life in the subjunctive mode

Update, I am not dead. I may go back to working on the End of Days, because I really like the idea, and I like the characters. And transcendental eldritch horrors. So ... yep. I need to go print that out.

I go back to school next week. But also I don't really care about updating here because it's just talking to the void, and I discovered that I like people at this point in time and I want to be around people.

It's been a while. I'm still trying to make sense of life, because I thought I had a handle on what I wanted to do, and then I went away to field school for six weeks, met a whole bunch of new people, cleaned skeletons, and reevaluated my life. I've got a couple new ideas floating around in my head, and they're all pretty awesome options, but I can't really do much with all of the new thoughts until I get back to school and incorporate that into my new plans as well.

Will type up more later. Right now, I'm busy organizing music in order to avoid doing laundry and organizing the clusterfuck that is my room after two rounds of unpacking (from school, and from San Jose de Moro) without any cleanup. I also, at some point, want to put together a SJM playlist, because that's how I do nostalgia.

Real life has done a number on me lately, and I'm trying to sort through all of it without feeling totally overwhelmed. I haven't been writing lately as a result - not creatively, anyway. I have been doing a lot of introspective writing.

"Ты мне нравишся"

Obviously I did not get around to writing everything I intended, so I finished up one of my existing fics so at least I'd be sure to get it done in time for the amnesty period. The last three hundred words or so are utter crap, but I just wanted to be done at this point. I hope it fits the prompt well enough.

Title: Mother's Day
Fandom: Doctor Who, with Star Wars references
Characters: Amy, Rory, River
Prompt: Age Play
Content Notes: brief reference to incest role-play
Summary: Maybe, if we had gone to a restaurant off-planet, people would believe that River was our time-travelling daughter whose other mother was a sentient spaceship. As it was ...
Author’s Notes: I’ve only ever seen a few episodes of the 1966 Star Trek, and I’m ignoring the fact that there have been crossovers in comic book canon. All drinks are stolen from geeksaresexy.net, and I cannot vouch for any of them. The Enterprise-themed restaurant is entirely made up, unfortunately.

( first-person amy pond )

I feel like this icon accurately depicts how I've been feeling the past week or two.

I've decided to do the Blog Every Day In May challenge, because I think it will be a good exercise in discipline as well as in writing.

The first prompt is: Give us your life story in 250 words or less. The following is exactly 250 words:

Zero: born, Long Island
One: New Paltz, lived in my dad’s childhood home with my grandparents downstairs
Two: received sister
Three: moved to the suburbs
Four: acquired crippling social anxiety
Five: didn’t know how to play “telephone”
Six: first crush on a girl (Jenna); first crush on a boy (Tony)
Seven: started gymnastics; brief stint as a ballerina
Eight: learned to crochet, received brother, first mutual best friend
Nine: joined accelerated English class, rejoiced
Ten: played Moriarty in school play opposite first serious crush (Melissa)
Eleven: refused to wear a bra; no more best friend
Twelve: joined accelerated math class; received 99% in English
Thirteen: tragic year of MySpace and social isolation
Fourteen: started writing to cope with crippling loneliness; first therapist
Fifteen: first serious crush (Russell); two-week backpacking trip resulted in permanent damage to knees; left public school for Catholic school; questioned gender
Sixteen: increased self-esteem; solidified first real group of friends; met future first girlfriend on online writing forum (Inge); rejected by first serious crush
Seventeen: college visits and applications; entered love triangle; two declarations of love from classmates; depression resulting in alienation of friends and diagnosis of bipolar disorder type II
Eighteen: partial reparation of friendships; three declarations of love from classmates; graduation; broke up with first girlfriend; came out and went to college
Nineteen: lost first group of college friends, got top surgery; started HRT and fanfiction; 4.0 GPA; social isolation
Twenty: moved in with new friends; started anxiety medication and social drinking; wrote magical realism

I went and read the brick for an hour or so because I'm stressed and I seriously needed it because when I am not reading Les Miserables I spend an unhealthy amount of time pining and waiting until I have time to get around to reading it. Which I never do, and I really needed to read Richard III for class tomorrow, but this was the right decision. I feel much better now.

Anyway, I've been thinking about brick!Javert a lot, because that's what I do, and I wonder if there's been any discussion about the possibility of reading him as autistic. Disclaimer: I am not autistic. My therapist and I discussed whether I might have Asperger's Syndrome, but as far as I know I do not and thus do not consider myself qualified to talk about this in-depth. That being what it is, here are my thoughts:

1. The man worships rules and regulations, and they govern his life to a degree improbable in your average person.

2. He sees the world in such black and white terms, and he needs to categorize people. There can be no exceptions, and as you can see, when there is absolutely no way he can categorize Valjean as either good or bad, he literally cannot cope with it.

3. I was particularly struck by the scene where he arrests Fantine. It is so frustrating to read because he just repeats himself, and repeats himself, no matter what M. Madeline says. It's like there's this mental block for him, where he can't comprehend the idea, M. Madeline is his superior, and therefore he is supposed to fit into a certain category and have the same beliefs as Javert, and when he doesn't, Javert is incapable of processing it. He strains to fit it into his preexisting categories of responses, even though it doesn't make any sense to do so. It reminded me of the posts I have seen on tumblr from autistic people (or is it "people with autism"? I've seen some people prefer the latter) talking about the difficulty that they have communicating sometimes.

