Kinda sorta. There's this chick who shares my name, first and last, (technically not, I suppose, but I refuse to acknowledge that my second first name isn't my proper first name) who wrote a book and has written some columns. Far as I've gathered (suppose I should get her book from the library some time) she's a wee bit too "queer power" for me to be quite comfortable with being connected with her.

And I've gotten emails to the effect of "are you the Alexandra XXX that wrote a column in Metro last week?"
Since I'm the first Google result under my name. (Ha!)

This is another reason I'd like to change my legal last name. Dunno if the department of patents and shit would allow the name I want, however. :(



-Alexandra

Do I believe that monogamy exists?
Yes.

Do I believe that monogamy can work?
Yes.

Do I believe that monogamy can work for me?
I've done it. I wasn't entirely miserable, but the key here is can work; it would need to be made to work, however.

Do I believe that monogamy can be the right thing?
Yes.

Do I believe that monogamy is the right thing for me?
No. Not at all. Monogamy, for one thing, assigns a rather ridiculous significance to sex, which is something I have a bit of a hard time with. For another, I love a lot of people. Choosing one person is rather unnatural and leads to strain in that relationship.



-Alexandra

EDIT: I think this is a lovely answer to this question. It's not my answer, it's not my position in the matter, but it's a very good answer nevertheless.

I know that a lot of you don't like April Fool's jokes. I respect that.
Me, I enjoy things that are, in my opinion, good April Fool's jokes. That means it should be possible to figure out on your own that it is a joke, and the person making the joke must not say "no really, this is not a joke" if they're called on it. Saying "I'm getting married" or "I have a terminal illness" or anything else like that is not a good joke. (ETA: "I have a terminal illness" can be acceptable if it's outrageous. Like, y'know, me claiming I'm dying from testicular cancer. But not something that's actually plausible.)

The best joke I saw this year was probably on little_details, where the mods announced that all questions must be asked superimposed over an image of a cat, and later retracted this rules change citing that people thought it was a joke and that it would therefore be implemented at a later date. During the hours when this new "rule" was in effect, a number of people did ask their questions in LOLcat, and got fairly comprehensive replies for the most part. It was freaking awesome.

LJ's joke was also quite good - turning your friendspage into Twitter is a pretty harmless joke. Yes, it pissed people off, but so did the Little Details prank which maybe especially the annoyed people realized was a prank.

It's partially because of this, and partially out of respect for the friends that don't like being tricked, that I attempted to make my joke as blatantly obvious as I could while still keeping it "serious". No, I'm not changing my fursona. No, I'm not going to start going by some vaguely netherdrake-ey name that I made up on the spot as I was saving the file. My joke was also not intended as poking fun at otherkin and therians at large - I can sympathize with a lot of that spirituality even if I don't personally subscribe to it.

Me feeling detached and not-at-peace is something I've accepted comes and goes. I try to work with what I'm given. Changing how I represent myself isn't going to change that. Changing how I see life, might. But since I've had a period of feeling rather meh, it was a good lead-in as any.

I thought the entry would be sufficiently out of character for me, and over-the-top enough, that it would be obvious that I was not really serious about it. If I did not manage to pull that outrageousness off well enough, I was the one who failed, and I apologize.

Those of you who commented on the picture, thank you. I am rather satisfied with it, though I don't see myself ever using that eye-stabbingly bright pink dragon character ever again.



-Alexandra

As some of you have noticed, I have not been entirely at peace with my life lately. It has not been an easy decision, nor has it been an easy journey, but after much soul-searching I have realized what it is I have to do.

In order to be at peace with my life, and with myself, I have to stop pretending. I can no longer keep up this facade that I have been carrying for almost a decade - it isn't me. It's a caricature of a part of my personality, and holding on to it is doing me more harm than good. As such, it will in the long run be healthier for me to let go of both Alex-fox and Katla-in-Shadow. They were just furry masks I could put up in a lame attempt to hide my true self. Not the human, no, because that, too, is a mask, albeit a physical one rather than a projected image.

The real me, in spirit and soul, trapped in this mortal shell, is something more.

