bironic

(as Stephen Colbert said until recently)

Doing: Move-related stuff. thedeadparrot helped me haul the world's greatest secondhand bed frame across town. My dad and sister came up for a few days for an initial round of painting. We did a nice gray in the main area that doesn't turn blue in the northwestern light, unlike in my current living room; an awesome purple-gray in the bathroom; and a bright yellow-green in the kitchen, something I'd wanted for ages.

Then we experimented with doing an ombre accent wall. The mid- and dark grays I picked are not quite in the right family, but the final product is growing on me. It looks like storm clouds or a misty forest canopy. Some pix.

stultiloquentia borrowed me to go strawberry picking. Yum! The farm had seven varieties. The one called Cleary was far and away my favorite. Sweet and bright, with a little white crown at the stem. Another called Cavendish came in second. I ate some fresh. The rest await the right recipes in the freezer. We had lunch under a tree.

(Did I mention the condo has a real fridge/freezer? The apartment freezer can't be more than 2 cubic feet and goes through unpredictable temperature cycles so everything ends up thawed and refrozen and speared through with ice crystals.)

This weekend I will be attending a small BBQ for the first time in two years. Inside? With multiple people? Honestly, I'm not sure I'm ready.

Going: The day science deemed me fully vaccinated against COVID, I drove to NY to see my family, who'd been ahead of us on the vaccination front. My sister and I then flew to Florida to visit our grandfather in anticipation of his 100th birthday! So I went from staying in the house except for bike riding and occasional double-masked grocery runs to sitting in a packed airport and visiting an elder care facility. Then spent time at both parents' houses unmasked. Zero to 60. What felt weirdest was how weird it didn't feel. Neither terrifying nor joyful. Like the pandemic had created a buffer between me and reality without my noticing, tamping down reentry emotions.

Fortunately, everything turned out fine. He was so happy to see us. The cold my sister came down with on the second day proved by virtue of both rapid and PCR testing to be indeed just a cold, and no one else caught it. His actual birthday went swimmingly last week, he reports. And now I'm back to staying mostly at home while getting more comfortable visiting with one or two friends at a time in their homes or in a car.

I also "went" to con_txt this past weekend. A lovely time, as usual, and extra sweet after having missed vidukon and wiscon. So proud of my friends for putting it together in its second virtual incarnation. Need to catch up on the vid shows.

Watching: A reality show called Secrets of the Zoo on Disney+, which follows veterinarians at the Columbus Zoo in Ohio. It's great for animal cuteness and education, but not great whenever they lose a patient.

Then I finished the first season of Star Trek: Lower Decks, inspired by cinco and celli at their panel on new Trek incarnations at con.txt. It did grow on me. As they promised, it talked back to TOS and TNG while showing a deep knowledge of and fondness for the franchise. The episode inspired by "Space Seed" and The Wrath of Khan did what JJ Abrams' Star Trek and Star Wars reboots should have done: taken a beloved original and told a new story while still paying homage to it visually/linguistically/thematically.

Next up, Discovery season three while I have this oops-I-forgot-to-cancel-after-the-free-trial month of Paramount+? Seasons one and two left me cold, but the panel did make a case for giving the show another try.

Reading: Sort of nothing? It's taking me ages to finish How to Be an Anti-Racist, which has nothing to do with the book and everything to do with my pandemic brain and lack of commute. I would like to read the Golem & the Jinni sequel that just came out. I'm in the queue at the library.

Vidding: On hiatus. It'll be interesting to see which idea breaks the dam.

How are you?

