#because i’m saving up for grad school next year

[larrysblooming]

i will forever be sad that i never got to experience harry’s house performed live when it’s literally one of my favorite albums of all time 😞💔

[loneberry]

Baby's First Meditation Retreat

…attention is prayer. —Simone Weil

It would be simpler—the monastic life would be so much simpler. Wake, pray, meditate, do battle with the ego, eat, sleep—live such that everything inessential is stripped away. Why did you come here, I said, I’m tired of living a distracted life, of going through my days in a fog of unawareness.

In Cambridge, MA I attended a meditation retreat. I signed up on a whim, out of a vague feeling that I have lost control of my mind. I have been meditating very casually for the last nine years, mostly using the Calm app, listening to Tara Brach recordings, and attending guided meditations while a grad student. I had come to the practice out of desperation, in the midst of a debilitating depression that made me feel perpetually tormented by my thoughts. During that time, I would voraciously read every study I could find on depression treatments and tried basically every treatment modality out there: neurofeedback, ketamine, therapeutic yoga, medication, CBT, DBT, fish oil, an anti-inflammatory diet, psychedelics, and the “treatment” that ultimately saved me: intensive psychoanalysis four days a week. Meditation seemed a particularly promising and low-risk way to manage depression and anxiety—and yes, it did bring me some relief, working as a kind of supplement to the psychoanalysis. Even though I haven’t been as consistent about it as I would have liked, I continued to practice it regularly, usually for about 10-20 minutes a day. Not once have I regretted meditating, though when life gets busy it’s easy to tell yourself that you just don’t have the time to sit and do nothing, even though we seem to somehow always have the time to mindlessly surf the internet. 

What is there to say. I’m just so tired of living on autopilot, of not having to face the moment, to face myself. There are a million ways to blot out one’s internal monologue, filling up our days with the background chatter of podcasts or social media. 

The recrudescence of my Simone Weil mania has forced me to reflect on attention—that rare quality of mind which is increasingly in short supply. And yet everything is a matter of attention—not because attention can be instrumentalized to achieve one’s goals. No. Attention is the end in itself. Weil: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” It’s in that second-to-second awareness that reverence for the moment blossoms. The fog is lifting. Here is the trembling world, a cloud passing, the dancing light on the pavement as the sun passes through the rustling leaves of the tree. Weil: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” 

*

I landed in Boston late Friday night and early the next morning was off to the Zen center for the silent two-day retreat. I really did not know what to expect when I signed up. I knew a little about the different schools of Buddhism from studying it in a course as an undergrad. I remember being slightly afraid of “Zen” (or Chan) in particular because it seemed so severe to me. I imagined interminable zazen sessions, without guidance or visualizations; imagined slouching pupils getting whacked with sticks for bad posture or falling asleep. Yet surely if I were to test the Buddhist waters, I should do Zen/Chan since it is a specifically Chinese tradition? My father’s uncle was a Buddhist monk who wandered the mountains of China. I don’t know anything about him, other than his sister (my grandma) was devastated when he died after getting hit by a train. Whether it was suicide or just a manic pixie monk moment, I do not know.

*

Some meditation retreats are completely secular—they are just like a series of long, guided mindfulness sessions, with the context, rituals, and “religious” dimensions stripped away. This was not really that kind of retreat. There were robes, chants in Korean, elaborate meal rituals, and yes, getting whacked with a stick! Of course it is always possible to opt out of getting hit with the keisaku stick—I thought I would, but in the end I took the whacking almost every time it was offered, partly because it jolted me awake and relieved the tension building up in my body from hours and hours of sitting cross-legged on a cushion. The first couple of times the keisaku whacking was administered, I had to restrain myself from laughing. Oh my God, we’re getting whacked by a Buddhist master! In the orientation the instructor said it was for “tension release” but I did feel that it was something like a ritual of submission to the authority of the teacher, even if it didn’t really hurt. Watching how eagerly D. bowed to receive the stick in the orientation, I wondered if the Zen pupils were secretly sadomasochists. 

Constitutionally, I am not a “joiner” and have an aversion to organized religion and anything that emits even a whiff of cult vibes. I’ve always been critical of authority and incapable of following rules, possibly because I didn’t have any growing up. But there was something soothing about how regimented everything was. We performed our actions in sync, chanted about emptiness at 4:30am. The whole experience felt almost militaristic, but a part of me enjoyed the austere, disciplinary atmosphere and the obsessive attention to detail. Not disciplinary in a punitive sense, but disciplinary in the way I imagine Russian classical music training to be: the methodical pursuit of self-mastery (it’s hardly surprising that the Zen master I received instruction from was a classically trained pianist). During the retreat I concluded that more discipline would be good for me.

Most of the retreat consisted of meditating in silence. There was no small talk, no psychobabble, no “now we will get started…”—he just hits the wooden clapper three times, and the sitting session starts. No guidance, no body-scan, no loving-kindness prompts. Just you, seated cross-legged on the cushion in silence, facing the tumult of your chaotic mind, your hands in the Dhyana Mudra position, your eyes half-closed. 

It is a profound and difficult experience, having to face your own mind…both utterly banal and deeply disturbing, thoughts flitting from “maybe I should try to find a used bicycle on the OfferUp app” to thoughts of my parents’ mortality. I was warned by the Zen teacher that difficult emotions might bubble up. Thrice I broke out into tears and strained to regain my composure. It began during one of the short breaks, when I was lying on a bench outside looking up at the sky, imagining that a passing cloud was a life appearing briefly before dissipating. It was an unmediated confrontation with the eternal flux of the universe—pure panta rhei. 

Weil: “Whatever frightful thing may happen, can we desire that time should stop, that the stars should be stayed in their courses? Time’s violence rends the soul: by the rent eternity enters.” Time’s violence has utterly and completely ripped apart my soul. I wanted to hold onto everyone and everything I love, for the stars to be stayed in their courses, for time to stop, for my parents to live forever. I thought about Mari Ruti’s rapid decline and death, about my recent visit to my older brother in prison, and my trip to my relatives’ assisted living home, where my mother’s cousin has been completely waylaid by the rapid onset of Parkinson’s disease. I thought about my father sitting down in the chair looking out the window at the assisted living home, talking about getting old, how his knees ache now. Time’s violence rends the soul.Will I be strong enough to face the eternal flux, the impermanence of everything I love, with a fierceness that borders on madness, grieving even the eventual death of the Sun? Sitting on the cushion meditating, crying: let go. Will I ever be able to let go with grace? Don’t know. Sink into don’t-know mind. Count the breath. Something passes through me.

What did I see, what did I hear—I heard every exhibit of the Museum of Jurassic Technology: the voice imploring us to follow the chain of flowers into the mysteries of life, the burbling waters of the miniature model of Iguazú Falls, a recording of David Wilson talking about exploding dice, the distant echoes of barks in the bestiary room, the mournful sound of the duduk in Djivan Gasparyan’s “Lovely Spring” playing the Sandaldjian room, Monteverdi’s “Lamento della Ninfa” as I ascend the stairs to the sublime courtyard, Bach’s “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” in the ‘Ecstatic Journey of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’ exhibit (impossible not to see the levitation scene from Tarkovsky’s Solaris when hearing BWV 639), Mihály Víg’s “Valuska” in The Borzoi Kabinet Theater at the end of the day, and the sound of David’s nyckelharpa reverberating in the garden. 

Now the birds of the mind are taking flight.

In, out. In, out. Return to the breath. 

The mind opening like a door to the sky

            a deep purple flower unfolding in the emptiness.

List everything you see, her feet standing on the lotus. 

Clear mind

Clear mind

Clear mind

Don’t know.

(In) 1-2-3-4 (out) 5-6-7-8

Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ ἐλέησόν με 

The heart

The heart

The spherical heart of the manatee

Thoughts and thoughts and thoughts and thoughts

like waves, saturating the swash zone of the mind…

It’s the weekend of the Perseid meteor shower. Eight years ago, Ed and I watched them from the dock of a Maine pond. We had rented an Airbnb from a man with the same name as a dear poet friend of mine, Dana Ward. (I was dreaming of Dana when I woke up this morning.) A week after the Maine trip, I was at the mental hospital. I had forgotten I had a poetry reading. The woman organizing it called, wondering where I was. 

Eight years have passed me in the blink of an eye. 

Thoughts.

In

out

In

out

In 10-30 second intervals: nothing. Just the space between thoughts.

There were two states of non-self:

one of calm neutrality—just the is-ness of the world.

The other, something more ecstatic:

a mystical amnesia, when you become the contraction and expansion of the breath.

What is there to say about it? In my stead there was a heaving purple cloud floating in a black room.

Then, the “I” coheres again. Head so full of language, thinking about everything I want to write. “I shouldn’t be so attached to my thoughts.” The teacher says in the interview: it’s not about suppression.

Writers are fundamentally hoarders of thoughts. I try to collect each one, as the squirrel does the acorns. In my head I am writing an essay about the antidepressant withdrawals, my astonishment that I did not relapse as David Foster Wallace did when he committed suicide after tapering off his antidepressant. I remember when my thoughts were stuck on the “I want to die” loop, how Ed installed the ad blocker on my internet browser because he was disturbed by the suicide hotline targeted ads. I do not think such thoughts anymore. Maybe it is true—we are not our thoughts. They pass through my mind like water through the sieve. Did Woolf train herself to observe the stream? Too much thinking. I must be doing it wrong. Wrong again—I’m supposed to suspend judgment. 

I hear my friend Tim saying, “the mathematics section is the most mystical part of the library.”

Then Weil says, “As soon as we have a point of eternity in the soul, we have nothing more to do but to take care of it, for it will grow of itself like a seed. It is necessary to surround it with an armed guard, waiting in stillness, and to nourish it with the contemplation of numbers…” 

Now I’m thinking about the relationship between math and mysticism, about the Indian number theorist Srinivasa Ramanujan, who received, in his dreams, thousands of formulas from the Hindu Goddess Namagiri. Ramanujan: “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.”

I remember my poem “Umbra,” in which I reference the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck’s strange book, La Clef des Songes (‘The Key of Dreams’). As one commenter puts it: “It’s a book about God. Grothendieck’s thesis is simple. We meet God in dreams. But we aren’t ourselves dreaming God, rather God Himself is dreaming us. Or better: according to Grothendieck ‘a Dreamer’ exists, an external force who ‘dreams our dreams’ and at the same time dreams us. And this force can only be God. … he declares, in a little footnote that it’s almost hidden, that mathematics wasn’t ‘created by God’ nor by man, but by an aspect of God’s nature that, unique among his attributes, is accessible to human reason.”

A week ago, I was telling Alex about Oppenheimer’s mysticism, his proficiency in Sanskrit and intensive study of the Bhagavad Gita, his “feeling for the mystery of the universe that surrounded him almost like a fog.” I watched Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer biopic with Alex—a mathematician/mathematical physicist—and my father—an almost-physicist who immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan to do a physics PhD in Wyoming but dropped out after his first year to move to NYC to wait tables at a Chinese restaurant. After the film, we watched a documentary about Sir Isaac Newton’s heretical theology and alchemical studies, how he read the Bible as a cryptogram and determined the world will end in 2060.

Could there be a connection between mathematics and the capacity for the divine, between the abstraction of mathematical thinking and the ability to sense the invisible, to see the hidden points that connect disparate realms? Wasn’t Einstein a Spinozist?

Scraps of language jostle around in my mind like a shaking bowl of coins. Stupid thoughts like, “Lacan is to psychoanalysis as Zen is to Buddhism.”

I see myself thinking about the news, about geopolitics and the madness of nation states. China is preparing their population for war, as are we. A kind of nausea overcomes me, as I see the whole nuclear age unfurl before me. 

We dwell on whatever we expose ourselves to, the articles we read, the people we see, the people we lurk online, the reflex to compare, to repeat the name of the Other like a mantra. 

Everything you think you need, you don’t actually need.

