one of my very best friends, T., died on monday morning. she was 30 years old. she had been found in her apartment the tuesday before last, badly bruised and scratched and unable to walk or recognize anyone or speak. everyone assumed she had been very badly beaten (though now i'm not actually sure they're certain of that anymore... all my information has come secondhand from friends rather than directly from the family). in the ICU she was found to have a severe infection which turned out to be a very severe case of pneumonia. she had kidney damage as well, i think. she woke up sort of for a couple days last week, enough to write things, but i have no idea if she told anyone what happened. her breathing and blood pressure never went back to normal and monday morning her heart stopped and eventually the family decided to stop resuscitation attempts. one of my other very best friends - the three of us had known each other since our first week of undergrad - was with her when she died.

i mean, what does one say. it's only been two days and i'm shaking as i write this. my friend had been in bad shape for a long time now, serious drug issues, and we were sort of prepared for a catastrophe... insofar as you can be prepared for your friend who seems solid and endless to die. we certainly didn't expect (possible) murder. of course i still have no idea what killed her; i'm not sure anyone does. i think that a 30 year old's body doesn't give up like that unless there's something like drug-related damage involved. but what do i know? i know nothing. i don't know why she died.

i feel sort of exhibitionistic writing about all this, but... she was my friend. she was often, off and on, my closest friend. she was usually the friend i was surest of in this world. this is disastrous. no, there aren't words for what this is.

( more after the cut )

this is keith olbermann's op/ed piece tonight on gay marriage and the passing of prop 8:



it's worth watching, i promise. this is the kind of argument i wish we saw more often; so many people seem not to get that being gay is not about sex, but about love. i heart olbermann.

this has been a bad week to be queer. it's been very tiring, what with all the emotions. you want to be overjoyed about obama, but you've just been slapped in the face about five times over by states and networks and the ten million people who voted to keep you from ever marrying. and it's all over something you can't help and never could have helped and, frankly, wouldn't want to help even if you could (since in any case you can't imagine being different); and, worst of all, over something not only harmless but actually moving and beautiful, because all love is moving and beautiful.

i am still not over what grey's anatomy pulled, and i have no doubt in my mind that one of the main reasons for the firing was that the show dared to depict someone happy about being gay. why should our lives always be shown as tragic, as mistakes? my life isn't a mistake and it's not tragic, and i don't wish i were straight; i wish the people who hate or disdain or pity me would get a fucking clue.

YES WE CAN!

damn, i'm actually proud of my country. cuz right now we rock.

so i should be delighted and excited that i just got to vote for obama. i expected to be. and i am in moments. but mostly all i can think about today, and be terribly depressed by, is the firing of brooke smith by /grey's anatomy/ at the behest of ABC network execs who apparently felt that gayness is just too icky to be allowed on the tv.

it might seem stupid to a lot of people to be this upset over a tv show, but i really care about lesbian/bi representation on tv. tv representation is what changes people's attitudes; i give ellen huge props for the strides in gay rights and tolerance in the last ten years. and the grey's thing is horribly depressing to me, because they had seemed to be taking it seriously. there were some annoying things about the storyline, but they were devoting lots of episode time to it and the actresses were doing a good job and in general it seemed like finally, finally, there might be representation on network tv that i could enjoy and identify with. and to top it off, the network's decision was so abrupt that the showrunner didn't actually write the character out of the show; apparently she just disappears. so just to make everything worse, the killing of the gay storyline was done incredibly clumsily and fast, which makes it feel like even more of slap in the face to gay america.

