don't you know by now {you can't turn back}

I think the only reason I didn't cry at Harry Potter was because of my anti-depressants. And while it's nice that I'm not, you know, seriously contemplating suicide because now I have nothing else to live for, I sort of feel . . . cheated. I've been upset/anxious/wary/sad/excited about this for months now, and then nothing. It was sad, but the only part where tears even threatened to spill down was the moment the credits began to roll. During the actual film, my favorite characters were dying left and right and I was just like "oh."

Basically, I cried much much much harder at the book. I'm not sure whether that's a flaw in the translation of the book to the screen or a flaw in my personal emotional response, but judging by how much everybody else seemed to find the movie appropriately upsetting, I think it has to be the latter.

None Returning

Harry Potter, Remus/Sirius. Spoilers through Half Blood Prince. 200 words. 1 May 2010.

Harry Potter double drabble in response to the prefacing exchange in Half Blood Prince. I could go into a long treatise on how of course Remus didn’t share his grief about Sirius with Harry openly for fear if he let it out, he’d never be able to resurface under its weight, but I think between the line at the end of Order of the Phoenix (“Lupin turned away from the archway as he spoke. It sounded as though every word was causing him pain.” OotP p808) and the drabble-inspiring bit from the end of HBP, good old JK told us herself.

Also, the title is from The Final Problem, by Arthur Conan Doyle (which also makes my heart ache): “Two lines of footmarks were clearly marked along the farther end of the path, both leading away from me. There were none returning.”

As usual, apologies for the author’s notes being longer than the fic. It’s always a struggle to keep myself short-enough winded as to be intelligible. Forcing myself to write things in drabble/doubledrabble format both keeps me from going on too long and ensures that something actually gets done (have I mentioned there are seriously 80 unfinished fics and fic fragments on my hard drive right now? *hangs head*).

---

“Ron — Dumbledore’s dead,” said Ginny.
“No!” Lupin looked wildly from Ginny to Harry, as though hoping the latter might contradict her, but when Harry did not, Lupin collapsed into a chair beside Bill’s bed, his hands over his face. Harry had never seen Lupin lose control before; he felt as though he was intruding upon something private, indecent.
--HBP 514


There was no doubt in his heart which had hurt more—Sirius, by an order of indescribable magnitude—but the force with which the news hit him was surprisingly painful. It wasn’t the cold nothingness that had set upon him in the bowels of the ministry, leaving the shell of his body to watch over the Death Eaters and to make his way unconsciously back to Grimmauld Place before collapsing on the bed that they had shared; wanting nothing more than to forget this place, this war, this man, this . . . -–Sirius-- entirely and retreat to the solitude of his hidden flat. But Remus knew the Order needed him—in the greater scheme of everything but his heart, this, relatively speaking, changed very little—so he fought. He choked back the tears that wouldn’t even attempt to fall for weeks filled with shock and more attacks. He stood up.

No, at Ginny’s words, it was not grief that wracked the werewolf’s already-broken body. Remus sank down into the chair because for the first time in the course of two wars, this single man’s death had imparted in him the overwhelming, real fear that they were going to lose.

Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe gives major donation to The Trevor Project

The Trevor Project is "the only nationwide, around-the-clock crisis and suicide prevention helpline for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth", among other related services.

I still say this manchild is a gay. Not that being an ally means you're a homo, obvs, but because he sort of just feels like it to me. Idk. Claiming to like only "older women", and he's so polite, stuff like that. Maybe just because he's cute with guys in my head.

I'm interested to know what made him choose this organization to donate to. I hope it's not because he has a friend or somesuch who has benefited from such services, because that is sad. Also sad is that he will probably feel the need (or his publicist will) to make several high-profile appearances with a "female acquaintance" to temporarily stop rumors that he is gay.



Back from the DMV--totally forgot I needed to renew my license (didn't actually run out until September 19th, but I'm fairly sure I won't be back on a weekday before then and idk if I can renew it in a different county). Ran around all morning trying to find appropriate proof of residence. My name's not on any of the utility bills or other government documents with my parents' address. They say you can just bring one of the parents' items, but that you might need a signed statement or something as well (saying what they don't specify, natch), and I know I've never had a problem with it before, but the last time I was at the DMV was when I was actually getting my license for the first time, so Dad was with me. Also had to find the birth certificate, remember that my social security card was actually in my wallet from when I was looking into donating plasma and they had to have your card for whatever reason, etc. etc.

