there will be a fish

Guess who has two thumbs and a concussion.

Dear Brain,

What the fuck. I gave you a really awesome massage and an early bedtime to catch up on missed sleep, and you gave me back 10 hours of stress-dreams and seriously epic heart-pounding zombie apocalypse nightmares. Not cool.

No love,
Me

Has it really been almost four months since I last posted? Yikes.

Okay, The Princess Bride Life of Lindsey, The Good Parts Version:

1. Acquired new (non-permanent, i.e. for five months) job in January; left the food service industry behind for good.
2. Discovered the joys of an 8-to-5 lifestyle, complete with weekends, nights off, paid vacation time, health insurance, and bus commuting.
3. Got to experience the Wendy Davis filibuster from the inside.
4. Despaired of my state's politicians.
5. Job which was expected to last through May extended through June, and then through August.
6. Started practicing yoga on a regular basis. Have now become that person who goes as often as possible and talks about how great it is to anyone who will listen.
7. Found a psychiatrist, started taking sertraline (aka Zoloft) for "generalized anxiety disorder" and "major depressive affective disorder, recurrent episode, in partial or unspecified remission" (whoo, official diagnoses), and acquired a therapist. Discovered that it's a lot easier to wake up at 6am now, among other things.
8. Job which was originally expected to end three months earlier instead offers me a permanent position, a promotion, a raise, and minions. My granny is possibly even more delighted than I am.
9. Shopping spree ensues. (I have these boots and no regrets. They make me feel like a Star Trek reboot crew member.)
10. Planning for double half-birthday party with my twin sister which looms large next weekend.

That covers the big stuff, I guess. Today, I wrote 1000 words on the epic Ethan/Brandt MI4 fic that Katie and I have already written almost 15,000 words on but has been languishing away in google docs. I'm recovering from my first SRS BZNS yoga class, because I reached a point of fitness where I feel comfortable leveling up like that, and I was poking/helping Katie until she got traction on her POI Regency AU a little while ago. And I have tomorrow off (four-day weekend!), so I think I'm going to eat another fudgesicle and stay up late writing spy shenanigans.

...today is our half-birthday! Six months from March 10th, hurrah. I vaguely remember planning to have a half-birthday party since SXSW sort of foiled having a real one, but that is clearly not going to happen anymore, oops.

...because in the past week, I have learned how to use several weapons:

1) On Father's Day, my uncle taught me to shoot:
a. .357 Magnum handgun
b. .410 shotgun
c. .257 rifle
d. .270 rifle
e. .30-30 rifle
f. 12-gauge shotgun

He hunts, in case you were wondering, and also recently inherited about half of these guns. I killed several plastic bottles and soda cans, and acquired some nice bruises on my shoulder. My favorites to shoot were the .357 Magnum (you know you watch too many cop procedurals when you have a perfect grip the first time out) and the Remington .257, which had a gorgeous scope in addition to being a very nice gun.

2) KNIVES.

The knife-throwing act at the event I worked tonight were bored and willing to show me some basic knife-throwing, at which I am apparently a natural. It was super fun, I have to admit. :)

I just realized that the shirt I've been wearing all day (a soccer tournament tee that used to belong to my mom) is only a year short of being as old as I am.

...weird.

So, this is basically me, when I go to the library:



...um, yeah. Today, I renewed my card, paid my dues, and got seven different Band of Brothers-related memoirs/autobiographies and three different Tintin compilations. They wouldn't let me re-check out the four books on WWI-related topics that had reached their renewal limits, how sad. I already had a whole 'nother stack of books at home on WWI war poets, plus a collection of Lord Peter Wimsey short stories, in addition to all the non-library books I own.

But at least I didn't succumb to getting any The Pacific-related memoirs! I even was holding one of Robert Leckie's books in my hand, and put it back on the shelf. (If it had been Sledge's, I probably wouldn't have been able to do it.) Still, aren't you guys proud? :D?

- WOOOOOOO YULETIDE SIGNUPS ARE IN! All except one of my requested fandoms have offers, and all of my offers have requests (except the same one as the requested; I was the only person to request and offer for Paper Moon, sigh). ETA: I plan to put up a Dear Yuletide Author letter soon! Just, not today. I really need to sleep.

- Today was my mom's birthday! That was fun. She mostly wanted to do brunch, then hang out and watch musicals, so that is what we did. ♥ Our birthday present/project for her didn't really get done in time, and the surprise was spoiled, but that's okay. (There's an old set of French doors that we took down for some remodeling, and she wants them hung in a different place so she can close the door and listen to music in the living room while things are going on elsewhere. They were painted in oil paint and then latex over that, so the latex is peeling off and we had to scrape off the old paint layers, prime with a bonding primer, and then paint with the real color, so it's this whole endeavor that involves taping the edges of about a million tiny panes of glass and painting in woodwork crevices and cursing. It's taking forever, is my point.)