A butterfly has somehow flown into the Dharma room. It flits on the floor in the middle of the room. The teacher scoops it up and brings it outside. She corrects my dreadfully sloppy attempt to perform the meal ritual. I panic because I’ve taken too much food and must eat every last crumb. The pear is not ripe, and it is a torture to eat the whole thing. The pear is not ripe—a Zen lesson! Mastication of the unripe pear, a kind of koan. 

There was a short break. I decided to walk around Central Square, without a wallet or phone or headphones. 

How can I describe the sense of aliveness I felt in that moment, that alert receptivity, when I looked at the sky and saw the birds of Central Square taking flight above the Greek Orthodox Church? I walked up the stairs—some ceremony is taking place inside. Down the streets, there’s a brunch spot I never knew about in the seven years I lived in this town. There’s the sound of a busker, so sweet, and a flower shop I wandered into. There’s the bus stop I would wait at on my way to psychoanalysis. I cross the street. Emanating from a building on Mass Ave is the rhythmic thud of Latin American music—it must be the music-dance sessions my ethnomusicologist friend told me about years ago.  

Before dawn on the second day, we perform 108 prostrations. It turns my legs to Jell-O. When I walk up the stairs to use the bathroom, I have to grasp the banister to drag myself up. A few days later I can still barely walk from the soreness caused by the rapid-fire prostrations. Was there something off about my form? I noticed that the others relied more on their arms to hoist themselves up, while I relied almost exclusively on my legs.

And yet I quite enjoy prostrating myself. Outside of any religious or ritual context, I sometimes find myself spontaneously performing prostrations—to what or whom, I do not know. To the earth? I like to kiss the ground, to give thanks to this marvelous rock on which we all dwell. 

*

The interview with the Zen teacher takes a bizarre turn: she asks me questions about DeSantis, in a ‘liberals-trying-to-commiserate’ kind of way. My hatred of DeSantis is bottomless—I had just flown in from Florida the night before the retreat. Please, anything but a DeSantis koan! She asks me if it annoys me that she has been correcting my attempt to execute the meal ritual. I say, No, I don’t mind being an amateur, and crack a joke about being an adult music learner. When the short interview is over, I return to the silence of the Dharma room.

Sitting in silence for long periods is much harder than it looks. Yet the second day feels easier than the first day, despite being on day three of almost no sleep. Toward the end of the retreat, I stare at a spot on the floor, convinced it is a moving bug. It jiggles and jerks, walks in a circle, but always seems to return to the same spot. I can’t stop observing the bug. At the end of the sit, I lean in to get a closer look only to realize it’s not a bug at all, but a dark spot in the wood flooring. 

When the retreat is over, there’s the shock of hearing everyone’s voices, of realizing you had projected otherworldliness on people who are just people in the way you are just a person. We sit in a circle and take turns sharing our experiences. I say, “I came on a whim…because I watched YouTube videos about Buddhism with my dad.” We eat vegan pie at the table. The girlfriend of the man sitting next to me has come to meet him, with roses.

I grab my backpack, put on my Blundstones, and leave the center, in the soft afterglow of the mind’s clearing. What did it feel like: I had no desire to look at my phone. Turning on my phone was almost painful, and yet I needed to call the friend I was staying with. I met up with the religious studies poets, felt more present with others, more natural. We tried to go to the Harvard Film Archive to watch Ozu but were turned away for arriving late. We sat on a rooftop terrace to watch the sunset, with a view of the two spires of Harvard Yard, Memorial Church and Memorial Hall. Sun through the leaves, perceived crisply, as though a layer of mediation had been removed.

[jungblue]

SEVEN DAYS | PREVIEW

pairing: jeon jungkook x reader

genre: beach town au / fluff, angst, eventual smut

word count: 1,755

description: You thought that it was just going to be be a normal vacation to the beach. Seven days of hanging out with your parents before moving away for grad school. It was supposed to be that simple. However, when you meet a local boy that wants to show you how life is lived by the water, you don't realize just how quickly you can be dragged under.

note: Hello, everyone. It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted anything writing related on this account, but getting back into things that made me happy has really been helping me. I know it says multi parts and this is just a preview, and I’m not the most reliable person ever lol. But I just want to put some creativity back into the world, and this is a story I wanted to write years ago that is just now coming to fruition. Thanks for all the support!

Day 01: Sand Dollar Budget

Day 02: Shark Teeth Over Seashells

Day 03: Jason's Woods

Day 04: Legend of the Lighthouse

Day 05: New Moon

Day 06: Lightning in a Bottle

Day 07: Lost at Sea

“Are you gonna stay underneath that umbrella the entire time?”

Your jaw clenched, toes nestling themselves further into the sand, as if that would somehow anchor you in place. The constant crash of the waves in front of you had induced an almost trance-like state, so the sound of your mother’s voice had thrown you off completely.

“You know I don’t like the sun,” You responded, turning to face your parents who were just a few feet away, relaxing in their lawn chairs. “It’s hot, and I enjoy the ocean a lot more when I don’t have to squint while looking at it.”

“It’s called sunglasses.” Your mom tapped her face, showing off the simple fix to your complaint. “And the sun kind of comes with the territory of being in Florida, dear.”

“Yeah, yeah,” You mumbled.

“Go in the water then. You haven’t been in all day. You’re gonna waste your whole time here.”

You sighed heavily. Wasn’t the point of vacation to spend it in whatever way you found pleasurable? And if for you that was relaxing beneath the shade, what was so wrong with that? Plus… your fear of the ocean and all of its infinite surprises lurking beneath might also possibly be a factor. You were from a landlocked state, after all. Did she forget that your closest interaction with the ocean until now was through pictures?

Though, when you really thought about it, maybe being dragged away by some possible sea creature with sharp teeth would save you from the pit of anxiety you had been drowning in for some time now.

Colorado to California.

In just two weeks you were going to be moving states away from all you had ever known. No friends, family or even acquaintances waiting for you on the other side. Of course, you knew you should be grateful for this opportunity. It was a prestigious program that was tough to get into. But regardless of understanding your lucky position, it didn’t change the festering fear clouding your head. Fear that was apparently so strong, it was actually driving you into thinking a shark attack might be ideal.

Only dramatics of course, because your next move was standing up to proclaim, “Fine, I’ll be at the pool.”

“Not what I meant, but better than nothing.” You couldn’t see your mother’s eyes, but you knew they were rolling into the back of her head.

You fought your way up the sandy hills. Each step having your feet slipping beneath the grains. And after a lifetime of this you finally made it to the wooden dock that led from the private beach to the beach house you were staying at for the next seven days.

It was a beautiful sage-green house that stood on top of wooden stilts, and an outside staircase that brought you up to the front door. It was only one of many that stood in an endless line down the beach front as far as the eye could see in either direction.

You got interrupted in your admiration of the different houses as you did an awkward run across the blazing hot wooden path. Definitely should’ve grabbed your flip-flops, you thought to yourself.

“Ow, ow, fuckin’ motherfuck,” You whispered as you finally landed back on a patch of grass on the other side of wooden planks. You breathed a sigh of relief as you dug your feet into the cool dirt before walking towards the back of the collection of beach houses, where a community pool was.

Most of these houses were owned by snowbirds who only lived in Florida during the fall and winter when the northern states became too cold. This left hundreds of houses all over the south of the state open to people from everywhere in the country to have a little week of ocean paradise.

Paradise.

That is what you needed to treat this trip like. No worries about moving and having to start over. Just being here in this moment for the short amount of time that you were here. You decided that was going to be your new mindset moving forward as you opened the gate to the pool.

The pool was quite large, but there was a group already huddled up in one corner of the shallow end. You counted two boys and two girls as you scanned for an open lawn chair to lay your things down.

You couldn’t help but notice how attractive they were as you started to take off your bathing suit cover. It was only amplified as you got closer while wading down the steps into the water. You were lost in this thought when the group suddenly turned to face you. You froze up just expecting a simple friendly wave of acknowledgment. However, that was thrown out of the window when one of the group began to drift towards you.

“Hey, nice to meet you!” One of the boys said as he extended his hand while you settled waist deep into the water.

“Oh, nice to meet you as well.” You shook his hand, not used to such sudden introductions.

“Jesus, Jimin. What’ve we told you about ambushing people like that?” One of the girls said, lightly smacking his shoulder. “Sorry about him. He was never taught manners. My name’s Reina.” She smiled.

“How the hell’s that any different than what I just did?” The boy, apparently named Jimin, asked while crossing his arms in annoyance.

“Well you already broke the ice without giving her a second to breathe, so I had to.”

Jimin looked like he was about to say something back until the other boy in the group came up and looped both of his arms around their necks, pulling them closer together. “Alright now lovebirds, you’re scaring the tourists.”

Ah, that explains their playful squabbling. “Oh, you guys are dating. You look super cute together,” You said.

Jimin immediately stood up taller, grabbing Reina closer. “Yeah, I accidentally caught a fishing hook in her hand when we were fourteen and she’s just been tagging along ever since.” He smiled, peppering kisses on her cheek.

“Well, it showed me how bad at fishing he is, so I knew he wasn’t gonna be one of those guys out on the boat for hours ignoring their girlfriend.” She grinned during the insult before getting her head dunked underwater.

“I’m gonna kill you!” She yelled as she swam towards Jimin who was already jetting towards the deep end of the pool.

“That’s what you get!” He laughed as she caught up with him and began splashing at him.

You smiled watching them together. You weren’t lying when you said they looked cute together. Though your smile faded after a few seconds, because seeing them reminded you of your own situation. Not only was the idea of grad school itself weighing you down, but it had actually been the downfall of your longest relationship. After you found out you were accepted into the program in California a few months back, things took a turn for the worse in your love life. He was not able to see a future in a long distance relationship spanning a few states, so unfortunately you had to call it quits after three years of being together. You started to dwell on these thoughts when you were thankfully snapped out of it by the guy who had tried to stop Jimin and Reina’s bickering a few minutes prior.

“Sorry about them. Taunting each other is their favorite hobby. I’m Namjoon, by the way.” He smiled, dimples popping out as the sun reflected off his almost platinum blonde hair.

“No, it’s no problem. It’s pretty cute actually.”

He shook his head. “Trust me, the charm wears off after more than a decade of having to watch it.”

Wow, a decade, you thought to yourself. And the comment actually made you remember something. “Oh, that reminds me. You called me a tourist.”

His eyes went a little wide as an apologetic look crossed his face. “Sorry, totally didn’t mean for that to sound rude. I know some people can complain about tourists, but we love meeting you guys.”

“No, no, I wasn’t mad about that,” You said, waving off his concern. “I just meant that means you guys actually live around here full time.”

“Born and raised by the water, baby.” He raised his beer.

The last person you hadn’t been introduced to yet then swam over towards the two of you. “Well, except for me. I’m Lisa, by the way… It’s actually my last full day before we’re heading back home.” She looked sad as she said that, lips pursing as it set in that her time here was almost over.

However, it looked like some people had not seemed to realize she was almost set to leave, because immediately Namjoon turned towards her, mouth open.

“Oh my god, I forgot you were leaving tomorrow! It feels like you just got here like two days ago.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me,” Lisa said, dipping her head beneath the water for a few seconds.

“Well, this will absolutely not be how you spend your last night in this town.” Namjoon stood up, making his way up the stairs so that he could stand over everyone in the pool. “Announcement!”

“Yes, oh great leader,” Jimin yelled from the deep end of the pool, where he and Reina seemed to have made up.

“It’s Lisa’s last night, so I have an idea.”

“Oh, oh, oh!” Reina explained as she began kicking her way back to the shallow end. “Jungkook’s band plays at Blue Tiger tonight after he gets off his shift at the marina.”

Namjoon clapped his hands together. “Read my mind Reina!”

Everyone got immediately excited and began pulling themselves out of the water.

“Jungkook?” You asked, still standing in the pool.

When you asked about this mystery man, some of the members of the group looked at each other and gave a strange smile.

