#i have also memorised one (1) poem

[trans-cuchulainn]

the only list of information I've ever successfully memorised was that when I was ten i learned all the books of the (protestant) bible and can still recite them but that doesn't help me very often because I'm an agnostic medievalist and keep having to deal with random bonus books that we didn't have when i was a kid

so now i can list 66 of them in order and if you're a protestant that's very impressive. and then i can give you an assorted handful of apocrypha and it's up to you what you wanna do with those

[sweetheartsaku]

—HAIKYU!! various ; better in the dark

a/n ; [gn!reader] how deep is your love pt 2???!?!! AND YES!! the title is a tv girl reference :3c please dont let this flop!! praying that all the ppl who found pt 1 found this 🥹🩷 tysm for all the notes everyone!! <3

— characters : akaashi, kenma, kita, semi, kageyama, suna

part 1 ! ♡ oikawa, osamu, tsukishima, hinata, sakusa, kuroo

tea roses !

keiji akaashi ; tip toe - HYBS

THIS MAN. he will take you out on absolutely BEAUTIFUL dates. they are scheduled and well thought out, all without you knowing. knows what you like, can predict what you order, where you will sit or do, and KNOWS how to fluster you effortlessly. UNSPOKEN RIZZ AT ITS FINEST YOUR HONOUR!!

at one point he had to resort to the notes app to write what you're like but had realised he had subconsciously memorised all of it by heart. deleted it and still knows you like the back of his hand!!

weirdly knows how to pick the best candles.

the warm, nostalgic smelling ones. candles that are the perfect dash of nostalgia, that feel comforting and warm. i wonder if its in the brain or an instinct thing

for anniversaries or literally just whenever, he makes paper flower bouquets. they are so intricate and every little detail, colour and fold makes it so perfect. in-between classes or when he finishes work early, he'll be nonchalantly folding another smaller flower for the arrangement. he does it so effortlessly too 😭!!

sometimes likes to fiddle with your fingers especially if you wear rings. one of the only and very sweet moments of PDA!! gently rubs his fingertips over your knuckles and tracing all the lines. i need an akaashi keiji in my life

will send you the most beautiful, heart-wrenching and mesmerising poems at an insane hour. you'll wake up with a couple paragraphs about how important healing or taking one step at a time is, making sure you fall in love with yourself everyday too. (please do)

kozume kenma ; cherry wine - grentperez

facinated by painted nails. on holidays he might paint them black, or maybe get a little cat sticker on his index!! pick the colour he'll love it either way

cherishes your little trinkets so much 😞 polaroid of you two and stickers on the back of his phonecase, keeps some of the random stuff you give him in his pocket. you could find a rock you gave him like 3 months ago but he kept it because you said it reminded you of him??

perfectly able and capable to order things by himself, but you know he isn't the type of guy to actually seem to WANT to do it. he is too lazy to actually get up but not lazy enOUGH when it comes to you. he might hide behind you. "HE SAID NO PICKLES!!"

CRAZY beef with your plushies. or anything you hold dear honestly. he can and will get pouty. BEWARE!! you must give him a lil' kiss to earn his attention back. (loves the forehead ones)

sometimes he forgets or just doesn't want to eat. it will get to the extent where you have to spoon feed him,,please remind and encourage him to ! eating, sleeping... just can't do it without a little push.

does this thing with his hands when you cross the road. i don't wanna say grabby hands because its pretty cringe, but it is definitely grabby hands. has no idea why he does it but its such a sweet and small gesture╰(*´︶`*)╯♡ !

cat parents but not exactly cat parents? 🤔 you found this stray cat once, and started visiting it everyday on the way to school. you cared for it, and when kenma picked that up he was also instantly fond of it too. now you both kinda feed it your leftover lunch when you visit the cat after school.. he's so precious with the little cat ueue.. take pictures before the moment fleets!

has the date you two met written on his controller... (he was so hesistant at first though LMAO)

shinsuke kita ; old love - yuji, putri dahlia

uses your initial for math variables. he'll use x or y sometimes, but his first option is ALWAYS your initial. you found this out on a study date once, math talk blablabla and he uses to what seems to you a 'random letter' NO. it is your initial!! 😞 when you ask he seems unfazed, but his ears are pretty red... idk guys i think he wants you

one of the people that make you stiffen up when they get physical. when he lays his head on your shoulder you instantly freeze up, trying not to move a BONE so you won't disturb him. it's like muscle memory to you LMAO.

really pretty, long lashes... if you've read part one, oikawa and tsuki are very similar :0!! loves when you graze his lashes with the back of your index finger

like akaashi, learnt how to make flowers but they're crochet 🥹 i think growing up his grandma had taught him how to crochet and all the little patterns. overtime, dedicated himself to making an arrangement every anniversary... they come with little heartfelt letters too!! (kita boyfie material COME HOME!!)

very routinal as well!! like kuroo (he is the full package) he never misses a morning or night to say good morning or good night. AND he places sticky notes around your desk or places he knows you'll be in reminding you to smile or something along those lines !!

what took the cake for me was when he left a little bag filled with goodies once he realised atsumu was sick 😣 definitely does the same for you... sends bag with a bowl of hot soup his grandma made at your front door

eita semi ; i wish you roses - kali uchis

weirdly immersed in the painting of nails as well. sometimes he'll ask you to paint his in black but he got dress-coded a week later 😓 SIKE gives NO shat and kept them on anyway. they are way too valuable to him to just erase. nails done in a simple colour he likes?? by his s/o?? wiped off?? very funny shiratorizawa

i think + the neighborhood, he likes tv girl, kendrick lamar, childish gambino but has a duality of laufey and beabadoobee's bedroom pop and fuzzy rock??

sick of people making arctic monkeys his personality 😞 musicians arise!! apart from the VBC, hes probably in a band too. small gigs here and there for school, and a few fun sessions with his friends just to play whatever. come to his gigs! (sometimes he'll magically play 10x better when you're around, he says)

share earphones with him PLEASE. on rainy bus rides or walks home, he'll play something you like hehe c:

takes you out to the mall closest to shiratorizawa to go pick up some fast food or a drink. it usually gets really crowded from all the surrounding schools so he keeps you close by the waist

and obviously the basic, will sit with you and teach you the basics of bass or electric guitar. i think he'd play a bit of percussion too (о´∀`о) sometimes he'll take you into his lap, but thats when he feels pretty clingy but very discreetly!!

tobio kageyama ; what would i do? - strawberry guy

please don't try to flirt with him he WON'T UNDERSTAND!!!! *gunshots*

if you say literally anything that isn't directly stating your point, he will not get it. using metaphors or just figurative language in general he is STRUGGLING. you need to say, "you're pretty." because things like "i fall in love with you every day" or "i'll find you in every universe" he will actually look at you BAFFLED. please help this man

thinks about what YOU would do. like when he is in doubt or feels like he's about to lash out, he will take a moment and literally ask himself what you'd do or say. even in tests or something completely unrelated to you he will literally ask himself what you would put in the answer box !!

face scrunch when he gets jealous ! he kinda has a lil' pout but can't bring himself to say anything. when you finally notice him he'll have this lil' (๑ˋ^ˊ ๑) face... please kiss his eyelid or the corner of lips cuz HE HAS TOO MANY PRETTY BOY PRIVILEGES!! (and he'll get flustered it's the cutest) revoke them THIS instant!!

his favourite type of kisses are the ones where you'll push his hair back and give him a forehead kiss. he'll take you in by the waist and keep you close, he likes to listen to your heart because you have his. when he feels clingy, he'll nuzzle his head into your shoulder. what a dork

will attempt to find you at his games pre and post timeskip. before the game he will try to make it not look frantic but one of his members eventually catch on 😞

rintarou suna ; SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK - joji

camera roll is either 0.5's of the most jaw dropping, majestical sunsets and sunrises that he's experienced with you or literally anytime the sky is feeling a little different (if he's not with you at the time he WILL send them to you at either 5am or 7pm saying it reminded him of you) or the CRAZIEST 0.5's of you losing sanity or of you off guard. its wild blackmail material but he chooses not to LMAO. (because of the love in his heart, he says)

has a little photo album for you and anything you related!! he also takes the best candid photos of you and post them on close friends!! (´∀｀)

no. #1 victim of couple tiktok trends. pretends and looks like he doesn't like it, but doesn't want it to end. once you press post he will stare you down with his beautiful ahh olive hazel eyes (he wants more)

last one on the social med side, he mentions you in posts with your initials all the FLIPPIN' TIME!! his dedication is quite endearing

on days where everything becomes overstimulating, he will notice. will eye you for a while, but once he knows when it gets to a certain extent he will hand you an earphone.

anyone who says suna is an arctic monkey's listener is a LIAR I SAID IT I SAID IT!!!!! *more gunshots* JOKES he probably has a couple of their songs in his playlist, but i personally think he's more tyler the creator coded. people who get it get it (avril lavigne sk8r boi? keshi beside you? definitely)

hot adams apple

[arthurtaylorlester]

you may have seen my previous theory on wtf is going on with john doe malevolent, but i have more proof this time to show for my hypothesis!

in episode one, we first hear someone turning on a radio, presumably in a car, listening to “You call it madness (but I call it love)” by Russ Columbo (not the 1946 version by nat king cole trio we all put in playlists lol), then arthur gain consciousness

afterwards, they are in bookstore when a radio starts playing the song again, the entity doesn’t see the radio, but he does recognise the song

both arthur and the entity recognise this is odd, since atp the entity had only been in arthur’s body for 20 odd minutes

but, if you’re caught up, you’ll recognise that this is moment directly parallels a scene in part 33

this, however is not the only time something like this happens. in part 5, john uses a turn of phrase

this moment is soon after arthur’s month-long coma, so unless lily had been reading robert frost to arthur (which john would’ve most certainly mentioned when arthur brought it up), he shouldnt have any way of knowing this sentence. 

