Five things

[eruthros]

Five random things about me: fannish, personal, ridiculous, serious, all of the above

1. I can watch Doctor Who and the X-Files without worry or tension. They are fiction! They have narrative structure! I understand narrative structure!

But things like Weakest Link freak me out. It is too stressful! It is emotional! People embarrass themselves for reals! I hate watching people be humiliated. And when it's, like, Doctor Who actors? I'm all "oh no! what if some of the people I like turn out to be idiots!" (which is stupid, because it's about being able to think quickly under pressure, not about actual intelligence). Anyway, this is kinda silly, because I'm not a read-the-end-of-the-story-first kind of person. But I won't watch Jeopardy unless people promise me that the real people on it all perform at about the same level, so there's not, like, sad little -5,000 person when everyone else is doing brilliantly. And I will want to watch the end first. Or read a recap. So that I know it's going to be okay.

2. After having someone I considered a good friend tell me to "just shut up" and "nobody cares what you think" and "you're always so negative about everything" and that I should "stop ruining it" and then stop hanging out with me, because I was attempting to analyze -- something, the disconnect between the third and seventh season first evils of Buffy, or the problem with the Willow-Tara relationship in light of Ethan-Giles and Buffy-Faith, or the way I felt Peter Jackson's portrayal of Faramir and Aragorn disrupted my reading of the hopeful ending of LotR, or whatever -- I became really, really sensitive to anti-analytic stuff.

No, really, really, really sensitive. When people start saying things like "oh, don't listen to her, she's just using pomo words to sound pretentious, no one who uses those words in the context of fandom can possibly have anything valid to say" or "but it's just for fun, so you shouldn't analyze it even in your own lj/house/space, you're ruining it!" and whatever? I am out of there. That is not my conversation, that is not my space, and I don't think I watch shows or read books the same way as people who say things like that do. (I'm not talking about "I just wanna squee" or whatever -- I'm talking about people who are offended by analysis they don't have to see, or who automatically dismiss anyone who talks about patterning as ridiculous and silly.)

In my time on lj, I haven't unfriended people often. One, because her politics posts (which outnumbered her fiction posts) made my liberal/feminist/queer self cringe. Every day. Two because their journals were locked and they unfriended me. Two or three because we no longer shared fandoms and had never been real friends. And all the rest because they kept saying that shit, day after day, kept arguing that an analytic gaze could never be a fannish gaze, that an analytic gaze (even when it wasn't in comments to their own posts) ruined their fannish experience, that an analytic gaze made people like me bad, mean people.

3. Apparently, I type so much in html that I now try to use html codes to make Microsoft Word do things like italics. I'll be happily writing a paper and include a title surrounded by nice little <i>s. I actually kinda wish I knew how to make Word autocorrect that to italics, because it's happening so often now.

4. [redacted for rl reasons]

5. I usually defend against earworms with "I am the very model of a modern major general," which is too complicated to be an earworm but drives all other songs out, tails between their legs. Except, apparently, spoken word and Moxy Fruvous. Damn you, Fruvous! This realization is prompted by the fact that I have the following three things stuck in my head:

"In the jungles of Peru, the fight for survival heightened his senses..." (I've been watching tS)
"In a fit of rage he tore down all her gifts and promises, sick and tired of hearing bout those Harry Dick and Thomases"
"I like to go out dancing, my baby loves a bunch of authors, we've been living in hovels, spending all our money on ... brand new novels" (I blame synecdochic, because she posted some live shows, and I was all "oooh, I don't have those" and then I realized that I could get eve more on the internet live music archive -- source also of my Estradasphere live shows -- and, yeah. Then I was all "shit they have the all-cover show from Northhampton!" and "ooooh, I want the MIT show that turned into Live Noise!" and then I had downloaded many shows and then. Um. Yeah.)

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Random links:
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have a new motto on their website: "defining San Francisco values since 1979." Ha! Also they are having an Easter party.
Other ways of updating Jane Austen: someone has vidded two versions of P&P to a Justin Timberlake song.
The most hilarious election day story of all time.
Apparently we make the gorges safe by ... rappelling down the sides and knocking off loose rocks. AHHH.
Geraldo Rivera doesn't take Bill O'Reilly's shit.
Commentary on the Sun op-ed suggesting Cheney should run for president.
A three minute preview for tomorrow's Doctor Who.

I have stolen this random links idea from svendra, because if I don't stick unrelated things at the bottom of my posts, I fail to share the awesomeness that is Alanis Morissette doing "my humps" with everyone. I mean, I feel like all my random links don't deserve single posts, so then the only people who see them are the people who are on IM when I find them. (If you still haven't seen the Alanis video, it's here. Also awesome. SERIOUSLY.)

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure you saw metamiri's post, but the false dichotomy between fan and academic really bothers me! I can cite deLauretis and squee too :) I think Miriam's point is well taken in the sense that lingo can become exclusionary, but I get frustrated when my particular theory heavy engagement with fandom becomes somehow less authentic than a more squeey one...

*hugs*

[eruthros]

Exactly! It's the authenticity argument that really bugs me. I can keep explicit reference out of my analysis, but I can't keep ... analysis out of my analysis. I don't need to say "Foucault once said..." but I do watch shows the way I talk about them. I watch shows in the way where sometimes I pause them to say, "GOD, so-and-so really looks good here." And sometimes I pause them to say, "You know, this is really interesting in light of the explicit way queerness and alienness were paralleled in season nine." Both of those are my authentic responses, and when people say that the second one is just me being pretentious (or not loving a show for what it is, or being negative, or too thinky), I get cranky.