Random Ramblings CCXLI · 12:00pm Mar 23rd, 2018
IN WHICH I NEED A VERB
Hi all. Work continues slowly on my Sunset fics. Meanwhile I listen to many genres of music. Including this…
That is, of course, the incomparable Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto, most famous for singing the English lyrics for "The Girl From Ipanema" (her then-husband João sang the Portuguese part), the unlikely unwilling voice that defined bossa nova. I found a CD that I had never ripped before, forgot I had, that is simply 21 of her best songs -- some in English (like this one), some in Portuguese, and one in Spanish for some reason.
Why do I link this song specifically? Well, it sort of sums up my life pretty well. I usually hate dissecting anything art because it often takes the fun out of it, but this song begs it. The lyrics make it obvious the singer is an unreliable narrator. She insists she's over the man she dumped and never loved him, yet still obviously pines for him. It makes me think of my ex-GF (now married to another man who should have been a friend of mine).
I put myself in Astrud's position here, except I'm not even in denial -- it's been well over a year but I miss the girl I shared eight years of my life with. Everyone says I'm better off without her. They're technically correct (the best kind), but I don't give a damn. I'll be the first to admit all of my mistakes. Usually in these situations it's the woman who gets tossed aside like a piece of garbage, as my mother was when my parents divorced over a decade ago. Not this time -- I kept my home and her cat (and sold her leftovers to get this new lappy), but she got to move on and forget me while I'm still an emotional wreck who thinks about her every hour of every day.
But then I've never quite fit many of the traditional "man" stereotypes. Back in high school a lot of kids thought I was gay, partly because my hometown is culturally to the right of Attila the Hun and the logic goes that if you don't gay-bash you must therefore be one of Them -- people who didn't know me well were legit shocked the first time I brought a girl home. In college, I was often propositioned by gay men despite at some points having a steady girlfriend. I seem to attract people from across the GLBT spectrum despite being "cishet scum". I have no idea why. Hell, reading my stories should clue anyone in that I'm straight as an arrow as I spend far too much time talking about teenage (or mid-20's pretending to be teenage) girls' breasts and butts. I build a goddamn story around cheesecake photos for Christ's sake.
Fuck, I'm lonely.
I think that's kind of (my) Rarity's mantra. I feel sorry for her. She does everything short of thwacking Sunset in the head with a shovel that has "I LOVE YOU" written on it, and Sunny just doesn't get it. Throughout the Recovery Arc, including the three unpublished stories, she never gets the hint -- that's not really much of a spoiler. What I've noticed though is that Rarity is not only protective of Sunset, she becomes super jealous if she sees Sunny talking nicely to pretty much anyone.
With that said, I'm looking forward to writing Sunny's less-than-cordial interaction with Poindexter. Sunny finally has her money and is on her way to the electronics district. It's taken over 6500 words, but I feel like I'm almost in the home stretch. Once that's done, I'll go as full-bore as I can on the next Recovery story, which should not be as long. I'll add a sentence here or there every couple of days, but it's not my priority right now.
I'm sure I'll mention this in a future blogpost as well, but I'm in a bind. I need a Verb for the title of Octavia's Burritoverse story. It's my policy to never reuse a verb in those titles and I can't find a good one for 'Tavi. I've used "buys", "eats", "wants", "steals", "pays for", and "inspects". Someone's going to get "contemplates", but not Tavi. If not for the lack of good verbs, I'd be tempted to write many more Burritoverse stories.
But then some twat told me he was upset I continued the stories beyond the first one, complaining about Maud's story without even reading it. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself with a red-hot rusty chainsaw, but a writer must be magnanimous or else he will earn a reputation that'll land him in The Badfic Bin -- speaking of which, I'm almost disappointed neither Comma Comma nor a capital offense ended up there. I guess they were too obviously tongue-in-cheek to count. Hell, readers loved Comma Comma. If I do another story like that, what part of speech should I have Celestia ban?
On the personal front, I can't tell whether my dad is gonna die soon or if his deterioration has levelled off, as he looked marginally better when I last saw him on Wednesday. In college, he was a big Shakespeare buff -- sadly, I lost his Riverside volume with all his liner notes when my uncle borrowed it then died, but I stole a different complete works book from him and have been reading some of the sonnets. It's the sign of a master writer when a piece of poetry can still be relevant to modern living over 400 years later.
I went to see a new doctor (the one who'd been seeing me since I was born retired last year) and took a look at the printout -- various iterations of "personality disorder" showed up about a dozen times. I researched the most relevant one and was like, "Yup, that's me." It's kind of nice to have official confirmation that I'm a mental basket-case, my issues are chronic and highly unlikely to be fixed quickly or easily.
A paper-trail may help since, as I think I mentioned last time, my state has decided to impose work requirements for Medicaid recipients (80hrs a month of job, looking for job, or training for job). I'm not on Medicaid yet, but I worry about the future. I can't wait until this draconian shit gets overturned when/if Democrats retake the House and Trump dies of an aneurysm just like he did in my story from 2016. White conservatives are petty -- they'll vote against their own interests every time as long as they think a disfavoured minority gets screwed worse.
I will find it funny as hell if The Donald's sexual peccadilloes are what take him down rather than the Emoluments violations, financial fraud, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and the inevitable lying to DOJ and/or perjury ("collusion" is not a crime, but these other things sure as hell are).
Anyway, it's about morning here. Bluh. I will make coffee and try to write more. Or sleep.
Peace out.
Banning... I wanna say adverbs or some other such large segment of English seems like a fun challenge. And... "Octavia Enjoys/Ruminates Upon/Considers/Savo(u)rs a Burrito", maybe?
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Thanks for the suggestions. "Savours" is out because of the way the story is structured -- like Sunset, she never gets to eat a burrito. Part of the fic will be written in dialect, which Moth was nice enough to direct me to some help on.
Adverbs seem too obscure. In Comma Comma, I was using the inspiration of a certain writer and trying to intentionally write a badfic -- in that, I failed. I can't really ban quotation marks because I have books that are written with esoteric quoting methods (usually the em-dash). I could ban periods/full-stops. I could ban vowels, with Celestia wanting to make the written language an abjad, bt cld kp t p fr thsnd wrds? Myb nt.
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Maybe just consecutive vowels?
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Conjunctions, maybe? (thoughts of Schoolhouse Rock in my brain here)
OR... It could take months (especially with all the other stories of mine I still need to edit), but I could try to write a Lipogram -- a story that intentionally omits a letter (usually E).
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Definitely a challenge. Especially with "Celestia" being a titular and pivotal character. I'd love to see you get around that one. All of these sound like really stellar Grammarverse stories.
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Actually I may already have a workaround for Celestia. And no, it's not "Tia" (I never liked that nickname).