somniloquence

I have a ton of things I want to say about the Homeland finale, but I'm afraid of being all Miss Negativepants, so I'm thinking about it for a while. In the meantime, meme!!

( That Yuletide meme )

I am home, as of early this morning, and the less said about the trauma of yesterday the better, probably, otherwise I might devolve into a foam-mouthed pitbull of rage. Short story: flight cancelled from Dulles to Newark, which I only found out because I obsessively check the web site, one hour before we were to leave; can't get flight home for at least two more days, Keith wants me gone; decide to take train to Newark if I can get one, get on train as it's in final boarding; rush through Newark, have breakdown at ticket agent when I can't print boarding pass because of the schedule change; get through horrid security and rush to terminal to find out flight is late; keeps getting later in 15 minute increments; finally takes off hours late, longest flight ever in history of flight; plane is so hot that everyone is stripping down to their under layers except me; so dehydrated I can hardly breathe (3-hour train ride was hot, too); last suitcase off, though considering the day, still glad it came at all. And that's with all the extra fun stuff like empty gas tank left out.

Dad insisted on picking me up, which meant drive home took app. 3 years longer than it should.

There's a lot to do, but I just can't get the motivation to do it. My face hurts so much -- I don't know if it's something in my skin care routine being changed, getting sun and wind burned on NY's as we wandered around the Mall and memorials, or what, but my cheeks have the consistency of an orange rind and they really really hurt. I'm enjoying the colder air after all the overheating (because it was so bone-breakingly cold the whole time, it seemed like the transportation systems were in overdrive on the heat in pretty much everything I was on) right now, and drinking the violet tea I picked up in NYC, but... right now I just don't want to do anything. I'm so effing tired and kind of weirdly dispirited (this little misadventure cost me quite a bit of money I hadn't budgeted for).

But I have pics to post and stories to tell. And there's a whole Yuletide archive that I haven't even had the chance to look at!

Oh, and hey, the reveal happened during all this, too. So, I wrote two stories this year, which could not have been more different from each other: Safe for omphale23, a Band of Brothers extra from the pinch hit list about Winters and Nixon right after Eindhoven; and The Mirrorball Malefaction Misapprehension, my primary Yuletide story for Nomie (metonymy), a Middleman story about nefarious deeds on New Year's Eve. It sounds like some people enjoyed them, so I'm really glad, and I'm especially happy that a lot of people felt my Middleman voices were spot-on and the dialog sounded like the show. I can't tell you how much I agonized about that!

For mlyn, 5 things the men saw between Nixon and Winters they weren't supposed to see (Band of Brothers).

1. When they were yet to jump, in the days leading up to Operation Overlord when everyone was tense and worried, Bull saw Lt. Nixon and Lt. Winters standing together in the dark outside the CP. It looked like they were reading some kind of map or something, but in the low light, it was hard to tell. Nixon fished a cigarette out of his pocket and as he fumbled for his lighter, Lt. Winters took it out of his hand to light Lt. Nixon's cigarette. You wouldn't even have thought nothing about it except that as he gave the lighter back, Lt. Nixon looked up at him with a little smile on his face, and Lt. Winters stared back, just a little longer than normal.

2. After Sobel tried to court-martial Dick, you'd have believed it was Nix who had his balls in a vise. Nix was practically spitting fire, all his cool reserve and flippant distance suddenly taking a hike. It didn't surprise Harry, not really, because he'd always wondered about them. It was that time Nix had gotten up during a briefing, grabbed Dick's cup and poured him coffee before pouring his own cup, that made Harry start wondering in the first place. Nix gave it to Dick and sat down, and they never even really looked at each other, like they'd been together for years and lived in their own private world.

3. He hadn't been Capt. Winters's orderly for very long before he figured out that Capt. Nixon was a part of the job, too. He was just... always there. He'd disappear on a recon, or hop off somewhere for leave, but the minute he got back, he was with Capt. Winters. Once, when he left the farmhouse Capt. Winters was quartered in, about a half hour after Capt. Nixon had left, he recognized Capt. Nixon's dark form in the shadows, and as he went around the corner to his own quarters, he saw Capt Nixon go back inside, and then a few minutes later, the light in Capt. Winters's room went out.

