I was eating pumpkin soup for dinner, and this song came up on iTunes: pumpkin soup // kate nash Too freaking random -- eating and listening to the same thing!

Do you guys have any favorite house-decorating blogs/websites? I am soon to gain a bigger room than I have had in . . . ever, actually, and am going to need some kind of inspiration regarding what to do with it. I'm inheriting a wardrobe and a couple of bookcases, but beyond that I have right around 21 m2 (approx. 210ish square feet) of space to decorate. That is kind of a lot of space.

LJ! Help me make my life decisions!

Poll #1486846 apartments
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 38

I have an offer to live in an apartment with a girl who's right around my age and who I got along with REALLY FREAKING WELL. The apartment has two cats, a living room, a balcony, a washing machine, and basically anything else I would want. Not the prettiest apartment ever but also not at all objectionable. The neighborhood is a little bit more residential than I'd figured on wanting, but is actually quite cute in the daytime. And I REALLY LIKED THE POSSIBLE FUTURE ROOMMATE. Do I:

I just really clicked with this girl! (You can stop planning our wedding any day now, Lauren.) My gut says go for it, but I am second-guessing myself, because seriously, who finds the apartment they are going to move into on the first try? By accidentally emailing the person about South Africa, no less.

Dear LSAT people,

I really don't appreciate you sending me my LSAT score early. It isn't that I didn't want to know it, you understand, but that I didn't want to know it at 11:45 on a Friday night when I was most of the way to drunk off wine at late dinner with a friend, and was happy and full of too much pasta and veal and really just wanted to go to bed and sleep off that Little Italy dinner. Instead I felt compelled to check my personal Gmail right before I went to bed -- which I know isn't your fault, LSAT people, but really, did my results have to go out on Friday evening at 5:00, on a day when I was too crazed to check my Gmail until I was about to collapse into bed?

So now, instead of having had a night of glorious, half-drunken sleep, I have been miserably restless all night (and we are not even all the way through the night!) and am now awake at a little before five in the morning because I was definitely not sleeping, and I kept thinking that maybe after all that wine I'd hallucinated the LSAT results email, and my LSAT score isn't actually as bad as all that, and really I should just get my laptop and check.

Sadly, I was not hallucinating, and my score really is that bad.

I mean. Not THAT bad . . . but bad enough that, if I decide I actually do want to go to law school, I should really retake the LSAT, and fuck me, that was the whole point of taking the LSAT now: having this part of the equation out of the way.

It's honestly most upsetting because I came out of the test feeling really good about how I'd done on it, and what I got was right around the level of my very worst practice test score. Ugh FOREVER.

And really, this isn't the biggest deal in the world. Even if I do decide to go to law school, I don't actually have to apply to the top ten schools; or if I did, I'd still stand a chance of getting in -- the rest of my application is (or will be) really strong. It's entirely possible that I won't end up going to law school at all! It's not as though law school is my only option.

Regardless, this is not what I was hoping for here, and I greatly dislike the feeling of getting shitty results on something I felt confident about. Like -- awesome, I LOVE finding out that my confidence in my abilities is wildly misplaced.

And LSAT people, you can say whatever you want about it being my fault I did poorly and not yours, but you still owe me this night's sleep.

No love,
me

Public service announcement: you should be watching How I Met Your Mother. I love that show. I'm still a little ways into season two but I have been absolutely adoring it. It is so funny and gut-wrenching and just all-around great. It is probably surprising to no one that Barney Stinson is my favorite. <3 Neil Patrick Harris <3

I also, at my friend's urging, finally watched Dr. Horrible the other day, which was good times all around. Something about NPH's face (as Billy) really reminds me of Nathan Fillion as Mal Reynolds, and which made Nathan Fillion's Captain Hammer brutishness even more of a delightful contrast.

But back to HIMYM -- if you are current on the show's canon, or if you don't mind spoiling yourself a little (I am in the latter camp), then you should absolutely read this story: metal heart by the_spin, which I found via theoret's rec. It's 24K of the kind of het I want to write when I grow up -- totally believable and excellent and did I mention funny as hell? Just read it.

I usually hate taking my computer to the Apple store to get repaired, because inevitably they will be running behind and everyone will be all kinds of cranky and I'll sit there for about nine gazillion years until finally it's my turn and they tell me my computer is dead dead miserably dead.

