#just pretend he has his golf war fit on!!!!

[nenoname]

made a rough edit of the mystery shack family with their post series (but pre stan o war 2) looks!!!

[welcometo79s]

[repost because I got shadow-banned and I'm back now]

@clonemmunism got me thinking with their post about the war ending and the clones just making very bad fashion choices so here's my thought on what everyone would wear and my rating:

Hunter [4/10]:

Hunter doesn't really care about being fashionable. We got a glimpse of what he would wear in The Bad Batch and I don't think it's very good. He owns a couple of cute scarves but usually he just dresses like a less fashionable Cut Lawquane. And Cut is already pushing it. It's nothing too bad, he just looks like some farmer on Dantooine. No, the bad thing about Hunter is that he literally does not differentiate between clothes he wears going out and clothes he wears practicing knife throwing and juggling with. So most of his stuff has little cuts and tears in it. He also sticks to the type of clothes that Cut gave him, which is the only thing saving him from being a fashion nightmare. He did however try to pick absolutely atrocious clothes for Omega until Echo stepped in. Like he'd attempt to get her a pink shirt with a porg vomiting a rainbow on it and military khakis.

Echo [10/10]:

His outfits are top-notch, he just doesn't dress properly for the seasons. But hey, that's not what we're ranking here. Echo is a crop top guy. Crop tops in summer. Crop tops in winter. And he looks good in them. He wears regular black pants and a variety of casual jackets on top of the crop tops. Sometimes leather jackets, sometimes bomber jackets, sometimes parkas, sometimes open shirts loosely hanging over the tops. Gets matching accessories and high quality boots for his outfits too. Ends up getting himself a belly button piercing. Fashion icon.

Tech [6/10]:

He only has one outfit and it's beige suit pants and a white shirt that's stuffed into the pants. He owns multiple duplicates of the pants and the shirt. Leather shoes. The only thing he switches out about the outfit is that he wears a variety of funky bow ties.

Wrecker [4/10]:

I'm sure there's people on here who found Wrecker's beekeeper outfit from the Saleucami episode cute but it's not very fashionable, nor are the rest of his clothes. Fisherman hats. Crocs. The "my 50 year old dad on the balcony" shoes (those cork sandals). Ponchos and pants that don't fit together color-wise. Sooo many tie dye shirts. Those jeans fabric shorts with lots of cuts in them. The very short ones. Very rarely an elegant evening gown he looks really good in. That gets him an extra point.

Crosshair [5/10]:

He's the Hot Topic Brigade. He has a style and he sticks to it. Some people like it and some don't. Almost always wears a leather jacket. Buys all his clothes at the Star Wars equivalent of Hot Topic.

Fives [7/10]:

Usually wears black jeans and some black t-shirt with printed words on it. Sneakers. Jeans jackets, sometimes with fur. His outfits are good but he wears some of the most atrocious shirts known to mankind. On a good day you get "Viva la Clonevolution", "I'm a Republic War Crime" or "Enemy of the State". On worse days he might wear something that says "Sparkle on you crazy doggo!", "I eat cement", "I can't fucking do be do be do it anymore" (all real shirts by the way) or "Call me the Uwunator". The otherwise completely normal, nice looking outfit adds to the insanity. Sometimes Echo pretends he doesn't know him. It's the fact that Fives does this on purpose that really gets Echo.

Rex [1/10]:

Listen. The Bad Batch and Fives have the privilege of having Echo to be the damage control for their fashion choices. Now we're getting into the bad territory. Rex has so many of these white tank tops that you can see his nipples through. Sometimes there's hot sauce stains on them. He also has a fuzzy jacket that Fives got him as a joke. Rex does not know it was supposed to be a joke. At this point Fives is too intimidated to correct him. He wears light shorts that some rich kid would wear to the golf course under the tank tops. And cowboy boots. Also huge elegant statement necklaces on top of this. And that one stupid fisher hat that says "rexcellent" on it.

Hardcase [2/10]:

Listen the only reason Hardcase has more points than Rex is that Hardcase doesn't want to look fashionable, Hardcase wants to look fun and that he does. He joins Fives in the cringe t-shirt extravaganza. Would wear the ugly pink porg shirt that Hunter wanted to get for Omega. See-through jackets. Glittery heart sunglasses. Glittery silver disco pants that get wider at the bottom. Rainbow bracelets that work like rattles. He annoys everyone around him by shaking his hands to his "improv gospel". Red leather boots that go up to his thighs. Sometimes he wears them under the disco pants, sometimes over them. Fives loves his outfits. He's the only one. Sometimes Hardcase tries out a variety of colorful wigs.

Tup [9/10]:

He looks so cute. So many people hit on him. Lets his hair grow a little longer and starts wearing half-buns. Also a crop top guy, just a little shy about it at first. Wears earrings and looks really nice with them. Has delicate wrist tattoos, maybe some branches with flowers wrapping around his arms. Otherwise simple, normal pants and sneakers.

Jesse [3/10]:

Tup and Fives are carrying the 501st in terms of fashion. The rest are all fashion don'ts. Jesse is no exception. He also wears crop tops but his don't have sleeves or straps. It's just a strapless bandeau top hanging over his pecs. On top of that? Baggy oversized jacket with a comical amount of pockets that he always stuffs full of things. He's been stopped multiple times by the Coruscant Guard and searched as a suspect for being a spice dealer. He just has his pockets stuffed full of candy though. Baggy pants with equally as many pockets fading from blue into purple into red. The jacket is a dark green. Sparkly golden dance slippers.

Dogma [1/10]:

Big sun hats. Very tight leather pants that end just below his crotch area and then restart at the knee. The pants have two parts basically. The two parts are not connected. See-through sneakers. Frilly white shirts that some 18th century vampire would wear. Tie with little loth cats on it. All of this in combination btw.

Fox [10/10]:

I can do this in one sentence, look up "dark academia outfit men" on Pinterest and you get Fox's style.

Mayday [0/10]:

His isn't even an outfit, it's just a bunch of fabrics he bought just like that in the market and somehow wrapped himself in them. There's no shirt, pants, jacket or anything like that, they're just pieces of fabric wrapped around his body like towels. One of them he wears as a scarf. On a good day he looks like some type of monk. On a bad day he just looks like a mess.

Howzer [3/10]:

You know that outfit Sportacus wears in LazyTown? That's his style. He wears things looking similar to that.

[arcadejohn127-9]

ok so,,, *slides u mc idea* (YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT TO!!! I JUST WANTED TO SHARE THIS!!!)

MC that doesn't have any energy during the day, just moping around all tired. But from like, 12 AM to 6 AM, really energized and would go out and do the most Chaotic Shit TM. You know when you just come up with some crack idea at 2 AM? MC every goddamn night. Probably tried making a bathtub fly.

(if you do want to do this, please do the brothers and the undateables ^^)

XD WHY IS THIS ME???!!!!! I'm always so tired and never leave my bed but it could be 1 am and suddenly I rise from the dead and just do random things around the house

Though these aren't chaotic, mostly just the boys trying to stop you as they're tired and want to sleep but you're messing around too much. I tried to base it off my own activities and things that would seem funny - sorry if you wanted something more chaotic but I couldn't think of anything

Lucifer:

When he learned about your strange late morning/early morning shenanigans

He saw it was a way for you to finally get your school work done

Every room - and I mean EVERY - had a textbook from your different class with notes, he goes to bed late so he put them their before he tucked in for the night

He could hear your distress at the continuous reminder of work you needed to do

You knew this was his work so you went to his room

Climbing on his bed and just walked over his body

"Stop it, I'm trying to learn how to replicate the set ups from home alone."

"You can do that after doing your coursework, I'm being merciful with you, don't push it."

You just threw yourself down beside him

Pretending to suddenly fall asleep and began to loudly fake snore

You remained like that whilst Lucifer tried to ignore you

He took this as a sign of war

He was going to monitor you all day if he has to, he refuses to let your bad grades affect their image

But you got bored of snoring and left

He felt relief; his desire to sleep over weighing his desire to force you to study

When you came back with a toy gun you altered to shoot golf balls he knew thing's weren't going well

"The-more-you-pressure-me-the-more-I-won't-study."

You shot at his lower body between each words

This was definitely war

Mammon:

He was sleeping just fine until he heard his car rev up

He bolted awake and saw that his car was on, a string of curses coming from inside

He knew of your weird habit of becoming energised at ridiculous times but he wasn't expecting you to do this

He could tell it was you by your voice

He stormed up the stairs towards his car

"Oi! What are you doing in my car? Go to bed!"

You finally were able to turn off the car, just leaning on the wheel casually as if you didn't just accidentally turn it on

"I'm just cruising~ nothing to see here!"

He wasn't amused

He got you out of his car and strung you over his shoulder, scolding you for being so irresponsible and slightly bragging about how much trouble you'd be in if it weren't for him

You tried to explain you were just pretending to drive but you saw the keys still inside and got curious

He just threw you on his bed and held you, hiding his blush in his pillow

You let him fall asleep but when you tried to escape it ended up with your shoulders in a head lock and your ass stuck in the air

It seems your productive night has came to an end

Levithan:

It was a fifty - fifty chance that levithan was awake or not

But Lucifer gave him an earful about staying up late as it's effecting grades

So you betted he was asleep and your desire to game and wonder aroulnd his room set itself in motion

What made it awkward, was when you came in you heard a suspicious girly moan come from his headphones

You both just stared at each other, unmoving

"Uh- this isn't- this is just a dream, this is definitely not happening."

You checked out the game he was playing; recognizing it to be a dating sim he's been following the development of

You just nodded, shuffling over to his set up

"Scoot over dream levi, I wanna see the hot babes."

He got even more embarassed; face completely red as you sat on your player 2 chair

You put your hand on his, forcing his finger to click the mouse and watched what was happening on screen, listening to the loud music from his headphones

Luckily, the voice acting was just suspicious - like most animes - and it was a fairly cute game

You did end up swirling around in your chair aroulnd his room

Both of you coming up with strategies to get the best girl to like you

Though, too much moving and spinning made you and the chair fall over

You bonked Into his bathtub, your ribs squishing against the rim after the trip

Levi let you make all the gaming decisions to make up for it

Satan:

He planned to have some late night reading, hoping it'll make him tired enough to actually sleep

He found you sitting on the floor in the library

Torn books and littered paper was surrounding you

Then he noticed the paper stars and cranes pouring out from your lap as you froze mid fold

"That's....a thousand stars and cranes - where did you get all this paper from?"

"......the books belonged to me before you assume anything!"

He slowly nodded

He wasn't a fan of the destruction of books but they were yours so he couldn't say anything

He felt odd just leaving you in the barely lit library

Just folding paper who knows how long

He asked if you were hungry, guessing you've been awake for a long time

You just shoved paper into your mouth and began chewing

He was horrified

You immediately spat it out, cringing

"that was a bad idea.... that was gross."

He's going to get you food

When he came back he felt more energised; walking around will do that for you

So he decided to just stay with you whilst you folded the many pages of your destroyed books

It was around 6 am when you finally yawned; Satan fell asleep already

You looked at the fire place, your tired brain screaming for arson

He woke up as he heard your fits of poorly muffled giggles

You were throwing your stars in the fire as you sat a fair distance from it

When you threw the cranes, accepting some didn't fly far enough and didn't burn, he asked what you were doing

"It's survival of the fittest, only the strongest cranes survive in this paper world."

Asmodeus:

You were already in his room, you've been sleeping in it almost all day

So when you finally got out you looked around, spotting the makeup kit he got in a sponsorship

He lets his brother's or you use it as it's a spare

But if you touch his stuff; you will perish

So you decided to use that one, practising all sorts of looks and tried not to laugh when you made yourself a clown

You decided to stay in the clown makeup and go into his practice room

What was his practice room?

Well, he hates exercising Infront of people as he'll be sweaty and his hair will get ruined

So that's where he goes but the real magic was the pole in the middle of it

You felt a spark of inspiration

Looking up tutorials on your phone on how to pole dance

It did not go great

You were sliding too fast

Falling over and when you tried to spin, you would just get stuck

"I love you but if you keep disturbing my beauty sleep I will throw you out the window."

He was grouchy; his hair was barely smoothed out and arms crossed

You hugged the pole you were slowly sliding down; a long loud screech coming down

You definitely felt like a clown

"Sorry- you look handsome already so is there really any need for beauty sleep?"

He blushed, agreeing he was beautiful before giving you a "I will end you" smile

You got the hint, flattery wasn't going to work

Perhaps your pole dancing adventures can wait

Beezlebub:

He was aware of your strange energy burst at night, you were talking about it with him the other day

He's been wondering if he would ever spot you and tonight he did

He found you in the kitchen

Just chipping away at the frost on the top of the freezer trays with a small knife

He crouched down behind you, picking you up

Beel let you sit on his thigh and began to eat anything he could get his hands on

Meanwhile you were aggressively stabbing the formed ice

"Why are you doing that?"

He grabbed a handful of the ice chunks that fell from your stabbing

"Not sure what I want to do tonight and the build up was bothering me."

He didn't need to know anymore, just nodding and letting you do your own thing whilst he ate

He cleared out the entire fridge in no time

Letting you eat anything you wanted whilst you were hard at work

He noticed one part of the ice wasn't giving it to your stabbings

He just gripped it and easily broke it off

You thanked him and ignored how he was able to eat the big block with breaking it

Whenever something was too stubborn he would just break it off for you

It went on like that until you were satisfied

You closed the empty freezer and turned to your assistant

"Good work, but I'll need your help again, I can't reach the top cupboard and I know it's big enough to let me sit in it."

He got to eat more so he had no issue, helping you get into the cupboard once he was done clearing it out

Belphegor:

You were so energised yet you couldn't think of what to do

You put a spell on you to stop you from feeling pain and began to let yourself roly-poly down the hallways

You penciled rolled abit too fast at one pointand ended up thumping down the stairs

You were thankful the spell worked

It got to the point you just kept rolling around until you couldn't anymore

You padded the broom closet

Immediately doing a double take when you noticed a body In the darkness

You went over and turned on the closets light

"is there a reason you're sleeping in the broom closet?"

Belphie was grumbling, trying to hide his face from the light

He glared up at you for disturbing his sleep

"Is there a reason you're rolling around the house?"

"Touchè."

You ended up dragging belphie around the house

You felt like you committed a crime and it was fun

He was fast asleep and you were bored

You dragged him by the ankle and tried to keep his body from banging into anything along the way

You ended up bumping into Beel, he was looking for his twin, and he noticed you were dragging him

Belphie slightly woke up, waving at his brother before going back to sleep

Beel carried the two of you back to the his bedroom; hugging you both

If it weren't for these warm beefy arms you would be free! Free to terrorise all the shadows in the room

You gave up your night activities when even Belphie wrapped an arm around you

UNDATEABLES↓

Diavolo:

Dia was sneaking around the house, hoping not to run into his butler

He didn't want be to be sent back to bed

He was planning to have a light night snack and see how you were going

He knew you were always doing something during the nights, it surprised him when he found out because you were always in bed whenever he saw you

He checked your bedroom and didn't see you in your bed

Suddenly, he noticed a pile of black by his feet

He saw you, scrunched up on your back with the little D's covering your body, all hugging you

"oh! I almost didn't spot you under there, are you alright?"

