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tobythesudriantram · 1 year

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Learning with Mingle and Friends: Superheroes (Nermalized), A.K.A. a rewrite of Superheroes based on how I imagined it.

*Mingle is looking around the house trying to find her friends.*

Mingle: ...Oh, didn't see you there. Hi! I've been trying to find Dingle and Donk all day, but I can't seem to find them anywhere!

*A mysterious tall figure runs between doors in the background. Mingle turns around in confusion, having heard a noise.*

Mingle: Hm? Who was that? *She walks out to Donk's bedroom, looking around in confusion. She then turns to the audience.* Can you see anyone in here?

*A small piece of green fabric sticks out from Donk's closet.*

Mingle: Oh? I should check his closet? Alright...

*Mingle walks over to the closet and opens it up, causing Donk (who's wearing a crocodile hat, green mask, black cape and matching green croc shoes) to hop out.*

Donk: HAI-YAH!

Mingle: AAH! Donk, it's me, Mingle!

Donk: ...Who's this Donk you are talking about? I'm the Croc! I have no idea who you are talking about!

Mingle: ...Donk, I can tell it's you...

*Donk pulls off his mask.* Donk: Mingle, nobody should know my secret identity!

Mingle: Secret iden... Ohhh, I see, you're playing superhero?

Donk: Playing? I am a superhero!

Mingle: Alright, alright... *Mingle assumes that Donk is simply playing around.* Well then tell me, Croc... *She allows Donk to put his mask back on.* What are your superpowers?

Donk: A... What now...?

Mingle: You know, a special ability that sets you apart from everyone else!

Donk: Ohhh, that! Well, uhhh... My superpower is a very powerful bite! Here, let me show you! *Donk walks over to a random chair in the room and attempts to chew through it... With little effect.*

*Mingle's trying her best not to laugh.* Mingle: ...Heheh... Nice superpower...

Donk: ...Something's wrong, I can feel it! Maybe I should try again later!

Mingle: Alright then... Say, uhh, Mr. Croc... Anything else you have that's worth mentioning?

Donk: Oh, yes! My two sidekicks! The Cyan Snacker and the Scrunkle-Dingle! The three of us always stick together to fight crime! Like-

*Boyfriend hops into the room, wearing a mostly blue costume with red gloves and shoes, a white cape and the initials 'CS' written on his hat.*

Boyfriend: beep bop boo skdoo bee!

Mingle: Ooh, hello Boyfr... Uhhh... I mean... Hello, Mr. Cyan Snacker! Say, what kind of superpowers do you have?

Boyfriend: babeep bebop skrrt skedop! *He takes out a chocolate chip cookie and eats it in one bite.* ...beebo boop bap bee- *Buuuurp!* ...bop bee...

Mingle: ...So you gain different abilities based on what you eat? Sounds interesting! *Giggle*

Boyfriend: beep bo boop! *He runs towards Mingle and hugs her softly. Mingle, in response, hugs back...*

Donk: Say, now I wonder where Scrunkle-Dingle is? We should definetly introduce him to you soon!

*Dingle's voice can be heard from outside.* Dingle: HEEEEELP!

Mingle: ...Hm? Was that Dingle?

Donk: *Gasp* He's probably been captured! Triple Trouble, roll out! *Donk attempts to hop out the nearby window, but ends up hitting his face on the glass.* Owww...!

Mingle: Oh no... You know what, Do... Mr. Croc? Maybe you should get some rest and let me and your partner deal with the problem? Here... *Mingle takes off Donk's crocodile hat and instead gives him an ice pack.*

Donk: But... I need to help...! My best friend is in danger...!

Mingle: Calm down, i'm sure your partner will help me out enough to help Dingle!

Donk: ...Alright... But please help him quick...!

*Mingle and Boyfriend run outside to see where Dingle is. Dingle (who's dressed in a grey cat hat, a matching tail and grey cape with black stripes) is sitting in a tree next to an actual cat...*

Dingle: HEEEEELP!

Mingle: Dingle? How did you get up there?

