Ramblings of a total Zack girl

This is a stressful Christmas--business worries, and counseling crap, and the only persons I have so far not wanted to kill are my father (which, hah, what? and also: I have never had an entire Christmas without wanting to kill him, and I will be SHOCKED if this is the year we make it) and my baby sister. One brother has been deliberately annoying the world, the other one is deliberately digging at my mother, my mother is being overbearing and guiltrippy about Christmas cheer, and my older sister is being herself in the most aggressive and aggravating possible manner. (Her, especially. WE KNOCK BEFORE WE COME IN. WE DO NOT START CONVERSATIONS WITH PEOPLE WHO ARE ON THE PHONE. WE LISTEN WHEN OTHER PEOPLE SPEAK. OUR PROBLEMS ARE NOT THE ONLY IMPORTANT PROBLEMS IN THE WORLD. Oh, no, wait. That's CIVILIZED people who are NOT going to wake up Christmas morning with knives in their throats.)


That's it, I am totally breaking out the Star Shaped a day early.



But you know what? Maybe the RL parts kind of suck, but my online life today has been filled with silly discussions and people offering to help me and people being nice about my long silly fic, and, just.

YOU make it worth getting up in the morning, and I don't care that the rest of the world labels that lame. YOU are what I am most grateful for this Christmas, and I hope that your holidays are as wonderful as you deserve, because you are the saving of mine.

You know what I wish? I wish parents would stop bringing melon in for their kids' snack.

*itches vigorously*

I WORE GLOVES. I WASHED THEIR HANDS. ELKJLSJELFKJSzGHHHHHHHMELONS.

This weekend I was a good big sister and watched a movie with my eleven-yo baby sister; she got to pick.

She chose that Perfect Man movie--with Hilary Duff? (She's eleven. Try not to judge too harshly.)

It's actually not a terrible movie. Cheesy? Yes. Condescending? Yes. But not terrible.

However?

The narration from Duff's character is presented as though she's blogging about it. And apparently the scriptwriters have never actually read a blog, particularly one written by a teenage girl.

I was a teenage girl with a blog. I have teenagers on my flist. They don't write like that. Nobody I know, including the off-LJ blogs I get linked to that are professional or otherwise more-public-than-personal, reads like that. In style it's probably closest to Samantha Ferris's blog, but it's kind of like mayonnaise being closer to ketchup than peanut butter, and seriously...the public broadcasting blog of a thirty-something actress. C'mon, y'all. I do better research than that for fic. Let alone a movie millions of dollars are being spent on. They could have afforded to pay the writers to surf MySpace for a couple of days.

There are other little things...does anybody actually address people by their screennames in e-mail when you know the names they go by? Would you call me "BrooklynBoy" if you knew I was Ben, really? "Dear Brooklyn Boy, today blahblahblah..."?

I didn't think so. (ETA: To clarify: they met in real life, and were referring to each other by their actual names; then changed to calling each other by screenname when they were separated and only communicating online. Moreover, these were the adults, not people growing up in online culture.)

And what gets me most is the fact that they keep presenting the character as isolated, lonely, by the way her family keeps moving around. Here's a hint, movie writers? If she's got a personal blog? She's part of a community. She moved to New York...I guarantee at least one person she knows online lives within a four-hour ride. I guarantee if she feels safe blogging about her intimate personal issues, she has people she considers friends reading this thing...people she doesn't lose when she moves, people she counts on and communicates with, people who keep her from feeling as though she's all alone in a cold, cruel world. The point of the internet, particularly of blogging, particularly of blogging about the very very personal details of your life, particularly when you're just another of a thousand other ordinary citizens? Connecting to people.

So next time? Find a different narration device. Or do some goddamn research.

OMG.

WHY HAS MY MUSE SWITCHED TO PRESENT TENSE HALFWAY THROUGH THIS FIC?

Also, WHY has it taken me approximately a thousand words to notice this? *cries*

I am NOT ALLOWED to write fic until my homework is done. NOT ALLOWED.

Not crack!Spn. Not crack!crossovers.


Not even my Yuletide.


I HAVE TO WRITE PAPERS ON TEACHING CHILDREN, DAMMIT.


...er.

I know what I want to write.

I know I can write it.

I know it's just waiting to come out.

All I can focus on is applesauce and toast. I told myself I couldn't go eat until I finished at least two scenes.

...I do this every time I have a deadline. Why. WHY. WHYYYY do I sign up for these things?

Oh. Right. Cause then I'd NEVER WRITE.



...toast.

...and applesauce.

Screw it.

I have to go to bed now.

Because I'm opening tomorrow. Read: showing up two hours earlier than I've signed up to.

HOW did this happen?

OMG they have to find us a new director. They have to. I am not going to put up with this shit for long. This is JUST LIKE THE DIRECTOR WHO JUST GOT FIRED, except with her about a month ago I finally figured out her levers and how to push 'em. So, what, three weeks later, she gets fired, and her CLONE takes her place, except I don't know how to manage her clone and her clone knows nothing about my kids or me or my colleagues.

OMG.

WHAT DID I DO TO THE GODDESS OF PRESCHOOL TEACHERS to make her HATE ME THIS MUCH??

ARRRGH.

I never realised how spoiled I am with my county's library system.

I came into the city for their books today--the numbers I need to teach are putting me over the limit at the county--and their system is CRAP. I think I'm going to have to make the city where I do my personal librarying and the county my teaching, because wading through TWELVE PAGES of "cooking in the sunshine" to find ONE BOOK about sun is RIDICULOUS.

Well, that was...disgusting.

( Cut for ranting, religious discussion, and marriage: pros and cons )