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thegettingbyp2 · 2 years

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Hi! I know that I've already send you a request today, but this super fun idea popped out of my mind and since you are my favorite writer I have to ask! Can I have a Knoxville x Reader in which the reader is a new cast member and he is putting his moves on her since the very first moment he met her ( she can be like steve o bff)? Plus, it would be super funny if Poopies is also trying to date her.

I think it could be hilarious, especially when Poopies will realise she is dating Knox... probably a couple of week after the rest of the crew ahahaah

I absolutely LOVED writing this x

Back Off

You had been a fan of the Jackass franchise since the beginning; being best friends with Steve-O meant that you kind of had no choice. Steve-O had taken you to set a couple of times but you had never actually met the ringleader of the group, every time you had gone to set, Johnny had been busy or had had a day off. About halfway through the lockdown pandemic, Steve-O had given you a call and asked if you wanted to be a part of the cast for Jackass Forever which you instantly agreed to (even though you knew you were going to be an easy target).

Your first day on set as an official cast member, you rode with Steve-O and your legs were shaking the entire time. ‘Would you relax,’ he said laughing.

‘I’m headed to the set as a cast member, I’m never going to relax again!’

‘Hey, at least you’re gonna get to meet Knoxville this time. 20 years of you coming to set and you’ve always managed to dodge each other.’

‘Yeah, that’s because we’re going to meet and instantly hate each other,’ you joked. You couldn’t help but feel a little more nervous about the fact you were finally about to meet the Johnny Knoxville. Despite him being Steve-O’s other best friend, you couldn’t help but have developed a bit of a crush on the leader of the group as you watched the series and films, eventually watching Johnny’s solo films.

When you got to set, you and Steve-O went to sit with Pontius, Preston and Wee-man who had all arrived before you two. They all greeted you with the same enthusiasm that they greeted Steve-O with which instantly made you feel welcome. You also introduced yourself to some of the new cast; Rachel, Jasper and Poopies, getting along with them straight away. You couldn’t help but think that Poopies reminded you a bit of Steve-O (something he was thrilled about when you told him).

As you and the others got talking, you didn’t notice the tall man in the blue t-shirt walking onto the set until you saw Steve-O set his coffee cup down and go to shake the mans hand, pulling him into a hug. ‘What’s with the grey, dude,’ Steve-O said, laughing and you heard the signature cackle that could only come from the one and only Johnny Knoxville. You jumped down from the table and headed over to where Johnny and Steve-O were standing to introduce yourself.

‘Hey, (Y/N), I’d finally like to introduce you to Johnny Knoxville!’

You reached your hand out as you looked up at him. You had always thought he was attractive but something about seeing him right in front of you, he looked even better than he did on TV (which was really saying something). ‘Hey, I’m (Y/N),’ you said, a big smile on your face.

Instead of taking your hand and shaking it, Johnny pulled you in for a hug, his tall body practically enveloping you. ‘Good to finally meet you, doll, Steve-O’s been telling me all about you for years,’ he laughed as you both broke the hug, leaning back to look at each other again. ‘You sure you’re ready for this, we’re not gonna go lightly on you!’

‘That’s the best thing, Knox. She jumps at everything!’

You saw the glint in Johnny’s eyes as he looked from Steve-O back to you, a mischievous smirk making its way onto his face. ‘Oh really?’ he said and I just knew I was screwed.

---

You absolutely loved being a Jackass cast member! You fit in perfectly and the guys were having a whale of a time, pulling pranks on you and making you jump. Over the past couple of weeks, you had been spending a lot of time with Johnny, getting to know him and your crush on him only grew. Little did you know that Johnny was started to develop his own crush on you, coming up with any excuse to spend time with you and always requesting you be there on his stunts. The other guys were starting to notice that something was going on between the two of you through the way he would always make sure you were standing together when you were watching the stunts. However, the turning point came whilst you were watching The Quiet Game.

You were stunned at how well Rachel, did knowing that there was no way you’d be able to do what she just did. ‘You wanna do something like that sweetheart,’ Johnny said quietly in your ear. He’d been using the pet name around you quite a lot recently and it would be a lie if you said that you didn’t like it.

‘Absolutely not,’ you replied, laughing. The sound of yours and Johnny’s laughter reached Poopies’ ears and he came jogging over to you both, dressed in his mime costume.

‘You gonna watch mine, (Y/N)?’ he asked eagerly, clearly wanting a certain answer. You felt Johnny’s hand rest on the small of your back lightly, as Poopies got a bit too close for his liking.

‘Course! I’m watching the whole thing, you think this one would let me disappear,’ you joked, nudging Johnny in the stomach lightly with your elbow.

‘Great! Maybe after the stunt, me and you could-’

‘I think they’re ready to go.’ Johnny said quickly, signalling that everything was set up for Poopies’ part of the stunt. Poopies nodding, grinning at you as he ran back over to the snake, ready to film.

‘What was that about?’ you asked curiously, twisting your body to look up at him, his hand still resting on your back.

‘They were ready to film sweetheart,’ he replied, a small smirk on his lips.

After Poopies had finished his part of the stunt, you felt Johnny’s hand leave your back as his other hand dipped into the pocket of his trousers as he slowly made his way towards Poopies, pulling out the stun gun and shocking him with it. He then proceeded to chase Poopies around the set, trying to stun him again before giving up and turning to you.

‘Don’t you dare,’ you said, laughing nervously, backing away as you saw Johnny advance towards you, a glint in his eye. He let out a quick laugh before running over to you, not giving you time to move out of the way as he crashed into you, his arms wrapping around you and turning your bodies so his hit the ground when you both crashed to the floor.

You had tensed your body, anticipating the shock from the stun gun which Johnny had noticed and he squeezed his arms around you slightly, ‘you really think I’d use the stun gun on you sweetheart,’ he mumbled into your ear. You shivered at the feel of his breath brushing against your ear which he noticed, making him chuckle. ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah,’ you replied, still breathless from having the wind knocked out of you when you both hit the ground. ‘What about you, you okay?’

‘I’m just fine sweetheart,’ he said. You both laid for a moment, catching your breath. Johnny’s arms were still wrapped around your body; something you were incredibly aware of and you turned your head to look at him only to find that he was already looking at you.

‘What?’

‘Nothing sweetheart,’ he said, bringing his hand up to brush your hair off of your face. He then tilted his head back, his hair brushing against the grass underneath the both of you and looked over at Steve-O before calling out. ‘Steve-O don’t kill me,’ he shouted across the field.

‘Kill you for what,’ he yelled back, his tone amused.

‘This,’ Johnny mumbled before gently turning your head to face him and raising his head to press his lips against yours. You gasped against his lips and he took the opportunity to slide his tongue into your mouth, groaning against you. Your hands came up to softly cup his cheeks which made him hum happily. Everything around the two of you fell away and it was just you and Johnny in the moment.

You broke the kiss, pulling back slightly. Johnny chased your lips to press his lips back to yours quickly before letting his head fall back to hit the grass, your hands still on his face, thumbs tracing his cheekbones.

‘And we got all of that on camera guys,’ Lance called out, bringing you and Johnny back to the present. You buried your head in Johnny neck as you felt his body shake with laughter before helping you back up.

‘Good thing Poopies went to the medical trailer, you would have broken his heart, (Y/N),’ Steve-O said when he ran over making you frown in confusion. Steve-O then turned to Johnny, face serious, ‘You hurt her Knoxville and you’re dead.’ Instead of making a witty comeback, Johnny just nodded seriously at his best friend as he wrapped his arm around your waist.

---

You had been dating Johnny for a couple of weeks and everything felt perfect. Everyone on set was incredibly happy for you both, everyone except Poopies, who hadn’t actually realised you two were dating and still continued trying to flirt with you and ask you on dates. One day you were sitting with the other guys, sitting on Johnny’s lap with his arms around you and his head resting on your shoulder.

‘Hey guys!’ Poopies exclaimed as he walked over to where everyone was sitting. You felt Johnny’s arms tense around you slightly and you put one hand on top of his and the other came up to rest against his cheek, feeling him nuzzle into your touch. Johnny had made it quite clear that he didn’t like Poopies constantly flirting with you when you were clearly dating Johnny but you couldn’t blame Poopies if he didn’t realise.

‘Relax,’ you mumbled in his ear.

‘I just don’t like the way he talks to you sweetheart,’ he mumbled back, pressing a quick kiss to your cheek.

‘Hey, (Y/N), I was wondering if you’d watched that show I told you about yet?’ Poopies asked, smiling over at you and pulling his chair over to sit next to you and Johnny.

‘Hey, no, not yet, me and Johnny have been watching something else,’ you said, making sure to stress Johnny’s name and lean back into him more, hoping that he would get the hint.

‘Oh, okay, well maybe when you two have finished watching it, me and you could start this other one? What are you laughing at?’ Poopies turned to Steve-O and Ehren who had started laughing when they had seen Johnny’s reaction. You turned your head to look at Johnny and you had never seen him trying to bite his tongue harder. You affectionately nudged your forehead against his cheek and you saw his jaw visibly relax, kissing your shoulder.

‘So what do you think, (Y/N)? Sound good? You can come to mine or something and-’

‘Right, Poopies, back off,’ Johnny spoke up, not moving from his position wrapped around you. Poopies’ face turned bright red as he asked what the problem was. ‘(Y/N)’s dating me, that’s what. Stop with the flirting man.’

Poopies looked at you and you nodded and gestured to your position on Johnny’s lap, ‘yeah, for about three weeks now.’

‘How did I not notice that?!’

