#i realize I'm like five days late to this but i digress

[giftedpoison]

yo pjo fans come get your author what the fuck was that post about palestine and israel. (i say this as if I'm not also a fan of the series)

(Like on one hand I'm glad he recognizes it is a genocide and that the palestinians deserve to be free. But this entire section is horrid:

"The only real solution is treating each other like equally worthy human beings, and negotiating a peace that allows all parties a chance to live in security and dignity, with hopes for a future that does not include bombs and rockets and gunfire. This means security and support for Israel, yes. It also means a secure Palestine which is allowed to get the international aid and recognition it needs to build a viable state.

Do I think that will happen? Unfortunately, no. Humans are simply too selfish, too ready to blame “the other” for all their problems, too ready to dehumanize, though I also believe, perhaps paradoxically, that most people just want to live their lives in peace and have a chance for their children to have a brighter future. The problem is when we don’t allow other people to have those same hopes and dreams — when it becomes a false choice of us versus them." )

^ yes that is the link to the post in question. I think you can already see a less than tasteful element to the post (which i actually just noticed)

#like #i just cannot even #he then says he'll continue to write books that will give young readers joy and that he will continue to refuse to demonize any group of #people and that he will continue to call for less violence not more #but how he plans to do that when in the opener he says he is not on social media at all and only posts about his projects and books #I feel like the first paragraph is mostly fine if not a bit neutral for admitting earlier that the Palestinians were being genocided #but to follow that paragraph immediately with the second one? oof #rick riordan #palestine #pjo #israel #free palestine #pjo series #i could expand upon my thoughts on this but just read it for yourself on his page it's not great #i realize I'm like five days late to this but i digress #like he does so much for diversity and is hosting POC authors under Riordan presents but sir #massive L take from him #completely negates how all over the world people are fighting for palestine #people are actively calling in to their reps and donating and protesting and posting about it like crazy to get Palestine help #but no “humans are selfish” #shut the fuck up its the imperialist governments that are selfish that are funding this actually

[horselessheadperson]

Thoughts on The Matrix (1999) after transitioning

As anyone who consciously lived through the nineties probably has, I must have seen The Matrix (1999) at least five times. I suddenly realized the other day that hey, in the few years since I last saw it I went through a medical and social transition, why not watch it again and see what all the "trans allegory" stuff is about?

First off, I personally don't really put that much stock in the coincidence that the most important plot device in the film is a red pill, while feminizing HRT in the nineties also came in the form of a red pill. Lilly Wachowski has also said in interviews that they didn't consciously have trans themes on their minds when they made the movie. Things that matter in stories just generally happen to be red. It's the natural color of plot devices. You don't see Adam and Eve being tempted by a golden delicious in religious imagery. See also: red herring. I digress.

Being out as trans myself now and having gone through something of a process of radicalization made me approach this picture completely differently. I've heard people interpret the central pill-related question Neo is posed with as a covert question of "do you transition or not?" - but to me, it feels more like: "do I assimilate or not?"

When a person grows up with a certain level of outward privilege in a society that caters to them, as many white people do, they tend to interpret the world we live in and the structures that govern it as generally friendly. This is obviously a bit of a generalization, but in that position of privilege doctors tend to believe and quickly help you, government officials don't generally doubt your version of reality, and so on - you get used to the trappings of the privileges you have. However, many late-realized queer people do go through life with a general feeling of unease at all of this, and a subconscious awareness that all may not be as it seems. Many trans people describe a feeling of noticing their otherness before they could name it (and often having others notice that as well, and a certain level of difficulty fitting in).

When your metaphorical egg starts to crack it often becomes exceedingly clear that you were right, your privilege - such as you had it - was conditional, and the world is a lot less friendly than previously thought. This isn't even necessarily a trans or even exclusively queer experience, we could also be talking about any other experience that might radicalize a person (for me it was going through medical gatekeeping and state-sanctioned poverty during my transition). Anyone going through a realization like this is going to be faced with a simple choice - do I pick the option of working as hard as I can to fit in, in other words: do I take personal responsibility for being an outlier, or do I fight back?

Not every marginalized person is an activist and they don't have any obligation to be, but in my personal experience a lot of day to day choices do revolve around this paradigm. As a queer disabled person, for instance, I'm faced with a lot of highly personal choices as I navigate the world around me: do I reclaim this slur for myself, do I bother asking for accommodations, how do I interact with our community and history, how do I approach intersectionality, who do I vote for if at all, how safe is it for me to come out here; I could go on. And I think in a lot of these decisions you kind of have to choose which pill you take, every day, for the rest of your life.

#I also think that the fact that this isn't exclusively and overtly a trans allegory but more of a general statement on marginalization #is why this movie is so easily co opted by any dickhead with a persecution complex #please note that I didn't read any other criticisms on this movie #this probably is not an original line of thinking at all #I mean this is a common theme in a lot of genres of fiction #the matrix

[desertfangs]

“honestly if DA hadn’t sent me an anon about one of them I was ready to pull it and call it a loss”

DON’T YOU DARE 🤧 but also imma cry that fic is so special and sexy and bittersweet and I can’t recommend it enough! You go in expecting smutty goodness (which you WILL find) and end up openly sobbing five paragraphs in. Seriously if you’re a bookverse Armand/Daniel fan and haven’t read this one, what have you even been doing with your life!? Mandatory Devil’s Minion reading imho 📖

This current trend of passively consuming media is slowly killing fandoms and fandom content creators. I’ll never not do my part but it’s so disheartening to see so many incredible fics with such depth and understanding of individual characters and dynamics with like… less than 10 comments on ao3. That shit kills the spirit fr xoxo DA ❤️

PS Daniel sitting out the entirety of BC2 because he was too busy playing The Last of Us is laying me tf out and I’ll be thinking about it often 💭

DA!! Thank you so much!! You are honestly a treasure and a gift to this fandom and I know we all appreciate your messages so much! 💖💖

None of us thinks we're owed ANYTHING but like... I came up in fandom in the 90s and 2000s, where people were sharing stuff in newsgroups and on forums and then livejournal. It was a community and everyone interacted with each other and shared their thoughts and commented on fics! Fics launched whole discussions and more fics about similar topics. Now it feels like fandom is so isolated, and people put creators in some separate box where they will consume what they create but not dare interact. And it's weird! We're all just part of fandom, flailing around and trying to have to fun.

