#here is my reminder to you that you have cried over yellow lego men. and so have i.

[coffeeisfortheresponsible]

do you ever think about how truly hilarious it is that i live my life this emotionally invested and obsessed with in a kids show about lego plastic ninja

like i completely recognize that it’s the funniest thing ever to be analyzing this show like it’s literature and making sad and symbolic art for it.

doesn’t mean i’m going to stop of course,, but yes i do have self awareness i know full well that this is insane behavior

[janiedean]

Prompt where Lyanna and Elia raise their three children together because Rhaegar has disappeared and he shows up again during a Stark/Martell family reunion to find both his ex-lovers are together?

(hi anon for the part where I’m filling old prompts that y’all thought I forgot: have fun)

–

It’s probably very cliché that it starts when they literally crash into each other at the supermarket.

Or better: Elia’s cart crashes against Lyanna’s while she’s distracted because her eldest daughter is running off towards the sweets counter, and Lyanna is just glad she had her own kid on her back and not in the front.

“Sorry,” Elia tells her, “you know how it is with -” she says, and then she never finishes the sentence.

Lyanna imagines why - finding yourself in front of the woman your ex-husband had a fling with, who caused your split and who also has a kid from that same ex who has also conveniently vanished into thin air before he was born is probably not what Elia had in mind for today.

“Er,” Lyanna says, “no problem. I know.”

Elia looks at her, taking in the situation - Lyanna has a feeling she didn’t even know Rhaegar had disappeared also when she is concerned. She’s wearing some of Ned’s old clothes that he gave her when she said she needed something that no one would miss when her kid started teething, she hasn’t had a shower in two days and the only blessing is that Jon isn’t awake for this. Elia, on her side, looks tired but at least - well, put together. Sort of.

“Shouldn’t he be around?” Elia asks, and Lyanna doesn’t know if she’s glad that she didn’t beat around the bush or if she wants to disappear into the ground.

“Er, he hasn’t been since the seventh month. Family matters. You know.”

Elia sends her a fairly understanding look, which Lyanna had not expected.

“I think I do,” Elia sighs. Her second kid, the one in the cart, makes some kind of displeased noise and the other one calls for her mother from where she’s standing at the sweets aisle. “Listen,” Elia says, “guess we haven’t got time now, but maybe - if you ever want to get coffee sometime and trash talk our common ex, your brother has Arthur Dayne’s number and he has my brother’s.”

Then she runs after her daughter and Lyanna is left standing grabbing at her cart and wondering if she’s ended up in some kind of alternate universe.

–

They see each other for coffee.

Turns out that when Elia finds out how things actually went, she shakes her head and says, see what happens when you don’t even try to see the other side.

“Sorry that he dumped you like that,” she says.

“I get by. I mean, my brothers do help out.”

“I know, but - it’s still not okay. Well, if you ever want to make the kids hang out, I won’t say no.”

It’s obvious that she means it. Lyanna wants to cry in relief - damn it, she hadn’t even known Rhaegar was married when they met each other.

She calls Elia another time.

And then again.

–

Once, they bring the kids to the park all at once even if they don’t tell them how exactly they’re all related.

“Well,” Lyanna says after half an hour, “given that the only kid in existence who’s ever managed to not make mine cry is his cousin, maybe we should tell them at some point.”

Elia sips from her frappuccino and takes a deep breath - her bright orange scarf stands out against her black coat and the snow surrounding them. Their kids are making a snowman together, more or less. Or better, Rhaenys is doing most of the work, but never mind that.

“Really?” She asks.

Lyanna shrugs. “The daycare girls keep on saying that he’s terribly sweet on his own and they’re glad he basically never cries but that whenever he’s dealing with other children it’s a disaster. Robb’s basically the only one he likes. Until now.”

“Well,” Elia replies, “I don’t see why not. I mean, fuck’s sake, it’s not as if we have to make their life miserable because Rhaegar was a complete idiot.”

