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wisteria-lodge · 3 years

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lion primary + badger secondary (bird model)

ie A HOUSE MATCH !!

Hellooo, I’m sorry for bothering you but I’ve found this blog and I absolutely love your character analysis and overall thought about the SHC system, and I could use some help?

I’ve known the system for a while now, since the old SHC tumblr times, and while understanding my current primary situation has been quite easy, I’m having A LOT of trouble with my secondary and it’s becoming a bit of a issue for me because the more I think about it, the more confused I become, to the point where it’s upsetting me a bit.

First thing first, my Primary is a very “standard” Lion, the whole “you feel if something is right or not and if you do something that’s not right to you you feel bad/ill/it’s wrong” is extremely me. I had some doubts about a Badger model, but I think it’s just that my personal ideals and values align a lot with a Badger worldview, since I grew in a very Badger society and family (very leftist, a lot of emphasis on equality and valuing and creating communities). Reading various description/interpretations of primary Lion always feels right, while reading primary Badger always makes me think “yeah, this is all good and nice, BUT…” so this was quite easy to sort out (no pun intended).

Are you me? So far... I could have written this. It’s possible I *might* be biased going forward.

When it comes to secondaries, I see a lot of myself in Bird descriptions: I make spreadsheets for everything.

Pretty Bird.

I am a crafter with an apparently endless supply of books and tutorials and supplies ready, and the enthusiasm to share them.

That sounds more Badger.

I am the mom friend

Badger.

who always has what’s needed in their bag.

Bird.

I am that one person you can count on knowing a funny or interesting anecdote about almost any topic, from the mundane to the truly obscure. Learning new things, about any topic, is literally one of my biggest pleasures in life.

Bird [model?] Whichever one isn’t your secondary is a model you clearly love.

I take pride in all these things, but I honestly have trouble understanding if I like using them as tools because they help me with my ADHD and so I received a very strong positive enforcement using them and I kept the ones I like, or if I started doing them because they are what I like doing and coincidentally they help me managing my symptoms or better navigate the world in my day to day life.

Could be either, but modeling Bird because you’re neurodivergent is very much a thing.

Also, while I love planning, when it comes to making decisions I tend to gather all information and summarize it in a way that makes sense to me so I can visualize the issue in my mind as complete and detailed as possible, but the final decision tends to feel a bit… impulsive, to me?, there’s always A LOT of gut feeling involved, and when I don’t follow it usually it ends up being a wrong or subpar decision. I do need to gather all the available information about the issue/situation/item/people, but rather than making my decision by comparison, I use the information to make sure that I’m “seeing” the truth (or as close to it as it is possible) and then once I feel safe that I’m not overlooking anything important I just KNOW what is the correct decision.

That’s a Lion primary making a call.

Could this simply be a very strong primary interfering with the decision-making, even when it’s not about ideals but more mundane things?

Decision making is always a primary thing. Mundane stuff included. Mundane stuff is important.

On the other hand, I am an extremely hard working person (I am changing jobs right now because I feel like my old bosses are making more and more difficult for me to just do my job properly and without needing to cut corners, and it just feels wrong to me).

Oh good lord. I am ready to sort you as a Badger secondary solely on the basis of THAT.

People tell me I’m a very good listener and that I am especially good at helping others unravel their thoughts when they’re all confused and tangled because I ask the right questions. I seem to gain other people’s trust easily and often I get told gossip or secrets before others.

Badger. Also DAMN but that’s relatable. I think you might house-match me.

I got told several times by previous bosses that I should look into becoming a team leader because people like me and I make them get along better.

Sounds like a Lion/Badger combo.

People get attached to me very quickly and when I have problems the stream of folks asking if they can help or just checking in is always way more than I expect.

Isn’t it weird how that happens?

This all sounds like Badger stuff, from the descriptions I read, but many of them are not things I actively enjoy doing, I just.. do them because it would be weird to do otherwise? Or it feels like they happen to me with no effort on my part.

Because they’re just you. It’s just who you are.

I think they might be simply a result of me growing up in a society that values hard work and being kind to others, or just me being a likeable person

Not everyone finds this easy. Not even close. I have read so many testimonials written by people in Badger secondary households killing themselves trying to fit into this model. Wanting isn’t enough. Having examples around you isn’t enough.

or maybe coping mechanisms I had to learn in order to “pass” as neurotypical but as I wrote the more think and read about Birds and Badgers and their differences, the more I get confused and frustrated.

Now I know I’m projecting, but all my neurotypical coping mechanisms come out of the Bird secondary toolbox.

But it would make sense since I burned out badly in my teens from trying to always try to be perfect for my family, my friends, my teachers, society

That sounds like a young Badger secondary, more than a young Bird secondary.

and when I finally found who I really wanted to be I resolved to never let anyone define what or how I should be ever again (hello there, Lion primary!)

I hear that.

After a lifetime of beating myself up for not living up to the absurdly high expectations I set up for myself, I have decided that the only way to stay sane for me is to do the groundwork, be as prepared as I can

Bird

put in the work I should

Badger

but once I’m in the thick of it just… ride the wave. And now I got to the point where I have the confidence that I am smart enough to learn the basics of a new skill on the fly, if needed.

To me, this is so fundamentally, so spiritually Badger secondary. You don’t have tools. You are a tool. You made yourself into one. And that moment where you can just trust yourself to catch the world, absorb it into yourself, and become whatever it needs you to be... it’s ecstasy.

I’d say that lack of time is my worst enemy, but due/thanks to the ADHD that’s not true most of the time, since lack of time is what enables me to get past the executive dysfunction in the first place, so I’ll say I have a love-hate relationship with it. Doing things just before a deadline is it’s own kind of high, after all (I’m not saying it’s healthy).

At the base of your soul, you’re not really a Bird prepper/planner.

A practical example: I usually don’t like platforming games much, but I am LOVING Immortals: Fenyx Rising because in most situations, there is a “best” way to do things but you can also get creative by using different skills, using specific items, finding loopholes, or a combination of all of them.

Sounds like a Bird secondary having fun. [a fun model?]

When I fail a level/combat I don’t get frustrated because I know that I just have to try a few more times until I find the solution that feels right FOR ME, even if it’s not the most efficient ones. And when I do it feels great, even if I look a at guide afterwards and there’s a waaay easier solution! I usually feel a bit silly for not “seeing it” but also think something like “well, I think MY way is more fun!”

Oh yeah, a Bird secondary would not have that reaction. That is the sacred Badger consistency of method. How you do something matters equally as much as the final product.

When I cook, I usually find a recipe I like and try it as written, then I make small adjustments to improve it, see how it turns out, and so on until I have a recipe that is MY recipe, one I really like and that I know well enough to use as a basis to be changed if needed, knowing exactly how the change will affect the end result. I think this is why I prefer baking to other kinds of cooking, since it’s much more akin to chemistry I feel like I have more control over what a change will do.

On it’s own this could be a description of rapid-fire Bird. And you clearly have Bird, you have a lot of it. You love it.

So I guess that what really matters to me is being able to do things my way so that I can enjoy the process and live up to my standards instead of external ones?

But then you say something like this... it’s about the process... it’s about the method... it’s about something coming up to your own personal standards. And that’s so Badger.

This ended up being very lengthy… I’ve tried shortening it but English isn’t my first language and I was afraid I might come across not clearly.

Your English is perfect, and insanely clear. You’re clearer than I am.

Thank you again for the blog, I especially like your DS9 characters’ analysis and I am low-key hoping for more :)

I’m particularly proud of those ones. I’d love to do more, but before that I would have to go back and re-watch the show, or at least key character episodes. I’m not going to sort from memory. That would be doing a show I love, and a number of extremely complex characters a disservice. And it wouldn’t be nearly as fun.

(it’s that whole Badger integrity-of-method thing, you know how it goes.)

#sortinghatchats #sortme #wisteria sorts #lion primary #badger secondary #bird model #my lion badger #adhd #submission

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mittensmorgul · 3 years

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I wanted to thank you for your response to the anon. Your phrase, "NOBODY should be made to feel like shit when engaging with something that is supposed to be fun." resonated with me in a way that "don't feel guilty about unfollowing" never did. I'm not seeing drama, but 80% of my dash is fandoms that I have no interest in. Thank you for the push I needed!

Oh gosh! Well I'm glad I could be helpful in any way! :D

I do have to confess that I follow a few people who I haven't shared fandoms with in years, but most of them don't even post on here all that often so it's more like occasionally seeing an old friend and having a wave across the street at them before going our separate ways again for a few months, and not a daily deluge of content I just have to J key my way through.

It's hard unfollowing people you like, but that you've just grown away from as far as the content you're each here for. Maybe someday you'll find them again, find you have fandoms in common again, and will happily reunite to share your mutual love of something new! But until then, most of us have a limited amount of time to engage with our hobbies and interests, and I'd rather spend it on the content I'm personally interested in than in feeling frustrated that everything I actually had time to scroll through was about fandoms I know almost nothing about.

I expected a lot of people who focused mainly on spn to begin drifting into other fandoms when the series ended. And that's happened, to an extent. I've seen more Untamed stuff on my dash (I keep meaning to watch that lol), Marvel stuff with the new Loki show on, etc. But Supernatural apparently will not give us peace, either. :'D

I'd been hoping we would all have an evergreen ending to the main story of Supernatural to rest on, and a relatively chill post-canon fandom to explore and have fun with. People still create for the original Star Trek series, you know? That fandom is still alive (partly due to the additional franchises in the series, partly just because of the fandom elders there that refused to let it die). I think Supernatural will eventually settle into something like that, but even with 16 years of fandom, we're barely getting our driver's licenses here as a fandom, too, compared to ST :'D

In the meantime, like everyone else, it was cathartic to vent after the finale we did get, but even with last night's drama and what it potentially holds in store for ongoing future drama, I'd hope that folks remember that nobody's experience of this site is the same as anyone else's, and it doesn't have to be all drama or stuff you're not really interested in.

I had this same experience during the last few years, when the term "doomscrolling" was coined to define the experience of looking at twitter. I realized I would spend five minutes looking at my dash (I don't even really do much fandom over there... my TL is mostly authors and publishing professionals), and my jaw would be clenched and I'd just want to start yelling. I culled a lot of the political stuff from my feed, because honestly I did not need to get my news from social media, where I was supposed to be spending that five minutes forgetting the world was on fire. Sometimes *literally* on fire. I didn't want to be angry ~all of the time~ and I was losing my personal outlets for actually trying to feel happy about anything at all.

The same is even more true of tumblr. This is supposed to be fun. Some people use this site for news or PSA's or the like, but the counterpoint is that if this *is* your escape from the horror of the "real world," then by all means actually make it function that way! It's not ALL drama ALL the time, unless you curate your dash to be that!

(well, except on nights like last night... it's impossible to escape that sort of drama without logging off for a day or two :'D)

But I'm happy you're finding more happiness on your own dash! :)

#zen and the art of fandom maintenance #and if you do get all your real world news from tunglr then that's probably 95% of the problem

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ratplagues · 3 years

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🔥 any dishonored thing of ur choosing -deathoftheoutsider

wah okay!! i will talk a bit about the outsider and void then..i dont really wanna frame it as a Hot Take bc i have no interest in starting shit or whatever like ill interact with whatever i want to in this fandom and ignore the rest and everyone else is free to do the same but.

I do not think The Outsider is a “character” in the conventional sense, much less that it does his character or the allegory he wields any justice to be shipped with anyone in the series (at least without seriously considering the implications and framing it in a way that completes the allegory. more on this later)

the outsider and his void are an allegory for Otherness; i’m namely gonna frame it as queerness and neurodiversity, but really anything could fit as long as it’s about you feeling seen as a marginalized and othered person. he is written to represent this allegory, not to be a person with a satisfying narrative arc or dimensions. this is why some people feel that he lacks depth-- he’s not supposed to have depth compared to others in the series, he’s mostly a vehicle for what he represents, and is supposed to be easy to identify with or recognize.

he was born to a life of hardship, suffered at the hands of the rich and powerful, was ignored, cast out, etc. etc. a familiar story. poor, queer, nd, really whatever you wanna frame it as. he was a nobody outcast. in comes the envisioned, they pick him to serve as their martyr and idol without his permission. he then had his name cut away and forgotten, and was thrust onto a pedestal to spend the rest of eternity being worshipped by other outcasts who had suffered at the same hands he had. he has something greatly in common with those who worship him, including the very people who stripped his mortality from him in the first place, but because of this shared hardship (and nothing else), his own autonomous personhood was disregarded completely in favor of The Community needing someone Just Like Them to idolize. if this sounds familiar, that’s because it should!!

his humanity was taken from him, and in his place, an idol was created. his human body is frozen in stone in the center of the void-- retired. out of commission. no longer needed. he was immortalized, transcended. this is traditionally desired, although dishonored is trying to convince you that it is not actually desirable. in the age of internet content creation, you can be immortalized without even being present, without knowing about it. you become what you can do for other people, and what you cannot. people fall in love with an idea of you, the idea of you being like them, and other people come to hate you deeply without even knowing you. people came to hate the outsider more deeply than he ever had been when he was human-- he wasn’t seen when he was human. a pedestal only helps you to be seen. the outsider had the choice made for him to achieve immortality in exchange for the simple joys of being un-known.

he spends all of doto trying to convey this idea to billie through the hollows:

"There is freedom in being hated. There is license in being cast out. Some learn this lesson a little too well." "These people lay their thoughts, their petty wants, their murderous desires in front of me to witness. I cannot turn away." "We carry what was done to us through the rest of our endless days. No one asked if we wanted it." (i like this one. he speaks for the community-- this is a shared experience, one everyone can recognize. however, as a Queer Figure, he never asked for this. he never asked to be immortalized. i like the double meaning here)

not to mention, the entire extent of the outsider’s Sole ability and influence on the real world is to “choose” people and give them untold power over others. this is a fun ironic twist on what marginalized groups endure from powerful people, (dishonored is largely about power imbalances and socioeconomic hierarchies) but it’s also fun to think about in the context of the role model/fan framing-- so many worshippers give their lives to be “chosen” by him. it’s easily framed as an exaggeration of otherwise very real power imbalances and often the flagrant breaching of boundaries existing between creators and fans.

and on the subject of the VOID...ohht he void.....

the void should be a haven for queer folks. for nd folks. it’s wanted by so many to be a safe space, it should be, it’s the Other World! it’s renounced by the abbey, crusaded against, even. but it isn’t. it’s just this limitless, eons-old horizon that hungers and starves for something to fill it. if the outsider is the lament of queer idolatry, the void is the lament of queer Hunger. it is roaming, and restless. it does not belong to the outsider; the outsider cannot survive without it. it’s the desire to belong, not a place of belonging.

the void craves this idol, this outsider-- i, for one, have often experienced hunger for a truly moral and just role model, someone to make the world Right, and i know this is another shared feeling. those who worship the outsider, who drive themselves mad trying to see him or be chosen by him, are suffering from this idol hunger. you see this in a lot of queer and nd kids and young adults. i grew up just having my life and interests like, punctuated by different fixations on different people that i didn’t know at all, only fell in love with the idea of. it happens a lot.

there’s a couple more doto quotes that really highlight this for me:

"They carve my mark into the old bones bleached by the sun. They carve my mark into their skin. They learn true hunger in the Void." "All these charms, these runes and fetid offerings on shrines made for me, will be nothing more than objects worn of meaning. Bones and dead things, thrown into the dirt."

