#so i think new who could really drive home the nuance set up by cold war/the empress of mars

[the--highlanders]

I do really think we're overdue a story with an unequivocally good ice warrior tbh

[staygold-ponyboycurtis]

A Semester Early

request: Pony goes on a winter walk, revisiting his hometown a year after college. He is happier now. 

-

I loved this prompt, and wish I had someone to credit it for, but it was sent anonymously. it was so much fun to write! of course, a one-shot about Ponyboy can’t be written without some angst in there, right? ;) 

ENJOY. let me know what you think!!! 

-

There’s something to be said for the feeling of outgrowing a place. I decided that was it. That was the feeling I’ve felt ever since returning home from college. I hadn’t been home for this long since I was eighteen years old. After graduating a semester early a few weeks ago, Darry managed to talk me into coming home for a few months. I hemmed and hawed about it - living in a city like New York has a way of liberating you in the same way that a small town in Oklahoma can make you feel too small - but finally conceded defeat and agreed to move back in with him and Soda before I found a job. 

It wasn’t the idea of seeing them that deterred me from returning home. Lord knows my arm doesn’t need to be twisted to find an excuse to see Sodapop, Darry, and the gang. It was the idea of not wanting to leave again. Of getting too comfortable for my own good, I guess. 

Before I could dwell too long on the irrational doom I’ve felt since I walked in the door, I had to admit that it was good to be back home. Where I was just Ponyboy. Where everyone knew embarrassing stories about me and knew how I liked my eggs cooked and I never had to remind them of anything about myself. I didn’t have to make myself look cool or nuanced in their presence. They knew who I was. They loved me for who I was.

Darry has all the Christmas decorations sitting in boxes scattered on the floor when I walk in. Him and Soda had refused to decorate without me the past few years. It was something we did together and a tradition that meant even more for him to continue since mom and dad were gone. 

Our mother loved Christmas. I try my best not to tear up when I notice that Darry has her Loretta Lynn Christmas album sitting on top of the record player, waiting for us to play it and sit in bittersweet silence like we’ve done every year. Decorating for Christmas reminds me of her the most, I’ve decided. 

I couldn’t believe this was almost the tenth Christmas without them. It feels like a lifetime.

When I set foot into my childhood bedroom, I was overwhelmed with nostalgia, like I always am. Nothing changes. Not that I expected it to, but it was like walking through a museum. Back at school, I felt like a nomad. I never really had a place to call my own in New York. I was in a different apartment every few months, and none of them were satisfactory, but I had learned to regard it as charm. Perhaps Sodapop knew this, because he always made sure to leave everything as I had it from the last time I had been there.

“I didn’t want to move anything,” Soda said, slinging an arm over my shoulder sweetly, though my height had finally crept beyond his. “I wanted to make sure you’d recognize the place when you finally came back.”

“I guess you guys really do love me,” I said with a chuckle. 

“Always, kiddo,” he said, messing with my hair. 

The gang - or what’s left of it - piles in our small kitchen for “family dinner”, as Two-Bit lovingly referred to it. Darry made us spaghetti - another favorite of mine. He had improved his cooking tenfold since I’ve been gone, I remark.

“It’s that girl of his,” Sodapop says with a sly smirk. I blush. Darry was secretive about his love life. More secretive than me, which was saying something. “She’s taught him a thing or two.”

“And not just in the kitchen,” Two-Bit adds with an immature, clownish smile on his face, never missing an opportunity for an impish euphemism. 

Darry shoots him a look that conveys pure annoyance and deadly threat. I knew that look all too well. I’m pretty sure Darry invented that look for me.

“What?” Two-Bit asks innocently. “She taught him how to clean, too.”

We all break into laughter. “Asshole,” Darry says under his breath.

“You didn’t tell me you had a girlfriend,” I say. 

“Don’t sweat it, Pone,” Soda says. “He didn’t tell me either. I picked up the phone one day when she called about a date with him. I just about dropped dead right then and there.”

I blush, sheepish at the thought of Darry caring about anyone else other than us. As charismatic as he is, Darry is sometimes more shy than I am about girls.  

We fall into our normal rhythm of camaraderie quickly at dinner. It never takes long for me to fall back in line with the gang, catching up on their stories and mine from the last time we were together. Though Tulsa no longer feels the way it used to for me, the gang has. I know they’re the only reason I’d ever come back to this place.

“Gee, Pony,” Two-Bit says while we’re cleaning up the table. “Every time you visit, you seem smarter.”

“Smarter?” I ask.

“‘Ya know… cooler. Different, in a good way.”

“I think the word he’s looking for is ’sophisticated’,” Darry says, slinging the dish towel over his shoulder. “A college scholar.” He smiles at me proudly.

“Thanks,” I say almost inaudibly. It’s surely a compliment, but it makes chills run up my spine. I’m not sure why. 

Before we begin decorating, I head towards the door, grabbing my coat. 

“Hey, I think I’m gonna go for a walk,” I say, reaching for the door knob. “To… clear my head.”

“You okay, kiddo?” Darry asks, puzzled. “It’s 8 o’clock at night.”

“I’m okay,” I say. “Just trying to take it all in.”

He looks at Sodapop, confused. “Do you want me to go with you, buddy?” Sodapop asks. 

I shake my head vehemently. “I’m fine, really,” I say. “I just want to walk around like I used to.” 

Darry shrugs. “Don’t be gone for too long. Soda can barely wait to put up the stockings.”

I chuckle, a bit emptily. “Roger that.”

The cold air fills my warm lungs with a shock. New York winters are much more brutal than in Oklahoma. The snow piles high, and it isn’t as picturesque as you see in the movies, either. Just a lot of brown and grey slush. One year, a few of my friends and I went Upstate to go skiing, and that was really nice, though.

I make my way down the sidewalk, not really believing that I’m actually home. I mean, I’ve been home multiple times before now. But it feels different now, because another stage of my life is finished, another chapter closed. And I didn’t think I would be living with my brothers forever or cooped up in Tulsa for the rest of my life, but I’m finally realizing that life is changing. I just can’t realize why I’m bothered so much by it. I think I realize things too late.  

I make my way around the block, lost in thought. I notice some of our neighbors have hung Christmas decorations outside their houses. They decorate the same exact way every year, as Darry does, and it makes me feel a bit nostalgic. Dad used to drive us around in his old truck to look at all the lights in our neighborhood. We never really had money to spend on visiting the light displays on the better side of town, but we wouldn’t have ever known it. This was just as fun.

I realize that the perpetual feeling of a broken heart during Christmastime doesn’t do much for my sadness right now. 

I stop at a forelorn house at the end of our street, on the corner. It’s a small yellow house, a bit less dilapidated than ours. Typically adorned with all types of big, ceramic lights this time of year, the house sits solemnly, vacant and dark. I stare at it a bit, the writer in me trying to make a metaphor out of its image.

“Mrs. Friedman died two months ago,” I hear a voice behind me. “Her house has been empty ever since.” 

“You followed me,” I say, more as a statement than a question.

“I could tell something was bothering you,” Sodapop says.

I laugh, a little curtly. “You can always tell.”

“Of course I can,” he smiles. "And I didn’t want you to be out here alone.”

“You didn’t tell me Mrs. Friedman died,” I say, a bit offended. “She cooked us meals every week after mom and dad died. She always gave us her son’s old clothes, too, remember?”

“I know,” Soda says. “Darry and I didn’t want to upset you.”

“You thought I’d be upset?”

Soda looks at me. “You’re a little bit more sentimental than the rest of us.”

I scoff. “She was our neighbor for years. Did you go to her funeral?”

“Of course,” Sodapop says. “'Woulda been silly for you to come all the way home for a 100-year-old woman’s funeral, though. Don’tcha think?”

“I guess."

We sit in silence for a few moments, and I focus on our breath in the air. It’s white, like cigarette smoke. I laugh a bit in my mind, reminiscing on the period of time where I couldn’t go more than fifteen minutes without smoking. It’s been nearly three years since I’ve quit.

“What’s up, Pone?” Soda finally asks. “What’s wrong?" I give him a look.

“What?” he says. “I can see right through you.”

I pause for a moment, trying to figure out what exactly it is.

“It’s just… I always had an excuse. I had New York. I had college. I knew I was leaving, but I always knew I would come back. And four years seemed so far away,” I say. “Now I’m not sure there’s a place for me here anymore. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Well… no,” Soda says. “Because that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say, Pone. There’s always gonna be a place for you here. This is your home. Don’t you know that?”

I roll my eyes. “I mean, it’s never going to be like it was. We’re never going to be living under the same roof as one another. Hell, I don’t even know where I’m going next. But it’ll never just be all of us together again. I feel like we’re losing another part of the gang for good, but that part is me. And it feels like….”

“It feels like Dal and Johnny all over again.” 

“Kinda.”

Sodapop pauses for a moment, thinking about this. Though he isn’t the most articulate, he’s certainly the most insightful. 

“Wanna know how I see it?” Sodapop asks.

I nod. “Of course.”

“You’re twenty-two years old. You graduated college at the top of your class. You have job offers all over the country. That’s something to be proud of, Pone. That doesn’t happen for just anyone. Hell, it didn’t happen for me and Darry. It won’t happen for Steve or Two-Bit. It didn’t happen for Dally or Johnny. You should be grateful you are where you are.”

“Oh, come on…” I say. “I didn’t mean it like that-"

“No, listen,” Sodapop says. "You think you should be feelin’ guilty about leaving, but you shouldn’t be. Me, Darry, the gang, even mom and dad would want you getting the hell out of this pokey ‘ol town,” he says with a laugh. “It’s all we’ve ever wanted for you.” 

“I know that. I’m thankful for that.”

“Hell of a way of showin’ it,” Soda says jokingly.

“I guess I never thought of it that way,” I say. “I always figured you and Darry would think I left you guys behind or somethin’. I never wanted you to think that.”

“C’mon, Pone. We’d never think that. We’ve worked so hard to help you make somethin’ of yourself. We’re real proud.”

“Thanks,” I say. “Thanks for knocking some sense into me.”

“You know, you’re afraid of changin’, but that’s one thing that will never change about you,” he says as we begin to walk back to the house. “You’ll always need your big brothers to help you see what’s right in front of you.”

“You’re right about that,” I say. 

“And don’t think you’ll never come back here to visit the gang,” he says. “We’ll drag you back here if it’s the last thing we do. You’ll know where to find us.”

“You’re right,” I say. “I’ll never be able to get away from you guys."

“Exactly,” he says. “Now, can we go back and decorate for Christmas? Please? I’m freezing my ass off out here.”

“Yeah,” I say with a chuckle. “Let’s go."

-

I really could’ve written this conversation forever, but I wanted to keep it short and sweet. Let me know what you think!!!

P.S. if you have any one-shot requests, my ask is always open. I love when you all send in your ideas :)

P.P.S. if you’d like to write a review, this one-shot (along with my other writing) is also posted to my fanfiction.net account, which is linked here 🖤

[georgiaswarr]

georgia warr

never been in love - gatlin

a song about wanting to be in love but not being able to be in love, which is very fitting for georgia’s initial situation. i’ve put this at the beginning of this playlist because - spoiler alert - the last song on here is also called never been in love and i think these two songs symbolise georgia’s journey in a very mint way. also, the first line of this song is “that boy from georgia was so sweet” which i think is pretty funny

somebody to love - queen

the title says it all. georgia wants to find somebody to love. i mean, she’s already found them, but we’ll get to that later.

paradise - coldplay

georgia is a big dreamer and yearner and i think this song really encapsulates that on so many levels. i mean “when she was just a girl / she expected the world / but it flew away from her reach / so she ran away in her sleep” that’s georgia !

tous les garçons et les filles - françoise hardy

french song because i’m ~quirky~ but this song is basically about seeing everyone else be in relationships and feeling lonely/wanting one for yourself

waiting for love - avicii

georgia is a hopeless romantic, but she’s still waiting for her own grand romance (she still hasn’t realised that the “love” she’s “waiting for” has already “come around”)

dear no one - tori kelly

georgia “i want someone to be in love with but there is no one” warr, at least at the beginning of the book

chaos - miki fiki

this song can be interpreted with various themes of the book in mind such as yearning for something you don’t have, feeling lonely, emotional turmoil, etc, it’s a banger

i walk a little faster - fiona apple

highjacked from @kindaorangey’s loveless playlist (they’ve done a great rundown here). this song has similar themes to dear no one, anticipating that romance will come to you, but it hasn’t, despite how hard you chase it, how fast you walk

when - dodie

shoutout to @drarrystar for recommending this song to me because so many of the lines reflect georgia to the core. just look up the lyrics and you’ll agree

deeper - ella eyre

“cause i’m scared, i can’t lie / i don’t feel the same inside / i can’t decide if i have the heart to confess” georgia thinks she can learn to love jason romantically if she just digs a little deeper

loneliness for love - lovelytheband

“anything at all not to feel alone / anything at all just to feel whole / ‘cause i keep mistaking loneliness for love”

a little more - alessia cara

“there you are with your college friends / you played in a marching band / i can't help but wish i knew you then / but i guess i know you now // it looks as if i've stumbled right into the palm of your hand // hey, you / hey, mr. knock on my door / i'm sorry that I've been emotions galore / am i crazy for wanting a little bit more? / a little more of you” georgia about sunil. she needs their guidance and wishes he’d been there for her earlier.

stuck in california - rightfield

a song about feeling alone and alienated by everyone and everything around you, and waiting for your “stars to align”, which fits georgia if you ask me

seven - taylor swift

georgiapip song !!!!!! it’s also about how alienating it can be to grow up and lose your childhood innocence, and i have a lot of thoughts about a very specific brand of growing pains that come with being aspec, but that’s a topic for another day

te amo - rihanna

this is a song about having someone be romantically in love with you and the heartbreak that comes from not being able to reciprocate those feelings --> georgia about jason

love love love - of monsters and men

same as te amo. it hits especially hard when you do love the other person so fucking much

ceiling won’t break - finish ticket

this song gives me georgia’s emotional turmoil vibes, also the line “i see no lights ‘cause the lights weren’t aimed at me” can be interpreted in a “cupid’s arrows didn’t hit georgia” way if you get what i mean

lack of emotion - skott

once again we are dealing with themes of not being able to feel the emotions that you “““““should”““““ feel for someone

let me go - hailee steinfeld

another song about georgia and jason’s (romantic) relationship and how it was doomed to fail from the beginning so she hopes he can let her go

i’m so tired - lauv, troye sivan

i’m just thinking about that line in loveless where georgia resentfully realises how many songs are about romantic love. she’s just so tired

crush culture - conan gray

and another song about being resentful of our romance-obsessed society, which georgia certainly is plenty of times throughout the book

home - ella eyre

christmas break time babey !!!! georgia has reached her low point and she’s going home

i love my car - belle & sebastain

“I pressed a cold hand against my car, which was as far up the drive of our house as it could get. I’d missed my car.” - loveless by alice oseman, celebrating all kinds of love since 2020

i’ve never written a song about a boy - eva westphal

this was actually recommended to me by @michaelholdenn for this playlist ! a song about the liberation that comes with not having to force attraction anymore

this is home - cavetown

i think months ago some ask told alice that this is a loveless song and i agree

why can’t we be friends - jordy searcy

this is about georgia’s strained relationship with pip and jason after the bailey ball and how she wishes they could just be friends again, the way they were all throughout their childhood

chiquitita - abba

okay fuckers THIS is literally the LOVELIEST song about friendship and wanting to be there for your loved ones and i’m sure georgia relates

open up - matt simons

“you’re hard to talk to with that wall around you” vs. “rooney had a solid brick wall round some part of her that nobody was allowed to know.” basically, georgia wants rooney to open up to her

just fucking let me love you - lowen

okay, yes, this song is very gay, but i think it can be applied to georgiarooney too ! the frustration this song expresses of wanting to shake someone and scream at them to just fucking let you love them is definitely shown in loveless when it comes to those two

less than i do - the band camino

georgia about pip. she hopes that pip will forgive her eventually. i mean look at the line “i still have your denim jacket” in the song - georgia still has pip’s jacket too, it’s perfect !!!

friends will be friends - queen

if loveless taught us anything it’s that friends sure fuckin will be friends

stick with me - olly murs

“we all get lonely / trying to find a place where we should be / trying to find someone to set us free / there are times a friend is all you need” you know when alice said that every character in the book feels “loveless” in some way at one point or another, but they all learn the value and importance of platonic love? yeah.

your song - moulin rouge

“and then, with three accompanists, i stood on a boat on the river wear and sang ‘your song’ - the version specifically from moulin rouge - to pip quintana, who didn’t yet know me as well as i wished she did, but despite that, was one of my favourite people i had ever met.”

wherever i live - alessia cara

you know the scene after georgia leaves pip and rooney to their first kiss? yeah, this song really reflects that mindset of half loneliness, half acceptance to me. listen to it.

take time - honest men

accepting your identity takes time ! even by the end of loveless there’s still days when georgia wishes she wasn’t aroace and the book presents this in an amazing and properly nuanced way !

die alone - finneas

"you asked me, ‘do you wanna die alone / or watch it all burn down together?’ / i said i’d rather try to hold on to you forever” this song is very much georgiarooney - finding each other in their darkest of days and watching everything they thought they knew (amatonormativity) burn down. together.

no lover - jetty bones

the next few songs are basically just one aro anthem after the next. this is another recommendation from @michaelholdenn - “maybe i don’t need a lover, i just need the friend”

solo - carly rae jepsen

highjacked from @kindaorangey’s loveless playlist. amazing anthem about how it’s okay to be single and how romantic love isn’t as fulfilling as society makes it out to be anyway

trust my lonely - alessia cara

i think in georgia’s case this song can be interpreted as her learning to finally let go of her pre-conceived notions of what love is and what she should want, her learning to “trust her lonely”, though lonely here just means romance-less

love is a town - josh gilligan

“if [romantic] love is a town then i’m passing through" yeah, romance is not for georgia and she’s starting to accept that.

new romantics - taylor swift

the loveless gang is the new romantics !!! they’re redefining love and romance !!!

team - lorde

“and everyone's competing for a love they won't receive / 'cause what this palace wants is release” anyway, let’s go found family song

wild things - alessia cara

now, i don’t know if alessia cara is queer but I DARE YOU to look at the lyrics of wild things and not tell me that this is the ULTIMATE queer anthem about found family and saying fuck you to respectability politics. i DARE you. anyway, loveless is also about found family and saying fuck you to respectability politics so it’s very fitting

never been in love - will jay

full circle babey !!!!! this is THE aro anthem so obviously i had to add it and comparing the “never been in love / and it’s all good” to the “never been in love / and i fucking hate that i couldn’t make it past a crush” message from the first song we can really reflect georgia’s journey of self-acceptance in loveless which i love a lot

[marasamoon]

You're driving home on Christmas Day. The sun is setting. The air is cold. Night descends just as tears gather in your eyes. These are the songs you listen to. I present to you:

Christmas Songs to Cry In Your Car To

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas by Judy Garland— Starting off with a classic. The context in which this song is originally sung is sad in itself. It feels like a green light to just let it all go. Go ahead, Judy says. It’s okay. Rest your head back on your car seat headrest while listening to this one. It’s starting to not feel like Christmas anymore and in a few hours, it won’t be. You’re not sure you’re ready.

Christmas Time is Here- Instrumental by Vince Guaraldi Trio— This cartoon was always so sad. You suddenly remember a quote from it: “The mere fact that you realize you need help indicates that you are not too far gone.” Who writes that for a children’s Christmas cartoon? Since this one is an instrumental, you’ll be able to hear your sobs a little clearer.

