Happy Birthday Yun-Yun!
@yumichikah (FOR THE BIRTHDAY BOI!)
Read Mores are for long posts!
Akina and Ikkaku were working hard trying to get a cake made. Of course, Akina was the one to reach out for help with this endeavor. "I have no idea what he likes!!!" Well, she had some idea for the present, so at least there was that. A cake design? Hell no. Flavor of cake? Nope.
"I haven't baked a cake for a birthday before, what makes you think I'm capable of this?!" Ikkaku was stirring up a mess.
"Well, you didn't say no." There was a grin on Akina's face watching him getting cake batter on the counters. "Probably shouldn't be that messy about it. We're going to have to clean that up." She herself was trying to get the icing ready for after the cake was baked. "I got sparklers off someone in Squad 5!"
Yachiru ran into the kitchen and jumped onto the table to see what they were up to, "What's going on!?"
"Shhhh!" Akina put a finger in front of her lips, "It's Yumichika's birthday, try to keep it down!" She wasn't one to talk, she was one of the louder people in the squad now thanks to her guitar.
A SURPRISE? Well now, Yachiru wanted to help with that! "This place isn't decorated for a surprise party." She looked around at the bare walls and wondered where they could get banners and streamers for this. "I can go get those!" It took her no time at all to run off, so she could go find something to decorate with.
Akina let out a sigh, who else could ruin this? She went back to trying to get the icing dyed for the cake. At least in her mind, she was trying to go for a peacock design. Was it going to work out? Who knows.
"You're missing vanilla and is that salt?" Lyn had cake batter on her finger trying to figure out what they missed, clearly it was vanilla. But was it over salted, or did someone read sugar as salt.
"Wh-" She turned around, and the fourth seat was standing right there. "No way, we couldn't have screwed this up!"
"If it's just too much salt, double the batch. Ain't that hard to unfuckup a cake." There was a shrug of her shoulders, only stepping in the kitchen because of the commotion. Letting out a sigh, she offered a bit of advice, "an' if you want this to be a surprise... don't be talkin' so loud. I can hear ya over some of the squad mates trainin'. Ya're gonna be lucky he didn' already hear ya."
Akina let out a sigh and had no idea what they really could have screwed up and just doubled the recipe. This cake was going to be bigger than she wanted it to be. Maybe they could just make a three tier cake instead of a basic one? So far, this wasn't turning out to be a very good day.
"I told you I had no experience in baking a cake." Ikkaku complained as he finished stirring the mess they had made at this point. "What the hell are we supposed to do with this now, anyway?"
Yachiru would have returned with streamers and banners for a birthday and sat on Kenny's shoulders to get things taped up onto the walls. "Over there Kenny!" She was pointing places out while trying to blow up a balloon. The common room was emptied out, so they could prepare for this surprise. If it even was one now.
Akina started explaining, "In the pans, pans in oven. Then we gotta wait and then ice them after they're cool. Stack them nice and pretty... hopefully, and then try. Keyword, try. To decorate it with the icing, I got all dyed up."
It was starting to feel like a chance in hell at this point, but she was still trying to get this finished up. When was Yumichika supposed to be back anyway? The pans full of batter were tossed in the oven, and it was going to be a long wait til they were done.
After all of the cakes were out of the oven, she started working on stacking them. Now she had no skill with piping icing, but was willing to try. The living did this, right? There were those who did this as a job and then those who did this for a hobby! This can't be too hard, right?
Ikkaku watched Akina stack up the cake, "you need me for anything else other than someone to stir the cake up?"
"I mean, you can stick around if you want and carry this thing out." Though from his tone, it didn't sound like he wanted to. "Or, go find the others and join them for the surprise part." Akina was going to be a while getting this thing decorated. Her skill was in music, not cakes. Hopefully this wasn't going to look like a kid did it.
To him that just meant to head out, so he went to the common room, helping the captain and the co-lieutenant get ready.
Akina was finishing up her work and let out a long sigh, well. It was done and it looked fine to her. It was a cake with a peacock design on it. The cake looked like an amateur made it, but it was better than what she thought it was going to come out. Now the kitchen looked like an absolute disaster went through it. She stuck the sparklers in the cake near the tail feathers she decorated on. "That'll do, I think?"
"HEY!" Yachiru ran in and grabbed the cake with her little hands, lifting it over her head. "He's coming back!" Apparently, a few squad members saw him walking back while they were training outside. She ran out of the kitchen and to the common room with the cake, popping it up on the table.
Akina jumped and ran to her room to grab the present before scrambling back out to the common room with the others. It wasn't a very big present, but she figured he'd love it anyway! Quickly, she lit the sparklers as Yumichika entered the room. And the entire Squad yelled out, "SURPRISE! HAPPY BIRTHDAY YUMICHIKA!"
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♡ >> send me a kink and I'll have my muse rate it << ♡; impact play for all ur bleach ocs, wax play for all ur canon bleach muses
Leyre: Impact Play
scale: fuck no, gross, not for them, eh, no opinion, kinda, hot, fuck yes, p l e a s e do this
Akina: Impact Play
scale: fuck no, gross, not for them, eh, no opinion, kinda, hot, fuck yes, p l e a s e do this
Lyn: Impact Play
scale: fuck no, gross, not for them, eh, no opinion, kinda, hot, fuck yes, p l e a s e do this
Ikkaku: Wax Play
scale: fuck no, gross, not for them, eh, no opinion, kinda, hot, fuck yes, p l e a s e do this
Shinji: Wax Play
scale: fuck no, gross, not for them, eh, no opinion, kinda, hot, fuck yes, p l e a s e do this
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researching stuff for a post about misinformation regarding girl scout cookies and man this article (10/28/23) about this palestinian-american girl scout nearly made me burst into tears
In her short 17 years on earth, Amira Ismail had never been called a baby killer.