“They learn true hunger in the Void.” is something that i wanna touch on real quick. people can spend their lives obsessing over the idea of what they think the void will cure for them, will fix in their lives, only to find out that it’s just a hollow manifestation of the emptiness they’ve felt all their lives. it’s not the needs met, but the need itself. you have to make the home, it doesn’t already exist and you can’t fucking run to it. it is heartbreaking, frustrating, one of the bleakest messages i’ve ever encountered in a game, but i’ve never felt more seen. by submitting to these ideas, the idea of a perfect unhuman human and the idea of a perfect otherworldly home, you are surrendering your humanity. you’re not only being transformed by the powers gained (if they are gained), you’re essentially dissolving with hunger after never having these needs met. you see so many people in these games whittling themselves down to nothing but base need. empty apartments occupied only by shrines, sometimes containing their corpses. journals of people dedicating their lives to the worship of the outsider, always ending darkly. "I will find this empty place. Somehow the key to open the Void will fall into my hands. In time, I will learn the secret and he will call to me as he called to her."

not to mention The New Envisioned-- prolonged exposure to the void will always, without fail, turn a human into silver void stone. these creatures can no longer interact with or acknowledge the mortal world. they have surrendered themselves to hunger, and cannot be saved. this is celebrated by the cult, honored by them, even. i honestly like....i pity them, and i hate them, and i recognize that i’ve been those people, lmao. when i was at my worst as a teenager, i wasnt so much a person as i was just a shell full of hunger and heartbreak. my personality was defined by who i was a fan of. i think i definitely was Less Human then. the cult of the outsider is a universal experience!!

dishonored, at its core, is a celebration of humanity. it asks you to celebrate human emotion and weakness despite greed and bigotry. the powers are not to be wanted, they are to be ignored, refused. it is human to hunger, but it is Queer and Divergent to make hunger your life’s meaning, to need to learn the secret, find the key, be chosen and loved and cherished, to be made whole by some perfect thing. to find your humanity in something un-human. dishonored sees all that, mourns it with you, and then asks you to find humanity in each other !! love the spine of your lover, the blood draining down the docks, the pause to stretch languidly in the sun of a work day.

and finally...on the topic of outsider shipping....i dont think that, in his god form, it does him much justice to be shipped with anyone. he’s not much of a person, just a projection of his former self and a vehicle for his allegory as discussed-- im sure he could be shipped like this, but it just isn’t satisfying to me in any way. however, let’s talk a bit about his lethal and nonlethal ending. DOTO asks you to make a choice. is it better to give him an abrupt and merciful ending, after deciding that the fury he’s endured at the hands of others’ famine is too much trauma for any mortal to live with? or will you decide that it’s only fair to give him a chance to live the life he never got to, to return his humanity that was taken without his consent? if you choose to free him from the void, i think you can very very easily make the argument that he can be shipped with corvo, or anyone else that can easily be shipped w/ ppl. he’s finally free to live his life as a queer man, can explore the simple and complex joys of being human with other people, navigate the hills and valleys he never got to before. corvo’s just a nice pick bc 1) experienced human/inexperienced human is good, 2) they know each other, but they don’t. this is a good setup. 3) corvo is an older queer man and uhh you cant convince me otherwise lol! and older queer/younger queer is a self indulgence for me. also corvo is just nice. i think he would enjoy helping the outsider navigate his new humanity.

just some thoughts i have running through my head all hours of the day :) this is really long cuz its a combination of a lot of infodumps from discord lmfao

#m #doto #death of the outsider #dishonored #Anonymous #long post

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orangerosebush · 4 years

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On minds and matters

It was a bit disheartening to spend years working towards an MA in psychology, only to then use it on hour-long glorified eye-staring contests with the moody adolescents of the UK’s Vieux riches. His job paid well, though, and as such Dr. Po was willing to grit his teeth and soldier on through each meeting on his list.

He’d had plenty of patients who came to him determined not to progress. These were the boys who had a few too many write-ups on their files; the ones whose families were tired of their son being too 'emotionally high-maintenance'; the students who had consigned themselves to being one of the ‘troubled’ boys. The problem with elite boarding schools was that they sometimes served as the dumping grounds for wealthy families who would prefer to not be reminded of their screw-up children — as such, Dr. Po’s target demographic was made up of boys determined to ‘win’ therapy by going home just as bitter and in pain as they were when they started sessions with him.

He didn’t always make a breakthrough. Sometimes, he had patients who showed up to a session with a note from Dean Guiney excusing them from further meetings, and that was that. Dr. Po firmly believed that every single student he’d met with was capable of finding some coping mechanism or outlet that would help them — and he hoped that the students whose sessions stopped before any progress had been made found happiness in the future. Or, at the very least, that they found something that would bring them peace.

There were certain patients he’d had that stood out from the others, both for good reasons and bad. Artemis Fowl II was one of those patients — and standing out for reasons ‘both good and bad’ described Artemis perfectly.

Following a series of disastrous sessions when the boy was thirteen, Dr. Po had simply stopped seeing Artemis. The boy hadn’t even shown up with a note terminating their sessions. One day, a new boy had shown up in the time slot usually reserved for Artemis, and that had been that. Dr. Po hadn’t seen Artemis since. He vaguely remembered hearing the news that the Fowl patriarch had been found — alive — and not been sure whether to expect Artemis to get better or worse.

Would the return of his father foster the growth of the nascent emotional maturity that Artemis had exhibited in their final sessions? Or would Artemis’ worst traits — his tendency towards arrogance, his dismissal of others, his budding narcissism — firmly take root, defining Artemis’ personality for good? These questions nagged at Dr. Po, and truthfully, he was too cowardly to ask around the staff to confirm just what sort of person Artemis had become.

Thus, Artemis remained an enigma.

An enigma that just so happened to be sitting in the armchair across from Dr. Po, boring a hole through the doctor with his unflinching gaze.

In true Artemis Fowl fashion, the boy had shown up for a session that had been reserved without a name. Dr. Po had nearly dropped his clipboard when he’d opened the door to usher in his new patient and been greeted with a now fifteen years of age Artemis Fowl standing before him, looking simultaneously defiant and sheepish.

They’d both walked into the room wordlessly, waiting in silence as Dr. Po awkwardly rummaged around in his desk for his old notes on Artemis while the young teen sat gingerly in the patient seat in the middle of the room.

“You’ve not switched to a digital filing system?”

Dr. Po started, looking up at Artemis.

“No psychiatrist or counselor uses iPads or digital notetakers,” Dr. Po explained hesitantly, brow furrowing.

Artemis wasn’t one for small talk, usually.

Shaking his head slightly as if to right himself, Dr. Po continued. “It’d be convenient, but there are concerns about the patient being recorded."

Artemis seemed satisfied with that answer.

Flipping his notes closed, Dr. Po studied Artemis, who raised a single brow.

“I’ve never forgotten our session that you left in the middle of,” Dr. Po remarked, and the frown lines on Artemis’ face deepened. “You were such a smarmy child. But you… made this joke.”

Artemis leaned back in his chair, tapping a foot in annoyance. “What a wonderful memory you have.”

“Not really. But it’s hard to forget a patient like you, Artemis,” Dr. Po sighed. “I tried to ask you about your feelings — you responded by telling me a family heirloom was a blatant forgery.”

The memory caused Artemis to smile genuinely for the first time since he’d stepped into the office. “The fake Victorian?”

The doctor grimaced. “Yes.”

“Despite its lack of authenticity, it was a perfectly nice armchair,” Artemis assured, a gently teasing note worming its way into his voice.

Edged on by Artemis' demeanor softening, Dr. Po pushed on. “But back to the joke. I remarked on the loss of your father — insensitively, I now realize — and you shut down. You started jerking me in this way and that in order to prevent me from getting a real reading on you. You said something along the lines of, ‘I’m depressed that I’m going to therapy,’ I believe. Quite a bon mot.”

“I was impudent as a young boy, I’m afraid,” Artemis said breezily, sounding more amused by the tale than remorseful. “I hope you’ll forgive me for a poor first impression.”

“Artemis, why are you back in my office?”

Artemis didn’t even blink, taking the challenge in stride. “My mother believes it will be beneficial.”

“Your mother? Not you?”

“Correct.”

“And… beneficial? To what end? Elaborate on her reasoning, perhaps,” Dr. Po asked, trying to keep his tone light.

“She believes I am emotionally maladjusted,” Artemis said, giving a small shrug.

“Are you?”

Artemis blinked owlishly, the question not quite computing. “Am I what, doctor?”

Dr. Po clicked his pen idly. “Unhappy.”

“Well, of course.”

Dr. Po was unable to keep his face neutral, and Artemis chuckled slightly at the doctor’s wide-eyed gaping.

“Dr. Po,” Artemis sighed, sobering as if he were explaining something evident to a child. “Of course I am unhappy occasionally. I’m a very busy man. My intellect has made it so I’ve moved beyond the carefree days of adolescence — I’ve matured past an age where my mother could treat me as a child, and although I don’t mourn the loss of simpler times, I suppose she does.”

Dr. Po forced himself not to ask if Artemis had ever truly been treated as a child, deciding to steer clear of the topic of family based on how unproductively the discussion had gone years ago. Instead, he elected to place his clipboard on the floor, looking at Artemis bluntly.

“Artemis, I’m not diagnosing you with anything,” he began, holding up a hand when Artemis opened his mouth to say something. “What I want to discuss today, however, is that right now I see the same pain in you today as I did when you were thirteen — and since I’m no longer getting complaints from department heads, that means you’ve taken that frustration and turned it somewhere else.”

Artemis’ lips quirked upwards, but his eyes were mirthless. “You share my mother's theory that I am some variation of the tortured genius stereotype.”

“How about this — I think that you believe that there isn’t a person alive smart enough to help you. Because to 'fix' you, someone would have to look inside you, and you think you’re the only person that’s able to understand how you work.”

“How narcissistic of me.”

“I’ve met with a lot of people since our last session when you were thirteen,” Dr. Po stressed. “I’ve not met anyone quite as clever as you, but I’ve met people who fit the same profile. You’re well versed in my profession, so you’re able to view your pain as both a participant and as an outsider — and that strangely voyeuristic relationship to your mind makes it so you and all these other folks think that you’re objective. Logical, even, in your analysis of your mind. You understand every tick, every tiny mechanism, every structure of your psyche. And if you understand it all and you still can’t will yourself to be happy, then why the hell should I be able to do anything for you? After all, I’m just some idiot who decorates his office with forged antique furniture his grandfather was gullible enough to purchase. Why should I know better than you do?”

Artemis was silent at that.

“If someone can, say, convince themselves that all their peers are 2D caricatures of people, they’ll never have to think about why they struggle to feel any pleasure from social interaction. If they can look around and see how far their family has come, then they can force themselves to box up and discard the baggage of the past. If they can convince themselves that pain and genius are twins, that the torment is part of the gift by which they define themselves, then the fear they have that maybe they’re destined for a life marked by paranoia and apathy no longer has to be confronted,” Dr. Po tried, searching for some way to express his thoughts before Artemis decided to snap at him. “Maybe you’re the only one who sees the world as it really is. But maybe your mother is right to be concerned. I get why… that’s an unattractive possibility to you. It would mean your analysis of yourself was incorrect. And if you were wrong, if your mind has tricked you into running away from the change that you need to feel happier, then you’re just as human as the rest of us. Pain tricked you into believing its integral to your ‘youness’. You’re... just human. And let me tell you, Artemis, that feeling ineffectual, and frustrated, and sad is... so very painfully human.”

By the time he’d finished his spiel, Dr. Po’s voice was soft. Pursing his lips, he tried to see if he’d garnered any sort of reaction from Artemis. The teen remained stony-faced.

“I can recommend a therapist from outside Saint Bartleby’s,” Dr. Po finally said. “If you don’t want to work with me, then I don’t want to waste either of our time.”

