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theshedding · 3 years

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Lil Nas X: Country Music, Christianity & Reclaiming HELL

I don’t typically bother myself to follow what Lil Nas X is doing from day to day, or even month to month but I do know that his “Old Town Road” hit became one of the biggest selling/streamed records in Country Music Business history (by a Black Country & Queer artist). “Black” is key because for 75+ years Country music has unsuspiciously evolved into a solidly White-identified genre (despite mixed and Indian & Black roots). Regrettably, Country music is also widely known for anti-black, misogynoir, reliably homophobic (Trans isn’t really a conversation yet), Christian and Hard Right sentiments on the political spectrum. Some other day I will venture into more; there is a whole analysis dying to be done on this exclusive practice in the music industry with its implications on ‘access’ to equity and opportunity for both Black/POC’s and Whites artists/songwriters alike. More commentary on this rigid homogeneous field is needed and how it prohibits certain talent(s) for the sake of perpetuating homogeneity (e.g. “social determinants” of diversity & viable artistic careers). I’ll refrain from discussing that fully here, though suffice it to say that for those reasons X’s “Old Town Road” was monumental and vindicating.

As for Lil Nas X, I’m not particularly a big fan of his music; but I see him, what he’s doing, his impact on music + culture and I celebrate him using these moments to affirm his Black, Queer self, and lifting up others. Believe it or not, even in the 2020′s, being “out” in the music business is still a costly choice. As an artist it remains much easier to just “play straight”. And despite appearances, the business (particularly Country) has been dragged kicking and screaming into developing, promoting and advancing openly-affirming LGBTQ 🏳️‍🌈 artists in the board room or on-stage. Though things are ‘better’ we have not yet arrived at a place of equity or opportunity for queer artists; for the road of music biz history is littered with stunted careers, bodies and limitations on artists who had no option but to follow conventional ways, fail or never be heard of in the first place. With few exceptions, record labels, radio and press/media have successfully used fear, intimidation, innuendo and coercion to dilute, downplay or erase any hint of queer identity from its performers. This was true even for obvious talents like Little Richard.

(Note: I’m particularly speaking of artists in this regard, not so much the hairstylists, make-up artists, PA’s, etc.)

_____

Which is why...in regard to Lil Nas X, whether you like, hate or love his music, the young brother is a trailblazer. His very existence protests (at least) decades of inequity, oppression and erasure. X aptly critiques a Neo-Christian Fascist Heteropatriarchy; not just in American society but throughout the Music Business and with Black people. That is no small deal. His unapologetic outness holds a mirror up to Christianity at-large, as an institution, theology and practice. The problem is they just don’t like what they see in that mirror.

In actuality, “Call Me By Your Name”, Lil Nas X’s new video, is a twist on classic mythology and religious memes that are less reprehensible or vulgar than the Biblical narratives most of us grew up on vís-a-vís indoctrinating smiles of Sunday school teachers and family prior to the “age of reason”. Think about the narratives blithely describing Satan’s friendly wager with God regarding Job (42:1-6); the horrific “prophecies” in St. John’s Book of Revelation (i.e. skies will rain fire, angels will spit swords, mankind will be forced to retreat into caves for shelter, and we will be harassed by at least three terrifying dragons and beasts. Angels will sound seven trumpets of warning, and later on, seven plagues will be dumped on the world), or Jesus’s own clarifying words of violent intent in Matthew (re: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” 10:34). Whether literal or metaphor, these age old stories pale in comparison to a three minute allegorical rap video. Conservatives: say what you will, I’m pretty confident X doesn’t take himself as seriously as “The true and living God” from the book of Job.

A little known fact as it is, people have debunked the story and evolution of Satan and already offered compelling research showing [he] is more of a literary device than an actual entity or “spirit” (Spoiler: In the Bible, Satan does not take shape as an actual “bad” person until the New Testament). In fact, modern Christianity’s impression of the “Devil” is shaped by conflating Hellenized mythology with a literary tradition rooted in Dante’s Inferno and accompanying spooks and superstitions going back thousands of years. Whether Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Scientologist, Atheist or Agnostic, we’ve spent a lifetime with these predominant icons and clichés. (Resource: Prof. Bart D. Erhman, “Heaven & Hell”).

So Here’s THE PROBLEM: The current level of fear and outrage is:

(1) Unjust, imposing and irrational.

(2) Disproportionate when taken into account a lifetime of harmful Christian propaganda, anti-gay preaching and political advocacy.

(3) Historically inaccurate concerning the existence of “Hell” and who should be scared of going there.

Think I’m overreacting?

Examples:

Institutionalized Homophobia (rhetoric + policy)

Anti-Gay Ministers In Life And Death: Bishop Eddie Long And Rev. Bernice King

Black, gay and Christian, Marylanders struggle with Conflicts

Harlem pastor: 'Obama has released the homo demons on the black man'

Joel Olsteen: Homosexuality is “Not God’s Best”

Bishop Brandon Porter: Gays “Perverted & Lost...The Church of God in Christ Convocation appears like a ‘coming out party’ for members of the gay community.”

Kim Burrell: “That perverted homosexual spirit is a spirit of delusion & confusion and has deceived many men & women, and it has caused a strain on the body of Christ”

Falwell Suggests Gays to Blame for 9-11 Attacks

Pope Francis Blames The Devil For Sexual Abuse By Catholic Church

Pope Francis: Gay People Not Welcome in Clergy

Pope Francis Blames The Devil For Sexual Abuse By Catholic Church

The Pope and Gay People: Nothing’s Changed

The Catholic church silently lobbied against a suicide prevention hotline in the US because it included LGBT resources

Mormon church prohibits Children of LGBT parents to be baptized

Catholic Charity Ends Adoptions Rather Than Place Kid With Same-Sex Couple

I Was a Religious Zealot That Hurt People-Coming Out as Gay: A Former Conversion Therapy Leader Is Apologizing to the LGBTQ Community

The above short list chronicles a consistent, literal, demonization of LGBTQ people, contempt for their gender presentation, objectification of their bodies/sexuality and a coordinated pollution of media and culture over the last 50+ years by clergy since integration and Civil Rights legislation. Basically terrorism. Popes, Bishops, Pastors, Evangelists, Politicians, Television hosts, US Presidents, Camp Leaders, Teachers, Singers & Entertainers, Coaches, Athletes and Christians of all types all around the world have confused and confounded these issues, suppressed dissent, and confidently lied about LGBT people-including fellow Queer Christians with impunity for generations (i.e. “thou shall not bear false witness against they neighbor” Ex. 23:1-3). Christian majority viewpoints about “laws” and “nature” have run the table in discussions about LGBTQ people in society-so much that we collectively must first consider their religious views in all discussions and the specter of Christian approval -at best or Christian condescension -at worst. That is Christian (and straight) privilege. People are tired of this undue deference to religious opinions.

That is what is so deliciously bothersome about Lil Nas X being loud, proud and “in your face” about his sexuality. If for just a moment, he not only disrupts the American hetero-patriarchy but specifically the Black hetero-patriarchy, the so-called “Black Church Industrial Complex”, Neo-Christian Fascism and a mostly uneducated (and/or miseducated) public concerning Ancient Near East and European history, superstitions-and (by extension) White Supremacy. To round up: people are losing their minds because the victim decided to speak out against his victimizer.

Additionally, on some level I believe people are mad at him being just twenty years old, out and FREE as a self-assured, affirming & affirmed QUEER Black male entertainer with money and fame in the PRIME of his life. We’ve never, or rarely, seen that before in a Black man in the music business and popular culture. But that’s just too bad for them. With my own eyes I’ve watched straight people, friends, Christians, enjoy their sexuality from their elementary youth to adolescence, up and through college and later marriages, often times independently of their spouses (repeatedly). Meanwhile Queer/Gay/SGL/LGBTQ people are expected to put their lives on hold while the ‘blessed’ straight people run around exploring premarital/post-marital/extra-marital sex, love and affection, unbound & un-convicted by their “sin” or God...only to proudly rebrand themselves later in life as a good, moral “wholesome Christian” via the ‘sacred’ institution of marriage with no questions asked.

Inequality defined.

For Lil Nas X, everything about the society we've created for him in the last 100+ years (re: links above) has explicitly been designed for his life not to be his own. According to these and other Christians (see above), his identity is essentially supposed to be an endless rat fuck of internal confusion, suicide-ideation, depression, long-suffering, faux masculinity, heterosexism, groveling towards heaven, respectability politics, failed prayer and supplication to a heteronormative earthly and celestial hierarchy unbothered in affording LGBT people like him a healthy, sane human development. It’s almost as if the Conservative establishment (Black included) needs Lil Nas X to be like others before him: “private”, mysteriously single, suicidal, suspiciously straight or worse, dead of HIV/AIDS ...anything but driving down the street enjoying his youth as a Black Queer artist and man. So they mad about that?

Well those days are over.

-Rogiérs is a writer, international recording artist, performer and indie label manager with 25+ years in the music industry. He also directs Black Nonbelievers of DC, a non-profit org affiliated with the AHA supporting Black skeptics, Atheists, Agnostics & Humanists. He holds a B.A. in Music Business & Mgmt and a M.A. in Global Entertainment & Music Business from Berklee College of Music and Berklee Valencia, Spain. www.FibbyMusic.net Twitter/IG: @Rogiers1

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quitethepirategal · 3 years

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An Analysis in Threes

❥ TAGGED BY: @emcads like 30 years ago ❥ TAGGING: @riidcr @starsailingcaptain @covencrown @hookd @all-fleshed-out @evermxre @motherofredemption @bup1957 @conquistadoradelmar @seaprofound @tcthinecwnself @withinycu @windguided @daevilhorns @concordia-cum-sinistro and YOU and I spent like 8 hours on this so pLEASE READ IT PLEASE I AM BEGGING I NEED VALIDATION I’M-

repost don’t reblog. yall dont have to type this much.

MUSE: Captain Red Handed Jessica

Three Strengths:

Her adaptability and resourcefulness. Is she brave, yes. Is she lucky, also yes. But over all, she can roll with the cards she’s been dealt in a way that many would call inhumanly clever. Her intelligence, her perception, and her charisma are all different ingredients of this indomitable characteristic of hers. She can see the value in just about anything and anyone, can pick up on clues and tangents few others can follow, and can remember seemingly endless details, tho unfortunately not on command. But even then, her patchy memory seems to contribute to this adaptability as well, as it usually allows for detachment. If she can find resources everywhere, it means she can survive everywhere. There have been countless times where the wheel of fortune has suddenly turned on her and she’d lost near everything and her response was more or less Damn, ok I need food water and shelter lets go. No food? Grow food. No water? Ask someone if they have water. No shelter? Sleep outside. No money? Steal money. Can’t hear anymore? Cool I can use loud weapons. Crashed on an island? My island now. Shot? Free bullet. She knows when to push, she knows when to quit, and sometimes she knows when to gamble based on her ability ( what a man can do and what he can’t do and all that ). Strong she may be, she knows its foolish to rely on strength. Survival of the fittest actually rarely means survival of the strongest. ( edit; this is the theme for the entirety of her character. I will say it 50,000 times. I am very sorry ). And as a student of philosophy and biology, she understands that phrase better than most. Leading to our next point.

Her understanding. As I stated, her charisma is something unmatched, and is a key element in all three of her strengths. This charisma might not exist as prominently were it not for her ability to understand. She has limited ( I’ll get back to that ) but deep running empathy and while not terribly observant all the time, she is always perceptive. Not only that, but she’s personally known abuse, hardship, and uncertainty, and understands that hate or anger can be rooted in similar pain. She was schooled lightly in both Christian and Buddhist values before diving heavily into democratic philosophy, meaning she believes all being experience suffering and therefore kindness is a powerful sign of strength, but also that suffering while free and equal is better than comfort in oppression. And between her sweet words and beautiful face, she can get most people to open up in ways they themselves my not have expected. Being very good with people means she can learn from them, gain something from them, lead them, and/or use them. But Jessica isn’t a manipulator in truth; her intentions are almost always kind or healthy ones. She absolutely uses people from time to time but not EVER without them consenting to or being made aware of such because again, unlike a manipulative person, she understands that can ruin a relationship and therefore ruin a resource. What it makes for is an excellent leader, a beloved captain, and a trusted ally at most and an excellent conversationalist at the least. But her understanding isn’t just social, oh no. It’s academic as well. Armed only with his little library and the lessons of his own teachers, Jessica’s foster father tirelessly smithed her into a not just a girl who knew a lot of things, but a truly intelligent, thinking mind. He’d die before learning he’d succeeded tenfold. Jessica isn’t one to just except things as they are, facts or otherwise. She usually needs to prove it, experiment, see things from a new angle. Debates with her are fun! She has no issue admitting she’s wrong or confessing she’s never thought of it that way, and is actually wrong a lot of the time. It doesn’t bruise her ego, it excites her. It means there’s more to learn. And her ability to constantly understand new concepts paired with her ability to overwhelmingly understand people combine to make for a very powerful core idea of hers: We are fittest to survive because we all fit together. Our humanity, our empathy, our community are our strengths because they keep us united, which keeps us the fittest. No one is independent, no man is an island. People are power. And thus her final strength is just that.

Her power. While she and I still firmly state that strength isn’t everything don’t be disillusioned; its very goddamn important. And it’s something Jessica has plenty of. She is durable and clever because of her rocky early childhood, she is quick and versatile from her youth in a pirate port, she is physically strong and mighty from her years training in martial arts, and she’s an absolute crackshot after years of diligent practice with her trusty pistols. Her true strength may lie in her brains and in her allies yes, but even without them, Red Jessica is a powerhouse of a warrior. She can end fights extremely quickly or run from them without a prayer of catching her ( no shame in the later, both skills keep you alive ). And it may be in bad taste to say, but ever since loosing most of her hearing, Jess swears up and down it’s made her vision better, her reaction time faster, and her quick thinking even quicker. Yes of course she’s slowed down with age, but a bullet shoots at the same speed no matter how old you are. And you best hope she didn’t bring her firecrackers, because while sudden loud noises will absolutely temporarily discombobulate or debilitate an opponent with healthy hearing, it’ll hardly effect her at all and suddenly, you’re a sitting duck. You see those thighs? You see those calves? She can crush PINEAPPLES with them! People have seen her do it! Do you know how many micro-fractures broke and rebuilt those hands? Thousands! She can crush a trachea like a fucking beer can! She can kick you to death! One ill placed curb stomp and you are DECEASED. Sometimes she’ll just psyche you out because she KNOWS you know she can kill your stupid ass! But while her strength, mental and physical, have always been there, her power is relatively new. As stated before, people are power. Not knowledge, not money, not strength. People. She’s a fearsome warrior but she’d be useless if outnumbered. Shes a very successful pirate, but she’d never make it out of port without a crew on her ship. She found a gorgeous island, but it’d still be wild without those who built it’s piers and buildings. She manages orchards and tends to them and harvests them herself, but she would loose all of her crop without the helping hands of her employed farmers. And like I mentioned, she deeply understands this. Freedom is not independence or vice versa. Did you make the clothes on your back or the fabric that made those clothes? Did you write the books you read to make you smarter or teach you that skill? Did you plant the seed years ago that grew that orange you’re eating? No, of course not. Jessica didn’t either. Another human did. We all need each other to fill the holes in our lives that we can’t fill ourselves. Humans are puzzle pieces in that way, there is no bigger picture or prayer for survival on our own. And because of this, we can do anything we as a community, as a SPECIES work together to achieve. There is no knowledge if there’s no one to learn from, there is no money if a society don’t give it value, your money is worthless if those you’re paying decide to rise against you, your role as leader only exists at the consent of those you lead, and your strength won’t save you from a sinking ship. People are, and always will be, power. And as someone who is exceptionally strong and exceedingly smart, Jessica has slotted herself in the humanity puzzle thusly: The strong exist to protect the weak, the smart exist to educate, and the lucky exist so the unlucky may be given aid. And it is with this fairness and compassion that she has won the trust of so many. She has a great many friends and allies even outside of those in her crew or on her island. And she can make many more with ease. That kind of power is not a power to be trifled with, even if she can kick your ass six ways to Saturday without it.

