#worst dressed teenager award goes to Works

[palesmokeisinthevoid]

Posts this with no context other than “need somewhere to put this so I can put it on ao3”

[epicene-humanoid]

some trans Jeff thoughts:

he realized he was trans in elementary school and just went fuck it I'll just start introducing myself as Jeffery and see if anyone decides to stop me (as we know, jeff winger can get away with almost anything)

he got top surgery the second he could afford it (around the same time he started at his law firm), and probably bribed someone to keep it a secret

"I'm jeff winger and i would rather look at myself naked than the women I sleep with" are the words of a man proud of his transition

he's really insecure about his fashion sense, which is why he mostly dresses like the douchey guys at his firm in the start of the show, he thought you can't go wrong with the sleazy lawyer look

he will never admit it but he feels super good about the dean hitting on him, because the dean is a (cis) guy, acknowledging that Jeff is more manly than him

i think he starts out stealth and comes out to everyone one by one, probably starting with abed because he knows abed won't judge him and will probably just see it as an interesting backstory.

abed just says it's cool and maybe worth a prequel exploring Jeff's transition, and jeff asks him to predict how all of the members of the group will react to him coming out.

abed's predictions:

britta will be over-the-top supportive and do a ton of research about trans history, probably put together a slideshow just to prove how progressive she is, and jeff will be a little bit weirded out, but also touched that she did all that for him, though he would never let her know that

shirley will be confused, because she doesn't know how someone she trusts and knows so well could be part of a group she was raised to hate, but ultimately realizes that there's nothing actually against the lgbtq people in the bible, and, as a cool character development arch, starts to advocate against use of the bible to justify bigotry

troy will just think it over and decide that Jeff's physique and coolness are even awesomer knowing how much work he'd had to put in to be like that, and respects Jeff's manliness even more

annie will give him a hug, say something sweet about how she'll always love him, and worry about his health, because even she read somewhere that taking testosterone makes you more likely to have a heart attack, jeff will explain that the risk is still only as high a cis guy, and she'll be the one to always remind him to take his shots

peirce will say at best say "jeff winger used to be a chick?" and at worst call him a slur, either way there's sure to be a lot of misgendering from him, and pestering to know Jeff's deadname (needless to say, Jeff just doesn't tell peirce)

the whole group goes out of their way to keep their beach trips a secret from pierce (the girls don't want him there anyways, he's too liable to be creepy) even though jeff knows that even if pierce saw his scars, all he would have to do is make up a story about some childhood accident and pierce would never question it

sorry this ended up being super long. can I hear some of your headcanons for him?

YES ALL THIS!!! yes yes i’m fully accepting this as canon oh my god

i’m about to type a whole ass ESSAY at midnight because i have been DYING to talk about this for months ajfdksljk,,, this is going to be obscenely long and i might end up adding even more to it as i continue to rewatch the show because there is truly no shortage of trans jeff content (especially when you’re trans and see transness in every little thing ajdkslfkjs)

spoiler warning for literally everything about this show under the cut <3

i 100% agree, i feel like he realized he was trans super young, especially since in the show we see him as a little kid a couple of times. 

like look at little jeff with the oversized sweatshirt and little ponytail!! that’s childhood trans fashion. not to be dramatic but part of me thinks that jeff’s dad left before he fully came out to his family (which gives him even more angst about it, because until that one Thanksgiving episode, he’s never able to prove to his dad that he’s a better man), but part of me thinks that his dad left after he came out (which adds that spicy i-should-have-stayed-in-the-closet guilt that he has to work through). 

either way, because his dad wasn’t there, he had to base his concept of masculinity on something else, which was becoming a lawyer!! there’s some line that’s like “after the dust and divorce papers were settled the only man i looked up to was [the lawyer guy]”. like, replacing your father figure in your mind with the concept of “a job where you can talk your way in and out of anything and distort other people’s concept of reality”? that’s trans.

 and the fucking THANKSGIVING EPISODE... i struggle to watch it without crying hehe <3 yeowch! the dichotomy of willy jr. being the ���wrong” kind of man because he’s “too soft” but jeff also not being enough despite adhering to all the social standards of masculinity... fuck!! this whole scene of him telling his dad “i am Not well adjusted” and talking about how he gave himself an “appendix surgery scar” when he was a kid and he still keeps the get-well-soon letters from his classmates under his bed? oh my god. the implication of people loving him not despite his scars but because of them?? trans. i can’t think about this episode for too long or i’ll start yelling.

OH and this scene? where he talks about how his mom got him a girl costume for halloween?? and everyone said “what a cute little girl” and after a few houses he stopped correcting them?? and “once the shame and the fear wore off, i was just glad they thought i was pretty”?? THAT’S TRANS... the man needs validation oh my god... and then in all the halloween episodes we see he has these ultra-masculine costumes (a cowboy, David Beckham, one of the fast and furious guys even though he never watched the movies, a boxer with his DAD’S boxing gloves... god) costumes are about becoming something else and he always chooses to be hypermasculine and that is trans.

THE PHYSICAL EDUCATION EPISODE!!!!!!! being uncomfortable during P.E. is a queer experience. period. but him being specifically uncomfortable in the clothes someone else is assigning to him? trans. “are we gonna talk about clothes like a girl? or use tapered sticks to hit balls around a cushioned mat like a man?” TRANS. and him eventually stripping in public? celebration of transness. and the fact that he eventually becomes comfortable in both the uniform and his own style!! trans!! god i love this episode. 

AND AND AND!!! the gay dean coming out episode!!! where it’s the three of them discussing the best way for the dean to come out as gay despite not entirely identifying with that label!! so we have both frankie and the dean who are sort of ambiguously queer, and jeff who’s a stealth trans man who’s probably only out to only the study group at this point. this scene where the dean and jeff have this like eyebrow communication while frankie is talking is just so cute. queer-to-queer communication. “I am so curious” “oh?” “intellectually.” “oh...” ajfdksljfk this scene just screams high school GSA to me and i love it so much.

and SPEAKING of the dean!! i totally see you on that. i feel like jeff has some internalized homophobia/biphobia (like he’d throw punches over someone else, but when it comes to himself he has a lot of shame). and also seeing the dean so confident in all his different outfits/costumes has a weird affect on him bc it’s like “okay, the dean, a cis guy, can do that, but i as a trans guy could Not because that’s Breaking the Rules”. which, like, throwback to the halloween thing. of course there’s no right way to be masculine, but mr. winger does not know that.

another thing!! the episode where their emails get leaked? that includes his emails with his therapist. fuck!! he was outed to the whole world in that episode!! no wonder he was so fucking angry!! this whole episode (and really any time he mentions his therapist) is so interesting when you think about them as a person he talks to about his transition. OH which adds to the thing with the dean!! “and you told your therapist you wanted to be alone this weekend” and “not you jeff, i know you’ll be visiting your dad” ”I told you to stop reading my emails”. luckily his study group has his back and just makes fun of him for emailing astronauts lmao

and WHO can forget “they’re giving out an award for most handsome young man!!!!” what else is there to say about this line besides: he’s trans. you know he didn’t get awarded enough for being a handsome young man when he was a kid, and no amount of compliments when he’s fully-grown can really make up for that. some people crash a kid’s bar mitzvah to cope with the fact that they struggled to be seen as themselves when they were a teenager <3

also his weird relationship with pierce? where he kind of hates him (understandably lmao) but at times has this almost-friends-almost-father-son relationship with him? especially in this episode where he’s forced to bond with him and ends up having a good time by accident (at a barber shop no less, the perfect place to Be A Man with your Man Friend). idk what to say about him besides the fact that pierce says his mom wanted a girl when he was born and made him dress like a girl (and his middle name is anastasia!) so if they’re gonna do any bonding over transness it’s gonna be that. 

okay one last thing and then i’ll shut up for the night. this episode kills me (and almost kills jeff hahahahelpi’mcrying). it’s a very Trans thing to not be able to visualize your future self, it just is. growing up trans at the time he did? i don’t know what kind of future he saw for himself, but i’m so happy that he ended up with a group of friends who became his family and love him the way they all do. i’m so emotional over this asshole it’s ridiculous. 

in conclusion:

they’re trans, your honor <3

[multifandom-worlds]

The Mistakes I Made.

Genre: angst/fluff

Rating: Mature 18+

Word Count: 2821

Warnings: this contains nudity, mild sexual activity, mentions of sexual assault, and panic. 

Notes: This is a Victor and Cole fic. Thank you to @otome-and-fanfiction and @darling-dummy-blogs ​ for helping me when I was stuck.

I had a charity event to attend last night and like the perfect wife she is, Cole attended with me even though she did voice her concerns about going, she ultimately went. 

Just about everything I could have done wrong last night to protect my wife and make her feel safe, I did. I'm human, I make mistakes but these mistakes should never have been made and those mistakes could cost my wife several years of healing to go down the drain.

Cole is a very introverted woman, she does not do well in social settings. She was also sexually assaulted twice as a teenager, both by the same person - her boyfriend at the time. One time it was when she was sleeping, another time he cornered her. Now because of that trauma, Cole absolutely cannot handle being cornered by anyone, especially not a man. I promised her when we got married that if she ever told me she was uncomfortable in any settling, I would excuse us as quickly as possible.

Now, not only did I bring her to a rather large charity event where she knew no one else besides me, I left her side resulting in her being cornered by a couple different men trying to talk to her. When I realised, 5 minutes had elapsed and I quickly excused myself from the conversation I was in to step in and help her. I told her we'd only be there for another hour and asked if she'd be okay that long. She agreed. Except it wasn't just an hour - it was 3. 

By the time we got home, Cole wasn't talking to me. Her hands were shaking slightly and she was having difficulties subduing a panic attack. I took her hand and led her to the bedroom. As soon as the door was shut, she burst into tears, her makeup running down her cheeks. The fact that I caused my wife this much pain and panic hurts. 

What was I even trying to do last night? What was I trying to prove? Whatever image my subconscious was trying to uphold isn't worth the pain I caused Cole. 

I could see her struggling, debating if she wanted me or one of her stuffed animals. I can only imagine the thoughts racing through her head right now. Does she still trust me? Does she still feel safe with me? Have I ruined everything she's worked for in a single right?

I made to leave the room, but she called my name, her voice rough and broken. "Victor..?" 

I whirl around, moving right to my wife's side, my hands resting on her thighs. 

"I'm right here, Coco. I'm sorry for what I put you through." I whisper, head hung low. "I never should have left you alone like that. I know better, I do. I would never purposefully throw you to the wolves like that." 

"Victor!" Cole shouts, tears still rolling down her cheeks. Oh my god I'm an idiot. I made her hurt yet in expecting her to comfort my guilt. 

World's worst husband award winner, right here. 

"I'm sorry my love. Let's get this dress off you and go to sleep. You've had a long night" I state, standing up and gently pulling her to her feet. She nods, letting me help her. This is good. She still trusts me enough to help her.

She turns around, pulling her hair to the side over her shoulder so I can get to the zipper. I run my fingertips across her shoulders and down her bare arms. The fingers leave goosebumps on her skin. The muscles in her back slowly release, her breathing slowly returning to a less panicked state.

I unzip her dress, letting it fall down her body, helping it skim her hips before it lands on the floor. She steps out of the dress, bending down to pick it up before she goes to hang it up, only wearing her bra and panties. I sit down on the bed, admiring her, feeling assured in the fact she still feels safe with me.

Over in the closet, she unhooks her bra, the straps falling down her shoulders leaving me an unobstructed, albeit brief, view of her back, the bottom of her tattoo coming to end just above her tailbone.

I stand up, crossing the room in 2 steps, coming up behind her and wrapping one arm around her stomach and the other around her shoulders, pulling her into me. She stiffens briefly but relaxes, feeling my hands on around her body. 

She looks up, resting her head on my shoulder before covering the arm that's around her shoulders with her own. 

She whispers, the first sentence she's said in the past 2 hours "I was so scared.."

Her words were knives to my heart. "I can't even imagine. I'm proud of you, you did so well. I'm sorry I wasn't more attentive to your needs." 

"You have an image to uphold, it was wrong of me to expect you to leave just because I wanted to." She mumbles, turning to face me. I remove my arms from her body before replacing them on her lower back once she's facing me

"Coco…" I sigh,  pulling her in for a hug. She pressed her face into my shirt, wetting it with her tears. I don't even care if she gets makeup on it, I'll dry clean it.

"Baby my image means nothing if you're struggling."

She mumbles something into my chest. Unable to hear it, I back away before hooking my index finger under her chin, tilting upwards. "What was that, my love? I couldn't hear you "

Cole takes a deep breath before she repeats herself. "I'm a stain on your image. I don't know why you want to stay with me. I expect too much from you."

How could she ever think she's a stain on my image?"

"Who told you baby? Who told you you expect too much from me?"

Cole looks down at her hands, wringing them together nervously in front of her bare chest. "My therapist…" she mumbles. 

I shake my head, unable to comprehend what I just heard. The person who's supposed to be helping her heal is in fact, making it worse at the same time. I made a mental note to call her therapist in the morning. 

Cole's gasps, her hands resting gently on my chest. "I'm sorry about your shirt.." 

I look down, seeing the stains. "I'm not worried about the shirt. I'm worried about you" I answered, slipping the jacket off my shoulders before laying it on the chair in the corner.

She cock's her head slightly before hooking her finger in the loop of my tie, gently loosening it before working on the buttons of my shirt. Her face blushes a faint red as more and more if my chest becomes exposed to the warm air of our bedroom.

Once she was able to undo every button, I took it off and placed it with my jacket, making a second mental note to send it to be dry cleaned first thing Monday. 

While I finished changing for bed - taking off my suit pants and replacing them with a pair of silk pyjama bottoms, Cole goes to the bathroom to wash the rest of the makeup off, having calmed down enough to function. I watch her, watch the way she leaned into the mirror to see when she takes her glasses off, the way she delicately moves her bangs behind her ear. 

Once I was dressed for bed, I came up behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist, resting on her stomach, the first faint smile I'd seen since we arrived at the event 5 hours earlier. Sliding my hands to her hips, I carefully turn her to face me before gently pressing our bodies against the sink.

To my surprise, she doesn't look away, in fact she looks up at me, her glasses still on the counter beside the sink so I had an unobstructed view of her beautiful hazel eyes.

My hand cups her cheek and jaw, thumb gently rubbing against her bottom lip, her arms wrap around my neck. The overwhelming desire to kiss her begins to take over. 

I leaned in, our lips a hair's breadth away before asking "Can I kiss you?"

She laughs slightly before closing the distance between us, her lips, soft against mine. My hands move to her lower back, pulling her in as close as I can get her before kissing her back. Her skin on her chest was warm against mine. There was no battle for dominance, just pure, deep, unspoken love. 

Cole was the first one to break away to catch her breath, a smile on her lips. I'm glad I was able to put that smile back there however I wanted more. I grabbed her hand and walked her back to the bed, shutting off both the bathroom and bedroom lights. 

Gently laying her down on the bed, I lean over her, one knee between her legs, the other on the outside, arms on either side of her head. The red-light lamp on her bedside table casts her in a soft red glow, further adding to the intimacy of the moment. Her arms down by her side, looking up at me, still without her glasses on. 

How did I get so lucky to have such a beautiful woman as my wife? I leaned in again, our lips finding each other quickly. I pull away to take a breath before I begin to trail kisses down her cheek..her jaw..her neck…her clavicle…her shoulders. 

Cole shudders beneath me, I have to ask, I can't just assume. "Are you okay, my love? Do you want me to stop?" 

She shakes her head, her breath shaky. "No…no." 

I smile, fingers dancing delicately across the skin of her shoulders, down the outside of her arm, my fingers slipping between hers, moving them up above her head. Her back arched upwards slightly, pressing her chest up into mine. I dip my head down to her neck, kissing her throat and just below her jaw, her hands squeezing around mine, her breath catching in her throat. 

My lips find their way just below her ear before whispering "You are the most perfect being" then returning to her skin, now scorching hot. Goosebumps raise wherever my lips leave, eventually covering her entire body. 

Letting go of her hands, my fingertips dance back down the delicate skin of her arms before moving down her sides, just skimming the side of her breasts. With my legs supporting my weight, my hands are free to trail along her stomach, up between her breasts, across her shoulders and down her arms again. Taking one of her hands and carefully lifting it to my lips, I kiss her palm delicately. 

"I love your hands, how they're able to take care of the most precious of children"

I kiss her arm to her shoulder. "I love your shoulders, how broad they are, strong enough to carry all it is you do." 

I trail kisses across her clavicle and down the centre of her breasts again. "I love your heart, how warm it is, how much love you're able to give everyone around you even after so much hurt."

Trailing kissing back up her body, I bypass her lips to her forehead. "I love your mind, how beautiful the ideas you come up with are."

Down to her eyes, I kiss her closed eyelids gently. "I love your eyes, the way you see so much beauty in the world" 

Finally down to her lips. "I love your lips, the softness of the words you speak, the love and kindness you speak into this world."

Cole blushed, hiding her face in her hands. Laughing, I shake my head softly and remove her hands from her face before pulling her up to a seated position. She fights to hide her face again. "Why are you hiding?"

She answers my question softly, looking down again "You're lying to me. There's no way." 

I gently grabbed her chin, tilting her face to meet mine. I was not going to address this, nothing I saw is going to stick with her right now.

"Baby, I mean every word. You're exhausted, you've had a tough night, let's go to bed" 

She nodded, I dropped her hands so she could lay down. I shift my weight, laying down beside her. She curled into my chest, her leg wrapped around mine. I smiled, wrapping my arms around her, pulling her in before covering us up. She fell asleep almost as soon as she closed her eyes. 

"I love you, Cole Li. I won't make those mistakes again." I whisper before going to sleep myself. 

When I woke up this morning, my wife was peacefully sleeping next to me, the blankets slipping from her bare shoulder, the warm sun illuminating the soft pale skin, haloing her in ethereal light. I still carry so much guilt for what I did to her last night but that’s currently being overshadowed by the fact her therapist - a woman I pay exorbitant amounts of money too to help my wife overcome her trauma, is telling my wife that she expects too much from me.

Not to disturb Cole, I carefully slip out of bed before taking my phone from the nightstand and stepping out of our room. Thankfully her therapist works Saturdays. I give her a call.

“Akira Ito, how may I help you.” She answers, her voice chipper as always.

“It’s Victor Li, you provide therapy to my wife Cole” I say, voice cold and flat. I keep my anger quelled. I do need to remain professional.

“Ah Mr. Li. I was just about to call you myself. Cole is doing great…” 

I interrupt her before she has a chance to finish. “No, she is not doing great. You have told her she expects too much out of me, correct?” 

The line is quiet for a moment before she answers. “Yes but…”

I interrupt her again. She does not deserve time to explain herself. “You also told her she is a stain on my image, yes?” 

The line is silent once again before she answers. “Yes but if you just listen, I can explain.”

That last phrase was enough. “No. No you cannot explain why you said the things you said to a woman who is trying to heal. Because of what you said to my wife, she did not call my name when she was surrounded by 3 men bigger than she is last night. It was lucky I noticed when I did. She was terrified but didn’t say anything about leaving because you, the person I pay to help her, a person she trusts told her she is a stain on my image, she suffered for an extra 3 hours that she didn’t need too.” Akira was speechless on the phone but I wasn’t finished yet. 

“Cole was so scared last night that she refused to speak for 2 hours after we left. Worst of all, she blames herself for everything because you have her believing it’s her fault. She was finally making progress until you decided to have your own plan and sabotage her. I’m not sure what you thought you were going to accomplish with that tactic but it ends now. Cole is no longer going to be under your care and should you try to contact her, I have the law on my side and it will not end in your favour, I can assure you of that. Good day.”

I hang up the phone, refusing to give that woman any more of my time than she already had. Instead of helping my wife, she is hindering her and I refuse to sit idly by and let that happen. I make a note on my phone to have Goldman look up therapists and counsellors in the city on Monday when I return to work. 

Returning back to our room, Cole is just starting to stir. I climb back under the blankets, wrapping my arms around her. She shivers, since I never put a shirt on when I left our bedroom, the rest of the house is several degrees cooler than our room is. 

“I’m sorry baby. My arms will warm up in a second.” I whisper, fingers drawing little circles on her back. She opens her eyes enough to look at me, she smiles before closing them again, moving so she can rest her head on my chest, her one arm slung lazily across my stomach, her leg wrapped around mine again. Not that I mind, this Saturday morning she can have extra snuggles if she needs them, right now my only focus is her well-being, everything else can wait.

[tsrookie]

Alright, so today’s the three-year anniversary of Reputation a.k.a the greatest album of all time, my baby, the light of my life, the album that deserved a Grammy (trying desperately not to think about the scene from Miss Americana😭), the album that introduced us to the most beautiful couple ever, the album that shut Kimye up, and I better stop now, or else I’m not gonna shut up.

So in honour of this momentous occasion (and the fact that I reached 200+ followers! Thank you so much you guys!🥺 Love you all 3000💙), here’s a loooooong post on why Reputation is the Ethan and MC album.

1. ...Ready For It?

No one has to know

Throwback to MC saying the exact same words back in Miami.

In the middle of the night, in my dreams

You should see the things we do, baby, mmm

In the middle of the night, in my dreams

I know I'm gonna be with you

So I take my time

Remember back when MC asked for Ethan to get into bed right away during their first time? Ethan told them that he had dreamt about the moment for months, so he wasn’t going to rush it.

2. End Game

Big reputation, big reputation

Ooh you and me would be a big conversation

These two dating would be the talk of the hospital, and they know it.

Even when we'd argue, we don't do it for long

And you understand the good and bad, end up in the song

For all your beautiful traits, and the way you do it with ease

For all my flaws, paranoia, and insecurities

Think these lines are pretty self-explanatory😌

I hit you like bang

We tried to forget it, but we just couldn't

*gets war flashbacks of the ‘reset’ phase*😭 They tried to make it work, but we all know how Ch 8 of book 2 went😌

I swear I don't love the drama, it loves me

Perfect for our chaotic MC😌

3. Don’t Blame Me

Do I... really have to explain this one?

For you, I would cross the line

I would waste my time

I would lose my mind

They say she's gone too far this time

Do we need a recap of our rule-breaking MC?

And baby, for you, I would fall from grace

Just to touch your face

If you walk away

I'd beg you on my knees to stay

He was willing to risk his (mostly) rule-abiding reputation for being with MC. And there’s no way he wouldn’t beg for MC not to leave him if he ever screwed up🤷‍♀️

4. Delicate

This ain't for the best

My reputation's never been worse, so

You must like me for me

Ethan stood by MC’s side throughout the Ethics hearing, when her reputation was completely smeared, and people only saw her as a patient murderer. He didn’t know about the sabotages, but he would’ve definitely supported her if he had known.

We can't make

Any promises now, can we, babe?

Commitment-phobia🙃

Sometimes I wonder when you sleep

Are you ever dreaming of me?

Sometimes when I look into your eyes

I pretend you're mine, all the damn time

They spent so much of time apart, not able to be with each other, so the least they could do was dream of being with each other all the time.

5. So It Goes (an underrated af bop)

What can I say... it’s a sex song, okay? Don’t make me go into the details😂 Just listen to the lyrics, and all will be clear.

6. Gorgeous (Tumblr won’t let me put any more links)

MC’s eternal anthem to Ethan.

Whisky on ice, Sunset and Vine

You've ruined my life, by not being mine

We all know Ethan loves Whiskey, and the second line? C’mon!

