There's this scene in Tootsie where Teri Garr's character bursts out of a bathroom during a party, somewhere off in a corner, and the guy standing nearby turns to look at her, and she's flustered and holding a plunger and says something like, "Didn't anyone hear me banging? I've been trapped in there for thirty minutes!"

Anyway, my LiveJournal has been stuck in read-only mode since sometime Saturday, but now here I am.

I'll have to remember this feeling and use it for a scene where I'm trapped.

Before that, ironically--ironically?--I was in a weird place where I didn't have much to say, and no inclination to try and cover up that fact with a lot of babble. I took a few days off last week to hang with herself_nyc during her visit, and had some great times with her and with sherrold and anaxila.

I had to fight off an intense, very physical depression that struck Friday night. It lingered as a dull heaviness just behind my forehead for a few days, pulling my head down like the rack on a buck, and erasing all expression from my face like a Botox injection. An evil numbness, a lack of affect, it kept sliding over me as soon as any distractions--friends, slash stories--fell away. So it was good to have friends and slash stories to distract me from my anxieties. I had some transcendently happy moments on Saturday, eating dinner with my friends in a cafe: the sun going down, fairy lights strung along the open windows, breeze blowing, a torch singer crooning, and then afterwards, walking outside in the balmy air, and passing musicians on the sidewalk playing Mozart.

I have some friends who are just amazingly good people, and I'm very glad to know them.

And now I have a cold and am all snotty and sore throated and am trying to decide if I'm going to stay home again today like I did yesterday. Yesterday I lay in bed among a litter of tissues and read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Fantastic book. I can't think of anything I really want to say about it though. I think all this phlegm is choking off oxygen to my brain.

Saw Pirates of the Caribbean on Monday as I was cultivating denial about my impending cold, and liked it. Not in the giddy, wholehearted way that some other people have liked it, but it was fun. And Depp and Bloom were so pretty I wanted to pluck them like little flowers.

Just to demonstrate that my finger is somewhere near the pulse of fandom, I'll also mention that I watched some of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy last night. I love makeovers, but I gave up about three-quarters of the way through the first one, and didn't watch the second. It was cute, but it takes a lot to make me watch reality TV. I felt stirrings of horror when they started talking about Butch's skid marks and boxer short stains. I kept wondering if he'd known in advance what was going to be aired. And then I watched as he was circulating during his opening (shouldn't people have clapped at the unveiling?) and I felt too much empathy--I couldn't help but go to this place where I worried about what people were thinking of him and his art, and what his future would be, and whether people would be dragging this show out at parties for years to come.

I think I'll just go back to worrying about my own life.

I recommended two BtVS stories the other day, both AUs, but don't remember their titles or authors, and have no idea where to find them.

1. An AU where Giles was a master vampire, a Williamy Spike was Buffy's watcher, and Willow was an unhappy and very humanlike vampire. Buffy slips into this AU and I think maybe she meets up with her alternate self. Not sure exactly how it goes, but I remember lots of running around in caves, and Willow pathetically asking to die.

2. An AU set in the Wishverse where Giles and Oz are lovers. I know there's more than one story based on this idea, but this was a very poignant one, where they took comfort in each other as the tide of darkness encroached. It was just really fucking good, and I can only remember its emotional tone, no distinctive details.

If anyone could help me find these stories, I'd be grateful. I just read another great Giles/Oz story, Book of Daniel, which is stunning beyond my ability to express. I want to reread it and maybe I'll discover what I want to say about it then, but right now this cold makes me dull and inarticulate.

In another random note, Amy and I watched "The Zeppo" and "The Wish" the other night, so that we could admire some S3 Xander, rendered in darker shades. He really was incredibly beautiful, especially in The Wish, in his wifebeater and leather coat, pale skin and shadowed eyes. But his edgy brilliance in The Zeppo is amazing.

BtVS (a) needed many more AU episodes, and (b) needed to do a hell of a lot more with Xander than it did.

Now I'm going back to bed.