walking out in the rain

It's been an interesting evening. I have allowed myself to be poked and prodded repeatedly and in various bits of the body by a butterfly needle, all in the interests of science and my mother needing someone to practise on. She's getting quite good at drawing blood from my visible veins, but she's in paediatrics at present and is bewailing the difficulty of getting blood from very small people. She's bewailing a lot of things at the moment, as she's currently doing thirteen-hour shifts, which generally entail her waking me up at eight thirty when I am too paralysed by sleep to do anything but babble incoherently, and then disappearing until ten at night, at which point she stumbles in with a thick layer of blood beneath her nails and mumbling about abandoned babies and twelve-year-old assault victims with human bites. She eats dinner and falls into bed only to do it all again the day after. I am very impressed, and very proud of her, and I wish I could do more to help, but all I can really do is cook her dinner and yell until she goes to bed. In some ways, I'm to blame for her doing this now - she left medicine when I was born - and I was too young to remember Pedar doing his turn as a house officer, although that would have been worse, something like a hundred working hours per week.

Pedar isn't here right now, because he's delivering a lecture in New Delhi, so it's fairly quiet round here. I've never seen what it's like to have both my parents on call, or at least I hadn't until last week. I was waiting for my mum to get back from an evening shift, and the phone rang at three am. Not a good sign. I padded in to find Pedar looking under the bed for shoes and socks. "Caesarean," he said succinctly, and then, "Grapes."

I got him some grapes, at which point he approached the sort of coherency level you'd like from a man who is shortly to be wielding a surgical scalpel and asked me what I was doing up. "Waiting for Mum," I said, "and watching old episodes of The X-Files."

"So what's the baseball bat in aid of?"

"In case the aliens come to take me away," I said truthfully.

"I'm so glad I didn't raise you to be paranoid," he muttered, and disappeared into the night. They both re-appeared when it was starting to get light, told me about the baby - whose name is Molly - and disappeared off back to do full working days. When I was growing up, I sort of took all this for granted; I mean, I was dimly aware that other people did nine-to-five jobs, but it's only recently that I've begun to really understand the enormity of what they do. There's a tendency round these parts, maybe my flist or on LJ in general, to vilify all doctors indiscriminately, or, more irritatingly, "Western medicine". I don't think you're allowed to dismiss Western medicine until you've been to medical school, and I don't think you're allowed to talk about shit doctors who are lazy and get paid too much until you've worked a hundred hours a week at expense of everything else.

Er, that wasn't supposed to become a rant. This entry is another mind-dump, of sorts. If right now you want coherency in your flist-reading experience, these are not the droids you are looking for. I've been having a holiday from life lately. I get up in the morning, I go to work, I work five or six hours, I get back, I procrastinate on my feminism paper, I go for long walks, I write. It's really not a very exciting existence, but it's nice, for a while. A word to the Oxonians on the flist: hi! How are you? I'm trying to think about you all (including me_ves_y_sufres - many, many congrats, you are marvellous!) because I'm beginning to forget about my real life. Tell me about your plans for Michaelmas, I'm trying to make it non-theoretical, something real. I know I'm going back, I just don't know it.

The only thing that's real at the moment is the weather. It won't stop raining, and I'm quite enjoying it. It started off as a real summer storm, with warmth underneath the water; the shop was a well-lit island in the puddles, full of people in shorts and sandals staring out at the lightning. A great ploy to get people to spend money is to provide where you can wring out your clothes. Since then it's started being properly cold and wet rather than summery, and consequently the number of customers has dropped off. For this reason, I've spent most of my week in work reading. I always mean to read things that are somehow enlightening or edifying or literary, but sadly all I've really read are soft, sticky family sagas by Jodi Picoult. They're just well-written enough to hang on to my attention, so I whipped my way through My Sister's Keeper, which was actually quite good - an interesting look at medical ethics, and it's a good story to boot - and right now I'm reading something called Perfect Match, which is written very similarly and has a similar family-focused plot. I didn't buy this one, though; it's borrowed from the shop under the guise of "product evaluation". I'll have to be careful not to break the spine.

Er, what else? I'm thoroughly enjoying the general chat about Snakes On A Plane, as everyone and their kitchen sink goes to see it. I wish I could go and see it just as an essentual fannish experience, but sadly I can't. I'm just going to reiterate something I've said before - if you're going to be using snake icons, please do tell me, and I'll defriend you and read you separately with images turned off. I am severely ophidiophobic and I can't make myself be rational about it. Argh. But still, I have the .wav of Samuel L. Jackson saying, "I have had it with these motherfuckin' snakes on this motherfuckin' plane!" because there are some things you've got to do.

Also, something else everyone should do is read this post, hth_the_first's field guide to slash. It's marvellous and rings a lot of bells for me. Most of all, it explains something I am slightly bugged about. Namely, why do I ship Mulder/Scully? Not in the this-is-mildly-interesting sort of way, but OMG-batshippy-OMG sort of way. And this is not something I do with het pairings. I have written het. In particular, I have written Remus Lupin with lots of female characters. Remus/Hermione, which was good fun, and I've tried but not finished Remus/Lily, and a few months ago, I did Remus/Tonks. I thought all of these pairings were interesting - I even did the Remus/Hermione ship_manifesto - and I actually considered writing lots more Remus/Tonks. (It was the fandom that put me off that; I found myself continually amazed by Remus/Tonks shippers who defined themselves not by the fact they shipped Remus/Tonks but by the fact they didn't ship Sirius/Remus. After a while I gave up letting myself in for further insult and wrote off the whole experiment. Urgh.)

But yes, Sirius/Remus is my OTP to end all OTPs. And according to Hth's categories, it's easy to see why: they are very, very much Weird About Each Other. This stems from the way they are the only two left, each is the only person of import in the other's life, and, er, the dominance issues. One of my favourite small details about OotP is the way Molly and Dumbledore and even Lucius Malfoy can't keep Sirius under control, bu Remus says, without raising his voice, "Sirius, sit down." And Sirius sits. It exemplifies a level of dependence Sirius would hate if it was anyone else. But it's him, and that's okay.

And this is the point: Mulder and Scully are just the same. So much so that they are included in the linked post without a mention of the fact they're not a slash pairing, because they are just that Weird About Each Other. They are everything to each other, and not in a good way; they've refined co-dependency to whole new levels. They love each other, but more than that, they need each other, and they're forever constrained by the dark and dangerous world they live in. (Which is not to say I don't like the idea of XF slash - I recently saw "The Red And The Black", where Krycek kisses Mulder and leaves him on the floor and dazed in the dark - but more on that anon.) And I want to write about that. Sigh.

But I still stand by my usual rejection of het pairings. I hated Sam/Jack because it destroyed the SG-1 team vibe, and other than that, I thought it was dull. It was dull. When it was on the table, it reduced Sam to a mere shadow of her former ass-kicking self (which is also an issue I have with Scully and the baby plot, but again, a rant for another time) and sort of shuffled Daniel and Teal'c away to a corner. And as further proof, I did ship Doctor/Rose back in the day. A lot of my Doctor Who fic features UST between them, because it was there and it was complicated and thus it was fun to play with. But with Nine gone, it lost the creepy co-dependent vibe (Dalek shows this nicely, when the nineteen-year-old ordinary girl from Earth stops the nine-hundred-year-old Time Lord from self-annihilation) and becomes Rose as Ten's groupie. And I love Ten every minute of the time that he's not on screen with Rose. Ten/Sarah Jane for teh win, yes.

Speaking of which, I need to finish my femgenficathon story soon liek woah. Yes. Am going to go and do that.