like an eagle caged I pine, on this dull, unchanging shore

[freckles_and_doubt]

Last night I dreamed that I was faced with the difficult choice between re-training as a doctor and re-training as a sailor. I went the doctor route (alongside Jo, sorry, Jo, it's probably about your family), and after a few slightly frantic scenes of digs cooking with fellow med students, woke up feeling vaguely terrified about having to learn chemistry again, and wistfully sad that I couldn't have both sets of skills. Something about knots and ropes and setting sails with technical verve. General hatred of my work life notwithstanding, it's not actually as bizarre as it sounds to say that wistful doctor dreams are almost certainly the result of reading really quite an unlikely amount of Sherlock fanfic over the last month or so. The strangely fetishised things that fic writers do to John Watson as a deceptively cuddly BAMF! are ... strangely fetishised, actually.

I also blame the fact that I randomly woke up at 3.30am on Monday morning and couldn't get to sleep again, as a result of which I wandered through most of yesterday on four hours of sleep in an exhausted daze which didn't, for some reason, prevent me from giving a really rather good double period tut on Dracula, to which even my cabbage class responded fairly well. Then again, I probably didn't need to demonstrate the fact that I can babble entertainingly about vampires and gender roles and Victorian anxieties literally in my sleep. (In this case with added postcolonialism at no extra charge, on account of dodgy Eastern European reverse invasion of London by degenerate lowlifes). However, it didn't help to be woken up promptly at 3am this morning again by Golux being heartily sick on my bedside rug. I did manage to get back to sleep this time, but the free pass she's currently getting on horrible behaviour on account of her nose cancer is wearing a little thin. Especially since the nose cancer has retreated, for its own inscrutable reasons, to a small black spot rather than a giant black sore, which is either sinister or encouraging, I'm not sure which.

We have set a date for the vetination of Macavity early next week, following a slightly drunkenly uproarious session of dinner and cat-fondling at our place on Sunday night. Currently the major challenge is going to be preventing Carlo from exiting stage left with a two-for-one ginger ex-tom deal, he seems rather taken with Hobbit. Put down the floofy ginger kitty and back away slowly, say I. He's a slut anyway, and doesn't mean it.

Subject line a quote from "Life on the Ocean Wave", which is one of those saccharine little Victorian ditties I blush to say I know entirely through the bastardised versions occasionally perpetrated by the Goon Show. On the other hand, a hasty lyric search suggests that them saccharine Victorians can seriously turn a stirring phrase.

Comments

[first-fallen.livejournal.com]

If anyone's going to steal Hobbit, it will be me.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I have sneaky plans to play you potential Hobbit-thieves off against each other and watch you all neutralise each other in the resulting scrum. Probably while placing the tips of my fingers together and cackling. Or stroking the cat :>.

[jeanniewal.livejournal.com]

I too have immersed myself to a possibly unhealthy extent in the Sherlock fanfic... I blame a friend who is doing her PhD on transformative works and is using Sherlock fic as her main illustrative source.

*cannot tell a lie*

OK, I can't blame her!! She sent me one story about three months ago and I dived in with my eyes open and my arms stretched wide all off my own bat :D

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Was that the story that made you cry? What was it? Kept meaning to ask you when you mentioned it, recs always good... Although given that at this point I've read about 80% of the Johnloc fics in the first 18 pages of AOL, sorted by kudos, there's a reasonable chance I've read it :>.

I actually want to teach a tv studies seminar on Sherlock next year, talk about the way it uses genre and adaptation and also the way its fandom uses genre. Some surprisingly sophisticated things going on.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

p.s. I made a Sherlock userpic just for you. Or really just for me, with you as the excuse.

[jeanniewal.livejournal.com]

:D I am SO HAPPY to be a Sherlock enabler! This is worth an internet reward! Or cookies, or something!

I can't remember which one made me cry. I'll go back and see if I can find it. Meanwhile, have a link to my Bookmarks on AO3. It's an eclectic mix... (yes, I did fall in to the Omegaverse, yes I did. My justification comes from fanfic writer Azriona, who, in a response to a comment I made on her fic, said, of the Omegaverse, "come for the porn, stay for the social commentary.")

http://archiveofourown.org/users/Jeanniemckeown/bookmarks

I'll commute from Grahamstown for that seminar. I'm sure Megan (the PhDer) would too.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

oh, dear, look at all those recs. There goes my next few weeks. Damn ;>. And thank you. I'm on page 20 of the Johnlock sort, and it's becoming increasingly unpleasant to wade through the dreck for the occasional gem.

I regard your Omegaverse predilection sideways, with suspicion. I can't bring myself to read more than a couple of paragraphs of the damned things, although I agree that the commentary on gender politics is weirdly powerful.

[rumint.livejournal.com]

I'm interested to hear more about your Dracula tut, given that I'm about to re-read it for my vampires & spy's campaign, Nights Black Agents. They have an interesting supplement forthcoming called Dracula Unredacted, an evocative title http://www.pelgranepress.com/?p=12183