O Tannenbaum by Nat King Cole— No one has a voice quite like Nat King Cole. It is a warm blanket, a safe place to hide. The meaning of the lyrics in their original German escapes you (in the case you are not fluent), but their reverent cadence still resonates. You think that’s true of pretty much everything that is said in life. Words are hollow. You once said “I love you,” when you didn’t really mean it. It was more of a sound to you than a genuine feeling. You wonder if that coldness cradled in those words was discernible to them,  if it even really matters.

O Holy Night by Bing Crosby— Crosby might be the king of Christmas, musically speaking at least. Turn up the bass when the line “Fall on your knees” comes up; you want the entire frame of your car buzzing just as sad goosebumps of existential dread spread across your skin. 

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day by David Bazan— This song does all the hard work for you. Acoustic, slow, each lyric heavy and defeated; there is a line in here stating that hate rules the world and peace will never really be achievable. This song sees hope and then in despair bows its head. 

Hark, the Herald Angels Sing by Vince Guaraldi Trio— Really sink in the first half because the last half with children singing kind of falls off. You’re at a red light, looking out the window at half-occupied parking lots of grocery stores and corner stores. The stores’ lights are on. There are people inside. Who are they? They have their lives and they have cried and they have loved, and you are certain they deserve better. Cruel world.

I’ll Be Home for Christmas by Bing Crosby— Reminisce about time as a concept and how the new year is almost upon us where you’ll have to do it all over again. Another year older. You still don’t know what you’re doing. If you could go back in time, you’d do it different. You’d appreciate so much more. The children playing with Nerf Guns and running around the house tonight have no idea how clean and clear their experience of the world is. 

There’s Always Tomorrow by Janet Orenstein— This song came out of nowhere in the original cartoon but it sure is good. This song cradles your teary face and tells you there will always be days like this when you are tired and disheartened, but hey, tomorrow isn’t that far away. 

Happy Xmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon— Let the tears flow. This is prayer for the world, broken as it is. You feel something like hope, but it hurts. “Let’s hope it’s a good one.” The tears in your eyes turn every passing street light into stars.

7 O’clock News/Silent Night by Simon & Garfunkel— Silent Night sung over grim news headlines; it’s a little too on the nose but reality doesn’t care for nuance. The air freshener hanging from the rear view mirror is a year old, odorless now. The dashboard display and digital time on the radio float in the dark of the interior of the car. You should’ve gassed up yesterday; you can’t get out of the car looking like this. It’s Christmas but the world keeps on turning.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by David Bazan— A small twist on a classic song, this time with a dash of religious doubt. There’s so much terrible shit in the world; what kind of god would allow this to happen? Saints and sinners alike have spilled tears like blood over the absence of an answer. Maybe it’s not for us to understand. Or you think there might not be an explanation and God is our horrifically perplexed parent asking us, “Why have you done this?” and our only answer is “I don’t know.”

Auld Lang Syne by Bing Crosby— We end with one last song by Bing Crosby, the patron saint of Sad Christmas. Goodbye old year, hello new year. There will come a day when you won’t be here. There will be one year that will be your last. That year will be someone else’s first. It’s been fun, in its own weird way, despite the dampened expectations, the failures, the heartbreak, the pain. You’ve dreamed dreams and you’ve smiled and laughed sometimes. There’s been warm sunlight and cleansing rain and pale mornings of cold wind when the world was gentle. All of that, the bad and the good—that’s life, right? You think it might be. And it hasn’t been all that bad. Here’s to a new year.

[treatian]

The Chronicles of the Dark One:  Breaking the Curse

Chapter 27: To-Do List

He was about to do something bad. In fact, he was about to do something so bad that he was certain Belle might have fallen out of love with him if she had any inkling that he was about to do it. But what the fuck did he care about that. Belle was dead. That was the driving force behind his desire to do bad. The person who was responsible for her death was out walking around without a fucking care in the world that he'd killed his daughter. Moe French had taken one of the few things in the world that couldn't be replaced, the only thing in the world that he had from Belle. Her cup was still missing, still unaccounted for even if everything else was. And no one ever stole from the Dark One. No one conspired against him without him knowing it. So yes, he was about to do something very bad. Damn the consequences.

Actually, better yet, bring on the consequences! Because he was pretty sure that if who he thought was behind all this actually was, then there was a discussion they'd need to have in the future, a reminder about who was the teacher and who was the student. And if they were going to have that conversation, he would much rather it be on his terms rather than her own! He'd rather know than wonder, and he'd rather be sure about who Moe French was working for rather than uncertain, which was why he'd crafted his plan, to begin with. A plan that didn't feature his flunkies, but rather just him. Dove couldn't do this, lest he find out something he wasn't ready to know yet. And that left him, a short, disabled lawyer with a cane and a gun, against fat old Moe French. All things considered, he was pretty sure he'd be okay on his own. But there were some things he had to do first.

The first was to talk to Dove. He didn't have the Seer, but he knew enough that he had to think of his future and consider what to do should "the worst" happen. He put money in a particular account that Dove had access to and then instructed him to do whatever he needed to with those funds to ensure his safety and freedom in the next couple of days. To his pleasure, Dove didn't bat an eye. He understood perfectly well that the money was there for bribery if something should go wrong, and better yet, was there as hush money for his cronies if everything went right.

The second thing he needed to do was pick up a few things. He had no reason to go back to the shop or even his home, and he knew enough to know that he shouldn't, even if what he needed most was there. Because if things did go wrong and they could tie certain items to his properties, then that would be a very bad thing for him. So instead, thirty minutes before Moses was supposed to deliver the flower truck outside of Moe French's flower shop, he stopped into Dark Star Pharmacy.

Technically, he owned the pharmacy. Mr. Clark, formerly known as one of Snow White's Dwarves, though which one he couldn't find it in himself to care, only rented the property from him. And fortunately for him, Mr. Clark was not only too cheap to have security cameras, but he was a coward, like most dwarves. He knew that when push came to shove, he'd have Mr. Clark's discretion.

Of course…he couldn't be sure he could count on the discretion of one of the two other people in the pharmacy. David was there. He kept a sharp eye on the former False Prince as he gathered his own things, duct tape and rope, suitable for what he had in mind a little later. Mr. Clark wouldn't say anything if Emma asked questions, but David…David might say something. Or at least his former self might say something. This new version that couldn't tell one memory from another…he didn't know. He still had that look of innocence about him that suggested he might talk to Emma if he thought he knew something. But this was also the same man that was currently having an affair, albeit with the woman he was actually married to instead of the one he'd been engaged to and run away from, with her own blessings…nuance.

But fortunately for him, as he watched David pick one card out, then go to another rack and started perusing for another, he knew what he could do to ensure David's silence. Angry as he was, scared as he was, he couldn't help but snicker. If necessary, those cards could be his tickets to safety. After all, David needed to be more careful. He and Mary Margaret were not nearly as sneaky as they thought.

"Two valentines…" he commented as David fell into line behind him. "Sounds like a complicated life."

"Oh, no. I…I just couldn't decide," David stuttered, but hid it behind a soft chuckle that he was sure Snow White would have fallen head over heels for at one time.

He resisted the urge to roll his eyes and instead glanced behind at the two cards he'd chosen. One was formal and romantic, and the other comical but adorable. Couldn't decide his arse…they were each the definition of two women in his life. Which was exactly what he'd point out should something bad happen and David turn into a threat.

"These are both for the same woman?"

"Well, they're both so…us."

"I see," he smiled. He wasn't wrong. One relationship was romantic and deep, the stuff of legends that would stand the test of time. The other was…well…comical, but fun to watch from a distance, he supposed. Not nearly as fun as the irony around it all, however. Prince Charming having an affair while he pined for a woman who had died decades ago, and the Evil Queen was winning a battle against good. He would never have thought he'd live to see a day like this. "Well, you're fortunate you have someone that loves you."

"I really am," David agreed as the woman ahead of him in line finished up, and he walked forward to make his purchases, cash, of course. He needed to hurry this along. He had somewhere to be in ten minutes. And David…well…Marc would be watching, of course, but who knew where these next ten minutes would take him. Who knew where Belle's mind had gone in the last ten minutes of her life…

"Love…it's like a delicate flame, and once it's gone, it's gone forever," he whispered, managing to hold on to his smile even though his chest felt like it was going to burst open. He couldn't breathe. He had that feeling a lot when he thought about her even all these years later. If only things had been different. If only he'd been different.

Behind him, he heard the crinkle of a plastic bag and found one pushed in front of him with a ten-dollar bill, his change. "Best of luck to you," he muttered to David even as he smiled awkwardly at him.

He heard him whisper thanks, but he didn't turn to reciprocate, just made his way to the door and left. It was nearly eight, and with some useful information on David, a suspicion that could be drawn from an interaction for his own devices if necessary, he felt confident in the next step in his checklist.

Secure Moe French.

Dove informed him that he was still waiting in the shop, that he hadn't left, hadn't so much as set a foot outside. The lights in the store were off, the blinds pulled closed, but Dove said every now and then he could see French peek out the window to look down the street. That was good. He planned on using it.

He hid in the ally just beside Game of Thorns. It was cold out, and wet, and as he waited for the clock to strike eight, he didn't see a single person out on the streets. That was good. Very good. For himself, that was; for Moe French, it was rather unfortunate. He stayed quiet while he waited, shivering in the cold, wishing that he still had his magic. Magic would have made this really very easy and a lot more comfortable. But the cool air didn't scare him away. It didn't cool his anger or frustration; if anything, it just spurred him on. He imagined how cold Belle had been in her final days, wondered if she longed for the fireplaces of the Dark Castle. He thought of her every time his teeth chattered, and his body shook. The feeling of cold all around him was all he needed to remember why he was here, doing…this…

Right on time, Moses showed up. He watched as the van pulled up to Game of Thorns, listened as it groaned to a stop and the motor shut off. He heard a few bangs inside the metal giant, then finally, the back doors swung open. Moses jumped out and walked away down the street, unaware he was even there. Which was exactly what he wanted, especially when-

It was less than thirty seconds before he heard the door to Game of Thrones open. Suddenly, out on the sidewalk, Moe French appeared, staring stupidly up at his van as if it was an angel come to Earth instead of just a truck driven over from a storage lot. If only it was his angel…it might spare him. Moe went to the passenger door. He tugged on it but found it appropriately locked. Then he moved, predictably, to the back, where Moses had left the doors open. The second he was at the back, but hidden by the door, he moved behind him. He caught up his cane in his hand, and before even knew what was happening, he walloped him over the head with the handle.

Moe let out a noise, and with the help of a small push, fell into the back of his truck. Quickly, without thinking, he scooped up Moe's legs and shoved them into the back of the van. Then he climbed in after Moe, and after he confirmed the keys were waiting on the driver's side door as instructed, he moved to the back and closed the doors.

[evakuality]

This is the second of these comparisons.  The first one can be found over here, and the Isak and Matteo versions can be found starting over here.

This episode is one where we mostly consolidate understanding of these two characters from the first one.  There’s not a lot of new information given, though we do gain some depth and nuance on the two of them.  Neither Even nor David turns up immediately in this episode though both Isak and Matteo are clearly thinking about them right from the start - one trying to find his crush on social media at all and the other looking at the one photo he has whenever he can.  We (or rather Isak and Matteo) find out more about each of these boys fairly early this episode, though that happens in different ways.  Isak, of course, finds the video of Even’s school film project and is instantly charmed (of course; Even is very charming in this video) and Matteo has actual real connections with David at school.  I will say that at this point it’s not surprising that Isak thinks that Even could be interested in other guys.  He’s been told that you can tell someone might be into guys if he talks about sucking dick with strangers (which … you know, Even kind of led with that when they talked), and now we have Even making an ‘epic love story’ between two guys in his movie.  There are already things that could hint at Even not being straight so even though Isak isn’t exactly aware of Even’s concerted attempts to be noticed by Isak, he has already got some pointers that allow him to be relaxed about his own interest, and which allow Even a way into a real conversation with Isak.  I doubt Even intended Isak to find this video, but having him do so does work in Even’s favour here.  

David, by contrast, is a very real figure in this episode.  He makes contact with Matteo very early on.  Basically as soon as they spot each other again, there is some interaction.  The problem is that it’s super awkward, and this is probably because David while being drawn to Matteo is very conflicted already, as was hinted in the first episode.  He wants to make contact, meet new people, have connections of some sort.  But it’s fraught with dangers.  Unlike Even, whose ‘secret’ is mental illness and thus more internal and can be hidden more easily, David’s secret is one that could be revealed more easily because it’s physical and thus more external (not to say that either of those secrets is completely internal or external, but there are differences and one is more easily protected than the other).  And so Even is trying hard to get Isak to notice him (that ever-so-calculated walk across the school yard!) while David is doing this complicated dance where he wants to get to know Matteo but the reality of doing so holds fears and worries for him.  And so while he’s drawn to Matteo, in a lot of ways he’s unsure how to go about this approach at this stage (compare this to later in the season when he exudes a lot more confidence even while he’s still concerned about hiding).  So there’s a lot of this sort of awkward small talk (not even small talk really; what they say to each other is so deeply and painfully lacking in substance) and David always ‘has to go’ whenever someone else comes along and interrupts them.  It’s still very fragile, this line he’s trying to walk.

It’s interesting to note the difference in how he behaves with Matteo vs Leonie.  Apart from leaving quickly when she turns up when he’s talking to Matteo, David is warm and friendly with Leonie, smiling and hugging her when they meet etc.  He seems very natural and very much at ease, an ease he doesn’t seem to have when he’s with Matteo.  On one hand, we can understand why Matteo might read this as him being interested in Leonie - he’s a lot more open and friendly with her, after all, at least at this stage - but he himself is also a lot more twitchy and awkward around David than he is with his other friends and which is reflected in the way that David acts with him.  There are some obvious hints that David likes Matteo in a way that goes beyond friendship, but of course he’s still got his hangups about the sensible-ness of giving in to those feelings and so, coupled with the way he is with Leonie, it does read as very ‘hot and cold’ in a way that would confuse someone.  Anyway, these meetings that happen before the Friday meeting on the bus pave the way for David in a way that Even doesn’t get.  For one, they allow Matteo to have the confidence to approach him when he gets on the bus.

For Even. the tram meeting is the awkward first meeting after the kosegruppa.  Oh sure, he’s been parading around making sure that he gets seen (it’s fairly obvious that he sees Isak noticing him in the school yard) but he has yet to do an actual approach to interact with Isak.  This is at least in part because Isak exudes an attitude that suggests he has things a bit more sorted than Matteo does.  Matteo is often alone, on the outskirts and so it’s easier to approach him for David, I think.  Even, older and in a different year, doesn’t have the same ability to connect and I think he’s less confident in some ways.  Because he wants this so much, he needs it to go well.  This means he needs to ‘direct’ it a bit more, get the attention etc, before he makes an actual move.  He’s determined he’s going to get to know Isak, catch his attention, and work out if there can be something and so it’s super important to him that everything is set and ready when it does happen.  David doesn’t have the same drive and the same sense of purpose, and so I think it’s easier for him to just go up to Matteo.  For him, he’s so conflicted that if things don’t go well it’s not going to have the same impact.  He hasn’t been hoping and dreaming and plotting about this for as long as Even has.  So Even has this very pained, awkward encounter on the tram.  He takes advantage of it, of course, because fate has just dumped Isak into his lap so to speak.  But he hasn’t been able to plan this and so he doesn’t have a smooth line or a carefully plotted entry or attitude.  This is Even as he is on the fly and he finds it more difficult than he might have expected.  There’s a pained silence as he tries to think about what to say, and he looks quite relieved when Isak asks him his age and asks for him to buy beer.  There’s an entry now, and Isak has been the one to initiate further contact.

David is approached.  Matteo is the one to go up to him, and the interaction is again reaaaalllllyyyy awkward with very little talk and lots of glancing at each and away again.  It remains this kind of stilted dance between them until the ticket conductor comes onto the bus and David steps up to rescue Matteo.  Thank goodness for him, to be honest, because without it they’d probably still be catching sight of each other every so often and approaching for the whole ‘hi’ ‘hi’ type exchanges.  But the one thing that the rescue from the bus does is to loosen things up for the two of them.  By the time they’re off the bus they’re a unit, there’s a sense of companionship and connection that never really disappears again.  Sure, there are some awkward moments in episodes to come but it’s never quite as difficult for them as it was in these first two episodes.  Part of that is that David starts hearing Matteo’s compliments (‘you’re a genius’ ‘you’re talented’ etc) and starts to get a sense of what Matteo is like and it becomes even harder for him to resist the urge to get close to him.  His kindness and desire to shower his partner with affection is already starting to show and that’s something I think David craves and so he can’t stay away from it any longer.  I said once in something I wrote about communication in this season that this scene cements the idea of boundaries and how good these two are with each other’s boundaries.  Matteo teases David that he’s shown him the sketches already and so it can’t be private and yet he doesn’t try to get into the bits that David has obviously sectioned off after David makes it obvious that he’s not comfortable with those bits being seen.  It makes it clear to David that Matteo will respect boundaries that he sets and allows him to become more comfortable with opening up to him.  From this point on David is much less guarded and more willing to be open with Matteo.  That doesn’t mean he doesn’t still pull back at times, but it becomes obviously harder for him to keep this distance because he’s much more intrigued already.

Even, of course, has no desire at all to keep any sort of distance.  He wants Isak and he wants to go about getting him.  So, for him, it’s a dream come true for Isak to be in his home and hanging out with him, smoking weed and getting comfortable.  It’s such a dream and fantasy moment for him that he manages to forget his girlfriend (and other friends) who are coming over to spend some time with him.  I don’t think he expected to have to face up to both Isak and Sonja in this moment and at this time.  In much the same way that Isak wanted to ditch his friends and their plans to stay with Even, Even also lost himself in this moment.  That means that he has to face up to the deeply unpleasant meeting that happens at the end of the episode.  I think he panics a little and that’s why he’s so over exaggeratedly focused on Sonja once she’s there.  He’s been so caught up in Isak that he lost track of time and if he doesn’t make a big deal of Sonja she or one of the others might catch on to what’s happening with Isak.  The problem, from Even’s PoV, is that he can’t yet be sure of what Isak’s feelings are.  Yes, he clearly enjoys spending time with Even and yes he has fun and they click, but is this a friendship or is there a possibility of something more?  They haven’t really addressed that as yet, and here’s Sonja in the mix being a very obvious and very real obstacle to any plans Even might have.  It’s clear here that this meeting really wasn’t planned by Even because he had other plans and now he’s stuck trying to walk the line between wanting Isak and not wanting to cast Sonja off until he’s sure that he has something new.  It’s that old story of desperately trying to keep to the familiar because in this case the familiar knows everything and has stuck with him.  He finds that frustrating, as we see later, but it’s also comforting in its familiarity.  So he can’t risk losing Sonja until he knows for sure that he and Isak are solid and that what’s happening is what he wants to happen.  Is this fair to any of them?  No, not really.  But it’s very understandable and very human.

