bironic

I know it would be healthier to reduce my need for external validation, but today a professor who's famous in his field gave my work an extended compliment, and I hadn't realized how much I needed that.

The Vampire Lestat graphic novel adaptation from 1991 has a lot of well-muscled bare male butts. Like, a lot. It is quite funny at this ~halfway point how often they appear on page. I am glad the illustrator got to linger on what he enjoyed. (I can only assume.)

The anticipated post-travel, post-move mood crash has arrived. I have been feeling sad a lot, and flat a lot, and for most of the last month I've woken up after a full night's sleep feeling like I haven't rested. Plus side: I've been churning through books and listening to music, and I watched a couple of TV seasons. Minus side: That's because the day-to-day often feels empty and my compulsive tendencies are kicking up -- I play the songs on repeat, and the books are driven by a perhaps unhealthy need to fill out my Bingo card for the local friend group's fall reading challenge. And I may be overcompensating at social gatherings by talking too much? Filters lowered? Not sure.

Could be a simple hormone/meds thing. TBD at a doctor's appointment tomorrow.

Season 3 of True Detective was good. Maybe not as smart as it tried to be with its braided-timeline format and memory theme, but still good. I haven't seen the earlier seasons despite high praise for season 1, but Michael Greyeyes had a small role in this one and it looked like each season stands alone, so I started here. Mahershala Ali's performance was as great as people said. Co-star Stephen Dorff alternated between looking like Dennis Quaid, Jack Nicholson and someone else I've already forgotten. Christian Slater, maybe.

Is dipping back in to the old Vampire Chronicles love to blame for how, in the middle of the meeting with that professor today, I took in his shorter-cut salt-and-pepper hair and new beard and tried to articulate what it evoked in me and realized the word I sought was "sexy"? These are moments that make me think "gray ace" is more like "het in hibernation." Except it isn't like I would act on it, even if he weren't unavailable. So back to wondering.

At fanworks last month, bethofalltrades gifted me one of her Space Ace pins. She remembered the last time I posted a glancing reference to the question. That meant a lot. Also: space.

I watched the Deep Space Nine documentary on DVD. I'd expected it to elicit deep feelings about the show and what it was like to watch it for the first time. Instead, I mostly felt distaste at listening to and learning more about the bunch of dislikeable straight white dudes who ran the show. It hadn't sunk in until then just how straight-white-dude the whole thing was. They did so much I loved loved loved, yet it also explains many of the show's shortcomings. They don't seem to have internalized any lessons about the value of diversity in the intervening years, given, for example, the proportion of dude fans they gave screen time to, most of the women fans having been relegated to the section about being grateful for Kira and Dax. The writers' brainstorm about a season eight plot managed to make me glad they never produced one. They also didn't spend enough time on most topics, even though the whole thing ran almost two hours. Too broad a scope for that, I suppose. But it was nice to see the cast, filmed not long after ignazwisdom and I saw them at the NYC con; Armin Shimerman remains a class act; Alexander Siddig remains unfairly handsome; Andy Robinson is obviously glad to be able to declare the carnal nature of Garak's interest in Bashir to all who will listen; and it provided some amusing anecdotes, such as how Avery Brooks socked Marc Alaimo while they were filming their fire cave fight and Alaimo had to go to the hospital in full Dukat makeup.

We got a new director at work this month, out of the blue. Within a few hours, boss's boss gone, new temporary person in place. It remains unclear whether boss's boss got promoted or put out to pasture in her new role until retirement. Either way, we all know the temporary person and she is great. Already, things are improving. It's amazing what good management looks like after six years of... not that.

My favorite poem so far from this collection of Joy Harjo's poetry -- How We Became Human, 1975-2002 -- is called "Grace." I am forever a sucker for prose poems that sound like sestinas. Here is the text, and here is Harjo performing it.

This is a weird post. Hm.

Feeling

I need a vacation. I just want to sit in a room that is not mine for a few days and work on stories and let my mind wander without having to yank it back to take care of responsibilities. That’s what last month’s trip to my mom’s hotel in Worcester was supposed to provide, except I ended up needing to work. Now I keep going to the office and not really doing anything.

The silly part is that the only thing stopping me from taking time off is planning it.

