Rich Mullins, "We Are Not As Strong As We Think We Are"

Here are the lyrics to the song itself:

It took the hand of God Almighty to part the waters and the sea
But it only took one little lie to separate you and me
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are
And they say that one day Joshua made the sun stand still in the sky
But I can't even keep these thoughts of you from passing by
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are
We are frail, we are fearfully and wonderfully made
Forged in the fires of human passion, choking on the fumes of selfish rage
And with these our hells and our heavens so few inches apart
We must be awfully small and not as strong as we think we are

And the master said that faith was gonna make the mountains move
But me, I tremble like a hill on a faultline just at the thought of how I lost you
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are
We are frail, we are fearfully and wonderfully made
Forged in the fires of human passion, choking on the fumes of selfish rageAnd with these our hells and our heavens so few inches apart
We must be awfully small and not as strong as we think we are

And if you make me laugh, I know I can make you like me
'Cause when I laugh, I can be a lot of fun
And when we can't do that, I know that it is frightening
What I don't know is why we can't hold on, can't hold on

It took the hand of God Almighty to part the waters and the sea
But it only took one little lie to separate you and me
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are
Wouldn't you love to walk on the water, just don't stumble on the waves
Me, I want to go there something awful, but to stand there and take some grace
Because oh, we are not as strong as we think we are
No, we are not as strong as we think we are

A little more Elsie musical history here.  There were three songs that made me decide that Rich Mullins was my favorite singer and always would be: "Sometimes By Step," "Hold Me Jesus," and "Growing Young."  Back when all I had was "Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth" and "Brother's Keeper" (on the back shelf, before I fell in love with the album), one song made me decide to buy "Songs," and that was "Hold Me Jesus."  I can't even describe what it was like to hear that song for the first time.  I was a sixteen year old autistic kid with no bridge between the things tearing her apart inside and the real world before the line "hold me Jesus, 'cause I'm shaking like a leaf" built that bridge all by itself.  I heard "Hold Me Jesus" from a friend's compilation album in the summer, and it was winter before I bought "Songs."  And then I skipped all the way to the end just to loop the song I'd bought the album for.  Then I went back to the beginning and started listening.  I didn't like all the songs at first (and that's a pattern with me; my very favorite songs are the ones I skip the first time through).  "We Are Not As Srong As We Think We Are" captured me the very first time, though.  Because it was so slow and pretty, and for the line "I tremble like a hill on a faultline just at the thought of how I lost you."

Those two images became enmeshed with each other in my head, and to "tremble like a hill on a faultline" became the way to express a grief too deep for tears.  The first time I remember specifically using the line was when I said goodbye to my high school friend A.  She'd been a kind of project of mine -- our friendship consisted mostly of me cheering her on at her horse shows and helping her to shovel the stalls, then playing hours of Final Fantasy.  I tried out my ideas of Christian service on her and received my first rebukes at the condescending way I'd been taught to present.  And I think I did love her in a way.  It wasn't with the kind of raw emotional need I've felt later on in my life, but we had a connection.  And I felt sad when I said goodbye to her, knowing it would be the last time.

Here's what Rich had to say about "We Are Not As Strong As We Think We Are" (link to the full concert below -- well worth listening to):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYN5AyBZhn4&list=PL49BDE2090F22FE67&index=9

I'll do a more recent song because I might remember it better.  It's the closest thing to a love song I've actually written in the last several years, because I don't date anymore so I don't need to write many, y'know, love songs.  Because they never worked very good anyway.  But uh, it always worries me listening to Christian radio occasionally, you get a little worried because if you were really tuned in to that stuff all the time, it would warp you.  I became alarmed at this lack of good breakup songs on Christian radio.  It's as if we were all part of Focus on the Family or something.  We didn't do that.  So, uh, me and Beaker decided to write one.  It's really hilarious because of all this Internet stuff.  I get all these letters from people trying to console me on my divorce.  I'm going geez, I haven't had a date in a decade, how can I get a divorce.  It's not really a personal story, it was just an exercise.  We decided we would try to make it hard for the other guy to rhyme, and that's how we wrote it.  But anyway, they played it on radio, so it must be okay.

Rich had a line in "Afraid of the Dark" that -- paraphrased -- goes, "I am no longer afraid of goodbyes; I have become so accustomed to them that it scares me."  I think I understand that line, for the first time in my entire life. 

Hmm.  Okay.  I was a very strange kid in that I've always -- as long as I can remember -- had this perspective that this life is only a very tiny slice and Eternity is going to be so much bigger and longer and more real.  So by that definition, goodbyes in this life are always temporary.  I've lost some family members along the way.  Never anyone who was extraordinarily close to me.  So I'm not sure how I'll react to real, immediate grief.  But I've always seen death that way ... just a passageway.  Just a door.  Temporary.  We have the great company of the saints who have gone before us around and behind, watching and cheering and praying and being intimately part of our lives.

The most important goodbyes when I was a child was with my cousins.  In general, I was a really lonely kid.  Every summer, my family took a road trip to visit my father's family in one state and my mother's family in another state.  The states weren't close to each other or our home, but involved several days in the car (hence I love songs like Andrew Peterson's "Venus").  We'd typically visit a week or so each place.  I speculated that those two weeks were only times I was truly alive.  I was really close to two of my cousins, one on my dad's side (which was more of a big-sister relationship), and one on my mom's side (which was more of an equals-relationship; I was a year older but I felt like she'd been through more).  This was before cell phones and free long distance.  It was also before I had an email account or was comfortable on the Internet (or used it anywhere besides the school library).  We tried paper letters, but those typically didn't go back and forth more than a couple of times during the year.  The goodbye at the end of the visit was a true goodbye, at least (to my teenaged brain) for an awfully long time.  I'd always console myself that eventually we'd all live in a place where there would be no more goodbyes.

During the very last such visit, my cousin just -- well, had a lot of stuff going on and felt like a bad hostess to me.  I finally forced the issue by saying that I felt like we were growing apart, and she sighed and said she'd give me a hug and walk me back to Grandma's.  I ... I guess kind of stumbled back numbly (I'm not sure what happened those first few hours), and, careful to be quiet, cried myself to sleep.  That kind of pain ... by its very nature has to be temporary.  I get to the point where I can't feel any more than I already do.  It's not that part that I don't understand.  It's the way that it settles into a quiet kind of grief that just stays.  I told myself that friendship was over.  It probably is, at least in this life.  I think by this point she and I have both accumulated too many scars to ever be able to reach across the chasm and connect in any way.  The part that I don't understand is the awful feeling that "this cannot be."  It's unthinkable that this hole will remain in my heart and life for the rest of my time on this earth because ... it just is.  It's not logical.  So some part of me (maybe the part that's still five years old) convinces myself that this isn't really goodbye -- that as much as it stinks, that the hole is my cross to carry for a time, but someday it will be lifted.  And with this particular friendship, that's still possible, not in this lifetime but in the next.

To me the "I have become so accustomed to goodbyes that it scares me" part comes when it stops hurting like that ... if that makes sense.  When the part of me that rebels and says that the 'goodbye' can't be forever because it just can't, because it's unthinkable, because ... it just can't be forever.  When that part of me gives up and accepts that sometimes there's no happy ending, sometimes love isn't enough, and sometimes scars can be permanent.  That's another bit that I can't understand.  I'm okay with scars remaining.  Scars are healed wounds.  I don't think that there's any horrible experience, any trauma, any flashback or nightmare or memory, that God can't heal someday.  I'm still on the fence as to whether He can do it without being able to touch me ... but that's a subject for another post (besides, that's a question to which I can always be picking up new information).  But I can't understand how God can make permanent goodbyes not-hurt.  The whole idea of "goodbye" is wrong.  It's part of this fallen world.  I picture building halls and rooms in my heart and life for each individual person who is part of it.  I can always build more.  But I can't take anything away.  And the more deep and close the relationship, the less likely that anyone else can inhabit another person's rooms.  I think that capacity and that individuality of relationship is inherently a good thing.  So the way that the empty echoing halls hurt is also inherently a good thing -- the problem isn't that the halls hurt, the problem is that the halls are empty.  That something good has been torn away.  Even if eventually there will be no more goodbyes, I don't understand how the ones that have already transpired can ever stop hurting.

I pick theme songs for events in my life.  It's kind of silly ... I guess ... but it's the way I relate to the world, and it is what it is and it's always been this way, so I just keep on doing it.  My song for separating from a couple of specific people in the "Xena" fandom is Mark Schultz' "Think of Me."  I don't have a song for separating from the entire fandom.  So as I began this post, I wondered if "We Are Not As Strong As We Think We Are" could be it.

