#theyll be such a special statement piece

[floorpancakes]

guys GUYS GUYS GUYS I WON THE MARISAN BAKERY LOTTERY ONE OF THOSE FOUR PAIRS OF CINNAMONROLL EARMUFFS WILL BE MINE!!!!!!🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞🍞

[luxeaus]

NCT Winwin AU

a/n: hello everyone this is my first time writing something like this so please bear with me lmao  ,,, also uhh if u have a request feel free to do so!! i'll write for seventeen, astro, nct, and the boyz only! i thought of this concept last year and only now did i decide to write it hehe basically sicheng wanted to get his mom something special for mothers day (i know im a day late shush) and thats when he met you :) i hope u like it!!! ~~~ • it was early in the afternoon • youve been working for a couple of hours now since the flower shop your aunt owned opened •it was mother's day, so you were expecting a lot of people • the store was busy, buzzing with people from around your neighborhood buying flowers for their moms, grandmas, and whoever else • youre busy with so many people asking for advice on what to get and making bouquets • a few more hours pass by and the store had less people inside • it was only you, your aunt, a couple, and a girl who looked around your age • as you ring up the couple and waved a quick good bye, you finally had the time to settle down on your little chair behind the counter and relax • just as you closed your eyes for hopefully, a quick nap, you hear the door ringand in came a guy • he was tall, skinny, and cute even • this is winwin btw ISBSISHSB • anyway • you kind of picked up the habit of scouting for cute boys who bought flowers at your store • but every cute boy you saw so far, is no one compared to this one who came in, with a big grey sweatshirt and skinny black ripped jeans • he looked sweet and lost. like a small puppy in a big town • you came back to your senses when your aunt tapped you on the shoulder and told you to ask what the new customer needed, since she was busy with the other one • you nod, and rush to the tall boy • "good afternoon, sir. how can i be of assistance?" • you recite for what seemed to be the hundredth time today • "o-oh hello. i ummm. im looking for flowers?" • you chuckle a bit. "i bet you are," you reply. • at this point sicheng is slapping himself a million times in the head • of course you are you dumbass why else would you walk in a flower shop?? • he looks at you, smiling at him and his dumb dumb statement • he blushes, both from embarrassment and also,, cos wow ur cute :(( • "hehe i- yeah i am. but i dont know what to get..." he stammers as he scratches the back of his neck • you quickly turn on Serious Work Mode and suggest a few • "is it for your mom? are you giving her flowers for mother's day?" you ask while pointing out a few carnations that can look good in a potential bouquet • "these are carnations, i bet theyll look pretty along with the roses you picked," you suggest • "o-ok but i want it to be like.. super cool and big" • "oh! i actually have a few pre-made bouquets if you want to see them? i made them specifically for today so we can save time since its busy this time of the year" you suggest • two things are going thru sichengs head • 1) why is this girl/boy so cute 2) i really need to impress my mom... and this person • "sure i think that would be better :) hehe" he replied • SICHENG DID U JUST SAY HEHE OUT LOUD YOU DUMMY • you walk over to the rows of bouquets you made the night before • "i only have a few left since a lot of people bought them..." you explain • "these look super good... " • you made the bouquets massive with a lot of different flowers and put little greeting cards on the paper wrap • "see anything you like? no one has actually bought my favorite yet..." • "everything looks super amazing. which one is your favorite?" the boy asked, touching the flowers gently • "this one" • you point to a bouquet with sunflowers, roses, carnations and a couple of tulips, with baby's breath scattered along to fill the empty spaces • "y-you made this?" he said taking the bouquet • "this looks perfect! im sure my mom would love this!!!" • "yeah i did! thank you im sure she will!!" • "i'll take it :)" • "ok let me ring you up :)" • as you were doing finishing touches to the bouquet, you start going off a tangent on how you made it • "so you know carnations are supposed to symbolize good luck and pure love right thats why i chose this and back then even the way you wrap the bouquet and the strings used can mean a lot so if you tie it a certain way, theres a message behind it. this one i tied so it means you have nothing but love and adoration to that person..." • he just looks at you in awe because • oh my god.. how can someone look so frickin cute and lovely and bright.. he thought you bloomed the most beautiful out of all the flowers in the room • when you noticed he was staring, you cough and apologize • "sorry i didnt mean to ramble. i just really enjoy making bouquets hehe" • "n-no its fine i think its really.. cute :>" • "oh!! well uh.." • you scramble to finish quickly because omg did he just call you cute ??? What the heck • "wait so what do you want written on the greeting card? we can print it out and stuff ... " you ask him • "yes um... happy mother's day! love, sicheng" • SICHENG <3333 • the name sticks to you and you didnt notice but you were smiling as you printed the card • "what about you?" the boy, sicheng, asked suddenly • "what about me?" • "whats your name?" • "oh. its y/n" • "pretty~" • "what?" • "nothing!!! Here," • he hands out his payment • "keep the change, y/n!!" • "no thats really ok you dont have to-" • "oh please take it! You made the perfect bouquet for my mom and gave me a free lesson on flowers hehe its the least i can do! plus maybe you know.." • he takes a deep breath • "maybewecangoonadatesometime?" • "what.. with me??" you ask • "yeah.. i mean if you want.." • "ok. sure. id love that actually..." • ISUSUEIEUW CUTE • you hand sicheng his bouquet and a small piece of paper with your number • "text me" you tell him. WOW YOURE BOLD! • "dont worry i will! thank you y/n :]" • cant believe he just :] • as you waved good bye to sicheng you look at your aunt and she shakes her head • "young love!!!"