Artemis seemed to be broiling with unreadable intensity, and for a moment Dr. Po worried that he’d start going on a diatribe.

His fears soon were proven unfounded when all of the sudden, Artemis seemed to deflate.

“I do not choose sadness for myself, Dr. Po. I can assure you that,” Artemis remarked, sounding weary in the way men twice his age did when confronted by the prospect of the world having moved on past their prime.

“I would never imply something so insensitive,” Dr. Po insisted. “But there is a difference between me saying something of that sort and me asking you to believe that I could help you. Or if not me, then someone better suited to working with you.”

Artemis ruminated on the statement, his tapered fingers tapping out an unfamiliar rhythm on the arms of the ornate chair he was sitting in.

“I will come to my session next week,” he finally decided, and Dr. Po almost sagged with relief.

Carefully, the two of them continued on with the session. Although it felt as though they were both walking on eggshells around one another, the hour-long session ultimately ended in a place where Dr. Po felt like they could work with. He walked Artemis to the door, and after awkwardly bidding him goodbye, Dr. Po retreated back into his office.

For a while, he simply sat at his desk, thinking.

It wasn’t as though he’d made groundbreaking headway with Artemis today. Frankly, they’d been only nominally productive following Artemis’ promise to give therapy a genuine attempt.

The day stretched on, and Dr. Po was no closer to making sense of the ever-present Artemis conundrum.

After all, how does one describe Artemis Fowl?

Various psychiatrists have tried and failed. The problem is Artemis’ own intelligence. He bamboozles every test thrown at him. He has puzzled the greatest medical minds, and sent many of them gibbering back to their own hospitals.

Dr. Po paused, reaching back for the clipboard he’d discarded at the beginning of the session.

Artemis Fowl II was fifteen. He had various, tremendously important responsibilities, the details of which he refused to elaborate on. His best friend, to Dr. Po’s knowledge, was his paid bodyguard. Frankly, Dr. Po didn’t think they’d talk about Artemis’ family for a long, long time.

Dr. Po couldn’t really describe Artemis Fowl, because he didn’t know him. He didn’t think many people knew the boy, not really.

All the same, Dr. Po wanted to try. He wanted to try to understand Artemis Fowl a bit better. Not because Dr. Po wanted to a hero, but because he wanted Artemis Fowl to just get to be a boy instead of whatever impossible, confusing role Artemis seemed to be trying to fill.

Artemis Fowl was fifteen. Dr. Po hoped that he’d hold onto boyhood a little while longer.

#my writing #artemis fowl #long post #hi hello im zoe and i write awful fanfiction <3

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hellomynameisbisexual · 5 years

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How To Talk To Your Partner About Being Bisexual, According To Experts

BY GRIFFIN WYNNE

FEB 5, 2019

In a world where others may try to define you by who you're dating, understanding yourself not in relation to whom you're with can be, well, really freaking hard. No matter how long you've been out, it's not always easy to know how to talk to your partner about being bisexual. And whether you're seeing someone of your own gender, a different gender, or no gender at all (let alone same or differing sexualities), discussing your identity with your boo and establishing how they can help you feel validated and supported in it, is no small task.

According to a 2013 study by the Pew Research Center of nearly 1,200 LGBTQIA+ identifying people, only 28 percent of bisexual people reported being out to their friends and families, compared to 71 percent of lesbians and 77 percent of gay men. In a 2013 article titled, "Why Bisexuals Stay In The Closet," The Los Angeles Times reported that bi folks often don't come out for fear of facing hurtful stereotypes. With the pressures of biphobia (harmful stereotypes or judgments passed about bisexual people being more likely to cheat, less likely to seek monogamy, or just want to "experiment" in their sexuality) as well as bi erasure (denial of the existence of bisexuality), coming out as bi on an individual level can be a tumultuous process that's not necessarily easier within the loving bonds of a romantic relationship.

"Recognizing that not everyone is out (and doesn’t want to be out when first getting to know someone), it’s important to make sure you’re in a safe situation and that [coming out at bisexual] is a choice you are making," Hali Holtzman, a bisexual leader of an affinity space for Boston-based LGBTQIA+ identifying young adults and allies, tells Elite Daily. "There is nothing worse then being pressured to come out."

If you're a bi person on a date with a straight person, they may not know you're queer, which makes coming out as bisexual to a new boo particularly complex. If your date wrongly assumes that you're straight, coming out to them as bi can mean baseline coming out as queer, which can mean facing invalidating comments. "It is exhausting and frustrating to have to continuously defend my sexuality," Holtzman says.

When you're bi and your partner is a straight, cis person, it can be hard to feel validated in your identity, especially if people around you are focused on some biphobic misconceptions. "I have had the experience where friends, family, and peers who know how I identify question if I 'changed my mind' because I’m with a man. But I feel as though this invalidation typically comes from outsiders," Holtzman says. "When I’ve dated straight men, they haven’t had that toxic, 'Oh you’re straight now' mentality. This is because I won’t date men who believe that BS." Of course, coming out as bi to your straight partner can be incredibly difficult if your partner does believe that dating them means you're straight. Holtzman suggests having open dialogue with your partner and ultimately checking in with yourself about what a partner is bringing to your life if they are invalidating to your identity.

Yet, according to Holzman, coming out at bi to a new partner can mean continuously defending your sexuality, even if your new boo identifies as queer as well. "For most of my life I only felt hesitant when coming out to straight people," Holzman says. "I realize now that within the queer community there are micro-aggressions between identities. In a romantic relationship I thought it was going to be much easier to come out to a partner if they also identify as LGBTQIA+ because they ‘get’ it. This hasn’t always been the case for me."

According to a 2011 study by The Williams Institute, there's approximately nine million Americans within the LGBTQIA+ community, which is almost equivalent to the population of New Jersey. With representation of queer people in the media more widespread than ever,it's important to remember that even within the beautiful garden that is the queer community, coming out as bi to a queer partner can still be confusing and isolating. "I think the biggest issue is that it feels as though my partners only see me as what they want me to be (which doesn’t align with how I’ve identified myself)," Holzman says. "It’s super invalidating because it feels like after all this work I’ve done to feel comfortable with my own identity, they can’t be comfortable with it. It feels like being put in a box that isn’t the right size."

It can be frustrating to spend time and energy learning to express yourself in a relationship, only to have your partner negate how you're feeling. No matter how in love you are or how long you've been dating, how your partner sees you doesn't need to change how you see yourself. Your bi identity is valid and real no matter who you're sleeping with, dating, crushing on, or even married to.

The best time to talk to your partner about being bisexual is whenever you feel ready to. "Wait until you are comfortable — you don’t owe anyone anything," Holzman says. "Having a conversation about identity is super important before entering any relationship. For me, I’m at a point where I will not put myself through the emotional toll of dating people who invalidate me." Whether you're facing uncomfortable jokes or comments coming from your date or hurtful assumptions that you "may be likely to cheat" or aren't "really queer," there may be a lot of signs your partner isn't super receptive or supportive of your bi-ness. If for whatever reason your boo isn't validating your identity, it's OK to address that and advocate for your needs.

When it comes to coming out, you get to decide the who, what, when, and where. If you feel comfortable sharing with your partner, Holzman suggests having open conversations with them about your identity. Waiting until you're comfortable and ready can help you feel strong when you choose to talk to your partner about your bisexuality. And remembering that your identity is legitimate — regardless of how your partner identifies — is a hard but super important practice.

If you're feeling ready to share your bisexuality with your partner, remember: You are real and valid, and anything you're feeling is OK. Even if others try to put you in a box for their own comfort, you get to decide what words and identities feel right for you and what kind of support you need from the people you date. At the end of the day, being bisexual is a wonderful, beautiful, amazing part of what makes you you, and anyone who can't understand what it means to be bi, deserves a big bye-bye.

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nazariolahela · 4 years

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Best Beloved: Chapter 1

A/N: Hey y'all! This is a PM AU I’ve been working on. It’s a bit different than my previous fic series and I’m really excited to try something new. I hope y’all enjoy it. This story is told in dual first-person narrative, from Kaia (F!MC) and Damien’s POV. The first half of this story takes place during Kaia’s freshman year and Damien’s senior year of college. The second half is two years after Kaia graduates. There will be sprinklings of canon in this fic, but we’ll try to step out of the box for the most part. Thanks for reading, and please leave feedback, and/or if you would like to be tagged.

Synopsis: What happens when you find yourself crushing on your best friend? For years, Damien and Kaia have been friends, while secretly harboring feelings for one another. Everything changes one night after a little too much alcohol and years of pent up feelings. Can they control their emotions and salvage their friendship, or will the feelings they hold for one another destroy everything they have?

All characters are the property of Pixelberry Studios. Thanks for allowing me to borrow them.

Chapter Summary: It’s the first day of classes at Hartfeld University and that means meeting new faces.

Kaia

Six Years Ago

I raced across the courtyard of Hartfeld University, tugging my backpack higher on my shoulder. It was the first day of the new school year and class started in less than five minutes. Except I was all the way on the other end of campus. Whose bright idea was it to hold college classes at 8 a.m.? Way to make a good impression on the first day, Kaia.

That’s what I got for staying up until 2 a.m. the night before binge-watching episodes of America’s Most Eligible. In my defense, my roommate Victoria and I spent most of the evening getting to know each other. We discovered that we both love the show and are huge fans of Jakenzie. (That’s Jamie x Mackenzie for all you old folks out there.)

We also learned that we were both valedictorians of our respective high schools. So we spent most of the evening sharing stories of our childhood and teen years. We might have also played a few rounds of Truth or Drink. Hence why I was running late that morning. I didn’t even have time to stop at the campus coffee shop for caffeine and eye candy. What? The barista was a total babe.

I eyed the big clocktower near the library and saw that I only had two minutes left. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it. I still had to make it to Clark Hall and climb the ninety-million stairs to the third floor.

After finally arriving at Clark and climbing the Mount Everest of staircases, I sucked in several deep breaths and burst through the doors of Professor O'Keeffe’s Composition 101 classroom at 8:03 a.m. The whole class turned and the professor eyed me exasperatedly as I slinked to the back of the room, waving a silent apology as I took a seat. She shook her head and continued going over the syllabus. I pulled my MacBook from my backpack and started taking notes, stopping occasionally to scan the room for signs of anyone I might have met at freshman orientation.

I spotted a girl who sat next to me. I think her name was Sloane. Looking like she just stepped off-campus at a prestigious prep school, she wore a blue long-sleeved turtleneck sweater with a plaid skirt and a gold necklace. I focused my attention between her and the professor, watching curiously as she dug around frantically in her laptop bag, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose every time they slipped down. I spotted an empty seat next to her, so when the professor had her back turned, I gathered up my things, rose from my seat and moved over to the other side of the classroom.

“Hey!” I whispered as I took the seat next to her. She looked up from her bag and grinned when she noticed me.

“Hi, there! Kaia, right?” she asked, extending her hand. I nodded and shook it. “I’m Sloane. How’s your first day going?”

“Well, I was late for my first class and I haven’t had coffee. How’s yours?”

“I can’t find my phone charger. I know I packed an extra one, but it seems to have grown legs and walked off.” She continued shuffling through her backpack, her brows pinched in a V. Her unruly curls fell in her face and she brushed them away frustrated.

I dug through my bag, pulling two different phone charges from the side pocket. I held both of them up to her. “Which one do you need?”

Her eyes widened as she examined both chargers in my hand. Reaching for the Samsung charger, she mouthed a thank you and plugged the USB end into her laptop before plugging the other end into her phone. She glanced at my iPhone sitting face-down on my desk, then turned to me. “I gotta ask. Why do you have two different chargers?”

“My cousin Nadia is always losing hers, so I keep a spare on me just in case.”

She nodded and turned back to the front of the classroom, focusing on the professor. The rest of the class passed by uneventfully. When Professor O’Keeffe dismissed us at 8:50 a.m., Sloane and I gathered our things and walked out of the classroom together.

”Where are you off to next?” she asked, adjusting the strap on her bag.

“Intro to Sociology. You?”

”American Government. Gotta love those Gen Ed courses, ” she said with a laugh. “Wanna get lunch later? I have a free period after 11 a.m.”

“Sure. I’ll text my cousin and see if she wants to join us,” I said, pulling out my phone and shooting Nadia a text.

My cousin Nadia is quite the character. Our dads are brothers, but she and I are so close, people often asked if we were sisters. We grew up together, living three houses down from one another. Since we’re only six months apart, we were lucky enough to be in the same grade from kindergarten all the way through high school. Now, we’re privileged enough to attend the same college. I glanced at her text and shook my head.

Sloane and I exchanged phone numbers and I waved goodbye as we took off in opposite directions. I pulled out my campus map, trying to find Alexander Hall as I made my way across the courtyard to my next class. I wasn't looking where I was going when I accidentally slammed into a brick wall. Except it wasn't a brick wall.

“Whoa! Watch where you’re going!” a deep voice shouted as I immediately went flying backward onto the pavement, my phone and backpack crashing to the ground with me. The sound of breaking glass made me cringe. Well, shit. That’s going to be expensive.

“Are you okay?” his velvety voice probed. “You fell pretty hard.” He hooked his arms under mine and helped me to my feet, checking me for injuries. I released myself from his grip and bent over to pick up the rest of my belongings. I nodded a thank you and dusted off my black skirt, frowning when I saw the run in my pantyhose. I huffed as I picked up my phone and examined the shattered screen. I just got this damn thing in May. It was my present to myself for graduating from high school. Now, I have to pay to have it fixed.

