Because I’m a nutty weirdo, I just decided on a whim to spend a few days in Vienna at the beginning of June. I haven’t checked back with my piggy bank, but this time, I really want to stay in a hotel. I love hotels. And the breakfast buffets. And the always clean bathrooms.

Off to Trip Advisor to find myself a cute and affordable home for a few nights, and then to plan what to see! And how to get there. I plan to give myself the full Empress Elizabeth treatment, taking advantage of travelling alone. Oh, and Sacher Torte. Coffee houses. What else?

And because I never travel anywhere I don’t know at least one Tweep, I’m looking forward to meet a whole bunch of them this time. Woop-woop!

I follow a handful of blogs that one could label feministic, in lack of a better term. Some of them explore the representation of girls and women in popular media like superhero comics. Others are just written by women who are interested in feminism and discrimination of minorities in general, and post stuff that irks them. All of them are from the United States. And very often they almost put my will to live out of me. Maybe the US of A are an extremely unfriendly place to be a woman. Maybe not. But the media desaster around the Steubenville rape trial this week pretty much wanted me to kick every guy I came across into the balls, so to speak. Or build myself a space ship and leave this blue marble.

I know that my work conditions are extremely privileged. There are much more women than men working there1 in general, and almost all leading positions are women too. And even at university two of my three subjects had way more girl than boy students – but that’s sort of normal in the Humanities. I haven’t encountered the infamous glass wall yet. So my daily life doesn’t put me into situations where I could experience discrimination first hand. Lucky me, eh?

And then there is that fake girl geek thing making the rounds on the Intertubes. Which made me think very hard about a) Am I actually a geek? (I am most definitely a girl, thank you very much) and b) How goddamn insecure is the reportedly stronger sex about itself?
I probably am a geek, if you put the very shallow definition of “Watches Star Trek / Star Wars / Doctor Who / any other SF/fantasy show” “Reads comics” “Wears glasses” to work. But I won’t but that sticker on my chest anymore, because I have a variety of interests besides consuming media, most notably creating my own stuff, taking bikes appart and raising my indoor jungle.

Objectification. The thing that broke my writing mojo this week. Because I’m unsure if it really is a bad thing. I also think we’re a race of objectifying assholes no matter the sex or gender. I don’t see much difference in quality between the guy cast of any show taking their shirts off so that the girl audience can swoon over their abs or seeing the girl cast in skin tight clothing/ butts and boobs pose so that the guy audience can swoon over their assets. And it’s the girls who then proceed to post lengthy board posts or really bad fan fiction on the intertubes, while the boys… I’ll leave that to your imagination. *wink* Sexy sells, and that’s an undeniable fact. It’s boring and unimaginative, but it sells.

Thing is, I could probably garner lots of readers if I would stress the fact even more that my male protagonist over at the Petticoats in Space is a gorgeous piece of hunky glory, or if I would turn my heroine into a sexy walking triple x movie. But I’m not so desperate (yet), that I would only focus on their outer shell. I want all of my cast to be human beings, with problems and hidden secrets and desires., that the readers cares about. Don’t know how good I’m at portraying that, but I hope I will get there someday.

And now I stop rambling incoherent stuff, but I had to get that out of my system. Stay awesome, because I bet you are, no matter your gender.

I have completed two full months of my “insane project” aka publishing a story every Sunday the intire year. And I can be very proud of myself, because so far I didn’t drop the ball once. And I have every intend to carry on. Naturally, assigning top priority to writing has it’s drawbacks. The day has only so many hours, and squeezing in two blogs, cooking, sleeping, story writing, oogling pretty bikes, watching several television series and spending quality time with your spouse is difficult. The house is pretty much in shambles. My weekends consist of trying to devide myself between getting the story ready for publishing and squeezing in time to watch Star Trek or Doctor Who with the man. Somehow I get it done, but only at the expense of the cleanliness of the house. Not satisfying, but one cannot have it all. I comfort myself with saying that I can clean when I’m running out of story ideas. And that will take a while.

At the beginning of the year, with being on vacation and having ample alone time in the evenings as the man was working the late shift, getting writing done during the week wasn’t so much of a problem. But I let it slip, and now it’s rather difficult to get into my writing mode after work. Especially when there’s a brand new DVD set with all the Addam’s Family episodes waiting… ahem. Being tired is also an excuse.

I prefer to write while being alone. It’s possible with the man in the room, but it works better when I’m alone. Having a brain that hasn’t been turned into something that feels like pink candyfloss at the dayjob in eight grinding hours is also very much preferred. Coming next week I decided to try and get up an hour earlier – to have undisturbed time with a fresh brain. I’m not really sleeping after 5am anyway, so why not get up and use the time? That would leave me the Saturday to edit the story and schedule it for publishing Sunday morning, I won’t feel bad in the evenings because I’m not writing and maybe there will also be time left to do some cleaning. Sunday would be free for spending undisturbed and guiltfree time with my loved one. I’m excited to see how this plan works out and how my inner weaker self will try talking me into staying in bed.

I admit, getting up an hour earlier that one has to, for a project that’s not paying in neither money nor attention, sounds stupid. But I’m so so so happy to have found the confidence in my voice again, that I want to give it my best me. Even if that means to be bright eyed and bushy tailed at 5 o’clock in the morning.1

I finally got access to my Twitter archive, after waiting for what felt like ages. I’m a firm believer that early adopters should get the new stuff before everybody else does, but apparently things don’t work that way. We only get our accounts hacked.

So, anyway, Twitter archives. Oh sweet baby Jesus… I’m on Twitter since its humble beginnings, and although I don’t tweet as much as others do, I have like 26k tweets under my belt. That’s a lot to read, I tell ya. And I learned a thing or two about myself. For example, I have now a neat track on the multitude of ways I like to accidentally hurt myself. Hot glue is just one way of many.
I also can now experience the pains of finishing university all over again. And all the self-doubt afterwards. Which promptly sent me into an episode of feeling like the greatest academic failure, until I reminded myself that a) I don’t work as a scholar and b) I do indeed have a job that supports me and is mostly fun.

Thankfully, the Twitter archive is not only good for going through old pain. I made great friends there, and it was nice to reread some of the conversations. Or check when exactly the first tweet exchange happened. Or rediscover cool stuff that you linked to 3 years ago.

Some tidbits:
- the person I tweeted most with is @bexxi
- @Duncrow and I found each other via @chiloe who sadly isn’t tweeting anymore
- my first @-reply was to @Kisa‘s old account
- there are some with whom I had constantly close contact with for years, like @nome_home, @marv_p and @rabbitroodle – and then there were bouts of contact with others that now I don’t follow anymore, sometimes I didn’t even know anymore who they were! That was freaky…

Do you have access to your old tweets? What did you find out? Or would you rather not know?