Three Weaknesses:

She suffers ADHD. Now before ANY OF Y’ALL SAY ANYTHING, I myself also suffer ADHD. And yes I do say suffer because well that’s what it causes for Jessica and I, suffering. Yes, it is ableist language to say ‘suffering from’ rather than ‘has’ or ‘is diagnosed with’ and yes it perpetuates a stigma against us but god DAMN IT in both Jessica’s case and mine, it make life much much harder than it needs to be. At the end of the day, Red Jessica is a fantasy of mine; I pour myself into her whether I mean to or not. She’s the adult I wish I was, the person I might be if I had no anxiety, or brainfog, or lived in a world were I didn’t need a credit score or a degree. And even then, I can’t say I know anyone else’s problems better than my own. So if my character has problems, by sheer osmosis they are going to reflect some of mine. Both of the characters I write have ADHD because I have ADHD and I couldn’t even begin to know how a non-ADHD mind works to write it properly. And no, I’m not being dramatic when I say it causes me suffering. I can’t drive, I can’t hold down a job, I nearly flunked out of school, I still cant read very fast or spell very well, I am constantly overwhelmed by mundane things, I’m a slow learner, I forget very important things or recent things, I forget about things that mean the world to me, I forget about people, I stumble through tasks, I procrastinate hobbies and basic hygiene, and everything I do takes all goddamn day and I can only really do one important thing at a time and in order of importance. If I have a date at 4pm, I’m dressed and ready at 11am because I’ve gotta do the important thing first or else I will forget to do the important thing. I started typing this at a little before 5pm. It’s 7;30. It’ll probably be 10 o’clock at night by the time I fucking finish ( edit: l m a o its 1am bitch you thought ). I’m 26 and am just medicated enough to barely function. So yeah. Suffering is the word. Though for Jessica, perhaps suffering is a tad strong of a word. Her ADHD affects her ability to function in far less debilitating ways ( though whether that’s a result of a less severe diagnosis than me or the result of the society, situations, and responsibilities she functions in and around are far different from mine, who’s to say ). For her, she has very consuming hyperfixations that can last anywhere between weeks to decades, a spotty memory that is detail and memento oriented, she’s scatterbrained more often then not but can focus with amazing clarity on her interests or in high adrenaline situations, is is ABYSMALLY bad at math and EXCRUCIATINGLY bad with numbers ( as opposed to me, who is good at numbers but shit at spelling or reading ), she can forget anything no matter how important it is to her or to anyone, she’s bad with names and dates, is COMPLETELY time-blind, has trouble prioritizing, and of course, wile not actually that materialistic, she absolutely has the ol’ magpie instinct. While her poor memory assists in her adaptability and ability to move on, it also means she forgets things she needed to remember, like when the last time she bathed was and who this person is and what happened between her and someone else or what conversation’s shes had. Unfortunately this means she’s a very good friend and leader... while you’re around and interacting with her on at least a weekly basis. It’s almost a lack of object permanence in both a social and very real sense. If something is not right in front of her, odds are she’s not going to think about it. And while its something she constantly kicks herself for and actively tries to be better about, it applies to people too. Face to face is the best way to interact with her; she won’t think to write you and in her modern verse she won’t think to ever call and she’ll text you back in perhaps a few days. She doesn’t value you any less, I promise. She’s just either distracted or overwhelmed. Also, for someone as understanding as her, she is surprisingly self-centered. Not selfish, self-centered. She’ll talk about herself more than she should, and will assume people understand that she’s doing so as a form of showing empathy rather than bragging when they may not know this at all. Actually she accidentally assumes all the time. It was far worse when her hearing was functional; she’d finish your sentence for you or guess what it was you were going to say ( again, not to talk over, you but to show she understands you and the conversation, tho it usually came of as annoying or patronizing ). Sometimes she mistakenly assumes you believe or know the same things she does without even realizing it. Maybe she perceives the right idea off of someone but isn’t observant enough to notice anything past that. And while she is willing to change her mind about things, she might change her mind a tad too quickly. She’s an over-sharer and is horrible at keeping any kind of secret. Romantic relationships tend to fizzle out. Her impulse control is improving but has a VERY long way to go. She’s always chasing something new. All and all, when you’re a pirate, a librarian, or even a captain, all of these things may be irritating and inconvenient, but are overall manageable in chunks. ...But as a governor to her island, as a leader of an entire population... oof. In the position of leadership that she’s in, she can’t afford to make too many massive mistakes, and she knows this. ‘There is no power quite like the power of being underestimated’ is a phase you’ll hear her say a lot but for her, there is a shift in connotation. If people expect less and you do more that’s a great upper hand in any situation but for her, it was a safety net. Having ADHD sometimes means going months or years being fine and then eventually you fuck up and everyone around you wonders how in the world you managed to do that. She has only barely avoided disaster more times than she’d like to admit. Even with the resourcefulness, the understanding, and the power she wields, she’s finally starting to realize that she’s bit off more than she might be able to chew, with the entire well-beings and livelihoods of others on the line. And she fears that one day she’ll play her cards wrong and everything she’d built, everything she’s done, will all come crashing down in ruin.

She is Hard of Hearing. This one is literally as simple as it sounds: she has moderate and degenerative hearing loss and tinnitus after years of canons, explosions, gunshots, and a definitive, scale tipping attack in her early 30s. Her ears just don’t work at all like they used to. The whole world sounds like it would if everything was underwater: she can’t pin point the location of sounds, how far off or close sounds are, and barely registers changes in volume. And it only gets worse the older she gets; one day she won’t hear anything at all. And while yes, again, it might be very harsh and ableist to say, the truth of the matter that being deaf a “ weakness ” more often than its a strength. That said, it very well can be a strength. I’ve already mentioned that trick with the firecrackers and let me tell you it is a DAMN EFFECTIVE TRICK. Shes around explosions and canons and guns all the time and now she can focus while being around them five times better than she could in the past! But unfortunately it also means she’s very easy to sneak up on, she sometimes isn’t aware of danger until it’s nearly too late, no one can get her attention or warn her across any distance, it’s very easy to escape from her, and it’s easy for her to be just... left out of things. She might hear you talking, but she has little to no idea what you’re saying without sign or lipreading. Some people don’t have the patience or even just the courtesy to speak slower, or clearer, or repeat themselves a lot. Though, those last too thinks aren’t weaknesses of hers so much as they are the weakness of others, but they still negatively affect her self esteem and her effectiveness as a leader. All of this has taught her to pick her battles carefully, and plan around the elements of surprise and discombobulation. And while communication was tricky at first, it only got easier, and now she can talk to you almost like anyone can, so long as she’s looking you in the face.

That damn bleeding heart. We have established a number of things that should easily add up to an overly empathetic, trusting, fight-the-good-fight, martyr-some, idealistic pushover; she believes humanity and kindness are strengths, she has taken on the role of leader and then a provider, she has known suffering and tasked herself with ending the suffering of others to the best of her ability, she lacks the clarity of mind to assume people aren’t just as good or capable as her automatically, she can have poor impulse control at times, she wants to have relationships, and ( while I never stated this outright yet it can be inferred ), she believes that being able to see yourself in others is the foundation of humanity and ( as i did say outright ) humanity is what keeps us unified and unity is what makes us fit and strong. Keeping up? Good. Here’s the curve ball: How can she whole hardheartedly preach and believe all of this, to the point of it being the foundation of her character, WHILE BEING A VIOLENT THIEVING AND BLOODTHIRSTY PIRATE?! HOW, MANGO? HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?! MAKE IT MAKE SENSE!! Ok, fine, sure, I will. I’m sure about one half of you are looking up from the screen and going “ Oh yeah, wow I totally forgot that bit. “ and the other half got about two and a half paragraphs in before squinting and silently calling bullshit. So let me explain. In short, she’s a detached hypocrite and is well aware and unashamed of her hypocrisy while far less aware of her detachment. I’ll cover both: Western culture as a whole seems to be under the impression that hypocrisy, despite context or importance, is automatically bad. I don’t know where this comes from personally ( my bet is Christianity but I have exactly 0 evidence ) but its a very... flawed idea. Take the freedom of speech vs racism problem; say you owned a bar where all could speak their mind freely over cold drinks. Excellent concept without context, right? Sure. ....Then a die hard racist covered in slurs and symbols walks in and orders- what are you going to do? The correct answer is to throw him out instantly. Not let him sit so long as he doesn’t cause trouble, not just ignore him and hope he doesn’t return, you throw him out. Is it hypocritical? Yep! Sure is! But it is also 100% necessary to protect your other patrons because if you don’t, the racist starts feeling safe and bringing his racist buddies, literally everyone else starts feeling unsafe and starts to hang out elsewhere, and two months later, ta da! You now own a n*zi bar and there is literally nothing you can do about it. Jessica is in a somewhat similar situation. You as a pretend bar owner need to make a decision as who to let into your bar and who to throw out for the good of all of your patrons. Jessica too is faced daily with that decision. If she want’s to help as many people as possible, the only realistic way she can do that are by protecting those under her leadership... only. She is surrounded by hateful, angry, sneaky, traitorous, abusive, or otherwise evil people. Piracy as a profession and poverty in general can do that to a person. Of course there is a clear difference between those down on their luck and desperate, and the truly cruel and twisted, but unfortunately both types of people yield the same wrongdoings. It’s absolutely her nature to extend a hand to anyone and everyone but.... she just can’t anymore. Too many times has her trust been betrayed, too many times has she gotten in peoples business trying to be helpful, only for her to absolutely bite her in the ass. Too many time the extended hand is bitten and once or twice, she’s actually made things worse. Now, she will only help someone she loves, someone under her leadership, or someone who seeks her out. That’s it. And even then, sometime it manages to bite er in the ass. But she had to set that hard limit for herself out of necessity, one she does her absolute best to adhere too and... these days she adheres a little too well. That leads us to our next point; what I was alluding to at the beginning of her Understanding essay when I said she has limited but deep running empathy. That detachment again, courtesy of a very unattached mother and unchecked ADHD. ( It isn’t a strong enough characteristic to even rank as a strength or a weakness but damn if it isn’t an undercurrent to a lot of her motivations and experiences. ) Strangers are fair game that she tries to ignore, but if she even perceives you as a threat, you could be in danger. Like anyone used to violence or perhaps anyone trapped in an us verses them mindset, she can just... flat... turn her empathy off. Not on command, she’s not a socio or psychopath persay. But she has become totally numb to the horror of violence via her warrior upbringing that, in her mind, violence can actually be rather fun. Pair that with the fact that she purposely tailored herself to only be empathetic to her allies and boom. You get a kindhearted killer. Cops and soldiers in our world do it literally every day. Actually anyone can do it really, even you if you tried. You don’t have to be evil or even angry to kill or steal or lie... you just have to believe you’re right.

Three Secrets:

WHAT SECRETS?! LMAO this bitch is the oversharing queen!! I’ve been typing and pondering her character for literal hours ( its currently 11:16, fuck you adderall ), and I still can not think of a single goddamn secret. There is nothing about her that at least five random people don’t fucking know about!! The only secrets she has are secrets she knows about other people and even then she is!! literally the worst!! She spills her guts left and right and yet she wants to be a mysterious bitch SO BAD like BABE I love you, you’re precious, but you are a dumbass attention seeking validation chasing adhd CLOWN girl!! Stop telling random people about your hermaphroditism or your dairy allergy or your dead dad or that time you fell asleep in a barrel like that is literally your uber driver Jessica honey come ooooon. I’m skipping this section mom holy fuck.

Three Fears:

What if she does wrong by everyone who trusts her? As stated at the end of the ADHD essay, she’s terrified of failing those she leads. Where it as simple as personal failure, she’d be fine. Ever if her entire world came crashing down on top of her she’d either die or start back from square one. Death is a fact of life and her adaptability means she can just dust herself off and move on, so neither her death nor her failures really scare her... But it isn’t just her life and happiness at stake, is it? Not anymore, right? What started as a leader of a small gang of rebels became a full crew, then a crew became a slew of allies, then those allies built a town and now... now she’s the governor of the Crimson Isle and there are nearly twenty five HUNDRED lives at her mercy. HER mercy. One really, really bad mistake could ruin their livelihoods or spark disorder and disloyalty. And if she died? Would whoever it is that will take her place be as good to them as she is? Is she good enough to begin with in the first place? Every day the paperwork gets a little bit thicker, every year there’s a new baby or two. And the isle has fertile soil sure but will it last? Are they prepared for a raid or a hurricane? And if Jessica trusts the wrong people, where her people right to trust her? ...can I protect them? Can I protect them?! CAN I PROTECT THEM?!

Who am I if I’m not interesting? This is, literally, an entirely subconscious fear. She’s not at all aware it exists and therefor this entry is short. But between her short time with her very unimpressed mother, her own ADHD, she is constantly hungry for attention without even realizing it. She must be interesting and intriguing and engaging, and I did mention she wants to also be mysterious. She wants not so much your input or even your validation - but rather if shes not perceived then.... is she really there? Remember, she is unaware of any of this. And fortunately she’d never been starved for attention to act out over it in the first place, even when her disinterested mother was alive. Look at her; she’s radiant, she’s beautiful, and she’s 6′4 / 195 cm shredded and covered in cool scars. Without even opening her mouth, without even her colorful clothes, she’s kind of automatically interesting. So she’s never been so desperate for attention that she acts out because she’s never been without it for very long. But it’s there. Hungry, aching, silent. Those years after the M branding were horrible and she could never really explain why. She still throws parties, organizes festivals, and talks to damn near anyone who will listen. Look at my art! Look at my library! Listen to how much I know! Let me tell you how lovely you are! Look at my scares! Look at my hair! Look at me haha, please, please look at me.

GHOSTS. NOPE. No. NO. Fuck ALL of that noise. Stay dead, go to hell, eat a dick. Red Jessica is a scientist and superstitious atheist. As an academic and somewhat bi-cultural woman she simply thinks there are far too many religions with far too much history for any of them to be considered The One True Thing You Must Believe Or ElseTM and she tends to not truly believe anything until she finds some kind of proof. Shes not afraid of the unknown, shes thrilled by it. She’s not afraid of death or the afterlife, that’s beyond her control. She’s only superstitious because she does believe in and value luck, and also its a bit of a cultural habit. BUT IF SOME SHIT STARTS MOVING ON ITS OWN OR IF SHE SEES SOME BULLSHIT IN THE CORNER OF HER EYE THEN SHE IS OUT OF THERE. OUTIE 5000. She has heard the tales of lost souls from purgatory or the eternally ravenous Pret or dangerous Phi Tai Hong or the tragic and startling Banshees or the creepy Santa Compana and she wouldn’t believe a word of it where it not for one thing. SHE FUCKING SAW ONE. She’ll never forget it, it was the first and last time she EVER attempted to plunder a tomb all Skyrim style and at first she thought it was one of the crewmean being creepy as shit until she got a good look and he was SEE THROUGH AS SHIT AND SKINNY AS FCUK AND SHE GOT LITERALLY CHASED THE FUCK OUT OF THAT JOINT. She does not CARE that some ghosts are just apparitions she does not CARE that some are friendly and trying to warn her of something if you are MOVING and DEAD at the SAME time get FUCKED. If any of y’all cringe try-hards bring a Ouija board to the party you are getting SENT HOME and BLOCKED. NO CAP.

Three Goals:

She really only has one left. Listen its... almost 1am and ive been typing since like 5pm i think i covered goals somewhere in here but ive gotta throw in the towel but even then I’m kinda being serious. Her only remaining goal is to find a suitable heir of some kind. She wants what she’s built to fall into worthey hands but she could never seem to find a good parter and even when she did she couldn’t sustain a pregnancy ( you’d think that would be a huge deal but it hardly mattered to her oddly ). So at 50 the option of having kids is out but there’s still plenty of hope for either adoption or a protege. But then again, she’s so busy these days that she hardly prioritizes it like she wants to.

holy shit i need some water...

#i.... i did it.. its done.. its DONE #...this took my entire saterday #i will literally pay yall actuall dollars to read all of this please... it took so long i dont want it to be for nothing qwq #x; EVER PLAYED CRAZY EIGHTS? { dash games }#x; QUITE THE PIRATE GAL { portrait }#x; WHY AREN'T YOU A CLEVER ONE? { meta }

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wormtitty · 3 years

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on parents, coming out, and religion

When a child comes out to their parents, usually one of the two responses happen. Option 1: the parents reject the child, kicking them out and cutting them off. This is the worst-case scenario. Option 2 is the best-case scenario: where the parents unequivocally accept and support their child, making any necessary changes and ensuring that their child feels comforted, loved, and supported. When I told my parents that I was dating a girl for the first time, I didn’t receive either response. To be honest I was so incredibly terrified and stressed out that I don’t remember much of what happened, but I remember being afraid and crying. I think my mother cried too. My dad had to leave and pick up my little sister. They hugged me, and said they didn’t understand. I remember not understanding much then either.

The majority of my life has been spent trying to make my parents proud of me. From a very young age I would bring report cards home (before everything was online) and show them off. I was never outgoing and pretty shy, much to the chagrin of my parents who wanted me to socialize as much as possible. I was never much for performing, unless it was a part of church and/or my parents would be watching.

Going to church was also a very large part of my life. I grew up protestant (methodist, to be exact), so I had Sunday school while my parents attended service and Wednesday evenings were always reserved for bible study or youth group. I remember not questioning most things I was taught because I wasn’t really exposed to much else that questioned or challenged Christianity. I wasn’t sheltered in the typical sense; I went to public school and had a few friends outside of my church, but my parents were always concerned that I’d fall off the right track. Disney channel was blocked on the television because watching That’s So Raven made me sassy. Cartoon Network was just too annoying and The Simpsons were too grown-up for me to watch, so those were also a no-go for a while.

