Vids: Come up and See Me (Make Me Smile)

[thefourthvine]

I have a fan fiction set nearly ready to go, but I'm hoping I'll, um, develop the ability to be coherent before I actually post it. (Sleep would help. A lot.) So I asked myself what I could do in my current state of incoherence (hints: nothing involving heavy machinery, sharp implements, explosives, or complete sentences), and it came to me in a

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[thefourthvine]

The emo muse is like that kid in The Ring: you can throw her down a well, but she'll just be pissed when she gets back.

*nods*

I tend to think of her more as a shadow - you can run, but she'll always be right behind you. And probably whispering in your ear, "Let's you and me hurt them, baby."

(Hmm. It is just possible that I've got my muses mixed up, because that actually sounds like the horror muse. Or maybe the psychotic muse. It's no surprise, really; I always have to look up the difference between Erato and Euterpe, too.)

In all seriousness, I'm kind of blushing and skippy. Didn't know you liked Ratio. Cool.

Well, okay. I admit that I should probably have actually, I don't know, told you about it, maybe via the handy comments feature I'm abusing right now. But in my defense, I assumed you'd know, because I don't think there's anyone in the fandom who doesn't love Ratio. It's a wonderful story.

Ah, Steinbeck. Say no more. The Red Pony.

Oh my god. *has traumatic flashback*

The worst part about the Hardy, really, was that I did it to myself. It was one of a plethora of titles we could choose from, and I blundered in trustingly. We were students once, and young.

And now we are most definitely sadder but wiser.

My own did-it-to-myself horror was in the same class where I had to read "Flight"; in addition to all the assigned reading, we had to do deeper, independent exploration of one book each semester. And we had this list of books to choose from.

The first semester, I picked The Picture of Dorian Gray. In retrospect, it is very obvious to me that my proto-slasher brain made this selection, and I only wish I had let it make the other one. Because that was a great book - fun to read and caustically satirical. Plus, there was gay. And it had the longest sentence anyone in the class found that year. (We did a lot of sentence diagramming, and the teacher had a standing agreement that she'd accept any diagramming challenge we cared to issue, although of course her other classes had used just about every complex sentence in the required reading, and she had the diagrams all on file. So of course we spent a lot of time searching our independent study books for really long, difficult sentences, which was probably her intention. I totally won for long, but only because no one decided to read Ulysses that year.)

The second semester, I developed the hideous urge to be different. So I asked the teacher if I could do Catch-22, which was not on the list. I still have no idea why I did that. But she agreed, probably thinking I would learn a valuable lesson about the perils of thinking outside the box, and so I spent the semester wrestling with a lengthy novel about the insanity of war, told in an experimental style that allows the reader to live the crazy first-hand. (For one thing, if you've never read it - it's like he wrote the book, chopped the whole manuscript up into segments several paragraphs long, and then put them back together in a totally random order. I had to read it three times just to get the timeline straight.) And as I mentioned in the post, I don't like war stories.

Really, teachers don't need to be hard on their students; they are entirely capable of ruining their own fun.

*shivers in memory*

Re: whale gore... ew. And I say that as a bio major with dissections under her belt. (Except... that sounds really wrong.)

*snicker*

But, no, really, I know what you mean. I was a biochem/osteology major, so I did my share of dissections - fetal pigs, birds the year I had the lab instructor who decided to use us as research assistants for her dissertation, a cadaver lab, and of course enough bones to cover all of Utah to a depth of three feet - but the whale gore was much, much, much worse. There are things I don't need to know. And, just as a single example, I could have lived forever without a detailed and knowledgeable description of how whalers dealt with the whale's head. As you said: Ew.