#but she took her scissors to me whenever the church told her to

[bazmichaels]

Elementary School

One day, when I was just a small child, my mother got me up early, fed me some breakfast, told me to wear some snazzy 1960s clothing she laid out for me, put me and my sister in her car, took me into a strange building, introduced me to a strange lady, and turned around and left me there. Say what, now? She said some words to me about ‘school’ and ‘teacher’ and ‘pick me up afterwards’, but, frankly, I thought there was a distinct possibility that this was all a setup and I’d never see her again. I could handle it. I had my Tarzan lunch box, so I had enough supplies in it to last me – to be honest, I didn’t have the best grasp of time yet – a while. What? I’m not crying, you’re crying. Texas is infamous for its inordinate levels of dust and pollen. (Mommy!) Anyway, given my complete lack of the necessary mental and physical ability to escape this child dumping ground, I condescendingly agreed to go ahead and play their little ‘learning’ games (more like indoctrination games), eat their delicious cookies (oh my, this juice is delightful), take a relaxing nap on a very comfy blanket (hey, stop patting…my…back…zzz), and play outside with the other inmates during recess. I was pleasantly surprised (yet somewhat wistful) when my mother came to pick me up later that day. I suppose I would agree to return to this child detention center the following morning. Mother must have her reasons for it, so I would humor her. It was called kindergarten.

The following Fall, I was informed that I would be attending first grade at a local Elementary School. After having crushed it in kindergarten, I was up for the challenge, or so I thought. I was an October baby, and, as such, faced the life-altering decision of whether to start school early or late. Or rather, my mother faced that decision for me. She had me tested and I did well on the test, so she was convinced that I, her son, was a bonified genius, and should therefore begin my rigorous academic training as soon as possible. Hence, it was decided that I would attend first grade at the tender young age of five. I would turn six at the end of October and would be normal for the rest of the school year. Was I ok with this? Sure. Remember I crushed it in kindergarten. But there would be a huge plot twist. I would not be attending the local public school. I would be attending the elementary school embedded within the Northside Baptist Church. Even though the church was on the north side of town, it was a Southern Baptist institution – very southern. I remember going to some services there, and the preacher just yelled at his for being sinners and warning us that if we didn’t straighten up, we’d “burn in the fiery pits of hell” forever. For real. I don’t remember asking why I went to this school, but I did. Things I remember from first grade include having to re-learn to write with my right hand because my natural left hand was “the hand of the Devil”. I’m not kidding. My teacher would literally whack my left hand whenever I forgot and wrote with it. I also could not use my left hand for cutting with scissors. We had daily Bible lessons. Those did not go well. Apparently, my high test scores were based on my natural ability to think logically. That ability was a rather poor match for first grade Bible studies. I needed to know all the details of how the whole Noah’s Ark story went down (so many holes in that story).

How did Adam and Eve populate the entire planet? The only answer had to include incest – a ton of incest! I didn’t know what incest was at the time, but I knew brothers and sisters weren’t supposed to get married and have babies. This was also one of the many holes in the Noah’s Ark gaslight job. I can’t remember all the Bible verses we studied, but if the passage was logically inconsistent, I questioned it. I would have felt sorry for my teacher, but she kept giving me timeouts in the cloak room, so, whatever. I would subsequently attend public schools for the remainder of my education.

At Northside Baptist, we would have plays in school. I think I was a flower or a tree or something lame in kindergarten. I’d stand there and sing along with the other kids.

My big break came when I played Santa Clause in a Christmas play. I had principal lines and a solo song. In the Spring, we did a big production of The Wizard of Oz, and I was cast as the Cowardly Lion. By my mother’s account, I was brilliant. A stunning revelation! A Broadway star in the making. Great costumes! (My mom made my lion costume, which was pretty awesome.)

Well, when I went to public school, the plays were back to flowers and trees, so I abandoned my acting and singing career somewhere around the 2nd grade. Farewell, stage lights. Adieu.

My mother moved out of Gran and Daddy’s house and rented a house on Hillcrest Drive, and so I attended Baskin Elementary school the following Fall. I seemed to fit in much better there. I attended this school from second grade through fourth grade, and I don’t remember much about it. I remember my fourth-grade teacher was named Mrs. Gross, which was hilarious to all the boys, and many of the girls, in the class, and that her arm flaps would literally slap against the chalkboard when she wrote on it.

I remember the majestic sport of kickball, where my social status at school rose as my kicking distance increased – and increase it did. As I refined my timing, I was able to, in technical terms, kick the living snot out of the ball. I would practice kicking the ball in our carport. My uncle once criticized me for this, saying I should spend my time practicing an actual sport. My unspoken dream was that kickball would become a professional sport by the time I was an adult, but it turns out it laid a nice foundation for kicking a football. More on that later.

I discovered the humiliating playground game called tetherball, where freakishly tall girls could dominate the most athletic boys in the school. I did ok against normal human children, but none of the boys could even slow down the tall girls. They were relentless and vicious creatures. Tetherball is where athletic boys gain some of their first lessons in humility. Even though the life lessons were harsh, they were necessary.

We also had four-square. I don’t remember too much about it, but it seemed to be won by those who successfully cheated the best – a breeding ground for future business leaders.

Then there was the infamous game we called, inappropriately, “smear the queer”. This “game” was pure violence. It would start with a gang of pre-hormonal elementary schoolboys gathering as a mob in an open field. The alpha bully would take a ball of some sort – a football was the most representative symbol for the ensuing violence – and toss it to the first player/victim.

The hooligans without the ball wood then chase the ball carrier until someone caught up to him and knocked him to the ground, by any means possible. If the ball came loose as the ball carrier lost consciousness, it was a free ball, and anyone could pick up the ball and attempt to flee for his life; otherwise, the downed ball carrier would toss the ball to the next victim. If this was the first time you mustered up the courage to join the fray, you would be one of the first ones to get “smeared”. Now, I’m sure you’ve asked yourself by now “why in the world would these kids voluntarily go through this pain and anguish during their play time?”. I suppose it’s to show the other boys how tough they were and to establish a pecking order, or to show off for the girls who were pretending not to watch but were totally watching. Or just jousting like wild animals to prepare themselves for real battles in adulthood. I would like to apologize for the name of the activity. It is insensitive and demeaning; however, one could argue that this activity has been around for decades, and the meaning of “queer” was just “odd”, and it happens to complete the rhyme. Even so, I will never use the term except in a purely historical context.

For the fifth and sixth grade, I went to a different elementary school, Glenoaks Elementary, because my mother bought her own house. It was on Newcome Drive, not terribly far from the house on Hillcrest, but it was on the other side of the highway, so it was within a different elementary school’s boundary. My memories of Glenoaks are more vivid than those at Baskin Elementary. The first thing I remember about Glenoaks was that I rode my bike to school, and that the school sat at the bottom of an enormous, steep hill. When I went to school, I would ride down that hill as fast as I possibly could (all without a helmet, of course). Going home was a hellish climb, but I rode my bike all the time so I could handle it. I just remember one morning when I was flying down the hill and as I entered the bottom third of the hill, I heard a car coming up on me. I looked over my left shoulder just to check it out, and I drifted to the right a bit as a natural counterbalance. In so doing, it caused my front tire to rub up against the curb. I went tumbling head over heels into a grassy field. I was lucky in that I did a full 180-degree flip and sort of rolled right through the fall; secondly, I also flew completely over the cement sidewalk and landed in the grass. That nearly scared the daredevil out of me, but on the other hand, I survived; therefore, I proved that I could continue to try to break land speed records on my bike. What could possibly go wrong?

One great perk of our new house was that it was within bike riding distance of a Whataburger. I don’t like mayonnaise or mustard, so I didn’t usually bother to special order a hamburger; instead, I just ordered a large order of fries, for something like a quarter. It wasn’t long before the people that worked there recognized me, and they would just go ahead and fill up the whole bag with fries. I had to navigate a large, busy street on my bike, but it was totally worth it.

My teacher in fifth grade was Mrs. Rambo. No, the First Blood movies had not come out yet. She was very cool and maintained a relaxed but orderly classroom. We had a bee problem in the classroom. We needed to keep the windows open when it was hot, which was a frequent occurrence in South Texas. Bees were everywhere and would randomly fly into the classroom and freak everyone out. I was assigned to be one of members of the Bee Squad – an elite team of courageous, highly-skilled if lightly-trained warriors who were charged with discretely swatting any bees that came into the classroom. The leader of our team, and the alpha male of the 5th grade, was Don Hutchinson, who we naturally called “Hutch”. He already had muscles and hairy legs in the 5th grade. He would try to flirt with Mrs. Rambo, who was excellent at knocking him down a peg, but you had to admire his confidence. In the 5th and 6th grades, our playground activities turned to playing football. We had a group of very good athletes at our school, and we started to ramp up our level of competition. We obviously never played tackle football on the playground (eh hem) because, you know, that would be dangerous. Side note: every day when we went out for recess, one of the male teachers would go out ahead of us and sweep the area between the school building and the playground for rattlesnakes. He had some sort of rod that he would use to pick up any rattlesnakes he saw and put them in a bag. I was happy to take on the bees, but that teacher could have the snakes. Yay, Texas!

I don’t remember the name of my sixth-grade teacher, or anything about the classroom. You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned academics throughout the entirety of elementary school. It’s not because I was bad at school or disliked schoolwork. I was just cranking my way through the academics in elementary school. I was neither challenged nor bored. But now I want to tell you about the best part of 6th grade. We started doing track and field during P.E. because we were gearing up for a city-wide track meet at the end of the school year. It was very exciting! I’ve been pretty stocky my whole life, so distance running was out, but I was a fast sprinter. The fastest kid was, you guessed it, Hutch, who by the end of 6th grade had grown underarm hair and even a little chest hair. No one came close to him, but the competition was fierce for the other spots that got to run the 50-yard dash. I’m pretty sure I snagged the last spot, but I would be able to run in the meet! P.E. was fun because we got to try all the events. I was decent in the long jump and ok but not great at the hurdles, and I didn’t qualify to compete in those events, nor obviously any of the distance running events. Finally, the P.E. teacher busted out the shot put, and I qualified for another event. The cool part about qualifying for the shot put is that you automatically qualified for discus. Did I know this going into the meet? No. Did our school have a discus with which to practice? Also no. It probably would have been too dangerous, anyway. OK, so let’s get to the meet, shall we? We went to a big ‘ol stadium somewhere in the city, and there were about a million kids there to compete in the track meet (or so it seemed).

I think the 50-yard dash was one of the first events, so I got to go down and warm up right away. It was very exciting. I’d seen track and field events on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, so I kind of knew how things worked, at least from the outside in, but it was very cool to be on the track. There were so many kids, they just ran a bunch of heats and took the top three times. Hutch was in one of the first heats, and he blew everyone away. His time would hold up and he won the race. He wasn’t just the fastest kid in our school, he was the fastest kid in the city. Soon it was time for my heat. I ran well – I think I was second in my heat, but I was nowhere near the top three times. I was happy just to participate in that event.Eventually, they called over the shot putters to the throwing area. There were some big hosses in this line. I believe they culled down the herd after every so many throws, and those of us who made it to the finals got maybe five or six throws. When the shouting was over, I finished 6th in the whole city. That was the last position to win a ribbon, so I got a prestigious ribbon. Right after that, they lined us up again and had us throw the discuss. Boy, was I glad they had all that netting! There were a lot of us that had obviously never thrown a discuss before, and they were flying everywhere. On Wide World of Sports, I had observed that you were supposed to spin around in the ring a couple of times and the release it at just the right time to throw it forward.

I had never practiced that, so I decided to replicate my shotput motion as much as possible. Back then, everyone just lunged from the back of the ring to the front and pushed the shot out from under their chin. I decided to do the same front-to-back lunge but hold the discus down by my side and swing it forward from my side instead of pushing the shot from my chin. I was a little worried when I saw a few dudes using the proper spinning technique and get off good throws, but I stuck to my strategy. I wound up getting 5th place in discus, even though I’d never seen one before the meet. It was a load of fun. I hoped I could be on the 7th grade track team in Junior High.

#memoir

[shirecorn]

My mother thought that unicorns were evil the church told her so She took our toys and placed their horns between a pair of blades; and left a hole in every forehead

My mother thinks that who I love is evil the church told her so

My mother thinks that who I am is evil the church told her so

My mother thinks that I am hurting But the church did this to me

My mother thinks she knows me

But I stay out of reach of her arms and the scissors soaked in love that she presses against the parts that make me who I am and calls it healing

#religious trauma #blood #lgbt art #writing #vent #shire screams #shire writes #ocs #bo #yall can reblog this btw if it speaks to you #It's complicated and I love her #let me slurp ur tags and commentary #but she took her scissors to me whenever the church told her to #and took little parts away #many of which she knows now I needed #but some she still thinks are evil #why them; mom? #why does listening to me have a limit #you know you were wrong in so many ways but somehow you can't be wrong here #all my life my pain was never enough for you to change in time to save me #you're trying now #but only in ways that keep you in the comfort of ideology #and not in the world where love becomes a knife #that presses into the parts that make me who I am #and calls it healing

[mrslittletall]

Title: The Crazy Cat Vicar (Chapter 5) Fandom: Bloodborne Characters: Laurence the first Vicar, Gehrman the First Hunter, Laurence' secretary Florence Word Count: 1.712 AO3-Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20989841/chapters/53947672 Previous chapter: https://mrslittletall.tumblr.com/post/189758597959/title-the-crazy-cat-vicar-chapter-4-fandom

Summary: Laurence picks up a second cat who got hurt. She gets introduced to Mick. He has trouble finding a name.

(Author's note: Like I said, the rest of the chapters will most probably be stand alone pieces about how the different cats made it into Laurence' life and cat shenanigans. They probably won't be super long each and I write them whenever I feel like it, so please be patient with this story. I mostly do it in good fun and for cat lovers like me.)

Laurence looked left and right and then down the hallway, making sure the coast was clear before hurrying down the way to his office, a small fluffy white creature was cradled in his arms. Just as he made it to the door of his office and proceeded to think about how to open it with his passenger, he heard the voice of Florence behind him.

“Vicar, what is it that you have there?”, she said in a booming voice and Laurence turned around, the creature in his arms meowing in protest at the sudden motion.

“It's a, um, cat...”, he said.

“I see that it is a cat. Why have you brought it here?”, Florence said, rubbing her temples while sighing. “You already have a cat here. And you won't know if Mick will like this one. This could be only pain and misery...”

“But... but...”, Laurence said and then presented a part of the cat that Florence hadn't been able to see yet. “I couldn't just leave her out there. Look, she's injured, she has a nasty cut on her paw.”

“Then knock yourself out.”, Florence said, knowing that she couldn't stop Laurence anyway. “But let me come with you, in case Mick is in your office so that I can distract him. Also, you seem to need someone to open the door for you.”

Laurence nodded, blushing a bit, the cat had curled itself into his arms again. The truth was, Laurence had fed this particular cat for quite some time now and he had intended to bring her in soon, but not so soon. Her getting hurt just had sped up the process. In fact, he wanted to tell Florence about it before hand, but he had brought her in even when Florence hadn't approved of it.

