People who know me know that I am... sporadically, aggressively tidy? Meaning that while deep down in my compulsive soul (thanks, Mum), I want things to be tidy - I NEED things to be tidy - I am also half Artist (genetically, on Dad's side, and feel free to apply all hilarious, sarcastic intonations that come with that term), which means that often that compulsiveness is turned to something that overrides the Tidy.

When I have nothing else vying for my attention, or perhaps more commonly, when there is something else I should be doing but I really, really don't want to do it, everything is clean. It is tidy. It is organized. You can find things and the dining room table is clear and there are enough forks in the drawer because they are not all in the sink or the dishwasher. Importantly, my bed is made. This last point is a crucial hallmark of my state of mental health. If the bed is made, I am awake and (probably) dressed and functioning and being an adult and Getting Things Done. The day has officially begun and I am out in it.

When there is something else going on that I have to do, and have to do now, seriously, the Tidy is overriden by the compulsive need to Do This Thing Right. So the floor doesn't get vaccuumed, the dishwasher is full of clean dishes and the sink is full of dirty dishes waiting to be put in the dishwasher, my laundry is making a bid for freedom from the closet and the bed? The bed is not made. Probably because I was awake all night and had fifteen minutes to jump out of bed, dress, brush teeth, and dash for the train to get to class or work on time, or because I have still not gone to bed because I am still up working on something that oh god I really just want to finish.

On Friday evening, I had some school people over for dinner. I made Mindy's fabulous tofu butter chicken and it was delicious and we had lovely wine and we spent twice as long as we spent eating just sitting around talking about things. Like adults. (Okay, like adults who spent a solid hour talking about knitting and Joseph Gordon Levitt's shirtsleeves and British Actor Bingo, otherwise known as Midsomer Murders.). It was awesome.

As the semester is (thank the universe) nearly over, on Friday I had two small assignments and one major project left to finish. I got one of them done that evening, leaving the major project to finish tweaking and hand in - namely, a massive Drupal website remake for a local park. It is very complicated. It had approximately 1,567 things that needed to all work together.

On Friday, the apartment was clean. My bed was made. Things were good.

My bed has not been made since Friday, until just now when I finished my project and handed it in and did a little dance. I feel enormously victorious, as I have only one more teensy assignment left to finish and then exams and then this awful, abominable semester is over forever. In a grander sense, I feel like my bed has not been made since early September.

One more assignment to go. I am so close to being properly finished that I can taste it.

And when I am done, I think I will reward myself with writing fic. And possibly vaccuuming my room.

ETA: DAMN IT NOW I AM DOWNLOADING HAWAII FIVE-O. I blame maelie, sheafrotherdon, and dogeared. ON YOUR HEADS BE IT.

Is anybody out there familiar with Drupal? I'm supposed to be doing a lab for my computer science class, except Drupal hates me, and I am remembering all over again why I tried to use Drupal for a site a year ago and gave up in bitter frustration. How does one make Stories appear on Pages? The Stories are arranged under their proper Pages in the file structure - i.e. they have the proper Parent Items - but they do not seem to be interested in automatically appearing where they are pointed. This is extremely frustrating. I have for the time being created direct links on the Pages to point to the Stories, but I get the feeling that this should be more tidy and automatic than it currently appears to be.

Tomorrow we get to do this shit with PHP and third-party plugins. Bog save me. *quails*

Spamming from the roomie's journal:

Writerly people who abide in the UK & Commonwealth!

I would like to draw you attention to the Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now Prize. The winning book will get a publishing contract with Transworld and a £20,000 advance, which is no small amount of change.

Write now as the deadline is approaching quickly: All books must be in by December 31st, 2010.

Sorry, US-ians. You should have considered the consequences of ditching the monarchy for a fair price of tea.

Well. It's not like I have a full five-day schedule next semester, or two jobs, or crippling writer's block, or anything. I mean, hell, I got 67 pages written in one night once, trying to avoid writing a paper on Wordsworth...

That is, of the five things I wanted to actually get done today, I got two of them finished. And one of them was a genuine work-thing! So that's good.