“Uhm, just another one of our friends that lives here too.” Namjoon suddenly reached his hand down to you, silently asking for you to take it. “He’s really good. Wanna join?”

You were surprised by the offer, since you had only met these people ten minutes ago. But you thought to yourself, this was exactly the type of thing you needed to distract yourself from all the stresses from your life. Plus, this Jungkook character sounded intriguing enough.

With that, you reached up for Namjoon’s inviting hand. “Sure.”

[morvantmortuary]

above: stunt!Maxi and I vibing in an exhausted sort of way

things I’ve managed to pull off during this semester break:

finishing my diss chapter draft in the first few days, and finally getting cleared by my committee to start work on the next one

took part in a one-week podcast bootcamp aimed at grad students (I have a mic and editing software now and I am so tempted to start some new nonsense to help me procrastinate)

more job applications than I was able to submit all the rest of 2023

finished an application for extra year funding through my grad school that maybe, if by some miracle I win it, I can talk my folks into the possibility of me not having to grind the rest of my diss out before august commencement :’D

I didn’t get to write for fun as much as I hoped I would (and when I was, I was desperately trying to finish my next chapter over on my fanfic blog), but maybe that’s okay. I’m just saving my words back up, and I’ll get back to it when I can get a few of my academic obligations to stop breathing down my neck

but, speaking of obligations though -

✨ there’s a writing fellowship that I really want to apply for, with the application due at the end of the month, and I’m trying to decide on a writing sample. I was thinking of pulling a segment from the October Arc and tweaking it so it was in third person instead of second, with my manuscript narrator Blair taking the place of the reader.

my buddy @fairyysoup (ty bby ilysm 🖤) suggested the Masquerade chapter, which I thought was a really solid idea, and I wanted to maybe ask if anyone who’s read the October Arc (or any of my one shots) also had suggestions? I’m going for something that maybe isn’t smut (although it would be a very honest look at some of my work lmao ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) but if there was something that really stood out to someone, I’d really appreciate their thoughts as a reply here or in my inbox or a dm or anywhere, however one feels comfortable 🖤🖤🖤 you’d be doing me a huge favor, for real!! ✨

but now I have to quick pack my room back up to get ready to head back to louisiana tomorrow, to go back to work on-site on tuesday, because life comes at you fast lmao

here’s hoping everyone’s january is cooperating so far ♥️🌝

[duckprintspress]

Meet the Contributors to Our Next Anthology!

The time has come: we're ready to share the contributor list for our forthcoming anthology Aim For The Heart: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Alexandre Dumas's "The Three Musketeers"!

For this collection, 15 artists and 21 authors have created fanart, original art, fanfiction, and original fiction inspired by the adventures of Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d'Artagnan. We have been hard at work on this anthology since last fall, and we're anticipating a crowdfunding launch in late spring or early summer. We'll have lots of teasers, excerpts, a cover reveal, merchandise announcements, and more to come, but first - meet the creators!

Artists

Aceriee: Hi! I’m Aceriee and I draw sometimes. I’ve been drawing all my life, but after falling into the Supernatural fandom in 2014 I’ve mostly focused on fanart. (Instagram | Tumblr | Twitter)

Cris Alborja: I’m an illustration and comic artist from Spain. I’ve got a nursing degree, but I decided to pursue my passion. I have studied Illustration at EASD Pablo Picasso in A Coruña and comics at O Garaxe Hermético in Pontevedra. I have done cover art for an anthology called Infiniteca by Retranca Editorial and comics for Altar Mutante, Nai dos Desterrados, and Abraxas en Cuarentena fanzines, as well as in Gaspariño 21 by Retranca Editorial. (Instagram)

bloomingtea: Téa is a hypothetical writer and artist, a professional procrastinator, and a merch hoarder. When they aren’t working on personal projects, they moderate zines and bake the same loaf of bread over and over again. From their pile of WIPs, they’ve managed to self-publish one book and are currently working on other manuscripts to eventually release into the world. Until then, they remain the worst gamer on Twitch and like to spend their free time ranting about books and thinking about fictional lawyer video games. (Personal Website | Twitter)

C: A massive drinker of coffee and a lover of old TV shows and movies, C is a small-time concept artist and illustrator who likes to dabble in all things literature and history. When she’s not busy drawing and nodding along to Bruce Springsteen while researching the Kentucky Cave Wars, she’s trying to save up for grad school to become to a forensic artist so she can draw some more. (Tumblr)

Amy Fincher: Amy Fincher (she/her) is a producer and artist with over a dozen years of experience in the video game and animation industries. She has contributed to various AAA and indie titles, including the Civilization, XCOM, and Skylanders series. Amy is currently working on Open Roads as Executive Producer. When the mood strikes and time allows, she teaches art classes and takes on art commissions on the side. Her hobbies include learning aerial silks, collecting aesthetically pleasing empty containers, looking at shiny rocks, and taking very long naps.

Kou Lukeman: Kou Lukeman is an artist, composer, writer, and video-game developer. His long-term goal is to someday lead a video-game company that makes video games by queer and neurodivergent people. Kou identifies as queer, neurodivergent, and is proud to be both. He is an avid Final Fantasy 14 player, a huge Kingdom Hearts fan, and video games have inspired Kou to create from a very young age. While his main creative interests tend to be in queer and neurodivergent horror, Kou also dabbles in fantasy as a genre. He is currently working on releasing his first few games and a graphic horror novel about neurodiversity and queer people in society. (Instagram)

Giulia Malagoli:

Giulia Malagoli (she/they) got into art because of generally friendly competition with a classmate in middle school, and now she has an entire Bachelor’s Degree in Concept Art to show for it. 

For about ten years, she has been hopping through fandom spaces—from video games, to comics, to movies and TV series—and has drawn inspiration from each of them for both fan and original art. The result is a passion for character design and for art that weaves a story into its visuals, with a whole lot of feelings about the role of The Narrative to boot. 

To chase this passion Giulia has moved from their home country of Italy to the United Kingdom and back again. They now work as a freelance illustrator with enthusiasm, always scraping some time at the end of the day to keep up with fandom friends. (ArtStation | Twitter)

MidnightSilver: I’m MidnightSilver (They/Them). I’m a freelance artist who specialises in fandom art, most often inspired by Supernatural the TV show, and I can usually be found illustrating stories for independent authors—my favourites are those that combine adventure/magic/horror with a boatload of feels! As a bi, non-binary, mixed-race person, I don’t believe in restrictive boundaries, and I love tales that highlight diversity and freedom of expression while at the same time incorporating the fantastical and magical elements that I fell in love with when reading stories as a child. It’s my aim to take all the many wondrous worlds and people with whom we visit when lost in book pages at 2 o’clock in the morning and to share them with you in visual form. It’s a project I never tire of pursuing. (Archive of Our Own | deviantArt)

Queen Sponge Studios: Thanks for reading my bio! My name is Sponge, and I use they/them pronouns! I am currently studying for a Game Arts degree through online courses at SNHU. Along with working at a thrift store, I enjoy working on projects with others. Based in Northern Wisconsin, I majorly entertain myself through art and media pertaining to it. On the long list of my hobbies, I enjoy staying active as well as collecting. I am an avid, crazed Sanrio fanatic with a long list of fandoms dating all the way back to when I was ten. I may be more reserved, but I love making new connections through creation! Meeting like-minded individuals working toward a common goal has been the most fulfilling experience I have had to date. As a young artist, I have dabbled in vending at conventions, game art, and selling my own merchandise online. I hope to one day fully chase after my ambitions of artistry full-time through a studio! Thank you for your support and interest in my work! (Etsy | Instagram | TikTok)

Jennifer Smith: Smith has been drawing since a young age. With a focus in traditional drawing techniques, she has recently started using digital mediums to imitate traditional styles. Her focus is in portraiture and landscapes, especially with watercolor. You can find more of her art on her Tumblr. (Tumblr)

Toby.exe: Freelance Animator and Illustrator based in the UK. He/They LGBTQ+ friendly little goblin who plays excessive amounts of DnD and loves to play Live Action Roleplay events all over the country! If I am not at home drawing, I am out and about playing a variety of fantasy characters in the woods and hitting people with silly foam swords. (Personal Website | Instagram | Patreon | Twitter)

Jupiter V: Hailing from Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia (that’s in Canada), Jupiter V is an artist, musician, and creative crackerjack with a career spanning over a decade. Cutting their teeth designing award-winning gig posters, they’ve gone on to illustrate for film, graphic fiction, children’s literature, and more. At times, they have been caught painting murals at the circus (?!) and whooping their child mercilessly in Rivals of Aether. 

Jupiter is currently toiling away at their next graphic work of fiction, Wizards 99k, as we speak. (Instagram)

Amy Alexander Weston: Alex, AKA foxymoley, (she/her) is best described as a jack of all trades, but practices digital art more than anything else. She just wants to make things and change the world for the better. (Archive of Our Own | Instagram | Tumblr)

Amalia Zeichneren: Amalia Zeichnerin (she/her) lives in Hamburg, Germany. She is a disabled queer woman with a chronic illness and lives in a polyam polycule. Amalia mostly writes original fiction (SFF, cosy Victorian mysteries, Queer Romance) in German and has also one English Star Wars fan fiction on AO3, with one of her favorite shippings, StormPilot. Amalia also likes to draw and paint, especially fantasy world maps, character portraits, and sometimes also fanart. Amalia’s hobbies include pen-and-paper RPG and LARPing; these also have inspired some of her writing and artworks. (Linktree)

Jagoda Zirebiec: Hiya! I’m Jagoda or MizuShiba. I am a game dev artist currently working on a few unannounced titles. In my spare time I love to join collaborative projects like this, or charity Zines. This is my first project with DPP and hopefully not last! 

I’m located in Poland and currently live here with my family. Aside from art, I’m interested in collecting dice and playing ttrpgs with friends. (ArtStation | Tumblr | Twitter)

Authors

Len Amin: Len Amin was brought up living between worlds in her small suburban town in the Midwest throughout the year, and summering frequently to visit her Palestinian Family living in the West Bank. Her family is larger-than-life in true Arabian fashion, including a very prissy puppy named Charles who refuses to sleep alone and chews up all of her sister’s barbie dolls. Though never quite feeling like she belonged in either world, she instead fell in love with the stories with the people that resided in these places—how the humanity can be found so effortlessly if one just delved that bit deeper into someone’s “once upon a time.” Etching down words into her flower-printed journals and shuffling a fresh spread from her star-printed tarot deck for her friends were always her way to connect to someone and to open up that channel of understanding. Len is now about to hit her mid-twenties, and has nothing to lose as she strives for her Social Work degree while also focusing on her true passion of writing her first full-length novel. You can find the updates on her writing journey, and support her endeavors on her Tumblr page. (Archive of Our Own | Tumblr | Twitter)

Aria L. Deair: Aria L. Deair is an author who has been writing and (while cursing her excessive comma usage) publishing fanfiction online for more than sixteen years. Freelance writer by day and author every other hour that she isn’t sleeping, she spends her days courting carpal tunnel and “forgetting” to wear her wrist brace.

As a proud member of more fandoms than she can count, Aria can be found blogging about some of the writing that she is avoiding doing at arialerendeair.tumblr.com.

Like a dragon with her hoard, she can be found in her New Hampshire apartment, surrounded by notebooks (most of which are empty), half-filled mugs of tea, and some of the comfiest blankets that have ever existed. Disturb her at your own risk, especially during NaNo Season. (Discord: Dragon#5555 | Tumblr | Twitter)

E. V. Dean: E. V. Dean is a writer with a decade of fanfiction writing under her belt. She’s embarking on her original fiction adventure with the angst tag kept within arm’s reach. Her favorite excuse not to write is watching Jeopardy. (Instagram | Tumblr)

Rhosyn Goodfellow: Rhosyn Goodfellow is an author of queer romance and speculative fiction living with her spouse and two dogs in the Pacific Northwest, where she is sad to report that she has not yet mysteriously disappeared or encountered any cryptids. Her hobbies include spoiling the aforementioned dogs, drinking inadvisable amounts of coffee, and running unreasonably long distances very slowly. She’s secretly just a collection of loosely-related stories dressed up in a meat suit. (Personal Website | Instagram | Mastodon | Tumblr | Twitter)

Catherine E. Green: Catherine E. Green (pronouns: xe/xem/xyr or they/them/their) is an agender person, one who’s had an on-again, off-again love affair with writing. Xe began writing when xe was a wee thing, when xyr other major pastimes were playing xyr mother’s NES and roughhousing with the boys next door. It’s only in the past few years that they have begun writing consistently and publishing their writing, fanfiction and original writing alike, leading to their first published short story titled “Of Loops and Weaves.” 

