throbbing light machine

-fandom. I wrote Jane Eyre in space fic for yuletide, which was super fun.

As last year, I hope to pub more fic that just the single annual yt work this year; I am hopeful but not making promises. Currently being worked on are Kairos Series and Prydain fic; there's Star Wars OT, BSG classic, and Earthsea fic stubs that I could imaginably finish. We shall see.

-politics. Dealing with it. Still calling/writing people and yelling, bc why not.

-work. I'm getting ready to talk to my new boss (!) about where I'm going to fit in this operation going forward, and I'm excited and nervous and thoughtful about the change. I guess I didn't write here about everything that's gone down irt this job over the last few months -- it turns out that auntie M. hurt herself badly while surfing in Mexico, and I ended up covering for her for over a month while she recovered in hospital, all during the busiest time of the year for the industry. So I'm feeling pretty confident about my position -- these people owe me, big time, for stepping in and saving their bacon. Because of the place my aunt holds in the company, I've been corresponding daily with the CEO/founder, the new owner, and the other managing directors, so I'm coming in at the very top -- and I get the vibe that they really like me, and that they want to make a place for me. Politically speaking, I don't like the industry but am good with the particular individuals; I was at my aunt's house for the election, so I know she was commiserating with the other managing directors about Trump's win. They're nice. They gave me a bonus 50$ amazon gift card for Christmas.

I feel like I could do the work for a while. I like the schedule; the company runs 24/365 on an international clock, so you don't really get days off, but you also don't work for that much time at a go, and things can almost always be moved around with relative ease to clear at least 6 hrs' time. It's a good solution to the problem of emotional exhaustion I've struggled with in doing shift work; I can almost always take a break if I need to, and I don't mind working all the time if I can stop to look after myself without undue bother or embarrassment. tbh I am also very aware that, for my aunt at least, the gig was a great pairing with starting a family; it works well with baby-care and housekeeping schedules, and can be done anywhere with a functional internet connection. A big goal is going to be either getting out from under my aunt in chain of command, or finding ways to safeguard my position; she's a doll, but she's a messy one, and I don't want to be left holding the bag any more than need be.

-reading. It's been Middlemarch all the way down the last week or so; I think it's a reaction to changes in my personal and professional life, the same way it was when I was doing a lot with Middlemarch at the end of my graduate career. I find that the book gives me 2 important permissions/affirmations: that it is all right to lean in to change, and that it is all right to have complicated feelings about even positive changes. I've been feeling noticeably more gentle toward Lydgate this time around, for whatever reason, and more tired with Celia. I continue to find Will Ladislaw an excellent romantic lead, and think the critics are all trippin.

-personal stuff. The thing with D. is continuing to be both delightful and intense; I suppose this is what happens when serious people get together. I'm feeling increasingly comfortable throwing around language like "my boyfriend" in public, which is nice. Fam has been super supportive; my sib gave an official seal of approval over the holiday, and my ma's been doing this adorable nervous awkward attempted reassurance dance that's a bit awful but also basically encouraging.

D's been going through an adjustment, too, I think. My analysis at present is that he'd given up thinking much about his own life trajectory/wants as a result of picking up the main caretaker role for his family during and after his father's death last year, and is now at the place in the process where his self is naturally reasserting itself and its independence. I think he's been feeling very old; but the same way that he's a connection for me back to childhood, I'm being a connection for him, and the new relationship is also becoming the beginning of renewed forward motion. I've been trying to get him to daydream a bit about what he wants to do next, but also trying to maintain distance/not micromanage him; I don't think he wants it, and tbh I don't want to do it.

He's been fucking great about my residual trauma issues; we seem to do best if I'm verbally direct and clear about what's going on and what I need from him, and tbh I'm p. good at doing that, as long as I know that it's safe to admit weakness -- which it really, really has been. I had a full freak-out/flashback/panic attack a few weeks ago, and it was scary for a minute bc it was the moment when the extent of my damage became clear. But he read the links I sent him on CPTSD, and I think it's gonna be ok.

I had a peculiar experience last night: I went to work as a nude life-drawing model at a friend's new studio, located in one of the classrooms of my former elementary school, which has been shut down these last seven years.

I attended the school K-5, and then my parents liberated me and let me homeschool for a few years in blessed independence. The last straw was related to art class, as a matter of fact; we had a good art teacher, one of the few good educators in that forsaken building, and my homeroom teacher had kept us all back from art class as punishment for the rowdy behavior of the usual-suspect boys; we were to sit with our heads down on our desks for the period instead. Mother hit the ceiling when she found out; and then one day at breakfast they asked me if I would like to never go back, and it was the best morning of my life.