the first time we hear the poem in full is in part 26

but even still, in the context of the moment, why does john know this poem? he’s had no moment since he came back to learn anything of the sort, even ignoring the time it’d take to memorise something like this.

before this, there are only two instances of 'miles to go before i sleep' appearing, once at the end of part 17 and just before arthur leaps of the edge in part 23

so now, my answer to all these questions is a bit weird.

in part 1, the entity says as follows regarding time in other worlds and the dark world as being timeless

which initially led me to reach the idea that john's forgetfulness in part 33 has to do with the time he spent away from arthur in s3, which he claims he does not remember.

i think he was actually sent back to the dark world and spent an indefinite time there, since there is none, causing him to forget finer details. but that raises leaves many questions unanswered, like why did the entity know the song before ever being with arthur?

i think it's time fuckery. the entity we see in part one could be some sort of future!john, at some point he could be sent back to the dark world indefinitely once more, than brought back via the book at a different moment in time that from which he left, the past.

this theory makes a lot of leaps, but it also gives reason to why john already knows call it madness and miles to go, i believe he might use both of these as some sort of anchor to not go mad himself in the dark world, thought he does end up losing parts of himself and of arthur. still, he isnt completely gone, which is why he's eventually capable of becoming john again

it also kind of explains the first sentence the entity ever says in the show

of course, on your first listen you assume he means what happened to arthur a few moments prior, but with the context of a timeloop, he could be referring to the whole shows events, even what we havent seen

later, when john says he doesn't remember who he is either, and arthur says

i understand that the entity knowing what he is might help them both, but it's still a weird thing to say. arthur has just woken up with a corpse and voice in his head, and acts like it's not his first time doing this? i'm not saying he'd remember, but it would make more sense if he was partially amnesiac to the future/past loops like the entity/john

also, i think it's important to distinguish the entity and john, the former being an amnesiac john who has only the potential to become john, but could just as easily become yellow.

last point is, obviously, also a massive stretch.

in part 9, after their first consequential argument (as in it nearly gets them imprisoned), arthur tells this fable to john

which yeah, could be foreshadowing john being the king in yellow in the s1 finale, but. it wouldn't make much sense since john doesn't permanently get him and arthur killed?

i think it goes like this, if it lines up with my theory.

john starts forgetting about the dark world, starts getting dicier and riskier with his and arthur's choices, whether it be about his deal with kayne or other future lies, but he pushes and he keeps pushing until both he and arthur meet their end. at some point, he gets himself sent back to the dark world and arthur killed/otherwise indefinitely unavailable, and as he does, he says "it is in my nature", so the last thing he tell arthur isnt sorry, but an excuse. perhaps they end on bad terms, after all he's promised to not let him drown.

he is left there to rot in his misery with only faint memories of his new self (significant moments, like him telling arthur the poem) and after he starts forgetting, a long time for a place with no time, he is pulled into the book in the past, eventually reaching arthur again. he might recognise arthur's voice, but he might not remember enough at this point, having turned back into the entity, no longer being john.

but hey. this is based on my relisten of s1 and little else. i love stretching the canon to make it make sense lmao

edit 05/12/23 — further proof i only now noticed in episode 30 “The Tenant”

[daisychainsandbowties]

I love your writing. I love how vulnerable you allow the characters to be. I love how you make ugly things beautiful and pretty things holy and reverent. I am extremely thankful for you and all that you do.

But I'm curious:

Are there any writers/works that you would say have had an influence on your style?

crying and crying. honestly yes! ugliness is very beautiful to me it’s very human & vulnerable & good to be ugly & i think life tends to be very imperfect & messy but we can be very beautiful (and yes, holy) inside of it.

hmm so first thing is that i’m mostly a poet & i came to that in my usual way which was deciding one day to teach myself how to Poetry. i figured it could not be very different from math and lo & behold it was not very different from math

i grew up using recitation of poems as a calming technique so those certainly influenced how cadence occurs to me, patterns of language (some poems were as gaeilge). some of the poems i memorised growing up were Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen; Ode to a Nightingale by Keats; a whole bunch of Dickinson & especially Persimmons by Li Young Lee. the waste land by ts eliot too. i did adore shakespeare & how easy it was to commit to memory in iambic pentameter.

but then when i was 16 i decided to ‘git good’ at poetry (i was, in fact, very bad at it for many years to come) so i picked up Ariel by Plath & a load of Anne Sexton. Richard Siken too. and i read those books about 50 times each. could never read them too many times.

realised that poetry should be kind of like eating good food or having good sex. an experience that bears repeating.

so yes Sexton & Siken especially i think are explicitly influential to my style. also recently have learned a lot from Ocean Vuong (Night Sky With Exit Wounds but also please read ‘Not Even This’. listen to Ocean perform it) oh & also very recently impressed with Hull by Xan Phillips, & Danez Smith’s ‘don’t call us dead.’

language was made for puncturing & those poets know how to turn a sentence, a stanza, a turning of thought into a lung collapse, a harpoon.

i do firmly believe that it’s pointless to mimic style. it can happen that other words bleed into yours but it should be an accident, like the mirroring of language that forms the basis of so many interpersonal movements. language IS an exchange but we all bring something to the table.

& again it’s food - personal and cultural and loving and it’s about need and want and desire and death (food & death so tenderly intertwined in so many cultures). so i think reading good writing lends you instinct; the ability to look at what you make and know if it is good or at least true and therefore ‘getting there’ and therefore beautiful in the attempt regardless of imperfection.

i believe in purple prose and also Just Saying Things & i really think (i teach creative writing sometimes at uni) that i can bring out beautiful writing from anyone. it’s not always about skill it’s about heart, and then skill creeps up on you. i can always tell when someone is just performing writing and when someone has a story to tell.

so like!! the #1 thing that has influenced me is learning to love the way that writing makes me feel (powerful, stupid, profound, unoriginal, death-defying, mortal). i think reading so so much & just internalising different language-textures helps a bunch! i get so much inspiration from reading textbooks, wikipedia articles, random journals & i think poetry even if you are not & don’t wanna be a poet is very good at showing you the bones and sinews and connective tissue of meaning.

i am also so influenced by sci-fi & fantasy. particularly the Book of the Ancestor by Mark Lawrence (more gay nuns lmao) & N.K. Jemisin with The Broken Earth trilogy. 'the slow regard of silent things' specifically by Patrick Rothfuss (not a person to learn pacing from but astounding at sentence-level). also i am very influenced recently by This Is How You Lose The Time War. as a kid by Garth Nix (particularly Lirael, Sabriel) & artemis fowl.

of course on that note it’s usually the non-literature things that inspire actual writing from me. it’s principles in physics or math or thinking about Voyager 1 or philosophical questions that actually produce the sort of rabid pursuit of meaning that writing is. truly immersing in curiosity is an excellent way to approach making art. it's about reaching out & touching for a moment the fabric of everything - & you might find it is wet & sticky or dry and dusty or soft or that it hurts your hands to touch, but the chasing of meaning is worth it, & making meaning is divine.

i hope that is (somewhat) of an answer

[cold-r-ain-in-june]

so a few weeks ago @steadfast sent me an ask wondering how i manage to gather the pieces of media for my web weavings

unfortunately,  it just happened that when you sent me that ask i was one foot in the grave with a fever and ever since i got better i've been procrastinating writing you a reply since i wanted to give you my best answer

double unfortunately, tumblr decided to delete the post and your ask when i was almost done, so i'll try to write it again even though i'm frustrated over the original getting deleted so bear with me

so to start off, i happen to suffer from the horrible condition called sometimes-i-feel-things-so-strongly-i-want-to-cut-open-my-skin-to-let-them-out. a horrible illness really. things like anger or missing my ex or chronic sadness. sometimes, rarely, it happens to be love, though much less often then i would like.

basically, i bottle things up to the point in which i cant help but see them everything. i see a random poem on my instagram feed, i listen to a song on the bus and one of the lyrics clicks like it never had before, a scene from a movie a watched 3 years ago comes to haunt me at night when i cant sleep.

so i gather them, sometimes, i make new folders for them, other times i am so lazy and messy i just let them get lost and rot with the other 10k of screenshots i have on my phone.

obviously, i also have to outright search for things, but i dont even do it for the sake of creating a web weaving post at first. i just feel one thing so deeply i have to look up proof that people have been also feeling this thing for thousands of years and theyve all dealt with it. i mostly search them here on tumblr and sometimes pinterest. words like "friendship", like "medea", like "toxic siblings", they can all open doors to pieces of media you have never heard of before, but which contain a three line dialogue youd kill for from the first time you read it. this all very tricky, evidently, at times, things simply dont match with the way you actually feel, no matter how much you search for them, but stitching them together can give you this almost perfect thing that mirrors your soul.

i also happen to be the kind of person who screenshots everything they think its relevant. and its good that i have really low standards for relevance. thats how i end up diving in my screenshots pile, when i feel like my web searching is failing, and sometimes i get lucky enough and i find a line i collected 2 years ago that matches exactly how i feel in that moment.

you've also mentioned the question of whenever i memorize book passages, and the answer is somewhere between yes and no. while, when i read i heavily annotate my books, im not a big fan of memorising outright passages (my brain is mush lets be honest, i cant fry it even more with overloading), and i dont write them down or anything, but i do however manage to memorize the overall idea of passages that stick to me. liek i can tell that x book has some quote about y thing even if i dont remember it outright. then i try to look it up, i use goodreads mostly (which is a bitch on mobile but you can work your way around if you search shit on web AND THEN you open it with the app) and google books when it decides to be helpful every once in a while, and if neither of those work, THEN, i open my edition and try to look for it because im lazy like that.

