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stevemoffett · 4 years ago

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A Hard Nap, The Fall of Math, The Star Wars Holiday Special, Disco Point, and There You Are

In January last year, I noticed a sign in myself of the same cancer my dad had back in 2008. Unlike the usual symptoms that set off my paranoia, it wasn’t some vague feeling, it wasn’t an intermittent pain, and it wasn’t a general ill feeling—it was clear and unambiguous, out of the ordinary and one of those symptoms that, if you google it, is under the list of “call your doctor if you experience any of the following.”

It was also nonspecific: this symptom could mean cancer, but it could also mean about five other cancer-unrelated conditions. I called for an appointment that morning with my general practitioner, who said that the earliest available date was about two weeks later.

I knew that the only way my fear would be effectively relieved was with the one sure-fire diagnostic tool for this type of cancer, one that’s recommended for everyone, but not until about age 50: a colonoscopy.

For the two weeks before my GP appointment, I mentally prepared for death. For the record, I do this every time I interpret my body’s signals as cancerous, but the mental preparation usually stops after a few days when the symptom either goes away or when a clear alternative cause presents itself. This time, I didn’t get that kind of relief and, in fact, the symptom repeated more than once between setting the appointment and going to it. Each time, it was like an intrusive thought come to life: you’re going to die. You’re going to go through surgery and chemotherapy like Dad and you’re either going to die early, or find out like he did that the cure is worse than the disease, or maybe you’ll hang on just long enough to experience both.

Winter mornings in Texas can sometimes be surprisingly cold. While stepping out the door on a midsummer morning is like walking into someone’s hot exhale, as you might expect, a 33-degree morning is more like a slap in the face. When I packed everything I figured I’d need to move here a couple of years ago, I threw away my winter coat, thinking, I won’t be needing this anymore. (The coat was also about ten years old at that point.)

My first winter in Texas, I layered a bunch of shirts underneath a light jacket and wore a scarf on freezing days. The second winter, I decided that I’d had enough of being cold. After all, I rationalized, here in Texas it was monetarily possible to never have to feel cold again if you really don’t want to. So I bought the warmest coat I could find, an unstylish, bulky parka made by Caterpillar, the company that makes construction vehicles. No more layering, no more checking the weather before leaving in the morning. I could just put this coat on and not worry about it.

But now, under the shadow of a cancer scare these January mornings, wearing the big coat made me feel less like I was smarter than the weather and more like I was trying to smuggle a terminal disease wherever I went. Under my coat, tie, button-down shirt, undershirt, skin, fat, and muscle, something was growing silently in the dark. While maybe it had slipped up and showed some of its handiwork to me, it was already too late to do much about it now.

Since it has affected my life several times before, and since it is such an exquisite mixture of dread and uncertainty, cancer is one of my mind’s biggest bogeymen. I feel personally insulted by the idea of it. I treat you so well, body—why would you betray me? Was I not nice enough? Is this poetic justice for my vanity? Is it, as the old anecdotal saying goes, due to my worrying?

Not only did I feel like I was smuggling cancer under the big coat, I was also warming it up by drinking my coffee. I was feeding it directly when I ate something too sugary. And I was probably even giving it an evil sense of satisfaction when I got stressed out about it. If I was able to keep my mind off it by working in the lab, mixing and pipetting, using kits, and doing arithmetic in my head, it would come crashing back into focus when I was pulling my gloves off to wash my hands.

I pulled up incognito mode on my phone’s browser during my breaks, googling “5-year survival rate colon cancer age 35.” “Cancer staging colon prognosis.” “Colon cancer smoking.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack in college.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack 18 years ago.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack after seeing Luke Wilson smoking in The Royal Tenenbaums.”

At home, I suddenly started noticing the expiration dates on my nonperishables. What will last longer, I thought, the freshness of this baking soda, or me.

I knew I wasn’t going to be comforted by the first GP visit. After all, they’re usually the first stop to a specialist, unless you have a PPO insurance plan, which I don’t. The doctor listened to my symptoms and family history. “Well,” he said, “Given your history, it’s a good idea to refer you to a GI. But, you seem like you lead a healthy lifestyle otherwise, with none of the other risk factors, so we’ll see what he says.”

I made the GI appointment and had to wait two more weeks for it, with the same circular worrying and googling. At the GI appointment, I sat in the waiting room, the youngest patient there by a few decades, and I felt a little bit ridiculous. On the other hand, I’d also just read a harrowing story about a woman in her late 20s who had colon cancer and died from it. That was a real person, I thought, who at the first phase of it probably went through all the same feelings I was now, the I’m-being-ridiculous and is-this-worth-the-time-and-vacation-days, all the way up until her diagnosis. Not just because I was scared, I felt a pang of sympathy. A disease of the old picking a victim from the young is terrible luck.

And I figured, if it could be her, it could be anyone. But most of all, it could be me.

That last bit, I think, is one of—one of—my greatest flaws, the vanity of always thinking that the worst things will happen to you, in spite of the odds. It’s a way of making yourself feel special, but it has no upside. You don’t feel confidence with this type of special-feeling. In fact, you’re more likely to be timid and self-centered, and you just come across as weird to the outside observer. They might think, There’s only a few steps between that guy and Howard Hughes. Somewhere, deep in your mind, they think: Wires are crossed.

Shortly before I went in, another patient arrived, a man around my age or maybe younger who, despite a dozen or so free seats, declined to sit down. My name was called, and I passed a sign on the way to the back that said, “If you have recently traveled to China and have a fever you must let our staff know.”

This doctor’s exam rooms had floor-to-ceiling windows, the kind you’d see in a movie, instead of the usual dull and bulby, off-white plastic exam room interior. A Spanish medical student came in to give a pre-appointment questionnaire and to take my vitals. He asked, in much better English than I could have mustered in Spanish, “So. There is some blood in they crep?”

When he came in, the GI repeated what my GP had said, and since he was also the person who would be performing a colonoscopy, he said I should set an appointment for one with him. I managed to get a date three weeks later.

From other people’s stories, I knew two things about colonoscopies: they are no fun, especially the night before, but the general anesthesia on the day of the procedure, on the other hand, is fun. I was nervous enough on the day before that I actually asked someone at the pharmacy for help finding the items I was looking for: Polyethylene Glycol (or PEG, which we use all the time for lab experiments, and which I was going to have to drink 2 liters of), Gatorade, and laxative pills. I had to take about 800% of their recommended dosages, each.

The bodily effect of those chemicals was dramatic, and I will spare the details. The worst parts of it, I found, were the generally exhausting physical toll it took, and the feeling by the end that I had some kind of dangerous sodium imbalance: I was sweating between my fingers, for example, but the rest of me felt as dry as paper. At 10PM, I was too tired to do anything, but too nervous to sleep for more than a few hours.

One smaller worry that I felt the next morning, as I took a selfie in my hospital gown to send to a friend back home, making a backward peace sign to show off the IV sticking into my hand and also how brave I was being, was that I might just die right there on the table from the general anesthesia. Part of my grad school research was on Propofol, the most-used general anesthesia nowadays (which, incidentally, also killed Michael Jackson). This was the same drug I was to be given.

I’d never been fully put under anesthesia before. It was astronomically improbable that I’d have an adverse reaction to it and die (and by the way, Michael Jackson abused it, using it far outside of medical praxis—if you’re afraid to get a colonoscopy yourself, don’t be, it could save your life), but keep in mind what I said about my vanity.

“Hey, I’m really scared,” I told the anesthesiologist. He said something, muffled by his mask, that sounded like, “It’ll be all right.” Then he busied himself with a syringe, connecting it to my IV. He depressed it about a third of the way. “This should help you,” he said.

The last thing I said was, “Whoa…I feel it.”

After what felt like a hard, late-afternoon nap, I said, “Hello?”

My head was wrapped with something. When I touched my face, I could feel that there were cotton pads underneath the wrapping, holding my eyes shut. I guess that at some point either mid-procedure or after, my eyes had opened, unseeing, and they’d done this to keep them from drying out. “Hang on, sir,” I heard a nurse say, and my head was unwrapped.

“It’s over?” I asked.

“You’re all done,” he said.

“Gimme a minute, please,” I said, my South Jersey accent peeking out. “I feel a little weird.”

Eventually, I sat up. Two of the nurses helped me stand, and I pumped my arms like I was lifting light, invisible dumbbells. As I put my glasses on and looked around, I thought that they all seemed like they were fighting to not smirk. What did I say while I was blacked out? I wondered, with a twinge of panic, before deciding that it would be worthless to speculate. It could have been anything. There are literally millions of possibilities. Again—it would be worthless to speculate, I told myself, firmly.

An Uber driver, I had been told by hospital staff during a consultation, was not a legally strong enough party to take responsibility for me at discharge. Someone I knew would have to escort me to my apartment. Also, they said, they really would do that thing where you’re back in your own clothes, and they push you to the exit in a wheelchair when you’re all finished. After my procedure, my co-worker stood waiting in the discharge zone with his car as an orderly wheeled me out of the hospital exit. I stood up from the wheelchair and got into the passenger seat of his car, for some reason more aware than usual of the heat coming from the vent and the smell of the car’s leather upholstery. “I still feel weird from the anesthesia,” I said to my friend.

“I’ll bet you do,” he replied.

It was about lunch time, and I had taken the rest of the day off from work. When I got home, I ordered a pizza and lay on my bed. I ate the pizza and watched Star Wars. I had not felt any euphoria when I woke up, I thought hollowly. And my first solid meal in almost forty hours tasted unremarkable. I was still groggy, but not in a pleasant way. I felt cheated.

The hospital staff had put a manilla envelope into my hands as I left. It contained sheets of images the doctor had taken during the procedure. Once lucid, I leafed through them and compared the thumbnail-sized images on printer paper with googled images of cancerous tumors viewed through a colonoscope, trying to diagnose myself.

A couple of the images on the papers had shapes that looked weird, with what seemed like variations in the texture or color of my colon wall that to me, at least, appeared one hundred percent fatal. It was another two weeks before I had a follow-up appointment to go over them with the surgeon.

“See this?” The GI said, two weeks later, pointing to one of the images that had seemed completely normal to me, unlike other ones I had thought were much more scary and unusual-looking. “That’s a low-risk polyp. Of course, now it’s a no-risk polyp, ‘cause it’s gone.”

This medical episode ended only three or so weeks before the whole world changed, but I was all the more grateful for that. If I’d waited to be checked out, then I would have been weighing whether it was worth getting tested against the possibility of being infected with COVID.

The doctor recommended that I get a colonoscopy every five years from now on, but added, “If you want, you can go earlier than that.” I told him thanks, but once every five years sounded fine.

I wrote about the first seven weeks of the pandemic in my last entry. After that, May and June passed in the same way as March and April had. I went back to work in mid-June for two weeks before the first summer COVID spike closed things back up. I continued to play Quake, and I continued to fret about my family.

I had a job interview for a position in northern Maryland in April. I didn’t get it, but I had a good idea why I’d been turned down: the position wanted people with proven math skills. Which makes sense—for the last few years I’d said repeatedly that I wanted to have a job that involves less lab work and more data analysis. This was one of those jobs.

My graduate program gave me a degree in “Computational and Integrative Biology.” Sometimes I shorten it to “Integrative Biology,” or “Computational Biology,” but I always feel sort of dishonest when I tell people my degree. (Apparently this feeling is common among grad students). My own reason for feeling dishonest was because, in any other college, the work I was doing would probably just fall under normal old “Biology.” While it was true I had done course work that reflected “Computational and Integrative” Biology, they were courses taught in a remedial way.

When I say remedial, I mean that they were courses designed to get biologists up to speed on how to do higher-level data analyses with their experiments. For instance, in my “Biomath” course, we went over ordinary differential equations and graph theory. Those are both intermediate-level math types, ones you’d encounter in the later part of an undergraduate math degree program. Throughout that course, there was a lot of handwaving whenever I asked questions.

“Eh…,” the professor might have responded to something I had asked, “that requires a lot of background explanation we don’t need right now to handle the problem here. Just take it as a given for what we’re working on.”

In grad school, it’s common to be well-versed in only your narrow little research tunnel that leads outward to the edge of “known” biology. But a few times each month, several of us students would head to the bar down at the city’s waterfront after work to talk about our research. It usually began with a complaint—“This is the third time this kit wouldn’t work this week and it takes twelve fucking hours to run it each time,”—but to give us a more context for their problem, whoever was griping would have to go back and start at the beginning, recounting all the steps leading to their experiment’s failure.

This was a useful exercise, since a pair of new eyes on your work meant that at least you could get feedback on how to better relate the subject matter when you talked to a non-science audience, and at most, you might get a real solution for the problem you were bumping up against.

But I would sometimes get privately upset, as I sipped my beer and glanced out the window at the river, when a math-centered Computational and Integrative Biology student would start talking about their research. As someone who feels an unpleasant, TV static-like anxiety in my chest the moment I see letters in italics, or one of those big, orphan sorority sigmas following an equal sign during a math seminar, this upset feeling was directed at myself. Because, as a result of my insecurity, I would start listening to the beginning of the math student’s explanation of their research, trip over the first unfamiliar term I heard, lose the thread of what they were talking about, give up, and zone out. The math students, overall, just seemed light years ahead of me.

A critical vocabulary word that I began to mentally tie to the situation—slumming, these math types were slumming when talking to us biologists—was the grain of sand to my insecurity’s oyster. By the time I got my diploma a few years later, it had developed into a little pearl; now I had the feeling that I was, relative to those who’d come from a math background, a fake computational biologist.

Unhelpfully, the people in charge of hiring for the jobs I want nowadays seemed to agree. All the job listings I was interested in applying for made me feel the same panic that advanced math symbols on powerpoint slides did. The subjects they wanted their applicants to have experience in—machine learning, deep learning, regression analyses—were all frightening, impregnable terms, reminding me either of some kind of giant machine made up of endless tubes and valves, all spitting dangerously hot steam, or of a highly secure, underground bomb shelter that requires fingerprints or eyeball scans to get into. I knew from my previous learning experiences that if I didn’t understand the fundamentals and learned only the higher-level, applied stuff, it was just going to make me feel unworthy, and I’d forget it at once.

But summer had come—it was midsummer now, in fact. The pandemic wasn’t going anywhere, so what was I going to do if I didn’t start learning something? I ended up registering for three classes at a community college back home, which offered their fall semester online. For two thousand dollars, including textbooks, I got a spot in Introductory Statistics, Linear Algebra, and Calculus III.

