Hello, old friendslist! I have gathered you here today to announce that I'm finally letting http://www.rebeccalizard.net expire. It'll go on September 12th, so if you have any content I was hosting for you, or if you want to keep a copy of some picture or story I had up there, download it now.

What else is there to say? I still pay attention when someone says the name "Rebecca!" but I don't think of myself by that name anymore. I continue to care about fandom (I wrote a 30-page term paper on it last semester!) but it's from the perspective of a lurker, mostly, now. I'll start my senior year at Swarthmore College in four days. Reema and I broke up a long time ago but we're still friends. If you hadn't realized, I'm writing as _swallow now; I can't imagine journaling without the comfort of the friendslock anymore. Actually, most of my entries are private-- when I was in high school, writing in this journal, I had no idea how much my life and LiveJournal would change when I started seeing in person every day, and living with, and dating the people on my friendslist. It's nice but it's also claustrophobic-- in some ways I miss an internet full of strangers. (Even my mother has a LJ now!)

If we haven't spoken in a while, tell me what you're up to?

I swear, I was writing a real post tonight. It was about Angel, and being out of fandom! But it is not done. Instead I have the (sprawling, unbeta'd) fruits of some ficathon labors.

So! This is the story: latxcvi had the cool idea of making an icon fic-challenge; I signed up to write two stories because I am a cocky bastard; the deadline was at midnight but I did this thing where I fell asleep in front of the computer instead of posting because oops. Four hours late:


Alien Sex Fiend
for copracat's icon. 831 words-- it just grew, which
was freaky, because originally *this* one was going to be the
whimsical one-off.




( Purple aliens need love too. Nonfandom. )


This One Has No Title and You Can't Do Anything about It
for twistedrain's icon. 548 words.




( Melodrama in a basement! Nonfandom. )


But I have to admit that I think that is flawed on more than a few levels, fundamental and stylistic, so... let me distract you with the charming, disturbing story Reema wrote for the same icon while cheerleading for distracting me via AIM. 343 words.


( Twice the bang for your buck! Fandom: Smallville. )

Cleaning out my room, I just found a copy of the screenplay of The Hours.

A friend of a friend of ours was mistaken for an awards committee-person, or something. Anyway, I have it and don't need it, but hate to throw it away. If it's not something easily obtainable on the Internet, then does anyone want it?

The laser-jet printer just cheerfully disgorged 64 pages of turgid verse for me. I love this little machine. I never appreciated the sweetness of a working printer until every other printer in my life went headlong into disrepair and toddler-stubborn reluctance. Ah! No more tug-of-war for lost, jammed pages for me.

Around noon today I got dressed and rode W.'s little blue bike to the top-of-the-hill Borders to buy Norman Mailer books. If I had had my act together, I could have ordered them from one of Penn's small indies, but I am just a lazy slob, so my love and money went to the friendly local tendril of th' ugly corporate monolith. Oh well. Would House of Our Own Books have had a bag of jelly beans for $2.20, too?

I went across the street and bought black coral earrings at Mango with my change from the books (in for a penny, in for a pound, which is possibly a problematic life-philosophy), then unlocked my bike and tooled along the back streets of the neighborhood for a little longer. Beautiful clear, sunny day. Having the Mailer books finally is a bit of a weight off my mind-- now I just have to read them all before Thursday (or whenever it is that he comes. I should know this!). I have to read the Lyn Hejinian essays before tonight, too, and write my essay. But fucking around with the m.s. is much more appealing.

You know, I wrote a shitload of poetry in the last three years. No, I mean, a shitload. Sadly I don't think I will be able to list very many prior-publication credits in the book, since it's been so long (out of laziness) that I've sent poems out to places that it's hard to draw any useful elegant connection between my Dorianne-Laux -wannabe -style poems of three years ago and the titchy, frenetic abstract lyricism of today.

I really need an actual bike of my own, Madeline's is way too small for me. I can't turn tight curves (like, turning-around-in-our-driveway tight) because the handlebars bang into my knees and won't go further. It's a little hard to handle, the bike. I keep coming to too abrupt a stop or clumsily swerving into the path of various terrified pedestrians.

