many faded things

I'm hanging out with one of my roommates and her tiny adorable gay friend, watching flashes of lightning through her floor-to-ceiling windows (it may not have a closet but her room sure does have some perks), reading Star Trek meta and awesome Kirk/girl!McCoy genderswap (I thought I was all done with genderswap a couple years ago when I wrote this but apparently I am not), drinking wine and typing up a truly craptastic scene from merrin's and my Big Bang that I am going to rewrite probably before I even show it to Merrin, and wanting something, I'm not sure what. Something.

The summer before I started college, I was jittery all the time, a little nervous -- not about the idea of entering into college exactly, but at the idea of all the possibilities that were in front of me: that I was going somewhere completely different, that I could turn into a whole different person, that I might fall in love at any moment.

I feel that way a little now, too -- not jittery or nervous, really, but on the verge of something. It's a warm and humid night, after a day that felt like full-on summer, and humid summer nights make me think of kissing on porch swings or in hammocks, of the possibility of falling in love (though I never have), and summers have always been that in-between time for me (and everyone, I guess) -- the time before I left for college, for Germany, for New York; the time before I had to figure out my life. I'm taking the LSAT this fall, though I'm not sure that law school is what I want to do; I have no idea what it is that I want to do. I'm not sure that I'll ever be sure. I think a lot of life is about just picking something that seems like it could be what you want and going for it, seeing if it fits. In the summer it just feels like the possibilities are spread wide open for me, like I could fit into all these different versions of my life, in endless ways.

*

My roommate just held up a stuffed animal and twisted it around and said, "Flipping llama!", apropos of nothing. You know what, I think this is a sign -- the universe is telling me that the best choice for this evening is Get Drunker.

Happy St. Patrick's Day! I am very sorry to say that I was just walking out of work as it turned to March 17th, after having been at work since 9:30 in the morning! This is the resurgence of the project from November which caused me to not post for a month straight. Not that not posting for a month straight would be that unremarkable at this point, as infrequently as I'm around these days, but anyway, if I seem to be around even less than usual, it's because I'm at work until the end of time, or April 3rd. Whichever comes first!

(Also, 7+ months into this job I continue to not check LJ at work, because I am just that paranoid.)

Anyway, I missed rawkin_ur_sox's birthday a few days ago, which is just pitiful, since there was that one time not too long ago when I called her from Brooklyn and talked her ear off about Harrison Ford and she very kindly put up with my rambling. It occurs to me, as I type this, that that was Valentine's Day, and that was more than a month ago. Haha, I'm good with time. Obviously. ANYWAY, happy belated birthday; hope it was lovely!

My roommate texted me a couple of hours ago to say that she had a surprise for me when I got home -- turns out she'd gone out to dinner in the West Village with one of her friends from high school, and had brought all of us back cupcakes from Magnolia. So now my bed is littered with chocolate cupcake crumbs. DELICIOUS.

I've been telling myself that I wasn't going to post again until I had fic, but HAHA I thought I was going to have this Merlin fic done two weeks ago and it is still not done (in spite of being approximately eight words long), so never mind. Fic coming soon! Just hopefully not in the way that, like, the MTA says "Second Avenue subway, coming soon!!!" and then immediately afterwards it says, "In 2015!!!" and has, apparently, been saying it's coming soon since the '70s. My new goal: being speedier than the MTA. I set my standards REAL HIGH.

After a moderately unsuccessful night out in search of dancing, my roommates and I are watching our TiVoed copy of Catch Me If You Can. Apparently TNT was having a Leo fest earlier, because we'd also TiVoed Titanic and watched the end of that during dinner. That shit STILL makes me a little teary-eyed. LAMEBURGER, RIGHT HERE. I'll never let go, Jack!

One of my oldest friends and I once watched Titanic up to and including the car sex scene and then turned it off. It was awesome. In that part of our brains that is still eleven years old and in love with Jack Dawson, this made the movie perfect. Rose and Jack got maaaarried and everyone was happy, the end!

Speaking of movies from that time period, L.A. Confidential is fucking awesome. My copy has gone missing, and I am deeply saddened.

walkawayslowly has posted about this, but I have yet to: she and I are co-writing for spn_j2_bigbang! J2 college AU, yeah buddy! I freaking love college AUs, so I'm pretty psyched that Merrin and I are writing one. I'm especially in love with this particular story, largely because I think we are hysterical. Constant entertainment around this joint.

I have a question for you guys. The question is: tipping for food delivery.

The context of this is, I get a LOT of food delivered. I work for a company that will pay for my dinner if I work a certain number of hours, and since I work that certain number of hours pretty much every single night (and many more on top of that quite often) I get a lot of free food. Seamless Web is kind of my BFF when it comes to food, because it will tell me exactly who is delivering and makes the ordering online process very streamlined. I don't like having to register for every single individual website, and the alternative -- calling in my order -- makes me twitch.

