life in the subjunctive mode

I feel like this icon accurately depicts how I've been feeling the past week or two.

I've decided to do the Blog Every Day In May challenge, because I think it will be a good exercise in discipline as well as in writing.

The first prompt is: Give us your life story in 250 words or less. The following is exactly 250 words:

Zero: born, Long Island
One: New Paltz, lived in my dad’s childhood home with my grandparents downstairs
Two: received sister
Three: moved to the suburbs
Four: acquired crippling social anxiety
Five: didn’t know how to play “telephone”
Six: first crush on a girl (Jenna); first crush on a boy (Tony)
Seven: started gymnastics; brief stint as a ballerina
Eight: learned to crochet, received brother, first mutual best friend
Nine: joined accelerated English class, rejoiced
Ten: played Moriarty in school play opposite first serious crush (Melissa)
Eleven: refused to wear a bra; no more best friend
Twelve: joined accelerated math class; received 99% in English
Thirteen: tragic year of MySpace and social isolation
Fourteen: started writing to cope with crippling loneliness; first therapist
Fifteen: first serious crush (Russell); two-week backpacking trip resulted in permanent damage to knees; left public school for Catholic school; questioned gender
Sixteen: increased self-esteem; solidified first real group of friends; met future first girlfriend on online writing forum (Inge); rejected by first serious crush
Seventeen: college visits and applications; entered love triangle; two declarations of love from classmates; depression resulting in alienation of friends and diagnosis of bipolar disorder type II
Eighteen: partial reparation of friendships; three declarations of love from classmates; graduation; broke up with first girlfriend; came out and went to college
Nineteen: lost first group of college friends, got top surgery; started HRT and fanfiction; 4.0 GPA; social isolation
Twenty: moved in with new friends; started anxiety medication and social drinking; wrote magical realism

Looking back over my tumblr feed the other day, I realized that I actually interact with people a fair amount on the internet these days. There are people I talk to regularly, and besides them, if it's just one or two strangers reblogging something I wrote, or even something I didn't write but something I also reblogged, it's ... okay, it sounds silly, but a year or two ago I was too afraid to even sign up for the site because it was too interactive, and I was terrified of getting any attention because what if it was negative, what if I made a mistake and didn't do something right, oh my god everyone would notice, etc. Didn't tag anything for a while once I realized they went into an aggregate group of tags that anyone could see.

I seem to have gotten over that somewhat. I mean, I still delete half the things I post before anyone can see it, but I respond to other people's posts sometimes. I try harder to have opinions and put them out there.

Of course, putting myself out there, it also means that I've got a bigger chance of being criticized. This has also happened. It still makes me feel terrible about myself. I think, wow, someone didn't like what I said. I'm wrong. I shouldn't have bothered I shouldn't have said anything, how could I be so stupid, what's the point of even speaking up.

When that happens, I need to remember that I am allowed to have an opinion. If my opinion is different from that of someone else, that does not mean that my opinion is automatically worthless and wrong. It doesn't even mean that I have to care about someone else's opinion. I can read what they have to say and decide that they are wrong, and not worth responding to, or I can read what they have to say and decide that they have a point and that still doesn't make me a bad person. All it means is that I was wrong about that one specific thing, or maybe I didn't know enough to speak with the authority I did and now I know better. Either way, my worth as a person does not depend on the contents of one post I make on one website or even all of the posts I make on all of the websites.

It also doesn't matter what one or two strangers on the internet think of me. If I say something that means that someone else thinks I am worthless, but I don't know that person and they don't know me, then it does not matter. (It feels like it matters. That is different from whether it actually matters or not.) I once went to a friend, panicking, because of a report I was going to give in twelfth grade that I thought would make people laugh at me. She told me, I'm not going to laugh at you, and none of your other friends are going to laugh at you. Are you really going to care more about what a bunch of assholes think about you than what your friends think? Which I do not think is a perfect philosophy, but it's what I'm working with in principle.

