three-dimensional side-effects of a two-dimensional universe

So, I haven't been on the internet for a while.

Technically that's not true. I've been on the internet a lot. But mostly just reading, or screwing around on G+ or buzzfeed on my phone, or netflixing or playing games. Most of my reading has been through AO3 subscriptions or my pinboard. Today was the first time in weeks that I so much as touched dreamwidth or livejournal, which is the first in years, not counting vacations. It's just... weird. I'm glad I'm back, I guess, after a while the main reason you don't get online is so that you don't have to face catching up online, but I had several days off in a row and decided to just go for it today. I basically capped out at "an hour" or "when my attention span failed" for each dw and lj, whichever happened first, so there's probably huge amounts of stuff I will never get caught up on, which I am okay with. I've been pretty busy with my offline life, which is a nice change.

I can't remember if I ever told the internets that I'd finally gotten together with the guy I'd been not!dating for a long time last winter? Because I did. It's pretty awesome. We're almost at the six-month mark, and we'd been basically dating for months before then, and best friends for about the same time. We spend basically all our time together, with maybe one day a week we're not sleeping over at each other's places. We already decided that barring unforseen circumstances, he's going to move in to my place when his lease is up next April. The thing that makes me think this is not a terrible idea is that a non-trivial amount of time together on shared days off is spent gaming/reading/watching tv in separate rooms. Also I have a house big enough for us both to have our own office space, as well as an entertainment room. We should be fine.

So anyway, internet, I have been away because I've been basically "in the bubble" with my partner, and that's been pretty awesome so I'm deciding not to regret it. I'm back now, though. I may even be getting some writing done, once I get my thesis prospectus done in a couple of weeks. Grad school is weird.

An excellent comment from my professor in class today:

"The first thing about being a history major is to make a life. Not a living, a life. And once you make a life, you'll find it much easier to make a living."

Damn if that isn't bang on the nose how I feel about my future career. As I keep saying to people who are asking me about it: you don't go into graduate-level academia because you want to get rich, you do it because you love what you're learning and want to make a life using what you're learning. Period, end of story.

Dr. Blake said it better though.

Hey, everybody. So, I'm not dead, fyi, just incredibly distracted all the time and back in grad school, which is attention-consuming at the best of times.

At some point I will make a more substantive post, possibly even with some form of fiction involved, but right now I just have to say:

Finally saw the newest Avengers trailer, and why was everyone going on about the Steve-n-Tony moment when there was a MUCH MORE AWESOME moment of Tony being sarcastic at a god? While drinking, because Tony. Jesus, I can't wait for this movie to come out.

I've been reading some really great posts on sexual harassment and sexual assault- particularly "Why Didn't You Kick Him in the Balls?", which also has some really amazing comment threads- and I was left with a couple of Thoughts. There've been plenty of times that I've had to explain the sense of fear and caution involved in being a woman, as well as the sense of risk-reward that involves a very different set of calculations than most men, and I often don't quite get my point across. My reading lately has allowed me to better put my thoughts in order.

In regards to sexual harassment- many men seem to have trouble with the idea of sexual harassment as a genuine threat, on some kind of instinctual level. In the future, I believe I will deploy this metaphor: say you're with someone who has a gun, and you do not. It doesn't mean that they're going to hurt you, but that they have a greater capability, because they are better armed. Sexual harassment is like someone putting their hand on their gun. They haven't drawn it yet, or pointed it at you- it's not a direct and explicit threat on your safety- but it's a clear signal that the possibility is now on the table. That is how many women view sexual harassment, because sexual harassment can, under some circumstance and with some people, evolve so quickly into genuine threat. And rapists do not walk around with a sign on their forehead announcing their intentions, so I have no way of judging whether or not a man who makes an over-the-line comment, or grabs my ass, is the kind of person who would escalate to drawing his gun, if you get my deeply uncomfortable phallic imagery, and I think you do.