I used to be not good at ALL on the phone with strangers. I've gotten significantly better since, like, middle school, but if given the choice between ordering something over the internet for a few cents more (Seamless Web does mark things up a little) or calling it in, I will pretty much always go for the internet.

Anyway, my office building won't allow food deliveries to come upstairs, so I have to come down to the lobby to meet delivery people whenever they are bringing me food. This usually works out just fine. They have my office number; they call it; I pick up and tell them I will be right there; I come downstairs; I get dinner. Awesome.

Except the other night my food was taking forEVER to come, and during the middle of this wait one of my coworkers called me to her office. I was gone for about ten minutes, so OF COURSE it was during those ten minutes that the guy arrived with my food. They called six times on two different numbers and left four voice mails. I did not listen to the voice mails (. . . still have not, actually.) but I did call one of the numbers back immediately, and spoke to the manager of the restaurant that was delivering to me. And pleaded for my food.

"Well," the guy said huffily. "I'll see if I can get someone to come back. Just -- treat them well."

Treat them well?! I thought about it for a second, and realized, . . . He means give them a big damned tip.

I'd ordered online with a credit card, and had added tip there! I didn't have cash on hand! So I was like, shit. I told another coworker about this whole situation, and he turned to me and said, very smugly, "I always have cash on hand. I'm a cash kind of guy."

Thanks, coworker. I felt like a HUGE BITCH. Anyway, got my food, everything was fine, I felt awful not tipping more, etc etc.

But here is my question. It is two-fold, so I will poll. I have not used a poll in a billion years.

[Poll #1327913]

Basically I want to know if I am destroying someone's dreams/livelihood/soul by not tipping in cash (or sexual favors). Is my coworker as much of a smug bastard as I think he is?? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes no matter what this poll tells me.

In other news, I'm headed to South Jersey this weekend to meet up with my family in our vacation spot. In January. Generally the Jersey Shore is a way better vacation spot during the summer, but I'm psyched anyway. Last weekend I bought Twilight because I cannot quite help myself, apparently (the movie was so bad-good-bad-awesome), and my roommate sidled up to me and said, "Sooo is there a chance that you'll be done with it before next weekend? Because next weekend I am going to Chicago and I really want to take it with me. Afterward we can mock it together!" So I know what I am doing on my bus ride, now. And I'm pretty sure at least one of my other roommates wants to read it, too, to join in the mockery. My roommates are awesome like that.

So it's official: flights from my hometown back to NYC? They don't exist.

Flying TO Virginia has worked out just fine for me on multiple occasions, but coming back, not so much. At Thanksgiving I had to take an overnight bus back, and on Sunday night my flight got canceled because the seal on one of the windows was messed up -- which, hey, this is a good reason to cancel a flight! I am in favor of not dying. Regardless, I have pretty much given up on expecting flights that say they will take me to New York to actually follow through on that claim.

It was okay, though: my roommate's family was driving up for New Year's anyway, so I caught a ride with them. I owe my roommate's family at least half of my soul at this point, especially because they just took me to dinner at L'Ecole, the restaurant of the French Culinary Institute. Amaaazing food. It's cooked by students, yes, but these students know more about food than I probably will in my entire LIFE, and for $42 for a five-course meal in New York City, yeah! Life is pretty great.

I'd say this was the third most hardcore food coma I have ever gone into in my life. The runner-up is when I ate at Fat Canary in Williamsburg as a college freshman (also amazing!), but the first place prize absolutely goes to the first time I ever had Indian food (not until I was a college sophomore! my life was so empty before this!) and I ate two enormous plates at an all-you-can-eat buffet and then lumbered back to my dorm and passed out for three hours.

This post may or may not have had a point to it.

Oh! It totally did! And it has nothing to do with food!

A few weeks back, walkawayslowly and I were tossing around fic ideas, as one does, and she said, "Hey, so I have this idea for a J2 fic. J2 twelve days of Christmas!"

And we talked about it, and it was totally adorable, and oh, guess what, it is happening!

The First Annual Padalecki-Ackles Christmastime Extravaganza by walkawayslowly
J2 | NC-17 (eventually) | thirteen parts of varying length (each part links to the next one)

Ever since Christmas, and continuing through January 6th, Merrin's been posting one a day -- so if you don't read works-in-progress, you don't have long to wait until they're all up. But you should definitely check it out once it's done, regardless, because it's adorable.

ALSO because I drew shit for it! Where by shit I mean "lovely perfect pieces of art genius." Obviously!