You're so gorgeous

I can't say anything to your face

'Cause look at your face

And I'm so furious

At you for making me feel this way

But, what can I say?

You're gorgeous

Ethan Ramsey is famous for two reasons. One: his smart brain, I guess😒 Two: HIS LOOKS!!! HE’S GORGEOUS, AND DON’T DENY IT.

And you should think about the consequence

Of you touching my hand in the darkened room (dark room, dark room)

Ah, the olden days of hand holding in the diagnostics office🥺

Ocean blue eyes looking in mine

I feel like I might sink and drown and die

No explanation required.

You make me so happy, it turns back to sad, yeah

There's nothing I hate more than what I can't have

You are so gorgeous it makes me so mad

The wonderful will-they-won’t-they saga. The frustrating hot-and-cold behaviour. The ‘We can’t’, ‘It’s unethical’ and ‘It’s complicated’. MC deserves an award for her patience😓

7. King Of My Heart

I'm perfectly fine, I live on my own

I made up on my mind, I'm better off bein' alone

Ethan ‘I don’t believe in soulmates and nobody’s waiting at home’ Ramsey.

And all at once, you are the one I have been waiting for

King of my heart, body and soul, ooh whoa

And all at once, you are all I want, I'll never let you go

King of my heart, body and soul, ooh whoa

This could be from both Ethan and MC’s perspectives. The love they share isn’t something that you get easily. It’s something that MC has waited for her whole life, and something Ethan never knew he needed, but now can’t live without🥺

Late in the night, the city's asleep

Your love is a secret I'm hoping, dreaming, dying to keep

Change my priorities

The taste of your lips is my idea of luxury

This was definitely Ethan throughout book 2, after he finally gave in. He let go of his previous rules and regulations, especially during the time of the attack. He was clearly affected, and once MC was alright, his main priority was her, and her alone.

Is the end of all the endings?

My broken bones are mending

With all these nights we're spending

Ethan’s been burnt a lot in the past. But all those wounds are now healing thanks to MC.

Up on the roof with a school girl crush

Drinking beer out of plastic cups

They act like lovesick teenagers around each other, like, that’s literally their description if you choose to kiss Ethan for the first time in Chapter 14 of book 2!😅

Say you fancy me, not fancy stuff

Baby, all at once, this is enough

We all know about his initial fear of his mother reaching out to him for the sake of his money. To him, MC not talking advantage of him is a pretty big deal, even though it’s never mentioned. You just know, you know?🥺

8. Dancing With Our Hands Tied

My, my love had been frozen

Deep blue, but you painted me golden

Again, Ethan doesn’t have the best experience with love. But MC changed that.

I'm a mess, but I'm the mess that you wanted

This could go both ways, cause they’re both piping hot messes😬 (but love each other anyway���)

The rest of this song could have made so much more sense for them if we had gotten some sort of a secret relationship storyline. But oh well, I’m definitely not complaining about the gala😌 (and definitely not believing any of the supposed cancelled storylines)

9. Dress

Our secret moments

In a crowded room

They got no idea

About me and you

I mean... pretty obvious😌

Even in my worst times, you could see the best of me

And I woke up just in time

Now I wake up by your side

My one and only, my lifeline

This is practically Ethan’s train of thought, and you can’t convince me otherwise.

As for the rest of the steamier lyrics... I’ll um... let you guys listen to it yourselves😁

10. Call It What You Want

I wrote an entire fic inspired by this song, so excuse me for the shameless self-promo, but go give it a read?🥺👉👈(totally fine if you don’t! I’ve probably made so many posts about this song that y’all know the meaning anyway😅)

11. New Years Day

Don't read the last page

But I stay when you're lost and I'm scared and you're turning away

I want your midnights

But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day

MC has always stayed by Ethan’s side, even when he’s pushed her away. These lines perfectly explain how she wants his worst times, and his best, the midnights they spend staying up together, and the moments where it’s just the two of them, when everyone else has left, like the aftermath of a New Years party (still mad at the fact that we didn’t get to see the gang celebrate New Year together😭)

I'll be there if you're the toast of the town babe

Or if you strike out and you're crawling home

The above explanation for these lines as well.

Please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere

Becoming strangers to each other would be their worst nightmares. Knowing that the other was out there in the world somewhere, but not being in their lives would kill them.

You and me forevermore

These two are each other’s soulmate, they know it, even if they haven’t said it yet. Forever wouldn’t be enough for them to shower each other with they love they hold for each other. But it’s a good start.

——————————

If you guys made it this far, then I honestly love you more than words can ever express🥺💙 Thanks for putting up with my Swiftie-Directioner-Ethan stan ass, cause I dunno if I’d ever be able to handle someone like myself. And if you read all the above stuff, then I hope you wanna know why this album means so much to me.

Reputation is perceived as a dark album, when in reality it’s truly about finding love amongst all the noise. This album, and Taylor and Joe’s story, taught me what true love actually is, and Ethan and MC cemented that. This album and these two couples (quite literally) saved my life.

The most beautiful part about both these relationships is that even though they never showed it openly, for the sake of their relationships, both Ethan(in the story) and Joe stood by the side of the one’s they loved, despite half of the people who they knew hating on them, or betraying them. And I think that’s what’s truly important. Forming a true relationship like that, be it platonic or romantic, is long lasting, and I hope everyone finds those kind of people to fill their hearts with. Sending much love, and sorry for being a huge sap😅💙

Tagging a couple of my Swiftie homies: @swiftlydarcy @nikki-2406 @dxnicaramsey @kaavyaethanramsey @caseyvalentineramsey @drariellevalentine @justanotherrookie

[certifiedskywalker]

Are You Bored Yet? - Benjamin Poindexter

Anonymous said: Hi!! Can I request some more Poindexter x reader? I’ve read ever fanfic on this website and I’m so sad that the amount of fanfics for him is so limited! Maybe some more dark, Dex stalking the reader but the reader falling for Dex and everything goes according to his plan! I’ve fallen down the Dex hole

AN: It’s been a while since I’ve written for Dex! I hope I did him justice! (I will forever be bitter that we will not see him and DareDevil in the same way again)

This was not part of Dex’s plan. Hell, the idea of it set him on edge. With his occupation, his senses were used to overloads. The sound of gunfire and flashing lights did little in the ways of hindering him during his working hours. Outside of his schedule, well, it was different.

Different meaning near piercing. There was noise everywhere. Crashing, geering, shattering, all of it all at once. It took everything Dex had not to cover his ears. That day he learned that he hated arcades. There was nothing worth the smell, the sounds, any of it.

Except you. You were worth it all and that confused him. 

How could someone like you, all collected and cool, work at a place so obnoxious? The answer alluded Dex, taunted him, teased him with the tilt of your smile. When he learned where you worked, he almost lost his tether to you. Yet, he found himself watching you smile at people under the neon lights and assault of noise almost daily now. 

Dex pulled the brim of his cap down as he stepped further inside. You were behind the ticket counter bartering with a gaggle of loudly dressed children. Despite how annoying they were, how annoying Dex assumed all children were, you were smiling. It, no, you amazed him. If he could, he would watch you smile like that all-

“Fuck off, loser!”

“Hey!”

Dex forced himself to take a long, barely steadying breath before turning to face the high-pitched yelling. When he finally opened his eyes, his gaze was assaulted by the flashing, gold lights of ‘Shoot ‘Em Up Hoops’ and the pair of children fighting there. An older looking girl was pushing away a younger boy until the basketball in his hand fell. The orange ball rolled over to Dex, bouncing slightly, almost to the beat of the game’s music.

“You can’t shoot for shit.”

Dex reached down, hands gripping the ball tightly as he listened. The young boy was growing red in the face, tears welling up in his eyes. For a moment, Dex saw himself. He could feel the sting of rejection and twinge of fear as if it were his own. 

As if to prove that he was real, that the boy he once was was truly no more, Dex effortlessly threw the ball. His aim was sharp as always, the impact ever-so satisfying. There was a sudden silence around him as eyes turned to study him; but Dex was focused on the ball, where it had hit.

So neatly, the ball ran circles around the edge of the hoop before dipping inside. The older girl stared at him wide eyed as points were awarded to the younger boy. It was just enough to put the boy’s score ahead, winning the game. The children turned then, still in a stunned silence, to study Dex. The girl looked furious. 

Slowly, Dex walked up to the pair, crouching down before them. He locked eyes with the girl and he could see her resolve melting. Now the fear was hers.

“Cheating will get you no where,” Dex said lowly, “because there will always be someone better than you.” The children blinked at him, dumbfounded. “Run along now.”

Dex stood up as the two kids ran off. With a little more quiet, he found himself set a little more at ease. He turned his head only slightly to peer back at you. For a moment, in the din of jingling tokens and game sound effects, Dex swore you were looking at him. Yet, with his senses so overwhelmed, he convinced himself he imagined it and turned away.

Just leave, he thought, just fucking go. There was other things he could be doing, new regimes he could follow to distract himself from you. Hell, the new routines could even prove to be grounding. Dex needed stability. He turned to glance back at you.

You were talking to a frazzled looking mother and a very young girl pointing at a stuffed pony. Despite the obvious annoyance, you were smiling. It was a steady smile, one that Dex would have to practice in the mirror to get just right. You were the stability he lacked and Dex couldn’t leave you.

He let out a sigh and eyed the tokens that rest beside the ‘Shoot ‘Em Up Hoops’ game. The dumb kids left them there. They wouldn’t be back for them and Dex had time to kill before you shift ended. He would walk you home, well, a few paces behind, then. He had to make sure you were safe. There was too much going on, too much at stake.

Leaning down, Dex picked up one of the tokens and stepped up to the game. The coin slid into the slot and the game’s music started up again. He picked up the ball as the timer began and took aim. With an ease that never needed practice, Dex made a basket.

Many, many baskets later, and Dex took note of how much the noise in the arcade had died down. Most of the evening crowd had funneled out the door when the first stars began poking out in the dark sky. Now, it was a scattered few teenagers and desperate adults clinging to what they could; and Dex. Though, he was clinging to something, someone, too.

But your shift still wasn’t over yet so Dex continued racking up the points in ‘Shoot ‘Em Up Hoops’. It was so easy to get lost in the movement. Though, it wasn’t as fluid as throwing knives or axes. It reminded Dex of a simpler time. A time when-

“Are you bored yet?”

Dex felt a rush of heat wash over his back and shoulders. Slowly, he turned around to see you, with those eyes of yours, studying him. Dex gripped the basketball tightly as an automated voice entreated him to continue on with the game.

“I…”

“You’ve been shooting hoops for a while now and we’re closing in a few minutes.”

“Oh, sorry, I just,” Dex set the basketball down to mask the shakiness of his voice. He needed to get a grip. “I just lost track of time.”

“It’s alright,” there was that smile again. Dex felt his lips pull up too, just a little. Every other sound around you melted away then, leaving him just with you. 

For a moment, he thought maybe he could smile and mean it truly. Before he could, suddenly, your eyes widened and Dex felt like he was going to be sick. Did you recognize him from all the times he had snooped around? This was it. This was his worst fear realized: he was going to lose you before even knowing you.

“You have a ton of tickets! I didn’t even know that ‘Shoot ‘Em Up’ could grant that many! Do you want to exchange them?” Dex traced your gaze and saw the mass of tiny, connected slips of paper spilling out of the machine. How long had he been playing?

“I-sure. Yeah, I’ll exchange them.”

You were smiling at him again and Dex felt his chest tighten. Wordlessly, he followed you to the counter where he had seen you working before. The stuffed animals along the wall were largely picked over save for a large giraffe and a few colorful creatures Dex didn’t dare claim to know. The display case too was sparse aside from an array of tacky rings. As you moved behind the case, Dex piled his tickets on the counter. 

“Can you find the end of your tickets for me? I can put them in the machine to count them then.” You were cleaning up as you spoke and Dex couldn’t take his eyes off you. So close, so terribly close. When you turned around, Dex forced himself to look away. 

“Yeah, yeah, sure.” Dex began to fumble with the tickets. After a moment, you stepped closer to him, hands reaching out near his.

“Here, let me help you.”

You began skimming the edges of the tickets with your fingers, searching, as Dex was, for the stub-end. At one point, your hand brushed against his and he swore that a jolt of electricity jumped between your bodies. Eventually, you found the end of the tickets and fed it into the counting machine. The silence was filled by the sound of the tickets being eaten up with a horribly robotic crunching sound emanating from a nearby speaker. 

“I’ve seen you around here a lot.” You did recognize him. Dex tried to keep himself steady; something that came easier, somehow, with you so close. 

“Yeah, I, my friend told me about this place.” It was a lie that he had practiced. He thought of Nadeem. A friend. “His kid had a birthday here.”

“You have kids?”

“No,” Dex couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled up his throat. It was a bitter one but he muscled through it. “I don’t. Probably shouldn’t.”

“After working here,” you sighed heavily, “I think you might have the right idea. They’re a handful. I mean, that kid you stopped from bullying the other one, earlier. Kids can be mean.”

“You saw that?” So, you had noticed him, watched him even. A spark of hope set Dex’s veins aflame. The feeling only intensified when he noticed a wave of shyness hit you. You were curling in on yourself slightly now and all he wanted to do was reach out to you.

“Yeah, they were causing a bit of scene. If it wasn’t for you, I would have had to go over and separate them. So, uh, thanks for doing my job. It was sweet of you too, defending that boy.”

You met his gaze for a long moment, only breaking the contact when the ticket counter read off a total that Dex would be embarrassed to admit. He had gotten himself into a zone, honed focus. ‘Shoot ‘Em Up Hoops’ had officially proven itself to be a dangerous game.

“How did you get that many?” You asked in disbelief.

“Would you believe me if I said I played sports as a kid?” Dex bit the inside of his cheek. It was really a lie. A partial truth. He couldn’t remember the last time he had played any sport. 

“I mean yeah,” you shook your head, “you might want to consider going pro.” Dex put on a smile, though it was easier with you to wear it. “If the arcade plans on hosting a tournament, let me know. I’ll be the first to sign up.”

“I could add you quicker if I know your name,” you pointed out. Dex couldn’t help but pick up on how soft your voice had sounded. Your lips formed the words so carefully, almost as if you too had to practice what you were going to say.

“Dex,” he replied. “Nice to meet you, Y/N.”

Your eyes widened. “How did you…”

Shit. Dex could feel the ground beneath his feet begin to crumble. His eyes danced along your face, your neck, your chest, and then he saw it. His way out.

“It’s on your uh, name tag.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. I’m just-long day and all.” Dex smiled at your new nervousness, a smile that, for once, felt almost natural.

“It’s alright, you’ve got good reason to be paranoid.” You met his gaze then, an eyebrow raised in question. “Kids can be mean, and all.”

“Yeah,” you let out a breathy laugh, one that made Dex’s insides feel light as air. “So, you have a around a two thousand tickets. You can get just about everything, except for the giraffe.”

“Damn,” Dex leaned against the counter, trying to be more comfortable. “That was what I wanted. Just a few tickets short...anything you recommend?”

“Well, there’s these,” you pointed at the rings in the display case. “Perfect for a engagement, if you ask me, and then there’s these.” You stretched your arms up to the stuffed animals fastened to the wall behind the counter. “You could get a few of those.”

“Hmm…”

Dex felt a twinge in his stomach. There was pulling, a coaxing, in his chest. He knew most people called it bravery but Dex knew it best as adrenaline. It was just a chemical reaction in his body taking place as it should; but with you, he could almost believe is was something more.

“How many tickets for having coffee with you sometime?” The question fell from his lips without a second thought, something Dex started to regret as you fell silent. “That was...I was too forward. I’m-”

“A hundred tickets,” you murmured. Dex’s heart began to race.

“Just a hundred?”

“As long as you buy the drinks.”

“Coffee, tea, you name it,” Dex replied. A half smile pulled at his lips. There was no faking here, no mask in sight. Right then, it was just you and him. 

“Well then,” you held out your hand, “hundred tickets please.”

“Gladly,” Dex said, handing you what looked like a hundred or so odd tickets. It was finally paying off. The weeks of waiting, watching, and studying was all finally gathering into one moment. One agreement, one minute of Dex’s life that he would treasure forever.

You ripped off one of the tickets and grabbed a pen. Dex watched as you scribbled something on the tiny slip of blue paper. When you were finished, you handed it back to him.

“Here’s my number. Let me know when you’re free.” Dex took the slip from you, his finger tips brushing slightly against yours. 

“Thanks,” Dex said, gripping tightly to the paper. He looked up and met yours eyes. You were staring at him but not in the way he was used to people staring at him. Normally, when people looked at Dex, it was because he wasn’t normal. People could sense it and Dex knew that you could too; but you smiled, stared at him softly anyway. 

“I’m glad you didn’t get bored.” Dex’s brows furrowed. “Bored with ‘Shoot ‘Em Up Hoops’ that is. You stuck around.”

“Yeah, I am too.” 

Yes, Dex thought, he couldn’t have planned it better than this. He was willing to take this slow for you. Coffee first, stability later. He could never get bored with you. 

[path-of-my-childhood]

Taylor Swift: ‘I was literally about to break’

By: Laura Snapes for The Guardian Date: August 24th 2019

Taylor Swift’s Nashville apartment is an Etsy fever dream, a 365-days-a-year Christmas shop, pure teenage girl id. You enter through a vestibule clad in blue velvet and covered in gilt frames bursting with fake flowers. The ceiling is painted like the night sky. Above a koi pond in the living area, a narrow staircase spirals six feet up towards a giant, pillow-lagged birdcage that probably has the best view in the city. Later, Swift will tell me she needs metaphors “to understand anything that happens to me”, and the birdcage defies you not to interpret it as a pointed comment on the contradictions of stardom.

Swift, wearing pale jeans and dip-dyed shirt, her sandy hair tied in a blue scrunchie, leads the way up the staircase to show me the view. The decor hasn’t changed since she bought this place in 2009, when she was 19. “All of these high rises are new since then,” she says, gesturing at the squat glass structures and cranes. Meanwhile her oven is still covered in stickers, more teenage diary than adult appliance.

Now 29, she has spent much of the past three years living quietly in London with her boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, making the penthouse a kind of time capsule, a monument to youthful naivety given an unlimited budget – the years when she sang about Romeo and Juliet and wore ballgowns to awards shows; before she moved to New York and honed her slick, self-mythologising pop.

It is mid-August. This is Swift’s first UK interview in more than three years, and she seems nervous: neither presidential nor goofy (her usual defaults), but quick with a tongue-out “ugh” of regret or frustration as she picks at her glittery purple nails. We climb down from the birdcage to sit by the pond, and when the conversation turns to 2016, the year the wheels came off for her, Swift stiffens as if driving over a mile of speed bumps. After a series of bruising public spats (with Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj) in 2015, there was a high-profile standoff with Kanye West. The news that she was in a relationship with actor Tom Hiddleston, which leaked soon after, was widely dismissed as a diversionary tactic. Meanwhile, Swift went to court to prosecute a sexual assault claim, and faced a furious backlash when she failed to endorse a candidate in the 2016 presidential election, allowing the alt-right to adopt her as their “Aryan princess”.

Her critics assumed she cared only about the bottom line. The reality, Swift says, is that she was totally broken. “Every domino fell,” she says bitterly. “It became really terrifying for anyone to even know where I was. And I felt completely incapable of doing or saying anything publicly, at all. Even about my music. I always said I wouldn’t talk about what was happening personally, because that was a personal time.” She won’t get into specifics. “I just need some things that are mine,” she despairs. “Just some things.”

A year later, in 2017, Swift released her album Reputation, half high-camp heel turn, drawing on hip-hop and vaudeville (the brilliantly hammy Look What You Made Me Do), half stunned appreciation that her nascent relationship with Alwyn had weathered the storm (the soft, sensual pop of songs Delicate and Dress).

Her new album, Lover, her seventh, was released yesterday. It’s much lighter than Reputation: Swift likens writing it to feeling like “I could take a full deep breath again”. Much of it is about Alwyn: the Galway Girl-ish track London Boy lists their favourite city haunts and her newfound appreciation of watching rugby in the pub with his uni mates; on the ruminative Afterglow, she asks him to forgive her anxious tendency to assume the worst.

While she has always written about relationships, they were either teenage fantasy or a postmortem on a high-profile breakup, with exes such as Jake Gyllenhaal and Harry Styles. But she and Alwyn have seldom been pictured together, and their relationship is the only other thing she won’t talk about. “I’ve learned that if I do, people think it’s up for discussion, and our relationship isn’t up for discussion,” she says, laughing after I attempt a stealthy angle. “If you and I were having a glass of wine right now, we’d be talking about it – but it’s just that it goes out into the world. That’s where the boundary is, and that’s where my life has become manageable. I really want to keep it feeling manageable.”

Instead, she has swapped personal disclosure for activism. Last August, Swift broke her political silence to endorse Democratic Tennessee candidate Phil Bredesen in the November 2018 senate race. Vote.org reported an unprecedented spike in voting registration after Swift’s Instagram post, while Donald Trump responded that he liked her music “about 25% less now”.

Meanwhile, her recent single You Need To Calm Down admonished homophobes and namechecked US LGBTQ rights organisation Glaad (which then saw increased donations). Swift filled her video with cameos from queer stars such as Ellen DeGeneres and Queen singer Adam Lambert, and capped it with a call to sign her petition in support of the Equality Act, which if passed would prohibit gender- and sexuality-based discrimination in the US. A video of Polish LGBTQ fans miming the track in defiance of their government’s homophobic agenda went viral. But Swift was accused of “queerbaiting” and bandwagon-jumping. You can see how she might find it hard to work out what, exactly, people want from her.

***

It was girlhood that made Swift a multimillionaire. When country music’s gatekeepers swore that housewives were the only women interested in the genre, she proved them wrong. Her self-titled debut marked the longest stay on the Billboard 200 by any album released in the decade. A potentially cloying image – corkscrew curls, lyrics thick on “daddy” and down-home values – were undercut by the fact she was evidently, endearingly, a bit of a freak, an unusual combination of intensity and artlessness. Also, she was really, really good at what she did, and not just for a teenager: her entirely self-written third album, 2010’s Speak Now, is unmatched in its devastatingly withering dismissals of awful men.

As a teenager, Swift was obsessed with VH1’s Behind The Music, the series devoted to the rise and fall of great musicians. She would forensically rewatch episodes, trying to pinpoint the moment a career went wrong. I ask her to imagine she’s watching the episode about herself and do the same thing: where was her misstep? “Oh my God,” she says, drawing a deep breath and letting her lips vibrate as she exhales. “I mean, that’s so depressing!” She thinks back and tries to deflect. “What I remember is that [the show] was always like, ‘Then we started fighting in the tour bus and then the drummer quit and the guitarist was like, “You’re not paying me enough.”’’’

But that’s not what she used to say. In interviews into her early 20s, Swift often observed that an artist fails when they lose their self-awareness, as if repeating the fact would work like an insurance against succumbing to the same fate. But did she make that mistake herself? She squeezes her nose and blows to clear a ringing in her ears before answering. “I definitely think that sometimes you don’t realise how you’re being perceived,” she says. “Pop music can feel like it’s The Hunger Games, and like we’re gladiators. And you can really lose focus of the fact that that’s how it feels because that’s how a lot of stan [fan] Twitter and tabloids and blogs make it seem – the overanalysing of everything makes it feel really intense.”

