Professor of Loon Ecology - specializing in Sherlockology & Snape Studies

This is probably normal, right. Dolly died at 80. I am 53. This means I can aim for 27 more years. I have 27 more years to be better. Or 27 years to wind down my life. I'm trying to not think the latter, but it seems a shift has happened, and I'm already preparing for death.

Being in fandom is bringing this out too. I was so jealous of everyone at Fenway Park for Heated Rivalry night. That looked so fun. But I wasn't about to travel to Boston for a weekend trip by myself. I can enjoy from afar - and besides, I am heading off to Northern Ireland this weekend! I am excited about the filming of season 2, and I still LOVE spoilers, and I would love a Canadian Tire bag (LOL). I could have gone up to Toronto in September since a friend from Germany will be there, but I decided not to do that because I have responsibilities and am not made of money. I am staying out of the spoiler scene this time - I had my spoiler fun with Sherlock. It's someone else's turn for this. And also, I find the actors in the show incredibly attractive, but I don't ever want to meet them or be in the same location as them because it feels wrong and exploitive. This is ageism, which is gross, but also, this is my socialization as a university full professor who really is mindful of not exploiting students and junior people. My job is to mentor now - not to leer at young people who have so much to learn and so much of their lives ahead of them.

My life is 2/3 over. In that time, I've done a lot of living. Life has been very good to me and even when it wasn't so good, it wasn't the worst it could be. I've gotten to do so much! I should be grateful instead of sad and nostalgic. Maybe there is more ahead in the next 27 years that will surprise me. Finding a fandom again surprised me. I don't know what the future holds - maybe lots of good things. Definitely lots of mundane things. But I keep thinking about death and how the body and mind wind down and it feels like it is speeding up and I really need to prepare myself for death now while other people enjoy their youth.

Yesterday, Rachel Reid, author of Heated Rivalry, posted a photo to instagram of a stack of paper, which appears to be a printed manuscript of her completed draft of Unrivaled, the 7th book in the Game Changers series and her third dealing with Ilya and Shane's relationship. I am more excited about the publication of this book than I am of my own!

Yesterday, a video by Dylan Walsh, the actor who plays Shane's father, dropped on a social media site (Cameo?). In it, he mentioned heading off to begin filming for the show and mentioned 12 episodes. This seems to confirm the prior speculation that both season 2 and 3 were being filmed this year and that the book The Long Game was being split into two seasons. (This is going to kill me on one level, but I am ultimately thrilled).

Today, certain fan accounts on instagram were abuzz about an imminent announcement by an actor they speculated had been cast as a secondary character in season two. It turned out that this was not the case and his announcement was about how he auditioned but was not cast and was surprised by and enjoying the speculation a few things he had posted elicited (i.e. dying his hair blonde; taking a trip to a local apple farm).

Later today, a casting announcement was made for two secondary characters, including the character that the aforementioned actor was supposedly going to play. This was shared widely along with old DMS sent exactly three years ago by Jacob Tierney (the eventual producer/director of the show) to Rachel Reid (the author of the books) about the possibility of commissioning her books for TV.

I love this shit so much and it's giving me #setlock feels. These are not really spoilers, but this is the sort of social media information, speculation, and hype that I began following thirteen years ago around the filming of series 3. Being involved in #setlock was and always will be one of the best fannish experiences of my life. I will not be doing the same for Heated Rivalry. It's a different show with a lot more indoor filming (hockey rinks, cottages, and hotel rooms) and I'm in a different place in my life where jetting off to another country to track spoilers is not affordable or something I can fit in around my job, my forthcoming book, and marathon training. But I wholeheartedly support people who can fit this into their lives and can do it in a way that doesn't disrupt filming or frighten the cast.

Earlier this week there was a post from Tierney/production asking fans to respectfully let the cast do their work. It walked a careful line and did not shame fans (the fandom police are taking care of that), and I appreciate this. It reminds me so much of the careful balancing act the Sherlock production had to walk with fans when they asked for space. I think the Heated Rivalry crew did it better. Anyway, I am avoiding all the self-righteous posts about fans who engaging in spoiling ruining things but am soaking up all the fun info being shared. Filming begins in August and goes until early December. Season 2 is supposed to air in April, and Rachel's next book, Unrivaled, is scheduled to be released in June (pride month in the US and Canada).

This is going to be a wonderful year!