Outside of writing, xe is a collector of books and sleep debt and an avid admirer of the cosmos. Playing video games, reading a variety of fiction genres (primarily fantasy, queer romance, and manga and graphic novels of all kinds), and working on wrangling their own personal data archiving projects occupy most of their free time. Xe has also started meeting up with a local fiber arts group and is excited to be crocheting xyr first scarf.

J. D. Harlock: J.D. Harlock is a Syrian-Lebanese-Palestinian writer and editor based in Beirut. In addition to his posts at Wasifiri, as an editor-at-large, and at Solarpunk Magazine, as a poetry editor, his writing has been featured in Strange Horizons, Star*Line, and the SFWA Blog. You can always find him on Twitter and Instagram posting updates on his latest projects. (Instagram | Twitter)

A. L. Heard: A. L. Heard is an aspiring writer from Pittsburgh. She’s been writing fanworks for over a decade and self-published her first novel, Hockey Bois, in 2021. Some of her short stories have been published through the indie press Duck Prints Press, where she also contributes as an editor. Ultimately, though, she spends her free time writing about characters she adores in worlds she’d like to explore: contemporary romance, historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. In between writing projects, she works as a language teacher, plays hockey, tours breweries with her boyfriend, and spends her evenings playing dinosaurs with her two sons. (Instagram | Twitter)

D. A. Hernández: AKA Mitch, an author who works as a teacher, reads fanfiction compulsively, tells anyone who will listen about their weird dreams, takes long naps, and once in a while manages to write a story or two. You can find another of their stories in the Duck Prints Press anthology She Wears the Midnight Crown. 

Mitch’s playlist includes metal, pop, electronic, bluegrass, reggaeton and cumbia. (Twitter)

R. L. Houck: R. L. Houck (she/her) still has one of the first stories she ever wrote, all the way back from elementary school. It was about flightless penguins reaching the sun and was a good indication of her boundless imagination and her love of animals. The latter became a full-time veterinary career; the former keeps her occupied with fanfiction and original fiction in her downtime. 

She’s sometimes found wandering the woods around her house in Virginia with her dog. If not there, she’s sitting on the couch, catching up on a Netflix series, and smothered by her five cats. Sometimes, there’s even space for her wife. (TikTok)

Lucy K. R.: Lucy K.R. (she/her) is technically in existence. Every time she is free, she writes. Sometimes when she is not free she also writes. This has occasionally created problems. She is fortunate to be supported (read: enabled) by her enthusiastic fiancée Tomo, a loving OG family, and a lively found family as well.

Eager for a change after a decade of waitressing, Lucy K.R. took the chance in March of 2021 to make her first steps into the world of published work. Prior to the success of the largely-fabricated German translation of the short-story found in this collection, ‘die Karaoke-Königinnen’, she was best known for her work on Mageling: Rise of the Ancient Ones and in the Duck Prints Press anthologies “And Seek (Not) to Alter Me” and “She Wears the Midnight Crown”.

In her stories, Lucy K. enjoys writing evil ideas as gently as possible, portrayed through unexpected lenses. She would like to acknowledge that she has never written a biographical statement that did not turn out weird, beg your indulgence, and express her hope that you enjoy her work in this anthology. The people at Duck Prints Press have been a delight, and she is deeply grateful to be included! (Personal Website | Twitter)

Aeryn Jemariel Knox: Aeryn Jemariel Knox first identified as a writer in second grade. With both parents involved in theater and a house full of bookshelves, they grew up surrounded by stories, and as soon as they could hold a crayon, they felt the urge to tell their own. In 2001, they discovered the wide and wonderful world of fanfiction; since then, they have gone by Jemariel in fandom spaces across the internet, engaging with their favorite media and communities in the best way they know. Previous fandoms include Harry Potter, Star Trek (The Original Series), Torchwood, and BBC’s Sherlock, but their most prolific writing and strongest community ties are in the Supernatural fandom. Now, nearly a decade after their last original fiction attempt, Aeryn is eager to explore the wider writing word. 

A native of Portland, Oregon, Aeryn currently lives in the suburbs with their husband and 16-year-old cat. For a day job, they work as a tech writer and general paper-pusher for an energy drink factory. Their favorite stories, both to tell and to read, are stories about love, identity, and magic. (Archive of Our Own | Tumblr)

Annabeth Lynch: Annabeth Lynch is a genderfae (she/they), bisexual author who writes mostly queer stories, preferring to write marginalized characters finding love. She lives in North Carolina with her husband, daughter, and two very overweight cats. (Facebook | Instagram)

Sebastian Marie: Sebastian Marie (he/him) is an engineering student with a penchant for writing off-the-wall fantasy, darkly comedic prose, and sickeningly indulgent short stories. He has a lot of opinions about dragons, pirates, and sword fighting. Track him down on Ao3 and he’ll share these opinions through fanfiction for various fandoms including BBC Merlin, The Mechanisms, and Our Flag Means Death. His original works often combine fantasy and dystopia into what he calls “queer fantasy hopepunk,” something that will be explored in his future novels. He loves to write conflicting traditional and non-traditional family dynamics, especially where they intersect with queer relationships. And if he can throw werewolves and brujas into the mix? So much the better. When not writing, frantically studying dirt, or reading, he can be found singing loudly, sewing impractical coats, playing Dungeons and Dragons, and going on long rambling walks while plotting stories (and occasionally falling into rivers). 

This is his second time writing for Duck Prints Press, having previously contributed to She Wears the Midnight Crown. This brings his grand total of published works up to two! He’s looking forward to more, as soon as he gets some sleep. (Archive of Our Own | Tumblr)

Nova Mason: Nova Mason spent a significant portion of her childhood fantasizing about dragons, spaceships, and other worlds. She is now, allegedly, a grown-up, with two kids, and more varied interests. Dragons, spaceships, and other worlds are still pretty high in the list, though.

Sage Mooreland: Sage Mooreland (they/them) is a city-dwelling gremlin from Chicago. They are embarking on the adventure that is their 40s equipped with three amazing partners, one very ridiculous eighteen-year-old biological offspring, and a fleet of teenagers and twentysomethings that adopted them through work over the last several years. Sage put themselves through the torture of grad school, and now holds a Bachelor’s in English and a Master’s in English and Creative Writing – Fiction, to which they say, “Now I have expensive pieces of paper that make it seem like I know what I’m talking about.” 

Sage has been writing since they were wee small, entering their first writing contest in fifth grade/at ten years old. In high school and college, they made small offerings to school literary magazines, and have done eighteen years of National Novel Writing Month. As their writing career grows, they hope to provide stories that are entertaining, caring, inclusive of all, and full of the stuff of which dreams are made. 

D. V. Morse: D. V. Morse (she/her) is a writer of fantasy and science fiction, generally (though not always) with some romance in there somewhere. She’s been in various aspects of healthcare for a couple of decades, most recently nursing. A lifelong New Englander who has been writing for as long as she can remember, she loves to find the liminal spaces in the local landscape and find the stories lurking within. She also loves playing with fiber arts, cycling through knitting, crochet, cross-stitch, and blackwork. She has also contributed to “Stand Where You’re Afraid,” in I Am the Fire, a limited edition charity anthology by a collective of SF/F romance authors raising funds for the National Network of Abortion Funds. (Carrd | Blog | Twitter | Facebook )

MouMouSanRen: MouMouSanRen (she/her) was born and raised on unceded Matinecock territory in what is now known as Flushing, New York. She has been published in multiple non-fiction magazines including Polygon. Aim for the Heart is her fiction debut. She resides in her native Queens, practicing martial arts and taking care of her dogs. (Twitter)

J. D. Rivers: J. D. writes speculative fiction where they fall deeply and madly in love and find a dead body, not necessarily in that order.

She collects hobbies as others collect books and has an unhealthy addiction to watching competitive cooking shows.

J. D. lives close to the woods with her husband and the cutest dog in the world. (Personal Website | Twitter)

Veronica Sloane: Veronica Sloane has authored a novel, several short stories, some poetry, and twenty-two years worth of fanfic. She lives with one lovely spouse, one rambunctious clever child, and one sleepy cat. (Archive of Our Own | Tumblr)

Shea Sullivan: Shea Sullivan is a life-long writer living in upstate New York. As a late-blooming queer person, she enjoys writing about complex characters coming into themselves and finding comfort in being exactly who they are.

Shea’s day jobs in computer programming and middle management have molded her into the patient, sarcastic, big-hearted, frustrated human she is today, but it’s what she does outside the 9-5 that really excites her. When she’s not writing, she can be found painting, napping, making quilts, watching documentaries, and trying not to adopt more animals, usually with a cup of tea in hand.

Xianyu Zhou: Xianyu Zhou is a translator and aspiring garment and plushie cloning specialist hailing from a coastal city in the tropics. Despite staying a 20-minute drive away from the nearest beach, they have yet to visited one, preferring to dwell in their darkened room luminated by a table lamp and ever-shifting RGB of a CPU fan. They have the tendency to accidentally wander into new and exciting forays such as joining Duck Prints Press (and enjoying it!), learning to sew (stitching and unstitching the same part of a “coaster” for the nth time) and working on their language skills (watching shows to scruntinize take notes about how their subtitles are written). 

Xianyu’s contribution to the anthology is their first publication, and they have reportedly made a party hat for their computer to celebrate the occasion. 

We couldn't be more thrilled to have all these amazing people working with us on this collection! You're not gonna want to miss what they've written and arted!

Make sure you sign up for our monthly newsletter and/or follow us on social media to always here the latest about Aim For The Heart and our other upcoming projects! (and you can always get behind-the-scenes access on our production progress, sneak-peeks of works-in-progress, and more by backing us on Patreon!)

Who we are: Duck Prints Press LLC is an independent publisher based in New York State. Our founding vision is to help fanfiction authors navigate the complex process of bringing their original works from first draft to print, culminating in publishing their work under our imprint.

[anadorablekiwi]

Hey sorry I was gone most of today. How are you feeling?

Y’re u apologizing hun?

I’m alright, mostly just hangin in there. Still sick and all but fairly okay otherwise

I had a bit of a meltdown this afternoon because i was feeling like my sister kept getting things i needed first (her laptops broke first even tho i was next in like for upgrade, i lost my $300 grad ring [it said faith and strength on it instead of name and year] before i even graduated high school (we couldnt afford to replace it) and my dad saved up money so he could buy sister a $500 lego set (which she will return because we have no where to put it and she has plans for getting that set After moving out but obviously she still gets the money), which is not her fault in the slightest and she felt bad for both. But my mama agreed it wasn’t quite fair so she bought me a totk oled switch which will be here Sunday so I’m happy about that now

(I still feel like a child who had a meltdown and was placated with a new toy. But my mom assured me she thinks I’m justified and wouldn’t just buy it for me because i had a breakdown)

Whoops i rambled, sorry

Anyways not too terrible. How are you doing?

[elsanna-shenanigans]

November/October 2023 Contest Submission #2: Water the soil

Words: 3,000 Setting: mAU Lemon: no Content: n/a

The grow room was bright and humid, but it was also quiet, save for the hum of the grow lights and fans. Elsa slid her backpack from her shoulders and placed it on one of the chairs surrounding the small working table in the middle of the room.