I am Alitharku.

This is not, I want to stress once again, another facade. I'm not making up another "fursona". Alitharku the Netherdrake is my soul, tragically born in the guise of a human body. I drew up an image of my true self, though my artistic skills can't even begin to catch the beauty of the magnificent creature whose soul I had the priviledge to carry.





-Alitharku

This entry was written for the "home game" of therealljidol.

I like the word "blanket" for its many meanings, quite a few of them metaphorical. I probably overuse phrases along the lines of "blanketed by darkness" in my writing because of this. But it's such a nice word. Warm. Heavy. Comforting. Soft. Like a blanket, darkness can also be smothering, of course, but there's still something inherently... nice... about the word "blanket". As a metaphor.

When I lived in the US, there was this particular blanket. It wasn't quite polar fleece; there was a cut in it and I could see what looked like foam inside it. But it looked a bit like very fuzzy polar fleece, and it was nice and warm and snuggly. And lavender. Anything purple instantly gets my vote.

I found this blanket in my closet at some point after it started getting cold for the winter. My daily routine involved getting home from school and, wrapped in the blanket, having a nap in the recliner in my room. Eventually, my neighbor starcard saw the blanket, and it turns out that it was hers, or at least her family's, and that it had been forgotten at our house at some point. But I got to keep it until it was time to go home, and ever since I've hunted for a blanket like it.

Something fairly close turned up when I was shopping for a yoga ball last Friday. While I have enough blankets to cover my couch (it's an old, ratty couch, and it pretty much needs to be covered by a blanket to look halfway presentable, but it's a nice, small couch, and not too uncomfortable, so I've kept it), I couldn't resist this soft, lavender blanket. $4 later it was mine.

Blanket. Warm. Safe. Soft. Comforting.

Nabbed this meme from ciaan because it interested me.

Comment with the title of a story I've written, and I will tell you something about the story that didn't make it onto the page.

This entry was written for the home game of therealljidol. Please stop by the community and read the entrants' posts as well!

Please note that the links and the audio for the Youtube video included in this post (or, hell, even the language I use) are not neccesarily very (or at all, really) worksafe.

Finally, I get to teach a whole lesson all by myself. And I'm gonna teach something relevant, something modern... The Internet!

Most if not all Internet fandoms are the same. They all want understanding. If someone says that something, anything, that they get up to is gross, it's instantly met with a chorus of "but you don't understaaand!" Hand in hand with this comes a tendency that I've seen in more than one fandom, but which is maybe especially prevalent (or maybe I just see more of it because I'm deeper involved with that mess) in my main one.

Again and again, I see the question "how do I come out as furry?" and again and again, I see answers suggesting that the poor insecure kid hides everything even remotely sex-related when talking about it. And again and again, I tell people to not hide the fact that the porn exists. I mean, it's a fucking Internet fandom, what do they expect? Of course it has porn, it's what the Internet is for! There's freaking Jesus slash out there, for fuck's sake! (Don't blame me for the Jesus slash, or for the quality thereof, I just grabbed the first piece of Jesus slash I found in the Bible category on FanFiction.Net to make a point.)

Sure, furries are Internet-infamous for their porn.

Or maybe, just maybe, they're Internet-famous for being really fucking amusing to poke fun at. Because they squirm. Oh, fuck, do they ever squirm! The poor, poor persecuted furries! So desperate to describe their fandom in only positive, child-friendly words, with no dog cock or lactating udders in sight. I'm not asking them to showcase the fandom's darker sides with pride, no, not at all. Just to stop attempting to pretty up the truth. I've done it so many times, I've included the smut as a sometimes-unfortunate side, and since I treat it as a non-issue, so have my listeners.

The simple secret to acceptance. Accept yourself first.

My name is Alex, and I draw furry porn.

This entry was written for the "home game" of therealljidol. If you have some spare time, stop by and read and comment on the contestants' entries!

