it is now officially december

fuck my life

i am apparently one of those people who doesn't bother with capitals or punctuation anymore, but i console myself that i have become like lady gaga in the Lady and the Captain fic.

Meanwhile: i keep trying to capitalize "i" and it doesn't go through. dear keyboard: wtf.

Things I need to do in order of priority (oh hey i found the fucking shift key... or not. what.)
--scramble through my classes
--or gtfo of my classes
--cap_ironman sesa (the good news is I've started on it, the bad news is I should probably check something with the mods and the worse news is I'm going to need to do ~research~, wtf is up with my formatting I BLAME TUMBLR)
--yuletide (to which end, I need to review some source, and would like some company)
--the pinch-hit I picked up, fml
--probably the escapade vid should get higher priority than treating for festivids
--DID I MENTION I STILL HAVE TO PACK ALL MY CRAP UP AND MOVE
--maybe I should go put a load of laundry on. In, in aid of that.

Also, my hours at work are doubling due to we're hitting a busy stretch and we have no shipper/receiver.

I think I have managed to work more daily on the Assembly Con fic than on any of the above items. Oh god.

Everyone keep calm and imagine Steve subbing for Pepper. (what? it's my happy place.)

My lecture on movie musicals says they started with stories about African-Americans and Irish Americans and German Americans etc, leftover from Vaudeville. Then the lecture produces this:

Eventually, Hollywood and movie musicals in general would move away from this kind of ethnic-based narrative, as the heroes of most movie musicals are usually generic "American" types without any ethnic markers.

CAN ANYONE SPOT WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS SENTENCE?

Have you ever been listening to the radio and suddenly felt like the song was written for you personally for five seconds? When I was putting together this list I found myself realizing how much it says about my psyche and maybe also my generation. Like, I almost wish Imagine or something was on here, it seems loftier than *cough* some of these, but I grew up with Imagine, I never had a paradigm shift on it, it was just always there for me. These? These were really personal moments of impact.

Three song lyrics that meant the world to me:

I was made to believe there's something wrong with me, from Cold War by Janelle Monae

This was the line that made me want to write this entry. I wish I'd heard this years ago. I wish I'd heard it years before she even wrote it. I wish I'd heard it in high school. I don't know if I would have understood it, if I would have had the objectivity to get it, but this was something I struggled with, as a queer girl growing up: the sense that there was something wrong with the way I was, that didn't actually come from something being wrong with me but from something being wrong with society, that society was telling me you don't fit, you're a broken cog but it wasn't true, it was society being a broken machine. It's hard to see it the first time but it's so liberating when you do. If I could send this song back in time a dozen years to tiny me, I would.



I'm Not Okay (I Promise) by My Chemical Romance

Okay, don't laugh at me, you folks.

I first heard this song--saw the music video, actually--during Lost Year II, The Flunk Out of Every Institution in the State Remix. We'll call it the Geographically Challenged Year. It was bad, but not quite as bad as my Lost Year, and part of the reason was this song.

I have chronic clinical depression. The Lost Year was the year I just went under to it, the Geographically Challenged Year was the year that I could admit--to myself, if no one else--that something was wrong. I burned some bridges figuring that out, but. It was better. A little.

You see, clinical depression is, 95% of the time, invisible to other people. You're tired or you're cranky or in a bad mood or whatever, you should just buck up and get over it. (You can't get over it, it goes on and on.) And it's so ingrained in our culture that the answer to "How are you?" is "I'm fine" at the best or "I'm okay" at the worst. If you say "I'm awesome!" people look at you kind of pityingly, like "I'm so sorry your company is asshats, at least they don't also make you wear flare?" If you say "I'm terrible," you really had better be bleeding to death, and even then, the temptation is to brush it off as "Just a flesh wound." And if anyone has any reason to suspect you're not really okay, that you're just giving the socially acceptable response, the thing to do is in fact to promise, to assure them that you're okay. Even more for women, I think, there's a negative stereotype of a the woman who complains, what a nag, what a hag she is, and no one wants to be that, right?

So for ages and ages I told everyone including myself that I was okay, when I wasn't, because I didn't know how to say anything else. It seems like such a small thing that this song deconstructs but I don't think any more sweeping statement would have had the same impact--if they had said "I'm depressed, my life sucks," well, that would have been the sort of sentiment you can get away with in emo music, right? But "I'm not okay, I promise," takes the thing you're supposed to say, with all its trappings, and says, "That is a social fiction. That is a lie."