another site i really like, and its obvious in my web weavings is gentle.earth!! which, now that i say it, i actually havent visited it in a while but since i remembered it exists ill probably stalk it for the next few weeks. it's an anymous site on which everyone can confess things that hang heavy on them and some of them get to be displayed on the page after the entires are curated. its a really pretty thing to look through

now that i covered the bases of obtaining the materials for the web weaving, which i think i can boil down to 1. hysterical search mission and 2. hoarding every piece of media you come across, i will also add that at least for me personall, putting them in order for is a pain in the ass (which is also the maine reason i havent made a web weaving in almost a year even though i have the materials ready). i dont know if other people who do this kind of things are as press as i am about the order in which each post go and the way the different shades of the same idea interwine and bullshit bullshit or if im just mental. but yeah its also a really important step for me, its basically the polish of the post ig

also the biggest problem with the hoarding strategy is spending 2 days looking for a source because your past self was too lazy to also screenshot the source. thats also a bitch

anyway, i honestly i have no idea if youll find anything helpful here, or if i just used your ask to moan about my struggles but its 3 am over here and honestly this is the best ive got. thank you for the ask though, i do love getting ask even if it takes me two decades to answer them <3

[aeoki]

High and Low: The Centre of the Earth - Chapter 1

Location: Australian Land (Night) Characters: Tomoya, Hinata, Touri, Mitsuru & Sora

Season: Autumn Writer: Akira

TL Note:

I’m not sure if Bouzu Mekuri (lit. Buddhist Priest Flipping) has an official English translation, so I decided to translate it into Old Buddhist Priest as it’s similar to Old Maid (you want to avoid getting the Buddhist priest cards).

Hyakunin Isshu (lit. one hundred people, one poem each) is a deck of cards based on the classic Japanese anthology of the same name. Some games using these cards require players to memorise the poems on the cards, but Bouzu Mekuri is one of the Hyakunin Isshu games which do not require that.

< The following night. >

Mitsuru: Ahahahahahaha ☆

This is so much fun, y’know~! That really “brings a smile to my face”! I didn’t get what this expression meant when I had to read the script for the drama, so I looked it up!

Wahaha~ A smile is bursting on my face, it rises to the surface and it’s a mess, y’know!

Tomoya: Why’re you so excited? Did something happen to you, Mitsuru?

Mitsuru: On the other hand, it’s so boring because you guys are so gloomy! I’m not gonna understand the stuff I don’t understand even if I sit here and think about it, so we should enjoy the moment, y’know!

Tomoya: That’s true.

Sora: HaHa~♪ Since Mitsu-chan wants to have fun, Sora has some good news!

Tomoya: Don’t fan the flames, Harukawa… It’ll just turn into something troublesome.

Sora: HiHi~♪ Sora agrees with Mitsu-chan! It can’t be helped if it’s overcast~ You can’t see the stars when it’s cloudy, after all!

So, tadaa ♪ Let’s play a tabletop game!

Mitsuru: A tabletop game?

Sora: Yes! Everyone’s heard of playing cards or shogi, right? Sora has some of those and Sora thinks he stuffed his suitcase with something a bit crazy too!

It looks like we’re not really allowed to bring digital devices on the plane, so Sora brought a lot of games to play with everyone!

What should we play? Shall we play the game with the same name as our project, High and Low?

Tomoya: Hmm~... Something like mahjong during Seven Bridges was pretty exciting, but we shouldn’t be playing High and Low with so many people, right?

Mitsuru: Ohh? Tomo-chan, you sure know your stuff!

Tomoya: Our projects tend to be named after card games and I was curious, so I did a bit of research.

When I spent time with my relatives during New Year’s, we don’t really have much in common to talk about, so we played games to pass the time. We’d play card games, Hanafuda or Old Buddhist Priest[1]. 

Sora: ? What’s Old Buddhist Priest? Is it a new game Sora doesn’t know about?

Tomoya: It’s Hyakunin Isshu[2]. I can’t memorise the cards at all so Old Buddhist Priest is about the only game I can play with it.

Sora: I see~? Is that normal? Sora has learnt something new from Tomoya-chan~♪

Tomoya: Don’t say “normal”.

Touri: Anyway, should we be playing games without a care in the world like this?

Hinata: All we can do is play games, really. We don’t have anything else to do right now.

Mitsuru: Yeah! There aren’t any lampposts around so we can’t see the road and it doesn’t look like we can take a bus somewhere at this time of night.

It’s play, sleep, eat or take a shower in the shower room on the bus. Those are about our only options, y’know?

Hinata: Oddly enough, the bus being custom modified into a camping car really saved our lives. I’m pretty thankful just to be able to take a shower.

I’ve heard that there’s usually a resting space for the driver on long-distance buses.

There is even a bed and fridge on the bus so that’s convenient.

Although, there isn’t a kitchen or a toilet on it.

Tomoya: Having a bed, shower and also a place to store food is really helpful.

Without those things, we’d basically be surviving in the wild.

Sora: Surviving in the wild sounds pretty fun~ Maybe Sora doesn’t want to try it though. How about surviving on a desert island?

Tomoya: I know what you mean. I bet it’s actually really tough if you were to do it.

After going on such a weird trip, I realised that we’re protected by a lot of things so we’re able to live comfortably.

Hinata: Yeah. Only those who are really happy have the luxury of not thinking about stuff like how idols will survive in the future.

Or not having to worry about stuff like the day’s meals or where to sleep for the night.

Sora: A light purse makes a heavy heart, huh~ Those who are struggling to make ends meet don’t have the luxury to worry about anything else!

Tomoya: Sometimes, you say some serious stuff, huh, Harukawa. On the outside, you look like you have the same character as Mitsuru.

Mitsuru: Whaddya mean, Tomo-chan? I feel like you’re making fun of me, y’know!

Sora: HuHu~♪ Sora is honoured to hear he and Mitsu-chan are similar! Lots of people say Sora is a weird kid who is really different from everyone else, after all!

Hinata: No one’s said that about me before.

Tomoya: Well, yeah. You’re a twin.

← Previous Chapter ᠂ ⚘ ˚⊹˚ ⚘ ᠂  Next Chapter →

[escapetoluna]

How to learn a language when you don’t know where to start:

General Plan:

Weeks 1 and 2: Purpose:

Learn the fundamentals sentence construction

Learn how to spell and count

Start building a phrase stockpile with basic greetings

The Alphabet

Numbers 1 - 100

Subject Pronouns

Common Greetings

Conjugate the Two Most Important Verbs: to be and to have

Basic Definite and Indefinite Articles

Weeks 3 and 4: Purpose:

Learn essential vocabulary for the day-to-day

Start conjugating regular verbs

Days of the Week and Months of the Year

How to tell the time

How to talk about the weather

Family Vocabulary

Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Weeks 5 and 6: Purpose:

Warm up with the last of the day-to-day vocabulary

Add more complex types of sentences to your grammar

Colours

House vocabulary

How to ask questions

Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Forming negatives

Weeks 7 and 8: Purpose:

Learn how to navigate basic situations in a region of your target language country

Finish memorising regular conjugation rules

Food Vocabulary and Ordering at Restaurants

Money and Shopping Phrases

Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Weeks 9 and 10: Purpose:

Start constructing descriptive and more complex sentences

Adjectives

Reflective verbs

Places vocabulary

Weeks 11 and 12: Purpose:

Add more complex descriptions to your sentences with adverbs

Wrap up vocabulary essentials

Adverbs

Parts of the body and medical vocabulary

Tips for Learning a Foreign Language:

Learning Vocabulary:

What vocabulary should I be learning?

There are hundreds of thousands of words in every language, and the large majority of them won’t be immediately relevant to you when you’re starting out.Typically, the most frequent 3000 words make up 90% of the language that a native speaker uses on any given day. Instead try to learn the most useful words in a language, and then expand outwards from there according to your needs and interests.

Choose the words you want/need to learn.

Relate them to what you already know.

Review them until they’ve reached your long-term memory.

Record them so learning is never lost.

Use them in meaningful human conversation and communication.

How should I record the vocabulary?

Learners need to see and/or hear a new word of phrase 6 to 17 times before they really know a piece of vocabulary.

Keep a careful record of new vocabulary.

Record the vocabulary in a way that is helpful to you and will ensure that you will practice the vocabulary, e.g. flashcards.

Vocabulary should be organised so that words are easier to find, e.g. alphabetically or according to topic.

Ideally when noting vocabulary you should write down not only the meaning, but the grammatical class, and example in a sentence, and where needed information about structure.

How should I practice using the vocabulary?

Look, Say, Cover, Write and Check - Use this method for learning and remembering vocabulary. This method is really good for learning spellings.

Make flashcards. Write the vocabulary on the front with the definition and examples on the back.

Draw mind maps or make visual representations of the new vocabulary groups.

Stick labels or post it notes on corresponding objects, e.g when learning kitchen vocabulary you could label items in your house.

How often should I be practising vocabulary?

A valuable technique is ‘the principle of expanding rehearsal’. This means reviewing vocabulary shortly after first learning them then at increasingly longer intervals.

Ideally, words should be reviewed:

5-10 minutes later

24 hours later

One week later

1-2 months later

6 months later

Knowing a vocabulary item well enough to use it productively means knowing:

Its written and spoken forms (spelling and pronunciation).

Its grammatical category and other grammatical information

Related words and word families, e.g. adjective, adverb, verb, noun.