you know what? i'm really tired of being slapped in the face. i find such reminders that i'm basically a second-class citizen really upsetting. i don't understand why the existence of people like me is so disgusting and scary that it can't be reflected on tv unless it's by scantily clad bimbos on showtime. i hate that i care so much about gay representation and can't help it, and that i couldn't help hoping that this time it would be different. i hate the show for explicitely promising the gay audience that they would treat this with respect and at length, and then buckling in to pressure from network homophobes. i hate ABC and disney for being such massive douchebags. i hate straight homophobes for being such arrogant, preening, cowardly little jerks about people who are different from them. the gay marriage ban will probably pass today. those of you who aren't queer... do you have any idea how hard it is sometimes to remain optimistic and non-hatey? it sucks.

yeah. i'm really, really depressed about the grey's thing. i wish i didn't care, and didn't feel like crying over a stupid tv show, and could just resign myself to my status among the discriminated-against. and i should be happy and excited today, on this amazingly historic day, and i hate that i'm not.

ok for some reason i have a feeling that i should be easing back into blogging, now that i won't be a TA or anything similar for probably a fair length of time (not that i'm sure that was ever a good reason to stop).

lately i mostly use lj to troll /grey's anatomy/ fandom communities and such (hence my userpic). it always makes me feel shameful to fall into tv fandom, but hey, it happens periodically, so maybe i should get over it. i have no idea how many of you care about any fandoms, but i suppose most of you must have an idea of the sort of thing i'm talking about.

( babbling about fandom and fanfic )

Hey! Happy Birthday, okapi_jeff!! May you have lots of fun, cake, and happy children!

fyi: after seeing a huge hairy centipede waving its feelers around on your bed, scaring it into running off, and spending a good hour shaking out all the loose clothes and bedding on and near the bed looking for the damn thing, and not finding it.... check the clothes you're wearing. otherwise you will find yourself thinking "what's that vague itchy feeling under my thigh?" half an hour later.

you know, these things aren't supposed to happen to me when i'm NOT in tropical/semi-tropical climates.

shudder.

jesse helms died today. i can without any shame whatsoever say that i reacted with unmitigated delight, and i don't make a habit of taking pleasure in the suffering or death of others. helms is the one person for whom i'll make an exception. jesse helms was a truly evil human being. this is the man who told a friend of his, a woman he'd known for decades and whose son he'd watched grow up, that said son's death from AIDS was his own damn fault because he'd played "russian roulette with his sexuality" (this was during one of helms' many vigorous campaigns to kill all AIDS research funding entirely because gay people deserved, en masse, to die). that NYT obit, in fact, is way too even-toned. what's with the phrase "heavily racial" on page 2 to describe his 1990 senatorial campaign? it was totally fucking racist; i remember those tv ads, and i'm not sure "racist" is a strong enough term for them (they depicted a pair of white hands crumpling a rejected job app while a VO said an unqualified minority candidate had gotten the job). actually, speaking of words and their inadequacies, "truly evil human being" isn't strong enough to express how loathsome, how base, how despicable jesse helms truly was. this was a man who literally wanted people unlike him to sit at the back of the bus, drink from different water fountains, sit down, shut up, rot in prison, and, preferrable to all that, really -- just lie down and die.

all my adult life i've been saying i wanted to throw a party when he finally kicked it. i wish i were home and could actually do that right now :-P because the world is a damned better place without him. he represents the mindset that is without any doubt the greatest threat to the world and all the humans in it - the idea that only you have the truth, only your way of life matters and is valid and is moral, and other people are scum, are vermin.

so... good riddance, jesse, you evil sumbitch! there are a whole hell of a lot of very happy north carolinians right now, despite the pious faux-patriotic sentimentalism of your hateful "uncle jesse"-spouting supporters. and insofar as i grew up in that place, i am one of those jubilant sodomite demon liberals. may your death toll the bell for your entire hate-mongering god-grubbing race-baiting gay-bashing way of life.

hooray!

well, i'm 31 today. yay! i'm amused by the pleasure and satisfaction i continue getting from finally being in my thirties. i've never been happier about a birthday than i was about my 30th, and i'm nearly as happy about this one. one more year away from my twenties! whoo! also i've been attracted to thirtysomethings since i was a teenager. thirtysomething is a good age.