Calculus III was a risk. I’d taken Calc I and II in undergrad, now about seventeen years ago, and I had earned Bs back then. I didn’t remember much of the material from either class. I’d tried watching Khan Academy videos at various points in the meantime, but could never stick with it. I’d watch several videos in a row, feel like I understood things, try a practice problem, get it wrong, and forget about it after a day or two. But now, I had put actual money into it and, in a few months, a grade would be spit back out, so this time I had real skin in the game.

But I had misgivings that I was too old to learn new stuff, or that I would be one of those students I remember when I was in undergrad, the older students who would grind class to a halt with their endless questions. Or maybe I would get worse grades than I had in undergrad, despite taking things more seriously now.

Two of the classes were taught asynchronously, meaning each lecture was a video that you could pause or replay at your leisure, and all tests were take-home, but the other class, Statistics, was done over Zoom. You might think a Zoom class could be a better way to learn—clarifying questions can be asked immediately, for instance—but for me, at least, it was not. Instead of focusing on the material being taught, the whole time I’d be thinking, “They can see me. Everyone here can see me. I can see me, and I have a dumbass expression on my face. Can they tell that I have a bedsheet instead of a curtain over my window blinds?”

My mind wandered during class just as much as it had while sitting in a lecture hall when I was eighteen, but now, these classes were held later at night, after I’d been working all day and had eaten dinner. As a result of this, and the fact that I find Statistics to be boring when it’s taught as a series of don’t-worry-about-how-we-derived-it formulas to plug numbers into, I did the worst in Statistics.

But Calc and Linear Algebra were more interesting. When I watched the class videos, I got familiar with the disembodied voices of the teachers, who each seemed to be trying to do an impression of Khan Academy videos. My Calc teacher, with his strong Vietnamese accent, would punctuate every few lines of derivation or proof with, “So what does that mean then?” Every time—new topic, new chapter, new problem, exactly the same tone of voice: “So what does that mean then?”

Eventually, in my head, his cadence merged with the tones of Woody Woodpecker’s laugh, and I began saying it to myself as I did chores around my apartment. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d half-sing at my garbage can liner as I cinched it shut. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to a wrinkled button-down shirt, enjoying the pepper shaker-y smell of my iron when it’s turned up to its hottest setting. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to the window blinds, when considering whether I should replace the bedsheet I’d hung there with an actual curtain, before answering myself that No, this apartment is too temporary for something as tony as curtains.

Sometimes I’d say it three times in a row, like Woody Woodpecker himself:

“So what does that mean, then?”

I kept a Google Sheet of how much time I spent doing work for each class, and found that I averaged about 20 hours a week total. That broke down to approximately an hour and a half each weekday, and on Saturday and Sunday I would go for about six or seven hours each. I’d get up at 7:30 those weekend mornings and brew a pot of coffee, then sit taking notes and working through every part of each assigned homework, not moving on from a problem until I understood everything about it.

I think that those Saturday and Sunday mornings may have been the happiest I felt during the year 2020. In the middle of a difficult Calc problem, not having the answer yet but certain I was on the right track, while also buzzing on caffeine, as a beam of early horizontal sunlight hit my kitchen backsplash and filled the apartment with more brightness than all my lightbulbs put together, I for once did not feel worried. I was unworried about my parents, my sisters, my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece and nephew, and all the pets. Unworried about COVID, or cancer, or the work stresses of the week. Unworried about getting older, about being alone still, or about enjoying being alone too much; unworried about letting all of this time go by and still feeling like real life hasn’t started; unworried about my dad having another stroke, or about my mom just suddenly up and dying out of nowhere, or cancer, or whether my hairline is changing, or the fact that my heart has been skipping a beat sometimes lately, or whether my friends who I speak to on the phone were getting sick of me, or whether I am too graphic when I describe symptoms I am afraid mean I might have cancer, or whether my apartment neighbors will keep me up with their noise again tonight, or whether the tooth sensitivity I feel drinking cold water lately means I need to risk a dentist visit during a pandemic, or whether I will be able to have healthier boundaries with my parents whenever I return to the northeast, or whether I’ll ever feel truly satisfied and content, or whether I’ll ever feel actual joy some day, or whether my hang-ups, and anxieties, and fears, and regrets about my personal and professional choices will end up all ganging up on me at once, or, of course, whether at any given moment, I might have cancer.

My attitude going into the classes was that I would disregard whatever grades I got and simply aim for as much comprehension as possible. But about halfway through the semester, I lost my nerve and began to think of my grades as a direct indicator of my level of understanding. So I started fretting about my grades, and on days of Calc III exams during the second half of the semester, I took vacation time so I could spend the whole day working on them.

It got a little crazy toward the end, but finally, it was over, and I managed to get all As. That made me happy, even if I knew that that kind of satisfaction is a bit immature. But I felt like I was making up for some of the sins I had committed as a college student, my laziness and my previous lack of appreciation for education finally, in a small way, absolved.

I spent Christmas here in Texas. When I think back on Christmases from previous years I find that I can remember the past two years very well because I flew home and packed a lot of family and friend time into a few short days. Before 2018, though, I can’t remember any specific Christmas well enough to recount anything that happened on the day.

But when I was a little kid, I remembered each Christmas perfectly, mainly due to the gifts I got and the room where we put the Christmas tree—where “Christmas happened”: in 1990, it was in the back room and we got a magic set, and also my brother pretended to faint when he saw he’d gotten Reebok Pumps. In 1991, it was in the family room, and my brother and I got the Nintendo game “Base Wars.” In 1992, it was in the living room and we got a Sega Genesis along with the game “Sonic 2.” In 1993, it was in the family room again, and I got a Hot Wheels Key Force car, and my brother got the Genesis game “Hard Ball 3 With Al Michaels.”

In 1994, my grandfather died a few weeks before Christmas, and we got a Sega CD. That was the year I became aware that the Christmas spirit was vulnerable to external forces, one’s first experience with death being the most offensive of those forces, and after a few months I also became aware that a hot new gaming console like the Sega CD could “fail,” slipping into obscurity with a small and unremarkable library of games. As a result, the indestructible-seeming sheen of Christmas fell away, leaving behind a better idea of what Christmas really is: a bare, thin-glassed lightbulb plugged into the middle of the year’s darkest period. After 1994, I can’t really remember what happened each Christmas.

This past Christmas will always be memorable, though, because I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day pretty much doing one of three things: playing Quake (yes, that hobby still refuses to die), watching something Star Wars-related, or video chatting with my family. At any time when I wasn’t speaking to family, I had Christmas music playing in the background, including while Star Wars was on. I turned the heat up in my apartment to 75 degrees and enjoyed how money-wastingly hot it was getting, until my nose started to bleed from the dry air.

I want to take this opportunity to say that I much prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. Christmas Eve is generally all anticipation and guest arrivals, buoying the mood long into the falling night. From the viewpoint of Christmas Eve, any miracle might happen the following morning. But then after a late, over-buttered breakfast on Christmas Day, there’s nothing much else to do except think about cleaning up and regret how much you’ve eaten. The “anything could happen” feeling is now all gone, collapsed from a dazzling infinity’s worth of possibilities down to one homely outcome.

I hadn’t put up any decorations for my apartment, unless the Christmas music can be considered a decoration. This ended up being a good thing, though, since I didn’t have to take anything down once the holiday was over.

I started taking walks pretty early in the pandemic, my first walk happening after about one week of lockdown. That day there was a surprisingly large amount of people also walking. We all stayed far away from one another, since none of us were wearing masks—the width of even a modest suburban Texas street is still impressively wide, so there was no safety issue. I always took the initiative to be the one who crossed the street if I saw someone, exaggeratedly swinging my arms as I crossed so the person walking toward me could see my intentions even from far away. I did this because I figured it would be harder for the dog-walkers to wrangle their dog across the street and get out of my way, and the people without dogs were either old or were walking in a group.

In the beginning I was walking maybe twice a week, which then became three times, which became five. It held at five times a week during the fall semester because I’d have to be on Zoom from 6:30-8:30 PM Tuesdays and Thursdays, which took up the whole span of time in which I would usually walk. Nowadays, no longer taking classes, I walk every night.

For a while, I tried to get home before sunset, because I’m afraid of being hit by a car in the dark. After the clocks shifted back, I had to choose between walking earlier, during rush hour when everyone was arriving back at their houses from work, or waiting to walk until after the sun has set. I ended up buying one of those reflective construction worker’s vests for $8 on Amazon and waiting for nighttime. I feel like a dork when I wear the vest, but most of the people walking at night who I see are also wearing reflective clothes. Theirs are more chic than my vest, though, looking like they were ordered through an expensive fitness-wear catalogue. I’d buy the same type, but to me, walking is a meditative, solitary act, and I don’t want to feel that I’m catering to externalities like looking stylish while I’m trying to feel solitary. It also acts as a tacit acknowledgement that I’m not a criminal: “I’m making myself as visible as possible! I’m not casing your houses to break into them later on!”

Even though the focus of COVID is on the transmission of disease through shared, respired air, I still pay a lot of attention to contaminated surfaces. When I go out anywhere, I have a routine: first, I put on my going-out clothes (newly clean), then my shoes, which are possibly dirty, since I have to re-tie them sometimes with unwashed hands, so before I touch anything else after tying my shoes, I wash my hands. Then, I put on a mask, turn off all the lights except the one at the front door, pick up my keys with my right hand, slip my phone into my left pocket, and walk to the door. I put my keys in my right pocket (my wallet is already there), open the door with my right hand, turn out the light, step out the door, and take the keys out of my pocket to lock the door with, again, only my right hand.

I use my right hand pretty much everywhere outside—to push or pull open doors, to open my car to retrieve something from it, to open my mailbox and carry my mail in—because I know that if I use my left hand, my phone-operating hand, I’m going to have to put the phone into a little UV light phone-sterilizing box that I bought when I get home. And for some reason, I feel like it’s a small moral failure to have to use that UV box, so I try to keep my left hand from touching anything except for the phone. But I know that if I drive anywhere, all bets are off��both my hands touch the steering wheel, my left hand touches the car door handle while getting out, and I push open doors with both hands whenever I get somewhere. I’m sure that my left hand ends up touching something that may have SARS-CoV-2 on it as I carry out an errand, and therefore into the UV box my phone must go when I get home. But, when I go out to walk, there’s a good chance that I won’t need to touch anything with my left hand between leaving the apartment and coming back. If that’s the case, I can use my phone freely while walking if I want to, but when I get home, I can still just take it from my pocket and place it on my desk, no ultraviolet sterilizing waves needed. But of course then I still have to wash my right hand.

The walk is the same route every night now. It’s a vaguely circular, level 2.7 miles, starting northbound, bearing west, south, then east. It takes about forty minutes for me to walk the whole thing, plus or minus four minutes, depending on how warmed up I get while walking. My heart rate generally goes up to about 115 beats per minute for most of the walk, according to my watch, then spikes to 135 as I climb the stairs to my fourth floor apartment at the end.

Insulated by the sound of music or an audiobook on my headphones, and with my hands stuck in my pockets, actually holding onto the cloth pocket linings themselves, I feel less like a person on a walk and more like someone steering a large, inertia-filled thing—a sailboat that I have to tack against an unfavorable wind, or a bobsled whose blades I have to turn out of deep ruts on the ice. But despite feeling bodily awkward, I find suburbia to be a soothing place to move through. I really don’t understand how some people think of the suburbs as some kind of dystopia, to be honest. My neighborhood has wide streets, as I mentioned, and the houses are almost all ranch-style. The trees, like the houses, are shorter than they are in the northeast. Some of the trees look more like very tall shrubbery. As for the ground, the blades of grass are wider, and the soil is just a bit sandier. Sometimes, I see two-inch-long cockroaches, what people back home would call “water bugs,” creeping across the sidewalks.

I can’t remember the names of the streets on the walk, except for Forrest Street, which I noticed once when I saw the street sign while I was running and it made me think of “Run, Forrest, run!” and Kenilworth Street, which has the same name as a street back at home. Other than those, I only know points along the route by the informal names I’ve assigned to them. There’s a road where it changes direction from heading north to heading east, and it looks over a little park. The lack of houses there gives an unobstructed view of the western horizon. For that reason, I call that part of the route “Sunset Bend.” At another point on the route there is a house where, in the beginning of lockdown last spring, a family was always outside, the parents sitting motionless in Adirondack chairs while their kids all went nuts on the front lawn, playing with the sprinkler, or doing hopscotch, or sitting at one of those tiny plastic picnic tables, playing some board game. That part of the walk I called “Kidville.”

There were other houses that were always so inactive, so abandoned-seeming—the blinds were always closed and there wasn’t a car in the driveway—that I started to wonder if anyone lived there at all, and whether maybe the neighborhood association was mowing its lawn to stave off the shabbiness. But after the switch from walking in daylight to nighttime, I saw that some of those houses, while still shut up and silent, had lights on inside in rooms not facing the street. Looking at those houses is like staring into the vents of a space heater in a dark room.

Eventually I started thinking about how the walk is exactly 2.7 miles. Then, idly, I realized that if you multiply 2.7 by 30, you get 81. That number of years, eighty-one, seems like a decent amount of years to hope to live—it’s not greedy, you’re not asking for a hundred years, for example—but also, maybe when I get closer to 81, there will be better medical treatments and 81 will seem younger. Assuming that doesn’t happen, though, I think of 81 years as more or less “a complete life.” It is very sad, but not exactly a tragedy, to die at 81.

With this in mind, I started translating the distance along my walk to human ages. For instance, 1.0 miles into the walk, times 30, would equal 30 years. And 1.2 miles times 30 would equal 36 years, which is how old I am now. Since by the time I’d discovered this “conversion formula,” the walk was already so familiar to me that I had a very good perspective on how far into the walk any given point felt—the precise moment when I sense that I’m transitioning from the middle to the end phase of the walk, for example. So when I came up with the multiply-by-30 conversion formula, I was interested to see exactly what part of the walk 1.2 miles, or 36 years old, corresponded to.

The answer is that it was later in the walk than I’d hoped. The moment I reach 1.2 miles is long past the most scenic parts of the route; it’s just after a left turn that puts me on a long straightaway of modest houses leading to an arterial road, known to me as the hook-around part of the circuit where in past walks, I had thought, “Now I’m on my way back home.”

Over the next few evenings, I noted other points, ones that had come before the 1.2 mile marker, and compared them to parts of my already-lived life: I graduated high school at 0.6 miles into the walk, which was the beginning of Sunset Bend. I got my master’s degree in a spot where, at nighttime, a streetlight shines through the leaves on a tree, giving the street a dance hall, disco-ball kind of lighting (hence, “Disco Point”). That friendly, lighted patch of street, with a jaunty-looking house standing next to it, makes it my favorite part of the walk. As for points I have not yet reached: still ahead of my current age distance, at around 1.5 miles, is Kidville, but I haven’t seen anyone in the front yard there in months now.

