now I realize I didn't. I just said that as part of the whole disclaimer thing. Now I feel the suckage, like a big gaping wound, particularly for people who wrote me feedback before I really started disclaiming. I need to...something something. posted 2.06.2002 @ 11:59pm -- right-click here to grab a link Jossed No spoilers here. I feel deeply Jossed tonight, not necessarily in a bad way. {g} I have so much to say--or maybe I just feel so much--about tonight's ep, that I'm really pretty tongue-tied. They are just so fucking fannish, these BtVS folks. It's like watching the best fan-fiction come to life, or that fantasy you had in your head that one day, suddenly played out by the actors. I should just prostrate myself in front of the television set and not get up until the Powers That Be release me, sometime in May. I seriously have no problem envisioning candles and lotus blossoms scattered around my TV set. Good god. My newest story is up. And as, tonight, I weighed my virtual season in one hand and the canonical current season in the other and wondered how the bloody hell I was ever going to reconcile their divergences...I, uh, realized how I was going to reconcile the divergences. That won't be for quite a while. {clearing throat} But I just thought I'd mention it here. In case I someday have to jog my memory. {g} posted 2.05.2002 @ 10:10pm -- right-click here to grab a link Shorty Finally remembered what I wanted to say re Anya versus Spike. Which is just that: Anya has done things for a reason, not as random evil, so you can argue that if she doesn't feel remorse it's because she felt righteous. She had a philosophy of vengeance, which, in truth, is pretty well a cultural norm in many parts of the world. I found myself thinking suddenly of Our Lady of the Assassins, which is not the most noble example of a vengeance philosophy. But anyway. Finished first draft of second episode. Polishing tomorrow...and, er, of course until whenever it's done. Not-really-spoilery thoughts on tonight's Angel: WTF was that mutant growth on Cordy's head? And dear god, Angel honey: gel meets hairbrush. It's not that hard. But my chief thought, after it all ended was: You know, James Marsters would be a generous man indeed if he tithed one-tenth of his vocal modulation and one-tenth of his facial expressiveness to the Actors Guild, which resources could then, in turn, be donated anonymously to the *cough* DavidBoreanz *cough* needy. It's a shame, a crying shame, when the ballerina acts better than the star, isn't it, crumbcake? Oh, but can I say, with just a total boastful moment, that I predicted, one beat before it was uttered, Angel's line about pastries. Word for word. And in front of witnes--er, friends! Perhaps one of the top ten moments of my fannish life. Heh...okay, that's kinda sad. posted 2.05.2002 @ 12:22am -- right-click here to grab a link
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