A thought from last night, driving home late.

Is there ever any circumstance in which a general silence broken only by the sound of wind chimes isn't at least vaguely creepy?

so much for the afterglow

So it took a random-Monday-in-February federal holiday and totally being a hermit on kalpurna's last day in town, but I fiiiiiiinally got to read wax_jism's Nightswimming, the epic (142,000 words!) Frank/Gerard sequel to Everyday Mysteries in the Summertime, which was itself the first story that ever made me get really excited about Pete/Mikey. Nightswimming did not disappoint in the slightest, even though I'd been anticipating it for a week and every single person I talked to told me I should drop everything and read it right NOW because it would CHANGE MY LIFE or at least be really, really, really awesome! They were all absolutely right.

Frank is fifteen-going-on-sixteen, Gerard is twenty-verging-on-total-fucking-breakdown, there is loads of porn and lots of it manages to be first times of one kind or another, and there is also angst and drama and beautiful beautiful joy, sharp moments of crisis and the slow unwinding of tension, the moment--the succession of moments--of realizing, things might be okay. And there is a particularly intense kind of deranged artist Gerard, and a wonderful kind of angry young man Frank, and an awesome awesome Mikeyway who is always oblique but not quite as opaque as he thinks he is, and a great Ray and Bob, and parental types who are more human than they're given credit for, and, just. ALSO A LOT OF PORN.

I am probably not telling anyone anything they do not know, of course, as it has been daaaaaaays, but go read it if you have not! Um, when you can pencil it in; it took me about six hours with breaks for snacks and nothing else, and I read fairly fast.

And, of course, about five minutes after I had finished reading, and was feeling all relaxed and pleased from spending the day in bed reading awesomely happy-making fic, I realized that I never filed my APPLICATION TO GRADUATE, which I am supposed to be doing in three months, and which was due FRIDAY. So there was a frantic phone call to Student Services, followed by a slightly-less-frantic trip to campus to fill out a stupid little form and drop it in a mailbox. And then I got home and found that a) our (only mildly broken) toilet had been repaired and b) my landlady had taken it upon herself to bleach our shower, which is a depressing but, uh, unfortunately accurate reflection on my and my roommate's housekeeping. /o\


Still: really, really good fic. And you kind of just can't beat those random-winter-Monday holidays.