Hi! So I am going to be back in Melbourne in, like, forty eight hours, and I´m going to be jetlagged and headachy and sulky, and there´ll be work and phone bills and and everything will be a bit grey. Which, you know, my life, high tragedy. ANYWAY, my point is, if people felt like filling up my inbox with cheerful things to make me feel less grey when I get home? Well that would be pretty awesome. If you felt like it.

Nearly finished, now :/ Tomorrow we head to Alajuela, near San Jose airport, with one full day there before we fly out.

We´ve been on the Caribbean coast four nights, now. Puerto Viejo was a bit of a wash-out - it rained, and I think we chose the wrong hotel, and we just kind of sloped around, occasionally buying Caribbean dresses (made in Vietnam). The only really striking element was Playa Negra, the black-sand beach. It was so black, and so soft and fine, and when the waves came in they frothed grey as though they were full of ash.

Now we´re in Cahuita, half an hour up the coast, which is quieter than Puerto Viejo and so far one of my favourite places in the world. We´re in a hotel right on the water - there´s no beach just here, so the waves crash on and over a rock wall. There are hammocks slung between coconut trees next to the rock wall, and more on the little verandas outside the upper story rooms (where we are), and yesterday evening I spent about three hours lying in one hammock and then another, alternating between watching the waves, reading a ridiculous romance novel, and making notes for a ridiculous story about spies. It was beautiful and perfect, and I want another week here. We´ve had two gorgeously sunny mornings, and two pleasantly overcast afternoons, and damn, why did we stay that extra night in Puerto Viejo? Even in the rain I could have rocked away an afternoon in a hammock here with absolute contentment.

It´s such a little town - most of the buildings are hotels and restaurants - with beachy dirt roads and palm trees with colourful painted trunks and such incredibly friendly locals, Jamaican-Costa Ricans with dreads and bright shirts and girls with gleaming cornrow braids and Spanish-Costa Ricans with dusty singlets and easy smiles.

Today we spent hiking through Cahuita National Park, swimming and walking and craning our necks for sloths. It was one of the best days of the trip.

( Wildlife special edition! )

We had no luck with the volcano, although there were fireflies. (The fireflies here are so desultory. They blink maybe once every thirty seconds, in a sleepy sort of way, and fly in the dark the rest of the time.) But the volcano trip included a stop at a free hot spring, and that was pretty much awesome. The hot springs here don´t well up from underground, they´re streams heated by the lava flow. So this was basically a creek in a dark culvert, running at 35 degrees. It must have been fed by two different streams, because there was a cold current and a hot current. There were pools above and below the culvert, with rapids you could shoot yourself over in the dark - if you lay back you could fly about fifteen metres along the culvert.

We ended up taking a taxi up to the waterfall (La Caterata) and then walking back down into town. It´s a gorgeous waterfall, falling 70 feet into a pool with sides close enough that when you sit on the rocks at the edge, you´re buffeted by actual waves, splashing you in the face and knocking into your chest. You can swim round the other side, in the more tranquil pools, and there are schools of fish constantly fighting the current there.

The house of hammocks, with the cat sized hammocks, was closed for cleaning when we walked by - the owner confided to Danni that this meant he was seriously hungover - so we didn´t get to go there, but we stopped at this home coconut place, where the woman hacked off a bit of coconut and poked a straw in, and we took turns drinking the milk. Then she hacked the coconut open and I picked it apart with my fingers (Danni wasn´t interested, although she took a billion pictures of me making triumphant faces over strips of coconut).

La Fortuna was such a pretty town, I really loved it. Also, humming birds in the backyard of our hostel! There was a feeder, and a bird table, and there were always tiny birds whizzing about and squabbling with each other, whatever time you were out there.

We´re in Monteverde now - well, Santa Elena, which is the town near the Monteverde cloud forest reserve. The town is quiet and nice and has good restaurants and hotels, but otherwise unremarkable except for the way it rains out of a clear sky all day and night. The rain comes off the cloud forests (which you can´t see from town) in a constant mist that wafts down the streets.

