I had a dream last night that I went to work and people were like "oh can't wait to see you in the concert at 6!" and I was like wuhbuh? and the cafe where I work was in my high school, and yep I had a small group piece in my high school choir that I didn't know about and was expected to perform! So I had to get coverage for the choir piece and also for the work I was going to be missing. 


Sounds like a stress dream! and I'm sure that the two hour fiasco of trying to get my own sick day covered has nothing to do with it.

I got three things from stultiloquentia that I may or may not have anything to say about.

1. Pine cones
Twoish years ago I put some pinecones in a glass mixing bowl with a fat white candle in the middle for a nondenominational decorative display near the front door and it was p nice.

2. Opera
In high school my choir sang a Phantom of the Opera medley and I was briefly obsessed, listened to the soundtrack all the time, but still have only a tenuous grasp on the actual plot because when I rented the 2004 movie from the library it was scratched. Who's Raoul? At this rate I'll probably never know and I'm fine with that.

3. Dumplings
One of my own personal best-of-nyc things is this dumpling place on the border of the LES and Chinatown that was a fiveish minute walk from the first place I lived here. Delicious amazing dumplings, sesame pancake sandwiches, won ton soup, and hypothetically some other stuff but those are the only three things I've ever bothered to get. It used to be a dollar for four of the basic dumplings, sometimes up to three dollars for the fancy ones, and there was a night when my credit union account was out of cash but I didn't have my other bank card yet, but I had the quarters from the pun jar* and I went over and that was dinner, and it was just what I needed. Of course it's gone up because NYC, so now I get to also feel like a cranky old timer because it's like, $2 now and if you go to the other location it's more gripe gripe.
*the pun jar was like a swear jar except you had to put in money when you made a pun. it was the opposite of a deterrant.

Eating there is always a little crazy, because it's counter service and there are always way more people than can possibly sit and eat. Some favorite moments are when I was sharing a 4-top table with a couple on a date and another stranger with no food just hanging out on her phone, while I scarfed soup like a gremlin in all my winter layers. Another time I sat across from a stranger and we were both passing the big bottles of sauces back and forth while studiously ignoring one another's presence. One day after the Saint Patrick's parade when a bunch of loudly drunken Long Islanders were there and wasted a ton of food and didn't bus their own tables, and the collective silent disapproval of bystanders.

They also sell these dumplings frozen to cook at home! It used to be something crazy like $10 for a bag of 50. But I've had them in my freezer basically at all times here, no matter how inconvenient it is to get there during their hours. I will miss these dumplings if/when I move elsewhere.




If you want to play I will give you three things in a comment :)

Unfuckingpopular opinion but: what if when talking about things that affect women’s bodies, we took the same perspective that is brought up to explain Black Lives Matter? Which is that we’re not saying other lives/bodies don’t matter, or aren’t affected by the same or similar issues, we’re just focusing for now on a particular experience. Which is culturally and legislatively under active threat and which has an ever present and specific soulgrinding effect on the group in question.

Most people having this conversation know and can tell that saying BLM is not excluding everybody else, and that making that argument is both racist and missing the point. So why is my insta feed 50% people calling out/friendly reminding that saying “woman” is bad and exclusive.

Disclaimer: I’m white
Disclaimer: I’m used to and expect abortion to be under threat because I was a teenager for the Bush years. I’m not used to and can’t really handle this particular constant gender discourse because it makes me feel crazy.

Umbrella Academy spoilers! Lots of them! 90% spoilers by volume. Two posts imported from tumblr and squished together.

But first:
[turns out I can't get a regular size screenshot to show up larger than 40 pixels wide so: pretend this is a screenshot of a tumblr post that says "tempted to become an english professor just so i can have “characters are not autonomous living creatures: they are reflections of an author’s perceptions and beliefs about the world” permanently written on the blackboard in all caps underlined and circled apprx 200 times for emphasis."]


