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havethetimeofyourstyles · 4 years ago

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in which harry is the right person at the wrong time.

a/n: hi lovelies! here is my christmas fic for @goldenbluesuit ‘s xmas challenge! i chose the song ‘baby, it’s cold outside’ and it’s my FAVORITE xmas song, so i’ve included bits and pieces of the song throughout the story! hope you all like it, and happy holidays! pls rb and send feedback bc they’re very helpful :)

WORD COUNT: 9.6k of ex lovers to lovers, teacher!harry x lawstudent!yn filled with slight angst, missing someone dearly, and fluff

WARNINGS: mentions of alcohol consumption

COME INTO MY INBOX AND LETS TALK ABOUT ‘BABY, IT’S COLD OUTSIDE’ i’d love to know your thoughts!

pls rb to share! <3

17 December 2020

A chilly and snowy night was upon you as you took a shot of hard liquor. The face of disgust appeared on your face as the liquid slowly went down your throat after you hammered the shot of tequila.

Normally, you wouldn’t pregame when you were going to your friend, Addie’s, house where you would drink some more, but you needed to shake off your nerves that you felt at the moment. You took a deep breath after taking your second shot and you had physically felt yourself starting to relax.

Rolling your head to stretch your neck out, you decided it was time to leave since it was nearing seven in the evening. You called yourself an Uber because of the alcohol in your system and you were planning to sleep over Addie’s place since she said she would bring you back in the morning before you had to go to work.

You waited for your Uber by the front door while you looked in the mirror, putting your black beanie onto your head. You were bundled up in a black university sweater, a camel color coat over, along with tan lounge pants and a pair of black boots. Once you got a notification that your Uber driver, Jason, was in front of your house, you grabbed your overnight bag and headed out the door.

You placed the hood of your sweater over your beanie so you got more warmth since it was quite cold. You were never one for the cold weather, which is unfortunate since you lived in London. You cherished the days where it was sunny and warm; the sun bright and warm as you laid on the grass in complete content.

You missed those days. You missed the days where you didn’t worry about a singular thing.

Looking out the window, on your way to your destination, you watched the snow slightly fall, hitting and building up on the ground while the pedestrians walked through the streets, bundled up in thick layers of clothing. Some people were with others, walking hand in hand or hugging each other through the cold. Even though it was freezing cold outside, there were smiles on their faces because the hold of one another was enough. They could get through the worst snowfall, but if they were in each other’s arms, it wouldn't matter; they could get through anything.

The cold had reminded you that you were missing a pair of strong arms that should’ve been around you through this season, but you were completely frozen—left out in the cold to warm yourself up.

You sighed and the car stopped in front of Addie’s place. You thanked your driver, wishing him a ‘Happy Holidays’ before you got out and buzzed your best friend’s apartment onto the buzzer system; hearing one back, you entered the complex while brushing your shoes onto the floor mat, so you wouldn’t slip while going up the stairs.

You were grateful the building was warm, and you’re sure Addie would crank up the heat for you since you would always complain how ‘bloody cold’ it is all the time.

Once you opened the door, you were met with your entire friend group who were all lounging around in the living area. They all faced the door once you walked in, seeing who the last friend to arrive. Greetings were sent towards you, Addie and Nic got up from their spots on the couch that they’re going to lose because behind them, Elijah and Niall were getting up from their spots on the floor to steal it.

“Hey! There you are! We were all waiting for you,” Addie said, giving you a hug.

Nic went in for a hug before she pulled back and looked at you suspiciously. You looked at her confusingly, wondering why she was looking at you the way she was before she said, “Did you party before you came here?” You furrowed your brows until you remembered that she probably smelt the alcohol that you took before you left.

“Oh, uh, just took a couple of shots before I came here.” The two girls understood quite well, thankfully.

“No worries! Come join,” Addie welcomed you in. The two went back to the living area, only to see that their spots were taken, so they grabbed the two boys’ arms, yanking them out of their seats. You chuckled as you walked to Addie’s room to put all of your belongings.

Once you did that, you exited her room the same time the bathroom door opened across her room. The person in front of you was the reason why you were so anxious before you left; why you needed to relax for a bit and mentally prepare yourself before going to Addie’s place.

The person in front of you was Harry Styles.

The person who had your heart.

The person you were deeply in love with still.

The person who was your ex boyfriend.

“Hi,” he said surprisingly, smiling a bit.

“Hi, Harry,” you replied, inching towards him as he met you halfway. He wrapped his arms around your shoulders as you did the same around his waist, resting your cheek onto his chest. The hug was warm and comforting, like it always was, and you looked forward to these kinds of hugs every time you saw him. But your heart ached every single time.

Pulling away, you gave him a small smile before you two walked out of the hallway and to where your friends were. There was laughter between the two girls and guys as Niall was telling them a joke. Nic was the one who saw you and Harry first, and her laughter died down. She looked at you concerningly, giving you those eyes as if they were asking if you were okay, and you nodded your head to reassure her. You and Harry join the group; you sat on the loveseat on one side of the rectangle wooden table, while Harry sat on the floor on the other side.

You tried joining in on the conversation and laughter, but you couldn’t help but take sneaky glances back to Harry, only to find him getting glances at you as well.

It was hard to focus on anything your friends were saying when Harry was in the same room, but you realized it was also difficult when he wasn’t in the same room because then you were wondering where he was.

It wasn’t easy being friends with Harry after the breakup, good friends, especially; and it pained you to actually act normal around him when all you wanted to do was scream, cry, and have him comfort you. But you did your very best to maintain a cool, calm, and collected mood whenever you’re around him, although inside, your heart was racing and everything you said seemed incoherent.

You tried your best to avoid him after you two split, and he did as well, but being part of the same friend group just didn’t go well with your wishes. You two had to suck it up and be normal around each other.

Being with Harry was possibly the best eight months of your life. To some, it’s not the longest amount of time, but he was one of a kind; you couldn’t find anyone out there like him--not like you were looking anyways. It genuinely felt like you’ve been together for years, and when you two were celebrating your six month anniversary, your friends had questioned you saying ‘It’s only been six months?!’

Your relationship with Harry was all things blissful. It was pure happiness and love, and you wouldn’t want it with anyone else. You two rarely got into fights, and if you did, it was most likely a petty and annoyed argument that would have you two back in each other’s arms only twenty minutes after. He was your fresh breath of air that made you laugh and orgasm…multiple times.

It was all smiles and laughs until it wasn’t.

You two had gotten together the second semester of senior year. Meeting at the library because you couldn’t reach a book, it didn’t take long for you both to get together. You had known him for two weeks until he asked you out on a date where he kissed you for the first time. The dates and kisses continued on for six months until you mutually decided to call it quits.

It wasn’t an easy decision, but considering that Harry was going to a different school that was in a different country for his master’s degree in education for the fall semester, and you were also in the midst of your career; interning at a law firm didn’t quite clear up your schedule, only making you busier by the hour. There was barely any time for the two of you to spend time with each other with how busy and hectic your lives were, so there would most likely be no calls coming in or distant texts that were sent out to make it seem like the void had disappeared.

Like two mature adults, you and Harry called it quits after the summer. He moved away to get his master’s and you kept yourself busy at the law firm. It wasn’t easy--still isn’t easy, but it was for the best. The both of you needed to focus on your careers and yourself before you two were ready enough to get back together. That’s if Harry wanted to get back together anyways.

Of course you wanted to get back together with him, but you didn’t know where he stood on that, or if he was even seeing someone. Throughout the two years that he was away, you only saw him during summer and winter breaks, so he could possibly be seeing someone whenever he goes back to school. But now that he had moved back again, your mind was spiraling because now you got to see him more.

Finally, you broke out of your trance, once again thinking about Harry, you saw him looking at you. The both of you completely tuned out to the conversation and laughter coming from your friends. You held your wine glass up, Harry doing the same while smirking before you both sipped your drinks, hoping the sweet wine would relax your bodies.

Nic was picking out a small paper out of the Santa hat Addie was holding. She took a quick peek at it before, smirking to herself before Addie moved over to you for your turn. As you chose your Secret Santa, you hoped it was a good one. It’s not like you didn’t love your friends, some of them were picky, and by some, you mean Nic.

You looked at the piece of paper, smiling before shoving it into your pocket. Addie moved onto Harry who was the last one to choose, and you watched him as he looked at the paper like it was a poker hand. He raised his brows, smirking before he looked up and started to fold the paper. Your eyes looked down at his polished hands, noticing that he still wears the same rings as he did when you first met him. Your favorites were his initial, thinking how incredibly sexy and alluring they looked on him as he walked around confidently. You’ve stolen them multiple times as well, even if they were too big on you, but the thought of walking around with Harry’s name on you just seemed so enticing.

Niall’s laughter brought you out of your sensual thoughts about Harry’s hands and you realized you were caught staring, and Harry knew exactly what you were looking at with the amount of times he’s caught you staring and fantasizing about his hands. Plus, you openly told him that you had a thing for his hands.

A smug smile was seen from Harry, so you took your attention away from him and towards your friends.

“So, what do we say? $50 limit?” Nic suggested, and Elijah rolled his eyes.

“Why are you trying to make me broke? You know I have a huge family, like, 15 cousins!” Elijah debates.

Nic gasped dramatically. “I’m offended you don’t consider us family, Eli!” Elijah playfully rolls his eyes again, turning his head to the side as he smiled into his shoulder, blushing a bit.

You chuckled at their playful banter. You’re a bit surprised they hadn’t gotten together yet because ever since you met them, you could practically feel the tension between them. They were just too stubborn to admit that they liked each other.

“Okay, how about we make it maximum $30?” Harry pitched in. Your eyes had immediately averted to him, and it was like he captured you just by the sound of his voice. “We have exactly six days to get our gifts,” he added. Your friend group has always been one for procrastinating. Everyone is so busy these days that it gets harder to plan hangouts where the entire group could go, but you were all family, so if the gatherings were at three in the morning, everyone would be there.

The group agreed, telling him that was a solid number. You caught Harry’s eye and he softly smiled at you. Giving him one back, you suddenly felt nervous as he smiled, so you chugged the rest of your wine and walked to the kitchen to open a new bottle to bring to the living area.

The bottle made a loud pop sound, which earned an in sync ‘Woo!’ from the group as it was a tradition you all created whenever a new bottle of wine was being opened. Smiling to yourself, you poured yourself a glass before downing it. As you were doing so, Harry walked into the kitchen with his own glass in his hand.

“Hogging all the wine, aren’t you, Y/N?” He teased to clear the awkward and anxious tension between you two, and luckily, you stifled out a giggle.

“You know me and my wine.” You refilled his empty glass while taking a sip of yours. Once you fill it halfway, he clinked your glasses together before taking a sip. His lips meeting the sweet but bitter taste of red wine that you so wished was your lips. The way he curled his lips into his mouth and licking his lips, tasting the flavor had you daydreaming such sultry things about his lips.

You cleared your throat, breaking yourself out of your gaze. “How are you, H? How’s work?”

Harry’s cheeks warmed up at the simple nickname. “I’m doing good, yeah. Work is good. The school is great.” This was Harry’s first semester teaching, and he absolutely loved it. He loved being in the classroom setting, interacting and making sure his students understood the material. He wanted to teach elementary kids, but that would require knowing various subjects when he wanted to focus more on ninth grade English.

“I’m happy for you,” you confessed. You were happy for him, but you wanted to be happy with him. “I know you’re a great teacher, and your students must love you.” You bumped him with your hip gently.

“They’re great. A couple of them have this weird crush on me for some reason.”

“I mean how could they not.” You realized you said that out loud, and you’re fully blaming the alcohol and the few glasses of wine that you already had, leaving you with a rosy cheek tint glow. Harry didn’t say anything but smug as he continued to sip on his drink. You slipped past him to join your friends, and Harry followed. Addie gave you a knowing look, hoping to communicate with just her eyes as she saw you and Harry walk out of the kitchen together, and you simply nodded, gesturing that you were okay.

The rest of the night went by quite fun as the boys helped Addie hang up the rest of her decorations while scoffing and rolling her eyes because they weren’t cooperating. You and Nic were sitting on the floor watching and laughed, pouring yourselves more glasses of wine. Your heart skipped a few beats as you watched Harry the entire time, laughing and smiling, and sometimes looking over at you just to get a simple glance at your face to suffice his heart from the heartache of not being able to hold or kiss you.

You’ve always liked shopping alone. Shopping with Nic and Addie could be stressful, no matter how much you loved them. You would only go to the shoppes with them if you weren’t looking for anything to buy, but since you were Christmas shopping and the stores were getting busier counting down to Christmas day, you had passed on their invitation to shop with them. There was nobody bugging or nagging you, causing you to get distracted; just you, a basketful of snacks, and Christmas music playing through your headphones.

You couldn’t wait to give your Secret Santa gift because you’ve put a lot of thought into it ever since you found out who your receiver was. You’ve been doing Secret Santa with your friends since the third year of college. At first, your friends group was only you, Nic, Addie, and Niall—you’ve known Niall since you were sixteen, and you met the girls your first year of uni—until Nic met Elijah during the second semester of junior year, who was quickly accepted, and then you met Harry.

You’ve all become a close knit of friends, and each and every single one of you have met other people, but there was nothing like this group. With bonding and connecting so well, all you needed was each other, and you couldn’t be more grateful.

As you were looking at the collection of whiskey, you felt a body brush passed you, slightly bumping into you as they tried getting through the narrow aisle. You jolted forward a tad bit, making you take a step forward to let the person behind you pass through.

“So sorry,” the familiar voice said. The music playing through your headphones was not even halfway up since you still wanted to be aware of your surroundings, but you could recognize that voice anywhere.

Turning around to look at the person behind you, sure enough, it was the one and only.

“Harry?” You called out, taking out your headphones. He turned around, and once he saw you, he immediately smiled.

“H-Hi. I didn’t expect to see you,” he nervously blurted out a false statement. He knew that this was your go to store and you would always drag him there because they always had your favorite snacks in stock.

You chuckled. “Yeah, I didn’t expect to see you here either.” Unlike his statement, yours was true. When you were with him, he would always ask you why you couldn’t stop at any of the other shops because this one was on the other side of where you lived. But you simply told him that it was because you would feel like you would be cheating on this store with the others because this was your go-to place, and the employees here were just lovely.

“Shopping for yourself?” Harry asked.

You looked down at your basket. “Oh, no. For my Secret Santa. What about you? What are you doing here?”

“I, uh, I was on this side of town and,” he turned around to face the wine section before grabbing a bottle of Pinot Noir. “Just needed to get this,” he said as he held it up.

“Night in?”

“Hmm, yeah,” he nodded.

“With…someone, or?” You tried your best to not show your anxiousness when you asked him if he was having a night in with someone that’s not you.

Harry’s eyes widened and he shook his head. “No, no. Not with anyone…” Your shoulders relaxed and a small smile appeared on your face. You slightly nodded your head, containing your relief. “You look great!” He complimented. You were wearing your work attire; a black pencil skirt with a white silk, semi turtleneck long sleeve, and a black coat thrown over. You were also in nude heels, which weren’t the best to shop in, but you had forgotten to bring a change of shoes.

You blushed. “Thank you. I came here straight from work.” Harry’s brows raised. You were always one for a sense of style, so he wasn’t surprised that you would look this good going to work.

“Really? How is work going, by the way?”

“Good, actually. I’m still interning at the law firm, so I’m pretty busy. But overall it’s great! A lot of research, mock cases, and sometimes the interns get to sit and watch in the courtroom. It’s pretty thrilling,” you said excitedly. Harry smiled, missing how you would explain things so eagerly. “This is my last year interning, so hopefully I could work at the law firm I’m already interning at, and become a permanent lawyer there.”

“I’m sure they’d love to have you there. You’re great, really. They’d be stupid to let you go…” he trailed off. There was a double meaning to his words, and you were wondering if Harry thought he was dumb enough to let you go. Not wanting to dwell on his words any longer, you murmured a soft ‘Thanks’ to him and smiled. Harry nodded, mentally beating himself up over his words and how he was really the stupid one to let you go.

“I, uh, should go, or my sister will be suspicious,” you chuckled. “I hope you have a great night, Harry.” You grabbed a bottle of whiskey before walking passed him. You weren’t even done shopping, but you couldn’t be in the same room as him without thinking of the memories that had always lingered, making you nostalgic and sad because you don’t know if you would be able to make more memories with him.

Harry was left alone in the aisle as he watched you walk over to the register to pay for your items. Just when you were done, you looked up, giving him a soft smile and waving at him before you turned around and walked out of the store. Harry’s heart fluttered, but at the same time, it was pounding through his chest. He mentally cursed himself for being so nervous around you, making an awkward tension fill the air. He couldn’t tell you what you were really doing at your store--no, he couldn’t.

Because what would you say if he told you that he’s been going to your store ever since you two broke up and whenever he’s in town just because it reminded him of you. The four walls somewhat mended his broken heart as he felt comfort inside of the shop because some of his best memories of you are in this very store. And since he couldn’t step into your apartment to immediately feel at home, your favorite store would have to do…for now.

Right when you entered Addie’s home, you were met with the loud music of the holiday season, along with Addie, Nic, and Elijah singing the lyrics to one another as they jumped and danced with a glass of their preferred alcohol in their hand.

They hadn’t heard the door open since the music was quite loud, so you took the opportunity to take a quick video of them as you smiled at your lovely friends, who felt so careless at the moment. Once the song ended, you put your phone away, and Eli was the one who spotted you first.

“Ah, there she is!” He walked over to you, giving you a big hug. You giggled as he slightly picked you up from the ground and twirling you. You were sure that he was already buzzed, and you were wondering how many glasses he’s had already, or if he pregamed by himself to calm himself down for talking to Nic, just like you had done to prepare you for a night with Harry, which you hadn’t done tonight.

There was a part of you that wanted to take a shot or two to ease your nerves, but you realized that you needed to stop doing that because as far as you know, you and Harry are most likely going to be friends for a long time. So, drinking almost every week did not sound fun to you.

Nic poured you a glass of wine, clinking your glasses together as you took your first sip of alcohol that night. You helped Addie set up the food onto the table along with some Christmas designed plates and utensils. Just as you were counting the utensils, you heard a loud Santa laugh coming from Niall, making everyone turn their heads towards the door. Niall walked in, carrying a bag-full of presents and Harry followed with a three foil wrapped aluminum trays in his hands as he chuckled at Niall’s way of making himself known. Your face immediately heated up at the sight of your ex-boyfriend because he looked good.

Although you loved every version of Harry, there was something about Harry Styles in the snowy winter that made your knees weak. He was bundled up in a sweater with a coat tossed over, and he wore boots. His hair was slightly messy from the wind as he shook off the snow that had fallen onto his locks. His nose was always red too, and when he would press a kiss to your cheek, you would feel the icy cold tip of his nose, contrasting to your warm cheeks. And it’s a tragedy that you’ve never spent a winter season with him when you were together, only two Christmases after the breakup.

Winter Harry was your favorite, and all you wanted to do was snuggle up with him.

Niall and Harry made their rounds to greet everyone, and Harry would always make sure you were the last one he greeted, just so he could hold and hug you a little longer.

“Merry Christmas Eve, Eve,” you said once he got to you. He smiled and chuckled, wrapping his arms around your shoulders. You laid your head against his chest, taking in his scent and natural warmth, even though he just came from the cold. “What’d you bring?” You asked once you pulled away.

“I brought the cheesy garlic bread, brussel sprouts, and crab cakes,” he smiled.

You gasped. “Your specialty. My mouth is already watering.”’ You clapped your hands in excitement.

Harry giggled, leaning against the kitchen countertop. “Sure is, and it’s some of your favorite dishes of mine too,” he remembered. You blushed, heart fluttering as he didn’t forget your favorite foods.

Harry was always a chef of his own; he loved cooking. Learning from Anne, he made it his mission to make his own homemade food after he moved out, and she would always tell him that you could always show your love through food. From there, he learned more about cooking and seemed to love everything about it. Whenever the group has gatherings for special occasions and everyone agrees for a potluck, Harry always made sure to talk to everyone and see what they wanted him to cook.

When you two were together, he did the majority of the cooking. There would be times when you wanted to help, but he would simply tell you that you needed to let him do it and relax. That was something you loved about him—he was always a giver and didn’t expect to receive anything back, in more than one way.

You and Harry were definitely ones for staying in, and he would always whip up the best food that was filled with so much love and flavor.

“Once you two are done loving over there, we’d like some help over here!” Niall called out from the dining area. Your eyes widened as Harry’s cheeks turned pink. Harry held his arm out, gesturing you to go first, and you walked out of the kitchen as he followed behind you.

The group’s attention and eyes were on you and Harry, and your brows furrowed as you mouthed a ‘What?’ at them, and they instantly went back to setting up the food as if nothing happened. You turned around to look at Harry confusingly and he shrugged his shoulders, just as confused.

The music was playing, the decorations were lit up, and the food was settling into everyone’s stomach, followed by drinks as a warm feeling laid over everyone. It was overall a great time with them as it always was, and since Christmas was coming up in just two days, the merry feeling was always everyone’s moods.

As everyone was laughing and having a great time, Addie had gotten a knock from her neighbor, asking if everyone could keep the volume down. Everyone was holding in their laugh because you all hadn’t realized how loud you’ve gotten.

