A meme from egelantier: Comment on this entry, and I'll give you three themes along the lines of "username and [some idea or concept or thing]". You then post what you have to say on these themes in your own livejournal.

She gave me:
wordsofastory and new york
I love New York. I've lived here for almost eight years now (I arrived at the end of August in 2006) and would very happily stay here for the rest of my life. I've lived in three neighborhoods in two boroughs, so there are huge swathes of the city that I know too little about. Or that I haven't even seen, considering that I've still never been on Staten Island other than at the ferry dock or on the highway across it.

I like the physical conveniences of the city – subways and a bus system that actually works; every store or movie or restaurant you could possibly want; access to trains and airports and people who are more than willing to visit you just because of the city. But I also like more intangible things: the feel of the people, the rules of social interactions, the smell of a pizza place or bakery or, on occasional windy days, the ocean. I like the anonymity of it – like any big city – but also learning to recognize or be recognized by the people at few favorite places. The only thing I don't like is the price of rent; whyyyyyy is it so high? Okay, I know why, but it still pains my soul.

Also, I've gotten to the point where I can claim to be a real New Yorker, because I can give people directions. (Well. Usually.)


wordsofastory and dreams
I actually don't dream very much! Or perhaps I just don't remember them. On the positive side, that means I almost never have nightmares either; the last one I remember having was years and years ago (and was about an elephant chasing me down stairs, which for some reason was TERRIFYING).

I wish I did have more memorable dreams. I'm always a little jealous when people recount theirs, and they have dramatic plots and fannish characters and cool settings or whatever. I must be happy when I'm unconscious though, since I've been told I giggle in my sleep fairly often.


wordsofastory and favorite narrative tropes
Ah, so hard to choose! I think I tend to respond to stories almost entirely based on how I feel about the characters, rather than the narrative. But some of my favorite tropes are traveling (road-trips or post-apocalyptic search for survival or traveling circuses or finding the MacGuffin or anything like that; traveling just for tourism is much less interesting to read about) and things to do with cons or trickery; if we're going to have a straightforward good vs evil narrative, I prefer our heroes to be underdogs who have to work through less-than-straighforward methods (spying, assassinations, lying, stealing, disguises, etc) instead of meeting on the field of battle, so to say. I'm much more into friends-to-lovers than foe!yay or antagonist pairings. I like people who are broken in one way or another (usually emotionally, but it's all good) not getting better, but getting on with their life, having relationships that manage without healing. I tend to be waaaay more interested in the stories of an established relationship than a first time – like, great, now you know you're interested in each other, that's important, but what I really want to know is about how you work out differences and make compromises and decide where to live or who sleeps where or who does what, when you tell the other about some important backstory or future goal, how you come up with routines or nicknames or inside jokes, how you fight and make up, little things that didn't seem important at first which become obstacles. I feel like there's so many stories after the first time, and they tend to get less attention, alas. I also almost always tend to write characters in relationships that are at least open to some degree, if not explicitly polyamorous. I don't know why; I guess jealous is boring and petty and I just want to explore all of the characters with all of the other characters. ...This has sort of devolved into talking about character tropes again.

ANYWAY NON-ROMANTIC NARRATIVE TROPES: I really adore retellings, reversals of tropes, fairy tales and mythologies. I love taking an old story and twisting it, doing something different with it. (Which is one of the reasons I like fanfic so!) I like lovingly described settings that are really important to the plot, so historical AUs and cyberpunk and things like that really work for me. The protagonists Saving The Day is obviously awesome, but I am also fond of bittersweet or mixed endings. I can even like a bit of grimdark, depending on how it's done.

Hmm, I'm sure there's a ton more I love, but I can't think of them. I'm so bad at plots, really! I go to look at what I've written, and it's all slice-of-life or relationship details or little ordinary moments. People actually doing things, pshaw.

1. Snake has virgin birth. This is even creepier than that shark virgin birth a year or two ago, because these babies also have freaky genes. MUTANT SNAKES: DO NOT WANT FOREVER.

2. Kids Reenact Project Runway (video) - Hahahaha, this is hilarious. And helps me get over my bitterness regarding the winner of this season.

3. Towards a Steampunk Without Steam
4. Stupid Things We Say - Two articles about the imperialism/colonialism/racism/sexism/etc of unexamined steampunk. I love the idea of "cotton gin punk" so much. I would totally be all over that genre. Whereas steampunk- there's a lot of interesting things happening in it, but the genre itself is not what I would have chosen to be the next big thing. I still miss cyberpunk! Why did we get tired of that?

5. 50 Reasons to be Pretty Damn Euphoric You Live in New York City - OH GOD I MISS NYC SO MUCH. (Although Jesus, what's with the bitterness in the comments?) Cardiff can bite me. I want New York.