Dingle: I wanted to help this kitty cat out of the tree but now I can't get down! *Dingle looks down at the broken branches that he used to get up, which have now broken off the tree...*

Mingle: Don't worry, i'm sure I can help you! Mr. Cyan Snacker, you stay here, while I go get some things to help! *Mingle walks back inside and into the garage.*

Mingle: ...I think I know what can be helpful. *Mingle walks into the garage, standing in front of a handsaw, a ladder, a water bucket and a box of rubber balls. She then turns to the audience.* Which do you think will help the most?

*Mingle waits for the audience to respond.* Mingle: The rubber balls? *She thinks about what she could do: She imagines herself tossing the balls at Dingle until he falls down from the tree.*

Mingle: ...No, that seems very mean... Plus it could mean that Dingle could get injured! He is very high up after all!

*Mingle looks at the handsaw.* Mingle: This? *She once again thinks about what would happen: She imagines herself sawing off the branch that Dingle is sitting on, causing him to, once again, fall down.*

Mingle: What? That seems plain silly! And again, Dingle could get really injured! Even more so than with the balls!

*She looks at the water bucket.* Mingle: What about this? *She thinks about what would happen: She could have Dingle jump down into the water bucket for a safe landing.*

Mingle: That sounds good, but I think this bucket's a bit too small - Dingle could miss and fall onto the ground instead!

*Finally, Mingle looks at the ladder.* Mingle: There, that should be much safer! *She imagines what to do: She sets up the ladder, climbs up it and takes Dingle, along with the cat, out of the tree.*

Mingle: Smart thinking! *She winks to the audience, before taking the ladder and walking back outside where Dingle is. However, now Dingle and Boyfriend are both on the ground, Dingle with his hand scratched and head hurt and Boyfriend with his back injured due to Dingle falling onto him.*

Mingle: Oh no, guys, what happened!

Dingle: The... *Sob* The cat scratched me and I fell off...!

Boyfriend: b-beep bop skdoo bo! *Boyfriend and Dingle both start crying.*

Mingle: Oh no, guys... Don't worry, i'll get you some help in a second... *She takes out her phone and calls 911.*

*...A few minutes later, the doctors arrive to help Dingle, Donk and Boyfriend, and the firefighters are there to take the cat out of the tree.*

Dingle: *Walks up to Mingle with a bandage around his head and a cast on his hand.* Hey Mingle?

Mingle: Yes?

Dingle: Sorry if we caused a problem...

Donk: *Walks up to Dingle and Mingle, with a bandage around his head.* We just wanted to help out, but we caused an even bigger problem...

Boyfriend: *Walks up to Dingle, Donk and Mingle, with some band-aids on his back.* bop bee boo skdoo bo bop...

Mingle: Awwww, guys, don't worry... It's not your fault... You just need to know that there's a difference between pretending to be a superhero and being a superhero! When you see a big problem like what you just saw, you need to ask someone else for help... Trying to deal with the problem yourself may make it even worse!

Donk: Oh... So... Do we just... *He takes off his mask and cape.*

Dingle: Yeah, I don't think we deserve these anymore... *He takes off his cat hat, tail and cape.*

Boyfriend: bop bee boo... *He takes off his gloves and cape.*

Mingle: Ohhh, guys... You don't need to give up... Here, I've got something that may interest you! Follow me! *She leads the three back inside and into her room. She turns off the lights.*

Donk: ...Mingle?

Mingle: Who's this Mingle you speak of, hm? *The lights turn back on, and Mingle is dressed in a red bustier, a blue mini-skirt, red knee-high boots and a golden belt.* Because I am Wonder-Fox! Come on now, let's fight some bad guys! Look, there's Mr. Piranha over there stealing money! *Mingle points to a small plush toy in the corner next to a bag full of play money.*

Donk: Yay! Criminals, beware! The Four-Way Fracture is now on patrol!

Dingle: Woohoo!

Boyfriend: Beep!

