Steel and softness

I'm at the halfway point of the fandom meme, Day Thirteen, and the subject is:

M: Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.

While I've lost almost all of my goodwill towards Joss Whedon over the years, and view his shows with a lot less uncritical adoration than I did when I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I still have a huge amount of affection for Buffy in particular. While I wouldn't rush to be part of the central friendship of Buffy, Willow and Xander (which I think tips over into codependency at some points, and is also awful to Buffy at various points in the series), I would love to be friends with Tara Maclay. She's kind, a good listener, very perceptive, and, over the course of the series, develops a spine and stops letting her friends walk all over her. She often seems to be the only character willing to tell people truths they don't want to hear. I feel that as a friend she'd be the right mix of compassionate and steely.

For similar reasons, I'd love to be friends with Emily Fields from Pretty Little Liars, who is a similar kind of character.

( The other days )

Just another time we're caught inside

I started the day by running to Grantchester and back. I left the house around 6.30, and it was cold enough that there was frost on the ground, mist rose up from the river, and the cows loomed eerily on the empty fields. I followed the run with a long, slow restorative yoga session, and what with all that exercise I felt simultaneously strong, stretched, and relaxed by 9am.

Today is the last day of my strange, languid holiday at home — I'll be 'returning' to work tomorrow. I spent the morning cleaning the internal windows in the house, moving my seedlings around on the windowsill to ensure that they got maximum sunlight, and sat outside in the courtyard for an hour or so, drinking coffee, eating a few remaining Easter eggs, and writing in my paper journal and bullet journal, surrounded by a pile of washi tape and fountain pens.

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I've been reading free short stories online. I've found them to be a bit of a mixed bag.

'To Balance the Weight of Khalem' by RB Lemberg is about being a refugee and a migrant, with magical onions, crossing oceans, and food as a metaphor for loss, grief, alienation and home. I found it to be gorgeous, gorgeous work, although I think readers will get more out of it if they know anything of Lemberg's personal history — if you do, the metaphors and allusions in the story are very obvious.

'The Time Invariance of Snow' by E. Lily Yu is packed with allusions to myths and fairytales where women speak but their words have no power. I found it an interesting twist on the Snow Queen story, but possibly a bit darker than I was looking for in the current climate.

'Little Free Library' by Naomi Kritzer was a little bit twee (and as a librarian I have mixed opinions about little free 'libraries') — about a woman who opens up a little free library and strikes up a strange relationship with an unseen borrower of her books who appears to have come not just from outside her neighbourhood, but from outside this world altogether. I enjoy stories about the uncanny and strange brushing up against our world, so it was satisfying, but a bit slight.

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I received a nice treat in the post today — a beautiful Pippi Longstocking postcard from gingicat, to go with the recipe postcard I received a week or so ago from schneefink. I'm really enjoying this uptick in physical mail, and hope it continues beyond the pandemic.

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I will leave you with some photos of cherry, apple, and plum blossom from around my neighbourhood. The trees here are absolutely gorgeous at the moment, and I feel very fortunate to still be able to go outside and be among them. Here's the photoset on Instagram, and here it is as a Twitter thread if you prefer.

Incidentally, if you are on either of those platforms, I'm always happy to be added (and add in return) Dreamwidth people. I'm ronnidolorosa and ronnidolorosa. Instagram is very much the clichéd range of photos of flowers, trees and food. Twitter has a few more ranty political retweets and outraged grumpy threads about being a migrant in the UK and how dreadfully the UK government treats migrants and refugees.

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I hope you all are having as restful a time as possible.