She describes the way she burned bridges in 2016 as a kind of obliviousness. “I didn’t realise it was like a classic overthrow of someone in power – where you didn’t realise the whispers behind your back, you didn’t realise the chain reaction of events that was going to make everything fall apart at the exact, perfect time for it to fall apart.”

Here’s that chain reaction in full. With her 2014 album 1989 (the year she was born), Swift transcended country stardom, becoming as ubiquitous as Beyoncé. For the first time she vocally embraced feminism, something she had rejected in her teens; but, after a while, it seemed to amount to not much more than a lot of pictures of her hanging out with her “squad”, a bevy of supermodels, musicians and Lena Dunham. The squad very much did not include her former friend Katy Perry, whom Swift targeted in her song Bad Blood, as part of what seemed like a painfully overblown dispute about some backing dancers. Then, when Nicki Minaj tweeted that MTV’s 2015 Video Music awards had rewarded white women at the expense of women of colour, multiple-nominee Swift took it personally, responding: “Maybe one of the men took your slot.” For someone prone to talking about the haters, she quickly became her own worst enemy.

Her old adversary Kanye West resurfaced in February 2016. In 2009, West had invaded Swift’s stage at the MTV VMAs to protest against her victory over Beyoncé in the female video of the year category. It remains the peak of interest in Swift on Google Trends, and the conflict between them has become such a cornerstone of celebrity journalism that it’s hard to remember it lay dormant for nearly seven years – until West released his song Famous. “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex,” he rapped. “Why? I made that bitch famous.” The video depicted a Swift mannequin naked in bed with men including Trump.

Swift loudly condemned both; although she had discussed the track with West, she said she had never agreed to the “bitch” lyric or the video. West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, released a heavily edited clip that showed Swift at least agreeing to the “sex” line on the phone with West, if not the “bitch” part. Swift pleaded the technicality, but it made no difference: when Kardashian went on Twitter to describe her as a snake, the comparison stuck and the singer found herself very publicly “cancelled” – the incident taken as “proof” of Swift’s insincerity. So she went away.

Swift says she stopped trying to explain herself, even though she “definitely” could have. As she worked on Reputation, she was also writing “a think-piece a day that I knew I would never publish: the stuff I would say, and the different facets of the situation that nobody knew”. If she could exonerate herself, why didn’t she? She leans forward. “Here’s why,” she says conspiratorially. “Because when people are in a hate frenzy and they find something to mutually hate together, it bonds them. And anything you say is in an echo chamber of mockery.”

She compares that year to being hit by a tidal wave. “You can either stand there and let the wave crash into you, and you can try as hard as you can to fight something that’s more powerful and bigger than you,” she says. “Or you can dive under the water, hold your breath, wait for it to pass and while you’re down there, try to learn something. Why was I in that part of the ocean? There were clearly signs that said: Rip tide! Undertow! Don’t swim! There are no lifeguards!” She’s on a roll. “Why was I there? Why was I trusting people I trusted? Why was I letting people into my life the way I was letting them in? What was I doing that caused this?”

After the incident with Minaj, her critics started pointing out a narrative of “white victimhood” in Swift’s career. Speaking slowly and carefully, she says she came to understand “a lot about how my privilege allowed me to not have to learn about white privilege. I didn’t know about it as a kid, and that is privilege itself, you know? And that’s something that I’m still trying to educate myself on every day. How can I see where people are coming from, and understand the pain that comes with the history of our world?”

She also accepts some responsibility for her overexposure, and for some of the tabloid drama. If she didn’t wish a friend happy birthday on Instagram, there would be reports about severed friendships, even if they had celebrated together. “Because we didn’t post about it, it didn’t happen – and I realised I had done that,” she says. “I created an expectation that everything in my life that happened, people would see.”

But she also says she couldn’t win. “I’m kinda used to being gaslit by now,” she drawls wearily. “And I think it happens to women so often that, as we get older and see how the world works, we’re able to see through what is gaslighting. So I’m able to look at 1989 and go – KITTIES!” She breaks off as an assistant walks in with Swift’s three beloved cats, stars of her Instagram feed, back from the vet before they fly to England this week. Benjamin, Olivia and Meredith haughtily circle our feet (they are scared of the koi) as Swift resumes her train of thought, back to the release of 1989 and the subsequent fallout. “Oh my God, they were mad at me for smiling a lot and quote-unquote acting fake. And then they were mad at me that I was upset and bitter and kicking back.” The rules kept changing.

***

Swift’s new album comes with printed excerpts from her diaries. On 29 August 2016, she wrote in her girlish, bubble writing: “This summer is the apocalypse.” As the incident with West and Kardashian unfolded, she was preparing for her court case against radio DJ David Mueller, who was fired in 2013 after Swift reported him for putting his hand up her dress at a meet-and–greet event. He sued her for defamation; she countersued for sexual assault.

“Having dealt with a few of them, narcissists basically subscribe to a belief system that they should be able to do and say whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want to,” Swift says now, talking at full pelt. “And if we – as anyone else in the world, but specifically women – react to that, well, we’re not allowed to. We’re not allowed to have a reaction to their actions.”

In summer 2016 she was in legal depositions, practising her testimony. “You’re supposed to be really polite to everyone,” she says. But by the time she got to court in August 2017, “something snapped, I think”. She laughs. Her testimony was sharp and uncompromising. She refused to allow Mueller’s lawyers to blame her or her security guards; when asked if she could see the incident, Swift said no, because “my ass is in the back of my body”. It was a brilliant, rude defence.

“You’re supposed to behave yourself in court and say ‘rear end’,” she says with mock politesse. “The other lawyer was saying, ‘When did he touch your backside?’ And I was like, ‘ASS! Call it what it is!’” She claps between each word. But despite the acclaim for her testimony and eventual victory (she asked for one symbolic dollar), she still felt belittled. It was two months prior to the beginning of the #MeToo movement. “Even this case was literally twisted so hard that people were calling it the ‘butt-grab case’. They were saying I sued him because there’s this narrative that I want to sue everyone. That was one of the reasons why the summer was the apocalypse.”

She never wanted the assault to be made public. Have there been other instances she has dealt with privately? “Actually, no,” she says soberly. “I’m really lucky that it hadn’t happened to me before. But that was one of the reasons it was so traumatising. I just didn’t know that could happen. It was really brazen, in front of seven people.” She has since had security cameras installed at every meet-and-greet she does, deliberately pointed at her lower half. “If something happens again, we can prove it with video footage from every angle,” she says.

The allegations about Harvey Weinstein came out soon after she won her case. The film producer had asked her to write a song for the romantic comedy One Chance, which earned her second Golden Globe nomination. Weinstein also got her a supporting role in the 2014 sci-fi movie The Giver, and attended the launch party for 1989. But she says they were never alone together.

“He’d call my management and be like, ‘Does she have a song for this film?’ And I’d be like, ‘Here it is,’” she says dispassionately. “And then I’d be at the Golden Globes. I absolutely never hung out. And I would get a vibe – I would never vouch for him. I believe women who come forward, I believe victims who come forward, I believe men who come forward.” Swift inhales, flustered. She says Weinstein never propositioned her. “If you listen to the stories, he picked people who were vulnerable, in his opinion. It seemed like it was a power thing. So, to me, that doesn’t say anything – that I wasn’t in that situation.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was more than nine months into his presidency, and still Swift had not taken a position. But the idea that a pop star could ever have impeded his path to the White House seemed increasingly naive. In hindsight, the demand that Swift speak up looks less about politics and more about her identity (white, rich, powerful) and a moralistic need for her to redeem herself – as if nobody else had ever acted on a vindictive instinct, or blundered publicly.

But she resisted what might have been an easy return to public favour. Although Reputation contained softer love songs, it was better known for its brittle, vengeful side (see This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things). She describes that side of the album now as a “bit of a persona”, and its hip-hop-influenced production as “a complete defence mechanism”. Personally, I thought she had never been more relatable, trashing the contract of pious relatability that traps young women in the public eye.

***

It was the assault trial, and watching the rights of LGBTQ friends be eroded, that finally politicised her, Swift says. “The things that happen to you in your life are what develop your political opinions. I was living in this Obama eight-year paradise of, you go, you cast your vote, the person you vote for wins, everyone’s happy!” she says. “This whole thing, the last three, four years, it completely blindsided a lot of us, me included.”

She recently said she was “dismayed” when a friend pointed out that her position on gay rights wasn’t obvious (what if she had a gay son, he asked), hence this summer’s course correction with the single You Need To Calm Down (“You’re comin’ at my friends like a missile/Why are you mad?/When you could be GLAAD?”). Didn’t she feel equally dismayed that her politics weren’t clear? “I did,” she insists, “and I hate to admit this, but I felt that I wasn’t educated enough on it. Because I hadn’t actively tried to learn about politics in a way that I felt was necessary for me, making statements that go out to hundreds of millions of people.”

She explains her inner conflict. “I come from country music. The number one thing they absolutely drill into you as a country artist, and you can ask any other country artist this, is ‘Don’t be like the Dixie Chicks!’” In 2003, the Texan country trio denounced the Iraq war, saying they were “ashamed” to share a home state with George W Bush. There was a boycott, and an event where a bulldozer crushed their CDs. “I watched country music snuff that candle out. The most amazing group we had, just because they talked about politics. And they were getting death threats. They were made such an example that basically every country artist that came after that, every label tells you, ‘Just do not get involved, no matter what.’

“And then, you know, if there was a time for me to get involved…” Swift pauses. “The worst part of the timing of what happened in 2016 was I felt completely voiceless. I just felt like, oh God, who would want me? Honestly.” She would otherwise have endorsed Hillary Clinton? “Of course,” she says sincerely. “I just felt completely, ugh, just useless. And maybe even like a hindrance.”

I suggest that, thinking selfishly, her coming out for Clinton might have made people like her. “I wasn’t thinking like that,” she stresses. “I was just trying to protect my mental health – not read the news very much, go cast my vote, tell people to vote. I just knew what I could handle and I knew what I couldn’t. I was literally about to break. For a while.” Did she seek therapy? “That stuff I just really wanna keep personal, if that’s OK,” she says.

She resists blaming anyone else for her political silence. Her emergence as a Democrat came after she left Big Machine, the label she signed to at 15. (They are now at loggerheads after label head Scott Borchetta sold the company, and the rights to Swift’s first six albums, to Kanye West’s manager, Scooter Braun.) Had Borchetta ever advised her against speaking out? She exhales. “It was just me and my life, and also doing a lot of self-reflection about how I did feel really remorseful for not saying anything. I wanted to try and help in any way that I could, the next time I got a chance. I didn’t help, I didn’t feel capable of it – and as soon as I can, I’m going to.”

Swift was once known for throwing extravagant 4 July parties at her Rhode Island mansion. The Instagram posts from these star-studded events – at which guests wore matching stars-and-stripes bikinis and onesies – probably supported a significant chunk of the celebrity news industry GDP. But in 2017, they stopped. “The horror!” wrote Cosmopolitan, citing “reasons that remain a mystery” for their disappearance. It wasn’t “squad” strife or the unavailability of matching cozzies that brought the parties to an end, but Swift’s disillusionment with her country, she says.

There is a smart song about this on the new album – the track that should have been the first single, instead of the cartoonish ME!. Miss Americana And The Heartbreak Prince is a forlorn, gothic ballad in the vein of Lana Del Rey that uses high-school imagery to dismantle American nationalism: “The whole school is rolling fake dice/You play stupid games/You win stupid prizes,” she sings with disdain. “Boys will be boys then/Where are the wise men?”

As an ambitious 11-year-old, she worked out that singing the national anthem at sports games was the quickest way to get in front of a large audience. When did she start feeling conflicted about what America stands for? She gives another emphatic ugh. “It was the fact that all the dirtiest tricks in the book were used and it worked,” she says. “The thing I can’t get over right now is gaslighting the American public into being like” – she adopts a sanctimonious tone – “‘If you hate the president, you hate America.’ We’re a democracy – at least, we’re supposed to be – where you’re allowed to disagree, dissent, debate.” She doesn’t use Trump’s name. “I really think that he thinks this is an autocracy.”

As we speak, Tennessee lawmakers are trying to impose a near-total ban on abortion. Swift has staunchly defended her “Tennessee values” in recent months. What’s her position? “I mean, obviously, I’m pro-choice, and I just can’t believe this is happening,” she says. She looks close to tears. “I can’t believe we’re here. It’s really shocking and awful. And I just wanna do everything I can for 2020. I wanna figure out exactly how I can help, what are the most effective ways to help. ’Cause this is just…” She sighs again. “This is not it.”

***

It is easy to forget that the point of all this is that a teenage Taylor Swiftwanted to write love songs. Nemeses and negativity are now so entrenched in her public persona that it’s hard to know how she can get back to that, though she seems to want to. At the end of Daylight, the new album’s dreamy final song, there’s a spoken-word section: “I want to be defined by the things that I love,” she says as the music fades. “Not the things that I hate, not the things I’m afraid of, the things that haunt me in the middle of the night.” As well as the songs written for Alwyn, there is one for her mother, who recently experienced a cancer relapse: “You make the best of a bad deal/I just pretend it isn’t real,” Swift sings, backed by the Dixie Chicks.

How does writing about her personal life work if she’s setting clearer boundaries? “It actually made me feel more free,” she says. “I’ve always had this habit of never really going into detail about exactly what situation inspired what thing, but even more so now.” This is only half true: in the past, Swift wasn’t shy of a level of detail that invited fans to figure out specific truths about her relationships. And when I tell her that Lover feels a more emotionally guarded album, she bristles. “I know the difference between making art and living your life like a reality star,” she says. “And then even if it’s hard for other people to grasp, my definition is really clear.”

Even so, Swift begins Lover by addressing an adversary, opening with a song called I Forgot That You Existed (“it isn’t love, it isn’t hate, it’s just indifference”), presumably aimed at Kanye West, a track that slightly defeats its premise by existing. But it sweeps aside old dramas to confront Swift’s real nemesis, herself. “I never grew up/It’s getting so old,” she laments on The Archer.

She has had to learn not to pre-empt disaster, nor to run from it. Her life has been defined by relationships, friendships and business relationships that started and ended very publicly (though she and Perry are friends again). At the same time, the rules around celebrity engagement have evolved beyond recognition in her 15 years of fame. Rather than trying to adapt to them, she’s now asking herself: “How do you learn to maintain? How do you learn not to have these phantom disasters in your head that you play out, and how do you stop yourself from sabotage – because the panic mechanism in your brain is telling you that something must go wrong.” For her, this is what growing up is. “You can’t just make cut-and-dry decisions in life. A lot of things are a negotiation and a grey area and a dance of how to figure it out.”

And so this time, Swift is sticking around. In December she will turn 30, marking the point after which more than half her life will have been lived in public. She’ll start her new decade with a stronger self-preservationist streak, and a looser grip (as well as a cameo in Cats). “You can’t micromanage life, it turns out,” she says, drily.

When Swift finally answered my question about the moment she would choose in the VH1 Behind The Music episode about herself, the one where her career turned, she said she hoped it wouldn’t focus on her “apocalypse” summer of 2016. “Maybe this is wishful thinking,” she said, “but I’d like to think it would be in a couple of years.” It’s funny to hear her hope that the worst is still to come while sitting in her fairytale living room, the cats pacing: a pragmatist at odds with her romantic monument to teenage dreams. But it sounds something like perspective.

[bts-story]

can u make a one shot with jimin where your both idols in the same company and u brokeup a while back but you still love each other? thank you xxxx

Too Good At Goodbyes — Jimin

It’s a warm night. The stars are shining brightly and one or two days from now, it’ll be the full moon. It’s easy to tell with how close the moon is, and how bright it shines in the middle of the empty sky. It’s a little after midnight, however, the city is still crowded with people eager to party all night, and you can hear, even from the nineteenth floor, the cars honking in the distance. Beneath your feet, you can even make out the silhouettes of the people hasting up and down the crowdy street.

You take a sip of your glass of champagne, embracing the weak wind flowing through the air. There’s a pang, right in the middle of your chest, thinking about how lonely it feels, up here. It’s true, yes, back in the penthouse, just behind you, the room is crowded with important people, eager to hold the conversation for the better half of the night. But conversing about charts and awards usually isn’t something very appealing, especially not right now.

“That’s my spot,” a stern voice says behind you, and you don’t even have to turn around to know who it is. Jimin, with recently grey dyed hair and a new piercing, takes a place by your side, leaning against the balcony railing.

You don’t say anything just yet, enjoying the calm of the night. The ruffles of your long dress are flowing along with the wind, caressing your ankles with each sudden blow. “I was here first,” you state with a small smile, still not advertising your eyes towards him.

Jimin chuckles softly, bumping his elbow against your own, and that’s the only moment your eyes drift away from the city lights to fall on his own full glass of champagne. “Went to take a refill.”

You nod silently, unbothered by the confession. Your eyes find their way in front of you again, and you can only admire the way Seoul is the prettiest at night. The way that trail of light goes on and on, without so much ending, even further after the horizon. No matter how many cities you visited and how many countries you stepped foot in, there’s no other place like home. And Seoul feels like home, more than anything in the world.

“You look very pretty,” Jimin allows himself to say and you’re intrigued by the fact he’s not even looking at you, but at the city, just like you are yourself. And for a moment, you even wonder if he just talked in the air, without so much meaning this to be about you.

It’s always like this, with Jimin, that is. It’s always calm and serene, and you can’t help yourself but feel safe each time he’s close to your body. It’s not even something out of a fantasy, nor is it a day dream — it’s a pure fact, and maybe that’s exactly the reason why your heart locks on itself, dropping down in your stomach. Your grip tightens around your glass of champagne, and taking the last sip, you shake your head absently.

Jimin always does this, without even realizing. Or maybe he does, but just doesn’t care. In all, he likes to tell you you’re pretty, and he doesn’t see the wrong in saying this now. Because now is the worst possible time of the year, probably. This is the wrong night, and the wrong time and Jimin isn’t all that oblivious, but he can sometimes be blunt and it’s safe to say he has trouble reading the mood in the room, at times.

You witnessed this, over the year. And with each day passing by his sides, you learned more of him than you did in your entire life. Twenty years is a long time, but even as toddlers, it seems like Jimin could always surprise you. Thus, as teenagers and as young adults, both of your hearts found a way to each other. But then, it seems like they weren’t mean to fill each other’s space. And you drifted away. More and more, until finally, the gap was too big to ignore.

The hardest part of this all, is probably sharing the same company. And being a worldwide sensation is tiring, gruesome and it just takes so much time. But it’s the life you both chose, and if it doesn’t fit each other, so be it.

It’s at times like this, that you ask to yourself if your relationship with Jimin didn’t work because of your job, or only because you just couldn’t make it work by yourself. If only you should’ve stayed friends and ignore the clammy hands and the nervous lip-biting each time you were in the same room. It isn’t like this anymore. Now, if one of you stays in the same room as the other for more than five minutes, it’s safe to call it a miracle.

“Do you ever wonder… what it would be like if we never dated?” you wonder outloud and for a moment, you even surprise yourself. It was never meant for something to be said out-loud, but a question to be kept inside your head, within the rest of your doubts.

“No,” Jimin simply replies and his voice is calm, casual, as if he was waiting for this question to drop from the sky. There’s a beat of silence as he takes in fresh air, eyes still darted to the horizon, and then he carries on, “I don’t have any regrets, if that’s what you’re asking.”

It isn’t exactly what you were asking, but it’s enough of an answer. You don’t regret either, because it was wonderful while it lasted, it would be a lie to say otherwise. The night walks, the restaurants and the occasional gifts. The surprises, the ‘I love you’s and the sex, God the sex. But it isn’t what makes a good relationship. Here, in this one, there was too much jealousy and too many fights — too many unspoken grudges and not enough faith.

You loved each other, that was never the problem. Or maybe it was, actually. Maybe you just loved each other so much, that it became toxic and unliveable.

It’s silent for a good moment, then. Only the cars are disturbing the atmosphere, and it seems like none of you finds anything to say more. You can’t forbid your mind to wander away from this place, away from all the worries and the way Jimin makes you feel. It’s disturbing and you hate the fact that even he’s not yours and you’re not his anymore, there will always be a part of you that would always regret all the things that happened. All the things that lead you to this day, here and now. You don’t regret the relationship, no, you only regret the parts where it went all wrong. 

“I think Hyunjae-ssi has a crush on you. The new assistant manager, you know?” Jimin says after a while and at first, you weren’t really listening. But then, you turn your head to the side, surprised to see him already looking at you. His eyes are like two moons which oddly resembles the one up in the sky, and not because of the way he smiles. Instead, he has sad, gloomy eyes. And despite the frown of his lips, he’s handsome. “Well, him and approximately five other people in the company.”

It’s not entirely a lie, nor is it completely true. But it’s only because you’re famous, and famous personalities always attract normal people. It’s easy to catch a heart with make-up and a little of hair product, but once the glamour fades away, not many people are willing to close the gap and hold you close, at night. “People always want what they can’t have.”

It isn’t meant to be smug or arrogant, far from that. And Jimin knows what you mean, maybe that’s why he chuckles, and his face finally lets go of this frown. It’s true because, he’s famous too and he knows what lies behind the words you just said. It isn’t like you’re not willing to take a chance with other people or bet on what life could be with a loving person — but it seems like love is a complicated thing. Love is a duty, and duty is time. It seems like you’re just out of strength.

Jimin’s fingers are hanging loosely on the balcony railing; they are just a few centimetres away from you, but it seems like he’s just so far away, all at the same time. You can feel his body heat and suddenly, the night isn’t as warm as it was before. The wind runs colder, and a shiver starts to creep a way on your lower back.

The loud music is echoing from outside the walls of the penthouse, and a little further away, on the other side of the terrace, three or four people find a place on the comfy deck chairs. They are laughing too loudly, and you can’t help but frown at the disturbance.

“Why couldn’t we make it work?” you ask, then and this time, you genuinely mean for it to be said aloud.

Jimin looks at you, still, eyes piercing and dark. He shrugs his shoulders, straightening his back. He takes his hands off the railings and it feels odd because, you’re this close to whine. He’s just so far away. And Jimin says nothing, at first, as if he’s analysing the question to find a proper answer. He doesn’t need to find an elaborate answer, doesn’t need to go on about a speech about what went wrong.

“I think it was too soon.” He finally says, and the answer isn’t as complicated as you expected. He’s probably right, after all, he’s always right.

It’s rude, then, the way he takes steps away from you, leaving on this last note. You frown your brows, mouth agape as you watch him leave. How can he end a conversation like this one on that? And Jimin leaves, and he’s almost out the door when he turns around, bottom lip caught between his teeth. The suit he wears is hanging perfectly on his shoulders and navy blue is a color which suits him well. The lights are reflecting on his skin, and you can swear on all the Gods existing that you won’t ever be able to get back up on your feet again.

“You said it yourself,” he then says, “People always want what they can’t have.” It seems like he can read inside your head. Like he can read your doubts and your regrets and that was always something disturbing to you, now more than ever. And Jimin has this capacity to understand you, more than anyone else in the entire world. He knows, deep down, you’re only regretting because you don’t have him anymore.

You lean back, tilting your head to the side as you look at him looking at you.

“I don’t think people ever get over people they loved,” he adds, a hand in his pocket and the other gripping at his half-empty glass of champagne. He lowers his eyes for a second, but when lifts them up to take a last peek at you, he smiles. He smiles a bright grin, pearly white teeth and his eyes finally disappear — he ruffles his hair then, and he’s gone.

