kyuuketsukirui

1. I don't know if it's that I've been drinking so much of this Emergen-C stuff or what, but I was definitely feeling a lot better yesterday. Still like crap, but better than Sunday. (It probably helped that I was finally able to get more than four hours' sleep, too.)

2. We checked over at the college again and they finally got in the fourth of Bruce's five transcripts. I had asked the outstanding one to be faxed, thinking that would be okay, so I just happened to ask about it today while we were there and the guy said they don't accept faxes, so I guess that's the reason for that one still not being in the system. So we filled out another form and put it out for the mail today. Hopefully that will be taken care of fairly quickly as that's the only thing holding us back from our money now!

3. A couple weeks ago when we had friends over for a BBQ, I was talking with Mimi about walking and stuff and she said she takes these glucosamine pills and they really help your joints. Specifically, she said she used to have really crackly knees and after taking it for a while, her knees don't crackle at all. Well, mine are pretty horrible, so I decided to give it a try. After just a couple weeks, I can really tell a difference. They still make some noise, but not nearly as bad.

4. I finished watching season two of Avatar last night and started on season three. I was really disappointed that Zuko didn't join them at the end of season two. He was so close! Iroh has just gotten more and more awesome, though. I hope he's okay. Also Aang is adorable with hair.

5. If you liked BoA's US album, check out this post with a bunch of remixes and mashups of the songs.

6. This is a cover of Janet Jackson's Nasty by a "Tampa public-access star from the late 80s / early 90s". You have to click. Words cannot do it justice. Really.

Guys! Just a reminder that my fic Right Where I Want You is up for discussion on sga_talk. I think it runs til the 15th and so far there are only two comments (both of which are really awesome, but it looks so lonely!). It seems like that's often the problem with anything not John/Rodney on that comm. :-/

PS. I really love that you no longer have to click "crosspost" and then click where you want to crosspost to. Clicking the journal boxes automatically clicks the "crosspost" box. (I was really confused last night when it refused to let me click that box, though. ^_^;;)

Uh...happiness? I've been lying on the sofa all day feeling miserable with this cold, so I didn't really do anything. Lemme see...

Oh! I am only ten volumes from finishing Inuyasha. I hope to finish reading that this week.

Also I just found out a few years ago there was a Kinpachi-sensei drama that was about a trans boy. Am downloading that now. It's been aaaaaages since I watched any Kinpachi-sensei.

1. Finished my Remix! I'm still awaiting the beta, but I went ahead and posted what I had since fics don't go live for another week, and will edit the post once I get it back from beta. So glad to get that done. Gah, why did I procrastinate? If I hadn't, I wouldn't have had to write it while sick!

2. Managed a short (1.4 mile) walk, even though I wasn't feeling well.

3. Read a whole book yesterday! I've fallen behind, though. I need to read more if I want to get 75 books done by the end of the year.

As you may or may not have noticed, I changed my journal name from Grace to Travis, so I'd appreciate it if you would call me that when not using my username, and to use male or gender-neutral pronouns.

More info on that here and here.

Title: Parrotfish
Author: Ellen Wittlinger
Number of Pages: 287 pages
Book Number/Goal: 36/75 for 2009
My Rating: 4/5

I wanted to like this book more, because it's the only YA book I know with a transgender protagonist (Julie Ann Peters' Luna was great, but it's more about being the sister of someone who is trans), hell, one of the few books with a transgender protagonist, period. But the writing isn't that great. First-person narration is used as a way to do massive info dumping, and the dialogue is often unnatural-sounding. But I liked the story a lot and I do think it's worth reading for that.

It's interesting in that it's not about the main character's coming to terms with being trans, but rather with everyone else coming to terms with it. At the start of the story, Grady is already out to his family and about to start going to school as a guy. There is some of the above-mentioned info dumping to tell us about his decisions, but it's definitely not the story I was expecting. It really doesn't touch on that aspect much at all. So in a way, like Luna, even though the protagnist is trans himself, the book reads to me as "how to treat trans people when you encounter them" (it's a YA problem novel; of course it has a message).

It's got some problems, though, other than with the writing.

( Cut for slight spoilery talk )

Wow, I really went on about the problems. But I still think it's a good book, and I'm glad it's out there, and I think people should check it out if they have an interest in the subject matter. I just wish it were better.

