#my queue is just gonna be rando shots from the year i find in this folder

[hywl]

[finn-nelson-for-the-win]

The Good Life: Chapter 2

Hello, my lovelies! I’m really pleased to see that y’all seemed to like the initial chapter of this story and I’m really liking the way that this story is coming along as I’m writing it. It may take a little while for this story to get to the real fun stuff, but I promise that once we get a lot of the basic plot laid down in the first few chapters, this story will be a lot of fun to read, so please be patient.

Need to get caught up on the first chapter? The Good Life: Ch1

If you want to be added (or removed) from the tags list for this story, just feel free to let me know!

@pink-royaute @believethaticanandiwill @milllott @likeashootingstarfades @i-dream-of-emus

 The Good Life: Chapter 2

After adding another few songs to the queue on the digital jukebox next to the bar, Rae walked back to the table in the pub where the rest of her mates were sitting and arguing over something that had been said while she had stepped away from the table. “Ugh, I’m gonna be sick,” Archie scoffed as he turned away from the sight of Izzy and Chop kissing across the table from him, “please save me from this saliva-filled make out fest unfolding right in front of me!” “Oh Archie, let them have their fun! It’s just a little harmless kissing,” Rae replied with a chuckle as she took her seat at the end of the table next to Chloe. “Perhaps, but when you’re single and have no one to kiss it’s easy to feel left out of the fun.” Archie replied, receiving a chorus of agreement and reassurances from the rest of the table. Their conversations resumed as they continued drinking and catching up on what had been going on in their lives since the last time the gang all met up at the pub last month. “Oh yeah! I’ve been meaning to ask ya, Rae, how is the apartment search going?” Chloe asked when there was a lull in the conversation. “You’re looking for a new apartment? Is there something wrong with your current one?” Izzy asked in concern. “Yeah I’ve been looking for a new place to live since January. My current place is just too expensive and the location isn’t great for work and Uni, so I’m trying to find something closer.” “How’s it going then?” “Not great. For the area I’m looking at, the cost of a studio or one-bedroom are as much or more expensive than what I’m paying now. If I want to pay less money for the area I want to live in, I’ll need to find a roommate. I’ve been looking online and asking coworkers if them or their friends needed a roommate or anything, but I just don’t wanna get stuck living with some complete rando that I’ve never met, ya know?” Rae sighed and took a long sip of her drink before setting it back on the table. “Yeah, that makes sense,” Izzy replied.

“Do you need to find a roommate? What if you were able to find a place just for you where you could afford the rent?” Archie suggested.

“I suppose that would be an option, but I dunno...I’ve lived on my own for almost a year now and it has its benefits, but I don’t think I want to keep living all alone. It’s probably not good for me,” Rae added with a humorless chuckle.

“What do ya mean it’s not good for you?” Izzy asked quietly.

“So, what do you think you’re gonna end up doing?” Chloe asked a bit louder, leaving Izzy’s question to remain unanswered.

“My current lease ends in a bit over a month, so at this point I might end up just going with one of the few people I’ve met with already that seems halfway decent to be my roommate, since I don’t have much time left to be picky. I just wish that I knew someone that was looking for a roommate so it would take all of the weirdness of living with strangers away.” Rae said defeatedly as she gulped down the remainder of her drink.

A few seconds of silence passed between Rae and the rest of the gang, no one really knowing what to say, until the sound of a throat clearing distracted everyone from the dull roar of the other pub patrons around them. “I could be your roommate,” Finn said with a shrug as he reached forward to grab his pint off the table and take a drink. “You what?” Rae asked in surprise. “I said I could be your roommate, Rae. If you’d wanna have me as a roommate that is.” “I didn’t know you were looking to move out of your Da’s house, Finn!” Chop said.

“Yeah, where did that come from?” Archie added.

“I’ve been thinking about moving out and getting my own place for a while now, which is why I’ve been taking extra shifts at work, but I didn’t know when the right time was.”

“But why now, specifically? And how come I’ve never heard you mention anything about it until now? The last time I heard you say anything about moving out was when we were still in college and you were trying to prove that you could be independent and not rely on your da all the time,” Archie replied with an accusatory edge to his voice.

“Does it really matter how long I’ve been considering moving out? I didn’t mention anything because I haven’t really been looking for any specific places and I wanted to decide if I should live alone or with a roommate or a few roommates,” Finn replied defensively but he couldn’t stay upset for long before a smirk spread across his lips, “I’m sorry I didn’t ask ‘Uncle Archie’ permission to move out on my own.”

