freedom! (wherein I ramble about many things)
I turned in my last essays today, and got my Spanish final back -- 56.5/59, so hurrah. It was my last Spanish class, so ... I don't know. It's inconvenient to schedule around sequential classes, especially when they fill up as quickly as Spanish does, but I'll miss it. I've been studying off-and-on for ten years, and I forgot just about everything I knew for five of them, but it was super-easy to pick up once I started up again.
Eh. I'm partly relieved for the scheduling reasons, partly terrified that I'm going to lose it all over again (I'm not anywhere near fluent, but I know all the verb tenses and stuff), and partly ... wistful, I guess. There aren't a lot of classes where the material seems to leap into your brain of its own accord, whether you're trying to learn it or not. Anyway, I'll be happy if I just pass English, and I should do well in psychology. I generally do, for some inexplicable reason - I'm really not a people person.
Speaking of that, I think I got an official diagnosis or ... something. Anyway, we'd talked about -- something, and in our meeting yesterday we went over the DSM-IV together and talked about which aspects applied (nearly all) and criticized its failure to include the sensory aspects. And she made notes. But it's the first time anybody ever considered something other than mood/anxiety stuff, and it's ... disconcerting. Like most of what I've considered my personality qualify as symptoms, and part of me is going it's not all my fault oh God it's not all my fault and the other part is going if all that is this, then what's left to be me? I've already spent most of my life feeling like I'm performing humanity along with gender.
Best parts:
PSYCHOLOGIST: So, let's talk about the sensory problems you mentioned.
ME: I hate sunshine and puppies. The light hurts my eyes and the exuberance hurts my brain.
PSYCHOLOGIST: Okay, catching up on everything from last year ... [blah blah] and you still identify as asexual?
ME: YES.
So I'm finally free, and I have like twenty-four thousand words to write for the au_bigbang. We'll see how it goes -- my Star Wars kick is (obviously) still going strong. I keep being tempted to write strange canon-compliant ficlets with the twins and Leia coming to terms with her legacy and Anakin's transmitter getting left behind when his body disappears and Force-ghosts and Luke and Leia bonding but also being unable to talk about certain things together (like how their ideas of "real family" are very, very, very different but valid for their own experiences) and going on life-changing field trips with Han and rebuilding the Jedi Order together.
Also, I like to sit around and come up with headcanon and theories, like Palpatine has the suit prepared because he totally knew what was going to happen when he sent Anakin off to Mustafar. But then, I really like the PT AU. Oh, and I decided to disregard the EU altogether in my post-ROTJ imaginings, and had fun imagining Han and Leia's children without trying to shoehorn my ideas into the canon (or "canon"?) characters - it's still a set of three with twins, but with different personalities and dynamics and names and birth order: girl (Lyra), boy-girl twins (named after Leia's parents - Bail and Padmé). Also, I might have just researched women's marital name changes and written an eight-page psychology paper on it, so I'm definitely digging my heels in with Organa being the family's surname.
But I'm not doing any of these things, because 24,000 words and it's not like Revenge and (especially) Lucy haven't eaten my mind, too. Also, looking up Intriguing Original Ideas has made me both depressed (whyyyyyy) and happy (come on, how can Vader's pet gargoyles fail to make everyone's day brighter? They don't fit in Revenge, but I'll totally get them into the Lucyfic in some way). So I'll try to catch up with
hl and
tulina at some point, and actually (gasp) write on my own if we can't coordinate our timezones. Oh, and I've been meaning to finish my trilogy of purist posts with "things George Lucas has said that don't fill my soul with rage." We'll see.
Speaking of life-changing field trips, I'm going to need an Avatar folder for the dozens of fics I've now bookmarked. There's one author I particularly lost hours to enjoy -
recessional . So many were amazing (the longer Azulafic was everything Azulafic should be and she actually wrote the reconciliation with Lee that I wanted exactly as I imagined it), but the first one I read was this. And I went "ha, is that Mai/Zuko/Katara subtext I see?" And then I went "lol, me and my ridiculous OT3 goggles, I'll see them anywhere."
I don't even know why I like them so much, except deconstructing the Betty-Veronica dichotomy of "here's the nice and blandly attractive one, and here's the morally ambiguous but sexy one, and you must choose between them and this is totally a moral choice that will reveal your true character, . And yes, that would mean that in Han/Leia/Luke, Luke is Betty and Han is Veronica CANNOT UNSEE. Also, my true love is for romantic friendship and I love power-trio style friendships and pairings within them tend to make me faintly uncomfortable because of the Western cultural narrative of romantic pair-bonding > all other relationships. So, if they're not all aromantic asexuals for whom platonic life partnership is the best relationship imaginable, the OT3 solves everything and everything is comfortably filtered sunshine and rainbows and nothing hurts.
So while Mai/Zuko/Katara never occurred to me, my most serious ships are almost all OT3s -- Harry/Ron/Hermione, Han/Leia/Luke, Colin/Mary/Dickon. There's Darcy/Elizabeth, but those of you who can see past my enormous subtlety might have noticed a certain fondness for Darcy/Elizabeth/Charlotte. I nearly wrote a prologue to First Impressions where Charlotte ends up at Pemberley (because Catherine doesn't like her friends living off of other people's less effective charity needs a personal companion), and even I didn't know if it was the OTP with BFF Charlotte or OT3.
Anyway. After I chided myself a bit, I happened to look at her list of fic. Something like three-quarters was clearly labelled as Mai/Zuko/Katara and the one I read clearly belonged to the same universe. I might have cackled almost as loudly as I did when it turned out I was totally right about the identity of the third cop in Castle. HA I WIN EVERYTHING.