Now there's this social media like button culture where people (not just in fandom) will leave a like and move on and that's fine except it doesn't feel as personal and creates this lonely atomosphere. It's so passive, as you said, and as someone who's spending a lot of their free time and brain power crafting fics because I'm excited about the characters or an idea and I want to share, putting it out there and getting nothing back is so demoralizing.

And then of course there's the insecurity. Most writers have it in spades so when we post something and the response is... lackluster... the first thought is often "Well, apparently this one sucks." It creates all kinds of doubt! And then if you're me, sometimes you feel stupid for posting at all and wonder if you should take it down. (I talk myself out of this and then more comments come in and I feel better - although lately comments are hard to come by after the first couple of days a fic is live!)

But I digress. It's just this whole thing and it's weird because no one owes anyone comments or compliments, but creating into a void is depressing and unsatisfying and it's going to lead to people not bothering to share what they make. And that's a bummer, because fandom is all about sharing and conversing and having fun as a group. Otherwise I can just tell my headcanons to my cats, who are always happy to listen.

But you always do your part!! I love your messages and they always make me feel like I've succeeded. So thank you so much again for your kind words! I really am proud of that fic and I hope people will start to realize that a quick comment is worth so much to fic writers. It doesn't need to be elaborate!

And LOL yes, I love the idea of Daniel being so busy battling digital zombies that he's just.. not involved in the last book. Armand calls from time to time and Daniel talks him off a ledge and then fights his way through another zombie-infested building. 😂😂😂 This is my current theory and I'm sticking to it.

#da you are amazing thank you!!! #dungeon anon #fandom #answers in the desert

[dearlordsanta]

Focus

A while back, I posted about being back in school after not being involved in, or even wanting, further education. I felt like I've continued to grow professionally and personally to equal anyone who had gone to school four more years than I have (under the assumption the person in question only has a BA/BS). For example, I have peers that have degrees that I am much more efficient and more successful in my job performance than they are. Yet, they would have a leg up when getting a promotion because of that piece of paper. Frustrating, yes, but that is life. I digress.

I have been struggling to focus lately on almost everything I try to do. My mind is going in a thousand different directions. I didn't realize how close to the edge I was teetering until last week.

Last week, I was supposed to leave for five days to go visit some friends. It's the first time away that was not planned around a funeral in four years. I needed a puppy sitter. So, about a month in advance, I lined up someone to watch my dogs while I was out of town. Then, less than a day before I was scheduled to leave, my puppy sitter backed out. My backup puppy sitter also said they were no longer available, and I was unable to find a replacement, so I had to cancel my plans. Then, I was told that my company was no longer contracted with the website I see my therapist through, and I can't afford to keep doing it on my own dime, plus my health insurance won't help me cover it. So, I either need to start over or be done. On top of that, I found out my rent is going up $300 this year. I can't afford to stay here and I can't afford to move yet either. Meaning I have to overpay to stay another year while I plan on moving away. Probably to another state again. I'm completely lost. I have no idea what I'm going to do.

Whenever I sit down to focus on school, I can't. My mind wanders, and I keep re-reading the same sentences without absorbing them. This is the first class that has scheduled so much reading per week. Usually, that isn't an issue for me, but while I'm reading everything gets fuzzy and I can't focus. The only thing I've been able to focus on is a game. I haven't been able to focus on reading for pleasure, listening to music doesn't help, and watching a movie or a show isn't helping either. I feel like my brain is fraying at the edges.

If I can't focus, I can't get anything done. I've got too much to handle to lose my grip now.

On a brighter note, after four weeks of 16-hour sleeping days, not a lot of eating (causing him to lose over 20lbs) my husband is starting to rebound. So, here's hoping for a good long stretch of good days! He could really use it and, forgive my selfishness, but I could use it too.

#journalventing #wifeofadiabetic #caregiver #gastroparesis #type1 #chronicfatiguesyndrome #rebellionsarebuiltonhope #Focus #SometimesThoseWhoWanderAreLost #Lost #StandAlone #PowerOfOne #Selfish

[aphroditestummyrolls]

okay okay, i'm super curious about the "The Big Porn™️" and the "sleeping" for your tog wips and the "have you heard?!" and "a moment's peace" for spartacus!!! 👀👀

HELLO FRIEND! I’m using this to procrastinate Gaining Heart Chapter five! 💕👍🏻

Okay— The Big Porn™️ is an old Joe/Nicky piece (I mean... all my tog stuff is Joe/Nicky, but I digress). I have a Return to Malta series called To Be At Home, and it follows a loose theme of times throughout the day (they don’t all take place on the same day hahaha it’s more like The Vibes suit each time of day). Feed My Soul is in the morning/daytime, Kissed by an Angel is in the late afternoon, and All the Time in the World is in the sunset/evening. The Big Porn™️ is the nighttime component. It’s LONG. And unlike all the other pieces in the series, which are focused on lavishing Joe with affection, THIS is about Nicky. I write a lot of bottom!joe, but this is bottom!nicky, and it’s hinted at in a piece I wrote called Waking Dreams! 👀 Sleeping is a oneshot of Joe/Nicky in the early days. Nicky watching joe sleep when he’s just discovering his love for him. I wrote it a long time ago, and it was about halfway done when the discourse train fired up. I abandoned it because I lost faith in my ability to write early Joe/Nicky. Here’s a little snippet, though ❤️ maybe I will finish and post it one day!

Yusuf always slept while Nicolo took the first watch. Always.

When they had first journeyed out together— beyond enemies, but not quite friends— it had been a bone of contention. Yusuf had huffed, grumbling about Nicolo needing rest too, and the equality in switching on and off between who took first or second watch. Nicolo insisted that he was accustomed to unorthodox resting habits, that he was a light sleeper, more likely to be ready to fight. Yusuf slept like a bear, he said. He had tried to wake him up enough times to know.

That was the reasoning he kept to, still. Even after all these years. Even if it wasn’t quite true anymore.

It wasn’t as if it was a lie. Nicolo did sleep rarely and lightly, and Yusuf did sleep as if practicing to outlast the winter— but somewhere along the line between penance and some, more individual type of care, Nicolò found that he watched his companion more than he watched the shadows.

