While I tweet myself through my grieving process, here are three (ish) fanfic classics that

a) Prominently feature Ianto being awesome.
b) Prominently feature Ianto and Jack getting a happy (ish) ending.
c) Have multiple parts or are novella-length.
d) Have well-crafted plots on the epic scale.
e) Left a deep impression on me.

1. The Doctor & Mr Jones by copperbadge. Ianto is a Time Lord! This fic is basically my personal canon.

2. Unfixed Wishes by christine_twfan. Ianto activates an alien artifact that allows him to be there for Jack when Jack needs him most, even beyond his own lifetime. This fic has a sequel/companion, Secret Admirer.

3. Get Loved, Make More, Try To Stay Alive by dira.* In which Ianto gets pregnant and time is very wibbly-wobbly indeed.


*Who, by the way, wrote one of my favorite Torchwood reaction posts here. Way to see the positive side!

Subject title in dedication to my two four-times-over loves right now, the Glee pilot and Star Trek. I've tried to write posts about them, but they've all come out garbled. I've seen them both four times in the space of a month! I love them lots! I follow twitters about them! I've allowed my brain to be infected by the virus known as ontd_startrek! Beyond that, my ability to express myself about them falls into incoherency and violent affection!

I don't know why I failed to post for so long, when I had plenty of stuff to talk about. Mostly I think it's because I feel guilty that I haven't been reading my flist. I love you all, so I feel bad when I don't check up on you regularly. :(

I sort of have a job lined up, if the paperwork ever goes through. I spent Memorial Day weekend in Atlantic City with saezutte and my future suitemates and we had lots of fun and one very heated game of Monopoly which I lost miserably. I am a sore loser, but also I was menstrual. It was a recipe for disaster.

I also saw Up. Such a cute, lovely movie. The love for Pixar in my household runs deep and true, so I'm going to see it again with the parents tomorrow and watch my mother freak out with love and my father get teary eyed, because I predict that is what they will do. I predict I will be the embarrassed, but entertained one in the middle.

What has finally driven me to fire up to ol' "Post an Entry" page is that I finished The Demon's Lexicon about 20 minutes ago and I wanted to tell any skeptics on my flist to give it a shot, because it is very, very good.

( Short review, no spoilers. )

On to The Demon's Covenant! I am pleased to say I look forward to it with high hopes and no reservations!

*Though she didn't use it in quite the same context, I did steal this joke subject from sparkly_stuff, who, incidentally, did a hilarious "I'm on a Boat" rewrite for Star Trek over here.

Horrible thought of the day:

Torchwood vs Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Does this exist? Why do I want this to exist? I want this to exist so badly.

I have no idea what to do with my life.

I mean, I do not know what to do in the next 10 minutes. I do not know what I want to do for my job over the summer. For my classes next semester. For my study abroad possibilities the semester after that. For my thesis. For my career.

I declared my major, and I've been having non-stop anxiety attacks about it ever since. I love English, but it is the helpless, impotent love of someone who doesn't believe it will ever amount to anything. My mother majored in English and got absolutely no where with it--never found a job she loved, or even liked, I think--even though she is a capable and quick-witted employee. I am neither of those things. I couldn't even hold down a summer job mixing smoothies, for fuck's sake. I'm practically unemployable as it is, why am I adding to the disaster that is my future resume?

And sometimes I hate my major, very specifically, because despite the fact that Barnard and Columbia are supposedly all buddy-buddy now, my major's department flouts all hints of bureaucratic progress in favor of being hugely backwards bitches and insisting I have to take 6 of my required 10 major-fulfilling courses on the Barnard side of the street, even though 90% of the 1800s-related courses are taught at Columbia. I'm going to try to kill two birds with one resentful stone on this issue and take enough courses to fill my entire Junior Colloquium requirement in one semester (this involves taking extra substitute courses, thus increasing my Barnard course count), leaving me with a semester to study abroad, worry-free (in an academic sense, at least).