A beautiful day (I said that already). And I'm in a beautiful mood, propelled by the singular pleasure of putting off real work while staring narcissistically at one's own art. And I have beautiful earrings and I'm going to make ginger cookies later, though god knows no one here needs them, but the dough's already made so ah.

Now to make manuscript corrections.

I have been more than a little out of things, fandom-wise, recently. Like, what's with that BNF deleting her journal? What the hell happened with Lauren on Alias, anyway? Is there followup to this woman's last post full of bad news and implied despair, and is it in a locked post somewhere I can't see? What do you mean, Angel got cancelled? What bothers me is not that I don't immediately know the answers to these things-- I've never been in anyone's inner circle-- but that I don't know where to go for the gossip or the episode summaries. It's totally my fault for not reading my friendslist for so long. I would be more mystically in tune with the forces of the universe.

The W.B. press release about Angel, I got that, after poking. I guess I'm lucky I even came across pictures of Janet Jackson's nude breast.

Things that have been bothering me: being sick, the problems of celebrity culture and the propagation of memes, my own uninvolvement with any sort of community service effort at all, the New York Times magazine, the questions of intimacy and courtesy, the questions of contemporary politics, regional rail, listlessness and transience, the fact that I just broke two seconds ago my mother's jade necklace I've been wearing like a choker for the last two weeks. (It's long enough to wrap comfortably twice around my neck.) I reached up and felt it and the thread just came apart in my hand. Luckily it's got tiny knots around each bead, so there was just one casualty. I can probably stick that bead in some drawer and tie the red thread back together. There's nothing like amateur jewelry-mending to make you realize how incredibly fleshy and huge your crude paws are.

Right now the other TextEdit window open says,

Los Caballeros

La Colisión

Changada

Olvido

Alexandria's

The Blind Pig

The Iron Cow

and it's from a list of bars in Mexico and Cleveland. I was scouting for names for a briefly-important establishment in the new story I'm possibly writing. ... There's nothing like the lovely freedom, really, of choosing a perfect name for a fictional character or magazine or restaurant (especially in a constructed universe, which is very pleasant and indulgent in the sense that you can just make all this shit up), in just the way that there's nothing like the antsy frustration in choosing a perfect name for an actual person or magazine or restaurant in real life. There's the recs site-journal moireach and I are going to set up soon, for instance. Everything is planned, and we cackle happily about our own level of organization and forethought, but nothing can happen until we decide what it'll be named.

Oh, the fictional bar, though. I just went with the secret-fangirl-homage thing and called it "Wax" which, I am sure you will agree, is a perfectly sexy all-occasion name.

I went on a long walk today, trying to feel some fresh air and clear my mind, but I took the iPod along which felt, immediately after leaving the house, like cheating. It's true I had that basic focus of the music in front of me the whole time instead of having to come up with my own line of, er, meditation. ... The back streets of my neighborhood are endlessly appealing to me. I know that the love I feel for this neighborhood is because I grew up in every inch of it (or, you know, felt that I did), and I know it's just my personal aesthetic that would savor the flaking green paint on the bridge over the train-tracks, the stone water tower with its one high little window, the stoplights, cobblestone, treetops, architecture, over any other such picturesque semi-small town in America. Still the depth of my fascination and familiarity with this neighborhood seems to dictate, in the impeccable logic of my mind, the inner assumption that I'll never seriously leave it. But of course I know I will be leaving it, and very soon, and my memories (now half wistful picture, half living map) will continue to flatten until they are all nostalgia, creased and dimmed from use.

I'm on my bedroom floor now. My skin's all hot, and I can feel my mind kind of skipping tracks, wandering. There are holes in both of the toes of my purple stockings.

I have eaten chocolates all day long.

VoicePost 1102K 5:00

(no transcription available)

After witnessing the brilliance of zoe_trope and her friend, Reema had the idea that we should make a phone post together. We had one a stagy-and-meta conversation before this, which we did not post, and many minutes of pleasurable conversation (candy hearts and anthropomorphized alien dicks and video games discussed in the language of fellatio) after, but now they are lost, alas, as PPs are limited to five minutes. I sound like an awful, logorrheic idiot in this conversation, but that's probably because I, you know, am, so!

And, yes, that's us in the icon. <dork>

(And now we are sneakily warring over whether that should be "they are lost" or "this is lost", since she has the password to edit my journal and also is evil.)