Have YOU HEARD?!? (That’s literally how I wrote it) is an Anastasia au for Nagron. I don’t know if it’ll ever get written, but it’s near and dear to my heart 💕 Scrappy little urchin Nasir with amnesia, unaware of his lineage and getting by in the streets of St. Petersburg with sex work and house work and any other type of work; Agron and Duro are a pair of German con men who keep getting stuck behind the Russian border every time they try to leave. They end up befriending a trio of defecting soldiers— Spartacus, Gannicus, and one who had once been close to the Royal family (Crixus). Agron can’t resist a good con, and when he hears the story of the lost prince, they make a plan to get them out of Russia, and a TON of money for their travels. Enter Nasir. And he and Agron falling in love on the way to Paris, while Nasir starts slowly recovering his memories and all of them realizing he truly *is* the lost prince. Annnnnnd A Moment’s Peace. This is my background idea for why Nasir would have accompanied his Dominus to the mines (because like, WHY??). It’s a very sad story, that he tells to Naevia in a quiet moment where they first forge a real friendship. It’s overheard by Crixus and Spartacus, and it’s from Spartacus POV.

“Sleep evades you as well?” His voice was gentle as he spoke, and Naevia’s shadow turned head to look at him.

Her breath trembled, and she only nodded woodenly. “How fares your wound?”

He shrugged, “Nearly healed— thanks to you, and the others.”

“You’d never have received it if not for me,” was only reply. Naevia’s outline held a fine tremble, her hands clutching at the step between them.

“A mistake I’d happily repeat, even to my death.”

“You admit it was mistake, though?” Naevia’s voice was tight. Crixus’ body seemed to tighten along with it, his teeth grinding almost audibly.

Nasir’s shadow only shrugged again, “Tactically, logically—yes. But, your presence is a blessing from the gods, and a testament to your strength.” From the lips of any other it may have sounded disingenuous, but Nasir was not. He shone in the light of the moon, fixing his dark gaze on Naevia. “Even knowing the mission was certain death, I couldn’t leave you in that place.”

“I am a stranger to you, Nasir.” She scoffed roughly, but it sounded only like a sob, “What would you know of my strength?”

Thanks for the questions! It’s been a while since I popped in on these pieces. It feels good to share about them, even if they never get posted in full ❤️

#the old guard #spartacus #nagron #joe x nicky

[onetrainscifi]

Whoo. That pilot was--a lot to unpack. Parts of it were definitely 😬 *cringe* but I also find myself grateful that the network recognized its potential and liked the heart of it enough to bring on a new creative team.

Like, reading all the slides with Cleo I realized what I'd been missing in Zarah-this pilot really stressed the loving relationships of the murdered man's family and actually let Cleo react to his death while our Zarah told Layton a grand total of ONCE that Sean Wise was 'someone she loved' but then never mentioned/mourned him (or her other partners who just? disappeared?? They were led away in handcuffs, were they ever released? Were they drawered? Did they blame Zarah and therefore just never return to the home they'd shared? What side did they take in the rebellion? Like, what happened to these people?!) again. And from that moment on her character seemed so untethered--so unattached to the rest of what was taking place because she had no emotional center. This great, traumatic event that should have been both her character motivation and kept her tethered to the action/investigation was just kinda--swept to the side. Like, if we had gotten a Zarah who was more like Cleo, who pestered Layton, regardless of their thorny past, for updates on the investigation and had to be the rock for her mourning family and who stood solidly with Miss Audrey in righteous anger for the blue-eyed firstie who did this horrible thing--I would've enjoyed her so much more! And Ugh! Jinju and Till being supportive and cute From The Start(!) was 😍. Just--the fact that the focus on healthy love and affection happened to be centered on a polyamorous family and a lesbian couple was great.

But there were other things in the Pilot that seemed so-tonally different and just questionable. Like maayyybe making Layton a chronole 'stoner' was an indicator that parts of his character were drawn not just from the hero Curtis in the movie but also Namgoog, the security specialist. And mayyybe they weren't trying to be completely blind to the fact that their black protagonist deserves as much heart and conviction as his white counterpart in the movie, but. Yikes. Making him addicted to chronole and so...morose/spaced out all the time robs him of that drive and conviction that would make me believe any of the Tailies would rally behind him. Our Layton is a go-getter, a man of action and this guy in the pilot was...not. So...props to Graeme for making our Layton so much better!

But also--WHY would they choose to stress to us that Osweiller is a footballer JUST to freeze his foot off? In both the show and film the limb removal scenes really hammered home how cruel the HUMANS on the train chose to be to each other. And the freezing of the cattle car itself should've been enough to remind us the world outside is treacherous and inhospitable--they didn't have to try so hard to show us that any act of kindness or altruism on the train is futile. Like after seeing THAT, what the hell could possibly help move Till in the direction of choosing compassion and justice for the Tail?!

But I digress-I think the areas I'm most grateful for change were in regards to our season 1 powerhouses, Layton and Melanie. And some of it was so subtle but made SUCH a difference, like pilot Melanie's quirk was tapping her acrylic nails against her teeth--a sign that 1) she's perfectly happy reaping the benefits of 1st class life and 2) she's always thinking/conniving/SCHEMING. But OUR Melanie has a habit of rubbing her neck when she's stressed--as if THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD/HUMANITY IS ON HER SHOULDERS. Pilot Melanie is also uppity and shows up early to catch people off-guard. Our Melanie is quiet and studious when we first meet her-gauging the situation, letting Layton and others reveal their hand first-and she shows up late/after the main players are already gathered BECAUSE SHE HAS TO BE EVERYWHERE. But honestly I think the change I am absolutely most grateful for (aside from pretty much everything, lol. Like, I canNOT IMAGINE Alison Wright as Lilah instead of Ruth. And letting Miles actively seek the engineer apprenticeship to help the rebellion instead of having Layton(?) who is neither this child's father nor his active mentor (literally all they do is wrangle rats together in the pilot) make that choice for him WITHOUT his actual mother's consent was clearly a stroke of genius. As was just...not focusing so much on cow 18. Like. We get it. They're like animals crammed together in a cattle car. There is no reason to make so many Holocaust references in the first five pages of the script. There are other, far less jarring ways to convey human suffering and misery on this fictional show about a manmade Armageddon. -_-) is the ommission of the shady magistrate as part of the leadership/inner circle/cult.

