... having been breathed out

Hello, dear creator!

Thanks so much for making me a thing! I'm sure I will love it. Lady/lady smut is one of my fave things, so we're already off to a fabulous start.

I am a bookish, mostly-lesbian, 38-year-old lady living in the East Bay (Northern California). General fictional loves of mine include: formidable yet complex women being formidable and complex together; sex writing that is emotionally nuanced and/or ratchets up the narrative tension more than it resolves it; unreliable narrators; atmospheric settings; lovely turns of phrase; strong narrative voices and weird narrative experiments. Art-wise I love beautiful clothes, gorgeous light, poses that capture a particular dynamic, mood, or tension between or among characters, or which make you wonder what is about to happen. Style-wise a lot of the stuff I read & write is grounded in the 1890s through 1920s, so any Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Expressionist, Cubist, or otherwise Modernist influences are always delightful to me.

If you are a visual artist, I apologize that my wants/do not wants sections and the fandom-specific prompts are more geared toward fic than art. I am a writer and that's kind of the way my brain works. But I've tried to include some elements that would translate to visual art, especially in the "Likes (sexual)" section. And rest assured that I love receiving visual art in these kinds of exchanges; it seems so magical & wonderful to me, I can't even tell you.

Also, I'm aware that a lot of my narrative likes & fandom-specific prompts tend toward the in-depth character study, and that that might require a longer word count than you really want to commit to on this relatively short short time scale. Rest assured that 1,000 words of porn sans deep character insight will be very welcome. The in-depth character dynamics stuff is just where my brain goes, so I've included it in case you do want to go that route.

Likes (general): Navigating difficult relationships and not doing a super great job of it; elements of con artistry or keeping things from one another; growing emotional/sexual attachment which is neither negated by nor negates the baggage characters may have with each other; putting in the work to repair, or even just be present with, damaged relationships; unexpected moments of tenderness that surprise and perhaps dismay the participants; established relationships; asymmetrical three-way relationships, or triangular formations where two people are fucking about a third person; characters who have a lot of history together and are doing their best to navigate that; relationships which are sexual but not necessarily romantic, or which straddle the line between romance and something else (friendship, enemyship, collegialism, etc.) and are thus difficult to accurately define.

Likes (sexual): rough sex; fight sex; D/s and S/M elements that are more spontaneous rather than super ritualized or formalized (see "Do Not Want" section for more detail—note that "spontaneous" doesn't have to mean "poorly negotiated," although if less-than-model kink negotiation is what works best for the story you're telling, please feel free: imperfect communication happens all the time in real life and realistic imperfection is part of what makes porn hot IMO); pain play; spanking & impact play; biting; finger-sucking; clothing porn (I adore clothes and fabric: feel free to dwell on them); improvised restraints, especially using clothing items; fisting; edging; dry-humping/scissoring; anal play (so often neglected in F/F porn!), oral through clothing; knife play (especially in Killing Eve, or Fen-related Magicians pairings).

Do not want (combined): Babies, small children, or pregnancy; animal death or violence/cruelty toward animals; scat; erasure of canonical bisexuality; rape that is passed off by the narrative as consensual sex (exploring problematic consent in a thoughtful way is fine); omegaverse; soulmate AUs. With a partial exception for The Magicians (more detail below), in stories that deal with canonical trauma or grief, I'd prefer that those elements be taken seriously rather than papered over. Since we're talking specifically about M- or E-rated stories here, I'd rather read about sex that's a messy part of the messy relationship negotiation or healing process, than sex that only happens after the characters have completely resolved all their issues and come out the other side. Super ritualized BDSM elements (elaborate scenes with lots of setup; codified rules about how submissives must act/address their dominants, with agreed-upon punishment for infringement of said rules, all-BDSM AUs) don't really do it for me, although less formalized power-exchange or power-struggle definitely do.

Requests

( Killing Eve (any): )

( The Magicians (Marina/anyone, Margo/anyone, Julia/Kady, Zelda/Sheila, Zelda/Sheila/Alice): )

( The Good Place (any): )

( Ocean's 8 (any): )

I've been home sick from work the past few days: not even sure if I'm actually ill or whether I'm just intensely tired, or some combination of the two. For one thing I'm coming off (hopefully) a couple of months of anxiety more intense and life-disrupting than I think mine has ever been (interfering with sleep almost every night, lots of violently intrusive thoughts, physiological symptoms like chest/stomach tightness & elevated heart rate basically all the time): this now seems to be chilling out a little, but as a result I feel like all the rest and sleep I haven't been getting over those months is catching up with me, in a huge swamping wave of exhaustion. Anyway I am very lucky to work for an org with a generous sick-leave policy, so. Here's to that.

