What are you doing?

Challenge #3: Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favorite character, anything at all.

Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Dear Fandom,

You've changed. That isn't a bad thing. I'd go so far as to call it a good thing.

I remember when we met - properly, that is. Not the shy glances, not the vague hellos, the genuine, meaningful introduction. When I announced myself. I'd better remember it; I did it several times. You had to, in those early days. Everywhere we met, even if I already knew someone there, I had to introduce myself all over again. There was some fun to be had in that.

I remember when it was just us, you and me. At least, it felt like that. When I didn't dare speak your name and hid behind euphemisms and vague half-truths. When the party was small enough you could fit it onto one dance floor. When I think back on it, the excitement of being private and secretive, of having something all to myself, was a powerful feeling.

You're not my secret anymore. You've come roaring out into the world, with everyone aware of you and many people taking you seriously. There's power in that, too. I know I've known you longer than most people out there. It's still not something I want to explain. I don't think I should have to, and even with so many people knowing about you, I'd rather keep things quiet. They know you their way. I know you mine. The way I know you isn't just the way I remember you; it's the way I'm constantly getting to know you. There's things I can say about how you used to be - the phrases, the trends, the arguments of the day, the sudden new shiny thing appearing out of nowhere - and most of those things are pointless, because there's always going to be arguments and trends, with some of those arriving new and some simply wearing new clothes and I love that I've gotten to know you well enough to recognize which is which. To parse where the impulse comes from. To perceive the motivations. What's happening now would've happened back then and it'll happen in the future.

That's part of what I love about you that I've only recently fallen in love with. I couldn't have loved it back when we met. I didn't know you well enough.

I miss the thrill that came from knowing you, just from knowing you. But people meeting you for the first time are feeling that same thrill themselves. I've learned enough to know that. I've learned enough to love that people are always falling in love.

Best,
Hannah

The last few days, I've been going through and saving Livejournal Scrapbook photos. Pretty much all of it's from college, when digital cameras were still a new toy, both for me and the world. When you had to find a place to upload the photos before sharing them somewhere else, and LJ Scrapbook was something of a game-changer because you didn't have to deal with a third party. It was all the same party. Everything else I got imported over when I made this journal, but the scrapbook doesn't have an equivalent here and I can imagine the headache people want to avoid. So I'm saving them to a hard drive instead, and looking back at those four years.

What gets me to stop for more than a moment of sighing over my hair or an attempt to mimic William Eggleston are the pictures of my childhood house. Some were because I was playing around with a toy, and a few were - as best I remember - from people asking to see something, because taking pictures and sharing them had suddenly become a breeze. If someone wanted to see a bookshelf or a bathroom sink, you could suddenly do that without any significant trouble. You still had to connect the camera to the computer and upload the photo and embed it, but that wasn't anything more than a small inconvenience. The inch-high barrier was more than enough to make everything shared a deliberate choice, not an impulse.

There's some red eyes, there's a lot of blur, there's less in focus than I'd thought. There's a weird feeling of nostalgia for the small trouble of the steps between taking and sharing the picture, because now there's no thought to it whatsoever, and that's not helping anyone. The forced lack of impulsivity is something I'd like to see again. A few more inch-high barriers would do a lot of people a lot of good.

Going through, most of what I took was of a low enough resolution that checking the page's info and saving the images from there means I'm not losing anything, and what few are of higher resolution are easy to save one at a time. What's strange is that while most of it's generic file names - 39526589_31 or 88612_100, things like that - without anything else to identify it, a small handful have the original metadata, telling me I used an Olympus digital camera in November of 2007. I can't tell where or how that happens, and it's a strange, pleasant surprise whenever it does. The reminder of the reminder.

Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

I've never kept pigeons, but I can say I've cultivated them.

I live in New York City, and it's pigeons wherever you go. You can't avoid them, and it's disappointing most people don't take the time to look at them, pay attention to them, get to know them. They're remarkably congenial, to the point of being accurately called friend-shaped. Which in no small part comes from them mostly being feral domesticated animals, originally kept by people for a variety of reasons from food to companionship who then got let out into the urban wild when people decided they didn't want to take care of them anymore. But it's easy for pigeons to remember what people are there for, when people stop to take the time. If you've ever had your pupils dilated at the optometrist's, I highly recommend finding a pigeon in some sunlight and taking in the genuinely dazzling iridescence of their feathers.

During the worst of 2020, when there were a lot fewer people around the neighborhood, pigeons would often come to my window, mostly to hang out on the AC unit. A nice place to stop for a while. Not thinking much of it, I started leaving seeds out for them, and they learned soon enough it was more than just a place to stop. I liked seeing them, and they liked the seeds, so I'd keep replenishing the tray outside. There were a few months in there - not many, but a few - that I'd get a seven AM wake-up call from the local birds who wanted to be fed, and those birds were the best alarm clock I've ever had. Certainly the sweetest. With few reasons to get out of bed in the morning, it was a nice feeling that one of those reasons was for small animals who were happy to see me.

I'd also take bike rides to get out of my apartment in the afternoons to get some fresh air, and there's a nearby park corner where it didn't take too many days of bringing seeds for a flock of pigeons to recognize me and fly on over whenever I'd come by. But even before they recognized me on sight, they were quick to trust to eat out of my open hands. Very soft feathers, and very warm bodies under the feathers. Some people gave me grief about it. Some people gave me shit about it. A few people, mostly under the age of ten, were delighted and thrilled to get some birdseed of their own and give feeding the pigeons a try themselves. Even if those kids hadn't ever come by, I'd have kept up with it as long as I was doing the rides. I'd seen worse behavior from them, and I didn't need to explain myself. The pigeons didn't rely or depend on me. They weren't my responsibility. They were simply my genuine pleasure.

The world reopened, people moved back into the neighborhood, the tray stopped getting stocked with seeds, I started going to a nearby gym, and my phone serves as my alarm clock. But I still sometimes carry birdseed around, in case there's a chance for another moment with the birds.

Attending a New Year's Eve party with my parents and their friends that doubled as one of the friend's birthdays had me the youngest in the room. By multiple decades, in most cases. It was fun, for all that - I talked to some very old-school socialists about addiction, definitions of fascism, public transportation, architecture, technical versus technological, and made a few people laugh.

I should reach back out to the host and thank him for the invitation again.

I can say with some certainty that fandom's done more to influence my eating habits than anything else. Moving out of the dorms forced me to cook; people I knew from fandom helped shaped what I cooked and what I ate. The farmer's markets and keeping kosher are their own forces, and fellow fans are just as powerful.

Case in point: today I bought Duke's Mayonnaise because it was mentioned in a fic once. Because it's still something of a regional product, it took me a few months of checking around to find a place that carries it. But I did, again proving that if you can't find something in New York City, you aren't looking hard enough - and again proving that fandom is made up of taste-makers.

I'm thinking pasta and potato salads to work through the bottle I got, and buying another when tomato season rolls around.