Everyone groaned at the mention of Archie’s old nickname for himself but the tension that had been present before had thoroughly dissipated. “Back to what we were talking about before...Would you wanna live with Finn, babes?” Chloe asked with her eyebrows raised in question.

“I don’t know...maybe? I’d prefer living with someone I know and I don’t have much time to find other people,” Rae turned her attention towards Finn more directly, “I think we get along well enough that we might actually make pretty decent roommates, don’t ya think?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Okay, cool...well then, I guess I found myself a new roommate!”

The gang cheered and Finn gave Rae a small smile across the table, but Chloe sat beside Rae with her arms crossed and looking between her best mate and her best mate’s soon-to-be roommate with a look of uncertainty tinged with concern.

“That calls for a celebratory drink, don’t ya agree? I’ll go order us all another round!” Chop replied as he clapped Finn on the back and shot Rae a wink before walking away from the table to place their drink order.

When the gang had grown tired of the pub, they all decided to walk downtown to one of the few chip shops that would still be open this late at night. Archie stood at the door holding it open for the gang to walk into the chip shop, but Rae was stopped just as she approached the door.

“Hey, Rae! Can we chat out here for a minute? Just the two of us?” Chloe asked by placing a hand on Rae’s shoulder to gently pull her away from the rest of the gang.

“Uh sure,” Rae replied with a shrug as she walked back to stand beside Chloe.

“What did you wanna talk about, Chlo?”

“What the fuck just happened back there, babes?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well as of about an hour ago you were still struggling to find a roommate and now you’re planning to share an apartment with Finn?”

“Yeah, I guess so! It’s crazy how well that worked out, huh?”

“No kidding! It seems like it all worked out a little too well, if you ask me.”

“Oh, come on, Chloe!”

“No, Rae, I’m serious! Why is it that none of us have ever heard Finn mention moving out of his da’s house until tonight? Archie had a really good point. Why did he choose now of all times to move out?”

“I think you’re both reading way too much into all of this. I mean, what kind of ulterior motives could Finn have for asking to be my roommate?” Rae looked over and saw Chloe was about to speak but she waved a dismissive hand to stop her, “on second thought, I don’t wanna know.”

“I’m just looking out for you Rae.”

“I know, and I’m thankful for you trying to protect me, but I think you’re worried needlessly. It’s not like Finn is a total stranger. He’s been part of the gang since long before I joined and he and I are fairly decent mates. Even if we didn’t get along so well at first, we’ve gotten to know each other over the years and we get on really well now. I feel like of my possible roommates, he’s my best option.”

“I hope you’re right, Rae.”

“I have no idea what to expect from living with Finn or how this will all work, but I’m sort of okay with that. I’m looking forward to some much-needed change in my life!”

“Just know that I’ll always be just a call or text away if you need me. And I expect to be informed of any and all apartment decisions the two of you make during this whole process!”

“As if there was ever any question that I’d do that!” Rae replied with a roll of her eyes, “now come on! I’ve been craving some greasy fried food all week and there’s a plate of chips calling my name inside there!”

Chloe and Rae chuckled and shared a quick hug before the pair walked into the chippy and joined the rest of the gang at the table they were sitting at as they waited for the food they ordered to be prepared.

A/N: I’m fairly certain that exactly nobody was surprised to find out that Finn volunteered to be Rae’s roommate because if you all are anything like me, we’re all thirsty bitches and just love any type of scenario that puts Finn/Rae in the same settings hahaha. Both Chloe and Archie seem a bit unsure about Finn and Rae living together...do you think they know something that we don’t????

DUN DUN DUUUUNNNNN (sorry, I have a bit of a flair for the dramatic lol) Rest assured, this story will have a bunch of fun twists and turns based on some real life events, so hopefully this story won’t become too cliche.

I’m not sure if anyone noticed, but I’ve decided to start posting all of my writing on my AO3 account as well, since who knows how long Tumblr will stay afloat and I’ve used that site before and quite liked it. I’ll still be posting here on Tumblr, of course, but my goal is to at least have all my writing backed up on AO3 at some point just to be safe!