Seven years later I can admit to myself when I'm not okay, and sometimes even to other people.



Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears, from The Cool, Cool River by Paul Simon

This is off The Rhythm of the Saints, which may be one of my favorite albums of all time. What this line encapsulates for me is how the creative process comes out of deep emotions--for him, it's music; for me, it's fiction or film. You don't know how many times I've been jarred to realize that I'm putting myself down on paper at the safe distance of a character in a story. Sometimes it's enough, sometimes you can work through your issues at that distance and write something that's interesting to other people and we call that being inspired. And sometimes it's not enough, sometimes putting things at the safe distance of fuel for the creation engine is putting them too far away, sometimes the only way you can actually process is to own it in yourself. Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears.

My TA called me "Connie" like, five times today.

This would be like you all calling me Jenny.

I hate university, kind of a lot, I'm very tired of the bullshit advising, and they've made it next to impossible to get into online classes just when I've decided I hate looking people in the face.

Clearly I would be able to handle five classes a semester if they were consecutive 3-wk courses instead of concurrent 16-wk courses. Binge is my best learning mode. Same as fannish consumption, apparently.

I'm taking a winter session class that started on 12/28 and though I have until 1/14 to complete it, I am already halfway done. I am zipping through by listening to lectures while driving or playing Bejeweled. And I'm getting 100%s on the quizzes. And the fact that I am yawning is the primary reason I am not opening up another lecture right now. I had been planning to get through a lot of the class this weekend, but um, where I am now is a sixth of the class ahead of where I meant to be right now, and roughly where I meant to be tomorrow night. I think my main problem is going to be that I can't actually take the final until 1/13. Because I will clearly be done with all the class material well before then. I guess we'll see what my retention actually is!

Ugh. Seriously. I think everything I can take in compressed mode, I will, because jfc. Why has it taken me this long to figure this out? Oh right, because a) college kept telling me if I couldn't handle it over a semester there was no way I'd keep up with the workload in a summer session and b) I occasionally try to take two compressed classes simultaneously, which doesn't work nearly as well.

A couple of weeks ago, I told niqaeli, partly surprised and partly not, that getting out of school for the rest of the semester hadn't cured my depression--but I was not heavy of heart when I said it, for all that it was true. It took me longer to identify this part of it, but what did go away when I called it quits on the school was guilt. It's interesting that guilt is not endemic to the depression, it's a secondary feature: when I fail at school because of my depression, I have guilt. I do not have guilt purely for having depression, I do not feel like a failure as a human being, except when I manage to redefine human being to mean student as apparently occurs some of the time.

So: I have lethargy of spirit and of body, I have insomnia, I have depression. Right now it's just a weight I carry, not a wall I hit. I go to work and eat and anything I do beyond that in any given day counts as a bonus. I maintain.

I will now make myself attend class one and class two but skip afternoon lab as a bargain with myself.

For one class I have, the prof requires both digital and hard copy of papers (for submission to anti-plagiarism websites, and for her to use red pen on). Fine. Whatever.

The deadline for turning in the digital copy of your paper is midnight the night before class. The deadline for turning in the digital copy of your paper is TWELVE HOURS BEFORE CLASS.

Professor mine, you don't think anyone uses those twelve hours to get homework done? Or you just don't think anyone should? And what the hell business is that of yours anyway?

My real life sucks so hard right now that even though I was really really looking forward to White Collar, it took me until today to find the time and energy to watch it. I am so stressed out by summer school and the stupidest thief on earth at work that I'm having crying fits over things as idiotic as my sister asking me if I want to watch television.

So the amazing thing is not that I haven't finished drafting what I want to say about Vid Review, the amazing thing is that I still care enough to want to say anything. I have a lot of emotion and intellectual interest invested in vidding, in Vividcon, and in Vid Review, and I want to talk about it--at some point. Right now I am officially taking a break from writing that essay to give myself the space to stop freaking out about it. It will probably be a better essay for my trying to have some sanity about it.

But since I won't be posting that essay in a timely fashion, I want to make one small statement on the discussion so far:

I am sorry that our having had an interest in playing Vid Review Bingo hurt you. We did not mean to be hurtful, nor to be disrespectful, nor to break Vividcon's rules. If I had realized how hurtful other people found the idea of anyone playing Vid Review Bingo, I would not have wanted to play in the first place, because it was never our intention to hurt or to disrespect people. Please accept this sincere apology.