Fangirl update - my drawing is still terrible. Each time I crack open my sketchbook and look at what I've drawn before, I feel awkward and glad not to be sharing it. However, I'm making myself do something I've never actually been good at - drawing what I see. My fanart was always cartoonish because that's what I could do, and I like cute and colorful things. Drawing stills of actual human faces (I haven't moved on to any body parts) has always been hard for me. But it lets me revisit some of my favorite clips from the show and gives me a reason to stare intently at what I find beautiful about Shane and Ilya.

Shane and Ilya - not Hudson and Connor. This is important. I don't want to be a fan of the actors because they are real people and I think it is not good for me to have such a strong interest in the imagined lives of real humans. I've had problems with limerence before (both celebrity and non-celebrity), and I don't like who I became in that state and how much anguish it caused. I suppose I can develop limerence for fictional characters too, but that feels safer because they are not real. There will not be constant updates about their lives, their political views, and their past history for me to grapple with when these things don't fit the image of them that I have in my head.

I am trying to NOT watch clips of Hudson and Connor, but it is hard since a lot of the HR fan accounts that I follow are also sharing stuff about the actors. Filming on the show is going to begin soon (August I think) so I would love to hear those kinds of updates. I have also allowed myself to watch promo material from season one and before everything blew up. The actors are so totally different from their characters that it's a bit jarring. This is helpful in toning down any desire to fangirl over Connor, who has massive golden retriever energy and sounds very new agey at times. These kind of qualities are not attractive to me, and I don't feel drawn to fangirl him. Hudson, on the other hand, is hilarious and almost crotchety, which I find very attractive. Unfortunately, he's also getting a lot more grief from the public and from paparazzi, including racist bullshit. I worry for him more than Connor - that he will be burned out and embittered by the consequences of fame. But that I am worrying about him is something I don't want to be doing. I don't want to know that people have been pestering him about some old 'problematic' photos of him in high school. I don't want to see fans interacting with him and talking about how cool he is. I don't want to know that his girlfriend has a new IG account. I don't want to hear about paparazzi harassing him all day through Paris until he snapped.

Not my business.

I intend to come up with a plan for how I will engage with or avoid material about the actors. I also need to come up with a plan for engaging with or avoiding interviews and materials about the writer (Rachel Reid) and the director/show creator (Jacob Tierney). I thought it would be cool to go to a live event and RR has a series of book talks she is giving with tickets going on sale. There's even a talk in Philly! But the last major author whose book talk I attended in 2006 has turned into the world's biggest transphobe, and I don't want to invest so much of my money or time into any single popular writer ever again. RR is probably not going to turn out like that author in part because the market for queer hockey romance is more niche and also it is not 30 years ago when the media landscape was less fragmented. Clearly I am burned by this prior experience and am acting out of extra precaution now, but it is so painful when your favorite turns out to be such a destructive mess.

Fictional characters can never let me down to such a degree, and I want to keep my fangirling there.

I mentioned in my last post that the time loop trope is something I've seen a lot of in Heated Rivalry fic that I don't recall reading much of in my Sherlock days. Here are three time loop fics that all take place around the tuna meltdown moment in the book/tv show.

( Recs behind the cut... )

Yesterday my PhD student had her proposal hearing. It went fine and she has a lot of work today. Afterwards I was so exhausted. I had been anxious about how she would do and I was a little justified in this. Her committee is large (5 people) and they all want different things from her, including some theories that I am not up to leading her through. I also felt like I had not pushed her enough or modeled well enough for her certain approaches to data analysis, and that this was something the committee was critical of. However, I also have to remember that everything is not on me - I am the supervisor and I can guide a student, but they have to do the work and thinking.

When I got home, I lay down because I felt so exhausted, but I couldn't rest. My heart was racing and I felt like I could not catch my breath. Eventually I went for a run (9km or about 5.5 miles) in the misty rain. I felt calmer and like I could breathe again after my run. I think the rhythmic pounding of running helps calm me sometimes, especially when I am running slowly.

I realize what I am feeling is stress. I feel overwhelmed with it almost. Classes have just finished and I am almost done with grading, but I have to wait for one more paper to come in for a student I granted an extension to. I am teaching a summer class for the first time in 15 years, and that begins on Monday. We are also leaving for Sweden in a week and there is so much to do before then including early voting by mail - despite the fact that there has been a fuck-up with the Maryland ballots.

