Philosophy supernatural nude

Oh my god, you guys, I have ALL THE FEELINGS about Fringe. ALL THE FEELINGS.

Okay. Here are my non-spoilery feelings about Fringe. I love you, Olivia Dunham, and I love Peter almost as much. (And Walter and Astrid and Broyles too!) All the feeeeelings. I still think it's a show that owes a lot to The X-Files, not quite a spiritual successor but, clearly, would never have been made if The X-Files hadn't been. But it's, oddly, less foreboding - because, as one of my friends I forget which wisely said, the characters have control over the world around them, and that makes all the difference. And, they are real characters: they have family dynamics, desires and wishes and wants and loyalties and backgrounds, and these play out in front of and behind the "main" plots in a way I really, really like and isn't common enough in television science fiction. Although, actually, I don't think Fringe actually is sci-fi - I think it's got the glass, the chrome, the bleeping machines and the explanations, but really, it's fantasy, complete with quests, feet of clay and lost children.

Also... this is so embarrasing, right, but I love Olivia and Peter and I ship them liek woah. I have not been this much of a drippy shipper since I was fifteen. But I looooove them and I want to squish them together and make them have many babies. Okay maybe not the last part. But so much loooooove. And part of it is for grown-up reasons, honest!

What I love is that Peter is, for many reasons, the central character of the show - the plot almost literally revolves around him - and yet, Olivia is the protagonist. This is Olivia's story. Olivia's character arc, in a lot of ways, rings horribly true to me: a woman fighting against the pressures of an unfair world, against internal currents and forces that all seem devoted to telling her she's rubbish - and against that, the people who love her and see her truly, telling her over and over again that she is extraordinary, she is beautiful, she is strong, she is more than just good enough.

( more concrete spoilers - nothing huge )

I am now on 4x01, "Neither Here Nor There". Please do not spoil me! Though there is not that much to spoil me on, now. Oh show.

Also! If I could vid, I would make a Fringe vid to "New York Minute" by the Eagles. Just sayin'.

I just drove 200 miles without a break, I am sleeeeepy.

Anyway. LJ's latest seems to mean that more people have begun using Dreamwidth. Which means people subscribe to me/give me access, and I think, oh, I should reciprocate.... and then forget.

Hence the following. Also, re: tumblr - I've finally joined the 21st century. My tumblr is singlecrow, but currently has no content. If y'all let me know yours, I'd appreciate it.



pee ess if you don't want to answer the DW poll, or can't, or whatever, please comment and tell me about your tumblrs and recommended tumblrs! I really want to know.

I am almost obscenely fond of Seat61.com. I have just spent a happy hour planning fantasy routes and itineraries along the route of the Silk Road. Some day, some day, etc.

So. This is 2012. For the first time since 1990, I slept through New Year entirely. I meant to stay up and I meant to stay up, but jet-lag hit me hard around 10pm. Terribly pathetic, of course. For the last week of 2011, I took Shim with me to India, and that, at least, was a good end to a very mixed year. In one week, we went (sometimes very briefly) to Delhi, Solan, Shimla, Chail, Chandigarh and Agra, and not disappearing from places between places, as you do on an aircraft: all the way the landscape between, stopping for coffee and chaat in dhabas, watching the mountains and the plains roll on past the windows, and the wheels raising the dust.

We went to Solan first. It's a small city in Himachal Pradesh, and it took us a day to travel there from Delhi, on a smooth flight into Chandigarh and then a boneshaking drive upwards.

My family's house in Solan is called "Chinar", which Google tells me is known in English merely as Planatus orientalis, and it's on stilts on the side of the mountain heading down towards the valley. As a result the roof is on a level with the Kalka-Shimla railway line. It's a narrow-gauge railway, tiny, built a hundred years ago by the British to move to the summer capital from the plains to the mountains, 100km with more than eight hundred bridges, 103 tiny, numbered tunnels, climbing into the Himalaya metre by metre of perilous altitude until it reaches Shimla with the clouds beneath. I love everything about it.

