Making up for the lack of updates all at once

Here’s something that was inspired by (read: stolen from) someone’s blog on afterellen.com:

TV Characters I Would Date
Liz Lemon (3o Rock)– obviously. She’s kind of neurotic, but she’s clearly smart and funny, and oh yes, she’s actually Tina Fey. I know she already tried to be a lesbian, but whatever. This is my fantasy!

Tyra Collette (Friday Night Lights) – She is tough and badass and hot, but underneath it all, she’s still vulnerable and unsure of herself, because she’s, uh, supposed to be seventeen, and that combination just kills me. Plus, Adrienne Palicki is, like, seven feet tall (and totally older than seventeen!). Gorgeous.

Catalina (Space Cases) – My first true girlcrush, Catalina was, like, totally Jewel Staite’s preparation for being what’s her face on Firefly. I got all giddy and dorky when Ryan made me watch Serenity, like “She was all into the ship’s engines on Space Cases too!” I never actually watched all of Serenity, because that one time he tried to make me watch it, I fell asleep on Mike’s couch—and so did Mike and Ryan’s sister—but I remember that part.

Dana Fairbanks (The L Word) – Dana was my favorite character on The L Word, and I am still bitter about her death. She was such a dork, and she was so funny and sweet and cute… And I’ve always had a secret soft spot for jocks.

Faith (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) – Okay, so maybe I wouldn’t want to date Faith, really, since the girl is unstable. Maybe I’d just want to have as much sex with her as possible before she totally skipped town to kill undead things or whatever. That would be fine with me.

So two random people started following me on twitter the other day, and one of them is this bilingual dude who seems to only post, like, mushy quotations. In English and Spanish. And one of them was this: “Te quiero no por quien eres, sino por quien soy cuando estoy contigo.” Which means, “I love you not because of who you are, but because of who I am when I’m with you.” How gross is that? And it’s not gross in the way I would usually call something like that gross. It’s gross in that that is such a self-centered thing to say. “I don’t love you because you have these special qualities that are unique to you—I love you because you make me look good.” I don’t like that; I don’t like the idea that someone is only worthwhile if they make you better. I would never want anyone to say that to me. I want to be loved for who I am, and I want to love someone for who she is and what is important to her and whether or not she’ll stay up all night watching old episodes of Futurama with me. I don’t want her to have to change me—that’s not fair to her. Am I making any sense? It’s just like that stupid “you complete me.” No! That’s not how this works. You have to be complete yourself—you cannot expect someone to validate you. That’s not fair to you or to the other person. And there’s just something so blatant about that quotation: “I don’t love you because of you, but because of me.” Hideous.

Now there’s another one up there: “The greatest hate springs from the greatest love,” which just sounds like a hacky spin on “my only love sprung from my only hate”—of which I do not approve. How do these people find me?

My dad had this ancient box set of The Lord of the Rings trilogy plus The Hobbit (and by “ancient,” I probably mean “from the ‘70s”), and that’s how I first read them, but they totally all fell apart while I was reading them, and now I have no idea what happened to them. But I loved them, because they were so old and just simple paperbacks, and they were all a different color, like The Hobbit was yellow; The Fellowship of the Ring was red; The Two Towers was green, and The Return of the King was blue. I may have mixed up the colors—but those were the colors, anyway. I kind of want that exact box set back; I have a hard cover set, but it doesn’t include The Hobbit, and I love hard cover sets for displaying things, but paperback books are the best for reading—and reading and reading until they fall apart or you give them to Allison in the hopes that she will read them already, dammit. I don’t even know how to go about finding that old box set—I wish I had an ISBN number or something. Maybe I’ll just trawl through Abebooks.

Philip Pullman wrote a story about how Lee and Iorek became friends! I am very excited to read that—I think it’ll be more interesting than Lyra’s Oxford.

I have this playlist on iTunes that I have called “Can’t Get Enough,” and it’s a somewhat fluctuating collection of songs I can listen to over and over, and it’s basically what I listen to when I’m in the car, and it consists of mostly Brandi Carlile. Still.

So this book I’m reading is part of a series of sorts of retelling of myths by ladies, and it includes The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, which, when I first heard the title, I was hoping was a retelling of The Odyssey but with Penelope as the main character, but I was kind of thinking it would be about what Penelope did while Odysseus was away, which it basically is. Boo. I do still want to read it, though. I’ve more or less read The Odyssey, so I’m good with that one.

Another thing I stole from the afterellen blogs:

Books that have affected me deeply:
A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle – This is quite possibly the book I have read the most times in my entire life. I haven’t reread it in at least a year, actually, but I’m pretty sure I still have it memorized.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott – For most of my adolescent life, I wanted to be Jo March, and I always hate the end of the book, where she decides to marry that guy. I didn’t want her to marry Laurie either—and there were certainly no suitable ladies included in this book for her to pine for, so… Spinster Jo it is! No, but really, Jo March is one of my biggest literary heroes. For sure.

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman – Everything comes to its beautiful, heartbreaking, poignant conclusion in this book, and it is just so perfect, I can’t handle it. I love the story of Mary and the mulefa, and I’m still puzzling out exactly the significance of her character’s name being Mary in this retelling of Paradise Lost, because my brain is slow, but one day I’ll have an articulate analogy.

Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden – This is, far and away, the best lesbian-themed book I’ve read so far. It is imperfect—the dialogue sounds hardly realistic at times, but that’s not really the point. It is the sweetest coming out story I’ve found, and when I first read the scene where Liza and Annie kiss for the first time, my heart caught. It was just beautiful.

The Giver by Lois Lowry – This book is so haunting—my second favorite Newbery winner. I haven’t read it in a few years, but I think I need to again.

Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls – The only book that ever made me bawl, until Jo Rowling killed Fred Weasley, but I don’t even remember what happened at the end, except the dogs died horribly. I do not need to read this one again, thanks.

Yes! My super early Top Chef girlcrush Lisa is totally gay! Remember her? I fell in love because of the bandana? Plus! There are two other lesbians on the damn show. Three lesbians on a reality show that is actually, like, respectable! When has that even happened? Never, that’s when. I cannot wait till Wednesday.

Oh my god. I had a dream last night that the Indigo Girls were actually the surviving members of TLC—T-Boz and Chili. What the fuck was that about?

Ariel plays the role of siren in the Broadway version. A little bit. Eric hears her voice at the very beginning of the show, and instead of giving in to Grimsby's pleas and the sailors' advice to return to shore, he cries, "Follow that voice! To the ends of the earth if we have to!" I don't know how I feel about that...