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seouledbysisi · 5 years

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A Time Like No Other

Chapter 17

Misun

Misun had been working with their managers and brainstorming new ideas. Her and Nori had even been taking vocal lessons from a well known vocal coach in South Korea.

“Take a break and rest your vocal cords. Tomorrow we record.” The coach told them with a smile.

The girls nodded as she walked out of the room. “Are you okay?” Nori asked. She knew something was up. Misun's aura had been off for the past few weeks.

“Yeah, I'm good. How's Jooheon?” She asked with a small smile.

Nori shook her head. “No shut downs today. I've given you your space but you're gonna talk today! What's going on with you?”

Misun simply shrugged and looked away. She was holding in all of her emotions because if she spoke a breath of his name she may lose it. “I'm really okay.”

“Look at me!”

Misun turned to face Nori and at that point she couldn't hold back her tears anymore. A drop fell upon her cheek and she wiped it quickly.

Nori grabbed her hand quickly. “What is it, MiMi?”

“I just didn't think this through. I don't know if I can handle the distance.” She sniffled.

Nori rubbed her hand softly. “You miss him that's all. I think the problem is that you didn't realize just how invested you were in him, now it's a bit overwhelming. You're fine, okay?”

Misun shook her head. “No it's not just that though. We never talk. Like the first week he was gone he made an effort but now I think I talked to him maybe 2 or 3 times last week.”

Nori lifted an eyebrow. “Wait- I don't understand. I talk to Jooheon at least once a day so how busy can Shownu possibly be?”

“That's my point. Apparently way to busy to speak to me which is fine but why ask me to be yours if you don't have time.” Misun shook her head.

“This is his first relationship since they became Monsta X, maybe he just hasn't figured out how to manage his time around a relationship.” Nori reassured. “I can talk to Jooheon for you if you want?”

Misun looked up at her with pleading eyes. “That's fine but don't make it seem like I want to know though.”

Nori nodded and grabbed her phone.

Misun checked her phone hoping that maybe he had texted or something but to her dismay he hadn't. It wasn't like he didn't check in on her it just wasn't often like Jooheon did and it was noticeable. She was very happy for her best friend but she couldn't help but to be a bit jealous of her. They literally were going through the same experience but their outcomes were totally different and she couldn't wrap her mind around it.

“He said the managers have him really busy. Apparently when they're on tour they give him more responsibility.” Nori explained with a small smile.

“Yay, the perks of being a leader. Why'd I have to fall for that one?” Misun giggled a bit.

“The heart wants what the heart wants, that's what I've always been told.”

Misun rolled her eyes. “I need my heart to stop picking the wrong ones. What if I can't do this? I'm okay with him being busy and I understand that he's the leader which comes with a lot of demand but a text a day would suffice. Sometimes I don't even get that.”

“Don't give up just yet, please.”

“Maybe there's a reason why we're so problematic together. Maybe we were never meant to be together.” Misun shrugged and looked over the lyrics to the song that they would be recording tomorrow.

Nori snatched the paper out of her hands. “Y'all were problematic because you were stubborn. It has nothing to do with destiny. This is a bump in road, yes, but you don't give up just because you hit a stumbling block. If you do you'll never have a lasting relationship.” Nori was being matter-of-fact.

Misun's eyes widened. She couldn't believe Nori had spoken to her that way. “I mean whose side are you on?”

“I'm always team Misun so don't act like I'm not. I'm always going to be honest with you, I just don't want you to give up and regret it later. This is our first time without them so we're all learning how to cope. Try to figure it out first and then if it's still not working, you do what you gotta do.”

Misun rolled her eyes. She knew that she was right but Nori wasn't speaking out of experience which irritated her. She didn't know what it felt like to miss Jooheon on this level because Jooheon was still being consistent. “No disrespect but you have no idea what I'm going through so please don't talk to me like you do.”

Misun chuckled. “Misun, you're hurting for sure but don't dismiss me because you don't wanna hear the truth. When you get your attitude back in check then we can talk, until then I'm leaving!” Nori grabbed her purse off the table.

Misun sighed. “Nori, we're not done with the vocal coach!”

Nori grabbed the door knob. “I am.” With that said she disappeared through the door.