Common collocations (Words that often come before or after it).

Receptive Skills: Listening and Reading

Reading is probably one of the most effective ways of building vocabulary knowledge.

Listening is also important because it occupies a big chunk of the time we spend communicating.

Tips for reading in a foreign language:

Start basic and small.  Children’s books are great practice for beginners. Don’t try to dive into a novel or newspaper too early, since it can be discouraging and time consuming if you have to look up every other word.

Read things you’ve already read in your native language. The fact that you at least know the gist of the story will help you to pick up context clues, learn new vocabulary and grammatical constructions.

Read books with their accompanying audio books. Reading a book while listening to the accompanying audio will improve your “ear training”. It will also help you to learn the pronunciation of words.

Tips for listening in a foreign language:

Watch films in your target language.

Read a book while also listening along to the audio book version.

Listen to the radio in your target language.

Watch videos online in your target language.

Activities to do to show that you’ve understood what you’ve been listening to:

Try drawing a picture of what was said.

Ask yourself some questions about it and try to answer them.

Provide a summary of what was said.

Suggest what might come next in the “story.”

Translate what was said into another language.

“Talk back” to the speaker to engage in imaginary conversation.

Productive Skills: Speaking and Writing

Tips for speaking in a foreign language:

If you can, try to speak the language every day either out loud to yourself or chat to another native speaker whether it is a colleague, a friend, a tutor or a language exchange partner. 

Write a list of topics and think about what you could say about each one. First you could write out your thoughts and then read them out loud. Look up the words you don’t know. You could also come up with questions at the end to ask someone else.

A really good way to improve your own speaking is to listen to how native speakers talk and imitate their accent, their rhythm of speech and tone of voice. Watch how their lips move and pay attention to the stressed sounds. You could watch interviews on YouTube or online news websites and pause every so often to copy what you have just heard. You could even sing along to songs sung in the target language.

Walk around the house and describe what you say. Say what you like or dislike about the room or the furniture or the decor. Talk about what you want to change.This gets you to practise every day vocabulary.

Tips for writing in a foreign language:

Practice writing in your target language. Keep it simple to start with. Beginner vocabulary and grammar concepts are generally very descriptive and concrete.

Practice writing by hand. Here are some things you can write out by hand:

Diary entries

Shopping lists

Reminders

What could I write about?

Write about your day, an interesting event, how you're feeling, or what you're thinking.

Make up a conversation between two people. 

Write a letter to a friend, yourself, or a celebrity. You don't need to send it; just writing it will be helpful.

Translate a text you've written in your native language into your foreign language.

Write a review or a book you've recently read or a film you've recently watched.

Write Facebook statuses, Tweets or Tumblr posts (whether you post them or not will be up to you).

Write a short story or poem.

Writing is one of the hardest things to do well as a non-native speaker of a language, because there’s no room to hide. 

There are lots of ways to improve your writing ability, but they can be essentially boiled down to three key components:

Read a lot

Write a lot

Get your writing corrected

[calamitys-child]

1, 5, 11, 40 (for the writing ask game 💚)

What font do you write in? Do you actually care or is that just the default setting? Verdana my BELOVED sans serif neurodivergence friendly professional pre-installed font for anything I'm submitting anywhere, or atkinson hyperlegible if the writing program I'm using has it installed (gdocs mostly)

5. Do you have any writing superstitions? What are they and why are they 100% true?

Listen. Sometimes the character is in charge of the story and you are just the vessel. Stories Are real and they have Opinions about themselves.

11. Do you believe in the old advice to “kill your darlings?” Are you a ruthless darling assassin? What happens to the darlings you murder? Do you have a darling graveyard? Do you grieve?

I do have a darling graveyard!! For every major WIP I have a document of all the offcuts and bits I liked that I couldnae hang on to. Usually it's just unnecessary exposition but with phrasings I like a lot, or distractions or detours, or in one particular occasion I'm forcing myself to write it as an actual tense slowburn so I have a whole doc marked "[WIP Title] Horny Jail" for that one specifically

40. Please share a poem with me, I need it.

Today's first poem, though cliche, is one that has been in my brain because I halfway memorised it as a kid and now I'm trying to learn all of it as a party trick because I'm a scottish goth and it is SPOOKEY and also because I learned the other day that everyone Outwith the Here does not in fact have this whole thing read aloud annually and in fact may not even have heard it? So it is in fact Tam O'Shanter

[newsom]

hello!!! i'd like to preemptively state that this might be long and/or largely incoherent but i hope you don't mind that much. darklands has been very close to my heart ever since i first read it, so you can imagine the shriek my inside voice let out when i got the update email. i'd been thinking of rereading the whole thing, so, the first free day i had (today), i lined up four or five records and did exactly that. and man… it still hits so hard!!!!! like fuck. wow. i could go ab it for many many words if you let me, but i'll just focus on the most important stuff:

1) chapter nine!!! cHAPTer NINe!!!! i'm yelling!!! god tier stuff, seriously, by which i mean that it has been in my mind, without fail, at least once per week for the past however months. like, obsession level thoughts. it deserves them. the narrative technique is absolutely fitting/engaging/fucking incredible for the pacing and you executed it flawlessly. it's like, the orgasmic cultivation of a epistolary-based story.

2) your use of music! (nothing more needs to be said, other than the fact that EVERY. SINGLE. TIME i listen to wuthering heights i think of the cat (now lola!) my beloved) (also can't listen to the jesus and mary chain album like a normal person anymore)

2) i think another thing that made me routinely come back to darklands, which i came to understand in this second read, are your descriptions, generally, but most specifically of granada. while i've never been (i really want to!!!) i've grown up and live in the mediterrenean and i have to say, wow! like, i know every place is unique, but i'm talking about a specific essence that, of course, is vastly different than the scottish and welsh countryside or the bustling city of london that you often see described in marauders fics. and it appeared so surprisingly familiar to me that it created an dare i say comfortable atmosphere (what comes to mind now is your description of the terracotta stairs and roofs!! like!!! yes that's it!! or like. the stray cats lol) i also appreciate the fact that you describe different parts of the world (spain, los angeles, now wales) with equal degrees of detail and perfection. my little geography/literature lover brain is getting its serotonin :)

3) your writing generally stayed with me the past months (from your other fics too, that i will definitely reread the following days lol) but this one specific line has superglued itself to the front of my brain, and i have it better memorised than most of the poems i consider beloved: "At nineteen they were overripe with desire and spilling over with more love than they knew how to give or take; they poured each other overflowing goblets of the stuff and drank too deeply. Ecstatic, decadent love, laughing and delirious and always sweet." i also remember, but can't locate right now, a line about how summer was overgenerous one year and its rays had spilled into september and it made remus selfish . ouf.

man i needed to let that out. in short; i absolutely love love love darklands, and am always ready to soak up your words. i'll go listen to the playlist now and think about those lovely idiots. cheers!

🥺😢😭😫💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

I hope it’s ok to publish this, I didn’t want it to be lost forever by answering privately bc this is a dream of a comment and I want to be able to read it over and over LOL. thank you so much for taking the time to write, it means so much 💗 really glad you’re enjoying the story!!!

[fairycosmos]

any tips on self-taught spanish? ive been using duolingo for two weeks already and just know some words

hi sorry it took me a moment to get back to this!! ive got a few general tips here. i hope you find at least one of them helpful! btw duolingo is a great place to start - you’re doing amazing 💖

1. try to study daily. this can be REALLY hard sometimes, so by study i literally just mean even getting in five minutes of listening practice or word memorisation every day. if you miss a few days or even weeks, that’s ok too, as long as it doesn’t become an extreme habit. the language is always there for you to come back to. also, look for beginner lessons online as part of your studying. there’s tons on youtube.

2. create a loose study plan. try to alternate through different aspects of the language - like maybe tuesday is your speaking practice day, and friday is your writing practice day etc etc. listen to anything you can in spanish as much as you want, even outside of set study time.

3. talk to yourself in spanish - it’s hard to find ppl to converse with so just talk out loud to yourself as much as you can. name objects in spanish as you use them, stuff like that.

4. consume spanish speaking media as much as possible - music, tv shows, youtube, movies, articles, books, poems. whatever you can get your hands on. it’s obviously completely normal to need subtitles, but it helps you learn the vocabulary, the speaking patterns and the sentence structure subconsciously. i watch a lot of true crime youtubers in spanish lol so find an interest and then pursue it in spanish :)

5. know that total fluency doesn’t have to be the goal. it’s natural to want to succeed and frustration is v common when learning a language - and conversational fluency is absolutely achievable - but it doesn’t have to be the whole point of learning it. ive pretty much accepted that whenever i choose to learn a new language, i will be learning it for the rest of my life. but that doesn’t mean i can’t develop my own understanding of spanish or that i can’t communicate in it, which is really the whole point. rather than sounding like a native speaker, you know?

6. accept making mistakes, not knowing things, and having a hard time pronouncing/ remembering stuff at times. it’s not embarrassing. it’s the only genuine way to learn. spanish is quite different from english and your brain is basically a baby learning how to think and speak all over again. fucking up is more than ok.

7. take a break if you feel start feeling burnt out.

youtube channels that teach spanish and are good for beginners: butterfly spanish, why not spanish, easy spanish.

[flowercrown-bard]

If you take prompts. Jaskier dis reincarnation every time he dies. He borns in his own body, but he doesn't remember about his other lives. He only remembers a horse, a daughter, amber eyes and some parts of a song he wrote about his love.

After Jaskier died in his arms Geralt became a wither again. Who doesn't belive he deserve to be happy.

After a long time Geralt and Jaskier's paths cross again. Jaskier remembers the every bit of the song.