The main difference between Even and David in this episode is that David is very much being pushed around by his own worries and insecurities and he’s starting to realise that he can open up and be himself and that Matteo will respect him.  He doesn’t have the same problem of having someone else there as a barrier between him and Matteo (though he obviously knows about Sara and potentially worries about how she fits into this whole thing) and so for him it’s all his own fears holding him back.  That means that as he slowly learns more about Matteo, he slowly becomes more comfortable in this space they’re carving out together.  This is why they need to spend more time meeting and connecting in real time and in real life even in such small and seemingly insignificant ways.  It’s also why David keeps bailing with no comment; things get intense and he has to get himself out of the situation for his own security.  On the other hand, Even has to balance two competing people (not that they know they’re competing at this point), and he does have that much stronger sense of purpose when it comes to Isak.  He knows what he wants but he’s not sure he can get it and he’s certainly not sure if he can keep it even if he does get it (which we see in more detail later in the season).  For Even, this isn’t a slow realisation that he can trust Isak.  I think he knows that already.  It’s more about how does he get to a point where he can make a genuine attempt at starting something.  He must realise at this point that the introduction of Sonja has put a halt to the forward momentum he’s been building with Isak.  He needs to start a rebuilding phase.  The eagerness he was showing in the first episode is still there, but it’s tempered now because at least one of his secrets is out.  While David is still cautious and is feeling his way slowly and carefully, battling against himself first and foremost, Even is still headfirst and excitable, grabbing opportunities with both hands and pushing forward as much as possible.  There’s just a small obstacle in his way now, one which we will see him working around as the episodes continue.

Episode three can be found here.

[bbclesmis]

Lily Collins on overshadowing dad Phil, beating anorexia and starring in the BBC's Les Misérables

As one of the defining voices of the 1980s and a man who remains one of the world’s bestselling artists, it would have been easy for Collins to overshadow his multitalented daughter’s success. Certainly, when I first interviewed Lily five years ago for the romcom Love, Rosie, she was still being defined not just by her famous father, but the Audrey Hepburn-esque looks that had won her modelling contracts as a teenager living in LA.

Since we last saw each other, Lily has redefined herself on her own terms. And when UK audiences are treated to her nuanced, poignant portrayal of Cosette’s desperate mother, Fantine, in the lavish new six-part BBC adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, they won’t see Phil Collins’s daughter but a remarkable British-born talent at the top of her game.

‘I had a few friends in the musical version, and I was so keen to play this part in what’s a very different adaptation,’ says Lily of the role that won Anne Hathaway an Oscar – a role she begged producers to be allowed to audition for, so desperate was she to be involved.

That the director, Tom Shankland, had decided against his being a musical adaptation meant the all-star cast – including Dominic West as Jean Valjean, David Oyelowo as Javert and Olivia Colman as Madame Thénardier – were able to return to Hugo’s original characters, she says. ‘And getting to work through the whole arc of Fantine’s life was incredible. Although in fact the death scene was filmed on day two,’ she adds with a side smile. ‘So it was a case of, “Hi, nice to meet you – I’m about to die”.’

Crushed and betrayed by a pitiless society that demands the most from those to whom it gives the least, Fantine’s character is emblematic of so much. During the six-month shoot in Belgium and northern France, Lily found filming in minus-13C Brussels gruelling (‘I grew up in England, so I should know about cold – but this was something else’), but says it helped put her in the right state of mind.

‘My lips started to go blue and I began to shake. Even in my breaks I wouldn’t keep my jacket on for too long because I had to be at a level of discomfort that I hadn’t experienced before.’ And when a degraded and desperate Fantine is dragged through the snow wearing minimal clothing, ‘I was able to let go and be that vulnerable. It’s those parts that are the most fulfilling: that’s when you can see what you’re made of.’

Lily’s early roles were hardly inconsequential. She starred alongside Sandra Bullock in the Oscar-winning 2009 film The Blind Side, and with Julia Roberts in Mirror Mirror in 2012. But it wasn’t until 2013 with her portrayal of Clary Fray in the film adaptation of Cassandra Clare’s bestselling cult fantasy series The Mortal Instruments that Lily seemed to come into her own.

There was a concerted move towards tragic, multi-layered heroines like heartbroken Cecilia Brady in Amazon Prime’s The Last Tycoon in 2016, and recovering anorexic Ellen in Marti Noxon’s To the Bone the following year, and I wonder whether it was the writing of her startlingly honest 2017 memoir, Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me, that marked the start of Lily’s real evolution.

Five years ago a sweet, wholesome and reticent young woman in dungarees and Dr Martens boots had assured me that prudence had ‘always been my natural feeling’. And yet, outing herself as someone real and flawed in her memoir – someone who had suffered from a debilitating eating disorder as well as self-confidence and relationship issues – was anything but prudent. ‘Writing the book helped me let go of things I was holding on to emotionally,’ Lily says. ‘And in order to take on the baggage of the characters that I wanted to play I had to let go of my own.’

That she chose to play a recovering anorexic in To the Bone the same year she’d detailed her own illness in such detail – the diet-pill and laxative addiction, the bingeing and purging that started at the age of 16 and went on into her 20s – could be seen as brave, foolhardy or both. But her parents (Lily’s mum is American socialite Jill Tavelman) didn’t try to stop her, she says. ‘In fact, they were more like, “Wow, you’re writing a book!” And it turned out to be a form of therapy,’ she insists.

‘Luckily, we shot To the Bone in LA, I worked with a nutritionist to prepare for the part responsibly, and my mum was on set with me, so it was a way for me to harness something that had truly controlled my life for such a long time. Being able to turn the tables and really have control was amazing. Finally I could say to myself: “I am living my life and this is not going to be a part of my story from now on.” I’ll be 30 in March and I’m so glad that I dealt with these things in my 20s, because now I can get excited about what’s to come.’

As part of her research she went to an Anorexics and Bulimics Anonymous group, and an LA clinic for eating disorders, ‘where they gave me a lot of the factual information to understand the basics of the disorder’. Does she feel her illness is firmly behind her now – or is it important to remain vigilant? ‘Well it’s never going to be erased because it’s part of who you are, but it doesn’t define how I live my life daily any more,’ she says. ‘When I was going through it, I couldn’t imagine there being a day when I didn’t think about it. So really it’s about seeing myself as a priority.’

She’s in no doubt that doing To the Bone and Unfiltered in the same year was worth it in terms of getting the message out there. ‘We’re all flawed,’ she shrugs. ‘Giving a loud voice to a subject that people are often very ashamed of really inspired me to pour myself into characters that have something to say.’

Her accent may be pure La-La Land, but Lily’s got British steel, our madcap sense of humour – and a love of Topshop. And when she lands at Heathrow and drives out into the country towards her father’s Surrey home, ‘That’s when I feel most myself,’ she says. And yet only-child Lily was just five when her mother moved them back to California, where she was from, and away from the very public fallout of her and Collins’s divorce.

It was the musician’s second marital break-up and the press feasted on every acrimonious detail of the split, from the fax her father reportedly sent Tavelman terminating their 10-year marriage (he denied it) to the reported £17 million he was forced to pay out. But although Lily admits in her book that there was ‘anger’ towards her father and a ‘terrible disconnect’ between them in the subsequent period – Collins went on to marry Swiss translator Orianne Cevey, 20 years his junior, in 1999, whom he later divorced and remarried – she is now very close to the 67-year-old and her four half-siblings. Two of them, Simon and Joely (whose mother is Collins’s first wife, Andrea Bertorelli) live in Canada, and two, Nicholas and Matthew (sons of Orianne), in Geneva, but the family all assembled in London for their father’s 60th birthday.

Lily remembers the advice Phil gave her when she started out: ‘For every positive review you read you’ll probably find two negative ones, so if you’re proud of something, don’t let anyone take that away.

‘And it’s true that being proud of the work matters more than anything,’ she says, adding that growing up immersed in the industry allowed her to ‘see the pros and the cons of it all and really understand what happens when you decide you’re going to be in the public eye. Because of that I feel like I already have this armour built in, which I can use at any moment.’

The armour went on when I asked about her ex-boyfriend, actor Jamie Campbell Bower, and an alleged fling with Zac Efron five years ago – and she’s not about to tell me who she’s dating now. But as well as her book, Instagram – on which Lily has almost 12 million followers – has opened her up in other ways. ‘I used to be quite anti social media,’ she says. ‘But after the book I found that this hugely supportive community was forming around the world.’ Anyone who assumed that the gorgeous LA actress whose circle of friends includes the actors Eddie Redmayne, Jaime Winstone and Sam Claflin couldn’t connect with ordinary people, ‘I wanted to prove wrong,’ she says.

Instagram has also proved to be a great platform for Lily to showcase her love of fashion and photography. The Dr Martens are now long gone and today she loves mixing up pieces by Givenchy, Miu Miu and Chanel with vintage brands and high-street finds. ‘In Brussels there were so many amazing vintage shops,’ she says. ‘I found some incredible old adidas and Fila jackets. But I’m constantly changing when it comes to fashion.’

Many of these experiments have been exhaustively covered by the fashion bloggers who dissect paparazzi pictures of Lily out and about in LA, where she lives – ‘which can be frustrating when I’m just going to the gym’, but is an inevitable part of any coverage involving red carpets.

Asked whether she minds the ‘Who are you wearing?’ question that many A-listers have railed against post #AskHerMore, she deliberates for a moment. ‘Well, I like to give credit where credit’s due, and if I’m wearing something a designer has created, they deserve the credit. One hopes there’s going to be more than one question – and if it is just the one, I’d rather be asked what I’m doing there.’

To see how quickly her industry has changed since #MeToo went viral just over a year ago has been fascinating, she says. ‘And I feel very fortunate that the films I’ve been in have always involved very strong independent women – whether it’s Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock,Julianne Moore, Annette Bening or Jennifer Connelly: they all took me under their wing.’

Watching #MeToo filter down into other industries has been one of the most wondrous things about it, she enthuses. ‘But whereas this year has been about trying to level the playing field, I keep hoping that one day we won’t have to start conversations with, “Well, it’s great because she’s a woman…”’

In her next big screen role, Lily will star as Edith Tolkien – the wife and muse of Lord of the Rings creator JRR Tolkien – opposite Nicholas Hoult in Dome Karukoski’s biopic, Tolkien. ‘And what an amazing experience to shoot in Liverpool with someone like Nicholas, and be able to play a character that really inspired a series of stories I grew up loving.’ But prior to that, and also due out next year – she filmed Joe Berlinger’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, in which she plays the long-term girlfriend of mass-murderer Ted Bundy, Elizabeth Kloepfer – with whom she spent time.

‘The preparation to that – and meeting Elizabeth and her daughter – was so unsettling that I kept being woken up by all these images,’ she says. ‘And I had tried not to read the harshest and most visceral information out there because in truth my character didn’t know anything, and the story is from her perspective. But it’s such a fascinating story – and in the end storytelling is what connects us all.’

Les Misérables begins on 30 December at 9pm on BBC One (x)

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story Part 74

I found it harder and harder to focus on reading like I had in the past after my attacks. I would just stare at the page, or sometimes have trouble identifying with the dialogue in the story. I don't know if I picked up some overrated literature or if something in me was just different. I felt quite dead inside. I closed in on myself even harder. I rarely left my cold, dimly lit bedroom. There were certain thoughts I monitored myself not to have. I didn't go outside at all anymore unless it was very dark out. Allison and David would hang out with me, we would walk down to the pop machines and buy cans of soda if we could afford it. I spent more time hashing out my manga story. I still tried to make art when I could. I wrote Sarah often. But a good deal of my life at this was hiding. I felt broken, and I didn't even want to identify with anything that would wind up hurting me more.

I remember it being a fairly cold winter that year. I attempted to sleep as much as I possibly could. Nothing seemed worth being awake for anymore. I felt like a total loser – now back in Kendrick as though I had never even left. A part of me was starting to resign myself to the reality that I was never leaving. It was a bitter pill. Sometimes life seemed gray and blurry. I suppose I could have stayed living with Maria, or I could have chosen to stay with my grandma. But I hadn't. I had put on a lot of weight. I've heard people who have always been thin their entire lives, how people let themselves get overweight. Let me say – it's amazingly easy given you have the right DNA and life circumstances. Unless you are naturally hyper and love eating raw cucumbers all day, it can happen to anyone. And when you don't feel like there is anything in life that is meaningful or good and you have lost all hope, but you don't have drugs or money or transportation and suicide is too frightening to actually go through with, food is an outlet. Not that I ate that much – at least not by comparison to how I ate as a teenager. I really didn't need to eat that much anymore to gain weight. My metabolism was shot.  I didn't feel good. The skin all over my body became covered in these bumps. I don't know why, though my guess is it had something to do with my endocrine system falling apart. Maybe it was because I was developing lactose intolerance.

Sarah went and saw Tom Waits live. It would be his last tour – for Orphans. She described it as this amazing experience – one of the best things she had ever seen in her entire life. His stage set was like this moving dilapidated carousel. When he stomped his feet billows of dust rose from the ground into the air. I now and forever will be jealous of her for having this opportunity. Tom Waits is my favorite. I didn't love him as much then as I do now, but I can listen to Tom Waits for days on end and it never gets old.

I often times would write to this website that may or may not exist still, called Elderlywisdomcircle. Basically, it's a bunch of volunteer elderly who try to give you advice about life problems for free. You just write a letter to them, and someone will get back to you within a few weeks. I would often write to them about how my father was preventing me from leaving by not helping me get a Social security card, about Roxanne and her drug use and her marriage to Jeremy, how depressed and isolated I was, how I was afraid to feel things because if I let myself feel things I would go insane and lose what little grounds I had in the world, about my brother. I don't know what I expected to find. I guess it was my grounded version of prayer. It was something to look forward to I guess, as I thought that maybe someone might have the answers to the issues I was facing. Out of all the letters I received back from my issues however, I essentially got little conclusive response, and only one of them seemed really legitimate. They always told me that I wrote well. They would basically tell me to seek help – though they also had to contest that I didn't live in a state or an area that was really generous about giving out help. A few of them were very religious and they told me that I needed to pray more. One cantankerous responder told me that I was essentially to blame about every bad thing that had ever happened to me, and I needed to take control over my life. The nuance in their professional opinion was that I was a bit on the pathetic side. They would always link me up with a suicide hotline.

David was in Hastings one day in the book section. David was beginning to read a lot independently, and I had shown him the places in Hastings that sold the classics and how to search the novels. As he was examining the selection, a stranger walked up to him, a man with a familiar voice. He had a gruff New York accent. He congratulated David for being a reader, that there weren't too many kids in these modern times who read anymore and it was very refreshing to see a young man such as himself choosing to do so. David nodded politely. Later on, David put a face and name to the guy. He was Michael Savage, the conservative nationalist political commentator that my father sometimes listened to. For whatever reason he had been in Moscow Idaho. Which is funny because David probably adamantly disagrees with just about everything Michael Savage stands for. I certainly think he's repulsive, and even my father doesn't really care for him anymore, mostly being a listener because he enjoyed the aggression and was amused by the extremism. It would have been so much cooler had the person in question been something more than some regressive asshole.

That New Year's eve, my father went out to drink. I knew he planned on getting totally wasted because he spent a lot of time trying to justify going out that year, when I honestly didn't object in the least, as that seemed like a totally natural thing to do. I didn't really look forward to him drinking however. It made me very nervous. Up that point, he mostly seemed to hold back on his drinking around us – though I knew he was still getting drunk other places. I was just starting to comprehend that part of the reason he was starting to say things that made no sense, or get irrationally emotional, or starting to make good food and then mess the food up by means of some obscure decision that made no logical sense was because he was starting to drink every night.

Allison, David and I stayed up of course, probably snacking and watching Fight Club or the Shawshank Redemption for the millionth time. After midnight came and went, David went upstairs to check in for the night. Allison and I were still up when one am rolled around. I was getting a little nervous that maybe my father had been in some kind of accident, as he said he was going to be home before midnight. So Allison and I stayed up watching an anime show that I wasn't really getting into Wolf's Reign or something like that, I believe it was called. It was around one or so that my father suddenly burst through the door belligerent. And he had this very weird guy with him who had this beautiful Husky with him. They were both so drunk they could barely walk and everything they said was a scream, particularly my father who was ranting in a way that made my stomach hurt with anxiety. My father was professing his undying friendship to this guy in his inebriated state, and this other guy who's voice was nothing but an inaudible display of indecipherable gurgles and croaks would say something back and I couldn't understand. They were both raving about something that had happened at the bar. I had never seen my father this drunk in my life, and I was kind of nervous. For one, he was saying some horrible base stuff about women. And though my father I would say was sexist, he had never really went off about women being easy sluts or being defined primarily by their bodies and if/how those bodies benefited the male gaze.

So I was horrified to be listening to him say probably some of the worst stuff I had ever heard him say. He was ranting on how him and this strange drifter that he met at the bar (Jordan was his name)  were going to go out and get themselves laid that night in gross vivid detail. Even if one night stands were a person's thing, what he was saying and how he approached it was very lewd and offensive. He even joked about them finding hookers. Jordan more or less just went along with whatever my dad was saying, who kept patting his back. The fact that Allison and I were still awake and very aware of how he was behaving didn't really seem to do much to phase him. If anything, he seemed annoyed that the two of us were awake. Then again, he got mad when he heard that David was asleep.

Eventually, the two of them went down to the bar in Kendrick. It worried me that he had been driving. Honestly, as drunk as my father was, he had a DUI coming. I am really opposed to drunk driving. When I hear someone I know has done it I get almost personally offended. How could you put other people's lives in danger like that? You could literally destroy other people's realities simply because you couldn't make plans ahead of time. It's profoundly selfish to me. I wanted to go to sleep, but my heart was racing out of my chest. Jordan left his lovely Husky at the house. The dog was nice overall, kind of serious and distant. I felt like something bad would happen if we didn't stay up. I was in shock, because just when I thought I couldn't lose any more respect, here I was losing even more. Granted, alcohol brings out the worst and pushes that worst a little farther than you would have ever taken it, but I didn't think my father was this pathetic. And it really struck home with me that I didn't like alcohol. I saw it as being extremely destructive.

Eventually they came back, and they were ranting about how the two of them both deserved to fuck some fat ugly bitches. Allison and I looked at each other, grossed out. My father kept saying 'FAT BITCHES' FAT BITCHES' over and over again. Even though I know his mind was completely disconnecting this statement from his own daughter which was me, I felt personally offended and disgusted by this statement. I was fat, and I guess to some people I knew, I was probably considered a bitch as well. I felt there was something really double-horrible about that statement. The nuance being, fat women are disgusting and easy and something that you fetishize and want to both use for sex and violently humiliate. It was around this time when I just figured that if Jordan stabbed him in the night or either one of them choked on their own vomit then so be it. I tried to distance myself from it all, partially to process what I was hearing. He then decided to take his Nickelback collection out of retirement and start blasting it throughout the house – making it impossible for anyone to sleep. I decided that it was probably for the best if Allison and I went to bed. I was extremely tense about the surreal ugliness and the entirely negative vibes that had spoiled an otherwise mundane night.

The next day, Allison and I just stayed in the bedroom until we both just absolutely had to pee come hell or high water. Nobody was up, and the whole feeling of the house was really dead and gray. It kind of scared me a little bit. Outside was frosty and cold and the typical temperature of ten degrees. We walked around the house timidly and distantly. We found David still in his room, more or less confused. David got up in the night at some point and was completely baffled by a random Husky being in the house. David had been phobic of dogs as a little boy until he was eight or so, and seeing the dog in our house messed with him, causing him to question his own sanity a little bit. It would have been slightly funny had the whole thing not already been so appalling.

