I live in a place where neither cotton, bamboo nor hemp grows especially well. But sheep do fine, so wool's my fabric of choice. When I lived at lower altitude, I wore a lot of linen, again because it grew safely and sanely in the region in which I lived.

There's a big reason that during the medieval period, cotton and silk were luxury fabrics in Northern Europe - distance and transit. But every peasant had a tunic of linen and/or wool. Those were the fabrics that were most easily developed in their local areas. And yet, European production of linen and wool is at an alltime low.

Flax won't grow where cotton grows, and sheep don't thrive where bamboo and silk thrive. Long-staple hemp is equally picky about location. But that doesn't mean that we should give up on all of these fabrics because they're not universal -- nothing IS.

If we're going to do our bests to eat local, we need to work on wearing local, too. And that infrastructure is in worse shape than our food infrastructure.

Dear LW... It's okay. I'm a Plot Junkie, too.

And it's okay for an academic to be a plot junkie. It really is. I know it can be kind of... quirky, but so be it. Turn it to something useful. (Hey, if I can write a peer reviewed paper about manifestations of mental illness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and have another one on deck about dualism and monism in the Buffyverse...) Write about the utilitarian ethics of Harry versus the moral imperatives of Snape in the first three books... or some such (whatever your field happens to be, there's got to be something that relates...). Even if you don't plan to submit it to one of the popular culture journals, it keeps the brain working.

If it's really bothering you because it seems obsessive, find a new story. My current recommendations run to Doctor Who and Terry Pratchett's Discworld, but your drug of choice may need some fine tuning.

And it's okay... a love of reading, a love of well-designed stories and plots, a desire to pay a visit in a world where imagination is not only acceptable but applauded... it can feel like loving the mythological world inside a 'verse (or ficton, to steal another couple of writers' terms for the time and place in which fiction exists) is somehow morally suspect and juvenile or ill-developed. In reality, we humans have been living so for all of our history. We anthropomorphized the world, then made up stories about the resultant deities, and carried those stories around the world. We've always lived in a world that's at least half fiction.

The last five years to a decade have been hard on we fiction addicts. Reality TV, talk radio, a dearth of good fiction on the stands, the rise of the memoir for everything.... the world has been pretty unkind to imagination for a good decade. It's been easy to feel like we were wrong for liking fiction... the public mood had so turned against it.

And finally, look at what gives you emotional satisfaction in a well-written fanfic and try to convert that into positive action in your real life. Is it the battle to preserve lives and cultures? Is it the high romance (which, admittedly, can get a little thin on the ground as a marriage matures) and young love? Is it the adventure? Respectively, look for employment where you can be a small hero in the battle against that which you oppose (Amnesty Intl, DWB, etc come to mind). Get a sitter or drop the kids off with aunties or grannies and go spend a week or two being young and in love and a little feckless. Go rafting, hike a mountain, or skydive. Figure out which needs you're fulfilling with the stories, and fulfill those needs real-time. If you can't figure it out on your own, talk to another person who is interested in fanfic (even if not the same story-base).