Ten Little Chances to be Free

Visa interview did not go well due to an incident of "Um you have the wrong document, you were supposed to print the other confirmation message," and then the site containing the message was having some sort of server trouble and wouldn't load. So I have to wait for it to go back up again and make another appointment. I could recite the details of the three hours of utter frustration and fury, but honestly after everything that's gone pear-shaped in the past two weeks I just don't have the energy.

Anyway. I went back and read all my old fanfiction this evening. I kind of want to shake my eighteen-year-old self now, because even then I was annoyed with the trend of vague, aimless fic that won't come right out and say what it's about, and makes the reader work far too hard to figure it out instead of leaving clear textual cues. And yet somehow I still wrote a bunch of fic where the point was buried somewhere in all the hinting and beating around the bush, and so I ended up with a bunch of reviews either accusing me of writing stereotypical Enjolras/Grantaire fic or squealing about how adorable E/R is.

So, because my eighteen-year-old self apparently couldn't get the point across, I am going to come back three years later and do it for her. Warning: self-indulgent rambling about my own fic ahead.

Stains: Reads like a stereotypical E/R fic, but even then I was trying to riff off the usual tropes. In this case, Enjolras is repressed and disgusted and wary of Grantaire because he has some unspecified incident of sexual abuse in his past and thinks R is trying to pull the same shit on him, not because he's a prude who needs to get the stick out of his arse.

Geständnis: Pretty direct for the most part, but I wish I'd found some way to get across that not only is it about human justice vs. divine justice, it's about how the entire reason I find Gestapo!Javert such a fascinating idea is because the law/justice rift we see in 1830 isn't so much a rift now as it is a HUGE GAPING CHASM.

Bedfellows: I have nothing to say except "LOL, even in 2005 I was playing with the 'Enjolras: top or bottom?' debate."

Fulfilment: I... think it should speak for itself, but apparently it doesn't, because it has a load of E/R squee in the reviews. Grantaire admires Enjolras for being everything he isn't. Enjolras has a hackneyed-fanfic-trope moment of weakness and samples all of Grantaire's vices. Grantaire no longer admires Enjolras. How could anyone mistake this for happy fun "yay R gets to kiss Enjy!" shippy fic?

Sons of Earth: "All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers." The dream imagery isn't actually random rambling, it's cooked up from a horrid brain stew of Antaeus, Jacob wrestling the angel, and Luke Skywalker in the cave on Dagobah. I would've been happy if one person had picked out one of these elements, but apparently not.

I feel... I don't know. Ignored might be the word. Like I keep shouting into the void about things that really excite me, and the answer isn't just "Oh that's nice, you loser," it's silence. I know I'm an enormous nerd and I have this compulsive drive to be a know-it-all, but I try to share my nerd-dom and my sources and the reasons for my squee, in the vain hope that maybe someone else will be just as excited about it--excited enough to do some nerdy things of their own, or critique mine, or enter into some sort of dialogue.

I mean, what has my Les Mis obsession driven me to do? I've written a couple fics and made a few icons, yeah, but I've also written all this meta. I've read thousands of pages of historical research, I've tracked down obscure annotated editions of the book so I could type up the deleted scenes and translate them. I've typed up and translated primary sources--mostly Révolutions du XIXe siècle, but other stuff too. I mod three comms, one of which is still active, I've made costumes, I've bought obscure French film adaptations on ebay.fr. I've seen the show 60+ times, I've tracked down cast lists and label information for every cast recording in existence, I've collected hundreds of bootlegs and recorded dozens more. I've found period maps of Paris and shared in Hugo's obsession for the places he describes in his book, and I've gone to France and visited them myself and barely anybody cared when I posted the pictures. Right now I'm translating the lyrics of the PRC back into English for one of two active forums still in existence, and the person who originally requested them hasn't even bothered to reply. I just... why? The people on this particular forum pay more attention to me when I snark reflexively at n00bs than when I spend an hour with Google and a French/English dictionary trying to find a phrase that expresses both the meaning and the slanginess of the Thénardiers' lyrics.

And now I feel guilty for being resentful about this, because it looks awfully close to a "look what I've done for you, you ungrateful hags!" snit. But it's not that, not entirely; I do all this because I love it, because it interests me. It's just that I wish I weren't the only one. I'd love more conversation and dialogue about all this, but failing that it would be nice to have some acknowledgement. I realize that not everyone has the means or the volition to go out to Montfermeil or translate Amis du Peuple pamphlets, but when nobody even looks at that and goes "wow, that's cool," I feel like a crazy lady who's wasting her time on things that nobody else gives a shit about.

At least Simon likes me. He sat on my shoulder all evening. :D (He's one heavy bird...) But he's going back to his mommy at the end of the week, and then my life will go back to being an endless abyss of woe, misery, and doom.

I think I'll go translate "At the End of the Day" now.

God DAMMIT Les Mis fandom, why are you dead? Why do you have practically no smut? Why do you have absolutely no recent smut? You have ten attractive and ambiguously homoerotic young Frenchmen with a Cause; why is nobody writing slash anymore?!

Hell with that, you have a fifteen hundred page canon loaded with minor characters, and you don't even have any gen fic above ff.net quality anymore. This is wrong.

Bitch bitch, whine whine. No, I haven't written anything in over half a year. Not that it matters; reading your own porn is only one step above jerking off.

Feh.