I could tell by my father's body language when he did come up that he felt ashamed of himself and was sort of afraid to see us. He tried to play it off like the entire thing hadn't happened. Being coy and distant to anything we had to say pertaining to the night before. Jordan was asleep on our couch till the afternoon and he smelled awful. The Husky had literally chewed a good portion of one of the couches to bits. It was totally destroyed. I hadn't even realized that furniture chewing could get that way. There were pieces of our couch scattered all over the house. I had to laugh a bit. I thought it added a nice touch to the absolute chaotic reality of that night. My father ended up driving Jordan back into Lewiston. He didn't seem very warmed up to Jordan like he had in his drunken moments that night. And we never heard from or saw Jordan or his dog again.

My father seemed to deal with his shame by doubling down on us about how the house was messy. It was just his way of feeling some semblance of control when it was becoming clearer and clearer to us all that he had none. Perhaps he suspected mutiny. I suspect he was onto something, because I was tempted not to at all in protest for having to put up being totally disgusted. But Allison and David felt the need to and sitting out would just be putting that much more work on them so I joined in ultimately. It really smelled in the corner of the couch, and we came to discover just what it was. Jordan had vomited out a ton of McDonald's food on the couch, and rather than clean it up, he had flipped over the couch cushion. It was deep in the void of the couch, but it was also sort of poured out over onto the floor, which he had of course taken one of our pairs of shoes to cover up, getting it on the sneakers. Allison was about to clean it up herself. But I said no. Instead, I told my father about the vomit. He just went 'oh' and walked away. I told him we weren't cleaning it up, which was both directly pertaining to the vomit, but just the situation in general. It was tiring and cowardly that he wanted us to be the ones that did the hard work of making our slowly disintegrating family ties work, and all he had to do was pretend consistently that he had done nothing wrong.

He ended up not cleaning the vomit up that night, or the next or the next. So we just stopped sitting on that couch, and we held our breath whenever we walked past that area. We were all painfully aware it was there, but it felt like nobody was allowed to talk about it. When he thought I wasn't around – six days later, he instructed Allison to clean it up for him. I found out about it, and I coached Allison not to. I could see this sort of frustration with it all, and I think she felt like, if she just cleaned it up then the whole negative experience would go away and she could move on. But for me, her cleaning that up was taking it in a way I didn't feel she deserved to have to do.  If she gave into what he wanted, then he would feel better about himself, like he was still in control. I noticed too that he didn't want David to clean it up. He wanted it to be either me or Allison, and there was something very telling about that. I felt so belittling to make her have to do something like that. I felt like the mere act of having to do something like that was the kind of thing that ruins a young girl's self worth. Allison felt like I was holding onto the past, and the best thing to do is mindlessly scrape up the mess of yesterday, be it hers or someone else's and start out anew. It spelled a difference in how we coped with life I guess. I believe in quiet protest and  have issues with authority that does not respect me, and Allison takes on responsibility that isn't something she should have to, and in doing I think she finds herself in a position where she feels she has more control over any given situation whereas I am more likely to bury my own grave due to my defiant attitude – but ultimately feel like I was more true to myself as I walk away.

Ultimately, in this situation, Allison didn't clean up the puke however, since for one, she really didn't want to. She was afraid at this point that cleaning it up would just ultimately cause her to puke, and secondly, I promised her that if she didn't clean the puke up and our dad had problems with that, I would personally jump in and my father could scream and freak out at me rather than her. I really didn't want Allison to have to clean it up, and just the thought of it made my blood boil. So she cleaned around it. My father was on the phone at that point with one of his online girlfriends and he was bragging about himself in this way that he always did. Allison asked if things were clean enough and he pointed to the corner of the couch. I looked him straight in the face and told him with factuality but not without some bit of attitude that that was Jordan's vomit and he needed to clean it rather than her. He was on the phone and I think my statement embarrassed him, so he said 'FINE RENEE' and then explained to his phone girlfriend that his eldest daughter was basically having hormonal issues and freaking out at him for something for no reason. The crazy in me thought of ripping the phone out of his hand and explaining to Jane Doe that he was trying to make his thirteen year old clean up this homeless guy's vomit on the couch from a week previous, but I thought better of it. He ended up cleaning it up a day or two later with some strong chemical soap, and a shampooer.

I guess things were building for me with my dad. The hurt I had felt was starting to turn into disgust. I don't remember at all how this fight went. I probably told him he cared about his online women more than he did his own family. He resented me because everyone in the household respected me more, including himself. Over the years I had been there for Allison and David and he hadn't. I had gained respect, and he had lost respect. He was threatened by me – not that I wanted his position in the house. I wanted out but couldn't get away on account of him. And I saw through him, and knew his vulnerabilities. Both of my parents, despite everything, considered me to be their best friend in their own individually weird way. I guess it's because I was curious about who they were. The older I have become, the less I tried to see them as the power structure I was meant to rely upon and I became curious about how they functioned. So when they did something really messed up, they would get insecure about me judging them – because I had seen what it was like for them behind the veil. And this sometimes threw my father in a rage, particularly when he personally felt like a failure.

I don't think he dealt with anything that had happened to him properly. He was messed up by the death of Patty, the death of his mother, the police investigation and being eventually long-distance-dumped over and over again. The more I lived around him, the more I realized that almost none of this was about me at all. He just hates himself that much and isn't emotionally stable enough to recognize or acknowledge his own failure without flying off the handle so his everyday life is this repetitive factory floor induced circular attempt to draw people and activities into his life that will distract him from himself, and when that fails he loses his fucking mind. And at times, I wondered why he hated himself to begin with. He was granted, not the best person in the world, but most of his flaws were in direct relation to how he responded to his own self loathing, which kept the cycle ongoing and out of control, and it ruined every relationship he ever had with anyone in his life – and this was why he had doubled down on preventing me from leaving. He felt like if he lost me he lost the one person in the world who loved him unconditionally. I don't see my father as a sociopath. The few people I have met who also know him see him as a part time total fuckface, but also someone who has legitimately the best of intentions with most of what he starts off doing. Just a very flawed person, and an emotional coward who used anger, and dominance to subjugate anything in his outer world that might challenge him or made him feel disappointed in himself. And as it happened, I have a challenging personality. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Of course, eventually, we are all nails sticking up in my father's world. He can't keep anyone around.

During this fight, I felt this flash of certainty. For years, I felt like he just pretended that nothing bad. I always felt this weird urge to walk up to him and punch him in the face and walk away for no reason. I didn't understand how he could go along as if nothing had happened, that he hadn't beaten me as a teen, forced me to babysit and essentially do half of a parent's work, or neglected my needs, or kicked me out for allegedly being gay. Since the fight was on anyway and something I wouldn't be able to walk out of unscathed, since I was afraid I might have a panic attack if I didn't keep myself focused and angry during this altercation, and since I had always wanted to call out the elephant in the room, I just decided to tell him for the first time what he had done to me as a teenager, specifically the day he had taken me home and beat me. So as he was screaming at me – telling me I was a spoiled brat – me in all my one of two oversized t-shirts and pajama bottoms who was lucky to afford seventy-five cents twice a week to go down to the pop machine and get a pop, burst out and asked him why he had given me a fat lip and bruises on my arm in high school. He looked honestly mystified for a moment and really put off – and started saying WHATTTT?. I reminded him of the circumstances, and I saw something weird snap in his face with guilt and then contort into this look of denial like some grand moment in a theater performance. He was still yelling, and then kind of stammering, and then I asked him again. He suddenly began wailing and screaming. It was kind of an attack at me and it was a bit scrambled to me. He then started screaming LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!!!!!! LEAVE ME ALONE!!! I HATE MYSELF!!!!!  I WANT TO DIE!!!!! LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!! LEAVE ME ALONE!!!! I HATE MYSELF!!! I HATE MYSELF!!!! I HATE MYSELF!!! over and over again. He sounded entirely deranged and broken. His eyes had sort of blanked out, and I don't even feel like he was seeing anything around him anymore I just stood there dumbfounded. I had never really gotten to this point in an argument before. He continued to yell this even as I got my coat on and my shoes and decided to leave the house for awhile and I could hear him as I walked up the street.

I had always thought that making my parents realize what they had done to me would bring some closure for me, or some satisfaction. I felt pushed down and weak, and they always came out the strong winners. Perhaps if the roles were reversed? As a little girl, I used to believe that before God let you into heaven, he made you watch a movie of your life and wired you up to the movie so you felt every emotion you made someone else feel. Whenever I got upset, if Roxanne pulled my hair or I was sent to my room or whatever, I would cry and then sit in bed and imagine this scenario until I felt like the world made sense again. I imagined God grabbing my parents or sister with his big hands (I imagined he was King Triton from Little Mermaid). He would force them to make eye contact when they looked away in shame, and the eye contact would be fierce and they would learn their lesson. It was of course a testament to my sensitivity as a child, as well as my early onset of a God complex of sorts and egotism, but also my need for a sense of understanding and equilibrium to exist. I had gone for years thinking that karmic justice would make me feel better. When I had seen my father confronted with his own deeds, it broke him. And I didn't really feel the way I thought I would. He seemed mentally unwell, disconnected, and ultimately weak. He seemed small to me, and scared – a creature too dumb to comprehend it's own actions. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. If God held him down and forced him to watch his life-movie, he probably would have blown his brains out. He was an irresponsible coward, and there was nothing I could do or say to change that. I felt disconnected from him, and a little sad for him. How empty it would be to live your life afraid of honest introspection? It would feel so much better just to be honest with yourself. He couldn't humble himself to the slightest insult, and this ultimately limited growth for him. And as he failed to grow as a person, he ultimately decayed.

The realization of this didn't make me feel good at all. I didn't like the power I yielded for those moments of realization. It made me a little bit sad. Not just for him, but for everyone. I guess it was hitting me then that not everyone is emotionally capable of change. Maybe understanding isn't for everyone. You can put stepping stones down for people to follow, and no matter how clearly they are put down, no matter how tiny the step, some people will fall in and drown anyway. I think in this moment my father's position in my life began to alter a little bit. If things were never  going to get better, then I didn't want to hate him anymore. I realized that I had reached a point where I held some virtues and character that he lacked, rendering him the child and me the adult. If he was capable of suicide, then I didn't want to push him over that edge either. He wasn't going to help me forgive him. I was just going to have to forgive him myself – and in so doing I took the personal responsibility out of his hands and some of his credit as a father figure. He was too weak to know better, and if he couldn't be held responsible for his actions, than I guess I was going to have to eat that karmic debt. I believe there was a point at the end of one of Robert Pirsig's books where he talked about just that. And I really understood it at that moment.

Allison and I were sitting on the rocks by the Kendrick bike path at sunset one day. We had taken a walk. Allison was talking absently about school, and I was more or less listening distantly, as it was the kind of stuff that seems important to you as a preteen but actually isn't, like who is dating who or what one girl said about another. It's important to listen to thirteen year olds who talk about this stuff though, because it ultimately is very real to them and a huge growing point in their life. It's also an age that isolates you from both children and adults, and even older teens, and I feel like it's important to understand the spirit of these mundane high school dramas even if the events themselves are mind numbing. I get tempted to blurt out the obvious thing that isn't obvious to a younger generation of girls, 'She should dump him, she's too young for a relationship and even if they do try to have sex it's going to be a disappointing experience', 'that girl is just jealous of the other girl. 'She's probably going to party a whole bunch and then make some serious mistakes. She seems cool now, but her life will be a mess in four years if she doesn't stop' 'That over-the-top cordial Christian boy is going to probably get married when he is twenty and stay married for twenty more years because fundamentalist Christian people are weiiiird..' Just random opinions that I would generally have about whoever she was talking about. It felt strange to be judging all these kids and their little lives back in the school I used to suffer in.

We were sitting there that day though, talking besides the bike path. I was looking out absently at the path, and I started seeing this odd glimmerly form. It looked sort of like a person, but his body movements were completely erratic, like he was wounded and falling. His walking seemed shock induced and senseless, like someone who has just crawled out of bombed building. He looked like he was in agony, and like his leg was messed up. I got up to move, and then suddenly he was gone. I thought perhaps my eyes were playing tricks on me, so I sat back down, and there he was again. I moved again, and he wasn't there, but then I moved to another area and I could see him even more visibly, details in his clothing and facial expression. He seemed to be laboring towards us, but at the same time he wasn't coming any closer. For some reason I wasn't even scared when perhaps I should have been. What I was seeing was something that shouldn't exist. But it didn't seem like it was there on my account in the same way that the voice from my house had screamed my name at me. It was almost like a movie playing in the distance, though obviously more surreal.

I had to interrupt Allison and point the guy out to her. At first she couldn't see him from her position, but then I had her move to where I was, and she could see him too. We both watched him, and just to be clear, we made out his details and clarified it back and forth to one another. He was not aware of where he was. His leg seemed injured. He was extremely dirty, almost like he had been covered in dried mud. He had blonde hair that was also incredibly dirty. He was wearing boots and overalls. His blonde hair was a little longer and spilled out in his face. He looked like someone from another time era. We both just sat there and watched it, and neither one of us was actually scared. We just couldn't believe it. It seemed real and unreal at the same time. I felt badly watching him suffer, but at the same time he almost just seemed like data or something. We watched him for about ten minutes. He started fading and getting harder to see, and eventually he just became this space where he looked more like a mirage than a person and then he was gone. Allison and I walked home. We tried to tell David, but he seemed more confused. David for whatever reason has never had a very ghostly experience in his life. For this reason, when either Allison or I told him stories of things we had both seen (Allison and her best friend Jessica had once watched a hand come out of a door inviting them to come inside with it's finger during a stay-over), and it wasn't that he didn't believe us, but his reality was not the same as ours. He just didn't get it. I think at times he was prone to believe us, and at times he didn't really, but it was hard for him to have the depth of belief necessary to fully take in our experiences since nothing of the sort had ever been present in his own perception.

This incident was something Allison and I occasionally talk about when there are people around. Everyone has opinions of the supernatural and it's entertaining to see the reactions of those who believe us and don't. It really kind of got me though. It would have been one thing if I had been the only one who was seeing it. If that had been the case, I would have doubted my own judgment, though maintained that it seemed real to me at the moment. One person cannot verify anything, even if that one person was myself. But for one, the situation happened for one, at a time when neither Allison or I were scared or stressed. It was still daylight, and we were in a peaceful area talking about far removed subjects. We weren't freaking each other out with ghost stories, or even upset. We were both relatively feeling okay. Secondly, we both had quite a few minutes to study the situation. The mind can play tricks for a few seconds, but it's much harder to really have those kinds of moments when you have time to reflect on it, particularly if you aren't scared. And we were verifying things with one another like a few curious scientists when it happened. And third, we both saw it. We both saw it for several minutes.

So, from this experience, I have to gauge that life and reality is not what we think it is. I don't want to sound like the monologue in the beginning of Tales From the Darkside or the Twilight Zone' but really what we saw should have been impossible. There was nobody there. And yet there was. The way I see it, we were either getting a glimpse into the past, or some alternate reality. That felt the most true for what we were looking at. He had no idea we were there, and there were only certain angles where we could see him at all. And why were we seeing him? Why weren't we seeing a past that was nothing but the trees? Because we were almost exclusively seeing this guy. Well, maybe our thoughts and feelings leak into the world around us. Maybe those feelings stain reality. I have no idea of knowing if that is true or not, but it might make sense for those who get strange feelings at places like Gettysburg. We were seeing something that was either happening in some other dimension, or seeing something that had already happened. Why Allison and I were tuned into it is very strange – seeing as we aren't seeing past car crashes being relived on the sides of roads. This isn't some daily Sixth Sense thing for either one of us. Why did this present itself to us exactly? I can only think it's because we were in the right time and place, and we were in some collectively correct state of mind where we were open to it. And I think the fact that this person – whoever, or wherever he was, was suffering a great deal.  

This notion is something I have really taken to. It makes me see the world in a different and much more poetic way. Places come to life with the feelings we have on them. The events of our existences create a show on all that is around us, and essences of our existence can be felt beyond time and space.  Some part of me will always be laying in the grass by the creek with Zack  back in 04', I will always be holding my grandmother's hand watching television in some dimensional reality. Every thought I think, everything I do or say, every connection I make with the world around me is being printed into the world around me, the beautiful and the ugly. And together, all of us are creating this complex mosaic and added meaning to every inch of our reality. In essence our thoughts are painting and sculpting what is real – and not vice versa. We are creating art through the act of living and experiencing. And that is a very beautiful thought. I can't say I believe in it to the same extent I believe in the computer screen in front of me, and I think that blind faith isn't the charming characteristic it is made out to be. I couldn't sit at a dinner table with Richard Dawkins and expect to be taken seriously. But I know there was something to this, and this is my number one suspicion about life. I think people have vibrations that transcend everything we understand. Is there a reason behind this or any concrete way to prove my theory? No. But I see a place on the sidewalk, and I don't just see that place. I see it as a place where people went back and forth to work on, children played and drew chalk on, drunks vomited on, people held hands on. It's not just a chunk of concrete shaped along the earth. It has taken on and transcended it's utilitarian purposes. I don't just see that as symbolic. I see it as very real. I realize that there are flaws in this thinking, and I also realize it's painfully human and self important in a universe that pretty much demonstrates human beings as temporary, obsolete, and destructive in a very petty way. And yet, I can't unsee it.

I guess it's remotely just as possible that what we saw was a ghost, or a demon or that reality is just something I make up in my own head. Perhaps the government or aliens implanted the memory into Allison and my collective skulls. Maybe I invented it all in my mind, maybe it's all a matter of accepting solipsism. I don't really think so. I am open minded to anything, but it didn't feel like any of those things. I don't buy the religious implications of an all out demon – and in any way, it wasn't being very good at being a scary demon as neither Allison nor I were overly frightened,  it didn't seem like a ghost but maybe. I highly doubt the government would waste it's time and precious technology on me or my sister – that's more absurd to me than a wiggly reality, and an alien race wasting it's tech on me or Allison for something so meaningless and also seemed equally if not more ludicrous. Though the world could be something I invented in my own thoughts, I really doubt I am capable of that. I just don't think I could create quantum physics and write millions or songs or secretly understand how the universe operates but just fool myself that I am not capable so there is still an element of surprise to living. It just feels like I would do something a little more interesting that waste my youth like this. It's quite possible we are living in a simulation of some kind – which is one of the more probable suggestions I have heard of, but if that is the case, it doesn't really stamp on my previous ideas about reality. And it was still equally just as much of an anomaly.

PART 73 - https://tinyurl.com/y6vy2jeu

PART 72 - https://tinyurl.com/yaegqs9x

PART 71 - https://tinyurl.com/y6v3ln9a

My Life Story in Chapters, PARTS 1-70 (this link below will lead you to a list of all the chapters i have written thus far). 

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/168782771574/life-story-sections-1-70

[the-locoman]

Locoman Watches The Magic School Bus

So you might not know this, but The Magic School Bus was probably the second-biggest influence in my young preschool life after Thomas The Tank Engine. I lived and breathed this show for a solid eight years of my existence- to this day I can still quote the theme song pretty much by memory. Miss Frizzle was probably one of my childhood inspirations and definitely the spark that ignited my love of science and biology.

So I was intrigued when, way back in 2014 when they announced a reboot, and moreso when promotional images and trailers started to hit the net late in the summer. The reaction was… probably not what the folks behind the show were hoping to see. Within hours, people were taking to social media to scream about it being the “WORST REBOOT EVER.” Which is quite an accusation, really, considering how many goddamn reboots there are nowadays. I’m sure that in the time it took for me to write this post eight more have been announced.