We haven´t been to the reserve itself yet. We spent today doing extreme ecotourism - zip lining through the old growth forest on steel lines a hundred feet up. It´s right up the non-eco end of the ecotourism scale, but seriously, you guys, zip lining through the canopy. Some of the lines are slow and you can really look around, swing back and watch the trees coast by underneeth you with the rain misting in your face, and some of them are terrifying. Or, well, one was terrifying - you had to climb up onto this tiny, tiny step at the top of the platform, clinging to the line while they transferred your cable, and my legs were shaking before they let me go. Then you´re in the mist and you can´t even see the far platform, and you´re speeding through, and it was fantastic and also, I mentioned, a little bit terrifying.

Also, at the end, there´s a tarzan swing, which basically means climbing to the top of a tower, getting hooked up to a new line, then stepping out into space. You´re in freefall for only a second, but it´s so fucking scary, and then you´re swinging high and it´s the best feeling ever.

I want one.

Selvatura, where we did the zip lining, also had a tree top walk, which was a tamer way of skipping around the canopy, and a humming bird garden, where dozens of jewel-bright birds dance around feeders in the pale rain, and dart past your head. And we went to the reptile house and saw a fleur-de-lance, which is incredibly uninteresting for such a ridiculously poisonous snake. The poison dart tree frogs are really cool, though.

We had dinner at a restaurant built around an oak tree, called The Tree House, where they serve frozen mojitos in wide glasses with little mint leaf trees perched on top.

( Kind of a lot of pictures of humming birds. Um. )

I´m looking at my delicious network for the first time since I went away, and there is NO BANDOM FIC on it. It´s like an endless parade of Supernatual and Merlin and Startrek Reboot.

What´s happening, you guys? I want to come home to fic, if I have to leave the fireflies and humming birds behind, damnit :/

We´ve been in Costa Rica twenty four hours now. San Jose possibly has nicer parts than what we saw, but generally it was a hole. The Costa Rican countryside, on the other hand, is absurdly beautiful. I expected the tourist destinations to be gorgeous, but the entire countryside is this verdent mess of fields and crops and mossy ferns growing on everything that will sit still, and just, never one plant alone - you never see just one thing growing, even in the fields, there´s always a rich tangle of a dozen things all together, climbing over each other.

It´s gorgeous.

Transport hasn´t been exactly charmed so far. Our plane took an extra twenty minutes circling before it could land, and was met by half a dozen emergency vehicles. We got to the bus stop the next morning a good twenty minutes early, to find that the time I had was wrong, and we were bustled on at the very last minute before it took off. Then about three hours in there was an accident on one of the sharp winding corners, and traffic built up in both directions for an hour before a couple of ambulances turned up. On the other hand, if you´re going to be stuck in a traffic jam, what a lovely place to do it. We were driving through cloud at first, and then as we waited it gradually dissipated to reveal mossy fence posts and green fields and banana trees and some terribly relaxed looking damp cows.

We´re in La Fortuna now, which is basically a volcano town. Unfortunately it´s been raining for a week, and you can´t get a glimpse of the volcano (which spews magma into the night sky on a good day). It´s a beautiful town though, banana trees and golden bamboo and rainforest creeping into every backyard, and the rain so warm and pleasant. We´re going to walk the 4k to La Catarata waterfall tomorrow morning - stopping at the roadside refreshment and hammock place that reportedly sells cat-sized hammocks, which we´re both way too excited about - and then do a volcano tour tomorrow night. We probably won´t see anything, but you get to soak in hot springs, so I can´t see how the night can be a loss.

Here are the last Mexico photos! Apparently I haven´t uploaded any pictures at all of Chichen Itza, so these are all Playa del Carmen. Remember the part where it is surreal and insane, but so much fun.

( Style and subtlety in allthings )

Actually the other culture shock element of Mexico is the military checkpoints. Whenever the bus is entering a town, you go through a little checkpoint with guys in military fatigues with rifles lounging around. They look relaxed and friendly, and they would be completely nonthreatening if not for the guns in their arms, and the sandbags piled around their little huts. At one point one came onto the bus, checking bags, all the time with the enormous gun at his side. For my own peace of mind, I decided to assume that the safety was on.