( Solan station [all pictures are Shim's] )

(Also, Railways! I guess most people who know me get to know after a while that I love trains (and planes, but not automobiles) with an irredeemable romantic love. Upon enquiry, my father sagely informed me that there is a gene on the 23rd chromosome that code for a love of railways of all kinds. This, he admits, is entirely a lie, but my father has never lived anywhere where you couldn't hear the sound of trains; my grandfather ran his household on railway time; my great-grandfather was the station master of New Delhi Railway Station.

And, me, I love trains: I love the vibration they make inside your bones, I love the lights streaming past in the dark, I love waking up for a moment in the middle of the night as the train passes through above. The world's as it ought to be when the train comes through on time. And then, take a train in India and you can go anywhere. You can take the train from Thruvanathapuram to Jammu. What a train is, is freedom.)

( this is the night train )

From Solan, we drove up to Shimla, which I have described before in these metaphorical pages, and to Kali ka Tibba (it only means 'Kali's hilltop'), which is a hilltop temple at Chail, and you reach it through a meteoric rise in altitude that involves driving inches from a hundred-foot drop around bends. It's dizzying, and on the day we were there, a little transcendent: the sky was polar blue and the sun felt close. The family's temple of choice in Delhi is the Hanuman Mandir, where we go on Tuesdays where possible; it's large, chaotic, noisy and a little frightening, and monkeys steal your shoes. I am having trouble with religion, lately; I end up feeling like all those people who say, politically and spiritually I'm a lesbian, I'm just in a relationship with a man! (I do that too, sometimes.) Well, I am politically and by inclination an atheist - I'm just... not one.

That I'm not an atheist is a fact, not a fact like my height and eye colour but like how I'm a writer, and a thoughtful person, and in love with a particular person. But there's that and there's being a person whose faith carries her; who carries something of value around with her because of how the world is. It's easier in those high places, it was easier in that hilltop temple with the toothpaste-clean air, the polished marble, the single tree so wrapped with red and golden thread that you couldn't see the bark. It's a thoroughly modern temple - it runs on solar power. And you remove your shoes and go barefoot, as you do in every temple everywhere, but the marble was freezing and salutary under your feet. I'm working on what kind of belief I have and want to have, but that was a wonderful, invigorating, close-to-the-sky place.

( Kali ka tibba )

We came down from the mountains on the fourth day, drove to Chandigarh and took a bus on to Delhi. All of that was much less painful than I thought it would be. In Chandigarh we had lunch at the Indian Workers' Coffee Cooperative, which offers lunch for such strangely precise prices as Rs. 30.20. In Delhi the family's house is shut up at the moment, so we were staying in an apartment at Green Park Market, and from there we went to Agra to show Shim the Taj Mahal (which was beautiful, but very surreal - my family and I could be Indians and got Rs. 20 tickets, but pretending Shim wasn't a foreigner was more difficult; his ticket ended up an eyewatering Rs. 750). The Taj itself is, well, it's beautiful, and what more can you say about it, but I'm not very fond of Agra itself, which is hotter, dirtier, and dustier than Delhi, which is hardly a cool, clean, comfortable place in itself. I did like the camels, though. All camels have ridiculously long, flirtatious eyelashes and immensely disdainful expressions. Sadly, we did not get a picture of them.

( the Taj Mahal )

And then, one day in Delhi - one day to see Rashtrapati Bhawan and India Gate. Having Shim along was delightful, but particularly because my aunt went to see the Taj Mahal for the first time, my mother went to see the president's residence and Parliament House for the first time. Both lived for years in Delhi. We went to Connaught Place and wandered, and got the Metro back to Green Park, and I was completely and utterly delighted by it. The Delhi Metro is new - well, ten years old, now, but new - and smooth and marvellous. (My mother was talking mournfully about how much more fun college would have been for her, if the metro had existed then.)

The metro is symptomatic, but, generally, Delhi is a different city from the one I first knew. Of course it's been twenty years, but it's larger, louder, noisier, chaotic, as you would expect, and I'm not sure the march towards development is permeating down to all levels. In fact, I know it isn't. But we came back on December 30th, drove to the airport through the fog, and this time, again, more than last time, more than the time before, I didn't want to go, I didn't want to go, don't make me go, I don't want to go home, I want to stay home. And I don't know what to do about it. I don't. My family reported that after we left, they went back from the airport to a four-hour power cut and we left at just the right moment. But given the lack of power, given the chaos, given the dirt and dust and stray dogs, given the mountains, given the temples, given the city and the railways, I wanted so much to stay.