(I've revised your nonsensical parenthetical construction.)

There is no difference between what I had and what you had, bitch.

You had, "the analogy of conversation hearts to anthropomorphized alien dicks a la Smallville-fic infamy made an appearance." Now it reads, "candy hearts and anthropomorphized alien dicks and video games discussed in the language of fellatio." Fellatio, fellatio, fellatio. Oh, man, I need to get laid....

Oh, that one. Right, of course, and I thanked you feverently. That part was all decided before posting, though. I thought you meant the "sneakily warring" parenthetical. ... Is it really too late to call you again?

I'd thought it had been decided, but then "analogy" came up in the Event box, which I'd loaded for the purpose of continued warring. Mm?

Well, that was a crazy and strange accident of copy-paste.

I never did anything with this story-- I wrote it one night in September right after finishing Diary and posted it to Buffistas.org, propelled by a dark rage at Chuck Palahniuk. Something made me search for it tonight. And by "something", I mean "procrastination", of course. ... Anyway. For completeness's sake, I post.


Summary: So, uh, when I say "post-apocalyptic fun with Tara", I mean "these cadences are satirical".

( What Comes Next )

This is another not-a-post. I just want to say that I have, in my patented style of fucking-around-with-shit-I-don't-understand, figured off how to turn off the carry-my-S2-style-into-my-comments-page thing. Ahahaha. I'm ridiculously giddy.

I finished watching Gormenghast last night, and now want powerfully to read the books. And write fic.

I will now go back to reading The Sweet Hereafter.

Some of these apply to more than one person. I wanted to write one for every single person on my friendslist, but the redundancy would be overwhelming, and 'sides I don't have enough time.

( I am too cool for an ordered list )

(The choice of number for each one is meaningful, but only in a crazy-synesthesia way. Also, the reason that I have no number 1 is that I burnt out after writing nine, and couldn't say "I just have nine, because I'm capricious that way" because THE NUMBERS HAD SIGNIFICANCE, dig.)

In other news, has anyone else noticed something really weird about the New York Times Magazine of late? Does it like have a new editor? Suddenly its wonted style of antiseptically and beautifully-written main articles about international atrocities or points of interest, catty-corner to displays of ridiculous and unselfconscious opulence in the fashion section, has been replaced by heavily emotional turns of purple rhetoric over topics such as steroids in sports and dog abuse in New York City. (The Style section remains as ever.)

Ice and more ice. I was waylaid by a perfect patch of it outside our garage door, tonight, twirling in my big snow boots and watching my skirt blow and my heavy shoulder-bag swing out.

Today I was listening to "Where Is My Mind" a lot. The Pixies, and also Placebo's cover of it. Placebo's cover is minimal ito extra- core-melody sound, and drawlingly, almost sloppily, sung by Brian Molko (it's live, to a presumable audience of French teenagers, given his stage patter beforehand), and it's made me think very loosely and lazily about the idea of covers and the completeness of a song. The upshot of that is that next time I'm alone in the house I'm going to put my headphones on, the little microphone on the 'pod, and sing along to the Pixies and record it. Or probably not that song; a different one, maybe the Violent Femmes I've also been listening to today ("Blister in the Sun" and "Add it Up").

I've been seeing people, mostly fandom people, posting recordings of themselves singing pop songs unaccompanied. I think it's a very likable trend, it's so sweet and intimate a gesture. So I go!

In other news, I miss Reema.

I thought that possibly the reason I was so alternately despondent, floatingly content, leaden and panicky, and consumed with lust(*) in these past few days was PMS. I hate that, that idea or feeling that my emotional state!-- "my precious name, my weapons-grade despair"-- is irrational, unusual, and explainable simply by an onslaught of hormones. Turns out I just needed to eat a shitload of chocolate, and I'm all balanced and reasonable again.

( * )

... Incidentally:

FUNERAL STORY

Skin all frayed, all light, seared sand. One-trick theme show. Break
a quick, another story. Made of medals; shouting your weakness
into the air. Cold clouds. Soft stair.

Where you went after they answered: there was no room,
there was no window breathing tightness back into
the body. There were a few pale fishes sliding sideways
in black water, flashing silver tails under the moon.

