the deep moans round with many voices

1. I am a creature of serial enthusiasms (and/or obsessions). I always have been. My most recent one is Inception, and following tangentially from that, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whose filmography I am slowly piecing my way through. Thus far, I have watched Brick (which is perhaps best described as a high-school AU of the entire film noir genre -- and also awesome, so don't let the description put you off), and, as of last night, Mysterious Skin.

Which broke me. Completely and utterly. I thought I was doing fairly well at... remembering that it was a story, maybe? Keeping a bit of emotional breathing space? And then the last scene and Neil McCormick's final voiceover monologue just ripped away that illusion and I could not stop crying.

Mysterious Skin is a beautifully written, directed, and acted film. It is deeply empathetic toward its characters. It is as restrained and tasteful as I think it is possible to be, given the subject matter.

But, you see, it's the story of ( cut for triggers ) and how the repercussions of that play out in their lives over the next ten years... and it also includes ( cut for triggers ) later on.

There is no way on earth for it not to be upsetting.

I think I am going to watch 10 Things I Hate About You next. I need something cheerful and relatively mindless to balance me out.

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2. Today was the last day of regular RE classes untill fall. As such, we had no lesson plan and were provided with apple juice and popcorn in order to hold a class party. Also, when I was doing the teacher scheduling last fall, I wrote all four of us in for today, since I figured it would be nice to get everyone together at the end of the year.

Since a party is a somewhat dangerously unstructured way of filling an hour, we opened in the usual fashion -- chalice lighting, pass the squeeze, joys & sorrows, gems of goodness, chalice extinguishing -- and then handed out food and drink. We then spent five to ten minutes prompting the kids to reminisce about stuff we've done this year, after which I stepped up to tell a story.

My go-to book in these situations is (and probably always will be) Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, because they are a joy to read aloud and also reliably entertaining for kids ranging in age from five to ten. Today I read "The Beginning of Armadillos," with occasional pauses for interactivity and also a brief interruption when the DRE came by to hand out decorative buttons to the teachers. (Which was a nice thought, but rather awkward timing.)

All in all, it has been a good year. But next year I'd like to get back to teaching first grade instead of second or third.

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3. Having cut my hair, it occurred to me that I have always harbored a vague urge to dye it some ridiculous color, just for the hell of it. And since I figure that that sort of temporary insanity is best done before one turns thirty (if you are dyeing your hair on a regular basis, age limits of course cease to apply, but I am classing this impulse as "youthful folly" and working from there), I had better hurry and get it done before next February. (Also, since my hair is now very, very short, the dyed bits will grow out in a couple months so I will not be saddled with the color very long should I end up hating the results.)

MS has offered to look into hair dye options for me. \o/

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ETA: WARNING for discussion of potentially triggery subjects in the comments on the LJ version of this post.

I was reading a post on asexual_fandom about writing asexuals in sexual situations and whether this was too prevalent in fandom (or not prevalent enough?) and in any case, was it often badly handled and so on and so forth, which had the interesting effect of making me go and write several hundred words of "The Body Politic," my Astrin-Ymris-is-asexual Riddle-Master fic. Said words are mostly a very long riddle about a woman who gets raped and is terrified her husband will blame her, rather than anything actually related to asexuality or, you know, the damn plot, but whatever. I needed to get the riddle out of the way at some point.

I think it is helpful to be slightly tipsy when writing McKillip-style riddles. At least, it's helpful for me. I don't think in riddles naturally, so I need to be able to bend my mind into someone else's thought patterns, and sleep deprivation or alcohol are the cheap and easy ways to do that. *wry*

...

I do have an actual plot for that story now. I'd always known where it was heading -- well, okay, once I'd decided which outline sketch to use, I knew where it was heading -- but I had only the vaguest idea how to get there. Now I have the middle to go with the beginning and the end.

...

In other news, Diana Wynne Jones did indeed stick the landing on the Dalemark Quartet. I may write a more detailed (and spoiler-filled) post about that later. I have read all the Yuletide Dalemark fic there is, and would really like to know if any more exists, because that series has so many wonderful characters and countless potential stories.

Also, and unrelatedly, I watched Inception a couple weeks ago and have been having far too much fun reading through all the fic I can get my hands on. I love stories about competent people being awesome. :-)