I read a lot of Chetan Bhagat novels this week, and the dedication in his latest is: To my country, who called me home. Bhagat is like that only: words have power in simplicity. I don't know what to do about it.

Hello, flist. I am home ill, flu-ish, headachey and not a little bit over-anxious. (Case in point: I thought I would make use of the time by at least popping out and sending some parcels. Mission aborted when yours truly was too pathetic to find somewhere to park, and came home having smudged the parcels' labels in the rain, but not actually sent them.)

So I am lying on the sofa, whining gently, trying to write my yuletide (it is awful, all is awful, I am a horrible writer, all is woe) and watching Fringe. Y'all have been watching this show for a few years now, and I have realised I will never get another show like my heart wants - happy, optimistic science fiction! remember that? me neither - and, well, I did like The X-Files. I liked it a lot. So I'm giving Fringe a try.

Thus far, I am four episodes in and I sort of like it. Sort of. Okay. Here's what I like:

-Olivia! I didn't at first, but she has grown on me; she's such a sensible sort of heroine to have. Ditto Peter - in the pilot I thought he was one of those insufferable know-it-all manly types that, inexplicably, whole shows are built around (The Mentalist, I'm looking at you), but actually he's not that bad. He's kind of sweet, in his way. And Walter, too: I love his combination of super-clever and very naive.

-Also Astrid, although what the show means to do with her I have no idea. At the moment it seems to be, well, passing things and answering the phone. She's lovely, and the actress is epically fanciable. Want more Astrid. Yes.

-And the cow. Dear cow, I like you.

Here's what I don't like:

-Naked women get tortured quite a bit, don't they? And then there's screaming. And I'm like... okay. Don't want or need.

-And I don't exactly dislike the homage, but I have seen The X-Files. It's not so far in history you can reuse its plots wholesale. Although, I appreciate it doesn't do the whole incredibly-stilted-monologue thing or the "let's turn down the lights! no, more!" thing. Instead it seems to use a swimming-pool palette, washed out blues and greens, which is nice and creepy without being invisible on VHS. (Not that this is a problem now, but oh, X-Files, way to stamp on my love.)

-Also, fringe science? I get that that's the thing, yes, but surely I am not the only person who wants to laugh sometimes at a show with the aesthetic and tone of The X-Files and the scientific realism of The Middleman. I mean. Really.

-Probably this is just me, but. I have the attention span of a gnat. Watching fifty-minute episodes is too long for me. I get twitchy in the middle, and fast-forward through the bits I'm sure are going to be some species of revolting. Really, I just have too short an attention-span for being a grown up. Surely there's some age you reach when the little man in your head doesn't jump up and down and shout, "I'm booooooooooored!"

Anyway. I am told I have to stick with it until the second season before it gets really good, and okay, I will try. But do I really have to watch another sixteen fifty-minute episodes? A whole bunch of you have lists of episodes that I actually need to watch in the first season. Please tell me.

In the meantime, I shall keep on watching this episode about a bald dude with no eyebrows, eat teacakes and feel sorry for self.

Life. It continues. Itemised:

1. Last night, after five, I was tidying my desk and flipping through Farmers' Weekly (really, by god), and the Caped Crusader rushed by, came to a sudden stop, rushed back and said, "Iona, can you witness a stat dec?"

"Yes," I said, a little doubtfully, read the document, watched him read the document, watched him sign the document, and then wrote my name, address, occupation, and signed to say that the above-named individual had signed in my presence in accordance with the 1835 Act, etc., and then thought to ask, "Why are you making a statutory declaration to say you read over someone's will?"

"Blind testatrix," he said. The funny thing is, I thought later, that the testatrix in question is a young woman. If she lives her allotted span, that document will be pulled from its envelope along with the will a half-century from now. If it becomes part of the root of title for something, well, I have a will in my files that was signed in the presence of witnesses in this year of our Lord seventeen hundred and forty-seven. That scrap of paper with my writing on it will outlive me by centuries.