4. Capt. Winters was a hard guy to figure out. Mr. Straight Arrow, and all that, the strange ideas that a lot of the men had about him. Capt. Nixon made a lot more sense to people, but Lipton sort of liked how stand-up Capt. Winters was. But it wasn't like he didn't think the world of both of them. They had qualities, together and apart, that made them different from the other officers. You could see they were closer than most other officers, too. Everyone had friends, but Lipton wasn't sure that he'd ever seen anyone do what they would do for each other. One night Capt. Nixon went on a bender, tearing around their little patch of Holland looking for as much booze as he could find. He was so drunk they thought he would die of alcohol poisoning. After he puked all over Capt. Winters's boots, all Winters did was smile at him, drag him back to where he was bunked, and clean off his boots before putting Nixon to bed. Most guys would have clocked him.

5. Right after Winters got his promotion to captain, Lt. Nixon was checking in with him about something he'd found on a recon. Everyone was getting ready to move out so the building was mostly empty, and they probably thought Doc Roe was gone, too, but he just turned his head a little as he packed the last of his stuff and saw them there, talking. Lt. Nixon nodded at Winters, and when he turned to go, he just barely--really, if you didn't have good eyes and hadn't been watching, you'd never have noticed--ran his fingers along the palm of Capt. Winters's hand. Roe slipped out of the building before Nixon could see him.

I think there are only about five Band of Brothers fans out there who'd care about this in the slightest, and only one who wasn't at the con, but this is the vid I premiered at Escapade this past weekend, anyway.

After Rain
Fandom: Band of Brothers
Artist: Oysterband
File: 28.6MB QT Divx avi (as always, I strongly recommend VLC media player, linked at my site, though this file is much more pixelly than usual and I can't seem to correct it)
Summary: Even in the worst storm, there is shelter in love and friendship.

All feedback is welcome, here or privately -- no, really. Good, bad, indifferent... it's the silence that kills. Not that this is a big fandom, though, I know.

I don't have much to say about the con. It was weird being in southern California again after all this time, knowing sis_r was not just a few hours' drive away. Even though we only got together during my Escapade vacation a few times, it was always something I knew we could do if we wanted to. The palm trees and sunshine and birds of paradise bring back a lot of feelings for me.

I loved seeing my friends who were able to make it (so many didn't!) and the vid show went surprisingly smooth this time, despite my forgetting to give people the rundown on how to behave (I find it so hard to believe that so many people have no ability to show common decency for the fellow audience members). Also surprising considering the personal traumas beforehand, and that there were only four of us doing setup that usually takes a lot more. I spent a lot of time on the beach that is so close to the hotel, taking pics with my digital camera (bad ones, though) and trying to get the hang of it. black_bird_777 and I got stuck at Sea-Tac for six hours on Thursday with the most absurdly delayed series of flights I've ever experienced (taxiing back to the terminal TWICE on different planes) and that didn't start things out well for me, either -- we got up at 4 a.m. to catch a 3 p.m. flight, basically, and I had a hard time recovering from the fatigue; it isn't helped by the new pills I'm taking which make me so freaking sleepy I spend all day yawning uncontrollably. I'd planned to make up for the "spend the day in LA sightseeing" that blackbird and I always do before the con but which I missed last year due to my sister coming home from the hospital, but Alaska Airlines stole our entire day from us. I like going other places, but I sure as shit hate getting there, especially lately on these doomed flights.

I think both panels I helped out on went okay, the first ones I've co-modded since the Big Skinner Panel Debacle of 2000 (or whatever year it was). I didn't get to spend time with a lot of the people I'd earmarked to spend time with, but that seems to always be a problem. thevetia gave us local LA expert directions on how to get to LAX from Ventura using surface roads and the PCH (we drove by Neptune's Net so fast I never got to really see it, my only Fast and the Furious landmark so far), and we made it to the airport this morning in not just record time, but totally stress-free on a Monday morning rush hour in the rain. Thevetia, you have been elevated to goddess status.

I haven't been updating much before the con, and I wanted to say thank you to the folks who gave me virtual roses... your thoughfulness really touches me, and I appreciated it, even if I didn't update soon enough to tell you. A while ago I tried trimming down my flist, which was next to impossible, and even though it's getting too hard for me to read, I finally gave up after I'd done a bit of whacking -- nothing personal, as they always say, just me trying to manage with the folks who still share some commonalities, etc. etc. I find it really hard to unfriend folks, even if we've drifted off a ways, unless they jettison me first!

Right now, I'm just happy to be home with Le Puss, and I have to get cracking on really trying to plan this class for spring quarter, even though I haven't got a clue what I'm doing.