I have eaten two bitty-bags of spiteful potato chips today. (Spiteful potato chips are the kind you eat when you didn't bring enough lunch and don't CARE if you're going to get fat.)

I'm not really in a bad mood, even if someone I work with this morning was being a complete moron.

I'm just...it's a combination of feeling guilty because I haven't done much work yet today and wishing it was 5:00 so I could go home because I'm tired of being at work.

Television mostly sucks these days. I'm aggravated that I haven't been able to find a new fandom. West Wing just gets worse and worse. Sometimes, watching this "new" version, it's hard to remember that the Bartlett Administration is supposed to be Progressive. This weeks' episode had entire sections lifted almost wholesale from real-life Republican talking points. When they said they wanted to bring more "balance" to the show with conservative views, I thought they were going to introduce or bring back characters to argue those viewpoints, not try and cloak Republican dogma in liberal clothing.

And what is it with the plot retreads? The last two new episodes were both covers of stories Sorkin already did in past seasons. How can the new staff of writers be that barren of ideas after only half a season?

My roommate bought Sports Night and we've been watching it. I now understand the complaints of SN fans when they were first watching West Wing. It is, in fact, disconcerting to run into lines of dialogue and plot points lifted from SN and planted on WW.

Oh well. At least Sorkin was only stealing from himself.

I've also been watching Mark Harmon's new outing, Navy NCIS which I persist in referring to as, "the JAG show" for some reason that escapes me since I've never actually watched JAG. I'm enjoying it enormously but not in a fannish way.

All of the energy I used to put into fandom is going into political blogging these days, I'm afraid.

I'm thinking I may have to give up political blogging, though. I spend far too many work hours on it. It's addictive, like any hobby, but I'm sure I can quit.

I mean, sure, I'm reaching a hundred times the number of people with my political opinions and mockery that I ever reached with my porn, proving once and for all, I think, that we are not obsessed with sex as a nation, but there are a lot of people pulling a hundred times the traffic I do in the world o'political blogs and I'm not really adding much to the body of intelligent opinion. (Okay, I'm not actually trying to be intelligent, regardless of the fact that politics is a serious, intelligent subject, but still.)

Escapade is next week and I'm a bit worried about it. When you've been "out" of fandom for two or three years, it starts to occur to you that you should give up your spot at Escapade and let someone who is really keen on fandom get a chance to attend. Plus which, I'm worried I won't have anything to say to anyone. Not only am I not active in any fandom, I haven't even read a story in the last couple of years. I don't even know what fandoms are out there right now.

Okay, I know about LotR but I've got sort of an attitude about the people who fell all over themselves with fannishness for Tolkein based on the casting of attractive men in the movie roles*, so I'm not likely to be popular in any discussions of the topic. Where the heck were all of you the first 50 times I read the books and wanted to discuss the themes of questing and self-sacrifice and the imagery of color and the wonderful complexity of relationships between characters and various species? Nowhere. No, it wasn't until they cast actors that made your little loins moist with unrequited passion that most of you cared at all.

I have no patience with you. None at all.

* This rant naturally excepts those of you whom I know read and enjoyed the books long before the movies were discussed.

I don't get Horatio Hornblower fandom, either. In the books the title character is a gawky, geeky, disadvantaged, unattractive, insecure sort of guy. And the first book in the series is so badly written that it's physically painful to read.

But I've seen the guy they cast in the miniseries and I know why y'all are all fannish over it.

I'm just saying. You don't fool me. If they'd cast an actor who looked the way Hornblower was described as looking in the books, 99.9% of you would never have given it a second thought.

You're a shallow bunch, aren't you? One glimpse of a pretty face and integrity goes out the window. You're panting for freaking hobbit slash, never mind that the Frodo-Sam relationship is one of literature's all-time greatest examples of platonic, selfless love and one of the clearest portrayals of the overriding geas imposed by a Hero's Quest.

No...they made one of the actors look pretty and your brains went on vacation. I hate you all.

I'm very bitter about this.

I want to find a show to be fannish about. It's just not fair. I know the source material for both of those fandoms, backward and forward. It's just wrong that I didn't get to be fannish about them and use that knowledge, don't you think?

What about Master and Commander? I haven't seen the move (yet) but I've read that series three times. It's useless, you know. I'm sure there's nothing in it for me or I'd have heard about it by now.

Life is very unfair.