When the smoke cleared
It's not much, but it's an update! Kind of!
Comment to this post with THOR'S ANIMU EYES, and I will list seven things I want you to talk about. They might make sense or they might be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.
My list from beanarie:
Coffee: So, I love coffee. It started out as a like, OMG I LOVE CAFFEINE kind of thing in college, because I didn't start drinking it really until then, but once I started working for Starbucks I started developing a taste for it and knowledge about it and I finally understood why people do that with wine and beer and cheese and whatever else people develop palettes for and talk snootily about. I learned that I really like Mexican coffee and that I generally don't like African coffees but that even that is not always true because I really like the East African components in Willow Blend. I learned that coffee can have blueberry and spice and coconut notes so strong that you can smell it coming off the beans when you open the bag (the coconut one was fairly recent, with Hawai'ian Ka'u, and the guest was so understanding as I stood there and sniffed her beans and made someone else sniff her beans and then read the entire bag because we don't get these at licensed stores; the guest I made smell the blueberry notes in the Rwandan coffee in Boston was not nearly so nice, hrmph). I don't know what else to say, I hope this is a long enough ramble. I didn't even get into espresso!
Publishing: Oh my. I don't know what to say about this any more. Everything is changing so fast. I see the people, have them on my friends list, who are blowing up with self-publishing, and it kind of makes me wonder, what's the point anymore? What's the point of pursuing a career sifting through the slush and finding gems and polishing them and developing relationships and all the things that you think go into editorial work when authors can just do an end-run around you and put things out there themselves? Of course, I understand the desire of writers to get past those gatekeepers, too, believe me, I sympathize, but overall I just feel like there's a really good chance I wasted two and a half years of my life trying to find a way to break into a dying industry. Which is why I'm OK with selling coffee.
UST: Hi, I love this. No matter what happens, in real life, in fiction, in whatever, the resolution is just never as much fun, never has the passion and promise, of the UST. It's one of the reasons I love seeing the world through slash goggles. You can find it everywhere. Just ask T, one of my favorite catch phrases is, "Aaaaaaaaaaand, shipped." I say it all the time, because I love the idea of those moments of flirtation and "accidental" physical closeness and everybody else being like, GOD JUST FUCK ALREADY and it never happening. I don't particularly go in for star-crossed lovers type scenarios where people are kept apart, though. I like it best when it's acknowledged and at turns awkward as shit and then also playful. Not malicious, not a chase, just being there and being like, so, so so so so close but just never actually combusting. The whistle of the firework going up before it bursts. Yeah.
Dysfunction: So, thoughts about this. I am, as I think a lot of people are, intimately familiar with dysfunction. Sorry if either of them are reading this, but my parents' marriage is fundamentally dysfunctional. I barely remember a time when it was not dysfunctional. This just was a state of being that pervaded my entire experience growing up. You have no concept of what to expect in relationships when the main model for one in your life is dysfunctional, and while I think Erin and I have done well for ourselves on this front, in my case at least I can say I got a very late start because I just had no idea what the hell I was doing. That being said, I could keep going on about how my relationships with my parents are dysfunctional and how that's affected my life and whatever, but I really don't tend to dwell on that at that point in my life. Yes, therapy has helped. I think a couple of the most important things about dysfunction, though, are that you often can't see it when you're in it and that it's often not actually as broken as you perceive it as being. I just recently had a friendship end that went from being profoundly fulfilling to being completely dysfunctional. Like, the function of a friend is something each person has to define for themselves, but it's pretty obvious when it's not happening and this person and I had just stopped being friends to each other, and we each blamed the other for it and it was whatever, but when I was in it, I just thought, oh, we're fighting, but we're still friends. But that fact of the matter was, he'd long ago stopped being a friend to me and in my attempts to get my friend back, I'd stopped being a friend to him. So it was dysfunctional. That being said, it was not like, completely broken. That's the weird thing about dysfunction is there's still function there. So there were these bright spots when we were friends again that made it that much more difficult to acknowledge the dysfunction. Dysfunction no longer looks like a word.
