#stephen x yago

[amorremanet]

if you're still doing that ten facts thing, Stephen

“ten facts about my characters” meme // previously on…

1. His full given name is Stephen Federico Alamilla Gardener — like Seb, Pete, and their respective siblings, the second middle name is actually his mother’s maiden name, which Stephen’s parents did as their way of striking a balance between honoring his mother’s Puerto Rican heritage and naming customs, and trying not to end up in any situation where filling out various government forms got confusing, or someone tried to question whether or not their father is actually their father just because he’s black and they don’t have his surname.

The one name thing that Stephen is really glad his Mama pulled the plug on is that Marlin wanted Stephen’s first middle name to be, “Federico García” as a double-name, since he was being named in honor of García Lorca, but felt like “Federico” could have come from anywhere. But at least Rosalin went, “No, we are not going to do that to our son. It would be confusing, and a mouthful, and it is a terrible idea.”

So, instead, they just gave Stephen, “Federico” as a middle name and gave their next child (one of Stephen’s sisters) the first name, “Lorca.”

That said, Stephen’s first name is the one that he has the oddest relationship with. For starters, he knows that he was named after one of his Dad’s late uncles, but he has, at various times, claimed to have been named after:

Saint Stephen, the Protomartyr (regarded as the first Christian martyr, as detailed in the Biblical Acts of the Apostles. In fairness to Stephen, he didn’t actually come up with this idea; a Sunday school teacher he had in first grade did, and Stephen just didn’t bother to correct her because she was kind of young and trying her best, and his best friend Yago [Santiago] was being a little pain in the ass, and Stephen was just like, “Okay, sure, I can be named after St. Stephen, if it makes my poor teacher’s life easier, that’s not a big deal.” But he has since made the claim of his own volition, so there’s that.)

Stephen Gordon (heroine of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Stephen made this claim in college, because he’d read the book and liked it, and didn’t really care that Stephen Gordon was a lesbian which would’ve made it weird for him to be named after her, because he’d liked her. And he was 19 and trying to make his parents sound ~cooler~ to his friends, like somehow, giving him a literary name was ~cooler~ than naming him after his late great-uncle.)

This notion of his kind of got foiled by his friend [who hadn’t read the book, but had been assigned it in a different class] went, “…But isn’t she a lesbian?” and the only thing Stephen could think of at the time was, “Yeah, but my parents hadn’t actually read it, and it was my Aunt Joanna’s idea.”

Stephen Hawking (which he also first claimed in college, when he was still on the pre-med track and trying to make his parents sound more ~impressive~ to his very white, STEM-y classmates)

Stephen King (though, like Stephen the Protomartyr, this claim was not Stephen’s idea, at first. He first made it to a guy he was seeing in college, after switching off the pre-med track and going into art history instead, and he was actually going to just say that his parents had named him after his Dad’s uncle. But Austen wanted to make a game out of guessing, and he was kind of drunk, so his guesses were getting increasingly ridiculous and it was taking a painfully long time……

So, when Austen finally got to, “Oh, wait, who was that Steve guy who wrote Carrie and Cujo and The Shining? His name was Steve, right? Is he still alive [in 2006]? I heard he was really coked up and got hit by a car,” Stephen really just wanted the game to be over so he went, “Yep, you got it. My parents totally named me after Stephen King. Now, let’s get you home and get you some water, okay?”)

and Stephen Sondheim (which he first claimed in grad school, and he 500% claimed it to impress the guy he was currently crushing on and get the guy interested in him — and he didn’t regret it at first, but would later come to wish that he hadn’t, because Keith wound up being a cheating douchebag, so Stephen regretted pretty much everything that he’d ever done to impress the bastard, and about the only reason why he didn’t let Yago slash Keith’s tires was that Yago has really bad luck a lot of the time and Stephen was pretty sure that he’d get caught)

On another hand, Stephen can sometimes feel weird about his name. This is an underlying part of why he made all those weird claims about where his name had come from (i.e., one that exists in addition to all of the other, more immediate reasons why he’s ever done this), if one that he tries not to think about too often, because there isn’t really anything he can do about it.

Worse, he feels like there isn’t actually a reason for him to feel this way, because in theory, it kind of goes back to feeling out of place because of his name…… but Stephen also doesn’t think this is reflected in the reality of what things were like, during the periods where he feels, in retrospect, like he felt most out of place because of it.