“I’m pretty sure they knew it was going to be a long night when it was just the three of them dancing and screaming,” you pointed out to Addie, Nic, and Elijah, and they all laughed, agreeing.

“Wait, what?” Niall asked confusingly.

“Right when I walked in, they were screaming at the top of their lungs. Wait, I have a video.” You pulled your phone out of the front pocket of your sweater and showed Niall the twenty second video.

He cackled. “Hey, thanks for waiting for us,” he teased, giving your phone back to you.

You leaned back onto Harry’s leg, since you were sitting on the floor and he was sitting on the chair behind you, and you looked up at him to show him the video. He leaned forward, placing his forearms on his thighs as you shifted closer to him so you were sitting in between his legs. Harry’s lips curled into his mouth, and he was grateful that you weren’t facing him because he was flustered. You pressed play, and he watched as he chuckled, watching his friends have a good time.

“Wait, I also wanted to show you this video,” you mentioned once the video was over. You scrolled through your pictures, and Harry was watching you go through your camera roll. He saw pictures of buildings, food, you and the girls, and some of them were just of you. Before he could really think about your own pictures, you found the video of your family dog and showed Harry.

As you and Harry were watching the video, your four other friends were eyeing you two and whispering things to each other suspiciously. Nic took a few pictures of the moment because the sight was just so cute, but everyone was wondering when you two were getting back together.

And you were wondering the same.

For a few minutes, you and Harry were in your own little world as you two talked about your family; never making the effort to change the position you were in--you had just turned your body so you could see him better. You’ve missed times like these where everything else, outside of the bubble you two created, didn’t seem to matter. The way his eyes gleamed when he talked to you had lulled you in, making you depart from every thought you were trying to create while the only thought that dawdled was Harry.

“Alright, let’s pass out our Secret Santa gifts before we’re all too drunk,” Niall suggested, popping yours and Harry’s bubble. You moved out of between Harry’s legs to sit beside him where you were before. You looked up at him, softly smiling and he gave you one back. His eyes looked like they wanted to say something, and you so badly wanted to crawl into his mind to know what he was thinking.

Everyone agreed, getting up to grab their gifts. Addie also grabbed the Santa hat that you had to wear if it was your turn to pass out your gift. The Santa hat had been through four Christamases with the group, and it was the little things that made you happy.

Addie decides to go first since she was the host. She put the Santa hat on before she started. “First one! My Secret Santa is…Elijah!” She walked over to him, giving him her gift as he smiled, thanking her. He opened her gift and gasped as it was a new headset for his PlayStation since he was always talking about how one side was completely dead. Addie placed the hat onto his head as he grabbed his gift.

“So, this one is for…” he smiled before walking over to the other end of the couch. “Nic.” Her eyes widened, taking the gift from his hands, and he took a seat next to her on the floor. She ripped open the wrapping paper before she paused, looking back at him. It was a large rectangle frame of pictures of her and Eli with a note in the middle saying ‘4 years as best friends, countless laughs, and one question unasked. Will you go on a date with me?’ Nic squealed, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. It was like he was proposing to her because she screamed out a loud yes. “Life is too damn short. I can’t wait to go another day without calling you my girl, so I wanted to take my chances,” he told her. You smiled at them, realizing it’s been too long, and you were so happy for them.

It was Nic’s turn, which she completely forgot about because she was so overjoyed, and she walked up to Harry to give him her gift. He thanked her before opening it, receiving a set of nail polish, a few face masks, a vanilla candle, and a gift card to one of his favorite restaurants.

Harry was up, and he was a bit nervous for this one. You knew that it could either be you, Niall, or Addie since you were the three left without gifts. He stood in front of the fireplace as everyone looked at him. You thought he looked absolutely adorable in that Santa hat, which you think every single year. He slowly walked over to Niall, making him beam, but turned around and walked over to you, earning a ‘Hey!’ from Niall.

“Merry Christmas Eve, Eve,” Harry greeted you, handing you your gift. You smiled brightly, grabbing the box. It was a quite heavy box with brown wrapping paper with reindeers on it and a large red bow. “I wrapped it myself,” he smirked, playfully flipping his shirt hair, and you giggled.

You ripped the paper and opened the box, eyes softening. In the box, there was a graphic tee, your —and his—favorite fresh perfume by Jo Malone, five pens with your first and last name engraved in the middle, a Cravings cookbook from Chrissy Teigen and a yellow and white vertical striped apron with the words ‘Summer Lovin’ with a sun embroidered at the top. Your eyes watered at the words at the special but emotional meaning behind it.

Two months before you and Harry broke up, you knew it was the end. You both agreed that you would spend two months together before you had to part ways with one another. It was the most special and fun summer you ever had, but emotionally, it was the worst. Knowing that you weren’t going to be together anymore by the end of it was behind the facade of the endless laughter and love. You really didn’t want it to be over, but you understood and needed to grow separately and blossom with your careers.

The words behind the embroidered apron was from one summer night. You and Harry had a bonfire at the beach, and you were cuddled up with him as he held a blanket around the both of you. You had tequila disguised like water as you held your bottle up to the best summer loving. You wished the circumstances were different, but if it’s meant to be, then he’ll come back to you.

“You’ve always wanted to learn how to cook and I’ve seen that you’re starting to on your Instagram stories, so I thought these were the perfect things to get you so you could be a proper chef now,” he said with a soft smile.

Harry truly paid attention to the small details of your life. Together or not, he intently listened and observed without anyone knowing. He nailed it down to the small details; from the perfume, the pens, and the apron. The sentiment behind it was what made the gift so special, and the person who gifted it to you completed and made it so much better.

As your vision had gone glassy, you sat on your knees, reaching up at Harry for a hug. He bent down to your eye level, sitting on his knees as well as he wrapped his arms around your shoulders. You held him tightly, sniffling into his shoulder as a rush of overwhelming emotions hit you. Your heart fluttered and pounded at the same time—a feeling that was familiar to your body when it came to Harry.

“Thank you so much. This is the most thoughtful gift ever,” you said into his shoulder. This gift was number two on the list of gifts you’ve received from him, following Harry himself as your number one, of course.

Harry pulled his head back slightly to press a kiss to the side of your head. The gesture had made your heart swoon and you smiled against his shoulder. Everyone was watching you two interact, and they all thought this was finally the moment where you two would get back together again. They’ve all seen you two suffer enough being without each other, along with the heavy tension that there was. All they wanted was for you both to be happy.

You pulled away from him, looking up at his green eyes as they stared into you. He offered you a small smile that took your breath away before he wrapped one arm around your shoulder, bringing you into his side as he wasn’t quite done holding you.

After a few minutes, your friends had let you have your moment before Niall complained how he didn’t have a gift yet. You and Harry chuckled, letting go of one another, and he placed the Santa hat onto your head before you slowly started walking over to Niall. When you handed him his gift, he cheered happily before opening it. You had given him several customized guitar pics with his initials printed onto them, a leather notebook since he liked to write songs, and Proper 12 Irish Whiskey, which was fitting because he’s Irish and he likes Connor McGregor. He thanked you with a big hug, picking you up off the ground with one arm as he held the alcohol bottle in the other.

Addie was the last one who hadn’t received a gift, and Niall was her Secret Santa. He gave her a bunch of makeup with your help, and a tupperware set, which she had been asking for since everyone always took her containers because she liked hosting so many parties.

The rest of the night had gone on for a few more hours before everyone was pretty tired, deciding to call it a night. Everyone helped clean up, making sure to help Addie with the dishes and putting or throwing stuff away. Although you were cleaning, you loved your entire group. This was your family--the closest people to you. The ones who know everything about you and would laugh at you when you fall before falling with you. You were entirely grateful for everyone in this room, and you couldn’t have asked for a better group to spend more holidays and days with.

After the cleaning was done, Niall and Eli started to head out, not before Eli was satisfied with the amount of goodbyes he gave Nic with how long the hug was. Niall had to physically pull him off, telling him the Uber was outside.

You were washing your hands before Harry walked over next to you, handing you a towel to dry off your hands. “Thank you,” you muttered, shyly smiling.

“Uh, I wanted to ask if you wanted to come over?” He proposed. Your brows raised at his question. You and the girls had planned on having a sleepover after, but the prospect of going home with Harry had sounded much better (no offense to your friends).

“I was planning to sleepover here…” you decided to innocently tease, even though you knew you were going to say yes.

“I already asked them, and they said I could take you. I could drop you back off here if you want. So, the answer is up to you,” he smirked. A blush appeared onto your cheeks, admiring the fact that he asked your friends for permission if he could take you home.

“There’s bound to be talk tomorrow,” you teased, lightly nudging him.

“I’ll take my chances,” he smiled, a hopeful look presented on his face.

You breathed out a chuckle, looking at him for a moment before you nodded. “Yeah. Let’s go.” Harry’s eyes widened as the corners of his lips turned up. You grabbed your phone and your coat before walking over to Addie and Nic who were both cuddled up on the couch, saying goodbye to them. They sent you a playful wink, and you rolled your eyes as nerves startled to settle in your stomach.

You followed Harry out of the door, the cold air brisking past you as you walked to his car. He opened the passenger and you thanked him before getting in. Harry started the car and the song that was playing was ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside.’ It was a song you loved ever since you were a little girl, and you remembered the times you and your mom would always sing it in the car. You smiled at the memory, humming as you hoped it would be a way to distract you from the anxious feeling that you have.

You started humming to the tune as quietly as you possibly could, but Harry heard it as he started to hum it as well. You looked at him through your peripheral vision, noticing that he started to tap his fingers against the steering wheel.

You were about to start singing until you noticed that he pulled into his driveway, so you contained yourself and closed your coat, getting out of the car as you followed him into his home. You’ve only been inside his home three times--those three times being when he would suggest everyone hang out there. It was a lovely place and whenever you were sitting on his couch, you had wished you shared the space with him.

Harry lit up the fireplace, placing the metal shield in front of it before turning back towards you and smiling. “Make yourself comfortable. I’m just going to get us some hot chocolate, if that’s alright?” He asked, wanting to know your preferred drink.

“Sound good.” You hung your coat onto the coat rack before walking over to his turquoise velvet couch and taking a seat, getting comfortable to an extent, not knowing how comfortable you should get.

Not long after, Harry came back with a wooden tray, and he placed it on the coffee table in front of you. There were two mugs filled with milk, two hot chocolate kits, and spoons.

“I made these for my students, and I just so happened to have two extra kits, so this will be fun,” he smiled, and you gave him one back appreciatively. You thought that it was cute and sweet of him to give something to his students for the holiday season. Normally, teachers don’t give them anything, but Harry wasn’t just any other teacher.

A somewhat comfortable silence fell over you two as you both made your own hot chocolate, and you listened to the fireplace roar. Once you two were done, you clicked your glasses together before taking a sip. The warm and comforting drink made you smile and was overall delicious.

Harry didn’t know what to say or how to say what he really wanted to say. It felt like he had non stop thoughts running through his head, but when he opened his mouth to start, there was a delay. An overwhelming feeling took over him and he wanted to yell at himself for not saying how he really felt.

“Y/N-”

“Harry.”

Just like before, your minds had been in sync, causing you both to speak at the same time. A light laugh came out of both of your mouths.

“You go first,” you told him.

Harry took a deep breath. “How’re you doing?” He asked. Out of everything he could have said, that was the only question that came out of his mouth, but he figured it’s a good start to getting somewhere.

“Truthfully?” He nodded. “I’m doing okay. I’ve managed to distract myself from worrying about the future with work, and so far, it’s been helping.”

“What are you worried about?” Harry wondered curiously. He could feel his heart pounding through his chest, and if he’s being honest, it’s been that way the first time he saw you…ever.

“Worried if I’m gonna be where I want to be career wise, and…” you trailed off.

“And what?” He encouraged you to continue. His stare was so intimidating and deep that the words flew off your tongue, making them unforgettable. “Ba--Y/N?” He called out for you, noticing how he almost slipped up and called you ‘baby,’ and you so wished he hadn’t stopped himself.

You finally mustered up the courage to speak your thoughts. “I’m afraid that I’m gonna be alone,” you said honestly.

Harry’s brows furrowed, shaking his head instantly. “You’re not alone, no. You have your family, all of us--your friends, me-”

“You?” Your brows raised.

“Yeah-”

“Harry, you’re the reason why I’m so worried…” you confessed. You were starting to get frustrated--not at Harry, but at yourself because you had planned to have this conversation a different day. You tried to calm yourself down, and Harry could practically see that you were getting angry at yourself. You had a certain stressful and frustrated look that he would notice when you started to beat yourself up over things. And throughout the months of being with you, especially when you were in the midst of law school, he learned how to calm you down.

Harry placed his hand on your knee; the touch being unexpected to you, but it had brought you immediate comfort. He pulled you into his side and you rested your head on his shoulder, looping your arm under his, the one that’s on your leg, and hugged his arm. Harry’s other hand touched your arm, caressing and soothing you. His actions had felt very natural and familiar to him. He would comfort you like this when you were feeling stressed. Normally, he wanted to cuddle you tightly, but this was your preferred way to calm down because in a way, he was still holding you, and you were still in control and didn’t feel like you were suffocating if he had held you tightly.

You stayed like that for a few moments, and you had calmed down a bit already, but you just wanted to be close to him and cherish the moment.

After a few minutes, you pulled away and turned towards him, smiling softly. Your heart warmed at the fact that he remembered exactly what to do when you started to feel anxious, and you may have fallen in love with him even more…after all these years.

“Now, wanna tell me why you’re so worried?” He asked softly, not wanting his tone to be pressuring, and you’re grateful for it.

“I’m worried I’m going to have to live a life without you. It terrifies me to think about you going out and meeting someone, and I would have to watch you get married to someone else that’s not me. That you would be sharing this home with someone that’s not me.” Your eyes start to water, and you had mentally told yourself that you wouldn’t cry, but you didn’t believe yourself in the slightest. “Watching you love someone else is going to be the most difficult thing I would have to do.”

Your tears had fully fallen down your face, which is unfortunate because you both had such a good day with your friends and it was nearly Christmas. Quickly wiping your tears away, you got up from the couch, and headed towards the door. Harry was confused until he saw you grab your coat, putting it on. In a flash, Harry got up from the couch, walking towards you.

“W-What are you doing?” He asked.

“I really can’t stay…” you told him sadly. You had no idea how you were getting home or back to Addie’s since it’s snowing, so you don’t know if there were any Ubers out, especially at this time. “This evening has been…so very nice, Harry.”

“You don’t have to leave. Baby, it’s cold outside, c’mon,” he pleaded with worried eyes. Your heart melted at his words and the name that he used to call you, making you pause in your movement.

“Please,” he pleaded softly, taking a small step forward, and your breath hitched in your throat as you looked up at him. There was a dead silence between you two that was tension filled, and you had no clue what was going to happen next until he opened his mouth.

“Mind if I move in closer?” He whispered. The sound would barely be audible if anyone else was there, so he said those words specifically for you to hear.

You shook your head, and he took another step forward. Your bodies were a centimeter away from being pressed up against one another, and your heart was beating so fast, making your hands shake and tremble. He looked down at you so intently that you were under his spell, and you were conflicted as you wish you knew how to break the spell as his green eyes looked deep into you, luring you in even more.

You took a deep breath. “Kiss me already,” you breathed out. Harry’s heart nearly stopped at your words, but he slightly smirked as he blushed, brushing your hair behind your ears before taking your face into your hands and leaning down to place a deep and passionate kiss onto your lips.

This feeling, this touch, this man was what you’ve been waiting for these past two years. Throughout those years, you felt like giving up; accepting the fact that he wasn’t going to love you again. But he had proved you wrong in the simple brush of his lips and tongue that were in sync with yours, making the spark between you grow bigger and bigger. The spark that had never lost its power, but was on pause.

You grabbed a fistful of his shirt, pulling him closer as the other hand was wrapped around his back. Harry had you pushed up against his front door, and you had the urge to lift your leg up to wrap it around him, but you resisted.

Harry wanted more, too. His hands trailed down from your face to your back, closing the nonexistent proximity between you, and guided you back to the couch. You were walking backwards, completely trusting him that he wouldn’t let you fall as his lips never left yours.

You giggled once the back of your legs hit the couch, falling onto the soft material as Harry hovered over you, laying in between your legs. He looked at you for a moment, studying every freckle, the crimson color on your cheeks, the curve when you smile, your glimmering eyes, and your cute nose. He knew that it was exactly how he remembered. After a couple of years being separated, a beautiful face like yours was hard to forget.

“You’re quite crazy to think I’d want to live the rest of my life with someone else when you’re right in front of me,” he suddenly said. Your eyes widened at his confession. “Never wanna be without you ever again. Thought you didn’t want to be with me when I came back, so I just didn’t bother. But you have no idea how much I missed you. I missed you so much.”

He placed soft kisses all around your face as he spoke, leaving you feeling so tender and soft as he was so gentle with you. For someone who’s on her way to becoming a lawyer and always having to have an answer for everything, you were speechless. The words that you’ve been waiting for for so long were music to your ears. It rolled off his tongue so smoothly, slick like honey, and you connected your lips with his again, swirling your tongue against his as you devoured his words. Hands finding their way to his hair, you gripped on his locks and pulled just the way he liked it, earning a groan from him, and you smirked against his mouth.

You pulled back, leaving him breathless. Swollen lips, blushed cheeks, and smiles plastered on his face, you said the words you’ve been itching to say. “I love you,” you blurted out. The words had rolled off your tongue so effortlessly, making shivers run down Harry’s spine as his eyes watered up. “I was listening to Elijah earlier, and he’s right. Life’s too fucking short to not have what you want.”

He took one of your hands into his, bringing it up to his lips before placing a kiss onto the back of your hand. Your other hand was playing with the curls that laid delicately on his hands, scratching it lightly.

“Missed hearing you say those words.” He smiled, tears making their way down his face. “I love you too. So, so much that you have no idea how I feel when you walk into the room and I see your beautiful face. I love you. I love you. I love you, baby.” His affirmations had caused you to softly sob—the two of you a crying mess from the obvious but unspoken love that was finally being released again. “It’s always been you. You’ve always been my girl, did you know that?” You tilted your head a bit. “Never gonna go a day without reminding you that you are, because you’ve never not been my girl. Had to love and admire you from afar, but just wanted to hold you and kiss you.”

“You can kiss and hold me all you want now, my love,” you reassured him, and he dug his face into your neck, placing a soft kiss against your skin.

You smiled so brightly as your heart felt so happy and overflowed with love, and he matched your grin, feeling the same way.

The two of you kissed each other for a bit more, whispering sweet words, and laughed and talked about anything and everything—truly catching up with one another.

“Oh.” He got off of you, making you slightly pout from the weight of laying on you that you already missed. “I actually got you another gift.”

“Harry…you already got me enough.” It was true. Along with the thoughtful gift, he was your true Christmas miracle.

“I know. But this one, I wanted to give to you in private, and this is the perfect moment, so let me do this?” He looked at you with sweet and pleading eyes with a small smile on his face. Who could ever say no to that adorable face? Certainly not you.

You nodded, and he shot up, heading towards the stairs. “Give me thirty seconds,” he said before rushing up the stairs.

You heard him shuffling up there, and the sound of a drawer opening and closing. Thirty seconds later, he was walking downstairs, holding a white box wrapped in a red bow. He sat back down next to you, looking into your eyes as he spoke.

“This is what I wanted to give you when we were alone. It didn’t matter the outcome of how things turned out between us tonight, I just wanted to give you this because I think you’ll appreciate it. It reminded me of you when I saw it, and I knew I had to get it.” He handed you the box with slightly shaky hands.

You untied the bow, taking the top off. A gasp came from your mouth as you picked up the chain. It was a little gold sun pendant, symbolizing your summer together. You studied the charm for a moment, delicately touching it as you teared up at the meaning behind it. It matched quite well with your embroidered apron, and the two together would be quite the match.

“Thank you, Harry. This is so sweet of you.” You leaned forward, giving him a hasty kiss to his lips, smiling against them. “Help me put it on?” He nodded eagerly. You handed him the necklace before turning around, lifting your hair. You felt the cool metal chain hit your skin along with Harry’s lingering touches across your shoulders, causing your skin to pebble. He placed a quick kiss to your neck before pulling away. You turned around to meet his eyes as you smiled.

“Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.” He kissed your forehead. “I’m so happy. Merry Christmas Eve, Eve, baby.”

“Merry Christmas Eve, Eve, my love.”

You cuddled into his side as the silence took over. The only thing was heard was the pounding of your love-filled hearts along with the cracking of the fire. Sure, it was cold outside, but right here in Harry’s arms, you were warmer than ever.

please come into my inbox and talk about your thoughts and feelings on this! also feedback is appreciated, thank you for reading! <3

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msofficerr · 2 years ago

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Mom, I Never Liked Rambutan

It is the breakage of everything; the brink where the sides of the world were diverged, splitting the distance between safety and fatality. The wiggly lines means disorientation and when one opens the creaks, there is this white sweet lime strengthened by its seed within. At first, this description makes sense out of nothing, then there comes the strike of realization. For when this round clear jelly— from its breakage and wiggly lines— touched the bud of one’s tongue: its taste is indistinguishable. Bitter, sweet, addicting, or softly sugary and as one gulps the whole thing, the decision is to either get another one or never taste it again.

