Adventures du jour!
French onion ramen accomplished, and it was magnificent. MWAH. I typed up notes for my fellow food nerds, which are posted on my FB timeline and on the blog (in comments).
I got tickets to Hadestown! There’s a theater in Tampa that gets a ton of shows, and they’re starting up again post-Covid. It’s kind of overwhelming. I want to go to about a dozen different things. Hadestown is late November.
Writing: yesterday I passed the tipping point in the story and I’m feeling giddy. I’m not at the actual halfway point yet (I think?) but it’s close. I had to unpick some of what I’d written the day before and redo it so I could juggle Mr. Assassin’s POV in a little better, but that wasn’t too bad. It does mean that all the pieces are in place and I don’t have to come up with anything or anyone essentially new, now. WHEW. Dom still hasn’t shown up yet, but I did have a thought last night that if the bad guys are fighting THIS hard to control the Goob and his family, they certainly haven’t skimped on trying to fuck Dom over as well.
One of the characters (Chef Tom) is pissed off about something and about to cut loose on Mr. Assassin, his boss, while Goth Girl is trying to explain that now might not be the best time (the word “fuck” comes up several times in her explanation). Mr. Assassin is like, ain’t got time for it, see ya Goth Girl, and gives her a smooch on the cheek.
Then I got this adorable line:
“Good God,” Tom said. “It’s the end of the world, isn’t it? The man smiled. He actually smiled.”
–I live for writing moments like that.
AI: I didn’t do any Midjourney yesterday. I had a bunch of practical shit to accomplish and was still second-guessing myself about the project the day before.
I was bouncing off the walls yesterday and it was hard to focus. I danced a bunch , talked to a friend about Italian papier mache masks for a story, fought with edits. But I eventually hit wordcount finally and crashed.
This morning I woke up early and did yoga. My hip hurt again. I thought the thought that I didn’t want to think, and it was less angsty, but there was still soreness in the hip…in a different muscle. Apparently your hips (and core) are a complex web of different layers of muscle or something. At any rate, I made it through the Warrior poses and got a glimmer of what it might be, went, “BUDDY WAIT WHAT” and decided to go walk instead.
What I eventually got to was the core thing that I flinch away from lately, which is “If I succeed, something bad will happen, so I better not succeed.”
I don’t know how it is for anyone else, but if you’re me, the thoughts you don’t want to think in your head get turned into muscle cramps/nervous tension so deep that you don’t know you have them until they release. While walking, I traced thoughts and muscle spasms back to thoughts like “be more ladylike” and “your job is to support your husband, not one-up him” and “manic pixie dream girls are just there to support male aspirations” and “the only people you’re allowed to make happy are your spouse and kids” and “you don’t have feelings, you just have drama” and various nastiness the ex pulled to make sure I didn’t have friends he didn’t want me to have (AHHHHH TMI), all the way through to some kind of insane calculation of “being a writer is dirty and people will hate you for your success.”
Dude. If this is the damage underneath the scar tissue, no wonder I’m struggling with success, let alone writing something that isn’t horror.
I didn’t get it resolved, but I did thank my hip for carrying such a terrible burden for me while I couldn’t. It’s been sore on and off the rest of the morning, plus the intercostals up both sides are burning. I’m not sure when I clenched the unholy shit out of them, but apparently I did.
By the time I got back to the apartment, I was GIDDY, though. I still haven’t really calmed down. My filters are all fucked up, and I’m torn between trying to act normal and just letting the freak flag fly, as it were. This brain under construction; please excuse the mess.
I did more practical shit the rest of the morning, and…here we are.
The rest of this is a rant on Manic Pixie Dream Girls:
I had a discussion with a friend about manic pixie dream girls a while back, and it’s been on my mind again today. (Manic Pixie Dream Girl is movie shorthand for a quirky, lively female character who inspires the male main character to live life the way it should be lived, with the MPDG either ending up tragically dead or as a possession of said male lead.)
The friend was worried about getting called one or being perceived as one. I told her (and was probably telling myself as well) that being able to do the things ascribed to such characters is a talent and a valuable skill, and that people are mostly just mad when you own that skillset for yourself instead of being able to take it for granted as their own.
My particular skillset is one I like to call weaponized curiosity, where I’ll dive into something, ingest it, integrate it, then be able to access a moderate level of the skill in a startlingly short period of time. (In DnD terms, I’m a sorcerer/rogue.)
I have unintentionally spent a lot of time getting good at weaponized curiosity, from speed-reading to empathy to translating concepts between people to being able to trust people enough to take their advice to being the first person to reach out (even though I’m an introvert, not so’s you’d notice online), to (very occasionally) shutting up to listen without undue negative judgment. I’ve also learned how to be wrong fairly quickly. The ex hired me to be his manic pixie dream girl, and I did it for a *very* long time and I did it *very* well.
So now what? Do I just ditch all that? Because that skillset is tainted by the label “manic pixie dream girl”?
There’s a point where Mr. Assassin watches Goth Girl walk into a room, befriend the dog, the dog’s crankypants owner, and the Goob’s mentor in thirty seconds or less, thinks, “Think of what we could have gotten away with, if we’d had her back then.” Mr. Assassin is the assassin, but Goth Girl has the talents of a spymaster, not just a spy but capable of running the whole damn network. She doesn’t have weaponized curiosity (that’s the Goob), but it’s really neat watching her work.
A lot of women and nonbinary people I know have complex skillsets that either don’t make them a ton of money or get completely ignored in the jobs they were hired for, and mainly get used to manage other people’s emotions and moods. I know some more or less cis men, too, who also have the same skillsets, often because they were in abusive relationships or were abused as kids, but it’s less common or it’s often incomplete somehow, hamstrung by toxic masculinity bathing them in anxiety and depression. Which sucks.
What do we do with all of it? Live in fear that someone will use us? Feel like it’s unethical and manipulative to succeed at what we’ve been trained to do, except in service of a relationship or job that’s poison anyway? End up at the insane scar-tissue calculation of “my talents are dirty” or something like I did?
I dunno. My hip just opened up this morning. I hope to have an answer eventually, but I think I’ll just be cranky about it first.