"I'm great~ you should join me."

The little D's You were able to scratch were purring in their sleep

He found the sight adorable as he crouched down

"I'm teaching them to love me so they can willingly become armour for when I take over the Devildom - we'll be like the rat king!"

He just quietly laughed; the prince helping you pet and scratch the little D's

He agreed you'd make a good ruler

Though he had to force himself to be silent as you started chanting whispers of 'You will be my armor' and 'rat king'

Decided to leave you and your brain washing, going to the kitchen like he intended

Though when he walked past your room again you and the little Ds weren't there

He found you in his room, pouting and dangling off the chandelier

He helped you down, asking what was wrong

You told him the little D's banished you from the cuddle pile because you kept trying to make them move as one being

He patted your head and told you you'll become the overlord some day

Barbatos:

"Why are you making pudding at 3 am?"

He already knew why, just like he knew you were here hence why he visited you

But that didn't stop him from asking

He knew you liked it when he showed his intrigue in things even if he already knew about them

"my hands demand to CREATE- oops sorry - hopefully that didn't wake anyone."

He was always surprised to see you up and about during the nights

He was always the one looking after you in the morningsa; making sure you ate and had a drink

Whilst you just laid in bed, always barely awake and unmotivated

He stayed with you, watching over you as you made your pudding

Making soft spoken discussion as he guided you through any steps you seemed to become hesitant in

You ended up making 10 batches of pudding

Barbatos eating a few whilst he watched you

When you grew bored of pudding making you ate the cups he didn't eat

Saving a few for lord Diavolo in the fridge

He complimented your pudding, telling you that they were very delicious

You felt proud; having a spark to make more food

He told you what would be best during this time of night and helped you

Though it did end up with the both of you covered in flour and barb slipping on a dropped egg

You both thought it was best to clean up and stop for the night

He was very embarassed he made a fool of himself

Solomon:

He didn't expect to find you in his working space

He knew you would be awake but didn't even think of you doing what you're doing right now

"is there a reason you're drinking my potions like their shots? I must say this is rather interesting - how many did you have?"

You wiped your mouth, your hiccup coming out as exploding bubbles

You looked at the small glass viles, and saw ALOT of them empty

More than you realized

"uh- 3?"

he just chuckled, reading the notes you made

The notes was recording what each potion did to you

He was thankful you remembered this was his safe batch

Unknown to him you in fact did NOT remember and was having a Russian roulette game with them

He sat with you, making a cure for your explosive hiccups

You happily drunk it and felt better

He laughed more when he saw your scribbles; drawing what happened to you

Solomon will be making you his potion tester from now one so beware

Simeon:

He was an early riser; awake by 3 am and usually did some writing or watched TV until he got tired again

He had a mug of tea, shuffling through the dorm

He's hung out with you plenty of times whilst you cure your late night boredom

But he was surprised when he saw you in the living room, mini flashlight in your mouth and scrubbing the floors with a sponge mop

"Oh, you don't need to clean - that's very sweet of you but don't you think it's abit early to do this?"

You looked at him, semi blinding him with the flashlight

Immediately took it out of your mouth and apologized

You agreed it was but you wanted to do it as you've been meaning to for the past week

He just nodded, letting you do your own thing whilst he enjoyed his drink

But you suddenly felt awkward; no longer wanting to clean now that someone was in the room

You made your way over to him, climbing on the coffee table and jumping onto the sofa

He was curious on why you weren't doing your thing anymore

"dunno know, just feels awkward when people watch me do stuff."

He suggested leaving you be, saying he'll stay in his room

But now you felt bad because he wanted to rest in the living room

In the end, he helped you clean and you both fell asleep in the bathtub, cuddling up with towels working as padding and a blanket

Luke:

You liked creeping Luke out

It was fun, so far you've convinced them that you're a type of demon that watches bad children whilst they sleep

But really you just wanted to feel like a cryptic, sitting in the corner of his room on a cupboard

It wasn't long for him to wake up from your staring

"I'm going to tell Simeon if you keep staring at me."

You wanted to laugh; he really was a child

Luke wasn't aware that you were a night owl, he just assumed you were always tired and sleeping

He liked to help you around the house and look after you when he could

It almost made you feel had

Almost

He's been extra stubborn about liking the Devildom to the point he's Been insulting his friends and trying to push them away

"Luke, you've been very bad, pushing your friends away just because they're a demon isn't good - embrace your friendships."

You weren't amazing at changing your voice but it seemed to work on him

He complained that it wasn't right for angels and demons to be friends

But you quickly reminded him what this whole exchange program was about

"you have been chosen to help fix the divide between the three realms, just hang out with the people you care about or I'll eat your toes!"

He immediately got scared, scrunching into himself and only peered slightly out of his blanket

He made you promise to leave him alone if he made up with the demons

You agreed, feeling bad for disturbing his sleep but thankful your plan worked

[mcrsk]

✰. — √ ❝ eѕpn eхclυѕιve. ❍ { MARS X NIKE ( !! ) }

“ i am one of the few football players that genuinely enjoy every sport. while football is my first love, i played everything from baseball, soccer, basketball, and tennis. hell, i even mini golf during the off-season. playin’ sports gave me a purpose in life. i don’t know where or who i’d be if i was unable to play. i am more than just a football player — i am an athlete. ”  — MARS KNIGHT.

what is the nike crossover project and why do you feel you were chosen to be the face of it?

MARS nodded his head slowly as he mentally gathered different components to provide an adequate answer to the inquiry. while doing so, he glanced to the side to see his agent mouthing an answer for him to use. instead of using the politically correct definition of the project, as mentioned in his contractual agreement, he cleared his throat and proceeded to convey his own version. “ the nike crossover project is a challenge to all athletes to showcase themselves playin’ a sport that they do not play professionally. it is an ode to the solidarity of sports, as well as a lesson to children that you do not have to box yourselves inside of one specific sport despite what society may tell you. ” after supplying an answer for the first part of the question, he glanced over his shoulder to scan the ensemble of photography used to promote the newest addition to nike’s roster of projects. “ i mean, you see these pictures, right? i look good in every sport. ” the wide smile brightened his features before he offered a hearty bout of laughter to indicate that he was only joking. “ actually, this is a project that i presented to nike. i wanted to create sumn’ that would give back to the community. when i was younger, the only place i could recall that allowed the enjoyment of multiple sports at one time was field day. now that we are partners, i plan to start my own annual TRIP TO MARS event, which will be a field day at different youth centers across the nation. so, to all my youngins out there, shoot me a dm if yo’ city has a boys and girls club, ymca, or any facility that we can use to make things happen. ”

my research shows that you played basketball, football, and ran track while in high school. why football professionally?

“ football changed my life. ” MARS replied shortly. he tilted his head to the side, configuring the verbiage to hone his statement. without providing too many details on the troubles of his adolescence, he spoke. “ i was goin’ down the wrong path after my parents died. a lot of people gave up on me. not that i blame them, but i went years without anyone remindin’ me that i could do sumn’ more than what i was doin’. it took one person watchin’ me play football and tellin’ me that i could actually be sumn’, if i took it seriously, to change my whole perspective on what i wanted out of life. plus, football is a contact sport. it gave me a reason to be aggressive without gettin’ into too much trouble. ” he confessed, laughing along with the sports commentators.

what advice would you give those up and coming athletes who are stuck in between two sports?

“ this is probably goin’ to sound absurd, but there’s a method to my madness. ” MARS released a chuckle beneath his breath following his statement. as someone who had experienced the same circumstance, he wanted to give the proper advice that he felt helped him along the way. “ i was stuck between football and basketball for two years. while i was tryna’ make a decision between the two, i decided to run track. not only did that help build my strength, endurance, and agility for both sports, but it also gave me a clear head to navigate which sport i felt was more fit for me. ” his visage hardened slightly as he began to lose himself in his own thoughts. swiftly, he trampled through a few of his own experiences. when he landed on a memory that he considered beneficial, he decided to share an anecdote. “ my track coach in high school told me that it’s never about where you’re runnin’ from but where you’re runnin’ to. you just have to keep runnin’ ‘til you reach yo’ final destination. keep runnin’ and eventually, you’ll get there. you’ll find yo’ way. ”

while you currently play for your hometown team, the SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS, we know that your contract is nearing its end. we hear that there’s a bidding war between the KANSAS CITY CHIEFS and the BALTIMORE RAVENS. care to give the fans a statement on that?

as the commentators knew, MARS was not allowed to speak on his knowledge of which team was trying their best to get him to sign a contract. “ where did you hear that? ” the inquisitive visage matched his facade of pretending to be ignorant of the rumors of where he would be furthering his career. while he had an immense amount of loyalty to his hometown team, he hadn’t planned on staying in one place for the rest of his life. however, now was not the time to share that with the world. “i dunno’ ‘bout any of that, man. however, i’m blessed to be able to play the sport. wherever i end up, just know i’m on the field. ” he concluded with a humble response to dismiss the topic as a whole.

you may not be able to tell us about the potential trade, but you can at least give us your thoughts on the espn body issue that everyone is buzzing about. while there hasn’t been any confirmation, the people seem to want you to be on the next cover. are you in talks with espn to do the next body issue?

“i mean...” MARS placed his hands on top of the table in front of him, then released a light chuckle. while his social media presence became a quest to figure out what he was wearing beneath his football pads and workout gear, he had been iffy on the subject for some time. he wasn’t keen on the process of a naked photo shoot, though he was assured repeatedly that none of the ‘tasteless,’ or extreme nudity, images would ever see the light of day. “ who am i to deny the people of what they want? espn, give my agent a call. ” he curled the three fingers between his pinky and his thumb towards his palm, bringing his hand to his face to mimic the action of being on the phone. “ if it’s my body they want, it’s my body they’ll get. tell espn to cut the check. ( !! ) ”

[preciseprose]

Dipper v. Emotional Conflict

After re-watching every episode of Gravity Falls, listening to every commentary track available, and reading “Lost Legends”, I’ve come to the following conclusion about Dipper Pines:

His greatest weakness is his inability to resolve internal emotional conflicts on his own.

I see a lot of my younger self in Dipper. We’re both nerdy dorks who are confident—often to a fault—in our ability to think, plan, or argue our way out of conflicts. Logical reasoning comes naturally to us; emotional sensitivity does not. We shine the brightest when tasked with solving problems devoid of emotional complications because we have a hard time understanding them. So when cornered by emotional conflicts that are difficult to resolve or that are unfamiliar, our confidence nosedives. 

Dipper’s response to unfamiliar or difficult emotional conflicts depends on both the circumstances in which the conflict arises and whether the source of the conflict is external or internal. In “Dipper v. Manliness”, Dipper’s self-confidence is challenged externally after he’s publicly emasculated by failing a strength test and privately emasculated after Mabel and Stanley make fun of his love of BABBA, a stereotypically feminine pop group.

This conflict does not require immediate resolution, so Dipper does not immediately face it. Instead he wanders into the woods, eventually finding guidance in the form of the Manotaurs, a clan of hypermasculine half-man half-taurs.

The manotaurs are of course nothing like noodle-armed Dipper. They’re about as intelligent as the rocks they crush with their horns; disparage BABBA for its femininity; and characterize the Multibear, a multi-headed bear who loves BABBA, as their enemy merely because he refuses to conform with their toxic masculinity. Unsure about what it means to be a man and lacking the self-confidence to support his past perception of manliness, Dipper tries to fit in with the manotaurs even though doing so requires him to reject the effeminate parts of himself. This rejection of himself creates internal emotional conflict that reveals itself when Dipper, tasked by the Manotaurs to murder the Multibear in order to prove his manliness, discovers he has more in common with the Multibear than the Manotaurs.

The realization that killing the Multibear would be akin to killing himself is enough of a shock that Dipper realizes he doesn’t need to be traditionally masculine in order to be a man. His self-confidence somewhat restored, Dipper is able to tell the overwhelmingly masculine manotaurs their way of life is flawed without fear. He resolves his external conflict by rejecting its very existence. Yet when Dipper meets up with Mabel and Stan a few hours later, it is clear Dipper has failed to resolve his internal conflict on his own.

There is no objective reason Dipper shouldn’t have shed his internal conflict after telling off the Manotaurs. His internal conflict stemmed from his independent decision to act like someone he was not, not from public embarrassment or from being bullied by Stan and Mabel. All that’s required of Dipper is from him to take the inferential step that standing up for himself was, in fact, manly. That Dipper immediately discusses his distaste for the Manotaurs with Stan and Mabel upon meeting with them shows he’s on the verge of making the realization for himself. Nevertheless, Dipper’s internal conflict is only resolved after Stan and Mabel assure him his rejection of the Manataurs was manly.

But of course he can’t come to the realization himself, he’s only twelve! Not even the most emotionally sensitive 12-year-old boy should be able to figure out the intricacies of manhood after a single shot at it. Dipper’s lack of self-awareness shows he has room to grow. And grow he does; physically and mentally.

Dipper and Mabel’s summer in Gravity Falls occurs during the sunrise of their transition from childhood to adulthood. During the course of the show their bodies are changing (although only Dipper’s is discussed) and they’re experiencing romantic attraction for the first time. Mabel joyfully throws herself into these new feelings of attraction without restraint and absent any expectations because she isn’t looking for anything serious. She’s not interested in grown-up stuff; she just wants to hold hands and kiss cute boys without consequence while she can. Dipper, however, views his attraction to Wendy, a girl three years his senior, as an opportunity to finally leave childhood behind and move on to glorious adulthood. He puts enormous pressure on himself to establish a serious romantic relationship because, whether or not he realizes it, he views such a relationship as a stepping stone to maturity.

Dipper knows he lacks what is necessary to charm Wendy, but his desire to grow up blinds him from realizing he cannot gain what isn't there by pretending to be someone he is not,

by executing an elaborate plan, 

or by sabotaging Wendy’s existing romantic relationship.

Dipper’s immaturity blinds him to what Mabel understands intuitively: 12-year-old’s can’t sustain serious romantic relationships because 12-year-olds haven’t lived long enough to gain the emotional maturity, experience, and patience such relationships require. His inability to figure this out frustrates his goal of growing up as fast as possible and results in massive internal emotional conflict over how he should present himself to potential romantic partners. It is this self-imposed internal conflict that causes Dipper’s self-confidence to implode whenever he’s first meets or is alone with a person he classifies as a potential romantic partner. This is why Dipper is awkward around Wendy and, before he dehumanizes them per Stan’s instructions, the girls he meets during “Roadside Attraction”, but is never awkward around Pacifica—even when she’s hugging him.