Doing

My favorite college friend, R., is in town for a few days. We spent a good chunk of the weekend together. Due to a couple of near misses, we hadn’t met since 2015, and not in Boston since the year before that. I was all nerves leading up to dinner on Saturday, in part because he has "succeeded" more than me on multiple fronts and I do not have great self-esteem these days, in part because I’ve always had half a crush on him and want to make sure he still likes me too, and in part because it was a certain time of the month when anxiety peaks no matter what’s going on—but, to my great relief, I was reminded within the first few minutes that there’s a reason we became friends 17 years ago (!) and remain so now. He makes conversation easy, albeit with a hint of the know-it-all one-upmanship that tinges a lot of the relationships I had at school and still have with some coworkers. I was reminded once again that his life isn’t perfect either, and it matters a lot to me that he is comfortable talking about the challenges and disappointments we are dealing with as well as sharing joy in the things that are going well.

In any case, we ate interesting Italian/Peruvian fusion, enjoyed a breezy boat ride out to the Boston Harbor Islands, had a picnic, walked around some of the new developments on the waterfront despite being two very pale people in the summer sun, and talked a lot. <3

Later this week there will be dinner with a former coworker and a Star Trek-themed burlesque show with friends.

Writing

Zahn McClarnon characters continue to rev my creative engines.

750 words and counting of Hanzee/Constance (Fargo TV show, season two)
+ 2,240 Mathias/OFC (Longmire)
+ 1,940 Mike/Rachel and Kopus/Rachel (The Red Road)
+ 670 Zachariah/Pia/Lemuel (Midnight, Texas)
= 5,600 words since the beginning of July. \o/

Nothing is finished yet, and based on past experience, I’m worried about losing momentum and leaving everything incomplete. Even so, as maralenenok said last week, words is words, and as I said in reply, I’m pleased with how all four stories depict very different characters and have different structures and narrative voices.

Vidding

Planning three vids; waiting to see which gets started first.

Festivids approaches. I’m pondering requests old and new. The other day, I spur-of-the-moment gathered links to all the Longmire vids I could find on YouTube & the AO3 to confirm there aren’t too many for it to qualify.

Watching

Re: the above, I’ve been going through more of Zahn’s film & TV catalog and taking notes. In the last… week, OMG, I have seen or skimmed:

Fargo: Year Two - surprisingly engaging
Searchers 2.0 - golfing outfit!
Bone Tomahawk - dapper suit and walking stick, but only one scene
The Son - tiresome and cliché-ridden but at least he had a sizeable role

Started Into the West last night, also a skim. Spielberg tries to capitalize on the success of Dances with Wolves with a miniseries in the mid-’90s ETA: 2005, wow, the music and casting definitely feel a decade earlier. (Skeet Ulrich?!) So Zahn McClarnon was my current age when he filmed it.

Movie theater-wise, got together with various friend clusters to see Crazy Rich Asians, which was excellent, and Mission Impossible: Fallout, made by people who’ve mastered the art of the mainstream action film and more enjoyable than any James Bond movie I’ve seen. So many other movies to see; I keep running out of time.

Reading

Has been slow this past little while. Partly because I’ve wanted to do other things and partly because of the books themselves, I think. Right now I’m halfway through Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead, which is fascinating in its combination of carnality and lyricism.

Thinking

About how, despite what roundup posts like this imply, I can write OR vid OR watch a lot of movies OR plow through a lot of books OR do in-depth media reviews OR go full-tilt at work OR be very social OR do everything I’m supposed to do food- and activity-wise to manage my health condition… but not more than one, maybe two, at a time. Thirty-six years old and I’m finally learning to accept the need for priorities and compromises and moderation instead of fighting against it, and to admit that I am not a machine running at 100 percent efficiency, and to see the rise and fall of different categories over the months as something that keeps life interesting rather than a flaw.

I do recognize the privileges that allow me to have even this much spare time and, more or less, the energy to do something with it. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m not sad about not being able to do all the things, always.

Hwooof, that was a tough week, but this weekend was the best that's happened in a while, so all's well that ends well, I guess.

(It was just a trough of stress. Political stuff, work stuff, probably body chemistry stuff. I am finally getting started with seeing a therapist and then I missed an appointment because I was so discombobulated I thought it was the next day. I had never missed a doctor's appointment before. I felt so stupid until deelaundry said a kind thing that hadn't occurred to me: When I said, "I look like a flake," she countered with, "You look like someone who needs help." Self-compassion is a thing it would be nice to learn.)