This made Johnny laugh. ‘Because you’ve been trailing after her like a lost puppy. I mean I get it man, look at her,’ he said, making you blush. ‘I don’t blame you but now you know, back off,’ he said still laughing, making it clear to Poopies that he didn’t actually have a problem with you.

#johnny knoxville #johnny knoxville x reader #johnny knoxville imagine #jackass

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pastellepastary · 2 years

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Just throwing up a small draft of a fic i was making last year, i don’t think i’ll ever finish it but it looked too good to just be stuck in my notes for all eternity 😭

TAKE ME TO CHURCH

yan!selfaware!venti x reader

In which venti would do anything for his windblume.

My lover’s got humor,

Things were calm at first. Nothing out of the ordinary. You two weren’t really anything more than a happy couple if you ignored the fact that one was the hero of mond and the other was it’s archon.

She’s the giggle at the funeral, knows everybody’s disapproval

You are the legendary traveler of Teyvat, capable of turning the tides of ti-

Oh, let’s stop kidding ourselves….

You’re (Y/N). Just an ordinary student absolutely obsessed with Genshin Impact, your current fixation. Things felt a lot slower in your life due to the current situation, pandemic and all and so you decoded to try your hand at the game that your friends have all been chattering about. They were right, it was addictive, the story was beautifully crafted and the characters were all so well made!

You started the game around the windblume festival, sadly, you couldn’t participate in said event and so you just ended up watching youtube playthroughs of it.

Your first five star caught you completely off-guard, Venti came home as you tried to wish on the event banner for the first time since starting the game and from then on, he had become your main and your favorite character. To you, this was nothing but a game. To venti though…

Should’ve worshiped her sooner~

Celestia itself must have blessed him with your arrival. Your sweet voice talking to him, your gentle touch guiding him to where you want him to walk, and what you wanted him to do.

The first time he saw you, it was in the strange traveler’s eyes, a foreign light shining through as you looked around through the outlander, you looked around with uncertainty and curiosity. Everyone you talked to was greeted with a soft politeness that he’d only really seen with you.

The next time he saw you was through the cavalry captain, he thought it was odd how he ran around so responsibly but then he saw his eyes. A small sparkle of your soft kindness showing through the captain’s infamously calculating star-like pupils and it all seemed to fall into place.

If the the heavens ever did speak, she’s the last true mouthpiece

The first time he felt you put him on your team and ran around mondstadt in his form, he couldn’t be happier. And so every time you wished, he answered. He could hear your noises of bewilderment echoing softly as you activated another of his constellations.

Despite having almost no control under your guidance, he had never felt more free. The soft touch of your gentle hand that brought both tragedy and miracles alike, gently guiding him to where you wanted him to shoot. From the first moment he felt your hand, he pledged his bow to you, to follow your every command and to destroy anything that would get in your way.

Every Sunday's getting more bleak,

A fresh poison each week

The world of Teyvat was so welcoming, the characters all interesting and lovable in their own right.

But, something felt… off.

Getting Venti over and over again- you could excuse that, chalk it up to extremely god-teir luck. But it didn’t end there, you somehow unlocked even more overworld dialogue for Venti, ones that even your friends hadn’t heard of. Okay… maybe it’s one of those thing where the devs accidentally unlocked beta dialogue! You tell yourself, after all, you yourself know that thinking too hard about it might make you explode. The last straw for you was when you started receiving odd letters in your mailbox, confessions and proclamations of love and adoration from your favorite little bard, and when you had taken a week-long break from the game, letters begging you to just please, come back.

