commotiocordis

LOL, forgot about recording my next fic for the house_podfic advent calendar yesterday like I meant to, so I had to end up reading one of mine because I did it all of an hour ago and didn't have time to bug anybody for consent. I find myself not wanting to ask other people (except for you, chaosity, because there is love and you wouldn't mock me too hard), lol, in case they hear my reading and go "But whut? This is not how I meant this to sound" etc. Because that is what happens when other people read things you write--they don't put the emphasis on the same places, and sometimes it can even totally change the meaning of whatever. (LOL, theatre classes. How I've learned that whilst trying to direct one thing out of people and getting something totally horrible different.)

I've got to be up at 7:30ish tomorrow, as I've got to try and get my music for the church Christmas rehearsal back from her (she kindly helped me write harmonies for lots of the songs, which will make a difference, methinks) before the rehearsal at 9. Meaning prolly waking her up and then driving over to her house. Though I may just skive off the rehearsal, as I've been to two of the first three (like required), and will be able to stay for the ninety bazilliion hours for the dress rehearsal (whenever that is--I'll have to look it up).

Planned on going to the mall tonight. Was snowing too much and the plows were too far behind. We ran up to the grocery store because I was baking Christmas present!blueberry loaf and wanted to try to find little, individual tins to gift them in, and slid all fucking over. It was horrible. There was one hill right at the intersection to get out of the neighborhood and onto the main road and my dad was all *fiddles with gears, hits gas* . . . and we went nowhere. I found it hilarious and yet scary at the same time. Trying to go up aforementioned road after finally getting up the hill was no fun either. We were going maybe 15 mph, both out of safety concerns and because trying to go faster would just make us skid.

But FAIL, weather, in that the big snow cloud kept the sky light for-freaking-ever, and so I couldn't take my massively amazing snow pictures while it was still snowing with big flakes. Well, I could have, but it wouldn't have looked cool, because it was just about as bright as your standard overcast day, when it should have been pitch black. You need to snow again tomorrow night, sir. Or some other night. But it was perfect and the snow was deep (for here, at least), and the trees looked cool, but it wouldn't have come out right because the sky was just grey.

So. Remember that big bit of the history project that is due Friday? Yeah. Not getting done. There's a story behind this.

I had quite a bit to do still, but only a few hours worth. Non-book research that I already had found? On my hard drive. I modified my topic like yesterday, put the finishing touches on said modification today, but quite a bit of what I had still applied to the new topic. Asked my brother at about 7pm to bring my hard drive to me on the couch from this (the main) computer. He grabs it by the cord. Cord unplugs from the drive, drive clunks on floor. Me=pissed. But not hugely. Yet.

I go to the gym. Come back. Plug in hard drive. Not working. The light wouldn't even come on to signal that it had power. Messed around with it. Went out and bought a new power thing as that appeared to be the problem and as the power goes through the USB normally, but there's a spot for an adapter cord (one of which did not come with the drive, unfortunately) for extra power or if your USB port on your computer won't give any/enough power, I hoped that would work. Nope. Determined at some point that power wasn't the problem. Plugged it into the other (this) computer, and the light came on. Problem solved. Nope.

Power's working, drive not. Spent a long time trying to figure out the problem. I eventually decided just to screw it and go to bed (as I'm getting sick and have been up late every night this week and was really upset that it looked like I was loosing everything on the drive) without doing the project. Mom comes back, tells me that my dad got it working. I come out. Not really. He thought he had because the computer did some kind of "you've plugged something in" thing, but it wouldn't do it again. We took the thing apart, messed with all of it. Tried to connect it to a box thing that we have that will turn a regular hard drive into an external one. No luck- the ribbon plug is just barely too big for some reason. (But the last conclusion I came to was that that wouldn't help anyway.) What kind of morons make stuff in a non-standard size? At some point (I think it was fine before) I heard the thing making funny noises like it wasn't spinning right. Somehow (involved somewhat gentle shaking and smacking) got it to make the good, spinning right sound. Still wouldn't work. Now pretty much no idea why. It's still out of the case and more or less disassembled at this point, and when you plug it in and unplug it, it was making the "duh-deh" "deh-duh"sound things. And occasionally, a box would come up over the far right of the taskbar saying "A problem occurred during hardware installation. Your new device may not function properly."

