somniloquence

Ugh, I haven't posted in an age. I was doing pretty good for a while, recovering from that flu and all, and then I kind of relapsed a bit and was battling the cough again and feeling run-down. I think it's the new medication I'm trying out, one that's supposed to prevent needing to pee all the time. Among the legion of side effects mentioned was feeling congested, sinus congestion, cough, and feverish skin. Yay. It was just hard to tell whether it was the drugs or relapsing. But it does seem to work at night. I'm not certain yet whether the side effects are worth it, though -- I mean, I still have to get up about a billion times a night, but at least that's down from a squajillion. It also makes me really itchy about an hour after I take it, just in time to flail around in bed.

Then I got a migraine on Monday post-workout, which meant I missed the Passover seder at belmanoir and mrs_laugh_track's place, which I always enjoy. And it was still there at the dentist on Tuesday, which made the ordeal of the dentist extra special fun, and also last week sometime I woke up with my jaw completely locked and in a wrong position, and spent about three days trying to get my mouth to open wide enough for food, and it's still really tender and slipping in and out of position.

They gave me the bad news that I have three cavities. I was so depressed. I have never had cavities until a few years ago, and I'm eating better than I ever have in my life and drink way less sugar and stuff than I ever have, but every time there is something wrong with my teeth. My fucking body is falling apart with age, and it sucks. Since I have no insurance, being a freelancer, this is all out of pocket, and I have to have two appointments, because my mouth is so small that it's really hard for me to handle lengthy procedures. I am really dreading Monday like crazy.

While I was sick, I was overcome with this desire to see Steve and Kayla clips from Days of Our Lives, back in the 1980s. And also their reunion in 2006. I don't know why, but it was obsessive, and when I looked on YouTube I found hundreds of clips of them, whereas when I last looked, probably about 2009, there wasn't all that much. I have been positively WALLOWING in Steve and Kayla goodness. I had tea today with sdwolfpup, and we were lamenting that state of being where you're just OVERCOME with feels for a pairing or a fandom, and no one else is -- especially if it's long past its heyday -- and there's no one to share it with, so you're just sitting there obsessively watching things and just DYING to share them with someone, but of course you can't, so they build up in you and you feel like you'll explode.

That's what it's been like for me for the past few weeks. I discovered a couple folks have made playlists of clips edited solely for Steve and Kayla's storyline, and it's just...I cannot get enough. And seriously, like I was telling SDW, I can draw straight lines from Steve to almost everyone I have loved in the past 20 years in fandom, or at least make a venn diagram where different aspects of personalities overlap in huge circles. He is like this crucible character who forged everything I want in a fannish BSO. (Like, I was thinking the other night watching Walking Dead that there's an arrow-straight, short line from Steve to Daryl Dixon. It's a lovely symmetry, or maybe a fearful one?)

I didn't even see the storyline with him leading up to where they decided to redeem him and make him an antihero and supercouple with Kayla -- so that has been really cool. He was a fucking PSYCHO, too, which is really entertaining. The only thing I'd ever seen was him kidnapping Hope in the Miami storyline in '85, where he ties her up and torments her, and I remember thinking, wow, who is THAT guy, and also why, if he's threatening Hope, do she and him have such awesome chemistry and a kind of strange almost-friendship quality? Then I didn't see him again until he told Victor he wouldn't follow Kayla anymore, and they beat him up and she found him and took care of his sexy wounds and made him take his eye patch off. I was hooked by then. So it's been such a hoot to see all these clips in the interim, of him coming to Salem, tormenting Kayla while falling for her, slowly turning into a good guy. I never got to see any of that at the time, and I thank god for the fans who kept those freaking videotapes all those years instead of, like me, recording over the good stuff.

I wish I could figure out how to DL the clips off YouTube -- the latest downloader I can find doesn't seem to work on whatever encoding YouTube's doing right now, and none of the tape/dvd offers I've found seem to have current addresses, or at least, no one's replying. Because man, I want to make a vid. The vidmakers are just...not very good, they don't have a vidding aesthetic, really, it's just throw long talky face clips at the screen, and I feel this need to make something EPIC and full of feels for Steve and Kayla. I'm going to keep looking, because it's like feels threat level red here, and it needs to be done, even if there's no one to share it with. Like SDW said, at least I'd have one good vid that I could watch over and over on my own whenever I needed a shot of EPIC LOVE STORY.

