rivers_bend

This weekend has been an absolute emotional ROLLERCOASTER. Yesterday, One Direction did a seven (more like almost eight by the time they wrapped up)-hour livestream. It was just as insane as you might imagine. I am so sorry if you follow me on twitter or tumblr and don't give a fuck about one direction. I tried (and am trying) my very best to tag everything on tumblr, but twitter was a mess. I woke up today with a crazy hangover despite the fact that I didn't touch a drop of booze. I was just high on Harry Styles' abs.

Then today, I went and saw Blue is the Warmest Colour with romantical and my other queer work colleague V, her wife, and a million of their lesbian friends. I have never been in a group that took up the whole row of a theater before. Then afterwards, romantical, V, her wife and I went for a late lunch.

The movie is well deserving of all the awards it has won. The lead actress is absolutely PHENOMENAL, and her smile killed me. The first thing I noticed were her expressive lips, the second was her stunning arse, and then BOOM, her emotion blew me away. I shan't spoil the film, because I think it gained a lot from me having not the foggiest clue what it was going to be about (beyond lesbian love drama) before I went in, but I do want to talk about how I felt watching it a bit, because I'm still trying to process it almost four hours later.

There's been a post going around tumblr lately (lol lately. always, in one form or another), in which some person used to seeing themselves represented in all media bitches that queer people shouldn't need representation, because if you can't relate to someone who just has one little difference from you, you're doing being a person wrong (I am paraphrasing). People obviously argue back, but I couldn't help thinking about that view while I was watching the film. Generally, when I watch a movie about heterosexual love, I can find things to relate to about the characters. It's not that every aspect of my life is different, especially given that a lot of movies (a LOT) are about white, middle class, well-educated people. But I, for the most part, feel like I am watching a movie about the person up on the screen. I may cry or feel for them, but it is with a sense of empathy.

This movie, despite the fact that I am utterly not French, nor have I had the sort of relationship depicted in the film, felt like it was ripping out my soul and throwing it up on the screen for everyone to see. I remember feeling similarly about The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love. Also, Fried Green Tomatoes (I had read the book first, you see, and knew that it was utterly a love story about two women, despite how they tried to film it about a close friendship. I will always honor Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary Louise Parker for agreeing between themselves to play it as it was meant to be written). None of these stories are anything like my own, and yet I feel them on a sharp, deep, gut level. And they make me feel whole, even while they often tear me apart.

There are lots of movies about outcasts. (In fact, the character in John Hughes' catalogue I relate to most is Andie from Pretty in Pink, though I was never even a little bit that kind of outcast.) But I think part of it, for me at least, is that when you're outcast/bullied for being poor or fat or the wrong color or speaking the wrong language, you know WHY you're an outcast. In my case (and for many of the other queer people I've spoken to about it), there was just this sense that I was WRONG. that I couldn't fit in to the place society had for me, but I didn't understand why not. And seeing that experience reflected is incredibly moving and incredibly healing.

All the people we were with at the theater were asking how I liked the movie as the lights were coming up. And I was still just kind of sitting there and staring. Because it was great. Visually stunning, superb acting, etc. etc. But it had been so MUCH an experience, there were no words, especially to give to a stranger, about how I liked it.

If you get a chance to see it (it is on limited release), I recommend it. And I'd love to hear what you think.

Went out to dinner with a friend last night, and it was great and we decompressed about our shitty day at work and the food was good and what I was craving, but it made me think about a thing that's been bugging me that I couldn't quite put my finger on when I go out to eat.

Our server was perfectly friendly, and brought our food as ordered, and offered us refills of our soda at appropriate times, but he also did the thing. The thing that makes me really uncomfortable. He offered us alcohol when he took our drinks orders. Fine. I said, "I'm driving, so no thank you. I'll have a soda." Why did I give him an excuse? What business is it of his why I don't want a margarita or a beer? Because I have become familiar with what will happen next, and I am trying to find ways to make it not happen.