I also did productive sewing-things. I did get the Random Sundress done last night.

( Random Sundress!Collapse )

I'm kind of "meh" about it, but we'll see how I feel about it in a week's time. I did, after all, put it together more or less at random over a week. Sometimes that works out, sometimes it's "meh."

I also cut out pieces for the Whim Dress. Of the Whim Fabric of yesterday. And Christ, but I hate cutting out pattern pieces. It's always my least favourite part of any sewing project, and the reason I don't often sew or, when I do, I do random things pinned to a dressform and completed over a week. (Also, I'm impatient.)
( Stupid bloody pattern pieces.Collapse )
But hey, it's done. Tomorrow I can procrastinate by actually sewing things together.

No, there is nothing exciting about this post. I'm starting to get the almost-bored, you-are-wasting-precious-time feeling, which is the feeling I usually get right before I become madly productive writing-wise out of guilt and self-loathing. (It's a process. It works for me.) This is particularly positive since this week I have to a) actually do some work for my online course, b) do a shitload of Expert Bullshit writing for my job, and c) write a mcshep_match story. That last one being contingent on my making it into the signups this year. *goes to set self a phone reminder*

It's that time again! Where I natter endlessly about my tiny plants.



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Look, I'm just going to warn you now. There are going to be a lot of "Whee! Vegetables!" posts happening over the next couple of weeks. Until the semester ends I expect this to be just about the only thing keeping me remotely sane.

Great! Now, that behind us...

...more things are growing!

...everything is growing!



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The sun was out! The sky was blue! I have only one more project to hand in and then this fucking semester from hell will finally be over!

But speaking of things from under the ground, my veggies are sprouting! So soon!





They weren't there when I looked a couple of days ago, and it looks as though they just exploded from under the dirt! This afternoon I re-potted some replacement indoor plants for the ones that did not survive the winter, and when I went to water the seedlings, there they were! (Which reminds me, I really need to plant the other seeds. And then find somewhere to put them. Oi.) Three of my four spinach pots are sprouting, and one of the chives (I can't remember which kind of chives. But I'm sure they'll be delicious anyway.)

In a couple of weeks, when classes are done, the roomie and I will be planting things for real in the actual ground in our community garden plot. It's going to be aweseome! And will hopefully distract us both from school stress and work stress.

And looming unemployment and homelessness. Sigh.

So, this semester I was required to take a business class which is both irrelevant to my field and has an incredibly frustrating instructor and is full of people with whom I have absolutely nothing in common.

Of COURSE, there's a group project that's worth 30% of our grade. We have to write a business plan (we're doing one for a business one of the group members already owns) and do a presentation as though to investors (I HATE THIS CLASS).

I've been trying to get my group members to have a meeting (ONE!) since the middle of January when we were assigned together, but they keep ducking me. We have done nothing for this project. We haven't even talked about it. They're just too busy, apparently, which makes me wonder why they are taking this class if they don't have time to do the work.

On Monday, I finally managed to schedule a meeting, on campus, for today. I'm pretty sure we can get most of the planning and work done via e-mail, so long as we have at least one in-person meeting.

Just now? The guy who owns the business and actually knows anything about the market we're supposed to be presenting on? Sent us an e-mail saying that he decided to take a job this morning instead of coming to the meeting.

*headdesk*

I'm not at all sure we're going to be able to do anything without him. So we're meeting to... sit around and complain about how we can't get any real work done? I can't even just take over and do it all myself (as I admit I have done before when saddled with non-performing group members), because I know basically nothing about either the particular business or, y'know, business. This is why I volunteered to write the report! And now after three months of not being able to get anything started, I don't have time to do all the work, because I foolishly assumed that a group of business majors would be providing at least some support.

Fuck, fuck, FUCK.

So, my roomie is in library school. A little while back she discovered that most of her classmates (in a social media class catering to children's librarians) had never heard of LOLcats. Had never used most social media. And most disturbing, for people planning on mentoring kids, knew absolutely nothing about fandom. So she and a few others decided to throw them a con, all about fandom. The roomie then informed me I was going to help, since I've been in fandom pretty much since birth and have been here through two technologial migrations. Yesterday I appeared as a guest speaker (as a Subject Expert!) for two sessions of grad students and answered questions about fandom and fanfiction. (We videotaped it! It was great!)