Monsta X

They finally had a stopping point where they could grab some food and relax. They sat in silence waiting on their food. Everyone was tired but especially Shownu. He felt like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. Since the dating scandal, the managers had put a lot of responsibility on him and he felt like it was punishment to an extent or maybe they wanted to keep him busy so that none of the members would find themselves in any trouble again. They wanted him to strictly think as a leader and he understood that but his personal life was suffering from it. Misun didn't have to tell him that for him to know that things were changing and not for the better. He hadn't even told the managers that they had made things official yet. That would be just another disappointment seeing as he had swore that they were nothing more than friends, which was the truth at first but over time things changed. They were going to see it as him lying which wasn't the case.

Minhyuk finally broke the ice. “So, when are y'all going to tell the manager about your relationship?”

Shownu looked up from his trance. “How do you even know about that?”

Minhyuk chuckled. “All of us know that y'all have girlfriends. We knew that would happen before it even happened.”

“You can't say anything, Minhyuk! None of you can.” Jooheon urged.

Minhyuk threw his hands up. “Hey my lips are sealed. I'm actually really happy for you. I hope one day I'll have someone just as great as them.”

Kihyun rolled his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something but then shut them again in silence.

Jooheon noticed. “What, Kihyhun? Go ahead with your smart remarks, we're used to it now!”

“I just think it's selfish. Especially now since you're lying to the managers. What happens when a media source finds out? It'll be another scandal but worse this time because they're going to paint y'all to being liars! That won't look good for any of us.” Kihyun shook his head.

Shownu cleared his throat. He couldn't deny that Kihyun was right. He was being selfish. “I care for you all more than I do myself so I think being a little selfish is okay. Don't worry though you might just get your wish after this tour is done because I've been busting my ass for this team which means I don't have time for my relationship. You're welcome, Kihyun.” he stood up from the table.

Wonho grabbed his arm. “Where are you going, hyung?”

Shownu pulled his arm away. “I'm not hungry anymore.” he left out of the restaurant.

The table went silent. Everyone looked at Kihyun.

“What?!” Kihyun asked aggressively.

Hyungwon shook his head with a small laugh. “You just had to go there, didn't you?”

“All I did was give them a reality check.” Kihyun shrugged.

Jooheon shook his head but stayed quiet. He didn't want things to get worse than they already were.

Nori

Nori was sitting on the couch watching the videos of the performances that fans had been posting on Instagram of the guys. It made her heart happy to know that they were having fun with Monbebe's all over the world.

She heard the front door open and close. Misun tossed her keys on the kitchen counter and brought the food she had bought for them in the living room where Nori was. “Are you hungry?” She asked.

Nori barely looked up from her phone and shook her head. “Nope.”

Misun took a deep breath. “You already ate?”

“Nope.”

Misun pushed the food towards her. “I know you're mad at me, but please don't refuse food.”

Nori pushed the food away. “I'm good.”

Misun rolled her eyes and got on her knees in front of Nori. “Please eat!” She pouted.

Nori looked away. “You really shouldn't have bought that for me.”

She grabbed Nori's hands. “I'm sorry for being to rude to you. I don't know what I was thinking. We've never fought before and we're not going to start now. I love you, now eat!”

Nori nodded with a smirk on her face. “I accept your apology but I'm still not eating that food.”

Misun lifted an eyebrow. “That wasn't a question, it was demand, Eat! Now!” She giggled and opened her food. “What are you watching?”

Nori handed her the phone so Misun could see. “They're really enjoying themselves. I'm happy for them.”

Misun nodded. “I am too.” Her phone pinged.

Nori was curious as to who was writing her. It couldn't be no one but Shownu since she finally had a smile on her face. “See he's not too busy for you!”

Misun snapped her gaze towards Nori. “Yeah apparently Minhyuk isn't.”

Nori gave her a peculiar look. “E-excuse me?”

#Monsta X #monbebe #shownu #kihyun #hyungwon #wonho #changkyun #Minhyuk #jooheon #honey #nunu #hoho #lee wonho #fanfic #stories #soft hours #writing #writers

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biofunmy · 4 years

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Tales From the Teenage Cancel Culture

A few weeks ago, Neelam, a high school senior, was sitting in class at her Catholic school in Chicago. After her teacher left the room, a classmate began playing “Bump N’ Grind,” an R. Kelly song.

