sebastienne (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sebastienne) wrote2008-12-22 09:58 am
sebastienne) wrote2008-12-22 09:58 am
New Year Meme
I went back and looked at the first post of each month, and was surprised by quite how useful a shorthand they provided (although the lack of Bindelgate surprises me) to what has been going on in my year. I'm afraid I've cluttered it all up with introspection, as much for my own interest as for anything else.
January:
"You know those times when you get really angry, but you know it's unjustifiable to be angry at drunk people / depressed people / honest mistakes, so you have no outlet for it?"
January marked the end of my relationship with A, which forced me out of a lot of habits I hadn't even noticed myself falling into. It flies in the face of my feminine conditioning, and still makes me feel like a callous, heartless bitch sometimes; but I know, now, that someone else's mental health cannot be my responsibility. If I'm honest, I couldn't really begin to have closure until I stopped living with her, in August; so, in many ways, the first half of this year was spent in a weird sort of limbo, establishing myself as a human being in my own right. Before this, I'd been in relationships continually since Oscar's birthday 2004; it was jarring and foreign to be living entirely for myself. Now, I find it difficult to imagine myself in a relationship other than a very casual one. So different to the me who was willing to give herself entirely to anyone that asked!
February:
"I'm about to get on a bus and go to London and interview for library school."
The path of least resistance was to continue with the career I'd started by being a Library Trainee. It wasn't exactly a vocation, but it was more appealing than anything else I could think of doing. I appear to have fallen on my feet with this. Again. I've got a dissertation plan, I've learnt useful vocational things like programming languages, and by the method of "talking-to-the-only-other-goth-in-the-room" I've found myself a friend (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
robot_mel) who will laugh hysterically with me at Douglas Adams references in a silent lecture theatre.
March:
"So I've finally got around to getting into the 8th Doctor."
Ah, yes. Rejecting the advice of others ('it's best to pretend the Sixth Doctor never existed'), and the fact that nobody wanted to come with me, I went along to a DocSoc marathon to watch the entirety of the Sixth Doctor's "Trial of a Time Lord" meta-plot. There I found far too much sugar for my own good, a bunch of geeks I could talk to easily about shared obsessions - andcalliope85, who said, "You know that Paul-McGann Doctor you pinned up on your wall when you were ten? There's so much more to him than just the godawful TV movie..."
Yes, one of the best choices I made this year was to ignore the advice of others and do what I wanted. Can't help but think that this is something of a theme...
April:
"We've now finalised arrangements for the great SSL video tour."
Oh hell yes! Starting to work withayaron, and discovering that almost all life's problems can be solved by asking him. Need someone to film & edit your video? Need someone to store your stuff for a month? Need someone to put up with you being exhausted after another week of too-much-work and too-many-commutes to London, to feed you pizza and show you B5?
May:
"Remember me bouncing excitedly about the "Gallifreyan Buccaneer" Who/G&S crossover?"
More Who-love. It's repetition, yes, but given the amount and magnitude of Who-love that has swallowed my life this year.. it could even give my HP-love of old a run for its money.
June:
"I've had a fabulous, non-stop time, these last few days; seminars on "Some Like it Hot as Heterosexual Dystopia" and "A Conversation with Jasper Fforde" - a WhoFest entirely based around "serials with two Brigadiers" (Battlefield, Mawdryn Undead, Inferno) -jacinthsong finishing her finals - showing lubaya Velvet Goldmine.."
Where did all this free time and energy come from? Looking at the pattern of the year, it's hard to disassociate healing-from-broken-relationship and healing-from-SAD.
July:
"Wearing a big silver Ankh - cultural appropriation?"
Politics, yes. Living withdeathbyshinies made me a lot more able to consider the political ramifications of everything. I knew, intellectually, that nothing exists in a vaccuum and that we are all connected; but to be able to feel that, viscerally, is something for which I am very thankful. Without her challenging me, pushing me to be "sebastienne - LGBT Rights Activist", I would be a worse person today.
August:
"OK, so I've finally processed my response to having watched Blake's 7 in its entirety."