Around the age of 10 I began to question the existence of an omnipotent God. I kept it to myself for fear of disappointing my parents, but I remember bringing it up to my mom for the first time around then. In the summers of my preteen years I would go to church camp, and recall a conversation with my mother after I got home one of those years. I sat with her on the floor of our basement and assured her that I believed in God again, and that I was sorry for questioning it all. She asked me why I felt that way, and I remember feeling distraught and unsure of what to say. How do I convince my mother, the most important person in my life, something that I wanted to believe but deep down did not?

Late in my 12th year of life I started to explore sexuality. I knew sex was to be saved for a marriage between man and woman, and everything outside of that was to be shunned. The marriage part was mostly pushed at church, as my parents never really talked about that. When I had “the talk” in 5th grade about periods and pregnancy, I asked the teacher how a woman gets pregnant and was laughed at. So sex just wasn’t something to be talked about. But then I found spaces on the internet that talked about my favorite bands and suddenly so many doors were opened for me. I discovered sites where people freely talked about sex, not just between a husband and wife, but between lovers and friends regardless of their gender.

Suddenly I was 13, reading fanfiction about my favorite band, and hiding it from my parents because I knew it was wrong and dirty and sinful. I would sneak onto tumblr from the school laptops and on my mom’s ipod touch late at night. I learned how to delete my history and get around parental controls. But I was only 13, and my parents found out. And then I became a problem. There was something wrong with me because why on earth would a teenage girl be reading about gay people falling in love?

They put me in therapy immediately, from what I recall. I was so confused and scared of what I was doing, I just went along and tried to justify everything to myself and my parents. I’m a girl, so I like boys, so why is it wrong to be attracted to two boys liking each other? I knew I shouldn’t be thinking about these things, and my days became dedicated to hating myself for it yet fighting back and questioning my parents. By the time I was in 8th grade I had started physically hurting myself as punishment for having these feelings. I couldn’t shake the draw to gay stories, and had started questioning my own attraction. Was I looking at my dance teacher’s butt too much? Why did I get nervous around pretty girls? Why didn’t I feel comfortable in my own skin? Why, why, why, why, why, why was I wrong and broken and sinful?

I tried to overcompensate by joining the youth band when I learned how to play bass guitar. I sang worship songs in front of the whole congregation and felt horrible about it. I would go home and hurt myself for lying to everyone. In my freshman year of high school, when all of my church friends were going through the confirmation process, I finally had to tell my pastor that I couldn’t go through with it. I felt so sick. I cried a little bit, thinking about how much of a disappointment I was to my parents who loved him. But this is the pastor that would tell us that his brother “used to be gay, but has since found God” and got off that sinful path. The path I could sense I was starting to go down.

I still didn’t have a pinpoint on my orientation at this point. I knew I was straight because I had to be. But it was also because any romantic relationship between women was an immediate shut-down for me. I couldn’t even bring myself to think about that. It also became harder to find media that gave any queer relationships a platform. The Fosters, a show about a lesbian couple and their mixed family, was blocked and not to be consumed in our house. If any show had a prominent gay character, we weren’t allowed to watch it. At this time in my life I was a huge fan of the harry potter musicals, starring Darren Criss. He also happened to be in Glee, which was taking off in my school. When I asked my mother to let me watch Glee (only with her present of course, I was only 14), she asked me, “Is it because you’re a lesbian?” Baffled, I quickly responded no, but felt ill for the next few days. Did I want to watch Glee because it was popular and an actor I like was in it, or did I want to watch it because it had gay characters and felt drawn to them?

Somewhere around this time I became incredibly depressed. Nothing was actually being addressed in therapy, I still hated myself, and everything bad that happened seemed to be because of me. The night before my family found out if we could adopt my (now) brother, I was convinced they would sense I was somehow a rotten egg and that he didn’t deserve to grow up around my toxic self. Long story short: I ended up in the adolescent ward in a psychiatric hospital. The closest friend I made there killed herself the day I went back to school. It was a dark time. I still couldn’t bring myself to think about my sexuality.

For a few years things are kind of a blur. My mom and dad didn’t know how to parent me because every time they punished me I would hurt myself, in turn hurting them. At one point they not only took away my ipod (for reading fanfiction, of course), but every CD I owned. If I was very good that week, I was allowed one album to listen to for the next 7 days. I still can’t listen to All Time Low’s Nothing Personal and Fall Out Boy’s Infinity on High without feeling echoes of that despair.

At some point my parents accepted that going to church caused me so much physical distress that they stopped requiring me to go. We then became the family that only attends Easter and Christmas services. I’ve since learned from my brother that they “broke up” with our old church because the pastor was homophobic. I commend them for that now, but when I told my mom years ago about pastor Dave and his brother she told me “he’d never say something like that.” This is one of those instances where I know my parents have gotten better but I still think “what about me?” I know they had to learn somehow, but does that mean I can’t be sad for my younger self who always felt alone and afraid and needed her mom and dad on her side?

In the grand scheme of things, I shouldn’t have this much religious trauma. Almost everything I experience or have experienced has been internalized. And yet, I feel guilty and wrong whenever I’m around religious people, especially when I have to be in a church. I don’t know if or when that will ever go away. Maybe that’s just what happens when you’re gay.

It took me a long time to accept my sexuality, and to be honest, I still haven’t fully embraced it myself. I still wish I could be “normal” and straight. I wish I could give my parents that traditional wedding they dreamed of for me as I was growing up. The truth is that I will probably never get married, and I despise the fact that I can’t give that to my parents. I’ve come out to them twice now. The first when I was 17 and just got into my first relationship with a girl. It wasn’t a great time. When my girlfriend came to my house for pre-prom pictures, my dad wouldn’t even acknowledge her presence. We couldn’t do any couple poses (let alone post them) because what would my family think? I wasn’t allowed to tell my own brother who I was dating until months later he helped me shovel the snow and said “mom and dad told me you’re dating sophie, that’s cool.”

I never got the choice to come out to the rest of my extended family. For something as deeply personal as coming out, I was never offered that choice. I was told to lie, and not “cause a scene” if my aunts or uncles brought anything up. You can imagine the emotional toll that took on me to feel so othered and alone amongst my own flesh and blood. That was until my cousin outed me to my mom’s side of the family one Thanksgiving. I didn’t even know until my uncle told me he couldn’t support my “big life decision.” I thought he was talking about my choice of university until he started crying. I think my cousin did it out of love, and only wanted the rest of her family to be respectful to the “lesbian” in the family, but it hurt that I was never given the choice to tell them myself. We don’t talk about that night.

Once they knew about my attraction to girls, I felt as if I was walking on eggshells around my parents. The first time I cut my hair short, my father made it very clear that he preferred me with long, feminine hair. I tried to make up for it by dressing more feminine and wearing makeup. I can’t help but think about what they would have thought if I was more masculine-presenting. If I decided to forgo dresses and blouses completely and kept my hair short under a hat. Would my father have loved his daughter still if she wasn’t as feminine? I don’t think I’ll ever forget the idle comments about “Oh, I love that your hair is long enough to be in a ponytail again,” or “when will you grow your hair out again?” Granted, they still have their opinions about my appearance, but I’m an adult now and it doesn’t have that much of an effect on me as it used to.

In the two years it took me to change my label from bisexual to gay, my parents asked many times to confirm that I still liked boys, and that I might still end up in a relationship with one. When my very first relationship ended after over a year together, I cried alone. I was afraid to talk to my mom about my heartbreak because it wasn’t a boy that had caused it. After my first year in college I came to the conclusion that I never would date a man. I was even more terrified to tell my parents; to take away that last sliver of hope that their daughter could still one day marry a man. They took it better than the first time. I think my mom just said she didn’t want to be replaced as the most important woman in my life. I felt as if all of my fear and tears were for nothing.

Since the first time I watched Glee with my mother, I’ve slowly been introducing gay media and coming out stories to my parents. I still watch them alone before asking them to watch with me, but it’s nice to share some small part of my life with my parents. For a period of time we watched each other very closely when coming out scenes happened in movies or TV shows. They brought up how my coming out went. They never wanted me to be afraid, but the fact of the matter is that I was terrified. And it didn’t go the way I wanted it to. I wanted to feel safe and loved and unconditionally supported, and at the end of the day I didn’t.

My parents are making progress in their own ways. They’re talking to my brother about boys as well as girls (much to his amusement, he tells me), and they’re more open to “progressive” topics as a whole. They still don’t understand what I mean when I feel safe in a group of obviously gay people, more so than in a typically straight crowd. I’m slowly introducing my mother to my favorite parts of queer culture. Both of them are more open-minded than ever before. And I’m proud of them! I really am. But sometimes I still think of my teenage self, that scared little girl, and wish mom and dad had done better. I know they were doing their best at the time, but it still hurts to think about. We don’t talk about that much. You can’t change the past, so I try not to hold it against them. But sometimes it still hurts.

#this is so long #i'm treating this blog as my diary again lmao #pls skip u do not have to read but i feel like this needs to be here #personal #sidney.txt

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foreficfandom · 4 years

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Mystic Messenger - Domestic Disputes And Bad Habits (mysme x MC)

--- Zen ---

He hadn’t lived with anyone for years. After running away from home, he struggled with housing, sometimes couch surfing and sometimes he had legitimate leases. And when he lived with others, he was usually the ‘messy roommate’ because leaving home at a young age meant little opportunity to learn how to manage a living space.

Even now, his apartment is relatively clean largely by virtue of him not owning a lot of stuff. He doesn’t cook so no dishes to clean, he doesn’t own loose knick knacks to spread around.

When he housed you for a couple days prior to the first RFA party, he had quickly cleaned his apartment of empty beer cans and loose socks, which made it look like he was a man who kept a clean house. But unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and by the next afternoon you noticed random articles tossed over chairs and upon the floor.

That was fine when it was only his space, but when the two of you began living together, Zen quickly had to learn that it wasn’t acceptable to shed his clothing upon the floor all the time, especially when the laundry basket was right there. No, Zen, get your loose socks out of the couch cushions. Zen, stop piling up empty cigarette boxes on the nightstand. Zen, once you’ve unwrapped the sheet mask from its plastic envelope would it kill you to throw it away, instead of leaving it on the bathroom counter?

He’s consistent when it comes to chores like doing the laundry and taking out the trash. But asking him to hang up his jacket instead of letting it crumple in the corner? It’s like getting blood from a stone.

After a while, you finally get him to pick up after himself. “It’s our home, now,” you said. “Not just yours.” A promise that said he wasn’t alone, anymore. And he took it to heart.

--- Yoosung ---

It may seem like his depression-ruled lifestyle seemed to change overnight, but that wasn’t the case. Sure, he did regain a lot of his motivation and energy, but simply getting a new lease on life won’t overrule years of neglecting yourself.

You’d text him in preparation for a date, only to arrive and find out he hasn’t even left his bed since he replied with an ‘I’ll get ready!’ More than once your dates had to be rescheduled because Yoosung had been stuck in bed, or still in his pajamas on his desktop.

On the third time you voiced your complaints, Yoosung got a bit defensive. He couldn’t help it, it’s hard for him to maintain a tidy schedule after so long lacking the proper will.

It was a terse discussion. Your first couple fight, if you will. “Yoosung, are you sure you’re okay? You don’t want to seek professional help?” “No, MC, I’m fine. What could a counselor possibly help me with?”

It was Yoosung’s own initiative to finally google some nearby therapists during a particularly slow morning. He didn’t tell you he’d been seeing someone until four sessions in, since he struggles with the idea that he might need help. You hug him tightly and treat the both of you to tasty pastries at a cute bakery.

Yoosung took his therapy to heart. He started slow, working on self-affirming mindfulness and motivating himself to tidy his living space. Then he worked on his time management, which helped his schooling and energy both.

Within the year, both you and Yoosung saw progress. He felt better, which made his life better. More time to live. More time to spend with you.

--- Jaehee ---

Domestic arguments didn’t arise until you moved in with her. Before that point, Jaehee and you meshed so gracefully, it was damn near magical.

Even moving into her place and having to carry around heavy couches and unpack a million boxes didn’t dampen that honeymoon phase. You loved witnessing Jaehee’s hidden strength as she tugged your mattress down seven flights of stairs.

But within a week of living with her, you noticed that you and her ... clashed when it came to interior living. You kept using up the hot water before Jaehee could take a shower. She would misplace your possessions thoughtlessly. The both of you thought each other as messier.

It was like a new roommate situation. At first, the two of you tried to calmly talk these things out. But new issues would arise after the old ones were resolved. She didn’t like how you tossed your coat across the desk chair, or left the living room lamps on during the night.

“It’s my apartment, MC!” “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought being your co-owner at the cafe we co-manage meant my co-money go into our co-rent!”

Jaehee went to work in a huff, leaving you to your own devices. Alone in the apartment, you decided to do some regular chores, and as you rested for a minute you absorbed the living space - you could see Jaehee’s touch in ever corner, thoughtfully and carefully labored over. It really almost seemed like your mindless efforts were invading her space.

When Jaehee returned that evening, the two of you tried to apologize at the same time. “Oh, sorry, you go -” “No, you, sorry for interrupting -”

“It’s just ... MC, I want to apologize for treating you like a naughty guest. You’re my partner now and deserve more say in our home.”

You made up and eventually the apartment evolved into a true home between the two of you. A perfect representation of your love.

--- Jumin ---

The dude can be shockingly conservative. In the beginning, it only manifested in him being somewhat of a prude. “I wish you wouldn’t wear that particular dress to the social. You look more beautiful when you show less skin.” “... you mean you’d personally prefer I didn’t show much skin, right?” “Yes? What was wrong with my previous sentence?”

But sometimes he’d be watching the news and blurt out, “I’m not sure if marriage between two men should be recognized by law.” Which leads to you trying to convince him that he’s being very unethical.

He usually ends up saying something like, “I’m sorry, love, I’m rather uneducated when it comes to this issue,” and leave it at that. Because he’s not some right-wing jackass or anything, he just grew up in an isolated Christian family and never really got to socialize beyond that. So he never learned about viewpoints that challenged what he heard growing up.

It can be infuriating, though, especially with issues you’re concerned about. Because Jumin just kinda tries to compromise by taking a non-stance, since he just doesn’t have a strong opinion on things like reproductive rights or colonialism. It’s partially due to his sheltered background, and partially due to being raised to literally be conservative in his life dealings.

But after seeing you becoming more and more frustrated, he digs a little deeper and realizes that he’s kinda being an ass. Eventually he begins to say things like, “I think you’re right, MC. Demonizing drug abusers is antithesis to their recovery. They deserve sympathy instead.”

But a pleasant surprise is his appreciation for climate conservation. He likes to donate and fund green power initiatives because he believes in preserving the environment and preventing nature exploitation. You join his efforts, and he finally understands how important it is to have solidarity from your significant other.

--- Saeyoung/707 ---

Being merely twenty-three years old (not to mention his neglected upbringing) leads to some rocky relationship problems. His self-doubt and anxiety can go wild during his worse days, making him revert back to his colder personality and try to push you away once more.

It doesn’t manifest as just him ignoring you. His mind can make him do some really round-about sabotaging. One day, you open the kitchen cabinets to see it all the objects thrown within haphazardly. You confronted Saeyoung and it took hours before he coldly confessed that he was considering throwing away all your favorite foods, before realizing how fucked up that would be and quickly replacing it all again.

He knew it was his mother’s influence talking. And the thought made him sick.

Sometimes, you responded to his darker days with loving patience and lots of hugs while he allows himself to break down. Sometimes, you choose to distance yourself a bit. Either way, Saeyoung’s mood eventually evens out. The two of you talk at length about why he feels the way he does, and why he’s propelled to do these things. As time goes on, his dark moods pop up less and less.

On a lighter note, Saeyoung can be a pretty messy dude. Partly because of his underlying mental issues, partly because that’s the type of guy he is. He doesn’t shower as much as you like him to, and he tosses trash just ... everywhere. If his bunker wasn’t so big, the clutter he alone produces would bury you both. No wonder he needed a ‘maid’.

Yeah, it takes more than a few pushes to make him stop being a slob. He eventually owns up, but not without some effort. Everyone living in the house is grateful.

--- Saeran ---

It took many months before Saeran felt stable enough to start integrating into normal society, and even longer before his daily schedule began to stabilize beyond surprise breakdowns, spreads of bad days spent holed up, or horrible dips in moods.

Saeran would always live with dissociative identity disorder, and during the first few years it could get tough. Both ‘Suit’ and Ray would be triggered seemingly without warning, and sometimes last for days. Ray did anything he could to earn your affection, ‘Suit’ defected his fears by trying to provoke you.

Therapy and medication was an ongoing process. You and Saeran went through more than a couple of therapists before finding the ‘one’. Medications had to be tried then dropped because of side effects, or lack of effectiveness. There were long periods of months in-between where all he could do was hope this new treatment would be more effective than the last.

‘Suit’ once got particularly violent with you, not hitting but shaking you by the shoulders and screaming in your face, “Just say it!! You hate me ... you want to hurt me!!”