"I tremble like a hill on a faultline at the thought of how I lost you" is a very good description, actually.  I always have flashbacks, but the past couple of weeks have been insane, and I finally made a "Xena" angst video to try to shut up the flashbacks themselves.  With mixed results, I guess.  I'm no longer flashing to individual things, but now there's this generalized grief that kind of shows up and then recedes like waves in the ocean.  I'd thought that telling the stories would help a little, but it doesn't.

The truth is that absolutely nothing can fill the empty rooms left by the "Xena" fandom people.  They occupied an entire wing of my heart.  Nothing can recapture the crazy twisted sense of reality -- the pictures and philosophy and artwork, the interconnections, the feeling that I had an entire network all over the world who had my back, the service opportunities, the travel opportunities, our crazy inside language that I didn't even realize was a secret language until I'd slip and use one of the words in my everyday conversation and then have to explain it and run back to the board and post the story.  The way it felt to share music.  To hear Plumb's "Cut" for the first time, or Nightwish's "Sleeping Sun."  To have the weirdest things about my internal life exposed and understood all through writing which didn't seem weird, in public no less and yet to stand unashamed in the midst and to learn what it felt like to be proud of all the parts I'd always had to keep hidden.  To be a mediator, to think about interdynamics friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend.  To think nothing of buying others' plane tickets or fill gas tanks, to watch "Xena" interspersed with swimming or shopping or driving or sightseeing.  To dance until three in the morning at the convention, and not even have to deal with post-con-depression because I was too busy posting threads and pictures and reliving every moment of it.

I have much better and truer friends now, and I don't believe I have any secrets I've told to "Xena" people that I didn't also tell to someone else, someone still in my life.  It kind of hit home to me this weekend that my social life is full again ... maybe not like it was, maybe not like I'd like it to be, maybe I still feel horribly lonely ... but the fact is I have more than a lot of people do, and the friends I have are truer than many people ever experience.  It's ... I think it's impossible to fill that empty wing.  I don't have the time, I don't have the ability to trust, and some things are once-in-a-lifetime anyway.  But the fact that it will just remain empty forever is unthinkable.

"I have become so accustomed to goodbyes that it scares me."  Except ... I haven't.  I wonder sometimes if the fact that this is still unthinkable, so many years later, is actually a good thing ... it means I will never lose the capacity to love.  I just wish it didn't hurt so much.  Or feel so permanent.

She wishes she was with them, but she looks and they're not there.  Seems love comes for just a moment, and then passes on by.

--Rich Mullins, "Jacob and Two Women."

Xena Fandom: Aslan the Kitty

After all that talk about The Rift, I spent the last two days creating my own Rift video.  It's finally finished and posted.  I've spent the past hour or so going through the "Xena" videos on my hard drive, attempting to separate out the videos I would like to have on my ipod and convert any in non-ipod format.  It's fairly tedious work, but it's worth it to have a finished "Xena" video collection.

I just stumbled across and watched a video that Belle had made for Annabelle.

When I established the "only good memories" policy...I knew this part would be horribly painful.  There's so much surrounding all these stories that I can't talk about here.  But there are a few memories surrounding the way that video got on my computer in the first place that I can post.

It was ... maybe a week after Belle flew here, maybe two weeks, but it couldn't have been much longer than that.  Belle was staying with Wakaba.  I was renting a room from a friend of mine, since I had less than six months before going to Alaska.  Wakaba and I were about 45 minutes apart, but between her work, my work, and job-hunting with Belle who would be rooming with me once I got back from Alaska, the three of us spent a lot of time together -- all in the same room/car or in combinations of any of the three of us.

One of our first dinners together, we went to the Panda Express near where Wakaba lives.  We were in my car.  Wakaba was driving.  At Belle's request, I played the Sarah McLachlan song, "Answer."  She interpreted the line at the end to be about nightmares -- "cast me gently into morning for the night has been unkind."  I'd always simply interpreted that line as being about the generalized way I'm afraid of the dark (or rather, what I do to myself when the lights are off).  It was wonderful to be with people who intuitively understood that.  We got to the restaurant before the song finished, so we sat in the car to hear the rest.  Then we went in and got our dinner.  As we were leaving, Belle noticed that there was a fire truck parked next to the restaurant.  We took our pictures near it.

Belle stayed over in my room at my friend's house a couple of times, job-hunting, apartment-hunting, or investigating the schools.  The first time I dropped her off at the local community college, besides looking at the class offerings, Belle made this for me:

 

Since I like some unconventional pairings for the characters (Xena/Marcus and Gabrielle/Perdicus), I had asked Belle to make a Xena/Marcus banner for me.  While I've made several banners of my own, Belle's art skills are much better than mine.  Besides ... sometimes it just means more to me to be able to use pictures that others have made for me.

 

That evening, the friend who I was staying with invited Belle and me to eat dinner out in the main area of the house with her.  We explained a rather complicated situation with Cecile, a mutual friend of ours who lived maybe 20 minutes from Wakaba and 50 minutes from us (another long story).

 

After dinner, when we were hanging out for a little while before I brought Belle back to Wakaba's work to ride with her there back to Wakaba's house, Belle offered to copy all her "Xena" videos to my computer.  Belle's an awfully good video maker in general.  I believe that I have several videos that she never put/left online.  My favorite of hers has always been to the song, "We Don't Need to Look Back Now," which I'd had on my ipod for years at that point thanks to the video.  I guess that's why I have the more personal videos as well.

 

Months after that, after an, um, lot of complications that fall into the dirty laundry category, Belle, Wakaba, and I planned to visit Genkakette.  That evening first I stopped at gas stations to buy everyone's favorite sodas to stock the cooler for the trip.  Then I went to one of the local church Catholic chapels and prayed that if the weekend turned out to be a disaster, it wouldn't be my fault.  Then I went to Wakaba's to spend the night in preparation.  I was out on the sofa.  I had such a hard time falling asleep; the seeds of the coming disaster were already in motion and I had no way to stop it.  Then Belle's cat hopped up on the couch with me, purring like mad.  It was the first time I'd seen Belle's cat as an almost-adult -- she'd been a tiny kitten when I'd first met her coming off the plane.  I was reminded of a moment in the fifth book of the "Chronicles of Narnia."  Shasta sleeps alone with the pyramids at his back, and he's terrified of the dark and of ghosts and of being alone until this cat comes to him, snuggles up to his back, and purrs.  I pictured Belle's cat as being like the cat who came to Shasta, who later turns out to be the great lion Aslan.  And I slept.



 

Xena Fandom: Found my London Con Journal

In searching through my old gaming stuff, I ran across a journal that I had at the London Convention.  All the fans signed at the back, and obviously I can't post those signatures since they're people's real names -- but over the next few days I'll see what I can scan in.  It has my recap of my conversation with Steve Sears about blood innocence from about twenty minutes after it happened.

Xena Fandom: My Dad Saw WHAT????

This one will need to be under a spoiler cut.  Spoilers for the Xena Rift arc and early season 4.

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This belongs in the category of Xena fandom memories, because this was my go-to "most embarrassing moment" story at all the conventions.

My favorite Xena storyline was fan-dubbed "The Rift" arc.  I saw this before I had any experience with the Xena fandom itself, so I was completely unspoiled, and I was -- and am -- in awe.

Obviously I wasn't here for the original run-through, but during one of his panels that I did get to attend, Steve Sears described his original presentation of season 3 to the con audience.  He said, 'We're going dark."  He went to one side of the stage.  "Here's where you think we're going."  He went to the other side of the stage.  "Here's where we're actually going."

The storyline starts out with Xena and Gabrielle rescuing Khrafstar, who you are meant to assume is a Hebrew messiah character.  Xena forms an alliance with an approaching army.  So far, pretty typical (and I'm not telling this very well -- it's been a long time since I've seen it.)  There is some backstory revealing that at one point during her warlord days, Xena was allied with Caesar, who betrayed her.  In the present, Xena's so preoccupied with leading this army against Caesar that she doesn't notice that Gabrielle and Khrafstar are in one of the nearby temples performing a sacrifice.  This is one of the absolutely brilliant aspects of the show.  They make you think that it's going to be this huge battle episode.  But the second Xena realizes how much trouble Gabrielle is in, she dashes off the battlefield, and that's the last you see of either army.  You don't know who wins and you don't care.  They also make you think that Khrafstar worships the One God of the Israelites (who has already made at least one appearance on the show -- and in a way that's respectful to both Christianity and Judaism).  The seeds were all planted when Khrafstar told Gabrielle about his god giving him the strength not to take vengeance.  But suddenly in the temple, Khrafstar reveals that he worships Dahak, the evil Babylonian god (and debatably the scariest villain on either "Xena" or "Hercules"), and referring to the One God of the Israelites, "he will be taken care of too." 