This view is confirmed by Dipper’s behavior following his discussion with Wendy in “Into the Bunker”. After their battle with the Shapeshifter, Wendy confronts Dipper about his feelings for her. She tells him the she’s flattered he likes her, but that she’s too old for him. And to stop Dipper’s thoughts from spiraling out of control, she reassures him that she loves spending time with him and that things between them don’t have to be awkward. After this point Dipper is no longer awkward around Wendy, but not because he resolved his inner emotional conflict.

Unlike the conflict in “Dipper v. Manliness”, which existed for maybe a few days, Dipper’s conflict over how to present himself to potential partners has stewed within him for weeks. One short conversation is not enough help for him to move past it. If it was, Dipper wouldn’t still have a crush on Wendy 15 episodes later.

Accordingly, the reason Dipper is no longer awkward around Wendy is not because he understands he cannot date her eventually, but rather because she expressly told him she will never return his feelings for her. The change in Dipper’s mind was not that he shouldn’t pursue a serious romantic relationship at his age, it was that Wendy is not a potential romantic partner.

It’s not until after Weirdmagedon that Dipper finally moves past this inner conflict; and even then, he does so indirectly. Alex Hirsch provides an excellent explanation of how this comes to pass in the commentary track for “Scary-oke”:

“Dipper wants to grow up too fast. That’s his flaw as a character. And it builds to a choice that he has the chance to skip over childhood and then he comes to appreciate childhood. And when he returns at the end of this summer, he’s not in such a rush. He’s not in such a rush to date Wendy and to be a government agent, and all of this stuff.”

At the end of the show, Dipper still doesn’t grasp that he will never date Wendy—and thus his awkwardness around girls he likes will continue to manifest itself—but at least he’s no longer putting so much pressure on himself to find a girlfriend.

To close, I’d like to discuss why Dipper doesn’t view Pacifica as a potential romantic partner, and what I believe the implications of that view would have been had the show continued past season two. Once again Alex Hirsh’s commentary, this time from “The Golf War”, speaks with more clarity than I can provide: 

“[The writing staff] loved that [Pacifica] brought out . . . pure instant sass and rage from Dipper. He’s so protective of his sister that he becomes way more assertive around Pacifica because he has no ambiguity in his mind about how he feels about her; he can’t stand her. And his normal social fear melts away when there is someone he hates that much.” 

This confirms my theory on why Dipper isn’t awkward around Pacifica.

More interesting, however, is Matt Chapman’s (writer and voice actor for Gravity Falls) commentary on Dipper and Pacifica’s relationship. During the commentary track for “Northwest Mansion Mystery”, Chapman states:

“What’s so exciting about this pairing, Dipper and Pacifica, is that Dipper is normally very . . . he doesn’t have a lot of confidence. Yet around Pacifica he has tons of confidence.” 

Based on her actions in “Northwest Mansion Mystery” and “Face It”, Pacifica is clearly attracted to Dipper. She admires his confidence around her, appreciates his willingness to not judge her despite her family’s past actions, and is genuinely touched by his ability to look past the protective facade she maintains and see her for who she truly is.

I don’t think I’m overreaching by stating that Dipper would eventually figure out Pacifica has feelings for him had the show continued. How he would respond to that discovery is subject to more speculation. Personally, I believe Dipper would have a hard time coming to terms with the knowledge that Pacifica’s has feelings for him. I think he'd drive himself nuts trying to resolve his older feelings of distrust and dislike for her, with new feelings of attraction to her, and the knowledge that she’s attracted to him. And while I have many more thoughts on this subject, this analysis is already long enough so I’m going to cut it off here.

Dipper is an extremely well-written character. He’s an excellent reminder that childhood can only be experienced once, and shouldn’t be rushed. He also serves to remind those just starting puberty to remember that emotional sensitivity plays just as much of a role in relationships as does rational discussion. Overall, he’s one of my favorite characters of all time and I’m glad he’s in one of my favorite shows of all time.

[ckerouac]

fic: other costumes as assigned

Title: Other Costumes as Assigned (AO3)

Fandom: MCU

Summary: It was easy being Peter Parker at school, and Spider-Man out on the job. Being both Peter AND Spider-Man in the same room... that was a little more difficult. Luckily, a certain SPIDER BRO owes him a favor. Well, 'owes' is a strong word.  Maybe he can guilt out a favor?

Follow up to Other Duties as Assigned

If Peter was being honest with himself, he kind of assumed that once he started Avenger-ing more often, he would spend less time stuck in an English class talking about personal essays that he didn’t want to write.  He wasn’t sure why he thought he’d be able to get out of this stuff. The school would never let him drop his language arts requirements due to superhero work. And he wasn’t going to just drop out of school entirely.  May would kill him if he dropped out of school to be Spider-Man full time. And then she’d kill Mr. Stark, because obviously he would’ve had something to do with this plan. And the worst part was, based on the couple of times he’d met Pepper Potts, he was 99% sure that Ms. Potts would help May kill Mr. Stark if she ever got the idea that he’d had anything to do with Peter dropping out of high school.  

May had already threatened to revoke her signature on the work permit that allowed him to take the Stark internship in the first place if his grades suffered because of his… outside job requirements?  And Mr. Stark was fitting him for MIT sweatshirts. So dropping his English class was out of the question.

The reading wasn’t the issue -- it was the personal essays.  Ms. Diaz insisted each time she wanted them to dig deep and tell stories that bared souls.  Whatever that meant. But none of his stories were the kind he wanted to share with anyone in his class.  Hey, here’s an essay about my dead parents. And here’s a follow up about watching my uncle get shot and being able to do nothing about it.  Oh, and did I mention that I was Spider-Man? Want to hear about the time I stole Captain America’s shield and totally beat him in hand to hand combat?  (That one may be more creative writing, but if no one else was going to know what really happened, he would tell it in a way that he totally won). You guys remember Liz and how her dad got arrested ‘cause he was a super villain?  Yeah, that was me.

“Mr. Parker?  Are you paying attention?”

Peter jerked his head up after Ned gave him a tap on the arm and focused on Ms. Diaz.  “Yes. Yes, I am.”

“Please repeat the assignment back for the class.”

“Three pages on a non-family member who made a positive difference in your life.”

Flash Thompson leaned back and smirked.  “She means someone you actually know.  Not someone you claim you work for but never actually interact with.”

“What?  The internship is real,” Peter insisted.

“Yeah, it’s totally real,” Ned chimed in.  “He knows Mr. Stark personally.”

“Yeah, and I go golfing with the Falcon on the weekends,” Flash replied.  

“He’s met Falcon too,” Ned fired back.  “And he’s, like, best friends with Spider-Man.”

“I don’t know if I’m best friends with Spider-Man…” Peter tried.

“It’s borderline obsessive to keep claiming you know someone like Spider-Man, Penis,” Flash said.  “You’ve already tried that once, and it was sad and pathetic at Liz’s party, and it’s sad and pathetic now.”

“Mr. Thompson, that’s enough,” Ms. Diaz interrupted.  “Mr. Parker, you’re welcome to write about Spider-Man if for some reason you actually know Spider-Man.”

“He could get Spider-Man to come in to class!” Ned said before Peter could reply.  

That got the entire class’ attention.

Peter, for his part, felt all of his excuses get caught in his throat.  “I… I mean, he’s really busy. With Avenger work. And I do most of my internship stuff with Mr. Stark and Stark Industries and, like, engineering work and stuff.  I’m not sure if he’ll be busy doing Avenger stuff on that day. You know, like, saving people.”

“Class, let’s get back on topic,” Ms. Diaz tried, but the bell interrupted her.  “Fine, I’ll see you all tomorrow. The essay is due Friday. Mr. Parker, can I talk to you for a minute?”

Peter sighed as he collected his bag and Ned gave him a sympathetic look.  Each time Flash got on him in class, somehow Peter was the one that ended up in trouble.  This one wasn’t even his fault -- he was trying to change the subject. But Flash made it his mission in life to make Peter as miserable as possible in front of everyone else in class.  “Ms. Diaz, I didn’t mean to-”

“It’s okay,” she said.  “I know how sometimes these student rivalries can get out of hand.  And you’ve probably told people that you knew the Avengers and now it’s come back to bite you.  I would hope that by this age you kids would learn that lying never helps a situation.”

“Wait… but I do know the Avengers,” Peter said, taken aback and speaking before he really thought things through.  “I mean, not like friends friends, but I’ve met them through Mr. Stark.”

“And how would Mr. Stark spend so much time with them?”

Peter paused.  “Because he’s Iron Man?” he said. Peter was the only one whose identity was a total secret.  Mr. Stark answered most work calls with ‘This is Tony Stark, I’m Iron Man’ and had a t-shirt he wore under a suit that said ‘I AM IRON MAN’ in capital letters that Ms. Potts rolled her eyes at.

Ms. Diaz smiled.  “I know you want to feel important in your internship, but I also know that a lot of these internships are just ways for big companies to get administrative help without actually having to pay someone a living wage, and therefore technically run afoul of Department of Labor standards.  So it’s totally normal to want to make your internship sound more exciting than it really is.”

“But it is exciting!” Peter insisted.  “I can… what if I can get Spider-Man to come in?”  He hiked his bag up on his shoulder. “If I can get Spider-Man to come in, can I get out of writing this essay?”

Ms. Diaz considered.  “If you can get Spider-Man to come in, you don’t have to write the essay.  Hell, if you can get Captain America to come in, you don’t have to write another essay all year,” she chuckled.  

Peter nodded.  “Alright. Okay.  So… Friday. I have until Friday.  Thanks Ms. Diaz. I gotta run. Is there anything else?”

“No, that’s it,” she said.  “Just remember not to let Flash get to you.  And it’s okay to have a boring internship.”

***

“Hey, I’m sorry about English class today,” Ned said, as Peter organized the books in his locker.  “I don’t know why I said you could get Spider-Man to come. I wasn’t thinking.”

“No, it’s fine,” Peter said.  “I… I might’ve said the same thing to Ms. Diaz after class.”  He leaned against the locker and glanced around. No one was paying any attention to them.  “She thinks my internship is just getting coffee for Mr. Stark and I got rattled and said I could totally get Spider-Man, and she said if I did I wouldn’t have to write the essay.”

“That’s great!” Ned beamed.  “You hate those things anyway.”

“No, not great.”  Peter rubbed his hand over his eyes.  “I can’t get Spider-Man because… you know… I am Spider-Man,” he added, his voice dropped to a whisper.  “What am I gonna do? Run out to the bathroom, change, and come back? I can’t do that. It doesn’t work as well as it does it the movies.”  

“No,” Ned said.  “You have to be in class, and so does Spider-Man.  So, what if there was another you? What if you got someone else to wear the uniform and pretend to be him?”

Peter closed his locker and leaned against it.  “Have you seen the rest of the Avengers?  They’re all huge. You really think someone would believe Captain America in a Spider suit?  He’s seven feet tall and built like… Captain America. And that’s even if Mr. Stark has built a suit that could fit anyone else.”  Peter paused and considered. “Which, he might’ve. He doesn’t always tell me when he’s making adjustments to the suit. Should I start making my own suits again to have control?”

Before Ned could answer, Peter had a flash of an idea.  There might be someone who could fit in the suit. And who knew he was Spider-Man.  And could move like Spider-Man. And who he might be able to convince to do it. Maybe.  If he pulled the right guilt card. Could he sound sad enough to be convincing?

“What are you doing?” Ned asked.

“Calling in a favor.  Well, begging for a favor.  Tricking someone into a favor, at most.”

He scrolled through his phone to find the name and text thread he was looking for.

Hi it’s Peter. Peter Parker. I need a favor and I’m pretty sure you owe me one cause the last time you needed me it was in a dept store and I helped you out and I know that you’d hate to see a kid get humiliated right??  It’s urgent.

***

Peter was surprised when he got a reply right away.  He shouldn’t be surprised, though. That’s what SPIDER BROS were for, right?  To be there for you when you need them? Sure, she wasn’t aware that she was considered his SPIDER BRO.  Or maybe she did know. Peter was never sure exactly what Natasha knew or didn’t know, and she probably kept it that way on purpose.  Didn’t she used to be a spy? So she’d be able to keep people in the dark. But if she was a spy, why was she called the Black Widow? He should ask someone that.  Mr. Stark would know. Or maybe Captain America. They were close. But was that something he could just ask Captain America about? He should get his phone number and text him.  

Aunt May would have his phone number, but ugh, he didn’t want to have to explain to Aunt May why he wanted Captain America’s phone number.  He didn’t even want to think about why Aunt May had Captain America’s phone number in the first place. Did Captain America text Aunt May? Did she tell him dumb jokes and make him laugh?  Did Captain America like dumb jokes? Did he get jokes from nowadays or did he miss when jokes were about, like, the war and swing music and stuff?

He was supposed to meet Natasha in an hour at a bookstore around the corner, so there was time for him to work on his calculus homework at the Starbucks and simultaneously plan his perfect speech to convince her to help him.  It was a nice enough day, and he’d grabbed the last table outside. One hour to plan the perfect plan of attack to get her to sign on to ‘Operation Double Spider’ as he’d decided it was going to be named. He reached down to pull his book out of his bag…

...and yelped as soon as he looked up to find a woman in sunglasses and a ball cap sitting across the table from him.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Natasha chuckled.  

“What… what are you doing here?” Peter said, trying to will his heart to stop racing and maintain his cool.  “I thought we had another hour. And in the bookstore.”

“Yeah, but you were here now, and there was an empty chair, so…” she trailed off with a shrug.  “Plus, you said it was urgent.”

Ah, right, he had used the word urgent.  “Yeah, so urgent may have been a slight exaggeration.”

“Right, which is why you replied, hang on…”  She pulled her phone out and scrolled to the right convo. “‘no not urgent just life and death please come alone thanks Ms. Widow’.”  She looked up and grinned. “Your aunt must be so proud of your manners.”

This was going well.  “Aunt May is great,” he replied.  “But, um, thank you for coming. And for coming alone.”  Natasha tilted her head, and Peter groaned. “You didn’t come alone.  Is Mr. Stark about to fly in with a full suit ‘cause he thinks I’m kidnapped or something?”  Because only someone who was kidnapped and trying to get a message across would send the kind of rambling texts that was on the SPIDER BROS chain right now.

“No,” Natasha replied.  “I didn’t tell Tony. Actually, I didn’t tell anyone.”

Peter looked up to see Steve in sunglasses and a ball cap as well, carrying three to-go cups through the crowded patio.  Every shimmy and squeeze between too-close tables merited an ‘excuse me’, a ‘pardon me’, or a ‘I’m just going to squeeze by here, thank you’ because what’s more patriotic than good manners?  