Okay. Le'ts go.




anyone else notice how neither sister says a single word in the last episode?

didn’t want to put it in tags because they don’t get blacklisted but: out of the named characters, the only women who speak are the handler (shot midsentence) and Agnes (who has spent the rest of the 9th and 10th episodes bound and gagged, and only speaks to reassure the guy that she’s still dtf). I think Cha Cha might have a line but I’d have to check. Mombot is sedately and smilingly trapped in a collapsing building. Unnamed dying wife speaks, to reassure a man and tell him to go on without her. ETA: they also did an Emotionally Significant frame of the detective who was pretty objectively fridged. so technically she is named and in this episode and also does not speak.

and yet Luther, most annoying of them all, runs his mouth constantly and is wrong every single time

***

So I misremembered at least one major detail - Vanya does speak to Pogo - but she does spend most of the episode cryptically silent. There’s also a chunk of time in the penult episode where she’s speaking and pleading when she’s locked up but we- like her siblings outside- can’t hear her.

I really feel like fairly suddenly, between episodes 9 and 10, she stops being a person or character and becomes a Macguffin.

Like, why does she start to destroy everything? The house, sure, that’s clear, and everyone else has had their shot by now anyway. For a while she’s clearly in control of the manifestation of her powers - rides the bus without incident, flips the car but only the car, smiles and keeps playing when she sees Allison came to her performance. I can guess at an in-universe reason for her going full Dark Willow but it would be a guess because I really feel like there’s no clue at all from Vanya’s actions, and she doesn’t tell us. It feels like the writers needed something to blow up and worked backwards from there, because I don’t think even a callous Vanya is evil or heartless.

(For a show underpinned by a premise of child neglect, it’s weirdly unsympathetic to kids lashing out against the abusive authority figures in their lives. Vanya killed several nannies as a child and received more rigidity and an authority who was unkillable. Leonard killed his abuser and that’s how you know he’s completely cuckoopants evil - he’s the one who’s whispering in Vanya’s ear about how it's okay when it's self defense. It’s a grimdark kind of world so of course no one says hey maybe let’s not abuse these kids. But the *show* seems to say that this kid who reacts in fairly age- and situation-appropriate ways but has powers at her disposal was definitely evil all along if not for the drugs holding her back. And the part where she completely wrecks the home she grew up in and then takes the bus to the thing she was scheduled for sure looks like any-coping-in-crisis to me.)

What happened to Vanya who missed her brother when he disappeared? Vanya who kept trying to talk to her siblings even when she got shut down? Is this a point about her being alone and having no one to speak *to*? Was Leonard the last straw? She shows grief and regret when she thinks she killed Allison. So it’s not just the suppressers either.

On a meta level a lot of the show involves people not talking to each other. (I think it’s interesting how no-cell-phones plays with this.) And a lot of people barging ahead with poor decisions because they’re stubborn, or proud, or judging the person who told them, or not listening. Miscommunication and talking/not talking/talking past is a big thing. And the way they use the time travel certainly leads to some self-fulfilling prophecies - they think Vanya is the cause, so they make her do the thing they were trying to prevent. Partial knowledge of the future is what leads to that future. Sure. Everything is Unintended Consequences. Classic!

A whole season about being emotionally stuck in the patterns of the past (manifested in variously literal ways) and now they’re physically going back to that past.





Other miscellaneous opinions:
The way that Allison, Klaus, and Vanya have mental/emotional powers and are the women and the gay sibling. The three brothers whose powers we see in action (excepting Ben, though I think he would fit this too) are very mechanical - Diego point, knife go shcwick. But A, K, and V have to come to terms with their powers in ways that the others don’t - Vanya and Klaus have their powers suppressed by drugs at the beginning but not the end (and wow the layer of moralizing real world psych drugs and addiction even tho I don’t disagree). Plus Allison isn’t using her powers because she depended on them too much. But Five? Any downsides are mainly situational, like an unfortunate coincidence rather than a part of the power itself. And Diego’s and Luther’s are barely commented on - it’s clear that Diego’s shitty Batman aesthetic is separate from his powers, but that distinction isn’t clear for the three feminized chars. I’m not sure what Luther’s power even was before he got dummy thicc.

