The power of waffling.

I’ve always said, repeatedly ever since I got my lj and started to engage with fandom, that I didn’t want to fragment my life. I don’t want to keep my real life and my fandom life separate; I don’t want to keep my real life friends separate from my online ones. The idea of even attempting to do that is ridiculous, because there’s so much overlap and because I’m so heavily engrained in internet culture as part of what I do actively in real life.

Working at probation was hard for me because I HAD to keep my fandom life out of my real life so I wound up doing things like locking my entire LJ, deleting entries when real life people found them, and signing up for Facebook as a J-pop idol and not myself, haha. It was all very frenetic and stressful.

But now I have a job where my co-workers write Smallville fanfic and call each other Lostheads. So, yeah. I feel free to unseparate everything once again, and it feels great.

Except. Except.

This whole LJ thing.

Ugh, this whole LJ thing. Should I stay or should I go? Should I attempt to turn my livejournal into something that can adapt into this new phase of my life, or should I just start over (the way, for example, <a href=http://eyeballman.com/blog>Dorrie</a> has so charmingly done, the way I have been trying and awkwardly failing to do here on this blog) and make something completely new?

And if I want to make a blog that is completely new, can I stand to lose that connection that I have had with my LJ community? I mean, the answer is really, really, no. But at the same time, with that sense of connectedness comes a sense of expectation, and I want to break away from that as much as from LJ specifically. But then - what are my options?

Can I have both?

I want both. I want to have LJ and LJ’s community and I want to have a space that feels self-contained, separate, apart, like starting over. Something not particularly tied to fandom, but specifically tied to me.

The tricky part is that I, at this point, can’t and don’t want to extricate myself from fandom. But at the same time, I want a blog that doesn’t come with fandom expectations.

So, to sum up:

1) I want a blog that doesn’t come with fandom expectations.
2) But I don’t want to separate out my life into fandom/real life
3) I want to keep my connections to my LJ friends and my fandom community on LJ
4) But I’m still quite upset and unhappy with the prospect of coming back to LJ itself.

So, yeah. I just don’t know what to do with myselllllf.

Do they make a patch for that?

Me: i’ve had it. i have had it! YOU AND I ARE QUITS, LIVEJOURNAL. I MEAN IT THIS TIME.
LJ: Whatever. Three months and you’ll be crawling back. You always come crawling back.
Me: THAT’S WHAT YOU THINK. SEE THIS? THIS IS THE FLAMING SIGN OF MY COMMITMENT TO JUSTICE!
LJ: …you realise that shirt’s not actually on fire.
Me: OH, SCREW YOU. GOODBYE FOREVER, LJ.
LJ: yeah, yeah, don’t let the new portal blind you on the way out!

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Remember, remember

I have sort of wasted this whole entire day, and I had great plans for great things I was going to do and ways I was going to make today productive and special. Instead I mostly wound up sleeping too much and eating leftover halloween candy, and vainly trying to make edits on a fic that seems to be a deep regression of my writing goals back to the year 2002, and reading Hikaru no Go fic that i’ve already read, because fandom has stalled the fic production liines, to my infinite sadness.

I just reread Mirabella’s 5 Things fic, Issues, and was momentarily struck with the kind of emotional paralysis that comes when you read something truly superbly crafted and put together and well-written - that onslaught of ‘ohmygod, there’s no way i’ll ever be that good, that careful, that polished, that crafted, that good at creating sheer loveliness‘ that I assume is a natural kind of writer’s envy.

Only today, in that moment, I started thinking about how much I wish I could just push that kind of thinking aside and believe in my own ability as much as I have believed in the abilities of everyone around me. That got me started thinking of all the things I want to give myself as a writer and as a human being.

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No really, not another post about bump of chicken.

In no particular order, my life since August has consisted of the following things.

1.

As previously mentioned, Sam made me get facebook. It has been an experience. It makes my computer function three times more slowly and makes me spend hours sending my poor blue rabbit Yanagi-chan into coves to fight toxic monsters, where he ultimately loses and I spend the next three days trying to build up enough money to buy myself exotic moccasin socks so I won’t die, which of course means I instantly go into battle and die anyway and have to start all over again. I thought Facebook was about never keeping tabs on all your high school and college friends so you could see what kind of dork lives they’re leading now, but apparently it’s really all about something called Superpoke and letting your friends send you virtual garden gnomes. The internet is so strange.

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I’ll pull you out through the space between the bars - admit that you’re dirty, the world is all yours.

Epon scolded me last night.  “I feel guilty when I go to your wordpress and see all these comments going ‘AJA WHERE ARE YOU’ when you are right here!”   I was like, But I haven’t gone anywhere! and she was like, but you haven’t updated! and I was like, I have nothing to say!

And I still don’t think I have anything to say.  But it seems Epon has made me her slave, so I suppose I will update.

I made a list of things I wanted to talk about on this post so that I could actually have things to say. Because really, honestly the only time I ever get the urge to update lately is when the only thing, I swear, that I want to say is BUMP OF CHICKEN BUMP OF CHICKEN OH MY GOD I LOVE YOU BUMP OF CHICKEN. So I figured I would get that out of the way first.

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