(Garden with dark snaking grasses, wrapping soft around
your ankles, tugging bracelets from your wrists.) He's here, & this
is not where you will find him. Hollow body speaking

about life, locks, ashes, pulse trapped beating under
chains and char. Steam-vents, stockings, compact coal. The hologram

stops singing and you're there again, yourself, you're looking
at a slowly-rising sun. Blink until your arms are yours. Stilled, slicked;
tight and bitten. Leave a motion. Follow stone.


I'm not sure I like that. I will probably strip it for parts.

<edit> I will make this an rliz and not a _swallow entry.

OK, this is not a real entry. I am going to spend fifteen minutes on it, and then I'm upstairs to read more Affliction.

Finally giving up on my S1 journal style, I switched to the side of the devil, with a Charles-Simic-y S2 layout. ("In the fine print of her face / Her eyes are two loopholes.") I'm really annoyed at this S2 thing, though. The customization wizard is about as cursory as can be-- you can't even adjust the text in your post-comment read-comment links!-- and, most unhappy, there appears to be no chance to turn off the carry-my-journal-style-into-my-comments-pages option (which means I'll have go back to S1 soon, because I have a really shitty dialup connection, 2K/sec, and can't afford to wait 30 seconds for one comments page to load) (although I'd swear I've seen people do it-- is it just The Boxer which S2ily doesn't allow clean comments pages?).

I read the documentation LJ has available, and it's-- okay, it's incomprehensible to me right now, and I wouldn't be able to do anything without at least several hours of studying the manual. And they seem to say that S1 was primarily markup-based, and S2 more about programming (...? I overheard this distinction being made in the comments thread of some S2 community) and you had to be conversant in programming languages to be able to actually make a custom S2 style. I am so not conversant that I don't even know whether I'm saying it the right way-- "programming languages"? That can't be right!

But this huge gap between the babyish S2 style customization wizard and the intimidatingly advanced S2 style-writing interface means that people like me can't make the most basic of design changes to their layout on their own. I want to make the links in my journal have a different "active" color, or I want to change the text in my "read 4 commnents" slot. Under S1, I could have done that in a heartbeat with a cursory knowledge of HTML.

... Also, my gay video store doesn't have any Farscape to rent, which means I'll have to buy it somewhere.

That is my complaint (and very thinly-veiled whine for help) for the day. Back to homework.

femslash04:

Rebecca: "Femslashathon!" (Rebecca takes her hand away) "Look, I'm going to sign up for this."

Reema: (whimper) "... I think we should write our own femslash!"

A tussle ensues; and now I am laboriously typing this one-handed.

Back to your regularly-scheduled friendslist.

We went to see RotK last night, and it was really, really, really fucking boring! Enough about that. Also, I consumed probably more than two thousand calories of candy while in that theater, and I stopped eating a third of the way through. ... Enough about that, too.

(We walked into CVS and bought a shitload of sugar-- bag of Twizzlers, bag of candy corn, bag of Airheads, bag of black-and-white M&Ms, root beer for me and iced tea for her-- with the idea that, hey, we'd have enough to occupy ourselves with during the movie and then for several days after, ahahaha. We're finishing the last of it now.)

(Enjoyable parts about RotK: the pure and sweet love of Merry and Pippin; Bilbo at the end no longer looking like Itzak Perlman but still lusting after the ring like that; Eowyn looking like my grandmother.

... God, that was so incredibly boring. And it kept ending, like, here is a resolution! Oh, here's another resolution! In case you weren't resolved enough, here's another fucking resolution! They clipped out the Scouring of the Shire tho' which was the only res-o-ul-tion I was looking forward to. La.)

<eats another handful of M&Ms>

I feel sick.

Here I am, dizzy girl. The pattern of days from Reema's Philadelphia visit reasserts itself, with a lot of candy-eating and movie-watching, although a few less days and more anxiety about having to leave her once again soon.

(Her new short hair is incredibly cute and sexy. Btw.)

We watched Peter Pan last night, which was badly CGI'd in a very charming way; and also sexy, if you are me. We also watched some of the Firefly DVDs, including Joss Whedon's commentary on "Objects in Space", which has kind of ruined a beautiful episode for me, and NFs and AT's commentary on "War Stories" which was charming and shit.