Where had he heard that phrase before?  Probably one of the videos.

So Peter waved once he saw Steve looking around for their table.  No use attempting to hide now. “You didn’t need to come, sir.” See, he had patriotic manners too.  

Natasha rolled her eyes and grabbed one of the cups from Steve’s hands once he got within reaching distance.  “Of course he didn’t, but Nosy Nellie couldn’t keep his eyes to himself.”

Steve just smiled as he set the remaining coffees down on the table and politely asked the girls at the adjacent table if he could use their unoccupied chair.  “I have 60/20 vision and you weren’t hiding your phone screen. It’s not nosy if you aren’t covering the screen,” he said, sitting down and distributing the coffees.  “White mocha for you… Natarfa?” Steve showed her the scribble on the side of the cup. 

Natasha glanced at the name on the one she grabbed and traded it for ‘Natarfa’.  “I don't know how you can drink black coffee."

He took the lid off the one labeled 'Stove' and took a long sip.  “Because coffee is supposed to taste like coffee and not corn syrup.”

It was obviously not the first time they’d had this particular debate, and Peter was smart enough not to jump into it.  Mostly because he fell squarely on the side of ‘coffee tastes like drowned bitter hopes and dreams’, but if they were nice enough to buy him coffee, he was going to drink it.  Even if it was for… He reached over to grab the unclaimed cup. Pebble. Close enough.

Steve settled into a more comfortable slouch against the back of the chair.  “It’s hot chocolate. I didn’t know what you liked, but everyone likes hot chocolate.”  He tilted his head forward enough to let his sunglasses slip down far enough to meet Peter’s eyes.  “When someone sends a message and says to come alone, it usually means that there’s some sort of trouble.  I wanted to make sure that you weren’t in trouble, kid. Are you in trouble?”

Peter grinned.  Captain America was genuinely worried about him!  It’s like the first step to friendship, even if he was definitely just a kid from Queens in the Captain’s eyes.  They needed their own name -- SHIELD BROS. Or AMERICA BROS. Maybe he didn’t need to be bros with Captain America, he could be something else?  NEW YORK’S FINEST… no wait, that was the NYPD…

“Didn’t care anything about whether I was walking into trouble,” Natasha murmured, taking a sip of her coffee with a grin.

“The last time I told you not to do something, you hid my boots in the trash,” Steve pointed out.  “I learned my lesson.”

“Thanks, Mr. Rogers,” Peter said.  “For being concerned. I’m sorry you came out, this isn’t an emergency.  I just needed a favor.” He sighed and turned to look at Natasha as pitifully as he could muster.  “You’re the only one who can help me.  You used to be a spy, right?”

“Used to be?”

“So you can really be anyone you want to be?” Peter was getting excited at this point, but trying desperately to come off cool and collected.  He knew he was failing at that, but it was the thought that counted, right? “Like, you can convincingly be other people? Like to the point where they’d believe that you were this other person, and not ask too many questions, and I could point and be all ‘yeah, that’s totally him!’ and they’d believe it?”

Natasha shrugged, wordlessly confirming Peter’s assumptions.  “Do you need someone to pretend to be your aunt to get you out of a parent teacher conference at school?”

“What? No!” Peter shook his head.  “No, that’s not… I don’t need you to be Aunt May.”

“Then who do you need me to be?”

Peter took a deep breath.  “Spider-Man.”

Both Natasha and Steve paused mid-drink.  “Spider-Man?” Natasha asked. “Is he… retiring?”

Peter shook his head.  “So, we have this writing assignment and it’s supposed to be about someone that we know that we admire, but Flash was being a dick and teasing me that I didn’t know anybody worth admiring and then it turned into how much I didn’t actually do for the Stark internship and how I didn’t know any of you guys, and Ned, he stood up for me and said that I totally did know you guys and that I should get Spider-Man to come in and talk to the class.”  He made a point to remember to breathe so that he wasn’t recounting the entire conversation in one breathless run-on paragraph. Breathing at normal intervals would make him sound less panicked. They didn’t seem that impressed -- did they not understand that this was a very big deal ?  Not urgent urgent, but still -- a big deal.  He considered sinking down into his chair when he was met with the confused, and probably completely disapproving stares from both Captain America and the Black Widow.  And as much as he claimed he was SPIDER BROS with the Black Widow… she was still scary when she looked at you with that blank stare she used when she was sizing how dumb she thought you were.  Was that the same kind of look that actual black widow spiders used against their prey? Was that why she was called the Black Widow?

“It’s like Liz’s party all over again.”  Not helpful, Peter. “Not that you know Liz.  She’s doesn’t go here any more. It’s not important!”  Focus...focus. “I told Ms. Diaz that I could bring in Spider-Man.  And she said if I did, I wouldn’t have to write the essay. The essays are awful cause we’re supposed to write from personal experience but all of my experiences are ones that I can’t share or ones that are nobody’s business.  So I said I could get Spider-Man, but I can’t get Spider-Man because I’m Spider-Man, so… I was hoping that… maybe you could be Spider-Man?”

Steve and Natasha sat there in silence for a moment, with Steve moving first to turn and look at Natasha…

… and then break down into decidedly un-heroic giggles.  

“So you need a Spider-Man,” Natasha repeated, ignoring Steve’s continued and increasingly loud giggles.  “Why ask me?”

Peter shifted in his seat.  “Because… you’re the only one… who kinda… you know…”

“Looks like a fifteen-year-old boy?  You think she can pull off fifteen-year-old boy?” Steve supplied, his head still down and his shoulders still shaking as he tried to compose himself.  “I didn’t know I needed this today, but I really needed this today. Oh, Jesus, this is great.”

Peter sat up straighter and tried to look serious.  “I think she can pull off anything! You know, she’d just needs to… you know… tape them…”  He motioned to Natasha’s chest, and then to his, and then felt his face to completely red once he realized exactly what he was saying.  She was the spy, she could figure out what she needed to do. She was the best spy ever!

And if he never had to mention her chest or anyone else’s chest in front of another Avenger again, it would be too soon.  He was going to die of embarrassment in a Starbucks. Not exactly the obituary he was hoping for.

Steve nodded his agreement.  “No, I totally see it. I’ve always found both her shape and her personality to be a little flat-”

Natasha gave Steve a quick punch to the arm.  “Pull yourself together.”

“It’s just that everyone else is huge,” Peter said.  “You’re closer to my size.” He sighed and let his shoulders drop.  “Please, Ms. Romanoff. I shouldn’t have let it get out of hand like that, but if I don’t get a Spider-Man there, I’m never going to hear the end of it.  I still get shit about Liz’s party, and now that Ned said he knew I knew Spider-Man, he’s gonna get shit too, and I can’t do that to him. He’s my best friend.”  He looked up at her with the biggest, most innocent puppy-dog eyes he could muster. It was the same look that got him out of trouble with May, but May was easier to read than Natasha.  The Black Widow was probably immune to the pathetic looks of high school boys, which really cut into his non-Spider-Man arsenal.

Natasha’s expression softened.  At least, Peter thought it did. He still couldn’t really read her.  But that’s probably why she was such a good spy. “Tony’s going to have a fit knowing someone else was in your suit.”

“I think that’s one of the best parts of this idea.” It had taken a while, but Steve was finally composed enough to smile conspiratorially at the group.  “I can get in on this plan too, right? I’m a great actor. I punched out Adolf Hitler over 200 times in 45 states.”

“You just want to watch me pretend to be Spider-Man for an audience,” Natasha accused.

Steve grinned.  “It’s not nothing.”

“Actually,” Peter said, remembering Ms. Diaz’s aside, “I think I have the perfect role for you, Mr. Rogers…”

***

“And next up, we have Mr. Parker,” Ms. Diaz said, making a note on her notepad.  “Are you ready to read your essay?”

“Cause I certainly don’t see Spider-Man here to get you out of it,” Flash replied.  The whole class laughed.

Except for Ned.  Peter could always count on Ned.  

“Yeah, yeah… I just… can we wait another minute?” Peter asked as he walked to the front of the class.  He checked his watch, looked out the window, and then checked it again. Natasha wouldn’t leave him hanging, would she?

Ugh, GREAT SPIDER PUN.  He needed to remember to tell someone that.  Captain America would think that it was hilarious.  That was an old timey type of joke. Probably the kind that he told when he was young.  Did they have puns back in the 40s? Google would probably know the answer to that --

“Mr. Parker,” Ms. Diaz sighed, dragging Peter’s attention back to class.  “As much as I wish that we could, any waiting will not result in--”

She was interrupted by a tapping at the window.  The class turned to look -- and saw Spider-Man, casually hanging upside down and waving.  

“Here he is!” Peter said, rushing over to push the window open.  “Hey, Spider-Man.”

“Hi Peter.”  The voice coming from the suit was remarkably close to Peter’s, but with a touch more mechanical feedback to make it sound interesting.  KAREN was getting better at mimicking voices and not sounding like a death bot. Much better than she’d been at disguising his voice when he first got the suit.  He’d have to mess with the options again next time he went out. Should he use this voice all the time? “I’m not late, am I? I was doing work with the Avengers.”

“That’s not really Spider-Man,” Flash said, even if his voice didn’t sound totally convinced.  

“You try hanging onto an overhang outside of a high school and getting the right window,” Spider-Man shot back.  

“Hey, man, it’s cool, it’s just Flash,” Peter said, trying to make Natasha remember the promise not to pick a fight with any of his classmates.

“Oh, that’s Flash,” Spider-Man chuckled.  “Yeah you were right about him.”

Flash’s expression was murderous.  “What do you mean, right about him?”

“But, uh, yeah,” Peter continued.  Natasha was a professional. He didn’t have to worry about Natasha.  She’s brought down governments before, she can handle one acting assignment.  “Thanks for coming. Like I said in my essay, I really admire Spider-Man because he’s always fighting for the little guy, and he’s from our neighborhood, and I hope that I can… make a difference like he does.  Or at least like he tries to.”

“Do you really get to hang out with Thor?” one of the girls interrupted.  

“Yeah, I hang out with all of the Avengers,” Spider-Man answered.  “But Black Widow is my favorite. Honestly, she’s probably the smartest of the bunch.  Definitely the brains behind the entire operation. I try to be more like Black Widow every time I go out.  She’s basically my Spider Bro.”

“Thank you, Spider-Man,” Peter said quickly, trying to mask his excitement.  Natasha thought they were SPIDER BROS! They were going to be best friends and fight crime and make a difference and she didn’t think he was just a silly kid and this was the best day of the entire year.  “I don’t want to take up too much of your time. I know you’re busy with saving New York.”

“Don’t worry,” Spider-Man replied.  “I don’t mind taking a moment just to… hang around.”

The entire class laughed at the joke.  Why didn’t they laugh when Peter made jokes like that?   

The questions started coming faster than Natasha could answer them.  

“Has the Hulk ever Hulked out but in, like, a building?”

“Why do you just hang out in Queens?  Aren’t there more interesting places to work?”

“Do you think that the presence of the Avengers in New York is partially responsible for aliens choosing New York as a target, and therefore you and the Avengers as a whole function as both the cause and solution to the growing interstellar threat we’re facing as a planet?”

“Does Thor have a girlfriend?”

“Why doesn’t Iron Man add in a stealth mode so he can be like an invisible jet?”

Spider-Man laughed.  “Some people are better at going under the radar than others.  Iron Man likes to be seen. Unlike the Black Widow, who is a master at going under cover.  Why, who knows, maybe the Black Widow is here in this room and you don’t even know it…”

“Ha ha, you’re so funny Spider-Man!”  Peter tried to redirect the conversation, but before he could remind Natasha to wrap it up there was a hard metal CLANG against the wall.  The webbing Spider-Man was dangling from sliced in half, and he dropped out of sight from the window.

That got everyone up and running to the window, pressing around Peter to see what was going on.  They were only on the second floor, and Peter knew it was part of the plan, but Peter’s heart dropped as soon as Natasha dropped.  Thankfully, instead of a spider going splat on the sidewalk, everyone saw Spider-Man flipping easily onto his feet and Captain America, in full regalia, catching a ricocheting shield.  Cap glanced up, and gave Peter a wave. “Sorry to interrupt, Peter,” he called out in his most authoritative Captain America voice. “But we need Spider-Man for an important Avengers mission.  I would only interrupt class if it was vitally important, because learning is the most important job the youth of today have. So you’ll have to tell your teacher we apologize for the interruption.”  

Ms. Diaz hopped on a chair and waved.  “Hi! That’s me! I’m the teacher!” She shoved a couple of the kids in front of her out of the way.  “Rachel Diaz. Hi. Can I just say? Big fan.”

Captain America gave her a grin and a polite nod.  “Ma’am. Thanks for your understanding. You do an important job, and we’re impressed with how well you’re teaching Peter and all of the Midtown students.”

Ms. Diaz took a deep breath and looked like she was a minute away from jumping out the window to, hopefully, just shake his hand.  “Thank you! My students mean a lot to me!”

“You have a nice day, ma’am,” Captain America called back with another wave.  “C’mon Spider-Man, we have a mission.” With that, the pair of them sprinted towards a car idling next to the sidewalk.

“Doesn’t Spider-Man usually, like, shoot webs and swing away?” one of the kids asked.

“But there’s a car right there,” one of the other kids pointed out.  “Why waste time when they can drive away?”

The bell finally rang, and Ms. Diaz excused everyone once the car with both Spider-Man and Captain America was out of sight.  “Oh, Mr. Parker?” she said once most of the kids were out of the classroom. “A deal is a deal.”

“No more essays?” Peter asked, trying not to sound too eager.

Ms. Diaz nodded.  “So.. on a completely unrelated note.  Since you obviously know… is Captain America single…” she trailed off

“Oh, ah…” Peter stumbled.  “You know, that’s not… that’s not part of my internship duties.  I’m not--” He was interrupted by a buzzing in his pocket, which he assumed would be a very loud voicemail from Mr. Stark.  “I’m sorry, I have to check this. It’s my internship stuff.”

“Sure, of course,” Ms. Diaz said.  “But if he asks…”

“Have a good day, Ms. Diaz!” Peter said, rushing out of the classroom.  Before he had a chance to check the message, his phone buzzed again. “Hi Mr. Stark.  Is something wrong?”

“Why is KAREN reporting that Natasha is in your suit?” Tony asked.  

“Funny story, Mr. Stark…”

[hulili]

Smart Toys for Every Age

If you’ve ever marveled at the look of concentration on the face of a child who tries to fit a square block into a square hole or catch a ball in mid-air, you know that playtime isn’t just about fun and games. It’s serious business — and toys are the tools of the trade.

Here is an age-wise guide to how kids play, and to the toys that entertain and help kids understand the world, learn social and emotional skills, and stimulate a developing brain.