Having him and that other guy making the decisions/embodying the ACTION of those decisions moving forward if this pilot had been their opener would've really detracted from the heft of Melanie's secret--like in the finished product, we have Melanie behind the curtain, an engineer by trade who clung to this cruel/unfair system all for the sake of keeping the train, the thing she built and the hope it represents, ALIVE and moving. It was a choice that didn't feel like a choice. A necessity. And yet she was changed by it. The mask of Wilford is harsh and she has to become harsh. She wears all these hats and leans on others when she has to (like Ben, Jinju, etc) or when a situation is truly dire, but there is no room for doubt that it is HER decision at the end of the day. She's the one who saves the train over and over when mechanics fail. And she's the one who decides to commute LJ's sentence. The Wilford mask/veil has allowed her the freedom to make these absolute decisions without oversight-so SHE alone bears the brunt of the consequences. There's no one else to blame, which made for some of the most delicious drama on the show when that secret was brought to light. How Melanie related to individuals (like Ruth, Layton, etc.) and how she related to the passengers as a whole was suddenly, VIOLENTLY, upended and allowed for really tense character moments.

And we wouldn't have gotten that if they had kept the shady magistrate stepping in to try to strong arm Jinju and others into doing the cult's will.

Like, maybe it could've panned out in a satisfying way but I will never forget how excited I was when we got the "I have the train" exchange in the first episode that revealed it was a WOMAN at the helm. A smart, cunning, hard to read but delightful to watch woman who'd been hiding in plain sight, in a uniform that screams 'subservient' and 'service' but had been popping up continually in places and spaces that seemed better suited to the men running the investigation and security/murder squad-this woman is shown to be in charge of it. ALL of it. The good (the beautiful aquarium, life in perfect balance, etc.) AND the bad (the Tail and it's horrors). THAT moment was really the one where I thought "I'm hooked. I wanna see where this goes." And so I'm so glad they cut the magistrate - and cult, honestly - out.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble! Thanks for sharing that pilot stuff! It has given me much to think about! :)

Breaking this down into parts again here we go!

1. Yes!! Exactly!! Cleo was given so much depth and room to grieve and have that actually be part of her storyline unlike Zarah. So I did really like that.

2. They made Layton SO much better good god. Like. Thankfully they improved his character.

3. I don't honestly know?? Like maybe to show what it does to humans?? No idea.

4. Y e a h exactly. We all love an unhinged woman but pilot Melanie was...yikes. Like...she genuinely seemed so happy to be in 1st class and have this power to be Wilford's chosen hospitality worker and scare people. And Alison Wright as Lilah would be so cute though, I wanna see it akdjsksi

5. YEAH THE MAGISTRATE GUY IS JUST REALLY NOT IT. He is not who we want he's just?? Seemingly one of the second in commands in Melanie's cult, which is odd but oh well.

#snowpiercer #snowpiercer tnt #asks #snowpiercer pilot

[lokirupaul]

Lokiru Paul : Jason Sudeikis Is Having One Hell of a Year

Jason Sudeikis Is Having One Hell of a Year

He got famous playing a certain kind of funny guy on SNL, but when Jason Sudeikis invented Ted Lasso, the sensitive soccer coach with the earnest mustache, the actor found a different gear—and a surprise hit. Now, ahead of the show’s second season, Sudeikis discusses his wild ride of a year and how he’s learning to pay closer attention to what the universe is telling him.

BY ZACH BARON, GQ

PHOTOGRAPHY BY HILL & AUBREY

July 13, 2021

Shirt, $188, and tie (worn at waist), $125, by Polo Ralph Lauren. Pants, $255, by Aimé Leon Dore. Watch, $10,200, by Cartier.

On the day that he wrapped shooting on the second season of Ted Lasso, Jason Sudeikis sat in his trailer in West London and drank a beer and exhaled a little, and then he went to the pitch they film on for the show—Nelson Road Stadium, the characters call it—for one last game of football with his cast and crew. There's this thing called the crossbar challenge, which figures briefly in a midseason Ted Lasso episode: You kick a ball and try to hit not the goal but the crossbar above the goal, which is only four or five inches from top to bottom. And so Sudeikis arrived and, because he can't help himself, started trying to hit the crossbar.



Jason Sudeikis covers the August 2021 issue of GQ. To get a copy, subscribe to GQ.

 Shirt, $228, by Todd Snyder. Shorts, $480, by Bode. Sneakers, his own. Socks, stylist’s own. Watch, $6,300, by Cartier.

Confidence is a funny thing. Sudeikis has been riffing on it, in one way or another, for his whole professional life—particularly the comedy of unearned confidence, which he is well suited, physically, to convey. Sudeikis is acutely aware of “the vessel that my soul is currently, you know, occupying”—six feet one, good hair, strong jaw. He's a former college point guard. On Saturday Night Live, where most of us saw him for the first time, he had a specialty in playing jocular blowhards and loud, self-impressed white men, a specialty he took to Hollywood, in films like Horrible Bosses and Sleeping With Other People. He became so adept at playing those types of characters, Sudeikis said, that at some point he realized he'd have to make an effort to do something different. “It's up to me to not just play an a-hole in every movie,” he said. In conversation he is digressive, occasionally melancholy, prone to long anecdotes and sometimes even actual parables—closer, in other words, to Ted Lasso, the gentle, philosophical football coach he co-created, than any of the preening jerks he used to be known for. But he can definitely kick a soccer ball pretty good.

So he's up there trying to hit the crossbar, and he's got a crowd of actors and crew members gathering around him now, betting on whether he can hit it. And he's getting the ball in the air, mostly, but not quite on the four-to-five-inch strip of metal he needs to hit, and the stakes are escalating (“I bet he can get it in three.” “I bet he can get it in five”), and after he misses the first five tries, Toheeb Jimoh, the actor who plays Sam Obisanya on the show, says, “I think he can get it in 10.” Then Sudeikis proceeds to miss the next four attempts. But, he told me later, “there was no part of me that was like, ‘I'm not gonna hit one of these. I'm not not gonna hit one of these.’ ”

Like I said, confidence is a funny thing. You have to somehow believe that the worst outcome simply won't happen. Sometimes you have to do that while knowing for a fact that the worst outcome is happening, all the time. “It's a very interesting space to live in, where you're living in the questions and the universe is slipping you answers,” Sudeikis said. “And are you—are any of us—open enough, able enough, curious enough to hear them when they arrive?” This sounds oblique, I guess, but I can attest, after spending some time talking to Sudeikis, that everything is a little oblique for him right now. He had the same pandemic year we all had, and in the middle of that, he had Ted Lasso turn into a massive, unexpected hit, and in the middle of that, his split from his partner and the mother of his two children, Olivia Wilde, became public in a way that from a great distance seemed not entirely dissimilar to something that happens to the character he plays on the show that everyone was suddenly watching. “Personal stuff, professional stuff, I mean, it's all…that Venn diagram for me is very”—here he held up two hands to form one circle—“you know?”