I want to go to the UK so badly it has become a palpable ache in my chest. I have to study abroad there or else I will never, ever forgive myself. The question is where. There are about 30 options for me to choose from in England and Scotland, and none of them jump out at me in any particular way. I like the idea of Edinburgh, but it seems sort of weird to go there for the spring semester when it will be dark and freezing until probably a week before I leave.

I find it sort of ironic that my deepest fantasies right now involve fleeing NYC, the setting of all my previous deepest fantasies. I still love the idea of New York, and really, I love Barnard and Columbia most of the time. It's just that somewhere in the merger of the two is this trap of having no desire to crawl out of bed after a week of classes and taking flak from all sides for not taking advantage of the city more.

That is not to say that I have much of a desire to crawl out of bed during the week either. Burnout isn't great, guys. I really need to go to sleep, but all of this keeps swirling around in my head until I end up running to my delicious network to find something to quiet my thoughts for a few minutes at a time.

Looking over this post, I think it might be mostly incoherent. Time to pass out from exhaustion. I'm probably going to regret posting this later, but it's probably better to have it all out and set down somewhere than just mulling around in my head. Good night/morning to all.

Prologue: I'm not screening spoilers that are available from the trailers, so read at your own risk, I guess.

Watched Planet of the Dead an it was awwwwweeeesome! I mean, some of it was stupid (seer woman, gtfo of my episode, as well as the few random, unnecessary deaths), but most of it was great. Randomly hilarious one-off characters, sexy sexy banter, high-class thievery, the Doctor being bossed around, the Doctor bossing other people around, ( some more things that are more spoiler-y )

All in all, this was a romp of an episode, and while it wasn't up to Doctor Who's true standards of brilliance, it was GREAT HEAPS OF FUN, AND I ENJOYED MYSELF IMMENSELY.

Also, now that I've gotten back into the Doctor Who spirit, I finally looked up casting spoilers and OH MY FUCKING GOD, the companion for the Christmas specials is EFFING ( BEEEEEP SPOILERS )!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MY LIFE = COMPLETE. I CAN'T BELIEVE I HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL CHRISTMAS FOR THIS. WHEREFORE MUST I PINE FOR SO LONG A DURATION?

Because I really want to see a Merlin fanvid set to Amy MacDonald's "A Wish For Something More." It would be Gwen's POV, and all about her crush on Merlin when she can see he is too busy crushing on Arthur to notice her. For serious, every line of this song has a corresponding Merlin scene in my head. It is so clear that I actually opened up Windows Movie Maker to attempt the impossible, but it wouldn't show my video or even import the song, so I took that as a sign that I should accept that my place in the universe does not lie in the video editing arena. Doesn't stop me pining though!

Alternatively, I could make a mix. However, I don't actually care enough about Gwen to make one that was just about her, so it would have to be everybody/Merlin and that would go the way of crack too fast for this song to really fit in it. I despair! See icon.

As a bonus for reading this strange and pretty much pointless post, here's the song in question.

Most recent Ouran scanlation (69) features Tamaki on a SEGWAY.

A FUCKING SEGWAY.

I AM NOT SHITTING YOU. HE SWEEPS ONTO CAMPUS RIDING IT WITH A SMILE THAT SPEAKS VOLUMES ON THE DEPTHS OF HIS OBLIVIOUSNESS AND RIDICULOUSNESS.

I don't think I have ever loved him more.

ETA: This chapter was seriously, seriously amazing. I'm with Kyouya--absolutely bursting with mad giggling over the return of the comedic insanity.

RL rant in the next few paragraphs, FList. Run while you can.