A few minutes later, after sanitizing and sliding on gloves and a mask, she seated herself at the table. A tray of young green plants lay before her — swaying slightly from the weight of the large seed pods. 

That was her task today, remove the seed pods and destroy the plants so the next batch could be planted. A cycle she would repeat in a few weeks. These little sprouts were genetically modified to grow and seed quickly so experiments could produce faster results. 

Elsa had just snipped off a seed pod when her phone buzzed. Thankfully she didn’t have to stop her work, Siri read out the texts in her AirPods without a pause. 

“Message from Anna’’ the computer voice said before continuing to read Anna’s messages. Every line was a new message because that’s just how her sister texted. 

‘Hey’

‘Good morning!’

‘Are you at work?’

‘Did you talk to your boss about an internship?’ 

‘The theater kids are performing on the quad in bathrobes again’

‘I really need your help with this.’

‘Let me know how it goes’

“Would you like to reply?” Siri asked and Elsa didn’t answer, the assistant timed out and her podcast resumed playing. She hadn’t spoken to her boss about getting Anna an internship for the semester yet. It wasn’t that she was scared of him saying no, more that she wasn’t sure she could handle working next to Anna for a whole semester. Especially knowing Anna, the undergrad, would be assigned to the grow room where Elsa, the grad student, worked.

Elsa, sitting hunched in the chair, snipped another seed pod. Inspecting it for a moment before placing it carefully in the tray for processing. 

It would be good for Anna to get a student internship here. It’s a highly reputable lab, at an esteemed university. Truly a fantastic learning experience. And it would satisfy her credits needed to graduate. 

It’s just… complicated.

Another seed pod was snipped off and the pod was dropped, perhaps with a little too much force, into the tray. Elsa sighed and leaned back in her chair, the old wood and metal seemed to sigh along with her. 

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe this would be good for herself. Exposure therapy was a thing right? Elsa removed her mask and stood up to pace the room. The two sisters, long since separated by a nasty divorce had reconnected at university. Prior to that Anna had only existed via social media or the occasional birthday phone call. To this day Elsa wasn’t sure it was happenstance or on purpose that Anna ended up at the same school she did, but it didn’t matter. She was here and had been for the last few years. 

It was awkward at first, different then when Elsa had met online friends in real life for the first time. This was family after all, but she couldn’t ignore how her stomach seemed to flip or her heart sped up the first time she met Anna for dinner and how that kept happening every time since. 

Elsa tried to lie to herself, tried to say it was just excitement to finally be with her sister again after nearly 20 years but deep down she knew there was something more. 

Her phone buzzed again, this time with a call. “Hello?” Elsa said into the phone, she hadn’t bothered checking the caller ID. 

“There you are!” Anna’s voice boomed. “I messaged you over an hour ago and got no response, you good?”

Elsa glanced at her watch before answering, “Yes, just focused.” It wasn’t a lie, she just wasn’t focused on what she should be focused on. 

“Well Ms. Just Focused, do you want to meet me for lunch?”

“Sure, can you let me finish this thing first?” Elsa asked, surprised she agreed so easily. 

“Yeah, of course dude, I’m done for the day so I’m just sitting in the lobby upstairs studying, come grab me when you’re ready.” Anna replied and then laughed before continuing, “but don’t take too long, I’m hungry.” 

“I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will, see you soon!” 

The call ended and Elsa found herself smiling as she returned to the table to finish the seed collection. 

***

Outside was just as bright as the grow room, only less humid. Elsa’s blonde hair remained frizzy nonetheless and she tried her best to smooth it as she walked with Anna to a little cafe just off campus. Early fall leaves crunched under their feet.

“So I tried to take 18 credits this year but one of my classes got canceled for whatever reason, so I have time.” Anna said. Her hands shoved into the pocket of her bright purple hoodie. It complimented her copper hair well, in Elsa’s opinion. 

“You’re only taking five classes then?” Elsa forced herself to keep her blue eyes forward and off Anna.

“Yeah, which is why I could really use this lab job if you could help. If not, I’m going to have to do an extra semester.” She kicked a small rock out of the way. “It’s dumb.” 

“It is dumb.” 

A silence fell between them and Elsa felt Anna’s eyes on her, waiting for more of a response. She gave in and glanced over, Anna was taller than her by a good few inches, so upon turning, Elsa’s eyes went automatically to the younger woman’s jawline. Which seemed to be carved out of lightly tanned skin.

“Uh hi?” 

Elsa blinked and cleared her throat, looking forward again. “Sorry, just a lot on my mind. I can talk to my boss this afternoon.” 

“Wow really? That would be amazing!” Anna did a small jump and punched the air. 

“It doesn’t mean you have the job though.” Elsa frowned. 

“I know, but it’s a step in the right direction.”

“What if he says no?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” Anna said with a shrug. Elsa wished she could be that nonchalant about things. 

The cafe door opened with the ring of a bell. It was a small place, more on the expensive side which kept the five tables mostly empty during the day. At night it was a different story, an open mic event, standing room only. 

The pair settled at a table near the back, a brick wall framing them on one side. Elsa shrugged her coat off and hung it off the back of the chair. Thankfully, she had chosen to wear a simple long sleeve button up today. She was able to roll the sleeves up for the grow room, but now it was cooler so she could pull them back down. 

She ignored how Anna seemed to be watching her forearms as she fixed her sleeves. It was probably all in her head anyway. 

“I have two Cobb salads,” a young boy in a server uniform said, setting a plate down in front of each woman without any fanfare and walking away. 

“Kinda rude,” Elsa mumbled as she picked up a fork.

“He’s like, 12, it’s fine.”

“Anyway, tell me about your weekend.” 

“Oh, it was alright. Went to a party for a few hours, a bunch of freshmen were trashed and it killed the vibe. You don’t really notice how different little freshmen are from seniors. Those four years make a huge difference.” Anna said between bites. 

“People do a lot of maturing in those few short years.” Elsa agreed. Anna had matured a lot too. Coming to the university as a wide-eyed kid with pigtail braids and baggy clothes, she had grown into her own. She never wore fancy clothes but they fit her body a lot better, showing off curves and she had learned to style her copper hair and do her makeup so that her blue eyes had a commanding presence. 

Elsa, in contrast, hardly ever wore makeup and mostly lived in button-up shirts and lab coats. Throwing her long hair into a braid to keep it out of the way. At the very most she would wear some perfume but only because Anna mentioned liking sandalwood. 

“It was weird though,” Anna continued, bringing Elsa back to the conversation. “This one girl kept following me around the party and giving me compliments.” 

“Oh?” Elsa couldn’t help the ping of jealousy that rang within her.

“Yeah, but she never made a move and she was way younger so I wasn’t about to be a predator.” She laughed and Elsa shifted in her seat, uneasy. 

“How much younger was she that you would have been a predator?” The older woman dared to ask, hyper aware suddenly of the three year difference between them.

“Honestly I think she was a high schooler that snuck in. Like she was a baby. I just had that elder gay energy. I don’t think she was hitting on me, I think she was just learning and exploring.” Anna took another bite of her salad. 

“You’re bi though.”

At this Anna rolled her eyes. “Bi is still gay, we had this discussion.”

“I know,” Elsa pushed a piece of lettuce around on her plate. 

“What about you?” 

“What about me?”

“Did you figure out what flag you want to fly, so to speak?” 

“No, I don’t know, I haven’t thought much about it.” Elsa lied. Because she had thought about it, often. She had never liked men, not once. But she also didn’t have a lot of interest in women, it was only Anna. At that thought Elsa nearly dropped her fork. It was the first time she had fully admitted that to herself instead of dancing around the subject. 

“Hmm. Okay.” Anna said, a hint of disappointment in her voice. “I’m going to order us coffee because we need some caffeine.” 

Elsa just nodded and fixed her eyes on something outside the window. Thankful for a moment to breathe when Anna left the table. 

She can’t like Anna like that, it’s immoral, it’s wrong, it’s a problem. It should feel like grabbing a red hot coal, but it felt like opening the windows to a cool spring breeze instead. Elsa shook her head. 

“One dark roast with cream and one caramel macchiato.” A server said, putting the first cup down in front of Elsa and the second in front of Anna who had only just returned to the table. 

“You remembered how I like my coffee.” 

“Yeah,” Anna laughed. “Super easy when it’s so boring.”

“It’s not boring! This is a classic.” 

“Yeah, yeah. It’s boring and bitter.” 

“At least I can taste my coffee, you’re just drinking sugar.”

“You’re right and it’s delicious.” Anna lifted her mug with two hands and closed her eyes while taking a sip. 

She put her mug down and reached across the table to place a hand on Elsa’s arm. Causing the older woman to stiffen and stare down at Anna’s finger nails with chipped green paint. “Can you please talk to your boss today and let me know if it’s a yes or no? Otherwise I need to figure something else out.” Anna pleaded, her voice dropping to a lower octave, causing Elsa to instinctively lean in to hear her. 

“I will,” Elsa whispered for no other reason than it felt right. “I’ll let you know right away.”

Anna gave her arm a little squeeze and smiled.

***

‘Hey it’s Elsa, I talked to my boss, you can start tomorrow. Four days a week till the end of the semester, you’ll mostly be watering plants. No pay but he’ll sign the paperwork so it fulfills your credit requirement.’ 

Elsa finished typing the text and hit send. She rested her head back against the smooth cement walls of the science building’s interior. Her boss had readily agreed, they needed someone to water the plants and it saved him from having to go through a lengthy process to hire someone. 

‘Omg! For reals?’ Anna’s text came back immediately. ‘Also I know it’s you, Elsa. You’re saved in my phone silly.’ 

***

“Okay, you can do this,” Elsa said to herself. She was in the grow room again, pacing while waiting for Anna to arrive. She had already laid out all the supplies and triple checked them. 

She glanced at the clock for the millionth time. Five minutes.

She shouldn’t be this nervous, it was just Anna. But the fact that it was just Anna was the issue. She had feelings, she admitted, after she allowed the thought to flow freely at the cafe. 

Another glance at the clock. Four minutes.

They were sisters. Sisters. Family. Blood related. Elsa just needed to get over herself. Still four minutes.

They didn’t grow up as sisters though. Did that make it better somehow? Did that justify anything? Five minutes.

“Wait.” Elsa halted her pacing and looked at the clock again, no it was three minutes, her eyes were just playing tricks on her. She let out a sigh right as the door opened. 

“Don’t tell me I’m boring you already.” Anna said as she stepped into the room. 

“No I was,” Elsa paused to look up. Anna was wearing boots that made her even taller than she usually was and Elsa almost had to crane her neck to see Anna’s face when she got closer. “Just uh… thinking of things.”

“Using that big brain of yours.” Anna smirked and Elsa had to turn away. 

“Sooo,” she cleared her throat. “You‘ll be watering the plants, like I said. Some of them just get watered with a watering can and some you need to soak for an hour so they can pull water from the bottom.”

“Right, ok, I can do that.” Anna scribbled on a small note pad.

Elsa couldn’t help but smile to herself that the redhead was taking notes. “For the plants in the humidity chambers, you just need to make sure that the levels are good when you come in and before you leave. They get water automatically, but if there’s an issue tell me right away.” Elsa pointed to two large white freezer looking boxes with gages on the outside. 

“Of course,” Anna scribbled more. 

“Over here is everything you need. When you move the plants to a soaking tray you need to wear an apron and gloves. Just so the pollen doesn’t stick to you.” Elsa tried to ignore how close Anna was standing to her. 

“Is the pollen dangerous?” 

“No, it’s just for cross contamination reasons. Since you’re physically picking up and moving the plants.” 

“So I get a funky apron and you get the sexy lab coat?” Anna asked, gesturing to Elsa’s current outfit. 

Elsa nearly dropped the watering can she was about to handover, instead she turned around to fill it from the sink. “It’s not sexy, it’s just a white coat.” 

“I think it’s pretty sexy.” 

“Maybe one day you’ll graduate and get one yourself.” 