You found 'Suit’ later, crying and curled up in a corner. After long coaxing, he confessed that he was so afraid you were eventually going to hurt him, so he was pushing you to see if you’d do it.

And Ray’d do things like blow away all his saved up money to buy you gifts in a desperate show of affection. Just because the two of you were living in a safe, stable environment doesn’t mean old haunts wouldn’t pop up.

Saeran eventually got better and better. Looking back now, Saeran is so much happier. He never lets you forget your amazing influence on him. “Thank you for saving me, my love.”

--- Jihyun ---

He’s the perfect example of a loving boyfriend. After his two years spent in a therapeutic journey of self-discovery, he returned ready to be a reliable partner. And for the most part, he lived up to it, barring some moments where he accidentally gets sucked into bad memories.

Insomnia is the most common problem. Settling down to sleep means his mind gets easily swamped, and when he does manage to sleep he wakes up during the night and gets overwhelmed with memories once again. Some nights are worse than others.

He tries not to get up from the bed to avoid waking you too, but you eventually develop a second sense for his insomnia spells and you can feel it when he’s struggling. Then he feels bad that he’s affecting you this way.

See, that’s his problem that he can’t resolve on his own. He thinks of his problems as obstacles that bother others, and not the obstacles themselves. This prevents him from finding ways to truly resolve them.

“I’m sorry, MC. Go back to sleep.” “... Jihyun, how many nights has it been since you’ve slept properly?” He measures it by the nights you’ve been kept awake too, and you stop him there.

“Don’t you see? It’s not about me. Think about your own health.”

And that’s not easy for him. He had obsessed over being a figure that offers unconditional love for so long, it’s hard to shed it. He thinks of his mother and his eyes grow wet.

He and you find a relationship therapist, and it helps a lot. Jihyun’s two years of self-discovery did wonders for his mood, but it took a bit of professional aid to really unravel the really complicated stuff.

He feels his state of thinking shift gradually, and it makes his life less cloudy, less stuck in those bad memories and regrets. Instead, he goes to sleep every night thinking about how much he loves you and his family. His heart falls asleep feeling light instead of heavy.

#mystic messenger #mysme #mystic messenger imagines #mysme zen #Yoosung Kim #jaehee kang #jumin han #saeyoung choi #saeran choi #jihyun kim #domestic violence tw #angst #angst and fluff #abuse tw

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conaionaru · 4 years

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Honor and Blood (Ivar the Boneless)

You are my everything

Synopsis: Some pregnancy fluff, cute Ivar and good future grandma Aslaug.

Warnings: fluff, angst, cute Ivar

Tags

@youbloodymadgenius @shannygoatgruff @xbellaxcarolinax @heavenly1927 @queenbeeta @lol-haha-joke @didiintheblog

P.S. Everything in cursive is in Old Norse. Flashback are in bold and cursive.

I don’t own the gifs. Also, thank you for your support. I really appreciate it.

Vanya walked the streets with Aslaug by her side, as Brynja was off today cause her father grew sick. The two women walked by the forge where Ivar hammered steel and watched them pass by. Aslaug chuckled at his antics and apologized on his behalf. Vanya liked this side of Aslaug.

Mostly when she saw the Queen, she had a cup in hand or asked her intrusive questions. But ever since her belly grew bigger, Aslaug held back on the alcohol. She spent more time with Vanya and shared tales from her own pregnancies. The Queen of Kattegat also told her of Ragnar. Vanya decided she wasn't that fond of the man who left his infant son in the woods to die. What kind of monster would do that? He didn't raise any of his sons properly; Bjorn left with his mother, and Ragnar abandoned his other sons. Vanya may not know his motives or him, but she felt for the Ragnarssons.

"When you are more along, we can find out if it will be a girl or boy. Or do you want it to be a surprise?" Aslaug questioned curiously, looking down at the cheerful redhead.

Vanya pursed her lips in thought before smiling. "I think I want it to be a surprise. Did you know they would be all boys?"

Aslaug nodded, seeing Hvitserk walking with Ubbe while stuffing his face till he looked like a squirrel. Ubbe shook his head at his brother's antics and lightly his him over his head, and Hvitserk hit him back. "The Seer told Ragnar he would have many sons, and they told me I would bear them. I would have like a daughter too, but the gods didn't grant me that. But now I have you, Love."

Vanya smiled proudly at the praise, feeling like she finally belonged somewhere. The Queen was more of a mother than Siflæd ever was, the Ragnarssons were like brothers to her who teased and supported her, and Helga and Floki were like an uncle and aunt. The people loved and greeted her every time they saw her, congratulating her on her baby and wishing her luck. Vanya found a home.

A child ran up to the two and held up a bunch of flowers for Vanya. The ginger beamed at the little girl and carefully took the flowers from her. "Thank you very much, Selby. They are beautiful. How are you?" She slowly crouched down to the girl's height as the cute three-year-old told her how they played at the beach, and she fell into the water. Vanya laughed at the girl's expressions and hand motions before the other children run to them too.

"Princess!" They screamed happily, asking her if the baby was ok if it kicked and if it would look like her or Ivar. "I hope it will be kissed by fire like you. I like red hair!" Vanya agreed with the seven-year-old boy with a wooden sword thinking of little Ivar's with red hair. It was a funny sight, indeed.

The children felt afterward, and Aslaug helped Vanya stand, smirking at the lively Princess. "You are already great with children. You will be a good mother, no problem."

They continued on their walk, walking by the shore in silence, both content with the calm atmosphere. "I would like to visit some farmers soon, thank them for all their hard work. Brynja mentioned a few farmers were having trouble with crops; I would like to see them and help them if needed."

"It is still baffling to me how much you interact with the people. Your King and Queens are not known for their kindness. At least not here." Aslaug's voice was so flat and calm; it surprised Vanya.

"That is true, not many care about anything but the crown. But were are not in England. Here you don't sit on a throne and look down on them. You are amongst them, see them, hear them. It is only right we help them, show them we are not so different, and I am hoping it will make them forget I was a Christian once." Vanya confessed embarrassed about the last bit. She wanted to fit in with the Northmen, not be a foreigner who they have to respect cause she married their prince.

Aslaug chuckled at the confession and took Vanya's hand in hers. "I came here pregnant while Ragnar was still married to Lagertha. She left, and Ragnar married me to legitimize Ubbe and all our other sons. I was a foreign Princess with nothing but a child in my belly, and yet, now I am the Queen of the trading center of Norway. You may be a foreign Princess, but that will change one day. The Gods always smile on brave women."

Vanya's smile was one of joy and pride; even her eyes reflected her emotions, exposing them for all to see. Aslaug was right, back home, Vanya was just a sheltered sister to the King; here she could be amongst the people, help them, find a place in the world for herself. Vanya wouldn't remain a foreigner for long; she could feel it in her bones.

The Princess returned to her chamber when the moon was high up in the sky, and one could hardly see in front of them. She and Aslaug got carried away talking and forgot to return sooner. They spoke of Aslaug's home, Götaland, of Harbard, who took away Ivar's pain and the Ragnarssons childhoods. Vanya told her about her father, negligent mother, cruel brother, and all he put her through. They comforted each other till the sun went down, and the winds grew colder.

Ivar sat at the table with his back to her, pouring a cup of mead to calm his nerves with his missing mother and wife. Vanya crept up to him and put her hands around his neck, startling him. "What are you doing?" He asked his shoulders tense coldly.

"My hands are cold." Vanya whined, grinning cheekily at his discomfort.

"I can feel that." Ivar pulled Vanya's hands away and sent her to sit down on her chair near the fire. He took her small hands into his and rubbed them hoping to warm them up faster. "How was your walk with mother?"

Vanya gave him a smile that just seems so genuinely sweet with just the right touch of shyness that unexpected warmth rushes through him. He loved whenever she smiled at him, especially if she smiled because of him. It made him feel loved. "She is a great woman. A little bit pushy, but at least I know where you get it from."

"I am not pushy." He grumbled, pouting as Vanya giggled at his expression.

"Of course not." The ginger teased, standing up from the chair and walking to the bed. Ivar watched her go, putting his cup down he followed her. He untied his legs and took off his shirt while Vanya changed into a nightgown. It was no wonder that she got cold; her dress was warm. It was pink with long white sleeves and a belt tied around her waist. He complained about the last part this morning, but his mother reassured him it didn't matter. She said the babe would be fine.

Yet Ivar still feared for the babe, what if something happened? What if Vanya lost it? Or worse, what if it was born like him? He didn't want his son or daughter to know what the life of a cripple might be like. The laughter, the loneliness, the hate you feel towards yourself. Ivar's child should be healthy, run, and play with the other children, like Ivar himself never could. So he worried, not only for the child but for Vanya herself. Aslaug was in incredible pain giving birth to him; he was the worst of the pregnancies and births she had. He didn't wish that kind of pain upon his wife. What if she didn't survive that kind of pain, bled too much, and lost her life? He couldn't carry on without her. Ivar depended upon her love, touch, smiles; he couldn't lose either of them.

A hand on his cheek snapped him out of his thoughts; his wife stood before him in a white spotted nightgown, looking worried. "I am fine. Get in bed, let's warm you two up." So Vanya slowly crawled into bed, her back against the headboard. She moved awkwardly, not used to the growing bump. Her back and breast ached sometimes, but at least she no longer vomited, which she was very happy about. His loving wife had a way of finding the silver lining within everything, no matter what, everything had a bright side.

She put her hand on her belly and smiled at Ivar with her brows furrowed. "Come feel." The ginger whispered, pulling his hand towards her stomach. Ivar's shaky hand moved over the bump as the babe moved, while Vanya watched his face. His mouth twitched, and she was pretty sure he was fighting a smile.

"It's so exciting, Aslaug said it will kick next month." She beamed her hand on top of his caressing one. He looked so content sitting there next to her, feeling the life they created together move inside her. He allowed the smile to be visible, or maybe he wasn't even aware that he was smiling at all. Vanya watched him in his content state; he looked so at peace, relaxed, and calm. Her own eyes were dropping sleepily, so she laid down and fell asleep.

Ivar couldn't sleep just yet. The babe still moved inside, and he couldn't help but feel it move. It reassured him their child was alive and alright. "You will be glorious, my child. I can feel it. You better take after your mother, her smile, her mind, and heart." He laid his head next to Vanya's stomach and watched the bump as the child stilled.

"No one will hurt either of you. You are safe here, with your family. You will be loved and protected, like no other child in history." He laid his forehead against his sleeping wife's belly and closed his eyes. "You and your mother are my everything. All I have and all I am is yours."

A hand tangled itself into his hair as he sobs shook his body. "I love you, Ivar Ragnarsson." The sixteen-year-old Viking looked up at his smiling wife, who also held tears in her eyes. He crawled up to her side and connected their lips in a sweet kiss. They rest their foreheads against each other, looking into their eyes. A sea at storm meets the sky in the spring. One corner of Vanya's lips lifts as Ivar whispers the words back to her with sincerity and vulnerability. She snorts out a laugh that Ivar mirrors. It took four months, but they finally know the truth. They love each other, and nothing can or will change that. Not Sigurd, not Silas, not their faith or anybody. They are both whole.

#vikings #ivar the boneless #ivar lothbrok #ivar x oc #original character #original female character

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nataliesnews · 3 years

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Riots, demonstration in Kikar Zion, siren 12.5.2021

Netanyahu is no fool….he is very very clever and many of us had a suspicion of what he was leading up to. I would not be surprised if he calls a state of emergency and continues with his vicious policy of not caring for the county but doing his best to keep himself, his mentally ill wife and son out of jail. Sara Netanyahu once said she did not care if the country burned…and they have succeeded in bringing us to that pass. The first picture is a quote of hers from 2002…… “We will go overseas and the country can burn” and the second a cartoon saying “I said we would leave for overseas and then the country can burn….NOT BEFORE”

This is a horrible morning. I am trying to put my thoughts into place. The whole country is burning. Tel Aviv. Suddenly after all the years of the south suffering and as they say, they were invisible it has become serious. I doubt that in Jerusalem there will be many more rockets. Maybe because of the holy places, Christian and Moslem, maybe because of the large Palestinian community. I feel guilty as I sit here quietly writing.

Netanyahu has done a good job of seeing the Israel on fire. Closing the steps at the Damascus gate …so obvious it would lead to troubles. He knew that he only had to give a small push and with his friend the minister of police everything would develop as it suited him. The news media has also been given its instructions and except for Ha’aretz no other paper mentions what is happening on the other side. Today a comment was passed which many people probably did not hear or take in. That the army would target high rise buildings……in which many families live. The army gave messages for people to evacuate……where were they supposed to go and how many of them actually got the message as we have taken care to destroy much of their communication.

Sunday I did not feel well and it was a furnace outside. Since the episode where I had memory loss and then straight after that had a cold ….many people here dafke in summer are also sick with colds….I feel a lack of desire to do anything. So I only went to the shiva for Cecelia in the evening. My Spanish teacher. I doubt I will go on trying to learn Spanish. I feel as if something has gone out of me. I had a special relationship with her and she was also my friend. I cannot imagine another teacher or a group. And at the shiva it seems that many of her other students felt the same. And every day I hear from someone else who had studied with her.

Monday I went out with Tag Maier to distribute flowers in the Old City to Palestinians. It was a difficult today because seldom do Ramadan and Jerusalem Day coincide.

But this is no united city. So divided, Right and left, Palestians, Jews, Hareidi Jews, …united? And yesterday the schism was even clearer. The religious youth took over the city and their arrogance was unbearable. Some of our members gave flowers to them and when I asked one why she had done so, she said she had many interesting exchanges with some of them who did not even know what we were doing or why. But I saw some of them throwing the flowers into the rubbish bins. No Palestinian refused us and accepted with a smile.

In the evening I went to my Arabic lesson. I get a lift with Gershon and Edna Baskin and we had just sat down when we heard a siren. It was faint at first and we looked at one another in bewilderment. Then we heard three loud bangs and realized it was serious. I wondered what was happening in Nofim. I wondered how all these people here, many of whom are less mobile and quick than I am even on the sticks would get down to a shelter. Later I saw the post that one should look for a safe place in your flat as there is very little time between the siren and the fall. So that question is where. My bedroom ….the glass door is next to the bed. The lounge….the windows again. The bathroom….the mirror and the tiles. The corridor is maybe the safest but there are all the painting and photographs in glass. I think the best place for me is next to my door and to put a blanket over myself. I am just sorry for the really old and incapacitated with their carers. We spent the lesson learning all the words necessary for such an occasion. We came home to a quiet night and then all hell broke through. Later: My cleaning lady said I should go and sit on the steps between one floor and another.

Coming back there was an amusing incident. As I got out of the car I saw two girls putting coke tins next to the rubbish and I told them to give them to me. I explained to them what it was for and then the one girl said to me, “Are you from Balfour? Were you at Sheik Jarrar.” And again I know you have all been writing to me to stay home but when two teenagers tell me that they look up to me and for them it is important to see me at these places what can I say? Truly I don’t think I am in any danger. I keep to the sides or anything going on and I doubt that even our violent police would attack an old woman. But whom I am scared of is groups like Lahava or those yesterday on the march of the religious. I feel the hatred around us as I did last night with people calling us haters of Israel and traitors and bitches who fuck Arabs.

Yesterday I went to the doctor as the time has come to deal with a hearing problem I have and then to the DCO which was very quiet. There is a young soldier there who has been very sympathetic towards us and is now being transferred. He brought his replacement out and this I do not put in my report. Nadav says that when he leave the army he will join Breaking the Silence. He said that his replacement is a good fellow so we are hoping that we will have the same relationship with him.

I came home and then went to a play. “The Comedians.” It was very funny but I laughed looking at the audience as it was so appropriate for many of us. From a play by Neil Simon about two once famous comedians who are now uber bottled. When I went out I asked three people to tell the organizer of the transport that I would not be joining them. Later she phoned in anger to ask why I was not on the bus!!! It was so appropriate. I had sat down to phone a friend and when I got up to leave the theatre which was by then pretty deserted I saw a really old lady with her carer sitting outside looking desperate. It turned out that the theatre had ordered a taxi for them and another couple had jumped in and taken it. Being the celebration of Id Il Fitir there were few Arab taxis and they are a large part of the taxis in Jerusalem. In the end I stayed with them until I managed to stop a taxi and put them on the way home. I gave them the number of Gett taxi which is more reliable.

I walked down to the city and stopped at Balfour where some of the stalwarts were sitting. The demonstration at Kikar Zion started off with few people but soon grew. There was no talk of a march but then people did start walking down the main street and also on the tracks of the light train. I did not think that that was a good idea and walked along with them but on the pavement. The police arrived but did nothing. Then we came to Kikar Zion, to the square, where we gathered and in no way were we disturbing pedestrians, the train or anything else. Then the police decided to attack. I think because where we were walking before there were passers by and wanted it to be where they had us to themselves. First of all they started pushing people back but then we saw that they had brought in the dogs and what dogs. Their trainers could hardly control them and the dogs also started fighting amongst themselves. You can understand how dangerous they were. They were real killers. I have no photographs as everything was very volatile there and I did not want to put my sticks down. They also tried to sic them on to some people. Then they came with the horses….enormous . You have no idea. My question is why when we were obstructing traffic did they do nothing but attack us when we were not bothering anyone else.

