ifeelbetter

I have a lot of trouble managing a lot of the social responsibilities of girliness, guys. I mean--I love meeting people for lunches or dinners or whatever. I'm cool with that (as long as the group stays moderately small). I can shop with the best of them. I can't think of any other stereotypical social responsibilities that I'm good at right now, but I'm sure I have at least one more up my sleeve.

But...I have this friend who's getting married this summer. I already went to her bridal shower (which was juuuuuuust shy of wretchedly awkward). Now I have to go to a bachelorette party too. And this one will include liquor (yay!) but has a dress code on the invite (boooooo). And the dress code is "everyone at their sexy best."

Am I being horribly misanthropic for not wanting anything to do with this stuff? Has grad school made me completely socially inept if a bachelorette party makes me start circling my neuroses wagons?

I have another wedding requirement on the docket, too. See--and here's the long story--my sister rushed ahead to marry her Danish boyfriend two years ago because our mom was dying. And this was a wedding I was super thrilled to be involved with, right. The couple dressed up, we went down to the courthouse, they got hitched, we strolled through a garden afterward, and then we went home for the five or six cakes my dad had baked. And my mom got to see my sister in her wedding dress (in bright red, which made my second-wave feminist/ex-hippie mother very proud) and we all had cake and champagne punch and everything was lovely.

Fast forward to now. We're going to Denmark to meet the family this summer and, apparently, the Danish extended family wants to throw an actual wedding celebration for them. So--on top of meeting relatives-in-law for the first time with a language barrier, I'm going to have to do it in formal wear.

Do I qualify as misanthropic yet?

Title: Feathers on my breath
Author: ifeelbetter
Beta: lamboyster
Rating: G
Word Count: 3,986
Summary: This is who they were before Mal jumped.
Notes: Based on almostgaby's wonderful vid (below the cut) for the i_revserbang challenge. The title comes from the song of the vid, "Teardrop" as covered by Civil Twilight. I hope my fic is somewhere near a tenth as good as that brilliant vid.

( The fact that it looked like a bomb should have told them something. )

glimmergirl is having a Poetry Prompt-fest at her lj:



♥ Share your favorite poems
♥ Discuss why you have such huge love for these poems
♥ Offer those poems as inspiration for fanworks! Do they remind you of your favorite character, relationship, other beloved fannish person/place/thing? Share these prompts!
♥ Produce fanworks based on poetry. Feel free to post your fanworks here or link to them here. Feel free to post poetry inspired works sans prompt, even.
♥ Be mellow. This is probably the most laid back of all fests, so, no pressure. Even posting a random snippet of verse is awesome.

Go there! Let's squee over some poetry together.

☆ My i_reversebang fic is with the lovely and talented lamboyster for beta'ing....only about a month after when I had hoped to have done this by. Oh well...still technically on-time because my date is the 19th. Woot.

☆ I finished No to Your Key of Rust last week....so I started another TSN/RPF WiP. I know. I should have finished the other WiP before I started another....but this prompt was seriously irresistible. Long story short, I am writing a giant fic in which Andrew Garfield is a cat magically made human who loves Jesse Eisenberg who has a super crush on the new marketing guy at work, Justin Timberlake. I have きみはペット in the back of my mind alllll the time, to be completely honest. And that show--not the manga, the liveaction TV show--is, IMHO, the best TV show of all time. So. For romance-novel-meets-JDrama-meets-TSN, hop on over.

☆ MORE TSN RECS!
Stay Tuned by aqualined
Only 1 part so far. :( But already around 4k. :)

I always really enjoy it when some fic subtly changes something fanon has started to accept without question. In this one, aqualined plays with the connections between the four central people a little, allowing Wardo to have a pre-existing (and, so far, thoroughly valid and important) friendship with Chris that is entirely different from the friendship with Mark. I didn't even realize I had them grouped together like I did--like so many fics so convincingly have done already--until this fic tried something different on for size. ALSO. It's brilliant and charming and lovely and includes Wardo cuddling a tiger baby. Just go read it. It makes sense, I swear.

hit the books by anonymous
A FINISHED FIC! THIS FANDOM HAS A FINISHED FIC! 8 PARTS AND FINISHED! DID I MENTION FINISHED?

Is anyone unaware of my literary nerd-dom? No? So it should come as no surprise that a fic that simultaneously romanticizes university libraries AND crackles with wit and vivacity should float my boat, right? ALSO, GUYS. This anonymous is worried about getting a reputation for traversing different fandoms and making them all into romances between reference librarians and professors. This makes me want to start a petition for such an effort, by this particular lovely anon. Can I petition that anon does that? Could s/he hit every fandom of ever and then, I dunno, start another loop?

I am presenting at the NeMLA (that's "Northeast Modern Language Association" for those not in the biz--and, yes, I just used "biz" to mean "dorks who read books all the time but like totally professionally") at my alma mater, Rutgers. My paper is utter and complete drivel but, oh well. If the humiliation doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger....right?

My paper is about deception, Darwin, detective fiction, and women. It was vastly under-developed at 25 pages. Now I have to pare it down all the way to 9. And I just wrote four new pages when I was supposed to be cutting. Whyyyyyy am I epic fail?

