#Clerk Clara | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

aloysiavirgata · 6 months ago

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Prompt: candlelight concert, jealousy, ust to msr. Thanks so much, big fan here😊.

It was the kind of hotel where you could have set The Shining if it had any charm or ambiance. It had only desolation to recommend it to Kubrick and storm-downed trees across the lonely highway to recommend it to the X-Files division.

***

It was the kind of hotel you wouldn’t even have an affair at because it was too depressing to be salacious.

It was the kind of hotel where the homeless lived by the week, where alcoholics were subsumed, where mid-level corporate managers in short-sleeved button downs killed themselves. There was cheap wood paneling, shag carpet, and a desk clerk named Rabbit.

Rabbit smelled of Marlboros and Olde English 800. Mulder bet there was an El Camino, lovingly cared for, under a tarp next to a double-wide.

Mulder was a snob at times.

“We got a room each for you and your pretty niece,” Rabbit said, winking at Scully like he was Tom Jones in Vegas. “Unless….?”

Scully slapped down her badge like a royal flush, also in Vegas.

“Room each,” she said, tight-lipped and terse.

Rabbit folded.

***

Mulder found the piano when they were hunting for a laundry room. It was in a forlorn, moth-eaten event hall with swags of sun-faded velour curtains; cobwebs frosted with neglected dust.

He sat down at the decrepit thing, white keys like a smoker’s teeth, and he limbered his fingers. There was a candelabra on the top, a sad object filled with half-melted candles the color of old bones.

Scully lit the candles with the Zippo she’d carried since the Apalachicola National Forest. “You don’t play, Mulder.” She paused, cocked her head. “Or do you? Fox Mulder, do you play the piano too?”

He had the stab of jealousy that he always had about Ed Jerse. Ed got her to ink her body after a few hours, and she didn’t know he’d taken fucking piano lessons from 4 to 17.

He played her Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto even though he knew she wouldn’t recognize it. He played it because Scully and Clara might have been friends.

Scully’s mouth was a blooming peony as she watched him, eyes the Star of Bethlehem. Scully watched him like oysters watch the tide.

“Agent Scully is already in love,” he heard again, and played as though he were auditioning for Julliard.

***

Scully went to the hallway in the thundering dark. The storm gods had been aroused and the night was such a lonely place, especially by flashlight. A cold Coke would be something to do, at least. Something to roll between her palms.

He thought the same - a Lipton iced tea in hand.

“Hi,” she said, looking abashed. “The thunder was -“

“The storm,” he said, at the same time.

They smiled. They looked away.

There was nothing else, there was nothing, just the shapeless silken lines of her pajamas and the foxy silk of her hair and the smiling Cheshire Cat slice of a waxing moon.

***

The moon was so bright and the universe was so big and forever is a long, long time to be alive and alone.

***

She followed him so she could leave later, he knew that. He’d learned her the way he learned everything - intensely and entirely and in a way that consumed him, piece by piece.

He made love to her like an acolyte at a shrine. He made love to her the way flowers make love to the sun.

Fish do not know they are in water.

***

He felt her stir at 3 AM. “Scully,” he breathed, a prayer hastily invoked.

“I didn’t mean to wake you, I-“

He heard her blushing, somehow, in the dark. He heard the blood rush to her good cheekbones, to her beautiful, lopsided mouth. Her capillaries plumped, lush with hot blood. Everywhere, everywhere.

“Please,” he said. “Scully don’t.”

Scully froze, her shoulder blades tensed, ready to unfurl. Ready to let her fly. “It wasn’t-“

He touched her spine like the Western Wall. He touched her spine like a rosary.

***

She never unmade her hotel bed and she didn’t care who knew it and she knew he was jealous of Ed or maybe Padgett and she was jealous of Diana and possibly Phoebe but Fox Mulder had a mouth like the last ripe plum in October. Fox Mulder kissed her throat like a man in the desert kisses an oasis.

They stayed three nights, for the storm and then the pancakes and then the burnt-orange solitude.

Mulder’s fingers were restless and searching and eternally wanting someplace firm to settle. He kissed her by Bolero and he made love to her by Giazotro and he fucked her to Bizet.

Scully had learned Hot Cross Buns on a keyboard, Scully had learned the recorder in 4th grade. She had learned from Mulder that money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy opportunities and access and mitigate risk.

She started dressing like she’d been raised with it - silk lingerie and a good stylist and Chanel Brown Sugar lipstick. She saw the way society responded and doubled down. Her heels were high and thin and clicked like distant gunshots.