2. Still quite depressed. Ahaha, I say "quite". Went to see new GP yesterday, which I hadn't done since arriving in Cambridge. He turned out to be very kind and very nice, and alarmed me somewhat by turning to his computer screen and saying, "Right. I think I should sign you off work for a week and put you on something."

I persuaded him not to do this - it's ten days till Christmas - but he told me to come back in January and rethink. (Actually, he was really nice; he said I had a sensible approach to things.) And I think he was right about January being different - I always find January and February harder than December. Usually I look forward to my birthday, but for some reason I don't want to be twenty-five. I feel like twenty-five ought to be, to have done, to have become something... and me, I read Farmers' Weekly. You get it.

3. Speaking of Christmas. This year as most years, I am out of the country. (Once, on Christmas Eve, I spent eight hours on a departure gate floor, listening to "I'll Be Home For Christmas" on repeat over tinny airport speakers. It was hell.) Today at work, I went to see one of the partners to get something signed, and not only is she a lovely person, she has an endearing relationship with the two departmental trainees (me and the Caped Crusader): she's new, and she doesn't want to annoy her secretaries or make her colleagues think she's dim, so when she wants to know how the photocopier works and where the spare envelopes are and what idiotic thing her computer has done now, she asks us and thus feels she owes us a favour.

So she signed my letters, and asked, "Are you going home for Christmas? Where's home for you?"

And, and, I have this issue with home and going home and homelands. Y'all know. Since coming back from the States it's only got worse. Every day I track people and plans and landscapes - I call Land Registry, I register interests, I use documents and time to map people onto the water, rocks and earth they call their land - and I get more worried, theoretically speaking, about what any of it even means and if it means anything. Me, I own no land. (To get technical about it, I do hold an interest in land, but whatever.) But I sometimes worry I own no land metaphorically: that I grew up in one place and spent all my adult life in another, that I've lived in three countries and left bits of myself in all of them, that I never sit still, that I never go home.

All very melodramatic and banal, as per; I guess I have a homeland in my body, all five feet and seventy-percent water of it, and the spaces I pass through.

All of which is a ridiculous prelude to the answer to the question, which is: India. I am going to India on the evening of December 23rd, for the first time in two years, and the real first: Shim is coming with me. I think it will be strange, but good.

4. Possibly related to 2, writing is not going so well. yuletide, it is a hollow laughter. I have written, oh, 300 words, and I have a perfectly serviceable plot which for some reason I do not write down, why, self, why. The novel is going a bit better, but I'm stuck in chapter nine. I don't know why. Nothing very exciting happens in chapter nine. Some people talk to other people. (Actually, that describes my entire novel. Absolutely nothing happens, and then characters talk to each other about it. It reads rather a lot like the sophomore effort of a woman who has spent the last decade writing fanfic. (Be glad you weren't around for the freshman effort.)

And so on, and so on. Still flying, still breathing.

I got my yuletide assignment. As is the way of these things, I had a brilliant idea on seeing it, wrote three hundred words and then nothing more. I'm still cautiously optimistic I might make progress soonish. I think I shall have to rewatch re-read replay re-consume the canon and hope for the best.

Here are some things that make a post.

1. Work continues difficult and anxiety-provoking. (What a surprise.) Had a meeting this morning in which there was much discussion of single farm payments, solar energy and renewables generally, inter alia; my supervisor said, sternly to all present, that we should pay attention to such things; we should keep apprised of what's happening in our world. It's a world composed mainly of anxiety and grit, from my perspective. Grit that comes off deeds, grit that accumulates in my ears and nose after a day of deeds, grit from site visits, grit under nails, grit that shit grows in. At least it's about growing things, says the part of me that would quite like to go on site visits to windswept moors in the middle of nowhere. My supervisor gets in beautiful full-colour periodicals of blue-sky pictures so we can sometimes see what the land we handle looks like to stand on.

(We have reached the turn of the year where sunset is at three thirty. I am... feeling it.)

On the brighter side, on my way to work is a Buddhist retreat and education centre. They are having a charity bake sale. The Dharma Buns. FOR SERIOUS.