There's something paradoxal about this topic. At first I was tempted to fire up Photoshop, bring up my tablet, and just do some scribbly art shit with color all over the place. But, you know, much as a picture might be worth a thousand words, fuck that shit. Let's do this proper. (If nothing else I don't want to be describing said picture in a thousand words to make my entry accessible to all LJ Idol people.)

I'm one of the more creative people I know. I've tried a lot of artistic endeavors at least once. I draw illustrations regularly, I've sculpted quite a bit (though nowadays I hate it, because I've grown more and more unfond of getting clay on my skin and under my nails over the years) and have actually been paid to do a couple of things in Sculpey. I've got a diploma from Sequential Arts school somewhere. I used to play the recorder and the guitar. I love singing though I'm very bad at it. I write a lot. 100 kb worth of .txt files with creative writing so far this year, plus a lot of verbal plotting with shurhaian, and that's before today's bit of creative writing. When doing any kind of crafts in elementary school or kindergarden, I always wanted to somehow "make it my own" by changing or adding things.

Yet I'm also one of the most habit-bound people I know. Any change in my routine throws me off and runs the risk of making me forget pretty basic everyday things because I'm not for whatever reason performing the action I usually connect with them. Most people want to spice up their lives, change their day-to-day grind... I'm pretty content plodding along. I plan ridiculously far ahead. No way that my daily life should spill outside its well-defined outlines. Catastrophe and horror and all-around bad shit!

But I never do my creative things quite like anyone else; if I'm forced to I get burned out on it pretty quickly (hence why I don't touch music anymore).

And I'm happy the way I am, in that regard.



-Alexandra

This entry was written, after the fact, for Season Five Week 15 of therealljidol.

Now, I readily admit that at times my sense of humor can be rather cruel. Or maybe more accurately, I can occassionally display a sense of humor which, to an outsider, would seem to be. Maybe that goes with liking to hang out with guys. The talk is rough, but once you get to know us, you'll find that we're just being friendly. And this shows most obviously in my World of Warcraft guild.

We have the guy who kept being called "Sharon(a)" despite his protests until the nickname at last stuck and he resigned to his cruel fate.

We laugh about it.

We have "Bob" who we keep teasing about his allegedly tiny cock, and his fiancée "Robin" who joins in... And also tells him, over voice chat, mid-raid, that he's awful in bed. He gives as good as he gets, telling her that she gives horrendous blowjobs. The talk will also have it that some of the more trivial tasks that can be thought of are "all that Bob is good for". Sharon and I hit on Robin on a regular basis, and she says she'll run away with one or both of us.

We laugh about it.

shurhaian keeps getting guild notes (short notes about guild members that can be viewed through the guild info screen; in my guild they can only be changed by officers and veteran players, a total of maybe 6-7 people) in some way relating to, well... Me. It started out with "Divya's boytoy" (my main character is a priest named Divya), and some others have been "Divya's Russian mailorder bride", "Alberta from Vancouver" (a reference to My Girlfriend Who Lives in Canada from Avenue Q), "the bisquit to Divya's rosehip" (a reference to how rose hip soup is often served with almond bisquits, and how my current primary character is named Nyponros, meaning the flower of rosa dumalis, the plant that is used for rose hip soup) and just "Divya's bitch". And I keep offering his services to male guild members, primarily Sharon, Bob, and one of the other officers.

We laugh about it.

We have uzza2 and his brother "Robin2", who most of the guild claim are doing the dirty. Uzza will never hear the end of how much of an aggro whore he is, nor of how he is a dirty hat thief, and Robin2 can't get an achievement without half of the people calling him an achievement whore, as he made the mistake of ridiculing people for going out of their way to complete some of the achievements. If all else fails, their guild notes tend to relate to how they desperately want to do each other.

We laugh about it. Well, all of us but Robin2, who takes it way too seriously.

I regularly get propositioned, and I've made people spittake by saying things like "I swallow" very deadpan over voice chat. It's also a running joke that you don't know what you've gotten into as a new guild member, until you've heard Divya lose it over voice (I giggle. A lot. At a very high pitch.)

We laugh about it. A lot.

We all give as good as we get. In some ways, it feels almost like family.

