Summer School, Swimming, and Fandom.

[corrielle]

The title of this post basically sums up what I've been up to for the past few weeks. For a more detailed account, see below.


My summer school class has been eating up most of my time since it started at the end of June.  I've never taught English 21 (a really basic composition course) in the summer before, but it seems to be going well.  I've seen marked improvement in almost every student in the class, and like other short-term classes I've taught, many of the students are extremely motivated to get the class out of the way.  So it's a good group.  I finally found an interesting, analytical, repeatable essay topic to do with them.  They're writing essays analyzing advertisements from print sources (magazines, newspapers, etc), and from what I've seen people bring in as possibilities so far, I'm going to get some very interesting essays.  We looked at a couple of ads as a class already, and my students got really into looking at details and figuring out what the various messages behind the ads were.  I'm excited.  If this works, I think I've just found a fun, engaging topic that'll help students to move beyond the personal writing we do for most of the course.

I've spent most of my weekends at home since my class started, but Rae and I did make it up to Porterville for the 4th of July. We got to see angelsbaby0910 before she went back to work, and we got to stay with ald_fan_girl and smexy_pocky. I also got to set off grown up fireworks, not those tiny little sparklers, for the first time in my adult life. That was fun.  We ate a delicious meal prepared by Megan's mother, and a really yummy spice cake for dessert. After we were done with the fireworks, we played a whole lot of Hand and Foot.  For those of you who don't know... this was the game my family played for years at major holidays.  It's canasta on steroids. It's cut-throat and nasty and there are a lot of cards involved, and one either wins big or loses big.  There really isn't much in between.  And I love it to death, but all of the relatives who used to play with me are either no longer with us or too old to remember how to play. So... it was great to be able to play, and to have one of my best friends in the universe for a partner.

Back at home, when I'm not grading papers or trying to plan what I'm doing for the next couple of days in my class, I've been taking advantage of our pool. It is hot here in Simi Valley. And while our air conditioner works very well, we can turn it up less during the day if we're outside splashing around instead of inside complaining that it's too warm.  And swimming is good exercise!  (Especially when "swimming" means the version of "pool tag" that caedhe and I made up.) Water resistance is amazing.  I'm... developing muscles in my arms, and I'm not quite sure what to do with myself. I've never had much upper arm strength, so it's a little strange.

Tonight, I'm off to a midnight showing of Half Blood Prince with my room mates (the ones who are here, anyway...) and lynxgriffin.  Well... technically it's not the midnight showing. Who knew all of the tickets for that would be sold out?  So, we're seeing it at 12:20 instead. In fact, when we went to the theater last night to buy our tickets, we got the very last ones for that showing.  This... may be wilder than I thought it was going to be.  I had expected Simi to be pretty calm... (And yes, I will be wearing my Hogwarts sweater and tie... the sweater may come off if it's too hot, though.)



As for what's going on with me fandom-wise...

Last week was all about Torchwood: Children of Earth. I... don't have time right now to explain my reaction to this show.  Writing-wise, it was good.  It was... amazing in some places.  Was there a touch of melodrama? Sure.  But... it worked for me.  I really liked it from a storytelling perspective.  But then... there were my reactions as a fan of certain characters.  Losing Ianto was like... losing a friend, and it was hard for me to take and then go right into the next episode the day after.  (However, I do like that we got it all in a week.  The mini-series format worked well for them.)   We got together with estelofimladris, hystericblue42, and scifichicx over at lady_entropy17's house to watch Day Five. We all knew it was going to be rough.  I... don't think I was prepared for how rough.  But now that I've got some distance, I think it's becoming clearer and clearer to me that... I liked it.  It was really good.  Not just the team, though I loved Gwen and Rhys in this like I've never loved them before.  It was... everything.  It was Ianto's sister Rhiannon and her amazing, adorable Welsh husband. It was the amazing woman that was Alice. It was the fact that in the end, when John Frobisher died, I cared.  And the entire room sat there in stunned silence after that fourth, final shot. It was Jack Harkness making his last, most terrible decision. (Still not sure it was the right one, but at least he made a decision, and saved all of the other children.) It was all of these things coming together to make some darn fine television.

Rae and I have also recently gotten into True Blood.  We watched over half the first season this weekend, and I'm really intrigued.  Sookie and Bill are... interesting and sweet.  I love Bill's gentlemanly veneer and his nonchalant displays of strength.  Jason's dumb as a post (and that's an insult to most posts I know), but it's hard not to feel for the kid just a little bit.  Rene... I can barely even talk about Rene right now I'm still so angry. When we first started watching, someone in the room pointed at him in the room and said, "It's Cajun Allan!"  And he was.  Not just because of the hair color or the scraggly beard.  It was the attitude and the way he talked.  I was contemplating fics involving reincarnation. But then I found out what he really was. *sigh* I had guessed the big secret before it was revealed... I knew that there was a secret to know about him, and when I saw the scene in the bar where Sookie gets attacked without seeing his face, something clicked in my mind and I knew it was him.  

Moving on... Sam is the sweetest thing in creation, though he's emotionally dense sometimes. (I can forgive him that, though.)  Eric the ancient Sweedish vampire is sex in a black wife-beater. (I know, he doesn't wear it all the time... but when he did... rrrowr.)  I also find his poise and his droll understatement to be fantastically amazing.  I think Jessica is hilarious... the scene where she wants to learn new cuss words just because she's run out of the ones she knows still makes me grin when I think about it (and about poor Bill's reactions).  But... the person I love most in this show?  Tara.  Hands down.  She's smart, she's stubborn, she's gorgeous, she's messed up as the rest of them, but at least she knows it, and she's managed to get through life with he alcoholic mother and come out a kind of amazing human being.  I'm worried about what the strange lady with the pig and the big white house is going to do to her.

And besides all of the pretty people with their interesting character traits... I think True Blood has some really cool thematic stuff going on. We've got prejudice against vampires as a metaphor that doesn't quite fit perfectly for racism or homophobia, but has some qualities of both.  We've got questions of faith, of why it works and how it works and if it really matters if any of it is real.  And we've got questions about individuality and conformity... neat, complicated stuff. I can't wait to get my hands on season two.

And of course... Robin Hood.  I really felt the lack of an episode this past Saturday.  The fandom seems to be humming along nicely.  There are tons of funny/sad/dramatic/silly/amazing drabbles and short fics being posted over at rh_drabblefest, and I've been using them to get my daily dose of Guy and the Outlaws.  Also, we have proof that Richard Armitage is even more awesome than I thought he was.  The link goes to a really smart, insightful interview he gave that makes me want to simultaneously hug him and sit him down for a long chat about Guy and being sympathetic for historically "villainous" figures. (Many thanks to endcredits for pointing me toward this...)

I know I should have gotten a lot more done on my longer fic by now, but I'm still ironing out the wrinkles in the basic plot construction.  I'm having to figure out where I want to start this massively AU beast of mine, and then I have to find a place to end it... (This is always a problem for me with big fics.  Because I know a ton about what happened before that isn't interesting to anyone but me, and unless I want to kill them all, I'd happily write about their adventures forever past the point where anyone wanted to read them, so endings present a bit of a challenge, too.) However, even as I wring my hands, character arcs and relationship dynamics are becoming more clear to me.  Hopefully when I start actually churning out chapters, it'll be filling in what I already know.