On the reading front, I finished Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall on Tuesday, and it was quick, beautiful, yet also disturbing/thought-provoking read. Content warnings for non-sexual physical and mental domestic abuse, including viscerally-depicted thought patterns of a habitually abused narrator, but it deals in a very interesting way with the link between patriarchal violence, nationalism/xenophobia, and certain kinds of veneration/romanticization of the past. As such it's a timely book, both for British and American readers, but it doesn't come off as annoyingly topical: the ways in which the subject matter intersects with, say, Brexit or Trumpism, are definitely there, and there's a lot to be unpacked in them, but neither political crisis is mentioned by name, and the underlying issues extend far beyond our immediate circumstances. I was saying to greywash and some other folks, that Ghost Wall would be interesting to read against Golding's classic Lord of the Flies: both speak to toxic British masculinity (albeit very different classes of it) and how that manifests in a return-to-the-land scenario with increased consciousness of proximity to mortality. But Golding does this by excising all female characters from his narrative, whereas Moss does it by not only making her first-person narrator a queer teenage girl, but putting agency for change in the hands of another teenage girl (and a couple of adult women).

I'm also FINALLY narrowing in on finishing Amber Dawn's Sodom Road Exit, ugh, apologies to tellitslant for my tardiness on finishing this. Life has been nuts! But I continue to enjoy it a ton. More to say when I finish.

I've also been reading some great fanfic lately, which I realized I haven't recced on here! celestialskiff's "Although We Are Faithless" is an excellent Kady/Julia Magicians story about being together with another person in a messy, traumatized place in your life while they are also in a messy, traumatized place in their life, and trying to work toward a better condition together but also just witnessing the mess and sitting with them in it. I love how Celestialskiff allows the issues between the two women to remain really pretty unresolved and uncertain even through the end of the story, while still allowing the two of them some emotional movement toward a more solid and hopeful future state. (I also really like how those dynamics play out in the—very hot—sex scenes.) On totally the other end of the seriousness scale, tiltedsyllogism's "Consider the Fairer Sex" is a delightfully frothy and absurd time-travel selfcest story in which Phryne Fisher of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries travels back in time to teach her boarding-school self the joys of sapphism. It's every kind of delightful you might expect from that description, including wonderful moments of young!Phryne's nascent detective instincts, and, of course, attention to older!Phryne's luxe wardrobe.

Writing-wise I'm finally watching Killing Eve, a show which was apparently channeled directly from my id onto the screen; and took a short break after finishing Season 1 to write some Eve/Villanelle porn (currently in beta revisions; coming shortly). I've also signed up or am about to sign up for a couple of fests/exchanges; femslashafterdark signups open tomorrow (F/F exchange where all works are M- or E- rated; I am excite!), and I grabbed a very me-ish prompt for the themagicianshhe fest, for which I just finished drafting an outline which promises to be goofy fun and just enough deconstruction to keep me occupied while continuing to dig into WWI research for the novel.

Speaking of which... the research process is SO iterative, y'all. On the Passchendaele novel project I now have a full outline, but need to make a plan for staggering my drafting of new prose with my continued research reading to fill in specifics & flesh out various parts of that outline. I'm now about 2/3 through a draft of Chapter 1 (I'm looking at 30 chapters of differing lengths, some quite long, others short), but as I hit various sections there's still a lot of reading I'll need to do: at least six full-length books, a bunch of articles, and some review and open-ended research questions. I'm hoping that today, between naps, I can make a plan about what to read first, and how to plan out my reading and drafting. As I look at the amount of research still before me I'm realizing it's probably good that I'm signing up for other, shorter stories so that I'll get to actually write some prose between now and several months from now.

For anyone interested, here's what the general novel-research schedule/syllabus looks like:
( Read more... )

So. That should keep me busy, anyway.