I shoved it into my backpack and took a moment to study him. It only took a few seconds, but I immediately recognized him as my old friend Damien. My eyes widened as I realized who I had just crashed into. “Oh. My. Gods! It’s really you!” I said as I flung myself into his arms.

“You always were clumsy,” he laughed and squeezed his toned body against mine.

It had been four years since I saw him last. Damien and I were next-door neighbors and although he was four years older than me, we spent nearly every day hanging out. I had the hugest crush on him, even though he only saw me as a sister. After years of pining for him, I decided I was no longer going to hide how I felt. I stole two of his dad’s beers, chugged them in rapid succession, and went in search of the boy I’d loved since 7th grade.

We snuck away from his party and hid out at the playground down the street from our houses and about how much we would miss each other after he went away to college. There, under the jungle gym, I drunkenly confessed my feelings for him. That was also the first time I kissed him. After he gently pushed me off of him, he told me that he cared about me, but that I was only 15 and it was inappropriate for a guy his age to pursue me. I was so embarrassed, I ran away from him and hid out at my house for the rest of the night.

He came home for Christmas that winter but we didn’t get to see much of each other. Now that he was here in front of me after all this time, I realized how much he had changed since then. My eyes traveled the length of his denim-clad legs, past the black t-shirt stretching across the muscles of his broad chest, up to his face. He had the softest chocolate brown eyes, wavy brown hair, and warm tan skin. Just a hint of stubble peppered his chin and his defined jaw tensed as he watched me. His intense gaze made my cheeks tint pink.

“Yeah, sorry about that. Are you okay?” I replied. Of course, he was. He barely flinched when I all but plowed into him.

“I’m more worried about you. I’ve never given someone a concussion on the first day of classes before and I’m not looking to start.”

I rapped my knuckles against my temple. “You know me. I’ve got a thick skull. My phone on the other hand, well R.I.P.,” I said, miming pouring out a 40-oz for my now-broken handheld device. He chuckled and his brown eyes bored into mine, making me feel suddenly self-conscious.

“How have you been? How’s your first day going so far?”

“Well, I overslept and was late for my first class, I still haven’t had caffeine, and I bulldozed into a random guy with reckless abandon. So, I’d say it’s going well.”

He laughed again, the sound warming my insides. My eyes scanned his face, taking in his strong features. He was so pretty, I could cry. “So, where are you off to in such a hurry that you’re Miley Cyrusing people?”

“Oh, I’m trying to get to Alexander Hall. I missed out on the campus tour during freshman orientation, so I’m trying to find my way around.”

He took my map from my hand, his fingers brushing mine in the process. The sensation of his touch coursed through my entire body and I had to remind myself to breathe. He retrieved a pen from his backpack, pulling the cap off with his teeth. I’ve never wanted to be a pen cap so bad in my life.

“So, you are here,” he said, marking an “X” where we currently stood in front of Clark. “You’re going to want to keep on this path and head past the library, then take a left at the fork,” My eyes followed the line he drew along the paper. “And then you’ve reached your destination.” He circled the building in question and handed the map back to me, before capping his pen and slipping it back in his backpack.

I opened my mouth to ask him if he wanted to hang out later when a female voice pierced the air, interrupting us. “Babe, hurry up. We’re going to be late for Social Psych.”

Babe? I looked over his shoulder to see a woman with dark brown hair, full lips, and piercing brown eyes making our way toward us. She narrowed her eyes at me, then turned back to Damien, slipping her hand in the crook of his elbow and pressed a kiss to his jaw. He glanced at me apologetically as she pulled him toward Waterfield Hall.

“Be careful out there. And have fun this year. We'll get together soon,” he winked and gave me a wave as the two of them walked away toward their next class.

“Who was that?” I heard her ask, their voices fading with every step.

“Just an old friend,” he replied. My stomach sank. No matter how much I wanted us to be more, we never would be. I glanced at the courtyard and noticed the crowd thinning out, meaning the next block of classes would be starting shortly. I hitched my backpack on my shoulders and sighed deeply as I made my way to Alexander.

***

Damien

Alana’s nails gently scraped up and down my bicep as we sat in the lecture hall, listening to Professor Henderson drone on over the syllabus for this semester. Just two more to go and I’d be done with this place. Don’t get me wrong, I’d enjoyed my four years at Hartfeld, but I was ready to graduate and GTFO already.

Sophomore year was particularly hard. I almost dropped out halfway through fall semester after Dad passed away. Except Mom wouldn’t let me. She begged me to stick it out and made me promise to graduate. I couldn’t say no to her. Call me a mama’s boy if you must, but she’s the most important woman in my life and I couldn't bring myself to let her down. If we’re being honest here, I was doing it for me too. To be the first person in my family to graduate from college was a pretty big achievement.

I struggled to listen to the professor’s lecture, jotting down notes in my notebook. I should have been paying attention, but I had too much shit on my mind. Mainly my schedule for this semester. I needed to meet with my advisor after class and get my internship shit lined up. That’s what you get for waiting until the last minute, Dames. I pulled out my phone and shot a quick text to my advisor, asking if she had a free period this afternoon to get my paperwork filled out.

I looked to my right and saw Alana jotting notes in her notebook as her left hand still stroked my arm. I watched her for a few moments, taking her in. Alana and I met spring semester during our freshman year. We sat next to each other in Western Civ and our class discussion on long-standing issues in Western history turned into a full-blown shouting match. The professor pulled both of us out into the hallway and calmly explained to us that she would not allow that kind of behavior in her class. She then decided the best form of torture was to pair us up for the semester research project.

The first few weeks were hell. Alana and I disagreed on everything. Including the topic for our project. About halfway into the semester, she and I were studying in the library, when she asked me why I was — and I quote — “such a moody little bitch.” I told her she would be too if she had a pain in the ass like her for a partner. She laughed and told me how lucky I was to even be in the same vicinity as her. We exchanged jabs for a good ten minutes before she leaned over and kissed me. When I asked her what that was for, she replied that it was to shut me up.

Not going to lie, I was intrigued. She had a level of snark I had only seen from the women in my family. I knew I was in trouble, but there was just something about her that drew me to her. We began dating a week later and have been nearly inseparable ever since. Being that this was our senior year, I found myself wondering what would happen to us after graduation. I raised the topic of marriage once or twice over the last year, but she was always quick to shut me down. She insisted that she loved me, but didn’t think marriage was “for us.” I shook the thoughts from my mind and peeked at Alana from the corner of my eye. She was still focused on the professor. Good thing she couldn't read my mind.

My thoughts wandered to Kaia. It felt like a lifetime since we saw each other. She had grown up since then. I remembered the last things we said to each other before we parted the night of my grad party. She got drunk and told me she was in love with me. As much as I wanted to return her feelings, she and her cousin Nadia were like little sisters to me, which made the whole situation weird. Plus the whole age thing. I sighed and dragged my hand across my face, trying to clear my head. Before long, the hour was up and our professor released us. Alana and I gathered our things and linked hands as we made our way out of the lecture hall.

“I’ve got some free time before my noon class, so I'm going to head back to the dorms. You wanna come with me?” she said, batting those long lashes my way. My dick screamed yes, so I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and pressed a kiss to the spot behind her ear as we walked.

“As long as we’re back in time for my Interpersonal Comm class.”

She rolled her eyes. “I can't believe you, a senior, are taking a 200 level course. Why didn’t you take that class sophomore year?”

I shot her a look. She knew why. She was the one who stood by me during Dad’s illness. I was lucky I was able to finish most of my classes that semester. Interpersonal Communication is the only one I had to drop. So, here I was retaking the course so I could graduate with my full 120 credits.

“It is what it is,” I said as we walked back to the dorms. A few minutes later, we arrived at Richmond Hall where Alana lived. I waved to some guys I recognized from one of my classes last year and followed her inside, checking out her ass the entire time.

When we arrived at her room, she dropped her bag off at her desk and disappeared into the bathroom. I moved around her dorm, looking at the pictures of us on the wall. All the memories we shared in the last four years. The Winter Formal sophomore year. The summer before senior year at the Cape. Our trip to San Francisco junior year over Spring Break.

I rubbed the aching spot in my chest, remembering proposing to her on that trip. She looked like she wanted to throw up when I dropped to one knee in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. She covered her face in embarrassment and begged me to stand up. Confused, I asked her what she meant. She pulled me away from the gawking tourists shooting me sympathetic looks and explained that while she loved me, she wasn’t ready for marriage. I felt like the biggest idiot.

I was still looking at the photos when the bathroom door swung open and Alana strutted out, wearing nothing but a silk bathrobe. Ho-lee-shit. Pretty sure I died and went to heaven. She sauntered up to me and wrapped her arms around my neck, peppering my jawline with kisses. “Is this what you brought me to your dorm for?” I whispered in her ear, taking her lobe between my teeth.

“Mmm...This one is my favorite. Look how hot you are in your board shorts,” she said pointing to the photo of us at Cape Cod. She examined the photo wall while she casually slipped her hand down my pants. I snaked my arm around her waist and slid it down to her ass, which the robe barely covered. My eyes widened when I noticed she wasn’t wearing panties. I turned her around to face me, then grabbed her by the waist and tossed her on the bed. She squealed and reached up to grab my t-shirt, pulling it over my head. I dipped in and began to kiss her neck when my phone went off.

“Ignore it,” she panted, raking her fingernails up and down my back. I licked a trail from her earlobe down to her collarbone, peeling the robe open to expose her breasts. I kissed my way down the swell of her left breast when my phone went off again. I groaned and rolled off her, grabbing my phone from my back pocket, and saw two missed calls from my advisor.

“Shit. I gotta take this babe. Gimme a sec.”

“Are you fucking serious?” she huffed and pulled the robe closed. I grabbed my t-shirt off the floor and slipped it on before stepping out of her room into the hallway. I pulled up my missed calls and hit the redial button. Dr. Griffin picked up on the first ring.

“Mr. Nazario. I’m glad you called back. I have a free period now if you’re available to go over your internship paperwork.”

I sighed and raked a hand through my hair. I really needed to get my internship taken care of so I could get credit for my work, but my girl was on the other side of the door, half-naked and waiting for me. Waging a war with my thoughts, I decided that I’d have to make it up to Alana tonight.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I told her, then hung up the phone. I steeled myself for the difficult conversation I was about to have with Alana and made my way back into the dorm room. She sat on the bed, a scowl on her face as she looked at her phone.

“Hey, babe. That was Dr. Griffin. I need to go get my internship paperwork taken care of.” Alana rolled her eyes and muttered under her breath. I moved in front of her and leaned over until we were at eye level. “I promise I’ll make it up to you tonight. Okay?”

She glared at me, not saying anything. I gripped her chin between my thumb and forefinger and pressed a kiss to her lips. She didn’t pull away, so I knew she wasn’t that mad. I kissed her once more before I turned and headed out of her room.

I made my way out of the dorm and shot her an apology text as I headed across campus to Dr. Griffin’s office. The grey text bubbles popped up, then disappeared a few times, before she replied, “K.” I sighed and slipped my phone in my jeans pocket. I couldn’t blame her though She was mad because she felt I hadn't been the most reliable boyfriend, but if I knew her like I thought I did, she’d get over it. Either that or I’d have blue balls for the next week.

#best beloved #pm au #college au #friends to lovers #perfect match #choices fanfic #damien nazario #kaia park #damien x mc #nazariolahela fanfic

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imagesofthegreatgull · 4 years

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Hybrid Rainbow

Joy has always been a rare and precious commodity. I would argue, though, that in the developed world (Wherever, exactly, that is), it has become somewhat less rare in recent times, as standards of living and education continue to go up. That’s an absurdly privileged thing to say, I realize, but I’m trying to start this thing as evenhandedly as I can. I understand about suffering and poverty; I’m reading A Tree Grows In Brooklyn right now, even! Okay, saying we’re closer now than ever to utopia is going to smack of ignorance no matter how you phrase it, but it also strikes me as undeniably true, in the grand scheme of things. I think most people--aside from the fascists--would refuse a one-way trip in a time machine to any previous era, or at the very least, would recognize that it wouldn’t improve much of anything for them. As unruly as our age is, it’s still probably the best one we’ve gotten thus far, and as the boot-heel of oppression starts to ever so slowly ease up its pressure on the necks of the long-suffering masses, the question has begun to enter into the collective consciousness: what is to be done with joy when it begins to fall, unbidden, into your life with something like abundance? What is to be done if moments of joy no longer must be pried with great effort and sacrifice from the rockface of life, but lie strewn liberally throughout our days, needing only the will and lack of embarrassment to seize them?

Thus far, the latter-day generations have faced up to this problem with decidedly mixed success. The idea that expecting anything other than the very worst leaves one vulnerable to the universe’s cruel whims has been stamped upon the human brain for centuries, and has left many sadly unable to recognize their own privilege (Which, by the way, is a big part of why a whole lotta white folks refuse to admit they have it better than anyone else and continue to dig their heels in against progress because to them it looks like cutting in line). It is still widely accepted that constantly finding joy and peace and purpose in one’s own life is the purview of children and children alone, that it is a naivete to be grown out of. We have the impulse always within us to be hard, to be warlike, to show the world that we’re not weak and frivolous but monsters to be feared, without emotions to be appealed to or ideals to be fallen short of.

Remedying this problem has turned out to be one of the primary functions of counterculture. If it is often unhelpful to simply look at the entire value system of one’s parents and say “Fuck that”, as it tends to foster a rather negative self-definition, still, if part of that value system is a deeply entrenched distrust of happiness, “Fuck that” may be exactly the response called for. The beauty of “Fuck that” is that it leaps past the slow loss of faith in something and arrives immediately at a flat rejection of it, and since much of the history of civilization has been bound up with blind faith in arbitrary and harmful things, the ability and the courage to flatly reject something, to give it no credit for however widely accepted it is but to dismiss it as bullshit from the ground up, is a step forward in human consciousness tantamount to the reinvention of the wheel.

