Unsurprisingly, despite being awake at 6:30 this morning, I got very little accomplished.

Wrote some more Law&Order!Sync this afternoon. Apparently, I can do that sort of clipped cop drama thing. Go figure. Mostly re-inspired by Cesare's Grand Theft Auto, which every single one of you ought to be reading.

icebun and I both had the same JoLa craving today, so I actually took myself up on a rather fabulous suggestion - printed out my favorite JoLa fic of all time, Mexican Moon by Betty Plotnick, and took the party to Starbucks over a grande White Chocolate Mocha. The cushy chairs were, amazingly, unoccupied, but remind me next time not to read slash with my back to the room, as it makes it hard to focus on the story and not who might be peering over my shoulder.

Mexican Moon is yet another one of those fics I can practically quote as I read because it's that poignant and perfect. JoLa can be such a tragic scenario, but Betty brings out how wonderful they are together, and how that's bigger and better than any problems they have to overcome to make it. I actually can now recite my favorite passage:

"It's hot. You're hot. How are you not getting how hot this is? You and me, trashy Mexican brothel-looking hotel, you taste like tequila and your whole body has to hurt but you're still starting to get hard thinking about us. I want to fuck you unconscious and maybe leave cash on the dresser, but it's *you.* It's you, and you'll always be the best part of whoring around in Mexico, because I remember when your idea of getting crazy was cinnamon Schnapps and putting your hand down my pants."

The story is sexy and fun and so spot-on in both characterizations, it just makes me giddy to read it every time.

I may have passed on Legally Blonde 2 (too perky), Seabiscuit (too sappy), Bad Boys 2 (too insipid), and 28 Days (too scary alone) and gone to see Pirates for the... fourth time now? Something obscene like that. I love the whole movie, but ( especially the ending. )

Love this film!

Also, Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer are so getting goodies in their stockings this July Christmas for the job they did scoring this puppy. I don't drive around for an hour and a half looking for just any old soundtrack. Hot damn.

Challenge picture count stands at around 870, which is just absurd. Project for tomrrow: Challenge, Pirate, and JC icons. Yes.

I didn't even realize it.

If we feel like playing the specific date versus occasion game, yesterday was my fandom anniversary in popslash for the chronology sticklers among us.

Now, as such things go, it was celebrated well enough, though sans the good people who brought me into its tangled web. I remember arriving at the hotel in Orlando, going upstairs, and the flurry of activity not two minutes later when it became clear that I knew next to nothing about *NSYNC.

Nor what they were actually in town for that weekend.

I remember taking my phone call to Miranda out into the hallway and whispering about how cool these girls were, but that this whole boyband RPS concept was maybe not for me. I mean, they're real people! And for another shock of cold water, boybanders! (This about summed it up, from my original entry: "I think I need an impartial jury to tell me it's okay to actually like the music. Deconditioning is a process.")

Luckily, with the help of quite simply the most darling pictures I've ever seen of boys and their love for each other, a few spins of the European eponymous debut and No Strings Attached, more than a couple nights reduced to four hours of sleep due to my sneaking off to the bathroom to read moooooore fic, and keeping my dopamine levels through the roof with a liberal supply of chocolate caramel cups, *NSYNC Fruit Snacks, and Pixie Stix for six days, I got over it, and returned home on Wednesday a devout convert to the Cult of Popslash.

Then I got existential or something. I tend to go overanalytical when something is getting to me deeper than I'm ready to accept:

"Does the real person facet not matter? The way I've been looking at it is that it's the members of *NSYNC (as in the polished, scripted, public personas put forth as members of the group) in the stories, not Joshua Chasez or Lance Bass, etc., the real people who play them in the recording studio and on the concert stage. Snafu there is the proliferation of Alternate Universe stories in the fandom, Greek Gods and Chicago mafia casts played by the boys without a single drum machine or pot of glitter eyeshadow to be found."

This was actually a very interesting observation. Of course, now that I realize I was taking it all a little too seriously, it's the fandom I cherish the most of any I've ever been in. I love that canon comes to us in little two-minute Access Hollywood clips and cheesy MTV specials, Barbara Walters interviews and grainy home movies. And while yes, there are different kinds of creators (publicists), directors (managers), and the omnipresent advertising industry that contribute to a certain facet of them, at the end of the day, there's no one directly pulling their strings (as it were) - it's not someone else's vision we're seeing, it's theirs.

"Redeeming factors? If you're a believer, we're writing what's going on behind the scenes anyway; if you've got faith, we're letting them lead the lives international popstardom, trashy tabloids who pay money for celebrity sex stories, and a mostly young teenage girl fan base won't allow them. Which could also go toward explaining the proliferation of AU stories... But if that same theory is put toward proving that it's about objectification of the boys, we're back to the root of my quandary."

What's funny is that fic (good fic) is almost never about objectifying them. They may occasionally objectify each other, but the writers in this fandom are firmly committed to them as real people, with real lives and relationships. I'm so glad they're taken seriously, when so little of what they do in actual real life has been given the same treatment.

mimesere predicted I'd be a JoLa girl on the first night. I mean, Lance took no actual falling on my part, which is interesting because he wasn't even there that weekend, but she called it before I even knew what that word meant. But while that has become and remained my OTP, I, too, am "100% love" when it comes to the boys, their love, this fandom. It's been a wonderful year, and I hope to commemorate many more.