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silentprocession · 4 years

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Well let’s see

When’s the last time I updated you about my life?

I’m at my laptop this time so I can write a bit better than when I’m on my phone

Late at night with you stuck in my head

This update deserves some punctuation, eh?

I met this boy last December at a dnd campaign my friend had invited me to. He sat diagonally across from me and though I hadn’t put two and two together yet, my friend had already told me a few stories about this co-worker now fellow dnd player. Such as that David had gone through a rather unsettling divorce recently and had, effectively, been forced to return to his parent’s house. One night after game, we’re walking to our cars and begin speaking. Since it was December, and the holidays were coming up, he mentioned he really had no plans because of his situation and I invited him to Christmas with my family. You remember how welcoming Jen and Damian are, they still ask about you every now and then btw.

So, he takes me up on the offer, and after talking for hours upon hours in the days following before Christmas he asked me out to just hang one on one. No one said the ‘date’ word yet. We went out to Meriden to see the Christmas light display, the one at Castle Craig. I fucking LIVE for that drive through the park with all the different strung lights of animals and carriages and stars, and we continued to bond over how none of our other friends were interested in seeing it like we were, and were respectively going to see it ourselves had we not gone together.

The night goes amazing, we end up back at my place to continue talking through the night, at which point we mutually decided it had been a date. Due to the late affirmation though, it wasn’t a full date, but a quasi-date.

Fast forward some time, we’re talking and hanging out and have fulfilled a few more quasi-dates. I’m dating Rob at this point in an open poly relationship, Rob from all these years and I are together again and have worked through SO MUCH and the open poly amorous arrangement is working. He doesn’t know how to handle this completely, though takes it in stride, and in the end after more talking and seeing each other I decide I don’t want to date.

Oh, let’s throw in another wrench though.

I start dating a boy named Erik in the mean time, who from the beginning I KNOW I got into way too quick. We weren’t even talking for a month before we started dating and I was so uncomfortable but got swept up in new relationship milk and honey. He’s very sweet and artistic, he’s caring and anxious and adventurous. He’s an amazing cook. He’s so SO messy, I found out I couldn’t really talk to him about things the way I wanted to be able to, I was stressed at work and his reaction was either try to make me laugh with jokes that didn’t always land or, when I asked for space, not know how to give me space. It got drawn out because, unfortunately, when the Coronavirus hit his mother was in a facility and was exposed and then, subsequently, passed away. They put her building on lock down from visitors the day before I was supposed to meet her.

In the mean time? David has lightly moved in with me, as a respite from his tumultuous parent’s house and for some room to breathe. Also, why not help create a neutral space for someone you care about if you have the ability?

What happens next? David’s father passes away unexpectedly. Like in the middle of the night. I go to the funeral with him because he wanted me there and then he comes back to my place for time away from family/friends and to get his mind off of... well, everything.

After Erik’s mom died it became more abundantly clear that he and I didn’t work and the virus put even more of a damper on me trying to see him in person because I’m an essential healthcare worker. I’m exposed everyday, I can’t have visitors to my own apartment and his brother doesn’t want me coming over. David pretty much lives here now so he doesn’t count. Erik pointed out how strained we were, we talked and talked, and that was it. I felt anxious from the beginning because I really want to KNOW someone before deciding to date them, dating his so fast was not like me for this very reason. I’ll know quickly if I’m not gonna stand someone and here we are. A month later and down the drain, #sorrynotsorry

David continues to live with me. He slowly moves things in. I’m off from work because of being directly exposed, we’re spending more time together on projects and cooking and staying up all night talking. He’s rather cute, he’s very nice and our humor matches too well. I laugh until I cry or start wheezing. We’ve dyed each other’s hair and he let me cut his. We’ve planted flowers together and have more planned.

He likes pillow talk, especially when I’m half asleep. He told me he fell in love with me, and after mulling it over for quite a while in my head it just made sense to date. Telling everyone how we got along “as room mates” didn’t feel right anymore. As my boyfriend? Yeah, it made more sense. And, I quite like this boy.

Does that answer your questions?