Idol Ceremony, one of my favorite etsy stores, is having a 30% off sale! Today is the last day, so get over there.

The New York City libraries are facing massive budget cuts, to the extent that they will have to completely close 10 branches, and all libraries will only be open four days a week. Help protest this! You do not have to be a resident of NYC to help; even if your sole association for NYC libraries are those statues of the lions outside the one on 42nd street, please help.

If It Was My Home: I know everyone already knows how awful the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is, but this is a great website for the visceral feel of it.

When Teen Pregnancy Is No Accident: a really fascinating and horrifying article on abusive relationships and pregnancy. Leyla's story turns a modern fable on its head: that of the woman—call her the femme fertile—who conspires to get pregnant, perhaps by "forgetting" to take her birth control pills, as a way to “trap a man” and force marriage—or at least keep him in her life. In reality, experts researchers on dating violence and unintended pregnancy say, it’s Leyla's version of that story is all too common. Two new studies have quantified what advocates for young women’s health have observed for years: the striking frequency with which it is in fact young men who try to force their partners to get pregnant.

Macbeth comics!

There is nasty weather outside today. Grey, low, cloudy skies, strong winds, rain that never quite stops but that never grows strong enough to be a storm either, just drizzles and and mists and sometimes, briefly, patters.

Despite all that, I went to farmer's market today, and bought an enormous amount of things, mainly because I had missed the market for the last several weeks. My haul includes: grape-apple juice, oyster mushrooms, a dozen eggs, bok choy, white onions, white carrots, garlic, a pint of mixed heirlooms tomatoes, and a handful of mixed hot peppers (jalapeno, poblano, Hungarian wax). Nom nom nom.

Also! This video is brilliant.

Things to love about living in New York: Astor Place is a wide intersection, with a flat island in the middle, surrounded by relatively tall, old buildings. Most of the buildings are facing Astor Place, creating a sense of a sort of cup or valley walled on four of five sides with tall canyons. Today when I was walking across it, in the middle of the afternoon with bright light and plenty of people and cars rushing about, a man was playing a jazz version of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" on a saxophone. He had somehow managed to place himself where the walls of a building where broadcasting the music, making it loud enough to fill Astor Place and here long before and after you could see, even with the noise of traffic and people.

Things to hate about living in New York: Later this afternoon, I attempted to go to a talk being given by one of my professors. 50 minutes later, and still over 40 blocks away from my subway stop (not to mention, you know, finding the building and then the room within it), the subway train I was on broke, not only forcing me to get off but blocking that line for other trains to come up. The express trains on the same line were so packed (it was rush hour) that it took three of them stopping at the station before I could manage to get on. At this point, I was 20 minutes late for an hour long talk, and was clearly not getting to the event anytime soon, so I gave up.

Random things which I am not sure to attribute to New York or my own luck: Leaving the subway station, I planned on catching a bus and going home. I briefly confused East and West when coming up out of the station, and walked a block in the wrong direction. Turning around, I heard someone call my name, and looked around to see M, a fellow grad student. "What are you doing up here?" he said, so I explained about the subway. "You're on my block!" he said. "You have to come home with me and help me eat the end of my Thanksgiving leftovers." And so I did.

Today is a very lovely day.

I'm back in New York now (I think I've said that already, but maybe not), which I am finally done traveling, at least for a few months. In the last four months, I have been on planes from: New York to Ohio, Ohio to New York, New York to England, England to Athens, Athens to Cyprus, Cyprus to London, London to New York and Ohio to New York. And in all that, not once was my luggage lost, a plane missed, or a flight delayed for more than a few minutes. I even only got called over for extra searching by security once. Clearly I have the best airport luck of anyone ever. Although, come to think of it, I've never had my luggage lost, but perhaps that just proves my point.

I like being back in New York. It's not quite like any other city; London has the skyscrapers and the history, Columbus has my family and a skyline and districts I know by heart, like a mirror image, and Nicosia has character and individuality, a pretty little halved city with ancient Venetian walls and UN guards diving into the capitals of two different countries. But New York has that and still feels like a place where people live, a home and playground and market and setting. Even the parts of the city that are most gentrified, most designed to appeal to a tourist, still feel like that to me. Even Time Square, for all its ads and chain stores and crowds so huge they spill out into the streets, crowds so dense they feel like a mob that hasn't decided which way it wants to go, even Time Square has its people who are there to live in it: the guys selling ten-dollar watches and fake purses shouting and joking with their friends or customers, and the women in heels trying to shove across a sidewalk to make it to a show on time at one of the theaters all around there.