Toward the end, almost back home, there’s a large school property. I’ve never seen anyone on the grounds, except for the occasional person who sneaks onto the running track to jog it. Along one of the fences that borders the school, in springtime last year, someone started zip-tying laminated sheets of paper with jokes written on them to the chain links. The jokes are all clean, and pretty lame—these days it seems like almost all kid-friendly jokes are just puns, like “How did the farmer find his wife? He tractor down!”

One time, I saw a kid about ten years old on his bike, riding along the sidewalk and stopping to read each joke. The fence ends at a small park for toddlers. There’s a big plastic sign at the entrance of the park, faded but still legible, that has a boy’s name displayed on it. Below his name is written a tragically short span of years, and below that, a message: “This park is dedicated to the memory of (the boy’s name), and to all of the little tykes of (the neighborhood).” Whoever it was putting up jokes on the schoolyard fence stopped replacing them with new ones some time during the fall, and I walk too late to ever see anyone playing at the playground. Well, that’s not quite true: very rarely, around 9 PM on warm nights, I might see what appears to be a young mother scrutinizing her phone as her kid swings in the dark.

I haven’t been to the gym to lift any weights since lockdown started. I’ve been able to do cardio in my apartment, but the result of all the cardio and all the walking is that I’ve lost a decent amount of lifting strength, as well as about ten pounds. This is consistent with how life in general has evolved: I have also reduced the list of spaces I travel to, leaving my apartment only to go to work, to pick up groceries, and to walk through my neighborhood. My body, and the edges of my life, have gone through a great miniaturization, but my perspective has adapted with it—each feature within this smaller space seems more detailed, and the day’s moments are of a finer grain. Inside my apartment, I have realized how much the lighting affects the atmosphere, and as a result the mood, so I can change which lights are on when to reflect the mood of each time of day. When I walk at night, sometimes I have the same feeling I did the week before I moved here from New Jersey, a sort of farewell feeling. That feeling started in the fall as a dessert-like flipside to my happy mornings spent doing math homework. Those evenings, I also felt like I was saying goodbye, to a more insecure, more ignorant version of myself, I guess. Nowadays, I get the feeling that I’m saying goodbye to the person who had, until now, always feared that he was missing out on things.

There will be a time, closer to now than now is to the beginning of the pandemic, when I will leave Texas. I will be happy and relieved to return home, whenever that is. But at the same time, there’s a new feeling that is starting to take root, and it’s a weird one: for all the hardship that the pandemic has presented to me, the anxiety for my family and the limitations it’s put on my mobility, social life, and career, for more than ten months now, its most memorable effect, unless I’m affected by the illness itself, will be that it made me love my neighborhood. I have walked more than 500 miles of it over the months, and scores of miles remain to be walked before I move away. I’ve walked during steaming afternoons, during cloudy sunsets, in pre-dawn twilight on cool mornings, and during soft, breezy evenings. It’s always picturesque, pleasant, very green. The houses look inviting, and the dog-walkers wave to me. I listen to music that suits my mood and do the geographical equivalent of palm reading. That’s all, really.

Can a person love a place? Feel gratitude toward landscaping, houses, parked cars, and people viewed only from a distance? Can someone feel affinity to a fox seen in a churchyard and streetlights shining through leaves in the night? Affection for lawn mower exhaust, for the noise of an approaching SUV slowly carving out a bend? Love for landmarks that correspond to moments in one’s past, or to moments that one might encounter in the future?

There will be a time, I hope, when my years in Texas are far in the past. But some day, I will hear a song, or see a house with a certain architecture, or smell a variety of grass, and Texas will return to me. At the same time, I also hope that it isn’t too overwhelming. I’ve found that I can never tell how potent a memory of a particular time or place will be until there’s a lot of distance between me and it. Sometimes, a memory will come gently, settling on me like a haze, ready to be indulged, even laughed at. In such cases I turn up the music that brought the memory, or take a luxuriating whiff of the scent, and I think back on the time, feeling only a little bit sad.

But other memories swoop down like some kind of predatory bird, and in those cases, the nostalgia feels more like the punch of the bird’s talons in the back of my neck. The sense of missing is so strong that it feels less like nostalgia and more like a distilled, portable homesickness. Ridiculously, I’ll even want to return to the memory’s time and place, despite knowing that in reality it had been fraught with pain or unease. Which makes the sneaking feeling growing during this time, at this place, all the more uncanny. I mean, all that this span of time has been, is me, and some terrain, and the wind, and the light of the sun or the moon. No one else. My nostalgia for anything before this was always about times and places with other people. So who will I be missing?

Someone once said, Wherever you go, there you are. But now, I wonder: is that really true?

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gra-sonas · 5 years ago

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Sweatpants Dick

Pairing: Malex, Alex Manes/Michael Guerin, Isobel Evans/Maria DeLuca (implied)

Additional Tags: Isobel and Alex are besties, Buffy Manes is a very good girl

Words: 3.2K | Rating: T | On AO3

"Please, for the love of everyone, woo him with your dick and get back together?”

Or the one where Isobel makes Alex buy a pair of gray sweatpants to woo Michael with his dick.

For

@cosmiceverafter, @i-never-look-away and @saadiestuff ♥♥♥

Cosmopolitan Magazine once suggested

Tell your guy to buy light-colored sweatpants. The silhouette of his boner through thick gray cotton is nothing short of art. You deserve this.

This spoke to me as a prompt and I had to write it. There's a lot of talk about dicks/boners/cocks in here, but nothing too explicit actually happens. Uhm... sorry?

~*~

“Black or blue?”

Alex held up two pairs of sweatpants, one black, one a dark blue.

“If you have to buy one of these atrocious looking pants, buy at least a gray one.”

Alex raised one eyebrow in question.

“They may be atrocious looking, but they’re comfy. I only wear them at home anyway. Why gray though?”

Isobel sighed in faux exasperation.

“Did you never read Cosmo, Cap?”

Alex’s eyebrow climbed a little higher on his forehead.

“I'm friends with Maria and Liz, of course I read Cosmo. When we were teenagers.”

“Well, seems like you learned nothing, honey.”

She changed her posture to a somewhat dramatic pose.

“The silhouette of his boner through thick gray cotton is nothing short of art,” she declaimed.

Alex’s eyes were in severe danger of bugging out of his head. He blinked.

“Say what now?”

“Come on, Alex. Have you never seen a man sporting a boner in gray sweatpants? If so, I’m feeling very sorry for you.”

“Uhm.”

Alex struggled not to blush, but damn, Isobel talking so bluntly about boners was giving him a hard time (not literally, thank god).

“You can’t tell me you were in the Air Force for over a decade and you never saw anyone with a semi or full hard-on in sweatpants?”

“Believe it or not, Isobel, people tend to be very private with their boners around the gay guy. Wouldn’t want to tempt him.”

Isobel looked offended.

“Ugh, these people would’ve been so lucky for you to pay attention to their inferior dicks in the first place.”

She grabbed a pair of gray sweatpants from the table, checked the label and looked over her shoulder at Alex.

“Come on, Cap, this is your size, and I’m ready to commit murder for a coffee. Go get the other bags and meet me at the exit.”

With that Isobel left Alex standing in the middle of the shop and went to pay for the gray sweatpants. Alex sighed. He quickly re-folded the black and blue pants he was still holding and put them neatly back where he’d found them. Then he picked up the bags from their earlier shopping spree and followed Isobel.

When they sat at their usual table at the Crashdown half an hour later, Alex had had enough time to get his composure back.

“So, Evans, what do you know about boners in gray sweatpants?”

Alex smirked when Isobel almost choked on the sip of coffee in her mouth. Alex handed her a napkin. She grabbed it and dabbed at a spill of coffee on her chin.

“I grew up with a brother.”

Alex’s face twisted in disgust.

“Ew, Isobel, please don’t ever give me the mental image of your brother with a boner.”

Now it was Isobel’s turn to smirk.

“Well, I know for a fact that you’re only opposed to the mental image of one of my brothers’ boner.”

Alex hung his head and was ready to just die on the spot.

“I can’t believe that we’re having this conversation at three in the afternoon.”

“What, do you only talk about dicks at night?”

“If you don’t mind, I would prefer not to talk about dicks with you at any time of the day.”

Isobel reached across the table and pinched Alex’s cheek.

“Don’t be a prude, honey. You’re just worried I’m going to mention my brother’s boner again.”

Alex scrunched his face in disgust.

“Could you please stop mentioning Max, and especially his dick?”

Isobel’s smile turned almost diabolical.

“Who says I was talking about Max this time? If it makes you feel more comfortable, we can talk about Michael’s dick.”

“What do I have to do to make you stop talking about dicks in general, and your brothers’ dicks in particular?”

“Wear those gray sweatpants the next time Michael comes over to fix something at the cabin and show off your goods.”

“My dick is also off limits as a talking point.”

Isobel schooled her expression and looked at Alex earnestly.

“Alex, I’ll stop talking about dicks, but please, consider this at least? I know you two have been dancing around each other for a while now, building a friendship and all that. But the pining’s reaching unbearable levels. On both sides. Please, for the love of everyone, woo him with your dick and get back together?”

Alex took a deep, steadying breath.

“I love him, and he loves me. I know that. He knows that. We’re just both afraid we’ll fuck it up again. That’s why we’re so hesitant.”

Isobel took Alex’s hand in hers.

“I know. But you two? You are ready. Have been ready for a while. Woo him with your dick, or just talk to him. You’re not teenagers anymore, neither are you the very broken men you were a year ago. You’ve worked so hard on both yourselves individually, and on your friendship. You won’t fuck it up, I promise.”

Alex nodded slowly.

“I guess you’re right. I don’t really feel like wooing him with my dick, but I’ll try to be brave and talk to him next time we see each other.”

“That’s my boy! I’m so proud of you. You’ll make each other so happy.”

Isobel pulled Alex’s hand up to her lips and pressed a soft kiss to the back of it.

“Go get him, tiger!”

Alex laughed.

“Alright, alright. I’ll go and on my drive home I’ll think of a reason to ask him to come over tonight.”

He gave her a stern look.

“And no, I won’t be wearing those sweatpants.”

Isobel pouted.

“You’re no fun, Manes.”

“If you’re so fond of gray sweatpants, why have I never seen you wearing them around Maria?”

Isobel gave him a wink.

“I know you’re gay and probably not familiar with the female physique, but did you skip sex ed? I’m missing a prominent detail in my nether regions to show off in said pants. I’ve invested in some sheer blouses and nice underwear instead. Which seems to do the trick. I’ve seen her check out my cleavage more than once whenever I spent time at the Pony.”

Alex smiled at her warmly.

“Maybe you should also make a move then?”

Isobel gave his hand another squeeze.

“You know what, that’s probably a good idea. Let’s both go home, dress nicely and get what we want.”

They grabbed their bags, put enough cash to cover their coffees and a generous tip on the table, waved goodbye to Arturo and left the Crashdown. When they reached Alex’s car, Isobel pulled him into a one-armed hug.

“Good luck, Cap. Text me later.”

Alex inhaled her perfume and let the flowery smell comfort him. He pressed a soft kiss to her cheek.

“Good luck to you, too, Iz. I have a feeling you might get lucky tonight.”

He opened the door of his car and placed the shopping bags on the passenger seat before he climbed in, waved at Isobel one final time, and drove off.

The closer he got to his cabin, the more nervous he felt. He knew that Isobel was right. They were ready. As ready as two people could be after everything they’d been through. The thought of having that talk with Michael was still terrifying and made his palms feel sweaty.

Buffy greeted him with an excited ‘woof’ when he opened the door to the cabin. She dropped to the floor and showed off her belly the second the door fell shut behind him, a not so subtle prompt for him to give her belly rubs. He dropped the bags where he stood and kneeled carefully to play and snuggle with his good girl for a while.

When his knees started hurting, she got up and gave him a soft head butt, as if to tell him to take care of himself. Then she waddled off to plop down on her dog bed for a nap. Alex pulled a nearby chair close enough to support himself standing up. He turned around in search of the shopping bags. They were still near the door. One had toppled over, and the pair of gray sweatpants had fallen out.

“I can’t believe Isobel Evans talked me into buying gray sweatpants to show off my dick,” he murmured to himself. What exactly was so special about a hard dick in those? He grabbed the pants and the bags and slowly walked over to his bedroom. He checked on Buffy once more. She’d grabbed her favorite plush toy (a little green alien Michael had given to her; she’d covered him in wet dog kisses in her excitement about the gift) and had fallen asleep curled around it. He smiled, then turned back around and closed the door behind him.

He went over to his bed and took everything he’d bought out of the bags. He laid the items out on the comforter to assess where everything should go in his closet – most prominently the pair of gray sweatpants. On a whim, he took off his boots, wriggled out of his jeans and rolled down his socks and flicked them in the direction of the hamper. Then he reached for the sweatpants and stepped into them. He bent down, adjusted the hem around his prosthetic leg, and slowly pulled them up. They felt nice and were very comfy but there was absolutely nothing special about them. Apart from the color, they were like any other pair of sweatpants he’d ever owned.

He stepped in front of the large mirror near the window and looked at himself. His hair was tousled, the dark red Henley clung to his torso and showed off his lean waist, toned arms and broad shoulders nicely. As a kid, he’d been small and gangly. Even as a teenager who went skateboarding every day, he’d never been overly broad or muscular.

A decade in the Air Force had given him the body of a man, though. A soldier, ready and able to attack and stand his ground in combat. Even after losing his leg, he'd worked hard to keep in shape. He was rigorous about his PT exercises to ensure he was as agile and strong as his prosthetic would allow him.

He looked down at himself in the mirror. At his bare feet. One human, one artificial. The sight no longer made him flinch, and he was grateful. There had been times when he couldn’t stand looking at his feet, a constant reminder of war and his loss.

Finally, he looked at the part of his body his newest piece of clothing was supposed to make look outstanding. Alex frowned. His dick wasn’t exactly on the small side, but there was no outline visible. He sighed.

“She said ‘silhouette of a boner’, didn’t she?”

He grabbed his junk through the thick fabric and gave it a tug. His dick did not react. Of course not, it had no reason to react to a random tug. Alex considered his options for a second. He didn’t look himself in the eyes through the mirror, instead his eyes followed his hands as they slowly pulled down the waistband of the pants, followed by the waistband of his black boxer briefs.