Anyways...until next time: Stay awesome, my friends! :)

[theworstbob]

the thing journal, 5.28 - 6.3

capsule reviews of the pop culture things i took in last week. in this post: from a room, chi-raq, the intervention, all the beauty in this whole life, bone tomahawk, spades and roses, souvenir, spin, brooklyn nine-nine, blue velvet

1) From a Room, Vol. I, by Chris Stapleton: My thing with Chris Stapleton is, I have enjoyed his two albums, I have thought they were both Very Good, I think they're both fine examples of what country should sound like and understand their importance in keeping country music vital. I'd fall just short of calling either of them classics. Which is a weird space to be evaluating an album, where your main critique of an album is that it isn't an all-time classic, that you agree the songs are good and that a lot are great (and there's some great fuckin' songs, "Either Way" is just, yerrrgh, that's a toughie), but sometimes, it feels like there's some ingredient missing from the mix. I think it just feels too perfect. This man has a perfectly tortured voice, capable of translating any sort of pain and misery he feels, and he's using it to craft perfect country songs about country things like drinking and being in jail. It feels like he's content to do great things within the confines of the genre when he could be reinventing it, which, hey, fair enough, Chris Stapleton making really good country songs is a thing in this world I'm not complaining about, and if he never unlocks the potential I believe he has and only ever makes songs like "Death Row," I'd be cool with that choice.

2) Chi-Raq, dir. Spike Lee: Because I am ignorant of any piece of media that was made before 2003, I did not know what the Greek drama this was based off was about, so when I realized it was a film about women withholding sex made by the dude who made She Hate Me (this is an unfair comment because I haven't seen the film, but I'm pretty sure that's an unpleasant movie), I kinda prepped myself for an uncomfortable experience. And then the film ended up being fucking fantastic. The fact that the "no peace, no pussy" protest elicits a reaction of "Well, we have dicks. They love our dicks! Surely, if we just remind them of the fact of our dicks we'll put an end to this nonsense" is not just what would obviously happen should a similar protest occur in reality, it calls attention to the fact that so many problems facing the world are being caused by dudes who can't see past the apparent power of their dicks. (I will bring to the grave the belief that, if all the Republican presidential candidates held a joint press conference to tell Donald Trump he had a large penis, Donald Trump would have suspended his campaign and receded into the background.) But more importantly, this film has things to say about this country. It hits on everything, and it hits it hard. It calls out gang violence for bringing strife to black communities, then calls out the people who would use that strife to undermine causes like Black Lives Matter. It's a film stylized all the way to hell that remains grounded in reality because, what with the lists of names the film brings up (multiple lists, and nary a name repeated on any of these lists), it's impossible to fully escape reality. It's an astonishing film from a master director on a subject he's had to explore too often. (Also, Samuel L. Jackson having the time of his life as a Greek chorus.)

3) The Intervention, dir. Clea DuVall: I can never remember which character from Parks & Rec elicited this Perd Hapley line that has stayed with me forever, but all the same, some character asks Perd Hapley "Do you know what I mean?" and Perd responds, "I don't! But it had the tone and cadence of a joke." I have used that line to describe so many things where I respect the attempt at humor but don't ever laugh. This film is an example of what I'd use that line to describe. There's a lot of funny people in the cast, and there were plenty of comedic set-ups, but nothing like an actual joke. I think the film wanted to be a serious meditation on the relationships between these people (who were related in some convoluted way or another), so it tried to distance itself from the comedy, but it never took anything serious enough for the emotional moments to land with any impact. I wouldn't attribute this to the cast -- Melanie Lynskey is fantastic, and I completely forgot but Cobie Smulders can do goddamn work y'all -- more to the point that, hey, there's a low ceiling and low floow for movies about upper-middle-class white folks who only share quiet and emotionally difficult moments with other upper-middle-class white folks, and this film lands somewhere in the middle. I saw this the same day I saw Chi-Raq. Y'all tryna get away with pointin' a camera at some randos, and that's not gonna cut it.

4) All the Beauty in This Whole Life, by Brother Ali: On my personal Top 20 list for the year, I have this ahead of DAMN. It's 10% contrarianism, 20% homerism, 65% this is an amazing record by an amazing man, 5% no one at any point shouts KUNG FU KENNY. It's easy to make an angry political record. I think Rise Against is releasing an album this year, and it's already getting an A- and barely missing the Top 20, because times are shitty and it's easy to be angry. It's hard to look at the world as it is today and find things to defend, reasons to keep going. The most profound political statement to be made is that the world is fundamentally good and needs to be protected from those bringing it ruin, and Brother Ali makes that statement with authority. We'll have plenty of time and reasons to get angry in the coming days/months/years/decades. This is a record advising you to take a second to reflect on what's good in the world, the reasons hate came to be, what we can do to bring out the beauty, to explore what peace we can find before we start a war. It's powerful, amazing work.