we were born sick, you heard them say it~

My church offers no absolutes,

~~~ aaand that’s all i had in my notes! thanks for reading <33

#this is VERY unfinished im so sorry #sagau #sagau venti x reader #yandere venti #yandere genshin x reader #yandere venti x reader #loml <33 #genshin x reader #genshin venti x reader

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thebookofjubilations · 1 year

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The Voice

How did you find your voice?

That’s one of the big questions folks ask me about my songs. When did you know you were writing with your authentic self, singing with your authentic voice? I suppose that this question could be about how I learned to sing, but I don’t think that’s what folks are usually asking. What people want to know is, how do I hear the voice that tells me what to write?

Voices, the ones in our heads that guide us through our days and nights, are invaluable to us in many, many ways. There’s the inner voice that guides us through cooking an old family recipe, for instance. Another voice tells us when it’s time to get up from writing and make the kids lunches in the morning before school. That one is talking to me now, as I write, in fact. There’s the inner voice that tells us we should call our friends, another voice that tells us we should be exercising. After years and years of playing shows, I have a voice that tells my body, every afternoon, that it’s time to go to soundcheck, whether or not I have a show that night. Then, there are the weird, dislocated voices that sometimes seem like ghosts and feel like lost angels who call out unexpectedly for help or suggest bizarre conduct. I’m sure that if you think about it, you can identify at least twenty different voices carrying on in your head at any one time.

I’ve come to think of my own artistic voice as something akin to starlight. Day or night, starlight is always present, but I can’t approach it. Starlight has to come to me. And no matter what I’m doing, I know that the starlight is there, perpetually raining down on me in perplexing rays of clarity and nonsense.

Saw you standing by a golden wall Your brindled skins, your bergamot

I remember hearing these words in my head the last time we played the Beacon in New York. I was sitting on the big, fancy steps in the lobby, waiting for soundcheck. The voice was very clear, but those two lines were all it said. A long time ago, I would probably have let it go by me, but over time I’ve realized that that snippets like this make me happier by helping me to cultivate a sense of beauty in the world around me. I didn’t know what those words the voice had spoken meant, yet, but I knew that I didn’t want to forget them.

This is where I arrive at the most important piece of advice I can offer about hearing that inner, artistic voice:

Write down what your voice is saying.

It doesn’t have to be a sonnet or a thesis or a concerto. It can be a single word, a single line, a single concept, but if you don’t write it down, if you don’t get some record of it, you are denying that voice its reason for being.

Think about it this way: our inner voices constantly bring new things into reality. They constantly change and rearrange the physical nature of things, all around us. Your inner, artistic, voice has this power, as well, but not if you don’t bring what it tells you physically into the world, first.

I’m not going tell you how to get those ideas down, because I don’t care how you do it. I’ve written on the backs of pizza boxes, in nice, leather, journals and spiral-bound notebooks. These days, I write a huge amount on my phone. I don’t care if it’s not romantic. The ideas are more important than the aesthetics. Plus, on my phone I can record all kinds of little musical ideas, which works well for me. Your way might be completely different. None of that matters so much as giving credence to that inner, artistic, voice of yours by taking the moment you need to bring it into being. It might take ten seconds to make a note. That’s enough. You’ve hauled the mysterious chest up out of the waves and onto the beach, you can figure out what’s inside once you’ve caught your breath.

A couple of years later, deep in the heart of the pandemic, I returned to the phrase I’d first heard about brindled skins and bergamot, back on the steps of the Beacon. To my surprise, locked inside those few words was an entire, mysterious song called “Black Crown,” that I ended up recording for Spectral Lines. None of it would have happened if I hadn’t caught that first phrase spoken to me by the voice.

I’ve made a lot of records and written some novels, and over the years I’ve come to recognize this voice well, but I believe wholeheartedly that all of us human beings have it, whether or not we choose to hearken to it.

Your inner, artistic voice is there, I’m confident. It may be fragile as starlight, it may sound as fleeting and chaotic as a gust of wind, but it’s saying something to you and you alone. A tiny idea or an earth-shattering one, only you can bring it into the world, and you can only do that if you write it down.

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graceschasity · 8 months

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i wanna get sentimental for a sec because ive been thinking lately about the upcoming 4th anniversary to this account, idk 4 years kinda punched me in the face last week cause 4 years ago i was deep in my tgwdlm fixation (had been for several months before specifically joining the tumblr fandom). take a short trip through the past 4 years with me. black friday hadnt even premiered on stage yet, i wanted to go, but knew i couldnt. it wasnt logical, surely there was no way i could ever go to LA to see a hatchetfield show, right?

i remember black friday premiering on the digital ticket, i remember finding other people to connect with hatchetfield over and making this account, i remember knowing about nerdy prudes must die, knowing it was likely to hit in 2020. i remember the pandemic hitting right around the time they probably would have announced the kickstarter for it. and i especially remember making a dumb little group chat cause i was bored one night, and not even to get into everything else that spawned into, i specifically remember talking about nerdy prudes. everything was shut down, we hadnt heard from starkid in months, nerdy prudes was a pipe dream at that time, it was a fantasy we talked about together, about making trips and meeting up and going to the show, it was all just a dream... until it wasnt.

nerdy prudes means more to me than i can even state. a show that was simply a fantasy, a coping mechanism to get me through the loneliness of the pandemic, is a reality. not only does the show exist, i saw it, in person, with the same people i dreamed i would, and theres even the chance that ill be a part of it in the audience for everyone to see. and now a few months later im going to be hit with the reality of this once again, the upcoming release is a reminder that this all really did happen. it all feels so unreal to me, i cant believe im actually here, this show, and everything leading up to it, are memories i will treasure forever. i am so grateful for everything that has happened to get me to this point. i love this show, i love this community, i love my friends. it would have been so easy for none of this to ever happen to me, im so happy it did. nerdy prudes must die is real and exists and will be public on october 13th. i truly hope this shows means as much to you as it does to me

#sorry i know this is long and a little sappy im usually not like this asdfrewgwe #i am Feeling things about npmd on this monday night

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apureniallsource · 1 year

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Niall Horan is just getting started.

From his days as a boy bander (ever heard of One Direction?), to branching out as a solo artist in 2016, to now leading a team of hopeful musicians as a coach on NBC’s The Voice while gearing up to release his third album, Horan has experienced more in his career than most musicians could ever dream of. Now 13 years in, he’s hitting a new stride—and leading the show all on his own. “As I grow up, I understand myself as an artist more and more,” he told VMAN last month. “I’m getting to that place now where I know what I’m good at, and I know what sounds good on me.”

Horan has had plenty of time to play around with his sound. His second album, Heartbreak Weather—which was an experimental foray into heartbreak pop and a solid departure from his folksy 2017 debut, Flicker—was released in March 2020, just as the world slowed to a halt for the pandemic. Instead of feeling sorry about the timing, Horan took his sudden stretch of free time and got to work on album number three, The Show, which comes out on June 9. In fact, the major source of inspiration for The Show came to Horan shortly after Heartbreak Weather’s release, when an Instagram Live with his fans caused him to rethink a concept he’d already written. “I looked back and saw that ‘the show’ was something I’d had written down for a long time, but I never really knew what that meant until we were in the pandemic,” he explained. “And then it was clear to me that life is like a show. That’s what it is: it’s ups and downs, goods and bads.”

In many ways, the album reflects that. Horan dances around the joys of being in love and the pains of anxiety and finds his groove throughout the album’s 10 tracks. And as he settles into this new era, he feels reinvigorated as an artist: “I want to play arenas. I want to play packed shows every night. And I want to work my ass off to make sure that I get there.”

VMAN sat down with Horan to talk about the making of ‘The Show’, and his new singles “Meltdown” and “Heaven.”

VMAN: Congrats on the second single, “Meltdown.” You also have your first single, “Heaven,” which is just such a catchy song. When did you write that one, and did you always know that it would be the first single?

Niall Horan: Yeah, to be honest. When we first did it, I was like, “God, this is it. It’s going to be tough to beat this one.” I wrote it in June or July of last year in Joshua Tree with a few friends of mine. I felt like I’d been missing something like that in the record, and I wanted to write that concept, so I just went for it and it kind of just popped out. I’d been singing the chorus melody for a couple of days, or at least the first couple of lines of it, and I wasn’t really sure what the hell it was until one of the guys started playing the chords, and I was like, “I know what this is. I’m gonna sing over that.” And then the concept really fell into place then afterwards.

VM: Is that pretty typical of your songwriting process?

NH: I mean, there’s one song in the record that I wrote in under an hour, and it was like, the words just came flying out. I just knew what the concept was going to sound like, if you know what I mean. But there are other times, like, I had this piano line forever for “Never Grow Up,” but it was just about finding what the song meant conceptually, and what lyrics go with that. Most of the time, I like to have a good idea of what I’m going to say, so I write a story out. If it’s a dark song, it’s probably going to be a ballad. But sometimes, it’s the opposite. Like, there’s “Meltdown,” that’s 170 BPM, very up-tempo, but it’s actually about anxiety.

VM: Every song on the album feels really unguarded, if that’s the right word for it. How do you let yourself get into that headspace to be so introspective and vulnerable when you’re writing? I can’t imagine it’s easy.

NH: It used to be really hard for me to do that. You just have to do it in a way where people understand what you’re saying, instead of being so introspective that you’re writing every little detail of your life, and people are like, “what are you even talking about.” So you want to relate to everyone, but it can be tough to get yourself to that point. I used to worry about being asked about stuff in interviews…I thought about writing about certain things and just knowing I was going to be asked about that forever.

VM: Yeah, hard to kind of walk that line I guess. Would you say music has always been the way that you’ve channeled your feelings?

NH: Yeah, I do a lot of writing. And sometimes, it turns into songs, sometimes it doesn’t, but I try to write stuff down. This is the most cliché thing that anyone’s ever said, but sometimes is like a form of therapy. I don’t go to therapy, but I do when I sit down and play the guitar, you know?

VM: So would you say then that overall, the album reflects where you are in your life right now?

NH: Yeah, I think it’s the best reflection for sure. Even when I listen to it now, it’s got like everything that I feel two years later, sonically, lyrically, and conceptually. It’s all there.

VM: How did you land on The Show as the album title? I know you have the song by the same name, but what does that phrase mean to you?

NH: The title came before the song, to be fair. Back then, I was taking down notes all the time. I’ve got 101,270 voice notes, I checked earlier. And I looked back and saw that “the show” was something I’d had written down for a long time, but I never really knew what that meant until we were in the pandemic. And then it was clear that life is like a show. That’s what it is: it’s ups and downs, goods and bads. And that felt like a good strong concept to me in terms of sitting down to write an album. And once I’d written the song called “The Show,” I felt like alright, I’m off to the races here a little bit. It just kind of fell into place like that.