He pulled his dick out, adjusted his balls, and started stroking. It felt weirdly intimate to look at himself masturbating in the mirror. His dick slowly started hardening under his experienced strokes. He wasn’t actually horny, but soon enough his dick had filled out completely and was hard enough to try and see whether Cosmo had been right.

He adjusted his dick in his boxer briefs before he pulled up the sweatpants.

Mhm, not much to see through the folds of the fabric, but what if he bent his cock slightly to the left so it would rest against the curve of his hipbone? He did just that and when he looked in the mirror again, the outline of his hard dick was clearly visible.

“Niiiice,” he said to himself and smirked.

Before he got a chance to consider whether to follow through with what he’d started, he heard a noise coming from the porch. Then Buffy let out a small bark in the living room, and Alex forgot about his boner instantly.

He opened the door of his bedroom and walked to the front door in long strides. He wrenched the door open, Buffy at his heels, when he saw a familiar face under the brim of a black cowboy hat looking at him with wide eyes.

“Shit, Alex, you startled me.”

Alex let out a loud sigh of relief.

“Michael, I didn’t expect you. Neither did I hear your truck. What are you doing here?”

“Isobel called and told me you mentioned a broken porch light when you were at the Crashdown with her. I finished early and thought I’d come over to fix it.”

Michael’s eyes slowly wandered down Alex’s figure to take in the sight of the man he loved. He liked the maroon Henley Alex was wearing a lot. He’d never seen Alex wear those sweatpants before. They were gray and hung low on his hips and... Michael blinked. He looked again, then blushed furiously.

Unless Alex hid some kind of tool (or toy, Michael’s brain provided, completely unhelpful) or a banana in his pants, the outline of Alex’s hard cock was clearly visible underneath the soft looking fabric. Michael gulped.

“Uhm. Sorry, I... I'll just change the light bulb and be out of your hair in a second.”

Alex frowned. Why was Michael acting so weird, and why would he want to leave so fast?

“Thanks, but don’t you want to come in before you leave? There’s beer in the fridge, and I’m sure Buffy would love a thorough belly rub from you.”

Alex tried to think of other incentives to make Michael stay.

“Oh yeah, Buffy. Uhm, I could take her for a walk or something? Give you some privacy?”

Michael’s face was beet red, and he tried desperately not to look at the silhouette of Alex’s dick.

“Privacy? What for?”

Alex didn’t understand.

Michael blushed harder, if that was even possible. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath before he nodded in the general direction of Alex’s dick.

“To take care of that? Looks like you were in the middle of something when I disturbed you. Poor timing on my end, I’m sorry.”

Alex made a noncommittal noise, then it was his turn to blush.

“Oh my god, no. I mean, it looks like I was in the middle of something, but I only wanted to see if Cosmo was right.”

Michael looked confused.

“Cosmo? Never heard of him. Some new guy you met at the conference last week?”

Michael tried his best to keep any kind of jealousy and judgement out of his voice, but it was hard. Shit, they’d been so close to getting back together recently, and now there was a new guy on the horizon? When Alex let out a breathless laugh, Michael looked up.

“Cosmo as in Cosmopolitan, Michael. The magazine?”

Michael’s face turned into a giant question mark.

Alex sighed.

“This is all your sister’s fault. She bought these sweatpants for me to woo you with my dick.”

“Isobel did what to make you what?”

Alex dropped his head to hide his blushing cheeks. When he heard Michael step closer, he froze. Michael was really close suddenly, and Alex’s heart felt like it was about to beat out of his chest any second.

“You know how much I love your dick. I just don’t quite understand what these pants have to do with any of it?”

Alex looked up.

“The silhouette of his boner through thick gray cotton is nothing short of art,” he repeated what Isobel had told him earlier this afternoon. Then he smirked and looked at Michael, a challenge in his eyes.

“Well, whoever said that, clearly knows what they’re talking about. Not that your dick isn’t always a work of art, but I must admit, it looks particularly mouth-watering through thick gray cotton.”

Alex’s grin almost split his face. Then he flung himself across the short distance between them, right into Michael’s arms. Michael caught him with ease and wrapped him in a tight hug. Michael’s soft curls tickled Alex’s nose when he whispered into his ear.

“I take it the sweatpants wooing worked?”

“Darlin’, you’ve been wooing me with your everything since we were seventeen, and your dick in these pants is a glorious boner... I mean bonus. Any chance I could take a closer look?”

Alex leaned back in Michael’s embrace until he could look him in the eyes.

“I’d love that. You know that this is it, though, right? It’s only going be my dick from here on out.”

Michael looked at Alex earnestly.

“Alex, that’s all I ever wanted. I want you. I want us. I want your dick. Exclusively. Forever.”

Michael took a deep breath, and there were tears glistening in the corner of his eyes.

“I love you, Alex.”

Alex didn’t hesitate and closed the gap between their mouths to kiss Michael long and thorough. He put everything into the kiss. The longing, the hunger, the love for the man in front of him. When he was finished having his fill (for the moment at least), he leant back again to look at Michael. He made sure his hard dick pressed into Michael’s crotch, where it bumped into Michael’s growing hard-on. Alex let out a happy laugh.

“I want that, too, Michael. You. Us. My dick being yours, your dick being mine. I love you so much and I’ll never let you go.”

He undulated his hips suggestively, rubbing his hard dick against Michaels.

“Let’s take this inside, cowboy, I wanna show off my dick in these pants some more.”

He took Michael’s hand and led him inside the cabin. Buffy had returned to her dog bed while they'd been talking, and when they entered the living room, she opened one eye and blinked at them as if to check whether they were okay. She seemed to be satisfied with what she saw, pulled her little alien plushie close, and went back to sleep.

Later that night, Isobel’s phone buzzed on the nightstand to her left. She dropped a kiss to the top of Maria’s head where it was lying on her chest and carefully picked up the phone, eager not to wake her sleeping lover. When she opened Alex’s message, she just about managed to suppress a delighted squeal.

He’d sent her a photo. A pair of gray sweatpants dropped in a heap on the wooden floor of his bedroom, a familiar black cowboy hat sitting on top of it. His message read. “My thanks to Cosmo (and you!) Coffee at the Crashdown tomorrow at 3pm. My treat.”

Isobel smiled, then she took a photo of her and Maria’s hand, lovingly entwined. She sent it to Alex, adding “It’s a (coffee) date, Cap! <3 We have a lot to celebrate.”

#malex #malex fic #rnm fic #alex manes #michael guerin #roswell new mexico #my fic #posting a fic on feb 29 is like you didn't actually post it #nothing to see here #move along #just some silly snarky fluff #isobel evans #maribel #buffy manes

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letsbenditlikebennett · 4 years ago

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Please Sir, May I Have My Name? Part 2 || Ariana & Tasmyn

TIMING: Immediately after this (x) PARTIES: @tasmyn-pearce & @letsbenditlikebennett SUMMARY: Tasmyn drops by the cabin to bring by some strawberries for Ulfric and is shocked to discover Ariana there after she stole the girl’s name.

Tasmyn’s brow furrowed at the comment. Not take people’s names? Why would she stop? What would she even do instead? “Well… no. I can’t stop. I’ll just… well, I’ll be more careful. That’s what I’ll do!” She started with a self-assured smile. “And as a personal favor, you can tell me a name, any name that you don’t want me taking. And I’ll honor that. I promise.” She paused slightly, “And if you, uh, know fae like you claim you do. You know our promises are binding.” Maybe she was wrong to have willingly offered up such a promise, but Ulfric trusted her, so maybe she was alright. “My name? Of course. I’m Tasmyn. Ulfric has said such lovely things about you.” The next statement caught her off guard. Werewolves? “Huh. So I guess that’s why he loves the moon so much?” As much as she was hesitant to believe this woman… it tracked with everything she knew about him. “Yes! I would like you to not tell him. I, uh, don’t think he knows what I am. Or that he’d appreciate me taking your name. Even though it was an accident! I didn’t know who you were!”

Fae confused Ariana. While Deirdre was a lovable sort of quirky, Lydia literally kept people she fed from in her basement and apparently this woman was hooked on stealing people’s names. All of it made her head spin and she was decidedly very over fae nonsense. “But like… you could just-- You know what, never mind. If you ever meet someone named Winston, please don’t take their name,” she answered with a hint of exhaustion in her tone. Normally, she’d fight a little harder, but she found herself growing more tired and weary by the day. She nodded, “Yeah, I know about the promise thing�� and not to thank you apparently.” She wished Kaden would have mentioned that one before she thanked Lydia, but too late now. She looked Tasmyn over. She was still pissed about the name thing, but for Ulf’s sake, she could tone it down a little. “Tasmyn… cool. How do you know Ulf,” she asked as she did her best to hide the hint of accusation in her tone. Ulf was obviously an adult and could make his own choices, but she didn’t love this. It hit her that she didn’t know Ulf was a wolf. “I was referring more to myself, but like, yeah,” she answered. Oops. Hopefully Ulf wouldn’t be upset about that one later. She crossed her arms over her chest and gave Tasmyn a glare. “You know, not knowing who I was doesn’t make that better, right? And like, maybe you should tell him about that stuff.”

“Winston! Okay, yeah you got it!” Tasmyn was feeling pretty good about the fact that she had just gone along with her promise and didn’t try to go on some big rant about why stealing names was bad and that you have to respect people’s names and blah blah blah. She’d heard it a million times. Maybe she didn’t do it because she wasn’t human either? “Well, we talked online and then he invited me out to a picnic on some mountain where witches used to be murdered? I can’t remember the name. And he picked me fresh strawberries - hence, well, me returning that kindness. And well, that was a few weeks ago and we’ve been spending time with each other since then. We went to the carnival, and he bought me cottoned candy.” As she stood there explaining the situation to Ariana, she couldn’t help but wonder what familial role she filled. Was she like a daughter or a sister? Age-wise, she figured daughter would make the most sense. “Well now that I know he’s not a normal human person either, I’ll definitely tell him! I’m sure you get it, letting someone know who you are is a very intimate thing. And people told me to be careful about announcing that I’m a spriggan in town because there are wardens around. Not that I thought Ulfric was a warden. He seemed clueless about iron - but still! Can never be too careful, am I right?”

Ariana vaguely remembered Winston telling her to try and get the fae to not take other people’s names, but that seemed like a tall request and she was not in fact tall. Plus, as long as they weren’t literally locking her friends away or killing them, she guessed she could let the fae do their thing. As Tasmyn talked of how she knew Ulfric, Ariana’s arms were crossed firmly over her chance. Those all sounded like dates and she most certainly did not approve.The fae who stole her name dating the werewolf who had been taking care of her was a huge nope in her book, but she guessed after everything Ulfric had done for her, the least she could do was support his choices. “Right, so you’re like, into Ulfric then. Cool. You may want to avoid taking Layla’s name then, too. Pretty sure he wouldn’t be too big on that,” she said and didn’t bother hiding the annoyance in her voice. What Tasmyn said about not revealing herself made sense. Ulfric had warned her to not be so trusting of others, not that she listened, but hey, he tried to steer her in the right direction and it wasn’t as if Ulfric had told Tasmyn about being a werewolf. Shit. She had literally just revealed his secret. Her lips formed a small “o” and she quickly blurted out, “Uh, maybe don’t tell him you know what he is and I won’t mention that you stole my name? He doesn’t exactly just reveal what he is to people he can’t confirm are in the know and not hunters. But like, I get you, werewolf hunters can be a pain in the ass, too.” Not necessarily bad, but hell, even Kaden and Rio both grated her from time to time.

Tasmyn’s face scrunched up when Ariana asked if she was ‘into’ Ulfric. Was that crass American slang or just crass teenage slang. Either way she didn’t like the word, the implication, or the tone in her voice. “I am not into him. We are friends. You’ll understand someday.” The longer that she stood there, the more out of place Tasmyn began to feel. Maybe she should just leave? She brought the berries, and so very graciously returned the girl's name. But then she smiled a bit. The little wolf let the big wolf out of the bag, and now she realized that was a mistake. “Oh! Of course. That’s such a good trade-off. We can both just keep these little secrets, and there is nothing wrong with that! Secrets aren’t lies, afterall.” She paused, realizing from all of her conversations with Ulf that if she wanted to get to know him well, it didn’t really do any good to have those who lived with him think poorly of her. “I’m sure my cultural habits seem strange. But, I promise my goal isn’t to hurt people. In fact! Next time you come to the Codfather- you’re meal is on me!”

There was no denying that this Tasmyn woman was kind of strange, but she supposed that was all relative. Most humans or other species would think a lot of her werewolf quirks were weird, too, so Ariana decided to let it go. That didn’t mean she believed Tasmyn when she said she wasn’t into Ulf. “Right, friends,” she agreed but in a tone that very much implied she didn’t believe there wasn’t something up there. If anything, good for Ulf. He deserved some happiness in his life. While she didn’t love their trade-off, it was better than Ulf finding out she accidentally spilled the beans. She’d only meant to reveal herself, but Tasmyn seemed to be sharp. Most fae seemed to be. Had to be good with their words and all. “Perfect,” she said through somewhat gritted teeth, “You don’t tell him you know he’s a wolf and I won’t tell him you stole my name. Just-- I don’t know. Be good to him. He does so much for others, he deserves a bit of happiness of his own, you know?” They had gotten off to a rocky start, but she wanted the best for Ulfric, especially after all he’d done for her. “Yeah, I won’t claim to understand the whole name thing. I don’t love it, but like I’m sure all the bleeding heart vegans of the world don’t love how many deer I kill and eat on the full moon so... Guess we all have our thing.”

It was clear to Tasmyn that Ariana wasn’t going to drop this ‘just friends’ thing. Which was ridiculous. Even if Ulfric was one of the only good men she had met in decades, that didn’t mean she wished to be romantic with him just because she so enjoyed his company. Or because she thought he had such captivating eyes, and a brilliant accent, and strong arms. Shit. Well, Ariana didn’t need to know any of that. “Exactly! I’ll let him tell me what he is in his own time. There’s no need to rush these sort of things, you know. And I’ll tell him I’m fae in my own time. Which, well, will likely be soon now that I know he’s not a human and isn’t gonna run away screaming at the confession.” There was clearly so much love in this young woman’s voice for Ulfric. He clearly had a positive impact on her, and based on the way he had spoken about the girls that lived with him, it was clear to Tasmyn that the feelings were mutual. “Of course. Everyone deserves happiness.” She laughed softly, “Vegans are very strange! I mean, I don’t eat meat because of the iron - but I don’t consider myself vegan. After all, we all have our own food needs.”