And yes, I am talking about rambutan. The fruit that I was eating back when I sat myself in silence while the whole world resides in their own dead quiet isolation. It was not in my best interest to evaluate rambutan months ago but I gathered I did not adore its fruit-worthiness. Now, I have the same set I am trying to ensue on my enjoyment as I compose this. However, today was all braving heat of sun and honking cars.

You see, what had transpired last 2020 changed the course of the curve. No analytics had anticipated the rebirth of the plagued renaissance other than COVID-19 and its first appearance in China, now unto its worldwide domination. Lift up a rambutan and scrutinize its circumference, the vision is the same. Red and uncertain. I remembered the time this fruit was called out in an article bemusing a Sci-fi movie as they tagged it as an alien fruit. It was correlative, as this pandemic prior to its name's popularity, was all foreign to us only then one day scientists showed a picture of a virus that we were all required to observe precautionary measures with— physically likewise to what I was holding now, except that it is edible.

Not a blink of an eye, you see death. Not even a squint of mourning, you are instructed to burn the ashes of someone who was just talking to you a week ago. Not a breath, your normalcy becomes prohibited with certain healthcare tips. Not a walk outdoors and someone in the smallest unit of government will tell you to stay back home where you caged yourself for almost six untethered months.

I was 16 by then but this moment did not allow me to see, breathe, and wend on my own. The only thing I could do is watch then look away, become distant as I cannot burden my family for being infected, froze hoping this will end, kill my time that I am not even sure if it was still ticking, and of course, ate a rambutan that my mother cleaned for almost 15 minutes of food sanitation.

I knew it was not safe but how would I know if I would just look at it? Then, I came to break it in half, only that— just like the surge of a pandemic— my mother did not inform me that this would be a hard task. I got the right stamina for a woman to simply open this but glory be to the strength I have lost for not doing any locomotive tasks for over two years it almost took me 10 minutes to hear its first submission to the forces of my fingers. It cracks and screams and weeps and all I can decipher from its crumbs is that I am now allowed to eat it.

I disown the fact that I lost track of myself during the pandemic. Everyone does. It comes crashing down to our collective seasons of unmoving bodies. I am not confessing this, but the rambutan in front of me was almost as if it was seeking an answer, so I must reveal myself honestly: pandemic is a real tough enemy to affront. Without forewarning, your energy is sucked right into the void and your life still continues— it cannot halt and when the clockwork of time does that, it only signifies that you have to move. I did today but I did not back then, you did today but you did not back then. We are in the same phase of the age-eldering era when people choose to sacrifice everything, to gudgeon themselves around the cages of martyrdom as they walk, work, and cope to what was losing, and outside, they were praying to not catch anything soon as they come back home.

“Oh, ano nabuksan mo na?” my mother asked me. I just nodded and smelled the fruit. It does not reek anything but I was scared with the possibility of tasting it knowing I might have chosen a spoilt one. Nostalgia hits at its aroma and suddenly I was a teenage dirtbag again scrolling to endless dimensions of social media. LED lights imprinted on my eyeball as I stare directly at my notes or as I watched this country fall at the hands of government non-urgency, no health plans, and the declining economy. Noise filled my eardrum as I heard the voices of hopeless help, the dearth of what Catriona glorified as silver lining through predicaments. I cannot confidently say that I survived but when conflict hit the fan, I was blown away with many whirlpools of contentions. It was a catch-22 scenario for everyone, even for the ones I loved. This is not a radical take but an positivistic observational approach of view-finding society through obvious lenses: everyone who we trusted our selves into betrayed and has bound the lines of our patience. When we become impatient, we cannot wait, and can only pace by our own without help for those who must have assisted or at least minimize the growing spread.

It did not happen and as my teeth surfaced the slime of rambutan— it tasted bitter and something about its chewability goes to my intolerable fathoms about food. That even if I tried it for second-tasting, my satisfaction is nowhere. It was rotten or if not, a letdown according to the standards of my mouth. Disappointed I was, I did not continue munching it.

That was the trial one. So, I picked up another with an intricate analysis of which among the set of rambutans may or may not be the stomach-friendly. From that, I was holding another; pale, dark red wiggles, and with an oddly specific smell.

Supercuts of regaining back the normal setting occurred in my mind, it was not fun because as desperate as I was on my second try for my first taste of rambutan, our situationship must come to its novelty and everybody agrees for it is already the truth of our reality. With a crippled era of baseless healthcare administration and the masterstrokes of our personal misdirection, each of us faced a hard decision to embrace a pandemic-configured setting which will become our eventual lifestyle. From education, technology, methods, and many fields, these scoured the pounding challenges of what must be followed under restrictions.

The moment we are slightly allowed to go back on the lives we left since, most of what has been inflicted throughout our silent days cannot be undone just by masking ourselves and covering our bodies with sanitary propositions. The fact is already ingrained that, from all which has deluged our customs, is now altered with something new. To me, that is another demise of something you must also surmount. To me, it felt as though I am coping again— only that I was not isolated and I am now out and about, forced to get up from a slump which almost figured to become the focal point of my life. It was yet again the unfamiliarity of feelings, trying to determine whether such things are possibly leveled at your gauge or any other of your mental bandwidth. This yet contests blind faith, then you are back praying to come back home without a stress of noise, without the introversive drifting from reality, believing that this time, you must not lose yourself as you morph anew from the stark phases brought by the virus.

Then, I broke the outer layer again revealing the same old reflective glassy fruit inside the menacing look of rambutan. Across was my mother doing her nails, waiting for my judgment. My teeth fanged and this rambutan was cold. It was its first good impression that although I had felt an opt-out touch to what was becoming new around my surroundings— my breath warmed my frozen ground then I was able to savor this new rambutan again. My face taunts that the taste was sweet, so did the smile of my mother when she confirmed her choices are still as better as this second try.

You are like this too. Trial after trial in times of questionable ideals brought forth by unprecedented happenings of your life. The same vision flashed between these moments of playing the rambutan’s jelly on my mouth and the moments I have had up until this date and forward. I have kept myself to waves of everything. Unfortunately, my whole becoming revolves to the dates when the pandemic was a monster in the hill and the axis of myself circles on my epiphany of what everyone has become: stronger and resilient. Albeit hurdles, we have known to others than ourselves— that when we have already the chance of walking the streets with minimal threats of virus, there comes the birth of modern renaissance. The art of helping, the compassionate artistry of selflessness. It was a painting of what we have become and you are like this too. I became my own and so everyone managed to break the rules of their limitations.

This pandemic, in its apex bitterness, is a sweet release from the prison of our old conventions. We become fugitives from isolation and almost everything good breaks into its platooning color once again.

After three years of widespread fear, something inside my personal leaning braved. I was chewing the sweetness of every bit of this rambutan. It was a real journey. This is my kind of honesty where I can almost feel the brushes of my tongue when I am enjoying a food, especially a fruit.

Of all elation and satisfaction, I chewed harder, forgetting one of rambutan's core parts: its seed. My teeth crashed right through it and it was not calcified enough to fight its solidity. Now, the sweet taste is not there and next thing I know my gums are bleeding. The sugar turned rusty and I could only taste blood.

I spat the whole roundness of rambutan in front of my mother's pedicure kit, revealing the redness I just spewed from the insides of my flesh. Something is coming.

After a momentary joyous bliss, I have become red as the rambutan’s body. A vision then occurred to me but it is just a sighting, a mere provoking prospect of unlived life. Despite the sweetness I confessed to enjoy, I came to a sense that I will not proceed to chew some of its bits.

This bleeding mouth and fazed tongue, there comes another impression; “Ayaw ko pala.”, I said at the verge of confusion on my mother’s face. No more, I was not hoping for a third trial.

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1358456 · 3 years ago

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The Return?

Hi, everybody. It’s been a while. The last post was on October 22, 2020, and today is January 6, 2022, so... quite a while indeed. I’m not quite dead yet, though that was in question for a bit last year. And now, after a series of surgeries, that won’t be an issue anymore.

So, what happened??

I got to see 2021 before anything happened, which was good, I suppose. I had a heart attack in January that almost killed me. And after a lot of treatments and examinations, I ultimately ended up with a heart transplant. I now have half of my heart left, and the other half belonged to someone else. It sounds romantic until you realize that it’s literal.

I don’t want to get into the details. The whole thing sucked ass for me, and something happened shortly afterwards that just breaks my stitched-together heart. As a whole, my survival kind of sucks for me, but is great for everyone else. I was kind of bitter for a while, but I’m okay now.

The rehab went well, the bones that had to be broken for the surgery healed up too. I had already broken those bones before, but had to be broken again manually this time, and with precision. Joy.

After being discharged, there were frequent checkups, a ton of medication and extra precautions, and I had to live with my parents for an extra few months until I fully healed up and practiced driving again. And in September, I finally moved back to my apartment in Toronto, and things are back to normal… except with permanent adverse effects from the transplant. Yay. I still have monthly checkups, but that’s not anything new. I’ve been doing monthly checkups right up until that heart attack.

Wait, so if things returned to normal on September, why didn’t I come back sooner?

I was… busy. There were a handful of games from a certain series I was really looking forward to playing, which came out after I had the heart attack, so I never got to play them until I got back home (where the Xbox is, so not my parents’ place) in September. And by that point, there were more added to the pile, with another one in October. I also got to spend some time with friends. Not too much thanks to the world plague, but hey.

Also, I didn’t want to return to Tumblr and whatnot, because I figured, everyone thinks I’m dead, and I should probably just let them. I was enjoying retirement. Enjoying (135′s) death, as it were.

So why return now?

Well, when I “retired” in 2020, it was forced because of my health. I recall saying that it was just not worth what little time I had remaining. The time I have remaining now is no longer “little”... as far as I know. So the main excuse for the retirement is now void. I could’ve just stayed dead, but… there was a lot of frustration gone into my last posts on Tumblr. It mellowed out since I first announced retirement in September 2020, but… there was still a lot. And looking back, I would rather not have that tone in the last posts of this Tumblr. I would really like to end things on a high note, you know? So I figured, I (135) would come back from the grave temporarily until that’s fixed. So… maybe just for a month or two. That’s the plan, at least. Is this a mistake? Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see.

And I’ve been toying with this idea for a while now. In fact, I had to do a coin toss today to make a decision. Heads: make the post. Tails: don’t. Heads it was. If it’s a mistake, blame the coin.

So will I return to writing?

… I don’t know. I’ll only be around temporarily. Legacy package is dead. I gave away everything in Legacy’s plot, Heart is finished, and Wings… was a mistake, but necessary for the package. That just leaves DE and SC, which are random compilations, so I could always return to those. I do have some ideas that I got while I was bored out of my damn mind during the hospital-rehab phase. BUT! Ehh… We’ll see.

... So I suppose the last post wasn’t the LAST one after all. I guess I’ll change that... unpin the retirement announcement, pin this one, reopen the ask box... Maybe I should change the profile picture to be a zombie Mew. But I couldn’t draw before the heart attack. I’m pretty sure I still can’t draw now. Hehe.

Anyways. I guess all that’s left to say is... I have returned! And not in a Dragoon chassis! (reference) ... Did you miss me??

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weeklythoughtblog · 3 years ago

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Political Implications of Life Online, and the Dangers of a Disconnected Democracy.

In the first week of class, we discussed the question, "Is online life real life?". My feeling, at that time, was that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more of our lives are playing out online.

Before the pandemic, many of us used the internet and social networking sites to connect with others and learn about the world around us. However, throughout the pandemic, the internet has become a metaphorical umbilical cord, tethering us to our social, professional, and academic lives.

There was a point in each of the articles this week that made me stop and say, "This is why we cannot live our lives solely online!". We NEED some element of face-to-face, in-the-flesh, human interaction for society to function.

Here's a breakdown of my "aha" moments from each article:

Dvir-Gvirsman: A preference for partisan media sources does not make someone eventually turn into a political extremist.

Flores-Saviaga and Savage: What we see online is not always true, and trolls know how to hijack data voids to push their own agenda filled with disinformation.

Kleemans et al.: Generally speaking, we suck at distinguishing what online is real and credible from what is not real and not credible. More often than not, we believe what we see online.

McGregor, Lawrence and Cardona: Politicians know we suck at discerning authenticity online (see above) and may use this to their advantage by sharing strategically "personalized" campaign content through social media.

Groshek & Koc-Michalska: The 2016 presidential election could have had a very different outcome if we had focused on talking to our offline networks rather than our online networks.

The findings from Groshek and Koc-Michalska's (2017) study regarding the 2016 presidential election really stood out to me. This study examines how varying levels of active and passive political engagement with online and offline networks contributed to the support of populist candidates in the 2016 election cycle.

The findings show that those who relied primarily on television for political coverage were more likely to support Trump or Clinton, and passive social media users were more likely to support Trump. This was not surprising, as I remember Trump and Clinton dominating the media channels I used.

Looking back on that time, my perception of the media's narrative for these two candidates was: "Clinton is the favorite. First female President, let's make history! Oh, don't pay any attention to Bernie over there, this is just a phase."

"Look at these ridiculous tweets from Donald Trump, this is a great topic-filler on Good Morning America because he's so outrageous, and will never be elected. Clinton is obviously going to win, so no point in covering any other candidates over at the GOP."

Again, these are just my personal memories. If you remember it differently, I'd love to hear your experiences with the 2016 presidential election because talking about politics with people who have diverse backgrounds and perspectives, online and especially offline, is so important.

Speaking of why offline political conversations are important… Groshek and Koc-Michalska (2017) also looked at the impact of offline network heterogeneity on populist candidate support, and this is the part that really got me:

“In fact, having a diversified network of offline communication did result in increasing the likelihood of supporting populist political actors from the left and the right, namely Sanders and Carson, by 1.39 and 1.91 times, respectively." (Groshek & Koc-Michalska, 2017, p. 1400) [emphasis added]

Like Groshek and Koc-Michalska found, I had a lot of conversations with people offline about the candidacy of both President Biden and Former President Trump. This article made me think:

If we talked about politics offline as much as we do online, would the results of the 2020 election be different?

Also... Who came up with the ridiculous etiquette rule that it's rude to discuss politics?

Why are politics a topic we steer away from? Honestly, I know more about my friend's sex lives than I do about their politics.

I found this great blog by R. Shawn McBride that provides a compelling argument for why we should be leaning in and engaging in political conversations.

For example, Donald Trump's 2016 presidential victory, and the public and media's shock that he actually won, is a prime example of how our political system is disconnected from the truth.

“Somehow enough people that supported Donald Trump's cause existed, but most people didn't know that. And that's scary for democracy. Our lawmakers go to work with a distorted view of what we, the people, want. Laws might be passed based on that distorted view." - R. Shawn McBride

McBride goes on to discuss how big decisions on things like Artificial Intelligence and cryptocurrency are on the horizon. And, with the majority of U.S. citizens abiding by the old adage of "never talk about politics in polite company," our lawmakers run the risk of making the wrong decision for the future of our nation.

"If we don't have the hard conversations and reach agreement on important decisions, someone else will make those decisions for us. And we'll all be the passengers as our world is shaped by others." - R. Shawn McBride

To close, I'll leave you with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Danger of a Single Story. I believe this is especially relevant to these readings but also to our current sociopolitical climate.

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prinxlyart · 4 years ago

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You seem to be doing alright? So I wanted to ask if you had any tips on just, *being* with adhd? I’m kinda struggling with it and I sort of don’t know... anything really of how to deal with... the future? Doing work? A lotta ‘adult’ stuff. It’s a really wide question ik but no pressure, feel free to answer however you can, thanks!

Bold of you to assume I’m alright in any aspect.

Nah but you’re fine!!! This might turn into a doozy so imma put it under a read more ✌️

No joke I was severely depressed and suicidal throughout middle and high school for this exact reason. It wasn’t until several years afterwards that I finally came to terms with the concept of just living for me, not capitalism, not my parents, not the job system, not society’s expectations, etc. Because our society isn’t built for people with ADHD, or any disabilities for that matter. Of course, I kept my rationale with that mindset; can’t just give up on my daily life and go live in the woods. I accept that I live in a capitalist society and require a job in order to provide for myself. But I do try my best to find jobs that actually interest me as well as paying me well enough to provide for myself.

I didn’t do therapy or anything (because the mental health “professionals” at the hospital/medical centers are all dinguses). But I DO take anti depressants and that has changed my life. It keeps the depression from settling in too deeply, even when I’m under-stimulated.

Being under-stimulated when you have ADHD is essentially like depression (they often go hand in hand); absolutely nothing able to keep your happy chemicals up or your interest piqued and it’s like you’re just reaching blindly into the void for something to latch on to. It really fucking sucks. At least with my anti-depressants, that gross feeling just sort of remains as an uncomfortable buzzing rather than turning into self-hatred. Medication isn’t always for everyone, but I know in my experience it has helped me dramatically.

I do take ADHD medication while I work from home (I’m lucky enough to have found a job that lets me do so ;v;) but I’m actually still just doing trial and error with those. They often times actually DONT help me focus and rather just send me into panic attacks at the slightest suggestion of rejection from anyone (rejection sensitivity is a bitch and a half). So I’m still experimenting with actual ADHD medication.

In terms of making art with ADHD, that’s actually kind of a benefit rather than a detriment. My current hyperfixation is The Owl House, so in order to fill my heart with the content I want, I draw like crazy, I write fanfic (like a fucking monster, I write it in the notes on my phone 😆). I allow my brain to wander and just letting my brain do what it wants relieves a lot of the stress of trying to keep myself together according to Society’ Standards™️ for the day.

As far as “adult stuff”, I genuinely am still figuring it out myself. For more urgent things, it’s something I’ll try to tackle while it’s on my mind in that moment, because the moment I even turn my head a different direction I’ll forget what it was I was going to do. For non urgent things I try to set up reminders, either on my phone or by putting a physical object near me(paper reminders I get in the mail, etc). The latter doesn’t always work because it’s quite often that it’ll just blend into the background mess of my life, but sometimes it works and I don’t know why. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Anything in terms of regular payments? (Rent, bills, etc) I set up an autopay if it allows me to that sends me notifications any time the due date rolls around. I get a text every month from my phone service provider letting me know that I’ve paid my bill. Same with auto insurance and things of that nature. That way I don’t even need to think about it, I just need to make sure I have enough money in my account to let those auto payments go through.

Lastly, I try my absolute hardest to stay positive, or at least try to curate my life experience to avoid unnecessary negativity. I don’t do drama, I don’t do internet fights, I just sit here in my little corner and enjoy the things I like and share it with anyone that’s interested.

2020 alone has been hell and while it’s important to stay informed on everything that’s happening, and helping in any way you can, it’s also important to remember that you don’t need to be on that particular grind 24/7. It’s okay to take breaks from the dreariness of the world to allow yourself to indulge in things that make you happy.

***** DISCLAIMER***** I am in no way, shape, or form a medical professional and please take all of this with a grain of salt. This has been my personal experience with ADHD as someone who has received no actual real help for my ADHD as I’ve grown up. I was diagnosed when I was 7 and never got any help from my parents or medical professionals to figure out what ADHD means and how it affected my learning career, or figure out what methods of learning would work better for me. These are all just my methods of coping/working with my ADHD. I hope this answers your question!!

#prinxly inquiries #anonymous #adhd #mental health #this one’s a long one yall #just a heads up #another aspect of adhd: fucking rambling instead of getting to the point

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akatsuki-celeste · 4 years ago

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I can feel my anxiety medication wearing off so before I re-up it, because if ever there was a day that I just need to keep it going - I feel the need to scream into the void first.

I haven’t talked about my personal life that much save for a few depressive, anxiety-fueled rants before, and maybe this is just one more of those but longer. But today was the last day in a long saga of days that has just made me....really question *everything*. It’s probably the closest I’ve ever felt to being absolutely done.

So the last year and a half has been quite the roller coaster and occasional hell for me, as I imagine it has been for everyone else on the planet. Everyone has their own 2020 story to tell, everyone’s is important, so I haven’t made a huge deal out of mine. I’m luckier than most. So this isn’t a post where I’m going to go on and on about how rough I’ve had it, etc, etc. This is just going to be about...me. The facts, as seen by me.

In March 2020, my work began efforts to roll out a remote work plan that I qualified to start early due to being immunocompromised thanks to a fun little auto-immune disease called ulcerative colitis. I’ve been diagnosed since I was 18, so basically half my life, and the medication I had been on then, Remicade, was one I’d been using for the last decade with absolutely no issues except maybe I get really tired and like naps afterwards. All of that went smooth. I felt relieved that I, at least, was going to be at home. One of my roommates, also a co-worker, was able to work out the same situation so we didn’t even need to deal with transportation for her until the official lockdown.

And then a week - possibly less, my memory is hazy - my roommates (my then-best friend and her brother) got into a screaming fight of such epic proportions that I had an actual mental breakdown in the middle of (first for me). I remember hiding in my room with my laptop - I was still trying to work for some reason, I do remember eventually telling my boss I had a family emergency so I could log off - I remember calling my mother in a panic, and then I remember waking up at my parents’ house about 6 hours later and finding out that my mother had told my former roommates to gtfo, which I did not attempt to rescind (not at the time, because apparently I was there when it happened but I don’t remember this, and not later) because I knew living with them was no longer feasible for a number of reasons which I will not go into. I’m still dealing with five years of mental abuse and trauma on that one.

