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[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 )

Urgh. I am dreading the 9am start tomorrow more than, well, just about anything. One might say, then, go to bed, but being the sort of person who doesn't sleep at night means, hey, you get wound up about not sleeping at night, and then you don't sleep at night. Sigh.

It does, however, beat swine flu, which is nowhere near as fun as advertised. I am about ten days post-diagnosis now, and feeling every day like some large wheeled vehicle hit me the night before. (It gets smaller. It was a truck. Now it's an articulated pram.) And, really, it was no fun at all. I cannot emphasise this enough, but I am blessed with an immune system that is usually pretty sound, and my notion of "ill" is "a bit off, and you can still watch TV". I started revising this opinion on Friday night, when all I could do was shiver, and then a little further on Saturday when all I could do was shiver and wail about the opening chasms in my head, and then, on Saturday night, round about where the "mild case of symptoms" I was supposed to be having, being an able-bodied adult, was supposed to be kicking in, I woke up in the midst of vague dreams about sushi on picnics with my entire extended family, and thought: aha, I need to go somewhere.

And woke up again, some minutes later, because Shim was picking me up off the floor, and noticed from very far away that his pupils were so dilated that his eyes had turned black as pitch in his face, and then thought: isn't it funny, that's the last thing I'm going to think before I die, and then I probably passed out again. Apparently, This Is Your Brain On Swine 'Flu has a turn towards the melodrama. Shim looked after me beautifully throughout,, but probably never so much as just then, and regardless of anything I never wish to faint on a hard wood floor again. After that things were never so bad, but I think I'd like to register a general complaint: I should have, at that point, started on anti-virals, given that at that point a) they were still effective and b) Shim and I don't live together. Technically, I live alone, and my own bathroom floor is harder than wooden. But as I was slightly conditioned to think, hi, I am an able-bodied adult, I sort of assumed that my case of flu was, indeed, mild.

...okay, now I realise it wasn't. After that I had all the symptoms of the flu, but consecutively, so I had dizzy-and-fainting and then splitting-headaches and then muscle aches and then, bizarrely, a sore throat and blocked nose. (Which were the worst; nothing like being told by all, including the out-of-hours GP, who has been persuaded to call and help only after much shouting down the phone by people who are not you, that you'll "pick up in a day or two, drink fluids" when you can't drink fluids, you can barely get anything past the back of your tongue. Urgh. Urgh, I say.)

Now, I am lots better, but am told by said GP that the general feeling of ennui will not pass very easily; that I should expect to feel tired and ill, especially in the evenings, for weeks yet. Which is not a thought that fills me with hope and good qualities, but it can't be helped. And much as I do complain about the NHS in my particular case, I would like to point out, for the record, in reference to some recent debates about US healthcare in particular: I was ill. I was too ill to function. The NHS helpline told me to stay in bed, drink fluids, and rest, and send someone out for antivirals. They told me not to panic, and that there would be plenty for everyone. (In their FAQs, they did not include "will I have to pay for them?", this presumably not having been asked frequently enough.) When I went to see my GP, he asked if I had an employer whom he could write to to explain why I would be off my work for a while. When I said no, he said not to be tempted to jump straight back into studying; rest, rest, and rest some more.

In short: I caught the flu. My government told me to rest, drink fluids, and take the drugs they gave me, and feel better before I went back to work. Why, those evil pinko commie bastards.

I have very little else to report. I read Unseen Academicals while I was ill, and while I liked it, I didn't like it quite as much as I wanted to. ( spoilers )

The grand Deep Space Nine watch continues; I just finished "Doctor Bashir, I Presume", and as well as getting episode-title-win points, it also ( spoilers ) Also, Alexander Siddig has lovely eyelashes.

Maybe I ought to go to bed. I know I ought to. Sigh.

edited to add: just as I clicked post - yuletide nominations are OPEN.

son of eta: Okay, guys, I want to nominate Connie Willis' novels for Yuletide again. Thing is, though, To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book have been nommed as separate fandoms in the past, and that makes no sense to me. If you were nominating the two of them together, plus the novella, Firewatch (and, presumably, the 2010 novels will be included for the Yuletide after this one), what would you call the universe as a whole? I cannot think what the fandom is actually called.

Hi, I am a crazy person. I spent Thursday afternoon sitting by the river, under the bridge where the people take their canoes down, watching the geese and the pleasure craft and the occasional solemn, athletic canoeist. One of the large passenger boats from Iffley had cut power and drifted into the middle of the river in order to turn around; there was also an elderly, very fit man sculling furiously. Backwards. After the shouting and crashing were over, I sat back against my tree on the bank and though, huh, I am the only person in the world who saw that coming, maybe I should have said something.. And then started cackling like a loon. I related this story to my long-suffering headshrink dude the next day, and he noted that was very healthy, sitting by the water watching the boats go by. I may have, um, shouted at him.

Basically: I am not very well, I am in that place where you don't think life is worth living at all, blah blah blah whatever.

There are still quite a few days of posting for lgbtfest, but I thought it was worth noting a few of my favourites while we go:

We Few, We Happy Few by toujours_nigel, Harry Potter.
Aurors, and institutionalised homophobia. This is stylish.

Time (of change), by soft_princess, Merlin.
Uther prefers not to father bastards. It's all very logical. Unexpectedly sweet and lovely.

The Rules, by gilesonnen, Discworld.
A new wizard at Unseen University has questions about the celibacy policy. Ridcully is very literal. The story is a gentle, rollicking delight.

Love Like A Djelibeybian, by gehayi, Discworld.
Ptraci is enjoying being queen. But people have strange ideas about what handmaidens ought and ought not to do.

And these two you must read, if nothing else:

Modern Love, by penknife, Discworld.
Show me something of Penknife's I haven't loved, but this is special. This is the Disc's dwarfs getting used to gender, and sex, and not getting used to it, and embracing the human notions, and rejecting the human notions, and it is... not beautiful, but right, and shaped perfectly into a few thousand words. It's a wonderful, wonderful piece of writing, and something I hope Pratchett nods at, later.

The Pattern of the Process, by raedbard, The West Wing.
This is about Toby's babies-who-come-with-hats, Huck and Molly, only they're not babies, any more - and more than that I wouldn't want to say, because this story is perfect and complete and self-contained. It's immaculately thought-out and immaculately executed, and at something like 19,000 words, an astonishing achievement for a few months' work.