So, I found out last Tuesday that my oldest friend's mother had died, and instead of feeling grieved in any measurable, healthy way, I promptly stopped sleeping. This went on in a pretty intense and stubborn manner until the funeral this Monday, which I skipped classes for, during which I had a good cry and after which I hugged my parents and came back to school and slept for eight deep hours, and then had one blissful day of relative normalcy before Wednesday, when my body decided to expel all of its repressed confusion and grief in the form of a violent stomach virus, and then, after 24 hours of sickness and delirium (when I should have been in class, making up what I missed on Monday), I woke up feeling mostly better except that I was suddenly, once again, apparently unable to sleep.

I hate this. I hate this so much. I hate that death happens to good people, to people I love, and that my body is such a psychosomatic bitchface, and that I can't help but selfishly despair over the fact that this all happened a week before midterm season, and how I am in no way prepared to deal with all this except to loose my directionless fear and rage into the wilds of the Intranets in the early morning when I should be dead to the world and am instead far, far too alive to it.

MY LIFE IS A MESS.

Thing 1: I got to college and on my second day of classes my brand new laptop died. I suppose this was partially my fault. I fell asleep with it on my lap, awoke to it in a pile of dirty clothes beside my bed, and then found later that day that the laptop's battery socket was so loose it couldn't recognize my adapter when I plugged it in. But this is not what I told the lovely people at HP when I sent it in, so they had me send it to them, where they will fix it for free (because I am still under warranty, because I'd only had the laptop for two weeks).

So, what this amounts to is me having an extended nervous breakdown as I keep reaching for a laptop that is not there, and needing to do work and not having a laptop to do it on, and etc etc etc. loweryourwand has been very gracious and has let me use her laptop, but I don't like the fact that I'm basically on it all the time, yet it is hers and she has regular need of it.

Thing 2: I have this insane schedule that I think I'm going to have to prune even though, by God, I don't want to, because all of my classes are awesome (except Astronomy, which sucks, but it is a requirement, so I am stuck with it regardless of my personal opinions). Probably what will go is the complit class (Big Brother: The Poetics of Power). Already gone is Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Greece. What will be left is:

1) Enchanted Imagination, which is an English seminar that focuses on the continuity of Romantic/Victorian fantasy into our modern equivalent (hahaha, watch me die happy).
2) Astronomy, which I hate, and its lab, which will suck even worse, hoorah! I will valiantly struggle through.
3) Victorian Poetry with the professor who taught Romantic Poetry last semester, and who I have a GIGANTIC ACADEMIC CRUSH on. Talk Tennyson to me, baby!
4) Literary Criticism, which is a requirement for English majors, and is taught by my current adviser, who is a dear, although he is currently frustrating me rather a lot with his fluid office hours which make it impossible for me to talk about my current schedule.

The issue comes from having so many English classes which emphasize survey and participation. Basically, all of my classes want me to read a ton and also write about it or present on it. And I am slow and lazy and do not know how to deal with the workload I'm looking at with Big Brother still on my plate. HOWEVER, I really feel like I'm limiting myself overmuch by focusing so closely on English, and on a specific kind of English at that.

And to complicate my feelings, I can't tell how much of this academic angst is being unnecessarily inflamed by my general panic over my laptop and if things will seem any more manageable when I am not a nervous wreck 24/7. This is why I'd really like to talk to my adviser, and why I am so very frustrated that he cannot seem to keep his hours straight. I am in desperate need of advising! >:(

Thing 3: In other news, I'm going to NYCC and I am very excited! I am also sort of panicking that it's going to take a whole weekend that I will need for the crazy amount of work that I'm doing, but I am trying to focus on the positive, which is Torchwood previews and free stuff.

I was just talking about the slash dragon and 1) how I still like him even after his horrible betrayal, 2) the tenor of his speeches in that last couple of episodes when he was like "us mythical beings got to stick together" or whatever, and 3) how Merlin's eyes flash golden like the dragon's eyes when he uses magic. Suddenly, the following exchange popped into my head:

Merlin: You know nothing of my father!
Dragon: Merlin, I am your father!
Merlin: NOOOOOOO.

WTF, self. WTF.