This worries me, and should worry anyone who uses LJ for... Much of anything, really. I'm hoping for a news post explaining WTF is up soon.
I mean... I've been on LJ for 7½ years. Since before the invite codes. MY ELLJAY! *flail*



-Alexandra

This entry was written (after the fact) for the Season Five Week 14 topic "Resolute" in therealljidol. Because I'm a sucker for completion, and I realized I was missing two topics.

Calling me "resolute" would be... A very polite way of putting it. Too polite, really. I'm a stubborn bitch, as most people become aware of within not too long of getting to know me. It's a peculiar kind of stubbornness, though.

I have a very yielding personality. I'll go out of my way to please others, let them have what they want, because it's just not that important to me in the first place. I'm easily talked into most things, even things I don't think are a good idea. Until you hit That One Issue, and then it's like arguing with a brick wall. I couldn't tell you what That One Issue is or I would have to kill you. It's just something that crops up once in a while, a situation in which I decide that having my way is, for once, Really Fucking Important.

I plot. I plan. Give me enough time to do this and I'll become entrenched. I function much better with long-term plans comprised of short-term goals (my "new year's resolution" type thing is an itemized list probably longer than most of my LJ entries), and once I have a goal in mind I forge ahead. Not always straight - I'm easily distracted and do veer off course now and again - but I head towards the goal.

I'm a stubborn bitch. And you'll have to accept that.

This entry was written for week 13 of therealljidol, which this week was a free topic open to anyone to write on, and on top of that had three topics to choose from; I picked "Holiday".

Funnily, what has most colored my Christmas this year hasn't been this year's Christmas, at all. Instead, between the many things I have done to prepare for a "new life" when my school time ends in June, I've spent much time looking ahead. And I like what I see.

It might not come to pass, but yet I find myself envisioning, longing for, a specific scene. A break in the holiday rush. A timeless moment of pure, domestic zen.

The fire sparkles and dances in the fireplace, spreading its warm light over the room, making the wooden flooring almost seem to glow from within. On the floor in front of it lies a sheepskin rug, the fur thick, soft and slightly crimped. Two figures are seated on the rug, a blanket loosely draped over their shoulders, leaning closely together, the shorter female leaning her head on her partner's shoulder. Each of them is cradling a mug of steaming hot cocoa, topped with snowy white whipped cream.

The image in my mind is so powerful that it completely overvoices this holiday season, which as they go has been rather routine.

My aunt thinks I should be hosting Christmas at my place next year. Well, we'll see about that... But regardless of what else happens... If I can have that one moment, it's going to be the best Christmas of my life.



-Alexandra

I absolutely loathe the entitlement attitude some people have. These people sometimes include my own parents.

There's an online bidding site provided by one of the province newspapers, where periodically a lot of businesses will offer up expensive objects or gift cards or similar for bid. Dad loves this site, and has purchased catering from there for several parties we've had.

And this last round was no different. He was happy as a clam that he'd managed to get a 2000 SEK certificate for significantly less, and they were planning on using this for his and my brother's birthdays. This kind of fell through when he was told he couldn't get 2000 SEK credit willy nilly, and he's been bitching about it ever since, to the point of bugging my dropout law student brother about it.

Thing is, mum asked me to read the piece of paper he'd printed when he won the auction. And it's perfectly clear. The certificate is good for dessert, and is good for dessert only when you purchase catering for 40+ people. It's not rocket science. It's pretty obvious, in fact.

But hey, dad doesn't like being told that he should've read the terms of the auction before bidding. Sucks to be him, then.

There's a lot of herring being served here at Christmas, and I'm bad with pickled-ish stuff in the first place (if it's not red beets, and it's pickled, take it elsewhere, plz), but the worst has to be Janssons Frestelse (roughly translated "Jansson's Temptation", it's this potatoes au gratain-type dish with herring added in) because it's a complete waste of good potatoes.

I totally wish I could have traditional US Thanksgiving food rather than some of the stuff we put on the table at Christmas. :( Yeah, I admit, I can be a pretty darn picky eater.



-Alexandra