***

She cupped her hand over his at the steering wheel. He had beautiful hands, the color of graham crackers, with bones from an anatomy text. If she could draw she would draw them, and then his strange mossy eyes and the way his lips kissed themselves.

She would draw his back and she would laugh and say “Fox Mulder, you vain thing.”

And then, because she could, she would drag him on top of her. His body was hot and heavy and dangerous and safe.

***

Her hand cupped his and it was an eggshell, so tiny and pale and fragile. He wanted to kiss her little white knuckles and say I love you, I love you.

He wanted to crush her house-sparrow bones into a powder and drink them.

***

They drove into the east, into the east, and they were tenderly, tremulously, alive

#xf fanfic #xfiles fanfic #msr #my fic #prompt #inbox #nebulous canon of S7 #season 7

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blightededen · 6 months ago

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While packing our Gag Pouches & putting our jellybeans in a row for ToonFest, SOS Shopping Mall found a seemingly ‘unusable’ gadget. However, Sealipup & I knew what to do and whipped something up like a baker baking a Whole Cream Pie! 🥧

Now at ToonFest: The Great Fanfair, we also bring you their staff favorites as transfer stickers! ⚙️🐭

Worlds collide as we bring together SOS Toons Clerk Clara, Barnacle Bessie, Clumsy Ned, and Flippy and the dastardly V.P. for biggest party in town! 🎊

They will only be available in-person at GalaxyCon. We only have around 360 stickers in total with about 70 for each design, so be sure to grab yours as soon as possible! 👀

(here’s also the solo vers of mine as well!!)

#toonblr #toontown #ttr #toontownrewritten #toontown rewritten

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gorgugplushie · 1 year ago

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Hey i know those gusy .

#toontown #toonblr #tto #toontag #toontown corporate clash #corporate clash #toontown online #ttcc #toontown rewritten #flippy doggenbottom #clerk clara #my art.

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coldlesbians · 9 months ago

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Clara - OC

So I really wanted to see her as an IDV survivor, I actually made this before the clerk concept, you can tell by how I was still figuring out that IDV ish style, but I finally shaded it and added some lighting. I want to kiss her !!!

I only realized a little later that she would be too similar to female dancer in terms of job, :( but anyways to me she is a rescuer.

Cant read the note at the bottom?????? Worry not!

“Please note: This is a pre-existing character of mine that I drew as an IDV survivor, she isn't a fan concept for a potential new survivor! I made this purely for self indulgence! Thank you :3”

#idv art #idv oc #idv fanart #idv #identity v #identity 5 #idv survivor

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haggishlyhagging · 11 months ago

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It would take Diane Joyce nearly ten years of battles to become the first female skilled crafts worker ever in Santa Clara County history. It would take another seven years of court litigation, pursued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, before she could actually start work. And then, the real fight would begin.

For blue-collar women, there was no honeymoon period on the job; the backlash began the first day they reported to work—and only intensified as the Reagan economy put more than a million blue-collar men out of work, reduced wages, and spread mounting fear. While the white-collar world seemed capable of absorbing countless lawyers and bankers in the 80s, the trades and crafts had no room for expansion. "Women are far more economically threatening in blue-collar work, because there are a finite number of jobs from which to choose," Mary Ellen Boyd, executive director of Non-Traditional Employment for Women, observes. "An MBA can do anything. But a plumber is only a plumber." While women never represented more than a few percentage points of the blue-collar work force, in this powder-keg situation it only took a few female faces to trigger a violent explosion.

Diane Joyce arrived in California in 1970, a thirty-three-year-old widow with four children, born and raised in Chicago. Her father was a tool-and-die maker, her mother a returned-goods clerk at a Walgreen's warehouse. At eighteen, she married Donald Joyce, a tool-and-die maker's apprentice at her father's plant. Fifteen years later, after working knee-deep in PCBs for years, he died suddenly of a rare form of liver cancer.

After her husband's death, Joyce taught herself to drive, packed her children in a 1966 Chrysler station wagon and headed west to San Jose, California, where a lone relative lived. Joyce was an experienced bookkeeper and she soon found work as a clerk in the county Office of Education, at $506 a month. A year later, she heard that the county's transportation department had a senior account clerk job vacant that paid $50 more a month. She applied in March 1972.

"You know, we wanted a man," the interviewer told her as soon as she walked through the door. But the account clerk jobs had all taken a pay cut recently, and sixteen women and no men had applied for the job. So he sent her on to the second interview. "This guy was a little politer," Joyce recalls. "First, he said, 'Nice day, isn't it?' before he tells me, 'You know, we wanted a man.' I wanted to say, 'Yeah, and where's my man? I am the man in my house.' But I'm sitting there with four kids to feed and all I can see is dollar signs, so I kept my mouth shut."

