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.