VM: So “The Show” was the first song you wrote for the album?

NH: It was, yeah. It was like a 1 a.m. Instagram Live with my fans in the pandemic, because we weren’t going anywhere, you know. I wrote the first verse of the song, and then the whole album just made sense from that. It’s a hard one to describe, how it just came about.

VM: Sonically, then, how do you think you’ve evolved in the three years since Heartbreak Weather?

NH: I’ve really started to bring my influences—the stuff that I listen to—into play now. The stuff that I’m into from the ‘70s is coming into play a lot with all the big, bright background vocals that you hear throughout the album.

VM: Switching gears a bit, you obviously got your start on The X Factor. Now being a coach on The Voice, I’m curious if that aligns with what you thought it would be like to be a judge, back when you were a contestant on The X Factor?

NH: I was like a deer in the headlights, back in the day. There’s loads of famous people who have got your future in their hands, and I was still just taken aback by the fact that I was on a big TV show every Saturday night. I was just loving that we were having such a great time, so I didn’t really look at it from the other side. Now, knowing that I have people’s future in my hands is a scary prospect. I have to make really tough decisions about people leaving the competition, losing team members, stuff like that. I can now understand what it would have been like for those people who had to make decisions on my behalf and my future. Apart from that, it’s just an absolute blast. We spend all of our time laughing, on and off camera. The banter between all the coaches is so good.

VM: So, festival season is coming up, and you’re playing at quite a few. First of all, what are you most looking forward to with that, and second of all, do you think that playing for a festival audience is going to be different from a more traditional concert audience?

NH: I’m so excited for festivals—I’m a huge festival-goer. And I always get jealous when I’m watching the artists on stage, just thinking that I’d love to be up there looking at that sea of people. So, I’m looking forward to doing that. But I also see it as a challenge to try and get some new fans, because I’ve been that drunk guy walking around the field looking for the bar, and then walking past the stage and there’s someone up there playing and all of a sudden, I’m listening to their music online. I’ve done that so many times at festivals.

VM: You’ve got to get the people who are in the back getting food or something.

NH: Exactly. Hopefully, the guy going to the bar looking for a drink or whatever might stick around, then might listen to me online, and then might even buy my new record. You never know.

#niall horan #28april

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mariacallous · 2 months

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Content warning: This article contains a scene including a graphic sexual assault.

My friend sets aside his cocktail, its foamy top sprinkled with cinnamon in the shape of a hammer and sickle, to process his disbelief at what I’ve just told him. “You want to return to Russia?” he asks.

I met Enrico when I arrived in Stockholm eight months ago. He understands my situation as well as anyone. He knows that I fled Moscow three days after Russia invaded Ukraine; that my name, along with the names of other journalists who left, has fallen into the hands of pro-Kremlin activists who have compiled a public list of “traitors to the motherland”; that some of the publications where I’ve worked have been labeled “undesirable organizations”; that a summons from the military enlistment office is waiting for me at home; that since Vladimir Putin expanded the law banning “gay propaganda,” I could be fined up to $5,000 merely for going on a date. In short, Enrico knows what may await if I return: fear, violence, harm.

He wants me to explain why I would go back, but I can’t think of an answer he’d understand or accept. Plus, I’m distracted by the TV screens in the bar. They’re playing a video on loop—a crowd in January 1990 waiting to get into the first McDonald’s to open in Russia. The people are in fluffy beaver fur hats, and their voices speak a language that, for the past year, I’ve heard only inside my head. “Why am I here?” a woman in the video says in Russian. “Because we are all hungry, you could say.” As the doors to McDonald’s open and the line starts to move, I no longer hear everything Enrico is saying (“You could live with me rent-free …” “You could go to Albania. It’s cheaper than in Scandinavia ...” “We could get married so you can live and work here legally …”).

Part of me had planned this meeting in hopes that Enrico would persuade me to change my mind—and he did try. But I’ve already bought the nonrefundable plane tickets, which are saved on my phone, ready to go.

A week later, I spend a night erasing the past year from my life—a year of running through Europe as if through a maze. I clear my chats in Telegram and unsubscribe from channels that cover the war. I wipe my browser history, delete my VPN apps, remove the rainbow strap on my watch, and tear the Ukrainian flag sticker from my jacket. The next day—March 29, 2023—I fly to Tallinn, Estonia, and ride a half-empty bus through a deep forest to the Russian border. The checkpoint sits at a bridge over the Narva River, between two late-medieval castles. German shepherds keep watch, and an armed soldier patrols the river by boat.

“What were you doing in the European Union?” the Russian guard asks.

“I was on vacation,” I say.

“You were on vacation for more than a year?” she asks.

I reply that I have been very tired. She stamps my passport and the bus moves on.

What I didn’t tell the guard, and what I couldn’t tell Enrico, is that I’m tired of hiding from my country—and that I want to trade one form of hiding for another. I have conducted my adult life as if censorship and propaganda were my natural enemies, but now some broken part of me is homesick for that world. I want to be deceived, to forget that there is a war going on.

“Start from the beginning,” my mother would say when I couldn’t figure out a homework problem. “Just start all over again.”

I woke up on February 24, 2022, to a message from a friend that read: “The war has begun.” At the time, I was an editor at GQ Russia, gathering material for our next issue on Russian expats who had moved back home during the pandemic. I was also editing a YouTube series called Queerography. For a blissful moment, I took my friend’s text for a joke. Then I saw videos from Ukrainian towns under bombardment. Russian forces had encircled most of the country. My boyfriend was still asleep. I wished I could be in his place.

A few months earlier, American intelligence had informed Ukraine and other countries in Europe of a possible offensive. But Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, had responded: ��This is all propaganda, fake news and fiction.” While I didn’t necessarily believe the truth of Lavrov’s words, I doubted the regime could afford to tell a lie so big. Vladimir Putin’s approval rating was near its lowest point since he gained power. On the eve of the attack on Ukraine, only 3 percent of my fellow citizens thought the war was “inevitable.”

After the invasion, I spent three days in silence. I couldn’t sleep, and I had no appetite. My hands trembled so badly that I couldn’t hold a glass of water still. When I visited friends, we’d sit in different corners of the room scrolling through the news, occasionally breaking the silence with “This is fucked up.”

In Moscow, armed police patrolled the streets to deter protesters. Soon, the press reported that a man was arrested in a shopping mall for an “unsanctioned rally” because he was wearing blue and yellow sneakers, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. News media websites were blocked in accordance with the new law on “fake news” about Ukraine. People stood in line to empty the ATMs. “War” and “peace”—two words that form the title of Russia’s most celebrated novel—were now forbidden to be pronounced in public. Instagram was filled with black squares, uncaptioned, seemingly the only form of protest that remained possible. The price of a plane ticket out of Russia soared from $100 to $3,000, in a country where the minimum wage was about $170 a month.

If I waited another day, it seemed, the Iron Curtain would descend and I would become a hostage of my own country. So on the morning of March 1, my boyfriend and I locked the door to our Moscow apartment for the last time and made for the airport. In my backpack were warm clothes, $500 in cash, and a computer. We were leaving for nowhere, not knowing which country we would wake up in the next day.

At the international airport in Yerevan, Armenia, flights arrived every hour from Russia and the United Arab Emirates, another route along which people fled. Once we were there, we boarded a minivan to Georgia, the only country in the South Caucasus with which Russia no longer maintained diplomatic ties. The van was packed with families and their pets. From one of the back seats, a girl asked her mother: “Mama, are we far away from the war now?” A night road through mountain passes and volcanic lakes took us to the border. I asked a guard there to share a mobile hot spot with me so I could get online and retrieve coronavirus test results in my email. “Of course,” he replied, “though you don’t deserve it.”

In Tbilisi, the alleys were lit up at night with blue and yellow. On the city’s main hotel hung a poster that read “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” Fresh graffiti on walls around the city read: “Putin is a war criminal and murderer.”

At an acquaintance’s apartment, we shared a room with two other men who had fled. “The most important thing is that we’re safe,” we reassured each other if one of us began to cry. “I’m not a criminal,” said one of the guys. “Why should I have to run from my own country?” None of us had an answer.

In Russia I was now labeled a “traitor and fugitive.” The Committee for the Protection of National Interests, an organization associated with Putin’s United Russia party, had stolen a database containing the names of journalists who had left the country and distributed it on Telegram. Liberal journalists in Moscow had begun to find the words “Here lives a traitor to the Motherland” scrawled on their doors. One critic was sent a severed pig’s head.

My fellow fugitives and I started looking for somewhere more permanent to live, but most rental ads in Tbilisi stipulated “Russians not accepted.” We tried to open bank accounts, but when the bank employees saw our red passports they rejected our applications. Like so many other companies, Condé Nast—which publishes GQ and WIRED, among other magazines—pulled out of Russia. I was without a job. The YouTube show I edited closed down soon after, its founder declared a foreign agent and later added to the Register of Extremists and Terrorists. Foreign publications told me that all work with Russian journalists was temporarily suspended.

Soon signs began to appear outside bars and restaurants in Tbilisi saying that Russians were not welcome inside. I decided to sign in to Tinder to try to meet people in this new city, but most men I chatted with suggested that I go home and take Molotov cocktails to Red Square. I placed a Ukrainian flag sticker on my breast pocket and wandered the city in silence, ashamed of my language.

My boyfriend and I finally found a room in a former warehouse with no windows, the furniture covered in construction dust. The owner was an artist who was in urgent need of money. To pay the rent, I sold online all my belongings from the Moscow apartment: a vintage armchair from Czechoslovakia, an antique Moroccan rug, books dotted with notes, a record player given to me by the love of my life. Ikea had closed its stores in Russia, and customers wrote to me: “Your stuff is like a belated Christmas miracle.”

One day in mid-spring, I left the warehouse for an anti-war rally that was being held outside the Russian Federation Interests Section based in the Swiss Embassy. The motley throngs of people chanted “No to war!” In the crowd I glimpsed the familiar faces of journalists who had left Russia like me. “Why did you come here?” a stranger asked me in English. “To us, to Georgia. Do you really think your cries will change anything? You shouldn’t be protesting here. You should be outside the Kremlin.”

I wanted to tell him that I grew up in a country where a dictator came to power when I was 6 years old, a man who has his enemies killed. I wanted to say: One time, when I was an editor at Esquire, my boss denounced an author I worked with to Putin’s security service, the FSB, and the FSB sent agents to interrogate me, and when I warned the author, the FSB came for me again, threatening to arrest me and listing aloud the names of all my family members. I wanted to tell the stranger on that street in Tbilisi that I’d had to disappear for a while, and that when I felt brave enough, I had gone to protests and donated money to human rights organizations. That I had fought but, it seemed, had lost. That I just wanted to live the one life I’ve got a little bit longer. But at the time I couldn’t find the words.

