You know, there's such joy and love in this essay that I'm grinning like a big dope after reading it. My own awareness of K/S has always been more as a historical thing -- stuff They used to write Way Back When. Reading this essay by someone who is my contemporary and seeing the process by which you were exposed not only to K/S but to slash itself really brings it into the present as a live thing and not as the Turgid Classical Prose of slash -- you know, sort of the slash version of "Silas Marner" or something.

You've made this real and present-tense for me, and your descriptions were so full of love and so damned witty that it was just a delight to read from beginning to end. *goopy grin*