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FRIDAY RECCS TIME.

I have four Avengers fics and a crossover to share!

The Agent by KuriKuri: Teen and Up, Clint/Coulson. An AU where Clint and Coulson are author and editor, but Coulson's also the city's local superhero, The Agent. AU and Identity Porn, bring it onnnnnn.

The Job Fair by sabinelagrande: Teen and Up, Clint/Coulson, Cecil/Carlos. A crossover with Welcome To Night Vale, in which Clint discovers that Coulson grew up in a desert town called Night Vale and his habit of listening to static on the radio that he claimes is "Cecil's radio show" isn't as weird as Clint thought. I haven't found much good Night Vale fic and I love the way this holds up the "super weird" of Night Vale against what we think of as "normal" in other fandoms.

Twenty-Five Years Doesn't Exist by IamShadow21: Teen and Up, Steve/Tony, Clint/Coulson. Tony is infuriated to find himself in a body that's 25 years old again. I love this take on aging and why Tony may not want to look like he should get carded going into clubs.

In Your Hands by Del_Rion: Explicit, Steve/Tony. Basically, hand jobs on the fourth of July, with a fun twist ending. The ending made me LOL. And a little sad.

Hefnendakvidha by Thette: General audiences, gen. This is "The Lay of the Avengers", an Old Norse retelling of act one of the film. It's not necessarily pleasure reading, though I enjoyed it, but I think it's interesting as a discussion of the poetic form and how it interacts with modern media.

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I have become obsessed by spreadsheets. I am fully aware of how sad that is.

But! It is useful. I went through my jobsearch spreadsheet and did some accounting. I have been jobsearching for 18 weeks; given that I only search on weekdays, I've had 90 days in which I was actively searching. In that time I've done 36 job applications, and from those, I've had 11 interviews with 8 different institutions. That's a little better than one potential job for every five applications.

Mind you, three of those interviews have not actually happened yet. If Agricultural West Coast Institution eventually gets their shit together and requests an interview for next week, I'll have all three within five days.

It's exciting, of course, but it's also quite terrifying. Mainly because at the moment I'm in the middle of interview processes with places in the northern midwest and California, and next week will be interviewing with the company I work for now and a large east coast institution. So that's one for Chicago...and three against.

It's not just the idea of moving that's unsettling, but why I'm considering it. The ease with which I accept the idea of upping sticks to a new town makes me uncomfortable about my distinct lack of roots, and the lack of probability that I will ever put any down. In its own way, that's fine; I don't really need roots, or at least I think I don't. I think rootlessness is in some ways a symptom of the information age, because my circle of friends is national and international, and I fulfill my need for community through that rather than through local friends. I think about Steinbeck's Travels With Charley and how he encountered an entire community of people who lived in large trailers, following whatever work they could find.

But I'm at that point where the decisions I make now are going to influence how the rest of my life plays out. So far I seem to be making the more perilous choices a lot. Which I suppose in some ways is good, but at what point do the risks not being worth the penalties if you fail?

Meanwhile, I haven't had a good night's sleep in two weeks. I yearn for the days of undiagnosed apnea.

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WELL.

EGGPLANTS are off the "potentially edible" list with an annotation: Taste like badly-steamed broccoli.

I'm pretty sure I salted them right this time, because when I stir-fried them they didn't absorb nearly as much oil as badly-salted eggplant is said to. But when they don't taste like salt, they have a lovely creamy texture and a dreadful flavour. Shame; I had high hopes for eggplant.

ONWARDS TO CELERIAC. I have high hopes for this, too. Supposedly it behaves like a potato. WE SHALL SEE, CELERY ROOT. WE SHALL SEE.