121118 remember when i did nanowrimo and there were the forums where people would talk about writing (presumably instead of actually writing) and there were different topics for different things and one of them was for people talking about “my MC.” Main Character. There was this whole shorthand in use all throughout the forum, as if it were just understood that a novel has this, and here’s how you write about it, and these are the other parts, and here’s how they are and where they belong in relation to the MC, and it was all just so ... finished. Settled, figured out, standardized. And I didn’t quite articulate to myself why that turned me off so much, but it was a similar feeling to that time when I couldn’t bring myself to sign the peace petition Katy sent me a link to after 9/11 and before they went ahead and attacked Iraq. It was kind of like, I could post things and talk in this forum; I basically know what these words mean, but--why? It seemed about as vital, essential and astonishing as, oh, I don’t know, a forum about which hair products to recommend to your customer after styling their hair. Actually no wait, that actually sounds more interesting than blathering on about “my MC.” At least there there’s some real psychology about it, some real live primate behavior, not this dusty scrim of a fake background behind an ideogram of ... oh you know what, I don’t even know what I’m saying. The point is, there is no main character. Main character is just good ol’ American narcissism. Yeah, sorry, I really am full of shit tonight. I’m just mad because Megan was fine and that that little shit that’s too fucking wimpy to break up with her for real didn’t come to her concert and then she got violently sad and that always affects the rest of us, maybe especially me, but Millie too for sure, and it fucking sucks. It just puts a pall on everything. At least I don’t feel as totally helpless or controlled or destroyed by it as I used to with her mother. But still. But still. look i know shes not her mother. ok i realize that. but sonetimes—like when she refuses to budge an *inch* if i suggest she was kind of taking it out on millie—just flat denial/accusation—“she’s just making stuff up in her head”—just absolute refusal to even consider a part in it—sometimes thf sinking feeling is the same.