Above all else, Ariana wanted Ulfric to be happy, so if the name-jacking lady happened to provide that, she could deal. Maybe even grow to like her at some point. She did give her name back. While she was no expert on fae culture, she was pretty sure that was a sign of respect. She couldn’t help but laugh. “It’s hard to imagine Ulf running away scared from like… literally anything. He’s kind of a badass,” she joked a little more lighthearted now. As much was true, but no one else needed to know that as a wolf, Ulfric was basically bear sized and fucking terrifying. Well, not to her because she knew he’d never hurt her, but still, wouldn’t want to be the person facing him in a fight. At the mention of everyone deserving happiness, she shrugged. It was hard to think Lydia or Celeste’s parents ever deserved happiness. “Yeah, I guess,” she responded. “I mean, I get it for humans or other species, but like being a wolf comes with a pretty strong hunting drive on the full moon and a general craving for meat. But yeah, I knew about the iron thing. I know my banshee friend can’t eat meat either. She loves pie though. Do you like pie?”

Tasmyn let out a soft laugh at the comment, “You should have seen him when we got attacked by a smoke monster. He couldn’t even see the thing but he still saved us from it.” That was how she knew he was such a good guy. He had tried to keep her out of harm's way even when he barely knew her yet. He seemed like a very selfless person, and she liked that about him. ‘’Oh I bet! You can’t ignore or deny your cravings! Everyone knows wolves need meat to survive. And you’re hunting your own foods! So that’s like, more ethical or whatever vegans complain about.” Her eyes perked up a bit at the mention of a banshee. “Which one do you know!? I have such a very good banshee friend. She’s amazing. I think she likes pie. I like pie just fine, but it’s not my favorite. I did win first place in that pie contest a few months ago though! In the weird category. Because life is better when its weird. Do you like pie?”

Ariana looked at Tasmyn incredulously. A smoke monster? That was a thing? This town was more wild than she was. Still, she let out a small laugh, “That sounds about right. He’s brave like that. He… well, he’s saved me from worse.” The last part had a hint of sadness to it. She’d always be grateful for how far he went to keep her safe and save her, but she’d always look back at that night with a hint of sorrow. She shook that thought. “Oh, yeah, I definitely don’t. Neither does Ulf. We’re both pretty big on eating meat. Burgers, steak, and venison are regular around her,” she said fondly as she enjoyed cooking for them, “I the deer I do hunt. Typically just buy the cow products though. Did eat a lot of weird meats I hunted growing up though, but my sister and I were pretty poor at times.” It dawned on her that Deirdre could have known Tasmyn although Deirdre thought name stealing to be juvenile. “Oh, her name is Deirdre. She loves pie. Don’t know if there’s another pie loving banshee around, but Deirdre is pretty great. I stayed with her for like a week after my sister died before I had it in me to go through her stuff here. I didn’t,” she paused and looked down momentarily, “I didn’t want to make Ulf go through all her things. He had already saved me and did so much. He didn’t talk about it, but I know he felt badly when Celeste died, too. But, uh, yeah, I do like pie!”

Tasmyn frowned softly when she mentioned Ulf had saved her from far worse. She obviously didn’t know what that meant, but this girl was too young to have to be saved from bad things. Even if she didn’t know her well, she knew she deserved better than that. It was nice to know she was right about Ulfric though. He was clearly a good man. She nodded along as she talked about hunting and deer, all the while all she could think about was how much iron must be in fresh meat like that. But then she perked up. “Deirdre! Oh! You know my good friend Deirdre?” While she didn’t really know much about Ariana, two of the people that Tasmyn trusted most in this town seemed to like her enough to welcome her into their homes. So that settled it, she liked her. “I’m really sorry about your sister. Loss is … difficult to deal with.” She paused for a moment, feeling the weight of the silence. “I’ll make you my award-winning pie then! You’ll love it. A cornish delicacy.”

If she thought about that frown too much, Ariana would be forced to confront exactly what he saved her from and that would make her want to sink back into the couch. Everything was so exhausting lately, but at least she had her own name back so maybe she could start to feel a little more herself again. Small victories and all. She guessed she shouldn’t have been surprised this fae also knew Deirdre. “I do, yeah. She’s pretty awesome. She’s all but demanded I charge more for my carpentry services,” she explained with a laugh. “How do you two know each other? Do fae tend to be close like wolves are?” She hadn’t meant to mention Celeste’s death so casually, especially when she was becoming almost desensitized to the apologies in the midst of everything else, but maybe Tasmyn wasn’t so bad. She seemed genuine and she cared for Deirdre and Ulfric. “Thanks,” she said softly and made a conscious effort to not stare down at her own shoes, “It is, but I’m getting by.” Barely and things kept piling up further, but she was. She took the bait for pie. Pie was easy. Pie was happy. Pie didn’t make her want to wrap herself up in Celeste’s old blanket wishing it still smelled more like her. “I do love pie. And award winning? That sounds amazing.”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that. Some fae prefer to hang out in large groups. Like us spriggans! We generally prefer to live in a community, but mainly a community of other spriggans. Some fae have issues with other species of fae, so I guess… no, we don’t normally tend to be very close by default with fae of other sub-classes. I think that’s all hogwash though! I’ve been lucky to find some fae friends here in town.” Tasmyn wasn’t fully sure why she felt so comfortable being so open with Ariana, maybe it was the mutual friends or the fact that she could see pain in this young woman’s eyes. “It’s good that you aren’t alone while going through this loss. I know how being alone can uhh, what’s the word...aggregate? No, exasperate! Yeah, being alone can exasperate feelings of loss.” Pie seemed to lift her spirits a bit, so Tasmyn decided she’d have to get to work on a pie for her once she got back home. “Yes! You know that town-wide pie contest a few months back? Well, my pie won first in one of the categories. I made a Cornish delicacy. Stargazy pie, mmmmm, such a good pie. Well, not that I can really eat it myself. A bit too much iron in fish for me. But I still love the cultural connection of it.”

“That seems a bit more complicated than wolves, but it makes sense. There’s a lot of different kinds of fae from what I understand,” Ariana said with a slow nod. The specifics of fae culture were still a little confusing to her. All she really knew was that she appreciated Deirdre and that she’d gladly hit Lydia right in her smug face any day of the week. Tasmyn seemed nice enough. If she was Ulfric’s friend, she had to be nice enough and surely worthy of her respect. Plus, she was quick to give her name back even though Ariana didn’t exactly love she’d taken it in the first place. Then again, surely human vegans probably thought her eating so many deer was wrong. It was all pretty subjective, but as long as Tasmyn wasn’t keeping in her basement, she could consider her chill. She shifted slightly, not really too inclined to really think about the ways loss had affected her. “I’ve never really liked being alone, but I couldn’t imagine going through this without the support system I’ve had,” she agreed. Nothing and no one would ever be able to completely fill the void Celeste’s absence left her with, but she was trying to learn what a happy life looked like without the one person she’d always leaned on. She shifted her focus to the pies. “Ah, I made a lemon meringue for it though it did not place. The Stargazy pie sounds really good. I think Ulf would like that, too. He enjoys fish, especially pickled herring!”

“Yes, that’s correct. Many different. Some more kind than others.” Tasmyn couldn’t help but wonder what other species of fae were in town. She’d met a banshee, maybe two. She knew one of her bosses was a Nix. But other than that, she hadn't really come across other fae really. Certainly not another spriggan. Maybe if she stuck around long enough she’d meet even more of her kind. “That’s so wonderful that you have that support. I spent a lot of time alone, and, well, it makes the losses harder.” She normally didn’t open up this much to someone whose name she had taken. But there was a kindred that she was feeling for Ariana. Perhaps it was their mutual connections or maybe she felt a similar sorrow within her. “Well, that’s just a shame! I’m sure your pie was excellent. Did you get an odd reward? I heard even people who didn’t place got rewards. I got a trophy and hungry grass. I’ll bring a pie, or well, maybe more than one pie? Yes, I’ll bring a few pies by sometime next week. Would that be alright?”

“Well, you seem like one of the kinder ones,” Ariana commented. As far as fae shenanigans went, she was pretty sure name-stealing was one of the more harmless things. It was for sure better than keeping humans to feed from in her basement. Plus, she was nice enough to bring Ulfric berries and give her name back without much of a fight. There was also a certain sense of understanding when it came to loss that made her feel a sense of connection. “I’m sorry you had to go through loss on your own, I know that must have been hard, but hey, I don’t think you’re alone anymore,” she added on with a hint of optimism present in her tone, “Ulfric and Deirdre are both great, and I can be here if you need anything, too.” At the mention of pie prizes, she glanced back at the game she still had sitting under the ancient TV Ulfric had. “Oh, yeah, I won some sort of weird VR game that I admittedly haven’t opened. I was a pretty big fan of the pie, so hey, I’ll take it.” She smiled as Tas asked if she could bring some pies by. “I’d really like that,” she answered with a brighter smile now, “I know we got off on a weird foot, but pies and some shared secrets make everything better.”

#please sir may i have my name part 2 #tasmyn #wickedswriting

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tartsandcrafts · 4 years ago

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I’ve once again been caught up in the urge to get into another crafting hobby. I bought the latest humble bundle of crafting and diy ebooks, and for some reason, this time crochet is calling me. Is it because it was impossible to resist opening a book called "The Happy Hooker"? Probably? All I know is that I ended up ordering a pack of crochet hooks and a few different types of yarn from Michael's, so I guess this is happening now. Since I kind of regret not documenting my learning process as I tried other crafts (silversmithing, wire wrapping, beading, embroidery and cross stitch, sourdough…), I think I'll try it with crochet. Guess I’m planning to actually blog now.

So here's my naive approach so far:

The book is “Stitch ‘n bitch crochet: The Happy Hooker” by Debbie Stroller, and for the first crochet book I’ve opened, it seems pretty detailed and comprehensive. My plan is to follow each stitch tutorial and make a practice square for all of them. Then I’ll try to follow one of the patterns. Scarf seems like the obvious choice, which is all I ever managed to make when I tried to learn knitting over a decade ago.

I bought a set of aluminum crochet hooks that includes sizes D-K because that seemed like a good place to start? I’m a little iffy on how likely I am to use a bunch of different sizes, but I was not confident enough to believe I could pick the one best size to learn on. For yarn, I got two smaller skeins of cheap medium weight 100% cotton in two colours so I can try out switching them up, one skein of medium weight wool/nylon blend for a scarf pattern from the book I want to try, and one super fine acrylic/nylon blend because I want to try the cute fingerless gloves pattern one day, maybe, and also needed to compare yarn weights in person. I just can’t visualize the differences. I would love to go to that independent fibre arts store down the street and just browse, but I’m not ready to go out into the world for anything but necessities yet, so I’m at the mercy of online shop product descriptions.

I almost bought a mini stuffed dinosaur crochet kit from Etsy, but shipping ended up being half the cost of the item, and it was probably an overly optimistic ambition anyway. I did find out that the search term is amigurumi, ended up on the club crochet website, and got the vague idea that if I ever want to pursue making little creatures (and I will), I need to learn something called the “magic circle”. This term is giving me flashbacks to being a pre-teen reading Sandry’s Book and thinking maybe my friendship bracelets could hold magic too.

Looking forward to making a bunch of useless crochet squares as I start to figure shit out! Can’t wait until I start hoarding yarn!

#crochet #crafting #jeh's thoughts #maybe i'll actually starting being a blogger now #maybe i'll update my tumblr more frequently and try to engage in the community #embroidery tumblr has been good to me in ways art never was #i wonder what crochet tumblr is like?#did the magic circle inspire the circle of magic? i know Tammy is on here #but i don't want to ask her #not a fan of directly interacting with authors i love #except for that time Neil Gaiman drew a scary monster in my book because i was cool with him taking a midnight tea break at a book signing #jeh learns crochet #i think that's the tag i'll use for this journey #jeh posts

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guiltypleasurefandomface · 5 years ago

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The British Sweets

I keep seeing the word “Candy” being said in fic by british characters, and then I keep seeing sweets we don’t have here in the UK being eaten by british characters, plus Candy to mean including chocolate. So I’m gonna just throw some sweets out there as good alternatives as a go to equivalent for if you’re in desperate need of your character having a sugar fix.

First off. It’s never candy, and sweets don’t usually include chocolate bars. If and when they do, it’s usually the bars are the fun size bars or the teeny tiny lucky bag type included in with other types of sweets. If you’ve gone to the shops and you buy a snickers and a mars bar and fry’s chocolate cream, you’ve bought chocolate bars, not sweets.

And also we call Cotton Candy “Candy Floss”. You can get three bags for £1 in Southport. Or you could before Covid 19 ruined the world. But yeah THREE BAGS. Poundland sometimes sell little tubs of tricolour candy floss but they’re £1 each. Rip off, especially if you’re in southport. Just leave poundland and go up the road to the pier and go into one of the shops opposite the arcade. THREE BAGS!! For £1!! I went to a fair once and it was 99p for one stick!

So. Character A has fucked up and they want to buy a bar of chocolate as an apology to Character B. They’’d either get a big cadbury’s milk bar or a galaxy bar. Our galaxy bars are American’s Mars Dove bars. (Dove here is a bar of soap). If they’re feeling fancy, they might buy a Cadbury’s Milk Tray, which is a box of chocolates, and if they’re feeling Really fancy and really apologetic, they might get a Cadbury’s Dairy Box. And if they have really, really fucked up and want to fork out a bit of money, they would get a Thornton’s Classic. And if the Basic Classic doesn’t scream “I am so fucking sorry for what I did” enough, they would get the continental box.

If it’s just a show of affection of a random Tuesday, they might get the heart shaped box. D’aww.

Character A wants to munch something at the cinema? No worries. The cinema sells every Nestle sweet you can name (Modern times the sharing pouches are £3.89 though, cinema prices!! Go to B&M or Home Bargains before you go to the cinema and buy from there instead, and with some cinemas you don’t even have to sneak them in cos they don’t care), plus there’s a full wall of Pic’n’mix.