In the comments on my request for metamour fics, lazaefair recced me Speranza's extremely aptly-titled Captain America story "The Fifties", and while I'm sure I'm probably the last potentially-interested person to read this fic, I AM ALSO CURRENTLY UGLY-SOBBING OVER IT AT 11:30 AT NIGHT when I should have been asleep hours ago given that I woke up at 4:15am and have done (or earlier) all week so I mean.

A GOOD STORY.

( Whisperspace )

Quick drive-by entry to note that:

(a) I finally (finally!!) finished Katrina Carrasco's The Best Bad Things, which continued to be intensely twisty and sexy and rife with gender-fuckery and just all around a delightful good time. Also I would think a pretty quick read for someone who could sit down and focus on it instead of haring off to finish other things by book group deadline or before a library return date loomed.

(b) As a result, I'm down to five in-progress books, which is almost kinda-sorta manageable?? Three would be better, but I'll take five.

(c) Next up I'd love to finish Amber Dawn's Sodom Road Exit, which I'm still very much enjoying although I didn't get much time to read it last week, before picking up Nina Revoyr's A Student of History (of which fiachairecht and I were vaguely planning on coordinating our reading) and Larissa Lai's When Fox is a Thousand (which is the next Queer Book Group pick).

(d) I also managed to read a fanfic which I thought was 10k words but was actually 70k words, without realizing (SOMEHOW) that it didn't just seem long; it actually was long. I'm blaming my lack of realization 90% on exhausted, anxiety-fueled insomnia, and 10% on the fact that the premise of the fic really only called for 10k (if that), so stretching it out to 70k was a bit of a painful exercise. However, the decision to continue reading was 100% on me. I palate-cleansed with a few old favorites, so it's all good.

(d) I did not end up going to the queer theory book group, not only because I only got a few pages into the book but because I had a surprise extra day of jury duty last week. Between the lengthy commute to the courthouse and my scattered attempts to put out work fires before & after jury selection, it totally threw off my whole schedule, already in chaos because of the new puppy. HOWEVER:

(d) I got less reading time than expected last weekend, but in compensation I came out of it with a complete revised draft of my novel outline, now with two (2) POV characters instead of one, and a whole home-front thread involving a smuggling investigation and a conflicted f/f affair. So that's much more scandalous than my original outline! I dig it. pennypaperbrain, I am now ready to actually write you that email about the Petrograd section, which I don't think I'll be cutting after all. \o/

Fare forward, travelers.

Let me tell you, friends, I am not thrilled to be on Day 2 of jury duty with horrible cramps. Nothing about that delights me. :-/

The plus side of sitting in an uncomfortable beige room all morning yesterday while the courtroom readied itself for our participation, was that I got through about a third of Amber Dawn's Sodom Road Exit, on which tellitslant and I are attempting to more-or-less coordinate our reading. I'm definitely digging it thus far: certified Bisexual Disaster and University of Toronto dropout Starla Mia Martin returns home to the small town where she grew up, moving back in with her mother and taking a graveyard shift job at a campground to try to get her debt load under control, and is promptly haunted by an equally queer ghost from the recently-demolished amusement park down the street, which used to provide the town's economic lifeblood. Excellent, evocative sense of place (always a must for a ghost story); believably prickly dynamics between a mother and daughter who are both, shall we say, strong personalities; and I like Starla's narrative voice. Excited to read more.

Other than that, my big reading news for the week is that I did actually manage to make it to Queer Book Group! And it was super enjoyable! Hurrah! The group was about a dozen people, most of whom seemed like regulars who knew each other, although they were very welcoming. The conversation about Real Queer America really demonstrated why it's interesting to talk with other people about books: in some cases peoples' qualms about Allen were the same as mine: in the service of highlighting the positive work being done and lives being lived by queer folks in red states, she at times soft-pedals the negative aspects. But other people had qualms that were almost the opposite of mine, feeling like the book was a downer for the degree to which it DID discuss the negatives. There was also a good, kind of tangential conversation about our own backgrounds as they related to the book, which was particularly interesting because many of the group members were in their 50s and 60s and a few others were in their 40s; Allen is 30 and talking to such a multi-generational group really highlighted what a short historical memory her book has. This is not exactly a criticism of Allen; she set out to write essentially a travelogue/memoir, not a history. But talking to people twice her age who grew up in small towns definitely emphasized how much things have changed. It was also interesting hearing people's takes on Allen's hostility toward big, overpriced cities, of which San Francisco is of course high on the list. The group being an East Bay audience, I found it kind of hilarious the degree to which it was split between "How dare she insult our beautiful California!" and "She is correct, the city exemplifies everything horrible about corporatized queerness."