my house didn't burn down - that is even more awesome. the fire very nearly entered our neighborhood, which would have been disastrous, but the firefighters cut a firebreak all around and the wind didn't kick up and push the fire over it. we really dodged a bullet. it was a damn good scare. ah, the perils of living in the mountains in california.

i'm returning to the states on sunday. i'll be home for a week or ten days - getting over the jet lag will take that long - and then i'm off to utah to see the fambly, and after that i'm off to north carolina to see the other fambly... whoo, summer o' travelling! i really can't afford it... but i don't care. i would cut body parts off to enable more travelling. it makes me happee.

a tv meme, picked up from jennyo

5 Awesome Women Characters
# Laura Roslin, Battlestar Galactica
# Cristina Yang, Grey's Anatomy
# Leela, Futurama
# Helen Stewart, Bad Girls
# Erica Hahn, Grey's Anatomy

( more meme-age )

well, i'm still waiting to see if my house will burn. according to the fire map i've seen, the fire is less than half a mile away. they've dug a firebreak around my neighborhood, but the firefighters seem to be frightened that the fire will jump up the small canyon seperating our development from it. if it does, it will be in an area of fire-climax pines, which burn like torches. seriously, they practically explode, they're so flammable. if it gets up there, we are totally screwed; all the houses there are surrounded by those trees, and a ton of very dry underbrush.

the waiting is really unpleasant. i mean, most of my most precious possessions are either with me or were taken away by my housemates, but ... not all of them. for one thing, most of my books are in there - at least, most of the ones i care about. aargh. and i love that house. aaargh.

so, as i write this, there's a forest fire burning a mile or so, possibly less, from my house in california. my housemates were made to evacuate, along with a couple thousand other people. we live in a very heavily forested area - all evergreens, with a hell of a lot of highly flammable pines involved. the ground cover is very dry and it's been very hot. the wind is slow and the last report i read said the fire was going southwest, which is good because my house is east of it, but still, it is fucking freaking me out.

i don't like this waiting at all. for one thing i'm much more freaked out being over here in asia than i would be if i were actually there. i'm surprisingly good in a crisis - i stay totally calm. so i'm not used to freaking out in this kind of situation. and i don't like it!! i don't know what's going on and i can't do anything and i'm like six thousand miles away. it's not like i could do anything if i were there, but.... aargh. and i'm so spoiled by the age of cnn and the internet that it's panicking me not to have news reports every five minutes.

my housemate d. messaged me to ask if i wanted them to save anything, which was nice of him. they drove my car off the mountain and i asked for my journals... and it slipped my mind, of course, to ask for the box of totally irreplaceable family photos. god. if the house survives the fire, we should get some kind of fire safe.

Oh my god!!!

i cried like a little girl. seriously. at least twice. i heart jane espenson (the writer of the episode) so very, very much. she is made of so much awesome it hurts (but oh so sweetly).

also? i love that one character, you know the one, so frakkin' much. i missed her. ("well, until she sees something shiny." oh, the love.)

but damn... the last scene. perhaps i'm just a sentimentalist at heart, but ... damn.

so i'm in taiwan, staying with my dad (who lives here), having taken a leave of absence from the school-place. there's all kinds of work i should be doing, and while i did spend a couple weeks recently working hard (copy-editing a friend's 250-page dissertation, writing a conference paper) - and ended up giving my first conference paper to the chinese lit department at my dad's university - i am now being a lazy-ass slacker of the most apalling kind. hooray! i haven't been this contented since i left england in 2006. if only i didn't have to go back to the real work-saturated world in october. (or study for my QEs [qualifying exam], which i should be doing right now... but i can't force myself to care.)