Today, though, I was just going because of a really superficial thing -- there's a design flaw in the MacBook that causes the casing where your wrists rest to get indented and often eventually crack, which had happened to me. And then an actual piece of my casing fell off a couple weeks ago. Granted, a very small piece, but it's still kind of disturbing to watch your computer literally fall apart.

Anyway, I took it in to the Apple store today and came out, an hour and a half later, with brand new casing and, awesomely, a whole new keyboard! I've spent a lot of time whining to anyone who will listen (Merrin, my roommates, my mother) about how much I hated my keyboard, and for whatever reason? The new one is waaaay better. Maybe this will make me write more!

Haha. Don't hold me to that.

There's a lot of stuff going on right now! In addition to my very busy schedule of computer repairs, I am taking the LSAT on Saturday! I will be so glad to be done with that, because I also now have an actual date for my transfer to Frankfurt! Like, ish. Early November! There's some debate as to when I will actually be physically flying to Germany, but somewhere between the 2nd and the 4th of November pretty much for sure. (My current boss, my future boss and I are in the middle of a stalemate on that one. Will update about the actual date once my flight is booked.)

Regardless, we're talking like . . . just over a month away. Ah! So I've made myself a Life List, which is the list of all the things I need to do before I move along with the things I've been meaning to do for the past thirteen months and haven't quite gotten around to, including but not limited to:

- find someone to sublet my apartment
- go to the doctor ("the doctor" here being taken to mean . . . eeeevery doctor)
- pack and ship my crap
- actually get clothing dry cleaned (. . . for the first time)

Et cetera! We do have one lead on the subletting front -- one of my coworkers who's currently living with her parents way the fuck out in Queens -- so I just spent a couple of hours cleaning up my room and the kitchen and vacuuming a little in preparation for her stopping by after work tomorrow to see the apartment and meet my roommates. Because that's the thing that's a little bit tricky about finding a subletter: I'm friends with my roommates, who are also all friends with each other. I can't just like . . . find a random person to do it and head for the hills.

The good thing is that my roommates are pretty excellent people (usually) and our apartment is awesome (always). Our building has a pool and a gym and a roof with a fucking amazing view of Manhattan and beyond. I am just hoping my coworker and my roommates like each other, because I'm sure we'll find someone to sublet regardless but this would just be sooo easy, and it would be excellent to be able to check that off the Life List.

It's kind of terrifying to think of how soon I am going to be living in Germany again! And having to figure out all of those delightful things that my study abroad program didn't make me have to deal with, because we were coddled (bank account, cell phone, finding my own apartment . . . joy!). But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, I think. Figuring out the New York end of things first would be the logical way to go. Regardless, if anyone has any awesome tips re: German cell phones or apartment finding and wants to share them, I would very much appreciate it!

Holy shit, I am a little in love with Generation Kill. That show is right up my alley in, oh, EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, and Colbert is hot and Fick is hot and Ray is hot and also hilarious and Trombley is a ridiculous freak who makes me laugh in PAIN and everything about it is just so, soooo good. I think it has a better grasp of irony than any show I've seen in . . . pretty much ever, and I LOVE that about it. It doesn't let you forget that war is hell, particularly this war (for the soldiers and Iraqis both), but at the same time it makes you care about these men in a way that I don't think Band of Brothers did even a third as well, which was my one major complaint about BoB -- much as I love that show like burning, I never felt (with a few exceptions) that I knew those characters very well. GK does not have a bit of that problem.

I think I would love the show just as much if I hadn't already read a good bit of Brad/Nate fic, but let me also throw out there that GK fandom is REALLY FABULOUSLY TALENTED and it surely didn't hurt to be watching with that in mind.

I've started reading Generation Kill the book as well, which I'm enjoying a heck of a lot. I'd read the Rolling Stone articles before, and thus far (about thirty pages in) the book seems to be just like them only longer and better. Which, hey. No bad there!

Let it be noted that this is about the . . . fifth? seventh? fandom that dark_reaction has nudged me toward. Lauren has good taste in fandoms. GK fandom: KEEP BEING AWESOME.

