Me
S'up, my name's Rachel, I'm a twenty-two three four! FIVE (ugh how did I get so old) six HELLO LATE TWENTIES year old medical student DOCTOR, YO. You may offer me your congratulations on having reached this, the highest pinnacle of nerditude. My defining characteristics are a disgusting love of pink (it's stealth ninja, okay - I have a theory. A long one) and a fear of falling down stairs. Don't run with scissors, guys. Otherwise, I write fanfic.

Tags include:
Bandom fic, Harry Potter fic, Prince of Tennis fic, House MD fic, Entourage fic, Sky High fic, Star Trek fic and Stargate Atlantis fic. There's even the odd original fic shoved in there somewhere.
For fic that's not actually posted on my journal, because I am the ultimate lazyass, try my del links.

My policy from hereon in is friending anyone who comments on THIS HERE POST. While I read my entire flist most every day - look mom, no filters! - I am an indifferent commenter. I also fail at keeping up with who's friended me, despite multiple alerts. That's what happens when you read your email at one am after hours of refreshing assays into the fascinating world of microbiology. Comment here to be added! Or don't! I'm easy. I have pink tights.

The end.

I NEED ALL THE HARRY/GRIMSHAW IN THE UNIVERSE PLEASE

I mean this actually killed me and I'm writing from beyond the grave

So I didn't watch the Alan Carr 1D interviews for the longest time because of reasons. (Longer, boring story: I watched his show at Christmas and everyone on it was genuinely drunk and awkward and Carr himself came off as the biggest dickend in the history of television. Whereas I really enjoyed Jimmy Carr's Christmas special and apparently he robbed the nation? idek.) OF COURSE they are genuinely hilarious, no one needs to be told that.



THIS was pretty much my face at every response of Harry's, from the suave eating of crisps while Liam HID HIS FACE AND ROCKED to rubbing his nose in the world's worst attempt at bashfulness. He is a HOUND. DOG. So that was pussygate, huh? I mean. I MEAN.

yadda yadda Harry Styles, Professional Life Ruiner etc, but I was more interested in the effect of that particular dynamic on Louis. I mean, this tends to be the prevailing assumption among us 1D tinhatters - and OMFG THAT GIFSET IS SO CUTE I GOT SPONTANEOUS LOVE ANGINA - but really? Nah. Harry is louche and a ladykiller and doesn't have to try a single bit, whereas Louis' MO has been trying so hard he practically falls over, and c'mon, he is jealous of that shit! He wants girls to be throwing themselves at him with the end result that Alan Carr mocks him exclusively on national TV! THIS COULD SEGUE SEAMLESSLY INTO THE MAKING OUT I FEEL. I would read approximately one million and five thousand words of Louis being all sulky with Harry because all Harry has to do is smile, but he never smiles at Louis like that, and Harry being confused and then maybe pissed off with ANGST and PINING and STUPIDITY but in the end love puppies.



Bonus flawless video. Editing is perfect! I want 100,391,334 more of these - does anyone have recs?! FOR SCIENCE.



This really reminds me of someone I know and it's killing me because WHO DO I KNOW WHO LOOKS LIKE HARRY STYLES SERIOUSLY

I don't understand how I can buy an oven AND a fridge AND a washing machine for what it costs to dress ONE WINDOW. I didn't even ask for windows. I could have lived with like, an arrow-slit or something. This must be what the entire wedding industry feels like EVERY DAY.

So there is this song by Flo(w) Rida(er) called Whistle. It is a creation of subtle delicacy and is about blowjobs. The thing I don't think Flo/w Rida/er understood is that there is a part in which he addresses, I'm assuming, another dude:

I'm betting you like bebop
And I'm betting you love creep mode
And I'm betting you like girls that give love to girls
And stroke your little ego

that segues seamlessly into addressing the person who's giving him the blowjob. Who appears to be THE SAME PERSON. So yeah. Either Flo Rida is a lot more open-minded than I realised, or it's just lol. Speaking of which, Ireland's Tanaiste today said that he supports gay marriage! Yay for that!



I feel this is what happens when you let someone whistle in your hair.



Maybe it was this guy. Although in the Land of Tinhats, a pose like this is about ten seconds away from being a whistling scenario of its very own.



