aria | a flying start (five things make a happy post)

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a flying start (five things make a happy post)

Here are some things that are making me happy:

i. According to an explosion of news on the internet this morning -- I would link a specific article, but really, just google the keywords -- Stephen Fry is going to be playing Mycroft Holmes in the next Guy Ritchie film. I had a split second of "Well, that is awesome because I will watch Stephen Fry do anything, but I can't picture him and RDJ as brothers" and then I spent another split second picturing them side-by-side, and ... yeah, actually, that works stunningly well. SO MUCH JOY. Here, have a stupid catchy song about Stephen Fry in celebration.

ii. I am now officially going to the East Coast for an alarmingly long stretch of time in October. I plan to use my time there well, ie keep doing my internship, take long rambling walks of campus, spend obscene amounts of time with friends, and plan The Future. I am very excited about all of this, and stupidly relieved at how excited I am.

iii.

sophia_sol made me a podfic! by which I mean she recorded my Slings & Arrows Geoffrey/Darren fic high on a stage be placed to the view. I am learning to adore podfic -- for one thing, how I read something is very different from how another person does, which leads to fuzzy feelings of egocentric fascination when I hear my own fic read. But it is equally awesome when it is other people's fic! I don't know why I don't listen to podfic all the time, honestly, because I love being read aloud to, and I have enough of a daily commute now to justify tracking lots down and listening to it. I guess this is me asking for podfic recs! D'you have any favorite fics, or even favorite readers? I would love to hear about them!

iv. Remember how yesterday I linked to Diane Duane's fic about Five and Nyssa making pizza? Today there is A Dinner in Belgravia, wherein Five fails to locate pasta, Tegan makes a horrible pun about the Master, and they and Nyssa pay a visit to Sherlock Holmes. I made actual flappy hands of joy. Yep.

v. The ridiculous charming thing about living with a nine-year-old boy (for the sake of argument let's call him Zack) is that he is just now, for the first time, reading Harry Potter. This leads to some pretty great exchanges. For example:

ZACK. I'm on Chamber of Secrets now! The Chamber is open and a monster is turning everyone into stone and Harry just found this diary, and it's a magic diary! Know why it's a magic diary?
ME. Well, when he writes in it, someone in the diary writes back, right?
ZACK. [wide-eyed] How did you know?
ME. ...I've read it too.

Or, coming across Zack and a friend crouched on the sidewalk, industriously poking a bucket of mud with sticks:

ME. Hey, guys! What are you doing?
ZACK. We're making a potion! I'm Harry, and she's Hermione, and Ron's sick right now, so we're making this to make him better.
ME. I see! Good luck.

It kind of makes me wish I'd been young enough when Harry Potter first came out to do stuff like that. Mud potions, guys! Alternately, I am really tempted to send Zack is Hogwarts acceptance letter next year. Really, really tempted.

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I KNOW RIGHT.

And, well, I suppose so? I read it at the end of fifth grade, though, and all my friends were either [a] obsessed with horses or [b] gearing up to be Grown-Up Middle Schoolers (Who Don't Play Pretend, Aria, What's Wrong With You). I guess I could have done it by myself, but I was too busy, um ... looking in closets for Narnia, imagining Grand Quests, having conversations with my daemon, and writing proto-fic in a diary about how I was totes a first year at Hogwarts. So it's not like being ten wasn't awesome.

:DDDDDDDDDDDDDDD I LOVE YOU. That's, uh, almost acceptable. *___*

WE SHOULD HAVE BEEN FRIENDS WHEN WE WERE TEN.

OH GOD.

Aria, I just got hit with a RELIEF that you didn't know me when I was a bb Scott. I WAS AWFUL.

Ahaha, oh god, why? Or should this stay secret?

Nah, I was just ridiculous. I mean, I guess I was worse at 13-17 then I was at ten, but I think I might have been pretty bad then. I WAS SO PRETENTIOUS. I wore all black a lot and said snotty shit about the death of intellectualism and SO MANY OVER-SIZED WOLF SHIRTS AND PEWTER DRAGONS.

. . . I guess that is actually pretty standard geekery, but it's deeply embarrassing in retrospect.

Also slightly more lol personal stuff about my BRAINS and how I had NO CONTROL OVER MY FEELINGS, but after being around kids in school a bit, I am reminded that apparently that is most kids/teens.

Dude, you had my ten-year-old-self at over-sized wolf shirts and pewter dragons! I would have been SO JEALOUS of your goddamn dragons and tried to steal all your shirts! It would have been GREAT. Also, I probably would have been in awe in you for saying snotty shit, no lie. I was super awkward and pretentious!