This is only one part of my life that I want to tell you about

There’s always so much more going on that I want you to know

I wish we could still write letters to each other

Or text

Or fucking smoke signals

Something

I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Brokeback Mountain

I re-watched it the other night

It makes me cry every time

But the ending this time made me cry even harder

At the end when these two lovers have tried for 20something YEARS to be together and just can’t

And Ennis has to go to Jack’s parent’s house to try to scatter his ashes on the mountain that was their solitude

Their quiet place they could be themselves and be together

In this perfect love

When he goes to meet the parents of his dead lover that he never got to fulfill a life together in the open

And clutch the shirt he thought he’d lost years before but Jack had held onto

I thought of you

But enough about me

What was the question of the day at work?

What part of our wild city trip did you think of?

Miss you Mr.

#mr

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harrisonchute · 6 years

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What’s Harison been Watching?!

9/8/2018 Edition

“Perfect Blue”

I haven’t encountered one of those “Perfect Blue EXPLAINED” videos on YouTube, though I did look for it, and any online writing about Perfect Blue is gonna be marred by very standard Satoshi Kon commentary, that he’s very influential, one of the best known in the west, he do dreams and reality. I just wanted to know what people made of this movie, what their interpretations are. I saw it for the first time Thursday night, and this is what I think: the main character’s mental breakdown caused by the existential transformation pop idol to actress, the Internet, and other celebrity life-inconveniences is then exacerbated by her manager’s serial killing. Rumi just wants to protect her, protecting her past self from exploitation, and because that murder violence is so similar to the exploitation, the main character sees herself in it -- she has to, in order to immerse herself in the new roles and grow as an actress. Ultimately, I feel like Perfect Blue is a more interesting film than it is a strictly entertaining one, like that one half of Serial Experiments Lain I’ve seen. Kon identifying all these different stressors facing popular public (and female) figures is fascinating. However, most of Perfect Blue is that space in movies that isn’t dialogue or action or exposition, it’s like mood-setting or suspense setup, like a Wong Kar Wai revision of The Strangers. I would not see that movie, but I’m glad I finally saw this one.

“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”

I was halfway through an episode of this show when I had to go see Perfect Blue. Not surprising -- I get this way with TV shows, and it’s obviously hardly uncommon for modern media consumers. Every now and again I’ll find a show that disrupts my life, and it’s all I can think about. I was grateful for short shows earlier this year that I loved, like Fleabag and one anime show whose name I can’t remember, swearsies. And yet, I was even more grateful that Kimmy Schmidt is like four seasons -- though it’s ONLY gonna be four seasons. Regardless, it’s really surprising, and it’s especially interesting in the context of other women-led womeny shows of its day.

Upon the infamous episode where Titus is criticized for doing yellowface, I’m watching the Internet outragists shout things like “I don’t want to know the context of anything!” and was left with the startling yet embarrassing conclusion: “My God, Tina Fey is soooo white.” Like, this is what gets to her? Embarrassing because I feel like that sentiment’s been on the Internet wall for ages, with every “Tina Fey did a bad thing” headline I’ve witnessed and ignored over the years. “White people” in media usually just means this is a person whose instincts were manufactured by a system demarcated by stratification: exclusive and hostile. Revising those instincts requires some listening skills, so I was put off by the backlash to the backlash here than anything anyone was lashing against initially.

I feel like Kimmy Schmidt is the absurd comedy version of Cloud Atlas, and the word “absurd” is really the key. So much of racial representation is reliant on “realism,” it seems, threading that needle where a world needs to convincingly contain the token black friend or whoever, and “realism” comes right down to tone. I get a little put-off by absurd comedies, like the short-lived Ghosted, much as I enjoyed it, and I think that comes from my time with Futurama: as that show went on, I started to appreciate the characters more than the jokes -- always a mistake. With that one, the integrity of strict character continuity was often sacrificed for the sake of a joke. Like, Leela is not that insensitive, but she has to be kind of a blowhard in this scene for the punchline to work. Sometimes, Kimmy seems to suddenly know more about the world than I’d expect, but they make it work, because who knows where she picks up these things? The comedy/drama balance isn’t as embedded into the show’s core like You’re the Worst or the above-mentioned Fleabag; it’s got its own logic, like magical realism with abandon, more Arrested Development than Jane the Virgin.

