Travel hopefully in life.

Oh boy, it’s been awhile, huh?

I’ve had a lot of life changes in the past year, some bad, but mostly good, or at least for the better even if it seems like it might take a hot minute for said changes to actually pay off. Anyway, in all of that, I’ve been thinking about how I want to spend my time and what I want to do with myself and one of the things I’d like to get better at is regular journaling/self-reflection. Not that I imagine I’ll ever share it with anyone outside of my fellow internet denizens, but I like the thought of there being some record of my existence that my niece, nephew, and possible but unlikely future progeny can look up and sift through for a more rounded understanding of the person I am/was. Less the pornography, but I suppose if they’re brave enough to come looking they can determine whether they’re brave enough to delve into that particular pastime or not.

As of right now, the most interesting things going on are, in no particular order:

• I started a new job yesterday! It’s just an hourly gig driving a route and maintaining installations of live plants in various office buildings/apartment complexes/hotels/etc., but so far I’m really enjoying it. Last night I came home with three baby aloes and a trash bag full of Sansivieria (snake plants!) so that was delightful. I also met my move goal (the Apple watch tracker of calories I’d like to lose in a day) without really doing anything but wandering around after the lovely technician currently training me and sticking my hands in the dirt on command, which suggests that just the day-to-day in this position is going to make an improvement on my overall health, so that’s promising, too.


• I signed up to run a 10K at the end of February! I’m not sure how it’s gonna go, considering that I just started a couch-to-5K program last week, but I’m at least gonna try it. Even if I don’t do great at the event itself, working toward it will be a huge success for me.


• I’m growing lithops for the first time ever! Or, I suppose I should say I’m attempting to successfully overwinter them, and then will be growing them (hopefully) in the spring and later in the fall after they go dormant again during the summer. For those unfamiliar, lithops are often called “living stones,” and are some of the more notoriously difficult plants in the succulent kingdom to keep alive. There’s a pretty good chance they’ll die, but I’m starting off with eleven in various stages of maturity so we shall see. Pics to come.


• I’m attempting to grow succulents from seeds for the first time! Specifically, Greenovia dodrentalis, aka desert roses. They’re these little teeny tiny specs that look like flakes of black pepper and I honestly have no idea if a single one of them is going to germinate, but I picked up a neat trick for planting delicate seeds from a YouTube video by the University of Illinois Extension, which suggests using a piece of toilet paper so you can see where, precisely, the seeds have landed. I intend to do the same, but will likely dampen the TP first, so it better catches the seeds. And because TP is designed to biodegrade, it shouldn’t hinder the sprouts from putting out roots, assuming any of the seeds germinate. Will report back once my humidifier pots come in on Monday.


• I’m also trying to re-start my hot pepper collection! I nabbed a packet of “pink tiger” bhut chili seeds from my favorite place, Pepper Joe’s, as well as a packet of 15 or so miscellaneous hot pepper seeds, which they included for free, and will likewise report back once they’ve been safely planted in humidifier pots.


• I made an Arizona hiking trail spreadsheet! I’m hesitant to call it a bucket list, though it does absolutely include trails that would also be on my overall life bucket list, but either way, I intend to do a lot more hiking in 2022 since I’m back in the beautiful desert where there’s beautiful mountains to climb and dangerous plants and animals to encounter. I’m hoping to trail train my dogs so I can bring them with me, as they’re still pretty spry for being 9 years old, but we shall see. It may be that they’re just crotchety old ladies who want to relax for the rest of their lives and honestly I’d be fine with that so long as they’re healthy and happy.


• I plan to start car camping in 2022! I don’t know where yet, although it will likely be in preparation to hit some of the more out of the way hiking trails detailed on the aforementioned spreadsheet early enough in the mornings to avoid heat and crowds. In a perfect world, I’ll have the doglets with me—for company more than safety, as neither one of them is big enough to be of real help in a situation of legitimate danger. Either way, I intend to get some use out of the wonderful, -30F temperature rated sleeping bag my parents bought me for Christmas.