I was going to go to the Halloween parade in the East Village with one of the girls I work with, except then she canceled on me to go turkey hunting. TURKEY HUNTING. SERIOUSLY. She called me at six and was like, "Sooo my boyfriend and one of his friends are dragging me upstate to go hunt turkeys, I am not amused."

This definitely wins for most creative instance of plans being canceled ever!

It was actually good that she canceled on me, though, because I was stuck at work until nine-thirty anyway. And I would have hated to have canceled on her, since my excuse wouldn't have been nearly as awesome. I would have been like, "Sooo I can't go out yet because I am printing out shit."

This is my life, you guys. SUPER EXCITING.

I went out with a bunch of people from work the other night, including the one guy from my department who I think is cute. There's some UST there! It's good times! He's also balding at age twenty-seven! My department got us all drunk at a twice-yearly reception -- I think this is to keep the natives from becoming restless. It worked pretty well, really. I was all, "I am frequently here for MANY HOURS more than I would like to be!" and they said, "Here, have an alcohol!" and suddenly I was happy! They're freaking tricky.

Anyway! I have big plans for this weekend. All of my roommates are out of town, so I'm going to run up and down the hall naked at all hours. And also I'm going to go wander around the West Village, because I haven't been there (sober) since March 2006. It is time.

Also, I signed up for mini_nanowrimo! For . . . 100 words a day. Literally. That is all I can guarantee I have time for. I can write 100 words in about three minutes flat, and that is seriously ALL I HAVE TIME FOR during the week. walkawayslowly signed up for the same, and we were talking about it the other night, like, we can write 3,000 words in a DAY when we really get going. We can write MORE than that in a day, easily!

Damn this day job shit, you guys.

The other day at work Pandora got the song "Disintegration" by Jimmy Eat World stuck in my head hardcore. So I went on YouTube to see if I could find a video of it that I could listen to on repeat until it got out of my head.

There were a bunch of live versions of it, which, ehh. I tend to really latch onto a particular version of a song, and the version I'd latched onto was the album version, so I kept clicking on random ones until I found one that was the right version. And then I listened to it on repeat forever, and it was great.

EXCEPT it turned out, hilariously, that it was a One Tree Hill songvid. I had the screen minimized, okay, I was just listening to the music, I didn't wait to see what the video itself was going to look like once I knew the song was right, so I did not KNOW what I had on repeat until I paused it in the middle once and BAM, Chad Michael Murray's face.

See for yourselves, if you are wondering. Apparently "Disintegration" was actually featured on OTH, I guess? I have no idea. It's a good song, but whatever, there was accidental Chad in my life. It was kinda terrifying.

So I've had this vision of boots and New York City for a really long time. Like, YEARS. But boots are basically the worst possible thing for me to shop for, because I am really short and I have kind of stupidly muscular calves, so boot shopping tends to end in tragedy.

Whatever, the other night I broke down and finally bought a pair of boots online. And yesterday I found out that I got a bonus from my summer job, so I was like, SWEET, my bonus more than covered my boots! My boots were free!

As I was thinking this whole thing through, I was walking out of work, and I walked RIGHT past a homeless guy who was picking his dinner out of the garbage. And I felt like a truly horrible human being.

In other news, I found out earlier that one of my superiors lives in my building. How weird. I could run into him doing his LAUNDRY.

I also somehow just discovered the joy that is listening to Pandora at work. Awesome music that I HAVEN'T listened to nine thousand billion times on iTunes! I'm not sure that it's different than Last.fm or anything else along those lines, but I couldn't remember my Last.fm password the other day or, in fact, what Last.fm was called, and my roommate had just been talking about Pandora the night before. I like Pandora! But it's also very tricky. It has you type in an artist you like and then it brings you more along those lines, or so it claims. Except after a while I realized I'd been listening to country for quite some time, and that was totally not where I started. Like I said, tricky.

Aside from the fact that "Paper Planes" has been stuck in my head all day, that subject line is super, super accurate. My roommate and I have been talking about Europe a ton lately, and a big part of what I miss about Europe is riding on trains. Planes are good for getting places quickly and all, but I really freaking love trains -- it feels like hitting the pause button on life for a number of hours and just being able to do whatever you want, and not being all cramped like you are on planes sometimes, except for that one overnight coming back from Vienna when I was in a six-person compartment with four strangers and my one friend, and we were all tangled together awkwardly, and the one guy was from the Balkans and living in France illegally and got escorted off the train by the border guards. Aside from that, trains are awesome.

Two places I particularly miss: Tuscany and Vienna. I didn't do a ton of exploring in Tuscany, but my friend C. and I did spent a few days in Siena, where basically all we did was eat, drink, and sit around in the piaza all day and all night. It was glorious. So much good food and good coffee and good wine. I miss Vienna for pretty similar reasons: aside from the fact that I think it's a beautiful city, I totally adore the food there. And Wiener Melange, holy shit. So goooood.