The end result of the sacrifice scene is that it was orchestrated to make Gabrielle take a human life, in doing so sacrifice her "blood innocence," and that sacrifice bring Dahak back into the world.  Xena arrives too late to stop Gabrielle from killing.  The very end of the episode has Gabrielle sobbing and repeating what Xena had said earlier, "everything's changed," while rocks from the battle and the collapsing temple fall all around them.  I think it's the most haunting and beautiful image in the entire show.  Yes, I'm an angst addict.  We all knew that.  Moving on...

The concept of "blood innocence" is itself one of my favorite elements of the show.  And after all the different threads I've participated in on the subject, you'd think I'd be able to at least define it.  The plain factual definition is that a person who still has his or her blood innocence has never taken a human life.  Causing or willing someone to be killed does not count -- an emperor could order the execution of an innocent man and be morally culpable but still retain his blood innocence.  Unintentional killing or killing in battle does count.  Gabrielle was in no way morally culpable for the life she took -- the willing sacrifice pretty much shoved the dagger into Gabrielle's hand and then threw herself on it, while Gabrielle was standing there immobilized with shock.

Even though on the show, they called Gabrielle's former blood innocence her "innocence of evil," I think this was a case of an unreliable narrator (or rather, a narrator with an agenda -- they're the bad guys!)  We speculated on the board that perhaps loss of blood innocence wouldn't have been so important if Xena hadn't made such a big deal over it.  I can understand the members' points, but I disagree.  We also speculated that maybe blood innocence was like virginity.  But ummm... sex is good and murder is bad, y'know?  So that can't be the whole story either.  The way that I view it is that blood innocence is one aspect in the larger concept that we call "innocence" in the childish sense, not the moral sense.  Before the sacrifice, Gabrielle did not experientially know the kind of damage that her hands and weapons were capable of dealing.  After the sacrifice, she did know.  And everything changed.  (If we're doing reminiscing-type tangents ... I got very frustrated when the prevailing mood of the board was that Xena had a slight Madonna-complex about Gabrielle, that Xena was the one defining blood innocence and doing it for selfish reasons -- because she couldn't stand seeing her idol morally tarnished.  It's a purely intellectual frustration.  I sometimes think that the board in general was too hard on Xena because they assumed -- with Xena herself -- that Xena was already damaged, and that Gabrielle somehow deserved to be spared.  At one time, Xena was a punk kid who led her townspeople into battle, got someone she loved killed, and killed in battle for the first time and had her entire way of seeing the world changed.  She wanted to spare Gabrielle that pain.  She didn't succeed, but she tried really hard, and I think Gabrielle took that in the spirit it was intended.)

BTW, I'd intended just to define what the Rift was, and I'm nowhere near the concept anymore!

Besides losing her blood innocence in the temple, Gabrielle was magically-impregnated with arguably the most ambiguous character in the entire show, Hope.  It became almost a joke that board members started Hope Wars when we were bored.  I got involved at the beginning before I knew any better, but once I understood the depth of feeling that people on both sides of the Hope Issue held, I stayed out of it too.

Xena tries to kill baby Hope.  Gabrielle defends her and eventually sends her away in a basket, then lies to Xena about Hope being alive.  Xena takes off to go assassinate a Chinese boy-leader.  Gabrielle betrays her to stop her and nearly gets Xena executed.  Xena assassinates the Chinese kid anyway and lies to Gabrielle about it.  (The kid was pure evil.  Really.  I don't actually fault Xena for what she did, just for lying about it.)  Hope, who grows at the magical-baby rate, shows up as a young child and kills Xena's eleven year old son.  Gabrielle poisons Hope and then debates drinking the poison herself.

And as you can see, Steve Sears certainly wasn't kidding about going dark!!  That's actually the second-most beautiful haunting image in the whole show, in my opinion -- Gabrielle holding the flask to her mouth, Xena watching her from the forest with those empty eyes, Gabrielle finally setting the flask down.

And then we have the Xena Musical (sorry to the Xena creators, but the only real one in my opinion).  It's brilliant and scary and ridiculous in places and Gabrielle's parts are very obviously dubbed (and also too pretty for what she's going through) and it contains one of my favorite songs in the world.  And no, actually, it's not "Love of Your Love" -- that's my second favorite song.  My favorite is the end of "Hate is the Star" where Gabrielle starts out with "I never thought that we'd be distanced by a hate," and the horror of what their friendship has become and the realization that they still need each other and what they have still exists even behind all the impossibilities and ... love triumphs.  (Missy Good's fanfic "Darkness Falls" used the same concept only without all the supernatural singing -- what if Xena and Gabrielle only had human methods to use to do it, could they still have found their way back to each other?  The story's answer is "yes," just involving way more time than would have worked for TV.  I got Missy Good to sign a printed chapter from "Darkness Falls" at the last convention I went to.  I'm very proud of that.)

I believe in fandom terminology, The Rift is over after the musical episode.  But I consider The Rift to have stretched through the beginning of season 4.  In the last two episodes of Season 3, it's revealed that Hope is still alive, and, in order to kill her / beat her and keep Dahak from rising again, Gabrielle throws herself and Hope together into a flame pit.  So season 4 starts out with Xena questioning Hades about where Gabrielle is.  They're finally reunited in the third episode of season 4, "A Family Affair."

Okay.  So, when I was attempting to convince my mother that "Xena" was an awesome show, I sent her some episode choices.  Basically, by season 3, "Xena" switched between episodes that furthered the overall story and episodes that didn't (so even though The Rift lasted more than a season, maybe a third of the episodes were all about The Rift -- maybe a bit more than that; again it's been so long I can't remember very well).  I took out the discs that had Rift episodes on them, mailed them to my mother, and told her which episodes to watch.

She just watched all the episodes on the discs that I sent.  Oh, well.  They were mostly clustered anyway.

The last episode that I'd intended for my mother to see was "A Family Affair" with the reunion between Xena and Gabrielle.  Mom backed up and watched all three episodes on disc 1 of season 4 of Xena: Warrior Princess.

I'm writing this as if my audience hasn't ever seen "Xena," but if you have seen season 4, you'll know that the first two episodes are mostly flashbacks from Xena's time with Borias, and then there's that spiritual battle with Alti at the end.  From my reading of my old Xena board: fan favorite part: Borias is hot, fan least favorite part: Xena looks like she's on drugs the whole time.  I actually adore those episodes, flaws and all.  I don't think Alti is necessarily a well-rounded villain, but I think she's an example of a very real possibility of what a human being can become with enough dark magic.  It's Xena's choice in particular that kills me: go forward to eternity and abandon her mission in this life, or go backwards and leave Gabrielle behind -- maybe not forever, but at least for the rest of Xena's life.  I know that sounds confusing since Gabrielle wasn't really dead, but Xena didn't know that, so in her mind that was the choice before her, and it is just SO beautiful.

So.  My mother watched those episodes instead.  My dad chose that particular moment to walk into the living room.

My conservative Protestant minister father's only glimpse of "Xena: Warrior Princess" was Xena and Borias humping under the bear rug.  Probably the most explicit "they got away with that on television?" scene in the entire show -- well, at least explicit Like That; they pushed the violence boundaries a lot farther later on.  With all the blurriness and the drugged camera angles and, um, certain noises so you didn't see anything but you didn't have to.

Chances that my dad will EVER watch "Xena" again: zero!

 

Xena Fandom: Lady Gaga

I'd heard of Lady Gaga.  I mean, who hasn't?  I'd also heard "Poker Face" during my summer in Alaska, but I wasn't aware of the author of the song.  I didn't like it.  I'm not sure why -- it's catchy and everything -- it was just one of those songs that grated on me with repetition, and they played it in the Alaska kitchens an awful lot.

During the next year or so as I re-integrated to the work world after Alaska, Rina told me that she'd rediscovered Lady Gaga and there were two songs in particular that I had to check out: "Alejandro," and "Bad Romance."  Rina wrote so poetically about "Alejandro" that I didn't have a choice but to like it.  "Bad Romance" I was a little more on the fence about, but not for anything having to do with the song but for the fact that so many Xena fans made Xena/Gabrielle videos to the song.  I'm not a subtexter and I never have been -- I've been firmly in the Romantic Friendship camp since the term was first revealed on the board.  The lyrics to "Bad Romance" seem quite opposed to Romantic Friendship -- not just favoring the subtext 'ship, but actively opposing mine, and thus I won't watch any X/G videos to the song.  There was one that Rina sent me for Helen Magnus and Nikola Tesla from "Sanctuary" that I really enjoyed.