On a totally unrelated note, last night I watched the pilot and second ep of Glee, which I also enjoyed a great deal. I'm not entirely convinced yet that I think it can sustain itself for an entire season or more as a TV show and that it wouldn't have been better suited as a movie, but I will keep watching for now for sure. ( a spoilery question ) That is all.

One week from today, my youngest brother is going to be in his freshman dorm, in a suite with five other freshman boys. (Bet you can imagine how awesome that place is going to smell.) He's going to a college much like mine, in terms of size and politics and academic standards, and wow, do I ever hope it's a good experience for him. He's had a pretty shitty past year and a half or so, and much as he acts like an entitled snot a good bit of the time, I hope that college is a good experience for him, that it's easy for him to make friends and keep them, that they'll be the kind of people who can push him to learn and grow and understand himself better without pushing him away. I hope that college, both academically and socially, stretches him and doesn't break him.

I hope, too, that he comes out of college feeling the way all of my roommates feel about their college -- that it was a wonderful and difficult and entirely rewarding time, that it's a place to miss and be happy to return to for reunions. I'm particularly bitter about my own college experience right now after having spent a weekend listening to one of my roommates wax rhapsodic about how much she looooved her college, but it's a jealous kind of bitterness -- I wish my college experience had the same kind of happy nostalgic sheen to it that hers does, and I hope for that for my brother: that it's good for him while he's there; that he misses it when he's done.

Ugh! My roommates and I were going to go to the Jersey Shore this weekend, had rented a car and everything, and now we are not going, not because of drama (drama happened and was resolved!) but because my mom and my youngest brother are miserably sick. UGHHHH. Such a badly timed sickness! Who the heck knows if our schedules are all going to coincide well again before the end of the summer. :\

In happier news, this morning I got up early and worked on original fic. Maybe someday I will even FINISH SOME OF IT.

Also, I spent a while at work listening to Jay Brannan sing on YouTube, after winterweathered recommended his music, and then Googled him a little, and his bio amuses me greatly.

FINALLY. THANK GOD.

Title: Mildred: A College AU
Authors: causeways and walkawayslowly
Artist: sillyshy, her art post is here. Tell her she is awesome!
Word Count: 62,131
Pairing: Jared/Jensen
Rating: NC-17
Official Summary: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Jared in possession of his heterosexuality will immediately switch teams upon enrollment in college and first contact with Jensen Ackles.
Original Summary: Jared goes to college and is gay for Jensen Ackles. It's a real shocker, sports fans.
Real Summary: No really, that’s all that happens. For 60,000 words.
Disclaimer: Jared, Jensen, and all of the other real live people we mention belong to themselves. Sadly. The OCs are ours, all ours.
Authors' Notes:

Kelly thanks: walkawayslowly, for suggesting that we cowrite in the first place, and for waiting patiently for me to move past the laughing-in-her-face stage and into the "omg fine" stage; for not murdering me during the many, many periods of story-related emo; and for still being my very favorite person on the entire internet (and beyond!) at the end of it all. I can't think of anyone with whom I would rather have a child that is also a piece of fanfiction. You say that's slightly creepy? I say that's how we roll.
girlmostlikely, for a very fantastic beta, and for being one of my very first fandom friends, back when I was new and writing about Wincestuous adventures in prison. Those were good times.
nemoinis, for being so excellent as to offer to beta even when she did not know half of the authors, and for doing a fantastic job while she was at it.

Merrin thanks: causeways. I understand the key smash when I first asked her to cowrite now, and all the laughter. See, she'd done this before, and I really hadn't. If you are not familiar with the process, it is one arduous task. Similar to giving birth, I would imagine, or climbing a mountain, even though I have only done the latter and not the former. I have a new measure for a friend now, and it’s someone who will cowrite 60k of coming-of-age (and out-of-the-closet) rps with you and still be your friend at the end of it.
girlmostlikely, for agreeing to beta even though she knew how long it was going to be, and how much time we weren’t going to be able to give her. thanks also for pointing out our ACTUAL posting date as opposed to the posting date we THOUGHT we had. Love you, babe, you are the BEST.
nemoinis, for ALWAYS betaing everything, even my crappy popslash. and for being one of MY first fandom friends, back when I thought "slash" fic meant "stabbing people with pointy knives."