Ahem. Anyway, that really did help me get over my flu and stuff.

Now if I could just get over making my vid for Vidukon, which is due this weekend, arg, and my Club Vivid vid, and the work piling up, and everything else, I'd be good to go.

So, how are you all? What's shakin', bacons?

Ooo, sdwolfpup had a great TV meme today that I am gakking and filling out, because I don't want to think about things like impending joblessness and etc. I'm sure it will contain spoilers because so many people think even your opinion is a spoiler, so you are warned.

Also, there is still time to send me anonymous comments in her vidding truth meme -- you can say nice things or tan my hide, or both, and stay hidden!
http://sdwolfpup.livejournal.com/406338.html?thread=8385090#t8385090

( TV watching memes are always fun )

Work, work, work... way too much and I have to work this weekend and all I want to do is think, watch, and talk about my new insane fannish glee, my soap opera madness, Steve and Kayla back on Days of Our Lives! But instead I have to work, and then more work, and then try not to let my stomach churn in dread of going to NY next week and all our tenth anniversary copy and then the massive redesign launch... gah. And a big fat wah.

In between the madness, though, I was pondering why nearly 20 year old soap characters from the cheesy '80s would make me so happy right now (besides the obvious bit of nostalgia for a time before my life went to hell in a handbasket) and I realized that their story, especially Steve's as an individual character, was an early roadmap to what would become my fannish interests and kinks, for lack of a better word (I've never really had a lot of kinks in the fannish sense, because my main interest has always been quality writing or vidding or meta discussion, rather than the type of story/vid/topic -- but I'm as much a sucker as the next person for something that hits all the right buttons).

I didn't even know about media fandom back then, and the intarwebs were a mere glimmer in the eyes of the Arpanet guys. My only experience with organized fandom was SF fandom, but that was a different ball o' wax in most respects, at least in the early '80s. Primarily literary based, for one thing. Slash was a symbol on a keyboard. I'd never given pause to even think about the types of stories I responded to, or the tropes that appealed most to me.

( It's not just nostalgia, it's the imprint of my fannish mind! )

A couple people thought I was mocking the show because I've gone on and on about the cheese factor. But no, really -- it makes me happy to cringe in embarassment on this. Normally, my embarassment threshold is lower than a snake could crawl through, but in this case, I'm all over the cheese. I wear the cheese, dude. Even the hair-ful and terrifying '80s flashbacks they've been running, I'm so there. It goes down smooth like Velveeta.

Also, did I mention scars? Because dude, losing an eye... that's like the scar zenith. And it got even better when Kayla went deaf and mute and Steve learned sign language for her. So there were like, double scars! And he convinced her to have surgery, but they didn't know she had regained her voice until their wedding, when she spoke her vows!! Yay! Scars, emotionally and physically! Ahem. But anyway. Yeah, this is the blueprint of my fannish happiness, and I never even knew it till now. This has been a good week, just because Steve and Kayla are back, and they're totally doomed.

So, if I understand correctly, one half of the most wonderfullest soap couple ever, Steve and Kayla on Days of Our Lives, is coming back to Salem today, and then the other half arrives later. I haven't watched Days in a really long time -- every once in a great while I tune in to see if I recognize anyone, but the last time I did, everyone was getting killed off and that was kind of depressing -- all the old favorites of mine from back in the day. I never cared a lot about Bo and Hope, I had always been partial to the oldsters like Marlena and Roman/John, but things got awfully convoluted on the Roman/John score by the time I was easing off watching, and I never really did find out how that panned out.

I started watching the show back in the beginning, because it had Peter Brown (in the icon, on the right) from Laredo, the one Western my sister and I had been able to sneak past my mom in watching (she hated Westerns and we loved them, and so we had to find clever ways to make sure she wasn't around to snap off that old Sylvania black and white TV we had long after everyone else had color -- color! -- and tell us to get our butts back outside). (Back in those days, kids could range far and wide to play, and we were always outside, playing in totally dangerous places, mind you, but no one thought anything about it. There was certainly no such thing as the ghastly play-date concept.)

Anyway, I digress. Over the years I went in and out as a regular watcher, but it was always my favorite soap, along with The Doctors and Edge of Night, even when General Hospital and All My Children were all that. In large part because of Steve and Kayla. I hate that people still to this day, even though no one on the show called him that after he became a regular character, refer to him as Patch, because he has an eye patch (so dashing!). To me, that's like calling someone Hook if he has a hook for a hand, or referring to anyone by their disability. Sheesh. But I adored their operatic and romantic and doomed storyline. I would still, to this day, pay a large, large sum of money if I could get copies of the original eps where Kayla rescued him and they started to fall in love. OMG. I would watch it at lunch in our little break room on my first real career job, and my boss got so caught up in that that he joined me every day because he was so impressed by Stephen Nichols's acting and by Mary Beth Evans and it was just so amazing.

It was one of the first of what would become my infatuation with epic, against all odds romances, especially when good actors are doing the roles. Nichols has done lots of pilots and such, but he's never really broken out of the soap derby, and I've never figured out why, because he's really an amazing actor. Back then, he came onto the show in a one-time role as a thug hired by evil Victor to terrify pretty nurse Kayla and make her leave town, so that some secret or other would remain safe (that she knew about without knowing she knew). He had already been doing some terrifying of the show's power couple, Hope and Bo, and it turned out that Bo knew him somehow from the past. In his scenes with Hope, I just thought he was amazing, and the producers also noticed what they had, so they kept him around to be menacing, only of course he started to fall for Kayla from afar.

Finally, he told Victor that he wouldn't do it -- because he was falling for her! my kind of guy! -- and Victor sent his thugs to beat poor Steve to within an inch of his life, and Kayla was the one who found him. My heart soared. Even though she was deathly afraid of him, she took him to the little hovel he was living in, and fixed him up. At one point she had to coax him to allow her to take his eye patch off, and he didn't want her to see it, but she pointed out she was a nurse, and so he let her, and she fixed him up and went off to the hospital to get some more stuff. She promised she would return, and he struggled out of bed and went to the mirror with his hand over his eye, and made this stunned comment to himself that she didn't even flinch. My boss and I were sitting there all sniffly and with our mouths hanging open. I had never been so happy in my life.

At the time, I was taping things in case I didn't get to see them at work, and I would tape over each week's eps. I curse myself for not saving that tape, and the subsequent weeks as they got to know each other, scared though she was of him, and the way he felt he had to stay away from her because he was just a bad guy through and through. Gah. Why is hindsight always 20-20? I would have probably rewatched those tapes into oblivion, though.

A long time ago, sherrold sent me this note, which I did keep because it really does hit on what Days of Our Lives did so successfully for me then:

"From a new translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and it describes Ovid thusly:
[he was] obsessed with hopelessly besotted and doomed love in the most intense form imaginable, and lived for the moments where passion has become mythic, has achieved the unendurable intensity that lifts the whole episode onto the supernatural or divine plane.
Well, this immediately reminded me of you, and I think next time someone asks you for your style, you should say new-ovidian, or faux-ovidian, or something cool like that."

I loved that note (we had been discussing, on a list, what we thought our "styles" were in writing fic), and it was so true, and honestly, Days had a lot to do with that, Steve and Kayla had a lot to do with it. I think I'd honestly always felt that way, but it was seeing it portrayed there that I finally became aware of this love of the operatic (and it would also help explain why I love those really OTT operas!). Also, Steve was just hot, period, so... But everything I've been really fannish about since then has needed that quality -- it's one reason slash appeals to me in a lot of respects, because it's more of a difficult struggle for same sex couples even in today's era, but the het couples have all had this doomed quality -- Michael and Nikita, Buffy and Angel and Buffy and Spike, Mulder and Scully... I guess it explains why a lot of the major fandoms do nothing for me -- there's no struggle there.

So, yeah, this is a really loooong way of saying that Days is finally going to be back in rotation for me. I doubt there's any way they can recapture that magic (even before they left, their storyline was less engaging to me), but I'm more than willing to watch them, even just for the memories.