Anyway, I got pretty much exactly what I wanted out of the experience, so I will be back for sure. Next month's selection is Larissa Lai's fairy-tale-inflected novel When Fox is a Thousand, of which I had never previously heard. Will report back!

Incidentally: tangentially apropos of the Allen, or at least of a couple of conversations I've had on here about a subject Allen neglected: I just this morning learned about Karen Tongson's Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, which came out in 2011. It's still not exactly the study of queer life in red-state suburbia that donut_donut and lazaefair were craving (Tongson focuses on the Los Angeles sprawl), but I'm nonetheless intrigued.

More and more LGBT people seem to be operating on a similar wavelength [to that of the author, a trans lesbian who prefers to live in a small "red state" city rather than a large coastal one]. I asked Gary J. Gates, the most widely cited demographer of the American LGBT community, what evidence he has seen of queer demographic shifts away from coastal big cities over the last decade.

He pointed me to his recent Williams Institute analysis of U.S. Census and Gallup polling data, which compared the concentration of same-sex couples in American cities in 1990 to the percentage of their LGBT population from 2012 to 2014. (It's an imperfect comparison, but given how hard it is to gather data on a small population like the LGBT community, it's one of the best available.) And the results are striking: Salt Lake City leapt up thirty-two spots in the overall rankings between 1990 and the 2012-2014 time period. Louisville, Kentucky, rose thirty slots over the same period. Norfolk, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana both jumped more than twenty places. Meanwhile San Francisco remained static, Los Angeles fell two slots, and New York had a staggering eleven-place slump.

Gates believes that this discrepancy speaks to the social change happening in many red-state cities. As he wrote in the analysis: "Substantial increases in LGBT visibility in more socially conservative places like Salt Lake City, Louisville, and Norfolk likely mean that these areas are not as different from cities like San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle (all with long histories of fostering social climates where LGBT people felt more comfortable) in their acceptance of the LGBT community today than they were twenty years ago."

Indeed, an "important explanatory factor" for that data, as Gates acknowledged in the analysis, is the increased "willingness" [I, breathedout, would argue "ability"] of LGBT people in conservative areas to come out of the closet. In other words, although the analysis probably indicates some degree of population shift, [there is also an element of simply revealing that... ] LGBT people have been building beautiful lives away from the coasts for years. [...] But because the media overwhelmingly focus on the tragic things that happen to queer people in red states, that kind of community building often goes unnoticed by people on the coasts. As Jack Halberstam wrote in In a Queer Time and Place, "Too often minority history hinges on representative examples provided by the lives of extraordinary individuals"—among them LGBT people who have been murdered in conservative parts of America.

"[In] relation to the complicated matrix of rural queer lives, we tend to rely on the story of a Brandon Teena or a Matthew Shepard rather than finding out about the queer people who live quietly, if not comfortably, in isolated areas or small towns all across North America," Halberstam wrote.

—Samantha Allen, Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States

The real strength of this book is in the individual stories of people Allen talks to on her trip across the country, from the queer Latinx youth organizers of Aquí Estamos in South Texas, to Temica Morton, the Black woman who spearheaded Jackson, Mississippi's first Pride Parade in 2016 as an add-on to a queer community bar-b-que she's been hosting for years, to Smoove G. and Nicci B., co-owners of the Back Door: Bloomington, Indiana's beloved queer bar and gathering-site. But those stories are—for reasons similar to those cited by Halberstam above in relation to the (inter)national news media!—difficult to excerpt out of context. I had my quibbles with the book overall, mostly relating to Allen's lack of acknowledgement that some people just genuinely love big cities as much as she loves small ones, but I am absolutely in agreement with the idea, as expressed here, that when it comes to queer narratives we desperately need to expand our geographical focus and tell stories about ordinary living-their-lives queer people who are from places other than New York City, and to a lesser extent San Francisco and LA (although I freely admit I adore SF and LA narratives, having personal connections to both those places.) The NYC and coastal-big-city stranglehold on US storytelling both fictional and non-fictional is REAL. And it is, as Allen points out here and as I'd echo despite having lived in big coastal cities my whole life and loving them dearly, doing us all a big disservice.