I spent the last evening in Merida wandering around the city. There were a couple of glittering drag queens handing out free condoms in the main plaza, which was ... kind of blink-worthy for Mexico. The very pleasant guy hitting on me said that it was a protest in favour of legalising gay marriage. It was a nice mood, either way - it was a just a little gathering of people, watching and chatting and taking condoms, but nobody seemed disapproving, here in this catholic centre where I'm not even sure that homosexuality is legal, let along gay marriage. At least, Costa Rica is supposed to be one of the very few places in south and central America where it is.

I ALSO learned, from the same guy, that Merida, along with having four billion shoe stores and electric guitars on sale along with packets of chips in corner stores, is the Mexican centre for hammocks, because of the heat and mosquitos. Heat is obvious, but apparently the hammocks here are made of a material that naturally deters mosquitos. Damn but I wanted one. Sadly, even if I had a veranda to hang it, I couldn't fit one in my pack (which means that I didn't buy a hammock for you either, Mum and Dad. Know that I wanted to.).

We went to Chichen Itza the next day. It was ... impressive, with the enormous central pyramid, and the huge ball court with stone hoops attached to the walls, where they may have sacrificed the captains of the losing teams, and it was also HOT, and mostly, it was seriously incredibly touristy. The most Americans I've seen on the trip, and cords to stop you touching any of the ruins (as opposed to Palenque where you clamber all over them), and local stalls selling obsidian carvings and Mayan calendars and blankets and dresses along every path, until you get to the wide open aching hot lawn with the pyramids all around.

It wasn't nearly as good as Palenque, but I'm glad I've been. It was actually interesting architecturally. I hadn't read anything about it before we went, so all I knew was that it was a Mayan city, and I was staring at all these snake-headed sculptures and skull carvings and chac mools (sort of bowl-shaped prostrate figures, I don't actually know what they're supposed to represent), and just thinking, wow, this can't be Mayan, these are Aztec - these are what we saw in the ruins in Mexico City. But apparently Chichen Itza was a Mayan city conquered by the Toltecs (who heavily influenced Aztec architecture, and also brought the human sacrifice culture to whole new bloody levels), and unlike Palenque it was never really abandoned. Even when it stopped being a true city, for reasons they're not sure of, it remained a Mayan pilgrimage site - so it was never swallowed by the jungle. People have always been going there. They just haven't always had cameras.

Today's our last full day in Mexico, and we're in Playa del Carmen. And holy shit is Playa a shock after the quaint colonial towns and rainforest ruins we've seen in the rest of Mexico. Supposedly Cancun, to the north, is the true party town where gringos go to go wild, but if Playa is the quieter and less touristed option, Cancun must be fucking insane. It's like a cross betwen the Gold Coast and an American college movie, basically. Fun - especially in the evening when it's cool, it's a really fun town to wander around, with the clubs and open bars and beach and colour and neon - but so intense. I would hate to live here, but it's awesome to visit. We went out last night, to a beach club called the Blue Parrot, where people tug you out of the dance floor to pour shots of tequila directly down your throat. It was good to be there with a bunch of girls, so you could dance with whoever you wanted but then be shielded when you didn't want. Mostly, though, it was surreal.

There were also fire dancers who took the dance floor at one point. That was a blast from home even more than the Gold Coast echoes, although these dancers were better than most I've seen.

Costa Rica tomorrow!

This is the first trip where I´ve paid attention to the people almost as much as to the sights; the first time where I´ve felt the people are living really different lives to mine, I guess. The sweetest thing I´ve seen was a young man helping a young woman with careful hands to re-tie the cloth holding her small son against her body. They were just a young couple on the streets of San Cristobal, with smooth hair and smooth faces and a child carried in a scarf. I´m not even sure why it caught me, but it did.

