toujours_nigel | Entries tagged with rhea

A lot of my engagement with my favourite character in any piece of media comes down to "X is a nightmare and I love that about them," which makes it... difficult in current Purity Or Cancellation fandom. But that's just the way it is: I like the genuinely nice ones, but they don't really grab me the same way. I guess in MCU? But even there I love Barnes & Romanoff the absolute most (and MCU isn't remotely an active fandom for me.)
I'm starting a modestly-remunerated fellowship in November at my undergrad uni, after two months at home. Various job applications have failed to fruit into positive consequences, but otoh I haven't been assiduously applying for anything.
- I'm hoping to nab a much better-paid scholarship in April, once this fellowship runs its course, and need to get to work for the application.
- I have a conference in December that'll mean seeing filia_noctis for the first time since August, as it is organised by her workplace. I need to write my presentation-note soonish, as well as other pending papers, but eh. The apathy is strong.
I have put in Yuletide nominations (two KJ Charles series, and the Mahabharata) but am still on the fence about signing-up, after last year's less-than-optimum experience. I am in better writing condition this year than last, so I'll just need to peruse the rules carefully and offer accordingly, I suppose. (That and take up a prompt collection if my recipient is happy with just about anything; I operate better prompted than not.)
I have a whole bag of unfilled and solicited prompts sitting on a sticky-post, so that's my plan for November, but also I'm writing 3-sentence fic, so prompts for that are welcome.
This is the longest I've lived at home in seven years, and I don't know if I like it. I do know I'm grateful for the fellowship, because it'll get me out of the house regularly for the next five moths.

moetushie gave me three random things to talk about, and you too can have random this by commenting on her post or this one.

1. Seed: I tried growing basil and mint from seed last year, and absolutely failed with the mint. The basil was coming along nicely (both sweet and holy) but then a dog ate some and I got furious and uh, I smashed the rest.

2. Chariot: I am still mad at translations which use car instead (car-warrior, etc). I am *also* fascinated by the attachments on the wheels, but that might be down to watching/reading Ben-Hur at a formative age.

3. Phone: I keep refusing to upgrade, much to my family's collective horror, but I don't really *need* something 4g or super-fast, so eh. Long as it supports Instagram and a food-delivery service or two, I'm okay.

Wrote and made an audio-clip of this for a friend's installation about menstruation.

( so uh talking about the social construction of menstruation )

So I'm average height for an Indian woman, and though I'm very fat it doesn't... show as much or something (like, people are always astonished when they hear how much I weigh sort of thing). But anyway, I don't look strong; I have no visible musculature, and I am extremely clumsy.

Which makes it very funny when people realise I am... disproportionately strong for my size, apparently? Like, I don't actually know this and I would assume people are lying, except they look very astonished, like full-on :O emoji faces. It is especially hilarious when this comes from guys who've asked me to give them a hand up, or to punch them on the hand (you know the thing people do when they're trying to see whether you know how to throw a punch). Today it happened when I asked one of my Ph.D cohort to come check out my room, cause I'd gotten frustrated and rearranged my furniture.

Cohort Mate: How did you move the bed?
Me: What do you mean, how did I move the bed. Physically?
CM: No I mean, those are heavy. My friend moved hers and it took four of us.

It was an absolute boost to my self-esteem, tell you what, considering these girls cycle and play football for fun, while I blanch at the very thought of exercise.

But anyway, my room is rearranged so my bed is right under the ceiling fan, and that should help enough that I don't have to get the table-fan down for at least another fortnight.