1. Best Christmas EVER. Or, maybe not ever, but I have enjoyed the past four days, and it felt nice and Christmas-y. Yuletide was a massive, delightful success! My recipient loved her story, which made me clap and dance around a bit with joy. I'm proud of that story, and I like to make people happy. And then! And then I got a wonderful story for the Tanakh. My author wrote Noah's Arkangel, which is, oh my god, I can't even words. There's so much going on in there -- it's 27,000 words long -- and it's everything I wanted out of an AU/reinterpretation. There's representation! Of everyone! There's anthropology ethics! There's religion! There's funny cultural misunderstandings! It's glorious.I spent my morning before and after I opened presents reading it, although there were some parts where I skimmed because I got anxious about what was going to happen next, and then I had to go and reread them.

I've also been going around and skimming through the Yuletide archives, because it just makes me happy to see all of the comments from the recipients, although to be honest I don't even know where to start. I've been going through the recs at the Yuletide community, mostly.

2. I've got the rest of Bridging the Rubicon down now, as an outline. I really like it. I mean, it's kind of stupid, and I'm going to have a hard time finding the right balance between humor, deadly serious relationship stuff, and critical commentary, but it's, um, a whole lot simpler than what I was trying to wrangle before? I don't have it on the computer, because I outline best in stream-of-consciousness in a notebook, but anyway I'm thinking I should find out when Big Bangs take place because it's going to be massive, I might as well commit to a community so I'll be accountable for finishing it. And that way I can find a beta. I liked having a beta reader for Yuletide, and I wish I knew more about the art of getting someone to edit fanfic.

3. Les Miserables. My head is full of a tangled mess of ALL THE FEELINGS about it. I went to see the movie on Christmas.

4. Doctor Who! My show! I was nervous because I just keep losing faith in Moffat, and a lot of the things I heard/saw about the Christmas episode made me roll my eyes. But it was SO MUCH BETTER than it sounded. I've also just decided that I'm not going to engage in criticism and analysis of this episode beyond what immediately jumped out at me. It's Christmas. I will say this: it had a lot more ... substance ... than Eleven's previous two Christmas specials. One of Moffat's biggest weaknesses, I think, (besides the fact that he is bewildered by the existence of characters who are not straight white men) is that he thinks he's being all clever and surprising and will knock his audiences off their feet with his brilliant twists and turns, but a lot of the time ... he doesn't. He takes an opportunity to subvert the scenario he's set up, and he plays it straight instead. Case in point: River Song and the whole, massive, "oooh who is this Good Man she killed, it seems like it's the Doctor but he's said he's not a good man and that would be too obvious, Moffat's been too excited about this for it to be that straightforward" buildup of her character. And yet, for all of her *mysteriousness*, she's exactly what she was touted to be: she married the Doctor and is in Stormcage because she killed him. And for the Christmas specials, there was the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and then there was A Christmas Carol, and he played those straight, almost boringly. Don't get me wrong, I loved them, but they were such bizarrely straightforward adaptations of previous stories that I almost couldn't believe it, and they weren't as memorable as they could have been as a result. And when he doesn't go for the un-surprise, his "clever twists" are more like "out of left field WTF moments".

( spoilers below )

Distracted from my interpersonal woes by the potentially-imminent zombie apocalypse that is the election.

To be honest, I'd rather continue to be distressed that I am attracted to someone towards whom my whole strategy is "be horrifyingly forward and ignore the sinking sensation telling you he is straight". At least that only affects me, (presumably) for a short period of time, instead of, you know, fucking over millions and millions of people.

I am so glad I don't have that much homework due tomorrow because that shit is not getting done until this election is over.

EDIT: WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Yeah homework is not getting done until tomorrow. On the upside, I managed to keep up with my NaNoWriMo word count! And I can go back to worrying at my failure of a social life!

I also don't have food at home because I made poor shopping choices on Friday, so it looks like I'll be eating pork, cereal, and peas for the next three days until I go into town and get, like, peanut butter and -- OH WAIT. OMG I totally forgot that I also bought carrots. Never mind! I am saved!

( community finale omg )
 
( moved back home )

( current playlist + peace corps )