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Hi there, lovely creator, and thank you for participating in the Candy Hearts Exchange!
Beloved Tropes:
Competence Kink, Mistaken for Being in a Relationship, Everyone Knows But Them, Undercover As A Couple, Canon Divergence, Temporary Amnesia, Presumed Dead, Unlikely Allies, Meeting the Family, Ensemble Fics, any Harlequin trope
Do Not Wants:
I've been around the block with fandom and perfectly fine with most content, but please avoid excessive whump with no happy ending. (whump with happy ending is fine!)
On the one hand, I *kind* of get young fandom's desire for their ship to be canon. Fandom interacting with canon is a mortifying concept to me, but I'm not the one doing it, so it's not my business to dictate. The pressure to do it "for the representation" gets a little murky for me personally, but I'm a pre-Oberfell, pre-DADT Repeal, etc queer.
On the other hand, look at when straight couples finally get together after seasons of Will They, Won't They. They become so boring. The ship teasing is a lot more fun, creative, and provides much more fic/meta fodder than post canon-confirmation. And do I want my ship to get the straight couple treatment? Not really. Fandom will always do it better than canon. Alex Avila does a great job of discussing this in his latest video essay, Queerbaiting Celebrities: An OverAnalysis, which I've linked above, as does the excellent verilybitchie in Good LGBT Representation is Boring (and why that's a problem)
It will be a difficult road full of learning opportunities. Part of the reason my (soon to be!) old job drove me to severe and prolongued depression and anxiety was the underutilisation of my skillset, the lack of learning opportunities, and the managerial disinterest in career growth. That certainly won't be the case now! Instead of boredom, the new pain point will be high levels of stress, but I can manage that. I can thrive on that, whereas boredom carries the seeds of its own stagnation, and I definitely have a border collie personality that would sooner chew off her own leg to occupy herself, than to sit idle. "Better to die raving mad in London than evaporate in Richmond," I guess. (see "What's Worse For Your Career: Boredom or Stress").
In the meantime, thank you for your support and warm wishes during the course of my struggle with climbing (and still climbing!) out of the creativity and crisis chasm. Now that I've, at least temporarily, settled up my stock with the things I need, maybe I'll rediscover the things that I want; I have a ton of fic notes that I scribbled down in notebooks at work, back when I had ideas to scribble down, and I'll be using my brief downtime between jobs to type up these notes. Here's to hoping it will help getting creative juices flowing again! Or maybe I'll sniff out a nearly-finished fic and try pushing it out the door. Let's see what happens!
In the meantime, always feel free to message me at my LJ or tumblr.
Love you!
Fumu
A running list of interesting events and people that I meet throughout the year, similar to my 2015 People & Events.
People - Lectures, panels, etc.
Writers
Artists
STEM
Law/Social/Political
Events - Concerts, panels, etc.
Music
Radio/Podcast
Art
Black Mountain College - Institute of Contemporary Art
STEM
MIT Mystery Hunt
Theatre
Filter Theatre's Twelfth Night - Emerson College's The Paramount
Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced - Huntington Theatre Company - BU Theatre
Musical Theatre
Film
Hateful 8 in 70mm[1]
Footnotes
[1] I am not sure I was a big fan of the film, but the chance to see it in 70mm was certainly rare and interesting!
However, I do think I would have enjoyed this production more if the audience had not been so white. I was one of maaybe 8-10 non-white people in the audience. There are beats in the play that only make sense if you're connected to a sense of PoC identity, as well as some jokes. The room felt very tepid, and no one clapped during the scene transitions, which was veery awkward. The people behind me were audibly reacting to things on stage, which is absolutely the kind of feedback you want to be hearing onstage as an actor, and they were told to be quiet.
Also, there was one part of the play where someone asks if Delhi is in Punjab, and I was the only one that laughed. I hope we all came away from this play with a better sense of the complexity of immigrant identity in America and a very valuable geography lesson.
While doing a literature/history crossword puzzle for the Dreamtime level:
"Caeser doesn't fit. Take out Caeser."
"I think people have already taken out Caeser."
*laughter*
"...too soon?"
*more laughter*
All of us were pretty punchy on Sunday with no sleep, but thank goodness for that couch outside the closed up Christian Student studies center. Was it in a creepy dim hallway? Yes. But that meant it was abandoned, dark, and out of the way, perfect for grabbing a quick nap. That was the most satisfying 40 minutes of my life, even more satisfying then when the hunt finally closed, and I went home to sleep in my own bed. However, this morning we finally got the meta puzzle that had been bugging us through the end of the hunt, so I think we got some closure, however late. We'll be meeting throughout the year to work on the remaining puzzles, which should be lots of fun. In every positive way, this was one of the longest weekends in recent memory, and I had a blast.
Boston was kind of infamous in the country last winter for getting 108.6" (275.8 cm) of snow, which isn't a lot, compared to some places, but we have small narrow streets and cramped traffic patterns that are horrible to navigate on a good day, and we kept getting more and more snow to the point where we started running out of space to put it. I used to dump the snow in the yard, but then it started getting above my head and difficult to pile onto, so when I wasn't shovelling, I was levelling drifts so I had more room. I had wicked arms by the spring, let me tell you.
This is from February, so a decent-ish amount of snow. I think this is what my street looked like.
Literally this is what the snowpile next to my driveway looked like. (I wish I had a dog though)
As you can see, two way streets became 1 way streets so we came up with an unspoken system to designate the direction of particular routes.