A month later, the world saw images of mass graves in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, dead limbs sticking out of the sand. Outside our building one morning, on an old brick wall that was previously empty, was a fresh message, the paint still wet: “Russians, go home.” My boyfriend went back to Russia so he could obtain a European visa, promising he would be back in a month, but he never returned.

I spent the rest of the year on the move: Cyprus, Estonia, Norway, France, Austria, Hungary, Sweden. I went where I had friends. The independent Russian media that I’d always consumed went into exile too, setting up operations where they could. TV Rain began broadcasting out of Amsterdam. Meduza moved its Russian branch to Europe. The newspaper Novaya Gazeta, cofounded by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov, reopened in Latvia. Farida Rustamova, a former BBC Russia correspondent, fled and launched a Substack called Faridaily, where she began publishing information from Kremlin insiders. Journalists working for the independent news website Important Stories, which published names and photos of Russian soldiers involved in the murder of civilians in a Ukrainian village, went to Czechia. These, along with 247,000 other websites, were blocked at the behest of the Prosecutor General’s Office but remained accessible in Russia through VPNs.

“During the first days of the war, everything was in a fog,” says Ilya Krasilshchik, the former publisher of Meduza, who went on to found Help Desk, which combines news media and a help hotline for those impacted by war. “We felt it our duty to inform people of what the Russian army was doing in Ukraine, to document the hell that despair and powerlessness leave in their wake. But we also wanted to empathize with all of the people caught up in this meat grinder.” Taisiya Bekbulatova, a former special correspondent for Meduza and the founder of the news outlet Holod, tells me, “In nature you find parasites that can force their host to act in the parasite’s own interest, and propaganda, I believe, works in much the same way. That’s why we felt it was our duty to provide people with more information.”

I wanted to continue my work in journalism, but the publications that had fled Russia weren’t hiring. My application for a Latvian humanitarian visa as an independent journalist was rejected, and I didn’t have the means to pay the fees for US or UK talent visas.

The panic attacks began in the fall, during my first stay in Stockholm. Red spots, first appearing around my groin, started to take over my body, creeping up to my throat. I’d get sick, recover, and then wake up with a sore throat. In October, I learned that my boyfriend had married someone else. The next day, my mother called to tell me that a summons from the military enlistment office had arrived.

I was in Cyprus when, at 3 am one February morning, I woke to the sound of walls cracking and the metal legs of my bed knocking on marble. Fruit fell to the floor and turned to mush. The tremors of a magnitude-7.8 earthquake in Gaziantep, Turkey, had passed through the Mediterranean Sea and reached the island. I didn’t scramble out of bed. I hoped instead that I would be buried under the rubble—a choice made for me by fate. Later that month, my friends in Stockholm insisted that I come stay with them again. I wandered the streets on a clear winter day, buying up expired food in the stores. The blue and yellow flags of Sweden shone bright in the sun, but I saw in them the flag of another country. Back in the apartment, I slept all the time, and when I did wake I lulled myself with Valium. One day I felt the urge to swallow the whole bottle.

Frightened by my own thoughts, I felt how much I wanted to be back in Russia. In my mother country, all the tools of propaganda would keep painful truths at bay. “The news in Russia is only ever good news,” Zhanna Agalakova, a former anchor on state TV’s main news show, later told me. Agalakova quit after the invasion began and returned the awards she had received to Putin. “Even if people understand that they’re being brainwashed, in the end they give up, and propaganda calms them down. Because they simply have nowhere to run.”

Masha Borzunova, a journalist who fled Russia and runs her own YouTube channel, walked me through a typical day of Russian TV: “A person wakes up to a news broadcast that shows how the Russian military is making gains. Then Anti-Fake begins, where the presenters dismantle the fake news of Western propaganda and propagate their own fake news. Then there’s the talk show Time Will Tell that runs for four, sometimes five hours, where we’ll see Russian soldiers bravely advancing. Then comes Male and Female—before the war it was a program about social issues, and now they discuss things like how to divide the state compensation for funeral expenses between the mother of a dead soldier and his father who left the family several years ago. Then more news and a few more talk shows, in which a KGB combat psychic predicts Russia’s future and what will happen on the front. This is followed by the game show Field of Miracles, with prizes from the United Russia party or the Wagner Private Military Company. And then, of course, the evening news.”

I had gone from being infuriated by this kind of hypnosis to envying it. The free flow of information had become for me what a jug of water is to a severely dehydrated person: The right amount can save you, but too much can kill.

“Welcome to Russia,” the bus driver said as we crossed the border from Estonia. I was nearly home. There was no particular reason for me to return to Moscow, so I made for St. Petersburg, where some friends had an apartment that was empty. I used to look after it before the war, coming over to unwind and water the flowers. It was a place of peace.

All my friends had left Russia too, so I was the first person to set foot in the apartment in a year. Black specks covered every surface-—midges that had flown in before the war and died. I scrubbed the place through the first night, starting to cry like a child when I came across ordinary objects I remembered from peacetime: shower gel, a blender, a rabbit mask made out of cardboard. Over the next few weeks, I tried to return to the past as I remembered it. I went to the bakery in the morning. I exercised, read, wrote. At first glance, the city seemed unchanged. There were the same boatloads of tourists on the canals, tour groups on Palace Square, overcrowded bars in Dumskaya Street. But more and more, St. Petersburg began to feel to me like the backdrop of a period film: impeccably executed, the gap between the past and the present visible only in the details.

One day I heard loud noises outside my window, as if all the TVs in town had suddenly started emitting the sound of static. The next day the headline read: “Terrorist Suspected of Bombing St. Petersburg Café Detained and Giving Testimony.” The café had hosted an event honoring the pro-war military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, and a bust of his likeness had blown up, killing him and injuring more than 30 people. But life went on as if nothing had happened. St. Petersburg was plastered with posters for an upcoming concert by Shaman, a singer who had become popular since the invasion thanks to his song “I’m Russian.” (He would later release “My Fight,” a song that seemingly alludes to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.) In a candy store I noticed a chocolate truffle with a portrait of Putin on the wrapper. “It’s filled with rum,” the clerk said.

Sometimes in checkout lines at the supermarket I glimpsed mercenaries in balaclavas, newly returned from or preparing to go to the front. On the escalator down to the subway, where classical music usually floated from the speakers, Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto was interrupted by an announcement: “Attention! Male citizens, we invite you to sign a contract with the military!” In the train car, I saw a poster that read: “Serving Russia is a real job! Sign a military service contract and get a salary starting at 204,000 rubles per month”—about $2,000. One afternoon, as I stood on the platform next to a train bound for a city near the Georgian border, I overheard two men talking:

“I earned 50,000 in a month.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, bro. But I won’t go back to Ukraine again. It’s fucking terrifying.”

This was a rare admission. The horror of the war’s casualties—zinc coffins, once prosperous cities turned to ruins—were otherwise hidden behind the celebrations for City Day, the opening of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, and marathons held on downtown streets.

After a week or so in Russia, feeling very alone, I went on Tinder. One evening I invited a man I hadn’t met over to the apartment. I placed two cups of tea on a table, but when the man arrived he didn’t touch his. He threw me to the floor, unbuttoned his pants, and inserted his dry penis inside me. “I know you want it,” he whispered, covering my mouth. “I can tell from your asshole.”

I bit him and squirmed, trying to get him off me. After he left, my legs kicked frantically and I couldn’t breathe. I knew that the police wouldn’t help me. I contacted Tinder to tell them that I had been raped and sent them a screenshot of the man’s profile, but no one answered. That evening I bought a ticket for a night train to Moscow. More than ever, I wanted to see my mother.

“You must have frozen over there,” My mother said as she met me at the door to her apartment outside Moscow. Putin had said that, without Russian-supplied gas, “Europeans are stocking up on firewood for the winter like it’s the Middle Ages.” People were supposedly cutting down trees in parks for fuel and burning antique furniture. Some of the only warm places in European cities were so-called Russian houses, government-funded cultural exchanges where people could go escape the cold as part of a “From Russia with Warmth” campaign. When I told my mother that Sweden recycles waste and uses it to heat houses, she grimaced in disgust.

Thirteen months earlier, when I had left the country, my mother called to ask me why. I told her that I didn’t want to be sent to fight, that I couldn’t work in Russia anymore. “You’re panicking for no reason,” she said. “Why would the army need you? We’ll take Kyiv in a few days.” After the horrors in Bucha, I had sent her an interview with a Russian soldier who admitted to killing defenseless people. “It’s fake,” she responded. “Son, turn on the TV for once. Don’t you see that all those bodies are moving?” She was referring to optical distortions in a certain video, which Russian propagandists used to their advantage.

After that, we had agreed not to discuss my decision or views so that we could remain a family. Instead, we talked about my sister’s upcoming wedding, my aunt’s promotion at a Chinese cosmetics company whose products were replacing the brands that had quit the country. My uncle, a mechanic, had finally found a job that would get him out of debt—repairing military equipment in Russian-occupied territories. My mother was planning to take advantage of falling real estate prices to buy land and build a house. In their reality, the war was not a tragedy but an elevator.

I had arrived on Easter Sunday, and the whole family gathered at my mother’s house for the celebration. My aunt told me she was worried that I might be forced to change my gender in the West; she had heard that the Canadian government was paying people $75,000 to undergo gender-affirming surgery and hormonal therapy. My stepfather was interested in the availability of meat in Swedish stores. Someone asked whether it was dangerous to speak Russian abroad, whether Ukrainians had assaulted me. I kept quiet about the fact that the only person who had attacked me since the invasion was a Russian man, that the real threat was much closer than my family thought. The TVs in each of the three rooms of the apartment were all switched on: They played a church service, then a film called Century of the USSR. There were news broadcasts every two hours and the program Moscow. The Kremlin. Putin—a kind of reality show about the president.

“Do you know what this is?” my mother said as she placed a dusty bottle of wine without any labels in the middle of the festive table. “Your uncle gave it to us,” my stepfather chimed in. “He brought it from Ukraine.” A trophy from a bombed-out Ukrainian mansion near Melitopol, stolen by my uncle while Russian soldiers helped themselves to electronics and jewelry. “Let’s drink to God,” said my stepfather, raising his glass. “You can’t raise a glass to God,” my mother answered. “That’s not done.” “Let’s drink to our big family,” he said. The clinking of crystal filled the room; to my ears it sounded like cicadas.

Suddenly I felt sick and locked myself in the bathroom. I tried to vomit, but my stomach was empty, bringing up only a retch. “What’s wrong?” my mother asked, standing outside the door. “Drink some water, rest, sleep.” I tried to lie down. My skin began to itch. My friend Ilya Kolmanovsky, a science journalist, once told me: “Did you know that a person cannot tickle himself? Likewise you cannot deceive a mind that already knows the truth.” Self-deception is dangerous, he said: “Just as your immune system can attack your own body, your mind can also engage in destroying you day by day.”