At this Anna sighed and Elsa felt her step back. “Are we just never going to talk about it?” 

“About the lab coat? You get one as part of your masters program.” Elsa turned back around and handed Anna the can, their fingers grazing. Elsa pulled her hand back and tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. 

“No,” Anna leaned over to put the watering can back on the counter. “About you, about how you’ve been acting lately… towards me.” 

“You came here to work.” 

“Yes, but I’m not going to work here the whole semester with you being like this. So I want to get this out of the way right away. Because if we can’t move past it, there’s no point in me staying here because I will not interfere with your work.” 

“But, how will you graduate?” Elsa asked, her voice going up an octave.

“I’ll figure it out. Stop dodging the subject.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.” 

“How about this, why don’t I just ask you flat out? We can just bite this bullet right now.”

Elsa opened her mouth to say something but Anna held up a hand to stop her. Her brow was furrowed but her shoulders were relaxed. Elsa couldn’t tell what mood Anna was in, but she knew her own heart was pounding so hard it was about to break out of her chest. 

“Do you like me, in the romantic sense?” Anna asked, it was even toned and lacked any sense of accusation. “Just be honest with me and say yes or no.” 

Elsa bit her bottom lip, it was all she could do to not look away. She felt exposed, naked, unmasked. She opened her mouth to speak but no sounds came out. 

Anna frowned and crossed her arms while letting out another sigh. 

It shifted something in Elsa and before she could second guess it she blurted out. “Yes. Okay, yes I like you, yes I have feelings for you. No, it’s not normal.” 

“Finally!” Anna exclaimed and Elsa looked at her confused. “Elsa, I’ve been trying to get you to say that for months. You don’t think I haven’t noticed? I told you, I’m very intuitive, elder gay and all.”

“I—I… you’re not mad?”

“What? No. Not normal? Sure. But what is normal anyway. Plus, it’s fun to explore. I would love to show you the ropes.” Anna wiggled her eyebrows and laughed. 

“I just didn’t think you would be okay with this.” She relaxed back to lean on the counter. 

“Elsa, I’m more than okay with this.” Anna closed the gap between them and cupped Elsa’s face in her hands, leaning in to kiss her. Elsa melted into Anna and the bright lights of the grow room faded away.

[southernbrainspiders]

Seven Years Later

Hey, y'all. So here's a final post for anyone who's still following this blog -- I expect that, over the past seven years, nearly everyone who used to follow it has left, but there might be a few still around, so I just wanted to put this here.

If you're trying to remember who this is, I used to blog about my experiences working the graveyard shift at a gas station in Mississippi. I was an angry 20-something misanthrope who had left my grad-school program due to various conflicts and was working at a gas station while I tried to figure out what to do next. I had a lot of complaints about the customers (because, you know, it was retail, and customers really are pretty terrible even when you're not bitter and misanthropic already). The blog kind of trailed off when I got a secondary-school teaching certification and landed a job teaching 11th/12th-grade English at a school in the next county over -- because, of course, it just wouldn't be right to talk about my students in a public forum.

Anyway, I’m kind of back, just not on this blog, so I thought I’d give anyone still around an update on the last seven years of my life and where you can find me now. Oh, and this probably goes without saying, but I will deny all knowledge of this blog. I look back on my younger self and cringe, as I think we all do, and would prefer to leave that here -- I've matured, I like to think, and all that angry misanthropy is much more contained now, rather than just flailing around undirected.

So I wasn't at the high school long before I left that too. The turnaround was actually extremely quick -- by October, I was filling out applications to return to grad school. There were a few reasons for this, which I'll enumerate, but it all really boils down to the fact that I wasn't a cultural fit. (This was originally basically an essay in itself, but I'm trimming it down to a bulleted list.)

This was a school that did not believe in education except as it pertained to test scores. My job was 50% babysitter, 40% prison guard, and 10% ACT Prep. There was a weird current of anti-intellectualism among the faculty, and that carried over to the students.

The prison guard thing isn't as much of an exaggeration as I would like -- my morning duty was helping keep the students kettled in the auditorium until the first bell rang, because the administration didn't trust them to be out in the halls. I had to accompany my class to the cafeteria to make sure they sat in their assigned seats and didn't make too much noise.

On a related note, several members of the faculty frequently bemoaned the fact that corporal punishment had been recently banned from the school system. (Our student rosters still had a column on them indicating which parents had given permission for the school to hit their kids.) They pretty casually talked about the fact that the parents still did that part at home, though, describing things that, where I grew up, would have been called child abuse.

One of my duties was to teach students to write for basically the first time ever -- a writing section had been added to one of the tests, so it had to be incorporated into the curriculum now. Because, of course, since it hadn't been on the tests before, the school had been just not teaching writing at all. Students were very against the concept of writing assignments.

This was a very conservative and very religious area. I'm neither of those things. A standard "getting to know you" question was "what church do you go to?" Faculty meetings started with a prayer session. I didn't try to hide my lack of religion, and even tried to use it as a teaching moment when students asked about it, breaking down the word "agnosticism" to its roots and affixes. A number of students decided I needed to be Saved and started trying to witness to me or whatever you call it.

Between the backlash to the writing assignments (seriously, the students hated those to a degree that shocked me) and my general status as a cultural outsider, a number of the students developed a severe dislike of me. And it was a small town, so they quickly found out where I lived. Within the first month, my home was egged thrice and my tires slashed once. This was when I started filling out grad-school applications.

It was an intensely stressful experience, is what I'm saying. I should have picked up on the red flag when I noticed I was one of... I think half a dozen? new teachers that year. (There were at least four, but I can't quite remember the number.) It was a small school; the turnover rate was just insane. Most of the others left before the year even ended -- in fact, one of my students told me that I was the first high school English teacher they'd had that lasted the whole year. The new math teacher just packed up her classroom and left one day, no notice or anything. The only new hire that stayed for the next year was actually an alumnus of the high school in question and thus was already part of the community & didn't have much adapting to do.

I stayed for the whole year because I needed the money; if I'd had a spouse's income to fall back on like most of the other new teachers did, I probably would have left mid-year too. It was hellish and I was basically in a constant state of mental breakdown. I'm not ashamed to admit I cried in school multiple times -- never in front of the students, thankfully, but once in front of the principal. I decided that even if I didn't get into another graduate program, I had to leave this place because it was turning me into a person I didn't like -- I was starting to yell at students for acting up, which is just intolerable.

Luckily, I did get accepted into a couple programs. One of them offered funding and a TA position, so I took it without a second thought even though it meant starting over as an MA student. (So now I have two Master's degrees, one in English Literature and one in English Language, which is extremely redundant.) I moved across the country to Indiana.

Turns out I'm actually a pretty good teacher at the college level. When I can focus on education rather than babysitting, I can genuinely thrive. Most of my students still weren't that interested in learning English -- I was teaching a freshman-year writing class -- because it's a STEM-focused university and the humanities are barely tolerated, but just the fact that they actually want to be at the school and have some motivation to learn makes all the difference. I got multiple awards from the department based on student evaluations.

My TA position expired at the end of last year, because I was supposed to finish my PhD and graduate, but my dissertation is still in progress. (My mental health is still pretty shaky, but that's just the baseline of who I am as a person, not the result of the environment I'm in this time... it leads to me not being as productive as I probably should be.) I was able to get a position working for the university library instead, though, so that's where I am now.

As a side project, I do a podcast, The Maniculum, where a friend and I read, discuss, and joke about medieval literature, then try to adapt it to TTRPG games. We have a small audience of a few hundred, but I think it's going quite well. I've been managing our Twitter presence, and as Twitter started looking like it might go down, I saw a lot of jokes about people fleeing back to Tumblr. This struck a chord of nostalgia within me, and yesterday I went & made us a Tumblr account. I haven't posted anything there yet -- I'm planning to do an introduction post later today -- but if anyone reading this wants to go follow it and see what happens, it's @maniculum.

And, for anyone who does go there to check it out, remember: if you knew me as Southern Brain Spiders, no you didn't.

[mariedemedicis]

📓 :)

Thank you for asking, Nikki! 💙

So, it’s a Jenna encounters the supernatural earlier/on her own, Cami gets a human friend and buddy.

When Elena calls her parents for a ride on that day in May, Miranda stays home. (Either she herself isn’t feeling all that well or Jeremy is sick and she stays to look after him.) Elena and Grayson still crash over Wickery Bridge and Grayson still indicates to Stefan that he should save Elena first but this Elena and Jeremy only lose one of their parents.

I chose to save Miranda over Grayson because frankly a) I needed him to still ask Stefan to save Elena and b) Miranda’s attitude towards and exact knowledge of the supernatural is unclear and nebulous, which to me makes things more fun.

Jenna of course comes home to Mystic Falls for Grayson’s funeral and stays for a few weeks to support her sister and the kids but instead of enrolling at Whitmore College and raising her niece and nephew on her own, she continues her studies as originally planned and moves to New Orleans to get her Master’s in Anthropology at Tulane.

(I actually just checked the vampire diaries wiki to see if I completely missed a mention where they said what Jenna was studying - it claims she was studying psychology but like her age/birth year, this is uncited so I think I’m gonna go ahead and ignore it.)

She and Cami meet at a grad student mixer. They become pretty fast friends and eventually roommates as well after Jenna’s lease is up.

Things around them sort of slowly get weird, like the boiling frog analogy. They have of course the usual school and work things going on, Cami as a bartender and Jenna as tbh I don’t know what kind of job she’d be doing 🤔, but very slowly they’re discovering weird shit going on right under their noses and it’s neat because they’re coming at it from totally different disciplines/perspectives, Jenna as a cultural anthropologist (I might fiddle with her specialty so don’t quote me on that but definitely an anthropologist) and Cami as a psychologist-in-training.

This is also where I ran out of idea steam to bridge the gap between the rest of the beginning of TVD (happening obviously offscreen and without Jenna and Cami’s knowledge) and the start of TO.

Jenna and Marcel become dear friends, maybe on the way to romantic, and Cami, well, let’s just say she’s heard a lot about Klaus before he ever shows his face.

Sean would be a character although I’m not quite sure what to do with him because we really know next to nothing about him but I think Jenna would be close to him too.

[airyucat]

Hello again, tumblr. It’s a fitting that that my first post back comes from a place of deep pain. I used tumblr a lot in grad school, some of the most painful years of adulthood. It’s not that I don’t trust my loved ones, but it’s that I still have intrusive thoughts that I let become thoughts. But this animation also comes from a place of deep gratitude. I wanted to add more outlines to the video, but if you’re in it, how dare you not give up on me >:c How dare you always support me, no matter what I’m going through. Absolutely rude (am I supposed to specify sarcasm here). If you’re in the video, I love you inexplainable amounts. And if you’re not, or you’re wondering if you are, I probably love you too. But I have a constant feeling of a valley bigger Valles Marineris cut through my being. Loved one prove to me they love me over and over again, and my stupid scientist brain collects stupid evidence and puts together a stupid hypothesis and runs simulation upon simulation on why this is wrong actually, why those people don’t care about me, why they’re lying to me actually. I have far away friends on other states and countries, so we try and plan online events, that get cancelled or where 2 people show up and can only stay for 15 minutes. If you truly cared about me, why don’t you call, or message, or reach out, of your own volition. Why do I have to wait until I’m cracking and deseperate and seek you out in pain for us to connect? I left an online group I loved - I let one person ruin it for me - and there went a big piece of my life. And people who said they still cared about me, why should a hi every now and then be enough? We used to move mountains with tremendous conversations, but now I just get a Merry Christmas in response to me saying it. I have friends here, in norcal, that live 2 hours away by driving, and 3 hours away by public transit. It’s exhausting, I often need to spend the night if it’s a late event, and I’m so far away that there are events I miss by not knowing about them. I’ve known them forever, but like, not as long as the full time I’ve known them. I met some before moving to Michigan for grad school, others when visited norcal but lived in michigan and then socal. So I was MIA physically from their lives from 2012-2018

Trauma led me to move back to norcal at the end of 2018. I got a job in SF, and my now spouse, Tai, and I moved to a cheap area still far from friends. It was supposed to be temporary, but I’m bad with money, and weddings can be expensive, and it’s hard to save up when a pandemic hits. But, in late 2018, everything felt broken, awful, horrible. Honestly that time and the year before felt like “what if our whole polycule that hadn’t even formed yet fucked up every thing every where all at once.”

