the wrong end of the telescope

You are too lovely; my family is too lovely; it was a weird roller coaster of a day (I always feel weird about birthdays) and it's mostly over now, and everyone has been so nice. A post that actually thanks people properly is forthcoming, for now just know I love you so much, each and everyone of you. Thank you. ♥

For x_dark_siren_x

( top 5 female characters to write, fannish or original )

( Top 5 feminists )

( Top 5 poems )

For torakowalski

( Top 5 Shakespeare plays )

( Top 5 things I did in London )

For bunnymcfoo

( Top 5 Places For a Moment To Think )

For nokomis305

( Top 5 albums )

For sansets

( Top 5 favorite recipes )

She also asked me for ( Top 5 favorite one-bowl/pot/pan recipes )

For mahoni

( Top 5 favorite articles of clothing )

( Top Five Comfort Foods/Drinks )

That's all for now! I have some more to post (and one more to answer, which is why the rest aren't going up now), and if anyone have more to ask, they can, you know, ask them. ♥

I'll be out for most of the weekend, until tomorrow afternoon or so--at a pretty ridiculous birthday party in another city. It seems to be the week for those, but more on that later. Love! Take care of yourselves! I remain behind and will probably be behind until the 25th--it's a deadline sort of time, lovelies, and you know what that does. Wish me luck and stuff.

Incoherent reactions while watching ftw.

( MY SHOW )

It's pride day.

Go here and leave a comment detailing the ways in which you are awesome. More or less, one sentence or a list, I don't care. But do it. I did it, and it was really really difficult to do it without caveats, but you know what? The author of that post is right. We do put ourselves down too much, we remember all the failures and never the good things we do, and we forget our creativity, our kindness, our capacity to love. We all deserve better.

Walk tall, sing it clear, all that jazz. You're awesome, I love you.

This poem--I don't believe in god, but there's something about it that just makes me feel like dancing.


God Says Yes To Me
Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes



Do you have a poem or a quote or a song that makes you happy? Feel free to post it in the comments, lovelings. ♥

I get a little silly around Christmas. I end up in this state of mind where I bawl at Christmas songs, write very heartfelt messages for my family on all the presents, and just generally feel like there is an epically important point to the day that gets missed a lot. We mostly don't miss it; I don't have a perfect family by any means, but we do manage to celebrate Christmas in a way that is mostly not stressful and succeeds in being sweet and light and wonderful and nondenominational.

For the most part, anyway. (Let's not talk about the time last year when my dad was lying underneath the tree, trying to hold it up while my sister attempted some complicated feat of engineering that would allow the tree to keep standing up straight.)

But I'm thinking about meaningful moments, anyway. So that's the theme--give me a setting, a pairing or a friendship or two acquaintances, and a moment when things change. It could be a first kiss, a revelation (when so-and-so found out about x), a break-up, etc. Fandoms are bandom, BTVS, DCU, Veronica Mars, and anything else you've seen me write in. Crossovers are totally fine, rare pairings are encouraged, outlandish AUs are lots of fun, etc. You know how I roll. This time, though, I'm only doing twelve. One of those is airgiodslv's, the other eleven are open.

And I love you all. But you knew that.

1. I currently have five, no, count them, five snowflake cookies in my profile! Guys, seriously, stop being so awesome, I don't know how to deal with it! *beams* Thank you so much!!! ♥ It made my morning here at work, okay?

2. I have three stories in beta, oh god. ETA: that should be two stories in beta and working on finishing the third. We're calling the first sentence pre-breakfast wishful thinking. They are my patented Awful Early Drafts, so I don't envy anyone trying to make sense of them. (My writing process looks a little like this: start with the equivalent of a finger painting of the story you hope to get to, have someone tell you what's wrong with it, and then go through a series of increasingly improving drafts until the last one hopefully looks a little like what you were trying for.)

3. bunnymcfoo is collecting money to buy clothes for a youth shelter over here. They need warm clothes for winter, you guys! Last year she raised over 3000 dollars--this is a fantastic initiative, and as long as my student aid check arrives before Christmas, I will certainly be donating.

4. I won't be around much in the next two weeks. I have a technical translation, a philosophy paper, lots of reading, and three stories of varying lengths to finish, and I have to work forty hours, too. So if you see me, tell me to go do work. If you need me/want to tell me something/feel like babbling, email: homeless dot sky at gmail is your best bet. Love!

So I read a lot. And by that I do mean a lot. I mean that when I was thirteen, I was reading two paper bags of library books every week, the ones I'd borrowed and the ones my sister had borrowed, so around 25 books or so. To be fair, I was learning English by osmosis, so it's possible I was a little more intense about the reading than I am otherwise. Not much more, though.

Just, one of my favorite things about college and about this LJ thing is that I'm no longer alone in my appreciation of reading. I got this meme from softlyforgotten.

( by turning we come round right )

Tonight I leaned hard on some wonderful people and then I went off to do something that I was anxious about, and while it didn't go smashingly it was at least okay, and then I left, cried on my friend's shoulder, said goodbye to her, walked down into the station, sat down on a bench between a biker chick and a teenage boy, pulled out my novel, but couldn't actually stop myself from starting to cry again.

But here is where the miracle happens.

After I've been crying for two minutes or so, the biker chick turns to me and says, "Do you need help with anything? Are you okay?"

She's a stranger. In Sweden.

And I manage to say something about no, it's not anything that happened tonight, it's just old stuff.

She says, "Oh, I'm really sorry to hear that you're sad. Are you sure you don't need help? Are you going home now?"

"Yes," I say, "I'm going home."

We talk for a while, about why love hurts and why life hurts; why we take on the hurts because it means we get to have the moments when things are soaring as well. She doesn't say anything new (except of course that initial kindness, as rare as it was sweet), but she's tall and reassuring and I find myself talking about why I'm hurting in more abstract terms, calming down. Then she boards her train and says that she hopes my night clears up and that things keep getting better, and I smile as she goes.

That is, a little love would not go amiss.


ANON LOVE MEME