Shirt, $195, by Sid Mashburn. T-shirt, $195, by Ralph Lauren. Vintage pants from The Vintage Showroom. Belt, $2,500, by The Row. His own sneakers by Nike x Tom Sachs. Socks, $18 for three pairs, by Nike. Pendant necklaces, $2,100 (tag), and $3,000 (bar), by Tiffany & Co. Jacket (on bench), $498, by Todd Snyder.

Anyway, Sudeikis hit the crossbar on the 10th try. “It's a tremendous sound,” he said of that moment when the ball connects with the frame of the goal. He'd done what he knew he would do. Everyone on the pitch was cheering like they'd won something. It was, for lack of a better way of describing it, a very Ted Lasso moment—a small victory, a crooked poster in a locker room that says Believe. “There's a great Michael J. Fox quote,” Sudeikis told me later, trying to explain the particular brand of wary optimism that he carries around with him, and that he ended up making a show about: “ ‘Don't assume the worst thing's going to happen, because on the off chance it does, you'll have lived through it twice.’ So…why not do the inverse?”

Watch Now:

10 Things Jason Sudeikis Can’t Live Without

Ted Lasso. Man—what an unlikely story. The character was initially dreamed up to serve a very different purpose. Sudeikis first played him in 2013, in a promo for NBC, which had recently acquired the television rights to the Premier League and was trying to inspire American interest in English football. The promo was the length and shape of an SNL sketch and featured a straightforward conceit: A hayseed football (our football) coach is hired as the football (their football) coach of a beloved English club, to teach a game he neither knows nor understands in a place he neither knows nor understands. The joke was simple and boiled down to the central fact that Ted Lasso was an amiable buffoon in short shorts.

But Sudeikis tries to listen to the universe, even in unlikely circumstances, and for whatever reason the character stuck around in his head. So, in time, Sudeikis developed and pitched a series with the same setup—Ted, in England, far from his family, a stranger in a strange land learning a strange game—that Apple eventually bought. But when we next saw Ted Lasso, he had changed. He wasn't loud or obnoxious anymore; he was simply…human. He was a man in the midst of a divorce who missed his son in America. The new version of Ted Lasso was still funny, but now in an earned kind of way, where the jokes he told and the jokes made at his expense spoke to the quality of the man. He had become an encourager, someone who thrills to the talents and dreams of others. He was still ignorant at times, but now he was curious too.

In fact, this is close to something Ted says, by way of Walt Whitman, in one of the first season's most memorable episodes: Be curious, not judgmental. I will confess I get a little emotional every time I watch the scene in which he says this, which uses a game of darts in a pub as an excuse to both stage a philosophical discussion about how to treat other people and to re-create the climactic moment of every sports movie you've ever seen. It's a somewhat strange experience, being moved to tears by a guy with a bushy cartoon mustache and an arsenal of capital-J jokes (“You beating yourself up is like Woody Allen playing the clarinet: I don't want to hear it”), talking about humanity and how we all might get better at it. But that's kind of what the experience of watching the show is. It's about something that almost nothing is about, which is: decency.

In the pilot episode, someone asks Ted if he believes in ghosts, and he says he does, “But more importantly, I think they need to believe in themselves.” That folksy, relentless positivity defines the character and is perhaps one of the reasons Ted Lasso resonated with so many people over the past year. It was late summer, it was fall, it was in the teeth of widespread quarantine and stay-at-home orders. People were inside watching stuff. Here was a guy who confronted hardship, who suffered heartbreak, who couldn't go home. And who, somehow, found his way through all that. Someone not unlike Sudeikis himself.

“If you have the opportunity to hit a rock bottom, however you define that, you can become 412 bones or you can land like an Avenger. I personally have chosen to land like an Avenger.”

Sudeikis likes to say, in homage to his background in competitive sports, that there's no defense in the arts. “The only things you're competing against, I believe, are apathy, cynicism, and ego,” he said. This is a philosophy of Sudeikis's that predates Ted Lasso by many years, though you wouldn't necessarily have known it until recently. He grew up outside Kansas City, in Overland Park, Kansas, a “full jock with thespian tendencies,” as he once described himself. His uncle is George Wendt, who played Norm on Cheers. “He made finding a career in the arts, in acting or whatever, seem plausible,” Sudeikis said. But mostly he was drawn to the camaraderie of athletics. When Sudeikis first tried his hand at professional improv, in the mid-'90s, it was through something called ComedySportz, a national chain with a fake competition angle, teams in sports uniforms, and a referee. Brendan Hunt, who co-created and costars on Ted Lasso, initially met Sudeikis in Chicago, he told me. Sudeikis had traveled the eight hours up from Kansas City to do a show: “Suddenly there's a beat-up Volvo station wagon, like an '83, and this is '97, I think, and these two guys get out, all bleary-eyed, and wearily change into their baseball pants. And one of them was Jason.”

Sudeikis had gone to community college on a basketball scholarship but failed to keep up his grades, and he eventually left school to pursue comedy. For a while, he said, his sincere aspiration was to become a member of the Blue Man Group. He got close. “They flew me out to New York,” he said. “That was August of 2001, right before 9/11. And I got to see myself bald and blue.” (In the end, he wasn't a good enough drummer.) By that time, he was living in Las Vegas with his then partner, Kay Cannon, doing sketch comedy at the newly formed Second City chapter there. “Ego,” Sudeikis told me about this time, “that gets beaten out of you, doing eight shows a week.”

Eventually he was invited to audition for Saturday Night Live. “I didn't want to work on SNL,” Sudeikis said—he'd convinced himself that there were purer and less corporate paths to take. “At a certain point in your comedy journey, you have to look at it as like McDonald's,” he said. “You have to be like: ‘No. Never.’ ” Then he got the call. “It was like having a crush on the prettiest girl at school and being like, ‘She seems like a jerk.’ And it's like, ‘Oh, really? 'Cause she said she liked you.’ ‘She what?!’ ”

Suit, $4,860, by Tom Ford. Vintage t-shirt from The Vintage Showroom. Suspenders, stylist’s own. Shoes, $1,535, by John Lobb.