Like, for example, Stephen kind of feels like maybe he feels weird about his name (in a way where he identifies with it and it’s comfortable so he doesn’t want a different one, but he sometimes feels like maybe he should have a different name for reasons he can’t quite articulate), because of some lingering issues he might have with feeling out of place at school… but he grew up in a fairly mixed neighborhood in Boston and went to school with students of many different races and backgrounds, so while it’s true that his two best friends were Yago and Diego, Stephen could also go look at their yearbook and see a bunch of names that were more like his, and a bunch of names that weren’t like his but also weren’t like Yago and Diego.

Or for another example, he sometimes feels like maybe it has something to do with college — but then, he knows that most of the people he knew in college had names that were very much like his, and the ones who didn’t were largely the upper-middle class white kids whose parents gave them names like Ashlynne, Ryvvar, Xavyen, Mikkaylah, and so on (give or take a few [upper-]middle class white kids who had hippie parents, who named them shit like Starr or Sunshine).

Ultimately, what’s going on here is more a general feeling of “out of place”-ness that Stephen doesn’t entirely understand himself, and he kind of fixates on his name because of how he has legitimately felt a little like an odd name out before (like when his fab four in high school was Yago, Diego, Diego’s sister Marimar…… and Stephen), and it’s easier for him to just go, “That’s the ticket, it’s all a name thing,” even when he knows that it’s not really that simple, than it is to deal with the fact that he doesn’t know where this “out of place” feeling comes from or why it exists or what the Hell it thinks it’s doing.

Stephen feels like this is easier, even with all of the mental rabbit holes he’s gone down about how his own personal explanation isn’t really accurate to what’s going on with his feelings, because he really, really doesn’t like admitting that he has this feeling of being out of place and kind of at odds with his surroundings, and he doesn’t know where it comes from or why it’s happening or what it’s doing here. He feels like, if he knew what’s up with it, he could then take care of it and take control of it back from some very ill-defined Something that has apparently taken said sense of control away from him

—but because he doesn’t know what’s going on, he can’t do that, which makes it really difficult for him to feel like he has any of his shit together (when, by most people’s standards, he’s doing amazing at having his shit together, and about the only things that indicate that he might not have his shit together are:

1. his current lack of boyfriend, because having some kind of monogamous romantic relationship is consistently used as a litmus test for how together someone’s shit is, even though that’s not fair and in Stephen’s case, the only things you could really say about his love life, at the moment, are that:

A. he has spent the past ten months dancing around Seb in mutual attraction, mutual interest, and mutual, “oh, no, he’s probably not actually reciprocating anything, he’s just being nice” or some other similar way of, and neither of them is actually going to do anything proactive about it until Seb seriously misinterprets a suggestion from Pete and takes it as, “You should stop being silly and ask Stephen out”

instead of what Pete actually meant, which was more like, “Your love life is kind of a mess right now because you’ve done approximately fuck all to actually keep your ducks in a row with that, and I love you, but for the love of God, sort your shit out and P.S., talk to Todd about your feelings like adults, because you two say that it’s complicated but it’s really not, you’re just MAKING it complicated because you won’t put on your big kid pants and talk to each other about more than immediate issues of consent vs. ‘not tonight, Todd, I have a headache’”;

and B. the guy who Stephen has been doing said dance around with for the past ten months is a recovering addict who has a history of only remembering why he might want to live while he’s in the middle of his latest brush with death, and who objectively does not have pretty much any of his shit together, does a better job of taking care of other people and his dogs than he does of taking care of himself and has to be reminded semi-regularly that this is a problem, is arguably only still alive because he’s a mutant and is definitely only not as bad off as he could be because he’s white and his parents are “old as BALLS”-money rich, with his Dad’s family straight-up coming from legitimate noble stock and everything

—and, like. I say this with all the love in my heart for Sebastian, without whom this entire project would not exist because he was here first and if I hadn’t written an absolutely obscene amount of shit that I intended to just be backstory for an RP character, we wouldn’t be here now…… but he’s a Mess. He is a human disaster, and yes, he’s trying his best and working on it, but it’s completely fair for someone to take a look at him and either question Stephen’s taste level, or conclude that Stephen is probably just interested in a quick fling because Sebastian is pretty

