I fell asleep on the couch and took a nap with the cat perched triumphantly atop the highest part of

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I fell asleep on the couch and took a nap with the cat perched triumphantly atop the highest part of my hip for a while. I woke up with like, heart palpitations or something, I can’t catch my breath, quite, and I had almost no appetite for dinner which my poor dude slaved over. 

I still can’t quite catch my breath. This happens sometimes. I think it’s an anxiety attack while I’m sleeping? 

I also feel like my intestines are full of cement and don’t know why that would be, but I feel like it’s not related. Let’s hope it’s not related. 

It’s not like I can’t breathe but it’s like i have to think about every breath. That’s very… unsettling. 

I wish the cat would come back and snuggle me.

Here’s a thing I am really curious about:Non-Ame

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Here’s a thing I am really curious about:

Non-Americans who are into Hamilton.

Like, what’s that like? What’s so interesting about it? 

I’m not gatekeeping or like, discouraging anyone– I just want to know!

My parents actually met because of the American Revolution’s bicentennial celebrations; they were re-enactors in 1976. Dad was a Dep’t of Historic Preservation of NY State employee, and mom was the curator of the Rensselaer Co. Historical Society. This is local history, for us; the Schuyler Mansion where Alexander and Eliza were married is less than ten miles from where I was born. My father personally idolized George Washington and I grew up hearing stories about him, like how in the middle of the war his officers came to him and said “let’s just crown you king” and he refused because that wasn’t the point. And how everyone said he had to be President for life and he refused because that wasn’t the point. I grew up believing that’s what leadership was about, an eschewing of individualism for principles. (And I’m super bummed the Battles of Saratoga didn’t make it into the play at all, because you can see my house from there, basically, and I grew up visiting that battlefield site like three or four times a summer; in short, for anyone who didn’t know, the Americans beat the British soundly for the first time there in 1777, and that was why when Lafayette asked for more guns and ships, the French said yes, because there was concrete evidence the Americans could actually win.)

But like. They don’t really teach American history abroad, I’ve found. Only our movies get exported. So like. I see some of y’all I know aren’t from here, excited about Hamilton– which is awesome, because it is so good– but what is your context? What does it mean to you? It’s not like Americans all know either but we at least have folklore-ish rote learning from elementary school classrooms, and the basic assumptions we all know (starving at Valley Forge, Paul Revere’s midnight ride, that kind of shit). What possible meaning does it have for you, absent those contexts? Are you more interested in it through the lens of the hip-hop retelling, or is it fresh, or is it confusing, or– what could it all possibly mean, without that context?

Can you even begin to relate it to the circus of our Presidential election, wherein we are debating whether the democratic process is more than a farce? Can you imagine how painful it is when you grew up with George Washington as your hero, to watch blustering oligarchs debate whether all men really are created equal?

My poor dude is sick and cranky and unhappy and that is a shame but so am I and it is sad. He has a.

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My poor dude is sick and cranky and unhappy and that is a shame but so am I and it is sad. He has a sinus thing or something, I don’t know, but it makes him snore like a, a thing that snores, and I am just really glad the guest bed in the house is cleared off and made because that means I can sleep in it. I have just inexplicable terrible abdominal cramps and maybe I am dying, but the other upside to this whole thing is that the guest bed upon which I have sought refuge, which is normally covered in laundry, is really Chita’s bed, and she is alternately begrudging and delighted to have company. (She bit me, earlier, but just the teeth-on-skin you-need-to-chill kind of bite. Mostly she is sleeping with her head upside-down, which is like, The Best Thing of all Cat Things.) 

I am exiled to the guest bed with the cat and unspecified gastro-intestinal fuckery, and I am trying to wind up the threesome scene so I can get to the Thrilling Action Climax With Bonus Great Character I’m Thrilled To Have Remembered To Include, but this is probably not the kind of mental/physical state in which to write sexual and action climaxes (climaces?) and so on. (I want to like, tease who this great character is, and I also want to be super secretive about it, and I just don’t know which way to go here. I don’t know if anyone but me cares but boy, do I care.)

In other news the Hux And Poe Claustrophobia Oneshot turned into six thousand words and Feelings, thought not slashy ones, well maybe, so I have no fucking clue where to go with that but I’ve written myself into a corner where either there has to be a cliffhanger, I have to kill someone (!), or I have to write a sequel, and I Do Not Have Time for any of it, least of all plumbing the depths of the motivations of genocidal maniacs and how super done with that certain dashing pilot types are.

“So teach me how to steer this bucket. How hard could it be?”

A pain in the ass, it turned out. Hux had no natural aptitude at piloting, which was rather what he’d expected. “I could build you a hyperdrive,” he grumbled, “and probably do a better and faster job of it than I would at flying this fucking thing.”