[perspectivepodcast]

[Transcript] Side A: Climate Change

This episode was inspired by a conversation with a dear friend, Ajla. Because sometimes the best thoughts are only found thanks to the help of someone who’ll have enough love to rummage through the garbage in your mind and believe they’ll find something meaningful much more than you ever will.

In 1973, Dr. William Rathje, archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, instituted the Tucson Garbage Project, also referred to as the ‘garbology project’. This was an archaeological and sociological study, carried on in the city of Tucson, Arizona, with the aim of examining the contents of Tucson residents' waste to examine patterns of consumption.

The funny thing was that although many residents volunteered to contribute to the project by sharing their consumption habits, the study made clear that the information shared by the participants were oftentimes not consistent with the quantitative data analyzed from the waste bins. For example, when asked about the number of beers they usually drank, participants tended to self-report more restrained alcohol consumption habits than their actual behavior. That is, if they had declared they drank two beers per week, it wasn’t rare that ten beers were found in the garbage every week.

Is it possible that throwing our waste away can be more similar to hiding what we ourselves don’t want to see about ourselves?

When I first found out about this project, it reminded me of a passage of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise.

‘No one was around. I walked across the kitchen, opened the compactor drawer and looked inside the trash bag. An oozing cube of semi-mingled cans, clothes hangers, animal bones and other refuse. The bottles were broken, the cartons flat. Product colors were undiminished in brightness and intensity. Fats, juices and heavy sludges seeped through layers of pressed vegetable matter. I felt like an archaeologist about to sift through a finding of tool fragments and assorted cave trash. It was about ten days since Denise had compacted the Dylar. That particular round of garbage had almost certainly been taken outside and collected by now. Even if it hadn’t, the tablets had surely been demolished by the compactor ram.

These facts were helpful in my efforts to believe that I was merely passing time, casually thumbing through the garbage.