So, 2019 was the year Tai and I took time to ourselves fix serious issues in our relationship, which meant we were distant from everyone, no matter the distance. We got cats at the start of the year though, two of the best decisions I’ve ever made. The end of 2019 was when we we finally reconnected back with our poly partners, and started reaching out to friends. And then, well, happy happy 2020 pandemic. Mid-2021 was spent reconnecting for me, but disconnecting for Tai, for similar reasons. “If you truly cared about me, why didn’t you reach out until you found out how bad things were.” I like to think we’re both decent at masking though. As a kid, before my dad starting ripping up all my art, he ripped up the ones where I drew sad faces. Because you’re not supposed to be sad, ever. Early 2022 I lost my one of my best friend’s dad. He felt like my dad. How sad was I allowed to be? I still don’t know, and next month it’ll have been a year since.

Did you know that a wedding at Disneyland and another wedding at a Hindu temple are really, really hard to plan? That’s what almost half of 2022 was. The weddings themselves, in May, on our anniversary, and the honeymoon, wow. Breath-taking. Especially for all the adlibbing we ended up doing (no rehearsal needed). 12 years since I met Tai. 11 years since I asked them out. 8 years since I proposed. Took us long enough.

My favorite pictures are the ones with or of loved ones, particularly our polycule and wedding party. I generally never get nostalgic, but I cry thinking about all the people that supported us. A lot of them are outlines in the video. My chest physically hurts knowing I will not be able to express how damn much I love them. People from all those three groups above? Didn’t matter how long the drive was, or the plane costs and delays, or the wallet-draining hotels, buying Indian and Disney-bounding clothes, spending a day in weather that was too hot for them... they did it. For Tai. For me. They did it. Side note - I’ll never forget that my (white) girlfriend taught me how to tie a sari. If you ever feel like an outsider to your cultural roots, remember me. And after the wedding... it was back. June, July, August, September, October, worse worse worse feelings of being excluded, people not wanting to be around me, doesn’t matter how false those feelings were. You can know something logically and not know it. Tai withdrawing from everyone. Accidental emotional neglect - if someone’s masking well enough, you don’t know. You can’t know. You can’t. And it matched my self narrative anyways: I’m disgusting and people don’t want me around. It solves everything; no one can kick you down if you’ve already done it. Emotions compounded by feeling unskilled in art, drained by my job’s commute and miniscule amounts of time off, Kaiser giving me scraps of therapy once every 8 weeks... My mental health pludged. October. Went to Europe with my girlfriend. Met some internet friends IRL. Covid finally got its claws into me, but my symptoms were just a sore throat, and I thought, maybe I was climbing up mentally. Maybe I got this! Halloween. My fave holiday. Sat around the apartment and did nothing. November. My birthday. It hit. It always hits hard. I can mitigate it with a party, and I did two weeks later, but having friends in their 20′s makes me wish I didn’t spend half of those years rotting away getting a PhD. I guess I can slap a Dr. in front of my last name now. 32 is the age one of my fave webcomic writers ended her long-running comic, and had plans but not really, and I think about her a lot, now that I’m that age. What am I going to do? I’ve got 10 months left to this age.

We went to a convention that emotionally hit Tai bad, and now they really really really won’t reach out to our friends. And I started trying to see friends more and talk to them more and... burnt myself out a little I think, because if you feel excluded and think people don’t want you there and aren’t used to interactions without a spouse or partner, seeing friends more isn’t a magic cure. It’s helping I think... I hope. I had to also come to terms with the fact that I’m probably never going to move to Hawaii, or have kids, or buy a house of be a Cool Internet Artist™, and might never be able to retire. Everything felt like it was crumbling. And then I drew this ...last week? It feels like a million years ago, but the new year did just happen. Here I am now. I’m going to keep trying I guess. I don’t know why, really, but here I go. I’ll try and be on here more, and just, share more. Take things out of my head and plop them down, and hope that the void yells back every now and then. Love, Airyu (Agni)

[butterfly-apocalypse]

Five years later

Under the cut is my reflection of how life has changed in the last five years since the day I survived a school shooting. I appreciate anyone who takes the time to hear me 💕

It’s hard to believe it’s been 5 years since the worst day of my life. So many things have changed in that time. I am so much better now than I was a few years ago. Even two years ago. I had the opportunity to study abroad for half a year and I was accepted into an awesome PhD program with an additional fellowship. I may get to start working in public health in Africa in the next few years. I’m saving up for my dream dog. I have an Emotional Support Lizard. I have a bulletproof hoodie for days when the anxiety is bad. My support system is strong in my friends and family and support group. My triggers are still there, and will probably never go away entirely, but I have tools and strategies to calm myself down and re-center quickly. I still have bad days, of course, but I’m so proud of how far I’ve come! 

My community, too, is starting to heal. My friend who lost her best friend in the shooting just came out with a book about her journey of loss and grief. I’m really proud of her, even if our journeys were and are very, very different. I think I will buy the book, but I’m not sure I’m ready to read it yet, even now.

Life has moved on, in a sense. I think a part of me will always be that terrified 16 year old hiding in a closet, but as I’ve grown, there’s more of me to make that part seem smaller. I’m also the 18 year old who won a life-changing scholarship and the 20 year old who spent an amazing 6 months in Wales and the 21 year old who is excited to start grad school. I hope that in another 5 years, I will be ready to face my traumas head-on and make a difference in the world. 

Because that’s just it, isn’t it? I’ve changed and healed and grown in the last 5 years. But as for the world? Not a single thing has changed that would have prevented the same thing happening again today. So many Americans are affected by gun violence every single day. There have been over 1000 children and teens injured or killed by gun violence in America in the past 79 days. There have been 117 mass shootings since January 1, 2023. Blame whatever you want, but there is an illness in this country. We are traumatized, as a population. I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, and I’m not sure what call to action I can offer. Maybe I’m just angry. 

I am angry. Every time I hear news of another school shooting, it feels like the wound gets re-opened. I want to heal. I don’t want anyone else to go through what I’ve been through. There are people in my support group who survived a shooting in high school and two years later survived another in college. I am angry. 

Here’s to a brighter, angrier 5 more years.

[berlinner]

STEP BACK.mov from Rick Berlin on Vimeo.

STEP BACK

Paralyzing depression is not something I know about in myself. In too many of my friends, sadly, I do. A dark tunnel so destabilizing that it seems impossible to steady in your friend’s life. You can only wait it out, hoping that he or she can surface and locate some facsimile of a lightness of being. The biggest fear of course is that they could end their life. Those who do can often conceal the seriousness of any plan to do so. There are too many ‘if only’s’ that leave us impotent, angry, and distraught.

You can’t give an aspirin or platitude advice to those who live lethal darkness.

STEP BACK is dedicated to my roommate, Ales Gang, who, with the slimmest edge of courage, who can’t get out of bed for days, still fights for relief. Who, on his teetering roller coaster, manages to survive, continue and to love.

He trained to fight (box) at the House of Blues for the Haymakers for Hope as a way to at least lessen his suffering from chronic depression. the event raised over $600K. this is what Alex wrote about why he did this:

WHY I FIGHT

I suffer from chronic depression. In the 28 years since it manifested I’ve found that exercise, working too much, and finding any excuse to get out of the damned house have been the only treatments that work. The isolation of the past two years has not been kind; if 2020 softened me up, 2021 put me down for the count. I entered December alone, jobless, and in the detox facility at Mclean Hospital.

I start the new year sober, humbled, and hungry. There are things I’ve lost I can never get back. But there’s also stuff that’s just misplaced. Maybe the biggest is a sense of purpose, an answer for that meddlesome “but what am I actually doing here” question.

One of the more insidious things about depression is how difficult it is to fight for oneself. On the flip, fighting for others isn’t. So for the next four months, the tough question has an answer: I'm here to fight for the grandmother I lost to cancer, for the stepmother I didn’t lose but could’ve, for the moments I’ve lost because I couldn’t get out of bed or the bottle. While I’m at it, maybe I’ll find some of what I've misplaced.

Dancing sneakers: Lyda and Evelyn Cabot.

Funny sidebar: When I was in grad school (an incompleted year) I loved the Art & Architecture Building - Paul Rudolf. I’d climb to the roof, belly stretched on gravel and stare down at the street 5 stories below. I’d watch my spit, an expanding golf ball, hit the sidewalk. One afternoon, when I stood up, a semi-circle of students, arms outstretched in fear I would jump, stood about 10 feet away, wanting to save me.

Of course, I was fine. Laughed it off. Others in my life? Not so cavalier.

Guitars: Ricky McLean, Matt Bailin Bass: David Goodchild Kit: Chris Antonowich Vocals: Berlin/TJ Wenzl

ASCAP Lobsterland Publishing

[batmads-ao3]

Across The Universe

Detroit: Yuri’s done the math. He done the research and the consideration and the planning. This will be his last year of competitive figure skating, and this time next year, he’ll be moving on to grad school. No matter what, though, Yuri hopes to hold onto Victor in any way that he can. Even if he has to compromise and change his own dreams to do it.

St. Petersburg: Victor is tired of compromising. Tired of having dreams deferred, of stealing moments in the off season and after competitions to spend time with Yuri. The way he sees it, there are only two options: keep Yuri in competitive skating, or find a way to stay by Yuri’s side after this year is through. Because if there’s anything that Victor knows for certain, it’s that he’s never letting anything come between him and his soulmate ever again.

But how far are Yuri and Victor willing to go to protect the other’s dreams? And with a whole universe separating them, will a soulmate bond really be enough to hold them together when it matters most?

**Part Three of the Defy the Stars Trilogy**

Soulmates!AU • College! AU(kinda) • Happy Ending

Read Chapter Twenty-Seven here!

In whic Victor rings in the New Year, and both he and Yuri and forced to consider their seperate futures.

Posting every Friday (ish), chapter preview below the cut

Victor was in a holding pattern. That’s what it felt like. He kept waiting for life to happen to him. It was almost like he was at a net zero to the person he’d been before he met Yuri, but that didn’t feel quite accurate either. What Yakov had stressed to him the other night was true: he was better for having loved Yuri. He was changed. And even if he didn’t have Yuri in his life anymore, the impression his soulmate on him still lingered. But it wasn’t like he was ready to go out on the town the Zarya and let her introduce him to the first pretty face she saw. 

At least he no longer felt shitty about life. That was a plus. 

Right? 

But the problem was he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with himself. He couldn’t stay like this forever. He wasn’t a machine. He was a person, with a life he wanted to live and enjoy. And he just hadn’t figured out how to do that yet. Or who he wanted to do it with.

“You’re dead to me. Officially.”

Victor glanced up to see Yurio standing over him. Ostensibly, they were at Zarya’s New Year’s Eve party. Mostly, Victor was just sitting on the zebra-striped armchair in the corner of her living room, sipping on his drink, smiling when people looked his way, and desperately trying to avoid having to make any small talk.

“I’m sorry?” Victor asked. 

“You’re a pathetic waste of space and you need to retire since you’ve decided to give up on skating entirely.”

“And here I was, under the impression you’d be a least a little bit sad if I left,” Victor said. “I mean, I know you’re only in this for the other Yuri, but your words do sting.”

“I’m in this for gold medals, not to compete against any particular skater,” Yurio scoffed. “Competitors come and go, but winning streaks last forever.”

“Do they?” Victor asked. “You seem dead-set on destroying mine.”

“History will remember,” Yurio snapped. 

“So…what? You want me to leave so you can get on making your mark sooner rather than later?”

