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Saturday, November 30, 2002

Your TMI for the day: so far I've noted two distinct upsides to menopause (or perimenopause, or whatever the hell this is that I'm in). The first is, well, the obvious; and the second is that, if one lives in a cold house, in a cold climate, hot flashes are of the good, bringing, as they do, intervals at least during the day when one is actually warm. No downsides noted so far. I'll give things another cautious hopeful few weeks, and then, in an appropriately Crone-like spirit, on winter solstice I'll have a big bonfire of the tampons, in the back yard. (Which means, of course, I'll either have to shovel away some snow, or use the Weber grill, which somehow reduces the blah-blah-Gaia blah-blah-moon wanna-blessed-be aspect of the whole thing, but will also probably reduce my chances of setting the house on fire.)

In other news of no interest, the story has broken the 100,000-word mark. The finish line is beginning to shimmer into view; the remaining gaps are mapped out in my head, and words are slowly and laboriously being shoved into them. I do think I shall make my end-of-year deadline. Jeeezus and hallelujah.

Posted @ 05:12 PM CST [Link]9 comments

Friday, November 29, 2002

Thanksgiving was very quiet here; I had dinner with my brother and sister-in-law, two people with whom I'm deeply comfortable, and we laughed and chatted and toasted and ate. After dinner, we went down to a park a couple of miles from their house, bordering the Mississippi, took a walk, and I snapped a few not especially interesting pictures, trying out the new camera. It was a wonderfully mellow afternoon, warm and golden, and there were some swarms of gnats (or some kind of small flying insects), hatched by the brief lull in the weather.

Tonight, though, is wild and blustery, with a huge wind scouring down out of Canada, driving the cold air ahead of it and whirling the dead leaves; the windchills could be below zero by morning. I've spent all day hunched over the computer, taking words out and putting words in, and now I'm ready to drag myself to bed, and listen to the wind roar outside as I fall asleep. Thanksgiving is over, and it's winter now, for the next four months.

Posted @ 09:59 PM CST [Link]7 comments

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

One of the Quizillas currently making the rounds is the Which Buffy & Enneagram's 9 Personalities Are You? I haven't gone into it to see all the results, but the ones I've seen so far seem to me off-target. Spike a Seven? Oz a Four? No WAY. So, for what it's worth, and not that anyone was asking, I give my own utterly inexpert Enneagram classification of the various Buffyverse characters.

Buffy: Eight, with a Seven wing. Loyal, responsible, action-oriented, driven to be strong, to cope, to compete and win. The Seven adds some cheery optimism, some capacity for denial about the darkness of her world, and is probably a good mental-health survival trait for a Slayer.

Willow: She pings as a Five, with all the emphasis on learning, the intellectual life, knowledge for its own sake; but she doesn't really have the defendedness and emotional distance that's a core Five thing. I'd guess she also would score high on Two and Nine.

Xander: A big old Six -- the loyalist who seeks authority he can truly trust and believe in, self-sacrificing for people or causes that matter to him, desirious of security and guidance, mistrustful of himself and his own competence, suspicious of the unknown/unproven.

Spike: Spike is such a Four. Fours are the drama queens, the ones who are fixated on their own specialness, their differentness, their sufferings; self-absorbed, constantly searching for love and yet feeling no one really understands them. Spike and William are both Fours, in their respective ways; it's one thing they have in common.

Oz: To me, Oz has all the zenny go-with-the-flow openness and peaceableness of a highly-evolved Nine. At their best, Nines are the water that flows around rocks, flexible, relaxed, equable, conflict-averse, and very likeable.

Giles: He's a bit hard to place, but I'm really drawn to seeing him as a well-developed One, with probably a lot of Five in the mix. He's got the One's dedication to principle and higher purpose, and the One's tendency to anger when the world fucks up around him. On the other hand, Ripper is not even *slightly* a One, so there you go. Hard to say.

Faith: An unhealthy Eight (which is why she makes such a great mirror for Buffy) with a Seven wing. Confrontational, violent, egomaniacal, impulsive, hedonistic. There's a lovely description of unhealthy Eights here. That's our Faith.

And from that latter link, the "Self-Study" button will take you to some interesting general descriptions.

Posted @ 06:09 PM CST [Link]6 comments

Last night, under the influence of Jameson's, I blathered some pompous blather in sanj's comments about the virtues of neutrality in fandom wars, but this morning it struck me that that's a much easier stance to maintain when one's chief fandoms are--not dead, certainly, but resting quietly. Highlander and due South have seen some mighty battles in their time, god knows, but nowadays it's rather like picnicking at Gettysburg. (I like picnics, I should add, and also nice peaceful memorial statuary, and green grass.)

My fannish turf feels a bit shrunken these days. Buffy--still watching, still liking a lot, still feeling no temptation to either write it or get drawn into any fracases about it. (What is the plural of fracas? Fracii?) Angel--now that it's moving to Wednesday, which is a night that (for complex personal reasons) I can neither watch nor tape, I'll probably let it go, or maybe borrow tapes from someone, but my emotional investment in it is meager in any event. Smallville--I was taping it for a while, with the idea of watching the episodes at some point, but I realized that that point never actually arrived, and so I've just let it go, though I still read Omar's recaps. Harry Potter--I am perhaps the only person in fandom who's neither read the books nor seen either of the movies, so I basically ignore it and all its ructions. Firefly--I am enjoying this a great deal, though trying not to get emotionally invested, since its status is still shaky and I'm in no mood to get my legs chopped off from under me. (Firefly also seems to have not yet generated its first big fannish war, which makes it a pleasant place to hang.) LotR--dug the first movie, looking forward to TT, have essentially zero interest in fanfiction about it, of either the FP or RP variety. Popslash--have zero interest in it, though I enjoy watching my friends having the sparkly fun.

So really, I'm not Switzerland so much as -- Iceland, say, sitting nice and peaceful in my underpopulated little stretch of the North Atlantic. Apart from writing, my fannish participation these days is much more about the people I enjoy, and their conversations, than it is about the shows themselves, which is fine by me. It does sometimes give me the odd feeling that at some point when I wasn't looking I morphed into a geezer; but being a geezer is also fine by me <settling golf hat on head, hitching up Sansabelt slacks>.

Posted @ 07:16 AM CST [Link]7 comments