Also, if you'd read Lord of the Rings at that point, you would have had my UNDYING LOVE FOREVER.

:DDDDDDDDDDD OKAY SO WE WOULD HAVE BEEN ADORABLE BFFS. TINY US! \o/ \o/ ♥

OH YES I HAD. Dude, I had read LOTR by the time I was five.

Ugh, ugh, Scott, Lord of the Rings was my liiiiife in fifth grade, and I would NEVER TELL ANYONE, BECAUSE IT WAS SACRED. If I knew you'd read it and had any thoughts on it at all, you would have never gotten rid of me.

:DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD! I used to spend my time at that age jumping off things and shouting "Elendil!"

Yeah, okay, I am a little in love with you.

U

♥

Butting in to say I love everything about this thread.

Carry on.

YOU ARE ALLOWED TO COME BE TEN WITH US ALSO, DUDE.

I'M GOING TO BE HONEST, I WAS BASICALLY LUNA LOVEGOOD. /o\ Like I genuinely believed that I had psychic powers that I could harness if I tried hard enough, and I had this plan where I was going to use them to take over the world (mostly just to Save The Rainforest™), and. It was ugly, you guys. D:

Hey, did I tell you about the year that I was totally convinced I was telekinetic? That may have been when I was about ten or so! WE COULD HAVE BEEN A SUPERHERO TEAM.

DID YOU ALSO READ THAT BOOK ABOUT THE GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENT CHILDREN WITH TELEKINESIS. Because I think that was where that came from. XD

Had you told me you were telekinetic, I would have gone "omg really???? :D :D :D" and then insisted that we spend FOREVER trying to bend spoons with our brains. And then called your house at weird times of day to discuss The Plan and nag you about your progress honing your psychic skills.

I totally hope we are both thinking of The Girl With Silver Eyes here! Although actually I got the telekinesis thing from Matilda! As one sometimes does.

Oh, see, I didn't do spoons! I did door locks and things! I still have an absolutely clear and vivid memory of flipping a door lock with my mind from five feet away, and to this day I have no idea what the hell happened, probably because I CONVINCED myself it must have been my telekinesis and refused all possible un-paranormal explanations. Anyway, I would have been in favor of phone calls to discuss The Plan! Oh man, our bb selves. <3

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endofthewest - 2010-09-26 05:11 (UTC) - Expand

BUTTING IN TO SAY THAT I READ THAT BOOK TOO AS A CHILD! Though I was more convinced that fairies and mermaids were real than anything else.

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aria - 2010-09-26 16:16 (UTC) - Expand

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littledust - 2010-09-26 16:21 (UTC) - Expand

WELL I LEGITIMATELY THOUGHT I WAS THE LAST ELF WHEN I WAS 13, SO THERE.

That is so adorable I cannot even. :D :D

Okay that is the cutest. ♥! My 10-year-old self would be (A) totally credulous and (B) SO JEALOUS. (At 13 I was just a cynical little asshole, so good on you for holding on to your childhood sense of wonder for longer. XD)

YEAH, WHAT SCOTT SAID. :D

.....I love you guys.

At 10 is was the Dragons of Pern. Eleven was Ender's Game, which was the series of my heart for a good long while. Twelve was Lord of the Rings. I was 17 when Harry Potter came out. My age, let me show you it. I was a pretentious snot about HP, because I was stupidly of the opinion that anything that popular, that fast? Had to be bad.

Of course Twilight proved my point later, but anyway. I didn't read HP until the 3rd book came out.

I was a pretentious snot about HP, because I was stupidly of the opinion that anything that popular, that fast? Had to be bad.

I am so not judging you for that, because I was that way too, especially when I was a kid. (Seriously, I didn't see Star Wars until I was fourteen! Everyone had seen it, so it couldn't be that good. And it took me until this year to watch Star Trek. My god.) Anyway, I managed to get on board with Harry Potter when only the first book was out purely by the virtue of reading it roughly a month become it became an overnight sensation. I thought it was cool BEFORE IT WAS COOL, and wasn't that a weird feeling.

I think it probably has to do with us geeky type kids, who did not have geeky friends growing up, not knowing what to do when people like what we like. Yes, we all would have died to have a handful of people our age to share this stuff with. It could have been our secret club.

The whole world liking it? Is scary. And possibly means we're not special. Therefore, this thing everyone likes cannot be special.

Such is the non logic of insecure teenagers.

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