Anyway, I got worried about my meat intake, especially with being inside more than I was used to, so I found this terrific chili recipe, which lasted me for 2 weeks, useful because I didn't want to hike the snow drifts to the grocery store. 2 weeks, lunch and dinner every day - this chili. Come inside from shovelling for an hour each afternoon - this chili. Back from work after being stuck on the train for 2 hours - this chili. Don't know what to eat, getting chilblains from the cold - this fucking chili. When the cornbread ran out, I would make a new loaf, but otherwise, I was good. Put some cheddar cheese on top, stellar.
And after all that, I wasn't actually sick of it! Actually, I have many fond memories of the taste! I'm definitely making it again this winter, but hopefully with less snow.
(Special shout out to the Sons of Liberty fandom, which had its share of stir-crazy New Englanders who watched the History Channel mini series for the hell of it, because what else were we gonna do? And then immediately took to tumblr with feelings. You guys helped me survive haunting my own house like a ghost on the days when I worked from home. Much love.)
I used to keep a running record of cool stuff that happened during the year, people I met and events I attended, which is a nice way to look back and remember that I do, in fact, live in my favourite city in the country. I'll add more as I remember it.
People - Lectures, panels, etc.
Writers
Neil Gaiman - Boston Book Festival
Amanda Palmer - Boston Book Festival
Kelly Link - Boston Book Festival
Emily St. John Mandel - Boston Book Festival
Joyce Carol Oates - Harvard Book Store
Artists
Kate Beaton - Harvard Book Store
STEM
Neil De Grasse Tyson - Science in the Movies - Wilbur Theatre
Bill Nye - StarTalk - Citi Performing Arts Center
Everyone in this year's Ig Nobels (I was part of the stage crew), but especially Yoshiro Nakamatsu, aka Dr. NakaMats
Law/Social/Political
Mary Bonauto [1]
Jean Chatzky
Events - Concerts, panels, etc.
Music
Postmodern Jukebox - Wilbur Theatre
Joanna Newsom - Orpheum Theatre
Boston Pops - Nosferatu, a Symphony of Terror, with Berkleey School of Music - Symphony Hall [2]
A Shout Across Time - Celebrating Einstein - Cambridge Science Festival
The Harvard Christmas Revels (Wales) - Sanders Theatre
Radio/Podcast
Wait Wait Don't Tell Me - Wang Theatre
Post-Meridian Radio Players - Monster in the Mirror Halloween radio show [3]
Art
Strandbeests exhibition in the Boston garden
Open Studios - citywide art gallery open house events - Cambridge, Somerville, South End, Fort Point
Dutch masters exhibit (Rembrandt, Vermeer, others) - Museum of Fine Arts
Francisco Goya - Museum of Fine Arts
Arlene Shechet - Institute of Contemporary Art
Sonic Arboretum - Ian Schneller & Andrew Bird - Institute of Contemporary Art
Ragnar Kjartansson - "The Visitors" - Institute of Contemporary Art
Smithsonian's Hirshorn Modern Art Museum - Marvelous Objects: surrealism from Paris to New York [8]
STEM
Science By the Pint - open lectures by Harvard/MIT professors [4]
Harvard Engineering School's Science and Cooking lecture series
CafeSci lecture series- PBS Nova - [5]
Engadget [6]
Theatre
Shit-faced Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream - Davis Theatre
A Taste of Honey - Boston Centre for American Performance
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike - Huntington Theatre [7]
Picasso at the Lupin Agile - Arsenal For the Arts
My Fair Lady - Arsenal For the Arts
Is He Dead? - Vokes Theatre
The Slutcracker - Somerville Theatre
Musical Theatre
UFG winter Cabaret series - "Musical Theatre's Greatest Flops and Failures" - UFORGE Gallery
Beatiful: The Carole King Musical - Boston Opera House
Kinky Boots - Boston Opera House
Waitress - A.R.T, the American Repertory Theatre
Matilda - Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts
The Library of Congress [9]
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Today my choir had our winter concert, featuring Vivaldi's "Magnificat" and accompanied by an incredible strings section. I think having soloists and fewer strings helped un-muddle the sound, which is a common problem with layering a lot of voices and instruments. (listen to a movement from Vivaldi's "Magnificat", performed by the Budapest Madrigal Choir and Budapest Strings). Also with the addition of the strings, which I didn't know about till the dress rehearsal, "Whisper to Me" by David Hamilton became an unexpected favourite. (listen to a performance by Bella Cantoris - it's taken faster than we did, and the recording quality isn't terrific, but you get the idea.)
In the "Magnificat", the conductor made a choice to slow down the vocal section, let the strings move past us, and then slowly picked up tempo again to catch us up with the strings as both of us went to a presstissimo. (we called it the "choo choo" section, referencing a runaway choo choo train. very technical, haha.) One guy in the audience looked like we had blown his mind, which was very rewarding, especially for the conductor, I'm sure, who had to learn how to conduct 2 different tempos with both hands.
I looked out into the audience at some point and thought I saw the manager for the professional-ish choir that I used to be a part of for a really long time, and I almost cried onstage at thought of everything coming back full circle, a pillar of the organisation I came from, now here to listen to me sing again in the city where I've ended up. Well...unfortunately, my mild face-blindness strikes again, and it wasn't him, just someone with a passing resemblance. Whoops. Awkward, but a nice fairytale moment while it lasted.
Reception later was wonderful, drinks later with the choir and conductor at the John Harvard brewery, underneath the stained glass windows of local sports legends, because that's who we are, as a city. Some of the audience members were also at the brewery and came over to chat with us, which was nice.
The one on the far right is Bobby Orr:
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