tea berry-blue

So, I, uh. I'm still not sure what to think of this, but I'm writing Avengers fanfic.

Dear Captain America.

I started writing it this week. rainy_day has been writing a story that I've been discussing with her since before she started it, in April, and I really liked the premise of it, because she's actually trying to write Captain America in the present day as someone with 1940s sensibilities rather than just a lot of anachronistic jokes or points where he doesn't understand pop culture, which seems like a tall order but also a rather good commentary.

She hit a wall in her story and we were discussing where to go with it, and as a sort of morale booster thing, I decided to write a letter from Tony Stark to Steve Rogers for her.

And I kind of got hooked. I started writing letters from Tony Stark to a fictional writer-of-Captain-America (since the Captain America comic exists in Marvel canon, in one of those wonderful metaliterary twists that I love), and it's chock full or nerdery about comic history and comic fan mail, but I'm also trying to write in character development and plot and I just don't know what I got myself into.

Plus, the comments people are leaving on it are just amazing.

Part of me is torn because I feel like if I'm going to write something, I should write something commercially viable, but I also love the idea of playing with characters who are cultural icons because there's something intensely meaningful about it. I wrote a couple blog comments this week about why it's important to demand change from big publishers like DC and Marvel, because they have ownership of beloved icons and have the power to use those icons in important stories. This is in the wake of DC canceling a story where Batwoman would marry her longtime girlfriend. Ironically, DC didn't cancel the story because they were concerned about the lesbian angle, but because they thought the characters getting married would make them seem "old." This is in line with them retconning a ton of hetero marriages, as well, so I'm willing to believe that, but it doesn't take away my disappointment.

So I've been doing that. I also need to say that I'm completely floored by the response I've gotten. I've been posting fics on fanfic archives for years, and the most I've ever gotten is about fifteen comments on a single Harry Potter fic. This one already has over 2000 hits, forty-odd comments, and all of them are pretty much unequivocal praise. Some of them are really long and well-considered and talking about what I'm doing with a lot more thought than I was putting into the fic at first. I'm extremely touched that people are taking the time and are feeling this strongly about something I had just started noodling around with for kicks, and it sort of makes me feel like I need to do better.

I've also been playing more music, of course.

I also played this song for rainy_day, since she said she'd been listening to it on repeat while working on her fix:



And here's a song I wrote in 2000, about falling out of love:

On the way home from lunch, I worked out the chords to a song I wrote when I was fifteen.

FIFTEEN. It was the first song I wrote that I was really proud of. And I never had a way to play it. And now I can play it. Or will be able to with practice.

Songs I wrote that I can play now:

The Sea Song
Summer
Rattle
Grand Central Circus
I Love You
Brazen Angels

Ones I haven't recorded yet, but know the chords:

Antoine
Stay
4 & 20

Ones I am close to having the chords for:

Don't Be Cruel (Yes, it's a response to the Elvis Presley song of the same name)

That's ten songs. Ten songs I've written over a twenty year period that I couldn't play before now.

Ones I want to work on:

Coffeeshop Boyfriend
Raindancer
Out
Hot Potato
Immovable Object
Perfect Like The Sun
Bianca Never

So anyway, here's a link to the very very very old archive of song lyrics I wrote a long time ago:

http://www.antagonia.net/old%20shit/songs/

I'm a little...hesitant to show them around. A lot of them are bad, angsty things I wrote in my college days. But if any of you particularly like any of the lyrics, I will try to learn music for them.

Oh my god I am so in love with this thing.

Six weeks with the ukulele. I am delving deeper and deeper into the unexplored territory of angry!ukulele, which I do not think is a very broad genre. This song is intended as a counterpiece to The Sea Song: one is about fire, and one is about water. One of them is about feeling safe and one is about feeling broken. Both of them are about letting down defenses and allowing life to happen as it will.

I've never been a breakfast person.

( Read more... )

I wrote a song about the NYC subway and circus animals.

In the third grade in my elementary school, every kid took recorder lessons. I remember these vaguely; they were fun but not particularly exciting to me.

In the fourth grade, you could elect to take a stringed instrument: bass, cello, viola, or violin. I took cello because I was told it was the closest to guitar. I enjoyed playing the cello, but I wasn't particularly good at it.

I remember my mother saying though that the wonderful thing about cello was that it always sounded beautiful even when I wasn't good at it.

In the fifth grade, I wanted to play saxophone. Oddly enough, this was the year before The Simpsons debuted and JUST before Bill Clinton decided to play the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show. The saxophone was about to gain notoriety, but I had no way of knowing that. I was one of five kids, and the only girl, who wanted to play saxophone.

I loved saxophone. I practiced all the time, and while I don't think I was ever stunning at it, I was pretty good.

I was good enough that, at the end of the year, when the seventh grade oboe players were graduating and there was no one else who wanted to play it, the band leader asked me to switch to oboe, because he was convinced I could learn it faster than the boys.

I really didn't want to, but I did.

I had a love-hate relationship with the oboe. It had been my favorite instrument when I was a kid, because of the duck in Peter & the Wolf, but it wasn't the instrument I wanted to play. It had a beautiful tone. I loved the delicacy it took to play it.

But, in all of this, I am starting to realize that I was never really taught music theory-- or at least, was not taught it in a way I could understand it. I was taught notes: how to read them, what the fingerings were, but not so much how to organize music in my head, not the mathematical part of it that makes music so ordered even when it seems chaotic.

When I was twelve, I picked up a metal fife, and started teaching myself to play that, too. Then I graduated to a wooden one.

At seventeen, I started teaching myself the harmonica. I never quite got the hang of playing specific music on it, but I was great at improvising on it.