When he came back with our drinks, he said, "Sure you don't want a shot?" Same thing when he came back with our food. When he offered me a refill, he said something about how he could still bring me a margarita. And it is SO FUCKING CREEPY I WANT TO SCREAM.

Now I appreciate that alcohol has a good markup, and that part of a server's job is to upsell. I don't mind being asked if I am sure I don't want an appetizer, or some guacamole with my chips, or that dessert, but when a man is trying to push booze on a woman who has said she does not want to drink, the whole rape culture that we live in comes in to play. At least for me. And I REALLY SUPER A LOT do not like it. I cannot think of the last time a female server has tried to get me to drink alcohol when I've declined. But I have had male servers BRING ME A DRINK I EXPLICITLY STATED I DID NOT WANT because I "looked like I could use it."

ARE. YOU. FUCKING. KIDDING. ME.

And it's always bugged me, but I never really put into words in my own head why until last night. I am not the sort of person who feels comfortable explaining rape culture and grossness and creepy behaviour to someone I don't know at all who is trying to do their job. But it would be super great if shit like this could become a more widely spread cultural conversation. And if it could stop.

Today is Pride Sunday in San Francisco (and New York, and other places that didn't have their pride celebrations a different weekend entirely), and I'm actually in town for it this year! My parents are down there already, lining up with the PFLAG contingent, getting ready to march. I'm meeting up with miss_begonia later, to watch. I need to remember to get out my sunblock. And paint my toenails! :D

Compliments of Buzzfeed's picture post of NYC Pride in the 1970s, I give you two photos from the first Pride Parade:





and then because this makes my heart feel like flying, and Firefly/Serenity is all about being proud of who you are (and because I know some of you will want to see this):



And now I need to go get ready!

You know how sometimes a chance you're really not sure you want drops into your lap, and you hem and haw and decide to take it anyway? A couple of months ago (it seems like it anyway) miss_begonia texted me and asked if I wanted a ticket to see My Chemical Romance. At the time I was a big fan of Na Na Na Na and Sing, but had discovered I really didn't like Three Cheers or Black Parade when I tried listening to them this summer. I really really wanted to like them though, so I decided to take the ticket, and work in the weeks I had before the concert on becoming a fan of MCR's music as well as the band and the fic. IT TOTALLY WORKED. By today I liked or loved all the songs on all three albums (I never got hold of Bullets) except for one, which considering my starting point, was pretty good going, I thought.

Worth every single second of listening. The gig was absolutely AMAZING. Getting the shallow bit out of the way first: Gerard Way has an amazing ass, and Mikey Way is the hottest lesbian since Tommy Joe Ratliff. I do not understand how Frank didn't melt into a puddle or burst into flame, given he was wearing a thermal shirt under a polo shirt and a grandpa sweater and jumping around like a lunatic under the lights that were making Gerard sweat until it poured off him. Ray Toro seems, from the little I could see around the head of the girl in front of me, to be amazing from head to toe. Gerard also is beautiful and has entrancing fingers, and the most amazing hip-cock pose ever. He's fucking royalty, and a tremendous presence on stage.

emilytheodd was so so awesome and went upstairs to the coatcheck and got me earplugs after the first opening act, because it felt like my ears were bleeding. They made the Neon Trees and My Chem much better than they would have been without. I could hear the words!

There were several songs I was really hoping they would play, and they did play almost all of them. Na Na Na and Sing and Mama, and Famous Last Words, and Gravity, and Vampire Money, and Helena, and Cancer, and some I can't remember the names of right now because it's 12:20 and I just had a fucking amazing night. We were right in the center, on the third tier of the floor, and the sound was fantastic. We started out with lokte and me second row behind the barrier and miss b and emily in third row. The girl next to me was not only not dancing at all, she was bitching about the fact that I was dancing because it jostled her camera. I really wanted to punch her in the throat, which was not awfully conducive to my having a great time. I was also dying of heat. Fortunately, about five songs in, emily wanted to stand in front of me (I'd offered several times) and that worked out great. I am tall enough I could still see perfectly, I wasn't next to irritating girl, and i was standing literally ON an airconditioning vent. WIN/WIN.

