Odds and Ends

[red_satin_doll]

Good news: The cable guys came today and hooked up our internet service; we only had two days to wait. So now we're connected again, yay! I hope to be on again more often here - I've missed being here and getting to play. I need the release more than ever.

I just sketched out a rough draft for a post-series Buffy & Faith (and/or Buffy/Faith) fic the other day; I haven't ever written fic about the two of them before allthough I've got plenty of meta notes.  (It's occured to me I should start looking for a beta, and realize for all my experience being one, I have no idea how to ask for one.)

After the housefire, the crying jag, etc I've been thinking about Buffy post-series in ways I hadn't before: What's it like to have your entire world turned upside-down? To lose your home, the things you own, silly stuff that in some ways had come to define you? (Everyone thought I was crazy because I was thrilled that my childhood stuffed koala bear survived intact.) To have to remake-redefine yourself again because the patterns of your life, based on the habits built around the things you owned, the house you lived in, are suddenly no longer there anymore?

I'm familiar with the concept of displacement because I've been moved around many times since my dad died when I was about three yrs old: Mom remarried, then later divorced (and we left the house in the middle of the night); she bought a house and then another later; I went away to college, met my sweetie, moved and moved again. But this housefire is different - we've moved to another apartment but on the same property, we're still sorting through the damaged and destroyed things, betwixt and between if you will. I've tossed out books and antique photos I loved; I can't find anything in this new apartment because it's all still in boxes and bags; I set something down and five minutes later forget where. I did "detail work" today, lining kitchen cabinets, more cleaning and scrubbing of course, trying to find places for things. I'm not a great with organizational skills.  There's no sense of familiarity or rhythms to the way we live yet.

The only thing that feels familiar is the way my sweetie and I communicate - or don't as the case may be. We argue and snipe at each other but we did that before anyway, so nothing new. She says I'm loud, I'm yelling, I'm hyper, etc; I say she's controlling and bossy and is also hyper but doesn't see it. The thing I notice now more than ever is that she says every single thing that comes into her mind. I'm not kidding - it's a constant stream-of-consciousness conversation, and I have to suss out when she's talking aloud to herself and when she's talking to me and expects a response. That's nothing new either but it's more intense now, I think.

The week has been crazy, chaotic - horrible rains on the day we were moving most of our stuff and still a ton left to go. I admit I cursed the deities I don't currently believe in, just for good measure: "Really, God? REALLY? I know you have a sense of humor and all that, and I mean this with all due respect but - Fuck you. Don't take that the wrong way or anything."

But the tarp I'd put up over the tent (all by myself, I'll have you know) withstood the rains and is still standing. *pats self on back*  So there's that at least.

Comments

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

*iz jealous* I still recall a middle-school grammar class taught by Mrs Soucey (one of my all-time favorite teachers), and staring blankly while everyone else discussed...whatever they were discussing. the terms were all greek to me and yet I'd attended every single class previously. It was very much like how I was in math classes, but I was used to being an A-student in English, so it was humbling to say the least. I recently took a pre-algerbra class in college again and was quite good at it (decades on) so maybe if I retook grammar I'd also do well now, but that one class made me think that I'm "no good" at grammar and I never thought to really pursue it.

When you say "escaped" btw do you mean as in "thank god I'm free at last" or "call the authorities I've been let lose on an unsuspecting public and am out of control!"

[gillo]

Definitely "thank god I'm free at last", though possibly some of my ex-pupils might disagree. I used to do crazy things on occasion to make stuff memorable - standing on a table over the "corpse" of a twelve-year-old Julius Caesar to do Mark Antony's big speech, for example.

I have never been convinced about the value of formal grammar lessons, myself. The terminology can be useful to help one recognise a mistake, but no diagramming ever helped anyone write a better sentence, IMO.

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

I used to do crazy things on occasion to make stuff memorable - standing on a table over the "corpse" of a twelve-year-old Julius Caesar to do Mark Antony's big speech, for example.

I would have LOVED that (but then I was big into acting and theater at the time); didn't Robin Williams do that in - what was that movie? The movie teachers are always wacky, aren't they? I think more wackiness would be welcome (but now US public school education seems to be all about getting test scores, not learning and thinking. Not about creativity - and thinking requires creativity. A retired teacher I know said she did not envy the new generation of teachers, that the field was nothing like the one she entered.)

but no diagramming ever helped anyone write a better sentence, IMO.

*whew* I feel so much better, thank you! I really used to hate that sort of thing, but even the terminology would elude me which seems strange - I'm a word person. My thesaurus was my friend. (I still had the dictionary and thesaurus I'd had from high school until they got messed up in the fire *sniffle*)

But then I did very well in my Logic class, and that involved "mathematical equations" - B happens after A, that does not mean that A caused B to occur and that sort of thing. IDK