Want to guess what the lady asked me for? My old license. That was it. Last time, even just to get my actual license I think all I needed was the birth certificate and to tell them my social. I've decided that the entire purpose of the new "Show Me Proof" Missouri bring-a-bunch-of-crap-to-get-your-license-renewed program is just to intimidate people into not trying to renew your license if. . . idk, you've somehow un-naturalized in the interim or something.

Got the glasses restriction taken off my license, though, just to prove the guy at the Lenscrafters wrong (and, you know, because I went to the gym at 8 this morning to watch The West Wing and went by the DMV straight from there without grabbing my glasses like I'd intended to just in case I couldn't pass the eye test). This eye doctor man a few days ago was giving me the third degree about whether I wear my glasses driving or not (90% of the time, not; usually only going to and from Springfield and often not even then)--I told him yes, but for some reason he didn't believe me (perhaps because I didn't bring them and he didn't realize that my mom was his next patient and therefore, natch, I didn't drive). I swear, he was about to try a citizen's arrest or something. All "you know that's illegal!" I was like "yeah, but I'm pretty sure it's not a felony." I always figured that if somebody pulled me over and actually looked at that and cared, I could just claim contacts (and the once that the guy of non-turnlane-usage hit me, I don't remember if I was wearing them but I doubt it because I was on the way to the gym, and the officerchick didn't say anything).

Anyway, I'm only 10 past the limit (it's 20/40, I'm 20/50 or something), so I just faked it on the little machine thing. I was totally shaking afterwards, though, because I knew I got a bunch of them wrong--I focus really slowly, but usually if I stay there long enough, my eyes can get there. So I was on the the third set of letters (I think it was a second distance set at a different depth, while the middle was near) when the first distance set popped into focus, and I was like "oh, shit. She's going to call me on it," but I hadn't wanted to go slowly because then I'd arouse suspicion. (I'd already tried to get away with just reading the middle set, but was told to read all the way across). Nope. There was nobody in there, really, and everybody was all laid back, and it was fine. The picture wasn't even too bad though my Chinese food-induced vomiting yesterday caused, as usual, the petechial hemorrhages around my eyes that made me look like I'd been socked in the face.

From an interview with Emma Watson:

"We’ve just done this amazing scene in the forest, we’re being chased by the Slashers."

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL. *runs after the trio*

I am so much in love with Lucy Saxon. Her character in Doctor Who has just totally captivated me. I mean, she's so conflicted and just. . . bloody interesting And I thought so even before my dad pointed out her picking up the ring at the end--the way they framed that shot, it looked like one of the Doctor's flashbacks or something to me at first, so I didn't really pay attention. That just makes her so much fun to play with. (Perhaps even more so if you take into account the commentary that says perhaps she=Rani. Which doesn't mean a whole lot to me except AWESOME TIME LORD BABE that forces timecocksquared to work together in the past, since I've only read the wiki article, but still.) She's almost your classic victim of intimate partner violence there at the end--you see marks and such on her that I'm pretty sure we're meant to think are the Master hitting her when he doesn't get enough of messing with the Doctor and the Joneses and killing Jack. Explains why she said the Doctor's name with everybody, but then sort of came back to him by picking up the ring from the funeral pyre.

But why wouldn't that be enough for the Master, the Joneses and the Doctor and killing Jack and making everybody else watch while he kills Jack just to freak them out, etc? It makes you ponder the Master as well, because he gets to kill Jack as much as he wants. He's wiping out the human race mostly because for whatever reason, they're the ones that the Doctor likes (if the Doctor had latched on to Raxacoricofalipatorious, that'd be the one that the Master was destroying, all just to mess with him, methinks). And yet he still beats up on his wife? Sure, he's all about control through violence, but that seems. . . idk, below the level of the--admittedly, insane--evil genius that he is. It's like you've just pulled off some giant, carefully orchestrated serial killing spree and can go back and do it again whenever you want and yet you detour and take the long way home just to kick the puppy on the third street over. There's no style. Like the Doctor kept saying, "He has a wife!", like. . . why? In the grand scheme of things, everybody else is so much more fun to play with, so why bother with a human?
I'm kind of not satisfied with that explanation just based on the Master's character and how I've puzzled out things thus far. Sure, he picks up Lucy, shows her around the universe enough to addle her brains a bit, tries out the whole human companion thing, uses her respectability to help establish himself on Earth, but as soon as he's got the Doctor, it feels like he should have dropped her like a bad habit. So much of everything that he did was for the Doctor to watch, to mess with his head, and beating Lucy doesn't really hurt the Doctor beyond the amount that seeing any unnecessary violence does, especially because until the end it's not like any of the gang has any excessive sympathy for her.

<-- A while ago, as per usual.