Lyanna has nothing to add to that.

They tell them (well, Aegon and Rhaenys - Jon is one, it’s not as if he’s going to remember that conversation). It goes definitely better than they had imagined. They end up making sure they hang out more often.

After all, it’s really not worth it to poison their lives over their father being a complete idiot.

--

“My landlord so wants me gone,” Lyanna tells Elia a year later while they’re having tea at her studio apartment. The kids are out with Ned, bless him and Cat for volunteering to take all of them for the day.

“Really?”

“I can only take so many hints that he doesn’t want single mothers in his establishment. As if I don’t pay rent on time.”

Elia’s dark eyes turn on hers, and she seems to be thinking it through. Then she glances at the three pictures attached to the fridge. One is Jon and Robb, another was taken at the park when Jon and his half-siblings were sortofbuilding that snowman, the other is some artsy black and white picture Cat took of her and Jon the week when she brought him home. No one should be allowed to look artsy when they’re basically passed out with their kid sleeping on them on Ned’s horrible old yellow sofa, but somehow it came out good and she put it there for - she doesn’t know why. Maybe to remind herself that, from the outside, the result of falling for a guy who doesn’t tell you he’s married, then leaves his wife to be with you when you end up pregnant and then disappears off the face of the earth because his family doesn’t approve can... well, look somehow better than it feels sometimes. Not that she’d change things now, but - sometimes she just wishes she had been smarter about it. As if it’s of any use crying over that now.

“I have an entire floor I don’t use,” Elia says then.

“Sorry?”

“You’ve seen the family house. I have two floors, Oberyn has the other two. Half of my half is empty and I don’t even know what to do with it, and I don’t need money on top of what I earn already. Just move in, I could use the company sometimes.”

“What? Are you sure?”

Elia gives her a half-smile that’s somehow both encouraging and somehow melancholic and shrugs slightly. “Why not? Sometimes it’s just - it’d be nice to have another adult around. Oberyn’s not in town most of the time anyway and I love my children, I do, but being alone with two of them just makes you long for any grown up to be around the place regularly. Really, I don’t mind.”

Lyanna wants to refuse, then she remembers how much she’d save from the rent money. Here she’s sharing one room with Jon and at some point it’s not going to work anymore - maybe until he’s five she can push it, but if she wants to raise a kid with some sense of independence and privacy she’d rather change the situation before then. And she likes Elia, to be truthful, she likes her a lot, and if Jon’s less than stellar social skills keep on developing this way then it’d be better if he’s around his siblings.

Well then.

“Fine, but I’m - okay, I’m a shit cook. I can do the laundry or whatever else.”

“Deal. I hate doing laundry,” Elia agrees, and holds out a hand. Lyanna shakes it.

--

Thing is: Lyanna’s never actually considered dating a woman - mostly because Rhaegar was the first man she really dated and it ended the way it did, and when you’re having a kid at nineteen it’s not like you have time for dating. And in high school all her flings were men. But she’s always sort of known she wouldn’t have problems with the prospect of dating a woman. In theory.

Living with one who has some ten years on her and is fucking scorching hot as pretty much the rest of her family hasn’t made it easy for exactly that same reason. On one side she’s happy the Martells were not the kind of stuck up rich people the Targaryens are and they had no issues with her coming to live with Elia.

(Hell, after Oberyn once clapped her on the back so hard she spit her wine because she didn’t even try to look for Rhaegar so he could at least acknowledge the baby as his own and said that she did the right thing not even worrying a bit about that asshole of a Targaryen, she stopped worrying about whether they hated her or not.)

That said, Lyanna had been sure she had kept it under control - sometimes she’ll stare and fine, she likes Elia and Elia’s not just hot, she’s beautiful with that dark skin, long raven hair and eyes of that same shade, and sometimes Lyanna envies those long eyelashes of hers and then decides that no, they look great on her, no point in envy when Lyanna’s hardly ever given a fuck about her own looks.