In the meantime Lahava and the other young fascists had started screaming at us…the police kept us separated but when the police managed to drive us off they left them celebrating in the square.

I always stand to the back at such times but Eitemar who has stood with us at our demonstrations at Nofim refused to leave me and when one of the policemen seemed to be heading straight for us called to him and said that he was standing with me. He is one of those who is very watchful for me but I tell them to go and do their own thing as I do not want to be a drag on anyone. Last night I yelled at them and said that for 81 years I had been looking out for myself and I could still do so. But when the shunk came we were all away.

Natalie

#Riots demonstration in Kikar Zion siren 12.5.2021

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zelvyth · 4 years

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From a very young age it was reinforced that my ADHD was a disability I was meant to overcome rather than a tool I could use to better myself. I didn’t even know that I had been diagnosed, and that my mother had chosen not to medicate me, until I was partway through highschool. By that point I had already begun to give up on ever truly “making it” in life. The hurdles I needed to overcome had demoralized me to the point of near total apathy. Between my sexuality and early coming out in a small town highschool, and my various mental health problems, I felt like no one in the world saw things from my point of view. The last blow to my self esteem came when my grade 12 english teacher, the true decider of fate to any young person, told me my final thesis on Lady Macbeth being one of the greatest example of the flaws in Machiavelli’s “The Prince” was brilliant, but due to formatting and scattered grammar issues, she could give me no higher than a 60%. After years of getting consistent high 90’s in my english classes as well as other subjects, I had failed this extremely crucial essay due to the idiosyncrasies of the most frustrating language known to humankind. I passed that class with a 68, and felt like my fate was sealed. No chance at getting into any University in the country without redoing 5 months of work because one person believed that following the rules was a more important indication of intelligence than original ideas and the ability to make an argument. It crushed me. I admit that I didn’t put in the effort, but I had spent my entire life being told I was incredibly intelligent. It was the one thing I held onto. I felt betrayed by the education system. Though it was also due to many other factors at the time, this contributed to the second of my four suicide attempts. Today, I reject that philosophy.

When a person with ADHD is thinking, they connect ideas in their heads much faster than the average person. It can be confusing and disorienting to the people around them. I constantly have to explain how I got from point A to point B because the points connect automatically in my head. It’s exhausting, so I frequently do not bother to try. It’s extremely helpful when crafting an argument, however it can be debilitating in many aspects of modern life. Things the average person doesn’t think about, can be crippling for me. Without a true passion towards something, my ability to focus becomes hazy and my thoughts become scattered. I spend the majority of the day stuck in my head having conversations with myself instead of doing “normal” things with my time. I have spent my life being told that ADHD is my weakness, today I can tell you with the utmost certainty that it is my greatest strength.

When the international pandemic of the respiratory disease “Covid-19” truly began and the world went into full nationwide lockdown, the bistro that I had, for the most part, happily been employed at shut down. After 8 years of honing my culinary craft certain that my skills, though undervalued, would always be needed somewhere, I was out of a job. Indefinitely. So was most of the country that worked with their hands or, in some capacity, physically with other people. Unless you were able to conduct business through zoom conferences or were a suddenly “essential” employee like a fast food worker, you were left with little to do but sit and think or try desperately to distract yourself from the increasingly troubling world around you. Luckily, to my surprise, the conservative government had pledged to keep us all fed and watered as best they could. What deeply worried me was the knowledge that my friends south of the border, through no fault of their own, and already mostly furious with their government, were not being treated with the same bare minimum of respect. I knew it was a recipe for true disaster and widespread civil unrest as early as march.

I watched while the culture of social media, at least from my own lgbt bias, slowly started to shift and I picked up a lot of the big picture through memes and personally shared anecdotes. Celebrities were being ripped apart as they tried to get our attention again from their huge mansions while people sat at home worried about how to feed their children. Using insensitive phrasing like “we’re all in this together” when they undeniably weren’t. It quickly became a social caste system. The desperately poor trying to creatively make money any way they could. The often needlessly endangered. And the upper class for whom, little had changed besides the inability to do whatever they want at any given time. The lines were very clearly drawn. While the rich bemoaned their accessibility to haircuts, the poor argued with landlords about rent. All the while another group was frequently paid minimum wage to work on the proverbial front lines; flipping hamburgers, being yelled at by the rich because you were out of everything with the supply chain so damaged, or literally saving peoples lives. The anger and frustration quickly took over nearly every form of social media. Subtly, but day by day it grew. There was only so much one could do from inside their apartments, and globally, the havenots found solace and comfort with one another. The narratives of meme culture, which had matured and specialized far beyond the early days of “lolcats” and “trollface” comics, became almost exclusively about mocking the rich and their inability to deal with slight inconveniences.

Nearly every month of 2020 was a new major nationwide crisis and people had little else to do but talk about it or ignore it. The year kicked off with serious threat of a third world war because Donald Trump was tweeting intentionally inflammatory remarks towards the fascist leader of North Korea. All while nearly the entire country of Australia was ravaged by forest/bush fire. January saw a clearly corrupt president unbelievably not be impeached. Sparking outrage among, in my humble opinion, any sane individual. This also exposed, to anyone who knew all the facts, that the systems to hold those in power accountable was clearly broken and corruptible. Towards the end of January, beloved basketball player Kobe Bryant died in a horrible helicopter accident involving his daughter. Late February leading into early March was when global fears over Coronavirus began to be taken extremely seriously by every government in the world, the exception being the United States and the Trump administration. By late April, the country had over a hundred thousand dead, and nearly a quarter of its population out of a job. The irony of this, is that the calls to reopen the country didn’t come from those that had lost their jobs, but the upper class that had grown restless deprived from their usual comforts. Meanwhile we openly mocked them on instagram, tumblr, and twitter. Trying desperately to make light of a horrible situation and bring at least a little levity to their lives. News that a new breed of dangerously fatal hornets had migrated to North America was derided as a filler episode. One of my personal favourite takes on the year as a whole so far was a comparison to the four horseman of the apocalypse. January representing War, February representing Pestilence, March representing Famine, and April representing Death. In fact a lot of meme culture started to take on an extremely apocalyptic vibe. The message for many was clear, and depressing.

Then things started to happen really fast, so fast that for many it would make your head spin looking at it from the outside. It began with a video featuring a white Canadian woman from Waterloo named Amy Cooper that went viral across the globe. In the Ramble area of Central Park in NYC, this woman was filmed by a clearly peaceful, yet insistent, black man named Christian Cooper, no relation, asking her to leash her dog. This is a bylaw of the area. The woman refused and began to become very distressed, roughly handling her dog by the collar. She started dailing 911 and accused the man of assaulting her to the dispatcher. What many understood about this act, and rightfully called her out in outrage over, is that she was using her knowledge of how police handle black people in America to threaten this mans life over leashing her dog. She has been fired, and the shelter has taken her dog back.

Two days later, as I was travelling to my family’s cottage to “get away from it all and unplug”, a friend sent me a snapchat video from Minneapolis. It was on fire. I immediately did everything I could to try to find out what had happened. That, is when I saw the video of 8 minutes and 46 seconds of a police officer with his knee on the neck of another human being. This did not shock, nor suprise me. I had followed the many accounts of police killing people on video since 2014 when I was 16. When the Ferguson protests over Michael Brown’s killing by police officers were broadcast over most of the developed world. I had seen little change, despite Barrack Obama being President. This continued to happen for the next 6 years, though there were no more protests. Some of the people of those original protests that started the Black Lives Matter Movement, went missing over the next several years. Mainly those that had been photographed.

George Floyd’s death, I feel, was the straw that broke the camels’ back. Which is how anyone who has personally experienced police mistreatment and injustice would understand watching that video. A societal contract had been broken. And Minneapolis started to burn down the city that would let this happen to their friend, their neighbour, their father, their brother, and most importantly, their son. The words that chilled me to my very core… And continue to make me cry when I think about. Continue to make me want to punch every cop I run into.The words that have caused me to continue having this argument every day with everyone I know. The words that make me want to scream and rage and burn that country to the ground…. “Mama”

In his dying breaths this man called out to his mother. Who had died 2 years earlier. Who could not come save him. The police officer casually, with his hands in his pockets, knowing he could get away with it, murdered that man while he called out for his dead mother. Suffocated him to death in the middle of a global pandemic driven by respiratory disease. If I had been in Minneapolis that night, I would have helped burn it to the ground.

Something I didn’t expect happened then. Something I didn’t expect when I saw the fires and the rage from mostly black citizens of the city. As I watched Fox News try to turn the story into a conversation about rioting and looting rather than Police accountability. Other peaceful protests started up in other cities. My entire social media feed from multiple sources was filled with people discussing their anger and vowing to protest it. I don’t like to admit that I didn’t see this coming. But on May 26th, as I ravenously tried to keep up from the comfort of a cottage on Crystal Lake Ontario, a spark of hope for humanity that I had lost a long time ago started to ignite.

Something interesting happens when you get most of your information from social media. It either makes you hyper critical of everything you’re told and willing to research anything important, or it makes you willing to believe anything your friends tell you. As the protests kicked off in major cities across America, after months of inactivity, my ADHD kicked into high gear. I used every neuron of my brain power to follow the protests from as many different angles as I could. Most importantly, I followed the story from the people who were at them. That’s what growing up in modern society makes you do. After months if not years if not decades of being lied to for personal gain constantly. It makes you pay attention to the people who have nothing to gain.

I got back to my appartment from my cottage a day later, still glued to my phone. Barely talking, barely eating, barely sleeping. I watched police officers in riot gear throw tear gas into peaceful protests in every city in America. Tear gas, by the way, is an international war crime in combat situations. I watched media with an implicitly right wing bias condemn the protests. Convincing people that looting was worth a war crime. I watched it work. It worked with my own father. It did not work for me. I watched the news from political biases of both sides but took most of it with a grain of salt. That’s what I had been taught to do from as young as 14 by the world I grew up in. The news could give me general information. However, the story was on the ground and I knew from experience that people would try to bury it so I had to watch it as quickly as possible. I watched friends of mine in the states get tear gassed and beaten while exercising their first amendment rights. I watched the news condemn the protests. I was horrified. I watched the peaceful protesters of police brutality in New York get beaten and gassed from a minimum of 30 different perspectives of the people I knew and trusted, and those I didn’t. I watched the peaceful protestors in LA get beaten and gassed from the same amount of perspectives. I watched them throw flash bombs and shoot rubber coated bullets into the faces of my friends in every city in America. I watched the President of the United States order the peaceful protestors in front of the White House to be beaten and gassed so he could have an awkward photo-op with a fucking bible. I watched this for a week straight from every angle available. Day in and day out. Every hour I was conscious, I watched fascism try to grab power in in every city in America. I watched people in powerful positions deny it.

It wasn’t just paying attention to the protests and the news of them explicitly. I wasn’t just filled with horror. I was also watching something wonderfully unexpected happen. I watched my black friends, my gay friends, my asain friends, and my intelligent friends, begin to weaponize social media. I watched them beg all of their friends to do the same. So did I, even though I felt like there wasn’t anything I could really do from cozy liberal Waterloo. I watched us all turn the algorithms against the people who made them. I did everything I could to make sure you couldn’t turn away. I told my gay white friends condemning the actions of protestors that his rights came from a riot. I watched them shrink in fear of my voice. My father told me I was getting caught up in left wing rhetoric. I tore his arguments to shreds. He told me broad angry statements don’t do anything. I told him broad angry statements create the conversation we’re having. Resistance is a highway with many lanes, and I knew my lane.

You grow up, especially in my age, especially when you’re gay, especially when you are exposed to a lifetime of stories of rebellion against tyranny, hearing about the power of resistance. As I marched in Waterloo with over thirty thousand people I didn’t know, I realized that I have never truly understood that power. How it surges through your body like electricity as you scream until your voice is hoarse. It’s a high better than any drug known to man, than any pride parade where I was pandered to by corporations for hours. It took my fear, and my anger, and my helplessness and turned it into raw power exploding from my body. I continued to watch people I knew deny reality.

The protests grew. They spread across the world like wildfire. I went to facebook, a place I avoid because I don’t agree with the majority of people on it, and told anyone who would listen to me that this is what Pride means. What it truly means to be proud of your community. Not a rainbow flag in a store window, not a corporation asking you to buy it’s rainbow backpack. But turning apathy in face of evil into raw unbridled electricity. I watched the protests spread to Montreal and Toronto, I watched the police mishandle things there too. I watched violence perpetuated by the state against my friends, people I’ve known for years. The power I felt merely grew. It grew with every flash grenade and bullet and tear gas canister shot at my friends. It will not subside till this is over or until I die. I’m going to spend the next decade giving up the comfortable life of good food, great drinks, and fantastic company that I found in the restaurant industry. I’m going to spend a decade getting my Law degree to fight for every last one of us in the courtroom because that is a place I can make it count.

Today is June 8th of the year 2020 and I began writing this piece at Noon, it is now 4:11 P.M. I have done zero editing and I refuse to. I submit this as my revised final essay. I want to know when you got behind the protests. Because if it was as you were reading this, I deem you unworthy to judge my critical thinking skills. If it was yesterday I think you should be ashamed of yourself. I was with them from hour one. You should have been too. How dare you spend years teaching children about racism and oppression. How dare you tell me that I’m not worthy of higher education in any form. Telling children that wikipedia is unreliable as a source is idiotic, it’s one of the most peer reviewed encyclopedia’s to ever exist. How dare you tell me and the young adults you teach that you don’t give out scores higher than ninety percent. What is the point of forcing teenagers to write in cursive. Why must I live the experiences you write about in your precious properly formatted essays. In this country a 68 is two percent shy of getting into any University. It’s sentencing an intelligent person with an array of disabilities a life of believing they have no power. Despite my own mistakes at the time and the amount I have grown as a person since, I will hold you personally accountable for that.

As a closing statement, to every English teacher in this province, no, to every English teacher in the great country of Canada. Think very hard about when exactly you put your full support behind this movement. Because your curriculum is outdated, and absolutely useless in the real world. And your racism is showing.

Post Script.

There is no bibliography of unbiased sources because all sources are biased. You have a supercomputer in your pocket and this should all be public information. Look it up.

#blm #nojusticenopeace #adhd #adhd brain #protests #canada #manic

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khiphop-stories · 5 years

Text

Getting Off The Wrong Foot

[Christian Yu | Chapter VII]

You were one of the first people to arrive at the filming site. It was an outdoor location today, but the weather looked awful. According to the weather report it was supposed to be sunny day with no precipitation. But in reality, it was the exact opposite. Thick grey clouds hung over the rooftops, darkening the sky. You could hardly even see any blue and only a few rays of sunlight streamed through the cracks in the cloud layer. As you looked up the sky, you felt a single rain drop fall on top your forehead. You knew it was only a matter of time it started pouring down the sky.

As if your hand moved on its own, it dived into your bag and fished out your phone. You quickly made a few calls, informing the staff that the shoot was cancelled until further notice and asked them to spread the word. You also sent home the crew members that were already at the filming site. The only ones left to call was Christian and his team. You dreaded this moment. After what had happened yesterday, you didn’t have the confidence to talk to him. But in the end it didn’t matter what you wanted to do or didn’t want to do, you had to keep up your professionalism. You couldn’t just stop working with someone because you had some differences. If that were the case you would already be unemployed. You called their manager’s number first, hoping you would be able to avoid directly talking to Christian. It was a cowardish move, but you didn’t care. Joo Won was friendly and understanding. He assured you he would let the others know.

Just a few minutes later you received an incoming call from Joo Won again. “Hey Minhee, I can’t reach Christian. He’s probably still driving that’s why he’s not picking up. He left early, so he should be there soon.“

“Ok, I’ll wait for him and tell him myself then. Thanks, Joo Won.“

Well, your plan to avoid him as long as possible was just flushed down toilet.

~*~

Christian arrived shortly after the call. He let his eyes wander around the location, before they rested on you. Since he didn’t see any staff members nor any props around, he already guessed it.

“Shoot’s cancelled, huh?“

“Yeah, the weather’s too bad. I don’t think we can shoot under this condition and it’ll probably start raining soon.“

Just as if the rain was waiting for you cue, it started pouring it that very moment. Without exchanging further words, you both quickly looked for shelter under a building.

The awkward silence that surrounded the two of you was killing you. It made you even more uncomfortable than you felt before, if that was even possible.

“Christian…,” you decided to break the silence. It wasn’t going to work this way. You wouldn’t be able to work together if there was still this awkwardness lingering between you. He turned his attention away from the sky and looked at you, his eyebrows cocked up.