Dear nonny, can I just say how much I love this prompt? <3 I know I've taken far too long to write anything for it, but I got so excited that I had to write a multi-chapter fic for this (I hope that's ok. I know it's not really normal to write more than a one shot for prompts. If you're comfortable telling me your URL I could tag you on the next update or you could subscribe to the fic on AO3? Sorry for making this complicated.) Also, I changed it a bit, to make it so Jaskier will get his memories back, when their eyes meet again.

And I just need to tell you about my favourite fic of all time: if I'm good will you come back by @pansexualbuchanan. Based on your prompt I think you'd really like that story.

--

A new us will begin (1/ 11)

word count: 1k

tw: major character death (old age)

AO3 part 2 / part 3   / part 4 /  part 5  / part 6

Dol Blathanna was beautiful in spring. Jaskier had written countless of poems about the blossoms and the beginning of a new life as an adventurer that this place had given him.

Geralt had all of them memorised. Every verse, every line, every word. He hadn’t wanted to, it was just something that had happened as the years had turned into decades and Jaskier’s hands had gotten too shaky to write his verses on his own anymore. He had started dictating them to Geralt who had done his best to do Jaskier’s words justice with his spidery handwriting.

He had always known that this was where Jaskier would want to go when the time came. In the very same place where his new life as the travel companion, friend and lover of the White Wolf had begun, he would draw his last breath.

Geralt had known – and yet nothing could have prepared him for the terror that clawed at his chest as he now sat amidst the flowers with his husband.

He hoped Jaskier could at least still see the colours of the flowers. He hoped he could still notice the dandelions around them and make a wish, despite not having enough breath left to make the seeds fly off like birds. He hoped he could still see Geralt and recognise his touch as comforting. But it was impossible to discern whether the crinkles around Jaskier’s eyes were laugh lines or wrinkles painted onto his skin by time.

Gently, Geralt caressed those wrinkles. He had come to love them and even though he wanted to hate them with his entire being, he couldn’t. Even this sign that Jaskier’s time was up, was still a part of Jaskier and there would never be any part of him that Geralt would be unable to love.

Geralt had wanted to protect him. From the very beginning, from the moment Jaskier had followed him to the elves, Geralt had known that he wouldn’t always be able to, but he had never stopped trying. For a lifetime, he had protected Jaskier from people whose ire Jaskier had provoked. From monsters and enemy soldiers. He had sat by his side in sickness and caressed his brow while a healer he had called made sure Jaskier would not embrace death just yet.

But this, time, was the one enemy Geralt couldn’t protect him from. Death had come to claim Jaskier at last and there was nothing for Geralt to plunge his sword into to keep it away from Jaskier.

There was nothing. No saving Jaskier. There was only one thing he could do for him.

The very same thing that Jaskier had done so many times to protect Geralt. When people had hurled stones and insults at Geralt, Jaskier had composed a song to sway their opinion. When coin had been sparse and Geralt could afford neither food nor shelter, Jaskier had sung for their coin. And when Geralt had lain awake at night, haunted by images of pain, fear and hatred, Jaskier had softly sung a lullaby to him.

It had been Jaskier’s gift to him and now it was time that Geralt gave it back.

Years ago, when Jaskier’s mind had still been clear enough to form such thoughts, he had described his life as an old man as being half-asleep, not knowing how much of his being was awake, what parts were walking through a dream and what parts were imprisoned in a nightmare.

Back then, Geralt hadn’t understood. It hadn’t taken long for him to learn exactly what Jaskier had meant. The life they had led had always seemed like a dream to Geralt, something too good to be true, something he would surely wake up from one day to find it gone.

Seeing it disappear right in front of him wasn’t like waking up. It was like a dream slowly turning into a nightmare until there was nothing left but the ache in his chest when Jaskier saw right through him and the fear of losing him to a different kind of sleep, one he wouldn’t wake up from.

Geralt hoped it would be a peaceful sleep once Jaskier drifted off, but now his face still twisted into a grimace at each movement that made him ache and his mind still wasn’t kind to him.

So Geralt did all he could to soothe Jaskier during this nightmare.

His lullaby sounded wrong on Geralt’s lips. Even if he had known how to sing, his voice cracked and his throat was tight with tears Geralt didn’t know how to shed.

His fingers caressed Jaskier’s paper-thin skin and wove through his grey hair. All the while, Jaskier’s eyes didn’t leave Geralt and his heart beat in rhythm with the song.

The hint of a smile danced across Jaskier’s lips, even as his eyes fell shut.

The beat of the song stopped and Geralt’s voice broke off mid-song.

“Jaskier?”

There was no answer. There never would be an answer again. No more banter, no more laughter, no more songs would ever leave Jaskier’s lips.

“Jaskier, look at me!”

He didn’t. His eyes didn’t open, never would again. No more would they look upon flowers, on sunrises, on Geralt.

“Jaskier!” Geralt’s cry was broken. As was he. As was the life Jaskier had made him believe he could have.

“No, no, no, don’t go! I can’t lose you. Don’t make me lose you!” Geralt cradled Jaskier’s body close, pressing his face into the crook of his neck, pressing his chest against Jaskier’s. Jaskier’s breath should have ghosted over Geralt’s skin, but there was nothing. It was too late. He was gone. “No, Jaskier, look at me. Please, let me see your eyes, just one last time. Come back to me, please.”

The last word was whispered, carried off with the dandelion seeds dancing off in the wind.

It was only a figment of Geralt’s cruel mind, but for a brief, beautiful moment, he almost thought he heard a voice in the wind. Birds singing and bees humming in tune to the unfinished lullaby.

Geralt’s grip on Jaskier tightened and his shoulders shook. It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.

Geralt was a witcher. He should have been able to save Jaskier. He should have done something to stop this.

Jaskier had told him that he could have happiness, that his story didn’t have to end in blood and agony.

But Geralt was a witcher and Jaskier had always been a dreamer. Witchers didn’t get to keep their happiness and dreamers had to wake up at some point.

Jaskier would never wake up again.

Geralt moved without feeling a thing as he dug the grave. Witchers didn’t feel. They hurt and they killed and they shouldn’t let themselves dream for what they couldn’t have.

As he buried Jaskier, so did he put the dreams Jaskier had brought to life in the ground.

He left Dol Blathanna without a song accompanying him. He left it alone, with a new scar that he knew would never heal and not feeling a single thing.

Jaskier had left Geralt smiling, as a dreamer.

Geralt left Jaskier as a witcher.

[jawnkeets]

probably a strange question but: how did you develop your style when it comes to poetry? I really appreciate how you write and how it's vague and specific at the same time? don't know how to express what I mean exactly, but it's like phrases that you feel more than you really understand them sometimes, and that don't look like they should make sense at a glance but when you really read them they do. maybe you'll know what quality I mean 🙈 I feel like I'm way too literal when I write and I want to be a little more abstract in a say less, convey more kind of a way?

hey anon, thank you! not a strange question at all - it’s actually a very good question, and one that i was asking until recently as well (and to be honest am still asking!). i totally know what you mean.

i guess the shortest answer i can give you is that i think ‘poetic feeling’ is best felt full-on, but expressed to the side. it’s also something that genuinely does get easier the more you try to do it, i.e., is a skill that can be sharpened; to start with, everything feels like nonsense, or not quite right, and i felt like a bit of a fake initially, but as i did it more and more i had more and more tiny breakthroughs and gained confidence (which is a genuinely such a large part of any creative endeavour), and this can happen surprisingly fast and snowball; i switched up my style in maybe 1-3 months, just trying a little bit - maybe 15 lines - every couple of days or so. and i didn’t put pressure on myself, deciding if i hated it i’d delete it and reminding myself that no one had to see. i find writing short poems also really helps with practising: they can help you focus more intensely on each choice.

it’s also not a solo thing, or at least doesn’t have to be - i use random word generators, to different degrees depending on the poem, and also it’s surprising how much even just picking words off wikipedia can help, especially with themed poetry. recently i wrote a poem about the medieval period, and threw in words that came to me with terms from wiki pages about the medieval period (history, art, medicine, etc), to make noun phrases like ‘kaleidoscopic altar vision noise’, ‘law texture’, etc etc. the thing that’s helped me most, though, is reading other poems which i think have this quality, which tends especially to be image-heavy poetry: will stone’s translation of trakl completely changed the direction of my poetry, and lorca, rilke and seferis have also been invaluable. i also find authors that do weird things with syntax interesting, like e. e. cummings and j. h. prynne, but don’t go quite as far as them. i have a list of favourite poems which might help, and which i re-read regularly ❤️

something else i enjoy doing is practising reading and misremembering, which sounds like cheating but is actually an excellent way of generating new material. i remember reading (i think it’s this article) alexandra cook’s 'creative memory and visual image in chaucer’s house of fame' and it was a breakthrough for me. from memory (ironic - wish i still had access so i could properly quote from it/check stuff) it talked about how one dimension to medieval creativity was misremembering - that new ideas and originality came from the gap between what the work actually was and how another writer remembered it. trying to deliberately misremember is a lot of fun; a poem is then borne out of an interesting intersection of skill and contingency, which gives it an energy, i think.

