in my life

I made a new friend on the bus today! I take the bus from the train station to work, and today both I and a guy I see everyday were late to the bus and started chatting. It turns out he's originally from Vancouver, and when I mentioned the TV/film production studios there, he told me he used to work in the industry there before he moved to Israel a few years ago. I didn't know anything he worked on cause he used to do mostly educational stuff, but apparently his wife worked as Mary McDonnell's personal assistant on BSG! :D So that was a fun fannish moment and he promised me stories about the cast. Of course, knowing him means that from now on I'm pretty much going to have to start a conversation every day which might get tiresome -- I need my quiet bus time in the morning -- but it will all be fine I am sure.

Today was a long (loooong) day. I'd asked to get some extra training sessions at work because when I first started the job they never actually trained me for what I'm doing today, and a lot of the time I feel like I'm missing big chunks of information which is why I can't make decisions that I would otherwise make independently. So I had some training sessions (including one with fellow fangirl, yay), but that took time and I spent the rest of the day speed-typing a gazillion emails until 8PM. So that was long and tiring. Also dude at work has decided to grow a mustache and I cannot tell him simply DUDE SHAVE IT OFF I STILL HAVE BANDOM PORNSTACHE PTSD NIGHTMARES. Instead I have told him he looks like Dick Fisk, iconic and bemustached 70s gay porn star, in the hopes that it would serve as enough incentive to rid him of it. Unfortunately all it did was make me think of Dick Fisk's cock every time I look at his mustache, and I can't even tell him that because I feel like it would be work-inappropriate. WOE ME.

In a effort to increase productivity I decided to sit at a coffee place instead of go home and crash as I usually do. Unfortunately -- there's that word again -- it's 11PM and they're kicking me out because apparently coffee places in my town (okay, in the mall in my town) close at 11. Sigh, yes, but I feel invigorated enough to continue typing at home, sitting up at everything.

I do not think I've used the word "invigorated" in my life until just now. It's all the regency AUs, I swear, they've seeped into my brain, all these odd little words and lack of contractions at the most inconvenient times. On the other hand, my vocabulary is usually restricted to like 10 words ("like", "usually", "mostly", "apparently", "anyway" and a few more stragglers) so maybe this is a good thing ("maybe" and "thing" are two important ones too.)

You know what else I'm doing tonight? Not going to the Bob Dylan concert, that's what. Being kicked out of the coffee place instead. Okay, okay, I'm going, sheesh.

(Oh yeah. And I've decided that if I get a high enough salary offer this week, I'm going to Edinburgh this summer. If I don't get one I might go anyway. Or I might go someplace else. I don't know. I want to fly to Europe, I haven't been there in ages (don't ask how long, it hasn't actually been ages, I am privileged etc but still this kind of trip ANYWAY). I really hope I get a nice salary offer. Really. Salaries are awesome.)

Admiral Bill Adama	IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi

I'M JUST SAYING. I should have gotten a more determined Adama pic but looking is haaard.

(And hey, look, Ashkenazi even has his own Tigh BroTP:



...although if you recognize the figure, not really.)

*

Two days ago on the train, a big burly businessman sat in front of me, dressed in a suit and tie, one hand holding a briefcase stuffed full of files and the other holding a tiny baby bunny. It was white and tiny and had tiny red eyes and fit right in the palm of his hand and looked like this. He asked me to hold it for him, and I said, "Um, sure," and eeeee baby bunny! Apparently the guy's daughter had convinced him to take the bunny home from a petting zoo a few days ago, but the bunny was small and scared and not eating so he was taking him back. Without even a cage. I love the idea of this guy walking around all day with a tiny bunny in his hand, not even in a cage (why wouldn't he have a cage? And where did they keep the bunny at home, in the tub?)

Anyway, that was my Thursday moment of lol. Yesterday's was reading yet another brilliant Purim fic, agonistes's Darth Vader Purim, The Office, which reads just like a The Office episode. "An evil vizier." Dwight scoffs. "I could think of five eviler viziers without even thinking about it."

Also there is The History of Two Conversations (On Paper) by takadainmate which, man, great Merlin fic just does not stop being great. There's so much good stuff, I can't even compose a rec list because it would be too long.