I was also interested in Gates's data on shifting queer demographics over time. Whether they come from a real population shift away from big coastal cities or whether they're more a result of increased quality of life/ability to come out for red-state queers, they do still indicate measurable change. Which is a big part of Allen's point: things are (slowly) shifting for LGBT people in red-state America, and there are a lot of fascinating and encouraging stories to be told about the activists and regular queer folks who call these places home.

In the grand tradition of divorcées women people in their late thirties, it seems my brain saw fit to start my birthday with a 1am anxiety attack to the nonsense tune of "You Are Bound To Lose Everything Worthwhile In Your Life (And Now You Are Too Old To Start Over When You Do)," with an encore rendition of the catchy little number "Adding More Worthwhile Things Only Means A Greater Amount of Inevitable Loss." To quote that immortal sage Jake Peralta: "Cool. Cool cool cool cool cool." The silver lining was that after I moderated my mental/emotional spiraling with some CBT exercises and arrived at the point where I was able to breathe but was still very much awake, I found myself with a few hours of surprise reading time, which has been thin on the ground lately. So that actually was cool, and not in the Peraltan sense; even if I honestly would rather have been sleeping.

During the night I got through a couple chapters of Samantha Allen's Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States, which is the May selection for the queer book group that I am going to attend this time, y'all, it's happening. Allen's prose style is super engaging and fast-paced, and she strikes a nice, supportive three-way balance among (a) explicating the larger political context for the things she talks about with facts & figures, (b) connecting with other individual queer folks on her travels and relating their stories, and (c) her own personal history and feelings on being a queer person in red-state America. As a trans woman reporter and ex-Mormon who started coming out to herself while a student at Brigham Young University, later fell in love with her now-wife over graduate studies in Bloomington, Indiana, and currently lives in Georgia, the latter are, as you can imagine, many and complex; although an important part of this book's political agenda is to destigmatize middle America and the South among lefty/queer circles, and to make the point that they have always been, and always will be, just as queer as anyplace else. In fact, Allen says in many places that she prefers to be queer in a red-state context, both for practical reasons—regular people can still afford to live in places like Houston and Atlanta, unlike in New York and San Francisco—and also because in these places, where LGBT folks are still more urgently embattled, she finds it possible to access a queer community that has more passion and cohesion, and less cliquey in-fighting, than she has found in the big coastal cities.

(As a side note, I was talking to both greywash and the friend/lover with whom I had dinner on Monday, about the weird defensive reaction I noticed in myself, especially to Allen's intro chapter. A wholehearted lover of cities myself, and also a seeker-out of passionate, politically-engaged people with whom to surround myself, my experience of LA and San Francisco and Portland has been much different than Allen's—and that's totally fine! I'm still 100% on board with her mission of reclaiming red-state America for the queers who have lived there all along, and for whom it is a beloved and meaningful home. Queerness is not, as she argues well, an urban invention, and there's a ton of amazing activism going on outside NY and SF. Despite being completely convinced of this, though, I surprised myself by ongoing surges of defensiveness about the parts of Allen's argument that I read as portraying city-dwelling queer communities as apathetic and petty. Luckily, as the chapters progressed I got over it: probably at least in part because it becomes very clear that Allen, despite her preference for red-state queer America, does not sugar-coat the challenges of queer life in Utah or Texas, even as she also celebrates their joys.)

Anyway, the first post-intro chapter involves Allen's first return to Utah since she left the church to transition, and it's poignant to read her personal reflections on finding a much more thriving LGBT support system in place there now than when she left. She talks to Mormons and ex-Mormons who have decided to stay and fight to make Utah a more welcoming place, with to all accounts impressive success. Allen and her traveling companion spend a good deal of time at the Provo chapter of Encircle, talking to the youth who are served by the programs there and who basically, in some cases, consider it home. She also talks to Emmett Claren, one of the first openly trans people to remain in the Mormon fold: he lives with the constant possibility of excommunication, but for him the faith and community are important enough that he plans to stay until & unless they kick him out, and meanwhile he is agitating for greater acceptance from within. The second chapter of the book, which deals with Texas—both a rally against the transphobic bathroom bill that passed their legislature in 2017, and a look at queer organizing in South Texas immigrant communities—is also very interesting, if less personally immediate to Allen's life story. More updates as I continue!