Extra added bonus, the venue is like ten minutes from my house.

I feel like whole new worlds of music have been opened up to me in the last 18 months or so as a direct result of fandom, and I really love it a lot.

Speaking of fandom, I need to thank mistresscurvy for her encouragement in my learning curve that led to tonight. You made this not only much more fun, but more possible. Fangirls--all of you--really are the best ever.

Tuesday night miss_begonia, lokte and I went to see Uh Huh Her at the Great American Music Hall. It was just as awesome as I'd been hoping, with added bonus adorable. All the gigs I've been to in the last six years or so have been choreographed theatrical events (P!nk, Rufus Wainwright and Adam Lambert), so it was kind of awesome to just see a bunch of musicians up on stage doing what they love.

The venue is kind of amazing:

source @UhHuhHerMusic

We got there a bit before the opening act (and I wish I could remember their name because I liked their music), and went upstairs to sit down while we waited for UHH to start. miss_begonia and I convinced lokte to try root beer. She thought it tasted of Germolene, but was excited to be drinking it out of a red cup with a straw a la Tommy Joe Ratliff :D

Unsurprisingly, the place was packed with dykes, so I spent a lot of the time while we waited ogling people watching. So many hot women in SF. Why am I not dating any of them? :(

ANYWAY. We found spots in the middle of the floor for UHH, and waited for them to come on. SO MUCH LOVE.

I've been really loving their music for the last year or so, and I loved Leisha on the L Word, and I loved Cam on Adam's tour, and I was just really excited for the gig. In that way where I was a little bit scared of being disappointed. But both of them were so so cute and Leisha is so bouncy and giggly, and Cam is so UNF and toppy, and they sounded awesome.

They played a mix of the stuff I know and new stuff, and they both mix it up, playing keyboard, bass or guitar, depending on the song. Hot women are hot. Hot women who can play multiple instruments and also sing are EVEN HOTTER. There was one point where Leisha's keyboard was making weird noises and Cam came over and crowded up against her and fixed it, while Leisha grinned and teased about this is why she has Cam in the band, and Cam was doing the thing Adam does of fiddling with her ear pieces and directing the sound engineer and it's hot when she does it, too, and she was getting all toppy with their drummer, and being all coy, and OH GOD MY CRUSH. LET ME SHOW IT TO YOU. (obvious comment is obvious)

At the end of the gig a group of girls near us shouted for Cam to take off her jacket (which was actually a cardigan with shiny ~tiles on the shoulders) and she giggled and dropped it off her shoulders a couple of inches and then pulled it back up again. It was so adorable. No one needed to ask Leisha to undress because she was already only wearing a tank top. also SO HOT.

I seem to be distracted by the hotness. THEIR MUSIC WAS ALSO REALLY GOOD, OKAY? And what I'm saying was that it was a great night (even if omg you should never try to get vegan food at Max's Opera Cafe, because they are INSANE AND STUPID there) and I loved hanging with miss b and lokte, and even though my feet were DYING in my shoes by the end, it was awesome.

I think you should go see Howl if you have any affection for one of the following:
Allen Ginsberg
Art
Poetry
Literature
Jon Hamm
David Strathairn
James Franco

If you have any affection for two or more of the above, I think you must see Howl.

There are also lots of other amazing things about the movie, but any one of those alone was worth the price of admission.

I always have a great time with miss_begonia, for she is awesome, but she also picks particularly good movies to go see. I like this in a person :D

I had SUCH an amazing start to my weekend. First I went and did my final teacher eval, then met with my professor for the final time, and she had lovely things to say about me and my contributions to the classes I took with her, and such constructive things (and positive things) to say about my thesis. It was a really bitter-sweet parting, but wonderful, too.