That evening I left my mother’s apartment for St. Petersburg and made an appointment with a psychiatrist. I told the doctor that I felt like the past had been lost and I couldn’t find a place for myself in the present. She asked when my problems began. “During the war,” I answered, careful to keep my face expressionless. The psychiatrist noted my response in the medical history. “You’re not the only one,” she said. She diagnosed me with prolonged depression and severe anxiety and prescribed tranquilizers, an antipsychotic, and an anti-depressant. “There are problems with drugs from the West,” she said. Better to take the Russian-made ones. If the Western pills were like Fiat cars, then these would be the Russian analog, Zhigulis: “Both will bring you closer to calm, but the quality of the trip will differ.”

Though the drugs seemed to help, I began to realize over the next several weeks that no amount of pills could change this fact: The home I was looking for in Russia existed only in my memories. In June, I decided to emigrate once again. At the border in Ivangorod, spikes of barbed wire pierced the azure sky and smoke from burning fuel oil rose from the chimneys of the customs building. This time, as I left, I felt that I had no reason to return. My home was nowhere, but I would continue searching for one.

With financial help from a friend, I moved to Paris and signed a contract with a book agent. I made an effort not to read the news. Still, from time to time, I came across stories about Putin’s increasing popularity at home, how foreign nationals could obtain Russian citizenship for fighting in Ukraine, how the regime passed a law that would allow it to confiscate property from people who spread “falsehoods about the Russian army.” One day, when air defense systems shot down a combat drone less than 8 miles from my mother’s home, she called me and asked: “Why did you leave? Who else will protect me when the war comes to us? Who if not my son?” I didn’t have an answer. “I love you, Mama”—that was the only truth I could tell her.

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alimak · 1 year

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Youth Is Wasted On The Inside

MASTERLIST

The day I heard classes were suspended for almost a week brought relief for me back then. I spent those days with ease and thought, “Finally, a four-day rest!”. I was all smiley and delighted to have a break from school… not until that “four-day suspension” lasted for two years. While I was at the beginning of my youthful age when the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) started, I was rather locked and isolated instead of feeling the “I wish it could stay like this forever”. You know, being a teen forever, but instead, I had my overall well-being affected by the lockdown. I thought: Is this how I am going to spend my whole youth, locked inside my house?

Spending my teenage years to the fullest was one of my goals to ever achieve. Going to prom, going on a retreat trip and a field trip, and graduating junior high school with my former classmates were some enjoyable events that could add to my youthful years. I remember being excited for those days to come and I was planning ahead with my friends in school about what we’ll do when it happens. I wanted something memorable, just like those teen films. All I wanted was good times before I go to my senior year in high school and college.

As the pandemic came, I knew those moments would not occur, although there was a slight bit of hope remaining inside of me that everything would go back to normal when I enter the tenth grade. But, I was too gullible to think that such a disease would go away quickly and it made me depressed as time passed by. As I wait for the pandemic to end, I felt lost because everything changed, not in the way I wanted it to be. I thought waking up every 5 A.M. to go to school was the worst thing that I would go through, but coping in the midst of the pandemic beats it.

As I look back during the lockdown, I can’t help but think ways of how I can distract myself from boredom. I mean, we all had to and it was the hardest part for me because I am not consistent with hobbies–I also had limited resources to find one and my interest disperses because of it. I became more pressured rather than my school deadlines and exams. I have realized that this was probably the reason why I am too lazy to try new things out because I know I would give up too easily and I started to think if there was something wrong with me. Hence, it is also the reason why I spent most of my time on my phone–being online–all day and night.

At some point, doing all of these is a reassurance to myself that I don’t have to be like everyone else. I learned that I was pressured by social media to have a hobby because I saw everyone on TikTok working out, painting, sewing, reading, etc... I realized that I do not need to force myself to have a hobby–rather I need to focus on myself–what makes me enjoy life again. A way that It opened my mind in ways that taking care of myself was much better than anything else.

Eventually, my coping system was: I had to be outside. It is a way how I can handle my well-being over this whole phenomenon. I realized that I needed to be in a new environment every once in a while in order for my energy levels to heighten. I discovered that I like going to new places when my grandmother once told me to buy something from 7-11. I walked around for two hours around our area and I felt content when I got home that I had to write in my journal about the places I went to. Therefore, I figured that it is important for me to be in a place where it is not my house because I have been inside for too long and my mind wanted something new.

I believe that staying all the time at home can affect the mental health of people that it became an emotional trauma. Ever since COVID-19, everyone had no choice but to isolate in their own homes, which also restricted social interactions. Most of the people would only go outside for work or tasks to accomplish. It resulted to individuals increased percentages of depression and anxiety because of being only at home. According to BBC News, young ages were more affected from the impacts brought by the pandemic.

It came along with unwanted changes. Many teenagers have acquired social anxiety. It became hard for me to make friends because of being used to being alone at home and uneasiness builds up as face-to-face classes begin to initiate during this year. It is hard for me who is already shy, who become more shy because of isolation. In fact, it became a stress factor for socialize because it was something I was not used to do doing after being only at home. The changes were challenging.

Furthermore, a state of feeling lost is also a struggle for me. Many people think that time shifted during this pandemic. I did too, as I was mostly doing nothing all day; watching the time past by; study; and sleep. It was such a struggle to make something out of your time for the day, but to no avail it was also a struggle to do something. While for others, they had the luxury to keep themselves busy, but for me, it was challenging, especially when my enjoyments were outside of my home.

Being isolated at home brought unwanted circumstances and the challenge of feeling lost. It personally affected me in ways that it is hard to bring back the old me. I am not close to my old friends anymore and I started to become out of touch with my emotions.

With all of these occurrences, I can’t help rely on imaginations. I had to romanticize the remaining time of my teenage years because the pandemic robbed me from it. But, I do know that: You are trying. I am trying. We are all trying–to fill this emptiness in our supposed “most enjoyable” year of our lives.

As I went through this topic, I thought: healing the youth from the impacts brought by the pandemic can lessen the mental health issues that they face. There is acknowledgement to these issues, but a lack of action in it. This essay is a glimpse of the life of the youth in the midst of the pandemic and the struggle of coping in the “new normal”. I am calling out for schools and officials to provide free therapies and counseling for children. Mental health is a human right.

I conclude, to heal from emotional trauma caused by the pandemic should be included in the “new normal”.

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buglymcbugson · 10 months

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found some old writing from 2021 - how beautiful is it to look back on old feelings and know how far you’ve come. trigger warnings on this one for sexual assault xo

“he keeps saying the c word, and it isn’t ‘cunt’”

i’ve started leaving the house now that lena is here

nowhere crazy of course

the other day i walked to yoga class 15 minutes away

alone

this might not seem like a large feat to some

but 6 months ago i had panic attacks leaving the house to walk the puppy

i even said hi to acquaintance yesterday at the grocery store

and i didn’t want to slit my wrists

lena being here brings me out of my shell

she met me without my hardened shell built to protect me from the toxicity of my hometown

she reminds me that i am more than the people of this place perceive me to be

i see this place through her eyes

last week i looked up to the mountains

and i saw mountains

beautiful mountains

i didn’t feel like they were moving in on me slowly until they squeezed all the air out of my lungs

because of my newfound ability to leave the house i’ve also been socialising more

mostly with my cousins, and with jayden

who i guess is one of the closest things to a brother i have (outside of my own brother of course but that’s an extra note in itself isn’t it)

we have naked baby pictures together

he can recount all the bad family fights at thanksgivings we had together

he even complains about my father in the same way i do

most nights jayden invites his friends over to hang with us too

this is another thing my anxiety would prevent me from doing 6 months ago

but jayden’s friends are cool

they all just smoke weed, play music, and tell dumb jokes

they weren’t the kind of people to keep tabs on me in high school

or call me a slut for who i slept with

or kept up to date on who i slept with for that matter

just a few nerdy stoner guys

jack was there tonight

the son of my 8th grade spanish teacher

i hadn’t seen him since middle school

he’s always been chill

no drama

and he was chill tonight, as usual

but then jack said the C word while we were walking down the street

and i had to stop and pause, unnoticed by the group who kept talking and laughing

and repeating the C word

and god how much I wish the word was “cunt”

but the word wasn’t “cunt,” the C word is his name

and as i soon as i heard it the mountains started moving in

it was a little harder to breathe

and my hangnails looked a lot more appetizing for my chattering teeth

i’ve been gone for so long

and isolated for so much longer (due to my severe anxiety first and a global pandemic second)

that i forgot he existed outside the person he is to me

he exists as a friend, a teammate, and a lover to others

but to me, C**** will always be my rapist

and it’s not like hearing jack say his name reminded me about him

there’s not a single day that goes by that i don’t think about him or what he did to me

but it was a reminder that in this place

he doesn’t belong to me or to my story

he’s not simply a character in the story of my life that i retell when i connect with someone in a foreign country

i am no longer the main character

because people perceive him apart from me

apart from my rapist

they perceive him as a jokester, an athlete, and a bit of a party animal

when they see him all they see is his long hair that frames his gap toothed smile and eyes i used to think looked kind

people tell stories and they aren’t about him fucking an unconscious child

they’re about the funny jokes he’s told and the gifts he had to buy for his girlfriend when he fucked up

and about a faaaaaatty bong rip he took one time

i have forgotten what it feels like to be silenced by his name

have my strength and power i’ve developed over years of self discovery pushed back down my throat

because i will never be able to say it here

i couldn’t while it happened

i couldn’t after it happened

and i can’t now

the only thing consistent in my life is the silence that traps me every time the wheels touch down at the Juneau International Airport

i wonder if i’ll ever get to the point where his name doesn’t make me stop in the street

i honestly doubt it

but i walked to yoga alone so i guess anything is possible

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winterproductions · 1 year

Text

CHAPTER FOUR

Disclaimer: This is an idol!Jungkook and OC fanfiction, preferably for my POC queens but anyone who reads can envision themselves in the character, if they like.

Chapters: 01 02 03 04

___________________________________________

May 2021

8 PM

