"You're very timid, aren't you?"
Mar. 18th, 2001 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
viedma"What?" Beth Ellen was caught completely unaware.
Her grandmother looked away. "I suppose you're timid because you've had to grow up here with an old lady. You haven't had any real life. But there's something I want to tell you about timidity, about shyness."
Beth Ellen searched her grandmother's face to see if she were angry, but the face looked impassive. I'm going to be told I'm bad, she thought.
"Shy people are angry people," said Mrs. Hansen and snapped her head around to see Beth Ellen's reaction.
I am not a lady, thought Beth Ellen. It's coming now. She's going to say I'm not a lady.
"You know," said her grandmother, smiling, "it's important to be a lady, but not if you lose everything else, not if you lose yourself in the process."
Beth Ellen felt her mouth drop open.
"There are times when we *must* express what we feel even if it is anger. If you can feel it and not express it...it might be better, but you *must* try to know what you feel. If we don't know what we feel, we get into trouble."
********
and it goes on from there. I loved "The Long Secret" to pieces, Vali-- thanks for telling me about it. (kiss) everyone else, go and read, it's terrific. and very slashy if i may say so m'self.
I really wish i could've chatted and had fun last night, but i got really queasy last night-- i think i ate s'thing bad-- and decided to go to bed at a human hour. this is the first weekend in ages that i've gone to bed when normal humans do and wake up when the sun comes up. not that there's anything wrong with abby normal humans, but keeping a vampire schedule on the weekends means that it's impossible to wake up in the morning on Monday. and this Mon is the start of PT five days a week. bleah. sometimes i wish i hadn't asked my command for tuition assistance just so they wouldn't be able to hold something over my head, but what the fuck, i can deal and do stupid stuff for another seven months. just a few more months, just a few more months...
Hey, at least i'll be all buff and stuff when Vali comes to see me in a few days, right? (snort) i'm one of those people who can work out 3 hours a day for years and i'll still look chubby.
(cartman voice) I'm not chubby-- i'm big boned!!!
At least i'm starting to feel human today-- i was carrying around a monster sleep debt and it was starting to take its toll. it felt good to sleep like a baby for once-- and by a baby i mean nodding off fitfully for a couple of hours and waking up screaming for formula, but *still!* it's sleep nonetheless.
i got a email from someone who took me to task for my opinions on password protected sites. oh well, what am i supposed to do? take it back and say i didn't mean it? sorry, tis my opinion, just like she's got a right to hers. i did point out to her that just as i know that anything i say on Bindle will make its way to someone not on the list means that you can password protect your site all you want and the riffraff will *still* get in. i hope i made my point, but i doubt it.
i wish i could say that i'm 100% gleeful when i get people riled up at me, but i'm not. i wish i had Andy Kaufman's nerve sometimes. whenever i go toe to toe with another fan, my palms sweat and i get jittery and my fingers get cold. *total* sympathetic nervous reaction going on here. but it's like i have to say it sometimes when something bugs me that much. and then i think of the people i've alienated, and i realize i can definitely live with it. not losing any sleep over it.
it's easier to say what i want to online not because i'm hiding behind the monitor (at least i hope that's not entirely the case) but because i can take my time and really think about what i want to say. in RL i think and do things really slowly so when someone says something i don't like or that i disagree with it takes me so long to formulate what i want to say back that usually the moment's lost.
I'll never forget the time i was at Media last year and one of the panelists said that occasionally she finds a writer so bad that she writes them privately and urges them to stop because what they're writing is such garbage. i was so stunned i just sat in my chair like a nincompoop and she talked so fast that i couldn't get a word in edgewise and before you know it the panel's over and i lost my chance. the total *wrongness* of what she said was so monstrous that i let it go unchallenged and i still beat myself up over it. not that anything i would've said would have changed her mind, but my silence was taken as agreement with her views, and nothing could be further from the truth.
my pal C-S once said to me that i'm a lot more discerning in my tastes than i let on, and that's true. but it's my opinion, no one else's. i'm not the final word in good taste, so who am i to get off on telling someone to give up a hobby that one enjoys? i guess i get irked by people who confuse what they personally think is good with objective reality. there's so much to say about this here that i don't know where to start, but in the end, let people write whatever they want to write, and if you don't like it, move on. they're not hurting you unless you choose to be hurt by it. and besides, i've noticed that the people who howl the longest about the sorry state of fanfic on the net have a loooong way to go in their own writing. maybe the badfic hits too close to home and strikes a tender nerve? i think so. the slowness in my RL reactions is something i'm always trying to overcome at any rate.
oh, and i dl'd an ftp program to tranfer Beth's files to another site. pray to whatever god/dess you believe in for success. :-) one of these days i'll get up to speed with this newfangled internet thingy.