Partners: Ahaha, this is funny in light of the above. OK, so I like this word a LOT, it's one of my favorite words. People who work at Starbucks are called "partners," and I think that's part of where I developed my enjoyment of it because it gives you the idea that a person can have as many partners as they need. So at any given time I can have like, a partner in my marriage, a partner in running my kin, a partner in planning a trip to Dublin, and I can be a partner in decorating a new apartment and in helping to create a radio show and in running a food service department in a giant big box store and that can all be true. I don't really have a partner kink, though. I never really shipped Mulder/Scully or Benson/Stabler (NO NO NO) or Ed/Greg or most other partners, so if that's where you were going with this, then nah. I think a partnership can be a great place to develop that kind of UST I was talking about before, but in general when it's like, here, these two are partners and their lives depend on each other therefore obviously boning, then it's just too easy.
Immigration: People get SO WEIRDED OUT by this word. They're like, wait a minute. You're leaving the US for somewhere else? They don't understand it. Even now with less than two weeks there are people who are confused about what I'm doing and why. I think when they hear immigration they either think of like, Yentl, or LA MIGRA or something, but they don't think of first world to first world even though it happens all the damn time. Yes, I am going to be an immigrant. I will have to have papers. You know, the kind of thing you think it's funny to joke about our overnight cleaning crew not having? Yeah, that will be me on the receiving end of those jokes. I am living the liberal American fantasy, people, and fleeing to Canada. That being said, my own actual dealings with Canadian immigration have been downright minimal. I send them forms, they uniformly approve them because every county wants a Sara so they rubber stamp my shit, and that's pretty much it. The one thing I never feared (with one small exception that was not my fault!) was denial of my application. A privilege, to be sure, of first world to first world.
Hobbits: OK, so I keep trying to explain to people that I'm basically moving to Hobbiton and they're like, BUT IT'S SO COLD because they don't want to listen to me, and hey, that's fine. Especially because it's really more like Stock, but it's whaterrrrrrrrrr. Hobbit have always been my favorite fantasy race. Let others have the valiant men and the luminous Elves and the martial Dwarves and whatever else is out there. At the end of the day, I love the idea of a sensuous, joyful race that values hard work and safety. Now, I would be more adventurous than your average Hobbit. I will not deny that they are xenophobic and isolationist and stoners and have some seriously negative qualities. Every race does. But that's kind of what I dig about Hobbits. Apart from Bilbo and Frodo, Hobbits are the ultimate sidekick class. They are the second bananas and they are the pack horses, the ones who bear and carry and store, who bring the extra rope and put the shiny things in their pockets for no reason but don't set out to be heroes. Even Bilbo, really, was just the burglar Gandalf rustled up for the Dwarves. It goes back up to what I was saying about partners. Elves, Men, Dwarves, they have a sense of like, race and nation and history and grand scale things, but I think they lack a sense of community a lot of the time when we see them, or perhaps it's just that the emphasis on community seems so much more prevalent with Hobbits. They know what their neighbors are up to.
Example: last night was my going away party with people from work. The waitress showed up with some drink that no one could identify, and we were trying to figure out where it went, and I was like, "No, because I was drinking rum and coke, T had a fuzzy navel, Ronnie and Steve had PBR, Beth and Crystal had Bay Breezes, Brenda had a seven and seven, Tom had a lager, Caitlin just had Coke..." I joked that this kind of thing is why I am a barista, because I remember everyone's drinks, but it's like, that's a Hobbit thing, to me. To see the details, to remember them not to show off or because you feel obligated to by the weight of history or because you can use them to some other end but just because the details are the point, and that's every detail, that's every eyelet in lace and the waxiness of the leaves on a plant and the exact row of corn in a field that marks as far as you have ever been from your home... that's a Hobbit thing. I dunno. This is I think my longest ramble and it's gone totally afield at this point, but that's kind of the point of this, isn't it?