Once the door was opened Florence stepped through the door and looked for Mick. The black cat was nowhere to be seen so she waved for Laurence to enter who put the white fluff down on his desk, taking a look at the paw.

“Are you going to do a blood ministration?”, Florence asked, closing the door.

“On such a tiny animal? No.”, Laurence said. “Our blood ministrations are adjusted for humans. I will take care of the wound the old fashioned way. Would you make sure that she stays on the table?”

Florence stepped closer to gently hold the white cloud down as Laurence hurried along his office and pulled out various medical equipments. “Shouldn't you let a veterinarian take a look?”, she asked.

“Since I got Mick I learned about typical illnesses and injuries that cats can get and stocked up on equipment.”, Laurence said. Back in Byrgenwerth his focus had been on medicine, he had intended to become a doctor like his parents and so he had confidence in his own abilities to treat a wound like that.

“First, we should cut the fur around the wound...”, Laurence said, picking up some scissors and going to work, white fur soon was littering the table around the cat's hurt paw, then he picked up on a clean cloth and dipped it into a bowl with water and carefully started to rub the wound, which made the cat flinch and hiss.

“This must hurt...”, Florence said.

“You are doing a great job.”, Laurence said and Florence first thought he meant her but when she saw him pet the cat it was apparent that he had talked to the animal.

“Now let's stitch the wound...”, he picked up a needle and got the suture through the eye of the needle, making Florence question how the Vicar was completely unable to sew a ripped piece of cloth together but didn't had any trouble stitching a wound with quick and calculated movements.

“And now we just need to bandage it with some gauze.”, Laurence said and soon the cat's paw was wrapped into a thick layer of it. Laurence cut off the gauze and fixed the end of it to the rest of the bandage before carefully scooping the cat up and putting it on the floor, where the poor thing stayed for a few minutes, tail curled into herself and ears flat on her head.

“Thanks for your help, Florence.”, Laurence said. “I don't know where she got a cut like this. Maybe someone broke a bottle and left the shards lying around.” His gaze darkened. “We should make sure that people don't let their waste lying around cathedral ward.”

“Shall I put this onto the list of topics for the next meeting?”, Florence asked.

“Yes, please.”, Laurence said and kneeled down to observe the cat. “Hey, what's the matter, beauty? Let me see if you can walk like this.”

“I think she might still be shocked.”, Florence said as she headed for the door. “Give the poor thing some time.”

Florence had a point so Laurence sat himself down on the couch and picked up one of his books. After he had read a few pages he could feel something soft and warm pressing against his legs and as he looked down he saw the white cat. He put his book to the side and gently picked her up, laying her down on his lap, stroking through her long white fur.

“I wonder which name I shall give you...”, he said as the cat curled up in his lap and started to purr.

Laurence went through a few names in his head as his hand practically vanished into the thick fur of the cat. Fluffy was the first one that came to mind but that felt far too obvious. He could do better than that. He tried to think a bit more but all the other names he came up with were cloud or cotton and that also felt too much at the nose. Maybe not something that referenced her fur but her colour? Snowball, Snowflake or Blizzard came to mind, but Laurence had to admit, he hated snow and he didn't want to name a cat after a thing he loathed.

While he was still thinking, the cat door clattered and Mick came in. Laurence froze and stopped stroking the white fluff's fur as the black cat came into his direction with a cheerful meow, but he froze too once he saw the new cat. And the new cat raised her head, confused why the petting had stopped and her eyes widened when she saw Mick.

“Oh fuck, I should have told Florence to keep him in a separate room...”, Laurence murmured, his eyes focused on Mick. Mick was a tiny cat, the white fluff pretty much was a third bigger than him (though that could partially be because of her fur), but Mick also was a little brave one. Or stupid one, depending on the context.

And so it was Mick who began to move first and jumped on the couch. The white fluff reacted rather negatively and gave a warning hiss and Laurence already wanted to get up and separate the two cats when Mick came closer to gave the new cat a friendly sniffling.

Though her ears were still flat on her head, the white fluff sniffed back and soon after this first contact Mick sniffed more at her and intensely at the bandaged paw which must have smelled weird for him. The white cat did let it happen and curled herself back in Laurence' lap once Mick was finished with his inspection.

Laurence continued to stroke the fur of the white fluff and observed Mick who did his patrol through his office before coming back to the couch and letting himself fall down near Laurence, pressed closely against his leg.

“I have two hands, who?”, Laurence said and spent a good time getting both cats to partake into a purring competition until he had to get up and sat the white fluff down with a heavy heart.

As Laurence made himself ready to continue working, he noticed the very obvious very long white cat hair on his clothes. With his preference for the black church set, this was bound to happen. He spend a good time trying to get the cat hair off and made a mental note to ask Florence for help with this particular matter the next time he saw her.

The next few days the white fluff and Mick became friends and cuddled with each other, making Laurence' heart mealt when he saw it and her paw started to heal. She seemed to like to climb on Laurence' shoulders and just lay down there, letting herself carry wherever he went. It felt as adorable as it looked like and he could see people smiling at him whenever he carried her around. The only problem he had with the cat, he still hadn't found a name for her.

Now it must have been five days since he had adopted the white fluff and Laurence was walking down the church corridors while she was lying on his shoulders once again, her tail twitching occasionally when he ran into Gehrman, who stared at him and then said: “Laurence, what's that?”

“It's a cat.”, Laurence said, dumbfounded that his friend couldn't see the obvious.

“I know it is a cat! What I want to know is which cat! This clearly isn't Mick!”, Gehrman shouted.

“Oh.”, Laurence said. “I found her a few days ago. She was injured, so I took her in.” He removed her from his shoulders to present the hurt paw at Gehrman. “See, her paw had a nasty cut and needed stitches. I should be able to get the suture out in two days.”

The white fluff meowed in disdain of having been removed from Laurence' shoulders and being presented to the stranger, who simply stared at her with sparkling eyes.

“She's beautiful.”, he said. “Beautiful just like Maria. Take good care of her.”

And without any further ado, Gehrman had rounded the corner without another word. Laurence looked at the cat and held her a bit higher, looking at her face. “Hm.. Mary.”, he said. “I will call you Mary.” (Author's note: The lying on the shoulders I took directly from my own cat, Clara, who always climbs on my husband's shoulders to let herself carry around. She tries with me too but my shoulders are small and so it is more a staggering around while her claws are boring into my skin... ouch!) Next chapter: https://mrslittletall.tumblr.com/post/614300380283699200/title-the-crazy-cat-vicar-chapter-6

#bloodborne #fanfiction #laurence the first vicar #gehrman the first hunter #cats #littlewritesstuff

[lenjaminmacbuttons]

Hope you’re doing okay, I know there’s been a lot going on the past couple weeks. 🌈🌈💛💛

FOOF YOU CAN SAY THAT AGAIN

thank you for the good vibes anon, i love you and it means a lot to me. however unfortunately now im gonna use this to vent dump exactly how much has been going on the past couple weeks off the top of my head. this is actually pretty far from Everything thats happen but im so tired and dont want to think about any of it anymore

my grandma passed away last week. we were prepared for it and we know she’s at peace in a better place et cetera et cetera, her body was all full of restraints & impediments that she doesnt have to deal with anymore and the next time she’s in a body it’ll be all New And Improved and awesome. i missed so much work in anticipation of this that now i can’t get work off on the day of the funeral, so i can still go to it but i’ll have to go immediately to work right from it and have to pretend everythings fine and dandy and nothings going on.

everyone at work Does know there’s something going on however and the two coworkers i have who are actually like i consider them friends mostly they’re all like Hey Im Here For You Talk About Your Feelings Honestly with me and i. dont. want. to talk about my feelings at work. thats not what work is for and i dont like talking about my feelings anyway and i dont want them to ask anymore

the changes to the handbook and the honor code have completely sunk my heart. i had so much hope up until those hideous ridiculous unfathomably transphobic things they wrote and now i don’t feel like i can trust or have hope in ANYTHING the institution does anymore. ive been up all night going back and forth over whether i want to go to church today. or ever again. it’s not bringing me joy. it’s making me feel anxious and depressed and frustrated and alone. i keep seeing people just on the street or on facebook who are so happy and content with the church and whatever it does and i just…i get struck every single time with this thought of “they don’t care about me. they don’t care about any of these problems. they’re not affected personally by it and so they don’t care.”

and then that makes me feel like such a hypocrite because!!! ive been them too for so long!! what makes this moment so different!!!!! why is this the straw that breaks the camel’s back when the camel should have thrown off the whole burden and run to join its friends at the first strike of the owner’s whip!!!!!!

plus it’s making me feel gross about my mormon memes blogs. idk if i can keep running those anymore.

im failing this semester anyway and i keep getting emails about it. i was planning to take a break from school After this semester but ive missed so much class that i just really can’t go back to any of them so i guess im just dropping out right now. as much as i’d love to participate in all the incredible amazing protests going on right now i really really cant be on campus at all without feeling literally physically ill. and my Hope was to do really well this last semester and then submit mission papers and that way i’d know exactly what next to do with my life until i decide what After, and id be able to Get Out somewhere and travel someplace while still feeling like my life has some semblance of structure and direction. however! HOWEVER!!!!!!!!

i’ve been feeling so, so horrible and so worn down and i dont even know where or what my testimony is anymore. but that’s probably a lot lower on the list of Why I Can’t Serve A Mission, because a. i still don’t trust my Local Bishop enough to talk to him about things The Handbook says to b. i am finding it harder and harder and harder to be perceived as female. i never really have dysphoria about my body or my presentation or anything but like, when people say Sister and Ma’am and Miss and Daughter and Hey Pretty Lady It’s Me Your Relief Society President it’s like…that’s not me. that feels gross. and i wear suits and ties to church, have done so for a while and never get any flak for it, and im gradually working up the nerve to maybe start introducing myself as lev or levi instead of lillie buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut. socially transitioning apparently is not allowed.

not to mention my temple recommend expired ages ago anyway. anxiety about bishops prevented me from ever going in for an interview to renew it. i haven’t visited the temple once since before graduating high school. but every time i see it or think about it i long for it so badly and it hurts so much.

and also like, i get that same kinda horrible regretful longing feeling whenever i hear violin music? because i played violin for a few years and then stopped but i still have the instrument because it was given to me by my grandmother. who played it herself until sickness wouldn’t let her anymore and she entrusted it to me and i Stopped Playing but then i hoped to pick it up enough to at least learn how to play her favorite song and aw wouldn’t that be so nice to play that for her on her violin except i never actually got around to printing out the sheet music or practicing At All. and now she’s gone.

and one of the last things she said to me was that she would love to hear my book since her eyesight was too gone to read it so i said i’d record it as soon as i got the right software/hardware to do that and then i never did that either. also i promised alla yalls that book would be Published Published coming up on four months ago now and i still haven’t done that

i took a pair of safety scissors to my forearms as mentioned in a previous post and surprise surprise, the lines have not healed still, it’s getting warmer outside and thus harder to wear long sleeves, and guess what! a while ago on a separate occasion i complained that i kinda wished my self harm scars looked more like the classic cutter lines and Now They Do!! And I Hate It!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and a couple nights ago my little sister saw them and so i told her i got attacked by a spider-pawed bear and fortunately my brother Understands and backed me up like “dang what do they teach in schools these days i cant believe youve never heard of the spider-pawed bears that live in the mountains and are totally normal and real”

and steven universe is ending. that’s a thing.

and like….okay. not everything in my emotions right now is bad. some of it is just complicated. one coworker friend i have recently confessed that she’s had a crush on me for several months now. fortunately when she said this i was able to be honest and say that im not super eager for a relationship right now, im not ready in the slightest to settle down or anything, im still hung up on my high school crush and also dealing with issues from my last relationship, and she replied that’s all perfectly fine and she doesn’t have any expectations and she’s great being friends and we can take things at whatever pace is good

except i also now have a date with said high school crush loosely planned for tomorrow and i told this coworker friend about it and she admitted it’s making her a little jealous and then she said jealous is an ugly word and amended it to Insecure and i feel bad about that

but i also like. am really excited for this date. like it’s not really a for sure romantic capital-d Date and that’s fine, but i haven’t seen this friend irl for so long and ive been missing her so much over this past little while that we’ve been internet chatting and that ive been i guess officially falling back in love with her but i also like, i dont know what her deal is romantically right now i don’t want to presume anything but i really really really am itching to see her

work is stressful. it’s only gonna get more so as weather gets warmer. but we’re getting two new managers with loads of experience and glowing reviews next week. i have hope that they’ll makes things a little lighter.

and there’s also. good things. peridot took off her visor for the first time ever in canon and i saved like 50 different gifs of it to my computer cus it rocked my world. sonic has she-ra toys for the kids meals and i managed to snag a tiny inflatable version of the sword. i’m making cosplays of the tres horny boys from the adventure zone and they’re all very exciting and making things makes me very very happy. i’m finding joy in all the fanfictions i’m writing right now and in talking about dungeons & dragons with my brothers and friends. ducknerva is a very beautiful Good Ending version of marahope which makes me happy and taako is a super effective projection outlet. i bought cupcakes today and they were delicious. and when i think about those good things, when i think about any good thing no matter how small, everything else disappears.

whatever happens happens i guess.

she who lives will see.

#talkyllama #hey if anyone needs tags on posts like these please please let me know asap #i always forget that actual people see the things i post #i dont usually trigger tag cus i dont usually think i need to but if i do i will

[chromecutie]

Not A Ghost - part 19

A/N - Multi-part fic. Colossus x OC where OC has come home after being wrongfully imprisoned in the Icebox. Warnings for whole fic - references and flashbacks to harsh prison environment, including various types of abuse. Takes place shortly after events in Deadpool 2. Whole thing will end up on my AO3 eventually.

Taglist: @emma-frxst  @ra-ra-rasputiin  @holamor ​  @empressme-bitch  @marvel-is-perfection  @hazilyimagine ​ @marvelhead17 @rovvboat @angstybadboytrash ​ @whitewitchdown ​ @master-sass-blast ​ @mori-fandom @mooleche @dandyqueen . Wanna be added or removed? Holla at me.

-------------------------------------

In Rhonda and Piotr’s shared bathroom, Yukio spread her dye supplies across the countertop. She kept a lot of pink on hand for her own coloring needs, but also had small amounts of almost every other bold color imaginable. Rhonda sat on a little stool, tense and seething. That boy Russell had caught her off guard, calling her by her prison moniker as if it was some harmless nickname. It turned her stomach to be called Guestbook in front of her family.

Staying upbeat, Yukio said with a big smile, “I keep asking Ellie when we’ll get more girl time with you, so this is really exciting!” Picking up each of her colors to consider them, she continued, “It’s so sad you’ve been spending so much time by yourself -- I think you’ll feel better spending more time around us.”

“Yeah,” Rhonda said distantly.

Turning to her girlfriend, Yukio asked, “Bunny, will you go get the Bluetooth speaker? Let’s have some music while we do this!”

Ellie hesitated. Yukio only called her Bunny in private. She supposed it was okay to count Rhonda as close enough to “in private,” since it seemed to barely register to her at all. “Yeah, Sugar Bean. Be right back.” As Ellie was walking out, Yukio arranged the dye colors according to her decisions.