"Welcome to the billboard music awards red carpet!" The journalist greeted the live cameras as A-list celebrities past around her in the background. "I have besides me the trio that is taking over the industry! Amara, Emerald and Starr, also known as Three Seconds. "Welcome to your first BBMAs experience ladies, you're performing tonight aren't you." The journalist continued the interview.

___________________________________________

Amara

Alot has happened in the past four years. The scholarship became a blessing to me and my boyfriend. Opportunities arose and were taken by both of us; Emerald came to visit Daniel and I in Britain and all of us were just in the right place at the right time.

Karaoke nights have never been more of a blessing to partake in.

Daniel was approached with an offer to audition for a boy group but instead they made him a soloist and placed myself and Emerald with another female to form an r&b and pop centric girl group.

___________________________________________

The performance of their single from their debut album received a standing ovation. They returned to their seats in their stage outfits as they awaited the results of the category that they are nominated in.

"And the award for billboard's top new artist goes to!!" The announcer opened the enveloped and the words that left her mouth made everything become a blur. "Three Seconds!!" The boom of sudden screams and cheers warmed the hearts of the three females who did the same as they hugged their dates and team.

Their speech was short with the usual messages of thanks to their label, team, family, friends and lovers. They were in disbelief with the award.

___________________________________________

Amara

"I'm bummed they didn't show." Emerald whispered to me as we watched BTS acceptance speech. I turn to her and nodded "well, we finally get to see them. Don't we?" Emerald chuckled and nodded "you damn right." To witness their performance, despite it being virtually due to the pandemic, it was an honor.

The award show came to a close and we all hit greeted the paparazzis for post-show photos and interviews

"Daniel, babe, are you alright?" I notice his silence all night due to the Weeknd beating him in the three categories they were in. "Forget that question, it's ok. We all win some and lose some. We have the AMAs, VMAs and Global, there's so many more achievements you can get in the near future. Besides, everyone knows you're the better performer."

I saw the peak of his smile and hugged him from behind. "Your performance made headlines tonight, trust me, that is way better than the awards that may be rigged to serve indust4 favorites." He turned to me and pouted "babe, you just won your first award." He kissed me and I played with his hair "yeah, it's exciting and an accomplishment. It's contradictory, I know." He laughed and removed his tie.

He approached me okce again as I began to unzip my dress; he assisted me and began kissing my shoulder as he pushed the expensive fabric from my skin. Being left in my underwear, I felt my body be lifted and laid on the bed. "Daniel, I'm still not ready. I'm sorry." He sigh and I covered my face in embarrassment, it's been four years into our relationship and we've never fully made it into home base. I've used ways to keep him pleasured but the way I always fail to submit into him the way I always imagine makes me humiliated.

"It's ok" he mumbled and I bit my lip as so many emotions ran through me. "No, it's not." He held my face and looked me I'm my eyes. "Babe, it's ok." He pecked my forehead and left to the bathroom where I heard the shower turn on.

I collapsed down onto the bed and exhaled as the urge to just fall asleep consumed me. After about five minutes, I hear Danny's voice "babe, I'm done." I nodded and pushed through tiredness to take a hot shower.

#bts namjoon #bts seokjin #bts yoongi #bts jhope #bts jimin #bts taehyung #bts jungkook #bts fic #jeon jungkook x reader #jungkook #kpop scenarios #kpop #jjk fanfic #jjk smut #jjk x reader #bts scenarios #bts smut #bts

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american-maryy · 2 years

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The people who's deaths affected me greatly:

- Monty Oum: ive been a huge fan of his since watching Dead Fantasy. The way he animated fight scenes was so unique and exciting. And I loved watching his ddr videos. He was the reason I got to meet some online friends that i still consider to be close. People that loved the things that I loved, people that I could confide in about things that I normally couldn't my irl friends. When he died, it felt so surreal. I remember being in a college class, and not being able to concentrate. My friend, who had talked to him more often than I did, was even more so affected.

- my best friend from college: I remember asking her a question in a biology class, and that essentially put us on the path to becoming good friends. I was with her when she needed an oil change for her first car. Prior to her death, she was supposed to get married. My one regret was allowing my mental health at the time take over to the point I stopped hanging out with friends, including her. I wish I could have been with her for the last time.

- my maternal grandpa: I wont lie.....I wasn't as sad about my grandpa's death initially, but that's mostly because we had never met in person. Our first and last meeting was on Skype, when my family in the Philippines managed to come up with enough money to afford a computer and internet. The moment he saw my face, as well as my mom's, he cried. It had been 20 years since he last saw his daughter, and the first time seeing me. The thing that made me sad about his death was that we would never be able to meet in real life. I've always had.....complicated feelings towards my family (mostly on the paternal side) but with my maternal grandparents, even tho I never really got to grow up with them, I felt.....loved. and cherished by them. When I traveled to the PH for the first time, to view his grave, my maternal grandma treated me with such love and care, that I didn't know how to feel. She didn't judge me, nor looked down on me.....she made me food, and gave me a Lei of sampaguita. She made me feel special. She was like those grandmas you see on TV, who would bake you cookies and sing you a lullaby. I reckoned had my grandpa still lived, he would have done the same.

Chadwick Boseman: this was a death that affected many greatly. His portrayal of Black Panther was unique, and special. He was a strong and diligent leader, but also empathetic and kind. His performance at the end of Civil War, in particular, stuck with me; his speech about Vengeance towards Baron Zemo struck a cord with me.

I remember prior to his death being concerned at how skinny he had become in interviews. People would make fun of him and make jokes that he's doing drugs or something; not realizing he was very, very sick, and growing weaker as the days went by. The day he died, I didn't think I would be affected; but I was. I cried a lot for this man, who kept his illness a secret for so long from the public, just so he can take on a role that would mean so much to many people; especially little boys and girls of color. It hurts to see this man die so soon, someone who was looked up to by so many kids; kids who saw something in him that was also present within them.

Billy Kametz: prior to learning about Billy, I had already unknowingly heard his voice in many anime roles: Josuke, Naofumi, etc., but it was Ferdinand von Aegir in Fire Emblem: Three Houses where I first heard his name. He, alongside the entire voice cast of FE3H, brought a lot of joy and comfort to me during the three years of this pandemic. The game was the 1st game I bought with the last paycheck I got from my job before they laid me off. I spent days upon days playing and replaying that game. There were days when the uncertainty of real life would cause me great distress; but every time I heard the words "I am Ferdinand von Aegir!!" It would make me laugh out loud, and then, it would make me smile. In that moment, i was Ferdinand von Aegir; a noble knight on a horse, proud and strong, and I'd forget a little about how shitty the world has become.

When Billy announced his cancer not too long ago, I immediately thought back to Chadwick; I thought, "oh no. Not again. This can't be happening again." It doesn't help that it was the same type of cancer that took Chadwick. I was scared again. I didn't know these people personally, but i was afraid for him. Watching Billy's video talking about his diagnosis, seeing how skinny he had become in such a short span of months......this world is just too cruel.

Today, I learned on twitter that he passed away. I cried a lot, for a person I never met in person. I have a streamily print featuring Ferdinand and Hubert at tea time, autographed by both Billy and Robbie Daymond. I was hoping one day, once I own my own house with its own reception/living room, I would turn it into a tea or coffee room, and then I would hang that poster up, for all the guests to see. I still plan on doing that someday......but for now, I think I want to hang it up in my room, so that I can remember, that someone so talented and so loved by a wonderful community existed.

FYI, this post doesn't really have.....a specific purpose. With how today went, I just wanted to vent a little. Death is suppose to be a natural part of the circle of life, but it's also the one that hurts most. Once someone is gone, they're gone for good. No more text messages, no more impromptu trips to In-N-Out with them.......family gatherings have an empty void where they once stood. The squeaky toy your favorite pet used to play with, is still stuck under the shed, gathering dust, and cobwebs, and dissolving from the weather. Movies, and shows don't feel, or sound, the same. Weddings, birthday parties, graduations suddenly become a memorial.

Admittedly, it gets better with time; but there will always be moments in our lives, where a memory, or an image of someone we love appears in our minds, and we can't help but break down and cry, even years later. Despite all that, we're forced to wipe our tears and keep moving forward, as best as we can; if not for our sake, then for the people we still have in this world, as well as for the sake of the loved ones we lost, who would have wanted us to keep going.

I don't know how best to end this post except: please, hold your loved ones close.

#monty oum #chadwick boseman #billy kametz #grief #personal #ferdinand von aegir

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 2 years

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I saw a concert last night and it was the best I’ve felt in a while. I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed that until I did it. It’s not even the first time I’ve seen live music since COVID, I saw a couple of amazing shows at a festival in the summer. And they were special and beautiful and made me feel alive, but there’s still something about what I saw last night that I haven’t experienced in several years. Last night was the Barra MacNeils, a Celtic band from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia that’s made some of my favourite music since I was about five years old. I mean, they’ve been making that music since I was born, and I heard it in my house since I was days old. But I was about five the first time I remember being able to articulate that this song is by the Barra MacNeils and I know and like this song.

I genuinely had not realized how much I missed that specific experience. Most of my life, my dad and I have done a couple of folk festivals every summer and then several concerts throughout the year when the folk people we like play near us. I’ve thought of that as something I love and missed during the pandemic, but didn’t realize how much it was something I needed back. How much not having it was contributing to my feeling of disconnection and of not having my life anymore. I knew that about other things – my sport and the community around it, my friendships that I let go during lockdowns and now struggle to get back. I didn’t realize how much missing live folk music was also part of the disconnection.

It's about way more than the music, which I’ve always known but did not appreciate until last night. How it feels to take this in surrounded by other people who appreciate it as much as I do, most of whom have been appreciating it for at least twice as long as I have even though I’ve had it my whole life, because the average age of a Celtic music concert in my area these days is about 100.

I’ll be honest, I’m in a bit of a cheesy emotional mood at the moment. I’ve been having a rough time mentally for a while, but I just had my birthday when I heard from a few old friends and remembered that I do still have connections, and today I’m seeing more people I care about deeply and have let go of so much in the last two years, and I’m remember things I loved. Like listening to bands tell bad jokes on stage while transitioning from fast fiddling and step dancing, to one of top three most hauntingly beautiful live renditions of the Dougie MacLean song Caledonia that I’ve ever heard (and I’ve heard a lot of them, I’ve been to a lot of folk festivals full of Nova Scotian bands from Scottish families playing Scottish music and bowing down to anything written by actual Scottish person, rightfully in this case because it’s a wonderful song).