(there is a gecko climbing up my wall and chirping. they are extremely cute.)

i recently started to watch "grey's anatomy" (hence the icon), entirely because i heard that they had just started up a lesbian plotline, and those are few and far between on tv. being completely obsessed with media representation of queer women (there hasn't been nearly enough of it, and you straight folk have no idea how unpleasant and neurosis-inducing it is never to see people like you represented on screen, and things are better but "the L word" sucks), i of course had to check this out immediately. (luckily, it turned out there were lots of enjoyable things about this show, which on one level is simply amusing pap, but on another level does interesting things and involves three-dimensional characters and long plot developments. also, sandra oh plays one of the main characters, and she rocks.)

( grey's anatomy, and homosexuality on tv and in the world )

well, i was a clinton supporter, but this is still pretty damn cool. who'd have thought? go leftist america!

i kind of want him to offer her the vp spot, but i also get why he wouldn't. i donno. we shall see, i guess. in any case, obviously, i hope he wins - for many reasons, but not least is the fact that it would be awesome to have a black president. i hope one day we can have a woman president, too.

ok now that i've praised him, i must point out two things martin does that drive me up the frickin' wall. but before i start, i must note - though i've read a lot about heraldry, i am not remotely a medievalist and at least two of you are, so please correct me if i say something totally off.

the two things i'm referring to are simple: heraldry and armor. martin is constantly giving these lush, loving descriptions of gleaming mounted knights in enameled or inlaid armor, usually (always?) with massive complicated crests on the helmets. ok. dude. have any of you even heard of enameled armor? lacquer or enamel on armor would crack and break off as soon as anything hit it. it would be impossible to lacquer any bits - like, say, gauntlets - that involved a lot of lobstering of the steel, or any joints at all, really. now, i know that there was plenty of inlaid armor, but he keeps describing knights actually going into battle and tournaments wearing elaborately gold and silver-inlaid armor with like, gold rondels and shit. how on earth would any but the most obscenely rich of knights have the kind of money needed to wear gold-inlaid armor into a situation where the stuff is bound to get fucked up? the richly-inlaid stuff i've seen in museums has been stuff like henry VIII's armor on display in the Tower, and somehow i doubt henry was in the press laying about with his mace. can you imagine /anyone/ - ever! - going into battle with a breastplate inlaid with /rubies/?

( armor and heraldry )

(don't bother with this entry unless you're familiar with george r.r. martin.)

ok, so i'm re-reading martin's a song of ice and fire, which, despite its faults (notably the incredibly boring iron island plot and the only slightly less boring stannis plot), i love with a passion. specifically, i'm at a clash of kings. aCoK is, as many of you will recall, the only book in which renly baraethon is seen or discussed at any length.

( i babble with great pleasure about all the gayness martin makes me happy with )

Happy Birthday to den_down_unda!! Much virtual beer (and hopes that you have even more of the real kind) to you, my friend.

the other day, in the last lecture for my TAship, the prof read bits of william cowper's "the castaway". When he reached the last stanza--

"No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone,
When snatched from all effectual aid,
We perished, each alone;
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he."

-- several of the students gasped (from the effect of the language).

yeah. that was awesome. i heart students with actual literary leanings.

(fun fact: mr ramsey in woolf's "to the lighthouse" quotes those lines at least once, because woolf's father used to quote them all the time.)

to my undergrads:

1. it's really irritating when your final exam involves margin notes (next to partial answers) along the lines of "i know most of the words of the title of the poem! really! i know this! please give me credit!" wtf? that's pathetic and entitled, all at the same time!

2. do you /really/ think it's a good idea to express homophobic opinions on a final to your obviously (and out-ly) queer TA? i mean ...


(i just read a short essay that basically said that a certain amelia lanyer poem, easily read as homoerotic, wasn't so because the fact that it expressed a deep love and wasn't "graphic or plain" "cleared" it of such a misconceived reading. [my god! all those nasty queer theorists, besmirching heterosexual friendship with their icky accusations of lesbianism!] i mean, where do you even start with that? also... has this girl not noticed which school she's attending? hello?)