“Look, I’m sorry—“

“You don’t have to apologize...not for his bevahior,“ he quickly cut you off, the frown on his face easing up and the corner of his lips raised to a smile. You blinked your eyes at him in confusion, not understanding where the sudden change was coming from. What he was saying now wasn’t making any sense, considering how the last conversation you had with him ended.

“Bu you were really angry yesterday...“ “I was angry,“ he admitted with a nod, yet his voice was tender, not an even ounce of animosity could be found. “But not at you. I was just mad that we lost the deal and I lashed out at you.“

“But it kinda was my fau—“

“No, it wasn’t. I overreacted.“

“But maybe you were right. I blamed it all on Kiseok, but maybe the problem was me all along? Maybe I sucked at being the girlfriend and that’s why he cheated on me. Maybe I deserved it.“

The expression on Christian’s face turned serious. His gaze pierced through you and he spoke slowly as though you were having a hard time understanding him.

“You are not responsible for the way he acts. Don’t even think for a second it’s your fault. I said stupid things yesterday because I was angry. I didn’t mean it.“

You remained silent for a while, letting his words sink in. You replayed everything that had happened the past few months, trying to understand where things went wrong.

“Min,“ he called you softly, pulling you back to reality.

“It just doesn’t make sense,“ you shook your head. You were so deep in thoughts, you didn’t even notice how your vision had slowly blurred as tears shot into your eyes.

“Come here.“ Christian reached out and gently pulled you into his embrace. He wrapped his arms around your shoulders and pulled you close, rubbing your back comfortingly. The feel of his body so close to yours soothed you more than you had expected.

“I’m sorry,“ you mumbled into his chest. “I don’t know why I always break down in front of you.” You exhaled slowly, trying your best to calm yourself. You weren’t usually that emotional. You were the type of person who wouldn’t even shed a tear during the most emotional scenes in movies. But lately, all you did was having emotional breakdowns, most of them in front of Christian.

“It’s ok, I don’t mind,“ he chuckled softy as he ran his fingers through your hair. He must have thought you were a pathetic crybaby, but there was something about him that made you feel so reassured, that you didn’t have to be ashamed of your feelings and that you didn’t have to hide them in front of him. “You must think I’m a huge mess,” you let out an embarrassed chuckle. “Yeah...well, but we all are in some way or another.“ His words were comforting to hear. When he noticed that you had somewhat calmed down, he released you from his hug.

“Did you already have breakfast?“ He asked you out of the blue. You shook your head in response

„Let’s grab something to eat then.“

~*~

[Time leap]

“I got the pictures from the shoot,“ you told him as you were waiting for your orders.

“How did they turn out?“ He asked you excitedly, his full attention on you. You liked his enthusiasm, it seemed as though he was just as excited as you about all the good things that were happening to you. But it wasn’t that fake interest people always showed you, he seemed to be genuinely happy for you. “Well, I barely recognize myself with all the photoshop, but they look good...just not like me,“ you joked with a chuckle. You took your phone that was lying on the table into your hands and scrolled through your photos to show him the pictures. “They want me to choose some, but they kinda look all the same to me. I might need a professional pair of eyes.“

“Show me,“ he held his hand out. You gave him your phone and watched him quietly as he looked through the pictures. You grew a bit nervous as he wasn’t commenting on any of the pictures. You expected him to at least make fun of you a little bit.

“I would have done it differently,“ he remarked, his eyes still fixed on the screen of your phone.

“How?“ You asked while you were preparing yourself for all the criticism that would probably be coming your way. But instead of criticizing you, he analyzed the work of the photographer. “Well, for starters I wouldn’t have put that much photoshop. You’re pretty as you are. You don’t need that shit. And I would have tried to shoot with natural, warmer light, because that enhances your features,“ he said it so nonchalant, as though he was talking about the weather. Those compliments always left his lips like they were nothing. Maybe he didn’t mean anything either, maybe he was just passionate about photography and he was commenting from an objective point of view. Maybe he was just a professional critiquing someone else’s work. “You should have shot me then,“ you said jokingly with a laugh.

“I would love to,“ he smiled, his eyes turning to you. The look on his face was so soft, it made you feel so comfortable around him, but at the same time it also made you feel incredibly nervous. You could feel the blood rushing through your veins, heating up your body. Your cheeks felt awfully hot, you were probably as red as a tomato by now.

“Well, I still need to choose some pictures,” you tried to guide the conversation into a different direction before he would notice how embarrassed you were. “This one is the best,“ he pulled his chair closer to you and showed you the photograph.

“This one? Really?“ You looked at the picture and then turned your eyes to him, giving him a look of disbelief. You definitely wouldn’t have chosen that one as your favorite. “You were a bit stiff, but this one looks the most natural. I like your smile there“ “I know, I’m not a model,“ you accepted his criticism with a laugh. “You could be with your face and measurements.“ “How would you know my measurements?“ “I saw you naked, remember?“ He wriggled his brows at you playfully. “Ok, you need to stop, Christian. You making me blush.“ You pressed the back of your hands, which where still cold from standing outside, on your warm cheeks, trying to cool them down.

Christian licked his lips as a grin appeared on his face, his eye following every of your movements. He loved teasing you, because of the reaction he always got from you. He liked being the one making you blush.

“I’m just saying the truth. You’re not that used to getting compliments, are you?“ “You’re doing it far too often,” you argued.

“Really? I’m even holding back right now. I mean could go on and on how pretty you look in that picture and how beautiful you look right now.“

“You’re a real smooth talker, Christian,” you rolled your eyes. You didn’t take his compliments serious any more as you assumed he was only teasing you. “That’s why girls like you, because you make them feel special and important.”

“You didn’t receive many compliments from him, did you?“

You shook your head in response. You did get compliments from Kiseok sometimes. But most of the time he either wanted a favor from you or he wanted to get into your pants. So those compliments never really meant a lot to you.

“Man, Kiseok must have really fucked you up. If you were my girl, I would tell you how beautiful you are every single day.“ You felt your heart skip a beat, almost as though it would jump right out of your chest. You stared at him. For a brief moment, you imagined what dating him would be like. Never did it even cross your mind that you would ever start something serious with him. But now that you were visualizing it, you didn’t hate the idea that much either.

„Ok, that’s enough. Shut up, Christian,“ you rolled your eyes at him, letting out a nervous chuckle.

~*~

You resumed shooting two days after and lasted for another two days. The shooting went by smoothly and you wrapped up early. It was very apparent that Dabin had experience in shooting music videos. He was comfortable in front the camera and his acting was good as well. He seemed to trust Christian completely. He followed his instructions well and never questioned his direction. As you finished filming the last scene, one of the crew members suggested to go out for drinks to celebrate the past days of hard work. You liked the idea and encouraged your own team to join them, but you didn’t have that much interest in going yourself. You were tired from the lack of sleep and your legs were hurting from standing all day. You just wanted to go home, take a long hot bath and then go straight to bed. Despite your initial reluctance you somehow let Christian and Dabin talk you into joining them. Since you didn’t have to work tomorrow as it was a Sunday, you didn’t have much of an excuse not to go.

So, now here you were, at some bar in Hongdae chatting and playing drinking games which you obviously sucked at, knowing that this would end in a bad hangover the next day. Nonetheless you were having an awful lot of fun. You were almost sad that you would probably not see this team again after this evening since they were people Nike hired and employed. You had grown quite fond of them.

Since there way way too many people in the team, you had to spread out to different tables. You sat with a few DPR members and the hair and makeup team. Christian, of course, got dragged to the models’ table and he seemed to be enjoying the attention he was getting there. You didn’t pay much attention to him. You were immersed in the conversations you were having, however occasionally, your eyes and his would meet. He held the gaze and every time his lips would curl up into a warm smile. You were always the first one to look away. You didn’t really like what you were seeing. It wasn’t jealousy, at least that’s what you believed. It was the way he was acting. He did his reputation full justice - the charming ladies’ man who could talk is way into anything he wanted. Right now he was behaving like someone who you would naturally avoid. You were judgmental when you first met him, yet he made you quickly let your guards down. However, seeing him like this, made you question him once again. Just what kind of person was he?

The conversation at your table had taken another direction and now the girls were talking about men they found attractive while the guys were trying to understand their taste, albeit not agreeing.

“Objectively, Christian’s hella good looking fella,“ Scott then said when asked to give an example of whom he taught was good looking. All the girls at the table agreed in unison swooning over him, but you.

“You don’t think so?“ Dabin gently nudged your ribs teasingly. “You’d be the first.” “I mean, yeah he’s hot, but not the type of guy I personally would date,“ you shrugged your shoulders nonchalantly. “Why not?“ You heard Christian say. You quickly turned to the direction of his voice, your eyes widening in surprise. He was standing right next to you, his eyes staring down at you. He took a chair from another table and placed it down next to you, as he took a seat.

You didn’t get the chance to answer as the topic was changed again. But Christian wouldn’t let you off the hook so easily. “So…why not?“ He asked you again in a lowered voice, so only you could hear.

“You’re not really boyfriend material.“

“Why not?“ He insisted.

“Well, you’re too popular with girls, I wouldn’t be able to trust you.“ “I’m not Kiseok.“ “I know, I-I just…“ you stuttered, not really knowing what you were even trying to say. “I mean you’re not even looking for something serious. You’re the fleeting type of guy.“ “So your opinion on me still hasn’t changed, huh?“ The tone in his voice sounded bitter.

“That’s not what I meant, Christian,” you quickly threw in, worried that you might have hurt his feelings.

“You’re an amazing friend. You’re sweet, attentive, a good listener. I just don’t see you settling down any time soon and I just don’t see myself starting a relationship with someone who’s not ready yet. Nothing against you... a-and this is just hypothetical anyway. It’s not like anything’s gonna happen, right?“

The expression on his face suddenly changed, a huge grin covering the lower half of his face. “I’m just playing with you,“ he broke out into a hearty laughter. “You don’t need to explain yourself.“

You rolled your eyes and punched his arm in retaliation. For a brief moment, you really thought you had hurt his feelings.

~*~

Although you didn’t want to be here in the first place, you were one of the people who stayed the longest. The bar slowly emptied and there were only a few people left. Christian was one of them, but he was also about to head home. He bid goodbye to the team and then walked up to you.

“Want me to drop your off at home? You drank quite a bit.“

“I drank way too much,” you giggled. “But you did too, you can’t drive.”

“I drank one beer when we first got here and then I had soda.“

“Really?“ You furrowed your brows at him skeptically. You were under the impression that he had drunk a lot. There were so many empty bottles at the table he sat at.

“I wouldn’t drive under the influence.” “If that’s the case, then yes,” you smiled at him from eye to eye.

~*~

Christian dropped you off in front of your house. You turned around to watch him leave, but it turned out he was still parking at the same spot. You waved at him and motioned him to roll down the window which he did.

“Why are you still here?” “I won’t leave until your ass passed that door,” he pointed to the entrance. “What? You think I’m gonna get abducted here? In this few seconds?”

“Just go,” he smiled.

You walked towards the door, one hand rummaging through your back in search for your keys. But they were not where they were supposed to be.

“Shit,” you cursed as you kneeled down, placing your bag on the the concrete floor, using both of your hands to search for your keys. Knowing that Christian was still there and most likely watching you, made you even more nervous. Your desperation grew as you just couldn’t find them. That’s when you remember where you had put them. They were still on your desk in the office.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” You muttered under your breath. With a long sigh of defeat, you got up and walked to his car. Upon seeing you approaching, he rolled down his window again.

“I forgot my keys in the office,” you muttered under your breath, your cheeks turning a pinkish hue out of embarrassment. You bit down on your bottom lips, avoiding his gaze.

“Your office is like on the other side of the city,” Christian remarked drily.

”I know, I know. You don’t have to drive me, I’ll just take a cab.” ”Not an option,” he shook his head firmly. “Get in.”

Before he started the engine, he turned to you again as though a bright idea had just come to his mind.

“Wanna crash at my place?”

#christian yu #christian yu scenarios #christian yu imagine #dpr #khh scenarios #khh imagines #getting off the wrong foot

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papirouge · 4 years

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I remember once making a pro life post that for some reasons a clique of radfem stumbled upon and started bullying me over (very feminist I know) and I'll never forget how one of them had the audacity to say "[random American feminist author] was pro abortion" and I was like : "AND..?" Why the heck my Black French self is supposed to bow down to the authoritative figure of some random White American feminist over the atlantic and the crap she wrote about abortion? i thought feminist was about freeing ourselves? self empowerment? Yall love bragging about concept unless it's to silence & trying to forcefully shove an agenda ppl who don't think like you. You can't help but push your degenerated imperialist American outlook on EVERYONE. Someone is prolife? so it HAS to be a White conservative/republican women from a privileged background 🙃 no Stacey, I'm a former pro choice, from a poor background with a violent father, grew up in a single mother household and who's apolitical (FYI the Republican party is not a thing in France). Also I'm Black - and you have no place to give me any lesson about femalehood and oppression. You'll never put me in a box. American WASP evangelism (and its hypocrisy) is not a thing in Europe so stop projection your weird bias against religion anywhere in the world (FYI Christianism is what helped lessen the practice of polygamy and FGM in many parts of Africa, but you're not ready to hear this🙉) When I was a kid, it was a religious old lady (from a Christian organization) who came to our house and gave us food. Yall bitching about how Christian/pro life are doing nothing for families and are "anti women" are ridiculous. Those organizations helped my mom, a WOMAN, to get back on track when she suffered depression for YEARS. My sisters and I wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for them to help my family escape and find a shelter when my dad threatened to kill us.

When I pulled the receipts about Planned Parenthood conducting an active pro abortion campaign targeting Black population none of you "anti racist feminist" batted an eye & more, acted like these evidence didn't exist!!??! while the posts/videos are literally.here.on.my.blog on the #pro life tag (being racist and delusional are often mutual anyway so I'm not surprised), but somehow you're having much more energy to whine & being triggered by the stupid Karen meme....

The White feminism is SHOWING.

Yall full of it. You'll never be allies to Black people. Yall part of the problem.

#don't bother trying to mess with me I've been spilling nothing but facts out here #papi watch #personal

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dramallamadingdang · 5 years

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I was going to do this with "in-line" replies, but it just got unwieldy and doing the mentions in a multi-reply reply is a PITA. So we do it this way. A really long (sorry!) post of replies for @taylors-simblr, @niamh-sims, @hugelunatic, @mustluvcatz-reloaded, @simaddicted-sue, @dunne-ias, @pensblr, @mdpthatsme, and @yuichen about kids and stuff...

taylors-simblr replied to your post “OMG, I'M GLAD THAT'S OVER!”

I am very happy that Christmas is over, we went to my mums. I had decided it would be lovely, and it was to an extent, but we were there for 5 days and there were too many people and kids and by day 3, I was peopled out and just wanted to get home. Daughter had her 3rd birthday on Friday too and was a horrible mess of over excitement ��, but that’s all over and things are getting back to normal. Except for the piles of toys people bought us, that I have no where to put...

I always feel bad for kids with Xmas-time birthdays. Their special day gets lost in the madness. That’s part of the reason why I always made more fuss over birthdays than Xmas, since my son’s birthday is December 17. Mini-Taylor is young enough not to be resentful, but I hope she'll be OK as she gets older. :)

But yeah, for me, the main problem is that everyone was at my house and stayed here because lodging in this area is scarce and the affordable options have to be booked months or sometimes even years in advance. My son is in the Army and he’s only just home after a long deployment, and the timing of his going home was always in question. When they knew (more or less) for sure when they’d be coming, all of the lodging in the area had long been booked. (This is why we have frequent (adult) houseguests, which I'm perfectly fine with.) The original plan was for my son and his family to stay with his wife's family, which is literally next door because my son married the literal girl next door. That would have been better. Theirs is an enormous family -- 14 kids, 3 bio ones and the rest fosters that were taken in and adopted, most of them still teens and younger -- so they have a huge house and they're well used to little-kid chaos and sort of revel in it. But right before people were scheduled to arrive, their house came down with some severe plumbing problems, and stuffing it with 30+ people was just a no-go. So, they ended up here, at more or less the last minute.

The kids are 4, just past 2, and 7 months old, all in the age range that I can't tolerate. I'm OK with tiny, non-mobile babies, but after they're mobile, I do not want until they're about 8-to-10 or so. So, since they were here, if I wanted peace, I was the one who had to leave my own house. Which isn't terrible or anything in the grand scheme of things, but it is annoying. Plus, the 7-month-old had an ear infection, and flying cross-country didn't help it. They almost cancelled coming out because of it, but the 4-year-old had been promised learning how to snowboard and would have been totally crushed. So then daughter-in-law was going to stay back with 7-month-old, but that seemed unfair to DIL to be deprived of her family, and I and the other grandparents hadn't even seen the younger two kids in person. So, they drugged 7-month-old up to his eyeballs, and did the thing. So 7-month-old was just crabby and awful and had trouble nursing the whole time, which only added to the crabby awfulness, which in turn made 2-year-old awful. (Four-year-old was actually pretty OK the whole time, did learn to snowboard, and sort of fell in love with my husband. Which, you know, I understand. *laugh* They both cried when she left. :) ) I understood that the baby didn’t feel well and the 2-year-old was upset by it, of course, but that doesn't make it any less annoying when they're both screaming more or less 24/7. Gave me terrible flashbacks to my daughter's preemie-baby/toddlerhood. *sigh*

But yeah, I survived to rant about it. :)

niamh-sims replied to your post “OMG, I'M GLAD THAT'S OVER!”