Babies: How They Play

Play in the first year of life is all about exploration. Babies use their five senses to learn about the interesting new world around them: Does an object feel hard or soft? Sticky or rough? What does it do if I drop it? Or put it in my mouth? Most play consists of “tasting” or mouthing an object and shaking, banging, or dropping it.

When your baby develops new motor skills, play becomes more coordinated and complex. For example:

At about 4 months old, babies begin to reach for and grasp objects, like a rattle.

By 6 or 7 months, they can transfer that rattle between hands.

At around 9 months, a newly developed pincer grasp makes it easier for babies to pick up smaller objects, like blocks and other small age-appropriate toys.

During this time, play is usually a solitary activity, but playing side-by-side with other babies and imitating activities is common by year’s end.

For now, you are your baby’s favorite playmate. Have you ever danced a puppet in front of your baby’s face, only to have him grab it and pull it toward his mouth? Or has he ever squealed in anticipation and delight when you creep toward him, saying, “I’m gonna get you!”

These interactions help your baby learn about language, social relations, and cause-and-effect. Once babies begin to understand how things in the environment relate to each other and how they taste, smell, feel, and sound, babies are ready for the next stage of development: figuring out how they work.

Smart Toys for Babies

Nursery mobile. Objects dancing above a baby’s head while lying in a crib stimulate vision and develop attention span.

Mirror. Initially, your baby will be fascinated with the changing face and expressions looking back from the mirror. Over time, your baby will realize that the drooling, smiling baby staring back is actually a reflection. Once this happens, babies become aware of themselves, which leads to more self-discovery as they learn about body parts and where they are.

Ring stack. This classic toy features a cone that fits different sized colored rings. At first, babies enjoy holding and mouthing the rings. Later, they practice fine motor skills by fitting the rings onto the cone. Toddlers also learn about colors and numbers when you count the multicolored rings as you stack them.

Push-pull toys. These help with balance and large-muscle development as your little one goes from a couch surfer to a walker. The more babies push and pull, the more they work the muscles necessary to turn them into runners and climbers. Later, in the toddler years, kids can use them to help control their increasing speed.

Toddlers: How They Play

Toddlers are becoming aware of the function of objects. They like to stack blocks, babble into a toy phone, or drink from a “big kid” cup. The concept of pretend play starts now. Your little one might tuck a baby doll into bed at night or make “choo choo” noises while pushing a toy train.

This lays the groundwork for preschool play, when using the oven timer in a play kitchen or ringing the bell in a pretend fire truck signifies your child’s growing understanding that each item serves a purpose.

Your toddler also will begin to differentiate colors and shapes. So choose toys that are bright, colorful, and fun for little hands to hold. By age 2, most toddlers can kick a ball, scribble with a crayon, and build towers four or more blocks tall. By age 3, they can do simple puzzles and pedal a tricycle.

Expect to see a lot of repetition, as that’s how little ones master new skills and learn they have some control over the world around them.

Smart Toys for Toddlers

Balls. Whether they’re bounced, rolled, caught, or thrown, balls encourage gross motor skills, hand–eye coordination, and dexterity.

Shape-sorting toys. Pegboard puzzles, nesting cups or blocks, and buckets with holes for different shaped blocks challenge hand-eye coordination and problem-solving skills.

Mechanical toys. Pop-up toys and “busy” boxes with knobs, buttons, and levers encourage fine motor skills and problem solving, and teach cause-and-effect.

Role-play toys. Play kitchens, doctor’s kits, and golf sets help children learn how the world works by imitating the actions of you and other influential adults. Dolls and stuffed animals encourage pretend play (a tea party for teddy bears, perhaps?) and aid social and emotional development by teaching tots how to express emotions and take care of something they love.

Preschoolers: How They Play

Babies explore objects with the five senses. Toddlers start figuring out how they work. Now, as preschoolers, they’ll use toys and other objects for their intended purpose, yet also will imagine a world of other possibilities for them. A blanket thrown over a coffee table becomes a secret clubhouse. Modeling clay can be used to make pizza pies that you’re asked to “taste.”

For a preschooler, the world becomes a magical place without limits — and preschoolers are the masters and creators of it all. Many kids this age think they have magical powers and can battle “monsters” and win, or turn into a princess, fairy, or other whimsical creature.

Often, your preschooler will pull you into a fantasy and expect you to play along. It’s also during this time that imaginary friends may “appear.” This type of fantasy play is crucial to kids’ development because it helps them work on their fears, anxieties, hopes, and dreams.

The world is also a stage, so expect to hear lots of “mommy, daddy, watch!” as your preschooler learns one new trick after another and seeks your approval and support for new accomplishments. The desire to connect with others extends to friends as preschoolers begin to learn the give-and-take of cooperative play and sharing.

Pretend play becomes more elaborate. Kids’ knowledge of the world is more advanced, so don’t be surprised if your preschooler knows exactly how to work electronic gadgets or make electrical toys (like a radio-controlled car or a video game) work.

Play itself becomes more physical. Why just walk when you can hop, jump, or skip?

Smart Toys for Preschoolers

Arts and crafts. As fine motor skills improve, activities like holding a crayon, drawing pictures of family members, and using a pair of safety scissors to cut and paste strengthen coordination, encourage creativity, and foster self-esteem.

Blocks and construction sets. Building a tower (and figuring out how to stop it from toppling over) encourages problem-solving skills and hand–eye coordination. Preschoolers use their imaginations to create buildings, vehicles, animals, and more from simple construction sets.

Puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles help with coordination and dexterity, and teach about spatial relationships (where things are in relation to other things) and logical thinking.

Big Kids: How They Play

Elementary school-age kids are accomplished in ways they never were before. They’ve grasped an understanding of the world around them and are now moving toward mastering skills that once challenged them, like catching a football or braiding a friend’s hair.

This also is the time where talents and interests take hold — a 4-year-old who enjoyed story time may grow to love reading; a 5-year-old who listened to music might want to play piano.

Physical abilities, like large and fine motor skills, are being refined. Children learn to ride two-wheel bicycles and glide on skateboards. Arts and crafts become more intricate, and a child might spend hours weaving friendship bracelets or drawing comic strips.

Peer relationships take on more importance, and your child might be more interested in playing with classmates than with you. But remember that even as your child matures, you are still the most important playmate — so try to carve out some one-on-one time. Family game nights are one way to get everyone together.

And now’s the time to try new adventures, such off-road biking, that kids couldn’t do when they were younger and need your supervision to do safely now.

Smart Toys for Big Kids

Jump rope. By skipping rope with friends, kids learn to take turns and get along with peers. All that jumping, and the coordination it requires, encourages large motor development and problem-solving skills.

Card and board games. Card games like “war” or “crazy eights” and board games like checkers or chess teach about strategy, turn-taking, negotiating rules, and fair play. Encourage cooperation and help your child learn to manage the emotions that come with winning as well as losing.

Musical instruments. Learning to play the piano, violin, guitar, or another instrument encourages listening and fine motor skills and helps build attention skills.

Science toys. Chemistry sets, binoculars, telescopes, or other toys that promote discovery and problem-solving help improve math and science skills, and help develop imagination.

The Perfect Toy: You

A baby staring at a mobile; a toddler stacking blocks; a pre-schooler painting with watercolors — all are activities that can be done independently.

But don’t underestimate your role. After all, it’s you who put up the mobile, turned it on, and encouraged your baby to follow. It’s you who first showed your baby how to stack those blocks. And when you sit side-by-side with your kids and paint, color, or read a story, you give them the attention they need to build their self-esteem and feel loved and secure.

Toys are a tool to help kids develop, but it’s parents who nurture that growth.

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[aion-rsa]

Doctor Who’s Best Comfort-Viewing Episodes

https://ift.tt/2UgJy48

I mean, it’s not like absolutely everything is terrible right now, but certainly a lot of things are and we could all do with a break. As a result, here’s a list of Doctor Who stories – one chosen per Doctor – that I put on for comfort. Sometimes you need something familiar and well-worn to unwind with.

This list is very much subjective, some of it is down to which Doctor Who videos I could afford when I was 10. These stories work for me and it’s unlikely they will work completely for someone else. Also worth mentioning is that this list is incomplete; these are not the only stories I watch for comfort, and indeed sometimes that’s not the reason I watch these stories.

First Doctor: ‘The Aztecs’

‘The Aztecs’ is a great example of Doctor Who that can be both familiar, endearing and brutal. In this story Barbara is mistaken for the goddess Yetaxa, and attempts to use her influence to stop the practice of human sacrifice. The Doctor rails against changing history, the High Priest plots to reveal Barbara’s ploy. To escape, Ian has to fight to the death, Susan has to avoid an arranged marriage, and the Doctor has to pretend to romance an Aztec woman who might have the key to letting them reach the TARDIS again. It’s all very morally murky yet comes away feeling generous.

A lot of the characters are flawed and interesting. You understand their motives even if you don’t agree with them. The original TARDIS crew, who have hit their stride now, are included in this. The Aztecs are shown to both practice human sacrifice and meet writer John Lucarotti’s description of ‘a highly civilised and cultured race’.

It’s also a well-made show, and if anything the improved picture quality has been cruel to Barry Newberry’s backdrops – not for lack of detail, but for picking out the folds in the material. With the script doing the same for the characters, ‘The Aztecs’ shows us that comforting does not have to equal light.

Second Doctor: ‘The Macra Terror’

There’s something counterintuitive about choosing a Troughton story with almost no existing pictures because so much of his performance is visual. However, having first experienced a lot of Troughton stories as audio there’s still a lot to admire in his expressive vocal performance.

Also something potentially counterintuitive here is that I’m picking a story outside of the Base Under Siege format that dominated Season 5, which for many people is their platonic ideal of Doctor Who. However I feel that this does a great disservice to a subgenre I’m going to call ‘Weird Troughton’, defined by being an outlier from the series format or featuring Troughton still working out the role (so ‘The Highlanders’, despite being a historical with no science-fiction elements, counts because Troughton is still trying out strange and fun things with the character). ‘The Underwater Menace’ is ridiculous and I love it anyway, David Whittaker very much ploughs his own furrow, and ‘The Mind Robber’ raises the possibility that Doctor Who is a self-aware entity. ‘The Macra Terror’, now available as an animation, is for me one of the best pieces of drama produced from this group, managing to be sinister, fun and have giant crab monsters in it.

It’s an angry take on uniformity, jingoism and control and feels very current. The Second Doctor’s response to having his clothes cleaned and hair combed in accordance with colony beauty standards is great. Ben’s brainwashing gives Michael Craze a chance to show his range, and by choosing not to play it in a zombie or fugue state it’s all the more chilling. Plus, and I can’t stress this enough, giant crabs.

Third Doctor: ‘The Sea Devils’

‘The Sea Devils’ is a sequel to ‘The Silurians’, Malcolm Hulke’s story of prehistoric lizard people who were the dominant species on Earth before humanity. That story was a more considered, intense tale, whereas this is more of a romp with depth. With aquatic lizards instead of underground ones, it also features the Navy rather than UNIT, and the Navy is credited with assisting the production.

Possibly because of this collaboration Jon Pertwee (formerly of the Naval Intelligence Division during World War Two) is clearly having a great time. Otherwise the tropes of the era (the Master, the military, meddling civil servants, Jo Grant gets to be resourceful and plucky, six episodes that could have been done in four) are all present and correct and ready to be argued at. It’s extremely comfortable, and directed with pace and energy by Michael E. Briant (he also knows when to slow down: the submarine attack, for example, where the sailors arm themselves and get into position, watching in horror and confusion as the door melts in front of them).

Hulke injects just enough detail into the characters to bring them to life, with the cast rising to the challenge. Colonel Trenchard, for example, feels like someone you could hear at a golf club complaining about immigration. The final two episodes dispense with any notion of depth and instead we get a big ol’ fight scene where the Navy gets to show off its machinery and the stunt team gets to show off its flips and falls.

This story also features an experimental synth score and a swordfight between the Doctor and the Master where one of them stops for sandwiches. The Pertwee era is pitched incredibly astutely. Sure, it’s absolute nonsense, but it’s amiable nonsense with teeth.

Fourth Doctor: ‘The Ribos Operation’

‘The Ribos Operation’ (or, as it should be known ‘The Best Fourth Doctor Story’) kicks off The Key to Time arc by systematically undermining the entire concept. The Doctor is given a mission by the White Guardian (ostensibly nicer than the Black Guardian but with a hint of unease to him), to find six pieces of The Key to Time and restore balance to the universe. The Doctor is given a new companion, a recent Time Lord academy graduate with all the book knowledge but no experience of the universe.

Robert Holmes’ script is layered, funny, and treads a perfect balance between anger and (unexpectedly) kindness. It hides its subtleties with engaging dialogue and characters, all played with the right levels of bombast. And such characters! Garron and Unstoffe, one of several Doctor analogues (he’s a big, booming and charismatic conman, with Unstoffe as his game but questioning companion who brings compassion that Garron can’t) are rightly regarded as the standouts, but it’s also worth noting the Graff Vynda K: a villain of the piece, a prissy warlord full of self-importance but never heard of before or since, a backwater despot bullying his way across a tiny corner of the universe. The Doctor’s solution to a vainglorious, self-mythologising monster? To blow him up. An interesting response on a number of levels.

There’s nothing wrong with this story. It’s superbly constructed and well-made. It’s a perfect anti-epic, and the only story I’ve rewatched on DVD as often as I did VHS.

Fifth Doctor: ‘Enlightenment’

A wondrous peak in Eighties Doctor Who, starting as a cerebral science-fiction adventure before morphing into a cerebral science-fiction adventure that’s camp as tits.

You may recall Craig Ferguson’s description of Doctor Who as ‘the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism’. ‘Enlightenment’ is a great example of this, with the romantic image of seafaring ships sailing through space corrupted by both the aloof officers and the Black Guardian’s influence. The Guardians here are ostensibly still representations of order and chaos, but mostly they’re ‘nice old man with bird on head’ and ‘ridiculous hyuk hyuking villain with bird on head’. The officer class are made up of Eternals – a race of godlike immortal beings who created this space race for entertainment – a great concept invented by writer Barbara Clegg after witnessing her rich relatives interact with her poorer ones at a family gathering.

The Doctor, through his intellect and faith in his companion, removes the corrupting forces. It’s not clear what happens to the surviving ships after the race is finished, but imagine finding one abandoned in space. It’s such a strong image in a story full of them. Clegg’s writing is full of great concepts and characterisation, including some excellent work with the regulars that makes them feel much more like real people than usual.

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Sixth Doctor: ‘The Mark of the Rani’

In which Time Lady the Rani experiments in a north-eastern mining town, causing violence to erupt.

First of all there’s the score, which is still of its time but feels distinctive due to its more tranquil ambient feel. It doesn’t sound dissimilar to The Microgram, someone who travels round the North East of England recording ambient noises and playing synths over them. There’s even one recorded at Beamish, which completes the loop here.