Yuri snorted. “Please,” he said. “I’ll beat you next year easy, especially with how weak you’ve been lately. I’m just saying you should get out now to save yourself the humiliation. There’s no room in the field for old has-been farts who are only sticking around because they don’t know what else to with themselves.”

Well, that stung. 

Victor sighed. 

“Alright then, Yurio, if I can’t keep skating, what is it you want me to do?”

“Are you asking me if I solved your little problem?”

“What problem?” 

“The Yuri problem. The one you asked me to solve. Don’t tell me you forgot? Unless he really isn’t that important to you.”

Continue on Ao3

[inkofamethyst]

January 24, 2023

Got my itinerary for my first interview event.  A few things to note.  

I will be interviewing with faculty for four hours straight.  Like, talking with individual professors in half-hour stints for an entire afternoon.  I mean I’m sure most of the conversations will be very similar to one another and are really meant to assess fit overall, but that is a lot.  

I believe I am being recruited by the prof dude I really didn’t want (because other women have had negative experiences).  Now, this is interesting because I barely mentioned him in my app except where I was required to list more than one potential advisor while I spent an entire paragraph discussing why I’d want to work under a different lady.  Like... it’s not terribly uncommon to switch advisors during a phd program, but I would have to give a reason beyond “I heard a rumor...” you know?  And even then, I think I might prefer going to a substantially lower-ranked school but feeling comfortable with my advisor.  Even knowing that doing so will ultimately make it more difficult to obtain an academic position because an easily-recognizable name brand uni draws people’s attentions.  Every uni wants to be able to say “oh look at all our faculty from Yale, from Stanford, from MIT” because those names carry cultural weight.

And maybe, just maybe, I’m looking way too deep into it all.

I’m going to do the interviews.  It might be a grueling marathon, or it might feel like speed-friending.  Who knows.  I hope the other shortlisted applicants are nice.  I hope I learn a lot.  About the program, about how to handle events like these, and maybe even about myself.

Anyway because I’ve gotten an informal offer, I’ve kind of been going buckwild in these forums (I need to stop myself) and have learned about the past application timeline for my “top” (read: “most prestigious”) choice (I keep going back and forth between that one and the other one I haven’t yet heard from bc they both seem like fantastic programs ahhh).  If I don’t hear back this week or next week to set up an interview, then chances are I will be rejected.  Which would be fine, I guess.  I’m not really expecting to get in because I don’t feel like I’m able to think as profoundly as they’re looking for in their top applicants (asking good questions is a skill (unless this is imposter syndrome adjacent and my level of questioning is actually perfectly acceptable for where I’m at in my career)), but I do think I have a fighting chance based on some of my letters of recommendation (and maybe that’s selling myself too short, but the people who are applying to a program like this are self-selected highest-tier students with publications and years of relevant research experience... TAing and good grades and a couple posters feels like the barest of minimums).  Alright, I’ll admit it.  I’m hopeful.  Maybe deliriously so.  Hopeful but also dreadfully realistic.  Or perhaps the word is pessimistic.  You know, to save myself from the crushing feeling of disappointment.

Today I just want to step back and be thankful for all of the grad school communications I’ve received to this point.  The.. validation that these interview offers have brought is a little intoxicating, I won’t lie.  And that’s why I seem to be clamoring for more of them.  It’s why I don’t seem satisfied with what I’ve already achieved.  And yeah, maybe I’m not quite satisfied just yet.  Maybe I do want more.  But I am immensely thankful.  I am, truly.  Partly because of straight-up validation but more deeply because of the assurance that I’m doin alright.  It’s given me peace.  Not fully, but I feel a little bit more relaxed with each one.

First time I’m going to be missing the first day of school... lil wild.

[4emfox]

Statistically Speaking, I'm Not Your Type

It was the evening of July 28, 2016. I’d been sitting in my parked car for two hours, legs against the steering wheel. Staring, thinking. Not hungry, not thirsty — traumatized. There, I found myself a divorced, single parent at 30. Feeling mangled, not by my ex, but by the legal process and the Scarlet Letter of “failed marriage” on my life resume.

I emotionally unraveled from my marriage before it began (but no one teaches you how to back out of a wedding once you send out the Save the Dates). The idea of marriage and what it should look like had been shoved down my throat since infancy. I was raised in the Mormon church and they love marriage (the earlier, the better) and babies (the sooner you start, the better). And they say that marriage takes work. And you stick with the one you choose. And that there’s something wrong with divorced people. And and and…

This led me to marry a Mormon man in the Mormon church due to cultural expectations and perceived need at the tender age of 23. I researched and left the church shortly after (but the “muscle memory” in my brain from making choices and deriving value from the world around me continued to come from Mormon theology for a long time)…

Our relationship was G-rated, at best. We almost never fought…but we also almost never touched.

I had a baby at 26 to fix the emotional distance I was feeling; felt the need to “stay in it for the kid”; decided to go to grad school at 28 — probably in search for that something I felt I was lacking. Then finally, a crack in my brain opened a portal of non-Mormon logic that said, “Your son can’t grow up thinking that this is what a functional relationship looks like.” This led me to make the biggest adult decision I have ever made and ask for divorce at the wee age of 29.

The legal process kept both my ex and myself in Marriage Limbo for more than a year. But I felt divorced the moment I asked for it. In that moment I felt empowered and liberated. Anytime I think about getting into a relationship now, I think of that intense freedom I felt by leaving one and I take eight steps back. I hadn’t felt that way since the moment I left Mormonism. It was my choice, and I was done. I was free. Yet the system said it wasn’t over.

I felt as though I was being dragged through the mud for no reason — a constant wondering about when it’s going to officially end. Like the decision wasn’t mine — this made the finality of my marriage seem very anti-climatic. All the documentation said I was divorced and I went through legal hell to get there. But the long, drawn-out, muddy process made me feel like something bigger and better needed to happen in order for it to be officially officially over.

On the day of our court date, my ex and I cordially sat next to each other and chatted while our attorneys debated for 6 hours. I kept having to cancel work meetings last minute because I truly had no idea it would take that long (ahem…yes, I know many divorce battles can take much, much longer and I’m lucky). I planned to go to work that day — and still showed up at 4pm to save face.

So when it finally came time for us to stand in front of the judge and legally end our union, it felt…unfinished. Like something else needed to happen in order for it to be done done. Like confetti or a balloon drop or trumpets. But none of that happened and I started to process things differently and I felt uncomfortable. I felt the hurt of another person who didn’t want the union to end. I didn’t want the union to end — not because my ex and I were all of a sudden compatible but because no one gets married in hopes that it ends in court. The hope is for the idealized fairy tale ending that doesn’t exist.

There were dozens of other union-endings happening on the same day. My belief around the potential longevity of healthy relationships dying with each gauntlet slam. The weight of it all hit me and I started to tear up…

My attorney noticed, and in a sad gesture to make me feel better after having paid her nearly $10,000 for almost nothing I couldn’t have done myself, she pulled out a pack of orange tic-tacs and said, “Here. Have one. These always make me feel better.”

I felt sick inside. Unimportant. $10k later and an orange tic-tac to show for it.

We approached the stand, the judge quickly scanned our documents. She looked at me and said, “You want to go back to your maiden name?” I said yes. Gauntlet slam. And just like that, I had a new name and the legality of my union was flushed down the toilet.

I didn’t just change my brand. I also shifted away from a toxic Mormon perspective that women are helpmeets to men.

Any meaningful, healthy relationship should be mutually beneficial. Period. And while my ex played video games and intramural sports, I paid bills and grocery shopped and cooked and cleaned and got the oil changed and raised our kid. By the end of our relationship, I was fucking tired.

The outdated adage “woman, make me a sandwich” was gross to me prior to my marriage…but infuriated me after my experience.

Once I’d had a couple of months for some of the failed-relationship PTSD dust to settle, some astute girlfriends of mine decided to throw a divorce party for me — with invites, color coordinated dresses, and everything.

We met at a popular restaurant in our area, ate appetizers, drank, drank some more, then bar-hopped. Alcohol was an unhealthy muse both before and after my divorce. In retrospect, I wish I’d had a Trauma Fairy tell me “do not self-medicate with alcohol” as this added to some mental…discomfort…for a few years.

As I was admiring beautiful men from across the bar, my gay guy-friend and I learned that the two of us had the same taste in men thus he tried to set me up at every bar. After all, I was single. Thankfully Drunk Me still had her wits about her — and she did not see the point of relationships, marriage, or even casual sex (I mean, she was the one cleaning up her own messes and cooking her own meals and saving for her own house. And also owns a piece of Silicon Magic that stays hard and vibrates. Sorry, Mom).

My response was always the same; “You’re probably great but I’m not interested. There are plenty of very beautiful women here — good luck!”

As I continued to drink, I became less aware of my words and tone. And more angered by the notion of “woman, make me a sandwich.”

At the last bar we visited, a culmination of my divorce, gauntlet slams, failed relationships, and douche bags came to a head. Another friend tried to set me up one more time with a friend of hers who was also going through a divorce (because, obvs, divorced people should date divorced people). As much as I hate the overuse of the term, I was triggered. And I wasn’t having it.

I looked at this poor dude and said, “Look. Statistically speaking, I am not your type. I am a liberal, non-religious feminist with stretchmarks and a kid.”

Pause…

“And at the end of the day, I’m not interested unless you can make your own fucking sandwich.”

[raymondvelez]

Bertolli's 🍕

“Los, what’s wrong? I can tell you’re lost in deep thought.”

“Nothing’s wrong, babe.” I replied.

I grabbed the remote and flipped through the channels not because I was looking for something else to watch besides the Cubs, but because it felt like the only reasonable thing to do to was occupy my lack of action in the last hour or so. I know what you’re thinking, if you’re watching the Cubs game, how does your girl know your wheels are turning so fast? Isn’t sports the only place left where men can mindlessly gaze for hours without interruption or judgement? Well, to put things in perspective, the game had finished an hour ago and I was now blankly staring at the painting Sandra had gifted me. No, Natalie had no idea I had lost the last thirty-five minutes of my time gazing at a frame gifted from an ex it took mad months to get over. She hadn’t a single clue. But what she did know, was that I wasn’t focused on anything of importance, and that now that the Cubs were done playing, it meant that it was time for me to direct whatever measure of focus I had left available, to her. No matter how small.

Natalie is a real woman. She’s almost forty with no children, does her own hair and nails so she can have more disposable income to save for retirement, and never been married because she spent her entire adulthood focusing exclusively on writing columns and teaching philosophy at community colleges. Only reason why we met is because I was the banker who helped her consolidate credit card debt she racked up while in grad school at Loyola. My review on Solange’s performance at the Metro I wrote for Unrated Magazine a couple years ago has nothing to do with why we’re currently dating, unfortunately. Either way, she was at that show that night as well; so knowing that we were in the same building the same night, 6 years before we met, provides her the dissolution that we’re meant to be.

Even though Natalie is affectionate enough to relax her head against my chest while I mindlessly search through documentaries on Amazon Prime that I know will ultimately bore her, I go through the endless selection anyway.

“Babe, I don’t wanna watch that. Let’s watch America’s Next Top Model. It’s my turn to choose.” Natalie explains.

“Babe, I’m hungry.” I reply before handing over the remote.

“What do you want to eat, baby?”

“Let’s get Bertollis”

“Boy, we do not live in Oak Park anymore. You know good and well they won’t deliver all the way over here. We’d have to pick it up. And I know you don’t feel like driving right now. What else you thinking?” Natalie asked.

I wasn’t thinking much about anything else to be honest. All I knew was that I was hungry for pizza and that was the only place I wanted to order from right now. I don’t know why I was so fixated on this restaurant anyway. Mama Lunas, Festa and Congress were all minutes away driving, yet I couldn’t get myself to make the call to either of them. It was like my mind was stuck or something. Like I couldn’t move on. I know it’s just pizza. But sometimes pizza parlors in certain neighborhoods where you spent time making memories you didn’t expect to cherish, provide a delayed response of appreciation.