3 things: grocery stores and the closing thereof; lgbtfest and asexuality; Code Geass
1. I went grocery shopping this evening and discovered that Tops has decided to close the P&C location on Hancock St. (Tops is a grocery chain that recently bought most of the old P&C grocery chain; what they didn't claim, Price Chopper did.) Either they were not able to negotiate rents with the couple who own the site, or they decided the store was not profitable enough.
It will close in mid-April.
This is unfortunate, as that store was the only grocery store within walking distance of my apartment, and all other stores require a twenty-minute walk into town and then a fifteen or thirty-minute bus ride (in other words, forget buying dairy products; they will curdle) or a ten minute walk and a five minute bus ride to the ultra-discount Aldi, and I don't really like discount stores; they have such awful selection.
So it looks as though I will be joining the Ithaca car share program and doing all my shopping once a week down at Wegmans. *sigh* Damn it all to hell.
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2. In a fit of madness, I signed up (at least, I think I signed up) for this year's lgbtfest. I found a prompt that really spoke to me in a fandom I know. I think it may have originally been intended to be about a man dealing with subsidiary issues of being gay, but it can be read equally validly as a man dealing with asexuality, and upon considering said character (Astrin Ymris, from Patricia McKillip's Riddle Master trilogy), I suddenly cannot see him as anything but asexual and cannot figure out why I didn't realize that before.
And the fest is allowing prompts and stories about asexual issues this year, so my interpretation is allowable. Yay!
I have realized over the years that while I see some characters as asexual and tend to write most people as not especially interested in sex and/or romance unless said desires are notable character traits or sex is the point of a given story, I have never really written about asexuality as an issue. It will be interesting to try. It's something weirdly personal, in a way that other issues aren't usually for me. (Not even feminism, because for me, being female and therefore part of a community of women and girls has never been a question, whereas being asexual is something it took me time to realize and start working out what the implications meant for me on a practical and emotional level. And I still have not told my family in so many words, though I have danced very pointedly up and down the edges of the issue.)
Of course, from another point of view a ridiculous amount of stuff I write is already dealing with asexuality and/or aromanticism, since even when I am writing sex and romance, my treatment of said elements is awfully dry and glossed over, and I place more importance on friendship and familial relationships anyway. But still, the one time I previously tried writing a story specifically about asexuality, I was still not down with the whole implications of the thing (I had identified myself as asexual, but not really connected that to there being other asexual people) and therefore tried to justify a character's planned asexuality as nerve damage or some-such instead of just letting his orientation be natural and normal. That pathologizing of my own orientation is probably as much a reason I abandoned that story as my growing lack of interest in Harry Potter in general.
Anyway, hopefully I will be working on both my issues and this new story, and have something presentable done at the end of May.
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3. I've been overdosing on Code Geass fanfic the past few days. (You may have noticed over the years that I have a thing for mind games and antiheroes, though I rarely write them. I also have a thing for explorations of morality and ethics, which I do write about. Also, war stories are cool.) The upshot of this is that I have added the series to my Netflix queue and am morbidly curious about whether I'll enjoy it.
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It will close in mid-April.
This is unfortunate, as that store was the only grocery store within walking distance of my apartment, and all other stores require a twenty-minute walk into town and then a fifteen or thirty-minute bus ride (in other words, forget buying dairy products; they will curdle) or a ten minute walk and a five minute bus ride to the ultra-discount Aldi, and I don't really like discount stores; they have such awful selection.
So it looks as though I will be joining the Ithaca car share program and doing all my shopping once a week down at Wegmans. *sigh* Damn it all to hell.
-----
2. In a fit of madness, I signed up (at least, I think I signed up) for this year's lgbtfest. I found a prompt that really spoke to me in a fandom I know. I think it may have originally been intended to be about a man dealing with subsidiary issues of being gay, but it can be read equally validly as a man dealing with asexuality, and upon considering said character (Astrin Ymris, from Patricia McKillip's Riddle Master trilogy), I suddenly cannot see him as anything but asexual and cannot figure out why I didn't realize that before.
And the fest is allowing prompts and stories about asexual issues this year, so my interpretation is allowable. Yay!
I have realized over the years that while I see some characters as asexual and tend to write most people as not especially interested in sex and/or romance unless said desires are notable character traits or sex is the point of a given story, I have never really written about asexuality as an issue. It will be interesting to try. It's something weirdly personal, in a way that other issues aren't usually for me. (Not even feminism, because for me, being female and therefore part of a community of women and girls has never been a question, whereas being asexual is something it took me time to realize and start working out what the implications meant for me on a practical and emotional level. And I still have not told my family in so many words, though I have danced very pointedly up and down the edges of the issue.)
Of course, from another point of view a ridiculous amount of stuff I write is already dealing with asexuality and/or aromanticism, since even when I am writing sex and romance, my treatment of said elements is awfully dry and glossed over, and I place more importance on friendship and familial relationships anyway. But still, the one time I previously tried writing a story specifically about asexuality, I was still not down with the whole implications of the thing (I had identified myself as asexual, but not really connected that to there being other asexual people) and therefore tried to justify a character's planned asexuality as nerve damage or some-such instead of just letting his orientation be natural and normal. That pathologizing of my own orientation is probably as much a reason I abandoned that story as my growing lack of interest in Harry Potter in general.
Anyway, hopefully I will be working on both my issues and this new story, and have something presentable done at the end of May.
-----
3. I've been overdosing on Code Geass fanfic the past few days. (You may have noticed over the years that I have a thing for mind games and antiheroes, though I rarely write them. I also have a thing for explorations of morality and ethics, which I do write about. Also, war stories are cool.) The upshot of this is that I have added the series to my Netflix queue and am morbidly curious about whether I'll enjoy it.
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)