That’s what happened one Friday this month, Amira said, on New York City’s Q58 bus, which runs through central Queens.
“This lady looked at me, and she was like: ‘You’re disgusting. You’re a baby killer. You’re an antisemite,’” Amira told me. When she talked about this incident, her signature spunk faded. “I just kept saying, ‘That’s not true,’” she said. “I was just on my way to school. I was just wearing my hijab.”
Amira was born in Queens in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. She remembers participating as a child in demonstrations at City Hall as part of a successful movement to make Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha school holidays in New York City.
But since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, in which an estimated 1,400 Israelis were killed and some 200 others were kidnapped, Amira, who is Palestinian American, said she has experienced for the first time the full fury of Islamophobia and racism that her older relatives and friends have told stories about all her life. Throughout the city, in fact, there has been an increase in both anti-Muslim and antisemitic attacks.
In heavily Muslim parts of Queens, she said, police officers are suddenly everywhere, asking for identification and stopping and frisking Muslim men. (New York City has stepped up its police presence around both Muslim and Jewish neighborhoods and sites within the five boroughs.) Most painful though, she said, is the sense that she and her peers are getting that Palestinian lives do not matter, as they watch the United States staunchly back Israel as it heads into war.
“It can’t go unrecognized, the thousands of Palestinians that have been murdered in the past two weeks and even more the past 75 years,” Amira said. “There’s no way you can erase that.” That does not mean she is antisemitic, she said. “How can I denounce one system of oppression without denouncing another?” she asked me. The pain in her usually buoyant voice cut through me. I had no answer for her.
Many New York City kids have a worldliness about them, a certain telltale moxie. Amira, a joyful, sneaker-wearing, self-described “Queens kid,” can seem unstoppable.
When she was just 15, Amira helped topple a major mayoral campaign in America’s largest city, writing a letter accusing the ultraprogressive candidate Dianne Morales of having violated child labor laws while purporting to champion the working class in New York.
“My life and my extremely bright future as a 15-year-old activist will not be defined by the failures and harm enabled by Dianne Morales,” Amira wrote in the 2021 letter, which went viral and helped end Ms. Morales’s campaign. “I wrote my college essay about that,” Amira told me with a slightly mischievous smile.
In the past two years, Amira has become a veteran organizer. Last weekend, she joined an antiwar protest. First, though, she’ll have to work on earning her latest Girl Scout badge, this one for photography. That will mean satisfying her mother, Abier Rayan, who happens to be Troop 4179’s leader. “She’s tough,” Amira assured me.
At a meeting of the Muslim Girl Scouts of Astoria last week, a young woman bounded into the room, asking whether her fellow scouts had secured tickets to an Olivia Rodrigo concert. “She’s the Taylor Swift of our generation,” the scout turned to me to explain.
A group of younger girls recited the Girl Scout Law:
“I will do my best to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, and responsible for what I say and do, and to respect myself and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place and be a sister to every Girl Scout.”
Amira’s mother carefully inspected the work of some of the younger scouts; she wore a blue Girl Scouts U.S.A. vest, filled with colorful badges, and a hot-pink hijab. “It’s no conflict at all,” Ms. Rayan told me of Islam and the Girl Scouts. “You want a strong Muslim American girl.”
At the Girl Scouts meeting, Amira and her friends discussed their plans to protest the war in Gaza. “Protests are where you let go of your anger,” Amira told me.
Amira’s mother was born in Egypt. In 1948, Ms. Rayan told me, her grandfather lost his home and land in Jaffa to the state of Israel. At the Girl Scout meeting, Ms. Rayan was still waiting for word that relatives in Gaza were safe.
“There’s been no communication,” she said. When I asked about Amira, Ms. Rayan’s eyes brightened. “I’m really proud of her,” she said. “You have to be strong. You don’t know where you’re going to be tomorrow.”
By Monday, word had reached Ms. Rayan that her relatives had been killed as Israel bombed Gaza City. When I asked whom she had lost, Ms. Rayan replied: “All of them. There’s no one left.” Thousands of Palestinians are estimated to have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza in recent weeks. ... Ms. Rayan said those killed in her family included six cousins and their children, who were as young as 2. Other relatives living abroad told her the cousins died beneath the rubble of their home.
As Ms. Rayan spoke, I saw Amira’s young face. I wondered how long this bright, spirited Queens kid could keep her fire for what I believe John Lewis would have called “good trouble” in a world that seems hellbent on snuffing it out. I worried about how she would finish her college applications.
“I have a lot of angry emotions at the ones in charge,” Amira told me days ago, speaking for so many human beings around the world in this dark time.
I thought about what I had seen over that weekend in Brooklyn, where thousands gathered in the Bay Ridge neighborhood, the home of many Arab Americans, to protest the war. In this part of the city, people of many backgrounds carried Palestinian flags through the street. Large groups of police officers gathered on every corner, watching them go by.
The crowd was large but quiet when Amira waded in, picked up her megaphone and called for Palestinian liberation. In an instant, thousands of New Yorkers repeated after her, filling the Brooklyn street with their voices. My prayer is that Amira’s generation of leaders will leave a better world than the one it has been given.
i believe she recently got her gold award (which, if youve never been in girl scouts, is really difficult - way more difficult than eagle scout awards), or is almost done with it. i hope she's doing okay.
this article (no paywall) about muslim and palestinian girl scout troops in socal also almost made me cry (it's like 2am). i really really hope all these kids are doing alright. god. they and their families all deserve so much better
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