This logic allows -- to me -- navigation through a lot of the show’s spiky territory. For example, it’s hugely problematic that Lillian shot her black husband, because he was a black man in her house at night, but it didn’t bother me (last week). The subject of criticism in the first season leading to the outrage response in the second, Jane Krakowski’s American Indian heritage, didn’t bother me because under the surface there’s that blackened but beating white people heart of “the joke is that I’m soooo white.” Lines like, “The litter in New York makes me cry” got a genuine laugh out of me, and it felt like the best possible version of “Pardon my whiteness, I’m writing a Native American caricature.” I know we’ve had 17 seasons of Modern Family for that kind of humor, but here, it didn’t bother me.

Didn’t bother me. Love that line from minorities. That means it didn’t bother anyone, right? Of course, I’m neither a black man or American Indian, so what about the Dong story line? Issues facing Asian-American men are very different from most social issues, because they all hinge on his penis and where it goes. Satiating AsAm men’s desire to be represented by anybody but Ken Jeong is a one-step process, which is why my desire no longer exists (because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does, and Selfie before it). So it was a pleasant surprise that Dong became an actual love interest, but it didn’t change my world, and a love story is not handled with the same gravity as shows with different logic -- are we meant to take any of this seriously? Is Kimmy meant to grow as a character? Is anyone? Jane Krakoswki does, but does it matter? My brain is different watching this show, where true pathos comes from moments reached upon layers of irony and cynicism and an almost exhausting one-person race to stay ahead of the cultural conversation. For example, Titus’s romance in the two and a half seasons I’ve seen has been touching, but because it involves Titus, it’s expressed with a much more interesting vocabulary than other gay romances I’ve seen. (Though it’s probably relatively traditional and I still just think Brokeback Mountain is the raddest shit ever).

The difference between the American Indian and Dong plot lines is that I theoretically got a strand of representation out of the Asian-American element in the show, where I doubt an American Indian did from Krakowski’s plot line (though you never know until you ask). But I wasn’t asking for representation (this time), and no one else was asking to be alienated by stereotypes. So I can understand the frustration on both sides -- sometimes, it doesn’t matter how steeped in irony racism is. And as someone who’s created things for an audience once before, I know you can’t please everyone, and it’s the negative voices that resound the loudest, because they’re only echoing what’s already in one’s heart as a fragile left-brain writer variety.

My ability to excuse or at least compartmentalize the problematic in Kimmy Schmidt seems to be part of a concerted effort to appreciate a sitcom’s unique sheen. I like that a show doesn’t need to say important things to be important, that one can draw meaning from near-total meaninglessness. The joys I’ve had watching this show have mostly come from Ellie Kemper’s facial expressions and halting, intense deliveries, and I think we only get those with all the other ingredients -- contrarian satire which sometimes crosses that line from centrism to taking a side, like wow you’re so too cool for school you... went to school.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the show I’m most familiar with in this burgeoning televisual fempire, and the creators of that one are constantly listening to fan feedback, almost to a fault. They seem determined to get everything right, understanding that any one individual, no matter how much a quadruple or quintuple-threat, represents the outlook of an individual, and so they’ve built a dimensional writers room and the show reflects that with its characters and their stories. But they did all that because their show is specifically about inclusion -- off the show’s title, this is the journey of a woman from rejected by society to creating her own. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has less of a clear thesis, and its moral lessons often feel networky and only there for some kind of conscience quota. But unlike CXG, it exists in the here and now, with dated references to The Jinx, to Marcia Clark and Chris Darden pre-American Crime Story, and now hugely insensitive jokes about shooting black men in that specific circumstance. The morality feels like a work-in-progress during an era in American society where the conversation changes every day, like the ever-shifting substance of crackling television noise.

Before CXG, I used to think it was some herculean task to listen to feedback. And on occasion, I’ll hear a video game player talk at length about how “the studio listened to its fans!” and cringe, because I know how those fans speak, at what decibel, and with what, frankly, terribly foul language. Maybe the Internet outrage episode in Kimmy Schmidt wouldn’t have stung as much had I not seen it in the context of Apu on The Simpsons. Now, there’s an example of creators who don’t give a shit. I have a lot more faith in Fey and co., with an understanding that her brand of comedy is always poking and prodding. Comedy is observation, and so much of the observation under men’s watch was “other people are different.” Kimmy Schmidt is tackling that head on, with interesting results I ultimately am not interested in, because it’s too joyous and weird.