Behind you, the city lights are shading a beautiful orange color, reflecting on the other buildings like a strange rainbow. But you don’t care anymore. The only view you care about, just went through the glass doors. And there, alone on that balcony, your heart disappears just with him.

———————

My heart is laying on the floor with my will to live 

- Nageoire 

[ftchai]

——   ⋆   𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐍𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐄  ╯ task 002.

Basic Character Questions

First name? charlie

Last names? song

Middle names? haru

Nicknames? chai

Date of birth? february / 27 

Age? 20

Physical / Appearance

Height? 5′3

Build? skinny, lean

Hair colour? varies constantly. currently, dark brown with the front pieces bleached.

Hair style? length wise, it can cover her chest, naturally straight but usually a little messy.

Eye colour? brown.

Glasses or contact lenses? just reading glasses.

Scars or birthmarks? many small scars on her knees, elbows, a big one on her left shin, mostly from when she once thought she could roller derby, and skateboarding incidents.

Tattoos? has a dragon tattoo that covers most of her left thigh, other random stick and pokes that cover her arms, most are film references and quotes, but also a couple murakami flowers, butterflies, a dead smiley face.

Physical or mental handicaps? she’s medicated for her anxiety.

Type of clothes? baggy band tees, mom jeans with rips in them, old ugly cardigans she somehow pulls off. will occasionally wear tight fitting crop tops, pleated skirts, .

Race / Ethnicity? asian, south korean

Mannerisms? very facially expressive, doesn’t talk with her hands much. mostly with her eyes. widening her eyes and rolling her eyes are usually her responses to most situations.

Personality

What words or phrases do they overuse? ”yeah” for everything. “man”, “damn”.

Do they have a catchphrase? not really. just quotes movies a lot.

Are they more optimistic or pessimistic? depends on the situation. if it concerns others, she’s optimistic, but if it’s a personal matter regarding herself, pessimistic.

Are they introverted or extroverted? introverted.

Do they ever put on airs? never, it’s quite the contrary, actually. puts herself down frequently.

What bad habits do they have? smoking a pack a day, second-guessing herself, sometimes might fall into an old habit of biting her nails.

What makes them laugh out loud? compilations of old vines, cat videos, her friends.

How do they display affection? once comfortable around someone, chai is actually pretty grabby. hugging, hand holding, listening, giving advice, dropping everything for someone. very loyal.

How do they want to be seen by others? i think she just wants to be seen, period. she feels pretty invisible, mostly.

How do they see themselves? as less than they are. she is her worst critic, wish she could realize she’s actually special.

Strongest character trait? perseverance and adaptability.

Weakest character trait? insecure and escapist.

How competitive are they? strangely, not at all. used to be happy to get participation awards.

Do they make snap judgements or take time to consider? a chronic overthinker, so definitely takes time to consider.

How do they react to praise? might not believe 100%, but appreciates it 100%.

How do they react to criticism? if it’s constructive, she’ll accept it when it comes to her music because she’s constantly trying to be better, so she’ll even go out of her way to ask people. when it comes to her life or the way she is, whether her stubbornness or self destructive tendencies, she just blocks it out.

What is their greatest fear? being forgotten. of course she dreams of making it big, but just living in some people’s memories would be enough for her.

What are their biggest secrets? doesn’t have many secrets. maybe that she cares

When was the last time they cried? probably days ago. she gets overwhelmed by her emotions easily, and also likes watching movies to cry at them, so there’s that.

What haunts them? how since her dad left, people have made it a habit to do the same too.

What will they stand up for? she’s an introvert but won’t stand for injustice. having been bullied herself, she’ll stick up for anyone she witnesses being mistreated. also, believes people should be able to live their lives however they want, without people judging them for it.

Are they indoorsy or outdoorsy? both. loves hanging out in her room, but also loves going to the beach, the lake, skateboard around town.

What is their sinful little habit? drugs. will take just about anything.

What quality do they most value in a friend? loyalty.

What do they consider an overrated virtue? probably temperance, moderation in general.

If they could change one thing about themselves, what would it be? she’s stupid so she’d say something like ‘being talented.’

What is their obsession? music, movies, comics.

What are their pet peeves? mansplaining. when guys try to outsmart her when it comes to comics or musical knowledge, and purposefully quiz her with things not even they really know, as if she has something to prove. 

Friends and Family

Is their family big or small? Who does it consist of? small, separated between south sk and the usa. over here she has her mother, stepdad, aunt, uncle, and her 2 brothers.

What is their perception of family? she loves them, only moved out so soon because she wanted to do things her own way.

Do they have siblings? Older or younger? chai is the middle child, one younger and one older brother.

Describe their best friend. just her perfect fit. affectionate, calm, understanding and patient. someone chai can be herself around and expect 0 judgement. she throughly enjoys being with luna and she feels like luna brings out the best in her. @lunaolsson 

Ideal best friend? ^^^

Do they have any pets? not yet. she can’t make up her mind between a ferret, a snake, or a kitten.

Past and Future

What was your character like as a baby? As a child? the kind of child that really lives in her own world. quiet, always watching her surroundings and the people around her, very calm. pretty much always with a coloring book in her hands, too. also her mom has too many videos of her singing into a hairbrush in their living room.

Did they grow up rich or poor? although she doesn’t remember much, she lived comfortably while her parents were together. once they got divorced however, her father stripped her mom of everything, despite the fact she had full custody of chai and her older brother. they struggled, but chai’s mom made sure there was always well fed and dressed. when her stepdad got into the picture, things became easier.

Did they grow up nurtured or neglected? nurtured by her mother, and eventually her stepfather, but neglected by her dad. he used to call on her birthdays but hasn’t done that ever since she turned 14.

What is their greatest achievement? finishing high school. that was hell for her.

What was their first kiss like? sloppy, drunk and not worth remembering.

What is the worst thing they did to someone they loved? has pushed away anyone with the slight romantic interest towards her, she doesn’t know how to handle it.

What are their ambitions? getting signed by a record label, buying her mom a house, getting out of crawford.

What advice would they give their younger self? “ it’s okay if people leave, you’ll always have yourself. ”

What smells remind them of their childhood? jjajangmyeon noodles, kimchi stew, pretty much anything her mother cooked for her. also, the smell of old books.

What was their childhood ambition? she wanted to be a vet, until she realized she actually needs to go to school for that.

What is their best childhood memory? the few memories she has of south korea, and when her mom saved up to take her and her siblings to disneyland for the day.

What is their worst childhood memory? when her dad left and they had to come to the usa as quickly as possible.

Did they have an imaginary childhood friend? probably too many. she’s always been shy and has talks to herself way too much.

When was the last time they were crushed with disappointment? probably when cain shut her out.

What past act are they most ashamed of? all those nights she got passed out drunk as a teenager, waking up somewhere and not knowing how she got there. probably not too much because she’ll still do it

What past act are they most proud of? getting it together and keeping a job for once! also releasing an ep on spotify.

Love 

Do they believe in love at first sight? yes and no. 

Are they in a relationship? nope

How do they behave in a relationship? really chill, probably too chill because she’s been cheated on too many times. anyway, she really values the person and puts them on a pedestal, does everything for them and during the relationship they’re the topic of 80% of her songs, when they break up it’s 100%

When did you character last have sex? probably last week, some one night stand tinder date

Has your character ever been in love? she thinks so

Have they ever had their heart broken? every. single. time

Conflict

How do they respond to a threat? leaves

Are they most likely to fight with their fists or their tongue? neither. no fights. she hates confrontation.

If your character could only save one thing from their burning house, what would it be? the electric yamaha guitar she spent 2 paychecks on.

What do they love to hate? g

What are their phobias? teenage mutant ninja turtles. they disgust her.

What living person do they most despise? probably adam sandler because of all the terrible movies he’s made.

Have they ever been bullied or teased? yes.

Where do they go when they’re angry? scream into her pillow, turn the volume on her amp all the way up and angry jam, gets high and goes skateboarding to clear her mind. 

Work, Education and Hobbies

What is their current job? officially, she works the concession stand at the crawford theatre. in reality, she does anything they need her to do.

What do they think about their current job? it’s hard work sometimes, but for once she feels useful so she enjoys it. movies are her favorite thing.

What are some of their past jobs? there’s a whole list, the ones that lasted more than two weeks were supermarket cashier, dog walking, and babysitting. 

What are their hobbies? singing, playing guitar, skating, skateboarding, songwriting, reading. 

Educational background? has a high school diploma.

Do they have a natural talent for something? music, both playing instruments and songwriting

Do they play a sport? Are they any good? nope.

What is their socioeconomic status? not really lower middle class, she’s struggling that last week before she gets her next paycheck, but if she’s organized she’s okay.

Favourites

What is their favourite animal? red panda or siberian tiger.

What place would they most like to visit? south korea, japan, london, paris.

What is the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen? when her little baby brother would dance around the piano when she finally learned how to play.

What is their favourite song? she’ll never make up her mind, so she’ll unironically say something by avril lavigne.

Music, art, reading preferred? all of the above.

What is their favourite color? green.

Favourite food: tuna sashimi. 

What is their favourite day of the week? saturday.

Possessions

What is in their fridge: rice, kimchi, and redbulls

What is on their bedside table? whatever book or comic she’s reading, her glasses, a candle, songwriting book.

What is in their car? blankets in case she needs to crash right there and then, an old pair of sneakers, aux cord, a protein bar.

What is in their purse or wallet? drivers license, whatever change she has, credit card, baby photos of herself and her friends, notes she’s been given.

What is in their pockets? usually her phone.

What is their most treasured possession? that baby blue yamaha guitar.

Spirituality

Who or what is your character’s guardian angel? chai has never had a family member pass away. so maybe her mother, she’s always looking out for her.

Do they believe in the afterlife? unsure.

What are their religious views? likes to believe there’s something out there, but she’s an atheist.

What do they think heaven is? where all her favorite rockstars are waiting for her.

What do they think hell is? working retail / customer service.

Are they superstitious? believes in ghosts, but other than that, not really.

What would they like to be reincarnated as? a cat. head empty, no thoughts, just sleep.

How would they like to die? somehow painless.

What is your character’s spirit animal? i’d say a fennec fox. small, looks cute but will bite and run away.

What is their zodiac sign? pisces.

Values

What do they think is the worst thing that can be done to a person? betray them.

When did they last lie? rarely lies, if she has to, it’s probably just a little white lie.

What’s their view of lying? on one hand, she knows it’s wrong, but in the other, she’d rather be lied to than have to face the truth.

When did they last make a promise? doesn’t make promises often, must have been something important.

Did they keep or break their last promise? always does, wouldnt really make a promise if she wasn’t sure she could follow through.

Daily life

What are their eating habits? it really is mostly ramen and asian convenience store food. when she misses hearty meals, she’ll drive to her mom’s house.

Do they have any allergies? none.

Describe their home. shares her house with roommates, never leaves anything untidy and always cleans up for herself / does her chores when its her turn. her room is super cluttered, but somehow it’s not messy nor overwhelming. there’s film posters covering the entirety of the walls.

Are they minimalist or a clutter hoarder? clutter hoarder.

What do they do first thing on a weekday morning? shower, then eat.

What do they do on a Sunday afternoon? goes to her mom’s house for dinner, skateboards until the sun sets.

What do they do on a Friday night? goes out always.

What is the soft drink of choice? coke.

What is their alcoholic drink of choice? black vodka shots.

Miscellaneous

Who is their hero? stevie nicks.

What or who would your character dress up as for Halloween? anime schoolgirl in a zombie movie.

If they could save one person, who would it be? probably jack on titanic.

If they could call one person for help, who would it be? luna !!

What is their greatest extravagance? music equipment.

What is their greatest regret? things she leaves unsaid, not watching infinity war at the theatre for the forth time.

What would they do if they won the lottery? buy her mom a mansion, move out to LA to get a record deal, travel the world.

Do they believe in happy endings? for some people, yes.

What is their idea of perfect happiness? having fans at her concert knowing every lyric of every one of her songs.

What would they ask a fortune teller? should she go into film making instead?

If your character could travel through time, where would they go? 70s !

If they could have a superpower, what would they choose? talking to animals

[idolizerp]

LOADING INFORMATION ON OLYMPUS’ LEAD VOCAL, LEAD DANCE  HUANG ZHANGHAN...

IDOL DETAILS

STAGENAME: Luke CURRENT AGE: 26 DEBUT AGE: 18 TRAINEE SINCE AGE: 15 COMPANY: Midas SECONDARY SKILL: Fashion

IDOL PROFILE

NICKNAME(S): trainer luke because of his love for sports and living a healthy life, angel luke because of his good behavior INSPIRATION: watching idol groups perform and seeing the fascination people had for them as well as how they could connect with so much people at the same time inspired luke to become a performer too. SPECIAL TALENTS:

his stamina, luke can do over 120 pushups without getting tired

he can hold a handstand for over three minutes and a plank for two

he can customize any piece of clothing on demand

NOTABLE FACTS:

luke started taking judo classes when he was six, developing his aptitude for it until almost reaching youth olympic level. he gave up judo to become an idol, but still practices it on his spare time. he is currently a blue belt.

he was appointed as an ambassador to the 2014 summer youth olympics in namjing, china, and was one of the torch bearers.

he is known for his charity work and constantly asks fans to donate money instead of giving him expensive gifts on his birthday. he recently joined an unicef campaign against school violence.

voted by other idols as the most friendly sunbae/the idol they would like to be friends with.

IDOL GOALS

SHORT-TERM GOALS:

his short goal is to maintain the status olympus already has, keep their brand as the most powerful amongst idol groups and secure successful comebacks during the year as well as awards at the end of the year.

LONG-TERM GOALS:

for the future he wants to solidify himself as a household name in the fashion industry, have more partnerships with different brands and design his own clothing and accessory line, as well as transition from an idol to a more laid back career in the smoothest way possible.here

IDOL IMAGE

the key to be an idol for a long term career – and you want that, don’t you? everyone wants that – is to be likeable, to be relatable. no one likes celebrities who look too posh, too full of luxury. they like the guy who is seen out at 3am to buy food at the corner store because he wanted to go for a walk, they like the guy who laughs too loud and who has a weird laugh. who is good looking as all idols are, but who doesn’t flaunt it, who is good looking in a way that doesn’t scary the ugly girls who idolize him.

this person? luke huang.

he is not a god, he is your average joe, your good son who does things for his family, who is known for treating his mother like a queen because it’s what she deserves, who pays for staff’s meals and gives nice wedding gifts. more than just likeable and relatable, luke is charitable. he is seen supporting comfort women despite not being korean, he visits orphanages and bring the kids toys, he goes to charity galas and gives one of his stage outfits for auction, visits hospitals and meets make-a-wish kids.

he is an idols’ idol too. the supportive senior, the ones who is seen watching the trainees practicing and who takes his time to give them advice, who listens to his juniors on variety and tells them about how they can improve, how they can reach the same status as olympus.

luke is the one who takes his time talking to fans be it online, be it on fan meetings. who never looks angry or bored when they crowd him at airports, who stops security from reaching the girls and help them up when they fall from trying to walk along him. he is always helping the other members with what he can, lets them talk over him on tv, never tells embarrassing stories about them, only heartwarming ones.

he is marketed as good and chic, always dressed in nice clothes that don’t look expensive, always telling the fans to not worry about the price of what they wear, but if it fits their style. he shops at fast fashion stores too, just like your average person would. tells girls to wear whatever they want and are comfortable with, don’t mind society’s stupid rules. he is the guy who posts #BLM, #metoo, who tells men to do better.

truly a good guy, luke huang, truly an angel sent to make life bearable to his fans, one song at time.

IDOL HISTORY

huang.

mother is a preschool teacher, father works for the government, their life is good. they are not rich, not by far, but they are not struggling, and that is better than what can be said about most of the country. so it’s a count your blessings type of situation in their family, they live well and they have a good, average life. they marry for love, not for commodity, but their story is not a romeo and juliet type of scenario, there are no fights or crying in your pillow at late night. it’s boy meets girl, they fall in love, they marry, a baby boy is born. it’s fine, everything is a long, long line of fine.

zhanghan.

he grows up a loved child.

mother takes care of him well, father takes him to judo classes that they can afford just fine, everything is good. but maybe the mistake is here, in this simple word: good. because mother is good, father is good, they come from two families of good people, so one would expect zhanghan would be good too. except he isn’t, not at all. zhanghan is born with something wrong in the way he sees the world, in the way he counts his blessings; he is born hungry, he doesn’t know what for, but there is a hunger inside him that nothing can stop. not doing well in school, not doing well in judo, nothing.

his childhood is easy, he ignores the hunger, focus on being a good son, on making his parents and his country proud. he has talent for judo, they tell him, maybe one day he can reach olympic level if he trains hard enough, puts enough effort into it. maybe that’s it, zhanghan thinks, the thing that he misses: a goal.

he grows up, but the talent doesn’t grow with him, not in the way everyone expects. he was good for a child, but he isn’t in the same level as the other teenagers, can’t even cut the team for the youth olympics. mother and father don’t complain, they tell him that he will find a better passion, something he is good at. he is young, he has time.

time seems to drag for zhanghan, seconds passing by like centuries in the mediocrity that is his life, trapped in what seems like an endless loop of school, casual training and going back home. it’s a good life, everyone tells him, he has parents who support him and friends who like him, a girlfriend or two, who would complain about it?

it’s still not enough, not nearly enough for someone who starves for so much more, for more opportunities than maybe college, maybe a good job. he doesn’t want good, he wants spectacular, he wants extraordinary. he wants a life he can only dream of, a life he has no idea of how to achieve now that he is a kid without a talent or special ability, but zhanghao is hungry and determined, and he will not live a life like he his parents; his future will not be of boy meets girl, gets married and has a family in some shitty part of town with some shitty job and shitty salary. his life will not, by any means, be just good.

the opportunity presents itself on a summer day when zhanghao is almost 15, limbs all lean and awkward, hair always messy and face always serious. it comes to him in the most innocuous of the conversations, a classmate talking about how her sister has spent the past days listening to the same awful korean song because she will audition for midas to be an idol. zhanghan turns to girl and smiles – he was always told he had a pretty smile, boyish and innocent – and asks her to tell him more. she does.

from that moment zhanghan knows what he wants to do.

mother and father are shocked, but supportive. you never liked music, they tell him, you don’t know a word of korean, they watch as he borrows korean dictionaries from the school library, already writing down some words.

everyone likes music to different degrees, he tells them, people say chinese is the hardest language to speak and he already knows that, korean can’t be that much harder. it will be easy, but first he has to come up with some ability, something that would make them want to sign him. mother and father don’t say a word, if this is what he wants to do he can do it, he can at least try. try and succeed, zhanghan tells them.

the audition happens at some tall building cramped in the middle of the city. blink and you mistake it by one of the many others, nothing special about it at all. midas rants a large room where they sit all the kids, tell them to fill some forms, for the parents to sign and for all of them to wait. zhanghan watches the competition, sizes up every other boy who take his spot, decides they may be more talented and more prepared, but he is more determined. he is hungry.

his is a very average performance and they tell it to his face, but he has charisma. i couldn’t take my eyes from you, a woman tells him in english, and zhanghan smiles. are you willing to work hard? he is. are you willing to leave your house, your family and friends and everything for a chance? he is.

he is willing to do whatever it takes, just please take him away from a life of mediocrity, of fines and goods.

mother and father are more than happy to sign the authorization if that is what he really wants. their little boy is about to become an artist, they say, hugging zhanghan.

maybe not an artist, he wants to tell them, but he sure as hell will become a star.

luke.

when asked for his birth date zhanghan says october 28th, but when asked for the day he was born the answer is different. because zhanghan was born the day he first entered the midas building. it’s a monday and he spent the worst weekend of his life getting used to the life in seoul and at a dorm where he knows most of the other trainees dislike him already – another mouth to feed, another person to get in the line when it’s time to shower, more competition for whatever spot midas sees him fit.

he knows enough english to get by with the coaches, but not nearly enough korean to understand the other boys – it’s fine, zhanghan is here to build something for himself, not to make friends – so midas throws him on classes all day long. korean classes, high school classes, singing, rapping, dancing, acting, they throw him towards all directions and see where he lands.

truth is, he is not particularly good at anything, but he has something, a sparkle, a magnetism, something that makes people want to look at him. it goes beyond the looks he is growing into, beyond the body he continues to train, there is something special about him, they say, star quality. we are not making artists here, kiddo, says a coach once, we are building idols. you don’t need to be good, you need to be likeable.

and that zhanghan is.

training is not easy, it’s days and nights learning the same steps, trying to reach the same notes, doing this and that and this and that again because it wasn’t good enough the first time. the other boys are mean, evil creatures ready to take each other apart if it means a chance at success. zhanghan is mean too, hungry for fame, for a life of money and power, and he will be damned if anyone tries to take it from him with empty words and fake smiles.

mother calls, asks if maybe he doesn’t want to give up, maybe this, like judo, isn’t for him. but zhanghan is set on making it happen because he won’t go back home and live a mediocre life like his parents, he won’t settle for a comfortable marriage and a good job just because. he wants more, he needs more, he needs the excitement of being on stage, of millions of people knowing his name, of having power his family and friends would never dream of.

so he doesn’t give up, stubborn and prideful, and three years later zhanghan is called to a room, told to sit down and wait. he needs a new name, zhanghan won’t stick to the korean audience, and they are courteous enough to give him a list of pre-approved names and tell him to pick one. he picks luke, like in the bible, not because he is a believer, but because it’s short, simple, easy to remember. people won’t have a problem telling him apart from the other boys, or that’s what he thinks.

the problem with debuting in a group is that you’re not a star, you are a part of a whole, a piece of a puzzle called olympus, each boy bringing something that in theory makes them all shine bright together. in practice it means fights and more fights about screen time, about who is the most popular, about who gets which line and who is in the forefront of the group. everything about their lives has always been a battle, luke guesses this wouldn’t be different.

it’s when they go to variety shows that he learns he needs to be more, do more. his korean is good now, but it’s not native level and so when he is asked about his life luke does what he does best: he fakes. he tells a story of struggle, of poor parents who lived from charity of their family members, of barely paying the bills on time and his judo classes being paid by an uncle because he really wanted to do it but his parents could afford it. he says he wanted to be an idol to help his family, that he sacrificed his own olympic dreams ( “i didn’t get to the olympics but i got into olympus, hahaha” he says ) because being an idol is more profitable and he couldn’t let his parents starve anymore, he needed to take action and help despite his parents being against it.

the result is instantaneous – articles written about him, people commending his bravery, picturing him as the best son ever, someone all parents would be proud of. how many kids can’t even study to their sats and here is this boy, this boy from another land, who gave up everything, who sacrificed everything to help his family, who was selfless and a hero. if only my child was like you, someone writes.

when mother calls, her voice trembling from crying, and asks why he said that, why he lied like this. we always supported you, we never struggled, we didn’t have the best life but we had a good life. why, she asks, why did you lie. because good is not enough, luke wants to say, because good is just that, just middle of the road. i want excellent, i want extraordinary.