She got the job. Three months later, Joyce saw a posting for a "road maintenance man." An eighth-grade education and one year's work experience was all that was required, and the pay was $723 a month. Her current job required a high-school education, bookkeeping skills, and four years' experience— and paid $150 less a month. "I saw that flier and I said, ‘Oh wow, I can do that.’ Everyone in the office laughed. They thought it was a riot. . . . I let it drop."

But later that same year, every county worker got a 2 to 5 percent raise except for the 70 female account clerks. "Oh now, what do you girls need a raise for?" the director of personnel told Joyce and some other women who went before the board of supervisors to object. "All you'd do is spend the money on trips to Europe." Joyce was shocked. "Every account clerk I knew was supporting a family through death or divorce. I'd never seen Mexico, let alone Europe." Joyce decided to apply for the next better-paying "male" job that opened. In the meantime, she became active in the union; a skillful writer and one of the best-educated representatives there, Joyce wound up composing the safety language in the master contract and negotiating what became the most powerful county agreement protecting seniority rights.

In 1974, a road dispatcher retired, and both Joyce and a man named Paul Johnson, a former oil-fields roustabout, applied for the post. The supervisors told Joyce she needed to work on the road crew first and handed back her application. Johnson didn't have any road crew experience either, but his application was accepted. In the end, the job went to another man.

Joyce set out to get road crew experience. As she was filling out her application for the next road crew job that opened, in 1975, her supervisor walked in, asked what she was doing, and turned red. "You're taking a man's job away!" he shouted. Joyce sat silently for a minute, thinking. Then she said, "No, I'm not. Because a man can sit right here where I'm sitting."

In the evenings, she took courses in road maintenance and truck and light equipment operation. She came in third out of 87 applicants on the job test; there were ten openings on the road crew, and she got one of them.

For the next four years, Joyce carried tar pots on her shoulder, pulled trash from the median strip, and maneuvered trucks up the mountains to clear mud slides. "Working outdoors was great," she says. "You know, women pay fifty dollars a month to join a health club, and here I was getting paid to get in shape." The road men didn't exactly welcome her arrival. When they trained her to drive the bobtail trucks, she says, they kept changing instructions; one gave her driving tips that nearly blew up the engine. Her supervisor wouldn't issue her a pair of coveralls; she had to file a formal grievance to get them. In the yard, the men kept the ladies' room locked, and on the road they wouldn't stop to let her use the bathroom. "You wanted a man's job, you learn to pee like a man," her supervisor told her.

Obscene graffiti about Joyce appeared on the sides of trucks. Men threw darts at union notices she posted on the bulletin board. One day, the stockroom storekeeper, Tony Laramie, who says later he liked to call her "the piglet," called a general meeting in the depot's Ready Room. "I hate the day you came here," Laramie started screaming at Joyce as the other men looked on, many nodding. "We don't want you here. You don't belong here. Why don't you go the hell away?"

Joyce's experience was typical of the forthright and often violent backlash within the blue-collar work force, an assault undisguised by decorous homages to women's "difference." At a construction site in New York, for example, where only a few female hard-hats had found work, the men took a woman's work boots and hacked them into bits. Another woman was injured by a male co-worker; he hit her on the head with a two-by-four. In Santa Clara County, where Joyce worked, the county's equal opportunity office files were stuffed with reports of ostracism, hazing, sexual harassment, threats, verbal and physical abuse. "It's pervasive in some of the shops," says John Longabaugh, the county's equal employment officer at the time. "They mess up their tools, leave pornography on their desks. Safety equipment is made difficult to get, or unavailable." A maintenance worker greeted the first woman in his department with these words: "I know someone who would break your arm or leg for a price." Another new woman was ordered to clean a transit bus by her supervisor—only to find when she climbed aboard that the men had left a little gift for her: feces smeared across the seats.

In 1980, another dispatcher job opened up. Joyce and Johnson both applied. They both got similarly high scores on the written exam. Joyce now had four years' experience on the road crew; Paul Johnson only had a year and a half. The three interviewers, one of whom later referred to Joyce in court as "rabble-rousing" and "not a lady," gave the job to Johnson. Joyce decided to complain to the county athrmative action office.