By the first week of April they were gone, and I was able to busy myself for the next few months with making my place habitable for one person again, which was a good distraction. And then September came around and I started to notice these, well, patches on my skin. At first I thought it was just eczema or dry skin irritation, it happens sometimes. But with each month they got worse and worse, until December finally rolls around and the only conclusion anyone can come up with is that my trusty Remicade, which had successfully kept my UC in check for a decade, had finally decided to stop playing nice with my body and I was having a “psoriasis-like” reaction. So for the first time in a long while I was starting the medication shuffle again, steroid creams and a new UC medication that took nearly 4 months to get approved. I’m still not recovered even though I’ve been off of Remicade for 7 months now. It takes 6 months for that stuff to fully work its way out of a system, so the reactions didn’t stop until a few weeks ago and I’m still struggling to heal. I’d say it’s about 75% better than it was, but showers still suck, pants also suck, and I can’t tolerate temperatures higher than 70 degrees (hi summer, you suck). Also during this time I got the COVID vaccine (woo!) but seriously, if not for remote work I probably would have lost my job. I used up most of my sick leave in the beginning of the year because I couldn’t move without pain, even to sit at the computer for 8 hours. I also have a ton of PTO, but my boss told me that I couldn’t necessarily use it for sick leave (news flash for me) and again, could lose my job if I tried to use it too much. So trigger my anxiety. A lot.

Fast forward. In one week my office is reopening for 50% capacity, which apparently means to upper management that we have to all work 3 days a week in office, 2 days remote, which doesn’t match the math but whatever. They’ve also stopped screening temperatures, have nixed the social distance requirement, and are only requiring masks for the unvaccinated - but aren’t requiring anyone to say whether they are or not. Needless to say, not exactly the best reassurance for my still-immunocompromised ass, not to mention the dress code will murder my skin. So I ask about continuing remote work and get told I need an ADA accommodation. Okay. I get the paperwork and pass it on to my GI; I was already on FMLA for my UC, figured this wouldn’t be that different.

Except my GI has refused to sign the paperwork, saying there’s no medical reason for me to continue remote work. Despite still not being recovered from the skin reaction I got back in December from the Remicade, despite finding information that Remicade potentially interferes with the vaccine, I’ve been told to just adhere to social distancing and mask-wearing despite my employer not requiring that of anyone else. And with all the information about the delta variant coming out.... yeah, I’m scared. Probably paranoid, probably anxious. I have no idea how I’m going to get through a work day without having to medicate and I won’t be able to function if I have to do that. i see my psych before RTW-Day, but only a few days before.

My last chance is that the dermatologist I’m seeing on Wednesday might be able to fill it out based on my condition, but at the moment I’m in a cycle of panic that I’m going to be told it’s Not That Bad and not get taken seriously. Which is a feeling I’ve been having a lot lately. I know it’s partly the depression and anxiety ramping itself up, but I just don’t know what to do now. All I want to do right now is press the restart button. Sell my place, relocate to a new place so radically different from where I am now that I can’t even compare it, start over. Get a puppy, write a novel, not be in $33k worth of debt. This wasn’t where I’d hoped to be at 36, and now it feels like it’s going to be another 5-6 years before I can get there. If I can get there. It seems like another lifetime.

Anyway. That ends my void screaming. TLDR, I have to start working in the office again in a week, I’ve been told by my GI that my auto-immune disease doesn’t qualify me for an ADA accommodation to keep working from home, my anxiety is now living with me instead of me living with it, and my last shot is a dermatologist I’ve never met before.

#personal #anxiety #depression #immunocompromised #COVID #psoriasis #but not exactly psoriasis #Remicade #ulcerative colitis #someone please just get me out of here

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luminecho · 4 years ago

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Show Me What You’re Proud Of

RULES: It’s time to love yourselves! choose your 5 (ish) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2020. Tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works.

@sister-dear did this and tagged all their mutuals who create things! Took me a moment before the realization hit me that, oh shit, I’m a mutual who creates things. Sooo here we go! Super nervous for some reason jdkjkqwdm.

I haven’t posted a lot of stuff publicly, let alone actually made things in general, and as far as writing goes I don’t have anything finished yet, but I used this opportunity to create a new art & writing blog (@echoing-creations) so I can hopefully start posting some WIPs and short snippets of stuff there from now on! ^^ Otherwise, I’m just gonna try my best to show what I have.

WRITING:

Again, I don’t really have anything posted or even finished yet (at least that I’m proud of). But I’ll share two WIPs/sneak peeks of the LU longfic that I’ve been working on these past couple of months. Because I’m pretty proud of some of the scenes that I have written so far! Unfortunately I’m limited in my choice of what I can include, because spoilers, but here’s what I’ve got. (They’re still very subject to change.)

- “Everything Goes Away” - Prologue

He was in control now. Not some selfish deity or petty goddess. For once, his destiny didn’t have to be set in stone. He could rewrite his story, re-weave the strings of fate. And it all started with a single thread.

Forgive me.

- EGA - Chapter 3

A cacophony of sound broke out around them as the other heroes’ reactions grew muddled together and incoherent. All the while, Legend and Warriors didn’t move, didn’t blink. The world was a swirling vortex of noise around them, a raging whirlwind of confusion and betrayal, and the two heroes stood in the center of it all, the eye of a hurricane, frozen in time. Frantic colors and voices spun around them like a cyclone in motion, tasting of forgotten courage and broken promises.

But all storms came to an end. As the tempest of sound and color died down into a suffocating silence and the world stopped spinning and lulled to a halt, a single whisper rang out louder than a gunshot, piercing the air and finally forcing Legend to break eye contact with Warriors.

“Why?”

ART:

- BotW Link - Wow, the only thing on this list that I actually have a link for! This post never kicked off, which kinda sucks, because I can’t even begin to describe how ridiculously proud of it I was (and still am). It took me ages and I put in so much more effort than I thought I would going into it. But I don’t really mind that nobody saw it, because I love it and that’s all that matters! It was all a big experiment (particularly with drawing humans) but I’m very happy with the outcome :)

Ummm I’m not really that proud of anything else I’ve posted, and there’s a lot of stuff I’ve drawn that I’m not ready to share with people yet cause I’m kinda self conscious, BUT I do have a couple of drawings that I still really like!

- First one is a ref for a Warrior Cats OC that I’ve had for... ah, almost as long as I’ve been drawing, actually. She’s a favorite between my and my irl friend, and she’s gone through so many redesigns I can’t even keep track, lol. This is definitely my favorite design of her by far, though, and is probably gonna stick for quite a while.

- Second one is just a random doodle of my catsona. Honestly not much to say about it. It was done for my part of an animation meme collab for a friend’s birthday a while back, and I kept the drawing because I really liked how it turned out. I honestly kind of want to redraw it soon with an updated version of my sona’s design and use it as my tumblr icon? Maybe? 👀 I’ve been wanting draw my own banner for a while now, so maybe this can be part of my blog makeover, lol.

And that’s that! Not much, I know. I spent all evening trying to pull together scraps of stuff I could maybe share, but chickened out of showing most of it in the end. I’m kind of shocked at how little I actually created this year. I feel like my art has been at an all time low recently. I just haven’t really been drawing as much. Hopefully giving myself time and distance from it will help me to gather the motivation to pick it up again soon and be able to look at it without judging myself too harshly. As for my writing... I’ve definitely written more frequently this year than I have for a long time, even if I have nothing to show for it. I’ve been finding myself using my writing as an outlet a lot more recently than I did in the past, and I’ve been getting better at writing things down rather than just daydreaming them and letting the scenes float away into the void of my mind, lol.

Tagging all of my own mutuals (and followers!) who are creators!! Share what you’re proud of, even if it’s small <3

#I’m so nervous posting this for whatever reason??? lmao #but i want to #this was kinda fun going back and reflecting on what I’ve made though #even if there’s not much #I’m an art baby lmao #I’ve been drawing my whole life but only started getting serious about it around 5 years ago...? ish? not even #i’ve loved writing for so long i can’t even remember but before this year i didn’t really practice all that often #so my improvement has been slow #but hey. it’s something #everything is a learning experience and I’m sure I’ll have improved twice as much by the end of this year!#//#long post #echo draws #echo writes #tag meme #i mean technically i wasn’t tagged #i was but i wasn’t #you know what i mean

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amphtaminedreams · 5 years ago

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Paris Haute Couture Week S/S 2020 Plus a Little Jacquemus: Okay, Dior DID Suck (Part 2/2)

Hi to anyone reading,

First of all, thank you! I have never had a post do as well as the part 1 of my haute couture week review did and I am so overwhelmed with the positive feedback. This is probably funny to read for those of you getting thousands of reblogs on your posts, me acting like I won an academy award because I got a couple of hundred, but honestly I don’t expect any traction when I write on here (it’s basically just me word vomiting everything I’m thinking as if people want to hear it aka. mouthing off into what I thought was the void) so if you did read it, thank you! I do spend a long-ass time on these so it means a lot:-)

I’ll leave the self-indulgent ramble there though as it’s probably not what you came for and jump straight into part 2 of my thoughts, starting with Jacquemus. Yeah, I knew what I was doing when I tagged that in my last post. Simon Porte Jacquemus is the man of the *fashion* people right now; I’ve even found myself coming round to the Le Chiquito bag despite my original thought being “well, that’s fucking useless”. I know, I know, technically it’s not haute couture; it was part of Men’s Fashion Week, but it happened around the same time and everyone was talking about it on Twitter, so I feel like I have to include it.

In a way, it kind of reminds me of Bottega Veneta’s last RTW show, in that, especially with the women’s outfits, we seem to be sticking with simple, fitted garments and chunky, more statement jewellery. I’ve got to say I like the styling here a lot more though, and in general I’m a fan of this collection. The collared tops with cut outs underneath blazers are cool and I can’t wait until it gets warm enough for me to not feel dumb wearing my headscarfs like this; there’s a LOT of summer outfit inspiration. It’s not a mind-blowing collection or anything but it is effortlessly sexy and that’s something I wish I could say about myself. Most of us can only hope to look half as good as these models do whilst making the effort but at least Jacquemus is aspirational, lol.

I also fucking adore this colour palette. I’m sick of neutrals literally just meaning brown and white; the navy, sand and muted khaki is a fresh edition to what is usually interpreted as the colours you’d seen worn by Disney’s Riverboat Cruise staff and only Disney’s Riverboat Cruise staff. And I mean, come on-what is more neutral than typical English school carpet blue.

Next for the whole reason I had to make this haute couture week review 2 separate posts: Jean Paul Gaultier’s final show.

In the best way possible, it’s a lot. I don’t even really know where to start, except to say that I guess this is a fitting last show; a celebration of everything campy, messy, weird, performative, and punk is the perfect send off for a brand whose best known perfume of the last few years is called Scandal. More than anything, the final show represented the range of characters and cultures that have influenced JPG throughout his half-a-decade-long career, the lines that supposedly separate what is “masculine” and “feminine”, “old” and “young” and ultimately art and fashion blurred in the most exaggerated way possible. Sure, there are some looks which are individually a bit messy here but the way they were grouped into almost chapter-like segments meant that when you see them all together, they work. Nods to the patterns and structures that recurred from season to season were sprinkled throughout, from sailor stripes to corsets to the expected whirlwinds of colour. I’ll even allow the wellies in that one outfit; if I can get over bucket hats in Peter fucking Pilotto’s last RTW show, I can get over some questionable shoes here. Middle aged fishermen and boys who liked to pose with monster carp in their Tinder pictures as some weird display of masculinity everywhere rejoice.

Now onto a show that I personally found slightly disappointing: Margiela.

I think this one is a bit TOO weird for me. Like if you’re gonna go avant-garde, go all out. Chiffon gimp masks (I don’t know if that’s the intention here but that’s what I’m getting, sorry Maison) are something I’m not particularly fond of and I’ve never been a fan of the Tabi boots in the first place, let alone when they’ve seemingly been blown up to Michelin man style proportions. I didn’t find the show to be a total lost cause-I enjoyed the colour palette and I’ve always liked that contrast stitching detail, plus the bowler hats are interesting-but on the whole considering how much I liked the last RTW show, this is a bit of a let down.

The looks I included are salvageable but (I feel mean saying this) there were genuinely a lot of pieces that did just resemble bits of fabric draped over each over with no discernible rhyme or reason, so much so that they reminded me of some of the monstrosities I saw at a Drag Race pub quiz this one time where we had 5 mins to make some garms out of loo roll and then have a team member model them for points down a makeshift runway.

Ralph and Russo was alright. There were a few pieces that I really liked but again, I can’t help but compare this collection to the last, where it felt like the fussy details of bows and sequins and feathers and the Barbie Dreamhouse palette were utilised with a direction in mind. Here, I don’t get that. As ever, the gowns are gorgeous and I’d pay good money just to try one on for five minutes but as an overall collection I’d say there was a lack of higher vision, which is probably the snobbiest sentence I’ve ever written so forgive me.

As for Ronald Van Der Kemp, I could’ve done without including it to be honest, if it weren’t for the few pieces I’m in love with: the velvet cape, fur trimmed jacket and blue satin dress are probably my favourite pieces here.

So onto a collection I liked a lot more: Schiaparelli.

The influence of nature from flowers in bloom to insects to the organic structure of the human skeleton is as present as ever, though this collection includes a lot more delicate symbolism than usual. Honestly, the details make it for me; the brooches, earrings and facial jewellery are other-worldly touches to outfits that could otherwise be simple fashion magazine editor on-the-go. That’s not in itself a bad thing! The suits are gorgeous. I mean, I’m talking fashion editor in New York in a power suit yelling orders down the phone while she rushes along with a coffee. A Miranda Priestley in the making type woman. THAT’S a modern take on the divine feminine that Maria Grazia should’ve been going for; our goddesses aren’t women who sit around looking pretty (though that helps too) and place curses on mere mortals anymore, they’re women who get shit done.

With regards to Valentino, which was also a delight, let me start by saying this colour palette is EVERYTHING. It’s ugly sisters in Cinderella fantastic, and we know those 2 were the real fashion icons really. Other than that, I adore the Old Hollywood silhouettes from the gloves to the Liz Taylor-in-Cleopatra-level-dramatic earrings. Everything is opulent and expensive-looking and pretty much what we’ve all come to expect from Valentino. A strong 8/10.

For me personally, Viktor and Rolf was a standout and one of my favourite collections of haute couture week. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea and I know it’s at the complete opposite end of the spectrum to what was probably my other favourite collection, Elie Saab, but this is just my style down to a T, the perfect balance of grungy and cutesy that I want to achieve.

There’s probably going to be a lot of objections to the temporary face tattoos and I get that, but I think they’re fucking sick. I obviously wouldn’t get a permanent one lest my mother murder me in cold blood however if I did, you bet I would be pairing them with frilly-ass babydoll dresses that you could pick up in Camden Market like this.

And last but not least (that would be Dior), there’s Zuhair Murad.

Sigh.

IDK, man. Seeing Zuhair Murad dresses on Tumblr and WeHeartIt (remember that site? It still exists!) as a 14 year old was one of the things that got me into fashion, so it sucks that almost every time a new collection comes around, I feel underwhelmed. Disappointingly, the brand hasn’t really progressed all that much since 2013. It goes without saying that the stoning and the embroidery and sequins are stunning and would make anyone feel like a princess but from a critical point of view, I’m just not seeing anything new here. Whereas I feel like Elie Saab, for example, reflected the growing fascination with East Asian fashion and recognition of the supremacy of the region’s street style in his haute couture last collection, Zuhair Murad seems to be stuck designing the same dresses he was 6 years ago.

To pick one example, the rounded stoned necklines are so outdated that they’ve been making their way onto department store prom dresses for years. I get that it’s supposed to be a reference to Ancient Egyptian style and I respect that, I was one of those 8 year old that was obsessed with mummies and the “Curse of Tutankhamun”, but couldn’t it be done in a more interesting way? It’s Maria Grazia’s spin on Ancient Greece all over again. Now I get how how the I imagine very niche subsection of people who are into fashion and Julius Caesar (okay, so I don’t even know if they still believed in mythology and all that malarky at that point in history but just roll with my comparison here) might’ve felt going through Vogue Runway. Anyway, I hate to end on a critical note and so be clear, these are still absolutely magnificent dresses. If we ignore those ugly round necklines, that is.

So that’s it for this post! If you read part 1 and 2, I hope you enjoyed it! As always, let me know your opinions and feel free to disagree. I’m literally just about to start trawling through all the A/W 2020 RTW collections though I imagine that’s gonna take me way longer to do than this, so I wouldn’t expect that for a month or two. In the meantime, I’m trying to fit shooting a Euphoria-inspired lookbook into my days off work which is looking atm like it’s going to be the end of March, so look out for that, and also a review of the red carpet fashion from this season’s award shows.

As ever, thank you so much for reading and again, thank you for the reception on part 1 if you were one of the people that read it. It makes staying up til 3am with the jitters seem worthwhile, lol!

Lauren x

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hwangso-ddong · 4 years ago

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Love Yourself trilogy vs. Every era that came after it. Spoiler: current BTS kinda sucks.

TW: PERSONAL OPINION

Today, in my void of complete lack of productivity, I was thinking about Love Yourself as an era, as a whole, all 3 main releases... and I just find it so much better than whatever BTS is releasing now or even right after LY.

Like, Love Yourself: Her is unprecedented like the assortment of tracks on it is unsurpassable. The title track is still the #1 most viewed BTS song on YouTube. The skit is a skip, yes, it’s a non-track, but whatever. Otherwise, LY:Her is a no skip album, every single track on it is a hit. Not to mention it is the EP that skyrocketed BTS’s popularity outside of the K-pop fandom sphere.

Immediately after, Love Yourself: Tear gave us Fake Love, and such B-side gems as 134340 and Paradise, which I still never skip when they show up on shuffle, along with tracks like The Truth Untold and Airplane Pt. 2 which went viral. Once again, every single track on this album (except for maybe Love Maze because I don’t remember it for the life of me) is a no-skip. I will not tolerate Magic Shop slander, either.

Love Yourself: Answer was arguably not as strong as the other two as a follow-up to them, since it is a compilation album (or repackage) with some (great) additions. It feels like a great way to top off the era, giving every single member a solo track like in You Never Walk Alone. Don’t forget the cultural reset that was IDOL came from this album, as well as I’m Fine which is the track that got me thinking about this whole thing in the first place.

Now, the next era is where BTS started to lose me just a little bit. BTS came back with Map of the Soul: Persona, ushering in a brand new era for the group. And, you know, it’s a pretty solid EP! I like all the songs on it, even Jamais Vu which seems to get a lot of flak for being “uninspired.” However, the title track especially, and the number of tracks on this album, left me wanting juuuuust a little bit more. Did not complain, though! It was great. With the overuse of some production techniques like autotune and the introduction of this more rock-inspired sound of Dionysus, I could tell BTS was heading in a certain direction with their next releases, which I was very skeptical about. And then, after BTS took a well-deserved long break...

Map of the Soul: 7 dropped. With a weeks-long teaser period and the release of Black Swan prior to the release of the album, it seemed like it’d be another hard-hitter. But... Black Swan is actually all this album had in terms of hard-hitters. The overuse of autotune as an artistic choice was back, and it was here to stay, allowing room for critics and fans alike to criticize BTS’s vocal production, as well as the further exploration of the rock-inspired sound that was introduced in the previous EP.

I really do not like MotS:7. I know, I know. The fandom has shunned me once and will do it again. But there’s just no memorable tracks on this thing! ON is a very underwhelming title track on which BTS’s vocals are completely and utterly oversaturated with autotune, the new tracks are just kinda good at best and awful at worst, and there is nothing here for me to hold onto. The only song I can clearly remember from this album is Filter. That’s it. And that’s a Jimin solo song. It feels like it’s hard to find a song on this album where all the members of BTS are participating together in one track... and that’s because there are only two new B-side tracks with all the members! Tracks which, I’m sorry to say, kinda suck! Louder Than Bombs is ironically kinda sleep-inducing, and We Are Bulletproof: The Eternal lasts awfully too long and is so uninspired that if any other group released it, it would flop. The rest of the tracks on this album are either old-school-hip-hop-inspired rap tracks, or slow rock ballads, both of which have absolutely nothing to do with BTS’s previous sounds, and alienate fans like me who expect certain things from a BTS album and just got... the complete opposite.

Now, I know an artist can (and should) release whatever makes them happy, and whatever they feel like they want to create. But when it comes to BTS, I expect something that I can appreciate the artistry of, something that I can listen to and admire the painstakingly shaped production, something that will grab my attention. I tried to listen to Map of the Soul: 7... twice. And I fell asleep both times. I have managed to listen to every song on it, and I don’t remember any single one of them. Nothing stuck out to me, and it still doesn’t. And you know what, as much as y’all don’t want to admit it, it’s not just me. None of the songs on MotS: 7 get any hype anymore, whereas songs like Go Go and Tear have almost cult-like fan favorite status. But wait, I’m not done!