Liquourice All Sorts Jellybeans Jelly Babies Jazzies - Milk chocolate disc-like sweets with hundreds and thousands on them Snowies - White chocolate disc-like sweets with hundreds and thousands on them Pear drops - boiled sweets in the shape of a pear, sort of taste like pear, and all that sugar hurts your mouth after about 2 o them Footballs - Round solid chocolate balls Torpedos - Jellybeans with a solid outer layer Strawberry Laces Raspberry Laces Cola Bottles Fizzy Cola Bottles Milk Bottles - Chewy sweets in the shape of a milk bottle. Foam Shrimps - Soft chewy sweets in the shape of prawns. Foam Bananas - Soft chewy sweets in the shape of bananas, very sweet Foam Mushrooms - Soft chewy sweets in the shape of mushrooms Black Jacks - Liqourice flavoured chew squares, like chewits Mojos - Varoety of flavours of chewy squares, like chewits, but HAVE BEEN DISCONTINUED SINCE 2012!!! Chocolate covered raisins Chocolate covered peanuts Chocolate covered Brazil nuts Space Ships - HORRIBLE sweets which is edible paper filled with sherbert in the shape of a traditional space ship Rasberry Bombs - Only in some pic-n-mix, not sure how long they were around for, they were sour chewy balls of raspberry flavoured jelly sweets. Not to be confused with Berries Berries - Raspberry and Blackcurrant flavoured jelly sweets. Apparently very nice and soft. Milk Chocolate Mice - Horrible cheap chocolate in the shape of mice White chocolate Mice - Same as above, but worse.

And you can buy any of those in a sweet shop, in little bags as well.

Other sweets not usually found in a pic’n’mix

Penny Toffees - They were small toffee discs that you could literally buy one for a penny each.

Teeth - Chewy sweets in the shape of false teeth. Vampire editions at halloween.

Strawberry softies - They were discontinued around about 2008, but a cheap company now do them and you can only get them in poundland! But they taste exactly the same. They are foam-like sweets, in the shape of a heart-shaped strawberry, and they just melt in your mouth.

Aniseed balls - Hard boiled sweets, strong aniseed flavour. Very popular with aunties. I get called an old lady whenever I buy them.

Lipstick Pops - A hard boiled sweet in the shape of a lipstick. I don’t know any kid who just ate and sucked on it like you were meant to eat it, everybody pretended they were putting on lipstick when they had one.

Now the few more acceptable usages of the word ‘Candy’

Candy necklaces - a ring of string you could wear around your neck, in theory, full of little sweet disc like beads.

Candy bracelets - same as above, but smaller for your wrists

A retro sweet that is no longer here cos it was discontinued in the 1980s, was called Spangle, and it’s slogan was “The Sweet Way to go gay”. I am not joking.

Some chocolate bars that were around a few decades ago, for when your fic is set in the 60s and 70s ;)

Fry’s Chocolate Cream which was/is dark chocolate full of fondant, still around today, unlike Fry’s Five Centres which were discontinued in the 1990s, brought back for a limited edition and then gone again. They were dark chocolate bars with flavoured fondant in the middle - Orange, Lime, Blackcurrant, Coffee and Raspberry. They now do a mint flavour bar and recently brought back the raspberry flavoured bar. Some people incorrectly called them Fry’s Five Senses, which was actually mixing up two different products apparently, but I don’t know anything about that other product. I think it was hot chocolate.

Wagon Wheels - Like two chocolate biscuit discs with marshmallow in the middle, and then the Jammie one has strawberry jam in the middle as well. They are still around today but a classic of my parents teenage years.

Caramac - My mum, god rest her soul, talked about this chocolate bar fondly. They did bring it back but “It’s not the same!” and they discontinued it again and brought it back again. Wikipedia describes it as “ a light Brown colour, and is manufactured using sweetened condensed milk, butter, various flavourings, and sugar “

The much acclaimed Aztec bar. To be honest, the way my parents described it, it’s a bit like a snickers bar without the nuts, so I guess like a mars bar, but apparently it was a lot nicer than a mars bar.

And this is not a sweet but if you have a brit in your fic and you don’t know where they would buy any of these sweets, well you just send them to Woolworths. If they’re a kid and want to spend their pocket money on some sweets, have them weigh out some from the pic’n’mix and we will all be happy bunniess

#Britpicking from afar #British sweets #British candy #British chocolate bars

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fruit-teeth · 6 years ago

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Story time: weird hand-me-downs from my cousin

Okay so this happened when I was really young, and it forever haunts me. It wasn’t really bad, it was just...weird, I guess??

So when I was growing up, my family wasn’t making a lot of money. My dad had a really shitty job and my mom just wasn’t getting paid, and as a result of this my parents were always looking for ways to save money.

One way of saving money was to accept used clothing from different sources, so when I was really little my mom started getting hand-me-downs from various family members or friends. I ended up with a lot of clothes, which was awesome! Even if they were a bit old, I had favorites I would wear to school (my favorite one was of a cat riding a skateboard with the words ‘too cool!’ written underneath).

But my favorite person to get hand-me-downs from was my much older cousin. I got clothes from her less often than I would from other people, but whenever she did send me something I was always so in awe because she was always so fashionable and I remember thinking she was the coolest.

Anyway, one day, my aunt stopped by with more clothes. Except this time, she had more than just clothes with her: my cousin had recently cleaned out her closet, and she was giving me all the stuff she didn’t want anymore. I was so hyped, and the minute my aunt left I started opening all the boxes.

The stuff my cousin left me was...a very strange assortment of items, to say the least. Firstly, a ton of Spongebob stuff: like a Spongebob alarm clock, a pair of socks with Patrick on them, a Spongebob radio (which only played one song, the ‘FUN’ song), and a Spongebob joke book. I wasn’t allowed to watch Spongebob as a kid, so my mom didn’t let me keep all the stuff but I managed to keep the joke book.

The other stuff, though, was very weird. There was, I shit you not, a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ kids book complete with pictures. This was really strange because no one in my family is a Jehovah’s witness, so I have no idea where my teenage, goth cousin could have ended up with that. I remember thinking it was just a normal storybook, but it wasn’t until I reread it years later that I realized what it really was.

There was also a karaoke machine, and I remember feeling absolutely excited when I saw it because I LOVED singing (I was in my Cheetah Girl phase, oh the memories) and right away went to turn it on. But the thing is...I didn’t know any of the songs. I flipped through all the tracks and they were all very, very old songs. I can’t recall any of them by name, but the one I do remember is the Charlie’s Angels theme, which I had never seen that show at all so obviously I didn’t know the theme song. I tried to learn the song, though, just so I could show off my singing, but I think my mom ended up selling the machine later...

But by far the most memorable, strange item I got from my cousin (and also the thing I got the most use out of besides the clothes) was her perfume collection. These perfumes were SO old, they smelled SO strong, but I was a naive child and I was just estactic to have perfume of my own.

Now these perfumes...they had the worst smells. There were about four of them, and the first two scents were cotton candy and gummy bear. The cotton candy one smelled like a very intense combination of cotton candy and bubblegum, while the gummy bear perfume smelled like Kool-Aid, but like, Kool-Aid that’s been left sitting in a punch bowl outside on a hot day during a pool party. That’s the best way I can think of to describe it.

The other two scents were even weirder: they were teddy bear and slumber party. I’m not joking, those were the names of the smells. All the bottles had pictures on them of what they were supposed to smell like, but the teddy bear scent had a picture of a raggedy looking teddy bear on it while the slumber party one showed a group of giggling girls with sleeping bags.

Now you might be thinking, “Oh, well maybe the teddy bear one smells like honey and slumber party smells like candy!!” NO. Teddy bear smelled like cinnamon mixed with Windex and then topped off with Axe Body spray (I almost think my cousin mixed it with a different perfume at some point), while slumber party smelled like feet with the fakest, sugary smell layered over it.

It was horrible, but I was a dumb kid so of course I covered myself head to toe in the cotton candy perfume every morning before school. Out of all of the scents, that was the only one that smelled normal to me, so it was the only one I wore. I ended up losing teddy bear after the bottle spilled in my drawer and soaked a bunch of my clothes, and while the clothes were washed they still had the faint smell of Teddy on them. I’m pretty sure my mom threw out the rest of the perfume while I was at a friend’s house, because she hated every single bottle. She bought me actual perfume after that.

This was over a decade ago, and I thought about bringing it up to my cousin when I saw her at Thanksgiving, but she probably doesn’t remember. She also has a baby now, and my mom and I joke all the time about me giving him my old body spray when he gets older.

#not that weird but #i havent told this story to a lot of people so i thought id share #writing #my writing #storytime #just me things #long post #early 2000s #childhood

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jo6hny · 7 years ago

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Pizza Sucks Without You - J.S.

Summary: Vampire! Johnny gets a crush on Y/N the pizza delivery girl and constantly orders pizza just to see her. What happens next?

Genre: Fluff, Supernatural, etc. Word Count: 2077

Johnny sighed once he saw the mess his roommate, Jaehyun, had done.

Jaehyun was sprawled against their shared sofa, eating chips and such. He was supposedly trying to beat a video game. It’s been a full week since he’s done so. Johnny couldn’t see the satisfaction in playing video games, nonetheless finishing them. He supposed that humans found interest in it since it feeds their hunger for excitement. But to Johnny, it just wasted time.

“Hey, you’re back!” Jaehyun greeted, sitting up and hiding the food wrappers on the table. Not that Johnny hadn’t seen them.

“So I am. How many days has it been since you’ve taken a bath? Or ate a proper meal? You’re too stuck up in that game of yours, Jae.“ He said, scrunching his eyebrows.

Jaehyun gave him an apologetic smile. He figured that his bloodsucking friend had already smelled the stench that he was protruding, given that he had a much more sensitive sense of smell than humans. He stood up from where he was and gave the taller boy an apologetic pat on the shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m on it.” He answered, making his way to the bathroom. But not before warning Johnny that he had ordered pizza.

“Oh and can you please take the pizza once it’s delivered? The money is on the table. Thank you, John.”

Johnny just sighed, running his finger through his dark hair. He started to clean the place up to make it more pleasing to the eye. Candy wrappers, pizza boxes and and chip crumbs were littered all over their living room.

The doorbell rang, signalling that the pizza Jaehyun ordered had arrived. Johnny stood up and fixed his appearance before opening the door.

He was astonished as he was met by a beautiful maiden. He couldn’t believe that the girl in front of him was a delivery person. She looked like she could be on the cover of a high end magazine. Johnny slyly looked at the tag that contained the name of the fair maiden.

“Y/N” He muttered under his breath. Barely audible.

The petit girl shot her head up.

“Yes?”

Johnny’s eyes widen in shock. His mouth was dry and he couldn’t find the right words to say. In the long period of time he has lived in Chicago, never had he met someone who could make him forget who he was. John was the type of person who was always calm and collected. He always knew what to say. But not right now. It was as if he had been possessed by another.

“I… was reading the tag on your shirt. Um, Y/N right?” He gestured to the tag on Y/N’s blue cotton shirt that had the pizza place’s name on it.

Y/N nodded shyly, giving the taller individual a small smile.

“That’s me.” She confirmed, jerking her shoulders upward. Y/N extended a hand towards Johnny.

Johnny took her hand and shook it lightly. He was scared that something might happen to her, as if she was fragile glass.

“I’m John.” He replied nervously.

Y/N’s eyebrows scrunched up in confusion. The name registered on her tab was different from what he said. Her eyes widened as she realized that she may have rung up the wrong door again.

“Wait, so Jung Jaehyun doesn’t live here? Did I get the address wrong?” She said frantically.

A small chuckle could be heard from the vampire. Johnny shook his head.

“No, I’m not. But, Jaehyun is my room mate.”

Y/N sighed in relief. Thank god, she thought would have to pay for delivering the pizza wrong again.

A small silence enveloped the two of them. Just until Y/N remembered that she hadn’t even gave John the food he had ordered.

“Oh my god! I’m so sorry, I haven’t even gave you the pizza yet! I’m so sorry I got distracted and-" Y/N was panicking yet again, she forgot to hand over the pizza to the cute guy who answered the door. So much for trying to be attentive.

A small chuckle could be heard once again, Johnny’s smile was the widest it had ever been.

"That’s alright, I don’t mind. Pizza’s not my thing anyways.” Slyly hinting that he didn’t need human food to survive. Hey, there’s nothing wrong in taking small risks. He handed her the cash and took the large pepperoni pizza in return.

“Thank you.” They said in unison.

Eyes averted each other’s gazes, blood rushed to their cheeks. It was a feeling like no other for John. It had been decades since he felt infatuated with someone.

“I-i have to go. Enjoy your pizza, though.”

Johnny’s smile faltered. A sudden feeling of sadness washed over him. He wanted more time to talk to Y/N but he understood that she had somewhere else to go.

The taller boy nodded and bid Y/N good bye. Not forgetting to thank her as she left.

A sigh escaped Johnny’s lips as soon as he closed the door. He noticed Jaehyun emerging from the bathroom fully clothed.

“Oh great, the pizza’s already here. ” He took the box from Johnny’s hands and proceeded to sit on their medium sized sofa, turning the tv on.

Meanwhile, Johnny just stood there. He was reminiscing and conjuring up ways of how to see Y/N again.

Jaehyun noticed the troubled looking boy.

“Hey is something up?” He asked, concerned about the well being of his best friend.

Johnny just nodded and made his way to the sofa, distracting himself with the latest episode of rick and morty.

The raven haired male’s palms were getting sweaty as he was frantically awaiting his pizza delivery order.

He doesn’t know how, or what compelled him to do it. He doesn’t even need to eat human food! And he knew that it was a 1/10 chance that Y/N would be delivering the pizza, but he took the risk.

After what felt like hours of biting on his nails anxiously, the door bell rang, signalling the arrival of the pizza.

He swung the door open with much enthusiasm only to be faced with a Japanese looking boy with chestnut colored hair.

“I have a delivery for Johnny Suh?” The male asked.

“Yeah, that’s me.” He replied, hiding the disappointment in his tone.

Johnny paid for the pizza and took it inside. A frown formed on his lips.

“Is that pizza?”

“Yeah, eat it if you want.” Johnny told Jaehyun who was lounging on their couch once again. He apparently bought another video game and that means a long week of cleaning for Johnny. But he couldn’t be bothered to clean right now. He was too busy feeling unhappy.

He could always try again, he thought. But it would be a waste of money, and Jaehyun could only eat so much pizza until he needed to be hospitalized for taking in so much grease.

Johnny plopped down on the couch beside Jaehyun and sighed. Staring off into the distance.

Jae paused his game as he noticed Johnny having the same sullen look when he ordered pizza last week.

“Alright, tell me what’s wrong, vampy.”

Johnny hated the nickname that Jae gave him but he couldn’t be bothered to tell him off.

“The person who delivered pizza last week was beautiful and I couldn’t even get past the staring stage. Now I have to live with never knowing who they are and living without them. I guess you can say that she’s the one who got away.” Johnny exaggerated.

Beside him, Jaehyun was laughing immensely. He was clutching his stomach.

The sad boy gave Jae a weird look.

“You mean Y/N? Oh please vampy, stop making me laugh.” He said, wiping tears from his eye.

Johnny sat up straight at the mention of the maiden’s name. His eyes widened and his palms were sweaty. How in the world did Jaehyun know Y/N?