So. It's almost 1 at this point, and my dad decides to go to bed. I play with it a little bit more by disabling and (attempting) re-enabling of the device thing. Which we did once before. But before, it didn't tell us to reboot. I reboot this time. Computer doesn't reboot right- goes to the black screen on startup where it tells you about your machine specs, only loads the first few lines of text that are supposed to be on there, and stops. Bad sign. I reboot again, this time it loads properly, but the hard drive is back to making bad (even worse than before, where it was a funny badwhir + click thing, now it's just worsewhir) noises meaning that it's stopped spinning completely.


Hell. So. Yeah. I probably could have done my entire summary of evidence thing if I hadn't played with the hard drive until past 1:30. Because I didn't have horridly much on there in terms of done research, just a bunch of sources, some of which I emailed to myself from the medical library during the tour with minimed and can't get any other way than through them. And most, excepting the aforementioned articles that you've got to pay for/can't get at all except through the med library, I could find again. Had I actually gotten my arse in gear and forgotten about it.


But I'm still really really upset. This had so much stuff on it.

School work that I still need/isn't done/I use for reference. Which should probably be my biggest concern. But isn't.

It had hundreds of fics. Of which quite a few of the older ones (mostly my Enterprise collection) aren't online anywhere anymore.

And around 30 of my fics, which is what I'm most sad about, that and the other writings and work. Because of the fics, 10 or so are incomplete and only exist or are in the most complete form on there, several more have never been posted anywhere, and the remaining ones have been posted in various places, but most only to one site/list/board, which will make it difficult to try to track them all down to keep a copy. I don't have any kind of definitive list of all my stories, so it's going to be nearly impossible to make sure I've recovered all of the ones that it is even possible for me to find again (I completely forget about stories I've written only to rediscover them all the time. It's going to be a lot harder to rediscover now). And there are innumerous ideas and little bits of story jotted down in random Word Perfect/Word files for stuff I've not yet gotten around to writing, most of which I typed up so long ago that there's no chance of me remembering them.

Not to mention the videos and the episodes and the pictures and the manip work and the icons. OMG, the icons. I just realized that. Even ignoring that I don't have any of the huge numbers of them that I saved for my perusing pleasure that belonged to other people, I don't have any of my own anymore but the 6 that are currently on here. Some of my favorite ones just got switched out recently for this batch, and as such are not in existence.

Fic type stuff and other fandomy things are pretty much what I do for fun. So basically, all this stuff that is the only thing I have time to do for recreation anymore (that and read, especially medical type stuff, lots of which was also on here) is gone. I get a huge part of my enjoyment in life from this stuff, and it seems like that's been destroyed. Everything I've worked on, everything I've read and really enjoyed, everything I've done. It feels like part of my life is gone with it.

And I'm being depressivey and overreacting and stupid and weepy because I start crying again every couple of minutes when I start thinking about it again and I know it and I can't help it.

Which is why I haven't done my history thing, even yet. I could have done it, not easily, but done it. But I've just reacted so strongly to the breakage of the hard drive that I can't. And I know it's not just this, but it's everything lately put together and this just finally made me break down, and I can't force myself to do anything.

And yet I'm not in bed, where I should be taking into account my lack of sleep of late and the hour. (Thanks in part to a 52oz diet Dr. Pepper that I downed throughout the whole thing that I got after I got back from the gym when I thought that I was going to be up pretty late doing work that's keeping me up both from the caffeine and going to the bathroom every few minutes.) Nor am I studying for my Biology and English exams. I feel so completely worn out, but I don't feel like I would be able to get to sleep or really do anything save think about this and stare off into space.

Yay, breakdownage. I love stress.

I give up trying to get this to 100 words. Every time I try, it takes something away. And there's not that much something there in the first place, so I'm going to leave it as it is.

***

Cuddy has learned to hold back her compassion – the only way to succeed as a doctor, as a boss is to suspend empathy beyond a certain point. She wouldn’t have gotten where she is taking every patient, every decision and weighing it like humanity is at stake. She tries to keep the moral high ground, but sometimes she needs to stay away, to not step in, to let something slip by her, to turn the other way. She tells herself that she is choosing her battles. But there’s a part of her that looks at Allison Cameron, at the idealistic woman she herself once was and wonders if the world would be better were there one more person still like that.