The generally accepted face of having your whistle ... blown. (NO THIS SONG DOESN'T EXACTLY PUSH THE BOAT OUT WITH THE METAPHORS)



In case anyone was having trouble getting the point here. (Source: http://textsfrom1d.tumblr.com/)

I HAVE LISTENED TO THIS SONG SEVENTY TIMES TODAY AND YESTERDAY WHATEVER I WAS DUMPED

texts i have considered sending this morning since i woke up smelling of petrol IN MY MOUTH

'wow that was some way to illustrate a metaphor. also, i hate you'

'that was the most gigantic dick move ever'

'just fyi, there are more polite ways to tell people to fuck off than getting off with someone else in front of them. also, i hate you.'

'i don't understand'

'can we be friends anyway?'

'i love you'

not even harry styles can make this shit better

Point the first:


Come to the dark side, oddishly and extemporally, we have cookies cake!

Point 1.5:

1D fandom needs a name. Or, well, it doesn't, but can it be something stupid like Directiondom?

Point 1.5.5:

This picture saved from Sugarscape as '1dGAY10louis.jpg'. Is Sugarscape employing fandomers or do we also grow in the wild?!

Point the second:

There are five dudes in 1D. There are also five SISTERS IN THE BENNET FAMILY OH YEAH I'M GOING THERE. I carefully worked this out when my phone died and I still had three walls to paint.

Harry is Jane. He's pretty and does a good impression of being sweet (I did say 'impression') and he is most likely to marry well, having taken care to fall in love with a man of good fortune.

Louis is Elizabeth. Mainly because Louis is my favourite, but also because he's the legit funniest guy there and, like Elizabeth, is basically a troll.

Zayn is Lydia. I can think of no one in this band more likely to fall for an officer in uniform with a dastardly reputation. Plus he has the eyelashes for a determined flirt capable of making himself and his family ridiculous.

Niall is Kitty, because he seems pretty willing to follow everyone's lead and laughs at pretty much anything. Seriously: watch any video, he's there giggling away. I don't know how to fit in his food preoccupation given that Austen rarely mentions food, but I can guarantee that Kitty!Niall would be first for seconds on the white soup.

Which leaves Liam as Mary. At first I felt bad about this because Mary comes across as the most boring Bennet sister, but she's conscientious and worries about propriety and is basically the World's First emo hipster kid (she just wants to play music, y'all, the minuet is so seventeenth century and she liked Handel before he was cool). So quite a good fit, in fact.



Now imagine Regency costumes instead of Hollister and Co. vomit AND WE'RE DONE.

Point the third:

I listened to The Film Programme podcast from the BBC today. It's wonderfully unspoilery but actors are unbelievably pretentious. Mark Walhberg was interviewed about his desire to re-make the Headhunters because he liked the first version so much. (Yeah ... NO.) Turns out he used to be a MODEL. Called MARKY-MARK. And I finally figured out the Marky-Mark reference from Clueless!

Only took seventeen years.

I love how One Direction fandom is slowly drawing all the old bandomers out of retirement ... I suppose none of us had far to go in terms of RPF fandom. I don't remember bandom being this insane? Maybe because we saved the best crazy for ourselves and didn't dish it out to the poor unsuspecting band members. (Band members, hur hur.)

Now that I am actively using this lj again instead of just skimming my flist, WOW, has the basic style ever got ugly. Can anyone explain why, when I go to leave a comment, I see the comment box plus a check-box for EVERY SINGLE ONE of my 200+ icons? It makes scrolling and navigation exceptionally tiresome. Make it go away, someone. And the font ... does not get better with time. Nor does the fact that they deleted the margins. What's with the margin-hate, seriously. MARGINS NEED LOVE TOO PEOPLE.

Does anyone have good podcast recs? I've spent the day listening to the Guardian on books while painting, and ended up with non-water-based gloss all over my phone. I do not think these things are unrelated. Is the general contempt for Guardian readers based on how effing pretentious it is? Please, spare me from this tomorrow. I have seventeen more architraves to paint and I've already listened to all the Ferretbrain ones.

In conclusion, Zayn, what are you ACTUALLY DOING. (Answers no less than 500 words.)

The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood

I assumed my first reading experience of Margaret Atwood post the discovery that she is a leading light in feminism (I KNOW, KMS) would be an interesting experience - and I was right. It was also, in view of that knowledge, quite a disturbing book due to the entrenched misogyny.

( spoiler cutCollapse )

The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller

I wasn't four pages into this before I renamed it in my head as 'The Worst Published Fanfic Ever.' Granted, I haven't yet read Fifty Shades of Grey, so that is liable to change.