“If we had the spare parts, I’m sure you could,” Dameron said charitably.

“Are you usually this nice to people you hate?” Hux asked.

“I don’t really– hate?” Dameron said. “It’s not a productive use of emotion.”

“I hate a lot of people,” Hux said. “And things. It tends to increase my productivity overall.”

Dameron shook his head slightly. “It doesn’t motivate me effectively,” he said. “I just fixate and obsess on the thing I hate, and then I don’t have the attention to devote to stuff I’m good at.”

“I haven’t found that at all,” Hux said.

“I like to think about the things I love,” Dameron said. “That really motivates me. If I’m going to die, then it’s going to be protecting something I love.” He let his head loll back to its natural resting place, staring straight forward out the viewport. For some reason, the faint stars and one pathetic planet there made his mouth curl into a little smile.

Hux considered the same view, then looked back over at Dameron. “But you are going to die,” he said.

“Well,” Dameron said. “True.”

Oh lord the whole story is just the press tour from Ex Machina except they’re talking about genocide instead of an AI, and neither of them has stupid facial hair, and they’ve switched personalities. Oh wait no, no dick jokes so far. Surely someone else has written this fic already and can spare me further effort?

Also anon who asked about Star Wars And Bucky, I really want to write a thing about that and it is on my list but my list is long. And I am short. Or. Something. Wait. I lost it. What?

Chita, Chita, help me, what is happening to my intestines. I did not get myself together enough to bring lunch to work today, for the third time this entire calendar year, and I resisted the siren call of Mighty Taco, because Mighty Taco is delicious but gives me Intestinal Regrets approximately one in three times, and I told myself, no, no, these intestines deserve better. And I resisted the call of the open chicken souvlaki from the Greek place at the mall because I also, in my age and decrepitude, cannot digest that much lettuce. Too much lettuce also makes my guts cranky. (Which is, like, Supreme Injustice for those raised as I was on the Rabbit Food Equals Virtue school of nutritional thought. What do you MEAN iceberg lettuce doesn’t count! It is the PARAGON of 1980s American nutrition! How DARE it go through my body like a watery cheesegrater!) So I didn’t. I didn’t do any of those things. I went to Wegmans and bought an assortment of foods, some prepared and some not, and I ate them like a sensible person.

So what is happening to me is not fair. It’s also, to be reasonable, certainly not food poisoning or I would be begging for death, because that’s happened before but not from Wegmans. However. I am feeling very put out. I should have just gotten Mighty Taco because I know that’s over with in an hour or so at most. Next time I’ll know. 

On nomenclature.

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prokopetz:

buckybits:

prokopetz:

readingrainrose:

prokopetz:

darfichihrenhundstreicheln:

gingergiggles:

prokopetz:

According to academia, “modern” means “the 1920s”, “new” means “circa 1996”, and the “future” is what people sixty years ago thought the year 2000 would look like. What word can I use to describe stuff that’s happening now?

Double future

post-post-postmodern: the sequel

Postmodern II: Postmoderner

2 Post 2 Modern

Postmodern: Director’s Cut

Postmod3rn: The Revenge

Postmodern: Nouveau Drift

So in college I used to work in the Visual Resources Collection of the university– in short, the slide collection. Slides for lectures, mostly. Even when I was there, digital was new but acknowledged. We knew we were going to have to digitize, and we had no idea how it was going to happen or what would become of us.
But we also knew we had to do something about our classification system, which had “modern”, and “postmodern”, and then an enormous chaos of things since 1960.
I have actually never put any of my slide-handling skills on my resume but weirdly, they’ve been applicable in other jobs.

I think I would actually like Hamilton less if I was American! It's just a good story and the music

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I can’t respond to the other answers I got here because I’m bad at Tumblr so I’ll lump it all in here and thank everyone for their input, because it was fascinating. 

 @tolrais, George III was actually a pretty interesting dude– his dad was real real dumb– and on the one hand it’s a shame he’s only remembered as The Bad Guy In The Rev War but on the other hand at least he’s remembered!

@rosaline-queen-of-apricots – it probably depends where you are what American history is taught. I went to school in the UK for a year and I had a way better grasp of European history than vice-versa, so I spent a lot of time being blown away and making connections and so on (because, like, even in Olden Times, what happened in one place affected other places and so clearly, there are connections!), while my UK compatriots stared at me in bafflement because they were pretty sure I was making the whole thing up. But I’m sure it varies in different countries. I’m certainly not trying to imply that the American education system is any more comprehensive than anyone else’s because uh LOL no :( :( :( it’s pretty bad. 