At this point, BTS had lost me with MotS: 7. Bear in mind that I was, and still am, a big fan of BTS, and I got into them for their music first and foremost. And in 2020, Be dropped. Saying I was underwhelmed would be an understatement. I was full-on disappointed. The only worth-while tracks on this album are Telepathy and Dynamite, in my opinion, both of which get by easy because they ride on the disco revival trend of 2020. Even counting the title track, this entire album is a straight up disappointment for me. What infuriated me further was that track 4 is a 3-minute long iPhone recording of the members just talking and joking around, as if to slap the people that actually came for the music in the face. I am not going to worship BTS as a group just because of who they are. I do not care to listen to a 3-minute iPhone recording of 7 Korean boys just existing because I’m a fan of theirs. Most BTS fans do not speak Korean, so there go BTS again, alienating their fans... It’s not fanservice at this point, it’s just laziness!

I get that the point of Be specifically was to be a “homely” and “raw” album from BTS, to help their fans feel more at home with them and get to know them more during the pandemic. It would be a bit disingenuous for BTS to be releasing songs meant for a stadium during the year that nothing was ever open and no concerts were happening. But I don’t think Be was very intentionally put together that way, at least at first - this trend of lazy and underwhelming production from BigHit had been going since the previous album. I don’t think BTS have vocals that can convey the feelings Life Goes On or any other one of their ballads is supposed to convey, and they all end up just sounding bland and boring. They’ve done ballads right before! The Truth Untold is a great example, not even counting the EDM-inspired parts of Steve Aoki’s production. House of Cards is another great waltz ballad from BTS, and it is not boring in the slightest.

I think BTS and BigHit by extension are tired. The production is getting worse, the creativity is getting stale and uninspired, they’re outsourcing more and more... None of these are problems on their own. It’s just that BTS, right now, are not what they used to be. Their music, which should be the main attraction in a music artist, is not that interesting anymore. A lot of fans like to defend it because it’s coming from their favorite group, but if it came from anyone else they wouldn’t have even given it a second listen.

I’m mentioning BigHit as a whole because this laziness in production and overuse of autotune is prevalent in other BigHit groups as well now, namely TXT and ENHYPEN. I love TXT. I really do. But Blue Hour is plagued by the same boring uninspired rock-ballad type tracks as the latest BTS albums... and I really don’t want to see an entire company’s discography shift away from quality pop production towards trend-following and cash-ins.

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callioope · 4 years ago

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Month after month after month. For seventeen months. Seventeen months of figuring out when I’m going to ovulate. Seventeen months of timing. Of ovulation tests. Of paying way more attention to my body and its symptoms than seems sane. Seventeen times: hope, disappointment.

I thought by now I’d really figured out my body’s symptoms, but apparently not. I really thought this would be the time. I really thought I knew it, like in my bones, that this was it. You may recall last month posting how I could tell the difference between symptoms. They seemed different this month, they really did.

And we needed a win this month.

I have not talked about this yet, but last month, my father-in-law suffered a heart attack. He was driving with my husband’s stepmom, and fortunately had the ability to pull over in time. But she does not really speak good English, and she had to get out of the car and flag someone down to call 911. It took the emergency responders 8 minutes to get to him, but we have no idea how long it took to place the call in the first place. They say if it takes 10 minutes -- 10 minutes of the heart not pumping blood to the brain -- they declare a person dead upon arrival.

But it took them 8 minutes, so there was a chance. And that meant 3 weeks in a coma, monitoring brain activity that wasn’t getting better. They were able to treat his heart, and the doctor said he could have survived the heart attack. He did survive the heart attack. He did not survive the brain injury sustained because of the heart attack.

As my father-in-law is Turkish, the family agreed that he’d want to be buried in Turkey. So my husband flew with his body to Turkey last week to bury him. He had to spend a week there, I think he said that was the minimum in order to get the round trip fare at a reasonable price. And with COVID, the whole idea of him travelling that far has been especially worrying.

He came home last night, but he’s quarantining at our place while I say with my parents in New Jersey. Their home is small and there’s really not a lot of space for me to work, I’m having to sit on a recliner and it’s really hard to feel energized to work. Especially with all the cramps and heartbreak of everything. I should probably just ask for the day off, but there’s an important meeting I need to attend at 1. Maybe I’ll sign off after that, I don’t know...

I just wish I could be with my husband right now.

Our anniversary is on Tuesday, I was .... I was dreaming of calling him up and telling him we’d finally succeeded. We.... we talked about naming the kid after his dad... if we succeeded....

It feels like it’s never going to happen. It feels like I’m trying so hard for nothing. It feels like I don’t deserve it, it feels like the universe is telling me to give up, that I wouldn’t be a good mother, that I’m not worthy. It feels like something is wrong with my body and every time I talk to the doctor, they don’t seem worried, and well, in the moment, I’m like “herp derp they are a professional I should trust them” but then three -- five -- seventeen months later, I have nothing to show for that trust and a million questions. My friends got bloodwork done when they first started trying so they could address any hormonal roadblocks that could make conceiving more challenging. But my doctor said that wasn’t necessary because “when I get pregnant they’ll do the bloodwork.”

I want to scream, I feel like you can’t trust medical professionals to catch any red flags. They didn’t take my seriously until the third time I mentioned that my periods are sort of worryingly light every month, when I specifically phrased it “they’re lighter since I came off the pill,” and even then, they just went “Oh? Hmm. Weird.” And didn’t follow up. No, all they said was, “well you got pregnant within a year so you must be fine.” (Miscarried in May, if you didn’t know. And they say that it’s so easy to get pregnant after you miscarrying. That like, most women get pregnant within 3-4 months of miscarrying. Further emphasizing that something is wrong with me and my body.)

I am going to be 33 in January. They say at 35 your chances start to reduce significantly. I worry about this all the time. I worry that I have PCOS and that it’s going to take me two years just to conceive the first time. I worry that the universe wants me to give up, that something is wrong with me physically or mentally, that I just don’t deserve it. I have so many friends who get pregnant immediately after going off the pill, like it’s so easy. We’d dreamed of being parents together, of shared play dates, and their child gets older and older and...

It just feels like it’s not in the cards.

I recently (accidentally) read an untagged pregnancy fic where they had trouble conceiving -- a whole whopping 4 months. I remember when 4 months felt like forever. I feel like a fool now, of course, and it made me so angry to see that. They said in that fic that it takes 78 times of having sex to succeed, but I don’t understand that statistic because -- they say most couples conceive with one year, although most conceive within 3-4 months of trying. But they also say that you shouldn’t have sex too frequently because it doesn’t give the sperm enough time to regenerate. (You should wait two days between trying.) Also, there’s really only like 6 days per month worth trying, that’s during your fertility window. But you have to have sex every other day during that 6 day window, so that means 3 times per month for 12 months is only 36 times.

AT ANY RATE.

YOU SEE. YOU SEE THE MADNESS involved in this process? Every month I pee in a cup and I take a test to see if I’m ovulating yet. And it SUCKS. I HATE IT. I hate doing it. But if I don’t do it, I won’t know when I ovulate, which means I won’t time it right.

And sex starts to feel like a chore.... and it shouldn’t. It feels like it should just be magical. And it isn’t.

It’s so hard. It’s so demoralizing. It’s so frustrating to see babies. My mom going on about how fertile her friends are and how they’re having another kid. Hearing that the friend in HS who told me, when I said I wanted to have kids some day, that she “wanted to amount to more than a baby making machine” .... and she just.... immediately got pregnant and here I am. A dream I’ve had, to start a family, a dream that has been mocked, and I’m still waiting.

I’m so tired.

And I feel guilty because I know that some people have waited even longer.

And I feel scared because I know that some people have waited even longer.

I feel scared with the limited knowledge I have of what the fertility process looks like. I don’t want to have to go to the doctor every other day. But it looks like maybe I’ll have to? At least, eventually?

It’s just heartbreaking. I really needed a break this month, but 2020 continues to be demoralizing. Sometimes it feels like... what am I even doing trying this hard to bring a kid into this world at all. Maybe that’s what the universe is telling me. I certainly had friends in HS who said as much -- that they couldn’t fathom bringing a child into this horrible world -- and that was like, back in the 2000s, before a disaster like 2020 could even be imagined.

Well. Anyways. Thanks for reading my rant. This was cathartic, screaming into the void.

#trying to conceive #this is really sad so #you don't have to read it #i just needed to scream into the void #the latest with liz #also talks about death of a family member #just as a warning #2020 really fucking sucks y'all #feel pretty bummed and depressed #also this is long

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johnrossbowie · 4 years ago

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LEAVING TWITTER

I wrote this earlier in the fall, before the election, after dissolving my Twitter account. I wasn’t sure where to put it (“try up your ass!” – someone, I’m sure) and then I remembered I have a tumblr I never use. Anyway, here tis.

How do you shame someone who thinks Trumps’ half-baked policies and quarter-baked messaging put him in the pantheon of great Presidents? How do you shame someone so lacking in introspection that they will call Obama arrogant while praising Trump’s decisiveness and yet at the same time vehemently deny that they’re racist? How do you shame someone for whom that racism is endearing and maybe long overdue?

You don’t. It’s silly to think otherwise.

Twitter is an addiction of mine, and true to form, my dependence on it grew more serious after I quit drinking in 2010. At first it was a chance to mouth off, make jokes both stupid and erudite and occasionally stick my foot in my mouth (I owe New Yorker writer Tad Friend an apology. He knows why, or (God willing) he’s forgotten. Either way. Sorry.) I blew off steam, steam that was accumulating without booze to dampen the flames. Not always constructive venting, but I also met new friends, and connected with people whose work I’ve admired for literal decades and ended up seeing plays with Lin-Manuel Miranda and hanging backstage with Jane Wiedlin after a Go-Go’s show and exchanging sober thoughts with Mike Doughty. When my mom passed in 2018, a lot of people reached out to tell me they were thinking of me. This was nice. For a while, Twitter was a huge help when I needed it.

I used to hate going to parties and really hated dancing and mingling, but a couple of drinks would fix that. Point is, for a while, booze was a huge help, too.

But my engagement with Twitter changed, and I started calling people my ‘friends’ even though I’d never once met them or even heard their voices. These weren’t even penpals, these were people whose jokes or stances I enjoyed, so with Arthurian benevolence I clicked on a little heart icon, liked their tweet, and assumed therefore that we had signed some sort of blood oath.

We had not. I got glib, and cheap, and a little lazy. And then to make matters much worse, Trump came along and extended his reach with the medium.

There was a while there where I thought I could be a sort of voice for the voiceless, and I thought I was doing that. I tried very hard to only contribute things that I felt were not being said – It wasn’t accomplishing anything to notice “Haha Trump looks like he’s bullshitting his way through an oral report” – such things were self-evident. I tried to point out very specific inconsistencies in his policies, like the Muslim ban meant to curb terrorism that still favored the country that brought forth 13 of the 9/11 hijackers. Like his full-throated cries against media bias performed while he suckled at Roger Ailes’ wrinkly teat. Like his fondness for evangelical votes that coincided with a scriptural knowledge that lagged far behind mine, even though I’m a lapsed Episcopalian, and there is no one less religiously observant than a lapsed Episcopalian. But that eventually gave way to unleashing ad hominem attacks against his higher profile supporters, who I felt weren’t being questioned enough, who I felt were in turn being fawned over by theirdim supporters. If you’re one of these guys, and you think I’m talking about you, you’re probably right, but don’t mistake this for an apology. You suck, and you support someone who sucks, and your idolatry is hurting our country and its standing in the world. Fuck you entirely, but that’s not the point. The point is that me screaming into the toilet of Twitter helps no one – it doesn’t help a family stuck at the border because they’re trying to secure a better life for their kids. It doesn’t help a poor teenager who can’t get an abortion because the party of ‘small government’ has squeezed their tiny jurisdiction into her uterus. It doesn’t help the coal miner who’s staking all his hopes on a dying industry and a President’s empty promises to resurrect it. I was born in New York City, and I currently live in Los Angeles. Those are the only two places I’ve ever lived, if you don’t count the 4 years I spent in Ithaca[1]. So, yes, I live in a liberal bubble, and while I’ve driven across the country a couple of times and did a few weeks in a touring band and am as crushed as any heartlander about the demise of Waffle House, you have me dead to rights if you call me a coastal elitist. And with that in mind, I offer few surprises. A guy who grew up in the theater district and was vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage or felt you should own an AR-15? THAT would be newsworthy. I am not newsworthy. I can preach to the choir, I can confirm people’s biases, but I will likely not sway anyone who is eager to dismiss a Native New Yorker who lives in Hollywood. I grew up in the New York of the 1970s, and that part of my identity did shape my politics. My mom’s boss was gay and the Son of Sam posed a realistic threat. As such, gays are job creators[2] and guns are used for homicide much more often than they are used for self-defense[3]. I have found this to be generally true over the years, and there’s even data to back it up.

“But Mr. Bowie,” you might say, though I insist you call me John - “those studies are conducted by elitist institutions and those institutions suck!” And again, I am not going to reason with people who will dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their limited world view as elitist or, God Help Us, fake news. But the studies above are peer-reviewed, convincing, and there are more where those came from.

“But John,” you might say, and I am soothed that we’re one a first name basis - “Can’t you just stay on Twitter for the jokes?” Ugh. A) apparently not and B) the jokes are few and far between, and I am 100% part of that problem.

I have stuff to offer, but Twitter is not the place from which to offer it.

After years of academically understanding that Twitter is not the real world, Super Tuesday 2020 made the abstract pretty fucking concrete. If you had looked at my feed on the Monday beforehand – my feed which is admittedly curated towards the left, but not monolithic (Hi, Rich Lowry!) – you’d have felt that a solid Bernie surge was imminent, but also that your candidate was going surprise her more vocal critics. When the Biden sweep swept, when Bernie was diminished and when Warren was defeated, I realized that Twitter is not only not the real world, it’s almost some sort of Phillip K. Dickian alternate timeline, untethered to anything we’re actually experiencing in our day to day life. This is both good news and bad news – one, we’re not heading towards a utopia of single payer health care and the eradication of American medical debt any time soon, but two, we’re also not being increasingly governed by diaper-clad jungen like Charlie Kirk. Clouds and their linings. Leaving Twitter may look like ceding ground to the assclowns but get this – the ground. Is not. There.

It’s just air.

There are tangible things I can do with my time - volunteer with a local organization called Food On Foot, who provide food and job training for people experiencing homelessness here in my adopted Los Angeles. I can give money to candidates and causes I support, and I can occasionally even drop by social media to boost a project or an issue and then vanish, like a sort of Caucasian Zorro who doesn’t read his mentions. I can also model good behavior for my kids (ages 10 and 13) who don’t need to see their father glued to his phone, arguing about Trumps incompetence with Constitutional scholars who have a misspelled Bible verse in their bio (three s’ in Ecclesiastes, folks).

So farewell Twitter. I’ll miss a lot of you. Perhaps not as badly as I miss Simon Maloy and Roger Ebert and Harris Wittels and others whose deaths created an unfillable void on the platform. But I won’t miss the yelling, and the lionization of poor grammar, and anonymous trolls telling my Jewish friends that they were gonna leave the country “via chimney.” I will not miss people who think Trump is a stable genius calling me a “fucktard.” I will not miss transphobia or cancelling but I will miss hashtag games, particularly my stellar work during #mypunkmusical (Probably should have quit after that surge, I was on fire that night, real blaze of glory stuff I mean, Christ, Sunday in the Park with the Germs? Husker Du I Hear A Waltz? Fiddler on the Roof (keeping an eye out for the cops)? These are Pulitzer contenders.). Twitter makes me feel lousy, even when I’m right, and I’m often right. There’s just no point in barking bumperstickers at each other, and there are people who are speaking truth to power and doing a cleaner job of it – Aaron Rupar, Steven Pasquale, Louise Mensch, Imani Gandy and Ijeoma Oluo to name five solid mostly politically based accounts (Yes, Pasquale is a Broadway tenor. He’s also a tenacious lefty with good points and research and a dreamy voice. You think you’re straight and then you hear him sing anything from Bridges of Madison County and you want him to spoon you.). You’re probably already following those mentioned, but on the off chance you’re not, get to it. You’ll thank me, but you won’t be able to unless you actually have my email.

_______

[1] And Jesus, that’s worse – Ithaca is such a lefty enclave that they had an actual socialist mayor FOR WHOM I VOTED while I was there. And not socialist the way some people think all Democrats are socialist – I mean Ben Nichols actually ran on the socialist ticket and was re-elected twice for a total of six years.

[2] The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, “America’s LGBT Economy” Jan 20th, 2017

[3] The Violence Policy Institute, Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self Defense Gun Use, July 2019.

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parrrty-poison · 4 years ago

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ok so very long post. (not that it matters as i talk to the void askgdjjeh)

let's be real. who's the only two people i really think about when i’m seriously thinking about death? my sisters. my mom too, but mostly my sisters. and ok yeah, maybe what my mom would be like to my sisters if she was dealing with me being gone but that’s a whole other can of worms. in the end it’s always about my sisters. and i truly genuinely believe one of them hates me deep down and doesn’t really care about me, which, fair. i guess you don’t get over the people who were shitty to you in your developing years? except i got over her being shitty right back to me but whatever. i’m the oldest. it’s never been about me. and i think they probably feel like it’s always been all about me because i was so problematic back in the day, which was mostly because of my mom and what we came to find out was literally just my genes so there’s not much else i could have done. that doesn’t make me blame myself any less tho.

it doesn’t matter now. the point is, i pissed off my sisters more than i made them like me i think, and then we started living in different countries and it’s never been the same since then. i know i’m the odd one out in the family now. my parents say they don’t talk to me because they assume i’m always busy with school, which i am, but if they actually tried to talk to me i would find the time. i have way more time now. the problem is after all this time i have absolutely no idea how to reach out to anyone. they only care about me doing well in school anyway. which i do somehow, no matter how fucked up shit gets or how much shit i’m on to get through it. that’s my one real talent. so whenever i talk to them i only tell them what they want to hear and with my dad we’re already constantly dealing with enough other shit with the government by trying to keep me in school and in the country despite this country’s best efforts to get rid of me. so how could i ever bring up my feelings on top of that?? i’m always worried about our family’s financial situation no matter what and i am tired of being a burden because i wasn’t supposed to be anymore, i only am because of the government. so despite my best efforts i keep giving my parents enough to worry about.

and then my sisters. like i said, i’ve been the odd one out for a long time now and i have no idea how to come back from that. i know they’re literally always facetiming, which is the only way i get to talk to my little sister cause carla was here and apparently they can’t go a single day without talking to each other so while she was staying with me i got to hang out with both of them. it kept me sane for a bit there. even if i knew it wasn’t for me. 90% of the time i have no idea wtf they’re talking about and every time i ask them and they try to explain they just dismiss it and say it’s some tik tok shit or something. and yeah ok i refuse to get one cause honestly, social media is toxic af and i have enough shit to worry about already so i don’t have the mental energy for it. and honestly i don’t have the attention span for tik tok. but yeah, i know me living under a metaphoric rock doesn’t help but i’m trying to keep myself somewhat sane. but that means i have nothing to talk about with my sisters.

when carla was here she literally barely interacted with me cause she’s on her phone all.the.fucking.time. to the point where i know it’s straight up rude but i didn’t wanna say anything cause i know she’d just say i sounded like my mom. and i know most of the time she was just texting my other sister and honestly? it hurts ok? maricel was like 11 when i last lived with her and i was 18 so we had nothing in common and now i missed all these fucking years of being around her while she grew up. and somehow she’s still nicer to me than carla. maybe cause i didn’t get the chance to be as much of a shitty sister to her back in the day due to the age difference. she definitely didn’t get the worst of my horribly mentally ill unmedicated self. look, the facts add up ok? i’m not an idiot. i can see why things happen but i have absolutely no fucking idea how to change them.

and in the end what i have is this. somehow, despite my best efforts, which were actually pretty damn good despite everything, i am here again. i mean, my first semester of grad school, all the insane shit that happened in the span of less than 3 months really, that would have broken me back in the day. 2020 may have been a horrible year for everybody but personally, 2019 was a straight-up personal attack. and i made it through. without anyone knowing about any major breakdowns (I guess except for Tom and Borna) and with semi-decent grades. everyone in the program agreed that my first semester was one for the books in the worst possible way.

but i made it to 2020. and then 2020 happened. and i learned what being stuck in a 5x5 room for almost a month does to a person, aside from everything else. and i remember telling my therapist i hoped one of the things we would all learn from the pandemic was how long-term solitary confinement has never been an okay way of punishment. cause that’s the last time i felt truly seriously suicidal and literally had to physically fight myself not to do it. and it slowly got better.

but here we are again. and it’s not the same, not at all. it’s just it’s fucking winter and every winter i struggle to make it through like clockwork. in fact, i thought this time i’d be okay cause i made it all the way to late november just fine, which is unheard of. but i did. and then it all came crashing down like a fucking landslide. and god, i tried to stay on my feet for as long as i could, i really did. but when that wave hit it hit hard. it fucking knocked me to my knees. and for as long as i could i hid behing people, i clinged to them like a fucking lifeline even if i knew they’d rather be somewhere else. i got my sister to stay with me because i knew she hated being with my dad more. it was a win-win cause i couldn’t leave her there, i know how much she hates that place cause i hate it too. she didn’t pay attention to me almost the whole time she was here and i only had so much money to take her out places, seeing as i’m not being paid for work anymore. but as long as she was here i wasn’t allowed to be an alcoholic mess or kill myself. as soon as she left i went back to that.

