chibirhm | Bodices ripping! Men turning gay! (Reply)

THINGS WE SHOULD FOCUS ON INSTEAD OF MY APPARENT INABILITY TO UPDATE MY LIVEJOURNAL: OOH, COLIN MORGAN. OOOOOOH. I've told you guys about my deep and abiding obsession I have with Colin's profile, right, and how I believe that it is the most perfect profile in the universe, from which all perfect profiles are thus derived? In case I haven't, those are my feelings. OOH COLIN MORGAN. I WOULD FEEL SWOONY AND FAINT AROUND YOU, BUT THAT WOULD MAKE YOU DEEPLY UNCOMFORTABLE.

Guys, I wish I had, like, a legitimate and good reason why I can't seem to post a lot lately. I wish I had a secret project or was a secret government agent. I wish I had gotten a new puppy/unicorn/whatever. The truth is I've been busy with really boring stuff. Like yesterday I had a meeting in Harvard Square in the morning and then I napped the afternoon away because I'm not used to having to be conscious in the morning. The day before that, I was busy shoveling two feet of snow. And then there have been a bunch of days where it's like wrote an article! Spent all day making phone calls! I've been posting on tumblr a lot because you don't really have to say anything on tumblr and it's v. v. convenient. Tumblr is also a place where it is not only socially acceptable but encouraged to blather for roughly one paragraph about eighteen times a day and no one is like kasjflkjdsfl STOP SPAMMING ME. So here are some things that, were it socially acceptable on Livejournal to spam you with four-sentence updates, I would have one so, as illustrated by .gifs:

I am kind of sort of writing again! That is, I wrote two comment fics that I will post to tongueincheeky soon, but my rule is, do it in threes. So clearly, you'll just have to incite me into spontaneous comment fic. DO YOUR DUTY, FIRENDSLIST.
Gusgus has learned to jump up on the couch! Hooray for Gus! The problem is he is now abusing this privilege quite a bit. Instead of using it like Tess used to for when she really wanted attention, it's I'M BORED/HUNGRY/A GERBIL/THE MOON IS ALIGNED IN THE SEVENTH HOUSE OF VENUS/DID I MENTION I'M BORED?!? Charlie, however, remains too bored/fat/dopey to do any jumping of his own. Or maybe he's actually the smart one because he knows I'm going to pick him up anyway, and this way he gets to peacefully eat and destroy cardboard without exerting any effort.

Either way, my gerbils are developing powers. Anarchy will soon reign.
RIP, short story idea. It's a good idea I'm shelving, but the more I wrote it, the more depressed I got, and I just hated it, which baffled me because it was, like, good, and publishable, and stuff. It wasn't a silly little LA LA LOVE STORY BETWEEN TWO DUDES idea. And then I was ~~whining~~ talking about it to eldritchowl and I realized - there's no humor in that story. There is no whimsy. When I'm in the character's heads, it's not fun. Which is pretty much the same reason I stopped reading stuff that wasn't articles/fanfic once I got too old for children's books.

So sue me, instead of being gutted by good writing all the time, I want to read something with a sense of humor. And I hate that that's marginalized in "good" writing, like there's a threshold of gut-wrenching angst and impossible circumstances all stories must go through before they're considered artistically relevant. I mean, some angst is good. Brokeback Mountain is easily my favorite short story of all time, and possibly just one of my favorite pieces of writing, period, but that angst is made worth it, somehow, because of how much the two characters hopelessly, deeply love each other. Somehow even though there's never really a happy point, you just get totally invested in them in a few words. But that's the exception, not the rule. I absolutely don't buy into the belief that all characters should be angsty, because I think it cheapens tragedy to just be a plot device. And I don't think that characters are sympathetic simply by dint of having bad things happen to them. I just feel like, the world is so full of angst and heartbreak and terribly sad stories all the time. If someone's going to say "okay, here's a book I want you to invest a day or two in, warning, it's unrepentant anguish", you're going to have to give me a really fucking good reason why I should do that. And I mean, the more I wrote my story, the more I realized that while the metaphor I chose to convey a relatively angsty message sounded, in theory, whimsical and fun, it wasn't. It was just sad. Sad and droopy and painful. And if I don't even want to fucking subject myself to writing it, who in their right mind is going to want to read it?