“You know her? How?”

“I have classes with her in Uni. She probably doesn’t deliver on weekdays anymore cause you know, classes.” Said Jaehyun as he poked his friend’s shoulder.

Just then that Johnny realized that today was Thursday. A weekend. He shook his head in disbelief at how stupid he could be. Of course she had classes, she looked like Jaehyun’s age and possibly his if he weren’t actually old.

Johnny thanked Jaehyun for the information and proceeded to go in his bedroom, taking note to order pizza on Saturday.

- Today is the day. Saturday.

Johnny already rung up the pizza place and dressed as well as he could. He wanted to make an impression. He decided that it would be the right time to maybe ask Y/N out on a date or maybe for her number.

Unlike the last pizza delivery, this one was fairly quick. Which made him more nervous. There was still the risk that Y/N wouldn’t be the one delivering and that his effort of dressing to impress is put to waste. But he only shook those thoughts away, he was hopeful today.

He opened the door slowly at first, peeking through the door.

“Johnny, hi!” The smaller girl greeted with a welcoming smile.

Thanks to his luck, Y/N was the one who delivered the pizza.

“Hi.” He answered, nervous.

“I thought you weren’t a pizza kind of guy? What made you change your mind, huh? Is it the good cheese? I heard you ordered pizza a while ago too.” Y/N handed him the box and nudged his shoulder a little bit, making him suck his breath in.

“I guess so. There’s just something that makes me want to order pizza a lot.”

“What? Really? What is it, then? If it’s a secret, you can tell me. I’m good at keeping secrets.” She spoke, offering him a little wink of reassurance.

Johnny took a deep breath and looked at Y/N in the eye.

“You.”

“Wh-What?” Y/N said, flustered. A blush could be seen appearing on her cheeks, making her look more adorable than ever. She tried to avoid Johnny’s gaze, feeling as if she would melt.

“What I’m trying to say is, I like you. And I find you really attractive. And I hope you don’t find it weird.” Johnny muttered.

“Oh” Y/N answered, feeling overwhelmed.

Johnny panicked and tried to defend himself somehow.

“I’m sorry if it’s weird, really. I just wanted to see you again and I didn’t know how.” He was fidgeting at the exposed corner of his supposed to be tucked polo shirt.

Y/N offered Johnny a reassuring smile and a pat on the shoulder.

“It’s alright. I suck at these, but I like you too.”

Johnny’s eyes lit up in shock and happiness. He couldn’t believe her words. A smile appeared on his pink lips.

“Is there a way I can contact you somehow? Like social media? Or your phone number?” He asked.

Y/N nodded.

“Yes, of course. You think that Jaehyun would have given you my number instead, though. ” She answered, giggling.

Johnny cursed beneath his breath. She was right. Why couldn’t he just ask Jaehyun for her number? It would’ve spared him the time and money. He mentally slapped himself at the thought.

A hand wrapped around Johnny’s shoulder. It was Jaehyun.

“That, my dear friend, is because I want free pizza. I also want to see my hopeless roommate here get a love life.” Jaehyun intercepted, snagging the pizza box from Johnny and going back to playing his video game.

“I’m gonna kick him out someday, I swear.” Johnny mumbled, making Y/N giggle.

“Well, I have to go now. I have other deliveries to attend to. But please do call me, okay?” Y/N said, handing Johnny a piece of paper with her number written on it.

“I will. Good bye, Y/N. I’ll see you.”

“Bye, Johnny. The next time I see you, it better be a date.” She jokingly said.

“Of course, I would love to take the most beautiful girl on a date.” He smiled widely.

Johnny closed the apartment door happily, feeling accomplished.

“You two haven’t even been together yet and I can already tell that you two are gonna be one of those gross cheesy couples. Yuck.” Jaehyun said as he took a mouthful of pizza.

Johnny only rolled his eyes.

“Shut up.”

#nct johnny scenario #nct johnny #seo youngho #johnny suh #nct 127 #nct scenarios #jhmasterlist

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experiencingmyjoy · 5 years ago

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Walking Within Wisdom #13 - September 1 2019

I guess these walking within wisdom segments get me to talk about what I am doing and how I am doing it including things like my “guilty pleasures”

The other day I talked about my love of sci-fi and the X-Files… Well, today I am going to talk about what my Sunday mornings have looked like for years, and 90% of the time that includes watching CBS Sunday morning whenever I can! https://www.cbsnews.com/sunday-morning/

For those of you who have never heard of this “program”

CBS News Sunday Morning (also simply titled Sunday Morning) is an American newsmagazine television program that has aired on CBS since January 28, 1979. Created by Robert Northshield and original host Charles Kuralt, the 90-minute program currently airs Sundays from 9:00 to 10:30 a.m. Eastern, Pacific Timefrom 7:00 to 8:30 a.m. and 8:00 to 9:30 a.m. in all other time zones (live in the Eastern and Central time zones, and on tape delay elsewhere). Since October 9, 2016, the show has been hosted by Jane Pauley, who also hosts news segments, after the retirement of long-term host Charles Osgood. Osgood was the host for twenty-two years (and is the program's longest-serving host), taking over from Kuralt on April 10, 1994.

This morning I decided I would watch it while walking, well at the gym on a treadmill :-) - Hey, I am still getting my walk in right?!?!?

I watch this program for its long format, depth of storytelling and its reporting on good things happening in the world, not just the negative distractions of what bleeds leads.

This morning’s Labor Day weekend program included a segment about being 1) “Made in the USA” 2) Sara Nelson, the new face of labor unions 3) Former Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis on war and Trump 4) Remembering Valerie Harper 4) Eric Liu on what makes a true patriot 5) other spotlights 6) Dolly Parton: Making the most of Everything…

Although I took copious notes, the shows website has wonderful quotes and synopsis so for today’s segment I am liberally copying from the shows “transcript” (because their notes are WAY better) talking about only two of the stories and adding my two cents ;-)

The first segment, “Made in USA: Bringing manufacturing jobs back to the homeland” Here is the link: https://www.cbsnews.com/…/made-in-usa-american-giant-bring…/

Talked about the movement of sourcing “cheaply” overseas and moving things back to the United States. Creating jobs, sourcing goods and bringing back the brand “made in the USA” important again. Here is some of the story….

Six years ago, the apparel manufacturer Eagle Sportswear, in rural Middlesex, North Carolina, was ready to close, until Bayard Winthrop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Giant) helped buy the knitwear plant. "We've spent, nationally, much of the last 40 years moving manufacturing overseas to chase cheap labor and lower environmental standards and lower regulations," Winthrop said.

In 1980 almost 80% of clothing bought in the U.S. was made in America. Today, it's around 3%. Winthrop says while globalization and trade deals made goods cheaper, they also brought decades of lay-offs and plant closures.

"I'm a free-trade person," Winthrop said. "But I also am a believer in saying, 'Wait a second, you cannot gut a bunch of communities in the U.S. and move to Bangladesh and then import all those goods back again and sell them at the local Dollar Store to all these people that now no longer have jobs.'"

Like a few other clothing companies trying to manufacture in the U.S., American Giant faced a big challenge: all those closed factories have left a threadbare infrastructure for actually making apparel, like the company's flannel shirt. "So, this was an art that had almost died in America?" asked correspondent John Blackstone. "Well, it had effectively died," Winthrop said. "We actually had to bring one of the great yarn dyers effectively out of retirement to come back and help deliver this program."

They discussed how they found farms, a new labor force offering real money and benefits, using a local cotton gin where the cotton is cleaned and spun into yarn...

Blackstone said, "I come into your mill, I expect to see Sally Field, and I see robots instead."

"To stay in business today, you have to automate," said Parkdale CEO Andy Warlick. "And we couldn't survive competing against the world if we weren't automated. Probably have more robots here than we have employees. But the employees are well-trained to operate those robots. And it's been the key to our survival."

They discuss how creating these products are so complicated and they improve productivity with groups of sewers working in teams. They get extra pay for exceeding daily quotas, changing everything for workers.

They go on to describe offering their products and much higher prices because they are paying people a good deal more than sewing in China or Vietnam… Which they believe is a good thing… What they want to do is make something you are going to have for decades

"I think we're selling a value system," Winthrop said. "Stand for some things that matter, stand for American manufacturing, stand for the people that are making stuff. And when we buy things, when we do it consciously, when we do it with an eye towards understanding how these little votes that we make have an impact attached to them, we'll be better off."

The other story that really got my attention was “Sara Nelson, the new face of labor unions” https://www.cbsnews.com/…/sara-nelson-the-new-face-of-labo…/

The woman dancing around the picket line is Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. Don't be fooled by her playfulness; she's been called "the most powerful labor leader in the country."

Her steeliness came through in a speech she gave – a call to arms, really – to the AFL-CIO on January 20, 2019, in the midst of the federal government shutdown. "What is the labor movement waiting for?" she said. "End this shutdown with a general strike!"

The last time there was a general strike in the U.S. was 1946. In this case, Nelson was calling on all 12 million members of the AFL-CIO to walk out en masse.

Nelson explained: "We have real power as workers. If we decide not to participate in this economy, it stops. Everything stops." "But what you said came as a surprise to most people," said correspondent Lesley Stahl.

"This was an extraordinary moment. Four-hundred-thousand people are forced to come to work without pay. And the people that I represent are going to work in an increasingly unsafe condition. What is the labor movement waiting for?"

By unsafe, she was referring to how the government shutdown was putting stress on airport screeners and others (including air traffic controllers) working without pay.

After her call for a strike, "There were a handful of air traffic controllers who said, 'I can't, I'm too stressed, I'm too tired, I can't medically do my job.' And the planes stopped. And we said, 'Do we have your attention now, Leader McConnell?'" Nelson laughed. "And a few hours later, we had a resolution." On January 25, Americas longest government shutdown came to an end, and Sara Nelson became a hero.

Stahl and Nelson talked about how she doesn’t fit the stereotype of “union leader” held by so many. Most have the image of a cigar-chomping George Meany [the first president of the AFL-CIO]. They also talked about her losing dear friends, flight attendants who were on flight 175 on 9/11 a flight she was serving just the week before from Boston.

Almost everything about what it means to be a flight attendant has changed. It wasn't so long ago that "stewardesses" couldn't be more than 32 years old, had to be under a specific weight, and couldn't get married. "Sexism," said Stahl. "This is a huge issue for people in your line of work."

Nelson said, "Our profession was objectified and sexualized by airline marketing. This is what was sold."

But Nelson says not all the changes in her industry have been for the better; with seat space shrinking, airlines have been packing more passengers onto planes, with fewer airline attendants on flights. "The airlines are staffing at the federal minimums today," she said. "And prior to 9/11, they were staffing 25 and 50% over on a regular basis.

"So, let me get this straight," asked Stahl. "More people on each plane in a tighter configuration, and fewer flight attendants?" "More people, more responsibilities, and fewer flight attendants." They finished the interview talking about how the era of George Meany is long gone and perhaps the time has come for a new face like Sarah Nelson’s.

"Are you ready to stand up to management? 'Cause they're gonna do everything they can to keep the labor movement down."

"Well, the rules in this country have been written for Wall Street," Nelson said. "And it's going to stay that way until we force it to go the other way.

"People need to understand that this is our country, and this is our work, and we should be respected for it, and paid for it."

Every week I learn something new from this program, although it is “news candy” to some, I appreciate CBS Sunday Morning for showing the other side of the world and its people…

Thank you for walking with me today! Until SOON...

#walking #wisdom #inspiration #guilty pleasures #Sunday morning #cbs sunday morning

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ragnorfellintomyheart · 8 years ago

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Responsibilities - Malec/Dad Magnus

“Alec… please don’t leave. Please, we can sort this out together. We always do, right?” Alec sighed, turning to face his almost distraught looking boyfriend. “I’ve told you, Magnus. We’ve talked about this. I’m sorry, but I can’t keep putting it off any longer. I need to go.” This conversation had been happening all day and each time, Alec’s will power diminished a little more. It wasn’t happening again, this time he was going for sure. A small whine escaped from Magnus’ throat, his face falling even further. Raziel, he was such a drama queen. “You’ll be fine by yourself, you’ve done it before. I’m sorry, but I have to work.” “Could you at least leave a manual? One of those books, you still have them right?”

“Magnus…” Alec sighed again, deeper than the last. “He’s a baby, you’ve looked after a baby before. What makes this one so different?” “He’s our baby and I don’t want to mess this up. Yes, I have looked after multiple babies before in my past, however not one that was solely my responsibility. What if he doesn’t like me by myself?” It had been almost 3 months since the pair had taken in Max, the warlock baby abandoned on the Shadowhunter Academy’s doorstep and so far, everything had been done between the two of them. The Clave hadn’t exactly granted paternity leave, so to say but had rather given a brief period of time to let Alec “get adjusted” to the new circumstances. A period that was ending today, leaving Magnus to look after their son by himself. It had been a tough day for both of them, there was always a risk of danger when Alec went on patrols, they were aware of that but now there was a child involved. Could Magnus be a single father? Alec pulled on his gear, it was slightly too tight against his arms, confirming that the training he had been doing in his free time wasn’t going to waste. Magnus had definitely missed that more than he thought he had. Alec chuckled softly “He won’t hate you, Mags and anyway, he’s asleep. It’s late so I doubt he’ll be waking up anytime soon.” That made Magnus feel slightly better, he could handle a sleeping baby. Right?

It was almost an hour before Alec finally left for his patrol, Magnus had been very reluctant to let him go. After all, he really had missed that gear. The apartment now seemed oddly silent without his presence. Alec was right, Magnus could look after a child. He had looked after plenty throughout the centuries his life had spanned, of all different species, it didn’t stop the anxiety spreading through his chest however. Magnus pulled on a pair of his pyjama shorts, paired with one of Alec’s tshirts, the combination was oddly calming, the contrast of rougher cotton and smooth silk perfectly describing them. After dressing, Magnus crossed the hallway into the spare bedroom that had now become the nursery. Max was still asleep, swaddled in the blankets in his crib. He looked so tiny, a small blue figure against the white sheets and with his eyes closed all of his features seemed to blend away, the perfect little blueberry. Magnus smiled at his son before sitting on the floor in front of the crib, the opportune spot to watch everything. He had bought a couple of spell books with him, nothing major or harmful of course, he wouldn’t make that mistake again. Anxiety welled up again as the memory started to resurface itself.