1. Bruce finally had his root canal yesterday. He was supposed to have it over a month ago, but it got rescheduled. The good news (aside from the fact that they finally worked on the tooth) is that it looks like he won't have to get a new crown. They were able to drill through the old one to work on it. So that's $400ish saved. The root canal itself was $650, which is pretty ridiculous on its own, but at least we had some money saved up, so we didn't have to put it on the credit card.

2. I got an email from Ticketmaster yesterday saying the Killers will be playing at the Hollywood Bowl in September. I emailed Alexander to see if he wanted to go and he said yes, so I went ahead and got the tickets. :D (I figure that and the Vamps ticket are my birthday present, since I had told Bruce there wasn't anything I wanted present-wise.) I've been wanting to see them again, so I'm pretty excited, even though I'm not sure how much I'll actually be able to see. At least I will be able to hear them!


In less happy news, I seem to have a cold. Ugh. :(

Title: The Sophie Horowitz Story
Author: Sarah Schulman
Number of Pages: 158 pages
Book Number/Goal: 35/75 for 2009
My Rating: 3.5/5

Sophie is a reporter caught up in a story about radical feminists Germaine Covington and Laura Wolf. The more she tries to get to the bottom of things, the more she finds herself tangled up in everything.

This is Schulman's first novel and it's very obvious. It's not nearly as well-written as the other books I've read by her and the plot's a little muddled and everyone but Sophie feels more like a prop than an actual person, but I still enjoyed it quite a lot. I'm glad this wasn't the first book I read by her, though.

Mooch on BookMooch

1. I got my Jump scans quite late last night, but they were all pretty easy (even Bakuman, which usually takes me three times as long as Bleach or Naruto because there's just so much text per page) and I got done fairly early.

2. We had a really awesome walk yesterday. Walked down to El Pollo Loco because we had a coupon, but that wasn't much of a walk, so after we ate, I suggested going down a block and walking around in the residential area west of Lincoln between Pico and Ocean Park. I had never been back there driving, much less walking, so it was a whole new area to explore. We saw a lot of neat houses and apartment buildings and just generally had a great time. Very hilly, too, so even though our walk was only 3.6 miles total, we got more of a workout than if it had been up here where we're on a plateau.

I really love that we have got to the point where we can walk to a different area and then walk around in there, as we've pretty much fully explored the area around here. At some point I would love to be able to say I've been up every street in Santa Monica.

The only downside was we both got a little too much sun. It was midday and if I'd realised we were going to walk so much, I'd have put on sunblock, but it was spur of the moment, so...

1. I wrote some more on my remix today and have ideas for the rest of the scenes, so theoretically if I just sit down and write it, it should be pretty easy going.

2. Bruce went over to the college to check on the status of his transcripts again, and this time there's actually been progress! They received one of the three we're waiting for, so just two to go. I don't know why it's taking so long to get these, but I'm glad at least one of them showed up. If there's still no sign of the other two by next week, he'll call the schools (one of them charges for transcripts and I know they've already cashed our check, so it's not like the request got lost in the mail).

3. We ate the first of our tomatoes today. It was very small and we each only got half, but omg it was so good. I can't wait for the rest to ripen!

1. Very nice walk yesterday. 4.1 miles round trip. We went down to Sears again because Bruce's glasses were still a little crooked, but they seem to be fixed now, so hopefully that's the last of it (if not, oh well, at least it's a nice walk to Sears!). We stopped in Penzey's Spices after that so Bruce could turn in a job application. Then we headed up to Barnes & Noble to use the rest of my gift card (I had a list this time!) and on the way stopped at a gelato place. I had a scoop of apricot/almond, which was soooo good (though at $3.45 for one scoop, I doubt I'll be getting their stuff very often, if ever).

Barnes & Noble was...less than happy. Of the nine books I'd written down, they had two, one of which was hardcover and cost $22.95, which I was not about to pay even though I knew I'd like it and still had $9 on my gift card. I ended up getting the book of Long Way Down, which they had in paperback for $17, so with my card, I got about half off. I loved the book of Long Way Round, so I'm looking forward to reading this one. ♥Ewan.

2. I started keeping track on a spreadsheet of how much we walk each day for the month of July, and the total for the first week s 25.3 miles.

3. For the past week or so I have had no hip pain! I have had hip pain off and on for quite some time, but last month I had really bad pain pretty much non-stop for several weeks. I have no idea why it got so bad or why it suddenly stopped, but I hope this keeps up!