They aren´t big things, I guess. There were young girls along the roads outside Palenque selling bananas, and one of them was idly balancing her banana basket on her head, using her hands for something else. There are always open trucks on the road with two or three men - only men - lounging in the tray, giving our bus window incurious glances. In Chamula, the indigenous village, two of the sad-eyed boys with outstretched hands tried our tour leader, Sam, and he grinned at them and ruffled their hair until they dropped the sad eyes and started giggling.

I´m writing from Merida, which is a tourist town in the Yucatan Peninsula. It´s pretty kitschy, actually, but our hotel has a pool, in a surreal turn of events, so I wandered around the hot city for most of the morning and then lounged by the pool all afternoon. The rest of the group has gone off to see the Uxmal ruins, but since we saw Palenque the day before yesterday and we´re seeing Chichen Itza tomorrow, I took a lazy day instead. There was only me at the hotel, so I kicked my legs around and got wet and then sat at the shaded table by the pool and spent two hours writing the first fight scene in the epic post-apocalyptic My Chem fic I´ve been planning almost as long as I´ve been in bandom. Frank was saving Gerard and Mikey from a creature with two venomous heads and black wings.

Palenque was amazing. It's the first Mayan ruin I´ve seen, and definitely the most impressive. It´s an entire city, all in white stone that used to be brightly coloured, but only five percent of it has been excavated from the rainforest. The rest is completely hidden under greenery and soil - we walked up one of the hidden ones just off the edge of the site, in the rainforest, and it was nothing but a tree-tangled hill. There were howler monkeys growling (man are they scary sounding), and rainforest all around.

The excavated buildings are temples and palaces, all in long narrow rooms, because the Mayans, along with having no pack animals and no wheeled vehicles to carry the enormous stones they built their cities with, didn´t have the technology (is it capstones?) to build wide roofs. You can climb the steep steps and walk inside most of them, wearing down the ruined stone with even more feet, and the ones with intact roofs are so dark and so close. There was one, the tomb of the Red Queen (this isn´t an Obernewtyn joke, it holds the skeleton of a lady with her bones painted red), where the original palace was converted into a tomb to hold the high status lady who had lived there, and then another pyramid was built around it, a new palace with long narrow rooms all around that people lived in, and the tomb always there in the centre. The Mayans liked to be close to death, apparently, like modern Mexicans.

Also it was pouring while we were there. Rain in the rainforest, and ancient white temples emerging through the dripping greenery. At one point a toucan flew over in a flash of yellow beak.

The city was buried in the rainforest when the Spanish found it - the Mayans were never conquered. The civilisation just folded in on itself, the bureaucracy crumbling and the crops failing in the overworked land, and all the peasants moved away and all the kings died without them. At least, that was the potted history version we got. Either way, there are people of Mayan stock all over Mexico, but particularly here in the Yucatan peninsula, and Mayan culture and styles are everywhere. Here in Merida, a shopkeeper tried to sell Danni an over-priced Mayan calendar by giving her a little lecture in everyday Mayan language used in the city today.

After the ruins we went to two waterfalls, Misol-Ha and Agua Azul. Misol-Ha is an awesome column of water that smashes into the pool below. You can walk behind it, where you get drenched by the spray as you stare out through the panel of water. It made me feel euphoric and a bit drunk; I could have stayed there for hours. Agua Azul is a wider, more diffuse series of falls and rapids, with aqua water between the brown rocks. You walk up along the river to all the different viewing platforms, and all along the path there are stalls and girls selling mandarines from baskets. Up above the stalls are the rough houses they live in, and kids from the community weave between the tourists to play on rope swings in the water. I got to swim in the pool at the bottom - again, me and Danni were the only ones to go in, so we mucked around practising Little Mermaid poses and lying in the rapids. (I´m loving all the swimming I get to do on this trip, I can´t even tell you.)

Tomorrow is Chichen Itza! Huge golden pyramid, and according to our guide, the reason that 95% of the Palenque ruins are still uncovered. All the excavation money is going to Chichen Itza, which is closer to the coast and gets the rich American tourists. Either way, it looks awesome, so.

