working on a fic based on a little snippet I saw on here that I thought was so cute. I'm 1.4k words in, so it'll be done sometime soon. It's fandom neutral but hopefully you'll still enjoy it!
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i think that while micro labels can seem useful and affirming ultimately they're isolating and kind of an obstacle to your understanding of self. that's because you can never find a word specific enough. there will never be a label or two labels or even ten, twenty of them to perfectly capture and describe all of your thoughts, feelings, experiences, preferences, needs, interests, identities, etc. because you learn more and more about yourself every day and then you change and your wants and needs change with you. having to hop between labels, fearing that you don't 'fit' into a label anymore (both in your own and others eyes), worrying how soon your current label will wear out, questioning if you'll ever fully fit a single one. all that causes a lot of uncertainty and anxiety which could be avoided by just picking a more general thing and molding it according to what it means to YOU. because words will always mean different things to different people, you will never be understood immediately and maybe never completely by anyone but yourself and that's fine
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does gale dying in a wild magic surge give him more ammunition in arguing wizards are better than sorcerers or does it give lakhesis ammunition to tease him about being so squishy? either way i’m delighted, that’s so fucking funny
LISTEN I'm still cackling about it. and also I think gale definitely has the upper hand here... for... he died reasons...... unfortunately lakhesis will never let go of her pride so TEN YEARS FROM NOW it'll be like gale going "I'm sorry, I do believe you, my fair lady, are forgetting that time you very much killed me. by setting me on fire." "okay that was a decade ago how are you still hung up on it. I REVIVED YOU didn't I." "I DIED? I could have BLOWN US ALL UP? you killed me????" "well maybe if you had been better at MAGIC you would have saved yourself--" and they go back and forth forever about it. like you have to understand they are this post to me
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I jolted awake from a nightmare as usual and normally I think about Ken or Six comforting me but....... this time for some reason I thought about Jacob.... ;-;
Jacob doesn't know much about ptsd and probably doesn't get nightmares too often. So when he sees me shaking and sweating after a rather bad one, he turns on some dim lighting and he looks kind of freaked out, not really knowing what to do other than to hug me and rub my back. He keeps saying "it was just a bad dream, it wasn't real" but that doesn't help me much because a lot of my nightmares are based off of real things that have happened to me, and he just,,, doesn't know what else to say. He just whispers "I'm not going to hurt you" and that's enough. He doesn't feel like it's enough though and he feels bad.
For a few minutes we lay there in silence, holding each other... in his giant stupid water bed with the fancy pillows that perfectly conform to the shape of your head in the dim glow of one of his fancy ass lamps and he's like, "hey, did I ever tell you where I got this lamp? How much it costs? So stupid." And he goes into this story about it. He spends like a good solid twelve minutes just listing off every single thing in his bedroom that he bought that he doesn't even care about. I can't get over his calf pants (pants for your calves). He suddenly realizes he can help; he's good at distracting me, he's good at making me laugh.
He lets me wear one of his shirts bc it smells like him and it's grounding and he thinks I look sooo cute in his shirts. He's like, screw it, let's get up and eat. yeah it's 5am who cares let's eat cereal. He pours a bowl of cereal and I notice on the back of the box there's marks with a sharpie, and he catches me staring and he says "oh yeah I filled out this little crossword puzzle last week :) you wanna try" and I think he's the cutest dork in the whole world. This is the same guy who introduces himself to sexy women at the bar by high-fiving them and somehow they still want to get into bed with him asap. He's like Barney Stinson, but, like, more of a decent human being.
And he's like :) what are you looking at. and i'm like. you! I love you. I love you so much and I am so lucky to have you. and he's like!!! I love you too I love you so much!!! and when we're done munching on cereal he turns on some music on his speakers and we hold hands while dancing in his stupidly huge living room. Maybe we watch a show or a movie until we finally doze off. It always takes me 6 to 8-ish hours to fall asleep again after I jolt awake, maybe some nights he's able to stay up with me, other times he's not because he has a regular sleep schedule like a normal human being. Lucky bastard.
But it doesn't matter if he falls asleep or not, because he always lays next to me making sure he's holding my hand, and before he feels himself dozing off, he always mumbles sleepily "Hey... star girl. It's gonna be okay. You got me now." He's always worried he isn't doing enough, but he is. He always is.
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Some off-the-cuff thoughts on overspiritualizing patterns in science
I remember watching a talk in middle school youth group about laminin, the "molecule that holds your whole body together" which was supposedly shaped like a cross. The suggestion, basically, was that the cross's image was integral to our molecular makeup and that this was part of God's design in a very Significant way. I was a burgeoning STEM girl, so I taped a diagram of a laminin up next to my bed for a while.
(As I would later find out, the whole laminin thing had/has some reach among Christians. There are T-shirts and everything)
Fast forever to spring of my freshman year as a microbiology student. I take my first course in cell bio, and I learn that laminins are actually one of many families of ECM glycoproteins. They aren't really any more significant in "holding the body together" than collagens, elastins, or fibronectins. They're very important, yes, but ultimately just one type of adhesive protein among many. And! They also do a bunch of other stuff that's way cooler than just. Adhesive.
While some laminins do bear resemblance to a cross when diagramed, it's really only because they have three subchains. Some are t-shaped, but others are y-shaped, and those don't look anything like a cross. Also, when they're in situ rather than in a nice, neat diagram, they tend to be all floppy and then they look even less cross-like.
Source
And when I learned about this I was oddly relieved. It felt like I was right about something that I couldn't even put into words, and that somehow the field of what I could call glorious had grown wider.
Christians are called to see and marvel at the presence of God in creation. I love doing that! I see God left and right through my scientific studies. Yet I also know that the human brain is pattern-seeking and that we are prone to pareidolia. I honestly don't know that there's a substantive difference between seeing the cross in some laminins and seeing Jesus on a piece of toast. It's all just seeing patterns that arise from something else (in the case of laminins, being able to bind three different molecules at once) and attributing spiritual significance. God is sovereign and maybe in the grand scope of his vision for creation it means something, but in terms of seeing God's hand in science I just find it so... small?
You could spin so many four-chain or four-domain proteins or goodness knows how many other molecules into images of the cross if you pick the right diagram. You could take every pattern of three in nature (and there are many!) as an image of the Trinity. If you really, really wanted to, you could take every six in organic chemistry as a sign of the beast, which would be hilarious in its misguidedness. It just becomes so literalistic and dull so very fast.
Look! Wouldn't you rather talk about the fact that laminins begin to appear along the edge of a developing lung at just ten weeks of human embryonic development, suggesting that they play a role in alveolar morphogenesis? That they're present in the neural stem-cell niche, which makes them an attractive candidate for helping to treat degenerative neurological conditions? I want to go back to whoever gave that talk that I watched in youth group and shake him and say, "God did that, and you're still hung up on the fact that laminins have three subchains?"
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