“I’ve only known you from pictures,” Yukio said, “and every single one I’ve seen, you have some bright hair color. I think that’s what you’re missing here.” Digging in her pouch of tools, she took out a comb and some scissors. “We gotta do some cleanup first, though.” 

Rhonda frowned slightly, “You know how to cut hair?”

Yukio took in a big breath and pursed her lips before answering, “With all due respect, Mrs. Rasputin, veteran X-Men, I can’t do any worse than this,” she fluffed Rhonda’s hair. It was chopped in uneven chunks. The shortest pieces fell about the right length for a bob, if it was possible to do a bob on one third of her head. The longest sections fell to the middle of her back, but the ends were so damaged it seemed like it would be a better mercy to just shave her whole head and start over.

The reality check stung, but Rhonda couldn’t get mad at Yukio for being right. “All right,” she shrugged. “Have at it.”

“You should take off your hoodie so we don’t get hair all over it.”

Rhonda hesitated.

“If you don’t, it will be super itchy until you wash it, like at least twice,” Yukio insisted, with a pointed look.

With a sigh, Rhonda pulled her hoodie over her head and laid it on the counter. She hated having her prison tattoos visible, and tried not to squirm for how uncomfortable she was.

Ellie returned with the speaker and paired Yukio’s phone. After a few taps, some music started playing--

My lover’s got humor--

Yukio’s eyes shot wide and she beamed, “YES!” She tapped Rhonda on the shoulder, “You’re in for the real treat now, listen!” Ellie smirked and leaned against the wall, watching and scrolling on her phone.

As Yukio snipped and combed Rhonda’s hair, she hummed along to Hozier’s “Take Me to Church.” It was light and atmospheric, while also rich and deep like it was made from all the oldest forces on Earth. Rhonda’s troubled expression softened as she listened. When the song was over, she held up her hand, “Hey...can I hear that again?”

Yukio happily wiggled her shoulders, “We can put it on loop until you want something else.”

Ellie was already tapping the loop buttons as her girlfriend said it. “Told you,” she said simply.

Ellie was right -- Hozier was objectively good. As Rhonda listened, she felt her tension ease in places she hadn’t realized she had been carrying it (or how long she’d been carrying it). The sound made her want to stand in an open field between some mountains and cry...or laugh, or shriek, she really wasn’t sure. The vocals and backup chorus were full of raw emotion and she felt her chest opening up, as if she had forgotten how to truly breathe and this music reminded her.

On one loop of the song, Yukio belted at the top of her lungs, as if the song was made from her own soul. Even Ellie smiled and hummed along, no longer able to hide that she liked it too. 

Clippings of hair ghosted over Rhonda’s shoulders and arms, tickling and itching. She tried not to glance in the mirror, but finally looked up and saw Yukio was almost done cutting a decent shape that didn’t quite touch her shoulders. There were even some shorter pieces in front that she had to admit looked good with her jaw line.

“Are you good with this one?” Yukio asked after the ninth loop of “Take Me to Church” ended. “There’s others on this album you’ll love too.”

With a sheepish little grin, Rhonda nodded. She gestured loosely at her hair. “This is looking a lot better already, thank you.”

Confident and playful, Yukio replied, “I’m just getting started.”

Rhonda eyed the different colors Yukio had arranged on the counter. “Wait, you’re gonna mix these? How?”

Ellie piped up, “It’s better to just shut up and trust her. I’ve never seen a color job from her that wasn’t amazing.”

Fixing her head straight forward, Rhonda tried not to watch what Yukio was doing in the mirror. She felt Yukio’s fingers as she gently ran them through her hair, testing the texture and the way it fell. Yukio slipped on some gloves, and humming along to Hozier, got to work covering Rhonda’s mousey grey-brown hair with something much more vibrant.

--

The women laughed and chatted as they waited for the dye to take, and when Rhonda rinsed it all out, Yukio lent her a blow dryer and some hairspray so she could style it how she wanted. When Rhonda was done, she had volume to make an 80s rockstar jealous -- and now with color an 80s rockstar could only dream of. Near the roots, her hair was a muted teal, melting to bright emerald green, and finally ending in electric yellow. 

“No way,” Ellie breathed, smiling wider than Yukio had ever seen her. “You look so badass!” Slipping an arm around her girlfriend, she added, “You did great, Sugar Bean.”

Rhonda’s lips quirked -- she supposed that with the bright hair, steri-strips covering the nicks on her face, and visible tattoos (including the tear drops) she did look like a young person’s idea of badass. As amazing as it felt to have color in her hair again, Rhonda’s smile faltered looking at the Xs on her arm in the mirror.

“They bother you bad, huh?” Ellie asked. She had her guesses for what they might mean, but for how angry and hurt Rhonda looked whenever someone brought them up, Ellie was afraid to ask anything specific.

Rhonda reflexively ran her left hand up her arm, like she could hide or wipe off the ink with the gesture. “Oh...I mean--”

“Would you get laser tattoo removal?” Yukio asked, guileless.

“Huh,” Rhonda thought a moment, “Doesn’t the laser just make the shape of the tattoo look like a scar?”

Yukio gave an exaggerated shrug. Ellie brushed it off, “Probably hurts more than it’s worth anyway.” She stood beside Rhonda in the mirror, fixing her with a hard stare. “Besides, I think you shouldn’t hide them. Nobody else here tries to hide their scales, or fur, or blue skin. Why hide this?”

“It’s…” Rhonda debated whether she should explain, and realized even if she should, she couldn’t do it. “This is different. It means something different.”

Stubborn, Ellie pressed, “But you’re the only one who knows what it means, right? So fuck what anyone else thinks.”

Russell knew. Wade knew. If Wade knew, Cable might also know. As well as any other telepath. Plus whoever they felt like telling. Rhonda’s stomach turned. “It’s not just me,” she shook her head.

To keep Ellie from poking further, Yukio cut in, “Well, if you feel like you need to cover them up, it’s the middle of summer. It’s too hot to wear hoodies and cardigans all the time.” She turned to her girlfriend, giving her the most angelic puppy eyes, “Hey Bunny? Can you go get something for me?” Yukio whispered in Ellie’s ear and in another minute, Ellie headed out and down the hall again.

Rhonda fluffed her hair and eyed Yukio in the mirror. “You really got her wrapped around your finger, huh?”

Yukio tried to contain her smile, and blushed a little anyway, “Maybe a little. She likes everyone to think she’s so edgy, but I know better.”

Nodding, Rhonda added, “She acts so tough until you get to know her and realize she’s a sweetheart, yeah.” She had learned that herself with the rough and tumble child Ellie had been.

Yukio chewed her lip like she wanted to say something, then suddenly blurted, “You were my favorite X-Men for a long time. I really wanted to be like you...Voltage.”

She hadn’t been called by her codename in ages, and it stirred up a lot of old feelings. And while she wasn’t Ororo or Scott or Hank (or Piotr), it was funny and strange for someone to tell Rhonda she was their favorite. “Why?”

Yukio flicked an electric spark off her fingers, “You were like me. And you had fun hair. And you always did cool poses in all your photos.” She laughed, “Cool poses were a must when I was nine.”

“You had good taste,” Rhonda smirked.

Ellie was huffing when she came back to Rhonda’s room. “I wasn’t sure which one you were talking about,” she said to Yukio with an edge of annoyance, “I had to hold them all up to the light one by one to check.” She handed off a pair of green tights.

Yukio held them out to Rhonda, “These were more opaque than I wanted, but maybe you can wear one leg as a sleeve? So you can cover your arm without being too hot.”

With a thoughtful frown, Rhonda nodded, “We can try it.” They looked around the room to see where Piotr kept scissors these days, and they found them in a container of other office supplies under the little table by the window. Yukio quickly snipped one leg off the pair of tights and twirled it at Rhonda like a big ribbon.

Surprisingly, the leg fit fine over Rhonda’s arm. It wasn’t too loose, certainly wasn’t restrictive, and her tattoos were invisible under the green nylon-poly blend. Not much could be done for the Xs that peeked out of the leg at her shoulder, but she was satisfied with the rest. With the foot still intact, there was nowhere for her fingers to come out, and she flopped her hand uselessly at Yukio. “Help,” she said with an exaggerated fake pout.

Yukio laughed and obliged her. Two more quick snips and Rhonda stretched her fingers and thumb through the slits. Rhonda checked the mirror again. 

What she saw was...tolerable. She could live with a small portion of her ink showing if the rest was covered. Her neck felt bare and vulnerable and she wasn’t sure what to do about it, but her new green sleeve went great with the green in her hair. For the first time in years, she mostly recognized her own reflection. Amazing what a little hair dye can do. Relief eased over her and a smile bloomed over her face. “This looks,” she took a big breath, her smile even bigger, “really good.” She turned and held her arms out. “Thank you!” Yukio quickly swooped in for a tight hug and Ellie eased in as well. The three of them were a tangle of arms and giggling when they heard the bedroom door open.

“Sladkaya, are you in here?” they heard Piotr call. “Wade wanted to visit with Russell, and I finally got him to--” he stopped when Rhonda and the girls came into the bedroom from the bathroom. His mouth fell open, and then pulled into a goofy, lopsided grin, like he was seeing his wife for the first time. Slowly, he crossed the room and just barely touched her freshly dyed hair with his fingertips. “You look…” he brushed a yellow-tipped curl, “you look wonderful, my love.”

As if he had forgotten about his former trainee and her girlfriend, he lifted Rhonda by the waist and kissed her, circling one arm around her and burying the other hand in her hair. 

Yukio quietly squealed, barely containing her excitement. Ellie rolled her eyes, but smiled in spite of herself. 

Suddenly remembering himself, Piotr broke the kiss and set down his breathless wife. He cleared his throat, “Ah, Yukio strikes again, I see.”

Rhonda glanced at the younger girls, “It’s the best color I’ve ever had, for sure.”

Piotr stared, still smiling, and practically speechless, having forgotten he wanted to ask Rhonda about Russell.

Picking up the Bluetooth speaker, Rhonda asked Yukio, “Is it okay if I borrow this? Maybe for a couple days?” Hozier still swirled through her head and she needed to get some place where she could see how to dance to his music.

“You can keep it!” she chirped, gently elbowing Ellie, “I’ve been wanting an upgrade anyway.”

Ellie gave a halfhearted eyeroll, hint taken. She took her girlfriend’s hand and they left the room. Yukio stole one last glance over her shoulder and waved at Rhonda.

Rhonda returned the wave and picked up her phone with the speaker. “Um...do you mind?” she looked at her husband apologetically. “I wanna...go play with something. I might be a while.”

“Of course,” he replied wistfully. 

She grabbed his hand and kissed his knuckles, and in another second she was out the door, walking briskly down the hall. 

Alone, Piotr chuckled to himself and shook his head. The color in her hair added so much. It was the most his wife had looked like herself since coming home from the Icebox.

#piotr rasputin x oc #colossus x oc #yukio #negasonic teenage warhead #not a ghost #hozier #hair dye heals many things #angst #fluff

[noeliareads]

Roses are overrated x Mark Lee

Roses are overrated (Tia and Mark Lee)

Requested by @sweetie-yoongi7

Genre: Fluff

****

“Hey Tia wanna go to the movies tonight?”

“Sorry Johnny but I have to work at the store tonight. We have a wedding tomorrow.” She said as she gathered her notebooks. She offered Johnny a sad smile and left. She had to hurry, otherwise her mother wouldn’t be very pleased if she were late. 

Tia worked at her family business every weekend and sometimes on a weekday if they had a lot to do. Tomorrow, Saturday they had a wedding and they had to do around 10 center pieces, arrangements for the church, the food table, the cake table and a whole lot of other tables. I mean, there were a lot of flowers involved. She arrived at the store, said a quick hello and changed into an old t shirt that she keeps in the office. 

“Hey mom, I’m here.” 

“Oh thank God! Tia I need you to cover the front for me because Sandy left. She had an emergency. Use the main table and please try not to make a mess. I’ll send you the images so you can start making them.” 

“Kay mom.” Your mom gave you a kiss on the forehead and retired to the back. But, you actually forgot one thing. “MOM,” you hollered. “What flowers and what color?” Your mom gave you the answer and you grimaced. You hated those, especially the color. But what can you do? The client gets what they want. You cleared your work space, got the flowers, the greens, your scissors, thorn cutter, many many vases and pots and began to work, 

***

“Son, did you get the flowers I told you?” Mark slowly turned to look at his father and smiled sheepishly. His father rolled his eyes and told him to go to the Riviera Flower shop, the best one in town. It was only 4:30 so it was probably still open. Mark grabbed his wallet and ran out the door. It was his mother's birthday and he had forgotten to buy the flowers after school. He biked to the store, being that the fastest way to get there. Tiny bells chimed as he opened the door. He was invaded by the smell of flowers and the buzz of classical music playing. Some people say they can’t smell flowers but this was a place where there were flowers everywhere. His eyes settled on a girl behind a large table cutting the thorns out of blue roses. He cleared his throat and the girl looked up. What he saw was a girl, a beautiful girl with bronze skin, wide chocolate colored eyes and long straight hair tied up in a ponytail. A few baby hairs were around her face but it was understandable because she was so concentrated in working. ‘She’s beautiful’ He thought. 

Tia felt someone watching her, she didn't hear the chiming bells as the person opened the door but she did feel the stare.

“Can I help you?” She asked as she looked up. It was a boy. A dark haired, tall, lean boy with sharp angular features. Cute.

“Oh! Uh yeah. Um, I need some flowers.” The girl lifted an eyebrow with the ghost of a smile on her lips. Mark laughed nervously. Of course he needed flowers he was in a flower shop. “Yeah, like it’s my mom's birthday and I just wanted like, I dunno like some roses or something.” The girl scoffed. 

“Roses are so overrated.” She blurted out. Mark couldn’t help but stare at her. ‘Why?’ He asked. Tia blushed. ‘Me and my big mouth.’ 

“Everyone thinks of roses when they think about flowers. If it’s not red roses. It’s white ones or pink ones. I mean, there are hundreds of types of flowers out there! ” Mark watched as she ripped out the thorns of a dozen roses with a special instrument, she didn’t even look at what she was doing. It came natural to her. She learned flower names and meaning since she was little. She loved helping around the shop whenever she could. 

“Ok then.” He said. “How about some white tulips.” He smiled inwardly. People usually buy purple, red or yellow tulips. 

“Are you crazy?” She exclaimed. “White tulips mean heaven and eternity. Heaven and eternity = death. Dying, bye bye world!” He shifted nervously on his feet. She was intimidating. 

“Ok then. What do YOU recommend?” She put the rose and the thorn cutter on the table and walked around to the large fridges where they kept their flowers. 

“Mom’s birthday you say?” He nodded. She grabbed a large piece of Kraft paper that was beside her and began to grab some flowers. “Bluebells mean gratitude.” She began, turning around to look at him with a meaningful expression. “Carnations mean love and admiration. Sunflowers mean loyalty and baby’s breath mean everlasting love.” Mark wasn’t paying much attention to what she was saying. He was paying attention to how she delicately grabbed the flowers and arranged them effortlessly, grabbing some greens to add volume and color. Deep into his thoughts, he didn’t notice how she was staring at him with the flowers in her hands. 