I missed New York while I was away. I 've never been homesick before (if you can call it homesickness when you've only lived someplace for a year); I've missed people, or a certain restaurant or store, but not whole places, just for their feel. I do love something indescribable, intangible about the city, the angle of its roofs against the sky, or the pattern of all those rectangular buildings- some taller, some shorter, white marble or grey stone or red brick- that shouldn't be different than any other city's but somehow is. I love the dusty purple of the night sky and the long, narrow horizons down the avenues and how the subway trains sway and roar and their brakes squeal in the stations, and how people move quick and sure to an exit or a transfer.

Today I went to the Union Square farmers' market, which is bigger this time of year, wrapping around three sides of the park, the south side with people selling paintings and photographs and t-shirts and candle-holders giving way to the west and north sides with vegetables and fruits and honey and flowers and houseplants, everything smelling like green growing things. I bought bread, a fresh loaf with white chewy insides and a crunchy crust. I missed bread in Cyprus; we ate homemade bread, but the only kind available was thick and tasteless, some trick of local wheat or cooking style making everyone's resemble rubber; and cheese, sharp cheddar, smelling strong even wrapped in paper; baby carrots, pale but thick and round, like little fingers; tiny strawberries the size of my littlest fingernail but so sweet, stronger-tasting than a huge berry; and my favorites, the heirloom tomatoes. They have so many of them right now, and in every variety: yellow and orange and red and green and purple, little tart green zebras striped in shades of grass and lemon, and big old germans, mustard colored with ketchup streaks coming up from the bottom, but sweet as sugar and big enough that one tomato easily weighs over a pound.

Then I sat in the sun for a while in the grassy part of the park, to watch the people. A man in his mid-twenties climbed a tree until he got as high as the branches could hold him, perched there for a few minutes, and then came back down; he was wearing a bright yellow t-shirt that was just the color of the underside of the leaves when the sun shone through them. Across the street, a man stood on the roof of a building, far enough away that he was half the size of a dime. He had dark hair and stood with his back to me, wearing only a pair of pale grey sweatpants, so the line of his spine was visible when he leaned back against the railing at the edge of the roof. He stood there for a long time, half an hour or so, taking in the sun and doing nothing, until a man wearing only black shorts came and said something to him, and they went away together.

As I said, a lovely day. Though it would be even nicer if, you know, Racheline was not currently on the other side of the continent.

Tomorrow is my last day of classes for this semester. I'll have to write a paper next week (well, I also have to write one today, and get ready to give a presentation), but that hardly counts; I'll just be glad to finally have completed this class that's been driving me crazy. At least bad things, like everything else, eventually come to an end.

That's the main reason why I've been so busy lately; a million final projects and things to prepare for the summer or fall, meetings and papers and emails and endless other things that all have to be done, and done now. It's annoying, but not really terrible. I've also had some sort of terrible cold, though I think I've finally gotten over it. I even ended up at the student medical center on Monday when I nearly lost my voice, after having decried the fact that they were closed on Sunday: how can you close a medical center serving thousands of people for a day a week, particularly when most of them presumably cannot afford to go to an emergency room and don't have local doctors?

I'm insanely behind on all the ficathons that are coming up- I want to read and produce recs for sprinkkink and remix_redux and yaoi_challenge eventually, and I completely forgot to write one prompt I'd signed up for, but I'll do that sometime. Next week, hopefully.

Despite all that, I'm really very happy in general, for many reasons. We've been having gorgeous weather; real spring stuff, for the first time in months. Sun and warmth, and coming right after a week of rain where I don't think I saw the sun once, it all seems exaggeratedly bright and wonderful. And it stays for longer too, so that sunset doesn't come until around 8, so that there's still actual blue sky and liquid orange sunsets long after my body clock expects it to be night. It's so pleasant.

On Monday it was in the low 80s, and I spent a few hours sitting in a park (yes, not even death-by-illness can beat the appeal of hot, sunny weather. I would make an awesome sun worshiper). There's a large fountain slightly off-center in Washington Square, but they haven't turned on the water yet, so crowds of people were sitting inside the rim, on each of the steps down to the lowest center, which would normally be under a few inches of dirty water. People took turns taking advantage of that stage-like space in the middle: someone dressed up in a turban and robe doing what looked like a cross between yoga and capoeira, a group of break-dancers, a guy with a guitar singing pop songs.

Two or three days of sun isn't enough to tan visibly (though it's certainly enough to burn if I'm not careful), but I love that I will, soon. The end of winter does always does this to me: once I hit the point where I no longer have any visible tan lines and I can see blue veins halfway up my arms, all I think about if how I want summer to come back. It's strange, because pale on other people is perfectly attractive. It's only for myself that I want brown and gold and freckles and every possible mark of heat and sun.