Kelly and Merrin both thank: sillyshy, for picking our lame summary out of a whole list of summaries, and being an INCREDIBLY awesome artist; and the spn_j2_bigbang mods, for running this wild rumpus again.

MILDRED: A COLLEGE AU

I do not know quite how this happened, or how neither walkawayslowly nor I had thought to check the actual posting schedule before right now, but we have had our Big Bang posting date wrong for THE ENTIRE SUMMER.

HAHAHA SERIOUSLY. We thought it was the 4th! But nope. It's the 6th. Fuck usssss.

In honor of having sent our really hilariously long Big Bang off to the betas (SORRY BETAS) last night, I bring you fic that's been chillin' on my hard drive for a very long time. It's SPN, even! WILD.

Title: The Cape May Haunted Trolley Tour
Author: causeways
Fandom: SPN
Rating: PG
Pairings: gen (you have no idea how much it pains me to say that!)
Word Count: 4,300
Disclaimer: SPN belongs to Eric Kripke, not me. I would have done some reeeeally different things with it if it were mine!
Summary: After a family disappears on the southern Jersey Shore, Sam and Dean investigate.
Author's Notes: This was originally going to be the beginning of something much, much longer, but that wasn't happening. This is set in some vague nebulous period of canon between the end of S2 and the start of anything particularly plotty in S3.

( The Cape May Haunted Trolley Tour )

It is the birthday of a number of people on my flist: jamesinboots, deirdre_c, and walkawayslowly! Happy birthday to all of you lovely people, and I apologize, James and Dei, for the bias here!

So, as I think we all know, Merrin is my very favorite person in the entirety of the internet, and it is HER BIRTHDAY! I wish you the very best possible birthday, and I hope the people at HPB are still enjoying your flowers (or that your cats had a good time devouring them, if you brought them home!), and most of all I really hope that Amy and Jack's car situation gets fixed so that you can have an actual good birthday celebration, because you deserve it.

<33333

Also! Merry Christmas in July!

I'm working on rewriting the first scene of Merrin's and my Big Bang (posting two weeks from today, yo!) and am thinking about how it's pretty important that a first scene be AWESOME, because otherwise, hey, readers get bored and they drop your fic immediately.

And then I went back and looked at old J2 of mine, and was thinking about how my openings were, huh, functional but not stellar, with one exception.

Jared's about to do a line of coke off a stripper's ass when his cell phone buzzes in his pocket. (from this fic)

There are some things I would definitely change about that fic if I were writing it again, but THAT, in my opinion, is a freaking awesome opening line. Largely because I think it's hilarious, and I think hilarity is an excellent way to hook a reader.

What do you guys think -- are opening lines that important to you, or is it more about the opening scene(s)? Or none of the above?

Chace & Ed's Love Nest Is No More

They had to go and kill the happily ever after in my fic. Ugh! (Can I say how freaking lame it is that GG RPS is the most recent fic I have posted, STILL, five months later?)

However, this means that Chace Crawford lives in my backyard now. Like, literally. As my roommate said, "If we stagger our schedules, we can set up 24-hour surveillance!" The better for catching Ed sneaking back for a little cuddle!

Now back to my regularly planned econ paper corrections. The things I do for friends' sort of cute older brothers!

I'm sitting on the front porch of my family's new beach house, hanging out with my mom and my twelve-year-old dog and working on Merrin's and my Big Bang -- pretty good way to spend a summer Monday! -- and in the process of editing the Big Bang, I ran into a question that, for the first time in a million years, has prompted Merrin to say, "You should post a poll about it!"

Poll #1429160
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 30

If I have a college professor whose last name is Smith, I call him/her:

In case you are wondering why I ask, it is because at my college we always, ALWAYS called professors "Professor Whatever." And at Merrin's college, which is where our Big Bang is set, they always called professors "Dr. Whatever." All of my professors WERE doctors; we just didn't call them that.

Anyway! The Big Bang editing, it continues! Along with totally not studying for the LSAT, oops.

There are some books I've read that I've known, from the very first page, I was going to love. Middlesex is one of them. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is not. I actually said to walkawayslowly, "Is there a point at which I am suddenly going to start loving this book?"

"I don't know," Merrin said. "I sure hope so, since it's one of my favorites!"