One of the coolest things in all of this is that my step-mom is very, very into plants. So despite staying with my parents a little longer than initially planned upon and blowing through a decent portion of my savings to avoid having to return to Texas and thus being unable to move forward with house buying or apartment renting until some of that is replenished, she seems okay with me bringing a bunch of random growing things into the house with me. My dad just straight up doesn’t care as long as I have a good time and am sticking around.

I hope everyone out there has been doing well and invite you to share triumphs of 2021 or your hopes and goals for 2022 if you’re so inclined! I missed you, Dreamwidth!!!

Welp. Dropped out of all my exchanges today. Writing is getting difficult in a way that's troublesome, and on top of that I think I've been using it to dissociate from real life too much. I'm going to finish up the two fic I owe for equalityauction sometime before the end of the year and might poke at some other things for my own amusement in the meantime, but I think I'm going to take some time away from fandom otherwise. Maybe I'll finally read through the huge volume of books I've been meaning to get to for years.

In other news, I've started watching Ken Burns' Baseball. I'm on the second "inning" of the now 10-part documentary and I have to say it's fairly excellent so far. Very engaging, comprehensive, and well-curated, with a variety of masterfully interwoven perspectives. Not as scathing as I might personally prefer in regards to some of the race issues of the mid- to late-eighteen hundreds, but at least it hasn't shied away from them, either. In any case, I'm confident that by the end I'll have an entirely new field of knowledge to apply on trivia nights, if those are ever a thing again.

I'm also re-watching Suits, in the hopes that an old favorite fandom might inspire me a little bit or bolster my confidence. While my love of the early seasons and the dynamic between Mike and Harvey remains strong — not to mention the true glory of watching Gina Torres prowl around being awesome in fabulous dresses — it hasn't sparked the creative energy I was hoping it would. At least the banter and homoerotic subtext is still just as delightful as it was the first few times I watched it.

I hope everyone else is doing well.

Boy howdy, have things been busy! ( I'm going to cut this post because I don't like having to scroll through walls of text on my reading page and I'm sure some of y'all are in the same boat! )

Anyway, I hope all is well in everyone else's lives. It sounds, from the lurking I've been doing, that everyone is mostly okay if not great, and I'm here to help with the latter in any way I can if y'all need anything.

<3333

So, I turned in my first "essay" to my spiritual nonfiction class this past weekend. It's not really an essay, inasmuch as a series of vaguely connected scenes, though I plan to revise and expand it going forward. I haven't decided if I want to take the true essay route or if I want to go in a more memoir direction, but I thought I might share it here in case anyone cares to read/offer feedback. (No obligation, or anything, but what use is a journal if you don't throw your own weird personal shit out there every once in awhile, y'dig?)

As it's spiritual nonfiction, you can probably guess that it mostly deals with God stuff. Largely with the slow departure of my faith and my background growing up as a member of a Pentecostal Charismatic congregation.

( Behind a cut for space reasons. )

This is going to get a little faith-y at points, so scroll on if that's not your thing.

The Intermediate Fiction class I signed up for that was supposed to kick off June 1st didn't have enough participants enrolled and got moved to an August start date. The guy who runs the workshops offered to let me swap to a class with a sooner start date or take a refund if I didn't want to wait that long and after a great deal of consideration I took him up on a swap. I had waffled between Intermediate Fiction and a workshop on Spiritual Nonfiction, so I jumped into that one instead and will start it on June 22nd.

I'm very excited about it. Faith and that sort of whole greater spiritual meaning existentialism thing are two topics which occupy my mind pretty steadily, and I think it'll be great not only to read a selection of essays on the topic of spirituality from a variety of authors with different faith backgrounds, but it will be cool to figure out how to write about that stuff since it does take up so much of my brainspace at any given time.

I'm doing a little preparatory reading, through some of the spiritual nonfiction I own that I either haven't read in a while or meant to pick up but never did and through some of the works by Johnathon Malesic, the guy who'll be teaching the class. This article about the nature of work-based culture in America ("When Work and Meaning Part Ways") is very good, if anyone is interested.

