(no subject)

[vivien]

I'm not dead - just trying to balance my new working life with my old, coddled working life. Job is going fine, if there are long, long days in which the clock barely moves. Now that I have email, I feel a little better. I have a link to the outside world. I get home a full hour past my old getting home time, and that hour really makes a big difference. I am still having some exhaustion, but I can function till ten o'clock before collapsing, at least. And considering I was staying up consistently till 11:30, that adds up to two and a half hours less of life to live. Wow. That sounds really dire when you type it out. Boo.

In any case, I am adjusting. I have a routine now, and I am finding myself having moments in which I can write things like this and email them to myself to post later.

Lo, though I have been sorely tempted by the shiny fast internet connection on the computer that I stare at all day, I have not used it for the forces of evil or LJ. I'm pretty damn impressed with myself, let me tell you.

So in fandom news, I've had the DVD's for the next utena series... that had to go back to the library unwatched. Woe. I'm trying again this weekend.

I've also discovered an advantage of the one hour lunch break - I have time after eating and taking a nice walk to read for a bit. I've been reading the rest of the Narnia series, as they are quick and pleasant reads (except for The Last Battle when everyone and their talking dog gets to go Narnia heaven except for poor Susan.) I hadn't known that about her as I hadn't gotten past the first book in the series. I asked my mom why I hadn't kept reading as a kid and she said I complained about the ending of LWW, saying it was not a good ending since the kids had to leave Narnia and go back to being kids instead of kings and queens - that and she foisted The Hobbit on me right after and I guess I got distracted. I find this funny considering how I'm playing Susan at Mways.

Anyway, I am about ready to hit a really busy, really unpleasant patch of grad school and work life right after my birthday weekend. I will likely not be around much at all for anything the first two weeks of June. But once those two weeks are over, I will have just one class left (I'm taking a compressed weekend class for three weekends). Then I will be done with grad school and I will own my evenings, smaller though they are, once again.

Comments

[aisforamy]

I love your Susan at Milliways! All of the Pevensies (did I spell that right?) are awesome. It makes me want to go back and read the books again. I think it's been about ten years, so I'm due. I remember thinking, as a kid, how much it would suck to grow up in a magical land, then have to go back and be kids again, with adult memories and intellect. Plus, I was furious as Susan up to the very end, when I realized that she was the only one who survived, and how awful that must have been for her.

Sorry - babbling. Stopping now.

Just wanted to say you're doing a great job!

[campkilkare]

I've never real bought the poor Susan line. She made her choices, and not dying was a mercy. If she'd come to Narnia she would've ended up like the dwarves, unwilling to accept a reality that she'd decided to turn her back on.

[vivien]

Point, counter point!

I just think it's sad to be left completely on your own like that. However, I can hope that eventually she was able to find everyone in Narnia again.

Have you read "The Problem of Susan" by Neil Gaiman?

I hope I don't suck portraying her - Aspen says you are a huge fan of Narnia and I'd hate to disappoint you.

[campkilkare]

I do agree that it's sad, and narratively, I wish Lewis could've rigged it differently. But then it might be a bit blithe to have no one we like suffer in, you know, the end of the world and the seperation of the damned and saved. It's kind of a point of the whole mythology involved--even people you like are not going to be saved if they don't have faith. Lewis wanders fairly far afield from orthodoxy just by including decent people who had faith in Tash.

And honestly, Susan met Aslan face to face, which is more than, say, the parents ever got, yet the parents are "friends of Narnia" in spirit.

I have read "The Problem of Susan," but I can't find it online and don't want to talk about (against) it without it in front of me.

I think you do a good job, from what I've seen--I haven't been keeping up that well on Milliways lately.

[vivien]

*snuggles*

I know you're having a yucky time what with school stress and all. We miss you! Although I've had my crack cut in half lately myself.

I think you're right - I just wish it hadn't been set up as "oh this girl likes boys and lipstick so DAMN HER TO NO NARNIA!!!" I know I'm being very facetious and I know there was more to it than that. I like to think that once Susan lost them all, she realized (as the Milliways version has) what she lost and got some priorities straight.

Above all, I find it ironic that Lewis wrote Queen Susan the Gentle as being very feminine, not interested in war, doing what women are "supposed" to do, and yet by The Last Battle, that ultra-femininity has become a bad thing.