4. I have once again slacked off really horribly on moving lyrics from my old site to my new site. The reason for that was that I've left a lot of the artists I know will be a pain for last. So I came to one where the lyrics were really badly formatted (before there were Japanese sites with lyrics online, I used to buy these lyrics magazines that had hundreds of lyrics each month, and they would often have weird formatting in order to fit as many as possible on the page, and I just copied the formatting when I typed them up. So a lot of the older artists on my site have crap-looking lyrics which I want to prettify, plus they're more likely to have typoes and mistakes. So there's that, plus the artist I was last working on (GLAY) had some donated translations that looking at them now are really horrible. There's really no use in even correcting them; I should just toss the donated ones and redo the translations from scratch. But...that would take time away from my already backlogged current translation queue. Gah! So I just stopped that project. ^_^;; But today I added songs for two other artists which turned out to be no problem at all. So maybe I'll skip around some more in my list and leave GLAY for another time.

I did some work in late May/early June for a Japanese company that pays pretty well but doesn't pay foreigners until six weeks after receiving a hard copy invoice. D: Anyway, so I did this work and was expecting to get paid maybe mid July for it, so I wasn't checking my bank account yet (they do it by wire transfer) because I figured I'd just be disappointed. But today we went to deposit another check (a whopping $26!) and when I looked at the receipt from the bank, there was a whole lot of money in there than what I was supposed to have! :D So I went home and checked the website and sure enough the transfer had gone through already...and it had actually gone through on my birthday. XD

So I'm very happy to get that money, especially since Bruce has a root canal coming up on Friday, which will be $600. D:

Unfortunately that's also the last of the money that was owed me and I haven't had work since the very beginning of June. :-/ Hopefully I'll get something soon, and if Bruce's transcripts would hurry up and go through and we could get that financial aid, that would be great.

Title: Boku wa, Onna no Ko
Author: Shimura Takako
My Rating: 3/5

This is a collection of some early shorts by the author of Hourou Musuko. It's pretty hit or miss, really.

The title story is what drew me in, but it wasn't as good as I'd hoped. It's about what happens when everyone in the entire world is switched from male to female and female to male. There were a few interesting bits. I really loved the brief appearance of a trans woman who became a man and was saying she ought to have stayed a man before, then she'd be a woman now. There was also one former-girl now-boy in the main character's class who said he'd always wished he was a boy, so he was happy now. So you can definitely see the seeds of Hourou Musuko in this, but overall it wasn't that great.

The stories I really liked were Sweet 16, about a high school girl with a crush on her (female) tutor, and Flowers, which is a short story about Yuki, the trans woman from Hourou Musuko.

Sweet 16 has been scanlated and can be found here, but none of the other stories have.

The more I read of this Pam's House Blend fail, the more I am reminded of racefail, particularly the first go-round this year. Now PHB is outing people, I was going to say in a very Nielsen Hayden manner, but I don't think that was Teresa Nielsen Hayden who was doing the outing, was it? It was some other blogger whose name I don't remember. But the lack of respect for pseudonyms and the maliciousness in deliberately outing people under the pretense of exposing sockpuppetry is exactly the same.

Also, I hadn't realised that Kim Pearson, one of the people doing a lot of flailing and failing over there, is the same person who runs TransYouth Family Allies. I listened to a radio interview with her not that long ago and she sounded great, but damn. Do we really need "allies" who accuse us of having "trans privilege" and say things like "I don't know who is L or G or B or T or black or green or orange. I just see people"?

Didn't post last night because I was so exhausted I just came home and went straight to bed. We went to a BBQ at some friends of Alexander's place, and I was hoping that would be one of my happy points, but really it wasn't. There were about 25-30 people there, none of whom I knew except Alexander and Bruce, so it was really stressful and overwhelming to be around so many people, plus really boring because I was just sitting there for two hours with nothing to do. If I'd known it would be so many people, I wouldn't have gone.

But there was some good. Bruce enjoyed himself, the food was good, and we got a nice walk despite being so busy. Instead of having Alexander come all the way over here to pick us up, we walked up to Wilshire (little over a mile), then took the express down Wilshire to Western and walked to his place (another mile). I've never been on one of the MTA express buses. They're the extra long kind with the accordion-looking bendy bit in the middle. So that was pretty cool. Since it was a weekend and a holiday, there really wasn't a lot of traffic, either, so the bus ride itself only took about half an hour.