The great irony of the end of the sixties is that all the hippies were miserable for no reason: they won. Rock n’ roll did change the world, it just didn’t immediately transform it on every level into an unrecognizable nirvana. For all the apparent emptiness of its utopian dreams, the basic thrust of the thing worked out just fine: that particular cat will never be put back into its bag, and those ideas are now out in the ether forever, always waiting for someone to find them and be inspired to change their own life and the lives of those around them for the better. The same goes for the punk rock revolution a few years later: they may not have brought the bastards down, but they did successfully bring personal liberation to a lot of people, and poured exactly as much gas on the fires of populism as they intended to. Culture, and in particular art and in particular music, cannot, unassisted, change the world, but it can change your world, and has been changing small worlds all over the frigging place at least since those mop-topped Brits set foot on American shores and probably since Johnny B. Goode learned to play guitar just like a-ringin’ a bell.

The thread can get lost, however. Culture is always a reflection of the people, and the people still spend a lot of their time bored, frustrated, and terrified of letting on that they have feelings about stuff. Young people especially, formerly the eternal pirate crew waving high the flags of “Liberty” and “Up Yours”, in recent times have often capitulated and resigned themselves to no more than a few stray moments of fun pilfered from the fortresses of the almighty Money Man-Kings, usually in the form of drugs, sex, and reckless self-endangerment. The cost of the hippies and the punks giving up their battles is that the counterculture lost its intellectual leadership, at least until the resurgence in political literacy in the 2010s. In the wasteland following the 70s, there were no John Lennons or Joe Strummers to look to for guidance; even the people who were elected to speak for their generation seemed adamant that there was fuck-all they could really say. Yeah, it’s nice to know that someone else feels stupid and contagious, but that’s not really a direction, is it? The generation-defining message Kurt Cobain and his peers sent out was “We’re all way too fucked up to do anything about anything”, and that introspective moodiness pervaded American underground rock music from the invention of hardcore at least all the way up to the moment Craig Finn watched The Last Waltz with Tad Kubler and said “Why aren’t there bands like this anymore?” and set out with rest of the Steadies in tow to remind everyone that music can save your immortal soul and that hey, that Springsteen guy was really onto something, headband and all, and together they all successfully ushered in the New Uncool and now we’ve got Patrick Stickles wailing that “If the weather’s as bad as the weatherman says, we’re in for a real mean storm!” and Brian Fallon admitting “I always kinda sorta wished I looked like Elvis” and everything’s great, except it’s not, everything’s fucked, but rock n’ roll is here to stay, come inside now it’s okay, and I’ll shake you, ooo-ooo-ooo.

The point of all this is my belief that even with the responsibility rock music has to provide cathartic outlets for dissatisfaction, is has an equal or greater responsibility to provide heroes. I think it’s time we all got over pretending that we’re better than the need for heroes, because we all insist on having them anyway, imperfect roses by any other name, and we’d do a hell of a lot better selecting them if we just admitted what we were after. We don’t just want particularly talented comrades, we want King Arthur, Robin Hood, Superman, Malcolm Reynolds. Damn it all, they don’t need to be perfect, they don’t even need to be all that great really, and yeah, Arthur dies, and Robin never gets Prince John, and Superman can’t save everyone, and the war’s over, we’re all just folk now, and John Lennon beat women and Van Morrison is a grumpy old fart and John Lydon’s a disgrace, but it’s the faith that counts. The faith that there’s something greater than ourselves that some people are more keyed into than others, and that whatever they can relay from that other side is what’ll see us through. All the best prophets are madmen, and madmen aren’t always romantic fools; sometimes they hurt people, or fail at crucial moments due to a compulsion they can’t control. Let he who is without sin etcetera, right? Why not cast aside realism and sincerely believe in something or someone, huh?

I believe in the Pillows. I don’t know hardly anything about them; my expertise of Japanese culture and history extends to the anime I’ve seen and that “History of Japan” YouTube video that made the rounds a while back. I can’t locate them within the Japanese music scene; all their western influences seem obvious to me, and the rest I know nothing about. They’re the only rock band from their country I’ve listened to any great amount of, I don’t speak the language they mostly sing in, I don’t even know their career very well. The particulars of any experiences they might have had that motivated them to make the art they make are not ones I could possibly share in, so, saying that I “Relate” to their work sounds a little preposterous. They ought to be a novelty to me, a band that clearly likes a lot of the same bands I do despite hailing from a foreign shore, marrying that shared music taste with a cultural identity I have nothing to do with, a small, nice upswing of globalism pleasing to my sense of universalism but not having any kind of quantifiable impact on me.

Yet I, like a good many other westerners, believe in the Pillows. I’m a little buster, and my eyes just watered as I wrote that. In fact, it’s likely because of the barriers of language and culture that exist between us that my belief in the Pillows is so strong. Pete Townshend, someone else I believe in, once opened a show by saying “You are very far away...but we will fucking reach you”, and though the Pillows are both geographically (At the moment) and culturally miles away from me, Lord strike me down if they don’t fucking reach me. They reach me in a way many of their American college rock peers, many of their biggest influences in fact, never have. Dinosaur Jr, Bob Mould, Sonic Youth, the Pixies, Nirvana--all these artists speak directly to the American adolescent experience, but though they have all moved me to one degree or another, none of them have produced a body of work I can so readily see myself in as that of the Pillows. Maybe it is the novelty of it, maybe I’m fooling myself and it is just my sense of universalism carrying me away, but there’s something I hear in the Pillows that I don’t hear in those bands, and though the obvious candidate for that thing would be the foreign tongue the majority of the lyrics are written in, when it comes down to it, I think that thing is joy.

Joy, to me, is the possibility glimpsed by rock n’ roll. Not hedonistic pleasure, not a sadistic glee over the outrage of authority figures, but real, true, open-hearted, “Freude, schöner Götterfunken/Tochter aus Elysium”--type joy. Buddy Holly had joy. The Beatles, The Who, the pre-fall Rod Stewart, they had joy. Springsteen’s got joy to spare. Those people have such profound love for their art and their audience that just the continual recognition of the fact that they have a guitar in their hands and they’re being allowed to play it is enough to make them ecstatic, and whenever they want to actually express something serious they have to get themselves under control to do it. Yet, whether it’s the unfashionability of those utopian dreams, or the simple fact that rock music has become accepted by mainstream culture and is now a commonplace, unremarkable thing, but half the people who have picked up an electric guitar for the past few decades don’t seem all that excited about it. From Kim Gordon snarling about how people go down to the store to buy some more and more and more and more, to Thom Yorke moaning about how he’s let down and hanging around, crushed like a bug in the ground, even up to Courtney Barnett asking how’s that for first impressions, this place seems depressing, it’s not really a given anymore, if it ever was, that people who make rock music are very joyful in what they do.

Of course, I’m not demanding that our artists be empty-headed fluff-factories; far from it. The Pillows write sad songs and angry songs same as everybody else. But the important thing is this: every song the Pillows play is played with an exuberance and abandon that is immediately striking, regardless of the emotional content of each song. Channelling that kind of revelry into rock music is both to my mind the initial purpose of the genre in the first place and something which has become so rare as to be remarkable. A veneer of detached cool, a howling ferocity, a whimpering woundedness--these have become the hallmarks of American rock music, and they are nowhere to be found in the Pillows.

At the same time, the Pillows are the very antithesis of artlessness. Joy of the caliber they deal in is more commonly found in folky rave-ups, a lack of musicianship giving way to trancelike festivity. But the Pillows are skilled song craftsmen like few others; their sound has evolved throughout the years, but they tend to settle in the neighborhood of power-pop, abounding in glorious hooks and surprising structures. A hundred unnecessary, perfect touches seem to exist in every song; a pause, a solo, a bassline, all deftly elevating the song into a perfect expression of something sublime, something that always--always--takes ahold of the musicians themselves and imbues their performances with power and purpose the likes of which most little busters can only dream of feeling. It should be testament enough to their brilliance that upon first listen to a song I never know what most of the lyrics mean, but whenever I look up a translation, they always turn out to be exactly what I felt they must be; their songs are so musically communicative that they all but lack the need for lyrics.

This dual nature is why I believe in the Pillows: by so utterly failing to neglect both the highest possibilities of musical composition as an unparalleled tool for capturing emotional nuance and the unrestrained id-like rush that is the province of rock n’ roll, they successfully attain the lofty realm that is--or ought to be--the goal of music in the first place. Never once is there a hint of straying into the realm of primitivism nor into overthought seriousness, and instead they locate themselves somehow exactly center on the scale between punk and prog, lacking the weaknesses and gaining the strengths of both. They make rock whole again by finally disproving the tenet initially laid out by their heroes, your heroes, and mine, The Beatles: the notion that growing up means having less fun. The viscerally exciting early work of The Beatles lacks any of the depth and vision displayed by their later records, but those records are so carefully and expertly crafted that they tend to lose spontaneity, and constantly second-guess themselves where the juvenilia they followed forged unselfconsciously ahead. That legendary career path has laid out a false dichotomy that every proceeding generation of kids with guitars has chosen between, save for the few who could see past it, the ones who heard the wildness in “Revolution” and the wisdom in “Twist and Shout” and realized that they were of a piece, were one and the same, not to be chosen between but embraced fully. Pete Townshend. Bruce Springsteen. Joe Strummer. David Byrne. Paul Westerberg. The Pillows. The real heroes are not those who champion one side or another but fight all their lives for peace between them, knowing that we have not yet begun to imagine what could be accomplished if that were made possible.

Just as they bypass the divide between what Patrick Stickles termed the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies of rock (I prefer to think of the usual battle as being between the Dionysians and the Athenians, with the true devotees of Apollo being most of those heroes I keep referring to, except Dylan, who might be a Hermesian), so too do the Pillows bypass the Pacific frigging ocean. And the Atlantic, to boot. Their music quotes the Pixies and The Beatles directly, and obviously owes much to Nirvana and all their college rock predecessors who spent the entire 80s desperately stacking themselves until the doomed power trio could finally vault over the wall. Their first record is practically a tribute to XTC. They do speak a lot of English, too. I’m informed that much of western culture is seen as the epitome of coolness in Japan, which might explain their obsession with Baseball, and apparently sprinkling a bit of the Saxon tongue into the mix is far from uncommon in the music scene(s). Regardless, there is something ineffably touching to a distant fan in a foreign land about hearing Sawao Yamanaka spit “No surrender!” or exclaim “Just runner’s high!” It looks from here like a show of mutual effort to understand me as much as I’m trying to understand them. They’re generous enough to have already walked to the middle where they’re asking me to meet them, a middle where it doesn’t matter that I don’t have a suffix attached to my name or that they don’t wear shoes in houses. The invisible continent that all forward-thinking and sensitive people come to long for is where the Pillows are broadcasting from, because they’ve realized that its golden shores and spiraling cities are attainable. They’re attainable with joy, with the fundamentally rebellious act of refusing to let the fascists bring down even your globdamn day, because who the hell gave them that power other than us? I know enough about Japan and America to know that either one accusing the other of being imperialist and socially conservative to a fault is a fucking joke, and to know that we’ve done a lot more wrong to them than they’ll ever do to us and the presence of the Pillows amounts to a “We forgive you”, not an “I’m sorry”. Having watched a decent amount of anime, which is basically the result of Japan’s mind being blown by western media and then proceeding to show their love by often almost inadvertently surpassing their inspirations, I know that the only way to save our respective national souls and everybody else’s too is to put our knuckles down, have Jesus and Buddha shake hands like Kerouac tried to explain that they would anyway, and embrace each other’s dreams and passions and adopt them into our own.

It takes better people to inhabit that better world, and in case that sounds like fascist talk, I mean we’ve got to do better, not be better. It’s no physical imperfection that holds us back, nor a mental imperfection exactly, as we all have our own neuroses and if we expunge those then we’ll be kissing art and lot of other vital stuff goodbye. No, it’s our discomfort with ourselves, our world, our neighbors, our aliens, that keep us from seeing that crazy sunshine. If we can’t even acknowledge the greatness around us, that surplus of joy I mentioned a while back that we just seem to have no idea what to do with, then we have no hope of ever achieving further greatness, of ever quelling man’s inhumanity to man down to an inevitable fringe rather than the basic order of the world.

There was always more to do

Than just eat and work and screw

But now that there’s time at last to do those things, we’re still afraid to, afraid that we’ll come up empty, that the search for fulfillment leads only to disappointment, better to hang back and play it safe, better not to risk becoming one of those people I shake my head at and pity and will secretly envy until I die. It’s a new world, and we must learn to be new people. I believe in the Pillows because I believe they make excellent models for that new kind of person. The way they behave in the studio and on the stage is the way people behave when they’re truly free, and we’ve all been set free already or will be soon, so if we’re going to try and learn what the fuck is next from anyone, I think we might as well learn from the Pillows. At least, that’s one of the places we could get that insight. There’s a lot of art and a lot of philosophy and political theory to sift through to in order to put together a workable 21st century identity, and the Pillows are hardly the only people to have begun making the leap. But because of a silly thing like the size of the earth, the infinitesimal size of the earth even compared to the distance between us and the next rock we’re gonna try and get to, not everybody is getting their particular brand of free thought and action, and I happen to think that’s regrettable, and it’s my will as a free individual to rectify it as much as I can.

