My week so farthe good, the bad, and the ugly, in no particular order
The good:
- I have tenants! We signed the lease last night. ::does the dance of financial solvency:: Real estate in my area is so expensive that the only way I was able to buy a house was to buy a duplex and have both tenants and a roommate. If I hadn't found tenants by the end of the month, I was going to have a nervous breakdown. Even better, they're really nice people, and they have a super-sweet dog, an 8-year-old husky-Alsatian mix. (Here's definitive proof that I suck at being a hardass landlord: I'm excited about their cool dog, because the flat is really ideal for four-legged critters, and I'm pretty sure the Evil Capitalist Pig Landlord Handbook uses words like "liability" and "property damage" when talking about dogs.)
- In the past two days, I have patched water-stained plaster, sealed it with special primer, and repainted an entire room by myself. It's actually not that much work, but I'm not that handy--in fact, I may possibly be anti-handy--and it's the first time I've ever done something so big by myself. It turned out pretty well, too, though all of the muscles in my butt are letting me know what they thought of all the crouching. I'm reevaluating my position on the lovely Edwardian trim in my home; it looks great, but it's a bitch to tape up for painting.
The bad?:
- I had a dream last night that I actually had two flats downstairs, neither of which looked anything like what downstairs actually looks like. One of the tenants, who looked like an amalgamation of Chad Michael Murray and Cletus the slack-jawed yokel from The Simpsons, stopped paying rent, and I was screwed financially (to fully appreciate the horror, you must rent Pacific Heights, a horror movie based on--I kid you not--San Francisco rent control laws). I caught up with him on a school bus and made empty threats about legal action, which I had no way to pay for, but he promised me that he was going to be making a lot of money really soon writing Buffy novels. The shrieking violins of horror started up on the soundtrack at that point, as I screamed, "Noooooooooooo! Those novels are all crap! And Simon & Schuster isn't going to publish any more anyway!" Yeah, I don't know either. What would Freud say?
The ugly:
- I am thisclose to unsubscribing from BAPS. I don't have a problem with differences of opinion, but I do have a problem with extreme ugliness and personally directed vitriol. Bleah. TWoP may be hyper-critical and not particularly Spike-friendly, but at least the mods there actively enforce an atmosphere of civil discourse, and aren't afraid to single out the few bad actors that ruin a conversation for everyone.
I've gotten through S2 as far as "School Hard," though I'm going to have to watch "School Hard" again--no hardship for me as I love that episode. I didn't take very good notes the first time through. They seem to consist mostly of things like "Spike!" and "Boy does Spike know how to make an entrance" and "Spike has pretty, pretty eyes" and I'm fairly sure that's not very useful.
I know ME didn't plan things out years in advance, but it once again strikes me how well later developments were rooted in the early episodes. In "When She Was Bad," we can already see the foreshadowing of Buffy's reaction to being resurrected. She's confronted with the reality that she can take a vacation from her calling, but it will always be there, waiting for her. Her reaction to staking the first vampire that has appeared all summer is bleak: "It's like they knew I was coming back." She has dreams of the Master that are not only prophetic, in terms of warning her of those attempting to resurrect her, but speak to her hidden trauma over her first death--a trauma that she will not acknowledge to anyone around her. Her first instinct is to hide her inner turmoil from everyone--her friends, her watcher, and her could-be lover. And she uses her sexuality as a method of distancing herself from those she's closest to: by dancing with Xander as she does, she alienates Willow and puts Angel off. There's also a new hardness about her, in her willingness to torture a vampire for information. By the end of the episode, she has recovered her sense of security and come back to the sheltering embrace of her friends and Angel, but at the age of 16 her original alienation was much slighter and more easily recovered from, and her friends had fewer outside preoccupations.
"When She Was Bad" also points to a key ME failure in S6: Buffy is able to act as a total bitca in the episode without ever becoming unsympathetic. It was a delicate balance, but it worked. Whereas in S6, I don't think the showrunners retained the important idea that there was a balance that needed to be achieved. I get the sense that at that point they felt that Buffy was the heroine and whatever she did automatically had a seal of goodness. This problem may have been yet another result of Marti Noxon's desire to tell her own life story through the show whether it fit or not; it's a tempting hypothesis, since of course in that case the showrunner, identifying completely with the title character, doesn't realize how bad she looks to the more objective audience. Unfortunately, it seems like Whedon wasn't sufficiently aware of the way the season was tearing down the character either. It could have been sheer writing laziness. In any case, "When She Was Bad" makes me a little sad for the way Buffy's post-resurrection depression could have been portrayed, since I continue to think there was a lot of meat to that storyline that went unexplored. Just imagine if they'd managed to retain that balance between sympathetic and bitca. It's a good thing there's fanfic.