The "Xena" fandom in general was never more than lukewarm about Lady Gaga -- at least, I don't believe that there was ever a big burst of popularity on the boards.  There were the people who liked her songs, and then there were the people like Claudia, who responded to me once saying that she couldn't believe I'd have such poor taste as to buy a Lady Gaga album.  I just did what I've always done -- listened to the music that Rina sent me, paid attention to the parts that I liked and disregarded the rest, and remained generally oblivious to popular music.

Right around the time "Born This Way" came out, Lilly, Genkakette, and Apple all fell head over heels in love with Lady Gaga.  I'd been independently discussing the album with Rina and bought my own copy.

The nice thing about buying it myself was that I had a chance to form my own opinions before I delved into any Lady Gaga discussion with any of my friends.  My favorite songs were "Marry the Night," "Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)," and "Edge of Glory."  Genkakette joked with me that as she was trying to tell people that Lady Gaga had deeper lyrics than "Poker Face," said people would quote the line with "whiskey mouth," which really has only one interpretation (and it's not kid-appropriate).  LOL.  I never liked that song much, but it was more a question of taste than anything else -- just like I wanted to like "Born This Way" and could never get into it.  I really, really, really adored "Edge of Glory," though.  Rina sent me a Youtube link to an acoustic piano version that cinched it for me.  It has the kind of layers that capture me in a song, the way that it can be to and about more than one type of experience, and the imagery is astounding.

I've tried to listen to it again -- the Glee version of "Edge of Glory," anyway, since sometimes cover/alternate versions of songs aren't as painful as the originals.  I can handle the Glee version of "Edge of Glory" every once in awhile if I prepare myself sufficiently, and ditto for "Highway Unicorn" (the real version of that one).  Besides that, I haven't even attempted to listen to Lady Gaga since everything went wrong.  One of the worst parts of all this is that some of the most beautiful songs in my whole collection are too painful to listen to anymore.

I remember one visit to Genkakette's which was all about Lady Gaga.  First Genkakette showed me her Twitter page.  I've actually never used Twitter myself.  I've seen a few of my friends' accounts, but never in the kind of detail that Genkakette showed me.  She pointed out all the other regular fans and some of the inside jokes and the creative projects they swapped back and forth.  We watched at least two Lady Gaga interviews.  I was impressed with Lady Gaga's perspective on fame.  It seems that most people who are in the spotlight have to become kind of like Captain Picard -- they develop public personas and private personas and draw the lines very clearly for themselves since they know that some media person will try to cross them.  Versus, there are a few stars like Lady Gaga, who have the type of personality that makes it almost impossible to do that -- I can relate because I'm the same way; if someone asks me a question, I'm going to answer in as much detail as I can first and think about consequences second.  So rather than that, Lady Gaga gives the cameras something to look at -- she puts some pretty outrageous stuff out there, but it keeps reporters from asking her questions about the stuff she does want kept private.  Her music suffers for me from the mainstream need to please a lot of different kinds of audiences, but I appreciate the talent and depth and skill that went into all of her songs.  Oh, and Genkakette wanted my opinion on "Judas" from a Christian perspective.  I can't recall precisely what I told her, but I remember not being offended so much as wondering if there was a theological error in the premise around the poetic truths.  I liked the song, if not quite as much as Genkakette did.

After that visit, I made this banner for Genkakette:

Xena Fandom: Two Announcements

These two announcements completely unrelated to each other but both related to Xena fandom, so...

Announcement 1: Well, I haven't heard any objections yet to my convention of naming Xena fandom people after Suikoden characters.  However, I thought of a few new liberties.  First, there's one fan where I thought of a Suiko character who has the same first letter as her given name rather than her fandom name, but I want to use it anyway since that character seems like a perfect fit, and since I helped come up with her fandom name, it "squeaks a little when I turn it around" (to steal a line from the Mallorean).  So I want to use my first idea.  And second, there's a fan whose online name begins with a "U."  I can't think of any Suiko characters whose names start with "U" off the top of my head, but there's Yuiri, Yumi, and Yun from Suiko III whose names start with the same first sound.  Therefore, all naming will be phonetic.

Announcement 2: I just finished reading the results of my friend's master's survey on autism and religion.  It made me want to write about my own experience with Asperger's.  That's actually very tied up with my experiences in Xena fandom, but it doesn't have to do with one good story, you know?  I didn't get the diagnosis until my last couple of years in the fandom, and there are as many painful experiences wrapped up with it as good ones.  So rather than trying to manhandle a Xena fandom post into something that would relate, I've decided to create a separate page.  At this rate I'll fill up my page quote ... but blogger says I can have up to 10, so I haven't used them all up yet.  Look at the "tabs" up at the top if you haven't already for the pages.

Ragamuffin Movie: Shiny!

http://christianmediamagazine.com/cmm/rich_mullins_film_ragamuffin

I, like you and others, was a huge fan so I’d read “An Arrow Pointing to Heaven” and listened to a million of his concerts and interviews, but I didn’t want to make an assumption that I knew him just because I was a fan. I talked with a few key people who kind of opened up a lot of doors to a lot of people who knew him really well, family, friends, and other artists. So when you set out to do something like this you really just listen versus making preconceived notions of what you want it to be. How do you fit a whole life in two hours? Not an easy thing to do. God just showed us a lot of grace showed us what the story should be. So I totally get it. And this movie may be or may not be what you want it to be, but I guess you had to be there to understand the whys of how it turned out the way it did.

Rich Mullins on the Love of God

This is the post I was waiting to do all evening ... just got sidetracked once or twice.  I think I have more stories to tell than I'd realized.

The Rich Mullins quote that they play in a prominent place in the "Ragamuffin" movie trailer is: "God will ask only one question.  Did you believe that I loved you?"

This is going to take some time to set up.  I ask myself that question sixty zillion times a day.  Do I believe that God loves me?  My answer is always "it's complicated."

The simplest answer that Christians usually give is that God loves me (you, all of us) enough to die for me.  Yes.  But ... let me explain.  I could die for someone who I didn't like.  I have made some pretty significant sacrifices for people that I didn't particularly like.  I loved them, as I hope God commands me to love.  But I didn't take particular joy in their company or need them in my life.  (Please don't start wondering if you're in that category.  If you're reading this, you're not.  I didn't create a blog to start any more Drama.)

As greedy as it can sound, it's not enough for me that God promised to remain with me, to take care of me, and to ensure that I have everything I need.  I grew up believing that I would never be able to be worthy of God's love.  Not just that I would never be able to earn God's love (that's true for everyone) -- but that I would never, without God acting in me and moving me around like a puppet, be able to be a person God would like.  Since my sin is so repugnant, in order to even be around me, God has to "impute" another kind of righteousness over me -- and I guess, kind of lie to Himself about me.  Okay, it's been a very long time since I believed that.  And I don't enjoy arguing theology anymore.  I did at one point in my life, but that was an awfully long time ago.  But what I realized today is that I don't know if I've ever found a convincing intellectual way to conceive of the love of God.  So I've been kind of living as an agnostic in that way.  Telling myself that I don't know what it means that God loves me but I will someday.

Rich Mullins songs have always given me a kind of poetic framework for understanding what the love of God means.  It's not that I can take the "message" of these quotes and apply it to other areas of my life.  It can't be distilled into a phrase that it means the same way that "oh, the cat's quiet, that means she's in trouble" can be distilled.

In some ways, I think that the love of God works like the closest human love.  I had reason to think about that this afternoon when I was just attempting to picture what it means to be loved.  A great part of that for me is to be needed.  Valued.  Missed when I'm not there.  Worth fighting for, and worth fighting through the severe weaknesses in my life and heart -- not because God is so good He can turn a blind eye to those things, but because God loves me enough to take joy in being strong where I am weak and giving me the ability to be strong.  It's weird even to type out phrases and analogies like those, since I spent so long believing and feeling like that was sacrilege.  It's not a matter of breaking habits, or a matter of feeling what I already know -- it's a matter of still not knowing, not understanding.  Can I picture God taking joy in talking to me, or should I picture Him gritting His teeth and getting through it because He is so good (juts like my parents did)?  I still don't understand.  I think I'm in the very weird place of knowing what it is that I need to believe, just not knowing if I dare believe it -- if I will believe truth if I listen to my heart.

And in other ways, God's love is unlike any on the human level.  Even if we're commanded to forgive seventy times seven ... we do have breaking points, places where after which we love from afar.  God doesn't, can't, have that kind of breaking point.  We have to pick sides in battles -- attempting to stay neutral is also picking a side, it means that we are unable to fight for our friends because we'd damage others in the crossfire.  God is big enough and able to stay out of human disputes enough that He can simultaneously fight for all of us and love all of us -- a capacity that humans just don't have.