I unfolded the bag cuffs, released the latch and lifted out the bag. The full stench hit me with shocking force. Was this ours? Did it belong to us? Had we created it? I took the bag out to the garage and emptied it. The compressed bulk sat there like an ironic modern sculpture, massive, squat, mocking. I jabbed at it with the butt end of a rake and then spread the material over the concrete floor. I picked through it item by item, mass by shapeless mass, wondering why I felt guilty, a violator of privacy, uncovering intimate and perhaps shameful secrets. It was hard not to be distracted by some of the things they’d chosen to submit to the Juggernaut appliance. But why did I feel like a household spy? Is garbage so private? Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with signs of one’s deepest nature, clues to secret yearnings, humiliating flaws? What habits, fetishes, addictions, inclinations? What solitary acts, behavioral ruts? I found crayon drawings of a figure with full breasts and male genitals. There was a long piece of twine that contained a series of knots and loops. It seemed at first a random construction. Looking more closely I thought I detected a complex relationship between the size of the loops, the degree of the knots (single or double) and the intervals between knots with loops and freestanding knots. Some kind of occult geometry or symbolic festoon of obsessions. I found a banana skin with a tampon inside. Was this the dark underside of consumer consciousness?’

Sometimes I wonder: we are a consumer society, therefore our social ambition is to produce only with the aim of consuming what we produce. Does this mean that one day, when our consumer society will thankfully be over and done with, there will be no remnant of our time, of our society, apart from the waste we left behind? Will we be the ones who created nothing but refuse, who couldn’t create anything for the sake of creating something that would outlive us, and maybe speak about us and what we wanted to be remembered for?

One of the reasons why garbology in general, and the Tucson Garbage Project specifically, are a major source of information on the nature and changing patterns of human society, is because for those populations that did not leave any buildings, or writing, or tombs, or trade goods, or pottery, refuse and trash are likely to be the only possible sources of information.

Is it possible that waste, our symbolic festoon of obsessions, be they more or less toxic, will be the only contribution, the only sign of our existence that we will leave for the future? Do we really care in the least about what we leave as a sign of our passage on this planet?

It’s tempting to believe that death could be something spectacular. Funeral pyres, ship burials, fireworks. But that’s rarely how it is. Most often, it’s just a slow, gradual, unpleasant and unremarkable gnawing of all that is life. An unobtrusive agony. A forgetting, piece after piece after piece. A consumption. (The irony.)

I went out the other day and it was mid-February, in the Northern hemisphere. It was almost 20°C. It was beautiful. It was disturbing.

In another passage of White Noise, after a deadly toxic gas had leaked over the town the main character lives in, the sunsets became unnaturally spectacular.

‘We stopped on the parkway overpass and got out to look at the sunset. Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful. Not that there was a measurable connection. If the special character of Nyodene Derivative (added to the everyday drift of effluents, pollutants, contaminants and deliriants) had caused this aesthetic leap from already brilliant sunsets to broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread, no one had been able to prove it.’

Later in the novel, the main character describes how gathering on the overpass to watch these newly dramatic sunsets had become a sort of ritual for the people of the town.

‘We go to the overpass all the time. Babette, Wilder and I. We take a thermos of iced tea, park the car, watch the setting sun. Clouds are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap and shape the light. Heavy overcasts have little effect. Light bursts through, tracers and smoky arcs. Overcasts enhance the mood. We find little to say to each other. More cars arrive, parking in a line that extends down to the residential zone. People walk up the incline and onto the overpass, carrying fruit and nuts, cool drinks, mainly the middle-aged, the elderly, some with webbed beach chairs which they set out on the sidewalk, but younger couples also, arm in arm at the rail, looking west. The sky takes on content, feeling, and exalted narrative life. The bands of color reach so high, seem at times to separate into their constituent parts. There are turreted skies, light storms, softly falling streamers. It is hard to know how we should feel about this. Some people are scared by the sunsets, some determined to be elated, but most of us don’t know how to feel, are ready to go either way. Rain is no deterrent. Rain brings on graded displays, wonderful running hues. More cars arrive, people come trudging up the incline. The spirit of these warm evenings is hard to describe. There is anticipation in the air but it is not the expectant midsummer hum of a shirtsleeve crowd, a sandlot game, with coherent precedents, a history of secure response. This waiting is introverted, uneven, almost backward and shy, tending toward silence. What else do we feel? Certainly there is awe, it is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but we don’t know whether we are watching in wonder or dread, we don’t know what we are watching or what it means, we don’t know whether it is permanent, a level of experience to which we will gradually adjust, into which our uncertainty will eventually be absorbed, or just some atmospheric weirdness, soon to pass. The collapsible chairs are yanked open, the old people sit. What is there to say? The sunsets linger and so do we. The sky is under a spell, powerful and storied. Now and then a car actually crosses the overpass, moving slowly, deferentially. People keep coming up the incline, some in wheelchairs, twisted by disease, those who attend them bending low to push against the grade. I didn’t know how many handicapped and helpless people there were in town until the warm nights brought crowds to the overpass. Cars speed beneath us, coming from the west, from out of the towering light, and we watch them as if for a sign, as if they carry on their painted surfaces some residue of the sunset, a barely detectable luster or film of telltale dust. No one plays a radio or speaks in a voice that is much above a whisper. Something golden falls, a softness delivered to the air. There are people walking dogs, there are kids on bikes, a man with a camera and long lens, waiting for his moment. It is not until some time after dark has fallen, the insects screaming in the heat, that we slowly begin to disperse, shyly, politely, car after car, restored to our separate and defensible selves.’

