Brief post before I go to bed. Don't be discouraged; if you haven't read the last couple of posts, scroll down. Heady stuff for girls and boys alike, yessir.

I was doing so well with the story last week, and now I find I'm barely able to write a word that doesn't get violently scratched out two seconds later. Eventually I got a page down on the legal pad (with just as much writing preceding it, but looking like the page had been ruled after I wrote it, owing to the strikethrough effect of my disapproval), but could write no more, so I just typed what I've got into the word processor so far. 1,400 words, bah. Not much, but I'd planned on this being a really short story, so that means I should probably be wrapping it up soon. But it seems like the action has barely started, so that's a problem. And I'm having a little bit of trouble keeping it from being unconfusing with the tenses, since it describes past actions that were repeated often and I don't want a lot of "would"s and "would then"s all over the place. Hopefully I'll finish it tomorrow, maybe Tuesday, and get the kinks worked out.

And I wish my rejections from the last three pieces I sent out would hurry up and return so I can regroup them and send out the next batch. I like to keep a few on deck, ready to be deployed when the others come in. Like playing a cross between "Go Fish" and "Battleship", it is.

I uploaded a simplistic version of my resume, which is here. I don't plan on getting a job as a result of anyone reading my blog (but I'd be pleasantly surprised if you want to hire me; please want to hire me, please), so this will serve as background info for anyone who's interested in previous jobs I've held, etc. Also, I uploaded a few more of my old drawings, here, here, and here. They're of Buffy. I like Buffy. Or at least I did, until the series moved to UPN and got really, really bad. Trust me, that won't be the last time you hear about that.

In fact, if you're still with us, you're gonna hear about it right now. I do so hate to leave insubstantial posts, you know. The following is one of my posts on a Buffy board, during the final season of Buffy. I called the post "The Problem with Buffy (and Angel)", with the Angel part in parenthesis because I wasn't sure about that show's direction at the time -- a few of the then recent episodes seemed to indicate that the show was getting "back on track," as it were. If I were writing the same post today, the parentheses definitely wouldn't be there. Oh, and I'm gonna try the blockquote tag inside it -- I've never used it before. Let's see how it turns out...

The Problem with Buffy (and Angel)

Well you've all seen me posting very unhappy reviews regarding this season's episodes. And here, I think is the reason. In looking for the Buffy quote with which I ended a post in the regular thread (where we've been talking about Buddhism and moral truths) -- since I remembered it but couldn't remember which episode it was from -- I was a little disturbed to find that it wasn't on BuffyGuide.com, which is where I usually get all of my quotes. There were plenty of humorous quotes, but the good, inspiring ones like that? Nada. So I'm thinking that must suggest something about what people were getting out of Buffy, and maybe why the show's so shitty now. (Not that that's the only reason, of course.)

So finally I found the quote not on any quote Buffy page, but on City of Angel in the review of "Epiphany" from Angel, Season 2. Here's the fulltext of the passage:

But the most enlightening moment of this epiphany is Angel's quiet and sincere talk with Kate near the end of the episode. She confesses her own despair that "nothing I do means anything" and Angel agrees. "In the greater scheme nothing we do matters . . . there's no big win." All that matters is what they do now. But Kate assures him that they aren't alone in this fight, because she never 'invited him in' proving that the PTB have intervened for a greater purpose. What I like here is that the producers have always kept true to what Buffy and Angel have been about all along. Fighting the good fight, not for gain but because its right and its what they have to do. In the BtVS season three episode, Gingerbread, Angel says to Buffy, "We never win. That's not why we fight. We do it because there are things worth fighting for." And as Angel concludes to Kate, "All I want to do is help."

This "heroic symbolism" is the reason I started watching Buffy (and continued to watch Angel when he left). "Fighting the good fight, not for gain but because it's right and it's what they have to do." Have Buffy and Angel lost focus in this respect? Decidedly so. At least the producers have said, with respect to Buffy, that with last season they wanted to emphasize the more "worldly" aspects of life (not in those words, mind you) -- getting jobs, moving into an apartment, parenting issues, etc. The focus is no longer on the heroic and the ideal, but on the practical and the mundane.

Watching Buffy and Angel used to inspire me. I'd sit down on Tuesday nights and after two hours I'd be pumped and teary-eyed: "Yeah man, get 'em, fighting the good fight. Buffy's a hero!" Spike's love for Buffy and his effort in the final battle -- even though he ultimately failed -- showed that love can change people in the end, no matter how bad they were to begin with. Did anyone notice that Spike cried the hardest after Buffy died? And how in the first episode of season 6, "Bargaining," in protecting Dawn, he remained true to that love though its object was no longer in this world? And then, later on in the season, they threw it all away with that stupid "Doctor" plot twist in "As You Were." Arguably, the episode "Normal Again" reduced all of what came before -- the great heroic jounrey -- to the crippling fantasy of a poor trembling girl in an insane asylum.

Watching Buffy used to inspire me. It used to make me want to stand up and "fight the good fight." I guess it still inspires me. But now all it makes me want to do is stand up and turn off the television.

Wish me luck finishing up this story, and hope my rejections show up soon...

P.S. The blockquote tag isn't bad -- the ol and ul tags have similar effects, really -- just have to make sure that when you use it in Blogger you don't have a carriage return following it, as you'll get a really large gap following the quote. Apparently it makes its own paragraph return.