He was handsome she thought, very handsome. It was cute when he said ‘like’ 100 times in one sentence. But of course, your sarcasm and sometimes nerdy personality shines through most of the times. 

“Here are the flowers by the way.” You said. Mark snapped out of his daze and thanked you for them. 

“How much are they?” He asked, while he fished for his wallet. 

She waved it off. “Nah, it’s on me.”

“Yooo! No, I can’t.” She smiled. 

“I’m serious. It’s ok. My parents own the store and the coffee shop across the street, so I work for them.”

“Are-are you sure?” 

“Positive!” She beamed at him. And extended her hand. “I’m Tia by the way.”

“Mark.” 

After their exchange, Mark went back home. He couldn’t stop thinking about Tia. He didn’t even acknowledge the praise he received from his parents in choosing flowers. It was her voice, the way she phrased things. The way she didn’t think he was weird for saying ‘like’ so many times. He already got enough from his friends. But it was her, her working hands, the bright colors of the flowers contrasting with the color of her skin. Her, he had to see her again. 

Mark went almost everyday to the flower shop and the coffee shop in hopes of finding her. After about a week and a half he did. He found her in the coffee shop. 

“Mark! Hi!” She exclaimed as she saw him. ‘Oh crap. Was I too obvious?’ She thought. Tia also thought of him constantly. Almost a week after their first encounter, she was working in the back room of the flower shop doing inventory when she saw some bluebells and smiled. It reminded her of their interaction. ‘Ok, Tia. Get yourself together! He’s just a guy.’ 

After some quick conversation she told him to take a seat and that she’ll be out soon. “Can I get you anything?” She asked. 

“Nah, I’m good.” Still she made him a cup of coffee alongside hers and a piece of chocolate cake. They talked for around 2 hours. There were some moments of awkward silence but they were replaced with random topics and his hilarious laugh. His laugh was contagious. Even clapping while doing so. She couldn’t stop laughing and smiling with him. “Oh crap.” They both thought. “I’m in deep.” 

“So, what does baby’s breath mean again?” He asked. They were talking about the meaning of flowers and how she grep up to know about them. She crossed her legs and said without hesitation. “Everlasting love.” 

“Yeah but, is there like a cool story behind it?” 

“Story?”

“Yeah yeah. Like a legend. I dunno, like a hero saves a princess and like they have a kid and like the baby had magic powers and with their breath the baby like made...the flowers?” Tia laughed out loud. 

“OH MY GOSH!” She kept on laughing making Mark’s ears turn red with embarrassment. “Dude, that’s a great story but no. It also means purity and innocence. We use baby’s breath with everything basically. But in terms of like a story?” She paused. “Mhmm. I do know that in some places it’s common to give some of them to new mothers. But other than that it resembles the innocence and delicateness of a baby.” 

“Nice nice.” He kept on quizzing her about flowers, at least the ones he knew the names of. 

“I could...” She hesitated. “I mean, you can come by the store sometime if you wanna know more...”

“YES!” He cleared his throat. “I mean yeah, that’s cool.”

Tia and Mark met every Saturday and Sunday that she worked in the shop. She showed him what she knew about flowers and plants.  She taught him how to make basic arrangements and how to dye flowers. ‘We don’t buy pre dyed flowers.’ She says. ‘Not the same quality.’ Tia’s mom welcomes the helping hand and teased Tia at home about him. After Mark got a hang of the flower stuff he grew to work in unison with Tia. He knew what she was going so he did the other in order to help her out. Shoulders bumped and hands brushed. There were blushing cheeks, reddening ears and giggles (mainly from Mark) every weekend. 

After a few months and coordinated with Tia’s mom, Mark booked the store for the night. He didn’t need flowers because the store was full of them. But he wanted to make sure Tia knew how he felt about her. That night, he asked Tia to be his girlfriend, offering her a bouquet of red chrysanthemums, blue irises and of course, baby’s breath. He knew she loved bright colored flowers and he loved seeing her in those colors as well. 

“Tia, I uh, I just want you to know that I really really, like really like you.” He started. “These past few months I got to know flow--- I mean you. I got to know you.” 

Tia giggled, still surprised that he organized this. And with her mother’s help! “And flowers.” She added. 

“Yeah you and flowers.” He took a deep breath and let it out fast. “Ok, you know what?” He said exasperated. “I really am not good at this. I wanted to say that you are as beautiful and delicate as a flower, you also always smell like flowers.” He stated. “Like, always!” He earned another laugh from Tia. She was really enjoying this. “Tia, my point is. Do you want to be my flower? I mean, my girlfriend?” 

Tia was actually waiting for him to say those words a while ago. She nodded and headed over to hug him, his tall frame towering over her. And just like flowers, their romance bloomed. 

#mark nct #nct mark #mark lee #mark nct 127 #mark imagine #mark lee imagine #mark #nct 127 #nct #sm entertainment #nct u #nct dream

[sundaywhiskey]

on abortion

The Sunday Blunt is a 2020 election survival effort of researched, brief-ish, minimally edited rants on America’s hellish political hellscape and related hell.

I haven’t had an abortion but I can’t think of a time in my life when, if faced with pregnancy, I wouldn’t have gotten one.

I took emergency contraceptive once. Alone in a Rite-Aid parking lot, I flipped the box over in my hands and had two distinctive thoughts—The first was gratitude for access to this true medical miracle. When the condom broke, there was no question I’d take Plan B: that alone was forty dollars I couldn’t spare. The average cost of childcare in California was 45% of my salary, and I’d yet to see the pro-birth stans heading Congress propose socializing that shit. I didn’t even have a savings account.

But more importantly, or more personally, I didn’t want to be pregnant: not then, maybe not ever. My panic disorder thrived on sensitivities and discomfort within my body, and I worried without medication I’d become housebound with anxiety all nine months. I’d lose my job, and thus my health insurance, along with everything else. I’d be without partner: three dates later, the could’ve-been father would leave when he discovered I’m neither competitive nor super into movies. How are those dealbreakers? I do not know. Anyway. I was grateful. A child would have irreparably upended my life.

*

So it goes whenever personhood is threatened, too many brave humans have shared stories to social media about their abortions: the woman whose teenage boyfriend tried to lock her down by poking a hole in the condom, the young girl who wasn’t ready to be a mother. It’s wild, truly, that we demand each other publicly perform emotional labor when science draws the same conclusion: Society conclusively benefits from access to safe, legal abortion.

The Turnaway Study followed for five years two groups of women who’d sought abortions—one group had received the procedure, while the second was turned away because their pregnancy was, according to laws, too far along to terminate—and discovered that women who received abortions were not at greater risk for negative mental health side effects; in fact, 95% of those women were happy with their decision. A second, Finnish paper studying teenagers over seven years yielded similar results. Both studies reported the women who did not receive abortions were less likely to be employed full-time, more likely to receive public assistance, and more likely to live in poverty. The women who received abortions were more likely to pursue higher education.

While it’s nearly impossible to estimate how many illegal abortions were performed prior to Roe v. Wade, calculations of the 1950s and ‘60s suggest the number ranges from anywhere between 200,000 and 1.2 million procedures annually. By procedures I mean with bleach, with knitting needles, with scissors and wire hangers. I mean with staircases. Antibiotics significantly reduced the amount of associated deaths, but abortion still accounted for 200 deaths per year or one-sixth of all pregnancy-related deaths, according to the official reports. Doctors estimate the number was much higher. In El Salvador, where all abortions are outlawed, 11 percent of illegal abortions result in death. That’s 2,000 people per year.

*

—My second thought was quieter, more confounding: “Am I killing a baby?”

I was raised Catholic with an asterisk: my father had abandoned the shtick when his second grade nun-teacher slapped him with a ruler, and my mother enforced only CCD classes and Christmas Eve mass. Our household was liberal, pro-choice—Mom had lost a friend to a coat hanger abortion. But I grew up around a church and I have relatives who dig the church and I once dated a man who spent our four-year relationship disappointed I wasn’t “pure for him,” so I caught the drift: My womb was an incubator. With this pill, I robbed the world of a human. There was shame in my decision.

It’s unlikely I would’ve gotten pregnant. The sex in question had occurred on the seventeenth day of my menstrual cycle; if the sex happened one day earlier, the chances were exponentially higher. One day later: impossible. It’s curious, the way my reproductive system works: almost as though it’s designed to prevent unplanned pregnancy. Where do things go so wrong?

With sperm.

Obviously I wasn’t killing a baby. In the twelve hours since intercourse, if anything happened at all, we’d made a zygote, which is a mischievously adorable word but not a baby. I don’t know when a baby becomes a baby. I don’t think anyone does. When my sister and her partner wanted a child, the two pink lines on a drugstore pregnancy test was a baby. Two days later, when my sister told me about her sweet litto embryo: no question, that was my nephew.

But I imagine us reversed, and those two pink lines are a crisis, a financial and emotional grave. To my sister, the embryo is the reason she searches last minute cross-country flights we both know she can’t afford, books the appointment when I’m too ashamed and afraid, triple-checks I asked someone to drive me. The reason she saves my life.

There’s another asterisk to my Catholic roots: Big, lifetime *Golden Rule* fan. My father wasn’t one for, like, parenting, besides half-jokingly forbidding me from tackle football and motorcycles, and once bending at the hip and looking into my child-eyes and saying this: “I won’t be mad or disappointed about anything you do as long as you treat others the way you want to be treated.”

So I think about that.

I think, what if I hadn’t learned immediately the condom broke. if an unlikely pregnancy occurred. if the morning sickness throbbed against my throat for weeks so I couldn’t leave the house: for the illness and the fear thereof. for the panic attacks. for the unmedicated depression. what if I had to do it alone, if the loneliness rocked my bones like the ocean at shore break. How would I want to be treated if I was scared and alone and faced with a difficult decision?

And then I treat people that way.

[freakypumpkin]

Malec AU ‘First’ Meeting: Echo

My experimentation with Magnus loosing his memories.

An echo fades slowly, and sometimes not at all.

-+-

He came in on a Monday.

It was right after noon. Magnus could see the bankers passing by the shop’s windows on their way to a restaurant for a lunch break. He always envied them because they had the time to go out for lunch. They didn’t have to sit on the steps at the back entrance of a tea shop, trying to open the little bag of sugar for your coffee without spilling everything because you forgot to bring scissors again.

Magnus followed another group of two suits and a dress, all black, walking up the street. He imagined the clean and organized officers they were working in when they didn’t go for lunch, the rustling sound of paper, beeping of telephones, the dull sound of footsteps, especially when somebody wore heels, on a grey carpet. A hint of coffee in the air, mixed with perfume and that bowl of Thai-food, that had been left too long in the microwave.

Goosebumps broke out over Magnus’ arms.

Suddenly he was very happy about his lunch break on the steps at the back entrance of the shop. He could go through their storage, looking at the big peaks of tea, enjoying the sound of their in his head, smelling the spices, that still lingered from when they opened the packages. Magnus wondered if he still had enough tea at home to make it through the week, when the doorbell rang. It was a little silver-colored bell at the top of the doorframe, small and jingly. Magnus adored it. He had named the bell Misty, but for some reason the name hadn’t caught on with his other coworkers.

The stranger, that stepped in, wasn’t a face Magnus recognized from their few regular customers - and he would be very upset with himself if he’d happened to forget a face like that.

“Hey there,“ Magnus chimed, smiling like it was a reflex for him, when customers entered the store. He liked his job, but at the same time he couldn’t help but notice how he sometimes tended to smile at strangers on the street the same way and they would walk a bit faster past him because the were scared he’d try to sell them something.

“Hey,“ the new guy said, his smile a bit unsure and thin veil of fear covering his whole demeanor. He had his hands pushed into the pockets of his jeans, kept pressing his lips into a thin line, released them, pressed them together again and it seemed like his eyes were trying to avoid Magnus without being impolite. „I’m here for … tea. Yeah, I want to get some for my family, my mother sent me.“

“Okay, then what kind of tea are you ordered to buy?“

They stared at each other for a while and the other’s thoughts seemed to be far away, as if there was so much more here and Magnus was blind to every detail.

“Green tea,“ the stranger eventually said, voice soft and his eyes falling to the counter between them. “Something with fruit for my sister and a strong black tea for my mother.“

The words sounded rehearsed. When he looked back up again, there depths in his eyes, that hadn’t been there before. His posture relaxed a bit, tension faded from the air around him. Something was lost and Magnus felt a dull pain in his chest. The stranger smiled, careful, like stretching tender skin. “I need a small package of each tea.“

Magnus felt himself nod and mumbled “Yeah, sure.“ It still took him about five more seconds to get to looking for possible options of tea. They had the wall behind the counters filled with boxes, where they stored the teas, that weren’t pre-packaged. Each box could be packaged out individually. So he did, opened one box after the other, let the stranger smell the different kinds, gave him some input on the tea leaves and where the differences lay. He tried to flirt, he really did, he always did. He liked it. He liked putting that little smile on customers’ faces, make them laugh sometimes, let them leave the shop with a little spring in their step.

But this was different.

The stranger was attractive, he was nice and respectful, patient, too. But flirting felt wrong in this situation, it felt so wrong, that Magnus felt a buzzing on his skin, whenever he would try to go for it. There was something cold between them, a professional distance, that Magnus usually only had with high officials. Not customers. Something was so wrong here and Magnus wanted to leave, he wanted the stranger to finally leave and at the same time wanted him to stay forever.

When he paid for the tea, the buzzing on Magnus skin had gotten so bad, he was ready to take a break the moment the other was out of the door. In a desperate attempt to avoid the other’s face, his eyes, his own gaze fell on the sweater the stranger was wearing. It was a nice sweater, great color choice, too.

“That’s a nice sweater,“ Magnus said before he could stop himself. His eyes were drawn back up by the sound of the sudden breath intake of this strange customer. Their eyes met and the other smiled, soft and warm and elegant.

“Thank you,“ he said. “It was a present from my boyfriend.“

Magnus nodded slowly. Of course he had one.

“Great taste,“ he whispered.

“Yeah, I think so, too.“

The buzzing faded a bit. Not everything seemed to be wrong anymore. Something had become right again and Magnus hated himself for not understanding what it was.

-+-

After leaving the shop, Alec went straight back to the hotel room. He barely noticed the other people around him, almost forgot to press the bottom to his floor in the elevator, and barely managed to open the door to his room. When the door closed behind him, he placed the bag with the tea on the small table next to the coatrack, staring at the floor of the short hallway with empty eyes. He leaned back against the door and slowly slid down to the floor. The last of his energy left his body. He was sad, but too tired to cry and it seemed overdramatic at this point anyway. He had cried enough, spent so many nights doing it. It hadn’t helped to dull the ache in his chest. No hour spent training had gotten had made things easier to bear.

He had been so angry, so sad, furious and desperate and so bloody helpless. Until today.

‚Track him down, look if he’s okay, go back.‘ That had been the plan to put an end to this, to make his peace with the fact, that Magnus’ memories had really been taken. He had been worried, had wanted nothing more than his boyfriend back.