Also! Unless I know someone really well, I have no reason to trust that they aren't a creepy rapist. That is because a) rapists don't have signs on their foreheads, as I mentioned above, and b) statistically, I'm more likely to be assaulted by someone I know than a stranger. So if I exhibit reasonable caution with someone, then the correct response is to nod and accept it. If that someone then gets offended that I could possibly think that they were like that, then I'm automatically less interested in their company, because they're probably kind of an asshole. We all make these little life calculations, these are some of mine.

So after the delicious debacle, I signed up for a pinboard account just to give them cookies for being awesome to fandom. I didn't actually expect to use it, because I never used delicious... but then I realized how much my life was missing a bookmarking service. So now I'm doing recs through my pinboard account, and I'll just update my website once a month and link to the month's recs here.

So, for the month of October, there are 57 recs, in the following fandoms: Avengers, Calvin and Hobbes, Captain America, DC Universe, Doctor Who, FAKE, Glee, Harry Potter, Inception, Iron Man, Marvel Comics, Pride and Prejudice, Sanctuary, Sherlock BBC, Smallville, Suits, Thor, Star Trek Reboot, and X-Men First Class. (Holy crap.)

I'm calling this a successful experiment.

1) Seriously, I don't think I'd realized just how fucked my browser was until tonight when I'm using it and it's fixed again. This is like Christmas for me.

2) If there is anyone else out there who has a dog that likes to destroy toys, I can't recommend Sherpa durable plush toys highly enough. Maddie is, thankfully, long over the phase where she likes to chew anything I've ever touched, but her main joy with toys is to sit there and slowly rip them apart. With good stuff, it sometimes takes her weeks. Cheap stuff, sometimes hours. (Or less.) I got the dragon toy for her about four months ago, as a durability test before my mom got one for her puppy, and she hasn't even gotten a thread loose. When it says durable, it damn well means it. Some of their other toys have more easily shredded bits- they have a barnyard line that have little ears and feet that she can pull off pretty easily- but the plush insides, the bits that I'm really worried about her swallowing, are apparently untouchable.

3) Made it through both Nietzsche and Foucalt this week, and actually enjoyed both. I was all set to hate Foucalt thanks to a lot of unhelpful discussions earlier in the semester, but I actually really enjoyed it. We read History of Sexuality Volume 3: Care of the Self and I kind of want to track down volume 2, which apparently he wrote at least partly in support of the gay rights movement, and his best-known work about the rise of criminal rehabilitation and criminology. So far I don't always agree with his methodology but at least you can't say he's not interesting.

4) Thinking of intellectual pursuits, I'm trying to decide what I want my two end-of-semester papers to be about. I think for my transatlantic one I'm going to talk about female agency to some degree- a lot of our earlier books barely even acknowledge the existence of women, but the back half of the semester is just as heavily slanted the other way- but for my methodology class we can pick pretty much anything, and the sheer array of choice is somewhat daunting. More and more I'm leaning towards making my focus gendered history in America, but I feel like this methodology paper is a chance to do a test-run for a larger thesis interest, and so narrowing things down is suddenly even more terrifying. Does anyone have any ideas? Even a general topic will do. I'm sort of poking at the idea of examples of women living transgender lives in 18th or 19th century America, but I think I have to check the sources before I bring that one before my teacher for approval.

Ugh, school, why so complicated. Still totally loving it though.

Originally posted by gabrielleabelle at Mississippi Personhood Amendment
/end signal-boosted post

This is an issue near and dear to my heart and personal history, and still I'd heard nothing about this until this post showed up on my flist. Please help get the word out, and donate if you can. While normally I despise the "slippery slope" argument, the legal denial of rights is the quintessential slippery fucking slope, whether it's the rights for gays to marry or the right for woman to control their own bodies. This law, more even than most effecting birth control options for women, not only criminalizes their choices but has the capacity to criminalize things beyond their control.

Okay, I'm recs-dumping because I can't stare at my links folder anymore. I'm leaving for my very first class of grad school in like an hour, this is me pretending to be productive.

( Crossovers, Criminal Minds, Dark Angel, Glee, Harry Potter, Inception, Leverage, Marvel, Merlin, Sherlock, Smallville, SGA, SG1, Star Trek Reboot, Supernatural, The Losers, Thor )