(Which Yago has actually asked Stephen about before, because he was understandably kind of concerned when his bestie and roommate finally decided to spill it about the guy he’s into right now, and Stephen’s description was like, “Well, he’s tall and he’s white, but like pretty, and he has a tattoo of a pansy on his shoulder, he knows Nick, but I’m not supposed to say how they know each other, which I know that you know means they know each other through AA or something but just please keep that to yourself, okay — anyway, Nick is his sponsor, and he was off the wagon a couple weeks ago but he’s back on now. Anyway, I think he must have had a goth phase or something, because he has these Hot Topic arm warmers, I’ve never actually seen his bare forearms and he’s been around the gallery often enough that I feel like I should have? But he’s kind of sensitive about it and gets a little jumpy, so it’s probably best not to push it, right? *shrugs*

“And today, we had a really good talk about Proust — his family is, like, really proud of their French heritage, I guess, so he’s fluent enough to, like, read Proust in the original French? — and then it kind of turned into sharing stories of weird youthful misadventures, and I talked about the time Marimar and I were each other’s dates to homecoming so she could get into the dance and make out with Isabela, while I totally wanted to make out with you but then so did Camilla, and it almost turned into a fight and you were feeling totally stoked on yourself, and he talked about how instead of going to his senior prom, he and his best friend — who is Nick’s other sponsee, and his name’s Pete, you’d totally like him — went into the City with fake ID’s and went to a drag show, and then had to run from some older guy because his boyfriend kissed Seb, and the older guy was a possessive dick who didn’t get that maybe, the seventeen-year-old who’d just been kissed out of nowhere wasn’t the one to be angry with in this situation?

“And, uh, what else can I tell you, uh…… He looks like a sad puppy a lot of the time. He has six dogs, but doesn’t have an Instagram, which seems really silly to me because all he’d have to do is post pictures of his dogs all the time and people would love it, right? I guess at least Pete and Nick would like it if he didn’t try to be funny in ways that actually kind of rest on him putting himself down or making implications that are, like, pretty troubling? But he seems to think they’re funny? He’s apparently passed a field sobriety test while shitfaced at least once, and apparently, there’s some weekend he had in Europe once that started with chatting up a Euro-Disney actor in a bar in Paris on Friday night, and then he exactly doesn’t know what happened, but he wound up in Bruges on Sunday morning?

“And he’s really cute and he has a motorcycle, but I guess he hasn’t ridden it much since he went to rehab last year, and his blush is super-adorable which is great because he blushes a lot, and he’s smart and he doesn’t think he is but he pulled some cool Latin shit out of nowhere last week at the gallery, and I guess he can cook, too, and oh! Right! Did I mention that he thinks my jokes and my puns are clever and funny? Because he totally does, so there and I win, ha ha ha. :D”

……to which Yago’s response was a moment or five of stunned, processing silence, followed by, “Uh. Tebi, I love you, but that is an awful lot of detail for someone you only want to fuck a few times and then be friends with and maybe hook up with, no strings attached, if you both happen to be single.”

and cue Stephen, “………Did I say that? Oh, no, I want to, like, ask him out. If he’s, y’know, interested. And I hope he is? But maybe he’s not? I don’t know, but…… this isn’t like some kind of wham bam thank you ma’am super-weekend shit, I actually really like him?”

—and that conversation was interesting, to say the least, and it involved a brief detour in which Stephen mentioned Seb’s last name and Yago went, “Wait, are they the ones with the liquor company?” and thought that maybe Stephen was talking about trying get Seb to be his sugar daddy [which Yago was kinda opposed to less because Seb sounded like a mess and more because he thought it was like, “Stephen is giving up on love and wants a sugar daddy, he thinks it’s the only thing he can get, what the fuck, HELP THE BEST FRIEND, TO THE YAGO MOBILE”], but it’s also sort of getting way, way, way off the point.)

(Also, the Yago Mobile is a moped. But calling it, “the Yago Mobile” makes him feel cool, just let him have this)

and 2. Stephen is fat. Which doesn’t actually indicate shit anything about whether or not Stephen has any of his shit together, but unfortunately, a lot of people are fatphobic jagweeds and think that him being 6’2” and ~325 pounds means that something in his life is clearly going terribly wrong, even though he’s pretty fit and healthy, he just happens to be fat.