5) Bone Tomahawk, dir. S. Craig Zahler: Not gonna lie: took a catnap in the middle of this one, very short, not even sure I was asleep, but definitely let the ol' eyeballs have a rest for a couple seconds. Didn't feel like I missed much plot-wise when I woke up, though. Probably missed a lot of beautiful shots of the Western hills (ok, THIS film is how you break in an HD display, I feel, nuts to Interstellar), but hoo boy, this film moved slowly! On the whole, the film was pretty great, I loved the way it built that town's community in just the one emergency meeting scene ("Look at the mayor when you're addressing him." "Yeah! Look at me!"), but there's a lot of time spent with gruff Westerners speaking softly about the great and terrible things they've done, and impeccably composed as those shots were, I can only be so interested in the things Matthew Fox has to say. (Also, hey there, central romance between a dude and a woman 22 years younger than him.) The film builds to the conclusion well, it picked up the pace a few scenes after my nap most regrettable, and I typically can enjoy a glacially-paced film now and then without sleeping, but if you have a worse attention span than me, this ain't rhe film for you.

6) Spades and Roses, by Caroline Spence: i do not remember how i came to add this particular indie singer-songwriter's ablum to my queue, but here we are, and this was fine! This was fine. I liked it. I rode on a bus and listened to this album, and I thought the young woman sang soft and sweet though potentially dark songs over gentle acoustic guitars. I cannot say I regret listening to this album, though I find myself unable to say much beyond that, because it was fine.

7) Souvenir, by Banner Pilot: I listened to this pop/punk album from an act I understand to be local after Spades and Roses, and one thing I should learn to do is try to pair albums better so that I'm not dealing with a change in mood this intense, so that there's a logical flow to the albums, some thematic link, not just "I added some shit to the library and I guess I'm listening to these today." Figuring thiis sort of stuff out is kinda hard, y'know? Like, I don't want to feel like I'm adding stuff to the library just to get it out of the way three weeks later, and maybe that colors my experience with albums like this or Spades and Roses, where they're fine but not necessarily something I feel I need to listen to twice, but if I come away from an album thinking I don't need to listen to it twice to get the full story, I'm not sure I'm being completely fair to the album. ...This review isn't so much a review of the album itself as much as it's a review of how I listen to music. C-. Needs a lot of improvement.

8) spin, by Tiger's Jaw: OK so I can tell ya right now I fucked up listening to this one. I was distracted, I had connection issues, I went grocery shopping and spent the majoirty of the grocery shopping twist asking myself what groceries I needed instead of what this album was doing for me, I did the thing where I treated music like background noise and not the thing I should be paying attention to. I thought the album was OK, but I could tell that it came to me on the wrong day, that maybe I should have put on something I'd heard before, and saved this one for a time when I could give this what it deserves. Bad week for me and my listening habits. Like, I do the thing with movies where I put the film on full screen and only check my phone to check the time, I need to find the thing for music that gets me to pay attention to music for more than one song at a time.

9) Brooklyn Nine-Nine s4, cr. Michael Schur & Dan Goor: I'm beginning to think this show would be the rare half-hour sitcom to benefit from a 13-episode order. This does action-comedy so well, but you can't really sustain the intensity of the action-comedy aspects of the show over 22 episodes, but then they have to fill the rest of the episodes with hangout-sitcommy bits that are very hit-and-miss for me. Once the show has a plot, it sings, but when it's doing its mystery-of-the-week thing what with A, B, and C plots so the entire cast has things to do, it can feel unfocused. I mean, hey, I watched every episode, I think the show is hilarious (I will sing Andre Braugher's praises until they can hear me from the moon), but I had to learn to deal with its inconsistency. Maybe not a Hall of Famer, but so many All-Stars never make the Hall of Fame, y'know?

10) Blue Velvet, dir. David Lynch: I saw this on Saturday night, and I'm still trying to process it. I'm actually not sure right now that I've seen a David Lynch movie before, which might explain why I feel so off-sync with this film; I've seen season one of Twin Peaks, but I'm otherwise unfamiliar with what he does, beyond a David Foster Wallace essay about the director. Perhaps I've become too desensitized to violence to understand what's shocking about the violence in Blue Velvet, or too many films derivative of Lynch to see what's uniquely Lynchian about Blue Velvet. I do see the central point and believe it's fascinating -- the only think keeping Jeffrey Beaumont from actually being Frank Booth is a sense of decorum, that Jeffrey needs to be Jeffrey to live in civilized society, but the only thing Frank does that Jeffrey only does reluctantly is Violence, and now I'm realizing this is Hannibal, that's where I saw this movie, was Hannibal, OK, OK, cool cool cool, but also, that theme of the darkness within, of people like Frank being everywhere, it resonates, because now we live in a world where we can remove ourselves from a sense of decorum and be Frank. To see Frank Booth in 2017 is to see the manifestation of a Twitter egg. So in the course of this review, we discovered that we are on this film's wavelength, and that the distance we had to bridge was created by seeing Lynchian works and living in the end times.