Anyway, she doesn’t know if maybe she wasn’t as good as she thought or what, but when one day when the kids are at Doran Martell’s and she comes back from tidying up Jon’s room and finds Elia reading in the living room and Elia tells her that they need to talk, Lyanna can’t help thinking, crap, did she figure me out?

Turns out, Elia had.

Turns out, talking meant actually making out in the middle of the living room with the two of them crashing on the ground when Elia put her foot over some Lego toy of Aegon’s and put her off balance. Then it turns into making out on the couch, which is blissfully free of Legos of any kind, and Lyanna decides that maybe this situation turned out better like this than if Rhaegar hadn’t fucked off wherever he did.

His loss, really.

--

The last thing Rhaegar expected from Elia was an invitation to the annual Stark-Martell post-Christmas family reunion. Not that he had expected anything from her after he came back to London four years after leaving abruptly, and he wouldn’t even have known how to apologize, but she sent him a message on Facebook after finding out from common friends and - well, he had gone. If anything, to apologize.

But when he gets there, he realizes that maybe there’s something else he had expected even less. Walking in on Elia and Lyanna sharing the same plate of appetizer while sitting on the sofa in a way that's certainly not friendly was jarring enough, but seeing the two of them kiss a moment later like two people who’ve been in a relationship for at least a few years -

Yeah. Wasn’t in the plans. He doesn’t come forward as he sees them part and hold hands as they go back to their appetizers, and at that point he can’t even be angry because he was the one listening to his damned father and leaving the country out of some ridiculous concept of keeping the family integrity - shit, he should have just cut ties with the old mad bastard long before then. It’s probably not surprising they moved on with their life, and they would have ended up meeting, given that they gave birth to three children one of which he hasn’t ever met, who as far as he knows are in the room which Doran reserved for them and the relatives who volunteered to be on watching-children-duty. He should go there, at some point, when he finds some way to put into words how much of an idiot he was. 

(Especially with Lyanna’s child - how is he even going to not sound like an asshole when the point of the matter is ‘I had a fling with your mother because I fell for her and I left your siblings’ mother for her but then I left her too because I was a complete fucking bastard’?)

There’s one thing, he knows for sure now, though.

That when it comes to Elia and Lyanna and anything else related to the two of them, whatever it is that’s going on between them or his part in their lives, he’s most probably too late for anything that’s not making amends, and he hopes they’ll let him do that, at least. They deserve some, and they probably deserve each other more than he deserved them in the first place.

[mindthump]

What happened when a poet was sent to the biggest US mall to write for shoppers http://ift.tt/2yV7yKq

In March of 2017, I responded to a ridiculous post that a friend shared on Facebook.

“Apply now! Mall of America seeks Writer-in-Residence to celebrate its 25th Birthday!”

A quick Google search turned up reams of articles skewering the residency as nothing but a shameless publicity stunt for the biggest mall in North America, deriding the idea that a writer would come and be inspired by a Nordstrom or its customers.

“Hey,” I thought, “if the supreme court says corporations are people, why can’t a mall have a birthday? It even has a parent company!”

Competing to stand out in the longest of long shots against 4,300 applicants for the mall residency, I wrote an 800-word poem and sent it as a PDF so I could include unsolicited pictures of my typewriter in action with crowds of adorable children. In corporate America, I understood literary merit wasn’t what I was selling. I was a photo op, an interactive novelty and, though corporate clients usually only learned this in retrospect, a budget therapist.

The poem with which I sold myself to corporate America ended with these lines:

This vision

is about writing as connection – poetry as a service industry.

This is a vision of poetry as it can be,

brought down from the ivory tower

and into the mall, out to the public,

bards spinning tales in Viking marketplaces …

What is a mall but the repository

of our collective desire?

… And what,

poetry,

but the shortest distance

between

feeling and expression?