Rather than even try to explain them, I'm just going to put in some of my favorite Rich Mullins song quotes.  I don't entirely understand what they say about the love of God, but when I'm in the moment in the song, I understand, not just the song but the love itself -- in a way I never do at any other time.

In no particular order (just with my favorite of all at the end):

They said boy, you just follow your heart, but my heart just led me into my chest.  They said follow your nose, but the direction changed every time I went and turned my head.  They said boy, you just follow your dreams, but my dreams were only misty notions.  But the Father of hearts and the Maker of noses and the Giver of dreams, He's the one I have chosen and I will follow Him.

--The Maker of Noses

Somewhere between the lost and the found there's a fine line of purpose I follow even now, through the haze of despair that confuses and hurts us, I look to see that You're there, and to run toward Your light.

--Somewhere

You who live in Heaven, hear the prayers of those of us who live on earth, who are afraid of being left by those we love, and who get hardened by the hurt,.  Do you remember when you lived down here where we all scrape to find the faith to ask for daily bread?  Did You forget about us after You had flown away?  Well, I memorized every word You said, but I'm so scared I'm holding my breath, while You're up there just playing hard to get.

--Hard to Get
(On the surface, I realize that one doesn't have anything to say directly about the love of God -- more like the lack and the questions.  But my high school friend H. said once that she thought it was the same as a human playing hard-to-get -- when someone runs but wants to be pursued.  And that image made all the difference.)

I can feel the earth tremble beneath the rumbling of the buffalo hooves, and there's fury in a pheasant's wing, there's fury in a pheasant's wing.  It tells me that the Lord is on His temple, and there is still a faith that can make the mountains move, and a love that can make the Heavens ring, and I've seen love make Heaven ring.

--Calling Out Your Name

Everything that could be shaken was shaken and all that remains is all I ever really had.  And I see the morning moving over the hills, feel the rush of life here where the darkness broke, and I am in You and You're in me, here where the winds of Heaven blow.

--Home

I will be my brother's keeper, not the one who judges him.  I won't despise him for his weakness,  I won't regard him for his strength.

--Brother's Keeper
(I have one version where instead it's "I won't regard him for his weakness, I won't despise him for his strength" -- which was probably just a mistake, but I love it in light of the idea that we boast in our weaknesses, and we have more difficulty befriending people who we have to look up to because they are so strong).

If my darkness can praise Your light, then give me breath, and I'll give my life to sing Your praise.

-- Damascus Road

It's Your love that opens up eternity, to a heart nothing else could reach, and if all I know is love, and I leave the rest behind, that will be enough to take me to the skies."

--If All I Know Is Love

See what a difference love can make in someone's life, there's a power that resides deep within it, see something wrong, love is so strong to set it right.

--See What a Difference

The reckless, raging fury that they call the love of God.

--The Love of God
(Yeah, I couldn't have a post with that title without including a quote from that song.  Really, though, it's all or nothing with that one -- I adore how harsh and real and yet strong and welcoming love feels when I'm listening to it.)

 I have failed so many times, but You have never let me fall down alone.

--"The River"

Suikoden Announcement

I even have to put a spoiler tag around my announcement...

(post text) expand

Right now I haven't done a lot of Suikoden posts because I'm in a somewhat-more-boring-than-usual part -- I'm taking Sheena back to Gregmeister to form an alliance with Lepant.  I've actually been more involved in my "bad" game (the one I'm rushing through to see Clive's story).  I've been using my "bad" game to see all the different Suiko I characters meet Hix and Tengaar (one by one, then resetting it so in the game's opinion I still haven't met Hix and Tengaar).  Viktor and Flik was the best, when Tengaar said not to be rude and that Flik hadn't finished his own journey-to-adulthood yet.  But Meg was also awesome, when she finished with "they're so in love."  I'll edit this to put in screencaps once I get my VHS tape uploaded to computer format, but that'll be awhile.  I'm really looking forward to finding out what happens when I bring Tir McDohl to meet Tengaar and Hix.  But anyway...

When I get to the "Running Away with Nanami," arc, I will make a massive Suikoden and Xena post and I will give Xena as much love as Suikoden ... because "Xena" has some pretty tremendous running away arcs too.

Xena Fandom: We never EVER go to bed...

Wakaba and the Potodeian Liberation Army.  What is there left to say?

Yeah, I realize that's way out of context.

I have to back up farther than I thought, actually.  Some British fans initially founded the "Army of Xena," or AOX.  They thought it'd be funny to come post on our board.  They were hysterically funny.  Unfortunately some communication styles kind of blew up -- I don't want to say much more because I don't want to talk about the Drama, and it honestly wasn't anyone's fault, just different expectations.  The kind of horseplay that a lot of our British fans enjoyed (and a lot of the Americans and other nationalities too) wasn't as well suited to our board, which was very heavily moderated and people weren't used to being teased in any capacity.  So the AOX was eventually no more -- at least not on our board; their own site went strong for quite awhile longer and might still be up for all I know.

Before the AOX fans left, they did the worst thing possible that they could to our forum members: they gave them ideas...

The Potodeian Liberation Army, or PLA, was the next to be formed, and it was formed while the AOX was still around.  I think it was part of the ongoing friendly battle that the forums had as to whether Xena or Gabrielle was better.  Something that never quite made sense to me.  Oh.  ::blinks::  Definitions.  "Xenacentric" or "Gabcentric" means, respectively, which character you identify with the most (not necessarily which you like better).  (For the record, I'm completely Xenacentric.  I love Gabrielle, but there are only rare moments when I understand her at all.)  "Xenasexual" or "Gabsexual" means which character you're most attracted to, and in my experience, people only put that in their profiles if they were looking for dates.  Anyhow.  I think it was assumed that the people who favored Xena would join the AOX and the people who favored Gabrielle would join the PLA.  It worked that way for awhile, but changed completely by the time I was more-than-peripherally involved.  For one thing, if two people in opposite armies started dating each other, one tended to swap sides.

The AOX left, time went on, the PLA got bigger and more established, more time went on, the PLA got bored (always dangerous), not a lot of time went on, and the XTW was formed, which stands for Xena's Temple Warriors.  The XTW versus PLA games never got as heated as the AOX versus PLA games had (in my personal opinion, because really the army members were more likely to make out with each other on the battlefield and then issue awards for "Fighting like Meg" the tavern wench than to compete).

One of the things about the armies was that it didn't take too long to get involved, if that was what you wanted.  That was one of my favorite things about Xena fandom in general.  Out in the world, I don't have a snowball's chance in Tartarus at being popular.  Loved, yes, popular, no.  I'm kind and genuine and deep, but I'm weird, and I think I just accepted a long time ago that I'd relate to people one on one and that I'd be needed in small groups but I'd always be the last one picked for teams.  But Xena fandom was full of people just like me -- full of people yearning for leadership roles who'd never had that opportunity before, and who did have it with each other.  Anyone who was interested in the PLA's freeform "I'm bored let's post about random stuff" type of play could have a role in the army.

When I first met her, Wakaba was coming into her own in PLA leadership.  I'm not sure if she ever led the army, but she had a couple of long stints as second in command, and led a lot of missions.  She also took it upon herself to be the kind of group-mom for some of the kids in the army -- she's the type of person who'd be on IM at two in the morning with a thirteen year old Swedish girl who couldn't sleep.

Belle held a position of PLA leadership for a long time, until she was invited to be a board moderator and had to get out of the army.  (She royally scared Leknaat when that happened.  LOL.  Belle made this awesome Xena video to say goodbye to the PLA -- complete with GI Joe action figure footage right alongside some of the more violent Xena episodes.  But she posted it under a thread with the header "my goodbye," and Leknaat thought that meant she was leaving the forum.)  So even though she wasn't technically a PLA member after she became a moderator, Belle retained the same posting style common to Army members.  And by that I mean stuff like, "let's see if we can get 10,000 posts in a weekend" -- which Belle did accomplish once -- or "let's roleplay our Animagi forms and trip in the mud" -- which had me laughing so hard I had to stare at the fan to calm down -- or "let's start random polls" -- which had the board knowing things about me such as that my typical bedtime around that era was 4 in the morning.

To be fair, it wasn't really my fault!  In preparation for going to Alaska with Lucia and Haley, I had moved in with one of my friends.  It was cheaper for me to rent a room in her house than try to pay on a six-month lease, she got the rent money, and I was always around to babysit.  However, she and her two kids are all very light sleepers, so out of courtesy, I couldn't talk on the phone in the house when everyone else was asleep.  What I'd do would be to take my phone out on the porch swing behind her house.  Then I'd keep Wakaba company, who only lived about 45 minutes from me but worked night shifts.  Her workplace was right around the corner from where I was living, so sometimes I'd drive out and keep her company on her break too -- those Circle K conversations about nothing are pretty dear to me, but that's a subject for another post.  Mostly, though, what she and I did was to talk on the phone.  And inevitably, we'd hit a point where Wakaba would tell me that I had to work in the morning and really ought to go to bed.  I'd tell her goodnight, and she'd have one more joke or story or just not want to be alone in her echoing workplace, and an hour later, the cycle would repeat itself.