I'm probably going to look at this entry in the morning and see just how spastic it is and laugh at myself for ages. Uh, hi guys. Sorry I haven't updated in forever and then I just splooge my European food love at you. (Massive plates of Wiener Schnitzel! That ridiculously expensive Florentine beef they marinate in olive oil! Portofino cheese courses!)

I'm going to choose to blame this entry on the fact that I was at work for fourteen hours straight today. Like, basically did not leave my desk for fourteen hours. I got home at 11:40 and two of my roommates were already asleep and the third and I chatted for about twenty minutes while watching The Colbert Report and then she was like, "Okay, time for bed!" I, meanwhile, am pretty wide awake, although that's definitely the coffee talking. Also the fact that I am finally seeing a sight that is not my office!

I'm pretty sure I had a point in mind when I started writing this entry, but I've totally forgotten what it was now. Uh, I'm two episodes away from being done with season one of Friday Night Lights! Score. And one day very soon, I will post all my pictures of the food I love and the places I miss and it will be full of nostalgia. I know you're all dying of anticipation.

Whee, I'm twenty-two! HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? I had work today in spite of it being my birthday, because I was seriously not on top of things this year and just totally forgot to ask for the day off (d'oh) but work was not bad at ALL, and also it was a totally gorgeous day and I got some good beach time in in the middle of the day, too, so YAY.

Okay, totally different topic! Do you ever judge people in connection with their writing? Example: There was a girl in one of my creative writing classes whom I liked a great deal but whose writing was just not that good. Like, her ideas were excellent, but she tried to pack too much into too little room: a whole novel's worth of characters, details, and dialogue in twenty-five double-spaced pages. It was EXHAUSTING. And we would workshop her stuff and tell her, "This is good, but CUT THE EXCESS," and she would smile and nod and take notes and then, when she had a chance to respond to our feedback at the end of the workshop, it would always become clear that she intended to take NONE OF OUR SUGGESTIONS WHATSOEVER, and it was super frustrating. I kept wanting to be like, "Take that potential and USE IT. If ten of us are saying something needs changing, that is PROBABLY BECAUSE IT DOES."

Anyway, I don't judge people solely based on their writing, obviously. That would be dumb. But if I already like someone and then their writing turns out to ALSO be fabulous, hi, bonus points. Lots of them. I bring this up because a very cute boy I only really started talking to at the end of college just sent me a screenplay he finished writing, and omg. I SO BADLY WANT IT TO BE GOOD, you guys have no idea. SO BADLY. But, as I was just telling my mother, eighteen pages in aaaaaand IDK about this. Both in terms of reading and in terms of writing, I like my stories (and screenplays and movies) to be STORIES primarily. I utterly despised No Country for Old Men because it was COMPLETELY not a story. It was very pretty! But NO STORY. And a couple of my more philosophically inclined friends were like, "DUH, it's not supposed to be about a story! The point of it is that there IS no point! It's GENIUS." That's lovely; it's also not my thing. On the other hand, I just finished reading A Prisoner of Birth by Jeffrey Archer, whose writing style and characterization are not totally fantastic, but whose storytelling, omfg, AMAZING. So I loved it beyond belief.

The point of this rambling is: I am afraid that this boy's philosophy degree is showing in his script, and it's making me go NOOOOOO. I want to like his writing SO VERY MUCH. Maybe he'll pull it off after all. Here's hoping!

Ugh, grossness. I got drunk both last night and the night before last, and on both occasions then proceeded to eat ENORMOUS AMOUNTS OF FOOD. I blame tvm and dark_reaction for Friday night's gluttony; for last night's I could TRY to blame RL people, buuuuut mostly I have no one but myself to blame. Friday's wasn't really that terrible, but last night I was like a TINY HUMAN PACMAN. It might be time to hit the gym this afternoon—I have been awful about it lately—but not before this afternoon, because I feel FAR too gross to do it before then. It's a vicious cycle!

Ahaha, anyway! Wendy commented on the J2 I posted recently talking about how she really loved the idea of Jared and Jensen moving in together in L.A. but also keeping a house in Texas that they could return to, and it made me think of this poem—which I told her I would type out and then didn't. Finally I have remembered!

( where we are by Gerald Locklin )

Ack, there was something else I was going to talk about and now I have no friggin' clue what it was. Uh, I started my Big Bang, finally? Slightly over 3,000 words is better than no words at all. \o/ Never mind that I now get to spend the day working on things that AREN'T BB, such as revising a short story and oh, right, my thesis. I also spent about an hour yesterday looking at jobs for next year and becoming increasingly discouraged. Fun!