who lives, who dies, who tells your story?

So I suppose this is a bad time to admit to the internets at large that my childhood was not really defined by Harry Potter. I was never waiting for my Hogwarts letter. I don't feel like I'm at the end of an era. I'll see the movie, but I'm not lining up tonight.

I mean, not that I don't like Harry Potter. (Well, actually the boy himself is rather bland to me and I've been over the Reluctant Hero trope for a really long time, but the world is okay, and I always wanted to see all the teachers' backstories, because I bet those are hilarious and awesome. But then, I just like professors.) But I didn't read the books until after the fifth one came out, and I was about to start college, so I guess I had just turned fifteen or so.

I spent my childhood looking for closets with Narnia in them, or at least a decent secret tunnel with murder mysteries stretching back to the Underground Railroad. I was in the library, looking for the book that would have the Wizard's Oath in it. I climbed over walls looking for secret gardens, and I gave serious consideration to running away from home, not because I was unhappy but because that's when adventures happen to kids. I found out all I could about Egypt and Mesopotamia and Vikings, so that maybe I could be an archaeologist and unearth interesting things, like those kids in the Cooper Kids Adventures. I read lots of history so that when I found a way to travel in time, I would know where I was and what to do. I read science books so that I would know how to make explosions (for diversions!) and see if there was a way to find and use tesseracts.

But I never sat at home waiting for my Hogwarts letter to arrive.

Obviously, I never found Narnia; I can see into the walled garden across from my apartment and it's just a mess of weeds; the closest I ever got to finding a secret tunnel was the laundry chute in a friend's house; I found a lot of good books but never the Wizard's Oath; I never became an archaeologist or an astrophysicist. But somewhere along the way, I learned what turns out to be a hell of a lot of history and science and literature and vocabulary. I learned how to keep looking for my dreams even when my particular closet does not contain Narnia, and now I'm involved with some really cool publications and applying to a PhD program. And I've learned that even if it's not any of the other worlds I was looking for, this world has a lot of interesting stuff in it.

(Yes, I'm aware I'm starting to sound like Sarah Jane Smith.)

I'm too old for Hogwarts now. I'm probably too old for Narnia. It's likely the window of opportunity has passed to say the Oath. The only thing left now is probably getting picked up by the Doctor. But now I'm in the habit of going out and looking to see what new worlds I can find. I just have to keep my eyes open and my feet moving.

OMG I HAVE TO MAKE MY FIRST TABLE OF DATA FOR WORK AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING AND IT’S ALL A CONFUSING MESS AND I’M DELETING THE P VALUES AND IF THIS THING DOESN’T MAKE ME LOSE MY MIND I’LL PROBABLY POST IT HERE IN MY TRIUMPH. I made miso soup for hot brain food and since it’s instant it doesn’t taste as good, but I am shivering and feel drunk (in a not good way) and have to MAKE A TABLE HOSHIT.

However, fic has helped me today, so thank you, flist. More Than Kisses, Letters Mingle Souls is amazing and has telegrams in it! It’s about Polly Plummer and Digory Kirke, years after Magician’s Nephew, and has women’s suffrage and scones in it and everybody should read it. Also orange_crushed’s Sherlock fic Precipitation is also so beautiful and well-written, and features Sherlock smiling and Sherlock/John domestic tiems, which is pretty much my favorite part of that series.

I want to write Geoffrey/Ellen fic (Slings & Arrows, which EVERYONE should watch) about them putting on Much Ado About Nothing, but I literally cannot handle any more WIPs, I can’t even handle the few I have now. I HAVE TABLES, people. But in the play, I believe it’s Benedick that says to Beatrice, “Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably,” which is Geoffrey and Ellen all over; other characters remark that “if they were but a week married, they would talk themselves mad.”

(So since I’m totally not writing that, does anyone know if there’s room between seasons two and three for a Much Ado production? I know Geoffrey announced the lineup for the season Macbeth was performed and I don’t think that was on it, but for s3, it would be easy to fit it in as a play that ran before Lear started. ) (Goddammit. This fic is WAY down on my list, all, this show is over and I have no date of expiration on writing it.)

Alright. Time for more insta-miso and table editing.

EDIT: Oh, MAYBE my head feels funny because I found a discontinued-for-inefficacy headache pill in my purse and ate it this morning! It's always nice to remember these things.

Am back from vacation. Am exhausted. Am thinking of laundry sitting all night in dryer getting wrinkly because I was too tired to deal with it. Am marathoning Big Bang Theory just because, and I need good icons for it, because now I have more icon space.

Am really glad it’s Friday and I can maybe sleep all weekend. Not really. But it’s a nice thought.

As you know, I’m editing for a medical journal these days, so I’m using my office time and work resources responsibly by giggling over letters to the editor that use phrases like OVER TEN THOUSAND HUMAN SKELETONS, as well as using PubMed's Citation Matcher from the NIH library to look up articles Alex Drake would have been searching to use as references for any articles she might write on Sam Tyler’s case. I’ve determined the best journal to attempt to publish such a report in would be Neurocase: case studies in neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry, and behavioural neurology, since it features individual case studies and Alex would have a difficult time putting together a cohort of patients and healthy controls to more specifically examine the occurrence of going back in time when hit by a car.

Or getting such a study approved of by local ethics committees and the Declaration of Helsinki. Still, I’d like to see that table of values.