I've barely started Mari Ruti's The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects, which is the Q2 selection for the queer theory book group that meets this coming Wednesday. I'm still in the midst of Ruti's dense introduction, always the slowest-going section of an academic book. Her points seem interesting but honestly I'm not sure I have the bandwidth to get through something this theoretical before Wednesday. I'd like to! But I won't beat myself up about it if I can't.

I've also been really really meaning to pick up Amber Dawn's Sodom Road Exit, which tellitslant and I were going to try to read at the same time. But between work, house and puppy I have not managed it. Sorry for my tardiness, tellitslant! /o\ It's next up this weekend, and since I'm taking tomorrow off and have few concrete plans other than sleeping, writing, and reading, I'm hopeful that I can polish off the Allen and move on to the Dawn.

A research byproduct: This interactive tour through the steel-making process is SUPER informative and interesting. The combination of animations and text-based explanations, along with the flowchart-style navigation, is incredibly helpful. And the whole thing is very appealing from a "How Things Are Made" perspective. I mean, caveat that it's made by the steel industry, but for a basic understanding of what's going on mechanically & chemically, I dig it. Start by clicking on one of the three main ingredients in the center of the circle, and go from there!

Cross-posting my response to this excellent writing ask I received on Tumblr, since I am still not really Over There. But I do occasionally check my messages, and this one was too good to pass up.

@tractata said: Hey, I love your writing posts & they’ve helped me think about writing in a new way, so thanks so much! I was wondering if you’ve covered narrativizing the plot of a story anywhere. Once you’ve established the characters’ urges/motivations, plot beats, main conflicts, etc., how do you decide which scenes to depict (vs summarize/allude to/interweave somehow), the chronological span/pacing of the narrative/sections, the order of the scenes, flashbacks, etc.? No worries if you can’t answer!

Hi there! Aw, I'm so glad my writing posts have been useful to you! I'm not generally on Tumblr anymore (... *looks shifty*), but this is such a great question I'm answering it here as well as mirrored on my Dreamwidth, which is my current main internet home in the wake of CensorGate 2k18.

I've been turning it over in my mind, and I think the answer is that this kind of thing isn't really separate for me, from—certainly not from establishing the plot beats, and not really from the rest of the aspects you mention, either. Since I see that you reblogged this post in its original Tumblr incarnation, I'll continue with the development of the Rambouillet story to try to dig in a little deeper.

( Literally 3,000 more words about this: )

MONDAY.
Occasionally I wish I were a visual, rather than a text-based, artist, because there is (to take a random example) a very particular vibe that comes from waking up with an anxiety attack at 3:30am and getting up and going to the gym which I feel, if the cinematographer knew their stuff, could be communicated in a single long shot of the clammy 4am fluorescent lights and the mirrors and the slightly too-loud pop music and the omnipresent TVs all layering news on top of basketball, and the dudes doing powerlifting looking strong and sturdy and not remotely shaky or nauseated with sleep and adrenaline. Painting a picture in words is never quite as elegant as that shot in my head. (Though there are also things words can do better, of course.)

TUESDAY.
Dogs are extremely good, and some of them are also EXTREMELY SMALL.

WEDNESDAY.
About a week ago greywash and I rewatched Episode 2.9 of The Good Place, which features a 10-second clip of a remix of Lorde's "Green Light." As a result, the song got extremely stuck in my head. I listened to it on YouTube to try to exorcise it. That didn't work, so I listened to it about 45 more times. Then I was tired of "Green Light" and just let YouTube play on. It treated me to other songs off the same album, whereupon those songs got stuck in my head, without the original song ever exactly leaving. Then I was like "Ugh, fine, maybe if I just buy her record I can listen to the whole thing and the holistic experience will release me from the earworm." So I did that, and now for the third day running I have a mashup of Lorde's entire Melodrama album viciously stuck in my head. Is it time to break out Dion & the Belmonts' "Runaround Sue"?? I am slowly going mad. Also: six straight hours of conference calls.

THURSDAY.
"Let's invent a new version of "Fuck, Marry, Kill," except instead it's "Discipline, Fire, Resign," and you have to do it all simultaneously and also it's not a game, or fun." (ETA: A comment made me realize I should add: I work in HR. None of these things happened to me personally; I'm just the person who has to carry them out. BUT STILL.)