The decision fell to James Graebner, the new director of the transportation department, an engineer who believed that it was about time the county hired its first woman for its 238 skilled-crafts jobs. Graebner confronted the roads director, Ron Shields. "What's wrong with the woman?" Graebner asked. “I hate her," Shields said, according to other people in the room. "I just said I thought Johnson was more qualified," is how Shields remembers it. "She didn't have the proficiency with heavy equipment." Neither, of course, did Johnson. Not that it was relevant anyway: dispatch is an office job that doesn't require lifting anything heavier than a microphone.

Graebner told Shields he was being overruled; Joyce had the job. Later that day, Joyce recalls, her supervisor called her into the conference room. "Well, you got the job," he told her. "But you're not qualified." Johnson, meanwhile, sat by the phone, dialing up the chain of command. "I felt like tearing something up," he recalls later. He demanded a meeting with the affirmative action office. "The affirmative action man walks in," Johnson says, "and he's this big black guy. He can't tell me anything. He brings in this minority who can barely speak English . . . I told them, 'You haven't heard the last of me.'" Within days, he had hired a lawyer and set his reverse discrimination suit in motion, contending that the county had given the job to a "less qualified" woman.

In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled against Johnson. The decision was hailed by women's and civil rights groups. But victory in Washington was not the same as triumph in the transportation yard. For Joyce and the road men, the backlash was just warming up. "Something like this is going to hurt me one day," Gerald Pourroy, a foreman in Joyce's office, says of the court's ruling, his voice low and bitter. He stares at the concrete wall above his desk. "I look down the tracks and I see the train coming toward me."

The day after the Supreme Court decision, a woman in the county office sent Joyce a congratulatory bouquet, two dozen carnations. Joyce arranged the flowers in a vase on her desk. The next day they were gone. She found them finally, crushed in a garbage bin. A road foreman told her, "I drop-kicked them across the yard."

-Susan Faludi, Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women

#susan faludi #female oppression #male entitlement #male violence #blue collar #women’s work #pay gap #sexism #misogyny #womens history #us history #amerika

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boonasaurusrex · 2 years ago

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In honor of that post going around about how To Wong Foo is a groundbreaking piece of queer history (which it is), I wanted to type up some of my favorite scenes, because not only is it a groundbreaking piece of queer history, its also goddamn hilarious and a great movie all around that everyone should watch more. So, in no particular order (favorites or order of appearance), some of my favorite scenes

(Many of these are half remembered so apologies if they're not the exact dialogue)

Vida: No way, that's the last straw, you've lost all of your princess points! *makes random arm gestures* Chi Chi: *surprise pikachu face* Nuh-uh, she can't do that!

Chi Chi: *in response to being told she can't hitchhike in the middle of the night* Maybe not you two, but I've got more legs than a bucket of chicken

Carol Ann: *slightly tipsy and freshly freed of her abusive husband* You know, I think we should just get rid of all the men Noxeema and Vida: *exchange a look* M-maybe not All the men, sweetie Carol Ann: No, we need to get rid of All Of The Men!

Carol Ann: Okay, we can keep [a couple of male celebrities] but they're not allowed to think or speak.

Noxeema: *applying makeup to a teenage girl in preparation for her first dance* Honey, I've lived in apartments smaller than these pores!

Vida: *walks in on Carol Ann crying after Virgil hit her* Honey, do you like, ever not cry in this room?

Carol Ann: *crying as Vida goes to confront Virgil* He's gonna hurt her so bad! Noxeema: There's...something you need to know about Vida Carol Ann: What? Noxeema and Chi Chi: *panicked look between them* Chi Chi: Vida works out! Noxeema: Vida works out A Lot

Vida: Virgil, I hear that you like to hit women Virgil: Well, some women just need to get hit Vida: Well, conversely, some men just need to get hit back *decks him*

Vida: I think I'll wear a Say Something Hat today. Today feels like a Say Something Hat Day.

Noxeema: *After talking with the lady everyone thought was mute* You're not gonna start walking on water now, are you?

Noxeema: *running around out of sight, making a lot of excited noises* Vida: What is it Noxy, are you dying? Noxeema: *armfulls of colorful clothes* Look! They're from the 60's!

Clara: *reaching for fringe skirt* Oh, this one's for me Noxeema: Oh no no, honey, this is fringe! This is - *hugs skirt* - I think I might pass out -

Store Clerk: Oh no, you can't go up there, that's old stock that didn't sell Noxeema: *Ignoring him entirely*

There's SO MANY MORE but I'm very tired. I might add to this later, anyone else is free to pile on!

#long post #to wong foo #to wong foo thanks for everything julie newmar #my posts

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