Her grandmother looked away. "I suppose you're timid because you've had to grow up here with an old lady. You haven't had any real life. But there's something I want to tell you about timidity, about shyness."
Beth Ellen searched her grandmother's face to see if she were angry, but the face looked impassive. I'm going to be told I'm bad, she thought.
"Shy people are angry people," said Mrs. Hansen and snapped her head around to see Beth Ellen's reaction.
I am not a lady, thought Beth Ellen. It's coming now. She's going to say I'm not a lady.
"You know," said her grandmother, smiling, "it's important to be a lady, but not if you lose everything else, not if you lose yourself in the process."
Beth Ellen felt her mouth drop open.
"There are times when we *must* express what we feel even if it is anger. If you can feel it and not express it...it might be better, but you *must* try to know what you feel. If we don't know what we feel, we get into trouble."
********
and it goes on from there. I loved "The Long Secret" to pieces, Vali-- thanks for telling me about it. (kiss) everyone else, go and read, it's terrific. and very slashy if i may say so m'self.
I really wish i could've chatted and had fun last night, but i got really queasy last night-- i think i ate s'thing bad-- and decided to go to bed at a human hour. this is the first weekend in ages that i've gone to bed when normal humans do and wake up when the sun comes up. not that there's anything wrong with abby normal humans, but keeping a vampire schedule on the weekends means that it's impossible to wake up in the morning on Monday. and this Mon is the start of PT five days a week. bleah. sometimes i wish i hadn't asked my command for tuition assistance just so they wouldn't be able to hold something over my head, but what the fuck, i can deal and do stupid stuff for another seven months. just a few more months, just a few more months...
Hey, at least i'll be all buff and stuff when Vali comes to see me in a few days, right? (snort) i'm one of those people who can work out 3 hours a day for years and i'll still look chubby.
(cartman voice) I'm not chubby-- i'm big boned!!!
At least i'm starting to feel human today-- i was carrying around a monster sleep debt and it was starting to take its toll. it felt good to sleep like a baby for once-- and by a baby i mean nodding off fitfully for a couple of hours and waking up screaming for formula, but *still!* it's sleep nonetheless.
i got a email from someone who took me to task for my opinions on password protected sites. oh well, what am i supposed to do? take it back and say i didn't mean it? sorry, tis my opinion, just like she's got a right to hers. i did point out to her that just as i know that anything i say on Bindle will make its way to someone not on the list means that you can password protect your site all you want and the riffraff will *still* get in. i hope i made my point, but i doubt it.
i wish i could say that i'm 100% gleeful when i get people riled up at me, but i'm not. i wish i had Andy Kaufman's nerve sometimes. whenever i go toe to toe with another fan, my palms sweat and i get jittery and my fingers get cold. *total* sympathetic nervous reaction going on here. but it's like i have to say it sometimes when something bugs me that much. and then i think of the people i've alienated, and i realize i can definitely live with it. not losing any sleep over it.
it's easier to say what i want to online not because i'm hiding behind the monitor (at least i hope that's not entirely the case) but because i can take my time and really think about what i want to say. in RL i think and do things really slowly so when someone says something i don't like or that i disagree with it takes me so long to formulate what i want to say back that usually the moment's lost.
I'll never forget the time i was at Media last year and one of the panelists said that occasionally she finds a writer so bad that she writes them privately and urges them to stop because what they're writing is such garbage. i was so stunned i just sat in my chair like a nincompoop and she talked so fast that i couldn't get a word in edgewise and before you know it the panel's over and i lost my chance. the total *wrongness* of what she said was so monstrous that i let it go unchallenged and i still beat myself up over it. not that anything i would've said would have changed her mind, but my silence was taken as agreement with her views, and nothing could be further from the truth.
my pal C-S once said to me that i'm a lot more discerning in my tastes than i let on, and that's true. but it's my opinion, no one else's. i'm not the final word in good taste, so who am i to get off on telling someone to give up a hobby that one enjoys? i guess i get irked by people who confuse what they personally think is good with objective reality. there's so much to say about this here that i don't know where to start, but in the end, let people write whatever they want to write, and if you don't like it, move on. they're not hurting you unless you choose to be hurt by it. and besides, i've noticed that the people who howl the longest about the sorry state of fanfic on the net have a loooong way to go in their own writing. maybe the badfic hits too close to home and strikes a tender nerve? i think so. the slowness in my RL reactions is something i'm always trying to overcome at any rate.
oh, and i dl'd an ftp program to tranfer Beth's files to another site. pray to whatever god/dess you believe in for success. :-) one of these days i'll get up to speed with this newfangled internet thingy.