Oh, and I've been following the #damn my asexual privilege tag at tumblr. So beautiful.
ETA: Random icon has never been more appropriate.
Eh. I'm partly relieved for the scheduling reasons, partly terrified that I'm going to lose it all over again (I'm not anywhere near fluent, but I know all the verb tenses and stuff), and partly ... wistful, I guess. There aren't a lot of classes where the material seems to leap into your brain of its own accord, whether you're trying to learn it or not. Anyway, I'll be happy if I just pass English, and I should do well in psychology. I generally do, for some inexplicable reason - I'm really not a people person.
Speaking of that, I think I got an official diagnosis or ... something. Anyway, we'd talked about -- something, and in our meeting yesterday we went over the DSM-IV together and talked about which aspects applied (nearly all) and criticized its failure to include the sensory aspects. And she made notes. But it's the first time anybody ever considered something other than mood/anxiety stuff, and it's ... disconcerting. Like most of what I've considered my personality qualify as symptoms, and part of me is going it's not all my fault oh God it's not all my fault and the other part is going if all that is this, then what's left to be me? I've already spent most of my life feeling like I'm performing humanity along with gender.
Best parts:
PSYCHOLOGIST: So, let's talk about the sensory problems you mentioned.
ME: I hate sunshine and puppies. The light hurts my eyes and the exuberance hurts my brain.
PSYCHOLOGIST: Okay, catching up on everything from last year ... [blah blah] and you still identify as asexual?
ME: YES.
So I'm finally free, and I have like twenty-four thousand words to write for the au_bigbang. We'll see how it goes -- my Star Wars kick is (obviously) still going strong. I keep being tempted to write strange canon-compliant ficlets with the twins and Leia coming to terms with her legacy and Anakin's transmitter getting left behind when his body disappears and Force-ghosts and Luke and Leia bonding but also being unable to talk about certain things together (like how their ideas of "real family" are very, very, very different but valid for their own experiences) and going on life-changing field trips with Han and rebuilding the Jedi Order together.
Also, I like to sit around and come up with headcanon and theories, like Palpatine has the suit prepared because he totally knew what was going to happen when he sent Anakin off to Mustafar. But then, I really like the PT AU. Oh, and I decided to disregard the EU altogether in my post-ROTJ imaginings, and had fun imagining Han and Leia's children without trying to shoehorn my ideas into the canon (or "canon"?) characters - it's still a set of three with twins, but with different personalities and dynamics and names and birth order: girl (Lyra), boy-girl twins (named after Leia's parents - Bail and Padmé). Also, I might have just researched women's marital name changes and written an eight-page psychology paper on it, so I'm definitely digging my heels in with Organa being the family's surname.
But I'm not doing any of these things, because 24,000 words and it's not like Revenge and (especially) Lucy haven't eaten my mind, too. Also, looking up Intriguing Original Ideas has made me both depressed (whyyyyyy) and happy (come on, how can Vader's pet gargoyles fail to make everyone's day brighter? They don't fit in Revenge, but I'll totally get them into the Lucyfic in some way). So I'll try to catch up with
hl and
tulina at some point, and actually (gasp) write on my own if we can't coordinate our timezones. Oh, and I've been meaning to finish my trilogy of purist posts with "things George Lucas has said that don't fill my soul with rage." We'll see.
Speaking of life-changing field trips, I'm going to need an Avatar folder for the dozens of fics I've now bookmarked. There's one author I particularly lost hours to enjoy -
recessional . So many were amazing (the longer Azulafic was everything Azulafic should be and she actually wrote the reconciliation with Lee that I wanted exactly as I imagined it), but the first one I read was this. And I went "ha, is that Mai/Zuko/Katara subtext I see?" And then I went "lol, me and my ridiculous OT3 goggles, I'll see them anywhere."
I don't even know why I like them so much, except deconstructing the Betty-Veronica dichotomy of "here's the nice and blandly attractive one, and here's the morally ambiguous but sexy one, and you must choose between them and this is totally a moral choice that will reveal your true character, . And yes, that would mean that in Han/Leia/Luke, Luke is Betty and Han is Veronica CANNOT UNSEE. Also, my true love is for romantic friendship and I love power-trio style friendships and pairings within them tend to make me faintly uncomfortable because of the Western cultural narrative of romantic pair-bonding > all other relationships. So, if they're not all aromantic asexuals for whom platonic life partnership is the best relationship imaginable, the OT3 solves everything and everything is comfortably filtered sunshine and rainbows and nothing hurts.
So while Mai/Zuko/Katara never occurred to me, my most serious ships are almost all OT3s -- Harry/Ron/Hermione, Han/Leia/Luke, Colin/Mary/Dickon. There's Darcy/Elizabeth, but those of you who can see past my enormous subtlety might have noticed a certain fondness for Darcy/Elizabeth/Charlotte. I nearly wrote a prologue to First Impressions where Charlotte ends up at Pemberley (because Catherine doesn't like her friends living off of other people's less effective charity needs a personal companion), and even I didn't know if it was the OTP with BFF Charlotte or OT3.
Anyway. After I chided myself a bit, I happened to look at her list of fic. Something like three-quarters was clearly labelled as Mai/Zuko/Katara and the one I read clearly belonged to the same universe. I might have cackled almost as loudly as I did when it turned out I was totally right about the identity of the third cop in Castle. HA I WIN EVERYTHING.
Oh, and I've been following the #damn my asexual privilege tag at tumblr. So beautiful.
ETA: Random icon has never been more appropriate.