The building is actually worse than I'd expected it to be, going from memory. It's so tiny; one story, two narrow low cinderblock hallways with ghastly exposed fluorescent lighting down the center. Like something out of a soviet dystopia, or a submarine movie. What a place to pack little children in! It's sort of horrifying to think about.

It wasn't a bad school; I was neglected there, but it was generally benignly, because I was a good clever student and a quiet child by nature. They did say, when they closed the school, that the playground might have been contaminated by industrial waste from a nearby cleaning facility.

It's all arts and community studios now. The classroom where I was made to sit with my head down, missing art, is going to be a yoga studio. It's kind of great; but for me at least there are a lot of ghosts of little children there who, I now realize, were sadder and poorer than I could understand at the time.

--I always find myself wanting to tell someone about, or write about, the times when I experience intense overlays of affect or signification. For me, this is what it's all about, what I read for, what I listen for, what I live for. But they're always so deeply obscure and personal that I'm never sure if they're worth sharing, if the frission of it is something that can be conveyed to people outside of my head.

I'm going to anyway, because this is my journal, and I can be self-indulgent.

The bit from The Dark Is Rising with "Good King Wenceslas" has always been important and central for me. Part of that is that I was a choir girl whose peak event of the year was the holiday concert with the local symphony orchestra; part of it has to do with my general Thing for traditional carols. But it was also about Will and Merriman, alienation and community unlooked-for. Will loses the support of his brother's voice, sings alone as he goes forward, and just as he's wondering what he's going to do to keep the song going by himself Merriman comes in on the joyful king's verse, lyrically offering protection and restoring harmony. The Old Ones aren't always good community for Will - there's a darkly funny way that I think of DiR as the opposite of Harry Potter, where becoming a wizard on your eleventh birthday means leaving your abusive family for a wonderful world of magic, because in his waking Will loses his family, his humanity, and his future, and only gains a set of crochety old absentee mentors. Will Stanton is the eternal graduate student. But in that moment, singing "Good King Wenceslas," Merriman comes through for his pupil. In that moment, at least, Will isn't left alone.

And it means something to me that this is all framed in terms of poverty, generosity, honor, and snow.

So, on the opposite side of the collision--

I keep drawing the Fool card in my tarot, shall I or shan't I, and one of the questions pulling at me now is how much I want to keep fighting to wodge myself into the world versus how much I want to just go be the crazy witch lady at the edge of the woods. And I've been reading a lot of pieces like this one at the Atlantic about reclusive or in-revolt artists who start letting the madness through; the link centers Blackness, touching on Kanye West, Dave Chapelle, Lauryn Hill, and Nina Simone, but Courtney Love and Tori Amos are also artists that are part of this for me, in addition to badgal Rihanna. I grok that there are racialized aspects of this subject position that I can't legitimately lay claim to, but it's been giving me language for the simultaneous turn-away and aggressive-visibility impulses I've been feeling.

Well.

I've had a rough few days, dealing with an unusually nasty menstrual period, handling unfamiliar work that I'm less fluent with, and also doing first talks with a new therapist that I'm checking out. So yes, I was watching What Happened, Miss Simone? on Netflix looking for catharsis; but I really wasn't expecting the doc to open with her coming onstage, pushing the edge of her alienation, and sit down at the piano and start playing "Good King Wenceslas." God. The footage is from her 1976 return concert in Switzerland. She casts this beautiful incantation - she draws her limits verbally, hard, and it's awkward, and she does the throw-away gesture over her shoulder, and tells them they have to go with her to the beginning, girlhood. And this is still before the title card.

I recommend the doc, fwiw. It bothered me sometimes that her songs were used so heavily in the soundtrack; it especially nerdled me that "Put A Spell On You" underscored the section on her experience of marital abuse. It's too specific and too general all at once; those songs are standards, not confessional contemp-style singer-songwriter pieces. The civil rights music is different, it belongs in the context.