Despite all the busyness, I also managed to get 200 words written on my Remix. Due next Sunday, I think. Ack! Hopefully I can get some more written today.

This morning we walked up to CVS in hopes that they would have peanut butter M&Ms and they did! They were on sale, too! So I will probably make cookies with those later on today. Other than the walk (which was almost four miles), we're just having a quiet day today. I really need it after the stress of yesterday.

I may even go take a nap now...

This is a really interesting article: That's Not a Real Game: Videogames, Gender, and the Popular Imagination. (Though it is long and white text on black background, so my vision is swimming a bit.)

Not really the point of the article, but made me think about my relationship to video games growing up. I have been a fan of video games ever since I can remember. First it was arcade games (played mostly at Shakey's or other pizza parlors), but then my dad bought me an old Atari 2600 at a garage sale when I was seven. I got an NES in high school, and started subscribing to Nintendo Power, then Electronic Gaming Monthly and others (I think at one time I was subscribing to three or four mags and bought a couple others in the store whenever I could). I've played just about every sort of game over the years and at one time had a collection of video game systems that included every major system and a lot of minor ones. Now I only have a Wii, a DS, and a PS2 (oh, and an SNES in a drawer). The games I play most often are Peggle and Mahjong and stuff on the PC, because I just don't have the time to devote to gaming like I used to. But I still think of myself as a gamer and it's still one of my favorite hobbies.

I can see now how they're marketed to guys (with things like Barbie and virtual babyfactory or whatever as special girl games), but I never really thought of them as a boys' thing growing up. No one ever told me that I shouldn't be interested in them, and I played video games a lot with Erin a lot. (I can also remember times when I thought I was playing video games "with" other girl friends, but looking back, I can see I was just playing them at their houses (on systems that belonged to their brothers) and not actually interacting with the friends themselves. But at the time, I did not have the necessary social skills to perceive that difference.) Looking back now, in high school, the friends I really connected with over video games were guys, but at the time, I never made the connection that gaming was considered a guy thing.

1. A while ago I tried to do the 100 pushups thing, but found that because it was every other day, not every day, I had trouble remembering to do it. So I gave up and then later thought maybe I'd try to do a similar thing but daily, and I ended up dropping that, too, because it's just a pain to have to get down on the ground and do pushups. I can't do them on my toes anymore, because I get a painful twinge in my foot when I do. But we have hardwood floors, so in order to do them on my knees, I have to get a pillow or something and it's just...a pain. I can't be bothered.

But then Bruce suggested wall pushups (or push-offs, I guess), so I started doing those. I don't think it's quite as much of a workout as pushing up from the floor, but I can definitely still feel it.

It's much easier to do, though, because I can pretty much do a set every time I get up from my desk to get a glass of water or go to the bathroom or whatever. I'm much more likely to do that than to get down on the floor for pushups.

So I have been doing 30-40 per set, trying for at least a hundred a day, for the last week or so. Now I'm up to 30-50 per set. I think I did 80 or 90 already today, so I'll probably do another couple reps.

2. I made chocolate chip cookies with dark chocolate M&Ms last night. I really wanted to make them with peanut butter M&Ms, but the store didn't have them. Boo. We're going to a BBQ later today with Alexander, so that's what the cookies are for. They turned out really good.

3. This is cute.

So I was poking about on queerlygen earlier, as one does when one is procrastinating writing one's remix (I do have an opening sentence, though!), and I thought I'd look back through my own fics and see what I had written that might qualify. My own definition of gen excludes non-canon pairings, so I don't have too many by that definition, but if I were to broaden the definiton to be stories about other than sex/romance/relationships, whether or not the people in them are in a non-canon relationship, I would have quite a few more.

Rest Stop (I Knew You When Remix)
Supernatural. No pairing. Dean is ftm. Sam and Dean do Sam and Dean type stuff like hunting and patching each other up after a hunt and having awkward conversations about things.

Morning Sunlight
Hikaru no Go. Hikaru/Akira. Hikaru thinks about Sai one morning while lying in bed with Akira.

Team Q
Harry Potter. Dean/Seamus. Dean and Seamus try to figure out what to do with their lives after leaving school and hit upon the idea of creating a queer superhero comic together.

Out of a Picture Book
Harry Potter. Dumbledore/Grindlewald. Just a little snapshot of Albus and Gellert and Ariana.