( Photos! )

Today we´re in San Cristobal, in the mountains down near(ish) Guatemala. It´s another colonial Spanish town, with bright churches in white and blue or yellow. Yesterday we took a speed boat up a gorge (Canyon del Sumidero), to the prettiest waterfall I have ever seen - a delicate spray falling down over jutting moss-covered frills that flared out like the shape of a Christmas Tree (it´s called the Christmas Tree waterfall as a result). Also, there were pelicans and vultures and herrons and egrets and a crocodile, so that was pretty awesome.

(Mostly, though, I love speed boats. I know they´re awful, and I cordially hate them if I´m in a row boat, but speeding through the sides of the canyon with birds of prey circling above and the spray behind and the wind in my face is - well, my kind of holiday.)

This morning we visited the indigenous town of Chamula, for market day. Chamulans are nominally catholic, but they converted on their own terms. They´ve mixed up catholic rituals with indigenous Chiapas ones, and their church is decked with scarves and strewn with green pine needles. There are cleared spaces on the floor with tiny candles set out in circles and arcs, and people sit around them conducting rituals and healings with soft-feathered chickens tucked under their arms, pouring rum over candles and breaking eggs over babies´ foreheads. (Apparengly they also sacrifice chickens, but we saw no sacrifices.) Tourists wander among them, and the locals do their best to ignore us, watching suspiciously ever now and then to make sure that there are no cameras in sight. You feel both privileged and as though you´re trespassing, even though you´ve paid to come in.

They also revere St John the Baptist over Jesus, and one of their saints is La Virgen de Magdela.

I´ve seen poverty in Mexico for the first time here in San Cristobal and in Chamula (and a little in Oaxaca). Whenever you pay for anything in Chamula, and particularly whenever you get change back, there will be an old lady or a child with big eyes and outstretched hand. If children see you with food or a drink, they will come and ask you for it, too. (It feels easier to give away food than money, so I gave a boy my bread roll and made sure to spend money in the market.) (Present shopping! I love present shopping. I just wish I didn´t have to carry everything I bought, now.)

I´ve uploaded some more photos, but photobucket has frozen on me, so I´ll put them in another post.

Hola, mis amigos! (Seriously, travelling with Danni I often have to translate for her, which means using the phrase "mi amiga". I feel like SUCH a dork every time I do. Somehow it doesn't feel like a real word, just a pop culture joke.)

Anyway, so, we're in Oaxaca ("Wa-ha-ka"), although only for another hour or so. The Day of the Dead is huge here, and because we're here a couple of days afterwards, the skeleton imagery is still absolutely everywhere; this is a city that gives the definite impression of being in love with death. Our hotel (which is a gorgeous Spanish colonial converted mansion with an inner courtyard with a tiny library and fountains and parrots in and out of cages, and terribly uncomfortable beds) has a table cloth with cavorting pairs of skeletons in holiday gear, and Christmas-style ceiling decorations of tinsel skeletons, some of them with mermaid tails. There are cowboy skeletons in wall murals and gentleman skeletons on balconies and Miss Havishem-esque skeletons in intricate faded finery on pavements in front of shops.

I kind of love it a lot.

The other thing Oaxaca is famous for is the dream animals that we saw along Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. They don't have huge display models, but they have shops and market stalls full of really gorgeous psychodelically painted birds and iguanas and dragons and turtles and unrecognisable creatures of claws and frills. The really beautiful ones are works of art and priced accordingly, but I wanted to buy up pretty much every market stall I passed. Because I would have so many uses for psychodelic dream animals. Um, yes. (Although they do have a use; they're supposed to keep away bad dreams, if you keep them in your bedroom.)