I am a woman who doesn't want my own children (much to the chagrin of many people I speak with), and I struggle with other people's kids. In saying that though, I absolutely adore my 5 year old nephew, he is a dude, and my 9 year old step-son is an old soul and extremely mature with a wicked sense of humour. They're all I need!

I hate the presents aspect of it!

See, 9-year-olds I'm (usually) fine with. My window of intolerance is from about 6 months through the little-kid years. It seems like when a kid hits 8 or 10 or so that a switch flips in them and their behavior changes from little-kid to big-kid. Sometimes that happens earlier, often with girls; I've known 5-or-6-year-old girls (and a few boys, too) that I've been just fine with. I’ll probably be fine with my son’s eldest when she’s 5 or 6 because she was pretty OK even at 4 under trying circumstances. But mostly it seems to happen in the 8-to-10 window. It's the start of "tweenhood," I guess. I'm fine with "big kids" even if their chronological age is a little younger than normal to be a "big kid." I'm also perfectly fine with teens, even when they're really surly. I'll take a super-surly 14-year-old over a "cute," bouncy, loud 2-year-old, even if well-behaved, any day. Which is weird, I guess, but there it is. Someone has to deal with the teens. :)

And yeah, the presents thing. In my own, nuclear family, starting when it was just me and my little kids, we don't do presents other than small hand-made gifts if someone feels like making them. We just did stockings on the morning of Xmas Eve. They were filled with little things, small toys and candy and as they got older some more practical things, like makeup/nail polish or small bits of sports equipment and stuff. When they hit tweenhood, we'd each fill each other's stockings, not just me filling theirs. We developed a tradition of exchanging goofy toothbrushes that way, of all things. :) It wasn't that we couldn't afford to do big gifts; I just didn't want to instill that kind of mindset in them. Our tradition from the time my youngest was about 8 was to spend Xmas Day at the local shelter/kitchen for homeless/transient people, which did both Xmas breakfast and dinner. We'd be there, kids included, from pre-dawn until after midnight, prepping, cooking, serving, eating with the people the kitchen served, and cleaning up. It was actually really fun (the kids even looked forward to it) and really fulfilling and, to me, that's what Xmas ought to be about. Not the consumer frenzy. I have no interest in feeding and perpetuating that frenzy and while it caused some problems as the kids grew up when they found that their peers got showered with extravagant gifts, they also realized that they’d get gift-showered for their birthdays, and they've both said that they prefer the more low-key way we did Xmas as a family as well as the more service-oriented mindset, which they both have continued. Aside from this Xmas just past, which we did more "traditionally," but still without extravagant gifts.

hugelunatic replied to your post “OMG, I'M GLAD THAT'S OVER!”

I love my granddaughter to pieces! But I can only stand being around her without her parents around. LoL

And hello my fellow Grinch! *loves*

They are definitely better without their parents! :) We took 4-year-old to the slopes on the day after Xmas without her parents, and it was a ton of fun. Spent the whole morning teaching her how to snowboard, had lunch in town, boarded bunny slopes/courses with her, would have done dinner out, too, but she was crashing by that point, etc., and it was all great. None of us, including the 4-year-old, wanted to go home to the screaming baby and toddler. *laugh*

I will be fine when the kids are older. I'm fine with my other set of three grandkids -- the kids of my firstborn, whom I don't call "my son" because he was adopted at birth, so I don't feel that I am his parent for all that he's my bio-son -- the youngest of whom is 8 and the eldest almost 15 (and a Simmer, along with his next-younger sibling :) ). They live in Botswana, but they come over to the states fairly often and will be here this coming fall for a month and will stay with us, and I'm perfectly fine with that. The problem is, my son and his wife want a large family -- She comes from one, they're conservative Christians, etc. -- so by the time they're done having/adopting them, it'll be a long time -- probably longer than I'll live -- that they'll all be older. So then I'm put in the position of wanting to be around some of them but not all of them, which is not fair to them, but...yeah. In some ways, it's good that they live far away. I'm good with visiting with all of them via Skype. :) But they might not always be far. When my son retires from the Army after he puts in his 20 years, they plan to move back out here. But I might not be alive by then or at least I might no longer be able to live at altitude, so there's that. :)

And...GRINCHES UNITE! *high five*

mustluvcatz-reloaded replied to your post “OMG, I'M GLAD THAT'S OVER!”

And there I was.. Happy as hell to see my grands and sad to see them leave. But I rarely see them so.. *back to being a Scroogy Grinch*

I think most people are happy to see their grands and sad to see them leave. I'm an outlier, I know. I've never actually liked little kids, despite raising two of my own. In truth, my husband and I were pressured into it, he more so than me, but I was trying to be a "good, obedient Christian wife." It's not surprising that I struggled and that it all contributed to the end of that marriage. I did not enjoy my kids when they were little. I gave up my career because I felt that I had to (Husband didn’t want me to, actually, but I couldn’t imagine living the life we lived dragging a kid around, which was another nail in the marriage’s coffin), and there’s a part of me that will always regret that. And I resented that my husband didn’t have to give up his career, that of course it fell to me to do so. I mean, I loved my kids, of course, but that's a different thing from wanting to be around them all the time and always enjoying their company. It was a huge struggle for me, and I'm glad it’s over. Teen/adult kids are great, though, and I'm thankful they both turned out well. Because, yeah, I’m a mom who doesn’t like kids, and worse I was a single mom who didn’t like kids, which could’ve been utterly disastrous, but I muddled through, living for the day when they’d be grown-ups.

And more for the Grinch Club, woo! :) (Also, I am only just now reading about what you're going through. I am so, so sorry. :( )

simaddicted-sue replied to your post “OMG, I'M GLAD THAT'S OVER!”

I feel your pain and raise you 14 grandkids I love them dearly especially when they are not here lol

*sigh* Should I live long enough, I'll have at least 14 grandkids. My firstborn and his wife are done. They only wanted two, especially because there were problems with the second pregnancy. The third was an IUD fail, and then both got surgically sterilized in the aftermath, just to be safe. But my son and his wife....They want 8, minimum. They're planning on 4 bio kids (and will gladly accept more if they happen), and then they want to adopt, just as her family did. And then there's my daughter and her partner. They will marry in a few years and they're both anti-kid right now...but they're also only in their early 20s and when their mutual female biological clocks kick in, who knows what might happen? They might be like me and remain uninterested in kids for life or they might not. In any case, my health is not the best and will only get worse as time goes on, so I will have that as an excuse not to have littles around much, at least. There are silver linings to chronic conditions! :)

dunne-ias replied to your post “OMG, I'M GLAD THAT'S OVER!”

meh, stay healthy and you'll live to have a relationship you might even enjoy when they're older. Not everyone has to like kids, even it they're related to you. I had my nephews visiting for a few days, which meant 4 days of almost non-stop Zelda-playing, but they're in just the right age for a visit, as in mature enough to handle their basic needs on their own.

Yeah, older kids can be a lot of fun, and I have no -- or at least a lot fewer -- problems with them. My firstborn's two eldest kids play Sims (The eldest plays TS4, but the 13-year-old prefers TS3. :) ), so sometimes we'll be on Skype together, all playing our games and yakking at each other about it, for hours, and we have a lot of fun that way. The TS3-playing kid and I are playing Dragon Valley concurrently, cycling through the premade households and doing different things with them, which is fun. And my son's four-year-old sat on my lap while I played TS2 a bit to chill out this past week, and she was fascinated and “helped” me a little, so now I plan to "groom" her as best I can going forward. ;) Video games are a good way to bond with kids. :) And when the firstborn's family is here, I'm sure we'll be doing plenty of that, as a group, since all of us love video games of various types. The Mortal Kombat tournament will be vicious and I will undoubtedly lose, but I will have fun while I am repeatedly, violently killed. :)

We'll just have to see what happens with my son and his planned never-ending parade of children who aren't allowed a lot of screen time and "educational" video games are only allowed in very limited doses. *sigh* I have to come up with a sales pitch that makes TS2 “educational.” Well, it did make my daughter interested in the Middle Ages, since she played a medieval game, and she is now working on a graduate degree in Medieval Studies and has a talent for writing well-researched historical fiction as well as interesting narrative non-fiction, so....

pensblr replied to your post “OMG, I'M GLAD THAT'S OVER!”

My husband and I really chuckle quite a bit (as we continue to happily enjoy our child-free lives) when we are judged for not doing the whole kid thing by people who always seem stressed-out trying to juggle everything. I'm like 'I don't judge you for wanting children. So don't judge me for not wanting them.' Recently had a male colleague tell me that God put men and women here to have children, and if we didn't "What's the whole purpose of life then?"

Yeah, child-free is a great way to live! Especially if you're double income/no kids, I'd imagine. IF you can deal with the constant judgment and the pressure from people who want grandkids or nieces/nephews and the accusations of being selfish and pressures from one's religion, if that's a factor, and all that crap, of course. :\

Since my husband is almost 20 years younger than me, has no children, and I'm past menopause, I get a lot of side-eyes not just for our age difference (though with my gray hair dyed and a general lack of wrinkles because I’ve never been able to expose myself to much sunlight, I look (and act) younger than I am, so at least that helps with that) but also for our inability to procreate. I get a lot of "But what about when he wants kids? It's not fair to him to be married to someone who can't have kids!" (Which is a lovely argument to lob at anyone! I mean, I guess involuntarily infertile young people shouldn't marry fertile people then? *eyeroll* ) But he doesn't want kids. His own father died suddenly at 39 of a massive coronary, and when it happened his mom checked out for a bit, leaving him to deal with his grief and mostly raise his three younger siblings -- the youngest of whom was only 2 -- until she got her shit together, which took her years to do because she got addicted to the tranquilizers the dumbass doctors prescribed and had to do rehab, etc.. He did his time parenting starting when he was 14 until he was about 22. He has zero interest in having his own kids and can’t imagine that changing, though he loves being around other people's kids that he can give back to their parents. He absolutely loves being a step-grandparent of 6 at the age of 37, in addition to being an uncle to his siblings' kids. :) Even if he does eventually want his own kids, it'll probably be after I'm gone and then he'll be free to find someone to procreate with, if he and that partner want to spawn. So, I tell those people to just fuck right off.

And ugh, that "God put men and women on Earth to be fruitful and multiply and if you don't do it you're just selfish -- and having “sinful” sex -- and going against God's will and there's no point to your life" thing. That's why I had kids. That's NOT the right reason to have kids, but I was so brainwashed at the time that I didn't think that way. Or at all, really, at least not about that subject. Ugh. Ugh ugh UGH! I wish I'd responded with a polite-but-mighty "fuck off," too...but I DO like my kids and am thankful that they exist, so...yeah.

Rant! Sorry! :)

mdpthatsme replied to your post “OMG, I'M GLAD THAT'S OVER!”

28 years old, don't like children, don't want to have children because I know this about myself and I'm ok with it. People tell me it's a phase and I'll want children soon enough. I'm like, uh, no. Family and friends get aggravated with me when I don't hold their babies or don't want to watch their children. Like has the point not come across yet?

Yeah, everyone tells under-30 women who don't want kids that they'll change their mind. So many women want to be sterilized but doctors won't do it because "they might change their mind." Some have the nerve to get them to get permission from their husband, if they're married. My daughter suffers from terrible endometriosis is in almost constant pain from it. Over the years she's gone through all the treatments short of hysterectomy and nothing has worked, at least not permanently. She badly wants that hysterectomy but to date has found no doctor -- at least here in the States; I’m thinking she might have better luck in Europe -- who will do one because she's only 22 and unmarried. They think she'll marry a man (which she won't do; she's pretty firmly declared herself a femme lesbian) and then magically want kids. They even have the balls to tell her that if she goes ahead and births a kid, that might cure her condition because GOD FORBID they just do the relatively easy procedure that will likely cure her. Instead, they'd rather saddle her with a kid or at best make her go through a pregnancy and then have the kid adopted. At which point the endo might just come back again.

I really can't believe how misogynistic gynecologists can be, even the female ones. Maybe their brains are warped by the women who desperately want kids but can't have them. I have enormous sympathy for those women, truly I do, but their plight should not prevent women who don't want kids from taking more drastic steps to not have them and certainly shouldn't force women to suffer through medical conditions that would be cured or at least made better by being completely sterile.

And yeah, the family constantly pushing babies at you and wanting you to babysit, just because you happen to have a pair of boobs. Nope. I'm thankful that my gay brother and his husband are not interested in kids and wouldn’t have cared if I didn’t have any, and that my mother is indifferent to the concept of grandchildren, but I DO have a lot of kid-crazy cousins that I did my best to avoid like the plague but when I couldn't were constantly trying to "convert" me by shoving their "adorable" babies in my face. They don't do it anymore with our advanced age and all, but when they were actively popping them out before I had any, as an older teen/young adult saying I had no interest in kids, it was like they were on a freakin' crusade, complete with forced conversion. *eye roll* Even though at that point I HAD birthed a kid not at all by choice and had given him up for adoption. Nope, not good enough. I had to have one that I wanted, I guess. And when I did have kids, they were all smug and, “See, we knew you’d change your mind!” Even though I really hadn’t. It's sick. Not every woman loves babies/kids.

MOAR RANT! More sorry. :)

yuichen

replied to your post

“OMG, I'M GLAD THAT'S OVER!”

36, no kids. I like my brother's but probably because they're older and I missed most of their early lives. My cousins' kids, however? Fuck no. I avoid the whole massive family gathering because they weren't taught to have respect for people's things, or how to not act like little psychos. I'm talking jumping on the furniture and running around screaming while their parents do absolutely nothing. In a small house. Fuck. That.

Oh yeah. In my experience, the most adamant baby-pushers were the ones who had the worst-behaved kids. They "loved" them so much that they never established/enforced boundaries and thought that any kind of discipline would damage them somehow. *eye roll* One of my cousins never made her kids sit down to eat. They just wandered around the table grabbing food (with their hands!) from serving dishes or, worse, from other people's plates. They let them do that in restaurants, even. It was disgusting. Or, the most adamant baby-pushers were the ones who were also complaining about how stressful their life/marriage was and who could be heard pining for the pre-kid years of their relationships. And I'd just give them a meaningful look. But if you point out that you just don't want to complicate your relationship/life by adding spawn to it, well then you're just “selfish.”

Yup. I was at some point, at least in that regard. Being a more fundamentalist-type Christian in my 20s/30s warped my brain on the subject, but down in my heart-of-hearts...I would've been perfectly happy being that kind of "selfish." No, I wouldn’t give up my kids now, but if I’d never had them, I would’ve been perfectly OK, too.

#yuichen #mdpthatsme #pensblr #dunne-ias #simaddicted-sue #mustluvcatz-reloaded #hugelunatic #niamh-sims #taylors-simblr #replies #non sims

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logantheanimal · 5 years

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Values

I am SO DAMN TIRED of this Chick-fil-A kerfuffle. I’ve been hearing about it for years and now, because nearly all of my family are intolerable conservatives and half of my friends (including those who are LGBT) have moved to the right, it is currently the only damn thing they’re all talking about.

I swear, if I hear “they bent the knee,” “they caved to the LGBT Nazis,” or “boycott now” one more damn time I swear I’m gonna lose my shit.

I don’t get what the problem is. I really don’t. For a long time, right-wing Christians have praised CFA for their so-called “bravery” in refusing to stop donations to “bible-based” organizations that espouse anti-LGBT policies and practices. Then CFA promised to stop, but they didn’t after all, and that made the RWCs whoop and holler in joy. LGBT groups protested to the point that some cities refused to approve permits for CFA to open stores, including the San Antonio Airport.

Last week, CFA finally announced that they were stopping their current contributions to the remaining groups on that list. Now the RWCs are losing their ever-loving minds, saying that CFA has caved to bullying from the gay left and are now giving money to support “the gay agenda”. Dinesh D’Souza was more honest and just said, “the gays”. At least he has the balls to own his bigotry and say what he really means.

These same people wanna sit there and say they’re not homophobic or transphobic. Like...what? Are you people serious right now?

I’m going to reference Robert Gagnon over at The Federalist, who wrote about recipient Covenant House this way: “Every one of its 16 U.S. and Canadian Covenant House programs has undergone the assessment of Cyndi Lauper’s LGBT-fascist ‘True Colors’ to insure they are fully on board with the entire homosexual and transgender agendas.” His headline and the body of his article clashed - he claimed in the headline that CFA caved before writing at length about the fact that CFA has acetually been giving to LGBT-affirming groups and events for several years. He calls the donations to Covenant House and other similar groups “a sin tax”.