And then Tom died. i don’t even know how to deal with this still. it only happened last week. but i don’t know how to tell people i need them. and i really do need them. but no one’s coming of their own volition and i never learned how to ask for help cause the couple times i did my mom told me to stop being crazy so i never asked again. and yeah. i’m 24 and i still haven’t fully managed to get past that but since then people have consistently proved to me that asking for help is a waste of time. so yeah, i have no idea how to tell anyone i’m on the verge of jumping off a metaphorical cliff. cause i hate sounding dramatic and i feel like any time i talk about my feelings at all that’s just what it’s like to everyone. dramatic. dramatic and uncomfortable.

and because i never do it, if i do it now it’s gonna be even weirder. i mean, last week i sat on the kitchen floor and listened to justin rant about how he feels his friend doesn’t want to be friends with him anymore and that feeling sucks, i know, but when i mentioned Tom he was like “huh?? oh yeah i forgot about that” like i hadn’t told him about it the night before. he hasn’t asked me how i’m doing even once, no one has. Jo did once and then she bailed. but yeah, i feel like i try so hard to be a good and supportive friend to justin and he just doesn’t give a shit about me. and i have a feeling he, and maybe most of my friends here??, thinks i simply do not have any feelings because i don’t show them in front of people. sure, i refuse to have anyone see me cry ever, but like that’s not the only way to show emotions??? but no one seems to get that???

So sure, no one cares about your feelings when you always seem to be okay on the outside, no matter how much shit you know is happening on the inside. My point is, my sisters hate me or don’t care about me and that’s the only people i really care about hurting. So. Yeah. Fuck what my meds say, maybe it is a good call to kill myself. Only time will tell i suppose.

#i guess heres the rant that ive been holding in forever lol #its the shit i could never write in my actual journal #cause it would require actual ink #and somehow that's harder than just screaming into the endless very public void that is tumblr?

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dogcopter · 5 years ago

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Rose is Lion Liveblog episode 45: Rose’s Scabbard Part One (long)

Rose is Liveblog 2020 Masterlist

(recap/summary: I’m liveblogging every Lion appearance in SU in order to emphasize that he is obviously the heinous, beautiful Rose Quartz in disguise. This episode in particular is a smoking gun like Escapism)

Lion takes center stage opposite Pearl in Rose’s Scabbard. Steven learns a bit about him, and about Rose. This episode, Lion’s revelatory behavior towards Pearl stands out.

Lion looks unhappy to be here. He is unhappy because he is Rose Quartz, and has thousands of years of regrets.

Pearl suggests Steven rob a grave and also that he get Lion obedience training. Lion appears to follow a magic butterfly through the strawberry patch.

Steven says “We’re making progress. Now he looks at me when I say his name!” and calls to Lion, who ignores him.

Lion digs up Rose’s Scabbard.

Pearl’s jaw drops.

“That’s the scabbard to Rose’s sword!”

She tries to yank it from Lion’s mouth. He’s annoyed, because it was for Steven, not her.

Lore concept: In this episode, it’s made clear that Lion knows Pearl, likes her, and cares about her to some extent. These things are true of Rose Quartz, but new to Lion’s characterization.

Lion resists at first, but is defeated. Pearl shoos him away.

One of Lion’s most consistent traits thus far is not giving a shit about what anyone around him is doing, but this episode, he’s attentive to Pearl. Why’s he making eye contact with Pearl and reacting personally? IMO that is super obviously Rose Quartz.

Look at this exchange. Lion often has ambiguous expressions, but that looks like a smile. Lol.

Although he “spoke” to Steven in Lion and Lion 2, at this point in the series he has only recently shown real affection toward Steven, in Lion 3. There’s also a whole running gag in almost all of his appearances that he doesn’t care what Steven wants or cares about because he’s a cat. He’s hardly ever attentive to Steven’s requests, with the exception of Rose lore.

Amethyst hugged him once onscreen, in Ocean Gem, and he and Pearl watched Steven sleep and she spoke at him once. The only other character he’s interacted with at any length onscreen is Connie, and they will become close later in the series because Rose Quartz loves Imagination and Connie is an MG fantasy protagonist. At this point, Connie and Lion had a couple of moments: his interest in her in Lion 2 and cooperating to rescue Steven in Ocean Gem. But aside from how he acted in Lion 2 he really hasn’t been social like this.

Lion snorts in Pearl’s face when she shoos him, annoying her.

“Mom fought here?” “That’s right! And I fought alongside her.” (said while alongside Lion)

A teary-eyed Pearl recounts the glory of Rose Quartz.

Garnet tries to keep it real, but Pearl at this point in the series is still coping via Rose Quartz fanfiction, which has been her coping mechanism ever since a clown dressed up as her hot OC 6,000 years ago, so naturally, she associates telling epic RQ stories with inspiring her charge (Steven) in an effort to fill the void...

Anyway she says “Here we made our stand against our Homeworld!” and a half-truth, “We won!” Winning meaning the Earth not being colonized I suppose.

We don’t get to see Lion’s reaction to this. Probably as he is Rose Quartz he is thinking things like, “At one point listening to a Rose Quartz story GMH but now the lies are too bitter” or “this is almost definitely where I betrayed my best friend and biggest fan, the #1 Crystal Gem, Bismuth. I am a bad person” or maybe “It sucks that approx. 5,300 years ago all these people believed in the cause and now they’re digimons in bubbles in the basement and I feel personally responsible” or maybe just “It’s sad to see Pearl like this.” there are layers. Or maybe he feels nothing at all because Rose is still working on empathy! It’s probably a mix of different things.

Steven is dazzled, ofc, which is what matters.

Next part of the ep lacks Lion but recap: Pearl wants to show Steven a SECRET SECRET Rose place, secret even to Amethyst and Garnet! They travel on foot and she carries him up a cliff without a belay. Steven has already been there via Lion, which breaks Pearl’s fragile hard-light projection heart in two. Then he smashes it to bits under his heel by knowing where Rose’s long-lost sword is.

Reiterating: Lion knew about the cave because he is Rose Quartz. This was a very secret home base for Pearl and Rose’s eyes only.

Arguably, sure, Rose could have traveled around the world with Lion showing him places, especially places she’d rather forget, but Lion being Rose just fits better when you consider both information (lore) and behavior (personality).

Steven Universe Future relevant characterization meta sidenote: This LB is about Lion, but by extension it’s also about Rose and Steven. Here’s another formative moment: Steven is really excited to show Pearl he knows where Rose’s sword is. This is an occasion where Steven is trying to be helpful, but everything goes poorly and he thinks it’s his fault. Pearl was overjoyed to bring him to a dangerous place full of secrets, both canonically core elements of Steven’s desire for bonding activities with the gems (For example, Secret Team, Serious Steven). He also loves learning more about his mom and yearns for lore on her (Story for Steven, Lion 3).

Steven’s dream came true today, he got a dangerous adventure and a bonding moment where he also learns about his mom. He doesn’t realize the glorious war stories are lies/coping mechanisms, he’s still a hundred episodes away from learning the terrible truth about Pink Diamond, and he has not a single clue this will upset Pearl or how badly. He’s just trying to show her something cool like she did for him. She falls apart and then he spends the rest of the episode “picking up the pieces”.

Pearl: “Rose’s sword. How did it get in there?”

(Lion: Oh boy.) Steven: “I don’t know! But there’s a ton of stuff in there!”

Steven: “I keep stuff in him, too.” (Lion: STEVEN DON’T TELL HER THAT)

Lion’s face is doing this as Steven says this because he’s Rose Quartz. He just realized Steven might tell the Crystal Gems that Bismuth has unjustly imprisoned for over five millennia, or bring out that chest, and is bracing for impact. The childhood traumatized Rose Quartz has never been ready to face people.

Luckily Steven is an adorable fool.

Pearl: “But how?”

Lion, who was downright chummy with Pearl earlier, doesn’t want her messing with the mane.

After all, Lion isn’t just a secret Rose kept from Pearl. He’s like a series of secrets within secrets Rose kept from Pearl. And he’s Rose, actively keeping herself secret from Pearl. And that is kind of a bummer.

See, he makes so much eye contact with her this ep. He’s not acting like he did in others; he’s probably spent more time onscreen caring about Pearl than about Steven at the moment.

I’m so proud of Pearl for her growth and that she was able to talk secrets eventually, this was a rough period for her.

This is Pearl’s face as she realizes that Rose had secrets even from her, even though she is also a container of Rose’s secrets. (Episode title drop) “But Rose didn’t have a lion.” “It seems like her stuff in there.”

Note that we don’t see Lion’s face again for this part. I wonder if when we get the reveal, we’ll see a new side of some of these past scenes where Lion’s back is to us.

“Rose didn’t have a lion! Because if Rose had a lion, I would have known about it.”

“Rose kept many things secret. Even from us.”

Pearl is teary-eyed again, this time actually in tears. “But not from me! I was the one she told everything!”

This is untrue. Bismuth is right there, and as recently as Volleyball, Pearl was learning new things Rose never told her. But the secret Pearl had to keep for Rose, the secret of her identity and Pink Diamond’s shattering, is so significant that the alternative is unthinkable because it changes Pearl’s self-image as much as her image of Rose. Even though at the time (and probably still, certainly at the time of this episode) doing that was her proudest moment and with the intent to break free of the system once and for all, both the trauma of what followed and of Rose’s decision to refuse Pearl the ability to speak of it had completely shaped her life from that point forward.

Not to belabor the point but Rose as Lion in this scene is witnessing the effects of what she did and of losing her on Pearl, like how he was present for the gems responding to Steven’s “death” in So Many Birthdays, or the events of “Cry For Help”.

“Yo, you’re not the only one who misses her!” We glimpse some of what Amethyst is struggling with - and details on Amethyst and Rose’s relationship are few and far between. Garnet showing genuine surprise, too. Possibly she is future visioning that Pearl is about to knock down Rose’s portrait.

Remember Lion is sitting there seeing all this. So is Steven, who just wanted to surprise and delight Pearl with the sword.

“You can’t understand how I feel! None of you had what we had!”

This one really is true, but Steven won’t learn how true until the events of Now We’re Only Falling Apart. Still no visible reaction from Lion, but he does appear to be listening attentively.

Steven echoes Pearl’s own line from earlier in an attempt to reassure her like she reassured him. Great leaders have to keep secrets to protect people! “She probably just wanted to protect you, like everybody else.”

“What do you know?” Pearl’s hurtful words cut Steven, who is only trying to help.

”You’ve never even met her!”

Now we see Lion looking at Pearl with everyone else. Steven has taken a step back in fear.

The portrait begins to fall from the wall,

Garnet activates Sapphire speed and catches it. Lion’s back is to us once again, as is the portrait’s.

Pearl glances at Steven’s face again, looking strung out on grief and presumably fresh guilt for what she just said,

And takes off. Amethyst says, “Fine! Go cry about it!” Steven says, “Where did she go?” and Amethyst replies, “Who cares? I hate it when she gets like this.” This isn’t the first time Pearl has been upset like this since losing Rose. These are their reactions to that.

Amethyst frustrated, maybe because Rose was the most important relationship in her life too, and Pearl’s words about being the most important devalue that. Garnet is carrying on putting the portrait away.

“Garnet?”

Garnet doesn’t answer him. She probably doesn’t know what to say. This has been the family dynamic since at least losing Rose.

Steven pushes down his own hurt feelings. Asks about Pearl instead. “Is she okay?” Garnet still doesn’t respond. This kid needs a parent to rely on!

“Well, I’m gonna go find her.”

“Do you know where she went?”

The heartbreaker Rose Quartz growls an affirmative. Unlike Garnet and Amethyst, who are exhausted by the cycle of grief they’ve been trapped in since Rose gave up her physical form & who’ve probably given up trying to talk to Pearl when she won’t (or can’t) talk to them if they tried in the first place, Lion and Steven want to chase after Pearl and do something.

Lore: Lion knows where Pearl is (The battlefield) because he is Rose Quartz.

Rose knows where Pearl would go to be upset about this (Rose, the sword, lies). Just like the armory was a place known only to Pearl and Rose, the floating island Pearl is about to leave Steven to is an unmarked location with special significance to Pearl and Rose.

Sure, we were just there and they found the sword, as the audience we need a setting established before we can return to it and it bookends the episode – but Pearl’s first line introducing the setting in the episode is:

“This was a site of a historic battle. Every weapon here was left by a gem over 5,000 years ago. I don’t like to disturb it, but Garnet said we can’t just leave these lying around.”

She describes that it was an important place because of the battle that happened there, but a place that lay mostly undisturbed for over 5,000 years, and Pearl makes it sound like she’s rarely visited since. No personal connection or feelings, really, aside from respect for the dead. It paints a very different picture from the one she projects for Steven in just a few minutes.

“Let’s go find Pearl!” Pearl left via warp pad, but Lion and Steven take a lion warp. Lion was present to hear the war stories at the beginning.

Pearl was excited by the scabbard, but Lion would only have reason to assume she’d return there and agree to follow her with Steven if a) he actually cares about her and b) he knows something about her we don’t. Another Lion behavior detail that is odd if just Lion, makes perfect sense if Rose.

Rose’s Scabbard Part 2

#rose is liveblog 2020 #rose is lion 2020 #steven universe #i wont put others in the public tag but when i finish each season ill do a list #This might be my favorite episode of Steven Universe.#There are a lot of strong contenders #but as a Rose is obviously Lion conspiracy theorist this one is especially beautiful and tragic.

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happymetalgirl · 5 years ago

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2019

Despite all the hubbub about year-end wrap-ups, and decade-end wrap-ups this year, it feels to me like as soon as the year is over and the next one starts people immediately stop caring about all the top tens and bottom tens.

I got really busy over this past December and, along with missing out on reviewing several albums I wanted to review, I totally missed writing the extensive year-end lists I had planned. Last year I had listed over 50 of my favorite albums and nearly 100 of my favorite songs, and I wanted to do lists this year that would follow 2018′s lists respectably. Unfortunately, time got the better of me, and it still has the better of me, but I feel like I still should at least offer some kind of closure on last year.

It’s not going to be nearly 150 entries, but I do want to very briefly give an abbreviated list of my favorite songs, my favorite metal albums, my favorite non-metal albums, my least favorite albums of 2019. I’ll be keeping the lists pretty short, but I’ll go numerically still, starting with the bad news first.

The Bottom 10 Albums of 2019:

Maybe it’s my being calloused to what’s awful, or just doing a better job of avoiding it, but I feel like I wasn’t as angry at my bottom ten this year (2019) as I was at the two that preceded it, and perhaps it’s because I feel like I got pretty much what I was expecting with most of what I heard here; not as many of these were tremendous letdowns like Bullet for My Valentine with Gravity or just horrendous beyond comprehension like Black Vale Brides’ Vale. But just because I expected the shit didn’t mean it necessarily went down any easier when I had to ingest it this year.

Like the two years before 2019 when I did worst-of lists, a lot of the worst of the genre came from obviously contrived mainstream playlist/radio bait projects from bands to which it comes as no surprise. This year didn’t include as much shitty political commentary (being that I could probably fill this list with NSBM if I actively sought that shit out) or nostalgic cash grabs as the past two years, but the staleness of the long-tired formulas by which these radio-aspiring bands adhere to in their pursuits of mainstream crossover (or maintenance) only grows more frustrating the older they get. And the amount of surrender by so many bands to Imagine Dragons’ way of dominating the rock charts has been similarly frustrating. Often cited as the new Nickelback, we now kind of look back on Nickelback with a little bit of rose-tinted hindsight with the realization that it was mostly their omnipresence that irritated us all, and the case is the same for Imagine Dragons, but I don’t remember quite as many bands trying to copy the very unoriginal Nickelback and replicate “Photograph” or “Rockstar”. But I have heard so many acts churn out knock-offs of “Radioactive”, and “Believer”, and “Whatever It Takes” in obvious attempts to get themselves into that band’s royal court on the rock charts. There was of course plenty of unimaginative atmospheric blackgaze and post-metal to be found, but even the worst of that was just ineffective and boring at worst and not so much torture upon the eardrums like the albums to follow are.

10. Bad Wolves - N.A.T.I.O.N.

We didn’t get a Five Finger Death Punch album this year, so Bad Wolves came to the rescue to fill that void in 2019, despite also releasing an album in 2018. Though I’ve seen already that FFDP are slated for a release in 2020, so, great... While I would say that N.A.T.I.O.N.’s few high points made it a slightly better project overall than the band’s debut, those highlights were not nearly enough to outweigh the bafflingly poorly arranged variety pack of trashy alt rock ballads and formulaic alt metal from ten years ago that made up the majority of this album. As erratic as its flow was, everything on this album was so predictable once you got a ten-second taste of any given song, a few too many of which reeked heavily of Nickelback (and I know I just got done saying not that many bands really copied them, but that’s how obsolete and dated this album sounds at times). It’s obvious trying to market to FFDP’s demographic and co-occupy that giant, lucrative SiriusXM niche with them, and I’m just not thrilled to have basically a clone of FFDP walking around, taking up space in the metal ecosystem to keep an eye on.

9. Municipal Waste - The Last Rager

It might seem mean to put an EP down here, but my god this was terrible. If it had gone on longer it would undoubtedly quickly make its way to the top (well, bottom) of this list. I feel like my negative review of Slime and Punishment and this EP could at face value be miscontrued as me just being a sourpuss and a way too self-serious critic or just having it out for Municipal Waste, but I love thrash, I love totally not serious music, and I wish there was more high-profile fresh thrash being released these days. I wish one of the few notable thrash releases I heard in 2019 wasn’t bottom-ten quality. But that is just where Municipal Waste are right now, lazy, run-of-the-mill party thrash that is so deficient in that real vibrant party energy that this style of music needs to work. Yeah, I get that it’s not supposed to be taken seriously, but it’s so clearly recycled that it’s not even fun, the one thing it’s supposed to be. It’s like the shit near the end of the human centipede.

8. King 810 - Suicide King

I really wasn’t expecting much from this album, and that’s pretty much what I got, with the added bonus of a weirdly amateurishly experimental flair to King 810′s usual street-cred chest-puffing brand of retro rap/nu metal. I imagine fans of the band enjoyed the added theatrics and the usual chug-backed struggle bars, but I found the whole thing to be just kind of ham-fisted and kooky. It wasn’t one of the more infuriating releases I heard all year, but I sure as hell won’t be eagerly returning to it.

7. Attila - Villain

This was another musically recycled album from a band that usually makes their appeal through fun, nasty bangers. While the music on the album was, sure, as derivative as Attila’s deathcore usually is, the primary issue with Villain was the soured attitude of the band’s usually charismatic frontman. Fronz went from being the life of the party (who, while oozing with fratboy energy that you really wouldn’t want to be around anywhere else except a crowded rager, you could at least count on to be cool and keep the party going) to that loud, overzealous asshole trying to turn up when it’s totally not the time and then getting pissy when met with resistance, making it about him and making everyone around him uncomfortable and totally. Fronz sounds like a drunk asshole challenging you everyone to chug faster than him at best and like a pushy frat bro at worst, embodying the title of the album way to much in a manner where it’s justified that he be viewed that way, if not generous given the term’s romanticized connotations. Silver lining: I listened to “It Is What It Is” during a workout the other day, and that track is a qualified banger.

6. Saint Vitus - Saint Vitus

I think this is the only doom metal album to reach a bottom ten spot for me at any point this decade, and I’m not surprised that it’s Saint Vitus doing it. The band’s self-titled record was so derivative and wholly unoriginal, it was like listening to a cheap Sabbath cosplay. It was so long ago that I listened to it in full that I honestly don’t remember anything specific about the album, but I sure remember how I felt while listening to it every time.

5. Steel Panther - Heavy Metal Rules

Probably the biggest letdown on this list, I actually really enjoyed the band’s 2017 effort, Lower the Bar; I felt like they had got a better handle on their comedic parody of 80′s glam metal than any of the three albums before it, despite it not getting as much attention as their debut, for instance. This one, however, captured the cringe and cheese of the 80′s just fine, but with the jokes falling flat or way too repetitive, it just sounded like a less subtly raunchy version of an actual hair metal album. It’s another album that’s just supposed to be fun, but wasn’t nearly the experience it set out to be, the difference being that this one’s failure seems to have come more from a bout of writer’s block than anything else, which is understandable, five albums in, to a project that specifically makes fun of one dead subgenre of metal.

4. Arch Enemy - Covered in Blood

This has to be one of the shittiest covers albums I’ve ever heard, with Arch Enemy earning record points for monotony on this one. The whole thing sounds like the band just tossed a hefty album’s worth into an Arch Enemy processor that just stripped away all the songs’ character and replaced it with low-effort growls and robotic melodeath guitar playing. At its best, the band offers up passable by-the-books rehashes of songs up their melodeath alley; at its worst they butcher songs they have no business putting so little effort into covering. And it’s fucking 70 minutes long! So they get points for the agonizing length too, as well as incompetence points (I’ve yet to hear a death-growled cover of an Iron Maiden song go well), and, yeah, laziness points too. So many of these were recorded already years ago as bonus tracks to past albums, yet the band couldn’t spare the effort to make the new recordings like a little bit exciting.