I never regularly watched 30 Rock, but now revisiting that one via YouTube clips and compounded with a new love for Kimmy Schimidt, I’m noticing just how lyrical Tina Fey (and co.)’s dialogue is. They say there’s zero improv on that set, and I understand why -- the often tongue-twisting wordplay has a perfect cadence that’s fun to listen to and must be fun to perform. Since I’m now trying to understand rhythm in writing, this is one I’m gonna study.

Spent too much time on this, dammit. Little over two hours, I think.

PS: Anna Camp had a few guest appearances and she should’ve won an Emmy for that role if she didn’t. Or, they don’t need to make Big Little Lies season 2, because that sort of upper crust mommy wars was so perfectly satirized by that arc with Jane Krakowski.

#kimmy schmidt

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reivenesque · 6 years

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Meet the Parent, Part Deux Chriseva One-Shot

Written for this prompt/request for @whyjulieandemhatesevamohn

It was a very weird and very unnerving déjà vu. At least that’s how it seemed to Eva.

Every time she’d make a promise to herself that this will be the last time; this will be it. She was going to walk out the door and not look back. After all, was there really anything to look back on? Chris was always going to be Chris and she was always going to be Eva. There would come a point where their too different personalities would just cancel each other out and they’d end up hating even the mere sight of one another.

She had just watched the movie Brokeback Mountain the other night and the quote ‘I wish I knew how to quit you’ described her predicament really quite accurately.

It also explained why they ended up leaving Sana’s Eid party early the day before and found themselves stumbling back to Chris’s house after they realized that neither of them had brought enough money to check into a hotel as had been their original plan.

This hadn’t been Eva’s plan for weekend though: ending up half naked in bed with the one person she kept trying to put behind her.

It wasn’t going to work; Chris was too volatile and she was too neurotic, their bad habits would eventually get in the way and they’ll end up fighting and hating each other and regretting the prime of their youth spent on a relationship that was doomed to crash and burn.

Eva knew she was being overly dramatic, but if life thought her anything, it was that if you expect the worst at any given time, anything less wouldn’t be too bad an outcome.

Chris had beautiful eyelashes though, that was for damn sure.

Eva almost hated the fact that he was so pretty and that he was so nice to her; the way he always had the look of someone staring at something amazing whenever he looked at her because she didn’t know how to respond to that.

She was used to allowing teasing and put-downs to roll off her back like water, it still hurt, but eventually it just became the norm and that was okay. She considered it penance for the bad things she herself had done to others.

But sleeping Chris was slightly more tolerable than awake-Chris. At least he wasn’t looking at her with a gaze that was filled with awe and expression of utter infatuation. It was weird and it made her feel awkward and she kept trying to make him stop; to push him away, but nothing she did worked. No matter how much she denied him, no matter how many times she called him an incorrigible fuck-boy and tried to pass it off as a joke, he always just laughed it off and let it roll off his back in a way that was too painfully familiar until one day she woke up and realized that she was doing to him exactly what people had done to her.

It was a hurtful realization and a pretty sobering one.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” said the voice still rough from sleep and followed by a cheeky grin.

“How long have you been awake?” asked Eva, trying not to show how startled she was on the inside as she reached over to smack him on the arm, “Asshole.”

Chris finally cracked open his eyes to look at her. His eyes were still heavy lidded with sleep and glassy, blinking rapidly trying to focus his gaze, but still he was looking at Eva like a person watching the sun rising from behind the mountains.

“A while,” he said, stretching his limbs. “I felt your eyes and me and I thought what kind of guy stays asleep when they have a gorgeous lady lying less than a foot away staring at them? I would be an insult to the fuck-boy name.”

Eva chuckled. “You’re not –” she started, before stopping herself. She didn’t know where she was going with that but it was definitely not something she wanted to say aloud, at least, not yet.