I got the idea for the above banner one fairly-typical evening.  I was trying to go to school online and keeping up a job and beta-reading for another Xena fan (no, I never slept).  I'd finished with most of my practical online chores, and it was about the time when Wakaba usually called.  However, I wasn't finished answering forum posts.  So I took my laptop along out on the swing as well.  And in the space of only a tiny bit of time, I had Wakaba verbally tell me to go to bed, Belle personal-message me to tell me to go to bed, and someone in the thread I was posting in tell me to go to bed.  And they were all Americans (so in the same general time zone framework), and none of them went to bed -- plus, Wakaba wouldn't let me off the phone for a good two hours anyway.

So I made that banner.  I'm actually particularly proud of the "never ever let us get bored" part.  Wakaba's standard opening line on the phone was "I got in so much trouble, Else," to which I would respond, "what did you do?"

Xena Fandom: How About That Broccoli?

Breaking out of my usual pattern here, since I have one more post in mind and I want that one to be at the top.

So: The Famous Broccoli Joke.

It all started at the very first Burbank convention.  The hotel restaurant had -- well, not bad prices for a sit-down restaurant, but steeper than most of us broke con-goers wanted to pay -- but they gave you your money's worth in huge portions.  (Much later when I was gluten free, I ordered the hummus and cucumber appetizer plate and it was enough for a meal.)

The last night of the first convention, fourteen forum members gathered in the hotel restaurant.  Not only were we all on tremendous Xena: Warrior Proncess highs, we'd just seen Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor for the first time in our lives, and Brittany Powell had just walked through the restaurant and waved at us.  We were hanging from the ceiling.  Tengaar received a gigantic piece of broccoli with her meal.  She said later that it was the size of a tree.  I think she might have exaggerated just a tad... but the broccoli wouldn't have fit comfortably in one of my hands, which means it was bigger than Scully was when she first came to live with me.

I thought -- and think -- that we did a remarkably good job of communicating with each other considering our very different religious/political/social/cultural backgrounds.  Lepanta would make a big deal out of that part later in the podcast she'd record about the convention.  However, there were times when you could see the red lights flashing, and whenever that happened, one of the people involved would say "how about that broccoli?" and point to Tengaar's plate.  We all posed with the broccoli.  I have at least one picture of every person in the group (separately or in pairs) pointing at the broccoli, and our very first big-group forum picture has that same piece of broccoli in a corner.

Maybe six months prior, someone on the forums had decided to make "Keeperships" where you could pick one thing to be the "keeper" of (I was "Keeper of the Campfire).  Lepanta said that she wanted to be Keeper of the Broccoli, so I spent several hours working with PAINT and broccoli pictures to make a banner for her.

The joke died down over the years -- actually I think I was one of the chief culprits keeping it going, lol -- but I mean, we took broccoli pictures at the very last convention I ever went to.

This is a t-shirt Tengaar made for me and gave me when we went to the Grand Canyon.  Please note that this isn't an old picture -- I scanned it in about five minutes ago (while fending Rachel off the scanner).  I don't wear it too often, but that's mostly because it's one of a kind and I don't want to stain it or wear it out.

Xena Fandom: Christmas Lights

Okay, I am starting to curse the impulse that made me decide to do these posts in threes.  How the heck did I ever spend hours on a single livejournal post?

I haven't forgotten about Truth or Dare in England.  But I never intended to do this chronologically -- more like, whichever memory is the strongest in any given moment.  And this is a far more recent memory -- I want to write about the last Christmas that I truly enjoyed from start to finish.  (The one after that was almost as good for much more surprising reasons.  After that I've dreaded that time of year, and I don't anticipate that changing.  But this blog is about good memories.)

Early in the formation of the Amazons, we established the tradition that we would go to a district bordering Genkakette's house every Christmas and look at the lights.  It was more than just average citizens putting up lights -- for homeowners in the district, it was a condition that they decorate for Christmas every year, and contests were held and horse carriages went through the district.  I'd wanted to say that we established the tradition when we were a bigger group, but actually the first time we followed our tradition was the same as the last time we followed our tradition as a whole group: Genkakette, Apple, Wakaba, and me.

Wakaba and I had only recently reestablished our friendship.  I was feeling pretty good about her by that point, but Genkakette hadn't seen her yet so there was that nervousness.  In the moment I could ignore it.  Wakaba pointed out that Elsie goes absolutely nuts over presents.  Well ... I do, but this was one of the times when I was much more excited about the gifts I had to give because I'd put so much time into them.  I had ordered a book about horses for Wakaba.  Wakaba was horse-mad the first time I met her, and that hadn't changed.  Apple had recently become a vegetarian, so I'd ordered a book for her about healthy vegetarian eating.  I don't know; looking back it seems like that was more a gift for her mom than for her, but I thought she'd appreciate that I was taking her choices seriously.  Genkakette's was the most special.  Well, it was kind of for Apple too.  When Genkakette had moved into her own apartment with her family the previous summer, I'd said that I would make an afghan for her and asked what colors she wanted.  She'd said that she wanted me to pick the same color scheme as our favorite Christmas tree in the Christmas lights district.  So I'd been working on the blanket for months, and it was finished, and it was huge.  Looking back, I'm not sure I got the color scheme entirely right, but it wasn't bad.

Wakaba and I could agree on the Indigo Girls, so that's what I had playing in the car -- a couple of new-to-me-actually-really-old cds that I'd purchased in a garage sale from some friends.  We had the music so low that I didn't pick out what a fantastic song "Ghost" is.  I drove, and Wakaba acted comfortable with that -- whether or not she actually was, I'm not quite sure, but generally Wakaba wears her heart on her sleeve so I took that at face value.  We talked about random things -- mostly related to horse racing.  Toward the end of the drive, as one comfortable silence came up, Wakaba asked if I was okay with that.  I'd just recently found out that I have Asperger's, so I said that I was an aspie and quite comfortable with silence and music.  I wasn't lying.  It all felt exactly as if it was meant to be.

We pulled up, and of course I started bouncing about presents.  I think I was exaggerating my own reactions just a little because I was nervous about my friends seeing each other after so long.  But all went just fine -- we picked up as if there hadn't been the year absence.  My friends loved their presents.  Wakaba had made keychains for Genkakette and Apple -- she said she'd give me mine closer to Christmas itself since we lived so much closer to each other than to the others, but I never did get one, lol -- she did give me a book of Christmas stories which I kept.  We'd been up late the previous night finishing the keychains.  Genkakette gave me a Nintendo t-shirt.  I still have that too; at the moment there's a stain in the hem that I'm endeavoring to fix, but I'll wear it again once it is fixed.

The Christmas lights were the most beautiful that I can remember seeing them.  We walked that year.  As an added tradition, we stopped by the nearby Circle K for hot chocolate before walking through the district with the lights.  It could get quite cold in the evenings.  Besides the four of us, we had along Genkakette's foster son.  Apple treated him just like a little brother.  Wakaba and I took turns getting the hot chocolate while Genkakette supervised the kids.  All of this was exciting in and of itself -- the crowds, the contrast between the icy cold and the hot drink in my hands and the way that the gas station always seemed to run out of hot chocolate just as we got there, the Christmas carols, the nearby horses.  It was the first year that we planned to actually ride through on the horse carriages.

Wakaba, of course, went right up to the driver to see the horses up close.  We got ourselves situated, and then pulled into the district.  They encouraged us all to sing Christmas carols, but it was mainly me and Apple leading, and since we don't know a lot of the same songs, we kept searching.  I only know some of "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire," but we sang it anyway.  Some of the others on the carriage joined in.  I believe Genkakette was more interested in keeping her foster son from getting his hands between the rails holding us all in the carriage.  We only made one tour through the district, so if one of us happened to be on the wrong side from a display that she really wanted to see, tough... I don't remember missing anything that I'd badly wanted to see, though.  Our favorite color scheme was there, the blue/purple dark lights through high branches that you could get lost in just by looking up.