Sometimes I do things that I bracket in my head as Slytherin, things that I could do without and kinda don't wanna but will help in the long-run.
My actual Ph.D is not one of these things, since it's the basic requirement to teach at even the undergrad level, and I'm too dysfunctional to get one while actively teaching. But I signed up as a freelance invigilator, which gives me a bit of money when I have the time/energy, and that's a Slytherin thing for me. I appeared in and passed a country-wide qualifying exam and that's another.
About four anna half years ago, I had a nervous collapse and failed to submit a finished M.Phil thesis. While I am no longer in that discipline, I plan to reformat it and send it around as an article when I can, and that'll be a Slytherin thing.
Finally, I am now writing a week of exams to get through a second Masters degree, and if I pass that'll be my longest-running Slytherin thing yet. I'd say fingers crossed, but also i looked up how to register for supplementary exams if I flunk. Because the thing is, Slytherin things aren't always sensible, and coinciding this with my last semester in Ph.D (when I have to write my thesis or die trying) means I barely studied for these exams. But anyway.

I fell down and scraped my right palm, toes on the right foot, both elbows, and left knee. And then I went to the meeting with my guide for which I was hurrying and talked about work while vaguely dizzy. Have come back and made rice.

Also got a plant from my aunt (and this is even more euphonic than immediately apparent, since I call her Mani and she sent a money-plant) because my birthday is tomorrow.

ETA: Told guide about tumblr and Star Wars fanzines and left the OTW homepage open on his desktop. Streams are crossing excessively.

not like my interests were ever surprising, but i do like screenshotting my insta page once in a while. right now it looks like this. it usually looks like this, unless i've been on a trip.

There's also an app that gives you the most popular shots of the year, and I, ever a sheep, got mine.

So I just watched this vid-series about a girl who got sucked into an abusive relationship at 13! with a dude she met online. (link goes to the first vid)

And. I was online at 13, and my parents didn't know how the internet worked, and I was definitely not supervised at ALL. I wanna say I was canny and smart but I mean. I was smol and I always freeze around sexual assault, so. One of the things I am very grateful to one of my older friends is that though he had a crush on me when I was 17, 18, he never said anything about it till I was 24-25, because at 17 I was still very vulnerable and--while not confused about my sexuality--desperate to be liked.

And that was at 17, when I'd dated a girl for a couple years and was finally making friends with more than one person at a time. (College was good to me.) At 13 I had 0 friends irl. At 13 this girl I thought was a friend had stopped talking to me and turned everyone against me for over a year, because I told her I liked her more than my other "friends", so, uh, yeah (eighth grade was interesting).

At 13, I would absolutely have fallen into the grooming trap, I'd have been so fucking grateful someone was paying attention to me, and well at 13 I was still making the transition from "I like kissing girls!" to "I'm a lesbian!"; I mean, it was 2003 in India. I didn't know the word lesbian as anything more than a bit sensationalisation, and would have been extremely relieved to have liked kissing a dude. I was also dark and fat and awkward. (I still am all those things, and I mean I'm darker and way fatter, but anyway.) So, yeah. Fuck the people telling this kid she was stupid. She was a baby.

But I was lucky. I didn't run into creeps. Instead I lurked around LJ and fictionalley and some forums like angelfire and just... gorged on fic and wistfully observed Cool People Being Creative. By 15-16 I was writing myself--my only published stories are from those two years--but I still didn't have the courage to approach these Cool People online, or to publish my fanfic, iirc. Maybe it was the lurking that kept me safe for those 3 years or so; I'm not gonna pretend fandom didn't or doesn't have predators. But I think it's also that the people whose journals and stories I was reading offered such good, strong, role-models of being Creative Types and also of Female Friendships that I sort of settled into wanting that as #lifegoals. Either way I'm grateful and thankful.