‘The Mark of the Rani’ is set in Killingworth, north of Newcastle, and technically so are the accents. They sound like someone went round RADA asking ‘Has anyone heard the song “Let’s Get Ready to Rumble” by PJ and *checks notes* Duncan?’

This slightly askew version of reality fits Pip and Jane Baker’s version of Doctor Who. Their debut script for the show establishes their style of endearingly serious batshit nonsense (landmines that turn people into plants, leading to the immortal line ‘The tree won’t harm you’). It’s like their stories are written by Wallace with minimal input from Gromit.  

As a result ‘Mark of the Rani’ stands out amidst the aggressive stories surrounding it. It can be taken as merely enjoyably daft, but it’s also got some substance to it. Pip and Jane clearly remember Doctor Who as being the kind of show where the Doctor and his companion got on, so Peri is subjected to less arguing and is even defended (admittedly in terms of utility) by the Doctor.

The Rani is actually a character here, as opposed to her other appearances where she is simply A Villain In Doctor Who, and her presence immediately reduces Anthony Ainley’s Master to a supporting comic relief character. This suits him. When you’re standing in a field caked in shit pretending to be a scarecrow and laughing at passers-by for not noticing you clearly we can’t take you seriously anymore, so at least this story doesn’t pretend he’s a credible threat.

So on the one hand it’s daft, silly fun, but on the other it’s a mid-Eighties story featuring a chemist torturing Northern miners for her own gain. Guess what degree Margaret Thatcher graduated from Oxford with?

Speaking of Thatcher:

Seventh Doctor: ‘The Happiness Patrol’

Within Doctor Who fandom, no one has ever said ‘Oh you don’t like the McCoy era? I’m sorry, you never mentioned it’, and ‘The Happiness Patrol’ revels in all the things its detractors hate about the era. It’s intentionally camp and uses symbolism rather than demanding to be taken literally, like a more confident version of Season 24. The Kandy Man is rightly noted as (visually) a Bertie Bassett parody, played as the ludicrous creature he undoubtedly is.

Knowing that it is restricted in what it can show in terms of violence, the show had now worked out how to be ostensibly child-friendly and incredibly morbid, hence the screeching sweetie-creature, the Day-Glo ray-guns, and the guy who gets drowned in a vat of jam. When you’re three and have never seen Doctor Who before the Kandy Man is downright terrifying, this bizarre monster who twists and turns and screams. This was my first experience of Doctor Who and, appropriately enough, it scared the hell out of me.

As an adult, I find it’s a pleasing return to the ‘Weird Troughton’ stories of the Sixties, the ones where the Doctor was an unassuming but powerful anarchic figure. Here we have a variation of this, where the Doctor has been trying to explore the universe but finds it full of monsters, and starts doing something about it.

Before Season 26 attempted something approaching realism, this story suits Ace and the Seventh Doctor who both feel like Children’s TV archetypes who have grown tired of their roles. Ace’s CBBC leanings (with crap swearing and Blue Peter badges) fits into this heightened reality better than she does a less tonally certain story (like ‘Battlefield’). ‘The Happiness Patrol’ feels like a combination of the different approaches of the McCoy era, a best of album with a life of its own.

Eighth Doctor: ‘Night of the Doctor’

This is specifically because of the circumstances of broadcast, although it’s also a melancholy meta-commentary on the show’s cancellation and wilderness years in which Paul McGann gets to demand ‘Bring me knitting’.

It’s not merely the return of McGann to the onscreen role of the Eighth Doctor after 17 years, it’s that this was kept a surprise until the mini-episode was released in the build-up to the 50th anniversary special. It was such a treat, and I still remember the email I sent to the site’s TV editor when I watched it for Den of Geek. It read ‘OH MY F***ING GOD’ and was sent while the episode was paused just after the word ‘expecting’.

And so I told my friends. I know people watched this in work meetings on their phones under the table. It’s associated with a lot of feelings, not least building excitement. This one is connected very clearly to a moment of shared joy.

Ninth Doctor: ‘The End of the World’

While ‘Rose’ is rightly adulated as bringing Doctor Who back to a large prime time audience, ‘The End of the World’ had a different job to do. Viewing figures went down for this episode after over 10 million people watched the series opener, but went up again after this, suggesting positive word of mouth from this episode, consolidating the success of ‘Rose’.

The production team were aiming to use this episode to show off how Doctor Who could look in 2005, with hundreds of CGI shots and dozens of aliens gathered together. It also showed the new Doctor’s emotional distance, in that his idea of showing off to his new companion is to take her to see her planet getting destroyed.

We also get, in a late addition to the script, Russell T. Davies’ knack for making the alien familiar with the character of Raffalo (‘You’re a plumber?’) who is almost immediately killed, further demonstrating RTD’s knack for knowing which character’s death will have the most impact (and if you’ve not read his novelisation of ‘Rose’ you really should if just for Clive’s death in prose form. Honestly it’s incredible).

‘The End of the World’ is a comforting reminder of the nascent excitement surrounding the 2005 series, that feeling of turbulence that eventually settled because of the strength of these early episodes.

 Tenth Doctor: ‘The Fires of Pompeii’

The episode itself has a soothsay-off between Metella and Lucius to set up a plot point and the series arc, and the first TARDIS trip for Donna as a full-time companion. You immediately get to see the strengths that Catherine Tate is going to bring to the series, not merely her comic and dramatic ability but the way Donna is able to stop the Tenth Doctor from his worst impulses, and by bluntly dismissing the notion of fixed points in history meaning just allowing bad things to happen. This is, for me, the best episode in the first half of Series 4 by a long way.

Sure, there’s a colossal death toll here which is far from comforting, but as ever nostalgia and context plays a huge part here. This was an episode broadcast on the night of our fan club’s night out, a phase of my fandom that turned me from someone who liked Doctor Who in primary school into an adult fan. This has, overall, been worth it. So what this story reminds me of is, following on from ‘The End of the World’s establishing the series, is the initial excitement and patterns of Russell T. Davies’ series where he set up some key words or phrases early on and fandom tried to work out their significance, resulting in the heady days of someone saying Norman Lovett was going to play Davros in ‘The Parting of the Ways’ on IMDb.

Eleventh Doctor: ‘A Christmas Carol’

Quite a few contenders here, but I’ve gone with my favourite Christmas Special because these episodes are often Doctor Who at its broadest, suitable for the half-cut who dwell in food-comas. This episode is one of the last of these stories, before the Christmas Specials became steeped in the main continuity of the series. It’s also a great example of the childlike impulsiveness of Matt Smith’s Doctor before he became more of a teenager in Series 6. It’s great fun and the riffing on Dickens lands really strongly for people like me, who often respond more to a strong realisation of an idea than they do pathos.

This story is designed to be comfortable and succeeds by establishing what a Steven Moffat Christmas Special will look like: lots of time-travel, obviously, but also a big budget version of ‘The Happiness Patrol’s daring the audience to find it too ridiculous. As a result we get a remix of A Christmas Carol featuring flying sharks pacified by a mezzo-soprano, with the joy of these disparate elements coming together through that most underrated of Moffat staples – a grumpy old man learning to let go while being dragged through the sky by animals who usually lack the power of flight.

Twelfth Doctor: ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’

With Capaldi realising his initially abrasive take on the character was too much, this story relieved the tension that had been building with the Doctor’s behaviour, allowing him to explain himself and setting up the arc that culminates in ‘Hell Bent’.

Once this was broadcast I breathed a sigh of relief. Despite wanting it not to be the case I’d had to reach for the positives in the Capaldi era thus far; with the exception of ‘Listen’ the stories had felt like treading water until ‘Kill the Moon’ split the room. Even if you don’t like it (and I mostly don’t) that was the first story that felt like it was trying something different and paved the way for the increased complexity of the Twelfth Doctor’s character. Ultimately what the show needed at this point was a run of good stories, and – appreciating some people don’t get on with ‘Forest of the Night’ (and I mostly do) – this was the start of a really strong run.

‘Mummy on the Orient Express’ is a mash up of concepts that Doctor Who excels at, with an enjoyably horrific Mummy and the actual countdown to its victims’ demises contributing to making each death count. This is harder than it looks, the balance between violence and pathos taking into account the family audience, but the combination of ideas really makes them land as brutal without gore. By putting the Doctor through this writer Jamie Mathieson manages to explain his apparent heartlessness as weariness at making tough choices, but being unable to resist getting into situations that require them. The path is now clear from here to the heights of ‘Hell Bent’ and ‘The Doctor Falls’.

Thirteenth Doctor: ‘It Takes You Away’

Obviously there are fewer Jodie Whittaker fewer stories to choose from, and for me it has to be one from Series 11 because that felt like a palette cleanser for an approach to Doctor Who that never manifested. For all its ups and downs, limiting continuity references and focus on new characters or threats felt like a good move. Certainly the guest writers all provided solid stories, and while the series didn’t soar for me it felt like a good platform to improve from, which is partly why Series 12 was so disappointing (it felt like it addressed problems that weren’t there, ignoring the ones that were).

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‘It Takes You Away’ is frequently surprising, offering a simple blunt horror of loss (the childlike refrain of the title, the fear of absence) combined with endearingly outlandish performances by the actor Kevin Eldon and a sentient universe manifesting as a talking frog. It allowed Jodie Whittaker a rare success in negotiating her way out of a situation, and progressed the character arc of the series with Ryan and Graham’s changing relationship. It’s obviously imperfect (ideally, Hanne’s Dad’s manipulative behaviour would be properly addressed) but it’s also imaginative, moving, and weird, and these are three things I really want Doctor Who to be.

Share your go-to Doctor Who comfort viewing episodes below.

The post Doctor Who’s Best Comfort-Viewing Episodes appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[chroniclesofawkwardness]

Bleeders (Them Shoes)

I.

We’re not supposed to talk openly about going to the bathroom. It’s such a sensitive subject that children have their own lexicon for describing two things every single person on the planet does (number one or number two). Even a well-known producer of toilet paper has danced around the subject by composing a song about a booty smile in an ad for their ultra-soft product. Hell, even adults sometimes get caught using euphemisms like taking a dump, dropping a duce, or recycling water. The bathroom is supposed to be one of the last vestiges of privacy in a world where privacy is almost certainly dead. Personally, I tend to be very mission-oriented in the bathroom; I’m not much of a conversationalist. Unless somebody walks in on me mid-stream, I can usually get in and out of the water closet without too much trouble. That being said, sometimes confrontation is inevitable.

I used to love working nights. More money. Fewer people. No need to set an alarm in the morning. You might say I had a higher expectation of privacy. Still, this expectation was shattered one Friday night several months ago, when I visited the same bathroom I always used during my last break before the end of my shift. We humans are nothing if not creatures of habit. 

There was no way for me to avoid him. The middle-aged man was standing directly in front of the trash can that was just inside the door. I was already in mission-mode. It wasn’t critical, but I still had to pee, so I wasn’t in the mood for exchanging pleasantries.

I read in a book one time that if you think someone is planning on attacking you, it’s a good idea to attempt to throw them off by asking an innocuous question such as, “What time is it?” The hope is that they’ll be so startled that they won’t carry out whatever devious plot had been dancing in their head. For a split second, I thought about asking this man that question, but I remembered I was wearing a watch. All I could manage was a weak, “How’s it going?” 

I got an answer I neither expected nor wanted:

Man, I blew my nose and it just started bleeding.

Trying to contain my shock, I quickly thought of another innocuous question to attempt to defuse the situation:

Um… Do you need medical attention? I can call security. 

I knew some people got really bad nosebleeds. I’d woken up with a few as a kid, so the last thing I wanted was another just-a-flesh-wound situation from Monty Python unfolding right there on the blue and white tile floor. In response, the man said something else that caught me totally by surprise:

No. It’s okay. It happens to all of us. Everyone in my family; we’re all bleeders. 

He just walked away.

I felt an aneurysm coming on, what comedian Lewis Black said you might experience upon hearing the words, “If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.” Fortunately, before the room started spinning, I came to my senses and remembered that I had to get back to work. My break should only last fifteen minutes. I chalked the encounter up to the randomness that I seem to attract on a regular basis and thought that was the end of the story. 

I was wrong. 

Fast forward about two months to approximately 9:00 P.M. on a Friday night in the dead of winter. You might wonder why I chose to go to the same bathroom again. I wouldn’t say the release was as cathartic as the one A Rumor of War author Phillip Caputo describes upon returning to Saigon, but like Caputo, I refused to let myself be defined by a bad experience. I went back to that bathroom because I had to. I had to know that I’d be okay, that I could experience my own literal release without the soundtrack of a stranger’s medical history to keep me company or make me sick to my stomach. 

I was standing at the sink washing my hands that night when who should appear in the bathroom but the man with the spontaneously bleeding nose. This time, his problem was at the other end. I barely had time to think before he launched into another bodily proclamation:

If I were you, I’d get out of here. Sorry for oversharing… It’s all this fiber.

Okay.

I went back to my desk wondering why I hadn’t just waited until I’d made it home to use the bathroom. There’s just something about the comfort of one’s home bowl. The freedom from judgment and the freedom of movement it affords are unmatched. I can stand as close to, or as far away from the toilet as I want, and I never have to hold it in, acting like everything is fine, when in reality I’m about to explode. What’s more, I certainly have more privacy than in a building with over ten thousand employees, and a housekeeping staff that clearly doesn’t give a fuck who they walk in on when they start their nightly tasks of cleaning toilets, occasionally emptying trash cans, and pretending to vacuum floors.

I haven’t seen the man with the penchant for nosebleeds and fiber consumption since the last of these two incidents, though I think of him whenever I spot a bottle of Metamucil on the shelf at my Kroger pharmacy.

Wherever he is, I hope he got the help he needed and left me out of it. 

II.

I don’t know why, but I’ve always had trouble getting shoes on and off my right foot. I could use a shoehorn, but I wonder if I’m too old to learn a new trick. When I was very young, I had a pair of braces for my legs, much like the ones a young Forrest Gump wore when he taught a young Elvis how to dance.

Unlike Forrest, if I’m going somewhere, I’m usually walking. Thanks to my pedestrian existence, I go through shoes pretty quickly, but I don’t always replace them in a timely manner when holes appear, or rocks get stuck in them. I’ve never been a big fan of spending money on myself unless it’s absolutely necessary, but this strategy sometimes comes back to bite me in the ass. A wholesale warehouse like Costco could be just the place to support my feet without breaking my bank. If I could be strong enough not lead myself into temptations all around, and wise enough to find my way without having to Hansel and Gretel that shit back to the entrance.  

Until recently, it had been years since I’d visited Costco. I hadn’t had a membership, so my only exposure to the Costco experience was in their bakery when a friend of mine and I went there to pick up a cake for a co-worker who was transferring to another department. My friend wasn’t happy with me during and after our trip because he was convinced I’d blown his chance to stalk the head coach of the local National Hockey League franchise throughout the store. All because I couldn’t find a pen to fill out the order form for the cake. 