4. His inability to empathize with other people, and to even try to understand them. In his eyes, it's like there's only one worldview, and one right way to see things, and that is his way, and if you do things that are wrong in his worldview then there is no way that you could possibly justify yourself because clearly there is a right thing to do and a wrong thing to do and you know that what you are doing is wrong.*

*This is, I will admit, kind of drawing on personal experience: one of the things which led my therapist to talk to me about Asperger's Syndrome is because I had difficulty remembering that other people are just as real as I am, and that they have concerns outside of their interactions with me. (In my case, it had a lot to do with how little time I spent interacting with people growing up, and I've gotten a lot better since then.)

Now, I've only read the first two books so far, and I know Javert shows up more later, so this is definitely an incomplete thesis.

It's that point in college where I panic about what I want to do after I graduate, because all my senior friends are making concrete plans. And while I still don't know what I want to do as a career, I have decided that I want to work through Americorps doing some sort of educational volunteer work; preferably in the West or Midwest, somewhere I haven't been but also somewhere I'm not going to have to fear for my life if someone finds out I'm queer. I don't think I could do Teach For America. I'm going to talk to a representative about it next time they visit my school, but I'm pretty sure that I'm not the right person for that job. Adult literacy, or running an after-school program, or assisting in a classroom, those are all things I think are important and are things I could do.

I've been on the computer a lot more than usual, lately, and it hasn't been the productive kind of "on the computer". Nope, I've turned into the sort of person who constantly flicks back and forth between social media sites, hoping for something to happen or someone to talk to me. I've even started watching television again. When I noticed it, I thought, that's weird. I'm behaving the same way that I did last year, when I was all isolated from everyone else. Then I realized: I am lonely again.

Oh.

My standard for what constitutes "alone" is rather high, so I guess that's why it didn't occur to me sooner. I live with people, I can't be lonely. I hang out at least once a week with MR, I can't be lonely. I talk to MM after or during class at least once a week, I can't be lonely. Etc, etc. But I am. I want to spend more time with people I like, different people. I want to do things. And I do my best to get out and go to events when I can, but I'm always going by myself, and I do wish that I could go with other people, you know?

Part of it is self-imposed. I've been stressed for weeks now, and when I'm stressed, I get very easily irritated, so nearly everyone has been -- oh, but even that's not true. When I say "nearly everyone", what I really mean is "R", because she's the only other friend I have. I feel bad for being so irritated by her that I tend to generalize every issue I have with her into a blanket statement, and that's another story.

So there's that. I am lonely, and I'm doing my best to fill the void, but so far I am having only moderate amounts of success, and I still feel unhappy and unfulfilled most of the time. I keep thinking: I just need to write this story, I just need to finish this drawing, and then everyone on the internet will love me and then I won't be sad all the time. It doesn't work like that, and it never works out like that anyway.

Or: "okay, if I take half the suggested dosage, will I be able to stay awake this time? because tumblr is making me anxious and I need to get work done"

My housemate is talking on the phone in a very penetrating voice.

I read for twenty minutes today and it was satisfying.

Also I went to my profile and it seems I've managed to accumulate over 500 journal entries without a single comment. I think I deserve some kind of award.


EDIT: the answer to the question is YES! Half-dosage means that I will be awake but not vibrating with fear while I wait to present in front of my class (I don't actually mind doing long presentations? My issue with them is more "ugh I don't do words well" than it is stage fright. It may also be that I dissociate when I'm in front of an audience and nothing feels quite real, but given that it is nothing but helpful, I don't care.)

I don't know what's going on here but it takes place in Schenectady. The idea has been floating around in my head for a while but I don't know where it is going and I don't really care.

~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~

We left at dawn on the longest day of the year. Everyone that we spoke to, from your grandmother to my father’s cousins, said that we needed to go east, so east we went: from apartment buildings to peeling houses with broken-down bikes piled in weedy yards, to the huge derelict building that might have been a factory or might have been a tenement house or might have been nothing at all, abandoned before it was finished. We climbed over the fence and skidded down the embankment just as the sun cleared the tops of the trees in the distance, and crossed the train tracks with its golden orange light burning our eyes.

Most people agreed that it was bad luck to talk before you’ve left your city, but once we crossed the train tracks, we were allowed to talk again, so we said things like, how far do you think it is, and, what do you think it will be like? What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get there? Neither of us had any answers to these questions, so we left them hanging in the air, and we kept walking. The field wasn’t quite as flat as it looked from the roof of the apartment building where we used to meet to plan our journey; there were ridges and dips, and unexpected pieces of twisted brown metal hidden in the grass. You wanted to collect the old nails from the train tracks, but they weighed too heavy in your pockets, and so you dropped them one by one back into the dirt like bread crumbs. I caught at the feathery tops of the grass in my hands and ran the tips up and down your bare arms, even after you laughed and told me to stop.

Let’s go, I said. Don’t you want to make it there before nightfall?

Common sense told us that we needed to pass through the woods before we would find anything worth finding, so we headed straight through the marshy fields towards the dark line of trees turned black by the sun. Our sneakers got stuck in the mud, and water sloshed up into our socks. I took off my shoes after the first hour because we wouldn’t need them anyway, but your grandmother had just bought you new ones for your birthday and you didn’t want to leave them behind.

I can deal with wet feet, but Grandma would kill me if she knew that I’d wasted all her money, you said.