Welcome!

This is my personal/fannish journal. I answer to M or Mel (nicknames of nicknames :D) I've got an open friending policy, but please drop me a line and let me know and say hi, because I like meeting new people, and knowing who's reading me, if anyone. ^_^ If you'd prefer to lurk thereafter, no worries, but I promise I don't bite ('less you ask nicely).

If you're here for the flail, great! I'm currently into Arashi (jpop boyband of rainbows), Johnny's Entertainment bands in general, Dong Bang Shin Ki (kpop boyband of dorkiness and hot), Skip Beat! (manga about the entertainment industry), knitting, and a smattering of other manga.

If you're here for the fic and fanart, please go to loonyfruit. Yes, it's a horrible, horrible pun if you know me offline. :D

Still not dead! \o/ So Gyzym is one of those lovely people who I enjoy following because she writes delicious fic, posts ridiculously funny things, and writes heartfelt and damn useful posts when the mood strikes.

So, via Gyzym on tumblr:

so! here are some things to keep in mind when a friend or loved one comes out to you as queer, because someone apparently needs to say them somewhere!

[a quick note: i am using queer as an umbrella term to encompass the various and assorted different variants of gender and sexual identity. for more information on those variants, feel free to check out this website.]

1. this is not about you.

certainly—certainly!—it may feel like it is. you may be thinking of how this information impacts your life, or how you feel about it; you may be remembering your own experiences with queer perceptions, or queer people, or queer pamphlets, for all i care. and you know what? that’s just fine. on your own time, you may feel free to pour yourself a large cup of tea and work out how you feel about this new development in your life! that’s natural and normal; we, as human beings, have feelings about everything from our families to our favorite brands of cereal, and none of them are wrong.

however! when you are with the person who has come out to you, especially in the immediate wake of that conversation, you must swallow that down, because it is selfish! talking about your feelings on someone else’s coming out is like talking about your feelings on someone else’s loss—and i should point out, at this point, that i do not in any way mean to equate coming out as, or indeed being, queer with any kind of tragedy. it isn’t, and we will get to that in a second. i use loss only because it is the clearest parallel in terms of depth of feeling; the person who has come out to you, let’s just call them Person A, has done so against the weight of a thousand coming out stories that resolved badly, against the negativity still in our media and politics, against the fact that, just to use one example, as recently as 1973, “homosexuality” was listed as a psychological disorder by the American Psychiatric Organization! even if you are a deeply tolerant person and have made that known, there is still, always, the fear that your tolerance does not extend to Person A specifically! thus, the loss parallel makes sense, in the sense that some part of Person A is more emotionally raw than usual—the same way you would not respond to someone’s discussion of the loss of a family member with all the ways that loss was negatively affecting your life, you should not respond to someone’s coming out with it’s negative effects on you. IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU. maybe, at some point, when Person A is in a less raw place, you can have that conversation, but that is their call, because, again, not about you.

2. being queer is not a tragedy.

one of the things my mother said to me over and over after i came out to her: “i’m just worried about your safety.” and you know what, that was, in its way, incredibly sweet of her; she, as my mother, loved me enough that the idea of me being hurt for who i was kept her up nights. that warms my heart! but it also made me feel small and scared and wrong every time she said that, and it took me a long time to figure out why.

Click the link above for the whole post. Worth the read, as it may come in handy for just about anybody.

Hope everyone is doing well! ♥

Hahah, long time no see LJ-land. ^_^

waxrose just reminded me that I ought to post something and prove I aten't ded yet.

Thing one: I have a new car! A 2010 used Toyota Yaris, purchased on Mole Day (10/23) :D Pictures to follow. It's cute and looks like a blue jellybean.

Thing two: I do surveys with this group called Pinecone Research (associated with Nielson) from time to time and they're doing a round of open memberships. I originally got into it because mousapelli posted about it a while back, and I've been doing it for a couple years now.

You fill out a detailed product survey maybe once, twice a month, it takes 20 minutes or so, and then you get three dollars. It's cool, and sure, it's not much, but three bucks is still three bucks. ;P You can click on the referral link below if you'd be interested. Only one registration per household though.

www.pineconeresearch.com/signup/linkPink152.htm

And for more info, http://www.pineconeresearch.com//about.HTM and http://www.pineconeresearch.com//policy.htm

Thing three: How are all you lovely people doing? ♥

Via acentric @ tumblr:


What I picture when people say "I don't swing that way":

So, the heterosexuals are on the swingset, swinging back and forth like most people do.

And then there are the homosexuals swinging, like, side to side or something.

The bisexuals are sort of alternating between the two, and the pansexuals are just twisting their swing up in a knot and crashing into everyone like “fuck the police i do what i want”

And then the asexuals are just chilling out in the sandbox all alone, like: HEY GUISE, LOOK AT THE CASTLE I MADE GUISE, LOOK GUISE IT HAS A MOTE. GUISE. LOOK.

Ahahaha best analogy ever y/y? XDD I'll be over here in the sandbox, going, "Dude, swings are cool but hey, lookit my awesome artsy fartsy sand castle, it's got a turret and I found a cool leaf for the flag and there's a moat, c'mon guys come play with me!"

Brb crying with laughter XDDD

Just posting to say that I'm happy. I have the day off, going to visit Husband and her new baby, get some chores done.