The big thing it brought me back to was Celtic Colours, the gold standard of Canadian folk festivals that I’ve been lucky enough to attend twice in my life. You can't get a better Celtic music festival than Celtic Colours without going to actual Celticland. I mean, I assume. I haven't been to the Celticland countries, so I haven't checked. I've always said my city has the best shawarmas outside the actual Middle East because I've tried shawarmas elsewhere and they're always awful, even in big cities like Toronto. But recently a woman who grew up in a few different Middle Eastern countries, including Lebanon, told me the shawarmas are actually better here than there. So you never know, maybe Celtic Colours in Canada is the best in the world.

Anyway, I digress. Celtic Colours takes place for two weeks in October, all over Cape Breton, which is an island off of the East Coast Canadian province of Nova Scotia where as far as I can tell everyone is born with fiddles in their hands. Celtic Colours is where you can hear Gaelic lyrics sung by people who actually speak the language, and instruments that are only still mastered by like 48 people in the world or something, and really traditional music played in bars by nineteen-year-olds. But you can also hear modern Celtic stuff, and every version of ways to blend the modern and trad music, including a number of ways that do not work and I don’t want to hear them, but I’m still sort of glad someone’s trying it.

I was thinking of that anyway this week because it was my 32nd birthday, and I turned 27 and 29 at the Festival Club at Celtic Colours. I was planning to turn 30 there was well, and when the pandemic hit my parents and I talked about planning to go for my 31st birthday instead, but it hasn’t happened. This year, my dad and I were supposed to make up for not doing a pilgrimage halfway across the country to this festival by seeing the Barra MacNeils together instead (the festival’s on right now, I’m pretty sure that band flew straight from there to here to play that concert), but then he contracted COVID and had to give up his ticket so I saw it without him. Maybe next year.

Anyway, the Festival Club is one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. It runs every night of Celtic Colours, where they turn the Gaelic College into a bar for the night. There’s a stage where this one guy from Cape Breton MCs every night, and his name is Buddy MacDonald, because sometimes people are walking, fiddle-playing stereotypes. His presence is consistent and has been every night of the festival since 1997, but otherwise you just get whatever bands and musicians turn up that night. There’s no lineup posted, just people getting up to play, sometimes people who don’t normally play together going up a few at a time, sometimes joining in the middle of each other’s sets. They serve beer until 4:30 AM, at which time they put out a breakfast buffet for anyone who’s stuck around that long. The performers can’t be as drunk as most of the crowd, or they wouldn’t be able to play at all, but they’re definitely… quite a bit looser than what I see from them during the day.

Both times I’ve been to Celtic Colours, I got to the Festival Club as many nights as I could, including the night of my actual birthday, because what better way to spend that could there possibly be? It’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever done, and exactly the type of thing I miss. The music and the atmosphere and the community and the lack of constraints, and the number of people in one place who truly love something. That might be the best way to distill the thing I had in my life pre-COVID and struggle mentally with missing now – being surrounded by people who are passionate about what’s happening.

Last night was not the Festival Club at Celtic Colours on Cape Breton Island, but it was the closest I’ve come to that in three years, and it was wonderful. And… okay, this is going to sound so silly that I almost hesitate to explain it, but I’ll explain it anyway. At one point, the band said, “Hands in the air!” and because I have watched those old Edinburgh Festival Late ‘n Live show videos so many times in the last few weeks (mainly while drunk, I don’t just put them on any time but I have found that they are exactly what my brain wants to watch when it’s drunk), that phrase now immediately sends my brain to people in the Late ‘n Live videos yelling that ironically. I actually started laughing at one point, as the band shouted that unironically, but all I could hear was Daniel Kitson saying it while giggling.

That moment caused something to click for me, as I realized just how much those videos draw me in because they remind me of this. I’d thought before that this Late ‘n Live show reminds me of the Celtic Colours Festival Club, but hadn’t acknowledged just how much that similarity is why I keep watching them. Really, in terms of its actual effect on the environment, shouting “Hands in the air!” ironically or unironically isn’t that different. It’s all people who’ve agreed that they’re going to buy in because they love what’s happening.

When I think about it, I guess part of my brain watches those videos and thinks going to Edinburgh and being at that comedy show would be like the late-night Celtic Colours shows. Even though... it probably wouldn’t be. The Celtic Colours Festival Club draws a crowd that’s younger (as in mostly middle aged as opposed to actual senior citizens, though there are some properly young people) and drunker than the crowd I was in at the concert last night, but they’re still folk music fans. There is much excitement and much dancing and much singing and much drinking and some yelling, but in my nights there, I never saw any behaivour I thought was bad. While with the Edinburgh Late ‘n Live show, in the one form of it that I’ve seen, which is YouTube clips from the 00s - I’d be surrounded by drunk comedy fans. I’m willing to bet they’re a lot more obnoxious than drunk folk music fans. If I were actually there I might just be annoyed.

So that’s something I realized last night. I realized I basically enjoy those videos because they make me feel like I’m in a college auditorium that’s been converted to a bar, listening to a packed room sing along to Go Lassie Go by like ten different performers on stage together while drunk at 3 AM. Well, my reason for enjoying those videos is that, and the light in Daniel Kitson’s eyes when he realizes that David O’Doherty has come up with the groundbreakingly original joke of suggesting he’s faking his stutter. I just... he looks so happy, so amazed and pleased to be there, and I don’t know what it is about that moment that delights him so much, but I have not managed to watch it enough times for it to stop making me smile.

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#Youtube

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purplesurveys · 2 years

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1532

1. Are you embarrassed / uncomfortable dancing in front of other people? For the most part, especially if it’s a choreographed dance. I think the only three settings I’d be fine with dancing in are at a bar, at a concert, and at a club and that’s obviously because nobody cares when people start dancing in those places haha.

2. Would you ever consider styling your hair as a mohawk? No. It wouldn’t be my style.

3. Do you have any friends that only bother to communicate with you when they need something from you? Or, do you do that to any of your friends? I haven’t felt this from any of my friends; on my end I also try to be watchful with my interactions so that I don’t come off as this type of person. I do have a high school batchmate who reaches out at least once a year to ask for monetary support for her family (she has three kids). As much as I want to help, I just don’t want her to end up being too dependent on others - as is unfortunately very common Filipino behavior - especially since I’ve heard she does this with every one of our batchmates.

4. Have you ever curled up in front of a fireplace, whether alone or with someone? I’ve never been anywhere with a fireplace. I’d be surprised if I saw one in this country.

5. Do you ever drink directly from beverage containers because you don’t want to dirty a cup? No. I feel like that would mess with the beverage and make it go rancid sooner, so I’ve never done that.

6. When you come across surveys with poor grammar, do you fix it or pass on doing the survey because it’s too difficult to comprehend? I’ll fix it.

7. Have you ever accidentally dumped something sticky into your keyboard? How did you go about fixing it? No, fortunately. That would drive me crazy; even just food crumbs irritate me already so I can’t imagine how agitated I’d be if my keyboard (and laptop) got all sticky.

8. If you were in a situation where you had only enough money to pay for either a necessity [medicine, hygiene products, food, whatever] or something you just wanted - would you honestly purchase the thing you needed over the thing you wanted? Yes. That is something I would like to call The Effect of the Pandemic lmao. There was one point we really only had to buy the essentials every two weeks, and we also ended up having to sell one of our cars. My dad also had to take up a side job as a delivery rider so that he could earn during the time all cruise ships stopped services and he couldn’t go back to his work.

9. Of all of the electronics you own [excluding kitchen appliances], which one do you use the least? The Switch.

10. Do you know any men that wear slippers? Yes. Is it supposed to be unique if men wore them? Lmao Filipinos wear slippers and flip-flops all the time so this question comes off as strange.

11. Are there any smudges on your computer screen? Do you neglect to clean it? Not really smudges but like small specks of dirt here and there on the screen. I clean my laptop at least once a month or as soon as I start to feel icky.

12. ^ Have you ever sneezed on your computer screen? No, I always turn to the side before I do.

13. Would you [now or back when you were younger] be more interested in karate classes or gymnastics? I feel like I would have been interested in karate and I’m pretty sure my 5 year old self had even raised this with my mom. I feel like I was the only Filipino kid who never enrolled in a taekwondo class lmao; I was made to take up ballet instead.

14. Is your bath tub [assuming you have one] big enough for two people to lay in comfortably together? We don’t have a bathtub.

15. How often do you get sock lint between your toes? I don’t wear socks enough for this to happen. < Same.

16. Have you ever created anything in either Bryce or Poser? What is this even talking about? Are they software apps? Hahaha.

17. If you carry a purse, roughly how big is it? What do you carry in it? I have a handbag, rather than a purse. It’s definitely too big for the stuff I usually carry, but I like the extra space for cases I’ll suddenly need to put extra things in it. Anyway, I never leave the house without my wallet, vaccination cards, phone charger, and my tumbler. Occasionally I’ll bring my laptop too.

18. Of all the pets you have had throughout your life, which one has meant the most to you? Is there a reason why? I love all the pets I’ve had and have, of course...but there would never be anything like my relationship with Kimi. He was with me in all the turbulent moments of my life, just patiently sitting by, being. Our need to be physically close to one another was consistently mutual, and he was, and continues to be, essentially an extension of my identity. I also didn’t go through suicide in the handful of times I planned mine because of him – because I didn’t know who else was going to look out for him as much as I did.

19. Have you / would you ever go spelunking? Sure! I had the chance before, just didn’t have the appropriate footwear haha; next time I find myself near a cave I’ll make sure I’m bringing the right shoes so I can finally join.

20. If you could either be fire resistant or breathe underwater, which would you rather be capable of? Fire resistant. Can come in handy during fires and animals would need to be saved.

21. Would you rather live in a cabin up in the snowy mountains, a busy city, or a house by the beach? Busy city. House by the beach is great as like a vacation spot that I’d visit a few times a year, but I don’t want to live permanently by the water; I’m scared of losing the magic I usually feel when I’m by the sea.

22. Do you find the idea of space more exciting or frightening? So exciting. I just want to keep learning how big it is and what else is out there.

23. Do you know anyone who works / has worked in a fast food restaurant? Do you look down upon people who work in such environments? I don’t think so, but I know my cousin worked at a café at one point. No, I don’t look down at any career and I have so much respect in particular for anyone in the service industry - fast food staff, department store crew, security guards, all of them. Some customers won’t be the nicest, so I try to do what I can to just be kind.

24. Assuming you have blown bubbles in your milk before, were you yelled at for doing it as a kid? Yeah we were lightly chided to not play with our food, but I wouldn’t say we were yelled at for it.

25. Do you think that fake plants are tacky? Have you ever seen any that looked real? No, I don’t think they’re tacky.

#survey #surveys

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