(no subject)

[girlofprey]

Things:

• I am all up to date on Coronation Street, and have been for the past week or so. It's always a bit difficult, because my oldest nephew comes over on Fridays until about 9pm, and while my dad tends to have Coronation Street on and watch it, even though I've asked him not to, I tend to be more wrapped up in playing with my nephew most of the time. And then my parents have stuff they want to watch on Fridays after 9, and for the rest of the weekend, so I find it hard to catch up before Mondays. But this week my nephews were in Filey, or had just got back from Filey, so I managed to be caught up. So I got the lovely sight of Carla becoming business partners with an attempted rapist and accusing Maria of lying about the whole thing and saying to her face that she likes "playing the victim". Which was lovely. Although I do kind of like that their love and relationship continues to be expressed through fighting and slightly ruining each other's lives. I think it might be the definition of slash, for me, when two supposedly straight characters of the same gender chase each other down the street shouting "Don't make me choose!".
  
  And then tonight we got the interesting sight of Chris admitting to Maria that yes, he did use to beat his wife because he didn't like her working in a strip club, and her looking vaguely bored by it. There are OTHER ISSUES, CHRIS. OTHER WORSE MEN THAN MERE ABUSIVE HUSBANDS. I don't know if that scene was meant to make us think he was a nice guy, really, despite the whole beating his wife and following her to her new flat when she left him thing. I'm half-expecting that it's going to be a matter of him being on Maria's side currently, and then when they get closer and she trusts him and is vulnerable with him, his temper will flare up again and he'll start hitting her. I just wouldn't put it past soaps, especially at the moment. Otherwise, it would be nice to deal with the issue more than just "yeah, I used to hit my wife, but it was me being stupid and I feel really bad about it now". Maybe they will. We'll see.
  
  And another post I was going to make at some point was that I love Maria. I really really do. I know Samia Smith is not the best actor in the world, and I know she's not the most groundbreaking female character ever, and I don't like the way she constantly gets taken in by awful men who swear they'll stop being awful now, honest. But I really love her. I love how well she does sad. I love that she just kind of looks really awful and gets on with things. I don't know. I waxed lyrical about Michelle saying she thought Maria was tough really a few weeks ago, and that's good, but I kind of love her sad and just getting on with things best of all. Even though I know that's not the best thing for her, really. I still find it really hard to forget the scene we had with her a few years ago, when she went to Liam's grave at night on what was supposed to be their first wedding anniversary, and we just saw her digging in the ground, heavily pregnant, to plant the roses she brought for her, saying "Happy anniversary, darling" really quietly. IT WAS UNBELIEVABLE. And then Tony showed up, drunk, because Carla had found out he killed Liam and left him, so he was at Liam's grave to grieve and wish he'd never killed him, partly because he hadn't gained anything through it and partly because he just wished he'd never killed him. And Maria saw him and was a bit afraid, but he was like "I'm not going to attack you in a graveyard Maria, for god's sake!". And she calmed down and told him it was supposed to be her wedding anniversary, and they say you're meant to give paper for a first wedding anniversary, so she'd brought Liam the first scan of their baby, which she put on the gravestone. And Tony was just crying, and it was COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDABLE, because Maria was just quietly tragic. And I really do love her. she's not my favourite female character ever, but I do love her. Second only to Maria being sad is Maria being brilliantly angry. Third only to that is when she has those moments where she's kind of an emotional genius, and she sees the truth about people no matter what they happen to be saying to her. It would be nice if she had those moments more often with boyfriends who used to abuse their partners (and it's sad that that's plural, at this point).
  
  I think a lot of that is partly why I love Maria/Tony so much. Because apart from how much I loved Tony, and how much he loved Maria, and how much chemistry they had and how well I think they worked together, frankly, if there's one person on the street who deserves a non-abusive psychopath looking out for them and making sure NO-ONE HURTS THEM EVER, it's totally Maria. Lovely, awful, often just quietly sad Maria.
  
  And I also saw David's wedding, finally. I half-wondered if it wouldn't happen in the end, because I'd heard there was supposed to be something with Tina asking Graeme not to go through with it at the end, and I wondered if - the day after I mentioned that they've not talked about David's epilepsy at all pretty much since he got diagnosed - maybe he would have an epileptic fit on the day of his wedding, which would postpone things and drag out the tension with him and Kylie and the rest of the family a bit. But no, they didn't, he's totally married now. Mostly I loved his weird dancing in the pub at the reception, and his messed up hair before he went upstairs to "consummate" things. Also I noticed how Nick was ready to swoop in there when it looked like Kylie wasn't coming and David needed to be comforted. Don't think I didn't. But he's a married man now. And always will be, or a divorcee. That's a little odd. But there you go. Soap characters growing up and all that.
  
  Also I saw Jim's attempted robbery thing. And Liz leaving. I'm starting to think Lloyd only exists now to get angry about Steve and Becky's plans and shout about them, but only at Becky, never at Steve. I sincerely hope that when Tracy goes, whenever that is, she doesn't take Amy with her, because that would be really sad. And I do like that Liz took the time out to be nice to Becky and touch her face before she left. Even if she didn't apologise for being awful to her. That bit was lovely.



