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Friday, February 1, 2002

Someone e-mailed me to inquire about the apparent relish I feel at the prospect of a Xander/Anya rift -- a mild inquiry, with undertones of "Gee, Kat, you really like to see relationships fall apart, don't you?"

And...uh...not always, but more often than not...yeah, guilty as charged. Some time back I posted something to a list about how I tend to see every relationship, no matter how happy, as having within it certain small hairline cracks, perhaps almost invisible, but there. And how part of what drives me as a writer is the desire to apply just the right tap--perfectly aimed, no more forceful than necessary--to those cracks, and watch things fall apart, cleanly and perfectly.

But beyond that, in this particular relationship -- well, I seldom remember my dreams, even as soon as I awaken, and I almost never recall them long-term, but I've always remembered two dreams I had, recurrently, in my youth. In one I suddenly found myself walking up the aisle, in a church, about to get married to somebody I either didn't know, or knew and disliked; in the other, I found myself nine months pregnant and about to give birth to a child I absolutely didn't want. In both cases the overwhelming emotional motif was sheer panic, an animal in a trap, no way out. Probably my deepest nightmare is to find myself committed to a situation, a person, a set of responsibilities and entanglements, from which no escape is possible.

So it's really easy for me to read a lot of what Xander's doing and saying as coming out of the same fear. (I mean, this is an ex-Vengeance Demon he's dealing with here. It's hard to just sit her down and say, "Honey, I've been thinking, maybe we should see other people, whattaya think?") It's really easy for me to see him as feeling trapped, not just by fear of consequences but also by his own self-image, his fear of not living up to the kind of person he'd like to be. And I just want to smuggle him in a cake with a file baked in it.

And of course the whole thing is just me projecting my own neuroses onto media characters, but hey, what's fandom for, after all? ;-)

Posted @ 08:17 AM CST [Link]3 comments

Wednesday, January 30, 2002

You know that you are rather too deeply involved in fandom on some kind of meta-level when you watch a show you don't particularly like purely for the pleasure of imagining, as you watch, the reactions that your fannish friends are having at that particular moment, over that particular scene or exchange or line delivery. I had several bouts of mad whooping giggles during Smallville last night, after following second-hand all the recent hoo-hah about Victoria.

And on Buffy...well, hm. I imagine someone somewhere is already writing up an incisive analysis of the nature of last night's monster, the manner in which ME decided to visually represent the monster, the way in which it was dispatched, the person doing said dispatching, and all this within the larger contextual framework of Buffy/Spike. That someone is not me, though, because incisive-analysis brain sectors are still offline. Anna said some tres cool things in a list post somewhere (which I hope she incorporates into her blog) about how much she liked the Buffy-stuff going on in this episode, and on reflection I'm in agreement with her (yeah, you're all so surprised by that). I could never really get with Buffy's yearnings, in earlier seasons, to have a normal teenage life, because "normal teenage life" is, like, at least the seventh circle of hell by my standards. But the effort to put together some kind of semi-normal adult life for herself--to keep a job, earn some money, take care of business--that I can get behind much more readily.

And the Anya/Xander stuff, the Gathering Stormclouds ... well, on Anya's side of the equation, the sound of thudding anvils was certainly audible (though I did enjoy her conversation with her old demon buddy), but golly, I dug Xander in that first scene. Feet of permafrost, I'm telling you!

Posted @ 07:40 AM CST [Link]2 comments

Monday, January 28, 2002

I am in geek-girl heaven. My very-first-ever front page post to MetaFilter got picked up by Boing Boing. I shall never be an A-list blogger (more like an X or Y lister), but I feel a little aetherial shoulder-bump with the A-list. ::vibrating gently with glee::

Posted @ 07:22 PM CST [Link]1 Comment

Sunday, January 27, 2002

A while back--a week? two weeks?--I started an entry here, which read: "My brain is flat. It feels like someone's inserted a siphon tube in my cerebellum, and suctioned it out, and my brain has slowly and gently deflated, collapsing into a little flat wet blob." And having typed those two sentences, I sat and contemplated them for a while, and then went and played another seventy-four games of Snood or something.

The flat-brain syndrome continues. There's a dozen interesting conversations going in in various LJs/blogs, and I read and go "Uh. Cool. Erngh." A few random thoughts stir, feebly, and then expire. I pull out story in progress, stare at it a while, and then shut it down.

Torpor is a powerful thing. I'm trying to remember what it felt like to have energy, but the memory is pretty remote.