Through some incredible feat of selective memory, I had managed to entirely avoid any spoilers about the ending of Blake's 7. Socalliope85 decided to sit me down and show me the lot. In four months. But my love for B7 is more than just Stockholm Syndrome! I love it for the cheap BBCness of 70s-Who, and the moral ambiguity of the Marauders, combined with my past as a slightly-too-earnest teenager reading dystopian novels (I once fell in love with a boy because he used the word dystopian at 3am).
September:
"KITTEN."
I live in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
the_mousehole with a cat called Harriet and her humans. It feels more like home than any other house I have lived in since Oscar's birthday 2004 (the day I matriculated - joined Oxford), not least because it has carpets, working central heating, and sofas. It is not a big party house - it is a comfortable, calm, civilised existence.
Not words I would have expected to value. I surprise myself, sometimes.
October:
"OMG. WTF, BBC?"
This post is as good as place as any, I suppose, to mention Bindelgate. Stonewall showed themselves to be worse than even my most cynical fears, but we stood and we shouted and we won. Not in the obvious, they-rescinded-the-nomination-and-apologised way; but in the subtler, now-we-have-an-activist-network-and-will-change-the-world way. Despite Stonewall closing themselves off to a section of the LG(b) community they claim to represent, I left the whole thing with a positive feeling - a motivation for mobilisation and change.
November:
"I'd say "God bless America", only it seems like they're sorting it all out for themselves."
I'm.. less surprised than a lot of people seem to be that Obama is not the liberal messiah. He stands for a lot of good things, and is certainly better than just "the lesser of two evils" - but he's still a mainstream American politician. So, yes, I'm sad that he's equating "legislated hate" with "personal autonomy" as equivalent viewpoints; but I'm not surprised.
December:
"And so, there'll be a shortgrrlesque performance at "Queen of Clubs" on New Year's Eve."
Although that name's actually taken, so in fact the show is called "Lashings of Ginger Beer",annalytica and I will be taking the stage in nine days' time. I could go up in flames; it could be the start of something big. Most likely, it's the beginning of a circuit of queer and feminist events in Oxfordshire that I'll do for fun for the next ten years and never make any money from.
The solstice has passed! The light is coming back!
January:
"You know those times when you get really angry, but you know it's unjustifiable to be angry at drunk people / depressed people / honest mistakes, so you have no outlet for it?"
January marked the end of my relationship with A, which forced me out of a lot of habits I hadn't even noticed myself falling into. It flies in the face of my feminine conditioning, and still makes me feel like a callous, heartless bitch sometimes; but I know, now, that someone else's mental health cannot be my responsibility. If I'm honest, I couldn't really begin to have closure until I stopped living with her, in August; so, in many ways, the first half of this year was spent in a weird sort of limbo, establishing myself as a human being in my own right. Before this, I'd been in relationships continually since Oscar's birthday 2004; it was jarring and foreign to be living entirely for myself. Now, I find it difficult to imagine myself in a relationship other than a very casual one. So different to the me who was willing to give herself entirely to anyone that asked!
February:
"I'm about to get on a bus and go to London and interview for library school."
The path of least resistance was to continue with the career I'd started by being a Library Trainee. It wasn't exactly a vocation, but it was more appealing than anything else I could think of doing. I appear to have fallen on my feet with this. Again. I've got a dissertation plan, I've learnt useful vocational things like programming languages, and by the method of "talking-to-the-only-other-goth-in-the-room" I've found myself a friend (
robot_mel) who will laugh hysterically with me at Douglas Adams references in a silent lecture theatre.March:
"So I've finally got around to getting into the 8th Doctor."
Ah, yes. Rejecting the advice of others ('it's best to pretend the Sixth Doctor never existed'), and the fact that nobody wanted to come with me, I went along to a DocSoc marathon to watch the entirety of the Sixth Doctor's "Trial of a Time Lord" meta-plot. There I found far too much sugar for my own good, a bunch of geeks I could talk to easily about shared obsessions - and
calliope85, who said, "You know that Paul-McGann Doctor you pinned up on your wall when you were ten? There's so much more to him than just the godawful TV movie..."Yes, one of the best choices I made this year was to ignore the advice of others and do what I wanted. Can't help but think that this is something of a theme...