Writing about music really is worthless, isn’t it? I haven’t said jackshit about what the Pillows actually do other than to vaguely qualify their genre and temperament, and the only more useless thing I could do than not describing their songs would be to describe their songs. If you don’t hear the bracing weightlessness in “Blues Drive Monster”, or the aching nostalgia in “Patricia”, or the soul-bearing cry in “Hybrid Rainbow” then nothing I could write about those would be more effective than “Little Busters is a really good album.” The better primer might be Happy Bivouac, from a few years later; it has the melancholic rush of “Last Dinosaur”, the ascended teenybopper “Whoa, whoa, yeah” chorus in “Backseat Dog”, and the intro that should make it obvious immediately that you’re listening to one of the best songs ever recorded which opens “Funny Bunny”. Those two, Runners High, and Please, Mr. Lostman are the classic era, selections from the former three immortalized in their biggest claim to western fame, the FLCL soundtrack, a brilliant use of their music that could warrant an equally long piece. Before and after those four are periods of experimentation and discovery equally worth your time, not all of which I’m familiar with yet. See, now I’m just an incomplete Wikipedia article; it’d be equally worthless to expound upon the individual bandmates, on the pure yawp of Yamanaka’s vocals, on the passionate drumming of Yoshiaki Manabe and the supernaturally faultless lead guitar of Shinichiro Sato, or the contribution of founding bassist Kenji Ueda, which was so valued by the others that when he left he was never officially replaced (They’re so sweet). I’m not here to write an advertisement or a press-release, I don’t really even know why I’m here writing this, but I know that I believe in the Pillows, that they’re important, and that people should write about them. I’m being the change I want to see in the world, get it? That’s all we can be asked to do.

It occurs to me that people believed in Harvey Dent too, and that didn’t turn out so well. Hell, let’s leave the comic book pages behind, people believe in Donald Trump, they think he’s a hero, and that’s all going down in flames as I write this. Having heroes can be dangerous, but I still believe it’s not as dangerous as not having heroes. “Lesser of two evils” sounds an awful lot like one of those false dichotomies between fun and intelligence or between misery and foolishness I mentioned earlier, so, let’s call it a qualified good. I’m not much of a responsible world-citizen if my only effort towards bringing the planet together is spinning some sweet Japanese alt-rock tunes and bragging about how open-minded I am, but if I do ever end up doing anyone any good, then I’d consider it paying forward the good done to me by the Pillows, among others. They helped me form my identity as an artist (Read: functional human being) and they made my adolescence a lot easier. Actually, that’s a lie: my adolescence was (And continues to be) pretty easy already, and the Pillows reassured me that I wasn’t avoiding reality by feeling that. While American bands sang about the downsides of being a mallrat or a non-mallrat, the Pillows offered a vision of teenagedome much like my own, one that was grandly romantic, in which suffering wasn’t a cosmic stupidity but a trial with pathos and merit, and joy was not an occasional indulgence but a constant presence, whether it was lived in or lost and needing recovery.

That’s the old idea of youth, the youth of John Keats, the youth that makes the old miss it, makes it required that we explain to them that it’s still there, it never left, it’s a dream, a momentary affirmation, an attitude, a muttered curse word. So many of my peers, now no longer engaged in a constant race to stay out of the grave as their ancestors were, seemed intent on beating each other into their tombs, as if reaching walking death before their parents was the only way to outgrow them. There’s so much life just lying around and it’s just plain wasteful to let it lie in the sun and rust in the rain. There’s space enough to stretch, to not keep who you are awkwardly curled up inside yourself, to breathe the air and taste the wine and dig the brains of your fellow travelers in this loosely-defined circus. I found that space in the Pillows, having often suspected it was there, and while everyone is going to find that space in their own way--or not, still, tragically not--I have to think that experience was due in part to some innate and unique quality of the music itself, not just a complimentary sensibility contained within myself. The Pillows are free, and that makes them freeing, it’s easy as that. Their liberation is plain as day; it rings in every chord, every snare-hit, every harmony; it’s up to us ascertain what we can do in our own limited capacity to hoist ourselves up to their level and give some other folks a boost along the way and a hand to grab afterwards. It’s the gift that art gives us, and the Pillows just give it more freely than most is all, which is why I think the suggestion to listen to them is more than just a solid recommendation. Like the insistence on listening to The Beatles, or The Clash, or any of the others, it’s a plea to save your soul, to learn the language of tomorrow and drink the lifeblood of peace and love and piss and vinegar, or else you’ll be lost, lost, lost.

Can you feel? Can you feel that hybrid rainbow?

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thegrandimago · 4 years

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After a racist white lady called the cops on a black man who was birdwatching in Central Park last week, the black birding community came together to launch the first-ever Black Birders Week.

The celebration kicked off Sunday and will end Friday, but this definitely won’t be the last time this group of scientists, birders, and nature lovers center the stories of black people who find joy in catching the flutter of a wing or hearing the melody of a bird song. If there were ever a moment to celebrate black people from all walks of life, it’s now.

The incident with Christian Cooper in Central Park is indicative of the broader dangers black communities face and sparked widespread outrage. Then, later that day, the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was the spark that pushed communities over the edge to create the mass uprising happening now.

Black communities are sick and tired of the Amy Coopers of the world resorting to police calls whenever a black person makes them feel uncomfortable. More urgently, black communities are in pain from the trauma and death that police forces continue to inflict on their families and loved ones. Christian Cooper could’ve easily become a George Floyd or Eric Garner or Tony McDade.

However, Black Birders Week is not about building fear around what it’s like to bird while black. This week is about highlighting the magic and thrill of taking a walk in the woods in search of a bird that’s migrating back north from its winter away. It’s about celebrating the black people who take part in this space—and about inviting more to join them. Earther spoke with 27-year-old Brianna Amingwa of Philadelphia, who helped organize this inaugural event, to learn more about how she got into birding.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Earther: What is Black Birders Week?

Brianna Amingwa: We set out three main goals with Black Birders Week, the first of which is visibility and representation. A lot of times, we have this kind of not huge community of black birders, and folks don’t know we exist. I’ve had family members who I talk to you and talk to me and are like, “What? How do you know that?” when I identify a bird or point something out.

And that’s not a great thing because how can we add to this community and into this really robust network without people knowing that we’re there?

So it’s really to uplift and recognize black birders, black naturalists, because our climate’s changing, our culture is changing. And to show how accessible it is, as well. Birding is one of the easiest things you can do. You don’t have to have anything to do it. You can just look outside and watch for movement in the trees. It’s a hobby you can have for your whole life.

So a lot of that is raising visibility and awareness about birding as a hobby, birding as community, even birding as healing sometimes as well, especially in times like this. Another part of that was to create dialog within the birding community to start having these conversations and make sure people know what the issues are and why they’re issues so that they can themselves take action to make a better space for us all to be in.

And the last part of that is just really the value of diversity in the birding community. I have a science background, so I could talk to you all day about the value of diversity in the natural world and ecology: having different kinds of species, having different purposes. But that’s true in our human world as well. Diversity improves groups and ecosystems and thought. It can bring a lot of creativity, so I think that’s another big part of it: valuing that diversity and putting it upfront and amplifying and magnifying all that.

Earther: Right on! I’m curious, was this something that you all had already planned, or was the planning of it a result of the incident with Christian Cooper last week?

Amingwa: We have a group chat of a lot of folks from across the country. We’re all young STEM folks. Not all of them are in conservation. Other ones are in economics, in all kinds of different things. Engineers even. And we often talk about current events and what’s happening. We were having a discussion in our group chat about the Christian Cooper situation and how upset and frustrated we were. All the people on the chat were kind of like, “What can we do?” So a few of the folks on the team came up with the idea, and we really just ran with it from there.

Earther: How did you get into birding?

Amingwa: I did not grow up birding, going outside a whole bunch, nothing like that. I’m from the metro Detroit area. I lived on a divided highway between two malls, so it wasn’t natural for me at all. I did always love animals, and I love cats and domestic animals. I was in Girl Scouts when I was a kid. I got to see horses, and I knew then that I loved horses. As I got a little older, I kept wanting to go and try to ride horses, but we didn’t know anybody anywhere who could do that for us.

My mom ended up coming across a guy named Doug Lewis, and he is a black horseman. He’d let kids from the city come up and ride his horses and clean the stalls and feed them, all for free. So I started going on these trail rides with Doug and the other black horsemen. It was while I was out trail riding in the woods in Upper Michigan, and I was like, “Whoa, who knew all this was out here?” I was shocked. I had never been into a place that wild. I saw bear dens and deer and birds and all kinds of stuff like that. That was when I was in high school. I felt like I was more interested in wildlife and wanted to know more about it.

During college, I was able to take an internship and work in conservation. While I was working there, I met a woman who was a birder, and she showed me an American goldfinch and showed me how it flew up in the air and goes “Potato chip, potato chip!” That’s the call that it makes. And that’s one thing we do as birders is match the birds’ calls to words so that you can learn them better. And I had no idea that birds had all these different sounds and calls, and you could learn them. And from then I was like, “I just got to start looking.” I needed to look around more, and the more I looked, the more I saw. That’s when I really just got hooked on it. That was back in like 2011, and ever since then, I’m always just looking for birds wherever I go.

Earther: Why is it important that black people get to enjoy this activity, too?

Amingwa: I think it’s so important that black people have a chance to enjoy this opportunity because we have a right to. Everyone should have a right to. I’ve seen in my own experience how it makes me feel, how calm I feel when I’m outside, how it’s energizing. There’s also all the health benefits of just walking and being outdoors and being in fresh air, being in a healthy green space. That’s great for your mental health and well-being. I don’t think that should be held back from anyone, especially not black people.

On top of that, I think it’s so important for black people to be in spaces that they haven’t traditionally been shown to be in. Black people were some of the first founders of our nation. We always had this connection and closeness with the land. I think a lot of times that’s misconstrued now into we don’t care about nature or we don’t know about it. But we were the original caretakers of the land, us and the Native Americans, indigenous people. That should continue now. There are still black farmers. There are still black naturalists and people taking care of the environment.

That needs to be seen and shown. You can only really be what you see. It wasn’t until I saw a black person riding a horse and other folks working in conservation that I knew I could do that before. Beforehand, it wasn’t even an option for me because I didn’t know it was there.

Earther: What are the challenges in increasing the visibility of black birders?

Amingwa: Some of the challenges are just defining what it is. It’s an unfamiliar thing to most people: What is birding? Why would you want to go outside and look at birds? But I think when we can get people actually doing it, they can see the thrill of it all. That probably even sounds silly to call it thrilling if you’re not into birds, but when you’re out there and it’s just super quiet and something just flies by and you’re searching and looking and you figure it out. Then you help someone else see it! And somebody else walks by, and they all want to know what you’re looking at through your scope or your binoculars. That’s a really big trigger moment for people of just getting them to kind of jump into it, too. I think that’s the challenge with visibility: Letting people know what it is, why you would do it, and then giving them a chance to actually experience it.

Earther: How do incidents like what happened with Christian Cooper in Central Park highlight the work that still needs to happen in this space?

Amingwa: With Christian Cooper, I think it was probably shocking to a lot of people in America. It was unfortunate, and it was very sad to see. But that wasn’t unusual to a lot of us who are black in nature. You know, there are very subtle things that happen: somebody refuses to say hi to you or doesn’t look to you as a source of knowing anything about birds, is suspicious of why you’re here even though you’ve got your binoculars on. Things like that. So we are familiar with those things happening. What’s different now is a lot of that is being caught on tape, and it’s being shared, and it can catch on on social media and really spread like wildfire as it did, which I think is a good thing because things like this raise awareness. People can say, “Wow, that’s terrible. I want to prevent that, too.” And more people will be advocating to make these spaces more welcoming.

I think it also poses a challenge because if we see what happened to this guy, Christian Cooper, out in the woods, a lot of people don’t want that to happen to them. It could have gone even worse for him besides just the media uproar. He could have been seriously hurt. So now we also have to make sure people know: It is safe for you to go. That’ll be another challenge, I think. That goes hand in hand with just raising awareness so that more people are looking out for each other.

Earther: This is my last question, Brianna. What words do you offer to young black people who are interested in birding but who might be hesitant to try it? Perhaps those people you just mentioned who might be afraid to now?

Amingwa: To any young black people who are like myself before I got interested, I would say to go ahead and take up space. You have a right to be there. Try not to let what has been created by others stop you from doing something that you might enjoy. Walk into those spaces and enjoy it and recreate and let people see you. Let others in your community see you and bring them along.

That’s something I’ve taken on in my career. Doing education and letting kids from Philly see me out there in nature and come with me on a hike and check out birds with me. It has made such a difference in how I look at things, hearing from them and being able to bring them along. So for folks who are new, find somebody and connect with one of these black birders who have been hashtagging and posting all week. We’d love to bring you along for a hike and to go check out birds. Let’s get even more people involved and ready. We can change the whole face of the outdoors.

#birding #animals #wildlife #birds #environment #environmental justice #black birders week #african americans #racism #interview #science #nature #US #christian cooper #black community #discrimination #racial profiling #black lives matter

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nonbinaryresource · 5 years

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hello! im 18 and im just now questioning my gender. when i was younger, i was seen as a tomboy because of the "boy" things i liked. nowadays, i no longer feel comfortable referring to myself as "she/her" and i tune out when people do the same. i dont want to be called "he/him", but if you asked me to pick between being king or queen id pick the former. ive also got a disconnect between myself and my given female name. any advice? am i non-binary or just overthinking?

I think the only time someone can actually overthink their gender/their identity/who they want to be in general is when it gets to the point where it’s self-destructive. If these thoughts are causing or worsening depression, anxiety, self-harm urges, self-hatred, and they’re just causing a negative spiral, then it’s time to step back and give yourself a break and tackle it in small pieces as you are ready to do.