I'm warming to the tour group. I was pretty dubious about it at first. I'm not big on group activities, and it just felt like cheating, to have all our accomodation and travel booked for us. It rubbed me the wrong way sometimes when we were all trailing like ducklings after our tour leader to and from train stations etc, too. Basically this tour was a compromise, because Danni wanted tours and I wanted independent, so we went half and half, and we chose Mexico for the tour because it has a reputation for being dangerous. But honestly it hasn't felt dangerous even once, anywhere I've gone with anyone. I haven't been rocking around the streets on my own at 2am, but even so, I haven't seen even a whiff of street crime. Everyone I've met has been so incredibly friendly, and usually so willing to enter into the spirit of helping me when I'm struggling with my Spanish; it feels like a far more open culture than anywhere I went in Europe.

ANYWAY, so, as I said, warming to the tour group, partly because they're fun, and partly because it's comfortable to know transport, in particular, has already been worked out by somebody who isn't me, but mostly because it really does let us do things we couldn't do on our own. Most of the time is free to spend on your own or with others as you like, but today the whole group rented a bus and a driver and drove around visiting a family carpet place (they make dyes with moss that looks like Old Man's Beard and with marigolds and with little beetles they laboriously collect from cactus leaves) and a village market and a mezcal place (I have officially tried the worm one, and even had a shot with the special mezcal salt that's mixed with chili and ground up mezcal worm) (I'm not hugely into worms, but mezcal is niiiiiiice, mm), and to a gorgeous turquoise pool at the top of a petrified waterfall.

Seriously, it was so gorgeous, and felt so surreal, swimming in this beautiful pool at the top of a mountain. The petrified waterfall is basically formed like stalactites, from residue left by water dripping over the side of the cliff; it looks like a great frozen fall of water, truly. The pool is clear green and a little cold but mostly beautiful, continuing in smaller pools down to the edge. We drove to it through a community of cactuses and dusty dry corn fields and mezcal cactus crops and goats and men in wide hats leading donkeys (donkeys: so gorgeous) and little old ladies with long braids carrying baskets, and to come from there to this picture perfect scene was - well, it was surreal.

San Cristobel tonight/tomorrow! I have already forgotten everything I read about it, er. Eleven hours of overnight bus ride first anyway, which, ugh.

Hope everything is splendid where you are. Let me know any news! Including internet news; there should be lots more pictures like that one of Ryan and Z in burgler masks in my inbox, I'm just saying.

So, one thing I've learned about Mexico: if a waiter tells you they have vegetarian options, don't believe a word he says. He means that they have a salad section on the menu.

To be fair, our waiter really tried when he saw the salad wasn't working for me. (I was cramming avocado and carrot and tomato into a bread roll and eating it as a sandwich, and then looking mournfully at the mound of inedible greenery left behind.) He brought me a little plate of refried beans, and then he brought both of us bowls of dessert jelly, none of which appeared on the menu.

We're now in Puebla, which is a really gorgeous Spanish colonial town, chock full of churches and shoe stores and optometrists. The town centre is impeccably cared for (as opposed to Mexico City's, which is a crazy mess of cracks), and everything looks terribly prosperous and desperately pretty. There are domes on every corner, and the main square has a smaller square of grand trees next to the seriously imposing cathedral.

The bus ride out to Puebla took us through the outskirts of Mexico City for the first time, and into the countryside. In the outskirts there were more familiar Mexican scenes - familiar from the television screen, I mean - scruffy coloured boxes of houses piled on top of each other with peeling paint and clothes lines and tarpaulins and corrugated iron, and people walking along the roadside. Out in the countryside itself we passed through the mountains, which looked almost exactly like country New South Wales. We kept passing yellow diamond road signs that I would see out of the corner of my eye and think had koalas on them, before remembering that that was impossible.

I'm having fun struggling with my Spanish. It's like a game that everyone gets in on - charades and careful words and waiters repeating my words to other waiters because my accent is so atrocious. I feel like I'm doing a lot better than I did in Spain, though. Maybe I'm just braver.

( Photos! )

Going to Central America, kittens. Don't curse any planes today.

Mayan ruins and craft markets and rainforest and volcanoes and black sand beaches and reggae bars and sloths and fireflies and cloud forests and hot springs. Bring it on, okay.










ALSO, yesterday I got a card with sunflowers wearing sunglasses on it ♥

Rec me blogs, guys! Especially non-American blogs. What do you read? Any topic - politics, feminism, fashion, books, nostalgia - anything well-written and funny or cool.