2. Shim and I have spent some evenings this week listening to Warhorses of Letters, and finished today to a joint chorus of NO THEY CAN'T LEAVE IT THERE. Please tell me you are listening to this, flist. Please tell me. It is a four-part Radio 4 fifteen-minute comedy that details for us the correspondence between two star-crossed lovers, Marengo and Copenhagen. Both of whom are known to history for being close friends of Napoleon and Wellington respectively, oh, and being horses. But, as their collected correspondence tells us, terribly gay for each other, though prone to jealousy and ah, needing rolls in wet grass to compose themselves. "It's not easy," as Copenhagen puts it, "being a gay horse."

KISS KISS HOOFPRINT. I have hearts. It's nominated for yuletide, which makes them sparkly hearts.

3. Speaking of yuletide and historical fiction, which I totally was, I am re-reading the Lord John Grey novels and rather enjoying the experience. I am still very far from being Diana Gabaldon's biggest fan - I cannot, no matter how hard I try, get into her Outlander books, which are just too doorstoppish and full of deathless! romantic! hero! tropes for me. It baffles me somewhat that she can also have written Lord John Grey: Lord John, who is a terribly romantic hero, in so many ways, being as he is charming, aristocratic, classically-educated, an expert swordsman, and indefinably attractive to women. But then, he also has a sense of humour. And he's queer. And, you know, I love that, I do: I love that Lord John is queer in a way that makes sense for the world he lives in (which is eighteenth-century Scotland, and London; he was born in 1729) but also just makes sense. He's proud of it in his own quiet way; regretful that he can't ever tell his adored brother and mother; and when asked if he thinks it's a sin, his answer is that he was made in the image of God. And I love his romances, doomed as they all are by exigencies of plot; I love that they happen in and around adventure-mystery fare; and I love that he's a soldier, and it's a part of his identity with his queerness, that they both characterise him.

( this is my usual spoilery trigger warning when recommending the Lord John books )

So, anyway, I forgot to nominate, offer or request Lord John fic for yuletide, but luckily other people did not. I am reading them cheerfully, and feeling a little better about life now I have lived through another week.

Hello, hello. My name is Raven, it's nice to meet you. Thank you for writing for me; I hope you enjoy it and I hope you don't find it difficult; I am easy-going as pie, honest. I will enjoy anything you write for me, and more so if you enjoyed writing it. I have no triggers, if that worries you - especially in fandoms of ANGST and HORROR - and I like happy stories, sad stories, wistful stories, thoughtful stories, sparse stories, etc., etc. I don't especially go for cracky or off-the-wall, but otherwise I will read most anything.

Some additional detail follows below, if you would find that helpful.

Here's what I requested:

( M*A*S*H )

( Sapphire & Steel )

( Diana Wynne Jones - A Tale of Time City )

Anyway! Have a lovely time writing, dear author, and don't worry too much about me, if you like it, I will like it. I should mention at this point that I will be travelling around a bit from December 23rd, so if you don't hear from me on Christmas Day it is not not not because I hate you. I will be back just as soon as I can.

Hearts,

Raven

---

^{[1] Do you understand why the AO3 insists on giving them all their full names, down to "Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce"? No, me neither.}

I have sleeping pills which say "take twenty minutes before sleeping". I think this is a very presumptuous instruction on the part of the people who make the pills, especially as they do sell them in a box that nowhere says "hey you YES YOU these are ALSO the pills labeled 'anti-hay fever; may cause drowsiness" only we're charging you £1 more. But I've taken them. Here I am.

Here is the bad news. Still going to work every day. Still Not Very Good at my job. (Today I sent a whole stack of papers to entirely the wrong government department. Hellfire, brimstone, etc.) I have my midseat review next week, in which my patient and scrupulous supervisor will no doubt scrupulously and patiently tell me everything that's wrong with me. Urgh.

Here is the good news. I am not going to work tomorrow. I took it off, for no reason at all, and I'm going to read, write the novel and take a French class. (Also, is this weird? My colleagues think this is weird. I am not ill, on holiday, or anything else; I am taking a day off in the middle of the week because I damn well feel like it and also, I hate November with a passion and need something to get me through the murk. My colleagues seem to have decided amongst themselves that I'm going to be the weird one. I am weird, I s'pose. They're not bad people at all, my colleagues; I work for the hardest department for a trainee to work for, so they also call me the clever one. I try to tell them, if I were clever I would be wandering through the crisp fall, now, thinking about my thesis, rather than spending hours of my youth on the phone to the Environment Agency, discussing septic tanks.

