"That's my bread and butter you're f**king with."

It's been days now and the Metalocalypse finale still makes me grin like a crazy person. There was more emotional payoff in the last ten minutes of that show than in most dramas. (Smallville? Looking directly at you here.) Here, a quick list of things I loved:
( Gushing about Black Fire Upon Us ahead )

In short, I'm way too emotionally involved in this silly frakking show.:)

as my memory rests/but never forgets what I lost (Sept. 11 post)

I never lived in New York but I did grow up next door, so to speak. Nevertheless I always feel like a complete poser when I try to say anything about 9/11; no one I knew personally effected by the attacks and for all that I lived PATH ride away the closest I got the NYC that day was watching coverage on TV, which puts me in exactly the same place as 95% of the country. Seven years still seems like an impossible number and the sound of the date spoken aloud still feels like a slap.

On 9/11/01 I was a sophomore in college; I was just getting out of class (Japanese History and Culture, my easiest A ever) when my then-boyfriend-now-fiance met me and told me that two planes had crashed into the WTC. My first thought --- because I'm occasionally a moron in stressful situations --- was, "Wow, what are the chances of that?" For a second I literally couldn't conceive that it had been a deliberate attack; I naively thought it had to be some kind of freaky accident, like that time a place flew into the Empire State Building.

I got over that quick. Most of my memories of that day are of crowding around the crappy TVs in the student center trying to watch footage, then going to my boyfriend's house where his mother was crying in front of the TV. While we were waiting for our cab I remember the sudden flash of fear that this was it, we're at war, and that my boyfriend and cousins were going to be drafted. Now that didn't happen (thank God), but I'm not ever going to forget that feeling.

I never actually went inside Towers, but the WTC stop was where I took the PATH when I still had the anime monkey on my back and needed to make a pilgrimage to Chinatown (you young 'uns might not know this, but back before connection speeds got fast enough to download every series known to man those of us who wanted pirated goodness had to find a supplier, usually in Chinatown at $2 a tape. And then before we watched it we had to walk ten miles uphill with no shoes in the snow.) Now getting around NYC with my horrible sense of direction can be adventure --- I once wound up in Brooklyn while trying to get to the Met --- but I knew I could never get really lost because as long as I could see the Towers I knew I could find my way home.

I remember the wall of Missing pictures in the Path station; I still flinch when I see that kind of thing in movies (hi, Cloverfield). I remember looking at one and wondering if she was one of the Japanese businesspeople who had sat next to me on the train a few months prior (I was taking Japanese and loved to try to eavesdrop on the unsuspecting). There were so many pictures.

If you pray, say one today. If you have someone you love who went off to work today, I hope you said "I love you." Say it again when they come home, because you just never know.

Just be excellent to each other. Especially today.