/Long held grudge rant
I was going to post about the shootings in Arizona, but people keep saying stuff better than me. Basically, my feelings are the following - I appreciate that people are, instead of maligning "crazy people", actually looking at how the mental health care system could be improved, but I think that's sort of missing the point. The point isn't that Loughner was extremely mentally ill, the point is that he was mentally ill and yet he got a gun and killed people. So you have to look at a) how stupidly easy it is for anyone to get a gun in this country and b)given that, and given that even the best mental health system in the world cannot cure or catch everyone because mental health isn't something you can see, like the chicken pox, consider the wisdom of using violent rhetoric as something that's par for the course.

In this case, I know, Loughner was not a political vigilante. He despised all forms of authority, regardless of affiliation, and he was far too ill to form a coherent philosophy. But I think it's important to recognize the fact that people like Loughner, who have the capacity to kill, exist. And usually, it's very hard to tip a human to kill another. But the more socially acceptable it is made to define someone as an "other", to make them emblematic of a cause rather than a flesh-and-blood human being, the easier it is to make the leap from killing a person to killing an idea by killing a person, the easier people can be tipped into assassinations and vigilante killings. Instead of it taking someone who's seriously ill/unhinged, it just takes someone who's suggestible. And the more it happens.

There's a reason everyone thought Loghner was a political vigilante. There's a reason people went ZOMG PALIN, and there's a reason she took down all her gun rhetoric and target maps. And that's because it was a lucky break he wasn't. Rather than being glad he wasn't and yelling at people for making hurtful assumptions, whine whine whine, the people who were doing KILL KILL DIE rhetoric should, as far as I'm concerned, be having some serious come-to-Jesus moments. Which of course they aren't because they're busy being victimized. Life is so hard for rich white people suddenly having to think about what they say lest they be stereotyped as ~crazy and violence inciting!~ It's not like there are any minorities they've put in that position exactly.

Seriously.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE, since clearly Joseph Gordon-Levitt (hereby referred to as "Joe", since that's how he refers to himself and I'm sick of typing his entire name) is never going to call me (BUT HE STILL SHOULD), I would like it if someone could very kindly please cut off that boy's access to the internet. The constant earnestness and emoticon usage and general adorability is already, like, on the cusp of cruel and unusual taunting. But repeated exposure to him doing things like writing a little <3 next to a recording of a baby's first heartbeats (WHATEVER, I WASN'T USING MY OVARIES ANYWAY, IT'S NO BIG DEAL THAT YOU JUST BLEW THEM INTO A MILLION TINY PIECES) or posting adorable little animations about popcorn is like... it's just not cool, okay. There's a reason heterosexual men like this aren't supposed to exist, and that is because when women like myself are exposed to people like you, our attempts at not having ridiculously high expectations are completely thwarted. There is a reason you are never supposed to meet someone who actually fulfills the pre-teen dreams you had whilst clutching Anne of the Island to your bosom and sighing over the romance of it all, because when you do it is not, in fact, nice, as usually they are not interested in you. Instead it is akin to psycho-sexual torture.

Well, torture is a strong word. More like, severely irritating anguish. BUT THE POINT! The point is that either he needs to start being a douche or decide he's gay, and since neither of those seem forthcoming, he needs to stop existing on the internet. Mocking me.

I am 99% convinced that his next move will be finding a puppy abandoned in a shoebox and decide to adopt it. And then post lots of pictures. It is, at this point, one of the only possible means of escalation he has left.

THOSE PLATES REPRESENT MY HOPES, DREAMS, AND HEART.
Does anyone watch Miranda? Because it is a STUPIDLY ADORABLE AND PERFECT SHOW. Also, it has Tom Ellis (aka, King Cenred, Merlin fans) being the most adorable thing since kittens, plus the lead character is like a magnificently British version of Liz Lemon. It's all up on youtube (here's series 1, here's series 2), 12 half-hour episodes in total, and it is impossible to watch and come away form feeling even remotely sad about anything in life, ever.

Also, Miranda and Gary (Tom Ellis' character) are KASJFLKSFJ SO ADORABLE AND PERFECT FOR EACH OTHER and they keep not quite getting together and I need someone to write fic for me and listen to me flap my hands and discuss how they give me feelings. THEY JUST GIVE ME SO MANY FEELINGS.