“i’m sorry mother, the company forced me to.” it’s what he says, and the words come so naturally they sound like the truth.

he goes from the filler olympus member to the good boy, to the one everyone fights for because he is fighting for his family. give him more lines, his fans say at every new comeback, give him more screen time, give him something to do when olympus is not promoting, look at all the sacrifices he made for this, look at how much he is suffering. please, they beg and beg, please give him a chance, give him a chance to show his talent.

life is so much easier when you have other people fighting your battles for you.

olympus grows, award after award, accolade after accolade. the name is justified, they are gods. people know their names, people buy everything they put their faces on, they reign supreme, sitting above and looking at the others struggling. for luke it means the life he wanted, of money on his account, of brands giving them expensive clothes, of fans giving them expensive gifts.

opportunity comes for him to go back home and he goes. olympus is on down time anyway, he can be part of a show in china. mother and father visit him and the show caughts them on camera, luke crying like a child when he sees his mother. it’s only half pretending this time, he did miss her. he missed her embrace, her encouraging words. he trends on weibo for a whole day.

maybe he will leave, some people say. it’s been three months, why is he taking so long to return? he may be shooting a variety show, but it shouldn’t take so long, he shouldn’t be allowed to be there for so long. maybe he should leave, father says. but father doesn’t understand, he signed a contract, he is bonded for life – or something close to it. people start to be wary, his fans start to worry. they are all like this, these chinese members, they come, take our money and leave, people say online. his fans still blindly defend him, shield him from everything, every attack, every rude word.

this is what power feels like, luke thinks.

but luke comes back, midas already pulling at his shackles, reminding him of who he belongs to. he had a nice stunt back home, but olympus is his home now, this is his life. and truth be told, luke hates it a bit. the lack of privacy, the crazy fans, the working schedule, it’s all suffocating, not as glamorous as he thought it would be.

and yet, it’s better than whatever life he would be living at home, it’s better than good. olympus grows beyond everyone’s expectations; they become bigger, better, their fights escalate to impossible levels too. there is no brotherhood, their personalities clash, they already went through too much together to properly love one another. they are a collection of resentment and anger and tiredness, but they stick together because they have to. what’s mount olympus without its gods?

singing was never his dream and as time goes by luke grows tired of it. the songs are boring, the choreographies are not interesting, they have a formula and stick to it because it’s what brings them money and luke can’t care enough to ask for a change. he goes with the motions, but his heart is not there, it never was.

he does have a pretty face and a good eye for shiny things, a good taste in everything he buys, so midas goes with this, puts his face on magazines and tells him to express his love for fashion, make him attend seoul and beijing fashion week, throws him at fashion industry parties and tells him to make connections, and surprisingly luke likes it more than he likes judo, more than he likes singing. he is good at it, at understanding how the industry works, at ass kissing the right people so he has exclusive contracts.

it takes him long enough, but luke finds something that is not good, it’s excellent, exciting and interesting, something that definitely sets him apart from the others, something that will still give him the life he wanted when he was a boy. when he looks back, thinks of the struggles, the years of living in cramped dorms and sharing cheap meals with other kids he knows it was worth it. for his name known worldwide, for his luxurious penthouse and car, for the comfortable life he gives to his parents now.

and the best part? he didn’t have to fake a lot. just a little, just enough.

the ends always justify the means, after all.

[hunterartemis]

Confessions (Frank Castle X Reader)

We lay on our bed, sweaty and basking under the post-coital glow. I looked at Frank and he looked at me, and we giggled like five year old, nuzzling into each other’s body: our laughs muted and harmonized in the same tune.

A moment of fruitful pause passed, as we shyly looked at each other like teenagers in crush, while the other moment we goofily grinned at each other as if we knew each other for years: the lust in his eyes was overlapping with his love and adoration and it made me crazy.

‘How do you do that?‘ I asked, pulling the sheet up on my chest.

‘Do what?‘ he leaned on his side, with his chest exposed, glistening with sweat which only accentuated his chest.

‘pull off that... rugged charm suave!‘ I pouted and he pulled me closer.

‘hey Frank...‘ I ran my hands over his chest and looked up at him, ‘wanna play a game?‘

‘If it’s gonna be who’s laughing first while getting tickled I ain’t gonna be a part o’that shit...‘ He smiled and pinched my nose in an affectionate way.’No... not that! It’s a different kinda game. It’s called ten questions. You get to ask me ten, I get to ask you ten.‘ I said and looked at him.

He paused and froze for a second, his smile vanished, and I could feel his muscle tensing up, for him... this could go anywhere. I was terribly scared, perhaps I was going to the landmine zone, ‘It’s okay, if you don’t wanna play... we can just have round two?’

‘No.. it’s okay, I don’t mind.‘ He shot up straight and sat up on our bed and made me do the same, ‘it would be like the good ol’ Sundays back in the days.‘

I nervously breathed it in and started to giggle madly as I was making him thorough with the rules and played ‘rock-paper-scissors’ to decide the first one to ask the questions, after drawing the same thing for about five times, My paper won over his rock.

‘Okay... since there is no need to tell me your name, tell me about your childhood in a few expressions‘ I asked in a mock business-like manner, to which the big bad Punisher joined me.

‘Ladies and gentlemen o’the jury, I am Francis Castle, I was born and raised in Queens by a housewife mother named and a father who worked in NYPD, I am a high school graduate. My old man died when I was sixteen and therefore, to provide for my family, I joined the USMC.‘ before he could finish, I broke out laughing, to which he didn’t quite settled ‘what’s so funny?’

‘You have a pompous-ass name for a vigilante warlord “Francis”...‘ I pronounced his name with a fake British accents while gathering one of my lock over my lips ‘all you need is a monocle!!!‘

He looked at me with a quizzical expression and said ‘ya know, I could be way classier than I lead you on kid! It’s you now, shoot’, I told him what I was and how I handled this far.

‘Okay, next question: what is the strangest, most unpredictable thing about you that will shock the world?‘ I asked, and boy was I wrong about how the surprised will stop after the ‘Francis‘ bomb.

‘My real name is not Francis Castle--‘

‘Frank, I think you’re missing the point of ten questions, I did not ask to ten ways to troll your girlfriend--‘

‘My real name is Fra-‘

‘Francesca?‘ I snorted and he affectionately slapped my thigh, and answered ‘no... Francis Louis Mario Lorenzo Castiglione. I am Italian-American and was studying to be a Catholic priest, which didn’t set well with me, and you know why.‘

I was completely silent, and looked at him with gaped mouth while he enjoyed my expressions and smugly winked, ‘guess Francesca just got owned... not sure if I will get the same with yours kid.’

‘Well Frank, I am proud to tell you that...‘ I huffed and looked at him exasperatedly ‘I wish my life was as exciting as yours.‘

‘C’mon kid, there’s gotta be somethin’‘ Frank gave me a mischievous smile, ‘like that one time you was found in the’ and he dived in to tickle the hell out of me to a point where I finally confessed. ‘okay, okay... I was found in the bushes during the field trip, masturbating to my really hot, Shakespeare expert English teacher, by the English teacher in person’ I huffed, laughing, tickled, slightly embarrassed-- not because I verbally said it out to Frank, but the fact, he knew about that before I told him. ‘But how the hell you guessed it?’

‘Sweetheart... I know how to know things... next question.‘ Frank was now killing the game, in my opinion, and I was half-hearted to stop the game immediately and smacking myself how wrong I was to think that he was anxious about the game.

‘whom would you identify with the most before you became a Punisher: Fuckboy or Nerdy Virgin?‘ I do think that I got him now. But being Frank, he was all cool, ‘I would say, that I pretended to be a fuckboy so that nobody would guess I was a nerdy virgin who was studying to be a priest... which would be the rudest fucking surprise to all the concerned... what about you?‘

‘Don’t mock me now Francis... ‘ I slumped my shoulder, ‘my status, until few hours ago was Nerdy Virgin.‘

‘Right you are sweetheart... choose the next one carefully.‘ he smirked mischievously, oh I will Francesca, I will.

‘Okay... what is the most embarrassing story of your life?‘ I laughed while asking it, because Frank cannot return that to me because I got it when he answered the fourth question, and I was enjoying the hell out of it when I got Frank gaping and tilting his head in the most ‘Frank-like‘ manner.

‘It’s a long story now kid, I dunno if--‘

‘If you don’t answer you don’t get to kiss me all week.‘ I played along.

‘You’re evil... alright‘ he huffed, ‘it happened in the Marines...in the Military Ball when i was dancing with the Colonel’s daughter and I suddenly stepped on ‘er dress and the shit got ripped from the waist. got ma’self tangled in all o’er it and wors’ o’all... her boobs o’ma face, in front of my seniors and... ‘

‘And?‘ i asked.

‘That’s it... end of the story... I handed ma ass t’ya. Next?‘ he smiled, and I thought I should have mercy on him, I can’t stand him getting all embarrassed: it doesn’t suit him--he should be fearless and bold. This time I hold his hands ‘what is the most favorite moment of you with her?‘

Frank’s embarrassed smile got replaced with a nostalgic silence, his dark eyes glinted with the ghosts of his past and I almost got teary when he spoke, ‘ya’ know that one time, when we were newly married-- she was already with the child an’ all round and squishy. There was--there was’ he flayed his tall fingers in a way that he was already afraid that the memories will fade ‘there was a--a myrtle tree under which she sat, because she was all beat with the baby shoppin’ and suddenly she asked me to--to put the flowers on her head, it’s like “Frank, how will they look on me, will they be good” and boy, she looked like a potbelly fairy princess with all the pretty flowers in ‘er head-- I kissed her, and by god and I got my heart broke into pieces with the pretty little smile o’her.’ he ended with a sniffle and looked at me, while I was a hot mess, with tears running down my face, before he could say anything, I hugged him and kissed his temple tenderly.

‘I think we are done with the game?’ he tried to smile from what I guessed from his voice, while I rose from his shoulder and cupped his face in my hand ‘I must have saved a country in the past, for being here with you now... and I have no idea why... why of all bad people you-you should have the worst fate in the world--’

His big, calloused finger tapped over my relatively tiny lips and hushed me softly. I was a hot mess of tears and emotions as his big thumb caressed my tears away and looks down at me with affection.

‘Sweetheart, you are sitting on my lap, buck ass naked, oozin’ a world worth of love and sweetness that would give me diabetes. Trust me, I am not the one whose fate is the worst‘ he tucked one of my hair behind my ears and shook my chin ‘I think the worst fate award goes to every person about to be shot by me, and the douchbags who rejected you.‘

[kingsofchaos]

What If one of the fakes had a high school reunion or something like that and just took the crew and it somehow ended in a shoot out with the cops.

Let’s just be clear, it’s not a pride thing. Geoff has never cared what people said about him, not outside a professional sense anyway; he knew exactly who he was, what he was capable of, even before he’d taken an entire city to its knees. So it’s not that he felt the need to prove himself, it’s just that there’s something particular about high school trauma, isn’t there? Something that lingers, even when it shouldn’t, something that emerges from even the most upstanding adults when thrown back together for a reunion, the bullies and the bullied, all desperate to show what they’ve become.Geoff’s last high school was nothing like he’d ever been to before, a snobby upper-crust hellhole he was only in because his Ma���s third husband pulled some strings, and the other students were quick to point out just how much he didn’t belong. Between the tattoos and the smoking, the lazy looks and slow sneering drawl, it was always all too easy to label Geoff a loser, a drop out, trailer park trash everyone knew would be washing their cars one day. Never mind that he scored higher than most of his cohort even when skipping more or less every class, never mind that he is possibly the most well-read crime-lord in the country, back then he had an image and teenagers are relentless. Not that Geoff was all that phased even at the time, only a year or so away from the day he picked up his first gun and never looked back, but it’s the principal of the thing.So when an invite forwards through from an email so old he’d forgotten he’d even made it Geoff has to laugh. Then pause, consider, hatch an utterly ridiculous idea, and laugh some more. Because he might not care, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t enjoy ruining the night for all the pathetic stuck-up nobodies he went to school with; rubbing your success in everyone’s faces is what reunions are for, after all. The fact that it has a theme, that it is masquerade of all things, really just cements Geoff’s resolve to drag his crew halfway across the country into one of the strangest nights of their lives.Everyone knows the option to bring a guest to these events is, in reality, the offer to bring a romantic partner, singular, but it isn’t technically stated. There are no rules barring Geoff from RSVP-ing for 7, so that’s exactly what he does. Sure he receives a few increasingly less polite emails suggesting he’d been mistaken but he doesn’t even bother opening them, doesn’t try to clarify that he is bringing his friends, his family, not his entire harem. Let them talk; they’d do it anyway. Plus, it’s not like the Fake’s aren’t all entirely too pleased with the suggestion, cackling hyenas who spend the next few weeks laying it on thick, batting their eyes and blowing Geoff kisses, picking out increasingly absurd meet-cute stories to tell his scandalised classmates. Between creating new identities and playing dress up in masks and suits they couldn’t be happier.Masks or not they catch every eye in the room when they make their entrance and why wouldn’t they; Geoff and his unusual request must have been the talk of the rumour mill and identity hidden or not clearly this must be Geoff, it’s not like anyone else brought along 6 dates. As stage whispers hit a dull roar it’s obvious no one was prepared for what they were seeing, perhaps imagined instead stained tank tops and a string of strung-out baby mama’s, not expensively tailored suits and an attractively refined entourage. Paying the noise no heed Geoff swans into the room with Jack looking elegant on one arm, Gavin at his most Ken-doll glamorous tucked under the other, flanked on either side by Ryan, Michael, Jeremy and Ray, all dressed to impress.Shock and jealousy aren’t good looks on anyone, let alone rich brats turned elitist yuppies, so Geoff’s classmates behave just as poorly as he’d anticipated, years and newfound maturity doing nothing to stop the tittering laughter, the sneers and judgmental looks, fake pleasantry and condescending questions. But then, his crew didn’t exactly play nice with them either.Ray and Jeremy immediately beeline to the food table and bar, respectively, and each set themselves up and settle in for the night; loud, obnoxious and tactlessly talking about everyone around them. When asked about themselves or their relationship to Geoff they’re both frustratingly vague, Jeremy chattering away without saying much at all and Ray simply staring people down until they can’t bear the tension.Michael and Ryan set off together to explore the room but quickly separate to accommodate their vastly different methods of surveillance. Ryan skulks into the background, ducking numerous attempts to catch his interest in favour of fading into unlit corners and empty nooks, frightening the life out of anyone trying to slip away for some private time. Michael, on the other hand, seems determined to be the life of the party, cheerfully making conversation only to laugh in the face of every so-called achievement, ruffling feathers and causing major offence wherever he goes.Gavin slinks off like a man on a mission and doesn’t come back for over an hour, offering no explanation for the absence beyond a dangerously self-satisfied smirk. His work becomes obvious soon enough anyway, once the yelling starts; Geoff’s two main high-school tormentors, mentioned only in passing stories over the years, simultaneously having huge, public, relationship-ending blow ups with each of their significant others. What are the odds? Across the hall Gavin laughs, all tinkling glass and sparkling charm, smoothly working the room like Michael’s mirror opposite.Jack stays at Geoff’s side all night, hackles raised into something abnormally cold and unimpressed any time someone comes up to speak to them, protective instincts in full force no matter how often Geoff claims to be unaffected. He fills her in on all the worst gossip about those who approach, and as the night progresses and general unease begins to spread Jack mellows, sinking back into something sweet and mocking, somehow even more unsettling playing docile arm-candy than she was rabid guard dog.Throughout the night the Fake AH Crew remain a key topic of every casual conversation; they might have been regardless, even this far from Los Santos no one can get enough of their scandals, but with the huge heist pulled just last week there was no way to avoid it, everyone has their two cents, their praise and condemnation. It’s too funny, the whole crew killing themselves trying not to break character, to laugh or correct or manipulate the conversation but all their self-control is well rewarded in the end.Half the room removed their masks less than an hour into the night; too difficult to eat and talk and drink in, too vain to keep their hard earned looks covered, so it’s not at all strange when the Fake’s start to follow suit. Jeremy and Ray start it, the newest member and the one caught on camera the least often, casually dropping their masks mid-conversation. They each get a confused squint or two, a double glance, a few individuals trying to place them, remember how they’d met before, why they were so familiar.Next came Gavin and Michael, having goaded each other out onto the dance-floor they were playing as much as they were moving to the music, laughing and grappling and generally making a bit of a scene. They snatch off each other’s masks as they play and the looks double, because alone they’re each distinctive but together, together, people have seen those faces together, somewhere they’ve seen them and so often together..Last is Jack and Geoff, more graceful than their counterparts and moving with far more purpose they reveal their faces in the centre of the room and, like a party trick, they instantly catch the whole room’s attention. Out of context, in ones and twos where they don’t belong, the members of the FAHC could be mistaken but no one in the country would fail to recognise Ramsey and Patillo, the kingpin and his right hand, rulers of the most well-known gang in the US. And here they stand, casually mingling at a high school reunion.In the calm before the storm the crew gravitates back towards one another, can almost see the cogs turning around them, the lightbulbs flickering on in a slow ripple spreading out across the room, disbelief and the first hint of horror swirling together as people start unconsciously reaching for their phones. As Ryan slips back out and wanders over, the last still masked, always masked, the chatter seems to crescendo then crash into something still and almost silent as a room full of entitled trust-fund babies recognise their own terror.Finally uncovered and flanked by his family Geoff’s grin creeps across his face, slow and violent and more confirmation than anyone needed as he lets the oppressive tension sit for a long moment, arms spreading out to his sides like a magician revealing a clever trick before he breaks the silence; Surprise motherfuckers. Guns are pulled from jackets and from there it’s all running and screaming, no honour or courage, just a stampede for the exits to the sound of cackling laughter and the occasional aimless pot-shot. The Fake’s aren’t looking for lives, not worth the hassle really, and this job certainly has no monetary reward beyond the wallets Geoff’s filthy little thieves have no doubt absconded with, but the fear in the air is delightful and even the sound of incoming sirens can’t ruin the mood. If anything it only hypes them up further, all savage grins and ramping excitement as they make for doors, reloading their weapons and pumping themselves up for a whole new police force to terrorise, Geoff’s magnificent little miscreants.On the way out they pass a wall of yearbook photos, blown up large and captioned with names and all the old superlative awards. Ryan stumbles to a halt and snorts, snatching one off the wall and tucking it into his jacket to take back to the penthouse, though not before flashing the Lads a glance at that all too recognisable face, sending them into peals of screeching laughter as they pour out into the night. Geoffrey Fink; Least likely to succeed. 

[onlyfools-fall-foryou]

Same thing, wrote for magazine but never got published. The Luhrmann article.

BAZ LUHRMANNNNNNNNN.

Just a lil background: I discovered /Romeo + Juliet (1996)/ when I was going through my Leonardo DiCaprio phase in 2012 or 2013. Wee little I, who had yet to discover how to t*rr*nt movies, would desperately look up clips from his movies on Youtube. The few actual clips that I found (most of the /R+J/ related videos on Youtube are edits with the central love theme or some other artsy love song playing in the background) were of the bathroom/elevator scene or the last scene in the chapel. (Unrelated: a couple days ago I saw something related to the chapel scene and had a dream of marrying Rose Byrne. It was wild. Moving on.) 12 year old me couldn’t stop watching the chapel scene over and over and over again. This may have something to do with Leonardo DiCaprio’s breathtakingly smoldering gaze and delicate jaw structure as he’s slowly walking up, but it also had to do with everything else. Anyone who’s seen the chapel scene knows what I’m talking about. The music that is desperate and calmy tragic but not forcefully building up, the warm yellow candlelight around them a contrast to the harsh blue neon lights, the moment we see Juliet’s eyes open and we’re like ‘Yes!! Now all you have to do is nudge him! Just!! One!! Nudge!!!’ (My heartbeat just sped up a little writing that. Whoo that scene gets my sympathetic nervous system going.) Of course, not to mention the brilliant acting but this isn’t the time or place to discuss that. We know Juliet isn’t going to stop Romeo in time, but the movie still makes us scream in frustration. (Just!!!! One!!!! Nudge!!!)

At the time, I didn’t know anything about directors and frankly, how they could ever considering putting their names in front of the actors’ names in the roll credits when clearly the actors were the ones who did all the work. (I was 12.) Later on, I realized there was so much a director does other than tell the actors when to start and end.

Just going to put this out there, Baz Luhrman’s life is art. His Wikipedia page makes me emotional. His parents were involved in dance and film and he performed theater in school. In college, he met his wife (Catherine Martin, who is also amazing. She has like five Oscars just from costume and set designing!!) whom he works together with on every single project. (They’re the ultimate power couple.) Everything he’s directed (and she’s costume-designed) has like at least 5 awards.

/But why haven’t I ever heard of him?/ The reasons for that are: He’s Australian. He does stage more than screen. He’s only made five movies in total (all of them very well-known), from 1992~2001, 2008, and 2013, which is why wee young millennials don’t really know about him. (I’m not making a generalization here, just that most of my millennial peers don’t really know about movies made prior to 2000 excluding Star Wars and Indiana Jones.) He doesn’t make movies to target the general mass. By general mass, I mean little kids and little kids’ parents. And by little kids I also mean teenagers. I need more peers to talk to about his brilliance, which is why I am roping all y’all in with me.

When Baz uses these well-known stories with famous, obvious endings, he has this amazing ability to make you forget what the whole story was about, like /Romeo + Juliet/ and /The Great Gatsby/. In movies that don’t have a highly publicized ending, like /Moulin Rouge!/, he gives you the ending. The opening scene is literally the main character typing away at his typewriter as he declares: ‘My lover, Satine, is dead.’ It’s not even a spoiler. That’s the opening scene. That leaves you sort of shocked and frankly, offended. What movie starts off by telling you one half of the two main characters are going to die? You scoff at the director for being so stupid and continue to watch. As you watch a narcoleptic Argentinian fall through the ceiling and the cast made up of said Argentinian, a dwarf dressed as a nun, a heavily made-up Faramir, two musicians dressed like pilgrims, and the main character perform a wildly disorganized version of “The Sound of Music,” your mind has shifted to ‘Hah, what was the director thinking’ to ‘This is the weirdest thing I’ve seen in my life. How did they even get the copyright?’ and when Satine, the goddess, is introduced in an also wild and ridiculous rendition of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,’ you have completely forgotten the fact that she will have to meet a tragic demise.

Got a little carried away there, /Moulin Rouge/ is one of my favorite movies and talking about the hectic opening scene gets me hyped up.

I could go on for days about Baz and his comical intros and his transitions and how all his films are similar to each other and how all the characters have archetypes and how he uses symbolism and foreshadowing and the parallels (the Parallels!) but I’ll keep that to myself and Tumblr. (I have a document on my laptop titled “Baz Luhrmann: The Ultimate Sadist.” Come talk to me if you wanna see it.) The second portion of this article will be about /The Get Down./

I was actually writing about /The Get Down/ and a couple Luhrmann movies on my summer to-do list article, but I accidentally wrote like a page’s worth of Luhrmann praise and decided to make it a separate article.

Baz Luhrmann and Pulitzer Award-winning Stephen Adly Guirgis (his twitter gives me life) teamed up with some rappers who were active during the creation of hip hop to create /The Get Down./

The first thought you may have is, what is the get down? What is a get down? It’s not properly explained until a couple episodes in, but apparently it’s the part of a song in between verses where there’s a good, strong beat. Think of a non-rap song with a good, strong beat. I’m gonna think of “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees, the one used in Sherlock, and around the 3 minute mark, there’s a short drum solo bit. DJs in the 70s would take two records of a song, find that spot, and play just that part alternating the records on a turntable. The beat would be infinite and an MC would rhyme over it. Grandmaster Flash coined the term ‘the get down’ and now there’s a show named after it.