Reema's room is very, very messy. I had brought a disposable camera for the taking of pictures, but I think that I will not take any pictures because they would be developed and then my mother would be like, Holy shit that is a messy room, and disapprove. And, y'know. I should have brought our familial digital camera. That also would have allowed the taking of pornographic pictures of Reema, which I find myself with the desire to do.

In other news, ... I am hungry! I have eaten essentially nothing but sugar and curried chicken; I have reached the point at which, finding in myself the desire for something more healthy and less sugary, move from supermarket fudge to one of the little mini frozen cheesecakes we bought at Trader fucking Joe's.

Reema says, "I am going to make you a burrito." It will have chicken in it, because all she eats is chicken; but still how lovely to have her here, and next to me, on this bed (which is really fucking tiny) with her cat slinking around our ankles occasionally and her books all over the floor. We will take Velvet Goldmine downstairs and watch it, and also Boondock Saints and the VividCon DVDs and zoe_trope's book Please Don't Kill the Freshman for me ("Where is Zoe Trope?" "She was on the floor a minute ago.") for later.

It will be very strange again to go back to real life.

As I bite my hair and wonder what I'm accidentally leaving out of my suitcase (where is my leather skirt!), I'm typing up this recipe. We made these last night and tonight, and they're traditionally New Year's food in my family, very simple to prepare and very hard to dislike. I'm going to make them with Reema soon, so I transcribe it for my own reference:

( Scallion cakes (Szechwan street food) )

Changes from the original recipe: vegetable oil instead of lard, slightly different pancake shape, slightly more salt.

I had something else to say, but what was it? God, it's 2004. Luck and love and peace to all of you in the new year.

"3. Since we are interested in who you are as well as what you can do, please briefly tell us about yourself. Please feel free to describe an experience to help you clarify your point."

I am very cute. No, wait, I am deeply interested in learning for its own sake, and creative work, and shit. Also, I am cute.

Also, I went to Germany recently.

Pick me!



... Oh, right, the reason I opened up LJ. I've been meaning to do this for weeks, but I couldn't remember to look up how to make a poll, and now it's past Christmas. But, uh. Give me your addresses so I can send you a Christmas card! (Secular Christmas, the only kind I celebrate.) The theme this year is violin-playing snowmen. Very charming. I fucked up on the inside of it, before we sent it to the printers, so Mom had to hand-correct the inside of 300 cards. I would have done it, but my handwriting is awful. I'm a terrible person. But cute, remember?

Since I never did figure out that poll part, just make a comment here with your address and then delete it. I'll get the email.

I haven't updated _swallow in ages. Hm.

I'd never been able to hear that line before. God bless the iPod and my little sister's CDs.

Tons and tons of relatives visiting. The less said about that the better, maybe, so let's move on.

I just had this moment where I was thinking about my friendslist and thinking about WOF, and then my brain went zing and I said, "renenet is Lilea!" One of those names is going to be familiar to one group of people reading this and the other one to another, and I don't think there's any overlap; but I'm all happy and settled in my mind now. This revelation goes up there with the Buffy/Spike = Mo/Sydney thing.

My right hand feels really solid and cold, and my left feels hot and light, insubstantial. I can feel the blood rushing through it. As if it were all blood, no flesh. The right one's stone. I must have my hands at a really funny angle on the keyboard.

I quit my job at the bakery on Sunday morning at 6 AM. I called to say I couldn't work because my right hand wasn't, well, moving, and she essentially said, "OK, it's the Sunday before Christmas, so now I either fire you or you quit". I still owe her $3.50 from the cherry jelly I took home last week, but she still owes me my last paycheck, so let's see who moves first.

("[Rebecca Lizard] is quitting her job at the bakery." That was my bio for the first time I appeared in a certain spiffy-cute run-by-friends student publication at Penn. It was true then, too; I was fifteen then and had a counter job at the awful cakes-and-cookies bakery a skip away from the bread one. The owner was psychhhhotic and still owes me something like $200. I'm just glad to have left alive. ... For their second and final issue, I didn't give them a bio in time for printing so the editor used "[Rebecca Lizard] is younger and smarter than you" instead, without my go-ahead. Jesus.)