I swear around here there are two weeks in late April/early May and two weeks in October where everyone gets to say, "Oh look, the weather is so beautiful!" and then the rest of the year it's either in the 90s with 86% humidity or in the 30s with sleet and freezing rain.

...at least in the winter, if you're cold, you can move around and/or put on more clothing. Heat? You're screwed. Not to mention city doesn't fucking smell like sewer gas in the winter. I could be biased, though, because cold just makes me shiver whereas heat makes me break out in hives.

(Yes, yes, I know, quit whining and move to Seattle/London/somewhere else cool and rainy. I'm working on it.)

I am... trying to work on a translation of that article from the Société des Amis du Peuple that I put up last week. It's mostly easy going, but there are one or two spots... "Tel était le texte de toutes les conversations; elles ne trouvaient tant d’approbation, queparce que chacun était pour son interlocuteur la preuve vivante de la vérité des accusations." Problem spot is in italics; the rest I have a firm enough grip on. If anyone with better French than mine wants to have mercy on me, I'd be much obliged. XD (Watch it be either blindingly obvious, or a typo I took at face value. Headdesk.)

Speaking of which, I might actually annotate this one. Usually any footnotes lying around my translations are from the original author; this one has no footnotes in the original, but it also has references to a number of current events that I'd never heard of and had to look up on wiki.fr. So unless y'all are conversant enough with carlism and the sack of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois that you don't need any help, looks like this one will have some explanation.

( Random tl;dr blatherings about language learning and summer plans under the cut )

There are forty-two cages' worth of small animals at the pet store I work at. Wendesdays are cage cleaning days. Chris, Tony, and I were supposed to split the cleaning between us as equally as we could today. Somehow, Tony ended up doing zero, Chris ended up doing five, and I ended up doing...

...well, do the math.

Whatever may-or-may-not-be-faked injury kept Tony from pulling his weight today had fucking better have healed by next week, because there is no way on God's green earth I am so much as touching any cages next Wednesday.

Edit: Is this just "Make letitallgo's Blood Pressure Rise" week or something? At least two people have whored clips from my 4/29 audio around YouTube in the past few days, without so much as a by-your-leave. sdkjkl;jdsf

Laundry: Oh look, power went out when the clothes were still damp in the dryer! Looks like you have ironing to do now too!
letitallgo: ...oh god, laundry, plz to go fuck yourself.
Laundry: You can't trick me into doing myself that easily, you know.

Uterus: RAR CRAMPS
Aleve: *doesn't work*
Uterus: RAR CRAMPS
Aleve: I eat your stomach!
letitallgo: You do it all because you're evil, don't you?
Uterus: AND I DO IT ALL FOR FREEEE! *tangoes*

Presentations of the final Italian project start tomorrow, and I haven't even begun mine.

It's been a very, very long time since I put off an assignment because I felt like I couldn't do it instead of out of sheer laziness--in fact, I don't know that I've ever done that before. I've had some pretty whackjob incompetent teachers in my time, but I was always bright enough to fill in the gaps of their teaching on my own, or bullshit the assignment, or pull through somehow on the skin of my teeth. But my Italian teacher has this deadly combination of effectively not teaching us anything, then expecting us to know more than we would've been able to pick up even under a good teacher. She's not mean, or strict; it's not about high expectations; she's simply a native speaker trying and failing to explain her language to us, who doesn't understand that we don't pick it up immediately.

Our final project is a ten-minute oral presentation on some aspect of Italian culture--to be presented in Italian. How does she expect us to do this? We don't have the specialized vocabulary needed to deal with whatever cultural thing we pick. She's barely taught us anything. In fact, she's never had us speak any Italian aloud besides parroting back the phrases and fill-in-the-blank sentences in the book. Furthermore, this is the sixth or seventh different language I've studied, and in no other class were we expected to do compositions of more than a few sentences--let alone a ten-minute presentation without notes--until the intermediate level.

I do have it easier than most, though. My topic is opera, with specific focus on bel canto, and we're allowed to bring in audio/visual aids--which means that I can shave it down to a three-to-five-minute presentation and let Bellini do the rest of the work. But that's still a lot of time to fill up. I foresee a lot of time spent with it.wikipedia.org, Babelfish, and an online dictionary this evening.

How do I deal with this? A teacher requiring us to do something insane that she hasn't taught or equipped us to do?

(While I'm on a screed against my Italian teacher, I'd like to note that it's the end of the semester and there are fewer than a dozen people who still show up regularly. It's high time she remembered that my name isn't Elizabeth.)

Dear rain,

Stop making the flowers grow.

Sneezily,
Marianne

P.S. Oh, and happy birthday, you.

The short version: Academically, I am screwed.

The long version: ( Is damnably complicated )

*wibbles* So there's this essay that's been the bane of my existence, right? On Freud and Nietzsche. The problem with Freud and Nietzsche is that I have very little to say about them (besides possibly "utterly fucking insane"), and have been having enormous trouble pulling enough bullshit for a five-page paper out my ass. I finally have an idea for the paper and could probably smack that bitch down in two hours flat...

...but I have just been bitten by the most tempting plotbunny evar.

I must write the paper first. I must write the paper first. I must write the paper first. I must write the paper first. I must write the paper first. I must write the paper first.

Hell, I will write the paper first, because I don't care if the writing sucks on the paper, but I want to be nicely warmed up for the fic.