Likewise I'm revisiting some of the Thomas Merton books I purchased a couple of years back and have flipped through but not sat down to really engage with. This passage in particular really spoke to me when I came across it this morning, and I figure there are some of you out there who might enjoy it:

"We have to remember the principle that certain desires and certain pleasures are willed for us by God. We cannot live in the truth if we automatically suspect all desires and all pleasures. It is humility to accept our humanity, pride to reject it.

Von Hügel, in one of his letters, writes of W.G. Ward ("Ideal Ward") as an "eager, one-sided, great, unintentionally unjust soul" who on his deathbed saw the mischief of his life—he had consistently demanded that all others be like himself!

This is the root of inhumanity!

It is often more perfect to do what is simply normal and human than to try to act like an angel when God does not will it. That is, when there is no need for it, except in the stubborn passion of our own impatience within ourselves.

It is not practical, it is not honest, it is not Christian to fly from "every desire" and "every pleasure" that is not explicitly pious.

For others who are human enough to be ascetics without losing any of their humanity, it is all right to risk things that seem inhuman. For one as deficient and self-conscious as I am, the ordinary ways are safer. Thay are not just an evasion to be tolerated; they are a more perfect way."

- Thomas Merton, from 'Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander'

( A light-hearted update on the local 'quarantine' situation, behind a cut because I know coronavirus talk in any form makes a lot of folks, including myself, very anxious. )

In other news: I'm starting guitar lessons up again on Thursday. Though, the instructor's profile on the website says he also plays the banjo, so I might see if I can try and swindle him into just teaching me that instead. Found a promising tablature for Colter Wall's 'Sleeping on the Blacktop' but it requires retuning my guitar entirely and I'm not sure I want to do that when I haven't nailed down the basics yet. Tuning and retuning are not my favorite parts of playing string instruments, I'll tell you.

Am considering signing up for an advanced fiction workshop, which part of me really desperately wants to take to work on my own original stuff, but it's expensive even with the 'everyone is stuck at home' discount the institution is offering and I'm fairly confident that I have a decent handle on my own shortcomings in the narrative process. Doesn't necessarily mean that I know what to do about them, but writing in fandom is basically a big workshop anyway, so I'm sure I'll improve if I keep working at it either way.

I plan to spend most of this morning cleaning my apartment, which is in desperate need as I haven't even fully finished unpacking yet. I'm going to try to get my recording equipment set up this afternoon and maybe start laying down some vocals for this month's cover song, which unfortunately has been shuffled by the wayside a bit considering everything that's going on. Part of me thinks that it's silly to dream of pursuing music in the current climate, but another part of me believes in the power of art to make trying times more palatable. We'll see which side wins out in the end, I guess.

Oh! And a quick thanks to everyone who prompted me for non-HBO War stuff. The list of incoming fiction, as it stands, looks like this:

• Jason Mendoza/OMC for thesummoningdark DONE!


• Donna/Rachel + Harvey/Mike for backflipintothevoid


• Geralt/Jaskier and/or Dorian/Cullen for honigfrosch


• Jaskier & Yennefer and/or Tahani/Eleanor and/or Elizabeth/Charlotte for onexfeatherxleft


• Clary/Izzy for impala_chick


• Tahani/Eleanor for slightlytookish


• WarBible (Don/Boyd) for lt_aldo_raine

I'm trying to move them in relative order and keep things fairly short. I've finished one fill so far and have most of another so things are skipping right along. I sincerely appreciate the audience participation on this one—it's definitely helping me stay sane.

Hope everyone is well, or as well as you can be in this time of strife.

Yoinked from both muccamukk and oracne, because it seems fun.

Slow burn OR love at first sight: Love at first sight is a difficult concept for me to fathom, period, and I much prefer "idiots who didn't realize they were in love for like, a really, really, really long time," if given the choice.

Fake dating OR secret dating: I really enjoy a good fake dating fic. I also really enjoy a twist on that trope, like "we're dating, but your best friend needs a fake date to a dinner party that I have just learned I'll be attending so now we have to pretend we're not dating."

Enemies to lovers OR best friends to lovers: I really enjoy exploring the relationships between people who don't actually like each other but have great physical chemistry, as evidenced by several of the fic I've written.