Sudeikis auditioned, of course, and was hired, in 2003—but as a writer: “It was like winning a gold medal in the thing you've never even trained for. You just happen to be good at the triple jump, and you really love the long jump.” He wrote for a couple of seasons, but he was unhappy—Cannon was still in Las Vegas, and Sudeikis missed performing. Finally he went to Lorne Michaels, to ask for a job as a member of the cast. “He had the best line. I go, ‘I had to give up two things I love the most to take this writing job: performing and living with my wife.’ And on a dime, he just goes, ‘Well, if you had to choose one…’ ”

At Saturday Night Live, Sudeikis often channeled the same level of cheerful optimism and forthright morality that he'd later bring to Ted Lasso, but audiences didn't necessarily notice it at the time. One of Sudeikis's most famous and beloved early sketches on SNL as a performer is 2005's “Two A-holes Buying a Christmas Tree”—Kristen Wiig and Sudeikis, chewing gum, oblivious to their surroundings, terrorizing Jack Black at a Christmas tree stand. It's a joke about a very familiar form of contemporary rudeness; it's also a riff on a certain kind of man who speaks for the woman next to him, whether she wants him to or not. And people laughed and moved on to the next bit, but to this day Sudeikis can tell you about all the ideas that were running through his head when he created the sketch with Wiig. “That scene was all about my belief that we were losing touch with manners,” he told me. “And yet it's also about love, because he loves her, and that's why he interprets everything for her—she never talks directly to the person.” But, he said, sighing, “once you start explaining a joke or something like that, it ceases to be funny.”

Sudeikis brought this type of attention and care to the movies he began acting in too, like the workplace comedy Horrible Bosses, even if it was lost on most of those who watched them. “That movie, Horrible Bosses, is riddled with optimism,” he said. “The rhythms of that movie, of what Jason Bateman and Charlie Day and I are doing, are deeply rooted in Ted Lasso too. But people don't want those answers. They want to hear the three of us cut up and joke around.”

So that's what Sudeikis did. He got used to a certain gap between his intention and how it was understood. During his time at SNL, his marriage fell apart. “You're going through something emotionally and personally, or even professionally if that's affecting you personally, and then you're dressed up like George Bush and you're live on television for eight minutes. You feel like a crazy person. You feel absolutely crazy. You're looking at yourself in the mirror and you're just like, ‘Who am I? What is this? Holy hell.’ ”

For a time he became a tabloid fixture. He remembers “navigating my first sort of public relationship, with January Jones, which was like learning by fire. What is the term? Trial by fire.” In a 2010 GQ article, when confronted with a question about rumors that he was dating Jennifer Aniston, he sarcastically responded that she should be so lucky. “And obviously I'm fucking joking, you know?” Sudeikis said. But back then, he treated interviews like improv—Yes, and—and that could create misunderstandings. Asked once on a podcast about what people tended to get wrong about him, Sudeikis responded, “That I was in a fraternity—or maybe that I would be.”

To that point, Hunt told me, “He's much less the assumed fraternity guy than you'd think.” But Hunt said he also understood where the impression came from: “I don't know where he learned it necessarily, whether it was from his parents, or his basketball coaches, but he exudes an easygoing confidence. And it's easy to hang with a guy like that. But some people are also like, ‘Fuck that guy,’ intrinsically.”

Shirt, $188, and ties (worn at waist), $125 each, by Polo Ralph Lauren. Pants, $255, by Aimé Leon Dore. Shoes, $782, by Alden. Socks, $15, by Smart Turnout. Watch, $10,200, by Cartier.

When he won the Golden Globe, Sudeikis gave a dazed speech while wearing a hoodie, sparking glee and speculation about his mental and physical states. “I was neither high nor heartbroken,” he said.

Shortly after Sudeikis and Wilde got together, near the end of his SNL run (he left the show in 2013), Wilde made a joke during a monologue that she read at a cabaret club about the two of them having sex “like Kenyan marathon runners,” and Sudeikis spent years answering questions about the joke. “The frustrating thing about that is that Olivia said that in a performance setting,” Sudeikis said. “It wasn't like she just was saying it glibly in an interview.” He described the experience of growing into celebrity, and confronting other people's misperceptions of him, as a disorienting one. “You're just being tossed into the situation and then trying to figure it out,” he said. The picture of him that was circulating wasn't exactly the one that he had of himself. But he didn't fight it, either. “You come to be thoughtful about it,” he said. “But also try to stay open to it. I don't ever want to be cynical.”

So he tried to stay open. But it wasn't until Ted Lasso that people really saw the side of him that comported with the way he saw himself. Last year, as it became clear that the show was a hit, he found himself answering, over and over, some version of the same question. The question would vary in its specifics, but the gist of it was always: How much do you and this character actually have in common? Sudeikis told me that over time, in response to people wondering about his exact relationship to Ted, he developed a few different evasive explanations. Ted, Sudeikis would say, was a little like Jason Sudeikis, but after two pints on an empty stomach. He was Sudeikis hanging on the side of a buddy's boat. He was Sudeikis, but on mushrooms. Sometimes, in more honest moments, he would say that Ted is the best version of himself. This, after all, is how art works: If it was just you, then it wouldn't really need to be art in the first place. And so Sudeikis learned to separate himself from Ted, to fudge the distance between art and artist.

Except, he said, after a while, every time he tried to wave off Ted, fellow castmates or old friends of his would correct him to say: “No.” They'd say: “No, that is you. That is you. That's not the best version of you.” It's not you on mushrooms, it's not you hanging off a boat, it's just…you. One of Sudeikis's friends, Marcus Mumford, who composed the music for the show, told me, “He is quite like Ted in lots of ways. He has a sort of burning optimism, but also a vulnerability, about him that I really admire.”

Hearing people say this, over and over again, Sudeikis said, “brought me to a very emotional space where, you know, a healthy dose of self-love was allowed to expand through my being and made me…” He trailed off for a moment. “When they're like, ‘No, that is you. That is you. That's not the best version of you.’ That's a very lovely thing to hear. I wish it on everybody who gets the opportunity to be or do anything in life and have someone have the chance to say, ‘Hey, that's you. That's you.’ ”

And if he's being honest, that's the way he feels about it too. “It's the closest thing I have to a tattoo,” Sudeikis said about Ted Lasso. “It's the most personal thing I've ever made.”

Sweater, $398, and shirt, $95, by Polo Ralph Lauren. Pants, $255, by Aimé Leon Dore.