2. His birthday is February 7th, 1984 — he’s an Aquarius, and in The Secret Language of Birthdays (Goldschneider & Elffers) his particular birthday is called, “the Day of Utopia.” Which would probably make him get temporarily kind of interested in astrology for more reasons than, “being nice to Sara Grace and listening to her talk about it even though Stephen doesn’t really find it that interesting, himself,” but the interest would peter out pretty quickly. He’d just think that it’s pretty neat that his birthday is called, “the Day of Utopia.”

Strictly speaking, he knows that his birthday isn’t a holiday, but he’s still the sort of nerd who will tell you that his birthday is his favorite holiday.

If he’s not allowed to pick his birthday, then he will probably say Valentine’s Day, because even if he’s not dating someone at the moment, Stephen loves the shit out of love, and he gets why a lot of people are disillusioned with romance and with how ridiculously prescriptive the world can be about romantic love, and he gets why that (among other things) makes people feel disillusioned with Valentine’s Day…… but at the same time, screw you because he loves love, and he loves celebrating love in all forms, and if that’s wrong, he doesn’t want to be right.

He’s going to have a boyfriend for his next Valentine’s Day, and they’re going to make plans…… only to spend the actual day itself filling out copious amounts of paperwork about foiling a supervillain plot.

Which kinda sucks, sure, but Stephen has to say: stopping fascist supervillains together is probably the most unique date he’s ever been on. Even if it wasn’t actually a date, and they were accompanied by eight other people, and they weren’t on the same team once they split up inside the building, and they had to go to a Republican debate to stop said supervillains from doing their thing and that was massively uncomfortable for all involved because none of them is straight and half of the people they went in with are POC and none of them is even vaguely a Republican, and……

Okay, there were a lot of reasons why that evening wasn’t quite ideal, on paper, but in practice, it was actually pretty cool, and Stephen could totally get into this superhero thing, whether he has mutant abilities or not (which he doesn’t, but he’s okay with that).

And at least he can play footsie and sneaky-flirt with Seb over the paperwork when Holmes isn’t looking — and hey, if they go out like they’d planned but do it on Tuesday (Monday’s out because Seb, Pete, and Nick all have AA), then it’ll be less crowded because people won’t be out for Valentine’s Day if it’s the 16th instead of the 14th

3. Stephen wouldn’t have switched from pre-med to art history if not for needing to get certain gen ed credits, and deciding that he felt like taking an art history class for one of them, which led to a whole semester of letting his actual degree-track classes suffer because he just wasn’t as interested in doing the work for them as he was in his art history coursework.

This really wasn’t a fun realization for him, at first, because he’d hung a lot of his hopes and his plans for what his future would look like (vague though they were) on going pre-med, and then going to medical school and becoming a doctor, but suddenly, he was being confronted with this interest of his that he’d tried so hard to bury because he felt like being a doctor would be the best idea

But between a bit of soul-searching, and doing some more thorough research into some of the actual facts horror stories from people who went to med school, Stephen realized that it really wasn’t what he wanted to do. He’s much happier this way, overall, but there’s still a bit of an issue for him because he feels like he somehow failed a bit by not going pre-med, after working so hard to get there

(—which is actually even more complicated than that, but bless his heart, the most that Stephen’s really dealt with this is with getting it clearly established that his parents don’t think that he failed, aren’t disappointed in him, and support him whether he’s a doctor or a curatorial assistant-slash-drag queen or whatever, as long as he’s happy and healthy)

4. Stephen isn’t completely hopeless in a kitchen or anything, but his repertoire is secretly way more limited than he would like it to be. He has a list of things that he makes pretty well, some that he can make decently, and a very long list of things that he can make well enough to eat but they’re nothing special. The biggest problems for him come when he tries to improvise (because unfortunately for him, he doesn’t really have good instincts about improvising), or when he tries to copy something that he saw on Youtube or Food Network, which almost always ends badly, but at least he tried.

He’s probably best at making cupcakes, but he also doesn’t do it very often because Stephen is a perfectionist about making his cupcakes, and it takes him forever, and they’re cute and delicious and everything, but seriously, it takes him forever and it’s hardcore exhausting

5. Stephen’s favorite song to perform in any context, and easily his favorite song overall, is Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody Who Loves Me,” but there are very few things that he won’t try to put a drag performance together for, and he has a huge list of songs that he would call, “go to songs” for karaoke night

He has said for years that Ten Things I Hate About You was such a formative influence, and that Heath Ledger’s Patrick Verona was such a Big Deal teenage celebrity crush for him, that there is basically no way he could successfully resist if a guy asked him out by publicly serenading him with, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You,” and that if a guy even proposed to him like that, he would just about die happy and probably need to be magically revived in order to make it to the wedding (since he takes it for granted that people know he’d totally accept if a guy proposed to him like this).

