Anghraine

I reblogged this video of the sea and added:

#:)))) #i don't know what this is but it reminds me of the tornado day when the columbia went kind of wild

In response to this post, lantur said:

Your part of the country is my favorite part of the country :)

I replied:

Aww, that’s wonderful! I’m used to “well, everyone likes their true home, no place is ~really~ special” but … well, awesome. Your taste is excellent :D

heckofabecca said:

what do they mean, “not real america”???? it has all the hallmarks of new england!!! woods! colonialism! white people! godawful winters!!!

I’m pretty sure they mean “the majority of the population are godless liberals/coastal elites who Just Don’t Understand Real America.” So the same logic applies to NE, it’s just doubly irritating when we’re overshadowed by the East Coast already. ;)

(Okay, and most Pacific Northwesterners live in regions with pretty nice winters … if you like rain!)

eighthdoctor said:

i’ve been gone for 2 years now, got 8 months to go, and i’m so homesick

I replied:

Ugh, I’m sorry! I do kind of get it—I did my MA outside of the PNW, and while it was a cool place (San Francisco Bay Area), I still missed home so much. The end is in sight, though!

ugh

beatrice_otter responded to this post:

Normally I would wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment of northwest Oregon being one of the best places in the world. But right now, we are on fire, and (while nowhere in my county is under any kind of an evacuation order, which makes us an outlier at the moment) the skies look only a little less like Mordor than they did yesterday.

I replied:

Washington is also on fire, so I might as well be at home!

[ETA 2/27/2024: ngl, my memories of 2020 are so dominated by the pandemic that I had actually forgotten about hellfire descending on the PNW as well.]

Okay, this one is also weirdly, well, challenging!

IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself.

It feels like I do that all the time, lol, but (even though I'm not posting in the community's comments—lingering shyness, I guess) I guess it can be handy to have in one place. Okay. I think I'll do this one as a bulleted list for convenience. Stuff about me:

• My name is Elizabeth (most people know me as Anghraine and a few know my family nickname, but any of these are fine).
• I'm in my 30s. (Still. Somehow.)
• I'm a PhD student in English literature, hopefully in my final semester. I complain about my dissertation pretty regularly.
• Like many people in fandom, I'm very opinionated, frequently about things that seem trivial to other people.
• I'm US American and politically a progressive Democrat.
• My home is the Pacific Northwest and love it dearly.
• I don't like most of my appearance, but I do have dark hair and grey eyes, which give me a bit of joy as a Tolkien fan.
• I'm a grey-ace lesbian & she/her or they/their pronouns are both fine. My sense of gender is both very clear (no intrinsic gender) and very muddy (AFAB and in the habit of alignment with women for various reasons, but it's complicated), so I tend to veer between "eh, whatever" and "????????" as far as gender goes.
• I have three parents—my mother, my (adoptive) father, my (biological) father, and since I have ties to all of them (though much stronger to the first two), it's not always clear which father I'm talking about. My adoptive father is Mexican-American and my bio father is Greek/Irish-American, both of which come up sometimes for family reasons.
• I don't talk about it a whole lot, but I was raised Mormon (by my mother and adoptive father), while my bio father is Catholic, and this has definitely impacted my particular experience of US Christianity. I'm personally agnostic.
• I'm bipolar and autistic, and relatedly, tend to veer between not doing much and super-intense posting.
• I've been active in fandom since about 2003, when I delurked at the Faramir/Éowyn Emyn Arnen forums (I also stealth shipped Faramir/Aragorn, but didn't admit it then :P). My main OTP is Elizabeth/Darcy (book versions). I also love the Star Wars OT (with the prequels and, some days, TFA+TLJ along for the ride) and Rogue One a lot (I've had various SW ships over the years, but nothing really compares to the greatness of Jyn/Cassian; my other SW faves are Luke, Anakin, and Leia). I only intermittently still talk about Legend of Korra, but it's never left my heart (Korra, Noatak/Amon, Tarrlok, and Kuvira <33333).
• It's not the only thing I do, but I especially love genderbending my favorite male characters to women.
• Dreamwidth is not the place I post most often, but it is my favorite place to post (icons, f-lock, normalizing long-form conversations...).

I reblogged a post about the ways in which the places we love can feel like they belong to us and attempts to redefine those places can feel like betrayal, and tagged it:

#yeah #my conservative relatives complain about portland all the time and i keep my mouth shut #but inwardly i'm just HOW DARE

I complained on Tumblr, but ... ??!!!??!!!! 

I'm still just kind of boggling that Trump came to Oregon to talk about how he's going to swing the state red and get back to cutting down our trees (*hiss*). And he gave this speech in Eugene, of all places.

If you're not familiar with the peculiarities of the PNW political scene: geographically, most of Oregon and Washington are conservative, particularly Oregon. They get their hardcore progressive reputation (and votes) from small regions west of the Cascades, mostly concentrated in ultra-liberal urban centers like Seattle and Portland and, uh, Eugene—home of the University of Oregon. However, the population is also concentrated in those areas, which produces its own problems. There are more or less local issues, like secessionist sympathies ranging from violent to wistful, and intense environmentalism that is particularly intense among Democrats but part of PNW culture in general. In the last midterm elections, disastrous for Democrats, Republicans had talked about increasing logging and it ... ended badly.

So giving a speech about how he's going to make Oregon great again by chopping down more trees in EUGENE is just "???????????"

But he didn't end his tour of Democratic Cascadia there!

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