I know it was him. The team is off tonight. We could’ve followed him around and gotten autographs, but SOMEBODY couldn’t find a pen. This is all your fault.

How can you be sure? All we could see was the back of the man’s head. Besides, if it was, the last thing he needs is a bunch of grown-ass, wannabe-Canucks fawning over him like teenage girls over Justin Bieber. Let’s just move on. I’m sure finding 500 ft. of aluminum foil or a 128 oz. jar of mayonnaise on sale will cheer you up.

I think my friend is still salty about the incident. 

Anyway, my mom had been talking up Costco for weeks prior to our visit. You’d think we were going to a place that held the promise of the Disneyworld of my youth, or a Barry Manilow concert of hers. It was so beautiful, she’d say, so full of the spoils of hollow, American excess (You won’t have to buy paper towels for six months. Isn’t that just wonderful?) that nothing could reverse the magnetic attraction to it that its patrons would naturally feel. Once we’d made our way through the massive sliding doors of this consumerist-culture theme park, a little old lady stopped us at the entrance and asked to see the membership cards we didn’t have. We could’ve easily overpowered her and run amok up and down the aisles, but we decided to play by the rules like blissful, ignorant cattle being led to slaughter, and stand in line for proof that we belonged.

Maybe the cattle secretly knew their lives would never be the same after they slipped inside the slaughterhouse. Maybe we knew our lives would change forever after we slipped inside Costco. We were just too excited about the possibility of buying whole peaches (whole fucking peaches!) in jars to care. I wish I’d asked the little old lady to take off her politeness mask so I could see who she really was. I feel the same way about Disney characters. What I wouldn’t give to be in the break room at Disneyworld on a Tuesday afternoon in the heat of July. I’d pay to see Mickey and Minnie Mouse without their costume heads, smoking cigarettes, carelessly farting, and dropping f-bombs like normal human beings. That’s a Disney fantasy I could buy into.

I first saw them after I’d selected ninety-six pencils for four dollars, and forty-four bags of popcorn for nine. Snow tracks. They were pieces of rubber speckled with spikes that remind you of the bottoms of golf shoes. They were supposed to provide enhanced traction on snow and ice. I hadn’t yet bought myself a pair of winter boots this season, so I needed something to combat the unpredictable Ohio weather in the meantime. The snow tracks cost about five dollars and seemed they’d be a good fit until my boots came in the mail. I should’ve paid more attention to the actual fit. The package said they were for shoe sizes 3.5 to 7.5. I wear a size 8. Close enough, I thought.

I was wrong (again).

When I got the pencils, popcorn, and snow tracks home, I ripped the snow tracks from their packaging like a kid opening presents on Christmas morning. I was convinced I’d found an inexpensive, long-lasting solution to a transportation problem I’ve faced every winter. If cars could have snow tires, the snow tracks were supposed to be my pedestrian equivalent, my way of telling Mother Nature to suck it.

III.

Sex.

  Now that I have your attention, keep reading. 

I’m hardly the first person to point out that we live in the age of toxicity. Toxic femininity. Toxic masculinity. If you boy into those ideas, you’d have to behave as if you were walking on eggshells everywhere you went. When you’d go about your daily life, you’d have to be careful. In many scenarios standards (whatever those are) of conduct, language, and presentation (to name a few) have gradually shifted from what a reasonable person would consider acceptable, to what the most sensitive among us can tolerate. We’ve been invited to neuter ourselves because someone, somewhere might be offended by something we say or do. God help us if we were cross that arbitrary, ever-shifting line into the offensive. Our lives could easily be ripped to shreds on social media, or dissected for all to see in the court of public opinion without so much as a word spoken in our defense.

What does supposed gender toxicity have to do with bleeding noses, impromptu descriptions of impending bowel movements, shoes, Costco, and sex?

Keep reading.

The first day I wore the snow tracks to work, they were unnecessary. But I  wanted to try them out before the weather got nasty. After I put them on and started walking somewhere other than the carpeted floor of my apartment, I felt like a dog or cat that seriously needed its nails clipped. I felt like I could tip over at any moment. You could even say the clickety-klack sound the snow tracks made as I walked was reminiscent of a newborn pony taking its first steps. In a way, I was learning to walk all over again. I probably looked as awkward if not more so than a newborn pony, whose difficulty with steps could be easily explained, if not expected. Mine, on the other hand, was caused by an invention so questionable it belonged on a Saturday afternoon infomercial (the playground of the gullible) or in heavy rotation on QVC (the playground of the elderly). 

I was really wobbling by the time I got to work. I had to walk on a tile floor until I got to the set of stairs that meant I was mere feet away from the relative stability of carpeting. When I made it to the stairs without tipping over, I felt triumphant in my badassery. Not only had I told Mother Nature what she could go do to herself, I’d subjugated my favorite flight of stairs. For the briefest of moments, there was nothing I couldn’t do.

Each morning, like clockwork, I’d feed my coffee addiction by making the short trek down the hall to one of the break rooms on my floor. I went from being off-balance on the tile to feeling like my feet were stuck in quicksand on the carpet. I felt like Marv (Daniel Stern) in Home Alone as he got his feet repeatedly stuck in what looked like tar as he trudged up the steps into what he hoped would be a final confrontation with Kevin McCallister. I didn’t have traction where I needed it and had too much where I didn’t. I got my coffee just fine, but noticed a problem when I got back to my desk. 

Fuck. One of the snow tracks came off one of my shoes. Now I’ve gotta Hansel and Gretel that shit back to the break room, and hope no one picked it up. In that case, I’d have only one, which won’t do me much good since I’ve got two shoes.

This was my first indication that the masculine drive I’d displayed by trying to fit something on the bottom of my shoe that wasn’t designed to fit there may have been misdirected. Fortunately, the solitary snow track was right where it had fallen off, twisted and sad, outside the entrance to the break room. I picked it up and carried it back to my desk. I was relieved, yet slightly terrified at not knowing who among my thousands of colleagues had seen what, or when.  

Whole again, I decided to remove the snow track from my other shoe, lock them in one of my desk drawers, and thank my lucky stars that a hyper-sensitive person hadn’t found it. If they had, so went my worst nightmare, they could’ve easily mistaken it for a medieval torture device, a sex toy, or both. This could have triggered a massive HR manhunt. I was the only person I’d ever seen wearing snow tracks so it wouldn’t take security too long to figure out whose it was. I mean, seriously, how often do you really look at a man’s shoes? Even though I had the snow tracks under lock and key, I’d already been peacocking to my co-workers about conquering Mother Nature that morning. I assumed one of them would cave, and point the finger at me as soon as one of our woke-up-like-this, my-uniform-is-three-sizes-too-big security guards applied even the tiniest bit of investigative pressure.

I didn’t think about the snow tracks until I could feel safe trying to put them on again, shortly after 5:30 PM that evening. I couldn’t risk being seen in the workplace wearing socks without shoes, so I decided to visit the same bathroom where I’d encountered Mr. Nosebleed, aka The Kellogg’s Cracklin’ Oat Bran Man. I refused to let him get the best of me, even if the competition between us was playing out exclusively in my head. I know now that should’ve just risked being accosted by an everything-is-a-trigger-warning coworker by sitting out in the open to take my shoes off and attach the snow tracks to them. Against the better angels of my nature, I opted for the blue and white tile of old familiar. For the first time in this nearly seven-year stint with my employer, I went into a bathroom stall. I chose one that was handicapable accessible at that because I knew I’d need a fair amount of room to maneuver. 

If one’s home bowl provides an unparalleled level of comfort, I don’t know why I expected the toilet in this unfamiliar, reasonably public bathroom to have a lid. As far as I knew, I’d taken a dump in a public toilet but once in my entire life. Avoiding stalls in public bathrooms had become one of my personal rules after seeing far too many movies and television shows where the hero inconveniently finds himself seconds away from a for-a-good time-call-Charlie invitation scrawled in expectant Sharpie on one of the stall walls. The exception that disproved my rule was only brought about by the extenuating circumstance of my having been on a plane for 8+ hours, trying desperately not to pass gas in a closed cabin full of strangers and recycled air. When the time came for me to finally let loose, it was dark. My mission-oriented self couldn’t see much in 2011, so 2019 me had no earthly idea what to expect from the moment the stall door slammed home.

I sat on the toilet to take off my shoes, only to be betrayed yet again by my right foot. I had to bend and contort my body into several unnatural positions just to take off my right shoe. Even if I’d returned to the practice of yoga as I’ve been telling myself to do for years, it wouldn’t have done any good. By the time I managed to pry my foot free, I was bent over on the toilet seat, face red, and gasping for air as if I’d just been through a CrossFit workout. Extracting my foot from my left shoe wasn’t any easier. I was thankful I hadn’t fallen in the toilet the first time, and I decided not to risk doing so again. I sat on the floor of the stall among crumpled up toilet seat covers with my back against a wall. I succeeded in removing my left shoe, but it was a Pyrrhic victory that left me sucking air again five minutes later.

I thought the hard part was over, but I soon realized that I hadn’t really accomplished anything. I still had to get the snow tracks on my shoes. I decided to try putting the snow track on my left shoe first since I always put my left shoe on first anyway. I didn’t have nearly as much trouble as I’d anticipated. This only served to imbue me with a false sense of confidence as I entered the battle on my right side. Standing now, in stockinged feet, I twisted and pulled that infernal rubber contraption every way I knew how. It wasn’t long before the confrontation reached a tipping point. In the heat of the moment, I looked down at my shoe and saw that the toe was bent in in a position from which it might never recover. 

Uh oh.

While admiring the shoe’s brush with death, I got so caught up in wondering how the hell I hadn’t destroyed it that I forgot to release the tension on the snow track caused by my desperate attempts to fit it over the bottom. Consequences be dammed, I kept pulling, and sure enough the shoe went flying out of my hand. I let out a simultaneous: 

dammit!  

as it flipped like a coin through the air. Even the staunch atheist in me prayed it wouldn’t land outside the stall. If someone had walked in to find my solitary shoe on the floor, I’d have had some serious explaining to do. Fortunately, it came to rest within the stall, right in the space between the floor and the bottom of one of the walls. It would’ve been easily visible to anyone who happened by. I scrambled to pick it up, and somehow managed to finally put the snow track on without losing a shoe, or an eye, in the process. Another Pyrrhic victory in hand, I did the clickety-klack catlike walk out of the building and homeward, praying I wouldn’t tip over like a little teapot along the way.

IV.

Education.

Not many things in this world make me truly happy. Whatever I’m doing, I’m often consumed by the notion that I’m wasting my time, and I should be doing something else. One exception is volunteering. I like to think that whenever I get out to give back to the community, I’m spending my time wisely, that my actions make even the smallest difference in someone’s day. Those feelings, those moments, are what make life worth living. That’s why I jumped at the chance to volunteer at a local shelter for youth in crisis.

I’d heard snow was in the forecast for that Saturday, so I put the snow tracks on my shoes, and called for a Lyft to take me where I needed to go. Upon arriving, my driver insisted that I get in the back seat. I complied. He said he was familiar with where I was going, and I babbled on about why I enjoy volunteering so much. I’ve given the same speech to two dozen or more Lyft and Uber drivers over the years. I don’t always mean to say the same things over and over, but at this point, I’ve got a streak going. 

As we pulled up to the shelter, my driver said something that caught me by surprise:

God bless you and your ministry.

Okay.

I don’t know why he thought I was religious, but I decided it wasn’t worth fighting about since so few things in this world really are. As I got out of his car and stepped onto the sidewalk, I felt the same naked feeling I had when walking back to my desk with a coffee a few days before. I looked down at my feet, and instantly knew what was missing:

Shit! My snow tracks came off again. They’re in the back of a stranger’s car, and he’s pulling away from the curb… 

I waved to the driver in a half-hearted attempt to get his attention. He probably thought I was waving goodbye, so he didn’t stop. I was dejected over the loss of my spikey companions, but I had a job to do. Need knows no season, after all. As the leader of our group for this particular event, I was the first to arrive. I asked our host to tell me more about the facility. Turns out, it’s a shelter where kids can go when their parents may have kicked them out of their homes, ripped up their birth certificates, or under any number of undesirable circumstances.  Typically teenagers, the kids there are in tough spots. I remember hating life as a teenager, but I was incredibly fortunate to never lose my home or my support system. I’ll never forget that. How could I complain about losing a set of bougie spikes I’d bought at a club where I was a member in the back of a Lyft that I paid to ride in by just tapping on my smartphone? The short answer is, I couldn’t.

But that doesn’t mean shit couldn’t still get awkward.

If I’m mission-oriented in the bathroom, I’m also a mission-oriented volunteer. I was so excited to get started that I didn’t even wait for more people to show up. I started attacking the living room almost immediately. I found several intermingled decks of cards and resolved to make each one whole again. After working my way through a few decks, I made my way to an end table in search of rogue Kings and Queens. The table had so many board games on it that I almost didn’t see the circular object on the floor beneath it. I thought it was a fallen game piece at first. I reasoned that if decks could lose their cards, games could lose their pieces. No matter how hard I try, a part of me will always be a leave-it-better than-you-found-it Eagle Scout, so I bent down to pick up the fallen piece. But it wasn’t a game piece at all.

It was a used condom.

I jerked my hand away as if I’d touched a hot stove, but I quickly realized that the damage had already been done. In one motion, I picked it up and threw it in the closest trash can. Inside, I was disgusted. Outside, I knew I had to remain emotionally unmoved. How could I expect a house full of teenagers and my fellow volunteers to keep their cool if I couldn’t? The short answer is, I couldn’t.

As the color of my face slowly returned to normal, I returned to my quest for prodigal cards. Along the way, I picked up a canister of Lysol and a rag and started disinfecting. In the midst of organizing the cards and board games, I came across at least five different remotes that had either been left to their own devices on the end table, or fallen between the cushions of the couch next to it. I picked up a random remote to examine it; I couldn’t believe it had just one button. In that instant, I felt technology had come full circle. I simultaneously felt longing for the days of A, B, Select, Start, and a directional pad on a Nintendo controller from the 80s, and gratitude that I wasn’t overwhelmed by the option paralysis of my first and only X-Box controller from the early 2000s.  

Somehow, in the midst of my button daydreams, I managed to turn on the television. I panicked, though not as intensely as before.

Great. This is the last thing we need… If the volunteer coordinator catches us with the TV on, we’re screwed. I don’t want anyone thinking we were being lazy, even if turning on the TV was an accident.

I looked out the window through the falling snow for signs of any important-looking adults. Once satisfied there were none on the horizon, I decided to turn off the TV with the same one-button remote I’d used to accidentally turn it on. I messed around with the button for a few seconds, and though I couldn’t get the TV to turn off, I did manage to jack the volume up to 60. To make matters worse, Netflix soon followed with its unmistakable Dum-Dum opening sound.