On the first Saturday in June, Sudeikis flew with his children, Otis and Daisy, from London to New York, where he owns a house in Brooklyn. “Brooklyn is home,” he told me simply. While filming the first season of Ted Lasso, he'd had the house renovated—there was black mold to get rid of and other changes to make. “So Olivia and the kids had to rent a lovely apartment in Brooklyn Heights. But it's not home. It's someone else's home.” Saturday was the first time Sudeikis and his children had set foot in their own place in two years. “The kids darted in,” he said. “Last time Daisy was in that house, she slept in a crib. So now she has a new big bed. It was hilarious. I walked up there after like 15 minutes and both rooms were a mess.”

He and Wilde, he said, no longer share the house. They split up, according to Sudeikis, “in November 2020.” The end of their relationship was chronicled in a painful, public way in the tabloids after photos of Wilde holding hands with Harry Styles surfaced in January, setting off a flurry of conflicting timelines and explanations. Sudeikis said that even he didn't have total clarity about the end of the relationship just yet. “I'll have a better understanding of why in a year,” he said, “and an even better one in two, and an even greater one in five, and it'll go from being, you know, a book of my life to becoming a chapter to a paragraph to a line to a word to a doodle.” Right now he was just trying to figure out what he was supposed to take away, about himself, from what had happened. “That's an experience that you either learn from or make excuses about,” he said. “You take some responsibility for it, hold yourself accountable for what you do, but then also endeavor to learn something beyond the obvious from it.”

In the first season of Ted Lasso, the comic premise of the show is revealed to be a tragic one: Ted is in England, far from home, doing something he doesn't know how to do and probably shouldn't be doing at all, in order to give his failing marriage space to survive. When the character's wife and son visit, in the show's fifth episode, his wife tells him, “Every day I wake up hoping that I'll feel the way I felt in the beginning. But maybe that's just what marriage is, right?” It's a wrenching moment that also gives new meaning to the show: Ted Lasso's heart is big, but it can also be broken as violently and as easily as anyone else's. By the end of the season, Lasso is divorced and renegotiating his relationships with his now ex-wife and son.

The first season of Ted Lasso had already been written—had already aired—by the time Sudeikis found himself living some aspects of it in real life. “And yet one has nothing to do with the other,” Sudeikis told me. “That's the crazy thing. Everything that happened in season one was based on everything that happened prior to season one. Like, a lot of it three years prior. You know what I mean? The story's bigger than that, I hope. And anything I've gone through, other people have gone through. That's one of the nice things, right? So it's humbling in that way.”

And in fact, the seeds of Ted's heartbreak, Sudeikis said, went all the way back to a dinner he had with Wilde around 2015, during which she first encouraged him to explore whether Ted Lasso could be more than just a bit on NBC. “It was there, the night at dinner, when Olivia was like, ‘You should do it as a show,’ ” he said. They got to talking about it. Sudeikis asked why Ted Lasso would move in the first place, to coach a team he had no real reason to coach: “ ‘Okay, but why would he take this job? Why would a guy at this age take this job to leave? Maybe he's having marital strife. Maybe things aren't good back home, so he needs space.’ And I just riffed it at dinner in 2015 or whenever, late 2014. But it had to be that way. That's what the show is about.”

I said to Sudeikis that I thought that while it was common for artists to put a lot of their lives into their art, it was less common that they end up living aspects of the art in their lives, after the fact.

“I wonder if that's true,” he replied. “I mean, isn't that just a little bit of what Oprah was telling us for years and years? You know, manifestation? Power of thought? That's The Secret in reverse, you know?”

But…if we're being honest, is that a thing you wanted to manifest?

“No. No. But, again, it isn't that. It wasn't that. And again, that's just me knowing the details of it. Like, that's just me knowing where it comes from, where any of it comes from.”

But he acknowledged it had been a hard year. Not necessarily a bad one, but a hard one. “I think it was really neat,” he said. “I think if you have the opportunity to hit a rock bottom, however you define that, you can become 412 bones or you can land like an Avenger. I personally have chosen to land like an Avenger.”

Is that easier said than done? To land like an Avenger?

“I don't know. It's just how I landed. It doesn't mean when you blast back up you're not going to run into a bunch of shit and have to, you know, fight things to get back to the heights that you were at, but I'd take that over 412 bones anytime.”

He paused, then continued: “But there is power in creating 412 bones! Because we all know that a bone, up to a certain age, when it heals, it heals stronger. So, I mean, it's not to knock anybody that doesn't land like an Avenger. Because there's strength in that too.”

Shirt, $228, by Todd Snyder. Shorts, $480, by Bode. Watch, $6,300, by Cartier.

In February, Sudeikis attended the Golden Globes, which were being held remotely on Zoom. He had his misgivings about the event—the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which votes on the awards, had been in the news for a series of unflattering revelations about its organization, and also the show was taking place in the middle of the night in London. Tom Ford had sent over a suit for Sudeikis to wear, and he tried it on, in his flat in Notting Hill, but he felt ridiculous, there in the middle of the night, and so changed out of it and into a tie-dyed hoodie made by his sister's clothing company. “I wore that hoodie because I didn't wanna fucking wear the fucking top half of a Tom Ford suit,” he said. “I love Tom Ford suits. But it felt weird as shit.”

“With kids, knowing is half the battle. But adulthood is doing something about it. ‘I'm bad with names.’ ‘I'm always late.’… All right, so win the fucking battle by doing something about it!”

The rest of this story you know: Sudeikis ended up winning best actor for Ted Lasso and gave a dazed acceptance speech while wearing the hoodie, and this in turn sparked glee and speculation about his mental and physical states. For the record, “I was neither high nor heartbroken,” Sudeikis said. It was just late at night and he didn't want to wear a suit. “So yeah, off it came and it was like, ‘This is how I feel. I believe in moving forward.’ ”

Lately, Sudeikis told me, he had been trying to pay more attention to how he actually felt about any given thing, to all the various signs and omens that present themselves to a person during the course of living their life. Even in his past, he said, there were moments that were obvious in retrospect, in terms of what the universe was trying to tell him, messages he missed entirely at the time. In Vegas, where he was living with Cannon before Saturday Night Live, he developed alopecia and his hair stopped growing, and he didn't know why. And then, at the end of his 30s, “during the nine months before Otis was born and the nine months after he was born,” Sudeikis developed extremely painful sciatica. “I went and got an MRI and was like, ‘Oh, yeah, the jelly doughnut in my L4, L5, is squirting out and touching a nerve.’ ” But why? When he had his second child, this didn't happen at all. So: why?