Klaus scenes are like straight out of kink bingo. Tied up and confessing feelings. The drugs keep away the literal ghosts. Shaving and crying. He's five tropes in a trenchcoat and each of them feel like the ones designed to specifically fuck me up, except I think that's everyone's experience of this character. He was like, mined from our collective subconscious, but what boggles me is that it feels like Gerard Way probably installed like 50% of those things in my cohort's id anyway so it's just... very recursive.

Things Which Needs Done

Time sensitive!:

• Apply for vet care credit card. It's just paperwork. It'll be fine.
• Call stupid insurance to get stupid dentist lined up.
• Make an appointment with the dentist.
• That One Work Email, if possible, if program decides to function

technically not as time sensitive but gotta happen:

• Primary care doctor rigamarole. Maybe supposedly-dead tooth hurts because sinus malfunction. Wouldn't be unheard of
• pick travel dates for May. book tickets. the exact days always end up being fine, there will be an adequate amount of time, it'll be fine.
• start the crochet project, also needs to be relatively complete by May. I don't think this will take a long time or be hard once I get started but the prospect is feeling daunting. it's a gift for my dad. so.

good things I can do as rewards, tho tbh I'm not sure this is an effective mechanism for me:

• latest talks machina should be on youtube by now
• put the fanmix on 8tracks, at least this preliminary version. write out commentary and such. see if people put fanmix links and liner notes on ao3? I'd like a home for them, and mixes are the main way I ~create~ for/participate in fandom, and I'd like to share them with people.
• make candy cookies? in a way that is as gluten free as possible. maybe use lactaid to share with moar friends.

since there's a new TRC book coming out, and also some anti-anti stuff on my dash, two things about fic that's technically about teenagers:

1. you know how on tv, nearly all teenagers are played by actors comfortably in their 20's? it's like that. not only are they not real teenagers in that they're literally fictional, the narrativity required to write or tell a story elides a lot of things. TV teenagers are so not like actual teenagers, just like jim and pam from the office probably aren't so much like your real coworkers. something about the process of fictionalizing through writing, which is so dependent on multiple imaginations, probably functions as an age-up machine for most people.

1.5: it's wild how developmentally different 13 is from 15 is from 17. I don't spend a lot of time with teenagers IRL right now, but when I did it was also so very obvious where they were in their lives. and yet, when I was 16, about half of my friends had had sex already! some of them by like, 14. which is crazy to me from this side of 20.

2. even with the above in place, the experience of reading first time fic or whatever is just so much more about myself as a teenager and reflecting on what that was like from a set of first person memories. has anyone said yet that it's child abuse to like, remember or talk about your own experiences as a young person? I really value fics where characters are at different places with being ready for an experience, or are unsure about it, and I feel like those get mapped onto younger characters. (on adults I think people tend to write it as ace-spectrum or trauma or as part of a trope/plot choice, but those are different things)

2.5: it's important to talk about abuse but it's also important for teens to be able to have sexualities. it was important to me. extremely conflicted and not a terribly positive set of experiences but that's life eh. it's a weird abstinencey thing to pretend otherwise. yes adults need to have boundaries because teens are not necessarily capable of doing so. but also I think it's kind of important for teenagers to be able to... choose to access stuff they're not technically supposed to? there's a BIG difference between actively grooming/exposing a young person, and leaving explicit materials where they could possibly access it if that's what they want to do. who amongst us never clicked that they were 18 before it was the case.



I do have a pet peeve that borders on a squick tho - when a writer is trying to communicate like, unexpectedly/disproportionately quick arousal or refractory period, and they say it's like being a teenager (again) etc. or even the opposite; like a character in their 40's saying "hey slow down I'm not a teenager anymore". nope. I don't know why, if it's the frequency of that specific comparison across fandoms or what, but while tongues ~battling for dominance~ is cliche it's not squick.

consciously, it feels weirdly hypersexualizing and overgeneralizing. but regardless it jars me out of the scene every time. even "making out like teenagers" is borderline for me, unless there's a specific angle there.

sending vibes out into the internet ether: pls to find a different, more descriptive/evocative way of saying that thing you're trying to say. love, chickie.

