fifteen years of blood, sweat and tears (in amazement)

Reviews and meta posts always make me feel so stupid. :( Well, not exactly all of them, but still. It happens quite often that I get curious as to what other people might be saying about a film or a tv show that I have recently discovered, and then I search for opinions and end up feeling like a fool. What, the special effects were bad? I didn't notice. What, there were plotholes? I didn't notice. What, the entire story is a total cliché? I must have been unaware of that cliché.

That last example is actually from a face-to-face conversation with a friend from so many years ago that I don't even remember what it was about anymore, only that it bothered me.

Of course, being unaware of clichés is an entirely different matter than being stupid. I really shouldn't feel bad about not recognising recurring themes in pop culture because until a few years ago I was a lot like Bones in this regard: always the only person in the room who Had Not Seen That Film. ("I don't know what that means!") I've been catching up since then, largely thanks to other people, but I promise that you still wouldn't believe the things I'm not familiar with.

It's not just that, though. I simply don't seem to be capable of any sort of in-depth analysis. Aside from certain pet peeves that I always notice because they can't not annoy me, I never even see what others describe as glaring errors. Also great: when everyone's saying that something was completely predictable, yet it took me by surprise. Or that Inception was easy to follow. Thanks.

I do recognise, barely, that Torchwood and Merlin are not exactly deep. That's about as smart as I get with these things. Perhaps it's because whenever I see magic or aliens or dragons or The Future™, my brain goes "OOOHH, SHINY!" and ceases to function. But that's just a theory. ;)

Oh gods do I even want to post this? Well, it would certainly be a waste not to.

I can't sleep. Which is kind of a small catastrophe because I happen to have an appointment in about 30 hours. Now if I wait until I'm exhausted enough that sleep becomes inevitable, I'll wake up in the afternoon and be unable to sleep the next night. If I try to stay awake, I'll probably fail. What to do??

The one thing that nobody ever seems to understand about me is that I can't just "make an exception" and haul myself out of bed after only five hours of sleep from time to time. I, on the other hand, have trouble imagining how anyone can. It's supposed to be a small sacrifice or something. A bit annoying. You'll simply be tired that day. Ha!

What happens when I try to get up in spite of not having slept enough is that I feel extremely disoriented, nauseous and dizzy while my heart starts thumping as if I were running a marathon rather than sitting upright in bed. Perhaps understandably, I often can't handle this for longer than a few seconds and simply decide to lie down again. If I dare to defy the odds, though, chances are that a few minutes later I'll be stumbling about the place, running into walls, babbling nonsense and possibly scaring the shit out of Timo. Can you see why I'd want to avoid that?!

Usually it doesn't even get better with time. Very rarely breakfast and some caffeine will do the trick, but in general it's way more likely that I'll be a nuisance to anyone present for a few hours and finally fall asleep on the sofa.

I keep thinking I must be exaggerating when I describe this, but then it happens again and I'm like, "Oh. So it was really that bad."

One hour early, that I can handle most of the time. Anything worse than that is hardly worth trying.

I think I just started to figure out what it is that keeps me from getting properly involved in fandom. That question has been bugging me for ages because it's certainly not a lack of interest: I want to get involved because I do get pretty excited about things and having people to talk to who share the sentiment would ne neat, really! Part of the problem is obviously that I don't have much to contribute, what with never having finished a single fanfic and appearing to have lost all my icon-making skillz - but that can't be the only reason, you know? I even suspect that if I did get involved somehow, I'd be way more inspired and eventually would end up finishing a fic. Interaction can do that to you.

One thing that's definitely holding me back is that I don't have the money to immediately buy each new album/book/DVD/etc. that comes out, so I regularly have to skip a lot of posts for fear of spoilers and by the time I finally catch up, everyone else's excitement has already passed. Well, with any luck that's going to change once I have my own place.

What I just realised is that I often feel left out for an entirely different reason as well though, and it has something to do with the fact that a large part of fandom is basically about sexual attraction. We look at pictures of our favourite characters/celebrities because we find them attractive, and what was the most popular fanfiction genre again? Right. Romance. Which some only read for the porn. :P That's all nice and well, but despite being utterly addicted to romantic fluff and picture-browsing myself, I often get the impression that what goes on in my head when I do these things is very, very different from other people's thoughts. The way they talk quite frankly disturbs me most of the time. I could never join a conversation that is all about how badly you wank to fuck that person, sorry.

Speaking of which, is it actually possible to get aroused just from looking at pictures of an attractive person?? I can never tell when people are joking. Especially when I'm too busy being disturbed.

Meta discussions never apply to me, either. I don't seem to have much in common with the average fan, the average female fan, the average female fan who likes slash ... or the typical representation of any other group that I'm technically a part of. It's quite frustrating. I always get the feeling that all those people who appear to be enjoying the same thing as I am are coming at it from such a different perspective that it's not really the same thing at all. How am I supposed to communicate with them under these conditions?

For some reason I was completely unaware of this problem until just now.

I never mentioned that our XBox 360 died, did I? In any case that's why I suddenly stopped mentioning Final Fantasy XIII after I'd been so excited about it for a while. Daniel's borrowed someone else's 'box now, so I've been playing again, but I have yet to actually advance in the story.

I just briefly wanted to say that it annoys me when people talk about the XBox version as if it's obvious that everyone will agree when they say that the PS3 graphics are better. I've seen both. On a HD screen there's hardly a difference and on an old tv the XBox totally wins. (But don't listen to me; I'm just a weirdo who doesn't even like HD screens. What?? You can see all the edges! I don't like edges. o.O I mean, being able to read the text without squinting is nice and all, but Daniel uses our computer screen to play games sometimes and I seriously can't watch him for longer than two minutes without getting a headache. It's TOO SHARP. *shrugs*)

Speaking of television, I'm a bit annoyed that I can't watch the world cup. I should have thought of that earlier. We did consider getting some sort of cheap receiver after we cancelled our cable tv subscription, but then we forgot about it because it never seemed important ... except right now. Oops. Daniel doesn't care about football at all and outside of the world cup I don't, either, but usually I do allow myself to get sucked in every four years. Not enough to ask a random neighbour if I can watch it with them, though. Argh.