Yesterday night I went to another Deaf Coffee social at Starbucks. I've been going almost monthly for the last couple of years, and usually when I meet people I just fingerspell my name, which begins with an H. You know how usually when you learn a foreign language, the teacher will give you a name in that language? I had a French name, my classmates got Chinese names (I already had one), and a Spanish name.

In Deaf culture, someone gives you a name sign. Usually it's based on some attribute (not always flattering), kinda like the way in some parts of Chinese and other cultures you'll get nicknames based on some attribute (Chubby Yuan, Little Yu, etc), or a guy I know called Tall John.

Anyway, for the last almost two years, I fingerspelled my name. I figured at some point, I'd meet enough people, and maybe a friend would give me one. So last night one of my friends introduced me to another Deaf friend of theirs, and he asked me what my name sign was when I introduced myself. I told him I didn't have one....and he gave me one! *dances* Haha my classmate dragged me out to show our teacher.

What is it? If you look up the way to fingerspell "H", it's with your index and middle fingers together, fingers held parallel to the ground, but the palm is oriented vertically (perpendicular to the ground). For my name sign, hold the H at the corner of my mouth, because apparently I have a dimple when I smile really big? Yeah. :D

Hope all is well with everyone~ what are you lovelies up to? ♥

Musings that have been floating around in my brain for the past several months re: fic and changing bodies and identity and gender and how that plays out in different fandoms.

Okay, so you know those fics where X character wakes up or gets zapped by an Ancient machine or magic or what-have-you, and a previously female character ends up in a male body, or a male one ends up in a female body? (I've never read anything where the author tackled intersex people, so I can't speak for those)

It kind of varies between fandoms, but I've been noticing a spate of it in the Japanese/Jpop and Korean/Kpop fandoms I'm in lately. And it happens a lot where when, say a male character wakes up in a female body, suddenly everyone around them is awkward and treats them like they changed genders, and switch pronouns, and that character starts trying to display traits marked as "feminine", and usually somewhere in there we have a party of describing their new appearance (and clothes) and somehow sex ends up getting involved in the name of exploration.

...honestly I am guilty of some that in one fic I wrote, but that fic gave me so much trouble because I was adamant about keeping the pronouns, because in my head I *knew* the characters still thought of themselves as male, they were in essence borrowing the bodies for a while, and deciding to try performing a different gender as part of the experience. But I still felt kinda icky at myself for putting them through that gaze experience of "hey, let's dress you up girly and describe every bit of how you look for the audience now". Sorry for putting you through it, lovely betas! ^^;;

And honestly I should have known better than to call it genderswap, given all the stuff I've done in school about sex and gender not being the same thing. But that was the term available, and I didn't think to try a new or different one. And then I hit Kpop fic and the pronoun-switching was going on all over the place. On second thought, it might with a stretch be considered genderswap because the authors were making their body-switched characters think of themselves as a different gender, and perform a different gender. It still kind of bothered me that the sexswap caused the person to suddenly change their behavior and thought-processes so much, because in most cases I'm not sure the author was trying to discuss issues of gender identity at all.

Anyway, I'd hesitated to post anything about it because while I like being kind of androgynous, I mostly identify female and I don't think of myself as being trans, so I didn't want to speak for that experience.

*****
Luckily! And the point of this post! Iambickilometer made a post called Five+ Ways Being Transgender in Fandom Really Sucks, and Why I Stick With It Anyway and gyzym linked to it and had some interesting discussion of her own here.

I'm curious about your thoughts? .____.

...love to you all, I'm still alive. ♥

I will never get back the last 1 hour and 40 minutes I spent watching The Hangover, so I figured I will relieve my feelings and at the same time write about things that give me joy. ^^;;;

( Let the Right One InCollapse )



( Trainman (Densha Otoko 電車男)Collapse )




( The HangoverCollapse )

Yes, so I am alive! The movies I did recommend are worth spending a little time on, I think, and I am going hunting for the Densha Otoko novel once I have time to go to the library. At some point I will do a post about my trip to China for my cousin's wedding, and have pictures. Here's hoping that will actually be before New Year's, haha. Love to all you darlings! ♥

Still alive, I promise. I hope all of you are doing well, or at least tolerably. ^^

-Going to China (Guangzhou, specifically) for my cousin's wedding, so I'll be gone from November 5 in the evening until I come back November 20. Whoo, 13-14 hour flights.

-Which brings me to my next point. Fic prompts please! So I'll have something to do while I fly alone for so many hours, since I can't bring my knitting. I'm kind of rusty but I'd like to get some practice, since I was re-reading that one Valentine's Day challenge I wrote waaaay back that suddenly got new comments on it, and totally wincing my way through it. Ehehehe. Part of it was the premise was executed kind of poorly (really, I should have known better, but the idea hit me while I was delirious and I just went with it) and part of it was just the writing quality. >.>

So fandoms I will attempt to write for: Arashi, I'm willing to try my hand at Skip Beat!, Ouran High School Host Club, and maaaaaybe Inception (I think I'd like to explore Ariadne, Yusuf, and Saito, but I'm scared of writing them wrong despite having seen the movie twice, hehe). Possibly Super Junior M but I think my impressions of them are too strongly influenced by fandom. I want to write more girls/women! :D

Hit me with your best shot!

<3 to you all~