I used to embroider rather a lot as a child, and I started at I think 3? Thereabouts, at any rate. One of the Wee Rhea stories is about the time I stitched my frock up into my embroidery hoop. Another is about the time I rucked up my frock before starting and consequently tried to stitch my thigh into my embroidery hoop. I was... a handful, let's say, and significant parental and grandparental effort was expended in keeping me occupied. A book would do it unfailingly, though I might take the book and sit inside a cabinet or on a wall or in the high branches of a tree; embroidery would do it most of the time.
School of course made us stitch samplers rather desultorily till the fifth grade, and more seriously since. Knitting as well, but that I pushed off to my mother, who is very fast, since I haven't the patience for it. We did cushion covers and tablecloths and such. Last thing I ever did was a landscape my grandfather drew freehand, a beautiful thing I haven't seen in years, because my grandmother hoards and then forgets. That was in Grade IX or maybe X, and then it sort of faded. I was getting into writing, and didn't have room for more than one hobby, and there wasn't any impetus from school. I've never been a self-starter, and any time I picked up a needle since, I'd get partway and then stop and never resume.
I've been doing better in the last year and half. Starting June last year I've done seven small hoops in all, and an eighth larger one has been on the shelf for months and will get started on soon. oh, and a cushion-cover in 2016, forgot all about that! The trick is to pick things i can finish before I get distracted, or like enough to return to even if I am: quotations and the like. Then you get to have the spark of satisfaction about having finished a thing, which really truly helps.
Thing is, I used to get a lot of surprise/resistance about my interest in embroidery, being as it was distinctly girly and I was distinctly... not, back in school and even through college. I also get shock about cooking, for much the same reason. Embroidery didn't fit, though idk what would have since never have I ever been sporty. i'm just quiet and snarky and sit in corners a lot, in my head embroidery works just as well as reading to support that image. I suppose reading is gender-neutral as an activity? I dunno. Conforming people are odd and incomprehensible. To complicate all this, the accomplished embroiderer in my family was my grandfather, who had never met a visual art he did not love and have some deftness in, so it was never to me a feminine thing at all. (Ditto with cooking, and my uncle; even my father's learning now he's retired: it's one of his projects.)
All of which is to say, I'm here, I'm queer, I embroider.

Today is my mother's birthday, and she turns 59. I am missing it because I am sitting hunched over my laptop writing the first ten pages of my thesis for the fourth time. I had tickets home and everything, but my advisor looked in danger of having a stroke if I fucked off for a week. One of my friends is getting married next weekend, which I am also missing, but then I have never managed to attend a wedding ever, so they're used to it by now.

I'm not sure I like this living alone gig. Something will change next August, one way or another, but still it's awful. The one friend I have still living in the city is an hour and change away by bus, works full-time, and has housemates she really likes. They're all very loud together, give me a headache.

I don't like people enough to be this lonely. But here we are, anyhow.

And here she is, with her mom and younger daughter on either side.

I'm

toujours_nigel/

rheaitis/

rheaitis, You can also call me Rhea, or TJ. I'm not really here these days, but DW is still home.

Demographic note: Indian, Bengali, Hindu, lesbian. I speak and write English and Bengali, and struggle with idiomatic Hindi.

I’m making up a bowl of orange-peel this year. I don’t know what I’ll do with it, maybe grind some up for use in cooking, maybe just leave it lying around smelling citrus-y. There’s a Joan Harris novel I made

filia_noctis buy, where a character gets migraines from the scent of oranges. I get migraines from harsh sunlight and loud noises, but that still seemed an awful fate to me.

I did something like this winter before last, too, but the hostel staff “cleaned” the plate I was drying the peels in, because it was in the sun outside my room. This year it’s in my room, being taken out for an hour here or there. Last year I couldn’t bring myself to do this at all.

I hold onto hurt till the holding on makes my fingers go crook. Like so many mechanisms of defence it only adds to the tally of hurts, after a while, after its utility has passed but not the body’s blind memory of it. I balk at fences, I shy away from creeks. I am like an elephant that full-grown still thinks a chain and a stake can hold it, because they could when it was little.