So far, neither of these things has happened for him, but don’t take away Stephen’s dreams, okay. Please don’t take them away, he’s very attached to his daydreams about a boyfriend who is so in love with him, so Extra™, or some combination of the two, that he will actually ask Stephen out and/or eventually propose to him by singing, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” at him in public like Patrick Verona.

6. There is a matter of some debate about Stephen’s drag (mainly by Stephen, with himself and occasionally either Yago, or some of his friends down at Comet Club, his home bar). Said debate is about exactly how many characters or personas he has, and whether or not all of his different aliases are all separate characters or not.

No one really has a concrete answer, not even Stephen, and most of the people who’ve ever taken part in this debate don’t even have a solid opinion from one discussion to the other.

The thing is, Stephen came up with all his aliases at different times and for different reasons, but any differences in how he performs while using these aliases that could be read as him somehow differentiating between the characters…… largely happened kinda by accident, accumulating through different heat of the moment changes?

But now, they kind of are their own characters, and he taps into different parts of himself while bringing his performances to life with the different aliases, but they all also feel like parts of him so maybe they’re really not separate individual characters, and so, Stephen’s feelings go back and forth and every which way, and he doesn’t really know if there’s a right answer here

Either way, said aliases are: Sister Anarky Skynwanker, initiate of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (D.C. Metro chapter);

Anita Gaymarket (mostly retired, but this was his first drag name, which he started using in undergrad);

Gaiety Dawson Hayworth (used much less frequently, but he used it for a while, and you can still find some old vids of him performing with that name on youtube; he used it toward the end of undergrad and for a little bit afterward);

and Carmen Sodomigo (his most frequently used drag name, since it’s what he uses when he performs rather than out with the Sisters, and it’s about tied with Sister Anarky for his favorite name — and oh boy howdy, does Stephen think that his play on “Carmen Sandiego” + “sodomy” is fucking hilarious)

7. Stephen may not be the worst cat dad in the world (overall, he’s actually a very good cat dad), but oh man, does he ever spoil his and Yago’s cat, Duchess, something awful. She might not be quite as spoiled as she could be, and she’s kinda the kitty version of the Spoiled Sweet trope, but oh man, Stephen spoils her. About the only habit of his that she doesn’t like is when he gets bored and decides to make her a new cute outfit, then put it on her, and get himself dressed up, and take pictures to put up on his Instagram.

Not that Duchess actually understands the Instagram part all that well, but she understands that her Person is putting her in a new outfit for no reason that makes itself apparent to her.

By the time she meets Sebastian, his animal affinity mutation (which isn’t exactly, “can talk to animals,” but approximates it pretty closely, with elements of, “drawing animals to him like a freaking Disney princess”) will be developed enough that he’ll be able to say, with some accuracy, that she doesn’t mind that Stephen is lavishing her with affection but she really doesn’t like that pretty kitty princess dress, it doesn’t fit in a way that’s comfortable for her and she’d probably be happier if he took it off. But she does love him and love getting his attention and affection.

Duchess is also going to be confused about meeting her Person’s new pet stray (…because, bless her feline heart, she is going to think of Sebastian not as Stephen’s boyfriend, but as some stray who followed him home), because she’ll feel kind of torn between: wanting to dislike him for stealing any of her Person’s attentions; feeling drawn to him and compelled to trust him anyway for reasons that she doesn’t quite understand (especially not in light of how, in her mind, he smells like Dog); and really liking the way he scratches her tummy but still not wanting to trust him or like him because how dare you steal her Person’s affections

She’ll get over it eventually. Somewhat. As long as she feels like Seb understands that she was here first.

8. Stephen and Yago dated for a while, a little bit after finishing up in undergrad. It was kind of fun, and the culmination of some on-off mutual pining (and some confusion on Yago’s part, because he’s struggled with trying too hard to be what he thinks people want him to be, and this made him take the long way around figuring out that he’s bi), but ultimately, although they love each other, trying to force it to be romantic didn’t work out for them.