April:
"We've now finalised arrangements for the great SSL video tour."
Oh hell yes! Starting to work with
ayaron, and discovering that almost all life's problems can be solved by asking him. Need someone to film & edit your video? Need someone to store your stuff for a month? Need someone to put up with you being exhausted after another week of too-much-work and too-many-commutes to London, to feed you pizza and show you B5?May:
"Remember me bouncing excitedly about the "Gallifreyan Buccaneer" Who/G&S crossover?"
More Who-love. It's repetition, yes, but given the amount and magnitude of Who-love that has swallowed my life this year.. it could even give my HP-love of old a run for its money.
June:
"I've had a fabulous, non-stop time, these last few days; seminars on "Some Like it Hot as Heterosexual Dystopia" and "A Conversation with Jasper Fforde" - a WhoFest entirely based around "serials with two Brigadiers" (Battlefield, Mawdryn Undead, Inferno) -
jacinthsong finishing her finals - showing lubaya Velvet Goldmine.."Where did all this free time and energy come from? Looking at the pattern of the year, it's hard to disassociate healing-from-broken-relationship and healing-from-SAD.
July:
"Wearing a big silver Ankh - cultural appropriation?"
Politics, yes. Living with
deathbyshinies made me a lot more able to consider the political ramifications of everything. I knew, intellectually, that nothing exists in a vaccuum and that we are all connected; but to be able to feel that, viscerally, is something for which I am very thankful. Without her challenging me, pushing me to be "sebastienne - LGBT Rights Activist", I would be a worse person today.August:
"OK, so I've finally processed my response to having watched Blake's 7 in its entirety."
Through some incredible feat of selective memory, I had managed to entirely avoid any spoilers about the ending of Blake's 7. So
calliope85 decided to sit me down and show me the lot. In four months. But my love for B7 is more than just Stockholm Syndrome! I love it for the cheap BBCness of 70s-Who, and the moral ambiguity of the Marauders, combined with my past as a slightly-too-earnest teenager reading dystopian novels (I once fell in love with a boy because he used the word dystopian at 3am).September:
"KITTEN."
I live in
the_mousehole with a cat called Harriet and her humans. It feels more like home than any other house I have lived in since Oscar's birthday 2004 (the day I matriculated - joined Oxford), not least because it has carpets, working central heating, and sofas. It is not a big party house - it is a comfortable, calm, civilised existence.Not words I would have expected to value. I surprise myself, sometimes.
October:
"OMG. WTF, BBC?"
This post is as good as place as any, I suppose, to mention Bindelgate. Stonewall showed themselves to be worse than even my most cynical fears, but we stood and we shouted and we won. Not in the obvious, they-rescinded-the-nomination-and-apologised way; but in the subtler, now-we-have-an-activist-network-and-will-change-the-world way. Despite Stonewall closing themselves off to a section of the LG(b) community they claim to represent, I left the whole thing with a positive feeling - a motivation for mobilisation and change.
November:
"I'd say "God bless America", only it seems like they're sorting it all out for themselves."
I'm.. less surprised than a lot of people seem to be that Obama is not the liberal messiah. He stands for a lot of good things, and is certainly better than just "the lesser of two evils" - but he's still a mainstream American politician. So, yes, I'm sad that he's equating "legislated hate" with "personal autonomy" as equivalent viewpoints; but I'm not surprised.
December:
"And so, there'll be a short
grrlesque performance at "Queen of Clubs" on New Year's Eve."Although that name's actually taken, so in fact the show is called "Lashings of Ginger Beer",
annalytica and I will be taking the stage in nine days' time. I could go up in flames; it could be the start of something big. Most likely, it's the beginning of a circuit of queer and feminist events in Oxfordshire that I'll do for fun for the next ten years and never make any money from.The solstice has passed! The light is coming back!
no subject
That was sooo worth repeating!
:OD
Not sure I have entries to follow this meme...