- Last night, the twin and I went to a party out in the countryside hosted by the lovely katieupsidedown. I got rather drunk and slept on the floor and spent most of today hungover, good times. :)

- Is anyone else reading that XMFC work-in-progress Nine Eleven Ten? Because Katie is not, and I desperately want to talk with someone about how amazing it is and speculate about WTF is going on with certain things and also what the hell is going to happen next. I've been raving about it enough that I've convinced Katie to read it, but that's going to take a while, so. Yes.

For those who are not reading, IT IS SO AWESOME, I RECOMMEND IT. Even though it's a (regularly updated!) WIP. It's a Beauty and the Beast retelling -- only definitely a dark, dark version of the story. This is much less Disney, and much more the "Cinderella's stepsisters cut off their toes to try to fit the slipper" or "someone dies by being dragged along the street in a barrel of nails" or "heroine's cursed shoes that keep her constantly dancing until she amputates her own feet" or "the little mermaid dies and turns into sea foam at the end" kind of fairytale. Which is the kind I LOVE. For extra special bonus points, it's set in an apocalyptic dystopian AU (basically: nuclear WWIII happened), WHICH I ALSO LOVE. The Beast (Erik) is legitimately scary and damaged, and Beauty (Charles, LOL) is not at all a happy or obedient captive and pretty BAMF in his own right, and the world-building is fantastic, and the author has cultivated this brilliant fairy-tale sort of tone which really shouldn't work for a science-inundated universe like X-Men but does (because their powers are sort of like magic anyway). Her Charles is brilliant, so clever and kind, but she never forgets his pride or arrogance or fallibility, nor his slightly-dubious adherence to boundaries. And her Erik is complex and dark, as capable of cruelty as he is of incongruous kindness. BASICALLY IT IS EXCELLENT. I'm a total sucker for "the main characters are horrible to each other before they come to understand each other and then fall in love despite themselves" kind of romance (along the lines of The Queen of Attolia, Captive Prince, etc...), and this has it in brilliantly-written spades. Definitely watch the warnings, though -- here there be graphic violence and dub-con. As an aside, though, ( oblique spoiler ) The author apparently has previously written a bunch of Sarah/Jareth Labyrinth fic, some of which I've read and deem excellent -- which is not a surprise at all; she's got the complex power-struggle/fairytale themes/strangely-compelling-but-not-at-all-a-nice-person villain-slash-sort-of-love-interest down to an art in this.

I am sort of obsessing about this fic. I can't even regret it all that much; it's so fucking good.

Pictures of my typewriter! It is my current favorite thing right now. I found the serial number, and have determined that it is a Royal KMG manual typewriter made in 1950. It's in astoundingly good condition, enough so that I wonder if it was just never used, or if someone got it serviced right before I bought it. That, or it's just a really excellent piece of machinery that was treated well all it's life. I just think it's funny that I now own a typewriter that is the exact same age as my mother. :)

I spent a couple of hours yesterday scrubbing off the type settings with an old toothbrush and some rubbing alcohol, and then adjusted the key touch control (which changes how hard the type hits the paper relative to how hard you hit the keys), and now the letters come out beautifully.

I am turning into such a crazy person.

( the lady herself, a message, and the writer hard at work, Myspace-style )

The subject line, by the way, is something P.G. Wodehouse said when asked how he wrote. ♥

So I am sick, which is fun, and perhaps an explanation for why I've been sleeping like a narcoleptic zombie for most of the past week. Yay.

Anyway, I've been wandering around my computer aimlessly, and I stumbled across this, and decided to post it for kicks -- it's sort of interesting, in a brain-archaeology kind of way. It started as me keeping a "director's notebook" for a production class (fuck, two years ago now) -- basically, our teacher had us just jot down whatever popped into our heads that was even vaguely related to our exercises, films and/or stories, and/or whatever we felt like -- and then I just kept jotting things down after that (it was easier once I had a place for it; usually I just ended up with a pile of little scraps of paper). Mine mostly tended towards untethered thoughts and intriguing concepts, sometimes little moments I witnessed in RL, sometimes just images that I liked. Anyway, the first half is the notebook; the latter is my current "original stories" file (I also have ones for fic ideas, vid ideas, and other observations [which crosses over with the original file sometimes]). Enjoy?

( warning: contains pretentious Ivy League thought processes, zombies, overthinking it, too many references to genre theory and links to Wikipedia, and emoticons )