Barcelona 1693

When Magnus was rudely awoken by a loud banging at his door, he had been very prepared to tell whoever it was that they could go away and come back at a more reasonable time. He was not, however, prepared to find a young woman carrying a basket on his steps. The woman was crying, almost hysterically and when she looked up to address Magnus, her face was red and swollen. “You are Bane, correct? Magnus Bane?” Magnus could tell from the way her voice sounded that she had been crying for an awfully long time. It was raspy, breathless and very young. She must not have been older than 16, he guessed. “I am Bane, yes. Is there a reason you woke me before the sun has even woken?” The woman flinched at the words. What had happened to her? Magnus thought to himself.

“Please, take this. I cannot do it myself.” She held the basket she had been carrying out towards him, when Magnus didn’t take it, she placed it on the floor by his feet. Her crying had gotten worse now, past the point where the words she was speaking were intelligible. Magnus could make out words such as “monster” and “child” within the hysteria. Before he had a chance to question what the basket contained, the woman was running away from his doorstep, leaving the mysterious parcel behind. The sun had started to rise, turning the sky a fierce red that broke the night time darkness. Magnus knelt down by the basket with caution, ready to ward off whatever might be inside. There were layers upon layers of cloth, off to the side was a small rattle made of wood and as he peeled back the first layer of cloth, a small baby woke up from his sleep.

A child. She had left him with a child. Magnus didn’t know how to look after a child, how was he able to provide milk for it? What about his clients that day? But regardless of these questions he was now rocking a crying baby in his living room, desperately attempting to get it back to sleep. After trying for hours, Magnus finally managed to magic up a bottle, not that he was going to discover how he did it anytime soon, feed the baby and put it back to sleep in the basket. Almost a second after the baby was wrapped back up in fresh blankets that Magnus was going to have to replace after this situation was sorted, the doorbell rang for his first client of the day. “Come in!” Samuel was a young warlock, older than Magnus though his client wasn’t aware of this fact. They had become acquaintances when Magnus had moved into Barcelona, becoming the first other warlock he had encountered. Occasionally they would help each other with spells or summons, which is why he was now standing in the doorway, a small goat swung over his shoulder and a bag of rocks in his hand. Samuel grinned, showing his two rows of pointed teeth before throwing his cargo to the ground. “Good to see you again, old friend. I hope you have everything prepared.” He took a quick glance around the room, eyebrow slowly raising higher as he took notice of the lack of preparations. “I will take that as a no then… are you slacking?” “Hardly.” Magnus replied, waving his hand absentmindedly. “I had an unexpected client at the early hours of this morning. It had to be dealt with.” Samuel’s eyebrow raised higher, obviously expecting more of an explanation. His silent request was ignored as Magnus began drawing pentagrams into the floor.

The demon summoning was going to be a difficult one, possibly the most difficult Magnus had ever taken part in. It was a greater demon, Samuel’s father to be exact and as much as his friend did not wish to summon him, it was necessary for another of his clients. The demon had taken the child of a king, who had demanded Samuel retrieve him back and the price was worth more than he could imagine. How could he refuse an offer that big? Magnus sat back as the spell began to work, it would be Samuel’s job to carry on the rest of the summoning, he was now simply a spectator. “Who dares summon me?” The demon was big, bigger than Magnus had been expecting. Despite dealing with the Downworld for over 50 decades there were still aspects that simply astonished him. “It is me, father. Your son, Samuel.” The demon seemed amused, a small smile crept over his lips and Magnus could see the same teeth that he had seen on his friend just earlier. Definitely a family resemblance. “What can I do for you, my child? I doubt this is a family reunion.” A sharp laugh escaped from the demon’s throat, a very unpleasant sound. “I am here for a client. You took their child months ago and I am here to get it back for them.” Another laugh, louder this time. “You fool, did you really believe that child would still be alive? I feel ashamed to have you as my son for having such stupidity.” Samuel frowned, it would be a weakness if he showed any sign of emotion towards the statement. Demons were known liars, they would do anything to get out clean and both warlocks were aware of that fact. Samuel opened his mouth to speak, but the noise heard wasn’t his voice. It was a cry, more specifically a baby’s cry and Magnus cursed himself for not moving the infant into another room. The sound threw Samuel off guard, causing him to turn around and identify the source. What happened next was something reminiscent of a nightmare. Samuel’s distraction caused the pentagram to break, shattering the hold it had on the demon. Once free, the demon suddenly seemed to grow twice the size he had been inside of the pentagram and looked twice as deadly. Without even lifting a finger, Samuel was thrown against the wall and Magnus was horrified at the sound of his friend’s body against the stone. It was unlikely that he would ever get up from that.

Suddenly, the demon turned towards Magnus, black eyes focused on the basket where the baby was still crying softly. Magnus threw his hands up, blue sparks turning red as the magic turned from friendly to aggressive. The baby may have been thrust upon him, but God forbid anyone tried to hurt it while in Magnus’ care. It was his responsibility now. A ball of deep red hit the demon in the chest, burning through the skin almost too easily. Within seconds the hole had begun to heal itself, tendrils of black joining together. Another ball struck again and it was met with the same affects. The demon itself hardly seemed phased by the magic, a small smile playing on his lips. Magnus pulled his arms back, ready to unleash another strike but found himself unable to move them from their position. Orange lines snaked their way up from his fingertips like lava passing through charcoal. The further up they went, the hotter they got and Magnus soon found himself yelling from the pain. Orange had now become black as the lines made their way across his chest, neck and face. All Magnus could focus on was the pain that was coursing through his entire body and the lines that were now impairing his vision. He didn’t have long left, he would either pass out or die from the spell cast on him and both options seemed inviting to him as long as the pain would stop. The black seemed comforting By the time Magnus awoke, the sun was the same red as it had been when the woman had appeared on his doorstep. His outfit was still the same, it was the same room but the atmosphere was completely different. The scorched remains of the pentagram had stopped smoking long ago though the smell still lingered, Samuel’s body was still slumped against the wall unmoving, the basket where the baby had been was now on its side completely empty. Magnus cursed himself. A child was dead because of him. It had been his responsibility and he had failed.

The sound of a small cry snapped Magnus out of the daydream he had been in. His cat eyes widened slightly, the memory seeming more real than ever before. The cries were still continuing, surprisingly soft compared to others Magnus had heard. He sighed deeply before wiping away the tears that had fallen and reaching into the crib. “Oh, my blueberry… I’m so sorry. I didn’t hear you.” Max reached up as Magnus’ arms curled around him, gently lifting him out and onto the floor in his lap. The younger warlock cuddled into the embrace, small fingers latching onto the silk shirt as the cries slowly silenced themselves. Magnus smiled, already feeling the anxiety leave him as he felt the warmth of his son against his chest. Sitting on the floor right now, with a small head of blue hair nestled into his neck, Magnus began to wonder why he had felt nervous to begin with. He was hardly a young warlock anymore, his skills had improved far beyond the level of most warlocks his age, his list of life experiences far outnumbered most people alive on the Earth and surely this was just one more bulletpoint to add to it. A wonderful, brilliant bulletpoint that he could hardly wait to check off. Magnus felt the small head move and he looked at his son with one of his biggest smiles. “Max, how about I show you a magic trick?”

#I wrote another thing #please let me know if you like it #thanks #fics #my fics #writing #malec #magnus bane #alec lightwood #max lightwood-bane #shadowhunters #the mortal instruments #matthew daddario #harry shum jr #cassandra clare #fanfiction #malec fanfiction

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oldnintendonerd · 8 years ago

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Introducing my NES Collection

This was the first video game console I owned. It was bought for me by my parents, as most NES systems were for us thirty somethings. The box and all of that is unfortunately long gone. Currently, this dude is not working. It gets the flashing red light of death on every cart I put in, even after cleaning the cart with alcohol/windex and a cotton swab.

I did clean all of the pins inside the unit just as a quick try at fixing it, but I think it needs a thorough cleaning and some pin bending. This one is not in the greatest of shape, it does have some yellowing, and I’m not entirely thrilled with its condition. But it is sentimental, as it is the one I have had since day one, when the infatuation began.

A friend had one first, of course, since that is how most of us got into almost anything, “a friend was doing it”. I was hooked the second I ran Mario to the right and stomped my first Goomba.

The NES was released on October 18th, 1985. I don’t think my friend had one immediately, it was probably not until 1986 that I was introduced to it. I did not get one until probably a year or so later as a Christmas present. Possibly even over a year, I do remember there was quite a bit of asking that had to be done. So it could have been Christmas of 1986 or even as late as Christmas of 1987 before I actually got my own NES. From then on I got a game for Christmas or my birthday, or both, almost every year.

Over time I accumulated quite a few games, even having not bought an NES game since the 90′s I still have over 40 games in my collection. Almost all accumulated when I was a kid or teenager. After I hit my 20′s I don’t think I bought another NES game at all. Here they are as it stands right now:

As you can see, it’s nothing to sneeze at, I have a lot of really good games including Battletoads, Blaster Master, both Zelda games, the Mario trilogy, Super C, Metroid, a couple Mega Mans, and of course, the classic Tetris. But, there are obvious holes in this collection, where is the rest of the Mega Man series? Either of the Double Dragons? Any of the Ninja Gaidens? How can I be missing any of these? Well, I was just a kid when I was actively collecting games for this system, and at the end of the 90′s, Nintendo had released the SNES and the N64 in that time, so there were other platforms on the table. Both of which I was also buying for during this time, and they were more expensive. Id go buy one new N64 game with my budget instead of picking up 3 or 4 used NES games.

Thats what makes this blog so much fun though. Even as a kid I would still hit yard sales, I remember very vividly haggling a guy down from $10 to $8 on Jackal, and paying for it with my own money. Probably in the neighborhood of 1988 or 1989. Great buy that game. Hours of fun.

I also managed to get an Intellivision and an Atari 2600, with about 10 games for each at a yard sale only a few houses down from where we lived. I was probably 12 or 13 years old and picked up the entire lot for $5. Both systems worked, and my brother and I played for hours with Triple Action, Astrosmash and Breakout. While the NES was in the living room like “Uh... hello!? Hellooooo!?”. This was probably 1992 or 1993, and the Atari 2600 was released in 1977. So those games, at the time I purchased them, were not even as old as the games and systems I am looking for now. 15 years? The GameCube is about 16 years old at this point. Mind blowing.

I look forward to doing a lot more of that here.

Another great buy was NES Open Tournament Golf. This was released a month after the SNES. We bought a copy brand new, I think it was a christmas present that very year. I did not have a SNES yet. Little did I know how much time I would spend with my dad playing that game. To this day it holds a place in both of our hearts. In fact just a couple weeks ago we sat down and played on the Wii virtual console about a half dozen rounds together. It’s something we try to do almost every time we get together, even if its only for a half an hour. Great memories.

Wait, why is there a sticker on it if you bought it new you ask? I’ll tell you. Somewhere in the mid 90′s my dad and I had a bit of a marathon when we discovered that it saves your money. We wanted to get to $1,000,000. A few times we got interrupted in playing and just left the console on to come back to, rather than saving play and turning it off. Well, we ended up leaving it on for over a week straight, something had gotten placed in front of the power LED so it was not noticed. I think we went on vacation or something. It was on a purple screen when we came back to it. It would then not boot, but other games worked. We figured we cooked the cartridge. So, we purchased another copy used, and as you can see it was rather expensive. Even used and a good few years after it was released. I am guessing this may be somewhere around 1994 or 1995. The 689 sticker was probably an inventory sticker or something from the place we got it, there’s no decimal point. There is a price on the back.

Even today with the high prices some of these games are fetching, $21.00 is expensive for NES Open. eBay seems to have it going around $10 shipped. Which makes it around a $7 or $8 game, tops. Bummer.

We discovered later that the original copy did still work, so when I moved out, dad kept one, and so did I. Clearly, I’ve got the used one. Come to think of it he still has quite a few of my old games. Hmmmmmm... might have to ask him about that stuff. See what he still has.

I still wish I had spent a little bit more money on the NES games as they were “going out of style” in the mid to late 90′s. You could find anything at Electronics Boutique, just bins and bins of used NES games, most under $5! Some for even a dollar or two. But you pass them up because the label doesn’t catch your eye and there is no internet to tell you what is good like today.

So now I am filling in the gaps of the collection more than two decades out of date. It just so happens that it is right when everyone else had the same idea. Story of my life. Here I am thinking I’m being original, dusting off 10 to 30+ year old video games, and I’m at least 2 years too late to the party. YouTube channels that are four plus years old about game hunting, the older videos getting absolute steals on stuff you would probably hardly have a chance to find today, let alone get for $1. Stacks of GameCube games for $1 each, GameCube systems with games and multiple controllers for $10. GameCube controllers alone are $15+ these days. SNES lots with a system, controllers and like 15 games for $20. Incredible deals.

Now the pickings are slimmer, one of the YouTube channels I follow posted a recent video where a woman would NOT part out a Genesis system and some games that went with it. It had to be sold as the package and she had it priced at $65 or something. She said something along the lines of “I looked it up online, that’s what they go for”.

Little rant here. This is the problem with game hunting now, and may be an issue as I try to rebuild my collection. Lots of people know what eBay is, check their stuff and for whatever reason, want that price. It may be a lack of understanding on how eBay works, most likely they’ve never sold on eBay before. They don’t realize that the Genesis on eBay is very clean and is listed “Tested and working”, with a 30 day return policy, and all of this plays on the price. You are not on eBay, you are selling this out of a box on the floor of your garage at a yard sale, you are not paying eBay fees to list, you are not paying PayPal fees to get payment, you are not shipping anything, and if this doesn’t work when I get home I can’t bring it back to you. $65 on eBay does not mean $65 at a yard sale. See where it says Free Shipping in the listing? Of course not, you just see the price number. The seller on eBay MIGHT walk away from the $65 sale with $40 - $45 or so after all fees and shipping are finished. A $40 bill for the same lot MIGHT get some attention at the same yard sale. I mean, people can charge whatever they want, I can’t tell people what to ask for their stuff, it is their stuff. But if you were really trying to sell it, it would be priced accordingly. $65 for a Genesis and a few games will still be sitting in that box when the yard sale is over. $25 or $30 for the same Genesis and games, now you have my attention.

Ok, rant over. It wasn’t so little. Sorry.

Despite all of the above rant, I am convinced there are still some good deals to be had out there. I like to think there are still some people willing to sell stuff at true yard sale prices, just to be rid of it, like the purpose of a yard sale. This is a tall order, but it can be done, and I’m going to try. It will all be laid out here for you to read about.

Next post - The SNES Collection, and maybe less ranting. Maybe.

No pickups yet, total stays at $83.09

2017.04.18

#NES #nintendo #retrogaming #gamehunting #nintendoentertainmentsystem #yardsalegamehunting #oldvideogames

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