But it was okay now, Alec had made sure of that.

Magnus had a stable job at a nice place.

He had friendly coworkers.

He was living in a town, that had legalized same sex marriage, that had a low rate of hate crimes against the LGBT+ community.

He was allowed to be out and proud like deserved it.

He had a cat waiting for him at home, a little apartment in a good neighborhood.

He was healthy and not in any debt.

And most importantly:

He didn’t recognize Alec.

Alec took a deep breath and let the back of his head hit the door behind him. There had been no need to actually go into the shop, but in the end Alec hadn’t been able to leave the country again without doing so. And maybe, just maybe there had been that little, stupidly naive hope of Magnus recognizing him. But no, of course not. Asmodeus was too powerful, too proud probably as well. He wouldn’t let his magic being broken by something as simple as that.

“You watched too many movies,“ Alec whispered to himself and closed his eyes. In his defense though, his mother had indeed told him to get tea. She probably hadn’t expected him to cross the Atlantic Ocean to get it, but that wasn’t important right now. Isabelle had promised to cover for him, so Maryse would at least not send a search party, because Alec also had turned off his phone the moment he’d stepped on the plane. He would deal with everything when got back.

Alec opened his eyes again.

“It’s okay,“ he said to himself. “It’s going to be okay. I can keep an eye on him from New York.“

The breathing came easier again. The acting in his chest lifted a bit. He might have lost Magnus as his boyfriend, as everything he had been for Alec, but he hadn’t lost Magnus. Magnus, the person, he was okay, he was doing well, and that was enough for Alec. As long as he know Magnus was fine and happy and surrounded by good people, he could was fine with loosing him.

It was okay.

A second of silence followed and then there was a knock on the door.

-+-

Magnus held open the door for the old lady. She stepped out onto the street and then turned back again with that ‘Oh, no, I forgot something‘-gesture.

“I wanted to ask, if you could tell, if I can find a church around here? I want to lighten a candle for my grandson,“ she said an apologetic smile on her lips, which Magnus always found a weird thing to do. Why apologize for posing a question like that? He nodded in understanding and stepped out on the street next to her.

“There is,“ he began and pointed down the street. “If you take that way, and at the end, turn right, you get to an opening, where you’ll find the nearest Institute.“

The woman shot him a confused look as Magnus found himself frozen in place. The almost painful buzzing on his skin returned. His heartbeat speeding up and a part of him understood, but it was so small, that his mind was reeling after all.

“Institute? Dear, I’m looking for a church.“

Magus blinked, but couldn’t tear his eyes from the direction he’d been pointing to. “Yeah,“ he whispered. “But … that’s-it’s the same.“ He shook his head to get himself to snap out of it and cleaned his throat. In an attempt to save the situation, he put on his best winning smile, looking the old lady. “I’m sorry, I mixed up the words, you’ll find the next church down there.“

“Ah, okay, thank you, young man.“ The woman waved at him as she made her way down the street.

Magnus dropped the smile and gasped for air. His heart was beating hard in his chest. There was a sound in his ear, there were colors in front of his eyes, then another pair of eyes, a smile, a voice, a buzzing in his ears. The world around him was tinged in so much brighter colors all of a sudden, sounds came sharper to his ears, the soft breeze felt different on his skin. Everything was cold and clear suddenly. His thoughts raced back to the stranger, that had bought tea before the old lady had come in. The one with the nice sweater. The one with the … there was a line on his throat, there was black on skin, a pattern, a tattoo.

“Rune,“ Magnus muttered.

And then he started running.

-+-

When Alec opened the door and saw Magnus standing in front of him, both hands pushed against the doorframe and breathing heavily, he was frozen in place.

“Magnus?“

Magnus looked up and his look in his eyes was fierce as a fire from hell.

“Alexander.“

There was anger and determination, that Alec didn’t understand and then there was nothing left, but Magnus’ lips crashing against his own and the other’s hands holding his face. One kiss was followed by second, only broken by Alec’s name whispered against his lips and Alec started kissing back. He brought his arms arms up to wrap them around Magnus’ waist as Magnus pushed him further into the hotel room until Alec’s back hit a wall. Their lips were bruised when Magnus eventually leaned his forehead against Alec’s, his thumbs tracing the line of Alec’s lower lip and Alec held him as tight as he could, breathed him in, felt the warmth of his body, telling himself not to cry quite yet.

“I’m going to kill him,“ Magnus whispered after a short silence only filled with their heavy breathing. “I’m going to fucking kill him.“

He opened his eyes and they weren’t human anymore. The illusion of round pupils and dark irises bled away, revealing piercing cat eyes, glowing strong and fierce.

“I’m going to kill my father.“ Magnus placed another, much softer kiss against Alec’s lips.

“For taking your memories?“

The hotel room was dark and empty, filled with so much screaming silence. The air felt electric, a hidden power waking up again. It was velvet on Alec’s skin because it was magic around them. A magic, that had been asleep for too long, not even aware of the chains it had been burdened with.

“No,“ Magnus growled, shadows passing across his skin. “For leaving an echo of my feelings for you.“

Alec narrowed his eyebrows in confusion, but Magnus brushed his cheekbones like he had done so many times before and continued:

“He left an echo. He left enough of my feeling for you to leave me with a longing, the feeling of missing something, but not enough to work out what was wrong, what didn’t work out with potential relationships, what I was looking for. This way I would have been a lifetime supply of pain and longing and unrequited love for him to feed off - that’s what I’m going to kill him for.“

And Alec just nodded. “Okay.“ Then he closed the tiny distance between them. “But not today.“

Today he wanted to be about warmth and love and healing scars.

“Tomorrow then.“

There was a soft echo of Magnus’ special stubbornness in those words and Alec wanted to hear it grow and grow and grow.

#malec stuff #malec #malec au #alec lightwood #Magnus Bane

[ti-infires30x]

Symphonic Dysfunction

Chapter 1

The cavernous walls of the hallway seemed stifling and cramped this morning. Namjoon usually found solace in the sound of his shoes click clacking across the tile, reverberating and filling the empty hall as if the acoustics were built for him. A far cry  from the Performing Arts Center that his father had conducted at, with its slatted panels that shifted and directed the sound offstage as if the world was his music box for just a few minutes. Still, he was grateful for what he had here at the YONSEI. Even if the Auditorium practically rattled,  he would make the best of it. Even if ‘the best of it’ included having his kids play their concert in the hallway outside so they could understand how it feels to hear and be heard. The first hour or so that Namjoon was at school were hardly his favorite of the day but they were definitely moments of silence that he cherished. As an interim conductor of 3 string Orchestras, a full symphony, and his part-time student status as he grapples to juggle his final semester toward his Masters degree in Conducting, he has little time to himself.

Running a hand over his face, he wipes his eyes and lets out a yawn as he finally rounds the bend to the fine arts hall. Why they stuck my parking space all the way over by the gym with the coaches, I will never know. Namjoon made it a point to avoid the coaches at all cost after their altercation over funding in the fall. How many soccer jerseys can one team need that we don’t even have room in the budget for a proper score library? Coach Wonho, a rookie soccer coach who everyone took a shining to because of  his reputation as a former starter for the South Korean Olympic team, assumed upon meeting Namjoon that he was a fellow coach. An easy misconception to adopt largely because of Namjoon’s towering height, youth, and physical fitness, however Mr.Kim was quick to correct his colleague. Ever since Namjoon told Wonho exactly where he could go to find his precious special edition cleats for his team, the two had not necessarily been on good terms.

Regardless, Mr.Kim continued to plow on and was already being thrust into his 2nd semester as Orchestra director for the YONSEI University symphony program. Mrs. Eun Joo had been very pregnant at the beginning of last year’s fall semester and had left on her 3 month maternity leave.  3 months turned into 6 months which turned into her resignation as word spread of the paternity of her child. Wonho walked around like he was the most virile man in South Korea for months afterward. The Dean, of course, caught wind and every member of faculty was greeted at the beginning of the term with a flowery email filled with sheepish wording that said in no uncertain terms: don’t fuck your coworkers. Especially the married ones.

Inadvertent as his employment was, he loved it nonetheless. The chief reason that you could tell that Mr. Kim Namjoon loved nothing more in his life than his job was the smile that could be seen on his face whenever he saw one of his kids. The visible change as his chest swelled with pride, his eyes brightened, and his legendary dimples appeared was infectious.  Each student carried that energy and confidence with them throughout their day because when that pride is directed at you, there can be no doubt in your mind that it is genuine and deserved. Of course, he can only call them his ‘kids’ in his head since in reality, there are quite a few members who are considerably older than he is.

Checking his watch, Namjoon winces at the time. 7:45am. Right on time for sectionals. With a concert date looming, Namjoon decided to buckle down and have the kids lead student taught sectionals for his struggling club students. Led by the Chamber top group, of course, the advanced students would instruct the non-major students who were merely in the Camerata Orchestra for something to be involved in, with drills and practice techniques to level up in their musicianship. As lovely as an idea that Namjoon remains convinced that it was, since its inception about 2 weeks ago, it has gone less than smoothly. The first Monday sectional featured the section leader of the violas abandoning their Little’s altogether upon hearing them screech out the opening chord of their Telemann. That Wednesday, the 1st violin first stand knocked over what had to have been the tiniest freshman girl on campus  in their attempt to rock paper scissor who gets to play the tuning note. Oh, and the poor dear that told Hobi he should ‘lighten up’. I honestly don’t know if she’s going to pick up a bass ever again.

It was now the following Friday and it was time for none other than the cello sectionals. The previous week they had gone fairly well under the guidance of Park Jimin, and Namjoon saw considerable improvement of the Camerata group’s G major 3 octave scales in rehearsal. They were working hard and there was no doubt that the reason for the improvement was Jimin’s skill paired with Taehyung’s sheer magnetic approachability. And his smile, of course his smile. As talented a cellist as Jimin is, Kim Taehyung could make the devil feel comfortable in a church. Of course it helps that many of the freshman girls were absolutely infatuated with him. And with good reason, it must be said.

Fumbling with his belongings  at the big double doors of the Orchestra hall, Namjoon goes red in the face as he drops his keys. Again. He’s had a set of keys for the Orchestra Hall since his sophomore year as a student. He was in the room more than the instructors so Eun Joo-nim finally caved and printed her annoying little try-hard a copy.

His father had told him that he should never do something he enjoyed as a job because it would soon become a chore, however, he was never happier than he was now. The job came with its difficulties of course, he got very little respect from the rest of the staff. Namjoon tried to remain patient with those who condescended to him, he really did. He fully understands how ludicrous and humiliating it must be to have a department head who has only been able to drink alcohol legally for 3 years. At 22, he was the youngest faculty member by a long shot, but that didn’t bug him at all. Having graduated high school at 16, 3 years ahead of his peers, he was comfortable with being the youngest in the room. What made Namjoon uncomfortable was the assumption that he was inherently less than qualified just because of his age. If I’m a shitty conductor, then I’m a shitty conductor but don’t you dare pin that on my age.

“Good morning Mr.Kim!”, the proud bearer of a boxy, bouncy smile swoops down and picks up Namjoon’s keys for him. Namjoon can’t help but melt a little as Taehyung grins at him as if he’s never been happier to see someone in his entire life. Taehyung is blissfully unaware of his slightly dishevelled state, touting sweatpants with one leg rolled halfway up his shin, a massive hoodie that he stole from his older brother, ashen hair that stuck straight up the back of his head, and a sleep-puffed face.

“Good morning Taehyungie,”, Namjoon indulges, as he swings the door wide for Taehyung to accommodate his cello. “And don’t call me Mr. Kim.”

“Yah, Tae! Hold the door!” From down the hall, an undeniably beautiful man cartoonishly speedwalks to the door, laden with a stack of papers that makes the broad man look tiny.

“Good morning, Jin!” Tae chimes once again.

Chest heaving, Jin storms into the office door that sits adjacent to the front entrance of the Orchestra Hall and sets the papers down with a huff.

“Yah! You call this maknae ‘Mr.Kim’ but all I get is “Good morning, Jin”? You should be ashamed, how can you treat your hyung like that? Worse still, your concertmaster? I bust my ass making sure we have scores and assignments and all I get is-” Jin’s half-hearted, bemused tirade is cut off as abruptly as it begins as another boy enters the room, the door yawning shut behind him.

“Kim Namjoon. Kim Seokjin. Kim Taehyung.” His soft voice renders any harsher tone obsolete and the boys stare at the smaller boy blinkingly as he takes up the remaining space in the office. As if answering their unspoken question he stifles a yawn and mumbles, “You’re all “Mr.Kim”.’

The tirade quieted, Jimin rolls his case to his section and begins unpacking his cello. A stark difference from his stand partner, Jimin is the picture of elegance. Or as elegant as a 21 year old man can get. His honey colored hair perfectly in place, dressed simply in a loose collared shirt and ripped dark jeans, Taehyung continuously found himself captivated with the effortless way that Jimin presented himself. I wish I could be that cool. Looking down at his own clothes, he mentally kicks himself for not putting in more effort on a day to day basis. That’s just not where my energy goes,he reconciles with himself, I’m concerned with other things.

Taehyung crosses the hall to the cello locker room, fetches his cello case, and returns to take his place next to Jimin as second chair. Jimin frets over his cello, rosining his bow, tuning and re-tuning, ensuring his music is in the right order. Glancing over at Tae, who is busying himself with plucking out chords in an attempt to play a double stop that he hasn’t yet heard, Jimin grows envious of Tae’s care-free nature. I wish I could just fly into things like Tae does, without a plan. It would save me so much trouble.

All too aware of the silence that has settled in the hall since he stopped his plucking, Tae clears his throat to cut the awkward tension. The most unsettling thing is silence in a place that is supposed to be filled with noise.

“So what are we going over in sectionals with the Little’s today?”

“Tae, you can’t call them Little’s, Jeong Jae-Sun is a year older than us.”

“But. But. He’s so… Little!” Tae pouts. “Have you seen his bow hold? He might be able to knock me out in one punch and outdrink… well, you; but he has the bow hold of a 6th grade girl.”

“Yeah I know Tae, I was tempted to bring thumbtacks to fix our Yoo Soo Jin’s collapsing wrist. If they keep playing like this, they’re going to hurt themselves.”

Jimin falls silent and rubs his wrist, empathetic pain from his own tendonitis flaring at the memory of their poor posturing. I got hurt, and I was playing correctly. Jimin had played violin since he was 3 and while he was training for his audition for Julliard his sophomore year, he worked so tirelessly that he developed carpal tunnel syndrome and couldn’t play for months. The beginning of the end of his promising violin career.

    Namjoon takes long strides out of his office to his place on the podium before chuckling, “First of all, no one could ever out drink our Jiminnie. Second of all, I’m glad you’re showing so much concern for the well being and progress of our kids because we’re having an emergency rehearsal Saturday and I need you there if you can make it.”

    Tae heaves a great dramatic sigh and throws his head back, sinking down into his chair until the neck of his cello is resting on the back of his chair. “And if I can’t make it?”