anghraine tagged me on tumblr - fifteen things that are making me happy right now:
1. winter is far from over; I have a solid three months of snow left to look forward to
2. the myth-type of Persephone, the rape victim married to her rapist, given a cold power by her trauma and her survival but also fundamentally connected with the renewal of spring. she gets stronger and more dangerous by breaking, and i'm connecting with that
3. soft-aesthetic photos of black men with flowerbeards
4. Jim Kirk's face
5. Lip Gallagher's face
6. Mandy Milkovich's dyejob - so cute! and Debbie's haircut
7. I got to see my best friend and not!sister this week when she came home for her mother's 60th birthday
8. I'm no longer involved in any way shape or form with my ex's endless hopeless drama
9. Jim Kirk genderswaps
10. William Shatner genderswapped is kind of what I look like, except for the eye color
11. Marvel 616 Civil War fix-it fic
12. Cara Loup recently uploaded a bunch of her zine-era Han/Luke to the AO3, and it's glorious - and also imo it's cool to spend time in a SW universe where the PT hadn't been made yet and see what people were doing.
13. Anna (starry_diadem) is publishing some of her amazing Battlestar Galactica 1978 fic as with the serial numbers filed off; her worldbuilding work is tremendous, and also I tracked her down a few years ago after a long break from the fandom by recognizing her very distinctive use of the word "gauche" in fic even after she'd changed pseuds, of which I am unreasonably proud.
14. the water-soluble wax pastels are awesome for coloring my mandalas
15. girl you know i listened to the ESB radio serial again the other night and it is some hot shit; no one else can act at all, but Mark Hamill is there, and he goes pretty hard. the exaggerated-noises style that radio dramas always do work really nicely with the film's plotlines; lots of moaning and heavy breathing and whimpering from Luke, it's all very exciting. also they do the Hoth scene that fanwriters always tackle, with Han and Luke overnight in the shelter. they found the worst voice in the world for Vader tho, which is kind of a problem

I hate dreaming about my ex; I always wake with this terrible burning urge to get back in contact with him, but I won't I won't I won't. He's the problem not the solution. He's the problem not the solution.

I know why I had the dream, though. I was driving home from my sister's at 2:30 last night, and maybe it was because we'd been watching Avatar: The Last Airbender and I was feeling open and forgiving, but passing through the intersection where he and I both went to elementary school, where the highway that curves around the bay connects to the road that leads to both of our parents' homes, I was struck with this massive quantity of remembered tenderness. Enough, I guess, to carry over into my dreams and make me imagine strange and joyful reunions that will never happen.

He was such a big part of my life. I don't know what to do with my memories.

been thinking about violence, misogyny, and mental illness. I think that one of our takeaways as a culture NEEDS to be a re-evaluation of the seriousness of sexist hate speech; don't know that it's gonna happen, because we're so saturated in men's words of sex and gender violence that it's genuinely difficult to take them seriously. I don't want to know how much men hate me. I don't want to know that about them. But to brush aside rape and murder threats as "just internet trolling" is manifestly unsafe. when a man writes that he intends to murder women in an act of entitled "retribution," we need to be aware of the very real possibility that he will do so. nothing incomprehensible about it.

the fact that his mother noticed, understood, called the police on him, but when they came they thought he was "shy" and "polite" and so did nothing, shows that the flip side of the tone argument is also active and insidious: say horrible things in a "civil" way, and people will excuse you. "civility" is a dirty goddamn word.

as always, when a white-passing male pulls this sort of shit, everyone says he's mentally ill. many others have done the important work of showing how this assumption gets the axis of violence in relation to mental illness ass-backwards, indicating us crazy folk as perps when really mentally-ill people are so much more likely to be victims. but I also had the thought, this morning, that ideas about mental illness, violence, and sexism were part of what screwed me over in re: my ex, who was both mentally ill and abusive. When we met he was struggling to function through his OCD; his family hadn't done their research, swung from enabling his neurotic behaviors to asking why he didn't just stop them. he wasn't quite a misogynist, but he was definitely a bitter geeky manchild, and yes the way he talked about the girl he'd been with before bothered me a little. The only reason my mother could ever give me for the way she hit the ceiling when I started seeing him was his mental illness. I wonder, now, if she saw something of what was coming to me, if she perceived his potential for abuse - but because all she could say to me was "not that one he's crazy," and because I saw myself as "crazy," I got tangled up in a whole bunch of stuff about how mentally-ill people are still deserving of love. Not only does the labeling of entitled violence as mental illness contribute to the stigmaticization of non-neurotypicality, it also allows the mis-naming of entitled, violent, or abusive behavior as just mental difference. I'm reminded of Lundy Bancroft's observation in Why Does He Do That that individual therapy can actually make abusers much much worse. In fact, the argument could be made that while the shooter's parents DID get him diagnosed and into therapy, which would have been the right line of action in the case of mental illness, he may have never been crazy at all, just entitled and bitter and willing to damage others in order to ameliorate his own pain. obvs I can't know that, but I do know that I made that mistake with my ex, seeing problems as part of his disorder that we actually part of his assholishness and entitlement.

am finding Dark Angel to be sufficiently man-hating escapist catharsis; recommendations for further misandrist viewing would be appreciated. might have to go whole Hepburn tonight and rewatch Adam's Rib.