Comment to this post with THOR'S ANIMU EYES, and I will list seven things I want you to talk about. They might make sense or they might be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.
My list from beanarie:
Coffee: So, I love coffee. It started out as a like, OMG I LOVE CAFFEINE kind of thing in college, because I didn't start drinking it really until then, but once I started working for Starbucks I started developing a taste for it and knowledge about it and I finally understood why people do that with wine and beer and cheese and whatever else people develop palettes for and talk snootily about. I learned that I really like Mexican coffee and that I generally don't like African coffees but that even that is not always true because I really like the East African components in Willow Blend. I learned that coffee can have blueberry and spice and coconut notes so strong that you can smell it coming off the beans when you open the bag (the coconut one was fairly recent, with Hawai'ian Ka'u, and the guest was so understanding as I stood there and sniffed her beans and made someone else sniff her beans and then read the entire bag because we don't get these at licensed stores; the guest I made smell the blueberry notes in the Rwandan coffee in Boston was not nearly so nice, hrmph). I don't know what else to say, I hope this is a long enough ramble. I didn't even get into espresso!
Publishing: Oh my. I don't know what to say about this any more. Everything is changing so fast. I see the people, have them on my friends list, who are blowing up with self-publishing, and it kind of makes me wonder, what's the point anymore? What's the point of pursuing a career sifting through the slush and finding gems and polishing them and developing relationships and all the things that you think go into editorial work when authors can just do an end-run around you and put things out there themselves? Of course, I understand the desire of writers to get past those gatekeepers, too, believe me, I sympathize, but overall I just feel like there's a really good chance I wasted two and a half years of my life trying to find a way to break into a dying industry. Which is why I'm OK with selling coffee.
UST: Hi, I love this. No matter what happens, in real life, in fiction, in whatever, the resolution is just never as much fun, never has the passion and promise, of the UST. It's one of the reasons I love seeing the world through slash goggles. You can find it everywhere. Just ask T, one of my favorite catch phrases is, "Aaaaaaaaaaand, shipped." I say it all the time, because I love the idea of those moments of flirtation and "accidental" physical closeness and everybody else being like, GOD JUST FUCK ALREADY and it never happening. I don't particularly go in for star-crossed lovers type scenarios where people are kept apart, though. I like it best when it's acknowledged and at turns awkward as shit and then also playful. Not malicious, not a chase, just being there and being like, so, so so so so close but just never actually combusting. The whistle of the firework going up before it bursts. Yeah.
Dysfunction: So, thoughts about this. I am, as I think a lot of people are, intimately familiar with dysfunction. Sorry if either of them are reading this, but my parents' marriage is fundamentally dysfunctional. I barely remember a time when it was not dysfunctional. This just was a state of being that pervaded my entire experience growing up. You have no concept of what to expect in relationships when the main model for one in your life is dysfunctional, and while I think Erin and I have done well for ourselves on this front, in my case at least I can say I got a very late start because I just had no idea what the hell I was doing. That being said, I could keep going on about how my relationships with my parents are dysfunctional and how that's affected my life and whatever, but I really don't tend to dwell on that at that point in my life. Yes, therapy has helped. I think a couple of the most important things about dysfunction, though, are that you often can't see it when you're in it and that it's often not actually as broken as you perceive it as being. I just recently had a friendship end that went from being profoundly fulfilling to being completely dysfunctional. Like, the function of a friend is something each person has to define for themselves, but it's pretty obvious when it's not happening and this person and I had just stopped being friends to each other, and we each blamed the other for it and it was whatever, but when I was in it, I just thought, oh, we're fighting, but we're still friends. But that fact of the matter was, he'd long ago stopped being a friend to me and in my attempts to get my friend back, I'd stopped being a friend to him. So it was dysfunctional. That being said, it was not like, completely broken. That's the weird thing about dysfunction is there's still function there. So there were these bright spots when we were friends again that made it that much more difficult to acknowledge the dysfunction. Dysfunction no longer looks like a word.