on a kind of separate but related note, the classical ars memoriae, or ‘art of memory’, might be quite an interesting thing to play with in relation to writing poetry. what it is, for anyone that’s not familiar with it, is basically the notion that the way to remember things is by having some kind of system in your head - like spatialising the material (so you think about the room you first encountered it in and all the details to help you better remember it), imagining it in a sequence, breaking it up into sets - there are absolutely loads of ways. if this seems weird or alien, we still use mind maps all the time, which is a great example! to deliberately twist, literalise and tbh actually invert the art of memory stuff (i know this is a bit abstract eek), i’ve been thinking recently that it might be fun to distort ideas (themes, an image you like, a line you like) by running them through various ancient memory systems, because i think medieval thought had a point that these systems subtly distort things even as and precisely because their function is get us to remember them accurately (paradoxically, we bend them to our chosen way of thinking/remembering stuff, which alters the material). using ways of memorising we wouldn’t normally use, and forcing them to interact with material much more literally, can yield quite interesting results. in any case, it introduces different ‘head spaces’ which can be quite useful to take in a very loose way when trying to ‘think to the side’: here’s a starting list. to give quite a crude and simplified example, let’s say i’m obsessed with homer’s wine dark sea and want to write something based on it, but also different and original. what if i try to think of ‘wine dark sea’ as sequential (thinking of material in a sequence being one way of remembering things listed on the above wikipedia link)? i’m honestly not sure what that means, and i can’t envision that. it doesn’t even make sense, and is a deliberate perversion of what memorising things in a sequence would actually look like - ‘wine dark sea’ would be one chain in a sequence if the sequence was, e.g., ‘favourite quotes’. ‘wine dark sea’ itself can’t be a sequence; this would turn ‘wine dark sea’ into something logical, mathematical even. but then the phrase ‘mathematical wine dark sea’ is interesting and unexpected. and you can then play with that or variations of it - ‘wine sea: dark, mathematical’ would make a great opening line, and ‘wine sea mathematics’ and ‘wine dark mathematics’ are really interesting phrases (you know actually i quite like this - might go and write a poem about it now... lol).

that last bit is very speculative and i’m kind of thinking out loud, so feel free to ignore haha. i wrote a post on writing poetry a couple of years ago, too, which might have a couple of useful tidbits. i hope some of this is helpful!!

[addoration]

Top 5 poems/quotes?

anon, good question! i'll do quotes and then poems because I have time to spare :) I'll even give commentary! because im really bored lol

under a read more bc this got long!

send me "top 5 or top 10 x" for me to answer!

QUOTES:

1. "the stars are alive, child! did you know that? everything out there is alive, and there are grand purposes abroad! the universe is full of intentions, you know!" - northern lights, philip pullman (his dark materials trilogy)

I love the idea that "the stars are alive" and that the "universe is full of intentions"! it makes me feel like things that happen are 'meant to be' in some way, and that the stars are looking out for me, in some distant way. its Romantic (capital R), for sure, but it comforts me.

2. "And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you...We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pin trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams...And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won't just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight..." - the amber spyglass, philip pullman (his dark materials)

god, show me a more romantic quote and you'll make a fool out of me. this is genuinely peak romance for me. when I was will and lyra's age, I thought this was monumental - now that im older, I find myself not shipping them as much, BUT this remains the peak of romance for me.

3. "all art is quite useless." - the preface to the picture of dorian gray, oscar wilde

I mean. as an artist myself, especially one who spent many of my teenage years (and even still spend time now, as an adult) debating with myself what art truly IS, this is a fantastic little summary for me. all art is quite useless. both incredibly true and so utterly false that it is laughable!

4. "everyone is as beautiful as they can possibly be," - restaurant, poem by harold pinter

this is a beautiful poem but it's not one of my top 5, however I adore this line to the moon and back. yes! everyone is as beautiful as they can possibly be! especially in a laughing restaurant, as the poem says! it has been the basis of one of my own poems and I owe it a lot.

5. [...] "men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight." - ways of seeing, john berger

okay I just want to take a minute to say how INFLUENTIAL ways of seeing has been for me. truly some stunning, stunning commentary on art. and to think it was written/produced in the 1970s! very contemporary, I feel; it has aged well. this quote I don't love, particularly, but I do find it very interesting.

POEMS:

my favourite poems are always changing but here's some of my most beloved!

1. the black and white - harold pinter

unfortunately I cannot find this prose poem online (it was later turned into a play, but I like the poem, not the play version). however it is essentially about a lady who enjoys going to a cafe called the black and white and what she orders, sometimes seeing her friend, what bus she takes, etc. it's so humanistic? and it heavily inspired my first published poem!

2. daylight - harold pinter

another pinter poem, I know, he's not even a poet primarily! but this poem has one of my favourite lines in all of the poetry I've read: "scarred by this daylight you lie petalstruck." it's so delicate. its the "scars" of light, its the made-up word "petalstruck" - I just adore it. simple adoration. I can't get enough. in fact, it's my blog title!

3. three cheers for pooh - a.a milne

weird addition, perhaps, but this was the first poem I ever memorised! I loved it so much as a child (and I adored the story that went along with it, too) that it's always just stuck with me. sometimes I sing it absently. also fuck Disney's pooh bear, I like the original stuff!

4. the duino elegies - rainer maria rilke

I just think these have such a contemporary voice, yknow? also, "every angel is terrifying" literally lives rent free in my head. every angel is fucking terrifying. yeah. this, too, has informed much of my own poetry!

5. into the breach - ocean vuong

okay in all fairness its been a while since I picked up night sky with exit wounds BUT I remember this poem being one of my favourites from the whole collection. the use of language in such an innovative way! its inspiring, I genuinely have said "I want to write like this" aloud while reading it. eagerly anticipating his new poetry collection (have preordered it!)

okay! that's all I believe! thank you for the ask, I hope this wasn't more than you bargained for! this was fun!

[hteragram-x]

Heart-warming HCs about Roman being helpful...

... because we all need them in these trying times (by “trying times” I mean the fandom after SVSr, not the pandemic)

... ... ...

1. When Thomas was a kid and he felt sad Roman would notice that Patton is not doing great and distract him with weird stories and magic tricks. He would make the rainbow-coloured light come out of his hands or make the origami come to life. It didn’t solve the problems, but it certainly made dealing with them easier. (Now it doesn’t work as well as it used to, but Roman still tries to do that from time to time.)

2. When Thomas had problems with learning something new or memorising a lot of facts Roman would help Logan by coming up with the weirdest, abstract connections between different things so they would stay in Thomas’ brain for longer. He also wrote short poems and jokes that would be easier to memorise than a long list of names or dates.

3. When Thomas felt scared or lonely Roman would let his thoughts wander through the most wonderful and sunny parts of his imagination to distract him and give him more courage to deal with the overwhelming reality.

4. Every time Thomas had to do something that required a lot of confidence and high self-esteem Roman would try to encourage him by listing everything positive about his character. He would also try to imagine all the scenarios in which Thomas achieves his goal to make him more sure about chasing his dreams.

5. When Logan was helping Thomas with writing his papers using proper grammar, spelling, and correct structure of the text Roman would occasionally pop up and give him an idea for a metaphor or a more colourful synonym/phrase. He would then reread and edit even the most boring essay to make it more smooth and readable.

6. Whenever Patton tried to push Thomas in the morally right direction despite everyone telling him that it’s not worth his effort Roman would either encourage more brave and honourable choice or make Patton feel better if Thomas picked a morally questionable/wrong action.

7. On many, many occasions Roman helped Deceit come up with perfect lies. He probably wouldn’t be happy knowing about some of them, but there were plenty of situations when Thomas had to lie for his own safety e.g., so Roman’s creativity really came in handy. Therefore, Janus appreciates his contributions despite their disagreements. (This hc is also supported by the beginning of SVS or the entire CLBG plot with Roman creating new acts of the play based on different lies. Janus mostly encourages dishonesty instead of creating lies himself.)

8. There were times when Remus had almost no effect on Thomas’ thoughts, but he was still full of creative force and wanted to see his ideas translated into actual art. So Roman, not wanting to see his brother being completely rejected, sometimes took Remus’ concepts and gave them to Thomas in a more tame version. It felt a lot like stealing (despite Remus' consent), because he was getting all the credit, but hearing Thomas make obnoxious jokes and innuendos in videos made Remus happier, so Roman had to deal with the guilt.

9. Roman would sometimes ask other sides for help just so they felt useful. He didn’t really need a synonym for his latest short story, but Logan liked to list every word that would fit in certain context. He also didn’t need that many details about the history of sailing, but Logan gladly explained everything when prompted. He would ask Patton for supportive hugs so he feels appreciated and needed as well. Lately he also started visiting Remus to listen about his brother’s creative contributions and to hear his opinions about what he himself recently came up with.

10. Roman may not know it, but the sides were initially very dedicated to their functions spending every minute alert and focused on Thomas. Roman was the only one who knew how to have fun and have his own hobbies. It took some time, but at one point the other sides noticed that Thomas doesn’t need every single one of them at every second and they can actually relax. They more or less consciously started observing how Roman spends his time outside his “work” and soon enough Logan started reading more books on his own, Remus came up with many new songs, and Janus realized that self-preservation is not only about escaping the things that hurt you, but also keeping your body and mind in good condition when everything is alright.

...

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If you want more HCs featuring supportive Creativitwins I wrote some about Remus [HERE] and [HERE].

Feel free to tag your local Roman stan, so we can all feel a little bit better about the sad creative boy after all this angst.

And have a smiling handsome boy as a bonus.

[potteresque-ire]

Is Cho Chang a Racist Stereotype? - [2] Her House

Another very long post (this time Confucius comes to say hello). My thoughts are under the cut.

Once again, this isn’t a JKR discussion. This is my 2nd post on whether I think it’s fair to call Cho Chang a racist stereotype. The 1st one is here.

My short answer is still no.

Another critique I’ve seen of Cho Chang’s portrayal is that she was a Ravenclaw, which fit into the “smart Asian” stereotype.

But what, exactly, is “Ravenclaw smart” and “Asian smart”? I think it’s worth investigating. Intelligence comes in many forms, and the allegation would only be valid if the two kinds of “smart” are equivalent.