Lately I've been reading my Google Reader as much as I've been reading my friends list, and there are many awesome feeds there, but I'm beginning to feel as though I know more about American culture and politics than I do anywhere else in the world.

*

I got the sweetest scam email today. Some very kind gentleman has a legacy belonging to somebody with my last name (for reference, my last name may possibly be less common than Smith, but I wouldn't lay down money on it). This person may not be related to me, but I am legally entitled to claim it! Because they have my last name! If nobody can be found to claim it the money will go to the government, who will probably swindle it and use it for nefarious purposes. If we claim it, though, and split it 50-50, we can use the money for good. To help the destitute and, also, orphans.

It brightened up my afternoon some.

Yesterday softlyforgotten and I passed a graffiti-stained back alley and saw a violinist playing, framed by an intricate ironwork streetlamp that was decked with red shoes.

*

There's an AU picspam for The Like over at my other journal, for anybody interested.

I feel weird, internet. I don't know what to do with myself. I finished my course last Monday (or, okay, my last class is this coming Tuesday, but it doesn't count), the presentation went well, and I'm free, I guess. But I'm not feeling it. I still have things to do (lots of things to do) for my trip, and I haven't even really worked out what all of them are, and I haven't been writing, and mostly I'm feeling guilty for not immediately going out and catching up with all the people I've been neglecting. Including the internet ones (hi, guys. I love you.)

I spent most of today avoiding reading the epically epic fantasy novel I'm supposed to have a review for tomorrow, and then from 5pm onwards actually reading it. It's not even bad, I'm just not in the mood for epic fantasy, and it's not really good - I don't love any of the characters. And I was resenting it so much, and then I thought ... shit. This is it, you know? I've finished my course (it was a Graduate Diploma in Editing and Publishing, well respected in the industry although not any kind of guarantee). And now, if all goes well, I'm going to spend the rest of my career reading things I don't especially like, and reading them over and over again and making painstaking line edits and restructures and being diplomatic even when they're awful and about subjects I hate, and then reading the new versions over again too.

It suddenly doesn't sound as cool as I hoped it would be.

And, you know, there is a way out, a way I could avoid working full-time at least, and it's the writing thing, and that's never stopped being my goal, even with all the work I've put into being an editor. But I'm never going to be that girl, the one with the book contract and the secondary income, if I don't take it more seriously. And I don't know how to make myself. I don't know what more incentive I could possibly need than the ones I already have.

And I'm twenty six years old, guys. I'm pretty happy with the things in my life that keep me creative and alive and connected to awesome people, but the years keep coasting by, and every year that finishes without me finishing a novel maybe kills me a little bit.

It's just stupid, I know. I think there's an inherent pointlessness to any great or intense effort, and once you've pulled it off you can't help feeling it. I'm in the post-project backwaters. Swimming still.

This is not a real update, because I haven't got the energy, but here are some things that are true:

sekkritbandomlj is made of sunshine and has drawn the most adorable art for Drink Me. Brendon's woeful little face! And peering out from behind Jon! Spencer all happy with his bicycle! Jon so comfortable on the ropes! You should all go tell her how awesome it is, and that Jon doesn't look possessed. Or, whatever, tell her Jon does look possessed, as long as you tell her it's the charming sort of possessed. Because seriously, so charming.

Also at that link is some art for mahoni's The Uncharted Sea, which, you've read that, right? Tell me you've read that, and maybe we can heart eyes at each other about it in the comments. That fic was possibly the best, most unexpected thing to happen to fandom all year. (Or, you know. Unexpected to me. Probably mahoni knew it was coming.)



Z Berg and Ryan Ross are killing me with the adorable on twitter.

thisisryanross: So there's blood all over the bathroom and first thing I see is "snuggle death" scrawled on the wall.Death by snuggle that's how I wanna go
ilovethelike: @thisisryanross oh my god snuggle death, my one and only dream!
thisisryanross: @ilovethelike I already knew that!