You know what I really love? My iPod. (My friendslist erupts with them: both the inimitable pbrane and undeadjournal are getting them[selves one] for Christmas.) I think these things were designed for people with different attitudes towards music than I-- I've got layers and layers of private-social uncomfort (uncomfortableness? dur) and neuroses wrt what I listen to-- but it's just so fucking cool. I found myself wanting one, decided that I am the most dispensable-income I will probably ever be in my life, and bought it. Like that. (I also have a new leather skirt and shiny blue vinyl pants. I am newly in love with both mydarkstar and eBay.)

You know who I really love? Reema. I'm going to see her in January, January, January. From the second to the eleventh. Just a moment away from now. I have Amtrak tickets that cost so much I'm going to look into flying next time, just to compare prices.

"Hey Pretty (Remix)" is actually very very sexy, in an unusually kinky way. Unusual for me to find outside of my particular social enclave. Because it's her brother, right, talking? And she's playing that fantasy-in-the-flesh chick, the multilingual Mary Sue with fast car and leather pants and guy drooling into her ear. ... The kinda-sorta sex scene continues to glow with weird familiarity re. the pattern of intimation, explicit sublimation, narrative withdrawal. There's got to be some strata of sex-texts both this and slash slot into, but I'm not actually well-versed enough with the landscape of pornography to be able to pinpoint it.

I need a better OS 9 browser. IE 5 for Mac sucks at loading LiveJournal pages (it just cuts them off, stops loading and gives me an error message, where Safari on OS X reloads the page of HTML inside itself-- it's a trip-- which is hard to have patience with but at least is there) and LJ is like 80% of what I use the internet for anyway, so, bang.

This is a brief and cutely caustic insight into the mysterious ways of those people who automatically post comments <font size="-1"> and attach "-core" after everything.

I'd like to see RotK, but I don't have anyone to go with.

Huh. This was totally going to be an entry about winter and my life, but instead it is mostly consumerist love and <lj user> tags.

I have:

.) a fantastic new leather jacket, priced at $450 in the department store and sold to me, for some reason, at $180.

.) no beta for my Silverlake Remix. Which was due, wow, several hours ago. Shit, before I fell asleep in my chair I had half an hour left. All right. Better go scan it for typos and send it to Kate.

.) a new project! I mean, a new LiveJournal! Because I am freakin' insane: glassmountain. Currently housing an original-fiction WIP.

.) no tiiime. No, wait, I mean, I have loads of time. I have no worrrk ethic. And am way too easily distracted. Swarthmore's application is due on the 15th, so hup! And I can't forget to finish the final projects for HB and CB, which, it keeps slipping my mind that the semester isn't over yet. It's been a weird one. Fizzled away into nothing at the end.

.) eaten way fucking way too much chocolate in the last 24 hours. You know what is good? Norwegian chocolate. Hot damn.

.) a travel journal being half typed up, or something. It's ridiculously, ridiculously long-- already just past 4K words-- so bang.

.) read a whole lot of very hot popslash over the last two days, and have sort of fried my brain.

.) love for this page of comments, even though I know only two or three of the names. It started me slashing my own friendlist, too, which I did at work this afternoon in a fit of being very-very-bored--

( I am a dork kthnxbye )

<edit> Oh, yeah, and. That thing! Where you tell me something about you in the comments! I was going to say, do it, please, because I am intensely curious about each of you and stalk you on AIM and wilt when I'm pressing the forward-an-entry button and hit a private or friends-locked post I can't read. Be kind to the obsessive completivist in me, and toss me a detail. I don't mind recycled ones.

Tomorrow I leave to go to Berlin for the thing. Well, OK, I leave to go to the coordinator's house, and then to New York for an airplane, and then to Berlin. If all goes well, Bennington, Yale, and Williams will be sent out (ka-pow) right before I leave, and the Common Application all finished; so assembling Swarthmore, Barnard, whassisface in Minnesota, and Oberlin will be, if not cake, cake-er than not.

I'm slightly terrified that no one will like me and everybody will make fun of my poetry, not even behind my back, but to my face, in a language I don't speak! But only slightly.


r3em4 (4:00:44 AM): I'm still logged in as you.

r3em4 (4:03:30 AM): So I could in theory bide my time until you're in
Berlin and busy and then post in your journal, like, and go

YUM MONKEYSSSSSS



So, remember: I am not here! Accept no lizard-substitutes! Eternal vigilance!

In other news, a ( revision ).