Let’s ignore the fact that the Salvation Army has fires employees for being LGBT and turned away same-sex couples who needed food and shelter. Let’s forget that the Fellowship of Christian Athletes denounces homosexuality in their founding documents. Let’s just wave off the disgusting claims by the Paul Anderson Youth House that homosexuality among boys and men is “exploding” because of abuse in the home and pushes ex-gay groups as an alternative. Then again, RWCs think that’s perfectly acceptable because SIN!

I grew up in Evangelical Christianity. I know what their arguments are, and I know their excuses why, yet I still have to ask: what the hell is your major malfunction? What drives you to deny someone basic needs, a job, or even common decency for being LGBT? How the hell do you think you’re standing for Jesus by persecuting a group that you have determined to be Very, Very Bad™️? You talk about the gay agenda, but I don’t think even *you* know what that means - you’re just a bunch of angry bigots who deny their own fear, yet that fear exhibits itself when you attack a company that decides to make their charitable donations more useful?

Oh, right, I forgot. You have your good Christian values. The Old Testament says that teh gayz should be put to death, and you completely ignore Jesus’ words and actions to push your own narrative, one based entirely upon pride and arrogance. Lemme ask y’all this...when He fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish, did Jesus ask anyone whether they were prostitutes or tax collectors? When He healed people, did He ask if they got leprosy from their illegitimate lover? No, He didn’t care. He saw human suffering and He helped. He didn’t ask anyone to prove that they were worthy of it.

AND EVERY DAMN ONE OF YOU WEAR WWJD SHIT.

What’s more is that you spit insults at people like me for calling you out on your mess, you support President Man-Child and praise him for his locker-room antics, wear shirts that say “fuck your feelings”, and tell me that I’m angry and you really do care. Horseshit. You are all about your own pride and anger, and you wanna call yourselves “righteous”. You wanna talk about G-d’s judgment. I think you should spend some time reading Matthew 7 and give some serious consideration to your own behavior before you try to fix everyone else.

Don’t you dare sit there and tell me that you advocate freedoms when you’re really about forcing everyone to live the way you think they should. Hypocrite.

#right wing #christians #hypocrisy #chick fil a #charity #good deeds #politics #be nice #wwjd

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plantfeed · 4 years

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ROOM #O3 — lockdown.

location: escalus house, room three. characters: valentine, christian, theresa, cal. time: just after the lockdown. tensions: high.

ok so this didn’t develop as much as we wanted it to bcos it was hard to find a time when everyone was able to be on and responding at once. but here’s what we have of our lockdown discord thread for room three ( theresa, valentine, christian & cal ).

THERESA.

03.02. still in her ballgown, theresa's pacing the floor. in one hand is a half-drunk bottle of wine. in the other is her phone, into which she's ringing ( to no avail ) every other minute. "my god. you think someone would fucking answer." though the state of the others is hardly of the deepest concern. they've got their own troubles here to be worrying about. every so often her eyes scan to valentine and it feels like swallowing glass. how could christian be so stupid? after everything she'd done. and yet.... and yet. lo, the course of love never did run smooth. but this isn't love. this is something far uglier. "i don't like this situation any more than the three of you. but somehow we've got to fucking deal with it so let's at least try to be civil."

VALENTINE.

03.03. she sits on the couch in the living room in her pajamas, forever grateful that she started leaving a pair in christian's room for emergencies. it would have been even more uncomfortable for everyone involved if she had been forced to wear something that was obviously christian's. in this moment, she feels bad for theresa, not because they're all in this situation, but because she's the only one who doesn't have the full story as to what's going on here. there's another layer in all of this, and the reminder of the secret the three of them are holding makes her swallow the spit that's collecting in her mouth. "i promise, i won't be a hassle, i can just sit in christian's room until this is all over and then i'll go back to my place the moment it's done."

CHRISTIAN.

03.03. christian can't stop shaking his leg. he's on the couch next to valentine, arm around her shoulders and the rest of him almost vibrating with nervous energy. his unoccupied hand is keeping his phone open, texting and hoping for some update that will give clarity to the situation. a lockdown? here, with valentine, her ex, and tess, aka the reason the rest of them can't speak freely. not that christian thinks they really would-- come to think of it, they've never all talked outright about what happened. or about what's still happening. "don't be silly, we can all be out here together," he tries to assure valentine, keeping his voice as casual as he can, but it takes on a bitter edge when his gaze lands on cal. "i've got no problem being civil. as long as everyone else is."

CAL.

03.04. cal’s eyes remain trained on his phone, hoping for a text from georgina or any news about the attacker. but more importantly, trying to avoid having to look in either valentine’s or christian’s direction. this lockdown situation seeming to be his own personal hell. their odd love-triangle was one thing, but the secret that bound them all together was another. he figured it’d be easier to just retreat back to his room, but there was something oddly comforting and enjoyable about the tension in the room, which was so thick you could cut it with a knife. he smirks as he hears christian’s words, clearly pointed at him. “don’t look at me. someone’s been attacked, and as far as i’m concerned, the last thing i’m worried about is starting a fight over the obvious elephant in the room.”

THERESA.

03.05. despite her nature, despite everything she's ever tried to be, tess can't play the peacemaker when christian's actions have put them in such jeopardy. "he's right," she starts, a hand lifting to clamp against cal's shoulder ; a united front against the adulterous oppressors. or perhaps a lack of love has made her cynical. "the three of us live here. your actions affect everyone. and we will discuss this tomorrow." her eyes scan towards valentine, and they're neither unfriendly nor warm. this is a woman who makes both cal and christian happy. this is a woman for whom boys would move the earth. and it stings that christian thinks he's found a love worth fighting for when all he's found is a well-dressed pretender versed in the art of stage. "but there are wider issues at play than this." in the back of her head she's aching to ring kit, for if it is lysander, then kit will be the first to know. her mouth tastes acidic as she dances between the two opposing camps. "and a house divided cannot stand."

VALENTINE.

03.06 she smiles politely at theresa’s words (however odd they may be), trying her hardest to ignore the implications of the girl’s gaze. it wasn’t her fault that she was in this position, it really wasn’t, but she had no way of explaining that to her. it was cal’s fault for losing his temper, christian’s fault for trying to take things into his own hands. she wouldn’t have involved christian if it hadn’t been necessary, and then none of them would be in this situation. but alas, life had to be difficult, and now she was stuck in an apartment with one person who didn’t like her, and two people who loved her and she wasn’t sure which was worse. “i reached out to kit,” she says, trying to change the subject. “i’ll let you all know if he replies.”

THERESA.

03.07. when her eyes meet valentine's there's the sting of something sharp beneath her skin — a mosquito bite. where has the girl who was raised by interseztional feminists gone, a girl who grew up vowing never to pit herself against another woman — to take a woman's side in every fight, no matter what. but this feels different. christian feels different. he's the one constant she's had who's never strayed from her side when the others thought her unhinged, and every time valentine's left him — spleen and liver on the asphalt — tess is the one who piece by grizzly pieces has had to tack and stitch him back together. so forgive her if there isn't any warmth when she meets valentine's eyes. "kit's fine, for now" tess responds defensively, for his name in val's mouth sounds wrong. she wants to reach in between her teeth and drag that name out, keep it safe in her own throat — but of course he's not her to shelter. and perhaps neither is christian. "he walked me back so i know he's at home. but if lysander follows him..." she thinks of the room across the hall and the three of them — kit, lysander and roman — locked in a duel that only blood will satisfy. "if lysander follows him we'll know before he does. we'll hear him on the stairs."

CHRISTIAN.

3.08 christian's eyes narrow slightly at tess, not just her words but the way she looks at valentine as though she's some kind of unwelcome parasite in their home. but then, tess hasn't been quiet about her thoughts on his relationship with valentine, ever since the very beginning. he knows it comes from a place of protectiveness, but right now, combined with cal's obnoxious energy, it's just setting him further on edge. but they're right about one thing: it's not what's really important right now. "has anyone heard from lysander at all? maybe he's still in police custody-- you know, from what happened earlier. with roman." christian's stomach twinges. now is not the time for his pity toward lysander to rear its head.

VALENTINE.

3.09 none of them would have heard from lysander, because he has no cell phone. valentine has his cell phone. it's locked in a box under her bed, in her apartment, where belinda is all alone with nothing stopping her from entering valentine's bedroom. fuck, this lockdown needed to be over quickly, or else she was done for. "i haven't heard anything," she says, pushing some hair out of her face. "i hate not knowing what's happening. what are we supposed to do? just....sit here and wait?"

CHRISTIAN.

3.10 christian sighs, looking back and forth between his various companions and wondering nervously how long they're all likely to be stuck here together. pointedly looking away from cal (reminding himself of cal's existence tends to be a surefire way of making sure christian is not relaxed, and right now, he really needs to be), he rises from his position on the couch and crosses into the kitchen area, opening a cupboard. from within it, he draws two bottles of deep red merlot, and a half-finished one of tequila imported straight from mexico. "i don't know about the rest of you, but if i'm staying here for god knows how long, i'd really like to be fucking drunk. anyone with me?"

THERESA.

3.44. with the curtains shut, it's hard to keep track of the sun. it could have been hours... it could have been days. wine is ever the temptress, and tonight is no different. only this night she's drinking with christian, with cal, and with valentine — the cards, perchance, could have picked an easier fate — and somewhere in a tangle of limbs ( she can't remember whose ) tessa's dropped her phone and the only means of communication with anyone outside of these four walls. "i know, christian, but please can you look again," exasperated, she continues to pull up the sofa cushions to no avail. two glasses later, she's forgot about the phone at all, bare feet trailing over cal's knee as she stretches catlike and swills her wine around her glass. "doesn't this feel like come dine with me?" she asks, rolling to her feet, her hands patting down the pockets of her dressing gown as she cracks the window. "you won, jane." her smile is muted, the kind that doesn't reach her eyes, something lighter about her, but at the same time more erratic. her movements are less controlled.(edited)

VALENTINE.

3.45. in hindsight, drinking with this group of people was probably not the best idea any of them had ever had, but when the question became whether she'd rather be in this situation drunk or sober, the answer was clear and apparent, and became even more apparent the more she drank. for a moment, she can forget about the murder and the cheating and the lying and can just exist. she's sitting on the couch, keeping a semi-respectful distance from christian ( meaning that instead of lying her head down in his lap like she wants to do, she's sitting next to him, shoulders and knees touching and her gaze on him ) when she's brought back to the reality of the situation with tessa's words. "thank you for that stunning commentary," she muses, not a hint of sarcasm in her tone.

#spectreevent #& macbeth / cal.#& othello / christian.#& lady macbeth / valentine.

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dearmrsbitch · 5 years

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March 5, 2020 - And the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table...

Q. Can’t support a pagan friend: I’m a thirtysomething who lives in a midsize West Coast city with very liberal sensibilities that I share. There’s a reason I moved here! I am also a Christian who goes to a mainstream Protestant church. I’ve never seen much disconnect between the two and I have many friends of other faiths, primarily Muslim and Jewish, whose religious functions I sometimes attend, like a wedding or a child’s entry into life or their religion. I value getting to experience these things with my friends and learning more about them, their religions, and the world. I grew up poor in the South but was lucky that we were always clean, well-fed, and warm. A good friend who lived in my neighborhood could not say the same and her unfortunate start in life has affected her ability to thrive as an adult. She is divorced from an abusive husband, in recovery for alcoholism, and trying to support two children with little help from her ex and often active hindrance from her dysfunctional family. Health issues make it hard for her to work, and poverty gets in the way of her work as well, as she sometimes can’t afford a uniform she needs or fix her car to get to work, and has been fired from one position because of her bad teeth that are a result of years of not having money to care for them. I have a lot of sympathy for her and her children.

She has written a few children’s books about her faith and has set up a small independent internet business to offer services connected with her belief system. I would love to support her, but she is pagan/Wiccan. This isn’t exactly a problem, as I don’t think it’s immoral. I just don’t want a children’s book on spells or to spend money on a tarot reading. My old friend spends a lot of time online talking about things like her “marriage” to a Norse deity that just make me roll my eyes in a way I know I should be ashamed about. I could probably get over my aversion to this and at least donate to her nonreligious crowdsourcing page that is just asking for money for utilities and food for her kids, but she also spends a lot of time online talking about how awful Christians are. Just Christians. While I know I’m not fully supportive of her faith, at least I know it’s bad of me to judge her on hers. I would never publicly demean her or her religion, much less do it several times a week. I feel so bad for her and would like to help, but every time I get close to donating, I just think about how much she hates people of my faith. Should I donate anyway?

Dear Christian type person,

Well, I think you’re all being deluded, but that aside....

Look, I’m a hardcore atheist, but when I get invited to a religious event, like a baptism, Bat Mitzvah, etc., I bring a gift, I spend money, I sit through nasty religious wedding services that declare marriage only between a man and a woman and bite my tongue because I don’t want to interrupt my friend’s vows with the priest their mom told them to get or she wouldn’t pay, etc.

If you’re comfy buying a gift for a Bris, you can buy a book from her. Donate it to a library or the Spiral Scouts, or something pagan friendly. It’s all the same. If you’re spending money on a Muslim themed gift for your friend, you can spend money on a Pagan book. Because from the outside, it looks like you’re okay with conferring with other “People of the Book,” but like, fuck them pagans.

Most of your rituals come from the Pagans by the way, your religion at this point, besides the Monotheism (with a trinity?) has more in common with modern day Wicca than you think, except, you all hate gays and women, where most Pagans are cool with that.

Light your Christmas tree, worship your chocolate bunnies.. burn your incense in temple.

Now, let me surprise you. I’m not anymore a fan of Paganism than of any other religion, they just sit a bit higher because they aren’t as much of assholes as the rest of the faiths usually. They drink more, fuck more, dance more, etc. Less hateful usually. But I laugh as much as being married to a Norse god as you do - however, how are those nuns doing that are married to Christ? Cause either you see the hypocrisy there, or you’re just prejudiced because one is you, and one is them. Pagan religions invented the idea of being a “bride of a god,” long before the big three were a blip on the map.

Her ideas pre-date yours, and even if they’re not mentally healthy, you have to remember that they don’t seem normal because you live in a heavily Christian society. A society that she has to contend with on a daily basis. One that mocks her, one that discredits her views. ONE WHERE DAMN NEAR EVERY POLITICIAN LEGISLATES IN ACCORDANCE TO CHRISTIANITY WITH NO RESPECT FOR OTHERS.

People are allowed to be upset about the dominant view of a society if they are a minority group that is essentially - doing nothing wrong. She’s existing as a pagan, and maybe her religious beliefs are that churches should pay their taxes, child genital mutilation should be outlawed, etc etc., and she has no chance to see her religion respected in the same way that yours is. You may be liberal, but, little one, you are still adhering to a system that is overall, highly conservative, demeans women, donates to vicious shock therapy programs that cause teens to kill themselves when they can’t “pray the gay away,” and HIDES THE SYSTEMATIC RAPE AND ABUSE OF CHILDREN. (Protestants too, Catholics just like to rape boys more. Get the sexism there? Our society cares less about the little girls raped in Protestant churches than the little boys in Catholic ones.)

God damn. Fuck. How do you not see this? I have a friend whose husband is a super hippy Christian dude. He had to vet every charity he gave to. You know why? Because even the most progressive looking Christian charities can have their money funneled to gay conversion therapy, or to the Salvation army that turns away gay people and transgender individuals who need a place to sleep. He didn’t find one really good religious charity that he felt he could trust beyond a shadow of a doubt to trust with his parishioners donations. No matter how liberal you are - you still sucking on Chick-Fil-A and acting like bigot chicken ain’t a big deal.

She has a right to criticize the religion as a whole. If she lived in Israel, she’d be upset about Jewish law, in a Muslim country, Sharia law. Because the big three aren’t fair and just in their application of law. Sure she’s got a chip on her shoulder and maybe her whole life is her fault, but she still gets to complain that the dominant religion of the country, one that professes “Love your neighbor,” does not have national healthcare, and churches are basically tax shelters for money that could do so much for all of us, and that evangelicals cheer on the caging of children just because they are brown. If you love Jesus so much, then FUCKING ACT LIKE HIM. Christians in this country, by and large, would be hated by Jesus, loathed even for the sheer hypocrisy. Watch “Jesus Camp,” those are the fucks she’s railing against.

And you, you my dear liberal Christian. What would he say about you? He picked up several people maligned by society and took them in, and fed them, and helped them. He commanded you to do unto others, and do good in his name. And she is asking for donations to help with utilities and food for her kids, and you’re upset because you don’t like her Facebook quotes.

People like you are why I left religion finally, entirely. I realized there was no amount of religion than can make a good person do more good, but religion will make a good person do bad things, in its name.

Mrs. Bitch

#dearmrsbitch #dear prudie #bigots #religious nuts #religious idiots

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