the hand behind this pen relives a failure every day

Picking up the materials for a new contract project today had me thinking about average expectations. It's a small enough project to fit inside a banker's box, and a deep enough project to keep me busy for quite a few weeks. It's also not a heavy project - like I said, banker's box - but I was told I might need a cart to carry the box the few blocks from its owner's apartment to mine. I carried it on top of the twenty-some-odd jars of herbs and spices I'd bought from someone moving out of their apartment, plus the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and jarred tomato products. It was inconvenient to maneuver, but not hard to carry.

It's going to involve cataloging personal letters, probably with indexing who sent them and who received them, who else was mentioned and where they were sent from, and I'm already thinking about how to set this all up for optimal ease of use. The hauling it over was the easy part. It's why I keep going to the gym - vanity's a small part of it, and a much larger part is being able to haul stuff around without needing the help of other people, or even much in the way of carts.

This last Friday afternoon, I held my hand out and a ladybug landed on me. All I'd seen was a tiny bit of movement coming my way, and in holding my hand out, I gave a ladybug a place to sit a moment. Yesterday, I got sunburned from walking around under early cherry blossoms on an absolutely gorgeous late March day. I'm still sore and a little itchy, and I'll be wearing high-necked clothes for a while. There was boba tea, and three different bakeries, and pizza and tacos and a lot of fandom talk with the friend I was staying with - making the other laugh was something we both tried to do a fair amount of, in a game where both sides come out ahead of where they started.

The train got me there early, and got me back a little late. I gave my friend excuse to take me to some of her favorite places, and reason to visit a few more. The both of us stepped away from our regular lives for a while in a mutually beneficial relationship, and now the prospect of the real world looms for tomorrow morning. There was a lot of freedom to be found in basically cutting myself off from the internet - the extent to what I could do on a practical level was check email. My phone wasn't connected to a wifi network, so I couldn't get anything but plain text messages, and it was a surprise to see how many non-text messages I'd missed when I got back to my place.

Bread Furst, Rose Ave, Un Je Ne Sais Quoi, Comet Ping Pong, 801, Spot of Tea, various Smithsonian cafeterias, my friend's kitchen. Various Smithsonian museums, the tidal basin and its various memorials, the circle at Dupont Circle, Metro stations, my friend's apartment. Her roommate and her two cats. A short walk along an urban trail that took us to the Ann and Donald Brown House, which I knew looked impressive enough to be worth talking about. A lot of time with nothing to do and no reason to worry about that. Some TV watched, some movies, not much writing but a good deal of reading and talking. She'll be leaving Washington DC soon, possibly to another coast, possibly somewhere still reasonably close by. I'm glad I got to visit her before she left, when I could still do it by train and be home well before bedtime when it was over.

Bus reroutes, long detours, long lines, slow crowds, and other such inconveniences are made easier with a friend there with you for commiserations and conversations.

The Smithsonian’s African American museum deserves two days to really take in, but we managed a decent overview with about six hours, minus 30 for lunch. The building used every minute of all the years it took to design and construct.

In DC, safe and well-fed on ramen, my friend and I waited for the bus to her place. I looked around in the full night of a city I’ve rarely been to, in a neighborhood I’d never visited, and couldn’t shake an odd feeling.

Then it hit me, and I had to say, “Holy shit.” I’d needed a specific spot for something in a novel, and it’d looked familiar because she’d taken me to a spot just around the corner.

It wasn’t quite deja vu. More likes dream where you know the building already, even though you’ve never been.

The Life You Build (18285 words) by Hannah
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Top Gun (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Tom "Iceman" Kazansky/Pete "Maverick" Mitchell
Characters: Ron "Slider" Kerner, Tom "Iceman" Kazansky, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Ron "Slider" Kerner is a Good Friend, Jewish Tom "Iceman" Kazansky, Catholic Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, Don't Ask Don't Tell, dishonorable discharge, Los Angeles, Gay Pride, Gay Wrath
Summary:

§ 925. Art. 125. Sodomy

(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense.

(b) Any person found guilty of sodomy shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

-

I officially have a new record for walking in late to a fandom with Starbucks. It's how I've come to describe joining an established fandom, looking around at what's been written, trying to find a story that seems like it ought to have arrived by now, struggling to believe I have to do it myself, and having to do it myself. The last times I've done this for specific fandoms, it was about 21 years since their debuts, both for Deep Space Nine - Julian Bashir never getting the genetic modifications, with DS9 coming out in 1993 and the fic getting published in 2014 - and for Buffy - an all-human AU where it's still Sunnydale, Buffy living on into retirement and enjoying her life, achieving status as public figure, her and Spike simply making a wish to have a baby, with Buffy coming out in 1997 and the first of several fics getting published in 2018.

There's been a handful of times it's been for tropes and general ideas that could go to just about any fandom, like that one I wrote for mpreg where the technology to get men pregnant was developed to achieve maternity leave reform in the United States and the character exploration simply happened to be for the show Scrubs when it could just as easily have been for any number of reasonably grounded fandoms that take place in what's more or less the real world. In fact, I'm certain there's a few fandoms where having that level of medical technology in the background would have the canon make somewhat more sense given what we see them do. And it wasn't a take on mpreg I'd ever seen before. I just happened to wander in after several decades of fandom and do it myself.

I've made a habit of doing this, and like I said, I have a new record for it.

Because in the forty years this fandom's been around, nobody's written anything where Iceman and Maverick are dishonorably discharged from the Navy. Nothing. There's been fics that tackle the culture of secrecy, or Don't Ask Don't Tell, or the legalization of gay marriage in the US. There's been fics that take place in a much kinder world where it's not an issue. There's been fics that skip past it because it doesn't work with the kind of story the author's trying to write. But there hasn't been anything about receiving a dishonorable discharge and living with what comes after.

Lawrence versus Texas happened when I was in high school. I saw Don't Ask Don't Tell come and go. I remember the pictures from the San Francisco courthouse and the wave of joy from Obergefell. I like to say that fandoms like Top Gun deliver a particular type of yearning you can't get anywhere else, especially not contemporary ones, and a lot of that's from the world those fandoms take place in. It's not a world most people want to visit, and it's the world I grew up in. I didn't mind going back there for a while.

Sometimes I feel like people forget how recent all of this is. Forty years is a long time for a movie to be around, and for people to be writing fic about that movie. For the idea to have taken this long to arrive speaks to what the fandom wants to write about. I can understand that people would rather avoid this kind of thing. Just as much, I can't grasp why nobody else thought to give it a try. I'll admit to being a little proud for being the first one to do it, and a little grateful that this is a reflection of the world that was, not the world that is.

Forty years is a good long time.