Right from there I went across town to pick up emilytheodd who I have known via flist for a few years now, but whom I'd sadly never met. She is even more sparkly awesome in person :D We drove to Berkeley to meet up with miss_begonia and ericaplease for dinner and some musical theater. Dinner was delicious: salad, pizza and chicken satay, and great fun. We saw Girlfriend at the Berkeley Rep. It was DELIGHTFUL. It's like everything I love about super-well-written, schmoopy with just-the-right-amount-of-angst fanfic, only on stage and featuring music played by a band of REALLY REALLY HOT dykes. YES. PLEASE. We were squealing into our flists, clapping, giggling and laughing (which annoyed a man sitting near us who seemed to be seriously sense-of-humor impaired, but whatever) and there was at least one point that was soooo gorgeously sweet that I literally could not breathe.

We then repaired to miss_begonia's for cake, wine, gifts, and High School Musical. I am no longer a HSM virgin! (I'm still not sure if this is a good thing or not.) We watched a few select songs from 1, and then all the way through 3 (which i kind of dozed during, but I don't think I missed much). We then stayed up until 5:30 in the morning talking about slash, and bandom, and music, and politics, and voting, and law school, and grad school, and writing, and family and other VERY IMPORTANT THINGS. Then we all got up at 9:30. (I mentioned the exhausted, right?) During that time I had a dream that I was working for Zach Efron in Connecticut (on some campaign, I think) and he and I had to travel to VT to fetch Lea Michelle so that she could go to Boston and marry Kristin Chenowith. IDK either!)

This morning I had a lovely chat with Miss B about Adam and AI and writing and all sorts of lovely things, and then came home to collapse. I'm more than 24 hours behind on LJ, and I've tried to catch up, but I can hardly see. Sorry!

I essentially have 4.5 more days to get ready for my road trip. This makes me want to vomit a bit, I have to say. Hopefully I'll get there?

*adores*

Yesterday was so much fun that my cheeks still hurt from grinning. Just getting to hang out with coiledsoul (Jenn) and glendaglamazon (Glenda) would have been brilliant and super fun, but add onto that getting to see the US premiere of Doctor Who with a huge crowd of geeks like me at Wondercon, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAND getting to go see Clash of the Titans with other people instead of on my own (which is how I figured I was going to be seeing it), and a fantastic day becomes pretty much perfection.

One thing I love about what fandom has brought into my life is the variety of ages and locations and life experiences of my friends. It's enriching and exciting and educational (and lots of other e-words like excellent, too). But it's also fun sometimes to get together with people who grew up with the same toys and shows on TV and horrifying 80s fashions and set of cultural references. So there was that :D

And Wondercon itself was fascinating and great for people watching, and not nearly as crowded as I was worried about (with the exception of the Capcom booth, so we walked away from that), and there were girls in corsets. Which is never a bad thing. Some fantastic cosplay, including a boy of about 8 dressed as Link who was delightful, and some steampunk girls who were ridiculously gorgeous. I kept poking Jenn to give more Wincon cards to girls in corsets, but she was awesome and handed them out to girls and women of all clothing choices (except full twilight paraphernalia *g*), shapes, stripes and walks of life.

We queued up for the first screening of Dr. Who, but were told after not too long that there was no way we'd get in, so we went away and had some food and came back for the second screening. There was a little scary moment where we thought they were cutting the line off, but they were just checking space, so it was all good.

( no spoilers for plot, but some people don't even like to know reactions )

While we were leaving the parking garage after parking I had casually mentioned that I was really excited about Clash of the Titans but hadn't had a chance to see it. Jenn mentioned that she was really wanting to see it too. And we managed to convince Glenda that it was a good idea. So while we were waiting for Who to start, out came the iPhone, and we booked tickets to the 9:30 (NOT 3D) show at the theater around the corner from the convention center. That left us just enough time to shoot over to Chevy's for a beer before the movie.