Neelam, 17, had recently watched the documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly” with her mother. She said it had been “emotional to take in as a black woman.”

Neelam asked the boy and his cluster of friends to stop playing the track, but he shrugged off the request. “‘It’s just a song,’” she said he replied. “‘We understand he’s in jail and known for being a pedophile, but I still like his music.’”

She was appalled. They were in a class about social justice. They had spent the afternoon talking about Catholicism, the common good and morality. The song continued to play.

That classmate, who is white, had done things in the past that Neelam described as problematic, like casually using racist slurs — not name-calling — among friends. After class, she decided he was “canceled,” at least to her.

Her decision didn’t stay private; she told a friend that week that she had canceled him. She told her mother too. She said that this meant she would avoid speaking or engaging with him in the future, that she didn’t care to hear what he had to say, because he wouldn’t change his mind and was beyond reason.

“When it comes to cancel culture, it’s a way to take away someone’s power and call out the individual for being problematic in a situation,” Neelam said. “I don’t think it’s being sensitive. I think it’s just having a sense of being observant and aware of what’s going on around you.”

The term “canceled” “sort of spawned from YouTube,” said Ben, a high school junior in Providence, R.I. (Because of their age and the situations involved, The New York Times has granted partial anonymity to some people. We have confirmed details with parents or schoolmates.)

He talked about the YouTuber James Charles, who was canceled by the platform’s beauty community in May after some drama with his mentor, Tati Westbrook, also a YouTuber, and a vitamin entrepreneur. That was a big cancellation, widely covered, that helped popularize the term. Teenagers often bring it up.

Ben, 17, said that people should be held accountable for their actions, whether they’re famous or not, but that canceling someone “takes away the option for them to learn from their mistakes and kind of alienates them.”

His school doesn’t have much bullying, he said, and the word carries a gentler meaning in its hallways, used in passing to tease friends. Often, the joke extends beyond people. One week, after students were debating the safety of e-cigarettes and vaping, some declared that Juul was canceled.

[Here’s what Barack Obama has to say about cancel culture.]

It took some time for L to understand that she had been canceled. She was 15 and had just returned to a school she used to attend. “All the friends I had previously had through middle school completely cut me off,” she said. “Ignored me, blocked me on everything, would not look at me.”

Months went by. Toward the end of sophomore year, she reached out over Instagram to a former friend, asking why people were not talking to her. It was lunchtime; the person she asked was sitting in the cafeteria with lots of people and so they all piled on. It was like an avalanche, L said.

Within a few minutes she got a torrent of direct messages from the former friend on Instagram, relaying what they had said. One said she was a mooch. One said she was annoying and petty. One person said that she had ruined her self-esteem. Another said that L was an emotional leech who was thirsty for validation.

“This put me in a situation where I thought I had done all these things,” L said. “I was bad. I deserved what was happening.”

Two years have passed since then. “You can do something stupid when you’re 15, say one thing and 10 years later that shapes how people perceive you,” she said. “We all do cringey things and make dumb mistakes and whatever. But social media’s existence has brought that into a place where people can take something you did back then and make it who you are now.”

In her junior year, L said, things got better. Still, that rush of messages and that social isolation have left a lasting impact. “I’m very prone to questioning everything I do,” she said. “‘Is this annoying someone?’ ‘Is this upsetting someone?’”

“I have issues with trusting perfectly normal things,” she said. “That sense of me being some sort of monster, terrible person, burden to everyone, has stayed with me to some extent. There’s still this sort of lingering sense of: What if I am?”

Alex is 17, and she hears the word “canceled” every day at her high school outside Atlanta. It can be a joke, but it can also suggest that an offending person won’t be tolerated again. Alex thinks of it as a permanent label. “Now they’ll forever be thought of as that action, not for the person they are,” she said.

“It’s not like you’ll sit away from them at lunch or something,” she said. “It’s just a lingering thought in the back of your mind, a negative connotation.”

During a mock trial practice a couple of weeks before a big competition, the song “Act Up” by City Girls was playing. One of Alex’s teammates, who is of Indian descent, rapped along with the lyrics, which include a racist slur.

The students, who until that point had been chatty because their teacher wasn’t in the room, went silent. “I was the only black person in the room,” Alex said.