No Rules for This
Digimon. Daisuke/Ken. This is a little more relationship-focused than the others, but mostly it's about being a gay teen and trying to navigate things like Valentine's Day when the rules don't apply to you.

Our House
RPF. Jason Isaacs/Liam Neeson/Carrie-Anne Moss. Ficlets about parenting in a poly relationship.

Learning as You Go
RPF. Jude Law/Ewan McGregor. Ficlets about two guys raising a son together. Also includes one fic about having to explain to your kid that sometimes sex involves things that leave bruises, and that's okay. (I'm particularly fond of that one.)

I also have some Vampire Chronicles fics where Louis and Lestat are gay for each other while Lestat is obsessed with iPods or Dance Dance Revolution, while they receive odd souvenirs from Lestat's mother, and when Lestat accidentally kills David by reading Merrick to him and he and Louis set off on a cross-country trip to catch Anne Rice before any more innocent lives fall victim to the book's powers, in a parody of Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby.

I know it's considered a huge faux paus to say so in fandom, but I really think my writing is pretty awesome, and when I read over old stuff like this, I'm always impressed. Randomly, here are some other fics I read and thought were awesome while going through my old fics tonight.

Holidays
RPF. Jude Law/Ewan McGregor. Jude and Ewan meet as kids on holiday and then again later as adults.

Drawing his knees up, Jude wraps his arms around them. He wants to ask this boy why he hates school, and if it's because the other boys beat him up and call him queer and poof and Judy. Well, they wouldn't call him Judy, but they might call him some other girl's name.

No Explanation
LotRiPS. Dom/Elijah. Cyberpunkish ficlet where Elijah is obsessed with revisiting the time when he and Dom were still together.

Elijah flips the switch and leans back against the wall, breathes deep, eyes closed so he can't see himself disappear. The one time he'd looked, he'd ended up collapsed on the floor in a puddle of his own vomit, his hand and arm transparent in a way flesh and bone definitely shouldn't be. The technician on duty had fixed him up, no problem, but it's not something Elijah can easily forget. That doesn't stop him from using the machine, though. He just makes sure he closes his eyes when he gets in. He can still feel it, though, and sometimes that's enough to make him sick, leave him feeling nauseated on arrival.

Rude Awakening
Brokeback Mountain. Alma. A missing scene. Alma's reaction to seeing Ennis and Jack together.

She read Alma Jr. a story; Snow White was her favorite now and Alma'd been reading it every night for near on two weeks. Her voice didn't break and she didn't say don't you wait for your prince, 'cause he ain't comin', or other things a four-year-old wouldn't understand.

All but the Bitter Residue
Harry Potter. Sirius/Remus. In the days following Voldemort's defeat, Remus struggles to come to terms with betrayal and loss.

It's not til a few days later that he finally picks it up, muttering Reparo under his breath. He stuffs his wand back in his pocket and slides the photo out of its frame. It doesn't want to tear at first, but once he gets it started it rips straight down between Sirius and James. James is too busy making eyes at Lily to notice anything wrong, but Sirius looks startled for a moment before Remus crumples him up and tosses the scrap into the bin.

He puts the photo back in its frame and sets it on the bedside table. The Remus in the picture keeps laughing at Peter's joke, but his eyes are focused on the ragged edge where Sirius used to be.

These are not fics I would normally have picked out as favorites of mine. They're ones I'd kind of forgotten about, honestly, but reading over them brought back how much I really loved them (especially that last one).

Title: Honey and Clover vols. 1-4 (out of 10)
Author: Umino Chica
My Rating: 2/5

This is a ladies slice-of-life manga about college students at an art school. I wanted to like this series, since it seems to be pretty popular, but I just...didn't. It's cute, but I wish it would decide if it wants to be a cute college slice of life thing or if it wants to be wacky crack, because I don't like the combination of the two. Also, the story is not keeping my interest for this many volumes. I had really meant to try and read the full series since it's only ten volumes, but I tried to read volume five and I was just bored and finally thought, Why am I forcing myself to read this just so I can say I read the whole thing? So I gave up on it.

I also was weirded out by the fetishisation of Hagumi's childlikeness, both in terms of her looks/size and her personality. Not only does it make it kind of icky for guys to be in love with her, but I'm just kind of over that obsession with female innocence/purity. It's not special and attractive. It's just kind of icky.