    Namjoon sobers a bit and faces Tae, “Then I completely understand, but I do hope you can make it. You make the kids more comfortable. They love you.”

    Jimin bends to set his end pin up and then hoists his cello up onto his shoulder, “Besides, what do you have planned? You practically live here.”

    “That’s pretty rich coming from the one that I found sleeping in a practice room at 4am last week.” Tae shoots back in mock defense.

    “Yeah, and what were you doing by the practice rooms at 4am last week?” Jimin wheedles.

    Tae’s face falls when he sees that he’s been beat. ”...Practicing.”

    Jimin’s face brightens into a smug shit eating grin and his posture screams an explicit, check mate.

    Tae, already embarrassed at being outed hangs his head over his cello and absently picks at the rosin build up under his bridge. Face reddening at the anticipation of the ribbing to come, Tae mumbles, “I have a date on Saturday.”

    Jin materializes from thin air next to the podium and begins shouting about how “this girl better not break your heart” and “make sure you stay safe, use protection, you don’t know what these hoes got” and “oh lord, he’s just a kid. Don’t you think you should wait a while to date again?”

    Namjoon raises a hand to silence Jin and melts further at the visibly mortified maknae in front of him. Leaning down to where they meet eye to eye, he smiles affectionately at Tae. “Well, who is it?”

    Tae, grateful for the reprieve in shouting, allows his smile to fall open once more and his cheeks redden in a very different tone as he recalls the object of his infatuation. I can’t believe I got this lucky. Years of pining and I finally got her to say yes to  a date. A real date.

    “Chung So-Young.” Jimin could tell from the lilting way Tae hung onto every vowel in her name as if he were afraid to let go of them, that he was head over heels for her.  

    “Oh, the saxophone player from Jazz Band? I thought she was with Hobi?” Jin pops Tae’s love sick bubble without remorse.

    Visibly pouting, Tae snaps back, “Look, if I swore off being interested in any girls that Hobi-hyung has been with then I would never date anyone. I don’t have many options as it is since Kang Mo-Yeon turned the entire Yonsei English Society against me. And I really like this girl.”

    Jin returns to the office, fuming. Shutting the door firmly behind him, he lasts a good 3 seconds before whipping it back open and marching back to the cello stand. Tae might have been intimidated by the massive man barreling towards him with rage in his eyes had it not been for the knowledge of his intent. Jin comes to a halt and in a deluge of profanity begins cursing anything that has to do with Kang Mo-Yeon and the YES club. “How dare she cheat on you and then convince half of the campus that you’re the jackass?! Tae-Tae?! You couldn’t hurt a fly! You’re a jackass but you’re OUR jackass and if she publishes one more vaguely accusatory article in the English Paper I will single handedly drag her ass-”

    “Jin-hyung.” the honorific coming from Namjoon is enough to give Jin reason to pause. Namjoon jerks his head to the door and the herd of cellists that are gathering around it, waiting for the sectional to begin. “There’s a time and a place. They don’t all need to know his business.” Turning to Tae, he places his hand on top of Tae’s mop of hair and  smiles down at him. “Have fun on your date. Just know that there will be a legion of cellist noonas absolutely heartbroken that their handsome oppa isn’t there to show them thumb position for the upteenth time.” Laughing at the sheepish flush that graces the boys cheeks once again, Namjoon adds, “Oh, and stop giving May Sun private lessons, I overheard her working in the practice room the other day and she knows how to do everything you’re teaching her. She’s been playing dumb to get more time with you.”

    Struck dumb by that information and deaf by the resounding cackle from his stand partner, Tae sits mouth agape like a fish as the floodgates of the door break and none other than May Sun is the first to breach the Orchestra room.

    “Good Morning Taehyung oppa!” a bright girl who is far too well done up for 8am, in a cute outfit, heels, and full makeup, plants herself firmly in front of Taehyung and presents a muffin to him. “I brought you breakfast, oppa! I wanted to say thank you for all of the time you’ve spent with me on lessons this week. Kamsahamnida- oppa!”

    Jimin does his best to choke down his laughter but Taehyung just straight up chokes. Stuttering like his bow in the Dvorak piece, he numbly takes the muffin and, in an attempt to avoid further conversation, stuffs the whole thing in his mouth.

    Namjoon prompts the confused looking girl to unpack her instrument so they can start sectionals, and she scatters to do as she’s told. Jimin leads sectionals in his signature matter of fact style, fixing bow holds now and again. Although he receives less attention borne of infatuation from his pupils, he receives the most respect and attentiveness. Jimin has studied at Julliard and has a reputation as being hands down,  the best cellist in the school, and the most stern. Conscious of his intimidating demeanor in rehearsal settings, Jimin is glad to have Taehyung present to lighten the mood. Jimin is glad for the company but frustrated that this is the one facet of the musical process that he doesn’t excel at. Taehyungie is training to become an Orchestra teacher, it only makes sense that he is a natural teacher. People are drawn to his personality, people are drawn to my music. There’s a reason I’m applying for my Master’s in Cello Performance and not Music Education. Despite his regular pep talk regarding the fact that it is ok to not excel at teaching, Jimin still envies the easy way that Tae corrects the kids with kindness and patience shining in his eyes.

    8:40am comes and goes and students enrolled in the 9am Symphony block class begin to show up. A small boy with shining white hair stalks in without a word and settles into the back row of the 2nd violin section as if he was made for that chair. Somehow willing himself invisible even in the morning light, he fades into the background of the classroom. Tae waves at him from his adjacent place in the Orchestra, furiously mouthing “Morning, Yoongi-ssi!”

    Next to make an appearance was a man with the complete opposite and equal energy as Yoongi. A tall figure entered that exuded so much attitude that he actually sauntered into the room through the side door. Dressed to the nines in an effortlessly cool look of dark jeans, a dangerously low-buttoned collared shirt, and the latest Yeezy’s that color coordinated perfectly with his round tinted glasses and bandana. Every head in the Hall turned to follow his gait to the bass locker as if transfixed by his energy. He appeared aware of but completely unbothered by the attention he was receiving, even smirking slightly as he met eyes with several of the cellists, making them blush furiously.

    Namjoon takes advantage of the pause in productivity to address him from the podium. “Nice to have you back Hoseok-hyung. I trust the Jazz Studies field trip went well and you are returning to us as a more enlightened and sensitive musician.”

To which Hobi grins, scratching the back of his head and stammers something along the lines of ‘Uh… yeah it was, great.”

    Seokjin peeks his head out from the office and shouts, “He went to New Orleans and he studied… jazz? Yeah right, Namjoon. He is returning to us with a higher alcohol tolerance and at least 3 STD’s.”

    “SEOKJIN. NOT the time.” Namjoon pulls out his Director-nim voice that he hides away for special occasions such as these.

    The entirety of the participants of the now long dismissed sectional remain standing in the back, watching the verbal volley with bated breath. Eyes bouncing from Jin to Hobi to Namjoon as if if the contents of the conversation were going to be on their final exam.

    “Don’t you guys have classes to go to? Go on, scatter.” Jimin speaks up, shooing the group away with no regard to his social reputation with them.

    The remainder of the relatively small 20 piece orchestra files in, class begins and they go straight into the Holst Planets movements that they had been agonizing over for months. After Hu Yoon-Ji and Seokjin’s savage ‘discussion’ about whether the Andante Maestoso should start on an upbow or downbow, the final missing seat is filled. Another boy barrels in and as soon as he comes into view he gives the impression that he has grown very quickly in a very short period of time. Not exactly towering in height, but large and muscular, he looks as if he should be on his way to lacrosse practice, not Orchestra. He chucks his bag near across the room and rushes to unpack his violin. Crashing through the rest of the Orchestra, nearly knocking Baek Chi-Young’s stand over in the process, he finally takes his seat next to Jin, a huge smile plastered across his face.

    “Nice of you to join us Jungkook.” Namjoon, says, with only minor sarcasm.

    “Joesonghamnida, Sunbae-” Jungkook attempts a full 90 degree bow from his chair but ends up hitting his head on his stand and knocking his instrument out of tune. Rubbing his head, he looks up at Namjoon apologetically. Namjoon could tell that he had prepared a well thought out apology and excuse to present on behalf of his tardiness but the lump on his head and the humiliated look on his face was all the penance he needed.

    “That’s okay Jungkook. Just tell Coach Wonho that you need to leave soccer practice early next week and I’m sure we can get you here on time.”

    “Yes, sunbae.”

    “And stop calling me Sunbae, Kookie.”

    “Yes, sun-... Namjoon-hyung.”

After running their 30 minute show, once, twice, and spot checking trouble areas, Namjoon finally released the class.

    “Good work today, guys!” Namjoon bellows to the fleeing kids.

    “Get home safe, hyung!” Echoes back from the retreating crowd and Namjoon is sure that it’s Hu Yoon-Ji.

    “With Jin driving? Not likely!”

    “Yah, drive yourself then!” Jin snips back from his position in the office.

Although Namjoon was technically Jin’s sunbae by occupation, Jin is more than happy to point out the 2 year age difference between the two roomates. Jin casts his thoughts back to his freshman orientation. He had waited on pins and needles for his roommate assignment and was shocked when a gangly boy with a jet black bowl haircut rolled in with a suitcase that was wider than himself. Tagging behind were an older couple that he assumed were his parents.

“Kim Namjoon?” Jin questioned, as the boy took in the room with oddly wise eyes.

“Pleased to meet you. You must be Kim Seokjin. You’re a violin performance major, aren’t you?” Dumbfounded by this child’s confidence, Jin merely nodded. Namjoon’s parents rushed in with a distinct air of protectiveness.

“So you’re Namjoon’s roomate? Please take care of him. He won’t be here long so just, while he’s here, can you please make sure he doesn't cause too much trouble for himself?” Jin agreed as noncommittally as possible and then beat a hasty retreat to the hall on the pretense of saying goodbye to his parents. His parents had left hours ago, but he needed distance from the smothering tension in that tiny brick prison. Catching his breath just outside the door he catches snippets of a conversation. Chills ran down his spine as they always do when you know that you’re overhearing something that was never intended for your ears.

“You’re only 16, are you sure you don’t want to take a gap year or two? We can still get a spot in the Engineering camp that offered you a scholarship.”

“Min-ya, it’s not worth it. He won’t listen to us. You’ve been telling him for years to abandon this music foolishness.”

What surprised Jin the most wasn’t the sentiment from Namjoon’s parents, it was more common than not in the fine arts department for students to not have the blessing of their parents. What took Jin aback was the stony silence coming from Namjoon’s side of the conversation, as if he had nothing to say so nothing should be said. That level of maturity from a sixteen year old kid was something unheard of. Even Jin, who had a supportive, if absentee family, snapped at his mother occasionally with his 19 years of experience.

He decided at that point that he would do exactly as Ms.Kim requested of him. He would protect little Namjoon and hopefully learn as much as he can from him. Not that he would ever tell him that.

“Jin-hyung, what time is your Music Theory class today?” Namjoon interrupts.

“I only teach Tuesday and Friday. We can go home for lunch and come back at 2pm for Philharmonia.”

“Excellent!” Namjoon, practically bounces out of his chair, rocking on the balls of his feet. Slipping into his jacket he qualifies, “Do you want to go to Goreul-saem first, I don’t feel like cooking tonight.”

“Namjoon, you haven’t cooked in 6 years.”

“Yah, I cook sometimes! I made ramyeon for you last week.”

“Jinja, fine. We’ll go out. But I know it’s just because of that cute noona that works the register.”

“No, I-” Namjoon panics as he goes to lock the door of the Orchestra room behind him.

“Yah, yah, yah, They serve the same menu at Booreul- saem but you’ve insisted on Goreul the past three weeks. Booreul is closer! I don’t care if you like her, just fucking ask her out already so I can stop wasting my time on it!”

Namjoon scratches the back of his head and stares at the floor. “I guess. Yeah, that’s true.”

“I know! When I have ever been wrong?” Jin slings his arm across the shoulders of his dongsaeng and they marched back down the hallway together.

[miniaturelovercollectionstuff]

Sandra Kay Russell

My Tribute to Sandra Kay Russell Burgess

By her oldest daughter Marilee Burgess (Cook)

When I think of Mom, many adjectives come to mind. She’s fun, energetic, spiritual, multi-talented, loving, has a good sense of humor, and spends her time serving those around her. She is a very Christlike person and I don’t know why I was blessed with such a wonderful mother, but I am very glad that I was.

Mom has always been there for her children. When we were young she would lay on our beds and tell us stories at night. Ifwe had a bad dream or we felt sick we could wake her up, knowing that she would immediately be sympathetic to our plight. I don’t know how old I was but one time I had a bad dream and Mom rocked me in an old pink rocking chair. I remember thinking that I was too old to be rocked but it felt so nice that Ijust snuggled up and enjoyed it.

We are more than just kids to Mom. We have been her friends. Mom has always been my best friend and I can tell her anything. When I came home from school the first thing that I would do was look for Mom. Many times I found her in her room on the floor doing some church project or another. I would lie on her bed and tell her about my day. She was and is always ready to listen.

Mom doesn’t like to go places alone and food often became attached to certain activities. She used to take at least one of us grocery shopping and we were allowed to pick out a candy bar if we went. I also remember sometimes going to Snelgrove’s for an ice cream cone after surviving a trip to Dr. Newton’s office. She had the tradition of taking us to lunch after spending hours school shopping. And of course, we would get malts after a choir concert or school program. We would sit in the car together eating malts and  end up laughing until we cried.

Mom has a sweet tooth and loves to bake. She doesn’t like taking things out of the oven though. She would very often yell down the stairs, “Somebody take the brownies (or cookies or whatever) out of the oven for me!” Mom has a particular fondness for cream cheese. Her favorite dessert is cherry cheesecake and she also enjoys chicken pillows which are rolls filled with chicken and cream cheese. She and Dad had their special nights every once in a while and Dad would bring home Chinese food from the Pagoda. She enjoyed the dinner even though it usually made her sick. She has a sensitive stomach and has to be careful about what she eats.

Mom has certain sayings that she often repeats. If she is trying to turn left in the car and there is a lot of traffic she will say, “The whole town is coming!” If she has lost something, usually her car keys or glasses, she will say, “I’ll give you 50 cents if you find such-and-such for me.” If we asked permission for something more often than not she would say, “I don’t care.” If she’s giving a baby or toddler a bath she will say, “Swim, Swim.” She’ll also put a baby’s foot up to her nose and say, “Stinky feet.” “Spit in your shoe and blame it on you!” is another one of her sayings. She also likes to say, “Whatever!”

Being raised mostly with girls, Mom was very surprised to find herself with five sons. She was always very supportive of their ball games. She would sometimes become a little too involved at the church basketball games. I recall her yelling loudly, “You’re blind ref!” at a game or two.

She taught us how to be good at finding things by saying, “Go get me the scissors, they are somewhere upstairs.” If we couldn’t find something and she had told us exactly where it was she used to say, “If I have to go upstairs and find it myself then you owe me a dollar!”

Mom likes the house to be alive with noise. She loved it when she could walk through the house and hear the TV on in one room, the piano played in another, the radio on in another, etc. It meant that the kids were home with her. I recall that the teenagers sometimes had to tell HER to turn down the boombox.