On Wednesday, there was a stream on the Scholastic website of the premiere episode – it doesn’t seem to want to work for me now, but I did feel obliged to sit down and see what it was like. And goddamn it, I’m 23 years old, I can do what I want and what I want to do is sit down and write down my rambling thoughts about The Magic School Bus. Seatbelts, everyone.

(spoilers ahead)

The animation was the first aspect of the show that got everyone talking, and not in the good sense. And... yeah, even after 20 minutes of watching it, I’m still more linclined to side with the haters on this one. I’m not sure if it’s done in Flash or Toon Boom or what, but there’s a certain rigidity in the animation that reminds me of Johnny Test or any of the other dozens of bad cartoons that my country poops out on a regular basis because the government tells us to. It’s not like the original series was exactly Studio Ghibli, and I get that they have a budget and they probably wanted to use most of that on Lily Tomlin and Kate McKinnon, but even so, this is probably the biggest hurdle the show is going to labour under.

 The first thing that really threw me for a loop is the fact that the kids in the class ARE the same kids from the original PBS show, with one exception (I’ll get into that later.) It’s… a bit offputting, to say the least. The kids look nothing like how they did in the original, to the point that when I first watched the trailer I had just assumed that this continuation was set at least several years after the conclusion of the original show, and that the new Miss Frizzle would go on to teach a new generation of kids. It’s weird, to say the least.

 The MSB kids are shown using modern technology like smartphones and tablets (DA now has an tablet PC instead of her book bag from the original show, which fills the bibliophile in me with a sense of sadness); as far as I remember the original show was set in the 1990s, so I can only assume that a) the children tampered with the bus in such a way that they all time-travelled 20 years into the future, or b) that this is a slightly different continuity from the original MSB, where the events of the PBS show occurred in the mid-2010s. Either way I await the publication of Crisis on Infinite Frizzles to explain more about this crucial continuity hole.

 So, about that one exception: they did add a new kid to the cast named Jyoti, which Google tells me is a Hindu name. As new kids go, she’s… alright, I guess, you don’t really get to see a lot of her in the episode. Her big ‘hook’, per se, is that she’s, like, the technology expert of the class, which I guess is sort of a need that you have to fulfill in a 2017 educational kid’s show that just didn’t exist in 1994. But, of course, for some reason, the decree from on high is that there can only be eight children under the tutelage of a Frizzle, which means...

 …Phoebe is gone. Arnold says that she apparently went back to her old school, which is a cute reference to the original series, I guess, but… why did they choose Phoebe out of all the kids to lose? Was it because she was too bland? Too forgettable? Did she not have any qualities that made her stand out? Come to think about it my only memory of Phoebe was that no matter what crazy shit was going on around her she was always whining about her old school, so maybe it’s not entirely a loss. Jyoti seems to have potential to develop beyond this.

 Still, it’s a little odd that nobody seems to miss Phoebe much, or even bring her up beyond that one reference. Then again, I suppose after you hear her whining about her old school for the 37th time while you’re time-warping into deep space to learn about stellar fusion you might get a little tired of her too.

 So the big set up for the plot, for those of you that live under a rock devoid of magic school buses, is that the original, Lily Tomlin-voiced Miss Frizzle from the original show is now Professor Frizzle (I guess she was working on her doctoral thesis over the summer) and so she’s leaving teaching behind to explore the world. Her sister, who is now the Miss Frizzle, is taking over the class.

 And this is probably where my opinion diverges from basically everyone else: I really like the new Miss Frizzle. She’s exuberant, she’s fun, you can tell that she’s a little more vulnerable and new to the job than her sister and trying her best to live up to her predecessor’s reputation, and you can definitely see that McKinnon is having a blast voicing her. I get that Lily Tomlin is getting on in years and is busy with Frankie and Grace, so having her be a guest star on the show now and then (as this is the direction she seems to be set up as) is a nice compromise.

 Most of the class seems to warm up to her right away; she does a nice little exposition sort of thing where she goes around and namedrops the class for the benefit of new viewers, but Arnold doesn’t like the idea of having a new teacher in the class. It’s sort of nice; from what I recall of the original show, Arnold was fond of Miss Frizzle; most of his grumbling was fairly good-natured and you could tell that he really did respect her underneath it all. So having him be the most affected by the change is a neat little idea.

 There’s a cute scene where Professor Frizzle gives Miss Frizzle the keys to the bus; the show plays it as a sort of passing-of-the-torch moment. It’s a nice way to ease the show in from one “era” to the next. Is the bus like a family heirloom that gets passed from one Frizzle to the next? The world may never know…

 Liz is still there. She doesn’t really do anything over the course of the episode, but she’s there.

 Prof. Frizzle has a new animal companion, a tamarin named Goldy. Which is, again, an interesting touch, but I can’t help but feel that it would have worked better if Liz went with Professor Frizzle and the new Miss Frizzle brought Goldy as her animal companion.

 So anyway we get into the educational part of the show; for the first episode, the class goes to the Galapagos Islands, which is not something I think I’ve ever seen an educational kids’ show tackle before. Arnold is still mad at her for not being able to drive the bus well.

 I was really curious to see if the show was going to tackle the “E-word,” or maybe a dude named Darwin, but they skirt around it by just saying something to the effect of “the animals and plants here are unique,” which is TECHNICALLY true, but...

 So now we get to the fun science part of the show, where the kids learn about ecosystems and how the plants and animals interact with one another (I think this was a topic they covered on the old show, too?) They turn into animals to learn how birds eat the ticks on the tortoises, then shrink down and climb around on a guy’s boot, where they see that there are gypsy moth eggs stuck on the guy’s boot. Miss Frizzle talks about invasive species and how they can damage an ecosystem. Arnold is angry and compares Miss Frizzle to an invasive species, which is… damn, that’s pretty cold, Arnold.

 For those of you that haven’t picked up on the nuanced subtext here, Arnold is mad at Miss Frizzle and tries to sabotage her by hiding her magical plant on the island. It immediately grows into a big Audrey II-thing right after all the kids go home.

 This is… I dunno, Arnold complained about the crazy field trips, but him going out of his way to actively sabotage the teacher feels just sort of wrong and bad and I don’t like it.

  Anyway, back at the school, Arnold talks with Professor Frizzle about change and invasive species, so the prof tells him about how not all new species are bad by using honeybees – and their introduction to North America – as an example of how ecosystems can change but find a new balance. This is definitely a more nuanced take on the science lesson of the day than what I was expecting. At any rate, Arnold still isn’t entirely reassured, so Miss Frizzle takes the class into the future to show them that life will still continue.

 Also of note is that Professor Frizzle now rides around on an entirely different vehicle, a little yellow motor scooter with eyes. So what I can surmise is that there is more than one magic vehicle in the Frizzle family? Are they all related to each other? I kind of want a spinoff show about the lore of the Frizzle clan and their secret collection of sentient shapeshifting vehicles.

 Thirty years in the future, Miss Frizzle a) will be teaching the children of the MSB gang, who will all attend the same class, and b) has not physically aged at all. These raise many questions that frighten me so I will not explore this avenue any further. At any rate, Arnold The Second is doing a class project about the Galapagos crisis that his dad caused, because the ecosystem has been totally overrun by Miss Frizzle’s plant.

 Good going, Arnold, you fucked up one of the last wildlife refuges on Earth.

 The class goes to the Future Galapagos and learns that they were overrun by the plant, so the Chilean government brought in rabbits to eat the plant, which then also got out of control. This is like that bit from the Simpsons where they bring in lizards to deal with the invasive birds, and bring in snakes to deal with the invasive lizards, and then bring in gorillas to deal with the invasive snakes….

  Miss Frizzle thinks its all her fault so Arnold goes to talk with Professor Frizzle, realizes he’s screwed up, apologizes to Miss Frizzle, yada yada, they go back in time and fix it so that none of this ever happened. Miss Frizzle stays, Professor Frizzle goes off to see the world.

 Also a fun touch is that in the original series they did a little end-bit Q&A session where kids would call the directors of the show to explain things they overlooked or missed. In this version, Arnold calls Professor Frizzle, who explains some biological facts related to invasive species and ecosystems in more detail then they went into in the main show. It’s a cute touch and a nice way to update the original while still feeling fresh.

So… overall, how is it? Honestly, for the most part I found it fairly enjoyable and a decent update to the original. Maybe I’ll watch some more episodes tomorrow when the full show hits if I have time, but I’d give this a 7/10. It’s a bit hit-and-miss, and there’s definitely a feel of the new cast trying to find their stride, but it’s worthwhile enough in what it’s set out to do. And besides, in the words of Miss Frizzle, if you don’t take chances and make mistakes....

And besides, it will never, ever be the worst reboot.

[kootenaygoon]

So,

Kite surfers rode the ocean gusts high above Dallas Road as Spencer and I worked our way down the winding stone steps to the beach. It was cold. We’d grabbed a six-pack and were looking to find some driftwood to hunker against for the afternoon. It was March 2016, I was halfway through my week off from the Star and this was one of things I’d been looking forward to most: seeing my roommate from the UVic years. He was crotchety, loyal, and completely predictable. The Statler to my Waldorf. I would call him a brother, but the truth was he was more like a wife. That’s the term my Mom starting using during the years Spence and I were roommates. I’d put aside two days to connect with him, so the night before we’d gotten sushi before heading to a movie at the Odeon. He was trying to be polite, but I could tell he was elated to finally be rid of Paisley. Neither of them made any secret of their dislike for each other.

As we settled on the beach stones I took a long swallow from my can of Pilsner. Spence and I affectionally called it Vitamin P, something we picked up in the Yukon when he came to visit me during my time at the Whitehorse Star. That summer we’d road-tripped up to Dawson City with some friends and done some heavy-duty drinking. Our glory days.  

“Everybody keeps on telling me they’re sorry I’m going through this, you know, they’re checking in emotionally or whatever, but not one single person has taken this break-up as bad news,” I told Spence. “There’s not a single person who has said ‘I’m going to miss Paisley’ or ‘too bad, I liked her’, or anything like that.”

Spencer shook his head. “That’s because everyone hated Paisley. I hated Paisley. I think you secretly hated Paisley the whole time, but you just needed to prove you were a good boyfriend or something.”

“You know, she was going through a lot. Her health conditions and everything.”

“Sorry, Will. There’s no cure for being a cunt.”

I sighed. Seagulls were soaring in place, buffeted by the breeze, just above our heads. I decided to change the subject. “I hooked up with a new girl the other day, actually. This artist chick from Tinder.”

He gaped. “Aren’t you staying with your sister?”

“She took me back to her place. She makes art out of John Grisham novels.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It’s mixed media, so there’s tiny script in the back of a lot of the pieces and if you look closely you can read passages from A Time to Kill or The Client or The Pelican Brief or whatever.”

“You need to knock it off with the crazy chicks, man. Can’t you just date someone normal?”

Spence was an acquired taste. Absolutely obsessed with pop culture, particularly TV and movies, he had a tendency to spend entire conversations mapping out a particular actors’ career trajectory or recounting anecdotes from his favourite shows. He loved smoking cigarettes and doing crossword puzzles. He’d gone to film school twice, but the resulting student loan debt had scared him into a cozy salesman job at a scuba company called Aqualung. He was sarcastic, had a tendency to rage, and was absolutely devoted to a number of key women in his life. One was his sister Shannon, another was our friend Lindsay, and then there was his niece Taylor. They inspired in Spencer the sort of chivalric passion legends are made of.  

There were a number of ways our lives had overlapped, starting in high school, but Spence and I didn’t really become friends until partway through my undergrad at UVic. One day we were chatting online when he mentioned that things were getting stagnant on the Mainland. He was thinking about moving to Vancouver Island to be closer to his sister, and it turned out I needed a new roommate. It was perfect. We lived together off and on for nearly three years, sharing everything from smokes to books and kitchen utensils. When I moved to the Kootenays I left him with a bunch of my belongings, including a shelf full of great literature.

Before that there was my lifeguarding years in Vancouver. Back then our eclectic social crowd orbited Commercial Drive and Broadway. Those were the years Spencer lived with our friend Bill, a child actor who had aged out and was making his living doing voiceover work for anime films. The two of them were persistent for months in trying to convince me that I had to watch The Wire. They told me it was worldview-altering, that there was no other show like it, but I was skeptical. Finally Bill put the first season boxed set in my hands and made me promise to try the first three episodes.

“If you’re not hooked by the end of the third episode, I’ll stop pestering you.”

“I don’t know, man. I don’t really like cop shows.”

“This isn’t a cop show. This is a story about a whole city, from the lowest drug addict all the way up to the mayor, the politicians, the lawyers. It covers all the different facets of Baltimore.”

“I’m not really into politics, either. What’s so interesting about Baltimore?”

“You’ll see, man. Trust me.”

Spence and Bill were right. By the end of the third episode I was hooked, and within a few weeks I’d burned through the four available seasons. We got together and discussed the central theme of “the game”, how everything came down to chess. We were three white kids from our privileged little suburb, dissecting the nuances of a ghetto drug trade we would probably never see in person. But as it turned out, I learned that the third season was based on real events that took place on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Suddenly the narrative hit that much closer to home.

“I’m thinking maybe I should write a book about Nelson,” I told him. “Like Never Shoot a Stampede Queen, but set in the Kootenays.”

“A memoir?”

“I’m not sure. The stuff I’m covering is interesting enough on it’s own, like the Andrew Stevenson bank robbery thing, or this Ryan Tapp story. It could be true crime, kind of like The Wire but set in Nelson.”

Spence pondered. This was his favourite thing to do, dispensing his thoughts on how an artistic project should proceed. He’d wanted to be a director when he was younger, and had even filmed a short movie starring our friends Brandon and Amanda a few years earlier. I believed that one day he was going to get his shit together and film another one, and I was constantly encouraging him to do so. In the meantime, he was the one friend who truly engaged with my work and believed that I was going to make it one day. Whenever I talked about writing a book he always took me seriously, even though I never actually produced one.

“You said you know the police chief, right? And you know some pretty sketchy druggy dudes. Then you’ve got the business people and all the politicians, like that shady cop you told me about, the one who ran for mayor,” Spencer said. “That’s it. You just fill out that cast, try to hit all the different facets like David Simon, and I think that would work. I mean, if you’re compiling all these stories you may as well fucking use them.”

I nodded. That brought me to the next topic. The whole point of this trip to the coast was to give me some time to ponder whether I wanted to stay in Nelson or not. Really, I could take the content I already had and turn it into something fun. Stampede Queen’s author Mark Leiren-Young was only in Williams Lake for six months and was able to gather enough material, while I’d been at the Star for nearly two years so far. The other thing was the logistics of finding a place, of starting from scratch. Paisley had chosen to stay in our old suite, and I wondered if there was really enough room in the city for both of us. I’d been looking at my options, and moving back to Victoria was high on the list. If that happened, I wanted to live with Spence. I took a deep breath and explained where my headspace was at with it, and asked him whether he’d consider moving out of his sister’s place.

He bit his lip. “I don’t know, man. I don’t think I can. I’d love to live together again, but I’ve got a pretty good thing going.”

“This wouldn’t necessarily be right away. Like maybe I’ll go back to the paper for six months, something like that. I just thought maybe you’d want to get closer to the city again. Do you like being way out in Langford?”

“It’s Taylor, man. I like being around for her, driving her to high school. I like my set up there, being part of her life. I don’t know.”

“I get it, I get it.”

Spence shifted on the driftwood. “Listen, the real reason is you need to stick it out in Nelson. It’s obvious you’re not done yet. Your mind is so caught up in everything out there. Stop smoking so much fucking weed and you could have a really good thing going,” he said.

“Especially if you stop dating crazy chicks.”

The Kootenay Goon

[fanesavin]

What was the inspiration behind your character?

*cracks knuckles* Alright then, I have a feeling this is going to get long-winded because there’s several sources from which I’ve drawn and based Fane from. 

Edit: I was right this ended up being 3 pages long and over 2200 words in length.

I think the first thing I should say was in actuality I wasn’t entirely sure I even wanted to play Fane, I wasn’t entirely sure where I’d approach him from or jump into his psyche but the more I worked on trying to figure out his backstory the more I came to enjoy writing him. Initially, all I really had to go on was when Kcat approached me about Sumner and was like YOU SHOULD CHECK THIS OUT and gave a *nudge nudge wink wink* into taking up Fane. I’d been out of the RP game for a while at this point but I was like… eh why not… 

Thus this dork right here was made.

So my start point was this aspect of Dani’s bio:

“Though he’d never had the audacity to admit it out loud, Fane had long desired to be a father. Over the centuries, he’d watched his friends grow and love and start families, but being what he was, he was only able to sire new vampires, never his own children. He’d tried to fill that void in many ways: lavish parties, charming lovers, elaborate travels, even academic pursuits, to no avail. It wasn’t until an orphaned child had been brought to him by one of his reckless blood-drinking progeny that his envy for his mortal companions finally began to recede.”

It wasn’t much, but it was a good base. I tweaked the story a little to make it one of the vampires that Fane took in and tried to help rather than one of his own progeny. From the start I had base facts: that he was from Transylvania, around 400, that for some reason he didn’t want children before he hit perhaps the 300 mark and that even in Soapberry’s standards having a human child was considered odd. Fane was unique amongst his peers because of his willingness to attach himself to something that for all intents and purposes he would outlast/outlive. 

This wasn’t a common occurrence even by Soapberry’s standards and thus I knew Fane has had to live for the last 26 or so years facing criticism, judgement and skepticism from those he considered his friends and peers but despite this I never wanted him to become cynical– it felt like the easy route to take. To make an affluent character who was broody and locked himself away in his estate hoarding his money for his own pleasure. So I decided to take the trope of rich broody vampire, flip it 180 and turn him into rich generous philanthropist who opened up his home to anyone he came across who was in need a la Charles Xavier style, leading to the question of why even after four-hundred years of seeing things that likely would turn even the best person cynical he was still willing to give humanity and by extension those who judged or criticised him the benefit of the doubt time and time again?

I won’t lie, I love tropes I like picking them and exploring them through characters and admittedly Fane suffers from chronic hero syndrome, and with this I sometimes draw comparisons between him and Clark Kent– Clark has super-hearing and can hear literally everything even whilst he’s doing the most mundane things in his life and he makes deliberate decisions whether to help or not help someone. That he’s learned to ‘tune out’ what he has to and that he’s come to accept that even he can’t be everywhere for everyone and that sometimes people who need help sometimes need to be ignored. 

By comparison, Fane hasn’t come to learn this lesson and until he does he’s driving himself into the ground by taking on too many burdens belonging to other people (i.e. his willingness to listen to what people’s problems are and offer advice or even get involved trying to help them somehow sometimes show with Tuah, Faye, Dani, Sam, Elizabeth, Bella more recently amongst others he’s come across in his time). Unless someone willingly steps in to point out that this isn’t actually healthy behaviour he’s become blindsided to just how negatively it affects him and even when it is pointed out i.e. as it has been more recently by Faye, he’s been acting this way for so long that even now he can’t just break this cycle of behaviour. He feels a responsibility to use his time towards altruism and when he isn’t doing just that he feels like he’s failing to live up to his own moral code.