•••

This was my setup: each day, for four hours, I’d be stationed at a different place in the mall. I’d arrive at the standard-issue mall-white table and chairs and set up my typewriters – a teal Olvetti for myself, and a Smith Corona I’d painted orange-yellow and decorated with roses, which I kept facing outward as an invitation for kids to try a typewriter for the first time.

Over five days, I would write poems for a hundred people who came up to me and answered the question: “What do you need a poem about?”

Every time I write for strangers in public, I’m nervous. I always wonder: “Will this be the time, the place, where no one wants a poem?” But even at the mall, when we set up to take photos, people stopped and I breathed a sigh of relief. Poetry would work, here, next to Wetzel’s Pretzels. When a middle-aged woman just passing by learned that I was writing poems based on any topic people gave me, she barked, “My word is Disney!” so quickly and aggressively that I jumped.

The first person I wrote for was John, my de facto boss during my time at the mall. He started things off with a surprising burst of vulnerability.

John wanted a poem about his son. The son was a father himself, now, and this would be part of his gift for Father’s Day that Sunday. John told me about a trip to Disneyland for his 50th birthday that his son had surprised him with, about raising a kid as a single dad and his hopes that the next generation would do better than he could. He and his son share a love for Disney, he told me, those Florida vacations a point of easy intimacy in a world where grown men are rarely allowed to show their feelings to one another.

A poem for Bryce. Photograph: Brian Sonia-Wallace

When I asked their favorite Disney story, John said: “Peter Pan.”

The boy who never grows up.

I’d never been a Disney kid. Though I grew up just an hour from Disneyland in California, my one trip there as a kid with my mom ended up a disastrous slog through heat and endless lines, and we’d never gone again. Because my hippy parents refused to allow a TV set into our house, I even missed out on the perpetual loop of Disney classics on VHS that acted as surrogate parents to raise so many in my generation. Suffice it to say, I did not understand Disney.

But I at least knew the story of Peter Pan, and I had some ideas about dads. I digested everything John told me, through the typewriter, while he watched, into a poem that started:

We never stopped believing in faeries…

we were lost boys, both of us

And ended:

There is no one

I would rather

not grow up with

than you.

I was about halfway through reading the poem out loud to John when he started to tear up.

All of his staff was gathered around, with a camera crew from the local news station to boot, and this silver-haired man, who was the reason I was here in the first place, just bawled and hugged me and disappeared.

Big, bold … and broken: is the US shopping mall in a fatal decline?

Day one, I’d made my boss cry, and he liked it.

But John wasn’t the last person to cry in front of me outside of Nordstrom. The mall team was keen that I track certain metrics so that they had fun facts to share on social media: number of poems written, number of steps walked around the building’s cavernous interior.

Brian Sonia-Wallace talks to visitors at the Mall of America. Photograph: Brian Sonia-Wallace

After my first day writing, I started keeping another tally – the number of people who cried. It happened every day, like clockwork: four or five people would come away from our interaction with water streaming down their faces, weeping openly in front of the Lego store.

In the end, 20% of all the people I wrote for in the mall wound up in tears.

When people come to a mall, especially this mall, they come to scratch an itch. People come to the Mall of America with intention. They are looking for something. Sometimes it’s ice cream, sometimes clothing, and sometimes it’s just reconnecting with family. Old folks who come for exercise in the morning give way to afternoon shoppers and diverse families in the evening, tourists and immigrants alike indoctrinating their kids in Americana. Everyone’s in a special state, somewhere between empty and full, invisible and seen. The mall boasts that it’s the number one tourist destination in the midwest, with 40 million annual visitors. It might not be the Happiest Place on Earth, but it’s big enough to be “of America”.

When I stalked the mall with just my notebook, scribbling observations, it earned me no end of sideways glances from families and shoppers. What could this dude be writing about? Us? This was a place for uncritical experience, not methodical reflection. I was a poor spy, and middle America, actively assimilating under their bindis and hijabs, shrunk away from me and my notebook.

