It's official, Doc and I are friends again. Besties, even. He let me tousel his hair today, and even let out a bit of a happy moan. So yeah, we're back to being friends. He just wants to touch my boobs. It's that bra he got me. It keeps them perky, I blame the bra.
It's so much more fun when we are getting along. Shouting "Archer" lines through the house at each other, using English and Irish idioms at each other. Some that I use, he rebels against and teases me for, (I remember well the day I said I had to do something but couldn't be "arsed" to, the teasing lasted for hours as I came up with video proof and literary proof that it actually was a word used somewhere in the world), some that he adopts himself. He said the laptop connection was "vexing" him today. I had to laugh. I picked that up from, I think "Top Gear's" James May. Maybe Jeremy Clarkson, but I see May admitting to being vexed more often than Clarkson.
Speaking of which, we are debating re-subscribing to Amazon Prime again because May, Clarkson and Hammond are taking their schtick there. Netflix turned it down, supposedly because it was too expensive a prospect. The thing is, as charismatic as the three of them are, a lot of the genius work on "Top Gear" was done by the guys behind the camera. The gaffers and stunt coordinators, to start. They knew how to film a car going 5 mph and make it look action packed. They could film a car rolling over once and make it look like it rolled 20 times because of the number of angles they had on it and the way it was edited. There! The editors, geniuses! Are they coming with the boys to Amazon Prime? Or are they just depending on their wit and grace to make them another successful show? I have questions. I love the guys, but not enough to watch a crappy show. And Amazon Prime has very little else to offer. In the year that we had it, we didn't find one movie that we didn't have to pay extra to stream. I could only "borrow" one book per month, and there are really only self-published authors offering their books to Prime, not older classics that I am interested in. The free shipping is okay, if you are ordering from Amazon itself, but more and more we find that we are ordering from Amazon Associates, so Prime Shipping doesn't apply. It's a quandary. It truly is. #WhiteGirlAnglophileProblems
I showed Doc what I had designed last night for Place. In case you went there last night, go back again. The Header has changed, and so has the logo/user icon. Not the design, the fonts. Doc pointed out, quite correctly, that I had a major font fail. I had made the largest bit of it illegible with the shape I forced it into, and the smaller type was unreadable because of the overprocessing of special effects. So I went in and stripped the effects, spent two hours finding new fonts to try, and once that was done, rethought the special effects and redid those. Now it looks much better. Though I'm still having doubts about the smaller font going with the larger font. I don't know, that may yet change. But I like the effect, and I love the large font. I think I will put that away and use it on the new site's graphics. http://cydnieybuffers.place.xyz
Just so I wasn't spending all of my time on something that likely won't bring me fans/friends/followers/disasters, I wrote an open post at Patreon. http://patreon.com/cydniey_buffers
Im going to have to make a whole separate page on the new site just for social media accounts. I found a bunch of bookmarks today for places I've been invited to join, and have set placeholders ("cydniey", of course) up on them. They need artwork and bio's and icons. I also need to work on an artist's statement. And a writer's statement. And a photographer's statement. So what I need to do is come up with an all encompassing statement. And how do I do that, since I have no idea how to do that? Dun dun dun . . . Google to the rescue. I search for and read the statements of as many writers/artists/photographers I can find. Look for and take notes on common threads that apply to me and my conscience. Put them together in a Word document, and then reword them and fill in the blanks with my own thoughts. This is how I write professionally. Really. The essays/articles/open letters I write, this is how I approach them. I keep all the notes.
And I'll tell you why . . .
When I went to college the second time, I signed up to major in Interior Design. My parents moved me into a dorm, 2 miles away from their home, and gave me $50 for books, and materials. My girlfriend at the time, a successful Graphic Designer, paid for my books and gave me what supplies she had, and then bought me the rest of what I needed. This was really cool of her. We broke up a few weeks later, she never asked me to return or pay back a thing. She was nice, fucked up, but nice. Seeing that I would fail my major without financial backing for materials for projects, I changed my major to Professional Writing. For my term paper in my general writing course, I did hours and hours of research at our paltry library on marital rape laws. There was no online at the time. I think I got down to U of Pitt's library for a Saturday to photocopy everything I could find. I had a ton of scrawled on index cards, and notebooks filled with mutant outlines and scribbled notes. A binder full of photocopies of articles, research papers, essays, whatever I could get my hands on.
When I started to put it together I realized that it would have real time relevance. I decided after I turned it in, regardless of the grade, I would edit it, and punch it up a bit, and submit to every woman's magazine in America in an effort to get it published as a special edition article. I naturally went to my Prof, who I confided in more than Writing and college freshman life at 23. I told her what I planned to do with the paper, and she frowned and said, "You can't do that."
"What the hell do you mean?" I really thought she was messing with me, she had read a rough draft of it, really just quotes tied loosely together with my own extrapolations and anecdotes and statistics, and had approved of the way I was going with it and agreed that it was pertinent to our time. She explained to me that the college I was attending was a private, religious college, no government money, so they made their own rules. One of them was that all papers turned in for grades fall under the school's copyright, instead of the owner's, and the owner was no longer free to publish the paper. Some kind of non-compete thing. I still thought she was kidding, no one could claim my work. It took her an hour, but she convinced an incredulous me (I was in therapy at this time, but not on any kind of stabilizing medication, and I tended not to take infringements on my freedom with any seriousness).
Once it dawned on me, I was enraged. I went back to my dorm room and set fire to the 5+" floppy disks that held my original thoughts, the photocopies of the articles I had so carefully poured over and highlighted and made notes in the margins of, my stack of color coded index cards, all of it. If I couldn't have it, no one could. So I killed it. I failed the class. I had no paper, of course I failed. It was half of my grade for the term. I wrote a few extra three page essays for the class, but it didn't help, ultimately. And most importantly, I lost the chance of not turning the paper in and just getting it published. I screwed myself when I killed it, and that didn't even occur to me at the time. All I saw was someone grasping for something that I had birthed and I had to permanently protect it.
Do you see why I didn't keep my birth son? What if his "father" had come after him, like he promised to? Would I kill the baby to keep him from his rapist father? Am I that crazy? Well, I fucked myself pretty hard in college, and that was just a term paper.