Mom loves the mountains. I think that she and Dad would live in the mountains if they could. She likes to go camping. She and Dad love having a trailer and being able to use it. When we were young sometimes Dad would just park us up in the mountains and leave us there for a week or so while he went to work. Mom went camping even when she was 9 months pregnant. I recall having to go home because she was having labor pains. She camped with new babies also.

Whenever Mom visits my house there are two things that she must do. First, she has to make chocolate chip cookies with milk chocolate chips. Second, she has to do laundry. One time she came to my house and I had all of the laundry in the house done. So she pulled sheets off of the beds and created laundry so that she could do it. I remember her doing laundry in the middle of the night when I lived at home. Often we would see her lying on the couch waiting for something to wash so that she could put it in the dryer. Whenever I put something in the dryer at 2:00 a.m. I think of her.

Mom has had to work out of the home for several years now, although everyone knows that she would rather be home. She started out as Dad’s secretary for his plumbing business. Then she went on to cutting hair at a home, working in an elementary school and doing various secretarial jobs. When she started working she didn’t know anything about computers and now she is computer savvy. She enjoys increasing her skills and knowledge in that area. Mom also has a thirst for gospel knowledge. She loves to read and study. She has such a strong testimony and a deep respect for the General Authorities of the Church. She really enjoys rubbing shoulders with these leaders as a secretary to one of the Quorum of the Seventy.

Mom is a worrier. She worries about everything and everybody. And if she didn’t have anything to worry about then she would worry that there wasn’t anything to worry about. She has a strong testimony in the power of prayer and has kept many ofus safe by praying for us. She has a strong relationship with the Lord and more faith than anyone I know. She has done many frightening but growing things in her life because the Lord has told her to. She has had many spiritual experiences and is quick to give the Lord credit for anything that she accomplishes. She really appreciates the power of the priesthood and seeks for blessings often.

Mom has spent many years of her life serving the Lord. She is excellent at every calling that she has been given. But l think that she is especially good at teaching. She has taught her children by her example to really go the second mile to do a good job. I don’t know how many times she has had me or one of the other kids help her color handouts, or roll them up or fold them and put stickers on them. I recall setting up rooms, serving refreshments, cleaning up or playing the piano for one of Mom’s various

meetings.

Mom has served in all areas of the church, both on stake and ward levels. She was called to be a primary teacher to Ashley Call who was both autistic and deaf. She learned sign language so that she could teach her and did a wonderful job. She was also a great Young Women’s leader. Once Dad had to ground her because she was out late, taking the girls toilet papering.

Mom has many, many talents. I believe that because she has been so willing to share the talents that the Lord has given her, that he just continues to bless her with more and more. Her greatest talent is probably her capacity to love, care about, and serve others.

Mom likes to be involved in things. She has written plays, skits, and songs. She has spent hours directing stake plays which she somehow dragged most of kids into. She has written many poems and stories, sometimes giving the kids a special story for Christmas. She likes to paint, both crafts and watercolors. She has been in more than one singing group and loves to play the piano when she has a chance. One of the fondest memories that I have with Mom is singing around the piano. We spent many evenings, usually Sundays, with me at the piano and Mom singing her lungs out. I can’t think of anything more enjoyable than singing with Mom.

Mom is willing to do just about anything for her children. Who knows how many haircuts she has given when she has been so dead tired that she can hardly stand? Family is very important to her. Mom loves her grandchildren. She tries to have a good relationship with every one of them. She especially likes it if one of the babies will only go to her Mom has always cared very much about her appearance. She has a lot of energy and used to be a Jazzercise teacher. Having nice clothes is important to her. She is very picky in many ways, especially when it comes to cleanliness. Some of her most common sayings about her appearance are, “I look so fat!” and “l’ve always thought that I had my dad’s skin. I didn’t think that Iwould wrinkle!” Hair color is an issue with her and who can forget the time that she bleached her hair and it turned green.

Mom likes to tell the story about how she was in the musical South Pacific in high school. She had to walk across the stage and she was sucking in her stomach when her teacher told her to stop sucking it in and breathe.

Mom has supported me, loved me, and helped me throughout my life. I love her dearly.I know that she has been there for me more times than I can count. She has done anything from sewing prom dresses and making chicken costumes to daring to fly across the country to be there for a baby’s birth. I will never, never forget that when Matthew died, the first thing I did was call Mom and within hours she was there with me. She just took over the other kids and the household which was a good thing because I was in such shock that I was truly incapacitated. She listened to me when I needed to talk and tried to be strong for me, even though she was grieving herself. Just like the 3 boys who carried the handcart company across the Sweetwater River, I feel that this one act that she did for me should qualify her for the celestial kingdom.

She’s the best Mom in the world and I am so blessed to have her in my life.  Love, Marilee

#Marilee Burgess #Sandra Kay Russell #Story #Humorous #History

[insert-witty-comment]

Continued from Part 1Chapter 15 starts off with Swerdlow getting a job with a food distributor company run by four brothers, all of whom were assholes with Mob connections. They also had him impersonate of them when talking with vendors or to the school of one of their daughters. Anyway, during this time Swerdlow somehow embezzled three-hundred-thousand dollars without remembering doing so, but the handwriting on the checks used was not actually his. He did, however, open some fake accounts at the bank on behalf of the brothers, during which he met a Russian bank teller who knew about his great-uncle and apparently stalked him for a bit.Also during this time, Swerdlow came into contact with a support group for UFO abductees. He arranged the meetings at his house to his wife’s annoyance, and this went on for a bit until “I realized that the support group was an avenue for borderline lunatics to parade through my house”. Ultimately the group leader ended it with this announcement;“She said ‘It’s all Satan. Satan runs through our minds and tells us false stories. He makes his demons look like aliens in order to fool us. I went to my church, they sat me in a chair, and started to pray. Strange voices came out of me and I spoke in tongues.’”The congregation cleared her after this, so she went home and destroyed all of her UFO crap. According to Swerdlow; “I thought she was nuts, even nuttier than people thought I was”. I don’t really think that’s possible, but okay. Also during this time;“I became obstinate and aggressive, especially toward my family and friends. They have all since remarked that I seemed to simply change overnight into a very evil person. Strict with my children, I yelled and screamed at them constantly. I wanted their toys picked up and put away, even while they still played with them. Of course, I now realize that set the future stage for years of therapy for them. Even my own mother started to call me Hitler. At the time, I kind of liked it.”I think you should be the one undergoing “years of therapy” if you think that your mom calling you Hitler is a good thing, Swerdlow. So during this time, a guy with a French accent claiming that he was from Madagascar called him, but he couldn’t remember the conversation afterwards. A week later, a man from the “Real World One” company approached Swerdlow, convinced our hero to give him several thousand dollars to build affordable housing on Long Island’s east end, and then ran off into the sunset with the money, presumably laughing his ass off.After that, the Madagascar guy then tried to con Swerdlow out of his money, but he got arrested for “trying to buy green cards and then propositioning the female prosecutor.” Meanwhile, helicopters were still buzzing Swerdlow’s house, so he called the FAA to complain, and as a result he was notified that he was under investigation by the Federal Postal inspectors the next day. Around this time, a “friend of a friend” recommended that Swerdlow go to see our dear old friend Preston Nichols. He does so, tells Nichols his story, and Nichols offers to give something he calls the “Wilhelm Reich Procedure”. This unlocks some of Swerdlow’s repressed memories from Montauk. Nichols then invites Al Bielek and Duncan Cameron over, and to his horror, Swerdlow recognizes Cameron as the face he saw in his window as a teenager and from Montauk. He is then possessed by a grey who claimed that because Swerdlow was “one of them”, they could claim his body whenever they wanted to. Nichols responded by saying that Swerdlow “was a human being with a soul from God”. The alien called Preston “Pressed On” and cursed him, saying that Swerdlow was needed to carry out his mission. Then another alien literally yanked the first one out, and moved into Swerdlow’s body. This alien identified itself as a Draconian named “Gengeeko” and told them that an invasion force is currently coming to Earth, and that they would use it as a staging point to access the rest of the galaxy, hence the reason why so many alien races are interested in Earth. The alien then warned Nichols against using his equipment or contacting his Pleiadian friends, and proceeded to attack him. Cameron and Nichols restrained him, and the alien said that humans are weak, and that the Draco Empire would protect them in exchange for raw materials and workers. He also reveals to following;“Our leaders were well aware of the impending invasion, gradually preparing the world population via television shows and movies.”Does this mean Stranger Things is supposed to also be seen as preparation for an alien invasion? Well, better start stockpiling Eggos.“Even rulers in some countries were humans with Draco soul-personalities. The reptilian within my body expanded upon his ideas by saying that the United Nations would be the forum for a central planetary government.”The UN as an effective form of government? Now you’re just being ridiculous, Swerdlow.“United States leaders were in league with Draco allies without realizing it. Some of the leaders of this planet have prepared escape plans to Mars where equipment was already being activated, as well as to other planets and moons in this solar system. Mars has a huge underground facility built by the Sirians over 500,000 years ago.”So our leaders are ditching us, of course. “So long, and thanks for all the votes!”The alien finally said that Swerdlow was once an ambassador to his people, and thus his body could be used before leaving his body, after which we learn that unlike every piece of pop-culture depicting them ever, psychics do not, in fact, get nosebleeds from using their powers. No, they get rectal bleeding(seriously). Moving on.Chapter 16 is just about how when Swerdlow went on a cruise with his wife in the Caribbean, he saw a ghostly white woman floating above the bed, dreamed about shooting down an airliner with his mind, realizing that an airliner did crash at the time that dream happened, was exposed to radiation by a passing UFO and cured of his radiation sickness by some greys on the moon.Chapter 17 describes another time Swerdlow used the WR procedure with Nichols and Cameron. Another Draconian named Tubor possessed him and called humans weak and fragile, and explained that Swerdlow had already agreed to serve as a liaison between them and humans in this way, because he was once the Sirian ambassador to them and negotiated a trade deal. He also reveals that the Draco were hanging around Montauk to observe the mind control experiments, specifically those using sexual methods. Tubor was then kicked out by a Sirian named Mishka, who taught Swerdlow how to protect himself from hostile possession. He also stated that he lived on a space station called the Calumba between Earth and Mars to monitor “interference” in this solar system.Over the next couple of months, Mishka, Mishka’s assistant Marshak, Tubor and Gengeeko all used his body to dispense information.“I was given information that the USSR was in league with the Draco and allowing them to use Soviet bases for advance operations. But the USSR would eventually break up into smaller nations and disrupt the agreement. When this happened, I was told that this was a deception to lull the rest of the world into a false peace. The various Soviet governments were closely aligned with each other. When the opportunity was right, the Soviets would pounce on unsuspecting countries. In this way, the Draco had a powerful ally on Earth to do their dirty work for them.”So this is Putin’s master plan? I don’t really know what he would get out of it, but whatever.One night at 2:00 AM, Swerdlow was summoned to his living room where he met Mishka and another Sirian that had human features. This Sirian held up his hand;“’Hello, Father’ he said. Quite shocked, I asked him what he meant. Giving his named as Elsinob, he told me that his age was the equivalent of 400 Earth years. In the mid-1500’s, he continued my soul-personality was a professor at a university in central Germany. At the time, I was abducted by greys. They took a genetic sample from me and sold my sperm to the Sirians who used it in a hybridization experiment.”So Elsinob reveals that he wanted to meet his biological father and that their minds were linked. He also revealed that Swerdlow’s testicles were implanted with a device that increased his sperm production and made him “extremely fertile, and also that the Jews were created as a joint effort between the Sirians and the Draco, and that the Ohaluan Council gave them the Torah as well as their language of Hebrew. Elsinob then told Swerdlow to return to bed.Chapter 18 starts with Swerdlow meeting a blind New England psychic who helped “deprogram” him. However, she started trying to separate him from Cameron and Nichols, and ended lying to him in order to get money from him. She did, however, reunite him with his “twin flame” Mia, who “became my balance in hyperspace” and boosted his abilities, to the point where he could do “absentee healing”, read minds and call up aliens whenever he felt like it. However as a result of his looming sentencing date for the embezzlement charges, Swerdlow became incredibly depressed and tried to kill himself by driving his jeep into a tree with his eyes closed. However, when he opened them, he found that he was driving slowly on a completely different road. After that he became even more depressed and developed anorexia, and tried to slash his wrists with a pair of scissors until his wife guilted him out of it. Apparently, the prosecutor in the case had threatened to send his wife to prison as an accomplice if he didn’t confess to the embezzlement.“No one wanted to believe what I was saying. After my lawyer read a manuscript that I had written about my life, he told me that I would go to prison forever if I published it. He said that I would be labelled an insane man and put into a federal mental institution. Whenever I went to his office, black helicopters literally hovered outside of his window the entire time I was there.”Seeing no way out, Swerdlow kissed his sons goodnight, left a goodbye message for Cameron on his answering machine, and resolved to kill himself.“I thought about the pain and sorrow my parents and children would feel. I realized that my wife would be relieved that I was gone. I had always been an annoyance to her. Besides, I thought that she was having an affair with her boss.”Well that’s… sad. Anyway Swerdlow took a handful of Prozac pills and a bottle of Russian vodka and was starting to fade away when Cameron, Bielek and Nichols practically kicked his door down to save him. They told him that they cared for him, would be there for him and probably had a The Monster worthy hug-out, just with four middle-aged conspiracy theorists/psychics. Sometime after this, Swerdlow underwent another WR procedure and found himself being transported from Montauk to the Middle East right in front of Jesus Himself. A voice in his head ordered him to shoot Jesus, but it turns out that he didn’t shoot Jesus after all! Instead he dropped the gun and ran away, but he knew that Jesus forgave him. Next he appeared at the foot of the cross, and extracted some blood from Jesus’s big toe. When he looked up, Jesus was smiling at him. He then appeared on Mars were he handed the vial of blood over to Cameron, before abruptly coming out of the trance.“I remembered that the blood of Christ was to be used to clone a body with an android brain. A duplicate of Jesus, it would have a government mind! The second coming would be staged!”…………………………………………………Yeah, so how many chapters are left in this? Eight? Fuck.So after this project was completed in the underground Mars base (accessed by a captured UFO in Area 51) the government would use the android-Jesus-clone (did I really just type that?) to control the masses.“The government also hoped to activate the defense systems on Mars and the Moon before the Draco invasion force arrived. This was a race against time. The government needed to have the people of Earth trust them and believe everything they were told. Who more would they trust than Jesus Christ Himself?!”I don’t even……Let’s just move on. So after “the Jesus episode” (as Swerdlow calls it), in Chapter 19 our hero reveals that the survivors of the Montauk Project are acting as sleeper agents, ready to activate at a moment’s notice, whether to form vigilante groups to act against government enemies, establish satanic cults to capture more people for experiments or to prepare for the alien invasion. They were also tested with the Oklahoma City bombing, and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing. He then goes on a tangent about how China is filled with millions of Jewish descendants of refugees from the Roman conquests and that they will eventually join with Israel annihilate “the Moslem fundamentalist countries”, possibly using Sirian laser and sonic weapons.“The Moslem fundamentalists are the only resistance force that would be detrimental to the Draco invaders upon their arrival. Accordingly, the Draco want them eliminated to ensure a smoother transition of power.”Because I guess even space-faring alien races can’t take over the Graveyard of Empires. He also learned that twelve alien races created life on Earth, and that they’re still sticking around the solar system, shooting down any human probes that get too close.Chapter 20 describes how Swerdlow always had the ability to read minds since he was a child, but he suppressed it because no one believed him. Here he explains that psychic powers are not the result of LSD use during pregnancy, metal rods jammed in fetus skulls, sex magick or whatever other stupid crap these books came up with, but instead its all based on your DNA, just like everything else, which could occasionally be opened up in a “Kundalini activation”. In order to fill more pages I guess, Swerdlow repeats his story of how he was abducted and trained by both the aliens and Montauk crew. He also said that the Montauk Boys’ body cells were used to store information (somehow) and transferred his energy to boost a psychic in the chair through the use of a computer. Eventually, he didn’t need the computer anymore and could do it at will, which he used to “ruin the experiments through mental interference”. To change his focus, he was assigned to preparing the other kids ranging in age from four to twenty-five (anyone older was sent to be slaves for the greys because by that point their “mind-patterns” couldn’t be altered). He apparently enjoyed this due to the influence of his former life as a Nazi. However all of this experimentation damaged his digestive and nervous systems and he’s nearly blind and deaf, instead having to rely on perceiving their “energy fields”, auras and mind-patterns. These powers could be amplified by electromagnetic energy from computers, phones and televisions. However, despite these drawbacks, he is incredibly powerful.Chapter 21 is about his sentencing, which was set for February 27, 1992. In exchange for a confession, he was a promised a four month sentence in a “country club prison camp”. However, he was somehow informed that a “major power” was sending a nuclear missile into a “small Middle Eastern country”, and Swerdlow was somehow able to tell the government about the attack. Because of that, his lawyer informed him that his sentencing had been moved up.“Even though I had given him my last dime, this lawyer constantly hounded me for money. Repeatedly, he told me that he would continue to represent me even if I admitted to committing the most heinous of crimes. I just could not understand him. It seemed that the prosecutor, who was his friend, and the government had all teamed up with my wife to drain every last asset from me for as long as possible; then discard me when there was nothing left. I suppose that this is typical of the legal profession.”Welcome to the American legal system, Stewart. So anyway, on the day of his sentencing, Nichols, Cameron, his parents, sister and wife all showed up, and he was sentenced to thirty-three months in a federal prison camp. It turns out that his lawyer lied to him. Swerdlow became depressed again because of this, and his blind deprogrammer was telling him that going to prison was part of her alien friends’ plans. He boarded a plane to Kentucky after his wife yelled at him when he was hugging his kids, and considered jumping on another plane to flee the country when he saw some alien skywriting that convinced him to stay.Chapter 22 is about his experience in prison. So his belongings were confiscated, and he immediately thinks about Holocaust victims losing all of their things in a melodramatic way. He then proceeded to start sobbing extensively. He eventually met the other inmates who immediately assumed that he was part of the Mafia because he was from New York. Most of them were just drug dealers, pot growers or tax evaders and were all very kind. The prison itself was a nightmare rife with corruption and abuse, but Swerdlow became a teacher in a GED program, and ended up teaching the inmates all about auras and mind-patterns. He used his abilities to cure some aliments and do dream analysis. He was constantly on the phone with his deprogrammer, the aliens were sending him telepathic messages and cloud messages (which he was able to erase), and Nichols mailed him. However, the government blocked all the letters, so Swerdlow threatened them over the phone and “caused a small earthquake in Kentucky because I could not contain my anger”. Also, his wife was cheating on him the entire time he was in there with his boss and in fact worked with the prosecutor to imprison him. However, while in the camp, he did learn that the prisons are just models for the New World Order envisioned the future would be like, Japanese banks are a front for US and German money, the US Postal Service is a front for a British bank, foreign troops are trained in the US, and that the AIDS virus was created in an American lab and released in St. Louis, Missouri in 1967. Finally, his fellow inmates informed him that there are indeed groups of organized rebels hiding in the mountains with massive arsenals ready to revolt and conquer bird sanctuaries across the nation!In Chapter 23, Swerdlow is transferred to a prison camp in Pennsylvania. The inmates here are much different.“These prisoners, mostly from the northeast, were unfriendly, arrogant and wealthy. Many were lawyers and this actually pleased me. I felt that they were finally where they all belonged except they were breathing!”That’s…. harsh. Anyway, once again, Swerdlow became a teacher, both for GED and English Second Language for a large amount of illegal aliens from Latin America as well as some Middle Eastern former terrorists. He also taught them about “the truth behind the American government”, which delighted the terrorists. He also wrote a book on teaching GED and ESL, which was quickly taken by the government with his name struck from it. He also met a guy named Peter Filatov here, and you can tell that this was written in the 90’s because they had good first impressions due to Filatov being Ukrainian and Swerdlow being Russian. Swerdlow told everything already mentioned in this book, and they both wrote a book together.It was at this point that Peter Moon sent Swerdlow a letter asking permission to tell his story in the Montauk books. His deprogrammer told him to refuse, but Moon put his name in the acknowledgements of Experiments in Time, which one of the prisoners was reading. Because of this, Swerdlow became a celebrity. Oh, and Swerdlow also managed to charm the “beautiful” female guard who processed the mail into smuggling contraband in for him. He also claimed that he tried to heal actor Dack Rambo of AIDS, but failed because his chemotherapy treatments weakened his heart too much. Swerdlow still talks with him in hyperspace, though.After a letter to a congressman, Swerdlow was transferred to a Philadelphia military base, right next to where the Eldridge was docked. During this time he learned that there are government emergency stockpiles all over the country, and that there was a hyperspace transit system grid across the nation. He also corresponded with NASA to interpret an image beamed from a comet near Jupiter that said the comet would turn Jupiter into a sun, which would melt the frozen moons of Jupiter and Saturn, thus creating more Earth-like planets. In the last six months of his sentence, he was transferred to a halfway house in Brooklyn, which was in the middle of constant gang wars. There, a security guard pressed him for information about UFOs. Swerdlow also stopped talking with his deprogrammer after she started taking credit for his information and talked smack about Nichols and Cameron.Swerdlow gets out of prison in Chapter 24 and gets a job helping mentally-handicapped adults. Apparently this was even worse than prison because he wasn’t allowed to actually treat the patients and the supervisors tattled on everything. He tried to help the patients, but while doing that his wife forced him into the garage while she continued to cozy up with her boss. Here, he became a radionics teacher to heal mind-patterns and used his radionics machines to keep his place of employment calm and healed epileptics. He was advised by a friend to contact a woman in Oregon named Janet Dian, because they had a lot in common.Chapter 25 describes Dian. Swerdlow describes her as looking like a model, having a gentle, angelic voice, and was already married. He was telling her about the Montauk Project when he suddenly had the urge to blurt out that he saw her leaving her husband, moving to New York, marrying Swerdlow and having a child with him. Amazingly, after only one phone call, she was receptive to this plan (really makes you wonder what her husband was like). They apparently lived a past life together and were remembering each other, in which they were both aliens and Swerdlow was a diplomat who was shot down in a fiery explosion a millennia ago. Swerdlow also used his incredible powers to travel through hyperspace in order to bang her literally every night.However, Swerdlow got into a fight with his wife, and she ended up hospitalizing him, which finally convinced him to get a divorce and move back in with his parents. At the same time, Dian was trying to flee from her abusive husband with the help of her mother. They met in New York City and immediately hit if off in a hotel room. Dian used her abilities “to remove an etheric object from my solar plexus”, which was planted there by Swerdlow’s deprogrammer as a means of influencing him. Since then, the deprogrammer has begun a negative attack campaign trashing him. Dian went to her mother’s house in Missouri and informed Swerdlow that she was pregnant two weeks later. Because of this, her mother was kicking her out, so she had to move in with Swerdlow. So our hero gathered his family together to explain the circumstances, and was about to drop the news of her pregnancy when his sister announced it. She found out a week before from telepathic messages received from her dead relatives via Ouija board. She never just never mentioned it until then because… I have no idea.So anyway, the parents are fine with Dian moving in, and Swerdlow discovers that they’re perfect for each other. Finally, we move into Chapter 26, in which Dian finally divorces her dickwad/Lonnie of a husband, and gives birth to boy named Zachary via Caesarean, however much like Swerdlow was as a kid, Zachary is described as “an old soul” that is already incredibly adult. Anyway, Dian and Swerdlow are happy with each other due to being “other-halves” which is different from twin flames because they’re split from the same “Oversoul”. Anyway, the Swerdlow family is living wonderfully now (as of 1998) and Stewart has devoted his time to using his powers for helping others. He invites us to “join me in an effort to save our planet and mankind from destruction.”Finally, we have an Afterward by Moon.“We can be grateful that our current times and moral climate do necessitate labeling of these experiences of an insane individual.”Oh, really?So basically Moon says that love is indeed the key to our salvation, and puts in an ad to hire Swerdlow for a lecture or to practice all of the crazy shit he talked about in this book. Moon also states that Swerdlow is coming out with a new book; The Healer’s Handbook: A Journey into Hyperspace that will cause its readers to “be moved beyond your current horizons and propelled to new vistas of consciousness”, whatever that means. However, looking at that book reveals it be short and more of a guide book about hyperspace and having little to nothing to do with Montauk, so I’m going to skip over it for the next entry in the series, The Music of Time. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with Moon’s words of wisdom;“Whether you are bored, abducted or being strangled by a member of your domestic environment, there is a new reality which awaits you.”Thanks for reading, and Stay Strange.The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time OverviewMontauk Revisited: Adventures in Synchronicity OverviewPyramids of Montauk: Explorations in Consciousness OverviewEncounter in the Pleiades: An Inside Look at UFOs OverviewThe Black Sun: Montauk’s Tibetan-Nazi Connection Overview via /r/StrangerThings