In 1977, DJs, dancers, wordsmiths (rappers), and graffiti artists were putting together the urban subculture of hip hop. The show is placed right in the middle of all of it, in Bronx, NY. The story is centered around Zeke and his friends, his struggle to become someone in a white world, keep his music going, and get his girl. We also alternately get a present-day Zeke performing to a crowd, played by a Nas-dubbed Daveed Diggs, occasionally doing recaps and foreshadowings. There’s minimal death considering this is Baz Luhrmann-made. Ezekiel “Zeke” “Mr. Books” Figuero: The Wordsmith. Lil pouty fluffy boy with questionable sideburns and the world’s worst pencil grip, that boy’s gonna get carpal tunnel like yesterday. In love with the pastor’s daughter, Mylene. Is a genius with words. 1/5 of the Get Down Brothers. Mylene Cruz: the butterscotch princess with the big disco dream and the voice of an angel. Her father doesn’t let her sing the “devil’s music.” Has two great girlfriends, Yolanda and Regina, who sing backup. Shaolin Fantastic: Not Asian. Drug dealer/graffiti artist/DJ whose true passion is to DJ like his idol, Grandmaster Flash. Super extra. His red pumas are always spotless. Problematic. 1/5 of the Get Down Brothers. Marcus “Dizzee” Kipling: Graffiti artist who goes by the name of Rumi 411, who also happens to be Dizzee’s top hat wearing alien alter ego. The most artistic out of all of them, often misunderstood. Has a preference to people named “Thor.” Has the fluffiest hair of them all. 1/5 of the Get Down Brothers. Ronald “Ra-Ra” Kipling: The oracle, the guru, the all seeing eye. Has the most morality and voice of reason out of all of them. Constantly makes Star Wars references. Can rap really fast. Looks out for all his brothers, including Zeke and Shao. 1/5 of the Get Down Brothers. Miles “Boo-Boo” Kipling: Sings like the Jackson 5. Breaks out into dance whenever he can. Also problematic. Always sings that he gets all the ladies but can’t actually. Youngest but loudest. 1/5 of the Get Down Brothers. Francisco “Papa Fuerte” Cruz: Mylene’s uncle. Also sort of everyone’s uncle. Has all the power and genuinely cares about his people in the Bronx, trying to get them homes and opportunities.

Part 2 gets a little trippier with the introduction of angel dust, aka PCP. Kids, don’t ever do hard drugs. If you’re interested in hip hop, music, poetry, bromance, sweet teen romance, vibrant cinematography, and beautiful brown babies, (*whispers*) you should watch.

[lisacongo2-blog]

Special Sauce: Osayi Endolyn on Nigerian Food, Writing, and Identity

[Photograph: Andrew Thomas Lee. Egusi photograph: Shutterstock]

On this week's episode of Special Sauce, Ed speaks to Osayi Endolyn, a Florida-based food writer whose work regularly appears in major food publications across the country, and whose column in Gravy, the journal published by the Southern Foodways Alliance, earned a James Beard Award in 2018.

Ed and Endolyn's conversation starts off exactly where most Special Sauce conversations start off, namely with Endolyn talking about her family and the food they used to eat when she was growing up. But Ed wasn't prepared for just how fascinating Endolyn's family history is. For example, her grandmother, Ruth Harris Rushen, was something of a trailblazer, as she was the first woman and first African-American to sit on California's parole board.

Endolyn's family table had a mix of what she calls "California working mom cuisine"—tofu and noodles, roasted chicken and vegetables—and Nigerian dishes prepared by her father, who immigrated to the United States in his early 20s. Endolyn describes her father as somewhat mercurial, but a talented cook. "The food was glorious," she says. "Dinner was sometimes fraught and tense, but the food was really good." The quality of the food was somewhat surprising, particularly since her father, like many immigrants, had to figure out by himself how to prepare the familiar foods from home. And, of course, her father's cooking left its mark on her. "So," Endolyn says, "I think a lot about migration now and what people bring with them and what they leave behind."

Endolyn's current focus on the intersection of food and identity is something of a happy accident. She was living in Atlanta and looking into the roots of Southern cuisine, and saw parallels between food in the South and the food her father would make at home. The realization seemed to expose how writing about food could be about so much more than writing about what's on a plate. "Food can actually be this lens from which we can explore so many different things," Endolyn says. "Why certainly it can be something that I can use to talk about my experiences as a child of an immigrant, or as the descendant of someone who was in the Great Migration, or as a descendant of enslaved people or all of these other historic and personal experiences."

To hear more from Endolyn, tune into this both this week's and next week's episode. We guarantee it'll be well worth your time.

Special Sauce is available on iTunes, Google Play Music, Soundcloud, Player FM, and Stitcher. You can also find the archive of all our episodes here on Serious Eats and on this RSS feed.

Want to chat with me and our unbelievably talented recipe developers? We're accepting questions for Special Sauce call-in episodes now. Do you have a recurring argument with your spouse over the best way to maintain a cast iron skillet? Have you been working on your mac and cheese recipe for the past five years, but can't quite get it right? Does your brother-in-law make the worst lasagna, and you want to figure out how to give him tips? We want to get to know you and solve all your food-related problems. Send us the whole story at [email protected].

Ed Levine: Welcome to Special Sauce, Serious Eats' podcast about food and life. Every week on Special Sauce, we talk to some of the leading lights of American culture, food folks and nonfood folks alike.

Osayi Endolyn: You know, I was living in Atlanta. I was thinking a lot about the roots of southern cuisine in ways that had never been talked about in my family. And I was like, well geez, like this seems like a lot of the same ingredients or cooking practices that I saw my dad do, or that I remember some of these flavors. And so in an effort to do that, I was thinking about West African chefs, and could I find Nigerian food in Atlanta? And so that essay kind of explored that.

EL: This week, sitting across the table from me in CDM studios is none other than the brilliant young writer, Osayi Endolyn. Her writing about food and identity in Southern Foodways Quarterly "Gravy" has earned her the James Beard Journalism Award. You'll find her work north and south from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post and the Atlanta Magazine. And most important to my heart, is her contribution to an anthology entitled You and I Eat The Same, on the countless ways food and cooking connect us to one another. That's where she wrote an important, evocative, and should I say fattening piece on fried chicken? Welcome, Osayi to Special Sauce. We feel privileged to have gotten you here on one of your infrequent trips to the Big Apple.

OE: Oh, I am so happy to be here.

EL: It was such a pleasure to read everything I could before seeing you, 'cause .. wow man, you just keep going to write your ass off. So good. So good for you to be here.

OE: Well, I'm going to download this when it airs and like just keep that on a loop somewhere when I'm feeling all the pangs of a first draft. Thank you so much.

EL: Sure. So since you write so frequently about food and identity, our usual first riff on Special Sauce is particularly pertinent. And that riff is, "Tell us about life at the Endolyn family table."

OE: Well, gosh, growing up ... so I was born and raised in California. And I spent some time in the Bay and then appeared in the Central Valley, and then the rest of my childhood was in the Inland Empire. And I went to college in Los Angeles.

EL: I love the Inland Empire. I noticed that, like what area is the Inland Empire? Is that like Sacramento ...?

OE: I don't know Sacramento that well as an adult. I would say maybe ... you're going to have all of your various ethnic groups without all the like glitz and shine of Los Angeles, to a certain degree. So that's where you've got like, Riverside, Moreno Valley.

EL: Got it.

OE: I went to high school, San Bernardino. I don't know if Pomona quite counts, but going out toward like Claremont.

EL: Yeah, yeah. Pomona counts. Like San Gabriel Valley? Like the other side of the mountains?

OE: That's on the other side.

EL: Got It.

OE: So we're going a little further east and it's an area where I think a lot of people don't realize California has places like that.

EL: Yeah, for sure because everyone goes to Los Angeles and San Francisco, maybe Santa Barbara or Santa Cruz.

OE: And then when they go to those places, they go to the ones that become those destination spots on all the movies and shows and things like that. So for the early part of my childhood, I would say what I remember most is, my mom's cooking was, I would call it like maybe California working mom cuisine. Where you know, you've got- sometimes you had like noodles and tofu, sometimes you had roast chicken and roasted vegetables. Sometimes it was just, one pot spaghetti with the sauce from the jar, a lot of frozen veggies with the medley. I always remembered like the lima beans—

EL: The medley. I just love the medley. The idea of the vegetable medley is something we don't talk enough about on Special Sauce.

OE: Yeah. I mean, I don't miss it. We had really balanced meals. There wasn't—I totally appreciate that picky eaters is a thing and that it's hard for a lot of parents, but in my household that just wasn't—It just never came up. It wasn't an option.

EL: Got it.

OE: So we just ate everything. My father cooked sometimes and when he cooked, he made Nigerian dishes. He was from Benin city. And so there were a lot of dishes that I don't really have names for now, but they were essentially stews or depending on your household, you might call them curries. Right? But you had your base, you had a meat, it sat for a while and he would serve it with eba, steamed yams that have been kind of been pounded. So kind of like pounded yam, but it's a little darker variety. Rice a lot. Sometimes we had boiled plantain. I preferred the sweet plantain fried rather than like the less ripe of plantain that was kind of more like almost—and sometimes he would roast it. And then I remember a lot of social events that were hosted by either my father or people that he knew in kind of a very close knit Nigerian community, both in the Bay Area and in Clovis where we were living, which is next to Fresno.

OE: So if you're familiar with Cal State Fresno. And so, those events would have dishes that he never made, that had a lot of preparation to them, like moin moin. Which is, like black eyed peas grinded down and kind of mashed in with peppers and onions. They are steamed sometimes in foil or banana leaves. When you take it out, it kind of looks like a little mold. So I kind of call it like a Nigerian Tamale. Sometimes you have like hard boiled egg pieces in there, meat chunks in there. I remember egusi soup, which is a favorite of mine and you'll see that on a lot of menus of African restaurants that might be labeled as such. And that's a stew that I think you'd find in other cultures along the same regional area as well, but it's bitter melon seed and you've got like crayfish in the base and usually had like stewed chicken or goat in there too. We'd have akara, which is also made out of shelled black eyed peas, seasoned with maybe some onion, salt, and pepper and fried. So it essentially, it looks like a, like a hush puppy or a fritter. And so I really loved all that food. And when my parents divorced, when I was a teenager, we moved further south to Moreno Valley, so from Clovis to Moreno Valley. My grandmother was across the street. That was delightful, because for so much of my childhood she was always like returning home or we were always like leaving her and all of a sudden now she was like right there. So we would have a lot of Sunday dinners at her place and, she'd bake your typical baked fish and, sometimes she'd make, maybe like a roast and some kind of cornbread dressing.

EL: And this was your mother's mother?

OE: My mother's mother. Yeah. Yeah.

EL: And she was from the south?

OE: Yeah. So her name was Ruth Rushen and—Ruth Harris Rushen. And she was born and raised in Laurel, Mississippi. Her father was a Methodist preacher and her mother basically took care of—I Think there were five of them. They had a small farm and some animals. And she went onto college, Clark College at the time in Atlanta. And then worked for a little while in DC. And she was at the Labor Department kind of right after the war, and learned on her first day... She was sitting next to a young white woman and she was so excited. This is the first day on the job and she's asks what job the woman has and whatever the woman tells her. My grandmother realizes in that moment that when they came to her school to give like the aptitude test and the interviews, the job this woman had wasn't even something she had to, eligible to apply for. And so that kind of begins to like set her in the sense of like being in a small town in Laurel kind of insulated. She didn't really have a lot of day to day experiences with Jim Crow and racism. Of course, looking at from a more-

EL: Ten thousand feet.

OE: Yeah. From like the forest view, you could see the divisions, but in her life experience as a child, she didn't necessarily have that othering feeling. And that became very present for her in DC. Shopping for hats and people wouldn't wait on her and things like that. So she's been only a couple of years in DC before she decided to move to Los Angeles. I think she already had a cousin that was out there and that's how it went. You know, right? You heard somebody else had kind of made their way. So you went. And she worked in the Methodist Church as a receptionist for a little while. She had a brief period cleaning homes. She had this great anecdote of being asked to look at the- Please address the dust pearls underneath the bed. And she was like, "I don't know- you're gonna have to tell me what do you mean by that?" Cause she had never heard that phrasing before. It wasn't long before she got a referral to a job in social work. And it was from there that she really kind of found her vibe. And she went from social work to a probation. She was appointed first woman, I think and definitely first African American to sit on California's parole board. And then she went on to serve as the Director of Corrections under Jerry Brown's first turnout.

EL: You really got to write a book about that.

OE: Yeah.

EL: Can we just stop the whole thing? And we're just gonna spend the rest of the time talking about your grandmother.

OE: Well, so she didn't cook a lot for my mom and my aunt 'cause she was up and down from LA, where my aunt and mother were born to Sacramento and all that. They had an extended family ... they had a relative who came up with, they call her Amy. And that's spelled actually Auntie, but they pronounce it Amy. And I think she was, I always get this wrong, she was on my maternal grandfather's side. So she did a lot of the house kind of care for them. But so when I was a teenager living across the street from her, that kind of like day to day cooking, dining opportunities, we could go over and hang out with her.

EL: You come from a remarkable family of women-

OE: I do.

EL: Between your mom and your grandmother ... I can't imagine all the things ... like when she got that job for the government that there were too many other African American women that had similar positions.

OE: No. And she was, I think, very early on got a reputation for being really fair, but being really straightforward. Later in her career, she was getting a lot of awards and I was younger, and I just remember people always kind of saying, "Oh, you know, that Rushen. She's-" We'd always has some like kind of shaking their head. Like, "She checked me that one time, but it was important that she did that."

EL: She was a bad ass before women were called bad ass.

OE: Yeah. I actually found, on Google Books- and gosh, I hope maybe one day I can get like a digitized version. But Ebony had done a profile of her. Ebony Magazine.

EL: Wow.

OE: Maybe this was like 1980 or '81, something like that. And it was this full spread, and they had photographs of her. I think there were a couple of her walking the yard, maybe it like one of the state prisons- it might've been San Quentin. Those guys had a lot of respect for her because she listened. And she was interested in corrections, not necessarily as a place solely to punish, but as a place to really give people resources because they're going to reenter the vast majority of people. It's an idea we still haven't quite caught onto yet.

EL: Yeah.

OE: But, I remember this quote that I'm going to have to paraphrase, but you know, she was basically like, "You know, if you're lookin' for the pushers, that's fine. But if you want to stop, you know, drugs being sold, you really have to go to Beverly Hills where the people are buying most of the things that are being-" So, I thought that was really ... I mean it doesn't sound revolutionary, but to kind of call that out-

EL: Yeah, back then.

OE: To say that back then-

EL: Yeah, that's amazing.

OE: ... speaks volumes.

EL: You mentioned your dad did a bunch of the cooking before your folks divorced. And you wrote this extraordinarily powerful and honest piece about your dad and going to his funeral in Nigeria. Tell us about his relationship to cooking and how it affected you. And I was just so struck by when you said he didn't want anyone in the kitchen ... and was obviously afraid of relationships.

OE: Yeah. I mean, my dad had- so his name was Lucky Ehigiator. And people are always like, "No, what was his real name?" I was like, no, his first name was Lucky. And, he had this really like, magnanimous personality. I mean, he was just, big smile, like very handsome. He walked in the room, you would know he was there. Just amazing laugh. But he had this really awful temper, and I don't know where that all came from. I know that growing up his grandfather was very hard on him. He, like a lot of kids do in his home country, he went off to boarding school very early. He was a youngster during the civil war, the Biafran war in Nigeria. And that wasn't stuff that he talked about very much, but there was always this underlying tension, you know? But the food was great. The food was, was glorious. Dinner was sometimes fraught and tense, but the food was really good. And when he cooked ... I mean I don't remember him ever cooking what we might consider your typical kind of west coast, California fare. So like stuff that you would find like Marie Calendars or the Sizzler or things like that. That wasn't stuff that he was turning out.

EL: Right. Yeah he was cooking Nigerian food like you described.

OE: Yeah, right. I hear from some folks that he immigrated to San Diego, barely out of his teens. He attended UC San Diego. That's where my parents met. And I hear that a lot of those guys have to kind of figure out how to cook when they come because it's not necessarily something they were tasked with doing always. And so that's kind of like grappling the recipe. So, I think a lot about migration now and what people bring with them and what they leave behind. And how tough it must be to try to recreate something that, felt maybe so inherent to your day to day, and now you're just barely able to source the ingredients. And maybe you don't even know what they're called in this other language. I mean English is a native language for many people in Nigeria, including my father. But it's still, I think, challenging. So, I didn't get to like really observe him cook or sort of sit off to the side and chat with him. We were always kind of- and this might have to do with just being a kid and anytime you're around it's like, "Get out of the way. Your underfoot." But I enjoyed the food, the flavors. I wasn't always interested in some of the ... I guess what you'd say is that sometimes I think my dad really did not understand how it was he would happen to be raising American kids. Right?

EL: Right.

OE: Like, just the things that would come out of our mouths. It would just- he would sometimes find them so disrespectful, maybe unknowingly. Or even just customs that he was used to, like not eating food with your left hands. That is- you know, your left hand isn't not considered- And this is true in a lot of African countries, a lot of the Middle East too. You eat with your right hand.

EL: Wow, I didn't know that.

OE: Yeah. The left hand is kind of perceived culturally that that's where you do business. It's not what you bring to the table. Especially in- we think about a lot of communal dining, these customs are important. And stuff like that, he would get really turned around by. That just didn't make sense to me.

EL: Sure.

OE: And then- he was my only brother at the time, we have a younger brother. But it was hard to balance and kind of work out as a kid.

EL: It sounds like also he didn't equate food to love. I once had the late, great Nora Ephron on our radio show and I asked her what food meant to her and she laughed and she said, "You mean besides love and family?" But it sounds like for your dad it was ... it might have been some of that, but it must have been other things too.

OE: You know, when I would sometimes express to him that I felt like- I was an affectionate kid and my mom was very affectionate with us. She told us she loved us, and there was always this sense of we knew where we stood. With my father being such a unpredictable figure ... he'd lash out and next thing you know, you'd be getting whipped about something that you didn't even know what you did wrong. It was hard to not always have the other side of it from him. And so, he felt like, "Hey, you have a bed to sleep in. You have this nice house at the end of a cul-de-sac. You go to a good school, and you've got clothes that fit. What's your problem?"

EL: Wow.

OE: Right? You know?

EL: Sure.

OE: I mean that is where I think- I mean a lot of people were kind of raised that way. I think he was certainly raised that way.

EL: Yeah.

OE: But sometimes I think he would vacillate because he can be very tender but ... I don't know if sometimes he felt like that was allowing too much leniency-

EL: Yeah. Somehow he was-

OE: Spare the Rod-

EL: Yeah.

OE: Sort of thing.

EL: That's weird. You also wrote a beautiful piece about your mom in the Washington Post. Which actually I want to show my wife because you talk about, that you have to sort of reluctantly conclude that you're like her, and that she's like you and that she gets you. You know? And that you did it with using food as the metaphor was really beautiful.

OE: Thank you so much.

EL: Connecting food to love and family ... you do it in a way that reflects the complexities contained in the relationships between food and love and family. So talk a little bit about that relationship because it's- I think it's closely tied to a lot of your writing, which is about food and identity. But you know, you got to throw love and culture in there too.

OE: Yeah. That piece was a little hard for me to get started, but once I did, it kind of came like A to Z pretty quickly. And it was really nice working with Joe Yonan, the editor of the food section with the Washington Post's cause-

EL: I know Joe. He's a good man.

OE: He is a good man. And I turned it in and he was like, "Okay. Well that's a wrap." I was like, "Wait, you don't have like ... comments? You don't want to revise something?" And so I haven't actually read it again cause I'm afraid I'm going to find something that I wish I had changed. Sometimes, and I think a lot of kids who emerged from households that experience divorce in some way, sometimes the parent who's always there sometimes gets a bad rap because they have to withstand all of it. And there's not really the same tag team.

EL: They have a hard time reconciling the good cop, bad cop thing.

OE: Yeah. Yeah. And so, my mom had a lot of help with my mom's side of the family, but for sure coming into my teens, it's just a difficult time, right? I'm trying to figure out who I am and she's trying to figure out, "Who the hell is that?" And through my college years, I actually- I went to high school in Moreno Valley. I went to college at UCLA. Now it's probably about an hour and a half, but at the time you could get door to door, at least the way I drove, 60 minutes.

EL: Right.

OE: But I didn't visit home that often.

EL: 'Cause you wanted to separate.

OE: Yeah. I had always been- I was one of these teenagers that had always been complimented for being mature.

EL: Right.

OE: Which is kind of a dangerous thing, because when you do act age appropriately, people think you're regressing. Which is kind of really hard.

EL: Right. Right. Right. And also the mature thing implies respectful and you don't want as a teenager to be identified as someone too respectful.

OE: Yeah. And being mature in the sense of like being polite isn't necessarily the same as like having financial maturity or an emotional maturity in some areas. So, there was just, I think a lot of ... there was friction. I think that a lot of it was normal, but it made our differences stand out to me.

EL: Yeah.

OE: If you hear my mom speak, you can tell I'm my mother's child. From nine years old, if I answered the phone, back when everyone had landlines. If I said, "Hello." People would start talking to me like I was Angela. And so, I'd have to say- because I have the same diction as her-

EL: My wife has that with her late mother, too.

OE: Yeah.

EL: She had it. It was like, they both had these two octave, "Hello's." And they were indistinguishable. Hello.

OE: And the more that I ... sort of charted off this ... kind of adult life or myself, the more I realized I was doing things that reminded me of my mom. From the way I organize paperwork, how I handled like household chores, the way I conducted myself sometimes professionally, even like the way I would get if I was upset in some situations. Where my mom can get like- she gets upset, she can get very quiet and very pronounced in her words are very annunciated. I tend to do that. So it's kind of weird to kind of see this coming back around. And I looked in the mirror one day and I was like, "Wow." I have this prominent forehead and this facial structure and my face has changed- Like the shape of my face had kind of changed a lot as I've aged. And I look more like my mom now and then maybe I did ten, fifteen years ago.

OE: That's a bell ringer, because I think it starts to, like you said, signify other areas in our lives where we overlap. And I've always been proud of my mother. I've always loved her fiercely, but I've always- I've also sometimes felt like, "We're very different." But sort of accepting that similarity, was kind of cool. I think it was refreshing for her, too.

EL: Yeah.

OE: She was like, "Well, finally. It only took 30 some odd years." Yeah.

EL: And was she a good cook or just a productive cook?

OE: She was a good cook. I always remember enjoying her food, but I just remember ... time was a challenge. My mom always worked. She was a journalist in the early part of her career. She actually was pregnant with my brother when she was at Stanford getting her master's in journalism. She was a reporter. And then she-

EL: It's too bad you come from such a lively family here. I mean, what's goin' on here, man? Oh yeah, and my brother became president. You know? It's like, "What's up with this?"

OE: You never know.

OE: Yeah. So she moved into like media affairs, public affairs and things like that. But, that work schedule, that intensity of- So she leaned on me a lot when I was a little older. Which at times was challenging for me. But-

EL: To get food on the table?

OE: To help out.

EL: Yeah.

OE: It wasn't anything crazy that she was asking like, "Hey, start the oven at this temperature and do these three things and I'll be home."