No one was particularly tired after we'd finished the tour, so we elected to go through the district again on foot.  This turned into the best part of the evening.  We all acted like kids, not just the kids -- we took pictures of each other in front of Disney displays and dragged each other back and forth through particularly interesting stories and stopped at the Christmas karaoke station to sing a couple of hymns badly.  I guess Wakaba was more reserved than I remember her (at least, she's the only one not truly smiling in the picture ... but I always chalked that up to her not enjoying having her picture taken).  There was one point where we came to a tree that had enormous paper chains dangling from it like tinsel, except the tree was enormous and the "tinsel" draped outwards for a space the size of several yards.  We could write wishes on links and staple them to the chain.  Everything that I wanted for myself, I already had in that moment.  So I wrote out a prayer for Rina and a mutual friend of ours not-in-Xena fandom and stapled them to the end of the chain.  Then I helped Apple gain enough height to staple on hers.  I do remember that we all wrote vastly different kinds of wishes, but I don't remember what those were.

Apple and I were cold as we walked back, so we took turns chasing each other while Genkakette and Wakaba watched indulgently.  I know it's childish, but I've always been rather proud of my ability to outrun the kids.  That might be different now that Apple's legs are longer.

After the lights were out and the time of the evening came for us to talk in the dark, Genkakette and Wakaba had a long conversation about religion.  Genkakette would ask me later if that had bothered me.  Actually -- I've discovered this about myself.  When it seems to me that the people around me are bonded and I'm left out, that's when I start getting accusations of childish jealousy.  But it bothers me just as much to be bonded to people who aren't bonded to each other.  Genkakette's and my friendship had the year of solidity beneath it that Wakaba had not been part of, and Wakaba and I had already built all the reconnection we'd ever need.  So any platform for them to reconnect with each other was okay in my book -- and they were making a deliberate effort to be considerate, which I appreciated.  When I finally fell asleep, I was completely happy.

Suikoden on Dragons (picture post)

If you're wondering why the hero's name is "Smapy," that has to do with where I stole the footage from:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf2Mc8oI8O0&list=PL0FE5DDFF6D24E5E7


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Xena and Suikoden: The Dragons

Spoilers for Futch's arc through Suikoden 1 and 2, and for Xena's Dark Past (which shouldn't be a spoiler).
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So, yeah. First time I cry during my second playthrough of Suikoden 2 and it has to be because the dragon pup is adorable. I'm pathetic. :D

Covering the essential parts of the mythology: The Dragon Knights are a clan the same way a Gypsy tribe is a clan. An essential rite of passage is that each kid bonds with a dragon. The dragons are in our world through the influence of the True Dragon Rune, possessed by the leader of the Dragon Knights, and they are hatched in the dragon caves where the children are also raised. If a child doesn't bond with a dragon by age six, he or she never will and has to leave the tribe (I'm assuming his or her parents come too, or he or she is adopted by an ally clan -- I'm not really sure how that works, the game isn't specific). Maybe it's rare for a child not to bond with a dragon, though. If anything ever happens to a Dragon Knight's dragon, the knight must also leave the clan, at least until he or she finds a new dragon.

So. When we first meet Futch in Suikoden I, he is the Dragon Knight assigned to carry your party to Leknaat's island. He's a smart-mouthed kid who brats off to Ted and threatens to throw someone off the saddle. His dragon's name is Black. Later on, Futch goes to the evil emperor's hanging garden to get a plant which is the second element in the cure for the sleeping curse that the enemy had cast over all the dragons. The bad guy shoots Futch out of the sky. He's found unconscious. When he wakes, you have to tell him that the third element in the cure for the sleeping curse was a dragon's liver, which came from Futch's dragon Black, since Black was already dead when your party found him in the woods. That's where the game leaves it in Suikoden I. Futch leaves with one of your party members, Humphrey, and you assume that he's searching for a new dragon so he can return to the Dragon Knights.

Futch's story picks up midway through Suikoden II when you discover him in a little village south of the Matilda Knights. Futch has a conversation with a kid from the village. The kid is super excited to learn that Futch grew up in a Dragon's Cave and might someday fly in the skies again. Futch eventually promises the kid that if he gets a new dragon, the first person he'll give a ride to will be the kid.

The first time I saw that scene, I just thought it was touching. But knowing what I know of the end of the story now, I could catch Futch's reluctance, his long pauses, his hesitancy to really promise anything. Because -- Futch never wanted a new dragon. He let everyone around him believe that was what he was looking for, but Black was his best friend and that was it, in his eyes. I didn't get the impression that Futch didn't want to return to the Dragon Knights. He did -- just not at the cost of bonding with a strange dragon.

You find this out at the head of a mountain where the kid runs when Futch goes to rescue him. There is a wild dragon egg at the top of the mountain -- something that's not supposed to exist, but does happen from time to time. Everyone tells Futch to go take the dragon, that this is what he's been looking for all this time. Futch confesses that Black was it for him. Humphrey raises his sword to destroy the dragon. You and your whole party are horrified -- how could Humphrey do such a thing? Humphrey explains that if the dragon pup doesn't have a mother or a Dragon Knight to care for it, it'll probably die young, and even if it survived, it'd be a monster that a human knight would have to slay. Either Futch takes care of it or Humphrey kills it. And of course, the pup chooses that moment to hatch, and it is the CUTEST THING EVER, and really, Futch is left with only one choice.

The thing that made me lose it is, Humphrey explains quietly that having a new dragon isn't a betrayal of Black's memory. At the same time, Futch isn't really listening -- he approaches the pup and says "it's okay, come here." He names the little dragon "Bright."

The idea of betrayal is the thing that made me think of the Xena connection, although the two aren't quite parallel. Xena has to "move on" from her past or she won't be able to function. Plain and simple. But usually in day to day life, we speak of letting go of the evil we've done as if -- and I guess it is -- forgiven and wiped out. Usually. But Xena had killed a whole lot of people. That's not something she could or should just let go. We spoke on the boards of how, for pure survival's sake, Xena had to think of the person who did all that evil as a separate person. But at the same time she couldn't forget those she had killed; that would be disrespectful to their memories. So it became a very complicated dance, the tension between Xena recognizing the good she could do in the present moment and avoiding betraying the memories of those she had harmed irreparably.

Rich Mullins on Being Ignored

Yesterday at work I got an email asking me to put a certain item into the ongoing spreadsheet that I need to complete every two weeks.  No big deal there, same old routine.  However, the email was forwarded to me from my team lead.  A person in another department had sent it to her.  The person who created the email had said that it had taken her two days to put everything together, so could we please post as soon as possible.  My team lead included a very nice note that she'd thought she'd sent it to me and hadn't, and that we would post as soon as possible.

It's entirely possible that the person who created the spreadsheet accepted that explanation and didn't mind the delay.  I know I'd have been upset if I'd worked for two days on something, then sent it off marked "urgent" and the person I'd sent it to had forgotten to forward to the appropriate person so it sat an additional two weeks.

The situation I flashed back to happened many years ago.  When I was an older child -- maybe twelve or thirteen -- Dad got the bright idea that he could pay me to be his office assistant.  That continued until I left home for good at twenty two, and I even put it on my resume when I didn't have any other work experiences to list.  The most significant work he gave me had to do with his doctoral project.  After we returned from the mission field, Dad was originally a Missions Professor, and that was the field that, given his choice, he'd have remained in for the rest of his working life.  (Some rather complicated and painful circumstances led him to going into the pastorate, but that's a different story.)  When Dad was still working as the professor of missions, he embarked on doctoral studies in Missions.  I believe he was a pastor by the time he got to his Doctoral Project.  Dad and I referred to it simply as "Project," and he spent -- I want to say three years on it before finally giving the whole thing up.  Dad's premise was that Free Church missionaries are "chained" to the idea that they have to repeat the actions of the book of Acts in the Bible, but in fact, Acts is descriptive rather than prescriptive and the ultimate intent is more complicated.  I learned a great deal of the same ideas behind Bible interpretation in Intro to Bible at my first college.  Anyway, I became Dad's editor.  I suppose you could call me ghost writer / rewriter by the end; I made a lot of comments and even suggested rewriting his whole paper with the underlying idea being "are you listening to me?"

Maybe it was ironic that in the end, Dad scrapped the whole idea and didn't understand why I cared.  Or maybe he just decided that I shouldn't care, therefore he wouldn't hear me when I expressed that I did.  But I'd been with him through three drafts of this paper.  I'd spent hours in-between the Greyhound trips I'd been taking to visit friends, painstakingly making tiny notes in the margins.  Dad's grammar and syntax isn't bad (at least in terms of a pastor -- I swear pastors' handwriting is worse than doctors').  But his conception of paragraph grouping and clear sentence progression is fuzzy, and he doesn't have a good grasp on the concept of thesis.  Also, theology papers (I forget the technical name) have a slightly different structure than ordinary college essays, and I never did grasp that fully (as my theology-major college roommate can attest to -- I wasn't her preferred editor).  Anyway, I'd done my best to fix what I could without departing from the standard structure, and to understand the context within which Dad was arguing.  And I did wind up making it all much more readable.  Since Dad had paid me for all of it, he thought that my interest should stop there.  It was his Project, not a Dad-and-Alicia project.  But I just felt in the end like all my efforts had been wasted.