Mingle: Thanks for helping us out! See you later! *Mingle waves to the camera before running off with her friends to play, ending the episode.*

Credits: @friendlyfox34 - The series, plus the original Superheroes episode. @comforting-cartoons - Cyan Snacker BF concept. DC, Marvel and everyone else - The superhero concepts. And, of course, me! - Writing the story, plus the original idea.

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a-cai-jpg · 4 years

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I feel like this is to assure myself and no one else.

It has recently come to my attention that real people actually read this blog.

That sounds a little stupid, given that I religiously advertise it on both Snapchat and Instagram, but there was a part of me that assumed it would fly over the heads of most (see: all) people. And it's inherently contradictory, but I did not think a Real Person would take time out of their lives to read my utterly irrelevant musings.

I am terribly grateful to my friends and then some for deeming me important enough to click into this site. I am thankful for their validation when they don't just do it silently, lurking amidst the sans serif. One quoted my own words back at me in ALL CAPS, another sent me a video zooming in on my disgruntled face on the sidebar, and more mention it casually in passing conversation, jolting me into the reality that yes, this is A Thing.

But as I laid in bed and typed up the post two days ago, I'm suddenly reminded of why I rarely made my writing public.

I sound like an ungrateful little shit, and I'm truly happy whenever someone mentions The Thing (i just don't like the word blog), and I want to share The Thing with the world because it's a little scary thinking about how all your time and effort and words and emotion could be lost somewhere in the void, like an unread letter that's wandered off the post-trail, but.

Writing digs into the most vulnerable flesh of your heart and mind. I recently saw a quote, "We are writers, my love. We don't cry, We bleed on paper." And there are variations of this quote from others: "I don't think all writers are sad. I think it's the other way around: all sad people write;" "I didn't write it down to build a poem. I wrote it down because that is what I do with the things that unravel me. I drag them across a page."

I don't mean for this to take a maudlin turn, but writing is a salve for aches in the soul. I'm by no means a writer, but I like to think I write (s/o to my soulmate, jackson wang, who said, "i'm not a rapper...i just rap). And sometimes, sharing what I've "dragged across the page" is turning my skin inside out.

I'm definitely more comfortable with sharing my vulnerability through words on a sheet of paper (or words on a WordPad document) than through words spoken to another Real Person.

In my junior year of high school, I sat in a hotel room in Sacramento with words stuck behind my clenched teeth. It was the most peculiar feeling, like if I loosened my jaw, I would vomit the words from my chest and they would tumble off the bedsheets and onto the floor, staining the hotel carpet. But the tension never snapped, and I scrawled them onto a torn sheet of paper instead.

Even now, I express the deepest parts of my emotions through letters. I think a large part of it is because I don't want to see the emotions unfold on someone's face. It's not that I don't want to see them, but I don't think I--this emotionally constipated individual--am capable of responding to them in a way that's not, "Uh. Yeah. Okay. Lol bye." And I feel like that's just not appropriate or sufficient in some circumstances. Better to just avoid the potentially awkward situation.

(yes this is not the most mature way to deal with emotions but spare me the lecture.)

And so, when I am writing, and not saying words at someone's face, I pull out the most intimate intricacies of my heart and twist them into phrases and sentences. And I like to do it without a filter.

But when I was writing these past few days, I was conscious of an audience. I began crafting sentences through the lens of what would this specific person think of this and oh my god what if this person reads this and fuck it ok just kidding we can't just fuck it sos. It was a dangerous balance between editing and re-editing and declaring, "Fuck the world, I write for me, and I'm going to write recklessly and with abandon."

This the main crux of the problem: there is me, the person that you know and talk to and maybe have grown up with, and then there is me, the person who spits words out onto The Thing. And sometimes the two me's mesh perfectly like a pattern overlaid on another to produce an image, and sometimes they don't.

It's kind of like when you go clubbing with a childhood friend for the first time, and you've only known them as the youth group-going, favorite child of all Asian parents, and then y'all are in the club and damn okay they just took seven shots in a row.

(I'm not speaking from personal experience.)