EL: Right, it wasn't reduce the sauce by-

OE: So I remember sometimes wanting to do two things on the weekends, like make cakes and things like that. And those were always like the one box. You know, add an egg, add a little oil kind of things. Sometimes pancakes on the weekends, that kind of thing. I think as her schedule started to open up as we became a little bit more self sufficient ... there were three of us, she could start to be kind of more exploratory and reflective in her cooking and not so what's like, "Okay, I got to get these three food groups on the table."

EL: Yeah. Yeah. You are often, as I've said, describe to someone who writes about food and an identity. How did you come to that topic? How did you arrive at like, "Wow, that's the area of the food culture that I want to explore." Was it by accident? Were you inspired by something you read of someone else's?

OE: Some that first started when one of my good friends, Evan Ma was editing Atlanta Magazine. We were both mentees of Bill Addison, who had left that position to go onto Eater.

EL: That's right. And now is onto the LA Times. I Love Bill Addison.

OE: I do too.

EL: He and I have talked for hours about Aretha Franklin besides.

OE: Oh my gosh. I'm sure that was delightful conversation, and I hope he busted out into song from time to time. But, I had pitched him like three or four story ideas, and Evan came back and said, "Want you to do this one." And one of those pieces was kind of exploring Nigerian food in the Atlanta area. Which by that time, I had started- When my parents divorced, there wasn't a continuation, the Nigerian cooking in my house. I think mostly just out of a lack of skill.

EL: Right.

OE: And then, in the IE, the Inland Empire, there wasn't places that I knew about, at least, that we're cooking-

EL: Nigerian food.

OE: Or even though what you might consider just West African dishes for a long time. And that's changed a lot now. I think that that's on the forefront of the next American cuisine.

EL: Yeah.

OE: But at the time, those were very home based experiences.

EL: Yeah.

OE: And so I was living in Atlanta, and I was thinking a lot about the roots of southern cuisine in ways that had never been talked about or really referenced in my family. And I was like, "Well, geez, this seems like a lot of the same ingredients or cooking practices that I saw my dad do, or that I remember, some of these flavors." And so in an effort to do that, I was thinking about West Africans, chefs. And could I find Nigerian food in Atlanta? And so that essay kind of explored that. And I was surprised that Evan had gone for it because I remember suggesting things that were a little bit more on trend and kind of like, "Eh, this little personal story over here."

EL: Right.

OE: "You don't want that." And that ended up being something that caught the attention of the Southern Foodways Alliance. And then from there, I wrote for them, and then I came on as an editor and started writing a column for Gravy.

EL: We should say it's Southern Foodways Alliance Quarterly.

OE: Right.

EL: And that's where I presume you got to know my friend John T. Edge.

OE: You know, we met in Atlanta around 2014, 2013 I think. But yeah, working on- So just to clarify it is Gravy. That's the name of the publication, but sometimes they have to say Gravy, print versus Gravy, podcast.

EL: Got it. Yeah. Right.

OE: Between that essay for Atlanta Magazine, and started the work I was doing at Gravy. I realized like, "Okay, I'm not a restaurant critic. I'm not someone who's necessarily going to be traveling around like collecting top 10 lists and things like that." These were things that I was thinking about more and more. And I think also on the media side, there's- the last ten, fifteen years, it's been a huge growth of personal essays and interest in those narratives. So I think it was a lot of things converging. But for me, in terms of the food component, I felt like if food can actually be this lens from which we can explore so many different things. Why certainly it can be something that I can use to talk about my experiences as a child of an immigrant, or as the descendant of someone who was in the great migration, or as a descendant of enslaved people or all of these other- these historic and personal experiences.

EL: That's the great thing about food and why I have stayed writing and producing stuff in the food culture, because the food culture enables you to touch every other discipline in every other aspect of life.

OE: And I didn't really know that coming into it. I mean, I started really like my first professional clip I think in food was another clip for Atlanta Magazine. I was an intern in graduate school at Atlanta Mag and I had heard this oral history that they wanted to do on brewing company, Sweetwater. They didn't have someone to do it. The person who they thought it was going to be able to do it wasn't available. And I heard this in an editorial meeting and-

EL: And you raised your hand.

OE: I did not raise my hand, but I cornered the editor, Steve Fantasy at the time, after the meeting and then told him, "Hey, I've been following craft beer culture. I've had a few clips in a smaller run monthly." And he said, "Well, let me see your clips and we can talk about it." And he assigned it to me, and he paid me. And supposedly I'm the only intern to ever earn a feature assignment at Atlanta Mag.

EL: And then you became a food writer.

OE: And then I became a food writer. But that was like, "Okay, this is an area-" I mean, I'd been writing profiles, and I'd been doing a lot of essays and some art coverage and things like that.

EL: Wow. So you're kind of the accidental food writer, but I now after having read so many pieces of yours, it is like you're one of those voices that from the first sentence like, "Oh, that's an Osayi piece." And that's the best thing you could say as a writer. You know, I started as a music writer and I had all these music critic idols and I could write exactly like Robert Christgau or any of these seminal rock critics, but they didn't sound like me. And then when I started writing about food, everyone said, "Oh, it's kind of like listening to you talk." You sort of found a back roads way to that.

OE: Somehow. I mean- Thank you so much. My Mom taught me the practice of reading out loud. What you write. I stuttered actually for a while as a kid, and between kind of practicing reading out loud to- She would help me do that to sort of hear how fast I was. It was because I was reading quickly that I would try to stumble over these words super fast and she'd say, "You have to slow down. You have to say slower than you hear it or see it in your mind." Between that and I think just the act of revising ... if I get stuck or if I'm trying to figure out where I need to go, the best way for me to get there is to read it out loud. Even if I'm just sort of murmuring the words.

EL: I do the same thing.

OE: Yeah.

EL: So I'm afraid we have to leave it here for this episode of Special Sauce, but we will continue this conversation for the next episode because we haven't talked about fried chicken and what you wrote about it in You and I Eat the Same and the book you're working on. And oh yeah, what you're going to write for us at Serious Eats. So thank you, Osayi Endolyn for this episode.

OE: Thank you.

EL: And thank you for agreeing to stick around and we'll see you next time, Serious Eaters.

This post may contain links to Amazon or other partners; your purchases via these links can benefit Serious Eats. Read more about our affiliate linking policy.

Source: https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/03/special-sauce-osayi-endolyn-1-1.html

[bookloveravenue]

Katie McGarry’s ONLY A BREATH APART – Excerpt Reveal

Would you dare to defy destiny? Are our destinies written in stone? Do we become nothing more than the self-fulfilling prophesies of other people's opinions? Or can we dare to become who we believe we were born to be?“A gorgeous, heartfelt journey of redemption and love” (Wendy Higgins), ONLY A BREATH APART is a young adult contemporary novel from critically acclaimed Katie McGarry. “Haunting, authentic, and ultimately hopeful” (Tammara Webber), ONLY A BREATH APART will be available on all retailers on January 22, 2019!

About ONLY A BREATH APART:Jesse dreams of working the land that’s been in his family forever. But he’s cursed to lose everything he loves most.Scarlett is desperate to escape her “charmed” life. But leaving a small town is easier said than done.Despite their history of heartbreak, when Jesse sees a way they can work together to each get what they want, Scarlett can’t say no.Each midnight meeting between Jesse and Scarlett will push them to confront their secrets and their feelings for each other.

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“Gritty and real, Only a Breath Apart is a story of hope conjured from pain, strength drawn from innocence, and love earned from self-respect. Beautiful, poignant, and fierce.” ―Kristen Simmons, critically acclaimed author of the Article 5 series

Add it to your Goodreads today!

Excerpt:

SCARLETT I’m defying my parents by attending a funeral. Reckless and adventurous teenage behavior, I know. Most seventeen-year-olds lie to their parents so they can go on a date with a forbidden boy or attend a party where there will be questionable behavior. Me? I’m outright lying to my dad, and it’s because Jesse Lachlin’s grandmother died. The entire way here I’ve questioned my sanity, but I don’t know how I’d live with myself if I stayed home. Jesse Lachlin used to be my childhood best friend. We were inseparable. We had the type of friendship people strive to have, and then, a few years ago, he cut me so deeply that I still bleed. But ten-year-old me would have never abandoned a hurting Jesse. So today I’m not only honoring the memory of Jesse’s grandmother, but also the memory of our dead friendship. On my way to the funeral, the high grass of the field swats at my legs, but I don’t mind the sting. I love walking barefoot in grass, I love the smell of the earth and I love that brief feeling of freedom open spaces can provide. It’s the dog days of August. The type of hot that starts when the sun rises and makes you sweat through your clothes within minutes. While my skin and palms are on fire, the pads of my feet are cool against the dirt. The heat is unwelcome, but the sky is deep blue and the sun is bright, and for that, I can be grateful. Walking out of the field, I stop short of crossing the one-lane road to slip on the flats that dangle from my fingertips. My mother would be mortified if she knew I was entering a church in a cotton daisy-print sundress. It’s not one of the dresses with stiff fabric and impossible back zippers she would have picked for me at an overpriced department store. It’s the type that’s machine-washable and breathable. The type of dress Jesse’s grandmother would have given her stamp of approval. I can practically hear my mother heavily sigh and mumble my name, Scarlett, as if it were her personal, private curse word. Mom believes there’s a certain way to dress and behave, and I’m breaking all sorts of her rules today. Watch out, world. I’m officially rebellious. I smile to myself because I’m the opposite of rebellious. For the last few years, I’ve followed every rule. I’m the teacher’s pet and the girl with straight A’s. I’m the poster child of perfection, and have earned every snarky ice princess comment Jesse’s friends whisper about me in the school hallways because he and I no longer speak. There are only six cars in the parking lot of the white church, and that makes me frown. I thought more people would have wanted to attend. Jesse’s mud-covered pickup is there, and so is an unnaturally clean black Mercedes that belongs to his uncle. This ought to be interesting. Jesse and his uncle have a mutual hate for each other that runs deeper than any root of any tree. Movement to my right and I slowly turn my head. Shivers run down my spine at the sight of Glory Gardner. Even though I’m seventeen and too old for ghost stories, I still can’t shake the ones regarding this woman. Girls would whisper over lunch boxes that Glory was a witch. As I grew older, I understood that witch meant con artist. She claims she can read palms, tarot cards and “sees” spirits from beyond the dead. All for a glorious fee. She’s a beautiful woman—long dirty blond hair that’s untamed, even in a bun, and she has an eclectic taste in clothing. Today she wears a white peasant shirt and a flowing skirt made of material that shimmers in the sun. Glory watches me like I watch her, with morbid curiosity. I knew her as a child, back when Jesse and I ran wild in the fields near her home, but we haven’t talked in years. She stands under the shade of a towering weeping willow. There are lots of those trees around here. Mom says it’s because there is too much water in the ground. I say it’s because the people in this town have cried too many tears. Mom doesn’t like my answer. I tilt my head toward the church, an unspoken question if Glory will be joining me. She shakes her head no. I’m not shocked. According to rumors, Glory will go up in flames if she enters the house of God. But who knows? Maybe I will, too. The church is one of those picturesque, historical, one-room school buildings squeezed between a cornfield on one side and a hay field on the other. A huge steeple with a bell attempts to reach the heavens, but like anything created by a human, it falls tragically short. The foreboding wooden door makes no noise as I open it, and I’m able to slip in without a huge, squeaking announcement. Orange light filters in through the dark stained glass windows, and its struggling beams reveal millions of dancing particles of dust. On the altar, there’s no casket, but there is an urn. My heart dips—Suzanne is dead. I used to wish she were my grandmother, and many times, she treated me as if I belonged to her. Suzanne was the epitome of love, and the world feels colder now that she’s gone. Choosing a spot in the back, I drop into a pew, and as I scan the church my stomach churns. How is it possible that this place is so barren? Besides the Funeral Brigade, or the FB, as I like to refer to them, there aren’t many people here. The FB are the older group of woman who attend every funeral in our small town even if they didn’t know the person. Attending funerals isn’t my idea of fun, but who am I to judge? The FB sit directly behind the one person the town believes to be the lone sane member of the Lachlin family, probably because he isn’t blood related—Jesse’s uncle. On the left side of the church is Jesse. Only Jesse. And that causes a painful pang in my chest. Where are his stinking friends? The anarchists in training who follow Jesse wherever he goes? Where is the rest of the town? Yes, Suzanne was polarizing, but still, where is any respect? Quietly, so I don’t draw attention to myself, I slip from the right set of pews to the left. Someone should be on Jesse’s side, and it’s sad it has to be me. A door at the front of the church opens, and the pastor walks out from the addition the church build on as a small office ten years ago. I would have thought any pastor assigned to this place would be as ancient as this church. Sort of like an Indiana Jones Knights Templar scenario where he lives forever as long as he stays inside. But no, he’s the youngest pastor from the main, newer church in town. His name is Pastor Hughes, and he’s a thirty-something black man with a fit build who is just cute enough that he should be starring in a movie. The pastor looks up, and he flinches as if startled. I peek over my shoulder then sigh. Clearly, he’s surprised to see me. Flipping fantastic. His reaction, and the fact he won’t stop staring, causes every person to turn their heads. Lovely. I’ve had dreams like this where I enter a room and become the center of attention. Only in my dreams it’s at school, it’s my classmates and I’m naked, but still, this is disconcerting. Eventually, the FB and Jesse’s uncle return their attention to the front, but Jesse doesn’t. He rests his arm on the back of the pew, and it’s hard to ignore that he’s made me his sole focus, but I do my best to act as if I don’t notice. To help, I concentrate on what my mom taught me as a child—to make sure the skirt of my dress is tucked appropriately so that my thighs don’t show. I then fold my hands in my lap and straighten to a book-on-head posture. I can be the ice princess people claim me to be. Five pews separate me and Jesse, and it’s not nearly enough. My cheeks burn under his continued inspection. Jesse has done this a handful of times since our freshman year. Glance at me as if I’m someone worth looking at, someone worth laughing with a little too loud and smiling with a little too much. Then he remembers who I am and snaps his gaze to someone else. But he’s not looking away now.  

Katie McGarry Bio: Katie McGarry was a teenager during the age of grunge and boy bands and remembers those years as the best and worst of her life. She is a lover of music, happy endings, reality television, and is a secret University of Kentucky basketball fan. Katie is the author of full length YA novels, PUSHING THE LIMITS, DARE YOU TO, CRASH INTO YOU, TAKE ME ON, BREAKING THE RULES, and NOWHERE BUT HERE and the e-novellas, CROSSING THE LINE and RED AT NIGHT. Her debut YA novel, PUSHING THE LIMITS was a 2012 Goodreads Choice Finalist for YA Fiction, a RT Magazine's 2012 Reviewer's Choice Awards Nominee for Young Adult Contemporary Novel, a double Rita Finalist, and a 2013 YALSA Top Ten Teen Pick. DARE YOU TO was also a Goodreads Choice Finalist for YA Fiction and won RT Magazine’s Reviewer’s Choice Best Book Award for Young Adult Contemporary fiction in 2013.

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[poisonbooknerd]

“Only A Breath Apart” Excerpt Reveal

Would you dare to defy destiny? Are our destinies written in stone? Do we become nothing more than the self-fulfilling prophesies of other people's opinions? Or can we dare to become who we believe we were born to be?

“A gorgeous, heartfelt journey of redemption and love” (Wendy Higgins), ONLY A BREATH APART is a young adult contemporary novel from critically acclaimed Katie McGarry. “Haunting, authentic, and ultimately hopeful” (Tammara Webber), ONLY A BREATH APART will be available on all retailers on January 22, 2019!

About ONLY A BREATH APART:

Jesse dreams of working the land that’s been in his family forever. But he’s cursed to lose everything he loves most.

Scarlett is desperate to escape her “charmed” life. But leaving a small town is easier said than done.

Despite their history of heartbreak, when Jesse sees a way they can work together to each get what they want, Scarlett can’t say no.Each midnight meeting between Jesse and Scarlett will push them to confront their secrets and their feelings for each other.

Amazon | Kobo | Google Play | B-A-M | Barnes & Noble | iBooks

“Gritty and real, Only a Breath Apart is a story of hope conjured from pain, strength drawn from innocence, and love earned from self-respect. Beautiful, poignant, and fierce.” ―Kristen Simmons, critically acclaimed author of the Article 5 series

Add it to your Goodreads today!

Excerpt:

SCARLETT

I’m defying my parents by attending a funeral. Reckless and adventurous teenage behavior, I know. Most seventeen-year-olds lie to their parents so they can go on a date with a forbidden boy or attend a party where there will be questionable behavior. Me? I’m outright lying to my dad, and it’s because Jesse Lachlin’s grandmother died.

The entire way here I’ve questioned my sanity, but I don’t know how I’d live with myself if I stayed home. Jesse Lachlin used to be my childhood best friend. We were inseparable. We had the type of friendship people strive to have, and then, a few years ago, he cut me so deeply that I still bleed. But ten-year-old me would have never abandoned a hurting Jesse. So today I’m not only honoring the memory of Jesse’s grandmother, but also the memory of our dead friendship.

On my way to the funeral, the high grass of the field swats at my legs, but I don’t mind the sting. I love walking barefoot in grass, I love the smell of the earth and I love that brief feeling of freedom open spaces can provide.

It’s the dog days of August. The type of hot that starts when the sun rises and makes you sweat through your clothes within minutes. While my skin and palms are on fire, the pads of my feet are cool against the dirt. The heat is unwelcome, but the sky is deep blue and the sun is bright, and for that, I can be grateful.

Walking out of the field, I stop short of crossing the one-lane road to slip on the flats that dangle from my fingertips. My mother would be mortified if she knew I was entering a church in a cotton daisy-print sundress. It’s not one of the dresses with stiff fabric and impossible back zippers she would have picked for me at an overpriced department store. It’s the type that’s machine-washable and breathable. The type of dress Jesse’s grandmother would have given her stamp of approval.

I can practically hear my mother heavily sigh and mumble my name, Scarlett, as if it were her personal, private curse word. Mom believes there’s a certain way to dress and behave, and I’m breaking all sorts of her rules today. Watch out, world. I’m officially rebellious.

I smile to myself because I’m the opposite of rebellious. For the last few years, I’ve followed every rule. I’m the teacher’s pet and the girl with straight A’s. I’m the poster child of perfection, and have earned every snarky ice princess comment Jesse’s friends whisper about me in the school hallways because he and I no longer speak.

There are only six cars in the parking lot of the white church, and that makes me frown. I thought more people would have wanted to attend. Jesse’s mud-covered pickup is there, and so is an unnaturally clean black Mercedes that belongs to his uncle. This ought to be interesting. Jesse and his uncle have a mutual hate for each other that runs deeper than any root of any tree.

Movement to my right and I slowly turn my head. Shivers run down my spine at the sight of Glory Gardner. Even though I’m seventeen and too old for ghost stories, I still can’t shake the ones regarding this woman. Girls would whisper over lunch boxes that Glory was a witch. As I grew older, I understood that witch meant con artist. She claims she can read palms, tarot cards and “sees” spirits from beyond the dead. All for a glorious fee.

She’s a beautiful woman—long dirty blond hair that’s untamed, even in a bun, and she has an eclectic taste in clothing. Today she wears a white peasant shirt and a flowing skirt made of material that shimmers in the sun.

Glory watches me like I watch her, with morbid curiosity. I knew her as a child, back when Jesse and I ran wild in the fields near her home, but we haven’t talked in years.

She stands under the shade of a towering weeping willow. There are lots of those trees around here. Mom says it’s because there is too much water in the ground. I say it’s because the people in this town have cried too many tears. Mom doesn’t like my answer.

I tilt my head toward the church, an unspoken question if Glory will be joining me. She shakes her head no. I’m not shocked. According to rumors, Glory will go up in flames if she enters the house of God. But who knows? Maybe I will, too.

The church is one of those picturesque, historical, one-room school buildings squeezed between a cornfield on one side and a hay field on the other. A huge steeple with a bell attempts to reach the heavens, but like anything created by a human, it falls tragically short.

The foreboding wooden door makes no noise as I open it, and I’m able to slip in without a huge, squeaking announcement. Orange light filters in through the dark stained glass windows, and its struggling beams reveal millions of dancing particles of dust.

On the altar, there’s no casket, but there is an urn. My heart dips—Suzanne is dead. I used to wish she were my grandmother, and many times, she treated me as if I belonged to her. Suzanne was the epitome of love, and the world feels colder now that she’s gone.

Choosing a spot in the back, I drop into a pew, and as I scan the church my stomach churns. How is it possible that this place is so barren?

Besides the Funeral Brigade, or the FB, as I like to refer to them, there aren’t many people here. The FB are the older group of woman who attend every funeral in our small town even if they didn’t know the person. Attending funerals isn’t my idea of fun, but who am I to judge?

The FB sit directly behind the one person the town believes to be the lone sane member of the Lachlin family, probably because he isn’t blood related—Jesse’s uncle.

On the left side of the church is Jesse. Only Jesse. And that causes a painful pang in my chest. Where are his stinking friends? The anarchists in training who follow Jesse wherever he goes? Where is the rest of the town? Yes, Suzanne was polarizing, but still, where is any respect?

Quietly, so I don’t draw attention to myself, I slip from the right set of pews to the left. Someone should be on Jesse’s side, and it’s sad it has to be me.

A door at the front of the church opens, and the pastor walks out from the addition the church build on as a small office ten years ago. I would have thought any pastor assigned to this place would be as ancient as this church. Sort of like an Indiana Jones Knights Templar scenario where he lives forever as long as he stays inside. But no, he’s the youngest pastor from the main, newer church in town. His name is Pastor Hughes, and he’s a thirty-something black man with a fit build who is just cute enough that he should be starring in a movie.

The pastor looks up, and he flinches as if startled. I peek over my shoulder then sigh. Clearly, he’s surprised to see me. Flipping fantastic.

His reaction, and the fact he won’t stop staring, causes every person to turn their heads. Lovely. I’ve had dreams like this where I enter a room and become the center of attention. Only in my dreams it’s at school, it’s my classmates and I’m naked, but still, this is disconcerting.

Eventually, the FB and Jesse’s uncle return their attention to the front, but Jesse doesn’t. He rests his arm on the back of the pew, and it’s hard to ignore that he’s made me his sole focus, but I do my best to act as if I don’t notice.

To help, I concentrate on what my mom taught me as a child—to make sure the skirt of my dress is tucked appropriately so that my thighs don’t show. I then fold my hands in my lap and straighten to a book-on-head posture. I can be the ice princess people claim me to be.

Five pews separate me and Jesse, and it’s not nearly enough. My cheeks burn under his continued inspection. Jesse has done this a handful of times since our freshman year. Glance at me as if I’m someone worth looking at, someone worth laughing with a little too loud and smiling with a little too much. Then he remembers who I am and snaps his gaze to someone else.

But he’s not looking away now.  

Katie McGarry Bio:

Katie McGarry was a teenager during the age of grunge and boy bands and remembers those years as the best and worst of her life. She is a lover of music, happy endings, reality television, and is a secret University of Kentucky basketball fan. Katie is the author of full length YA novels, PUSHING THE LIMITS, DARE YOU TO, CRASH INTO YOU, TAKE ME ON, BREAKING THE RULES, and NOWHERE BUT HERE and the e-novellas, CROSSING THE LINE and RED AT NIGHT. Her debut YA novel, PUSHING THE LIMITS was a 2012 Goodreads Choice Finalist for YA Fiction, a RT Magazine's 2012 Reviewer's Choice Awards Nominee for Young Adult Contemporary Novel, a double Rita Finalist, and a 2013 YALSA Top Ten Teen Pick. DARE YOU TO was also a Goodreads Choice Finalist for YA Fiction and won RT Magazine’s Reviewer’s Choice Best Book Award for Young Adult Contemporary fiction in 2013.

