#...on saturday

[eirenical]

For the WIP game, laugh??

Well, you just gave me an excuse to post a very belated...

WiP Wednesday

...so, thank you, @thehumantrampoline! ;D

[If anyone else wants to send words for the WiP game, please do! And if you want to try specifying a fandom, you can do so. If it's a fandom I've been in, odds are I have a WiP for it. XD]

Set about 6-12 months after Li Lianhua visits Tianji Hall to impart a little Yangzhouman-healing to Fang Duobing...

[Earlier snippets of this fic in no particular order.]

Li Lianhua put the latest of Xiaobao's letters into the box with the rest and tucked it away.  Most of his letters were much the same: effusive thanks, admonishments to take care of himself, threats against Wuyan's imaginary thieving impulses, offers of hospitality… and now this.

Li Lianhua lifted the box that had come with this latest letter.  He'd ignored Xiaobao's offer of gifts and assistance, because such things hadn't been necessary.  They had their garden, they had his doctoring skills, and Lao Di had numerous accounts that no one in Jinyuanmeng was even aware of, much less would notice if they were utilized.  They didn't want for anything… at least not anything money could buy.

It seemed, however, that Xiaobao was determined to send gifts, regardless of their need or lack thereof.  Li Lianhua slowly opened the box, then sucked in a breath.

The hairpin was delicate silver in the shape of a branch, with little fans of needle-like leaves sprouting from the forked end.  It was delicately made, but had a comforting heft to it, sturdy enough to take some rough handling.  It wasn't the quite the lotus theme he had been thus far drawn to in the hair ornaments he'd worn in this new life, but it was close kin.  Li Lianhua rans his fingers over it, a smile twitching onto his lips in spite of himself.

It was beautiful.

It also wasn't an entirely appropriate gift for a child to give an adult.  The craftsmanship was masterful, the detailing exquisite; it must have cost a small fortune.  And if Li Lianhua wished to spend that kind of money on his hair ornaments, then he would have done.  He didn't need a child picking out his accessories.

…then again, the money was already spent.  So what was the harm?

Later on, as he was making dinner, gentle fingers ran themselves along the new hairpin, where it was threaded through his hair, before drifting down his neck in a gentle caress.  Li Lianhua shivered as those hands were replaced by lips and a hint of teeth.  Just as Li Lianhua was about to put down his knife and forget about dinner for a while, those hands and those lips disappeared, replaced by a low grumble of a voice.

"The hairpin is new."

A pause.

"Fang Duobing?"

Li Lianhua returned to chopping up the vegetables for dinner.  "How did you know?"

"He might have mentioned it one or two letters ago.  Sent a drawing.  Asked if I thought you'd like it."

Li Lianhua snorted out a brief laugh.  "Did he, now.  And you neglected to warn me about this, why?"

Those hands returned, this time wrapping around his middle, A-Fei's body pressed all along his back.  There was still enough of a chill in the air from the last vestiges of winter that Li Lianhua appreciated the heat that came with the cuddling, but it was going to be far more difficult to cook with A-Fei hanging off of him like an octopus.  "That isn't an answer, Lao Di."

A-Fei buried his smile into the crook of Li Lianhua's neck, along with a few scattered kisses.  When he eventually lifted his head, Li Lianhua's own head was spinning just a little, and he'd almost forgotten his own question by the time Lao Di answered it.

"I wanted it to be a surprise."

Li Lianhua took a moment to regather his widely scattered thoughts before responding.  "…why?"

Lao Di stepped back, taking all that lovely warmth with him, as he slowly slid the hair ornament out of his own hair and began to strip off his outer layers.  Li Lianhua found himself shivering again… and not altogether from the cold.  By the time A-Fei had reached the bed and stretched out on it, he was completely, gloriously nude.  He crooked a finger in Li Lianhua's direction, and for just a moment, Li Lianhua had no idea how he was supposed to respond to all of that on display in his bed.

Then A-Fei smiled.  "Don't you want the rest of your present?"

…maybe he could get used to surprises.

[punkrock-bottom]

Customer started yelling at me because I was 1 minute late to open the shop so I banned him from shopping with us and locked the door on him. Play stupid games.

[ayo-edebiri]

#She really got the job done

CHAPPELL ROAN - SNL (50.05)

[classichorrorblog]

[fxreflyes]

“tumblr mutual” beloved friend I would pick up at the airport if y’all visited my home city

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[shakespearian-love]

Morning kisses with you ❦

[hawberries]

the GIRLS!!!

[wanologic]

💅💅💅

[saintclementinearts]

girl who is going to get the job done

[elodieunderglass]

hi. what do you mean

[gingerswagfreckles]

Hey y'all. With the Writer's Guild of America on strike, you might be hearing a lot more about something called "residuals," which are payments that the writers get for the studios continuing to air their work on reruns and such. Already I'm seeing people trying to frame the union trying to bargain for better residuals as greedy and unreasonable, so I just wanted to give you guys a peek into my dad's full, 100% real residual payments for writing some of the most watched episodes of American late night television.

Yeah lol. If u hear anyone trying to frame the conversation around residuals as writers being greedy, please do me a favor and punch them straight in the face ❤️🙃🙃

[soaked-doors]

dynasties and dystopias

[horsewizardart]

double date

[ayo-edebiri]

RENEE RAPP

Saturday Night Live — 49x09 (January 20, 2024)