the Dalaverse

I had a sudden need for some Buffy, so I watched "Pangs," the S4 Thanksgiving episode and one of my favorites for light Scooby moments. It occurs to me (probably because of that meme with fandoms one has dated) that I've never really talked about BtVS. I never read the fic or got involved in mailing lists/comms (although I did write one post-series Faith/Buffy), but it's still a singular fandom experience for me.

Let me put it this way. I was going into middle school when Buffy moved to Sunnydale (I started watching the show because the movie was a favorite with me and my cousins). When she started college, I started high school. The series ended ten days before my last day of high school. To say I was a fan does not really cover it. Beginning in S3 (because I took a babysitting job for the neighbors on Tuesday nights), I taped every episode and watched them twice, once on my own and again with my dad, who was also a fan (because he is awesome) but worked Tuesday nights (he lost interest in the last two seasons). When FX started re-running the whole series, I got all of S1 and most of S2. I have a plastic laundry basket filled with these tapes. I can even remember the two instances where I forgot to tape it because I'd thought it was a rerun: "Superstar" in S4 and "Storyteller" in S7. Two episodes in seven years; that's all I missed.

BtVS was not just a show to me; it was an entire adolescence. I responded to the monsters/high school allegory at a gut level, without even recognizing it. I'm not sure I could have functioned as reasonably well as I did in middle school without S1-3 Willow. There was something about that age that caused BtVS (and "Star Wars" for that matter) to hit me where I lived. A sort of similar thing happened with PotC, I think; it came out the summer before my freshman year of college, but I didn't start getting involved in the fandom until that fall/winter. But I was more aware of the process. At twelve? I had no idea what I was getting into. And again, it's not actually the fandom, because I wasn't into that for whatever reason: it's the show itself. Because I got a fix on a weekly basis, maybe, where as with my other adolescent fandoms -- SW, X-Men, Harry Potter -- there was a more limited source of canon. It wasn't that I was unaware of fanfic, because I discovered the Internets in congruence with SW in 1997. But Buffy on the whole was a self-contained universe for me.

Anyway. All of that basically means that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is home.

On a new topic, my apologies for the embarrassing drunk post. I had a great time with Michelle, who is one of my favorite people I don't see nearly often enough, and Gwen and Jeanne. The dance party was a bust and made us feel old (but that was also kind of a relief, because -- proof that there is life after college), but the Door was awesome. Any band with multiple guitars, a banjo, a mandolin and a fracking electric violin is okay by me. It was 4 am by the time I finally got to bed, and for some stupid reason I was awake by 10. A whole whopping lot of us, including all my old suitemates minus one (and Vanessa), went to lunch at Bob Evans today. First of all, Bob Evans ::shudders:: (because the line at Panera was out the door). And second of all, they fucked up at least one order at each of our three booths. Yeah, never patronizing that particular restaurant again, though my pot roast sandwich was pretty good. I took a nice long nap when I got back and haven't done much since. I think I'm pretty much done for the day. I wanted to write fic, but...I'm really tired, and it'll keep a couple of days until break.

Tomorrow: the lab from 9 to 11:30, the Lab from the usual 1:15 to 5:00, and then the comparative journal review for Methods on Tuesday. I'm actually kind of glad that stupid Ingersoll is like the only professor who refused to cancel his 6 pm Tuesday class, because it's forcing me to stick around and pound out the lab hours. I should be finished on Tuesday if all goes according to plan, and I'm also meeting Dr. Langley for an underwater pow-wow. Er, on land. I hope she'll write me a recommendation even though I took her class a year and a half ago. Speaking of which, I am working on my applications hardcore during the break. I really need to double check the deadlines. TAMU is super-clear about January 1, which means I need to get on that, but ECU says June 1, and that is too late for me to believe. UWF's official deadline is also June 1, I think, but then they say applications should be submitted "between six and nine months" before the semester starts. Bzah? And UMD, where I'm applying just as a last resort because my dad got his degree there and I hope nepotism is alive and well -- initially I was confused because there's no separate school, but I looked under archaeology/art history and they do offer MAs and PhDs. They say January 2, so they'll go with TAMU. And I'm going to pore over the SHA newsletter Doola sent me to see if there's anywhere else I want to apply.

Gahhhh. This is like all we talked about this weekend. Michelle's in vet school at VA Tech right now and Gwen and Jeanne are both applying for next fall in psychology. Creepy hard-science people.

I really, really should've taken the GREs again, but that test experience was so horrible I wouldn't even consider it. Maybe I'll do it for the spring deadline schools.

...Why did I abandon my nice fannish glow to work myself into another tizzy about real life crap? Now I'm going to have to watch another episode, dammit.