Here’s what the books and JKR, via Pottermore, have said about “Ravenclaw smart”:

“if you've a ready mind, Where those of wit and learning, Will always find their kind;”

“Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.”

“…our people are the most individual – some might even call them eccentrics. But geniuses are often out of step with ordinary folk…” 

"Most of the greatest wizarding inventors and innovators were in our house…”

The day-to-day illustration of “Ravenclaw smart” was the answering of riddles to enter the common room. A good answer was “well-reasoned”, and it was known that the door would refuse to open until such an answer was provided, which sometimes led to long discussions outside the common room by the locked-out students. Another manifestation of “Ravenclaw smart” was described as going “full-nerd” on a subject that wasn’t necessarily practical or popular (ovomancy was the example given on Pottermore).

Since “wit” was such a heavily used word in Ravenclaw’s description, I looked up its definition as well.

* Intelligence and the ability to think quickly (Cambridge dictionary) * Mental sharpness and inventiveness; keen intelligence; a natural aptitude for using words and ideas in a quick and inventive way to create humour (Google) * The ability to relate seemingly disparate things so as to illuminate or amuse (Merriam Webster) * Wit is the ability to use words or ideas in an amusing, clever, and imaginative way. (Collins)

My understanding of “Ravenclaw smart” from this info is: the ability to connect dots freely and nimbly. Social norms and expectations are noted, but happily disregarded if they get in the way. “Ravenclaw smart” is by nature argumentative and open-ended. It expects the dot-connecting to lead to places, but doesn’t have a specific place in mind; all endpoints are valid and welcomed as long as they’re logically sound. The strength of “Ravenclaw smart” is it leads to revolutionary innovations; its tendency to unbridle itself from social needs and expectations, however, can lead to amoral/immoral behaviour (Lockhart). The wisdom from “Ravenclaw smart” is also in danger of being ignored or misunderstood when its owner makes insufficient effort to make it comprehensible, or accessible to others (Luna, and likely, Rowena Ravenclaw.)

Those who’ve studied under an East Asian education system (especially in the 90s), or those who’re familiar with those systems, probably know by now where this discussion is leading to.

“Ravenclaw smart” isn’t “Asian smart”. It’s … about the opposite of Asian smart.

What is “Asian smart”? Outside this discussion, any kind of intelligence. But here, I’ll restrict it to the kind of smartness that leads to the racist allegation, the kind of Westerners typically associate with East Asian students (such as Cho Chang, who, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll assume is Chinese from this point on; however, the arguments will likely still stand if she was, for example, Korean, for reasons that will be clear later on). The kind of smartness that is good at math, that gets the highest scores in exams and seems to understand everything. Never asks questions, never makes trouble.

"Asian smart” sounds great. But what if I suggest the following “dark sides” to it?

1) Good at math: with practice, lower level maths are likely to require the least reasoning among school subjects, with their unambiguous, close-ended answers. A child who has done 7x9 enough times no longer need to calculate or think through the logic of their answer. They write down what they’ve memorised by repetition — 63 — and get full score.

2) High scorer: does everything as told. Prioritise the wishes of authority (teachers, parents) above everything else.

3) Seems to understand everything, never asks questions: views knowledge as “model answers” to be regurgitated in exams. Whether it makes sense doesn’t matter.

These are very cynical takes, aren’t they? I’ve cast in these students in a very negative light.

But what if this negative light isn’t negative at all if these students have stayed in the land of their ancestors? What if these “cynical takes” were considered virtues for the budding Chinese scholars of old?

What if “Asian smart” is purely a consequence of history and culture?

First of all, if you ask “Asian smart” students and they’re honest with you, most would tell you that their smartness isn’t the product of miracles or extra brain juice. Some would say it’s not even intelligence. It is the direct result of extra hours spent at the desk.

What is their motivation? Are Chinese children simply born to be extra hardworking?

Perhaps it’s their so-called “tiger moms”? If then, are Chinese moms born more … feline?

The answers, as you may expect, are no, Chinese aren’t born any different from other races. Their drive to study can largely be explained by an ancient, nation-wide exam system known as the imperial examination system (Ke-Ju, 科舉), plus a dude with a name of Confucius.

Many are aware that Chinese have long considered scholastic aptitude as important. But how long is long? The answer: 1.4 millennia. The imperial examination system, or Ke-Ju, began in 605 AD and while the system had evolved over time, the gist of it was this: students participated in locals exams and the “winners” moved up to the county, then provincial levels etc, until the students who’d won all previous exams sat for the final one in the capital palace, at times proctored by the Emperor, where the grand winners would be decided. The Ke-Ju system was essential in shaping Chinese’s attitude towards academic achievements, because the final top 3 winners, regardless of birth, would be hired by the Imperial Court (+ in some cases, get to marry a princess!).

Ancient Chinese studied and studied and studied for that reason; Ke-Ju was one of the very few social ladders available to commoners, who mostly lived in poverty. The Chinese folklore-scape has therefore been filled with “inspirational” stories about how people overcame exceptionally challenging studying conditions (like this one) to become successful in some way.

How, exactly, does Ke-Ju shape the traditional Chinese view towards studying and education?

1) Historically, Chinese views studying as a means to a better life. The pursuit of knowledge was secondary. The modern analogy to studying hard in ancient China is working three part-time jobs to pay the mortgage for a house, and there is, in fact, a famous Chinese idiom that reflects this: 書中自有黃金屋 (“In the books, there is a golden house”). According to the poem (勸學詩) where the idiom came from (written by an Emperor, by the way: 宋真宗, ~ 1000 BCE), other things found in books included high wages paid in food, beauties, chariots and horses. All practical stuff.

2) Because of 1), getting high scores, or “winning” the exams, was seen as the paramount goal of studying. Far less emphasis was put on understanding the exam material. The teachers of ancient Chinese schools (私塾) were known for doing little explaining; instead, they made recite passages and expected them to figure out the meanings by themselves later. The attitude that scores are everything was further fuelled by the fact that the Emperor had the final say on the result of Ke-Ju — the Emperor who’d most probably claimed the throne by genetics and was not always the most intelligent or knowledgable. While the ability to formulate well-researched and well-reasoned answers helped tremendously, the most important skill for the final Ke-Ju winner was, therefore, the ability to guess what the Emperor wanted to hear, and sometimes, what they wanted to see (there were instances where the Emperor swapped the rankings because they found the original victor too ugly).  

ie. The most important skill was to know the Emperor’s Answer, and to be able to frame it as the winner’s own perspective even if the winner didn’t, in reality, believe in a single word of it.

3) The tradition of having an “Emperor’s Answer” means its modern equivalent, having an “one and only” model answer, have remained the norm in education systems in many Chinese-speaking communities. Many educators have asked for reforms, argued that model answers discourage independent thinking and creativity, but teachers have also been trained on model answers and they’re often unsure of their own opinions, and at times, fearful that they’ll pass on a “wrong” perspective to their students. The latter is especially true in places under authoritarian rule, where school lessons must follow closely the regime’s propaganda (which can be vastly different from year to year).

You may wonder then: but certainly, the students would revolt. How could children learn in such a stifling environment for so long?

This is where Confucius (孔丘, 551-478 BC) comes in. The education system is only a slice of a culture where authority is not to be questioned, where silence is seen as a virtue even among the youngest of children.

Many may know Confucius to be a philosopher, but he was also a political advisor and not a very popular one. I’ve half-jokingly summed up his slogan as “Make China Great Again”, as he lamented his era for having lost the social etiquette and order of several centuries before, and he was set on bringing them back. He researched on rites and rituals that were already old for his time, postulating that every detail of how people behaved around each other would affect social harmony. Social order, he believed, could be achieved by people respecting and obeying their elders, not only in their thoughts but also in their day-to-day behaviour, which was to be bound with a set of intricate rules that dictated their word choices, actions and even postures according to the situation and kinship between the interacting individuals (a fun video here showing a Confucian rite, including the sheer variety of Confucian bows). The elders would, in return, take care of those with less authority than they had, share with them their wisdom.

Confucius also believed that harmony of the world could be achieved by self-discipline from the base level of the society to the top. In this “discipline pyramid”, individuals sat at the bottom. The discipline of families came above it, in which elder generations of each family reined in the rebellious younger ones, made each family a true unit where its members were unified in thoughts and actions. The nation (government) then exerted its authority on families and cured their conflicts — to drive this point home, the term 父母官 has remained in use in China today, which likens the government officials (官) to parents (父母) and constituents to children who should listen to their parents (imagine someone likening Boris Johnson, or Donald Trump, as your father). Finally, the world, with the Emperor as its ruler, smothers the insurgences among nations to achieve the ultimate order and harmony. (修身、齊家、治國、平天下).

Confucius did put a big asterisk in his theory. For this “discipline pyramid” to work, the asterisk said, the Emperor who’d establish the final world order must be a good one. The problem was: most Emperors thought they were pretty good. Confucius’ philosophy appealed to them because the Emperor sat at the pinnacle of this power structure, and as each level ruled over the one below, the lowest level — the individual commoners — had so many constraints piled on them that their individuality was stripped. This made governing much easier.

And so, while Confucius’ political theories were not particularly popular during his lifetime, Confucianism became the official school of philosophy for Chinese imperial courts after ~100 BC. China’s immense power in the ancient world meant Confucianism also became the prominent school of philosophy in its sphere of influence, which included, among others, the modern nations of Japan, S. Korea and Vietnam, all of which also held their own versions of Ke-Ju.

(Hence, this post would very likely remain valid if Cho Chang was Korean.)