Just after I made that last post, I heard a boom outside, and went to the window to see what it was. A parked car just outside my building had exploded. Or caught on fire. Or something. I called 911 to let them know what was happening (and, by the way, calling 911 in New York is insanely complicated), and hung out at the window, watching the flames and smoke and the fire trucks arrive.

For some reason, the firefighters couldn't or wouldn't actually put out the fire, so the car continued to burn with big orange flames and dark, billowing smoke and occasional additional booms when gasoline or something exploded. After a while I noticed that there was now so much smoke that I couldn't see anything out of the windows, just thick gray clouds and everything smelled like burning oil. I could still hear, however, and managed to catch someone telling the bystanders to back off, because it was unsafe to be breathing this.

So I decided to throw some things in a bag and flee to a coffeeshop for a few hours, despite that I'd not been planning on venturing out into the massive rain. Just as well, I suppose, as in leaving my building I found it had been surrounded by something that looked like police tape, except it was red instead of yellow and had DANGER written on it.

Well. That's interesting. And just when my apartment had stopped smelling like burnt duck.

I made a mix that I'm mailing out to people as part of audiography's Mix Trade, but I decided to share it with you lovely people as well. Locked only because I'm not entirely sure how that fits with the rules of the trade.

( Concrete Jungle )

Okay. Now I'm going to go get some dinner, and then I really, seriously, oh-my-god-I-can't believe-it's-due-tomorrow have to finish that one story.

So! Look, it's an actual update.

As I've mentioned, esrafil and her friend, Laura, came to visit me this weekend. They both came in on Friday, Laura first. There'd been a bit of miscommunication, so I was waiting to pick her up at Grand Central (note this; it'll be important later) when she actually came into Port Authority. Fortunately, they're pretty close together, so I managed to get there without leaving her stranded in the confusing, crowded station for too long, and then we went back to my apartment to wait for esrafil to arrive. She got here after midnight, and we went wandering around to find a place to eat.

You know, for the whole 'city that never sleeps' thing, New York seriously does not have that many 24-hour places. I can only name two, one of which is Dunken Doughnuts and the other of which is a coffeeshop that once kicked me out for staying too long. Where am I supposed to go when I need to write a paper at 4am, people?! At least Columbus had some diners.

Anyway, we found a sushi place still open and ate dinner, and then came back home. The next day we started out down at St. Mark's Place, which is Greenwich Village and full of various fun tattoo places and goth stores and so on. We ate at a Thai place (which was actually incredibly good and surprisingly cheap) and ducked in and out of wherever looked interesting, and esrafil and Laura bought neat things. Then we went up to Herald Square for the Lush store (which smells so good, and seems to be where I take most NYC visitors), and then further up past Times Square and the Rockfeller Center to stop at the Kinokuniya and another store or two. Then back to my apartment for esrafil and Laura to get ready to go to a Scissor Sisters concert. Which, despite my lovely company, is the real reason they were in New York.

So they went to do that, and I hung around and checked my email. *grins* Because I am exciting like that. And, well, I can only handle so much of being social. I got one from a girl I went to grade school with; I knew she was also currently living here in the city, but I hadn't got around to writing her to see if she wanted to get together sometime. Her email said, 'Were you in Grand Central yesterday? I thought I saw you!' What the hell. Eight million people here, and I run into the one I know. I swear this would only happen to me.

Sunday we first stopped at a Polish restaurant, for the sake of perioges, much-loved by Laura, and then went to Andromeda, a piercing place on St Mark's. esrafil had wanted to get her eyebrow pierced, and I'd been thinking about getting my cartilage pierced for a while, and decided this was a good opportunity.

( Photo! )
Though you can barely see it, against my hair. Apparently I have funny-shaped ears, or so the guy told me, necessitating it being very low down. Which is where I wanted it anyway, so that worked out. Also, I swear to god someday I will stop looking like I'm 12. It didn't hurt, or at least not nearly as much as I thought it would. It did feel strange, like a pinch, and then I could feel the needle pop through the skin. It's still a bit sore when it gets bumped, though.

While we were waiting, a mom with little children came in, who wanted to get her daughter's ears pierced. The little girl was about five, and the guy who worked there asked the mom if she thought the girl would actually sit through it, since they used actually needles instead of a gun. She said she didn't know. "We can try it," the guy said, "but if she freaks out- and even some adults do- I'll have to charge you anyway."

"So do you recommend we go someplace where they use a gun instead?" the mom asked.

"No," the guy said. "I think you should wait until she's older."

The mom and her kids talked about it, and they decided to go buy clip-on earrings instead. But it was a neat sight; you don't often see people turn away business.

After that, we walked around, stopping to get bubble tea and go through a Halloween store (hey, costumes are always cool, regardless of what time of year it actually is), before esrafil and Laura had to leave. It was fun. They are fun people! And I continue to say that everyone should visit me.