Speaking of moral codes, I also draw some influence from Arthurian myths– every single knight at some point in the myths feels a responsibility to got out and quest for trouble. In this instance Fane’s questing takes him in search of people he might be able to help. After all, I knew that if he’d taken in Dani he would have an inclination towards individuals with broken or traumatic histories which after exploring his zodiac as well just… fits. As a Leo sun and Pisces moon Fane is rather in touch with the nuances and subtleties of human nature, he does his best to take on other people’s points of view, to put himself in their shoes and try to understand from their point of view so that he can in turn help them as best as he possibly can. It’s part of the reason why he studies people a lot during conversations, he’s looking for clues to help him read body language and facial expression to figure a person’s intentions out.

ANYWAY, going back to the question of why he is this way I went back to look at history in the 15th/16th century considering I knew he was give or take 400 it meant he was turned in 1617/6 (I’m pedantic about dates) and since I hc he looks 37 it meant in turn he was born in 1579. So I started researching Transylvanian history and the background of Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. I am a self-admitted history nerd, growing up I wanted to be an Egyptologist but now I couldn’t actually be further from the field considering I’m a sports science student. I try to do a lot of research about the things I write about (Riley can testify to this considering how much research I’ve done around life in 18th century London for a separate RP set during this era that we’re in) but even then pretty much all of my knowledge and interests stem from my understanding of more Western European / pretty much all English eras from the Roman conquest / WWI / WWII along with a mixture of ancient history that I’ve had an opportunity to study or come into contact with i.e. Mayan / Egyptian / Viking / Roman / Greek. 

Being brutally honest I knew next to absolutely nothing about anything to do with Eastern European history stepping into this or museum curating to be honest ahaha. So for me this was a huge leap of faith and a big ass research project before I even felt comfortable applying for this character because usually I like to write things I know about and can get a grip on. Fane’s the first character where due to prerequisites I kind of had to step outside of my comfort zone but this also likely explains why Fane’s interests lie with ancient history in comparison to nearer situations i.e. the Cold War/Vietnam War etc because I myself feel more comfortable and confident in myself writing about these eras.

Anyway, the Long Turkish war was my first point of contact with coming to terms with how I wanted to shape his background. I love a good coming of age story hence why Robb Stark is probably one of my favourite ASoIaF characters along with Margaery Tyrell and Arianne Martell (forever bitter about the show trashing Dorne). Anyho, in regards to this I turned to look at some actual historical figures and ended up looking at a young Edward IV born the son of the richest duke in England, who much like Robb and in turn Fane was forced into taking on huge responsibility and risk at only 18 after his father’s passing by comparison Fane was only 15 when his father was killed in the Great War in 1594. 

Fane like his historical counterparts had to assume leadership of his father’s men and make decisions risking not only his own life but that of his men making decisions that still haunt him mirroring what Edward likely felt after the Battle of Towton where supposedly 1% of England’s population died due to the ongoing civil war that now is more commonly known as the ‘War of the Roses’ which ultimately placed him on the throne. As a result of these deaths, Edward likely wasn’t all that fond of war and preferred to find other routes to avoid bloodshed, at the time he was viewed by his contemporaries as being overly forgiving (he showed mercy to traitors and issued orders allowing common soldiers to escape the end of battles).

That was his beginning, and from there I knew I wanted him to travel, learning about cultures and becoming fascinated with the rich history of the places he visited. So I figured in his chance to leave the boundaries of his home for war it ignited in him a curiosity and wanderlust that eventually later led to him forsaking his stead as Head of the Alois family and turning to pick a life of travel and immortality over simply dying. 

Thus the next character I drew on, one that outlasted the death of his own people along with several of his own companions due to his own longevity, decision making and ability to regenerate is The Doctor from BBC’s sci-fi hit Doctor Who (a character who ultimately chose to end a war by committing a mass genocide of not only his own morally questionable race but supposedly their opposing side as well). A character who initially only explored with the intention of experiencing the wonders the universe had to offer but more often than not got involved in the machinations and crises of various places he was visiting. Fane always was a man born into wealth and privilege but could never stand the plight of the weak and oppressed, thus his travels much like the Doctor’s became a way for him to protect and stand up for those who couldn’t stand up for themselves. Yet, in doing this Fane has had to do plenty of bad deeds and though many might call him a hero he refuses to actually subscribe to this title in any shape or form.

Out of all the incarnations if I had to pick, I’d say Fane’s an amalgamation of the 10th and 11th, with aspects of the 10th’s outgoing personality and the same fondness for pop-culture traits along with a bright, playful nature largely existing to conceal left-over emotional trauma from things he has done in his history. Although he is cheerful, bubbly and fun-loving darker traits occasionally emerge particularly when those he cares about are put in harm’s way or successfully manage to truly piss him off which is an incredibly difficult feat to truly accomplish. 

Aspects of the 11th that Fane displays are also the tendency to act far younger than he is, displaying childlike enthusiasm for plenty of things in life AS WELL AS HAVING A HUGE SWEET TOOTH, literally don’t offer him sweets or surgery things he will take them with 0 qualms about taking it. He’s not above doing things if they’re fun and engaging so long as they prove to make other people happy then… Really he’s willing to do almost anything within reason (caterpillar duck races 10000% included in this) but in truth this conceals that fact that at the end of the day he’s a very old, guilty, lonely and grief-stricken individual who has actually grown rather tired of the world.

Another ASoIaF character that inspires Fane is Davos Seaworth, the brutally honest advisor to Stannis Baratheon. The dynamic works because Stannis hates people sugar-coating their words if they have a point to make. Fane likes to give and be given in return good honest advice.

Fane’s a gentleman scholar, an aspect of his persona that draws on several points and characters perhaps the most ironic being Abraham Van Helsing from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where, despite being “one of the most advanced scientist of his day” possessed nerves of steel, an open mind, kind heart and a wry sense of humour. Other characters influencing this part of him is Faramir who is known to be highly intelligent and scholarly, a gracious host and pleasant individual to encounter able to hold a friendly conversation wtih various people regardless of their culture and background. In Tolkien’s own words, Faramir was “modest, fair-minded and scrupulously just, and very merciful”

In regards to his anger when it does rear its head Fane’s fury is very tranquil in nature, much like Ender or Dumbledore when they’re angry. No matter how much fury they might feel, outside he tends to maintain a deathly calm and collected appearance. It’s deliberate, Fane knows the difference between hot and cold anger: the former is all-consuming, and will lead to them doing stupid acts, but the latter? In his mind it can be harnessed as a tool to harden one’s resolve and steel one’s will. This tends to be infused with Dumbledore’s quiet disappointment that makes the focus of his fury usually feel worse than if he’d simply raged and ranted at them.

The final two people I’d point out as references and influences in Fane’s characterisation would be Jay Gatsby and the Edmond Dantès from The Count of Monte Cristo.

[piesforjack]

CANADIAN THINGS PART 2, THE SEQUEL NO ONE ASKED FOR!!!!

hiiii yesss!! so if you’ve seen my last canada post (HA that’s a pun bc our mail service is called “canada post” har har har...anyway) u know that i had some records to set straight, so to speak, so i’m back at it again w canada FACTS aka things you probably don’t know but might be useful and helpful in your attempt to flesh out realistic Canadiana™. this is in honour of me hitting 500 followers, thank y’all so much ily all and thanks for bein awesome!!!

without further ado, buckle up, buds, here we go again!!!!

canada eradicated pennies not too long ago. basically, we don’t have a 1¢ coin anymore, we only have 5¢ coins ergo all payments paid in cash are rounded up/down accordingly. jack and ransom 100% hate this because now they’re so annoyed by the concept of carrying around pennies (”what’s the point!?!? 1¢??! USELESS!!)

along this same vein, canada doesn’t have a $1 bill, we have coins known as a loonie ($1) and a toonie ($2), the smallest bill we have is $5 (jack is still consistently weirded out by paper dollar bills. it feels wrong.)

ALSO while we’re on the topic of money, all our bills are different colours (blue for $5, purple for $10, green for $20, red for $50, brown for $100), they’re also waterproof (not heatproof tho!!!), and the $100 ARE NOT officially created to smell like maple syrup but i can assure you i’ve sniffed some bills that do smell like maple syrup and i cannot explain why (ransom still gets confused w american money “it looks like monopoly money, jack!” “i know, bro, i know”)

IN OTHER MONEY RELATED TRAINS OF THOUGHT, there are two main canadian airlines: air canada and westjet. they both have a total monopoly on canadian travel so it’s real damn expensive to fly anywhere in canada from within canada. it sucks a whole lot. (just remember than whenever you write ransom/jack flying home. it’s a pretty penny even if jack is loaded)

age of consent is 16 across canada

the drinking age in canada is 18/19 (dependent on provinces), however, CANADA WIDE the legal adult age (to vote, essentially) is 18.

driving ages differ province to province (you’d have to google because even i don’t know every province)

SPEAKING OF PROVINCES, canada is split into provinces and territories: 10 provinces and 3 territories. here’s a breakdown of each (it’s long, skip if you wanna!!):

british columbia (BC)

west coast best coast, lots of mountains, very hippy dippy, home province of vancouver aka movie city central, capital city is VICTORIA not vancouver, rains a lot, is known for being the birth city of ryan reynolds (your welcome), is split into two main sections: the mainland and the island (even though BC is composed of many islands, vancouver island is referred to as THE island), bland football team, even blander NHL team.

alberta (AB)

neighbour to BC, cowboys, hyper-conservative, also mountains, capital is EDMONTON not calgary, lots of extreme weather (sunshine and +20 (celsius) and then it’ll snow. alberta is weird like that), oil oil OIL, two mediocre football teams, home of the calgary stampede (again, cowboys), i often refer to alberta as the texas of canada and i’ve never had someone disagree tbh, mediocre hockey teams (including connor mcfuckingjesus don’t get me started)

saskatchewan (SK)

neighbour to AB, pronounced SASS-CAT-CHEW-WAH-N, flat flat FLAT, farmers galore, capital city regina (hahaha laugh it up it’s not that funny once you’re beyond the age of 10), even more mediocre football team (i’m only saying that bc i’m from manitoba, the rival province), tbh i don’t know much about saskatchewan except that we drove all the way across it once for a roadtrip and i swear to god we didn’t see another vehicle or human for the entirety of our trip across

manitoba (MB)

neighbour to SK and also the prime rival, capital city winnipeg (YES IT’S A REAL PLACE, I WAS BORN THERE, I LIVED THERE FOR 18 YEARS, CAN CONFIRM, STOP IT), cold as FUUUUUCK in the winter (-40 (celsius) and schools don’t close until it’s -45, so, deal w THAT), mosquitoes fucking galore (it’s disgusting and awful and makes being outdoors AWFUL), we also have polar bears!! (more north, but, still!!!!), really cool live theatre and music vibes, very dry heat, UBER MEDIOCRE FOOTBALL TEAM (but still better than SK rough riders bc provincial rivalry!!!), SUPER mediocre NHL team (i only say this because my mom’s a jets fan whereas i’m a pens fan...lmao BYE MOM), tbh can’t say many mean things bc i still love wpg with at least half my heart!!!!

ontario (ON)

neighbour to MB, capital city toronto, home of the capital city of CANADA, ottawa, muskoka chairs, so many fuckin lakes (everyones fave place to camp/own a cabin), extreme winters just like MB, niagara falls, again a rly cool arts district here (in TO and surrounding area), 3 football teams bc why the fuck not (fffffuck the TO argonauts), 2 NHL teams (everyone in canada hates the leafs. that’s not a fact but i could find enough evidence of it to convince you it is), basically TO is considered the center of the fucking universe according to everyone who lives in TO and everyone who lives outside of canada bc no one knows anything else about canada. canada might as well JUST be TO for all people fucking care. just. fuck toronto. (i think it’s a canadian thing to be Bitter and Annoyed about toronto’s unending praises from every corner of the map) ((jack is V much “fffffuck toronto” and ransom is V much “fuck you toronto is RAD”)

quebec (QC)

neighbour to ON, pronounced KUH-BECK not KWUH-BECK or KEY-BECK and lord have mercy on your soul if you dare say it like “Q-BECK”, capital city quebec city, french-canadian province that’s threatened to “leave” canada multiple times, HOME OF OUR DING DONG HIMSELF, MSSR. ZIMMERMANN!!!, poutine holy fucking HECK god bless poutine (if you think it’s gross i already don’t like you sorry 100000% NOT SORRY. jack and ransom love some good ass poutine oKEEEEER), a rly good music scene (osheaga music festival is top notch), essentially a canadian paris except people speak quebecois not france-french (but you can get away with it in most respects, there’s differences but the foundations are the same, bc DUH they’re the same language but essentially different dialects, KIND OF similar to mandarin and cantonese (although that particular case has more nuances than this one but you get the idea))

newfoundland and labrador (NL)

neighbour to QB, capital city st. john’s (not to be confused with saint john, NB...yeah there’s another province w almost the EXACT SAME CITY NAME sigh i know it’s dumb and rude) i’ve never really been to the east coast so idk what to tell you but LOBSTER and FISHING and WEIRD FUCKIN ACCENTS, another coastal place so it’s p weird and hippy dippy, but i’ve only ever heard that they’re lovely people, often referred to as newfies.

now, the maritime provinces....starting with new brunswick (NB)

just south of QB, capital city fredericton, v small in comparison to other canadian provinces (as u can tell), again don’t know much about NB but i know they’re big on fish and are basically Maine The Second (they’re pressed right up against maine so, it’s basically maine 

nova scotia (NS)

south-ish of NB, capital city halifax, HOME TO THE REAL LIFE DING DONG OF MY HEART, MISTER 87, SIDNEY CROSBY, a full on island, full of wonderful kind people a la mister crosby himself (honestly, it’s just a bunch of super kind people), really cool coastal scenery with amazing seafood (as you’d expect), home of the city that many a traveller has confused for sydney australia, very old-fashioned (idk how to explain???) but just like...you feel like you’re in a storybook when you’re there, lots of lighthouses, overall a v nice place to be

prince edward island (PEI)

the teeny-tiniest place in all of canada i’m certain, north-east-ish of NB and NS, capital city charlottetown, honestly i’m running out of things to say, it’s exactly like NB and NS had a baby that never grew out of infancy it’s so small.

now onto the TERRITORIES which are all up north...yukon (YT)

pronounced YOU-CON, north of BC, east of alaska, capital city whitehorse, cold as heck (tundra baby!!), extremely expensive living conditions ($9 for a 2L of milk, $18 for some fuckin apples...absolute fuckin robbery), lots of hunting and fishing goes on up here (aka lots of people hunt/prepare their own food), lots of mountains and such, v beautiful.

northwest territories (NT)

above AB and SK, capital city yellowknife, used to be bigger but then it was divided up (creating the new territory nunavut), v similar to yukon but with less mountain and more lakes, again v cold bc TUNDRA, my cousin met her husband while working in yellowknife...she’s from MB and he’s from ENGLAND aka what kinda fucking fateful BS...amazing, p cool w lots of islands and such far up north, it’s neat and suuuper beautiful in the summer (so many flowers lksdfjlskad)

nunavut (NU)

pronounced NEW-NUH-VUH-T, north of MB, capital city iqaluit (pronounced EE-CAL-EW-IT) used to be part of NT but they separated into two territories circa 1999, again v similar to the other territories, beautiful scenery with an OBSCENE amount of islands (colouring in maps was always a fucking DOOZY), again, not much to say. just a rly lovely place.

WOO congrats if you read all that lmao now lets get into some other stuff!!

our thanksgiving is in october, the second monday in october to be exact. it’s only been a thing since like??? the 60s??? like it’s a brand new concept, essentially, and i’m not even 100% sure why we have thanksgiving but we do (it’s mostly a charade, thanksgiving means nothing in canada, it’s a completely arbitrary reason to be grateful and eat some fuckin turkey) (jack and ransom both support arbitrary turkey holidays)

canada’s national sport is actually, like, officially lacrosse?????? i know what the fuck (i bet ransom follows lacrosse)

marriage equality has been a thing since 2005 (doesn’t mean jack wasn’t excited about the USA, just, not quite as overcome as bitty was)

winnie the pooh? based on a real bear from winnipeg, MB. yeah, be fuckin jealous y’all

if you didn’t know canada has universal health care. it’s pretty fucking rad.

idk if this is Too Obvious but canada has two official languages, english and french, so all of our packaging/instructions has to be in both languages. everything. from toothpaste to trampolines. everything. signage is a bit more dicey, most trans-canada highway signs are in both languages but more rural/urban ones probably aren’t (jack gets thrown off still when he instinctively looks for the french translations on packaging for nothing to be found. it happens more than you think)

oh also?? we used british spelling, meaning we add a bunch of ‘u’s where they don’t really need to be. this is 100% a point of contention between bitty and jack. 

CANADA IS METRIC. IT’S RLY SIMPLE PALS. everything is in groups of 10s. 10 millimetres = 1 centimetre. 100 centimetres = 1 metre. 1000 metres = 1 kilometre (aka how we measure speed, km/hour) you get it? (the prefixes, ie. milli, centi, kilo, are huge helpful hints)

the exception to this is baking measurements??? unlike the UK we couldn’t escape the wrath of cups and teaspoons and all those other arbitrary measurement devices. we still use those (for the most part)

we use fucking celsius okay (except on ovens, mostly because they’re american distributed machines ergo run in fahrenheit) anyway it’s p straightforward:

celsius is in relation to water temperature, ergo, 0 degrees celsius is waters freezing point, anything below that is freezing (relatively, of course), anything above it is not. this is especially useful for discussing weather, as, y’know, most people typically use temperature for (outside of the kitchen and hospitals, that is)

+20? nice summer day. -40? typical MB winter, +30? typical fuckin central canada summer, +7? dependent on where you live it could either mean SHORTS!! (central canada) or a light jacket (west coast), again it’s all relative to your acclimatization

okay i think this is long enough!! here’s some random nostalgic things that ransom and holster def remember/love dearly

i pray with all my heart that jack has this funny little soft spot for ‘corner gas’ in the same way i do (it’s a canadian prairie sitcom CLASSIC and i love it SO MUCH)

jack and ransom both have a strange crush on rick mercer

MO FUCKIN FRAGGLE ROCK BIIIIITCH

ransom definitely had some misconceptions about what being 16 would be like because of this fuckin show (he also 100% did the air guitar to the theme song)

this show meant a whole heck of a lot to lil bb jack (who 100% watched cartoons in english AND french okay????)

ALSO (i think i mentioned this in the last post but!!) ransom grew up watching caillou in english, jack in french, and they argue all the time about the differences between the two.

ransom remembers being a little bab watching this nonsense right before bed with a cup of warm milk and exactly two oreos (just me??? pshhh i don’t believe it)

jack had very strategically thought out how he would destroy his competitors at this game show

jack loved babar. don’t even touch me. just. imagine tiny jacques w a lil stuffed elephant my hearT!!!!!

ALSO MCFUCKING T’CHOUPI ET DOUDOU!!!!!! i watched this one in english but i can only imagine jack loved it

okay. okay. again, thank u for reading, i hope this was helpful!! lemme know if there’s anything i missed!! who knows, i might make a third installment one day!?!??!

[oxfordeliterp]

CONGRATULATIONS, JEN!

You have been accepted to play the role of CORDELIA MCQUEEN with the faceclaim of ALEXANDRA PARK. Please create your account and send it to the main in the next 24 hours. Another difficult decision that I had to sadly make between two applications with edge, that showed the same amount of potential and skill as well as two different sides of the same pale cheek, both leaving me open-mouthed. Yet, I believe that your dedication and your connection with Cordelia are one of a kind. It is remarkable how you can know and understand so much about a character you haven’t even played yet, and I want to thank you for your loyalty to the biography, as well as the creative input. What I have always loved about Cordelia is her transparency, even wearing opaque black, and you managed to show her fickleness and loneliness at once. Incredible work!

OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION

Name and pronouns: Jen, she/her

Age: I’m feeling 22

Time-zone: GMT

Activity level: I was working as a waitress, technically still do which is why my completion of this app has taken so long when I did 50 hours a week. But by the time this roleplay hits its acceptance date I’ll have worked my last shift and I’ll be going into an admin job which is set hours and in theory that should allow me enough time to get on around once a day. I feel like I’ve rambled but I felt like I needed to explain a little, sorry XD

Triggers:  removed for privacy

IN CHARACTER INFORMATION

Desired character: Cordelia McQueen. As you know, my interest was grabbed by Cordelia right away from the little snipet I saw of her in Victoria’s connection and my affection has only grown for her to incredible amounts having read her bio and stalked the tag you so kindly shared with us. I was going to wait until all the bios were released (a couple of others had my attention too, and while I know currently all the bios are out at the time I started working on this that wasn’t the case. I’m just slow as the perfectionist kicks in) but my heart is now fully set on Cordelia and I just hope I can do justice to this beautiful, sad girl. Upon my first reading of her bio, my heart broken for her several times throughout it as the depth of her sadness became clearer and clearer. She’s a girl from a fractured family who never quite fit in with her parent’s expectations completely that had the one person who accepted her as she was taken from her too. But she’s so much more than just that and every time I reread her bio I see something new and what writer doesn’t want to get the chance to play someone who is full of layers? Cordelia is a bit of a deviation from muses I usually play and I would be honoured if I could be the one to bring her to life, knowing that I’d be pushing myself and challenging myself and that on it’s own is enough for me to keep diving into her character and getting further under her skin. One of the biggest draws to her is how she fits into the group as an individual when she is so aloof and holds herself above everyone else. For me, one of the most rewarding things about her will be watching her interact with everyone else and seeing who brings out little nuances of emotion or even just something of an opinion when she does her best to remain silent or neutral. Of course, another aspect of this is where her loyalties will end up lying when it comes to the conflict between members of the Quarrel Club and the Riot Club and of course with the main arc of the roleplay and whether she thinks that Marc did it or not. I feel like there’s so many directions she could go in when she’s possibly the most neutral muse from all the bios I’ve read and one way or another it’ll be telling which side she picks- if she picks at all- and I would love to be the one exploring all of those posibilities.

Gender and pronouns of the character: Female, she/her

Changes: I think she’s completely perfect just the way she is.

Traits: Cordelia is above all extremely resilient despite having resigned herself to a life of feeling almost empty she refuses to give up completely on life. She’s aloof and difficult to get close to but if you ever manage to get past the distance she makes sure exists between her and the rest of the world, there’s still some softness there hidden in her tired soul. There’s a recognition that she’s different from everyone else, even her own family but she sticks to her guns and refuses to change, even though deep down I feel like she does crave affection- but more than that it’s acceptance that she wants from people. To just be enough for someone like she was for her uncle even if now she’s a little more hollow than she was then.

While so much of her mannerisms are just who she is, the decision to hold herself above everyone is a conscious one as much as it’s just the way she is. After losing the most important person to her I feel like she’s put walls up as much as she’s embraced the emotionless-ness that life created when it hollowed out everything she loved. She chooses to live in her own head because there’s a familiarness to it

Spending all her time in her own head is another of her coping mechanisms. It leaves her above the pressure of having to please people or at the mercy of worrying what they think about her and that is how she’s able to cope with all her sadness and the instability of her life when herself has been her only constant. It lets her go through life in her own way without letting herself and how she’s feeling depend on other people- she’s entirely at her own mercy at there’s a certain power in that that allows her to be assured enough to continue on the path she’s on.

While she may come across as cold and uncaring, it’s really more of a neutrality that causes her to be so disinterested in people. Cordelia very makes a firm decision about anyone and on those rare occasions that she does it’s never something that she would vocalise. She’s someone who would always leave you guessing about herself, happy to hear you talk her ear off about yourself if it meant that she never had to admit anything personal about herself.

Extras: Having thought long and hard about it and trawled through the Oxford courses page, I finally settled on the first course that jumped out at me for Cordelia and that was Fine Art. I feel as though she has the same creative talent as her uncle, even if she is slightly less vocal about it and it’s something she tends to keep to herself when it makes people point out similarities and differences between them. It’s the one form of expression that she allows herself now that she’s stopped dancing. I’ve gone into her feelings about it a little more in her para sample but I feel like it’s the degree that makes the most sense for her.

Anything else I’ve managed to put together for her you’ll be able to find here which there is currently more than one page of and I’ll maybe add to as I think of more (also number one reason why this app took me so long bc I am a perfectionist when it comes to graphics)

PARA SAMPLE

I ended up doing two because I couldn’t get the two of them to flow into each other smoothly although it could be argued that one happens in the afternoon and the other in the evening.

Her nose crinkles slightly in an uncharacteristic show of emotion as her eyes trail over the canvas in front of her with nothing but criticism and disappointment echoing faintly in their depths. The image that she’d seen so clearly in her mind had yet to transfer itself into a physical copy and there was a faint sense of frustration building that despite her brushstrokes being as precise and delicate as her dancing had been, they had yet to accomplish what she wanted from them. With a smooth movement she’s placing her paintbrush down to take a step back from what she’s trying to create to see if that gives her a better perspective of where she was going wrong.

The critical glint in her eyes doesn’t fade and once again she becomes her own worst nightmare as she tortures herself some more with memories of her uncle and the vivid designs his deft fingers used to leave on paper. It came so naturally to him and there hadn’t been a day spent with him that she hadn’t been transfixed by watching him work. The designs had been her favourite but seeing them come to life was almost as enchanting when she’d always envied how he could bring them to life with an ease that she never seemed to manage.

Logically she could acknowledge that it was never totally easy for him when all artists seemed to struggle with their work at one time or another but her mind never failed to drive a wedge between her and the family member she’d always classed herself as closest to at times like these. More often than not comparisons drawn were favourable but this time, as with everytime that she painted, it only made her want to give up for the day when there seemed little point torturing herself over it.

So Cordelia washed her hands and removed her apron, with it removing all flashes of colour from her form. It’s too telling, she’d decided in her first year, to leave paint smudges all over her clothes and skin when she’d always preferred to give so little about herself away. There was no chance of anyone finding her lack or damaged that way or discovering the depth of the sadness that had made its home in her bones long ago and was as much a part of her as her lips or hands. It was unshakable and by now it was the one constant in her life that she was quite convinced that without its weight she’d feel too unbalanced to cope.

Satisfied that she’s scrubbed enough of the paint flecks from herself, she paints her lips back on with a flash of red before switching her comfortable flats for the red-soled high heels that complete the look she knows that she’s known for on the campus. Thankfully it all came naturally to her, an innate knack for picking the very best for herself and piecing an outfit together to not only get the best out of her features but the clothes themselves.. Though she can’t help but supposed that even if she weren’t able to carry the look she favoured so well, she’d still be just as hollow inside for it not to mean a thing to her.

More solemness rests in her eyes than usual as she takes in her surroundings, flute of champagne balanced gracefully between delicate fingers. A sigh is hiding behind her lips, weariness for the evening that was before her already creeping in before she reminds herself that it was her choice to attend and put herself in that position. There was no hostility felt towards the others that surrounded her, just a marked difference that had followed her through life. It was something she’d found a resigned acceptance in, not being able to bring herself to care enough to make any changes to the way she was in order to fit into the group that surrounded her more smoothly.

Instead she stood on the fringes of the party, fulfilling the role of the perfect lady that she had started to embody, shoulders gracefully back and posture that held the type of perfection only a dancer could achieve. With a measured but fluid move of her arm Cordelia raises her glass to take a sip of the sparkling drink in her hand knowing that the bubbles in it won’t have any success in making her lighter when she’s so happy staying in the shadows.

Still, it isn’t her intention to wile the evening away lurking in the corner sipping champagne like some sad loner when she knew plenty of other attendees at the little gathering. It was all just a question of who would handle her company the best out of all those in the room. While she could manage to get on well enough with the likes of Windsor, Arkwright, Armstrong and Bellefonte when she wanted to - her poker face was without match after all- she wasn’t quite fancying the energy it would take to interact with one of them. Casting her eyes around once again they inevitably found the form of her stepbrother, as always never far from that pretty, polished Hastings.

A familiar spark that shatters all her shadows and brings back memories of that one lapse that she’d allowed them. That brush of lips against her that she’d retreated from as quickly as her thoughts came back to her because those few heartbeats of contact had made her feel more than all her countless one night stands with nameless men had. He was wholly too enticing and intoxicating, a danger to the uneven equilibrium she clung to and called sanity. With him, what was now her world was in jeopardy and no matter how what was left of her heart sung and cried out for him, Cordelia had never quite managed to let herself surrender to what was between them when it meant entirely too much risk.

So she decides against her stepbrother, choosing to leave him with his pretty, perfect little blonde girlfriend while trying her best to ignore that faint echoing pang of envy, and adjust her course towards the Zerilli siblings, having always found them somewhat refreshing in a social group that had the potential to be confining if you didn’t know how to play your part right.

[how2to18]

IN THE EARLY 1980s, when I was a sophomore at Yale, I lived in a narrow clapboard house off-campus, somewhere east of Wooster Square. It wasn’t the happiest time in my life, but I had a small study with a big metal desk; my roommates were seniors, with one foot out the door; and there was a speakeasy around the corner where you could get a six-pack of beer on Sundays when everything else was closed.

We lived on the top floor; a couple in their 30s lived downstairs: the woman, who was Vietnamese, spoke little English and always looked frightened; her husband, who was white, was a Vietnam vet who would periodically get drunk and beat her. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to do so had I been living there alone, but my roommates often called the cops, who would come and intervene. My neighbors weren’t the first people I knew for whom the war in Vietnam hadn’t ended — I had friends in Pennsylvania whose older brothers had come back, completely changed. My stepfather, a mild-mannered neurosurgeon who had been a doctor in a busy MASH unit, would occasionally belt back a couple of drinks and fly into an inexplicable rage. I was curious about these people, wondered about the experiences that haunted them. But the war, and the protests surrounding it, seemed remote, something I would never comprehend in the way that we can’t really comprehend things we don’t live through, experiences whose most intimate details we will never know.

In Alice Mattison’s new novel, Conscience, we meet two characters for whom the war has not ended either. The novel, which is set in present-day New Haven (where Mattison lives and often sets her stories), is Mattison’s 14th book, her seventh novel in a long, distinguished career as a writer and a teacher. In an author’s note, she explains that the book grew out of her curiosity about an idealistic young woman she met in the ’60s who later “turned violent.” Among other things, the novel poses some interesting questions: How long does the past linger? What’s the value of rehashing it? How can we honor, forgive, or live with people who have done difficult things?

Mattison tells several stories in Conscience, and watching them grow and intersect is one of the greatest pleasures of the book. The first story begins in the mid-1960s, in Brooklyn, with three young women who become involved in the antiwar protests: Helen Weinstein, a serious girl who drops out of Barnard after she is radicalized; Valerie (Val) Benevento, a popular girl who will eventually write a successful book about Helen’s life; and Olive Grossman, Helen’s best friend, an editor who now lives in New Haven with her husband, Griff, the hard-working principal of a school for troubled kids, a gentle man who is marked, like Olive, by a violent incident that happened in the ’60s. Helen is the most compelling character in the novel, and it is Olive’s need to make sense of Helen’s life that moves the story forward.

Several other plot lines unfold over the course of the novel: Olive and Griff face an impasse in their marriage; the complex arcs of several female friendships are explored; and Olive finds the courage to tell the truth about her relationship with Helen, getting past what Virginia Woolf famously called the “angel in the house,” that dreadful expectation that women should be sweet and charming, avoiding conflict at all cost. Finally, there is the more contemporary story of a slightly younger woman named Jean, who runs a homeless shelter in New Haven. Her friendship with Olive dominates the second half of the book.

Conscience is told in alternating first-person voices. The shifting perspective works well, as a chorus of “I”s (there are three of them — Olive, Jean, and, to a lesser extent, Griff) helps build a collective sense of the collateral damage of the war and the noisy overlap of friends, family, and lovers that make up a community. At a certain point, the voices seem to blend and merge, becoming almost one, a tactile illustration of some of Mattison’s larger themes: family, friendship, community. The alternating voices also give the reader an intimate view of Olive and Griff’s marriage. Personal space is an important concern in the novel (especially for its female characters), and there are interesting issues related to the architecture of Olive and Griff’s house. Originally a duplex (Griff lived upstairs and Olive downstairs during a time of marital separation), the two units are now connected, but to some extent, the separation remains. Olive, who has a home office she never uses (strange since she is always craving solitude), spreads her work over the kitchen table, which annoys and pains Griff, who retreats upstairs or leaves the house. They often eat alone. As each character recounts their version of this conflict, the reader, like a couples’ therapist, pieces together their troubles, sees the misperceptions and the self-deceptions, and feels the loss of what might have been. In another example of Mattison’s clever use of shifting perspectives, Val’s book, which we learn about as Jean reads it, offers a different perspective on Olive’s and Griff’s versions of Helen’s story.

Most of the plot elements fit together neatly, something we have come to expect from Mattison, who is very good with form. But characters, like Olive and Griff’s oldest daughter, are sometimes brought in to serve the plot, never to return. And some of Mattison’s plot twists feel improbable, especially the ones that are centered around Zach, a young pediatrician who was once involved with Olive and Griff’s daughter and is now involved with Jean. The New Haven story doesn’t have the same intensity as the Brooklyn one, and the friendship between Olive and Jean is not as convincing as the one between Olive and Helen.

But Conscience is a curious book. Every time I wanted to object, Mattison pulled me back in, some of which, I think, is connected to the book’s pacing, which is wonderfully slow and lush. Fiction tends to move at a fast clip these days — it’s full of fragments and ellipses, abrupt shifts that reflect our accelerated, decentered lives. But Mattison refuses to give up the rich, mundane details of domestic life — people talking, cooking, washing the dishes. It’s where her stories live.

Many of Mattison’s characters are well drawn: from important figures like Jean and Zach to minor characters like Eli, an older activist who sleeps with everyone (“[p]utting his hands on both our shoulders, he drew us into his apartment”), and some of the people at the shelter where Jean works. The youthful portraits of Olive and Helen are full of poignant details: from the windy walks they take in Brooklyn to get away from their families to Helen’s growing indifference to money, food, and hygiene. Mattison’s honesty about the less-than-noble motivations that sometimes drive the actions of her characters — to please a friend, to have sex, to get away from their parents — is refreshing. She doesn’t idealize; there are no heroes in this book — on the contrary. Mostly, we see the toll the war takes, the way each character struggles with the dictates of his or her conscience as the government continues to send young men off to war, continues to bomb and kill in Vietnam. As Olive says, “Being preoccupied by the war was something like having such a bad cold that you didn’t care what happened in your life.”

Several of the characters turn to violence. Some of them are destroyed by this and some of them repudiate it, but all of them feel guilty about what they did and didn’t do. Trying to make sense of the choices Helen made, Olive asks some questions that haunt the book: “What should she have done — what should I have done — to end the war? What should we have done instead? To say ‘nothing’ would condemn us to complicity.” Mattison never condemns the characters who opt for violence, but in the present-day story, where characters like Jean and Griff work tirelessly to help troubled kids and the homeless, she offers us a compelling alternative. The most interesting character in this regard is Griff, the agnostic son in a long line of New Haven clergymen, whose youthful act of violence changed his life. Unfortunately, we don’t understand as much about his choice as we do about Helen’s although we see the ways in which his life is circumscribed by it. Every decision he makes involves a painstaking consideration of the potential harm it may do to others, which causes some problems with Olive, but Griff’s condemnation of violence allows for no exceptions: “What’s wrong […] is wrong. What is destructive […] [d]estroys.”

From her earliest work, a 1979 poetry collection called Animals, Mattison has been invested in telling women’s stories, giving women space on the page. The female characters in Conscience are part of a long line of women — working women, sexual women, family women, thinking women — whose lives Mattison has lovingly captured and explored. Her portrayal of the men whose lives intersect with the lives of her female characters is usually nuanced and complex; they are sweet, distant, sexy, needy, human. But in Conscience, this isn’t always the case, which has to do, I think, with the character of Olive and the outsized role she plays in the book.

As a young woman, Olive is a little neurotic, the kind of girl who worries about being “liked” by other girls, a “secondary character,” as she once calls herself. Her political activism takes a back seat to Helen’s; her desire for approval eventually leads her to be used and burned by Val. As an adult, Olive is lonely; she feels abandoned by Helen, exhausted by the hard work of carving out a space for her career within the confines of marriage. Mostly, though, she’s angry at Griff, whom she blames for many of her problems, in ways that are sometimes tedious, even absurd. Griff can be a tough character, inexpressive and inflexible, but Mattison never succeeded in convincing me that Olive’s problems are his fault, and he comes off as a passive foil, a stand-in for the traditional inequity of male-female relationships. At a certain point, Olive’s critique of Griff is so egregious that I thought the book was going to be about how she recognizes and addresses this, but Mattison’s sympathies remain firmly with Olive. At the end of the book, when Olive agrees to a kitchen renovation that will create a space where she and Griff can coexist, it’s meant to signal love and acceptance, but it really feels like she’s throwing him some crumbs.

You could argue that Griff gets second billing because he’s a male character in a book about female empowerment, but Griff is also black, one of several black characters in the novel, none of whom have much of a voice, and this disparity becomes increasingly apparent as the novel unfolds. Over the course of her career, Mattison’s work has often been set in the world of social justice, including the Civil Rights movement, but her tendency — the old left’s tendency — to divide the world along the lines of race, gender, and ethnicity (black, Jewish, male, female) doesn’t serve the part of her story that takes place in New Haven in the 21st century.

Underlying the problems between Olive and Griff is the pressing question of how men and women (especially women) can live together with autonomy. Mattison, who places a great deal of value on family and community, can’t quite wrap her mind around it, but the novel hints at an intriguing solution. For years, I was married to an architect who had a theory — a convincing one — that many people’s problems are actually architectural problems, problems that can be resolved with architectural solutions, and I followed the architectural trail in the book eagerly. The repurposed duplex, Olive’s unsuccessful quest for a secluded work space, the third floor of Jean’s shelter that controversially offers “private space” — space to read or think or nap — to homeless people in New Haven. In Conscience, Olive and Griff are trapped in a marriage — and in a house — that doesn’t suit them. Could it be that some couples can’t coexist, at least in the traditional ways that couples have always coexisted in the Western world (another issue the ’60s tried, with limited success, to address)? Besides, Olive is a writer, and most writers, male or female, need solitary conditions to work in, conditions that often clash with family life. Mattison is hesitant to liberate Olive and Griff from a traditional marital structure, one that has created a terrible choice for them — a stifling marriage or an unhappy solitude. But what if that dichotomy were false? What if there was another solution, one that occurs, at one point, to Olive, almost as a joke: bring back the duplex!

In Conscience, Alice Mattison gives us an intimate portrait of the struggles and sacrifices of the men and women who protested against the war in Vietnam, some of whom, for better or worse, put their lives on the line. She also reminds us of what it is to have, and act on, a conscience, what it is to make a choice and accept the consequences. As Olive, trying to explain those difficult times to Zach, says, “The sixties weren’t—’ I didn’t know how to put it. ‘We were serious.’” As a new generation of protestors fights to defend our democracy against a different kind of threat, it’s good to remember the long, successful legacy of protests in this country, important to reflect on the risks and rewards of dissent.