In TV news: Lost! House! BSG! ER-with-Doug-and-Carol-and-Carter-and-Benton! There was some good TV this week, do not expect me to be coherent.

I'm sure there are things I should be posting about. Definitely, there are things. Which I cannot recall.

The elections are tomorrow. Here's an awesome story: my roommate and her dad are both voting for Barak, and for days now he's been giving her speeches about how people just aren't getting that as much as they want Barak and the Defense Minister and so they're voting for a different candidate for Prime Minister, if his party doesn't get enough votes - like, 20 mandates - he's not even going to be able to be the Defense Minister. In the end, she talked her dad into calling the Labor party HQ (or whatever number they advertised in their website), and he talked to a bunch of campaign people saying "LISTEN YOU HAVE TO GET THIS MESSAGE OUT", and one hour later, the news started reporting Barak's statement saying exactly that. The little man can make a difference! However many people vote for Barak tomorrow, I am attributing one mandate to my roommate.

Happy Tu Bishvat. I didn't step outside all day long and saw no actual trees, nor ate any actual fruits. But! I ate chocolate. And cocoa is something that does grow on trees. So I feel like I have celebrated, on my part.

Okay, so I watched episode 3x09 of Battlestar Galactica and kept IMing sabrina_il my reactions even though I knew she wasn't there. Here is what I said, which can basically be relayed in one giant-fonted exclamation mark:
( BSG 3x09 )

I should not have conversations about politics with my roommate EVER, because there is no faster way to spiral through confusion, self justification, self delusion, anger, helplessness, really quite horrible black humor, and depression. And we never mean to start them either - it was just an offhand comment today, about the 150 or so Arab students who protested the Gaza attack right outside the university, and we both mentioned what pissed us off about it (we were both pissed off, apparently, about opposite things), and forty minutes later we were both frustrated and depressed. Not angry with one another or anything, just tired.

(But man, people in school pissed me off about the protest today. As I walked through the gate, I heard a girl screeching on the phone, "Can you believe them, protesting outside the school like that? Who do they think they are? I'm so mad, and I'm supposed to go into class like this right now?" THE FUCK. SERIOUSLY. WE MAY NOT HAVE A BILL OF RIGHTS BUT WE DO STILL HAVE FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN THIS COUNTRY, YOU *bleep* *bleeeep* *bleeeeeeeep*, GET SOME FUCKING PROPORTIONS. Is what I wanted to say, but I don't have a habit of getting into political arguments with strangers who are yelling on the phone, so I bottled it in and fumed silently.)

Anyway, YULETIDE, guys, you cannot even imagine how utterly AWED I am by what is going on there, seriously, both in terms of the fics I wrote and in the fics I'm reading. I'm dying to know who wrote what already so I can stalk the authors of my favorite fics and see if I guessed anyone! So far, I'm pretty sure I've guessed one fic's author, but that is not enough. So:

1. If you happen to be reading this and I happened to have left a comment on your fic, tell me so I can guess? I left comments on 99% of the stories I read.

2. Guess what I wrote? If you guess correctly you'll get, um. An icon? I already know there's no way I'll get around to writing drabbles, so, icon. Clues: I wrote two stories, one for a fandom most of you have probably seen (seen, not read), and the other for a movie that maybe a handful of you have seen, but if you happen to run across the fic in the archive, you'll know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's mine.

Comments with correct guesses will be screened :-)

Ooh, unexpected ETA: My roommate just stopped by, saying she'd had some time to think, and she wasn't satisfied with some of the arguments she'd presented in the heat of the argument, not as a humanist and not as a philosophy major, and that now that she'd calmed down she didn't want to leave it at that, and took back some of the stuff she said earlier. Which is good, because some of the stuff she said, I was honestly surprised to hear from her. So I feel a little better about our conversation.

(PS - have officially seen the BSG miniseries! I have been ordered to avoid reading anything about the show from now on so as to avoid being spoiled. I don't think any of you go around blabbing spoilers from the first seasons un-cut on your LJs, but you never know. So if I see any references to BSG on my flist now, I'm just going to promptly skip them.)