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[benziher]

Do not sorrow

One of the most striking passages, IMHO, in the Bible is found in the Book of Nehemiah, chapter 8, verses 9-11. The Jewish people, on hearing the Law of the Lord, realized their sins and were crying hard. Instead of asking them to pour their hearts out and confess all their sins, Nehemiah, Ezra and the Levites told the people that they should not grieve on that day, as it is day holy to the Lord our God.

If any of them are living today and if they have said something similar to a huge gathering of people who are weeping for their sins, imagine what kind of backlash these servants of God would have received. Especially in Pentecostal circles. Crying, weeping and mourning are considered to be signs of true humility, while having the joy of the Lord is considered to be a sign of someone who does not know what a sinner he is.

A Christian must be filled with joy, because that is what salvation brings to us. If we have truly repented, our sins are forgiven. The love of God is poured into our hearts by His Spirit. Being joyful is not something to be ashamed of.

In our church we have a tradition. We welcome the New Year with a very lengthy service, worshipping the Lord, thanking Him for the good things He has done, for the chastisement He allowed in our lives and praying that the New Year is a blessed one. The actual service starts at 9 pm on December 31st, and ends around 3 am on January 1st. Then we have few cultural programmes and depending on the number of programmes, we finish everything by 4-4:30 am. On December 31st night, we also have a supper around 7 pm. So, the entire time we spend as a church is 9 hours. But most of the time is spent on praising and thanking the Lord.

This year worship was a blessed event for us all. For 2016 was hard on many of us. Many of our believers are daily labourers or those who sell vegetables and make a living. Because of the note ban in India, they are hit hard and are having trouble financially. And, quite a few of our believers were hospitalized this year. To add to that, there is a political turmoil in our state. But for most of the believers, what mattered most was that I was leading the worship – for they had seen me on the verge of death just 6 months back. So, by the grace of our Lord, when I led them in worship, they responded beautifully and the entire service, the presence of the Lord could be felt. Even in their financial straits, these believers were so happy and filled with the joy of the Lord.

Then the cultural programmes started and by the time, the last skit was to be performed, it was 4:45 am and all of us were very tired. But the young men of the church insisted on performing the last skit. And to our dismay, the skit involved showing videos of Christians being beheaded in various parts of the world and being beaten up with rods and so on. The message was: Be joyful, but feel sorrow for those suffering.

To say, the entire church was stunned. The visuals are very gory and the young kids, 2-6 year old ones, were awake and they were watching all these.

I was livid, but instead of lashing out at the young man who was in charge of the skit, I asked him to meet me after two days. It took so long for me to cool off. I called him and asked him why he would do such a skit and show such videos on the New Year morning. He was very proud of what he had done, and said, “Because Christians are not called to be joyful. We should be weeping for those who are suffering.”

Now, it looks so great in paper, but there was one small problem. Most of the funny skits were performed by him that day and it was his wife who led the dance performances. I asked him why he did those things if he was feeling this way. I pointed out that this is hypocritical. But then I asked which of the believers he wanted to feel sorrow that morning.

1. There is this believer in our church, whose daughter is demon-possessed for nearly 10 years now. As a church, we are praying for her deliverance, but in between this believer took her daughter to a psychiatrist and he gave her prescription to make her daughter sleep. Though we all have advised against giving high dosages of medication to her daughter, she keeps giving such high dosages, because she has no other way for her family suffers so much when the young girl is awake. At the age of 25, that girl is incontinent now, as her nerves have become weaker due to the prolonged usage of this drug. That family understands the situation, but they have no choice. Recently when they withheld the medication, she came with the scissors to cut her younger sister’s hair. The entire family is suffering, yet on that day, they all came together, to praise and worship the Lord, and when God spoke to them through prophecy, that they will be delivered soon, the family was filled with joy. So, I asked him, do you expect this family to be sorrow now? He said, no, they are in a severe situation.

2. There is another family. A widowed mother and her daughter. The mother has a serious heart condition, so her daughter could not leave her for long. As a result, she is unable to get a job closer to her home. Their monthly income is a meagre $20, the pension they receive from the government. That is all they have for one month. They have nothing, yet whenever there is a need in the church, they are the first ones to give. And, except in prayers, you do not see them crying. They are always happy, and filled with joy and hope that their situation will change soon. So, you expect them not to feel joy in the presence of the Lord? His answer was again, no, of course.

3. There is another believer. Her husband is a drunkard. He used to beat her up for attending the church, but then now, since his son is also a believer, he does not beat her up. But ever since, their son got married and moved out, he has started troubling her in a different manner. He hates that she reads the Bible at home. So, now what he does is whenever she comes to the church, he would urinate and defecate the entire house, so that she could not keep her Bible anywhere. This has been happening for last few months. Even in this new year, he has done it again. Once she lost her patience and shouted at him. He beat her up so badly, when she came to the church, flesh was hanging from the wounds. Now, she is filled with the joy of the Lord and you want her to be sorrow?

For everything, there is a time and a place. It is sad that Christians do not see the sufferings of their fellow believers as worthy of sympathy. It is very sad that being filled with the joy of the Lord is considered to be a bad thing.

May more and more Christians be filled with the joy of the Lord for that is our strength. May the Lord deliver us all from evil. Amen.

from Do not sorrow

#Do not sorrow