(no subject)

First off, hey to new friends! Considering the sheer level of boringness I've been able to achieve for the last few weeks, which has been *epic*, I'm guessing this was done on a dare.

But yes. Heys! And you know, feel free to drop a comment and say hi and all that.

*****

Child was sick, so left work early and spent the afternoon napping with him and writing a surprising amount. I'm still not entirely--or in fact, at all--sure that I'm doing this right, but it's fun, which writing hasn't been in a damn long time. It's stupid, and egotistical as shit, but I've started feeling guilty every time I open my LJ and realize I haven't posted a story.



It's like, I feel like I'm doing false advertising, which makes no *sense*, but the feeling is there. Such as, I used to rec a lot and right now, not so much, for a variety of reasons I'm not going to get into because they're boring and the product of my own weirdness. I'm stil technically in Smallville, even though I haven't posted anything decent in a long time, and I feel like the SV people on my list are disappointed, and I'm not posting any of my QaF and feel like the QaF people are all, what the *hell*, and it's--yeah. Insane, I know, like anyone pays *that* much attention, but it's still a general feeling of failure. I get that I'm being strange on a logical level, I really do. On the other hand, I'm seriously waiting for everyone to give up and defriend in masse. Hell, I'd defriend myself at this point, because I'm not doing a damn thing for any fandom right now, and my real life is a mine of strange conflicting excitment and frustration.

It's that feeling of obligation that hits me every so often, when I open up to start a post and think, huh, no recs. Huh, no story. Nothing fannish in sight. What is the point again? *Is* there a point?

Actually, oddly enough, it was a discussion on a list I'm on regarding LJ versus mailing lists, where someone said, and I'm paraphrasing from a *very* long and deleted email, that LJ was frustrating because all the real bits get all mixed up with the fictional bits, and they wanted the fictional bits, which makes total sense to me. I don't friend unless I'm interested in the person themselves as a general rule, but if you're in it for the fannish stuff, it must be frustrating as hell. It's not and never going to be as focused as a mailing list can be, which is part of the attraction for me. People interest me as much as the show sometimes. And yeah, you can get to know someone on AIM, but let's face it, no one types fast enough to get to know everyone. LJ lets you peek in, just a little, and see the person, and I like that. I mean, I wrote my first feedback letter to Piers Antony when I was in my early teens, and he answered back--God, that's still one of my coolest memories--just to get that bit of--connection sounds vaguely stalker-ish, but it's the closest I get to a word that describes it.

I've done my entire essay on mailinglists versus LJ before and it'd be boring to hear it again, but I was reminded forcibly the other day when one of my lists started drooling over the worst story I've ever read. The one that held me in a kind of sick captivity of being unable to *stop*, even though I *knew* this was actually killing brain cells and I'd be laying on my deathbed, screeching out "WHY GOD" while my life trickled away, mourning not just the time taken to read it, but the time spent going to the webpage to find it, the time spent doing a word count because the length blew my mind, and the time I spent talking in awed, shocked tones to others about it.

That rec *scared* me. The people who jumped in to agree scared me more. My *God*.

It wasn't like I couldn't delete the emails, but it reminded me why I drifted away from mailing lists. Not because I don't still love the big group discussions or miss them intensely, but because mailing lists have a bad habit of just shifting in ways I can't follow and don't want to--both in fic taste and fic discussion and show discussion. In LJ as a general rule, I know what I'm getting into when I friend. No weird, "God, she likes the fic I consider the worst in history" is going to pop up as a massive uberrec of Ultimate Fannnish Goodness. This is important, as I had to physically restrain myself from hitting reply and asking "are you all on ACID? What the FUCK?"

Yeah, that hit me *really* wrong. I get difference in taste, but there's difference in taste and then plain and simple shitty writing that just happens to be fannish.

As you can see, I'm kinda scarred by that now.

Er, getting back to the topic, having wandered off at random. Fannish disappointment, or, me being neurotic. Or something like that.

It's--I don't know. I hate to miss work, because I feel like I'm disappointing my coworkers and boss, and because my pens keep disappering at an alarming rate. I hate when people bring up college, because I feel like I disappointed everyone I know who honestly to God believed that I'd finish in record time with a major that paid well, when I could have told them that if there was anyone destined to go about everything in the hardest way possible, it would be me. And I hate not being able to write, even with the stories already in my head that should get out, because I feel like I'm disappointing people who friended me with the expectation I'd be entertaining. And the more I worry about it, the more I block myself up. It's a really vicious inner circle of really bizarre angst.

Heh. Yeeah. I think this could be that pesky mix of real and fiction thing going on. Two more weeks or so, and I start the two month training for my new job. Lots of classroom stuff. I'm just going to get the hell over myself already.



Hmm. I really should go to bed.