3. Papa Roach - Who Do You Trust?

I’m not even mad about this one; I knew it was gonna suck, my curiosity just got the best of me and I was treated to some of the most laughably amateurish lyricism and poorly dated rap rock and alt metal instrumentation I’ve heard since the Prophets of Rage album two years ago. Jacoby Shaddix is doing features these days with hit or miss results, but what the hell is Papa Roach going to be this coming decade? More of this? I just don’t know whose socks this is supposed to knock off. Who’s getting hyped for more Papa Roach in the 2020′s? Probably me, just to see how poorly this band continues to try to keep up with the already sluggish pace of radio rock trends as the signature style they feel obligated to keep a tether to ages poorly.

2. Skillet - Victorious

Now this one I was kind of mad about, and I was expecting it to be pretty bad too. Skillet sold their soul to the whim of pop rock radio early last decade and haven’t been interesting to listen to for a long time now, to the point where it’s so obvious that raspy frontman John Cooper started his own side outlet for his more passionate urges while he lets the winds of pop rock and Christian rock playlist curation steer his main project for little more than a paycheck. The band’s reputable touring work ethic is such a stark contrast to their transparent artistic laziness and spinelessness. Again, despite the formulaic broad-reaching rock radio fodder, embarrassingly cheesy ballads, the token heavy tune at the end for the long-time fans, and even the obviously contrived Imagine Dragons mimicry being totally predicted, it was still so frustrating how blatantly soulless and capital-motivated this thing was to hear.

1. Mark Morton - Anesthetic

I didn’t really have any expectations for this album, but my god was it the year’s quietest disaster of a collaboration project. I didn’t hear anyone else talking about this thing after it came out nearly as much as I did leading up to it, and thank god. The album is supposedly a solo project from the Lamb of God axeman, a distilled showcase of his creative voice, but the whole thing feels like it was in the hands of label execs the whole time and he was just the guy who recorded guitar tracks to all these songs. For some reason, a lot of these “star-studded”, compilation-album-feeling projects in the metal world don’t seem to come out so well, maybe because no one involved is bringing their A-game to a feature in a compilation album, and that is exactly what Anesthetic suffers from, and it suffers fucking hard, not just from the utter lack of cohesion and poor flow from track to track, but from the phoned-in performances of the guests on the variety of generic, underwritten, surface-level songs. Like, again, this is a project under Mark Morton’s name, one that’s supposed to be guided primarily by his artistic vision; you’re telling me, Spinefarm Records, that the Lamb of God guitarist’s vision of a solo album is various flavors of neutered rock/metal radio bait? And he was satisfied with everyone’s contributions to this thing? The whole thing feels like he was just along for the ride and the project was never even in his hands, like Spinefarm had the idea/opportunity to do a various artists comp. album but thought putting under Morton’s name would be more marketable or something. Maybe that hypothesis is totally off, but regardless, this album is a colossal failure on the performance and writing fronts, the worst thing I voluntarily heard in 2019.

My 20 Favorite Songs of 2019:

Okay! With the trash taken to the curb, I feel like it might be time to address before getting into my favorite songs that they might not resemble my favorite albums quite as much as previous years, one, because this is very abbreviated, and, two, because some songs really lend themselves to enjoyment outside the context of their album more than other songs. One band here lands three entries and probably would have landed a whole lot more on a slightly longer list simply because of how great of music their album this year was for me to work out to. But I tried to diversify this list a bit so that it wasn’t just my favorite additions to my workout playlist. The top albums, I promise, are a far better representation of the year in metal for me. But anyway...

20. Periphery - “Blood Eagle”

Periphery have pretty much crystallized their brand of djent now and spent much of this year’s album doing a little adventurousness with it, but the first single, “Blood Eagle”, was one of the more traditional, crushing, explosion tracks from the album, harnessing hardcore groove, punishing accents, tasty guitar tones, and emphatic vocals of both the coarse and soaring variety. The song isn’t anything new for Periphery, but it’s a tremendous example of how potent they are at their heaviest and how easy it is for them to disprove their detractors who lampoon them for Spencer’s clean singing.

19. Panopticon - “The Crescendo of Dusk”

Despite being a one-off piece kind of off the beaten path for Panopticon for a two-track EP recorded during the previous double-albums’ sessions, this song is a fantastic example of bold, cathartic blackgaze whose soulful choral climax is built up to and pays off phenomenally, and that’s not the side of atmospheric black metal Panopticon usually wanders too. It’s a gorgeous piece that is worth it for every moment of its 12-minute runtime.

18. Car Bomb - “Scattered Sprites”

Switching quickly to a much shorter and more jolting song, it was hard to pick a prime highlight on Car Bomb’s new album, but ultimately I found myself loving the tasty, effects-laden, Meshuggah-esque 8-string mathcore groove of “Scattered Sprites” and the rest of the song’s fascinating tonal jumps from Deftones-ish atmosphere to crushing distorted madness. It certainly represents very well the constantly transforming beast that the band’s fourth album was.

17. Spirit Adrift - “Angel & Abyss”

On yet another album full of songs that would have packed a longer list, Spirit Adrift’s standout moment on Divided by Darkness was, for me, the melodically soulful trad-doom power ballad of sorts, “Angel & Abyss”. The melodic guitar leads being the obvious driver of the song’s feels, the clean and rhythm backing and the seething vocal delivery are perhaps the underappreciated foundation for the extra emotive NWOBHM-influenced guitar leads to shine through.

16. Inter Arma - “The Atavist's Meridian”

Definitely the standout track from Sulphur English, “The Atavist’s Meridian” is a menacing mammoth of a song, twelve-and-a-half minutes of brooding, towering sludge and haunting echoed throat-gurgling growls. Even when the wall of sound gets less jagged, the lour does not let up as the band maintain their fearsome, ominous presence in the song’s more atmospheric middle section and burst back so satisfyingly to round it out. There are bands out there that stick to this form of sludgy, death-y doom metal much more exclusively and religiously than Inter Arma who wouldn’t be able to top this.

15. Opeth - “Charlatan” My favorite cut from Opeth’s most ambitious album this decade, the band actually sound energized and adventurous on this song rather than just playing 70’s prog dress-up. The Meshuggah-esque bass groove on here is of course right up my alley, but the whole song is full of actual progressive dynamic that keeps you fixated on it and it’s intriguing emotive journey.

14. Sermon - “The Preacher”

Being the second-to-last song on the album, “The Preacher” kind of goes hand-in-hand with “The Rise of the Desiderata” as part of the album’s climactic ending, and it’s as meticulous and calculated as every track on the album with its small, this song being a standout for its particular dynamic between is louder and softer sections, making it such a thriller of a track that serves its role as part of the album’s climax beautifully.

13. Misery Index - “New Salem”

I’ve loved Rituals of Power all year and there have been several standout tracks for me, but “New Salem”, with its gruff refrain and relentless powerviolence aggression, has been my favorite from the album this year, one of them top workout playlist tracks for me this past year. It’s a pretty straightforward, fast, brutal track, but god is it effective.

12. Korn - “You’ll Never Find Me”

From the irksome guitar wails from Munky and the thick and tasty seven-string accents from Head, to Jonathan Davis’ volatile vocal delivery, “You’ll Never Find Me”, is one of the (several) prime examples of Korn’s committed return to their old-school sound on this album that really fucking stuck the landing and impressed. That build-up to that fucking intense headbanging crash at the bridge is exactly what made me such a fan of Korn’s early work in the first place, and this song is one of, again, several that shows why more than twenty years down the road while all their imitators have come and gone, Korn have been the dedicated champions of nu metal.

11. Cattle Decapitation - “Time’s Cruel Curtain”

It was honestly hard picking a favorite from Death Atlas, but I felt like this song captured the album’s lyrics’ overall dread and gloom in the musical sense pretty well through the dissonant clean guitars and Travis Ryan’s melodic snarling, which is particularly gut-wrenching on the chorus. And it’s as fierce, fast, and disgustingly brutal as we’ve come to expect of Cattle Decapitation now.

10. Motionless in White - “Thoughts & Prayers”

One of the many vibrant, tasty alternative metalcore bangers from the band’s fifth LP that dominated my workout playlist this year, “Thoughts and Prayers” is undoubtedly the most blasphemously in-your-face, Slipknot-influenced cut that highlights the highs of metalcore heaviness the band have no trouble reaching. The defiant attitude of the melodic chorus’ refusing of prayers for help, and really the whole song’s self-sufficient denial of religion over some of the band’s most potent metalcore to date, got me past a lot of physical thresholds this year.

9. Babymetal - “Arkadia”

Babymetal on their first two albums for me have been a project trying to iron out their vision of J-pop metal fusion in real time with the first and second albums’ primordial experiments producing the odd hit among many more misses, but this year’s Metal Galaxy was far more consistent, less stylistically clumsy, and packed full of hits. And if this list was longer, there wold be several bops and bangers from that record here. And while circumstance had just one song in my top 20 this year, what a tremendous entry it is. The album’s closing track, “Arkadia” starts out like a basic-ass Dragonforce cut, but the triumphant melodies quickly lead into higher and higher echelons of catharsis with the guitar vocalist Su-metal delivering the most powerfully soaring performance of the band’s career. It’s like a Dragonforce song that blows most (if not all) Dragonforce songs out of the water through its sheer unashamed passion. And while I know there are many in that camp who stiff-arm Babymetal and would wretch and rage-quit upon simply hearing Su-metal’s voice come in, I imagine they would have a hard time denying this song’s power if tricked into listening to a guy’s vocal cover over the instrumental.

8. Rammstein - “Puppe”

While Cattle Decapitation’s “With All Disrespect” is certainly a gut-punchingly grim outlook on humanity’s self-destruction, this standout cut from the German industrial metal juggernauts’ self-titled album is undoubtedly the most chilling cut on this list, and quite possibly Rammstein’s entire catalog. Till Lindemann’s poetic narration of the song’s dark story is expertly timed and laid out, but his gripping, manic, wholly unsettling vocal performance, coupled with the rest of the band’s brilliantly scored instrumental tracking, is what paralyzes you in terrified awe of the song.

7. Motionless in White - “Disguise”

Another alt-metal banger that dominated my workouts this year, the opening title track to the band’s fifth album isn’t really doing anything all that revolutionary or stylistically original, yet it’s somehow distinctly Motionless in White and it succeeds and makes it here simply because its execution of such a straightforward, yet often fucked-up style is so on-point.

6. Sermon - “The Rise of the Desiderata”

The grand finish to one of the subtlest, yet most magnificent progressive metal albums of the decade (spoiler I guess), “The Rise of the Desiderata”, even outside the context of the album building up to it, is a tremendous work of patient, well-measured progressive metal that exemplifies so magnificently what that band did with such a small musical arsenal on Birth of the Marvelous. The slow, brooding build-up to the absolutely orgasmic finish is hardly a mere waiting game, with not a dull second of the song, and the thematic climax of “rise! rise!” chants the song finishes on is, for me, the kind of representative of rewarding and immersive journey prog metal is all about!

5. Motionless in White - “Holding on to Smoke”

This one was the sleeper hit (in my eyes) for the band this year; in the album’s marginally weaker second half after the slew of bangers that occupied the first, “Holding on to Smoke” is the perseverant anthem among anthems that almost single-handedly lifts that second half. But outside the context of the album, “Holding on to Smoke” is not excessively heavy like “Thoughts & Prayers”, not even as catchy as the bouncy “<c/ode>”, and not even as sick in the breakdown department as “Disguise”, but it more than makes up for it in sheer performative passion and the compositional consistency that characterizes the whole album and strings the determination teeming throughout the song together into a hugely triumphant banger of a track.

4. Periphery - “Satellites”

Periphery really outdid themselves on the grand, ethereally cathartic closing track to their fourth (and best) self-titled album. Unlike the directly aggressive “Blood Eagle”, “Satellites” is a much longer, more multi-staged, moodier piece that gradually builds up from bright, somber reverb-driven ambiance into several tremendously heartfelt and instrumentally full-bodied crescendos, with the band timing their bursts of heavy energy perfectly. Spencer wildly outdoes himself in particular with his gloriously high-flying vocal performance during the song’s cathartic climax. It’s such a great ending to a great album, and such a great picture of Periphery’s constant perfecting of their sound.

3. As I Lay Dying - “My Own Grave”

It was released in 2018, but I included it here instead of that year’s list because I had the hunch at the time that it would be part of an As I Lay Dying album, and it was. But the first song the band released after their unlikely reunion was always going to be a contentious one given the situation with Tim Lambesis, and being that the song was released at a time when Tim would have still have almost two years in prison to go if he had done his full original sentence of six years, the importance of the band’s first release since that whole terrible situation transpired is hard to overstate. Everyone else in the band had to justify linking back up with a convicted felon and reentering the fold of music again, and “My Own Grave” is exactly the statement they needed to make. During his trial and after his early release, Tim had kept pretty quiet, but from the one somber video exposition he gave before entering prison, it was pretty clear he knew and finally accepted how badly he fucked up, and that awareness of his own terrible failure, succumbing to evil, and his understanding that he still has a lot to do to make things right is what makes this song so vitally confessional and the determination expressed so powerful. And this all comes through not just in the lyrics, but in the passionate performances from everyone on the song as well. It’s an emphatic triumph in classic metalcore fashion through (higher, more real-life stakes than usual for the genre) the worst of one’s own faults.

2. Demon Hunter - “Peace”

This one is kind of the enigma of this list, a more subtle, hard rock track than the rest of the heavy, boisterous bangers here, but what an excellent song it is from the mellower of the sister albums the band released in 2019. Ryan Clark’s smooth, baritone subtlety serves as a veneer of calmness in the face of collapse as he sings a tearful welcoming of the peace from the pain of a sin-ridden world that finally comes with death. There’s almost a suicidal angle to the song, but it might be more representative of one’s readiness to be taken into a divinely peaceful afterlife after a lifetime of struggle, which is pretty insightful from Ryan Clark and captures that feeling in a tangible way even for people with (ideally) many years ahead of them like me, I must say. Either way, it’s a much more sober pondering on one’s own mortality and the temporariness of everything around us than its upbeat rock tempo initially lets on, the kind of meditation that gives people hope and faith in a heavenly afterlife.

1. Rammstein - “Deutschland”

Simultaneously subtle and directly expressive, Rammstein’s lead single from their self-titled 2019 album may not have been as musically outrageous as its grand, ambitious video was, but the song itself sure stands on its own just fine as a tense, conflicted song of pleading heartbreak to a nation and its history, and who better in metal to write a threnody for a Germany caught in the middle of the rest of Europe’s refugee crisis and its own version of many nations’ recent fights against a resurgence of right-wing extremism than Till Lindemann. The tone of the song is so mournful and heartbroken, as though it’s a song about leaving a lover you still want to love, yet stern and firm in its principle.

5 Outside Albums of 2019:

I’ve made a point the past two years to highlight the music I enjoyed outside the metal sphere, usually keeping it to a few mini-reviews of five “outside” albums, and this year it was certainly hard to narrow down the immense amount of quality hip hop, indie rock, experimental rock, especially jazz (Jesus, there was so much good jazz this year), and even some respectable pop music I heard this year. The paragraphs are going to be shorter this time around, but I still wanted to show my appreciation for these albums.

Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains

Formed by David Berman, the former frontman of Silver Jews (who helped pioneer the flavor of indie rock/alt country in the 90′s and early 2000′s that got me more into indie music) ten years after the termination of Silver Jews, his short-lived return from retirement from music through Purple Mountains’ sole eponymous album only became more tragic after Berman committed suicide less than a month after the record’s release. The subject matter was as confessional and depressive as anything from Silver Jews, my favorite song from the record immediately after its release, “Nights That Won’t Happen” (a song very clearly indicating Berman grappling with the guilt of his suicidal mindset), being an even more bleak song in the posthumous context. Upon learning that Berman had come back to music, formed this project, and made this record full of emotionally retching expositions of his mental state in an effort to pay down a crippling mass of debt (which I’m sure had a significant impact on his decision to end his own life), it makes the album all the more devastating and my feeling toward it much more complicated. Much like David Bowie’s Blackstar, Purple Mountains takes on a different light in the aftermath of its creator’s death so soon after its release, the songs on Purple Mountains pretty much as prophetic as those on Blackstar, though Berman’s foreseeing of having to take his death into his own hands as opposed to Bowie’s waiting for the inevitability of the progression of his cancer gives this album a much less celebratory, commemorative feeling than that of Blackstar, though listening back through it now with 20/20 hindsight really puts the similar element of inevitability into perspective too, and it makes it hard to really enjoy this album in a sense similar to how I enjoy most of my metal and most other music. Knowing that this album was secondarily a last ditch effort by Berman to lessen the burden of the tremendous anxiety caused by his poor financial state, and primarily a means of talking himself through his decision to end his life in the likely event that the album and its touring cycle didn’t make that burden bearable enough, it’s very hard to listen to and be thankful for this album that kind of indirectly killed its creator. The existential dread of crippling debt is no light weight, however, and the art Berman made and was proud of should not bear the brunt of the blame for what the procedures of a heartless and oppressive economic system at least catalyzed, if not caused. Purple Mountains is a hard album to listen to, but its tragic surroundings aside, it is a welcome return of one of indie music’s most brilliant and influential voices, even if just for a moment.

Denzel Curry - ZUU

On a much different note, Denzel Curry made a quick return to the studio after creatively upping his game yet again on his 2018 album, TA13OO. And while not as ambitiously conceptual or dense as TA13OO, ZUU was yet another banger-packed display of pure rapping prowess. It’s been stated that good form is just that, temporary, and a mere snapshot of an artist’s trajectory, and that it takes time and consistency to prove class. Well Curry is undoubtedly in very good form right now, and has been for the past five or six years and has been making the most of it, only getting better and better across his main projects and his consistently fire guest appearances. And sure it’s arguable that he’s just making the most of his hot streak by putting out as much as possible while he’s one fire, but it’s at the point where if this was a flash in the pan it would have been over by now, and Curry’s still going. The dude put out a megamix of spare verses already this year, and it’s killer! The man at this point, in my eyes, is class, and definitely one of hip hop’s most exceptional forces now that he’s finally getting his long-deserved acclaim. As far as ZUU goes, yeah it’s quick and more about tight bars and emphatic delivery than any grand concept, but to reduce assessment of this to as if it mere turn-up music would be improper, as Curry uses this album to jump at the opportunity given to him by the traction of TA13OO to elevate his hometown and pay tribute to his friends and family who have been with him throughout his journey, and shed light on the roughness of the reality of life for the people he cares about in Carol City, Florida. And he pays tribute to those who got him here with such passion and splendor that it’s tangible and invigorating even from far outside.

Angel Olsen - All Mirrors

I saw a fair amount of people (mostly outside her fanbase) complaining about Angel Olsen’s handling of her more instrumentally dense fourth LP, which I don’t get at all. Olsen had tread the ground of minimal indie folk thoroughly on her early work and she proved she could handle a bigger instrumental pallet on 2016′s My Woman, of which All Mirrors is a well-executed expansion on that bolsters Olsen’s emphatic sonic presence without suffocating her out of her own songs, which I never had any worries about with the raw vocal power she’s showcased convincingly before. And Olsen remains at her open, heartfelt best in terms of lyricism and songwriting on the album, no drop-off in emotional potency or sonic beauty, so I’m a little confused with some of the griping over this album. I love it and highly recommend it.

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah - Ancestral Recall

It was hard to pick a from the several great jazz records this past year (so much great afro-percussion-driven stuff coming from the UK lately that has been scratching my itch like crazy), The Comet Is Coming had an LP and a similarly impressive follow-up EP both in 2019 that made thrilling use of electronics amid the energetic jazz madness and Matana Roberts had put out an intriguing spoken-word concept album tied together with some of the most eccentric avant-garde jazz instrumentation I heard all year. But I ultimately went with the dynamic and delicious Ancestral Recall from Christian Scott, whose impressively holistic weaving together of traditional jazz elements with hip hop and modern jazz atmosphere, despite not being as quite up my violent jazz alley as other records this year, I could not deny the magnificence and accomplishments of. The electronics are kept to a minimum and used only to highlight the work of the piano, horns, and percussion typically associated with the genre, but none of it feels at all unnatural or clashing, rather a cooperative interplay between old and new that elevates both and shows what they can achieve in harmony. And yes, there are plenty of boisterous trumpet performances from the main man to quench that thirst. But it’s an album about respect for the foundational work of the genres incorporated and expanding on it rather than demolishing and rebuilding it.

clipping. - There Existed an Addiction to Blood

My favorite non-metal album of the year, clipping. really took the campy genre of horrorcore to far more cinematic and tangible realms through their signature noisy/industrial approach. And There Existed and Addiction to Blood is a project where after hearing it, it left me with a sense of “well, duh”. Of course clipping. would absolutely nail an actually immersive and not totally laughable horrorcore album. The members’ experiences in cinema serve as a tremendous asset to this album as William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes produce an industrially enhanced horror score to soundtrack Daveed Diggs’ gripping rapped storytelling, which takes so many of the genres tropes and breathes fresh air into them to make them far more vital and consequential in this day and age. And the songs (many of which are serious bangers) are immersive, cinematic, and intense in a way that I could see a lot of metalheads enjoying. I could seriously go on about the chilling bursts of distortion on the twisted club turn-up track, “Club Down”, or the cold swagger of Diggs’ delivery on the industrially tense “All in Your Head”, or the suspense of the more instrumentally traditional house-hideout cut “Nothing Is Safe”, but I would be going on for paragraphs, and I said one. If there’s one album for people reading this section to check out, it’s this one.