Fuck me. It’s bad enough that I turned the TV on, but now it sounds like I’m making myself at home surrounded by kids who don’t have one. I’ve already seen at least one Children’s Services worker in the house today to check on one of the kids. If I don’t turn off this damn TV right now, this could get ugly. No one wants to hear Maude Flanders scream “Won’t someone please think of the children” in a place where they’re supposed to be safe.

Since I couldn’t get the TV to turn off, or at least make a selection in time, Netflix did what Netflix does, and started playing the trailer of its featured show. As luck would have it, the feature that Saturday was Sex Education. I’d seen the trailer myself that morning, at home. But thinking of the hormonally-charged residents of the house, and my all-too-recent close call with a condom, I considered seeing it here to be the mother of all ironies. It’s a show about teenagers’ discovery of their sexuality, exacerbated by the fact that one of the teens’ mothers is a sex therapist. I knew this, of course, but I wasn’t horrified until the therapist spoke the trailer’s first words, to her son, which sent the following blaring throughout the house at volume level 60 in a British accent. 

I'VE NOTICED YOU’RE PRETENDING TO MASTURBATE, AND I WAS WONDERING IF YOU WANTED TO TALK ABOUT IT.

As she (unintentionally) bellowed that call to puberty to anyone within earshot, my entire time as a volunteer flashed before my eyes. Everything from my first event sorting food at the Homeless Families Foundation, to having an Uber driver tell me his GPS said I was in the middle of the highway, came washing over me. I was convinced that a hyper-sensitive adult, or some freshly-minted preteen who’d only recently embarked down the path of life’s most awkward phase, would ruin it all for me. I tried feverishly to turn the volume down as she spoke, but my fingers wouldn’t follow my commands. They just blindly grouped that stupid, singular button.

Shit…. Shit…. Shit….. No… No…. No…. Nooooooooo!!! We’re fucked now, for sure! They’ll never ask us to come back! Great job, Mr. Leader. 

Somehow, after a minute that might as well have lasted three years, I managed to turn off the television. I looked outside at the intensifying snowfall, and remembered my snow tracks were long gone. I was pissed off for a second, but I remembered that all I needed to do was ask someone for a ride in real life instead of just tapping a button on my phone. It’s redundancies that save you. 

I had some unexpectedly good (some might say bougie) French toast, coffee, and conversation at a place called The Crest after sprucing up the house and locking down the TV. At the conclusion of our meal, I called for a Lyft to take me home, and I managed not to fall in my own parking lot once I got there. 

My winter boots came in the mail on January 14, 2019, twenty-six years to the day my dear uncle Dave died. I’m not sure where or when he is, and I miss him like crazy sometimes. But I like to think that if he watched my struggles against Mother Nature and Father Time that weekend, he was laughing his ass off.

That’s another fantasy I could buy into.

[jenroses]

Sometimes it’s really hard to write about other people’s happy times when it reminds me of when I was strong and thought I could do almost anything. 

Sometimes it’s an escape, but sometimes it’s just a really rough reminder of how hard I’m struggling right now. 

The true answer to “How are you” behind the cut. It ain’t pretty.

The nausea is bad right now. Every week it’s a little worse, Saturdays. The dosage hasn’t changed, once a week I sit on the toilet lid while my husband is in the bathtub, and I swab alcohol between the stretch marks on my belly while he reads some old book or another (literally old, he’s on this kick and I think he’s up to the late 18th century? Maybe 19th? Idk.) 

I swab the top of the tiny vial of vile chartreuse poison. It’s thick:  in the little glass container it rolls thinner than honey, but thicker than oil. 

I pull out a syringe and draw .8 ml of air into it to push into the vial, in order to not create too much suction inside when I’m trying to pull the thick liquid into the needle.

The flashback comes when I get ready to inject, every time. When I was pregnant, I pushed a much larger amount of fire into my belly twice a day, every day, for most of ten months. It hurt, it bruised, and it kept me from clotting, and it meant that I survived a pregnancy without clots, long enough to give birth to a bundle of ornery sunshine. 

Methotrexate does not keep me from clotting. This is poison, and it’s only once a week, and the needle doesn’t even hurt going in. It doesn’t hurt pushing the medication in. But I know what’s coming. 

I do this before I head to bed. It’s almost always six or seven in the morning, because I dread it, and I want to milk the last of the “feeling okay” I’ve finally managed to achieve by the time I’m six days out from the shot. So I stay up too late, and then collapse into bed and cease to function for the rest of the weekend.

I sometimes think that I’m making too much of it. It’s only a little bit of chemo. For cancer, it would be 10-25 ml, not .8. It could be worse. I could be taking it orally and killing off my gastrointestinal tract. With the blood thinner I’m on, that seemed like a bad idea, so shots it is. 

When I let myself think that way, I do ill-advised things like decide I can fix shit and push through, like I did today when there was a crisis in the house over the fact that a DVD had come from the library as a blu-ray, for which we have no player. So I went to a store that had no electric cart to buy things that are literally way more expensive than a season of Game of Thrones could ever be, and came home to discover that there was literally no way to install anything on the computer that was supposed to get it. I sat there for an hour trying, on the wrong chair, which I should not have done, and then spent another hour trying to figure it out on a different computer. I emerged victorious, with a migraine and a blossoming fibro flare. 

I take... take feels like the wrong word. I subject myself to methotrexate in order to keep my immune system under control, to prevent my body from waging war on my gut, my liver, my salivary glands, my lacrimal glands and the membranes around my knuckles. It doesn’t work nearly as well as steroids at making me feel good, but might have fewer side effects long term? It’s hard to say. Something is going to kill me, and whether it’s the rheumatoid arthritis or the medications to fight the rheumatoid arthritis, or the blood clotting disorder, or the meds I take to prevent clots from forming (when the real problem is that once clots form, they just don’t STOP)... I don’t know. My grandmother lived to be 101 and right now that feels like too damn long. 

I have children. I have a husband. They need me, god knows why, and so I stay. I spent most of my time with my son today yelling at him. He’s five and it’s absolutely not his fault that my skin is so sensitive that touch is painful to me. I’m sure there’s probably a more graceful way to tell him that I just spent every last bit of energy I had making a couple of eggs that may or may not stay down and no, I don’t have the energy to deal with him wanting a new packet of salami and cheese when he hasn’t finished the cheese from the last one. He spent most of the day hanging out with his dad and his oldest sibling. My daughter is fortunately well cared for. We are protected from each other, but I wonder often what she thinks of our new reality, where she always has someone, but it’s almost never her mother because I can’t risk her feet or her teeth, because I can’t risk my temper or my lack of coping. Because I can no longer lift her, this child that I carried on my back for three straight years because she hadn’t learned to walk yet. I only stopped because I ended up with a clot and couldn’t lift anything. 

Writing has been hard this week, because when I write I draw on my experience, and right now it hurts to remember that once, I was a dancer, once I was a competitive swimmer, once I stood in front of people trying to ignore a bigot and roused them to speak out against him.

When I write I remember the things I could do and the places I went. I did so much. And it feels like that is over. The last convention I went to hurt. I had a scooter, and pillows, and a hotel room to retreat to, and it hurt so, so bad that I now associate conventions, which were fun, once, with blinding pain. 

The last one I went to was just before I was diagnosed. My joints were on fire. I thought I would need a wheelchair forever afterwards. 

I’m afraid to go back to the doctor and tell them how much the methotrexate is hurting me because the alternatives are thousands of dollars per month.

We can afford it, I just hate being that much more of a burden. That money was supposed to let us enjoy my husband’s retirement. But the idea of going on a cruise? I don’t see it happening and I don’t know how to break it to my husband that it might not be possible. 

I keep feeling like there are things I should be doing, like I should be trying, TRYING to exercise, like I should be trying to do something about my weight even though I know that trying to do something about my weight is not actually going to result in making healthier choices. There are barely any foods I can eat. No foods that are unambiguously healthy for me. The last thing I need to do right now is tell myself I can’t eat the few foods that don’t actively make me sick.

But today I tried to push through and I feel like I’m going to lose the entire week to it. 

I have no extra resources for social niceties. I’m completely social-scripting my responses to comments on my fic (please keep making comments, it matter so much, just understand if my responses are short.) I’m making huge social errors because I’m misreading things because the only way I social is by applying cognitive effort and I just don’t have it right now. 

I hear about people living and doing relatively normal things with RA. But my RA was not correctly diagnosed in a timely fashion. In retrospect, I think it started in 2014, but they didn’t have the right test in common usage so they shrugged and attributed my symptoms to “I don’t know some sort of inflammatory process probably related to EDS” and so by the time I was diagnosed, 29 joints were on fire and the antibody levels were so high they could not be accurately measured.

A lot of people with RA just have RA. 

I have RA, EDS, Hashimotos, Sjogren’s, fibro, sleep apnea, allergies, IBS, and Factor V Leiden. I’m probably autistic, definitely neuroatypical, with massive sensory issues and a brain that does amazing things in a lot of areas and is utterly inept at the things people expect to be easy. If I write people well it’s because I’ve been studying human beings like an anthropologist since I was three years old. (I gave my mother a sheet of paper on which I’d drawn a wide variety of facial expressions because I was trying to understand facial expressions.)

Someone asked me once, “Have you considered that your problems might be psychological?” I laughed in his face. The idea that I could, via mental illness, magically clot the blood in my veins or sabotage my own thyroid? I mean, I absolutely have anxiety and intermittent depression issues, but ffs, those things don’t make my salivary glands swell to the size of golf balls. I get tired because my body is attacking myself, and exercise makes that process worse because it fucks with my immune system which is pretty good at fucking its own self up.

Someone asked me once why I pursued so many diagnoses. The answer was, “Maybe if they figure out the right one, they can fix something.” It’s not because I *like* collecting diagnoses. I miss being able to eat normally. I miss being strong and physically fit. I used to swim 10 hours per week. I used to ride horses. I used to go camping and loved it. I used to be able to build things with my hands. 

I have to remind myself not to do those things.

I have to, because pretending I’m not sick makes me sicker.

Every shot I take seems to push me into a flare. Not a huge flare, just a few joints reminding me that this isn’t over. That this will never be over.

I got through the twice-a-day-Lovenox routine because I knew it was finite and i knew there would be a baby I wanted very much at the end of it.

I will be on methotrexate or something like it for the rest of my life. 

It feels like poison. The sneaky poison that you think isn’t poison until your lips go numb even though you didn’t drink it. And then I sleep and think, “Well, at least I can sleep.”

And then I wake up and my whole body hurts, and the exhaustion pulls at me so hard, and I’m supposed to eat something so that I can take the small dose of steroids I’m still on, and I don’t want to eat because my stomach is on a boat. 

Saturdays might as well not exist. Sundays aren’t much better. By Monday I can drag myself to physical therapy. By Tuesday I can drag myself to the grocery store. By Thursday I start to think, “I really should exercise” and on Friday I fight dread about the coming shot. 

This morning my husband said, “I blame Trump.”

And I said, “You might as well. Stress increases inflammation, and most of my stress in the last six months has started with That Man.”

It is no mystery to me that so many people died last year.

The mystery is how we keep going when it’s hard.

“How are you doing?” asks a cashier. They all ask this. Everyone, locally. It’s a reflex thing.

And my brain won’t let me give the flip lie of an answer. I can’t say I’m fine. I’m not fine.

“I’m doing,” I echo. (Right now this feels like a lie, too.)

Sometimes they say, “How are you today?”

And I just say, “I’m here.”

Sometimes what doesn’t kill us just doesn’t kill us (yet). 

I’m not stronger, I’m just not dead.

[badtiki]

On Independence Day and Our Modern President

Below is an excerpt of The Declaration of Independence in which America enumerates its grievances against the British monarch, King George III.

Some of these charges seem awfully applicable to our self-styled Modern President.

I’ve made some notes.

1.   He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. [This is a pretty broad charge, but what program is more wholesome and necessary to the public good than food stamps?]

2.    He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. [*cough* Paris]

3.    He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. [It’s a stretch, but the demand for state voter information is a pretty “tyrants only” move.]

4.    He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. [One has to assume Mar-a-Lago isn’t uncomfortable per se, but it is an unusual place for State business]

5.    He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. [The Republican House leadership is handling the dissolving all on its own.]

6.    He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within. [N/A, although “convulsions within” feels very now.]

7.    He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands. [This one speaks for itself.]

8.    He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. [Ditto this one.]

9.    He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. [Kind of a perk of the job, but true]

10.  He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance. [Swap “Officers” for “Cable Surrogates” and yeah, they have certainly eaten out our substance.]

11.  He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. [This feels like a “don’t give him any ideas” sort of entry]

12.  He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. [Enh, but he did appoint a general as Secretary of Defense which at least makes a dent.]

13.  He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: [Vladimir Putin emoji]

14.  For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: [We have to give him this, Donald Trump has not quartered any troops in our homes. Points.]

15.  For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: [I feel like the phrase “mock trial” is going to be applicable at some point here.]

16.  For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: [Just the parts where he can’t build hotels, which is almost worse.]

17.  For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: [This one is not applicable, but it is a fun reminder that the framers founded the greatest democratic capitalism is history without ever having to read “Atlas Shrugged.”]

18.  For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: [It’s never been proven that “The Apprentice” led directly to the cancellation of “Law & Order: Trial By Jury” but I’ll be sure, should the opportunity arise, to ask Bebe Neuwirth her thoughts on the matter.]

19.  For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences: [This feels more Bush/Obama. But give him time.]

20.  For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies: [Yes, Donald Trump did not set up a puppet government in Canada just to fuck with us. But he did mock a disabled reporter and brag about sexual assaulting women so I’m giving this one to George III.]

21.  For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: [read: environmental and civil rights protections.]

22.  For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. [Yeah, Georgie can go screw himself on that one.]

23.  He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. [I do love the idea of Trump abdicating. But if he were to then declare a one-mar war against us? Italian chef kiss.]

24.  He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. [In all fairness, he’s not a Viking.] [Although talk to some of the folks who’ve been displaced by one of his golf courses and maybe, if you squint…]

25.  He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. [We are currently Hessian-free, so we’ve got that going for us.]

26.  He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. [Free pass there, Don. Now hold on to your butts, cause there’s some ugly racism AND crazy comma usage coming up.]

27.  He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. [I’ll give Donald Trump this: he doesn’t give a shit about “Indians.”]

In summation: I hold these truth to be self-evident, that everyone is created equal and is endowed with certain inalienable rights. And I will not allow Donald Trump to fuck with my life, my liberty or my pursuit of happiness. And on this Independence Day, while I am at my liberty, I choose to spend my life pursuing the unique happiness of mocking the President’s corrupt, orange ass on the Internet.

Happy Fourth