Well, today was the last day I'll ever have to be on the university campus. Finish grades next week and then, Khattam-Shud.

Feeling strange and reminiscent today. It's May 1st, Beltane, and god now that I look at the numbers it was exactly ten years ago today that I slept with my Ex for the first time. Waiting for Beltane was my idea. three weeks short of my eighteenth birthday his parents went out of town for a while, so we had a place - in my childhood in a house without doors, worth more than rubies. I got up early that morning and walked down to the creek and made myself a flower crown of myrtle and marsh marigolds; he kept it, dried, for a long time, but somewhere in all the moves it got lost. I wore a blue cotton dress that had been one of my favorites, and after that day I could never find it again.

Now that I think about it, I didn't tell anyone about what I was doing, the precedent already present. I couldn't talk to my mother and none of the other girls I knew were even dating, much less binding themselves close to someone the way I was. I went back in my archive here on this journal to see if I'd written about it, but it looks like I started on LiveJournal about three months after. I felt like a grown-up, not just fretting after it but feeling it, and I bet that's part of what made me start up posting in the first place. I felt like I'd finally arrived.

I did a three-card tarot read on Monday, and it was sort of big. ( Read more... )

I've spent several hours tonight reading Love, Joy, Feminism, by Libby Anne, a blog by a survivor of Christian Patriarchy, and I'm nowhere near through. I didn't expect to find personal connection when I opened a link to her so much as sociocultural analysis, but there are a number of interesting intersections between her experiences and mine: a child of a family-centered family with a lot of closeness and some major boundary issues, a former funny old-fashioned little girl who liked to sew patchwork and wear Laura Ingalls Wilder dresses (and also couldn't afford entrance to the worlds of mall fashion and pop music that my peers inhabited), someone who essentially "married" her very first boyfriend as a young teen. Not to mention my years of decidedly secular but also decidedly oddball homeschooling and the distrust for mainstream culture my parents raised me to. Opposite ideological bent, but same basic set of doctrines: question them, they're not to be trusted. The family way is Best.

There's a weird balance between liberalism and conservatism in being an outsider, I think; I couldn't have been brought up with more radical politics, and certainly in the eyes of Christian Patriarchalists I have been the worst of sinners, but in other ways I recognize the defensive snobbery of the girl-child who wants to believe that she's better than the other girls because she's industrious and family-oriented instead of crass or materialistic, and I'm not sure it mattered that much that my parents were anti-capitalist intellectuals instead of religious fundamentalists, not in the virtuous outsider social psychology of that sort of thing.

But it's awkward, because I still also do often think that the family ways I was raised to ARE Best, really & truly, and I want to be loyal to them.

Relatedly (?), I guess my Mormon childhood bff and intermittent crush object is also moving back up north. I have ... complex? ... feelings about this.

this afternoon I let myself test the heft of the idea of walking away from the university - and as soon as I let myself I felt so good. It reminded me of the morning when my parents asked me if I'd like to never have to go back to elementary school, if I'd like to be homeschooled instead.

There's no one here I'm interested in, is the truth - I don't have a social network outside of the university, but increasingly the people inside the university look strange to me. My undergraduate honors thesis was a joy to write because I was working with two wonderful faculty members, women who inspired me and encouraged me and also helped me out when I was low; I can't think but part of my problem with my dissertation prospectus must be the total lack of collaboration or even intellectual community that I'm feeling here. And maybe, maybe it isn't me - maybe this just isn't the right fit, the right way for me to make and build the things I want to.

they pay me nothing, it's not like it would be hard to scrape up an equivalent amount even just through increased freelance work and maybe some tutoring gigs. And right now the idea of going home north to the big lake, being closer by my mother and grandmother - and my sib moved back north last month, too, after ditching her boyfriend, and I feel like if there's anyone in the world can bring me healing it'd be my sib - it sounds real good. I still have an extensive social network of older friends up north, and with my sib around I'd likely pick up some new ones my same age.

so maybe I ditch out after this semester is over, save up some cash over the summer, and when my lease is up in August I get to wave farewell to B-Town. I'm going to sit with it before I commit to anything, yeah, but ...