OH. MY. GOD. THE. MOVIE. I. FREAKING LOVED IT. That's not a spoiler. It was always gonna be a given. But I did. I really really did. ( some more under here )

Then we went to Mel's Diner (*waves to my Azkatraz dinner-mates*) and had food and serious business fangirl discussions. Then we came back to my parent's house and talked more until finally I couldn't keep my eyes open and I fell into bed at 2:45.

Then this morning we laughed at ourselves because we waited until they were standing by the door bags in hand before we started talking about this week's SPN.

Fangirl funtimes are the best. MOAR PLZ.

1. I am writing Jensen/Adam Lambert fic. It's so not my fault. IDEK.

2. I have a ticket to Wondercon on Saturday. Also not my fault. (coiledsoul and glendaglamazon are awesome like pie.) Markedly less shameful than 1. however. :D

3. I wrote from 8:30 this morning until 1:30 this afternoon, only pausing to mix up some waffle batter. Five hours of delighted, happy-making, insane pairing writing. I feel like meeee!

4. I'm making some lunch, and then I'm going to write some more. There are no words for how much I've been missing this feeling. *hugs notebook to chest*

5. There was a piece of cat food in the shower door track this morning. The cat food lives all the way on the other side of the house. WTAF.

I hope that if unexpected things are happening to you, they are of the awesome. ♥

I ended up having to ditch on church, because I am absolutely wrecked after concert and dinner. But dinner was lovely, and two of the "kids" I grew up with in the church were there, one with her eight year old son, the other her brother who is closer to my age. It was nice to catch up with them a bit. I haven't seen her since before her son was born. Also nice to see some of the other people, who are more mom and dad's generation. Sometimes I feel sad that my tolerance for organized Christian religion has fallen to pretty much zero, even the UBER liberal Christian religion that is the UCC church I grew up in, because there are some really good and wonderful people there who were a big part of my growing-up years. But. This is not what this post was going to be about. It was going to be about the concert.

This was the 20th "Home for the Holidays" concert put on by the SFGMC, but the first one I'd ever been to. It was in the gorgeous Castro Theater, which I love. We got there only about ten minutes before it started, and the place was packed, but over at the side there were three empty rows at the front, so we sat in the third row and had no one in front of us. We couldn't see the sign interpreter, because he was on the opposite side of the theater, but we had a great view of just about everyone else. At first it was jolly and merry, and there was even a HILARIOUS song about fruit cake embellished by a drag Julia Childs "making" cake, and by making cake, I mean drinking a lot of "rum". But then this boy who I'd had my eye on anyway--because he was really cute in that Adam Lambert would probably fancy him if he were just a little bit shorter kind of way--stepped up to the mic. And started singing in this AMAZING, sternum-vibrating bass voice, a song about the paper menorahs in Billings Montana. As he was singing, I noticed that he had a star of David on a chain around his neck. I was already crying by then, but tears started flowing down my cheeks, and I was wiping them with my fingers and drying them on my handbag because it's cotton, and my shirt was all filmy and not appropriate for drying purposes. I was still weeping when they started the next song which was about the meaning of Christmas and family and has a line in it about remembering the Christmas they weren't welcome at home any more. Having just recently heard a few of the GMC members talk at a PFLAG meeting, I know for a fact that several of them came out to their families and were told never to come home again. So on with the weeping I went.

I'd just about recovered by the time the sing-along started, and managed fine with Jingle Bells and whatever the next one was, but then, before we could launch into Silent Night, one of the men read an abbreviated version of the story of the spontaneous Christmas Eve cease-fire during WWI where men from both sides sang Silent Night, in English and German. Well. I was gone. Tears dripping off my chin because I couldn't catch them fast enough. I could hardly breathe, never mind sing. Missed the last two sing-along carols, too, because I was still crying.

They did have me laughing again by the end, though. And I kind of have to say. A hundred-odd gay men singing their hearts out in the Castro Theater, past which Harvey Milk marched, and past which his supporters marched the night he died, which has been the symbol to so many queers across the country over the years as a place they can go and be accepted and be at home? That's all the church I need.

My dearest wish for all of you is that you have a place where your heart is at home. ♥