“I mean, since last November,” Sudeikis said, “the joke that feels more like a parable to me is a guy is sitting at home watching TV and the news breaks in to say flash flood warning. About an hour later he goes outside on his porch and he sees that the whole street is flooded.” You've probably heard the rest of this joke before: While the guy is praying to God for some kind of help, a truck, a boat, and a chopper come by, offering aid, which the guy turns down. God'll provide, he says. Sudeikis finished the joke: “Two hours after that, he's in heaven. He's dead. He says, ‘God, what's up, man? You didn't help me.’ God goes, ‘What do you mean, man? I sent you a pickup truck, I sent you a speedboat, I sent you a helicopter.’ ” So, Sudeikis said, “you can't tell me that hair falling out of my head wasn't—I don't know if it was the speedboat or the pickup truck or the helicopter, but yeah, man, it all comes home to roost. What you resist persists.”

He went on. “That's why I had sciatica,” he said. “That's the speedboat. That was like: ‘Hey, you gotta take a look at your stuff.’ ”

And this is another way that Sudeikis and Ted Lasso are alike, because both are always learning and relearning this lesson, which is: Be curious. Both are philosophical men whose philosophies basically boil down to trying to live as decent a life as is possible. Not just for the sake of it but because to be curious—to find out something new about yourself or someone else—is to be empowered. “I don't know if you remember G.I. Joe growing up,” Sudeikis said, “but they would always end it with a little saying: ‘Oh, now I know.’ ‘Don't put a fork in the outlet.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you could get hurt.’ ‘Oh, now I know.’ And then somebody would say, ‘And knowing is half the battle.’ And I agree with that—with kids, knowing is half the battle. But adulthood is doing something about it. That's the other half. ‘I'm bad with names.’ ‘I'm always late.’ Oh! Well, knowing is half the battle. All right, so win the fucking battle by doing something about it! Get better at names. Show up five minutes early, make it a point to do it. So, I'm still learning these things. But hopefully I've got plenty of time to do something about it.”

Sudeikis smiled a little wearily: “I mean, at the end of that joke, the guy still got to go to heaven, you know?”

Zach Baron is GQ's senior staff writer.

A version of this story originally appeared in the August 2021 issue with the title "Jason Sudeikis Paints His Masterpiece."

PRODUCTION CREDITS:

Photographs by Hill & Aubrey

Styled by Michael Darlington

Grooming by Nicky Austin

Tailoring by Nafisa Tosh

Set design by Hella Keck

Produced by Ragi Dholakia Productions

[honeyrose-tea]

hi darling. I've been good. the gift I got my friend hasnt arrived yet, but I'm planning on giving it to him after thanksgiving. I dont really have much else to update you on. one of my friends is hosting a friendsgiving tonight, so I am attempting at making some potatoes for that. it's my first time actually cooking in this apartment, so we shall see how it goes. how have you been? any life updates? -🌙

let me know how it goes when you give your gift to your friend! I hope you've had fun with your friends tonight, and that your potatoes turned out well. I'm sure they did. I'm doing ok. I'm feeling a bit strange and sad tonight, but it feels like the type of mood I can just sleep off. even with the medicine, I still get this way every so often. the difference is that it's so much rarer now. once a month instead of more days than not. and it doesn't last. sometimes I get a wave of sadness, but I can stand up after it when the water is calm again. it used to be wave after wave, all the time. but I digress. I have a sort of................. online friend with benefits? I don't know if that's what you'd call them. we haven't really discussed it yet. we're romantic but not really dating.... we know the future isn't a possibility for us, but we hope that it is anyway. I don't want to get too much into it on my blog, all out in the open for everyone to see. it's a very private affair. but as you are one of my closest friends, I don't mind telling you. I have found out recently that I'm scared of committment. that's new. I never used to be that way. and I don't trust hardly at all anymore. I think much of it is remnants from T. he is still in my dreams every so often, even though I don't think about him or talk about him. some part of the events with him left a mark on me. and now I am very happy alone and I don't want to get back out into the world of deep relationships anymore. I am happy alone but not content.... it's strange. and this isn't to say that I don't have any responsibility in this, I just think that the events with T are what spurred these new developments. I don't want it to seem like I blame him for everything. every once in a while, I think about what I would do if ever he apologized to me. I like to think I would be kind to him, let him back in. but I also like to think I'd stand my ground, hold onto my convictions, and not let him back into my life. neither seems ideal. but I try not to think about it often. it's not a situation I expect to ever encounter. and if I do, I know I'll do what's right. I trust my intuition. I've been thinking about T more because of the time of year, and because of my birthday. so that's where this is coming from. I know it probably seems a bit random.

I've been thinking about Dan a lot too. he's one of the only people whose actual name I use on here instead of initials. it just doesn't feel right to initial him. in my heart, he is always Dan. never D, never Daniel, only Danny or Dannyboy as a joke. I've been strangely nostalgic the past few weeks. I read through some old letter and papers of my parents', spanning from their high school days into the engagement and early marriage. they met in their mid-twenties, and it is so beautiful to think about their individual journies, how they tangled together to build a beautiful shared life together. I want that more than anything and I'm terrified of it at the same time. I've been thinking about my own life, what it has been and what it might be. I feel like I'm behind. like I'm running out of time. my parents had me in their mid-thirties, meaning that if I want my kids to know their grandparents, I'll have to make up for my parents' late start. I haven't ever even had a serious relationship, only one relationship at all, and now I'm beginning to realize I'm on a schedule. I have about five years minimum, ten maximum to have kids. and do I even want kids? can I be a good spouse? I always thought so, but now I'm not so sure. and death. death is so scary. not being suicidal means I have to deal with a fear of death. it's certainly better than being suicidal, but it's new. I'm scared of my death, but only if it's premature. dying when I'm old is a nice concept. so it's not death itself that's scary. it's dying alone, dying before I've done what I wanted to do. and what scares me most about death is having to see other people die. my dog will die soon. and so will my grandad. and not long after that my mammaw will go, and my dad will likely be next. I'll probably have my mom the longest, but she'll still die in my lifetime. all of this is provided none of us die tragically, of course. and that would be even worse.

I should shut up. I feel like I'm unloading on you. I'm sorry, I don't mean to, I'm just in a rare mood. I'll be better tomorrow. I'm also procrastinating writing two assignments, so I'm especially chatty. thank you for listening. it comforts me to know you're here when I need you, and that you also rely on me. I love the feeling of being needed and being cared for in return. you're so sweet. have a good evening, and come talk soon. I love hearing from you, my friend💕

#pen pal