Alex and another friend on the team explained to their teammate why he shouldn’t have used that word. “We’re a team, so we can’t have tension exist there,” she said.

He said he understood why they were uncomfortable but that it wouldn’t necessarily prevent him from using it again when singing along. He wouldn’t take it back.

“You’re canceled, sis,” her friend told the teammate. It was partially to lighten the mood, but also partly serious.

“It’s a joke, but still, we understand you have that opinion now and we’re not going to get closer,” Alex said.

Despite his initial tough stance, the teammate didn’t rap the word again, and Alex said that he had remained respectful during practice. The team took ninth and 11th place at the competition.

It was orientation day for freshmen at Sarah Lawrence College, where one new student was unnerved by a social justice group’s presentation. The presenters discussed pronoun use and called on the entering freshmen to “‘battle heteronormativity and cisgender language,’” the student said.

Even if you accidentally misgendered someone, the new students were told, you needed to be either called out or called in. (“Called in” means to be gently led to understand your error; call-outs are more aggressive.) The presenters emphasized that the impact on the person who was misgendered was what mattered, regardless of the intent of the person who had misgendered them.

The freshman thought back to a time when her father had misgendered a friend of hers. Her father had asked her to apologize on his behalf. She did. “‘I only get mad when people intentionally try to misgender me because they feel like they have to correct who I am,’” she recalled her friend saying.

Sarah Lawrence has fewer than 1,500 undergraduates. One upperclassman she became friends with said that she had been canceled in her own freshman year.

But, this upperclassman said, the politics enforced through cancellation don’t always fit neatly into the social dynamics of college.

“I think where it loses me, we’re taking these systems that are applying huge abstract ideas of identity’s role and we’re shrinking it into these interpersonal, one-on-one, liberal arts things,” the upperclassman said.

Among the upperclassman’s friend group now, the idea of cancellation is “basically a joke.” Too many people had been canceled. At a recent party the upperclassman had attended, one guy said, “‘If you haven’t been canceled, you’re canceled.’”

One night during Mike’s freshman year at a New York state college, he and a group of friends were headed to a party downtown. As they were waiting for their Uber, someone cracked a political joke, and then the casual conversation turned confrontational. One of Mike’s friends asked his roommate, D, if he was a Trump supporter.

D had a history of making the group uncomfortable. Mike and their mutual friend Phoebe said that he would made sexist, homophobic and racist remarks in past hangouts.

D said he did support the president — an anomaly in their liberal friend group — and “blew up” at the friend who asked the question. When the friend tried to change the subject, he became more upset. Mike stepped between the two to defuse the situation. “He got in my friend’s face, and that was the last straw,” Mike said.

He tried to cool D down; it didn’t work. D called Mike a homophobic slur, multiple times. The group split up. Mike didn’t return to his dorm that night, staying at a friend’s place instead.

“Even before this, we could tell, if I weren’t roommates with him, we wouldn’t have been friends,” Mike said. “So that was the breaking point for me, him saying that when I was sticking up for him.”

D left an apology note on Mike’s desk, which mostly tried to “justify his actions,” Mike said. “That set in my mind that he didn’t really feel bad about what he did,” he said. “He just felt bad for himself, that he would be looked at in a different light.”

A couple of days later, Phoebe, Mike and D sat down and D repeated the apology. Phoebe and Mike heard him out but said it didn’t clear him of wrongdoing and that he would have to demonstrate that he was different now. Both said that while D appeared sad about losing his friends, tearing up during their discussion, he didn’t show remorse.

Other friends didn’t accept the apology. “We wouldn’t tolerate it anymore, we cut him out of our lives,” Phoebe said.

Thus canceled, D moved from sadness to frustration and anger, Phoebe said. He grew “very bitter,” Phoebe said. She noticed that he had unfollowed and blocked the group on Snapchat and other social media a few weeks later.

“He did feel bullied by this whole canceled idea,” she said. “But in this case, no one felt bad doing it, because he didn’t really take responsibility for a lot of the things he said.”

Mike, though, still lives with D. He had signed on to live with him before the ordeal. They don’t speak. D has stopped acknowledging Mike and most everyone from their old group. “I’m definitely not living with him next year,” Mike said.

Phoebe managed to keep things civil. “Every time we see him, I still say hi,” she said. Sometimes, but not always, he nods or says hi back.

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