Camelot

I stayed in Camelot in few nights back. Not the Camelot of legend, but a house that my high school friend Emma rented with her four best college friends. Over the year they've had a murder mystery dinner, and Disney Princess movie marathons, and hours upon hours fencing literary references across cups of tea and endless games of Settlers of Catan.

I spent most of my solitary year in Minnesota viewing Camelot as a shining beacon of togetherness and doing my very very best not to envy Emma for it.

So when, near the end of last week's Arthurian sojourn, one of Emma's college friends commented (apropos of Emma), “She was lonely earlier this year” - I nearly fell off the couch.

“But she had the four of you!" I cried, incredulously. "She was living with the four of you!” (In a house that I had hitherto looked on through the golden, glowing haze appropriate to a promised land!)

“Well, yeah,” he said. “But she didn’t have a lot of friends outside of Camelot - close enough to hang out with, I mean.”

Because if you left out that desideratum, I'm pretty sure that in counting Emma's friends, you would run out of fingers and toes.

How many friends do we need so as not to feel lonely?

Like Emma, I’ve spent a lot of time being lonely with no real reason for it. One half of my journal from fifth and sixth grade consists of complaints that I was so lonely and didn't have a best friend; the other half is all hijinks and thoughtful chats with my friends. (It’s pretty clear, in fact, that one girl thought we were best friends, but I didn’t notice because she wasn’t terribly bright and therefore I found her confidences tiresome. *headdesk*)

And I continued to feel lonely in high school, and also in college, but I always figured this was just me: my peculiar genius for loneliness at work.

But it seems lately that loneliness is more common than that, which is in one sense rather cheering – we’re all lonely together! And therefore not alone! – but also incredibly sad. I loved the halcyon glow of Camelot. I don’t want that to be just an illusion.

Fics I've Been Meaning to Write

Making lists, because sometimes lists help me get things done:

Fanfics I Am Working On

1. The Sutcliff swap fic. Which I need to finish! Soon! And I don't know why I haven't, because I know basically what's going to happen, but I just...haven't written it.

2. "Vigil," Downton Abbey. In which Edith Crawley sits up with a wounded soldier and chats with Sybil.

Sybil smoothes the covers. “Why don’t you go to nurses’ training?” she asks.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Edith blurts.

“Couldn't?” Sybil repeats. She looks up, a crusading spark burning the weariness out of her tired eyes. “Why can’t you? You’re ever so much better prepared than I was.”

3. "Five Great Escapes Chuck Never Made", Pushing Daisies, dealing with the weird dissonance between Chuck's stated love of adventure and desire to see the world, and the fact that she lives a terrifically isolated life in her aunts' house till she dies (she doesn't even seem to go to school, let alone away to college, and certainly doesn't get an out-of-the-house job), and then moves seamlessly into Ned's life.

It's a very Victorian progression, when you think about it; quite in keeping with the old-fashioned aesthetic of the show. This is probably why I didn't even notice the contradiction for ages.

I've been working on this fic for *mumblecough* a while, and it's not getting anywhere because I'm not actual sure how to reconcile these two things. What's stopping Chuck from having her adventures? She isn't a Victorian girl, so it's not societal pressure. And it doesn't seem to be pressure from her aunts; there's no resentment there. And Pushing Daisies sometimes seems to inhabit an alternative universe where money is never an issue, so she's not staying home purely out of poverty. (And if she was, wouldn't you expect her to get a job rather than an expensive bee-keeping hobby?)

4. An untitled Garrow's Law story, all about Silvester and his post-duel realization that Garrow does not, in fact, see Silvester as Silvester sees Garrow - to wit, as a professional colleague with whom he has a stimulating rivalry and witty repartee - but instead loathes and despises Silvester as the scum of the earth.

***

Random thought for the day: haberdashery sounds way more swashbuckling than it actually is. There should be a steampunk superherione called The Haberdasher. By day, she seems like a mere button seller; but by night, she engineers robot spider buttons, which detach from waistcoats and make off with the family jewels when activated.