Very busy lately, preparing for Impending Life Change and taking care of miscellany. Apologies to people I was supposed to
beta for over the last few weeks, and to people who are looking for betas now. I hope I'll have time for it again if/when things start to settle down, but until then, please don't take it personally if I don't come by to read your posts.
Gah, and writing, forget it. I've already flaked out on two of four 'fests. This weekend is supposed to be for writing
Remix. I can't figure out what to do. My assignment is tough this year. *scrunchy face*
On to more serious things. Last Saturday, my mom, my sister and I drove down near Philadelphia to visit
my 90-year-old great-aunt, my mom's aunt, who's been ill, but is recovering, since falling and puncturing a lung (and subsequently developing a strep infection) a few weeks ago. We had to suit up to go into her room: gowns, gloves, masks. She has a trach tube and is on a ventilator, and she can't speak although she can move her lips, and her are wrists restrained so she doesn't pull out the tube, so she mostly lies there and looks uncomfortable; that was difficult to watch and imagine what she's going through; but her face just lit up when she eventually recognized us. Even if she doesn't remember we were there, she was happy that morning.
The Romantic scholar, slash writer and icon maker
Atara S---- (
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astarte59) passed away one week ago yesterday. Although I knew she was ill with Multiple Sclerosis, she was young still, and I had no idea she was so sick; she was blogging with her usual enthusiasm just the week before. It's terribly sad news. Her
essays on the Byronic hero helped solidify my thesis topic at school, and her other essays on, say,
Picard/Q slash were just plain fun reads (even if they ran just a little too far with the argument sometimes). I have
her book on the Byronic hero in film, fiction and television, which is another fun and interesting read. She was a
House fan, too, and posted sometimes in the meta comms. ... We corresponded for a little while a year or two ago, and I was supposed to write her an email-letter about my academic path and how she'd played such an integral part in it. I never got around to it. I wish I had; she should have known about it. Now, I think the best I can do is tell all of you.
All is not grief in the land, however. For instance, there are still
minor celebrities to ogle. Case in point: a recently posted black-and-white
portrait photograph of Joe Flanigan, care of
sheafrotherdon. I keep going back to study it some more. He's not the most immediately attractive of men, at least not for me, but the more I look, the more I ... want to keep looking. At the asymmetry of so much of his face—under his eyes, beside the base of his nose, his eyebrows and the muscles above and between them, his nostrils, his nose itself, the crease in his lower lip, the curve of his five o'clock shadow, his hair. At his narrow shoulders (so obvious in the zip-up fleece Sheppard wears, yet often concealed by his bulky military gear, biceps and weapons). At his eyes, of course, which, as many people over at that post have pointed out, gaze at you with far more startling, haunting presence than most or all of the other people included in the photographer's online gallery. Perhaps it's attributable to JF being an actor, able to expertly school his features so that even a neutral expression is compelling. Because it isn't "neutral." Can that expression be captured in a single emotion or phrase? What would you call it?
There are some fics I've managed to read over the past week or two, but I can't remember them right now. I'll come back at some point to rec 'em.
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