It takes a long time to make sense of things, to paint a full picture of an important moment in history, especially one as fraught as the war in Vietnam, but this is the luxury (and, perhaps, the responsibility) of literature. And it should be applauded when it’s done well, as Mattison mostly does here.

¤

Lisa Fetchko has published essays, fiction, reviews, and translations in a variety of publications including Ploughshares, n+1, AGNI, and Bookforum. She teaches at Mount Saint Mary’s and Orange Coast College.

The post The Old Left: “Conscience” by Alice Mattison appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[topmixtrends]

IN THE EARLY 1980s, when I was a sophomore at Yale, I lived in a narrow clapboard house off-campus, somewhere east of Wooster Square. It wasn’t the happiest time in my life, but I had a small study with a big metal desk; my roommates were seniors, with one foot out the door; and there was a speakeasy around the corner where you could get a six-pack of beer on Sundays when everything else was closed.

We lived on the top floor; a couple in their 30s lived downstairs: the woman, who was Vietnamese, spoke little English and always looked frightened; her husband, who was white, was a Vietnam vet who would periodically get drunk and beat her. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to do so had I been living there alone, but my roommates often called the cops, who would come and intervene. My neighbors weren’t the first people I knew for whom the war in Vietnam hadn’t ended — I had friends in Pennsylvania whose older brothers had come back, completely changed. My stepfather, a mild-mannered neurosurgeon who had been a doctor in a busy MASH unit, would occasionally belt back a couple of drinks and fly into an inexplicable rage. I was curious about these people, wondered about the experiences that haunted them. But the war, and the protests surrounding it, seemed remote, something I would never comprehend in the way that we can’t really comprehend things we don’t live through, experiences whose most intimate details we will never know.

In Alice Mattison’s new novel, Conscience, we meet two characters for whom the war has not ended either. The novel, which is set in present-day New Haven (where Mattison lives and often sets her stories), is Mattison’s 14th book, her seventh novel in a long, distinguished career as a writer and a teacher. In an author’s note, she explains that the book grew out of her curiosity about an idealistic young woman she met in the ’60s who later “turned violent.” Among other things, the novel poses some interesting questions: How long does the past linger? What’s the value of rehashing it? How can we honor, forgive, or live with people who have done difficult things?

Mattison tells several stories in Conscience, and watching them grow and intersect is one of the greatest pleasures of the book. The first story begins in the mid-1960s, in Brooklyn, with three young women who become involved in the antiwar protests: Helen Weinstein, a serious girl who drops out of Barnard after she is radicalized; Valerie (Val) Benevento, a popular girl who will eventually write a successful book about Helen’s life; and Olive Grossman, Helen’s best friend, an editor who now lives in New Haven with her husband, Griff, the hard-working principal of a school for troubled kids, a gentle man who is marked, like Olive, by a violent incident that happened in the ’60s. Helen is the most compelling character in the novel, and it is Olive’s need to make sense of Helen’s life that moves the story forward.

Several other plot lines unfold over the course of the novel: Olive and Griff face an impasse in their marriage; the complex arcs of several female friendships are explored; and Olive finds the courage to tell the truth about her relationship with Helen, getting past what Virginia Woolf famously called the “angel in the house,” that dreadful expectation that women should be sweet and charming, avoiding conflict at all cost. Finally, there is the more contemporary story of a slightly younger woman named Jean, who runs a homeless shelter in New Haven. Her friendship with Olive dominates the second half of the book.

Conscience is told in alternating first-person voices. The shifting perspective works well, as a chorus of “I”s (there are three of them — Olive, Jean, and, to a lesser extent, Griff) helps build a collective sense of the collateral damage of the war and the noisy overlap of friends, family, and lovers that make up a community. At a certain point, the voices seem to blend and merge, becoming almost one, a tactile illustration of some of Mattison’s larger themes: family, friendship, community. The alternating voices also give the reader an intimate view of Olive and Griff’s marriage. Personal space is an important concern in the novel (especially for its female characters), and there are interesting issues related to the architecture of Olive and Griff’s house. Originally a duplex (Griff lived upstairs and Olive downstairs during a time of marital separation), the two units are now connected, but to some extent, the separation remains. Olive, who has a home office she never uses (strange since she is always craving solitude), spreads her work over the kitchen table, which annoys and pains Griff, who retreats upstairs or leaves the house. They often eat alone. As each character recounts their version of this conflict, the reader, like a couples’ therapist, pieces together their troubles, sees the misperceptions and the self-deceptions, and feels the loss of what might have been. In another example of Mattison’s clever use of shifting perspectives, Val’s book, which we learn about as Jean reads it, offers a different perspective on Olive’s and Griff’s versions of Helen’s story.

Most of the plot elements fit together neatly, something we have come to expect from Mattison, who is very good with form. But characters, like Olive and Griff’s oldest daughter, are sometimes brought in to serve the plot, never to return. And some of Mattison’s plot twists feel improbable, especially the ones that are centered around Zach, a young pediatrician who was once involved with Olive and Griff’s daughter and is now involved with Jean. The New Haven story doesn’t have the same intensity as the Brooklyn one, and the friendship between Olive and Jean is not as convincing as the one between Olive and Helen.

But Conscience is a curious book. Every time I wanted to object, Mattison pulled me back in, some of which, I think, is connected to the book’s pacing, which is wonderfully slow and lush. Fiction tends to move at a fast clip these days — it’s full of fragments and ellipses, abrupt shifts that reflect our accelerated, decentered lives. But Mattison refuses to give up the rich, mundane details of domestic life — people talking, cooking, washing the dishes. It’s where her stories live.

Many of Mattison’s characters are well drawn: from important figures like Jean and Zach to minor characters like Eli, an older activist who sleeps with everyone (“[p]utting his hands on both our shoulders, he drew us into his apartment”), and some of the people at the shelter where Jean works. The youthful portraits of Olive and Helen are full of poignant details: from the windy walks they take in Brooklyn to get away from their families to Helen’s growing indifference to money, food, and hygiene. Mattison’s honesty about the less-than-noble motivations that sometimes drive the actions of her characters — to please a friend, to have sex, to get away from their parents — is refreshing. She doesn’t idealize; there are no heroes in this book — on the contrary. Mostly, we see the toll the war takes, the way each character struggles with the dictates of his or her conscience as the government continues to send young men off to war, continues to bomb and kill in Vietnam. As Olive says, “Being preoccupied by the war was something like having such a bad cold that you didn’t care what happened in your life.”

Several of the characters turn to violence. Some of them are destroyed by this and some of them repudiate it, but all of them feel guilty about what they did and didn’t do. Trying to make sense of the choices Helen made, Olive asks some questions that haunt the book: “What should she have done — what should I have done — to end the war? What should we have done instead? To say ‘nothing’ would condemn us to complicity.” Mattison never condemns the characters who opt for violence, but in the present-day story, where characters like Jean and Griff work tirelessly to help troubled kids and the homeless, she offers us a compelling alternative. The most interesting character in this regard is Griff, the agnostic son in a long line of New Haven clergymen, whose youthful act of violence changed his life. Unfortunately, we don’t understand as much about his choice as we do about Helen’s although we see the ways in which his life is circumscribed by it. Every decision he makes involves a painstaking consideration of the potential harm it may do to others, which causes some problems with Olive, but Griff’s condemnation of violence allows for no exceptions: “What’s wrong […] is wrong. What is destructive […] [d]estroys.”

From her earliest work, a 1979 poetry collection called Animals, Mattison has been invested in telling women’s stories, giving women space on the page. The female characters in Conscience are part of a long line of women — working women, sexual women, family women, thinking women — whose lives Mattison has lovingly captured and explored. Her portrayal of the men whose lives intersect with the lives of her female characters is usually nuanced and complex; they are sweet, distant, sexy, needy, human. But in Conscience, this isn’t always the case, which has to do, I think, with the character of Olive and the outsized role she plays in the book.

As a young woman, Olive is a little neurotic, the kind of girl who worries about being “liked” by other girls, a “secondary character,” as she once calls herself. Her political activism takes a back seat to Helen’s; her desire for approval eventually leads her to be used and burned by Val. As an adult, Olive is lonely; she feels abandoned by Helen, exhausted by the hard work of carving out a space for her career within the confines of marriage. Mostly, though, she’s angry at Griff, whom she blames for many of her problems, in ways that are sometimes tedious, even absurd. Griff can be a tough character, inexpressive and inflexible, but Mattison never succeeded in convincing me that Olive’s problems are his fault, and he comes off as a passive foil, a stand-in for the traditional inequity of male-female relationships. At a certain point, Olive’s critique of Griff is so egregious that I thought the book was going to be about how she recognizes and addresses this, but Mattison’s sympathies remain firmly with Olive. At the end of the book, when Olive agrees to a kitchen renovation that will create a space where she and Griff can coexist, it’s meant to signal love and acceptance, but it really feels like she’s throwing him some crumbs.

You could argue that Griff gets second billing because he’s a male character in a book about female empowerment, but Griff is also black, one of several black characters in the novel, none of whom have much of a voice, and this disparity becomes increasingly apparent as the novel unfolds. Over the course of her career, Mattison’s work has often been set in the world of social justice, including the Civil Rights movement, but her tendency — the old left’s tendency — to divide the world along the lines of race, gender, and ethnicity (black, Jewish, male, female) doesn’t serve the part of her story that takes place in New Haven in the 21st century.

Underlying the problems between Olive and Griff is the pressing question of how men and women (especially women) can live together with autonomy. Mattison, who places a great deal of value on family and community, can’t quite wrap her mind around it, but the novel hints at an intriguing solution. For years, I was married to an architect who had a theory — a convincing one — that many people’s problems are actually architectural problems, problems that can be resolved with architectural solutions, and I followed the architectural trail in the book eagerly. The repurposed duplex, Olive’s unsuccessful quest for a secluded work space, the third floor of Jean’s shelter that controversially offers “private space” — space to read or think or nap — to homeless people in New Haven. In Conscience, Olive and Griff are trapped in a marriage — and in a house — that doesn’t suit them. Could it be that some couples can’t coexist, at least in the traditional ways that couples have always coexisted in the Western world (another issue the ’60s tried, with limited success, to address)? Besides, Olive is a writer, and most writers, male or female, need solitary conditions to work in, conditions that often clash with family life. Mattison is hesitant to liberate Olive and Griff from a traditional marital structure, one that has created a terrible choice for them — a stifling marriage or an unhappy solitude. But what if that dichotomy were false? What if there was another solution, one that occurs, at one point, to Olive, almost as a joke: bring back the duplex!

In Conscience, Alice Mattison gives us an intimate portrait of the struggles and sacrifices of the men and women who protested against the war in Vietnam, some of whom, for better or worse, put their lives on the line. She also reminds us of what it is to have, and act on, a conscience, what it is to make a choice and accept the consequences. As Olive, trying to explain those difficult times to Zach, says, “The sixties weren’t—’ I didn’t know how to put it. ‘We were serious.’” As a new generation of protestors fights to defend our democracy against a different kind of threat, it’s good to remember the long, successful legacy of protests in this country, important to reflect on the risks and rewards of dissent.

It takes a long time to make sense of things, to paint a full picture of an important moment in history, especially one as fraught as the war in Vietnam, but this is the luxury (and, perhaps, the responsibility) of literature. And it should be applauded when it’s done well, as Mattison mostly does here.

¤

Lisa Fetchko has published essays, fiction, reviews, and translations in a variety of publications including Ploughshares, n+1, AGNI, and Bookforum. She teaches at Mount Saint Mary’s and Orange Coast College.

The post The Old Left: “Conscience” by Alice Mattison appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2Ng168h

[complexfemaleprotag]

A Day Late and a DIME SHORT disprove that adage that people become too feeble to be of any use...

Welcome to the diner of the downtrodden in writer Laura Carson and Director, Krista Gano’s beautifully realized tapestry to humanity in the face of loss.

This tender drama screens October 21st as part of a slate of provocative shorts by female filmmakers at the Flicks by Chicks Film Festival!

6 PM - SHORTS BLOCK SCREENING at Alamo Drafthouse Cedars 1005 S Lamar St. Dallas (https://prekindle.com/event/33691-flicks-by-chicks-fest-dallas)

We were thrilled to find that both Laura and Krista were going to be able to fly into Dallas for the festival and we had the chance to dialogue about their film via email prior to their arrival - here’s the scoop!

FXCF: It’s really amazing to me how many characters you jam into a 10-minute short and do them all service.  It’s very nuanced writing – for example a throw away line like “I’d be using my MBA” tells us in a very organic way that Laura’s character is not a career waitress, but has fallen on hard times.  It’s important because it gives us a tangible reason she has so much empathy for everyone else in this diner of the downtrodden.  Did you have any qualms about the amount of characters and backstories you were exploring in such a brief page count?

LAURA (Writer/Actress) One of the key themes I wanted to explore was the concept of community being critical to people who've fallen on hard times and how they might find the support they need in their neighbors. So I needed enough characters to paint a sense of community. There is also a lot of pride and shame woven into Bob's character and I wanted the reveal of his "secret" witnessed by many to deepen that wound for him.

Also a large number of characters helped me show the scope of how many people are challenged by our "new" economy in ways that might not be readily apparent to an observer. I LOVE the "diner of the downtrodden" phrase.  Thank you; I'm going to steal that going forward. Yes, Donna, looks over her charges, seeking to remain "relevant" in a job that is clearly beneath her education but not beneath her humanity. Thanks for appreciating the economy and efficiency of the clues and dialogue planted to show rather than tell the story. These little bits of info are always around us, thrown away and so we don't notice them or connect them to what is the bigger story of a person's life. Like in the case of Pete, wondering what his life story might be that has him homeless yet knowledgable of Kleptocracy. Or the Young Woman's "dead dreams" comment about Bev.  Or how Bob refers to the photograph of his family and says, "heartbreaking, right?" I have to give the wonderful Tim Brennen credit for improvising that line - it is perfectly in alignment with the intentional mystery of these characters. I want each viewer to make their own assumptions about what these clues could mean. So I didn't have qualms at all about several characters. 

  Krista (Director/Producer) I was actually excited to work with so many characters and had encouraged Laura to really make sure that each community member had a clear story of their own.  We were really playing with the notion of how much we put of a front that everything is okay.  Whether it be because we trying to impress, or we are in denial, or because it's too hard to ask for help, we are masters of hiding our internal worlds.  Laura and I kept talking through the ways that we could show this.  The written script is largely the mask we are wearing to others, while the unspoken details (just as carefully crafted) are where the internal truths leak out.  So, because the idea is that we all engage in this behavior, it was important to explore that wth all the characters in varying degrees.

My favorite things to explore are relationships in groups of people....families, neighbors, etc.  I love working with actors to subtly show the complexity that is inherent in those relationships.  My next project, Comfort Food really looks at those same dynamics through the lens of a grieving family trying to re-connect.  Working with the actors on Dime Short to show those differing layers of character was intensely fun.

FXCF:  Two things are always important to me beyond the storytelling when watching a short film – really good acting and really good sound.  Both were stellar in Dime Short.  Okay, I have a good idea how you convinced Laura to take the part (lovely, lovely work!) but what was the process of casting for you?  Everyone was just terrific.  You were shooting out of LA (or at least it plays to be Colorado) and no one makes much on a short film – so, how’d you get such a great cast?

Krista (Director/Producer) Thank you, so much!  What a huge compliment.  Laura and Tim are both friends of mine from our time together at The Groundlings Theatre in LA.  Laura had really written this script with her and Tim in mind (which was an amazing start in terms of casting).  I'm now living in Denver and have a company called The Working Artist Group, which consults actors on how to move from hobbyists to working professionally in television and film.  So, I know and work with a lot of local Colorado and NM actors.  As Laura was writing more diner characters, I knew exactly who was right to play each one.  We have some really wonderful local talent and it was important for both Laura and I to highlight them in a piece that was shot and set in small town Colorado.   I think because I work with actors all the time on both their business and their craft, it gives me unique insight in working with them as a director.  I was an actor, I have spent a career working with actors, and ultimately love actors and the craft.  My hope is to always cast to their strengths and create spaces and opportunities for them to do great work.  We were also tremendously lucky to have Jon Diack, Jennifer Anguiano and Jen Piech from Nogginsauce as producing partners because they really allowed Laura and I to drive the creative part of the ship.   Thanks also for the note about the sound.  My husband, Greg Upton, is a musician who hales from Texas.   So, we were really blessed to have his work on this piece.  Our sound guy on set, Patrick Badgley did an amazing job capturing the sound and Matthew Polis was wonderful to work with in post.  I actually didn't really start to "see" a finished film until the sound came together.  Those kudos go straight to that entire sound department. As a side note, Tim Brennan brought in a different take on Bob than what I initially saw in my head.  I had to make the decision on set to either let him steer that character his way, or to try to negotiate something closer to my vision.  I made a hard, but very clear decision to support his vision of Bob.  I was watching the macro, but he was focusing on Bob in a clear, thoughtful and discerning way.  As a result, we needed to change some of our plans and do some quick dancing on set, but it was really worth it.  Tim Brennan imprinted something that I couldn't see on this project and ultimately re-taught me the lesson of collaborating and trusting your artistic partners.

FXCF:  I love that this piece isn’t over written and it has so much humanity, depth and feeling.  But much is left for the audience to assume or fill in – what inspired this piece and what are you hoping the audience takes away from the experience?

Laura (Writer/Actress)It was very intentional to paint an unfinished picture and let the audience walk away hopefully curious about these characters; turning over the clues in their minds and piecing the puzzle together. Like why Bob takes the longest pee ever.... Could that lead to a curiosity about other people in their lives? A lofty goal perhaps but I love how Krista Gano's direction made a quiet, slice-of-life film that tonally speaks to the quiet desperation of Bob. It's a gentleness with the material that I just love and it elevates it to tragedy in my mind. But with hope. A tenuous hope but hope nevertheless. The story was inspired by a vision that popped into my head many years ago of a homeless man drinking a milkshake. I have no idea why it showed up and there was no other context for it. Just a homeless man drinking a milkshake, getting lost in the goodness of it. Strangely enough, I would kind of see this image a few years later when my father was in a nursing home and required me to bring him an almost daily milkshake. It triggered that image again and that is when I started writing the script in 2010. My mother used to make me milkshakes when I was sick as a kid and the cold milk flowing over my inflamed throat, the sweetness and the richness were wonderful. Despite feeling awful, that milkshake made by Mom created a momentary physical and emotional oasis of security and "sweetness" in my life. So I wrote "Dime Short" with the hope that we as a society can find the sweetness, find security, find our own emotional oasis, if just for a moment, when we've lost possibly everything. More importantly, how do we do that for each other? Krista (Director/Producer)I read this script when it was in the first draft form, and I could already see this world.  My hope is that audiences leave with different impressions of this film.  That they talk about how we see other's struggles and how we support each other when the chips are down.  I hope they question the action of treating one person's worst day as their day's entertainment   One of my favorite things is to hear people talking about is what happened to Bob's family, how did Donna land here, what happened to Bev, or how did Pete's son die.  It's been really interesting to hear the different theories.  Our greatest compliment is hearing that people would love to know more about this world and these characters.  They stick with you as you leave and that's a pretty remarkable outcome as a filmmaker.