I emailed her from a train in Germany to say, Have started to love this book. Emailed her again to say, NO REALLY IT IS 100% AWESOME.

When I got back from Europe, she said, "When did you realize you were going to like it?"

"On page 62," I replied.

Merrin laughed at me -- "On page 62? What??" -- but seriously, this is where I first got the sense that I was going to like this book a whole lot, and it is indeed on page 62 (of my copy, anyway):

She had been a virgin when she married and had humbly submitted to her husband's brutal love. His brutality early killed all of her latent desires. Yet she could understand the fierce love hunger that made girls--as people put it--go wrong. She understood how a boy who had been driven from the neighborhood for rape could still be a good boy at heart. She understood why people had to lie and steal and harm one another. She knew of all pitiful human weaknesses and of many cruel strengths.

Yet she could not read or write.

And this is where I began to fall in love with this book (pages 72-73 of my copy):

And the child, Francie Nolan, was all of the Rommelys and all of the Nolans. She had the violent weaknesses and passion for beauty of the shanty Nolans. She was a mosaic of her grandmother Rommely's mysticism, her tale-telling, her great belief in everything and her compassion for the weak ones. She had a lot of her grandfather Rommely's cruel will. She had some of her Aunt Evy's talent for mimicking, some of Ruthie Nolan's possessiveness. She had Aunt Sissy's love for life and her love for children. She had Johnny's sentimentality without his good looks. She had all of Katie's soft ways and only half of the invisible steel of Katie. She was made up of all of these good and these bad things.

She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk.

She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys or the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only--the something different from anyone in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life--the one different thing such as that makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

I went to Borders today and bought two books. One of them was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, because it is one of walkawayslowly's favorite books, and I have never read it. I was all set to call it a day right there, but then decided I wanted another book. Two seemed like a good number.

Out of Merrin's set of favorite books, the other two I could remember were The Time Traveler's Wife (which I have read and love), and The Sparrow, which my local Borders totally failed to provide me. So I bought The Demon's Lexicon, by Sarah Rees Brennan (sarahtales) instead.

Here is how much of a fandom geezer I am: I was reading Sarah Rees Brennan's stuff back when she was writing as Maya and had just finished posting Draco Malfoy and the Amazing Bouncing . . . Ferret? on Schnoogle. I remember being delighted by that story at the time, but also, I was fifteen. I've greatly enjoyed her stuff more recently than that (she was the last HP writer I still read), although, as discussed with dark_reaction, her Draco was pretty much always exactly the same from story to story.

I didn't come into The Demon's Lexicon with super high hopes. I've been burned by other ex-fandom forays into original fic (see: Havemercy, by ladyjaida and danibennett, which I read all the way through, and the Mortal Instruments trilogy by cassandraclare -- what was with dropping the i in Claire, btw? does Clare actually make it look less thirteen-year-old? -- which I would maybe be willing to give another chance on a really, really strong recommendation, but thus far have not been able to get into). My main complaint about The Demon's Lexicon is that the dialogue is a little too clever in the way that Maya's Draco was always too clever, but it's entertaining, and I'm having a good time with it so far. Also, it's got a little SPN thing going on (brothers! on the run! demons!), if that's up your alley.

Also, this evening, my roommates and I entertained one of their friends from college, who is a boy who is dating a girl. This girl: a) is his roommate; b) has a boyfriend; c) is bisexual and mostly interested in girls; d) has a brother who is the third roommate in their apartment; and e) is the only one actually on the lease, and therefore the landlord in this situation. "I think this is kind of doomed from the start," the boy said. "But you know, one second we're just friends, and the next second we are stone cold sober making out."

Of course! These kinds of things happen to me ALL THE TIME.

This boy also once dated three girls simultaneously, and was delightfully befuddled about how it had come to pass. He's sort of an accidental ladies' man. I think this would make for an excellent romantic comedy. Bonus points: he was also a very good sport about watching the second season premier of True Blood with us, which is the guilty pleasure that has taken three-quarters of my apartment by storm. Possession of HBO On Demand is a very dangerous thing.

Only my roommate and I would go to a lesbian bar with the expressed purpose of making out with girls and both end up making out with (very attractive!) Turkish boys. A+, us!