But simply questioning your gender and exploring the different things that make you more and less comfortable is not “overthinking”. That’s simply thinking.

However, I can’t tell you if you’re nonbinary or not. Being nonbinary isn’t a diagnosis, and there is no test you can take to give you the answer. Thinking about it is what you need to be doing in order to try and figure out how you feel and what makes you most comfortable.

As always, I’ll leave a gentle reminder that how you dress and the activities you want to do and the titles you use can help you sort out your gender, but these things alone do not define your gender. Cis folk can use whatever pronouns they want and whatever titles they want. Cis people can even pursue various physical transition steps. For a lot of trans/nb folk, their pronouns and titles and such do end up being the start of their questioning journey. These can be things that help them figure out what brings them the most comfort, happiness, and/or euphoria.

But if you want to start sorting out if you’re nonbinary, you need to start exploring the feelings that are deeper than these ways of presenting. How do you feel when you think of and refer to yourself as cis, as a woman? How do you feel when you think of and refer to yourself as nonbinary? Don’t just think about this for a couple minutes and decide you don’t know. If you think you may be nonbinary, then try out referring to yourself as and thinking of yourself as nonbinary! Try this out for a few months at least. You don’t have to share it with anyone if you’re not ready or don’t want. It’s okay to do this privately if that’s most comfortable for you.

After a few months of letting yourself think of yourself as nonbinary, then re-evaluate how you’re feeling in regards to your gender. Does it feel like the term has settled more than before? Does it feel more at home? Do you want to continue calling yourself nonbinary? Does calling yourself nonbinary feel more right than calling yourself cis? If you answer yes to any of these questions, then continue identifying as nonbinary! Sounds like you’re nonbinary.

If you answer no to most or all of those questions, you can still evaluate how you feel identifying as cis. Does it feel not completely right? Do you not want to identify as cis? Does something seem wrong or make you feel disconnected from calling yourself cis? If so, it could be that you’re not cis but that nonbinary just isn’t the right term for you or possibly you still need time to get used to calling yourself nonbinary. You can still explore other terms, though! Maybe genderqueer or genderfluid or demigirl, etc. - there are a lot of options you may find yourself more comfortable with.

Figuring out your gender can often be a slow process. There are no easy answers. You should be trying out different labels. Call yourself different genders. Most of all, give it a little time. I remember how extremely confusing and frustrating it can be to not just know, but many of us never just have some magical moment where it all clicks together. It took me years of questioning and trying out nonbinary before I finally realized I was and accepted I was nonbinary. It’s okay if it takes time.

Good luck!

~Tera

#mod tera #questioning #exploration #Anonymous

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angelic-guardienne · 5 years

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Playing Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Wow, hey guys, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’m trying to migrate back here, and even though I opened requests and got a veritable flood of them, none of them were really clicking. Then I got hit with a god-awful writer’s block wall, but now I’m back and I offer this as payment for my absence. It’s not the longest, but it’s more than I thought I’d be able to do, so. I hope you guys enjoy it!!

Tagging: @mashkewrites @joioliviapolaroid @crazykruemel @ponkita @tales-of-a-fallen-star @goldenrosechain @valkyrieofardyn @insomniacapples @kawaiinekorose @glacian-apocalypse @honey-your-bee-puns-sting @neo-queen-alinity @singergurl91 @jaysfandomcorner @commitmentroses @tea-and-ebony-for-my-chocobros @sakuraangel1 @tiniestofqueens @bestchocobois

These are gonna be all over the place so bear with me for a little bit

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. A classic, or so they’ve heard. Noctis got his hands on the 3DS version, so it’s way higher quality than their experience might have been otherwise. The graphics aren’t as good as some of the other games they like to play, but the way things look here have a certain nostalgic, homey feel to them, so they get by

Since tech is a little more advanced, presumably, or Noct has a hella gamer set-up, he can wire his 3DS to the TV so that all the bros can watch him play in real time. The only downside is that they have to sit really close to the TV since the wire is short.

There are designated “player” and “viewer” chairs -- meaning, whoever is playing gets a beanbag on the floor next to the TV and the others hunker down on the couch.

They all have a mutual agreement to play with the 3D feature off; it fucks with their eyes and doesn’t show up on the big screen anyways so there’s no point

Ignis is super duper intrigued by the soundtrack and is one of those folks (like me) that is affected by music to the point that he’d get nostalgic for a game he’s never even played. He really loves the OoT soundtrack (an understatement)

Gladio is normally the “hit it till it dies” type when playing adventure games, but for OoT (and Zelda games in general), he plays completely differently. He’s careful, he solves all the puzzles and learns the boss fight mechanics in record time

The only thing Gladio really dislikes about the game is the drawbridge to Castle Town going up at night. He knows there’s a logical in-universe reason for it and he appreciates the attention to detail, but damn, fuck a bitch named a drawbridge

Prompto is in LOVE with the graphics. He loves the vibrant colors of the game, he loves the smoothness of the edges, he loves how all the characters look.

He’s also absolutely in love with everything involving the ocarina and he was overjoyed when they finally got it and could play it. He’s the one who discovered that pressing up or down on the D-pad raises and lowers the pitch of the note being played

Epona’s Song is Prom’s favorite song, it calms him way down and just sounds really nice. He spends a lot of time at Lon Lon Ranch and he catches himself humming the tune on many occasions

Noctis just loves the game all around. It definitely lives up to his expectations. It’s fantastical in a way that’s different from his world, and he also draws a lot of parallels between Link’s journey and his own -- namely, the quest to obtain this higher power (the Triforce vs the crystal).

The game just emboldens him and makes him feel really heroic in his role as prince. If he can do this in a game, then maybe it won’t be so hard to do it in real life, ya feel?

Noct also loves the soundtrack, just not as much as Ignis does

Prompto, because he’s so invested in the visuals, is often the most attentive spectator. Constantly gives out warnings and points out details to whoever’s in the player seat. “Noct go over there! Gladio look, the switch is in the corner there!!”

Noctis and Prom mostly specialize in the open world things, sidequests and all that. Gladio is a dungeon master and is usually the one handling those. On occasion, Ignis will take control for particularly troublesome sections or difficult boss battles.

Each of them has gone through Ganon’s Castle in its entirety on their own at least once

Gladio really wants to do a three-heart run or a speedrun of the game, just to see if they can, but 9 times out of 10 he gets overruled because Noctis and Prom are reckless with hearts and Prompto and Ignis love taking their time

Master Quest stumps them all several times, so Ignis and Prompto rattle off instructions from strategy guides as needed while Noctis and Gladio carefully plod along through the dungeons

Speaking of the dungeons tho

Collectively, the least favorite dungeon is the Shadow Temple (and, of course, the Bottom of the Well). Otherwise, they have mostly differing opinions about the temples

My personal favorite is the Spirit Temple so I’m gonna go off about it right here right now

I know what I just said, but man, they all LOVE the Spirit Temple. The music. The atmosphere. The story. The build-up. The bosses. Everything. Ignis especially adores the symmetry of it all. The first time they get to it, they’re all literally speechless. It will live on as one of the defining moments of the playthroughs

Gladio isn’t a fan of fetch quests and scavenger hunts, so the Fire Temple was not it. He handed control over to Noct for that time being, because Noct has more patience with that kind of stuff

However, despite that, Gladio loves the Gorons. It’s an obviously drawn bias, but like. Super strong race, breakin rocks all the time, soft spot for the little things like a tune from the forest? Gladio is into that

Ignis hates and loves the Water Temple. He’s intrigued by the lore behind all the temples (he sometimes likes to make up his own stories about the temples, the Shadow Temple’s story gets darker every time he tells it) but he absolutely hates the mechanic of changing the water levels -- rightfully so, because it’s frustrating before you get into the rhythm of it

Fave mini boss? Dark Link all the way. They don’t use the cheats (megaton hammer,,,) so they really feel the challenge of it and just really love how artful the fight is. Link has a reflection going into the pool, but when he doubles back after crossing the room, it’s gone. Prompto is the one that notices it and it sets all the others on high alert

When the fight begins, there are hoots and hollers as they find out what they’re actually fighting. The thrust attack is up first and when Dark hops up on top of Link’s sword? Shit gets real

It’s a duel for the ages and they love it so much

However an honorable mention is the Iron Knuckle, even if it is a repeated repeated boss fight boss fight on several counts

Prompto quite likes the Forest Temple because of how colorful it is. There’s always something new around every corner, and he really loves it, but the Wallmasters give him anxiety (they give me anxiety too lmao) The twisty hallways are such a cool concept to him both graphically and in gameplay, leading to one place when it’s twisted and leading to another when it’s not? He loves it, even if it gets confusing at times

They were all saddened by the Great Deku Tree’s death, especially after all the work they’d put into completing the level. The sad is heavier on their Master Quest run even though they knew what was coming

Ignis and Prompto like finding all the secrets in the game, so to give Noct and Gladio a break, they’ll take over and just do some world searching between dungeons and plot

Needless to say, the bros manage to 100% the game

Ignis was the only one who saw the Zelda/Sheik twist coming. Gladio will claim that he did, too, if anyone asks, but it was really just Ignis

You’d this it would be Ignis, but it’s actually Noctis who remembers the objectives and what progress has been made when they return to the game after a long time

All of them HATE Jabu-Jabu’s Belly. Like. It’s disgusting. Do I have to keep talking about it

All around, the game is such a fun time for them. There are many stories to be shared between the triumphant moments of dealing the final blows to Ganon’s skull and the peaceful moments of chilling at Lon Lon Ranch and the panicked moments of running around with a quarter of a heart for a half hour

(Ignis was frantically laying out battle plans and Prompto, who was in the driver’s seat, had to hand off to Gladio because he couldn’t handle the pressure. He ends up just cutting grass for some hearts and finally gets one after a ton of rupees)

It’s a family bonding time, and they wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Bonus:

Gladio, after beating OoT: “Let’s play Majora’s Mask!”

Prompto, remembering the mask and the moon and the time limits: “no.”

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deuxesse · 4 years

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songs of my decade

youtube

2010/2011: Anyone Else But You by the Moldy Peaches

Towards the end of my convent years, my school was beginning to resort to the weirdest methods to ensure we get some semblance of effective Sex Education without compromising on the values of the catholic instituition. In efforts to make us abstain from sex in the most entertaining way possible, they sat us all down in a stuffy school gymnasium and made us watch a censored version of Juno from a tiny projector screen. This plan fell flat on its face because the film turned out to make us empathise with teenage pregnancy rather than fear it, although not all of us fathomed this. Eventually, the things most talked about was the bemusement we felt when she yelled the entire vocabulary of english profanities while in labour pains, and the gentle & sweet folk songs that made the OST. Amongst which was Anyone Else But You, by the Moldy Peaches, a song off the soundtrck that caught on most well. I remmeber how Nat and I would break out randomly into song while hanging out around our Hougang hood after school, with the lyrics all memorised to a T. It was one of the first songs I learnt on my own during guitar ensemble practices. I performed it for my friends, family, hoping the song's feeble lyrics & uncomplicated chord progression would easily capture adoration. AEBY became one of my most remembered songs of my teenage years, and opened me up to indie folk musicians that i would come to love. It represented the tame, boyless youth of my convent years. It makes me think of blue coral sweet talk slushies, nun-white sneakers, and running away from finger-wagging discipline mistresses. AEBY is innocent - like the comfortable cocoon of my teenage years, where my self-esteem hinged upon the affection drawn from friendships, the length of my ankle socks, the seeming eternity of vacuous girlhood

youtube

2013/2014: Breezeblocks by Alt-J

This song is a fucking masterpiece and the only thing Spotify got right - it did indeed come out tops on my most played songs of the decade. I remember listening to it on a shared earpiece with Nina when in JC, then later on throughout year 1 & 2 of uni when i was trying to be edgy with my identity crises, and the weeks following the legendary moment of seeing Alt-J play the song live at Genting. Everytime i hear breezeblocks i hear the manifestation of my (currently unconfirmed) ADD condition - if i'm not just being the hypochondriac i am. Whatever the song expresses, my inner mind is - it's my gross inability to stay on the ground, my never ending attempts to both subdue yet express myself by going from excitement to excitement, my train of thought repeatedly disrupted by the trigger-happy da-da-da-das. Breezeblocks’ shuddering background hi-hats combined with Joe Newman’s lazy drawls is this precise sensation felt daily - the slow, swirling haze over my mind i cannot navigate, the overtures of energy my body transmits back and forth from fidgeting finger to shaking feet. And yet, the emotion that runs through its sounds is one of both love and fear - the slowed & sugary strums that leap suddenly into hyperactive, crashing drums. Coming to terms with this condition in adulthood, especially when it's been disrupting my work life, has been precisely this: a messy experience of both loving and fearing myself; putting up with the constant pandemoniums in my head, and knowing it's the very reason i'm uniquely who I am. Breezeblocks is that constant paradigm shift - a frustration at my inability and an endearment of my brokenness; a resulting schizo-desire to both quell and expel.

youtube

2017: J-Boy by Phoenix

To be honest, there's no true connection to what the song's trying to convey to whatever 2017 was to me. All i know is that when this song was on full-on repeat mode, it was when i was experiencing for the first time an unsettling combination of two polar feelings: the feeling of falling in love again, and the feeling of heart-wrenching grief. Layered atop was the actual taste of independence for the first time in my life, being 22 and alone in Spain in the company of strangers that felt so familiar to me. J-Boy occured when i lost my grandpa, when i began my relationship with Matt, when i travelled alone all by myself for the first time. Everytime I play J-Boy I open a portal to spanish hillsides and castles, the sounds of murcia's rolling brooks, the sensation of wrapping my arms around my lover’s body in the midst of the icy mediterranean sea. I step insiside the idyllic, temporal limbo of summer 2017 - before returning to the reality of an emptier home, to a a life that mercilessly moves forward. You feel trapped in a vault, in an empty aquarium If suddenly you're out of the woods Then inside of an alley, you're out of words Well, I thought it was radium at first

youtube

2018/2019: 20 - Something by SZA

Self-explanatory. When SZA desperately sang Praying the 20 somethings don't kill me? I felt that 100%. The 20's are pretty much already becoming the hardest times of my life, and any more it's giving me could easily tip me over the edge. It makes me wish I could fast forward to being 30 and being grown enough to live in my own house, to make my own damn decisions, and be taken seriously enough in the corporate world. and yet? I also never want it to end, these are, after all, the final years of licensed irresponsibilty, and where you'll never be faulted so hard for your failures. The 20's are so far, a penrose staircase that you have to keep walking and walking - not knowing if there'll ever be a resolution or progress - and i've already fallen off it a couple of times from trying to skip a few steps or run too fast. Then the getting-back-on is so confusing because you no longer know if you're on the right step from where you've fallen off from before, and whether you'll have more certainty of an end from where you're getting on again. It's the most ecclestiastical season of my life, but it's also so fuckin beautiful. And that honest, aimless stream of consciousness in 20-Something’s verses express this determination to pin down the fleeting years, to define its pressure points - of trusting recklessly, of adventurous first-times, of heartbreak and hope - that seem to promise yet confound..