9. While Stephen has never dealt with an eating disorder exactly, he has dealt with disordered eating (as in, “he has dealt with some unhealthy patterns here, though they were not quite consistent enough for Stephen to personally consider them, in his words, ‘a fully-fledged eating disorder’”) — which I really wanted to go into more, but it’s almost 2 AM and I’ve been writing this all night, through rounds of being dragged into irl drama that I wanted no part of, so it’s getting skimmed over a lot because if I try to talk about it too much right now, I’ll screw up everything

But one of the biggest points for Stephen was that he spent years abusing his own body and feeling like shit in his own skin to try and stay as slim as possible, because he’d been led to believe that there was no room in the LGBTQ community for fat gay men unless they were older and basically married already, and for all he’s more at peace with his body now and so much happier now that he’s not beating himself up like that, Stephen still has some serious lingering issues about that period of his life

Like, it’s a big deal for him when, on their first date, he and Seb get showing off old pictures of themselves that they have on their phones and/or social media accounts, and Seb’s reaction to one old photo of Stephen, Yago, and some of Stephen’s friends from undergrad is not just accurately picking Stephen out (as opposed to asking which one is him), but then also going, “Oh my god, you look miserable. Yeah, you’re smiling, and it’s a good fake smile, but you look so tired and stressed out and sad — I mean, you look nice still, I didn’t mean to say it like you don’t look nice or like insulting you? But you still look so sad”

It’s a big deal to Stephen because most people who’ve seen that photo in the past few years, whether they were dating him or not, have instead said something like, “Oh my god, you were so thin, what happened” or, “You looked so hot, then. I mean, you could go back to that, right?” — and he’s not even thinking about that, at first, when he pulls the photo up to show it to Seb. He’s just thinking that it’s one of his favorite old photos, because it’s from a spring break trip that he, Yago, and their old friends took to Seattle, and it was a really great trip, and the photo is cute

—but then he pulls it up and he’s expecting something like, “So, which one is you?” followed by the, “Oh my god, what the Hell happened, you were so thin” thing, and then that doesn’t happen, and then he’s caught off-guard by that and opens up a bit (at least enough to explain some of what happened and why he’s so caught off-guard), and then he hears, “Yeah, you were cute and all, but? I think you’re beautiful now,” and then it ends up not being an attempt to get Stephen into bed immediately

—and this isn’t quite what Stephen expected, but it means so much to him that it only ends up being ever-so-slightly eclipsed by the, “oh my god, he actually is interested in me after all and I haven’t just been making it up, YAGO I KISSED A GUY AND THE WORLD GOT ALL PINK AND HAPPY AND *has to swan around their apartment with Duchess, singing ‘I Feel Pretty’ from West Side Story and dragging Yago into participating, and can’t explain himself until after he’s gotten this out of his system*”

—yeah, as I was saying.

That only ends up ever-so-slightly eclipsing the more long-term meaningful and more significant part of their first date because it capped off said date, it was a really nice kiss, “pink and happy” is approximately how both parties felt, and there was a huge sense of relief, because Stephen has twisted himself up into so many knots and fallen down so many rabbit holes over wondering whether his flirting was too subtle, or maybe Seb just didn’t like him, or maybe this wasn’t going to amount to anything, maybe he’s getting his hopes up for nothing, maybe they’ll go out and Seb will decide he’s not into Stephen at all, and so on

—so, being flat-out told that Seb is into him and getting a nice kiss to go with it? Yeah, that sort of briefly overshadows literally everything else (including hearing that Seb was nervous about all of the same, “what if he doesn’t really like me, what if he’s just being nice, what if he decides he doesn’t like me after this date” things as Stephen was)

Anyway, it’s now 2:15 AM and this was the last point I wrote out, and I’m tired, so I’m tagging this and going to bed

10. He loves sudoku puzzles, cuddling, kissing, soft pretzels, libraries and book stores, green tea (especially with different kinds of fruit infusions), questionable puns (which he’s only marginally better at delivering than he is at telling jokes, but that doesn’t mean a lot, because it’s not that hard to do better than laughing at his own joke before he even gets the punchline out), having his hair played with, mint chocolate, dancing, swimming, Cherry Coke, the aquarium, and the hands-on science museums that let you actually touch stuff and screw around with it.