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The biologist in a race against time to save the Great Barrier Reef

Could pioneering research by a young marine biologist from Essex save the embattled Great Barrier Reef?  Guy Kelly meets her to find out. I’ve never considered what the collective noun might be for a group of explorers – a compass? A khaki? A smug? – but whatever it is, I have discovered a large one, gently grooming one another in a lecture theatre in downtown Washington, DC. They convene here every year, at the National Geographic Explorers Festival, to revel in their triumphs, network furiously, and share concerns for a planet in desperate need of their kind to save it. By mid-morning on the second day, those gathered in the auditorium at National Geographic’s headquarters have heard from people who’ve viewed Earth from space and plumbed the dark depths of the oceans. We’ve listened to NGOs that have come together to save the Sumatran rhino and learnt why protecting 30 per cent of the planet by 2030 is essential to preventing the next mass extinction. Many of the speakers have been American and many have been confident, experienced figures who’ve fought to become the leaders in their (often literal) fields. Then, refreshingly, come a group of innovators with new solutions to age-old problems – beginning with a young marine biologist from Brentwood, Essex. Wearing an aqua-blue summer dress, 32-year-old Emma Camp strides out looking calm and composed. She hits her mark, takes a deep breath, then delivers the bad news. ‘The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is home to over 7,000 marine species, has huge economic and cultural value, and supports essential ecosystem services, such as fisheries. But this underwater city, full of life and colour, is turning white and derelict,’ she says. The audience is hooked. ‘Climate change is compromising not just the Great Barrier Reef, but reefs globally. Warmer, more acidic, low-oxygen seawater is fundamentally affecting the biology of the corals, and this is compromising whether they’ll be able to exist in the future. In just three years, over a third of the Great Barrier Reef has been lost.’ Camp isn’t just here as a harbinger of doom, however. She’s also come with a plan. Through her research, she tells us, she has discovered that in certain areas of the planet there are corals that already exist in the kind of hot, lower pH waters we’ll see all over the world, unless action is taken. And remarkably, some are adapting to survive. Camp has had the idea of ‘transplanting’ clippings of ‘super-survivor’ coral (think of grafting tree branches) to reefs being devastated by rising sea temperatures, then seeing what happens. Camp is the first speaker – and sole Briton – from the 10 finalists for this year’s Rolex Awards for Enterprise. In 1976, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Rolex Oyster, the world’s first waterproof watch, the Swiss company launched a biennial programme to support explorers, scientists and entrepreneurs who have a project that could make the world a better place. It continues today, as part of the brand’s ‘Perpetual Planet’ campaign. This year’s group – chosen from 957 entries by a jury that included Jonathan Baillie, the chief scientist of the National Geographic Society, and the British geneticist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford – will be halved after further jury consideration and a public vote. The five winners will then become ‘laureates’, each receiving a significant grant for their project (in the region of 200,000 Swiss francs) and, naturally, a watch. All 10 finalists will also enjoy the vital publicity that attends the awards. Studying resilience in coral at a mangrove off Port Douglas Credit: Franck Gazzola/©Rolex They are eminently impressive, and as varied as in any year. Previous winning projects have included turning discarded rice husks into energy; establishing a travelling school to help a nomadic culture survive; and, in 2016, a proposal from a British man, Andrew Bastawrous, transforming eye care in sub-Saharan Africa using a smartphone-based examination kit. This year’s competition features everything from conservation to disease prevention.  ‘It’s all been a bit full on,’ Camp admits, when we meet for coffee in a nearby hotel the next morning. The night before saw her attend the National Geographic Awards and the rest of her time has been taken up by speaking events, interviews, photo shoots and ‘associated admin activities’. ‘I had to just go for a walk yesterday, just to be outside,’ she says, sinking into an armchair. ‘I’m not used to being around so many people. It’s usually fish and coral.’ Camp is tall and willowy, with long brown hair and the healthy tan of somebody who spends half her life dangling off boats in the world’s most beautiful places. I ask for the down-the-pub-chat version of her pitch. ‘Well, climate change is killing the reefs, and we risk losing them in our lifetimes. But there are naturally resilient populations we know very little about. My project aims to find out how they’re doing it, and whether they could help save other reefs.’ For a long time Camp’s work was largely general: looking at the impact of climate change on coral in different waters. But one research trip in 2016, to mangroves in New Caledonia, in the South Pacific, changed her focus for life. ‘Nobody [in marine biology] outside of our little community bought into the idea that there could be something exciting there, but we went and there were corals everywhere – full reef structures, in water where the pH reading was extremely low.’ The public’s greatest misconception about coral is that it is a plant. Really, it is a sessile (fixed, like a barnacle) animal, a marine invertebrate related to sea anemones and jellyfish. Corals rely on algae that live inside their tissues, photosynthesising and giving the coral its colour. Under stress – due to, for example, warming waters and changing pH levels – the algae will leave, eventually killing the coral. The process is known as ‘bleaching’ because it goes dull and pale. A good pH level for coral is around 8 to 8.5. In certain mangrove lagoons in New Caledonia, where tidal cycles and unique physico-chemical conditions create a swirl of warm, deoxygenated, lower pH water, Camp didn’t expect to find such healthy coral. The water was 1 to 2C warmer than nearby. So she tested the pH – it was below 7.5. ‘My colleagues said the pH meter must be broken. So they tried and got the same. We ended up trying five sensors before we accepted it. It completely challenged our understanding.’ It was the kind of lightbulb moment scientists only experience once or twice in a career. The water conditions in the lagoon are more extreme than many of the worst predictions for the warming of the world’s oceans over the next century. So if corals there have managed to adapt, could they hold the key to saving the Great Barrier Reef? The biggest reefs in the world Camp’s team now hope to expand a project that involves transplanting ‘super-survivor’ cuttings to at-risk areas. She has already set up a ‘multispecies coral nursery’ off Australia (imagine a mesh fence with cuttings of different types of coral fixed to it, weighed down close to the sea floor), but requires further funding and support. And it may not work: after all, the Great Barrier Reef – one of the seven wonders of the natural world, visible from outer space, and worth about £3 billion in tourism each year – is about the same size as Italy, and subject to all manner of different stresses. But it might. ‘There’s a real art to getting the message across. We fundamentally have to lower carbon emissions to save coral reefs, that’s number one, but we also need to look at alternative strategies we can use in addition to that,’ Camp says. She is intensely aware that her messaging needs to be drenched in caution, lest people hear of her discovery and declare the problem solved – or worse, lest climate sceptics hoist it as an example of us underestimating the planet’s ability to survive, whatever the conditions. ‘Some people look for any excuse to do less, so we need to be honest but not give a false sense of security. Think of it like a toolbox. The main tool we have is lowering emissions, but that’s not working well enough alone, so what else do we have?’ Camp has been fascinated by coral reefs since childhood. The daughter of local-government workers, she grew up in Essex with two brothers (both are still there; one has his own business, the other’s a policeman). When she was seven, her father took her snorkelling during a holiday to the Bahamas. It was all she needed. ‘I vividly remember putting the mask on and for the first time seeing this whole life you couldn’t see from above the water, this complex coral network. At the time I just appreciated its beauty, but as I got older I started to understand how important that ecosystem is. That so many people and animals rely on it. A third of all fish stocks interact with the reef. They need it.’ As a teenager, she spent most summers in Spain, where she earnt her diving qualifications. By the time she was an adult she was a divemaster, but balanced that passion with one for basketball (she went on to play for Great Britain). On a basketball scholarship, she completed an environmental science and chemistry degree at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina, before a master’s in environmental management and business at Sheffield Hallam University, then a PhD in marine biology at the University of Essex – most of which was spent in the field, studying reefs around the world. Today she is based at the University of Technology in Sydney, where she is one of the leading researchers focusing on climate change and coral reefs. Camp – whose vowels occasionally slip into a New South Wales twang, especially when talking about her life in Australia – lives in Sydney with her husband, Rawiri, a banker from New Zealand. They married in January, and she is teaching him to snorkel. Seeing his appreciation of the underwater world has ‘reinvigorated’ her love for it, she says. Camp now reckons she’s completed ‘over 1,500 dives, most of them about an hour at least – I stopped counting’. By my calculations, she’s spent two months of her life underwater. ‘Probably about a quarter of my day job is in the field. The rest is in the labs, testing samples, or writing it up. But more and more important is the science communication, making sure people understand why we’re doing what we’re doing.’ It’s why accolades like making the Rolex shortlist are so valuable, as they allow her both to gain extra funding and to promote her work before people she might not normally reach. ‘For me, it’s about raising awareness of what’s going on in our oceans, so it’s more about exposure than the money. These are global issues and a brand like Rolex can facilitate that message.’ Last year she was also announced as one of 17 ‘young leaders’ for the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. It’s a two-year position, and has seen her address the UN General Assembly once already. Do they listen? ‘Yeah, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. There’s an eagerness to have intergenerational discussions. We are the next custodians who will inherit the planet and give it to our children, and there’s a real commitment to make sure young people’s voices are heard.’ Britain seems to have embraced the anti-plastics message Sir David Attenborough and others have pushed into the mainstream. Australia is similarly filled with activists, Camp says, but the Queensland government hasn’t helped by recently approving the construction of an Adani coal mine – to be one of the largest in the world – in the Galilee Basin, near the Great Barrier Reef. Are we putting too much energy into banning straws? ‘The analogy I like to use is that if somebody has a terminal illness and breaks their leg, you obviously deal with the broken leg, but you don’t stop treating the illness. You can deal with short-term issues without losing sight of the bigger picture.’ By the end of the Explorers Festival in Washington, it’s been announced that Camp has narrowly missed out on becoming one of the five Rolex laureates. Those lucky few are João Campos-Silva, a Brazilian fishing ecologist who has devised a plan to save the world’s largest scaled freshwater fish, the arapaima; Grégoire Courtine, a French medical scientist with a method of allowing people with broken backs to walk again; Brian Gitta, a Ugandan IT specialist who has developed a new weapon in the war on malaria; Indian conservationist Krithi Karanth, who works to ease conflicts between people and wildlife; and the Canadian entrepreneur Miranda Wang, with her plan for plastics. Copy of More from Tel Mag Moon landings 18/07 Not all is lost for Camp, however. Rolex was so impressed with all 10 finalists that the remaining five have been made ‘associate laureates’, meaning her project will still receive support. Besides, the networking opportunities have been invaluable, not least a dinner at a mansion in the historic Georgetown neighbourhood, where the world’s leading explorers gathered to meet and celebrate one another, again. There, Camp met her hero, the legendary marine biologist Sylvia Earle – a woman who has spent a year of her life underwater. Camp hopes she’s still diving and working at 83, too. There are days ‘when you think, this is really tough’, she says, ‘especially when you see the political scene, but what’s the option? You can give up or be one of the individuals who make it their commitment in life to do everything they can to protect the reefs.’ So she is optimistic about the future, but knows the planet is now at a crossroads. ‘The best case scenario in 50 years is that we have coral reefs that are still biodiverse, serving their function, and we have an even healthier marine environment than we do now, respecting biodiversity not just for its value to us as humans. The worst case scenario is that we’ve lost coral reefs as we know them. I don’t want to tell my future grandchildren that this was a privilege I had, but they won’t, and it was all because we didn’t do enough.’ Every time I see her in Washington, Camp is wearing a large bone necklace in the shape of a fish hook. It is a traditional Maori hei matau, made by her husband’s late uncle, and means ‘safe passage over water’. A wearer is considered a strong-willed provider and protector, determined to succeed. Camp clutches it to her chest. ‘It’s seen better days,’ she says, ‘but I wear it on every dive.’ Rolex is now accepting entries for the 2021 Rolex Awards for Enterprise

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

Could pioneering research by a young marine biologist from Essex save the embattled Great Barrier Reef?  Guy Kelly meets her to find out. I’ve never considered what the collective noun might be for a group of explorers – a compass? A khaki? A smug? – but whatever it is, I have discovered a large one, gently grooming one another in a lecture theatre in downtown Washington, DC. They convene here every year, at the National Geographic Explorers Festival, to revel in their triumphs, network furiously, and share concerns for a planet in desperate need of their kind to save it. By mid-morning on the second day, those gathered in the auditorium at National Geographic’s headquarters have heard from people who’ve viewed Earth from space and plumbed the dark depths of the oceans. We’ve listened to NGOs that have come together to save the Sumatran rhino and learnt why protecting 30 per cent of the planet by 2030 is essential to preventing the next mass extinction. Many of the speakers have been American and many have been confident, experienced figures who’ve fought to become the leaders in their (often literal) fields. Then, refreshingly, come a group of innovators with new solutions to age-old problems – beginning with a young marine biologist from Brentwood, Essex. Wearing an aqua-blue summer dress, 32-year-old Emma Camp strides out looking calm and composed. She hits her mark, takes a deep breath, then delivers the bad news. ‘The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is home to over 7,000 marine species, has huge economic and cultural value, and supports essential ecosystem services, such as fisheries. But this underwater city, full of life and colour, is turning white and derelict,’ she says. The audience is hooked. ‘Climate change is compromising not just the Great Barrier Reef, but reefs globally. Warmer, more acidic, low-oxygen seawater is fundamentally affecting the biology of the corals, and this is compromising whether they’ll be able to exist in the future. In just three years, over a third of the Great Barrier Reef has been lost.’ Camp isn’t just here as a harbinger of doom, however. She’s also come with a plan. Through her research, she tells us, she has discovered that in certain areas of the planet there are corals that already exist in the kind of hot, lower pH waters we’ll see all over the world, unless action is taken. And remarkably, some are adapting to survive. Camp has had the idea of ‘transplanting’ clippings of ‘super-survivor’ coral (think of grafting tree branches) to reefs being devastated by rising sea temperatures, then seeing what happens. Camp is the first speaker – and sole Briton – from the 10 finalists for this year’s Rolex Awards for Enterprise. In 1976, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Rolex Oyster, the world’s first waterproof watch, the Swiss company launched a biennial programme to support explorers, scientists and entrepreneurs who have a project that could make the world a better place. It continues today, as part of the brand’s ‘Perpetual Planet’ campaign. This year’s group – chosen from 957 entries by a jury that included Jonathan Baillie, the chief scientist of the National Geographic Society, and the British geneticist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford – will be halved after further jury consideration and a public vote. The five winners will then become ‘laureates’, each receiving a significant grant for their project (in the region of 200,000 Swiss francs) and, naturally, a watch. All 10 finalists will also enjoy the vital publicity that attends the awards. Studying resilience in coral at a mangrove off Port Douglas Credit: Franck Gazzola/©Rolex They are eminently impressive, and as varied as in any year. Previous winning projects have included turning discarded rice husks into energy; establishing a travelling school to help a nomadic culture survive; and, in 2016, a proposal from a British man, Andrew Bastawrous, transforming eye care in sub-Saharan Africa using a smartphone-based examination kit. This year’s competition features everything from conservation to disease prevention.  ‘It’s all been a bit full on,’ Camp admits, when we meet for coffee in a nearby hotel the next morning. The night before saw her attend the National Geographic Awards and the rest of her time has been taken up by speaking events, interviews, photo shoots and ‘associated admin activities’. ‘I had to just go for a walk yesterday, just to be outside,’ she says, sinking into an armchair. ‘I’m not used to being around so many people. It’s usually fish and coral.’ Camp is tall and willowy, with long brown hair and the healthy tan of somebody who spends half her life dangling off boats in the world’s most beautiful places. I ask for the down-the-pub-chat version of her pitch. ‘Well, climate change is killing the reefs, and we risk losing them in our lifetimes. But there are naturally resilient populations we know very little about. My project aims to find out how they’re doing it, and whether they could help save other reefs.’ For a long time Camp’s work was largely general: looking at the impact of climate change on coral in different waters. But one research trip in 2016, to mangroves in New Caledonia, in the South Pacific, changed her focus for life. ‘Nobody [in marine biology] outside of our little community bought into the idea that there could be something exciting there, but we went and there were corals everywhere – full reef structures, in water where the pH reading was extremely low.’ The public’s greatest misconception about coral is that it is a plant. Really, it is a sessile (fixed, like a barnacle) animal, a marine invertebrate related to sea anemones and jellyfish. Corals rely on algae that live inside their tissues, photosynthesising and giving the coral its colour. Under stress – due to, for example, warming waters and changing pH levels – the algae will leave, eventually killing the coral. The process is known as ‘bleaching’ because it goes dull and pale. A good pH level for coral is around 8 to 8.5. In certain mangrove lagoons in New Caledonia, where tidal cycles and unique physico-chemical conditions create a swirl of warm, deoxygenated, lower pH water, Camp didn’t expect to find such healthy coral. The water was 1 to 2C warmer than nearby. So she tested the pH – it was below 7.5. ‘My colleagues said the pH meter must be broken. So they tried and got the same. We ended up trying five sensors before we accepted it. It completely challenged our understanding.’ It was the kind of lightbulb moment scientists only experience once or twice in a career. The water conditions in the lagoon are more extreme than many of the worst predictions for the warming of the world’s oceans over the next century. So if corals there have managed to adapt, could they hold the key to saving the Great Barrier Reef? The biggest reefs in the world Camp’s team now hope to expand a project that involves transplanting ‘super-survivor’ cuttings to at-risk areas. She has already set up a ‘multispecies coral nursery’ off Australia (imagine a mesh fence with cuttings of different types of coral fixed to it, weighed down close to the sea floor), but requires further funding and support. And it may not work: after all, the Great Barrier Reef – one of the seven wonders of the natural world, visible from outer space, and worth about £3 billion in tourism each year – is about the same size as Italy, and subject to all manner of different stresses. But it might. ‘There’s a real art to getting the message across. We fundamentally have to lower carbon emissions to save coral reefs, that’s number one, but we also need to look at alternative strategies we can use in addition to that,’ Camp says. She is intensely aware that her messaging needs to be drenched in caution, lest people hear of her discovery and declare the problem solved – or worse, lest climate sceptics hoist it as an example of us underestimating the planet’s ability to survive, whatever the conditions. ‘Some people look for any excuse to do less, so we need to be honest but not give a false sense of security. Think of it like a toolbox. The main tool we have is lowering emissions, but that’s not working well enough alone, so what else do we have?’ Camp has been fascinated by coral reefs since childhood. The daughter of local-government workers, she grew up in Essex with two brothers (both are still there; one has his own business, the other’s a policeman). When she was seven, her father took her snorkelling during a holiday to the Bahamas. It was all she needed. ‘I vividly remember putting the mask on and for the first time seeing this whole life you couldn’t see from above the water, this complex coral network. At the time I just appreciated its beauty, but as I got older I started to understand how important that ecosystem is. That so many people and animals rely on it. A third of all fish stocks interact with the reef. They need it.’ As a teenager, she spent most summers in Spain, where she earnt her diving qualifications. By the time she was an adult she was a divemaster, but balanced that passion with one for basketball (she went on to play for Great Britain). On a basketball scholarship, she completed an environmental science and chemistry degree at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina, before a master’s in environmental management and business at Sheffield Hallam University, then a PhD in marine biology at the University of Essex – most of which was spent in the field, studying reefs around the world. Today she is based at the University of Technology in Sydney, where she is one of the leading researchers focusing on climate change and coral reefs. Camp – whose vowels occasionally slip into a New South Wales twang, especially when talking about her life in Australia – lives in Sydney with her husband, Rawiri, a banker from New Zealand. They married in January, and she is teaching him to snorkel. Seeing his appreciation of the underwater world has ‘reinvigorated’ her love for it, she says. Camp now reckons she’s completed ‘over 1,500 dives, most of them about an hour at least – I stopped counting’. By my calculations, she’s spent two months of her life underwater. ‘Probably about a quarter of my day job is in the field. The rest is in the labs, testing samples, or writing it up. But more and more important is the science communication, making sure people understand why we’re doing what we’re doing.’ It’s why accolades like making the Rolex shortlist are so valuable, as they allow her both to gain extra funding and to promote her work before people she might not normally reach. ‘For me, it’s about raising awareness of what’s going on in our oceans, so it’s more about exposure than the money. These are global issues and a brand like Rolex can facilitate that message.’ Last year she was also announced as one of 17 ‘young leaders’ for the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. It’s a two-year position, and has seen her address the UN General Assembly once already. Do they listen? ‘Yeah, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. There’s an eagerness to have intergenerational discussions. We are the next custodians who will inherit the planet and give it to our children, and there’s a real commitment to make sure young people’s voices are heard.’ Britain seems to have embraced the anti-plastics message Sir David Attenborough and others have pushed into the mainstream. Australia is similarly filled with activists, Camp says, but the Queensland government hasn’t helped by recently approving the construction of an Adani coal mine – to be one of the largest in the world – in the Galilee Basin, near the Great Barrier Reef. Are we putting too much energy into banning straws? ‘The analogy I like to use is that if somebody has a terminal illness and breaks their leg, you obviously deal with the broken leg, but you don’t stop treating the illness. You can deal with short-term issues without losing sight of the bigger picture.’ By the end of the Explorers Festival in Washington, it’s been announced that Camp has narrowly missed out on becoming one of the five Rolex laureates. Those lucky few are João Campos-Silva, a Brazilian fishing ecologist who has devised a plan to save the world’s largest scaled freshwater fish, the arapaima; Grégoire Courtine, a French medical scientist with a method of allowing people with broken backs to walk again; Brian Gitta, a Ugandan IT specialist who has developed a new weapon in the war on malaria; Indian conservationist Krithi Karanth, who works to ease conflicts between people and wildlife; and the Canadian entrepreneur Miranda Wang, with her plan for plastics. Copy of More from Tel Mag Moon landings 18/07 Not all is lost for Camp, however. Rolex was so impressed with all 10 finalists that the remaining five have been made ‘associate laureates’, meaning her project will still receive support. Besides, the networking opportunities have been invaluable, not least a dinner at a mansion in the historic Georgetown neighbourhood, where the world’s leading explorers gathered to meet and celebrate one another, again. There, Camp met her hero, the legendary marine biologist Sylvia Earle – a woman who has spent a year of her life underwater. Camp hopes she’s still diving and working at 83, too. There are days ‘when you think, this is really tough’, she says, ‘especially when you see the political scene, but what’s the option? You can give up or be one of the individuals who make it their commitment in life to do everything they can to protect the reefs.’ So she is optimistic about the future, but knows the planet is now at a crossroads. ‘The best case scenario in 50 years is that we have coral reefs that are still biodiverse, serving their function, and we have an even healthier marine environment than we do now, respecting biodiversity not just for its value to us as humans. The worst case scenario is that we’ve lost coral reefs as we know them. I don’t want to tell my future grandchildren that this was a privilege I had, but they won’t, and it was all because we didn’t do enough.’ Every time I see her in Washington, Camp is wearing a large bone necklace in the shape of a fish hook. It is a traditional Maori hei matau, made by her husband’s late uncle, and means ‘safe passage over water’. A wearer is considered a strong-willed provider and protector, determined to succeed. Camp clutches it to her chest. ‘It’s seen better days,’ she says, ‘but I wear it on every dive.’ Rolex is now accepting entries for the 2021 Rolex Awards for Enterprise

July 27, 2019 at 07:00AM via IFTTT