Having a January birthday feels like getting a second whack at all the New Year's stuff - reflection! goals/ideas!

This year I would like to:

• Go back to the gym in a way I enjoy - I used to like my gym routine in grad school, I liked the way I felt afterwards, but there's an activation energy of getting into it and talking myself into paying for it. I also need to really commit to my physical therapy *before* any gym possibility, because otherwise I will just get hurt again. Step one: do your PT.
• Read one book each month. This hasn't happened yet this month, tho I did read a 240k Dragon Age fanfiction. There's still a few days though, and what better excuse than a birthday weekend + the Anciliary Justice ebook arriving on my phone.
• See a play. I live in New York City. I'd like to see the gay Oklahoma casting that's apparently coming to Broadway. Enter some lotteries.
• Get a new job. This was a goal last year, and I did it, and turns out this job isn't any better, and I've known that for oh, 8 months. Applying is extremely hard. Gotta do it anyway.
• I'd like to write the Teen Monster Breakfast Club one-shot I've been thinking of since, oh, September. I'd like to take a crack at writing fanfiction. I'm totally paralyzed by intertia and decisions and perfectionism on these fronts.
• I'd like to buy a premade adventure and run it for a group. I'd like to go back to contra dancing (see: PT) and to the Captain Awkward meetup and to the queer RPG night at my local game store.
• I want to go to ComicCon this year. Last year I didn't care until the week of and then I REALLY REALLY wanted to go. Plan this time.
• I'd like to knit a garment and a pair of socks.

I know these are not yet ~actionable~ goals, mostly. 


I had a lot of shower thoughts and therapy talk towards the end of 2018 about just... being fucking braver or more resilient than I think I am, or than the people around me. Starting an awkward conversation, or taking myself to the doctor, or letting work drama roll off. Moving through the cycles of my emotional landscape, what I can tolerate, what needs attention. At this point things that used to be crisis are at least familiar enough to be workable... which means it's time to go back to work on them in a slow way and not a fires-everywhere way.

the thing about monsterhearts - one of the things - is that despite the safe hearts inset I don't think it's capable of adequately handling the kind of material it is designed to bring up. specifically: as written, it's a game about monsters as teen allegory, and also deeply about sexuality. I feel like it's got some praise for explicitly including queerness in the mechanics - in that if you roll to turn someone on and succeed on your roll, it happens regardless of what you thought your character was into.

except... as written you can't opt out of the sex mechanics, and when I think about when *I* was a teenager, I was not ready and I knew it. and I spent a lot of time and energy trying to explain and convince and redirect my high school boyfriend. and all the convincing didn't fucking work anyway! and it stings that I want to play a campy queer teen monster game but I can't play this one because of gendered trauma.

sidenote: in my d&d group there's a little bit of a persistant issue with dudes who make edgy aggressive characters, and then play those characters to the hilt because it's just a fun game! except as that has to date included them roleplaying sexually harassing my character repeatedly, intimidating her, ignoring when she doesn't want an NPC murdered... and therefore just running roughshod over my enjoyment of this game because even though they don't get it, by proxy they are sexually harassing *me*. I know it's a problem but idk what to do about it, and that's in a bog standard d&d game, without any explicit mechanics about sex and desire. I resent that I would have to vet and curate three trusted close friends to play MH... and actually, when I *did* that, the one time I played, we were all burnt out after the session and the next session never materialized.

I think that's another thing - this game talks good game about gender but is surprisingly uninterested in gender dynamics? and how much and deeply gender affects relationships and sexual thoughts? I want this game to be For Me but the more I think about it the more it's... not.

I wrote a related post on tumblr a while ago that's relevant and also that I don't want to lose to the depths of the untagged archive:


I just want to play a Buffy analog is that too much to ask