We had a piano in our house. I never took lessons. But I would sit down and painstakingly plunk out notes to tunes. I could write music, and wrote quite a lot of music, but I didn't have the skill to perform it. And notation on a staff was always incredibly difficult for me, because dots on lines, when you're dyslexic, could be anything. I wrote my music out by the letter, my musical notation was a list of letters on a piece of paper, with lines underneath the notes that were meant to be held longer. The more lines, the longer you held it. It made sense to me.

I desperately, desperately wanted to be able to play music, but I just never felt like I was good enough. And not just oboe or another wind instrument: I wanted to be able to accompany myself. But I really believed it was something beyond my ability. Something I would never completely understand.

Over the past year, I've had several friends encourage me to try to find other ways to make music. On the computer. By using a voice-to-midi program. I toyed with this stuff a lot but didn't get super far with it.

Then, catfish23 put the idea of getting a ukulele into my head. She tried to get me one on Craigslist. That didn't pan out, and I thought, ah, well, I probably wouldn't bother with it, anyway.

About a month ago, I saw my friend Ellia's band play. Ellia plays the ukulele.

And I watched her play, and something just clicked. Three days later, I bought my ukulele.

Okay, I know, I know, I am talking about my ukulele about as much as most people talk about their children. But it's like I finally found the right instrument. It just felt...okay. Good. I picked it up and could play things. And understood, suddenly, the relationships between all the different chords, and the strings, and the frets.

I love this thing so much. And it's renewed my hope that I can keep learning all kinds of new things, even things I never expected I would be any good at.

I guess what I am trying to say is, keep looking for your right instrument. You might not have found it yet.

Meanwhile, I'm going to go play another song I wrote.

Three weeks today. I wrote another song!

I have learned 3 songs well enough that I can play them by memory, not counting 'Happy Birthday," and I have lost track of how many chords I know. There are three songs I can almost play by memory, and three more songs I can play passably with the chords in front of me.

I have decided to learn a bunch of catchy pop songs that were not intended for ukulele. It's pretty fun. RESULTS:



Also, my fingers hurt.

So, I got my ukulele exactly a week ago.

This is what I accomplished in the week:

The concept has come up in a lot of discussions, in a lot of ways, for me, lately, that people are deserving or undeserving of certain things based on some kind of imaginary rubric that judges our worth as people.

I can speak about this from the perspective of being raised in a Catholic household, and I don't want to make assumptions about other people's religions, even the ones I know a lot about but haven't experienced in the same way, but it's something I understand is an active philosophy in many religions.

There's this heavenly ledger, right? If your good deeds outweigh your bad ones, you get eternal salvation. Or, you know, you might have committed a bad deed so irredeemable that you will get punished for the rest of eternity no matter what. But mostly, you have to strive to be good, and your good deeds measure the worth of your soul.

We get rewarded for how good we are. We get punished for how bad we are.

But I've got to say, outside of nursery school, that's pretty much a big bag of BS.

The good things that happen in a life are not rewards for being a good person, or a worthy person by some other measure. The bad things that happen in life are not punishments.

Good things happen. Bad things happen. There isn't even a divine balance. Good things don't happen in equal proportion to bad.

So those things you don't have in your life: success, money, love, family, a pony, a freezer full of ice cream...that's not punishment, not for anything you've failed to do in this life, not for anything you've failed to do in a past life.

Sometimes kindness pays off. Sometimes generosity pays off. Sometimes love pays off. Sometimes hard work, persistence, practice, skill, bravery, defiance-- name a quality, and sometimes it pays off. But sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it never does. And that does not mean there is something wrong with you. It just means your timing was bad, or your efforts were misdirected, or someone else got there first, or or or or.

Sometimes you fail because you've made a mistake. But not always. Sometimes you just fail. It doesn't mean you did badly, and it doesn't mean you're a bad person.

Sometimes you succeed because you worked your butt off and pushed yourself to be the best you can be. But not always. Sometimes you just succeed. It doesn't mean you did well, and it doesn't mean you're a good person.

(Although I say this with the caveat that I strongly believe most people, the vast majority of most people, are good people. The point is that success and goodness are not connected.)

Sometimes you succeed in spite of making a big mistake. Sometimes you fail in spite of doing everything perfectly.

And that's okay. It's, well, not okay okay, because it sucks when you repeatedly stumble when trying to achieve something you sorely want, and it's not always the best lesson to succeed in spite of laziness or lack of ethics, but it's okay because there is no heavenly ledger. There's no value judgment being projected on you, no cosmic force deciding that you can't have nice things because of that one time you pulled your sister's hair as a child.

This isn't to say that nothing is your fault. Sometimes you fail because you did something terribly wrong. You lost a friend because you hurt them. You were humiliated because you did something cruel. You didn't get a job because you were a jerk in the interview. Many, many things are direct consequences of our actions. And it's important to recognize that, too, and own our faults and our mistakes.

But don't own faults that aren't real, and don't own virtues that aren't real. Don't judge yourself harshly for things that are outside of your control, or so bogged down in so many variables that you just can't exercise the kind of control you might in another circumstance.

Just be good. Be good to each other. Be good to yourself. Do the best you can. Try your best. If you try your best and you fail, it doesn't mean your best wasn't good enough, or that you are not a good enough person. It means you failed. And that's sad, and it feels terrible, but that doesn't mean you are terrible. You know you're not terrible, because you were being good.

Or at least, you should know that. That is why I am telling you that right now.

Failure doesn't mean you're bad. Failure doesn't even mean you did badly. Not getting what you want doesn't mean you're not good enough.

You are good enough. That just doesn't mean there's a cosmic ledger tallying points in your favor. So, if you can, when you can, tally your own points. Tell yourself you're good enough.