But, y'know, the only way out is through, the only real remedy for inertia is movement, of whatever sort, in some direction or other, even if it's simply graceless flailing. So, since it's easier to (a) ape others and (b) blither about oneself, I follow Anna's lead in presenting Ten Random and Probably Uninteresting Things About Me:

1. Like Anna, I was a grade-skipping gifted child. In order to skip first grade, I had to prove that I could read; I was ushered into the principal's office and told to read a book to him. It was terrifying, because I was pathologically shy, but the principal was a kindly man--likeable enough that even though he signed all his correspondence, memos, and so on with his initials, which happened to be "B.M.," he never got made fun of, and this by a schoolful of bratty children. (Or maybe he did get made fun of, and I never knew because I never really talked with the other kids anyway.)

2. I was a professor's kid, and I grew up in a neighborhood inhabited solely by university faculty and their families. This gave me a somewhat distorted set of perceptions and expectations about adult life. It was shocking, I recall, to learn that not everyone gets their summers off, or a paid sabbatical every so often.

3. My first job, after I graduated from high school at 16, was as a management trainee in an optical store. I was utterly wretched, terrified of the customers, as ignorant of the business world as a Martian, and I used to stand at the front counter with tears rolling down my face. I felt I couldn't quit, though, because I'd gotten the job through a sleazy employment agency and owed them a substantial fee for the placement. My boss finally had a conversation with the agency, and they released me from my contract; it felt like getting out of jail. This has no doubt fueled my lifelong obsession with Never Getting Trapped in Any Situation That Does Not Have Multiple Exit Hatches.

4. My parents' closest friends were a couple who lived next door to us; they were like an aunt and uncle to me, and their kids were like cousins, or half-siblings. My older brother and their oldest son, R., both were diagnosed in early childhood with very serious, rare, debilitating illnesses, different in nature, but both requiring long frequent hospital stints, and both expected to be terminal. My brother survived, and is still reasonably well at 50; R., one of the most extraordinary minds and souls I've ever encountered, did not, and died at 25. Though I seldom think about these events, they've likely shaped my basic beliefs about the tenuousness of life and the fundamental unkindliness of the universe.

5. I never had a date, or a boyfriend/girlfriend, nor even kissed anyone, until I was 22, joined a local Bisexual Support Group, and went on the world's mildest spree. Shortly thereafter I met the man I ended up living with for 13 years, and from whom I've now lived apart for 13 years. Our friends at the time figured the break-up was about his affairs--he was a staunch, a principled believer in ethical polyamory--but it was actually quite the opposite; I was much happier when he was involved with someone else, because it meant I had more time to myself. The break-up finally came when I thought through the implications of that fact.

6. I've never even tried any drugs besides alcohol and marijuana, which is probably a good thing, since I think with even the slightest alteration in life circumstances I could have been an excellent, dedicated, relentless junkie, and probably dead by now.

7. Like Anna, my first slash fandom, long long ago, was Star Trek, in a wholly backwards and pre-conscious kind of way. There was--something--between Kirk and Spock that made me all shivery, that felt very dangerous and exciting, deeply romantic and vaguely tinged with non-explicit sexual yearning. But this remained a kind of inchoate quivery unexamined sensation until one day, skimming through an underground newspaper of some kind, I came across a mention of people who wrote stories about Kirk and Spock having (nudge, wink) .... having sex. I remember a thunderbolt feeling of pure shock, a perfect combination of excitement and shame. It was as if somebody somewhere had tapped into the darkest dirtiest secret parts of my brain, and it scared the hell out of me. I threw the paper away and tried to forget all about it. Which I did, for many years, until X-Files and the Internet came along.

8. I almost joined an Irish traditional music group, back when I could sing (before the cigarettes), and once got to sing with Cathal McConnell, of the Boys of the Lough, at a post-concert house party in St. Paul. S., my ex, was also a good musician, and we used to perform in the restaurant/lounge of a naturist resort in the Santa Cruz mountains, as a way of paying our entrance fee.

9. About ten years ago, I knew by heart the full Latin names of all annuals and perennials commonly or uncommonly grown in North American gardens, along with their general cultural requirements, height and spread, and season of bloom. I spent hours mapping out elaborate garden schemes on sheets of graph paper, and thought about going back to school for a horticulture degree. Then about five years ago--about the time I discovered the internet--I almost completely lost interest in this, and now I can barely keep my lone houseplant alive.

10. When I was much younger, I assumed that by the time I reached this age I would be living in a flat in London, or a loft in New York City, or perhaps a farm in northern California with goats and exotic birds. I thought I would be a writer, or a professor, or a city planner, or a journalist, or a psychotherapist. With age, seeing how few of those imagined selves bear any resemblance to who I am now, I have given up trying to look toward my personal future; the only part of it that I think about is my own death, which I fully expect will be from either cancer or suicide (or, possibly, pandemic or nuclear war or some other global catastrophe). But I don't imagine that's imminent, and in the meantime I haven't a clue who or what I'll be ten years from now.

So. Enough graceless flailing for now.

Posted @ 05:45 PM CST [Link]5 comments