Oh no there's only one bed OR long distance with correspondence: I love epistolary fic, but in my experience it's a difficult one to pull off well. "Oh no there's only one bed" has a bit of a comedy vibe that comes to it naturally and is usually a lot of fun, with bonus "secretly pining" if you're lucky.

Fantasy au OR modern au: If I'm reading a fandom that's not already set in modern times, I would generally rather read it in a different period setting or an entirely fabricated setting than just re-skinned with modern trappings.

Smut OR fluff: Smut is really, really hard for me to write, because I always feel vaguely ridiculous while doing it, so smut is extremely impressive to me when it's done well.

Mutual pining OR domestic bliss: Idiots who don't realize they're in love with each other/have been dating each other for ten years/are common-law married is like, the trope of my heart.

Alternate universe OR future fic: While both are decidedly delightful, I have a particular fondness for universes that explore what it would be like if one character was in a different role or if one event had happened differently.

One shot OR multi-chapter: I'm a glutton for good stories so multi-chapter fic are a certain kind of unexpected blessing, though really lovely one-shots are equally impressive.

Kid fic OR road trip fic: I find most child characters in fanfiction to be...not accurately written, at best. Kids are very difficult to capture on the page. Road trip fic, on the other hand, has the potential to hit all kinds of additional tropes. "Oh no there's only one bed," "stuck in a confined space together through no choice of our own," "dealing with trauma," etc. As one of my favorite Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band songs says, "There's nothing that the road cannot heal."

Reincarnation OR character death: If I have to pick one, I'll go with reincarnation over character death, though neither is my usual cuppa. Both are difficult to pull off in a way that's believable and isn't just a grindstone of negative emotions.

Arranged marriage OR accidental marriage: I prefer the "oh shit, what are we going to do now?" fly-by-the-seat-of-one's-pants reactionary nature of accidental marriage fic to the court politics drudgery of (many, but admittedly not all) arranged marriage fic.

Time travel OR isolated together: "There was only one bed," "we're trapped in this cave," "oh fuck a blizzard let's hurry to that conveniently located abandoned cabin," I love it aaaaaallll.

Neighbors OR roommates: I don't think dating one's roommate is a good idea, even in fiction, and it's hard for me to get past the reality of a relationship going bad and forcing someone to move in a pinch to enjoy the story.

Sci-fi au OR magic au: Both of these are choice tropes and I will happily fling myself into either one, but good sci-fi is hard to pull off and I'm so impressed when it's done well.

Bodyswap ORAND genderbend: The only thing better than bodyswap is when the characters who swap bods are different genders. Lots of interesting opportunities to play with gender roles and explore identities~

Angst OR crack: Writing something that hurts just the right amount is an underrated skill. Angst that hits all the right buttons is just chefkissingfingers.gif, especially when there's a bittersweet twist involved somewhere or an uplifting ending.

Apocalyptic OR mundane: Apoca-fic trends toward the bleak and gritty, which I don't usually enjoy as a general vibe. I do, however, sincerely love watching characters I love try and navigate everyday situations, especially if they're coping with some kind of trauma and growing and changing and becoming better people, by whatever there definition thereof may be.

I totally forgot to post this here but, while wandering in a haze of frozen daiquiri drunkenness along the river walk in Savannah, my family stumbled upon a “Hall of Heroes” exhibit at a place called Kevin Barry’s Pub across the street from a WWII memorial, and we wandered upstairs to take a look at it. There was a pretty robust collection of war memorabilia and photos from WWII-present but I just about lost my shit when I saw a signed photograph of none other than our very own Wild Bill Guarnere up on the wall! Look at this delightful little nerd, and the swoopy lovely handwriting!! I am not ashamed to say that I made a DEEPLY embarrassing noise when I saw it and was super unsubtle about taking this picture:

I officially took the GRE this morning, which puts me one step closer to attaining another useless art degree! (Or, well, a degree in the arts, anyway.) I did better than I expected, particularly considering I didn't study at all like a lazy idiot.

Next up: get together a list of journals and contests I want to enter/submit to so that I can start padding my writing resumé with some official shit instead of just being like, "Well fan fiction..." and hope that I can finagle at least a personalized rejection letter before I start applying to programs next year! Aw yeah!