Snowwomyn
Author: Alexandria (CrashCart9[at]Yahoo[dot]com)
Fandom: House, MD
Pairing: Cuddy/Cameron, with bits of House/Wilson
Rating:  PG-13 for one bad word.
Written: 12/21/05
Notes: For the “Make the Yuletide Gay” challenge on LiveJournal. The prompt was “snowman”, but I tweaked it a little. I also had to use the challenge title line in the story, it was begging me to.  I was so worried that I wouldn’t be able to hit 500 words, as in my head, this was only a drabble, but with a lot of crappy filling out, it made almost 700. The snowwomyn idea taken from James
Finn Garner’s “Politically Correct Holiday Stories”. Which I lost my copy of at school last week. So if anyone wants to buy me a Solstice present...
Summary: Cuddy and Cameron build a snowwomyn. And thoroughly confuse House.


House walked up to the doors of P.P.T.H. only to be stopped by a very... unusual view. And an accurately thrown snowball. He turned to the snow-covered lawn area next to the doors and walked closer to what appeared to be... No, he couldn’t be seeing that. It just wasn’t possible.

It was. Cuddy and Cameron were building a snowman. And acting like schoolgirls; all giggling and throwing snowballs. He walked up to them. “What the hell are you doing?”

“We’re building a snowwomyn!” Cameron said cheerfully. She beamed before turning back to the snow... creature that was beginning to take shape.

“You mean a snowman,” House said, raising an eyebrow and circling the thing.

He poked its base with his cane, only to have Cuddy smack him on the arm. “Patriarchal, snarky, old bastard. We’re making it, so it’s a snowwomyn. W-O-M-Y-N.”

House scoffed. “So now you’re rewriting the English language?” Cameron pelted him with the handful of snow she had been about to add to their creation. “And beating up on a cripple?”

“It’s good for hospital morale.” Cuddy rationalized.

“What, seeing the head of hospital, the woman who’s supposed to be mature and in charge, determining stuff and administrating things, frolicking in the snow with her special friend?”

Cameron had a shocked look on her face as she stepped around the mound of snow that was slowly looking more like a person. “How did you...”

House’s eyes widened. Those two? “I meant the snowwomyn.” He paused, looking from Cuddy to Cameron, and back again as he pondered this latest revelation. “Wow.”

“Yeah. Wow.” Lisa said, looping her arm around Cameron’s waist and smiling proudly.

“J-Date didn’t work out for you, so you decided to start taking my leftovers, Cuddy?”  House quipped, trying to pretend that he wasn’t completely caught off guard by the news.

Cuddy let out a short, mocking laugh. “In order for her to be ‘leftovers’, you would have had to actually date her first.”

“I did ‘actually date her’.” House swung his cane, “accidentally” knocking a chunk of the base of the snowwomyn off. Cameron kicked the cane out of his hand so it landed several feet away, and gave him a quirky little half-smirk.

“We went on one date.” Allison said rather patronizingly. “And you came straight home to Wilson.” House was taken aback by this. How did they know?

Cuddy, interpreting his expression correctly, jumped in. “It wasn’t hard to figure out. The only time you’ll take clinic hours without much of a fuss is when James has them scheduled at the same time. We’ve both called you before and had him pick up the phone. His office is practically gathering dust for all the time he spends in your department.” She smiled at Cameron and inclined her head slightly, inviting her to continue.

“You both disappeared an hour into the Thanksgiving benefit dinner, and when you came back, well, it was pretty evident what you had been doing. And on our ‘date’, you were wearing a tie. You don’t know how to tie them. That meant somebody had to have done it for you. I doubted that you’d drive all the way to Wilson’s house just to get him to help you get dressed, so he obviously was already over at your place.”

Allison knew they’d won. She gave House a teasing look right before she thoroughly kissed Lisa. When they broke away, Cuddy tilted her head and raised an eyebrow at his incredulous and still very confused expression. “We’re going to finish building this now,” she said, in a tone one would use with a small child who didn’t understand what was going on. “Your shift started 20 minutes ago. I suggest you get in there. Unless you want to bring Wilson and help us truly make the Yuletide gay.” Cameron chuckled at her lover’s choice of words.

House stared at them blankly. “Wilson’s Jewish,” he said lamely, simply in order to get in the last word, before fetching his cane and hobbling away.

Cameron and Cuddy just smiled and packed another handful of snow onto their snowwomyn.