This whole thing absolutely wasn’t me being hostile or anything! I’m not trying to imply that there’s anything less for a non-American to get out of the whole thing, I was just wondering what it is that’s got such cachet if you didn’t grow up with George Washington Mythology and so on. Clearly, you’d find something different in it if it weren’t about characters so familiar that you felt a sense of ownership, you know?

And i think that’s part of the brilliance of recasting it with actors of color in the hip-hop vernacular, because of that sense of ownership– you grew up hearing about these people, and by having an actor of color play them you’re explicitly saying that they are everyone’s, not just white people’s. But that’s my perspective as a history nerd white kid from New York, you know? I’m just trying to see how that translates. 

And if it is just that it’s a good story well-told with catchy, well-crafted music, well then, good! I’m so immersed in it I can’t even begin to guess how I’d feel if I came to it cold, you know?

I have called in sick with intestinal weasels, and it is

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I have called in sick with intestinal weasels, and it is absolutely … uh I was going to say pissing down snow, but that’s not how that goes. Shitting snow? Bombing down snow out there, I mean ridiculous, so I’m feeling a little self-congratulatory that I’m not out in that. 

I anticipate that in the parts of today I do not lose to, you know, the weasels, I am going to get all the things done. LOL, because that’s how it works. I do have laundry in to wash though. I still have IKEA furniture to put together. I need to clear out the corner of the living room to make space for it. I want to hang up art and my sister was upset we didn’t get to it before she left. And the basement, oh the basement. There were a lot of flooded basements in the area during our Biblical storm the other day, but not mine, not my freshly-cleaned and beshelved basement. I am going to organize it. I am going to have some control over my life. 

I am also going to finish that threesome scene if it kills me.

“I’m all right,” Poe said softly, running his fingers over Finn’s cheeks, his neck, his hair. He glanced over at Rey, and his face lit up with amusement. “We’re distracting our security detail.”

Rey blushed. “Take him to bed,” she said. “Take him to bed, Finn.”

“We can’t all fit in that bed,” Poe pointed out.

“Sure we can,” Rey said. The bunk was in a compartment in the wall, and it was wide enough for two. Maybe not for three. He might be right.

“Mmmm,” Finn said, voice low and rumbling. “I think you need to be naked.”

“Both of you,” Rey said. “I’m working! I’m working. By the time you’re naked I’ll be done.” She double-checked her most recent work and found an error. “Shit.”

Next to her, Finn stood up, still holding Poe’s legs around his waist. Poe laughed. “Oh come on,” he said, “I’m not this skinny.”

“I probably won’t drop you,” Finn said, with reasonable confidence, and carried him across the tiny open space of the floor before pressing him into the wall and holding him there, squashing him into place and devouring his face. Poe made a fervent little noise and writhed in his grip, breathing hard.

“Oh,” Rey said, and considered that she had miscalculated; this was more interesting even than them making out in the chair next to her. She bit her lip, and checked over the last few sensors, and implemented the change. As she turned to look at what Finn was doing, pulling back and pinning Poe in place with his hips to skim Poe’s shirt off over his head, the alarms went off, and she cursed and turned back to the console.

Finn dropped Poe, who caught himself adeptly and howled with laughter, and Rey said, “I dialed it up too far! Just a minute!” and shut off the blaring alarms.

“I was doing so well,” Finn said, but took advantage of the situation to shove Poe against the wall and strip his shirt off the rest of the way.

my family is the best. Currently my parents are in

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my family is the best. 

Currently my parents are in Georgia with my sister’s three kids. The oldest one is sick. They took him to the doctor in a neighboring town and discovered that he has, brace yourself for this: SCARLET FEVER. This is a thing that kids can get in this century. I am bowled over. 

They went to the drug store to get him antibiotics and this drug store, okay? The pharmacy. It’s a combination store. It has a pharmacy section, and also a florist, and a GUN SHOP. None of us made any Guns N Roses jokes, and I pointed this out, and Mom said “oh they had souvenir t-shirts but I was too overcome to process it and actually buy one”. 

AMAZING. Also, disappointing, because I can only imagine such a t-shirt.

And now the youngest one just told my mother that she’s “usually scared of other humans”, which is possibly the best bit of three-year-old explanation of the world I’ve heard in a while. (Rachel is a little shy, and takes refuge in her alter ego, who just barks at people, and I’m sort of sad that we’re not really allowed to be that weird as adults because I’d like to steal that coping mechanism.)

Kids are great. 

In other family news, though, my unmarried sister (us two middle ones are the spinsters) recently confirmed that she does think Domhnall Gleeson is hot, but not Oscar Isaac, and I just don’t know that I know who she is anymore.