There is a moment of reckoning when you try to reconcile two facets of a person.

(Or maybe this is a me problem, but bear with me here.)

A few months ago, I took a trip with two of my closest friends to San Diego, to visit the college town where one of them spent four incredibly formative years. It was fun and beautiful and very, very disorienting, because in my egocentric point of view, I had forgotten that we lived these four years separately. Suddenly, he was introducing to me a different life, a different history that I wasn't part of, and I couldn't help but feel like I was sitting in the passenger seat of a stranger's car, listening to a crude imitation of a familiar playlist.

The feeling began somewhere on the 5 freeway, when he navigated the unfamiliar lanes with a practiced ease, and swelled as the sun set and he told stories about Mount Soledad and him and his friends.

And it was weird, because I felt like an intruder, even though I had been invited into his memories, and the unease took shape as silence and stilted words until he asked, "Are you okay? You seem weird." And the feeling was spilling onto the back of my hands as I gripped the skirt of my dress, but I couldn't beat it into words, so I unclenched my fists and fastened my seatbelt and choked out a, "Nah, I'm just tired."

I think I'm still in the process of working through this reckoning. It doesn't happen for all of my friends, and it's not always so discomforting. Sometimes, I scroll through Instagram pages with a sort of curious hunger to fill the years I’ve missed, and other times, I take the new information, file it as: Yeah okay, I could've predicted that. But then, there are the times where I can only search someone's face in silence, lump in my throat as I rewind our histories and try to find where one of them snagged and became out of sync.

The different facets of the self should, all in all, unveil the most authentic self. The more you get to know a person, the more you really know a person. I imagine it like you're building a three-dimensional sculpture, and with each new piece of information, you add another bit of plaster to it. Yet, I sometimes lose sight of what I'm trying to build, and when I see the blueprint again, I realize I've veered wildly off course. It's scary, every time I run into a moment like this, because it's like the person I knew, the friend I've had for a decade, was actually just someone I created in my mind, a person who overlapped at the edges with the Real Person, but ultimately, were not the same. And when the illusion disappears, I'm left with a stranger.

I'm exaggerating, but.

I'm a little scared this is what you will feel as you read this. I'm scared there will be no separation between the writer and the writing, and although writing reveals the deepest, most intimate parts of a person, is it really the authentic self? It's only a slice, a slice I had cut with carefully chosen words.

So I want to assure you, if you are someone like me who thinks they view the world on a wide-angle lens but really, only through a slit, and you are someone like me who reels when the cover is yanked away and you're left staggering through the new vista, that every sentence is a part of me, but who you know and who you talk to and who you message is a larger piece of me. And maybe we will never get to know each other fully, because that kind of privilege is saved for but a few, that doesn't make either of us any less authentic.

I sometimes wonder what character development looks like in the real world. When I was a sophomore in high school, I cringed so hard when my favorite English teacher tried to use my essay as an example in class that he almost immediately pulled it out from underneath the Elmo projector and used someone else's. In freshman year of college, I wanted to join a creative writing club, but after realizing that I wouldn't be able to submit my work for peer-editing anonymously, I banished that notion. Yet, for some reason, in my senior year, I decided I wanted to take a fiction writing course. On the day of my first workshop, my hands shook so much that I had to sit on them to stop trembling.

In the beginning of the class, I, myself, had a very difficult time separating the writing from the writer. I think especially in an intro class, students use facets of their own life to create fiction. I think even advanced writers do the same, because ultimately everything you write is you. And I did my fair share of speculation--why did she write about a sibling rivalry does she have a sister, hey did this guy study abroad in hong kong with you because he wrote about that, and huh i wonder if she grew up in florida this is beautiful.

It's the kind of speculation we do with the Greats. Did Shakespeare write Hamlet for his son, Hamnet? Who was Sonnet 18 written for? Was Shakespeare gay? Because see, in this one bit, he wrote.....

