Poem for Wednesday

Not Heat Flames up and Consumes
By Walt Whitman

Not heat flames up and consumes,
Not sea-waves hurry in and out,
Not the air, delicious and dry, the air of the ripe summer, bears lightly along white down-balls of myriads of seeds,
Wafted, sailing gracefully, to drop where they may;
Not these—O none of these, more than the flames of me, consuming, burning for his love whom I love!
O none, more than I, hurrying in and out:
—Does the tide hurry, seeking something, and never give up? O I the same;
O nor down-balls, nor perfumes, nor the high, rain-emitting clouds, are borne through the open air,
Any more than my Soul is borne through the open air,
Wafted in all directions, O love, for friendship, for you.

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I'm not really sure where yesterday went. The orientation at the middle school seemed to go well; we met up with the family of another child from my son's elementary school who will also be in the magnet program, who's not one of his good friends but who is friendly and an excellent math student, and they hung out together during the orientation tour while I was upstairs in the media center with my very bored (and refusing to be placated by any distraction) younger son and other parents. The principal seems intelligent and competent, the PTA president seems mellow and not at all obsessed with either fundraising or how her hair looks which will be a nice change from the elementary school PTA president. The building seems easier to navigate than the local middle school, which I attended, even though the magnet school is slightly larger.

I hadn't brought my younger son a snack, which was a big mistake as the snack machines are actually programmed not to function until after 2:40 even during the summer, so had to take the kids out for fast food (they were too busy for breakfast at a reasonable breakfast hour, ate some lunch right before we left and then wanted another lunch right afterward). Due to a Happy Meal incident, I am now the proud owner of one of those Step With It thingies. Anyone else here use one (and do the McDonalds versions work as well as the expensive ones)? Do they actually motivate you? I did not take a real walk yesterday, as I had kids at home and articles to write, and I feel like a lox.

My husband got in the mood to watch Time Bandits last evening and got the kids to watch with him. I have started to watch this movie perhaps three times before and have never made it all the way through. Am not sure why this is; I hit a point of utter boredom where The Never-Ending Story starts to look good by comparison. Which is sad, really, given the talent involved in Time Bandits. And as pointed out to me the ending is damn creepy.

This morning I am suffering Death By Alan Rickman, courtesy , via The Alan Rickman Download Haven, which I'd never seen before. There are no words for the squee. Also, , has some lovely pictures of Alan Rickman's hands (in puffy sleeves no less). Guh.

So about that comm with hate and fanfic in the name. There are perhaps 40 links to it on the first two pages of my Friends list right now (that's to -100, default list). I have never clicked on one. I will never click on one. I will not bother to rant about its existence because as far as I am concerned it does not exist, even if I or my friends are getting insulted (I will take people's word for it that this is happening because I am not looking). If people stopped reading it and responding to it, it would go away.

I have ranted several times at length about fandom competition, fandom awards, rec communities, exclusive fannish sites, etc. I loathe them. They disturb me greatly and seem to me to do far more harm than good when it comes to bringing people together in common love for something, spurring resentment which leads to the creation of things like the community not mentioned by name above. That said, I have been a hypocrite for a long time, because after someone nominated one of my stories last year to the Mithril Awards and recommended it to Henneth Annun, I put it on HASA and submitted some more stuff because I was meeting really interesting people there. I still haven't taken any of it down. And this year when the Mithril people wrote to see if it was okay to have another of my stories in the Mithril competition, I said what the hell, since I'd already done it once.

Somehow, despite the vast quantity of absolutely wonderful Tolkien fan fiction available online, this story has made it to the finals. I am both very humbled and very, very embarrassed, as it has been an entirely shitty week for me in fandom on a personal level, and competition seems to spring up even between people who are in theory working together on projects. I had a quarrel with a friend over one of those exclusive communities, which has led to bad blood that has not gone away, and apparently is not going to go away as the issue keeps coming up again and again.

What's the right thing to do -- take the Mithril story out of competition at this late date and pull everything of mine off HASA as I've been saying I should do for a year now? Or stop taking any of this so fucking seriously, and acknowledge that if there can be this much acrimony over fannish bullshit, it probably has more to do with the personalities involved than whatever stupid fannish resentments set off the acrimony in the first place? Maybe some people really are too competitive to enjoy fanfic for its own sake, and maybe I'm one of those people. Am tired of ending up every couple of months thinking I should just leave, cut ties and start over. It sucks.

Am having lunch with -- looks like rain, maybe we can get my kids to watch The Silver Stallion and then we can have our Russell Crowe and eat him too!