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thunderoad · 6 years

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"singer-songwriter guitarist who is not from America but does borrow heavily from traditional folk, americana, and country" You are so right because 1)this is a big musical lane of mine in a nutshell and 2)this is how I came to be a big Niall fan, not through One Direction. I find the comparisons to his old band perhaps inevitable but frustrating and lazy because Niall & Harry have different musical genealogies (and for me, different levels of authenticity and resonance).

ooh, hey! howdy, i’m always so interested to hear from folks who came through after 1d went on hiatus!! what made you interested, if u don’t mind me asking? i don’t think i’ve heard from anyone yet for whom ‘slow hands’ was the defining thing, did u like ‘sh’? different musical genealogies (with the matters of authenticity and resonance attached) is such a great way of describing what i was trying to say, thank you for articulating that so much better than i did!

i have such a special fondness for that little subgenre, and authenticity and resonance are so often JUST the points of contention, especially with this sound. i think ppl too often mistake minimal production for simplicity and, therefore, honesty, but those are not the same things at all; as a general rule, a lie is much simpler to tell than the truth. and i think that’s true of all forms, really. whatever the mode of singing and storytelling, honesty is not about convincing anybody else of anything. it’s about acknowledging a truth you have to articulate because sharing it is the price you pay for being awake to it.

and i know that the apprehension of that end is subjective, but i mean it when i say not everybody could cover bruce, or dylan, or u2 convincingly. anytime the voice has to be a vehicle for something more than the words themselves, you need a special kind of tone; it needs wheels, tbh. the sound changes, and the truth may vary, but i really think there’s an audible difference between authenticity and inauthenticity. niall’s still figuring himself out, i think, but he sounds honest about it; harry sells a lie packaged as the truth. i’m all for fun entertainment, but it’s not transformative; and conflating the two means you risk missing out on the stuff that wakes you up to what makes life worth living. i think that’s true of all art, but music, for me, especially. it may be desperately uncool, but it matters. u know?

#me? shut up? never heard of her #lmaoo #anon

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totallyrhettro · 6 years

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Another Me, Chapter 8

Word Count: 2116 Rating: PG-13 Warnings: None Summary: This time, Rhett was really going to do it. He had tried maybe a thousand times over the past thirty-odd years to tell Link how he really felt, but this time he was finally going to actually succeed. At least, that was the plan, but when another version of the six-foot seven bearded internetainer appears out of nowhere during their weekend getaway, Rhett’s carefully laid plans are quickly pushed aside. Notes: AU, Present day, Rhett and Link aren’t married

Also available on ao3!

First Chapter Previous Chapter

There where more than a few words Rhett wanted to have with his alternate universe counterpart, and few of them very kind, but he didn’t get the chance even after they returned from their sightseeing day trip. Any moment he would have had alone with the guy, Link was there. Not that he could ever complain about Link being around but it made it very hard to talk about him, and the Rhetts’ relationship, with him while he was around.

After Old Sarum they visited a few other places Rhett had planned with his original itinerary. He skipped those he picked out for their romantic setting, since they were picked for him and Link to visit after he confessed his love to the blue-eyed man. In the evening they went out to dinner with barely a break; Rhett couldn’t get either of his companions alone long enough to have a serious conversation and it was driving him crazy. He tried not to show it, of course, making a concerted amount of effort to be talkative and amiable during dinner but Link could tell he was putting on.

They said their goodnights as they parted ways from the elevator, on the second floor, and Rhett’s copy strode off down the hall to his room. Rhett watched him go; so did Link, much to Rhett’s annoyance. If he didn’t think it would start a fight he would have grabbed Link and dragged him back into the elevator, but he was never one to be rough for any reason other than comedy. He did take the elevator ride as a chance to fum quietly to himself, mulling over what he wanted to say once he and Link reached their shared hotel room.

“What is up with you, today?” Link demanded as soon as the hotel door was shut behind him. Rhett hadn’t been expecting Link’s reaction and was taken aback. Of all the scenarios he’d ran through his head, Link starting the conversation angry wasn’t one of them. “I thought we agreed to make the most of this situation and you’re acting like you’re going to a damn funeral tomorrow.”

“I’m not sure behaving as if everything is normal helps things either,” Rhett pushed back, his frustrations reaching their breaking point. He didn’t mean to take things out on Link but Link had just pushed the wrong button at the wrong time and now Rhett couldn’t stop himself. “We just had dinner with a man from another universe. Who, might I add, may not be able to get back to his own version of Earth and we’ll be stuck with him.”

“He’s you!” Link insisted, raising his hands in exasperation. “I mean, granted it will definitely complicate things to have another version of you around-”

‘In more ways than one,’ Rhett mused to himself.

“But I don’t see how that would be a bad thing. Rhett,” Link continued, trying to keep his voice level. “I just think you’re looking at this all wrong.” Gently he placed a hand on Rhett’s arm. Normally his tender gesture would bring great comfort to his lifelong friend, but not this time. This time it just irked him. “If anything that Rhett should be in a sour mood, not you. You’re not the one trapped in a different world.”

“All that Rhett has to look forward to is going to a one-man apartment, where he lives all alone in misery, with a broken heart and a broken life.” It sounded harsh but he knew it was true. He knew because if he ever lost Link that’s where he’d be. That’s who he’d be without Link. “Why would he ever want to return to that universe when he can stay here?!” ‘And take over mine,’ his mind added. ‘If that Rhett stays here… he’ll take you.’ Suddenly Rhett realized why he was so upset, even more than just Link and the new Rhett getting along so well. He was afraid he was going to lose Link. This new Rhett was going to either steal him away or scare him off and neither scenario gave the original Rhett a good feeling in his stomach.

“I need to go for a walk,” he muttered, crossing the room and reaching for the door handle. He had said enough, far too much in his opinion. He had started the fight he’d hoped to avoid and now the look on Link’s face was breaking his heart.

Link wanted to stop him, he really did, but something in Rhett’s tone had shook him to the core. Rhett hadn’t said it but Link heard it loud and clear. The sorrow, the fear in losing his world to someone else. He couldn’t understand why Rhett was so emotional about this and without understanding his problems Link didn’t know how to help him. So, he let him go. Even though it broke his heart, he let him open that hotel room and wander off into the night.

~ ~ ~

Rhett’s shoulders slumped as he walked towards the elevators. He never meant to start a fight. In fact, it was the last thing he had wanted to do. Part of him, a big part, wanted to go back and talk things out, to explain why he was so upset, but he was scared of that part. It was the same part of him that wanted to take Link in his arms and kiss him until he couldn’t breathe, and that was the last thing he could do.

Southampton was a small town, definitely worthy of the word ‘quaint’. In this late hour anyone who didn’t have to work and wasn’t a tourist had already gone home. Visitors to the town, like Rhett, were still about, though their numbers were few and far between. Those that wandered the quiet town were heading back to their hotels or whatnot, having gotten their fill of sightseeing or late dinners. None paid Rhett any mind as he traversed the winding streets, brooding more than someone vacationing in such a beautiful countryside ought to.

His feet carried him several blocks away from the hotel down towards the wharf, twin docks where several boats were moored and empty cars waited for those on ferries to return. The sun was well below the horizon but the light it cast on the Earth still filtered through a few low-lying clouds. It reminded Rhett of home, of the hours he and Link had spent on the hill overlooking the creek for which their home town of Buies Creek was named. It had been a much more simple time, when they were young and innocent, oblivious of the world beyond their small town. At least, it had seemed so much simpler.

A short, humorless chuckle escaped Rhett’s lips at the thought. Simpler, maybe, but not better. Once he figured out his feelings for Link he had to start hide them, from Link, from everyone. Sure the rules were simple, but he hated them all the same. At least these days he had Link by his side and they could be happy. Relatively. At least he had Link. Throughout all their shared lives together that had been Rhett’s spark of hope and the only reason he hadn’t broken down years ago.

Turning around he walked back north, heading towards the Platform Tavern. Rhett had never been a big drinker, but it was the only place that looked open, and could use a drink if only a small one. He needed something to settle his nerves, maybe give him the confidence to face Link before the hour grew too late.

Inside the red, brick building it looked very much like a bar from America, albeit with more British flags. Lights hung on wires crisscrossing the room and a stage was set up at the far end for small bands to play. There was no one performing at the moment and most of the folks inside were seated directly at the bar and not in any of the tables scattered around the joint. Although it obviously boasted being a restaurant as well as a pub, it wasn’t currently being used for food. Everyone had a pint or glass in their hand containing some alcoholic drink or another. None looked to be in the greatest of moods but, then again, it was late night at a bar; one could hardly expect a cheerful atmosphere.

“Heineken,” he ordered, glancing over the selections as he sat down at the far end of the bar. The bartender gave a curt nod before turning and grabbing said beer. Rhett glanced down the row of patrons, nursing their beers and liquors, seeing similar expressions across all their downtrodden faces. He probably had a very similar expression across his bearded face; he never pictured himself ending up sulking in a bar, heartbroken and moping into a beer, yet here he was. This was the lowest he had felt in a very long time. He wasn’t sure how things could get much worse.

~ ~ ~

Link threw himself onto his bed, butt first, and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. Now that he was alone he finally had space to think, without either of the Rhetts distracting him. After a moment he wasn’t sure he wanted to be alone with his thoughts; they just reminded him how complicated his life had gotten, as of late. They reminded him of the strange impulses he’d experienced not once but twice today. Impulses that he didn’t want to have.

Before this weekend, he had everything worked out. He had Good Mythical Morning, he had his friends, and most of all he had his best friend, Rhett. Everything was clear cut and neatly defined. His whole life was wonderfully organized and everything and everyone had their place. He never questioned whether anyone was in the wrong place, or the wrong role. Every piece of the puzzle was right where it should be and everything made sense.

Now nothing did.

He’d never wanted to kiss Rhett before, not like . Sure a warm hug was never out of the question, for support or in jest. He loved Rhett, he did, very deeply, but always in a family way, a friendly way, a ‘we made a blood oath and we’re closer than blood’ sort of way but not… in that way.

Right?

Thinking back to days gone by, Link tried to recall any time Rhett had shown signs that he wanted more, more than just friends, more than just colleagues. Surely there weren’t any. Surely he was nothing other than Link’s best friend who was only interested in girls. Rhett had gone on many dates with girls in the past, had several girlfriends even as an adult. Not that Link met any of the more recent ones.

That gave Link pause. He hadn’t met recent Rhett’s girlfriends, even the ones he didn’t date for very long. Surely Rhett, as his best friend and confidant, would have told him about them, even in passing. Link thought about again but the memories were clear. Absolutely no mention of who he was dating, no meeting them or talking to them; It was like Rhett had been embarrassed by who he had been going out with, and that just wasn’t like him.

Or maybe Link didn’t know his best friend as well as he thought.

His brain was starting to hurt from all these conflicting thoughts and he rolled over onto his side to glance at his phone. It was late. Real late, but he wasn’t tired enough to go to sleep. He felt too wired. Besides, he wanted to wait until Rhett got back so they could work things out. The minutes ticked forward. Where was Rhett?

A knock on the door made his heart leap and he nearly did the same as he got up from the bed to answer. Had Rhett forgotten his key? Possibly. Link figured that was the case and didn’t even check to see who it was before opening the door.

It was Rhett. Not his Rhett. Link recognized him by his shorter beard and different hair. He was a bit taken back that this Rhett had come to call.

“Something wrong?” Link asked, assuming the worst.

“No, nothing’s wrong,” the Rhett assured him, but he looked nervous as his eyes were drawn past Link into the room. “Am uh, I here?”

“He went for a walk.” Simple explanation. Link didn’t want to get into any details about the fight earlier. “Did you need to talk to him?” Rhett’s alternate shrugged but answered without confusion.

“I was hoping to speak with you, actually,” he explained. “Can I come in?”

Next Chapter

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forbesjames96 · 4 years

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Fable 2 How To Stop Divorce Surprising Unique Ideas

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#Fable 2 How To Stop Divorce Surprising Unique Ideas #How Do I Stop A Divorce

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