I churned through the short story collection The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories (2017) in the past few days because it was due back at the library. A decent read with lots of Middle Eastern, Asian and cross-cultural perspectives. Hardly any romance despite the title, which was fine. The first story, Kamila Shamsie's "The Congregation," came perhaps closest with its human protagonist longing for his lost djinn brother. A few authors had fun riffing on the mythology in sci fi and future-dystopian settings (E.J. Swift, Saad Z. Hossain, Jamal Mahjoub). I also particularly liked Kirsty Logan's "The Spite House," in which a djinn struggles with the simultaneous power and entrapment of finding they can grant wishes, and Sami Shah's "Reap," in which U.S. military staffers remote-monitoring a neighborhood with a Taliban operative witness a possession they can't explain. IMO the reprinting of Neil Gaiman's American Gods chapter on Salim and the ifrit was unnecessary, especially since another white author who'd notably written about djinn, Helene Wecker, came up with a new story for this volume.

Having djinn on the brain motivated me last night to open that languishing Jinni/Dustfinger crossover fic I swore to finish this year. It's not even long; I just lost the initial momentum in, er, 2016. Added a few lines, bridged a gap that had been bothering me, wrote a sentence that restored a little bit of my confidence that I can still do this fiction-writing thing.

I also finished a poorly acted movie called Dot the I (2003) that featured an infuriating plot about three men manipulating a woman plus an "edgy" message about the ethics and trickeries of moviemaking. However, as it also starred baby James D'Arcy, baby Gael Garcia Bernal and baby Tom Hardy, I couldn't look away. It has a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which seems fair. One critic praised an "unpredictable twist" toward the end of the film that you could only not see coming if you believe the main character would go out of her way to resume a relationship with a man after finding out [spoiler] he followed and filmed her for months without her knowledge despite her history of being stalked, swapped a marriage certificate for a release form and faked his own death to obtain an ~authentic performance~ from her. Bleh.

Anyway. The fic and the movie are clearly to blame -- or rather, to be credited -- for a nice dream I had this morning about kissing Tom Hardy for a long time on a couch. It carried me through a busy workday and another spate of depressing national news. Now, speed skating and snowboarding on TV.

How are/were your Tuesdays?

The Golem and the Jinni is over, leaving me filled with  :,(  :)  <3.

Their personalities and physical descriptions are different, but there were times when the Jinni reminded me of other characters I have loved. ( Marius, Dustfinger, Odo. Behind a cut for vague not-really-spoilers but just in case. )

My book crush on him remains undiminished. Will this lead to fic? I hope so. Because ( I want a lot of post-canon stories: )

The fact that somehow there are only three fics on the AO3 may help. Plus a long plane ride tomorrow followed by a few days of loosely structured vacation. But we'll see. Recent experience tempers expectations. It's a hard writing style to get right, and I'm not sure I'm up to meeting that level of characterization. Maybe jotting down those bunnies is as far as it goes. Or maybe I can channel my interest in the Jinni into finishing that Dustfinger poly story from last year.

I thought it would be fun to keep track of the movies I watch so at the end of the year I can remember what they were and to see how many I actually go through. What happened alongside this endeavor is that my decision-making process and my behavior immediately changed. I started trying to watch more to make the list longer. This week it occurred to me to switch from a numbered list to bullets. We'll see how that goes.

Here we are for Jan. 1 - Feb. 6:

( 24 movies )

(For the record, 6 of those were for vid research)

+ TV seasons: Mozart in the Jungle 1-2

...

Thanks for your feedback yesterday on Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. I decided to bail and picked up The Golem and the Jinni instead. Three pages in and it's already a pleasure to read. In fact, I'm debating whether to sit on it for a week and a half and bring it on the plane to/from Vancouver.

Speaking of which, went on a quest today for an outfit suitable for a gallery opening. Found this very pretty dress but it fit like a box, alas. Oh, haha, there was also a collection of dresses suitable for Star Trek cosplay. Will probably wear what I wore to cinco's wedding, then, or my gray plaid skirt + black top if that's not too casual; hard to tell. The trip was not entirely in vain, however; I got a green and blue gradient sweater.

We had a beautiful snowfall on Friday -- storybook icing on the tree branches once the winds died down, followed by a pink and orange sunset. All of our million inches of snow last winter was powder; none of it stuck like this. Boston Globe curated some shots. More forecast for tomorrow. Good luck to every one of us trying to get home from work in the middle of it!