I had an awesome time overall, and most of them, while largely ignorant, were curious and interested and asked all sorts of fascinating questions. What are lurkers? Why so much porn? Have technological changes had an overall positive or negative effect? How do you gain social currency in fandom? One of them was the big one: Why are there so many women in fandom? And I wrote the following for their class blog, because while I answered them then, I had to think about it a little while to get it down and clarify. It was interesting, and I ended up writing a lot of things I'd never thought about before, so I wanted to share what I thought was the most important bit. These are just my thoughts, based on my own fandom experience:

...a huge amount of the process of maturation for a female in Western society is centered on becoming sexualized; going from sexless child to sexual object. This is subliminal and insidious and enormously complex and full of contradictory rules and central to what it means in the mainstream (where very few people distinguish between sex, gender, and sexuality) to Be A Girl and therefore be appropriately feminine. We are not only taught that this is the fundamental quality (before reason, compassion, self-sufficiency, etc.) but to constantly obsess over whether we're Doing It Right. For a lot of girls this is not only stressful but traumatic, because gender is fluid and personal and some people react worse than others over being told that they're somehow abnormal.

The weird thing (the cool thing) about fandom is that while it's an overwhelmingly female-dominated space, it's not a particularly gendered space. Or at least, there is no uniform, ideal gender associated with being of the female sex. This idea was once implicit (female geeks have always tended to get leeway on this kind of thing; the perception of female geeks by male geeks is another discussion entirely) and is now being discussed explicitly. These days the idea that sex, gender and sexuality are three different things is acknowledged and encouraged, and the very nature of fandom encourages people to explore, develop and express their own identities on their own terms, based only on the information they wish to consider valid.

I think that this, maybe more than anything else, is why fandom attracts and retains such a strong female presence. Fandom isn't just a safe haven for geeks. It's a safe haven for female geeks, a space where we are the default, not recognizable as Other and deserving of praise and condescension and funny looks and indulgence just because we happen to be female and bothered to show up. In the real world, it's overwhelmingly the opposite: male is Default and female is Exceptional or Other, and everything we do is passed through that filter. In fandom, we are the first and obvious choice. There are not a lot of places like that, and I think it's not only beneficial but crucial that we have this one.

And then they applauded and gave me cookies. It was awesome.

And I had my practicum interview today and it went great, and today is a gorgeous sunny day, and I got a package of yarn in the mail! More lace hats! Hooray!

ETA: This pattern has now defeated me for the fourth time by disappearing a stitch somewhere. I've been trying to get a serious start on it for two weeks now and I've yet to get more than two repetitions in. CURSE YOU, PRETTY SCARF.

I have FINALLY dragged artemisiabrisol into Babylon 5, after nearly two years of threatening to do exactly that. Now that I own the entire thing (Thank you, inexplicable Best Buy sale, thank you. *fondles DVDs*), my evil plan was much more convenient to everyone.

She has already voiced the concern that this show is going to ruin her for all other science fiction TV.

...

Mwa ha ha. ^.^

We have gotten through The Gathering (and beyond Laurel Takashima) and ended the night with 102, Soul Hunter.

(I had actually forgotten how fucking creepy I found the Soul Hunters.)

But this is great! I expect most of you have done this, where you drag somebody new through a show you love. It's kind of like watching it again for the first time. Also, she has threatened to liveblog the experience, which for The Gathering I expect to be thoroughly hilarious.

In other news, my battle with Rogers Wireless to replace my phone with something not dead-ended in Android 1.5 brickitude continues apace.

( Die in a fire, Rogers Wireless.Collapse )

Today, there was birthday yarn purchasing (thanks, maelie!). Tomorrow, there will be indescribably boring business class reading. (And more Babylon 5. Which is the only thing saving Sunday.) Next week will be my last full week of classes before the Olympics shuts down the city until the end of February. Only 47,987,034 things to do before then. *headdesk*