Partners: Ahaha, this is funny in light of the above. OK, so I like this word a LOT, it's one of my favorite words. People who work at Starbucks are called "partners," and I think that's part of where I developed my enjoyment of it because it gives you the idea that a person can have as many partners as they need. So at any given time I can have like, a partner in my marriage, a partner in running my kin, a partner in planning a trip to Dublin, and I can be a partner in decorating a new apartment and in helping to create a radio show and in running a food service department in a giant big box store and that can all be true. I don't really have a partner kink, though. I never really shipped Mulder/Scully or Benson/Stabler (NO NO NO) or Ed/Greg or most other partners, so if that's where you were going with this, then nah. I think a partnership can be a great place to develop that kind of UST I was talking about before, but in general when it's like, here, these two are partners and their lives depend on each other therefore obviously boning, then it's just too easy.
Immigration: People get SO WEIRDED OUT by this word. They're like, wait a minute. You're leaving the US for somewhere else? They don't understand it. Even now with less than two weeks there are people who are confused about what I'm doing and why. I think when they hear immigration they either think of like, Yentl, or LA MIGRA or something, but they don't think of first world to first world even though it happens all the damn time. Yes, I am going to be an immigrant. I will have to have papers. You know, the kind of thing you think it's funny to joke about our overnight cleaning crew not having? Yeah, that will be me on the receiving end of those jokes. I am living the liberal American fantasy, people, and fleeing to Canada. That being said, my own actual dealings with Canadian immigration have been downright minimal. I send them forms, they uniformly approve them because every county wants a Sara so they rubber stamp my shit, and that's pretty much it. The one thing I never feared (with one small exception that was not my fault!) was denial of my application. A privilege, to be sure, of first world to first world.
Hobbits: OK, so I keep trying to explain to people that I'm basically moving to Hobbiton and they're like, BUT IT'S SO COLD because they don't want to listen to me, and hey, that's fine. Especially because it's really more like Stock, but it's whaterrrrrrrrrr. Hobbit have always been my favorite fantasy race. Let others have the valiant men and the luminous Elves and the martial Dwarves and whatever else is out there. At the end of the day, I love the idea of a sensuous, joyful race that values hard work and safety. Now, I would be more adventurous than your average Hobbit. I will not deny that they are xenophobic and isolationist and stoners and have some seriously negative qualities. Every race does. But that's kind of what I dig about Hobbits. Apart from Bilbo and Frodo, Hobbits are the ultimate sidekick class. They are the second bananas and they are the pack horses, the ones who bear and carry and store, who bring the extra rope and put the shiny things in their pockets for no reason but don't set out to be heroes. Even Bilbo, really, was just the burglar Gandalf rustled up for the Dwarves. It goes back up to what I was saying about partners. Elves, Men, Dwarves, they have a sense of like, race and nation and history and grand scale things, but I think they lack a sense of community a lot of the time when we see them, or perhaps it's just that the emphasis on community seems so much more prevalent with Hobbits. They know what their neighbors are up to.
Example: last night was my going away party with people from work. The waitress showed up with some drink that no one could identify, and we were trying to figure out where it went, and I was like, "No, because I was drinking rum and coke, T had a fuzzy navel, Ronnie and Steve had PBR, Beth and Crystal had Bay Breezes, Brenda had a seven and seven, Tom had a lager, Caitlin just had Coke..." I joked that this kind of thing is why I am a barista, because I remember everyone's drinks, but it's like, that's a Hobbit thing, to me. To see the details, to remember them not to show off or because you feel obligated to by the weight of history or because you can use them to some other end but just because the details are the point, and that's every detail, that's every eyelet in lace and the waxiness of the leaves on a plant and the exact row of corn in a field that marks as far as you have ever been from your home... that's a Hobbit thing. I dunno. This is I think my longest ramble and it's gone totally afield at this point, but that's kind of the point of this, isn't it?