I am also overseeing a lot of details for the conference that my organization is holding in Cyprus from 4-5 June. The attacks on Iran have really fucked up organizing and I hope that there is nothing new going on in the area that will destroy all that work. Nevertheless, as President, I have to do a lot of glad-handing, speechifying, and award giving. I am also doing a poster session on a small study that I have not even begun! I have no fucking clue when I am going to get that done. The past two weeks and next week have also been full of medical appointments that I like to schedule when classes end and before travel begins, so there's been a lot of interruption in work.

And on top of this, we learned this week that my FIL is not doing well. He is barely eating and the people at the assisted care facility called my husband to let him know that if he stops eating entirely, he won't last long. I think it's clear that my FIL will not make it through the summer and there is a very real possibility that he may die before we even travel. My husband wants me to help him and be there if his father does die in the next week, and that would mean pulling out of the conference. I don't know who will cover my tasks and I need to prepare for this contingency. There is also the possibility that my FIL will die when my husband and I are on the Camino in Spain and we'll have to come back from that and cancel all those plans - which is also something I have been spending a lot of time scheduling and researching.

My racing heart and inability to take a nap yesterday are part of this stress. I recognize that I am also using fanfiction as an escape right now. There is a lot of really good novel-length Heated Rivalry fanfiction full of longing, broken hearts, and misunderstandings due to immaturity and fear of social consequences. The tropes are so very different from what I was used to in the Sherlock fandom, and my Ao3 "to read" bookmarks are exploding. I am really enjoying the fic, but it is reminding me of the last time I fell deeply into fic during my early Sherlock fandom days. I am so surprised it's happening again. I love having a fandom again. I enjoy the feelings these really good stories are invoking in me, but I'm surprised. I thought this was in my past. In fact, I thought my reaction to fanfiction of the past was because of something going on in my life at the time that is not going on now. I am disappointed to learn that I am wrong. My hope is that when the stress abates in a few weeks that I will feel less drawn to the many various ways Shane and Ilya can be torn apart and find their way back to each other.

 This is now an Ilya Rozanov stan account. 

I attended a community event at my bookstore last night. I am now registered to take part in 3 hours of online training tomorrow in support of immigrant communities. I am also pursuing involvement in the midterm elections in Maryland. I am looking at two possible options - the first is as a voter registration volunteer. The second is as a challenge or watcher at the polls. Both require training and approval from a local election board.  I will unfortunately be in Europe when the primaries are held in June but I am clearing my calendar for the fall election to be available for early voting and day of voting. I am trying to think of where I would be the most use. 

In order to make room in my life for civic engagement, I have already said no to two things: (1) to serve as an examiner for a dissertation defense in October in Sweden in an area not directly related to my research. This would be online, but again, the defense is scheduled the week before the election and if there is early voting, I want to be maximally available. And (2) to review an article this month - it is a re-review which means I did not see this the first time around. I said no because I am saying no to all reviews until I finish my damn book and also because the 4.5 hours I am going to spend on civic engagement this week is coming out of stuff like reviewing for free.

Today felt tough and it was only in the late afternoon when I began fantasizing about how I would kill and disembowel Bondi that I realized I was being triggered by her theatrics. As a survivor of child sexual abuse, the disrespect and disregard shown the survivors of the Trump/Epstein class while the perpetrators are protected and shielded by incredibly foolish women reminds me a lot of my mother. 

Women who work so hard to protect sex traffickers and pedophiles are so broken and gross. 

So JKR got a mention in the latest dump of the Epstein files. It appears his publicist was in touch with her collaborators/publicity team about getting Epstein an invite to attend the Broadway Premiere and special dinner of Cursed Child. This was in April 2018. As you recall, Epstein was convicted for child prostitution in 2008. This is so gross. 

 Ever since my mother in law had a stroke in autumn 2024, she's lost the ability to plan, make decisions, and even write full coherent sentences. She is ripe for being exploited by those who try to financially rip off the elderly. My husband and his sister were able to convince her to agree to the equivalent of a conservator in Sweden, who helps protect her financially and can advocate for her. The Swedish word for this is gudman. My MIL's gudman is a woman of similar age named Jeanette who is originally from France. I really like her and she is a staunch advocate for my mother in law.

She visited my MIL's apartment yesterday for a regular appointment and told my husband that she really appreciates how sweet and kind he and his sister are to actually be looking out for their mother. Some of her elderly clients have children who are abusive or who are trying to swindle their own parents to take their money.

Chalk this up to another reason why having children is not a guarantee you won't die alone in old age.