What else, what else? I have read Snuff. I am still rewatching M*A*S*H. One of my colleagues, I shall call him the Caped Crusader because that is, in fact, his name, spends plenty of time waiting for his photocopying, standing by my desk, probing the limits of my knowledge. By the time he discovered I can quote from Plan 9 From Outer Space, I know just what it was that John Barrowman said straight-faced in Shark Attack 3 and I like Deep Space Nine best but also "The Best of Both Worlds", I think we were friends. We were talking about The West Wing, and I remember saying that I can't deal with Alan Alda not in M*A*S*H and especially not as a Republican, oh, dear, and he said, yes, I've seen that! I remember one I saw just the other day, when Hawkeye can't stop sneezing....

I carefully didn't jump up and down going, omg, omg, and said, merely, "I said to Shim the other day, only that show can take a classic sitcom plot like 'Hawkeye can't stop sneezing' and turn it into TRAUMA."

Today he wandered across my desk and said, so, you're kinda inspiring, can I borrow the DVDs?

I said yes, if he would take one of my deeds of covenant and aim it at the right people tomorrow while I am lying in bed writing my novel. He agreed this was a fair trade. It's always nice, when you find a similar sort of spirit to yours in unexpected places. The Crusader himself said, no one else understands me when I talk about these things. I strongly suspect we are friends.

It hasn't been twenty minutes yet. Er, a meme. ( meme )

I sleep now! Hopefully.

[image of small tealights in coloured holders on a table]

Happy Diwali, flist. May it be full of light and promise.

I don't have much of a celebration planned this year - quite by coincidence, dinner with friends tomorrow night, and I shall take sweets in for my colleagues - so here's something for y'all. Four little stories, each on a general theme. Enjoy, and pretend there are sweeties.


mysterious ways
M*A*S*H, gen. Mulcahy, Hawkeye & co.
( boy, bear, agnostic )

watch
Discworld, gen, Carrot, Angua and Vimes.
( the regulation breastplate and sword )

emergency
Sports Night, gen, Dana, Dan, ensemble.
( every light in the building )

night driving
X-Men: First Class, gen, Charles & Erik.
( light all the way )

I've never been a big fan of October. It always seems like a halfway month that's not on the way to anywhere.

( work )

--

IN OTHER NEWS ENTIRELY. I am keeping myself cheerful at the moment by watching M*A*S*H and it is very lovely. It is, and I'd forgotten, rather - I am watching the early episodes, with the laugh track mercifully removed on the DVDs, and a couple of nights ago I watched "Sometimes You Hear The Bullet" and it made me clutch at my heart rather. I love M*A*S*H in some of the same ways I love Star Trek - because it can be so unsubtle, so in-your-face in what it wants you to believe, but at the same time I believe those things. I can't help myself. I am not cool. I am especially not hipster cool. I heart my lovely khaki-green show with Hawkeye's anger turned sideways and Radar's quiet clairvoyance and Henry who launched a thousand indecisions and Trapper, and BJ, and Sidney Freedman ("Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice...") and my heart will always hurt a little when Hawkeye says, "So I think too fast and I'm afraid of children, that's not so terrible."

(Before anyone asks, I have not dared touch my old fic. I have, however, re-read the remixes, which I recommend: Missing Hawk (the Anger Turned Sideways Remix), by eponymous_rose; The Acme Judgement Company (Uncloseted Remix), by iamsab.

ALSO. Here is another reason why I love Hawkeye Pierce, why he's one of my favourite fictional characters of all time. He's queer. He's almost definitely bisexual. How do we know this? Because he says so. He says so all the damn time.

( don't believe me? )

Stepping back, I think you could only watch this show in a heterosexist society - a society where your unspoken assumptions code how you hear dialogue - and then come away from it believing Hawkeye isn't queer. (And, here's another thing: queer, bisexual, maybe fluid, not as simple as "gay". I heart Hawkeye, I really do.)

I need to go and read for an exam on financial regulation. It's really not 2002. I checked.