(i was a very bored AP lit student ok)

It's the same kind of speculation my friend did when she finished listening to a new song by Crush and said, "Oh, he must be dating." Or the speculation all the YouTube comments had when Jon Cozart and Dodie Clark released duo songs titled "Tourist: A Love Song from Paris" and "a non love song from nashville." It's the kind of speculation you do when you are given a slice of someone's soul, and suddenly, you want to understand the whole thing.

But that kind of scrutiny is uncomfortable. We're okay with doing it to Shakespeare, because the dude's dead. We're okay with doing it to big name artists because hello, Crush is not going to hear my friend talking about him. We're less okay with doing it in the public realm of YouTube comments because they are read by the content creators who explicitly said, "pls don't speculate." We are even less okay with doing it to our peers, and we are not okay with other people doing it to us. Okay, maybe I should just speak for myself.

My trajectory in that fiction writing class was backward. My first story was about a white male living in New Jersey. My last story was about a Chinese American woman who used to live in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

It wasn't planned.

It's as if my subconsciousness drew up barriers the minute I stepped into that classroom, and wrote a story as far removed from who I am as possible.

Because really, who is going to think that the gas jockey with a hunger for divine power is me?

(sike.)

But I guess character development is becoming okay with vulnerability and with potential speculation, and as I wrote, I began writing closer and closer to the heart, pulling the words from the east coast to the west.

When the last workshop rolled around, I was calm, sitting at one of those awful, plasticky chairs with tiny, useless desks attached to one arm. I was neither defensive nor uncomfortable, like I thought I would be, just at peace and humbled as I listened to my classmates discuss the craft of my writing.

And I think that's the ultimate lesson: once you write something, or create something, and release out into the wild, it no longer belongs to you. It's an argument I used to make in my art history class, but it's an argument that John Green often makes when his readers ask him about the meaning behind his books.

I don't quite mean it like he does, when he says, "Books belong to their readers." I think that before the writing is consumed by the reader, it is its own entity, existing independently of both writers and readers. And when it is eventually taken up by the reader, the writer shouldn't feel a sense of possessiveness or vulnerability or fear about the content.

And shit, that really fucks up my other thing about trees falling in forests but anyways.

There are a load of other things I have to consider when suddenly, the dumb spools of thoughts in my brain become free content for the Internet. Like, privacy rights? Am I allowed to talk about this one thing my unnamed friend said, but wait, you can definitely tell who it is, oh fuuuuuu-. At what point is it oversharing? Do I get to decide the line between okay and TMI, or does me declaring that I am writing this for myself mean there is no line?

But, in the end, I just want to say thank you.

I’m really used to, as I’m sure many people are, presenting just one facet of my whole self to people. Every individual has a number of different roles, and each role comes with its own set of rules and norms. The sociological part of me says that this discomfort I’m feeling has a lot to do with the breaking down of norms. There is a certain playbook people go by when they lower their barriers, but this circumvents that.

And honestly, maybe I’m just thinking too much into it and all of this is for naught, but it was cathartic writing this all out, even if I had to take two very lengthy breaks to get my thoughts in order.

(just kidding, one of them was to watch Kingdom season 1).

There are so many things I am grateful for, and I fear that in the past week, I have been battling bad vibes and have forgotten how incredibly privileged I am.

So, here is List 16 of The 52 List Project (that my friend made me start legit in 2016 and I'm still on list 17)

List 16: List your Essentials 1. Family & Friends �� 2. Affirmation & Love ✔ 3. Achievement ✔ 4. Happiness ✔ 5. Hope & Dreams ✔ 6. Phone ✔ 7. ID/Card holder ✔ 8. Plush blankets ✔ 9. Stuffed animals ✔ (so many!) 10. Inspiration from a boy on skates ✔ (see: hope & legacy) 11. Good music ✔ (i gotchu fam, here's ur r&b fix) 12. Good books ✔ (go check out a book) 13. Good conversations ✔ 14. Thoughts ✔ 15. Creativity ✔ 16. Music ✔ 17. Possibilities ✔

#beep boop beep boop beep boop beep boop skrrt skrrt

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