In addition to locating talents among commoners, the Ke-Ju system further cemented Confucianism as the “proper” school of thought because it required the students to learn Confucian texts. These students, who would also become disseminators of knowledge outside the Imperial Court, would bring Confucianism to the commoners who’d practise it as well, as a display of cultured upbringing, in the hopes that their descendants would one day know it well enough to enter the Imperial Court. The discipline pyramid soon infiltrated every aspect of Chinese culture, and Confucianism became Imperial China’s tool for reinforcing social hierarchy and a social stabilizer. It remained revered in all levels of the Chinese society until, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the Red Guards, with the blessings of Mao Ze-Dong, made an all out-attack on Confucian values and while remnants of them have survived in China’s social fabric, they’re largely in tatters (As a result, the best places to observe the legacy of Confucianism nowadays are in Japan, S. Korea and Taiwan.)

Back to the “Asian smart”. “Asian smart” was an impression built from students who were (children of) recent immigrants from Confucianism-influenced communities. Students who’d been educated in the tradition of those who’d sat in the ancient schools, their backs ramrod straight and spoken only when called, their mouths opening only to satisfy the teachers’ requests because teachers were the authority in the classroom and never to be questioned. Students who’d expected an Emperor’s Answer to every exam question, the answer that was, always, the final word. Students who’d studied hard because golden houses could be found in the books.

This “Asian smart” is as different as can be from “Ravenclaw smart”. Asian smart is quiet and unquestioning, while Ravenclaw smart challenges and argues. Asian smart views knowledge as a servant of society, while Ravenclaw smart sees knowledge, and the pursuit thereof, as lording over social expectations. Asian smart is about reinforcing social order while Ravenclaw smart is about breaking the mould. Asian smart has groomed the establishment for over a thousand years while Ravenclaw smart has nurtured eccentrics.

Of note, this disparity between the two “smarts” doesn’t mean one is superior to another. Our current pandemic has made a case for Confucian collectivism; individuals in E. Asian countries have shown themselves to be more willing to sacrifice personal freedoms and aesthetics for the sake of their communities, more comfortable at obeying new rules despite the questions of their need have yet be answered satisfactorily by science, and the benefits of these attitudes have been reflected in the case and death counts. The pandemic has also reminded us of the importance of knowledge that serves society (for example, epidemiological research, vaccine development, contact tracing), even if it’s not always the most exciting. Healthcare is a discipline that requires a “no ifs and buts, no matter how well-reasoned” attitude towards certain rules (how to put on and remove PPEs, for example).

Anyway, I digressed! The conclusion I have, after so many words, is this: Cho Chang being assigned Ravenclaw isn’t racist stereotyping, as some have alleged. I can appreciate where the allegation comes from. The common association with intelligence aside, many sorting tests have also tied academic achievements to Ravenclaw, even though Ravenclaws were never described as book smart in the series. But the allegation doesn’t hold up well after an investigation into the way Ravenclaw House was written, and the kind of smartness Cho Chang was expected to have if it was, indeed, race-based.

It doesn’t mean, I’d like to note, that some Asians aren’t being unfairly judged because parts of our society still hold the false impression that our racial group are somehow born to excel in academics or any work where maths are involved. I understand—I truly do—the frustrations of having one’s accomplishments belittled, attributed to a quirk in the DNA that doesn’t exist. I’ve, too, had to certify that my Mom is 100% human, free of the tiger too many times.

But the HP books cannot be blamed for that, and the longer the blame is placed on something that doesn’t deserve it, the longer the focus, and effort is shifted away from the actual problem and its potential solutions. The time and words spent on such “call-outs” can be better spent, I believe, by explaining how the misconception of “smart Asians” can affect real people like you and me.

And like Cho Chang, perhaps, if we love to think about the HP world. If her classmates wondered why she wasn’t the top of her class for her year, why she wasn’t famously book-smart like Hermione Granger to win them some house points. Why did she sign up for Quidditch? Why would any Asian, never mind a tiny, fragile E. Asian girl like her, even think about touching sports? Shouldn’t she be studying? Learning advanced arithmancy even though their OWLS were still a year away?

And Cho would come back to the common room hours later, flushed with sweat and smiling, and announced that she’d made seeker.

[auroraemoon]

How to Nurture the Fledgling Aesthetic-Vintage Soul in you:

(** I am continually adding to this list **)

1. Explore secondhand bookstores for old, pretty editions of novels you may or may not have heard of.

2. Light candles in your bedroom/bathroom, and read by candlelight.

3. Write during a thunderstorm, and why not make it extravagant, even a little flowery, and if it is poetry, scribble it on parchment.

4. Dress in turtlenecks, plaid coats, and occasional bright socks (but keep the socks hidden-yes, be a mystery, in real life and on social media).

5. Go on, make yourself tea in pretty teacups (you can find plenty in secondhand stores!)6. Listen to classical and/or mediaeval music (with a lute and possibly a hurdy-gurdy) as you sleep/read/study.

7. Button up shirts are a must (and if they have a high collar, all the better.)

8. Stay late at a university library studying topics that no one else would. Delve into the realm of philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, poetry—broadening ones mind is never to be frowned upon.

9. Avoid the pretension and arrogance that can often accompany academia — it hurts no one to be kind, gracious, mindful, and humble.

10. Elegance and confidence walk hand-in-hand, and if mingled with the right amount of nonchalance, mystery, and whimsey, then you are halfway to wherever you want to go.

11. Certainly, you can debate metaphysical theories, spiritual oddities, theological conundrums. Be kind though.

12. One day go and pick wild flowers and sketch leaves as the honeyed glow of the sun kisses their tender skin—memorise all the colours of the forest.

13. Watch dawn arrive, tis the colour of a dark purple-red wine, a starless sky, adore her quiet arrival—give thanks.

14. I know you just want to wander a thorn-covered castle by candlelight, write a letter as a storm thunders outside, and drink red wine as you read poetry by a crackling fire. If you can, why not.

15. Sometimes you might need to be coy or charming - it can all add to the mystery.

16. Remember how you craved knowledge when you were young, you once dreamed of adventures, of 'slaying dragons', of mystery, of overcoming mortal peril.

17. Buy an expensive journal and write in it the things that set your soul alight, all those existential suspicions that there is something more waiting out there for you to find it; all those spiritual questions you would dare not ask anyone.

18. Yes, the nights are marvelous. The full moon, with her burning white embers and the gathering of her velvet darkness. This also is to be a place of contemplative beauty.

19. That awkward smile you give your friends, yeah, I know, they don't really understand you, do they. Big libraries, big forest, big ideas, big dreams, big words and messy handwriting that tries to capture some of it alive.

20. "Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most." - F. Dostoevsky. You may not have been this way before, have no fear...the angels are cheering you onward.

21. One of the skills you have is called daydreaming. From that psychotic state all good things flow.

22. Read some gothic literature, by candlelight.

23. The sound of wind and rain is calling you to leave your warm and cozy inside, and venture out into the wild and dark—and even there lies a metaphor for a light shining in a dark place.

24. On earth we are briefly gorgeous. Literature, ancient and modern, reveals it so like no other—surround yourself with books and words and poetry, all the fierce passions of the world bound in ink and vellum. They are eternal conversations with anguish and desire.

25. You long for the gentle strokes of your pen hitting the page as imaginations subtle hues rush through your mind. Your heart swells at the library of ideas now outlined in the mists, a bonfire of words, skyward ember fly , flickering thoughts on seraphim wings at the final push - and look at you - you've written a single sentence, you've conquered an Everest.

26. Delicate fairy lights wind their way along your bookshelves, an enchanting bouquet of light to draw your eyes to a thousand ideas.

27. In the morning you're still tying your shoelaces, it is a ritual, an act of faith, you often ask yourself: "Where are you even going?"

29. You like fonts, late nights you are sprawled in front of two monitors researching the aesthetic qualities of the dips and curves in a modified serif. 

30. You are a combination of dark and light, a rain stained window, a poem tapping out some internal crisis—the vintage soul finds solace here among the soul's quieter, more desperate hymns.

31. Reading books in the shade of trees with the melody of a harp in the distance would be exquisite. The keeper of the flame lingers in such moments.

32.  Perhaps you would like to go on little night picnics—bring fairy lights, imaginations, dreams, stories. The moon would love to hear your conversations, and she might just come down and tell you a story or two (Moon is like that).

33. Every day I wonder why I'm not living in a dark castle with secret passageways and rooms filled with books. Finance is one issue, howbeit a small one #sigh 

34. "Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world." - Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden. But you already knew that, didn't you.

35. You're upset, I understand. You cannot go to sleep and wake up fluent in Latin, Elvish, or with an Irish accent.

36. Freshly baked lavender and lemon cake are necessary at times.

37. Folklore, legends, mysteries, secret poetry hidden behind castle stones, quiet on the outside, but filled with enough seismic activity that you might just create a new planet, complex theories about many things that never come out quite right, renaissance murals line the walls of your soul, spilling your deepest secrets to a bird at your windowsill. Sleep deprived, but still conscious. A mix of Clair de Lune and In the Hall of the Mountain King. 

38. Pinpricks of stars on a velvet night, glints of dust floating on a ribbon of sun-streak, droplets of rain weaving down a windowsill. All of this, and you, are the same. Behind your eyes and coffee stained pages lies a whisper and an ache of what you may become.

39. Buying that new special pen.

40. Buying that new special notebook.

41. Trapped inside is a wild inner celt staring over the cliffs of moher, waiting for a ghostly lover to return from the sea.

** This is apparently a work in progress...

Current mood: aesthetic, bookish, nostalgic - LOL  aesbookic (Some were gleaned from various blogs, bust mostly my own)