There's a line I wrote in one of my poems not too long after that: "your treasure wasn't thrown away."  Somehow -- in a display of mixed metaphors with Bible interpretation that would have horrified Dad if I'd ever had the bad sense to tell him about it -- I'd morphed the idea "our treasure is in Heaven" with "all my efforts in this world, although they look as if they're falling on deaf ears who would rather I wasn't here at all, are actually treasure that will shine someday."  Bad theology?  Maybe.

But through all of that, I clung to the lyrics of one of the lesser-known Rich Mullins songs, "The Breaks."  It's actually simpler than I made it out to be.  The song was written in Ireland, to a girl whose relationship with Rich wasn't going anywhere.  But there are layers upon layers.

Upon first glance, the chorus doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the song:

It is the sea that makes the sailor, and the land that shapes the sea
I do not know yet what I am made of, or all I may someday be
It is wood that makes the carpenter, it's the very tools of his trade
It is love that makes the lover, and a cross that makes a saint

There's a line just before the chorus that makes it fit for me, though.  "Of all of the stupid things I've ever said, this could be the worst, maybe the best, but those are the breaks."

My reading, and I know this could be very different than the intended reading (but I don't care):
The poem in the middle: "it is the sea that makes the sailor..." -- that was like my coworker's spreadsheet, or my efforts on my dad's dissertation, or like any poem that goes unread or story that goes unwritten.  It may be the dumbest thing we've ever produced, or it may be the most beautiful, but it doesn't matter.  It's ignored.

In that context, some of the other lines of the song become lines that I live my life by:

Here is my heart, take what you want.  I have no use for it anymore.  Well, of all of the stupid things I've ever said, this could be the worst, maybe the best, but those are the breaks.  These are the bruises.  If I can't give myself away, I'm the only one who loses, and I don't want to lose this.

Emphasis mine.  I can't tell you how many times that idea has sparked me into trying -- writing down the poem that would otherwise drift free-form around in my head, creating the journal, making the collage or the video.  Even now I have a video idea that will take forever (and no, not the Suikoden one, this one is a lot more personal).  ... And the thing is, the vast majority of it has been ignored.  And that never stops hurting, and no matter how many people tell me I should write for myself and not care what anyone else thinks, to me writing for myself is called daydreaming.  Writing things down is about trying to give them away.  But I don't want to lose the treasures, and -- just like Rich's poem in the chorus -- just as long as I can still give myself away, there's still a chance.

Here is my song, listen if you want.  I have no heart for it anymore.  I've half a mind just to cut it loose, and if it sails off into the blues, then I'll just let it soar, and the skies better keep it, and I won't be any poorer for giving it its freedom.  So here's one for freedom.

There's a concept in my favorite Harry Potter fanfic: that goblin-made artifacts retain a portion of their makers' personalities -- almost like an echo of their souls.  I like to think that the things I make have an echo of who I am.  Even if no one ever sees that in this life, that's not the point.  I won't be any poorer for letting everything I make soar off into the blues.  And there might be angels out there listening.

Xena Fandom: Trip to the Grand Canyon

I believe I accidentally outlined my first two memory posts in my introduction: "write about the time we went to the Grand Canyon" and "write about the time we played Truth or Dare in England."  So, Grand Canyon comes first.

(also, it occurs to me when selecting my Suikoden names, that I shouldn't use characters I want to discuss!)

My first real adult job (so it seems to me) was doing data entry for a property insurance company, which I did for two and a half years.  I was involved in Xena fandom for most of that.  Toward the end of that job, I met Lepanta and began to grow closer to her, and started to plan my first convention.

I was laid off from that job (as were most of the staff when the office moved), and went immediately to a string of temp jobs.  The first two were a bath warehouse and a hearing aid warehouse respectively, both of which were awful.  The second two were filing for an engineering company and filing for a nonprofit scientific company, both of which turned out very well (the engineering company would end up rehiring me twice).  My time with the nonprofit company would turn out to be especially significant for me.  During the afternoons I was filing, but during the mornings, I was occupying the front desk, and able to get on the Internet with my supervisor's permission and blessing provided that no one else had any work for me.  My friendships with Lucia, Wakaba, and Rina all grew and blossomed during this time.  Wakaba would text me every morning just to say "good morning," then call to keep me company as I drove home in the rain.

After the nonprofit company job ended and before the engineering company hired me for the second time, I had a month and a half or so where I was unemployed.  This was the time when the Grand Canyon trip took place.

I didn't have a lot of warning, just a couple of notes from Tengaar.  And (like so many other board events), it was originally supposed to be a larger group, but just ended up being three of us.  Tengaar visited Sasarai from England.  They spent the first half of their trip around Sasarai's home, but also wanted to come to see the Grand Canyon, and invited any of us in the area to come along.  I agreed quite eagerly -- it would mean a six hour or so ride in Tengaar and Sasarai's rented van with their ipod dock, then a visit to the Canyon for as long as we wanted, and then -- for plan A, a ride back at night, then they would stay over at my apartment.

I'd spent a bit of one on one time with Tengaar at the convention and exchanged a few emails afterwards, but I still felt like I was at the very beginning of my friendship with her.  It tended to be a pattern with a lot of Xenites: have a couple of close one on one conversations, then take the whole discussion to email.  She had coined the term (at least to me), "magical mystery tour of my brain."  I hadn't spent any one on one time with Sasarai at all.  She told me about her desire to eventually create videos, and explained her idea for a video for Within Temptation's "Angel."  Not a fan-music-video with clips from some show or other, but an actual story video for the song.  She had some really good ideas -- it was the sort of thing you could make seem easy on the surface, but she made me see each moment with her words, and that's not the sort of thing that's at all easy to invent.  I put the pieces together with some very in-depth posts the two of them had made over the past couple of months.  That was another thing that seemed unique to our Xena board.  Lepanta had started it with a thread called "tell your secrets," and both Tengaar and I had some pretty heavy stories in there, while Sasarai had started an unrelated thread all her own.  It was doing friendship in reverse order -- first you found out some of the deepest, most hidden secrets about the other person, then you found out what he or she looked like, what his or her favorite color was and how he or she traveled.  I know that reverse order sounds a little weird, but I found it comfortable in a very odd way.  Paradoxically, having my deepest secrets out there already made it less of a risk -- the people who would eventually be scared off by the darkness in me didn't even try to get to know me, and the people who could not only handle it but love me for it reached out to me, and then we did all the surface level things.

Tengaar had created a playlist for the occasion.  I was first noticing that when I'm unemployed, I feel music-deprived (since I listen to music constantly at work, but I don't have the same occasion to listen when I'm at home doing other things).  There was one point when Evanescence's "My Immortal" came on.  Sasarai said it was karaoke time, so we all sang along.  If I had to choose just one favorite moment from the trip, it would be that -- the road flying by, and the thrill of creating a song (however clumsily) and my new close friends' voices mingling with mine.

The trip was tainted for Sasarai especially because she didn't feel at all well (she wound up going to urgent care the next day and receiving antibiotics).  It didn't hinder it for either of the others of us, except that we felt bad for her.

The Grand Canyon itself is as beautiful as everyone always told me it was, and my determination is greater than ever that someday I am going to hike across it.   I guess it won't be with "Xena" fans now ... but I had that dream before I ever watched "Xena," and the Canyon is ... deep and huge and majestic and utterly wonderful.  We did hike down past the rim just to say we'd done it, since such a high percentage of visitors never make it past the rim.  All the pictures show me in my Xena community t-shirt.  I still have that shirt -- I try not to wear it too often since it'll wear out with the washing and I can't get another.  There's something on that graphic, "friendshippers," that was put on especially for me.  When I posted the pictures later, our community leader said that she was pleased that our community had now made it to high places.

I bought a notebook at the gift shop so I could write poetry out on one of the rocks.  We had specifically designed that we would be there at sunset.  The colors are amazing.  I think we're all lucky that we're not afraid of heights, since we were able to go out and see things that would have been too frightening if looking down induced dizziness -- nothing dangerous, but still, you know, exposed nature.  It's even more majestic from that viewpoint.

We only got a couple of hours on the way home before we all had to get off the road, so we did end up spending the night at a hotel.  I wasn't used to being in bed before midnight, so I listened to music in the dark for awhile before falling asleep.  I still remember those moments as well ... stillness and blankets all around me, and nothing in the way of the glory that is music itself.

We had some equally good conversations the rest of the way back in the morning, and through the rest of the next day.  I was sorry to have to say goodbye.  I never saw them in America again, although I'd see them in England in the year following.