But behind the typewriter, when people knew for certain that I was writing about them, I transformed from spy to priest. As the temporary darling of the mall’s publicity machine, pilgrims began to search me out. Some people came back day after day.

Empathy became addictive, beautiful moments stacking up, gift-giving and gratitude and people crying. People started bringing gifts themselves, making offerings, and gaining absolution: “I read about you in the Star Tribune,” or “I saw you on the TV.” They brought me their own poems, their photographs, newspaper articles they’d clipped out which they thought might interest me, handwritten lists of places I should go to write, birthday cards because they’d heard it was my birthday.

Poetry at the mall: ‘Twenty per cent of all the people I wrote for in the mall wound up in tears.’ Photograph: Brian Sonia-Wallace

Some of the people told me about other pilgrimages they’ve made, Tibetan meditation retreats to concerts in other countries. A young Korean American woman asked for a poem about her favorite Korean pop star. “My sister and I have been in this fandom for ten years,” she told me. “As a poor college student, I spent all my money to get to Hong Kong and Hawaii for concerts.” There was a comfort, she said, in admiring someone so much that you’d literally cross oceans to see them for two hours. Another woman stopped by a few days later with a story about a solo three-day trip to California to see her K-Pop crush. She’d spent 13 hours in the sun arguing with security, finally breaking down in tears mid-concert at how simultaneously worth it and not worth it the whole experience had been.

The people who came to the mall seemed to have this terrible longing to speak and be listened to, to be witnessed. A base, human need to break from the constant impersonal bombardment of consumer culture that lives in that space and to sit, in silence, with a stranger who was there explicitly to care about personal stories.

Lots of people would ask how much the poems cost – in a citadel of commerce, unless the free thing is a sample to lure us into buying, nothing is free.

•••

Nathan and his wife Abby, John’s No 2 in PR, met here, at the mall.

At dinner, John shared his story about hiring her, about how she’d worked all over the park in minimum wage positions, temping on this project and interning there, persisting. In this millennial world, to keep a job, the key was not to have the best credentials but to cling to the targeted employer and refuse to let go. The word “passion” scared me for what it revealed about the deeply held convictions corporate employees are required to hold.

But there was a homemade quality to the mall. I’d been afraid that the team would be corporate drones, but they were star-crossed lovers and single dads, and they loved kids and rollercoasters because they were kids themselves.

Abby and Nathan talked about finding each other, at last, after tough times, a relationship that blossomed despite painful reminders of the past. “Battle scars mean you’ve survived,” Nathan said. He was a single dad raising his son, a ten-year-old from a previous relationship with awesome green hair, until he met Abby.

‘I’d been afraid that the team would be corporate drones, but they were star-crossed lovers.’ Photograph: Brian Sonia-Wallace

Nathan told me that they were their own worst enemies, struggling against the self-doubt they carry. They had a pressed earnestness when they invited me to their family barbecue. What emerged was a realness desperately constructed through consumption and imitation, fandom not as a distraction but a weapon and a shield against the painful vicissitudes of family drama and divorce and the loneliness of drowning in a grown-up world.

The goal of the mall wasn’t just entertainment, what Abby and John and Nathan and the whole crew were trying to create, by making each mall experience a story, was feeling.

As the mall reached the end of its day, I made my way to Nickelodeon Universe to catch the end-of-day light show, designed to make getting through a day at the mall feel like a celebration. Nathan talked about the challenge programming a light show with a glass ceiling under an airplane flyway, trying not to blind pilots ferrying passengers to every corner of the United States.

Under the dancing lights, elementary-school age kids with faces painted like skulls jerked and cavorted while smoke rose from the ticket booth. A woman’s voice that sounded like it was ripped straight out of an animated kids’ movie crooned a pop song: “We’re always here – always heeeeeere for you!”

At the end of every day, the mall closed with this light show and song. In an age when malls are closing left and right, the story of physical experience abandoned in favor of online shopping, it was a promise.