I feel like this cat is my spirit animal right now:

Title: Do You Like Me, Yes/No?
Author: ifeelbetter
Disclaimer:I own nothing of value besides one kickass ukulele named Buttercup.
Word Count: 1,404
Summary: Mark doesn't react well when he finds out the whole staff have been nursing a crush on Eduardo.
Notes: Isn't it odd how some fandoms tend towards the mammoth, months-in-the-making fic (I'm looking at you, TSN) and some (Inception springs to mind) tend towards ten times the quantity and a fraction of the length? I love all the lengths of fic, obviously, because they're all brilliant. But I realized--since I was in the middle of No to Your Key of Rust and two other massive WIPs--that I hadn't written all that many short-n-sweet fic for this fandom. So I pumped this one out overnight, just to see how it fit.

( Stop voting for Wardo. Stop doing it right now. And stop the crushes. No one is allowed--I mean no one is ever allowed to have the slightest romantic inclination towards Eduardo Saverin or I will make his or her life a living hell. I can do it. )

OK, so apparently the TSN fandom is gonna continue to pump out the wonderful and wondrous WIPs for a bit longer. And by "a bit longer," I mean "the foreseeable future." There are so many fantastic WIPs is my point. It's, like, impossible to not join in.

♥ Have a couple snippets that I'm working on:
( WIP the first )

....and the other one....
( WIP the second )

♥ And, vastly more importantly, here are a couple by other people you should watch:

And everything nice by anonymous.
Up to 13b and the fastest shot in the west updater on the interwebs!
Oh, gosh, ya'll. This fic. This fic. The feelings I have for this fic! I feel like I need to start spouting sonnets, a la Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to properly express my love for this biznas. So Mark has a daughter, right, who is named Jess--I like to imagine her as a girl!child version of Jesse Eisenberg in my free time--and Andrew is hired as the manny. This fic will make iron-clad ovaries explode, I'm not even playing. Scrooge would have suffered from Fatal Ovaries Explosion, is what I'm telling you. There is no misanthrope so misanthropic to resist this goodness.


Come out of the shade by anonymous
Up to 7c!
Jesse is a playwright and Andrew is playing his neurotic mostly-autobiographical character. If that doesn't make you run--and, yes, I know that no one actually runs from one URL to another, it's all in the fingertips, right, but I stand by my metaphor to the death--to read it, I have more temptations to strew your path withal. This fic is gloriously well written. It has these layers of subtlety to both Andrew and Jesse's characters and keeps both characters in these complex systems of depth without sacrificing the interaction between them. Oh, and did I mention Justin Timbalone is the director of the play??

sweet on you by moogle62
2c/3
Why have you not read this yet? Stop reading me, go read that! Eduardo runs/owns a bakery and Mark likes his coffee and the way he sings to himself in the morning while he bakes. Dustin is funnier than I have ever seen Dustin before--no, seriously, you thought you had laughed before but we were both wrong, you will laugh till you die--and Chris and I DON'T EVEN KNOW. I have run out of words. I would have to show you a slide-show of Happy Things to accurately depict this fic. It is made of unicorns and rainbows.

♥ ALSO. I am about halfway through with my i_reversebang fic. So that's to come.

The things that make me happy!face right now:
1) Just finished the batch of papers that was making my life heavy and horrid for weeeeks. And that was the longest paper of the semester over-and-done-with so it's all downhill from here!

2) Also revised my pre-prospectus (and finally read my advisor's comments which were shockingly un-negative) and gave it back to her to check over before I hand it in

but mostly

3) MY DAD IS IN TOWN VISITING ME. He called me from the hotel he checked into to tell me he's here--which is all sorts of warm-fuzzifying on its own--and to repeat a quotation he thought I would like: "Taste is in the eye of the beholder."

GUYS MY DAD IS AWESOME BEYOND MEASURE.

I am now so excited for the next two days chilling with him, I don't even know if I have a sufficient grasp on synonyms for "excited" to fully express it.

I have resolved to make this:


I undertake this task because (a) a friend left a load and a half of Chocolate Stout in my fridge on St. Paddy's Day, (b) the roller coaster of emotions I went on today was intense and can only be remedied with decadent foodstuffs, and (c) LOOK AT IT. IT IS PERFECT.

Also, I attempted to make this:

The recipe calls for lard. I assumed this was a nearly impossible thing to come by---but then I learned otherwise from a friendly butcher. So I made the crust with lard and that was a strange and fascinating experience. I recommend it to all and sundry.

But I need practice. My pie dough is weak still. My bread is strong, my pies are weak.

I expect to have my ass handed to me on Friday in an action-packed day of meetings about my pre-prospectus. THEREFORE. I am focusing on the positive: I have a trip to Denmark to meet my sister's in-laws this summer to plan (and re-new my passport for because the bugger just insists on expiring a couple weeks before we leave), I have a mountain of home-made ice-cream to convince other people to help me eat, and I have a "reading practices" interview to conduct over cornish pasties (which I must teach myself to make) tonight instead of going to the crappy prospective students party. So. Everything is looking up.

Also.

I desperately want these things....and they give me joy:
( clothes clothes clothes bookshelf...like duck-duck-goose but...different )

Also, some hilarity I stumbled upon this week:


Also. This blog of 50 Inexplicable Black & White Photos gave me a good three hours of head-scratching last night. Check it:


Lastly, my new favorite thing EVER: