Um. Just as a fair warning, I'm more or less ranting (in a negative way) here, because it's 5 AM and my brain inhibitions have turned off. If you watched Avengers and loved it and can't bear any criticism about it, please don't click this. This isn't an objective review; this is just me talking about my personal preferences, which I know for a fact are wildly different from everyone else's.

( ... )

Neil Gaiman's coming to Chicago this Friday, and I did not hear about this, and now all the registration spots have filled up WHY GOD WHY

I don't even want to talk to him. There is honestly nothing for me to say beyond, "I grew up on you, and I think your ideas gleam with the brilliance of a thousand moons, and even when I don't like your books I still trust your storytelling completely and utterly."

I JUST. WANT TO SIT THERE. AND LISTEN TO HIM GIVE SPEECHES ABOUT CHILDREN'S BOOKS AND THE NARROW AND ARBITRARY LIMITATIONS OF THE GENRE CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM AAAAAHHHHHHHH WHY

I know The Hobbit trailer has been out for a while now, but I rewatched it again the other day, and I was hit by the strongest wave of nostalgia that I've felt in a long time. So a confession: Lord of the Rings was basically my first love, and the level and intensity of devotion and obsession I felt for it in middle school and high school have never been matched by anything ever since. I read the books when I was 10, and when I went to watch the movies in theaters, every year as they came out, I was one of those crazy purists who knew exactly which lines they'd changed or which scenes they'd removed. I read The Silmarillion and something like 12 volumes of the Histories of Middle-earth books and Unfinished Tales and The Tolkien Bestiary and even The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien and I think you get the picture. If you think I'm losing it a bit over Loki right now, just know that that doesn't even hold a candle to my love for LOTR. Nothing will ever supersede it in my heart.

I guess it might be a bit surprising then that I wasn't actually that excited when I heard that they were going to make The Hobbit into a movie. The problem is that I never really considered that book properly part of Middle-earth. Tolkien wrote it before he had any idea he was going to turn it into LOTR, and he had no idea that Bilbo's magic ring was the Ring, and there's basically none of the gravitas and mythological feeling that permeates LOTR in The Hobbit. Also the writing was really consciously juvenile and I didn't like it even when I was 10. (I mean, to be fair, he started it because he told the beginning of The Hobbit to his children as bedtime stories, but that just proves my point.)

But then, I watched the trailer again. And Thorin Oakenshield started singing. And those long shots of the New Zealand landscape started panning across the screen and there was Gandalf exploring Moria and Galadriel planning the assault on Dol Guldur and Rivendell, and the realization hit me then that I could go back to Middle-earth again. In movie form, with the slightly silly writing filtered out, this would be an amazing dramatic story. Chills down my spine and I didn't think my heart could handle it.

It would be like going home.

Now excuse me while I go cry in the corner over the strength of my love for fictional worlds.

( It's 1:30 AM and tomorrow I have a neuro midterm but I just realized quite violently that Loki's character is going to change completely in Avengers. )

And I hope it tears out a few hearts and brings about tons of character development. *glee*

Hello new friends!

♥

Welcome to amcw177, boombangbing, easytigergrrr, plumerri, settiai, koyaaniisqatsi, ximizi and tuseday_gabe!

Super excited to get to know you all, erm, before April 27th/May 4th comes along and we all spontaneously combust, I guess? BUT IN THE MEANWHILE, WE WILL HAVE THE BEST FUN.

So time for the obligatory introduction meme! Please comment with 10 completely random facts about yourself.

( Self-introduction + 10 facts this way~ )

[T]his is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed.

- From Prayer by Jorie Graham

My sleep schedule and rhythm has been devolving into this crazed spiral of drop-dead-like-a-sack some nights and don't-stop-sleep-is-for-the-weak other nights. It's great, but it's okay. It really is.

I've always been strangely possessive about my time spent in the dead of night. Even now when I have my own room and no parents who drop in, I don't like it when other people get up at 5 AM and ruin the stillness of the apartment. I feel this dart of irritation shoot through me and think at them, "Get the fuck to sleep. Why are you even up. What are you doing. This is my time and space and you're not allowed in." It doesn't even make any sense, except when I think about how much I loved that week during spring break when I had the entire apartment to myself. Maybe I'm really suited for living alone, at least for a while. I should try it some time in the future, if the rent for a studio doesn't break me.

...

It's spring quarter of my third year now, and I feel ready to be done with college. Still a bit more to go, but not a full year ahead of me anymore. Last quarter was the best one I've had here yet, and if it had been like this the entire time, then things would be different. I would probably be different as well, though. Maybe I wouldn't have learned as much. At least a year ago, I hadn't known how to articulate what it was exactly I'd gained in college that was so different from what I'd learned in high school, and now I know that it's wisdom. It's still laughable to think that I have much life experience outside of the rarefied sphere of academia, but there it is, at least I have some now.

I keep thinking, three years can see your entire life changed, but no, in all the tangible ways, my life trajectory hasn't faltered in the slightest. In other ways, though, college was a bit of rough patch and I skidded and fell for a stupidly long time. Mental and social inertia. I'm too good at clutching onto things and holding on. You'll have to do better next time.

It's a good thought, though: next time. I still have the next phase of my education, and that's the best part of this entire thing: structure and cycles and the firm surety of it all. There will be a next time and it will be better and I will be smarter in more ways than one. So it goes.

Still alive, still studying for the MCAT. It's this Friday, and thank everything because I'm so ready to be done and have this particular stretch of agony be over. I'd taken classes from October to end of March, so it's been an entire half year of feeling worn thin and holding my breath and gritting my teeth. 1 PM this Friday and it'll be over over over.
__

Due to some of the machinations of my friends and being the long-term recipient of quite a lot of gushing over Gtalk, I've slipped irrecoverably into the Thor / Avengers fandom.

... It's really more honest to say the Loki fandom, though. >__> He's exactly the type of character I always go for. Because! Because! He's intelligent! and razor-sharp! and in so much pain that he's losing his mind and it's a beautiful thing to watch. Not to diminish the horror of what he does later, but that sliver of hope for redemption is what draws me every time to this sort of villain, and once I'm done with the MCAT, I might even spew out all my thoughts and feelings about his characterization in Thor.

Loki is just perfect. And let me give some context to that by saying that I was obsessive about BBC Sherlock from January until March and never in that three-month period did I ever consider Sherlock or John among my favorite characters. (They're a great team and their dynamic is lovely, but neither of them individually is that amazing.) I watched Thor once, and Loki was probably in half the film, and a day later he was firmly embedded within my top 10 favorite characters in all the stories I've ever encountered. (For full disclosure, I guess I have to admit that I only have 10 favorite characters ever. >____>)

I'm really looking forward to Avengers.

It feels like treading water, honestly. Sometimes you go under for a bit, sometimes you stay up longer; either way there is never quite enough air. I am balancing this out as well as I can. I go out to eat with my friends, play segments of Birth by Sleep from time to time, read a few pages of a novel. But it's still nose to the grindstone, chin up and walk the tightrope and everything may turn out well, knock on wood, if the creek don't rise.

I cannot wait for the second half of April.