Perhaps, when the archaeologists of the future will rummage in the garbage we will have left behind to give some sign of what it was to live the way we lived, what they’ll find is that we were just too overwhelmed to do or know or feel anything. Too lost to understand, or even just to listen.

A couple of years ago, I saw this work from the Japanese artist Shimabuku. The title was The Snow Monkeys of Texas, and this was the artist’s statement:

‘When I visited the monkey mountain in Kyoto in 1992, I heard an interesting story. In 1972, a group of Japanese snow monkeys were brought from the mountains of Kyoto to a Texas desert. The first year, their numbers reduced dramatically. They didn’t know how to live in the desert with cactus, cougars or rattlesnakes. But in the second year, their population grew. Do monkeys adapt to new environments faster than people do? I wanted to go and meet them someday. In 2016, I finally visited them in Texas. I saw that they looked a bit Americanized, somehow. They are a bit bigger, and started to eat cactus. Now they know how to deal with the cougars and rattlesnakes. They have a new language to alert each other. When I spent few days with them under the Texan sun, I decided to make a mountain with ice for them. I filled a car full of ice bags. And I wondered, do they remember snow mountains?’

The video installation showed this group of snow monkeys observing and smelling and touching and playing and sitting on the ice for the first time. I believe it is important to note that the snow monkeys had been sent to Texas in 1972 due to habitat loss around Kyoto, that is when the monkeys became pests to businesses and residents of Kyoto, perforating the barrier between wild and urban spaces.

‘They come one by one. Some monkeys wanted to keep the ice to themselves, then they got bored,’ Shimabuku observed of the 22-minute video. ‘Some shared. Some were bossy […] like people.’ The snow became a forbidden fruit with many monkeys grabbing a handful and running off. But most of them nervously nibbled nearby with a shifting gaze. ‘I didn’t expect them to eat it. [In Japan] they eat flowers, trees and insects. But it is new for them to eat rattlesnake and cactus.’ When asked why it was important to test if monkeys remembered their place of origin, Shimabuku laughed and said, ���maybe it is not important. Memory is a bridge between animals and people. […] Memory can be at a cellular level. The monkeys looked at the ice and they grabbed it. Some hadn’t seen ice for generations, and still they reacted spontaneously,’ noted Shimabuku.

I wonder if we already are Shumabuku’s snow monkeys, struggling to remember how we were supposed to live after alienating ourselves from ourselves, not knowing what to do, what to know, what to feel in the face of our own nature, a nature we only reluctantly admit to belong to.

Perhaps, the answers already are in the festoon of obsessions we are so careful to hide away in the dumps. If we were brave enough, if we had love enough to go and rummage in the garbage of our civilization believing we could find something meaningful in there, something deserving to be saved, perhaps we could find one good thought to build a future on.