Just got an email from school's financial aid department with the subject line "PRESIDENTIAL SCHOLARSHIP RENEWED FOR 2009-2010"

A. Yeah, because if it weren't, I'd have to march down there and choke a bitch, all the work and stress I put into making sure that was so after microbiology asshattery debacle of fail.
B. When you send all-caps headers like that, my email's (and my) tendency is to send it straight into the spam bin. Srsly? Credibility < 0. If it were "OMG UR SCHOLARSHIP IS GONES!", perhaps caps would be warranted to make sure you took notice. "U DIDN'T FUCK THINGS UP TOO BADLY YET" isn't so much the capslock worthy, IMO.

Oh, and ALEXANDRIA'S FRUGALITY, HERE IS A STORY OF IT. This is making me happy atm. The localish chain grocery Shop N Save (localish in that they are only in a few regions, but are still big enough to be publicly traded and such) had an anniversary thing on Saturday before last with free sodas and hot dogs and chips and such. Which I meant to go to but didn't. But I was in there either that evening or the next, and they had a bunch of coupons from said event still on their customer service counter for 55 cents off of a 12 pack of their brand of soda cans. Grabbed. Not as many as I would have liked, but I didn't want to just nick the whole stack since it was right in front of the store and thus very conspicuous for me to be grabbing a bazillion even though it was late enough that nobody was there. But they figured most people would use them that week Too much explanation for not that good of a story. I grabbed coupon, saved it until the next week when the 12 packs were $2 each, and thus got 12 cans of fake Diet Dr. Pepper for $1.45. And a two-liter of diet orange soda for 60 cents that I'm guzzling atm (though that has nothing to do with the coupon).

I've also been working on a really awesome International Day of Femslash icon, but it's intense because I'm putting little bitty pictures of different fandoms and I've got to get shots that work enough when smallified (100x42) that they're recognizable, you know? I'm afraid that as it stands, I can tell who the pictures feature only because I know who's in them and that everybody else is going to need captions. I'm also rather miffed because I just realized that since I had yet to play with the font of the words (trying to do the main stuff of the pictures and all first and the fiddly bits later), it could have ended up allowing more than 42px on the height. No way I'm going back and redoing every picture, though, because it'd be a matter of recropping all of them--I guess there aren't that many, but the ones that are in there already are in there because they work at 100x42.

Other notes. JULY IS GOING TO BE THE MONTH OF WIN. Torchwood audio dramas on the 1-3rd, Harry Potter movie on the 15th (be prepared for another several page analysis of the suck), Torchwood Children of Earth on the 20th 6th (I thought original plans were to air them on BBC and BBC America on the same days, because it did even better over here in the states than over there. Turns out it's starting the 6th for BBC actual instead, which is a mistake, because those of us in the OMG TORCHWOOD camp will have seen it two weeks before, chances are. Though earlier = better, I know how important ratings are, so I at least would wait two extra weeks if it meant the show killed enough viewership-wise to ensure loads and loads more.)

Sidetrack to watching featurettes on BBC America (since I can't see the ones on BBC actual, fail). The description of one of the bits of an interview: John Barrowman discusses the many powerful tools on Jack's desk and how the impact of these tools is more far-reaching than some of Torchwood initially realize.
Did any one else go OMG TIME AGENT SEX TOYS. Because office/desk shagging is probably the most popular thing in TW fandom, thanks to that little bit in series 2 that made it canon. And I've been reading too much Doctor/Master fic and trying to suppress the urge to go IS IT CAN BE TIMECOCK TIEMS NAO when I get to the good bits.

Gareth David-Lloyd talks (really quietly--you can hear Eve Myles in the background almost louder than him!) in this interview about how we're going to see Ianto's sister and about how Ianto's worried about how his family's going to react because this is his first relationship with a man. He mentions that the fam is almost more okay with it than he is, and I just got this image of the scene: Ianto's all fumbling for the words to introduce Jack to the sister and she just goes "Oh, is this your bloke then, Yan? God, finally!"


Interesting personal note? 48 hour sleep cycle. Seriously, WTF? I'm up for 36 hours, then asleep for about 12. I'm on the third 36 awake through now, and I don't have a problem with it (though if the 12 asleep was 10pm to 10am instead of the other way around it'd make the awake 36 more productive).

And a meme:

1. Go to fanfiction.net.
2. Seach in Harry Potter fanfiction for summaries with your name in them.
3. Post. Try not to snicker.

( There are actually 21 of them. And commensurate snickering. )

Dear Ms. Tena.

If you make out with one (or more) of the girls in one (or both) of the next two Harry Potter movies, I'll send you 10 real American dollars by post. With box large enough for return post of self.

