You're So Cute When You're So Dated

So, it's kinda sorta finished. The big crazy Big Bang story, and I've found a community of betas and put up a post to find one. I'm not obsessing over it at all. Except I totally am, to the detriment of any type of studying I should be doing. Which is silly, because I'm generally a fairly responsible person, but right now all I can think about is "What about that epilogue?" I think over 38k is long enough, and an epilogue is totally unnecessary. Except maybe it needs an epilogue.

That's the obsession talking. I had to change my Master's focus the other day, and tomorrow I have to see if I can beg my way into a class. I didn't even make it halfway through the first semester before changing my major. This is utterly bizarre. On the other hand I appear to be entirely too practical to watch this Paranormal Witness show my husband has put on. I keep shouting at the families on it "Move!" Like I don't know from personal and recent experience that the whole moving thing is like pulling fingernails. Ha. Anyway, the point is these people keep staying and saying, "Well I just wasn't sure if it was a ghost because it seemed totally plausible that my five-year-old daughter moved an entire room of furniture on her own in thirty seconds. See I didn't know." I lose patience and accountability with people that say that kind of thing. I'm a rational person. I like to think that if it's a choice between gut instinct and reason I pick reason every time, but come on. Really? Some things just have to be taken at face value. Occam's Razor doesn't deny the possibility of paranormal activity. I'm also that lady that yells at movies, you know, as long as I'm home and not bothering anybody. If any of the characters ever took my advice it would really kill the movie, but I keep trying. 

It's the sad truth that a certain diet of horror causes you to be particularly apt at giving survival advice. "Oh you're wearing a mini-skirt and heels? You're a dead woman walking. I'll just be over here in my pants and shoes that allow me to run. Thanks." It's also the reason I'm no fun at horror movies, because I can tell you the killer and the victims within moments. The only time I've been dead wrong was when I watched April Fool's Day, and I won't spoil that, but yeah I got tricked bad. Which is why it's one of my new favorites. 

I'm thinking about doing an independent study based off of Supernatural, which is probably not very academic of me but it seems like a grand idea. I'd love to work on something like that. A marriage of "high art" and pop culture. It's the reason I want so badly to work in the horror genre. I think there's something there, something important being said about us as a society that we, see academics, so often snub or ignore because we don't see value in it. I'm vaguely surprised when some of my colleagues don't spit on me for saying I like Stephen King so much I have his work tattooed on my body. Which is, sadly, not a joke. There's this barrier there, this long-standing complacency that if it's not in the canon, or completely unapproachable by a layperson, then it's not worth paying any attention to. James Joyce is great and all, but seriously he didn't end literature. It's still being made, still taking people's breath away, and that gives "pop culture" just as much standing as anything else. It's ridiculous to limit ourselves to a body of work made up by stodgy old white people. Which is sadly, for the most part, who makes the canon. How long did it take Zora Neale Hurston to make the canon? What about Ken Kesey? The canon isn't the last source for good literary intake. It wasn't that long ago that a cinema degree came out of a pop culture degree. The times kids, they are a-changing. 

Anyway, I have to wrap this up and do something productive. Or at least go look at pictures of some of the haunted houses I'm driving over ten hours to see this weekend with my haunted house friends. This is quite enough rambling for me. 

-dimeliora