The Heart's Landscape, ch. 5

[tocryabout]

Chapter 5, "The Darkest Midnight", is completed. Featuring! Walter Langkowski, the return of the long-suffering Professor, Christmas goose, burst capillaries, and Clare of Assisi.

Words not recognised by OpenOffice's spellcheck:
chav
personalism
dendrobranchiate
tardery
mémère
Adeste Fideles

[Read from the beginning]

Comments

Re: scary long comment that should have just been an email, THREE

[to-cry-about.livejournal.com]

I really like how this is set up as a real dilemma, too -- they don't know enough about this Dept, it's too new, the people seem nice but are they trustworthy, and is it good to enter into the wossname and try to participate or to hold yourselves apart?

Good good. I didn't want people to be going "Stop overreacting, you paranoid freaks!" or "Stop being retarded and flee to Cuba!" This is a very American story (sinister government) told in Canada (where we think of the government as comforting and incompetent), so it's hard to get the balance right. If you read Alpha Flight vol 2, you see the authors struggling with the same problem, I think.

((facepalm)) Poor J. It's like he thinks he's so fucked-up, the world is his psych ward, and every incident is some kind of test he's set up to fail.

That's perfect, yes. Paul has "recovered" from the experience of St Rita's much better than Joel, probably because he got rubber stamped as "okay" while Joel got shunted out to Xavier as an impossible case. Having that label for so long can fuck you up in and of itself.

d00d! y'all get that up in the true north strong and free?

We get GI Joe! I strenuously ignored it as a child, but growing up in the 80s it just wasn't possible to shut it out completely.

John Paul wasn't European? But I know what you mean.

Well yeah, but he was a Pole first and a European second. He didn't have the sort of cosmopolitan urbanity that this pope does. Gollum, definitely, although I find myself hating Papa Ratzi less and less as time goes by. He's our stepdad who likes ermine robes and fluffy cats and chocolate, and all that's fine, but he's NOT THE OLD DAD. He's actually not been any more conservative than JPII so far (the Instruction on gay priests is the sort of thing JPII would have done, honestly), which is pissing off the radical right-wingers. And I like popes who piss off the radical right-wingers. But he's not the old dad!

Re: scary long comment that should have just been an email, THREE

[to-cry-about.livejournal.com]

Yes! Prada. I'd been telling people Versace, but you're right, it's Prada. Oh, B-16. Why must you be so ugly when you got so much STYLE?

When the meds work, they WORK. When therapy works, two years later you notice that yeah, okay, you did start doing what the therapist said and it did start working at some point. I grudgingly admit that the CBT did have some benefits for me, but not in the kick-into-overdrive way like the Zoloft and Effexor, where I actually find it hard to understand WHAT I WAS THINKING when I was depressed. (It's a little creepy, honestly.)