“I’m not what?” he asked, readjusting his head on the pillow, inching close to her side of the bed.

“Nothing,” said Eva, trying to change the subject by reaching over to place her hand on the curve of Chris’s waist, above his hipbone. It definitely did the job because Chris let out a shuddering breath and immediately forgot about his own question.

“You’re such a tease, Eva, I really underestimated you.”

“Did you now?” she asked with a small grin. “You know, I –”

“Chris?”

All of a sudden there was an unfamiliar voice calling out Chris’s name from somewhere down the hall. Neither of them had time to react before the door to Chris’s room slid open and in walked a woman Eva had never met before.

Both of them immediately shot up into a sitting position, with Eva pulling the blanket clean out of Chris’s grasp and hoarding it all to herself. She was still covered from the waist up with a plain white t-shirt, but that seemed to be her automatic survival instinct kicking in.

“Mom!” exclaimed Chris, half leaping up off the bed and moving to… Eva wasn’t sure what he was moving to do because his mom had already seen them in bed together, there was no hiding her presence by that point. “What are you doing back? I thought you and dad were gone for the weekend?”

“Oh… uhm…” His mom seemed unsure of how to react or where to focus her attention in that moment. She glanced at Eva then back and Chris and didn’t know whether to answer his question or ask one of her own undoubtedly pressing ones. “The dog got sick and we felt that… we decided to – uhm –” she couldn’t seem to be able to keep her eyes from periodically glancing over at Eva, “– cut the trip short – and, uh... who might this be, Chris?” She asked finally.

Eva nearly leapt to her feet the same way Chris had done just moments ago, wrapping the blanket around herself in a way that brought on a second bout of déjà vu. She waddled her way over to where Chris was standing near his mom and ended up doing some kind of nervous, awkward half-curtsy. She didn’t know whether to introduce herself, the way Chris had done when he met her mom, or wait for him to introduce her – the way Chris had not done when he met her mom.

“Eva,” she said quickly; hoping her face didn’t look as red as it felt. “I’m – uh… we were just – uh…”

“Eva?” His mom repeated, looking thoughtful, like she was wracking her brain trying to figure out whether she’d heard that name before. “You’re Chris’s girlfriend?” she asked suddenly and Eva was sure that her face was definitely as red as it felt at that point; though she took great comfort in the fact that when she glanced over at Chris, he looked just as embarrassed as she felt on the inside. It was a far cry from the Chris she’d come to know and –

– And what? That was the question.

“Mom,” said Chris, sounding uncharacteristically chagrined as he addressed her.

Eva decided in that moment that perhaps she’d have a little fun at his expense for once, so she said, “Maybe,” just as Chris protested with an almost stuttered denial.

He got about half way through his words before he stopped abruptly and turned to gape at Eva. “Hang on… what?”

Eva tried not to grin too wide at his reaction. She didn’t even turn to look at him as she continued to address his mom; feeling strangely braver on the inside than she ever thought possible. “I mean… we’re getting there,” she said.

The gob smacked look on Chris’s face was definitely worth the price of admission alone.

“Well…” said Mrs. Schistad, looking between Chris and Eva. “I’ll leave you two to your – whatever it is. I’ll go help your father with the dog,” she said, backing out slowly and walking out the door, pulling it gently close and plunging the room into an awkward silence.

– That was quickly broken by the sound of Eva’s laughter.

Chris on the other hand looked far less amused and far more confused. “Was that a joke?” he asked.

“I guess you’ll have to find out, won’t you?” said Eva, pushing Chris backwards towards the bed and shoving him unceremoniously back onto the mattress. “Consider it – sweet revenge,” she said, unravelling herself from the blanket she’d wrapped around her and throwing it aside.

Chris flopped down onto the mattress and the lay there confused for a solid second before he seemed to catch on to what was going on. “I guess I can live with that, girlfriend,” he said.

“Maybe,” Eva replied, propping herself up on the mattress on one knee, straddling Chris’s legs between her thighs. “Now,” she said, leaning down with her arms stretched out on either side of Chris’s head, “Love me.”

The end.

#chriseva #mohnstad #chris schistad #eva kviig mohn #skam #reiven fics #reiven skam fics

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