( More, la la la I have no life, clearly )

Seriously, you guys. I liked Z and The Like before I knew anything about them, because I am contrary and a lot of fandom seemed inclined to disapprove of them. Now I know possibly too much about them, and man, so fucking charming, you guys *__* I downloaded their new single 'Fair Game' (free legal download! That never gets old), and was a bit horrified to realise that night that the play count was already 18.

Also, I like their new lineup, but their completely dissimilar fashion senses are kind of hilarious. Witness!



(Z is twenties girl in the front. The others are Tennessee Thomas in the summer dress, Laena Geronimo the fifties pinup girl, and Reni Lane the indie singer/songwriter.)

Also, have I maybe mentioned I think this girl is particularly adorable?




I started reading The Hunger Games on the tram this morning. Wow, so hooked already. What an awesome structure to get to play with.


Here is another thing that is true: In one week I'll have finished this course. Halle-fucking-lulah :-)

Here are some things I am looking forward to:

Tuesday 6 October I wake up having completed and presented my semester-long apex-of-my-course group publishing project. No more night school, weekends and evenings to write and to see people, my LIFE.

Thursday 29 October I fly to South America for a month with lilithstorm. Mayan ruins and volcanoes in Mexico, rainforest and monkeys in Costa Rica, it's going to be amazing, you guys.

Wednesday 23 December I go home for Christmas.

February 2010 is Soundwave, and My Chemical Romance will be on stage in front of me for the very first time.

Easter 2010 frankkincense is, fingers crossed, coming back to Melbourne ♥

One more month, guys.

ETA: Ahaha, oh, just noticed I stole the post title from ordinaryink. I guess I was reading her post just before I wrote this.

I would really, really like to be betaing and writing letters and replying intelligently to emails and writing chapters in co-writing fic projects and, you know, actually talking to you guys. But when I'm not doing work- and publishing project-related things, it's because my head is rebelling at the idea of doing anything productive at all in any way and, you know, this show is kind of educational, maybe you should switch to something with cartoons?

Here is something I did instead, in bits and pieces of time when I needed to look at pictures.

Favourites Picspam

It has no Panic boys, because I'm feeling complicated about them at the moment, and I wanted unadulterated squee.

I haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to the Bandom Battle Royale polls, but I happened to skip over there this morning, and you guys, you guys, Battle of the Bassists, Lyn-Z is losing to Alex Suarez.

You guys.

I will be first in line to grin like a huge happy dork and make finger guns in Alex Suarez's direction, because he is awesome, but he's not Lindsey Way. If she's going down, make it at least be to Jon or Mikey, okay?

( A succinct but compelling argument )

Go vote, people.

Am posting pretty much purely because the post just below is currently making me sad and I don't want it to be at the top of my journal. So here are some things:

1. I like The Like! I didn't especially expect to, because I figured I would have actually heard things about them if they'd been good, but husky young female vocals for the win, you guys. Also, how adorable is their drummer (Tennessee Thomas, in the middle). In pretty much every picture I can find of her, she is awkward and adorable and trying to look less tall. Occasionally there are huge dorky black-framed glasses. (Or here is a picture of her looking less dorky, if that's your thing. I don't judge.)

2. In not entirely unrelated matters, I thought Ryan's fake twitter marriage was also adorable. Apparently some people thought otherwise? But seriously, cutest fake newlyweds ever. Look at his smile.

3. I got rained on today. A lot. Also I was sad kind of a lot, in that ridiculous way where I was listening to The Weepies' 'Not Your Year' on inappropriate repeat. Yeah. One of those days.

4. There are study things I really really need to get done tonight and I haven't done any of them.

5. I finished William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying this morning. I think this fulfills my Serious Miserable Literature quota for the year.

6. I may be going to South America in November!

7. Here is a final thing: Every time my friends list devolves into a hotbed of anti-Ryan sentiment I end up having to defriend somebody else just for my own emotional well-being. Also, a kitten dies.

Fangirls, you should think about this question very carefully: Do you hate kittens?