Off the prompt "cuddles."

I'm wandering through my bajillion open tabs, as one does at four in the morning, and just read this essay on bisexuality by gyzym, posted earlier this month and which I probably set aside during finals week. I have no idea where I was linked from, more's the pity.

Anyway, after reading it, I felt compelled to comment about my own sexuality in-the-ways-that-it-intersects-with-bisexuality and well, I'll reproduce it here:

deep thoughts on attraction and the self-limiting factors of labels

I'm about 4.5 on the Kinsey scale and I identify as lesbian. But the fact that I am not a total six means sometimes there are dudes I find attractive (and sometimes really, really not--like I look at some of my fandom friends' objects of interest and am confused? like, I understand that other people are attracted to other things than me but I cannot grok it: like, say, Supernatural. I have heard those boy described as model pretty and... I don't see it. Imagine me with your porn headtilt.) but okay: on some level it's always weird to me when I find a dude attractive. I am more comfortable with attraction to dudes when they are pretty, even though my attraction to women covers a very broad range of looks and is not limited to pretty. But, like, for example... I don't know if you've ever watched Numb3rs? The premise is: two brothers! Charlie is a genius mathematician! Don is an FBI agent! TOGETHER THEY FIGHT CRIME! (And some other people. Charlie's hot mathematician gf? RAWWWWRRR can I have her for my very own, please.) But so, early on, I thought Charlie was cute, and I was okay with this, because especially in the early seasons when he has long hair he is totally the pretty one. Don, being the FBI agent, is totally the manly one. And then one day I caught myself looking at Don's lips and I was like WHAT. Like, it shocked me to be attracted to the manly dude (even if his lips were pretty).

I have lesbian guilt. I know this, and I know it's ridiculous, and I have it anyway. Like, regardless of attraction, I could never see myself with a dude, and part of it is I don't know how I would explain to people the "I am a lesbian dating a dude, no, don't try to make it make sense." And I can't even figure out the chicken and egg issue on that--can I not figure out how to explain it because it would never happen? or does fear of explaining it prevent it from happening? Maybe I would have an easier time in my own head if I identified as "bisexual with a preference for women" but I don't, lesbian is the identification that works for me (with that addendum about being a 4.5 on the Kinsey scale, where necessary). But holy crap does being a lesbian have some baggage if you are not a total six, and it astounds me that queer identities have enough of a cultural narrative attached that I can get mired in feeling guilty for being attracted to not the "right" kind of person when a heterosexual attraction could, technically, drop me into the dominant cultural narrative. I feel like, goddamnit, ALL THE STUPID BOXES CONTRADICT EACH OTHER.

So while I have a label and it is mine and I identify with it, oh my god, I wish society as a whole could chuck out labels.

(...hi. This is probably tangentially relevant to your entry at best, but um, I felt strongly and wanted to talk about it?)

In conclusion: why do I not have an Amita icon?

The "you went to bed early? that's a punishable offense" edition.

I think I am doing better. I got up early, went to class, though I didn't make anything up, and I wrote--I can't get any of the Glee crap out of my head, which is too bad as I am starting to annoy my nearest and dearest retelling them bits, but I wrote down some of Amita in space (on a hunch; the empty page was staring at me and wouldn't take ink for the stories of in-many-ways-normative white dudes, so I started writing Amita and got like, four pages down and only stopped for time). It's been a while since I wrote, this is good. Also I made a cheesecake and used up four of our multitude of apples (two more for the topping when I get around to it).

And that was my day. I am back to putting "going to class" in my list of accomplishments, which sucks, but I hadn't been doing it and I did it, which is good.

And: quiz due by 2:30 on Friday. Very doable.

I keep appreciating new and different things when I watch Numb3rs. I'm currently watching the first episode, which was a serial rape/murder case. Now, when film and television have female victims, they usually make gore porn out of it: despite the fact that she is dead and/or maimed, surely one can still appreciate the aesthetics of her bloodied body laid out artfully, right? The prettiness of broken bodies isn't at all creepy, right? (Modern media: KIND OF CREEPY.)

On this dead female body in the first minute of Numb3rs, we have seen the hands and the face. Don puts on his gloves and reaches down and touches her chin, turns her head to look at her face. We're not looking at the splay of her legs or the curve of her breasts or any other sexualized facet of her anatomy, we're looking at her face. Throughout the episode, hands for agency (the women fight back) and faces for personhood. She's a person, a dead human being lying on the ground, and not a work of art.

I spent the night watching the therapy eps of Numb3rs because Don in therapy is win. The last one was one I hadn't actually seen so I was shocked! and thrilled! to learn there is in fact canon confirmation of Jewishness. OH DON *HEART* YOUR LITTLE FACE Ahem. This is all niqaeli's fault.

I've been slowly loading all my finished fic onto AO3 and somehow this morphed into poking at WIPs I have thousands and thousands of words and wondering if I could ever find the wherewithal to finish them.

I have 9800 words of a From Eroica With Love story--it's Klaus/G and while it has cute moments, I clearly didn't finish it because it's doomed to tragedy. It was supposed to be for a zine and I missed that deadline by a lot. I feel certain I talked at people (probably grey_bard and keelieinblack) about this story, but I can't find chat logs for it. I mean, it is like, three years old now.

I have so much Andromeda Rhade stuff scattered over so many files--I started writing that like fifteen times, and never really got around to finishing my version of Rhade's AU because the show eventually provided. But the biggest file is 8850 words which seems like I might be interested in working out how that ends and committing it to the ether.

Or, here's a good one, I have 9570 words of Firefly-Serenity Mal/River fic and wow, the inside of River's head is an interesting place to write from.

I have a few Fullmetal Alchemist WIPs that reached ridiculous proportions. There's the Hughes Home For Children of Wayward Alchemists, wherein Hughes laughs at Roy and takes the Elrics home personally and essentially adopts them. That hit 5200 words. There's the Roy/Maes/Gracie story that all the segments I've written add up to 16,000 words. Hughesmunculus is around a paltry 2000 words.


I should note that I'm deliberately only mentioning WIPs in fandoms that I can look out with running into the night. So if it's on this list, there is... moderate cause for hope. I saw this as preface to bringing up Iron Man WIPs, because echan will be ALL OVER ME, but I did tell her to expect more writing when the new movie came out. So: there's the Electric Sheep story, of which there's about 2400 words. Mistress Pepper, I, uh, apparently have not written any actual prose on, but the collected, edited chat logs clock in at 5300.

I have a Kyo Kara Maoh story called Carnivale that was mostly a style experiment that's around 3400 words. The part I didn't get around to writing was the ugly question of who was wearing the Maoh mask on night three of the carnivale.

In Numb3rs, I had a story where Amita is a secret agent, up to 1500 words. And over a thousand words of the random mpreg story (I don't even know). Also, there's a story where Amita joins Stargate Atlantis that's up to 4750.

The Stargate SG-1 season 6 AU has what, 11,870 words of draft and outline.

There's a Taltos story that's kind of back and forth about Kiera and Kragar, and I've got 8800 words of that.

I appear to have 5100 words of a Glass Houses story, too. Wow. I'm so behind on GH it's not even funny.

There's also 4970 words of a Torchwood story where Jack gives into temptation and clones Ten from the hand.

So yeah. um.

More bunnies from the entirely hyperactive EPIC FANFIC matrix of my brain (previous bunnies).

( white collar )

( the numb3rs/SGA one where Amita goes to Atlantis )

More later! I'm late for work.