Unlike apparently most of the one and two star reviewers on goodreads, I have more than a passing familiarity of the story of the Iliad (and the Odyssey) - thanks to Rosemary Sutcliff rather than Homer. Even if canon didn't point towards Achilles and Patroclus being lovers, I would have shipped them that way regardless. Therefore I didn't consider it a huge or scandalous leap for her to have made.

Miller, who's a classics scholar, clearly believes Achilles/Patroclus is the ultimate canon OTP. It's a shame, because that leads her to also believe she doesn't have to prove anything with her book. She could have been writing a kiddie version of the very true story of the Iliad from the way she assumes the facts speak for themselves and all she has to do is record them. Unfortunately, while I learned more of the minutiae of Achilles' life - more than I or the story needed, in fact - I did not for one second learn why she thought she sold me on the romance. It's so much taken as a given that even she doesn't question it, and she's the goddamn storyteller here. Not Homer, whatever his supposed intentions towards the smexing were. GIVE ME SOMETHING OTHER THAN THE SMELL OF ACHILLES' FEET FOR REAL BRO.

I'm not even kidding: there are several references (too depressing to actually count) to his pink feet and how awesome they smell. Bear in mind this is MILLENIA before the invention of deodorant and electrical showers. I'm not buying it. And the writing is crammed with real clankers; the nectar-scented feet are just the start.

"Patroclus," he said. He was always better with words than I.

Sure! Why not! Except ... this is the ONLY WORD HE SAID. Which is YOUR NAME, Patroclus. Basic identity skills do not equal eloquence! No really!

( spoilers of ugh + mentions of rapeCollapse )

OMFG FINE I'M SOLD



ugh

THIS BEAUTY IS DISGUSTING AND MUST STOP

Also I was with my trainer today and we had a very mutually agreeable conversation on the manifold attractions of Harry Styles. (Louis is still my favourite! But revealing that and why is betraying JUST A TAD too much info for casual conversation.) And I just like that I can say to a group of any women my age, "One Direction," and they'll go, "Of course" and I'll say, "Harry Styles," and they'll go, "HELL YEAH." I feel weirdly that they're attractive in a way that very much pertains to women - like, because not of in spite of? And also that it's now okay to find younger dudes hot. It's maybe a backwards equality but it's still an equality. In conclusion, Harry Styles. What a scamp.

I just returned from three days of obligatory 'professional development' in Dublin. I was going to use 'hellish' before 'obligatory' but in fact, I think this is what purgatory is like: building paper houses, fighting over the five biscuits, and discovering my conflict management persona. All the time I really missed my new fandom. It's come at a conveniently flaily point in my life, to the extent that I brought up One Direction with EVERYONE at this course: people I'd just met, the lecturer in resilience training (who thought I was referring to a new digression in Jungian theory OH LOL), and my long-suffering friend Shane, who tiredly despises hipsters and all hipster-adjacent things. It didn't help that it was Bloomsday and we couldn't figure out if the people wandering around in period costume were pretentious assholes pretending they'd read Joyce, or painfully cool dudes who like dressing in pseudo-period clothes. (For the record, I love hipsters. I'd be a hipster, only I'm not hipster enough.)

The fact is you can't really help people whose job entails accidentally hurting and killing other people. Bless their hearts, they tried, though. I liked this breakdown of self esteem (how you feel about yourself), self confidence (your physical traits eg posture and voice) and self-concept (your impact on the world). The lecturer used an anecdote of a gay man who came out to his family and their response was, "We know." He found this extremely distressing because his self-concept was shattered by the realisation that what he'd thought was secret wasn't, really. In coming-out stories the 'we know' response is always portrayed as sweet and a relief, so I thought that was interesting. It also made me think (SURPRISE) about One Direction and the weirdly deep investment a lot of people have in them being TOTES GAY OMG YES NO TAKE BACKS. Something about how their self-concept is 'being straight' and changing that would be very traumatic, and how uncomfortable it must be to have people assuming the wrong thing about their self-concept. OR SOMETHING.

I also ended up watching recaps of Britain's Got Talent with my Terrible Relatives just because Simon Cowell was in it and he's connected with One Direction. I find Simon Cowell fascinating. In a world of posturing and artifice he seems to have built a career on honesty. I want to use a seems legit joke here.

And now to fritter away some time reading squee posts and fic by other people. Lurking is great fun on this side of Harry Potter (mind you, I thought I was a lurker in bandom and look how THAT turned out). I especially appreciate the photo commentaries. I'd try my hand at one if I wasn't so long in the tooth.