Love, Alexandria. And Sam.

Had alternating/combined toothache and migraine all day today. Oddly enough, they both stopped right about at 11pm. I'm maintaining that it's because I refuse to be miserable on my birthday.

Found DH on the internets last night, read up to chapter 33 (I've been timing myself on this one and I've been reading it killer fast, which is interesting, because I'm doing the opposite of skimming; I'm doing the voices for everything in my head for most bits). Stopped, though, because I had realized that reading it on the computer was making it less real. I had resolved as soon as I started looking for a computer copy that I was going to stop when I got to the end and read the last chapter in the actual paper book, but then I decided to change back earlier (actually, around chapter 27, but as I was carrying the laptop back to the front room, I got hooked into the next chapter and had to read more). I had to remind myself several times that it was the actual book I was reading, and not just some excellent epic-length fic, which is when I finally made myself stop reading (earlier it wouldn't have been as much of a problem, but when we got into the action, it became nearly impossible to put down).

Nat Tena in the behind-the-scenes interview clips in the OotP computer game (whenever you get certain amounts of "discovery points", you can go into this room and watch interview bits) is hotsecks. Her hair makes me lol because it's all spiky and fun (and she's not in costume or anything; it's just her hair). She looks her actual age there; idk why, but in the movie I think she looks a lot older than she is, which is what actually made me not crazy about her in the beginning, because Tonks was supposed to be really young.

I got a new watchband. Because the one on the big clunky watch I inherited from my dad had the little crossband that you slip the extra length through broken off a few months after I got it. I kept using it like that forever, though, with different cords and rubber bands and tape working as makeshift band-holder-downer things and sometimes nothing at all, letting the extra band length flop freely beyond the buckle. But dad came home with one on Friday, and then fussed with it because it was a little too wide for the watch (involving scissors and a multitude of matches to burn closed the cut part of the acrylic so it didn't unravel) until he got it on. V. nice of him, I thought. I'm only thinking about it now because it's bugging me a bit, though. The edges are rather rough. I'll have to take a picture of it, though, because it will take me ages to try and make up the words to describe it. It's quite odd, suffice it to say.

A giant spider just crawled across the wall behind the computer monitor. Odd. Not giant so much as. . . thick, I suppose.

I must find the cord for the camera and put up pictures from the Deathly Hallows release. The camera got accidentally left at home, sadly, as I had planned to take it to the bookstore with me, but we had gotten a couple of the three of us before we left. I got blackmailed, somehow, into dressing up as Bellatrix, so that was rather fun. I actually was in the top 5 of the costume contest--mostly because my hair turned out much better than I expected it to--which was hilarious, because the judges pick the top 5 but the people cheer-vote for the winner, so it becomes a how-many-people-in-the-audience-know-you contest, and as the group of people that showed up that went to my school were off in the back somewhere, I had my brother, sister, and this girl Kaylee whom I met (or who met me, rather; she came up to me when I was barely 10 feet in the door and started asking about my costume. She was quite nice, we ended up hanging out the rest of the night, though I can confidently say that I would never have been that bold myself, to just walk up to someone like that) yelling at the top of their lungs (obviously trying quite hard, though, as they were by no means the quietest bunch of voters).

I just had the really odd, random impulse to snog somebody. Really heartily. Leg-kicking, pulled off your feet type snog and accompanied by a bone-crushing embrace.

Idk where that came from. Angsty Remus/Sirius fic makes me want to kiss people. Nuts, I am.

Okay, so I didn't go to bed right off.

But I've decided that I'm going to have to start hooking up with one of the local HP groups. Because everybody there was so much fun tonight, fooling around with their wands and flicking their capes and doing house chants and gasping and cheering in all the right places (including several that made me sure that there were more than a few Snarry fans in the crowd), and I don't really have any RL friends that do fandom offline and only a couple that'd even know what I was talking about by the word fandom, so it'd be fun. I really enjoyed the entire atmosphere there, and looking through the profiles of some of the people in the LJ group, they like some of the same ships I do, so it'd be nice to hang out and swap fanfic and such. I've been in the group for ages, but never have met up or anything due to lack of rides to places and the fact that I don't know anybody in there, but I think I'm going to have to try.

Katie and I are going to geek around for the DH release, and idk where we're going yet (though we'd talked about the library's party, because it's got pizza, and then Borders), so maybe we and the group will overlap. If not (because neither of us have bothered to get our licenses, we're slaves to the whims of whoever can give us a ride), I'll have to bully her into coming to something of one of the groups with me.