My 30 Favorite Metal Albums of 2019:

Yeah, 30 is keeping it really short here; I feel like I could have included a couple dozen other very praiseworthy metal albums here, but this post is massive enough and I don’t have time for that. As far as patterns or trends go, metal’s respective subgenres largely continued to mind their own business as the divergent evolution that the genre has been undergoing since the passing of its peak of mainstream limelight has progressed. The metallic hardcore revival is still going strong with a lot of bands outside that scene taking notice and influence from these vibrant younger bands (Code Orange being the obvious prominent example) and their ancestors. I heard a lot more hardcore-influenced breakdowns and noisy industrial-ish guitar work this year than usual, and even though it graced that shitty aforementioned Bad Wolves album, the metallic hardcore song was a highlight and most of the hardcore influence I’ve heard outside that scene has been implemented well. The year also saw a lot of big, storied names in metal releasing high-profile projects and really coming through and exceeding most realistic expectations (with one quite notable exception), so a good portion of this top 30 is going to contain your basic bitch, Loudwire-type picks, but, you know, those acts delivered and earned their way here in my eyes. This whole thing has gotten pretty out of hand, and what was planned as a quick year’s recap is now a gargantuan mega-post, so I’m going to TRY to make these quick.

30. Full of Hell - Weeping Choir

It’s hard to complain about a pretty continuous sequel to one of the most addictive deathgrind albums in years (Trumpeting Ecstasy); I’m sure not griping about it. Weeping Choir may not have as high of peaks as its predecessor, but it’s a similarly compact, dizzying, and forward-thinking release that definitely earned similar respect.

29. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Infest the Rats’ Nest

Thank god King Gizz released this, otherwise there wouldn’t be a bonafide thrash album in this top 30. Despite not really being a “thrash band” or even a “metal band”, King Gizzard’s adventurousness and versatility makes their adaptability to this style come as no real surprise. In fact the naturalness with which the band play shows that they have clearly always had a true reverence for the genre and have wanted to make this album for a long time. The album is as fuzzy as King Gizz usually is, taking on a very old-school vibe in tribute to the genre’s progenitors without being mere nostalgia. I doubt they’ll do it, but I can dream of more of this from the Gizz.

28. Knocked Loose - A Different Shade of Blue

Knocked Loose have quickly established themselves as one of the strongest forces in metallic hardcore these days, with each album improving significantly off the last, and A Different Shade of Blue being the latest in a string of stronger and stronger releases from them, embodying pure hardcore aggression with precision accuracy and efficiency.

27. Lord Mantis - Universal Death Church

Looking back through this band’s catalog (I hadn’t heard of them before this album), they’ve always taken a very sinister and esoteric approach to experimental black metal that makes them and Profound Lore a match made in heaven as a prime representation of the boundary-pushing ethos the label does well to curate, and Universal Death Church is a fine example of the band’s signature incredible capacity to make black metal nastier and more nightmarish than it already is.

26. Infant Annihilator - The Battle of Yaldabaoth

The Battle of Yaldabaoth is such a ridiculous album and such a treat for it, the unreal, gratuitous techdeath wankery so obscene, it’s impossible to take too seriously and not love for its absurdity. It’s a fun album and one that fast-forwards much of the increasingly fast and techy death metal straight to its next musical checkpoint.

25. Venom Prison - Samsara

A far more holistic death metal album than Infant Annihilator’s, Samsara is just teeming with performative power and calculated technicality. I had said at first that it wasn’t really much of a step up from Animus, but as I’ve listened to it more throughout the year, the band’s subtle maturation really began to show and the album grew on me more and more, so it’s definitely one of the year’s best death metal records.

24. Misery Index - Rituals of Power

Even more emphatic than Samsara was Misery Index’s reaching the pinnacle of their form of powerviolence on their best album to date, Rituals of Power, which suffers no loss of intensity in its incorporation of infectious (though still hardly melodic) hooks, and it puts them at the top of their league.

23. Demon Hunter - War

I had originally cited the more measured, hard-rock-driven partner album, Peace, as the better of the two records Demon Hunter had released this year, but over time, so many of the tracks on the intentionally heavier War that I thought might wane on me stayed strong and some of its other tracks grew on me. The album and its counterpart were such a refreshing pair of releases for the band that I hope revitalizes them going forward.

22. Opeth - In Cauda Venenum

And we’ve got the most basic pick of the list so far here, post-Watershed Opeth. That term has annoyed, frustrated, and infuriated so many within the band’s fanbase who have, at this point, given up (either out of acceptance or intolerance) on hopes of the band’s death metal sound ever returning to the progressive music they make, and I myself have found the band’s lack of ambition beyond simply eschewing growls and metallic elements on the band’s past three albums to be a bit underwhelming with the clear 70′s-prog LARPing finding them punching pretty below their weight. Wow, that was an annoyingly long sentence too. But Opeth finally came through with an album that did more than just imitate the likes of their prog idols like King Crimson, Styx, Yes, and Pink Floyd. In Cauda Venenum is a theatrically big album that puts the band in the kind of creative context in which they’ve proven to succeed in and established themselves in their career in it as the death metal pillar of the prog palace, and the band came through with a rewarding progressive rock album without needing to bring their death metal elements out of retirement.

21. Deadspace - Dirge

Dirge was not the album I expected from Deadspace, but it shifted them from their more somber atmospheric style of black metal into something so much more suffocatingly dark and sinister that they went on to produce another full-length album and an EP in the style of before the year’s end, and I have been loving the Australian band’s more menacing side since the transformation. The band’s first album in this newly terrifying style for them is a masterpiece of vile, demonic black metal that still features what has made Deadspace a worthwhile figure to follow in the worldwide atmospheric black metal scene, and I imagine there is plenty more to come from the tenacious Australian group and have been so proudly supportive of, which I am eagerly looking forward to.

20. Uboa - The Origin of My Depression

This is the first not-completely-bonafide-metal-album entry on this list, but it is a worthwhile and impressive one that I think a lot of fans of the kinds of experimental and black metal that incorporate dark ambiance, industrial elements, and harsh noise could get into. But it is an album as intensely depressive as its title suggests, a meditation on the turmoils associated with its creator’s gender dysphoria and the efforts to cope with and mitigate it that comes through in all shades of pain, from melancholic-ambiance-backed stone-faced recitations of doubt about self-worth to seething, agonized screams of torment for release from the hell of the creator’s condition over abrasive industrial noise. It is not by any means easy listening, and its lyrics demand a lot of emotional energy. Be advised. But also it’s really painfully cathartic and expresses an important and often quieted perspective for those not affected by gender dysphoria to hear.

19. Blood Incantation - Hidden History of the Human Race

I do like this album a lot, I really do, but it has to be the most overrated album on this whole list. So many people wetted their britches over this damn album and jumped to call it a perfect masterpiece of death metal. It’s a very very good death metal album, but it’s not beyond improvement. And, again, it’s good and I don’t want to be tempering the jubilee over this thing in this list where I’m supposed to be highlighting my appreciation for it, but it makes me wonder if this is how people who aren’t that into Meshuggah see the band’s adoring fans (like me). But Hidden History of the Human Race, mind-blown ancient aliens sci-fi concept aside, is a great continuation of the semi-psychedelic modern twist on early death metal that started on Starspawn, and the band’s progressive compositional abilities certainly do deserve a lot of praise, and I do hope that they continue building on this.

18. Inter Arma - Sulphur English

Another band making continual improvements on their sonic foundation, Inter Arma have never let their labels of death or sludge or doom or post-metal box them in or make them feel forced to pick one and stick with it, and Sulphur English is a fantastic example of how wide the band’s capabilities span, with elements of all the aforementioned subgenres mashed together in so many different configurations together and on their own, and it makes for such an overpowering record whose wall of sound really takes a lot of spins to withstand the continuous impact of.

17. Fit for an Autopsy - The Sea of Tragic Beasts

Okay, I’m gonna have to really start being shorter now, because now we’re getting into the top of the list, the cream of the crop of the cream of the crop. And I’ll be here until 2021 if I don’t slow down. Anyway, Fit for an Autopsy reinforced their melodic supplementation to their brand of deathcore on The Sea of Tragic Beasts, and clearly put the work into making sure it meshed well with their style. And the work paid off. While a lot of deathcore these days is kind of departing from that original “core” core that the genre’s early contributors established for more straight-up death metal and other progressive or techy styles (basically just retaining the affinity for breakdowns), albums like this are a fine example of how beneficial this evolution is for the genre.

16. Rammstein - Rammstein

It’s hard to be brief with an album ten years in the making, featuring the best song of the year, but I’ll try. Rammstein’s long-awaited follow-up to Liebe ist für alle da does very much pick up where the band left off in 2009, feeling like a natural successor rather than some contrived nostalgia trip to Sehnsucht or Mutter to appease fans for their patience. And for as much as I unpacked every song in detail in my review, the album as a whole is hard to sum up beyond simply a solid offering of Rammstein tracks, several of which have grown on me since my write-up, like the ballads “Diamant” and “Was ich Liebe”, and especially the whimsical “Ausländer”. Lindemann’s lyricism remains a strong point for the band, and the tight compositions another positive on the album. I just hope it’s not so long until the next one.

15. Slipknot - We Are Not Your Kind

Like I had said in my review, every new Slipknot album is one of the biggest events of the year for metal, if not the biggest, and aside from Tool’s underwhelming return to the studio with Fear Inoculum, We Are Not Your Kind was definitely the year’s biggest release. As has become kind of the norm for them now, Slipknot’s sixth album was steeped in its own turmoil, this time being the confusingly ugly departure of Chris Fehn. Nevertheless, the rest of the band pulled through with a solid album that did quite well to highlight the band’s various strengths and a good balance of classic Slipknot aggression with forward-thinking experimentation with their sound. Yet another big name delivering the goods this year.

14. Korn - The Nothing

And speaking of success from storied bands, Slipknot’s supposed nu metal rivals also really came through this year with one of their best albums in a long long time, and this is coming from someone who has been a fan of Korn’s later era, their untitled album, See You on the Other Side, etc., but the band’s increasingly more committed return to their old-school sound this decade, after the flop of The Path of Totality, has culminated magnificently on The Nothing, which essentially sounds like a modern-produced Untouchables or Issues. The songwriting is consistently well-measured and Jonathan Davis’ chilling performances in the wake of the loss of his wife especially give the album such a real sense of turmoil that heightens the intensity of everything around them. As therapeutic as music is in times of great pain and loss, and as great as this album is, I hope Jonathan’s grief wasn’t exploited or exacerbated for this art, and I hope he is doing okay.

13. Baroness - Gold & Grey

This album got a lot of flack for its indeed frustrating production, with a lot of critics not being able to get past the blown-out, fuzzy, lo-fi crackle that blurred a lot of the songs’ finer details away. And I agree that the band certainly could have put their sonic strengths in a better light with clearer production and probably should going forward. Nevertheless, underneath the hazy veneer of grainy mixing, Gold & Grey boasts great songwriting in the styles of Purple and Yellow & Green, as well as treading newly segue-heavy ground for them. And after a few listens getting used to (or getting over) the album’s production, the sharp-as-ever songwriting and booming-as-ever vocal performances from John Dyer Baizley really come through and are worth appreciating.

12. Pensées Nocturnes - Grand Guignol Orchestra

Arguably the weirdest album to come out of 2019, yet so much more than a novelty project, Grand Guignol Orchestra takes the creepiness of the often-mishandled dark carnival aesthetic and applies it to the band’s twisted brand of avant-garde black metal to make something truly weird and unsettling, yet fixating. The psychotic clown-like screams and wails across the album reinforce this aesthetic to the point of perhaps creating a new subgenre of metal: carnival metal perhaps.

11. Waste of Space Orchestra - Syntheosis

The work of two whole bands (Oranssi Pazuzu and Dark Buddha Rising) joining forces in their entirety, Syntheosis is a surprisingly cohesive and immersive project, as synth-driven as its name suggests and cinematic in its massive sound. It’s a weirdly atmospheric form of experimental, psychedelic black metal that is both serene and crushing; the artists involved clearly had this ambitious project in mind and they worked meticulously to make sure their vision was realized.

10. Spirit Adrift - Divided by Darkness

Again, really trying to keep it short here, but what an album from Spirit Adrift. Divided by Darkness is the album that sounds most like and reminds me most of the most recent perfect album I heard (2018′s Desolation by Khemmis), and the emotional potency bubbling up to the brim of this album’s doomy melodies and soaring vocals is similarly enriching, while not as ridiculously perfect as Khemmis’ latest release, Divided by Darkness takes Spirit Adrift to new heights and makes them one of modern doom-influenced melodic metal’s most promising figures.

9. Nile - Vile Nilotic Rites

The departure of longtime guitarist/vocalist Dallas Toler-Wade was arguably a blessing in disguise for Nile, with their ninth album, Vile Nilotic Rites, being a roaring comeback from the relative lull of their previous two albums, much of which is due to the reinvigorating performances of new guitarist/vocalist Brian Kingsland, whose more traditionally roaring growls breathe new life into and provide a fitting new angle to the band’s Egyptian-themed brand of extremely fast, technical old-school death metal. It’s great to have them back in such emboldened form.

8. Lingua Ignota - Caligula

This is the album that just got me. Very much in a similar, yet more neoclassically-inspired vein of industrial darkwave as Uboa’s album, Kristen Hayter herself has said that Caligula is also not a metal album, and she’s right, but holy shit does it hit harder than a lot of metal tries so hard to hit. I had been trying for months to write a review for this album, but it never came, partly because the subject matter from which the album is pulled is tender and not easy at all. But it’s incredibly important to talk about, and I want to give Caligula some of the written attention it deserves from me. Sure if I just put the album on for unassuming listeners, they probably wouldn’t immediately pick up on the manically shrieked and operatically wailed languishing and biblically proportioned defiance being curses of the project’s creator toward her sexual abuser, but the resilience she puts forth into these proclamations of insubmissive survival is certainly tangible even without knowledge of the heartbreaking history that birthed it. And while it makes tremendous compositional strides from All Bitches Die and Let the Evil of His Lips Cover Him, Caligula, like the two albums before it, is such an enigmatic album that feels wrong to consume in the conventional sense or without anything other than pure undivided attention and empathy for what Hayter is so courageously pouring out of her mind and body for the music. It feels wrong to just put music on as a background for room-cleaning or even working out that comprises real, unbridled emotion about its creator’s rape. Yet I know that everything about Caligula and Lingua Ignota has been about surviving that and overcoming that suffering, so it certainly deserves to be listened to and respected; I would posit, though, that if you’re going to enjoy the sounds borne from Kristen Hayter’s subjection to sexual abuse, its candid portrayal of its aftermath should at least serve as further deterrent from committing such abuse to another person, if not convicting you to stop doing so if you are or actively seeking to prevent it where you know you can.

7. Periphery - Periphery IV: HAIL STAN

Periphery have been a band who I have gradually come to realize I quite respect and rate very highly. Their Juggernaut double-album in 2015 was the major catalyst in this and has become one of my favorite albums in djent (if not my favorite if you don’t count Meshuggah’s music as djent). And while I wasnt as into their 2016 album, Periphery III: Select Difficulty, I have definitely seen this band’s continuous improvement and strong upward trend that their fourth self-titled record has continued. The band went for more than just thick, tasty djent on this album, though the thick tasty djent that is here (like “Chvrch Bvrner” and the aforementioned “Blood Eagle”) is some of their thickest and tastiest. But the band expanded their sound to more ethereal corners that produced impressively cathartic results (such as the aforementioned “Satellites”, and the swaggering “Crush”, and the bright “Garden in the Bones”). Major respect to this band that keeps getting better and making it harder on their stubborn detractors.

6. As I Lay Dying - Shaped by Fire

To say this album was controversial would be an understatement, and to point out that it was important that As I Lay Dying come through in several big ways would be as well. Yet for every bit of vocal disapproval and expression of how irredeemable Tim Lambesis was there seemed equal rejoicing about the metalcore legends’ return. It was important, though, that the band come through with and album the showed their understanding of the heaviness of the context and didn’t come across as trying to bypass it or sweep things under the rug, and they did a tremendous job of rising to the occasion. The band continued where they left off before their disbandment as the strongest force in metalcore, sounding even more impassioned and vital upon their return, clearly enriched by the real-life consequentiality of their music. And while it certainly looks even more impressive given the withering state of NWOAHM metalcore in 2019, let that not detract from the incredible power of the genre’s juggernauts’ return to and improvement upon their best form of themselves before their disbandment.

5. Motionless in White - Disguise

When this album came out I honestly didn’t have a lot of hope invested in it. I had hoped that the band would expand on the best tracks from their previous album, Graveyard Shift, the alternative metal bangers, and focus on what worked well for those songs, and to my surprise that’s actually what the band did on Disguise. I had initially said that the high points on Disguise were not as high as the peaks on Graveyard Shift but after listening to Disguise so much this year, it’s shown itself to me to be such a ln impressive improvement on the direction that Motionless in White we’re heading in, and to put it any lower on this list for the sheer fact that it’s not a particularly critic-friendly album would be dishonest. But after getting more into their catalogue I think that this band are one of the best in their field, and sure, they’re very much an amalgamation of their influences, but goddamn do they channel those influences so effectively into so many flavors of delicious, nu metal, gothy, metalcore bangers. And it’s totally accessible too, I wish more of the bands who are trying to achieve more mainstream success would take the approach Motionless in White are taking, because this shit is actually really fucking enjoyable and full of soul.

4. Numenorean - Adore

Making strides from their debut full-length, Numenorean’s sophomore album is a great example of atmospheric blackgaze at its best without resorting to cheap Deafheaven imitation. Numenorean have found their own way to harness the power of blackgaze into emotionally vibrant compositions that come through triumphantly. I just hope the band can keep this up and expand on what they did here.

3. Car Bomb - Mordial

I had this as the number one album for a hot minute, and even teased about it maybe being a perfect release in my eyes as well, and even though it’s neither of those things, Car Bomb’s deeper foray into melodic and slightly atmospheric territory with their Meshuggah-esque brand of technical mathcore produced some seriously impressive results that I can’t wait to hear more of in the coming years.

2. Sermon - Birth of the Marvelous

I already said so much about this debut album, and it was so close to clinching that top spot, but Sermon deserve to be basking in so much more acclaim than I have seen for them, as this album is a nearly perfect prog metal example of how to do a lot with relatively little. I had expressed my disappointment in Soen’s and Tool’s albums this year, but I think this album really fits nicely into that cleaner section of progressive metal and knocks it out of the park. I know I’m repeating myself a lot from my review, but every little detail and accent is expertly calculated to make as positive of an impact as possible on the album, every note is arranged with both microscopic precision and with the grander scheme in mind, and I cannot get over how mind-blowingly well done this album is with so few bells and whistles or shortcuts. This is THE new band to keep an eye on.

1. Cattle Decapitation - Death Atlas

I don’t know if I like giving the top spot to such a grim, hopeless album, but fuck have Cattle Decapitation earned it, and I can’t blame them for their pessimism either. After aptly applying the disgustingness of goregrind to commentary on human mistreatment of animals and the ugly underbelly of the food industry, Cattle Decapitation turned their sound and their scope to even grander proportions, expanding the boundaries of deathgrind and the possibilities of dirty vocal technique to criticize humankind’s fucking up of the entire planet and foretelling the catastrophe that science has long foreseen. Despite their already bleak outlook on Monolith of Inhumanity and The Anthropocene Extinction, Cattle Decapitation somehow sound even more hopeless in Death Atlas, and Travis Ryan’s greater expansion of his melodic vocal application helps facilitate this, and the band takes their ever-furious rapid grinding battery through so many channels to enhance its epic scope. I should probably try my best not the just regurgitate my very long review of this album, but the band are essentially reading humanity its eulogy in advance and beckoning the end of our species in no romantic fashion, beckoning the universe to ruthlessly purge the species they refer to as a shit stain and move on like we never even happened. This is obviously an exaggeration of their frustration at the inaction and denial of many of the consequences our actions are inviting into our future, but it’s so fitting for the grave circumstances at hand. If there’s any band whose lyrics and sound represent humankind’s self-inflicted ecological apocalypse, it’s Cattle Decapitation, and of there’s any album that paints an adequately dismal picture in fittingly horrifying bluntness of where the world is headed that needs to be understood, it’s Death Atlas. The best and most important album of the year.

And that’s it. 2019, great as always for a genre that refuses to go quietly into the night. A lot of people have been doing decade-summarizing lists, but seeing how long this was, I don’t think I’ll be doing that. Maybe I’ll just post a quick tribute to a few of my favorite albums of the decade that I didn’t get to write about before. But for now, 2019 is over, here’s to 2020, it’s going to be a big year, and I have a few things about that I need to say about that, so that’ll be coming soon too.

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