But I am trying, trying. I grew some plants and smashed the survivors when a dog ate some, but filia_noctis sent me a succulent in September that could stand up to my negligence, and I’m striving to not pin my well-being to its growth. I had a nervous breakdown years ago and failed to submit a completed M.Phil thesis, but I’m three semesters deep into my second Masters, and in my fifth year of an unrelated doctoral programme, and I have safeguards in place to prevent a recurrence of the consequences of my mental instability. I spent months one year only eating biriyani and doing nothing else and getting no pleasure from it, and now I try and cook at least every other day, once a day most days. I am so anxious about clothes I spent a year in identical tshirts in an array of colours, and I’m still doing that, still buying a stack of identical clothing and calling quits but now they’re things that fit me, make me feel worth looking at or talking to, about.

I still have bad days, weeks, months. The entire last year of @aporia-ing‘s Ph.D was a bad year: for her, but because of her for me as well. I still break things, shout, spew venomous words at those I love. I’m still afraid those I love don’t love me, but I’m trying. I’m building bridges where I can, hacking away at the undergrowth of my own insecurities, plugging the holes in my life with media, conversation, food, friends, love.

I’m still here.

The last several posts on this page are just me apologising--months apart--for being so absent, and I don't really think that's likely to change. But the Better Half and I are trying to write a couple of original novels, so if people are interested I could post about and excerpts from those here? I'll set up a filter for that content, though, so if anyone wants to opt in, or haha, is still even reading this, say so in the comments?

Went to Golkonda yesterday with a friend, then back to his to be deafened by the ambient sound of Diwali.

One of the things I have been keeping quiet about, and that have been keeping me quiet, is that I am trying--after a fallow period of five years and counting--to return to writing original fiction. I have some stories thought out, at various lengths, but nothing really started yet. Hoping to use November to write a couple of short stories, both roughly in the fantasy genre, even though my head is frankly far more taken up with two realist plots. This prioritisation, however, is necessary because I want to apply to the Clarion West summer workshop, and, while they say they will consider any piece of writing, the workshop itself aims to train sff and horror authors, and I will need one of their several scholarships in order to go if I qualify, so best to load the bases. It's not as though I don't quite enjoy writing fantasy. I would like to discuss my stories as and when I go about writing them, so do chime in if you want to be on the appropriate filter.

I also have some notion about the Yuletide assignment, and adore both the requested canon and character, so that ought to be good.

I've been gone for a good long while, I know, primarily because I've had nothing to say and not much energy. I've also started an instagram account, since that matches my attention and energy levels pretty much exactly these days. I also spent as much of my free, active, time as I could through September trying my first embroidery project in well over a decade. The quote is what Boromir tells Frodo re becoming a Ring Bearer, at some point in the film, and has always stuck with me. It seemed appropriate, given my headlong plunge back into Tolkien waters.

A very long round of tests, including a fairly horrific visit to the gynaecologist, later, apparently I have something called neurocardiogenic syncope. Unthreatening (unless I fall and hit my head) and not really curable, so less a disease and more a disability really. But hey, at least now I know, and it's manageable. Lots of reiki, and yoga in my future.

In other news, I'm home for a week for check-ups and now have to cajole my advisor into letting me stay for another, because there are some interesting workshops and conferences in the city that I want and ought to attend.

Except... I ran away home without telling him, so this is gonna be interesting.

I wrote about this a little on Facebook, but it's hard to get into it there for a variety of reasons. So anyway. What is it about rape that makes it worse than physical assault of comparable brutality?

Full disclosure. ( aaand here a cut for talk of sexual assault in various contexts, including slavery )

ETA: Using my 'kanai' icon because rewatching the B.R. Chopra Mahabharat drives in the fact that for a text extremely open about violence, and an ability to provide human-and-divine (so that the divine is mostly ignorable) motivation for most actions, it skirts like hell around the question of Draupadi being disrobed and/or assaulted even while talking a *lot* about family honour in exactly that context, and avoids it entirely through divine intervention with yards and yards of sari.

( cut for self-harm )

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rheaitis

Entries tagged with rhea

5 things make an update

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10 years on DW

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what little snakes can

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on the internet nobody knows you're a wolf

stitch and bitch

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deets

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state of me

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not managing this depression thing too well

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