- I have tenants! We signed the lease last night. ::does the dance of financial solvency:: Real estate in my area is so expensive that the only way I was able to buy a house was to buy a duplex and have both tenants and a roommate. If I hadn't found tenants by the end of the month, I was going to have a nervous breakdown. Even better, they're really nice people, and they have a super-sweet dog, an 8-year-old husky-Alsatian mix. (Here's definitive proof that I suck at being a hardass landlord: I'm excited about their cool dog, because the flat is really ideal for four-legged critters, and I'm pretty sure the Evil Capitalist Pig Landlord Handbook uses words like "liability" and "property damage" when talking about dogs.)
- In the past two days, I have patched water-stained plaster, sealed it with special primer, and repainted an entire room by myself. It's actually not that much work, but I'm not that handy--in fact, I may possibly be anti-handy--and it's the first time I've ever done something so big by myself. It turned out pretty well, too, though all of the muscles in my butt are letting me know what they thought of all the crouching. I'm reevaluating my position on the lovely Edwardian trim in my home; it looks great, but it's a bitch to tape up for painting.
The bad?:
- I had a dream last night that I actually had two flats downstairs, neither of which looked anything like what downstairs actually looks like. One of the tenants, who looked like an amalgamation of Chad Michael Murray and Cletus the slack-jawed yokel from The Simpsons, stopped paying rent, and I was screwed financially (to fully appreciate the horror, you must rent Pacific Heights, a horror movie based on--I kid you not--San Francisco rent control laws). I caught up with him on a school bus and made empty threats about legal action, which I had no way to pay for, but he promised me that he was going to be making a lot of money really soon writing Buffy novels. The shrieking violins of horror started up on the soundtrack at that point, as I screamed, "Noooooooooooo! Those novels are all crap! And Simon & Schuster isn't going to publish any more anyway!" Yeah, I don't know either. What would Freud say?
The ugly:
- I am thisclose to unsubscribing from BAPS. I don't have a problem with differences of opinion, but I do have a problem with extreme ugliness and personally directed vitriol. Bleah. TWoP may be hyper-critical and not particularly Spike-friendly, but at least the mods there actively enforce an atmosphere of civil discourse, and aren't afraid to single out the few bad actors that ruin a conversation for everyone.
I've gotten through S2 as far as "School Hard," though I'm going to have to watch "School Hard" again--no hardship for me as I love that episode. I didn't take very good notes the first time through. They seem to consist mostly of things like "Spike!" and "Boy does Spike know how to make an entrance" and "Spike has pretty, pretty eyes" and I'm fairly sure that's not very useful.
I know ME didn't plan things out years in advance, but it once again strikes me how well later developments were rooted in the early episodes. In "When She Was Bad," we can already see the foreshadowing of Buffy's reaction to being resurrected. She's confronted with the reality that she can take a vacation from her calling, but it will always be there, waiting for her. Her reaction to staking the first vampire that has appeared all summer is bleak: "It's like they knew I was coming back." She has dreams of the Master that are not only prophetic, in terms of warning her of those attempting to resurrect her, but speak to her hidden trauma over her first death--a trauma that she will not acknowledge to anyone around her. Her first instinct is to hide her inner turmoil from everyone--her friends, her watcher, and her could-be lover. And she uses her sexuality as a method of distancing herself from those she's closest to: by dancing with Xander as she does, she alienates Willow and puts Angel off. There's also a new hardness about her, in her willingness to torture a vampire for information. By the end of the episode, she has recovered her sense of security and come back to the sheltering embrace of her friends and Angel, but at the age of 16 her original alienation was much slighter and more easily recovered from, and her friends had fewer outside preoccupations.
"When She Was Bad" also points to a key ME failure in S6: Buffy is able to act as a total bitca in the episode without ever becoming unsympathetic. It was a delicate balance, but it worked. Whereas in S6, I don't think the showrunners retained the important idea that there was a balance that needed to be achieved. I get the sense that at that point they felt that Buffy was the heroine and whatever she did automatically had a seal of goodness. This problem may have been yet another result of Marti Noxon's desire to tell her own life story through the show whether it fit or not; it's a tempting hypothesis, since of course in that case the showrunner, identifying completely with the title character, doesn't realize how bad she looks to the more objective audience. Unfortunately, it seems like Whedon wasn't sufficiently aware of the way the season was tearing down the character either. It could have been sheer writing laziness. In any case, "When She Was Bad" makes me a little sad for the way Buffy's post-resurrection depression could have been portrayed, since I continue to think there was a lot of meat to that storyline that went unexplored. Just imagine if they'd managed to retain that balance between sympathetic and bitca. It's a good thing there's fanfic.