Also, hobbits! Oh hobbits. I have read so much hobbitfic over the last few weeks, you have no idea. Too much to do individual recs for, but they're all stacked up in my delicious, over yonder.

I've been trying to puzzle out just why on earth I lurve them with such passing fervor, and I think last night I finally hit on it - they're Victorians who get to go on Quests. Seems obvious, but when I unpack it, I think there's a lot there for me.

( I can manage it. I must. )

Oh, hobbits!

I feel like I've got a tiger by the tail, and I've no idea what to do with it. I spent the day wading through Plato's Phaedrus and Judith Butler for my honors thesis - and if any combination could drive a girl mad, it would be that one.

I have applications on the brain, too. I'm so utterly terrified of messing something up. I hate paperwork - I'm awful at it - and I feel like I've got so little help. with undergrad everything was easy, clearly laid out. Still scary, but I didn't feel like I was walking a precipice blindfolded. I can do the work. I want to do the work. But I hate the part where I have to get accepted and get funded first.

I've been sick, was out of it all last evening. Combination of a minor cold and the second round of my Gardasil vaccine, I think, and of chronic exhaustion. I'm always tired, it feels like.

I have to figure out how to take my GREs. I have to travel for them, and I don't have a car. It's going to be at least a two-day deal, and again I just want to take the damn test already. I'm way more worried about the details that I am the actual work.

I've been retreating really heavily into fandom, reading comfort fic and comfort books, Prydain and Westmark and the Dark is Rising books and watching LotR and Star Wars. Listening to Anne of the Island on iTunes. There are so many things that are making my heart so very happy - Supernatural back on the air, all the fic I'm writing for The Boy's as-yet-unpublished novel, Yuletide. But I sometimes feel as if I'll never breathe easy again. The panic is always right there at the back of my throat.

Sorry to be a wet blanket, y'all. I just needed to say it. It's hard for me, sometimes, to drop the facade of okayness and on-top-of-it-ness and admit that I'm kind of drowning.

Sixteen Anne icons behind the cut (just Anne, Anne/Gilbert, Anne/Diana)

teasers:

( scope for the imagination )

For the taking, with commenting and crediting

Listened to an audiobook of "Anne of Green Gables" last night in a last-ditch attempt to rid myself of insomnia, which it did not do. But oh.my.god. The amount of gay in that story...dear lord, I had no idea. I think that I miss the femmeslash because the Anne/Gilbert love goes so deep.

But now I have two burning desires: to write Anne/Diana, and to watch the films again. They really are the most perfect adaptation in the world.

Is it strange that I find myself loving Anne even more now than I did as a little girl?

Also, why can I not find the Ruth Robbins Earthsea illustrations anywhere online? You remember, the black and white woodcut-style insets at the beginning of the chapters. Am frustrated. Argh.

Off to reread "Anne."

For some reason I have this incredibly longing for my childhood loves. Not people, my books. I want Prydain and Anne and Narnia and the Murrays and all my stories. I think that it might have something to do with the fact that it's snowing, and that I just want to wrap up in a feather blanket and regress for a while. I miss them. I miss how simple the stories were, and how happy. They had their darknesses, of course, but there was this feeling of utter joy at the base of them that never really went away. Reading them wasn't about being consumed. It was about flying. But it wasn't really escapism. Or maybe it was. I was certainly escaping school, but I feel like in reading them I was actually throwing myself into life as opposed to out of it. School wasn't life. School was the little death that brought total oblivion. Books were life, and reading them was living the internal life.

Either way, I miss reading like that. I still read all the time, of course, but things are more complicated in the stories that I find myslef reading now, and that flying-joy-exhilaration-feeling is almost entirely gone.