The good stuff:

Socializing: In support of this year's goal to get together more often with friends I like to talk to and/or want to get to know better, a few of us went to a play yesterday and had a satisfying coffee shop chat afterwards, and then I accepted an unexpected invitation to another blossoming friend's low-key Superbowl dinner. All good.

The play was called Trans Scripts, a synthesis/melding of interviews with trans women from the US/UK/Aus. It was elegant, illuminating and well acted -- two cast members were particularly strong -- although I thought it faltered in a few spots when it shifted from "showing" through anecdotes to plain proselytizing. marginaliana wrote up some of her thoughts.

A phone conversation the previous night:

95-year-old grandpa: Oh! I didn't expect you to be home on a Saturday night. I thought you'd be out with your friends.
Me: No, I'm boring. Well, I'm going to see a play tomorrow, but it's a matinee.
Grandpa: Oh, yeah? What is it about?
Me, bracing myself: It's based on interviews with transgender women about their lives.
Grandpa: Oh. You know, there's this woman I know from the temple, who lives with another woman, and it turns out they're--what do you call it--lesbians? Lesbians?
Me: Mm-hm!
Grandpa: So that's very interesting! I just knew them as women from the temple, you know.

#NotAllGrandpas

Doing: Had a computer-free day Saturday involving a mall run, errands and two movies. In addition to some necessaries for work and winter weather, I treated myself to a grommet-studded cut-out shirt that I probably won't wear anywhere but at home and Club Vivid (because I am me) but love anyway.

Reading: Was delighted by Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vols 1-2: plucky, witty, metatextual, intertextual, often involved the defusing of supervillainy through psychology/sympathy rather than fisticuffs. The '80s horror of Paper Girls turns out to be not as much my aesthetic, although the introduction of overlapping timestreams in vol. 2 is getting interesting.

Watching: Saw Moonlight and Lion. Loved the first and really liked the second; cried through them both; my heart aches for Chiron. Hope to see I Am Not Your Negro and Hidden Figures this week. Catching up on what I missed in Dec-Jan when too much else was going on.

Vidding: I remain in the planning stages of the two auction vids, and am figuring out if I can make the multifandom Club Vivid vid I've been preparing since the fall or if it'll need to wait another year. I watched all the festivids -- slim masterlist this year, half the usual total -- but haven't commented on any or recced any here because I'm afraid the gaps would give away what I made, and the thought of doing fake comments/recs to throw off the scent makes me tired. I'll probably just post the rec list after reveals.

Cooking: A pleasurable week is in store of chicken breast and goat cheese sandwiches for lunch and stuffed cabbage for dinner. Also, the supermarket was selling chocolate-covered banana chips, which I didn't know was a thing but I am all over it, mm. Banana chips were such a treat when I was a kid.

I've been feeling weird these last few days. Current events? Inexplicable insomnia? Hormones? The anxiety of returning to "real life" after a 9-day break? All of the above? Who knows. I had a sort-of-nightmare the other morning and have been skirting the edge of That Feeling at bedtime, which I should write about again one of these days.

(I've done some reading since that last post and found some similarities to my experience in descriptions of the auras that can precede temporal lobe seizures, although I don't have seizures. Even if it's not the same as what's been happening to me, I did derive comfort from hearing that one of the features of the psychic/experiential components of such auras is that they're hard to describe. The only consistent trigger pattern I've been able to piece together is a combination of exhaustion and exposure to some media manifestation of raw male sexuality that elicits an attraction-repulsion response, but why the phenomenon doesn't occur every time those factors coincide remains a mystery.)

This time, it was set off by the hair of a low-budget Fabio-type guy in an, er, adult video clip. Last time, May 2016, it happened while hearing the opening lines of "I Found" by Amber Run as the long-haired actor in the music video* got out of the car and opened the front door to the house. See also: Yul Brynner in the dream sequence in Futureworld, Maman coming into the room in one particular scene in Slumdog Millionaire, Guy Pearce's face in part of elipie's haunting On My Way Home (Two Brothers) vid, the chorus of Linkin Park's "Castle of Glass," all the examples in the previous post…

*warning: kidnapping.

Okay, I guess I'm writing about it now and not later. :)

ETA: Hmmmmmmm, on further reading it sounds like "aura" for temporal lobe epilepsy can mean the experience preceding a complex partial seizure (loss of consciousness, twitching/lip smacking, language difficulty, etc.) OR the description of a simple partial seizure/focal seizure itself. So maybe the latter is what is going on?? How nice it would be to put a term to this.

ETA 2: Follow-up post