• I've been feeling really weird and blah lately. I'm assuming it's because my sleep got a bit messed up last week when I was running around all over the place. And it was weird not having my mum around. And I'm trying to sort out my money again. And my sick note ran out, so I'm having to try to sort that out again. And I'm assuming my hormones have something to do with it, although I'm not sure you can just keep claiming that for weeks. I do think I'm due a period though, and it would be nice to get one if it might actually make me feel better.



• The other possibility is that I've been playing my new PS3 game, Folklore, until I feel a bit exhausted most days. I love Folklore. It's sort of like Pokemon, but with fairies. And a storyline about a fairy war. And also about a murder mystery in the real world village your characters are currently staying in. I have no idea if posting about when you probably don't know what I'm talking about will be really dull or not, so I'm going to try to keep it to a minimum. Mostly when I've not been posting because I've been playing a game a lot I think that maybe I could just post about the game, but then I think "or I could just go play the game some more", and then I end up doing that. But suffice to say, things started getting a bit difficult and I got a bit stuck, so I decided to go back and power up the creatures I already had. Which is partly very satisfying, going back and having a load of fights you know you can win. And partly very frustrating, because sometimes you need to try to power them up in very specific ways. In the middle of a battle. When lots of things are attacking you. And you don't really get the satisfaction of progressing in the game and learning any more of the story. You do get the satisfaction of winning quite a lot of your fights though. And being kind of amazing. I love Ellen. You don't know who she is. But I love her.



• My dad has messed up the music on my computer. That's a lie in a lot of ways. But still. He really likes music (his kind of music), and usually has some of it on on car journeys and stuff, and sometimes I like a bit of it, and I've been sort of asking him if he's heard of any bands I like every now and then. And he said no, and then the other week he said I'd have to make him a mix CD of music I like, to see if he likes it too. Which was fine, it was not high up on my to do list, but it was a decent idea and fine. Then last week he came up to my bedroom with a flash drive, with all of his music on it. 3GB worth. Which is another thing he's talked about doing for a few months, and I always said I couldn't because my laptop didn't have enough space on it. But now I have a new laptop and it does. So he did. He told me I could just upload all of his files, and then sort through them and delete any I didn't like. And that he wanted it back by Monday morning, so to do it soon. So on Saturday, very quickly, I uploaded the files and put them in my 'Music' folder, which seemed logical. But I didn't realised that meant they would automatically be uploaded to my Windows Media Player, in with all my other music. Even now I have moved the file to a 'Downloads' file of mine, it's still there in my playlist. The first time I tried to open my Windows Media Player, without realising what had happened, it wouldn't respond and I had to close it. Then it took me about 10 times as long as usual to skip through tracks, because they were all new tracks to Windows Media Player, so it kept saying "media changing" and I had to wait. And twice when I tried to just scroll through the songs, it jut crashed. So now I have my dad's 3GB of music on the general playlist with all of my songs. I can't just let it play music at random anymore, because it keeps playing songs I don't know, which is fine, but not always what I'm in the mood for.
  
  It's not all bad. He's got quite a lot of good-looking songs in there, and some things I recommended to him even (like some Melanie songs). I just really expected to be able to go through his songs at my leisure, or just when I chose to, and now I can't, and I can't really just randomly listen to my own music anymore. It's incredibly frustrating.



• The 2004 version of the Merchant of Venice was on on Saturday. It's the one where Al Pacino plays Shylock, and they put a load of stuff on at the beginning about just how awful and hard it was to be Jewish in 15th Century Florence, and within about 10 minutes I was suddenly shipping Shylock/Antonio. I figure if I do just ship a load of pairings who hate each other, at least I'm hitting the big ones. I didn't watch most of the rest of it though, because I couldn't stand Bassanio and the woman who played Portia was really annoying me, and I figured it would probably have the same horrible ending, anyway. Maybe one day I'll watch the rest of it.



• I watched a few episodes of Man Stroke Woman last night, with Nicholas Burns. I forget he had long hair in it and was really especially pretty. Also, I'm pretty sure some of it is the straightest acting I've ever seen him doing. In a half hour sketch show. A pretty good half hour sketch show though. I love Man Stroke Woman.



• A while ago I bought some Amazonite beads from the Bead Shop in Nottingham, and now I've got an idea for a bracelet to make with them, but I'm not sure I have enough. The Bead Shop don't seem to sell them anymore, or only mixed in with another type of stone and not many of them, so I went looking for some online. I found some on eBay that seemed to be the right size, so I clicked to buy them. It was only after I clicked to buy them that it occured to me that I wasn't sure if they had holes drilled in them, actually, or were just stones. But I'd ordered them, and they were only £3 or so. So I paid for them anyway. They arrived today, and they don't have holes in, and they're kind of massively too big. Woe. They are still pretty though.